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

6 NOTHING MAT(T)ERSStructuralism 5 became fashionable during France’s conservative Gaullist period,in a climate of political resignation. Marxists have critiqued its conservatism, antihumanism,and self-referentiality. Jost Hermand has argued that structuralism’spessimistic emphasis on unalterable structures serves the interests of stateinterventionist monopoly capitalism:Serving these functions, structuralism once again reveals its ideologicalaffinity for the establishment. Positivism, with its emphasis on the individual,was an accurate reflection of the principle of free enterprise within thebourgeois system. Structuralism shows that even the bourgeois who arefighting so desperately to maintain their privileged position have become thecaptives of structures (read “monopolies”) (Hermand: 1975, p. 220).The political engagement typical of Sartre’s existentialist stance was abandoned, andaccording to Hermand, “a period of luxurious tristesse set in” (1975, p. 214). Indiscussing the reception of French structuralism in Germany, Hermand indicates thatit was attractive to traditionalists who appreciated the following qualities: “theemphasis on the purely formal, the historical timelessness, the apparent‘scholarliness’ of an absolutely objective, even scientific method and, last but notleast, ideological independence which seemed to be free of all political affiliations”(1975, p. 213).Structuralism was ridiculed during the student movement of 1968. French studentswrote on the walls of the Sorbonne: “Structures do not take to the streets” (Roudiez:1975, p. 212). This may be why “everyone” was a structuralist in the early 1960s,but after 1968, few admitted it. Apostles became apostates: Roland Barthes, JacquesLacan, Michel Foucault, Philippe Sollers and Julia Kristeva of the Tel Quel group allrepudiated the label. The attempt to modernize the human sciences viastructuralism’s promise of scientific credentials had met with setbacks. For example,the collaborative projects of followers of Lacan and Lévi-Strauss to establishconnections between the “constituent units” of myths and analysands’ dreams withcomputer technologies had failed (Kurzweil: 1980, p. 21). Both Lévi-Strauss andLacan were concerned with unconscious structures, one at the universal,anthropological level of tribal myth, the other at the individual, psychological level.It was believed 6 that human minds, histories and desires could be input and printedout like pure data, and read like algebraic equations, mathematical laws. In spite ofthe inevitable failure of this project, the work which developed out of structuralismremained part of the century of Saussure and linguistic law:In France in the 1960s, linguistics, in particular structural linguistics, broughtthe promise of a true scientific conversion for the humanities. When thisproject miscarried, linguistics provided the critics of the scientific approach5. See Boyne (1986), Broekman (1977) and Caws (1990) for a standard introduction to anddiscussion of structuralism and French social/sociological theory.6. Sherry Turkle (1978, pp. 164–188) discusses Lacan’s attempt to render his theories of theunconscious scientifically rational through the use of mathemes, mathematical formulas.