Hypatia, Inc.

Agency, Signification, and Temporality

Author(s): Stephanie Clare
Source: Hypatia, Vol. 24, No. 4 (Fall, 2009), pp. 50-62
Published by: Wiley on behalf of Hypatia, Inc.
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Agency, Signification, and Temporality

STEPHANIE CLARE

This paper examines the temporality of agency in Judith Butler's and Saba
Mahmood's writing. I argue that Mahmood moves away from a performative
understanding of agency, which focuses on relations of signification, to a corporeal
understanding, which focuses on desire and sensation. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze's
reading of Henri Bergson, I show how this move involves a changed model of
becoming: whereas Butler imagines movement as a series of discontinuous beings, in
Mahmood's case, we get an understanding of becoming.

Judith Butler's writing has shaped the way many feminist theorists think about
subjectification, agency, and signification. But how does her writing figure time?
What is the relationship between a theory of agency and a notion of temporality?
Given that feminist theory is interested in change, it often harbors under
standings of temporality and futurity throughout its manifestations. This essay
will examine Butler's literature alongside Saba Mahmood's Politics of Piety. The
understanding of agency that emerges in Mahmood's text, I will show, builds on
Butler while displacing her prioritization of signification. At the same time,
although Mahmood does not bring this out in her writing, her own notion of
agency provides a different understanding of temporality from that of Butler. By
drawing on Gilles Deleuze's reading of Henri Bergson, I draw out this under
standing to argue that whereas Butler's writing exhibits the false problems that
come with retrospective thought, Mahmood allows for the analysis of becoming,
and thus offers a promising alternative. Throughout, I will demonstrate how
conceptions of temporality are intertwined in the analysis of agency, significa
tion, and subjectification. A theory of agency that captures feminism's feistiness
will capture a sense of how worlds are not, but continuously become.

JUDITH BUTLER: AGENCY AND SIGNIFICATION

Before elaborating Mahmood's contribution to feminist theories of agency, I

begin by outlining Butler's theory so as to set the context for Mahmood's
intervention. I will proceed in general terms, recognizing, however, that

Hypatia vol. 24, no. 4 (Fall, 2009) ?) by Hypatia, Inc.

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 Stephanie Clare 51
Butler's writing is disparate: to gloss over her texts necessarily misses their
differences. Yet the following sketch remains generally true.
Butler theorizes agency in terms of signification. She contends that the
gendered subject is constituted through performativity and that the notion
of performativity provides a theory of agency. This involves at least
three premises. First, there exists no subject that precedes action. The subject
comes into being through action. Next, the subject desires recognition
from another and is constituted through this recognition.1 Finally, recognition
occurs only when a performance is read in relation to a norm. This means
that the subject, who desires recognition, comes into being through the
ritualized repetition of acts, gestures, or desires, which, upon recognition,
create the illusion of an essential identity. One is recognizable (and hence a
subject) to the extent that one performs recognizable gendered norms. In this
sense, the subject is constituted in a field of power relations; it is produced in
the repeated performance of norms, and gender is one of its characteristic
properties.2
Butler insists that this understanding of subjectivity is also a theory of
agency. Gendered norms must be repeatedly performed because of the im
possibility of inhabiting gender or fully producing gender once and for all.
Because performativity requires continual repetition, there is the possibility of
introducing difference into the chain of citationality. The gaps embedded in
repetition are, for Butler, the location of agency. This agency is in no way pure
or independent from relations of power or discourse; it exists within the
citational chain-a chain, that is, of signifying relations. In brief, Butler's
theory of agency is developed in terms of signification: signification, she writes,
"harbors within itself what the epistemological discourse refers to as 'agency"'
(Butler 1999, 185).
For many feminists, Butler's theory of agency is insufficient. Martha Nussbaum's
"Professor of Parody" argues that in Butler's model, women become entrapped by
power (Nussbaum 1999). Seyla Benhabib claims that Butler's theory of agency does
not offer an ontogenic understanding of agency (Benhabib 1995). Eve Sedgwick
claims that Butler misses how performativity depends upon the context or the
ecology of an act (Sedgwick 2003).
Although critics have different focuses, many readings of Butler's theory of
agency center on one common theme: her treatment of embodiment (see Moya
1997; Moi 1999; Bordo 1998; Hekman 1998; Colebrook 2000; Grosz 2002,
2005). Butler's prioritization of language means that she most often treats the
body as a sign. For instance, the body's surface, she argues, is not natural but the
site of "a dissonant and denaturalized performance that reveals the perform
ative status of the natural itself" (Butler 1999, 186). This means that the body,
as a site of a performativity, is treated as a sign that becomes meaningful.
Although this sort of poststructuralist analysis has developed important insights
in the field of feminist theory, many argue that this treatment of the body is, at
worst, idealist, and at best, limited in its ability to account for the "fleshiness" of

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 52 Hypatia
bodies or the lived experience of corporeality. In short, while Butler has been
deeply influenced by Foucault's writing, her theory of agency prioritizes
signification; this leads to an understanding of the body as a meaningful entity,
rather than as an entity that senses.

MAHMOOD: AGENCY AND CORPOREALITY

Saba Mahmood's Politics of Piety contends that although Butler's theory of

agency is preferable to those accounts of agency that take the subject as
foundational, Butler's theory cannot be taken as universal. Mahmood writes an
ethnography of the piety movement in Cairo, a movement that encourages
women from various socio-economic classes to meet in public to learn
about Islam and to foster a pious life. According to Mahmood, there exists a
central difference between agency in queer politics and agency in the piety
movement: in the former, agency is often practiced "in terms of subversion or
resignification of social norms" (Mahmood 2005, 14). For this reason, she
claims, Butler's theory of agency is appropriate to the context in which it
emerged. In the latter context, however, agency is enacted "in the multiple
ways in which one inhabits norms" (15). Mahmood explains that through
the attempt to develop piety, women in the mosque movement do not
simply reaffirm social norms. They take on norms and enact them through
teaching and learning as well as through embodied practice. For instance,
Mahmood explains that some women emulate Abu Bakr3 by crying in prayer.
Through this "mimetic reproduction," participants believe that they can come
"to acquire the moral character of the exemplar" (148). In this example,
Mahmood shows that to simply focus on whether Abu Bakr's piety is emulated
or rejected, subverted or resignified misses the analysis of how piety is embodied.
Women attempt to develop the inner quality of piety through the practice of
crying. Thus, not only is appropriation or rejection of moral character
important, but also the modes in which this moral character is developed or
fostered.4
This is different from Butler's theory of agency since for Butler, the question
of agency focuses on whether norms are consolidated or resignified through their
citation. This implies that the question of agency is always posed in relation to
the meaning of a performance, and this performance must be interpreted and
recognized by another. In contrast, Mahmood explodes the question of agency
beyond the discussion of acts of subversion and consolidation to include the
consideration of the multiple ways that norms are embodied. This
allows Mahmood to write a theory of agency that does not understand the
practice of agency as occurring only within practices of signification, but also
within registers of corporeality. As a result, rather than seeing "the materiality
of the body on the model of language," like Butler, Mahmood identifies how
within the mosque movement, the body functions as "a medium for, rather
than a sign of, the self" (Mahmood 2005, 165-66). Whereas for Butler,

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 Stephanie Clare 53
embodiment is key to the extent that it is interpreted as meaningful, in
Mahmood's understanding, embodiment is key because of the sensations and
desires it fosters.
Butler's use of psychoanalysis, however, complicates this reading. In The
Psychic Life of Power, for instance, Butler argues that subjectification is possible
because of psychic desires, such as the desire to survive. The subject is formed in
subordination, but "this subordination provides the subject's continuing
condition of possibility" (Butler 1997, 8). In other words, because the subject
desires to survive, the subject accepts, even seeks and becomes attached to
subordination.5 In this view, as Butler develops in Undoing Gender, a subject
who transgresses gender norms and challenges subordination risks social death.
Through such discussions, Butler does point toward the desires that formulate
the subject, but nonetheless, her understanding of agency remains tethered,
as Mahmood convincingly argues, to "her overall interest in tracking the
possibilities of resistance to the regulating power of normativity, and ... to her
model of performativity, which is primarily conceptualized in terms of a
dualistic structure of consolidation/resignification, doing/undoing, of norms"
(Mahmood 2005, 22). In other words, although Butler considers desire as a part
of subject-formation, the density of desire and sensation drops out of her
discussion of agency when she figures agency as the transgression, rather than
the inhabitation, of norms.
Mahmood's framing of agency away from the language of consolidation or
subversion of norms allows feminists to talk about agential practices without
normatively judging the ends of these practices and without tying the
definition of agency to liberal politics. This is key to Mahmood's contribution
to feminist theory. She argues that to figure agency in terms of acts that signify
either consolidation or subversion leads too quickly to the claim that actors
in non-liberal political movements enact no agency. Instead, Mahmood's
discussion of the piety movement draws out a rich engagement with con
ceptions of selfhood, politics, and embodiment by withholding normative
judgment. This is important to developing non-dogmatic, feminist academic
writing.
As a corollary, Mahmood's formulation of agency also decenters academics.
When agency is understood in terms of performativity, one can too readily slide
into a troubling yet formulaic model of academic study: someone acts, another
watches and interprets. A theory of agency articulated in terms of signification
and performativity may naturalize the position of the academic within an
international division of labor as she who holds the normative, interpretive
gaze over her objects of study because she judges whether an action is an
instance of agency or not. In contrast, a model of agency concerned with the
practices through which norms are embodied destabilizes the position of the
academic. In this model, agency is not identified by the academic through her
interpretation of an action. Instead, the academic must attempt to understand
the multiple effects, sensations, and desires that emerge from a practice for the

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 54 Hypat ia
subject enacting it, to the extent this is possible. The academic, in this model,
is no longer positioned as the audience for action.
A final implication concerns the destabilization of gender norms. Although
Mahmood builds her analysis of agency through her ethnography of the piety
movement, she abstracts from this ethnography to make conclusions about the
transgression of gender norms more generally. Mahmood's analysis of agency
allows her to reflect that "transgressing gender norms ... might well require the
retraining of sensibilities, affect, desire, and sentiments-those registers of
corporeality that often escape the logic of representation and symbolic
articulation" (Mahmood 2005, 188). This idea suggests a massive change of
focus for feminist scholarship in the humanities. Instead of conducting
a critique of various forms of representation (that is, a critique of ideology
or discursive analysis), feminists could look to the formation of sensibilities,
sensations, and desires.6 This posits, however, a difficult methodological
problem. It may be compelling to look to the formations of sensibilities,
sensations, and desires in the construction of the subject, but how exactly is
this possible?
Mahmood works empirically, treating the claims of women in the
mosque movement as revelatory of the women's own sensations. She claims
that this is not to re-center the subject because she does not figure mosque
participants as creations "of their independent wills" (Mahmood 2005, 32).
Instead, she insists that participants must be viewed as products of the
"authoritative discursive tradition whose logic and power far exceeds the
consciousness of the subject they enable" (32). Such a statement is very close
to Butler's formulations of subjectification. But what remains important for
Mahmood is that although subjects are constituted through discursive
traditions, they experience, through their participation in social relations
around these texts, various sensations, desires, and so on that are not
themselves discursive.
I imagine that Butler would respond to this argument and claim that
Mahmood inevitably posits both corporeality and sensation in language. This
statement implies that although Mahmood's discussion of transgression con
siders embodiment, she inevitably builds a theory of agency in terms of sig
nification. I want to explain this strong counterargument to my reading of
Mahmood to then show a key problem with it. I partially agree with Butler's
formulation: it is true that corporeality and sensations, as I write about them
and feel them, have meaning. Even to posit them as outside discourse is, in
effect, discursive-I am positing them as outside discourse within discourse. Yet
although I agree with Butler up to a point, her argument may be read as
circular. The critique "that which is outside discourse is always discursive" is
concerned primarily with recognition rather than acts. It places the importance
on the signification of, for instance, sensation and corporeality, rather than on
their multiple effects. As a result, it offers a circular argument: the signification
of X is important, and hence X can only ever be understood in terms of its

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 Stephanie Clare 55
signification. In contrast, the recognition of the discursivity of sensation and
corporeality does not foreclose the possibility that although sensation and
corporeality signify, their effects need not be understood as related primarily
or only to signification. To recognize the inevitable discursivity of
corporeality and sensation is not to discover the primacy of signification but
to understand one force that corporeality encounters: signification. These two
forces cannot be collapsed into each other, though they affect each
other. Therefore, sensation and corporeality, though only ever grasped through
discourse, not only effect relations of signification but affect sensation
and corporeality themselves. This means that Mahmood's discussion of
agency does, in effect, provide a working critique of Butler's writing on agency.
She allows us to discuss forces that are not reducible to relations of
signification.

THE TEMPORALITY OF AGENCY

While Politics of Piety provides a strong understanding of agency, the text does
not consider its temporal implications. Feminists would do well to analyze how
theories of agency figure time in order to attend to various conceptions of
time that work cross-culturally and in order to begin to develop feminist
understandings of temporality. In this part of the essay, I will draw on the
understanding of time and movement that emerges in Henri Bergson's writing
and Gilles Deleuze's reading of his work.7 Reading Bergson and Deleuze beside
first Butler and then Mahmood, I explore the temporality of their theories of
agency to show how, whereas Mahmood provides an understanding of
becoming, Butler gives us a set of reiterated beings.
In order to explain how Bergson's and Deleuze's writing implicates Butler's
theory of agency, I want to begin with a closer study of how Butler models
subjectification and agency in The Psychic Life of Power. Butler's analysis of
subjectification involves a set of paradoxes that revolve around a central
problematic: we are fundamentally dependent "on a discourse we never chose"
but nonetheless, this discourse "initiates and sustains our agency" (Butler
1997, 2). In this model, the subject is a site of ambivalence. It is, on the one
hand, constituted in subordination, and yet on the other hand, it is not
determined by this subordination: the power that forms it may unpredictably
"turn." According to Butler, this paradox of subjectification involves a
"paradox of referentiality: namely, that we must refer to what does not yet
exist" (4). This is because in order to explain the constitution of the subject, we
must refer to a figure, the subject, who internalizes norms. However, because it
is the constitution of the subject that we are after, we must recognize that this
figure is but a figure; in the moment we are trying to describe, the subject has no
ontology: there is no subject before internalization, no individual for power to
subject. Rather, through subjectification, the subject comes into being.

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 56 Hypatia
Yet this formulation of the paradox of subjectification curiously resembles
one of Henri Bergson's false problems, as Deleuze describes in his text on the
philosopher. Deleuze explains how Bergson elaborates two forms of false
problems. The first mistakes the less for the more and assumes that "nonbeing
existed before being" (Deleuze 1997, 18). In effect, the logic used in Butler's
narrative involves such a "retrograde movement of the true," where being
projects "an image" of itself back into a "possibility, a disorder, a nonbeing
which are supposed to be primordial" (Deleuze 1997, 18). That is, when Butler
argues that the paradox of subjectification involves a paradox of referentiality,
she is precisely enacting such a retrograde movement: she posits an image of the
subject and insists that it is less than the subject before the subject was formed.
According to Deleuze, however, there is not less in nonbeing but more: there is,
in fact, both being and its negation. Such an understanding reframes Butler's
paradox of subjectification to suggest that while being (or the subject) will
project an image of itself back into the past in order to explain its formation,
in effect, a being of a different kind, a potentiality, existed before subjectifi
cation-not a "lesser" image.
I will draw out the implications of this reading soon, but I first want to
introduce a second aspect of Bergson's work on temporality, which relates
to these false problems and may also be mobilized to clarify Butler's theory
of subjectification. In Creative Evolution, Bergson argues that movement is
continuous. To do so, he draws on the ancient Greek philosopher, Zeno of
Elea, and the paradox of the moving arrow. Zeno explains that when an arrow
moves from point A to point B, we may want to say that it occupies a series of
positions along a line between point A and point B. The problem with such a
view, however, is that it imagines the arrow at rest in a series of places and
therefore figures movement by tracing an essentially motionless arrow. Instead
of breaking up movement by figuring a series of points through which an arrow
moves, Bergson insists that movement is continuous: "the truth is that if the
arrow leaves the point A to fall down at the point B, its movement AB is as
simple, as indecomposable, in so far as it is movement, as the tension of the
bow that shoots it" (Bergson 1998, 309). Bergson explains that the image of
movement as a series of points is an illusion, which arises after movement. He
writes, "movement, whilst being effected, lays at each instant beneath it a
position with which it coincides. We do not see that the trajectory is created in
one stroke, although a certain time is required for it; and that though we can
divide at will the trajectory once created, we cannot divide its creation" (309).
This suggests that as movement is effected, it cannot be divided. After it is
terminated, then it can be plotted as a series of points, yet in this retrospective
model, the essence of movement it lost, replaced with a set of stationary
moments.
With this understanding of movement, Bergson develops a wide criticism of
Greek philosophy, from Plato to Plotinus (including Aristotle). This "philo
sophy of Ideas," he argues, is a result of understanding becoming as a series of

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 Stephanie Clare 57
"snapshots, taken at intervals, of its flowing" (Bergson 1998, 316). When
becoming is treated as being in a series of stationary points, philosophy leaves
"nothing accidental, nothing contingent" in its wake (316). The world
becomes mechanistic: a set of frozen images.
While Butler's theory of subjectification confuses the more for the less,
her treatment of becoming may likewise be complicated by Bergson's under
standing of movement. I have already explained how the moment of
subjectification, according to Butler, is likewise a moment of agentification,
meaning that at the heart of agency there exists ambivalence between past
power that constitutes the subject and future power that the subject mobilizes.
But this understanding of agency and subjectification freezes time by formulat
ing becoming as a series of moments or steps. This is clear in the following
passage, where Butler writes:

Painful, dynamic, and promising, this vacillation between

the already-there and the yet-to-come is a crossroads that
rejoins every step by which it is traversed, a reiterated
ambivalence at the heart of agency. Power rearticulated is
"re"-articulated in the sense of already done and "re"-articu
lated in the sense of done over, done again, done anew. (Butler
1997, 18)
By figuring the vacillation between the "already-there" and the "yet-to
come" as a "crossroads," Butler posits the present as a space that is immobile
(though ambivalent). Power, Butler claims, is done and redone in a
series of discrete moments or performative acts. The fact that these doings are
imagined as discrete moments is key; it means that although becoming or
change is possible in Butler's model, it miraculously appears in between
moments. In other words, Butler builds an image of movement as that
which progresses through a series of fixed points or iterations. Even
though she understands these moments as ambivalent, she does not
understand them as continuous becomings. As a result, she exhibits Zeno's
paradox whereby movement is figured as a series of immobile points. This
means that Butler traces the line of subjectification's movement, thereby giving
an account of it after the fact, and yet, while it is effected, the subject's
becoming is indivisible. Butler's theory of subjectification and agency misses
this point.
This is not to say that Butler figures time itself as discontinuous but rather
that the function she traces over time, action or performance, is posited as
discontinuous. Because Bergson's thought engages mathematics, the easiest
way to make this point is to follow suit. A function is continuous at point a if
the limit of f(x) as x approaches a is equal to f(a). An easy way to portray this
graphically is to explain that a function is continuous if someone can draw its
graph without lifting her pencil.8 The following graph, then, represents a
discontinuous function:9

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 58 Hypatia

C(t)

1 2 3 4

Say the t axis here represents time and C(t) represents position. In this case,
where 0 < t< 1, position, C(t) is constant at 2. But when t = 1, the function is
discontinuous because the limit of C(t) as t approaches 1 is, from the left-hand
side, 2 but from the right-hand side, 4. The problem with discontinuous
functions is that their derivatives are undefined at moments of discontinuity.
In other words, at t = 1, the rate of change or movement cannot be calculated.
Butler's figuration of movement implies such a graph, although the length of
each line may be truncated. If Butler were interested only in signs and
signification, this sort of analysis would make sense, in as much as signs appear
in discrete moments. But Butler is also interested in how gender and
subjectivity emerge and change, and it is in this context that her understanding
of movement is limited. Butler argues that gender is not a stable identity; rather
it is produced through the repeated performance of acts, gestures, and desires.
These acts, according to Butler, have an "arbitrary relation" to one another,
such that it is possible to introduce difference or parody into the chain of
citation. For instance, Butler writes, "if gender is instituted through acts which
are internally discontinuous, then the appearance of substance is precisely that
... a performative accomplishment" (Butler 1999, 141). It is precisely within
this model of discontinuity that Butler locates the opportunity of transforming
gender and therefore- the possibility of agency. Graphically, Butler's under
standing of performativity could be represented as a series of points, each
disconnected from the previous point. This produces a discontinuous function,
where change becomes mysterious rather than described.
That said, I do not want to make a plea that feminist theory bring all to
clarity, that we banish the mysterious, that we become mathematical. Rather,
the trouble with Butler is that in her passages that insist on discontinuity, she
gives us a false choice. She makes it appear that we can either (a) understand
gender as a substantial, unchanging essence or (b) understand gender as

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 Stephanie Clare 59
produced in repeated, discontinuous acts. A third option is possible: a sub
stance may exist, and yet this substance could consist in a continual becoming
rather than in an unchanging ground.
In fact, the two complications concerning Butler's work (the confusion of
the more for the less and the figuring of becoming as a series of beings) are
variations on the same problem: retrospective thought. In the first case, an
image, which is taken as "less," is posited after the formation of the subject. In
the second, the becoming of the subject is described after it has emerged.
In both cases, Butler's project is inevitably retrospective. Notwithstanding, a
problem arises when retrospection is taken to be an accurate description of the
process while it is effected. Yes, after subjectification (if, that is, we can ever
imagine subjectification as having been fully effected), we may posit an image
of the subject before its formation, but this image, as quantitatively less than
the subject itself, is but an effect of retroactive thinking and ought not to be
confused with an ontological understanding of subjectification. Likewise, we
may describe subjectification as a moment of ambivalence and agency as that
which is possible in every moment where power is rearticulated. However, this
retrospective account does not capture the becoming of the subject as a
continuous (though perhaps uneven) process: agency emerges in the process
of becoming, not in the mysterious moments between beings.
As I have begun to suggest, instead of explaining the moment of
subjectification as a mysteriously ambivalent crossroads between the past and
the future or arguing that agency emerges in the discontinuity between
performances, it would be better to use Bergson's concept of actualization in
order to figure agency. Deleuze connects the possible, realization, and the real
and distinguishes these concepts from the virtual, actualization, and the actual.
He explains that often the relation between the real and the possible is
imagined as follows: through the process of realization, the possible becomes
real. This process is governed, Deleuze explains, by two rules: "resemblance and
... limitation" (Deleuze 1997, 97). The real is said to resemble the possible
that it realizes. Yet this process of realization involves a limitation: only
some possibilities become real. In contrast, through actualization, the virtual
becomes actual. This process can be explained by "difference or divergence and
... creation" (97). The process of actualization does not involve a process
whereby a limited number of actualities are realized. Instead, because the actual
"does not resemble the virtuality that it embodies," in order for the virtual to be
actualized, it must "create its own lines of actualization in positive acts" (97).
That is, actualization produces a difference between the virtual that we begin
with and the actual with which we end.
Bergson, Deleuze explains, rejects the notion of the possible and champions
the idea of virtuality. In his model, the possible is the "source of false problems"
(Deleuze 1997, 98). This can be explained as follows: although we usually
imagine the real as that which resembles the possible from which it was
realized, Deleuze argues that in effect, the opposite is the case: the possible

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 60 Hypatia
resembles the real. This is because the possible is an image of the real, produced
after it has come to being: "it is the possible that resembles the real, because it
has been abstracted from the real once made, arbitrarily extracted from the real
like a sterile double" (98). When the real is understood as having been formed
in the realization of possibilities, a closed image of the world emerges. All
appears already "completely given" (98). In contrast, the theory of actuali
zation produces an open understanding of the world: the actual is not an image
of the virtual, but emerges in a process of transformation.
Borrowing Bergson's (and Deleuze's) concepts, subjectification could then
be read as a process of actualization, whereby virtual power actualizes itself
producing a difference. This account of becoming can help to explain how
although a prior external power constitutes the subject, the subject is not
determined by this power. The subject produced is not an image that resembles
the first power, nor is the subject the result of the realization of a limited
number of possibilities. Instead, the subject emerges in the production of
difference as difference: the actual. In this model of becoming, the existence of
agency as the possibility of change is not mysterious; the world opens to
multiple becomings.

BECOMING, SIGNIFICATION, AND MAHMOOD'S THEORY OF AGENCY

It is easy to dismiss this discussion of temporality, agency, and subjectification

as inconsequential: so what if becoming is continuous movement? How does
this substantially affect feminist theories of agency?
The figuring of performativity as a series of discrete moments is entwined
with Butler's prioritization of signification over sensation. As I have already
explained, Butler's theory of agency and gender performativity is concerned
with the meaning or signification of corporeality. This implies that she is
concerned with the audience of an action rather than an action itself. To focus
on signification in this way is to consider corporeal action from the point of
view of an observer, rather than from the perspective of the entity that acts.
An observer's recounting of action looks back on action, and therefore
could, as Bergson explains, likely explain action as a series of points. However,
as Bergson argues, during movement, from the point of view of the actor
becoming, this motion is continuous.
Bergson's understanding of becoming therefore allows for the discussion of
change to emerge without positing movement as discontinuous-that is,
without imagining a series of points that are themselves unchanging and
mysteriously placing the possibility of change in moments of nothingness:
between two points. Instead of replacing being for a series of beings, as in
Butler's model, Bergson gives us becoming. This turns the focus away from the
signification of acts since we move from seeing change from the point of view of
an audience member and looking back on an action that was just performed, to
seeing change from the point of view of the actor herself, who is becoming in

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 Stephanie Clare 61
her activity. As a result, we come to an understanding of agency that is closer to
Mahmood's than Butler's: we move from the signification of the body to the
becoming of the body through practice. Therefore, although Mahmood does
not elaborate the temporality of agency, in contrast to Butler, Mahmood allows
us to trace change as a process of embodied becoming.

Notes
I would like to thank Agatha Beins, Niamh Duggan, Elizabeth Grosz, Laurie Marhoefer, Andrew
Mazzaschi, Amber Musser, Debarati Sen, and two anonymous reviewers for their input on this
paper, as well as the Social Science and Humanities Research Board of Canada for their financial
support.
1. Elizabeth Grosz has traced and critiqued the importance of recognition in Butler's writing.
According to Grosz, this Hegelian trope to Butler's work formulates an essentially servile subject.
See Grosz (2002).
2. This is the account of subjectivity that Butler develops through Bodies that Matter (1990),
The Psychic Life of Power (1997), and Gender Trouble (1999). My claim that gender is central to
Butler's theory of subjectivity is not self-evident. Butler's discussion of performativity in Gender
Trouble focuses on the formation of gender identities. Later works, however, such as Undoing Gender
(2004), seem to suggest that performativity offers a general theory ofthe subject, not just of gender,
but that gender coherence is primary to the formation of the subject because this coherence is
required for its recognition.
3. The first caliph and Mohammed's companion.
4. I am aware that by generalizing "women in the mosque movement" here, I am in danger of
partaking in a form of orientalism that glosses over differences among non-Western women. My
challenge, however, is that Mahmood herself, in these passages, does not specify particular
participants who have this belief. She explains, "my argument is not concerned with whether this
was the attitude of all the mosque participants. Rather I am interested in explicating the ideals
inherent in different discourses on piety among the mosque participants and their critics"
(Mahmood 2005, 147).
5. This summary of Butler's writing exhibits a paradox that she points to: it is not exactly
right to say that the subject desires to survive and therefore desires subordination, because the
subject, here, is not yet existing but comes to being through this subordination. In narrating this
story, then, the subject is but a figure of speech. I will analyze this paradox later in this essay.

6. This change is concurrent with work on affect and emotion such as Mu?oz (2000),
Massumi (2002), Ahmed (2004), Clough (2007), and Puar (2007).
7. I want to highlight that Bergson and Deleuze offer just one understanding of temporality. I
do not wish to posit this writing as universal. I merely pull on their texts because I have found their
writing provocative.
8. Though this is most often true, in some examples, such as the absolute value function, the
function may be drawn without lifting one's pencil, even if the function is discontinuous at x = 0.
9. This table is taken from online notes that the Mathematics Department of the University
of British Columbia publishes at http://www.ugrad.math.ubc.ca/coursedoc/mathlOO/index.html
(accessed April 3, 2009).

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