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

20 NOTHING MAT(T)ERS
“end of meaning” would be Sophie’s 27 choice. Wisdom is not manic, and the fateful,
fatal law of eros is simply male ideology and not proto-feminist theory. In the postworld
of male theories and conference circuits, the death of woman is the ticket to
masculine redemption and resurrections; and such performances never acknowledge
the death of women from male violences.
At the centre of contemporary French and derivative social and political thought is
a violent, oppositional and static model of consciousness. These theories of
subjectivity and power are inadequate because they have neither grasped nor
admitted the nature of patriarchal ideology, or attended to the critiques from feminist
theory. These theories of structure, subject and power are ideological. Reading them
is torture: recalling that to torture originally meant to separate the mind from the
body.
This phenomenon, developed in France but labelled in North America, has been
seen as creative, innovative, liberating and varied, as ambiguity opening up space. I
suggest it is a new Napoleonic Code and can be understood as a movement with
specific parameters, common themes and ideologies relating to the historical context
of masculinist orientations to form and matter. It is unexceptional, unoriginal and but
for its hegemony, uninteresting. Therefore, I am criticizing these philosophies in an
historical as well as a substantive way. I am attempting to evaluate whether
postmodernism is the philosophy of the “prophets of prick and prattle” as Mary
O’Brien maintains. 28 In fact, Jacques Lacan says:
In other words—for the moment, I am not fucking, I am talking to you. Well!
I can have exactly the same satisfaction as if I were fucking. That’s what it
means. Indeed, it raises the question of whether in fact I am not fucking at this
moment (1977, pp. 165–166).
Their prophecy is the death of God; nevertheless, the law of postmodernism is Father
Knows Best and the phallus is its symbol. Feminism is the Devil, staked out and
variously pilloried as bourgeois deviation, biological determinism, foundationalism
and essentialism. Accordingly, opposition to the ontological teleology of masculinist
body and culture is sin and women’s autonomy lacks grace.
I define poststructuralism/postmodernism as a neurotic symptom and scene of
repression of women’s claims for truth and justice. Postmodernism is the attempted
masculine ir/rationalization of feminism. I prescribe a listening cure for this
masculinity in extremis, this masculine liberal philosophy in totalitarian form.
How can one recognize a PMS (postmodern/poststructuralist) man An individual
27. Sophie’s Choice, a 1982 CBS Fox movie directed by Alan J.Paluka, where Sophie, played by
Meryl Streep, chooses suicide and a manic depressive man over life with a boring, protective one. In
other words, she chooses Dionysus over Apollo, postmodernism over the Enlightenment.
28. Mary O’Brien, personal discussion, 1982.