Judith Butler and Vikki Bell (Interviewer). "On Speech, Race and Melancholia." in: Theory, Culture and Society. Vol. 16, No. 2, pp. 163-174, 1999. (English)
Judith Butler's work has been extremely influential in feminist theory and philosophy, and its influence is also beginning to be felt more widely within cultural studies. In this interview, I wanted to ask Judith Butler about her most recent work, especially Excitable Speech (1997) which had just been published at the time of the interview, in terms of how it represents a continuation of certain themes and how it represents moves into new terrains of debate. In particular, I wanted to give her the opportunity to address both possible critiques of her work, especially around the issue of the possibility of political visions and the attention to speech when theorizing subjectification, and, with an eye to the interview's incorporation in this TCS issue, to introduce some of the tensions that are of interest in this context. That is, just what is the possibility of using the same analytical framework to talk both about racializing and gendering pro- cesses? How useful is the concept of melan-cholia? How are textuality and visuality interconnected?
VB: I was interested to find out what was behind the move you make in Excitable Speech to the work of Austin ± in combination with Althusser ± in the first essay [of the book]: was that motivated by a need to answer some of the theoretical questions you were left with after using Foucault and Lacan more predominantly in the past? Or was it a response to the contemporary field of legal decisions that you are looking at explicitly [in the book]?
JB: Well, I think that there were two problems. One is that I had made a set of fairly strong claims in both Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter that the subject is constituted in discourse, and I received several criticisms and queries about that: what does it mean to be constituted as the subject only by discourse? What is the mechanism of that constitution? What do we mean when we say constitution? So I think Bodies that Matter sought to understand constitution through the notion of materialization. But then I was in a bit of a bind because I felt that the predominant Foucauldian frame that I had been using didn't give me a precise enough account of what it meant for a subject to be constituted in discourse given that a subject is only partially constituted, or is sometimes constituted in ways that can't quite be anticipated: how do I talk about the failure of subject constitution? How do I talk about its tenuousness or vulnerability? How do I talk about its unpredictability? People also wanted concrete instances ± for me to give an example of what it meant ± so it seemed to me that although the Althusserian frame relies upon this verbal address, this being hailed by another, at least it produces the possibility of a subject not answering, of a subject being constituted along certain kinds of fault lines. Althusser's work gave me a scene, as it were, with which to start to ask the question: what does it mean to appropriate the terms by which one is hailed or the discourse in which one is constituted? And sometimes in Foucault it just seems too unilateral. In Discipline and Punish, perhaps one of the places where the theory of subject constitution is too unilateral, it's clearly too unnuanced. It's as if the prisoner is simply made, it's as if somehow the prisoner is constituted almost mechanistically. The central chapters there about the body strike me as problematic because they can't accommodate a theory of the psyche, and they can't accommodate the vulnerability or the unpredict- ability of subject constitution. There's not enough give in Discipline and Punish. So I suppose that's why I was recalled to the Althusserian scene, so that I might meditate a bit about when and where the discourse through which one is constituted fails to hit its mark.
VB: There's a tension it seems to me in using Austin next to Althusser, given the different domains in which they were thinking. What happens, for example, to the Marxism of Althusser when you pull him on to the domain of Austin?
JB: I think that the only reason that Austin is interesting is that he gives us this distinction between the illocutionary and the perlocutionary. And he gives us a fantasy. He charts, without knowing it, a fantasy of sovereign power in speech. Mine is not a loyal use of Austin. I suppose the use of Austin became important because you know it is a theory of the performa- tive, and this is a word that I've been using all along without quite dealing with him, which has already been somewhat scandalous. I think in Gender Trouble I actually took it from Derrida's essay on Kafka, `Before the Law' which had Austin as its background but which I didn't bother to pursue. But more importantly, speech act theory has been used by a number of feminist scholars in the pornography and hate speech debates. I'd say that contem- porary legal scholars in the US are very preoccupied with Austin, not just MacKinnon but the philosopher from Australia, Ray Langton, Frederick Schauer at Harvard and other First Amendment scholars are suddenly extremely interested in this. But they think that the speech act is something performed by a subject, performed on another subject, or part of an address that one subject makes to another. My interest is in the Althusserian problem of how, one might say, a speech act brings a subject into being, and then how that very subject comes to speak, reiterating the discursive conditions of its own emergence. So it seems to me that hate speech has to be located in both this first and second dimension. But the real task is to figure out how a subject who is constituted in and by discourse then recites that very same discourse but perhaps to another purpose. For me that's always been the question of how to find agency, the moment of that recitation or that replay of discourse that is the condition of one's own emergence. So I think I need Althusser and Austin. I think Althusser gives me interpellation, the discursive act by which subjects are constituted, and Austin gives me a way of understanding the speech acts of that subject. VB: Excitable Speech is much more about the questions of speech act and sovereignty, as opposed to questions of discourse and genealogy. But there are some points in Excitable Speech in which those questions are raised again. I wanted to ask you in this context about a phrase that seems to be a favourite of yours, that comes up in Bodies that Matter and Excitable Speech, and it's this phrase from Foucault which is `Discourse is not life, its time is not yours.' I wanted to ask about that phrase because it seems to pose a question which is about the responsibility of the speaker in terms of inheritance and citation, but also to have a sense of the future about it, in the sense that the way in which you contribute to a discourse might not be the way that you intend to, or that it might be used differently in the future. Could you say a bit about that phrase and what work you think it does for you? How does it fit into your vision? I'm pushing you toward an idea of some sort of politics of speech.
JB: I might need you to say more, but I'll just say this as a way of opening the discussion: I think there has been a somewhat sceptical response to Foucault and the question of discourse and agency in which people say that the life of the subject is simply discourse or that everything can be reduced to discourse, or reduced to what the subject says ± a kind of collapse of discourse and enunciation ± which is problematic. Maybe there is also a sort of logocentric idea to the effect that the subject comes into being through its speech and is only its speech in that quasi-Aristotelian way. What I find really interesting is that the subject in speech is always both more than itself and less than itself in any given speech act, that what it speaks is not simply its own speech but it speaks a life of discourse and it is installed, as it were, in a life of discourse that exceeds the subject's own temporality. This isn't the romantic idea that I speak and my words exceed me and immortalize me, or I write and my words exceed me and immortalize me through time, it's not so much that. It's actually about being, as it were, always already lost to or always already expropriated by a past of discourse that I do not control, and a future of discourse that I do not control; that the time of discourse exceeds the time of my life doesn't memorialize my agency. It's actually a certain principle of humility and a certain principle of historicity, of being installed in a historicity that is not my own, but which is the condition of my own. In that sense it's a historicity that exposes the limits of my autonomy but which I would also say is the condition of my autonomy, oddly enough. But a politics, you want me to move to the politics police car siren sounds] . . . there's politics . . . a state of emergency! . . . I] . . . want to say that there's a different notion of responsibility. I think in the US we go around trying to target people who say racist things, and indeed there are good reasons to do that, targeting people who say homophobic things, holding them responsible for their speech. I think there are all kinds of reasons to stop a person when they speak such things and say, for example, `look, that's a racist act'. I think that's important. But I think a politics that begins and ends with that policing function is a mistake, because for me the question is how is that person, as it were, renewing and reinvigorating racist rituals of speech, and how do we think about those particular rituals and how do we exploit their ritual function in order to undermine it in a more thorough-going way, rather than just stopping it as it's spoken. What would it mean to restage it, take it, do something else with the ritual so that its revivability as a speech act is really seriously called into question.
VB: You say at one point that the question is how the repetition of an injurious statement or calling will occur and when, and you say that is the pain and the promise. That's the politics then, this opening up of the possibility [of repeating differently] ± not the possibility of not repeating, but the possibilities concerning where and how. It seems to me that people are going to press you on the same issue of politics that they pressed you on around Gender Trouble ± they want to know . . .
JB: . . . more concretely . . . like five suggestions on how to proceed.
VB: Is that a moment that you feel you should refuse, in the way that Foucault did?
JB: I don't know if I should refuse it, I think what's really funny ± and this probably seems really odd considering the level of abstraction at which I work ± is that I actually believe that politics has a character of contingency and context to it that cannot be predicted at the level of theory. And that when theory starts becoming programmatic, such as `here are my five prescriptions', and I set up my typology, and my final chapter is called 'What is to be Done?', it pre-empts the whole problem of context and contingency, and I do think that political decisions are made in that lived moment and they can't be predicted from the level of theory ± they can be sketched, they can be schematized, they can be prepared for, but I suppose I'm with Foucault on this. I'm willing to withstand the same criticisms he withstood. It seems like a noble tradition.
VB: You talk at some point about `vain utopias', and yet you also talk about an alternative vision of democracy, or you suggest that you are coming from a broadly speaking democratic position. It seems that `vain utopias' are linked in some way with identity politics. One of Foucault's favourite poets Rene Char once asked `how can we live without the unknown in front of us?' [suggesting] that we need that sense of the contingency that you are talking about in order to go on. But there are certain things that you think are misguided around the question of identity politics, around setting up utopias?
JB: I can't remember where I talk about `vain utopias', I can't remember what my reference is.
VB: It's mentioned in Excitable Speech I think. I was just thinking about Wendy Brown's work, where she talks about ressentiment [and feminist argumentation and politics]. Is there a chiming that's, unsurprisingly, going on there?
JB: Probably. She introduced me once at a talk as an ironic utopian.
VB: And you like that?
JB: Evidently. It was obviously an interpellation that worked! I recognized myself in it.
I do think that one cannot work with political theory without a sense of the unforseeable, without anticipating a break within the present regime that cannot be known in the present. I'm always searching for such breaks. I also think that what appears as a radical rupture usually turns out to have within it a trace of the past. That produces a certain irony in the end.
VB: OK. Can I move to a slightly different way in, and ask about issues around racialization, because your work seems to be increasingly to incor- porate issues of racialization and racism since Bodies that Matter. Could you say something about the processes of subjectification that you term `girling' and . . . I don't know if you use the term racialization but you mention Kendal Thomas's work on being `raced'? You want to distance yourself from the idea of `double oppression' and that way of thinking about racism and sexism as structures that confer oppression. How then do you see those processes interacting or working together?
JB: I think that I'm less interested in theories of intersectionality, or in versions of multiculturalism that try to keep processes of gendering and racing radically distinct. I'm much more interested in how one becomes the condition of the other, or how one becomes the unmarked background for the action of the other so that, for instance, in the Anita Hill event, it became very interesting how the various analyses could either focus on the gendered aspects or focus on the racialized aspects of that public spectacle, but they could not quite see, most of them, how they worked together. There were a couple of pieces in that Toni Morrison (1993) volume on Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill that I felt did do that, and Morrison herself I think gestures towards it at the beginning. For me, it's not so much a double consciousness ± gender and race as the two axes, as if they're determined only in relation to one another, I think that's a mistake ± but I think the unmarked character of the one very often becomes the condition of the articulation of the other. Then the question is how to sustain an analysis that is able to shift perspectives sequentially in such a way that no one reading is actually adequate without the other. I'm not sure that what I want is a synthetic reading. I think what I want is a set of sequential readings that expose the partiality of each constitutive reading. So I like Kendall Thomas's work quite a bit. I think that it is the most rhetorically and philosophically interesting work in the legal theory of racialization that I know. His idea of what it is to be `raced' is very much about the accumulation of speech acts. Speech acts don't always have to be explicit, verbal statements ± it's not that one becomes raced as it were by being addressed explicitly. There are all sorts of implicit modes of address that structure institutions. I think what I don't like are structural accounts of racialization that refuse to understand the temporality of the structure, the fact that the structure must be reiterated again and again, and that it has a kind of ritual dimension and that its very temporal dimension is the condition of its subversion. I mean I suppose I've always thought that ± it remains true of Gender Trouble and it remains true of this contemporary work. What is poststructural in my work is the fact that I want those subjectivating norms to be temporalized and open rather than fixed and determinate. I'm also wary of theories that seek to compartmental- ize gender over here and race over here, and I'm wary of those that seek to synthesize them absolutely or set up analogies between them as if they are isomorphic in relation to one another. I think there is some interarticulation, which seems much more promising to me ± what that means is that the theoretical means of describing that is going to have a narrative form and it's going to be sequential and it's not going to give or explain everything at once. I'm not sure I can do better than that right now.
VB: On the question of narrative that you raise there, I was thinking about the piece that you wrote about Rodney King and the LA riots, because there you are more focused on the use of the visual evidence and the politics of seeing. I was wondering whether you see a tension between the idea of the narrative, and the dominance of the idea of the text, in thinking through processes of subjectification [on the one hand], and the politics of visuality [on the other]? Do you agree that there is a tension given that the stuff about masquerade and mimicry is very much about the way in which people are categorized and placed visually, and then this work is more about the categorization through speech: can both senses or both forms be theorized through a similar theoretical frame?
JB: I think I'm actually trying to struggle free of a narrow version of textualism, quite frankly. I think for me the very fact that I am emphasizing speech in Excitable Speech is something that some of the more strictly Derridean friends of mine would be wary of, given the way in which speech is supposed to be secondary to writing so for me it's not as if there is some primary textuality of writing that I then find in the visual or verbal field. Obviously I take a lot from him and especially the theory of iterability. On the other hand I do think that there is a performativity to the gaze that is not simply the transposition of a textual model on to a visual one; that when we see Rodney King, when we see that video we are also reading and we are also constituting, and that the reading is a certain conjuring and a certain construction. How do we describe that? It seems to me that that is a modality of perfomativity, that it is racialization, that the kind of visual reading practice that goes into the viewing of the video is part of what I would mean by racialization, and part of what I would understand as the performativity of what it is `to race something' or to be `raced' by it. So I suppose that I'm interested in the modalities of performativity that take it out of its purely textualist context.
VB: Coming back to processes of subjectivization, I wanted to ask you what happened to the use of the analogy of melancholia that you use at the end of Gender Trouble to talk about how the melancholic structure of heterosexu- ality encrypts the homosexual. Is that an analogy that could be used in the field of `race' as well?
JB: Absolutely. In fact I have several students who are working on melancholia and `race'. Let me say two things. One, I have another book recently published with Stanford University Press called The Psychic Life of Power which has an extended discussion of melancholia and gender and sexuality, so I take that up there. It's an effort in a way to reconcile the Foucauldian perspective with the theory of the psyche which does involve this whole analysis. Second, I think that there is all kinds of interesting work to be done on melancholia and `race' and in particular with the place of `race' within diasporic culture in which as it were the origins of racialization are foreclosed ± [there is] the impossibility of return to any pure notion of race, the impossibility of an historical return to the origins of racialization in say the US and slavery or in emigrations from Africa or the Afro-Caribbean, that kind of impossibility of return and yet a mindfulness of history and a desire for history that's never quite satisfiable. So to the extent that the history of race is linked to a history of diasporic displacement it seems to me that melancholia is there, that there is, as it were, inscribed in `race' a lost and ungrievable origin, one might say, an impossibility of return, but also an impossibility of an essence. I think also that the history of miscegenation involves a history of melancholia in an interesting way, that to the extent that cross-racial sexual relations have been foreclosed ± and I use that word specifically, i.e. not just prohibited but foreclosed ± in the sense of unthink- able. Those forms of desire become ungrievable within available public discourse. There are certain kinds of love that are held not to be love, loss that is held not to be loss, that remain within this kind of unthinkable domain or in a kind of ontologically shadowy domain; it's not real, it's not real love, it's not real loss. So I think that can be linked with some of the work I've done on the unthinkability and the ungrievability of homosexual attachment.
VB: But it's a melancholia that's discursively given, as opposed to a more classical Freudian sense of melancholia?
JB: Yes, I suppose so. It's a love foreclosed by discourse.
VB: Is it an analogy or is it a `real' melancholia?
JB: I think that there are cultural forms, culturally instituted forms of melancholia. I suppose by that I would also mean discursively in the broad sense of discourse. It's not a question of this ego not being able to love that person ± it's not that model ± it's rather what it means to have one's desire formed as it were through cultural norms that dictate in part what will and will not be a loveable object, what will and will not be a legitimate form of love. To the extent that there are racial foreclosures on the production of the field of love, I think that there is a culturally instituted melancholia because what that would mean is that there is a class of persons whom I could never love or for whom it would be unthinkable for me to love, and they are constituted essentially as the unthinkable, the unloveable, the ungrievable, and that then institutes a form of melancholia which is culturally pervasive, a strange ungrievability.
I also think that there is a lot of interesting work in the US on the problem of slavery and memory, and contemporary US scholars like Saidiya Hartman (1997) has written about what it means to try and grieve the losses of slavery. She actually tells the story of travelling to Africa, going back to the sites of slave trade under the sponsorship of US corporate travel plans for African Americans who want to find their roots ± MacDonald's corpor- ations sponsoring African Americans to go back to Libya to see exactly where the slave boats were launched from, to try and relive and re-experi- ence that trauma, which of course is a money-making enterprise for these corporations and which produces the following situation. She returns to these sites in order ostensibly to re-enact or re-live that trauma, only to find herself interpellated into a commodity system ± here are the tokens, the fetishism, the slave trade, buy them! Buy them, African American middle class of the United States, and help this capitalist enterprise! So she gets interpellated by capital at the very moment in which she returns to re- experience this loss, and it turns out that this loss actually cannot be found because it's a loss that is also covered over precisely through the commodity structure. So what she ends up confronting is the loss of the loss, in Hegel's sense, the impossibility of grieving a loss which is not only figured by this commodity system but covered over once again by it. So it becomes an impossible referent, it becomes an impossible object of grief. That strikes me as a highly melancholic situation. It's an ungrievable loss.
There's Deborah McDowell also in the US who has done some work on melancholia and race, talking about what it means to have repeated, endless images of black men who are murdered on the streets of urban US cities in the newspaper all the time. There is this numbing effect every time she gets the Washington Post in which there's this picture of another young black man who has died on the streets of Washington D.C. and his weeping mother. This has almost become an iconography of US journalism. She says that the way in which these deaths become figured is that all of these black men become interchangeable with one another, that there are infinite numbers of them, and that it's a scene that's produced again and again, that these lives are nameless and interchangeable with one another and `lost' again in and through the journalistic representation. Then there's this figure of the grieving mother. But the question is is there any end to that grieving? Is there any possibility of a grieving that would actually work through that loss? Or is it the case that the sheer numbers and the sheer repetitive force of this iconography is such that there's no possibility of a completed grief, that it's actually an infinitely extended grief, which makes it into a candi- date for melancholia. Her argument is that the public discourse that gives us these lives and gives it to us through that iconography institutes a kind of melancholia for the black community which can't be overcome. It makes melancholia into as it were a kind of constitutive condition of urban black culture. There's a kind of grieving that is limitless and without end.
VB: I wonder if I can use that to connect back with what you have argued about AIDS in your contribution ± `Sexual Inversions' ± in the Hekman book, because it seems that you are arguing that AIDS has brought death into the deployment of sexuality in a way that Foucault didn't envisage, and that he depicted an older form of power which figured the link between sex and death as archaic, so it is constantly reiterated that there was an older form of power, that it used to be that sex and death were connected, but that now we are governed through a bio-political form which takes life as its object. It seemed to me that you were arguing that AIDS has brought death into the deployment of sexuality such that sex can be seen as an agent in itself, as causative, so that we might want to update Foucault's project in the first volume of The History of Sexuality to bring it forward in some way. Would it be right to see you as involved in some ways in an updating of that project?
JB: Yes, but I think that Foucault probably updated himself. The shift between the first and second volumes is an under-read shift, and very often it is lamented, and readers think that the exuberance of the first volume is lost in what follows. But I actually think that what follows is very interesting, because the self-care emphasis is in a way an allegory for surviving with AIDS. It think it is much more self-consciously within the culture of AIDS, a project that resonates with what it means to cultivate life against death. I think there is an awareness of finitude and mortality in the subsequent volumes. I think in `Sexual Inversions', what I found particularly ironic was that Foucault made this sort of blanket claim that plagues were over, and probably in the very moment in which he wrote that sentence he was HIV positive. It strikes me that he was not only blind to AIDS, as he would have had to have been in the late 1970s, but he was also clearly blind to plagues that are outside the purview of a narrow European perspective. It seems to me that he was really in the grips of a fantasy that somehow disease was fully controlled, that we'd somehow mastered the problem of mass scale dying that is the result of epidemics, and that we had now turned to more subtle forms of the culture and maintenance of human life forms. I think he was just wrong. My interest in AIDS, though, I think links up to this problem of melancholia in a different way. I think perhaps I mentioned it in that article (1996), but in the US there's been a series of these quasi-psychological articles in newspapers about gay men, in particular, who suffer from depression not because they have the virus but because they don't. It gets termed `sur-vivor's guilt' and my sense is that the so-called depression actually has everything to do with living in a culture in which gay relation- ships don't get legitimated as real relationships, and hence when they dissolve, or when a partner dies, the loss isn't really legitimated as legitimate loss ± hospitals don't release the body to the lover, courts don't accept the status of the partner, families do or do not convene to grieve the loss, places of employment struggle to accept whether this is equal to a spousal death, whether bereavement policies apply on airplanes, etc. ± so I think there is a kind of cultural institution of denial on this issue that raises the question of whether this is a grievable loss.
VB: So the narratives are a form of this `forced narrative' that you talk about, the narratives of these surviving men?
JB: Well I think that the question is whether one can survive without the possibility of grief ± I think grief needs its public rituals. If there's a public foreclosure of the possibility of grief and the recognition of loss, then it's not that an individual fails to grieve, it's that there's a public foreclosure of the possibility of grief, instituting melancholia throughout that culture, and that is part of this depression that the newspapers are trying to psychologize.
VB: It would be interesting to see if you see a difference in Britain, the way that AIDS is debated in our public sphere. Yesterday in the Guardian there was a headline `AIDS: No longer a death sentence?' as if there's an attempt to bring AIDS back into the realm of the administration of life, or, rather, to remove the association with death.
JB: Yes, and it's so quick. This happens in the US too. The very fact that there are protease inhibitors that prolong life for some, and only for those who have extraordinary amounts of money is quickly taken up as a sign that AIDS is no longer fatal, and that it's not linked with death any more.
It's really been astonishing, how quickly and manically that conclusion has been drawn, and it's why people like Larry Kramer, for all of his excess, are really important because they just continue to disrupt that public mode of denial. I think that kind of interruption, that interruption of denial, that interruption of a kind of hallucinatory ease about all of this is crucial.
Interview conducted on 13 May 1997.
References:
Butler, J. (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.
Butler, J. (1993) Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of `Sex'. New York: Routledge.
Butler, J. (1996) `Sexual Inversions', in S. Hekman (ed.) Feminist Interpretations of Michel Foucault. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Butler, J. (1997a) Excitable Speech. New York: Routledge.
Butler, J. (1997b) The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Foucault, M. (1979) Discipline and Punish, trans. A.M. Sheridan. London: Penguin.
Foucault, M. (1981) The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. R. Hurley. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Hartman, S. (1997) Scenes of Subjection. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Morrison, T. (ed.) (1993) Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas and the Construction of Social Reality. London: Chatto and Windus.
Judith Butler is a Professor in the Department of Rhetoric, University of California at Berkeley. She is the author of Subjects of Desire (Columbia University Press, 1987), Gender Trouble (Routledge, 1990), Bodies that Matter (Routledge, 1993), The Psychic Life of Power (Stanford University Press, 1997), Excitable Speech (Routledge, 1997), as well as numerous articles and contributions on philosophy, feminist and queer theory.
