This article aims to critique Judith Butler’s recent use of the concept of the ‘frame’ in the context of the war on terror. While many of the questions that Butler raises about the ways in which violence is framed in the post-9/11 world are perspicacious, I argue that this conceptual reliance on framing actually stands in the way of her ability to answer them. Instead, it causes her to inadvertently exacerbate precisely the kind of framing process that she is ostensibly attempting to deconstruct. By making this argument, I do not mean to negate the ultimate goals of her project, nor the headway she makes towards them in other ways. Neither am I attempting to undercut her ideologically, by taking what some might interpret as a Badiouian position that rejects her as a proponent of a nihilistic ‘ethics of difference’.1 Rather, my aim is essentially to push her thinking further, holding her to account when she claims that her point is ‘not to paralyze judgement, but to insist that we must devise new constellations for thinking about normativity if we are to proceed in intellectually open and comprehensive ways to grasp and evaluate our world’. I suggest that Butler’s analysis of the frame does in fact involve a partial paralysis of judgement, which prevents these ‘new constellations for thinking about normativity’ from being as fully realised as they otherwise might be. With reference to Dave Eggers’ biographical novel, What Is the What (2006), a text that actively strives to challenge the media-driven post-9/11 framing of reality by telling the ‘real-life’ story of a marginalised figure, this article contends that literature can prompt its reader to think about the framing of contemporary reality in ways that may help more radical ‘new constellations’ to begin to emerge. I make this case in two parts. In the first, I analyse Butler’s understanding of the frame, showing why her approach to literature plays a key part in what is problematic about her theorisation. In the second, I explain how Eggers’ novel offers a more nuanced and radical approach to the process of framing post-9/11 reality; an approach that foregrounds the textuality of the frame and suggests that the reality it limns might be more open to interpretation than Butler’s analysis allows.
O'Gorman, Daniel
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences\Department of English and Modern Languages
Year of publication: 2014Date of RADAR deposit: 2019-02-01