Yes, I thought it was appropos.
> I just noticed the shift to Snit,
>and the d-c-m on your e-address, that's why I made the joke.
Borrowed e-mail address. Finally figured out how to change the from-name. Snit as appropriate but generally more because I don't feel like typing out all the r's as the number of r's *means* something though it's constantly shifting--the meaning behind the r's--so that it's difficult to keep up.
>Hmm. But I don't think performativity is reducible to performance art,
>some of which works, some of which doesn't.
Perhaps not. But this is where _Gender Trouble_ was taken by its readers. And by Butler. The Madonna Industry was in full gear at the time, too, you'll recall. But below is what she wrote, no?
"Practices of parody can serve to reengage and reconsolidate the very distinction between a privileged and naturalized gender configuration and one that appears as derived, phantasmatic, and mimetic--a failed copy as it were...The parodic repetition of gender exposes the illusion of gender identity as an intractable depth and inner substance. As the effects of a sublte and politically enforced performativity, gender is an 'act' as it were, that is open to splittings, self-parody, self-criticims, and those hyperolic exhibitions of 'the nature' that, in their very exaggeration, reveal its fundamentally phantasmatic status? (146-7)
This, of course, has strategic, political ramifications w/ regard to feminist politics:
"the reconceptualization of identity as an effect, that is, as produced or generated, opens up possibilities of 'agency' that are insidiously foreclosed by positions that take identity categories as foundational and fixed. For an identity to be an effect means that it is neither fatally determined nor fully artificial and arbitrary...Construction is not opposed to agency; it is the necessary scene of agency, the very terms in which agency is articulated and becomes culturall y intelligible. The critical task for feminism is not to establish a point of view outside of constructed identities; that conceit is the construction of an epistemological model that would disavow its own cultural location and, hence, promote itself as a global subject...The critical task is, rather, to locate strategies of subversive repetition enabled by those constructions, to affirm the local possibilities of intervention through participating in preceisely those practices of repeition that constitute identity and, therefore, present the immanent possibility of contesting them...The deconstruction of identity is not the deconstruction of politics; rather, it establishes the very terms through which identity is articulated....The task here is not to celebrate each every new possibility qua possibility, but to redescribe those possibilities that already exist, but which exist within cultural domains designated as culturally unintelligible and impossible" (147-9).
The thing about Butler is that she (and most of her fans and critics) fails to realize that this stuff has already been written about before, though not with the same political intentions. Erving Goffman wrote about the Presentation of Self in Everyday life in which he argued that the self performs on a shifting stage every day, but even this analogy is inaequate, he insisted, because there is no true self behind the performing self. He also wrote a short little piece, Gender Advertisements about gender performance. And I think another one about being fooled by a transvestite. Something like that anyway.
I love Genny Cream Ale. We
>drank it alot back in college. Most people I meet can't stand the stuff
>though.
You know I once worked in a classy little joint--hey Alec, they used to have live jazz with the likes of Buddy Rich and Dizzy 'cause my boss hung out in dark little jazz clubs in the 40s with the likes of Rich and Dizzy--and my boss considered himself a connoisseur of beer and wine. A blind taste test revealed that Schmidt's (in them thar short stubby brown glass bottles) held up to the finest beers around the world.
But hey K, how many working class folks were at the conference?
>What kind of conference was it? I'm just curious.
Well I suppose it depends on who constitutes the working class. Can such a thing, such an entity be constituted? Anyway, it was in Flint Michigan. Do I rack up any street cred for that? I can't remember the dang name of the conference but I do know that it included lots of folks involved in various kinds of social movment work as well as in social work. It was about bridging theory and practice.
>Let us consider that a subject is not only formed in subordination, but
>that this subordination provides the subject's continuing condition of
>possibility. A child's love is prior to judgment and decision; a child
>tended and nourished in a "good enough" way will love, and only later
>stand a chance of discriminating among those he or she loves. This is
>to say, not that the child loves blindly (since from early on there is
>discernment and "knowingness" of an important kind), but only that if
>the child is to persist in a psychic and social sense, there must be
>dependency and the formation of attachment: there is no possibility of
>not loving, where love is bound up with the requirements for life. The
>child does not know to what he/she attaches; yet the infant as well as
>the child must attach in order to persist in and as itself. No subject
>can emerge without this attachment, formed in dependency, but no
>subject, in the course of its formation, can ever afford fully to "see"
>it. This attachment in its primary forms must both *come to be* and *be
>denied*, its coming to be must consist in its partial denial, for the
>subject to emerge.
Okay, I can read same in, say, Penelope Leach's books on childrearing. Yes. Freud foregrounded this reading with his discussion of eros and thanatos, a life instinct and a death instinct which only means that in order to develop psychically/socially one must come to destroy and preserve at the same time that which one loves.
> That accounts in part for the adult sense of humiliation when
>confronted with the earliest objects of love--parents, guardians,
>siblings, and so on--the sense of belated indignation in which one
>claims, "I couldn't possibly love such a person." The utterance
>concedes the possibility it denies, establishing the "I" as predicated
>upon that foreclosure, grounded in and by that firmly imagined
>possibility. The "I" is thus fundamentally threatened by the specter of
>this (impossible) love's reappearance and remains condemned to reenact
>that love unconsciously, repeatedly reliving and displacing that
>scandal, that impossibility, orchestrating that threat to one's sense of
>"I." "'I' could not be who I am if I were to love in the way that I
>apparently did, which I must, to persist as myself, continue to deny and
>yet unconsciously reenact in contemporary life with the most terrible
>suffering as its consequence."
My grad school mentor used to read (to intro students for pete's sake) the story of the daughter of a Nazi somethingerother who'd escaped to Brazil. When confronted w/ the knowledge of the crimes her father had committed, she told a story about how he'd hold her hand as they looked out the stars in the skies and he'd delight her with stories about the constellations. He is that and he is not. I loved that man and I did not. How could I love that man and how could I not?
He also used to talk about a man he'd heard about when he was young, (he was an exile from Nazi Germany) who loved patent leather shoes. He'd stand at the bottem of escalators and steal the left (only the left) patent leather high heeled shoe off the unfortunate woman wearing hers that day. What this had to do with anything was beyond me, something about Commodity Fetishism as he read from Marx soon after that discussion.
>I read this all in the overarching movement from foreclosure to
>melancholia. That movement as the site of vanquishing, primarily the
>Hegelian "loss of the loss". P. 24:
>
>Is this what Hegel called "the loss of the loss," a foreclosure that
>constitutes an unknowability without which the subject cannot endure, an
>ignorance and melancholia that makes possible all claims of knowledge as
>one's own?
Yes, this is why I call it the Opaque Self. The self, if it is anything, is a center of opacity--unknowability--that is required in order for the self and self-reflection to be.
>Oh heck, here's a little more, about going from the subject to politics,
>p. 29 (by the way, I'm not too far along in the book, just in the first
>chapter on Hegel):
>
>A critical analysis of subjection involves: (1) an account of the way
>regulatory power maintains subjects in subordination by producing and
>exploiting the demand for continuity, visibility, and place; (2)
>recognition that the subject produced as continuous, visible, and
>located is nevertheless haunted by an inassimilable remainder, a
>melancholia that marks the limits of subjectivation; (3) an account of
>the iterability of the subject that shows how agency may well consist in
>opposing and transforming the social terms by which it is spawned.
> Although such a formulation can hardly be the basis for an optimistic
>view of the subject or of a subject-centered politics, it may stand as a
>provocation and as a caution against two forms of theoretical desire:
>one in which assuming and stating a "subject-position" [us bisexual
>queers? - Alec] is the consummate moment of politics;
I think there is a difference between saying " I am ____therefore____" and saying "hey what about us Black women?" to the binary discourse of man/woman of white middle class feminists or "hey what about us bisexuals?" to the binary discourse of het/homo. The former does insist on a stable identity from which one may speak; the latter does and it does not.
>and another in
>which the dismissal of the subject as a philosophical trope
>underestimates the linguistic requirements for entering sociality at
>all.
>Haven't been able to find Hegemony and SS. The SF public library
>doesn't have any listings for Laclau. I did pick up Mouffe's Return of
>the Political the other day. But hey, I've got to finish the German
>Ideology first! There's some interesting stuff in Althusser's _For
>Marx_ also.
>
Well. Do you want to read Butler with me n Frances or not? Eliding the demand will not work with me Alec Cat.
Snit
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