TSAI

PERFORMATIVE POLITICS AND GENDER: JUDITH BUTLER

De Man’s own work was notoriously silent on the question of politics. He presented modern irony as the recognition of the power of narrative to produce speaking subjects, a recognition only enabled after the advent of structuralism. It is precisely because there can be no final recognition of irony that we cannot have an ultimate theory of narrative. Any description or account of the origin of meaning will itself be one more narrative and will have to install itself in the illusion of meaning: the allegorical illusion that language is the belated signification of some pre-linguistic identity. Poetry can work with this illusion—presenting it as illusion—only by presenting language itself, and not a language that is imagined as the sign of some world, or the expression of some subject. For de Man these structures of irony, and the impossibility of recognising irony, have to do with time (de Man 1983, 226). We can only have meaning—or allegory—if we imagine a self and world before signs. But we can also only have this difference between a before and an after through language or narration. This situation, for de Man, is transcendental and inescapable.

Some more recent writers have politicised this constitutive structure of language, the most notable being Judith Butler, whose Gender Trouble, published in 1990, revolutionised not just feminism but the very notion of discourse as grounded in a subject or identity (Butler 1999). Language is performative, according to Butler, because in speaking I produce myself as an ‘I’ to be recognised. For Butler it is not modern poetry with its reflection on language as such which can radicalise the illusion of a self before language; it is the political performance of gender. For the most part we live our gender and our social identity as the linguistic or social construction of our ‘real’ selves. We imagine, for example, that women are constructed as feminine through literary and cultural stereotypes and that there is a real sexual self somehow existing before cultural identity. But Butler, like de Man, wants to insist that this ‘before’ is an effect of language. The idea of a ‘sex’ or biology that is then overlaid with ‘gender’ or social identity is actually an effect of the performance of gender. Whereas de Man looks at the universal creation of ‘a’ subject, Butler focuses on the political identities of the selves produced. The self that is created through the performance of language is always the self of a certain gender. Language, through its system and regularities, creates or performs certain social roles. When I dress, move and speak as a woman I create myself as a woman. Our gender identity is not expressed in language but created and performed through language. But Butler wants to go further and say that language does not just perform and create identity; it also creates the illusion of some subject or being that exists before language. The performance of the self as gendered or as social, creates the illusion of a self or body that was there to be expressed.

Consider, for example, literary character. We can imagine that the images of women in novels somehow represent or reflect what women actually are; this would place language and literature as secondary. Alternatively, we could say that we only have ideas of ‘woman’ and femininity through the constructions of literature and culture; this would be a social construction argument. But Butler wants to take the next ironic or, in her terms, parodic and performative step. The assumption or performance of one’s gender does not just construct identity, it creates the illusion of something that was there all along to be constructed. Performance creates the sequence of a ‘before’ and after, or a pre-linguistic nature that precedes a socially constructed nature. In being or acting as either male or female one presents oneself as a proper realisation of one’s material body, and precludes matter from being anything other than what is recognised as either male or female (Butler 1993, 67). The ‘heterosexual matrix’ creates its ‘before’ through prohibition (Butler 1993, 95). To act and be recognised as a subject one must be either male or female; to not perform one’s gender would be to deviate from the proper or natural body—the matter—that gender and identity pre-supposes. On Butler’s account, we can only think of ‘real’ bodies who are subsequently constructed as women because language itself performs or creates the subject who precedes it.

Butler’s radical proposal is avowedly political and ironic. It is only if we present identity as performed that we will recognise the ways in which it creates, rather than expresses, the subject. The subject ‘is’ nothing other than the illusion of a ‘before’ to language. The person who labels the homosexual as ‘queer’ has an allegorical notion of language: that there simply are homosexual identities, which can then be labelled and discovered. But the homosexual who, in a gay Mardi Gras, presents himself explicitly as an amalgam of performances, as nothing more than a series of camp gestures, allows the performance of identity to be presented as performance: ‘the parodic repetition of “the original”…reveals the original to be nothing other than a parody of the idea of the natural and original’ (Butler 1993, 41). The supposed pre-linguistic matter of the body that would issue in a secure male or female identity is thereby exposed as having potentials to act in multiple and incalculable ways, in ‘alternative imaginary schemas’ (Butler 1993, 91). By performing differently, by acting in ways that are not recognised as reducible to heterosexual norms, the illusion of matter as having a natural sex is undone.

Whereas de Man had argued that the power of language and narrative to create some originating subject was best recognised in modern poetry, Butler turns to the more public and politically charged examples of the destabilisation of identity. Both de Man and Butler, however, remain committed to the inescapability of the illusion of language, or language’s power to create the subject who supposedly precedes it. Both remain committed to the performative function of speech: that the use of language as language creates us as subjects who supposedly, but not actually, exist before that language. Both de Man and Butler can be located within the tradition of irony: there can be no appeal to the world or body as such, in all its immediacy. The minute we speak or act with others we are already committed to a system or language whose origin we neither constitute nor control. And language must then have the function of a law: of a system that enables us to speak and act, but also precludes us from speaking or acting from some point beyond the system. We cannot elevate ourselves above this power of language; all we can do is destabilise the system from within by presenting it as system: as language.

Irony, even early Socratic irony, recognised that language has a force or power that limits what we can and cannot say. Socrates challenges the sophists who believe that rhetoric and concepts can simply be used and manipulated according to our individual wills. Concepts have a meaning, which lies above and beyond any particular speech act. The Romantics insisted that this Idea or sense, which Socrates constantly used to challenge the sophist’s easy definitions, could never be presented. The Good, the Law, the Beautiful and the Soul are not objects that could be correctly labelled within language. It is because language is limited and always particular that we must imagine, but not articulate, that which precedes all limitation. For de Man, it is only after structuralism or the emphasis on the system of language, that we can see that what supposedly lies above and beyond language—the absolute—is actually an illusion created through language. For Butler, this is not just an illusion in literature; it has political consequences. The idea of a self before social performance has enslaved us both to notions of the essentially feminine, and allowed us to dismiss certain sexual identities as unnatural. By performing or drawing attention to the structure of gender as performance we will be liberated from a dogmatic politics or a politics that claims to know the real authoritatively. We cannot escape the systems of identity, or the illusion that there is a subject who speaks. But we can perform, repeat or parody all those gestures that create this subject.

Irony, for writers like Butler and de Man, is not a figure of speech that ‘we’ can choose to use or not use. There is no such thing as faithful and literal speech, which is at one with its world, and then ironic or distanced speech, which would speak with a sense of distance, quotation or otherness. In order to speak at all, ‘we’ must adopt a system that is not uniquely ours. Not only are ‘we’ therefore necessarily displaced from any unique or authentic self, we also only have this ‘we’ or ‘self through the very speech that appears to be Other. This also means that there can be no final achievement of irony. We cannot, as Richard Rorty suggests, adopt our language with a recognition that it is merely a language. Such a hope would rely on a notion of language as other than ourselves, as something we might have to use, but which ‘we’ would always recognise as provisional and arbitrary. Any thought of the ‘we’ or ‘self’ that may or may not be ironic, that would believe or doubt language, is itself an effect of language.

How, though, did this idea of the signifier or this impersonal notion of ‘the’ system of language emerge? Does it have a history? De Man insists that it does not. When the structuralists point out that language is an impersonal system that creates relations, and not just a collection of labels that ‘we’ attach to already differentiated things, they recognise a necessary and transcendental feature of language. It may be that we can only understand this structure from some particular point in history or language, but this does not detract from the necessity of structure as such. The pre-structuralist idea that language is something ‘we’ use is an illusion, and any attempt to think of a ‘we’ or world before structure, would itself have to use and be located within structure. We could only think the ‘before’ of a structure ironically, as itself an effect or illusion of structure. The attempt to give a history and origin to the notion of structure and to the concepts of the signifier and the subject was made by Deleuze and Guattari in their monumental history of capitalism, Anti-Oedipus, published in 1972. Not surprisingly, perhaps, Deleuze’s criticism of the subject, the signifier and negativity was also issued in a critique of irony (Deleuze and Guttari 1983).

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