Sunday, June 30, 2013

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.

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