October 25, 2021 - 10:06am
Plenty has already been written about Judith Butler’s latest fusillade against those who dissent from her gender utopia.
On the central charge of ‘incoherent’, I will only observe that many groups who agree on little else think her ideas are nuts. This may be less of a slam-dunk argument in Butler’s favour than she seems to imagine.
Butler presents herself as an opponent both of something called ‘neoliberalism’, and also of those bad wicked fascists. What she ignores, though, is the profoundly neoliberal nature of her own gender revolution — born of a boomer anti-materialism nourished in an age of abundance, that dreamt of bottomless resources and leisure for all.
Against this, the dreaded category of ‘fascist’ extends to include anyone who suggests, however mildly, that some boundaries or structures might occasionally be a good thing, given that resources are not bottomless and never will be.
This two-step is evident in a passage that bears quoting at length:
The vanishing of social services under neoliberalism has put pressure on the traditional family to provide care work […] In turn, the fortification of patriarchal norms within the family and the state has become, for some, imperative in the face of decimated social services, unpayable debt, and lost income. It is against this background that “gender” is portrayed as a destructive force, a foreign influence infiltrating the body politic and destabilising the traditional family.
- Judith Butler, Guardian
Here Butler has noticed that eroding the welfare state prompts a renewed need for the family, as an important source of solidarity. It’s a significant insight: social mores are grounded in real-world needs and pressures. But rather than take the next step, and ask whether those mores may have some value, Butler inverts the order of priority: she castigates communities for the way their materially-grounded social structures risk impinging on her ideal order.
By rhetorically positioning ‘neoliberalism’ as other, she skates over the implication of her dream of rainbow gender multiplicities within just this order.
A few levels down from Butler’s rarefied world, Shon Faye writes in The Transgender Issue about the way transgender individuals often face workplace discrimination, estrangement from family bonds and mental health or substance abuse issues. To survive, Faye notes, many are obliged to make do with prostitution, gig-economy work and ‘chosen family’ support structures.
Butler condemns people for seeking to shore up structures of solidarity against the encroachments of the market, lest doing so hampers the unfolding of selves in perfect freedom — even down to remodelling one’s own body. But these are precisely neoliberal selves. Faye describes the downsides of selfhood on this neoliberal model: a life stripped of stability in work, identity, relationships and even one’s own body.
Nothing, in other words, could be more neoliberal than the reality emerging from Butler’s idealism — including the booming biomedical industry now emerging to cater to their radical self-fashioning. And including the manifest suffering of many individuals who pursue radical self-fashioning on the axis of sex and gender.
Once translated from the foggy language of theory into plain English, Butler’s politics amounts to “Neoliberalism has horrible liquefying side effects, including on women, but hear me out, what if we somehow came up with a version that kept all the individualism and none of the alienation?”. Less politics than wishful thinking.
Meanwhile, she condemns as ‘fascist’ all those who argue — whatever else they disagree on — for some boundaries on the neoliberal liquefaction of all social structures. Including, notably, those family ties now re-emerging as an important element of the pushback against liquid modernity. This isn’t an argument, it’s the petulant huff of an adolescent given a sensible bedtime on a school night.
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SubscribeGreat article Mary. I’m amazed that you could glean sense from her ramblings. Here’s a line of Judith Butler’s I memorised and which I regurgitate occasionally in conversation for comic effect:
“Gender is not to culture as Sex is to nature. Gender is the discursive/cultural means by which sexed nature or a natural sex is produced or established, as ‘predicurisve’, prior to culture; a politically neutral surface on which culture acts.”
I think it must take a great deal of practice to take very simple ideas and then make them sound complicated with verbose, blunt words void of imagery and precision.
I presume Only an expensive University education can achieve that.
As George Orwell once put it:
“you have to be an academic to believe some things. No ordinary person would be so stupid.”
And of Fascism, Orwell said:
“The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies “something not desirable.”
This has been so since Orwell wrote it in the 1930s. Butler stands in a long line of useful idiots.
When you simplify her text, where you can, the absurdness becomes clear.
She notoriously won the Bad Writing prize for the following absolute corker:-
“The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.”
That is just amazing, thank you for sharing! I’m going to quote that to someone soon!
You’re most welcome!
Exactly – just what I often say to my friends in the pub after Mass.
Don’t we all!
the word fascist, has no sting any more, it just means baddies. Like Mary says at the end its the insult of a petulant adolescent trying to scandalise their parents by using a swear word, but its also the only word they ever use use so it now has no capacity to shock.
The question is who gave this as thick as pig shit rabble rouser credibility and a platform.
It can only serve as indictment of the whole higher education establishment and we should truck no defence from anyone tying to defend it against total and immediate defunding.
A very bad version of ‘Squealer’ from ‘Animal Farm’, lacking all the charming and convincing oratory skills – but still game to get out and push ‘Napoleon’ Pig’s twisted message.
Every time you find yourself amazed at the incredibly insane Fas *ism message and actions of the Cultural Marxists, one can fine an animal in Orwell’s book to represent them.
Exactly. Once you subvert all structure you subvert, totally contrary to Butler’s wishful thinking, all legal restraints on power, and so end up with a Hobbesian dystopia where the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.
The irony of her piece attacking ‘Fascism’ is the best exemplars today of her approach of subverting institutions and the rule of law are the likes of Trump, Orban, Poland’s Law and Justice and above all Putin and his eminence grise, Surkov, the creator of the true ‘politics of parody’ – see his recent interview in the FT from June 2021 and his utterly cynical description of how he created a Potemkin politics to supplant the real thing and cement Putin’s power.
Great piece by Harrington. But not to take anything away from her, the best on Butler still remains Martha Nussbaum’s peerless and coolly contemptuous measured take in ‘The Professor of Parody’ in The New Republic, from all the way in 1999, but eerily prophetic of exactly where this nonsense would lead.
As for Butler, I’m sure she couldn’t care less. Like the nineteenth century German nationalistic/metaphysical ‘philosophers’, it’s hard to escape the conclusion her windy insubstantial and largely meaningless rhetoric is calculated simply to garner herself notoriety, a following, and a certain status and standard of living.
– George Orwell
Mary have enjoy your writing and the topics you cover but I found this hard to follow. Orwell strove for clarity of writing and thought. A times your article strayed away from Orwellian clarity and into the jibberishness of Butler. No offence intended. It’s difficult to make sense of Butler. Butler is twisted by her prejudices. She fails to understand basic human evolution and ultimately her vision of the world is inhuman and artificial. Is short she’s a very dangerous person.
In fairness, Butler is like the Tar Baby of American South folklore—any attempt to engage with her gets you all stuck in the goo, arms useless.
In Butler’s writing, pronouns have unclear referents—thus, paraphrasing her arguments to respond to them requires a writer to supply an educated guess as to what Butler most likely meant. To which Butler can retort that she never said what the writer said she said.
Harrington’s piece therefore wisely includes direct quotes, but cannot encompass the true Tar Baby quality of Butler’s Guardian piece—in which Butler refers to the intersex “movement,” and to the “ideal” of sexual dimorphism, as though these things were not biological conditions or facts.
Finally, would just add that Butler’s Guardian piece characterizes gender theory’s critics as opposing protections for women’s safety, a mind-bogglingly counterfactual claim, which I will not bother to refute. It is past noon on the East Coast, the Tar Baby is well melted, and I have already wasted enough time on it.
As R MS observed, Butler could not care less.
Thank you, I thought it was just me. However, I understand very little of what Judith Butler says. So, perhaps I shouldn’t expect to understand what is written about what she says.
They is one weird haggis (is that the gender neutral term for hag?).
I look at people like Judith Butler and her followers and I realize why zombie movies are so popular these days.
Can anyone translate that quote into English? I am reminded of Orwell’s comment about some similar gibberish, which
although I’m not sure the last part applies to Ms Butler’s nonsense.
Professor Butler gets a mention in my heroic couplet satire, The Wokeiad by Richard Craven:-
Now neither washing claws nor wiping arce,
Wokeness takes wing and flies South business class.
Where Berkeley’s Judith Butler plies her trade,
Her torch of idiocy casts its shade: 90
Gender performativity’s her thing,
A stinkpot full of greasy ink which stings.
Let Logos wither now, deprived of light,
And all of Oakland bathe in blackest night.
Watch Butler tie up Sense in tangled rope
Of subclause pendant from embedded scope,
See Preposition yawn over chiasma’s void,
Neologism coined, curdling, and cloyed,
See Sentence butterflied upon the wheel,
And Meaning, drained, in agony congeal, 100
Poor Commonsense, imprisoned and ignored,
Naive Intelligence, traduced and bored.
The smiler with the knife under the woke,
Who patronises ordinary folk,
The sugared pill, the blandness and bromide,
The utter b0110cks never once defied.
Who are the self-described neoliberals?
I only ever see it used as a pejorative.
Maybe it’s like TERF – a term that these lunatics use to abuse normal people?
But it’s Mary Harrington who is using the term here. And she’s attacking Judith butler. Is Mary the lunatic and Judith the normal?
If Butler’s normal then without noticing it I have died and gone to Hell.
Yes, you’re right! I think I need to sleep more 🙂
The definition is “ Neoliberalism is contemporarily used to refer to market-oriented reform policies such as “eliminating price controls, deregulating capital markets, lowering trade barriers” and reducing, especially through privatization and austerity, state influence in the economy.”. In economics this is sometimes called neo-classical.
Neo-liberal means free enterprise fundamentalist or extreme individualist.
No wonder those who belong to those categories don’t wish to be identified as the lunatics they are.
It’s a difficult term to describe because we’re living it. I would describe it as superficially pro free market, but rather than being confined to the profit-making private sector this commercial drive permeates all levels of the public sector too through managerialism and performance targets. Outwardly driven by efficiency and continual improvement, ultimately it produces a layer of highly-salaried directors and managers that cream off the labor of those actually doing all the serious work. Sensing that people are clueing on to their agenda, the managerial class has appropriated left-wing rhetoric to obscure their actions and to morally browbeat those who stand up to them. This is why we are now in a distorted scenario where those who propagate totalitarian ideology are accusing those who stand up to them as ‘f*scists’ or ‘domestic terrorists’.
It’s a clever system and one that’s designed to keep us locked in.
Thanks all for your replies.
So , who publicly calls themself “neo-liberal” , using that exact term?
Or is it just something that’s decided for them by others ?
Surely Judith Butler is just a hologram produced by Private Eye’s Pseuds Corner? Surely laughter is the only sane respose to her blatherings?