Judith Butler: A Critique

Judith Butler is one of the most widely-read postmodern theorists today. Her blend of Foucauldian queer theory and deconstructive critique is rightly seen as innovative. However, while Butler remains true to her Foucauldian roots, extending a genealogical approaching into feminism and beyond, unlike Foucault, her critique substitutes culture for nature. For Butler, 'discourse' is seen as all-powerful, and material reality, practice, the unconscious, and even nature are reduced to mere cultural 'constructs' or categories. I see this as problematic, given the growing number of material issues affecting contemporary society.

Over the last one and a half centuries, critical theorizing (with roots in Plato) has attempted to 'denaturalize' the order of things. It has been enough to show that common sense is based on taken-for-granted assumptions in order to question the privileged status of certain dominant modes of thought. The 'operative assumption' of this practice, however, is that certain mentalities are presupposed in 'discourses,' making them ideological. What I want to suggest, however, is that practice (experience) sets limits on what can be thought - certain ideas are necessary in order for institutions to operate, but they are not sufficient by themselves; indeed, the most they can do is reinforce or contest the existing system of practices, but not govern practices. The importance of materiality and nature is both actual and potential. It is actual because our sensuous experience is given to us historically in praxis, we always experience more than mere 'sense-data' and perceptions representing the world. It is potential because we relate to this materiality through singular dispositions, mostly free from pre-determination. As such, more than one future can be 'given,' whether or not it is recognized as such. It therefore makes sense to see nature more in terms of developmental plasticity (as contemporary neuroscience and epigentics does), instead of a closed set of categories which is necessarily static. Hence, deconstructing categories does not prevent us from experiencing nature, because non-categorical experiences exist within practice. At an ontological level, even if different elements enter into something (complicating our perception of it), they do not subvert its own distinct existence, which already consists of multiple relations. For example, human beings interact in symbiosis with nature, but in unique temporal, social, symbolic, and sonorous ways, unlike other living species (see Corey Anton's Selfhood and Authenticity [1999]). There is no 'one' (universal) human characteristic, but through the singular interconnections of these specific elements, we each become what we are. Ultimately, Butler's deconstruction focuses more on critiquing universal categories than on the potential to disrupt oppression from within continuous practices. The material world's 'incompleteness' and 'instability' results more from its finite existence than any discursive 'construction.' Indeed, when Butler argues for the fluidity of relations, she makes the mistake of conceiving of this in spatial rather than temporal terms. As Butler herself relates in the 1999 Preface to Gender Trouble:

In this book, I tend to conceive of the claim of 'universality' in exclusive negative and exclusionary terms. However, I came to see the term as important strategic use precisely as a non-substantial and open-ended category as I worked with an extraordinary group of activists first as a board member and then as a chair of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (1994-7), an organization that represents sexual minorities on a broad range of issues.

(xvii)

This is a concept of universality as a non-given: "I arrived at a second view of universality in which it is defined as a future-oriented labour of cultural translation" (xviii). However, while she supports this in later works such as Contingency, Hegemony, Universality (with Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Zizek in 2000), and writings where she began to turn to temporality, her legacy is mostly associated with earlier works such as Gender Trouble (1990) and Bodies That Matter (1993).

Ironically, unlike one of her main feminist influences, Luce Irigaray (who was sometimes criticized for sexual essentialism), Butler relies on a neo-Gramscian cultural essentialism to challenge what she see as biological determinism. In responding to critics of Irigaray, feminist theorist Helen Fielding stated that opposition to her theory of sexual difference "arises from an inherited cultural understanding [on the part of her critics] that posits nature as either unchanging organism or as matter that can be ordered, manipulated and inscribed upon. Hence the concern over essentialism is itself grounded in the binary thinking that preserves a hierarchy of...culture over nature" (2003: pg. 1). A similar response to Butler's theory is appropriate. Critical of early modern theorists such Rousseau (whose 'state of nature' hypothesis she derides), Butler's thought remains in the modern tradition of reducing nature to a static entity or resource determined by culture. She writes: "the production of sex as the prediscursive ought to be understood as the effect of the apparatus of cultural construction designated by gender" (1990: pg. 11). This is a very limiting world Butler imagines - perhaps it must be so for someone from a sexual minority in a sexist and homophobic society, but this do not justify a generalization that removes freedom from nature. With no mediating term such as sexuality or the unconscious in between sex and gender, it is easy for her to dismiss the 'dictates' of nature  While Butler admits that her concept of performativity tends to exclude 'internal' psychic considerations (i.e., she has under-theorized this), she remains sceptical of notions of the unconscious, which she links to biological determinism, something very few contemporary biologists and neuroscientists actually subscribe to. Other contemporary theorists are not so reticent. For example, Pierre Bourdieu's theory of habitus links habits and practices to changing unconscious dispositions, such as the ability to sustain motor memory, body language, and temporality. I feel Butler's theories unfortunately reflect an internet age and information society in which creative expression is overcoded, whether by algorhythmic, financial, representational, genetic, or other signs. What is needed is a more experiential and affective practice of communication, one not so dependent on technological metaphors such as 'construction,' with their separation of techne from poiesis and praxis. 

Butler's theory may have importance for how we think about 'queerness' and the performance of gender, but it does not respond well to the dynamic materiality of nature which has recently asserted itself. The materiality of a mounting environmental crisis, a politics of fear and terror, growing inequality, and precarious labour regimes requires that we see not as a determining system, but as a site of possibility and risk. Cultural constructionism will only get us so far, as I suspect many of our attitudes, such as political apathy and cynicism, stem from frustrations of affect, practice, and mood, which are sensuous and material, yet hardly mechanical in their existence.

References

Anton, C. (1999). Selfhood and Authenticity. New York, USA: SUNY Press.
Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London, UK and New York, USA: Routledge.
-----. (1993). Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of 'Sex.' London, UK and New York, USA: Routledge.
Fielding, H. (2003). "Questioning Nature: Irigaray, Heidegger, and the Potentiality of Matter." Continental Philosophy Review. Vol. 36 (1): pg. 1-26.

Visual Power and Recognition

Our eyes are one of the most stimulated of our senses. Living in a media-saturated of world of signs, symbols, and information, we now process more visually than in the past, and have to imagine how our local experiences are connected to global and historical realities. But if the world is becoming more spectacular, it comes with a  lack of sympathy, articulation, and sensitivity in interpersonal situations, especially in our intimate and community life. Maybe we are losing some of the ability to respond attentively without the need for visual code. It is time to scrutinize the visual bias.

Vision, perspective, recognition, and identity are closely linked to power in the symbolic gaze. We are sense-perceiving beings, but perception is further from our experience than sensation is (and sensuality), which has several consequences. First, within visual perception, we tend to represent empirical 'data,' information, or stimuli about the world. We tend to view the world as made up of discrete resources or things, rather than in a process of becoming that we ourselves are woven into. Thus, our minds usually 'process' these things as coherent models, where the dynamics and changes are internal to the system itself, rather than relations shaping and transcending the system. Secondly, according to Lacanian psychoanalysis, the "I" is shaped by identifying with a mirror-image of ourselves at an early age. This reveals that from a visual standpoint, things appear unified and autonomous, while sensually they are multiple and relational. Third, and similar to this, perception creates the belief that self-consciousness and recognition constitute experience, which in sociological terminology is where the idea of the looking-glass self comes from (you are who you imagine you look like). The relations that perception allows, as a visual mediation, are external relationships that seem imposed on us, rather than internal relations sensed from within practice. So applying various 'lenses' to look at the world has the effect of translating our deeply practical stances into perspectives or worldviews. We then seem to be trapped within solipsistic mentalities and attitudes, as our experiential know-how is then devalued. The problem is that these visual metaphors are two-dimensional (because mirrors and images are flat), while lived experience is three-dimensional. Perception allows us to interact with things (which can be useful), but does not allow us to feel and be inside relations as well.

This thinking is also part of the common sense of social movement activism. A common way of understanding struggles is as 'awareness raising' and seeking recognition for rights and citizenship. But the 'cognition' in recognition is not random. Questioning legitimacy often invokes a rational standard by which to include particular identities. For example, the Canadian trade union movement gained union recognition through strikes lead up to the end of WWII, which established a collective bargaining system (PC 1003, the Rand Formula) based on the rule of law. As a result of recognition, working-class experience was identified with wage-labour and full-time employment - legal statuses that may or may not reflect people's actual needs. Workers can't go on strike if they have a collective agreement (no wildcat strikes), can't strike in sympathy (so no general strikes), and must voice class struggle through the formal bureaucratic grievance procedure. This has limited solidarity among working-class people to those who are employed and paying dues. To take another example, the civil rights movement fought for and gained reforms affecting people of colour, women, gays, and many other groups. Yet, like the labour movement, their fight was primarily for recognition as equal members of society. This meant implictly siding against movements like the Black Panthers and an ambivalent stance toward decolonization - after all, wasn't America one of the superpowers from post-WWII onwards? Recognition institutionalizes praxis such that creative ideas are turned into formal and systemic ones - it is a great way to ensure security, but it also produces political paralysis. Maybe, as Salmon Rushdie suggests, creativity can regenerated by fragmentation, since as he writes in Imaginary Homelands: “human beings do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capable only of fractured perceptions.” In Rushdie’s metaphor, each shard of a broken mirror gestures toward the imagined whole of which it came from, but this whole will always be non-identical once the parts exist as parts (even if you reconnect them they will show fractures). What this produces is a stereoscopic vision of the world, one more open to the exile than to the citizen. Perhaps the ability to perceive multiple dimensions simultaneously, as Palestinian cultural critical Edward Said suggests (using the term contrapuntal vision), can shape a new politics which is left of centre.

But we are still terrified and intimidated by the gaze, which is part of a system identified by Pierre Bourdieu as 'symbolic violence,' and by Michel Foucault as panoptic surveillance. Bourdieu's argument is that within domination, practical habits become visually represented in various 'official' forms, and that through this misrecognition, the dominant are able to accumulate various forms of 'capital' - economic, cultural, social, emotional, and symbolic. For cultural capital, credentials and art works are only the most visible forms, and these crucially rely on their owners' 'taste' (habitus) for refined expression, even though they seem to possess their own value. Panoptic surveillance (originally developed in 18th century English prisons), meanwhile, involves the mutual self-regulation of bodies through visual technologies (including the extension of discursive and conceptual apparatuses).
'Conduct' becomes normalized according to pre-existing standards which makes people subject to labelling, categorizing, and diagnosis - we all become the judges of ourselves and others. The gaze produces powerful effects, one of which is the transparency of individuals' self-identity. 'Know thyself!' is virtually a given in our society. Speaking from personal experience, it is as if every look is a question, as if it is impossible not to be pierced and feel watched at all times, regardless of if anyone is there to do it. So I feel great sympathy for Foucault when he says that: “I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning." As well as when he says that “maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are.” There is a need to open up new possibilities, but in representing the world, the gaze keeps things in the present.

The gaze activates a fight-or-flight panic hightened by mimesis. Someone who has learned by imitating others, rather than by trusting and working through their feelings, is vulnerable to fear and uncertainty because their responses depend on outside confirmation. As critical theorists Adorno and Horkheimer wrote in their difficult book Dialectic of Enlightenment: "The reason that represses mimesis is not merely its opposite. It is itself mimesis: of death....Imitation enters the service of power when even the human being becomes an anthropomorphism for human beings." The result is a world of self-preservation or, in the words of Hannah Arendt and Giorgio Agamben, 'bare life,' where everyone is in fear of what could happen next, rather than excited about future possibilities.

I think it is crucial to challenge the optical illusion of a stable identity (and reference point recognized by the state) and the practical possibilities it conceals. Instead, we will be able to decompress life experience into more meaningful expressions (textual, verbal, and affective) and live ecstatically. Perhaps then all the terrifying gazes will become inviting glances.

Why The Left Should Use Theory Tactically

On the left, some readily embrace theory, while others insist on practice, opinions, and subjectivity. As elitist as theory can be, and as rationalist, I want to present at least four reasons why critical theory is still important before we reject Theory Per Se on our path to liberation.

1. The heart of praxis is the dialectic of theory and practice. Just as direct action is not a stand-alone tactic, practice without theory would mean re-learning everything when you want to do anything, and would be 'impractical.'
2. One way the oppressed can deal with oppression is asking questions. Even if you don't get a full answer, you can still open up new experiences that were hidden or silenced or which you wouldn't have otherwise thought of. But there is a logic of asking questions too, which can be guided by theory. If theory is assisting rather than controlling our thinking, it can be complimentary. Sometimes asking a question is more powerful than denying a dominant authority outright. Make those with power doubtful of the naturalness of their privilege and you will make everyone more confident in resisting them.
3. One of the few remaining activities left to you as a social loser, or an economic loser (unemployed), is reading books by yourself or discussing ideas online on forums. It opens you to a community of people who think like yourself. There is a long tradition of auto-didactic scholars from less privileged backgrounds who find their work rewarding and stimulating, as an alternative to a world where practice is technical and depends on proper specialization and skill-qualifications. There is also something about immersing yourself in ideas (avoiding practice for a moment) that allows you to generate new thoughts without the need to transform or question your own, which practice often demands when oppressive.
4. There are theoretical alternatives to positivism and overly detached science. Not all thinking is necessarily technical, but it can still be rigorous and interdisciplinary. Not all science is mechanistic or rationalistic - science is a method for developing theory out of experience - not just of collecting 'data.' Good science is premised on a humble uncertainty about how systems truly work, and is about projecting possibilities rather than predicting the future. The question of whether science is 'normative' (and hence, informed by the same biases as opinion) or whether it deals with facts is based on a false dichotomy between facts and norms/values. If science deals with facts, hypotheses, explanations, comparative knowledge-claims, there will be lots of points when values enter, but more often they guide, rather than falsifying scientific efforts at validity. I try to cut postmodernists some slack (I tend to be more of a post-structuralist myself, within Marxism), but a discursive reduction of methodolical and ontological questions leads to a premature closure, based on an overly-symbolic vision of practice.

Insofar as part of oppression is not just the system oppressing us but our own inability to get ourselves out of the oppression or to imagine and enact other futures, we need theory to help us get there. But it will have to be dialectical theory which allows for constant change (truth is temporal), the play of differences, and to imagine a world which is inherenly 'open' to transformation by praxis, rather than just an oppressive 'system.' As Michel Foucault argued, the role of the theoretician in social and political struggle has changed - now theorists are more like recollective thinkers, and they give 'tactical pointers' rather than general strategies. This vision of theory is not divorced from or superimposed on practice - but it is necessary for practice, and in that sense, necessary for 'the left.'

We Live in a Post-Identity World

"Wherefrom does the receding characteristic of identity stem? The answer is, from the aporetic constitution of identity."

(Vahabzadeh: 2003, pg. 94).

In the 1960's-70's, the shift in Western political praxis from the totalizing social movements of the modern era to the particularistic New Social Movements of the post/late-modern era involved a shift toward a politics of identity, that is to say, a politics in which difference became more important than similarity, or sameness. For a cadre of activists who believed that the familiar was the source of solidarity and power, this was profoundly distressing. However, are these two experiences really that different? I will argue that, in fact, it is only possible to distinguish the content of particular identies from the prior standpoint of totality (structure), and that in contrast to both, the new forms of distinction or otherness are more futural and indeterminate patterns than present-at-hand differences. That is, identity is the other face of universality, and cannot govern action and change within this dialectic.

Identity as a symbolic referent is backward-looking, and tends to deny its own emergence and affectivity in praxis. "Identity/experience emerges in the configurative moment of identification/articulation - the moment of decision. This implies that the 'original' modes of presence of the discursive terrain are of little significance to the current articulation" (Vahabzadeh 2003: pg. 88). What this means is that identity can never be definitively grounded in a past event or "peril," and always integrates new elements. Identity involves self-knowledge, yet it cannot effect genuinely transformative change, according to Vahabzadeh, because "knowledge of categories of being and of the event of unconcealment can never be attained before the event. Experience, as the summoning of discursive elements, replaces such beforehand, verifiable knowledge" (pg. 94). Rather, "experience, identity, the summoning of discursive elements, destiny, social imaginary, action, and (categories of) being all leap forth at one and the same time in one single event" (ibid).  Vahabzadeh's work thus shows how identity can have significance when situated within action, and the conflict and struggle this entails, but not according to an 'essence' or 'agency' aiming at a pre-defined goal or fulfillment. In a section of his book Articulated Experiences (2003), entitled "The Aporias of Identity," Vahabzadeh states that:

The concept of 'receding signfied' shows that action will never turn into agency. It is obvious that the aporetic character of identity radically challenges all versions of agency in favour of the genuine resuscitation of actor; 'genuine' because it is nontelic action itself that defines actor's being, and not any structurally designated mode of performance."

(pg. 95).

This makes it clear that movement actors must move away from both prospective and retrospective modalities and loci of practice if they are to enact transitional experiences. This can only be achieved, however, once the universal-particular relationship of revolution/citizenship is reversed in the identity politics of new social movements, which now privileges civil society over the state (pg. 156-7). For Vahabzadeh, the particularities that are thence released allude to the inadequacies of party and institutional politics, yet are destined to become singularities through anarchic action. That is, the fragmentation is only temporary and from the perspective of totality, since the actors are in a process of sharing different experiences, i.e., creating a genuine sociality.

While identity and identity politics are often associated with postmodern theory, post-structuralists and post-Marxists have critiqued these terms from a different angle. For post-anarchist Richard Day, identity politics "faces certain impediments that are inherent t:o the politics of demand" (2005: pg. 14). Rather than seeing the new social movements based in particular self-identities, Day writes that "it is difficult to understand how striving to improve the situation of queers, women and people of colour, or working against military and ecological destruction, can be seen as individualistic pursuits" (pg. 69). Rather than achieving private self-interest, "the burnout rate of activists in these movements would also seem to suggest that their struggles are no more pleasurable than those associated with class warfare" (ibid). Day proposes a politics of affinity that challenges many of the hegemonic features of the politics of identity:

A politics of affinity...is not about abandoning identification as such it is about abandoning the fantasty that fixed, stable identities are possible and desirable, that one identity is better than another, that superior than another, that superior identities deserve more of the good and less of the bad that a social order has to offer, and that the state should act as the arbiter of who gets what.

(pg. 188).

Some have gone further into non-identitarian praxis. About the founding affect of social movements (that is, the scream of refusal), John Holloway (2002) writes:

The scream is an expression of the present existence of that which is denied, the present existence of the not-yet, of non-identity. The theoretical force of the scream depends not on the future existence of the not-yet (who knows if there will ever be a society based on the mutual recognition of dignity?) but on its present existence as possibility.

'We scream' does not begin with a unified 'we' prior to the scream. Like Vahabzadeh's radical phenomenology, for Holloway, any identity emerges through 'discourse' despite referring to an originating arche. Holloway thus states that "rather than starting with the multiple identities (women, blacks, gays, Basques, Irish and so on), we need to start from the process of identification that gives rise to those identities." He calls this context of identifiation "the social flow of doing," which expands the Marxist concept of labour to any creative social activity and its alienation or fetishization under domination: "Identity is perhaps the most concentrated (and most challenging) expression of fetishism or reification. The breaking of the flow of doing deprives doing of its movement. Present doing is subordinate to past done. Living labour is subordinated to dead labour. Doing is frozen in mid-flight, transformed into being." Holloway adds that "the rule of identity is the rule of amnesia" - we forget not just the origin of things but the existence of past struggles. "What is important in thought that takes identity as its basis is things as they are, not things as they might be or as we wish they were. There is no room for the subjunctive in the scientific discourse of identitarian thought." Indeed, the closure of different possibilities involves a flattening of temporality into the present, which `particular` identities seek to fulfill.