Bourdieu offers a promising account of the way in which non-intentional and
non-deliberate incorporation of norms takes place. What Bourdieu fails to
understand, however, is how what is bodily in speech resists and confounds
the very norms by which it is regulated. Moreover, he offers an account of
the performativity of political discourse that neglects the tacit performativity
of bodily ‘speech’, the performativity of the habitus. His conservative account
of the speech act presumes that the conventions that will authorise the
performative are already in place, thus failing to account for the Derridean
‘break’ with context that utterances perform. His view fails to consider the
crisis in convention that speaking the unspeakable produces, the insurrec-
tionary ‘force’ of censored speech as it emerges into official discourse and
opens the performative to an unpredictable future.
(Butler 199 7 : 1 4 2)In other words, for Derrida,
the force of the performative is derived precisely from its decontextualisation,
from its break with a prior context and its capacity to assume new contexts.
Indeed, he argues that a performative, to the extent that it is conventional,
must be repeated in order to work. And this repetition presupposes that the
formula itself continues to work in successive contexts, that it is bound to no
context in particular, even as, I would add, it is always found in some context
or another. The ‘illimitability’ of context simply means that any delineation
of a context that one might perform is itself subject to a further consideration,
and that contexts are not given in unitary forms. This does not mean, and
never meant, that one should cease any effort to delineate a context; it means
only that any such delineation is subject to a potentially infinite revision.
(Butler 199 7 : 1 47 )Derrida, in other words, fixes his attention on the utterance that will persist apart
from social contexts – and all consideration of semantics – according to the same
logic as written models. Thus:
Derrida’s account tends to accentuate the relative autonomy of the structural
operation of the sign, identifying the ‘force’ of the performative as a structural
feature of any sign that must breed with its prior contexts in order to sustain
its iterability as a sign. The force of the performance is thus not inherited from
prior usage but issues forth precisely from its break with any and all prior
usage. That break, that force of rupture, is the force of the performative,
beyond all question of truth or meaning.
(Butler 199 7 : 1 4 8)But Butler is clearly as unhappy with this structural account as she is with
Bourdieu’s contextual account. For
130 Part II