Semiotic Subversion
So postmodern thinking is not a foreign import—it is as American as violence or apple pie. But what is its essential content, apart from its skeptical stance on objectivity as conventionally understood (that is, as Cheney understands it)?
There is very little agreement among intellectuals on the chronology of the postmodern, except that—this is important—it always appears as a moment in the twentieth century. Some suggest the revolution in “bourgeois perception” of 1905 to 1915, when relativity, psychoanalysis, and radical empiricism made everything indeterminate; some suggest the 1920s and 1930s, when postindustrial society first emerged; some suggest the 1960s, when pop art adjourned the distinction between high culture (read: priceless European heirlooms) and low (read: commodified American excess); and some suggest the 1970s and 1980s, when the term and its attendants—for example,
“deconstruction”—became household words.
But there is substantial agreement on what postmodern thinking accomplishes. It acknowledges an ongoing, incomplete “mutation in Western humanism,” as Hassan says, without displacing or renouncing its origins in the Enlightenment (except, of course, at the extremes of the thinking, where angry exiles from the present congregate). In other words, it recognizes the plurality and the plasticity of truth; it remaps the treacherous terrain of “rational grounds,” where the “man of reason”—the light-skinned son
of Enlightenment—still sets the universal standard; it accepts the eclipse of the old pioneer individualism and the emergence of socialized, multicultural forms of identity; it notices the erosion of sovereignty for both nation-states and individuals, at least as conceived and enforced by modern constitutional law; it celebrates the demise of metaphysics, the philosophical urge to ignore the material causes and historical consequences of mind; and it accordingly welcomes the decay of “metanarratives” like Marxism or liberalism, which narrate the history of the future as progress toward the one true goal of all humankind. Postmodern thinking doesn’t deny the possibility of ideas that sediment over time, gradually becoming a kind of external, independent, cultural reality most people can treat as a given fact, a usable past, a universal truth, as in, say, “all men are created equal.” The Declaration of Independence makes a difference, as Herman Melville, one of our still-canonical novelists, once said. Postmodern thinking does, however, insist that our differences—the particular and the plural—have been sources of, not deviations from, this unconscious consensus, this common sense we call reality. For example, a whole is not the sum of its parts; it is the contested relation between those parts. Or put it this way: a provisional truth becomes commonsensical, transhistorical, and possibly universal when it begins to explain, not ignore, particular historical circumstances.
Postmodern thinking is then powerfully animated by the more local imperatives we have come to know as deconstruction and feminism. The dreaded and the difficult deconstruction—the handiwork, again, of a transatlantic, cosmopolitan crew originally centered at Yale and the École normale supérieure in Paris—was, and is, the farthest outpost of semiotics, the science of signs invented early in the twentieth century by the American philosopher Charles S. Peirce (the “early pragmatist” quoted above) and the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Their new science offered the fundamental insight that language is not a mirror of nature, a transparent reproduction of external reality; instead, it naturalizes certain things and marginalizes others. By situating us in specific ways, it produces the external reality we take for granted. The form chosen by an author, for example, does not merely reveal the content of her thought—it determines what she can say or write or think. Or, to put it more emphatically, the author’s writing is the thinking. Concepts, facts, truths, whatever, cannot and do not exist prior to or independent of their expression in language, in narrative, in signs. They’re a result of the performances we experience as speaking and writing, and, yes, reading.
The extreme sport of semiotics we know as deconstruction thus directs our attention away from authorial intention and toward readerly expectations. For the text no longer subsists as a complete or closed object with measurable cultural weight, just as the author no longer subsists as an intact or intelligible subject with calculable intellectual bearings. Each is now construed as a field of forces beyond the control of anyone except readers, including critics. The critics’ task is then to explain why both text and author are resistant to interpretation because they are not coherent, autonomous entities to be easily, naturally cast in the roles of object and subject. The critics’ task is to demonstrate that the relation between subject/author and object/text is an unintentional result of writing, of a kind of performance, not something that existed prior to or independent of its expression in language, in narrative, in signs. Indeed, Jacques Derrida, the French godfather of deconstruction, suggested in a seminal essay called “Violence and Metaphysics” (1964, English translation, 1978) that when you treat this subject/object relation as given, as prior to its production through performance, you have fallen back on the enduring divisions of metaphysics, where particular historical circumstances disappear—where bodies do not matter, where even the face of the Other is obscured by intellectual abstraction—and where, accordingly, violence can be done in the name of those Truths that transcend any time or place or person.
Deconstruction is difficult, confusing, and even threatening because its practitioners appropriate Heidegger’s itinerary in Being and Time (1927, English translation, 1962) and apply it to texts that, unlike philosophical treatises, persuade without argument—that is, to fiction and poetry, where form is content. Heidegger wanted to demonstrate two propositions. First, the primal scene of modern philosophy and modern science was the confrontation of active subject (inner) and inert object (outer); the inevitable corollary of this staging was the separation of mind and matter, of reason and desire, and so forth. Modernity as such was constituted by these metaphysical theatrics, he argued, even though its intellectual origins were ancient; here his text was the common sense of Western civilization. Second, both philosophy and science were mistaken in positing that primal scene as the self-evident beginning or foundation of thinking, whether philosophical or scientific. The subject/object relation, and with it the very idea of the individual, were the effects of thinking, talking, writing—or acting—rather than their causes. Our inner selves are not the results of retreat from the world; instead, the “objectification” of our desires in that outer world produces what we experience as our subjectivity, our interiority. So human being, what Heidegger called Dasein, had a history, and a material one at that. Absent time, it was indecipherable.
These propositions are difficult enough to digest in a long-winded philosophical treatise. They become confusing when they function as unstated assumptions of literary criticism, as they did in the 1980s and after—if you haven’t already assimilated Heidegger’s agenda, it all begins to sound like noise, like a foreign language you’d like to learn if only you knew where to speak it. These propositions become downright threatening when you realize that they drive nails into the coffin of the modern individual, that they celebrate what Roger Kimball mourns as the “eclipse of the self.” No wonder “deconstruction” became a synonym for every kind of academic idiocy in the late twentieth century—it was, in fact, a challenge to every regulative assumption of Western civilization. For it suggests that individuals are not somehow prior to any social contract or political community or linguistic convention; that reason is not the universal intellectual means by which particular desires are suppressed so that all rational individuals can agree on the nature of a fixed, external reality; and that language is not the transparent medium of the truth-tracking capacity we call reason. Deconstruction notes that almost every text is a transcript of a desperate struggle to attain authorial mastery and thus to validate the notion of the authentic, enduring subjectivity whose alias was the genuine self or the modern individual. And deconstruction always
decides that this struggle is futile—or at least inconclusive.
The Wingspan of Feminism
But for all its notoriety in the late twentieth century, deconstruction was not a method with a solid purchase on disciplines outside of literature, political theory, and philosophy (and in the latter, it was mainly a local curiosity). Feminism was a different story. It radically reshaped all the liberal arts and social sciences, from anthropology to sociology. At first this meant adding females to the disciplinary mix, as in the pioneering women’s history of the 1970s written by Gerda Lerner, Anne Firor Scott, Mary Jo Buhle, Suzanne Lebsock, Ann D. Gordon, Ellen Dubois, Linda Gordon, Alice Kessler-Harris, Bonnie Smith, Lynn Hunt, and Nancy Cott, among many others. By the 1990s, however, a poststructuralist sensibility was becoming the norm of feminist studies across the curriculum, and the social construction of gender began, accordingly, to replace the historical deeds of women as the proper object of scholarly scrutiny. So, once again, identity, personality, and even sexuality—in short, the sources of the individual, the subject as such—were construed as a problem rather than a premise, as a product rather than a presupposition. Here the key figures were Gayle Rubin, Joan Scott, and Judith Butler.
Not to worry about the new “post-ism.” Poststructuralism is merely the linguistic form in which a postmodern period of human history gets experienced; it is the medium in which that ongoing, incomplete “mutation
in Western humanism” gets transacted in words, images, categories, and characters—that is, in signs. It is no more uniform than the newspaper and the novel, the narrative forms in which the modern period (ca. 1600–1900) was typically experienced. But in all its incarnations, poststructuralism provides credentials, sources, and skills to those who would explain why and how we experienced the twentieth century, particularly its ending, as a new stage of human history. And for feminists, it has been an especially rich vein of theoretical insight and political leverage.
Rubin was still a graduate student when she wrote “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex” (1975), the inaugural event in the development of a specifically feminist poststructuralism. Here she drew on Karl Marx, Claude Levi-Strauss the French anthropologist, Jacques Lacan the French psychoanalyst, and Sigmund Freud himself to outline a theory of kinship that explained the difference between sex and gender. In brief, sex was material or biological; gender was social or cultural. But those social/
cultural sources of gender difference and hierarchy were deeply rooted in the most basic taboos and archaic practices—hence the “anthropological” style of the argument.
The incest taboo, by this account, was the enduring device through which daughters were “exported” from their immediate families by fathers with property rights to their bodies. The resulting commercial exchange between families became the basis of a larger kinship system that allowed for political peace and cultural continuity rather than warring clans—a system that allowed, in other words, for society and civilization as such. For the “gift of women” via marriage makes the partners to the exchange blood relations, thus widening the scope of kinship. The modern enforcement of heterosexual marriage and the sexual division of labor within the family were, then, the distant echoes of an ancient prohibition that was still resoundingly successful in reproducing male supremacy. Not even an Equal Rights Amendment could change these fundamental, transhistorical facts of familial life. “The oppression of women is deep,” Rubin concluded. “Equal pay, equal work, and all the female politicians in the world will not extirpate the roots of sexism.” The public was private, the political was personal: “Feminism must call for a revolution in kinship.”
That meant attempting “to resolve the Oedipal crisis of culture by reorganizing the domain of sex and gender in such a way that each individual’s Oedipal experience would be less destructive.” This resolution sounds utopian, of course, but Rubin assumed that infants and children were naturally bisexual and that the renunciation of their primary attachments to their mothers—what Oedipus could not accomplish—was an emotional catastrophe that had been reproducing gender difference and male supremacy for thousands of years. Like many other theoretically inclined feminists in the late twentieth century, from Jane Flax and Jane Gallop to Susan Suleiman and Kaja Silverman, Rubin wanted to reclaim psychoanalysis, not Freud, the Victorian man who could not have understood her political purposes. For such feminists, the personal was most emphatically not political in the sense that the man’s ideas were merely incidents in his autobiography. Instead, they suggested, the personal was political in the more abstract sense that the private, particular sexual dispositions of children had long been systematically converted into public, universal gender differences that validated male supremacy. And so, for their purposes, Freud’s theories of infantile development and differentiation became indispensable. As Rubin put it: “Psychoanalysis provides a description of the mechanisms by which the sexes are divided and deformed, of how bisexual, androgynous infants are transformed into boys and girls.” Dismissing it because Freud himself was a misogynist “would be suicidal for a political movement dedicated to eradicating gender hierarchy.”
Rubin’s essay has been cited many thousands of times since its publication more than thirty years ago in a collection of essays entitled Toward an Anthropology of Women edited by Rayna Reiter. Its protean force and intellectual reach is comparable to that found in the work of Joan Kelly or Heidi Hartmann, who also tried to suture Marxism and an emergent body of explicitly feminist theory. But Rubin’s essay has sparked much more debate and discussion among American feminists, largely because it raised questions that could be addressed only by understanding and then rewriting the theoretical backstory of her argument.
Certainly that is what Joan Scott set out to do in a paper presented to the American Historical Association in 1985 and published a year later in the American Historical Review (AHR) under the title of “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis.” Scott’s career is a calendar of the changes caused by the rise of the women’s movement in the 1960s and 1970s, on the one hand, and by the articulation of a specifically feminist poststructuralism in the 1970s and 1980s, on the other. She started out as a more or less Marxist labor historian affiliated with Studies on the Left, the signature journal of the early New Left. Her first book was The Glass Workers of Carmaux (1974), a study of skilled artisans turned into machine herds by French industrialization. Soon after, Scott collaborated with Louise Tilly, a sociologist, on an influential book called Women, Work, and Family (1978), which blended their mutual interest in class formation with the new agenda of family history to argue that women suffered at least as much as male workers when industrialization emptied the home of its economic functions. In 1980, she became the director of the Pembroke Center for the Study of Women at Brown University, thus completing the transition from historian of labor, where class is the operative category, to historian of women, where gender was quickly becoming that category.
The AHR essay marked two other transitions, Scott’s move from Brown to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton—which gave feminist scholarship a new intellectual cache—and her emblematic embrace of poststructuralism as a theorist of gender rather than a historian of women. She wrote the essay on the assumption that the early promise of women’s history to redefine “traditional notions of historical significance” was still unfulfilled; for the category of gender, like that of race, did not yet have the elaborate theoretical infrastructure that sustained the scholarly study of class across the curriculum. Her task was then to draw up the blueprint and see if the thing could be built.
In a more programmatic sense, her task was to end the “continuing marginal status” of women’s history in the discipline by demonstrating how gender was a crucial component of every field, even those given to reporting on what presidents and prime ministers said to each other about where next to go to war. But this seemingly modest, “synthetic” project had implications for ev
ery discipline because the challenge posed by the “separation or dismissal” of women’s history was not empirical: “It has not been enough for historians of women to prove either that women had a history or that women participated in the major political upheavals of Western civilization.” Only a new paradigm for empirical research on gender as such would change all the facts: “The challenge posed by these responses [to women’s history] is, in the end, a theoretical one.”
The theoretical alternatives available to scholars interested in gender were all of recent vintage, Scott noted, because classical social theory, from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century, from Adam Smith to Max Weber, never developed a way of thinking about sexual relations as social systems: “Concern with gender as an analytic category has emerged only in the late twentieth century.” This absence explained both the incoherence of honest attempts to enlist classical social theory in the analysis of gender and the emergence of the very word gender “at [the] moment of great epistemological turmoil” in which poststructuralism came of age.
As theoretical things stood in the early 1980s, there were only three alternatives to a poststructuralist approach. One was to study the persistence of patriarchy by focusing on reproduction and sexuality; this tended toward the anthropological attitude that treated male supremacy as a transhistorical attribute of all civilizations and gender difference as a natural, unmediated dimension of every society. Another was to adapt Marxism to the task at hand and argue that “families, households, and sexuality are all, finally, products of changing modes of production”; this was to accept the nineteenth-century formulas of Frederick Engels as the last word on the subject. And another was to adapt psychoanalysis to the analysis of gender; but this, at least in the Anglo-American context, was to settle for the “object relations” school supervised by Nancy Chodorow and Carol Gilligan, who treated gender difference as a function of child-rearing habits or posited a social ethic specific to a separate “women’s culture.”
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