NOTES TO CHAPTER 1 141body- subject. Performativity is a productive process; it genders the subject and
sexes the body according to pervading norms. It comprises the repetition of
an “act that has already been rehearsed” (Butler 1990, 272). In contrast to the
idea of socialization, however, performativity resists any temporal stratification
or sense of completion. While it is embodied, it is not tied to a developmental
context, nor stratified by age or stage of maturity; instead, gender performativity
requires constant reiteration over time. Butler understands biological matter not
as a static ground of experience, but rather as engaged in a process of material-
ization, one that sediments over time to give the impression of originary stasis.
For Barad, however, Butler’s conceptualization of performativity “ultimately re-
inscribes matter as a passive product of discursive practices rather than an active
agent participating in the very process of materialization” (2007, 151). It is culture
or discourse that creates the script for the body, and it is culture that, in the guise
of nature, gets performed. To be treated as an active agent, the body has to be
recognized in its material specificity. Following insights from quantum physics,
Barad insists that matter is agential; it is always in the process of its own making.
Thus all matter, including biological matter, can be characterized in terms of an
event, a doing, “a congealing of agency” (Barad 2007), or a becoming. How does
biological matter gain its boundaries in relation with the rest of the world? How,
when, and under what conditions does it sediment or congeal? How, when, and
where does matter come to matter?
23 Mani et al. (2013) conducted two experiments to see how poverty might be con-
sidered a circumstance that affects cognitive performance. In the first study they
prompted subjects to think about finances; in those with low ses this impeded
test performance, whereas it had no effect on those with high ses. In one study
they tested a group of farmers before and after harvest. The farmers performed
better on cognitive tests after harvest, when they were presumably less financially
vulnerable, than before. Mani et al. argue that financial stress affects the subject
not merely indirectly through well- known biological markers but also through
cognitive routes: Poverty itself takes up neural resources. “The poor, in this view,
are less capable not because of inherent traits, but because the very context of
poverty imposes load and impedes cognitive capacity. The findings, in other
words, are not about poor people, but about any people who find themselves
poor” (980).
24 This includes Farah, Shera, et al. 2006; Farah, Noble, et al. 2006; Hackman and
Farah 2009; Hackman et al. 2010; Noble et al. 2005.
25 Similarly, Cajal was interested in the prospects of improving the brain through
mental exercise. Because he believed that plasticity closed down in early life, ex-
cept in cases of injury, he wrote, “it is a cultural task of the society to shorten the
time required by the brain cells to reach their perfection” (Berlucci and Butchel
2009, 313).
26 This quote is from William James, “Bergson and Intellectualism,” Lecture VI, in
A Pluralistic Universe, cited in Rubin (2013).