Language and Gender: Nietzsche and Butler

Recently, a friend of mine came out as genderqueer as well as one of my online acquaintances. These are the first individuals I’ve known who identify this way. One thing that has really caught my attention is just how difficult it has been for me to use the they/them pronouns. I certainly want to use whatever pronouns an individual prefers. Personally, I cannot stand assholes like Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro who make a big deal out of using someone’s preferred pronouns (especially those of trans people). These pricks really do this for the sake of YouTube views but under the guise of “principled” stances for “tradition”, “biology”, “reality”, “facts”, etc. But I must say that using the they/them pronouns has actually been a verbal challenge for me. I’ve had to keep pausing before enunciating the pronoun to be used in a statement. Using pronouns that are usually reserved for multiple people or groups for single individuals has been something I’ve had to work at. I feel like I’m having to rewire my entire brain in order to make the most basic of linguistic tasks become effortless. Philosophically speaking, I think there’s something very illuminating in this struggle. It’s shown me just how much words are habits that arbitrarily shape of perception of ourselves and others. Nietzsche famously argued that we get our concept of the unitary subject (the soul, Descartes’ cogito) from the subject/predicate schema operative in language. While I’ve been intellectually familiar with this argument for many years now, it’s taken on a new, concrete signifiance of late. Here’s the question: How much differently would our default concept of the human being be if we had all grown up using they/them pronouns for every person? Would this have served to combat the worst aspects of the liberal-capitalist concept of the rugged individual and its radical responsibility? A concept that has long been ideologically weaponized by those in power. Let’s explore this line of thought.

Nietzsche famously critique our concept of the subject by making the case that it is merely the result of the structure of language. More specifically, the “subject” (the soul, the I, the self) is the product of the subject-predicate schema (a key presupposition of logic). As he it put it, “For, formerly, one believed in “the soul” as one believed in grammar and the grammatical subject: one said. “I” is the condition, “think” is the predicate and conditioned — thinking is an activity to which thought must supply a subject as cause” (Beyond Good and Evil, Section 54, p. 67). The structure of grammar, according to Nietzsche, does not necessarily have an isomorphic correspondence to the structure of reality itself. In fact, the arbitrary structural configuration of grammar distorts reality by forcing us to perceive that latter through the image of the former. This is not to say that Nietzsche thinks that there is a single perspective through which we can experience the Truth with a capital “T”. This critique of the relation between grammar and reality is just meant to show that the basic way we talk about human beings does not actually represent their basic ontology. For Nietzsche, there is a discrepancy between language and reality, that is, the subject-predicate schema is bullshit. Language limits our reality. Wittgenstein’s words come to mind: “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world” (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 5.6). It can be said that language is that through which we are able to get some grip on reality, but, at the same time, it is precisely what limits our relation to the multifaceted truth(s) of things.

The strange family resemblance between all Indian, Greek, and German philosophizing is explained easily enough. Where there is affinity of languages, it cannot fail, 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; just as the way seems barred against certain other possibilities of world-interpretation.
(Beyond Good and Evil, Section 20, p. 27)

“Subject,” “object,” “attribute” — these distinctions are fabricated and are now imposed as a schematism upon all the apparent facts. The fundamental false observation is that I believe it is I who do something, suffer something, “have” something, “have” a quality.
(The Will to Power, Section 549, p. 294)

Nietzsche was quick to stress just how limiting and confusing the subject-predicate schema is. It has led philosophy astray insofar as modern philosophy (Descartes, Kant, etc.) gave the subject such metaphysical and epistemological priority. He deconstructs the Cartesian cogito (substantial identity) in the following manner:

Let the people suppose that knowledge means knowing things entirely; the philosopher must say to himself: When I analyze the process that is expressed In the sentence, “I think,” I find a whole series of daring assertions that would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to prove; for example, that it is I who think, that there must necessarily be something that thinks, that thinking is an activity and operation on the part of a being who is thought of as a cause, that there is an “ego,” and, finally, that it is already determined what is to be designated by thinking — that I know what thinking is. For if I had not already decided within myself what it is, by what standard could I determine whether that which is just happening is not perhaps ‘’willing’’ or “feeling”? In short, the assertion “I think” assumes that I compare my state at the present moment with other states of myself which I know, in order to determine what it is; on account of this retrospective connection with further “knowledge,” it has, at any rate, no immediate certainty for me.
(Beyond Good and Evil, Section 16, p. 23)

Michel Haar provides with a very helpful supplemental exegesis of Nietzsche’s line of thought (Butler also quotes this passage in Gender Trouble).

The destruction of logic by means of its genealogy brings with it as well the ruin of the psychological categories founded upon this logic. All psychological categories (the ego, the individual, the person) derive from the illusion of substantial identity. But this illusion goes back basically to a superstition that deceives not only common sense but also philosophers — namely, the belief in language and, more precisely, in the truth of grammatical categories. It was grammar (the structure of subject and predicate) that inspired Descartes’ certainty that “I” is the subject of “think,” whereas it is rather the thoughts that come to “me”: at bottom, faith in grammar simply conveys the will to be the “cause” of one’s thoughts. The subject, the self, the individual, are just so many false concepts, since they transform into substances fictitious unities having at the start only a linguistic reality.
(‘Nietzsche and Metaphysical Language’, The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation, pp. 17–8)

We also find Nietzsche attacking the concept of the subject (substantial identity) produced by logic and grammar in the context of morality with his famous analogy of the lightning bolt.

To demand of strength that it should not express itself as strength, that it should not be a desire to overcome, a desire to throw down, a desire to become master, a thirst for enemies and resistances and triumphs, is just as absurd as to demand of weakness that it should express itself as strength. A quantum of force is equivalent to a quantum of drive, will, effect — more, it is nothing other than precisely this very driving, willing, effecting, and only owing to the seduction of language (and of the fundamental errors of reason that are petrified in it) which conceives and misconceives all effects as conditioned by something that causes effects, by a “subject,” can it appear otherwise. For just as the popular mind separates the lightning from its flash and takes the latter for an action, for the operation of a subject called lightning, so popular morality also separates strength from expressions of strength, as if there were a neutral substratum behind the strong man, which was free to express strength or not to do so. But there is no such substratum; there is no “being” behind doing, effecting, becoming; “the doer” is merely a fiction added to the deed — the deed is everything. The popular mind in fact doubles the deed; when it sees the lightning flash, it is the deed of a deed: it posits the same event first as cause and then a second time as its effect. Scientists do no better when they say “force moves,” “force causes.” and the like — all its coolness, its freedom from emotion notwithstanding, our entire science still lies under the misleading influence of language and has not disposed of that little changeling, the “subject” (the atom, for example, is such a changeling, as is the Kantian ‘’thing-in-itself’); no wonder if the submerged, darkly glowering emotions of vengefulness and hatred exploit this belief for their own ends and in fact maintain no belief more ardently than the belief that the strong man is free to be weak and the bird of prey to be a lamb — for thus they gain the right to make the bird of prey accountable for being a bird of prey.
(On the Genealogy of Morals, Section 13, p. 45)

To state the obvious, Nietzsche vehemently assaulted the cogito and the metaphysics of substance it is based on. But what was Nietzsche’s alternative? How did he conceive of the human being? Well, he thinks we are made of a multitude of forces. Wills within wills. Drives with drives. This sounds perplexing but just think about all of the organs in our bodies and how they all strive for certain states. To use some Heideggerian phrasing, we can say that the heart hearts, the brain brains, the liver livers, etc. The point being that each organ is what it does and that the “self” is really just the interaction of all of these forces — these wills to power. We can actually use a biblical story involving exorcism to convey this. Remember when Jesus casts a bunch of demon(s) called Legion out of a possessed man and into a herd of pigs. The demon(s) is a strange entity owing to how it seems to be both a singularity and multiplicity. A plural singular or singular plural. “My name is Legion: for we are many” (Mark 5:9). Notice how this story leaves us associating the multiplicity of self with immorality, the demonic, evil, etc. Anyway, Legion seems to suggest that the typical grammatical structure of language is incapable of incorporating its kind of subjectivity. Legion hints at the absence of a singular-plural pronoun. Well, Nietzsche’s concept of the “self” is similar.

The assumption of one single subject is perhaps unnecessary; perhaps it is just as permissible to assume a multiplicity of subjects, whose interaction and struggle is the basis of our thought and our consciousness in general? A kind of aristocracy of “cells” in which dominion resides? To be sure, an aristocracy of equals, used to ruling jointly and understanding how to command? My hypothesis: The subject as multiplicity.
(The Will to Power, Section 490, p. 270)

The influence of Nietzsche’s concept of the subject as multiplicity and his deconstruction of the single subject with its substantial identity (metaphysics of substance) cannot be overstated. We all too easily see how it impacted the thinking of Heidegger, Deleuze, Derrida and Foucault. For example, in Being and Time, Heidegger argues against Cartesian subjectivity by phenomenologically describing the being-in-the-world of Dasein (human beings). We see that Dasein is not a pure, substantial I, but, rather, complex structure of relations with others, tools, language, etc. Heidegger calls these existential structures existentialia. They include being-with, das Man, facticity, understanding and discourse just to name a few. Dasein involves a complex network of relations in order to be the being that it is. Butler, too, has been influenced by Nietzsche’s critique of the metaphysics of substance. Let’s turn our attention to how she applies it to gender. On a side note, some people are surprised to see Butler appeal to the work of Nietzsche due to his strongly misogynistic moments. However, this shouldn’t surprise us. Quite fittingly, there are so many Nietzsches in Nietzsche that we’re all bound to love at least one of them. Let’s find out why Butler appreciates the Nietzsche that attacks substantial identity.

The metaphysics of substance is a phrase that is associated with Nietzsche within the contemporary criticism of philosophical discourse. In a commentary on Nietzsche, Michel Haar argues that a number of philosophical ontologies have been trapped within certain illusions of “Being” and “Substance” that are fostered by the belief that the grammatical formulation of subject and predicate reflects the prior ontological reality of substance and attribute. These constructs, argues Haar, constitute the artificial philosophical means by which simplicity, order, and identity are effectively instituted. In no sense, however, do they reveal or represent some true order of things. For our purposes, this Nietzschean criticism becomes instructive when it is applied to the psychological categories that govern much popular and theoretical thinking about gender identity.
(Gender Trouble, p. 28)

Okay, so Butler is going to utilize Nietzsche’s insights on how language generates our blind embrace of the concept of substantial selfhood in her critique of the substantializing of gender. Whereas Nietzsche attacked the metaphysics of substance for the sake of undermining the concept of self it produces, Butler is going to attack this type of metaphysics for how it substantializes and reifies gender identities. Gender is neither a substance nor an attribute that inheres in a substance. Gender: neither substance nor attribute.

If it is possible to speak of a “man” with a masculine attribute and to understand that attribute as a happy but accidental feature of that man, then it is also possible to speak of a “man” with a feminine attribute, whatever that is, but still to maintain the integrity of the gender. But once we dispense with the priority of “man” and “woman” as abiding substances, then it is no longer possible to subordinate dissonant gendered features as so many secondary and accidental characteristics of a gender ontology that is fundamentally intact. If the notion of an abiding substance is a fictive construction produced through the compulsory ordering of attributes into coherent gender sequences, then it seems that gender as substance, the viability of man and woman as nouns, is called into question by the dissonant play of attributes that fail to conform to sequential or causal models of intelligibility.
(Gender Trouble, p. 33)

Let’s unpack this paragraph. So what happens if we reject the myth of substantial gender? What results from the rejection of the idea of there being some essentially masculine substance, on the one hand, and some opposed but equally substantial feminine substance, on the other? If such substances did exist, then it would be rational to speak of a feminine substance with certain masculine attributes and vice versa. Colloquially speaking, this way of thinking comes out like this, “I’m a man but I still have my feminine side”. That is, in other words, “I am a masculine substance/subject in which certain feminine qualities inhere”. But what happens when we realize that no masculine and no feminine substances exist? Well, we’re left to think that there are just gendered features, tendencies or traits. This is a feminine quality. That is is masculine attribute. But, as Butler argues, once we reject the reality of gender substances, gendered attributes only make things more perplexing. The gender attributes, lacking the anchoring of a primary substance that gives them their secondary identities, enter into a mode of free play. It’s a kind of wild and non-principled clustering of attributes that Butler has in mind. But this sort of clustering is not enough to base diametrically opposed and persisting gender identities on. To reject gendered substances is to demolish gender ontology altogether. Substance ontology does not work without the substances.

If there is no abiding gender substance, then we cannot speak of an abiding gender identity that just so happens to have some characteristics of the opposite gender. For example, there is no enduring “man” (essential substance) that feminine properties (inessential features) contingently reside in or momentarily pass through. And inessential features, no matter how they are clustered and organized, cannot generate essential gender identities. If we think only in terms of gendered attributes, then what we empirically find is nothing but contingent clusters of them that lack any internal principles of organization. If gendered attributes are forced into matrices of organization, it is through an arbitrary and exterior schema, i.e., society externally imposes certain norms and standards on the free play of gendered attributes. They are imposed without being imposed, which means that society transmits these normalizing schemas from one generation to the next one without this process being noticed by the vast majority of people. For Butler, the human body “becomes its gender through a series of acts which are renewed, revised, and consolidated through time” (‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory’). Society invisibly decides, “These traits right here go together and those other traits over there go together.” But these external ordering procedures will never succeed in establishing substantial gendered identities. A violence will always be done to the free play of the attributes. All that the normalizing organizations will do is punish the people whose clusters of gendered attributes don’t happen to line up with the “coherent” schemas and models, Butler’s term is “gender sequences”, society arbitrarily imposes. What these exceptions, these non-conforming clusters of gender attributes, go to show is that there really are no gender identities, i.e., there are no gender substances/essences. To talk like Baudrillard, gender can be said to be a simulation — a group of signs that indicate the reality of substantial referent that actually isn’t there at all.

The appearance of an abiding substance or gendered self, what the psychiatrist Robert Stoller refers to as a “gender core,” is thus produced by the regulation of attributes along culturally established lines of coherence. As a result, the exposure of this fictive production is conditioned by the deregulated play of attributes that resist assimilation into the ready made framework of primary nouns and subordinate adjectives. It is of course always possible to argue that dissonant adjectives work retroactively to redefine the substantive identities they are said to modify and, hence, to expand the substantive categories of gender to include possibilities that they previously excluded. But if these substances are nothing other than the coherences contingently created through the regulation of attributes, it would seem that the ontology of substances itself is not only an artificial effect, but essentially superfluous.
(Gender Trouble, pp. 33–4)

What we call “gender”, the simulation of a gender substance, is produced by society forming constellations of attributes that serve as regulative and normative mechanisms. The fictional aspect to the production of gender roles (“substances”) is revealed by those attributes that do not fit nicely into these little identity slots. Witnessing dissonant attributes escape the capture of the two main gender identities discloses that the hetero-cis matrix of intelligibility is arbitrarily trying to force these attributes into the reductionism of an either/or — either “man” or “woman”. If these dissonant attributes could speak, then they’d say along with Bartleby, “I would prefer not to”. In other words, these dissonant attributes reveal that there are no essential gender identities, since they defy the grammar of gender, i.e., “the ready made framework of primary nouns and subordinate adjectives”. In Lacanian terms, they’re like the perturbing Real that the Symbolic order of gender cannot assimilate. Some people might argue that dissonant adjectives actually serve to validate and modify gender nouns (gendered substances). At first, these dissonant adjectives/attributes are rejected, but, eventually, they come to expand gender identities while preserving them. Butler rejects this positions, since we’ve already seen that gender “substances” are mere simulations produced by external regimes of coherence (the production of arbitrary constellations of gendered attributes). She thinks that if people grant that attributes reshape gender identities, then they should already see that gender is not substantial, since it is produced through how we organize gender attributes.

In this sense, gender is not a noun, but neither is it a set of free-floating attributes, for we have seen that the substantive effect of gender is performatively produced and compelled by the regulatory practices of gender coherence. Hence, within the inherited discourse of the metaphysics of substance, gender proves to be performative — 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 preexist the deed. The challenge for rethinking gender categories outside of the metaphysics of substance will have to consider the relevance of Nietzsche’s claim in On the Genealogy of Morals that “there is no ‘being’ behind doing, effecting, becoming; ‘the doer’ is merely a fiction added to the deed — the deed is everything.” In an application that Nietzsche himself would not have anticipated or condoned, we might state as a corollary: 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.
(Gender Trouble, p. 34)

Butler now gives us a lucid definition of “gender”. It is neither a noun/substance nor a set of free-floating attributes/adjective. Gender is a contingently imposed set of regulatory practices that we perform and that produce the simulacrum of gendered substances by organizing and normalizing gender attributes into coherent clusters. Gender is not something we necessarily and essentially are — it is something we contingently and inessentially do. But this doing is not the deed of a pre-gendered subject. It is not the case that a subject chooses to perform a gender in the way we choose what we order at a restaurant. This doing is far more complex, elusive and structural. Remember, Butler is appealing to Nietzsche, ontologically speaking, that is, she, like him, refuses to use the subject-predicate schema to conceptualize the human being. She is not going to separate the doer from the deed. The lightning is the flash. There is no gender outside the expressions of gender — but these gender performances are contingently brought about through a whole network of structural mechanisms. Getting rid of the structural causes gets rid of the elemental effects (performances of gendered identities). It’s best to see gender as an elaborate structural system of norms and behaviors that program us to act in certain ways without it even requiring something like a choice on our part. Gender is like a McLuhanite medium, i.e., it is a contingent environment. Things can be different.

I said all this just to provide a context for considering how we might view ourselves as multiplicities if we had all grown up using they/them pronouns in the singular. I’ve found that the trouble I’ve had in using genderqueer pronouns and making their usage become effortless has really illuminated Nietzsche’s and Butler’s insights into how language shapes our “reality” and our “gender”. Given the state of our current online culture war, given the attacks the LGBTQ+ community has been facing, I think Nietzsche’s attack on the metaphysics of substance and Butler’s theory of the performativity of gender are indispensable to understand for those of us on the left. I just keeping thinking about how different our world would be if we viewed ourselves and others as multiplicities. What if this was our ontological default setting instead of that of the pure subject? What if our defaulting setting was to view gender as a contingent system of performances instead of binary essences? What if we grew up using both singular-plural pronouns and plural-plural pronouns? Plural nouns for individuals as well as for groups of people? All of this has me thinking of gender as being like a genre of music. From the perspective of a naive phenomenology, both genders and genres seem to have an essence to them. The masculine has an essence just like hip hop does. But, in reality, different of genres of music often use the same keys, chords, instruments, etc. They pull from the free play of musical attributes but in certain ways that organize their sound fields in disparate ways. Gender is like genre. Is there a true essence to hip hop, to metal, to punk, to jazz, to pop, to classical? Or is this “essence” merely the effect of various modes of compositional organization (structure)? It seems obvious to that there is no Platonic Forms behind these genres just as with gender. It’s all about contingent groupings or orderings.

It’s so important to see that the ordering of language is twofold. Language orders in two ways. It orders in the sense of organizing how we perceive the world. It organizes our basic intelligibility and presuppositional familiarity with things. It organizes how we descriptively intuit our reality. However, it orders in another sense. Language orders by giving us orders, that is, it commands us to behave properly. It demands specific modes of behavior patterns. This is language’s normative aspect. These orders do not have to take the form of explicit commands. For example, when I ask a barista for a cappuccino, I’m really saying, “Make me a cappuccino right now”. Questions can be orders. Deleuze and Guattari call this aspects of language “order-words”.

We call order-words, not a particular category of explicit statements (for example, in the imperative), but the relation of every word or every statement to implicit presuppositions, in other words, to speech acts that are, and can only be, accomplished in the statement. Order-words do not concern commands only, but every act that is linked to statements by a “social obligation.” Every statement displays this link, directly or indirectly. Questions, promises, are order-words. The only possible definition of language is the set of all order-words, implicit presuppositions, or speech acts current in a language at a given moment.
(A Thousand Plateaus, p. 79)

Language is always already telling us how to behave, what gender we are to perform, how to think about the world, and so on. But we must see that there are very negative repercussions to this arbitrary tyranny. Wherever language harms us, wherever it limits our freedom, we must push back against it. I don’t have a central thesis I’ve been attempting to prove in this post. Rather, I’m establishing a context for any future thinking I do on how language shapes reality and regulates gender. I have been questioning — not answering. I have been thinking — not proving. I think that what is needed now more than ever is thinking and questioning. All one has to do to see just how much true thinking is missing in the world today is to read online comment sections. Let’s all be like Pooh and think, think, think.