Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (39 page)

The
postmodern
has been described and redescribed with so many different points of departure that the whole discussion is by now its own most exemplary definition. Every discipline has its own theories, key figures, watershed events. In architecture—one of the most concrete and historically influential instances— postmodernism arose as a response to modernism, with its faith in social amelioration through technological innovation and systematic design. The buildings that resulted from this ideology were often cold and unlivable, and sometimes flimsy; as they began in the late 1960s and 1970s to deteriorate and collapse, the "death" of modernist architecture was declared.
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In philosophy and literary theory, at the other extreme, it is usually modernity that we diagnose as being "post," and its correspondingly more abstract (and highly debatable) "deaths''—of Man, of the Subject, of the Author—that we take as proclaiming the end of the ideology of a historical
era
and not just an artistic movement within it.

As modernity is described as beginning (and ending, according to some) at very different historical junctures and for very different reasons, the kaleidoscope of the postmodern shifts from discipline to discipline (sometimes revealing inventively postmodern configurations). One of my colleagues begins her course on postmodernism with the Holocaust, as delivering an unhealable wound to Enlightenment notions of human perfectibility and rationality. Other, more epistemologically oriented philosophers characterize the postmodern largely in terms of breakdown of belief in scientific truth and objectivity. Many tie this epistemological fragmentation to the collapse of the hegemony of Western culture; others see the "information explosion" as key. If you view (as I do) the progress of consumer capitalism as central, then the amoral and ceaseless

proliferation of products and images will figure strongly in your story of the postmodern. There are those academics in literature and philosophy who, conflating theory with all of culture, identify the postmodern solely in terms of particular poststructuralist authors and the schools of thought they have spawned. And then, too, sitting atop these various notions of the postmodern condition, there is tremendous disagreement over whether that condition is cause for celebration or depression.

"Post," too, is a slippery notion. Insofar as modernity, whatever else it is, conceives of itself as breaking with the past and inaugurating the "new," then any movement or condition which describes itself as ''postmodern" is something of a redundancy. On certain understandings of modernity, the heralding of a "postmodern age" is symptomatic of modernity's endless infatuation with innovation, with wiping the slate clean and beginning afresh. For a modern, to be "post" is de rigueur, and today it is academically fashionable as well, with its evocation of cutting edge, avantgarde sophistication attractively combined with the suggestion of politically informed opposition. And sometimes, the appellation
postmodern
appears to be used simply to advertise or indicate work or attitudes that are believed to manifest such qualities, to mark membership in an exclusive club of the brilliant and subversive. In this way, the spirit of being "post" completely overwhelms any substantive understanding of modernity, and
postmodern
comes to mean, as Charles Jencks points out, "anything resisting or deconstructing common assumptions of culture."
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This oppositional spirit is reflected in the Foucauldian buzz words which liken our professional activity to daring epistemological guerrilla warfare: intervention, contestation, resistance, subversion, interrogation, and so forth.

Membership, as the commercial says, has its privileges. It can replace the need for ongoing critical selfreflection with delusions of purity—delusions that are particularly galling (and selfcontradictory) when they claim to be "post" hierarchical thinking. I once heard a wellknown speaker go on at some length about the dangers and distortions of oppositional constructs, congratulating contemporary academics on having "gone beyond" all that, but reminding the (academic) audience of the hopelessly retrograde world "outside" that continues to think in dualistic terms. "We" cannot become complacent, so long as "they" remain in the cave. Dualism, apparently, is easier to "go beyond" in theory than in practice. The

bad faith of such theoretical hubris is also evident in much academic writing, where the division between the enlightened (averring, of course, to be thoroughly "postenlightenment") and "the others" is continually reinforced by the obscure, exclusive powerlanguage which has become virtually an obligatory club uniform in much poststructuralist prose.

Is the postmodern merely a stylish, selfpromoting, haveitanywayyoulike fancy of contemporary intellectuals? Despite what I have said above, I don't think so. A good deal of the linguistic paraphernalia of academic postmodernism, for all its pretentiousness, has its origins in important insights and ideas that ought not to be dismissed out of annoyance with the elitism and insularity that are, after all, hardly new to academia. Heterogeneity, discontinuity, displacement, destabilization: these terms may be items of postmodern academic accessorizing, but they also point to real elements of contemporary experience. "Something
is
happening" (to borrow Jane Flax's phrase); an array of cultural alterations
have
made significant changes in the conditions of life, changes which need to be named, described, and understood.

Three books by feminist authors can help us to map the postmodern. None of these books is exclusively about postmodernism. Jane Flax, in
Thinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, Postmodernism in the Contemporary West,
considers postmodern philosophy as one of three "modes of contemporary Western thought" which she brings into conversation with each other (the others are psychoanalysis and feminism). Bell hooks, in
Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics,
devotes one essay explicitly to "Postmodern Blackness" and comments on various aspects of postmodernism in several other essays in a wideranging collection of cultural criticism. Judith Butler, in
Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity,
critiques several theorists often described as postmodern, but her book is less a commentary on postmodernism than itself a postmodern approach to gender.
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These books are very differentin style, in content, in concerns, in language, in their relation to the postmodern. Yet all seem (in varying ways) "inside" the contemporary condition—embodying it as well as commenting on it—as much academic writing is not.

To illustrate this point, let me contrast the mood of Jane Flax's opening section (evocatively titled "Something Is Happening") with a few lines from a letter I received soliciting contributions for

a collection on postmodernism. "Where are our historical surveys and our critical judgments to dwell," the prospective editors ask, "after the disruption of the framework of historical periods and of the assurance of the critic/intellectual? We don't want to give postmodernity its place in the Academy; we know that the academy is a modernist project." Here, with apparently no consciousness of bad faith, the editors fashionably invoke the loss of stable historical frameworks and crises of authority, and in the very next sentence manage to retain their
own
authority neatly and unequivocally to locate the academy as a "modernist" project!

That attitude is not unique; many academic writers pronounce solemnly about the "groundlessness" of the postmodern while demonstrating no evidence that the ground has been shaken for them personally or professionally at all. Jane Flax, contrastingly, is disconcerted, troubled, and personally challenged by the prospect of trying to "do knowledge" in conditions of epistemological fragmentation and foundationlessness. "What meanings can writing have," she asks, "when every proposition and theory seems questionable, one's own identity is uncertain, and the status of the intellectual is conceived alternatively as hopelessly enmeshed in oppressive knowledge/power relations or utterly irrelevant to the workings of the technicalrational bureaucratic state?"
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I take Flax's question to be asked fully in good faith.

Throughout her book she struggles not only with the project of constructing new sources of meaning out of the partialness of others' theories (a task at which she is superb, providing detailed examinations of Freud, Lacan, and Winnicott, as well as equally incisive general discussions of feminism and postmodernism) but with her
own
''authority" as well. Scrupulously monitoring any impulse to speak from magisterial heights, Flax wins both my admiration and my affection, and also at times frustrates me. For there are insights of great importance in this book, which deserve to be showcased more than Flax's qualified "No Conclusions" (the title of the last section of her book) approach allows.

For example, as a practicing psychotherapist, Flax has an excellent grasp of the fantasies of omnipotence and control that drive philosophy and the characteristic "blind spots" that result. Not since John Dewey's has there been such a penetrating critique of the philosopher's "overestimation of the power of thinking and its

centrality to human life" and of the narcissistic reduction of history to the story of philosophy. Flax extends this critique to Derrida, Rorty, Lyotard, and (less accurately, I believe) to Foucault: "Under the cover of the 'displacement' of philosophy, a traditional activity continues: an inquiry into the conditions of possibility, meaning, and limitations of our
knowledge
via a critique of reason and philosophy."
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She emphasizes that this "mentalist, deeroticized" conception of the subject of history as philosophy is gendered (she earlier offers a similar critique of Lacanian psychoanalysis). If the story were written from the perspective of women's experiences "the dramatic episodes might not be the three deaths [of Man, of history, of metaphysics], but rather an ongoing series of struggles: to give birth and to avoid giving birth; to be represented or to avoid being misrepresented; to be concretely in time and to have one's activities order time and conceptions of history; not to exist as the eternal, 'feminine,' 'other' or 'mysterious' life source.''
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Other feminists have, of course, criticized Western philosophy's privileging of reason. What is most impressive and timely about Flax's discussion is how skillfully she brings poststructuralist thoughtwhich advertises itself as the antagonist of the "phallogocentrism" of past philosophy—under this critique. As such, poststructuralist thought presents itself not simply as a "fragment" of partial truth with which Flax is "conversing" (her chosen metaphors) but also as an important illustration within an
argument
Flax is making (extremely persuasively, perhaps despite herself), an argument about persistent and resilient
continuities
within Western culture. The Great White Father (who also has a class identity, as Dewey first pointed out) just keeps on returning, even amid the seeming ruptures of postmodern culture.

My divided reaction to Flax's postmodern hesitation to present her book as (at least in part) an argument is exemplary, perhaps, of the lovehate relationship that many of us who are trying to develop insights and perspectives out of marginalized experience have with the postmodern fragmentation of knowledge. When I was in college and graduate school in philosophy, feminists were in the vanguard of the challenge to the ahistorical, eternalizing notions of Truth and Reason that have ever been dear to our discipline. Our iconoclasm was not merely an intellectual fascination (and it certainly was not then in academic style), but was painfully grounded in our historical

experience of
knowing
other truths than the Philosopher's Timeless Ones and continually having them dismissed. I do not remember becoming "converted to" historicism, contextualism, pluralism, or "the social construction of reality." Rather, that had always been the way I (and many other academic feminists) saw things. In no little part, our intellectual perspective had been shaped by the more politically focused feminist challenge to cultural consciousness that began in the late sixties and that had raised for so many of us the startling idea that the organization and deployment of gender as we knew it (not to mention "Man" and "Woman") were human constructions rather than eternal forms.

When historicism and contextual considerations began to be seen as philosophically legitimate (rather than mushy thinking, a position many philosophers still take), not only did we feel intellectually vindicated, but it also seemed as though the moment might be at hand when the significance and vitality of those "other truths" (the truths made available through nonEuropean cultural traditions, through gendered experience, through histories of subordination) would be culturally recognized. Not for an instant did I think of any of the emerging knowledges as new candidates for the throne of Timeless Truth, but neither did I see the only choice as being that between an imperial monarchy and epistemological anarchy. In my eyes, historicism was an ally against arrogant perception and insular thinking, fostering a healthy suspicion of the "givenness" of our realities, and
not
a foreclosure on meaning, judgments, or distinctions. So much for the "love" part of the relationship.

The "hate" part has to do with the disconcerting swiftness with which the toppling of the Timeless Truths of Western thought gave way to the postmodern fragmentation of culture, with its "stylish nihilism" (as bell hooks calls it in her trenchant review of
Sammy and Rosie Get Laid
)
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and its neverending proliferation of images and options. Within this climate, feminist knowledge and the knowledges born of racial experience and consciousness were allotted the historical equivalent of approximately ten minutes to stake a claim on the conscience of our culture before the processes of their deconstruction—not only by academic theory, but also in the popular and aesthetic imagination—began. The author was suddenly dead in the academy, just as we began to write for it; and just as we began