The World Turned Inside Out Page 9

  Scott proposed to historicize the schematic psychoanalysis of the object relations school by using Jacques Lacan’s poststructuralist emphasis on language in creating the unstable subject of modernity: “This kind of interpretation makes the categories of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ problematic by suggesting that masculine and feminine are not inherent characteristics but subjective (or fictional) constructs. This interpretation also implies that the subject is in a constant process of construction.” Like many other feminists, she had some doubts about Lacan’s applicability to the local knowledge of discrete historical events. But she insisted that his poststructuralist approach to symbolic systems—“to the ways societies represent gender”—was indispensable: “Without meaning, there is no experience; without processes of signification, there is no meaning (which is not to say that language is everything, but a theory that does not take it into account misses the powerful roles that symbols, metaphors, and concepts play in the definition of human personality and human history).” And this approach harbored decidedly deconstructionist purposes: “We need a refusal of the fixed and permanent binary opposition [between male and female], a genuine historicization and deconstruction of the terms of sexual difference.”

  Scott’s own definition of gender realized these theoretical imperatives by evacuating the anthropological premises Gayle Rubin had rented in writing her feminist address. Gender has been “a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes,” Scott declared, and, even more provocatively, it has also been “a primary way of signifying relationships of power.” It isn’t merely a function of family, household, or kinship, and it isn’t a relic of archaic taboos, as Rubin had claimed. Instead, it has organized and amplified every symbolic system, including those that have permitted the idea of individualism and the collective identity of class; the history of subjectivity and the history of work, which between them include almost all of human history as such, would, according to this theoretical program, now require the study of gender difference. Gender could not, then, be foreign to “politics and power in their most traditionally construed sense.” For the legitimacy of state power and military force is a linguistic problem rather than a logistical matter—laws and armies and wars must eventually be justified in words, no matter who fights them. So their success must depend on the legibility of the gendered metaphors that statesmen, jurists, and diplomats have always deployed to explain their decisions.

  Scott’s concluding trespass on the terrain of traditional political history clinched her theoretical case and opened up a whole new way of writing diplomatic as well as social, cultural, and intellectual history. It got her into some trouble, too, mainly with her empirically minded colleagues in departments of history, sociology, and political science, for whom the actual deeds of women mattered more than their representation as females in the discourse of their disciplines. But regardless of your discipline, Scott’s essay still stands as the bridge you must cross if you want to map the connection between the theory and the practice of gender.

  Gender Trouble

  Judith Butler’s enormously influential work of the 1980s and 1990s—it is impossible to exaggerate her impact on every academic discipline—is built upon the specifications of Joan Scott’s design for a new theoretical infrastructure of feminism. But it redraws the bridge in crossing. Butler’s first book, based on her doctoral dissertation, was Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (1986). Here she traced the recuperation of

  G. W. F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) by the French philosophers Alexandre Kojeve, Jean Hippolyte, and Jean Paul Sartre, then turned to the recent revolt against the Hegelian “dialectic of desire” in the works of Foucault, Lacan, Derrida, and Deleuze. As she tells us in the preface, she was not yet prepared, in 1985, to treat these revolutionaries with the same care she had taken with their predecessors. Even so, the intellectual sources of her next book, published three years later, can be found in that last chapter, called “Hegel and Contemporary French Theory.”

  Another crucial source of the incendiary new book, Gender Trouble (1990), was the Gender Seminar assembled under Joan Scott’s direction at the Institute for Advanced Study in the 1987–1988 academic year, which included two other prominent scholars, Donna Haraway and Evelyn Fox Keller, who, as accomplished feminist historians of science, were then asking, “Is sex to gender as nature is to science?” Butler, like Scott, Haraway, and Keller, was looking for a way to “denaturalize” gender by interrogating the relation between bodies and identities, between subjectivity and agency. In conducting this search, her working hypothesis was the guiding assumption of modern feminism—to wit, the important differences between males and females, apart from reproductive capacities, are historically determined cultural conventions and, as such, are the proper objects of intellectual scrutiny, social movements, and public policies.

  So the personal was definitely political; for Butler’s book was a profound critique of “the” subject presupposed by modern philosophy and modern science. Indeed, it recalled Heidegger’s excavation of the same subject, perhaps because it, too, designated Friedrich Nietzsche as its philosophical antecedent. But her concern was that women recently liberated from male supremacy would merely imitate “Man” in the era of the ego. That is why she asked, “Do women want to become subjects on the model [of Man] which requires and produces an anterior region of abjection?” Her answer explained the political connotations of her project: “We may be tempted to think that to assume the subject in advance is necessary in order to safeguard the agency of the subject. But to claim that the subject is constituted is not to claim that it is determined; on the contrary, the constituted character of the subject is the very precondition of its agency. . . . [And] if we agree that politics and power exist already at the level at which the subject and its agency are articulated and made possible, then agency can be presumed only at the cost of refusing to inquire into its construction.”

  As the political theorist Adam Przeworski claimed in 1985 that class consciousness is the product of struggle (thus annulling sociological definitions of class), so Butler claimed that the gendered subject and its agency are the results, not the origins, of actions (thus annulling sociological definitions of gender). That subject was neither imposed on nor determined by the inert externality of sex or nature—it was performed, and so it was always and already a historical event to be treated as such by historical methods. She cited a Nietzschean warrant for this antiphilosophical claim: “The challenge for rethinking gender categories outside of the metaphysics of substance [a reference to the sublime object of deconstructionist critique] will have to consider the relevance of Nietzsche’s claim in On the Genealogy of Morals that ‘there is no “being” behind doing, effecting, becoming: the “doer” is merely a

  fiction added to the deed—the deed is everything.’” And having assessed the warrant, she allowed the search: “There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results.”

  “No ideas but in things,” as the pragmatist poet William Carlos Williams put it early in the twentieth century. By insisting that an inquiry into the construction of agency (hence identity) was the political purpose of feminism, however, Butler made some significant enemies. At least she started some important arguments. For example, two political theorists, Seyla Benhabib and Nancy Fraser, both feminists trained in the school of critical theory, worried that Butler’s account of gender formation robbed women of their political capacities. Benhabib asked, “If this view of the self is adopted, is there any possibility of changing those ‘expressions’ that constitute us? If we are no more than the sum total of the gendered expressions we perform, is there ever any chance to stop the performance for a while?” She concluded that “the very project of female emancipation” was simply unthinkable from the perspective Butler proposed: “What f
ollows from this Nietzschean position is a vision of the self as a masquerading performer, except of course we are now asked to believe that there is no self behind the mask.” Fraser was less combative but equally critical of Butler, especially of her “deeply antihumanist” language—that is, of a language so far “removed from our everyday ways of talking and thinking about ourselves [as] to require some justification.” She recommended a return to nineteenth-century notions of subjectivity and agency as the antidote to a performative theory of gender and identity.

  Notice that these worries were conveyed by committed feminists, women of the Left who nonetheless sound very similar to Roger Kimball—the man who saw the eclipse of the self in the great transformation of higher education and its corollary, the demise of the humanities as conceived in the nineteenth century. Notice, too, that these debates about identity and agency were conducted on the Left , by the Left, in remarkably strident terms. In view of these weird facts, is it possible to say that the so-called culture wars began when liberals and leftists started disagreeing about the nature of the self, the function of the family, and the pliability of reality?

  Culture Wars on the Left

  Well, yes, it is possible. That was a rhetorical question. Kimball himself said in 1998 that “the real battle that is now shaping up is not between radicals and conservatives but between radicals and old-style liberals.” So let us examine some other outstanding examples of left-wing frustration with the “linguistic turn” of poststructuralist, postmodernist thinking in the late twentieth century. Having examined them, we will be in a position to understand that the so-called culture wars were domestic squabbles—they were in-house arguments about the future of liberalism—until the very end of the century, when they spilled out into party politics, when the private became public, when the personal finally got political.

  Our first example is from 1995, when Alan Sokal, a physicist from New York University (NYU), embarrassed the editors of the cutting-edge left-wing journal Social Text by writing a hilarious parody of poststructuralist prose for a special issue on the “social construction of nature” (one of the editors was Andrew Ross, also of NYU, who, as Lynne Cheney noted with disdain, labeled himself an “assassin of objectivity”). The day the issue came out, Sokal revealed his hoax in Lingua Franca, a popular new magazine devoted to the cultural politics of academia (a good indication, by the way, that the headquarters of the larger culture was higher education). Like Mrs. Cheney, he believed in a fixed external reality governed by scientifically proven laws of motion—and like the editors of In These Times, a socialist newspaper published in Chicago, he believed the academic Left had lost its way when it made the linguistic turn and decided, following Charles Peirce’s semiotic lead, that “matter is effete mind.”

  As a dedicated activist who lent his time and money to many left-wing causes, Sokal wanted to show that the academic Left was wasting its time on esoteric, trivial pursuits insofar as it was not concentrating on the material realities of poverty at home and abroad. He wanted to show that what passed for serious thinking on this strange new Left was merely jargon. It was a convincing performance, but it begged the questions that founded the journal and animated the particular issue—what can objectivity mean in a world that can take Thomas Kuhn’s conclusions for granted, and what can subjectivity mean in a world that can’t assume the position of a white, male, bourgeois proprietor of himself?

  Our next example is from 1997, when Harvard University Press published three lectures by Richard Rorty under the title of Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in 20th-Century America. Rorty was one of the most important public intellectuals in the United States, and by most accounts he was our most distinguished pragmatist philosopher (the only competition would be Hilary Putnam of Harvard, who invited him to Cambridge to give those lectures). Certainly he led the revival of pragmatism on this side of the Atlantic during the 1970s and 1980s, mainly by participating in the poststructuralist linguistic turn that derived from the rediscovery of semiotics. As a “red-

  diaper baby”—his father James was briefly affiliated with the Communist Party of the United States of America in the 1930s—and a bona fide liberal who has always wanted to tax the rich and educate the poor, Rorty had solid left-wing credentials. But his lectures were a withering critique of the Left that had taken over the universities.

  Like many right-wing critics of this same political tendency, he called it the Cultural Left, but the story he told was a tale of decline and fall from the glory days of the New Deal, when the Old Left—a coalition of labor unions and intellectuals like Rorty’s own father—invented the welfare state. First the New Left of the 1960s repudiated these predecessors; then its constituents went to graduate school, became professors, and taught students how to hate their country. This Cultural Left of the universities had nothing to say about the economic sources of poverty and inequality because it was interested only in the return of repressed ethnic identities: it spent “all its time talking about matters of group identity, rather than about wages and hours.” It lacked “American national pride” because, unlike the Old Left, and even the New Left—which had, after all, fought for the civil rights promised by the Declaration and inscribed in the Constitution—it did not believe that the original promise of American life could be redeemed.

  The wonderful irony in Rorty’s best-selling performance was his prior sponsorship in philosophy of the linguistic turn that produced deconstruction, among other novelties of scholarship. Like the influential literary critic Richard Poirier, he had often compared the American proponents of pragmatism, from Emerson to James, with the French proponents of poststructuralism, from Lacan to Derrida, and had declared them obvious affiliates of the same solution to both the philosophical problem of situating the self in the world and the literary problem of explaining oneself to the world. Rorty called this solution “postmodernist bourgeois liberalism,” but it was just as dangerous to Mrs. Cheney’s conventional notion of objective truth as Michel Foucault’s rendition of reason. Meanwhile, however, Rorty’s call for a renewed “national pride” and a reinvigorated individualism offended almost everyone in the pilot disciplines of the American university system—almost everyone, that is, on the Cultural Left.

  Yet another example of left-wing culture wars is from 1999, when the eminent philosopher and ardent feminist Martha Nussbaum went after Judith Butler in the pages of The New Republic, the wonky weekly that has taken itself too seriously since 1914. Here again the issue was the evasion of “material realities” and the erasure of individual agency supposedly navigated by the linguistic turn of poststructuralism. Nussbaum’s blistering attack on Butler recalled the remarks made almost a decade earlier by Benhabib and Fraser, but its angry emphasis on “material realities”—the phrase is used eight times in a seven-page piece—finally makes it sound like a parody of the vulgar Marxism once peddled by Communist Party hacks. And again, it begged the very question raised by Butler’s theoretical position: to wit, what is the residence of agency if we cannot answer by writing the address of the old pioneer individualism? Or ask the same question another way: what if the agency of an individual is something like a linguistic capacity? People learn to speak a language by adapting themselves to inherited social conventions they choose not to avoid because they want to be understood—they are constituted as speakers, if you will, by inserting themselves into the language they are learning, playing by its rules. But isn’t there plenty of room for innovation, variation, and deviation in any individual’s facility with the language being learned? As Butler herself answered in another setting, “the constituted character of the subject is the very precondition of its agency.”

  Let us consider one final example of left-wing doubts about the linguistic turn of poststructuralism in the 1980s and 1990s. The three most influential Marxists of the late twentieth century were Fredric Jameson (a founding father of Social Text), Frank Lentricchia, and David Harvey—two literary critics at Duke and a geog
rapher from Johns Hopkins by way of Oxford. All three were both intrigued and disgusted by the phenomenon of postmodernism, which they associated with what they called “late capitalism” or “consumer capitalism” as per Ernest Mandel’s specifications; Jameson went so far as to announce that this sorry stage of civilization represented “the purest form of capital yet to have emerged.” And all three were appalled by the “humanist fantasy” of poststructuralism because it sentenced them to the “prison-house of language,” where—you guessed it—those fundamental “material realities” were unavailable for critical scrutiny. They never diagrammed an escape route from this obscure site, but they did arm many academics against its stifling enclosures.

  The critique of “tenured radicals” was, then, an intramural sport on the left in the late twentieth century. It was most definitely not a vast right-wing conspiracy—but it was in many ways conservative because it sought to rehabilitate nineteenth-century notions of individualism, agency, and objectivity. There was, in fact, a right-wing critique of academic excess, but its producers lived in a state of exile, far from the debauched ivory tower and in protest against the reckless hedonism of the larger society; this self-imposed distance made their complaints always sound like they were radically distorted by the wrong amplifier. For example, Robert Bork, the outspoken jurist we met at the end of chapter 1, claimed in 1996 that the only conceivable explanation for a progressive income tax was envy; that gun control laws were the cause of violent crime because they disarmed the law-abiding population (if criminals knew everybody carried a gun, they would be deterred from using their own); that the Declaration of Independence was a big mistake because, by enfranchising the insane individualism of the Enlightenment, it ignored the problem of social order; and that—oops—Western civilization was to blame for what happened in the abominable 1960s.