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By the same author.
An Introductory Guide to
The PoliUcs of MulUrociol EducoUon (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986)
POST-STRUCTURALISM
Education and the Ideologies
of Racism (Trentham Books, 1991)
AND
=======:::J
CI
':'. j.
Jacques Lacan (Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992)
PO S T MOD ERN I S
,"" -
Second edition
Madan Sarup
_I -
'-""-
M""'i
HARVESTER WHEATSHEAF
New York London Toronto Sydney Tokyo Singapore
REVIZE
First published 1993 by Harvester Wheatsheaf Campus 400, Maylands Avenue Hemel Hempstead Hertfordshire, HP2 7EZ A division of Simon & Schuster International Group
For Sica in reparation
2001
© 1988, 1993 Madan Sarup All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or othenvise, without prior permission, in writing, from the publisher. Typeset in 1O/12pt Ehrhardt
by Hands Fotoset, Leicester Printed and bound in Great Britain by BiddIes Ltd, Guildford and King's Lynn British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 0-7450-1360-0 -1-
tlA/ M V'IL:::>,'T
5
96 95)
-
Self-consciousness would not be possible without an organic lack. Alack ('1 feel hungry') makes us aware of ourselves as a being that needs something. Hegel continues that for a desire to develop in us we need to focuS on a specific object. When we desire not a thing but another's 'desire we become human. Moreover, desire is mobile, not static; a desire can be continually negated, but it continues.
16
--tacaiiIms,
17
Hegel and Lacan
As what La£"_I)I11eansbydesireis.drawnJromHegel,I"'"-I)ttor~tell in ffiissection Hegel'~_l!l~.taphoIicstoryo/:theMasterand.the Slilyebefore I try to ejg;;idat~: theLacanian concepts of need; demand-and desire. 22 -whatf~llows may seem a digression, but this 'detour' through Hegel is necessary because the Master/Slave theme, in both Marxist and Nietzschean versions, constantly reappears in contemporary social thought. Hegel remarks that we all know that the person who attentively-, contemplates a thing is 'absorbed' by this thing and forgets himself. He may perhaps talk about the thing but he will never talk about himself; in his discourse the word 'I' will not occur. . For this word to appear, something other than purely passive I contemplation must be: present. And this other thing is, according to Hegel, Desire. Indeed, when man experiences a desire, when he is \1, hungry, for example, and becomes aware of it he necessarily becomes aware of himself. Desire is always revealed to the individual as his desire, and to express desire he must use the word '1'.23 ...j Desire dis-quiets him and moves him to action. Action tends to satisfY ' desire but can do so only by the 'negation', the destruction or at least the transformation of the desired object: to satisfY hunger, for example, the '.food must be destroyed or in any case transformed. Thus, all action is '~e""ting'. The being that eats creates and preserves its own reality by overc'iJming a reality other than its own, by the 'transformation' of an alien reality into its own reality, by the 'assimilation', the 'internalization', of an 'external' reality. Generally speaking, the'!, of Desire is an ~mptiness that receives a ;~-;;(p,;sitive contelltby a negating action that siitis6es in rlestroying-,--transforrni;;g and assimilatingihed~-;;rred
I
DOii.::r: Desire .. .._--- -- .. , . . / .. "'lre5Tie, being the re~ei~tf~n~\~fc~~ emptiness,
..
the presence of an-1 absence, is something essentially different from the desired thing.
18
Post-structuralism mId postmodemism
Desire is directed towards another Desire, another greedy emptiness, another'!,. Desire is human only if one desires not the body but the Desire of the other; that is to say, if one wants to be 'desired' 'Of, .rather, l 'recognized' in one's human value. AlrDesire....is~desite Jor a value. To l{desire the Desire of another is really to_C!~4:~,..:~.r.~cognitio_n'.
Master mId Slave
,--
\ If there is a multiplicity of desires seeking universal recognition, it is obvious that the action that is born of these desires can - at least in the beginning- be nothing but a life-and-death fight It is assumed that the fight ends in such a way that both adversaries remain alive. Now, if this is to OCCUT, one must suppose that one of the adversaries, preferring to live rather than die, gives in to the other and submits to him, recognizing him as the Master without being recognized by him. The Master, unable to recognize the other who recognizes him, finds himself in an impasse.
The Master makes the Slave work in order to satisfY his own desires. To satisfY the desires of the Master, the Slave has to repress his own instincts (for example, in the preparation of food that he will not eat), to negate or 'overcome' himself!· The Slave transcends himself by working, that is, he educates himself. In his work he transfonns things and transfonns himself at the same time. In becoming master of Nature by work, the Slave frees himself from Nature, from his own nature, and from the Master. It is because work is an auto-creative act that it can raise him from slavery to freedom. The future and history hence belong not to the warlike Master, but to the working Slave. The Slave changes himself by changing the world. To summarize, according to Hegel it is a fightto the death for the sake of recognition that leads to a relation between a free man and a man who is enslaved to him. Hence man is necessarily either Master or Slave. But the difference between Master and Slave can be overcome in the course of time. Mastery and Slavery, then, are not given or innate characteristics. Man is not born slave or free but creates himself as one
or the other through free or voluntary action. In short, the character of the Master/Slave opposition is the motive principle of the historical process. All of history is nothing but the progressive negation of Slavery by the Slave. Finally, the thesis of Mastery and the antithesis of Slavery are dialectically 'overcome'.
Laca1l a1ld psychoanalysis
19
Identity a1ld 1Iegativity Thanks to identity every being remains the same being, eter~ally identical to itself and different from the othe~s. ~ut tI;anks. to ?egatIVIty .•..... identical being can negate or overcome Its ldenllty With Itself and :come other than it is, even its owa op?osite. I~en~ty and negativity do . ·t exist in an isolated state. Just hke totahty Itself they are only ~ . s complementary aspects of o?e and the:ame re.al bemg.. . . The thesis describes the gIVen matenal to which the acllon IS gomg to . be applied, the antithesis reveals this action itself as well as the thought -\vhich animates it ('the project'), while the synthesis shows the result of that action, that is, the completed and objectively real product. The new 'p'roduct is also given and can provoke other negating actions. Human
beings are always negating the given. Negativity is the ne.gation of ideatity. Human beings are truly free or really human only m and by effective negation of the given real. Negativity, then, is nothing other than human freedom. The freedom which is realized and manifested as dialectical or negating action is thereby essentially a creation. What is involved is not replacing one given by another given, but overcoming the given in favour of what does not (yet) exist. In short, man is neither ideatity nor negativity alone but totality or synthesis; that is, he -- ( 'overcomes' himself while preserving and sublimating himself. .... In my view this dis!,ussion has a direct bearing on education. All education implies a long series of auto-negations effected by the child. As Kojeve remarks, it is only because of these auto-negations ('repressions') that every 'educated' child is not only a trained animal (which is 'identical' to itself and in itself) but a truly human or 'complex' beingi although in most cases, he is human only to a very small eX1ent, since 'education' (that is, auto-negations), 26 generally stops too soon.
Particularity and universality .Particularity refers to the individual agent. Every man, to the extent that he is human, would like - on the one hand - to be different from all others. But on the other hand he would like to be recognized, in his Ilnique particularity itself, as a positive value; and he would like this recognition to be shown by as many people as possible. Universality refers to the social aspect of man's existence. It is only in and by the
20
Lacal! altd psychoaltalysis
Post-structuralism altd pastmodernism
universal recognition of human particularity that individuality realizes and manifests itself. Individuality is a synthesis of the particular and the universal, the universal being the negation or the antithesis of the particular, which is . the thetical given, identical to itself. In other words, individuality is a totality and the being which is individual is, by the very fac~ dialectical. Man is and exists only to the extent that he overcomes himself dialectically (Le. while preserving and sublimating himself). The opposition of particularity and universality is fundamental for Hegel. In his view history will develop by the formation of a society, of a state, in which the strictiy particular, personal, individual value of each is recognized as such, in its very particularity, by all. The synthesis of particularity and universality is possible only after the 'overcoming' of the opposition between the Master and the Slave, since the synthesis of the particular and the universal is also the synthesis of Mastery and Slavery.27
21
People can continually be making a demand but they need not to be )~\'COIISciolIS of it. A demand is the means of revealing desire, but it is olJlj<Jllle. Desire is desire for the Other but it has to be interpreted. Lacan says need is cancelled by demand which re-emerges on the other sid~ofdesire. We often want an object that could be given only to liS, but 'l!1.ere is no such object. A demand is for a response, but that response is A child cries. The mother gives a bar ofchocolate; but the child can never know whether this action was performed for the satisfaction ofits need or as an act oflove. Lacan believes that such a response is inherently ambiguous. And because the response is ambiguous the demand is repeated, repeated . . . ad illfi1litum. Need, demand, desire - how are these three categories interconnected? A child cries. It can use physical hunger as a vehicle for a communication. Sometlmes the food satisfies a physical need but it can also become synabolically freighted. There can be a split between need and desire. In an account of anorexia Lacan states how a young woman is given food but wants love. The meaning of demand is not intrinsic but is partly determined by the response by the other to the demand. Though our demand is specific we can never be certain of other people's ~esponses to ourselves. After all, how do you give love?
lI1this section I will retell Lacan's story and will focus specifically on the s,ense ofloss or lack that the subject undergoes. You ,vill have noticed tlIatLacan's theory of the subject reads like a classic narrative; it begins With birth and then moves in tum through the territorialization of the ~~dy, the mirror stage, access to language and the Oedipus complex. .~~ch of the stages of this' narrative is conceived in terms of some kind of .~;lf-Ioss or lack. , ••.. L.can situates the first11l~s in the history of the subject at the moment'! • o[birth. To be more precise, he dates it from the moment of sexual gifferentiation within the womb; but it is not realized until the .s~paration of the child from the mother at birth. This lack is sexual in ~.efinition and has to do ,vith the impossibility of being physiologically both male and female. TJ!e.comes the third term and we enter the symbolic order by accepting his name and iiiterdictioj1s:-111--ilie'sY;;;b~lic' there is no longer a' one-to-on~' correSIJondellce between things and what they are called - a symbol ao open-ended system of meaning. SJ:Ill..lo.!i~..signification is n,.g!.n.arcissistic. IUs the Oedipa]crisis-whichmarks the child's '~~~:~iint;'i:he'-wodd' of the sylnbolic. TheJ"lYS, of language anel .' to,d\vell.\vithin the child ashe accepts the father's name . .~]ie:Jithll;r;s 'no'.-
I
l
~~~~~~~th~a~t~L~a~c~an~£u~n~d~e~rs~t~an~d~s~th~e~o~e~d~iP~U~~sstOryin terrnsof no i;lidrtliiirig"s'i:h:e jnte'1,reted experience is
"mediated
";·~~~~~:~~;~~~~~~~}~~~~·;';II~ibf:·~Jli:~~· ~!d~~~~al~;;~i~;!;f}t~
,'j
create
between libidinal analysis and the linguistic categories, to pll",u.e, in other words, a transcoding scheme which allows us to speak OUlll\',"Ulln a common conceptual framework. The Oedipus complex
is;tr'llSIiterated by Lacan into a linguistic phenomenon which he d~sigrlat'" as the discovery by the subject of the Name-of-the-Father.
feels that the apprenticeship oflanguage is an alienation for the ] but he realizes that it is impossible to return to an archaic, pre-
stage of the psyche itself.
Post-structuralism Gnd postmoderllis't11
Lacan alld psychoallalysis
I have underlined the point that Lacan places great emphasis on the linguistic development of the child. He argues that the acquisition of a name results in a thoroughgoing transformation of the position of the subject in his object world. There is a determination of the subject by language. The Freudian unconscious is seen in terms oflanguage: 'The unconscious is the discourse of the Other' - a notion that tends to
interestedmdeveloping theory iILth e.universitt.than l!!.~!i[lic.alp ractice. [On the other hand, it could be argued tha~though L~can fails to provid: . ase studies one way out of the problem IS to examme the work of hIS ~ollowers, for examp.1:.c.lIilrl.P~lc~().I~~s.ts..~uEh.~s !£"_'!Sois~'p,...Q!lp a~d MaIld..Mannoni.} As he believes that in analysis nothing should be ~ or predictable his sessions are sometimes only ten minutes long! keargues that psychoanalysis is not a psychology. Ifit was a psychology it"vould be like ethology (the study of animal behaviour); but the salient
26
surprise those who associate language with thinking and consciousness. Lacan's theory has attracted a good deal of interest among feminists because the emphasis on the production of gendered subjectivity via signification (the processes whereby meaning is produced at the same time as subjects are fabricated and positioned in social relations) implies that it is possible to escape the subordination of women inherent in Freud's recourse to biological difference. However, it could be argued that, in privileging the phallus as the sign of difference as opposed to the penis, Lacan's analysis is not any less deterministic than Freud's.30 This is because Lacan relies heavily on Levi-Strauss's structural analysis the incest taboo which, it is said, underlies all human societies. The use of Levi-Strauss's thesis means that the terms of the debate are fixed around the 'Law of the Father', Because Levi-Strauss's theory is a universalist one Lacan's account tends to collapse into an account of a universal subject who is not situated historically. The third order is the real. The reality which we can never know is the real- it lies beyond language ... the reality we must assume although can never know it. This is the most problematic of the three orders registers since it can never be experienced immediately, but only by \ of the mediation of the other two: 'the Real, or what is perceived as is what resists symbolization absolutely'. Fredric Jameson, ho·we',er. thinks that it is not terribly difficult to say what is meant by the real in Lacan: 'It is simply History itself.'31
I
27
difference is that we cannot predict human behaviour. Moreover] Lacan 1I~lds that only an analyst can authorize himself or herself as an analyst. B~t, surely, self-authorization leads to problems about standards? Is it
rih6ugh to be told that becoming an analyst is like becoming a poet, one ",hohns a new, intimate relationship ,vith language? Feminist criticisms of Lacan
B'ilean continues to be one of the most controversial figures within contemporary feminist theory. Many feminists use his work to challenge phallocentric knowledges; others are e>.tremely hostile to it, seeing it as elitist, male-dominated and itself as phallocentric. Three key areas of
La'can's work are of deep interest to feminists: the interlocking domains of,subjectivity, sexuality and language. His decentring of the rational, conscious subject (identified ,vith the ego), his undermining of common :clsumptions about the irltentionality or purposiveness of the speaking
sUpject's 'rational' discourses and his problematizations of the idea of a '~ntural' sexuality have helped to free feminist theory of the constraints of humanism. lilt seems that feminist relations to psychoanalysis fall into two broad
ca,tegories: those committed to Lacan's work, seeing it as a means of describing patriarchal power relations, and those who reject it from a p~e' or non-psychoanalytic position. In the first category can be
Some criticisms of Lacan To conclude the chapter, let me now tum to some criticisms of Lacan. It is often said that he intellectualizes everything and does not consider the emotions. He is highly critical, for example, of the Reichian approach [iwhich asserts that we can get to the emotions directly.32 For Lacan an
is a signifier; it means something but what it means is an Iquestion. ~J.ashis_'.v~g~lack clinical mat,,~~~it.isdifficult learn f!Q-~his.P!'Qcedugs._or to test tlieir validity. He seems to be - ._, ---, - ---I emotion
-------
----.-----~------
'
iricluded Juliet Mitchell, Ellie Ragland-Sullivan, Julia Kristeva, l\1onique Plaza and Catherine Clement. In the second category are Germaine Greer, Dale Spender and others.
,t:~here are, however, feminists who occupy neither category. Here can
b~included feminists who have an impressive familiarity with Lacan's
~ork while maintaining a critical distance from it: Jane Gallop, J~~queline Rose, Sara Kolinan, Luce Irigaray. ~(On behalf of Lacan it could be argued that, firstly, his work is a ,~,ccess~ry
counterbalance to the humanism so common in theories of
Post-structuralism and postmoderllism
Lacall alld psycbomzalysis
human subjectivity. Secondly, his sharp distance from ego-psychology and object-relations accounts of psychoanalysis makes Freud's work more useful to feminism. And, thirdly, his intermingling of languagelike processes with Freud's notion of sexuality and the unconscious have been useful to feminists in a wide variety of disciplines in which questions of subjectivity and desire are usually ignored. On the other hand, many feminists have criticized Lacan and he is
'" notfully und,,~stoo(Ithep~y£h.oal1alyticexplanationofpatriarchy.as.not. "s,mjlfjCIclations.between men and women, butthe.relation,both .have to,
28
often censured for his conception of woman as lack, as other, as
castrated. Secondly, Lacan is accused of privileging masculinity and participating in, and perhaps developing, Freud's phallocentrism. A fierce critic of Lacan, Luce lrigaray, has suggested that what Lacan's
work does is to renew the familiar theme of the female as support or substratum of the male subject. One of lrigaray's objections is the way in which Lacan takes a particular discursive organization to he unchangeable. The Lacanian
conceptual system offers little possibility for radical social change. It implies a deep social conservatism as far as the situation of women is
concerned. !he consen:atism is. embedde~ in the Lacanian concept of \ the ~bohc order. Smce thIS order IS phallocentric, structured \ accordmg to the law of the father, it represses the truly feminine, Idefining femininity in patriarchal terms as a consequence of lack. lrigaray argues that Western systems of representation privilege seeing; what can be seen (presence) is privileged over what cannot be seen (absence) and guarantees Being. Nothing to be seen is equivalent to having nothing. No being and no truth. As a result, within discourse; the feminine finds itself defined as lack, deficiency, or as imitation and negative image of the subject. 33 . Irigaray has examined the role of the mirror in the construction of subjectivity. Taking Lacan's mirror as an image of representation, she asks why he used a flat mirror, 'in that the flat mirror reflects the greater part ofwomen's sexual organs only as a hole' .34 To put it in another way, the flat mirror does not reflect the sexual specificity of the woman. For, the exploration of woman's sexual specificity, a different sort of mirror would be needed - for example, a speculum, the concave mirror which gynaecologists use to inspect the 'cavities' of the female body. I will be discussing lrigaray's work in Chapter 5. In defending Lacan,]uliet Mitchell has made some important points'. She claims that feminists have not adequately understood Lacan's position and she suggests that he provides an accurate descriptiol/ of patriarchal power relations. l\t!~r_eover, she argues that feminists have
I
29
~::~~~~rs, like Ellie Ragland-Sullivan, also defend Lacan and
:~mphasize his achievement. i~ ridding Freud~an th~ory of biologism.
Sne argues that some cnllcs of Lacan, Irke Ingaray, read him ,substantively rather than structurally and thus see him as prescriptive j;;~tead of descriptive and analytic. In her view, lrigaray's assessment of ':~acan as a phallocrat is wrong; she does not fully understand the .~bolic nature of the Lacanian phallic signifier which is neutral in its °lynright. :3'Elizabeth Grosz believes that Lacan's defenders are correct on two ~tlunts.35 One, Lacan does shift the ground of our understanding of 'pirtriarchal power relations and their social reproduction. That is to say, iris'not men per se who cause women's oppression, but rather the socioEconomic and linguistic structure. Yet in his formulation of this ~tiUcture as an inevitable law, patriarchal dominance is not so much challenged as displaced, from biology to the equally unchangeable .. :;ocio-linguistic law of the father. Two, although he himself does not .cknowledge the structure of patriarchal oppression, Lacan does provide some crucial elements for a description and explanation of the p'sychic components of women's oppression. Further reading
B. Benvenuto and R. Kennedy, The Works Ilf Jacql/es LaCi/lI: All ["tradl/ctioll, London: Free Association Books, 1986. This clear and helpful book discusses Lacan's major texts from the early works, 1926-33, to the works of the mid-1970s in chronological order. An excellent introduction. M. Bowie, Lacal/, London: Fontana Press, 1991. In the Fontana Modem Masters Series, this book is a coherent and '£9mprehensive outline of Lacan's theory.
M. Bowie, Freud, Prollst and Lacall: TheoTJI as Fiction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. '.Three interconnected case studies of the theoretical imagination at . ,work. A very interesting book which contains an analysis of Freud's self, )"mages as archaeologist and conquistador. Bowie argues that Freud's
10
Lacan and psychoanalysis
Post-structuralism and postmodernism
desire-laden fantasies are the fertile psychical soil from which Freud's working fictions and conceptual models sprang. After a consideration of the similarities between Freud and Proust, there is a concise
introduction to Lacan's work.
C. Clement, The Lives alld Legellds oJ Jacqlles Lacall, New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. One of the most accessible accounts that I know. A very readable introduction that explains many aspects of Lacan's work.
J. Gallop, Readillg Lacall, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985. An accessible and helpful book. Most of the chapters focus on the famous texts in .!:~canJsj;:mts.
E. Grosz, Jacques Lacal1: A Femillist Illtroduction, London: Routledge, 1990. A sympathetic overview from a feminist perspective. The topics covered include: the ego, the Oedipus complex, language and the unconscious.
The chapters on sexual relations and feminism are particularly useful. A. Lemaire, Jacqlles Lacall, London: Routledge, 1977. An informative and useful guide to the 'structuralist' (post-1955) Lacan, whose debts to Heidegger, Kojeve, Bataille and others are not mentioned. Lacan's work is presented as a system; and Lemaire rearls it in purely synchronic terms.
D. Macey, Lacall ill Cml/exts , London: Verso, 1988. The title is accurate. The book is a clear introduction to the socialhistorical context of Lacan's work. It contains chapters on his early writings, the influence of Surrealism, his relationship with philosophers like Hegel, Heidegger and Sartre, linguistics, and the nature of femininity. There is also a useful overview of the major events in Lacan's life from 1901-81.
J. Mitchell and J. Rose (eds), Femillille Semality: Jacques Lacau alld the Ecole Freudiell1le, London: Macmillan, 1982. An indispensable collection of seven articles written by Lacan between 1964 and 1981. The aim of the editors, especially in the lucid Introduction) is to show the importance of Lacan for psychoanalysts, and of psychoanalysis for feminism. S. Schneiderman, Jacques Lacall: The Death oJ all bltellectllal Hero, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983. Is it true that Lacan spent so much of his time on theory that he lost
UC
11
h with clinical practice? And is the theory so intellectual that it
to Iec ts emotion and affect? I found this book a valuable account of this negd other matters. He wntes .. . sensluvely about death an d'Its
an bolization, the relation of the dead and the living, and the ~ rtance of Sophocles's Alltigolle for an understanding of ethical Impo . . 0 fth e E' coIe F reu d'lenne t'onduct. The author descn'b es th e orgamzauon and the short session.
.5. Turkle, PSJ'c/zoallalytic Politics: Jacqlles Lacall alld Freud's Frellch ReVolutioll, London: Burnett Books, 1979. . . Ac]ear introduc~on to the post-1968 growth ~f psychoa?alysls In France. Part One IS most useful as It places Lacan s thought In a post'{var social and political context.
~'E'.,,' Wright) PSJIc/lOalIa(ytic Criticism: Them]1 ill Practice, London: Methuen, 1984. . The key theme is the relationship between different psychoanalytic tiieories and theories of art and literature. It is an excellent introduction t~Freud, Klein and Lacan.
Derrida and deconstruction
Chapter 2 D
Derrida and deconstruction
33
concepts to grasp is the idea of 'SOliS ratllfe', a term usually translated as 'under erasure'.:,To put a term 'SOliS ralure' is to write a word, cross it out, •. ~nt both word and deletion. The idea is this: since the word is . inaccurate, or, rather, inadequate, it is crossed out. Since it is necessary if remains legible. This strategically important device which Derrida uses derives from Martin Heidegger, who often crossed out the word '.Being Oike this:~) and let both deletion and word stand because ~ ·.:'word was illadeqllal2!!-'II!!eSs~1J" Heidegger felt that Being cannot be ,",;;:contained-OY:-is always prior to, indeed transcends, signification. Being i~.tlie final signified to which all signifiers refer, the 'transcendental signified'. "[n Derrida's view oflanguage the signifier is not directly related to thel ->,'~igrufied. There is no one-to-one set of corrrespondences between them. In Saussurean thought a sign is seen as a unity, but in Derrida's word and thing or thought never in fact become one. He sees the ·sigrr as a struct::':e of eli,!ere1'c.: half~f it is-"ll'C"YL'lQL~e!~~glldthe 'otllefll:i!nsalways 'not that'. Signifiers and signified are continually -bfCaking apart and reattiiCfiIng in new combinations, thus revealing the inadequacy of Saussure's model of the sign, according to which the sigoifier and signified relate as if they were two sides of the same sheet of paper. Indeed, there is no fixed distinction between signifiers and g'ignified. If one answers a child's question or consults a dictionary, one "Soon finds that one sign leads to another and so on, indefinitely. 'Signifiers keep transfonrting into signifieds, and vice versa, and you 'never arrive at a final signified which is not a signifier in itself. :->,,:'In other words, Derrida argues that when we read a sign, meaning is , ,,'~dFimmediately clear to us. Signs refer to what is absent, so in a sense )rieanings are absent, too. Meaning is continually moving along on a ::Cham of signifiers, and we cannot be precise about its exact 'location', Jfecause it is never tied to one particular sign. .• Now, for Derrida the structure of the sign is deterntined by the trace (the French meaning carries strong implications of track, footprint, i '::iIllprint) of that other whichj§lQr~ver a~ent. This other is, of course, i .n,ver to befoun,riiiTtS full being. Rather like the answer to a child'sj .qiIes.tionor a definition in a dictionary, one sign leads to another and so indefinitely ... the implication of this? That the projected 'end' of knowledge \ ever coincide with its 'means' is an impossible dream of plenitude. one can make the 'means' (the sign) and the 'end' (meaning) become illenltical. Sign will always lead to sign, one substituting the other as
I
I
Introduction Deconstruction, which has attained widespread recognition as one of the most important avant-garde intellectual movements iaFranc_e...and America, is essentially post-phenomenological and post-structurafut. In the history of contemporary deconstruction the leading figure is Jacques Derrida, who published three influential books in 1967: OJ Gra11l11lalo!ogy, Speech and Phenomena and l'Vril;lIg al1d Difference. 1 Among other things these texts contain powerful critiques o(phenomenology (Husserl), linguistics (Saussure), Lacanian psychoanalysis, and structuralism (Levi-Strauss). . In this ch~pter I give .an exposition of Derrida's thought. Beginning W1th an outlme of h,s view of language I give an explanation of what he means by phonocentrism and logocentrism. I then present his arguments against the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Claude LeviStrauss andJacques Lacan. There arc also sections on his 'predecessors' Freud and Nietzsche and an account of how they have influenced Derrida's thinking on reading te.\15 and the nature of metaphor. After that I exa~ine some metaphors in common usc. FinallYl after situating metaphor m ~e context of political and ideological struggle, I discuss the relatlOnshlp between deconstruction and Marxism.
The instability of language In trying to understand Derrida's work one of the most important 32
'"Vi"'"
.J
i'
34
Post-structuralism and postmodentism
Derrida and decollstrltctipl1
35
I signifier and signified in tum. For Derrida the sign cannothe.ta!>en as a 1 homo~eneous unit bridging an origin (referent) and an end (meaning), as semIOlogy, the study of signs, would have it. The sign must be studied
unsettie and shatter the original distinctions. Derrida has used this ,
; 'under erasure', always already inhabited by the trace of another sign JY-hich never appears as such. ( In addition, language is a temporal process. When I read a sentence its meaning often does not emerge until the end of the sentence; and even then the meaning can be modified by later signifiers. In each sign there are traces of other words which that sign has excluded in order to be itself. And words co~tain the trace of the ones which have gone before. All words/signs contain traces. They are like reminders of what has gone before. Every word in a sentence, every sign in a chain of meaning, has these traces in an inexhaustible 15omplexity. Meaning is never identical with itself; because a sign appears in different conteJl.'ts it is never absolutely the same. Meaning will never stay quite the same from context to context; the signified will be altered by the various chains of signifiers in which it is entangled. The implication of this is that language is a much less stable affair than was thought by structuralists such as Levi-Strauss. None of the elements is absolutely definable; everything is caught up and traced through by everything else. Eagleton explains: 'Nothing is ever fully present in signs. It is an illusion for me to believe cliat I can ever be fully present to YOllin what I say or write, because to use signs at all entails my
o The method of deconstruction is connected with what Derrida calls the 'metaphysics of presencf:'. It is Derrida's contention that Husserl, along·W1thalmost all other philosophers, reli!;s. on_the_.aS!H!.!llPtion.ofan immediately available area of certainty. The origin and foundation of ;~stphi1osophersl theories is presence. In Husserl's case the search for 'the form of pure expression is at the same time a search for that which is inunediately present; thus implicitly, by being present in an unmediated way and present to itself, it is undeniably certain. ,'Derrida, however, denies the possibility of this presence and in so doing removes the ground from which philosophers have in general ,proceeded. By denying p~esence, Derrida is denyin~ th~t ,ther~ is a present in the sense of a SIngle definable moment whIch IS now. For most people the present is the province of the known. We may be unsure ofwhat took place in the past, of what may take place in the future, or of what is taking place elsewhere, but we rely on our knowledge of the present, the here and now - the present perceptual worl~ as we are experiencing it. By challenging access to the present Demda poses a threat to both positivism and phenomenology. 'Husserl made an important distinction in The Logical 11lvesligaiiollS between expression and i!!..dication. The expression, linked to the intention Of the speaker, is what we might call the pure meaning of the 'sign, and as such is distinguished from indication, which has a pointing function and could occur without any intentional meaning. Now, .Derrida has argued that pure expression ,vill always involve an indicative element. Indication can never be successfully excluded from e'"pression. . Signs cannot refer to something totally other than themselves. There, is no signified which is independent of the signifier.rrhere is no realm i of meaning which can be isolated from the marks which are used to point to it. -.l Having argued that a realm of the independent signified does not 11 exist, Derrida concludes, first, that no particular sign can be regarded as \' referring to any particular signified and, second, that we are unable to \! escape the system of signifiers. In combination these conclusions imply there can be no unqualified presence. q Now, it is because of the assumption of presence that a priority has given to speech over writing. Derrida calls this p.!!l!.nQcentrism. c'~pe.t.) At first, from about the time of 'Project for a Scientific Psychology' (1895), Freud used mechanical models, but these were soon discarded. As Freud moved from neurological to psychical modes of explanation he began increasingly to refer to metaphors of optical mechanisms. Then, in Thetmei'pretatioll a[Dreams (1900), Freud thought it more appropriate to compare dreams with a system of writing than with spoken language. In order to suggest the strangeness of the logico-temporal relations in dreams Freud constantly referred to alphabetic writing as well as nonphonetic writing (pictographs, rebuses, hieroglyphics) in general. Dream symbols, he wrote, frequently have more than one or even several meanings and, as with Chinese script, the correct interpretation can only be arrived at on each occasion from the context. Later, in 'Note on the Mystic Writing Pad' (1925), Freud used a GYriting apparatus as a metaphor for the working of the psyche. A child's toy had come on the market under the name of the Mystic Writing Pad. You may have come across a modem version of it. Basically, it consisted of a celluloid covering-sheet which rested upon a wax slab. One could write on it with a pointed stylus and the writing could be erased by raising the double covering sheet by a little pull, starting from the free lower end. The pad, cleared of writing, is thus ready to receive fresh messages. Freud argued that its construction was very much like that of the perceptual apparatus. It had an ever-ready receptive surface and
r
r
could retain permanent traces of the inscriptions made on it; the wax , slab, in fact, represented the unconscious.
~ In short, Freud found in the Mystic Writing Pad a model that would
, contain the problematics of the psyche - a virgin surface that still retained permanent traces. The Freudian argument is that the establishment of permanent traces in the psychic apparatus pt'b-CIurd~s the possibility of immediate perception. In other words, we have 'memory-traces', marks which are not a part of conscious memory, which may be energized into consciousness long afterwards and so affect us. Derrida's chief interest in Freudian psychoanalysis lies in the fact that
l
-f
Derrida and deconstruction
Post-structuralism and pastmodernism
43
and uses a certain method of decip~ering texts. Freud lists the >'iitt,,"cnoh,'niques used by the 'dream-work' of the-psychic apparatus to teC d tho ....'disto1rt or refract the 'forbidden' dream-thoughts, to pro uce e pictoofthe dream: and as metaphor and m.etonymy. may third item on the list refers to the technique which dl.":orts. an '\. that it can be presented as an image. Secondary reVISIOn IS a force that smooths over contradictions and creates an apparent •••,~~~;,~t~d-~~ss. 'i"H'••,,,d suggested that the verbal text is constituted by co~cea~ment ~s as by revelation. Freud suggests that where the subject IS not m of the text, where the text looks very smooth or very clumsy, IS ",;u ',"'"re"readers should fix their gaze. Derrida develops this further; he li ,ye sts that we should fasten upon a small but tell-tale moment in the sugge . . b hich harbours the author's sleight of hand and which cannot e t W . h dismissed simply as contradiction. We should examme t at passage \ \vhere we can provisionally locate the moment when the text· '\ transgresses the laws it apparently sets up for itself, and thus unraveldeconstruct - the very text. Freud's greatest contemporary interpreter is Jacques Lacan. Let me briefly remind you of the ,key features of Lacan's ~ought befo~e outlining Derrida's critique ofit. Like Freud, Lacan demes that there IS a'difference in kind betwee'n 'the normal' and 'the abnormal'. Moreover, he rejects the work of those American psychologis~ w~o s~ess tha: th~ ego is the primary determinant of ~e psyche ..I~ hiS Vlew the s~bJect can never be a total personality and IS forever dlVlded from the object of its desire. Lacan goes on to define the unconscious in terms of the structure of a language. This extends Freud in a direction that Derrida would endorse, but, nevertheless, the relationship between these thinkers is an uneasy one. It would seem to an outside observer that Lacan and Derrida have a 7 lot in common: they are both deeply concerned with anti-positivist theories oflanguage and are highly aware oflanguage's metaphoricity. Secondly, both thinkers have been influenced by Freud's theories of the unconscious and the dream a~!Lt!!xt" This means that they are interested in (ways of) 'reading' and (styles of) 'writing'. Thirdly, they both draw attention, as did Freud, to the relationship between nature and cultu.r~ And so, why is there an uneasy relationship between them? I?emda argues that the goal of Lac anian analysis is to draw out and establIsh 'the 'ext'"
44
Post-structllralism alld postmodernism
truth' of the subject, and it appears to him that in spite of giving to the unconscious the structure of a language Lacan has entrenched some of Freud's (metaphysical) suggestions by making the unconscious the source of 'truth'. Derrida believes that Lacan sees himself as unveiling 'the true' Freud and is sceptical of Lacan's notions of 'truth' and 'authenticity', seeing them as remnants of a post-war existentialist ethic, the unacknowledged debts to Hegelian phenomenology. Derrida believes that Lacan simplifies Freud's teAt. In Lacanian analysis the truth (logos) systematically shines forth as spoken or voiced. I Psychoanalysis remains 'the talking cure' founded on spoken truth. 7 Derrida cautions us that when we learn to reject the notion of the primacy of the signified. (of meaning over word) we should not satisfY our longing for transcendence by giving primacy to the signifier (word over I meaning). He feels that Lacan has done precisely this. . I stated earlier that Derrida is attempting to subvert the logocentric theory of the sign. Traditionally, the signifier refers to the signified, that is, an acollstic image signifies an ideal concept, both of which are present to consciousness. The signifier 'dog' indicates the idea 'dog'j the real dog, the referent, is not present. In Derrida's view the sign ma~ 1I1l abSClll presence. Rather than present the object we employ the sign; I hDWever-;-tlie"iIiCaiiing of the sign is always postponed or deferred. Derrida has developed a concept which he calls 'differance' and which refers to 'to differ' - to be unlike or dissimilar in nature, quality or form - and to 'to defer' - to delay, to postpone (the French verb differer has both these meanings). Spoken French makes no phonetic' distinction between the endings' -ance' and' -ence'; the word registers as dijfirence. This undetected difference shows up only in writing. The advent of the concept of writing, then, is a challenge to the l idea of structure; for a structure always presumes a centre, a 1 principle, a hierarchy of meaning and a solid foundation; and it is \ these notions which the endless differing and deferring of writinl' I th. . 1 rows mto questIOn. ( As we have seen, Derrida's analysis of Husserl led him to . language as an endless play of signifiers. Once an indiep,enlient signified was abandoned signifiers referred to other signifiers yet again referred to signifiers. Language is thus the play differences which are generated by signifiers which are th"mseives the product of those differences. Derrida incorporates into meaning of dijfirallce the sense of deferring. Differallce is I endlessly deferred.
· I I , I
Derrida and decD1lstr?'ct' '""
Ion
45
Nietzsche and metaphor Derrida's acknowledged 'precursors' were Nietzsche, Freud and Heidegger. They all felt a need for the strategy of'SOliS raI ' I-Iel'degger , lire, under erasure, Freud the ps h' d NI'etzsche Put 'Being' ,M th yce, an 'knowing. hit tisellems d at NP~st-strhu~turtialists such as Derrida have not so m~c a owe m letzsc e 5 . OOtsteps as rediscovered his philosophIcal stance, a stance that owes Its character to an all-pervasive reflexivity. The current emphasis ~n reflexivity (a form of self-awareness, a turning back O? oneself) is m part due to a Critical shift of focus from the individual subject to the :e.lrt. Thus from Nietzsche to Derrida we see the human subject - tradlttonally ~e focus of philosophical thought as the place of expenence, morahty, choice and will _ gradually abandoned. Derrida su~ges~ that the main c~aracteristics of Nietzsche's work are a systematic mistrust of metaphYSICS and a s " , , usplclOn afth e values of 'truth' and 'meanmg . Many cultural relativists believe that, although we may interpret the world . 1cont ex~, ~ there . differently, according to Our socia is a single world which we are all mterpreting F N' h ho,vever . ., ' or letzsc e, ' there is no sl~gle phYSical reahty beyond OUr interpretations. There are only perspectives. Rooted in Ni~tzsche'~ philosophy is the hnplicit stance that there are no final conclUSIOns; the text can never be fixed d result it can 'h d·th N' hb anasa never be declp ere el er. letzsc e eHeves that we are unable to escape the c?nstraints of language and thus have no alternative but to operate withm lan.gu~ge. He IS aware. of the reflexive problem: if we say ~we are trapped withm language ~nd Its concepts', that claim is in itself, of course, part oflanguage, We :WIsh to eXpress aUf 'trappedness' but we unable to do so other than m the very concepts which trap us. The' ,.;;'dotlbl,e-llind, which states one thing but requires You to understand \ different. (I found it interesting to learn that many ",s(:hi2:ophre:ni(:s cling to the literal and avoid metaphors because these ultimately undecidable.) Metaphors evoke relationships and the
I I'
48
Post-structuralism a1td postmoderllism
making of the relationships is very much the task of the hearer or reader. Indeed, understanding a metaphor is as much a creative endeavour as making a metaphor, and as little guided by rules. Metaphor is ubiquitous and ineradicable. I want to stress the point that metaphors are not just the concern of the poet or the literary critic, not just figures of speech; they represent one of the ways in which many kinds of discourse are structured and powerfully influence how we conceive things. I would like you to ).consider for a moment the metaphor 'time is money'. In OUf culture time is money in many ways; we calculate telephone-calls, hourly wages, interests on loans. But not only do we act as if time is a valuable commodity, we also c01lceive of time that way. 'I don't have the time to give you.' 'How do you spend your time these days?' Thus we understand and experience time as the kind of thing that can be spent, wasted, budgeted, invested wisely or foolishly, saved or squandered. 'Time is money\ 'time is a limited resource' and 'time is a valuable commodity' are all metaphorical concepts. They are metaphorical since we are using our everyday ex-periences with money, limited resources and valuable commodities to conceptualize time. But this is not the only way in which human beings may conceptualize time; it is tied to our culture. There are cultures where time is none of these things. Let us consider another example: the organizing metaphors surrounding work and leisure. One does a full day's work; one is in or out of work. Leisure time, on the other hand, is to be filled; holiday I" weekends are breaks between work. We associate the metaphor of work with plenitude, with something of importance, and that of leisure with L~ emptiness, with a vacuum. The metaphors reinforce the idea of life as ! first and foremost the life of work, while activities outside ofit belong to &the frivolous and not to the main business of life. Metaphors like these :fi\are particularly insidious since they are so interwoven into our speech ~ that their flavour of metaphor is lost upon speakers and hearers.
i
The politics of metaphor Ou; ordinary lan~ag~ is saturated \vith metaphor. For example, in our society argument IS m part structured, understood, perfonned and talked about in terms of war. There is a position to be established and defended, you can win or lose, you have an opponent whose position you attack and try to destroy and whose argument you try to shoot down. The
I
I
Derrida and deconstruction
49
language of argument is, basically, the language of physical combat. That 'argument is war' is built into the conceptual system of the culture in which we live. Lakoff and Johnson have pointed out thatit need not be so; that one can easily imagine sod.eties in which ar~ent is concei~ed differently - for example as theatncal performanc~~n such a society both argument itself and the criteria for success or failure in argument \ would be quite unlike our own. Some metaphors, in certain historical periods have been liberating. The historian Christopher Hill has described h~w in the seventeenth century nature came to be thought of as a machine to be understood, controlled and improved upon by knowledgeY Nature as a machine was (at that time) a tremen?ously exciting, liberating idea. Human beings were freed from ProVIdence or divine \vill and could not only . understand the world ~etter ~ut c.oul~ begin to change it. I think that the creative or Imagmative aspect of sociological theonesl often lies in their use of metaphor. Parsons likens society to a biological organism; Marx uses the metaphor of a building the base and superstructure; Goffman uses the. metaphor of a stag~ 'perfonnance~i Metaphors serve to draw attentlOn not only to similarities but. to differences. As the theory develops and becomes more precIse, concepts emerge that sometimes have little to do \vith the original metaphor. An influential post-structuralist thinker, the late Michel Foucault (whose work on the social sciences and the relations between power and knowledge will be discussed in the next chapter) was particularly fond of using 'ge~graphical' me~~hors s~ch as te'rritory, domain, soil, horizon., archIpelago, geopolItIcs, regton, landscape. He alsO makes profuse use of .spatial ~etaphors - position, displacement, site, fie~d. Althusser, too, m ReadlllK Capital uses many spatial metaphors (terram, "space, site, etc.). Foucault suggests that, since Bergson perhaps, there has been a devaluation of space. Space has been treated as the dead, the fixed, the undialectical, the immobile; time, on the contrary, was , richness, fecundity, life, dialectic. But to talk in terms of space does not that one is hostile to time. Althusser believed that the use of spatial in his work was necessary but at the same time regressive, Foucault, on the other hand, was more positive. He said it is through t!zese spatial obsessions that he Clime 10 mha/he was looking '/ the relations that are possible between Power and knowledge. 'Once (lJQIIVII,d~(e can be analysed in terms of region, domain implantation, lisl,la"err,ent, transposition, one is able to capture the pr~cess by which!
t\
II
I
50
Post-structuralism mzd postmoderllism
knowledge functions as a form of power and disseminates the effects of power.,IJ I believe that metaphors determine to a large extent what we can think in any field. Metaphors are not idle flourishes - they shape what we do. They can help to make, and defend, a world view. Itis important that the implications of the metaphors we employ or accept are made e'"plicit and that the ways in which they structure our thought and even our action are better understood. I also want to stress that metaphors can be productive ofnew insights and fresh illuminations. They can promote unexpected or subtle parallels or analogies. Metaphors can encapsulate and put forward proposals for another way oflooking at things. Through metaphor we
can have an increased awareness of alternative possible worlds.
Deconstruction and Marxism
The metaphor most often used by deconstructionists is that of the palimpsest; reading te,15 resembles the X-raying of pictures which discovers, under the epidennis of the last painting, another hidden picture. Deconstructive criticism takes the 'metaphoric' structure of a text seriously. Since metaphors are not reducible to truth, their own 1 structures 'as such' are part of the text. The deconstructive procedure is , to spot the point where a text covers up its grammatical structure.
Gayatri Spivak puts it like this: Ifin the process of deciphering a text in the traditional way we come across a word that seems to harbour an unresolvable contradiction, and by virtue of being one word is made sometimes to work in one way and sometimes in another and thus is made to point away from the absence of a unified meaning, we shall catch at that word. If a metaphor seems to suppress its implications, we shall catch at that metaphor. We shall follow its advenrures through the text coming undone as a structure of concealment, revealing its self-transgression, its undecidability.14
\Derrida has provided a method of'close-reading' a 'text' very similar to i psychoanalytic approaches to neurotic symptoms. Deconstructive 'close-reading', having 'interrogated' the teAt, breaks through its defences and shows that a set of binary oppositions can be found 'inscribed' \vithin it. In each of the pairs, private/public, masculine/ feminine, same/other, rational/irrational, true/false, centraVperipheral, etc., the first term is privileged. Deconstructors show that the
Derrida and deconstruction
51
'privileged' term depends for its identity on its excluding the other and demonstrate that primacy really belongs to the subordinate term 1 instead. -' Derrida's procedure is to examine the minute particulars of an undecidable moment, nearl~ imperceptible displacements, that might· otherwise escape the reader s e~e. He tries t~ locate not a Illoment ambiguity or irony ultimately mcorporated mto th: text's system of unified meaning but rather a moment that genumely threatens to collapse that system..Der:nda's m?thod is not ~at of Hegel. Hegel's ' idealist method consIsts m resolVIng by sublallon the COntradictions between the binary oppositions. Derrida stresses the point that it is not enoug~ si,:,ply to neutralize the binary oppositions of metaphysics. ~str~~t:I0!l~!...nvolves reversal and displacement. Within the familiar philosophical oppositions there is always a violent hierarchy. One of the two terms controls the other holds the superior position. 1he first move in deconstruc~ng the opposition is to overthrow the hierarchy. In~!LPJlg~Lthis reversal must be displaced, the winning term put 'under erasure'. Decons.truction, then, is the attempt
Of!\
1
to locate the promising marginal text, to disclose . .fithe undecidable rno men,t to pry it loose with the positive lever of the slgm er, to reverSe the resident hierarchy, only to displace it; to dismantle in order to reconstitute what is ls always already inscribe,d.
Before making some critical remarks, let me try to sum up. Derrida has made a close study of many philosophers: Nietzsche, Rousseau, Husserl, Heidegger and others. He argues that they have been able to impose their various systems of thought only by i.gn~rin~ Or sUppressing the disruptive effects oflanguage. One of the rulmg illUSIOns ofWestern metaphysics is that reason can somehow grasp the world Without a close attention to language and arrive at a pure, self-authenticating truth or method. Derrida's work d~aws a~ention to the way~ in whiCh language deflects the philosopher s proJect. He does this by fOcusing on metaphors and other figurative devices at work in the texts of . . philosophy. In this way Derrida underlines the rhetorical nature of J .. philosophical arguments. . Deconstruction stresses the .irr~ducibility of metap~or, the difference play within the very conslltullon of hteral meamng. It should be rememtlen,d that deconstruction is not simply a strategic reversal of >'categ(lri(" which otherwise remain distinct and unaffected. It is an
I
1
52
D.errida and deconstruction
Post-strllcturaJism and pastmodernism
. tion or a hrase overheard and noted for fu~er
.
activity of reading in which teAts must be read in a radically new way. There must be an awareness of ambivalence, of the discrepancy
I
between meaning and the author's assertion. Derrida discovers a set of
• paradoxical themes at odds ,vith their manifest argument. His method consists of showing how the privileged term is held in place by the force
of a dominant metaphor and not, as it might seem, by any conclusive \ logic. lfi Metaphors often disrupt the logic of an argument. Derrida writes that we have a metaphysical desire to make the end coincide with the means, create~crOsllreJ maKe-the definition coincide with the defined, the 'father' with the 'son'; within the logic of identity to balance the equation, close the circle. In short, he is asking us' to change certain habits of mind; he is telling us that the authority of the
f text is provisional, the origin is a trace.
Contradicting logic, we must
learn to use and erase OUf language at the same time. Derrida wants us \ to 'erase' all oppositions, undoing yet preserving them. (Deconstructionists tend to say that if a te,1: seems to refer beyond itself, that reference can finally be only to another text. Just as signs refer only to other signs, texts can refer only to other texts, generating an
intersecting and indefinitely e"-pandable web called illlenexlllll/4J!-... There is a proliferation of interpretations, and no interpretation can
lslaim to be the final one. Now, Derrida is sometimes taken to be denying the possibility of truth. This is not so. It is more plausible to think of him as trying to avoid assertions about the nature of truth. The usual superficial criticism of Derrida is that he questions the value of , truth' and 'logic' and yet uses logic to demonstrate the truth of his own arguments. The point is that the overt concern of Derrida's
writing is the predicament of having to use the resources of the heritage that he questions. . Derrida's work confronts us with many problems. Having argued that there cannot be a realm of the signified independent of the signifier, he opens up the vista of an endless play of signifiers that refer not to signifieds but to other signifiers, so that meaning is always ultimately undecidable. Derrida gives as an example of undecidability Plato's frequent presentation of writing as a drug, plwwu!f:r1ll. This Greek word can mean either 'poison' or 'cure' and, as with a
drug, which way it is
taken (translated) makes a lot of difference. Consider another important case of undecidability: an isolated note found among Nietzsche's unpublished manuscripts, a single sentence in quotation marks: 'I have
forgotten my umbrella.' In a sense, we all know what this phrase means, and yet we have no idea of what its meaning is in this instance. Is it a
53
hIm:!, ~~~~ena see~ :.use? Perhaps th ) Nietzsche on the verge of breakdown, has left hIS jotting to
is
as some sort of defence, a protectio.n
..ft o.III the wea er. h' ' 'e"torm he has forgotten his umbrella. b hi d' caug t m a rau= , I . defences ~ n also be analysed in Freudian terms, as ps~choa~a YSIS Ofcourse, It cou th . 'ficance offorgetting and phallic objects. I h~ve
id
:often focus~~ o~mb:::~ the phrase is undecidable. This illustratIOn forgotten ta hor for the whole ofDerrida's text. could be a me p.th D 'd's work on Saussure and Levi-Strauss, 'As we sa.w w~estio~7~: self-identity of signifier and signified an~ deconstrUctIOn q f th king subject and the voiced sign. There IS the. self-presence 0 f .; ;~;:rence to a centre, to a fixed subj~ct, to a .an abandonment 0 'gm' to an absolute foundmg and rivileged reference, to an on
,
p 11' first principle th contro mg . d' ti' I tes traditional conceptions of the au or Deconstruction
and the work and
Isar cu i~es conventional notions of reading and.
und~rmtic
expressive and didactic theories of
?~story. I?~te~er~~e::;~ty (ecrilllre). It kills the author, n:~ns history
~~r:l:~~ ~nto intertextuality anfd celetb~r::~!:~::d:~Ory
\.
is the f the main features 0 pos b . ne o . the self In place of a unified and stable emg or deconstrUction of '1 .c t d and disintegrating play of selves. . ness we get a mu tl!ace e . consclOUS . bl W·th deconstruction the categones d lik the text IS unsta e. I
o
~~a ;r,,:
h
,'and 'literature' collapse, borders are overrun.
'cntiCISm, philosieltext' explodes beyond stable meaning and ~th The work, now ca ., la of infinite meanings. CntJcal e becomes playfully fragmented. y wntJng: ormer fD 'd' view oflanguage? It has been suggested by Is thiS a result 0 errl a s Terry Eagleton that
to\~~ds
t
rafi~~al;~a~:~~~~~e~e:r,
I
I' atel undecidable if we view language meaning may well be. U ~ . y n a a e' it becomes 'decidable' and \ contemplatively, as a cham OfSl gIll fie r5 ~ P ~c;rtainty' have something of " j dge, an d tho I 'k 'tr th' 'reality' 'knowe ward s I1 'e u , 'h think oflanguage rather as some mg Is their force restored to them w en we. ti 1 forms ofHfe. we do as indis50ciably interwoven With our prac ea
, . ts of deliberately inverting The deconstruct~r:s method oft:~ co~~ play of hitherto invisible traditional opposltJons and ~ar mg between 0 osing terms. In the ame : I~!~:;;to decons::Ction there is a .shift concepts that reside un.n
:ro~~:~~m:~:~::::~~sa~o s differences,
unities to fragmentatlOns J
S4
Post-structuralism and postmodernism
ontology to philosophy ofianguage, epistemology to rhetoric, presence to absence. According to one recent commentator 'deconstruction
celebrates dissemination over truth, explosion and fragmentation over unity and coherence, undecidable spaces over prudent closures, playfulness and hysteria over care and rationality,.19 It is said that every boundary, limit, division, frame or margin instals a line separating one entity or concept from another. That is to say, every border marks a difference. The question of the border is a question of difference. Derrida writes, 'No border is guaranteed, inside or out.'
Applied to texts, this finding becomes 'no meaning can be fixed or decided upon'. According to deconstructionists there is nothing other than interpretation?O As there is neither an undifferentiated nor a literal bottom or ground, the activity ofinterpretation is endless. It is also a fact that every text tends itself to deconstruction and to further deconstruction, with nowhere any end in sight. Finally, no escape outside the logocentric enclosure is possible since the interpreter must use the
concepts and figures of the Western metaphysical tradition. The term used to describe the impasse of interpretation ('there is no way out') is aporia. 'The supreme irony of what Derrida has called logocentrism is that its critique, deconstruction, is as insistent, as monotonoUS and as inadvertently systematizing as logocentrism itself.,21 Having given a few criticisms of Derrida and deconstruction, I now want to ask, 'Are his methods allied or opposed to Marxism?' When' faced with new approaches such as deconstruction it is very hard to try to
work out whether they are useful aids in building a new socialist order or are just other forms of bourgeois recuperation and domination. I think I am right in saying that deconstruction is, for Derrida, ultimately a political practice, an attempt to dismantle the logic by which a particular system of thought and, behind that, a whole system of political structures and social institutions maintains its force. But in practice it
cannot be denied that his work has been grossly unhistorical and politically evasive?2 One post-structuralist, Michel Foucault, argued that Derrida's own decision to avoid questions about the Cx1ent to which
the text arises out of and reHects underlying social practices itself reHects a social practice. He said that by deliberately restricting himself to textual analysis the question of evaluating textual analysis as a social and political practice cannot be raised. In so far as textual undecidability precludes raising questions about truth it perpetuates the status quo. On the other hand, some commentators have suggested that deconstruction, by unsettling the theories with which we have
Derrida and
deconstruction
55
surrounde.d ourselves, serves to in .
could be dIfferent but that it can dleate that Our account of the world Derrida seems to believe that d nOt tell us how it would be different. the structures within which Weeconstruction is able gradually to shift 1 terrain of our work, and thereboperate 'little by little to modify the \ e~ough? Is Derrida playing arno~ produce new figurations'. Is this \ hunself, and then parodying the g the webs of language, 'parodying Derrida has himself observParOdy'?23
d deconstruction work to enSUre 'a e. that certain American uses of
dominant political and econorni~.rnstitutional closure' which serves the also said that Marxist texts are sho~nterests of.American society. He has concepts, themes that carry alo thr?ugh WIth metaphors disguised as n baggage of presuppositions. But g WIth them a whole unrecoguized about Marx - a silence that on the whole Derrida has been silent postponement, a refusal as yet to can be construed as a prolonged There are some critics , like Fred' engage with Marxist thought. of synchronic thought must s nc Jameson, who feel that the claims historical understanding, that ~roehow be reconciled with those of rhetoric and Marxist dialetic. 2. B ere roust be a rapprocllemelll between Marxist model of representatio Ut other critics have suggested that the up in a rhetoric of tropes and ?, hOwever refined in theory, is caught ~~~topher No~s, for exarop~ages that entirely controls its logic. mm:lcal.to Manast thoug~t. In hi~ ~as argu~d .that deconstruction is are mevuably couched in a rheta .VIew ~e InSIghts of deconstruction deconstructive reading: 'Once tI~ ~hlch itself lies open to further deconstruction it is committed t CtIticism enters the labyrinth of O back to Nietzsche, rather than M a sceptical epistemology that leads Some of the most trenchant
~rx.J25
CtIti . made by the English Marxist . ~Isms of deconstruction have been Eagleton the main characteristi OtItic Terry Eagleton. According to . 0 f totaI'Ity and that it Cs . are th at it rejects any notion . of deconstructlOn subject. Deconstructionism as IS against the privileging of the unitary serts relations to something other th that literary texts do not have struction is not concerned with ~ th~mselves. It follows that deconthat exists, since this would e t .Ianung anybody for the exploitation which definite judgements can Some kind of vantage point from wrote that U d be delivered. Eagleton, in 1981,
tIi
many of the vauntedly novel the reproduce some of the most Co IDes of deconstruction do little more than The modest disownment of theoIIlIDonpiace topics of bourgeois liberalism. ry, method and system; the revulsion from
56
Post-structuralism and postmodernism
("the dominative, totalising and unequivocally denotative; the privileging of plurality and heterogeneity; the recurrent gestures of hesitation and
indeterminacYi the devotion to gliding and process, slippage and movement; the distaste for the definitive - it is not difficult to see why such an idiom rhould become so quickly absorbed within the Anglo-Saxon academies. 26
r
It is suggested by Eagleton that deconstruction is not only reformist but ultra-leftist too. On the one hand, deconstruction is a sort of patient, probing reformism ofthe text. Because it can only imagine contradiction as the external warring of two monistic essences, it fails to comprehend class dialectics. On the other hand, deconstruction is ultra-left in that it is 'a problematic that sees meaning itself as terroristic'. Both left refonrusm (social democracy) and ultra-leftism are among other things antithetical responses to the failure or absence of a mass revolutionary movement.
In a recent book the leading exponent of Derrida's thought in Britain, Christopher Norris, reminds us that Dcnida wants to stress
the non-availability of any such thing as a direct unmediated knowledge of the world. Derrida wants to emphasize the culturally produced (as opposed to the natural) character of thought and perception. In his polemic against Jean Baudrillard and others, Norris argues that deconstruction has nothing in common with those forms of extreme anti-cognitivist doctrine that would claim to have come out
'beyond' all distinctions between truth and falsehood, reason and rhetOric, fact and fiction. In Norris's view, Derrida has been at some
pains to dissociate his project from the kind of irrationalist or nihilist outlook which takes it for granted that truth and reason are obsolete values. He has a continuing critical engagement with the truth-claims and ethical values of Enlightenment thought. 27 Derridean deconstruction supports the Enlightenment critique even while subjecting that tradition to a radical reassessment.
Further reading
D. Hoy, jacques Derrida', in Q Skinner (ed.), The Re/llnl oJ Grall" TheoIJI in Ihe Humall Sciences, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. A useful discussion of Derridean deconstruction and the DerridaFoucault dispute.
Derrida alld deconstruction
.
Z
, alld Practice, London: Methuen, 19~2.
~'good introduction to the su~~ct. - Norris, DecollSlmdlOll: T.Jeo,?
57
T
0
excellent chapters on Dernda
w implications of Nietzsche's the are followed by others that dISCUSStruction and Marxist tllOught, and ..
the relation between econs.
..
wnungs, the work 0 f contemporary American hterary crrtlcs.
t
.
Norris, Dernda,
L
d
. Fontana Press, 1987.
d cin Derrida's writings on Plato,
on, on. .
An ·' excellent book; beSIdes mKtro u' gxplains the significance of his t R usseau ant, Ie . .H.egel, Saussure, a 'hil phical controversies. It contalUs a and discusses recent p oso k wor, ful bibliography. use 'd ,. R Edgley and R. Osborne od 'An Introduction to Dem a, m . 1985 :!dlosopllJ' Reader, London: Verso, . ) A I .d exposlnon. UCI . )' . A Phillips Griffiths (ed. , D Wood, 'Beyond Deconstrucn~n. , ~~d ~. Cambridge University C~1Jle11lpOraT)1 French Philosoph)', am n g .
f.d~~adical
Press, 1987. £; A clear and useful de ence
0
f Derrida's deconstruction from the r m and tex"tUal idealism.
accusation of nihilism, empty reversa IS
.
Fot/cault atld the social scietlces
59
gap between the past and the present underlines the principle ofl
Chapter 3
o
Foucault and the social sciences
Introduction: Foucault's view of history
Foucault is against any form of global theorizing. H: wants to totalizing forms of analysis and is critical of systemall~'ty. Though works do not constitute a system, nevertheless there 15 an coherence which stems from the fact that Foucault's works are a vision of history derived from Nietzsche. Indeed, he expressed indebtedness to Nietzsche for having outlined a conception of called ~alogy.' Nietzsche's b';-ok 011 the Gellealogy oj Morals was an delegitimize the present by separating it from the past. This is Foucault tries to do. Unlike the historian who traces a inevitability, Foucault breaks off the past fro~ the present and, demonstrating the foreignness of the past, relallv.zes and undercuts . . legitimacy of the present. Foucault rejects the Hegelian teleological model, m :vh.ch one iJ. of production flows dialectically out of another, :n favour ' Nietzschean tactic of c~tique .thro~gh the presentaMn of \, The Nietzschean histonan begms WIth the present and goes in time until a difference is located. Then s/he proceeds forward I tracing the transformation and taking care to preserve the \ uities as well as the connections. This is the method used by The alien discourses/practices are explored in such a way negativity in relation to the present ",-plodes the '''Lticmalily phenomena that are taken for granted. When the technology. the past is elaborated in detail, present-day assumpllons WhICh past as 'irrat~?nal' are undermined.
I:'
I
58
::il~~:~::~i~at~ t~the heart of Foucault's historiography. He allows the ,'':; remain unexplained. The role of cause or explanation is j'sev,:fely reduced in most post-structuralist texts, since it leads to conclusions and works against the purposes of the of difference. analysis, then, differs from traditional forms of analysis in several ways. Whereas traditional or 'total' history iLe'lfnts into grand explanatory systems and linear processes, •• ,.,. ~'P" moments and individuals and seeks to document a point ;iJl,.g,:neala1gic:al analysis attempts to establish and preserve the', events, tufnS away from the spectacular in favour of the ' the neglected and a whole range of phenomena which have a history. According to Foucault there has been an of subjugated knowledges, of a whole set of knowledges disqualified as inadequate - naive knowledges located on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of scientificity. '"~ ...._... uses the tenn genealogy to refer to the union of i~:::~~~,~:and local memories which allows us to establish a ffl of struggles and to make use of this knowledge G,:neal"gi'!s focus on local, discontinuous, disqualified, :kr.ow'ledges against the claims of a unitary body of theory hierarchize and order them in the name of some true i
repeat, is a form of critique. It rejects the pursuit of the of a conception of historical beginnings as lowly, t1conltinllerLt.lt attempts to reveal the multiplicity of factors ;~~" ••. " the fragility of historical forms. In this view of iFoiuc:mllt's writings exemplifY, there can be no constants, l";immclbi].e forms of uninterrupted continuities struc-
Reason and unreason
is mainly concerned ,vith the growth of those known as the social or human sciences. to the question of how the human sciences are what the consequences of their existence arc. centre on the eighteenth century - the period in
il
r!
J ~!
Post-structuralism and postmodernism
Foucault and the social sciences
whi~h the human sciences in their modern forms were constituted_and
works ,of art express an enormous anxiety about the relationships
60
certain new 'technologies' elaborated. ~9th of these developments were linked to a new philosophical conception of Man as a simultaneous subject and object of knowledge. . Throughout his life Foucault was interested in that which reason excludes: madness, chance, discontinuity. He believed that the literary text aUows 'otherness' to speak. In philosophy and law this otherness is silent, whereas in madness it is not listened to. Foucault valued the literature of transgression - it attempts to subvert the constraints of all other forms of discourse by its difference. And so he admired the literary tradition that includes writers such as de Sade, Nerval, Artaud and Nietzsche. In his first weU-known book, Madlless alld Civilizalioll, Foucault describes how madness, along with poverty, unemployment and the inability to work, comes in the seventeenth century to be perceived as a 'social problem' which falls within the ambit of responsibility of the state. 2 There is a new conception of the state as preserver and augmenter of the general welfare. In the book there is an important discussion of the emergence of 'humanitarian' attitudes towards the insane at the end of the eighteenth century. The opening of Tuke's Retreat at York and Pinel's liberation of the insane at Bicetre are portrayed as leading to a 'gigantic moral imprisonment', morc oppressive than the former practices of brutal incarceration since they
operate on the mind rather than merely on the body.
The great cOllfillemellt At the end of the Middle Ages leprosy disappeared from the Western world. Foucault suggests a connection between this and some of the attitudes then taken towards madness. As leprosy vanished a void was created and the moral values had to find another scapegoat. He shows how in the 'classical period' (1500-1800) madness attracted that stigma. During the Renaissance madmen led an easy, wandering existence.
The .towns drove them outside their limits and they were allowed to wander in the open countryside. One common way of dealing with the mad was to put them on a ship and entrust them to mariners, because folly, watet and sea, as everyone then 'knew', had an affinity with each
other. These 'Ships of Fools' were to be found criss-crossing the seas and canals of Europe. Many texts and paintings, for example the works of Breughel, Bosch and Durer, refer to the theme ofmaduess. These
61
between the real and the imaginary. Then within the space of a hundred
years, th~ 'madship' was replaced by' the 'madhouse';. instead of embarkatIon there was confinement. Men did not wait until the seventeenth century to 'shut up' the mad, but it was in this period that
they began to 'confine' them. Why was this? Fouca~lt argues that during the second half of the
seventeenth c~n~ry social sensibility, COmmon to European culture, be~an to mamfest itself; a 'sensibility to poverty and to the duties of assls~ance, new forms of reaction to the problems of unemployment and Idleness, a new ethic of work'.3 And so, enormous houses of confinement (sometimes called 'houses of correction') were created
throughout Europe. To these places a (strangely) mixed group
at
?eople, poor vagabonds~ the unemployed, the sick, the criminals and the msane were sent. No differentiation was made between them. Confin.ement was a massive phenomenon, a 'police' matter whose task was to supress beggary and idleness as a source of disorder.
T~e ~nemployed person was no longer driven away or punishedi he was t~ken III charge, at the expense of the nation but at the cost of his individual hbe~. Between him a~d society an implicit system of obligation was estabhshed: ~~ had the nght to be fed, but he must accept the physical and moral constramt of confinement,of
The repressive function 'of the houses of confinement was combined with a ~ew use: the internees were made to work. In the Middle Ages the great SIn had been pride, in the seventeenth century it was sloth. Since sloth had become the absolute form of rebellion the idle were forced to work. Labour was instituted as an exercise in moral reform.
Confinement played a double role: it absorbed the unemployed in order to mask their poverty and it also avoided the social or political disadvantages of agitation. In the Renaissance madness had been present everywhere, but the houses of confinement hid it away. Confinement marked a decisive
event: ~Th~ new meanings assigned to poverty, the importance given to
the obliganon to work, and all the ethical values that are linked to labour, ultimateJy determined the experience of madness and inflected its course." Most of Foucault's book is a detailed description of how madness was thought about in the seventeenth and eighteenth ~:nturies: he writes about mania and melancholia, hysteria and liypochondria; how it was thought that the savage danger of madness
Post-structuralism and postmodernism
Foucault alld the social sciellces
was related to the danger of the passions, and how madness was conceived as a fonn of animality to be mastered only by discipline. Gradually in the eighteenth century confinement came to be seen as a gross error; it began to be said that charity was a cause of impoverishment and that vagabonds should seek employment. Moreover, legislators were beginning to be embarrassed because they no longer knew where to place mad people - in prison, hospital or the family. Measured by their functional value alone, the houses of confinement were a failure: when the unemployed were herded into forced-labour shops, there was less work available in neighbouring regions and so unemployment increased. Thus the houses of confinement, a social precaution clumsily fonnulatd by a nascent industrialization, disappeared throughout Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
ni~eteenth century began to be categorized as social failu Th gamed a new social status and increasingly the patient reo e doctor the medical profession. In short, the asylum of the age o:urr~~dered to not a free realm of observation, diagnosis and therapeuti P~SltiV1sm was of Tuke and Pinel it became a juridical space where cs. n the hands . d d one was a d JU ge and condemned - an instrument of moral unifonni I ccus~ the names of those who have gone mad, such as Artaud ty..~voki~g Nerval, Nietzsche and Van Gogh Foucault reminds th' Holderhn, · ' us at w . the hab· It of calling this gigantic moral imprisonment th Tb e are m the insane. e I eration' of
62
63
1
The birth of the asylum The legislation passed to segregate criminals and poorpeopleJrom fools was prompted, as often as not, by a desire to protect the poor and the criminal from the frightening bestiality of the madman. A hallowed tradition has associated Tuke in England and Pinel in France with the liberation of the insane and the abolition of constraint. But, Foucault argues, we must be sceptical of this claim. In fact, Tuke created an asylum where the partial abolition of physical constraint was part of a
_~
.
system whose essential element was the constitution of a self-restraint.
'He substituted for the free terror of madness the stifling anguish of responsibility ... The asylum no longer punished the madman's guilt, it is true, it did more, it organized that guilt.,6 The Quaker Samuel Tuke organized his Retreat so that it had a religious ethos. In it work was imposed as a moral rule, a submission to
order. Instead of repression there was surveillance and judgement by 'authority'. Everything at the asylum was arranged so that the insane were transformed into minors and given rewards and punishments like
children. A new system of education was applied; first the inmates were to be subjugated, then enc~uraged, then applied to work: 'The asylum would keep the insane in the imperative fiction of the family; the madman remains a minor, and for a long time reason will retain for him
the aspect of the F ather.'7 During the 'classical period' poverty, laziness, vice and madness mingled in an equal guilt within unreason. Madness during the
,-.
Fouca.ult's book has a sense of great loss. It state th th Middl e Ages mad people were not locked up· indeedsth at du· nng e I certain freedom. There was a notion of the 'wise .fi e~'poss~ssed aJ character in Killg Lear. Even in the eighteenth centu 00 - hke thej still not lost its power; but in the nineteenth centu~ ;:dn~ss hacj' between reason and unreason was broken. There is dlalogu1 monolo.gue of reason all madness. Foucault suggests ~ow only the\ dlmenslOns that are miSSing in reason or to put it in a th at there are .. , n o erwa th may be a Wisdom m madness. y, ere Human beings have been released from the physical ch . have been replaced by mental ones. One of the main th ams, but these emesofth b k . h· IS ow external VIOlence has been replaced by internal" e 00 Th b·rth Ization of th e asylum can be seen as an allegory on th .. ~ I . . e constitutio f · .. \I I· su,bJ.e.ctiv:ty. ,t IS an mdictment of modern consciousness kw n 0 Czvzlzzatzol1 IS as much concerned \vith the li h' adlIess alld . . pgtof d conSCIOusness In the modern world as with the spe·fi f: every ay labelled insane. Foucault implies that modem fonns OCfl Cb~te of those ~~ .. an d welfare are inseparable from ever tighter c. prOVlSlOn ,orms of s . 1 d OCta an psychological control. From the bemnning interventi. • b~, on and d · · strattve control have defined the modem state a mlnIAccording to -Foucault madness can never be captured, m .. not exhausted by the concepts we use to describe it H' ' adness IS · IS work c . th e N letzschean th ontams idea that there is more to madn . . ess an . 'Ii categoTlzatton; but in associating freedom with mad h SClenti c . . ness e seem to ~omanttclze madness. For Foucault, to be free would b s to me rattonal, conscious being. Though Foucault's positi ' e l10t to he a h on IS a relativi e actually had deep-seated preferences. Critics f F st one, 'How could Foucault capture the spirit of madne~s houcault asked, b· 1 .. Wffi~W o VIOUS Y WIlttng from the vie\vnoint of reason),8 Sh as so . 11 . " . ouldn' t h e, 1ogIca y, have given up writing altogether?
64
Post-structuralism and postmodernism
FotlcaZlI~
Most of Foucault's books are really analyses of Ihe process of'
is a structure of heterogeneous elements such as dis~oursesl apparatus" 'short, the said as much as the unsmd. The institutions, In , nd 1
'condense a general historical argument into a tracing of the emergence of specific institutions, His second main work, The Birth oflhe Clinic, is subtitled 'An Archaeology of Medical Perception',9 This perception Or 'gaze' is formed by the new, untrammelled type of observation made possible for the doctor at the bedside of the hospitalized patient intersecting with a system of monitoring the state of health of the nation through the new teaching hospitaL Foucault's subsequent books, The Order of Tilil/gs and TheArchaeology ofKnowledge, deal largely with the structure of scientific discourses,lO (Discourses are perhaps best understood as practices that systematically 1 form the objects of which they speak,) Foucault is concerned with the ' question, what set of rules permit certain statements to be made? In TI'Je Order ofTilings Foucault argues that in certain empirical forms of knowledge such as biology, psychiatry, medicine, etc:, the rhythms of transformation do not follow the continuisnchemas of development
aWS,aratus contams , . strateoies of relations of forces supportmg, a b~
A struggle over meaning
F cault returne d to some 0 f the topics discussed in Madlless II dIP'alld ou. ' , b k h'ch he edited twelve years later ca ef th , /Crre C· 7ral1011 In a 00 w 1 12 . ~~,~ A Case ofP01Ticide illlize 1911z Cen/lll)" One 0 e m:n
R,vzere, .
When I think back now, I ask myself what else it was that I was talking about, in illadlless alld CiviH::alicm or The Birth of the Clillic, but power? Yet I'm " perfectly aware that I scarcely ever used the word and never had such a field" of analysis at my" disposal. ~ 1
r In his later work,
where Foucault is concerned with power and knowledge, he is much more inclined to talk about 'apparatuses', An -...--".-.~~
f th'
'dossier' is the problematic division between
e
0 f IS d the guilt of crime, This work is trulyf ,themes ocence 0 unreason an , f' mn d' 'plinary in that one can approach it from the pomt a VIew a inter ISCI th I
history: politics, l~tera~:~tq~~~~:~ :~oute ;;:~ forms of knowledge It raIses many Impor Ri " k d the d their interrelationship, The case of Pierre Vlere m~r e
an d where many types of discourse, institutions an powers bor nted one another, To anyone wishing to read a case study of a confr Ie over meaning or wanting to understand what Foucault means among discourses through I would recommend
e:
b~~~~attle
...
In-'I "'i
discourses~
'ihi~i~~~~'Riviere was, in two different ways but in virtually ~ singthle de~~~ 'I n 1835 the twenty-year-old peasant killed h,s mo . er, an ,au th or. uiving
characterized as scientific from what may not be characterized as scientific.
missing was a consideration of the effects of power:
-.Jj
app ted by, types of knowledge, suppor
I
Unlike most of Foucault's other work, The Order ofThillgs and Tire Archaeology of Kllowledge are not concerned with the emergence of modern. forms of administration, One reason for this may be that the structuralists during the 1960s veered away from any form of political ' analysis and that he was influenced by them. Looking back on his early work, Foucault conceded that what wa;
65
"
1~lOdenzi:::atioll._One of the characteristics of his work is the tendency to',
'''Nch are normally accepted. In medicine, for example, within a period of about twenty-five years there arose a completely new way of speaking and seeing. How is it that at certain moments and in certain knowledges there aTe these sudden transformations? There seem to be changes in the rules of formation of statements which are accepted as scientifically true. There is a whole new 'regime' of discourse which makes possible the separation not of the true from the false but of what may be
and the social sciences
,
d h·s brother While he was detained he wrote a memOIr C"
sIster an and I an exp , IanatIon . o f the crime particulars . Though he had received d .
I· a village education he produced a text that has beauty an,
~~~uence, The memoir is ofinterest to historians and others, be~aus~lt
raises so many questions. Frightful crimes were bemg ~ommltte
In
.~
. countrysl'de at that tJ'me dl , but what were those acts saymg , 'd and twhy d vith they speak such a terriJYing language? Why was pamCl e equa e \ . bl ] r Sorel) regicide) The life story of this obscure peasant (who resem e~ u len . has considerable literary value; and as there are so ~a71~te~ret~tJ.~:: it raises the question, 'How do we read a text?' VVhat IS a~cmatJ.~g~s h
the book shows how two conflicting arguments (that a vance y t e ~ rward b the lawyers) could be constructed from doctors and that put 0 fRi ,! , life both of them based on the sallie two different accounts 0 vlere s 1 • I' d tJ'on Of course ' r Jo sources 0 f m rm a . , the frontier between~ ratJona f Ity an ti I
madness is hard to establish, but can they coexist in the orm 0 a par a
I
66
Post-structuralism and pastmodernism
delusion an d th e IuCld . mterval? . Whil memoir a proof of rationality th ~ some people saw in Riviere's the guillotine oth I an. ere ore wanted to condemn him to h , e r peop e saw III the m . . ence wanted to isolat h' . effiOlr a SIgn of madness and S. e lIn In an asylum. Orne saId that the sa . f fact ofpremeditated m ~e Slgn~ 0 madness could be found alike in the ur e~ an m the particulars ofwhat was narrated' others said that th e same SIgnS of I 'd'Ity ld ' PhrepllTalioll and cirCll111slances of the lICI d eDu . be found both in the ad writt . . d mUr er an d m the fact that Ri " en It own In other d th f: vlere writing, the deeds d'one and th:o~is, e act of killi.ng and the fact of _were elements of l'k ngs narrated, comclded since they WI!" a I e nature . .1 de the doctors presented Ri " aWYers claimed th t h Vlere as always having been mad the 'b'lZarre behaviou ' a e was . always . sane. Th e doctors stressed' his Ri'" rasaslgnofhismad'l %ere s intelligence, ascribed to hi fi II ness, a.,,~ers, by stressing m u .. responslblltty for his crime. at was really happenin in thi th.e penal authorities g s competIUon between the medical and ~nminality. Emergent :v:~i:n attempt to pathologize a sector of Intervention and createP Y try was attemptmg to gain a space for its . a new apparatu Th . .
d
m the book on h th d s. ere 15 an mteresting section responsibility th ~w e evelopment of the theory of limited . , e eXIstence of extenu u' . . way In introd . a ng CIrcumstances opened the . ucmg not merely h' b ' SCIences psychol . I psyc latry ut all the social and human I ogy, SOCIO ogy gen u· d procedure. ' e cs an so on, into judicial
This bo 0, k th en glVes . u 'd knowledge such as :nedicine ~ran I ~a of how a particular kind of that the documents in th . p.sychlatry IS fonned. Foucault tells us dOmination and conflict ':i:i~k:~e us ,3 key to the relations of power, and hence proVl'de t ' I chIch dIscourses emerge and function rna erIa lor a potenti I I' ' may be both tactical d r ' a ana ySIS of discourse which book exem l'fi an po Itlcal and therefore strategic. In short th pIes one of Foucault' . , e ' re d ISCover th. . s mam preoccupations: the attempt to . e mteractIon of d' defence in the 1 ti f lscourses as weapons of attack and . re a ons 0 power and knowledge.
DiSciplinary power
I have m . . . N' entlOned several tim th F ,. letzsche. M f th es at oucault s work owes much to stru any 0 e themes that h cruralism, such asrelUtivi dth .........ave :eappeared in poste relationshIp between knowledge sm an
Foucault and the sodal sciences
67
in
and power, call be found Nietzsche's work. Foucault inverts, •.•••• ·\{olh"viifig Nietzsc:he, the common-sense view of the relation between •.'nn'.velr arId kno,.vledg,e. Whereas we might normally regard knowledge as " ;'rovi.diIlg us with power to do things that without it we could not do, j',ou(:ault argues that, knowledge is a power over others, the power to fine others. In his vie~v knowledge ~eases. t~ b.e a liberation ana-I·' becomes a mode of sunreIllancc, regulatIon, disCiplIne. Foucault's masterpiece, Disdplil1e alld Plwish, focuses on the moment when it became understood that it was more efficient and profitable to place people under surveillance than to subject them to some exemplary penalty. This transition in the eighteenth century corresponds to the formation of a new mode of exercise of power. l3 The book begins ,vith a horrifYing description of a regicide's torture and public execution. The author then describes how within eighty years vast changes occurred·: torture disappeared, there was regulation of prisoners, and the new mechanisms of surveillance began to be applied in barracks, hospitals, prisons and schools. _ Foucault suggests that under a feudal and monarchical system'
!k
individualization is greatest 'at the summit of society. Power is visibly embodied in the person of the king, who has unlimited power over an anonymous body of subjects. Under this type of regime the notion of crime is still not fully distinguished from that of sacrilege, so that punishment takes the fanTi of a ritual intended not to 'reform' the offender but to express and restore the sanctity of the law which has been broken. In general, power in feudal societies tends to be haphazard and imprecise, whereas in modern societies the agencies of punishment become part of a pervasive, impersonal system of sUrVe'i1lance and correction which pays an ever-increasing attention to the psychology of
the individual. Intention rather than transgression now becomes the central criterion of culpability. Let me restate Foucault's argument. In feudal societies, under 111011arclzical power, the judiciary only arrested a very small proportion of criminals and it was argued that punishment must be spectacular so as to frighten the others. The new theorists of the eighteenth century objected to this: such a form of power was too costly in proportion to its results. In contrast to monarchical power, there is .!!is~~p!J!za'1}OTP!r, a j' system of surveillance which is interiorized to the point that each person is his or her own overseer. Power is thus exercised continuously at a minimill cost. Once you suppress the idea of vengeance, which previously was the
68
Post-structllralisni alld postmoderllism
Foucault and the social sciences
act of a sovereign threatened in his very sovereignty by the crime,
punishment can only have a meaning within a technology of refonn. Foucault's hypothesis is that the prison was linked from its beginning to a project for the transfonnation ofindi.iduals. The failure of the project was immediate and this was realized virtually from the start. People . knew that prisons did not refonn but on the contrary manufactured . criminals and criminality. It was soon discovered that criminals could be put to good Use as ihformers, pimps, policemen. Foucault writes that at the end of the eighteenth century people dreamed of a society without . crime. And then the dream evaporated. Crime was too useful to dream rof anything as dangerous as a. society without crime. (No crime means no police. What makes the presence and control of the police tolerable for the population, if not fear of the criminaI?,H In short, supervised illegality was directly useful. It provided a justification and a means for the general surveillance, the policing of the entire population. The transfonnation of Western societies from monarchical (or sovereign) power to disciplinary power is epitomized in Foucault's
69
pticon becomes th e m ode!- for all forms ,of domination. th d m P the ana Foucault makes a powerful case agamst e rna e . nothing as a constructive alternative to It. Moreover, prison system, I . that according to Foucault, the Panopncon lS.a •. point that puzz es me IS '. ght and which no one knows. Wh~t, . . hich everyone IS cau . F'" I machl.ne m w.. f this strategy, how do these tactics anse? .oucau t I
thO~e\ffers
then, IS
th~ ongm 0
~ne
.
h
. erely states that all these tactIcs were
:do. ~s not gIve a clea~ ands:er, the ~tarting points oflocal conditions and y d and orgamze lram e . , inve~t,e nee ds, that they took shape in piecemeal fashIOn, pnor to an :partIcular CIass strategy .
.'
Technical rationality
wathsth~ ::~~;~e consci~us subject whodcalculates m:a~~ ~nd e1 pable of 100nanng that reall worried Foucault? Bourgeois thought
What stresses
ends. The subject is rational, autonomous an ca 'Important the s one becomes th e more action. But the more autondombou No,. the work of Foucault has ., f s and en s ecomes. 1 I cntenon 0 mean . th t f Ma.x Weber one of whose centra
description .of the Panoptic;QlJ, an architectural device advocated by Jeremy Bentham towards the end of the eighteenth century. In this circular building of cells no prisoner can be certain of not being observed from the central watch-tower, and so the prisoners gradually begin to police their Own behaviour.
often been
co~pared '~lth
,.; bOer held that
a~tion could be rational
themes was ratIonalizatIOn. e , tr d efficiency of means. in its ends or its means, B~reaucra~:~osns e~se:son was shaped into
This new mode of power, which we can call aImQn.t:;.J~ml was used first of all in schools, barracks and hospitals. People learned how to establish dossiers, systems of marking and classifYing. Then there was the pennanent surveillance of a group of pupils or patients; and at a
In. im.personal,
~utyre~~:a~~jeo:J~~'0f scientific rationality is
SCIentIfic ratIona 1
, ,
mastery over the phYSlcal."n~:
to
g~in
.
e social environment. Weber, followmg
.
lity focused on means but not on
certain moment in time these methods began to be generalized.
Nietzsche, argued that sClentI c ratIona
Ifyouhave already read Disciplille alld PI/llish you will have noticed the likeness between the Panopticon (the 'all-seeing') and the Christian God's infinite knowledge. It is also similar to Freud's concept of the
ends. Instrumental reason cannot tell us anythmg ietzsche and) Weber: lives. In a sense Foucault reitera~es!e :~:;~.o:u~cience itselfis a myth science uncovers the mr:i'~of ~n tifi: ImO\~ledge has brought about a '~hich has to be s~Ptherse o~ld ~:;ns can be calculated ,vith efficiency _ II disenchantment 0 ew , . . b d alues become this is what is called technical ratwn.abty -0 ut er~ St' :f th; rise of i
super-ego as the internal monitor of unconscious wishes. Another
parallel is between the Panopticon and the computer monitoring of individuals in advanced capitalism. Foucault hints that the new
.
about how to live our
bl . t detennme ne e1lec increasingly pro ematIc 0, r . process of reification which technical or instrumental ratIona Ity IS ~e
th
techniques of power were needed to grapple with the increase in
popUlation: to undertake its administration and control because-of newly-arising problems of public health, hygiene, housing conditions, . longevity, fertility, sex. As we shall see in a moment, sex is politically significant because it is located at the point of intersection of the discipline of the body and the control of the popUlation. At times Disciplille flIId Pllllish regresses to a totalizing logic in which
has produced disenchantment. d by the 'critical This analysis is in some ways dose to the °dne mAade a and Max th F nkfurt School Thea or am theorists' of e r.a d b ber analysed the capitalist
Horkhe~er,
W
much mfluencef theY auto:o~ous dynamic of a means-
economy as merel~ onekform a 'bl not only an unprecedented ing~ase end rationality. This rna espOSSl e .
,
•
Post-structuralism and post111odentis11l
Foucault and the social sciences
in the forces of production, and therefore in the domination of external nature, but also in the domination of human beings who are adapted to. the system of production through social engineering and psychological manipulation. According to Adorno and H.orkheimer the calculating , inslI"11mental rationality required of the subject in its struggle to gain independence from the overwhelming powers of external nature requires_ a corresponding repression of the spontaneity of inner nature." For Weber and the Frankfurt School the social forms engendered by (technical or) instrumental rationality represent profounderthreat to human freedom than class oppression. Adorno and Horkheimer believed that even the space for individual responsibility
by medicine and s c ,a hlstones one reads that sexuality was ignored origin of neuro p ~ hIatry and that at last Freud discovered the sexual
70
a
and initiative, which was opened during the early phases of capitalism, is now closed by the admifilstered society. Foucault, too, was worried about the productivity and efficiency of
those instrumental-rational forms of organization which Weber detected in modem bureauGracies and in the capitalist organization of' the labour process. Foucault's view that power cannot be considered a possession of groups or individuals should be understood in the light of
Weber's account of the transition from 'traditional' to 'legal-rational' forms of domination. That is to say, power in modern societies-does not depend upon the prowess and prestige of individuals but is exercised
through an impersonal administrative machinery operating in accordance with abstract rules.
Sexuality and power
Foucault is generally known as the historian who stresses discontinuities. But in fact, when he writes about other thinkers he often emphasizes the continuities in their work. For example, at the time Althusser was empbasizing the epistemological break in Marx's work (separating the early 'ideological' te>."ts from the later anti-humanist,
economic work) Foucault argued that Marx's concepts were only a development of those of David Ricardo and, what is more, that Marxism fitted into nineteenth-century thought like a fish in water; that is, it was unable to breathe anywhere else. Similarly, Freud's work does not
represent a radical break; psychoanalysis is, in fact, an episode in ·the machinery of the confession. (By confession Foucault means all those procedures by which subjects are incited to produce a discourse of truth about their sexuality which is capable of having effects on the subjects
themselves.) In the usu I '
71
.'
true' the prahl ses. f ow everyone knows, says Foucault, that that is hot . , em 0 se>."Uality . I' . d' th . and psychiatry of t h . was massive y Inscnbe In e medicine e mneteenth century Psychoanalysis w a s ' . .' . . estabhshed in opposition to a certa.in kind of sychiatry th f d egeneracy, eugemcs . P relation to, thate psychIatry h' 0 and' heredity. In PsyC ofits activities h ,atry psychoanalysis played a liberating role' some . of control an d" In Foucault's ,oweverha . 1 ve the fu nctIOn normalization. View psycho I ' . . . of confessional ana YSlS grew out of the mstItutlOoalization
civilization V,' prdocedures which has been so characteristic of our . eWe medicalization f
W~st.
0
avera h .' . sorter span of arne, ,t forms part .of that se>."Uahty which is another phenomenon of the .
. / These are some of the . . ' Volllllle Glle: All! d . Views e>'"pressed In The Hls/0l)' of Semali/y,' . . pOInts . 0fth e b 00 k is that sexuality ,'s car IUro lie/lOll . 16 0 oe 0 fth e mam Ii more a .. repression of sexuali posrtLve product of power than power Was ever since the eighte th ty. Foucault states that we have only had sexuality . before that was en dcentury ,and sex ' Since the nmeteenth. "What we had ) no Dubt, the flesh Foucault argues th . . locus of sexual'ty I at at one lIme the Christian confession was the , . thn the. Middl . was concerned with what people did. , e Ages th e pnest activities. In th' e :Olthful were asked in detail about their sexual at penod se concerned only the bod ~a I'lty, .III th e unrlerstan d'mg 0 f society, Reformation th d' y. With the Reformation and the Countere ISCour . . confession the . b .'e on sexuahty takes another form. In the pnest e~ns t" I . about intentio S ? a mqUIre not on y about actIOns but also ns. exuahty b ' b d f well as the bod Th" egIns to e efined in termS 0 the mind as Foucault 'm h.Y ·' 's 's similar to the pattern of change discovered by 'and . . intensifies Co 's h IStory 0 f Crime pUnishment; there also, dIScourse 11ro maconcer .h . mind and its', t . n \Vlt acaon and the body to a concern with the n entions. Foucault's work sho h . training and regul . ws ow In the eighteenth century processes of specific instituti a~~n of hum~n bodies emerged in a wide range of overall outcom on; thocatlOllS: In factories, prisons and schools. The useful and dOci~e 0 r ese ?isciplinary practices were bodies that were of the twentieth' p oduclIve and subjected. And then, at the beginning . SCIence Foucault'century . I th e d'lscourse on sex became ~ matter of sci~nti'fic c : m?ln example of a modern discourse on sexuality a onleSSlOn aI, 's . psychoanalysis. He says that by positing' a
'0
72
Post-structuralism and post11lodernis111
Foucault and the social sciences ""..::;
sexual instinct Freud opened up a new realm for the domination of science over sexuality.
Foucault draws attention to the dissolution of the forms of group identity characteristic of traditional societies, and their replacement by a
form of identity which depends increasingly upon the capacity of the individual to reflect upon and 'articulate the domain of private ex-perience. It is an attack on what he calls 'the represslv_eJ!Y.I2Q!Jlesis' ,
the assumption that the asceticism and wo-;'k discipline of bourgeois society demanded a repression of sexuality, The sexual-repression hypothesis is associated with Wilhelm Reich and the Frankfurt School. Reich's story, to put it simply, is that ,vith the onset of capitalism there was an increasing repression and confinement of (natural) human
sexuality, The authoritarian bourgeois father, devoted obsessively to accumulating capital, hoarded his energies for the market place and the factory, Foucault's The His/ol]' olSeXl/alil)' opens with an attack on this Freudo-Marxist position, He claims that it was precisely during this period that there was 'a veritable explosion' of discourses about sexuality in, for example, medical, psychiatric and educational theories and the
practices that were both informed and presupposed by these discourses, Foucault's main objection to the repressive hypothesis is its reliance upon a negative conception of power as prohibition_ or limitation: Against this he maintains that since the eighteenth century power has become increasingly positive or productive, involving the careful construction of new capacitieS rather than the repression or removal of
pre-existing ones, The fundamental thesis of the book is that sex-uality is not a natural reality but the product of a system of discourses and practices which form part of the intensifYing surveillance and control of the individual. Foucault suggests that liberation is a form of servitude, since our apparently 'natural' sexuality is in fact a product of power. Foucault's primary objective is to provide a critique of the way modem societies control and discipline their populations by sanctioning the knowledge claims and practices of the human sciences: medicine,
psychiatry, psychology, criminology and sociology, The human sciences have established certain norms and these are reproduced and legitimizecl" through the practices of teachers, social workers, doctors, fu-dges, policemen and administrators. The human sciences have made
Irian a subject of study and a subject of the state, There has been an unrelenting expansion of rationalized systems of administration and social control. It is time to examine Foucault's theory of power.
7J
Power and knowledge In structuralism all relations were seen as linguistic b' ' ' A "Iter a wh'lIe such a I'mgmstic " sym d.Iscurslve. model was seen to' be l' ohc . ' ' Iy mterested ' ' b ecame mcreasmg ' an d some th eOTists in power F 1m1ted .. . . oucault' wnUngs are an example of thIS trend, His work in the 1960s focu s " f t hesub'lectm 'd'ISCourse. Theind'sed On Ianguagean d th econstItutlono 'd ,., M~ ' subJect was an empty entIty, an mtersectlon of discourses I h' I '" d from I'mgmstlc " d eternunatIon " ' n . IS ater wark F oucau It s h lite to the , eli¥l'dua Is are constitute 'd b ' m y power relanons, power being theVlew I' that principle of social reality, U Umate Foucault remarked that Nietzsche's contemporary pr . , 'I' .. esence IS mcreasmg Y Important. It was NIetzsche who specified th . e Power re Iatlon as the general focus, whereas for NIarx it was the d ' I ' N' h' th pro Uctlon re atlon. letzsc e IS e philosopher of power a philoso h ' P er who ' k ' , manage d to thm of power WIthout haVIng to confine himself 'th' " l t h ' d d ' W1ma po1Itlca eory m or er to a so. HIstorians have studied those who hel power and there have been many anecdotal histories of k' d ,,' mgsand ' genera Is; contrasted WIth thIS there has been the history of . ' d" f' , ., economIc processes. Agam lstmct rom thiS we have hlstones ofinstituti , , ' d ' h ' h ons, But power ill Its strategIes an Its mec amsms as never been studied Wh
has been studied even less is the relation between power and kn 'I at ' ow edge I t ,IS, af course, the mterdependence of power and knowledge (p " , ) th ' h ' " . saVOIr at constitutes t e strategIc lulcrum of Foucault's lat 01/1'11/1'_ " .. erwork T rad1uonally, power has often been thought of in negative te ' beBYseen as an essentially judicial mechanism: as that which I nnds and ' h I"ImIts, ab th e_ Iaw, whIC structs," ret uses, prohibits and c ays own
. " ensors. It presupposes a sovereign whose role IS to forbid: to have power is
.no, And
~e challenging of power thus conceived can 'appe~~ o~ say
transgreSSIOn.
y as
This is the view that Foucault accepted in his early work b around 1971-2 he realized that the question of power need~d ut by ~eformulated, Hereplaced a judicial, negative conception of po We to ,be ' , VIew , can be seen in D' f\Vlth ' I an d strategic ' one. Th'IS posItIve a t ech mca '1':, I d '7'1" "CIP lIIe IP am ImiS I an lde Hlst(1)' o[Sexllali(v· Ivlodern power operates thr ' " the cons tru ctIon a f" new capaCIties an d rno des Qf activity rath ough h , " f ' ' . . -""'-'''---'' .or t an through th e IImItation 0 pre-eXIStIng ones. Foucault argues that power is not a possession or a capacity 17 It' , ' t eh ' 0 f the economy 'HI S ' su bord'mate to or m some th mg service ' ,not . . e InSists th at relations of power do not emanate from a sovereign or a st t a ej nor
74
Post-structuralism and postmodernism
, d as the property of an individual or class shoul d power b e conceptuaIlZe " . ' t' 1 modity which may be acqUired or seIzed . ower 15 no SImp y a c o m . P. t fa network' Its threads ",~end everywhere -th --, h th h . R a er It as e c arac er 0 ' 1 th t all'sis of power should concentrate not on · .' . " F oucau t suggests a an an 'h 1 f ' ' t 11' n but on the pOInt of apphcatJOn of power t e leve a consclOUS In en 0 . , • 'ft attention from quesl!Ons such as Who h l' I no th er word 5, h e wanIS t 05hl " 'Wh ' t 11' ns or aims do power holders ave. to the has power!' or at III en 0 . ~b h' h b' re conSl1tuled as effects of power, processes Y W Ie Sil Jects a . . . . , 1 h' hi cate the source of ongm of power wlthm a He rejects ana yses W Ie 0 . , . , , , t a centre Of summIt. Foucault 5 VIew calls structure or an msUtutlOTI a . , 'th M ' l1'on of conflict between a ruhng class and a mto questIon e amst no . h ' 1 F It states that the mechaOlsms, tec Olques and ' Sil b ord mate c ass. aueau .. 'Invented by the bourgeOIsie, were not the prace dures 0 f power were no t . fd ' , , f 1 k' t exercise effectIve forms 0 ommatlOn'· creatton a a c ass see mg 0 . ' m the moment that they revealed their rather they were d ep 1aye d fro .. political and economic utility for the bourgeOlsle" , 'ving of power as repreSSIOn, constramt or th 1 or oucau t, en, cancel I' , ' I d F F . " dequa te.' po,,'er 'produces rea Ity; ---It pro uces IS ma -,,--proh 1'b'It10n domains of objects a_llcl_,il!1?"l?_gftruth']oucault remad(s that we often k mad' but we should consIder the fact that - th r h-; ;-, . h ear e c IC e power rna es 'f 'IS If reates and causes to emerge new obJects of the exercise a power 1 e c , "" It IS not ,'ledge induces cffects of power, ; ,. , 1 d ge. C onverse1y, knm kn owe 'bl fi b ' rcised without knowledge, It IS ImpOSSIble POSSI e or power to e exe . !' for knowledge not to engender power, 'ng about Foucault s vIews on power and the want to say some th I , I noW'11 1 F It's constant emphaSIS on power and on role a f mte ectua s, ~ oucau , , 'd '.,' g core to his work, As I Imphed above, ' . d Iscourse proVl es a unllllO ·F 1 h no longer operates through a strmghtoucau t argues t at power " , ' d ' 1 'sm where those lO authonty exert vanous mec 101m . fiConvar d f top- own ' ' t upon the mass of more or Icss comphant lorms 0 coerCive restram , , , I h" 1 differential power, , relatIOnshIps e,tend to subjects. n IS VIew comp ex -" , , . f ' 1 cultural and pohtlcal hves, mvolvmg all every aspect a our SOC13! , . J d ' ' tory) 'subJ'ect-posmons ,an secunng our. manner ooten contra d Ie ," . f ( f . h b th threat ofpunlhve sancllOns as by persuadmg assent not so muc y e , 'th' h ' I' th and values that prevad WI m t e SOCIal , us to mterna lze e norms
Foucault and the social sciences
removed the very ground of truth-telling moral authority that birn C:holmslcyandjean-Paul Sartre occupied, ~6ilcault is highly critical of those 'universal' intellectuals (like know a lot about a specialized topic and then exploit their in order to pose as the intellectual conscience of their age. In he believes in 'specific intellectuals" those who work in
r
iii~:~~~;i.~well-defined areas oflocal expertise, This seems to go with
L
order, , th C sub'Ject as th e knowmg, ' uld not vlCW ," F oucau1t asserts th at we sho , I' If 'l1'cal or 'transcendental subject ofKantlan w11 mg, autonomous, se -cn . , f' \" h Id nderstand the subject as a locus a multiple, ' I d Iscourse, rve S au now U ' d d d d' courses The death of the transcendental • d lsperse or ecentre IS
75
tii
the micro-polilli:[,oflocalized struggles and specific power
e~r~~~~s~p~~e~d:fic intellectuals do not have universalist aspirations.
view, intellectuals now have to acknowledge that the ightenlm.,nt was one particular historically dated and culturediscourse whose truth-claims and values amounted to no i;;;;;;~tlh"n a transient episode in the modern history of ideas, History is ;;!:!
5;"i~~~,'~l1~~i,u~:s::e.~d to describe a homogenizing approach to the past and is often ":.;
with a master narrative. In contrast, Foucault adopts a Ni,etz,;chean or genealogical perspective which treats all truth-claims as '")pf(ldu.cts of the ubiquitous will-to..:.power within language, discourse or
Foucault and Althusser
••·•.. ·FriUC
100
Some currents within post_structuralism
Post-structuralism and postmodernism
e::%.pression of the revolutionary consciousness of the proletariat, the 'voice of history' . JO Lyotard argued against this view because he believed that the bureaucratic communist parties often claimed to speak in just such an authoritative (and authoritarian) way. Nevertheless, during this period he wanted to retain the concept of alienation because he was concerned ,vith the individual, unlike A1thusser, who rejected it as being an ideological remnant from the work of the young Marx." In recent years Lyotard has supported symbolic protest actions because he believes that through such actions societal veils are dropped. But it has often been noticed that this sort of activity, an interruption of routine, gradually comes to replace revolutionary political activity itself. Once a political act is severed from revolution and becomes symbolic, then all it does is produce a shock effect, which is also a stylistic device of many artists. In detaching action from political goals this sort of activity becomes a self-defeating convention. , The younger generation of post-structuralist thinkers are very concerned not only ,vith the spontaneous but also with the subjective. Lyotard, for example, values the intensity of experience and suggests that ifwe are always thinking of what we are, we cannot'let go'. Ifwe are always theorizing about things, we cannot enjoy them for their own sake. In Lyotard's view there should be a shift from the dominance of dry, abstract thinking to a greater appreciation of the emotional. The main message seems to be that we should move from criticism of the present to hedonistic affirmation. It could be argued against Lyotard that he has forgotten that Nietzsche's affirmative view implies that we have to affirm suffering as well. The importance of Nietzsche is that he tells us to put reason and impulse together. Basically, what the post-structuralists like Lyotard are saying is that there is more to life than politics. If we are totally immersed in the political, we miss what is going on here and now. Marxists are always criticizing the status quo in the name of an ideal. Militants are so inflexible that they have no time to enjoy life as itis now. Ideals cutus off from the present. Instead of having a nostalgia for an unalienated community that may have existed in the past we should celebrate aspects of contemporary life - its anonymity, its fragmentation, its consumptionism. The poststructuralists also want to extol everything that has been left out in the totalizing theories. And so they focus on the marginal, the excluded. But for how long can a group or movement stress the marginal without
becoming marginal itself? Furthermore, it could be argued that if all
101
. (th t for 'kicks') then one can get as much e ques . '. m . .th·n the system as outside It. ,'fntenslty actIng WI I ,
attcrs is intensIty
The 'new philosophers' :, , " ,
h t strictly post-structuralists themselves, intellectuals: thoug no the ost-structuralists and have used been deepl~ lllfluence~by. pTen years after the events of1968 ideas in their ~ttack on al arxl:~ed notoriety by making criticisms S of French llltellec.tu . t aCocieties This group, which includes B . d . m and the SOCialIS s · M anas • Andre Glucksmann, Jean-Marie enolst ..n Levy, f the media to propagate thelf Views
9thers, made successful
~se
0
tism of Marx, of Marx's logos.
against what they call the ~~a f the views of the 'new philosophers', But before I give an expo;,lIon ~e more common arguments - about f 'let me enumer~te .bri~fly a fe~~rxism _ on which their ideas are based. the limits and Illnltanons °d E Is clearly express the idea that the of Marx an nge th c the Th e wn·tings . . in the final instance and that erelore economy IS deternunant d termined However, the superI . are in some sense e · ctu
supers!rU res. d ible to the economy, they have re alIve structures are not sunply re uc . a of the most senous consequences of the lack of any.
autonomy. ne. . th two propositions - economiC precise mechamsm conne~tmg ese of the superstructures - is the
. ti d the relallve autonomy r I determllla on an olitical level. Additionally, the lOrm a , absence of a
th~ory
abstract categones
of, the,P
obstruction to analYSIS smce
.
. al
d 'superstructure' have become an
~f ?ase than h e displaced real human activities ey av
es as objects of study. . d any coherent or comparatwe . Marx did not pro uce M ore over, .. res of bourgeois class power. There IS no analysis of the pO~III.cal ~tru~~ of the capitalist state." Marx neglected t and did not appreciate the developed analYSIS III hl~ w
and histonc
process.
changes in the in~ern~nonal state. ~~:le:ultures. And what is more, he importance of natlOnahsn: .a~d nan II'on of science within his works
. .. t The pOSllIViSt concep I' . was a pOSllIViS . ~ the articulation of a Marxist po IlIcs. has had harmful cons~que~chesth°r . tificity of Marxism is said to be cupation WIt e sClen . In dee d, a preoc fth tr lity of human agency, expenence the source of the neglect 0 .
and conSCIOusness.
e cen a
13
. Lenin's theory and practice. We are often
There are also problems 'd~ ti between his conceptions of workers' told that there was a contra IC on
Some currents within post_structuralism
103
Post-slrrtctllralism alld postmodernislll
102
'new philosophers" denunciation was largely based on these
fi subsequent reality of party th ,ry ?r~ of proletarian power and th rth' au ontanamsm and th d i e ~ono I IC bureaucratic apparatu If T " e eve opment of a mtegrate hisdoctrine of the partys;vith ~put It sImply, Lenin, failed to After Lemnism , Stalinism. If'It was possible s account fa of. the I'SOVIets . c~eate a personality cult around himself r a smg e m~ividual to \VIth the theory of historical mate' , ,theremust be somethmgwron g great individual' in hist ) a thnabsm (whIch denies the role of'th h ory, n e otherh d 'fth e 'r an, I e cult arose from t e Soviet system (Leninl ) th responsibility for the inhe~~nt ;:t;~~~ losft Ssoci~,!, itself must bear the And then there IS ' teh ' questIOn of . rtabmsm, substance to offer on the t f socIa Ism, Marxism has little of , I' fla ure 0 the trans'ti fi SOCIa Ism, The nature of that h' h ' I on rom capitalism to b' W Ie IS to emerg fi th councils as a necessary revolutiona
~
ourgcms society remains problematic
One of the problems was the dOff< Marxism and the reality ofth
1
rom
e ruins of
band relattvely unformulated,
erence etween the classical vision of
bl?c, Marx did not realize ~sa: s:!e~whi~? becamepartofthe Soviet nughtproduce an authoritarian and m an~lti?nal perIod of 'socialism' was quite clear that the p d onobthlc state machine, By then it ower an pcnrasiven f th a created a situation in \ h' I . ess 0 e state machine h ,d v IC " even gIven the b I' , f pnvate property the p d a 0 IlIOn 0 capitalist ro ucers did not e' . processes of production and d' 'b' xerClse control over the , d h'lcrarchically organiz d Istnd utIOn : Rathe f, contro I was centrallze the interest of the produc e an exercIsed by an elite, ostensibly in ers, W estern European countri 'J' es have seen the ap d I mlltant working class and th parent ec ine of a I
~ritidsms, They were fond of comparing the dominance of Marxism in 'meaIIing-' '. . w en It IS consumed by tranS . . t? the indIVIdual consumer. A potentially infinite play ofSlgn~ du millStituted which orders society while providing the indivi an usory sense of freedom.
b
161
i
. ·.I
162
Post-strllcturalism and postmodemism
In Consllmer Society (1970) Baudrillard, stilI a Marxist, continues to develop the argument that consumer objects constitute a system of!igns that differentiate the population. 2 Consumer objects are best under'Stood not as a response to a spedfic need or problem but as a network of /loating signifiers that are inexhaustible in their ability to indte desire. There has been a movement away from regarding goods merely as utilities having a use-value and an exchange-value which can be related to some fixed system of human needs. Baudrillard has been particularly important in this context, espedally his theorization of the commoditysign. He argues that the commodity has now become a sign in the Saussurian sense, with its meaning arbitrarily determined by its position in a self-referential system of signifiers. Consumption, then, must not be understood as the consumption of use-values, but primarily as the consumption of signs. Baudrillard believes that it is through objects that each individual searches out his or her place in an order. The function of commodities, then, is not just to meet individual needs, but also to relate the .individual to the sodal order. Consumption is not just the end pomt of the economic chain that began with production, but a system of exchange, a language in which commodities are goods to think with in a semiotic system that precedes the individual, as does any language. For Baudrillard there is no self-contained individual, there are only ways of using sodal systems, particularly those oflanguage, goods and kinship, to relate people differently to the sodal order and thus to construct the sense of the individual. Baudrillard's critique of Marx culminated in TheMirrorofProdllctioll (1975).3 It is symptomatic of his desire to distance himself from Marx's alleged economic reductionism, and the alleged inability of Marxist theory to conceptualize language, signs and communication. Each of Marx's major positions (the concept of labour, the dialectic, the theory of the mode ofproduction, the critique of capital) is in tum revealed as a mirror image of capitalist society. Marxism em~rges in this book not as a radical critique of capitalism but as its highest form of justification. In his early work Baudrillard emphasized symbolic exchange in opposition to consumption, to production and to all the values of bourgeois sodety. Borrowing from the ideas of Marcel Mauss and Georges Bataille, Baudrillard's symbolic exchange is a positive antithesis to 'productive' activity, it is beyond exchange and use, beyond value and.equivalence. Connected with festival, prodigality, potlatch (a public distribution of goods; the holder of a potlatch makes a claim to status on the basis of his
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or her power to give), it is a form ofinteraction that lies outside of modern Western sodety and therefore haunts it like its own death. As the politics of the 1960s receded so did Baudrillard's radicalism: political economy was no longer the foundation, the social determinant, even a structural reality in which other phenomena could be mterpreted and explained. From a radical position on the Left, he graduall.y moved towards a right-wing post-structuralism and postmoderrusm. Theories like MarxiSm, psychoanalysis and structuralism noW come 4 under attack. 011 Sedllctioll (1979) is about these theories that deny the su!face appearance of things in favour of a hidden structure oress ence . Thes~ inte:rretive strategies, these 'depth' models, all privilege forms o~ :atlOnality. Against them Baudrillard celebrates the Nietzschean cntIque of the 'r:uth' and favours a model which plays on the surface, thereby challengrng theories that 'go beyond' the manifest to the latent.
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From modemity to postmodemity Baudrillard grounds his thought in a historical sketch of the transition from moderrdty to PostInodernity. He writes about a world constructed ?ut ~f :nodels or simulacra which have no referent or ground in an~ reality except their own. The first order of simulacrum can be call: d 'early modernity', the se.cond period 'modernity' and the thlr .'P~stInode~ty'. (These orders, by the way, are no; to be read as a umversal hIStory.)
Ear!y ~lOdemity This is the period from the Renaissance to tt;e begummg. of the Industrial Revolution. Before the Renaissance, In feudal socIety C I '. . aSSl'goed to a .~~- ';-.' things mne onI uneqUIvocally. Everyone·Is speCIfic SOCIal space and the mobility of sodal class is impossible. The m a SOCIal space d guarantees . . darity, A ferocious hierarchy prevents d~s?r er; of SIgns IS punished. With the rise of the bourgeOISIe, th order breaks down.
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The advent of the Industrial Revolution moves US into th~ . order of simulacrum. Modernity is the era of the bourgeoisie.' ~ prunacy of industrial production Later with the technologt.c .I . ., 'ztOg SOCIa reproduction replaces production as the orga(l1 of society. The dominant image of the first order, theatre
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and the stucco angel, is replaced in this period by photography and the cinema.
5
postl1lodernity We are now in the third order of simulacrum, the order of models. In our current system, formed after the Second Wo~ld War, the theoretical basis of the system of power has been transferred from Marxist political economy to structuralist semiology. What Marx considered as the non-essential part of capital, such as advertising, media, information and communication networks, has become the 'essential' sphere. The use-values of commodities, the imperatives of production, have been replaced by models, codes, simulacra, spectacles and the hyperrealism of 'simulation'. In the media and consumer society people are.. caught up in the play of images, simulacra, that have less and less relationship to an outside, to an external 'reality'. In fact we live in a world of simulacra where the image or signifier of an event has replaced direct experience and knowledge ofits referent or signified. The new postrnodern universe tends to make everything a simulacrum. By this Baudrillard means a world in which all we have are simulations, there being no 'real' external to them, no 'original' that being copied. There is no longer a realm of the 'real' versus that of 'imitation' or 'mimicry' but rather a level in which there are only simulations. 6
is
The media alld the masses Baudrillard suggests that the mass media symbolize a new era in the old forms of production and consumption have given way to a universe of communication. This new universe, unlike the old (which he argued involved striving ambition, and the struggles Son against the patriarchal Father), relies on connections, feed9'Lcl and interface; its processes are narcissistic and involve constant change. Baudrillard writes that today the scene and the mirror no longer instead there is screen and network; the period of production consumption has given way to the era of connections and fee:dbacl"V live in the ecstasy of communication. 7 And this ecstasy is Advertising invades everything as public space disappears. In a way this loss of public space occurs contemporaneously with private space. The one is no longer a spectacle, the other no
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secret. __ -;_'~ At . one _ _ time there was a cl ear ' difference between an exten.af and :;: mteno~. ~ow this opposition is effaced in a sort of obscenity wh~re e most mtImate processes of our lives become the virtual feedmg ground of the media. . What . Media I . practices have rearrange d OUf senses of space and tune. IS. rea IS no longer our direct contact with the world but what we are ,?ve.n o? the screen: TV is the world. TV is dissolved into life, and ~[e.l~ dlssol;ed mto TV. The fiction is 'realized' and the 'real' beCOmes ~tItIous. Slm~lation has replaced production. B T:~re a~e mteresting parallels between Marshall McLuhan and . au ril1ard s !ater writings. Baudrillard believes that McLujJlUI was nght: the ~e~u~ is the message; that is to say. not content but I"C~~/I 'of the ::d~ IS ~f Importance. BIn Baudrillard's increasingly pessinllStIC _' . ~~tton of TV and mass media is to prevent response, t~ . _. l.nrllvlduals; to place them into a universe of simulacra where It Isunpos~lble to distinguish between the_spectacle and the real. : Et~ll.drillard ~tates that we are in a universe wher~ _thl;!r.ej~ mP.re and mforma~on .and less and less meaning. -'He suggests that ?,e ",'en,,,) ofmeamnglS the .only lorm C ' .m . ' t}'ltke 0f reSIstance pOSSible a sacte 9 _. su~ers from. mformation overload. :We are J'ust bombardeld th .y Images every moment of our lives, and e . formaLbcianoncope with this, the only way we can resist the power of this to take over our lives, is to accept the images o?ly as eds only as .s~rfaces, and to reject their meanings, their signlfi . .Uonsi,der teleVISIOn news. It is simply a succession of surface images, !si~:nifier:,. for the viewers to experience. People cannot recall last Dews because there is nothing to recall there are only images, to .experience. The news is a' collage of fragmen.ted and each Image spawns more, calls up more, each image IS a .- a perfect copy that has no original. The news is imag~s of . Images,. the final hyper-reality. In the news there IS a d~mal of historicity, the past is treated simply ~s a of Images for casual reuse a collapse of everything mt? The postrn . ' IS . one of synchrOnIC . it}'· . . ad em expenence .'. It :stile ~tast!or Its unages and in using them denies their histOrICIty mto a kind of eternal present used th~ term hyper-reality. what does 'hyper-real~ty' sJO • IS a new condition in which the old ten ? h :nd Illusion, between reality as it is and realitY as .It as een dissipated. In Baudrillard's world everything IS
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, 'hyper' - in excess of itself. Being hyper means dissolving the old ) oppositions, not transcending or resolving them. When the borderline , between the real and imaginary is eroded, reality is no longer checked, called to justifY itself. It is 'more real than real' as it has become the only existence. What is the relationship between the media and the masses? Without the media, there are no masses; without the masses, there are no 'mass' media, It should be noted that Baudrillard's formulation of the masses goes beyond 'mass society' theory which denounces the masses as destroying authentic bourgeois culture, and the Frankfurt School which sees the masses as stupefied by a capitalist 'culture industry'. In 'The Beaubourg-Effect' (1982) Baudrillard reads an art centre as a miniaturized model of our current system,lO In traditional critical thought artworks, museums, cultural centres (such as the Pompidou Centre, Beaubourg, Paris) are the devices by' which the bourgeois culture produces cultural dupes, narcotizing the masses, Or, to follow the arguroent of cultural elitism, artworks elevate the masses to a higher cultural level, and invoke critical consciousness, But Baudrillard tells a different story, When the masses enter into the Beaubourg, they do not conform to the official culture, they transgress and destroy the myth of the system. They simulate and play with the models, They do not make sense of the cultural objects, for they know there is no meaning but only simulation. In the essay 'The Masses: The Implosion of the Social in the Media' Baudrillard recapitulates some of the main themes of his work in the 1980s, One, the media generate a world of simulations which is inJ!nune to rationalist critique. I I Two, the media represent an excess ,J::?f information and they do so in a manner that excludes response by the recipients. Three, this simulated reality has no referent, no ground, no source. It operates outside the logic of representation, The masses, however, have found a way of subverting it with the strategy of silence or passivity, By absorbing the simulations of the media, by failing to respond, the masses undermine the corle. In Baudrillard's writings, the masses, the silent majorities, passively consume commodities, television, sports, politics, mass-produced simulations to such an extent that traditional politics and class struggle become obsolete. This is the era of consumer culture, and consumer culture, for Baudrillard, is effectively a postrnodern culture: traditional distinctions and hierarchies have collapsed, polyculturalism is acknowledged; kitsch, the popular and difference are celebrated,
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Before I conclude this section with some c 'ti ' work I must first briefly mention the work ofth~ C~~~:i::B~Udrillard'S Kro~er because he has emerged, next to Baudrillard ,wnter Arthur leadmgproponentofaradicalpostrnoderrtism H' b khImself, as the Sce~leis in many ways an attempt to out-Baudrill~rdo~ TIz~Postlllodem believes that there has been a radical rupture b tw audnllardY He pos,trnodernity, and that Marxism should be ~ee~en modernitJ: and antiquated modernism, The Enlightenmentprojec: o;~d as a, relic, of h as been annulled . We are now 11'" umanhberanon vmgm an era 0 f iljJl , 1J collapse ofprevious. differences, distinctions and hierar: • aSlolZ, of the been a transformation from stable referents to 'fl ti hI,es, There has !he old modern order rooted in industrial pro~:c:g SIgnS', of objects, relations of physical force direct co ~n, ~e e~change ,mmumcation h I ace d by the new postrnodern order f rep d' , as been ro " o_m~ , ~unlca~on.s and signs. Signs are incredibly i~ l'InatlOn, don:man~ pnncI~le of postrnodernity is not production b porta,nt. The prolIferation of mterpellative signs a quantitati d lut Selllllirgy, the leads to a qualitative break Us'I'n Ba drillved' eve opment which ' I" ,g u arsma' (Imp oSlOn, senuurgy, simulation and hyper-reality) Krok Jor Concepts er Subject, Meaning, Truth Nature Society Pow d R ~rgues that blih' ' , ,eran eahtyh all b . een a 0 s ed In the transformation of industrial-co . ave mto a post-industrial mediascape, mmadlty society
Some criticisms of Baztdrillard I want to make the following criticisms ofBaudrillard' to have a conservative nostaloia for face-to-c.ace S w~rk..H~seem5 , r th f: .... ... o' " commumcana h' h Imp les at ace--tb':;;face"COmmuflication-is-superlo T-illi n, W Ie would like dissimilar modes of commulU' ti' roo er/anns. He [, " , ca on to canfo eatures of thi~ pnvileged mode but he fails to take accou no, to the between ~edIa. Baudrillard's theory is close to be~tafdi/Tert'1lces technological or semiotic determ" g afI SOrt of . ' mlsm. H e ab Str3Cts m d' SOCial system and fails to see that me d"13 III contemporarye soci Ia rOm the contested terrain, an arena of struggle ' I'n W h'IC h socIal . confl' --:~-ty_are a k d we: e out. In Baudrillard's world there is no notion of r' lets arc \Vhichcan be chosen and justified in its choice to h' / a!ect, : design struggles. W Ie Society alIns and 1
The most trenchant criticism of Baudrillard's views falsehood has been made by Christopher N ,13 H on trulh and Baudrillard has been deeply influenced byO~~\ e argues that n emporary French
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thought, particularly post-structuralism. Post-structuralism promoted the idi!a that 'reality' is a purely discursive phenomenon, a product of the vari~s codes, conventions, language games Of signifYing systems which provide the only means of interpreting experience from some given socia-cultural perspective. For Baudrillard, and for some other postmodernists, there is simply nO appeal beyond the structures of representation, the discourses, that determine what shall count as knowledge or truth within a given interpretive context. This is part of a \videspread drift towards varieties of relativist thinking in matters of historical, political and ethical judgement. Baudrillard now takes the view that there is ultimately no difference between fictive and other, truth-telling forms of discourse; truth arii:! falsity are wholly indistinguishable. Truth and critique are hopelessly outmoded concepts. Baudrillard rejects any defence of truth-claims in philosophy or critical theory as a hopeless appeal to obsolete 'Enlightenment' habits of thought. For Norris the resultofpostmodernist thought is firstly to undennine the epistemological distinction between truth and falsehood, and secondly to place ethical issues beyond reach of argued, responsible debate. Baudrillard's position leads to moral and political nihilism.1+
Some postmodernist cultural practices
The discursive and the figtlral Having given a (compressed) account ofBaudrillard's main ideas, I now want to consider some postmodernist cultural practices. Many social thinkers have argued that modernist culture signifies in a largely discursive way while postmodernist signification is importantly figural. The discursive gives priority to words over images, it is a sensibility of the ego rather than of the id. The figural is a visual rather than a literary sensibility; it contests rationalist and/or 'didactic' views of culture; it asks not what a cultural text 'means' but what it 'does'. When Lyotard writes of the discursive he is referring to the Freudian secondary process, the ego operating in terms of the reality principle. IS The figural, by contrast, is the primary process of the unconscious which operates according to the pleasure principle. The figural is connected with the extension of the primary process into the cultural reaim.
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Lyotard has asserted the exi .es f desire. In the first, the d' . stence of two alternative econorru 0 into the' lscurslve, the secondary process makes inroads pnmary process For e l F d's 'talking cure' itself to . xamp e, Lyotard considers reu promote a discur . . th Ough the colonization of the u ' SIVe economy of deslfe f . of the primary process b ~consclOUs by discourse, through a subverSIOn prefers the figural econ Y an~1e ~nd the transference. Lyotard clearl~ the unconscious); he wa~:~ 0 ~~~~ (the image-based significatio~ °h the primary process 'ern ts' ~enslthllity, a culture and a politics in whlc . Pinto e second ary process. L yotard IS sympathetic t th 'd process by the prima a e I. eaofthe colonization of the secondary ry process In art and' . H reJ' ects . tn psychoanalysIs. e . th e concept of the s ch " which desire . IP Y e ngtdly hlerarchized into levels for one lU IS no anger an underl' , d . is present on the surface of 'a! ymg essence'. Instead, eSlre SOCI and cultur 1 . now to exanu' a practIces. I tum . ne some cultural . . figural' architecture painting TV 'd practIces which are . , " VI eo and film,
Architecture Modernism in architecture had' b . . 1 founded in Germany in 1919 ~: egtnmngs in the Bauhaus sc~oo were expressed in the k' e Ideas of architectural modernIsm wor and writi . Le Corbusier and Mies van de R h D . ngs of Walter GropIUS, f these three architects h r 0 e· ."splte their differences the work 0 as mue h 10 e . d that architecture was to b . ommon. They beheve e nem; It was t . d eW construction techniques L' 0 USe new matenals an n. essentials. They stressed ~~e~~face and form were to be pared ~o th?" of every building' the ext' ty and the self-sufficient functlonahty . enor was to be th . ' These architects had a faith in t h . e result of the mtenO r. expression of a new un'ty efratIona.!. Architecture was to be the visible 1 a art, sCIence and' d Architectural modernism be tn ustry. the 1950s everyone in th . d ca~e .the dominant sign of the new. By . e m ustnahzed n . ili··th the Simple fonns, the glass and steel ~tIons was fam ar WI . van der Rohe and his £ U boxes, the Internationa! Style' ofMies simpliCity of form and i~ O\~rs, ~he characteristics of this style are its not refer to anything outs~ed -.'u Ifcblency. The modernist building does ie Itse y quotati . . On or allUSIOn. T he postmodernist buildin i the most influential propo s/ery ?Ifferent. Charles Jencks, one of semiotic view of th nen o. archItectural postmodernism, holds a e way architectur fu . . fr J1l Saussurian theories of Ian a e 16 F' e nCtions that derIves 0 gu g. Irstiy, he argues that the language
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of architecture is not, as modernist architects would have it, a language of archetypal or absolute forms; rather its structural elements derive their meanings from their relationships of similarity and contrast with other elements, Secondly, Jencks argues that the codes which are used to understand or interpret the abstract forms of architecture are not fixed or unchanging since they always derive from and reflect the multiple contexts in which any work of architecture is experienced and 'read'.
What, then, are the main differences between modernist and postrnodernist architecture? While modernist architects stress absolute urtity of intention and execution in a building, postrnodernist architects explore the incompatibilities of style, form and texture, Architects such as Robert Venturi like complexity and contradiction, they admire the display ~f architectural differences, Secondly, modernist architects reject the decorative, the superfluous, the inessential; postmodemist architects, on the other hand, are very fond of ornamentation, Thirdly, in place of the urtified city, planned according to consistent principles (for example, the work ofLe Corbusierin Chandigarh, Punjab), Venturi would have architects learn from the urban sprawl of Las Vegas,I7 In this view incompatible elements are laid side by side and work in juxtaposition, Moderni~rchitecture is associated with the functional, the impersonal, with heroic individual vision and expression. In contrast, postmodernists want an architecture which is more responsive to its contexts and more relative in style, postrnodem buildings are in many styles, There is straight revivalism; a famous example is the Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, California, which is an exact re-creation of the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum, Other postrnodernist buildings depend on a disparity of the codes, the contemporary and the antique, the functional and the decorative, the domestic and the public, and their harmonization. Some critics want to resist the tendency to flatten out cultural differences into the urtiforntity of a universal architectural grammar, They therefore support the assertion of local particularities within and against modern building forms,ls In some contemporary buildings, like the Lloyd's Insurance building in London and the Beaubourg, the Pompidou Centre, in Paris, all the 'plumbing' is on the outside; this reminds me of Derrida's inside! outside paradox where the 'pure' inside must be protected from the impure surplus or excess of the outside, But is the Pompidou Centre modernist or postrnoderrtist? Jencks argues that it is 'Late Modern', that
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is to say, it no longer has a clear com . functionality, But surely one Id mlttnent to modernist ideals ofpure ay of functionality? A consideratt~OU fSth ,that the pipes and ducts are signs , l a n a I hows that IttS " never a sImp e matter to define th d'ffi IS exampes lerenceb ' d ' e postmodernism. etween rna errusm and Let us take another exam Ie Th ' ere IS a fascinating account by Jameson which focuses on p, rebuilt) by Frank Gehry in ; Pos~od~rn building, a house built (or bought an old house and built:n~ h ,~:,ca, California," The archite~t Between the old house and th Igl h b ll,of corrugated metal around It. ewa e utltth I I' , e a house remains totall' fi e new gassed IVlng space, Th Id y mtact ram t h ' I k 't e outsIde; you can 00 att through the new house as tho h' ug It was now k d" ki pac age m th,S new s n, The a Id house is the core d th architect's own term 'wr p ~g' , e new house is the wrapper, The d a pm IS rathe lik context: the wrapped can be used as the r e talking about text an wrapper; the wrapper can also be wrapped in its turn, The house, then, consists of a corru at d an existing pretty 1920s' ho ' g e metal shell wrapped around usemawayth h new areas, between the old ho d th at creates new spaces. T e use an eWra d' and ,therefore visually open to and ind' , pper,aremostlyglasse III outsIde, \ In the glassed are th Istingmshable from the former . as ere are d' perspective lines going to numerous contra IctOry ' ' numerous v 'h' , G hry' allis mg pomts, e s dIstorted perspective planes. a d 'II' n I llSlOnistic f' b canfironts us with paradoxical' 'b' , Use 0 frammg mem ers S fth unPOSSI llities ' , orne a e features ofpostrnodern h are: the effacement of the cat ' yperspace (as Jameson termS It) egones of insid / ' vild ment and loss of spatial orientati ' th ' e outsIde; the be' erwhich things and people no Ion on, Ii edmthes~mess of an environment in As ger n elr' I ' you go up the old-fashioned stairs of pace, old-fashioned door, through which ou the old house, you reach an The door is a time-travel de' , hY enter an old-fashioned room, fi h' VIce, w en you c1' 'Id as IOlled room with its privacy, its kitsc . OS~ It} you are In an ~ out that the time-travel evocation' 'I h, Its chmtzes, Jameson pomts IS mlS eadingb ' reconstruction of the past t II' , ecause the room IS not a . t . a a SInce tius encI and replicates the real dwelli f ave space IS our presen ng spaces a th th t?day, Yet it is a present reality that h eo er houses on this street SImulacrum by the process of ' as been transformed into a wrappmg Or q , G hry e has produced new kinds o f ' uOlation, new, inside and outside Jam space, Space that includes old and at . . esan goes on to s Space IS a way of thinking a fd ' uggest that architectur , way a omg philosophy, We are caught I
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within complex global networks, yet we have no way of thinking about them. He observes two features about contemporary America: the corrugated metal wall is the junk or Third World side of American life today, the production of poverty and misery, people not only out of work but without a place to live, bag people .... And then there is the other side, the postmodern United States of extraordinary technological and scientific achievement, the abstract wealth and real power, things which most of us will never know. These are the two antithetical and incommensurable features of America today. Gehry's house is a meditation on this problem.
Art The American art theorist Clement Greenberg is often credited with having provided modernism in art with its most influential form of legitimation. His main thesis is that, while painting in the nineteenth century fell under the sway of the other arts, especially literature, the painting of the twentieth century set itself to rediscover what was specific and proper to painting alone. According to Greenberg, the prime characteristic of painting, unlike any of the other arts, is that paint is applied to a flat, two-dimensional surface. Painting is reducible, in the end, to this one characteristic. Art's absorption in itself is the essential principle of modernism. It should be added that in modernism there is often a desire for absolute originality. The artistic products of modernism are supposed to be pure signs of nothing but themselves. One of the main characteristics of postmodernism in art is the multiplication of stylistic norms and methods. This emphasis on stylistic diversity is part of a larger mistrust of the modernist aesthetic of exclusion. While Greenberg and others tried to argue for a modernism that becomes what it is by purging itself of what it is not, theories of postmodernism in art stress the deep connectedness between what it acknowledges as its own and what it excludes. Some critics have suggested that the postmodern sensibility involves a shift of emphasis from epistemology to ontology. There has been a shift from knowledge to experience, from theory to practice, from mind to body. Some critics wish to describe those contemporary works thattend towards the body and away from the intellect as postmodern. For example, one critic has written that the postmodern sensibility and the art of Francis Bacon, which focuses on the body as meat and bone, have a certain affinity?O The postmodernist painting of Francis Bacon
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breaks with the principle of ft . on the canvas's surface. ormal rationality and shows deSire In postmodernism there is ft . of what lies between rather th .th~ en the deliberate exploratIOn ,h of h ' an WI m art ft T b' . toge",er eterogeneous images and t ' orms. he nngmg stion the idea of pure origm' thechnolOgies seems to throw into que Ie II ko WO cxamp or au arship Th' of the American artist Robert . ere IS the we - a uc ed silkscreen canvases which Rauschenberg who has prad " s d use repraduc . , Rokeb), r"'Ill an Rubens's VI!1lIlS at herr, 'j . tians afVehizquez s ZI 'fa put it briefly, Rauschenber h OJ et WIth painted and other images. . to techniques of reproduc~o:s I~ave~ fram techniques of pradUC~O;g's work postmodemist Tbr . h IS thIS move that makes Rauschend I5 . t ' . aug repr d . tIIlO ern art dIspenses with the aura. The fi ti0 Uctive technology pas . w . t gIves ay to the frank confiscation U ~ on of the creating sub)ec .ti'an of already existing ima ;;; atatian, accumulation and repeti eth heterogeneous imag!es. d arks such as these which bring tog eyr I d rmine man s an technala' mo demist assumptions but als . gtes not on y un e.. . and authenticity. a raIse questions about ongIDabt)' Theories of pastmodemism . ds The first is exemplified by th k m art encompass two main stransocIU '. t d with him, which can be wor of Charles Jencks, and those as coned e ca ll ed c . . The se strand, exemplified in th k anservative-plurahst. C . . ewar afR l' DIS nmp, raIg Owens Hal Fast d asa md Krauss, aug a C b ' er.n other . a1 0 lober can e called critical-pluralist. The I IVfIters for the journ C er:usm by revealing the inslab'I" atier attempt to go beyond mod . I Ioes withi . T I I liSts alID, to preserve s f n It. he critica -p ura . however, . orne a t h e ' ethie 0 f suspIcion which chara t . d oppoSItional exploratory Ch e enze many ft f . what it arlesJencks believes that a arms 0 maderms~. always was thorough! b rt can now acknowledge Itself as s d .' Y aurgeais a d th 'onD an su b)ects tabooed by m d . ,n return itself to e ,. .' Iy . a ertUsm In I onU s)11g umversal horizons of d .' p ace of the uneompr t attitude of amused, believes that we adZa' : and the other writers who Pb gIfidaUsm. In contrast, RosaI)11d alist tr d , e m a y th .. . . al plnr s an of pastrnodernist thea e.appaSItianal or enne ~ that challenges traditional d' . ry,. beheve in a postmadernIS)11 an Institutional power.22
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TV, video and film It has often been said that eve a . f, rm or genre. There is no doubt' J ry ge IS dominated by a privileged o. O d it m arneson's ntind that in the present petI
Post-structuralism and postmodemism
174
is video. He believes that experimental video is coterminous with postmodemism itself. In discussions of culture the older language of the 'work' (the work of art) has largely been displaced by the language of 'texts' and textuality. Everything can now be read as a text - the body, daily life, even the state. The videotext itselfis at all moments a process of ceaseless, apparently random, interaction between elements. It may seem that one such element (or sign) somehow 'comments' on the other, Of serves as its 'interpretant', but this is not the case. The main characteristic of postmodem experimental video is a ceaseless rotation of elements such that they change place at every moment, with the result that no single element can occupy the position ofinterpretant (or that of primary sign) for any length of time but must be dislodged in tum in the following instant. Jameson suggests that a videotext is a structure, or sign flow, which resists mea1ling, whose fundamental inner logic is the exclusion of the emergence of themes. To put it in another way, whatever a good videotext may be, it will be bad or flawed whenever an interpretation proves possible. Jameson concludes ,vith a fable: at one time, long ago, the sign seemed to have unproblematical relations with its referent. But now reification penetrates the sign itself and disjoins the signifier from the signified. Now reference and reality disappear altogether, and even meaning _ the signified _ is problernatized. We are left with that pure and random play of signifiers that we call postmodemism, which no longer produces monumental works of the modernist type but ceaselessly reshuffies the fragments ofpreexistent tC)"Ls, the building blocks of older cultural and social production, in some new and heightened bricolage.D
There are some critics who say that video exemplifies in a particularly intense way the postmodem dichotomy between avant-garde disruptive strategies and the processes whereby such strategies are absorbed and neutralized. For Jameson, TV and video represent in their forms challenges not only to the hegemony of modernist aesthetic models but also to the contemporary dominance of language. He argues that, whereas representational media like novels and/or films are committed to produce the effects of 'real time' while actually distorting it (by foreshortening, telescoping, etc.), non-narrative avant-garde video locks the viewer into the time of the video." Now let me tum to film. First of all, I would like to make some general points about the cinema before making some remarks about
Baudrillard and some clIltllral practzces .
175
postmodernist fihns. Cinema has alwa s·v . been stated byChristianMetz d th Y thllI en pnmacy to images. It haS .. an 0 ers at the . . . ga . ofiexpenence of.VIe'VIll fihn m the cmema _ the dark, th e successIOn c. lfilment - has a great deal in common WI·th the exp mages, the WIsh ,u . . 25 enence of dreanung. M any people have noted a new h 'read' all the arts as we read b~o~o~~non: we are now learning to example, allow us to watch mOVl.e . Ih eo cassette recorders, for f1 • s as we ave al ks We o ten mterrupt our reading to deal with other thi ways read boo . and start reading a few pages before we finished ngs ~nd then w~ return, es read the same page again and a . W readIng. Somenm we submit to the jurisdiction of an a~=rita~a~: no longer compelled to play-back, or freeze the frame There is b. u~or Or allieur. We may one's natural or domestic rhyth· Th a su jection of the work of art to . fr ms. e compact d· . uS similar eedoms The p. . aI ISc recorder gIVeS . . nnclp consequence ofth· m IS that culture is something which 'h appens ' to us . IS reproductive boO e . mcreasmgly at hom , and correspondingly less m· th Th. e venues erected in th e dommant form of cinema as mass cultu 1 e past. ha~ been called the 'classical-realist' text of ra entertainment ~s ema what which derives from the ad u· f th the Hollywood cm , . op on 0 e reali nd assumpUons of the nineteenth - centu ry nove 1and dst techniques athe . a! temaUve practices in the cinema who h drama. What are dOminating model of Hollywood? S IC nfethe to ~e defined against the , 'film th . orne 0 evana t the art , e 'avant-garrl'e' mm and th' d . n practices are: ' , '1 e rno emlSt' fi] Th e art film is typified b the e . 1m. . Y complexity. The 'avant-garde' fiilm • h xplor.ano n of psycholOglcafl . . IS C aractenzed b s0 rejection of narrative causality Th yvarious fo!111 od . fihn's forma! exploration ofits o~ e dr:n ermst ~lm emphasizes the the mode of narrative) Th d m: lfiuhnm (~s agamsths domination by . fl. . e mo ermst IS ofte ·th the m uentia! alliellrtheory of the 1970 h th ~ associated WI . d. ·d ali s were e um . nd m IV1 u ty of the director was e ected que personality a xp to generate his or her unique vision of the world. Some wnters . h ave drawn attention to the fi been structured around sexuality or r th act that the cinema haS mid . . ' a eraround the b· ·fi . n of .a e esrre m screen images of worn I thi 0 JectI ca110 dIstinction has been made betwee ' en. ,n, s context an important MUlvey.26 She argues that mass_::~~:~~~e:d 'spectacle' by Laur~ around the 'spectacle' ofworn ,. . a has been structure with Freud's ego and 'specta eln: Ir:nthagthes. She Identifies film 'narrative' ceWl esexuald· S There has been a move from realist to os of the id. . the latter there has been a hift fi p ~odemlst cinema, and In s rom narrative to Spectacle. In other
flV:
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Balldrillard and some cllitural practices
Post-structuralism and postmodernism
words, there is a contemporary trend towards a figural cinema.
Postmodernist films (Blade RlInner, Diva, 17" Drollghtsman 's Contract) are, of course, in different styles. Some of them (American Graffiti, Star Wars, Chinatown, Body Heat) are 'retro' films based on nostalgia. While in modernist art attention is drawn to the picture surface and to the
signifYing process, in postmodemistwork it is not the signifYing process but the fIxed nature of reality that is questioned. What, then, are the characteristics ofpostmodemist films? It has been said that these films bring the viewer into the film \vith a rather startling immediacy, but, having done so, the 'real' that the spectator has been drawn into is revealed as artifIce. A fIgural cinema which privileges spectacle over narrative (or discourse) operates largely on the model of and through the primary process. Some critics believe that these fIlms suggest the instability of subjectivity. If subjectivity is less fIxed, then space is left for the construction of identities which deviate from the norm. That is, space is left for 'difference'. This is one way, perhaps, in which postmodernism can be seen as supportive of a left politics rooted in principles of pluralism and difference. One account suggests that many contemporary Hollywood films may be read as cultural statements which locate \vithin small-town America all the terrors and simulated realities that Lyotard and Baudrillard see operating in the postmodem period. A reading of such films could provide a deeper understanding of the kinds of experiences the
and challenge the boundaries that ordinarily separate private and public life. DenzinJs argument, then, is that postmodern films echo and reproduce the tensions and contradictions that defIne our time. These films awaken desires and fears that expose the limits of the real and the unreal in contemporary, everyday life. He shows how Bille Velvet, for example, is pastiche and parody, an effacement of the boundaries between the past and the present, and a presentation of the unpresentable. Postmodern cultural texts locate strange, eclectic, violent, timeless worlds in the present. As Lyotard has remarked: 'The Postmodern would be that ... which searches for neW presentations ... in order to hnpart a stronger sense of the unpresentable. ,28 And yet, at same time, these films often attempt to fInd safe regions of escape in fantasies and nostalgia of the past. They search for new ways to ;]Jfeserlt dh, unpresentable so as to break doWn the barriers that keep the profane out of the everyday. However, they take conservative political ... while they valorize and exploit the radical social margins of .. Denzin concludes that as the world political system turns ever violent and conservative, the need for cultural texts which sustain key elements of conservative political economy increases.
Further , reading
postmodem period makes available. Sometimes, of course, critics are
unable to agree on what genre a film belongs to, and some films resist classification; hence they are read in multiple ways. There are a number of popular films which could be categorized as postmodem, and I will mention a few. They take up, in one way or another, the controversial topics of race, gender, class, ethnicity, Japan (Asian) and American relations, and the media in the postmodem age. The films are Bille Velvet, Do the Right Thing, I've Heard the Memlaids Singing, Chan is Missing, Thelma and LOllise, Black Rain and Broadcast
News. Norman Denzin has observed that fzlms like David Lynch's Bille Velvet simultaneously display the two features of postmodernist texts that Jameson has identifIed: namely, an effacement of the boundaries between the past and the present (typically given in the forms nfno"ml" and pastiche), and a treatment of time which IDeates the vi"wing subject in a perpetual present.'7 These fihns bring the unpre,selllalble: (sexual violence, sado-masochistic rituals, for example) to the ";"WE,r'
177
Ceonnlor. Postmodemist ClIltllre: All Illtrodllctioll to Tizeories of tlze '!ietl',pOI'ary, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989. introduction to postmodemist debates, the author clearly outthe philosophical positions of Lyotard,Jameson and Baudrillard. of the book is then devoted to a discussion of postmodernism in the visual arts, literature, TV, video, fzlm and popular The book contains a useful bibliography.
Balldrillard: Critical and Fatal Tlzeol)', London: Routledge, Balldrillard's Bestiary: Balldrillard and GlIlllIre, London: 1991. ~urler.,:J,'all &Ill.irilla,d: From MarxislIIlo post11lodenzism a1ld Beyolld,
Polity Press, 1989. study Kellner analyses the development of ideas over twenty years. A scholarly and critical work.
'0
Conclusion
o
Conclusion
Taking history seriously Lyotard is only one of many post-structuralists, 'new philosophers' and others who attack Marxism for being a 'grand narrative' and mock its beliefin the emancipation of humanity. As they assert that Marx's story under Hegel's inspiration clearly exhibits a providential plot, it is important to ask, 'What is "narrative"?' One of the insights of recent literary theory is that narrative or story is not specifically a literary form. Fredric Jameson believes that narrative is really not so much a literary form or structure as an epistemological category.1 Like the Kantian concepts of space and time, narrative may be taken not as a feature of our experience but as one of the abstract or 'empty' co-ordinates within which we come to know the world, a contentless form that our perception imposes on the raw flux of reality. This is not to say that we make up stories about the world to understand it;J ameson is making the much more radical claim that the world comes to us in the shape of stories. Jameson argues that it is hard to think of the world as it would exist outside narrative. Anything we try to substitute for a story is, on closer examination, likely to be another sort of story. Physicists, for example, 'tell stories' about subatomic particles. Anything that presents itself as existing outside the boundaries of some story (a structure, a form, a category) can only do so through a kind of fiction. In Jameson's view structures may be abundantly useful as conceptual fictions, but reality comes to us in the form of its stories. Narrative, just by being narrative, always demands interpretation, and so we must always be aware of the 178
119
distinction between manifest m . should remember that eamng and latent content. Moreover, we every narrativ . I nd represents a world that.. e s[mu taneously presents a ,1S, s1multaneou I lilY an d asserts that it stand . d s y creates or makes up a rea words, narrative seems at s to ependent of that same reality. In other or distort it. once to reveal or illmninate a world and to hide Narrative, the contentless [, f reality, has a function' it . arm. of our most basic experience 0 collective consciousn."ss 1S a specific mechanism through which the . represses hist . I d·· Th·s is wh at [S meant by 'the politi I onca contra [C(lOns. [ ca unconsciou 'I . II· F actuaIIy discovered the I·. I S . romca y, [twas reu d ,who po [tica unco . b h· . ned . . nsclOUS ut w 0, unpnso through ideolOgical circu ta ms nce Wlthin hill· 'the . d. . m lVIdual psyche' and th lik . suc usory categones as consequences of his disco:erye, Was In no position to understand the It is obvious thatJameson h· b . lSt thinJting: there is the id [, as een much influenced by strUctural consciousness' is incohe~aJ t o(r;:.ampI~J that the notion of 'individual idea of a 'collective consc~n . IS notion, he wou1d say, implies sowe M arnsm . is the story of a fall IOusness' or total SOC[.aI system.) For James on f a world of estrangement a~~t ~l"colle.ctive life and consciousness i?t~ becomes a primary catego wi[e~ation where 'individual identity separation or individuality ~ th thm thought. He would say that symptom of estrangement fi a the !evel of consciousness is itself a the feeling or experience oJ~~ivi~ life .of th? collective. To treat the. 'j', category is to repress histo its If ual Identity, as the main ontolOgical . ry e. Jameson IS antagonistic to th idea of a master code or 10 ose post-structuralists who reject the aster narrati H fin t r code a valuable one and . ve. e ds the notion of mas e . Uses It in his k that Jiormalism, whose claims a b d . own wor . He argues r e "_ o o = · · illy a Jiorm of transcendent int anent mterpretation, IS re • 1 ecpretation 10 d· . F I ... en sunp y rewrites literary wo ks . [sgu[se. orma ist cntiC[S mtennsof tho I d th r an e [ca master co e at·[s a pro duct of its historical m form oftranscendentinterpomten.l. Another example is structuralism, a re ation that th arneson argues that the ' Uses e master code language. th J . master code' o f · . th d is e [deology it works to pe tu any mterpretative me 0 underlying contradictions ':he t ~te. Ideology is the repression of those conceives ofideologies as str a ,ave theIr source in history, Jameson an ideological production a:egte~ of containment, and ofliterawre as .>individualworks 'He tn· tmlffb~nng SUch stratemes at the level of . esosuletl" o· . c [terature to symptomatic analYSIS, a mode of interpretation th at reveals the speCI·fiC ways m . WhiC . h works
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1
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Post-structuralism and postmodemism
deny or repress history. Symptomatic analysi~ is also ab~~ to sh?w that critical approaches usually assumed to be 10 co;upentlOn WIth one another (the Freudian, the formalist, the structoralist, etc.) .share ~t the deep level an identical set of assumptions, they deny hIstory 10 an identical way.3 This method has some similarities with Foucauldian or Nietzschean 'genealogy', which elicits from the structore of a cultoral text that unexpressed subtext or hors texte it can~ot acknowledge. ~at Jameson tries to do is to find certain patterns which represent strategtes of containment; he looks at gaps or absences as specific signs of the way the text denies or represses history. In Jameson's view taking history seriously means accepting some story as the means of knowing anything at all. (Indeed,. I would argue that the more people believe that history should be mOVIng towards e establishment of a rational society, the more likely history will be movtng towards it. By making this link between theory and practice we make history conform to our notion of it.) Jameson defends the concept of 'mode of production'; the 'story' of the successive modes of production is heuristic and the value of the concept lies in its use as an instrument of social analysis. What the concept 'mode of production' is really concerned with is not some story of successive economic stages but the possibility of seeing all the social phenomena \vithin a given historical framework as related to one another as to a totality. Jameson conceives the social totality as somethi.ng always constitoted by a class struggle between a dominant and a labo:mng class, and h~wants us to think of the social order at the cultorallevel 10 the form of a dIalogue between antagonistic class discourses. This dialogue is always made possible by what he calls the unity of a shared code. (It is easy to forget that disagreement is made possible only by a shared lan~age and a comm~n set of assumptions.) The example Jameson proVIdes IS th~t?fEn~land 10 the 1640s when religion operated as the shared code Wlthm whIch was fought out the antagonism between opposing discourses. ~is.toricallY speaking, we 'hear' only one voice because a hegemo~c l,deolo gy
?t
suppresses all antagonistic class voices, an~ yet the h.egemoruc dIscourse remains locked into a dialogue with the dIscourse It has suppressed.
Towards a pedagogical political culture
The controversy over postrnodernism is one example of class stru~gle ~t the cultoral and political level. On the political level postrnoderrusm IS
181
an attack on Marxism. On the cultorallevel it is a repudiati f the modem movement: abstract expressionism in painting the int on D, al style in architecto re, eXlstenna . . lis m 10 . philosophy Most ' pOS'-ernanon d . . th < II . . . uuO ermsts reject e.o owmg models: the eXIstential model of authe .. d . th .. nticlty an mau ennclty, the seutiotic opposition between signifier and . ifi d the Freudian model of latent and manifest and the Ma . SIgn e f' • J I'XIstoneo appearance and essence (the VIew that the empirical world 'ap , . all ' pearance IS caus y cormected to deeper levels the structores and p f th I 'th ' I rocesses 0 e rea, e essence). These depth' models have been repl db f . . ace ya · concepn on 0 pracnces, dIscourses and textual play. Jameson suggests that with postrnodernism there has emer d kind ff! ge a new o atne.ss or depthiessness, a new kind of superficialily.4 The shifr from the penod of modernism to the world of the posnuod b h ·d .. .. ~=e c aractenze as one 10 which the alienanon of the subject is d· I d by t!le [ragmelltatioll oJ the subject. The disappearance of the . ~~ .~ce I lVl subject and the unavailability of unique and personal slyle h tnb uha b .. aSrougt a out a new pracnce: pasnche. To recapitulate pastiche has b b' . J ecome a u Iqmtous mode (in film, especially) which suggests that we . h b alld· . WIstoe rec e to nmes less problemanc than our own There see b ful. . mstoea re sa to engage WIth the present or to think historically, a ref, I th t Jameson regards as characteristic of the 'schizophrenia' of Usa a . H b I· consumer socIety. e e leves that there has been a disappearance of f 0 . a sense 0 hi story.. ur enltre contelllPorary social system has little by litt] b to lose Its capacity to retain its own past; it has begun to I~ e.gun perpetoal present. Ive 10 a There seems to be a random cannibalization of all the slyl f th tAth.. eso e pas. t e. same ttme we seem mcreasingly incapable of las r h. . lOomg representatIons of our current experiences. For Jameson pos~ d . li . uuO ernIsm rep cates, remforces the logic of consumer capitalism Th emergence of postrnodernism is closely related to the emer . ~ present-day multinational capitalism. gence 0 Jameson has usefully periodized the stages of realism m d . d d' ,Oennsm an postrno ernlSm by dra\viog on the work of the economist E Mandel. Mandel, ~ho argues that technology is the reSult o;:n:~ development of capItal rather than some primal cause in its 0 • h . the evolution of machine~~~ ou~ es three fu ndamentalleaps 10 d capin:l: machine. productio~ of steam-driven motors sinc~ ~~4~: machine ~roducnon of electoc and combustion motors since th 1890 s, and machine production of electronic and nuclear-powered appe since the 1940s. This periodization underlines the general thara:usesf I
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Post-stmdllralism and postmodemism
Mandel's book Late Capitalism, namely that there have been three fundamental moments in capitalism: market capitalism, monopoly capitalism (or imperialism) and multinational capitalism. s Among the theorists of the New Right the assertion is fashionable that we are living in a type of society that no longer obeys the laws of classical capitalism (namely the primacy of industrial production and the omnipresence of class struggle) and that therefore Marxism is outtnoded. In contrast with this postroodernistlpost-structuralist view Mandel argues that the contemporary form of capitalism represents the purest form of capitalism to have emerged. There has been a prodigious expansion of capitalism into hitherto uncommodified areas: for example the penetration and colonization of Nature and the Unconscious, that is to say, the destruction of the pre-capitalist agriculture and the rise of the media and the advertising industry. Jameson's main political concepts, inherited from Lukacs and the Frankfurt School, are those of reification and commodification. He contends that aesthetic production has become integrated into commodity production: This whole global, yet American postmodem culture is the internal and superstructural expression of a whole new wave of American military and economic domination throughout the world: in this sense, as throughout class history, the underside of culture is blood, death and horror.6
Jameson is deeply concerned about the incapacity of our minds (at least at present) to map the great global multinational and decentred communicational network in which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects. He describes how we all, in one way or another, dimly feel that not only local forms of cultural resistance but also even overdy political interventions are somehow secredy disarmed and reabsorbed by a system of which they themselves might well be considered a part, since they can achieve no distance from it. While the high modernists were very interested in time and memory it seems that now our daily life, our cultural languages, are dominated by the category of space rather than time. Jameson uses the metaphor of an alienated city to refer to a space in which people are unable to map in their minds either their own positions or the urban totality in which they find themselves. He argues that we should map our individual social relationship to local, national and international class realities, a process that requires us to co-ordinate existential data, the empirical position of
ConclUSion
183
the subject, with theoretical conce . to develop an aesthetic of cOgrdtive ptions of the totality. We ne~~ I .culture which seeks to endow th .ma?~ing, a pedagogical polInca heightened sense of its place in the IndiVIdual subject with some neW .. WhI·l e readIng thIS you ma h e global system. . avGe been asking, 'What has all this ~o do with mel' I agree with . omo rams·' th ' rything IS po litical, even philosophy and hil C! s remark at eve d , r t h · p osophi ' 'T' so 10 acqUire power thrau h h es. ~exts, phil asap.h·1es an • dissemination into and hege~ w at Gramsci describes as dtffuSIO~' 'In the realm of culture and of C:f? OVer the world of 'common sense: to earn a place.foritselfbutto d. °IU ght each production exists not onlY est that th e controversy about m dISp ace . 1 win out over, ath,7 ers. I 5ugg . oermsmad d· huldbe seen 10 the context of ideological s n postmo emlSm so .. about the status, the validity of Ma!:'ggle. This debate is, impb~ldr~ one with that of the Enlighte SIO. The project of modemIlY Enlightenment. But the postmnmd ent: And Marxism is a child of the . 0 emlsts d I th .smyth· ObvlOusly each position on or withi ec are at progress I political interests and values B H n POStmodernism is marked by o~r centraI to how we re-present. th Ow We Con· celve af postma dernism IS ourselves and others. e past, the present, and the future to
An/ .
A characteristic of human bein . . between 'the real' and 'the ide al' Bygs IS that they make a distincno~ the present situation and by th ·.d thle real I mean an awarene"th° ' , ea So . f h rfe e warId could be like. Human beine I8 h Ine nODon 0 w at 1.' . the future and they have the h g thave a sense of what is pOSSIble !U today. Marxists not only have ~~e h at tomorrow will be better than future, but they try to undersm::d :e, this orientation toward~ .th~ consciousness of it and try to d I e World, to develop a CTII1~f course, they realize' that progre e.ve op Slrategies for changing it f .. b use 0 the nature of contradiction the 58 IS uneve . 11, not unilinear; eca d re reversals and painful losses M ~re Inevitably negative aspects, sa TXIsts r aU, but they know that this doe: struggle for a better future fo d not mean th . antee or th at the processes of the dial". at progress IS guar th . . . ecuc IVIllie d th p ~ I believe at It IS Important for people t0 a to e eflect. . rt because education is closely con SUpr the Enlightenment proJec~ conSciousness; gaining a wider, n~~~e e with the notion of a change ~d P r understanding of the wo r represents a change for the ben An er belief in a worthwhile future W.th . d this, in tum, implies some th dation . lout this p of people would be poindess. resupposition e e uc I
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Post-strllcturalism and postmodemis", Reo-vision
Before I conclude I would like to give a brief 'precis' of the ground covered in the foregoing chapters. Its main purpose is not to tell you 'to read the chapters in a certain way' but to encourage you to reflect - and comment - on the issues raised. I began by discussing the three most influential post-structuralists: Lacan, Derrida and Foucault. Chapter 1, a general introduction to Lacan and his theory of psychoanalysis, suggested that Lacanian theory offered a way of thinking about the social and the linguistic construction of the self. We urgently need a model that overcomes the opposition between the individual and the social, because no political revolution can be completed until the 'character structures' inherited from prerevolutionary society are transformed. I think that a (revised) Lacanian model of the subject could perhaps help us to conceive of a different signification, a different subjectivity, and a different symbolic order. There was an account of Derrida's thought in Chapter 2. I outlined his arguments against Lacan and other thinkers and then described his views on Freud, who influenced Derrida's thinking on reading texts, and Nietzsche, who influenced his understanding of the nature and function of metaphor. I argued that metaphors determine to a large extent what we can think in any field and that they shape what we do. Finally, after situating metaphor in the context of political and ideological struggle, I discussed the relationship between deconstruction and Marxism. Chapter 3 focused on Foucault, a writer whose works are based on a vision of history derived from Nietzsche. I gave an exposition of Foucault's work, which is largely concerned with the growth of the modem sciences and the process of modernization. The relationship between knowledge and power, another Nietzschean theme, was also discussed. For Foucault knowledge is not neutral or objective but is a product of power relations. Power in modern times is productive, it operates through the construction of new capacities and modes of activity. Mter describing some of the similarities and differences between Foucault and Althusser, I presented Foucault's arguments against Marxism. I stressed the point that Foucault believed that Marxism was authoritarian and outmoded, a view that has been vigorously propagated by his many followers, both in France and internationally. Nietzsche's thought influenced Foucault so deeply that it is not surprising that he rejected Marx's view of economics, history,
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185
politics and method. For Foucault it was no I conceptualize relations of power in terms of the s~nger feasible to relations of production and capitalist exploitation. e, class struggle, In Chapter 4 I outlined some of the important difti th.e philosophies of Nietzsche and Hegel and stress:~nces between NIetzsche's thought - his antipathy to any system h. .the. fact that Hegelian view of history as progress, his pre~ccUIspretiJectio~ of the ·· . a on WIth the s~ bJective - IS central to the post-structuralists' anti-Iv! . al"Xlst stance: I mtroduced some of the ideas of writers like Del (who see in Marxism an instrument of dominatio~uzedand Guatt~n spontaneity, subjectivity and intensity) Foucault L an Who glorifY . the local, the heterogeneous " andYOlard the E and others wh 0 al ways emph aSIze I then discussed the 'new philosophers' who also d ragro~ntary. Nietzsche's thought and combine certain elements and ~a\V heaVily on ernes from the work of post-structuralist writers. In Chapter 5 I widened the issues discussed in th introducing the work of Cixous lrigaray and Kri e book by . ab out psychoanalytic ' Steva These thinkers all wnte issues, sexuality and . . . . and, despite their many differences, they have much. femmlmty of them reject the notion of individual subjectivity ~: ~o~on: all stable. They all draw heavily on Lacanian and De.d lllfied and rn And they are all deeply concerned about languag ean .concepts. .. . . I e, readmg texts wntmg, JustIce. t Was pointed out that Cixous's strate . ' the subversive possibilities of 'feminine' writing. I thgy IS to explore lrigaray's critique of patriarchy and her claim that en focused on language of their Own. I argued that though Kristeva IV~rnen ne~d a of an ecrilllre fi'mi1li1le that would be inherentl;eJ:eCts. ~e Idea female, she does have a belief in the potentially rev I . ll1!mne or 0 of the repressed aspects of language. It seems to Utionary force thinkers, unlike same social theorists, are ethically :d that. ?,ese concerned about marginalized groups. In their difti pohncally erent IVa they seem to h ave a project that involves psychic, linguistic ys . transformation. and SOCIal I began Chapter 6 ,vith an exposition of Lyota d' . knowledge is now becooting the principal force of r ~ th~SIS: as should seriously consider the changing nature o/~o ucnon, we computerized societies enter what is known as the pastrnn~lVledge as was explained that the debate about modernism aod pas~ ~m ~ge. !t ~partly) about the arts, and so there was a discussion about tha ernlsm IS m bOUrgeois society. Postroodernists/post-structuralists b I.' rale of art e Ieve that the
186
Post-structuralism and postmodernism
modem narratives ofthe emancipation of the working class, the classless society, have lost credibility. Marxism is outmoded. This is also the view ofBaudrillard, whom I discussed in Chapter 7. As we saw, he has gradually abandoned Marxism and espoused postmodemism. Personally, I find many of his insights stimulating and provocative but, generally, his position is deplorable. In Baudrillard's world truth and falsity are wholly indistinguishable, a position which I believe leads to moral and political nihilism. Post-structuralists, I maintained, are antagonistic to the concept of totality and in its stead emphasize fragmentation. Everything consists of fragments; and as they do not recognize a unity against which the fragments can be measured they tend towards relativism. The poststructuralists also emphasize the local and the contingent and have a hatred of all overarching theories. With some thinkers, such as Derrida and Foucault, this has led to a conceptual relativism so strong as to seem self-defeating. It is not surprising, then, that Lyotard believes that power is increasingly becoming the criterion of truth. Derrida, Foucault and other post-structuralists challenge the idea that knowledge 'grows' or 'progresses' in any more than a purely
quantitative sense. (One paradox of their work is that although they repudiate any notion of a general theory, their theory does express a general view about the nature of knowledge.) Not only do they give up humanism's belief in epistemological progress, they also give up its belief in social historical progress. Derrida, Foucault and other modem Nietzscheans see history as 'ending' in the sense of dying. Having lost faith in the progressive character of history, they are reacting against the thinkers of the Enlightenment. They assert that the Enlightenment project of modernity has failed. In opposition to this view it was argued that Marxism, a child of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, is committed to education, rationality and progress. Of course, I agree with Jameson's point that we need to recover a
history of society which hitherto has been misrepresented or rendered invisible. We need to develop a pedagogical political culture which seeks to endow the individual subject with some new heightened sense of its place in local, national and international realities. This is an extremely difficult project. In contemporary societies there is a struggle for interpretative power, and the prevailing ideologies limit the means by which individuals understand their material experiences. The modem culture-industry robs individuals of ,languages' for interpreting self and world by denying them the media for organizing their own experiences.
Cone/usion
187
We urgently need to provide individuals and' .' 'spaces', in which they can deal with subli . so~,al groups WIth pubh~ learn to understand these experiences mma y felt experiences ~n 1 · aflamor . ritten 1eve!. 9History, literature story-tellin th e conscIOUS, C functions because theypro~de discaurs!' a derefore, have impor~nt ,vith experiences by discussing them. Onl ~ oP~ortunities for deahng corroborated through discussion and co/ d XP~nences confirmed a~d ence can be said to be truly exp' e WIth as collective expenenence d A · .' W consciousness is the historically concrete . d CC,ordmg to thIS Vie d ing an . . pro Uction f every hi stoncal SItuation contains ideol . I 0 mean , possibilities for social transformation. ogrca ruptures and offers
189
Notes to pages 7 to 20
D
Notes
Introduction For a good introduction to these debates see K. Soper, HU111allism a1ld An/jLondon: Hutchinson, 1986. 2 C. Levi-Strauss, The Savage iY1ind, London: \Veidenfeld & Nicolson, 1966. The attack, Chapter 9 of the above book, is published as 'History and Dialectic' in R. and F. DeGeorge (cds), The StmclIlralislsJrom .klor.\'!o LtiJiHZ1111a1liS11l,
3 4
5 6
StrallSS, New York: Anchor Books, 1972. F. de Saussure, Course ;11 General Liuguistics, London: Fontana/Collins, 1974. ]. Lacan, Em'ls: A SelcctiO/l, London: Tavistock, 1977, p. 154. See]. Culler, SlmclUralis/ Poetics, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975, p.247. It is important to differentiate clearly structuralism, structuralist Marxism and post-structuralism. By putting these three together as theories of structure (as opposed to action) many writers fail to underline the profoundly anti-Marxist nature of post-structuralism. See, for example, I. Craib,Modenz Sodal Theo1J': From Parsons 10 Habenl/as, Brighton: Harvester Press, 1984.
Chapter I Lacan and psychoanalysis
4 See]. Mitchell, PsycllOall I ' d . . 1974. 5 S. Freud B, d J. aO'SlS all Fe",,,,is",, London: Pengutn, d' 'p t)01l I Ie Pleasure Pn'udple, Standard Edition vol. 18, Lon on. H ogarth ress, 1955, ' 6 J, Lacan, Een)s: A Selecli01 L ' TAL._.-'-.y, ........ /'. ondon: TaVlstock, 1977, pp. I~7. 8 Ibid.~;;~75 :;,q~"S Lacan, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977, p. 92.
,.d!" Ibid., p. 166.
,W')'When the psyc~oanalytic session begins the anal sand talks of hiIIlself or herself as an obJect Th" h Y , I ontrast 'full ' ' ' IS IS W at Lacan calls 'empty speech. n C •' IS when the sub)' ect comci "d es W1·th the 0 b'Jec,t when w"o IS talki speech "d ng comCI es with whal is b . 11 See Laplanche and Led' ,emg talked about. , Study' Yale Frellch SllJdies 48 1 alT, The Unconscious: a psychDa~a1yttc a ter 9:
12 Laca E'· 12" 972, pp. 118-75; also Lemaire, op. Cit., Ch p n, enls, p. , 13 J. Gallop, Femhlism aud P l ' M 'n 1982, p. 12. ~C:lOa"al.J'sls: The Dallghlt:r's Sedud/O. ll , London: acrru ~n, 14 Lacan, Ecrits, p. 134. JiJ2,1¥,JVinnicott, I dR /. . 1974,J!P..,.,,-----130--8. -E~-:--~'-Playillg ._ . .L!L--...!J!.{!!Yl London: Pengum, ,---, . '---'~"'---' -.,---.-.-16 Lacan, enls, p. 2.
i~ {~~~;,at:;s~;:Uft~~d NOllu'llgncss, London: Methuen, 1957. 19 D. Archard CO/ISO . 1984 25 Th" oltmess mzd IIU' UllcolIsciollS, London: Hutclunson , '
~~rtr~' ~s. useful. book contains a brief outline of Freud's theorynaro an,d critiqu: :~~qu,~ofItd,.a cle~r exposition of Lacan and, finally, Timpa s . e reu Jan slIp'. 20 Lacan, Emls, p. 161. ' 21 Ibid., p. 281. """"AK" . to Ihe Readi1JgofHegel: Leclllres OIllhe Plu:1lomell%g)' of ~ S:..~.-?J~J~':(!, 1_.n~'!!ripcII~!l
pmt, assembled by Raym dn.
. B okS, Inc.,
1969 It h ldb on '--{.ueneau, New York: BaSIC 0 of Ge'/'st sKo~~ be ~oted that for Hegel human consciousness waS an aspecft ents 0 Ib I. oJeve nngs Hegei d own to earth and stresses the e Ie rn a our, anguage and struggle
23 24 25 26
Ibid., p. 37. . Ibid., p. 228. Ibid., p. 206. Ibid., p. 220. ?1.1 Ibid., p. 58. makes a distinctio b . gy) and ( 2S- jLacan d . th ' ' . n etween need (a purely orgamc coer. eSIre, e active pnnclpie of th h . 1 5 lies both beyond and before de e P YSlcal p~oces5es, Desire a way 5 that --.,..J'
1 S. Turkle, Psyclwa1Ja/yticPolilics:Jacqltes Lacall audFreud's French RevolutitJ1t,
London: Burnett Books, 1979, p. 67. 2 The article 'Freud and Lacan' is in L. Althusscr, Len;,z and Philosoph), ami
Other Essays, London: New Left Books, 1971.
3
J. Lacan, De Ia psyclwse paralloiaqlle dam ses rapports wee la pers01z~lQlile, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1975.
188
.
mand. To say that deSire is beyond demand mean eternal because it is im ossible to satisfy. ~t is for:ver Insatiable StOce it refers back to the ineffa~Ie to the unconscIOUS deSIre and the absolute lack it conceals. Every h uman actIOn, '. eyen the most It
.
trans~end~ It, th~t it is
Notes to pages 21 to 42
190
altruistic, derives from a desire for recognition by the Other, from a wish for self-recognition in some fonn or another. Desire is the desire for desire, the
desire of the Other. Lacan, The FOIlr Fuudamental Concepts of PSj'c/w-allalj'sis, London: Penguin, 1979, pp. 196-7, 205. A useful account of the myth is given by K. Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983, p. 151. 30 For a discussion of Lacan's phallocentrism and its implications See ]. Mitchell and]. Rose (eds), Fem;l1;l1e Sexuality:Jacques Laca" a1ld the Ecole Frcudiell11C, London: Macmillan, 1982. 29
J.
31 Jameson believes that both psychoanalysis and Marxism depend fundamentally on history and story-telling. See F. Jameson, 'Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan: IvlarxisID, Psychoanalytic Criticism, and the Problem of ~ the Subject', Yale Frellch Swdies, nos 55-6, 1977, pp. 338-95. (:J~ Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957), a prophet of se,'Ual revolution, asserted that VI mental health is dependent on the capacity to experience orgasm and that mental illness is the result ofinhibition of the capacity to e~:perience orgasm. See C. Rycroft, Reich, London: Fontana, 1971. 33 M. "Whitford, Luce In'gara)': Philosoph)' ill the Femillille, London: Routledge, 1991, p. 88. 34 L. Irigaray, Speatillm oILlIe Other 1Yomall, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985, p. 89. 35 E. Grosz,Jactjues Lacall:A Femillist IllIroductioll, London: Routledge, p. 144.
r
Notes to pages 44 to S6
191
7 j. Habermas, Knowledge alld Hit H 'Demann Educational Books 1972 Ch mall IllIeresl!, London: el , , apters 1G-.12 8 Readers should be reminded that p ' h Freud raper nam h NielZSC e, thors' . H eldegger are a convenient fi . es suc as Ction. For D 'd th mes of all , indicate neither identities nor ca em a e na rviceable 'metonymic contractions' that fi Uses, Proper names are se 9 N' r: • re er to problems ·th modern letzsche laces reflextve concern t h ' t relativism, but instead of stepping ba~k, wahi. have parallels .WI ossible, he endorses paradox and incorp ch he regards as Imp, . See Orates reflexivity . t hi wn ,VClttng· H. Lawson, Reflexivitj,: The Post-moden p . In a 5 a . H tchin son , 1985, p. 32. I redlCQmelll, London. U
10 Nietzsche, 'On Truth and FalSity in their ' in O. Levy (ed.), 17,e Complele Works ofFriedn'c/1 ' lfltramoral Sense, 11 G. Lakoffand M.Jobnson M ,Nz""c1ze, New York, 1964.. 'ty of , elapflOIl We L' B Ch' Unnrerst Chicago Press, 1980. roe ry, lcago: ["12 C. Hill, Re[onllatiotl /0 blduslrial RevoltUiofl ' . 1967. 13 M. Foucault, Power/K1lowledge: Select I L.ondon. PengulD, . . 19721977 edited by C Gordon B . h ed blleroz,,",s aud Olher WntruC'8 70 ' . , ng ton' lia 0 6- . 14 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak IT I' rvester Press, 198 ,PP' ma, rans ator's p r: 'D 'd OljGra11l lolom', p. lxxv. I have found this ref; . rei ace , ern a, 15 Ibid., p. lxxvii. P aCe lUCId and most helpful. 16 Bur, as Ree has pointed out, Derrida is so
" ta hor that he fails to remember such literary pro preoccupl.ed WIth me dP lot. See cesses as narratIve story an P . , J . R ee, 'M etap h or an d Metaphysics: The E .' d Derr1da , Radical Philosophy, 38, Summer 1984 33 nd of Philosophy an Derrida see D C Woods in Radi"aIP" '1 I' p. . For an introductIon to • • ~, III osop 1J' 21 S . 17 Eagleton, op. cit., p. 138. ' , pnng 1979. 18 Ibid., p. 147. 19 V. Leitch, Dec01lslnJctive Criticism' A . London: Hutchinson, 1983, p. 246. ,11 Advanced J,lIrodllcIWIl, I
Chapter 2 Derrida and deconstruction
1 ]. Derrida, Of GrammalololD" Baltimore and London: johns Hopkins University Press, 1976; Speech and Phenomena, ami Other EmlJ'S r)1J Hmserl's Theo1J' a/Signs, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973; fYn'til1gam/ Diffirence, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978. 2 See T. Eagleton, Litera1J' Theo1J': All I1ltrodllctioll, Oxford: Basil Blad·well, .. 1983, p. 130. 1 am indebted to this study for much of what follows. 3 Derrida's arguments are largely based on the chapter 'A Writing Lesson', in Levi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiqlles, London: Penguin, 1976, p. 385. 4 For critiques of Saussure, Rousseau, Levi-Strauss, see Derrida, Of GrammatologJ', 5 Derrjda finds the same powerful metaphors at work in Husserl's meditations on language and thought; see Derrida's Speech Q/ld Phenomena. 6 See Derrida's 'Freud and the Scene of Writing', in fVrit;'lg and Dif[ermce, p. 196. Derrida traces the emergence of the metaphor of writing through three texts placed on a thirty-year span in Freud's career: 'Project for a Scientific Psychology' (1895), Th, IllI,rpretaliOlz oJDreallls (1900) and 'Note on the Mystic Writing Pad' (1925).
20 Post-structuralists, generally, favourauth . r of their production, the ambiguity and the lura' ors who shift the textuu Ity Qund. They admire authors like
Rimbau~ La~~?fmeanings, to the. for, Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis, London: Routledge, 1989, p. 108. In this book there is also the essay by Luce Irigaray, 'The Gesture in Psychoanalysis'. 13 Speculflm ofthe Other Woman is divided into three main parts: the first part is
14 15
16
17
18 19
a sharp critique of Freud's theory of femininity; the second part contains readings ofWestern philosophers from Plato to Hegel; and the third part is a close analysis of Plato's parable of the cave. For some abrasive criticisms ofIrigaray see T. Moi, Sexuall Textual Politics: Femillist Litera1J1 Theo1Jl, London: Methuen, 1985, pp. 146-8. T. Moi (ed.), 77/C Krisleva Reader, Oxford: Basil Black'well, 1986, p. 101. A comprehensive introduction to her work, the thirteen essays are representative of the three main areas of her writing: semiotics, psychoanalysis and politics. Ibid., p. 93. See J. Kristeva, 'Giotto's Joy' and 'Motherhood According to Giovanni Bellini" in Desire i" Language: A Semiotic Approach 10 Lileralllre ami Art, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981. Kristeva has claimed that it is not woman as such who is repressed in patriarchal society but motherhood. She has made several analyses of motherhood, in the form of the Madonna, in Western painting. The book also contains analyses of writings by Barthes, Beckett, Coline and Sollers. J. Kristeva,Abollt Clti"ese PV011JetJ, London: Marion Boyars, 1977, p. 28. E. Grosz,Jacqlles Lacon: A Femimst 11llrodllClioll, London: Routledge, 1990, p.154.
~.
Braverman, Labour alld MOIJopoly Capital N R view ress, 1974. ' ew York: Monthly e 3Theimporldnt ~ . questIons are: what . th transmission and to whom? Through WhItS transmitted? Who doesW.the htfli amediu. /' W a e ect? Only a coherent set of an III and m what form . bl e e d ucatIOnal . swersto th eSe questions can fi0"" a VIa policy 4 L. Wittgenstein, Philosop;u'callnvesligatiom 0 "8 I ha~e found the following books hel fi'l' xford: Basil BlnclnveIl, 19' : WlllgCllstei1J's VielJlla, New York: Sim~nu A. Janik and S. TOU~~~ T¥illge1Jstei1J alld J,lSIice Los Angeles' U . SchUster, 1973; H P1tki12, 5 Th ' . ruversity f 19 . ose utterances which do not describe b ' 0 California PresS, . 1 'bettin' , . ut do's . 'J1llng, . g, marrymg', etc.,].L. Austin calls perfo ?rnethmg, e.g. na lear mtrod~ction to these concepts see D. SilV;lID/lveS. For a short and cThe Malenal Word: Some Theon'es ofLanguage a1ld' nn~n and B. Torode, dge e & Kegan Paul, 1980, Chapters 3 and 9. Irs LIII/irs, London: Roud 6 Lyotard, op. cit., p. 17. 7 Introductions t0 th e p hil osophy of science' I • I is TIllS 11iillg Called Sciellce?, Milton Keyn ~~ude A.F. Chalmers, JJ110 1978; R. Harre, The Philosopmes of Sdet~s. Lhe Open University pre:ty" Press, 1972. ce, ondon : Oxford UniverSl
8.
8 Fre.dricJameson has cogently observed that L
to POSIt the disappearance of th yotard is rather unwilling d e great master Ua . d nave ves - they co ul . Wng passe ~nderground, as it were, and may still and actIng unconSciously Th" Influencing our duO . ha . IS perSIstence of b . . 5 15 W tJameson calls 'the political unconsci ' uned master narratIve OUS. 9 Lyotard, op. cit., p. 37. 10 Ibid. p 45 Ab tho . ,. . out IS statement Eagleton com . . pot
;?ti
dIfficult, then, to see a relation between the h~ntiously remarks: 'It IS nd IBM, or between the various neo-Nietzsch P . OSOphy ofJ.L. Austin rl1ist
epoch and Standard Oil.' See T. Eagleto e~~ls~s of a post_Stnl cturrl n d Postmodemism', New Lefi Review 152 J tiA apItalism, ModernisJIl rl 11 But res~stance ~D change has a us~. Se~ ~.YKu~~st 1985, p. 63. . ,tijic Revoitl/wlJs, ChIcago' Unive 'ty fChi ' Ttze Stnlctllre orSClel . . rSl 0 cagoPre 19 Ij. USSlon of Kuhn's views see I Lakatos and A M ss, 70,p. 65. Fora diSC tl ve (Cds), Critidslll oud ,e Grow.:1z o/KlIowledge, Ca~bridge: Cambrld 12 P. Burger, Tileor), oftileAvalll-Garde Man;h ",Vc~ity Press, 1970. 'ty Press, 1984. I would like to suggest that the 'Rester: Manchester Univet51 d after the text oreword'to this book be rea 13 H Marcus '0 th Affi . ' '. e, n e rmative Character ofC I IlYS J1l CntJCal Theory, London: Penguin 1986 U ture', in Negations: Ess 14 Theremayb I ,. e s~ver~ avant-gardes. Biirger's tenn 4 • de' refers to the hlstoncal uniqueness of the avant- the hIStoric avant-garthe 1920s such as Dadaism and Surrealism. garde movements of
:0:
Chapter 6 Lyotard and postmodernism 1 J.-F. Lyotard, ThePostmodem COlldilioll:A RcporlO1J Knowledge, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984. 2 The term 'white-collar' is perhaps no longer useful as it puts together the well-paid positions at the top of the hierarchy and the mass of proletarianized workers. See the interesting chapter on clerical workers in
197
Notes to pages 142 to 155
198
Notes to pages 155 to 168
35 M , Mom' s, TI.Ie P'trale •s J'Wllcce' V' • Po " . L don' ' emllllsm,Readi1lg,PoslmodenIlS/TI, on . Verso, 1988, p.16.
15 Burger, op. cit., p. 66. 16 Burger feels that the avant-gardistes' attempt to reintegrate art into the life process is itself a contradictory endeavour. An art no longer distinct from the prruds of life but wholly absorbed in it will lase the capacity to criticize it, along with its distance. Perhaps the distance between art and praxis ofHfe is a necessary free space within which alternatives to what exists can become conceivable? See Burger, op. cit., p. 54.
36 N. Fraser and L. Nicholson'S' .. . . h . An Encounter between Femini ' ocml CTItIclsm without Phi!osoP Yi d ) Ul1ivmal Aba1ldoll? 17lC Po~: and Postmodemism', in Andrew Ro~s er . bu University Press, 1988. cs oJ Poslmodemism, Edinburgh: Edm g
h
37 S, Firestone, 17,e Dialectic ofSex Ne Y k 38 M. Rosaldo 'Woman C , w or: Bantam, 1970.
, ' M. Rosaldo 'and L L , ~lture and Society: A Theoretical OvervieW' , ~n
17 See]. Habermas, 'Modernity versus Postmodemity" New Genllatl Critique,
r Stanfiord U· .. pamp ere (eds), WOmQll, Culture and Sodety, Stanfo : mverslty ress 1974 39 N. Chodorow, 17u Reprodt~cti011 oiM l ' S 'olog)' o/Geuder Berkeley' U" Ollenllg: PsycllOQualysis aud Ihe oct , . mverslty of Cali fomi a Press, 1978.
22, Winter 1981.
18 D. Bell, The CulJural C0111radicliollS ofCapitalis11l, New York: Basic Books, 1976.
19 Lyotard, op. cit., p. xxiii. 20 Lyotard in an interview with Christian Descarnps. 21 Lyotard, op. cit, p. 37. 22 See the work of the anthropologist Robin Hortoo, for example, 'African Traditional Thought and Western Science', in B. Wilson (ed.), RatiotlalilJ', 23 24 25
26
Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1970. F. Jameson, 'Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Capital', New LejJ Rroiew, 146, July!August 1984. Burger, op. cit, p. 69. For debates between Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukacs, Bertolt Brecht, ~alter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno see Aesthetics and Politics, with an afteHvprd by Fredric Jameson, London: New Left Books, 1977. For a concise description of Adorno's position see G. Rose, The Melat/fhoo'
Somee: An Imrodllclion 10 the Thought oJ Theodor fV. Adomo, Lo~don: Macmillan, 1978. See particularly Chapter 6, 'The Dispute,' over Modernism'.
27 See W. Benjamin, 'What is Epic The~tre?', in IIl1l11linatimls, e~l~~~_ by Hannah Arendt, London: Fontana/Collms, 1973. i' l' 28 C. Norris, Uncritical 17leory: Poslmodemis11J, Intellectuals a1ld the e,ttlJ War, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1992, p. 85. // 29 1. Kant, Critique oJJudgement, London: Oxford University Press,' 1978. 30 J.-F. Lyotard, The Diffemld: Phrases ill Dispule, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988. 31 Norris, op. cit., p. 170, 32 The rhetoric ofliberation has been denounced with passionate ambivalence by M. Foucault in Histo1J! oJSe:t.·ualifJ!,' Volume Onc:A" Illlrodllctio1J, London: Allen Lane, 1979. Totality and totalization have also been rejected by many contemporary theorists; see M.Jay, Matxism and Totality: 17,cAdvenlllres oJa C01Jcept from Lukacs 10 Habenllas, Oxford: Polity Press, 1984. 33 Lyotard, op. cit., p. 60. 34 R. Rorty, 'Habermas and Lyotard on Post-modernity', Praxis Intematiollal, 4,1, April 1984, p. 40.
199
Chapter 7 8audriIJard and some cu 1turaI practIces .
II
1 J. Baudrillard, Le Systeme des obje/s Paris'D "I G tho 1968 for a most useful collection f .. ' . cnoe on ler, ' d Mark Poster o"rord' po l.wTIp"ngs see J. BaUdrillard, Sdeded Writillgs, e . , Kit • 0 tty ress 1988---2 ]. Baudril/ard La Socitft· d ' .. 3 ]. Baudrillard' The MI' e ~rCOp"S0dlll111~/1011' Paris: Gallimard, 1970, , rror OJ. ro UctlOll St L . 5 4 J. Baudrillard Dela S" t' p. ' OUlS: Telos, 197 . , CalU:, 1011 aTIS' D HI G 5 W. Benjamin 'The Work fA' . tho enoe onthier, 1979. , ' , a rtm eA f M ' d tion,m Hannah Arendt (ed) 'II ' . ge 0 echamca! Repro uc • • ,JJ 1I11111101101IS, London' Fo . 1973, 6 ]. Baudnllard, Simulations, New Yo k' S .' ntana/Collms, 7 ]. Baudrillard 'The Ec~'ta" " r,',emlOle>t(e), 1983. Post11l0dern--Cullllre London~Plofl Cpommunication', in- Hal Foster (ed.), 8 , . u 0 ress 1985 130 D. Kellner, Jeau Baudn'l/ard' From Ai '. ' p,. ,01ld Cambridge: Polity Press 1989 aTXlsm to Posl11lodemistll and DC) • 9JF'k "p.73. • IS e, Readi1lg the Popular. Basto . U ' 10 J.Baudrillard 'TheBeaubo~r n. nwmHyman, 1989,p. 180. r 20, Spring 1982. g-EfTect: Implosion and Deterrence', Odobe ,
11 ]. Baudrillard, 'The Masses: The! I . . . . , New Literary History, 16,3, 1985. mp OSlon of the Social m the MedIIl, 12 A. Kroker and D Co k Tl P re d Hyper-Aesthetics,
M Kr k
(
New ~drk'. '; t ~1110~e;1 Scene: Excre11le1ltai Clllttl and arnn s Press 1986 See also A. an
L~ndo~: ~a::Ha:'O~~~aders: Sexuality alld ~"e Po;tJllodem
Conditi0
1l
,
13 C. Norris, Ullcn'tical17,e01)" P d' dJ: London: Lawrence & W' h' oslmo enllS1l1, illtel/ectllals alld Ille GIIIf rl' ar, 14 Ib'd
I'IP·
194
.
IS
art, 1992.
15 J.-F. Lyotard, DiscOImljigllre, Paris: Klincksieck, 1971.
Notes to pages 169 to 183
200
Notes to pages 183 to 187
201
16 C. Jencks, The Language of Post-hlodem ArC/litee/ure, London: Academy Editions, 1984. 17 R. Venturi et al., Leamingfrom Las Vegas, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
7 For a study of the genealogy of the concept fh see E LucIau and C Moufli }{, dO' . 0 egemony' . ... e, egetl101IJ' all JOClahs! Strate /' 11 d Radkal De1110crallc POhIICS, London: Verso, 1985, m· owa,., s a
1977. 18 K. Frampton, 'Towards a Critical Regionalism', in H. Foster (ed.),· Poslmodem Cullllre, op. cit. 19 There is a photobrraph of the Frank Gehry House in F. Jameson, Postmodemis11l, or, The ClIllural Logic of LaIc Capitalism, London: Verso, 1991, pp. 110--1I. 20 R. Boyne, 'The Art of the Body in the Discourse ofPostrnodernity', Theory'. Clliture aud SocielJ" 5, 1988, p. 527. 21 This painting is discussed by Douglas Crimp in Foster (ed,), Pos/modem CII/illre, op. cit., pp. 45-53. 22 S. Connor, Postmodemist Cll/ture: Al1 Introductioll 10 Theories of the COlllempora,)', Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989, p. 92. 23 Jameson, op. cit., p. 96. 24 Ibid., p. 74. 25 C. Metz, PSj,dlOmwD'sis ami Cinema, London: Macmillan, 1982. 26 L. Mulvey, Visual mId Other Pleasures, London: Macmillan, 1989. 27 N. Denzin, 'Blue Velvet: Postmodern Contradictions" Them)" ClIltllre alld Sadel)', 5, 1988, p. 46I. 28 ].-F. Lyotard, The Pos/modem Conditio11, Manchester: Manchester Univer-
8 Se.e the articles by Habermas,Jameson and Said and others in the anthology edIted by H. Foster, Pos/modem Cllltllre L d PI P ss 1985, 90Negt dAKl -. ,onon:uto re , . 1972. an . uge, OjJelllltchkeit 111ld Erjillmmg, Frankfurt-on-Mam,
sity Press, 1984.
Conclusion 1 F. Jameson, The Political U11conscio1lS: Narrative as tl SocialD' Symbolic Ad, London: Methuen, 1981. For a useful introduction to this book see W. Dowling, Jameson, AIlhusser, ""1ar.1.", London: Methuen, 1984. 2 Jameson claims that political criticism is the absolute horizon of all interpretation. Literary works are to be grasped not primarily as objective structures but as Sj'mbolic practices. 3 It has been remarked thatJameson's typical intellectual habit is to consider two or more apparently incompatible theses, show how each is symptomatic of a real historical condition and thus try to dissolve the contradictions lietween them. See T. Eagleton, 'The Idealism of American Criticism', New Ldi Reuiew, 127, May!June 1981, pp. 60--5. 4 F. Jameson, 'Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Capital', New Left
Review, 146, July!August 1984, p. 58. 5 E. Mandel, Late Capitalism, London: Verso, 1978, p. 184. 6 Jameson, 'Postmodernism', p. 57.
.
o
Index
Adorno, Theodor W., 69, 148-9 Althu5ser, Louis, I, 2, 3, 5, 76, 77 America, 172 anorexia, 20 Allti-Oedipus (DeIeuze and Guattari),
93,96,97 Archaeology ofKllowledg,~ (Foucault), 64, 85 architecture, 169-72, 181 Aristophanes, 21 art, 140, 142, 143, 147, 149, 172-3, 185 asylum, 62, 63, 66 avant-garde, 126, 140, 142, 143,147, 148,149 BataiI1e, Georges, I II, 162 Baudrillard,lean, 161-8, 176, 186 Being a1ld No/lzillgllcSS (Sartre), 12
Benjamin, Walter, 147, 149 Bentham, Jeremy, 68 Bqolld the PleaSlire Pri1lciple (Freud), B binary oppositions, 38, 41, 50, 51, 109, IJO, 1J7 biology, 25, 157 Birth ofthe Clillic (Foucault), 64 bisexuality, IIJ Brecht, Bertolt, 148, 149
Burger, Peter, 140 capitalism, 182 157-8 Chodorow, Nancy,
cllOra (Kristeva), 12!_16 158 185 Cixous, Helene, 10 ' I
commodities, 162 3
condensation, 15,4 confession, 70, 71 Z 75 confinement, 61, 6 '62 166 181 consumption, 161, 1 I I
.
deconstructlOn,
32 ' 34,37,50,51,53,
54 55,56 . F 90 ' and Gua rtan, " I Deleuze, G. 93-7 demand, 20, 21 2 3 32-57,90, Derrida, Jacques, '0 '184 115,121, J7
i
Descartes, Rene, I, 0 21, 23, 24, 93, desire, 16, 17, 18, 2
89n
94, 95, 96, 1 Dews, Peter, 7~ 44, 1J5 tii/Prallce (Dernda?'h (Foucault), 67, Dhdpline and FIIIIIS 73, 76, 83, 8~ 97 discourse, 64, 65, 6 , displacement, 15,43 203
204
l1zdex
dreams, 15, 43 Eagleton, Terry, 53, 55, 56 ego, 9, 12, 14, 15,24, 27,28 ego psychology, 7, 43 Enlightenment, 75,143,144,167, 183, 186 existentialism, 5,44, 181 father, 25, 120 feminist theory, 27-9, 85-7, 109-28, 155-8, 160 films, 175-7 Firestone, Shulamith, 157 fort/da game, 8, 23 Foucault, Michel, 2, 4, 49, 54, 58-89, 97, 98, 104, 151, 155, 184 fragmentation, 147, 148, 181, 186 Frankfurt School, 69, 70, 166, 182 Freud, Sigmund, 7, 14, 15, 16,42,68, 70,71,94,119,120,122,179 genealob,)" 58, 59, 75, 80 gift, 111-12 glissCmflll, 11 Grarnsci, Antonio, 183 Greenberg, Clement, 172 Grosz, Elizabeth, 29
Habermas,Jiirgen, 98, 153 Hegel, Georg W.F., 12, 13, 16, 17-21,51,90,91,92,110, 121, 145, 147 Heidegger, Martin, 33, 45, 114, 150 historicism, 2, 103 history, 26, 58, 75, 81, 92, 94, 179-80,181,185,187 HistoIJ' of S/!\1lulif)! (Foucault), 71, 73 human subject, I, 2, 3, 5, 6, 10, 13, 15, 43,45,74,75
Husserl, Edmund, 35, 36, 44 hyper-reality, 165-6
identification, 14, 22, 121, 125 ideology, 38, 76, 77, 79, 80, 179, 180 imaginary, 22, 24, 95, 118, 122 intellectuals, 75, 79, 80, 148 /lIlerprelali011 ofDreams (Freud), 42 I, Pierre Rivien' (Foucault) 65 1rigaray, Luce, 28, 85, 87, 116-21, 122, 158, 185 Jameson, Fredric, 26, 55, 146, 147, 159,171,174,176,178-82 jencks, Charles, 169, 170, 173 Kant, Immanuel, 150, 151, 152 Klein, Melanie, 25, 123 knowledge, 67, 74, 84, 85, 87, 133, 134, 136, 137, 138, 185 Kojeve, Alexandre, 16, 19 Kristeva,julia, 122-6, 158, 185
Lacan,Jacques, 2, 3, 4, 5-31, 95, 104, 122, 124, 146, 184 iack,17,21,28 language, 2, 6, 7, 8, 9, la, 16,23,25, 26,34,36,43,44,45,46,51, 53,55,95,113,118,121,123, 133, 145, 151 Law of the father, 9, 16,26,28,29, 124, 125 leisure, 48
Levi-Strauss, Claude, 1, 2, 8, 26, 34, 36,99 Lispecrof, Clarice, 113-14 logocentrism, 36, 37, 40, 41, 44, 54 love, ZO, 21 Lukacs, Georg, 148, 149, 182 Lyotard,jean-Fran,ois, 90, 99-100, 106,131-7,144-7,150-5, 169, 176, 178, 185, 186 madness,7,60,61,62,63,95,96,124 A'fadllt!ss alll/ Civili:.:alitm (Foucault), 60,85, 104
205
I1Idex Mandel, Ernest, 181 Marcuse, Herbert, 140-1 Marxism, 2, 5, 70, 77, 78, 80, 87, 92, 9~ 101-2, 117,145147161 162,167,179,181.'183:184' Master and Slave (Hegel), 13, 17 18 20, 110 ' , mathemes, II A1ay'68,5, 6, 99, 102 meaning, 2, 9, 10, 33, 34, 36, 65, 97 148,165,174 ' media, 164--7, 182 metaphor-metonymy, 9, 15, 16,43 45,46,47-50,135 ' lvletz, Christian, 175 mirror,28, 114, 120
mirror stage, 8, 12, 22, 24, 122 modernism, 131, 172 modernity, 130 144 153 163 183 ' , , , rnodernization, 64, 131, 184 montage, 148 mother, 25,118,119, 122,124 mothering, 157-8 Mulvey, Laura, 175
Oedipus complex, 8, 9, 16, 23, 25, 94, 95, 124, 125 'd) 36 O/Grammatolo/fJ' (Derr! a , Order o[Things (Foucault), 64, 85 palimpsest, 50 81 Panopticon, 68, 69, 76, pastiche, 146,176,181 patriarchy, 29, 116 phallocentrism, 27, 28, 118, 190n phallus, 8, 9, 16,24, 29, ~ 11 phenomenology, 6, #, 9 phonocentrism, 35, 36, 37 Plato, 21, 36, 120 Poe, Edgar Allan, 113 POstmodemism, 129, 131, 132, 144, 154 155 156,172-6 ostm d '. 130 164, 167 P o ernlty, ' 7 105 146 POst-structuralism, 3, 9, , , 168 Poulantzas, Nicos, 82 power 64 66 67 68,70,72,73-5, '79'SI '82'83,84,87,98, 103, 104, 133, '138, 184, 186 presence, 35, 36, 37 Psych el Po 112 psychoanalysis, 70, 71. 94, 117, 118,
Nambikwara, 40 narrative, 135, 136, 137, 145, 146, 153, 178-9 122 173 nature-cuIture dichotomy, 15,38,39, Rauschenberg, Robert, 40,43,49, 110, 120 reading, 52 need, 20, 21 real order 26 96 'new philosophers', 103, 104, 105 recognitio~, 13, 18 106, 185 ' Reich, Wilhelm, 72, 93, 190n Nietzsche, Friedrich 4 45 46 52 representability, 43 53,55,58,66,69,737585 see a/so, sublime 90, 105, 112, 121, 151 ' repressive hypothesis, 72 154, 184, 185 ' Rosaldo wlichelle 157 , ' 39 40 Rousseau,]ean_]acqu es , ~ , Norris, Christopher, 55, 56,152 167 168 ' , rules, 139
12,
mi,
'Note on the Mystic Writing Pad' (Freud),42
SanreJ I ean-Pau,I 2 I 12 ' 13, 16,75, 103
206
Index
Saussure, Ferdinand de, 2, 3, 10,33,
36,41 schizophrenia, 95, 96, 146-7 schools, 68, 71, 104 secondary revision, 43 self, 9, 12, 14, 23, 25, 158 semiotic (Kristeva), 123, 124, 126 sex, 68 sexuality, 70-2,119,175 sign, 2, 3,10,34,35,44,162,167, 174 signifier/signified, 2, 3, 9, 10, 11, 24,
33,34,35,41,44,52 simulacra, 163, 164, 165 SOIlS ratllrf! (Derrida), 33 space, 49, 182 SpeCllill1ll (Irigaray), 28, 120 speech, 39, 40, 41,112 Spivak, Gayatri, 50 state, 79, 83, 84, 91, 101, 104, 137 structuralism, 1,6,38,39,40,179 sublime (Kant), 150, 151, 152 supplement, 38, 39
surveillance, 62, 67, 68, 72, 76
symbolic order, 23, 24, 25,28, 95, 117,119,123,124,125,126 SJ'I1lPOSill1l1 (Plato), 21 technical rationality, 69 theatre,
114,5
time, 48, 49, 114, 174, 182 trace, 33, 34
unconscious, 8, 9, 11, 14, 15, 16, 23,
26,43,44,93,94,99,112, 117,182 undecidability, 52, 54 video, 174 voice, 36, 37, 112 Weber, Ma.x, 69, 70 Winnicott, D.W., 12, 123 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 134, 150, 151 work, 18,48,61,62 writing, 36, 39, 40, 41, 42,111,112, 114