Nothing Mat(t)ers: A Feminist Critique of Postmodernism

6 NOTHING MAT(T)ERS
Structuralism 5 became fashionable during France’s conservative Gaullist period,
in a climate of political resignation. Marxists have critiqued its conservatism, antihumanism,
and self-referentiality. Jost Hermand has argued that structuralism’s
pessimistic emphasis on unalterable structures serves the interests of state
interventionist monopoly capitalism:
Serving these functions, structuralism once again reveals its ideological
affinity for the establishment. Positivism, with its emphasis on the individual,
was an accurate reflection of the principle of free enterprise within the
bourgeois system. Structuralism shows that even the bourgeois who are
fighting so desperately to maintain their privileged position have become the
captives of structures (read “monopolies”) (Hermand: 1975, p. 220).
The political engagement typical of Sartre’s existentialist stance was abandoned, and
according to Hermand, “a period of luxurious tristesse set in” (1975, p. 214). In
discussing the reception of French structuralism in Germany, Hermand indicates that
it was attractive to traditionalists who appreciated the following qualities: “the
emphasis on the purely formal, the historical timelessness, the apparent
‘scholarliness’ of an absolutely objective, even scientific method and, last but not
least, ideological independence which seemed to be free of all political affiliations”
(1975, p. 213).
Structuralism was ridiculed during the student movement of 1968. French students
wrote on the walls of the Sorbonne: “Structures do not take to the streets” (Roudiez:
1975, p. 212). This may be why “everyone” was a structuralist in the early 1960s,
but after 1968, few admitted it. Apostles became apostates: Roland Barthes, Jacques
Lacan, Michel Foucault, Philippe Sollers and Julia Kristeva of the Tel Quel group all
repudiated the label. The attempt to modernize the human sciences via
structuralism’s promise of scientific credentials had met with setbacks. For example,
the collaborative projects of followers of Lacan and Lévi-Strauss to establish
connections between the “constituent units” of myths and analysands’ dreams with
computer technologies had failed (Kurzweil: 1980, p. 21). Both Lévi-Strauss and
Lacan were concerned with unconscious structures, one at the universal,
anthropological level of tribal myth, the other at the individual, psychological level.
It was believed 6 that human minds, histories and desires could be input and printed
out like pure data, and read like algebraic equations, mathematical laws. In spite of
the inevitable failure of this project, the work which developed out of structuralism
remained part of the century of Saussure and linguistic law:
In France in the 1960s, linguistics, in particular structural linguistics, brought
the promise of a true scientific conversion for the humanities. When this
project miscarried, linguistics provided the critics of the scientific approach
5. See Boyne (1986), Broekman (1977) and Caws (1990) for a standard introduction to and
discussion of structuralism and French social/sociological theory.
6. Sherry Turkle (1978, pp. 164–188) discusses Lacan’s attempt to render his theories of the
unconscious scientifically rational through the use of mathemes, mathematical formulas.