William Lear wrote:
By "social construction" of something, say gender, I assume what is meant is something other than innate development. That is, the human liver and its function are not something that is socially constructed (though they are in part "environmentally constructed"). To be "socially constructed" means to be defined, e.g., behaviorally, by social convention.
ML: Butler's argument is that through the reiteration of gender norms there are produced "bodies that matter", by which she means at once to materialize and to mean. The reiteration of gender norms thus shapes and sexes the body. Part of what she is getting at here is how certain physical attributes -- say breasts on women -- come to be understood as erotic and linked to all sorts of ritualised practices. But she is also getting at the ways in which such practices actually shape the body: examples might be silicone breast implants or being slim. The reiteration of norms thus produces bodies that are under- stood in certain ways and are also shaped, literally, in certain ways.
The risk of seeing subjects (can't we just use the word "people", aren't we all subjects in one way or another? Well, I won't quibble...) as solely formed by social convention has dangers, so
ML: the body/subject distinction is not well-captured if we just say "people." What Butler, in line with standard feminist arguments, is pointing to is the fact that we never find people in the abstract but always people who are certain kinds of subjects: gendered, raced etc.
while Butler wants to retain this, she also wants to add another piece, aimed at one particular shortcoming of viewing subjects as solely constructed by social convention, namely, that this view erases agency of the subject (I assume "agency" is akin to Free Will?). Her addition which is aimed at allowing for agency is called "the performative". She locates the "act", or ongoing "activity", of "performativity" in "discourse", which I assume means some form of social encounter among humans. This performative act brings into being the thing it "names" or refers to. I'm curious to know why, if Butler is trying to propose something other than social construction, she constructs a theory ("performativity") which is based on human social interaction. Is not then performativity itself social construction? This seems to me to be the case, especially since Butler says that "The 'performative' dimension of construction is precisely the forced reiteration of norms", and where else can these norms be reproduced, but in culture.
ML: Performativity is a way of saying 'yes, subjects are social constructions, but they are nonetheless not determined in the sense that they can change those conditions that produce them but they can only do so on the basis of the ways in which they are constructed in the first place. This is akin to Robert Brenner's argument about the transition from feudalism to capitalism: you cannot explain the transition by assuming that the feudal mode of production already contained within itself capitalist social relations. That way lies the essentialising of capitalism as having always existed. Instead, you have to show how, on the basis of feudalism, forms of action were possible that produced capitalism. Butler is trying to specify this kind of transformative possibility but to do so in a somewhat more precise way (depending on your point of view, I guess) than does Brenner.
I'm also curious: What does it mean to "bring[] into being" a subject?
ML: think of it this way -- all we have is an endless series of ongoing practices and activities. How then do we cut into those practices in order to assign responsibility for them to a thinking, acting, willing subject? How do we order the blooming buzzing confusion of the social world in such a way that it appears as the effect of individual actions? What Butler is saying is that subjects are effects of practices -- such as those laws and the like that treat people as atomised individuals -- but that this production is never finis hed. Instead it is continuous.
Butler thinks that agency lives in the interstices of reiteration. Somehow the repeated acts are not smooth, are discontinuous, and therefore agency sneaks in.
ML: yes, that's right, so long as we don't see agency as defined in contrast to the social construction of the subject. Rather, the latter is the condition of the former.
She equates performativity with "citationality", or citing things repeatedly. This repeated citation demands a certain linguistic continuity ("it must draw upon and recite a set of linguistic conventions"), but aside from that, there is some form of (unnamed) element in subsequent reformulations which is to some extent "skewed" from earlier ones, thus providing the cracks in the subject formation in which agency can appear. I could easily see how skewed reformulation actually provided better "cover" for pernicious ideas. Even if ideas were entirely "orthogonal", they have some persistence (the slave-owner tells the black that they are lazy and worthless today, tomorrow he says they are stupid and dirty the next --- just how does a lack of overlap provide for *more* agency rather than less?).
ML: Butler's model is the practice of citing but by a practice I think she means more than this example suggests. There's not much real change going on here. Try a labor example instead: workers engaged in a series of debates about their relationship with their employer. Now that discussion has to take place using the language available to the workers and Butler would argue the forms of subjectivity brought into being by it. But if social construction was determinative, in the sense that Butler is arguing against, then workers would never be able to transform themselves into (say) revolutionary subjects. They would be trapped in the limits of the discourse through which they are pro duced as subjects, as Butler might put it. But we know that sometimes workers do become revolutionary subjects. How does this occur? Through the performati ve, which produces that which it names (note that making practices equivalent to language is an oversimplifcation but it serves to illustrate the point). Obviously, you don't become a revoluytionary worker just by talking about it but that is part of it, as is engaging in certain other practices. Part of her point here is that the revolutionary subject isn't just lying around like a costume that you can simply put on but rather it has to be produced on the basis of and out of and by non-revolutionary subjects (again, see the Brenner example above).
So, what I get from this is that because of some form of discrepancy in succeeding formulations of norms ("multiple logics"?), subjects are able to somehow detect this inconsistency and to thereby "act" as agents (do they commit an act of agency in detecting this?).
ML: No. By multiple logics, what I was getting at is the way in which you cannot equate the social world with a logic of signification, as Butler, in common with Laclau and Mouffe and others, tends to do. There are other logics, like capital accumulation, for instance, which is not reducible to a logic of signification. And subjects do not detect the inconsistency -- although they might well be aware of it -- in order to act; that makes it sound like agency is external to the processes of social construction, which is to return us to a metaphysical notion of agency, of the kind that characterises liberal social theory. Of course, people are amateur social theorists, in that they are aware of their situations, give reasons for their actions and so forth. What Butler is trying to get at are the conditions of possibility of those reasons and awarenesses.
So culture ("cultural practices") reinforces heterosexual norms through marriage and the division of labor. Then, "reproduction" (intercourse, pregnancy, childbirth?) is "overdetermined" by things that "are not reducible to ... citation", i.e., marriage and division of labor. By "overdetermined", I assume she means there are multiple factors pushing in the same (similar, given the lack of precise overlap?) direction (some of) which are individually capable of producing the observed effect of subject formation.
ML: Not quite. The argument that Hennessy is making here, as a critique of Butler, is that she locates the reproduction -- on her account, the forced reproduction -- of gender norms in a cultural logic of signification (saying "I do", for instance). But the reproduction of heterosexuality also depends on property relations, and while it is probably possible to talk about the ways in which such relations implicate forms of representation, they serve to reproduce heterosexuality through a logic that again is not reducible to the kind of citational model deployed by Butler. The argument is not about reproduction in the biological sense but rather about the ways in which the reproduction of the species is carried out within a heterosexual set of social arrangements and a gendered division of labor and why heterosexuality as a social institution persists (note also that this is not a nature/nurture argument; Butler's argument neither implicates nor contests genetic claims but rather tries to account for how it is that a very wide range of genetic possibilities in terms of gender -- as opposed to sex -- are narrowed down into a much smaller range of what is taken to be the normal and the natural).
I'm sorry to be dense, but just how is any of this novel? Don't we know that despite vicious and repeated attacks on people, they can retain dignity, hope, sense of self, agency? And don't we know that this same repetition is sometimes extremely difficult to overcome? And why does Butler assume that it is *further* efforts to undermine a person's sense of self, their agency, that produce the effect of agency? What role would activism and scholarship aimed at undermining power and its institutions have? It is not a form of resignification, but it does often have the effect of freeing people from the labels they have come to internalize. And how does what she describes fall outside of "social context", whatever that might encompass? She tries to say subject formation is not "completely determined by social context", but if she is to do so, she needs to show how *her* account is not a part of "social context".
ML: I don't think she would disagree with the first part of this but she is not making the claim that it is further efforts to undermine a person's sense of self that produce the effect of agency (see above). Also, she is saying quite explicitly that subject formation is "inside" social context -- how could it be otherwise? -- but that agency is nonetheless possible, precisely on the grounds made possible by those processes of social construction. That position is, as I have stated it here, not so far from and probably recuperable for a more overtly Marxist argument.
Also, why doesn't she travel more the route of Chomsky in his description of language development, according to which the innate capacities interact and grow within a certain environment, much like the formation of the ocular apparatus. Can't agency and subjectivity be looked at similarly? Could not the capacity for agency (and subjectivity) be innate capacities which are formed in interaction with the (social) environment? Wouldn't we then be interested in social practice which enhanced the former and diminished the latter? Haven't we seen this before?
ML: as stated here, I am not sure we are so far apart, with the proviso that 1) a lot rests on how we define the social environment; and 2) what counts as innate matters too. One of the areas into which I confess that I cannot follow Butler and other writers like her is the psychoanalytic aspect of their work. There is however nothing inherently anti-Marxist in engaging with such material -- see, for instance, the also forbiddingly difficult work of Zizek (although I recommend reading someone else writing about it or reading interviews with him first).
I hope this is of some help. I'm not claiming by the way that Butler is the best thing since sliced bread; but in my little part of the academic world, if you want to convince people -- or some people anyway -- that Marx and historical materialism matters, then you have to deal with at least some of, and at least once in a while, arguments such as Butler's.
Mark Laffey