Is Performativity the Feminine Not-All?

This is the question I have come to while thinking about a historicized critique of the phallus in work which uses Lacan. Initially, I was hoping to make a Butlerian critique of the concept, styled like what we debate folks would call a "language PIC", as Isaac West and Regnier properly identified the project.

This seems to have fallen by the wayside as I place more and more scrutiny on the clash between Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity and Joan Copjec's logic of the feminine not-all. Essentially, to be able to run the critique of the phallus, I would have to make use of the diachronically existing reserves that could render the phallus sensible as the very object I would critique of standing in for--the penis. After all, the goal of the critique would be to say "if you don't gain anything from calling it a phallus, why do that?". You could simply instead make reference to the point of impossibility that makes subjectivity possible--wholeness is not had so that partiality can be, and that partiality exists in relation to totality to explain why subjects move towards a perceived wholeness, although that is a fiction.

At any rate, after pushing Jason Regnier and Meryl on this question, and rereading Joan Copjec's chapter "Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason" in Read My Desire, I struggle to believe that I can make this historicized argument without repudiating Copjec's account of feminine sexuality. In order to conclude that there is something objectionable about the term phallus, I have to confer upon the term a certain historicized meaning which implicates me in already understanding sexual difference in a recognizable way, and particularly, as somehow reconstructing a binary of some sort which makes phallus recognizable as a term that has a gendered effect.

Ergo, I am thinking instead of pursuing the following question: is performativity for Butler the same thing as sexual difference in Copjec? After all, Butler's argument is simply that the always evident and prevalent performances of gender demonstrate that there is no such natural thing as woman or man, gay or lesbian, trans or straight. Each performance is evidence that there is no totality to which gender terms actually point. Similarly, Copjec's argument is that the feminine is evidence of the not-all of being, that totality is itself impossible- the difference between the masculine and the feminine is that the masculine claims to be complete. I think one could argue that this is consistent with Butler's position. The feminine, which is positively valenced for Copjec, is good because it provides a space of contingency outside of signification, crucial as an escape hatch to the discursive prison of say Foucault. This is why Copjec is running a critique of Butler--the feminine provides a hope for something beyond the mere existence of discursive survival. But I think one can read Butler as more than a mere survivalist- that gender performances which attempt "passing" are negatively valenced for Butler, who points to examples of what happens when someone "can not pass" as evidence of their failing to live up to some totality to which they are articulated. In the sort of best possible world for Butler, gender performances have denaturalized essences to the point that the recognition of difference is impossible. Crucially important to this argument is that we may not be where difference is meaningless; instead, difference is all there is, a series of performances that exist as singularities, not particularities articulated to a totality.

Once More Into the HOS Vol. 1 Breach, Dear Friends!

We're reading this for my queer rhetorics class. I'm going to post various and sundry meandering thoughts about this text as I read it today.

Part One: We "Other Victorians"

Text begins with section dedicated to outlining a taken for granted understanding of sexuality as a thing which has been represeed by modern developments. An understanding of sexuality as an object of manipulation and operation, and prohibition is contrasted with repression. Prohibition serves to stop actions from taking place, while repression indicates that there are a series of charges and obsessions which are simply redirected. And about this Foucault asks:

"Could things have been otherwise? We are informed that if repression has indeed been the fundamental link between power, knowledge, and sexuality since the classical age, it stands to reason that we will not be able to free ourselves from it except at a considerable cost: nothing less than a transgression of laws, a lifting of prohibitions, an irruption of speech, a reinstating of pleasure with reality, and a whole new economy in the mechanisms of power will be required. For the least glimmer of truth is conditioned by politics. Hence, one cannot hope to obtain the desired results simply from a medical practice, nor from a theoretical discourse, however rigorously pursued" (5).

This to me reads as a mortar lobbed at those reading the fallout of a post-68 politics as a call to arms for a more universal and powerful rebellion against instituted powers. The result of a repressive thesis is an understanding of the source of repression must have been appropriately strong to suppress something inimical about human being, and, moreover, that the proper solution is to enable conditions for this human spirit of some sort to rise up in all its glory and power.

And this repressive hypothesis has the effect of turning an ordinary and everyday behavior into something transgressive--if power has operated by repressing sexuality, merely talking about sexuality is enough to constitute a trangression of sorts. Thus all the criticism of psychoanalysis--a means of "transgressively" disclosing the secrets that speak a deep and infinite validation of the existence of some notion of sexuality within, repressed and quashed by a nasty apparatus. This hushed speaking of sex hints at a future utopia wherein "liberation and manifold pleasures" will be free for all. What seems important throughout is that sexuality is a sort of object which much be liberated from the chains in which it is embedded. As this is the sedimented common sense of the matter, Foucault argues, his whole book might read as somewhat mad.

Foucault is out to trace the history of how we have come to believe in this repression. Why has sex been made into a sin? And what of repression, if its explanatory power is of such magnitude that it becomes an all encompassing tautology we are incapable of opposing on the basis of fact and argument?

Thus three meta doubts about repression: Is this repression a historically established fact? Is power always repressive, or at least primarily repressive? And finally, is critical analysis of repression itself a break or a continuation of the set of power relations that enabled repression's supposed effects to continue to reproduce themselves? And by connection, Foucault plans to investigate the ways in which sex comes to be an object which is said to have forces exerted upon it, even as it as a notion colonizes the individual in an internalized and controlling fashion, mutually constituting itself through a series of discourses and practices marked and mapped by discourse.

He is not out to say that the history of prohibition does not contain truths--rather, we should not take that one story as the only and proper one, for granted. Historical facts will be used to reduce the monolithic force of the repressive hypothesis.

More later.