Episode 13 - Performativity
Transcript
00:07
Ellie: Hi, I'm Ellie Anderson,
00:09
David: And I'm David Pena-Guzman.
00:10
Welcome to Overthink.
00:12
Ellie: The podcast where two friends
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David: who who are also professors
00:16
Ellie: put philosophy in dialogue with the everyday.
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David: Because big ideas are within everyone's reach.
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Ellie: David, one thing I've noticed a lot lately is that everybody
00:34
is talking about performativity.
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I heard this a lot this summer with the term performative allyship, which I take
00:43
it, as basically the idea that a lot of people are trying to act like allies,
00:47
say to the Black community in the wake of the BLM protest last summer, but they're
00:52
not really doing so in an authentic way.
00:55
Have you noticed this?
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David: Well, there was also that moment when the term was also used
01:00
a lot in social media to talk about performative environmentalism, when we
01:05
were having that debate about or not we should be buying and using straws.
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Ellie: Oh my God, do I remember?
01:13
As somebody who lives in LA, this was
01:16
everywhere
01:16
David: Yes.
01:17
Yes And then there were all these startups that started selling these metal straws
01:21
that would be like on your key chain or a hidden in your pen so you could
01:25
like, "Oh don't mind me, I'm just popping my metal straw out of my pocket."
01:31
Ellie: Honestly, I think those are pretty cool.
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David: Well, but the point is that a lot of people notice a level of hypocrisy in
01:38
the discourse of those who were calling for a ban on straws, because as they
01:43
were calling for a reduction in the consumption of straws, they didn't mind
01:47
ordering takeout with like, you know, a thousand plastic boxes, et cetera.
01:50
Ellie: Oh my God.
01:51
David: And so people were saying, "This is a kind of performative
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environmentalism that doesn't actually get at the root of the problem and
02:00
doesn't actually offer solutions."
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So it's a kind of virtue signaling.
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Ellie: I have to put myself on blast there because I order takeout a lot.
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Granted, it's a pandemic now, and so it's, you know, I'm ordering a
02:09
lot more takeout than I ordinarily would, but also with the straw thing,
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I didn't own any straws prior to the straw debacle a couple of years ago.
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And then what did I do?
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I bought metal straws.
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And so I went from having no straws to metal straws, which is
02:23
technically not more environmental because it just consumed something
02:27
that I hadn't consumed before.
02:29
I'm adding to my footprint.
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David: Yeah.
02:31
It's such a millennial thing to buy
02:34
the latest trend,
02:35
even when you didn't buy into the previous trend that it's replacing.
02:38
Ellie: Yes.
02:39
And so I think performative environmentalism, as a term, is
02:42
naming something, just as performative allyship, as a term, is naming something.
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But I have to say, as a philosopher, these terms bug me.
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I think they are actually just wrong because the term performative comes out
02:59
of the discipline of philosophy and it doesn't mean what people think it means.
03:04
It doesn't mean artificial.
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David: I just imagine you like following social media, being
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like, "Oh yeah, for sure."
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But secretly boiling at the fact that you this term is being misused and
03:14
holding it back, trying not to seem like that person who's just going
03:17
to the philosophy-splain the term.
03:21
Ellie: Well, there are ways that language is always in process, and I don't want
03:25
to say that those in power determine the meanings of words, but at the same
03:30
time, words do have given meanings and performative has a particular meaning
03:36
that I think we want to hold onto.
03:37
So for instance, I've heard the term optical allyship being used as an
03:42
alternative to performative allyship.
03:44
And I really like that term, because I think that is getting at the way
03:47
that a lot of supposed allies in the cause of racial justice or feminism
03:52
are just doing so for the optics.
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That's designating the artificiality, but performativity doesn't mean that.
03:58
David: Well, my partner, who is an ophthalmologist, is like sitting in the
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background being like optics does not mean that, optics means something else.
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Ellie: Oh, my God.
04:08
Okay, touche.
04:09
I'll take that up with
04:11
David: But you're pointing to something that I also relate to, which is that when
04:15
certain terms that have very clear and very specific philosophical meaning, or
04:20
philosophical baggage, attached to them used in a way that is not attuned to
04:25
that meaning or to that baggage, we have difficulty jumping on board because we
04:30
only see them as application of the term.
04:32
Ellie: Exactly.
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And I think this is especially a problem with the concept of performativity,
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because that concept is central to philosophy of gender, to philosophy of
04:41
race, and to a number of elements of philosophy that are really trying to get
04:46
at the oppressive oppressive structures in society, and so it's not just a
04:49
debate about philosophical terminology.
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It's a debate about what we mean by terms, which I do think is important,
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but it's also a political debate on top of that, and a debate about the
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efficacy of terms we have in our arsenal for resisting oppression.
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David: Yeah.
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And not to mention the philosophy of language, where the term comes from.
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And so maybe we can agree on a basic difference between
05:12
performance the more philosophically technical term performativity.
05:24
Ellie: Today, we're talking about performativity.
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What does this concept mean?
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David: Where does it come from?
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Ellie: And what can it tell us about things like pornography,
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hate speech, and gender.
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David: Let us discuss this subject imminently.
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Ellie: I am going to stop the recording now.
05:44
David: Oh, no.
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But really, let's find out.
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Ellie: David, what is performativity and where does it come from?
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David: The concept of performativity is often traced to the writings of
05:58
the English philosopher of language J.
06:00
L.
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Austin, who wrote a book entitled How to Do Things with Words,
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which came out in the 1960s.
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And in this book, he rejects the idea, which was quite popular at the time
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amongst professional philosophers of language, like himself, the
06:15
sole function of language truth.
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most philosophers, uh, at the time, really believed that the only thing that
06:24
was interesting about language, the only thing that was worth talking about from
06:27
a philosophical standpoint, is that it allows us to piece together, or to string
06:33
together, words and concepts sentences that are, as philosophers of language like
06:38
to say, truth apt, is to say, sentences that capture states of affairs in the
06:45
world and that are either true or false.
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Ellie: Something like Sacramento is the capital of California.
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David: Yeah, just basic, descriptive statements that essentially
06:55
deliver a little kernel of truth.
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And Austin says, "No, actually that's not the most interesting part of language,
07:02
because words are not just for speaking truth or for conveying truth value.
07:08
There's a lot more that you can do with words."
07:13
Ellie: Enter the performative.
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Austin distinguishes different types of speech acts.
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So basically, things we say, and he says that there's a particular kind of
07:23
speech act called a performative, which actually brings about a state of affairs.
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This is in contrast with most of the things we say, which
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would be called constatives.
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A constative names an existing state of affairs, so the idea
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that Sacramento is the capital of California, but a performative
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actually brings about a new reality.
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David: This bringing forth captures the force of language, according to
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Austin, especially that force that other philosophers of language have not yet,
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or had not yet in the 1960s, understood.
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For example, when somebody says, "I do," at the altar, in the context of a marriage
08:06
ceremony, says, in the act of saying those two words, they're not just describing
08:12
something, they're not referring to an external reality, they're actually doing
08:15
something, something that is going to change their legal status, their political
08:20
status, suddenly they are married.
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so the speech act performative precisely in that it brings about a new reality.
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He also uses the example of betting.
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Ellie, if I tell you, " I bet you $10 that I can jump higher than you," in the
08:38
act of saying those words, I've already enacted the act of betting, right.
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I've already made the bet.
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So it's not as if talked about the bet and then later it became a reality, it
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became a reality through my speech act.
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Ellie: And so the magic of the performative is that, in uttering it,
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you are actually bringing a reality into being, but lest you think that
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this means that you can go around saying all sorts of things that are
09:08
bringing new realities into being, unfortunately, that's not the case.
09:13
Performatives only work in particular contexts.
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And so if I say, "I do," at a marriage ceremony, that's the appropriate
09:21
context for that utterance to work as a performative, but if I'm just
09:25
hanging out here in my closet, recording a podcast, and I say,
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"I do," I'm not suddenly married.
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That was not a successful performative.
09:35
David: She went to Jared!
09:38
Ellie: In addition into the appropriate context, the person
09:42
who says a performative has to have the right authority.
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So for instance, if I say, "I now pronounce you husband and wife," to
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use the old heteronormative terms, I need to have the authority of
09:57
actually being what, like a minister or something, in order for that to work.
10:01
It is a failed performative if I just go to a wedding and, as a
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guest, yell that from the audience.
10:08
David: Yeah.
10:09
In connection to this example about pronouncing people, X, Y, or Z, or
10:13
Christianing someone, uh, one of the most-
10:16
Ellie: Christening!
10:17
Christianing?!.
10:19
David: Same thing.
10:19
It's christening somebody under a Christian ritual.
10:23
Ellie: Oh yeah, I guess?
10:23
is that where the term comes from?
10:25
David: It's a baptism.
10:26
Maybe, I don't know,
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That was just-
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Ellie: We should not say things on the podcast that are just like, I don't know,
10:30
and leave it to our listeners to find out.
10:33
We're authorities here.
10:34
David: But they're adorable when they are the effects- when
10:37
they're the effects of my ESL
10:38
status, they can stay.
10:40
One of the examples that Austin writes about at length, and that gets cited very
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frequently in the philosophy of language, is the example of a captain who goes to a
10:51
new ship then takes a glass of champagne and breaks it the stern and then says, "I
10:59
hearby name this ship Queen Elizabeth."
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that performative to be a successful performative, well, the person
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has to be an actual Admiral or a captain, otherwise it's a failed
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performative, the point being that it gives birth to a new entity.
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In this case, Queen Elizabeth, the ship.
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Ellie: And one last feature of performatives to mention in this
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context is that they have to be in the present, active, and indicative voice.
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So for instance, the ship's captain isn't saying, "I named this ship queen Elizabeth
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yesterday, and now I'm just telling you."
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That's a constative, not a performative, so it's present and it's active, right?
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He's saying, "I name this," or, "I do."
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"I now pronounce you man and wife."
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This concept of performative speech acts has been very important because it
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broadens our understanding of language beyond just the truth-and-falsity
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distinction and shows us how language actually acts on the world rather
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than just describing the world.
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David: so if we wanted to use a metaphor, we can say that lot of philosophers
12:02
of language think of language as a mirror that reflects truth, but Austin
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thinks it's a hammer with which you do things, and so the question is,
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what can we do with this hammer?
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Ellie: Thanks for bearing with us as we talked about performativity
12:38
in the technical sense, in the philosophy of language.
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Now, let's think about how performativity is used in different contexts, which are
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frankly pretty fascinating and juicy.
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So one way that it's been used is in law.
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The notion of the performative has been used to distinguish between what's covered
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and not covered by the First Amendment.
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For instance, if I yell, "Fire!"
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in a crowded room, it's not covered by the First Amendment because yelling
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"Fire" in the particular context of a room full of people has performative effects.
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It's going to cause people to run out of the room, to scream, have
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their adrenaline shoot up, et cetera.
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David: And at stake here is the perennial question among law scholars
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which forms of speech really are simply free speech that can base a
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viewpoint about the world, and which forms of speech actually produce Harm.
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So for example, the feminist theorist Rae Langton has used the Austinian
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framework of performatives talk about what is wrong with pornography,
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especially pornography that depicts uh, patriarchal images of women.
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Ellie: So most of it.
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David: Uh, yeah, so like 99.9% of it.
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Um, and she says the argument that people make to defend this kind of
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porn is that, again, it's free speech.
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It simply expresses a worldview on the part of the director.
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But, according to Langton, one of the things that people miss
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pornography when they talk about it, especially in the context of whether
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or not it's covered under the First Amendment, is that people tend to
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interpret pornography as a constative,
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Ellie: Yeah.
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David: and not as a performative.
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Ellie: Or even as fictional, right?
14:22
David: Pornography achieves certain effects beyond what it represents.
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it might tell a specific story, but the things that it does as an institution,
14:33
as a social practice, go way beyond that because it has performative force.
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She develops this argument by pointing out one of the things that we
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expect of language that our speech acts have their intended effects.
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So for example, Ellie, if you and I are going for a walk then I say
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to you, "Stop, I don't want to keep walking," I expect you to stop, right?
14:57
That's a very reasonable, basic assumption about social normativity
15:02
in connection to language: that words have meaning, and that that meaning
15:06
will be respected by our interlocutors.
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Ellie: Unless I'm just like an asshole.
15:10
I'm like, "David, not stopping for you!"
15:11
David: Yes.
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Unless you're an asshole or, as we will see, unless the frame of reference for
15:17
the meaning of terms has socially shifted, which is one of the performative effects
15:23
of pornography, according to Langton.
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Ellie: Explain that to me a little bit.
15:27
Super interesting, but I'm not sure I get it.
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David: It has to do with the ways in which pornography rewires men's
15:34
desire, or rather, conditions men's desire to reflect the desire that
15:40
pornography itself represents.
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And so, when you think about what you see in pornography, what is it?
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Well, it's typically like bosses and secretaries, teachers and students,
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all these roles that have a very clear dominance dynamic, And in which the
15:54
subordinate's nos never really mean, no.
15:59
In fact,
16:00
are.
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kind of yeses, you know, they are invitations for further activity.
16:07
Ellie: AKA assaults.
16:08
David: Exactly.
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The problem is that pornography the meaning of the word no to mean yes.
16:16
Ellie: Yeah, it's like eroticized.
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David: Yes, and so when you live in a culture that is knee-deep in the most
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misogynistic forms of pornography, men internalize the discursive
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worldview of the pornography they consume, and when they interact with
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women, speech acts of women lose their normal performative force.
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In a pornographic culture, the woman says no, the man hears yes.
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Ellie: And I think this is interesting because it strikes me that there's a
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deviation from Austin's original use of the term performativity because
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something like "yes" or "no," or "stop," wouldn't be considered performative
17:00
under a traditional Austinian framework.
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But I think the broader point here that Langton is getting at, and deriving
17:07
from Austin, is precisely this idea that language doesn't just describe
17:11
reality, but it has these effects.
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It has effects on bodies.
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It has effects on imaginations.
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It has effects on our wills.
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And here we see that the concept of performativity is really felicitous,
17:22
to use one of Austin's favorite words, for describing things that go
17:26
beyond specific speech acts, right.
17:29
David: And so, I think it goes beyond in the sense that it's no longer merely about
17:35
in the traditional sense of utterances.
17:37
Here, we're talking about visual representations and
17:40
Ellie: Yeah.
17:41
David: about sexuality and desire, um, and you know, a pizza man showing up and
17:45
you not having enough change, et cetera.
17:48
Ellie: Yeah.
17:48
That's, that's the, that's the porn narrative that you're choosing to-
17:52
David: Well, I mean, that is like the porn archetype, right, like the pizza man.
17:56
Ellie: The pizza man and not having enough change?!
17:58
David: Uh, yes, and then you have to pay them somehow.
18:00
Ellie: Oh, okay.
18:01
I miss I must've missed that one.
18:02
David: Uh, and they don't have change.
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So, pornography does have all these other effects.
18:08
And so make a mistake when we interpret it merely a viewpoint.
18:14
It's, again, it's hammer that allows people to do things.
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And the feminist philosopher Rebecca Kukla has also used this framework to talk about
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many other ways in which, in general, utterances under conditions of patriarchy
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have less performative force than men's.
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Ellie: Yes, there are so many possible directions when can take
18:34
this in, and one that comes to mind here is discussions of hate speech.
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So we talked about the First Amendment earlier and how some things are
18:41
protected by it and others aren't.
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Critical race theorists have used the conception of performativity to make
18:48
sense of why hate speech shouldn't be protected by the First Amendment.
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Law professor at NYU Jeremy Waldron argues in his book The Harm in Hate Speech that
18:58
hate speech is largely performative in exactly the sense that Austin means.
19:03
So for instance, when somebody expresses animosity towards a group by
19:06
playing on stereotypes, that doesn't just lead to a form of exclusion,
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it is a form of exclusion itself.
19:16
David: Well, and I think for anyone who has been subjected to a racist term
19:22
or a pejorative or an insult, there is that sting that comes with it that
19:28
traditional philosophies of language before Austin's intervention just
19:33
couldn't make sense of, because they would say, "Oh, well, language just
19:37
either expresses a truth or it doesn't."
19:39
And so it misses some of the most important dimensions of our linguistic
19:44
interactions with one another.
19:46
Ellie: And what's so interesting too, about what you're describing, David, and
19:49
the discussions around hate speech is that they also show us that performatives
19:53
don't just have effects on us as subjects.
19:56
Performatives ultimately reveal to us the way that language has effects
20:00
not only on ourselves, but also on the social world, on other people.
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David: And so far we've talked about people who lift this Austinian conceptual
20:08
framework to talk about different forms of speech or representation, whether
20:12
that'd be hate speech or pornography.
20:15
Ellie: Like the pizza guy.
20:17
David: Yes.
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But the queer theorist Judith Butler makes the argument that the Austinian notion of
20:23
performative should be taken all the way to our sense of identity and our behavior.
20:29
Who we are and what we do is performative.
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Ellie: And I love this and I'm so excited to talk about it.
20:44
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21:01
So when you hear performativity today, you're most likely to hear it in context
21:06
where people are talking about gender, and this is thanks to Judith Butler who became
21:10
famous for the term following the 1990 publication of her book Gender Trouble.
21:16
Butler uses performativity within the context of gender in order to
21:20
say that gender is not something you are or something you have,
21:25
but rather something you do.
21:27
For Butler, gender performativity means that gender is enacted.
21:33
It's enacted through repeated movements and bodily styles in the world.
21:37
It's not a core attribute of the person from birth.
21:41
So gender is a doing and a becoming.
21:44
And one thing that's really interesting here is that she's taking the
21:47
Austinian notion of the performative, but she's really emphasizing the way
21:51
that performativity, in its strongest sense, happens over time, through
21:57
repetition, through habit formation, and through our very embodiment.
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David: Famously she develops this argument about our becoming over time
22:07
through iteration, largely through her reading of the writings of Simone de
22:11
Beauvoir, the French existentialist.
22:13
Ellie: Who's famous for saying, "One is not born, but becomes a woman."
22:16
David: And also the German philosopher Hegel, who believed that there
22:19
is no inherent or intrinsic human nature; rather, uh, we are constantly
22:25
changing and developing over time.
22:29
drawing from these thinkers, she lands on the position that
22:32
gender is socially constructed.
22:35
Ellie: Yeah, one is not born, but becomes a woman because you have
22:40
to develop certain attributes of femininity over time, and be recognized
22:44
as a woman within a social context, in order to count as a woman.
22:47
And Butler, Beauvoir, and Hegel all share this idea that the human
22:52
is a historical idea and human attributes are also historical ideas.
22:58
So gender and even sex are not intrinsic natural categories, but they
23:03
are socially constructed over time.
23:05
And this doesn't mean that they're fictional.
23:07
It doesn't mean that gender isn't real, but it does mean that it has historical
23:11
origins rather than natural ones.
23:15
David: And the way we talk about this is to say that
23:16
gender is socially constructed.
23:19
And in thinking about the meaning of the thesis of social constructionism, that
23:23
lies at the root of Butler's approach to gender, is the concept of mimesis,
23:28
which means repetition or mimicry.
23:31
And according to this concept, we perform gender largely by observing the behaviors
23:36
of those around us and repeating those behaviors that are coded in particular
23:42
ways when attached to particular bodies.
23:45
And so we start learning social scripts about how to talk, how to
23:49
behave, how to move and hold our bodies, in order to be read as having
23:54
a specific sex and a specific gender.
23:57
Often when she writes about gender, she draws comparisons to the theatrical.
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It captures the fact that when we are beginning to learn the scripts, we
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sometimes are not very good at it.
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And so we either overshoot or undershoot performance.
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So it takes time learn the role.
24:17
Think about a 12 year old boy, right, like hitting puberty Yeah.
24:23
He starts walking in a ridiculously exaggerated, masculine way,
24:29
projecting more masculinity than they can possibly convey.
24:33
Um, you know, you see there the performance, but the performance
24:36
that is not quite right.
24:38
And so these performances of sex and gender are something that we
24:41
have to be broken into over time.
24:45
Ellie: And this hits pretty close to home for me because I was obsessed with
24:48
the movie Legally Blonde when I was 13 years old, and I literally copied
24:54
Elle Woods' is walk from that movie in my developing feminine persona.
25:00
Ell(i)e Woods: I'm able to recall hundreds of important
25:02
details at the drop of the hat.
25:04
Hey Elle, do you know what happened on Days of Our Lives yesterday?
25:08
Why yes, Margo.
25:09
I do.
25:10
Once again, we joined Hope in a search for her identity.
25:12
As you know, she's been brainwashed by the evil Stefano.
25:17
I feel comfortable using legal jargon in everyday life.
25:22
I object!
25:25
Ellie: That movie really appealed to me because it was this apotheosis
25:29
of femininity, but also she was smart and so there was, you
25:32
know, that kind of dimension.
25:33
And I also really want to caution our listeners here in about the theatrical
25:38
as artifice or as performance, because Butler says that even though gender
25:43
performativity is in some ways like a theatrical performance, it's also in other
25:48
ways, very, very different, because a lot of times when people are performing,
25:54
they're still positing a distinction between the actor and the role.
25:58
For Butler, there is no distinction.
26:01
You are your role.
26:02
Performativity means that you are actually bringing about your identity
26:07
in the process of producing it.
26:09
That's what she takes from Austin.
26:10
And so for instance, I'm a former theater kid, as David knows.
26:15
And when I was in high school, I went to an all-girls high school,
26:19
and I'm a cisgender woman, and when I was in high school, I had to play
26:23
a man in one of the school plays.
26:25
And in order to do that, I had to study typically masculine mannerisms.
26:30
And so I learned to sit with my legs spread wide.
26:33
I learned to hunch my shoulders more and kind of bring them up closer to my neck.
26:37
I learned to take up more space, and to hold my face in a different way,
26:41
to smile less, because I was very serious about my acting in high school.
26:47
But when I'm up there on stage, dressed as a man, acting the role of a man, I
26:52
am not doing what Butler calls gender performativity, because I knew the
26:56
whole time I was performing that school play that I was a cisgender woman.
27:00
There was this distinction between me and my character.
27:03
However, when we are talking about performativity in the true sense, we are
27:08
talking about actual repeated actions that are indistinguishable from your identity.
27:14
David: Very important point Ellie, because a number of people misinterpreted
27:18
the publication of Gender Trouble along precisely these lines.
27:21
So a number of people raised the question, "Oh, well, Butler, are
27:24
you saying that that means I can choose my gender and my sex, like
27:28
one day, and change it the next?"
27:29
Ellie: Yep.
27:30
David: As if it's a costume or a prop that you use for an actual theatrical
27:34
performance and Butler says, "No, that's a misunderstanding of what
27:39
mimesis is, of that force of repetition that over time comes to you as second
27:45
nature, and that blurs the line between the actor and the character."
27:50
She published a book later, called Bodies That Matter, where in the introduction
27:55
she begins by clarifying this, where she says, "No, I am not saying that
28:00
you just choose a performance one day willy nilly, and you just discard it the
28:05
next because they are much too rooted in us, in our behavior, in our bodies,
28:10
in our understanding of ourselves to be so easily taken on or taken off."
28:15
Ellie: Precisely.
28:15
And this is part of what bugs me about the terms like performative allyship
28:19
and performative environmentalism that we began with, because there, the term
28:23
performative is used as a synonym for artificial or acted out and that's exactly
28:30
what is not going on in performativity.
28:32
We are are really creating our identities through performative actions, so other
28:38
people recognize me as a woman based on my performative embodiment of femininity.
28:43
David: That's an important point because it puts Butler in direct dialogue with
28:47
Austin, because remember that for Austin, in order for a performative speech act
28:52
like, "I promise," or, "I hearby name this ship Queen Elizabeth," there have
28:57
to be certain conventions in place.
28:59
It has to be the right context, and Butler makes the argument that something
29:03
similar happens in connection to gender, that there are conventions about what
29:08
counts as femininity and masculinity.
29:11
We don't choose them individually; rather, we effectively perform our way into
29:18
preexisting conventions and in the act, bring those about as a lived reality.
29:31
Ellie: One of the domains that Butler thinks is really interesting for
29:34
showing gender performativity and how it goes beyond sheer performance
29:39
or artifice is in drag culture.
29:43
And she talks about the documentary from the 1990s called Paris is
29:47
Burning in particular, which is about black and latinx ball culture
29:50
in New York City in the 1980s.
29:52
She says what you see in these drag performances is the
29:56
performativity of all gender.
29:58
So the drag performers are not just adopting a different gender identity
30:04
for a moment, they are actually saying something really important
30:07
about how all of us, whether you're cis, trans, queer, et cetera,
30:12
are performing gender at all times.
30:14
David: Yeah.
30:14
It's like that saying that some people have as a magnet on their fridge,
30:17
"We're born naked and the rest is drag."
30:18
That's Butler's thesis.
30:23
Ellie: Although for her, we're not even born naked, because I'm already marked MRF
30:26
on my birth certificate before I'm born.
30:29
David: True, but you get the point, that we come into this world, and then
30:33
everything that we do is performative in this stronger and more robust sense.
30:39
And one of the things that Butler finds really interesting also about this
30:43
documentary Paris is Burning, and for our listeners who have not seen it,
30:48
I highly recommend it, I've actually shown it to my students several times.
30:51
Ellie: Yeah.
30:52
I taught it in philosophy of film.
30:53
David: Is that what it highlights, what these drag performances and
30:58
ballroom, uh, displays of theatricality and gender and exuberance, um, show
31:04
us, is also the inherent danger playing with the boundaries of
31:09
accepted scripts about about gender.
31:12
Ellie: Yeah, because she says in this piece, uh, her article about
31:14
Paris of Burning is called "Gender is Burning," that in ball culture, folks
31:20
of different gender identities are performing femininity and Butler talks
31:25
about the way that in doing so, they are citing the dominant norm, right
31:29
through signifiers of femininity, like high heels, makeup, big hair, dresses.
31:35
And for her, there's not something intrinsically subversive in
31:38
citing the dominant norm.
31:40
The simple presence of bodies who are not traditionally designated
31:44
feminine embodying femininity doesn't automatically displace the norm.
31:49
She says that actually, things like ball culture can reinforce the dominant norm
31:54
by reiterating it as the very desire of the subjects who are performing it.
32:00
And so there's a complicated relationship here between embodiment,
32:03
gender identity, and desire.
32:06
David: Yeah.
32:06
And I think the term complicated is exactly right, because another point
32:09
that she makes is that there's an inherent ambiguity, or a danger, in these
32:14
performances, because what you're doing is either reinforcing existing social norms
32:20
about what women look like or what women are, or men, because in the documentary,
32:25
there are also performances of masculinity, but she also makes the claim
32:30
that it can go the other way, and it can be transgressive to the point of putting
32:35
people who engage in those kinds of performances in danger, precisely because
32:40
in signifying accepted modes of femininity and masculinity, they also resignify them.
32:47
So they cite it, but then they tweak it and that tweaking can be
32:51
dangerous from a social standpoint.
32:53
Ellie: And do you mean, you mean it can be dangerous from the
32:55
perspective of the dominant norm?
32:56
It can serve to unsettle the binary between masculinity and femininity
33:00
and it's associated with sex- and its associations with sex and gender?
33:03
David: That's right, but I think, again, the point here is about ambiguity,
33:06
because it can go both ways, right?
33:07
You can end up enforcing the status quo, or you can disrupt it.
33:11
And sometimes there's no way to know until after the fact.
33:14
Ellie: And so we see here that performativity itself is neither
33:16
necessarily conservative nor necessarily disruptive, but has
33:20
this ambivalence attached to it.
33:22
David: Yeah.
33:23
And there are two figures in the film that Butler writes about
33:26
who exemplify this ambivalence.
33:30
One of them is Venus Xtravaganza, who is a 23 year old Puerto Rican trans woman who
33:36
appears in the film, and is interviewed and talks about her life and her desires
33:41
and wanting to get married, and you get the sense that, in many ways, Venus has,
33:46
in fact, internalized this image of being a real woman, being read as such by
33:52
those around her, and living that dream of having a husband who takes care of you,
33:58
and being essentially a stay at home wife.
34:00
Ellie: Yeah.
34:01
Venus Xtravaganza: I would like to be a spoiled with- rich white girl.
34:05
They get what they want, whenever they wanted it.
34:09
They don't have to really struggle with finances, and nice things,
34:14
nice clothes and they don't have to have that as a problem.
34:19
I want to be with the man I love.
34:22
I want a nice home, away from New York.
34:25
I want to get married in church, in white.
34:30
I want to be a complete woman.
34:32
David: And on the other hand, we have a character named Willi Ninja
34:37
who is a black ball performer, and the interesting thing, according
34:40
to Butler, is that both and Willi Ninja are signifying and resignifying
34:47
gender through their performances and their participation in ball culture.
34:51
But the effects of that resignification was not the same for both of them.
34:57
Willi Ninja went on to become a famous dance choreographer and a model.
35:02
He modeled for Jean Paul Gaultier.
35:04
He was, uh, Paris Hilton's dance coach.
35:07
He was a guest- yeah, like he really rose to fame.
35:11
He was a guest on the, on Jimmy Kimmel Live.
35:15
And in general, he became the public facing figure of
35:18
ball culture in the 1990s.
35:22
But on the other hand, Venus Xtravaganza, this 23 year old trans
35:27
woman who, again, is playing with the same boundaries, pushing the same
35:31
buttons about what acceptable social performances of gender are, was found
35:36
murdered in a hotel in New York, um, even before the documentary finished
35:42
recording, before it finished shooting.
35:44
And we don't know what happened, but only theory that we've been left with is that
35:50
she went to a hotel with a man who did not know that she was a trans womanand
35:56
who murdered her upon finding out.
36:00
So Butler's point is that your performance of gender either can uphold
36:07
the status quo or be transgressive.
36:10
And if it's transgressive, you can either be rewarded for it, or you can
36:15
be punished for it, sometimes, you know, the highest form of punishment.
36:20
And you can not know that before the fact.
36:23
And so when you enter into these spaces of transgression, you
36:27
enter into an ambivalent space.
36:29
Ellie: One of the critiques of Butler's theory of performativity, though, is
36:32
that there are different stakes for different people and that different
36:36
people's access to gender performativity that is transgressive is uneven.
36:41
So for instance, I'm going to be read differently as a cisgender
36:45
white woman, and I might have greater access to subversive gender
36:50
performance because of my white privilege than say, a black woman.
36:54
David: Yes, or even a woman performing masculinity is differently read than
37:00
a man performing femininity because of the different values our culture
37:04
attributes to those two ends of the most simplified version of the spectrum.
37:08
Ellie: Absolutely.
37:10
David: We need to pay attention to all these asymmetries.
37:13
Ellie: And I think what we're seeing here is that the concept
37:15
of performativity opens up so many discussions that are complicated,
37:20
and interesting, and politically important about not only gender, but
37:25
also identity and identity production.
37:28
And so there's so much more to say here, which we don't have time for,
37:32
but one thing to just say in closing is that I think it's really important
37:36
to hold on to the complexities of this theory of performativity in
37:40
order to preserve it's richness, whether you agree with it or not.
37:45
And for that reason, I would really caution folks against using
37:49
performativity as a synonym for artificial, optical, or fake.
37:55
David: And one point that I would want to bring up, by way of conclusion, is
37:58
that somebody like Butler in particular, it's not as if there is performance at
38:03
the margins and nature at the center.
38:07
It's not as if these, like, Black and latinx kids in New York in ball
38:11
culture—which was at the time largely underground, now it's much more
38:14
popular, especially when you think about mainstream drag culture—it's not as
38:19
if that's performance, and the rest of us are over here doing the real thing.
38:25
Everybody is performing gender.
38:27
I am, you are, our listeners are.
38:30
And all of those performances are equally performative, in the sense that they
38:36
bring about our identity as gendered subjects, even if the identities that
38:41
they bring into existence not on the same level on the political and social scale.
38:48
Ellie: Yeah.
38:49
All right, now, back to episodes of Pose.
38:51
David: Or the less interesting version of that, RuPaul's Drag Race.
39:01
Ellie: We hope you enjoyed today's episode.
39:04
Please rate and review us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever
39:08
you listen to your podcasts.
39:09
David: You can email us with questions, feedback, or even requests for life
39:13
advice at dearoverthink@gmail.com.
39:17
Ellie: You can also find us on Instagram and Twitter at @overthink_pod.
39:23
We want to thank Anna Koppelman, our production assistant, Samuel P.K.
39:27
Smith for the original music, and Trevor Ames for our logo.
39:31
David: Thanks so much for joining us today.