[written in conjunction with Dr. Christopher Voparil's course Ethics After Postmodernism,
Union Institute and University, Spring 2012]
(Triirity,
2012).
If humanity were to embrace and recognize the formative
nature of our actions—the meanings implicit and explicit in how we live out our
days—and their relationship to the way we form and change our identity, how
might we more efficiently and effectively make representative use of our
“statuses,” our blurbs, and the discord of our multiple presences across
virtual platforms of engagement? New communication technologies, including the
domination of mass media networks, have complicated our definitions of
engagement and discussion, from which we once derived our traditional
constructions of identity and categorizations.
Should our identities be dictated and defined solely by
our empowered and realized actions—that is, through the action that is
accompanied by our own simultaneous evolutions in self-knowledge—one might
expect to discover within modern public discourse a cavalcade of both
establishment and anti-establishment views, concurrent with high levels of
participation in community, civic, and political events. The ways in which we
make productive use of our bodies, including our minds, are an ultimate and
imperative expression of our identities, who we believe ourselves to be. As the
participatory nature of our democracy and culture may be continuing to undergo
its own technological transformation, however, some critical theorists,
including Judith Butler and Donna Haraway, have sought to define how identity
assigns one’s alignment with and within larger systems, across both
pre-determined and chosen categorizations: of race, gender, creed, economics,
politics, creativity, and other dynamic characteristics.
This discussion will define Judith Butler’s discursive
construction of self-knowledge through declarative and formative practice; Butler’s
definition of identity provides contextualization for Donna Haraway’s framework
of power, identity, and technology presented in her seminal “Manifesto for
Cyborgs.” Together, these authors’ conceptualization of the construction of
identity provides a critical lens that may be useful in assessing trends in individuals’
participation in society—for declarations of individual and collective identity
across new forums like Facebook and Twitter have, not long after their
inception, led to the unanticipated political ramifications of such networking
platforms like the Arab Spring and Occupy Movement. This discussion will
illuminate and present foundation for a framework regarding the performative
nature of our present-day (and increasingly digital) means of identity
construction.
Performative Centrality of the Body: Judith
Butler
Judith Butler’s 1990 essay “Contingent foundations:
Feminism and the question of ‘postmodernism’,” challenges the universality of the term
‘postmodern,’ and the problematic nature of sweeping inclusivity in the naming
of intellectual movements. She calls for further discrimination in the
construction of terms to describe who we are, through analysis of the actions
and effects we create: “What form of insidious cultural imperialism here
legislates itself under the sign of the universal?” (p. 157). The relationships
and dynamics of power inherent in the construction of identity rise as Butler’s
dominant concern: “to require [a fixed] subject means to foreclose the domain
of the political” (154). As terms like “postmodern” seek to unify and describe
a broad movement, the act of generalization that comes as a result of the
establishment of a category of intellectual thought is, to Butler, dangerous
and actually an act of alienation and exclusion. She describes her work as “a
kind of poststructural analysis” (p. 169).
A dilemma similar to that of the parallel between
subjectification of the individual and traditional power dynamism exists in the
construction of identity, as feminism, a specific ideological movement, has
suffered from the fragmentation of groups based on sub-categorization and
individual details (p. 166). Butler seeks the acknowledgement of a metaphysical
centrality and “psychic center” to gender, calling necessary a total
reconceptualization of identity categories, one that supports the language that
we use, and have available. In this call, Butler hopes we may find our
identities constructed using language that itself constitutes “a site of
permanent openness and resignifiability” (p. 166); this “site” within one’s
self-concept is critical to this extension and evolution of feminist identity,
and the development of useful and salient critical theory.
In her 1990 essay,
Butler advocates not for a blanketed postmodern nature to identity, but
for the subjection of “notions of the body and materiality to a deconstructive
critique” (p. 168). Butler calls for a situation in which our physicality
remains at the core of the construction of gender, but rests prior to any
preconception or categorization: that the terms we use to define our identities
might more fully take root in a mobilization
of identity, the fulfillment of which is “productive, constitutive, one
might even argue performative” (p.
168). This latter term would become utilized by scholars and theorists, to
encapsulate Butler’s reconceptualization of gender and identity; in a 2011 video
interview, Butler further defined the characteristic of performative identity
as “producing a series of effects […] our acting or our role-playing is crucial
to the gender that we are and the gender that we present to the world” (Butler,
Feb. 2011). These “effects” of our identity, our behavior and our choices, may
not necessarily be in line with previous, institutionalized concepts of gender,
but specific and unique to individuals.
Butler identifies the construction of identity as a
process of experience and as having its own significability, to the individual
at hand as well as the institutions that individual functions within and
around. “I think there is a real question for me about how such gender norms
get established and policed and what the best way is to disrupt them and to
overcome the police function. It’s my view that gender is culturally formed,
but it’s also a domain of agency or freedom” (Butler, Feb. 2011). Within this
“domain” rests responsibility for Butler’s construction of identity, beyond
contextualization and categorization. One example of Butler’s centrality of the
body to her construction of identity came through in remarks she delivered on October
23, 2011, in Washington Square Park in New York City, in support of the Occupy
Movement. In striking irony, Butler delivered her message through the a “human
microphone,” or “people’s mic” technique employed at Occupy Movement sites, to
subvert regulations that prohibit electric amplification. In this poetic
speech, Butler’s call for physicality in protest illuminates and gives example
to supplement her theoretical framework established decades earlier: “It matters/that as bodies/we arrive together
in public/As bodies we suffer/we require food/and shelter/and as bodies we
require one another/in dependence/and desire/So this is/a politics of the
public body” (Butler, Oct. 2011).
Unable to Dream, But of a Return to
Dust: Donna Haraway and the Cyborg
If Butler’s framework supports an individual’s
confrontation and dismantling of any subscriptions to traditional identity, Donna
Haraway’s essay “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist
Feminism in the 1980s,” first published in Socialist
Review in 1985, imbues and enlivens the debate of gender construction within
a brutal and skeptical irony, as she embeds a cyborg metaphor with an
impassioned and critical fear. “The cyborg is a condensed image of both
imagination and material reality, the two joined centers structuring any
possibility of historical transformation” (p. 191). Due to the merging and
collapse of traditional paradigms in Haraway’s cyborg culture—admittedly, her
aim is “an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for
responsibility in their construction” (p. 191)—the cyborg emerges as a vessel
for an ultra-modern vision of technological discourse, characterized by its stringent,
perhaps ‘performative’ vocationalism. The cyborg supports a culture that blurs
distinctions between humans and machines, and between humans and animals (p.
192). Haraway’s construct exists beyond common conceptions of knowledge and
understanding: “the cyborg skips the step of original unity, of identification
with nature in the Western sense. This is its illegitimate promise that might
lead to subversion of its teleology as Star Wars” (p. 192). If mass commodification
of individuals has been allowed to progress beyond the centralized, and into
mythic and virtual realms of construction through the use of technology, Haraway’s
cyborg identity may be at present all-too salient in its depiction of a
confusing, hybridized atmosphere of both physical and virtual identities,
rooted in Butler’s bodily actualization but accounting more fully for exterior
systems of power and ownership.
The world, in its technological, industrial, and militant
exploitation of individuals, may be described as having continued its rambling
evolution of identity construction and deconstruction, since the original publication
of Haraway’s essay in 1985. The term ‘monetization’ has become common, as our
data—our virtual and digital effects, as it were—has come to represent saleable
virtual items, from which the creator receives a sliver of remuneration: the availability
of sidebar advertisements, to run alongside our generated feeds and pages, is
an important characteristic of our present-day identity. “The machine is us,
our processes, an aspect of our embodiment” (p. 222). Further identification
and assessment of these trends in economic legitimization of individuals’
virtual and available productions may reinforce and more fully discern the
action of “embodiment” that takes place, as one asserts an identity rendered
beyond traditional paradigms.
As response to this harrowing intellectual climate, Haraway’s
playful and dark irony is critical to her theoretical extension of feminist
construction of identity; across spirituality, economics, and politics, the
cyborg is an outsider and deconstructionist, a conscripted identity (p. 218)
that comes as the result of historical traditions of power dynamism. This framework
of cyborg identity comes alongside the advent of the technological potential of
the individual, and, in its irony draws into question our heralded theoretical
unifications: “To be One is to be autonomous, to be powerful, to be God; but to
be One is to be an illusion and so to be involved in a dialectic of apocalypse
with the other” (p. 219). While the political implications of Haraway’s
conceptualization are illustrated as threading twentieth-century literature—she
identifies science fiction, and the world of Samuel Delany and Octavia Butler
as prime examples (p. 220)—the “dialectic of apocalypse” looms large, as the
cyborg’s enrapturing and ironic characteristic, in which the true value of “the
necessity of limitation, partiality, and intimacy even in this world of protean
transformation and connection” (p. 221) becomes a new critical focus. Cyborgs
function in ways that compound and redefine their purpose: they may be productive,
performative, or otherwise mechanical.
The dynamics of power identified as critical to Butler’s (1990)
conceptualization may be, to Haraway (1985), only part of a larger matrix
within which only an characteristic irony and skepticism may be useful: “Human
beings, like any other component or subsystem, must be localized in a system
architecture whose basic modes of operation are probabilistic, statistical. No
objects, spaces or bodies are sacred in themselves” (p. 205). While Butler’s legitimization
of identity through bodily universality seeks to acknowledge our physical commonality
(“and as bodies/we require one another,” Butler told the crowd gathered in
Washington Park, New York City, in October 2011), Haraway’s cyborg beings are
sentient and secular, themselves the result of a merging of Western dualism and
traditional paradigms. “The cyborg is a creature in a postgender world […]
resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity” (p. 192):
through these aspects, a cyborg may respond with a new grace and transcendence,
to the grim realities of present-day injustice and conflict.
Haraway predicts technology will either lead society to
“the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet, about the final
abstraction embodied in a Star Wars apocalypse waged in the name of defense,
about the final appropriation of women’s bodies in a masculinist orgy of war”
(p. 196), or else help foster a world that deals with “lived social and bodily
realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals
and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory
standpoints.” In only one scenario does Haraway’s role for the individual
remain active and productive, as an intentional and formative act; the
subjectification and submission to a larger and imposed “grid of control” might
suggest a similar codification and access to knowledge to the tasks Google
performs daily. While Haraway saw her metaphor, and its “rearrangements of
race, sex, and class rooted in high-tech-facilitated social relations” (p.
207), as useful to progressive politics and the extension of socialist
feminism, the efficacy of the cyborg is critical and useful to an understanding
of present-day identity construction.
Conclusion
While dimensions of gender and feminism may have been
both authors’ established paradigm of social critique, more than the
differences between the sexes has been subject to the shift Haraway described
in the construction of identity: from “representation” to “simulation” (p.
203-204), from “sex” to “genetic engineering,” from “mind” to “artificial
intelligence.” However performative one’s identity construction may be, these
shifts represent the contention of intellectual paradigms, and the collapse of
one or all may render any performative nature as vastly reconceptualized. Thus,
communication is critical to both Butler and Haraway: while “cyborg writing is
about the power to survive not on the basis of original innocence, but on the
basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other” (p.
217), the tools are themselves may only be accessories to the performative
choices made within an individual.
Butler’s performative, constructive, “site” of identity
is essential to modern interpretation of Donna Haraway’s “A Manifesto for
Cyborgs”; though Haraway preceded Butler’s essay establishing performative
identity by five years, the centrality of the body—both the physical and the
virtual—may accompany Haraway’s inventive reconceptualization. Butler and
Haraway may share a common vision, of new use for postmodern rhetoric as a way
to provide meaningful interpretations of their, and our, lives: the two may
share as well a fear of the vacancy that follows the death of traditional
textuality and rhetoric itself, within a climate of vicious capitalism and a
rise in omniscient, omni-present technology.
References
Butler, J. (19 Feb.
2011). Your Behavior Creates Your Gender [video
transcript]. J. Fowler, Dir. Big Think. Retrieved from http://bigthink.com/ideas/30766
Butler, J. (23 Oct.
2011). “Composite Remarks- Washington Square Park, October 23, 2011, via human
microphone.” OccupyWriters.com archive. Retrieved from http://occupywriters.com/works/by-judith-butler
Butler, J. (1994). “Contingent
Foundations: Feminism and the Question of ‘Postmodernism.’” In The Postmodern Turn, ed.
S. Seidman. p. 153-170.
Haraway, D. (1990). “A
Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, & Socialist Feminism in the
1980s.” In Feminism/Postmodernism,
ed. L. Nicholson. New York: Routledge. Retrieved from http://blogs.vassar.edu/confronting-modernity/files/2011/02/donna-haraway-a-manifesto-for-cyborgs.pdf
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