In the concluding section of Gender Trouble, Butler reflects on some of the broader implications of their critical analysis of gender performativity in the book. What began with a question about who the ‘we’ is in feminist theory opens onto a much broader set of questions about identity and agency, about the nature of the subject, and therefore about the possibility of ethics and political engagement.
That ‘we’, the presumptive ‘woman’ of feminist discourse, turns out to be an inherently unstable category. It is unstable first for what we can call ethnographic or cultural reasons: what marks the specific difference of women just is variably different in various cultures, without there being any singular and universal differentia. This is true whether we are looking for a substantive attribute or any relational quality. The latter point is tied to the fact that there is also no universal form of patriarchy, since even the kinds of oppressions endured by women in different cultural and sociopolitical systems are nonidentical across contexts. This remains true in principle even if one manages to identify significant forms of substantive or relational overlap.
These ethnographic or anthropological reasons for the instability of the category ‘woman’ are, I think, for Butler actually just empirical instantiations of a more profound point, namely that there is no prediscursive identity whatsoever. In each case one goes looking for the pre-discursive thing-in-itself, whether as an attribute or relation, that would mark out the specificity of, say, womanhood or femininity, and discovers only an endless set of cultural mirrors refracting discursive effects back onto the supposedly ‘real’.
This is why Butler can say that this book has turned out to be a critique of foundationalist feminist theory: there one finds a pretense to ground one’s political engagements and systematic theory on the stability of a transcendental subject, and this effort necessarily fails. In other words, even the transcendental subject is not prediscursive.
Taking a broad view, we can say that for this reason Butler is clearly much more Hegelian than they are Kantian. At the other end of 20th century continental philosophy, the Husserl one encounters in the Cartesian Meditations is resolutely Kantian: he thinks there is a way to construct a systematic philosophy or scientific theory upon the stability of transcendental subjectivity, but in order for that to be possible this subjectivity must have an objective, prediscursive structure. Otherwise, the unambiguously discursive theory that is built on top of this would risk losing its apodictic certainty. This is explicit in Husserl’s text. However, there is at least one obviously discursive category that he cannot do without: namely, the concept of science itself, and this notion of scientificity involves a set of presuppositions about, say, knowledge, objectivity, systematicity, totality, and completeness. Scientificity in this sense does not appear to be a prediscursive category at all, which threatens to undermine not necessarily the legitimacy of Husserl’s enterprise as such, but perhaps its claim to transhistorical objectivity.
A Hegelian approach like Butler’s, by contrast, insistently demonstrates that there is no such prediscursive category at all, but rather that the ‘real’ that one hopes to gain access to is precisely constructed in and through the articulation of discourse. One can talk then about a post-foundationalist feminist theory and practice, one that no longer presupposes the prediscursive subject or the stability of the identity that is produced as an effect of intersubjective and discursive practices. Thus the question now will be: what is the ethics and politics of a feminism that no longer takes as given the interests of a subject outside of the context of its discursive construction?
Butler holds that it is a mistake to think that this post-foundationalist approach means giving up any conception of subjective agency. True, on the classical articulation of this notion, agency is thought to refer precisely to a prediscursive subject, a prediscursive “I”. And it has also been typically assumed that for an I or a subject to be constituted by discourse means that it is fully determined by it. But it is just these two classical philosophical assumptions that Butler’s analysis calls into question (182).
The assertion of an “I”, the reference to one’s own subjectivity, is conditioned by the rules of discourse that establish what counts as intelligible self-assertion and intelligible reception by others. A core part of this discursive structure in the tradition that we have here inherited is, precisely, the shape of this epistemological subject, with its characteristic subject-object, self-other binary. Butler’s critical argument is that we must consider the shape of this epistemological subject as a discursive figure, rather than as a pre-discursive transcendental structure.
Thus they write: “The shift from an epistemological account of identity to one which locates the problematic within practices of signification permits an analysis that takes the epistemological mode itself as one possible and contingent signifying practice” (184). Butler’s inheritance from Foucault, who saw in sexuality a variable set of historically specific discursive practices that gives rise to the appearance of a subject of truth with a stable sex, is probably clear enough. Here we can see how they are productively drawing on Derrida as well: in a piece like “Signature Event Context”, he argues that signification is a process of re-iteration in which decontextualization is a constitutive condition for the possibility of any meaning-making; thus failure is not an extrinsic possibility but a grounding condition for the construction of meaning. The same goes here, now, for the process of subjectivation or identity constitution through discursive practices, which for Butler are also invariably tied to repetition. It is impossible even to conceive of a singular discourse; discourses and their effects are only intelligible as variations on repetitions.
So here is where we re-locate agency, without reference to a prediscursive subject. Agency is found as the set of possible variations of the repetitions that make up coherent signifying acts in a discursive regime: “it is only within the practices of repetitive signifying that a subversion of identity becomes possible” (185).
Subversion becomes a kind of provisional ethical injunction here. It makes sense that the book would end in this way, since the modern regime of normative sex/gender signification—what Butler has called the heterosexual matrix—involves the production of the appearance of a ‘real’, prediscursive sex binary and an equally normative set of culturally legible forms of relatively stable gender expression. Relative to or outside these normative constructions, any sex or gender can only appear as ‘mimetic’, ‘phantasmatic’, ‘derivative’, “a failed copy, as it were” (186). Of course, the true lesson is that even the normative constructions of sex and gender are only apparently stable effects of an iterative discourse. If subversion takes on an ethical meaning here, it is because there is obvious value in performatively revealing these normative constructions to be no less derivative than non-normative expressions. In other words, my masculinity as a straight, cisgendered male is a discourse-effect, as is the subjectivity that I inhabit by identifying with this construction in reiteratively performing my gender in a way that is legible as such to others.
There is no question of not participating within a signifying discourse, of repeating tropes and varying them in some ways. The ethical question is how one takes up the figures of a discourse in which one always already finds oneself engaged, and how one varies them in their repetition. “The task is not whether to repeat, but how to repeat, or, indeed, to repeat and, through a radical proliferation of gender, to displace the very gender norms that enable the repetition itself” (189). To reveal the artificiality of dominant norms, to displace them, is the practice of subversive repetition. This takes on the character of an ethical injunction precisely because these dominant norms present themselves as non-artificial, as real, in relation to which everything else is demoted within a violently maintained social hierarchy.
This, it should be noticed, is only a negative or critical operation; subversion cannot be given a positive meaning by teleologically relating it to anything like the aim of furthering of some subject’s ‘interests’, or on the basis of increasing ‘inclusion’ within a system of gender intelligibility, or anything like that. Such positive prescriptions would require the foundationalist assumptions that Butler’s own discourse seeks constantly to demonstrate cannot be maintained: it would require our access to the prediscursive real, a subjectivity that retains its transcendental purity in spite of its empirical historicity and linguistic mediation. Perhaps, however, such an insistently negative-critical ethics, the only kind apparently possible within a post-foundationalist frame, is enough.
gil morejón 