Alex Tarnava on Judith Butler, social anxiety, and the power of performance.
Vadim Gershteyn, PhD, MPH served as my editor for StressHacked and contributed writing to my upcoming book The Stone Wall. He joins me for this discussion.
VG: In a reading of Chapter 1 from StressHacked: The Mind, you speak about your struggles with social anxiety. In particular, you describe a “method” that you developed early on in your life to deal with said anxiety, by “performing” as different “personas” set in various hypothetical situations until you (to vulgarly summarize a bit) “faked it till you made it.” For instance, you had a persona in business, a persona when you talked to girls, a persona when you were clubbing or when doing competitive sports. I wish to unpack that aspect of your personality and personal trajectory here.
On its face, and speaking of “Learning From the Loathsome” (a concept you developed in StressHacked), I thought that this approach of yours had the flavor of what Judith Butler calls “performance,” hence my use of that word above. Butler is most famous for claiming that gender is a form of “performance,” which, based on what I will say subsequently, is not particularly loathsome. Her conflation of gender (as it is explicitly defined based on performance) with biological sex is indeed loathsome. In her essay “On Judith Butler and Performativity,” Sara Salih writes (emphasis mine):
The idea of performativity is introduced in the first chapter of Gender Trouble when Butler states that “gender proves to be performance—that is, constituting the identity it is purported to be. In this sense, gender is always a doing, though not a doing by a subject who might be said to pre-exist the deed.” She then quotes the claim Nietzsche makes in On the Genealogy of Morals that “there is no ‘being’ behind doing, acting, becoming; ‘the doer’ is merely a fiction imposed on the doing—the doing itself is everything,” before adding her own gendered corollary to his formulation: “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” …. This is a statement that has confused many people. How can there be a performance without a performer, an act without an actor? Actually, Butler is not claiming that gender is a performance, and she distinguishes between performance and performativity (although at times in Gender Trouble the two terms seem to slide into one another). In an interview given in 1993 she emphasizes the importance of this distinction, arguing that, whereas performance presupposes a preexisting subject, performativity contests the very notion of the subject.
More explicitly, in Butler’s own words (emphasis mine):
If gender is instituted through acts which are internally discontinuous, then the appearance of substance is precisely that, a constructed identity, a performative accomplishment which the mundane social audience, including the actors themselves, come to believe and to perform in the mode of belief. If the ground of gender identity is the stylized repetition of acts through time, and not a seemingly seamless identity, then the possibilities of gender transformation are to be found in the arbitrary relation between such acts, in the possibility of a different sort of repeating, in the breaking or subversive repetition of that style.
There is a lot to unpack here and I do not have the space to do so in this newsletter. Butler opens her book Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative with the question, “When we claim to have been injured by language, what kind of claim do we make?” And to this I respond, “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me,” perhaps adding a “LOL” or an eye-roll emoji at the end of my rejoinder. Similarly, Butler borrows from the cursed Linguistic Turn-era of analytical philosophy, centered around J.L. Austin and his so-called speech acts, which holds that language has a constitutive power rather than being the semiotic overly to our “precognitive drivers,” as you put it in The Stone Wall. And yet, I see something to Butler’s idea that labels, ‘self-concepts,’ and the like (in a word: language) are fundamental to our evolution as people, provided repetition is involved. We cannot call ourselves one thing and be done. We have to inhabit that linguistic universe over and over again. You get good at presentations (“performances”) and the lingo if you live inside of it. Being someone who worked in Washington D.C., I know a thing or two about lingo.
This is all to say that I think the projection of a better future for yourself is possible with sustained effort, with a sustained willingness to “live within” the personas you gave to yourself as models, until they become as part of your persona (as Butler’s gender-nonconforming personas become the personalities of people who believe in her ontology). Butler, having gotten her bat mitzvah (unlike me), should know that repetition (meditation) is principal to all spiritual traditions. In a certain reading of these traditions, what is termed ‘magic’ is simply language (repeated) and the application of (repeated) language for, let’s just say, manipulative purposes (such as getting someone to believe something or to do something). How does your approach of multiple personas to cure social anxiety differ from magic, manipulation, or the kind of social ‘reinvention’ that sustains the gender-nonconforming movement (which, as I intuit in previous newsletters and as the passage from Salih demonstrates, probably comes from Nietzsche?)
AT: What I see as loathsome with the Judith Butlers of the world, is that in the truth they speak for a finite minority, they demand cultural changes that redirect and distribute the harm they have observed, namely that of performance to a label, against the majority and away from the minority, at the same per capita intensity. This, of course, dramatically increases the totality of harm done to individuals, and since our society is not one which exists within a bubble, this increase in individual harms leads to chain events that magnify the harm and consequences exponentially, seeping into every domain—tragically and ironically, including into the lives of the minorities they wish to protect.
Perhaps we are destined to swing between extremes, the masses incapable of interpreting any scenarios in a nuanced way, accepting the complexity and interconnectedness of everything encompassing our reality. As the evidence demonstrates, even our supposed “intellectuals” struggle with this concept, consistently deferring and fixating on isolated instances in which they are emotionally drawn to, leading to dogmatic ideological stances resistant to new evidence or logical argumentation. Or, perhaps, we have simply elevated the wrong types of individuals into the label of “intellectual,” an artifact of our broken educational paradigm. I digress.
Since labels can alter our behavior, at least on average in a macro sense, logic holds that applying a label to oneself, and then acting intentionally to perform to that label, can lead to a beneficial future. The prevailing voices within our “intellectual elite,” which is to say neo-Marxist imbeciles drowning in the ressentiment they exude, is that these labels and performative actions only lead to harm. But why? In pharmacology, we understand the concept that any intervention that may drive a beneficial change, can also lead to a physiological harm. This is why dose is critical, as is personalized treatment, and it holds true for lifestyle interventions such as exercise just as it does with pharmaceutical interventions.
Our minds are part of our bodies. Changes to ourselves, either through external factors or internally driven alterations, leads to change. Change is neither good or bad, it is simply contextual. As such, labels and performance are neither good nor bad, but depend on the context of each individual circumstance. The Judith Butlers of the world demand everyone else suffer through performance, as she deems it suffering, to alleviate this supposed harm from a minority of individuals, who in the end suffer greatly due to the increased totality of suffering at a population-wide scale. I choose another path, another perspective, and hope to motivate more to use labels and performance in a manner that elevates them, strengthens them, and guides them to a better future.
VG: I agree with the notion that Butler’s ontology is pro-harm, because she is personally sadistic. Whereas, in the way you describe your performative activities, it’s neutral. As you put it, in a very Nietzschean way, “Change is neither good or bad, it is simply contextual.” Perhaps this is the difference between you and her: personal convictions that color our philosophies determine how we use these labels to our benefit or detriment.
I want to explain why I think Butler is sadistic, instead of just leaving that psychologization hanging. In her book Undoing Gender, which came out in 2004 and followed 1990’s Gender Trouble in terms of its claims, she celebrates (or at least positively evaluates) the case of the twin Reimer brothers as an example of the malleability of gender, even vis-a-vis biological sex. To explain what happened, David Reimer as a child suffered a botched circumcision (I believe we should discourage male circumcision generally but this is a topic for another time) and so his parents took him to see a lunatic doctor, John Money, who insisted that David could live life as a woman, “Brenda.” As part of his “therapy,” Money 1) showed David and Brian pornography, 2) made David and Brian “simulate sex,” and 3) photographed them. Allegedly this was some sort of “natural experiment” on the part of Money, who wished to compare David’s trajectory (as Brenda) to his identical twin brother Brian. Brian, who was not injured from a circumcision but was involved in his twin brother’s treatment, died from an overdose of antidepressants in 2002. David died from suicide in 2004, the same year Butler’s book was released. This is a predictable effect of the pedophilic abuse they suffered at the hands of Money.
Talk about learning from the loathsome! Maybe you are correct that “Perhaps we are destined to swing between extremes, the masses incapable of interpreting any scenarios in a nuanced way, accepting the complexity and interconnectedness of everything encompassing our reality.” I hope what the reader of this newsletter can see is that sensible, coherent frameworks of reality—performance/performativity—can be usurped into defending the indefensible. Plenty of coherent frameworks can lead to this result. What about liberalism, as we discuss in The Stone Wall? What do you think the reader should take away on the differences between you and Butler? I hope that, from my exposition, that the differences displayed are stark but the similarity, such that it is, exists. One can only see this when they are not swinging between extremes.
AT: Liberalism, in a word, is potentially the most devastating ideological inversion to have occurred in modern history. Liberalism is the philosophy centred around individual liberty; advocating for the freedom of individuals to choose the life and behaviors best suited for their nature—so long as said nature does not cause harm to others. Today, modern “liberals” have become something unrecognizable. They have mutated the philosophy into isolating the behaviors and traits of a small minority, first impassionately advocating for these minorities’ rights to live as they wish, before abandoning the remaining tenets of liberalism. They defend the right of minorities to harm the majority before going a step further and working to actively harm the majority, under the faux-cover of helping minorities.
This is antithetical to liberalism, as I discuss at length in my upcoming work The Stone Wall. It is a neo-Marxist ideology that seeks to destroy the strong under the guise of helping the weak, so that in time all are weak, dependent upon the ideologically captured institutions. It is a roadmap towards totalitarianism, the end-goal being the complete extirpation of all individualism, individual rights, thoughts, beliefs, and actions, replaced with dogmatic group-think and a population living in servitude, subjugated by a rigid managerial class.
VG: I don’t disagree with you about liberalism, certainly not totally. The reader of this newsletter should absolutely check out The Stone Wall and the interlude where we discussed this, “Simone Weil and the Limits of Liberalism.” I initiated this interlude because I believe Weil perfectly captures the tension that you’re describing: the idea of rights and individual liberty sounds great, but obligations precede rights. You always have something to do before you’re given something. To put it another way, there is no free lunch in nature.
I want to push back on your answer, though. My comment about liberalism was throw-away but I’m glad you clarified it. Yet, you didn’t answer my question. The question is, I believe, non-trivial. You discuss in StressHacked how you invented different personas in order to succeed in social situations. Is this different in kind from how Butler effectively advises her readers that repeated performativity could allow them to (with extra steps) “change” their biological sex? If it is the case that what confines your performativity, compared to hers, is biological reality, then is there any limit to performativity if reality changes? First, with transhumanism, and second, with memetics or hyperstition. Richard Dawkins, who introduced the term memetics, claims memes do not undergo natural selection effects like entities do. However, memes attached to people, in time, do spur evolution, via hyperstition. What do you say to this?
AT: I’m glad you pushed back, because I wasn’t finished, but forgot that I wasn’t finished. Call it an ADHD moment, but another task distracted me and I never returned to finish my thoughts.
This is a common discussion I find myself having to engage in with—usually aggressive—men who take umbrage to my position on the subjective nature of many aspects of our reality, or better put, our subjective interpretations of the largely objective and measurable forces which make up our reality, and the subsequent observation that when we alter our subjective interpretations of some objective aspects, in time the objective aspects can also change. This is true for numerous physiological processes, both internally and externally when dealing with other beings which subjectively interpret our objectively measurable actions.
Of course, the midwits enraged at this position tend to lack any comprehension of nuance, believing that if it’s suggested that some objective measurements can change through subjective interpretation, then the asserter (me) must believe that all objective laws, matter, and so on can likewise be changed. To make it clear, no matter how hard you alter your mindset, you will never be able to walk off a cliff, unassisted, and fly.
Likewise, no matter how many performative actions a biological man engages in, they will never be able to change certain aspects of their physical reality. Moreover, no amount of external mutilation will alter their internal physiology in a way which meaningful alters their biological sex. It’s simply an impossibility, at least at this stage in our technological advancement—and I’d argue if we ever advance to a point this physical reality can be altered, the person being altered will cease to exist in any manner that we previously recognized them.
To be clear, the position that enough performative changes can alter someone’s true biological nature, to the point of changing sex from man to woman, or vice versa, is equivalent to the schizophrenic who believes they can walk off a cliff and soar into the sky like an eagle. The key difference being the schizophrenic believing they can fly tragically harms only themselves, where the supposed intellectuals like Butler, Money, and countless others are harming an unfathomable number of people with their delusions. Some could argue an entire generation.
VG: It’s interesting to me that you attribute a rejection of the view you laid out, that subjective interpretations can condition objective reality, to aggressive men. Two men I can think of who had analogous views to this were Marcus Aurelius (and the other Stoics, among them Epictetus) and Friedrich Nietzsche. You’ve talked about ways Nietzsche failed as a man in other newsletters, but Nietzsche was “aggressive” and so was Aurelius, at least in the domain of serving his people as Emperor. Yet men do not often take this advice to heart, I agree with you (despite the prevalence of Stoic-influenced pop philosophy urging them to do just this).
To just circle back on Butler, I absolutely appreciate your willingness to find common ground with her method, though not the substance of her beliefs. I was pushing you to do just this, for the sake of literary alchemy. However, it’s also important to “call a spade a spade” and maybe end with a repudiation of what is really problematic about Butler. To this, I wish to let her arch-enemy (in a way, as Butler also has antipathy for Luce Irigaray, who you covered in The Stone Wall), namely Kathleen Stock, have the last word. I hope you allow me to do this. From her book Material Girls: Why Reality Matters For Feminism, Stock writes (emphasis mine),
Only relatively rarely will you find someone publicly denying that trans men are men and that trans women are women (etc.). On the contrary: politicians, celebrities, journalists, officials from major charities and NGOs, senior figures in the police and judiciary, and many ordinary members of the public all tend enthusiastically to repeat the same mantras that trans women are women and trans men are men, either when prompted by others or off their own bat. For many of these, it seems unlikely that they’ve read Judith Butler or 70s radical feminism. I don’t think all of them really believe that sex is ‘assigned’ or that there are literally hundreds of genders. Yet neither do they seem to be going through the motions. Perhaps some are just being polite. Perhaps others are (quite reasonably, as we’ll shortly see) wary of deviating from a socially sanctioned script. But still, it seems that a significant number of people who repeat these mantras—both trans and non-trans—are more emotionally involved than this, yet in a way that stops short of full belief. My hypothesis is that many are immersed in a fiction. I think this hypothesis can explain some interesting features of the current state of public discourse…For those of a certain mindset, Butler is the Harry Potter of philosophy, transforming boring old truisms about the material world into something alchemical, shifting and sexily impermanent. This effect is heightened by the famous opacity of Butler’s prose style, which can make people think they must be accessing really deep truths, and by the fact Butler rarely spells out the consequences of her view, coyly offering with one sentence what she then seems to take away with another. On a single page, she can imply both that there are no human bodies prior to various contingent sociocultural constructions of them, and that, somehow, there is such a thing as ‘materiality’ after all…It follows from the logic of Butler’s worldview not only that there are not two naturally pre-given, stable biological sexes, but also that there are no pre-given facts about natural selection. There is no sexual reproduction. There are no pre-given chemical elements or biological species. There is no climate change, at least not as commonly understood. There are no molecules, atoms or quarks. There are no viruses and no bacteria; no successful drugs nor placebos. Talking about oxygen as a cause of combustion is ultimately no more rationally justified than talking about the eighteenth-century concept of phlogiston (which was thought to reside in every flammable substance and be released as it burned). Talking about neurons as causes of behaviour is neither more nor less accurate, ultimately, than talking about bodily ‘humours’. Creationism is neither worse nor better a theory than Darwinism. There is no ahistorical, non-relative truth, in fact, nor ‘accurate’ scientific theory or representation.
AT: The word “aggressive” needs to be clarified. When I use it in this context, and most, I mean aggressive and weak. The type of men that lose their temper when something challenges them, even to a small degree, and refuse to concede or back down in any regard, no matter the evidence presented to them. The media would have us believe that high testosterone leads to aggression, however the evidence suggests this is not true. There is actually evidence suggesting the reverse, that high testosterone leads to patience in many instances. Regardless, the empirical evidence suggests that high-testosterone on its own, even at supraphysiological levels in young males, does not increase aggression.
Biology is complex, and it is interesting to note that increased estrogen, particularly estradiol, is linked to aggression in males. This is relevant to steroid use, which may have led to the false link between testosterone and aggression, as excess testosterone is converted by aromatase to estradiol (a form of estrogen) in many brain regions, with the spike in estradiol leading to aggression. The aggression in these instances seems to be an imbalance between testosterone and estradiol, the estradiol being too high, proportional to the testosterone.
Now that these biological observations are elucidated, I can redefine what an “aggressive man” is. To me, an “aggressive man” is one that is unreasonable, that defaults to rage, is incapable of any discussion requiring friction, and so on. Strong men, who are usually capable of much more devastating aggression when they choose to employ it, are able to temper their aggressive capacities, assess threats, and direct their strength of mind or body at select targets. Weak men exercise their aggression indiscriminately at anyone they deem a threat, like shivering, scared animals traumatized by prior abuse, overwhelmed by a feeling of powerlessness to such an extent they lash out and bite whatever hand approaches them, even one looking to help.
Nietzsche, in many ways, was a weak and aggressive man. Marcus Aurelius, from what we can discern, was not—although, as with any historical figure, we only have access to limited information.
Weak and aggressive men, in short, possess many of the worst qualities of women, all the while lacking their strengths. Simultaneously, they are, almost exclusively, devoid of the character traits that lead to male strength and greatness. This is why I have no patience or tolerance for weak men, that is at least weak men who are outwardly aggressive, refusing to even attempt growth or self improvement.
Historically, women have agreed. In our early civilizational evolution, the number of women who reproduced, as compared to men, was 17x. As time went on, this gap tightened, but still, throughout human evolution only 40% of males have reproduced while almost 90% of women have. Modern researchers make best attempts to wave their hands and explain rationales, ignoring the reality: women are historically extremely discerning, selecting for only the strongest men.
Women seek safety, they look for men who are fair, powerful, and have the capacity for aggression—and also the ability to keep it under control. Weak men have none of these traits, and as they deal with rejection after rejection, they tend to become weaker and weaker. This is tragic, and ties into the very performative discussion at hand. Our cultural framing as strong men being “aggressive” could arguably amplify this very behavior in weak men. In desperate attempts to signal they are not weak, they behave outwardly aggressively, showing potential female suitors that they are just that, weak. These weak men confuse what women want, believing it to be undiscerning aggression, parroting aggressive behavior without an understanding of when to employ it, and likewise misinterpreting the contempt and condescension they receive from strong men as aggressive attacks.
Performance can strengthen us, or defeat us. Almost exclusively, the performative behaviors influenced by neo-Marxist ideologies have weakened us.
