Nothing mat(t)ers: A feminist critique of postmodernism

Women’sStudies Int. Forum, Vol. 17,Nos. 213, pp. 315-321,1994 Copyright 0 1994ElsevierScienceLtd Printed in the USA. All rights reserved 0277-5395/!34 $6.00 + .OO

Pergamon

BOOK REVIEWS

NOTHING

IMAT(T)E

A FEMINIST CRITIQUE OF POST-

culine methodology and ideology,which has trained and constrained us all. (p. xxiii)

by Somer Brodribb, 178 pages. Spinifex Press, Melbourne, 1992. AU$24.95; UKf10.99. MODERNISM,

Somer Brodribb does feminist theory a great service by showing exactly why it is important to “reject postmodernism for feminism.” She attacks the works of the masters of postmodernism from a position of considerable knowledge. Other radical feminist theorists have tended to avoid postmodernism. They have not wanted to spend valuable energies on the work of deliberately obscure male authors who seemed to offer nothing to the feminist project. They have chosen to wait for postmodemism to lose its currently fashionable status. But so many feminists have chosen to adopt the protective coloration of postmodern jargon or even to become enthusiastic disciples that it threatens to dominate what is seen as feminist theory in the academy. Brodribb doesn’t think that postmodernism can be harmlessly annexed by feminists. She points out that postmodernist thought, whether by women or men, consists of the interpretation of the male canon: Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, even Nietzsche and Freud. She says it is important to understand the glaring misogyny of these texts and proceeds to demonstrate this misogyny with wit and great energy. These founders of what is now called postmodernism are not accidentally sexist, she argues, but base their work on “the masculine repertoire of psychotic mind/body splitting and the peculiar arrangement of reality as Idea” (p. xvi). In fact, postmodernism exults in female oblivion and disconnection; it has no model for the acquisition of knowledge, for making connections, for communication, or for becoming global, which feminism has done and will continue to do. (p. xix) So why has this body of ideas been attractive to some feminist theorists? For those to whom this whole corpus remains immensely unattractive, however it is read, this is an intriguing question. Brodribb suggests that male ideas are so abundant that “we have a difficulty in refusing, of not choosing masculine theoretical products.” The old radical feminist notion that male philosophy and science were so compromised that women really did need to start from scratch to create feminist theory, to use their own experience and credit each other, is treated as bizarrely old-fashioned and separatist by the handmaidens of postmodernism. The idea that experience can be used in any way in the creation of theory is particularly derided by ‘feminist’ postmodernists. As Brodribb remarks: Underneath this notion lies the historically specific dualism of intellect vs act, theory vs practice, a mas-

Some feminists are choosing to use the work of postmodern men because this gives them a credibility in the academy which they could never achieve through referencing women. Using the boys can be a desperate plea for attention:

. . . it is true that if we read/write/speak of women, very few will attend to what we say, even if the women referred to are not feminists. So that the objection to leaving male theory behind expresses a real fear of being silenced: unless you read/write speak the boys, no one will listen to you. (p. xxviii) The women who choose for this reason to use men’s work seek to make it less unpalatable to feminist sensibilities. They “reprogram the machine, turning it from a war machine against women into a gentler, kinder war machine, killing us softly” (p. xxix). Brodribb explains why such feminist theorists are likely to defend their work so fiercely. They have made a huge investment of time and energy and cannot afford to “admit that the effort was virtually futile.” Brodribb argues that postmodernism is rotten at its core and cannot be reclaimed or rehabilitated for feminist uses and that it would be “Sophie’s choice” to: “simply add woman to the recipe for the ‘death of man.’ She sees the death of woman as central to postmodernist consciousness, as the “ticket to masculine redemption” in the “post-world of male theories and conference circuits.” She reveals fascinating examples of the wit and wisdom of various postmodernist heroes: Foucault, for instance, wrote a series of articles after a trip to Iran, praising the Ayatollah Khomeini ardently for, amongst other things, being nonpolitical. When an Iranian woman protested, Foucault replied that she was unintelligent, hateful, and did not understand Islam. Brodribb also includes a delightful quote from Lacan: In other words- for the moment, I am not fucking, I am talking to you. Well! I can have exactly the same satisfaction as if I were fucking. That’s what it means. Indeed, it raises the question of whether in fact I am not fucking at this moment. (p. 89) Brodribb uses this to illustrate Mary O’Brien’s description of postmodernism as the philosophy of the “prophets of prick and prattle.” Brodribb’s irreverence toward those men seen as the very fount and total content of what is considered social theory or philosophy by the western academy is delightfully refreshing. The gods of contemporary patriarchal discourse are very nicely cut down to size. Brodribb also offers advice on how to recognise a PMS (postmodem/ 315

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Book Reviews

poststructuralist) man. Those suffering from this new disorder will exhibit such symptoms as “Thinks his word is God. Or at least, confuses his penis with a deity” or “Cannot make a commitment. Fears the political engagement of others” (p. 21). As any reader of recent feminist theory will know, it is Foucault who has been seized on as most useful to the feminist project. Brodribb responds to the enthusiast: “Foucauldian feminism is ill-advised: how can we speak with the Master’s voice, tell our lives in his categories?” (p. 49). One aspect of this Master’s voice, she points out, is to strangle feminist analysis of sexual abuse. Foucault’s understanding of “perpetual spirals of power and pleasure” leads to seeing incest and its taboo as a game of pleasure and power. To illustrate Foucault’s understanding of power and sexism, Brodribb offers the example of his hiring of his male lover, instead of a more qualified woman, to the department he chaired at Clermont, with the statement “We don’t like old maids” (P. 50). Brodribb considers the other really illustrious star of postmodernism, Lacan. She explains that Lacan “claims origin, action, generation and matrix for the phallus” (p. 9.5). And does this phallus have anything to do with the penis? It seems so. The importance of the penis creates problems for women: as Brodribb explains, “women are biologically incapable of representing the phallus, are eternally secondary citizens in the symbolic order and can only come through the phallus” (p. 99). Not a particularly attractive theory for feminists, one might have thought, but many have been drawn to phallus worship. Why should some feminists believe that there is really no possible escape from the phallic signifier? Brodribb suggests that they seem to think that psychoanalysis is “magic and not ideology.” Nothing Mat(t)ers is not an easy book to read. It is thickly populated with ideas and written with great verve and panache. However, it does assume considerable prior knowledge of texts which feminists may well have avoided, because of their obscurity and because the game did not seem worth the candle. It is unfortunate that such an exciting critique is not always as lucid as one might like. Yet beside the work of the handmaidens, the endless, dutiful and incredibly boring glosses on the work of the Masters which are called postmodern feminism, this book is a model of readability. There are international conferences on Lacan at which earnest men and women seek to understand the real meaning of the Master. There are not yet such conferences on Mary Daly or Catharine MacKinnon. And of course there probably never will be. Feminist theorists are not seen as real theorists and are unlikely to achieve status with the boys. But it would also be pretty terrible to see feminists who are known for wilfulness and rebellion treating the work of their sisters as if it were engraved on tablets. So it remains something of a mystery why so many potentially wilful women are prepared to accord to unregenerately sexist male philosophers the respect, nigh on adulation, they would never accord a woman. Why can we not respect, reference, use and love the work of other feminist philosophers instead of holding the train of a male priesthood? Some feminists employ the Masters of postmodernism to criticise feminism. Brodribb quotes the editors of Feminism and Foucault (Diamond & Quinby, 1988, p. ix) as saying that Foucault helps challenge feminist

‘orthodoxy’ and that this is helpful at a time when “feminism is on the defensive politically” (p. 46). She asks whether feminism needs Foucault to make it humble in antifeminist times. Brodribb’s book, which uncovers the deeply anti-woman agenda of the masters of postmodernism, makes the current enthusiasm of some feminist thinkers seem truly astonishing. SHEILA JEFFREYS UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE AUSTRALIA

REFERENCE Diamond, Irene, & Quinby, Lee (Eds.). (1988). Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on resistance.Boston: Northeastern University Press.

NOTHING MAT(T)ERS: A FEMINIST CRITIQUE OF POSTMODERNISM, by Somer Brodribb, 178 pages. Spinifex

Press, Melbourne, 1992. AU$24.95; UKf 10.99. An empassioned and deeply felt book, Somer Brodribb’s Nothing Mat(t)ers disputes not only “the masculinity of postmodernist/poststructuralist theory, and the texts central in its debates” (p. ix), but also sees such writings as constitutive of the ideology of masculine domination. For Brodribb, this discourse is an especially narcissistic one, in which the male gaze is turned upon an icon of ‘the Man’ and within which knowledge for women is accessed only by means of the word of ‘the Masters.’ Chapter 1 deals with the personal and political context of this discourse. Chapter 2 is concerned with feminist encounters with structuralism. Chapter 3 looks at Foucault’s critique of Sartre. Chapter 4 is concerned with Derrida. Chapter 5 contrasts the work of Lacan and Irigaray. Chapter 6 deals with the ‘immateriality’ of postmodernism and with masculine reason. Somer Brodribb’s stance is that the medium is the message, as far as the postmodernist, poststructuralist, and deconstructionist discourse is concerned. That is, its overt arguments may be seductive, but the language and form in which the discourse is expressed are highly hierarchical, mystificatory, and masculinist. Her concern is with the medium, and in her impulse to condemn it on behalf of feminism, almost by default she denounces all aspects and nuances of the wider arguments associated with it. This leaves readers with two severe puzzles. The first is the puzzle of being able to ekplain why any feminist should take any aspects of this discourse seriously, for in Brodribb’s account ‘(true) feminism’ stands on the side of the good, and ‘postmodernism’ on the side of all that is repellant and abhorrent. However, a set of ideas that have engaged and persuaded so many feminists deserves more serious consideration than it gets here, a consideration which certainly must note the determined antifeminism of the medium but also recognise the power and good sense of many of the ideas themselves. These ideas have been pillaged from what are for postmodernism the despised texts of humanism, marxism, psychoanalysis, and feminism itself- the end of grand narratives, the death of ‘authoritative’ pronouncements, knowledge as contextual and situated, the fragmentations of identity, the recognition of differ-