AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.

book that somehow marries the idea of performativity (in the trendy gender studies sense) and biology. The "all the way down" means that one thinks of the agency of various biological subsystems (organs, cells, genes) not so much as selfish (in the Dawkins sense) but as selfing, performing themselves into being.

Sounds a bit like autopoiesis (I thought Free Agents was also rediscovering Varela)

Yeah. Is there a real me? The same kind of vertigo we get like looking at like Judy Garland and asking like, is there even a real person there to get to? Or is she just like an empty shell made up of these flickering images? That becomes a question that we ask ourselves. Something that has always puzzled me is the great popular. success of Judith Butler's idea of the performative self. Of course, Judith Butler didn't invent this concept, but you know, that idea that in very ordinary things like going to a restaurant with your friends, you're playing a certain role. Now, Butler and other critical theorists of that generation were promulgating this idea because they hated the idea of a centered self and they wanted to explode. (around 1:01 mark)

performativity

25 May 2024 - 27 May 2024

Judith Butler’s Concept of Performativity – Literary Theory and Criticism, nor the more boring linguistics concept.

Refusing fixities, Butler sees gender as provisional, shifting, contingent and performed. This view also rejects essentialisms and stable identities and meanings, while also eschewing notions of authenticity, authority, universality and objectivity.

I am honestly not sure what this trendy academic concept means. That gender is performative, at least in part, seems blindingly obvious and I'm not sure why you want to make a thing of it. That everything is performative is something Erving Goffman and others theorized long ago, what is new.

I find academic postmodernism so exasperating. Yes the foundations have been undermined, it is time to build in the rubble.

To claim that all gender is like drag, or is drag, is to suggest that ‘imitation’ is at the heart of the *heterosexual *project and its gender binarism, that drag is not a secondary imitation that presupposes a prior and original gender, but that hegemonic heterosexuality is itself a constant and repeated effort to imitate its own idealizations.

OK, that strikes me as deeply subversive, and I mean that as a complement. We are all doing drag, not so much enacting gender as satirizing it. None more so than a clueless cis-het-male like me who slaves under some received notion of masculinity. OTOH, we know that part of manliness is imitation, that fact underlies the whole phenomenon of the hero, the role model, the person we strive to be like. imprimers in Minsky technical terms.

What does it mean for the agency of a subject to presuppose its own subordination? Is the act of presupposing the same as the act of reinstating, or is there a discontinuity between the power presupposed and the power reinstated? Consider that in the very act by which the subject reproduces the conditions of its own subordination, the subject exemplifies a temporally based vulnerability that belongs to those conditions, specifically, to the exigencies of their renewal.