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

28 NOTHING MAT(T)ERS
The totalising thought of historical materialism has established everything
except its own existence. Or, to put it another way, contaminated by the
historical relativism which it has always opposed, it has not exhibited the truth
of History as it defines itself, or shown how this determines its nature and
validity in the historical process, in the dialectical development of praxis and
of human experience (1976, p. 19).
In order to grasp the problem of how to “speak the truth” without absolutizing it or
falling into an historical relativism, Sartre distinguishes between scientific and
dialectical reason:
The modern scientist sees Reason as independent of any particular rational
system. For him, Reason is the mind as an empty unifier. The dialectician, on
the other hand, locates himself within a system: he defines a Reason, and he
rejects a priori the purely analytical Reason of the seventeenth century, or
rather, he treats it as the first moment of synthetic, progressive Reason. It is
impossible to see this as a kind of practical assertion of our detachment; and
equally impossible to make of it a postulate, or a working hypothesis (1976,
p. 20).
Lévi-Strauss rejects Sartre’s distinction:
The discovery of the dialectic subjects analytical reason to an imperative
requirement: to account also for dialectical reason. This standing requirement
relentlessly forces analytical reason to extend its programme and transform its
axiomatic. But dialectical reason can account neither for itself nor for
analytical reason (1966, p. 253).
For Sartre, only dialectical reason can understand human history and its totalizing
movement through praxis: matter is mechanical and inert, but mind is dialectical and
active. It is possible to criticize Sartre’s model, however, without turning to
animism, animatism, or Lévi-Strauss. The structuralist “dialectic” is static: men/Man
are the unconscious bearers of a universal totem. Women are neither particular nor
universal in this account, but our subjugation is necessary to the establishment of
civilization. Lévi-Strauss’s argument about the relationship of consciousness to
nature is therefore not original: “male-stream thought” has always concluded that
male superiority is natural. Lévi-Strauss’s particular contribution to patriarchal
ideology is his binary coded model of nature and culture (sky/earth, man/woman,
and the social relations of marriage) as structure. He rejects the Sartrean for-itself but
simply reformulates the in-itself as passively structured: if Sartre says matter is
nothing except the site of struggle, necessity and nausea, Lévi-Strauss argues that
matter is entirely negative-form. Lévi-Straussian Man is competitive, hostile and
uncooperative, and requires the formation of alliances through the exchange of
men’s sisters. However, he also transfers this drive to power from men as a group to
a primordial structure. His theory of culture refers to the body, but the embodiment
is male, and the sexuality is already constructed as patriarchal. Lévi-Strauss has