Judith
Butlers Bodies that Matter
deals largely with interrogating notions of femininity and queer and
the association of those terms with materiality. In a move that some
might see as unnecessary, Butler retraces materiality to its humble
origins in both the Latin and Greek senses. She writes,
The classical configuration of matter as a site of generation
or origination becomes especially significant when the account
of what an object is and means requires recourse to its originating
principle (p. 31). She argues that matter, when not associated
with reproduction, is generally linked to origination and causality.
To talk of matter is to locate the substances of which any physical
object consists or is composed. These substances themselves assume
a history and a form. Matter is itself composed of matter. As Charles
Peirce conceives it, [a]ll inspired matter has been subject
to human distortion or coloring (p. 59). The point that Peirce
is trying to make pertains more directly to the doctrine of fallibilism,
which neither affirms nor denies that men cannot attain a sure
knowledge of the creations of their own minds, and only
says that people cannot attain absolute certainty concerning questions
of fact (p. 61). For Peirce, there is no room for conservatism
in science, only room for a radicalism that tries experiments.
According to Butler, Marx understood matter as a principle of
transformation, presuming and inducing a future, and
Aristotle conceived of matter as potentiality [dynameos],
form actuality (p. 31). For all of these figures, matter itself
is not an absolute certainty but is, however, invested with a certain
capacity to originate and compose, which leads to intelligibility,
a particular reading of that matter. Butler further proposes that
matter is clearly defined by a certain power of creation and
rationality, so that to know the "significance of something
is to know how and why it matters, where to matter means
at once to materialize and to mean (p.
32). If the body then is clearly matter, how that body comes to materialize,
mean, or matter is contingent on its origination, its transformation,
its potentiality. The bodys intelligibility therefore is not
a given but is produced. Butler identifies the production of this
intelligible body at the site of performativity or specific
modality of power as discourse.
Of performativity, Butler
writes:
For discourse to materialize
a set of effects, discourse itself must be understood
as complex and convergent chains in which effects are
vectors of power. In this sense, what is constituted in discourse
is not fixed in or by discourse, but becomes the condition and occasion
for further action. This does not mean that any action is possible
on the basis of a discursive effect. On the contrary, certain reiterative
chains of discursive production are barely legible as reiterations,
for the effects they have materialized are those without which no
bearing in discourse can be taken. (p. 187).
Butler wants to avoid any
misreadings of performativity as willful and arbitrary
by arguing forcefully that domains of intelligibility are bound with
effects, that historicity of discourse and historicity
of norms . . . constitute the power of discourse to enact what it
names (p. 187). Hence, the normalization of the material depends
largely on reiteration but also exclusion. Similar to Austins
perlocutionary and illocutionary force of the performative, Butlers
performativity works through a normative force, the practice of reiteration.
Exclusions, on the other hand, haunt signification as its abject
borders or as that which is strictly foreclosed: the unlivable, the
nonnarrativizable, the traumatic (p. 188). According to Butler,
identity categories are troubled by its impossibility to fully establish
an identity contingent on both reiteration and exclusion. While she
sees performativity as a potential to open the signifiers to
new meanings and new possibilities for political resignification,
one could also view her project as an indispensable tool, insofar
as it allows us not only to envision a futurity, but also locate that
which challenges new possibilities.
The set of sequenced
assignments I have developed encourages my students to
open signifiers to new meanings and new possibilities in a space where
they might find relations to the world and its inhabitants or to locate
a difference of force. In its inchoate stage, the Internet
is precisely one of these spaces, I believe.