Judith Butler, “gender performance,” and the nature of “bullshit”
This post discusses how classical liberalism relates conceptually to 20th-century notions of gender. It then puts Judith Butler’s ideas in conversation with Harry Frankfurt to help pinpoint the character of gender discussions.
Classical liberalism as precedent
Classical liberalism—henceforth, “liberalism”—is a modern political philosophy that emphasizes personal autonomy and identifies personal freedom as the highest good (i.e., freedom understood as fashioning and pursuing for oneself one’s own version of the good life; see Patrick Deneen’s 2018 monograph Why Liberalism Failed). It is individualist. And it often defines individuals’ “freedom” either negatively in terms of a lack of constraint, a lack of interference, or positively as self-determination.
Liberalism emerged in an intellectual environment that was critical of classical conceptions of human nature. By “nature,” I mean something distinct from the existence of this or that individual. I mean an objective essence of x or y that can be discerned through common sense; observed empirically (e.g., miniature poodles and rottweilers are both recognizably “dog”); and understood and refined analytically (e.g., not a dog but caninity; not a cat but felinity; not an equilateral or isosceles triangle, but traiangularity; not a human being but humanness; etc.). From something like an Aristotelian or Thomistic perspective, such notions of human nature are understood as implying certain constraints on how individual human beings are to live. To live well here means living in accordance with, not against, one’s nature, which bears normative weight. From this angle, there is no such thing as fashioning and pursuing one’s own version of the good life as such, since what it means to live a good life is drawn from considerations of nature and how a given kind of being flourishes. These considerations ground norms by which this or that individual ought to live.
According to Michael Sandel’s 1982 monograph Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, even if liberalism might not reject human nature as such, to the degree that liberalism does consider it, it tends to understand nature as something like pure, unencumbered choosing. In other words, the point to be drawn from our nature is that any choice about life is necessarily ours to make. Nature has virtually no instruction to offer beyond a promise of no normative instruction. Hence, liberalism’s conception of being human diverges deeply from classical conceptions.
Political outworking(s) of liberalism
Liberalism’s presuppositions about human nature can have implications that diverge. One is a strong sense of individual agency, summed up in the idea of a “self-made man.” One might think of aspiring toward limited government, laissez-faire economics, etc., for the sake of preserving the centrality of individual choice, individual preference. But another, rather different political implication is that, if individuals by nature are self-sufficient and self-oriented, then in order to have a stable society, it is necessary for a sovereign to enforce order with citizens expected to submit. Otherwise, chaos will ensue due to ever-competing wills clashing over their personal preferences (e.g., Thomas Hobbes’ 1651 book Leviathan). This mode of liberalism entails a more limited conception of individual agency in the context of a society.
“Gender performance” as the offspring of liberalism
In key ways, Judith Butler is aligned with classical liberalism’s anthropology of human beings as ethically unconstrained by nature. Butler is a widely known and oft cited figure in gender studies. Published in 1988, her paper, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory” was written amid 20th century trends of dismissing the very notion of human nature. Butler too dismisses it, as well as the discreteness of subjectivity. After mentioning phenomenologists’ discussions of how social agents contribute to social reality, Butler situates herself among “a more radical use of the doctrine of constitution,” which holds that a social agent is “an object rather than the subject of constitutive acts” (original italics, p. 519). One’s sense of “I, me” is not a discrete subjectivity (i.e being a discrete, individual subject), but rather the product of socio-political forces extrinsic to the “I, me.” Butler thus represents a strong version of social constructivism, leaning toward a form of social determinism. It presupposes a sort of blank slate view of human beings, with the slate filled in by social contingencies.
Where does this argument lead? If there were an objective essence of “the human,” with a telos indicative of a good life, there would necessarily be limits to what individuals can do and be while still claiming to live a good life. Human nature has a constraining effect. To be sure, it’s not all about constraint. Knowing what something truly is enables people to pursue a fulfilled instantiation or embodiment of x based on what x intrinsically is for. In short, essence is tied to issues of flourishing; it is inseparable from truth and natural goodness. But notably, Butler distances sex/gender from issues of nature, truth, and goodness, suggesting near the end of the paper that “women do not exist” (p. 529; but cf. her title’s mention of “Feminist Theory”). Yet she writes as a feminist, which historically has relied on an essence of “the feminine, womanhood” as an objective reference point for ethical and political critique. Claiming such things to be a “false ontology of women,” Butler sympathizes with the idea that the truth or reality of “woman” is to be subordinated to issues of political utility. She recently reaffirmed as much in a Guardian interview, where she aligns her ideas with a “radical democratic movement”:
The right is seeking desperately to reclaim forms of identity that have been rightly challenged. At the same time, they tend to reduce movements for racial justice as “identity” politics, or to caricature movements for sexual freedom or against sexual violence as concerned only with “identity”. In fact, these movements are primarily concerned with redefining what justice, equality and freedom can and should mean. In this way, they are essential to any radical democratic movement, so we should reject those caricatures.
The goal is radical democracy, a vision of being subject to none, including the intrinsic limits implied by human nature. The aim is a particular form of politics, distinguished from concerns with truth and natural goodness (e.g., she is willing to rely on what she claims is a “false ontology” if it serves political purposes).
What if we ask, Is Butler’s argument true? She certainly writes as if she takes herself to be conveying something true: something that can be known to be real apart from whatever whims an individual brings. But with this sort of social constructivism, what we call “truth” and “human nature” and “subjectivity” would be strictly accidental products of societal powers (i.e., artificially constructed, not discovered). In this respect, even her mode of writing appears inconsistent with her actual claims of strong social constructivism, which, if correct, would dissolve objective truth as something that can be found. Instead, she uses theatrical language of “performance” in the title and throughout the essay: We are compelled to play a part that we did not choose, but since it is grounded in nothing, there is a possibility to remake things. A problem is of course that Butler is in a position where she cannot logically claim her argument is true and something that ought to be embraced because of its intellectual soundness and alignment with reality. It would undermine the constructivist axiom that truth is an artificial product of power.
So perhaps we should ask, What is Butler’s argument for? According to her, it is for politics. Interestingly, in her 1988 paper, she does not specify what kind of political usefulness it achieves; for whom it functions; nor to what end. Nonetheless, a focus is a sense of individuals being liberated “performers” in matters of sexuality, reproduction, and so on (cf. the classical liberal ideal of autonomy). If truth and natural goodness are illusory, then one can still find pleasure in things without anyone being warranted in questioning it. Having dismissed notions of normativity (the true, the good), this mode of thinking ends up being about what is needed for a particular end that individuals perceive as desirable. Sexual activity would be open-ended because it would be a non-normative category; likewise, sexual identity would be open-ended because human nature would be a fiction. For Butler, truth and natural goodness are distractions.
Popularizing “bullshit”
Since Butler wrote in the 1980s, these ideas have become rather mainstream (e.g., the month of June has been designated “Pride month” by a wide range of institutions that profit economically from sales and market exposure). The cluster of factors we have observed brings to mind Harry Frankfurt’s 2005 book-length essay On Bullshit. It is an analytical attempt to define “bullshit,” which he differentiates from lying, and to articulate the relationship of lying and bullshit to truth. He writes:
When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose. (p. 56)
It seems fair to say that Butler’s discussion qualifies as a case of what Frankfurt calls “bullshit” — a mode of speaking or writing that is unconcerned with the truth or falsity of things and prioritizes effectiveness in their place. His essay begins with the statement, “One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this” (p. 1). Nearly twenty years later, the degree of bullshit has not lessened. A reason is probably that our own socio-political default of liberalism, which idealizes and centralizes personal autonomy, not only fosters bullshit, but also has become a system in which we have invested so much that few are willing to let it go. Through liberalism, bullshit has, perhaps unwittingly, become an object of our affection.
