Performing Identity and the Ideology of Politics - PowerPoint Presentation

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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 post-

structuralist 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 1970s to the 1990s

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=Bo7o2LYATDc

“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

/us-news/shortcuts/2017/

jan

/23/alternative-facts-the-greatest-strongest-facts-that-ever-existed

Ideology

Imaginary relationships of individuals to their real conditions of existence (

Althusser

): the world we create around usWe are inscribed into ideology through complex processes of recognitionInherent 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 lifefantasy …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; homophobiaKureishi’s novel interrogates the conjoining of the real and the

fantasmatic

(about the “other”)