ONTOLOGY AGAINST PERFORMATIVITY.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Author: Walsh, Mary
• Date: 01 January 1997

Contemporary feminist debates over the meanings of gender lead time and again to a certain sense of trouble, as if the indeterminacy of gender might eventually culminate in the failure of feminism. Perhaps trouble need not carry such a negative valence. To make trouble was, within the reigning discourse of my childhood, something one should never do precisely because that would get one in trouble. The rebellion and its reprimand seemed to get caught up in the same terms, a phenomenon that gave rise to my first critical insight into the subtle ruse of power: The prevailing law threatened one with trouble, even put one in trouble, all to keep one out of trouble. Hence, I concluded that trouble is inevitable and the task, how best to make it, what best way to be in it.(1)

This opening passage of Judith Butler's Gender Trouble alludes to an extremely important point in the context of many contemporary feminists political concerns with ontology and performativity. Butler's point that trouble is inevitable and that the task is how to make the best of it can be used as a point of enquiry into the current status of what is politically at stake by framing the contestations in contemporary feminist critical practices around either position. After all, Butler is not suggesting that the subject be done away with(2) and this is precisely why feminist political theorists need to look closely at what constitutes the performativity challenge to ontology. Ontological understandings of the subject need not be limited to ontology as essence because contemporary feminist political theorists also utilise an understanding of ontology as becoming, an understanding of ontology that is significantly elided because of the contemporary tendency to view all ontological positions as suspiciously essentialist. In recent years much feminist philosophical, political and social theory has been largely preoccupied with questions that pertain to issues surrounding epistemological/ethical concerns. This has largely been at the expense of any arguments from ontology which have been prematurely dismissed for committing theoretical faux-pas that cluster under the rubric of various forms of essentialism. However, ontological arguments are not necessarily always essentialist and the association of essentialism and ontology are based on widely held misconceptions of exactly what is at issue in rethinking identity and difference.

This paper outlines the two `positions' of ontology and performativity based on the work of Grosz/Gatens and Butler respectively. In terms of theoretical orientation, the ontological position is developed and understood to be a form of what I understand as Replying Elsewhere whilst the performativity position is understood as a form of Speaking Otherwise Within. Although I acknowledge that bodies matter, I argue that the question of which bodies matter should remain central to the feminist political theorising agenda if the issue of women's subordination is to be effectively theorised.

Ontology as Replying Elsewhere

In previous work I have identified what I understand to be three distinguishable forms of reply by various orientations of feminist knowledges to mainstream knowledges. These are the approaches that I refer to as Speaking With, Speaking Otherwise Within and Replying Elsewhere.(3) Although there are various ways in which to classify approaches to the mainstream literature, I chose these three demarcations to enable me to assess the tensions within feminist philosophical/political theorising. Briefly, the Speaking With approach can be identified by those feminist theorists who articulate their political positions by using the enunciative term gender as their foundational reference as authoritative feminist speakers. The approach encapsulates a distinctive neglect of an active understanding of the body and the limitations of this approach are best exemplified by Gatens(4) and Grosz.(5)

In the Speaking With approach the mind and body are understood as discrete and separate entities that have a passive role in knowledge acquisition. This approach understands both the mind and body as essentially blank or neutral with political and social inscriptions working actively from the outside in to shape individual consciousness. A further postulation is that the mind controls the body or, put in another way, that consciousness(6) actively shapes the human subject with the body having an auxiliary role in the formation of that consciousness. The concern with gender is intimately linked to the central theoretical focus of equality and difference, where theorists who discuss gender are attempting to present an argument about women's commensurability with men without having to grapple with the complex underlying ontological tensions that such an enterprise would obviously entail.

The second approach, referred to as Speaking Otherwise Within represents a conglomeration of positions that I identify as variations of biological foundationalism because of their tendency to cluster about various biological affectations. The approach has three variations. The first variation refers to understandings of sex as a brute prediscursive anatomical facticity (the sex/gender distinction), the second to sex as directly related to sexuality and sexual practice and the third to reproductive understandings of sex. Although there has been feminist recognition of the theoretical and conceptual shift from a focus on sex/gender to discussion where the term gender only is used, there has not been a corresponding recognition of the complexities surrounding notions of sex. Politically, it is significant that much contemporary feminist political theorising is appearing under the rubric of the term gender. Equally as crucial, but almost completely ignored, are the conceptual and theoretical complexities that attend our notions of sex where `sex', `sexuality' and `sexual difference' are often presented as meaning the same thing. My point is to highlight the way in which usage of these various understandings of sex serve to undercut politically the sexual difference approach I refer to as Replying Elsewhere. Speaking Otherwise Within represents approaches to sexual difference that have closed ontologies and make claims about women which foreclose any possibility of open ended political theorising.

The position I understand as Replying Elsewhere does not juxtapose mind and body. It does not understand the body to be opposed to mind because the subject is not understood as a thing but as a process. This view suggests a notion of subjectivity that is referred to as the corporeal;(7) an understanding of the subject which does not displace the mind because body is not opposed to mind. Mind becomes a displaced term as the approach is not concerned with the body as a flesh entity but rather with how this flesh entity is constructed linguistically, that is, its psychical and physical dimensions. The subject is never simply `fleshy matter' as the subject is mediated through language.(8) The subject is understood to be both historically and culturally located and sexually specific with an ontological understanding of the subject based upon a notion of becoming rather than essence.

The approach that I refer to as Replying Elsewhere offers an exciting alternative to understandings of the gender approach with its implicit notions of women's equality (sameness) with men and the biologically foundationalist understandings of sexual difference (where difference is utilised in ways that work against women). I had initially identified this third approach with the Australian feminist theorists Grosz and...