Let me offer a few random queries and thoughts up front: What *counts* as an act of performativity? viewing a turn signal? paying cash for a dress? picking up a candy wrapper? Does listening to a lecture by a professor count as an act, or are references she makes to various things each individual acts? Do acts shoot at you from her words like shards of glass, making you think of certain things which trigger performativity within you? I mean humans can make associations of the most strange sort. I might pick up a candy wrapper with a name and picture on it which make me think of terrible times I had when I was in the Army (were I to have been) or of my trip to Australia (where Men are Men, or at least so the TV says) or of sharks, bats, Social Security, or none of this, or all of it at the same time, creating within me a shattering of the original act of performativity ("hey candy bar wrapper, I'll pick it up because I am a worthy subject and I care about my neighbors even thought they are fundamentalist Christian bigots that I really can't stand; I'll just swallow my anger and be Good Joe Citizen without realizing that is what I am doing, because I have been told that this is the proper thing to do a thousand times") which can produce a stream of free-association in a (horrors) almost non-deterministic way. Not to mention that this shattering could occur even with the most carefully constructed and properly field-tested propaganda.
I should note that any signs of impatience or hostility I evince below is not directed at Mark.
On with the discussion...
On Mon, January 25, 1999 at 19:04:25 (-0500) [Mark Laffey] writes:
>...
>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.
So, through reiteration of norms we as individuals and a society come to recognize a certain form of female body as desirable, or "normal", thus pressuring women to conform to it by shaping their bodies to fit (or, despairing, plunging into the potato chips and achieving precisely the "opposite"?). How is this different from 19th century feminists griping about corsets? Hasn't this practice (a repetition of norms) been long recognized? Of course norms have an effect, whether in the mind --- or through the mind, upon the body. Also, can't norms have opposite effects? Don't they often cause people to rebel?
I really see nothing new here (yet again).
>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.
So, everyone is a slave of some sort. We are all shaped and therefore ruled by some set of norms. Ok, but again, how is this novel? How are we all free in one way or another, as well as being slaves? How does our innate capacity for language, expressing deep-seated creativity, work against these pernicious body-and-mind-shaping norms? How do our other capacities work against these forces and free us from these bonds? How do people resist subjection (total?) in the first place? Why do we "always" find "people who are certain kinds of subjects"? Does nobody escape this? Does this mean that if you *reject* the slavery others want to place upon you that you are still a subject?
>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.
So, Butler is not in fact trying to build anything other than a "non-deterministic" social construction hypothesis. She is merely trying to move beyond the "fatalistic determinism that sees the subject as completely determined by social context" (a crude and empty empiricist formulation of subject formation to be sure), while retaining a "social construction" framework. Again, Butler seeks agency in the "performative", this is her way out of "fatalistic determinism".
You say that subjects "can change those conditions that produce them" and must seek such change only "on the basis of the ways in which they are constructed in the first place". I'm not quite sure what "on the basis" means here: are you saying that they must use the same "tricks", the same performative acts used against them? Is a black woman who is denied a seat on the bus using "the conditions that produce" black women when she refuses to move and sets in motion a chain of events that eventually redefines "black woman" to be "someone who deserves a seat on the bus, as anyone else"?
Again, she is arguing against something that I find absolutely astonishing that anyone could belive in. How can anyone believe that social conditions fully determine people? Has nobody bothered to read anything about, say, cognitive science in that last 30 years?
>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.
Continuous formation of the subject: new wine, old bottles, don't you think? Propaganda is a continuous endeavor, everybody knows that. You must repeat your lies, your calumny, your disparagement of the people you wish to demean and degrade.
>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.
But again, my question is: why should we believe that this sort of discontinuous performativity yields agency? Why not an even more effective subjugation?
>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).
Ok, so she is talking about some sort of visualization, of imagining that you deserve to be free compels you in a sense to start believing it, to desire it, to work for it. I thought this was normally called "learning". How does an algebra-capable student get created out of a non-algebra capable student? Where's the "paradox"? Certainly I agree: you can't throw on the ol' red cape and become Revolution Man, you have to engage with others in struggle, in building awareness, etc. Through this activity you become revolutionaries (or maybe you just fix things up a bit). But again, how is this new (I hate to keep repeating this)?
Also, she seems to my eyes to be needlessly conflating two things: determinism of subject formation and the totality of it. In your example workers have to debate using language and "forms of subjectivity brought into being by it" (by "it", I assume you are referring to language, or discussion? I thought the "it" that supposedly determined subjectivity was "power").
But, what if the subjectivity is incomplete, what if it is not total in the first place? This seems to be a much more plausible reason that agency is able to creep in. You can't, again, merely dash to the closet and put on your revolutionary garb, but you may have seeds of revolution within you that have been immune to power's withering touch. Perhaps you just need to awaken them in concert with other people.
So, to say that "the revolutionary subject ... has to be produced [from] non-revolutionary subjects" seems to me to be rather ill-founded. How do we know people are 100% non-revolutionary? What if they are only 62% revolutionary? What if they retain significant amounts of "revolutionary non-subjectivity"?
> .... 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 think this is an interestingly posed question, and an admirable one to tackle: "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". So gender is a wide range, kind of like meats one likes to eat, fruits one delights in, etc., a whole list of things that defines the particular "gender vector" of a person (to use mathematical jargon). But somehow, we have converted this multiple-dimensioned vector into a two-dimensioned one, male/female, which mimics that of the biological vector. I'll have to think about this a bit more.
>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.
I'm going to have to go over this stuff again. How agency is possible "on the grounds made possible by those processes of social construction" is still eluding me --- why exactly it should be those very processes of social construction which provide for agency, other than it sounds kind of neat that this should be true ("Your very chains are your means to freedom!" sort of thing)... I don't see why we view the process of social construction as incomplete, as imperfect, as not totally forming perfect subjects in the first place, in requiring constant "maintenance" to keep people from drifting (often quite easily) out of their subjective trances.
>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.
Well, thanks for your efforts at explanation, I really do appreciate it. I just wish she would write this stuff down in plain English. I really see little to nothing that could not be put more simply.
One last question: does the term "performativity" that Butler is using derive from J. L. Austin's work and later John Searle's work, and on through later "speech-act theory"?
Bill