Improvisation within a Scene of Constraint

AN INTERVIEW WITH JUDITH BUTLER

Tracy McMullen

As a cultural theorist and a scholar in the growing field of critical improvisation studies, I am often preoccupied with the following question: "What exactly is improvisation?" I ask this not only in relation to musical performance but, as a student of Judith Butler and other theorists of identity, in terms of the subject and "everyday life." As George Lewis has remarked, the practice of improvisation in everyday life is ubiquitous. Moment to moment we are faced with choices. Events occur and we must respond to them: from operating a vehicle, to answering a student's question, to responding to a stranger's anger erupting in our vicinity — in our moment-to-moment existence we have few formal and explicit rules to follow; rather, we acquire a "feel for the game" (Bourdieu 1993, 189). There are formal traffic laws, but no universal law on how to avoid a specific accident; we prepare for our lectures, but we must decide on the best answer to any student's question based on our perception of his or her understanding and the rest of the listening students; every day we must negotiate with other people in a variety of emotional states. In Butler's terms, this "game" we get a feel for is the "scene of constraint" (2004, 1). That is, there are certain rules about our identities. If there weren't, we would never have the feeling we were breaking them. How a black man or an Asian woman responds to anger may be informed by different "games" based on the race- and sex-based rules they have subtly intuited in culture, but as Butler argues, there is a modicum of freedom within our scene of constraint. Within that game, within those structures, improvisation occurs. However, it is difficult to articulate just what that improvisation is. At least in my view, to understand this space would be to unlock the secret of how the subject can undo itself and access human freedom. But this is my thinking and certainly not how Butler would put it. I wanted to better understand how this important theorist thinks about improvisation.

In her ground-breaking book Gender Trouble (2008), cultural theorist Judith Butler articulates how gender identity is performatively constructed. She writes, "there is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very 'expressions' that are said to be its results" (34). Influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche's assertion that the "doer" is a fiction that arises and coheres around the "doing," as well as Louis Althusser's explication of ideology as "hailing" the subject into being, and Austin's linguistic analysis of "performatives" (words that accomplish things, like the pronouncement that christens a ship), Butler argues that "the subject is retroactively, performatively 'hailed' into gender in much the same way that Austin's ship is named and Althusser's 'man on the street' assumes his subject-position in response to the policeman's call" (Salih 2004, 6–7). The subject, therefore, is brought into being in and through the other (and not just in terms of gender). The subject is produced in the doing of language, law, gender, race, culture. This is its condition of possibility. The subject may appear to be an independently operating entity, but this is only the outcome, the "subject-effect," of myriad and complex cultural operations that, in short, could be described as the "law."

Even so, all is not lost for the subject. Influenced by Jacques Derrida, Butler conceives of the operation of the law as linguistic and therefore endlessly open to citation and even misfire. Furthermore, subjects do not always answer back to their hailing in ways that perfectly repeat cultural norms. As Sarah Salih writes, Butler finds "potential for agency in the subject's response to an interpellative call that 'regularly misses its mark,' while elsewhere [she] insists that there are any number of ways in which the subject may 'turn around' in response to the call of the law" (2004, 10). Within this condition of possibility for the subject, then, there is space for productive misunderstanding, misinterpretation, misrecognition, and even conscious reinterpretation. Butler's emphasis is less on trying to reinterpret and more on allowing for the possibility of not knowing. To the extent that the subject can recognize his or her own incompletion, contingency, and co-arising with the other, she or he can remain open to the productive nature of discourse, allowing new meanings to continually emerge. Indeed, the solidification of rules and norms institutes the violence of identity boundaries. Butler is therefore committed to an ethics of "unknowingness" and is conscientiously nonprescriptive. She urges us "to [know] unknowingness at the core of what we know, and what we need" (2004, 39). Because decisions are made in a "lived moment" and are not the perfect enactment of rules, theoretical or otherwise, she steers away from prescribing specific steps to move toward a more livable world for all subjects. This, in particular, is where her thinking dovetails with work on improvisation.

Although the term improvisation is not prevalent in Butler's work, her emphasis on "unknowingness," openness (incompletion), and responsiveness to the "lived moment" aligns her work with recent discussions on ethics and improvisation. Furthermore, the term appears several times in Undoing Gender where she describes gender as an "improvisation within a scene of constraint" (2004, 1). Because Butler specifically uses the idea of improvisation here, I wanted to query her on its role in her thinking, and I begin the interview with a reference to this title. I was hoping to get answers to the following types of questions: How does improvisation accord (or not) with theories of performativity and the subject? Does the subject do improvisation? Or is the subject done by improvisation, much like it is done by gender? Or is it something in between? If improvisation designates a "relative domain of freedom" for the subject "in a rule-bound world," as Butler states in the interview, what is this domain? Is there a way to expand it? Where is the point where the rules end and improvisation takes over? While I think it would be a mistake to attempt to pin down what improvisation is, I do believe we need to take a closer look at how this "relative domain of freedom" is constituted.

In my efforts to query Butler on this space, she replied in ways I have heard from her before: that we cannot imagine the subject to be able to simply "step out of the rules." If the subject is constituted through the field of the Other, there is no subject who can work from outside of this system to dismantle it. There is some leeway, however, in that the law is also carried out through the subject. The subject embodies and repeats the law — but this repetition is not mechanical or completely predictable. The law is not perfectly repeated through the subject. In this sense, paradox is the subject's condition of possibility. The subject is constituted in and through the law, but it also does the law. It is being done and it is doing. The subject's agency, however, is too often confused with the liberal humanist individual who can pull herself up by her bootstraps and transcend every social structure as if she resides outside of it. This view does not take into account the ways the subject is disciplined for exceeding norms or the subject's own necessary perpetuation of these norms in order to be intelligible within the social field.

Nonetheless, I believe it is imperative to examine this space more closely. One way I tried to ask about this space was in relation to how "newness" enters the system — how is it, more precisely, that the law is not repeated exactly? For Butler, it is generally in the imperfect way we reproduce the law through repetition. The law is like language in that it cannot perfectly convey its message (there is always some gap between meaning and representation) and its mode of operation, reuse, opens it up to new meanings. To me, the concept of misfire in particular suggests a random error like the imperfect replication of a genetic characteristic as described by Charles Darwin. I wonder if there is something more that can be said in addition to the inadequacy of language to predictably "hit its mark." Can the subject do something to help along a result different than the repetition of the law? Here Butler's and my contrasting perspectives on the predictability of the law and the repetition of discursive regimes become evident. Butler underscores the unpredictability involved in reproducing discursive regimes, whereas I envision this repetition as highly predictable. For Butler, this unpredictability is the opportunity for difference and newness to enter the system. My view is that the law can be understood as a habit that will reproduce itself quite predictably (I do not argue that it is completely predictable) because it offers a sense of security. Therefore, some effort is needed to do the unpredictable thing, an effort that is akin to some practices of improvisation. Butler and I were in agreement that improvisation can be understood as a space of "allowing," a type of openness that acknowledges an unknowingness — a refusal to cohere into a decision. I believe this space offers the moment of unpredictability within the law that constrains us. I would argue, however, that recognizing openness and unknowingness is something that needs to be practiced again and again. It involves some effort on the part of the subject, and it shifts the focus from the inability of the other (law, language) to adequately convey its message toward a focus on how the subject (self) encounters everyday experience. Butler is leery of words like effort because she wants to avoid facile arguments about the freedom of the subject. I agree. Let us not be facile, but let us also investigate.

Judith Butler graciously accepted my invitation to do an interview and I am grateful for her time and thoughtfulness. Although we only had the opportunity for a short discussion, Butler ended it by saying, "Well, this is a beginning." I certainly hope so. As it turned out, our interview took place in the immediate wake of the killing of Osama bin Laden by U.S. Navy Seals in Abbottabad, Pakistan. As our interview came to a close, I asked her if she could comment on this event in light of our discussion.

May 2, 2011 Berkeley, California

TRACY MCMULLEN: I am intrigued by a certain musicality in your book Undoing Gender and the way you use the term improvisation in relation to gender identity. For example, the book begins with a chapter entitled "Acting in Concert," which I found to be a very musical metaphor. In that chapter you describe gender as an "improvisation within a scene of constraint," and later in the book you discuss a little boy "improvising" with putting on girls' clothes. You actually highlight and italicize improvisation as a way to understand his behavior.

JUDITH BUTLER: Yes.

TM: When you speak about "improvisation within a scene of constraint" then, do you see a difference between what could be called "performance" and what could be called "improvisation"?

JB: Well, yes. Let's take performance: Performance has many different valences. We talk about people's work performance, we talk about "high-performance technology," for example, and performance studies has introduced an idea of performance that is both theatrical, in part, but also a part of everyday experience or involving modes of actions or presenting in the world that don't require a proscenium stage. If we are going to work with this latter idea of performance, then a number of questions emerge. For instance, is the human subject or the human body always performing? Is it defined by the fact that it is performing? I want to say that can't be the case if we understand performance as always active or always a question of doing something. There are domains of passivity, modes of not doing or undoing or doing nothing or being done to that clearly do not form part of a traditional idea of performance. I think that in my work I try to underscore the ways we are acted on by norms, by conventions, by prior practices, by cultural forces, that we don't choose and never chose, and that it's in relationship to being acted on in certain ways that we ourselves act. So for me the idea of performance always has to be understood in light of what acts on us. We're not just active, we're also acted on, and it's that doubleness that constitutes the scene of our acting.

Now improvisation strikes me as a very specific kind of practice because while it involves to a certain extent what it says — namely, improvisation — it also involves a certain relationship to rule-bound behavior. We wouldn't understand improvisation if there were no rules. In other words, improvisation has to either relax the rules, break the rules, operate outside the rules, bend the rules — it exists in relation to rules, even if not in a conformist or obedient relation. And this opens up the question of what leeway we have for acting in a rule-bound world. So to say, for instance, that gender rules or laws or norms precede us and act on us is not to say that we're determined in advance, that we must replicate them faithfully. And when we do replicate them, or even though we do situate ourselves in relation to those norms, rules, and practices, there is sometimes a possibility of a kind of free play — an improvisational moment. Perhaps that happens when we follow the wrong rule or we use a particular resource that's available that was not supposed to be available to us. Like the boy uses the ribbon to dance with and actually the ribbon was meant for his sister but it was still there in the room and at the moment in which he felt the need to dance he saw that ribbon or perhaps the ribbon instigated in him the desire to dance and he took it up. It's a prop that becomes a resource for a certain kind of improvisation. So for me improvisation designates a relative domain of freedom in a rule-bound world.

TM: So I often saw, and I'm wondering if you have any more to say on this, a connection — and you brought it up right now — of improvisation and play.

JB: Yes.

TM: Could you say a little more about play? You speak about the subject improvising within a scene of constraint and the subject coming into being, basically, through ideology as its condition of possibility. But there are times when you speak about the things that are in excess of subjectivity; the things that are in excess of identity. Sometimes you put it in terms of "psychic excess," sometimes you put it in terms of sexuality — spaces that are going to exceed any type of category. I'm wondering if there is a relationship there between play and the space of improvisation, that something is breaking out or not completely colonized by the realm of the Symbolic? Do you see any connection there?

JB: I guess I want to resist your question.

TM: OK, please.

JB: I say this because I feel that too often my account of gender performativity has been reduced to an idea of play that I don't really like, and that I think tends to imply that experimentation with gender norms is easier than it actually is. I mean, people who experiment or "play" in the wrong time and place can be subject to incarceration or pathologization or other forms of violence, so I don't know about play. I know that play is a very important category in the history of aesthetics. Kant makes aesthetics into a question of the play of understanding. Play is also important to [Donald] Winnicott, in his analysis of child psychology and the question of how we form attachments. Play seems crucial to that whole process. So I do not mean to demean or dismiss the concept. But I'm afraid that it takes us too quickly away from the scene of constraint, and for that reason it wouldn't be a word that I would choose.