The Matter at Hand: Butler, Ontology and the Natural Sciences

Australian Feminist Studies

Volumn 14, Issue 29, 1999, Pages 91-104

  Kerin, Jacinta ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0033411137     PISSN: 08164649     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/08164649993353     Document Type: Article

References (47)

1. Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Allen & Unwin) Sydney, 1994; Pheng Cheah, 'Mattering', Diacritics, vol. 26, no. 1, 1997, pp. 108-39; Vicki Kirby, Telling Flesh (Routledge) New York, 1997.
2. Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Allen & Unwin) Sydney, 1994; Pheng Cheah, 'Mattering', Diacritics, vol. 26, no. 1, 1997, pp. 108-39; Vicki Kirby, Telling Flesh (Routledge) New York, 1997.
3. Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Allen & Unwin) Sydney, 1994; Pheng Cheah, 'Mattering', Diacritics, vol. 26, no. 1, 1997, pp. 108-39; Vicki Kirby, Telling Flesh (Routledge) New York, 1997.
4. Discourse appears to be co-extensive with human language in Butler's work. Although discourse seems to include actions when Butler details her thesis of performativity, she sustains an emphasis on repetition, iterability and the inherent instability of language as the site of transformation of identity. These foci lend a distinct linguistic focus to the way in which she uses 'discourse', and it is arguable that Butler uses discourse and language interchangeably (see also A. Bray and C. Colebrook, 'The Haunted Flesh', Signs, Summer, 1998). Moreover, language and discourse are presented as uniquely human constructs within Butler's work. Importantly, Butler displaces the intentionality of the human subject, such that the human subject emerges from within an anonymous field of language. While human agency is displaced, however, the processes of discourse and language remain contained by the human. This point is important since many writers (see, for example, Kirby, Telling Flesh) use language and discourse to describe more general forces of differentiation that arc not contained to the human.
5. Thus Butler writes: 'Materiality designates a certain effect of power ... Insofar as power operates successfully by constituting an object domain ... as a taken-for-granted ontology, its material effects are taken as material data or primary givens'. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of 'Sex' (Routledge) New York, 1993, pp. 34-5.
6. See, for example, Evelyn Fox-Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science (Yale University Press) New Haven, 1985; Donna Haraway, 'Situated Knowledges: the Science Question in Feminism as a Site of Discourse on the Privilege of Partial Perspective', Feminist Studies, vol. 14, no. 3, pp. 575-99, Helen Longino, Science as Social Knowledge (Princeton University Press) Princeton, 1990; Sandra Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking from Women's Lives (Cornell University Press) Ithaca, 1992; and Hilary Rose, Love, Power and Knowledge: Towards a Feminist Transformation of the Sciences (Indiana University Press), Bloomington, 1994.
7. See, for example, Evelyn Fox-Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science (Yale University Press) New Haven, 1985; Donna Haraway, 'Situated Knowledges: the Science Question in Feminism as a Site of Discourse on the Privilege of Partial Perspective', Feminist Studies, vol. 14, no. 3, pp. 575-99, Helen Longino, Science as Social Knowledge (Princeton University Press) Princeton, 1990; Sandra Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking from Women's Lives (Cornell University Press) Ithaca, 1992; and Hilary Rose, Love, Power and Knowledge: Towards a Feminist Transformation of the Sciences (Indiana University Press), Bloomington, 1994.
8. See, for example, Evelyn Fox-Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science (Yale University Press) New Haven, 1985; Donna Haraway, 'Situated Knowledges: the Science Question in Feminism as a Site of Discourse on the Privilege of Partial Perspective', Feminist Studies, vol. 14, no. 3, pp. 575-99, Helen Longino, Science as Social Knowledge (Princeton University Press) Princeton, 1990; Sandra Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking from Women's Lives (Cornell University Press) Ithaca, 1992; and Hilary Rose, Love, Power and Knowledge: Towards a Feminist Transformation of the Sciences (Indiana University Press), Bloomington, 1994.
9. See, for example, Evelyn Fox-Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science (Yale University Press) New Haven, 1985; Donna Haraway, 'Situated Knowledges: the Science Question in Feminism as a Site of Discourse on the Privilege of Partial Perspective', Feminist Studies, vol. 14, no. 3, pp. 575-99, Helen Longino, Science as Social Knowledge (Princeton University Press) Princeton, 1990; Sandra Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking from Women's Lives (Cornell University Press) Ithaca, 1992; and Hilary Rose, Love, Power and Knowledge: Towards a Feminist Transformation of the Sciences (Indiana University Press), Bloomington, 1994.
10. See, for example, Evelyn Fox-Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science (Yale University Press) New Haven, 1985; Donna Haraway, 'Situated Knowledges: the Science Question in Feminism as a Site of Discourse on the Privilege of Partial Perspective', Feminist Studies, vol. 14, no. 3, pp. 575-99, Helen Longino, Science as Social Knowledge (Princeton University Press) Princeton, 1990; Sandra Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking from Women's Lives (Cornell University Press) Ithaca, 1992; and Hilary Rose, Love, Power and Knowledge: Towards a Feminist Transformation of the Sciences (Indiana University Press), Bloomington, 1994.
11. See Sally Haslanger, 'Feminism and Metaphysics: Negotiating with the Natural' forthcoming in M. Fricker and J. Hornsby (eds), Cambridge Companion to Feminism and Philosophy (Cambridge University Press) Cambridge, for an argument which holds that the version of metaphysics that many feminists attack is a 'strawman', somewhat outdated within philosophy of metaphysics. While through means completely different from those set out in this paper, Haslanger also argues that the domain of metaphysics should remain a site for feminist negotiation.
12. See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank (eds). Shame and its Sisters: a Silvan Tomkins Reader (Duke University Press) Durham, NC, 1995, pp. 1-28, and Elizabeth Wilson, Neural Geographies: Feminism and the Microstructure of Cognition (Routledge) New York, 1998, pp. 31-69, for a more detailed analysis of this emphasis within feminist thought.
13. See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank (eds). Shame and its Sisters: a Silvan Tomkins Reader (Duke University Press) Durham, NC, 1995, pp. 1-28, and Elizabeth Wilson, Neural Geographies: Feminism and the Microstructure of Cognition (Routledge) New York, 1998, pp. 31-69, for a more detailed analysis of this emphasis within feminist thought.
14. For example, Butler opens Chapter One of Bodies That Matter with a discussion of Aristotle's notion of schema, followed by a critical review of Plato's concept of chora. Both of these philosophical terms pertain to the form/matter distinction in general, and neither are specific to the sexed materiality of human bodies. Moreover, her arguments continually make use of Saussure's system of signs and signifiers, which stems from an attempt to describe a general theory of the workings of language and its relation to the world.
15. Hence her question: 'What does it mean to have recourse to materiality ... We may seek to return to matter as prior to discourse to ground our claims about sexual difference only to discover that matter is fully sedimented with discourse on sex and sexuality that prefigure and constrain the uses to which that term can be put'. Bodies That Matter, p. 29.
16. Hence, in regard to natural science, her emphasis is on what 'it means to affirm them, and through what discursive means'. Bodies That Matter, p. xi. This focus contrasts with any attempt to account for the seeming persistence/necessity of the materiality of the objects of natural science.
17. Such a question is not intended to negate the feminist work that has emphasised a certain isomorphism between scientific representations of cellular biology and ocdipalised male sexuality (see, for example, Luce Irigaray, 'Is the Subject of Science Sexed?', Hypatia, vol. 2, no. 3, Fall, 1987, pp. 58-68). Rather, it is to stress that an analysis of the genesis of scientific knowledges might require specific tools of analysis, which would differ from those relevant to the process of human identity formation.
18. Evelyn Fox-Keller, Refiguring Life: Metaphors of Twentieth-century Biology (Columbia University Press) New York, 1995, p. XIII.
19. N. Katherine Hayles, 'Constrained Constructivism: Locating Scientific Inquiry in the Theatre of Representation' in George Levine (ed.), Realism and Representation: Essays on the Problem of Realism in Relation to Science, Literature, and Culture (University of Wisconsin Press) Wisconsin, 1993, pp. 27-43.
20. One could argue that this manoeuvre is commonplace precisely because epistemology has become instituted as the level of analysis at which feminist intervention should operate.
21. Isabelle Stengers, Power and Invention: Situating Science (University of Minnesota Press) Minneapolis, 1997.
22. Karen Barad, 'Meeting the Universe Half-way: Realism and Social Constructivism Without Contradiction' in L.H. Nelson and J. Nelson (eds), Feminism, Science and the Philosophy of Science (Kluwer) UK, 1996, pp. 161-94.
23. Wilson, Neural Geographies.
24. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge) New York, 1990.
25. See preface to Butler, Bodies That Matter.
26. These arguments are characteristic of second-wave feminism (as described, for example, by Rosi Braidotti, Patterns of Dissonance: a Study of Women in Contemporary Philosophy, Elizabeth Guild (trans.) (Routledge), New York, 1991).
27. Butler, Bodies That Matter, p. xi.
28. Butler, Bodies That Matter, p. 9.
29. Butler, Bodies That Matter, p. xi.
30. Butler, Bodies That Matter, p. 32.
31. This is not to say that the natural sciences must assume that the language which describes natural phenomena is transparent or neutral. It is consistent to emphasise that matter influences the interpretations to which it is given while at the same time accepting that such interpretations arc also a result of the cultural frameworks in which they arc articulated.
32. Butler, Bodies That Matter, p. 67. We should also note that even these comments fall short of the minimal force of matter that is considered necessary by most feminist philosophers of science. The mere fact that most philosophers of science assume a certain relation with matter is, of course, not in itself an argument for the necessity of this relation. It does, however, present a certain challenge to those who wish to subsume this relation in epistemological terms. This paper specifically holds that Butler's argument does not address this challenge, and hence is limited in its critical purchase for natural science.
33. Butler, Bodies That Matter, p. 67.
34. For an alternate analysis holding that matter can be seen in terms of a movement of language that is not confined to, or uniquely, human (hence matter and language are no longer incommensurable), see Kirby, Telling Flesh.
35. Kirby, Telling Flesh, p. 108.
36. Butler, Bodies That Matter, p. 10.
37. As Cheah, 'Mattering', p. 116, elaborates, the lack of any elucidation of how the ideal might effect this formation raises concern regarding how the human psyche acts as anything but the Kantian epistemic grid from which Butler wishes to distance herself.
38. In accordance with Butler's emphasis on discourse as the condition for referring to anything pre-discursive, it becomes imperative to put 'pre-discursive' in scare quotes in order to avoid the possibility that we might forget the paradox of attempting to refer to the outside of language through language itself.
39. 'Although the referent cannot be said to exist apart from the signified, it nevertheless cannot be reduced to it. That referent, that abiding function of the world, is to persist as the horizon and the "that which" which makes its demand in and to language'. Butler, Bodies That Matter, p. 69.
40. Butler, Bodies That Matter, p. 69.
41. For example, Butler prefers to use 'materialisation' rather than 'matter', since the former term evokes a process, while the latter is held to imply a certain stasis or givenness. Kirby (Telling Flesh, p. 125) also notes that Butler avoids the use of words such as 'substance', which indicates an inferiority of matter with which Butler avoids grappling.
42. Butler, Bodies That Matter, p. 67.
43. It is noteworthy that Butler distinguishes at least three sorts of materiality: 'Apart from and yet related to the materiality of the signifier is the materiality of the signified, as well as the referent approached through the signified, but which remains irreducible to the signified'. Butler, Bodies That Matter, pp. 68-9.
44. See Butler, Bodies That Matter, p. 34, where Butler provides and endorses a particular interpretation of Foucault: '..."being" belongs in quotation marks, for ontological weight is not presumed but always conferred'.
45. This is not to say that affirmation can only come after being. Rather, it is to stress that the being of an object must be articulated through its affirmation and vice versa.
46. For a more detailed reading of how we might conceive McClintock's scientific approach as a 'principle of narration', see Isabelle Stengers, 'Is There a Women's Science?' in Power and Invention: Situating Science, Paul Bains (trans.) (University of Minnesota Press) Minneapolis, 1997, pp. 123-30.
47. Gametic imprinting refers to differential modifications of genetic material depending on its gametic (i.e. egg or sperm) origin. For a review of these phenomena, see Denise P. Barlow, 'Imprinting: a Gamete's Point of View', Trends in Genetics, vol. 10, no. 6, 1994, pp. 194-9.