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

Paris, July 14, 1985Dear Mary,Just saw an exhibition showing in Paris right now called Les Immatériaux (theimmaterials); appropriate name for its abstract tyranny: the talking heads ofLacanian structuralism are finally disembodied. In fact, the exhibition leadsthrough a birth tunnel and then spills you out into a theatre of the non-body fora period of Sartrean anguish and nothingness, and the appropriation of the birthprocess for death by means of slides and voices from genetic experimentation. Ascreen shows a huge pregnant belly (no other parts of the woman are visible)and a wall traces the various kinds of paternal, nuclear affiliation the newreproductive materials afford. So that you enter the Theatre of the Non-Bodyand end up in the Labyrinth of Language: Theseus enters the womb and kills mat(t)er! Les Immatériaux is curated by Lyotard (the author of The PostmodernCondition); it is really tied to an ideology of modernization begun by de Sadeand culminating in the growing opinion that these new technologies will finallyliberate “us” from the dirty animality of the maternal body. And after theemergency conference last week in Sweden! (We changed the name to theFeminist International Network for Resistance to Reproductive and GeneticEngineering). Les Immatériaux is really about The Mother Machine and a totalmining of the local female body as raw material. It was sort of a lecherous hymnto Amandine, the first French “test-tube” baby: in fact, the “Father” of IVFhere recently told a men’s magazine how he fantasized about Amandine andhow she would be at puberty: would she ever understand what she owed him?He also dreams of pregnancy for men, in the oral cavity: patriarchal genesis atlast! Je n’y crois pas.Amitiés,Somer