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Addicted to race: Performativity, agency, and Cesaire's A tempest
College Literature, Spring 1998 by Scheie, Timothy
A performance that could draw attention to the repeated gesture of identity's constitution would reveal that this repetition is neither self-identical with its imaginary source nor a slavish imitation of it, but that it generates what it appears to copy, what it purports to "be." Butler envisions an opening for a strategic maneuver, for an agentless agency: It is necessary to learn a double movement: to invoke the category, and hence, provisionally to institute an identity and at the same time to open the category as a site of permanent political contest. That the term is questionable does not mean that we ought not to use it, but neither does the necessity to use it mean that we ought not to perpetually interrogate the exclusions by which it proceeds.... (Butler 1993, 222)
An iteration at once loyal and disloyal reinscribes the term while evoking the constraints that govern this gesture of inscription.6 The performative does not represent a radical disloyalty or an outright rebellion against categories of identity, nor does it represent a sort of obedience in bad faith, implying a knowing agent under, above, behind, or otherwise prepositioned outside of the performance itself. It neither subverts nor overthrows, but instead "troubles" apparently immutable identities by making evident their constitutive gesture.
The necessary ambivalence of the performative's destabilizing terms compromises its potential as the theoretical justification for subversive activist strategies. With no "outside" to evoke, the performance of identity can only operate through and never fully against the "questionable terms" of the "inside," and without recourse to a knowing position of truth or authority nothing guarantees that any disloyalty will be detected at all. A disloyal performance necessarily resembles the loyal one which repeats the "sedimented" categories of identity in an uncritical and accepting manner. In short, only a spectator who already believes in the performativity of identity will detect the disloyalty inherent in a performance. There is no radical subversion, only a rearticulation and a redeployment that is at the same time a repetition and perpetuation of the offensive terms targeted for subversion. How effective is the strategy of revelation when it entails a repetition of the very identities deemed injurious in the first place, while relinquishing recourse to a knowing performer who can issue a discreet and reassuring wink at the spectator? How appealing is this "no pain no gain" formulation of performativity when the pain (the reinscription) is a sure thing and the gain (the revelation) tenuous? And what, finally, is there to be gained? Janelle Reinelt has skeptically written of the requisite faith in a post-identity world that underlies theorizations of the performative, an as yet unthinkable world which cannot guarantee that it will be any less oppressive than the one we know and presumably seek to change (1994, 101). While Butler's performative is theoretically provocative, it ultimately suggests less how to enact a strategic deconstruction of gender or other subject positions than how difficult such an endeavor might be.
