- Austen: How to Do Things with Words
- Butler: Bodies That Matter (excerpt)
- Butler: Gender Trouble (excerpt)
- Butler/Connolly: Politics, Power, and Ethics
- Deleuze: On Human Rights
- Derrida: Before the Law
- Kafka: Before the Law
- Kafka: An Imperial Message
- Kafka: A Report to an Academy
- Nietzsche: Preface to the Genealogy (section 13)
- Dolar Quotes
- Voice and Nothing More Powerpoint
Bodies of Persuasion 
Kafka’s “A Report for An Academy” distinctly reminds me of Poe’s “Murders in the Rue Morgue.” In both, Kafka’s ape and Poe’s “Ourang-Outang” both successfully pass as human beings, while their actual identities as animals remain concealed. In Poe’s story, the brutal murder of a mother and her young daughter remains a mystery because no witness can seem to identify the sounds heard from the apartment in which the crime took place. There are many speculations on the criminal’s voice—one man claims “the shrill voice was that of an Italian,” while another, convinced the voice belonged to a man, “could not distinguish the words uttered. They were loud and quick – unequal – spoken in fear as well as in anger. The voice was harsh – not so much shrill as harsh” (201). Notably, none of the witnesses distinguished between the sounds of a human and that of an animal. When Dupin discovers that it was an Ourang-Outang that committed the crime, its startlingly human linguistic qualities are recognized as the clue that sidetracked the case. In fact, the reason for the Ourang-Outang’s escape to begin with results from it imitating its owner shaving. Actually, the idea “imitation,” or “appearances v. the real” seems to be the point of interest for this week’s reading. Kafka’s ape realized he could “be human” literally because he said so: “I cried out a short and good “Hello!” breaking out into human sounds. And with this cry I sprang into the community of human beings, and I felt its echo—“Just listen. He’s talking!”—like a kiss on my entire sweat soaked body” (5). The ape became human because language made him so; by talking or sounding like ‘one of us,’ the ape was no longer separate, but related.
Throughout How to do Things with Words, J.L. Austin repeatedly argues that speech is actually an action, and further that some words imply specific action (i.e. christening a ship). When Austin states, “there is something which is at the moment of uttering being done by the person uttering,” it is clear that when the ape utters his first human words, he is doing more than just uttering—he is becoming something else (60). Since apes and humans do not speak the same language, when Kafka’s ape begins to speak ours, he could transcend his identity as an ape in order to be recognized as human. Following Austin’s logic, Kafka’s ape can, in truth, pronounce himself human simply by saying that he is human.
Similar to Austin and Kafka’s arguments, Butler notes that gender, too, is discursively fabricated. Butler argues that gender is a repeated act, “at once a reenactment and reexperiencing of a set of meanings already socially established” (Gender 178). What this says is that in order to “be” female, or “be” male, we must repeat these constructions regularly, as they are not stable identifications. Gender, just like Kafka’s ape insisting upon its humanness, relies upon the doer “saying” he or she is a male or female through one’s “socially established” alignment with gender identifiers (obviously ‘socially established gender roles’ is another contested issue altogether, but I will avoid that here).
Nietzsche says, “There is no ‘being’ behind doing, effecting, becoming; ‘the doer’ is merely a fiction added to the deed—the deed is everything” (Preface pt. 13). The deed, then, is Kafka’s ape convincing the Academy that he is a human while at the same time persuading them that he was an ape. Actually, he can be neither or both, as the two identities are only “discursively fabricated.”
Question: So, do we agree with Butler? Is gender a discursive fabrication?
Response-response coming soon. I found yesterday’s in-class convo quite interesting, and am still digesting…
Sweet Transvestite: Gender, Drag, and Rocky Horror
The obvious text with which to put some of Judith Butler’s theories of gender performativity to the test is the 1975 film of Richard O’Brien’s cult musical The Rocky Horror Show (the film’s title adds Picture before Show) written by O’Brien and Jim Sharman, who also directs. In particular, two songs seem worthy of a Butlerian reading: “I Can Make You a Man” and “Sweet Transvestite.” In the interests of time, though, I will restrict myself to “Sweet Transvestite.”
To establish the setting of “Sweet Transvestite:” two prototypical white-bread squares, the newly engaged Brad Majors and Janet Weiss, have sought refuge from a rainstorm at a bizarre gothic manse in the woods. Inside the house, they learn that it is the evening of the master’s ball to celebrate the completion of his latest creation, although Brad and Janet find themselves more than a little bewildered by the outré wardrobes and bizarre behavior of the party guests. They are nonetheless shocked to meet the master him/herself, Dr. Frank-N-Furter, who introduces her/himself to Brad and Janet through this song while wearing a black-mesh halter top, lace garter belt and stockings, and six-inch heels.
What is interesting about this song, however, is that its lyrics knowingly address the parodic, performative aspects of drag that would later be theorized by Butler. Frank-N-Furter sings:
As noted by Butler, “drag fully subverts the distinction between inner and outer psychic space and effectively mocks both the expressive model of gender and the notion of a true gender identity” (Trouble 186). Here, O’Brien’s lyrics play on this dissonance between interior and exterior in the good doctor’s warning not to “judge a book by its cover;” although Frank-N-Furter is plainly not abiding by the rules of normative masculinity—as he reminds us, he is “not much of a man by the light of day”—he nevertheless asserts a claim on properly male behavior in at least one sphere: that of his sexual prowess. One might read in this a further pun or parody that invites a critical reading if one notes that Frank-N-Furter’s insistence on his essential masculinity itself couched in terms of performance: an erotic performance that offers a promise of being “one hell of a lover”.
Of course, all of this is dependent on the audience’s recognition that a male actor, here British actor Tim Curry, plays Frank-N-Furter. (To my knowledge, no production has ever featured a female actor playing Dr. Frank, but the resultant gender confusion would only add to the text’s critique of gender and sex norming.) I highlight this because the gender parody only works if it is plain that Dr. Frank—despite his/her garish makeup and tarted-up vampire dominatrix getup—is not anatomically a woman; his distinction between the way he looks (like a bad joke of what a woman might look like, and, at the same time, a refusal of superficial normative male-gendered signifiers) and the way he conducts himself is valid precisely because the audience (and their entirely normative stand-ins Brad and Janet) recognize an assumed essential masculinity beneath the drag costume. Which is to argue that the text itself calls attention to what Butler claims is the critical component of drag performance; “in imitating gender”, Butler writes, “drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself—as well as its contingency” (187). Here, though, Dr. Frank’s drag outdoes Butler and makes the gender imitation explicit by drawing attention to the complex relationship between the performer’s gender/anatomy and the character’s gender/anatomy. While Brad and Janet stare gaped-mouthed at Dr. Frank’s gender-bending antics, the film’s audience chuckles merrily, in on a joke that remains outside Brad and Janet’s discursive familiarity. Within the film’s diegesis, the Dr. Frank’s disregard for normative sex-typing is cause for horror precisely because they are confronted with only level of performance: that of a man dressed as (something that sort of resembles) a woman. In the auditorium, however, what is horrifying becomes hilarious: a man performing a man performing a woman.
My hastily improvised question, redux:
If drag is meant to offer a critique of gender naturalization, either as practice or thought experiment, to what degree does its success as critique depend on its audience’s knowing reception of it as performance? That is, is the critique still effective if not recognized as performance? Conversely, if the performance is too good–i.e., the drag actor/tress convinces her/his audience that she/he is actually a member of the other gender (or a gender of other members, haha)–is there still an active critique?
A thought: we should send Doyle thank you cards anyway–but, you know, ironically.
I know we’ve moved a little beyond, but if anyone else is working on post/trans/humanism, this looks like an interesting site to check out:
Transhuman Site
Crystal Starkey
Dr. Pruchnic
Titled: I Can’t Even Come Up With a Title For This
Autin’s text dissects the idea that our spoken words create an action in that our words actually do things and speech in itself is an action. Thee actions are thought of as Performatives (or words that do instead of describe, and the performance of speech). For Austin, when performative words and acts of speech go wrong, he calls these occurrences infelicities. He furthers his idea on performativity by asking questions like “could one do the action? Deliberately? Could it be false? In addition, Austin categorizes performances into five categories: 1) Verdictives, which gives a verdict, such as by jury or umpire; 2) Exercitives, which exercise powers, rights, or influence; 3) Commissives, which commit one to doing something; 4) Behabitives, which relate to social behavior (ie occurs when we exhibit attitudes and feelings); 5) Expositive, which explains how the utterances fit in context. But for Autin, there are problems with this performative-constative distinction because there are no grammatical tests for performatives, and although it would be ideal if we could reduce or translate every performative to an explicit performative, we can’t. Even when explicit is not very performative, some explicit performatives are either true or false. Austin thinks the distinction between performatives and constatives is really an illusion because every utterance can be categorized as one of the following three categories: 1) locutionary act: the meaning of a statement; 2) illocutionary act: the contextual function of the act; 3) perlocutionary act: results of the act upon the listener. For my response, to Austin, then, I’d like to dissect the connection between Austin’s perspective on performativity (and thus infelicities) and Asperger disorder. What Austin introduces as performativity in terms of action is precisely what prevents Asperger students from being successful in mainstream classrooms—precisely where learning performativity “occurs”. Asperger students are partially defined by actions like playing their game-boy, putting their head down on the desk rather than actively taking notes and constantly fidgeting during lectures, while taking in every word and often committing it to memory. This “performativity”—series of unfocused activities in which the Asperger is prone to do—goes against everything teachers have been conditioned to recognize as “good traits” in “good students.” The Asperger student’s performativity is often viewed by her teacher as prohibitive behavior, off-putting in its divergence from the performance of “most” students. It is years of teaching these “most” students and training (or lack of training) received in graduate school which constructs higher education instructors’ expectations for students’ performativity in the classroom. So my question is, if an Asperger student’s performativity distinctly varies from the “most” students’ performativity, yet does not disturb others and does not prevent the Asperger student from “getting” the lecture information, or from performing academically up to par (despite his obvious different social behavioral performance), what is the problem? Why are teachers resistant to this “other,” to this “different” performativity? Aren’t we (teachers) the very people who should be open to readily readjusting, reassessing our expectations of (as well as strategies to help our student reach) the possible and the definition of success?
In the most recent issue of Time magazine, Nov. 5 2007, the article “Outing Dumbledore” discusses J. K. Rowling’s recent announcement that Dumbledore was gay. It was written by John Cloud, a self-described gay man. He opens by lamenting the scarcity of gay characters in the sci-fi/fantasy universe, but refers to several characters he considers obliquely gay, such as almost everyone in The Lord of the Rings and C-3P0 and R2-D2 in Star Wars. About the latter: “their Felix-Oscar dialogue suggests the banter of a couple of old queens who have been keeping inter-galactic house for millenniums. But their implicit homosexuality is quite safe. There is no real flesh that could actually entangle.” He goes on to say that while he’s happy to see a prominent, human gay figure in the sci-fi/fantasy canon he’s angry that this wasn’t revealed in the books: “The Potter books add up to more than 800,000 words before Dumbledore dies in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, yet Rowling couldn’t spare two of those words to help define a central character’s emotional identity: ‘I’m gay.’ We can only conclude that Dumbledore saw his homosexuality as shameful. His silence suggests a lack of personal integrity that is completely out of character.”
Obviously Cloud’s essay is partly farcical, and likely my essay could be completely disregarded for taking a joke too seriously. Even so, there is an undercurrent of something important here, and I think it reveals several interesting notions about sexuality that are widely accepted today and relate to our readings. The first bit that intrigues me is his characterization of two robots, which presumably don’t reproduce sexually and have no sexual organs, as gay. Even granting them sex/gender seems ridiculous, especially in the case of R2-D2 who is not even vaguely shaped like any organic creature and who communicates only in beeps. Perhaps Cloud would say that these characters are modeled after people, and this is how he attributes gender and sexuality to them. In this case it seems that homosexuality is associated with certain speech patterns; so-called old queens have a distinct and unique way of communicating with each other. The broader implication is the paradoxical notion that homosexuality is in necessarily sexual. I also find it interesting that he censors Dumbledore (Rowling) for not publicly proclaiming his sexual orientation, saying that silence indicates a “lack of personal integrity.” Apparently one is morally obligated to reveal one’s sexual orientation, and the only possible explanation for not doing so is shame. And if homosexuality is really accompanied by such a distinctive set of mannerisms, speech patterns, culture interests (the illustration accompanying Cloud’s essay shows Dumbledore listening to Barbara Streisand in a closet), etc., why is it necessary for Dumbledore, or any homosexual, to explicitly acknowledge their sexuality? Shouldn’t it be apparent, and obvious?
I want to suggest, in the context of Butler’s work, that homosexuality has recently become understood in a particular way that negates it as a threat and makes it acceptable to mainstream society. One of the doctrines that makes it acceptable is that gay people are born gay and couldn’t change that if they wanted to. This, perhaps, neutralizes homosexuality as a threat because it casts people into a distinct and static sexual role. The “heterosexual imperative,” as she calls it, can accommodate homosexuality, if it is properly organized. It becomes a kind of third sex that one can assume. Butler writes: “The abject designates here precisely those ‘unlivable’ and ‘uninhabitable’ zones of social life which are nevertheless densely populated by those who do not enjoy the status as subject, but whose living under the sign of the ‘unlivable’ is required to circumscribe the domain of the subject.” Even after accommodating a suitably tamed and restricted homosexuality, there remain any number of sexual practices/identities that are excluded, prohibited, and unlivable, including pedophilia, incest, rape, bestiality, etc., all of which constitute the “abject.” Or to put it another way, the villain in any given episode of Law and Order SVU is the abject. My point, of course, is not to defend those who commit sex crimes. My point is that homosexuality is being integrated into the “heterosexual imperative,” and that this can be safely done because there remains an abject, one that people feel more comfortable condemning. Meanwhile, the essential structure remains the same. Homosexuality, suitably integrated, is no longer a threat, and can appear on prime time network television, and the assumptions underlying Cloud’s article are what have tamed it: homosexuality is not just the act of homosexual intercourse; it is a lifestyle/personality/emotional identity, it is natural and unchangeable rather than constructed and fluid, and it is, or at least should be, a matter of public record. My question: do you buy this argument? Also, Butler seems to be advocating social change; is the new structure of sexuality the kind of change she envisions? Are we living the dream? If not, then what should be changed? Is homexuality as popularly understood by homosexuals conterproductive, simply reinforcing a slightly modified “heterosexual imperative”?
This week’s readings were very difficult for me to understand. I guess if I were to place them under a heading, they each appear to decentralize a conceptualize viewpoint of various issues such as the law, gender, word appropriation etc. One thing that I found interesting in the readings is the concept of “before the law” that is referenced in many of the texts. I especially found Delueze’s response to human rights intriguing. He argues against the concept of such a thing and repositions it within jurisprudence. He further argues that we should not be concerned with the matter of human rights; it is the system of laws that should concern us. When speaking of the injustices that the Armenians faced at the hands of Turks he asserts, “That’s not a human rights issue, and it’s not a justice issue.” And later, “They’re not denials of abstract rights; they’re abominable cases. One can say that these cases resemble other, have something in common, but they are situations for jurisprudence” (On Human Rights). My overall concern with his position is can jurisprudence extend to people who are not seen as human? Many laws have failed to succeed in assuring fair and equal treatment. The law cannot pursue an individual to view another individual as human and moreover, although law can be written for the purpose of eliminating those “abominable cases”, it does not prevent them from occurring. To give an example of the limitations of jurisprudence, I want to refer to the desegregation laws that were enacted in America. Even though those laws have been written, segregation still exists and polarization within America is arguable just as prevalent today as before. Therefore, my question is, do he view or should we view, (as we consider his argument) human rights as a substitution for jurisprudence? My understanding of human rights is one that does not substitute the law, but acts as a form of argument that could be used within the confines of the law. Therefore, I am not able to embrace his argument at this time, even within the understanding of Derrida who asserts that humans created the law, that we write and enact the laws (I will get back to this later). Another problem that I face in reading his work is that he appears to ignore the interpretation of laws that would call for “human rights.” In order for jurisprudence to be effective in a pseudo-utopian worldly sense, non-visceral entities would have to mediate between law and man. Interestingly enough, the film I, Robot, an adaptation of the book written by Isaac Asimov, fictionalized the possibility of artificial intelligence as interpreters of the law. Yet, by the end of the film, the interpretation of the laws jeopardized the freedom of humans. So when thinking about Deleuze’s concept and I know that I may be misinterpreting it, I think that looking at Derrida work will help to develop my idea.
Derrida starts his work on “Before the Law” with a story taken from Franz Kafka. The extreme complexity of this story can be viewed not by the invisibility of the law, but the actual visible law that resided between the gatekeeper and countryman. As I followed the story, I was expecting to see the man move within degrees (from one gatekeeper to the next) until he reached some form of semiotic law. Unfortunately, the story did not go that way and as I read along, I found that the countryman wasted away while waiting to see the very thing that was preventing him from entering the gate, which was the law. After the story ended, the gatekeeper roared, “Here no one else can gain entry, since this entrance was assigned only to you. I’m going now to close it” (“Before the Law”, Franz Kafka). After reading this, I was left to wonder who or what caused the hindrance; was it the gatekeeper or was it the man himself or a combination of both? Whichever is the case, the law was present all along and was subjected to interpretation. In the same likeness, we see the interpretation of the body as it stands before the law in Butler’s work. If this is the case, then how can we reconcile Deleuze’s position of jurisprudence while negating human rights within the understand that the systems of law are not autonomous and unbiased?
In the “Preface to the Genealogy (section 13),” Nietzsche writes, “But there is no such substratum; there is no “being” behind doing, effecting, becoming; “the doer” is merely a fiction added to the deed—the deed is everything.” Here is that wonderful thing that language does, namely it imports a subject into everything; Nietzsche once again, “For just as the popular mind separates the lightning from its flash and takes the latter for an action, for the operation of a subject called lightning, so popular morality also separates strength from expressions of strength, as if there were a neutral substratum behind the strong man, which was free to express strength or not to do so” (Genealogy, section 13). Is the statement here proposing that the strongman cannot be not strong? Is there no space between the quality of the thing and the thing itself?
When Brian Rotman argues that the Judeo-Christian God, Yahweh, shares its origin with that of the alphabet, an argument is made about language that is similar to the Nietzschean statements above. Language operates on presupposed subjects and objects. When I reflect on this dilemma, I go back to Aristotle’s Poetics (suddenly using I to refer to myself feels like a joke). There, Aristotle makes a significant separation between character and action: “All human happiness or misery takes the form of action; the end for which we live is a certain kind of activity, not a quality. Character gives us qualities, but it is in our actions—what we do—that we are happy or the reverse” (1450a). In this talk about tragedy, there is the classical understanding of action and character (ethos), and with primacy given to action, the thing we really care about, Nietzsche’s claim does not seem illogical. Nietzsche extends the claim by saying, “The subject (or, to use a more popular expression, the soul) has perhaps been believed in hitherto more firmly than anything else on earth because it makes possible to the majority of mortals, the weak and oppressed of every kind, the sublime self-deception that interprets weakness as freedom, and their being thus-and-thus as a merit” (Genealogy, section 13). Thus, the oppressed human subject, who is weak because his/her actions are limited, feigns choice in order to circumvent the unhappiness caused by impotence, the inability to act. In this move, character is given primacy over action. The oppressed subject, too weak to oppress another in vengeance, claims it is better not to avenge, that it is good not to. The oppressed subject seeks consolation in being good.
There is an assumption here that being “patient, humble, and just” is somehow not active in the way that revenge, outrage, and demands are active. Is it just the self-deception that Nietzsche is criticizing or is something proposed about actions of strength versus actions of weakness? And that’s a question.
Nonetheless, allow me to get to my real interest: “I am” statements. If there is no “‘being’ behind doing, effecting, becoming,” then what about our use of language to describe ourselves and others? To say ‘I am writing,’ ‘I am bored,’ or ‘I am stressed’ are self-observations either unobservable or observable to any other. However, to say ‘I am Muslim,’ ‘I am American,’ ‘I am Democratic,’ or ‘I am heterosexual’ is to identify with some group or way of doing things that is presumably visible, observable to a degree. In “A Report for an Academy,” the speaker identifies himself as once an ape. The fictional account provides an identity for the ape-becoming-human character. So what interests me here is the creation of identity through discourse that may or may not be so-called, visible action (the visibility of identity is an Arendtian notion derived from the Greek public sphere). Of course, there are occasions were an ‘I am’ declaration seems performative: Austin points this out plainly with the example of the marriage, “I do.” Thus my question: how often is what we think of as our identity the result of our own performative words? For instance, publicly announcing a change in religious or sexual orientation actually does something in terms of identity. Or does it? I don’t know.
Slashing Open New Spaces for Homosexual Occupancy
` In Gender Trouble, Judith Butler describes the subversive act of dressing in drag, which indicates that appearance is an illusion or more precisely that an original gender identity is an illusion. It is parody of gender norms which serves to reveal the “regulatory fiction of heterosexual coherence” through its performance (187-88). Butler discusses gender as a fantasy, fashioning itself after an image that has no origin. The fantasy of gender not only pertains to outward dress assumed by drag queens, it also manifests itself through romantic heterosexual love. This fantasy is publicly regulated through the media, in how sexual relationships are developed on television, especially network television.
One of the most popular television shows selling sex is Grey’s Anatomy, an ensemble show featuring a diverse cast of multiple races and a homosexual couple. However, while romantic love seems to be the catalyst driving millions to watch, only heterosexual couples are seen in the throes of passions creating exclusions and a hierarchy. Butler writes, “gender ontologies always operate within established political contexts as normative injunctions, determining what qualifies as intelligible sex, invoking and consolidating the reproductive constraints on sexuality” (Gender Trouble 202). The homosexual couple doesn’t get to experience on-air make-out sessions, are not allowed to tear off each other’s clothes and expose some skin, or even given the chance to speak about what they would like to do to each other. Instead, they are relegated to chaste pecks on the mouths and more often hugs. This seems to be saying that we only support you getting turned on to man on woman action and because this is such a normalized experience of “what romance looks like,” the audience does not even notice. This is where parody steps in, only this time the parody is achieved through written constructions not outward attire. The parody I’m speaking of is known as slash fiction, a phenomenon that offers another perspective to the cultural hegemony that is network television. The following example parodies Grey’s Anatomy:
From the very moment it started it was unusual. It was during the first few weeks when he stumbled in on George getting head from another intern. A male intern. And it wasn’t really the George he’d known. Oh no, this George was fiercely grabbing the back of the other man’s neck, and grunting like a predator as he continued to shove him down… [Alex] watched as the then unknown fearsome George melted away as he spilled down the other man’s throat. (homo_genius)
This excerpt features two characters that are heterosexual on the show: Alex and George. On the show, Alex finds George to be whiny and unappealing. However, when he spots George taking charge sexually in this fictionalized account, Alex is mesmerized. George is more appealing, more sexy, as a gay man. What this piece does is work to destabilize what is thought of as desirable and contest the normalized view of what a sexual identity looks like. In J.L. Austin’s How to Do Things With Words, it is argued that utterances perform an act. According to Austin’s breakdown, I would classify slash fiction as a perlocutionary act, alerting the listener to the presence of a lifestyle and hopefully allowing the homosexual body access to “life within the domain of cultural intelligibility” (Bodies That Matter, 2). In Afterelton.com, it states that “slash fiction makes room for gay,” opening up a livable and inhabitable zone within the social sphere, which is a vital need because as the site’s slogan states “visibility does matter.”
Sidenote: Interestingly, the heterosexual character of George on Grey’s Anatomy is performed by an openly gay actor. Would the playing of a straight man by a homosexual be considered a form of parody in the sense Butler uses the term, even if it is not the intentional public act of parody that is employed by Drag Queens and slash fiction writers? Also, is it better that he came out after playing a convincing love interest for women? If so, should more actors come out or should it be kept a mystery to keep people consciously guessing and questioning their perceptions?
Postscript/Response:
Mike, could you clarify your question about the role of audience awareness? I’m not sure if you really meant to limit this question to “drag,” as it is a contextualized performance that would seem to indicate that the audience would have to be aware at least of the possibility that their perceptions may be off. Or were asking if it is better that the audience is never sure? Personally, I think gender performance is more disruptive if there is an initial misread or if there is a conscious realization that you don’t really know who was “born” (I couldn’t think of a better term) a biological man and who was born a woman.
Butler vs. Reimer vs. Diamond: Those who are not yet “subjects”
I stumbled across an argument between Butler and Diamond over the case of David Reimer. The ambiguity in understanding each other’s work occurs in Butler’s “Undoing Gender” (A work we are not subsequently looking at this week) and Diamond’s “Biased-Interaction Theory of Psychosexual Development.”
For those who are unfamiliar: Reimer’s case is, at the very least, exceptional. His penis destroyed as an infant, Reimer underwent sexual reassignment, hormonal therapy, as well as being raised as female. The “project” was overseen by John Money, a psychologist dealing largely with gender identity. The project ultimately failed when, at the age of 13, Reimer threatened suicide if made to see Money again. Though the basis of Money’s work on nurture overriding nature, the project failed. Reimer “chose” to be male at puberty. I will use the case of Reimer and the subsequent response of Diamond to engage Butler’s selected sections of “Bodies that Matter” and “Gender Trouble.”
Butler engages the site of inquiry, sex, from a standpoint reducible to a question of nature versus nurture. The inquiry inevitably follows into questions of agency and performativity. Butler states,
“the critic might also… seek assurances that this abstracted theorist will admit that there are … sexually differentiated parts, activities, capacities, hormonal and chromosomal differences that can be conceded without reference to ‘construction… To ‘concede’ the undeniability of ‘sex’ or its ‘materiality’ is always to concede some version of ‘sex’, some formation of ‘materiality.’”
The annex of sexual dimorphisms, the systematic differences between the sexes of the same species, i.e. “sexually differentiated parts” and “hormonal and chromosomal differences” with, what is generally viewed as, gender-related characteristics, such as “activities” and “capacities”, confuses the issue of opening the conceptualization ( and undoubtedly the materiality) of sex. Referentially, the lamination of socially-based subjectivity onto biological processes holds no place in discussion of sexual dimorphisms, states-of-being based upon the biological process of natal development. (with the exception of intersexualization, the “mix and match” of hormonal, chromosomal, and physical sex characteristics, a concept which will only be touched upon here) Indeed, Butler may consider intersexualization as the basis for “versions of sex,” though to see intersex as grounds for subjectification of bio-sexual axiomatics places biological sex at an apex of irreconcilability. Butler, leave the subjectivity for gender identity.
If “gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts,” (Butler 191) then Reimer’s case presents a problem; Reimer was raised for 13 years without any knowledge that he was once “male”, instead repeatedly acted as female, and irregardless of this repeated action came to the conclusion that was biologically determined at his birth: he was a he. (And it is later discussed, Reimer viewed this as discovery, not as a performative action, that is, “I am deciding to be male.”) Diamond expands on this, stating “one’s identity is the result of interaction of biological and social forces: ‘behavior is a composite of prenatal and postnatal influences with the postnatal factors superimposed on a definite inherent sexuality.’” (emphasis mine) Then it follows, the superimposition of the gender matrix, a la Butler, does not “conceal its genesis [through] the tacit collective agreement to perform, produce, and sustain discrete and polar genders as cultural fictions” (190), but are steeped in biological origins, and thusly are irreducible to a cultural phenomenon.
Truly, the discussion of nature and nurture has extended through the whole psychology, and the jury is still out concerning. I found Butler’s texts engaging in the scope of the “sustained and repeated corporeal project,” though Butler tends to discredit biology as a source for inquiry in the production of identity and the self in tandem with a “social matrix”. Then: How might we consider the other, agency, subversive repetition, the pre and postdiscursive in terms of a definite inherent biology?
Postscript:
Now after our discussion in class Tuesday night, I have a bit more to say on Butler, Diamond, and intersex:
I think that Butler’s critical approach is destined, in certain ways, to rub Diamond the wrong way. Diamond is a psychologist, and his work tends to lean toward a more medical pragmatism than a necessarily abstract (in Butler’s own words) critical/theoretical approach to sex.
And I left class with the word ontology ringing in my head. Oh my God! Am I soo 1965?
I don’t think so. I’ve possibly fallen into the same category as Diamond in a way. After a bit of research, it is estimated that (depending on who you ask) between 1-2% of all the people on the planet are born intersexed to some degree, and only 0.1-0.2% are “ambiguous enough to become the subject of specialist medical attention.” I think the materiality in sex lies solely in intersexualization for Butler, or at least it should. Butler speaks of the polarization of sex… I don’t have the space to grapple with Anne Fausto-Sterling’s 5-sex theory here (that could be a few hundred pages, honestly.), but Butler’s basis, that sort of bio-lacking basis, needs rethinking, regardless of questions of polarization or heteronormativity. That fuzziness exists between two polars, at least, what we regard as two polars currently – the argument meanders through the fields of psychology, anthropology, biology.
And it’s Reimer that brings me to this place! What was most striking is the statements Reimer made after the fact: he never “felt” female, even with the surgery, hormone therapy, and being placed into a feminine social role. Now, the “girling up” stage of development could be called into question, but so could the relationship between biology and social environment. I suppose that’s what I was going to say in the first place: cutting out biology from socialization seems to debase Butler’s conceptualization of sex.
AH! Back to nature/nurture! It never ends.
To Katrina:
It seems to me that the reason the concept of human rights has become ubiquitous is that it allows people to avoid formulating a system of laws. This is desirable because what proponents of human rights advocate could not be enforced as law. Taking your example, the human right that desegregation is based on, if we think in these terms, might be something like: people of all races have the right to dignity, respect, and equal opportunity. When a law is written based on this right, it is of limited usefulness because it’s unenforceable; how can you make someone respect another person? Even if you could, wouldn’t that violate the humanist concept that people (should) have free will? Should the law have the power to force me to adopt certain opinions? As you point out, I, Robot illustrates this well.
The distinction between human rights and jurisprudence boils down to this: laws attempt to force, human rights attempt to persuade. Deleuze seems to be arguing that human rights are too abstract, that creating change requires concrete action in the form of laws that force compliance. I agree, to an extent, but I think he’s overestimating the power of the law, and underestimating the power of rhetoric. True desegregation can’t be legislated; it can only happen if people are persuaded to integrate.
Of course this raises issues of free will, but I won’t open that can of worms.
I don’t know if this was relevant…
I was especially intrigued with Judith Butler’s essays this week, particularly Gender Trouble, and its intersection with the claims made by Donna Haraway in both “A Cyborg Manifesto” and even more in “Situated Knowledges.” Throughout Gender Trouble, Butler advocates a dismantling of the distinction between anatomical sex, gender identity, and gender performance in favor of a fluid and situated gender: “a corporeal style, an ‘act,’ as it were, which is both intentional and performative, where ‘performative’ suggests a dramatic and contingent construction of meaning” (190). This contingent knowledge is a key part of Haraway’s “Situated Knowledges,” where she also draws attention to the contradictions and irony inherent in the construction of these partial, contingent knowledges.
While Haraway discusses the formulations of knowledge and feminist voices through the creation of a web of interconnected relationships between humans and nonhumans (we are, after all, cyborgs), Butler conversely focuses more on the body itself, but the two still inform each other in key ways. Butler writes, for example, “acts and gestures, articulated and enacted desires create the illusion of an interior and organizing gender core, an illusion discursively maintained for the purposes of the regulation of sexuality within the obligatory frame of reproductive heterosexuality” (185-6). In other words, not only do we need to dissolve the male-female binary, but the interior-exterior, I-“Other” binaries and hetero-centricity must similarly be thrown out the window. Haraway calls for a re-inscription of myth to fill in the holes of the postmodern world, and invokes a figure from Native American folklore: the Trickster. This is a key move on Haraway’s part because the Trickster was not only anthropomorphic, transitioning from one form to another, but also non-gender specific. The Trickster in its various forms is performative, certainly, but also—in certain stories at least—serves to complicate the lives of the people with whom he interacts.
Haraway uses the Trickster to show the inherent ironies in the world, much as Butler discusses the need for parody and pastiche to poke fun at the contradictions that plague gender construction. Butler writes: “Gender is an ‘act’ . . . that is open to splittings, self-parody, self-criticism, and those hyperbolic exhibitions of ‘the natural’ that, in their very exaggeration, reveal its fundamental phantasmic status” (200). The idea of “natural” seems to stem from our Western desire for transcendent and unequivocal knowledge or meaning, but Butler here shows that any sort of naturality is illusory at best. What is crucial to understand about Butler’s argument in contrast with Haraway’s, though, is that Butler calls her readers to take part in this subversive performativity, while Haraway is almost resigned to our dependence upon other entities in world, embodied as a sort of joking Trickster, for meaning. We can perform with and against the embodied Trickster, says Haraway, but in the end, it is the Trickster, which is embodied in the other entities we relate with, that serves to dismantle our conceptions of the “world.”
I don’t think for a minute that Butler disagrees that we do not create meaning on our own through logic or reasoning. If we were, then gender would have some sort of interior, some sort of origin point, some sort of boundary. Given that these things are precisely what Butler is arguing against, it seems a fair to say that Haraway writes: “Feminist objectivity makes room for surprises and ironies at the heart of all knowledge production; we are not in charge of the world. We just live here and try to strike up non-innocent conversations by means of our prosthetic devices, including our visualization technologies” (Simians 1999). However, Haraway never explicitly states that we, too, can be the Trickster figure and act to subvert and change the scene in which were are performing. Butler, however, as she recalls anthropologist Esther Newton and her discussion of the fabrication of gender through impersonation dressing in drag, gives a tangible example of how we can blur the lines of gender, embody the Trickster ourselves.
Butler’s essays could also be appropriated for a postmodern rewriting of the Sophists and ancient female rhetoricians like Diotima and Aspasia into contemporary discourse. Perhaps by adapting both Haraway’s and Butler’s ideas via Susan Jarratt’s historiographical account of the Sophists, I will be able to incorporate some of these postmodern ideas into my own research both for the conference paper and my general interests.
Works Cited:
Haraway, Donna J. “Situated Knowledges.” Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. New York: Routledge. 1991.
In class, Erik mentioned that there is a specific problem with the “I am *this*” moment for anyone desiring to pronounce her/his identity. Now, upon reading Jack’s response, this got me thinking about homosexuality, what it means to pronounce oneself as gay. Dumbledore’s outing was retrospective, and since he didn’t pronounce himself to be gay – he (well, “he” the character, as “alive” as that is) needed someone else to identify himself as such. Coming out is a pronouncement of identity; it is saying to everyone that “I am *[insert sexual preference]*” rather than ‘waiting’ for someone to identify you. But, how does this tie into Butler/performance acts? This debate then arouses the question of sex (as in the act, not the biological distinction) and gender in a new light—and what happens to performance once one insists upon a gay identity? And further, how does insistence upon a certain sexuality now play into recognition?
In Thinking Matter: Consciousness from Aristotle to Putnam and Sartre, Joseph Catalino gives a compelling and accessible explanation of why bodies matter in a world that is constructed through the imposition of abstract ideas upon it. The meaning that we derive from our experience in the world seems to be disconnected from the body because they are immaterial, but this is because we have forgotten about the way in which the body mediates our perceptions. Catalino explains that the body is closely tied to the way we represent reality. “Suppose,” Catalino argues, [ . . .] “that consciousness had emerged in such a way that its organic structure did not include vision. I claim that not even our wildest science fiction or thought experiments could sketch what such a world and such an awareness of the world would be like. The world in which we live is structured in relation to an organism for whom sight is an essential bond to matter.” The evidence for the particular role the body plays in mediating consciousness is apparent in our understanding of blindness as the privation of sight. When we read, we forget about the role that the ability to see enables that activity. Catalino explains that we often forget that the body works for us in this way because when the body works well, we pass over the way it connects us to the world, overlooking the way it shapes our expression of it. (18)
Where Catalino observes the way in which our bodies produce perceptions, Judith Butler observes the way in which our perceptions produce bodies. In Bodies That Matter, Judith Butler interrogates the way our perceptions of our bodies impose limits on human experience. The primary focus of Bodies that Matter is the way in which normative constructions of sexuality are imposed upon the body. The norm of heterosexuality is commonly accepted as what is natural to bodies and this perception limits other possibilities for the expression of sexuality. Butler examines the extent to which cultural norms pervade and limit human experience when she explains that norms are not simply descriptive, they generate certain material “realities.” So, the codification of sexual activity produces regulatory norms that impose a “heterosexual imperative” on the body. The heterosexual body is the body that counts in that the foundations of the social world is predicated on its behavior. All other sexual orientations are perceived not simply as other, but also as abject. Butler describes the abject as the “unlivable and inhabitable zones of life which are densely populated by those who have not achieved the status of the subject.” It is through the enactment of norms that a person comes into being as a subject. Butler, however, does not reduce the body to its symbolic mediation in discourse as she points out that bodies rarely conform completely to the norms the produce them. She argues that these abject bodies, those that fall outside the scope of normalcy, open up a space for rethinking human experience. It is in this space that Butler envisions “room for rematerialization.”
The body is important for Butler’s work because it is the site of cultural contestation. In an interview published in the October 2007 of IGLA, Butler notes that there is a need in our culture to better understand gender as misunderstandings about gender have resulted in violence towards people in the gay and lesbian community. There is also a tendency to pathologize non-normative expressions of gender. Butler seems to be working towards developing a completely new understanding of gender that does more than upset the traditional male/female binary as acceptable forms of gender expression. In the interview, she says, [ . . .] it’s more important to know the traditional concepts we have for thinking about how bodies are feminine or masculine or how sexuality is, straight or gay. These categories very often fail to describe the complexity of who we are. So it’s not like it’s a brand new vocabulary that permits to have a new reality. It’s rather a new vocabulary that lets us see that our lives have always been more complex than traditional categories allow.” It is difficult to evade the constraints of cultural norms, since they both produce and repress expressions of gender. Butler argues that there isn’t a “natural” body that exists prior to culture and its descriptions of it. The trouble with gender is that our accepted descriptions of it are too narrow to encompass the range of gendered expressions that appear in social life.
As a point that seems self-evident but rarely mentioned in such discussions (at least from my own experience):
Being anything other than heterosexual is the only sexual orientation/preference that requires an announcement, a coming-out. This in itself is interesting, and perhaps–thinking about Austin’s performatives–might be the reason cultural conservatives can dismiss nonhetero sexual drives as a “choice:” from their perspective, perhaps, the announcement “I’m gay” is wholly performative, a speech-act that at once describes the speaker and legislates an in/appropriate series of behaviors for his/her future actions.
In a broader ideological sense, the scene of coming out remains part of the heteronormative regime: we don’t need to announce being straight because it’s naturalized and assumed, just like noone announces a cat that meows. Find a cat that barks, or a man that likes to copulate with other men, and that’s unnatural and worthy of announcement . . . .
Sorry … forgot to post my response till now…
Performing Deformativity (and Deforming Performativity):
Citing Elephant Man
This weekend in Toronto I saw a new version of The Elephant Man with Brent Carver chronicling the last years of the life-story of Joseph Merrick, who died in 1890. From the opening backdrop of the Vitruvian Man, to Merrick’s death in a subtle straightening his posture–the play adds to many of our deliberations on the dimensions of subjectivity and corporality. One of the truly interesting elements of the play this weekend was the use of actual pictures of Merrick in a few early scenes–particularly during his initial medical evaluations– and set against this, Merrick’s actor, Brent Carver, wore no costume or make-up throughout the play. Carver was asked by director Robin Philips to perform Merrick’s deformations with his own body– the weight of his right arm, and his massive head, the severe curve in his spine, the misshapen mouth and eye, the challenge to move, talk and maintain an upright position, that is, a certain elevation.
Merrick’s deformed body was a Victorian archetype of a “polluting person.” Intuited to be contagious and wrong, he was abused, neglected, abandoned, and humiliated by everyone, even his family, from childhood until four years before his death at age 27. He survived as a sideshow attraction in England and Belgium until his own manager robbed him and his was forced back to Britain where he was nearly killed by a mob as he came off the train in Liverpool. Dr. Frederick Treves took Merrick off the streets and into the critical “care” of the hospital and its brand of Victorian moral and scientific pity.
Medically diagnosed with elephantiasis, it still was not at all clear what made Merrick progressively more grotesque. The Elephant Man, who was intelligent, curious and creative, was removed from the street and began a kind of citationality in his hospital room, an “acquisition of being through a citing of power” that was reflected back through his figure onto those who studied, analyzed and conversed with him. Under the care of Treves, Merrick was educated, especially taught to repeat phrases and read devotedly.
Over time Merrick’s body continues to thoroughly disgust and nauseate most, even medical staff, but it also increasingly supplied startling scientific and human intrigue. Merrick’s body at this point was breathtaking. His massive head, 36 inches in circumference, and his mammoth right arm with a scaly paddle in place a hand weighed him down significantly. His left arm and hand in particular were noted for their perfect, almost feminine gracefulness. A quality unnoticed on the street, perhaps because of the sheer stench. Now constantly bathed, Merrick was famously introduced to London high society, where the Elephant Man became a sensational object of pity to celebrities and the rich, but also a friend of a good number of these. He conversed with artists, actors, priests, royalty, but most of all men of medicine; Merrick was truly before all aspects of the society and law. With the perspective of the permanently excluded “human, inhuman, and humanly unthinkable,” Merrick asks his doctor: “if your pity is so cruel, what of your concept of justice?” Merrick’s character developed into a poetic and performative recitation of his place and position as scientific capital and a celebrity other in the London hospital. Merrick proceeded to more actively and poetically reflect the underpinnings of human morals and scientific duty– what Derrida and Freud call the schemes of elevation. Merrick was engaging, deeply disruptive and destabilizing to some of our most powerful and naturalized human laws, but in a truly tragic moment, a most basic gesture to be normal, Merrick, in a simple determined experiment to sleep like others do, lying down, he dislocated his neck and asphyxiated himself under the weight of his own head.
Many people have been obsessed with Merrick since. Are there other individual figures since Merrick who cite power and refract it through their analyzed, dissected and spotlighted physicality? Who might be our Merrick? (For an obvious starters…one is obviously Michael Jackson!)
Response to Jared’s question:
After taking sometime to think about your question (of course Michael Jackson was my first response as well), I remembered the scientist Stephen Hawking who is paralyzed but also, is well known among the scientific elite for his work in cosmology and quantum gravity. His paralysis is a result of a motor neurone disease also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease. I remembered him because when I viewed a series of documentaries on space exploration and theories, his name and works were constantly mentioned. More recently, he is know for being the first quadriplegic to float at zero gravity. In this state, his body was able to move freely. So, in the same likeness of Merrick, whose physicality is “in the spotlight”, so is Hawking to a major degree. His deformity and his inability to speak through his own voice have not hindered his work. What makes this very interesting is that his voice is projected through a voice synthesizer that has an American accent (I will have to give the use of the synthesizer in place of the voice some more thought). I guess in thinking about Merrick as he disrupts the social ideology of deformed individuals, Hawking is a perfect example, because his scientific works exhibit a progressive research into the possibilities of what the “space frontier” can offer us, while his body is yet deteriorating. Moreover, his deformity shows the benefits of the body-machine amalgamation in which his ability to produce research papers and speeches are make possible by his wheelchair that has computer systems integrated into it.
Also in response to Jared:
I wonder whether the question of our “modern-day Merrick” is sort of misleading (not in a deceptive way) in that the comparison to Merrick invites suggestions (like Katrina’s above or your own of MJ) to subjects whose “analyzed, dissected and spotlighted physicality” is dependent upon a physical abnormality–or disjunction from physical norms, if we want to be Butlerian about it. This is not unproductive, mind you–I think the Hawking and Jackson examples are great–but since you’ve construed the defining characteristics of the modern-day Merrick so broadly (rightfully so in my reading), I wonder whether we might ask questions about some examples somewhat less extra-ordinary (hyphen intentional):
–Britney Spears
–Nicole Richie
–Barry Bonds
–The subjects of Leonard Nimoy’s “Full Body Project”
Just a handful of examples that hopefully complicate the question of the modern-day Merrick.
Annotated Bibliography and Revised Abstract
Jared Grogan
Bataille, George. “The Notion of Expenditure.” George Bataille: Visions of Excess Selected Writings 1927-1939. Ed and Trans. by Allan Stoekl. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985.
This key essay lays out most plainly the foundation for Bataille’s economic theory and its relationship to fundamental human practices of production, conservation and pleasure. The notion that human society has an interest in considerable loses, catastrophes, or non-productive expenditure, is fundamental to a general economy that is excluded in principle from a more traditional/restrictive economy. By establishing the existence of such expenditure’s social function of redirecting characterizations of power towards ritual loss, Bataille demonstrates how wealth can redistribute in creative ways, as he explains in his modern adaptations of potlatch. The essay can be interpreted in many creative ways and is ripe for new readings. The risks of Bataille’s agonistic free market can be tied into potential discussions about green economies; for instance, the fight for true cost economics between smaller scale green economies and global economic systems, or the development of renewable energies and their relationship to the evolution of the notion of expenditure and universal meanness in disaster economics.
Costanza, Robert, Olman Segura, and Juan Martinez-Alier Eds. Getting Down to Earth: Practical Applications of Ecological Economics. Washington: Island Press, 1996.
The collection of essays is a product of a workshop held in Costa Rica following a conference of the International Society for Ecological Economics. The book presents an overview of integrated thought from many of the leading thinkers on ecological economics, which is described as “a transdisciplinary way of looking at the world that is essential if we are to achieve sustainability” (1). The text offers a fundamental look at the shared vision of sustainability taking shape between policy makers, scientists, and managers of large institutions. Of particular interest is the shared recognition of a fundamental uncertainty of the future, an acceptance of economic limits, and an understanding that the principle hindrance to sustainability (as an effective/complex system) is in the strict dichotomy of basic and applied science–what is compared to the maintenance of the mind-body dichotomy.
Dobrin, Sidney I. Weisser, Christian R. “Breaking Ground in Ecocomposition: Exploring Relationships between Discourse and Environment.” College English. 64.5(2002): 566-589.
Gadotti, Moacir. “Pedagogy of the Earth and Culture of Sustainability,” Costa Rica 2000 Commission: A New Millenium of Peace (2000).
Hoekstra, Rutger. Economic Growth, Material Flows and the Environment: New Applications of Structural Decomposition analysis and physical input-output tables. Edward Elgar Publishing Limited: Northampton, 2003.
Killingsworth, Jimmie M. Palmer, Jacqueline, S. “Millennial Ecology: The Apocalyptic Narrative from Silent Spring to Global Warming.” Green Culture: Environmental Rhetoric in Contemporary America. Eds. Herndl, Carl G. Brown, Stuart C. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison: 1996. pp.75-105.
Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Toronto: Random House of Canada, 2007.
Klein deals with a specific force or progression in global capitalism that hinges on what she calls “orchestrated raids on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events, combined with the treatment of disasters as exciting market opportunities, [or] disaster capitalism” (6). Klein draws together many examples of economic policies pushed through after various crises; and her exploration generates a belief that an “economic system that requires constant growth, while bucking all serious attempts at environmental regulation, generates a steady stream of disasters all on its own, whether military, ecological or financial. […] Disaster generation can therefore be left to the market’s invisible hand” (513). Although Klein offers little theoretical explanation, her text shows many concrete examples of how economic policies, often seen as politically impossible are forced into existence from, as Milton Friedman said, ideas that have been lying around. This presents challenges for sustainability to thrive within a framework that is already conditioning itself to respond and profit a from a stream of crises, whether social, ecological or financial. The challenges can be seen as comparable to the obstacles to Bataille’s general economy in that this is a form of ‘celebration’ of degradation that is shackled to a national self-interest and a model of restricted expenditure.
Milani, Brian. Designing the Green Economy: The Postindustrial Alternative to Corporate Globalization. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000.
Nadeau, Robert L The Environmental Endgame : mainstream economics, ecological disaster, and human survival. New Brunswick, NJ : Rutgers University Press, c2006.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings. Ed. Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
(You obviously know more about this book than I do! So I’m skipping the any absurd formality here… this is pretty much how Nietzsche fits in at this point…). Nietzsche’s exploration of the tragic sensibility in ancient Greece and the new tragic character of modernity relates closely to several of the innovative discussions of sustainability that encourage some form of ritualized celebration or representation of destruction. Strong pessimism, dread, and strong sustainability all hinge on facing both deep uncertainties and the limits to growth. Similarly to how Nietzsche sees this as fundamental to the human condition, proponents for sustainability also see something like the tragic sensibility as a necessary and vital motivating force. Simply stated, the sustainability motive is another revision of strong pessimism and the tragic sensibility. There are many productive and nuanced connections to make with Nietzsche, including: his discussion of optimism and decline, the unifying force of a Socratic/reasoned will, the Dionysian dissolution of boundaries, and the Apollonian and Dionysian connections to nature.
Norton, Bryan G. Searching for Sustainability: Interdisciplinary Essays in the Philosophy of Conservation Biology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
This collection of essays is an interdisciplinary experiment in philosophy and conservation biology. Section one, “Pragmatism as an Environmental Philosophy,” section three, “Integration or Reduction: two approaches to environmental values,” and section nine “Improving Ecological Communication,” are particularly useful for exploring sustainability’s unifying drive, as they explain how the goals of environmental ethics usually offer a unified and monistic account of our moral obligations to the planet {48). The axiological character of environmental ethics tends to lock in versions of valuation into a debate with neo-classical economists in ways that are typically equally reductive and monistic. These essays explain how unified theories of environmental ethics are not building bridges in ways that would relate to understanding sustainability as a more complex dispotif.
Owens, Derek. Composition and Sustainability: Teaching for a Threatened Generation. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 2001.
Reisch, Lucia A. and Inge Røpke Eds. The Ecological Economics of Consumption. Cornwall: Edward Elgin Publishing, 2004.
This collection brings together research concerning consumption in an environmental and eco-economical perspective. The essays trace studies of consumption back to Veblen’s sociological analysis of the ‘leisure class,’ through to early critiques of consumption as related to environmental impact, to a range of perspective that offers an outline of the increasing interest in consumption’s moral implications, and finally to the related studies of energy use and waste disposal behavior (2). The text offers a detailed view of the quality and quantity of current consumption on both global and local scales. Among the diverse ways to conceptualize consumption, of particular interest are the new sociological and anthropological studies that argue there is an “ethical challenge to reduce consumption [that] will interfere with well-established and highly appreciated patterns of life and consumption as a central field of meaning, relation and identity” (7).
Sagoff, Mark. Price, Principle, and the Environment. New York : Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Sagoff complicates the relationship between conserving the environment and exploiting it. He suggests humanity will continue to be motivated through its economy to destroy some (or most) of the intrinsic beauty and character of the natural world in order to capture and exploit its services (20). However, his argument takes nature’s exploiters or “temple destroyers” and environmental protectors towards a common ethical foundation where he sees reconciliation as possible. He argues that this reconciliation is not possible when seen in strictly (restricted) economic terms. Sagoff’s also claims that ecological economics fails as a science of valuation because it misinterprets the relationship between human welfare and a deeper desire for human satisfaction, or pleasure.
Stewart, Kathleen. Harding, Susan. “Bad Endings: American Apocalypsis.” Annual Review of Anthropology, (1999) 28, pp. 285-310
Stoekl, Allan. “Excess and Depletion: Bataille’s Surprisingly Ethical Model of Expenditure.” Reading Bataille Now. Ed. Shannon Winnubst. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007. p 252-282.
Stoekl examines Bataille’s notion of expenditure in The Accursed Share in light of current ecologic and economic problems of depletion. Stoekl ultimately positions sustainability as a “logical aftereffect” in a future that celebrates excess expenditure on a more human and physical scale (277). Stoekl believes that through a rigorous reexamination of Bataille’s general economy we can see a reversal in standard approaches to sustainability, where “waste logically precedes conservation, then; but its practice entails conservation as an aftereffect” (277). Thus Bataille’s theory is not obsolete, despite the new quality and quantity of our waste that now threatens the survival of the earth. The essay provides a useful qualification of our understanding of consumption, and how the body’s work, labor, consumption and expenditure need to be more intimately and immanently connected with the laws of the general economy. Particularly interesting is the potential for exploring ritualized and embodied notions of limits (and dread), as well as identifications with renewable energies and their potential renegotiations of current ideas about expenditure, excess and sustainable development.
Revised Abstract:
The New Anatomy of Consumption in the Sustainability Apparatus: A Body’s Pleasure in a Disaster Economy
The word sustainability continues to proliferate throughout socio-political discourse and academic scholarship, but its meaning is nebulous, sometimes supporting revolutionary implications, but typically sounding so wholesome that everybody can endorse it (Greider 448). The rhetorical/persuasive effects of “sustainability” are quickly becoming a complex social dispotif (apparatus). As explained by Foucault in 1977, the term apparatus refers to the nature of the connection that can exist between society’s heterogenous elements as it forms as a strategic imperative response to an “urgent need” (201). This work begins by exploring theories about two fundamental views of how sustainability can possibly function as a social apparatus: a broadly interpreted sustainability motive, and what is most-currently reiterated as ecological or sustainable economics. The complex rhetoric of a sustainability motive rest in holding up diverse hopes by increasingly unifying people within a desire for self-preservation, which we typically feel in an emotion of desire or pleasure. Intensifying calls for sustainability are again changing this relationship between desire and self-preservation, bringing a sense of unity, coherence and meaningfulness back to fragmented groups, modes of production, and human activities such as labour, politics, and art. In contrast with such unifying forces are powerful divisive influences tied to a conflictual apocalyptic discourse that gains its charge while being intensely antagonistic, causing extremist political forms. Both the unifying and divisive aspects of the sustainability motive can be usefully explored as part of a tragic sensibility explored since pre-modern times and recycled skilfully by Nietzsche, Arendt, Burke, Bataille, Markell, Maffesoli, and others. Sustainability encourages and advances the return of the tragic sensibility while revising its vital force through new aesthetic celebrations of destruction, revitalized pessimism, a renewed intergenerational ethos, and varied but profound re-orientations toward the future.
What this relationship between a sustainability motive and the tragic sensibility allow us to explore is an advancement of sustainable economic systems as a foundational goal of sustainability. This goal is questioned in terms that Bataille set up in his vision of a general economy, and chiefly examined in light of global capitalism’s increasing proclivity to rely on ecological crises to make vital profits, a trend that is currently referred in popular media as the expansion of “disaster capitalism” (Klein). This expression points to complex moves in global capitalism and key debates in the field of ecological economics and globalization studies. Bringing Bataille into this debate, the challenges for sustainable economies can be seen as comparable to the obstacles to Bataille’s general economy. Particularly interesting is that disaster capitalism is a form of ‘celebration’ of degradation that is shackled to a national self-interest and a model of restricted expenditure. Disaster capitalism can be interpreted as a post-postmodern evolution of Bataille’s notion of expenditure, universal meanness, and the traditions of restricted economic theory.
Bataille’s theory of general economy in The Accursed Share faced similar challenges to what a sustainable economies face in a disaster economy. First, the varied goals of sustainabilty will have little chance of success if we only gear toward decelerating the market, averting disaster, or forms of reduction of economic growth to fundamentally more manageable and ecological cycles of production and conservation. Allan Stoekl examines Bataille’s notion of expenditure in The Accursed Share in light of current ecologic and economic problems of depletion and claims that sustainability can instead be a “logical aftereffect” in a future that celebrates excess expenditure on a more human and physical scale (277). Stoekl believes that through a rigorous reexamination of Bataille’s general economy we can see a reversal in standard approaches to sustainability, where “waste logically precedes conservation […] but its practice entails conservation as an aftereffect” (277). Thus Bataille’s theory is not obsolete, despite the new quality and quantity of our waste that now threatens the survival of the earth (254).
Of overriding importance to this essay is that the goals of sustainability must conform to more human and intimate relationship with an ethics of consumption that rest on a creating a paradigm of symbolic expenditure. Bataille provides a useful qualification of our understanding of consumption, and how the body’s work, labor, consumption and expenditure need to be more intimately and immanently connected with the laws of the general economy. Particularly important for a paradigm of symbolic expenditure is the development of a detailed anatomy of consumption that ritualizes and embodied notions of limits (and dread), as well as more ethical and intimate identifications with renewable energies and their potential for renegotiating expenditure, excess and traditional understandings of sustainable development.
This seems pretty ragged as I articulate it here… but I feel good about the project. I think I just need to distil a bit and get some writing done.