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.
 
