Feminists Theorize the Political

Judith Butler, Joan W. Scott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135769635
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

A collection of work by leading feminist scholars, engaging with the question of the political status of poststructuralism within feminism, and affirming the contemporary debate over theory as politically rich and consequential.

II

Signifying Identity

7

A Short History of Some Preoccupations

Denise Riley

Part of a polemical essay I published a couple of years ago, Am I That Name?,¹ suggested that feminism had necessarily inherited those ambiguities heavy in the ordinary collective noun, “women.” That “women” could be used as a coinage in any political currency ensured that its face value had to be deciphered carefully. But to examine both that and the many other peculiarities of “women” didn't undermine feminism, as some might feel, but was on the contrary an aspect of understanding the historical and the contemporary strains upon, and the alliances of, various kinds of feminism. In brief, both historical and political interpretations needed some scrutiny of “women,” and this could only be taken as postfeminist or antifeminist if you believed that a celebration of women en masse was the only permissible strategy.

To distinguish the levels of indeterminacy which characterized “women” was a rather artificial task—but it seemed that three could be roughly picked out. The individual's indeterminacy (when am I a woman?), the historical indeterminacy (what do “women” mean, and when?), and the political indeterminacy (what can “women” do?) are, however, variously blurred, and the nature of their overlappings was what I had in mind when I wrote about the peculiar temporality of “women.” This generated an anxiety, I think, for some readers who felt that if the whole category of women took on the aspect of a problem, then the self-identity was under attack, and feminism as a politics was consequently being eroded by thoughtless theory. About this problem of “identity,” I'd say that it's important to try to know the resonances, for as many hearers as possible, of what you are claiming. So that part of replying to that worry—“How can you simultaneously query the cohesion and the constancy of ‘women’ and retain any politics of women, be a feminist? Don't you need the security of the identity in order to have the politics at all?”—would be to say that the politics would be more effective if you knew the different ways in which you were likely to be heard, what your assertion of identity was doing. My own feeling is that “identity” is an acutely double-edged weapon—not useless, but dependent on the context, sometimes risky—and that the closeness between an identity and a derogatory identification may, again always in specific contexts, resemble that between being a subject and the process of subjectification. “Women” can also suffer from too much identification. Yet an aspect of any feminism in formation is that collective self-consciousness of “being women,” and to deny the force of that elective identification would be mistaken, as mistaken as the supposition of its necessary fixity.

The question of the politics of identity could be rephrased as a question of rhetoric. Not so much of whether there was for a particular moment any truthful underlying rendition of “women” or not, but of what the proliferations of addresses, descriptions, and attributions were doing. The dizziness induced by seeing “women” named from the political left or the right in a morass of opinion, journalese, sociological observation, or family-policy statement, will be familiar to anyone immured in libraries and archives. Earlier feminisms, whose stock in trade was also women, were also necessarily busied with elaborating or refuting the thickets of labor statistics, departmental minutes, or bright articles about women's real wants and aspirations. Where to turn for clarity? I looked for but did not find any accounts of rhetoric which would be helpful, and it was hard to devise any boundaries between the formally rhetorical and the rest, the generally discursive deployments of “women.” Perhaps the former was merely an intensification of the latter, at once more and less self-conscious than it. During these library years, which were not undisturbed, I had read Michel Foucault's earlier work; The Archaeology of Knowledge appeared in translation in 1972. I can't say that I recognized what would become more valuable to me later; it was, then, the streaks of sheer obstinacy in his refusals to make reductions of discourse to history or vice versa, and the theatrical drive toward self-obliteration that I liked—the introduction says of the text:

It rejects its identity, without previously stating: I am neither this nor that. It is not critical, most of the time; it is not a way of saying that everything else is wrong. It is an attempt to define a particular site by the exteriority of its vicinity, rather than trying to reduce others to silence by claiming that what they say is worthless. I have tried to define this blank space from which I speak, and which is slowly taking shape in a discourse which I feel to be so precarious and so unsure . . . . I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face.²

A few years later, studying the history of developmental psychology and of psychoanalysis and their ramifications in the hope of grasping more about childcare and “the State,” I went back to the tentative formulations of The Archaeology of Knowledge. These tried to replace the smoothness of “the history of ideas” with something more jagged, more demanding, but also curiously more prosaic; the aim was “to substitute for the enigmatic treasure of ‘things’ anterior to discourse, the regular formation of objects that arise only in discourse.”³ There were, of course, new difficulties, and these were laid out by Foucault in his book: where and how were the “edges” of a discursive formation to be traced? Or did this matter; but then how could you give any delineation of change, not of what Foucault denounced as “the general empty category of change” but of modest local alterations? Were you at risk of ending up in a positivist position where everything simply was as it was, and did this antiheroic flatness have anything much to commend it beyond the silent charm of stoicism? Nevertheless, and with acknowledgment to such tenacious complexities and to Foucault's suggestions for their resolutions, there was an immediate helpfulness about the idea of discursive formations. When the first volume of The History of Sexuality appeared in 1976, not only did it characterize the nineteenth-century construction of “homosexuality” but also, in placing “sex” in the modern sense as an aspect of the history of the present, it opened the way to the historicizing of any category, including that of “women.” And given that people understand their lives discursively, the point therefore wouldn't be to trace a history of rhetoric as if this were a layer plastered over the strata of real silent lives underneath; but to distinguish what different forms of description were active at what levels. This was surely a fully historical and indeed a materialist undertaking, if the latter term is used in a more modest and less canonical sense.

My object, however, isn't a defense of Foucault, but to set out why someone engaged with feminism, especially socialist feminism and its possibilities, would have been drawn to Foucault's early work at all. This is an awkward undertaking, to hint at some of the intellectual background to the work of people of “my generation,” now over forty years old—the aim isn't to be chauvinistic for a group, but just to suggest some sources which will be different from those available to others of different ages, convictions, and national educational and political backgrounds. I am deliberately and artificially omitting reference to political campaigns and to changes in the women's movement, since my brief is to touch only on the sort of reading which preoccupied me and many others. This is really a skeletal history of mottoes. Certain phrases and formulations take on a talismanic quality, rattle at the back of one's brain for years. Perhaps, or even probably, they are not deployed, not formally worked up and digested into a coherent theory; none the less they keep a powerful presence on top of which later “influences” lie only lightly.

I'd gone to the archives originally in search of illumination for the problems of the State and family policy which occupied the women's liberation movement in the early 1970s; what was then called the politics of childcare or of welfare was especially pertinent for a young single mother; was it true that in the Second World War, the State had deployed psychology to justify its closing of nurseries, or was that a misconceived way of stating the problem? This reflected a general uncertainty about what “the State” was, and what “rights” might be; the British women's liberation movement formulated demands to a (solidly unresponsive) State, so that there was nothing academic about this interest; it was understood to be sharply political. Those of us who could somehow manage to research these questions saw our investigations as “at the service of “feminist politics and campaigns. In this we continued an aspiration of the late-1960s libertarian socialism which hoped for critical intellectual work to be done outside of the universities, to have an independent base.

We (and this “we” is a difficulty, as I want to avoid being autobiographical, but am uncertain of who else I can properly speak for) followed a self-imposed countereducation of reading Marx and Hegel, Engels, Althusser, Freud—among a great many other European socialists and theorists of society. What worried us was how to understand the individual-society relation and how that drew on psychology and psychoanalysis and biology, vis-à-vis various collective theories, sociology, and socialism. Translations of European socialist writers, several of whom were made available through the New Left Books series, fuelled these discussions; among these Timpanaro's On Materialism, which tried to retrieve questions of life and, literally, death for socialist argument, stood at a tangent to self-consciously antihumanist writings. Much of this debate gyrated around the poles of humanism and antihumanism.⁴ In brief, it was argued that the historical anthropology of Marxist humanism placed “man” at the center but that this was a hindrance to political clarity; the counterattack, the dethronement of “man,” turned on different theories of the human subject. These variously displaced the sovereignty of “man,” in part through Lacanian and other readings of Freud's psychoanalysis. Juliet Mitchell's Psychoanalysis and Feminism, published in 1973, was a masterful work of synthesis whose drawbacks echoed those of its sources. The chief inspiration for the feminism of the early 1970s (which did not then use the term, preferring “women's liberation”) was probably Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, of 1946, and Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own. Doris Lessing's earlier novels were also strong background presences. This history of progressive politics of “the personal” was being dug out by Sheila Rowbotham and Jeffrey Weeks, among others; their work was in the libertarian-socialist tradition where “theory” and “politics” were intimately bound together; and Lenin's formulae on that topic were quoted extensively (and by those whose ideas about the sexual would have been as repugnant to him as were Alexandra Kollontai's). Most of the arguments were waged through small press leaflets, articles in new journals, and polemical pamphlets; and the more historical or philosophical writings also placed themselves under the banner of politics, and were occupied with campaigns about unionization, or abortion legislation, or other contemporary issues.

I mention these things, glancingly, to suggest a little of the discussion which buoyed up the then-embryonic feminism of the early 1970s. In this flux, everyone hung onto a set of references perhaps of their own, perhaps held in common with others. I imagine that many of “us,” especially the bookish ones, felt ourselves to be hung around with talismans or mottoes which we'd collected and which could be fingered like rosaries for guidance in the tumult. The new feminism gave us the ubiquitous “the personal is the political” and the slogans (like “No women's liberation without socialism! No socialism without women's liberation!”) but these were new accretions which fell upon the older layers; the formulations about the State and the individual, Marx and Freud and why 1917 had failed. It is these formulations, these talismanic memories, which possess a powerful and continuing presence in the work done perhaps a decade or fifteen years later, even where they are not consciously remembered, or are refined, or indeed are repudiated.

A hunt through old notebooks and pencilled underlinings turned up a few of the mottoes which determined, however obscurely, my own directions. I don't want to be portentous, or self-important; the point is simply to set out the kind of readings and fragments which might have been present to anyone leaving higher education in the years shortly after 1968. Marx, above all, was studied scrupulously. From his Theses on Feuerbach (a critique of the author of, among other works, The Essence of Christianity), we took his objection to the abstracted and isolated human individual who also figured in classical political economy: “Feuerbach resolves the religious essence into the human essence. But the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of social relations.”⁵ In Feuerbach's account, wrote Marx, the human essence could be conceived only as an inner, mute generality, naturally uniting the many individuals. Whereas, Marx held in 1845, supposedly abstract individuals belonged to particular forms of society; by 1857–58, his Grundrisse elaborated on this concept of “social individuals.” These were, in short, produced historically, first as clan beings, then as political city dwellers. “Exchange itself is a chief means of this individuation.”⁶

What mattered about this was not so much the problems inherent in Marx's designation of the mode of exchange as the main source of individuation, but the implied transformation of a timeless society-individual antagonism. The publication of Reading Capital (in 1968 in Paris, two years later in London), by Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, let loose more speculation about what this historical individuality was, and how it could be differentiated from a “historicist humanism” of Man through the ages. Balibar criticized the conception of “men” as miniature centers or concentrated representations of the social structure, from which the whole might be read off. Instead, just as there were different kinds of time at work within the social structure, so “there are different forms of political, economic, and ideological individuality in the social structure, too, forms which are not supported by the same individuals, and which have their own relatively autonomous histories.”⁷ Whatev...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• I. Contesting Grounds
• 1. Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of “Postmodernism”
• 2. “Experience”
• 3. Feminism and George Sand: Lettres à Marcie
• 4. French Feminism Revisited: Ethics and Politics
• 5. Ecce Homo, Ain't (Ar'n't) I a Woman, and Inappropriate/d Others: The Human in a Post-Humanist Landscape
• 6. Postmodern Automatons
• II. Signifying Identity
• 7. A Short History of Some Preoccupations
• 8. Dealing with Differences
• 9. Speaking in Tongues: Dialogics Dialectics, and the Black Woman Writer's Literary Tradition
• 10. The Real Miss Beauchamp: Gender and the Subject of Imitation
• 11. Toward an Agonistic Feminism: Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Identity
• III. Subjects Before the Law
• 12. The Abortion Question and the Death of Man
• 13. “Shahbano”
• 14. Gender, Sex, and Equivalent Rights
• 15. Women “Before” the Law: Judicial Stories about Women, Work, and Sex Segregation on the Job
• IV. Critical Practices
• 16. The Issue of Foundations: Scientized Politics, Politicized Science, and Feminist Critical Practice
• 17. Feminism, Citizenship and Radical Democratic Politics
• 18. Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words: A Theory and Politics of Rape Prevention
• 19. Gender, Power, and Historical Memory: Discourses of Serrano Resistance
• 20. A Pedagogy for Postcolonial Feminists
• V. Postmodern Post-Script
• 21. The End of Innocence
• 22. Feminism and Postmodernism
• Index
• Notes on Contributors