Five

At the core of discursive materialism is the poetics of invention. The post-al politics of "invention" is a politics of discursive transformation that seeks to move "beyond" established codes into a "utopian" space of unencumbered (semiotic) freedom through the subversion of existing regimes of discourse and hierarchies of representation, language games, and signifying relations. It is a politics of local, contingent acts generating new phrases, idioms, linkages and rules of judgments for each particular situation without any pre-existing criteria. Such judgments, according to Jean-Francois Lyotard, have 'to be always done over again" because they concern incommensurable linkages among differends — linkages that must be "always done over again" in order not to suppress some other differend, some other linkage (Differend 140). Politics is thus reduced to discursive alterations and subversions: what Lyotard calls the "invention of new idioms" for the differend.

As I earlier suggested, part of what is at stake in the emphasis on "invention" by ludic postmodern and feminist theorists (not only Lyotard but also Derrida, Butler, and Cornell, as well as Luce Irigarary, Helene Cixous, Gregory Ulmer and others) is the crisis of social constructionism. Structuralism and, later on, poststructuralism critiqued traditional humanism for its metaphysics of presence — by which it secured its basic categories (self, consciousness, gender, sex, race ...) in nature. They offered, as a "supplement" to this theory of the subject, the notion that the subject was not naturally created but was socially constructed. By now, the idea of social construction as opposed to a "natural" essentialism has become the ludic orthodoxy, and the conflict between "essentialism" and "constructionism" has become one of the most contested scenes in feminism. Recently, however, the theory of the subject as socially constructed is turning into an impediment for ludic feminists and postmodern theorists, for whom constructionism seems too deterministic and restrictive of the agency of the subject. Ludic theorists are thus attempting to problematise this determinism through the trope of "invention" — the multiple, indeterminate, reversible play of significations that subverts any stable, definite meanings. For these ludic critics, the subject's inventiveness — that is, her/ his participation in the discursive "play" of language games, metaphors, significations — enables her/him to overcome the determinacy of social construction and move into the terrain of a utopian future.

This move first to a semiotic constructionism and then to invention involves a double displacement of historical materialism. By construing social construction largely in terms of a discursive construction, structuralists and poststructuralists have substituted a linguistic determinism for a historical materialist concept of construction as determined by the forces and relations of production. Now the more recent ludic rejection of even linguistic determinism entirely eclipses the historical actuality of determinism without having to address its materialist and economic forms.

This valorisation of a liberating inventiveness and complete erasure of any form of necessary relation is clearly evident in Drucilla Cornell's "utopian feminism" with its strategies of "remetaphorisation" (Beyond Accommodation). But perhaps one of the fullest articulations of this eclipse of historical material'. m in the shift from constructionism to invention is developed by Judith Butler in Bodies that Matter.

Butler's work combines a deconstructive textualism with a Foucaultian analytics of power. It is thus important to briefly critique here the basic presuppositions of Foucault's notion of power. Power in Foucault is not understood as primarily textual, although it is irrevocably linked to the operation of discourse and knowledge relations. Rather power, according to Foucault, "must be understood in the first instance as the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organisation" (History of Sexuality 92). Moreover, these "force relations" of power are, according to Foucault, Self-constituting, immanent, local, diffuse and a-systematic. Power, in other words, is "aleatory" (that is, marked by chance and arbitrariness); contingent (rather than historically determined); heterogeneous (divided by difference within), and unstable — by provoking "resistance" it "undoes" itself. Foucault's analysis of the local, specific and contingent, however, is based on a quite abstract, static, a-historical and mystified concept of power: for Foucault "Power is everywhere ... comes from everywhere ... is permanent, repetitious, inert" — it is always already with us and always will be. Moreover, Foucault turns resistance into a nearly automatic, immanent response to the exercise of power: "where there is power, there is resistance" (95-96). For "Resistances," Foucault declares, "are inscribed in the [relations of power] as an irreducible opposite" — rather like a natural resistance to a physical force (96). Such a theory of power substitutes a logic of contingency for the logic of social necessity. In so doing, it preempts any need for collective, organised social transformation — any need, in other words, for emancipation, and more important, it dispenses with the necessity for organised social and political revolution to overthrow dominant power relations. All we need to do, according to this ludic logic, is recognise and validate the local "multiplicity of points of resistance" that power itself already generates.

Perhaps the most "appealing" aspect of Foucault's theory for most "left" critics and feminists is that it offers, as Foucault himself says, "a non-economic analysis of power" as opposed to the "economism in the theory of power" in Marx as well as in the juridical-liberal notion of power (Power/Knowledge 88-89). Foucault conflates these two quite opposed understandings of power by equating a trope with a theoretical explanation — he follows the ludic assumption that explanation/concepts are, in fact, tropes. He characterises the juridical-liberal notion of power as a form of economism simply because it relies on the trope of commodity exchange. Whereas, in "the Marxist conception of power," he says, "one finds none of all that" (88). What one does find — and what Foucault's entire theory of power is an attempt to displace — is, as Foucault describes it: "an economic functionality of power ... power is conceived primarily in terms of the role it plays in the maintenance simultaneously of the relations of production and of a class domination which the development and specific forms of the forces of production have rendered possible" (88-89). In opposition to a Marxist theory of power — which always insists on the dialectical relations of power and the economic — Foucault (the former student of the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser) develops an unrelentingly anti-historical-materialist theory of power. He severs power from its material connection to the social relations and contradictions of production, and reduces it to an abstract force confined to the superstructure. His is an anti-dialectical theory that substitutes an analytics of localised, reversible domination for a theory of systematic global exploitation. This ludic displacement of historical materialism has made Foucault one of the main articulators of post-Marxism in late capitalism and given him an extraordinary influence among academics, professionals and other middle and upper class knowledge-workers, especially in the West.

Building on Foucault's theory of a localised, diffuse, a-systematic power, Butler rewrites constructionism, specifically the construction of gender/sexed bodies, as indeterminate. In short, she rewrites it in terms of invention — what she calls "performativity" or "citationality." In Bodies that Matter, Butler specifically contests, what she calls, "radical linguistic constructivism" which "is understood to be generative and deterministic" and forms a "linguistic monism, whereby everything "is only and always language" (6). According to Butler, "what ensues," from this position, "is an exasperated debate that many of us are tired of hearing" (6): a debate over determinism and agency, over essentialism and constructivism. She decries the way structuralist and radical linguistic theories reduce "constructivism" "to determinism and impl(y) the evacuation or displacement of human agency" (9). This is an especially important issue in Butler's work. She is committed to the preservation of "agency"; in fact, it is the priority of her post-al politics. But she rejects both the "voluntarist subject of humanism" and the "grammatical" subject of structuralist and classical post-structuralist theories. She thus dismisses those who "construe" construction "along structuralist lines," because they "claim that there are structures that construct the subject, impersonal forces, such as Culture or Discourse or Power, where these terms occupy the grammatical site of the subject" (9). In other words, she objects to what she considers to be a personification of "discourse or language or the social" that posits a grammatical subject as initiating the activity of construction. Butler attempts to displace this grammatical logic of structuralist and "radical linguistic constructivism" (the logic of subject and predicate) with a more open rhetorical or discursive logic of agency as "reiteration": in other words, with a notion of agency as invention, which she variously calls "performativity" or "citationality."

She argues that Foucault's "view of power" should be "understood as the disruption and subversion of this grammar and metaphysics of the subject" (9); it is an analytics of power that, for Butler, accounts for the generation of subjectitivities without in turn positing a determining subject. This enables Butler to understand construction as "neither a subject nor its act, but a process of reiteration by which both 'subjects' and ,acts' come to appear at all. There is no power that acts, but only a reiterated acting that is power in its persistence and instability" (9). In other words, subjects/agents, are for Butler, effects of the agency of a reiterative power that she calls performativity. Butler is asserting a localised and localising theory of power and construction (performativity) that is determinate yet indeterminate; involves subjectivities but not a "Subject," and an agency that constructs its own agents.

Invention or performativity enables Butler to posit a mode of inquiry — into the construction of the subject — that she claims "is no longer constructivism, but neither is it essentialism," because there is, Butler asserts, "an 'outside' to what is constructed by discourse" (8). However, this is an "inventive" rather than a conventional notion of "outside": as Butler says,

this is not an absolute 'outside,' and ontological there-ness that exceeds or counters the boundaries of discourse; as a constitutive 'outside,' it is that which can only be thought — when it can — in relation to that discourse, at and as its most tenuous borders. (8)

In other words, the very "outside" to discourse that allows us, according to Butler, to escape the dichotomy of constructivism/essentialism, is itself invente through the play of discourse. By this she means that "the extra-discursive is delimited, it is formed by the very discourse from which it seeks to free itself" (11). However, this is not so much a move beyond the "exasperated debate" as it is yet another ludic displacement of fundamental issues through a tropic play that conflates differences through a logic of supplementarily.

The limits of this discursive "invention" of the outside (the "extra-discursive") are made especially clear in Butler's ludic articulation of matter/materiality. She re-understands "the notion of matter, not as a site or surface, but as a process of materialisation that stabilises over time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity, and surface we call matter" (9). In other words, Butler is substituting "materialisation" for construction, but in so doing, she puts forward a concept of "materiality," "matter," "materialisation" that breaks both with the common sense understanding — where these terms refer to a reality or referent outside language — and with a historical materialist understanding, in which these concepts refer to the objective reality of the actual historical conditions produced by the mode of production. Instead, Butler rewrites materialisation, itself, as a form of discursive practice: as she says, "materialisation will be a kind of citationality, the acquisition of being through the citing of power" (15). Citationality — that is, the practice of "citing," repeating, summoning sexual norms and "laws" — is, in turn, also a form of performativity. Performativity, a concept Butler originally developed in Gender Trouble, is a form of performance, but its meaning, for Butler, cannot be simply reduced to performance, especially theatrical notions of performance as role playing. Butler argues that "performance as bounded 'act' is distinguished from performativity insofar as the latter consists in a reiteration of norms which precede, constrain, and exceed the performer . . . further, what is 'performed' works to conceal, if not to disavow, what remains opaque, unconscious, unperformable. The reduction of performativity to performance would be a mistake" (Bodies 234). The meaning of performativity, in other words, slides into a kind of "speech act" that enacts, repeats or "cites" the norms of sex. In fact, one of the main concerns of Bodies that Matter is "the reworking of performativity as citationality," so that Butler now defines performativity as "the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names" (14, 2).

Butler's "outside" to discourse, in other words, is what discourse itself constructs through "exclusion, erasure, violent foreclosure, objection." But this "outside" is itself supplementary: it is a "disruptive return" that constitutes what excludes it. For example, the primacy of masculinity in Western metaphysics is, Butler argues, "founded ... through a prohibition which outlaws the spectre of a lesbian resemblance" (the lesbian phallus); masculinity, then, is an "effect of that very prohibition ... dependent on that which it must exclude" (52). The "outside" (the excluded lesbian), in other words, is the necessary ground "constituting" the "inside" of masculinity and heterosexuality. Butler is following here the classic poststructuralist erasure of the boundaries between inside and outside, that is, "supplementarily" (Derrida, Grammatology 144-145). But this supplementarity — what Butler insists is the "indissolubility of materiality and signification" (30)-also locates us as always already in an infinite semiotic loop: a kind of discursive Mobius strip. Butler reduces materiality to the materiality of the signifier and the effects of signifying processes, notably citationality. As she declares, "it is not that one cannot get outside of language in order to grasp materiality in and of itself; rather, every effort to refer to materiality takes place through a signifying process which ... is always already material" (68).

Thus, sex, for Butler, is not "a bodily given ... but ... a cultural norm which governs the materialisation of bodies" (2-3). The "construction" of sexual identity is an activity of performativity in which the body "assumes" or "materialises" its sex through a process of "citationality" — that is, a speaking in and through bodies in which the symbolic laws, norms and discourses of heterosexuality are "cited" in the same way, according to Butler, that a judge "cites" a law (14). There is in Butler's theory then an equivalency or rather a tropic sliding and linking together of materialisation, performativity, citationality as all forms of discursive reiteration. In other words, "matter" (the body) is given its boundaries, shapes, fixity and surface — it is "materialised" (sexed) — through the "citationality" of discourse, through the "reiteration of norms." The materiality of sexuality, then, is not outside language but is the effect of discourse.

However, in a footnote, Butler specifically disclaims that materiality is "the effect of 'discourse' which is its cause" (Bodies 251, n. 12). But, she is able to make this disclaimer only through a series of dissimulations that in turn validate "dissimulation," itself, as the crux of her theory of materiality/materializations. She does so by deploying Foucault's theory of power, which, as I have already indicated, posits power as diffuse and dispersed without a cause or originary source. Foucault's aleatory and contingent notion of power enables Butler to, as she says, "displace the causal relation through a reworking of the notion of 'effect.' Power is established in and through its effects, where these effects are the dissimulated workings of power itself" (251, n. 12). Butler is, in short, deconstructing causality (following Nietzsche's re-reading of causality through its effects in his The Will to Power) into a circuit of supplementary relations in which the "cause," as Nietzsche claims, is itself the effect of its own dissimulated causality, or the "effect" is itself the causality of its own dissimulated effects. This move enables her to rewrite materiality as the "effect of power": according to Butler, "'Materiality' appears only when its status as contingently constituted through discourse is erased, concealed, covered over. Materiality is thus the dissimulated effect of power" (251, n. 12, emphasis added). In Butler's ludic argument, materiality is thus entirely confined to the level of the "superstructure," to discourse. Moreover, this ludic articulation of materiality is an extended ideological re-mystification. in the name of openness, it puts forth an understanding of power as a closed, self-legitimating operation. It completely suppresses the real material conditions of what Marx calls the "working day": the production of profit (surplus value) through the exploitation of our unpaid and subsistence labour.

Butler's suppression and mystification of the materiality of materialism the materiality of labour — is quite explicit in two brief references she makes to Marx's historical materialism. The first is an offhand reference in which she attempts to appropriate Marx to her position by linking him to her rereading of classical notions of matter as "temporalised" and as positing the "indissolubility of ... materiality and signification" (Bodies 31). She attributes this temporalisation to what she claims is Marx's understanding of "'matter' . . . as a principle of transformation" (31). However, Butler is able to appropriate Marx for a genealogy of (idealist) theories of matter, only by profoundly misreading him and completely excluding the issue of labour from his work. In a footnote to her observation on Marx, she specifies that her reading is based on the first of Marx's Theses on Feuerbach, in which, she says, Marx "calls for a materialism which can affirm the practical activity that structures and inheres in the object as part of that object's objectivity and materiality" (250, n. 5). She goes on to argue that on the basis of "this new kind of materialism that Marx proposes ... the object is transformative activity itself and, further, its materiality is established through this temporal movement.... In other words, the object materialises to the extent that it is a site of temporal transformation ... as transformative activity" (250, n. 5). This reading is a remarkable act of mystification and idealist abstraction, for it completely suppresses the fundamental element in Marx's "new kind of materialism": this "practical activity," this "transformative activity," constituting the object is labour. Marx's reunderstanding of materiality in the first Theses on Feuerbach as "sensuous human activity, practice" is the insistence on materiality as labour. To reduce labour to mere temporality is to exclude its materiality and do exactly what Marx opposes: to substitute "interpretation" for "transformation" of the world. As Marx writes in Capital, "Labour is, first of all, a process . . . by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature.... Through this movement he acts upon external nature and changes it, and in this way he simultaneously changes his own nature" (Capital, Vol. I, 283). Labor, of course, takes place in a temporality, but this is a specific "history" (i.e., a particular articulation of a mode of production), not an abstract, idealist, immanent "temporality" of differance. However, Butler does indeed reduce this transformative activity to basically an abstract (and quite idealist) notion of "temporal movement." Of course, the notion of temporality informing Butler's concept of materiality — as well as her concepts of performativity and the differences — within reiteration and citationality is not a historical, materialist temporality but rather the deconstructive trope that is one of the core principles of the Derridean notion of differance.

In "basing" her theory of materiality on Foucault's notion of a diffuse, autonomous, contingent and aleatory power, Butler, like Foucault, makes power, itself, the constitutive "base" of society and all social processes, substituting it for the Marxist concept of a determining economic base. But how effective is such a move, especially when we also consider that Butler has articulated Foucault's analytics of power in relation to a deconstructive logic of supplementary, thus generating a circular logic that quite outdoes Foucault? As I have already suggested, Butler constructs a supplementary circuit in which all the fundamental concepts of her social analytics are equivalent — or tropically slide one into the other. She declares not only that "'materiality' designates a certain effect of power or, rather, is power in its formative or constituting effects" (34), but also that "performativity is one domain in which power acts as discourse . . . [as] a reiterated acting that is power" (225). Moreover, Butler insists, as we have already seen, on the "indissolubility of materiality and signification" (30) and that "materialisation will be a kind of citationality" (15), that is performativity. In other words, power is not only the constitutive base of the social, immanent in all processes, but, through a series of tropic slippages power is materiality is discourse is citationality is performativity. Such an understanding of power and materiality becomes so closed and circular as to border on the ludicrous. It does not so much explain processes of power and social construction as avoid explanation altogether by inventing a series of tropic displacements. Butler is, of course, following Foucault, who claims that "power is everywhere ... comes from everywhere" (History of Sexuality 93). But as Nancy Hartsock rightly points out, "Power is everywhere, and so ultimately nowhere" (170). Such a notion of power is so broad and idealist, it is both absurd and quite ineffectual. How much more absurd, then, is Butler's supplementary logic in which power is materiality is discourse is citationality is performativity.? Not only is power everywhere and nowhere, but power is everything and nothing.

While this may be a quite ineffectual theory of power for any politics of social transformation, it is nonetheless a very appealing and popular one among ludic feminists and theorists, precisely because it provides an analytics of power in which we do not have to confront the global relations and systematicity of power; in which we do not have to deal with the most serious consequences of power operating in dialectical relation to the mode of production and division of labour— , the consequences, in other words, of exploitation. By construing power as immanent in all processes, as operating as discourse, as citationality — and thus as a "reiterative acting" divided by differences-within — this ludic logic constitutes power as reversible, as generating its own resistances. The "compulsory power relations," that Butler argues operate through multiple local sites to "form, maintain, sustain, and regulate bodies" (34), are themselves "unstable" and indeterminate: generating and sustaining resistance along with regulation. Moreover, the privileged place ludic theories accord discourse means, as Foucault argues, that "Discourse transmits and produces power; it reinforces it, but also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it possible to thwart it." The agency of change, in other words, is discourse itself or power as discourse. More, specifically, it is what Butler calls "resignification."

The politics of such a ludic theory is that it blurs the lines between the powerful and powerless, oppressor and oppressed, and produces a social analytic that turns the historical binaries of social class into reversible matters of discourse in which exploiter and exploited become shifting positions in the (Lacanian) Symbolic, open to resignification. This means that, through the play and invention of discourse (resignification), every subject, everyone, always already has access to the power imminent in discourse without any connection to the position of the subject in the social division of labour. In other words, in this analytics of power, the social relations of production-class relations-are covered up and concealed. Everyone is always already located in multiple sites of resistance no matter what their location in property relations may be. This view occludes the source of power: the fact that power is always constructed at the point of production. In contrast, power for historical materialists is always linked to relations of production and labour. In any society divided by the unequal division and appropriation of labour, power is a binary relation between exploiter and exploited; powerful and powerless; owner of the means of production and those who have nothing but their labour power to sell. Power, thus, cannot be translated into a plurality of differences as if all sites of power are equally powerful. The resolution of these binaries does not come about through a linguistic resignification but through revolutionary praxis to transform the system of exploitation and emancipate those it exploits.

We especially see Butler's assertion of the agency of invention (citationality) as a de-materialised site of reversible power in her efforts to account for the way "sex is both produced and destabilised in the course of this reiteration" of norms (10). Not only does citationality invoke the "chain of binding conventions," but it is also "by virtue of this reiteration that gaps and fissures are opened up," producing instability, and "this instability is the deconstituting possibility in the very process of repetition, the power that undoes the very effects by which "sex" is stabilised" (10). In other words, as supplementary processes, citationality, reiteration, and performativity, all simultaneously constitute and "deconstitute"; regulate and deregulate; 'produce and destabilise" the materialisation-sexing-of the body. The process of reiteration (citationality/performativity) is, in and of itself, a process of invention: the reversible, de-stabilising, de/reconstituting play of significations that subverts any stable, definite meanings. What this means is that the "regulatory power" of norms-which is established through reiteration-is itself reversible: it is also a deregulatory power.

However, contrary to ludic claims, this diverse deployment of deregulating invention by Butler, as well as by Cornell, Lyotard, Derrida and others (whether as performativity, citationality, resignification, remetaphorisation, refiguring, the differend, differance ... ) is not a progressive move beyond (free of) the bounds of existing systems and their material conditions. Rather invention is a way of avoiding the consequences of the structural forces in society-the social relations of production. The logic of invention is a double move that attempts to displace exploitation. Again, it does so by first construing material structural forces either as discourse or as so heavily mediated by discourses as to be "indissociable" from them, as Butler does. Then it reinterprets these structures in terms of the trope of invention and a differential logic (differance/differend/difference-within), thereby defining them as, in themselves, heterogeneous, indeterminate, self-deconstructing processes. In other words, within this ludic logic, structures are always already being undone by their own destabilising processes, their own differences-within. This means, in effect, that, for ludic theorists, there are no exploitative or determining structures or systematic relations, including production, because such structures would always already be in the process of undoing themselves and their effects. Of course, ludic critics do not deny oppression (that is, domination as opposed to exploitation), but they largely confine both their recognition and explanations of the occurrences of oppression to particular, local events and gestures of power that are, by definition, reversible, that generate their own resistances. What this means is that there is no need for revolution or class struggle since any oppressive "structure" is itself a deconstituting process that undoes its own effects (oppression). Domination is especially seen as undoing its own attempts to regulate subjectivities. As Butler argues, "'sexed positions' are not localities but, rather, citational practices instituted within a juridical domain," which attempts to "confine, limit, or prohibit some set of acts, practices, subjects, but in the process of articulating that prohibition, the law provides the discursive occasion for resistance, a resignification, and potential self-subversion of that law" (Bodies 109). Liberatory politics, for Butler, is thus a matter of invention, of resignification: the difference-within every citation or repetition of norm that opens up a space for reinvesting the norm and its symbolic regime, as in the regime of heterosexuality.

However, by trying to explain heterosexuality as regulatory regime of discourse, a compulsory symbolic law operating through "citationality," Butler confines "the regime of heterosexuality" entirely to a scene of the superstructure, to a discursive order. She suggests how it may operate, but she is not able to explain in any way why it does so; why it has the social and historical power it does; why it deploys (cites) the norms that she thinks it does. In cutting off heterosexuality-as well as materiality-from the material conditions of production, she isolates the "regime" of heterosexuality from any relation to patriarchal capitalism. This move then enables her to substitute the symbolic regime of heterosexuality for the social formation of patriarchal capitalism (which she entirely occludes) as the determining structure constructing our lives, gender and sexuality. Moreover her post-al politics posits invention as the latest trope for the freedom of deregulated subjectivities and unbounded desire-unconstrained by the "truth" of needs. But in actuality, the deployment of invention justifies, normalises and, in the name of deregulation, regulates the subjects of the new World Order. None of these ludic modes of invention-Butler's resignification, Cornell's remetaphorisation, Haraway's recoding, Lyotard's ode to the pleasures of inventing new phrases break the logic of the dominant ideology of capitalism which produces subjects according to the needs of the moving forces of production.

Butler's own analysis points up the limits of her ludic privileging of the discursive. Class, labour and the relations of production are the suppressed, covered over," "exclusionary" and "constitutive outside" of her own theory. Her notion of citationality, for instance, is unable to explain the material reality, of lesbian and gay oppression. Thus, she briefly moves toward a class analysis of resisting sexualities in order to ask, "For whom is outness a historically available and affordable option? Is there an unmarked class character to the demand for universal 'outness'" (227)? However, following her notion of citationality, Butler regards class, itself, to be a performance: an individual quoting of the texts of power. In other words, class, for Butler, is based on "power" as access to discourse and is contingent and individual; it does not concern the position of the subject in the social relations of production. But class is not the "effect" of power; rather it is the construct of production and, as such, it is a collectivity of practices.

For historical materialist feminists and lesbian/gay critics, however, "outness," and the possibility of exploring alternative sexualities is not simply a matter of individual "desire" nor is class a series of individualities. This is not to deny that one -experiences" sexuality on the level of individual experience, rather it questions whether sexuality can be explained on the level of experience. Butler's question about the "affordability" of "outing" both hints at and withdraws from dealing with the historical forces that, in fact, make "individual" experience socially possible. In his text, "it's Not Natural," Peter Ray demonstrates how the

industrial revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries broke down the traditional bonds and constraints of a society which had been tied to the land by economic necessity. Millions began to work in the cities for money wages, and for some at least the possibility arose of living outside the traditional family arrangements. Heterosexuality and homosexuality were concepts developed by the medical, moral and legal authorities at that time, in order to police the new society by demarcating acceptable and unacceptable behaviour. Male homosexuality was not specifically outlawed in Britain until 1885. (32)

Similarly John D'Emilio's work develops a sustained argument for the way alternative sexualities are tied to the labour relations of capitalism (Making Trouble). In her intimate critique, "A Question of Class," the contemporary lesbian theorist and writer, Dorothy Allison offers an explanation of alternative sexualities and class that is an effective intervention in the ludic reading of queerity. She argues that "Traditional feminist theory has had a limited understanding of class differences and of how sexuality and self are shaped by both desire and denial" (Skin 15). Focusing specifically on lesbian sexualities, she writes:

I have known I was a lesbian since I was a teenager, and I have spent a good twenty years making peace with the effects of incest and physical abuse. But what may be the central fact of my life is that I was born in 1949 in Greenville, South Carolina, the bastard daughter of a white woman from a desperately poor family, a girl who had left the seventh grade the year before, worked as a waitress, and was just a month past fifteen when she had me. That fact, the inescapable impact of being born in a condition of poverty that this society finds shameful, contemptible, and somehow deserved, has had dominion over me to such an extent that I have spent my life trying to overcome or deny it. I have learned with great difficulty that the vast majority of people believe that poverty is a voluntary condition. (Skin 14-15)

No matter how much ludic theorists try to erase questions of class, poverty and the economic from their work, their analysis is haunted by the relations of production and divisions of labour. We find this "return of the repressed" of the relations of production in Butler's ludic analysis in the opening chapter of Bodies that Matter, in which she attempts to "discern the history of sexual difference encoded in the history of matter" through a "rude and provocative" re-reading of Plato (54, 36). She begins by positing matter within the metaphysical binary of matter and form, and confines her argument to this metaphysical circuit. But at two points in her text, when she attempts to explain why Plato has constituted the category of the "excluded" in the way he has, she is forced to move beyond the domain of discourse to the relations of production and the division of labour. As Butler explains, "This xenophobic exclusion operates through the production of racialised others, and those whose 'natures' are considered less rational by virtue of their appointed task in the process of labouring to reproduce the conditions of private life" (48, emphasis added). And again, she says, "There is no singular outside, for the Forms require a number of exclusions; they are and replicate themselves through what they exclude, through not being animal, not being the woman, not being the slave, whose propriety is purchased through property, national and racial boundary, masculinism, and compulsory heterosexuality" (52). All these exclusions are part of the same "singular outside": the material relations of production which construct all of the social divisions and differences around labour and the appropriation of social resources. In other words, for all Butler's discursive displacements, the concealed, sutured over base of her own theory-as it is of any theory or knowledge practice-is still the (occluded) economic base.

We can see the consequences of these different theories of materialism by briefly examining the construction or "materialisation" of female gender-what Butler calls "girling." To describe this process, Butler adapts Althusser's concept of "interpellation" which means the ideological process of "calling" a person to take up (identify with) the position "named" (e.g., girl). According to Butler,

medical interpellation ... (the sonogram notwithstanding) ... shifts an infant from an 'it' to a 'she' or a 'he,' and in that naming, the girl is 'girled,' brought into the domain of language and kinship through the interpellation of gender.... The naming is at once the setting of a boundary, and also the repeated inculcation of a norm. (7-8)

Butler understands this naming ("girling") as placing the infant in a "regulatory regime" of discourse (language and kinship). But for historical materialists, ideological interpellation does not simply place the infant in discourse, but more important it also places the child in the relations of production, in the social division of labour (according to gender, heterosexuality, race, nationality). Butler's theory of performativity completely eclipses this dialectical relation between ideology and the economic. Butler is concerned with changing how "bodies matter," how they are valued. But without relating ideological "interpellation" to the relations of production, no amount of resignification in the symbolic can change "What counts as a valued body"-for what makes a body valuable in the world is its economic value.

This truth is painfully clear if we move beyond the privileged boundaries of the upper-middle class in the industrialised West (for whom basic needs are readily fulfilled) and see what is happening to "girling" in the international division of labour — especially among the impoverished classes in India. Here the "medical interpellation" (naming) of infants/foetuses, particularly through the use of the sonogram, immediately places "girled" foetuses not only in discourse but also in the gender division of labour and unequal access to social resources. About 60 per cent of the "girled" foetuses are being immediately aborted or murdered upon birth (female infanticide) because the families cannot afford to keep them. The citational acts, rituals, and "performatives" by which individuals are repeatedly "girled" such as expensive ear-piercing ceremonies and exorbitant bride dowries-are not simply acts of discourse, but economic practices. In India, under postcolonial capitalism, the appropriation of women's surplus labour is increasing to such an extent that these rituals and "performatives" of "girling" are becoming highly popular and widely exploited sources of capital and direct extraction of surplus labour. So much so, the unmarried woman's family is itself being "girled" in order for its combined labour to collectively produce the surplus value taken from the "girled body" (e.g., bride dowries). Revolutionary praxis and not simply "resignification" is necessary to end the exploitation and murdering of hundreds of thousands of economically de-valued "girled" bodies.

At the core of discursive materialism is the poetics of invention. The post-al politics of "invention" is a politics of discursive transformation that seeks to move "beyond" established codes into a "utopian" space of unencumbered (semiotic) freedom through the subversion of existing regimes of discourse and hierarchies of representation, language games, and signifying relations. It is a politics of local, contingent acts generating new phrases, idioms, linkages and rules of judgments for each particular situation without any pre-existing criteria. Such judgments, according to Jean-Francois Lyotard, have 'to be always done over again" because they concern incommensurable linkages among differends — linkages that must be "always done over again" in order not to suppress some other differend, some other linkage (Differend 140). Politics is thus reduced to discursive alterations and subversions: what Lyotard calls the "invention of new idioms" for the differend.

As I earlier suggested, part of what is at stake in the emphasis on "invention" by ludic postmodern and feminist theorists (not only Lyotard but also Derrida, Butler, and Cornell, as well as Luce Irigarary, Helene Cixous, Gregory Ulmer and others) is the crisis of social constructionism. Structuralism and, later on, poststructuralism critiqued traditional humanism for its metaphysics of presence — by which it secured its basic categories (self, consciousness, gender, sex, race ...) in nature. They offered, as a "supplement" to this theory of the subject, the notion that the subject was not naturally created but was socially constructed. By now, the idea of social construction as opposed to a "natural" essentialism has become the ludic orthodoxy, and the conflict between "essentialism" and "constructionism" has become one of the most contested scenes in feminism. Recently, however, the theory of the subject as socially constructed is turning into an impediment for ludic feminists and postmodern theorists, for whom constructionism seems too deterministic and restrictive of the agency of the subject. Ludic theorists are thus attempting to problematise this determinism through the trope of "invention" — the multiple, indeterminate, reversible play of significations that subverts any stable, definite meanings. For these ludic critics, the subject's inventiveness — that is, her/ his participation in the discursive "play" of language games, metaphors, significations — enables her/him to overcome the determinacy of social construction and move into the terrain of a utopian future.

This move first to a semiotic constructionism and then to invention involves a double displacement of historical materialism. By construing social construction largely in terms of a discursive construction, structuralists and poststructuralists have substituted a linguistic determinism for a historical materialist concept of construction as determined by the forces and relations of production. Now the more recent ludic rejection of even linguistic determinism entirely eclipses the historical actuality of determinism without having to address its materialist and economic forms.

This valorisation of a liberating inventiveness and complete erasure of any form of necessary relation is clearly evident in Drucilla Cornell's "utopian feminism" with its strategies of "remetaphorisation" (Beyond Accommodation). But perhaps one of the fullest articulations of this eclipse of historical material'. m in the shift from constructionism to invention is developed by Judith Butler in Bodies that Matter.

Butler's work combines a deconstructive textualism with a Foucaultian analytics of power. It is thus important to briefly critique here the basic presuppositions of Foucault's notion of power. Power in Foucault is not understood as primarily textual, although it is irrevocably linked to the operation of discourse and knowledge relations. Rather power, according to Foucault, "must be understood in the first instance as the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organisation" (History of Sexuality 92). Moreover, these "force relations" of power are, according to Foucault, Self-constituting, immanent, local, diffuse and a-systematic. Power, in other words, is "aleatory" (that is, marked by chance and arbitrariness); contingent (rather than historically determined); heterogeneous (divided by difference within), and unstable — by provoking "resistance" it "undoes" itself. Foucault's analysis of the local, specific and contingent, however, is based on a quite abstract, static, a-historical and mystified concept of power: for Foucault "Power is everywhere ... comes from everywhere ... is permanent, repetitious, inert" — it is always already with us and always will be. Moreover, Foucault turns resistance into a nearly automatic, immanent response to the exercise of power: "where there is power, there is resistance" (95-96). For "Resistances," Foucault declares, "are inscribed in the [relations of power] as an irreducible opposite" — rather like a natural resistance to a physical force (96). Such a theory of power substitutes a logic of contingency for the logic of social necessity. In so doing, it preempts any need for collective, organised social transformation — any need, in other words, for emancipation, and more important, it dispenses with the necessity for organised social and political revolution to overthrow dominant power relations. All we need to do, according to this ludic logic, is recognise and validate the local "multiplicity of points of resistance" that power itself already generates.

Perhaps the most "appealing" aspect of Foucault's theory for most "left" critics and feminists is that it offers, as Foucault himself says, "a non-economic analysis of power" as opposed to the "economism in the theory of power" in Marx as well as in the juridical-liberal notion of power (Power/Knowledge 88-89). Foucault conflates these two quite opposed understandings of power by equating a trope with a theoretical explanation — he follows the ludic assumption that explanation/concepts are, in fact, tropes. He characterises the juridical-liberal notion of power as a form of economism simply because it relies on the trope of commodity exchange. Whereas, in "the Marxist conception of power," he says, "one finds none of all that" (88). What one does find — and what Foucault's entire theory of power is an attempt to displace — is, as Foucault describes it: "an economic functionality of power ... power is conceived primarily in terms of the role it plays in the maintenance simultaneously of the relations of production and of a class domination which the development and specific forms of the forces of production have rendered possible" (88-89). In opposition to a Marxist theory of power — which always insists on the dialectical relations of power and the economic — Foucault (the former student of the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser) develops an unrelentingly anti-historical-materialist theory of power. He severs power from its material connection to the social relations and contradictions of production, and reduces it to an abstract force confined to the superstructure. His is an anti-dialectical theory that substitutes an analytics of localised, reversible domination for a theory of systematic global exploitation. This ludic displacement of historical materialism has made Foucault one of the main articulators of post-Marxism in late capitalism and given him an extraordinary influence among academics, professionals and other middle and upper class knowledge-workers, especially in the West.

Building on Foucault's theory of a localised, diffuse, a-systematic power, Butler rewrites constructionism, specifically the construction of gender/sexed bodies, as indeterminate. In short, she rewrites it in terms of invention — what she calls "performativity" or "citationality." In Bodies that Matter, Butler specifically contests, what she calls, "radical linguistic constructivism" which "is understood to be generative and deterministic" and forms a "linguistic monism, whereby everything "is only and always language" (6). According to Butler, "what ensues," from this position, "is an exasperated debate that many of us are tired of hearing" (6): a debate over determinism and agency, over essentialism and constructivism. She decries the way structuralist and radical linguistic theories reduce "constructivism" "to determinism and impl(y) the evacuation or displacement of human agency" (9). This is an especially important issue in Butler's work. She is committed to the preservation of "agency"; in fact, it is the priority of her post-al politics. But she rejects both the "voluntarist subject of humanism" and the "grammatical" subject of structuralist and classical post-structuralist theories. She thus dismisses those who "construe" construction "along structuralist lines," because they "claim that there are structures that construct the subject, impersonal forces, such as Culture or Discourse or Power, where these terms occupy the grammatical site of the subject" (9). In other words, she objects to what she considers to be a personification of "discourse or language or the social" that posits a grammatical subject as initiating the activity of construction. Butler attempts to displace this grammatical logic of structuralist and "radical linguistic constructivism" (the logic of subject and predicate) with a more open rhetorical or discursive logic of agency as "reiteration": in other words, with a notion of agency as invention, which she variously calls "performativity" or "citationality."

She argues that Foucault's "view of power" should be "understood as the disruption and subversion of this grammar and metaphysics of the subject" (9); it is an analytics of power that, for Butler, accounts for the generation of subjectitivities without in turn positing a determining subject. This enables Butler to understand construction as "neither a subject nor its act, but a process of reiteration by which both 'subjects' and ,acts' come to appear at all. There is no power that acts, but only a reiterated acting that is power in its persistence and instability" (9). In other words, subjects/agents, are for Butler, effects of the agency of a reiterative power that she calls performativity. Butler is asserting a localised and localising theory of power and construction (performativity) that is determinate yet indeterminate; involves subjectivities but not a "Subject," and an agency that constructs its own agents.

Invention or performativity enables Butler to posit a mode of inquiry — into the construction of the subject — that she claims "is no longer constructivism, but neither is it essentialism," because there is, Butler asserts, "an 'outside' to what is constructed by discourse" (8). However, this is an "inventive" rather than a conventional notion of "outside": as Butler says,

this is not an absolute 'outside,' and ontological there-ness that exceeds or counters the boundaries of discourse; as a constitutive 'outside,' it is that which can only be thought — when it can — in relation to that discourse, at and as its most tenuous borders. (8)

In other words, the very "outside" to discourse that allows us, according to Butler, to escape the dichotomy of constructivism/essentialism, is itself invente through the play of discourse. By this she means that "the extra-discursive is delimited, it is formed by the very discourse from which it seeks to free itself" (11). However, this is not so much a move beyond the "exasperated debate" as it is yet another ludic displacement of fundamental issues through a tropic play that conflates differences through a logic of supplementarily.

The limits of this discursive "invention" of the outside (the "extra-discursive") are made especially clear in Butler's ludic articulation of matter/materiality. She re-understands "the notion of matter, not as a site or surface, but as a process of materialisation that stabilises over time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity, and surface we call matter" (9). In other words, Butler is substituting "materialisation" for construction, but in so doing, she puts forward a concept of "materiality," "matter," "materialisation" that breaks both with the common sense understanding — where these terms refer to a reality or referent outside language — and with a historical materialist understanding, in which these concepts refer to the objective reality of the actual historical conditions produced by the mode of production. Instead, Butler rewrites materialisation, itself, as a form of discursive practice: as she says, "materialisation will be a kind of citationality, the acquisition of being through the citing of power" (15). Citationality — that is, the practice of "citing," repeating, summoning sexual norms and "laws" — is, in turn, also a form of performativity. Performativity, a concept Butler originally developed in Gender Trouble, is a form of performance, but its meaning, for Butler, cannot be simply reduced to performance, especially theatrical notions of performance as role playing. Butler argues that "performance as bounded 'act' is distinguished from performativity insofar as the latter consists in a reiteration of norms which precede, constrain, and exceed the performer . . . further, what is 'performed' works to conceal, if not to disavow, what remains opaque, unconscious, unperformable. The reduction of performativity to performance would be a mistake" (Bodies 234). The meaning of performativity, in other words, slides into a kind of "speech act" that enacts, repeats or "cites" the norms of sex. In fact, one of the main concerns of Bodies that Matter is "the reworking of performativity as citationality," so that Butler now defines performativity as "the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names" (14, 2).

Butler's "outside" to discourse, in other words, is what discourse itself constructs through "exclusion, erasure, violent foreclosure, objection." But this "outside" is itself supplementary: it is a "disruptive return" that constitutes what excludes it. For example, the primacy of masculinity in Western metaphysics is, Butler argues, "founded ... through a prohibition which outlaws the spectre of a lesbian resemblance" (the lesbian phallus); masculinity, then, is an "effect of that very prohibition ... dependent on that which it must exclude" (52). The "outside" (the excluded lesbian), in other words, is the necessary ground "constituting" the "inside" of masculinity and heterosexuality. Butler is following here the classic poststructuralist erasure of the boundaries between inside and outside, that is, "supplementarily" (Derrida, Grammatology 144-145). But this supplementarity — what Butler insists is the "indissolubility of materiality and signification" (30)-also locates us as always already in an infinite semiotic loop: a kind of discursive Mobius strip. Butler reduces materiality to the materiality of the signifier and the effects of signifying processes, notably citationality. As she declares, "it is not that one cannot get outside of language in order to grasp materiality in and of itself; rather, every effort to refer to materiality takes place through a signifying process which ... is always already material" (68).

Thus, sex, for Butler, is not "a bodily given ... but ... a cultural norm which governs the materialisation of bodies" (2-3). The "construction" of sexual identity is an activity of performativity in which the body "assumes" or "materialises" its sex through a process of "citationality" — that is, a speaking in and through bodies in which the symbolic laws, norms and discourses of heterosexuality are "cited" in the same way, according to Butler, that a judge "cites" a law (14). There is in Butler's theory then an equivalency or rather a tropic sliding and linking together of materialisation, performativity, citationality as all forms of discursive reiteration. In other words, "matter" (the body) is given its boundaries, shapes, fixity and surface — it is "materialised" (sexed) — through the "citationality" of discourse, through the "reiteration of norms." The materiality of sexuality, then, is not outside language but is the effect of discourse.

However, in a footnote, Butler specifically disclaims that materiality is "the effect of 'discourse' which is its cause" (Bodies 251, n. 12). But, she is able to make this disclaimer only through a series of dissimulations that in turn validate "dissimulation," itself, as the crux of her theory of materiality/materializations. She does so by deploying Foucault's theory of power, which, as I have already indicated, posits power as diffuse and dispersed without a cause or originary source. Foucault's aleatory and contingent notion of power enables Butler to, as she says, "displace the causal relation through a reworking of the notion of 'effect.' Power is established in and through its effects, where these effects are the dissimulated workings of power itself" (251, n. 12). Butler is, in short, deconstructing causality (following Nietzsche's re-reading of causality through its effects in his The Will to Power) into a circuit of supplementary relations in which the "cause," as Nietzsche claims, is itself the effect of its own dissimulated causality, or the "effect" is itself the causality of its own dissimulated effects. This move enables her to rewrite materiality as the "effect of power": according to Butler, "'Materiality' appears only when its status as contingently constituted through discourse is erased, concealed, covered over. Materiality is thus the dissimulated effect of power" (251, n. 12, emphasis added). In Butler's ludic argument, materiality is thus entirely confined to the level of the "superstructure," to discourse. Moreover, this ludic articulation of materiality is an extended ideological re-mystification. in the name of openness, it puts forth an understanding of power as a closed, self-legitimating operation. It completely suppresses the real material conditions of what Marx calls the "working day": the production of profit (surplus value) through the exploitation of our unpaid and subsistence labour.

Butler's suppression and mystification of the materiality of materialism the materiality of labour — is quite explicit in two brief references she makes to Marx's historical materialism. The first is an offhand reference in which she attempts to appropriate Marx to her position by linking him to her rereading of classical notions of matter as "temporalised" and as positing the "indissolubility of ... materiality and signification" (Bodies 31). She attributes this temporalisation to what she claims is Marx's understanding of "'matter' . . . as a principle of transformation" (31). However, Butler is able to appropriate Marx for a genealogy of (idealist) theories of matter, only by profoundly misreading him and completely excluding the issue of labour from his work. In a footnote to her observation on Marx, she specifies that her reading is based on the first of Marx's Theses on Feuerbach, in which, she says, Marx "calls for a materialism which can affirm the practical activity that structures and inheres in the object as part of that object's objectivity and materiality" (250, n. 5). She goes on to argue that on the basis of "this new kind of materialism that Marx proposes ... the object is transformative activity itself and, further, its materiality is established through this temporal movement.... In other words, the object materialises to the extent that it is a site of temporal transformation ... as transformative activity" (250, n. 5). This reading is a remarkable act of mystification and idealist abstraction, for it completely suppresses the fundamental element in Marx's "new kind of materialism": this "practical activity," this "transformative activity," constituting the object is labour. Marx's reunderstanding of materiality in the first Theses on Feuerbach as "sensuous human activity, practice" is the insistence on materiality as labour. To reduce labour to mere temporality is to exclude its materiality and do exactly what Marx opposes: to substitute "interpretation" for "transformation" of the world. As Marx writes in Capital, "Labour is, first of all, a process . . . by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature.... Through this movement he acts upon external nature and changes it, and in this way he simultaneously changes his own nature" (Capital, Vol. I, 283). Labor, of course, takes place in a temporality, but this is a specific "history" (i.e., a particular articulation of a mode of production), not an abstract, idealist, immanent "temporality" of differance. However, Butler does indeed reduce this transformative activity to basically an abstract (and quite idealist) notion of "temporal movement." Of course, the notion of temporality informing Butler's concept of materiality — as well as her concepts of performativity and the differences — within reiteration and citationality is not a historical, materialist temporality but rather the deconstructive trope that is one of the core principles of the Derridean notion of differance.

In "basing" her theory of materiality on Foucault's notion of a diffuse, autonomous, contingent and aleatory power, Butler, like Foucault, makes power, itself, the constitutive "base" of society and all social processes, substituting it for the Marxist concept of a determining economic base. But how effective is such a move, especially when we also consider that Butler has articulated Foucault's analytics of power in relation to a deconstructive logic of supplementary, thus generating a circular logic that quite outdoes Foucault? As I have already suggested, Butler constructs a supplementary circuit in which all the fundamental concepts of her social analytics are equivalent — or tropically slide one into the other. She declares not only that "'materiality' designates a certain effect of power or, rather, is power in its formative or constituting effects" (34), but also that "performativity is one domain in which power acts as discourse . . . [as] a reiterated acting that is power" (225). Moreover, Butler insists, as we have already seen, on the "indissolubility of materiality and signification" (30) and that "materialisation will be a kind of citationality" (15), that is performativity. In other words, power is not only the constitutive base of the social, immanent in all processes, but, through a series of tropic slippages power is materiality is discourse is citationality is performativity. Such an understanding of power and materiality becomes so closed and circular as to border on the ludicrous. It does not so much explain processes of power and social construction as avoid explanation altogether by inventing a series of tropic displacements. Butler is, of course, following Foucault, who claims that "power is everywhere ... comes from everywhere" (History of Sexuality 93). But as Nancy Hartsock rightly points out, "Power is everywhere, and so ultimately nowhere" (170). Such a notion of power is so broad and idealist, it is both absurd and quite ineffectual. How much more absurd, then, is Butler's supplementary logic in which power is materiality is discourse is citationality is performativity.? Not only is power everywhere and nowhere, but power is everything and nothing.

While this may be a quite ineffectual theory of power for any politics of social transformation, it is nonetheless a very appealing and popular one among ludic feminists and theorists, precisely because it provides an analytics of power in which we do not have to confront the global relations and systematicity of power; in which we do not have to deal with the most serious consequences of power operating in dialectical relation to the mode of production and division of labour— , the consequences, in other words, of exploitation. By construing power as immanent in all processes, as operating as discourse, as citationality — and thus as a "reiterative acting" divided by differences-within — this ludic logic constitutes power as reversible, as generating its own resistances. The "compulsory power relations," that Butler argues operate through multiple local sites to "form, maintain, sustain, and regulate bodies" (34), are themselves "unstable" and indeterminate: generating and sustaining resistance along with regulation. Moreover, the privileged place ludic theories accord discourse means, as Foucault argues, that "Discourse transmits and produces power; it reinforces it, but also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it possible to thwart it." The agency of change, in other words, is discourse itself or power as discourse. More, specifically, it is what Butler calls "resignification."

The politics of such a ludic theory is that it blurs the lines between the powerful and powerless, oppressor and oppressed, and produces a social analytic that turns the historical binaries of social class into reversible matters of discourse in which exploiter and exploited become shifting positions in the (Lacanian) Symbolic, open to resignification. This means that, through the play and invention of discourse (resignification), every subject, everyone, always already has access to the power imminent in discourse without any connection to the position of the subject in the social division of labour. In other words, in this analytics of power, the social relations of production-class relations-are covered up and concealed. Everyone is always already located in multiple sites of resistance no matter what their location in property relations may be. This view occludes the source of power: the fact that power is always constructed at the point of production. In contrast, power for historical materialists is always linked to relations of production and labour. In any society divided by the unequal division and appropriation of labour, power is a binary relation between exploiter and exploited; powerful and powerless; owner of the means of production and those who have nothing but their labour power to sell. Power, thus, cannot be translated into a plurality of differences as if all sites of power are equally powerful. The resolution of these binaries does not come about through a linguistic resignification but through revolutionary praxis to transform the system of exploitation and emancipate those it exploits.

We especially see Butler's assertion of the agency of invention (citationality) as a de-materialised site of reversible power in her efforts to account for the way "sex is both produced and destabilised in the course of this reiteration" of norms (10). Not only does citationality invoke the "chain of binding conventions," but it is also "by virtue of this reiteration that gaps and fissures are opened up," producing instability, and "this instability is the deconstituting possibility in the very process of repetition, the power that undoes the very effects by which "sex" is stabilised" (10). In other words, as supplementary processes, citationality, reiteration, and performativity, all simultaneously constitute and "deconstitute"; regulate and deregulate; 'produce and destabilise" the materialisation-sexing-of the body. The process of reiteration (citationality/performativity) is, in and of itself, a process of invention: the reversible, de-stabilising, de/reconstituting play of significations that subverts any stable, definite meanings. What this means is that the "regulatory power" of norms-which is established through reiteration-is itself reversible: it is also a deregulatory power.

However, contrary to ludic claims, this diverse deployment of deregulating invention by Butler, as well as by Cornell, Lyotard, Derrida and others (whether as performativity, citationality, resignification, remetaphorisation, refiguring, the differend, differance ... ) is not a progressive move beyond (free of) the bounds of existing systems and their material conditions. Rather invention is a way of avoiding the consequences of the structural forces in society-the social relations of production. The logic of invention is a double move that attempts to displace exploitation. Again, it does so by first construing material structural forces either as discourse or as so heavily mediated by discourses as to be "indissociable" from them, as Butler does. Then it reinterprets these structures in terms of the trope of invention and a differential logic (differance/differend/difference-within), thereby defining them as, in themselves, heterogeneous, indeterminate, self-deconstructing processes. In other words, within this ludic logic, structures are always already being undone by their own destabilising processes, their own differences-within. This means, in effect, that, for ludic theorists, there are no exploitative or determining structures or systematic relations, including production, because such structures would always already be in the process of undoing themselves and their effects. Of course, ludic critics do not deny oppression (that is, domination as opposed to exploitation), but they largely confine both their recognition and explanations of the occurrences of oppression to particular, local events and gestures of power that are, by definition, reversible, that generate their own resistances. What this means is that there is no need for revolution or class struggle since any oppressive "structure" is itself a deconstituting process that undoes its own effects (oppression). Domination is especially seen as undoing its own attempts to regulate subjectivities. As Butler argues, "'sexed positions' are not localities but, rather, citational practices instituted within a juridical domain," which attempts to "confine, limit, or prohibit some set of acts, practices, subjects, but in the process of articulating that prohibition, the law provides the discursive occasion for resistance, a resignification, and potential self-subversion of that law" (Bodies 109). Liberatory politics, for Butler, is thus a matter of invention, of resignification: the difference-within every citation or repetition of norm that opens up a space for reinvesting the norm and its symbolic regime, as in the regime of heterosexuality.

However, by trying to explain heterosexuality as regulatory regime of discourse, a compulsory symbolic law operating through "citationality," Butler confines "the regime of heterosexuality" entirely to a scene of the superstructure, to a discursive order. She suggests how it may operate, but she is not able to explain in any way why it does so; why it has the social and historical power it does; why it deploys (cites) the norms that she thinks it does. In cutting off heterosexuality-as well as materiality-from the material conditions of production, she isolates the "regime" of heterosexuality from any relation to patriarchal capitalism. This move then enables her to substitute the symbolic regime of heterosexuality for the social formation of patriarchal capitalism (which she entirely occludes) as the determining structure constructing our lives, gender and sexuality. Moreover her post-al politics posits invention as the latest trope for the freedom of deregulated subjectivities and unbounded desire-unconstrained by the "truth" of needs. But in actuality, the deployment of invention justifies, normalises and, in the name of deregulation, regulates the subjects of the new World Order. None of these ludic modes of invention-Butler's resignification, Cornell's remetaphorisation, Haraway's recoding, Lyotard's ode to the pleasures of inventing new phrases break the logic of the dominant ideology of capitalism which produces subjects according to the needs of the moving forces of production.

Butler's own analysis points up the limits of her ludic privileging of the discursive. Class, labour and the relations of production are the suppressed, covered over," "exclusionary" and "constitutive outside" of her own theory. Her notion of citationality, for instance, is unable to explain the material reality, of lesbian and gay oppression. Thus, she briefly moves toward a class analysis of resisting sexualities in order to ask, "For whom is outness a historically available and affordable option? Is there an unmarked class character to the demand for universal 'outness'" (227)? However, following her notion of citationality, Butler regards class, itself, to be a performance: an individual quoting of the texts of power. In other words, class, for Butler, is based on "power" as access to discourse and is contingent and individual; it does not concern the position of the subject in the social relations of production. But class is not the "effect" of power; rather it is the construct of production and, as such, it is a collectivity of practices.

For historical materialist feminists and lesbian/gay critics, however, "outness," and the possibility of exploring alternative sexualities is not simply a matter of individual "desire" nor is class a series of individualities. This is not to deny that one -experiences" sexuality on the level of individual experience, rather it questions whether sexuality can be explained on the level of experience. Butler's question about the "affordability" of "outing" both hints at and withdraws from dealing with the historical forces that, in fact, make "individual" experience socially possible. In his text, "it's Not Natural," Peter Ray demonstrates how the

industrial revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries broke down the traditional bonds and constraints of a society which had been tied to the land by economic necessity. Millions began to work in the cities for money wages, and for some at least the possibility arose of living outside the traditional family arrangements. Heterosexuality and homosexuality were concepts developed by the medical, moral and legal authorities at that time, in order to police the new society by demarcating acceptable and unacceptable behaviour. Male homosexuality was not specifically outlawed in Britain until 1885. (32)

Similarly John D'Emilio's work develops a sustained argument for the way alternative sexualities are tied to the labour relations of capitalism (Making Trouble). In her intimate critique, "A Question of Class," the contemporary lesbian theorist and writer, Dorothy Allison offers an explanation of alternative sexualities and class that is an effective intervention in the ludic reading of queerity. She argues that "Traditional feminist theory has had a limited understanding of class differences and of how sexuality and self are shaped by both desire and denial" (Skin 15). Focusing specifically on lesbian sexualities, she writes:

I have known I was a lesbian since I was a teenager, and I have spent a good twenty years making peace with the effects of incest and physical abuse. But what may be the central fact of my life is that I was born in 1949 in Greenville, South Carolina, the bastard daughter of a white woman from a desperately poor family, a girl who had left the seventh grade the year before, worked as a waitress, and was just a month past fifteen when she had me. That fact, the inescapable impact of being born in a condition of poverty that this society finds shameful, contemptible, and somehow deserved, has had dominion over me to such an extent that I have spent my life trying to overcome or deny it. I have learned with great difficulty that the vast majority of people believe that poverty is a voluntary condition. (Skin 14-15)

No matter how much ludic theorists try to erase questions of class, poverty and the economic from their work, their analysis is haunted by the relations of production and divisions of labour. We find this "return of the repressed" of the relations of production in Butler's ludic analysis in the opening chapter of Bodies that Matter, in which she attempts to "discern the history of sexual difference encoded in the history of matter" through a "rude and provocative" re-reading of Plato (54, 36). She begins by positing matter within the metaphysical binary of matter and form, and confines her argument to this metaphysical circuit. But at two points in her text, when she attempts to explain why Plato has constituted the category of the "excluded" in the way he has, she is forced to move beyond the domain of discourse to the relations of production and the division of labour. As Butler explains, "This xenophobic exclusion operates through the production of racialised others, and those whose 'natures' are considered less rational by virtue of their appointed task in the process of labouring to reproduce the conditions of private life" (48, emphasis added). And again, she says, "There is no singular outside, for the Forms require a number of exclusions; they are and replicate themselves through what they exclude, through not being animal, not being the woman, not being the slave, whose propriety is purchased through property, national and racial boundary, masculinism, and compulsory heterosexuality" (52). All these exclusions are part of the same "singular outside": the material relations of production which construct all of the social divisions and differences around labour and the appropriation of social resources. In other words, for all Butler's discursive displacements, the concealed, sutured over base of her own theory-as it is of any theory or knowledge practice-is still the (occluded) economic base.

We can see the consequences of these different theories of materialism by briefly examining the construction or "materialisation" of female gender-what Butler calls "girling." To describe this process, Butler adapts Althusser's concept of "interpellation" which means the ideological process of "calling" a person to take up (identify with) the position "named" (e.g., girl). According to Butler,

medical interpellation ... (the sonogram notwithstanding) ... shifts an infant from an 'it' to a 'she' or a 'he,' and in that naming, the girl is 'girled,' brought into the domain of language and kinship through the interpellation of gender.... The naming is at once the setting of a boundary, and also the repeated inculcation of a norm. (7-8)

Butler understands this naming ("girling") as placing the infant in a "regulatory regime" of discourse (language and kinship). But for historical materialists, ideological interpellation does not simply place the infant in discourse, but more important it also places the child in the relations of production, in the social division of labour (according to gender, heterosexuality, race, nationality). Butler's theory of performativity completely eclipses this dialectical relation between ideology and the economic. Butler is concerned with changing how "bodies matter," how they are valued. But without relating ideological "interpellation" to the relations of production, no amount of resignification in the symbolic can change "What counts as a valued body"-for what makes a body valuable in the world is its economic value.

This truth is painfully clear if we move beyond the privileged boundaries of the upper-middle class in the industrialised West (for whom basic needs are readily fulfilled) and see what is happening to "girling" in the international division of labour — especially among the impoverished classes in India. Here the "medical interpellation" (naming) of infants/foetuses, particularly through the use of the sonogram, immediately places "girled" foetuses not only in discourse but also in the gender division of labour and unequal access to social resources. About 60 per cent of the "girled" foetuses are being immediately aborted or murdered upon birth (female infanticide) because the families cannot afford to keep them. The citational acts, rituals, and "performatives" by which individuals are repeatedly "girled" such as expensive ear-piercing ceremonies and exorbitant bride dowries-are not simply acts of discourse, but economic practices. In India, under postcolonial capitalism, the appropriation of women's surplus labour is increasing to such an extent that these rituals and "performatives" of "girling" are becoming highly popular and widely exploited sources of capital and direct extraction of surplus labour. So much so, the unmarried woman's family is itself being "girled" in order for its combined labour to collectively produce the surplus value taken from the "girled body" (e.g., bride dowries). Revolutionary praxis and not simply "resignification" is necessary to end the exploitation and murdering of hundreds of thousands of economically de-valued "girled" bodies.