In a lot ways Butler can be reduced to the idea that we are accomplices in our own oppression and that feat is achieved through an hierarchical ordering of psyche---the internalization of socially prefigured classes and privileges and their concomitant sensibilities, morays, and stances toward the world at large. It then follows that the road to liberation is a re-figuration through habitation of that ordering, hence an abandonment of our own subjugation. Or something like that.
I don't disagree with this regime, but it leaves a lot to the imagination as to how all that is accomplished and how it is to be changed. Certainly Butler's labyrinthine prose isn't very liberating. Never mind. But the role of reading and writing in all this, seems to be critical in a larger sense, since at least one means of liberation of psyche is through these practices. And this is in a sense what makes Butler's writing anti-thetical to her program. Shouldn't you write to liberate?
It is within reciprocal practices like reading and writing, along with or through the practice of other arts that Dennis Redmond's point about the turn toward symbolic signification occurs---and can be resolved. That is, the trap of an informatic idealism can be escaped through concrete practice in the arts. In a theoretical abstraction, this is the revolutionary role of the arts: that of liberating the psyche from its ritualistic replication of the grand bourgeoise programs along with their meritocratic and moralistic armatures.
We could for example turn this discussion into an analysis of post WWII jazz, or weave the discussion around and through the works and lives of bebob musicians and abstract expressionist painters. What is occurring in these arts is the symbolic liberation of psyche through their break down of melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic forms which comprise the symbolic temporal universe of a bourgeois sensibility---all of which have analogues in painting, and the spatial universe of bourgeoise life. What makes or made these forms accessible to working class sensibilities was to a certain extent their symbolic criminality, outrages, assaults and raw celebrations of liberation, their formal celebrations of power. However, under a more intimate contact with these practices what emerges are forms of work, labor, and intellectual discipline that accompany and compose the re-figuration process.
The re-figuration process or education goes to the issue of how one is supposed to habituate subjugation in order to defeat it. The process is or can be accomplished through the arts through their reciprocals of practice and social engagement (consumption? ugh!), precisely because they are the external symbolic universe of forms which correspond to whatever composed and composes the private and individual world of psyche. The accompanying understanding here is that what is critical is laboring on form and its social engagements. In other words you have to write as well as read, play as well as listen or dance, paint as well as see.
What occurs is a liberation of many different forms of subjugation. Not the least of them is the re-figuration and re-appropriation of skills upon which the worlds of mass produced media/communication and its comatose consumption are based. Essentially, the basis of society is repossessed through re-appropriating language and other symbolic forms of expression through which both psyche and society are configured.
Chuck Grimes