[lbo-talk] Butler

[Seth Ackerman]

wrobert at uci.edu wrote:
>> wrobert at uci.edu wrote:
>>     
>>>> Materiality and reality aren't being used as synonyms here, they're
>>>> just
>>>> being put in analogous positions.
>>>>
>>>>         
>>>      The problem is that they aren't even analogies.  If you took the
>>> trouble to read the broader argument, you would realize that Butler
>>> is stating that the meaningfulness of sex is not accessible through
>>> 'materiality', rather it is discourse that makes the body meaningful
>>> by transforming that 'matter' into something meaningful.
>>>       
>> That's true, she is saying that - but that's not all she's saying.
>>
>> If she were just arguing that things in the world can't be apprehended
>> directly but only through constructed patterns of thought, the argument
>> would be incontestable. But that's closer to the position of the
>> "moderate critic" she's arguing against.
>>
>> What she is really saying is that it is in some sense "not right" to
>> talk about any extra-discursive "sex" because in doing so we presuppose
>> that we can distinguish between an extra-discursive "sex" and a socially
>> constructed "sex." Since her epistemological position is that we can't
>> do this, she wants us to strictly abjure any attempt to talk about
>> extra-discursive sex. My point was: Try doing that with the gas chambers
>> and see how far you're willing to take your epistemology.
>>
>> Seth
>> ___________________________________
>>     
> Okay, let's run with this.  To begin, I think we need to sharpen up the
> definition of social construction.  I'll point to some text of Butler's
>
>      In this sense, what constitutes the fixity of the body, its contours,
> its movements, will be fully material, but materiality will be
> rethought as the effect of power, as power's most productive effect. 
> And there will be no way to understand "gender" as a cultural
> construct which is imposed upon the surface of matter, understood as
> "the body" or its given sex.  Rather, once "sex" itself is understood
> in its normativity, the materiality of the body will not be thinkable
> apart form the materialization of that regulatory norm.  "Sex" is,
> thus, not simply what one has, or a static description of what one
> is: it will be one of the norms by which the "one" becomes viable at
> all, that which qualifies a body for life within the domain of
> cutural intelligibility.
>
> What the body is, is constructed within dense complex social networks,
> regulatory norms, etc.  Meaning is constructed in those networks and
> intelligibility and unintelligibility as well.  Social construction is not
> 'false' or 'inessential' or even volunteeristic, but at the same time,
> there is no meaning to a body that is outside of those meaning networks,
> that transcends them.  Joanne noted that these processes are material,
> which was implicitly my point, but there is a difference between claiming
> that meaning is created in material social processes and there is
> something inherently meaningful in matter itself.  To point to an analogy,
> when I point to the fact that race is a social construction, I am
> frequently told that race is 'real'.  After all, one can see it quite
> clearly, not realizing that the have moved from 'matter' to structures of
> social signification.
>   

This is helpful - and of course I willingly defer to your understanding 
of what Judith Butler means to say - but it's hard to resist the feeling 
that there is a continuous bait and switch going on here. On the one 
hand, the message is: Don't be a dunce, of course no one is denying that 
sex or skin color or gas chambers are real and material; it's just that 
once you start making meanings out of them you're imposing upon them 
discursively embedded categories. But then on the other hand, Butler 
vehemently rejects any attempt to say: "Here is the material thing; and 
then over here are the meanings we impose on them," since she claims 
that, unavoidably, the one is always constituting our apprehension of 
the other.

So suppose I were to say: "Women bear children and men do not; there is 
a nearly infinite number of ways in which this material fact might find 
expression in human societies and structures of meaning, but all of 
these ways will be rooted in the material fact that women bear children 
and men do not." What an unutterably gauche thing for me to say! Don't I 
realize that my very apprehension of and discourse about the "material 
fact" of women bearing children is itself socially constructed? How can 
I be so simple as to try to make such a distinction?

The problem, though, is that while this kind antifoundationalism may be 
a perfectly legitimate thing to do when you are talking epistemology, it 
stops being legitimate and becomes simply juvenile when you are talking 
about anything else. Once Judith Butler (or anyone else) starts talking 
about a cross-burning case, the expulsion of the Palestinians, how to 
care for a sick loved one, what to make for dinner, she has necessarily 
decided to bracket her antifoundationalism and to begin making 
distinctions (however "unfounded" epistemologically) between what is 
important to treat as things-in-themselves and what may be regarded as 
socially constructed. Yet at any moment she feels justified in turning 
around and denying the legitimacy of such distinctions as soon as she 
feels it desirable to do so.

Thus, I want to say: The gas chambers were real; people were physically 
herded into them and exterminated; then people started making all kinds 
of meanings about this fact and these meanings are socially constructed. 
To be consistent, Butler would have to respond: Not so fast - you *say* 
the gas chambers were real and people were physically herded into them, 
but this is nothing but discourse and cannot be disembedded from that 
discourse. And I want to respond: Enough already; you are tiresome.

It's like having a dorm-room bull session about Descartes, and how we 
have no way of knowing we're not all brains in a jar, and then moving on 
to the subject of, say, the war in Iraq - only to have your interlocutor 
keep trying to undermine your arguments by saying we don't even know 
there is such a thing as Iraq. And then, to add insult to injury, your 
interlocutor thinks he's some sort of genius for pointing this out. By 
all means, investigate how societies create and naturalize meanings. 
Doing so is hardly some novel idea that Judith Butler came up with. But 
don't pretend that the dilemmas of epistemology add anything to the project.

Seth