Judith Butler and Organization Theory

Melissa Tyler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781351673822
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

2020 will mark thirty years since the first publication of Judith Butler's ground-breaking book, Gender Trouble. Here, and in subsequent work, Butler argues that gender and other forms of identity can best be understood as performative acts. These acts are what bring our subjectivities into existence, enabling us to be recognized as viable employable social beings, worthy of rights, responsibilities and respect. The three decades since the publication of Gender Trouble have witnessed Butler become one of the most widely cited and controversial figures in contemporary feminist thinking. While it is only in her most recent work that Butler has engaged directly with themes such as work and organization, her writing has profound implications for thinking, and acting, on the relationship between power, recognition and organization. Whilst her ideas have made important in-roads into work, organization and gender studies that are discussed here, there is considerable scope to explore further avenues that her concepts and theories open up. These inroads and avenues are the focus of this book.

Judith Butler and Organization Theory makes a substantial contribution to the analysis of gender, work and organization. It not only covers central issues in Butler's work, it also offers a close reading of the complexities and nuances in her thought. It does so by 'reading' Butler as a theorist of organization, whose work resonates with scholars, practitioners and activists concerned to understand and engage with organizational life, organization and organizing. Drawing from a range of illustrative examples, the book examines key texts or 'moments' in the development of Butler's writing to date, positing her as a thinker concerned to understand and address the ways in which our most basic desire for recognition comes to be organized within the context of contemporary labour markets and workplaces. It examines insights from Butler's work, and the philosophical ideas she draws on, considering the impact of these on work, organization and management studies thus far; it also explores some of the many ways in which her thinking might be mobilized in future, considering what scope there is for a non-violent ethics of organization, and for a (re)assembling of the relationship between vulnerability and resistance within and through organizational politics.

1 Making Trouble

Organizational Performativity and Parody

Introduction

Because I am a strong Black woman, people always assume that I am angry. It makes me so angry.

Butler’s writing on performativity and undoing is developed across a number of her ‘core’ texts (1988, 1990/2000a, 1993, 2004a, 2004b, 2005), in particular, Gender Trouble (1990) and its anniversary edition (2000a). It is the latter for which Butler is best known, and which remains her most widely cited publication to date. It is in Gender Trouble that Butler connects, in a very formative way, her phenomenological account of gender acts (Butler, 1988) to her Hegelian preoccupation with the dialectics of recognition (Butler, 1987). I say ‘formative’ because it is in this way that Butler sets out the ontological starting point for her subsequent work, namely her theory of performativity as a gendered organization of the desire for recognition. This theory rests on a radical questioning of the idea that intelligible (i.e. coherent and continuous) subjectivity is a pre-social and self-evident given, a presumption that denies both the complexities of social life as it is lived and experienced, and the on-going struggles for recognition on which subjectivity depends. The main target of Butler’s critique is the ways in which heteronormativity organizes the relationship between sex, gender and desire, but her insights have much wider resonance and relevance beyond this thematic focus. Kirby (2006: 20, original emphasis) notes that underpinning Butler’s performative ontology is her aim ‘to acknowledge the complex forces that render any identity inherently unstable’, but more than this, she does so in order to show how within this inherent instability lies the capacity to do things differently, a conviction that connects her theoretical commitment to performativity to her political interest in parody (Butler, 1990/2000a, 1993), and more recently, to her faith in the political capacity of assembly, vulnerability and resistance (Butler, 2015a, 2016; Butler and Athanasiou, 2013).

To put it simply, ‘gender performativity’ describes Butler’s (2000a: xv) view that ‘gender is manufactured through a sustained set of acts, posited through the gendered stylization of the body’. While Butler’s focus (at least in her earliest expositions of this performative ontology) is largely on gender, performativity is a way of thinking about subject formation that has much wider applicability, particularly for understanding the complexities of organizational life. It is an idea that is indebted to various strands of critical theory, phenomenology, poststructuralism and existentialism; in Butler’s hands, these strands are woven together into something distinctive that transcends intellectual boundaries and at the same time interweaves them.

De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex is particularly vital to her performative theory of gender. For Butler, her theory would have been impossible without two important insights in this work that underpin Gender Trouble. First, De Beauvoir’s ontological emphasis on gendering as a dynamic, corporeal process summed up in the book’s most oft-quoted line: ‘One is not born, but rather, becomes a woman’ (De Beauvoir, 2011: 293),¹ and second, her insistence on understanding this process as embedded within a dialectic of recognition, not as one in which two opposing subjects encounter one another but through which two hierarchically ordered beings engage in a perpetual struggle within which maintenance of the abject status of one is the condition on which the subjective status of the other depends. In De Beauvoir’s own words, ‘she determines and differentiates herself in relation to man, and he does not in relation to her; she is the inessential in front of the essential. He is the Subject; he is the Absolute. She is the Other’ (De Beauvoir, 2011: 6), reducing the other to a perpetual state of alterity. As do so many other aspects of her writing, this issue takes Butler straight to the heart of the question of agency and its relationship to subjectivity (a separation that is crucial to her critique). It is not that those who are Othered lack agency; it is that they lack the capacity to exercise it as the latter is paradoxically both a condition for, and dependent upon, being accorded recognition. Agency is to be found precisely at the junctures where matrices of power are open to ‘resignification, redeployment, subversive citation from within, and interruption and inadvertent convergences with other such networks’ (Butler, 1995b: 135). Picking up where De Beauvoir left off, it is to the question of how one becomes a woman both as a ‘variable cultural accomplishment’ (Butler, 2000a: 142) yet at the same time ‘always under a cultural compulsion’ (Butler, 2000a: 12) that Butler turns, as she asks: ‘How does one “become” a gender? What is the moment or mechanism of gender construction?’ (Butler, 2000a: 143–4, emphasis added).

Drawing on both Hegel and De Beauvoir to respond to this question, Butler suggests that agency should be thought of as a capacity that exists within, and which is both contained and compelled by, the desire for recognition as a dialectical endeavour. Her theory of gender performativity illustrates this; as Lloyd (2007: 40) sums it up, for Butler, ‘gender norms are culturally conditioned, but in the process of appropriating those norms, space is generated for their transformation’. In becoming gendered through ‘a series of acts which are renewed, revised, and consolidated through time’ (Butler, 1988: 523), and we might argue, in spaces and settings such as the labour market or workplace, Butler brings to the fore the performative labour involved in sustaining modes of agency, and ways of becoming, that have the potential to elicit recognition. Indeed, Butler (1995b: 136, emphasis added) hints at this herself when she notes that ‘gender performativity involves the difficult labour of deriving agency from the very power regimes which constitute us, and which we oppose’. In contemporary organizational contexts, in which practices reaffirming unequal gender relations and regimes outnumber and outweigh, or unreflexively undermine, those that oppose them, this remains a considerable, ‘labour intensive’ challenge (Fotaki and Harding, 2017; Ortlieb and Sieben, 2019).

The performative ontology underpinning Butler’s work can be discerned most clearly in her widely cited conviction that gender is ‘a corporeal style, an act as it were, that is both intentional and performative, where “performative” suggests a dramatic and contingent construction of meaning’ (Butler, 2000a: 177). Arguing that ‘this repetition is not performed by a subject’ but rather ‘is what enables a subject’ (Butler, 1993: 95), Butler emphasizes that subject positions are continually evoked through stylized acts of repetition, through mundane acts of gesture and inflection that, if performed in accordance with the social norms governing the conferral of recognition, result in the attribution of viable subjectivity. Butler is very clear that her use of the term ‘performative’ is derived from Austin’s (1955) How to Do Things with Words, read through Derrida’s (1979) ‘Signature, Event, Context’ in Limited, Inc (see Introduction), when she emphasizes that ‘a performative act is one which brings into being or enacts that which it names’ (Butler, 1995b: 134). She clarifies that the force or efficacy of the performative act derives from its capacity to draw on (to cite) and re-encode the historicity of particular conventions in a present act, but the same can also be said of the settings in which performative acts are undertaken, including (but clearly not limited to) organizational contexts. Again, this slightly blurs her attempt to differentiate between a linguistic and theatrical meaning of performativity,² but it is important, especially for those who draw on her work in organization studies, to grasp the extent to which because performativity does not necessarily take place ‘on stage’, it also does not occur in a social vacuum. As Austin (1955) emphasized, performative acts can be ‘infelicitous’; saying ‘I do’ does not have any performative capacity if the people saying it aren’t legally allowed to marry or are unlikely to be recognized as a married couple. To be effective, performative utterances need to be intelligible within the social contexts in which they are enacted and made meaningful. Butler makes this very clear when she says that performative acts are constitutive of social realities

Not because they reflect the power of an individual’s will or intention, but because they draw upon and reengage conventions which have gained their power precisely through a sedimented iterability.

(Butler, 1995b: 134, original emphasis)

To reiterate, this conceptualizes subjectivity as an act of ‘doing’ but, crucially, ‘not a doing by a subject who might be said to pre-exist the deed’ (Butler, 1990: 33). In other words, Butler argues against a notion of the subject as the originator of action, in favour of understanding how the doer (or ‘subject’) is the outcome of a process of recognition rather than the basis of it, so that ‘the doing itself is everything’ (Butler, 1990: 25). This bifurcation of agency and subjectivity has led Butler to be accused of reducing the subject to a discursive effect, disavowing the capacity of the subject to exist beyond discourse (see Benhabib, 1995a, 1995b and Butler, 1993 and Introduction).³ However, this bifurcation is crucial to understanding how, for Butler, subjectivity is effectively the outcome of a process of social organization through which certain performative acts come to be recognized as viable subject positions, while others are disavowed. As she puts it,

The subject ought to be designated as a linguistic category, a placeholder, a structure in formation. Individuals come to occupy the site of the subject (the subject simultaneously emerges as a ‘site’) and they enjoy intelligibility only to the extent that they are, as it were, first established in language. The subject is the linguistic occasion for the individual to achieve and reproduce intelligibility, the linguistic condition of its existence and agency. No individual becomes a subject without first becoming subjected.

(Butler, 1997b: 10–11, emphasis added)

This opening chapter examines Butler’s performative ontology of gender, initially through a discussion of her 1988 paper ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution’, and then through a focus on her most widely cited book Gender Trouble (Butler, 1990/2000a), arguably Butler’s most ground-breaking and influential work to date, albeit one that, for a range of reasons, might now be considered to be outdated (see Fischer, 2016). The focus in the second part of the chapter is on the implications of Butler’s performative ontology, and her critique of the conditions shaping the conferment or denial of recognition, for understanding organizational life.

For Butler, gender performativity and its materialization in the form of ‘bodies that matter’ (see Chapter 2) are driven largely by the desire for recognition of ourselves as viable, intelligible subjects. In other words, underpinning our performance of gender is the desire to project a coherent identity, one that is recognized and valorized by others, but one that in Butler’s terms produces its coherence at the cost of its own complexity (see Chapter 3). This way of thinking about gender resonates with performative ontologies of organization based on an understanding of the latter as a process rather than a fixed entity. It also highlights the ways in which performativity is a process of organization, or rather an organizing process, through which certain ways of being are compelled, while others are constrained.

In Gender Trouble, Butler emphasizes how the recitation of particular gender norms (and not others) is necessary in order to be accorded recognition as culturally intelligible, or viable. Signification is particularly important in this respect, as a process connecting the terms, or signs, of intelligibility and their repetition through social practice, as what we might think of as an organizing process. In gender terms, performances recognized as successful are those that conform to heteronormativity, which Butler (2000a: 185) describes as ‘rigid codes of hierarchical binarisms’. The matrices of intelligibility that govern social and, as discussed later, organizational life can therefore be understood as compelling and constraining gender as a ‘performative accomplishment’ (Butler, 2000a: 179). In her early work, Butler uses the term ‘heterosexual matrix’ to make conceptual sense of what she describes as ‘a self-supporting signifying economy that wields power in the marking off of what can and cannot be thought within the terms of cultural intelligibility’ (Butler, 2000a: 99–100). This means that organizing schemas such as the heterosexual matrix enable certain subjectivities—those that conform to normative expectations—to come into being, at the same time as foreclosing or disavowing others. In other words, intelligible subjects are configured ‘as a consequence of recognition according to prevailing social norms’ (Butler, 2004a: 3) that, in gender terms, are binary and hierarchical. The widespread practice of surgically ‘correcting’ intersex bodies is but one illustration of this.⁴

Although Butler has moved away from the term in her more recent work, the links between performativity, parody and the heterosexual matrix have been particularly influential in work and organization studies (Borgerson, 2005; de Souza et al., 2016; Ford and Harding, 2011; Hancock and Tyler, 2007; Harding, 2003, 2013; Harding et al., 2013; Hodgson, 2005; Kelan, 2009; Kenny, 2009, 2010; Parker, 2002; Thanem and Wallenberg, 2016; Tyler and Cohen, 2010; Wickert and Schaefer, 2014). To date, however, drawing as she does (particularly in her early work) on Foucault and Derrida, Butler has tended to be read predominantly as a poststructuralist thinker⁵ to the extent that other important influences in her writing derived particularly from phenomenology, psychoanalytic thinking and critical theory have been relatively retired.

Performative Acts and Gender Constitution

In one of her earliest papers articulating her theory of gender performativity, subtitled ‘Phenomenology and Feminist Theory’, Butler (1988: 519, original emphasis) explores the relationship between feminist theory and phenomenology, developing a theory of gender ‘acts’ which seeks to explain ‘the mundane way in which social agents constitute social reality through language, gesture, and all manner of symbolic social signs’. She argues that

Gender is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceed; rather, it is an identity tenuously constituted in time—an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts. Further, gender is instituted through the stylization of the body and, hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and enactments of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self.

(Butler, 1988: 519, emphasis added)

Significant in her analysis is that

if gender is instituted through acts which are internally discontinuous, then the appearance of substance is precisely that, a constructed identity, a performative accomplishment which the mundane social audience, including the actors themselves, come to believe and to perform in the mode of belief.

(Butler, 1988: 520, original emphasis)

In contrast to her later work on social justice and transformation (see Chapters 5 and 6), Butler’s analysis here emphasizes alteration not of the wider context of gender performance, or of the compulsion to perform in a particular way, but rather of the performance itself:

if the ground of gender identity is the stylized repetition of acts through time, and not a seemingly seamless identity, then the possibilities of gender transformation are to be found in the arbitrary relation between such acts, in the possibility of a different sort of repeating, in the breaking or subversive repetition of that style.

(Butler, 1988: 520, emphasis added)

Through this conception of gender acts, her analysis emphasizes the ways in which reified and naturalized conceptions of gender might be understood as constructed and hence as capable of being constituted differently—a theme she develops in her...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Making Trouble: Organizational Performativity and Parody
• 2 The Organizational ‘Matter’ of Bodies at Work
• 3 Un/Doing Organization—Coherence at the Cost of Complexity
• 4 Accounting for/in Organization: Giving and Working an Account of One’s Self
• 5 Organized Dispossession: The Organizational Politics of Precarity
• 6 Organizational (re)Assemblage: Towards a Plural Performativity
• Postscript
• References
• Index