Feminist Poetics

Performance, Histories

Terry Threadgold

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134971428
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Feminist Poetics in concerned with all of these questions, but also with the issue of rewriting an older poetics for what it does not say about the marginalisation of the feminine. The first half of the book traces the trajectory of a particular, feminine, academic subject learning to find her voice. The second half uses that differently disciplined voice to re-read the textual traces of the Governor murder stories, murders committed against white women and children by black men in Australia in 1900. This book is a feminist poetics for those who are engaged in the teaching of literacies, and in the making of Knowledge about literacies.

Chapter 1

Feminist poetics

METALANGUAGE AND REWRITING

It is now both a feminist and a poststructuralist/postmodernist catch-cry, in some places, that one does not analyse texts, one rewrites them, one does not have an objective metalanguage, one does not use a theory, one performs one’s critique. Critique is itself a poiesis, a making. In feminist theories and practices what has been at issue is the rewriting of patriarchal knowledges (Caine et al. 1988). I want to suggest that there are also seductions involved in allowing oneself to be positioned totally by the discourses and genres of rewriting and refusal of metalanguages, the seductions of an anti-science metaphysics (Haraway 1991b). If we have accepted, in the postmodernist context in which we now work in the humanities, that science and modernist theory are stories told from some body’s position, stories that can be rewritten, then I think we must also accept that stories are theories, and that they always involve a metalinguistic critique of the stories they rewrite.

To accept this means to rewrite the notion of metalanguage, and perhaps to reconsider some modernist theory, in ways that may make it useful again for an explicit feminist critique. Any such undertaking also forces a rethinking of the politics and ‘poiesis of rewriting’. That politics and poiesis is, after all, at least in part derived from the work of male theorists. And it owes much more than it ever admits to the histories and disjunctions of its production in relation to an older poetics, rhetoric and hermeneutics. Nor does it ever actually function without a metalanguage as it claims to do. There is much that a feminist poetics—by which I mean here a feminist work on and with texts—can learn from rereading and rewriting the theories and practices of poetics and poiesis against one another. To rethink poetics in these ways suggests a variety of other possible strategies and metaphors for making new feminist theories which will speak and write what the older poetics ‘does not know it says’. It will also transform the aporias of masculinist ‘rewriting’, what Foucault called commentary, into new concepts of metalanguage and theory for use in a feminist poetics of explicit textual analysis and critique.

That is why in this book I want to question the patriarchal nature of the linguistic/structuralist contexts in which the production and reception of texts has been understood historically, but also to suggest that aspects of linguistics and structuralism can again be made functional for an embodied feminist textual practice. This involves rethinking a version of linguistics to challenge also the current feminist and theoretical anxiety about metalanguage. It also involves challenging the (by now) almost institutionalised belief in some quarters that women are oppressed by language (Threadgold 1988).

Why then does the title of a book calling itself feminist poetics juxtapose the terms poiesis, performance and history?

If we take the term ‘poetics’ to mean ‘work on and with texts’ then there have been a number of generalised movements or intellectual frameworks in the twentieth century that qualify as poetics in this very general sense. All of them share an interest in some of the following questions: What is a text? How is it internally structured? How do texts mean? What is a writer? What is a reader? What is the relationship between verbal and non-verbal, ordinary and aesthetic texts, and so on? What do these things have to do with the social world, with culture, with history, and with subjectivity and the body? There has been a general, but uneven, progression in the twentieth century, from theories which have concentrated on the first two of these questions to theories which have gradually tried to grapple with all of them. Russian formalism and Roman Jakobson’s poetics, narrative poetics in its standard forms, and structuralism generally, concentrated on the problem of understanding the internal structure and nature of verbal (and aesthetic) texts. Theories like those of Prague School poetics, ethnographic, sociolinguistic, pragmatic and anthropological theories, dominant modes of semiotics, and poststructuralist and deconstructive approaches, as well as reader-response theory and certain kinds of social semiotic perspectives (Kress and van Leeuwen 1990; O’Toole 1994) and feminist theory (de Lauretis 1984; Gatens 1989; Butler 1990; Grosz 1994), have gradually extended the meaning of text to include, for example, the visual, the filmic, the spatial, the corporeal. The source of textual meaning has been relocated in negotiations between readers, writers and texts. That has necessitated a theorisation of the subjects who read and write, first a deconstruction of the humanist knowing subject (Henriques et al. 1984), then a gendering and sexing of the subject, and finally a recognition of the importance of her colour. In the process the older construct of social class has been radically rewritten (Bourdieu 1980/1990; Finch 1993), and the metaphor of performativity has emerged to focus attention on the subject’s (compulsory) performance of gender and the possibilities for performing gender differently (Butler 1993).

As the understanding of these processes became more processual, less focused on cultural and semiotic products and more on cultural and semiotic processes, the dynamic term ‘poiesis’, making, seemed for a time more appropriate than the static term ‘poetics’. But that very focus on the dynamics of the processes of cultural making also foregrounded the need for histories, histories of the making of texts and of the subjects who, in negotiation with textual processes, made or were made themselves. Various terms have been coined for the products of those histories. They have been conceptualised, among other terms, as accumulated cultural, economic or symbolic capital (Bourdieu 1980/1990), ‘members’ resources’ (Fairclough 1989), ‘linguistic potential’ (Halliday 1978), codes (Eco 1979), intertextuality and interdiscursivity (Bakhtin 1981; Kristeva 1970; Pêcheux 1975/1982). In general terms these theoretical categories have been to do with explaining the semiotic and discursive possibility of cultural exchanges between networks of bodies and networks of texts, although Bakhtin, Kristeva and Bourdieu are the only theorists among these who deal with the body in any explicit way. In a good deal of poststructuralist work the categories of genre (Derrida 1980), narrative (Lyotard 1979/1984), discourse (Foucault 1973), myth (Barthes 1973) and metaphor (Ricoeur 1978) have also been privileged as constituting some combination of the resources subjects use to make texts with. These are resources derived from experience in and with other texts, large chunks of ready-made text to be used again as the occasion arises. The references I have just given are at least the source of my own use of this terminology (Kress and Threadgold 1988) but the terms, along with ‘subjectivity’ and ‘intertextuality’, have become a kind of poststructuralist metalanguage for focused work on language and textuality in a whole range of interdisciplinary places—women’s studies, cultural studies, literary studies, and radical and feminist pedagogy to name only the most obvious. A system of intertextual resources—multi-medial, understood to be differentiated according to the subject’s location in the social and cultural space, limited or constrained by the habitus of daily life, by class, race and gender—is put in the place of the linguist’s system of language. Texts are now understood to be constructed chunk by chunk, intertextually, not word by word, and there can thus be no link between text and context except through the intertextual resources of this discursively produced subjectivity.

What this has accomplished is a radical deconstruction of many of the tenets of the older structuralist poetics and associated theories of text/context relations which depended on a prioritising of the verbal (and often also the literary) text in relation to a non-verbal context. In the process, in a number of poststructuralist and interdisciplinary contexts, including academic feminisms, linguistics as a discipline and as a methodology for the analysis of cultural processes and products has been largely discredited, along with many other specific forms of textual analysis and criticism. Paradoxically, at the same time there has been a general acceptance of the fundamental importance of language and other semiotic processes in the constitution of the social world, the culture and subjectivity.

Both moves have been aspects of the radical critique of the disciplines which followed Foucault’s (1969/1972, 1975/1982) identification of disciplinary structures as technologies of power and subjection (in both senses, control and the making of subjects). Derrida’s (1967/1976b, 1978) deconstruction of the languages of the social sciences and of the binary narrative structure of Western epistemology provided a second focus for this critique. Almost contemporary with this work was the struggle within semiotics over the verbal/non-verbal binary which resulted in the discursive routing of a linguistics that was perceived to be a colonising discourse. Linguistics was for a time the dominant discourse in the field of semiotics, but at the point where the ‘non-verbal’ (context) was recognised as semiotic in its own right (culture as systems of interrelated semiotics), linguistics was decisively rejected in a series of protracted discursive encounters. My accounts of Foucault and de Lauretis in this book record some aspects of the complexities of these encounters.

This conjunction of often disjunctive theoretical agendas has had profound effects, not least on feminist theory and the work now done in Women’s Studies and Cultural Studies. Linguistics, like all the other major disciplines, has come to be ‘read’ as a particular construction of knowledge, of a specifically modernist, patriarchal and gender or sex-specific kind, an objectifying metalanguage. This is, of course, not true of the work that continues in linguistics itself, or of the work of feminist linguists, which has taken much of this poststructuralist work on board and made good use of it (Mills 1995). Elsewhere, though, it has implicated all the older forms of poetics and textual analysis, which derived many of their fundamental arguments and modes of analysis from specific kinds of linguistics. It has also produced new forms of interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary alliances, and focused textual work on almost every kind of textual semiotic but the specifically linguistic.

SUBJECTIVITY, BODY, PERFORMATIVITY

From the discursively produced body we have moved to a focus on the body as signifying practice, branded by the other signifying practices with which it engages. This concept of the body has come to be among the most powerful resources for feminist work in certain contexts in recent years. Much of that work is strongly influenced by psychoanalysis. At various points in this book I have also questioned that dependency, quite deliberately engaging with other theories of the body, derived from different paradigms, in order to try to write back in some of the materialist and sociological focus (the focus on the semiotic apparatus) that it seems to me some of these more recent theories (or at least their current uses) have lost touch with. That is why in Chapter 3 I have used de Lauretis’s Peircean semiotic of habit-change, linked it with Bourdieu’s work on habitus, and then gone looking in Chapter 5 for a linguist/semiotician (Rossi-Landi) whose work would say some of these things again from somewhere else.

I have also been concerned, however, to trace the feminist concern with subjectivity, with identity and location, and to trace it as a rhetorical and theoretical response to scientific and masculinist pretensions to objectivity and impartiality, and to attempts to elide the self, the body and sexuality, not only in the making of texts and in theorising about that making, but also in the everyday practices through which certain types of masculinity and femininity are constructed. This dialogic response of feminist theory to the scientific metalanguages of patriarchal theory, and the fictional objectivity of patriarchal textual productions (including masculinities of various kinds), results in attempts in feminist writings and theories to name and specify identities and the positions from which texts are written, read and made. These recognise that ‘identity’ is discursively produced, and that it is not one; that it is a network of multiple positions, constructed in and through many chains of signification, always realised in texts, enacted and performed, read and written, heard and spoken, in verbal, visual, graphic, photographic, filmic, televisual and embodied forms, to name just some. In Chapter 2 I historicise these concerns, explore the multiple identities of Newton making science. I look at the ways in which his texts and his selves are discursively constructed in complex dialogic and institutional contexts and the way his texts and the textual generic practice they give rise to are disembodied. I want to de-reify the subject of patriarchal science, and use feminist theory to do it with.

I also want, in this book, to use feminist understandings of biology and sexual difference as themselves discursive and textual constructions. The difficulties associated with the understanding of ‘construction’ and the relation of ‘construction’ to biology or sex have been carefully articulated by recent feminist work, which has tried to relocate sex as performance, iterable and normative, and always constitutively unstable:

Crucially then, construction is neither a single act nor a causal process initiated by a subject and culminating in a set of fixed effects. Construction not only takes place in time, but is itself a temporal process which operates through the reiteration of norms; sex is both produced and destabilized in the course of this reiteration. As a sedimented effect of a reiterative or ritual practice, sex acquires its naturalized effect, and, yet, it is also by virtue of this reiteration that gaps and fissures are opened up as the constitutive instabilities in such constructions, as that which escapes or exceeds the norm, as that which cannot be wholly defined or fixed by the repetitive labor of that norm. This instability is the deconstituting possibility in the very process of repetition, the power that undoes the very effects by which ‘sex’ is stabilized, the possibility to put the consolidation of the norms of ‘sex’ into a potentially productive crisis.

(Butler 1993:10)

Sexuality, then, is not a fixed biological origin, but nor is it as primary as much psychoanalytical feminism has argued. Freud argued that the superego was the psychic agency which regulated sexuality, the interiorised judge, which produced socially ideal ‘men’ and ‘women’. Lacan intervened at this point to argue that it was the symbolic itself, the set of laws that are language, which compel the performance of socially ratified versions of ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’. Much psychoanalytic feminism has taken this position as a starting point, arguing that sexual difference is as primary as language, that there is no speaking, no writing, no listening, no reading without the mediation and the presupposition of sexual difference. This has also tended to produce the claim that sexual difference is somehow more fundamental than other kinds of difference. Butler (1993:181) suggests that this has led to the assumption that there is something called ‘sexual difference’ that is itself unmarked by race, so that white sexual difference becomes the norm, and whiteness itself fails to be categorised as a form of racial difference. Butler’s radical rewriting of the Lacanian symbolic to include ‘racializing norms’ is in fact central to some of my arguments about race in the later part of this book, but it is also crucial to a feminism or a feminist poetics which wants to understand and to represent categories such as race, class and gender as something more than simply a litany of politically correct concerns:

If, as Norma Alarcon has insisted, women of colour are ‘multiply interpellated’, called by many names, constituted in and by that multiple calling, then this implies that the symbolic domain, the domain of socially instituted norms, is composed of racializing norms, and that they exist not merely alongside gender norms, but are articulated through one another. Hence, it is no longer possible to make sexual difference prior to racial difference or, for that matter, to make them fully sexual axes of social regulation and power.

(Butler 1993:182)

Thus it is that the discourses of sexuality, biology and race transgress (and intersect with) the discourses of ‘position’ and social categorisation. They do this according to a whole range of additional discursive and narrative practices which locate these already complex intersections in relation to other positions, both in the texts of everyday life in late-twentieth-century societies (being a mother or a housewife, being a citizen who applies for jobs, takes out insurance, borrows money for a home, pays rent, applies for the dole, being a middle-aged unemployed man, and so on) and in relation to the texts of explicitly disciplinary or vocational knowledges, skills and practices (being a linguist, a sociologist, a teacher, being a computer programmer or a laboratory technician, being a secretary or a boss, a process worker or a part-time or home-worker of some kind).

These discourses participate in and help to construct yet other discourses and narratives about the nature of the social and cultural worlds, their typical ‘sectors’ and ‘divisions’ or ‘spheres’—divisions between public and private, economic and cultural, social and individual, everyday and institutional, politics and knowledge, and so on. And for every individual these multiple positionings and constructions must be seen as forms of identity and experience which frame and constitute the sexed, classed and raced human subject’s life history, which give it both its narrative coherence and its discursive and narrative multiplicity.

To understand even some of these complexities is to provide the scope for much more acute empirical and theoretical accounts of the intersections through which what used to be called the categories of class, race and gender—or of ethnicity and age—might actually be produced as changing and constantly processual forms of subjectivity, subjects who are both synchronically and diachronically in p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Feminist poetics
• 2 The poetics of rewriting: poiesis, transmission, discipleship?
• 3 Teresa de Lauretis: sexing the subject of semiosis
• 4 Discourse, expressibility and things to do with Foucault
• 5 Rewriting linguistic poetics: the trace of the corporeal
• 6 Patriarchal contexts
• 7 Poiesis, performance, (his)tories: black man, white woman, irresistible impulse
• 8 The other side of discourse: traces of bodies at work
• Bibliography
• Index