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POSTMODERN, POSTSTRUCTURAL,
AND CRITICAL THEORIES
SUSANNE GANNON
BRONWYN DAVIES
WHAT ARE THE PRINCIPLES OF
POSTMODERN, POSTSTRUCTURAL,
AND CRITICAL THEORIES?
In this chapter, we explore postmodern, post- structural, and critical theories and discuss how they affect feminist research. These labels are sometimes taken to refer to the same thing and are sometimes taken up in oppositional ways. Further, what each of these names refers to is not an orderly, agreed on, and internally consis- tent set of ideas. What they mean depends on the vantage point from which the speaking or writ- ing is being done. Among those who wear each of these labels there are many interesting and productive divisions, which are ignored when they are lumped together under one collective noun. Butler (1992) points out,
A number of positions are ascribed to postmod- ernism, as if it were the kind of thing that could be the bearer of a set of positions: discourse is all there is, as if discourse were some kind of monis- tic stuff out of which all things are composed; the subject is dead, I can never say “I” again; there is
no reality, only representations. These characteri- zations are variously imputed to postmodernism or poststructuralism, which are conflated with each other and sometimes understood as an indis- criminate assemblage of French feminism, decon- struction, Lacanian psychoanalysis, Foucaultian analysis, Rorty’s conversationalism and cultural studies. (p. 4)
Postmodernism is a term often used by critics who believe postmodernism is undermining the most fundamental assumptions necessary for social science and feminist research. Against this monster they try “to shore up the primary premises, to establish in advance that any theory of politics requires a subject, needs from the start to presume its subject, the referentiality of language, the integrity of the institutional description it provides” (Butler, 1992, p. 3). Through exploring these commonalities and oppositionalities, we will make visible some of the ideas and practices that emerge in the writing and research to which these names are given. We will extract a set of principles that characterize these paradigms and set them apart from different understandings of research and the world. Our
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account of these perspectives is written neither from a distance, informed by a positivist ideal of objectivity, nor as if they can be defined once and for all. Every definition creates exclusions that might (and should) be contested. Among feminist concepts, for example, sisterhood was an impor- tant concept for feminist activism for much of the 20th century, but it underpinned the policing of behavior and the exclusion of those who did not display appropriate sisterhood: “As bad as it is for a woman to be bullied into submission by a patri- arch’s unitary truth, it is even worse for her to be judged as not a real feminist by a matriarch’s unitary truth” (Tong, 1998, p. 279). We will, with this caveat on categorizing, attempt to create some coherent storying of the interconnections of postmodern, poststructural, and critical theories as they are taken up by feminist researchers. It is a principle of critical, poststructural, and post- modern approaches to feminism that objectivity must be carefully rethought. An account, from these perspectives, is always situated. It is an account from somewhere, and some time, and some one (or two in this case), written for some purpose and with a particular audience in mind. It is always therefore a partial and particular account, an account that has its own power to produce new ways of seeing and that should always be open to contestation. In this view of feminism, we do not rely on objective truth but on “being accountable for what and how we have the power to see” (Castor, 1991, p. 64). The par- ticular position from which we write this chapter is as feminist poststructuralists looking back, as we trace the emergence of that field and its influ- ences on feminist work, and looking forward,
simultaneously, to the possibilities that such work opens up. Like many other feminist researchers in the 1980s and early 1990s, Patti Lather (1991) com- bined what she called a critical approach with postmodern and poststructural approaches. In envisaging the task she was undertaking, she located these three approaches along with femi- nism within the overarching social science framework in terms of the analytic work that social scientists took themselves to be doing in their analyses (p. 7). (See the table below.) In this representation, earlier forms of research characterized as positivist and interpre- tive adopted a naturalistic or realist approach in which the researcher is understood as separate from the research and the social world as inde- pendent of the researcher’s gaze. This is in marked contrast to work that sets out to make a difference to that social world, to emancipate subordinated groups from oppressive versions of reality. The deconstructive or poststructuralist/post- modern movement will be the main topic of this chapter. In this section, we will adopt the short- hand “deconstructive” to refer to postmodern and poststructural approaches and we will sub- sume the “critical,” for the moment, inside that term. Our account is not offered as a grand nar- rative of the progress of feminist theory from one approach to another. Such grand narratives exclude other ways of seeing, privilege accounts from those with power, and promote falsely lin- ear versions of history. In what follows, we will point out how, and on what grounds, some fem- inists have been alarmed by the effects of
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Postpositivist Inquiry
Predict Understand Emancipate Deconstruct
Positivism Interpretive Critical Poststructural Naturalistic Neo-Marxist Postmodern Constructivist Feminist Postparadigmatic Diaspora Phenomenological Praxis oriented Hermeneutic Educative Freirian Participatory Action research
The binary metaphors through which our narratives and storylines are constructed and our identities as men and women are made real are recognizable here. It is possible to recognize one’s gendered identity (who you are or believe you should be or are seen to be) by looking at the appropriate side of the table (the one you have been “assigned” to). But it is also possible to claim characteristics from the other side. Nevertheless, the binaries act as an ordering device, defining what is appropriately “male” or “female” in terms of their opposition from one another. They rule out multiplicity and differ- ences to create order, social coherence, and predictability around the idea of two opposite hierarchical categories (Davies, 1994). By drawing attention to the way binaries insert themselves into thought, deconstructive writers provoke us to think differently and more carefully about the nuances and the possibilities
of meaning in the language and the ideas that we might use. In pondering the nature of decon- structive thinking and the concern that it might not be useful for feminists because it has been produced by men, it is fascinating to run down the female side of Wilshire’s table. Most of these metaphors can be used to characterize the theorizing that is done by deconstructive writers whether male or female. We might ask then: Is poststructural and postmodern theorizing female even when it is produced by men? We can use such questions and observations to begin the work of deconstructing the male/ female binary. We can ask, How are such cate- gories constructed and maintained? What exclu- sions and inclusions mark such sites? How are social identities, the iterations of sex/gender, performed and sedimented in the particularities of people’s lives? How are they lodged in their bodies? How are the unstable borders of these
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KNOWLEDGE (accepted wisdom)/IGNORANCE (the occult and taboo) higher (up)/lower (down) good, positive/negative, bad mind (ideas), head, spirit/body (flesh), womb (blood), Nature (Earth) reason (the rational)/emotions and feelings (the irrational) cool/hot order/chaos control/letting be, allowing, spontaneity objective (outside, “out there”)/subjective (inside, immanent) literal truth, fact/poetic truth metaphor, art goals/process light/darkness written text, Logos/oral tradition, enactment, Myth Apollo as sky-sun/Sophia as earth-cave-moon public sphere/private sphere seeing, detached/listening, attached secular/holy and sacred linear/cyclical permanence, ideal (fixed) forms/change, fluctuations, evolution “changeless and immortal”/process, ephemeras (performance) hard/soft independent, individual, isolated/dependent, social, interconnected, shared dualistic/whole MALE/FEMALE
sites policed by individuals and institutions through oppositional and moralistic discourses and regimes of truth? As Cixous (1986) writes,
Men and women are caught up in a web of age-old cultural determinations that are almost unanalyz- able in their complexity. One can no more speak of “woman” than of “man” without being trapped within an ideological theatre where the prolifera- tion of representations, images, reflections, myths, identifications transform, deform, constantly change everyone’s Imaginary and invalidate in advance any conceptualization. (p. 83)
Feminist deconstructive writing searches for ways to disrupt the grip that binaries have on thought and on identity. Such deconstructive writ- ing draws not only on rational argument but also on poetic writing, on fiction, on music, and on the performing arts. Sometimes it rewrites figures from the past (e.g., Cixous, 1991; Clément, 1989). Through play with language and alternative forms of narrative and representation such writing can blur the gender binaries, making a deconstructive move from either/or to both/and, disrupting, deconstructing, and troubling the clichés and stereotypes of everyday thought and practice in which we are enmeshed. This is a fourth princi- ple: The binaries within discourse limit and con- strain modes of thought and the possibilities of identity. They disguise them as natural and give us only one option—of mimicking one part and abjecting the other. It is vital, life-giving work to play with and find ways of disrupting those lin- guistic forms, the binary oppositions, and the identities and meanings they hold in place. The power of language must be understood and language itself opened up for revision. It is here that we run into one of the deepest divisions within the approaches we are writing about in this chapter. The disruptive and decon- structive work on the categories through which we know ourselves and through which we argue for change is read by some who work within the critical framework to destroy the categories and to make them unusable for the work of changing society. Others do not see deconstructive play as destruction. Butler (2004a), for example, sug- gests that calling terms into question doesn’t mean debunking them but leads, rather, to their revitalization (p. 178). From a deconstructive perspective it is clear that we must work within
the language we have. The terms and the cate- gories that we wish to question are nonetheless powerful categories that have a great deal of political purchase. They can and do accomplish a great deal within our personal and social worlds whether we choose to mobilize them for political ends or not. In drawing attention to their consti- tutive power, a deconstructive approach does not foreclose the use of constituted categories on behalf of those who are subordinated by them. In a double move characteristic of deconstructive writing, we continue to use particular categories, like feminist, but work to destabilize some of the category’s certainties. We put them “sous rature” or “under erasure,” following Derrida (1976), using a textual reminder to stand as a permanent reminder that we continue to need the concept but are also wary of some of its dangers. A fifth and important principle of thought is this deep skepti- cism toward assumed truths and taken-for- granted knowledges, because they are generated through language, combined with a pragmatic understanding of the power of those categories to effect powerful positionalities and actions within the social world. The history of feminism can be read as a series of moments in which wins against patriarchal structures and practices have been achieved, and then subtly undermined by a shifting ground of resistance that negates the wins that have been made and keeps women’s subordinate status care- fully locked in place. Deconstructive approaches to feminism eschew simple recipes and actions in favor of a complex and continuous reflection on the ways in which identities, realities, and desires are established and maintained. This does not mean that they are prevented from action. Feminists are capable of working within multiple discourses, depending on the social and interac- tive contexts in which they find themselves, the particular moment in history, and the particular task in hand.
HOW HAVE CRITICAL THEORY,
POSTMODERNISM, AND
POSTSTRUCTURALISM BEEN TAKEN UP
WITHIN FEMINIST RESEARCH?
In this section, we will separate critical, post- modern, and poststructural theories and elaborate some of the key concepts within them. We then
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traces of Marxism in current critical theory. However, their claim that “institutions” and “sovereign regimes of truth” might be over- turned implies a more rigid and hierarchical conception of power and its operations than that to be found in poststructural theory (e.g., Butler, 1997b; Foucault, 1980). Although few feminists overtly cling to the founding fathers of critical theory, there is much sympathy with these positions particularly in our longing for emancipatory agendas. Indeed, recent critical theory is sometimes called new left theory or neo-Marxism^1 and it informs crit- ical race theory, critical multiculturalism, criti- cal psychology, critical feminist theory, and critical pedagogy. In Getting Smart , Lather’s (1991) early synthesis of feminist and critical pedagogies, she articulates her indebtedness to critical theory and continuing affinity with its emancipatory objectives, but she critiques aspects of critical theory from a postmodern perspective. Although it can also be claimed that critical theory has “largely mutated into post- structuralism” (Boler, 2000, p. 362), authors and areas of study that thematize the “critical” tend to insist that, unlike those working with post- modern and poststructural approaches, the out- come they envisage is “real” social change, with the implication that this must entail subjects who have agency in the world. As we will argue later, these agendas are not as absent from the work of postmodern and poststructural femi- nists as some critical theorists claim, though the concept of agency is carefully revised by these feminists as a “radically conditioned” form of agency (Butler, 1997b, p. 15). In Judith Butler’s view, for example, the social subject is a site of ambivalence where power acts to con- stitute these subjects (who might elsewhere be called “individuals”) in certain limiting ways but where, at the same time, and through the same effects of power, possibilities to act (albeit constrained and limited) also emerge. Critical theorists are committed to a more straightfor- ward concept of emancipation, and of the free- dom of individuals to strive toward it, as a necessary and permanent possibility. Power tends to be seen within critical theory as oppres- sive and unilinear, and it is enacted by certain groups on other groups. Emancipatory potential lies in the radical overturning of those hierarchical
relations of power. Freedom from oppression is a central goal of critical theorists. In pursuit of this outcome, discursive analyses of sexism, homophobia, racism, religious, and cultural oppressions in everyday life and institutional practices are part of their methodological arse- nal though they may not take up postmodern or poststructural positions on truth or subjectivity. Two prominent feminist exponents of critical theory have been philosophers Seyla Benhabib and Nancy Fraser. In their influential and polemical collection Feminist Contentions (Benhabib, Butler, Cornell, & Fraser, 1995), they defend the tenets of critical social feminist theory against the effects of poststructuralism, represented in the collection in two papers by Butler.^2 Benhabib and Fraser see value in some postmodernist ideas but they are wary of theories that they see as radical and dangerously relativist. Benhabib grounds her critique in three principles that she argues must not be aban- doned by feminism and that, she claims, are weakened within a deconstructive approach. First, feminists must be able to assume an autonomous feminist subject who remains capa- ble of self-reflection and agency. Second, she argues that large-scale narratives have their purposes, and feminists need to maintain some distance from social contexts they critique to develop objective perspectives and contribute to new narratives. Third, she insists that utopian ideals, abandoned by postmodernism, are neces- sary for feminist ethics and social and political activism (Benhabib, 1995, p. 30). In Feminist Contentions , Fraser is less resistant than Benhabib to postmodern feminism. She argues that feminism can benefit from incorporation of “weak” versions of postmodern ideas, but that feminist work must enable political action (Fraser, 1995a, 1995b). Benhabib and Fraser acknowledge some of the contributions of post- modernism to feminism, including the constitu- tive effects of language and the rejection of abstract (and masculine) universal reason. Their commitment remains, however, with critical theory, which they read as emancipatory and as enabling political activism in a way that they perceive postmodernism does not. The goal of critical theorists, they say, is not only to inter- pret social life but also to transform it. This transformation, like any theory of liberation,
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they argue, is dependent on a notion of subjec- tivity that allows some agency and incorporates possibilities for choice and for freedom to act in the world. Within postmodern and poststructural approaches to feminist research, in contrast, “lib- eration” is made problematic, because one can never stand outside of discourse, agency is always radically conditioned by the positions made avail- able to the acting, agentic subject, and subjectiv- ity is always also subjection to the available ways of being. Further, absolute moral or ethical truth claims are regarded with a measure of skepticism, though that does not prevent feminists who take up these approaches from passionate attachments to both morality and action. Nevertheless, critical theorists are wary of postmodernism and post- structuralism because of the obstacles they see in such positions for political, social, or economic transformation. If critiquing the foundations of radical thought and activism leads to their col- lapse, then how are we to move on? How might we, they ask, effect change in the world? How might we “work the ruins” of what we had and knew (St. Pierre & Pillow, 2000)? Accusations of ethical paralysis and apoliticism as the inevitable consequences of poststructuralist thought are common but they rest on an assumption that crit- icism and transformation are binary, irreconcil- able opposites that cannot work together in a “both/and” kind of way. In such feminist dis- missals of poststructuralism, criticism is allied with “theory,” transformation with “praxis,” and each side of the pair is positioned as oppositional; that is, as mutually exclusive. Michel Foucault (2000a) argued, in contrast, that critique and transformation are necessarily implicated in each others’ operations, indeed that radical transforma- tion can only emerge from radical critique:
I don’t think that criticism can be set against transformation, “ideal” criticism against “real” transformation. A critique does not consist in saying that things aren’t good the way they are. It consists in seeing on what type of assumptions, of familiar notions, of established, unexamined ways of thinking the accepted practices are based.... There is always a little thought occurring even in the most stupid institutions; there is always thought even in silent habits.
Criticism consists in uncovering that thought and trying to change it; showing that things are not as obvious as people believe, making it so that what is taken for granted is no longer taken for granted. To do criticism is to make harder those acts which are now too easy. Understood in these terms, criticism (and radical criticism) is utterly indispensable for any transformation. For a transformation that would remain within the same mode of thought, a trans- formation that would only be a certain way of better adjusting the same thought to the reality of things, would only be a superficial transformation. On the other hand, as soon as people begin to have trouble thinking things the way they have been thought, transformation becomes at the same time very urgent, very difficult, and entirely possi- ble. (pp. 456–457)
The project for any critical theory, Foucault argues, is to make it possible to think differently and thus to open the possibility for acting dif- ferently. This has profound implications for social practice and for social research. In this sense, critical theory, poststructural theory, and postmodern theory can work together rather than in antagonism with each other.
Postmodern Theory The terms postmodern and poststructural have at times been used interchangeably in the United States, both terms signaling a “crisis of confidence in western conceptual systems” (Lather, 1991, p. 159). Postmodernism is “an American term” (St. Pierre, 2004, p. 348) that has been used in diverse arenas of social and cultural life and that was in the early 1990s inclusive of poststructuralism. In a recent anthology of postmodernism, Bertens and Natoli (2002) trace three aggregations of this “protean” term: first, as a set of literary and artistic practices; second, as “a set of philosoph- ical traditions centered on the rejection of real- ist epistemology and the Enlightenment project” mostly associated with French poststructural thought (p. xii); and, third, in its most “ambi- tious” form, as a term that seeks to describe “a new sociocultural formation and/or economic dispensation... an aggressive entrepreneurialist capitalism” (pp. xiii–xv).
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the brave new world of ultimate liberation rather than subjecting it to critical scrutiny. (p. 18)
Foucault (1998) also drew attention to cate- gorical problems when he asked “What are we calling postmodernity? I’m not up to date” (p. 447), and, he continued, “I’ve never clearly understood what was meant in France by modernity... I do not grasp clearly what that might mean, though the word itself is unimpor- tant; we can always use any arbitrary label” (p. 448). He goes on, nevertheless, to name the “recasting of the subject” as the central problem that allied those who had been working in what might be called postmodern theory up to that time. Of his own work he says,
The goal of my work during the last twenty years... has not been to analyze the phenomena of power, nor to elaborate the foundations of such an analysis. My objective, instead, has been to create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects. (Foucault, 2000b, p. 326)
It is this task of resituating the human subject not as the central heroic and active agent who shapes her own destiny but as the subject who is constituted through particular discourses in par- ticular historical moments that is central to the postmodern approach to research. Butler also traces the splits and contradictions that are elided by the abstract collective noun postmod- ernism. Like Foucault and Bauman, Butler (1992) rejects the name: “I don’t know about the term ‘postmodern’ but... [I know that] power pervades the very conceptual apparatus that seeks to negotiate its terms, including the subject position of the critic” (p. 6), and again, “I don’t know what postmodernism is, but I do have some sense of what it might mean to subject notions of the body and materiality to a deconstructive critique” (p. 17). The subject, power, and the body—and deconstruction as a strategy for critique—are issues that they both signal and that are at the core of our theoretical conversations in this chapter. Although categories are useful in academic work, and we use them and are here engaged in their perpetuation, we are less concerned with policing their borders than with exploring the
work that might be done with ideas emanating from these modes of thought. The semantic puz- zles prompted by the naming of theoretical positions—and the seductions of theoretical progress narratives and successor regimes— have led us to a moment when we are variously faced with “post-postmodern theory,” “posthu- manist theory,” “postfeminist theory,” and even “post-theory theory.” Rather than becoming entangled in these confabulations, and having alerted readers to some of the problems with such labels, we go on to explore in more detail poststructuralism and what that might be said to entail. Because many feminist authors who orig- inally used the term postmodern have since vacated the term and moved toward poststruc- tural, we will devote the remainder of this sec- tion to an exploration of poststructural theory and the concepts that have been taken up within it by feminist researchers.
Poststructural Theory While the postmodern label was initially used to cover both the postmodern and the poststructural, the term poststructural has subsequently become more common. The post- structural label signals in particular the “linguis- tic turn,” although many theorists who would see themselves as responding to this turn would not describe themselves as poststructuralists and may or may not see themselves as postmod- ernists or critical theorists. The turn to language marked by poststructuralism is a recognition of the constitutive power of language and of dis- course, particularly as introduced through the work of Michel Foucault (1997b) where dis- courses are seen to “articulate what we think, say and do” and to be historically contingent (p. 315). The subject is discursively produced and the very body and its desires are material- ized through discourse. Thus, the linguistic turn of poststructuralism is, more accurately, a “dis- cursive” turn. Poststructural theory turns to dis- course as the primary site for analysis and brings a deep skepticism to realist approaches where the task of social science is to discover and describe real worlds, which are taken to exist independent of their observations and their subjects. It troubles the individualism of human- ist approaches, seeing the humanist individual
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as a (sometimes) troubling and fictional accom- plishment of social and discursive practices (Davies & Gannon, 2005, 2006). In this sense, poststructuralism, in marked contrast to post- modernism, might be seen as the antithesis of global capitalism and of neoliberalism in which the individual is emphasized and the social is proclaimed as dead. Humanist psychology and some aspects of psychoanalysis are among the metanarratives that have been brought into ques- tion by poststructuralism, though many feminist poststructural researchers find aspects of psy- choanalysis useful (e.g., Britzman, 1998; Butler, 1997b, 2004b; Clément, 1989, 1994; Flax, 1990, 1993; Grosz, 1990, 1994a; Ussher, 1997; Walkerdine, 1990). These theorists use psycho- analysis to theorize desire and to explore the changes individual subjects must engage in to bring about new patterns of desire and thus new ways of being. The focus of poststructural thinking is on cultural life as the production and reading of texts and on the deconstruction of those texts. Its work is in marked contrast to the realist and naturalistic modes of thought in which the task was to “understand” or to make predictions about what was already there (Lather, 1991, p. 7). This poststructural work, which Butler (2003) describes as the work of critical intellec- tuals, is often a difficult and painful process of making strange that which we take for granted:
I believe it has to be the case (certainly since Marx it has been the case) that becoming a criti- cal intellectual involves working hard on difficult texts. From Marx through Adorno, we learned that capitalism is an extremely difficult text: it does not show itself as transparent; it gives itself in enigmatic ways; it calls for interpretive hermeneutic effort. There is no question about it. We think things are the way they must be because they’ve become naturalized. The life of the commodity structures our world in ways that we take for granted. And what was Marx’s point? Precisely to make the taken-for-granted world seem spectral, strange. And how does that work? It only works by taking received opinion and received doxa and really working through it. It means undergoing something painful and diffi- cult: an estrangement from what is most familiar. (p. 46)
Though poststructuralism does not provide a clear set of practices that might be taken up and ossified as a “method,” it does provide a new set of approaches that might be made use of in analy- sis to provoke the sort of estrangement that Butler speaks of and to allow for new thought. In addi- tion, methodologies themselves are made strange as “thinking technologies” that are also, always, subject to critical scrutiny (Haraway, 2000). Within a poststructural research paradigm it becomes difficult to define discrete methods for research. Indeed, Barthes (1989) suggests that we need to “turn against Method... regard it with- out any founding privilege, as one of the voices of plurality: as a view... a spectacle, mounted within the text” (p. 319). It is more useful to think of strategies, approaches, and tactics that defy definition or closure. Poststructuralism promotes close textual analysis as a central strategy but the idea of a text encompasses far more than conven- tional written or spoken data. It allows for macro- texts like “capitalism” (or Marxism, humanism, feminism, postmodernism), and it allows for more familiar “micro” level texts like interview transcripts or literary texts. Strategies for post- structural analysis have nomadic tendencies and cross over disciplinary boundaries. Texts go beyond the conventional perceptions of literary or linguistic texts and might include bodies in space, spaces without bodies, or texts comprising nonlinguistic semiotic systems. In poststructural research, the shift of interpre- tive focus is from language as a tool for describ- ing real worlds to discourse, as constitutive of those worlds. There are no “right” research meth- ods that will produce a reality that lies outside of the texts produced in the research process because reality does not preexist the discursive and consti- tutive work that is of interest to poststructural writers. This is important for feminist researchers in that it makes visible the historical, cultural, social, and discursive patterns through which cur- rent oppressive or dominant realities are held in place. What might have been taken for granted as natural, even essential to the human condition, and therefore unable to be questioned in any sys- tematic way, is no longer taken to be inevitable, no longer left invisible. The structures and prac- tices of everyday life are opened to scrutiny. Inevitabilities are reviewed as constituted realities (which have the possibility within themselves of
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discourses relating to emancipation and revolu- tionary changes in France and the United States that questioned what it is to be a human subject in a democracy. They arose in part from the new thinking that became possible at these intersec- tions for individual subjects and from the strate- gic alliances that these women made with others who had begun this deconstructive thinking. Poststructuralists, however, are suspicious of successor regimes and victory narratives. They prefer to trace how a certain mode of thought became possible at a particular juncture, and how it became a dominant discourse or regime of truth that can itself be subjected to retracings and retellings. Butler (1992) sees such question- ing of democracy as central to radical, decon- structive politics:
A social theory committed to democratic contes- tation within a postcolonial horizon needs to find a way to bring into question the foundations it is compelled to lay down. It is this movement of interrogating that ruse of authority that seeks to close itself off from contest that is, in my view, at the heart of any radical political project. (p. 8)
Possibilities for shifting discourses, for tak- ing up new ways of thinking and being, that is, for agency in the world, become possible in the contradictions and mo(ve)ments^3 within discur- sive regimes (Davies & Gannon, 2006). In con- trast to the humanist essentialist more or less fixed version of identity, poststructuralism proposes a subjectivity that is “precarious, contradictory and in process, constantly being reconstituted in discourse each time we speak” (Weedon, 1997, p. 32). Some feminists have worried that the idea of doing away with the subject (i.e., the humanist, essentialized subject) has meant an abandoning of the possibility of agency and so of social change. Theorizing agency has thus become one of the most impor- tant tasks for feminists working within post- structural perspectives (Butler, 1997b; Davies, 2000a). In “Contingent Foundations,” Butler (1992) makes a strong argument for subjection being a precondition of agency:
The constituted character of the subject is the very precondition of its agency. For what is it that enables a purposive and significant reconfiguration
of cultural and political relations, if not a relation that can be turned against itself, reworked, resisted
... In a sense, the epistemological model that offers us a pregiven subject or agent is one that refuses to acknowledge that agency is always and only a political prerogative. As such it seems cru- cial to question the conditions of its possibility, not to take it for granted as an a priori guarantee. (p. 13)
Subjectivity is an ongoing construction tak- ing place through an ongoing process of subjec- tification, in which one is both subjected to available regimes of truth and regulatory frame- works and at the same time and through the same processes becomes an active subject. As we are imbricated within discourse, we become complicit in our own subjection, simultaneously seeking submission and mastery (Butler, 1997b). In contrast to the poststructural interest in sub- jectification, both radical and liberal feminisms relied on a humanist conception of the individual subject as separate from and outside of language, as autonomous and capable of rationality. However, because individualism and realism have been opened up to question by critical theory and the wider effects of postmodern and poststruc- tural thinking, many of the strong claims made from within liberal feminist and radical feminist frameworks can no longer be counted as absolute certainties (Clough, 1994; Davies, 2000a; Moi, 1985; Tong, 1998). These essentializing claims were already under challenge because feminists of color (other than white) queried their invisibil- ity—or their objectification—and these so-called third world women challenged the commonsense of Western feminism. The question of the ongoing formation of the subject in everyday practices draws attention to the poststructuralist concepts of power / knowl- edge. Foucault (2000b) attended very closely to the micropractices of power relations and their effects in the creation of subjects:
This form of power that applies itself to immedi- ate everyday life categorizes the individual, marks him by his own individuality, attaches him to his own identity, imposes a law of truth on him that he must recognize and others have to recognize in him. It is a form of power that makes individuals
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subjects. There are two meanings of the word “subject”: subject to someone else by control and dependence, and tied to his own identity by a con- science or self knowledge. Both meanings suggest a form of power that subjugates and makes subject to. (p. 331)
Power is not hierarchical, for Foucault (1980), but it proceeds in every direction at once: It is capillary. It is not a possession that we have (or do not have) and that we can deploy to oppress (or to liberate) ourselves or others. Power is productive rather than oppressive, pro- ductive of subjects and of nets of domination and subjection within which subjects are always in motion. Subjects are constituted within power relations: They are not prior to or apart from them, nor can they be delivered from them. The rational, autonomous subject of some critical theory is a subject generated with a masculinist discourse. Foucault talks more often about power relations; that is, about how power is operationalized in interactions between individ- uals and institutions, than about power as some- thing apart or prior to the discursive regimes within which power is in continual circulation. Indeed, we are always within relations of power, because we are always within discourse. In his work on power, beginning with his early work on asylums and prisons through to his later work on the care of the self, Foucault explored how the disciplinary power that was exercised in institutions became part of the humanist subject. Disciplinary power shifted from something brought on the individual, from outside the self, to a form of power relations taken up and inter- nalized by individuals as their own responsibil- ity. Similarly, women have sometimes been seen within feminism as complicit in their own oppression, though those feminisms assumed that once “false consciousness” was revealed, women would be free. Within poststructuralist conceptions of power, and the knowledge that power produces, there is no freedom from power relations, nor is there any place outside discourse. But just as within discourse we might find the possibilities for deploying new dis- courses, power relations also contain their own possibilities for resistance, albeit resistance that is “local, unpredictable and constant” (St. Pierre, 2000a, p. 492).
The concept of power in Foucault’s (2000c) work then circles back, inevitably to the concept of discourse that he developed in his early work as he struggled to analyze power and its quotid- ian operations. Political thought from neither the Right nor the Left gave him the tools with which to think about power:
The way power was exercised—concretely and in detail—with its specificity, its techniques and tactics, was something that no one attempted to ascertain; they contented themselves with denouncing it in a polemical or global fashion... the mechanics of power in themselves were never analyzed. This task could only begin after 1968, that is to say, on the basis of daily struggles at grass-roots levels, among those whose fight was located in the fine meshes of the web of power. This is where the concrete nature of power became visible. (p. 117)
The concrete nature of power is materialized in women’s desires, in their bodies, and in social relations and institutional structures, and these areas remain the focus of much feminist post- structural empirical research (Davies & Gannon, 2005, 2006; St. Pierre & Pillow, 2000). Foucault’s work provides concepts with which we might think differently through what we still call “data” (though that term belongs squarely in positivist regimes of thought), about the truth games within which disciplinary and other knowledge is produced and reified. He provides us with a toolbox of strategies: archae- ology , genealogy, and technologies of the self. Rather than distinct methods for analysis, these are intertwined modes of thought that make pos- sible particular inquiries into games of truth, as sets of possibilities that we might take up because they are useful to us. Foucault’s initial strategy of archaeology studies the conditions of possibility through which disciplinary knowl- edge is formed and becomes sedimented. It looks at discursive formations, at historical archives; it searches for subjugated knowledges. Rather than the human subject as the source of knowledge, which Foucault called “anthropo- logical” history, archeology works in the labyrinth of the archive, in “the domain of things said” (Foucault, cited in Eribon, 1992, p. 191). Archeology interrogates the edifices of
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deconstructionists, but that meaning will always be multiple, shifting, and deferred. The text can be provoked to reveal its own contradictions and (im)possibilities through deconstructive analysis. Analysis does not produce definitive new read- ings of a text but is oriented toward the continu- ous deferral and displacement of meaning, which Derrida (1976) calls différance. Derrida’s work began from the linguist Saussure’s separation of the signified (the concept) from the signifier (the word representing the concept). Derrida argued that the relationship between word and meaning is arbitrary. Rather than being fixed or transcen- dental, meaning emerges in specific temporal and discursive contexts. As we suggested in the first section of this chapter, deconstruction pays par- ticular attention to detecting and displacing binary pairs. In its narrowest application, decon- struction is a strategy for identifying and disrupt- ing binary pairs. As Royle (2000) describes it, this form “took hold (like a virus or parasite)” and could be “stupidly formalistic” (p. 5). On the other hand, in its widest context, deconstruction has come to mean almost any analytical opera- tion on any sort of text. McQuillan (2001) defines deconstruction as “an act of reading which allows the other to speak”; that is, as a practice that resists closure, a “situation or event of reading” rather than a method applied to a text (p. 6). Derrida prefers to consider “deconstructions,” and he stresses that it has “never named a project, a method, or a system” (Derrida & Ewald, 1995, p. 283). Although Derrida’s work can be usefully applied to specific texts, which may be its most prolific application, deconstruction is applicable to social institutions and discursive regimes that exceed a single text or set of texts. Deconstruction as it is useful for feminist poststructural research can be applied as an everyday everywhere prac- tice, something we might use in our lives, some- thing active that might help us “make sense” of lived experience but that is most likely to trouble our sense making, even to reach “into the bare bones” of who we see ourselves to be (Lenz- Taguchi, 2004). Whatever its object or its scope, or its partic- ular strategy, deconstructive work aims to unfix meaning so that it remains incessantly at play, mobile, fluid, unable to come to rest or ossify into any rigid structures of meaning. Derridean deconstruction opens language to différance, a
principle that captures both “difference” and “deferral.” Deconstruction attends to the spec- tral logic of absences that haunt the text. It is productive, inventive, and creative, concerned with excess and ceaseless iteration. It “opens a passageway, it marches ahead and leaves a trail” (Derrida, 1989, p. 42), and the trails crisscross to create new trails and surprising openings and closings. Deconstruction can, perhaps, be any- thing: “and indeed, one starts laughing, and I’m tempted to add ‘deconstruction and me, and me, and me.. .,’ to parody the parody of a famous French song—‘50 million Chinese and me and me and me” (Derrida, 2000, p. 283). Parody is one of numerous strategies that Derrida—and those who have found his work useful—have taken up to dislodge the fixity of meaning in a text (see Kamuf, 1981; Spivak, 1976). Gayatri Spivak (1976), translator of Of Grammatology , describes the difficulties of capturing his work in language:
The movement of “difference-itself,” precariously saved by its resident “contradiction” has many nicknames... trace, différance, reserve, supple- ment, dissemination, hymen,... and so on. They form a chain where each may be substituted for the other, but not exactly (of course, even two uses of the same word would not be exactly the same): “no concept overlaps with any other”... Each substitution is also a displacement and carries a metaphoric change (p. lxx).
Although Derrida has used particular figures to work as “hinges”—as analytic devices to double and displace meaning—in particular texts under analysis, the figures available to feminist researchers for this sort of work are limited only by our imaginations and the texts we take up. Along with Spivak, who has used deconstruction to take on the fields of cultural studies (2000) and politics (2001), literary theo- rists Diane Elam and Peggy Kamuf have found Derridean strategies particularly fruitful for deconstructing “feminism” (Elam, 2000), “sex- ual difference” (Elam, 2001), “love” (Kamuf, 2000), and “critique” itself (Kamuf, 2001). Yet deconstruction as an analytic approach exceeds its origins and its originator. Judith Butler (1990, 1993, 1997a, 2004b), for instance, makes only passing reference to Derrida in the articulation of
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her radically deconstructive theory of gender performativity.
Rhizoanalysis and Nomadism
The rhizoanalytic work of Deleuze and Guattari (1972, 1987) has also been of great interest to feminists working within poststruc- tural paradigms. In contrast with the linear, sys- tematic branching of tree roots, the rhizome is a secret, unseen, underground, creeping, multi- plying growth that can strangle the tree or the root of conventional thought, that “plots a point, fixes an order” from beneath (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 7). Rhizomatic plants, like heliconias, are knobbly, unpredictable, unstable, vigorous, prolific, extending in multiple direc- tions at once, moving underground, splitting off, and springing up anew in unexpected places. Thought modeled on the rhizome links unex- pected texts and events to make surprising new connections and unpredictable, unreplicable, insights. Such analysis is also concerned with the dissolution of the transcendental and unitary rational subject, of he who “knows.” Deleuze and Guattari modeled many strategies—cartog- raphy, rhizomatic analysis, assemblages, figura- tions, becomings, flows, and intensities—that have been taken up and extended in interesting and provocative work by feminists (Braidotti, 1991, 1994, 2002; Colebrook, 2002; Gatens, 2000; Grosz, 1994a, 1994b; Probyn, 2000; St. Pierre, 1997a, 1997b, 1997c). This provocative philosophical shift has also been critiqued by feminist scholars. For example, provocative concepts, such as “bodies without organs” (BwO), emphasizing the corporeal as “non- stratified, unformed, intense matter” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 153), as intensity and energy rather than matter, have been both vehemently rejected by feminists concerned about the era- sure of the materiality of embodied experience (Irigaray, 1977, cited in Braidotti, 2002, p. 76), and taken up by other feminists as productive ways to rethink female corporeality. Rosi Braidotti (1994, 2002) has used the figuration of the nomad to generate a feminist nomadic sub- jectivity that emphases “flows of connection” and “becomings” that rely on “affinities and the capacity both to sustain and generate inter- connectedness” (Braidotti, 2002, p. 8). The
feminist nomadic subject “critiques liberal indi- vidualism and promotes instead the positivity of multiple connections”; it emphasizes “the role of passions, empathy and desire as non-self- aggrandizing modes of relation to one’s social and human habitat” (p. 266). The sort of femi- nist subjectivity that Braidotti theorizes emerges from an “empathic proximity and intensive interconnectedness” (p. 8) rather than from any independent, separate, or selfish mode of being human. In contrast to theories of the self that emphasize individualism, subjectivity is always already a “socially mediated process” (p. 7). Feminists who think through Deleuze and Guattari also attend to questions about imagina- tion and creativity in their search for ways to think differently, and playfully, against the grain of dominant discourses and sedimented truths. Another feminist figuration, analogous to Braidotti’s nomad, is Donna Haraway’s (1991) cyborg, a type of nonsentimental Deleuzean BwO, neither girl nor woman, human nor ani- mal, nature nor culture, corporeal nor techno- logical but composite of all of them, becoming all of them. Yet the cyborg is a material and political figure as well, representing the human exploitation of underpaid workers, the invisible underclass of white capitalist production. Haraway brings Deleuzian thought together with an update of Foucault’s conception of bio-power, showing that “contemporary power does not work by normalized heterogeneity any more, but rather by networking, communication redesigns and by multiple interconnections” (Braidotti, 2002, p. 242). Haraway’s dissolution of the binary of subject/object through the figuration of the cyborg is a call for a feminist poststructural- ism that entails both pleasure and responsibility. In Volatile Bodies , Elizabeth Grosz (1994a) also brings Deleuzian and Foucauldian concepts together to develop a deconstructive corporeal feminism. The body is the inscribed surface of events—as Foucault theorized—but in her car- tography of the female body she theorizes a fleshy volatile body, subject to flows and intensi- ties of desire and of substances, particularly flu- ids (e.g., blood, milk, vomit). She deconstructs inside/outside to show that the female body is “an assemblage of organs, processes, pleasures, pas- sions, activities, behaviors linked by fine lines and unpredictable networks to other elements,
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Trinh’s work plays with the aesthetics and effects of language, and is simultaneously intensely and provocatively political. Hélène Cixous, likewise, works in another highly original textual location. Although she has been positioned for English readers as a theorist, she refuses that name. She writes fic- tion, criticism, psychoanalysis, and philosophy “without enclosing herself in any of them” (Conley, 1991, p. 12) and often within the same texts. In conversation with Conley, she locates her work in relation to “theory”:
I am obviously not without a minimum of philo- sophical and analytical knowledge, simply because I am part of a historical period. I cannot act as if I were not a contemporary of myself. Neither do I think that I must wage a mortal war against a certain type of discourse... I do have knowledge of theoretical discourses. Yet the part that represses women is a part which I quickly learned to detect and from which I keep my dis- tance. One leaves these parts aside. (Cixous, in Conley, 1991, p. 147)
Cixous’s (1981, 1986) explication and prac- tice of écriture feminine , of a feminine writing that exceeds the phallogocentrism of rational thought, has influenced diverse feminists, including Trinh. Écriture féminine is a practice of writing that Cixous (1986) says “will never be able to be theorized, enclosed, coded, which does not mean it does not exist” (p. 92). Nevertheless, Cixous’s work can be understood within a theoretical landscape. Cixous’s texts are dense, enigmatic, intensely lyrical texts of desire, and of loss that might be understood as texts of bliss (Barthes, 1975). Cixous’s (1991) writing is deeply metaphor- ical. Her writing shimmers with “signifiers that flash with a thousand meanings” (p. 46). Her writing entails careful attention to the possibili- ties of language, sensitivity to the multiplicity, and excess of language. Like Trinh she shows that the simple truth (if such a thing can be said to exist) is neither desirable nor possible. She attends to other sources of language beyond the conscious, beyond reason. She locates her imagery and understanding of the corporeal effects of language in dreams, in the unconscious, and in what she calls zones in(terre)conscious
(Cixous & Calle-Gruber, 1997, p. 88). Language emerges in zones between earth and conscious- ness, deep in the body and memory (Davies, 2000b). Cixous (1991) reads her body as a text. She sources the “truths” of life and of writing within the body, which always mediates every experi- ence and which is itself the ultimate text (of life):
History, love, violence, time, work, desire inscribe [life] in my body. I go where the “fundamental lan- guage” is spoken, the body language into which all the tongues of things, acts and beings, translate themselves, in my own breast, the whole of reality worked upon in my flesh, intercepted by my nerves, by my sense, by the labor of all my cells, projected, analyzed, recomposed into a book. (p. 52)
The body is the fundament of writing, and the poetic writing practice that Cixous devel- oped derives from the body and reverberates with the body and with other bodies. It resonates in and with the body—like music or like blood. Bodies are texts of lives and can be written within an embodied writing practice of écriture feminine, a writing that seeks to preserve Otherness. It was in theater that Cixous found the medium where the writer, as ego, could let go and make space for the multiplicity of the other: “In the theater one can only work with a self that has almost evaporated, that has trans- formed itself into space” (Cixous, cited in Sellers, 1996, p. xiv). In the space of theater, the writer must imagine and create and be everyone. She can encounter and inscribe the other, and in writing the other she puts herself under erasure. It is in writing for theater that the self will “con- sent to erase itself and to make space, to become, not the hero of the scene, but the scene itself: the site, the occasion of the other” (Cixous, cited in Sellers, 1996, p. xv). She sees her writing for theater as a critical component of her scholarly practice and as the place where an ethics of writing becomes possible. These authors, as well as ourselves, have also been influenced by Roland Barthes who, like other French “founding fathers” of contempo- rary theory, marked the movement from struc- turalism into poststructuralism through his body of work. Barthes (1989) explicitly rejected the binary of science and literature in academia:
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Science will become literature, insofar as literature—subject moreover to a growing collapse of traditional genres (poem, narrative, criticism, essay)—is already, has always been, science; for what the human sciences are discovering today, in whatever realm: sociological, psychological, psy- chiatric, linguistic, etc., literature has always known; the only difference is that literature has not said what it knows, it has written it. (p. 10)
In his later works, Barthes (1977, 1978) trou- bled the category of the individual writer and the practices of writing the self. His work, with that of the other writers in this section, has been inspirational in our own writing, provoking Gannon (2001, 2002, 2004a, 2004b, 2004c, 2005, in press) to develop a poststructural prac- tice of autoethnography, and to (re)work data as fiction, drama, and poetry in a range of feminist textual interventions. This work has also been concerned to disrupt the binary of academia and the world, so that a text that began as a research project in a feminist academic context reemer- ges as a fictional play on a public stage and vice versa (Gannon, 2004b, 2005), and memory becomes the site for collectively theorizing a feminist poststructuralism (Davies, 2000a, 2000b; Davies & Gannon, 2005, 2006). The writers we discuss in this section aim to bring language into crisis, to push at the bound- aries of understanding so that multiple mean- ings can be provoked and multiple readings invited through a politics of form that disre- spects generic integrity and disciplinary bound- aries. They work at the limits of language where, as Trinh (1991) says, the aim is
to listen, to see like a stranger in one’s own land; to fare like a foreigner across one’s own language... It is, to borrow a metaphor by Toni Morrison “what the nerves and the skin remember as well as how it appeared. And a rush of imagination is our flood- ing.” “What she wishes to leave the reader/viewer with, finally, is not so much a strong message, nor a singular story, but “the fire and the song.” (p. 199)
CONTROVERSIES AND GAPS, CRITIQUES
The intersection of feminist and poststructural theories has been a vehemently contested but
productive site. Although some readings of the debates suggest that poststructuralism has closed off possibilities for feminist work, vigor- ous new fields such as queer theory and feminist postcolonial theory have emerged in part from this collision. We have already explored some of the new work done by feminists and have dis- cussed some of the concerns. In this final sec- tion of the chapter, we will further delineate feminist criticisms of these paradigms. Many of the accusations with which poststructural and postmodernist work have been charged by fem- inists hinge on their apparent relativism , explic- itly their rejection of fixed truths and certainties. In contrast, researchers who locate their work as “critical theory,” who claim emancipatory agen- das and privilege praxis over (or alongside) theory, are not generally subjected to this cri- tique. Accusations of relativism work along various axes in critiques of poststructural theo- rizing. Each axis rests on a binary way of think- ing that asserts particular possibilities and impossibilities entailed in poststructuralism.
Relativism and Social Action
The first axis relates to action. The history of the feminist movement, as “women’s libera- tion,” was characterized by individual and col- lective action directed at political and social change. The relativism of poststructural femi- nism is seen by some critics as incapable of provoking any action to improve the lives of women. If “women” as a coherent category has been deconstructed, and “power” is seen as a capillary and localized operation, then how and where can feminists work to improve social worlds? And who is a feminist anyway in these times? Delmar (1986) suggested,
At the very least a feminist is someone who holds that women suffer discrimination because of their sex, that they have specific needs which remain negated and unsatisfied, and that the satisfaction of these needs would require a radical change... in the social, economic and political order. (Delmar, cited in Beasley, 1999, pp. 27–28)
Appropriate feminisms, and feminists, are driven by the imperative for social critique and the possibility of radical social change. Social
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