performativity

Zizek is capitalism the only game in town

… while this standard postmodern Leftist narrative of the passage from ‘essentialist’ Marxism, with the proletariat as the unique Historical Subject, the privileging of economic class struggle, an so on, to the postmodern irreducible plurality of struggles undoubtedly describes an actual historical process, its proponents, as a rule, leave out the resignation at its heart — the acceptance of capitalism as ‘the only game in town’, the renunciation of any real attempt to overcome the existing capitalist liberal regime (95).

postmodern politics definitely has the great merit that it ‘repoliticizes’ a series of domains previously considered ‘apolitical’ or ‘private’; the fact remains, however, that it does NOT in fact repoliticize capitalism, because the very notion and form of the ‘political’ within which it operates is grounded in the ‘depoliticization’ of the economy.

Regarding JB:

[Butler] is well aware that universality is unavoidable, and her point is that — while, of course, each determinate historical figure of universality involves a set of inclusions/exclusions — universality simultaneously opens up and sustains the space for questioning these inclusions/exclusions, for ‘renegotiating’ the limits of inclusion/exclusion as part of the ongoing ideologico-political struggle for hegemony. The predominant notion of ‘universal human rights’, for instance, precludes — or, at least reduces to a secondary status — a set of sexual practices and orientations; and it would be too simplistic to accept the standard liberal game of simply insisting that one should redefine and broaden our notion of human rights to include also all these ‘aberrant’ practices — what standard liberal humanism underestimates is the extent to which such exclusions are constitutive of the ‘neutral’ universality of human rights, so that their actual inclusion in ‘human rights’ would radically rearticulate, even undermine, our notion of what ‘humanity’ in ‘human rights’ means (101-102).

This passage from ‘essentialist’ marxism to postmodern contingent politics (in Laclau), or the passage from sexual essentialism to contingent gender-formation (in Bulter), or — a further example — the passage from metaphysician to ironist in Richard Rorty, is not a simple epistemological progress but part of the global change in the very nature of capitalist society. It is not that before, people were ‘stupid essentialists’ and believed in naturalized sexuality, while now they know that genders are performatively enacted; one needs a kind of metanarrative that explains this very passage from essentialism to the awareness of contingency: the Heideggerian notion of the epochs of Being, or the Foucauldian notion of the shift in the predominant épistème, or the standard sociological notion of modernization, or a more Marxist account in which this passage follows the dynamic of capitalism

So, again, crucial in Laclau’s theoretical edifice is the paradigmatically Kantian co-dependency between the ‘timeless’ existential a priori of the logic of hegemony and the historical narrative of the gradual passage from the ‘essentialist’ traditional Marxist class politics to the full assertion of the contingency of the struggle for hegemony … The role of this evolutionary narrative is precisely to resolve the above-mentioned ambiguity of the formal universal frame (of the logic of hegemony) — implicitly to answer the question: is this frame really a non-historical universal, or simply the formal structure of the specific ideologico-political constellation of western late capitalism? The evolutionary narrative mediates between these two options, telling the story of how the universal frame was ‘posited as such’, become the explicit structuring principle of ideologico-political life. The question none the less persists: is this evolutionary passage a simple passage from error to true insight? Is it that each stance fits its own epoch, so that in Marx’s time ‘class essentialism’ was adequate, while today we need the assertion of contingency? Or should we combine the two in a proto-Hegelian way, so that the very passage from the essentialist ‘error’ to the ‘true’ insight into radical contingency is historically conditioned (in Marx’s time, the ‘essentialist illusion’ was ‘objectively necessary’, while our epoch enables the insight into contingency)? This proto-Hegelian solution would allow us to combine the ‘universal’ scope of ‘validity’ of the concept of hegemony with the obvious fact that its recent emergence is clearly linked to today’s specific social constellation: although socio-political life and its structure were always-already the outcome of hegemonic struggles, it is none the less only today, on our specific historical constellation — that is to say, in the ‘postmodern’ universe of globalized contingency — that the radically contingent-hegemonic nature of the political processes is finally allowed to ‘come/return to itself’, to free itself of the ‘essentialist’ baggage … (106-107).

This solution, however, is problematic for at least two reasons. [1. it’s Hegelian, Laclau hates Hegel]

2. … from my perspective, today’s postmodern politics of multiple subjectivities is precisely not political enough, in so far as it silently presupposes a non-thematized, ‘naturalized’ framework of economic relations. … One should assert the plural contingency of postmodern political struggles and the totality of Capital are not opposed … today’s capitalism, rather, provides the very background and terrain for the emergence of shifting-dispersed-contingent-ironic-and so on, political subjectivities. Was it not Deleuze who in a way made this point when he emphasized how capitalism is a force of ‘deterritorialization’? And was he not following Marx’s old thesis on how, with capitalism, ‘all that is solid melts into air’?

… MY KEY POINT … the need to distinguish more explicitly between contingency/substitutibility within a certain historical horizon and the more fundamental exclusion/foreclosure that grounds this very horizon. When Laclau claims that ‘if the fullness of society is unachievable, the attempts at reaching it will necessarily fail, although they will be able, in the search for that impossible object, to solve a variety of partial problems’, does he not — potentially at least — conflate two levels,

the struggle for hegemony within a certain horizon
and the more fundamental exclusion that sustains this very horizon?

And when Butler claims, against the Lacanian notion of constitutive bar or lack, that ‘the subject-in-process is incomplete precisely because it is constituted thorugh exclusions that are politically salient, not structurally static’, does she not – potentially at least – conflate two levels,

the endless political struggle of/for inclusions/exclusions within a given field (say, of today’s late capitalist society)
and a more fundamental exclusion which sustains this very field.

(107-108)

laclau on sexual d and hegemony

Laclau, Ernesto. “Identity and Hegemony: The Role of Universality in the Constitution of Political Logics.” Contingency, Hegemony, Universality. JB, EL and SZ. New York: Verso, 2000. 44-89.

It is precisely because I fully appreciate the potentialities of the notion of ‘parodic performances’ for a theory of hegemony, that I find some of Butler’s questions rather perplexing. She asks: “If sexual difference is “real” in the Lacanian sense, does that mean that it has no place in hegemonic struggles?’ I would argue that exactly BECAUSE sexual difference is real and not symbolic, because it is not necessarily linked to any aprioristic pattern of symbolic positions, that the way is open to the kind of historicist variation that Butler asserts — and that a hegemonic game becomes possible. The same goes for some of Butler’s other questions: ‘Does a logic that invariably results in aporias produce a kind of stasis that is inimical to the project of hegemony?’ If there were no aporia, there would be no possibility of hegemony, for a necessary logic inimical to hegemonic variations would impose itself, entirely unchallenged. We have here the same mutually subverting relationship between necessity and impossibility to which we have been referring from the beginning (note 39, 88).

If the representation was total — if the representative moment was entirely transparent to what it represents — the ‘concept’ would have an unchallenged primacy over the ‘name’ (in Saussurean terms: the signified would entirely subordinate to itself the order of the signifier). But in that case there would be no hegemony, for its very requisite, which is the production of tendentially empty signifiers, would not obtain. In order to have hegemony we need the sectorial aims of a group to operate as the name for a universality transcending them — this is the synecdoche constitutive of the hegemonic link. But if the name (the signifier) is so attached to the concept (signified) that no displacement in the relation between the two is possible, we cannot have any hegemonic rearticulation. The idea of a totally emancipated and transparent society, from which all tropological movement between its constitutive parts would have been elmininated, involves the end of all hegemonic relation (and also, as we will see later, of all democratic politics).

universality

Butler, Judith. “Restaging the Universal: Hegemony and the Limits of Formalism.” Contingency, Hegemony, Universality. JB, EL and SZ. New York: Verso, 2000. 11-43.

A recent resurgence of Anglo-feminism in the academy has sought to restate the importance of making universal claims about the conditions and rights of women (Okin, Nussbaum) without regard to the prevailing norms in local cultures, and without taking up the task of cultural translation. This effort to override the problem that local cultures pose for international feminism does not understand the parochial character of its own norms, and does not consider the way in which feminism works in full complicity with US colonial aims in imposing its norms of civility through an effacement and a decimation of local Second and Third World cultures. Of course, translation by itself can also working full complicity with the logic of colonial expansion, when translation becomes the instrument through which dominant values are transposed into the language of the subordinated, and the subordinated run the risk of coming to know and understand them as tokens of their “liberation” (35).

The universal announces, as it were, its ‘non-place’, its fundamentally temporal modality, precisely when challenges to its EXISTING formulation emerge from those who are not covered by it, who have no entitlement to occupy the place of the ‘who’, but nevertheless demand that the universal as such ought to be inclusive of them. At stake here is the exclusionary function of certain NORMS of universality which, in a way, transcend the cultural locations from which they emerge. Although they often appear as transcultural or formal criteria by which existing cultural conventions are to be judged, they are precisely cultural conventions which have, through a process of abstraction, come to appear as post-conventional principles. The task, then, is to refer these formal conceptions of universality back to the contaminating trace of their ‘content’, to eschew the form/content distinction as it furthers that ideological obfuscation, and to consider the cultural form that this struggle over the meaning and scope of norms takes (39).

When one has no right to speak under the auspicies of the universal, and speaks none the less, laying claim to universal rights, and doing so in a way that preserves the particularity of one’s struggle, one speaks in a way that may be readily dismissed as nonsensical or impossible. When we hear about ‘lesbian and gay human rights’, or even ‘women’s human rights’, we are confronted with a strange neighbouring of the universal and the particular which neither synthesizes the two, nor keeps them apart. The nouns function adjectivally, and although they are identities and grammatical ‘substances’, they are also in the act of qualifying and being qualified by one another. Clearly, however, the ‘human’ as previously defined has not readily included lesbians, gays and women, and the current mobilization seeks to expose the conventional limitations of the human, the terms that sets the limits on the universal reach of international law. But the exclusionary character of those conventional norms of universality does not preclude further recourse to the term, although it does mean entering into that situation in which the conventional meaning becomes unconventional (or catachrestic). This does not mean that we have a priori recourse to a truer criterion of universality.

It does suggest, however, that conventional and exclusionary norms of universality can, through perverse reiterations, produce unconventional formulations of universality that expose the limited and exclusionary features of the former one at the same time that they mobilize a new set of demands (40).

Antigone ch. 3

JB. “Promiscuous Obedience” (1998) The Judith Butler Reader 2003, pp. 278-301. originally appeared as Chapter 3 in Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death. 2000 (This blog post was originally published Jan 23/09)

Is structuralist kinship the curse that is upon contemporary critical theory as it tries to approach the question of sexual normativity, sociality, and the status of law? And, moreover, if we are seized by this inheritance, is there a way to transmit that curse in aberrant form, exposing its fragility and fracture in the repetition and reinstitution of its terms? Is this breaking from the law that takes place in the reinstituting of the law the condition for articulating a future kinship that exceeds structuralist totality, a poststructuralism of kinship.

Incest taboo: prohibit sexual exchange among kin relations or rather, to establish kin relations precisely on the basis of those taboos.

The Antigonean revision of psychoanalytic theory might put into question the assumption that the incest taboo legitimates and normalizes kinship based in biological reproduction and the heterosexualization of the family (286).

From the presumption that one cannot — or ought not to — choose one’s closest family members as one’s lovers and marital partners, it does not follow that the bonds of kinship that are possible assume any particular form (286).

Tada: Now here is what drives me nuts about JB, trying to disentangle phrases like the following, yet I know, this is also her absolute, impeccable genius:

To the extent that the incest taboo contains its infraction within itself, it does not simply prohibit incest but rather sustains and cultivates incest as a necessary specter of social dissolution, a specter without which social bonds cannot emerge … one that works precisely through proliferating through displacement the very crime that it bars. The taboo, and its threatening figuration of incest, delineates lines of kinship that harbor incest as their ownmost possibility, establishing “aberration” at the heart of the norm. Indeed, my question is whether it can also become the basis for a socially survivable aberration of kinship in which the norms that govern legitimate and illegitimate modes of kin association might be more radically redrawn (286) (Antigone’s Claim: 67).

[…] other forms of social life, inadvertent possibilities produced by the prohibition that come to undermine the conclusion that an invariant social organization of sexuality follows of necessity from the prohibitive law. What happens when the perverse or the impossible emerges in the language of the law and makes its claim precisely there in the sphere of legitimate kinship that depends on its exclusion or pathologization?

For a woman who is a single mother and has her child without a man, is the father still there, a spectral “position” or “place” that remains unfilled, or is there no such “place” or “position”? Is the father absent, or does this child have no father, no position, and no inhabitant. Is this a loss, which assumes the unfulfilled norm, or is it another configuration of primary attachment whose primary loss is not to have a language in which to articulate its terms? And when there are two men or two women who parent, are we to assume that some primary division of gendered roles organizes their psychic places within the scene, so that the empirical contingency of two same gendered parents is nevertheless straightened out by the presocial psychic place of the Mother and Father into which they enter? Does it make sense on these occasions to insist that there are symbolic positions of Mother and Father that every psyche must accept regardless of the social form that kinship takes? Or is that a way of reinstating a heterosexual organization of parenting at the psychic level that can accommodate all manner of gender variation at the social level? Here it seems that the very division between the psychic or symbolic, on the one hand, and the social, on the other, occasions this preemptory normalization of the social field (288) (AC: 69)

The question, however, is whether the incest taboo has also been mobilized to establish certain forms of kinship as the only intelligible and livable ones (288).

Consider the horror of incest, the moral revulsion it compels in some, is not that far afield from the same horror and revulsion felt toward lesbian and gay sex, and is not unrelated to the intense moral condemnation of voluntary single parenting, or gay parenting, or parenting arrangements with more than two adults involved (practices that can be used as evidence to support a claim to remove a child from the custody of the parent in several states in the United States).

These various modes in which the oedipal mandate fails to produce normative family all risk entering into the metonymy of that moralized sexual horror that is perhaps most fundamentally associated with incest (289).

What in her [Antigone’s] act is fatal for heterosexuality in its normative sense? And to what other ways of organizing sexuality might a consideration of that fatality give rise? (290)

In the 1970s socialist feminists sought to make use of the unwaveringly social analysis of kinship to show that there is no ultimate basis for normative heterosexual monogamous family structure in nature, and we might now add that it has no similar basis in language (290).

Lacanian Formalists: insist on fundamental notions of sexual difference, which are based on rules that prohibit and regulate sexual exchange, rules we can break only to find ourselves ordered by them anew.

The subsequent turn to Lacan seemed to be a turn away from a highly constructivist and malleable account of social law informing matters of sexual regulation to one that posits a presocial law, what Juliet Mitchell once called a “primordial law” (something she no longer does), the law of the Father, which sets limits upon the the variability of social forms and which in its most conservative form, mandates an exogamic, heterosexual conclusion to the oedipal drama. That this constraint is understood to be beyond social alteration, indeed, to constitute the condition and limit of all social alterations, indicates something of the theological status it has assumed. And though this position often is quick to claim that although there is a normative conclusion for the oedipal drama, the norm cannot exist without perversion, and only through perversion can the norm be established. We are all supposed to be satisfied with this apparently generous gesture by which the perverse is announced to be essential to the norm. The problem as I see it is that the perverse remains entombed precisely there, as the essential and negative feature of the norm, and the relation between the two remains static, giving way to no rearticulation of the norm itself (Butler, AC: 75).

[…] Antigone, who concludes the oedipal drama, fails to produce heterosexual closure for that drama, and that this may intimate the direction for a psychoanalytic theory that takes Antigone as its point of departure. Certainly, she does not achieve another sexuality, one that is NOT heterosexuality, but she does seem to deinstitute heterosexuality by refusing to do what is necessary to stay alive for Haemon, by refusing to become a mother and a wife, by scandalizing the public with her wavering gender, by embracing death as her bridal chamber and identifying her tomb as a “deep dug home”. If the love toward which she moves as she moves toward death is a love for her brother and thus, ambiguously, her father, it is also a love that can only be consummated by its obliteration, which is no consummation at all.

When the incest taboo works in this sense to foreclose a love that is not incestuous, what is produced is a shadowy realm of love, a love that persists in spite of its foreclosure in an ontologically suspended mode. What emerges is a melancholia that attends living and loving outside the livable and outside the field of love, where the lack of institutional sanction forces language into perpetual catachresis, showing not only how a term can continue to signify outside its conventional constraints but also how that shadowy form of signification takes its toll on a life by depriving it of its sense of ontological certainty and durability within a publicly constitute political sphere (294).

To accept those norms as coextensive with cultural intelligibility is to accept a doctrine that becomes the very instrument by which this melancholia is produced and reproduced at a cultural level. And it is overcome, in part, precisely through the repeated scandal by which the unspeakable nevertheless makes itself heard through borrowing and exploiting the very terms that are meant to enforce its silence (294-5).

If she is human, then the human has entered into catachresis: we no longer know its proper usage. And to the extent that she occupies the language that can never belong to her, she functions as a chiasm [crossing over] within the vocabulary of political norms. If kinship is the precondition of the human, then Antigone is the occasion for a new field of the human, achieved through political catachresis, the one that happens when the less than human speaks as human, when gender is displaced, and kinship founders on its own founding laws (297).

resignifications

(Salih 2002. p 114).
… can a single speaker wrest a term such as ‘lesbian’ from its prior contexts in order to make it signify in unexpectedly ‘innocent’ ways? If there is no doer behind the deed, then what sort of an agent will effect such a recontextualization, and must resignifications be recognized as such? Furthermore, if resignifications take place within discourse and the law, then how do we know that they are not themselves the products of the law? (Salih 2002. p 114).

If there is no prior subject, no doer behind the deed, then who or what is it that effects the kind of linguistic and semantic reallocations that Butler exemplifies in the interview quoted above? Would it be possible for me as a ‘subject-effect’ to make the autonomous and unilateral decision that ‘lesbian’ is now an affirmative term, particularly if my interlocutor is not in agreement with me? It is entirely possible that the ‘kid’ left her or his brief encounter with Butler with an unaltered view of the term ‘lesbian’ and those who identify as lesbians, and it could be argued that how we judge the efficacy of Butler’s appropriative strategy depends at least in part on the kid’s response. In that case, it would seem that, even if contexts are not binding, semantic consensus is still important in the successful redeployment of performatives.

We may accept with Derrida and Butler that sign and referent are not intrinsically connected, but in spite of this arbitrary link it is still not clear how it is possible to rematch signs with alternative referents. Just as Austin’s man on the waterfront cannot come along and name a ship Mr Stalin once it has been named something else, speakers cannot single-handedly alter the meaning of signs.

If Butler uses the term ‘lesbian’ in one way, and the Berkeley kid still understands it in another, what exactly has been achieved? According to Butler’s own reading of Althusser, the Berkeley kid might continue to ‘call’ Butler a lesbian in a way that is wounding and insulting, and even though Butler may not choose to recognize herself in the interpellation, the call of the kid will still have the performative force to subject and subjectivate Butler (Salih. 2002. p 115).

Excitable Speech does not provide a clear idea of how interpellatives may be replayed or their meanings altered. Butler accepts that words cannot be metaphorically purified of their historicity, even though she celebrates what she calls ‘the vulnerability of sullied terms to unexpected innocence’. However, she gives little sense of exactly how sullied terms may be made ‘innocent’ again, and indeed she herself seems reluctant to deploy such terms in Excitable Speech: whereas the word ‘queer’ has been widely appropriated so that in many contexts it is no longer a term of abuse, there is a question mark over ‘nigger’, which is still a verbal insult when used in certain contexts by certain speakers. Butler’s reluctance to resignify this term (which is used only once in Excitable Speech) may be symptomatic of her hesitation as to whether words do wound and her uncertainty as to how radical resignifications are effected. In that case, it would be possible to describe Excitable Speech itself as a failed performative since ultimately it does not enact the theory it describes. A further question, already raised, is whether we want to effect the appropriations and resignifications Butler advocates, since these acts, which might look subversive on the surface, may be no more than the effects of power. Why should we retain or remain attached to the terms that subordinate us, and how will it be possible to distinguish subversive repetitions from repetitions that merely strengthen existing power structures? The question of the subject’s attachment to subjection is the focus of The Psychic Life of Power, published in the same year as Excitable Speech, in which Butler returns to the issues of subjection, subjectivation and self-subjection in response to the call of the law (Salih 2002. p 116).

Does language enact what it names? Do words wound? Is threatening someone or talking about hitting them the same as actually doing so? Should representing sex or talking about sex/sexuality be construed as ‘sexual conduct’? Who decides whether representations are ‘obscene’ or ‘pornographic’, and should such representations be censored? These are some of the questions posed in Excitable Speech, where once again Foucault, Althusser, Austin and Derrida provide the theoretical frameworks for Butler’s analyses of language and the subject. In Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter the subject was characterized as a performative entity, but in Excitable Speech Butler argues that language is not necessarily (or indeed ever) an effective performative; in other words, it does not always enact what it names. Moreover, if we accept that the subject comes after rather than before the deed (an argument put forward in Gender Trouble and Bodies and reiterated here), then it will be difficult to ascertain who or what to prosecute in cases of hate speech or ‘obscenity’/‘pornography’. Butler is also concerned by the extent to which legal institutions are implicated in producing and circulating the ‘violent’/‘obscene’/‘pornographic’ representations they apparently aim to censor. If we accept Nietzsche’s formulation that there is no doer behind the deed, it may be difficult to see what agent or subject will bring about the semantic and linguistic changes Butler describes as necessary to the linguistic future of certain marginalized or oppressed communities. Furthermore, the idea that sullied terms are vulnerable to innocence is paradoxical, and Butler herself concedes that prior histories are significant in determining the meaning of signs. It is also not always clear as to why sullied terms should be appropriated, since such a practice may engage the subject in acts of self-subjection that effectively strengthen discourse and the law: self-subjection and the subject’s attachment to the law are dealt with in The Psychic Life of Power (Salih 2002. p 117).

interpellation

(Salih 2002. p 88-89)

To claim, as Butler does, that sex is always (‘to some degree’) performative is to claim that bodies are never merely described, they are always constituted in the act of description. When the doctor or nurse declares ‘It’s a girl/boy!’, they are not simply reporting on what they see (this would be a constative utterance), they are actually assigning a sex and a gender to a body that can have no existence outside discourse. In other words, the statement ‘It’s a girl/boy!’ is performative. Butler returns to the birth/ultrasound scene in the final chapter of Bodies, ‘Critically Queer’, where, as before, she argues that discourse precedes and constitutes the ‘I’, i.e. the subject: To the extent that the naming of the ‘girl’ is transitive, that is, initiates the process by which a certain ‘girling’ is compelled, the term or, rather, its symbolic power, governs the formation of a corporeally enacted femininity that never fully approximates the norm. This is a ‘girl’, however, who is compelled to ‘cite’ the norm in order to qualify and remain a viable subject. Femininity is thus not the product of a choice, but the forcible citation of a norm, one whose complex historicity is indissociable from relations of discipline, regulation, punishment. (BTM: 232) ‘It’s a girl!’ is not a statement of fact but an interpellation that initiates the process of ‘girling’, a process based on perceived and imposed differences between men and women, differences that are far from ‘natural’. To demonstrate the performative operations of interpellation, Butler cites a cartoon strip in which an infant is assigned its place in the sex– gender system with the exclamation ‘It’s a lesbian!’. ‘Far from an essentialist joke, the queer appropriation of the performative mimes and exposes both the binding power of the heterosexualizing law and its expropriability’, writes Butler (BTM: 232; her emphasis). We will return to expropriability and citation shortly; here the point to note is that, since sexual and gendered differences are performatively installed by and in discourse, it would be possible to designate or confer identity on the basis of an alternative set of discursively constituted attributes.

Clearly, to announce that an infant is a lesbian is not a neutral act of description but a performative statement that interpellates the infant as such. ‘It’s a girl!’ functions in exactly the same way: it is a performative utterance that henceforth compels the ‘girl’ to cite both sexual and gendered norms in order to qualify for subjecthood within the heterosexual matrix that ‘hails’ her (Salih 2002. p 88-89).

8) “It’s a girl!” and “It’s a lesbian” Are these really equivalent?

lesbian phallus pt 2

(Salih, 2002. p 86).

‘The question, of course, is why it is assumed that the phallus requires that particular body part to symbolize, and why it could not operate through symbolizing other body parts’, writes Butler, and she argues that the ‘displaceability’ of the phallus, its ability to symbolize body parts or body-like things other than the penis is what makes the lesbian phallus possible (BTM: 84).

Women can both ‘have’ and ‘be’ the phallus, which means that they can suffer from penis envy and a castration complex at the same time; moreover, since ‘the anatomical part is never commensurable with the phallus itself’, men may be driven by both castration anxiety and penis envy, or rather, ‘phallus envy’ (BTM: 85). The phallus is ‘a transferable phantasm’ (BTM: 86), ‘an imaginary effect’ (BTM: 88), part of an imagined morphology (or a ‘morphological imaginary’) that can be appropriated and made to signify/ symbolize differently.

Such ‘aggressive reterritorializations’ (BTM: 86) deprivilege the phallus as both symbol and signifier, as well as revealing its status within a bodily schema, which, like language, is a resignifiable signifying chain with no ‘transcendental signified’ at its origin. Butler makes the most of this resignifiability in her ascription of the phallus to other body parts:

‘Consider that “having” the phallus can be symbolized by an arm, a tongue, a hand (or two), a knee, a pelvic bone, an array of purposefully instrumentalized body-like things’, she writes. ‘[T]he simultaneous acts of deprivileging the phallus and removing it from the normative heterosexual form of exchange, and recirculating and reprivileging it between women deploys the phallus to break the signifying chain in which it conventionally operates’ (BTM: 88). Butler claims that the phallus is a ‘plastic’ signifier that may ‘suddenly’ be made to stand for any number of body parts, discursive performatives or alternative fetishes (BTM: 89).

And yet it would appear that the phallus remains somewhat elusive, since Butler does not specify exactly how such resignifications can ‘suddenly’ happen, or why women would want to make their arms, tongues, hands, pelvic bones, etc. into phallic signifiers. The subversive potential of the resignifiable phallus resides in Butler’s insistence that you do not need to have a penis in order to have or be a phallus, and that having a penis does not mean that you will have or be a phallus. ‘[T]he lesbian phallus offers the occasion (a set of occasions) for the phallus to signify differently, and in so signifying, to resignify, unwittingly, its own masculinist and heterosexist privilege’, she writes (BTM: 90).

Again we return to the idea that anatomy is discourse or signification rather than destiny, which means that the body can be resignified in ways that challenge rather than confirm heterosexual hegemony. In her conclusion to the second chapter of Bodies, Butler states that she is not suggesting that a new body part is required, since she has not been talking about the penis as such; instead she calls for the displacement of the symbolic heterosexual hegemony of sexual difference and the release of alternative imaginary schemas of erotogenic pleasure (BTM: 91). It would indeed appear that Butler has wrested this hitherto privileged signifier from Lacan’s discursive control (BTM: 82– 3), and yet the lesbian phallus she ‘offers’ in her description of alternative bodily schemas (BTM: 90) will be equally open to appropriation and resignification by those who do not identify as ‘lesbians’. Indeed, we might well wonder who can ‘have’ and ‘be’ a lesbian phallus that is presumably vulnerable to subversive reterritorialization by men who, among other complexes, may also suffer from ‘lesbian phallus envy’ (Salih, 2002. p 86).

WIELDING THE LESBIAN PHALLUS

The lesbian phallus is not a dildo and it is not something one keeps in one’s desk drawer (see GP: 37). The morphological imaginary is the morph or form the body takes on through imagined or fantasized projections, and Butler’s rewriting of Lacan’s morphological imaginary displaces the phallus from its privileged significatory position. Asserting that penis and phallus are not synonymous, Butler shows how the phallus may be ‘reterritorialized’ by people who do not have penises. This is because the phallus is a symbol of a body part whose absence or ‘vanishing’ it signifies. To disconnect sign (phallus) from referent (penis) in this way allows Butler to displace the privilege Lacan accords this phallic signifier. ‘Of course there’s also a joke in “The Lesbian Phallus” because to have the phallus in Lacan is also to control the signifier’, Butler states in an interview. ‘It is to write and to name, to authorize and to designate. So in some sense I’m wielding the lesbian phallus in offering my critique of the Lacanian framework. It’s a certain model for lesbian authorship. It’s parody’ (GP: 37) (Salih 2002. p 87).

Salih, Sara. Judith Butler. Routledge, 2002. p 62.

Butler has collapsed the sex/gender distinction in order to argue that there is no sex that is not always already gender. All bodies are gendered from the beginning of their social existence (and there is no existence that is not social), which means that there is no ‘natural body’ that pre-exists its cultural inscription. This seems to point towards the conclusion that gender is not something one is, it is something one does, an act, or more precisely, a sequence of acts, a verb rather than a noun, a ‘doing’ rather than a ‘being’ (GT: 25).

Melancholia part 1 of 2

Salih, Sara. Judith Butler. Routledge, 2002. p 53

In ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ Freud distinguishes between mourning, which is the reaction to a real loss, usually the death of a loved one, and melancholia. Since the melancholic does not always know what he or she has lost and is in fact sometimes unaware of having ‘lost’ anything at all, Freud regards it as a pathological condition resembling depression. He argues that, instead of ‘getting over’ and accepting the loss, the melancholic response is to take the lost object into the ego by identifying with it.

Identification is a concept that is central to Freud’s theories of the structuring of the mind into ego, superego and id and, as you might expect, denotes the process and effects of identifying with others, often as a response to loss.

Introjection is the process whereby the subject takes objects from the outside world into itself and preserves them in the ego, and is closely related to identification. In fact, identification takes place through introjection as an object is metaphorically ‘installed’ in the ego, and Butler will argue that introjection is not the only way in which identification takes place.

In The Ego and the Id Freud no longer regards melancholia as a pathology or mental illness, but he now describes all ego formation as a melancholic structure. Freud claims that in the process of ego-formation a child’s primary object-cathexes are transformed into an identification, a formulation that is not as complicated as it might sound once you have deciphered the Freudian terminology. Initially the infant desires one or other of its parents (these are its primary object-cathexes), but the taboo against incest means that these desires have to be given up. Like the melancholic who takes the lost object into heror himself and thereby preserves it, the ego introjects the lost object (the desired parent) and preserves it as an identification. ‘[A]n object which was lost has been set up again inside the ego – that is . . . an object-cathexis has been replaced by an identification’, Freud writes (1923: 367). The ego is therefore a repository of all the desires it has had to give up, or as Freud puts it, ‘the character of the ego is a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes and . . . it contains the history of those object-choices’ (1923: 368).

Salih, Sara. Judith Butler.
Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 2002. p 53.

Mourning: the response to a real loss.

Melancholia: the response to an imagined loss. Object-cathexis: the desire for an object; in this case, one’s mother or father.

Identification: the process by which one comes to identify with someone or something; in this context, the object that has been lost. Identifications take place through introjection or incorporation.

Introjection: the process whereby objects from the outside world are taken into and preserved in the ego.

Incorporation: Dispositions: the process whereby objects are preserved on the surface of the body (Freud does not discuss incorporation in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ or The Ego and the Id). whether, from birth onwards, you desire members of the same or the opposite sex.

Salih, Sara. Judith Butler.Routledge, 2002. p 54.

If your primary desire is for your mother, you will introject the figure of your mother and establish an identification with her; conversely, if your primary desire is for your father, you will substitute your impermissible object-cathexis for an identification with him. Freud is not sure what determines the primary object-cathexis – i.e. why the infant desires one parent rather than the other – but he gets around this problem by attributing the direction of the infant’s desire to what he calls dispositions.

By ‘disposition’ he appears to mean the infant’s innate desire for a member of the opposite or the same sex, but Freud expresses some hesitation on this subject in his description of the development of the ‘little girl’. Freud writes that, after relinquishing her father as a primary love-object, the girl ‘will bring her masculinity into prominence and identify with her father (that is, with the object that has been lost) instead of with her mother. This will clearly depend on whether the masculinity in her disposition – whatever that may consist in – is strong enough [i.e. to identify with her father]’ (1923: 372). It would seem that object-cathexes are the result of primary dispositions, i.e. whether one is innately ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ to start with, and, as you might expect by now, Butler refutes Freud’s somewhat tentative postulation of innate sexual ‘dispositions’.

Salih, Sara. Judith Butler.
Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 2002. p 54.

Melancholic Heterosexuality

Now let us look at what Butler does with Freud. Butler is interested in the ‘dispositions’ Freud glosses over somewhat hastily, but, rather than accepting that they are innate, she wants to know how ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ dispositions can be traced to an identification, and where those identifications take place. In fact, Butler asserts that dispositions are the effects of identifications with the parent of the same/ opposite sex rather than the causes of those identifications; in other words, desire does not come first. ‘What are these primary dispositions on which Freud himself apparently founders?’ she asks, noting the ‘hyphenated doubt’ (‘– whatever that may consist in –’) with which he interrupts his assertion (GT: 60). While Freud describes ego formation as a melancholic structure because the infant is forced to give up its desire for its parents in response to the taboo against incest, Butler argues that the taboo against incest is preceded by the taboo against homosexuality (although curiously, she does not specify her source here) (GT: 63). This seems to imply that the child’s primary desire is always for the parent of the same sex – after all, why do you need a taboo if there is nothing to prohibit? – and although Butler argues that the law produces the desire it subsequently prohibits, she is still unspecific as to why one desire is produced and repressed before another. ‘Although Freud does not explicitly argue in its favour, it would appear that the taboo against homosexuality must precede the heterosexual incest taboo’, writes Butler (GT: 64) and, although she reiterates this assertion several times in this section, the qualifiers she introduces here (‘Although Freud’, ‘it would appear’) resemble the ‘hyphenated doubt’ that she notes in Freud’s description of dispositions. All the same, the assertion that the taboo against homosexuality precedes the incest taboo is crucial to Butler’s argument that gender and sex identities are formed in response to prohibition. Rather than regarding gender or sex as innate, Butler asserts that ‘gender identity appears primarily to be the internalization of a prohibition that proves to be formative of identity’ (GT: 63). Since the ‘prohibition’ to which Butler refers is the taboo against homosexuality, it is clear that for Butler all gender identity is founded on a primary, forbidden homosexual cathexis or desire. If melancholia is the response to real or imagined loss, and if heterosexual gender identity is formed on the basis of the primary loss of the same-sexed object of desire, it follows that heterosexual gender identity is melancholic. Butler’s Foucauldian appropriation of Freud’s theories of mourning, melancholia and ego formation and her argument that heterosexuality is founded on primary homosexual desire constitute one of Gender Trouble’s most important achievements and, since the theory of melancholic gender identities and identifications underscores so much of her subsequent work, I will quote Butler at length here by way of summary:

If feminine and masculine dispositions are the result of the effective internalization of [the taboo against homosexuality], and if the melancholic answer to the loss of the same-sexed object is to incorporate and, indeed, to become that object through the construction of the ego-ideal, then gender identity appears primarily to be the internalization of a prohibition that proves to be formative of identity.

Further, this identity is constructed and maintained by the consistent application of this taboo, not only in the stylization of the body in compliance with discrete categories of sex but in the production and ‘disposition’ of sexual desire . . . dispositions are not the primary sexual facts of the psyche, but produced effects of a law imposed by culture and by the complicitous and transvaluating acts of the ego ideal (Judith Butler. Gender Trouble 63-4, cited in Salih, 56).

gender

Sara Salih. Judith ButlerRoutledge 2002.

What Butler means is that gender is an act or a sequence of acts that is always and inevitably occurring, since it is impossible to exist as a social agent outside the terms of gender (GT: 5 cited in Salih 47).

Butler argues that sex and gender are discursively constructed and that there is no such position of implied freedom beyond discourse. Culturally constructed sexuality cannot be repudiated, so that the subject is left with the question of how to acknowledge and ‘do’ the construction it is already in (GT: 31). Gender Trouble will describe how genders and sexes are currently ‘done’ within the heterosexual matrix, while elaborating on how it is possible to ‘do’ those constructions differently (Salih, 48).

‘gender is not a noun[but it] proves to be performative, that is, constituting the identity it is purported to be. In this sense, gender is always a doing, though not a doing by a subject who might be said to preexist the deed’ (GT: 25 Salih, 50).

Reading structuralist and psychoanalytic accounts of gender, identity and the law through a Foucauldian lens Butler

gives what she calls ‘a discursive account of the cultural production of gender’; in other words, she works from the premise that gender is a discursive construct, something that is produced, and not a ‘natural fact’;
and characterizes the law as multiple, proliferating and potentially self-subverting as opposed to the singular, prohibitive and rigidly repressive law posited by other theorists (for example, Lacan) (Salih, Sara. Judith Butler: 51).

‘There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very “expressions” that are said to be its results’ (GT: 25 cited in Salih 63).

‘That the gendered body is performative suggests that it has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality’, she writes (GT: 136; my emphasis).

Once again we return to the notion that there is no doer behind the deed, no volitional agent that knowingly ‘does’ its gender, since the gendered body is inseparable from the acts that constitute it. All the same, in the account of parody and drag that follows this description it does at times sound as though there is an actor or a ‘doer’ behind the deed, and Butler later admits that in Gender Trouble she ‘waffled’ between describing gender in terms of linguistic performativity and characterizing it as straightforward theatre. Her theories are clarified in Bodies That Matter where Butler emphasizes the Derridean and Austinian underpinnings of performativity that are as yet only implicit in Gender Trouble (Salih. 2002. p 65).

Gender does not happen once and for all when we are born, but is a sequence of repeated acts that harden into the appearance of something that’s been there all along. If gender is ‘a regulated process of repetition’ taking place in language, then it will be possible to repeat one’s gender differently, as drag artists do (and you might also recall my wardrobe analogy – the ripped clothes and the sequins representing my attempts to ‘do’ my gender in subversive and unexpected ways). As I argued previously, you cannot go out and acquire a whole new gender wardrobe for yourself, since, as Butler puts it, ‘[t]here is only a taking up of the tools where they lie, where the very “taking up” is enabled by the tool lying there’ (GT: 145). So you have to make do with the ‘tools’, or in my example, the ‘clothes’ that you already have, radically modifying them in ways which will reveal the ‘unnatural’ nature of gender. There are two problems with this formulation: one is that the manner of taking up the tool will be determined as well as enabled by the tool itself – in other words, subversion and agency are conditioned, if not determined, by discourses that cannot be evaded. This leads to the second problem, which is that, if subversion itself is conditioned and constrained by discourse, then how can we tell that it is subversion at all? What is the difference between subversive parody and the sort of ‘ordinary’ parody that Butler claims everyone is unwittingly engaged in anyway. All gender is parodic, but Butler warns that ‘[p]arody by itself is not subversive’ and she poses the important question as to which performances effect the various destabilizations of gender and sex she describes, and where those performances take place (GT: 139). There are some forms of drag that are definitely not subversive, but serve only to reinforce existing heterosexual power structures – in Bodies, Butler cites Dustin Hoffman’s performance in Tootsie as an example of what she calls ‘high het entertainment’ (see Chapter 3, this volume), and we might also add the more recent film Mrs Doubtfire in which Robin Williams gives a cross-dressed performance as a nanny. Neither of these drag performances are subversive, since they serve to reinforce existing distinctions between ‘male’ and ‘female’, ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’, ‘gay’ and ‘straight’.

Butler’s claim on the penultimate page of Gender Trouble that ‘[t]he task is not whether to repeat, but how to repeat, or, indeed to repeat and, through a radical proliferation of gender, to displace the very gender norms that enable the repetition itself’ (GT: 148) presents a similar problem: she has already asserted that to describe identity as an effect is not to imply that identity is ‘fatally determined’ or ‘fully artificial and arbitrary’, and yet at times it sounds as though the subject she describes is in fact trapped within a discourse it has no power to evade or to alter. In which case, ‘how to repeat’ will already be determined in advance, and what looks like agency is merely yet another effect of the law disguised as something different. All the same, this is certainly not a view Butler expresses, and she seems optimistic about the possibilities of denaturalizing, proliferating and unfixing identities in order to reveal the constructed nature of heterosexuality. A proliferation of identities will reveal the ontological possibilities that are currently restricted by foundationalist models of identity (i.e. those theories which assume that identity is simply there and fixed and final). This is not, then, ‘the death of the subject’, or if it is, it is the theoretical death of an old, fixed subject, and the birth of a new, constructed one characterized by subversive possibility and agency. ‘Construction is not opposed to agency; it is the necessary scene of agency’, Butler affirms (GT: 147; see also CF: 15), and this leads her to refute another assumption popular among critics who are hostile to so-called ‘postmodern’ formulations of identity: ‘[t]he deconstruction of identity is not the deconstruction of politics; rather, it establishes as political the very terms through which identity is articulated’ (GT: 148) (Salih.2002. p 67).

Gender Trouble calls the category of the subject into question as Butler engages in a genealogical critique that analyzes the conditions of the subject’s emergence within discourse. Butler deploys psychoanalytic, Foucauldian and feminist theories in her discussions of homosexuality and heterosexuality and their mutual construction within the law. Heterosexual identities are constructed in relation to their abjected homosexual ‘Other’, but melancholic heterosexuals are haunted by the trace of this ‘Other’ which is never finally or fully abjected. This means that identities are by no means as straight, straightforward or singular as they appear and may be subversively worked against the grain in order to reveal the unstable, resignifiable nature of all gender identities. Some of these subversive practices are outlined in Gender Trouble and are analyzed further in her next book, Bodies That Matter (Salih 2002. p 71)

butler discourse

In sum, then, Butler’s desire to engage the structured movement of differentiation within language does not preclude the existence of an outside language that truly does exceed our perceptions and representations; it’s just that the human condition bars access to it. Accordingly, the perception and representation of this outside, despite its convincing transparency and our sense of its immediate accessibility, will always be a language effect — a cultural production. Butler’s reliance on the overarching term ‘culture’ as the explanatory category that contains this shifting process surely makes the point. In other words, language and culture and mutually implicated — indeed, some would say they are one and the same (68).

No signifier can be radically representative, for every signifier is the site of a perpetual méconnaisance; it produces the expectation of a unity, a full and final recognition that can never be achieved. Paradoxically, the failure of such signifiers … fully to describe the constituency they name is precisely what constitutes these signifiers as sites of phantasmatic investment and discursive rearticulation. It is what opens the signifier to new meanings and new possibilities for political resignification. It is this open-ended and performative function of the signifier that seems to me to be crucial to a radical democratic notion of futurity (Butler in Bodies That Matter, 191. cited in Kirby JB: Live Theory, 73).

If women and other socially abjected subjects are themselves subjected to/through these same significatory transformations then their existence and its significance must be determined within the Symbolic order. Unfortunately, Žižek’s reading of the bar as an absolute prohibition, as if the cut of castration is a definitive fact, reaffirms an ‘outside discourse’ in derelict terms of trauma and castration. Thus, by appropriating Lacan’s notion of the Real to explain this foreclosure, Žižek actually endorses the inevitability, the indisputable necessity, of this violent inheritance of abject subject formation.

In view of this, Butler’s intervention is important because it illustrates that the bar is not an absolute, fixed barrier, but a process of demarcation, an ongoing attempt to bar or draw a line that is never finished. The installation of the bar as an absolute frame achieves the effect of both discovering and repudiating that outside as inherently deficient and naturally base (Kirby, 2006: 73).

By interrogating the foundation, or what is supposedly ‘given’ as the indifferent ground of valuation, and by discovering that it is forged from the same political determinations as other significatory practices, Butler is able to dispense with the foreclosure of the Real entirely (73).

Butler politics what makes a life livable

What moves me politically, and that for which I want to make room is the moment in which a subject — a person, a collective — asserts a right or entitlement to a livable life when no such prior authorization exists, when no clearly enabling convention is in place. (Undoing Gender 2004, (2002) 224).

When we ask what makes a life livable, we are asking about certain normative conditions that must be fulfilled for life to become life. And so there are at least two senses of life, the one, which refers to the minimum biological form of living, and another, which intervenes at the start, which establishes the minimum conditions for a livable life with regard to human life. And this does not imply that we can disregard the merely living in favor of the “livable life,” but that we must ask, as we asked about gender violence, what humans require in order to maintain and reproduce the conditions of their own livability. And what are our politics such that we are in whatever way possible, both conceptualizing the possiblity of the livable life and arranging for its institutional support. There will always be disagreement about what this means, and those who claim that a single political direction is necessitated by virtue of this commitment will be mistaken. But this is only because to live it to live a life politically, in relation to power, in relation to others, in the act of assuming responsibility for a collective future … Democracy does not speak in unison; its tunes are dissonant, and necessarily so (226).

One could say that for her (Anzaldua), the subject is “multiple” rather than unitary, and that would be to get the point in a way. But I think her point is more radical. She is asking us to stay at the edge of what we know, to put our own epistemological certainties into question, and through that risk and openness to another way of knowing and of living in the world to expand our capacity to imagine the human. She is asking us to be able to work in coalitions across differences that will make a more inclusive movement. What she is arguing, then, is that it is only through existing in the mode of translation, constant translation, that we stand a chance of producing a multicultural understanding of women or, indeed, of society. The unitary subject is the one who knows already what it is, who enters the conversation the same way as it exits, who fails to put its own epistemological certainties at risk in the encounter with the other, and so stays in place, guards its place, and becomes an emblem for property and territory, refusing self-transformation, ironically, in the name of the subject (228).

There is the possibility of appearing impermeable, of repudiating vulnerability itself. There is the possibility of becoming violent. But perhaps there is some other way to live in such a way that one is neither fearing death, becoming socially dead from fear of being killed, or becoming violent, and killing others, or subjecting them to live a life of social death predicated upon the fear of literal death. Perhaps this other way to live requires a world in which collective means are found to protect bodily vulnerability without precisely eradicating it. Surely some norms will be useful for building such a world, but they will be norms that no one will own, norms that will have to work not through normalization or racial and ethnic assimilation, but through becoming collective sites of continuous political labor (231).