Performativity and Abjection

From the Introduction to Judith Butler's Bodies That Matter (p. 14-16):

... the symbolic law in Lacan can be subject to the same kind of critique that Nietzsche formulated of the notion of God: the power attributed to this prior and ideal power is derived and deflected from the attribution itself. It is this insight into the illegitimacy of the symbolic law of sex that is dramatized to a certain degree in the contemporary film Paris Is Burning: the ideal that is mirrored depends on that very mirroring to be sustained as an ideal. 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 prior and autonomous to its assumption is contravened by the notion that the citation of a law is the very mechanism of its production and articulation. What is "forced" by the symbolic, then, is a citation of its law that reiterates and consolidates the ruse of its own force. What would it mean to "cite" the law to produce it differently, to "cite" the law in order to reiterate and coopt its power, to expose the heterosexual matrix and to displace the effect of its necessity?

The process of that sedimentation or what we might call materialization will be a kind of citationality, the acquisition of being through the citing of power, a citing that establishes an originary complicity with power in the formation of the "I." 

In this sense, the agency denoted by the performativity of "sex" will be directly counter to any notion of a voluntarist subject who existes quite apart from the regulatory norms whih she/he opposes. The paradox of subjectivation (assujetissement) is preciesely that the subject who would resist such norms is itslef enaled, 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. 

As a result of this reformulation of performativity, (a) gender performativity cannot be theorized apart from the forcible and reiterative practice of regulatory sexual regimes; (b) the account of agency conditioned by those very regimes of discourse/power cannot be conflated with voluntarism or individualism, much less with consumerism, and in no way presupposes a choosing subject; (c) the regime of heterosexuality operates to circumscribe and contour the "materiality" of sex, and that "materiality" is formed and sustained through a materialization of regulatory norms that are in part those of heterosexual hegemony; (d) the materialization of norms requires those identificatory processes by which norms are assumed or appropriated, and these identifications precede and enable the formation of a subject, but are not, strictly speaking, performed by a subject; and (e) the limits of constructivism are exposed at those boundaries of bodily life where abjected or delegitimated bodies fail to count as "bodies." If the materiality of sex is demarcated in discourse, then this demarcation will produce a domain of excluded and delegitimated "sex." Hence, it will be as important to think about how and to what end bodies are constructed as it is 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.

How, then, can one think thorugh the matter of bodies as a kind of materialization governed by regulatory norms in order to ascertain the workings of heterosexual hegemony in the formation of what qualifies as a viable body? How does that materialization of the norm in bodily formation produce a domain of abjected bodies, a field of deformation, which, in failing to qualify as the fully human, fortifies those regulatory norms? 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, whays of living that count as "life," lives worth protecting, lives worth saving, lives worth grieving?

[Note: Whatever the implications of her argument, its scope is restricted in Judith Butler's book Bodies that Matter to issues of 'gender bending', transsexuality, intersecuality, etc.— NOT to issues like abortion or animalism which might lead to alternative reflections on which bodies matter, which bodies are abjected, etc.]

 

Denying the Ungrieved, and the Unborn, a Life

—and even a mention

—oOo—