[Fwd: [PEN-L:2529] Butler and bad writing]

rc&am rcollins at netlink.com.au
Mon Jan 25 10:03:37 PST 1999


with mark's compliments

-------- Original Message -------- From: MLAFFEY at KENTVM.KENT.EDU Subject: [PEN-L:2529] Butler and bad writing Resent-From: Mark Laffey <MLAFFEY at KENTVM.KENT.EDU>


>>I have not followed all of the discussion about Butler but the repeated
references to bad writing made me think that the following might help. These are a couple of excerpts from a paper of mine that criticises the turn to Butler in international relations theory (yes, really). They focus on Butler's key notion of performativity and mention in passing one of the main criticisms of this notion made most strongly by materialist feminist scholars such as Kathi Weeks and Rosemary Hennessy. Both of the mentioned works are in the edited volume Marxism Beyond Marxism (Routledge, 1996 or 1997).
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>>Mark Laffey
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>>Initially articulated as a critique of compulsory heterosexuality within
feminism (Osborne, 1996: 110), the notion of performativity is best understood as an attempt to avoid two forms of reductionism: on the one hand, a metaphysical voluntarism that makes agency an unexplained attribute of the sovereign subject, and on the other, a fatalistic determinism that sees the subject as completely determined by social context. While acknowledging the social construction of gender, Butler is also concerned about the politically disabling consequences of theories of social determination. Her aim is therefore both to recognize that the subject is socially constructed and, at the same time, to argue that this does not mean the erasure of agency. Butler seeks to open up a space for agency through the notion of the performative.
>>"A performative act is one which brings into being or enacts that which it
names, and so marks the constitutive or productive power of discourse. To the extent that a performative appears to 'express' a prior intention, a doer behind the deed, that prior agency is only legible as the effect of that utterance" (Butler, 1995: 134). Subjects do not exist somehow behind or outside discourse but are constituted in and through it. Performativity is the "vehicle though which ontological effects [such as the effect of a sovereign doer behind the deed] are established" (Butler, quoted in Osborne, 1996: 112). At the same time, while they are constituted through discourse, this constitution is "an activity not an act; the subject is not a final product but an ongoing, always incomplete series of effects of a process of reiteration" (Weeks, 1996: 94).
>> Contrary to some voluntarist misreadings (deriving from an equation of
'performative' with 'performance') of the initial articulation of her position in Gender Trouble (1990) as implying that gender was radically free, Butler has subsequently emphasised that this is not the case. Rather, performativity implies a kind of compulsory reiteration of those norms through which a subject is constituted: "The 'performative' dimension of construction is precisely the forced reiteration of norms" (Butler, 1993: 94; emphasis added). Agency is then located in the possibility for variation on that reiteration through resignification (Butler, 1995: 135). The notion of a performative is defined in relation to linguistic conventions: the model is the practice of citing (i.e., to re-cite) in legal practice. Butler is explicit about this: for instance, she equates performativity with "citationality" (1993: 21) and illustrates her argument by reference to "the judge who... invariably cites the law that he applies" thereby giving the performative "its binding or conferring power" (1993: 225). "For a performative to work", that is, to reproduce or reiterate a particular effect, such as bringing a subject into being, "it must draw upon and recite a set of linguistic conventions which have traditionally worked to bind or engage certain kinds of effects" (Butler, 1995: 134). Linguistic here does not mean mere words; by signification Butler means not just "how it is that certain signifiers come to mean what they mean, but how certain discursive forms articulate objects and subjects in their intelligibility" (1995: 138). Reiteration is compulsory, but agency lies in the possibility of resignification, i.e., the reworking of the discourse through which subject effects are produced.
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>>Butler's model makes reproduction internal to the cultural practice of
citation. This obscures the relations between the multiple logics that constitute the social and their implications for the reproduction or transformation of subjectivity. As Hennessy (1996) shows, the reproduction of heterosexuality -- the "forced reiteration of [heterosexual] norms" (Butler, 1993: 94) -- is effected through both cultural practices associated with the institution of marriage and the division of labor. In short, reproduction is overdetermined by practices and relations that are not reducible to the cultural practice of citation nor readily captured by it. Explaining the reproduction of heterosexuality therefore requires that signifying practices be located in their social context. Although a warrant for such an analysis can be found in Butler's work, she does not follow this course; consequently, "[t]he relations between socioeconomic and political institutions on the one hand and everyday signifying practices on the other are invisible in her account" (Weeks, 1996: 95-6).
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