Feminist Theory, Women's Writing

Laurie A. Finke

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781501726262
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Feminist Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In this rewarding book, Laurie A. Finke challenges assumptions about gender, the self, and the text which underlie fundamental constructs of contemporary feminist theory. She maintains that some of the key concepts structuring feminist literary criticism need to be reexamined within both their historical context and the larger framework of current theory concerning language, representation, subjectivity, and value.

1

A Powerful Infidel Heteroglossia: Toward a Feminist Theory of Complexity

As a concept “woman” is too fragile to bear the weight of all the contents and meanings now ascribed to it.

—Rosalind Delmar

The real political task in a society such as ours is to criticize the working of institutions which appear to be both neutral and independent; to criticize them in such a manner that the political violence which has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight them.

—Michel Foucault

During the 1980s, feminist literary criticism was marked by an often contentious split between those pragmatically committed to the recovery of the woman writer and, with her, something usually called women’s experience,¹ and those concerned to explore the implications for feminism of postmodern theories that question the legitimacy of such constructs as the author and experience. This book explores feminist contributions to poststructuralist debates about language, texts, the status of the real, and the nature of political oppression and resistance; it locates both the “woman writer” and “feminist theory” within a series of cultural and historical matrices to reveal the complexities of these critical formulations. Finally, it offers a dialogical materialism through which to understand the ways in which traditionally marginalized women writers challenge notions of what constitutes the institutions of literature and criticism.

The increasing prominence of theory within feminism is evident from the sheer proliferation of hybrid labels during the 1980s: Marxist feminism, feminist reader-response criticism, feminist new historicism, and feminist psychoanalysis, to name just a few. This dissemination of theoretical allegiances has not gone unremarked. To some feminists it represents a dangerous sectarianism that threatens the ability of women to engage in meaningful political action; to others, it offers a productive diversity that may lead to a more effective, because more inclusive, activism. “Theory"—by which we almost always mean poststructuralist theory—has been an almost obsessive subject of polemics, defenses, dialogues, and debates among feminist literary critics. Elaine Showalter’s 1981 essay “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness” and her 1983 “Critical Cross-Dressing” both warn against too close an alliance with “misogynist” theories. In 1982 Peggy Kamuf and Nancy K. Miller debated in Diacritics how French theories of language and subjectivity affect the feminist project of recovering “lost” women writers. As late as 1987, Barbara Christian was decrying theory for its “linguistic jargon, its emphasis on quoting its prophets, its tendency toward 'Biblical' exegesis, . . . its preoccupations with mechanical analyses of language, graphs, algebraic equations, [and] its gross generalizations about culture” (1987, 33), while Mary Jacobus, in contrast, was criticizing the “untheorized, experiential, and literary herstorical tendency” of much American feminist criticism (1986, xii).² This obsession with the place of theory in feminism is not merely an academic question: what is at stake for feminists in these debates, in Foucauldian terms, is how best to expose the political violence that inheres in the institution of literary studies under the guise of neutral and objective scholarship, and how most effectively to implement strategies of political resistance to sexual oppression.

Debates about theory within feminism are, significantly, also struggles to define the status of the “real.” At least since Simone de Beauvoir’s celebrated manifesto in 1952—"One is not born, but rather becomes a woman” (1974, 301)—most feminists have committed themselves to a social constructivist view of gender, to a belief that “male” and “female” are functions of historically specific forms of mediation, cultural narratives through which we structure the world, and not fixed ontological essences. At the same time, they have voiced strong ambivalence about that position. Feminists (myself included) have insisted upon the social construction of gender because we have perceived that our oppression has always been fobbed off on us as “natural,” the result of universal and immutable “differences” between the sexes. To change these gender relations we have to conceive of such concepts as human nature, masculinity, and femininity not as unitary and unchanging but as heterogeneous cultural fields, always sensitive to historical contingencies. In short, a progressive feminist politics depends upon perceiving gender and, indeed, reality as social constructs that can be dismantled and reconstructed in new and perhaps more egalitarian ways.³

But the constructivist insistence on the linguistic and rhetorical nature of reality can rebound in ways that have been troubling for many feminists. If reality is nothing more than narratives we tell ourselves, if the world is a “contestable text,” then these “stories" can have no greater claim to inherent authority than the old ones feminists have rejected. The dilemma becomes how to proclaim new, politically progressive “truths.” As Donna Haraway puts it, "We would like to think our appeals to real worlds are more than a desperate lurch away from cynicism and an act of faith like any other cult's” (1988, 577). For feminist literary critics the problems posed by a social constructivist perspective are immediate and political. Women have been denied access to the means of producing culture, and the ultimate aim of feminist criticism for many of its practitioners is to create the opportunity to help construct the conditions of their existence. In the 1970s and 1980s this meant recovering the woman writer and validating women’s experiences. But social constructivism suggests that there is no author (Foucault 1979) and that experience is a simulacrum, a set of discursive practices (de Lauretis 1987, 18). Furthermore, women’s “experience” is saturated with and not separate from the practices by which masculinist cultures reproduce their domination. The problem for feminist theorists, then, as Haraway succinctly puts it, is “how to have simultaneously an account of radical historical contingency for all knowledge claims and knowing subjects, a critical practice for recognizing our own 'semiotic technologies' for making meanings, and a no-nonsense commitment to faithful accounts of a 'real' world, one that can be partially shared and that is friendly to earth wide projects of finite freedom, adequate material abundance, modest meaning in suffering, and limited happiness” (1988, 579). The recognition that knowledge and truth claims are radically contingent and historically specific does not, however, strand us in some never-never land of relativistic paralysis—far from it—although this is precisely what the forces of conservative reaction want us to think. Nor does this recognition of the social and semiotic construction of gender deny the real, material oppression of many women by reducing it to “simply language.” A brick wall is a social construct, produced by the socioeconomic relations of production and labor, but if I run into it, my head still hurts. The task for feminist criticism in the 1990s is to develop more sophisticated theoretical models that offer a way out of the impasse described by Haraway, models that enable women to recognize the “historical contingency” of the social relations of gender, while allowing them to claim their own “truths,” however partial or contingent.

In this regard, my concern is with feminism’s need for what I shall call a politics of complexity. I use complexity in a technical as well as an evaluative sense, drawing specifically on the works of cultural critics such as Donna Haraway, N. Katherine Hayles, Bruno Latour, and Michel Serres, who work in hybrid fields at the intersections of science and culture. Complexity describes a cultural poetics of indeterminacy, informed by contemporary theoretical debates in a variety of fields but without the political paralysis often attributed to poststructuralism. By collecting the difficult questions posed by contemporary theory about language, representation, history, culture, and difference under the rubric of “complexity,” I hope to move away from the still-prevalent tendencies to construct theory in terms of totalizing systems and the “maze of dualisms" that require us to view reality in binary terms (Haraway 1985, 100). The discussion that follows, then, serves two purposes. The first is frankly polemical. I contend that feminist criticism can neither ignore theory nor simply celebrate an untheorized “difference"; it must engage—and challenge—many aspects of the competing languages that constitute contemporary theoretical discourse. The second purpose is to introduce the theoretical issues that figure prominently in later chapters, whose primary aim is to articulate a dynamic description of cultural and literary activity sensitive to the complexities of gender and the semiotic practices of culture which constitute it.

I turn to the cultural critiques of science to suggest a critical rhetoric for my argument precisely because I am concerned to decenter notions of objectivity and totalizing theory which underwrite a host of disciplinary and critical practices that inform feminist theory. Understanding these critiques provides an opportunity to expose the violence masked by the claim of science to objectivity. The warrant for such a project has been suggested by the conclusion of Haraway’s 1985 essay “A Manifesto for Cyborgs."

Taking responsibility for the social relations of science and technology means refusing an anti-science metaphysics, a demonology of technology, and so means embracing the skillful task of reconstructing the boundaries of daily life, in partial connection with others, in communication with all of our parts. It is not just that science and technology are possible means of great human satisfaction, as well as a matrix of complex dominations. Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves. (100)

Haraway’s cyborg is, in effect, a figure for a theory of complexity. Like Haraway, I believe it is important for feminists to go beyond simply showing the myriad ways in which the sciences and other institutions have oppressed women; the more difficult task is to rethink the boundaries separating different cultural practices, to examine how structures of knowledge function as strategies of oppression, and to explore how feminism might help to restructure larger cultural institutions. This project must ask not only how science or literature might be changed by feminism but also how we might appropriate aspects of dominant discourses to offer feminist theory a way out of the “maze of dualisms"—nature/culture, mind/body, fact/fiction, real/artificial, theory/praxis, objectivity/subjectivity, order/disorder—by which we have traditionally defined ourselves and our politics.

As Haraway suggests, some of the problems being posed in contemporary scientific thinking—in nonlinear dynamics, information theory, and fluid mechanics—may help feminists think about how to move away from the production of universal, totalizing theory and toward a “feminist theory of complexity” which is at the same time nontotalizing and theoretically aware of what complexity implies. These fields pose problems that cannot be solved by resorting to any simple principles of order or linear determinism. In Luce Irigaray’s terms, they resist “adequate symbolization” and signify “the powerlessness of logic to incorporate in its writing all the characteristic features of nature” (1985b, 106–7). I will forgo all the usual disclaimers about the dangers of analogies between such disparate fields of inquiry as, say, fluid mechanics and literary criticism because what I am proposing is precisely the need to explore the possibilities of circulation and exchange between artificially erected cultural boundaries, as well as to examine the institutional structures that hold them in place. I am interested in the emergence at this particular historical moment of disorder as a productive theoretical principle in the sciences—in chaos and information theory—as well as in such critical theories as de-construction. My perception that feminist theory needs to articulate noncoercive theories of complexity and disorder seems consistent with developments in several fields. In her book, Chaos Bound, Katherine Hayles speculates “that disorder has become a focal point for contemporary theories because it offers the possibility of escaping from what are increasingly perceived as coercive structures of order” (1990, 265). Disrupting cultural boundaries and tracing the possibilities for exchanges among disparate fields exposes the political interests masked by our ideas about order. As Irigaray suggests, disorder and chaos constitute a threat to Western economies of representation. Order is coercive because it is achieved through the exclusion, neutralization, or marginalization (sometimes through violence) of whatever lies outside of artificially constructed “norms,” whether the norm is constructed as an electron, a human genome, or a ruling class. To move from scientific conceptions of complexity to their implications for women’s writing in different cultural and historical contexts, though, requires that we define complexity as precisely as possible.

A theory of complexity is exactly the opposite of what physicists call a theory of everything (or TOE), a single succinct (if quixotic) mathematical description that is supposed to unify the four fundamental forces of nature: the strong force, weak force, electromagnetic force, and gravity. “A good TOE should consist of much more than a mere catalogue of underlying laws and objects; it should have explanatory power and it should establish linkages between the various facets of nature” (Davies and Brown 1988, 6). A TOE would be marked by elegance and simplicity. It would be a totalizing, universalizing theory; as E. David Peat remarks in his popular account, "A perfect theory would be forced on physicists by nature itself; there would be no room for arbitrary assumptions or for making adjustments. The theory would stand or fall on its own" (1988, 104). What is significant for my purposes is that most literary critics—including feminist literary critics—consciously or unconsciously, have derived their beliefs about what a theory is from precisely this kind scientific idealism, itself a remnant of totalizing misinterpretations of eighteenth-century Newtonianism (Markley 1991). Stanley Fish, for example, describes theory as “formal, abstract, general, and invariant,” as “a recipe with premeasured ingredients which when ordered and combined according to absolutely explicit instructions . . . will produce the desired results" regardless of the political commitments of the investigator (1985, 110–11). In other words, literary and feminist theory—according to both its detractors and its proponents—is implicitly or explicitly modeled on the “rigor” and denotative clarity idealistically attributed to deterministic science and mathematics.

Scientists in many fields, however, are routinely challenging totalizing beliefs about theory. Stephen Hawking, for example, has remarked that “quantum mechanics is essentially a theory of what we do not know and cannot predict” (1989, 138). As Hayles notes, in both the postmodern sciences and in literary theory, the 1970s and 1980s brought “a break away from universalizing, totalizing perspectives and a move toward local, fractured systems and modes of analysis (1990, 2), in other words, toward theories of complexity. In contrast to a TOE, a theory of complexity reveals the messiness behind the illusion of unified narratives about the world by restoring information—what I shall call noise—previously marginalized and excluded by those narratives. It attempts to expose the “ficticity"—or the constructed nature—of facts.

Consider disorder. Ordinarily we think of disorder as the absence of order and assign a negative value to it. Theory, in this mindset, exists to make the disorderly orderly, to discover order in it—or impose order on it. One of the insights of chaos theory, however, is that disorder is perhaps more productively conceived of as the presence of information. In the sciences, chaotic or complex systems turn out to be far more prevalent than we might at first suspect—from dripping faucets and the smoke swirls produced by a cup of hot coffee to epidemics, the weather, and even the complicated rhythms of the human heart. Although the sciences of chaos are primarily quantitative, their implications for theory are far more suggestive than the “application” of a few odd principles to feminist theories or even (though I recognize that this assumption is implicit in scientific descriptions of chaos) for promoting a deep structural explanation for disorder. My concern is to enable feminism to account for more information from those sources that have most often been marginalized by dominant systems of “order” and to create new ways of discussing and using this new information to challenge the political repression of complexity.

In this respect, I prefer to think of complexity as a trope occupying a site somewhere between an evaluative ...

Table of contents

• Preface
• 1. A Powerful Infidel Heteroglossia: Toward a Feminist Theory of Complexity
• 2. The Rhetoric of Desire in the Courtly Lyric
• 3. The Grotesque Mystical Body: Representing the Woman Writer
• 4. Style as Noise: Identity and Ideology in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
• 5. Theories of Value and the Dialogics of Culture
• Afterword: From Text to Work
• Bibliography
• Index