Six—
Postmodernism
Thinking in Fragments

No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or if neither, mechanized petrification embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance. For of the last stage of this cultural development, it might be truly said: "Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved."
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

But cleverness becomes meaningless as soon as power ceases to obey the rules and chooses direct appropriation instead. The medium of the traditional bourgeois intelligence—that is discussion—then breaks down. Individuals can no longer talk to each other and know it: they therefore make the game into a serious and responsible institution which requires the application of all available strength to ensure that there is no proper conversation and at the same time no silence.
Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment

We are wondering about the meaning of a necessity: the necessity of lodging oneself within traditional conceptuality in order to destroy it . . . does it hide . . . some indestructible and unforeseeable resource of the Greek logos? Some unlimited power of envelopment by which he who attempts to repel it would also already be overtaken?
Jacques Derrida, "Violence and Metaphysics"

Fragments

Like the category "feminist theory," "postmodern philosophy" does not correspond to any actual or unified discourse. The persons and modes of thinking aggregated under the category of postmodernism are quite heterogeneous in regard to voice, style, content, and concerns. Jacques Derrida, Richard Rorty, Jean-François Lyotard, and Michel Foucault are four particularly influential writers associated with postmodernism. Yet each writer's focus and the salience he assigns to certain issues differ. Derrida has a special concern for ontological questions, including the "misrepresentation" of Being, "writing," and the "tyranny of metaphysics." Rorty is interested in epistemology and the history of philosophy, especially the traditional practices and concepts of philosophy and truth and alternatives to them. Lyotard and Foucault focus on relations between truth, power, legitimation, and the "subject." By even speaking of "postmodernism," I run the risk of violating some of its central values—heterogeneity, multiplicity, and difference. Postmodernists claim, however, that the "fictive" and nonunitary nature of concepts need not negate their meaningfulness or usefulness. Therefore I will assume here it is possible to speak of "postmodernism." Although internally varied, postmodernist discourses are unified in identifying certain subjects of conversation as particularly appropriate to and necessary for "our" time. These crucial subjects include: (1) contemporary Western culture—its nature and the best ways to understand it; (2) knowledge—what it is, who or what constructs and generates it, and its relations to power; (3) philosophy—its crisis and history, how both are to be understood, and how (if at all) it is to be practiced; (4) power—if, where, and how domination exists and is maintained and how and if it can be overcome; (5) subjectivity and the self—how our concepts and experiences of them have come to be and what, if anything, these do or can mean; and (6) difference—how to conceptualize, preserve, or rescue it. Postmodernists are also unified in their rejections of certain positions. They all reject representational and objective or rational concepts of knowledge and truth; grand, synthetic theorizing meant to comprehend Reality as and in a unified whole; and any concept of self or subjectivity in which it is not understood as produced as an effect of discursive practices.

Furthermore postmodernists all share a common framework

within which they attempt to conceptualize contemporary Western culture. All define Western culture by its struggle with, in, and against modernism .^[1] My primary disagreement with and disappointment in postmodernist thinking is that this struggle, and hence postmodernists' understanding of contemporary Western culture, is primarily (re)situated and understood as occurring within the history of Western philosophy . Postmodernist discourse is constituted by and in a series of attempts to close doors or paths back to Enlightenment modes of thinking or promises of happiness. This is precisely what I find most valuable and problematic about it. Unlike the work of other radical critics such as Habermas or Marcuse, the postmodernists question the necessity and desirability of completing the "project of modernity" or making good on the "emancipatory" promises of bourgeois culture/Enlightenment.^[2] By rejecting the teleological view of history implicit in such claims, the postmodernists encourage us to create alternative modes of thinking and practice outside this project's imperative. Disrupting the equation of modernity, enlightenment, and emancipation opens a space to explore the "dark side" of reason and modernity in greater depth than Horkheimer and Adorno were able to do.^[3] The postmodernists go beyond their critique to throw into doubt the ideas that reason is the necessary ground for philosophy or freedom and that an emancipatory culture will arise if and when the "negative" aspects of modernity (or "modernization" in Habermas's terms) can be "aufheben ." To the advocates of modernity, the postmodernists say we need "something else." What this something else might be, either in philosophy or practice, is not clear. This "lack" is one of the reasons postmodernism is more successful as a critique of philosophy and modernity than as a theory of the postmodern as such.

Postmodernism is a valuable form of discipline philosophers impose on themselves. Postmodernists generate intradiscourse warnings and limitations: No, you can't do that. That way lies grandiosity, illusion, the seductive tyranny of metaphysics, truth, the real. They also articulate, reflect, and exemplify a belated shift in philosophic consciousness and some of its paradoxes and limitations. This shift is a response to fundamental changes in Western culture and the epistemological and sociopolitical consequences of these transformations. In the realm of knowledge, postmodernism represents philosophic attempts to come to grips with the displacement of philosophy from

any privileged relation to truth and knowledge. In post-seventeenth-century Western culture philosophy as the enunciator, representative, or guarantor of truth has gradually been displaced, first by the natural sciences and then by the so-called "human" sciences. Despite such rearguard skirmishes as may be found in the "philosophy of science" or attempts by logical positivists to scientize philosophy no one except a few philosophers really pays attention to philosophers' epistemological judgments. Philosophers may evaluate whether certain "truth claims" are "warranted," but the practitioners of the allegedly problematic practices continue, by and large, to be unconcerned and unaffected by the philosophers' judgments of them. Scientists would not grant philosophy a place as the "queen of the sciences." Nor would they turn to it for a more accurate understanding of their own "logic of discovery."

Philosophers' repeated attacks on psychoanalysis or "technical reason" are in part battles for terrain and dominance.^[4] Despite their claims, postmodernists are not willing to abandon this terrain. Although Plato considered poetry and drama as his rivals to the claim to represent truth, today conflict exists between philosophy and the sciences of "man" and nature. But practically speaking, in contemporary Western culture the philosopher literally and figuratively can produce nothing. Hence, philosophy has already lost. Marx was perhaps more correct than he knew when he stated: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it."^[5] This, however, philosophy cannot do.

Faced with philosophy's impotence in a relentlessly materialistic and nonmetaphysical Western world, the would-be philosopher could pursue several strategies. Instead of practicing "pure" philosophy, one might enter into an alliance with science and create a new form of "practical reason," as for example in the neo-Kantian and Weberian "policy sciences." Alternatively ceding the "material" world to the scientist or denying its existence, one might attempt to reclaim the world by "textualizing" it. Here language plays a doubly mediating role in the following series of claims. There can be no (practical) thought without language, and thought within the modern world has no practical effect without being transformed into writing or texts that are "disseminated." Hence there is no world outside the text. Philosophers can reclaim terrain; as theoreticians of writing or texts, their place is resecured. By claiming to "know" the endless heterogeneity

and undecidabiity of texts, philosophers can displace or "set to play" any particular truth claim among others. "There is no truth" is merely the equal and opposite of "these are the conditions that all truth claims must meet." Confronted with the philosopher's failure and impotence to change the world, one can make a counterclaim: Everything is interpretation in various and unending ways. The reader is enticed into a (Kantian) discussion of what cannot be known, what cannot be done. The philosopher is necessary to show us our errors, limitations, and "excesses."

But who is this "us"? Here a suspicious but seductive compounding of the philosopher and "the others" emerges. Certainly a major contributing factor to the philosopher's displacement or crisis of confidence is the revolt of the others against any unifying authoritative voice. The voices of the others include nonphilosophical modes of formal knowledge. Equally important are what Foucault calls the "subjugated discourses." Among these are the voices of women and people of color throughout the world. These voices have enunciated a "great refusal" on a scale not even Marcuse dared to dream.

The voices of others radically undermine the philosopher's claims to representation. Such representational claims have many different components: that there is a truth to be represented, that there is a subject of history that there is an emancipatory project, that there is a form of progress that a reason can discern and make real. Here too philosophers may accept displacement or try to reclaim terrain. They may attempt to dictate the form these voices ought to take (conversation), to cut off clamorous accounts of alternative experiences by proclaiming the nonexistence of subjectivity or to forestall discomforting, heterogeneous demands for justice by disconnecting all possible interrelations between knowledge(s), truths, and emancipation(s). As we will see later in this chapter, each of these tactics appears at some point within postmodernist texts.

Like psychoanalysis and feminist theories, postmodernism is ambivalent and ambiguous as a transitional mode of thinking. In its closure vis-à-vis Enlightenment, postmodernism has much to contribute to the deconstruction of certain authoritarian forms of thought and practice, including its own. Although it cuts off certain moves "backward," the same postmodernist devices make it more difficult for the others to be heard. There is a danger of being seduced by its claims to set free the play of differences. Unfortunately postmodernist philos-

ophers are not free from a will to power whose effects they trace elsewhere. A cooptation of the others and an effacement of the traces of these maneuvers frequently result. This double erasing may account for some of the obscurity in the writing of postmodernism; tracks have to be erased or effaced as they are made.

Ultimately, I will argue, in their naming of the most fundamental problems of contemporary Western culture, postmodernists, like critical theorists before them, succumb to the "siren's mythic song."^[6] Although philosophy is supposed to become only one voice in the "conversation of mankind [sic ]," what the philosopher "really does"—conversation or writing—retains a privileged place within much of postmodernist thought. Therefore I will treat postmodernist discourse as one, internally varied, necessarily imperfect, and partial set of stories about contemporary Western culture. These stories capture some important elements of a more complex plot but obscure others. The incompleteness of postmodernist stories is not the problem that concerns me. Like other postmodernists I do not believe it is possible ever to capture the "truth" of the "whole." The problem is rather that postmodernists repress, exclude, and erase certain voices and questions I think should be heard and included. This excluded or repressed material includes many of the ideas and social relations feminists and psychoanalytic theorists correctly believe are essential to understanding self, knowledge, and power. Hence postmodernist discourses must be supplemented and interrogated by the others.

Postmodernist Deconstructions of Knowledge

This is a paradox of postmodernism: If philosophy is so problematic as knowledge, and if its claims as the representative of truth are so unwarranted, then why is it worthy of anyone's attention—even as the object of critique? Part of the answer lies in the postmodernist equation of knowledge and philosophy.

Postmodernists paradoxically accept fundamental Enlightenment tenets—the identification of Western culture and self-understanding with reason and of reason with philosophy. They believe the history of the West is the history of reason and philosophy. This is a negative history one in which domination, exclusion, and asymmetry are the true concealed effects. Western culture is imprisoned in and by meta-

physics. An understanding of the failure of Enlightenment must therefore be achieved by an immanent critique of reason. The focus of this critique should be philosophy because it is seen as reason's primary representation and representative. Relations of domination are understood as effects of this imprisonment, not as its origin or source.

A (postmodernist) deconstruction of the history of Western philosophy reveals at least three errors at the heart of Western culture and thought: (1) a misrepresentation of the real that necessarily entails the suppression of difference (the violence of metaphysics), (2) an obsession with and misapprehension and overvaluation of the redemptive or emancipatory qualities of truth, and (3) the constitution of the "self" as the "subject" of knowledge in the double sense of subject of and subject to. These three errors are necessary in and to the construction of Western thought/philosophy. They cannot be resolved, avoided, or transcended within its context. Hence the unveiling of these errors must lead to a conviction of the necessity of the displacement of the mainstream practices of Western philosophy (and culture?). The deconstructionists do not intend to counterpose an alternative philosophy that would more "adequately" "solve" the problems of being, truth, or subjectivity. Rather they wish to persuade us not to ask the old questions anymore, to change the subjects of the conversation completely.

Derrida, Rorty, Foucault, and Lyotard all conceptualize philosophy fundamentally as episteme—as knowledge and as knowledge about knowledge. This concept of philosophy does reflect an aspect of philosophic practice. Since Kant, philosophy has sustained itself in part by claiming special insight into the "foundations" of human knowledge and the conditions of its possibility. Epistemology is to provide a firm grounding for the queen of sciences. Other forms of philosophy such as ethics or aesthetics are nonfoundational, hence less important.

These writers do not treat this overvaluation of epistemology as a curious quirk of some professional philosophers to be understood in relation to the sociology or history of the profession. Rather they believe it reveals something about the "essence" of philosophy itself. In turn the "dominant" Western concept of philosophy is said to reveal and mirror certain problems and fundamental qualities of Western culture. To the extent that all experience is textual or interpretative, ways of thinking cannot be separated from ways of being. Rorty ar-

gues, for example, "you won't understand the West unless you understand what it was like to be bothered by the kinds of issues that bothered Plato."^[7]

Thus in postmodernist writings knowledge is still conceptualized as originating in and expressed through thought , even if thought is to be understood in relation to language rather than the intention or consciousness of an individual or collective subject. Except for Foucault, postmodernists define and confine knowledge by what can be linguistically expressed. Under the cover of the "displacement" of philosophy a traditional activity continues: an inquiry into the conditions of possibility meaning, and limitations of our knowledge via a critique of reason and philosophy.

The continuing privilege of philosophy in relation to knowledge is revealed by the fact that the inquiry is undertaken in the form of a deconstruction of epistemology and metaphysics. Alternate approaches are not explored. Alternatives do exist; for example, Melanie Klein postulates the existence of an epistemophiliac instinct arising out of and expressed through the infant's curiosity about and exploration of the mother's body.^[8] The inquiry into the conditions of knowledge is then framed within an investigation of child-rearing practices, fantasy, research on infant development and neurophysiology, and so forth. Yet this is clearly not a postmodernist approach. For postmodernists knowledge and philosophy as well as knowledge and reason and knowledge and the subject are inextricably tied. Both the inquiry into the nature of knowledge and the possibility of shifting an understanding of knowing are located within the terrain of the history of philosophy.

Nonetheless for anyone trained in relatively traditional ways of philosophizing, reading postmodernist texts is a frustrating task. Intrinsic to traditional philosophy is the demand to "give reasons," to offer a set of arguments for why x is better than y. It is precisely this sort of discourse that postmodernism seeks to displace. Derrida claims the goal is not the end of philosophy, but reading it in a certain way. This way of reading generates a series of interpretations through which a story emerges. A fictive entity for example, "philosophy" is constructed. The narrative is to lead to the conclusion that it is impossible to philosophize in the traditional way. The story of knowledge, philosophy and thought becomes a narrative of its own deconstruction seen as such (as in Hegel's dialectics) by a consciousness that can

grasp the hidden "essence" of philosophy. This essence is composed of self-reflexivity acts of exclusion and self-generation, intertextuality, and lack of relation to the real. The impossibility and self-contradictions of "philosophy" are not demonstrated in a logical, cumulative argument. Both logic and any notion of the progression to "truth" are themselves suspect. The strategy is to construct an alternative narrative whose rhetorical force is to displace the traditional self-understanding of mainstream Western thought.

Much of the force of this counternarrative is derived, as postmodernists argue about other forms of philosophy, from its own acts of exclusion and construction. It is important to emphasize at the outset that the philosophy postmodernists seek to displace is a fiction, chosen (in some sense) as a maximally effective rhetorical device. The history of philosophy could be told in many different ways. By the logic of postmodernism itself, the adequacy of any of these stories can be judged only by the effects produced and by whether and to the extent that such stories open up or permit further, interesting conversation to proceed. Nor could only one (his)story of philosophy be "true." Postmodernists claim the construction and choice of one story over others is not governed by a relation to truth, but by less innocent factors. These ultimately include a will to power partially constituted by and expressing a desire not to hear certain other voices or stories. However from feminist or psychoanalytic viewpoints the absences postmodernists evoke and attend to in their discourses or in those of others are not necessarily the most salient ones.^[9]

The postmodernist tendency to collapse the histories of Western philosophy and culture is perhaps most evident in the work of Jacques Derrida, who writes, "What has seemed necessary and urgent to me, in the historical situation which is our own, is a general determination of the conditions for the emergence and limits of philosophy, of metaphysics, of everything that carries it on and that it carried on."^[10] Derrida believes the misrepresentation of Being is intrinsic to the "founding" of Western philosophy. It has been dominated by the metaphysics of presence, by the desire and claim to represent the real. The real of philosophy is not the Real of Being, but rather an artifact and consequence of certain philosophic practices. These entail both inclusion and exclusion. The exclusions are not neutral or extrinsic to the discourses or the cultures that follow the founding. Instead they actually determine and dominate their texture.

Derrida's deconstruction of the misrepresentation of the Real presupposes and depends upon his own, often covert ontological premises. For him the Real does have a (mystical) essence. It is heterogeneous, infinitely open, and governed by chance. The philosopher's task is to invoke rather than present the Real. Any attempt at representation results in a reduction of the Real to what can be present to consciousness and hence becomes its equivalent (the same). These attempts do violence to Being. They enclose its otherness, chance, and heterogeneity within the homogeneity of a consciousness whose contents are to be transparent and not alien to itself. All of Derrida's key moves and concepts (differance, chance, deferral, spacing, writing, supplement, trace, and other) are bound up with the attempt to evoke a nonrational Real without transforming it into the Same of consciousness, reason, and logic. As we will see, these concepts also turn out to be related inextricably to another one: "woman." As in Lacan's work "Woman" turns out to ground and represent "other" in many complex and partially "veiled" ways.

Derrida's primary criticism of mainstream Western philosophy is directed at its incapacity to respect "the Being and meaning of the other." Since Socrates, Western philosophy has been dominated "by a Reason which receives only what it gives itself, a Reason which does nothing but recall itself to itself." Its "ontology is tautology and egology. . . . It has always neutralized the other, in every sense of the word." Western philosophies have thus been philosophies of violence or philosophies of power. In its suppression, exclusion, and transformation of the Other to the Same, "the entire philosophical tradition, in its meaning and at bottom, would make common cause with oppression. . . . To see and to know, to have and to will, unfold only within the oppressive and luminous identity of the same." The equation within philosophy of the Real with what can be seen by and in the light of reason provides an alibi "for the historical violence of light: a displacement of technico-political oppression in the direction of philosophic discourse."^[11]

The ontology of Western philosophy permits and requires us to turn our glance away from "the origin of the world"—the other. This other is "the inaccessible, the invisible, the intangible, secret, separable, invisible." It is absence and the nonphenomenal. It is the trace, not a Being perfectly seen and re-presented in thought. It is difference (alterity without contradiction or end): "the infinity which no thought

can enclose and which forbids all monologue." The other's alterity is absolutely irreducible, that is, infinitely irreducible, and "the infinitely other can only be Infinity."^[12]

The other can be invoked by speech but never captured by or represented in it. It moves through texts and between them in a general economy of the infinite play of meanings. It can be approached only by desire, not Reason. The proper relation to it is one of respect and separation, not consumption or mastery. Its truth cannot be grasped and represented once and for all. The other is thus the limit of Reason because it is "unthinkable and impossible." It cannot be re-presented in or through concepts or in logocentric discourse (the coherent discourse of reason). The other "interrupts all historical totalities through its freedom of speech."^[13] It is under no obligation to mean, to be, to conclude; it exceeds all meaning, truth, unities, or totalities. It is writing , not philosophy. The repression of writing/the other/difference constitutes "the origin of philosophy and episteme , and of truth as the unity of logos and phone ." The unity and homogeneity of thought, the system, the subject, Reason, the Real is made possible and is "haunted" by this repression. The traces of the repressed are everywhere within these apparent unities for those who know how to evoke them, for "repression as Freud says, neither repels nor flees, nor excludes an exterior force, it contains an interior representation, laying out within itself a space of repression." These traces "can no longer be represented except by the structure and functioning of writing."^[14]

Unlike philosophy writing is not bound up with the myth of an "originary or modified form of presence."^[15] In writing, the play of differences circulates in and through texts. Texts like the other do not mean . There is nothing (no presence already there) they are trying to represent in or to consciousness. Texts cannot be univocal because they are constituted of and by written signs, signs that already exist, have always already existed, within a system of relations. As a (or many) system(s) of relations, signification has no single origin or author. Nor does a text. The text is not the product of the consciousness of a singular author making present some aspect of experience, history or thought. Real writing means to perform, evoke, and operate within and be operated upon by the "scene of writing." This scene is not one of presence, intentionality, or consciousness, but rather of the trace, other, difference, and change. "The trace is the erasure of self-

hood, of one's own presence, and is constituted by the threat or anguish of its irredeemable disappearance, of the disappearance of its disappearance." "The subject" of writing does not exist if by subject we mean a sovereign solitude of the author. The subject of writing is a "system of relations between strata . . . the psyche, society the world."^[16]

Writing offers an at least partial alternative to or beyond the violence of metaphysics. To write is to open oneself up to chance, to free oneself from the compulsive linking up of "meaning, concept, time and truth" that has dominated Western philosophic discourse. Writing involves risk, play loss of sense and meaning. It rescues the "poetic or ecstatic . . . in every discourse," even philosophy. But in order to "run this risk in language, in order to save that which does not want to be saved . . . we must redouble language and have recourse to ruses, to stratagems, to simulcra." Writing "exceeds the logos (of meaning, lordship, presence, etc.)." Unlike the philosopher the writer renounces "the desire to hold on, to maintain his certainty of himself and the security of the concept" against the sliding into the nonmeaning or the excess of meaning, which is the "nonbasis" of an "unknowledge."^[17] This unknowledge is not a "moment" (in the Hegelian sense) of knowledge—but the absolute other, difference, supplement.

To write in this sense is to "transgress the entirety of the history of meaning and the entirety of the meaning of history and the project of knowledge which has always obscurely melded these two together." It is to "absolve myself of absolute knowledge, putting it back in its place as such, situating it and inscribing it within a space in which it no longer dominates." Writing is dedicated to the "indefinite destruction of value." Its predicates are not there in order "to mean something, to announce or signify, but in order to make sense slide, to denounce or deviate from it."^[18]

Writing cannot be the completion or Aufhebung of philosophy Rather, by freeing the poetic traces within it, by desiring the Other and evoking it, writing can undo the "violence of metaphysics." "Nonviolent language, in the last analysis, would be a language of pure invocation." It would do without the verb "to be" because "predication is the first violence."^[19] Freed of the obligation of meaning, of presenting being and its unity in transparent language, writing effects the destruction from within of philosophic discourse. It "multi-

plies words, precipitates them one against the other, engulfs them too, in an endless and baseless substitution whose only rule is the sovereign affirmation of the play outside meaning."^[20]

The "irruptive emergence" of the scene of writing poses the unanswerable "question of speech and meaning."^[21] Writing is also the space of the other—of dissemination, of an "irreducible and generative multiplicity the supplement and the turbulence of a certain lack fracture the limit of the text, forbidding an exhaustive and closed formalization of it."^[22] Only within this space can we hope to encounter the Being with no name, the (unrepresentably) Real. This is the space also of "strategies" for endless readings, not for representing the Real in an en-closed final totality. This space is to be the dis-placement of philosophy.

Derrida's concept of the Real is somewhat contradictory. On the one hand any finite, unitary concept of the Real is said to be merely an effect of a delimited set of (deconstructable) philosophic strategies or metaphysical claims about the nature of Being. On the other hand Derrida does make ontological statements about the Real. It is "really" heterogeneous, fluctuating, infinitely open, and governed by chance, not logic or an immanent telos unfolding inexorably in and over time. Furthermore there is one practice, writing, that seems to have a privileged relationship to this Real.

If taken seriously, this view of the Real and of "writing" undermines or renders problematic many traditional philosophic concepts of Truth and of the relation of Truth to emancipation, freedom, or justice. Although Rorty, Foucault, and Lyotard have somewhat different views of the Real, they all attack the "metaphysics of presence." They treat "philosophy truth, goodness and rationality [as] interlocked Platonic notions."^[23] The postmodernist intent is to deconnect and dislocate these notions in both philosophical and political/practical discourses. All these philosophers assume that any transcendental or representational theory of truth is necessarily false. This conclusion follows from one or both of these postmodernist tenets: metaphysical claims about the nature of reality and epistemological ones about the nature of thought/mind as intrinsically nontranscendental, historical, linguistic, and context dependent.

If reality is infinitely open and fluctuating, it, like texts, generates an infinitely large number of possible interpretations and material for interpretations. Closure is merely an effect of a philosophic strategy,

as are all systems claiming to be based on self-evident or transcendental axioms. Truth cannot be conceptualized in terms of completeness, adequation, transcendence, or self-identity It cannot be the representation or mirror of an eternal or universal substance ("presence") or subject because none exists. Truth can no longer be understood in terms of a correspondence to the Real because the Real always exceeds and escapes our thinking about it. As Derrida says, the problem is not that there is no truth, but that there is "too much" truth.^[24]

The "origin" of thought in any case is "preconceptual." It exceeds and is other than all logic or logical systems. Postmodernists argue that thought is irreducibly linguistic; it can be practiced only in and through historical and context-dependent "language games" or "discourses." The effect of truth is produced only through discourse, that is, in and through systems of signification or practice. "There are no criterion that we have not created in the course of creating a practice, no standard of rationality that is not an appeal to such a criterion, no rigorous argumentation that is not obedience to our own conventions."^[25] But these systems themselves are generated by interpretations of previous such systems. Hence they too are infinitely open, heterogeneous, and subject to further interpretation and change. There is no Reality for us outside such systems because, as Rorty argues, "there is no way to think about either the world or our purposes except by using our language." We cannot step out of "the traditions, linguistic and other, within which we do our thinking and self-criticism and compare ourselves with something absolute." We should thus "drop" the notion of truth as correspondence to reality altogether, for we "never encounter reality except under a chosen description."^[26]

The notion of truth as correspondence to the Real rests in part upon mistaken ideas about both philosophy and ethics. Since Plato, some philosophers have seen the idea of an absolute, transcendental truth as a necessary foundation and condition of possibility for desired human outcomes such as justice. Somehow "asking questions about the nature of certain normative notions (for instance, 'truth,' 'rationality,' 'goodness')" has been seen as necessarily connected to redeeming "the hope of better obeying such norms."^[27]

On the contrary "it will not help to say something true to think about Truth, nor will it help to act well to think about goodness, nor

will it help to be rational to think about rationality."^[28] Truth is merely the name of a property that all true statements share, or a kind of honorific we give to practices or ideas that accord with our cultural assumptions. It is not possible to have an interesting philosophic discussion about such notions. Nor should we expect that conflicts about the meaning of truth, goodness, and so forth can be resolved philosophically. The perennial controversies about these notions throughout the history of philosophy indicate the futility of this expectation. Instead the only test of truth is a pragmatic one: whether some ways of talking and acting are "better" or "pay off" within the context of the needs of a particular culture at a particular time.

"Knowledge is power, a tool for coping with reality." Different sorts of knowledge help us cope with different bits of reality. No kind of knowledge, even science, has a privileged relation to reality or can produce a noncontextual Truth. "Modern science does not help us to cope because it corresponds, it just plain helps us to cope."^[29]

Rorty argues that a postmodern culture will also be a postphilosophic one. In postmodern culture philosophy, understood as the desire, attempt, and claim to be able to divide sentences into "an upper and lower division—the sentences that correspond to something and those that are 'true' only by courtesy or convention"—will be abandoned. Instead the philosopher will no longer claim any special relation to Truth or the Real, even via "writing." All postmodern philosophers can or should do is "compare and contrast cultural traditions" and languages. They will engage in a process of "playing vocabularies and cultures off against each other" with the hope of seeing how things "hang together" in the broadest sense.^[30] The philosopher helps keep "the conversation of mankind" going by providing information about possible "alternative self-images" humans have had and may once again choose. In doing this philosophy can contribute to human "edification" (i.e., the project of finding new, better, more interesting, and more fruitful ways of speaking). These new ways of speaking are also ways of remaking ourselves. Edifying philosophy is to "break the crust of convention, thus preventing man from deluding himself with the notion that he knows himself, or anything else except under optional descriptions."^[31] Although edifying philosophies may have an unsettling effect, choices about how to remake ourselves ultimately can be made only by a "slow and painful" social process of

discussion.^[32] In no case will philosophers or anyone else discover how things "really are" and settle once and for all the questions of how we should live.

To have this view of philosophy is also to forswear or at least question the philosopher's relation to legitimation. Unlike Rorty, Lyotard and Foucault explore the more sinister aspects of the relationship between knowledge and power. Unlike Derrida, neither Lyotard nor Foucault believes "writing" can provide a space beyond or outside power. According to Lyotard any attempt to seek the Truth, rather than play within a circumscribed language game, entails an obligation to "legitimate the rules" of the game. All language games generate their own rules about how to play, what counts as a successful move, and so forth. But by definition these rules are context dependent and valid only within a particular game. Games and their rules are incommensurable. Hence any more general truth claims would have to be made by constructing a "metadiscourse" that has the appearance of universality and neutrality. Such a discourse entails a claim to authority "legitimated" by a particular relation to Truth: "Narrative knowledge makes a resurgence in the West as a way of solving the problem of legitimating the new authorities. It is natural in a narrative problematic for such a question to solicit the name of a hero as its response: who has the right to decide for society? Who is the subject whose prescriptions are norms for those they obligate?"^[33]

This attempt then "produces a discourse of legitimation with respect to its own status, a discourse called phiosophy."^[34] Such "metadiscourses" take the form of a "grand narrative" in which the relationship of knowledge to power and to specific language games is obscured. Lyotard argues that two such narratives have dominated the modern Western world: the Enlightenment narrative and the narrative of spirit. In the Enlightenment narrative the philosopher is the representative of universal truth and of humanity whose emancipation will occur through the learning and development of such truth. The exemplar of such a narrative is, of course, Kant. In this narrative "all peoples have a right to science. If the social subject is not already the subject of scientific knowledge, it is because that has been forbidden by priests and tyrants. The right to science must be reconquered." It can be reconquered by creating an enlightened (e.g., representative) state. The spread of new domains of knowledge to the population is the means of winning freedom and progress for the

people and the nation as a whole. Only an enlightened people can create and sustain an enlightened state. The state "receives its legitimacy not from itself but from the people," who must be taught to demand and obey a state founded on reason and rational authority?^[35]

In turn, claims to power must be made on the basis of claims to knowledge. "The connection of knowledge, legitimacy and power gives rise both to an idea of socially useful but neutral [universal] knowledge and to the creation of agencies and professions whose task is to spread and apply this knowledge throughout the population, thus further emancipating it." Knowledge, power, and emancipation are thus inseparable and interdependent in the Enlightenment narrative; "its epic is the story of [the people's] emancipation from everything that prevents it from governing itself."^[36]

The second narrative, of the Spirit, is more philosophical. Its exemplar is Hegel. In this narrative "philosophy must restore unity to learning . . . it can only achieve this in a language game that links the sciences together as moments in the becoming of spirit." The narrator of this story is a "metasubject" whose task is "the process of formulating both the legitimacy of the discourses of the empirical sciences and that of the direct institutions of popular cultures." In contrast to the previous metanarrative, "knowledge first finds legitimacy in itself, and it is knowledge that is entitled to say what the state and society are." Such knowledge also begins to speculate on how it knows what it knows, on how other knowledges know what they know, and on the place of all other knowledges within its system of knowing. This narrative assumes that "there is meaning to know and thus confers legitimacy upon history (and especially the history of learning)." Its metasubject "grasps" reality as the unfolding history of a subject who is also the "ground" of learning, society, and the state. From this transcendental standpoint "true knowledge . . . is composed of reported statements that are incorporated into the metanarrative of a subject that guarantees their legitimacy."^[37] Inasmuch as philosophy is bound up in "grounding" and constituting these narratives, it is also implicated in the contemporary and oppressive practices of legitimation and power. These two grand narratives condition and shape our belief that truth and justice are necessarily related. On the contrary, like Foucault, Lyotard argues, "truth is of this world."^[38] Truth claims must always be understood in relation to political and social practices, not an abstract correspondence to the Real.

Lyotard defines the postmodern in terms of an "incredulity towards metanarratives." This collapse of belief in metanarratives contributes to "the crisis of metaphysical philosophy and of the university which in the past relied on it." Although he does not privilege writing, like Derrida, Lyotard equates the postmodern with that which seeks to "impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable." The postmodern philosopher's obligation is not to "supply reality" or represent humanity or the spirit, but to "invent allusions to the conceivable which cannot be presented." Truth is decoupled from the representation of the Real and instead is placed in the space of the aesthetic, the "sublime," the "event," of "working without rules in order to formulate the rules of what will have been done ."^[39]

The Limits of Postmodernist Discourse: The Subject of Knowledge

In many ways Foucault's work is radically different from that of Derrida, Rorty, and Lyotard. Foucault provides pointed and accurate critiques of some of the ideas of other postmodernists. His emphasis on power and domination and the ways these are conceptualized has been most productive and stimulating for the further development of discourses about justice. However in his treatment of the questions of self and subjectivity, he shares many of the inadequacies of other postmodernists. His inattention to gender relations and the weakness of his alternatives to biopower call for feminist and psychoanalytic critique and supplements.

As Foucault argues, the notion of an avant garde (intellectual) writer who can somehow escape the rules of the dominant "discursive formation" of his or her culture is a self-serving illusion. Through the "relentless theorization of writing,"^[40] the writer tries to hold on to the Enlightenment privilege of the "universal intellectual" who serves as the voice and representative of a general consciousness, free subject, or at least some transcendental "other" that escapes or is outside of the contingencies and power relations of our time. In granting a primordial status to writing, "we . . . in effect simply reinscribe in transcendental terms the theological affirmation of its sacred origin, or a critical belief in its creative nature."^[41]

Unlike Rorty, Foucault is not enamored of the self-understanding and practices of "postmodern bourgeois culture."^[42] For Foucault the

most important feature of contemporary culture is the process by which humans become "subjects" of knowledge. The "conversation" of this culture generates ever more subtle and extensive exercises of "biopower" and self-deception, rather than more interesting sentences about ourselves. He is also much more attentive than Rorty to the conflict and polyphony of Western culture. Instead of as a relatively benign set of "moves" among fairly equal and homogeneous "partners," Foucault conceptualizes contemporary Western culture as an ongoing struggle between heterogeneous elements that cannot be assimilated. "The history which bears and determines us has the form of war rather than language."^[43] There are dominant and marginal discourses, innumerable instances of the effects of power and local resistances to them. Foucault's view provides more space for the acknowledgment and analysis of relations of domination within "bourgeois" Western culture.

Like Lyotard and Rorty, Foucault conceptualizes knowledge as historical, contingent, and always generated by pragmatic questions oriented to action. Knowledge can be produced only within and is an effect of "discursive formations," which originate in historically specific, often random events. They are discontinuous both internally and across time. Internally, a discursive formation is often made up of heterogeneous activities. "What is found at the historical beginnings of things is not the inviolable identity of their origin, it is the dissention of other things, it is disparity."^[44] Across time these formations are incommensurable. They are not all (better, worse, or progressive) approximations to one "unsaid thing, or an unthought, floating about the world, interlacing with all its forms and events."^[45]

Unlike Rorty, Foucault stresses the role of conflict and violence within "our" practices; "we must conceive discourse as a violence that we do to things, or at all events, as a practice we impose upon them; it is in this practice that the events of discourse find the principle of their regularity."^[46] Discursive shifts do not occur as a result of the introduction of a better theory or the emergence of a great, creative mind. They are an effect of changes in the unceasing struggles for power that are a constitutive element of history Discursive shifts occur when violence is inflicted on violence, and "the resurgence of new forces . . . [is] sufficiently strong to dominate those in power."^[47]

A discourse is a system of possibilities for knowledge. Discursive formations are made up in part of sets of usually tacit rules that en-

able us to identify some statements as true or false, to construct a map, model, or classificatory system in which these statements can be organized, and to name certain "individuals" as authors. The rules provide the necessary precondition for the formation of statements. The place, function, and character of the knowers, authors, and audiences of a discourse are also functions of discursive rules. All discursive formations simultaneously enable us to do certain things and confine us within a necessarily delimited system. "Truth" is simply an effect of the rules of discourse. Because there are no non-discourse-generated rules, there is no external standpoint from which we can claim to judge the truth, falsity, or "adequacy" of a discourse in its entirety. The relationship between words and things is always partial and rooted in discursive rules and commitments that cannot themselves be rationally justified. These tacit rules are usually exposed only when an object of discourse is modified or transformed.

The foundations of a discourse can be located only in power; "all knowledge rests upon injustice."^[48] The "will to knowledge" cannot be separated from the will to power even though, as presently constituted in our culture, "the fact of power [is] invariably excluded from knowledge." Contemporary culture effects this exclusion of the fact of power in part by masking power and our subjection to it in the discourse of "humanism." Through this discourse Western man is told, "even though you don't exercise power, you can still be a ruler. Better yet, the more you deny yourself the exercise of power, the more you submit to those in power, then the more this increases your sovereignty."^[49]

Like other postmodernists Foucault intends to weaken the hold of "the theory of the subject" and to destroy concepts of the subject as "pseudosovereign." To effect this deconstruction he adopts a strategy with at least two key moves. The first is to destroy any essentialist claims regarding "human nature" by demonstrating the historical origins and contingency of all such notions. Like Rorty and Derrida, Foucault denies that there is really anything "deep inside" us that is not a product of the practice and discourses in which we literally and figuratively find our "selves." The second move is to locate the constitution of the contemporary Western subject and our apparent experiences of subjectivity within two sorts of practices: disciplinary and confessional. These practices are important elements within the dominant form of power (biopower) in contemporary Western societies.

They are also connected to and effects of certain kinds of knowledge that emerge over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe—the human sciences.

Foucault studies the triangle of power, right, and truth. He questions the "how" of power. What rules of right are implemented by relations of power in the production of discourses of truth? In our culture we must produce the truth; there can be no exercise of power except through the production of truth. These "truths" reflect the "facts of human nature" as revealed by biological and human sciences. These discourses tell us what it is to be human. They "normalize" the "individual" who is constituted and named by these discourses. The individual that power has constituted becomes the vehicle of that power. Power cannot be understood in terms of repression or domination. It is a "productive" force. It does not "only weigh upon us as a force that says no but traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse."^[50]

The "individual" comes to be first through disciplinary power. New forms of knowledge that permitted time and labor to be extracted from bodies with increasing regularity emerged in the eighteenth century. The human population's health, numbers, and condition are studied in order to increase these subjected forces. The more abstract knowledges that make such studies possible are developed and improve the force and efficacy of that subjection. The purpose of disciplinary power is to assure a cohesive public body. To make the heterogeneous elements of a population cohere, concepts and practices of "normalization" are produced. These practices are supported and exercised both by the state and by new bodies of knowledge, especially medicine and the human sciences. Under the humanistic rubric of the state's interest in and obligation to the creation and protection of the "well-being" of its inhabitants, global surveillance of its members is increasingly instituted. The state needs experts to amass the knowledge it requires and to execute the policies said to effect and maximize this well-being and protection. Instances of such knowledge and associated practices include medicine, education, public health, prisons, and schools.

Concepts of deviancy illness, maladjustment, and so forth are products of the same discourses that create the normal. These concepts also name the dangers the normal must be protected against. They justify the need both for new and better knowledge to control

the problems and for the exercise of power. This knowledge is simultaneously individual and global. It entails both the study of specific "traits" possessed by individuals that cause their deviations and the search for methods that can be applied to all such individuals to effect the disciplinary results desired in the population as a whole. "Prevention" of disease or crime requires the at least potential extension of these knowledges and practices to everyone. The state's interest is in ensuring regularity of behavior, not only in punishing crimes after the fact. The more peaceful (e.g., controlled) the population, the more the state's power is legitimated and assured. Failure of disciplinary practices becomes the basis for "experts" to ask for more resources and power to pursue and exercise their knowledge in the name of the public good. A new form of power, "biopower," begins to emerge. Biopower is distinguished from other forms of power by the concrete and precise character of its knowledge of human bodies. Biopower is based in and effects a "real and effective 'incorporation' of power. It circulates through and roots itself in the concrete lives of individuals and populations through multiple and variegated means."^[51]

In addition to the processes of normalization and discipline, the individual subject is also created through confessional practices. The primary exemplars of these practices are psychoanalysis and psychiatry. These discourses produce sexuality as a dangerous force within us that can be controlled only by the person exercising surveillance upon her- or himself. Such surveillance is said to lead to both "self-knowledge" and freedom from the effects of these forces. However, in order to attain such self-knowledge and self-control, the individual must consult an expert whose knowledge provides privileged access to this dangerous aspect of the person's "self."

These discourses create the idea that there is something "deep inside" us, something bodily but at least partially knowable by consciousness, a source of both pleasure and danger. By transforming pleasure into "sexuality," these confessional discourses/practices in turn give rise to further practices/knowledges of self-control and self-knowledge. They teach us we have an individual "self" about which knowledge is possible. This self is seen and experienced as deep and foundational. However such experience is not "true" in some ontological or essentialist sense. It is merely an effect of a subjectivity constituted in and through certain discourses, especially Freudian psy-

choanalysis. In other discourses no such notions and hence experience exist.

What is the point of Foucault's painstaking "genealogies" of power? He tells us that the will to know and the will to power cannot be separated. Presumably his own researches are motivated, at least to some degree, by desires or interests that may not be evident in the content of these studies themselves. Foucault's work does have an ethical or "positive" intention—one bound up with freedom. Foucault hopes at least to facilitate better outcomes in the ongoing if submerged struggles between heterogeneous and localized "subjected knowledge/practices" and the forces of biopower. However Foucault's notion of freedom or the possible locus of opposition shares many of the weaknesses of that of Derrida and Lyotard. It has an aesthetic or even romantic cast that by its nature excludes important social relations from further consideration. He counterposes an older Greek idea of "the bios as a material for an aesthetic piece of art" to the modern notion of a techne of the self. The ethics of this older techne are aesthetic; they are bound up with the effort to "make everyone's life become a work of art." Foucault argues. "from the idea that the self is not given up to us, I think there is only one practical consequence: we have to create ourselves as a work of art."^[52] Freedom, ethics, and "selfhood" would be situated in the individual's creative activity, as she or he ceaselessly creates and recreates the "self." New forms of knowledge would be generated by the practices of making one's self and life into a beautiful object.

Significant Absences: Gender and Subjectivity in Postmodernist Discourses

Like many feminists and psychoanalysts I believe postmodernists make important contributions to undermining the faulty ideas about self, knowledge, and power still prevalent in the contemporary West. However there are also many important tensions and gaps between feminist and psychoanalytic discourses and those of postmodernism. First and most obviously, extended discussion of gender relations as essential to and constitutive of contemporary Western culture is absent. Postmodernism itself suggests that we ought to query the rela-

tionship between acts of exclusion and the founding and apparent coherence of any discourse. The absence of any serious consideration of feminist discourses or of gender relations profoundly affects the texture of postmodernist works. None of the metaphors for the postmodern (writing, the sublime, conversation, or aesthetic practices) seems congruent with the concerns of feminist discourses or practices. It is questionable whether any of the spaces opened up by postmodernism would be comfortable to or inhabitable by those concerned with issues of gender and gender justice.

Second, the postmodernist narratives about subjectivity are inadequate. As postmodernists construct subjectivity, only two alternatives appear: a "false" unitary and essentialist self or an equally nondifferentiated but totally historically or textually constituted "true" one. The nature of this dichotomy itself is partially determined by the absence of any systematic consideration of gender or gender relations. Within postmodernist discourses there is no attempt to incorporate or do justice to the specificity of women's experiences or desires as discussed by women ourselves. Women's experiences of subjectivity suggest there are alternatives to the two presented within postmodernist discourses.

From a psychoanalytic viewpoint postmodernist discourses on subjectivity are naive and self-deceptive. Postmodernists seem unaware of the possible differences between a core self and a unitary one. Although claiming to see the self and concepts of it as socially and historically constituted, postmodernists do not adequately consider some of the most important social relations in self-formation (e.g., early mother-child relations, the sexual division of labor in child rearing). Paradoxically, although appearing to critique and reject any form of "deep" or nonsocial subjectivity, certain elements of each writer's theory in fact presuppose it. The capacity for aesthetic or mystical experience (Lyotard, Derrida, Foucault), the ability to utter new and interesting sentences (Rorty), and the will to resist totalizing discourses (Foucault) all require a "deep" subjectivity.

Gender: Its Absence and Effects in and on Postmodernist Spaces

Postmodernist discourses, or even commentaries about them, notably lack any serious discussion of feminist theories, even when these

theories overlap with, supplement, or support postmodernist writers' ideas. Rorty's work, for example, contains no references to the feminist critiques of philosophy or to the feminist discussions of science and philosophies of science that parallel and would enhance his own. The exclusion of any consideration of gender relations has political and intellectual consequences for Rorty's work. It contributes to his sense of smugness about and mystification of "our" postmodernist bourgeois culture. The identity of this our is never clear. Rorty never specifies whose practices and experiences, said to be constitutive of this culture, are included within its parameters. The problem of inequality is excluded from Rorty's pragmatism. Feminists and those concerned about relations of domination such as racism must be concerned with the possibility that incommensurable and unequal forms of life exist in any apparently singular culture. Rorty does mention that our culture includes many different communities. However he never systematically explores the possibility that some of these communities are enmeshed in systematic and pervasive relations of domination. Despite his emphasis on the historically specific and pragmatic basis of all thought, he fails to acknowledge that in one culture the experiences of some persons or groups may be radically different from those of another. In such situations a problem is how to develop a capacity to engage in empathic translation rather than "conversation." It is misleading and dangerous to assume that everyone is engaged in more or less the same "language game." It is not evident how either systematic biases or constraints within a culture may be acknowledged within, much less resolved by, conversation.^[53]

Despite Rorty's emphasis on the social and historical constitution of practices and of individuals through these practices, his conversation "partners" have a strangely abstract quality. He does not question what sorts of conversation could exist among fundamentally unequal partners. His partners are never marked by asymmetric social relations. Such relations do not affect and constrain the kinds of moves people make or the kinds of conversation they may imagine, welcome, and sustain. The problems Foucault raises about marginalized and subjected discourses or the critique of consensus that Lyotard offers are ignored. A more feminist sensitivity to gender-based asymmetries would disrupt this form of happy unconsciousness.

Foucault mentions women as one of the subjected or marginalized and resisting elements within contemporary culture. He stresses the

need to pay attention to the minute, local, and differentiated forms of events and power that are said to constitute "history." However he does not consider the feminist claim that in important ways the histories of men and women are themselves differentiated and heterogeneous. Foucault's histories seem totally uninformed by any awareness of feminist narratives of his major subjects (e.g., sexuality and biopower). Systematic consideration of gender relations would profoundly affect his genealogies of sexuality, subjectivity, power, and knowledge.^[54] Many of his historical claims appear problematic when juxtaposed against feminist narratives. For example, his notion of biopower as a uniquely modern form of power runs contrary to many feminist accounts of history. According to these accounts, women's bodies have always, although in many different ways, been "colonized" by the intersection of knowledge and power.^[55] Struggles around conceptualization and control of women's bodies have been a predominant but historically variable feature in all cultures. Perhaps what distinguishes modern culture is not the introduction of biopower per se, but rather the extensions of this power (in old and new forms) to different groups of men as well as women.

The absence of any systematic consideration of gender is especially puzzling because Foucault claims to be writing "histories of the present" that will in some way be useful to marginalized groups. From a feminist perspective no compelling history of the present could ignore the centrality of relations of gender and the struggles about them that reemerged in full force in the late 1960s.

Derrida's treatment of gender is also problematic. He claims one of the asymmetric and false dichotomies produced by the violence of metaphysics is that of man/woman. A deconstructive reading of this discourse would first reverse the asymmetry of the pair. Writing should effect a transvaluation of values. The qualities attributed to or associated with "woman" should be rescued from the ordinary phallocentric concept of them (e.g., the body would be exalted over the mind, feeling over thought, the preoedipal over the oedipal, the mother over the father, pleasure over work and production, the non-cultural [other] over culture, style over truth). In these reversals one would begin to "read like a woman." "Woman" operates "outside" and disrupts the metaphysics, logic, and concepts of phallocentric culture. "Out of the depths, endless and unfathomable, she engulfs and distorts all vestige of essentiality, of identity, or property. And the

philosophical discourses blinded, founders on these shoals and is hurled down these depthless depths to its ruin."^[56]

Reversal, of course, is not sufficient. A "positive" deconstruction of the man/woman pair must also be effected. Woman (and man) and sexual difference itself must be disconnected from any historical, specific, or biological referent. Woman must be deessentialized and set to play among other equally nonnecessary, nondetermined, and nonreferential signs. "There is no such thing as a woman, as a truth in itself of woman in itself." There is also "no truth in itself of the sexual difference in itself."^[57]

As sign, woman has the following effects and affects in addition to her generally disruptive character: She is that which will not be pinned down by truth. She is "skepticism, dissimulation, and swirl of veils."^[58] She is "too clever to believe in castration or anti-castration" (its exact opposite). Thus woman wants nothing to do with feminism, for "feminism too seeks to castrate. It wants a castrated woman, gone with style." Unlike the "masculine dogmatic philosopher," woman renounces any claim to "truth, science and objectivity." She is beyond metaphysics. Her "affirmative" and dionysian power is that "she plays at dissimulation, at ornamentation, deceit, artifice, at an artist's philosophy." By affirming the beyond of metaphysics, the "question of woman suspends the decidable opposition of true and nontrue. . . . Whereupon the question of style is immediately unloosed as a question of writing."^[59] Beyond metaphysics woman turns out to be identical or interchangeable with writing, the other, being, the supplement, the trace.

Derrida's deconstruction of woman may seem compatible with aspects of feminist discourse. His move away from biological, essentialist, or nonhistorical concepts of gender appears congruent with the intent of many feminists. Yet his writings make me profoundly uneasy. Derrida's own concepts of woman/gender have a transcendental quality. He poses a constricted set of choices in which woman always ends up signifying "sexual difference," despite his claims to set her free. Derrida asserts that most concepts of woman are essentialist and wrong. The only alternative is concepts of woman that have no referent to any historical, specific beings constituted by and through differentiated sets of social experience. Woman as writing/other/style is "outside" all concrete history and bodily experience or determination. This set of choices excludes the possibility of considering differ-

ences as arising out of nontextual and historical as well as race and class differentiated experiences. The specificity of being woman in locatable and discrete cultures is lost. The lack of a historical and social consideration of woman also leads to an obscuring of her constitution in relations of domination that have not ceased to exist whether or not she "affirms" artifice and style.

Women in modern Western culture occupy "a specific liminal cultural position which is through a tangled skein of mediations somehow connected to their anatomical difference, to their femaleness." Derrida's elimination from consideration of concrete, historical female differences in time forecloses exploration of a space that has only begun to be explored: "the pitch black continent of what patriarchal culture has consistently connoted as feminine and hence depreciated." Even if cultural criticism has such power, it is too soon to tear down the "ghetto where the feminine has been confined and demeaned, we need to map its boundaries and excavate its foundations in order to salvage the usable relics and refuse of patriarchy, for to do so is perhaps the only chance we have to construct a post-deconstructionist society which will not simply reduplicate our own."^[60]

There is another problem with Derrida's approach. It seems to replicate woman's place as the undifferentiated other to man rather than to conceptualize both man and woman as constituted by and existing within historically discrete systems of gender relations. There is no internal deconstruction of the concept "woman" so that the many differences among women could be spoken. Instead woman is confounded with so many other complex categories (writing, style, being, other) that such deconstruction becomes even more difficult.

Consideration of "man's" fantasies about women or the effects on him of defining himself in relation to the other/woman is also lacking. Despite the rhetoric of "reading like a woman" or displacing "phallocentrism," postmodernists are unaware of the deeply gendered nature of their own recounting and interpretations of the Western story and the strategies they oppose to its master narratives. Postmodernists still honor Man as the sole author and principal character in these stories, even if this Man is dying, his time running out. They retell the contemporary history of the West in and through the stories of the three deaths—of Man, (his) History, and (his) metaphysics. Whatever women have done with and in all this (becoming past) time is

"outside" by definition and according to the conventions of (their) story/line.

Postmodernists do not question whether woman "is" the "excess," the "margin," or the "supplement" only by virtue of and as an effect of (still) being placed within phallocentric discourse and culture. This "effect" is not produced by and is not a consequence of the structure of "language" (or its "binary" logic) or the inescapability of "intertextuality." It is produced by the logic and dynamics of contemporary gender systems and identities, including the repression and denial of women's acts of agency and mastery, even by the writers of postmodern "texts." One of the grounds of possibility for and consequences of phallocentrism is the repression and denial of such acts.

However, rather than "deconstruct" such acts of repression, Derrida builds a theory out of and on top of them. If he really wanted to effect a reversal of or to deessentialize the pair man/woman, he could assign to "man" the characteristics stereotypically associated with "woman": style, artifice, and so forth. However, as in the similar case of Lacan, the coherence and plausibility of Derrida's discourses depend on the congruence of the qualities he assigns to woman and the pervasive social meanings associated with her.

Stripped of its word play, its opaque, narcissistic rhetoric, Derrida's writings echo phallocentric metaphysics. Minds and bodies are two completely distinct entities. Those who engage in rational thought are inscribed on the side of masculinity and culture. Yet one can become woman without having a female body. Through writing some may elude the phallocentrism that imprisons the others. Woman's "style" is dangerous to culture because it has been outside it. Woman/writing/the other is thus the unthinkable, mystical, dionysian force outside or beyond time. She is the Real, the disorder men have sought to both subdue and possess in the course of constructing rationality, truth, and culture.

In fact there is nothing new or "postmodern" in such claims. Similar themes have recurred in Western philosophy, for example, in the work of Plato or Rousseau.^[61] What is still "absent" (forbidden) is the in-corporation of "woman" qua embodied, desiring, and concrete and differentiated being(s) within culture, language, ruling, or thinking on our own terms and not as man's "other," "Object of desire," or linguistic construct. The "postmodernist" woman is in the same position as

Emile's Sophie. Sophie is good because she is outside politics and her "goodness" (outside) is necessary to the preservation of culture and man's selfhood.^[62] The major difference I can see between Rousseau's position and that of Derrida is he wants to identify, read like, become, or (at least) openly envies woman as he has defined her . He still does not want her to speak for herself or, as Irigaray points out, among her or ourselves without him.^[63]

Subjectivity: Feminist and Psychoanalytic Questions

The absence or disappearance of concrete women and gender relations suggests the possibility that postmodernism is not only or simply opposed to phallocentrism but may also be "its latest ruse."^[64] A closer consideration of the postmodernist critique of subjectivity and its possible defensive functions and purposes provides further support for this suspicion. The writings of Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault on subjectivity are contradictory. Although they denounce any essentialist or universalist notion of human nature, their work also incorporates a profoundly romantic/aesthetic dimension.

Both Lyotard and Derrida restore a form of transcendental subjectivity in and through its relation to the unrepresentable other. As in high modernism the writer (writing/text) reemerges as hero. Against the banalities of mass culture, he "wage[s] a war on totality [and] activate[s] the differences" that have their (nonoriginary) origin in the unpresentable other.^[65] Writing transgresses the limits of language and at least evokes something beyond or outside of contemporary cultural practices. A transcendental faculty must exist in order for the artist-writer to enter or be affected by the "scene of writing" or for anyone to have an experience of the sublime as defined by Lyotard or Derrida. This faculty cannot be merely a knitting together of the "same" conventional historical and social practices in and through which "the beyond" is said to be produced, or it could not go "beyond" the given. Shifting the metaphor from the individual artist-author to "writing" or the "sublime" cannot successfully conceal the congruence of this view with the "high culture" modernist view of the work of art and the artist. In this view "true" art signifies and refers only to itself; yet at the same time it and the artist can represent a "higher" dimension of reality and being "outside the words of the tribe."^[66]

In Foucault's work the aesthetic is connected with subjectivity in

his idea of replacing the technologies of self with the ideal of making one's own life a work of art. Yet paradoxically, despite his criticism of Derrida's mystification of writing, Foucault does not ask himself the question "What forms of life make such a notion possible?" about his own aesthetic ideal. Such a constant remaking of the self presupposes a socially isolated and individualistic view of the self. It precludes the possibility of enduring attachments or responsibilities to another in which the other can rely on one's stability and "continuity of being."^[67] Indeed, despite Foucault's criticism of Sartre's "humanism," this aesthetic self seems to have some of the same empty, projective qualities of Sartre's monad, which is driven to throw off the "slime of history" in its constant search for freedom.^[68] I do not see how this highly individualistic and atomistic quest for the "beautiful life" could be reconciled with, for example, the care of children or with participation in a political community.^[69] It is deeply antithetical to feminist views of self in relation to others. And despite Foucault's critique of the notion of the "universal intellectual," it betrays a romantic hope that the beautiful can rescue us from the "totalizing discourses" of modern Western culture.

Despite their aesthetics these writers continue to deny that "deep" subjectivity exists. By deep subjectivity they mean any sort of experience that is not "put into" the person by the immediate practices and discourses of that person's culture. A person is just a "tissue" of these practices. There is nothing else there. Such a view obviously implies or entails a rejection of the ways psychoanalysts have conceived the unconscious, drives, innate constitution, primary process, and fantasy. This is particularly evident in Rorty's work. He dismisses Freud's view of the unconscious as a "dark cauldron" and rejects Freud's concept of the mind as structured by intrinsic and necessary conflicts between and within its three parts (ego, id, and superego).^[70] Instead we should read Freud as populating "innerspace . . . with analogues of persons—internally coherent clusters of belief and desire." The mind is not a dynamic and often conflictual interplay of somatic drive, ego, and superego forces. Rather it is a "conversation" among three partners. These "persons" all have interesting "stories" to tell about our experiences. There is no fundamental disjuncture between primary and secondary process. Instead the unconscious is defined as a "rational unconscious—one that can no more tolerate inconsistency than can consciousness."^[71]

Thus no part of ourself is fundamentally strange, alien, inaccessible to or through discourse. Yet, as in Rorty's other discussions of "conversation," these "partners" have a strangely abstract and harmonious quality. They are pieces of a "self" that in its parts and thus as a whole arises out of nowhere and exists in no relation(s) to others, to desire, or to the body. These partners were evidently never children who had parents toward whom they felt complex feelings of love and hate. Freud's ideas of the ego as constituted in part by the precipitates of its object relations and of the often intra- and interpersonal conflicts between the multiple desires of a self and its "others" have simply disappeared.

Postmodernists have made important contributions to deconstructing the (apparently) universalizing forms of conceptions of the self. Postmodernists join feminist theorists in viewing these concepts as artifacts of (white, male) Western culture. However the postmodernist critique of subjectivity differs in important ways from both psychoanalytic and feminist views. Postmodernists seem to confuse two different and logically distinct concepts of the self: a "unitary" and a "core" one. All possible forms of self are confounded with the unitary, mentalist, deeroticized, masterful, and oppositional selves they rightfully criticize. It has been important to point out that these forms of self overlap and are congruent with definitions of "masculinity" that have recurred throughout Western culture. It is also true that in many ways Freud's own work reinforced and revalidated in scientistic disguise these traditional, Western conceptions of self and masculinity. As the founder of the discursive practice of psychoanalysis, Freud of course deeply affected the work of subsequent analysts. Hence in rethinking the question of subjectivity we would be foolish not to interrogate and regard with skepticism psychoanalytic discourses on this issue. Nonetheless postmodernists' critiques of subjectivity remain incomplete and simplistic. These critiques do not provide persuasive grounds for abandoning all possible discourses concerning subjectivity.

I work with people suffering from "borderline syndrome." In this illness the self is in painful and disabling fragments.^[72] Borderline patients lack a core self without which the registering of and pleasure in a variety of experiencing of ourselves, others, and the outer world are simply not possible. Those who celebrate or call for a "decentered" self seem self-deceptively naive and unaware of the basic cohesion

within themselves that makes the fragmentation of experiences something other than a terrifying slide into psychosis. These writers seem to confirm the very claims of those they have contempt for, that a sense of continuity or "going on being" is so much a part of the core self that it becomes a taken-for-granted background. Persons who have a core self find the experiences of those who lack or have lacked it almost unimaginable.

Borderline patients' experiences vividly demonstrate the need for a core self and the damage done by its absence. Only when a core self begins to cohere can one enter into or use the transitional space in which the differences and boundaries between self and other, inner and outer, and reality and illusion are bracketed or elided. Postmodernist texts themselves belong in and use this space. It is grandiose and misleading to claim that no other space exists or that this one alone is sufficient.

Many feminists (including myself) are skeptical of the motives of those who would deny the existence of subjectivity or an "outer" reality constituted in part by nontextual relations of domination. Given the particular forms of self and repression (political and psychodynamic) that women in Western culture are likely to experience, feminist theorists have a special interest in constructing concepts of self that do justice to the full complexity of subjectivity and the spaces in which it is likely to find itself. It is possible and more desirable to construct such concepts of subjectivity than to "repress our intuitions of it" or abandon the subject altogether.^[73]

It is possible to construct views of self in which it does not experience difference as irreconcilable or the existence of others as an a priori threat to getting what it wants. Thus it does not fall into the sense of alienation and permanent estrangement that Lacan attributes to a "decentered" or nonunitary self. Unlike the postmodernists' vision such a self would also feel no need to forswear the use of logic, rational thought, or objectivity, although it may play with them. Neither would it lose itself and imagine the I to be merely the effect of thinking or language rather than also its cause. It would also know itself to be social, to be dependent for its existence on others. Yet at the same time it could experience itself as possessing an internal world that is never exactly like any other. It appreciates the fact that others also possess such a world. It could acknowledge the desire of its sexual aspect and the autonomy of desire and its objects. It would

tolerate or even enjoy the tragedy and comedy of desire: the frequent failure of objects and even our own desire to conform to our wishes or "rational" plans, the strangeness and otherness of that desiring aspect and of that aspect in others.

To glimpse such a self is also to confront a paradox: It cannot fully exist within contemporary culture. The forces of repression here are not only within the individual, metaphysics, metanarrative, or discursive formations, but in social relations as well. These social forces are too powerful, too fragmented, and too pervasive for any individual or individual analysis to comprehend or overcome. The existence of asymmetric gender relations and the asymmetries of race encourage and reinforce the splitting off and disavowal of parts of the self. Homophobia is used to enforce repression of aspects of desire, sexuality and relations with others. These forces enter into and help structure our inner" world. Hence consideration of this multiple self, its absence, repression, and mutilation, pushes us "outside" to take up existence as agents who can aggressively confront civilization and its discontents.

Postmodernists intend to persuade us that we should be suspicious of any notion of self or subjectivity. Any such notion may be bound up with and support dangerous and oppressive "humanist" myths. However, I am deeply suspicious of the motives of those who would counsel such a position at the same time as women have just begin to re-member their selves and to claim an agentic subjectivity available always before only to a few privileged white men. It is possible that unconsciously, rather than share such a (revised) subjectivity with the "others," the privileged would reassure us that it was "really" oppressive to them all along. As (more or less) well-trained women, we may still be too willing to abandon our own agency and ambitions. Our choice is not limited to either a "masculine," overly differentiated, and unitary self or no self at all. We should be suspicious of those who would revise history (and hence our collective memory) to construct such flawed alternatives. By retrieving or reconstructing repressed aspects of the self together—our anger, our connections with, attractions to, and fear of other women, our self-hate—women in feminism's "second wave" have begun to re-member memory—as differentiated yet collective experience (history). This "new" memory provided many women with a powerful impulse toward action (politics) and the need for more just social relations. In a

respectful evaluation of these experiences, we may find alternatives to and ways to incorporate the postmodernist metaphors and spaces of writing, aesthetics, and conversation. Without an emphasis on justice, however, these postmodernist spaces threaten to become another "iron cage."

Experiences in therapy as well as in feminist consciousness raising suggest that, without access to many aspects of the self, memory in its fullness cannot emerge. Without a location and participation in collective memory and its retelling or reconstruction, a sense of "we" cannot emerge or be sustained—a we of which each I is a part and to which each I is responsible. Without a sense of an I among we's, politics as (distributive) justice is not possible.^[74] Postmodernists have not offered adequate concepts of or spaces for the practice of justice. What memories or history will our daughters have if we do not find ways to speak of and practice it? Without re-membered selves how can we act? Such questions may be foreclosed within existing postmodernist discourses, but many feminists insist upon reopening them. We cannot risk such repression (again).