Indo-Europeanization

This is the full text of the presentation I made at the Phantasmic Binds conference on February 26th, 2021


To begin I’d like to thank Thato Magano and Monica Tomas for organizing this conference, Professor Walker for moderating the panel, and Professor Rajan.

Let me state from the outset that the goal of this presentation is to “Indo-Europeanize” Judith Butler’s critique of “Queer Theory”, to place it in a wider intellectual context than she at first perhaps envisioned, and demonstrate through this contextualization the scope and applicability of said critique.

However, while seeking to recontextualize Butler’s works in the face of a wider indo-european philosophical tradition, I’ve also at the same time come in danger of colonizing the very “material” of critique, the complexities of Japanese society and history which have--to use an unfortunately feminizing term--”birthed” the film I will be discussing today, Ghost in the Shell; from here we must tread carefully, and I would appreciate the assistance of anyone who is more knowledgeable on the religious history for help in expanding this project beyond the original scope which I establish here.

Let us begin, initially, with my first critique of Ghost in the Shell, that of an excessive heterosexuality which, in the end, undermines its own premises. From there, I will move on to my secondary critique, that in Butler’s attempt to establish a material political practice, she has actually delimited the very scope of what that practice may entail. Third, I will attempt to establish that this mixture of apparently distinct cultural formations which comprise Ghost in the Shell into a single intelligible unit--the film itself--is actually demonstrative of the wider context in which Butler’s thought exists, and to conclude with what that means in a larger schema for the limits and potential of said thought.

First, to contextualize Ghost in the Shell, and then provide my argument: Ghost in the Shell is a 1995 film directed by Mamorou Oshii, based on the manga by Masamune Shirow. The film is set in a not-so-distant future, where humanity is thoroughly integrated with its technology down to a biological and psychical level; and focuses on Major Kusanagi, an agent of Section 9, a fictional Japanese clandestine governmental organization, who gradually loses confidence in her own sense of self, the film ending with its total dissolution. The film features references to specific Christian texts, and the original author of the Manga has stated in an interview that he also incorporates Buddhist and Shinto themes into his work--the importance and juxtaposition of these influences will be discussed later, for now, I will focus only on the ostensible importance of the film to queer theory, and the “radical potential” it may hold for political critique.

The second scene of the film, after Kusanagi is introduced as a character, shows the entire process of her body being built, manufactured, produced, a scene that makes the one it follows feel odd and inappropriate. Because in the very first scene before it, there is a gaze applied to her body, a gaze with shots that “hang on her [nude] body for far too long”--shots that emphasize the “parts”, the breasts, the legs, the thighs[1], only to immediately after show them being put together. It is in this world, where “gender is so far removed from it’s natural origins”, that our film takes place, and it is this dilemma of her own body as nothing more than a system of commodities, that Kusanagi grapples with throughout the entire film, defining it all the way into the final scene.

In the final scene, and the penultimate one, Kusanagi “mates” with the “puppet master”, an entity derived from the “flow of information itself”, from within the network of technology and communication Kusanagi only participates in as a cyborg, but yet one where she is still “outside” these processes of the network, still maintains an “Ego”. After the mating of a fully in-network entity, the Puppet Master, with one who is still outside of it, Kusanagi, I posit that, in the second movement of queer practice, Kusanagi becomes an agent of the network--in this case, a literal, material network, but when applying Butler’s critique directly, we would say she is an Ego “displaced” from the network of language, and she is able to harness this displacement. Furthermore, by applying Butler’s critique, I have also attempted to “materialize” it, as in, apply these structures of the network to actual, physical structures such as the cables, wires, and semiconductors that make up the technological networks of our own society, in turn describing how such a state could be applied to us, today.

This was the conclusion of the first critique, and leads naturally to the second; that is, a critique of Butler’s argument itself, and the dangers of stating something as material, or even discussing materiality, within the boundaries of language itself, which we cannot escape, but may, as Butler tries, to describe materiality for the purpose of political goals.

If it was not made clear with the conclusion of the first critique, allow me to restate Butler’s position in terms of the “Ego”--or “I”, the language she uses--and then state the terms of her radical political project which follows from the displacement not only of this term, but political rallying points in general. Butler says, in the chapter “Critically Queer” from Bodies that Matter, “Where there is an ‘I’ who utters or speaks and thereby produces an effect in discourse, there is first a discourse which precedes and enables that ‘I’ and forms in language the constraining trajectory of its will. Thus there is no ‘I’ who stands behind discourse...the discursive condition of social recognition precedes and enables the formation of the subject...the ‘I’ is thus a citation of the place of the ‘I’ in speech…” Later on, in the chapter, carrying on an argument in the previous chapter “Arguing with the Real”, she states that this constant “resignification” of political rallying points, as they fail to fully encompass the groups that identify under them, allows for a radical democratic political movement whose possibilities remain open.

My argument is as follows: Butler does not propose agents of action, instead she suggests that one's apparent agency is already bound to its place in a text, and that its only through the inability of a “subject” to fully identify with said place that political movement may be enacted. That is to say, the subject is determined by the text, but the gap between the place of identification and the subject in said text provides the room for its warping or “queering”.

But I would argue it is in fact, in the attempt to ground the text in the material domain, wherein the necessity for a reader, who exists beyond the scope of language--one who is capable of personal interpretive capacity--is instantiated; if not truly materially than symbolically--and it is this symbolic reader, this symbolic material, who exists simply to ensure that the text exists and can be grounded, it is this reader who enacts the very permanence of textuality--the admittance of an “outside” of discourse, a life beyond it, that states, at once, the supreme hegemony of language; for the critique outlines the very scope of the critique, demonstrates the possibility of the gaps and delimits all criticism around them.

A simple example to explain, as I’m aware it bears explanation; to take Zizek’s old joke: A man enters a cafe; after he sits down a waiter approaches and he asks “may I have a coffee, but no cream”, the waiter replies, “I apologize, but we’re out of cream; would you like coffee without milk instead?”

What I mean to demonstrate with this joke is that, when we are discussing an outside, in this case an outside of political possibility, we are already constituting that outside in the frame, in this case, the joke, of our critique--we are already demonstrating the possibilities of what can’t be spoken over in the framework of the speech itself; and any radical position, so long as its stated in text, is not radical at all, even within the possibility that it may be deformed and restated, resignified as Butler says, as this is the end of its stated possibility, the statement of an open end actually delimits the end as the “open-ended”, as the boundary of what the critique can accomplish.

And this, of course, leads me to my third, and final critique, in which I restate parts one and two and hopefully demonstrate, through a genealogy of the idea and a short discourse on philosophy and grammar, that this critical failure was inevitable.

Let me be clear, and ask of course the help and correction of any crypto-tibetanologists lying in wait while I state my argument: Because I have initially based my critique on a Japanese film, I have decided to use Japan as a basis, as the “material” for my criticism of Butler, as I feel that Japan, having had two “waves'' of indo-european contact wash up on its shores--in my working, the first being the “Buddhist”, and the second being the “Germanic”--can be appropriately used to describe a chronology of Indo-European thought, a timeline, if you will, of ideas. Once again, I will be clear and careful; when I discuss Buddhism as Indo-European, I only mean as far as two things, 1), it is a belief system undoubtedly of indo-european origin, and this can be observed not only in the words it uses (anatman, Buddha, Karma), but possibly within the philosophy itself--this may be examined later; and 2) there are Sanskrit texts dated in Japan since the 8th century which have been preserved in the original, notably the Heart Sutra, a very important text for Zen Buddhism--however, extreme caveats must be made when discussing these claims, as Buddhism's development takes place heavily between Indo-European and Sino-Tibetan contexts; the complexity of this history cannot be understated, many investigations into it are only taking place now.

But to give a quick and dirty genealogy, and state why this is important in the context of Ghost in the Shell, and Butler’s thought, and the history of indo-european thought in general, I must begin with Nietzche, who Butler derives part of her critique from. For its Butler's theory of performativity in Gender Trouble, of the “I as a repetition and citation”, that first arrives as a corollary, a modification of one of Nietzsche critiques of the “Ego” against Descartes’ the Cogito Ergo Sum “I think therefore I am”--what Nietzsche works into a kind of dissolution or displacement of the Ego, a movement which I believe Butler’s work follows (the reference may be supplied as needed). Furthermore, Nietzsche himself was a classicist, and states there is a “strange family resemblance of all Indian, Greek, and German philosophizing...” which is “...owing to the common philosophy of grammar--I mean, owing to the unconscious domination and guidance by similar grammatical functions--that everything is prepared at the outset for a similar development and sequence of philosophical systems…”, and it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that perhaps Nietzsche’s derivation of Ego dissolving, and ego “death”, philosophy comes from the same genealogical root as Buddhism’s; and when these two terms are mixed together inside of Ghost in the Shell, as Shirow, the original Manga artist states in an interview as a “mixture of religion and sci-tech”, sci-tech here being the term of postmodernism or the postmodern condition in my working--a deconstruction of the body itself--they track very well onto each other; so well in fact that it might not be so strange to say that they are actually the same idea, an idea which has once again found itself repeated in Butler who is, as Nietzsche said, bound by the “unconscious domination and guidance of similar grammatical functions” in the course of Indo-European philosophy. That she is arguing in the context of a vast intellectual tradition she may not be fully aware or even totally capable of understanding she is a a part of, and that to contextualize this entirely to European or American philosophy, as she does, erases that history, and Europeanizes an idea that perhaps first came about in a wider Indo-European context--if not an even larger Asian context as well--intentionally or no.

To conclude: Although Butler asked in her political project to “let things go”, allow for a radical “democratic” process of resignification, she has perhaps only restated a position, taken part of a wider process she is only a small piece of; a process which, due to the limitations of grammar, may presage the response to her critique, and delimit the scope of possibilities she presents, that, in this further review, may not be so wide at all.


[1] Interesting that the same language used to describe meat packing is also used to describe desirable female features.

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