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

xxiiAccording to Kristeva, “women exist” is an essentialist statement, but nothing is,negation is, and is a higher form of being than woman. 8 More mundanely, this is theideological practice of the organization of consent and deconstruction of dissent,necessary for professional practice. For Kristeva, woman is an attitude, not a sexualor political subject. As Ann Rosalind Jones (1981, p. 249) remarks, “‘woman’ toKristeva represents not so much a sex as an attitude, any resistance to conventionalculture and language; men, too, have access to the jouissance that opposesphallogocentrism.” Woman represents the semiotic—an oceanic bliss/swamp of themother-child dyad, a communication of rhythm, preverbal sound. “She” is anattitude best held by men: for Kristeva, it is in the work of male authors Joyce,Artaud, Mallarmé, etc. that this semiotic state of union with the maternal is bestelaborated. This, I suspect, is why Kristeva forbids women to mention the game, tomove to subjectivity: it would block men’s access to the primal maternal source oftheir verbal creativity, it would profane men’s ancestral memories of Mother. Ifwomen claim and proclaim this matrix, it would be horrid. Then there would be realchaos. So women must be still and think of the linguistic empire. In Kristeva’s view,“woman” or “women” by women is a bad attitude.Let’s be realistic, say some women. Do you really think that you can start fromscratch and just leave theory out entirely, just because it’s male? Don’t you see thatyou can pick and choose from it all in order to make feminist theory? Or, asElizabeth Grosz 9 puts it in introducing feminists to Jacques Lacan, “feminists maybe able to subvert and/or harness strategically what is useful without beingcommitted to its more problematic ontological, political and moral commitments”(1990, p. 7). This is based on her understanding of psychoanalysis as “a method ofreading and interpreting (where questions of truth, bias and verification are notrelevant)” (1990, p. 21). That rational—or irrational—science is pure methodologyis an old ideology which feminist critiques of science have exposed (Keller: 1985;Harding, et. al: 1983; Lloyd: 1984). These recent feminist analyses of masculinerationality show how subjective it is, how it masks and develops masculinedomination. Such epistemological critiques warn against a dangerous and superficialneutrality.The objection to “starting from scratch” denies women’s social and politicalthought and its suppression. First of all, women, who try to use unprocessedingredients in their recipes in order to avoid preserving masculine categories and8. For an examination of critical approaches to Kristeva’s work, see Eleanor Kuykendall (1989) whoillustrates how Kristeva endorses Freudian paradigms and “leaves no place for a feminineconception of agency” (1989, p. 181). Gayatri Spivak is quite clear: “I’m repelled by Kristeva’spolitics: what seems to me to be her reliance on the sort of banal historical narrative to produce‘women’s time’: what seems to me Christianizing psychoanalysis; what seems to me to be her sort offerocious western Europeanism: and what seems to me to be her long-standing implicit sort ofpositivism: naturalizing of the chora, naturalizing of the pre-semiotic, etcetera” (1989, p. 145).9. Grosz displays more inadvertent masculine supremacy with the statement: “Given the mother’s(up to now) indispensable role in bearing children…” (1990, p. 146). Artificial wombs and placentasare still a fantasy. Even if Grosz is referring to “contract mothers”, this negation of them as mothersparticipates in the patriarchal ideology which privileges genetic genealogy over birth (Brodribb:1989a).