oh bloody hell...
Bodies That Matter
Chapter One
Chapter One of Judith Butler’s “Bodies That Matter” articulates her effort to trace the creation of “sexed morphologies” (17) through regulatory and pre-existing schemas. In elaborating upon the contingent and transferable nature of body, Butler first feels it necessary to disturb or unsettle matter - for as she points out, to say that the body is posited prior to sign, is to necessarily posit or situate the body firmly with in the parameters of sign. This is in and of itself a signification - a placement where body at once becomes signifier and signified. Essential to this unsettling, is the notion that matter, and therefore “materiality” is not as some might claim “irreducible” but rather subject to a long linguistic history (and perhaps as she aptly points out “more than one”) which creates and informs upon how matter is read and comes to constitute meaning. Essential to this text, is the idea that this history of matter is “in part determined by the negotiation of sexual difference” (29). In this manner, and in order to possibly understand the “materiality of sex”, she calls for a necessary examination of the “sex of materiality”. To this end, she takes to task some possibly foundational “violations” which appear to be in the canonical texts of Aristotle and Plato. She does so, not to inaugurate what she terms a “simple return” (32) to these teleologies, but rather to foreground a comparison and facilitate a critical discourse with the likes of Foucault and Irigaray in seeking to redeploy terminologies and expose the “gendered matrix” at work in the "constitution of materiality” (32)
Aristotle and Foucault
In this section, Butler performs a brief comparison between Aristotle and Foucault, drawing on sections of “De Anima” for the former and elements of “Discipline and Punish” and “The History of Sexuality” for the latter. Imbedded within this section is the analogy of Aristotle’s actualization of matter through schema and Foucault’s discussion on the material cultivation and investment of power manifest in the prison system, both through the body of the prisoner and the body of the prison itself. (34) Central to this discourse, then, is the process of materialization - the how and the what of formation, and the degree to which this process is bounded by what is potentially made material and what remains dematerialized though discourse. Here, she picks up the thread of the inclusive and exclusive modes of “discursive intelligibility” and asks not only what is excluded from these economies but what is excluded by necessity - in other words what “has to be excluded in order for these economies to function as self-sustaining systems.” (35) This, then leads directly into her discussion on Irigaray’s deconstruction of Plato’s “Timaeus” - a deconstruction in which she [Irigaray] determines a phallogocentric economy that produces the “feminine” as its constitutive (and perhaps discursive?) outside.
Irigaray, Plato and Beyond
In this section, Butler executes the dual function of replicating and extending certain strands of Irigaray’s reading of Plato, while offering a critical communiqué on Irigaray’s methodology. The work here (or at least some portion of it) is not to merely establish the feminine as the “constitutive excluded” of philosophy or simply identify the feminine as the “unspeakable condition of figuration” (37), but rather to enable the practice of feminism to transcend identifications of the feminine as a “disavowed” remnant, to move beyond the “feminine” as the “inscriptional space of [that] phallogocentrism” (39) and into an alternate cosmogony or even rival ontology that calls into question “systematic closure” (45) and prefigures materiality in a way that allows for the inclusion of “radicalized others” (48). The trick, then, is not to duplicate the “founding violence of any given-truth regime”, nor even to produce an economy of “radical and inclusive representability” (53) but to give recourse to this necessary outside as the site of disruption - a venue which imparts awareness of “the exclusions by which we proceed” (53).
Some questions that may apply…
To what degree is the matrix of compulsory heterosexuality at work in the figuration of bodies whether Digital, Virtual, or Actual? In what sense do these same modalities of representation (viewed through a composite lens of sexed materiality), the constitutive dynamic of power, and the actualization of matter change when co-opted by the “radicalized other”? Does this appropriation work towards formulating a new cosmogony or does it (as the processes of technology and access are thoroughly modulated by privilege) perpetuate systems of discourse that manifest the necessary excluded as that which is already inside? Do virtual composite bodies (i.e. flesh “monsters”, cyborgs) or digitally rendered flesh constitute a new form of materiality that is equally reducible to pattern and “cyber presence”? In what way do screen and interface approximate the “outside” as the surface of disruption - the site which delimits the possibility of overcoming the “necessary” and violent foundation of matter?
Chapter One
Chapter One of Judith Butler’s “Bodies That Matter” articulates her effort to trace the creation of “sexed morphologies” (17) through regulatory and pre-existing schemas. In elaborating upon the contingent and transferable nature of body, Butler first feels it necessary to disturb or unsettle matter - for as she points out, to say that the body is posited prior to sign, is to necessarily posit or situate the body firmly with in the parameters of sign. This is in and of itself a signification - a placement where body at once becomes signifier and signified. Essential to this unsettling, is the notion that matter, and therefore “materiality” is not as some might claim “irreducible” but rather subject to a long linguistic history (and perhaps as she aptly points out “more than one”) which creates and informs upon how matter is read and comes to constitute meaning. Essential to this text, is the idea that this history of matter is “in part determined by the negotiation of sexual difference” (29). In this manner, and in order to possibly understand the “materiality of sex”, she calls for a necessary examination of the “sex of materiality”. To this end, she takes to task some possibly foundational “violations” which appear to be in the canonical texts of Aristotle and Plato. She does so, not to inaugurate what she terms a “simple return” (32) to these teleologies, but rather to foreground a comparison and facilitate a critical discourse with the likes of Foucault and Irigaray in seeking to redeploy terminologies and expose the “gendered matrix” at work in the "constitution of materiality” (32)
Aristotle and Foucault
In this section, Butler performs a brief comparison between Aristotle and Foucault, drawing on sections of “De Anima” for the former and elements of “Discipline and Punish” and “The History of Sexuality” for the latter. Imbedded within this section is the analogy of Aristotle’s actualization of matter through schema and Foucault’s discussion on the material cultivation and investment of power manifest in the prison system, both through the body of the prisoner and the body of the prison itself. (34) Central to this discourse, then, is the process of materialization - the how and the what of formation, and the degree to which this process is bounded by what is potentially made material and what remains dematerialized though discourse. Here, she picks up the thread of the inclusive and exclusive modes of “discursive intelligibility” and asks not only what is excluded from these economies but what is excluded by necessity - in other words what “has to be excluded in order for these economies to function as self-sustaining systems.” (35) This, then leads directly into her discussion on Irigaray’s deconstruction of Plato’s “Timaeus” - a deconstruction in which she [Irigaray] determines a phallogocentric economy that produces the “feminine” as its constitutive (and perhaps discursive?) outside.
Irigaray, Plato and Beyond
In this section, Butler executes the dual function of replicating and extending certain strands of Irigaray’s reading of Plato, while offering a critical communiqué on Irigaray’s methodology. The work here (or at least some portion of it) is not to merely establish the feminine as the “constitutive excluded” of philosophy or simply identify the feminine as the “unspeakable condition of figuration” (37), but rather to enable the practice of feminism to transcend identifications of the feminine as a “disavowed” remnant, to move beyond the “feminine” as the “inscriptional space of [that] phallogocentrism” (39) and into an alternate cosmogony or even rival ontology that calls into question “systematic closure” (45) and prefigures materiality in a way that allows for the inclusion of “radicalized others” (48). The trick, then, is not to duplicate the “founding violence of any given-truth regime”, nor even to produce an economy of “radical and inclusive representability” (53) but to give recourse to this necessary outside as the site of disruption - a venue which imparts awareness of “the exclusions by which we proceed” (53).
Some questions that may apply…
To what degree is the matrix of compulsory heterosexuality at work in the figuration of bodies whether Digital, Virtual, or Actual? In what sense do these same modalities of representation (viewed through a composite lens of sexed materiality), the constitutive dynamic of power, and the actualization of matter change when co-opted by the “radicalized other”? Does this appropriation work towards formulating a new cosmogony or does it (as the processes of technology and access are thoroughly modulated by privilege) perpetuate systems of discourse that manifest the necessary excluded as that which is already inside? Do virtual composite bodies (i.e. flesh “monsters”, cyborgs) or digitally rendered flesh constitute a new form of materiality that is equally reducible to pattern and “cyber presence”? In what way do screen and interface approximate the “outside” as the surface of disruption - the site which delimits the possibility of overcoming the “necessary” and violent foundation of matter?