Prof: Now,
I don't think it's ever happened to me before--
although it might have but I can't recall its having
happened-- that I found myself lecturing
on a person who had lectured yesterday here at Yale,
but that's what happened in this case.
You read--let's just call
it--the facetious article on the lecture in The Daily News
this morning. Some of you may actually have
been in attendance. I unfortunately could not be,
but as it happened I ran into her later in the evening and
talked to some of her colleagues about what she'd said,
so I do have a certain sense of what went on.
In any case,
as to what went on, I'm going to be talking today
about the slipperiest intellectual phenomenon in her
essay having to do with what she calls "psychic
excess," the charge or excess from the
unconscious which in some measure unsettles even that
which can be performed. We perform identity,
we perform our subjectivity, we perform gender in all the
ways that we'll be discussing in this lecture,
but beyond what we can perform there is
"sexuality," which I'm going to be turning
to in a minute. This has something to do with
the authentic realm of the unconscious from which it
emerges. What Butler did in her lecture
yesterday was to return to the psychoanalytic aspect of the
essay that you read for today, emphasizing particularly the
work of Lacan's disciple, Jean Laplanche,
and developing the ways in which sexuality is something
that belongs in a dimension that exceeds and is less accessible
than those more coded concepts that we think of as gender or as
identity in general. So conveniently enough,
for those of you who did attend her lecture yesterday,
in many ways she really did return to the issues that
concerned her at the period of her career when she wrote
Gender Trouble and when she wrote the essay that you've
read for today. All right.
Now I do want to begin with
what ought to be an innocent question.
Surely we're entitled to an
answer to this question, and the question is:
what is sexuality? Now of course you may be given
pause-- especially if you've got an ear
fine-tuned to jargon-- you may be given pause by the
very word "sexuality,"
which is obviously relatively recent in the language.
People didn't used to talk
about sexuality. They talked about sex,
which seems somehow more straightforward,
but "sexuality" is a term which is not only
pervasive in cultural thought but also has a certain privilege
among other ways of describing that aspect of our lives.
In other words,
there is something authentic, as I've already begun to
suggest, about our sexuality, something more authentic about
that than the sorts of aspects of ourselves that we can and do
perform. That's Butler's argument,
and it's an interesting starting point,
but it's not yet, or perhaps not at all,
an answer to the question, "What is sexuality?"
Now for Foucault sexuality is
arguably something like desired and experienced bodily pleasure,
but the problem in Foucault is that this pleasure is always
orchestrated by a set of factors that surround it,
a very complicated set of factors which is articulated
perhaps best on page 1634 in his text,
the lower right-hand column. He's talking about the
difference between and the interaction between what he
calls the "deployment of alliance"
and the "deployment of"--
our word--"sexuality." I want to read this passage and
then comment on it briefly: "In a word [and it's of
course not in a word; it's in several words],
the deployment of alliance is attuned to a homeostasis of the
social body..." The deployment of alliance is
the way in which, in a given culture,
the nuclear reproductive unit is defined,
typically as the "family,"
but the family in itself changes in its nature and its
structure. The way in which the family is
viewed, the sorts of activities that
are supposed to take place and not take place in the family--
because Foucault lays a certain amount of stress on incest and
the atmospheric threat of incest--
the sorts of things that go on in the family and are surrounded
by certain kinds of discourse conveying knowledge--
and we'll come back to the latter part of that sentence--
all have to do with the deployment of alliance.
On the other hand,
the deployment of sexuality we understand as the way in which
whatever this thing is that we're trying to define is talked
about-- and therefore not by any state
apparatus or actual legal system necessarily--
but nevertheless simply by the prevalence and force of various
sorts of knowledge police. Okay.
To continue the passage:
In a word, the deployment of alliance is attuned to a
homeostasis [or a regularization;
that's what he means by "homeostasis"]
of the social body, which it has the function of
maintaining; whence its privileged link with
the law [that is to say, the law tells us all sorts of
things about the family-- including whether or not there
can be gay marriage, just incidentally:
I'll come back to that in a minute];
whence too the fact that the important phase for it is
"reproduction." The deployment of sexuality has
its reason for being, not in reproducing itself,
but in proliferating, innovating, annexing,
creating, and penetrating bodies in an increasingly
detailed way, and in controlling populations
in an increasingly comprehensive way.
What he's saying is,
among other things, that a deployment of sexuality,
which isn't necessarily a bad thing--
these deployments aren't meant somehow or another to be
terroristic regimes-- a deployment of sexuality,
which for example favored forms of sexuality such as birth
control or homosexuality, would certainly be a means of
controlling reproduction. Just in that degree,
the deployment of sexuality could be seen as subtly or not
so subtly at odds with the deployment of alliance,
alliance which is all for the purpose of reproduction or at
least takes as its primary sign, as Foucault suggests,
the importance, the centrality,
to a given culture-- or sociobiological system,
if you wil-- of reproduction.
These are the ways in which the
deployment of alliance and the deployment of sexuality
converge, don't converge, and conflict with each other.
But in all of these ways,
we keep seeing this concept of sexuality;
but, as I say, it continues to be somewhat
elusive what precisely it is. Just to bracket that for the
moment, let me make another comment or two on the concepts
in the passage that I have just read.
Let's say once and for all at
the outset that the central idea in Foucault's text,
the idea which he continues to develop throughout the three
volumes on the history of sexuality--
the central idea is this idea of "power"
as something other than that which is enforced through legal,
policing or state apparatus means.
This is power which is enforced
as a circulation or distribution of knowledge,
which is discursive in nature, and which enforces its norms
for all of us, for better or for
worse--because discourse can release and can constitute sites
of resistance as well as oppress--
which, for better or worse, circulates among us ideas that
are in a certain sense governing ideas about whatever it is
that's in question, in this case,
obviously, sexuality. Foucault calls this,
sometimes hyphenating it, "power-knowledge."
This is absolutely the central
idea in late Foucault. I introduced it,
you remember, last time in talking about
Said. I come back to it now as that
which really governs-- and guides you through--the
whole text of Foucault: the distinction between power
as it's traditionally understood as authoritative--
as sort of top- down, coming from above,
imposed on us by law, by the police,
by whatever establishment of that kind there might be--
the distinction between power of that kind and power which is
simply the way in which knowledge--
and knowledge is not, by the way, necessarily a good
word, it's not necessarily knowledge
of the truth-- the way in which knowledge
circulates and imposes its effects on us,
our behavior, the way we are or the way at
least that we think we are-- the way in which we
"perform," in Butler's term.
All of that in Foucault is to
be understood as an effect of power-knowledge.
Now notice, however,
in terms of our question--What is sexuality?--that Foucault is
being quite coy. He's talking about sexuality
but he's not talking about it in itself,
whatever it "in itself" might be.
He's talking about the
deployment of it, that is to say the way in which
power-knowledge constructs it, makes it visible,
makes it available to us, and makes it a channel through
which desire can get itself expressed,
but a channel which is still not necessarily in and of itself
that natural thing that we look for and long for and continue to
seek: the nature of sexuality. So when the emphasis in
Foucault's discussion is really on deployment,
that is, the way in which alliance--
the family, whatever the nuclear social structure might
be-- or sexuality--whatever it is
that gets itself expressed as desire--
the way in which these matters, these aspects of our lives,
can be deployed, we still aren't necessarily
talking about the thing in itself.
Foucault isn't an
anthropologist. He's not talking about the
family in itself either. He's talking about the way in
which a basic concept of alliance out of which
reproduction arises and gets itself channeled can be
deployed, and understood as manipulated
by, the circulation of power-knowledge.
The issue of gay marriage is
very interestingly, by the way, between the
concepts of the deployment of alliance and the deployment of
sexuality, because there's a certain sense
in which the deployment of sexuality is at odds with the
deployment of alliance. If sexuality is something that
is really just looking around for ways to get itself
expressed, taking advantage of deployment
where that's a good thing and trying to resist deployment
where that seems more like policing--
if it's just looking around for a way to get expressed,
it's not particularly interested in alliance.
It's not interested in the way
in which relationships involving sexuality could settle into any
kind of a coded pattern or system of regularity,
so that there is this tension which,
of course, gets itself expressed whenever,
within the gay community, people strongly support gay
marriage and see that as the politicized center of
contemporary gay life; or people also in
the gay community, many of them theoretically
advanced, think of it as a non-issue or a
side issue which loses track precisely of what Foucault calls
the deployment of sexuality, simply trying to extend the
domain, arguably a tyrannical domain,
of the deployment of alliance-- in other words,
to redefine the basic concept of alliance in such a way that
doesn't really touch very closely on the deployment of
sexuality. So it's an interesting and
rather mixed set of issues that the whole question,
the whole sort of profoundly politicized question,
of gay marriage gives rise to. So that's what sexuality is
> in Foucault.
In Butler it's just clearer
that to ask the question--What is sexuality?-- is--well,
it's just been a false start. We thought it was an innocent
question, but you get into Butler and you see very clearly
that you simply can't be a certain sexuality.
You can perform an identity,
as we'll see, by repeating,
by imitating, and by parodying in drag.
You can perform an identity,
but you can't wholly perform sexuality precisely
because of this element of psychic excess to which her
thinking continues very candidly and openly and honestly to
return. Butler's work,
in other words, is not just about "the
construction of identity." It's not just about the domain
of performance, as one might say.
It acknowledges that there is
something very difficult to grasp and articulate beyond
performance. Its main business is to explain
the nature and purview and purposes of performance,
but it's nevertheless always clear in Butler,
as she returns to the question of the unconscious in
particular, that there is something in
excess of, or not fully to be encompassed
by, ideas of performance. So we've made a false start.
We've asked a question we can't
answer, but at the same time we have learned certain things.
We've learned certainly that
sexuality, whatever it is,
is more flexible and also in some sense more authentic--
that is to say, closest to the actual nature of
the drives. Yesterday Butler made a
distinction between instinct and drive which I won't go into
because it had to do with her reflections on what is cultural
and what is biological or not cultural in the life of the
unconscious. For our purposes,
whatever role sexuality may play in the unconscious,
and however authentic--that is to say,
however not culturally determined that role may turn
out to be-- it's more flexible.
That's the important thing,
more than any kind of social coding: the sort of coding,
for example, that Foucault would indicate in
speaking of alliance or deployed sexuality and the sort of coding
that Butler refers to repeatedly as "gendering."
Still, for both of them--and
this is the other thing we've learned--
even sexuality through deployment, or through the way
in which it can get expressed in relation to gender and
performance, is discursive. It's a matter of discourse.
It arises out of linguistic
formations, formations that Foucault
understands as circulated knowledge and that Butler
understands, again, as performance.
Foucault sees sexuality as the
effect of power-knowledge, power as knowledge.
Butler sees it as the
effect--insofar as it's visible, insofar as it is acted
out--sees it as the effect of performance.
So now to take the way in which
Butler makes this relationship between what one might suppose
to be authentic, actual, all about one's self,
and that which is performed, that which is one's constructs
toward being a self, let's take one of the most
provocative sentences in her essay,
which is on page 1711 about a third of the way down:
"Since I was sixteen, being a lesbian is what I've
been." Now what she's doing--remember
at the very beginning of the essay she says that her whole
purpose is to reflect, is somehow or another to
register a politicized intervention in gender studies
in terms of a philosophical reflection--
on ontology, on "being."
What is it in other words,
she says, to be something?
Now what she's doing in this
sentence, which is an awkward-seeming
sentence, "[B]eing a lesbian is what
I've been," is pointing out to us that to
be something is very different from to be "being"
something. For example, I can say I'm busy.
(By the way, I am.)
I can say I'm busy and I expect
you to take it that there's a certain integrity,
there's a certain authenticity in the fact that I'm busy.
Yes, I'm busy,
but suppose you say, suspecting that I'm not really
busy, "Oh, he's being busy."
In other words,
he's performing busy-ness. He's going around being busy,
sort of imposing on me the idea that this lazy person is
actually accomplishing something.
So, the performance of being
busy. But here's the interesting
point that Butler is making: the ontological realm is
supposed to be about the simple being or existence of things,
and it's always in philosophy contrasted with agency,
with the doing of things, with getting something done,
with the performance of things. But what Butler is saying--and
that's why she says that she takes an interest in the
ontological aspect of the question--
what she's saying is that there is an element of the
performative which actually creeps into the ontological.
Even being, she says,
is something that in some measure--perhaps not altogether
but in some measure--something we perform.
Hence the doubling up of the
word "being" in the sentence,
"Since I was sixteen, being a lesbian is what I've
been." In one sense,
yeah, I am--that's what I am, but in another sense I've been
performing it. I've been being one.
>
I've been outing myself,
if you will. I have been taking up a role
that can be understood, as all roles can,
intelligibly in terms of its performance.
So that's why she puts the
sentence that way, and if you made a big mark in
the margin and said, "Aha, got her!
This is where she says she
really is something. No more of this stuff about
just constructivism, making oneself up as one goes
along. This is where she says she
really is something,"
then you're wrong. >
She's escaped your criticism
because she says, "Oh, no,
no, no. I have been being a lesbian:
I've been being one, which is a different thing,
although not altogether a different thing,
from being one." She is deliberately,
in other words, on the fence between the sense
of the ontological as authentic and her own innovative sense of
the ontological as belonging within the realm of performance.
She doesn't want to get off the
fence. She really doesn't want to come
down squarely on either side because for her--
and this is what I like best about her work,
even though it's perhaps the most frustrating thing about
it-- because for her,
what she is talking about is ultimately mysterious.
She has a great deal to say
about it, but she's not pretending that
in what she has to say about it she's exhausted the
"subject." That's why it seems to me to be
admirable that she stays on the fence about this,
and not simply an occasion for our frustration.
So with all of this said--and
mystification aside, if you will,
as well--with all of this said, it seems plain that Foucault
and Butler do have a common political agenda.
Foucault is a gay writer who
was, in the later stages of writing The History of
Sexuality, dying of AIDS;
Butler is a lesbian writer. Both of them are very much
concerned for the political implications of their
marginalized gender roles, while at the same time--of
course, being theoretically very sophisticated about them.
Their common political agenda
is to destabilize the hetero-normative by denying the
authenticity, or in Butler's parlance
"originality," of privileged gender roles.
In other words,
who says heterosexuality came first?
Who says the nuclear family is
natural? Who says sexuality can only get
itself expressed in certain ways that power-knowledge deploys for
it? These are the sorts of
questions, the politicized questions, which these
discourses raise in common. So it seems to me that they
have a very broad agenda in common, and it also seems to me
that they are very closely in agreement.
I say that just in order to
pause briefly on the moment in which they seem not to be.
You've probably noticed that
one text is referring to another at one point in your reading,
and so let's go there: page 1712, the right-hand
margin. The context for this,
of course, is Butler talking about Jesse Helms having
deplored male homosexuality in attacking the photography of
Robert Mapplethorpe, and by implication,
Butler argues, simply erasing female
homosexuality because his diatribe pays no attention to
it. Butler then complains that
there's a certain injustice in that because,
in a way, it's even worse, she says,
sort of to be declared nonexistent than it is to be
declared deviant. At least the male homosexual
gets to be declared deviant: we're simply erased.
That's the position she's
taking here, and then at that point, what she says is:
To be prohibited explicitly is to occupy a discursive site from
which something like a reverse-discourse can be
articulated; to be implicitly proscribed is
not even to qualify as an object of prohibition.
Here's where she gives us a
footnote on Foucault, footnote fifteen (you know we
love footnotes): It is this particular ruse of
erasure which Foucault for the most part fails to take account
of in his analysis of power. Butler's argument is that in
Foucauldian terms, there's got to be
discourse for there to be identity.
Helms's refusal of the category
of "lesbian" simply by omission--
and of course, we know, by the way,
that this is a refusal only by omission--
Helms's refusal of this category is,
in other words, an erasure of discourse.
No discourse, no identity.
That is, in other words,
what Butler is claiming Foucault's position entails.
Discourse creates
power-knowledge. Power-knowledge creates
identity. Therefore, where there's no
discourse, there can be no identity,
and since Helms has erased the lesbian by refusing discourse
about it, it must follow that there is no
such thing as a lesbian. That's the implication of this
footnote. He almost always presumes [and
we must do honor to that word "almost"]
that power takes place through discourse as its instrument,
and that oppression is linked with subjection and
subjectivization, that is, that it is installed
as the formative principle of the identity of subjects.
Now in defense of Foucault,
let's go to page 1632, the upper right-hand column,
a passage that's fascinating on a number of grounds.
It's rather long but I think I
will read it, upper right-hand column.
Foucault says:
Consider for example the history of what was once
"the" great sin against nature.
The extreme discretion of the
texts dealing with sodomy-- that utterly confused
category--and the nearly universal reticence in talking
about it made possible a twofold operation.
Okay.
Here's Foucault saying that
this is a category. The homosexual identity,
as understood in terms of sodomy, is a category.
He's going to go on to say that
it's punishable in the extreme by law, but in the meantime he's
saying there's no discourse. There's a kind of almost
universal silence on the subject.
You don't get silence in Dante,
as I'm sure you know, but in most cases in this
period nobody talks about it. It's punishable,
severely punishable by law, and yet nobody talks about it.
This would seem to
violate Foucault's own premise that discourse constitutes
identity but also plainly does contradict Butler's
claim that Foucault supposes that discourse always
constitutes identity. Let's continue:
… [T]he nearly universal reticence in talking about it
made possible a twofold operation: on the one hand,
there was an extreme severity (punishment by fire was meted
out well into the eighteenth century,
without there being any substantial protest expressed
before the middle of the century) [Discourse is here
failing also in that it's not constituting a site of
resistance, and nobody's complaining about
these severe punishments just as on the other hand nobody's
talking very much about them: there is,
in other words, an erasure of discourse],
and [he continues] on the other hand,
a tolerance that must have been widespread (which one can deduce
indirectly from the infrequency of judicial sentences,
and which one glimpses more directly through certain
statements concerning societies of men that were thought to
exist in the army or in the courts)--
In other words, he's saying there was an
identity and that identity was not--at least not very much--
constituted by discourse. As you read down the column,
he's going to go on to say that in a way, the plight of the
homosexual got worse when it started being talked about.
Yes, penalties for being
homosexual were less severe, but the surveillance of
homosexuality-- the way in which it could be
sort of dictated to by therapy and by the clergy and by
everyone else who might have something to say about it--
became far more pervasive and determinate than it was when
there was no discourse about it. In a certain way,
Foucault is going so far as to say silence was,
while perilous to the few, a good thing for the many;
whereas discourse which perhaps relieves the few of extreme fear
nevertheless sort of imposes a kind of hegemonic authority on
all that remain and constitutes them as something that
power-knowledge believes them to be,
rather than something that in any sense according to their
sexuality they spontaneously are.
It seems to me that this
pointed disagreement with Foucault,
raised by Butler, is answered in advance by
Foucault and that even there, when you think about it,
they're really in agreement with each other.
Foucault's position is more
flexible than she takes it to be,
but that just means that it's similar to her own and,
as I say, that fact together with the broad shared political
agenda that they have seems to me to suggest that they're
writing very much in concert and in keeping with each other's
views. Now in method they are somewhat
different. Foucault is a more historical
writer, although historians often criticize him for not
being historical. The reason historians don't
think he's historical is that he never really explains how you
get from one moment in history to the next.
He talks about moments in
history, but he talks about them in terms of bodies of
knowledge-- "epistemic moments,"
as he sometimes says. Then these moments somehow
mysteriously become other moments and are transformed.
The kind of causality that
might explain such a thing from an historian's point of view
tends in Foucault's arguments to be left out.
He nevertheless is concerned,
however, with the way in which views of
things change over time, and it's the change in those
views that his argument in The History of Sexuality
tends to concentrate on; so that he can say that
starting in the nineteenth century and continuing to the
present, there are essentially four
cathected beings around which power-knowledge deploys itself.
He describes them as the
hysterical woman, the masturbating child,
the Malthusian couple-- meaning the couple that is
enjoined not to reproduce too much because the economy won't
stand for it, which is a way of,
you see, of deploying alliance in such a way as to manipulate
and control reproduction. That's a moment,
by the way, in which the deployment of alliance and the
deployment of sexuality may be in league with each other,
because obviously birth control and homosexual practices can
also control reproduction. As you see, it's not always a
question of conflict between these two forms of deployment.
So in any case,
there's the Malthusian couple and then the perverse adult,
meaning the queer person in whatever form.
He says about this--on page
1634 in the left-hand column-- that you get these four types,
and he says that therapy, the clergy, family,
parental advice, and the various ways in which
knowledge of this kind circulates have to do primarily
with the preoccupation with, tension about,
anxiety about these four types. The hysterical woman is
determined to be hysterical once it begins to be thought that her
whole being is her sexuality. The masturbating child violates
the idea that children are born innocent and must be--
because it suggests something terribly wrong about the cult of
the innocent child that begins in the nineteenth century--
it's something that is subject to extreme and severe
surveillance. "Who knows what will come
of this?" Scientific thinking about
masturbation had to do with the notion that it led to impotence,
that by the time you got around to being in a relationship,
there wouldn't be anything there anymore.
Just terrible thoughts--also it
stunted your growth and you died sooner--just terrible,
terrible thoughts about masturbation existed.
All of this dominated the
scientific literature until well into the twentieth century.
Then the Malthusian couple,
which was primarily a phenomenon of what's called
"political economy" in the earlier nineteenth
century but has prevailed, by the way, in what we suppose
to be, and indeed what is,
our progressive technology of the promotion of birth control
around the world. "We must control
population" is still the Malthusian
principle on which we base the idea that people really need to
be enlightened about the possibility of not just having
an infinite number of children. Again you see that Foucault is
right still to suppose that the notion of the Malthusian couple
prevails among us. Then finally the perverse
adult, who is first discoursed about in the nineteenth century,
as the earlier passage that I read suggested,
and is still, of course, widely discoursed
about. Of course it now has a voice
and discourses in its own right: a literature,
a journalism and all the rest of it,
and is in other words very much in the mainstream of discourse
and still has controversy swirling around it,
precisely because of the discursive formations that
attach to it. All of this Foucault takes to
be in the nature of historical observation.
For Butler on the other hand,
as you can tell from her style--
I am sure that, as in the case of reading
Bhabha, you recognize a lot of Derrida
in Butler's style-- in Butler it's a question of
taking these same issues and orienting them more in the
direction of philosophy. I've already suggested the way
in which she understands this particular essay as a
contribution to that branch of philosophy called
"ontology," the philosophy of being.
In general she takes a
particular and acute interest in that.
Her basic move is something
that I hope by this time you've become familiar with and
recognize and perhaps even anticipate.
For us, perhaps,
the inaugural moves of this kind were the various
distinctions made by Levi-Strauss.
The one that I mentioned in
particular-- as accessible and I think
immediately explanatory of how the move works--
is "the raw" and "the cooked."
I tried to show that
intuitively, obviously, the raw precedes the cooked.
First it's raw,
then it's cooked, and yet at the same time if we
understand the relationship between the raw and the cooked
to be a discursive formation, we have to recognize that there
would be no such thing as the raw if there weren't the cooked.
If you talk about eating a raw
carrot, you have to have had a cooked carrot.
You don't just pick up a
carrot, which you've never seen before, and say,
"This is raw." The only way you know it's raw
is to know that it can be and has been cooked.
Well, this is the Butler move,
the move that she makes again and again and again.
What do you mean,
the heterosexual precedes the homosexual?
What do you mean,
the heterosexual is an original and the homosexual is just a
copy of it? Who would ever think of the
concept of the heterosexual? You're the only person on earth.
You stand there and you say,
"I'm heterosexual." >
You don't do that.
You just say,
"Well, I have sexuality."
You could say that.
If you had enough jargon at
your disposal, you could say that,
but you can't say, "I am heterosexual."
You can't have the concept
heterosexual without having the concept homosexual.
They are absolutely mutually
dependent, and it has nothing to do with any possible truth of a
chicken and egg nature as to which came first.
In sexuality,
the very strong supposition is for Butler that neither came
first. They're always already there
together in that psychic excess with which we identify
sexuality, but in social terms the idea
that what's natural is the heterosexual and what's
unnatural, secondary, derivative,
and imitative of the heterosexual is the homosexual
is belied simply by the fact that you can't have one
conceptually without the other. It's the same thing with gender
and drag. Drag comes along and parodies,
mimics, and imitates gender, but what it points out is that
gender is always in and of itself precisely performance.
This could, of course,
take the form of a critique, I suppose, but we're all quite
virtuoso when it comes to performing.
Here I am.
I'm standing in front of you
performing professionalism. I'm performing whiteness.
I'm performing masculinity.
I'm doing all of those things.
I'm quite a virtuoso:
what a performance! >
Perhaps it's kind of hard to
imagine my standing here sort of exclusively performing
masculinity as opposed to all the other things that I am
performing, but okay, I'm certainly doing
that too. I'm insecure about all of these
things, Butler argues, because I keep performing them.
In other words,
I keep repeating what I suppose myself to be.
I'm not comfortable in my skin,
presumably, and I don't just relax into what I suppose myself
to be. I perform it.
It is, in other words,
a perpetual self-construction which does two things at once.
It stabilizes my identity,
which is its intention, but at the same time it betrays
my anxiety about my identity in that I must perpetually repeat
it to keep it going. All of this is going on in this
notion of performance, so what drag does is precisely
bring all this to our attention. It shows us once and for all
that that's what's at stake in the seemingly natural categories
of gender that we imagine ourselves to inhabit like a set
of comfortable old clothes. Drag, which is not at all
comfortable old clothes, reminds >
us how awkward the apparel of
ourselves that we can call our identity actually is,
and so it plays that role. The relationship between
identity and performance is just the same.
This notion of performing
identity should recall for you "signifyin'"
in the thinking of Henry Louis Gates.
It should recall for you,
in other words, the way in which the identity
of another is appropriated through parody,
through derision, through self-distancing,
and through a sense of the way in which one is something
precisely insofar as one is not simply inhabiting the subject
position of another. It should also recall for you
the "sly civility" of the subaltern in Homi
Bhabha's thinking: the way in which double
consciousness is partly in the subject position of another,
partly in one's own in such a way that one liberates oneself
from the sense that it's the other person who is authentic
and that one is oneself somehow derivative,
subordinate, and dependent. All of these relations ought to
gel in your minds as belonging very much to the same sphere of
thought. The way in which you can't have
the raw without the cooked is the way in which,
generally speaking, categories of self and other
and of identity per se simply can't be thought in
stable terms in and for themselves,
but only relationally. Now "why is this literary
theory?" you ask yourself,
or you have been asking yourself.
Of course, Butler gives the
greatest example at the end of her essay when she says,
"Suppose Aretha is singing to me."
"You make me feel,"
not a natural woman, because there's no such thing
as natural. "You make me feel
like a natural woman," "you"
presumably being some hetero-normative other who shows
me what it is really to be a woman.
Suppose, however,
"Aretha is singing to me," or suppose she is
singing to a drag queen. That is reading.
That's reading a song text in a
way that is, precisely, literary theory.
Now obviously I'm thinking of
Virginia Woolf's Mr. Ramsay in writing this sentence
[gestures to sentence on chalkboard: "The
philosopher in a dark mood paced on his oriental rug."].
It's a terrible sentence for
which I apologize. Virginia Woolf never would have
written it; but just to pass in review the
way in which what we've been doing is literary theory:
the Marxist critic would, of course, focus on
"his" because the nexus for the
Marxist critic in this sentence would be possession--
that is to say, the deployment of capital such
that a strategy of possession can be enacted.
The African American critic
would call attention to white color-coded metaphors,
insisting, in other words, that one of the ways in which
literature needs to be read is through a demystification of
processes of metaphorization whereby white is bright and
sunlit and central, and black, as Toni Morrison
suggests in her essay, is an absence,
is a negation, and is a negativity.
This is bad, a dark mood.
For the postcolonialist critic,
obviously the problem is an expropriated but also
undifferentiated commodity. By "Oriental"
you don't mean Oriental. You mean Kazakh or Bukhara or
Kilim. In other words,
the very lack of specificity in the concept suggests the reified
or objectified other in the imagination or consciousness of
the discourse. Finally, for gender theory the
masculine anger of the philosopher,
Mr. Ramsay--you remember he is so
frustrated because he can't get past r;
he wants to get to s, but he can't get past
r-- the masculinized anger of the
philosopher masks the effeteness of the aestheticism of somebody
who has an Oriental rug. That in turn might mask the
effete professorial type, that might mask an
altogether too hetero-normative sexual predation and on and on
and on dialectically if you read this sentence as an aspect or
element of gender theory. Okay.
I will certainly end there,
and next time we'll take up the way in which what we've been
talking about for a few lectures,
the construction of identity and of things,
which has obviously been one of the common features of this
course, is theorized at an even more
abstract level, with certain conclusions.
