Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (32 page)

We also need to guard against the "view from nowhere" supposition that if we only employ the right method we can avoid ethnocentrism, totalizing constructions, and false universalizations. No matter how local and circumscribed the object or how attentive the scholar is to the axes that constitute social identity, some of those axes will be ignored and others selected. This is an inescapable fact of human embodiment, as Nietzsche was the first to point out: "The eye . in which the active and interpreting forces, through which alone seeing becomes seeing something, are

supposed to be lacking [is] an absurdity and a nonsense. There is
only
a perspectival seeing,
only
a perspectival knowing."
16
This selectivity, moreover, is never innocent. We always "see" from points of view that are invested with our social, political, and personal interests, inescapably centric in one way or another, even in the desire to do justice to heterogeneity.

Nor does attentiveness to difference assure the adequate representation of difference. Certainly, we often err on the side of exclusion and thus submerge large areas of human history and experience. But attending
too
vigilantly to difference can just as problematically construct an "other" who is an exotic alien, a breed apart. As Foucault has reminded us, "everything is dangerous" and every new context demands that we reassess the ''main danger." This requires a "hyper and pessimistic activism," not an alliance with one, true theory.
17
No theory, that is to say—not even one that measures its adequacy in terms of justice to heterogeneity, locality, complexity—can place itself beyond danger.

Indeed, it is possible, as we all know, to advance the most vociferously antitotalizing theories, and yet to do so in the context of an intellectual discourse and professional practice (governing hiring, tenure, promotion, publications) whose very language requires membership to understand, and that remains fundamentally closed to difference (regarding it as "politically incorrect," "theoretically unsophisticated," "unrigorous"). We deceive ourselves if we believe that poststructuralist theory is attending to the "problem of difference" so long as so many concrete others are excluded from the conversation. Moreover, in the context of a practice that
is
attentive to issues of exclusion and committed to developing the conditions under which many voices can speak and be heard, clear, accessible, stimulating general hypotheses (eschewed by postmodern feminists) can be dialogically invaluable. Such ideas reconfigure the realities we take for granted; they allow us to examine our lives freshly; they bring history and culture to new life and invite our critical scrutiny. Showing a bold hand, they can encourage difference to reveal itself well.

In terms of such practical criteria, feminist gender theory deserves a somewhat different historical evaluation than is currently being written.
18
Certainly it is undeniable that such theory, as Fraser and Nicholson persuasively argue, has overly universalized.

(Chodorow's work, for example, requires careful historical circumscription and contextualization; it then becomes enormously edifying for certain purposes.) Such overgeneralization, as I suggested earlier, reflects the historical logic conditioning the emergence of contemporary feminist thought and is not
merely
symptomatic of the ethnocentrism of white, middleclass feminists. We all—and postmodernists especially—stand on the shoulders of this work (and on the shoulders of those who spoke, often equally univocally, for black experience and culture). Could we now speak of the differences that inflect gender and race (and that may confound and fragment gender and racial generalizations) if each had not first been shown to make a difference?

While in theory all totalizing narratives may be equal, in the context of Western history and of the actual relations of power characteristic of that history, key differences distinguish the universalizations of gender theory from the metanarratives arising out of the propertied, white, male, Western intellectual tradition. That tradition, we should remember, reigned for thousands of years and was able to produce powerful works of philosophy, literature, art, and religion before its hegemony began, under great protest, to be dismantled. Located at the very center of power, at the intersection of three separate axes of privilege—race, class, and gender—that tradition had little stake in the recognition of difference (other than to construct it as inferior or threatening "other"). This is not to say that this tradition is univocal. Indeed, elsewhere I have argued that it has produced many "recessive" and subversive strains of philosophizing.
19
Rather, my point is that it produced no practice of selfinterrogation and critique of its racial, class, and gender biases—because they were largely invisible to it.

Feminist theory—even the work of white, upperclass, heterosexual women—is not located at the
center
of cultural power. The axes whose intersections form the cultural locations of feminist authors give some of us positions of privilege, certainly; but
all
women,
as
women, also occupy subordinate positions, positions in which they feel ignored or denigrated. Contemporary feminism, emerging out of that recognition, has from the beginning exhibited an interest in restoring to legitimacy that which has been marginalized and disdained, an interest, I would suggest, that has affected its intellectual practice significantly. As an outsider discourse, that

is, as a movement born out of the experience of marginality, contemporary feminism has been unusually highly attuned to issues of exclusion and invisibility. This does not mean, of course, that the work of feminists has not suffered deeply from class, racial, and other biases. But I find Donna Haraway's charge that "white feminists . . . were forced kicking and screaming to notice" those biases to be remarkable.
20
It is a strange (perhaps a postmodern) conception of intellectual and political responsiveness that views white feminism, now critically scrutinizing (and often utterly discrediting) its conceptions of female reality and morality and its gendered readings of culture,
barely more than a decade after they began to be produced,
as "resistant" to recognizing its own fictions of unity.

Assessing where we are now, it seems to me that feminism stands less in danger of the totalizing tendencies of feminists than of an increasingly paralyzing anxiety over falling (from what grace?) into ethnocentrism or "essentialism." (The oftenpresent implication that such a fall indicates deeply conservative and racist tendencies, of course, intensifies such anxiety.) Do we want to delegitimate a priori the exploration of experiential continuity and structural common ground among women? Journals and conferences are now coming to be dominated by endless debates about method, reflections on how feminist scholarship should proceed and where it has gone astray. We need to consider the degree to which this serves, not the empowerment of diverse cultural voices and styles, but the academic hegemony (particularly in philosophy and literary studies) of detached, metatheoretical discourse.
21
If we wish to empower diverse voices, we would do better, I believe, to shift strategy from the methodological dictum that we forswear talk of "male" and "female" realities (which, as I will argue later, can still be edifying and useful) to the messier, more slippery, practical struggle to create institutions and communities that will not permit
some
groups of people to make determinations about reality for
all.

In theory, deconstructionist postmodernism stands against the ideal of disembodied knowledge and declares that ideal to be a mystification and an impossibility. There is no Archimedean view

point; rather, history and culture are texts, admitting an endless proliferation of readings, each of which is itself unstable. I have no dispute with this epistemological critique, or with the metaphor of the world as text, as a means of undermining various claims to authoritative, transcendent insight into the nature of reality. The question remains, however, how the human knower is to negotiate this infinitely perspectival, destabilized world. Deconstructionism answers with, as an alternative ideal, a constant vigilant suspicion of all determinate readings of culture and a partner aesthetic of ceaseless textual play. Here is where deconstruction may slip into its own fantasy of escape from human locatedness—by supposing that the critic can become wholly protean, adopting endlessly shifting, seemingly inexhaustible vantage points, none of which is "owned" by either the critic or the author of a text under examination.

Deconstructionism has profoundly affected certain feminist approaches to gender as a grid for the reading of culture. Such readings, these feminists argue, only reproduce the dualistic logic which has held the Western imagination in its grip. Instead, contemporary feminism should attempt, as Susan Suleiman describes it, "to get beyond, not only the number one—the number that determines unity of body or of self—but also to get beyond the number two, which determines difference, antagonism and exchange."
22
"One is too few," as Donna Haraway writes, "but two are too many."
23
The "number one" clearly represents for Suleiman the fictions of unity, stability, and identity characteristic of the phallocentric worldview. The "number two'' represents the grid of gender, which feminists have used to expose the hierarchical, oppositional structure of that worldview. "Beyond the number two" is, not some other number, but "endless complication" and a "dizzying accumulation of narratives." Suleiman here refers to Derrida's often quoted interview with Christie McDonald, in which he speaks of "a 'dream' of the innumerable, . . . a desire to escape the combinatory to invent incalculable choreographies."
24

Such images from Derrida have been used in a variety of ways by feminists. Drucilla Cornell and Adam Thurschwell interpret Derrida as offering a utopian vision of human life no longer organized by gender duality and hierarchy.
25
But Suleiman interprets him as offering an
epistemological
or narrative ideal. As such, key

contrasts with traditional (most particularly, Cartesian) images of knowing are immediately evident. Metaphors of dance and movement have replaced the ontologically fixing stare of the motionless spectator. The lust for finality has been banished. The dream is of "incalculable choreographies," not the clear and distinct "mirrorings" of nature, seen from the heights of ''nowhere." But, I would argue, the philosopher's fantasy of transcendence has not yet been abandoned. The historical specifics of the modernist, Cartesian version have simply been replaced by a new, postmodern configuration of detachment, a new imagination of disembodiment: a dream of being
everywhere.

My point can best be seen through examination of the role of the body—that is, of the metaphor of the body—in these (seemingly contrasting) epistemologies of "nowhere" and "everywhere." For Cartesian epistemology, the body—conceptualized as the site of epistemological limitation, as that which fixes the knower in time and space and therefore situates and relativizes perception and thoughtrequires transcendence if one is to achieve the view from nowhere, the God'seye view. Once one has achieved that view (has become
objective),
one can see nature as it really is, undistorted by human perspective. For postmodern Suleiman, by contrast, there is no escape from human perspective, from the process of human making and remaking of the world. The body, accordingly, is reconceived. No longer an obstacle to knowledge (for knowledge in the Cartesian sense is an impossibility, and the body is incapable of being transcended in pursuit of it), the body is seen instead as the vehicle of the human making and remaking of the world, constantly shifting location, capable of revealing endlessly new points of view.

Beneath the imagery of a moving (but still unified) body is the deeper postmodern imagery of a body whose very unity has been shattered by the choreography of multiplicity. For the "creative movement" (as Suleiman describes it) of human interpretation, of course, "invents" (and reinvents) the body itself.
26
Donna Haraway imaginatively and evocatively describes this fragmented postmodern body through the image of the cyborg, which becomes a metaphor for the "disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self [which] feminists must code." The cyborg is not only culturally "polyvocal"; she (?) "speaks in tongues."
27
Looked at with the aid of the imagery of archetypal typology rather

than science fiction, the postmodern body is the body of the mythological Trickster, the shapeshifter: "of indeterminate sex and changeable gender . . . who continually alters her/his body, creates and recreates a personality . . . [and] floats across time" from period to period, place to place.
28

The appeal of such archetypes is undeniable. Set against the masculinist hubris of the Cartesian ideal of the magisterial, universal knower whose privileged epistemological position reveals reality as it is, the postmodern ideal of narrative "heteroglossia" (as Haraway calls it) appears to celebrate a "feminine" ability to enter into the perspectives of others, to accept fluidity as a feature of reality. At a time when the rigid demarcations of the clear and distinct Cartesian universe are crumbling, and the notion of the unified subject is no longer tenable, the Trickster and the cyborg invite us to "take pleasure" in (as Haraway puts it) the "confusion of boundaries," in the fragmentation and fraying of the edges of the self that have already taken place.
29

However, the spirit of epistemological
jouissance
suggested by the images of cyborg, Trickster, the metaphors of dance, and so forth obscures the located, limited, inescapably partial, and
always
personally invested nature of human "story making." This is not merely a theoretical point. Deconstructionist readings that enact this protean fantasy are continually "slipslidin' away"; through paradox, inversion, selfsubversion, facile and intricate textual dance, they often present themselves (maddeningly, to one who wants to enter into critical dialogue with them) as having it any way they want. They refuse to assume a shape for which they must take responsibility.