Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (9 page)

attend carefully to the specifi logic of the discourse of piety: a logic that in.. heres not in the intentionality of the actors, but in the relationships that are articulated between words, concepts, and practices that constitute a particular discursive tradition.29 I would insist, however, that an appeal to understanding the coherence of a discursive tradition is neither to justify that tradition, nor to argue for some irreducible essentialism or cultural relativism. It is, instead, to take a necessary step toward explaining the force that a discourse commands.

POSTSTRU CTU RALIST FEM IN IST TH EO RY AN D AG ENCY

In order to elaborate my theoretical approach, let me begin by examining the arguments of Judith Butler, who remains, for many, the preeminent theorist of poststructuralist feminist thought, and whose arguments have been central to my own work. Central to Butler's analysis are two insights drawn from Michel Foucault, both quite well known by now. Power, according to Foucault, can.. not be understood solely on the model of domination as something possessed and deployed by individuals or sovereign agents over others, with a singular intentionality, structure, or location that presides over its rationality and exe.. cution. Rather, power is to be understood as a strategic relation of force that permeates life and is productive of new forms of desires, objects, relations, and discourses ( Foucault 1978, 1980 ). Secondly, the subject, argues Foucault, does not precede power relations, in the form of an individuated consciousness, but is produced through these relations, which form the necessary conditions of its possibility. Central to his formulation is what Foucault calls the paradox of

subjectivation:
the very processes and conditions that secure a subject's subor..

dination are also the means by which she becomes a self..conscious identity and agent ( Butler 1993 , 1 997c; Foucault 1980, 1983). Stated otherwise, one may argue that the set of capacities inhering in a subject-that is, the abilities that defi her modes of agency-are not the residue of an undominated self that existed prior to the operations of power but are themselves the products of those operations.
30
Such an understanding of power and subject formation

29
The concept "discursive tradition" is from T. Asad 1986. See my discussion of the relevance of this concept to my overall argument in chapter 3.

30
An important aspect of Foucault's analytics ofpower is his focus on what he called its "tech.. niques," the various mechanisms and strategies through which power comes to be exercised at its point of application on subjects and objects. Butler differs fr Foucault in this respect in that her work is not so much an exploration of techniques of power as of issues of performativity, in.. terpellation, and psychic organization of power. Over time, Butler has articulated her diff rences with Foucault in various places; see, for example, Butler 1993 , 248 n. 19; 1997c, 83-105; 1999,

11 9-4 1; and Butler and Connolly 2000.

encourages us to conceptualize agency not simply as a synonym for resistance to relations of domination, but as a capacity for action that specifi relations of
subordination
create and enable.

Drawing on Foucault's insights, Butler asks a key question: "(I]f power works not merely to dominate or oppress existing subjects, but also forms subjects, what is this formation ?" ( Butler 1997c, 18). By questioning the prediscursive status of the concept of subject, and inquiring instead into the relations of power that produce it, Butler breaks with those feminist analysts who have formulated the issue of personhood in terms of the relative autonomy of the individual from the social. Thus the issue for Butler is not how the social en.. acts the individual ( as it was for generations of feminists), but what are the discursive conditions that sustain the entire metaphysical edifi of contem.. porary individuality.

Butler's signal contribution to feminist theory lies in her challenge to the sex/gender dichotomy that has served as the ground on which much of femi.. nist debate, at least since the 1 940s, has proceeded. For Butler, the problem with the sex/gender distinction lies in the assumption that there is a prerepre.. sentational matter or sexed body that grounds the cultural inscription of gender. Butler argues not only that there is no prerepresentational sex ( or rn .. terial body) that is not already constituted by the system of gender representa..

tion, but also that gender discourse is
itself
constitutive of materialities it refers

to ( and is in this sense not purely representational).31 Butler says, "To claim that discourse is formative is not to claim that it originates, causes, or exhaus.. tively composes that which it concedes; rather, it is to claim that there is no reference to a pure body which is not at the same time a fu formation of that body. In this sense, the linguistic capacity to refer to sexed bodies is not denied, but the very meaning of 'referentiality' is altered. In philosophical terms, the constative claim is always to some degree performative" ( Butler 1 993 , 10- 1 ).

What, then, is the process through which the materiality of the sexed and gendered subject is enacted? To answer this, Butler turn not so much to the analysis of institutions and technologies of subject formation, as Foucault did, but to the analysis of language as a system of signifi through which sub..

31
Feminist philosophers Elizabeth Grosz and Moira Gatens, infl by the work of Gilles Deleuze, make a similar critique of th problematic distinction between materia
l
ity and represen-

tation underpinning the sex/gender dichotomy (Gatens
1996;
Grosz
1994).
While they are similar to Butler
in
their rejection ofany simple appeal to a prerepresentational body, or a feminine ontol- ogy,
as
the foundation for articulating feminist politics, they diff fr Butler in that they accord the body a force that can affect systems of representation on terms that are other than th of the system itself. For an interesting discussion of the differences between these theorists, see Colebrook
200

jects are produced and interpolated. In particular, Butler builds upon Derrida's reinterpretation of J. L. Austin's notion of the performative as "that reitera- tive power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and con- strains" ( Butler 1993 , 2).32 For Butler, the subject in her sexed and gendered materiality is constituted performatively through a reiterated enactment of heterosexual norms, which retroactively produce, on the one hand, "the ap.. pearance of gender as an abiding interior depth" ( 1997b, 14), and on the other hand, the putative facticity of sexual difference which serves to further consolidate the heterosexual imperative. In contrast to a long tradition of feminist scholarship that treated norms as an external social imposition that constrain the individual, Butler forces us to rethink this external.. internal op- position by arguing that social norms are the necessary ground through which the subject is realized and comes to enact her agency.

Butler combines the Foucauldian analysis of the subject with psychoana.. lytic theory, in particular adopting Lacanian notions of "foreclosure" and "abjection" to emphasize certain exclusionary operations that she thinks are necessary to subject formation. She argues that the subject is produced si.. multaneously through a necessary repudiation of identities, forms of subjec.. tivities, and discursive logics, what she calls "a constitutive outside to the subject" ( Butler 1993 , 3 ), which marks the realm of all that is unspeakable, un.. signifi ble, and unintelligible from the purview of the subject, but remains, nonetheless, necessary to the subject's self..understanding and formulation.33 This foreclosure is performatively and reiteratively enacted, in the sense that "the subject who speaks within the sphere of the speakable implicitly rein.. vokes the foreclosure on which it depends and, thus, depends on it again" ( 1997 a, 139-40 ).

Given Butler's theory of the subject, it is not surprising that her analysis of performativity also informs her conceptualization of agency; indeed, as she says, "the iterability of performativity
is
a theory of agency" ( 1999 , xxiv; em.. phasis added). To the degree that the stability of social norms is a function of their repeated enactment, agency for Butler is grounded in the essential open.. ness of each iteration and the possibility that it may fail or be reappropriated or resignifi for purposes other than the consolidation of norms. Since all so.. cial formations are reproduced through a reenactment of norms, this makes these formations vulnerable because each restatement/reenactment can fail. Thus the condition of possibility of each social formation is also "the possibil..

32
Whereas for Austin the performative derives its force from the conventions that govern a speech act, for Derrida this force must be understood in terms of the iterable character of all signs (see Derrida 1988). For an interesting critique of Derrida's reading of Austin, see Cavell 1995 .

33
For Butler's discussion of how Foucauldian conceptions of power and the subject may be pro- ductively combined with the work of Freud and Lacan, see 1997 c, 83-105.

ity of its undoing" ( Butler 1 997b, 14). She explains this point succinctly in re, gard to sex/gender:

As a sedimented eff of a reiterative or ritual practice, sex acquires its naturalized effect, and, yet, it is also by virtue of this reiteration that gaps and fi are opened up
as
the constitutive instabilities in such constructions, as that which escapes or exceeds the norm. . . . This instability is the de possibility in the very process of repetition, the power that undoes the very eff

by which "sex" is stabilized, the possibility to put the consolidation of the norms of "sex" into a potentially productive crisis.
(
1993 , 10)34

It is important to note that there are several points on which Butler departs from the notions of agency and resistance that I criticized earlier. To begin with, Butler questions what she calls an "emancipatory model of agency," one that presumes that all humans qua humans are "endowed with a will, a free, dom, and an intentionality" whose workings are "thwarted by relations of power that are considered extern to the subject" ( Benhabib et al. 1 995 , 136). In its place, Butler locates the possibility of agency within structures of

power (rather than outside of it) and, more importantly, suggests that the reit, erative structure of norms serves not only to
consolidate
a particular regime of discourse/power but also provides the means for its
destabilization.35
In other

words, there is no possibility of "undoing" social norms that is independent of the "doing" of norms; agency resides, therefore, within this productive reiter.. ability. Butler also resists the impetus to tether the meaning of agency to a pre, defi teleology of emancipatory politics. As a result, the logic of subversion and resignifi cannot be predetermined in Butler's framework because acts of resignifi /subversion are, she argues, contingent and fragile, ap.. pearing in unpredictable places and behaving in ways that confound our expectations.36

I fi Butler's critique of humanist conceptions of agency and subject very compelling, and, indeed, my arguments in this book are manifestly informed by it. I have, however, found it productive to argue with certain tensions that

34
Butler's analysis of the production of sexed/gendered subjects is built upon a general theory

of subject formation, one she makes more explicit in her later writings. See Butler 1997a, 1997c, and Butler, Laclau, and
Z
izek 2000.

1. Echoing Foucault, Butler argues, "The paradox of subjectivation
   (as jetissement)
   is precisely
   

   that the subject who would resist such norms is itself enabled, if not produced, by such norms.
   AI
   .. though this constitutive constraint does not foreclose the possibility of agency, it does locate agency as a reiterative or rearticulatory practice, immanent to power, and not a relation of exter.. nal opposition to power" (1993, 15).
   

2. See Butler's treatment of this topic in "Gender Is Burning" in Butler 1993 , and in Butler
   

2001.

characterize Butler's work in order to expand her analytics to a somewhat dif.. ferent, if related, set of problematics. One key tension in Bulter's work owes to the fact that while she emphasizes the ineluctable relationship between the consolidation and destabilization of norms, her discussion of agency tends to focus on those operations of power that resignify and subvert norms. Thus even though Butler insists time and again that all acts of subversion are a product of the terms of violence that they seek to oppose, her analysis of agency often privileges those moments that "open possibilities for resignify

the terms of violation against their violating aims"
(
1993 , 122), or that pro..

vide an occasion "for a radical rearticulation" of the dominant symbolic hori .. zon
(
1 993 , 23
)
.37
In other words, the concept of agency in Butler's work is de..

veloped primarily in contexts where norms are thrown into question or are subject to resignifi ation.38

Clearly Butler's elaboration of the notion of agency should be understood in the specifi context of the political interventions in which her work is in.. serted. The theoretical practice Butler has developed over the last fi teen years is deeply informed by a concern for the violence that heterosexual nor.. mativity enacts and the way in which it delimits the possibilities of livable hu.. man existence. Her theorization of agency therefore must be understood in its performative dimension: as a political praxis aimed at unsettling dominant discourses of gender and sexuality. As a textual practice situated within the space of the academy, the context of Butler's intervention is not limited to the legal, philosophical, or popular discourses she analyzes but is also constituted by the reception her work has garnered within feminist scholarship. Butler has had to defend herself against the charge, leveled against her by a range of fem.. inists, that her work has the effect of undermining any agenda of progressive political and social reform by deconstructing the very conceptions of subject and power that enable it (see, for example, Bordo 1993 , and the exchange in Benhabib et al. 1995 ). To counter these claims, Butler has continually posi.. tioned her work in relation to the project of articulating a radical democratic