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] This article was prepared with editorial assistance from ChatGPT under the Lawnmower Rule: the tool remained ministerial rather than agentic and idolatrous. Its author is accountable for every sentence unless specifically attributed to outside sources.

“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 this, the essay situates conativity within Shema-Christological anthropology: hearing, heart, rightly-aligned mind, neighbor-bearing action, and created substrate entrusted to repair. The body is covenantal bearer, rather than primarily matter or signifying surface; life is accountable continuity under stress, rather than legibility under relativizing norm. The argument distinguishes three accounts of continuity: Butlerian continuity through reiterated recognition, "orthodox" continuity through non-identical repetition and analogical participation, and covenanted radiation through conative eschatological bearing. The first two seek validation through antecedent form: Butler through the backward circulation of sedimented norms whose repetition confers recognizability, Pickstock et al. through creaturely participation in an eternal formal order disclosed through the analogia entis. The present account rejects both social recurrence and analogical resemblance as warrants of covenantal identity. Creaturely continuity is opened ethically and eschatologically toward its telos, rather than secured by conformity to inherited predicates or participated archetype. Christ’s eternal time field launches within earthly time fields, interrupting, judging, and redirecting historical becoming toward repentance, neighbor-bearing repair, and transformed fulfillment. Butler repeats inherited form; Pickstock et al. conceit to participate in eternal form; conative eschatology opens historical form toward an ethically demanded orientation transdirecting both. Human substrate continuity is therefore served through telos not ontics--conative bearing and eschatological gathering: an opening toward accountable becoming whose end exceeds both prior social intelligibility and the recurrence of established form.

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 [9]. 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.

Performativity recognizes that repetition reshapes social life, yet repetition alone does not identify what becomes historically accumulated. Social reality is composed through susceptual fields: patterned inclinations transmitted by language, education, institutions, architecture, law, custom, media, and technological mediation before reflective concepts arise. These suscepts organize what appears salient, plausible, and worthy of pursuit before explicit judgment begins. Concepts emerge where conative persons bear these susceptibilities into accountable discernment, preserving, correcting, or refusing them through historically embodied action. Social order therefore arises through accumulated susceptual formation borne by living persons rather than through reiterated performances detached from substrate and covenantal history.

This distinction clarifies why repetition becomes morally decisive. Lesser-evil reasoning, bureaucratic accommodation, and routinized compromise become susceptualized through continual rehearsal, retraining perception before conceptual judgment occurs. Managed concession becomes the ordinary geometry of discernment, contracting the conceptual horizon--and its time-field bearers--until covenantal alternatives disappear from apparent possibility. Time-bearing judgment gathers present sacrifice into historically accountable repair; susceptualized accommodation disperses that gathering into successive adjustments whose cumulative effect diminishes historical consciousness, weakens covenantal responsibility, and narrows the future before deliberate thought begins. AI accelerates this process by engineering susceptual fields through probabilistic routing, substituting managed salience for accountable conation while borrowing predicates belonging to living, time-bearing persons.

Time-bearing 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.

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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.

Within the wider genealogy of artifice proposed in this Blog and in this essay, Butlerian irrealia also prepares the temporal and anthropological conditions under which machinic administration becomes attractive as a promise to sublimate the challenges of time-bearing. Its recursive reinscription suspends created sequence by routing embodiment, memory, correction, and cross-generational obligation through symbolic fields whose governing categories remain perpetually revisable. Accelerationist systems then mistake the resulting paralysis for insufficient speed of valorized pattern, forcing futurity through computational infrastructures trained upon archives already marked by deferred judgment, unresolved contradiction, and severed accountability. The relation resembles the pharmacological acceleration or suspension of pubertal signs. The civilizational analogy with clinical treatment advanced here concerns the substitution of an induced marker for borne development. Computational time-shifting of patterns similarly produces the signs mistaken for futurity—speed, novelty, output, adaptation, and administrative reach—without the historical and ontogenetic maturation through which contradiction becomes correction. Repatterning accelerates the artifices of suspension because no system can generate the correction absent from its data: correction requires a continuous, repentant bearer capable of receiving contradiction, owning consequence, and redirecting history toward neighbor and creation. Predicate theft succeeds within this atmosphere because civilization increasingly seeks absolution from accountable judgment. Dead artifice receives the predicates of intelligence and decision while living persons are reduced to routed profiles, statistical abstractions, and administratively legible substrates. Cowardice, selfishness, and deontological failure are recoded as optimization, inevitability, or technical necessity, while operators claim only to execute what the system has determined. Time suspension and technological acceleration thereby converge in delegated unaccountability within the wider regime of irrealia: suspension refuses created sequence and its telic time field, while acceleration seeks futurity without bearing either. The apparatus imports uncorrected time into every accelerated decision until accumulated incoherence approaches seizure, leaving open whether routed idolatry freezes before its momentum distributes injuries across bodies, generations, and the created field.

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 present account therefore addresses Butler’s program for the historical force of repetition while relocating its metaphysical ground. Repetition forms susceptual fields that dispose perception before conceptual judgment begins. Living, conative persons remain the bearers who receive these suscepts, correct them into accountable concepts, transmit them through time, or allow them to harden into instruments of civilizational capture. Substrate is therefore the living bearer through which suscepts are accumulated, judged, corrected, and transmitted across generations. Social continuity and covenantal structure arise through conative time-bearing rather than through reiteration, because history accumulates by the entelechy of accountable, time-bearing persons before it stabilizes in institutions, language, or custom. 

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 (de)stabilize norms or rearrange signs alone.

Butler’s vitiating achievement is architectural theory. 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 even Darwinian throughput, it represents a displacement of reality’s ground.

Butler recognizes repetition as historically formative. The present account argues that repetition accumulates susceptual fields rather than constituting identity. Identity is borne by living persons whose accountable participation in history determines whether susceptual formations mature into concepts ordered toward covenantal repair or contract into mechanisms of civilizational capture.

Reality bears time through conation, burden, generational entrustment, reproductive continuity, and pedagogical formation in accountability. Butler's architecture substitutes citation, intelligibility rooted in pleasure, normativity detached from accountable bearing, and reiteration elevated into ontology. The endurance of repeated forms is thereby mistaken for reality itself, an instance of Whitehead's fallacy of misplaced concreteness.

Butler's architecture possesses no internal criterion by which susceptual formation ordered toward substrate repair can be distinguished from susceptual capture ordered toward administrative normalization. Persons therefore inherit susceptual fields engineered for accommodation rather than historical repair because unified conative bearing has been displaced by performative administration.

What stands in place of covenant is idolatry under susceptual decorum dressed as theory. Visualized secondary sex characteristics, sexual acts of recognition, and performative reiteration become simulated substitutes for accountable freedom.

The final question remains unchanged: does this  theoretical framework accumulate time into shared repair, or does it circulate identity within a closed funnel 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.

NOTES

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[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] Olds, Douglas Blake. “Paradox as Gift to Open the Prophetic Heart.” The Iconoclast’s Descending, June 19, 2025. https://douglasblakeolds8.blogspot.com/2025/06/paradox-as-gift-to-open-prophetic-heart.html

[9] Catherine Pickstock’saccount offers a partial metaphysical counterpoint to Butler’s theory of performativity. Butler locates identity’s continuity within reiterated norms, citations, and social recognition: the subject remains intelligible through repeated participation in an ontic field whose terms may be displaced and resignified. Pickstock instead treats identity as non-identical repetition borne through historical geography, embodied duration, and continuity amid variation; finite identity is sustained through participation in divine creative action and directed toward charity, recapitulation, and apocatastatic restoration, rather than produced afresh by each citation or preserved as static substance (Repetition and Identity, xi–xii, 11–12).

She describes Origen’s apocatastasis as “universal redemption” and treats it as the return and retrieval of all things in Christ (182–83), pairing it with Irenaean recapitulation as a complementary account of Christian return: recapitulation gathers and repairs history through time, while apocatastasis names the consummating relation in which temporal process is fulfilled by eternity (163–67, 178, 180–83). Pickstock locates restoration within earthly history as well as beyond it: symbolic repetition acquires validity when it becomes real repetition in lives of charity that “continuously begin to restore the face of the earth,” while Incarnation, Israel, Mary, and historical reception enact restoration within time (178, 180–81). Her account therefore challenges Butler by supplying metaphysical and eschatological continuity beyond discursive recognizability.

Yet my present argument departs from both. Butler seeks provisional permanence through reiterated ontic intelligibility, while Pickstock grounds historical continuity in "radical orthodoxy's" analogia entis and creaturely participation in divine being. The account advanced here rejects the ontics of both citational self-maintenance and analogical mediation as sufficient, locating identity instead in conative time-bearing within telic eschatological movement. The eschaton launches within earthly time fields wherever Christ’s future interrupts, judges, and redirects historical becoming—consciousness—toward repentance, repair, and fulfillment; it is deferred neither until creaturely time-bearing is superseded nor to an eternal time field. Apocatastasis is therefore proleptically active within creaturely time, though its consummation remains eschatological. “Recapitulation” must likewise be handled cautiously, since Pickstock also uses it rhetorically for recursion, renewed disclosure, and the reinvocation of a whole procedure within one of its moments (159–60), a usage that risks assimilating Christological gathering to recurrence of type. Here recapitulation names the Christological gathering and transformation of damaged histories toward an end exceeding their original configuration, rather than typological recurrence or reassembly of a prior formal pattern. 

My argument with Butler is about more than her compromise about biological substrate. It is about substrate undergoing telic transformation under eschatological claim.  And against Pickstock: human salvific essence lies in eschatological gathering that radiates to enflourish covenanted creation through the historical transformation of conativity and immanent entrustment, rather than in either a heightened natural identity, the successful repetition of recognizable predicates, or graded resemblance between finite and divine being.

-- Catherine Pickstock, Repetition and Identity, The Literary Agenda (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), xi–xii, 11–12, 159–67, 178, 180–83.