Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (59 page)

As I discussed earlier, Butler's conception of performativity is also at the core of her theory of agency: she claims that the iterable and repetitive char.. acter of the performatives makes the structure of norms vulnerable and unsta.. ble because the reiteration may fail, be resignifi , or be reappropriated for purposes other than the consolidation of norms. This leads Butler to argue: "That no social formation can endure without becoming reinstated, and that every reinstatement puts the
in question at risk suggests the possi.. bility of its undoing is at once the condition of possibility of the structure it·· self" (1997b, 14). In other words, what makes the structure of norms stable the reiterative character of bodily and speech performatives-is also that which makes the structure susceptible to change and resignifi tion.8

Butler's notion of performativity and the labor it enacts in the constitution of the subject may at fi glance
.
seem to be a useful way of analyzing the

mosque participants' emphasis on embodied virtues in the formation of a pi.. ous self. Both views ( the mosque participants' and Butler's) suggest that it is through the repeated performance of virtuous practices (norms in Butler's terms) that the subject's will, desire, intellect, and body come to acquire a par..

6
An important aspect of Butler's formulation of performativity is its relationship to concepts in psychoanalytic theory. On this relationship, see the chapter "Critically Queer" in Butler 1993.

7
See Amy Hollywood's excellent discussion of Butler's analysis of embodied performativity and its relationship to the concept of ritual ( 2002).

8
Wh Butler remains indebted to Derrida in this formulation, she also departs fr m him by placing a stronger emphasis on the historically sedimented quality of performatives. See Butler 1997a, 147-50.

ticular form. The mosque participants' understanding of virtues may be ren.. dered in Butlerian terms in that they regard virtuous performances not so much as manifestations of their will but more as actions that produce the will in its particularity. In this conception, one might say that the pious subject does not precede the performance of normative virtues but is enacted through the performance . Virtuous actions may well be understood as performatives ; they enact that which they name: a virtuous self.

Despite these resonances between Butler's notion of performativity and the mosque participants' understanding of virtuous action, it would be a mistake to assume that the logic of piety practices can be so easily accommodated within Butler's theoretical language. Butler herse lf cautions against such a "technological approach" to theory wherein "the theory is articulated on its self-suffi ency, and then shifts register only for the pedagogical purpose of
n
..

lustrating an already accomplished truth" ( Butler, Laclau, and
Z
izek 2000,

26 ). Such a perfunctory approach to theory is inadequate, Butler argues, be .. cause theoretical formulations often ensue from particular examples and are therefore constitutively stained by that particularity. In order to make a particular theoretical formulation travel across cultural and historical speci.. fi , one needs to rethink the structure of assumptions that underlies a the.. oretical formulation and perform the diffi task of translation and reformu.. lation.9 If we take this insight seriously, then the question we need to ask of Butler's theorization of performativity is: how does a consideration of the mosque participants' understanding of virtuous action make us rethink the la.. bor performativ ity enacts in the constitution of the pious subject?

To address this question, I believe that it is necessary to think through three important dimensions of the articulation of performativity in regard to subject formation: (a) the sequencing of the performatives and their interrelation.. ship; (b) the place of language in the analysis of performativity; and (c) differ.. ent articulations of the notions of "subversion," "change," or "destabilization" across different models of performativity. One of the crucial differences be.. tween Butler's model of the performative and the one implicitly informing the practices of the mosque movement lies in how each performative is related to the ones that follow and precede it. The mode l of ethical formation followed by the mosque participants emphasizes the sedimented and cumulative char..

l)
Butler argues this point eloquently in her recent work: "no assertion of universality takes place apart from a cultural norm, and, given the array of contesting norms that constitute the interna..
tional fi no assertion can be made without at once requiring a cultural translation. Without translation, the very concept of universality cannot cross the linguistic borders it claims, in princi..
ple, to be able to cross. Or we might put it another way: without translation, the only way the as..

sertion of universality can cross a border is through colonial and expansionist logic" (Butler, La.. clau, and
Z
izek
2000, 35).

acter of reiterated performatives, where each performative builds on prior ones, and a carefu calibrated system exists by which differences between re.. iterations are judged in terms of how successfu (or not) the performance has taken root in the body and mind. Thus the mosque participants-no matter how pious they were-e ised great vigilance in scrutinizing themselves to gauge how well ( or poorly) their performances had actually taken root in their dispositions ( as Amal and Nama do in the conversation described earlier in this chapter).

Signifi ntly, the question of the disruption of norms is posed diff rently in the model govern the mosque movement from how it is posed in the model derived from the examples that Butler provides. Not only are the standards by which an action is perceived to have failed or succeeded different, but the practices that
follow
the identifi of an act ( as successful or failed) are also distinct. Consider for example Butler's discussion of drag queens ( in "Gender Is Burn g") who parody dominant heterosexual norms and in so do.. ing expose "the imitative structure by which hegemonic gender is itself pro.. duced and disputes heterosexuality's claim on naturalness and originality" ( Butler 1 993, 125). What is signifi here is that as the drag queen becomes more successful in her approximation of heterosexual norms of femininity, the challenge her performance poses to the stability of these norms also increases. The excellence of her performance, in other words, exposes the vulnerability of heterosexual norms and puts their naturalized stability at risk. For the mosque participants, on the other hand, excellence at piety does not put the structure that govern its normativity at risk but rather consolidates it.

Furthermore, when, in Butler's example, a drag queen's performance fails to approximate the ideal of femininity, Butler reads this failure as a sign ofthe in.. trinsic inability of the performative structure of heteronormativity to realize its own ideals. In contrast, in the model operative among the mosque partici.. pants, a person's failure to enact a virtue successfully is perceived to be the marker of an inadequately formed self, one in which the interiority and exte.. riority of the person are improperly aligned. The recognition of this disjune.. ture in turn requires one to undertake a specifi series of steps -to rectify the situation-steps that build upon the rooted and sedimented character of prior performances of normative virtues. Amal, in the conversation cited above, describes how she followed her initial inability to simulate shyness success.. fully with repeated acts of shyness that in tum produced the cumulative effect of a shy interiority and disposition. Drag queens may also expend a similar kind of eff in order to better approximate dominant feminine norms, but what is different is that they take the disjuncture between what is socially per.. formed and what is biologically attributed as necessary to the very structure of their performance . For the mosque participants, in contrast, the relevant dis..

juncture is that between a religious norm ( or ideal) and its actual perfor.. mance: their actions are aimed at precisely
overcoming
this disj uncture.

One reason these two understandings of performative behavior diff from each other is based in the contrastive conceptions of embodied materiality that underlie them. Butler understands the materiality of the body on the model of language, and analyzes the power of bodily performatives in terms of processes of signifi whose disruptive potential lies in the indeterminate character of signs. In response to those who charge her with practicing a kind of linguistic reductionism, Butler insists that the body is not reducible to dis.. course or speech, since "the relationship between speech and the body is that of a chiasmus. Speech is bodily, but the body exceeds the speech it occasions; and speech remains irreducible to the bodily means of its enunciation" ( But.. ler 1997a, 155-5 6). So how are we to understand this chiasmus? For Butler, the answer lies in formulating a theory of signifi n that is always opera.. tive-whether acknowledged or not-when one tries to speak about this chi.. asmus, because in speaking one renders discursive what is extra.. or nondiscur.. sive ( Butler 1 993 , 11). The discursive terms, in turn, become constitutive of the extra..discursive realms of the body because of the formative power of lan- guage to constitute that which it represents. 10 Butler remains skeptical of ap.. proaches that leave the relationship between discursive and extra.-discursive forms of materiality open and untheorized, and seeks to demonstrate the power of an analysis that foregrounds the signifi aspects of the body. 11