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]