-------- 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).
>>
>>Mark Laffey
>>
>>
>>
>><snip>
>>
>>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.
>>
>><snip>
>>
>>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).
>>
>>
>