October 25 LT Readings

The October 25 readings were thought-provoking as they discussed the power of language to shape our assumptions and ways of thinking about culture and identity.  Culler details how literary utterance and specifically “performative” language can bring into being characters and their actions and also bring into being the ideas it deploys.  Literature can be an act of speaking things into existence and although this can support the idea of man or woman as a creator, Culler contends that the performative act “breaks the link between meaning and the intention of the speaker” because the act one performs with words is “determined” by social convention. (p. 97) Culler cites Derrida’s view that performatives only work if they are socially recognized and repeatable (iterable) phrases such as “I do” or “I promise.”  Judith Butler then applies the performative act of language to gender, asserting that even gender is created by acts, that one “becomes a man or a woman by repeated acts that depend on social convention.”  Both Culler and Barry discuss the implications of using the performative concept as a model or “stake” for thinking about social processes, such as the nature of identity and how it is formed, particularly sexual identity.  Barry quotes the Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader’s claim that “lesbian/gay studies does for sex and sexuality what women’s studies does for gender” by making sexual orientation “a fundamental category of analysis and understanding.”  Ironically, Barry ties the understanding of identity within lesbian/gay studies with that of postmodernism, a view that identity is “a constant switching … of roles and positions,”  and he points out that such “anti-essentialism” undermines the foundation on which “identity politics” depends, that is, discrimination based on gender, race, or sexual orientation. (p. 140)

I found Nealon’s and Giroux’s discussion of ideology interesting. They begin their chapter by stating “Ideology is a tough thing to get at” because it is the study of ideas which are immaterial in nature, a study which attempts to show “the way things are” and to create a general social agreement or consensus about meaning and purpose.  They describe ideologies as “stakes of ideas” engaged in the production of knowledge in the fields of science (the physical world,) philosophy (the metaphysical world,) politics (the social world,) and religion (the supernatural world.)  The authors argue that a society’s ideology or “common sense … can’t be examined or challenged or rearranged,” but, on the contrary, it seems to me that each successive generation engages in an active discourse which challenges its older generation’s scientific, philosophical, political, and religious ideologies, and then attempts to retain that which it considers valuable and correct or discard that which it deems no longer credible.  I do think the authors’ question asking “What unarticulated premises stand behind our knowledge?” is a good one, and I believe that one of the most important services literature performs in society is that it prompts readers to examine commonly-held ideas too often unexamined and taken for granted in their individual and social lives.