Differance or the Difference Within: Postmodernism and Poststructuralism

In her assessment of the postmodern school of difference Evans remarks: ‘Postmodernism is frequently regarded as a recipe for statis, if not indeed paralysis: and I believe that’ (1995: 140). Although post­modernism is an umbrella term that covers a range of theoretical positions, it is certainly the case that postmodernism has been highly contentious within feminism. For example, the postmodern view does not see history as progressive but as cyclical. There are, therefore, no guarantees within postmodern theorizing that activism will bring about a hoped-for utopia or better world. Instead all we might hope for is something different. In addition, there are great concerns about post­modernism as a relativist creed whereby all views are considered equally valid. This issue of relativism is linked to a postmodern critique of metanarratives and in particular on how metanarratives act as forms of social legitimation. As Norris (2000: 28) notes: ‘A metanarrative is a story that wants to be more than just a story, that is to say, one which claims to have achieved an omniscient standpoint above and beyond all the other stories that people have told so far.’ In this respect, aspects of feminism can be regarded as a metanarrative because of the claims to ‘truth’ that are made about gender relations. Postmodern critiques note that there are as many claims to ‘truth’ as there are different language games and discourses. As we have seen above, early feminist claims to knowing the ‘truth’ about women’s experiences have been shown to be the ‘truth’ of White, middle-class, Western feminists. Indeed, Lather (1991: 4) comments: ‘postmodernism profoundly challenges the politics of emancipation’.

Weedon (1999) notes that much of the critique that has arisen within feminism over these issues is due, in part, to a conflation of post­modernism with poststructuralism. Issues of universality, subjectivity and power overlap in postmodernist and poststructuralist concerns. However, while postmodernism may be termed a ‘position’, Weedon comments that poststructuralism ‘offers useful and important tools in the struggle for change’ (ibid.: 180). In this Beasley (1999) suggests that one way of understanding the distinction between postmodernism and poststructuralism is to view poststructuralism as a sub-set of post­modernism. For example, Butler and Scott (1992) caution that poststruc­turalism is not a position such as socialist feminism, radical feminism, or liberal feminism commonly found within feminist theorizing. Rather, poststructuralism is ‘a critical interrogation of the exclusionary opera­tions by which “positions” are established’ (Butler and Scott, 1992: xiv). As such, and of course marked by variety, poststructuralist deconstruc­tion can be viewed as a methodology that is used to examine, for example, how commonly accepted ‘facts’ about women’s lives come to be established and maintained. In this regard, Spivak comments:

Deconstruction does not say there is no subject, there is no truth, there is no history. It simply questions the privileging of identity so that someone is believed to have the truth. It is not the exposure of error. It is constantly and persistently looking into how truths are produced. (2001)

It is with poststructuralist conceptions of deconstruction and differance that I am mainly concerned here. Barrett notes that poststructuralism is a response to critiques of Marxist certainties and the problems that are associated with finding adequate theories of ideology and subjectivity. Poststructuralist analyses seek to explore the relations between dis­courses, subjectivities and power. The conceptualization of subjectivity within poststructuralist writings owes much to the Derridean notion of differance and the processes of deconstruction that were discussed in Chapter 1. In addition, feminist poststructuralism draws on post — Lacanian psychoanalytic theories that I discuss more fully below, and Foucaldian analyses of power.

Chapter 1 illustrated how poststructuralist accounts argue that there is no fixed structure to language. Poststructuralist accounts also argue that language is central to the development of subjectivities. Here the argument suggests that as language is multiple and varied with no guarantees of the transference of intended meanings, so too, subjectivity is multiple, varied, contradictory and processual. For many feminist poststructuralists this view of the subject as process is a positive one. This is because it gives rise to the possibility of creating new gender discourses and, by implication, new subjectivities and ways of being and doing. Figure 3.1 summarizes these key aspects of poststructuralism.

There are four elements of Foucault’s conceptualization of power which are essential to an understanding of the attention given to the significance of discourses. These four elements are: (a) power can be understood in terms of a matrix or capillary; (b) where there is power we will find resistance; (c) the operations of power, through disciplinary

Подпись: 1. The experience of being a person is captured in the notion of subjectivity. Subjectivity is constituted through those discourses in which the person is being positioned at any one time . . . One discourse that contradicts another does not undo one’s constitution in terms of the original discourse. One’s subjectivity is therefore necessarily contradictory. 2. The concepts of the individual and the collective are not understood in terms of a dualism but are constituted through the multiple discourses available. 3. One can only ever be what the various discourses make possible, and one’s being shifts with the various discourses through which one is spoken into existence. 4. Fragmentation, contradiction and discontinuity, rather than continuity of identity are the focus. However, continuity is recognized as existing and is as yet inadequately theorized. Source: Adapted from Davies, 1991: 43

Figure 3.1 Subjectivity within the poststructural

practices, regimes or techniques, give rise to self-surveillance or self­discipline; and, finally, (d) power is productive rather than repressive. Through the relations of discourse, subjectivity and power, poststruc­turalism facilitates a recognition of how power is exercised within groups as well as between them; how, for example, women exercise power over other women.

Evans’ focus in delineating this school of difference is through the attention given to deconstruction and differance. In this her choice of an exemplar of deconstruction is Joan Scott (1988). The exemplar of differance is Judith Butler (1990). Scott’s essay takes a deconstructive approach to conceptualizations of equality and difference. She com­ments on the difficulties for feminism that have arisen through these two terms:

When equality and difference are paired dichotomously, they structure an impossible choice. If one opts for equality, one is forced to accept the notion that difference is antithetical to it. If one opts for difference, one admits that equality is unattainable. . . Feminists cannot give up ‘difference’; it has been our most creative analytic tool. We cannot give up equality, at least as long as we want to speak to the principles and values of our political system. (Scott, 1988: 43)

Scott’s response to this problem is to argue that feminism should not be forced into such a pre-existing dichotomy. In this, feminism needs to find a way that can both retain difference and also argue for equality. Scott does this through illustrating how equality and difference is a false
dichotomy. Although equality and difference are usually paired, the correct opposite of equality is inequality and the correct opposite of difference is sameness. However, in terms of their dominant meanings in contemporary North American debates, equality relies on difference and difference relies on equality. For example, Scott notes that the aim of equality is to overcome particular differences. Thus: ‘Demands for equality have rested on implicit and usually unrecognized arguments from difference: if individuals or groups were identical or the same there would be no need to ask for equality. Equality might well be defined as deliberate indifference to specified differences’ (ibid.: 44). In terms of difference, Scott argues strongly for the importance of contextuality. She comments:

There is nothing self-evident or transcendent about difference, even if the fact of difference — sexual difference, for example — seems apparent to the naked eye. The questions always ought to be: What qualities or aspects are being compared? What is the nature of the comparison? How is the meaning of difference being constructed? (ibid.).

Overall, therefore, Scott argues that feminists have to resist the false antithesis of equality-difference and instead insist on the multiple meanings of difference through continual deconstructive moves:

Placing equality and difference in antithetical relationship has, then, a double effect. It denies the way in which difference has long figured in political notions of equality and it suggests that sameness is the only ground on which equality can be claimed. It thus puts feminists in an impossible position, for as long as we argue within the terms of a dis­course set up by this opposition we grant the current conservative premise that because women cannot be identical to men in all respects, we cannot expect to be equal to them. The only alternative, it seems to me, is to refuse to oppose equality to difference and insist continually on differ­ences — differences as the condition of individual and collective identities, differences as the constant challenge to the fixing of those identities, history as the repeated illustration of the play of differences, differences as the very meaning of equality itself. (ibid.: 46)

In turning more fully to differance, Evans draws on the work of Judith Butler (1990). Butler’s work is viewed as the founding text of queer theory. As Butler comments in the Preface to her second edition, one of her concerns is to ‘criticize a pervasive heterosexual assumption in feminist literary theory. I sought to counter those views that made presumptions about the limits and propriety of gender and restricted the meaning of gender to received notions of masculinity and femininity’ (1999: vii). In this regard Weedon notes:

In theoretical terms queer theory is in many ways postmodern, since it renounces any fixed notions of difference; in particular, fixed distinctions between masculine and feminine, maleness and femaleness. Binary oppositions are replaced by a proliferation of differences which queer theory and politics refuses to hierarchize. Gender ceases to express anything fundamental about women and men. For some queer theorists, gender becomes a question of performance. Transgender practices, such as drag, are seen as fundamentally transgressive. As Judith Butler argues in Gender Trouble, once the centrality, obviousness and naturalness of heterosexuality are questioned it is no longer clear that gender has any natural meaning, and drag is one way of acting out this political point. (1999: 73-4)

The issue of gender as performativity is one that Butler (1999) further takes up in the Preface to her second edition of Gender Trouble. She notes how difficult it is to give a precise definition of performativity because her own views have changed over time. She comments:

I originally took my clue on how to read the performativity of gender from Jacques Derrida’s reading of Kafka’s ‘Before the Law’. There the one who waits for the law, sits before the door of the law, attributes a certain force to the law for which one waits. The anticipation of an authoritative disclosure of meaning is the means by which that authority is attributed and installed: the anticipation conjures its object. I wondered whether we do not labour under a similar expectation concerning gender, that it operates as an interior essence that might be disclosed, an expectation that ends up producing the very phenomenon that it anticipates. In the first instance, then, the performativity of gender revolves around this meta — lepsis, the way in which the anticipation of a gendered essence produces that which it posits as outside itself. Secondly, performativity is not a singular act, but a repetition and a ritual, which achieves its effects through its naturalization in the context of a body, understood, in part, as a culturally sustained temporal duration. (1999: xiv-xv)

Butler notes that this doctrine has raised a number of questions the most significant of which is:

The view that gender is performative sought to show that what we take to be an internal essence of gender is manufactured through a sustained set of acts, posited through the gendered sytlization of the body. In this way, it showed that what we take to be an ‘internal’ feature of ourselves is one that we anticipate and produce through certain bodily acts, at an extreme, an hallucinatory effect of naturalized gestures. (ibid.: xv)

Butler’s concern with overcoming the binaried relationship of internal and external and with finding ways through which theories of power and theories of the psyche are not polarized has led her to turn to psychoanalytic perspectives. For example, Butler comments that in addition to considering how Foucault and psychoanalysis can be brought together, she has

also made use of psychoanalysis to curb the occasional voluntarism of my view of performativity without thereby undermining a more general theory of agency. Gender Trouble sometimes reads as if gender is simply a self-invention or that the psychic meaning of a gendered presentation might be read directly off its surface. Both of these postulates have had to be refined over time. (ibid.: xxv).

Indeed, it is psychoanalytic explanation that I now consider.

Updated: 03.11.2015 — 15:33