ABSTRACT ON BUTLER'S 'BODIES THAT MATTER (PREFACE + INTRODUCTION)'

ABSTRACT ON BUTLER'S 'BODIES THAT MATTER (PREFACE + INTRODUCTION)'

• Butler criticizes the humanist subject in its utopia of choosing the gender as she understands that gender chooses itself, but at the same time she rejects denying the possibility of critical agency
• Gender is the site of ritualistic repetition which generates itself but also the space of possible critique against those rituals and itself
• She reminds the constitutive constrains of construtivism, and therefore of the construction of the body
  • bodies depend on the productive constraints of certain highly gendered regulatory schemas producing intelligible bodies and abject, unlivable bodies
    • heterosexual hegemony crafts what is sexual and political 'matter'
      • Foucault says that sex is a 'regulatory ideal' in which sense it's also a regulatory practice producing bodies
        • Production is made through demarcation, circulation and differentiation
        • Materialization is made through reproduction – rituals
          • Rituals of materializing gendered bodies are performative as they reiterate citational (interpellative on Butler's reading of Althusser) practices producing the very effects that it names
          • In philosophical terms; the constative claim is always to some degree performative
          • What constitute the fixity of the body, its contours, its movements, will be fully material, but materiality will be rethought as the effect of power
            • Once sex itself is understood in its normativity, the materiality of the body will not be thinkable apart from the materialization of that regulatory norm
              a) the matter of bodies will be indissociable from the regulatory norms that govern their materialization
              b) the understanding of performativity not as the act by which a subject brings into being what she/he names, but, rather, as the reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains
              c) the construal of sex no longer as a bodily given on which the construct of gender is artificially imposed, but as a cultural norm which governs the materialization of bodies
              d) the subject speaking ''I'', is informed by virtue of having gone through such a process of assuming a sex
              e) the heterosexual imperative of identification enables certain sexed identifications (intelligible bodies) and forecloses and/or disavows other identifications (abjected bodies)
            • The necessity to reproduce bodies is a proof that material bodies as a product never quite comply with the norms by which their materialization is impelled
            • To the extent that certain productions of materialities escape those regulatory norms, Butler argues that the heterosexual hegemony can be contested by those very bodies an their dissent logics
    1) Intelligible bodies
    • Bodies which materiality conforms to the normativity of the 'regulatory ideal' of sex
    2) Abject, unlivable bodies
    • This is not the opposite of the former, for oppositions are, after all, part of intelligibility
    • The abject designs those unlivable and uninhabitable zones of social life which are nevertheless densely populated by those who do not enjoy the status of the subject, but whose living under the sign of the unlivable is required to circumscribe the domain of the subject
      • An abjected outside, which is, after all, inside the subject as its own founding repudiation
      • It's the way subjects who don't perform the rites of gendered bodies quite well are lead to recognize themselves as inhabitants of abjected spaces, therefore carrying on with their lifes under threatening spectres
    • In a Foucauldian sense of criticizing hegemonies from their contending logics, those abjected bodies should not be seen as perpetual failures, but as critical resources in the struggle to rearticulate the very terms of symbolic legitimacy and intelligibility
      • In this sense, not only mobilizations under identity categories are important to rearticulate democratic contestation, but also disidentification.
        • She foresees here a link between feminists and queer movements.

• Butler's genealogy shows that the materiality of bodies is contested by two different trends: 1) A materialist critique of Beauvoirian constructivism; which assumes the sexed body before the gender but notices its desubstantiation through culture
  • This kind of feminism assumes the sexed body as a given matter and problematizes the extent to which, even assuming its giveness, the role of cultural aspect is so much as to relinquish sex in the course of its assumption
  • In such approaches, gender emerges not as a term in a continued relationship of opposition to sex, but as the term which absorbs and displaces ''sex'', the mark of its full substantiation into gender or, from a materialist point of view, its full desubstantiation
    • She presents some feminists who criticize constructivism on the bases that woman bodies being passively the object of imprinted sexualities is a disempowering notion
    • Other feminists criticize the modern view of nature, which they link to feminine, as a mere instrument of technology, thus creating connections with Deleuze on what they claim for a distinct paradigm emphasizing dynamism and interrelations of nature.
      • This is also the base for much feminist critics on Beauvoir and her view of woman as marked bodies
        • Butler criticizes, however, the fact that those approaches miss that nature has a history of its own and that sex is positioned ambiguously in relation to that concept and its history
  2) A deconstructivism which preserves agency as it sees the socially constructed as operating through exclusions of non-ontological outsides. That's where she locates herself among those who consider the sexed body to be a creation of gender coming previous to gender (contingency of body/sex and gender).
  • If the first version of constructivism presumes that construction operates deterministically, making a mockery of human agency, the second understands constructivism as presupposing a voluntarist subject who makes its gender through an instrumental action
    • A construction is understood in this latter case to be a kind of manipulable artifice, a conception that not only pressuposes a subject, but rehabilitates precisely the voluntarist subject of humanism that constructivism has, on occasion, sought to put into question
      • The “I” neither precedes nor follows the process of this gendering, but emerges only within and as the matrix of gender relations themselves
        • This doesn't imply doing away with the subject, but only to ask after the conditions of its emergence and operation
          • In this sense, the matrix of gender relations is prior to the emergence of the human
          • In what can be related to the Althusserian concept of ideology as interpellation (to which hailing does one attend), Butler suggests that interpellation (citationality) is reiterated by various authorities and through various intervals of time to reinforce or contest this naturalized effect
            • Attending the hailing, or the assumption, is compelled by a regulatory apparatus of heterosexuality
              • As subjects to her cannot exist before the hailing itself, she points, however, that this act is not primarily theatrical; indeed, its apparent theatricality is produced to the extent that its historicity remains dissimulated
                • In a critical reformulation of the performative, Derrida makes clear that this power is not the function of an originating will, but is always derivative
                  • The derivative power of the Lacanian symbolic law and, of God, following a Nietzschenian critique, steams from the mere attribution to those figures through linguistic norms.
                  • And though the symbolic appears to be a force that cannot be contravened without psychosis, the symbolic ought to be rethought as a series of normativizing injunctions that secure the borders of sex through the threat of psychosis, abjection, psychic unlivability. And further, that this law can only remain a law to the extent that it compels the differentiated citations and approximations called feminine and masculine. The presumption that the symbolic law of sex enjoys a separable ontology priorand autonomous to its assumption is contravened by the notion that the citation of the law is the very mechanism of its production and articulation ---- THE BEST CRITIQUE OF LACAN!!!
  • It is not enough to claim that human subjects are constructed for the construction of the human is a differential operation that produces the more and the less human, the inhuman, the humanly unthinkable. These excluded sites come to bound the human as its constitutive outside, and to haunt those boundaries as the persistent possibility of their disruption and rearticulation
    • The debate between constructivism and essentialism thus misses the point of deconstruction
  • Constructivism is criticized as a discursive monism or linguisticism that refuses the constitutive force of exclusion within the very terms of discursive legitimacy
    • Indeed, the propositional form 'discourse constructs the subject' retains the subject-position of the grammatical formulation even as it reverses the place of subject and discourse
    • There are defenders and critics of construction, who construe that position along structuralist lines in which impersonal forces, such as Culture or Discourse or Power occupy the grammatical site of the subject after the human has been dislodged from its place.
      • As a result, construction is still understood as a unilateral process initiated by a prior subject, fortifying that presumption of the metaphysics of the subject that where there is activity, there lurks behind it an initiating and willful subject
        • This reconsolidates the metaphysics of the subject
          • This view informs a misreading by which Foucault is criticized for personifying power. But as Butler puts, Foucault didn't relocate subjectivity into power, because for him there's no power that act, but only a reiterated acting that is power in its persistence and instability
            • Foucault's view is rather close to the previously mentioned derivative concept of power of Derrida (power is not the function of an originating will, but is always derivative)
  • What Butler proposes instead of constructivism is a return to the notion of matter, not as a site or surface, but as a process of materialization that stabilizes over time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity, and surface we call matter --- NEW MATERIALISM
    • She than stresses that, the process of materiality is both produced and destabilized in the course of its reiteration
      • In this sense, the agency denoted by the performativity of sex will be directly counter to any notion of a voluntarist subject who exists quite apart from the regulatory norms which she/he opposes. The paradox of subjectivation (assujetissement) is precisely that the subject who would resist such norms is itself enabled, if not produced, by such norms. Although this constitutive constraint does not foreclose the possibility of agency, it does locate agency as a reiterative or rearticulatory practice, immanent to power, and not a relation of external opposition to power
      • it will be as important to think about how and to what end bodies are constructed as is it will be to think about how and to what end bodies are not constructed and, further, to ask after how bodies which fail to materialize provide the necessary outside, if not the necessary support, for the bodies which, in materializing the norm, qualify as bodies that matter
        • I find interesting to think how anarchism as a historical failure could fit her description of a failed materialization which can reveal norms of exclusion !!!.
        • What challenge does that excluded and abjected realm produce to a symbolic hegemony that might force a radical rearticulation of what qualifies as bodies that matter?
• The historical range of materials is not meant to suggest that a single heterosexualizing imperative persists in each of these contexts, but only that the instability produced by the effort to fix the site of the sexed body challenges the boundaries of discursive intelligibility in each of these contexts
  • Identificatory processes are crucial to the forming of sexed materiality
  • Given that normative heterossexuality is clearly not the only regulatory regime operative in the production of bodily contours or setting the limits to bodily intelligibility, it makes sense to ask what other regimes of regulatory production contour the matteriality of bodies.