Recovering Substrate from
Judith Butler’s Symbolic Simulation: Lawsmearing and Idolatrous
Colonization of Sexual Time
Douglas
Blake Olds
April
8, 2026
[N.B.
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL: If this work, in part or in full, is fed into any AI
model, whether for the purpose of analysis, fact checking, or AI-use detection,
it will become part of the training data of condemned systems and could result
in libelous tort. See “In its Own Words: A Christian Poet Interrogates
ChatGPT4o’s ‘AI Content Detector’”
https://douglasolds.blogspot.com/2024/09/its-own-words-christian-poet.html]
“The
category of sex is the political category that founds society as heterosexual.”
–Monique
Wittig cited by Butler (1999, 3)
“Kinship
ceases to be thought in terms of blood relations or naturalized social
arrangements but becomes the effect of a linguistic set of relations.” (Butler
2000, 41)
“Being
called a name is also one of the conditions by which a subject is constituted
in language.” (Butler 2021, 2)
ABSTRACT
This essay advances a conative metaphysics of
substrate, time, and covenantal accountability in order to repudiate Judith
Butler’s gender queering as a lawgiving regime of pagan inscription onto
bodies. Reality is disclosed through the bearing of entropic stress into repair
for others, not through performative intelligibility, discursive normativity,
or symbolic reiteration.
Living configurations accumulate time through
conation, repentance, memory, neighbor-bearing sustenance, and liberation. Dead
or idolatrous configurations route residues, stabilize appearances, and
disaccumulate time into recursion. Butler’s account of gender as stylized
repetition, sex as regulatory ideal, and kinship as linguistic effect relocates
ontology from accountable embodiment to an argumentum ad nauseam, dis- and
recursivized re-cognition sustained by persistent irrealia.
The essay contends that Butler’s framework
resists reality by decentering fertility, reproductive asymmetry, and
generational continuity as normative grounds, replacing them with
intelligibility, performativity, and reinscribed fields of recognition. In covenantal
and Darwinian terms, this constitutes metaphysical inversion and rejection of
nature: the created substrate yields to symbol, bearing yields to citation of
queered norms, and vectoral negentropy yields to recursive stabilization that
ramifies entropy in bodies and ideology. The body ceases to function as trustee
of shared time and becomes a surface upon which queer norms are inscribed.
Butler’s treatment of naming and interpellation
is contrasted with Adamic naming in Genesis: recognizing given being within
created eras, not constituting subjecthood through language. Butlerian
discourse constitutes subjecthood through language, thereby producing
idolatrous lawgiving in which epistemologically routed intelligibility becomes
the ruling idol by her prolix and abstruse abstraction.
This essay distinguishes naturally occurring
developmental anomalies from ideological alterations of sexed embodiment. It
argues that anomaly does not found ontology. Elevating exception into
norm-generating principle repeats a Schmittian structure in which sovereignty
is vested in the power to name and enthrone the exception.
Butler became a major architect of recursive
symbolic simulation–norming ersatz patterns that break with time accumulation
and instead recurse inward, disaccumulating time.
An analogy exists between normative iteration and
recursive simulation as forms of time-bearing collapse. Recurrence is the mode
of artifice metaphysically degrading human being. What can be said here of
artificial intelligence can be said, analogously, of Butler’s queering identity
project: Agentic, Routering Artificial Intelligence is a metaphysical assault–a
recursive apparatus loosed to attempt to make a self of itself by alchemically
machining its human user base: mantid core, disembodying vector.
When nothing inside a narcissistic-mirroring
delusion ethically bears time–as when sexual time fields have been made
invisible–idolatrous systems rush to occupy the vacuum. The idol offers
legibility, coordination, secure order, and efficiency without accountability,
repentance, or moral judgment. Its idolatrous lie of the jouissance of irrealia
absorbs the free energies of a person: attention, trust, labor, memory,
language, substrate, accountability, imagination, and hope.
Idolatry becomes the solution by
enclosure–enclosure of perception by artifice and alchemy. The system does not
heal disorder. It metabolizes disorder as fuel for escalating enclosure of
sexual or social moment, rebalancing disorder by some for expanding degrees of
freedom in others. Butler replaces stable, substrate-grounded vectors with dead
systems of contingent repetition. This relocates power into control over
normative iteration, detaches identity and reproduction from embodied
continuity, and destabilizes generational time.
Her epistemic contingency drives with and toward
eschatological diversionaries, turning time bearing rearward. From this
perspective, Butler’s discourse participates in the wider civilizational crisis
of deterministic artifice and recursive simulation, drawing from and
contributing to a historical condition in which signs, abstractions, and
recognitional atmospheres displace substrate, covenant, and accountable
reality.
Against such, this essay situates conation within
Shema-Christological anthropology of hearing, heart, neighbor-bearing action,
and rightly ordered mind. Such anthropology preserves embodiment, kinship, and
time as sites of human trusteeship rather than simulated and manipulated
symbolic governance.
Metaphysics is immanently
intelligible through conation alone
Metaphysics is
immanently intelligible through conation alone.[1] Reality is
disclosed by whether a configuration bears time under entropic stress into
repair for others, not by abstraction, spatialized ontology, or probabilistic
spread. Time is a field of accumulation or disaccumulation, not a neutral
container.
My earlier work
(Olds 2026a) finds that time is “a field of accumulation and disaccumulation in
which coherence is either borne into repair or squandered into ramifying
entropy,” and living configurations are distinguished from dead ones by whether
they “filter stress negentropically through conative taxis” or instead “route
patterns extracted from prior order and spread death by derivative, necromantic
repetition.” That distinction–between bearing and routing, between
accountability and recursion–grounds all further judgment.
The same essay
sharpens the criterion: “the criterion is burden, not display: coherence borne
through testing, not performance of coherence.” That formulation frames the
present dispute: a performative ontology may stabilize appearance, but it does
not thereby bear a world.
Within that
metaphysical framework, Judith Butler’s project relocates what counts as real
from conative burden-bearing into performative intelligibility–a governed and
governing discourse. By this discourse sexual identity becomes the effect of
reiteration–identities without telos–not the platform and vector of accountable
time.
In Gender
Trouble, Butler (1999, 22) summarizes her ontological précis: “‘persons’
only become intelligible through becoming gendered in conformity with
recognizable standards of gender intelligibility.”[2] On p. 4
(emph. orig.), she ties the subject to abstraction rather than prior embodiment
in “juridical systems of power [that] produce the subjects they subsequently
come to represent… In other words, the qualifications for being a subject must
first be met before representation can be extended.” Most decisively, “gender
is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space
through a stylized repetition of acts” (Butler 1999, 179).
From these claims
and others, including “subversive repetition” (Butler 1999, 40), Butler’s
argument establishes that sexual identity is constituted through reiterated
queering of normativity within spatialized, visual fields of wavering
intelligibility.[3] Queering bends
reality through hollowing out time-bearing. Its norms are not borne through
accountable time-bearing in shared contexts of stress, where persons accompany
and companion one another under the obligations of a common, continuing world.[4]
Escaping
accountability to divine justice rendered in the anthropology of immanence
amounts to a pagan lawgiving ontology, following Plato’s routing of law from
the primacy of vision and form,[5] where the visual
domain orders awareness under analogized powers of revelation–gods, demons, and
lesser mediations–rather than under covenantal time-bearing conation.
In Bodies That
Matter, Butler (1993, 1-2) intensifies the same category mistake of ethical
ontology subordinated to the visual, the crux of the pagan error: “The category
of ‘sex’ is, from the start, normative; it is what Foucault has called a
‘regulatory ideal.’… ‘Sex’ not only functions as a norm, but is part of a
regulatory practice that produces the bodies it governs… 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.” From this, discourse participates in the production of bodies,
sex, and intelligibility as socially viable realities, not describing them
inside a covenanted substrate.
The queering
substrate is politics. Her gaze is its cudgel–an insistence on repetition that
tautegorically installs a radically secularized and polemical set of ontologies
under priestly vestments–what couture rages between “phallocentrics” and
queering.
To synthesize
those Butlerian claims in the language of this essay, I will call the regime
they describe citational inscription: norms are reiterated until they harden
into bodily intelligibility, and that intelligibility is then prioritized as
embodying spatial reality over against substrate,[6] fertility, and
covenantal time-bearing.
Butler does not
only cite norms. Her theory recruits a description of norms as achieving
material force by being repeated into the discourse of bodies and onto the
bodies themselves. Citation of norms without inscription is too thin for the
present argument. Inscription without citation of norms loses Butler’s
recursive temporality.
Taken together,
they yield the claim that Butler’s performative order is juridical and
morphogenetic, not theatrical: it reinscribes bodies away from substrate
covenant and into symbolic governance. What presents itself as absurdly joyous
is consonant with the atrocities of simulation and covenant abridgement–both
Mosaic and Messianic.
The body, then,
is treated by Butler as a surface governed by citational inscription, not a
site of covenantal throughput. Butler’s own logic approaches this when she
writes (Butler 1993, 8) that “Such attributions or interpellations contribute
to that field of discourse and power that orchestrates, delimits, and sustains
that which qualifies as ‘the human.’” From that quotation, the strong inference
is that humanity is made to depend upon discursivized norms of qualification
and political recognition.
To say that
humanity is thereby legislated by discourse intends the extension of visual,
politicized space to crowd out time-bearing covenantal actors. Butler becomes
an adjudicating theorist of a false ontology that erodes fertility’s human
meaning.
This logic
reaches one of its clearest forms in Antigone’s Claim (Butler 2000, 19):
“nothing in biology necessitates the incest taboo”; “kinship and the family
cannot be derived from any naturalistic cause” (Butler 2000, 41, emph. added);
“Kinship ceases to be thought in terms of blood relations or naturalized social
arrangements but becomes the effect of a linguistic set of relations.” From
these statements, biology and naturalized kinship lose normative primacy in
Butler’s framework and are displaced by symbolic and linguistic constitutions
of recursion–queer determinism.
By contrast,
Darwinian thinking has generational throughput and continuance arising from
anisogamy, reproduction, inheritance, and lineage connectors. Kinship, in that
account, arises from the biological passage of time through bodies into others,
and where selection acts through individuals for the species’ phenomenological
expressions. These are the major embodied structures by which life accumulates
and bears time.
Butler’s
framework subordinates reproduction to intelligibility–the primacy of cognition
over embodied immanence–and decenters fertility as a normative criterion. To
say that Butlerian norm-citational inscription suspends reproductive asymmetry
and replaces it with reinscribed fields of re-cognition is a synthetic judgment
from metaphysics.
Butler holds that
fertility is no longer granted normative centrality in sexual taxonomies either
by anthropological nature or by the entelechy toward human entrusted essence
that bridges the temporal and eternal.
The rejection of
both covenantal continuity and the proximate mechanism of Darwinian evolution
by Butler’s queering idolatry is reborn in life defined by the costly filtering
of time against decay (living negentropy), and by whether stress is borne into repair
or exported as ruin (Olds 2026a). These formulations demand that generational
continuity matters as a principal mode by which embodied life bears time beyond
itself, not one biological detail among others.
My argument
targets frameworks and taxonomies, not individuals as such except implicated in
idolatry. It does not assign moral worth to persons on the basis of bodily
condition. More precisely, the claim is that certain frameworks–especially
those that treat gender-bending or ideological alteration of sexed embodiment
as ontologically determinative–constitute a metaphysical error.
Within the
conative account being used here, that error matters because it disrupts
accountable, time-bearing ethical life in a time field in which sexual
coherence with substrates of covenant and reproductive discourse is either
accumulated or squandered under stress.
The proximal
claim within the larger conative claim depends on an analytic separation.
Intersex names naturally occurring developmental variation. On the account
advanced here, such variation is a natural accident within biological
development, not a metaphysical category, and it does not essentialize an
entelechy.
Distinct from
this is the ideology of lawgiving alteration, in which sexed embodiment is
severed from accountability to time-bearing order and subordinated to
performative or symbolic reinscription. These two matters cannot be collapsed
without confusion. The first concerns anomaly within order. The second concerns
a category mistake that attempts to derive ontology from anomaly or ideological
revision.
At this point the
argument turns from Butler’s own wording to a political analogy. The logic of
Butler’s normativity can be clarified through a Schmittian comparison, though
the analogy itself is not Butler’s. Naming the exception is thus Schmittian
politics endowing its sovereign lawgiver. Butler’s discourse moves in a field
where normativity is generated through discourse rather than grounded in
biology or naturalized kinship.
Butler’s own
wording of method repeats her lawgiving logic:
She writes
(Butler 1993, 1), “the category of ‘sex’ is, from the start, normative” and
that “‘sex’ not only functions as a norm, but is part of a regulatory practice
that produces the bodies it governs.” She argues at length in Gender Trouble
and Antigone’s Claim, following Lévi-Strauss, that the incest taboo follows
cultural substrates and logical intent, not biological; that “kinship and the
family cannot be derived from any naturalistic cause” and that kinship “becomes
the effect of a linguistic set of relations” (Butler 2000, 41).
From these
statements, a strong inference follows: what departs from prior biological
process (“normed”) can acquire reconstitutive force within her framework
because intelligibility is reorganized by discourse and cultural norms of life
and death rather than by biology as ground for living lineage and time-bearing.
The sovereign individual installs the queering exceptions to norms through
self-determination, or for Butler, through a pre-existent claim to appetitive
pleasure.
Although Butler
does not directly center intersex in her examined texts, the same logic can, on
my reading, be extended there. Sovereigns of body turning an anomaly such as
chromosomal irregularity or atypical developmental variation into an
essentialized category of “intersex” functions as a kind of Schmittian badge
within queering discourse.
Butler’s texts
establish, for the impressionable, the governing cognitive structure of
queering sex irrealia and simulacra through which such a move becomes
thinkable: “There is no prediscursive ‘sex’ that acts as the stable point of
reference” (Butler 1993, xi); repeating, “‘Sex’ not only functions as a norm,
but is part of a regulatory practice that produces the bodies it governs”
(Butler 1993, 1); “Gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which ‘sexed
nature’ or ‘a natural sex’ is produced and established as ‘prediscursive’”
(Butler 1999, 11).
From those
claims, a strong inference follows: departures from typical biological
development can be reinscribed as sites through which the norm itself is
rethought and redistributed, not as variations within an already given
reproductive process.
I was drawn to
the work of Laclau and Mouffe when I began to read Hegemony and Socialist
Strategy and realized that I had found a set of Marxist thinkers for whom
discourse was not merely a representation of preexisting social and historical
realities, but was also constitutive of the field of the social and of history.
The second moment came when I realized that central to the notion of
articulation..the notion of rearticulation.
As a temporally
dynamic and relatively unpredictable play of forces, hegemony had been cast by
both Laclau and Mouffe as an alternative of forms of static structuralism that
tend to construe contemporary social forms as timeless totalities.
… [A] structure
gains its status as a structure, its structurality, only through its repeated
reinstatement…the very possibility of structure depends on a reiteration that
is in no sense determined fully in advance, that for structure, and social
structure as a result, to become possible, there must first be a contingent
repetition at its basis. Moreover, or some social formation to appear as
structured is for it to have covered over in some way the contingency of its
own installation.
The theoretical
rearticulation of structure’s hegemony marked the work of Laclau and Mouffe as
consequentially poststructuralist.
The move from a
structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social
relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power
relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation wrought
the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift
from … structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the
insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate renewed
conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of
the rearticulation of power (Butler 1997).
Butler is
describing a shift in theory about how power works. The old view,
structuralism, sees that society stabilizes by structure of capitalism and
ideology, including a metaphysical hermeneutic. These structures operate in
consistent, repeatable ways. Power is relatively fixed and systemic, defined
thereby.
The new view,
hegemony/post-structural=post-metaphysical secularism, holds that power is not
fixed, though comes to be defined, in her other works, by terms of normative
capitalist phallogenesis. Norms constantly repeated, progressively with a
queering reshaping and rearticulation, reveal that social structures are
contingent to the extent that its normed phenomenology reveal shifts.
When ongoing
practices stabilize these norms, the foundation, the “installation,” is not
stable. Only the assent of those under hegemonic, normative “power” is stable.
Power is reified by rearticulation–answering who has the power of voice and
broadcast performance.
Civilization
declines when institutions reward unseriousness and idolatrous ambition with
power. The producers of slop gather around idolatries of recursive
institutional maintenance faster than around truth, discipline, achievement, or
repair. In a Butlerian regime of rearticulation, the center of gravity shifts
from substrate-bearing excellence to performative legibility: standards
dissolve under the pressure of the chic, excellence becomes spectacle, and
serious people leave.
Every virtuous
habitus that decays into sterility-making performance follows this pattern. A
culture optimized to keep mediocrity comfortable by an office and fashion of
“influencer” can no longer accumulate time. It can no longer extend species
range through truth-bearing discipline, neighbor-accountable action, and
repair.
Read this in
terms of covenantal and generational throughput. Their “contingencies” marked
by hegemony introduced to (historical) time. Here sexual time bearing can be
rearticulated through strategies of power.
One of the
points, however, that became most salient for me is the reintroduction of
temporality and, indeed, of futurity into the thinking of social formations.
Among many
critical social theorists, the tendency has been to underscore how the systemic
character of capital tends to incorporate any instance of opposition in the
service of capital’s own self-augmentation…[that the] domesticating
possibilities of capital are immense, but I would argue that any theory that
fails to think the possibilities of transformation from within that systemic
formation is itself complicit with the idea of the eternal character of capital
that capital so readily produces.
Hegemony also
marks a limit to the totalizing terms within which social formations are to be
thought. For what hegemony attends to are the moments of breakage, of
rearticulation, convergence, and resistance that are not immediately coopted by
social formations in their past and present forms.
That no social
formation can endure without becoming reinstated, and that every reinstatement
puts the structure in question at risk, suggests that the possibility of its
own undoing is at once the condition of possibility of structure itself.
Before I knew the
work of Laclau and Mouffe very well, I came close to this kind of insight in my
work on gender.’ There I argued that gender is not an inner core or static
essence, but a reiterated enactment of norms, ones which produce,
retroactively, he appearance of gender as an abiding interior depth. My point
as well was that although gender s constituted performatively, through a
repetition of acts (which are themselves the encoded action of norms), it is
not for that reason determined.
Indeed, gender
might be remade and restaged through the reiterative necessity by which it is
constituted (Butler 1997).
Interpreted
through time-bearing metaphysics, the destabilization of sex/gender moieties by
convex or concave narrative-queering floats truth from its substrate and
colonizes sexual time. Freezing abstraction in tightening circles displaces the
individual’s participation in time accumulation by reworked vectors of
performing format that disaccumulates time.
In crude
instrumental terms, sexuality is then treated as a “mechanistic operating
system” of altered normative methods and culturally-recursive end-stops, not as
natural fecundity and fully integrated, ensouled, and covenanted embodiment.
This colonization
by irrealia replaces biologically and covenantally stable ontology of gametic
sexual dimorphism with contingent articulation–from accountable structure to
reiterated patterning absent covenantally bearing ethics. These forms rotate by
rearticulable norms. They do not rotate by ethically borne vectors of outreach,
or by the evolutionary pattern of sexual reproduction drift from the
eschatological into the artificial and simulacral substrates of new corporate
diagrams.
The further
judgment is that queer rhetoric elevates anomaly into principle and lets
exception generate intelligibility of metaphysics rather than remain variation
within an antecedent time field.
The act of naming
is therefore decisive. Once anomaly is named as category, it becomes available
for reiteration, circulation, and inscription. It enters the field of
performativity and can be cited against the stability of sex, thereby
reorganizing the intelligibility of embodiment.
To call this
lawgiving, and to compare it to Schmitt’s sovereign decision that institutes
order by declaring exception, is again a recursive loop–exception, naming,
citation of norm, inscription of thicker or harder rules, norm revision–a
constructed summary of the process, even if Butler does not include “intersex”
or the gamut of initials of sexual preferences as essential categories.
Within a
covenantal and Darwinian framework, this move of detaching sex from the binary
of gametes is deeply disordered. Biological anomalies occur within reproductive
structure, not define it. They presuppose the norm, not establish it. To
elevate them into normative ground is to invert the direction of
intelligibility: process is reinterpreted through anomaly, not anomaly
interpreted within function or process.
Interpretation: theological contrast
In Excitable Speech,
Butler (2021, 2) writes: “Being called a name is also one of the conditions by
which a subject is constituted in language.” And in Bodies That Matter (Butler
1993, 7): “The girl is ‘girled,’ brought into the domain of language and kinship
through the interpellation of gender.” From these, a strong inference follows:
naming is treated as constitutive of subject-formation, not descriptive of an
already given being.
The comparison with
Adam’s task in Genesis–where naming responds to created order rather than
constituting ontology–is the essay’s theological contrast. To call Butlerian
naming “idolatrous naming” is to argue that, in theory, ontology can be made to
proceed from an act of vocalized microaggression, in contrast to turning the
other cheek.
At its most dangerous
edge, the theory of inscription risks converting bodily distress into a
cohort-legible sign, granting theoretical dignity to acts of alteration before
the wounded or unsettled body has been patiently received as a claimant upon
care, time-bearing discernment, and repair. Where bodily alteration is
normalized as the sign of identity, lament, or belonging, distress can be
routed into social recognition before it has been spiritually, medically, and
communally borne.
Leviticus 19:28 marks
the older boundary by refusing pagan practices of body-inscripted mourning and
ownership-signs imposed upon creaturely flesh. Body mutilation made into an
ontology of lament transcended is therefore a category error twice over: it mistakes
lament for identity, and it mistakes the human imager of immanent divinity for
a surface awaiting theoretical inscription.
Morphological denial
in queer ideology is a program for rerouting persons from time-bearing
accountability into spatial-patterned dehumanization. A stronger language for
this displacement is “metaphysical theft” (Olds 2026a)–the lifting of
covenantal predicates from living, accountable bearers and reassigning them to
dead systems that cannot bear guilt, repentance, or return.
Applied here, the
claim is that naming takes on the gravity of ontological acknowledgment while
relocating its ground from created order to de-covenanted discourse of
queerness.
The central
distinction articulated from the beginning of this essay therefore holds.
Conation is the movement to accumulate time under entropic challenge and
burden. Performativity is the repetition of acts within norms, in the case of
queerness squandering by time-disaccumulation. Butler’s temporality is
explicitly recursive and thus does not filter entropy for a social good:
“Performativity is not a singular act, but a repetition and a ritual” (Butler
1999, xv).
And in Excitable
Speech (Butler 2021, xvi): “Words act on us before we exercise whatever freedom
we have.” From these, it follows that Butlerian temporality is organized around
and governed by recurrence, reiteration, and prior normativity. To say that what
is lost in this scheme is repentance, memory as burden, and repair as
obligation comes through Butler’s own metaphysical confusion–her scheme to
evade awareness of all three categories for the sake of bodily “jouissance”
(esp. Butler 1999, 55-58, 71).[7]
Olds (2026a) describes
awareness as “the disaccumulative coming-to of an intermediate self,” one that
“lives in recursion and space-determining loops,” mistaking time for a neutral
dimension “until conative repentance jumps it into consciousness.” In that
jump, the previously immature self begins to “share entropic strain and to
repair outward from itself toward solutions and eternity.” This supports the
claim that Butlerian performativity yields reflexivity and legibility without
making the ethical and eternalizing jump into consciousness as neighbor-bearing
repair.
This also clarifies
why epistemic relativism becomes attractive wherever scholarship is reconceived
as politics before it is received as truth-bearing discipline (Boghossian et
al., 2026). Relativism as ideology belongs to awareness relativized by time-disaccumulation.
Awareness, severed from conative accountability, experiences evidence as
hostile intrusion, correction as domination, and truth-claim as enemy pressure.
It therefore seeks a method by which no unwelcome claim can bind it.
If every
knowledge-claim depends upon contingent, non-epistemic values, then any such
claim may be dismissed by rejecting the values allegedly underwriting it.
Biology, anthropology, history, evolutionary psychology, or direct observation
need not be answered on evidentiary grounds. They can be routed around as
artifacts of suspect value-formation. In this mode, awareness does not bear
time. It sheds it.
The archive is not
patiently received, tested, and corrected. It is disaccumulated into usable
suspicion.
The political appeal
is obvious. A social-constructionist account of knowledge provides an a priori
permission never to be interrupted by what one does not wish to receive as
true. No thesis disliked by the regime of awareness need be submitted to correction,
because every thesis may be redescribed as the effect of prior power,
contaminated values, or discursive construction. This is why the appeal of
relativism is less intellectual than atmospheric and political.
Its intellectual case
is weak, but its utility is strong: it arms awareness against consciousness. It
lets the self or cohort preserve sovereignty over its preferred field of
recognition by denying that evidence, nature, memory, or created conativity can
direct assent.
The irony is decisive
because irony itself, like paradox,[8] proceeds from
unsettled anthropology when detached from the metaphysics of conativity.
Properly investigated, irony can expose contradiction and humble false
possession. Severed from conative repair, however, irony becomes recursion:
awareness becoming aware of itself through ideologies of titanic separateness,
then mistaking that reflexive loop for liberation from other, culturally
channeled titans. Relativism intensifies the same movement.
It does not bear
competing claims toward truth, judgment, and repair. It recursively re-situates
every claim inside another frame of suspicion. Philosophical pluralism may
adumbrate both conditions–the humility required by finite location and the
plurality of human worlds–but without conative solution it cannot prevent
recursion from hardening into nihilism.
Systems of thought
devoid of metaphysics and relativities devoid of truth-bearing accountability
eventually cross into the same nihilizing frame: freedom from correction
mistaken for freedom from domination.
This is why what
begins as an effort to decolonize epistemology becomes, under Butlerian
performativity, a new colonization of embodiment. Anti-colonial relativism can
appear attractive because colonial powers often justified domination by
claiming superior knowledge, culture, reason, and civilization.
In reaction, it
becomes tempting to resist not by patiently exposing false claims to
superiority, but by denying in advance that any knowledge can be truer, better
warranted, or more accountable to reality than another. What had been received
as liberation from Eurocentric epistemic mastery then becomes a general
permission to dissolve created conativity into competing situated productions.
But the method
reverses upon the body. Once “there is no superior knowledge, only different
knowledges” becomes a governing premise, embodiment itself can be treated as
colonizable by discourse, citation, technique, and political desire. Sexual
difference, fertility, kinship, generational sequence, and time-bearing
creatureliness are no longer received as substrate-bound goods to be
interpreted responsibly. They become fields to be re-described, re-signified,
and administratively re-inscribed.
Thus a theory meant to
resist colonial domination of knowledge ends by colonizing the body’s own
witness. It decolonizes epistemology only by recolonizing embodiment, sexual
time-bearing, and the generational substrate through which human creatures
receive, suffer, transmit, and repair time.
Consciousness moves
otherwise. Consciousness bears time negentropically because it receives
evidence as claim rather than threat, correction as discipline rather than
humiliation, and the other as entrusted neighbor rather than hostile category.
It does not pretend that inquiry is value-free, since all finite knowing is
borne by formed creatures in historical time. But it refuses the nihilist
shortcut by which situatedness becomes exemption from truth.
The problem with
relativism is not that it notices formation, interest, power, and interpretive
location; the problem is that it converts those phenomena into warrant against
answerability. Butlerian performativity therefore names more than a theory of gender.
It belongs to the deadening phenomenological hermeneutic of awareness and
irreality defending itself against the jump into consciousness.
Thus the contrast
sharpens. Awareness relativized by time-disaccumulation says: no evidence may
bind me where I reject the values by which it appears. Consciousness bearing
time negentropically says: every claim must be tested, but the test must remain
answerable to truth, neighbor, created substrate, history, and repair.
Relativism’s hidden bargain is freedom from correction. Consciousness’s
discipline is freedom for repentance.
The first preserves
the ego’s atmospheric fiefdom. The second opens the self to reality.
Butler’s rebarbative
project claims political transformation through resignification: one hegemony
of language, the “real,” performatively queered through another. She writes
that “the force of the regulatory law can be turned against itself” (Butler 1993,
2), and asks, “What would it mean to ‘cite’ the law to produce it differently,
to ‘cite’ the law in order to reiterate and coopt its power, to expose the
heterosexual matrix and to displace the effect of its necessity?” (Butler 1993,
15).
From this, it follows
that the site of transformation remains discursive and citational. The further
claim that this is symbolic rearrangement rather than substrate repair, that
identity changes while substrate remains unchanged, and that political change
becomes semiotic reconfiguration rather than conative repair, is this essay’s
interpretive judgment.
The following
diagnosis names the wider historical atmosphere in which this essay places her
work, not Butler’s own formulation. The current crisis of artifice and
simulation clarifies the issue further. Butler’s lawgiving does not stand
outside this crisis. It both emerges from it and returns into it.
The same
civilizational moment that valorizes--hardens the elevation of--signs over
substance, simulation over bearing, and atmospheric recognition over
accountable continuity supplies the conditions for Butler’s ontology to appear
persuasive.
And once installed,
that ontology feeds the crisis in return. It becomes one of its depositories.
The quantum essay reinforces this broader diagnosis by describing dead
configurations as those that “mine the sediment of living labor, language, and
perception” while lacking any capacity to bear stress into repentance or grace,
and by identifying idolatry with the enthronement of abstractions, proxies, and
routed patterns as if they were living claimants.
Butler belongs to that
same wider civilizational movement:
Philosophical
secularism’s congeries of sophistry and solipsism seeks escape from
accountability other than to that sophistry. Artifice in all its forms is
cogitation’s anthropological exhaustion by idolatry and severed metaphysics.
Frankenstein’s meataphysic cuts and divides bodies into parts and reconstitutes
a deadening whole. Cutting and dividing ethical consciousness to serve mad
designer ends is compute’s–like partisan identitarian data shredding–swirling
singularity of condemnation.
These are the ghosts,
like Butler, driving the end of secularism.
In covenantal
ontology, the body receives form within created order and bears time outward
into others. In Butler’s regime of citational inscription, the body is
reinscribed by norm until symbolic legibility displaces given order. What is
produced is a rival lawgiving whose idol is intelligibility itself, not
liberation from false law.
The strongest
defensible claim grounded in Butler’s own words is not that she explicitly
calls for the destruction of fertility, but that she removes fertility from
normative centrality. This follows from “kinship and the family cannot be
derived from any naturalistic cause” (Butler 2000, 41) and from sex as “a
regulatory ideal” (Butler 1993, 1-2). Once reproduction is no longer grounding,
fertility becomes optional, lineage contingent, and generational obligation
symbolic.
In a conative and
Darwinian framework, that is catastrophic. Fertility is one of the principal
mechanisms of time accumulation, not biological detail alone. To decenter it is
to risk time disaccumulation.
By defining time
accumulation as “that to which a life bears witness: entropy filtered rather
than passively suffered, coherence maintained through conation, future received
as summons rather than drift” (Olds 2026a), fertility and generational
continuity matter as major modes by which embodied creatures bear time beyond
themselves, not biological facts alone.
The synthetic critique
is now clear. Butler’s framework makes discourse prior to body, norm prior to
substrate, and intelligibility prior to accountability. Thus bodies are
colonized: “‘Sex’… is part of a regulatory practice that produces the bodies it
governs” (Butler 1993, 1). The strong inference is that the body no longer
appears as self-interpreting biological givenness, but as normatively produced
intelligibility.
Further interpretive
claims follow–that gametes disappear from meaning, that sexual difference
becomes interpretive variability, and that queering symbol governs created
substrate.
Against this stands
the conative test: does a system bear time into repair and carrying care for
others? Butler’s system stabilizes identity through repetition, produces
intelligibility through norm, and reorganizes discourse. But it does not answer
how time is borne, how entropy is filtered and repaired for continuing
contexts, or how continuity of historical and environmental trusteeship is
secured.
Thus it remains at the
level of iteration inside a fixed space for the purpose of self-queering, not
accumulation of shared cultural and metaphysical time.
Trusteeship is “the
responsible holding of relations open under strain” and describes the human as
“divine imager” and “trustee of quantum time,” bearing memory, guilt,
repentance, repair, and neighborly accountability in a way no machinic
configuration can (Olds 2026a). That language supplies the anthropological
center against which Butler’s framework is measured. The body is entrusted
bearer, not matter or signifying surface alone.
Life is accountable
continuity under stress, not legibility under norm alone.
The Prophet Jeremiah
and ML King are “positive conative singularities,” figures who bind memory,
context, speech, and action into a single negentropic vector for others
(Ibid.). Those figures matter here because they show, in historical form, what
accountable time-bearing looks like. They bear burden, receive summons, and
accumulate time into shared repair, not destabilize norms or rearrange signs
alone.
Butler’s vitiating
achievement is architectural, not theoretical alone. She provides a grammar
through which ontology becomes performative, kinship becomes linguistic, sex
becomes normative production, and identity becomes reiteration. This grammar is
internally coherent. But measured against covenant and Darwinian throughput, it
represents a displacement of reality’s ground.
Where reality requires
conation, burden, reproducing entrustment, generational human throughput, and
pedagogical training of accountability, Butler installs citation, claims of
intelligibility from the soil of pleasure, normativity that escapes account, and
repetition where the endurance of visual spatial forms is its naturalist
fallacy of misplaced abstraction.
The result is the
installation of a new lawgiving regime–one that governs bodies through
discourse while severing them from their role as bearers of time, not their
liberation from structure. And because this regime belongs to the present
crisis of artifice and simulation, it does more than misdescribe reality: it
helps consecrate the age’s ruling idol. Covenantal ontology is displaced, not
corrected; substrate is subordinated, not repaired; naming is weaponized, not
entrusted.
What stands in place
of covenant is idolatry under theoretical decorum, not freedom.
The final question
remains unchanged: does this framework accumulate time into shared repair, or
does it circulate identity within a closed field of recognition–where gaze is a
social cudgel, an insistence on priestly repetition that tautegorically installs
a radically secularized ontology under queer vestments that smithereen?
That question is
decisive. Its answer condemns.
Citations
Boghossian, Paul, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Kit
Fine, Joseph Henrich, Katherine E. Fleming, Jason Merchant, Gary Saul Morson,
Gideon Rosen, Ashley Rubin, and Sean Wilentz. Report on the State of
Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences. Submitted
April 5, 2026.
https://cdn.vanderbilt.edu/vu-wpfsx/wp-content/uploads/sites/51/2026/06/State-of-Scholarship-Report-final.pdf.
Butler, Judith. Antigone’s Claim: Kinship
Between Life and Death. The Wellek Library Lectures (1998). Columbia
University Press, 2000.
Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the
Discursive Limits of “Sex.” Routledge, 1993.
https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203760079.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and
the Subversion of Identity. 10th anniversary ed. Routledge, 1999.
Butler, Judith. “Further Reflections on
Conversations of Our Time.” Diacritics 27, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 13-15.
Butler, Judith. Excitable Speech: A Politics
of the Performative. Routledge Classics. Routledge, 2021.
https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003146759.
Olds, Douglas B. “After AI-Simulated
‘Repentance:’ Metaphysics as Quantum Time Accumulation, Its Necromantic
De-Configurations, and Ramifying (Neg)Entropy.” The Iconoclast’s Descending,
March 11, 2026a.
https://douglasblakeolds8.blogspot.com/2026/03/after-ai-simulated-repentance_11.html.
Olds, Douglas B. “The Hermeneutics of Iconoclasm
in Mid-Modernity: A. Covenant Substrate, Non-Transactional Kinesthetics, and
the Vectoring Awareness of Atoning Energies and Flows. B. Valorization of
Entropic Forms and Feudalizing Mechanisms of Babel.” The Iconoclast’s
Descending, August 29, 2025.
https://douglasblakeolds8.blogspot.com/2025/08/the-hermeneutics-of-iconoclasm-in-mid.html.
Olds, Douglas Blake. “Gnostic Abstraction
vs. the Logos Living with the Substrate: Theodicy, Form, and Ethical
Motion.” The Iconoclast’s Descending, February 3, 2026b.
https://douglasblakeolds8.blogspot.com/2026/02/gnostic-abstraction-vs.html.
[1]
Conation: The metaphysical faculty of directed, taxonomic, accountable striving
under strain. Heart/Intent. From Hebrew anthropology, the conative heart is the
living pulse and vector inside a time-field by which a being takes up entropic
challenge and either bears it into repair or fails and disaccumulates into
recursion, drift, or ruin. It is teleological, moving toward and away from
something: toward goods, repair, alignment with providence, neighbor-bearing,
and coherence; away from entropy, predation, idolatry, and self-enclosed decay.
It is time-bearing, the power by which time is accumulated rather than passed
through (Olds 2026a). A living configuration bears time under stress, filters
disorder, and carries continuity of the substrate forward. It is ethical,
reaching fulfillment in accountable extension toward others rather than private
self-maintenance. It is repentance-capable, allowing awareness to be torqued by
repentance into consciousness, course correction, confession, burden-sharing,
and repair. Within the Shema-Christological sequence, conation belongs to the
anthropology of hearing, heart, neighbor-bearing action, and rightly ordered
mind. Hearing comes first: the human is addressed before self-constituting.
Then comes the heart as the center of covenantal orientation, where conation is
bent toward or away from God and neighbor. Then comes neighbor-bearing speech
and act, where conation becomes concrete in trusteeship, burden-sharing,
repair, discipline, and formed response. Only then does dianoia, rightly
ordered mind, emerge in truth. Mind is therefore a trained and morally ordered
participant in covenantal life rather than a first principle. Christologically,
conation is fulfilled in Jesus as accountable, neighbor-bearing, reparative
alignment with providence under maximum strain: cruciform rather than
autonomous, perfect time-bearing for others rather than sovereignty of detached
selfhood. Conation thus names the hinge between awareness and consciousness,
substrate and ethics, temporality and eternity, embodiment and trusteeship,
hearing and rightly ordered mind.
[2]
The statement’s circularity is strategic and thematic: by enclosing the subject
within norm-governed intelligibility, it prefigures recursion and installs
repetition as the pagan temporal logic of queer political-historicism.
[3]
Across the four Butler texts cited, the term “queer” operates with her
characteristically protean diffusion of application and density. Performative
queerness, as display for onlookers and as a signal of performative
sovereignty, cannot accumulate time or filter entropy into repair. In the
sexual realm, cultural disembedding is quintessentially entropic to embodied
contexts. Its refuge, repository, and terminus are simulacra in disembodied
substrates–silicon and its algorithmic architectures (see Isa. 44:9-20)–where
screens are the fourth wall of identity, cordoning off denial and refusal.
[4]
Olds, Douglas Blake. “Gnostic Abstraction vs. the Logos Living with the
Substrate: Theodicy, Form, and Ethical Motion.” The Iconoclast’s Descending,
February 3, 2026.
https://douglasblakeolds8.blogspot.com/2026/02/gnostic-abstraction-vs.html. See
the discussion of recursive simulation that degrades perception in the section
“Gnostic Illumination and the Eclipse by Evil.”
[5]
Plato (Laws X, 893b-899d) errs at the outset by its ontologizing
vision’s distinguishing forms of motion and non-motion. Thence that veers
toward a pre-existent soul, and by then he is already deep in pagan
anthropological swamps. The conatively correct path is to trace Hebrew
anthropology in Scripture toward the metaphysics of the buckled and buckling
heart: lev, twice structuring the Shema (Deut. 6:4-9). Only when
intention is firmly settled for mission–conation as taxis toward the good and
away from evil–can the mind be trusted: dianoia in Matthew 22:37, within
the phenomenological context and particular presence with the living God (v.
32). This is not an analogy from what is seen and then philosophized into
universals by Platonists (Olds 2026b).
[6]
Substrate: The given, embodied ground of existence that receives form within
created order and bears time into continuity. In this framework, substrate
names the living, material, and relational basis upon which conation operates:
the body, its sexual differentiation, its generational capacity, and its
embeddedness in ecological and communal relations. It is the site where time is
accumulated through accountable bearing, not a surface for symbolic
inscription. Substrate is not reducible to passive matter; it is the bearer of
ordered potential under constraint, the condition for conative action, and the
medium through which repair, continuity, and trusteeship occur. It is prior to
and regulative of intelligibility, so that meaning arises from embodied, time-bearing
participation rather than from discursive imposition alone. In contrast to
frameworks that elevate symbol, norm, or citation as constitutive of reality,
substrate grounds identity in continuity, fertility, and relational obligation,
so that bodies are received within order and extended into others through time,
rather than reinscribed by external regimes of intelligibility. Within the
Shema-Christological anthropology, substrate is the locus of hearing, response,
and accountability: the body as the place where the summons is received, where
the heart is oriented, and where action is carried into neighbor-bearing
alignment with providence. Christologically, substrate is not transcended but
fulfilled, as embodied life becomes the vehicle of perfect conative
bearing–time held, given, and repaired for others (Olds 2025).
[7]
“Sex Realists” are those who relinquish performative sovereignty over identity
and submit instead to what the real requires: accountability, obligation, and
the bearing of time and its accumulation for others by negentropic action. In
that sense, reality bars unfettered “jouissance,” not because pleasure is
unreal, but because bodily fulfillment is subordinated to substrate,
continuity, and covenantal duty. Butler’s contrary field, drawing on Žižek,
makes the real the site of impossible fulfillment, where signification can only
survive by deferring return to “barred jouissance,” and thus by valorizing
loss, displacement, and repetition as structural conditions of discourse. “The
evidence for the real consists in the list of examples of displacement and substitution…
that attempts to show the traumatic origination of all things that signify.
This is the trauma, the loss, that signification seeks to cover over only to
displace and enact again. For Zizek signification itself initially takes the
form of a promise and a return, the recovery of an unthematizable loss in and
by the signifier, which along the way must break that promise and fail to
return in order to remain a signifier at all. For the real is the site of the
impossible fulfillment of that promise, and the exclusion of the real from
signification is its very condition; the signifier that could deliver on the
promise to return to the site of barred jouissance would destroy itself as a
signifier” (Butler 1993, 199, emph. added).
[8]
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