Title: The politics of performative resignification: translating Judith Butler’s theoretical discourse and its potential for a sociology of education
Abstract: Abstract More than any other recent social theorist, constructing a disquisition on Butler's ideas draws the writer into speculating on the formation of their own intellectual grammar, perhaps to confront the disconcerting truth of how often their own cherished analytical rationality is broken up by glimpses into the imagination of more provocative thinkers. I have come to the conclusion that it is not so much that we self‐consciously assemble all of the resources for the making of research imaginaries as those vivid ideas (and frequently their authors) come to haunt us. Butler's work has been of this 'disturbing' order. The 'unconscious of intellectual work' is worthy of more attention than I can offer here but it is important to bear this in mind in the course of the following. In this paper I will describe the concept of 'performativity' and its theoretical elaboration in Gender Trouble, Bodies that Matter and subsequent and secondary texts. Performativity conceptualises the paradox of identity as apparently fixed but inherently unstable, revealing (gender) norms requiring continual maintenance. Her works thus contribute a new conceptual grammar in the inter‐related concepts of performativity and citationality to denote a reading of gender not as essence nor socialisation, but as the consequence of the performative (i.e. recurring) 'citations' of gender thought as actions that institute 'girling', for example. Butler's insistence on seeing gender as constitutive (as literally making the material of the embodied self) signifies the social and cultural forces that come to sculpt femininity and masculinity as norms on the body and the psyche. In arguing that the Butlerian performative has complicated a reading of the discursive and material conditions of the processes of (gender) identification, I will review my own poststructuralist vocabulary with its focus on the sociality of subjectification as a way to interpret and interrogate the power and limitations of Butler's ideas. Despite the awkwardness entailed in transposing performativity to embodied practices of classed distinction, her work continues to expand the ethnographic imaginary. My exegesis of performativity also serves another purpose, as a methodological comment about academic praxis, as I simultaneously open up and share in the modes of translation used in coming to appreciate Butler's important and exhilarating theoretical landscape. Notes 1. The discussion of Appadurai is found at http://www.blastfromthepast.bermudafunk.org/subpolitics.htm entitled Zooming Out (accessed 3 December 2005). Appadurai sees an important shift in the new 'work of the imagination' that has superseded consumption as an analytical concept: if consumption is understood as reproduction of meaning, then consumption surely must mean an imaginative effort. He clearly distinguishes imagination as a programme for action against fantasy as a more passive and private act. 'The work of imagination, viewed in this context, is neither purely emancipatory nor entirely disciplined but is a space of contestation in which individuals and groups seek to annex the global into their own practices of the modern' (Appadurai, Citation1996, p. 4). Thus we can argue that Butler's pre‐eminence as an intellectual is part of the global imaginary that mediates the 'flows' of ideas and peoples to make for a new sort of mobile intellectual habitus. 2. Although there is a wonderful interview in Radical Philosophy quoted online (www.theory.org) in which Butler is commenting on her surprise at the take up of Gender Trouble: I remember sitting next to someone at a dinner party and he said he was working on queer theory. And I said 'What's queer theory?' because he evidently thought that I was part of this thing called queer theory. But all I knew was that Teresa de Lauretis had published an issue of the journal Differences called 'Queer Theory' I thought it was something she had put together it certainly never occurred to me that I was part of queer theory! This is such an endearing story revealing the unpredictable work done by the human practices of discursive citation. It also throws a fascinating light on the irrational aspects of rationality regimes. 3. None of these are considered as intellectual 'lightweights'! 4. See note 2. 5. The assignment given to potential contributors to the Special Issue asked writers to 'celebrate Judith's Butler's contribution to the field of the sociology of education in an accessible way suitable for undergraduate and postgraduate students …'. Given what is carried by the cachet and prestige of Butler's name—only one of X women theorists to have been awarded a 'special issue' in the British Journal of the Sociology of Education(!)—one invariably enters into the 'unconscious' of the texts, the psychic life of her power. 6. Gender Trouble has been subject to this form of development in explicit commentaries on its 'ambiguities' and in building the intellectual case for theorising the body, which was taken up in Bodies that Matter. This authorial revisiting and revising incidentally parallels the reader's device of supplementing texts by recourse to translations. One should be aware by now that iteration, citation and recitation are central to what Butlerian texts enact. 7. The wilful decontextualisation of ideas from their original generating context. 8. Sarah Salih's (Citation2002) excellent Routledge Reader, along with another of her commentaries (Salih, Citation2003), was enormously useful; as were engaging websites such as http://www.theory.org and http://www.sla.sla.purdue.edu/academic/engl/theory/index.html. See also the series of provocative comments on her work in debates in Feminist Contentions, (Benhabib et al., Citation1995) that were also captivating. 9. Yet, given that discourses construct identity, such a challenge is a particularly acute one for all her readers, especially perhaps for some feminists since rethinking a new gender imaginary implies unthinking feminism(s), which certainly is not without its costs. I will return to this later. I have often thought that we need greater understanding (in both senses) about how revolutionary ideas confront and destabilise ontological security. 10. That feeling of being embodied and psychologically intelligible as a specific sort of subject; the idea of subjectivity or sense of self as, for example, feeling feminine—being a feminist 11. Most famously rendered in Barthes's essay 'The Death of the Author' (Citation1977). Barthes asks the origin of the voice of a character in Balzac's prose: We shall never know, for the good reason that writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing. (p. 142) 12. Subjectify, meaning 'make subject (to)', always carries a negative charge in deconstruction or poststructuralist thinking. But, of course, the issue of how we can do politics without subjects remains (Squires, Citation1993). 13. Foucault used the notion of archaeology initially to conceptualise his research into the 'historical a priori on which certain forms of knowledge become possible'. Later Foucault preferred the term genealogy to describe his method seeing 'positivist' elements in the notion of 'archaeology' (Jary & Jary, Citation2000, p. 26). 14. Space does not permit a fuller exposition of Butler's important discussion of melancholy; suffice to note that it is the disavowal of homosexuality that structures heterosexual gender as 'loss'. It is also seen in later work by Butler as the paradigm of all other forms of 'hauntings' that lie within the forever attempted but never entirely successful, attempt to 'fix' identity. 15. Wittig (Citation1992) is only one of a number of French feminists to have drawn upon the literal figuration of the female body. Similarly, Irigary (Citation1985) has deployed gynaecological metaphors such as the use of the 'speculum' to assert what she sees as a feminine aesthetic. 16. I am completely indebted to Stuart Hall's introductory essay 'Who Needs identity?' (Hall, Citation1996) and specifically his insight into identifications as articulations, in which he situates the theoretical and political purchase of Butler's reworking of Freud and Foucault. He argues that this allows her to propose a materialisation of the body as already discursively saturated by norms repeatedly performatively incorporated in/on the body via bodily gestures, cultural inscriptions and psychic forms of intelligibility. 17. One of the girls in Kehily's study that formed part of the Special Edition (See Kehily et al. (Citation2002)) I reviewed. 18. This question of how to think embodied agency is a theoretical problem not unique to Judith Butler, but to poststructuralism more generally (Hall, Citation1996; London Feminist Salon collective, Citation2004). 19. Judith Butler is characteristically not charitable about her own presentation of performativity in Gender Trouble (Citation1990), noting that she had for example 'waffled' between J.L. Austin's notion of performativity and the theatrical metaphor of action (cited in Salih, Citation2002, p. 65). 20. For an instructive review of this book see Gray (Citation2004). 21. This is not without its own performative effects, the consequence of the preference for representational forms based on narrative realism. There is an extensive debate on the politics of the 'truth' texts produce that I do not have time to enter into here. See Clifford and Marcus (Citation1984). 22. Undated attribution.
Publication Year: 2006
Publication Date: 2006-09-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 98
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