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

xIt is possible to avoid the fate of Ariadne and the love-death 2 ritual with Dionysianirrationality, binary twin of Apollonian logos. The princess of Crete enabled Theseusto enter the labyrinth and slay the Minotaur, said to be the child of her mother’s lust.They sailed away but Ariadne was abandoned by Theseus on Naxos, where shegrieved until she was rescued by the god of love and forgetfulness and disappeared;seduced, abandoned, abducted, absent. Titian displays a desolated Ariadne standingat the cliff, and the god of rapture approaches. Testart, the Father of immaterialreproduction, sighs “I gave the little eggs names” (in Breen: 1982) and imagines thegratitude of Amandine at puberty. 3 From Theseus to Testart, the art and science oftaking women out of their bodies, senses, minds—times; cutting the cords betweenwomen, masculine metamorphoses and fantasies of the feminine. From the discordof the labyrinth which enables the Matador to slay the Minotaur, to the laboratorywhich ruptures material connection; always the extrauterine ecstasy of Dionysus,who had no mother that bore him. Les Immatériaux: this is the postmodern dream.The Labyrinth introduces the phenomenon of the postmodern Lord-becomewoman,and raises critical questions about the politics of feminist work which isfascinated by the Master discourse. This section also briefly highlights diversefeminist works which raise various critical questions, from specific locations, aboutthe oppressive practices of postmodernism.Chapter 1 charts the personal and political context of the “prophets of prick andprattle” 4 through the accounts by their contemporaries, anti-fascist writers Simone deBeauvoir and Maria-Antonietta Macciocchi. A history of definitions and categoriespresents structuralism, poststructuralism, deconstruction and postmodernism. Thecentral mood of fin-de-siècle crisis and melancholy is considered in terms of arelegitimation of masculine dominance and indifference. Dematerialization ofcreativity and the disconnection of community are raised in relation to femalesacrifice.Chapter 2 considers feminist encounters with structuralism. The potency ofabsence in the work of Lévi-Strauss and Sartre is discussed in terms of masculineorientations to form and content, subjectivity and substance. The centrality ofnothing, nothingness and neutrality springs from masculine temporality andtemporizing.Chapter 3 introduces Foucault’s rejection of Sartre’s dialectical and historicalformulations and concern with authenticity. The originality of Foucault’s2. My analysis of the cult of Dionysus as the murder of the (M)other is in contrast to the essentialistand male-supremacist orientation of Paglia (1990). She bases her work on de Sade and takes theview that rape and domination are “natural”. It is the ordinary approach of the “glorious” penis andthe rude vulva/mean uterus: “An erection is architectural, sky-pointing… In the war for humanidentity, male tumescence is an instrument, female tumescence an obstruction. The fatty female bodyis a sponge” (1990, p. 91). A heterosexist dualism: dynamic Dionysus adds energy (masculinity) tomere, swampy matter. An important feminist text on woman and the domination of nature is PatriciaMills, Woman, Nature and Psyche, New Haven: Yale University Press (1987).3. See Brodribb (1988b) for a discussion of women and the culture of the new reproductivetechnologies; and Chapter 6 for a discussion of Lyotard’s Les Immatériaux.4. Mary O’Brien, personal discussion, 1982.