Non-dualism

Non-dualistic Sex
Josef Mitterers Non-dualistic Philosophy in the
Light of Judith Butlers (De)Constructivist Feminism
Martin G. Weiss University of Klagenfurt martin.weiss/at/aau.at

>Context Josef Mitterer has become known for criticizing the main exponents of analytic and constructivist philoso-

phy for their blind adoption of a dualistic epistemology based on an alleged ontological difference between world and
words. Judith Butler, who has developed an influential model of (de)constructivist feminism and has been labeled a
linguistic constructivist, has been criticized for sustaining exactly what, according to Mitterer, most modern philosophy fails to acknowledge: namely that there is no ontological difference between objective facts beyond language and
the discourse about these facts. >Problem In the scholarly discussion on non-dualism, two main questions have
been raised: Where does Mitterers basic consensus, i.e., the starting-point description, come from? and: What does it
mean, to say that further descriptions change their object? >Method Comparative analysis of the core concepts of
Mitterers and Butlers work in the context of the history of ideas. >Results Butlers conception of a performative
production of objectivity through discursive and non-discursive iterated practices can be interpreted as an illustration
of Mitterers claim that descriptions change their object. The problem of where Mitterers starting-point descriptions
come from can be solved by adopting Butlers concept of culturally inherited practices. >Key words Non-dualism,
constructivism, feminism, body, sex, gender, hermeneutics, performativity, Josef Mitterer, Judith Butler.

The true world we have abolished. What

world has remained? The apparent one
perhaps? But no! With the true world we
have also abolished the apparent one.
(Nietzsche 1988a: 81)

Introduction
In his recently republished Das Jenseits
der Philosophie (Mitterer 2011a), a programmatic outline of a non-dualistic approach to
epistemology, first published in 1992, Josef
Mitterer accuses the heroes of contemporary
analytic and constructivist philosophy
from Ludwig Wittgenstein and Willard van
Orman Quine to Benjamin L. Whorf and
Thomas S. Kuhn of (implicitly) promoting
an inconsistent word-language dualism. According to Mitterer, all the above-mentioned
authors share the basic idea that the objective world and the language with which we
talk about the world pertain to two different
ontological realms; in other words, that language always refers to non-linguistic objects
beyond language. Independently of precisely
how the relation between words and things
may ultimately be conceived as representa-

tion, image, interpretation or even construction the core dualistic principle remains
the same: words refer (in some way or another) to non-linguistic things.
This dichotomy, which is at the origin of
all epistemological problems, can be traced
back to at least Plato for its naturalistic version, and to Kant for its more constructivist
one (Weber 2005). Plato established the first
systematic doctrine of two worlds by introducing the ontological distinction between
the realm of unchangeable, everlasting, objective ideas located in the topos hyperuranios, intelligible only rationally on the one
hand, and the realm of their ephemeral material representations, accessible only sensually on the other.
A more constructivist version of epistemic dualism is offered by Immanuel Kant
in his dichotomy of the inaccessible thing
in itself (Ding an sich), which lies beyond
all qualities and concepts and the appearing
phenomena shaped by the cognitive apparatus of the subject namely its forms of pure
intuition (space and time), and its conceptual
categories (quality, quantity, relation, modality) , which molds the thing in itself into
an epistemic object accessible to subjectivity.

Mitterers critique
of dualism
Mitterer makes the claim that the dualism underlying modern epistemology is
inconsistent because self-contradictory
although his critique would also apply to
the historic versions of Plato and Kant. The
reason for this, according to Mitterer, is that
every form of epistemic dualism, the naturalistic as well as the constructivist models,
needs to distinguish between the object
and the description of the object, which
ultimately results in a self-contradictory
conception of the object. In fact, dualism
on the one hand defines the object as that
which is completely unknown, i.e., radically
inaccessible before its description, but on
the other hand as the entity that the description describes, i.e., as the entity represented
by its description. Mitterer argues that the
object of dualism beyond, i.e., prior to, any
description is simply inconceivable. This is
because if we take an object and try to purify
it from all descriptions, we will not reach the
objective object before description but mere
nothing. A similar critique has been put forward by Friedrich W. J. Schelling in relation

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to Kants thing in itself. Schelling stressed

that the very concept of a thing in itself
was a contradictio in adjecto since either the
thing in itself was a thing, i.e., a singular entity in time and space provided with
specific qualities, or it was in itself, outside
of time and space and without any qualities,
i.e., nothing at all (Schelling 1968).
A different critique that Mitterer puts
forward regarding the dualistic model of
epistemology argues that the object of a description does not come before its description, but is the performative (a word Mitterer does not use, but which describes what
he is describing) result of the description.
Therefore it seems not too far-fetched to
define Mitterers descriptions as Foucauldian discourses, i.e., as practices, that systematically form the objects of which they
speak (Foucault 1972,49). Thus the object
of description is always the description of
the object (Mitterer 2011a: 12ff). The
starting-point of a description is therefore
not an object beyond any description but an
antecedent description:
The object of description is already a descrip
tion, namely the description on hand. In the
non-dualistic parlance the description of a description is nothing more than the continuation
of the first, i.e., the antecedent, description
(Mitterer 2011a: 17)

According to Mitterer, the object of a

description can be conceived only as it had
already been described, i.e., as a description so far, which then may be continued in
a further description from now on (Mitterer 2011a: 21). Although Mitterer emphasizes that he does not want to claim that
the object of description is no object, but
only description (Mitterer 2011a: 18), and
stresses that the description from now on
exceeds the description so far, this does not
mean that the starting-point description, or
basis-consensus (Mitterer 2011b: 153f),
is some kind of extra-discursive object. On
the contrary, Mitterer suggests that the starting-point description is a description and an
object of a description. The description so
far is the linguistic object of the description from now on.

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Non-dualism and
hermeneutics
Mitterers position thus reechoes the
hermeneutical insight that in everyday life,
as well as in science, we do not deal with
pure, meaningless, i.e., empty, objects,
which are simply inconceivable, but with
meaningful descriptions. This is also true for
the extreme case in which the first startingpoint description (the description so far)
might seem meaningless and lead to a description from now on, expressing the fact
that the description so far is not describable
at all. This is so, because even if we encounter a non-further-describable starting-point
description, to describe it as such is still
a further description of the indescribable
as indescribable. To describe something
as not describable is still to describe it as
something. We always already deal with descriptions and not with pure objects beyond
description. Hermeneutics claims that as rational beings we cannot escape description,
i.e., understanding. We are doomed to understand and are surrounded by meaningful
entities, even if we do not know what they
mean. What we cannot encounter is a pure,
i.e., meaningless, object beyond meaning.
The starting points of descriptions are thus
not meaningless, pure objects, but tacit
(Weber 2010: 20), pre-predicative meaningful descriptions (so far), which may then
in a second stage get explicitly described
in predicative assertions, i.e., descriptions
(from now on). Explicit asserting descriptions from now on are about starting-point
pre-predicative descriptions so far.
But what exactly are these starting-point
descriptions which Mitterer calls descriptions so far, rudimental descriptions
(Rudimetrbeschreibungen), objects of indication (Angabe Objekte), starting-point
objects (Ausgangs-Objekte) basis-consensus (Basiskonsens), and starting-point
consensus (Ausgangskonsens) (Mitterer
2011a: 72ff; Mitterer 2011b: 127, 151,
112) from which all our further descriptions start? Mitterer has been criticized for
his strict linguistic approach, which does
not take into account the role practical experience plays in epistemology (Ofner 2008;
Janich 2010; Gadenne 2008). Despite this,
it seems plausible that Mitterers startingpoint descriptions, the pre-conditions of

all further explicit propositional descriptions, may themselves be unspoken and

resemble tacit practices, although they are
linguistic and have a linguistic structure in
a hermeneutic sense of the word, i.e., they
are meaningful (as language has to do with
the transmission of meaning and cannot be
reduced to mere sound). The fact that prior
to explicit predicative description we always
deal with practical, tacit meaning, which
then can be made explicit in asserting descriptions, is one of the main points made by
Martin Heidegger when he introduces the
concept of a hermeneutic circle in Being and
Time. According to Heidegger, the theoretical, or logical, description of something
as something (the apophantical as) in an
explicit assertion or description is based on
a primordial practical meaning that he calls
hermeneutical as:
Prior to all analysis, logic has already under
stood logically what it takes as a theme under
the heading of the categorical statement for
instance, The hammer is heavy. The unexplained
presupposition is that the meaning of this sentence is to be taken as: This thing a hammer
has the property of heaviness. In concernful circumspection [the practical everyday approach to
reality, the author] there are no such assertions at
first. [] Interpretation is carried out primordially not in a theoretical statement but in an action of circumspective concern laying aside the
unsuitable tool, or exchanging it without words.
From the fact that words are absent, it may not
be concluded that interpretation is absent. []
When an assertion has given a definite character
to something present-at-hand, it says something
about it as a what; and this what is drawn from
that which is present-at-hand as such. [] Thus
assertion cannot disown its ontological origin
from an interpretation which understands. The
primordial as of an interpretation (hermeneia)
that understands circumspectively, we call the existential-hermeneutical as in distinction from the
apophantical as of the assertion. (Heidegger
2005: 200)

If one accepts this hermeneutical interpretation of Mitterers starting-point descriptions, i.e., their identification with the
primordial, practical, implicit, hermeneutical meaning that represents the condition
for all later explicit predicative descriptions,
one may take this analysis a step further and

Non-dualism

Non-dualistic Sex Martin G. Weiss

define these starting-point descriptions (or

hermeneutical-practical interpretations) as
inherited, naturalized norms performatively
produced by iterated practices, as Judith
Butler has suggested in relation to sexual
difference (Derra 2008).
Working along this line of interpretation
of Mitterers work I will compare Mitterers
non-dualism with Judith Butlers performative notion of sex, as she has been criticized
for doing exactly the contrary of what Mitterer criticizes in contemporary philosophy,
namely disregarding the categorical distinction between objective non-linguistic facts
(in her case, biological sex), and subjective
descriptions of these facts (in her case, gender) (Alaimo & Hekman 2008). I will try
to show that Butlers performative notion of
sex/gender in many aspects comes close to
Mitterers idea of a non-dualistic philosophy, and may provide answers to two questions that have been posed in reference to
his work: namely, where the starting-point
descriptions come from and how changes
occur in descriptions.

for the historical character of understanding

and Gadamers intimation of the linguistic
mediatedness of every experience famously expressed in his sentence Being that can
be understood is language (Gadamer 1965:
450) it has increasingly become difficult
to argue in favor of nave, or even scientific,
realism. According to Nietzsche (Nietzsche
1988a: 57161), neither the objective object
of natural sciences professing the paradoxical ideal of objectivity consisting in seeing the object as it is when nobody sees it,
or speaking of it before anybody has spoken
about it, as Mitterer puts it nor the subject,
which in modernity, at least for Descartes,
became the last fundamentum inconcussum
of knowledge, are accepted as unquestionable principles of epistemology. On the
contrary, the focus lies more and more on
the historical, cultural and linguistic preconceptions and contexts, i.e., the background
and framework, of contingent truths. Nietzsche, anticipating the basic idea of contemporary, post-analytic, postmodern philosophy has written:

Non-dualism and
(de)constructive feminism

Against empiricism, which halts at phenomena

There are only facts I would say, no, facts are

As Mitterer notes in the foreword of the

new edition of his Das Jenseits der Philosophie, the philosophical landscape has greatly
changed since the first edition in 1992, as
there has been a considerably strong shift
away from classical naturalistic epistemology towards different forms of more or less
non-dualistic approaches.
The postmodern heirs of Gadamer, especially Gianni Vattimo but also the exponents of what has been called post-analytic
philosophy, have initiated widespread criticism of the notion of self-evident, unquestionable facts outside of our minds that are
only waiting to be discovered. What has
become questionable is the very goal of traditional philosophy, namely the possibility
to know the first principles of ontology and
epistemology: in other words, the first principles that philosophy has been eager to gain
possession of at least since Aristotles prima
philosophia. What is called into question
today is the possibility of an unmediated
knowledge of the eternal truth and the first
causes of reality. Since Heideggers argument

precisely what there is not, only interpretations.

We cannot establish any fact in itself : perhaps it
is folly to want to do such a thing. Everything is
subjective, you say; but even this is interpretation.
The subject is not something given, it is something added and invented. Is it necessary to posit
an interpreter behind the interpretation? (Nietzsche 1988b: 315)

Although Nietzsche himself speaks of

perspectivism and of drives that interpret the world, suggesting that his thought
is still within the framework of dualism,
the quoted paragraph could serve as a description of the core idea of what has been
called deconstruction. Although it is not
clear what this method, dating back to the
work of Jacques Derrida, exactly means, it
is commonly accepted that it has to do with
the loss of believing in an objective true
world of objective stable things waiting to
be mirrored in our minds. And if Thomas
Laqueur is right in maintaining that the deconstruction of stable meaning in texts can
be regarded as the general case of the deconstruction of sexual difference (Laqueur

1992: 12), then the work of Judith Butler,

dealing with the deconstruction not only of
sexual difference, i.e., the dualism of male
and female, but also the deconstruction of
the dichotomy between (biological) sex and
(socio-cultural) gender, may be taken as
an example of applied non-dualism, which
could help to shed new light on the general
theory proposed by Mitterer.

Judith Butlers non-dualistic

sex-gender theory

Certain feminist thinkers, such as Gale

Rubin (1975), have argued that at the basis
of gender there is some sort of biological
raw material (i.e., sex) that limits its possible
socio-cultural interpretation (i.e., gender),
and they have therefore examined how this
interpretation (i.e., gender) is linked to its
object (i.e., sex). Judith Butler on the one
hand takes seriously the notion that gender,
although conceived as mere contingent interpretation, has not lost anything of its constraining normativity, i.e., its reality, and
on the other hand does not want to advocate
cultural determinism. This leads her to ask a
much more radical question:
If gender is not an artifice to be taken on or

taken off at will and, hence, not an effect of choice,

how are we to understand the constitutive and
compelling status of gender norms without falling
into the trap of cultural determinism? How precisely are we to understand the ritualized repetition by which such norms produce and stabilize
not only the effects of gender but the materiality
of sex? (Butler 1993: X)

Hence, whereas Rubin still argues within the framework of classical dualism, distinguishing an objective material here, the
biological fact (sex) , and a socio-cultural
interpretation of this biological fact (i.e.,
gender), Butler questions the alleged objectivity of the biological fact, suggesting that
sex is at least as much the product of iterated
practices as gender.
In the wake of Nietzsche, Derrida and
Foucault, Butler advocates the priority of
discourse and language conceived as form
of practice over alleged objective facts.
This is because for her, language represents
the inevitable medium of all experience.

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This primacy of discourse over silent objects

becomes evident if one considers the fact
that to posit something outside language can
be done only by language and in discourse.
In addition, the object beyond language is
a linguistic phenomenon. Every thing in
itself is in itself only for consciousness,
as Hegel (2006: 5369) put it. Every description is always a description of a description,
as Mitterer would say. According to Butler,
this is true also for the biological material,
for the body, i.e., for materiality. The material conceived as independent from discourse
is posited as independent from discourse
by and in discourse. The objectivity of the
material, its alleged independence from discourse, is itself a product of the discourse
of and on objectivity. The discourse on the
non-discursive nature of biology is performative in so far as it produces what it masks
as its condition. Biological sex is not the
objective starting-point of the discourse on
biological sex, but its product. The discourse
is performative, for it produces what it allegedly describes:

guage. By an assertion of their exteriority to

language, objects lose this exteriority:
To have the concept of matter is to lose the ex
teriority that the concept is supposed to secure.
Can language simply refer to materiality, or is language also the very condition under which materiality may be said to appear? If matter ceases to
be matter once it becomes a concept, and if a concept of matters exteriority to language is always
something less than absolute, what is the status of
this outside? Is it produced by philosophical discourse in order to effect the appearance of its own
exhaustive and coherent systematicity? (Butler
1993: 31)

Although questioning realism, Butler does not advocate a nave linguistic

constructivism, which, as a form of only
reversed Platonism (Nietzsche), would
remain in the dualistic framework. On the
contrary, she stresses that to say that materiality is produced by discourse does not
mean that there is no difference between
materiality and language:

The body posited as prior to the sign, is always To claim that discourse is formative is not to

posited or signified as prior. This signification pro- claim that it originates, causes, or exhaustively
duces as an effect of its own procedure the very
body that it nevertheless and simultaneously
claims to discover as that which precedes its own
action. (Butler 1993: 30)

In accordance with Mitterer, Butler emphasizes that the notion of an object outside of discourse is inconceivable because,
if taken seriously, it would be completely
impossible to speak or refer to it in any
way since an object beyond language cannot be grasped by any concept. Nothing
could be said about the object beyond language, not even that it is beyond language.
Every attempt to speak about it would, in
the framework of dualism, not only be selfcontradictory but also transform the allegedly objective object beyond discourse into
a linguistic phenomenon. Every reference
in dualism to an object beyond discourse
paradoxically destroys the idea of such an
object. Objects are necessarily implicitly
conceived as discursive phenomena by explicit and discursive assertion of their nondiscursive character. Otherwise no linguistic reference to them would be possible,
not even to say that they are outside of lan-

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composes that which it concedes; rather, it is to

claim that there is no reference to a pure body
which is not at the same time a further formation
of that body. In this sense, the linguistic capacity
to refer to sexed bodies is not denied, but the very
meaning of referentiality is altered. In philosophical terms, the constative claim is always to some
degree performative. (Butler 1993: 10)

In Mitterers terminology, The nondualistic discourse does not claim that

the description constitutes the object. Instead, it claims that the description changes
the object (Mitterer 2011a: 71). Every description of an object, i.e., a description so
far, is a further description from now on of
the description so far, altering the notion of
objectivity. This is unmasked by Mitterer as
a pure rhetoric instrument adopted to make
ones position invulnerable as it is impossible to argue over facts. This emancipatory
pathos underlying Mitterers attempt to free
philosophy from the unquestionable, and
therefore violent, yoke of objective truth
aiming to silence all further discussion is
also shared by Butler, who stresses that she
does not want to deny the discursive reality

of materiality (and advocate a self-transparent absolute autonomous spiritual subject),

but liberate the reference to materiality of its
violent, silencing aspects, to redefine it as an
ongoing creative process of materialization:
Here it is of course necessary to state quite

plainly that the options for theory are not exhausted by presuming materiality, on the one
hand, and negating materiality, on the other. It is
my purpose to do precisely neither of these. To
call a presupposition into question is not the same
as doing away with it; rather, it is to free it from
its metaphysical lodgings (Butler 1993: 30)

Emancipation through nondualism?

Similarly to Mitterer, Butler also notes

that the assumption of unquestionable allegedly objective facts always includes a moment of violence, as the reference to unquestionable facts silences all further discussion.
Gianni Vattimo, an author quoted by Butler
on the first pages of her Bodies that Matter, also stresses the violent character that
the reference to objective reality entails, for
the assertion of objectivity allows no contradiction. The violence of this reality, i.e.,
the immediate pressure of the given, the
incontrovertible imposition of the in-itself
(Vattimo 1997: 93), assumes the form of the
reference to brute facts, to an ultimate instance beyond which one does not go and
which silences all questioning and thereby
closes the discourse (ibid: 85), stopping all
further descriptions.
(De)constructivism and hermeneutics
destabilize the notion of unquestionably
true facts by stressing the discursive sociocultural conditions of our descriptions. Butler stresses that these descriptions, although
contingent, cannot be changed arbitrarily.
Instead they represent a form of undeniable preconceptions that we cannot escape
totally, although we can at least weaken their
persuasive force. We may well know that our
gender is not the necessary result of given
biological facts, but rather the product of
socio-cultural discourse, but nevertheless be
unable to change our sexual behavior arbitrarily. But even if we cannot escape gender
and decide arbitrarily whether we want to be
male or female (or something different altogether), the knowledge that gender is not

Non-dualism

Non-dualistic Sex Martin G. Weiss

predestined but a product of socio-cultural

discourse destabilizes the notions of sex
and gender, leading to a form of liberalization from traditional heteronomic gender
norms.
The common conviction that to be a
real man means to have a penis and to desire women, at second glance appears not
to be a natural fact but a naturalization of
contingent practices stabilized through continuous iterations. The nature of man is the
effect of certain linguistic and socio-cultural
practices and not a given fact beyond descriptions. Therefore divergent practices
of desire have the power to undermine the
very idea of sexual difference. The divergent
practices of homo- and transsexual desire
cause the allegedly unchangeable natural
facts of gender-identity to waver. The fear
that this destabilization of an important
part of self-identity produces often results
in an aggressive homophobic reaction. The
mere existence of this aggressive homophobic reaction may serve as proof for Butlers
hypothesis that gender-identity is not a
natural fact, not destiny, but the product
of arduously repeated stabilizing practices.
Homophobia, as reaction to divergent sexual practices, is driven by the fear that ones
own gender-identity may not be as stable as
it ought to be. If gender-identities were truly
as unchangeable, as the homophobic stress,
this fear would not exist.

Explaining Mitterer
with Butler
The best possibility to answer two questions that have been put forward in regard to
Mitterers work (in part by himself) would
perhaps be to take into account Butlers
theory of performativity, i.e., the concept
of materialization. These two questions are:
Where do starting-point descriptions come
from? and: What triggers the change in their
further descriptions?

On the origin and mutation

of descriptions

The basis-consensus, i.e., the startingpoint descriptions, are the dominant contingent preconceptions opinions about what
is objective in a given historically and culturally framed language community. Therefore,

this starting-point description, commonly

called reality, is not beyond discourse, nor
is it an objective, unchangeable, given fact.
Nevertheless, it is by all means real, in the
sense that it is not arbitrarily changeable but
experienced as stable meanings, at least in a
given historic-cultural situation. But as Butler has shown, this alleged stability of reality,
i.e., the inherited preconceptions on what is
beyond discourse, is revealed to be unstable
and continuously changing as it is not objectively given but the product of ongoing
performative practices that mutate reality
in the attempt to stabilize it. Every attempt
to describe the (starting-point) description
changes the description and becomes itself a
new (starting-point) description for further
descriptions, transforming the attempt to
describe the object as it is into an ongoing
process of performative production of new
versions of the object. Butler calls this materialization:
What I would propose is a return to the no
tion of matter, not as site or surface, but as a process of materialization that stabilizes over time to
produce the effect of boundary, fixity, and surface
we call matter. (Butler 1993: 10)

Mitterer suggests that constructivism

cannot do without a strong concept of the
subject. He claims that all constructivism,
as radical as it may be, must keep one criterion, one strong principle in place: the
human subject (Mitterer 2011b: 66). But
this is precisely what Butler denies when
she stresses that the subject is a product of
construction no less than objects. The ways
in which discourse and language shape not
only gender but also sex are referred to by
Butler as construction, although she stresses that by construction she does not mean
an arbitrary action by an autonomous selftransparent subject. On the contrary, she
identifies construction with an impersonal
process, in which the subject is also constructed. The performative actions through
which gender is constructed are always inflected by an unreachable ideal masculinity
and femininity present in a given society.
The symbolic order, the system of meanings,
the framework in which the expressions
male and female make (a certain contingent) sense and the ways in which these
entities are constructed, are always already

established. We are born into a world of preexisting starting-point descriptions shared

by the vast majority and therefore commonly called facts.
Mitterer raises the question of how the
constructivist position can know when a
construction has come to an end (Mitterer
2011b: 58). Here, Butler would probably
argue that there is in fact no end; in other
words, the construction is an ongoing, endless process of materialization that evolves
through slightly changing iterations of former practices, which become mutations of
the description so far and lead to new unstable and continuously evolving descriptions
from now on. Butlers concept of construction as ongoing mutation through slightly
different repetitions of given practices may
provide an answer to another question
posed by Mitterer: How do we come from
one construction to another (ibid: 64)? In
Butlers work this is not a problem at all, but
rather an unavoidable necessity: construction can be materialized only by trying to
repeat given practices, which will never be
exactly the same. Therefore, the change in
the construction, its mutation, is the unavoidable side effect of the process of construction/materialization through iteration.
The fact that gender norms can be destabilized by deviant practices shows that
gender is not a necessary given outcome
of objective biological facts. According to
Butler, gender norms are socio-cultural
constructions that continuously have to be
enacted performatively in order to maintain
their relative stability:
Performativity must be understood not as a

singular or deliberate act, but, rather, as the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse
produces the effects that it names. The regulatory norms of sex work in a performative fashion
to constitute the materiality of bodies and, more
specifically, to materialize the bodys sex, to materialize sexual difference in the service of the
consolidation of the heterosexual imperative.
(Butler 1993: 2)

Why we cannot do without

(a certain kind of) dualism

The kind of epistemological monism

that Mitterer and Butler represent claims to
overcome the strong version of dualism, arguing that an ontological or even epistemo-

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logical difference between words and things

is self-contradictory and cannot be upheld
without recurring to a self-contradicting
definition of the object of knowledge, as
well as of its subject. However, both authors
agree that dualistic speech in everyday life
and political struggle appears as a persisting
necessity. Butler expressly states that against
the claim that poststructuralism reduces all
materiality to linguistic stuff, an argument is
needed to show that to deconstruct matter
is not to negate or do away with the usefulness of the term (Butler 1993: 30). Mitterer
argues that there are allegedly objective presuppositions that we have to share to survive
in a given society, but we should therefore
not masquerade as the true World behind
our descriptions:
Part of reality are certainly conceptions we

have to share to survive in our society. But this

should not lead us to speak of the conformity of
our concepts with an independent reality, but of
a consensus between the participants of a conversation, which can only go on as long as the basisconsensus on which it is based is in place. (Mitterer 2011b: 154)

Mitterer and Butler, although demonstrating at a theoretical level the inconsistency of dualism, i.e., objectivism, assert
that the reference to allegedly objective objects beyond language is (still?) unavoidable
(Mitterer) and perhaps even useful (Butler).
Whereas Mitterers admission that we have
to make concessions to the still dominant
dualistic/objectivistic ideology is comprehensible despite the risk of opening an
intellectual gap between philosophy and
common sense within the philosopher her-

Constructivist Foundations

vol. 8, N2

Martin G. Weiss
is Assistant Professor at the Department of Philosophy of the University of Klagenfurt and member
of the Life Science Governance Research Platform of the University of Vienna. His publications
include: Gianni Vattimo. Einfhrung. Mit einem Interview mit Gianni Vattimo (2012); and Bios
und Zo. Die menschliche Natur im Zeitalter ihrer technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (2009).

self the concept of usefulness advanced by

Butler remains questionable. At first glance
it appears to be an appeal to rhetoric demagogy, i.e., to the use of concepts recognized
as self-contradictory (a certain notion of
materiality beyond language) as a weapon
in the political struggle for emancipation.
However, this is not what Butler intends:
when she claims that there is no materiality beyond discourse, she does not mean
that the concept of materiality should be
abolished altogether. Instead, in a similar
vein to Mitterer, she argues for a different
concept of materiality beyond the matterlanguage dichotomy. According to Mitterer,
the object of a description can no longer
be conceived as a pure object beyond language, but must be recognized as already a
(starting-point) description in itself. This
may then be described further on by second
order descriptions, which radically changes
the ontological and epistemological status of
the object, insofar as in this perspective the
(allegedly absolute) object of discourse is always already part of the discourse (in which
it is posited as independent from discourse).
Similarly, for Butler, the allegedly objective
matter (sex) on which the gender-discourse
relies is not accessible before this discourse.
This discourse performatively produces
continuously what it pretends only to describe, revealing that objective materiality
is nothing beyond discourse but a continuously produced, and therefore continuously
changing, effect of discourse on materiality.
Discourse and materiality therefore cannot
be seen as distinct entities that may then be
placed in relation to each other, but as coproducts of an ongoing, endless process that
Butler calls materialization.

Conclusion
I have tried to show that Butlers key
concept of materialization, with which she
describes the performative (always mutating) construction of pre-discursive entities
within discourse, means naturalization,
i.e., the gradual solidification or sedimentation of certain contingent descriptions. Butlers question is: What are the mechanisms
that transform a contingent description into
a seemingly unchangeable eternal fact? How
are descriptions stabilized, i.e., naturalized,
materialized to the point of being regarded
as unquestionable facts?
According to Butler, the stabilization of
descriptions is achieved by means of permanent iterations of performative acts. The
continuous repetition of the same performative act is what produces the effect of objectivity, i.e., materiality.
But the same mechanism that serves to
produce allegedly stable descriptions is also
the archimedic point that enables the destabilization of already naturalized interpretations. For facts to remain stable, they need
to be iterated continuously and reproduced
in performative acts, and because no repetition ever equals its predecessor, the mechanisms of stabilization are essentially unstable. The necessity to iterate the descriptions
continuously in order to naturalize them
in itself undermines this attempt, as every
repetition of a description slightly changes
the description. Paradoxically, the same acts
that aim at producing naturalized facts end
up denaturalizing the same facts. Precisely
because the factual must be continually reproduced, i.e., stabilized by means of the
endless repetition of performative acts, di-

Non-dualism

Non-dualistic Sex Martin G. Weiss

vergent acts (and every repetition is different from its precursor) can destabilize and
change reality:
Construction not only takes place in time,

but is itself a temporal process which operates

through the reiteration of norms; sex is both
produced and destabilized in the course of this
reiteration. This instability is the reconstituting possibility in the very process of repetition,
the power that undoes the very effects by which
sex is stabilized, the possibility to put the consolidation of the norms of sex into a potentially
productive crisis. (Butler 1993: 10)

It is important to keep in mind that the

epistemic monism proposed by Mitterer
and Butler does not deny reality, dissolving
it into mere discourse or advocating linguistic relativism, for this sort of reversed Platonism would still remain in the framework
of dualism. It is possible to accuse Butler and
Mitterer of relativism only from a dualistic
perspective. This is because to say that there
is no objective object beyond description,
i.e., to abolish the true world (of platonic
ideas or scientific facts) beyond the apparent one, does not leave us with merely deficient appearance, for with the true world
we have also abolished the apparent one, as
Nietzsche puts it. Abolishing the true, objective world behind description does not
leave us with mere appearance/description/
discourse, but with the only reality that
there is, i.e., endless descriptions from now
on, as Mitterer would say, or the process
of materialization, as Butler calls it. To define descriptions/discourse/appearance as a
somehow deficient form of truth is possible
only within the dualistic framework and its
distinction between true objects and more
or less deficient mere descriptions of these
objects. If there is no objective true world
beyond description/discourse/appearance,
then description/discourse/appearance is
neither true/objective nor a mere (subjective) description, but the only thing that
there is beyond dualistic epistemological
distinction.

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Received: 26 September 2012
Accepted: 6 February 2013

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