Page 48 - Cultural Change and Ordinary Life

Understanding and theorizing cultural change 39

distinction between performance (which presupposes the existence of a subject)
and performativity (which does not). This does not mean that there is no sub-
ject, but that the subject is not exactly where we would expect to find it – i.e.
‘behind’ or ‘before’ its deeds – so that ‘reading Gender Trouble will call for new
and radical ways of looking at (or perhaps looking for) gender identity’ (Salih
2002: 45).
There seem to be a number of strengths and potential ways forward from
Butler, for a reconstituted theory of ordinary life as media drenched. Thus,
Butler’s approach points to the role of the enactment and re-enactment of
identities in social life – ‘Space does not disappear but is reconstituted: gone is
metaphorical space – the continents of subjectivity habitable only by authen-
tic substantive identities – and in its place is social space: the symbolic realm in
which subjects interpellate and hail other subjects, in which performative
enactment of gender occurs’ (Lloyd 1999: 196–7).
This is very suggestive, as it allows for both some measure of agency and
the recursive nature of social life (see the many works of Giddens that deploy
this idea). As Butler recognizes and as has been explored by others, there are
some significant parallels with Bourdieu here (see also Chapter 3). In this
respect, it can be suggested that there is, at this point, some potential. How-
ever, for the purposes of this book, two key issues remain. First, there is the
continuing confusion in the relationship between performance and performa-
tivity. Second, and even more pertinent, is the relative neglect of the audience
in these theorizations. I wish to return to the former after discussion of the
latter.
One of the striking things about much of the commentary on Butler’s
work is that it discusses the way in which there can be a performance without
an acting subject, but that in relative terms it neglects the significance of the
audience to the performance. It is significant that Butler herself seems to rec-
ognize the status of some of the issues involved. Thus, in the 1999 Preface to
Gender Trouble she argues the following:
Moreover, my theory sometimes waffles between understanding per-
formativity as linguistic and casting it as theatrical. I have come to
think that the two are invariably related, chiasmically so, and that a
reconsideration of the speech act as an instance of power invariably
draws attention to both its theatrical and linguistic dimensions. In
Excitable Speech, I sought to show that the speech act is at once performed
(and thus theatrical, presented to an audience, subject to interpretation)
and linguistic, inducing a set of effects through its implied relation to
linguistic conventions.
(Butler 1999: xxv, my emphasis)
This is significant, although the place of the audience still requires theor-
ization. A clear instance of some of the issues involved can be found in the
following comment from an interview conducted with Butler in 1997:
I do think that there is a performativity to the gaze that is not simply the
transposition of a textual model onto a visual one; that when we see
Rodney King, when we see that video we are also reading and we also