Performativity and Becoming

Abstract

Performativity and Becoming Mikko Tuhkanen (bio) In her recent work, the Deleuzian feminist critic Rosi Braidotti suggests that, because of a reduction of flesh to discourse and "psychic foreclosure" to "social repression" (Metamorphoses, 42), Judith Butler's work not only loses sight of "the embodied nature of the subject" (43) but also, more important, is unable to theorize the kinds of radical "metamorphoses" that Braidotti seeks to think. Such inability to conceptualize transformation is noteworthy in a project whose central concern, according to Braidotti, is to identify "how effective change can be achieved" (42). While affirming the differences in their intellectual trajectories, Butler, in a brief response to Braidotti in Undoing Gender (2004), also carefully notes their compatibilities: "I am also looking for the new," she reminds her colleague, "for possibilities that emerge from failed dialectics and that exceed the dialectic itself" (198).1 With this argument—that newness can be conceptualized through a reworked or resignified dialectic—Butler exhibits her theoretical and political project's remarkable consistency. It returns us to the culmination of the narrative of her first book, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (1987), where she discovers in the Foucauldian understanding of power and production a "dialectic gone awry," "unmoored from both the subject and its teleological conclusion" (222). Instead of leading to the sublated whole of a synthesis, in Foucault "binary oppositions . . . tend to create effects that are thoroughly unforeseen, to multiply and proliferate into new forms of power that cannot be adequately explained within the terms of binary oppositions" (224). Butler's subsequent work can be seen as an effort to trace such unforeseeable "futural imaginings" (Bodies, 228). For her, a dialectic at once operative and derailed allows this "unknown future" to emerge (Undoing Gender, 180). Butler's project thus seems to approximate Braidotti's, which seeks [End Page 1] "to think about and account for changes and changing conditions: not the staticness of formulated truths, but the living process of transformation of the self" (Nomadic Subjects, 100). Despite their shared ambitions, neither of the two thinkers disputes the foundational differences in their philosophical allegiances. As Braidotti notes, Butler's framework "cannot sustain any theoretical comparison with rhizomatic or nomadic philosophies" (Metamorphoses, 112). If rhizomatic thinking characteristically engages Gilles Deleuze's work in theorizing and precipitating transformation and change, Butler would not quarrel with Braidotti: in Undoing Gender, she clearly distinguishes her project from Deleuze's in insisting on the ontology of lack in her work (198). While she suggests the autobiographical contingencies that necessitate her thinking of loss (Undoing Gender, 195), it is her scholarly background in Hegel's philosophy that guides Butler's attempts to build a philosophy of becoming on negativity. Looking back at her work in 1999, she observes: "In a sense, all of my work remains within the orbit of a certain set of Hegelian questions" ("Preface," Subjects, xiv). As an example, she alludes to her work in progress on Sophocles' Antigone that, once again, evinces Hegel's usefulness for thinking about "the political limit of the subject" (xiv). In her consideration of Antigone's resistance to Creon, she is perhaps attracted to Hegel because, as she had written in her doctoral work, "[he] provide[s] a way to discern reason in the negative, that is, to derive the transformative potential from every experience of defeat" (Subjects, 62). Logically, then, the thrust behind the theory of performativity is her concern with becoming. For example, gender, according to her well-known formulation, "is itself a kind of becoming or activity" (Gender Trouble, 112).2 I here wish to reconsider Butler's articulation of becoming as "an openness to what is new" ("Changing the Subject," 327) by charting the emergence of her influential theory of performativity from her engagement with the Hegelian philosophical tradition. While arguments about Butler's Hegelianism have become uncontroversial at least since the publication of Undoing Gender, it is important to consider the consequences of her philosophical paradigm for the fields influenced by her work, of which I am particularly interested in queer theory. This essay traces the effects of Butler's Hegelianism, especially as it enables and steers her theorization of becoming and...

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