In essay number four entitled, “Non-Thinking in the Name of the Normative,” Butler discusses a certain intellectually blinding technique of some otherwise logical and coherent arguments that are really attempts to create non-thinking subjects. But first let’s consider the word “normative”. Normative is the fancy word for what is normally considered an “ought” or “should” claim; behavior that is considered uncritically normal is normative behaviour. For example: people should do good and avoid evil. Normative claims are often contrasted with positive claims which purport to describe something factually true. Therefore the sentence: “it is raining so you should take an umbrella when you go.” is made up of a positive and a normative claim.
The world is full of people with various characteristics which are created normatively. For example man, woman, gay, straight, Moslem, Christian, etc. We often think we know what these labels mean but we should ask ourselves whether what we think they mean actually corresponds with the real people whom we label. So for example, if you are not gay then any use of the word “gay” comes without any personal lived experience or actual knowledge (dictionary definitions are nothing compared to real lived experience as can be intuited from the difference between the definition of love and the experience of love). Similarly a Christian who uses the word “Moslem” probably has no idea what he or she is talking about. “There are persistent questions about whether and how such subjects can be represented in law, and what might count as sufficient cultural and institutional recognition for such subjects. We ask such normative questions as if we know what we mean by the subject even as we do not always know how best to represent or recognize various subjects….[We] assume that the problem is a normative one, namely, how best to arrange political life so that recognition and representation can take place….we cannot possibly approach an answer if we do not consider the ontology of the subject whose recognition and representation is at issue…[we must ask] what is the norm according to which the subject is produced who then becomes the presumptive ‘ground’ of normative debate?” From Google, Ontology means the set of concepts and categories in a subject area or domain that shows their properties and the relations between them. In this sense this essay is an ontological analysis of normativity in relation to thinking.
She considers the example of the two concepts of tolerance and recognition as they relate to the homosexual and the religious subject. First there are a whole set of normative questions around how to tolerate and recognize gay and religious subjects: how to?, who should?, when should?, to what degree? etc. Additionally, the subjects themselves come with norms of expectations: religious subjects tend to have trouble being tolerant of sexual diversity and gay subjects have trouble tolerating and recognizing exclusively straight sentiments based on religion. But the reality of the lived experience can be much different because the norms are just perceived or assumed norms based on not really knowing. “…both positions get defined in terms of their putatively conflictual relation with one another, at which point we come to know very little about either category or the sites of their sociological convergence. Indeed, the framework of tolerance, even the injunction to tolerance, orders identity according to its requirements and effaces the complex cultural realities of gay and religious lives.
“The consequence is that the normative framework mandates a certain ignorance about the ‘subjects’ at issue, and even rationalizes this ignorance as necessary to the possibility of making strong normative judgments.” In other words it is easier to make a strong judgment if you do not really know what you are judging but only think that you do know.
Butler observes 5 assumptions: 1) religious people can be gay meaning that religion and sexuality can oppose or compliment a subject. 2) To say that there are laws or taboos against homosexuality in Islam is meaningless without considering how people relate to these laws and taboos in Islam. 3) Stating that there is a doctrinal prohibition does not go nearly far enough as one should seek to understand the cultural significance of the doctrine and how people make sense of it. 4) Even if there are tensions between the religious and the homosexual subject this “does not imply contradiction or impasse as necessary conclusions.” And 5) “such a framework does not bother to ask about the complex ways that religion and sexuality are organized, since the binary framework assumes to know all that it needs to know prior to any actual investigation of this complex cultural reality. It is a form of non-thinking ratified by a restrictively normative model, one that wants a map of reality that can secure judgment even if the map is clearly false. Indeed, it is a form of judgment that falsifies the world in order to shore up moral judgment itself as the sign of a certain cultural privilege…”
What is needed is a new way of thinking about normativity that actually promotes thinking and understanding. Normativity (judgments) must come after positivity (statements of fact). The great error is in mixing the two or hiding normativity in side positivity. Butler takes the notion of “terrorism” and “terrorist” and two authors who look at this notion to demonstrate the non-thinking and the thinking about normativity.
First Butler looks at Michael Walzer’s argument in favour just wars. Since just wars are good some state violence is good and some other is bad. In this argument only states can wage a just war and therefore terrorism is always wrong. Butler’s analysis clams that in Walzer’s definition (and definitions should be entirely positive – ie statements of fact) of “just war” there is a hidden normative clause (paraphrasing him): only states can engage in just wars and here are the conditions…. That definition legitimates some state violence and condemns all non-state violence. Therefore our judgment is made before we can know and before we can understand.
Butler contrasts this argument with Talal Asad’s book “On Suicide Bombings,” in which he “explicitly refuses to decide on the matter of what kind of violence is justified and what is not….He is, I want to suggest, standing to the side of the ‘for and against’ arguments in order to change the framework in which we think about these kinds of events or, rather, to understand how such phenomena are seized upon by certain moral and cultural frameworks and instrumentalized for the purposes of strengthening the hold of those frameworks on our thinking….Asad distances himself from the question of justification in order to open up the possibility of a different sort of evaluative claim…. [in Asad’s work] we can see that some of the very terms through which contemporary global conflicts are conceptualized dispose us in advance towards certain kinds of moral responses and normative conclusions. What follows from this analysis is…that our conclusions need to be based upon a field of description and understanding that is both comparative and critical in character….To take distance from the ‘ready-made’ is precisely a critical activity.” Normativity is not necessarily a problem. It is when it is hidden in the description or definition because then it is the frame that is foisted on us. Identifying the hidden pre-judgment in descriptions can lead to the obvious revelation of the existing frame thus making it easier to counter.
In the last essay of the book, “The Claim of Non-Violence,” Butler considers how we can ever take credibly a moral claim to non-violence given that our formation was drenched in violence. She seems to agree with Žižek that the apparent non-violent aspects of our world are bought with violence every day and that we are all subject to vast amounts of invisible violence in all our social relationships especially since we were born – violence founded our identity; it made us who we are. (“Abuse” is the term we give to culturally and temporally “inappropriate” levels of social violence). Even our status in the world, that is our citizenship, is maintained by real and threatened state violence.
Butler’s solution starts with the realization that identity is fluid and an iterative process. That is, we negotiate it every day and we can change it or modify it. Iteration is why norms are not all powerful in our lives. Our identity is a struggle. With some identities, like our gender, we have to struggle to prove almost every minute of the day. Traditional ethical theories have almost always demanded a complete adherence to their normative claims – this is created violence especially directed to women since they have traditionally been more willing or more easily forced to self-sacrifice in their service to others. “In this sense, non-violence is not a peaceful state, but a social and political struggle to make rage articulate and effective—the carefully crafted ‘fuck you.’… When the norms of violence are reiterated without end and without interruption, non-violence seeks to stop the iteration or to redirect it in ways that counter its driving aims.”
Butler makes a distinction between those who glory in victimhood which she calls “moral sadism” and a more mature response which she calls “responsibility.” One who is mature and responsibly hears and accepts the claim of non-violence “‘owns’ aggression as well as the ethical mandate to find a non-violent solution to rageful demands….[one] seeks to protect the other against [ones] own destructive potential. In the name of preserving the precarious life of the other, one crafts aggression into modes of expression that protect those one loves. Aggression thus restricts its violent permutations, subordinating itself to the claim of love that seeks to honor and protect the precarious life of the other.” This translates into acting politically to “stay responsive to the equal claims of the other for shelter, for conditions of livability and grievability.”