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

EXISTENCE AND DEATH 45
unconscious, and particularly explicative of the totality of scientific and
philosophical concepts of an era” (1969, p. 191).
In his work, Foucault is ambivalent and purposefully obscure about who thinks,
who conceptualizes. It is his belief that this radical mystification and quality of
absence will open up the space for a critique of knowledge and power. He refuses to
formulate or directly address philosophical questions about the being of language
and knowledge, or the knowledge of being. The anonymous “discoursing subject”
also resented any attempt to question his motives or link his public and private life.
“Foucault is extremely resistant, indeed actually hostile, to any attempt to discuss his
personal motives. He not only regards his private life as irrelevant to his public role,
but he is opposed on principle to efforts to impose psychological norms on his
discourse” (Major-Poetzl: 1983, p. 42).
Is Foucault’s work fertile for feminist use While the emphasis on discursive
practices does shimmer with a promise of politics, Foucault’s work is
epistemologically and ontologically static. What is the practice of his politics
Monique Plaza finds that Foucault’s work on rape for the French Commission for
the Reform of the Penal Code placed rape in the field of sexuality and penalty,
setting the rapist at the centre of concerns with processes of institutional power.
Foucault, Plaza argues, obliterated the struggles and signs of the women against
violence against women movement (Plaza: 1981). In “Ideology Against Women,”
she summarizes her objections:
Although Foucault has partially called heterosexual power into question and
has questioned the “naturalness” of sexuality, he cannot see from his position
as a man how this power essentially injures women. And in a debate which
opposes the interests of rapists—that is, of men—to the interests of rape
victims—that is, of women—he defends the interests of his class and acts in
solidarity with it; he defends the right which men want to keep—raping
women, that is, subjugating them, dominating them.
Here we can see how the intelligentsia of the Left, by defending the
interests of the class of men, produces a counterideology, which is in fact a
“new look” ideology against women (1984a, p. 77).
Nancy Hartsock argues that postmodernism, and her particular focus is Foucault,
“represents a dangerous approach for any marginalized group to adopt” (1990, p.
160). She wonders, “Why is it that just at the moment when so many of us who have
been silenced begin to demand the right to name ourselves, to act as subjects rather
than objects of history, that just then the concept of subjecthood becomes
problematic” (1990, p. 160). Foucault is like the colonizer who resists within the
paradigm of colonialism; his position and perspective is irrelevant to the dominated.
Hartsock finds that in Foucault’s view, power “is everywhere, and so ultimately
nowhere” (1990, p. 170). The subjugated are secondary, disruptive forces whose
worlds and potentials are not primary. This is not helpful to the marginalized who
must “engage in the historical, political and theoretical process of constituting
ourselves as subjects as well as objects of history” (Hartsock, 1990, p. 170).