The Good Citizen

David Batstone, Eduardo Mendieta, David Batstone, Eduardo Mendieta

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135302870
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Philosophy
• Sous-sujet: Philosophy History & Theory

In The Good Citizen, some of the most eminent contemporary thinkers take up the question of the future of American democracy in an age of globalization, growing civic apathy, corporate unaccountability, and purported fragmentation of the American common identity by identity politics.

NINE

Contagious Word:
Paranoia and “Homosexuality”
in the Military

Judith Butler

The question of whether citizenship requires the repression of homosexuality is not new, but the recent efforts to regulate the self-declaration of homosexuality within the military repose this question in a different light. After all, military personnel enjoy some of the rights and obligations of citizenship, but not all of them. The military is thus already a zone of partial citizenship, a domain in which selected features of citizenship are preserved, and others are suspended. Recent efforts of the U.S. military to impose sanctions on homosexual speech have undergone a series of revisions¹ and at the time of this writing, continue to be contested in court. In the first version of these regulations proposed by the Department of Defense, the term “homosexual” was disallowed as part of a self-ascription or self-definition on the part of military personnel. The term itself was not banished, but only its utterance within the context of self-definition. The very regulation in question, must utter the term in order to perform the circumscription of its usage. The occasion for the formulation of this regulation was, of course, one in which the term “homosexual” already proliferated in military, state, and media discourse. Thus, it is apparently not a problem, within the terms of the regulation, to utter the word: As a consequence of the regulation, in fact, it appears that public discourse on homosexuality has dramatically increased. Indeed, the regulations might be held accountable, paradoxically, for the apparent fact that the word has become more speakable rather than less. And yet the proliferation of public sites in which it has become speakable seems directly tied to the proposal to make it unspeakable in the military as a term that might be taken to describe oneself. The regulations propose the term as unspeakable within the context of self-definition, but they still can only do this by repeatedly proposing the term. Thus, the regulations bring the term into public discourse, rhetorically enunciating the term, performing the circumscription by which — and through which — the term becomes speakable. But the regulations insist as well that there are conditions under which the term is not to be insisted on at all, that is, in the service of self-definition. The regulation must conjure one who defines him or herself as a homosexual in order to make plain that no such self-definition is permissible within the military.

The regulation of the term is thus no simple act of censorship or silencing; on the contrary, the regulation redoubles the term it seeks to constrain, and can only effect this constraint through this paradoxical redoubling. The term not only appears in the regulation as that discourse to be regulated, but reappears in the public debate over its fairness and value, specifically as the conjured or imagined act of self-ascription that is explicitly prohibited by the regulation, a prohibition that cannot take place without a conjuring of the very act. We might conclude that the state and the military are merely concerned to retain control over what the term will mean, the conditions under which it may be uttered by a speaking subject, restricting that speaking to precisely and exclusively those subjects who are not described by the term they utter. The term is to remain a term used to describe others, but the term is not to be used by those who might use it for the purposes of self-description; to describe oneself by the term is to be prohibited from its use, except in order to deny or qualify the description. The term “homosexual” thus comes to describe a class of persons who are to remain prohibited from defining themselves; the term is to be attributed always from elsewhere. And this is, in some ways, the very definition of the homosexual that the military and the Congress provide. A homosexual is one whose definition is to be left to others, one who is denied the act of self-definition with respect to his or her sexuality, one whose self-denial is a prerequisite for military service.

What could account for such a strange regulation of homosexual locution, one that seems bound to redouble the term at the site of its prohibition? How do we understand this simultaneous production and restriction of the term? What is it about the speaking of the term in the context of self-description that seems more threatening to military morale than the tacit operation of the sexual practice itself?

The military suspends certain rights for its own personnel that are accorded to civilians, but that very suspension offers an opportunity to interrogate what is perhaps most uneasily anchored in, and most easily jettisoned from, the zone of citizenship. In this sense, one might consider gays in the military as overlapping with other retractable zones of citizenship: recent immigration law and the suspended zone of citizenship for immigrants, the various degrees of suspension accorded to different immigrant statuses, not only legal and illegal, but degrees of legality as well. Such comparisons might well be considered in relation to Giorgio Agamben's recent thesis that the state itself has become a protracted “state of emergency,” one in which the claims of citizenship are more or less permanently suspended.²

The revisions of the policy on gay speech in the military make clear how rights based on the First amendment, privacy claims, or the Equal Protection Clause have been systematically suspended. Whereas Clinton proposed that homosexuals ought only to be excluded from military service to the extent that they engaged in conduct, and not on the basis of their “status,” it became clear in subsequent clarifications of the policy that stating that one is a homosexual, that is, making reference to one's status is reasonably construed as homosexual conduct itself. In the Department of Defense Policy, statements are themselves conduct: according to the more recent Congressional Statute, statements present evidence of a homosexual “propensity” that poses an unacceptable risk for the military.

It seems clear, as Janet Halley has shown, that arguments that seek to restrict the prosecution of homosexuality to either status or conduct are bound to produce ambiguities that threaten the coherence of either legal basis. In the most recent version of the policy, Halley argues, the question of whether a reasonable person would surmise that another person has a “propensity” to engage in homosexual conduct constitutes the standard by which interrogations proceed. Halley rightly points out that the “reasonable person” is, in this instance, the one who embodies homophobic cultural norms. I would add that this reasonable person is also pervasively paranoid, externalizing a homosexuality that “endangers” the reasonable person from within. It is no longer the case that a statement making reference to one's homosexuality is sufficient to infer the “propensity” to engage in homosexuality: There may be other “signs” — affiliations, gestures, nuances, all of which equally point in the same direction. The “propensity” clause appears to ascribe a natural teleology to homosexual status, whereby we are asked to understand such status as always almost culminating in an act. And yet, this “propensity,” though attributed to homosexual status as its natural inclination to express itself, is attributed by the “reasonable” person, and thus remains a figment of the homophobic imaginary.

Although the military now suspects all kinds of signs as indices of “propensity,” I will be concentrating on the view of explicit gay self-declaration that the military seeks to prevent, and which it takes to be equivalent to homosexual conduct itself.

The act by which the Department of Defense seeks to circumscribe this act of speech is one that depends on a fabrication of the speech act to be constrained, one in which the fabrication already begins to perform the work of constraint.

In the recent military regulations on homosexual conduct, homosexual self-definition is explicitly construed as contagious and offensive conduct. The words, “I am a homosexual,” do not merely describe; they are figured as performing what they describe, not only in the sense that they constitute the speaker as a homosexual, but that they constitute the speech as homosexual conduct. In what follows, I hope to show that the regulation describes as performative the self-ascription of homosexuality, doing precisely that which it says. In describing the power of such acts of utterance, the regulations produce such utterances for us, exercising a performativity that remains the tacit and enabling condition for the delineation of “I am a homosexual” as a performative utterance. Only within that regulatory discourse is the performative power of homosexual self-ascription performatively produced. In this sense, the regulations conjure the spectre of a performative homosexual utterance — an utterance that does the deed — that it seeks to censor, engaging in a circularity of fabrication and censorship that will be specified as paranoid.

If, however, the military can be said to produce a paranoid construal of homosexual utterance as contagious and offensive action, as performing or constituting that to which such utterances refer, how is this attributed performativity to be distinguished from the kind of performativity that is explicitly owned by the movement to authorize greater homosexual publicity, the clear aim of queer politics? According to this latter movement, coming out and acting out are part of the cultural and political meaning of what it is to be homosexual; speaking one's desire, the public display of desire, is essential to the desire itself, the desire cannot be sustained without such speaking and display, and the discursive practice of homosexuality is indissociable from homosexuality itself.

Toward the end of this chapter, I will return to this issue, if only to pose the question of whether homosexuality is not the kind of term that constantly threatens — or promises — to become its own referent, that is, to constitute the very sexuality to which it refers. I hope to suggest that the term cannot fully or exhaustively perform its referent, that no term can, and that “it's a good thing, too.” The political benefits to be derived from this incommensurability between performativity and referentiality have to do with setting limits on authoritative constructions of homosexuality and keeping the signifiers of “homosexuality,” “gayness,” or “queerness,” as well as a host of related terms, alive for a future linguistic life. Over and against the commonly stated worry that if homosexuality has no referent, there can be no effective gay and lesbian politics, I would suggest that the absence of a final referent for the term keeps the term from ever being quite as performative as the military imagines that it is. The term gestures toward a referent it cannot capture. Moreover, that lack of capture constitutes the linguistic possibility of a radical democratic contestation, one that opens the term to future rearticulations.³

In what sense are the military regulations symptomatic of a paranoia that forms the possibility of military citizenship? The specific performativity attributed to homosexual utterance is not simply that the utterance performs the sexuality of which it speaks, but that it transmits sexuality through speech: The utterance is figured as a site of contagion, a figure that precipitates a return to Freud's Totem and Taboo in which the speaking of prohibited names becomes the occasion for an uncontrollable communication. Through recourse to Freud's view of conscience, in which the repression of male homosexuality becomes the prerequisite for constituting manhood, the analysis of the military regulations can be read as producing a notion of the “man” as a self-denying homosexual. Against a psychological reductionism that might locate military acts as acts of individual psyches, I propose to turn to psychoanalysis as a way of reading the text of a highly symptomatic regulation of military citizenship.⁴

Psychoanalysis not only sheds theoretical light on the tensions between homosexuality and citizenship, but psychoanalytic discourse is itself a textual allegory for how the production of the citizen takes place through the rejection and transmutation of an always imagined homosexuality. Indeed, I hope to show that the peculiar form of imagining against oneself which is paranoia constitutes homosexuality not only as a form of inversion, but as the exemplary model for the action of conscience, the turning against oneself that involves the inversion and idealization of the sexual aim. In this sense, Freud's text proves to be as much diagnosis as symptom, and though I propose to read his text psychoanalytically (and, hence, not merely as the enunciation of psychoanalytic practice), I will also be proposing a way to read psychoanalysis allegorically.⁵ What this means, more simply, is that Freud will appear to tell us a story about how citizenship and social feeling emerge from the sublimation of homosexuality, but his discourse will be, in the course of this narration, implicated in the very sublimation it describes.⁶

To understand the act of homosexual self-definition as an offense, it seems reasonable to ask, what set of relations or bonds are potentially offended or threatened by such an utterance? It makes sense to turn to Freud's text, “On the Mechanism of Paranoia,” in which he links the suppression of homosexual drives to the production of social feeling. At the end of that essay, he remarks that “homosexual drives” help to constitute “the social instincts, thus contributing an erotic factor to friendship and comradeship, to esprit de corps and to the love of mankind in general.”(31) And at the close of the essay “On Narcissism,” he might be read as specifying the logic whereby this production of social feeling takes place. The “ego-ideal,” he writes, has a social side:

It is also the common ideal of a family, a class or a nation. It not only binds the narcissistic libido, but also a considerable amount of the person's homosexual libido, which in this way becomes turned back into the ego. The dissatisfaction due to the non-fulfillment of the ideal liberates homosexual libido, which is transformed into sense of guilt (dread of the community).(81)

This transformation of homosexuality into guilt and, therefore, into the basis of social feeling, takes place when the fear of parental punishment becomes generalized as the dread of losing the love of fellow men. Paranoia is the way in which that love is consistently reimagined as always almost withdrawn, and it is, paradoxically, the fear of losing that love that motivates the sublimation or introversion of homosexuality. Indeed, this sublimation is not quite as instrumental as it may sound, for it is not that one disavows homosexuality in order to gain the love of fellow men, but that it is precisely a certain homosexuality that can be achieved and contained only through and as this disavowal.

In Freud's discussion of the formation of conscience in Civilization and its Discontents, the very prohibition against homosexuality that conscience is said to enact or articulate is precisely what founds and constitutes conscience itself as a psychic phenomenon. The prohibition against the desire is the desire as it turns back upon itself, and this turning back upon itself becomes the very inception of what is later called “conscience.” Hence, what the noun form of “conscience” suggests as a psychic entity, is nothing other than an habituated reflexive activity, the turning back upon oneself, a routing of desire against desire, such that the prohibition becomes the site and satisfaction of desire. That repeated practice of introversion constitutes the misnomer of “conscience” as a mental faculty.

The restrictions on homosexual self-definition suggest that the very circuit of self-prohibition necessary for the production and maintenance of social feeling can no longer be guaranteed by conscience, that conscience is no longer in the service of social regulation. If the military represents a fairly explicit extreme of this regulatory production of homoerotic sociality, it seems that this circuit by which homosexuality is enjoined to turn back on itself again and again has failed to close. This paradox was articulated perhaps most obviously in the claim that social cohesion in the military requires the prohibition on homosexuality, where that cohesion was then described as a magical je ne sais quoi that kept military men glued together. The formulation might read: we must not have our homosexuality in order to have our homosexuality: please take it / don't take it away from us.

The prohibition that seeks to restrict the outbreak of homosexuality from within this circle of collective introversion figures the very word as a contagious substance, a dangerous fluid. Contagion will be important here, as I will try to show, for homosexuality will be figured implicitly on the model of AIDS, and will be said to “communicate” along the lines of a disease.

The text is overtly one which seeks to regulate homosexual behavior, but as regulatory, it is also incessantly productive. What is conjured in this text is a kind of homosexuality that acts through the magical efficacy of words: to declare that one is a homosexual becomes, within the terms of this law, not merely the representation of conduct, offensive conduct, but offensive conduct itself.

Sexual orientation will not be a bar to service unless manifested by homosexual conduct. The military will discharge members who engage in homosexual conduct, which is defined as a homosexual act, a statement that the member is homosexual or bisexual, or a marriage or attempted marriage to someone of the same gender.⁷

The statement begins by making a distinction between orientation and conduct, restricting the military to discharging only those who engage in homosexual conduct. But then homosexual conduct is defined through a set of appositions which, rather than delimit the barriers of ...