Performing Identity and the Ideology of Politics Judith

Performing Identity and the Ideology of Politics Judith Butler and Slavoj Zizek

The theorists � � Judith Butler An American professor of philosophy; one of the founding figures of queer theory and poststructuralist feminist theory (Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 1990; Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”, 1993) Slavoj Zizek Maverick sociologist and philosopher � Author of The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989); Welcome to the Desert of the Real (2005) � Popular culture and ideology; power and desire � Marxism, psychoanalysis, semiotics � �

The effects of language � Language has material effects on our lives, culture and politics. Eg. Speech/Discourse has the power to injure bodies (cf. falsely shouting “fire” in a cinema hall) � J L Austin’s theory of speech acts: “I pronounce you man and wife” or “Long live the Queen” (authoritative speech carries an invocation of convention) � History and social context transmute speech into action (the power of discourse)

Transforming terms of engagement: queer and black � Queer: from abjection and shaming, via activism, affirmative set of meanings � Shift in the conception of black identity from the 1970 s to the 1990 s � From unifying framework across differences (common experience of racism and marginalization) to a disaggregation of interests and identities

Identity as performative � Exclusionary and freedom-giving (“a necessary error”) � https: //www. youtube. com/watch? v=Bo 7 o 2 LYATDc � “Your behaviour creates your gender” � Gender as performance (no prior self, but the performance itself constitutes the self) � Limits: addressee never quite inhabits the assignation perfectly � Drag exposes naturalization of gender norms through miming and hyperbole, though it doesn’t necessarily subvert them

Drag queen

Identity as interpellation � � Interpellation (from Althusser): The “I” or our subjectivity only comes into being when hailed, called, named. � Social recognition precedes and conditions the formation of the subject. � “It’s a girl”; “It’s a lesbian”—heterosexualising law—girling process—citing the norm in order to be a viable subject. Femininity is thus not the product of choice but the forcible citation of a norm (power) � Recognition forms that subject; individuates. So there is instability and incompleteness of subject formation due to impossibility of a full recognition.

It’s a girl!

The Buddha of Suburbia � Draws attention to identity as both performance (text uses theatre as a literal and metaphorical figure throughout the novel— characters act out parts or want certain parts both on the stage and in real life) and as interpellation (they are hailed, named as subjects—black, brown, Pakis) � Question of resistance: are we imprisoned in the naming or can we resist? How can we forge alternative/non-normative identities?

Zizek The Paradox of Truth � Post-truth: Word of the year in 2016 (OED) � Def: “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief” � Alternative facts: Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway � https: //www. theguardian. com/usnews/shortcuts/2017/jan/23/alternative-factsthe-greatest-strongest-facts-that-ever-existed

Ideology � Imaginary relationships of individuals to their real conditions of existence (Althusser): the world we create around us � We are inscribed into ideology through complex processes of recognition � Inherent antagonisms materialised in external structures � Utility/the everyday present patterns of ideology: the feature that effectively sustains identification… is not the obvious one, the big ‘official’ insignia, but a small feature, even the one of taking a distance toward the official insignia. � � Ideology exceeds politics: So, paradoxically, the dangerous ingredient of Nazism is not its ‘utter politicization’ of the entire social life, but, on the contrary, the suspension of the political via the reference to an extra-ideological kernel, much stronger than in a ‘normal’ democratic political order. (703)

Trump’s wall

Structure of fantasy � Ideology as distance between our symbolic universe and fantasmatic inner life � fantasy …constitutes our desire, provides its co-ordinates – i. e. , literally ‘teaches us how to desire’; � the desire staged in a fantasy is ultimately not the (fantasizing) subject’s own desire but the desire of his/her Other: fantasy is an answer to the question, ‘What am I for the Other? What does the Other want from me? ’ � “the relationship between fantasy and the horror of the Real that it conceals is much more ambiguous than it may seem: fantasy conceals this horror, yet at the same time it creates what it purports to conceal, its ‘repressed’ point of reference”

Multiple subjectivities � Identification with the gaze where I may appear likeable--fantasy always involves an impossible gaze by means of which the subject is already present at the act of his/her own conception; � contrary to the common-sense notion of fantasizing as indulging in the hallucinatory realization of desires prohibited by the Law, the fantasmatic narrative does not stage the suspension-transgression of the Law, but is rather the very act of its installation

Law and Desire �Law stands between subject and desire-the transgressor desires the Law �the gap between the subject’s everyday symbolic universe and its fantasmatic support. �the fantasmatic kernel of my being-- the subject loses his or her symbolic consistency, it disintegrates.

The Buddha of Suburbia �Thatcherism as ideology: real and fantasmatic �“Real” effects: Dismantling of the welfare state; free markets; deregulation; controls on immigration �“Fantasmatic”: tradition; nationalism, racism; homophobia �Kureishi’s novel interrogates the conjoining of the real and the fantasmatic (about the “other”)