Here's that previously-promised and long-overdue passage from Butler. I
actually chose something from "Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the
Question of Postmodernism," because in this article she attempts to respond to
the type of questions that many have raised here.
"I would like to turn to a...question...that emerges from the concern that a
feminist theory cannot proceed without presuming the materiality of women's
bodies, the materiality of sex. The chant of antipostmodernism runs, if
everything is discourse, then is there no reality to bodies? ...In responding
to this criticism, I would like to suggest that the very formulation
misconstrues the critical point.
I don't know what postmodernism is, but I do have some sense of what it might
mean to subject notions of the body and materiality to a deconstructive
critique. To deconstruct the concept of matter or that of bodies is NOT to
negate or refuse either term. To deconstruct these terms means, rather, to
continue to use them, to repeat them, to repeat them subversively, and to
displace them from the contexts in which they have been deployed as instruments
of oppressive power. Here it is of course necessary to state quite plainly that
the options for theory are not exhausted by *presuming* materiality, on the one
hand, and *negating* materiality, on the other. It is my purpose to do
precisely neither of these. To call a presupposition into question is not the
same as doing away with it: rather, it is to free it up from its metaphysical
lodgings in order to occupy and to serve very different political aims. To
problematize the matter of bodies entails in the first instance a loss of
epistemological certainty, but this loss of certainty does not necessarily
entail political nihilism as its result.[footnote follows] The body posited as
prior to the sign, is always *posited* or *signified as prior*. This
signification works through producing an *effect* of its own procedure, the body
that it nevertheless and simultaneously claims to discover as that which
*precedes* signification. If the body signified as prior to signification is an
effect of signification, then the mimetic or representational status of
language, which claims that signs follow bodies as their necessary mirrors, is
not mimetic at all; on the contrary, it is productive, constitutive, one might
even argue *performative*, inasmuch as this signifying act produces the body
that it then claims to find prior to any and all signification."
actually chose something from "Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the
Question of Postmodernism," because in this article she attempts to respond to
the type of questions that many have raised here.
"I would like to turn to a...question...that emerges from the concern that a
feminist theory cannot proceed without presuming the materiality of women's
bodies, the materiality of sex. The chant of antipostmodernism runs, if
everything is discourse, then is there no reality to bodies? ...In responding
to this criticism, I would like to suggest that the very formulation
misconstrues the critical point.
I don't know what postmodernism is, but I do have some sense of what it might
mean to subject notions of the body and materiality to a deconstructive
critique. To deconstruct the concept of matter or that of bodies is NOT to
negate or refuse either term. To deconstruct these terms means, rather, to
continue to use them, to repeat them, to repeat them subversively, and to
displace them from the contexts in which they have been deployed as instruments
of oppressive power. Here it is of course necessary to state quite plainly that
the options for theory are not exhausted by *presuming* materiality, on the one
hand, and *negating* materiality, on the other. It is my purpose to do
precisely neither of these. To call a presupposition into question is not the
same as doing away with it: rather, it is to free it up from its metaphysical
lodgings in order to occupy and to serve very different political aims. To
problematize the matter of bodies entails in the first instance a loss of
epistemological certainty, but this loss of certainty does not necessarily
entail political nihilism as its result.[footnote follows] The body posited as
prior to the sign, is always *posited* or *signified as prior*. This
signification works through producing an *effect* of its own procedure, the body
that it nevertheless and simultaneously claims to discover as that which
*precedes* signification. If the body signified as prior to signification is an
effect of signification, then the mimetic or representational status of
language, which claims that signs follow bodies as their necessary mirrors, is
not mimetic at all; on the contrary, it is productive, constitutive, one might
even argue *performative*, inasmuch as this signifying act produces the body
that it then claims to find prior to any and all signification."