As a concept “woman” is too fragile to bear the weight of all the contents and meanings now ascribed to it.
—Rosalind Delmar
The real political task in a society such as ours is to criticize the working of institutions which appear to be both neutral and independent; to criticize them in such a manner that the political violence which has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight them.
—Michel Foucault
During the 1980s, feminist literary criticism was marked by an often contentious split between those pragmatically committed to the recovery of the woman writer and, with her, something usually called women’s experience,1 and those concerned to explore the implications for feminism of postmodern theories that question the legitimacy of such constructs as the author and experience. This book explores feminist contributions to poststructuralist debates about language, texts, the status of the real, and the nature of political oppression and resistance; it locates both the “woman writer” and “feminist theory” within a series of cultural and historical matrices to reveal the complexities of these critical formulations. Finally, it offers a dialogical materialism through which to understand the ways in which traditionally marginalized women writers challenge notions of what constitutes the institutions of literature and criticism.
The increasing prominence of theory within feminism is evident from the sheer proliferation of hybrid labels during the 1980s: Marxist feminism, feminist reader-response criticism, feminist new historicism, and feminist psychoanalysis, to name just a few. This dissemination of theoretical allegiances has not gone unremarked. To some feminists it represents a dangerous sectarianism that threatens the ability of women to engage in meaningful political action; to others, it offers a productive diversity that may lead to a more effective, because more inclusive, activism. “Theory"—by which we almost always mean poststructuralist theory—has been an almost obsessive subject of polemics, defenses, dialogues, and debates among feminist literary critics. Elaine Showalter’s 1981 essay “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness” and her 1983 “Critical Cross-Dressing” both warn against too close an alliance with “misogynist” theories. In 1982 Peggy Kamuf and Nancy K. Miller debated in Diacritics how French theories of language and subjectivity affect the feminist project of recovering “lost” women writers. As late as 1987, Barbara Christian was decrying theory for its “linguistic jargon, its emphasis on quoting its prophets, its tendency toward 'Biblical' exegesis, . . . its preoccupations with mechanical analyses of language, graphs, algebraic equations, [and] its gross generalizations about culture” (1987, 33), while Mary Jacobus, in contrast, was criticizing the “untheorized, experiential, and literary herstorical tendency” of much American feminist criticism (1986, xii).2 This obsession with the place of theory in feminism is not merely an academic question: what is at stake for feminists in these debates, in Foucauldian terms, is how best to expose the political violence that inheres in the institution of literary studies under the guise of neutral and objective scholarship, and how most effectively to implement strategies of political resistance to sexual oppression.
Debates about theory within feminism are, significantly, also struggles to define the status of the “real.” At least since Simone de Beauvoir’s celebrated manifesto in 1952—"One is not born, but rather becomes a woman” (1974, 301)—most feminists have committed themselves to a social constructivist view of gender, to a belief that “male” and “female” are functions of historically specific forms of mediation, cultural narratives through which we structure the world, and not fixed ontological essences. At the same time, they have voiced strong ambivalence about that position. Feminists (myself included) have insisted upon the social construction of gender because we have perceived that our oppression has always been fobbed off on us as “natural,” the result of universal and immutable “differences” between the sexes. To change these gender relations we have to conceive of such concepts as human nature, masculinity, and femininity not as unitary and unchanging but as heterogeneous cultural fields, always sensitive to historical contingencies. In short, a progressive feminist politics depends upon perceiving gender and, indeed, reality as social constructs that can be dismantled and reconstructed in new and perhaps more egalitarian ways.3
But the constructivist insistence on the linguistic and rhetorical nature of reality can rebound in ways that have been troubling for many feminists. If reality is nothing more than narratives we tell ourselves, if the world is a “contestable text,” then these “stories" can have no greater claim to inherent authority than the old ones feminists have rejected. The dilemma becomes how to proclaim new, politically progressive “truths.” As Donna Haraway puts it, "We would like to think our appeals to real worlds are more than a desperate lurch away from cynicism and an act of faith like any other cult's” (1988, 577). For feminist literary critics the problems posed by a social constructivist perspective are immediate and political. Women have been denied access to the means of producing culture, and the ultimate aim of feminist criticism for many of its practitioners is to create the opportunity to help construct the conditions of their existence. In the 1970s and 1980s this meant recovering the woman writer and validating women’s experiences. But social constructivism suggests that there is no author (Foucault 1979) and that experience is a simulacrum, a set of discursive practices (de Lauretis 1987, 18). Furthermore, women’s “experience” is saturated with and not separate from the practices by which masculinist cultures reproduce their domination. The problem for feminist theorists, then, as Haraway succinctly puts it, is “how to have simultaneously an account of radical historical contingency for all knowledge claims and knowing subjects, a critical practice for recognizing our own 'semiotic technologies' for making meanings, and a no-nonsense commitment to faithful accounts of a 'real' world, one that can be partially shared and that is friendly to earth wide projects of finite freedom, adequate material abundance, modest meaning in suffering, and limited happiness” (1988, 579). The recognition that knowledge and truth claims are radically contingent and historically specific does not, however, strand us in some never-never land of relativistic paralysis—far from it—although this is precisely what the forces of conservative reaction want us to think. Nor does this recognition of the social and semiotic construction of gender deny the real, material oppression of many women by reducing it to “simply language.” A brick wall is a social construct, produced by the socioeconomic relations of production and labor, but if I run into it, my head still hurts. The task for feminist criticism in the 1990s is to develop more sophisticated theoretical models that offer a way out of the impasse described by Haraway, models that enable women to recognize the “historical contingency” of the social relations of gender, while allowing them to claim their own “truths,” however partial or contingent.
In this regard, my concern is with feminism’s need for what I shall call a politics of complexity. I use complexity in a technical as well as an evaluative sense, drawing specifically on the works of cultural critics such as Donna Haraway, N. Katherine Hayles, Bruno Latour, and Michel Serres, who work in hybrid fields at the intersections of science and culture. Complexity describes a cultural poetics of indeterminacy, informed by contemporary theoretical debates in a variety of fields but without the political paralysis often attributed to poststructuralism. By collecting the difficult questions posed by contemporary theory about language, representation, history, culture, and difference under the rubric of “complexity,” I hope to move away from the still-prevalent tendencies to construct theory in terms of totalizing systems and the “maze of dualisms" that require us to view reality in binary terms (Haraway 1985, 100). The discussion that follows, then, serves two purposes. The first is frankly polemical. I contend that feminist criticism can neither ignore theory nor simply celebrate an untheorized “difference"; it must engage—and challenge—many aspects of the competing languages that constitute contemporary theoretical discourse. The second purpose is to introduce the theoretical issues that figure prominently in later chapters, whose primary aim is to articulate a dynamic description of cultural and literary activity sensitive to the complexities of gender and the semiotic practices of culture which constitute it.
I turn to the cultural critiques of science to suggest a critical rhetoric for my argument precisely because I am concerned to decenter notions of objectivity and totalizing theory which underwrite a host of disciplinary and critical practices that inform feminist theory. Understanding these critiques provides an opportunity to expose the violence masked by the claim of science to objectivity. The warrant for such a project has been suggested by the conclusion of Haraway’s 1985 essay “A Manifesto for Cyborgs."
Taking responsibility for the social relations of science and technology means refusing an anti-science metaphysics, a demonology of technology, and so means embracing the skillful task of reconstructing the boundaries of daily life, in partial connection with others, in communication with all of our parts. It is not just that science and technology are possible means of great human satisfaction, as well as a matrix of complex dominations. Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves. (100)
Haraway’s cyborg is, in effect, a figure for a theory of complexity. Like Haraway, I believe it is important for feminists to go beyond simply showing the myriad ways in which the sciences and other institutions have oppressed women; the more difficult task is to rethink the boundaries separating different cultural practices, to examine how structures of knowledge function as strategies of oppression, and to explore how feminism might help to restructure larger cultural institutions. This project must ask not only how science or literature might be changed by feminism but also how we might appropriate aspects of dominant discourses to offer feminist theory a way out of the “maze of dualisms"—nature/culture, mind/body, fact/fiction, real/artificial, theory/praxis, objectivity/subjectivity, order/disorder—by which we have traditionally defined ourselves and our politics.
As Haraway suggests, some of the problems being posed in contemporary scientific thinking—in nonlinear dynamics, information theory, and fluid mechanics—may help feminists think about how to move away from the production of universal, totalizing theory and toward a “feminist theory of complexity” which is at the same time nontotalizing and theoretically aware of what complexity implies. These fields pose problems that cannot be solved by resorting to any simple principles of order or linear determinism. In Luce Irigaray’s terms, they resist “adequate symbolization” and signify “the powerlessness of logic to incorporate in its writing all the characteristic features of nature” (1985b, 106–7). I will forgo all the usual disclaimers about the dangers of analogies between such disparate fields of inquiry as, say, fluid mechanics and literary criticism because what I am proposing is precisely the need to explore the possibilities of circulation and exchange between artificially erected cultural boundaries, as well as to examine the institutional structures that hold them in place. I am interested in the emergence at this particular historical moment of disorder as a productive theoretical principle in the sciences—in chaos and information theory—as well as in such critical theories as de-construction. My perception that feminist theory needs to articulate noncoercive theories of complexity and disorder seems consistent with developments in several fields. In her book, Chaos Bound, Katherine Hayles speculates “that disorder has become a focal point for contemporary theories because it offers the possibility of escaping from what are increasingly perceived as coercive structures of order” (1990, 265). Disrupting cultural boundaries and tracing the possibilities for exchanges among disparate fields exposes the political interests masked by our ideas about order. As Irigaray suggests, disorder and chaos constitute a threat to Western economies of representation. Order is coercive because it is achieved through the exclusion, neutralization, or marginalization (sometimes through violence) of whatever lies outside of artificially constructed “norms,” whether the norm is constructed as an electron, a human genome, or a ruling class. To move from scientific conceptions of complexity to their implications for women’s writing in different cultural and historical contexts, though, requires that we define complexity as precisely as possible.
A theory of complexity is exactly the opposite of what physicists call a theory of everything (or TOE), a single succinct (if quixotic) mathematical description that is supposed to unify the four fundamental forces of nature: the strong force, weak force, electromagnetic force, and gravity. “A good TOE should consist of much more than a mere catalogue of underlying laws and objects; it should have explanatory power and it should establish linkages between the various facets of nature” (Davies and Brown 1988, 6). A TOE would be marked by elegance and simplicity. It would be a totalizing, universalizing theory; as E. David Peat remarks in his popular account, "A perfect theory would be forced on physicists by nature itself; there would be no room for arbitrary assumptions or for making adjustments. The theory would stand or fall on its own" (1988, 104). What is significant for my purposes is that most literary critics—including feminist literary critics—consciously or unconsciously, have derived their beliefs about what a theory is from precisely this kind scientific idealism, itself a remnant of totalizing misinterpretations of eighteenth-century Newtonianism (Markley 1991). Stanley Fish, for example, describes theory as “formal, abstract, general, and invariant,” as “a recipe with premeasured ingredients which when ordered and combined according to absolutely explicit instructions . . . will produce the desired results" regardless of the political commitments of the investigator (1985, 110–11). In other words, literary and feminist theory—according to both its detractors and its proponents—is implicitly or explicitly modeled on the “rigor” and denotative clarity idealistically attributed to deterministic science and mathematics.
Scientists in many fields, however, are routinely challenging totalizing beliefs about theory. Stephen Hawking, for example, has remarked that “quantum mechanics is essentially a theory of what we do not know and cannot predict” (1989, 138). As Hayles notes, in both the postmodern sciences and in literary theory, the 1970s and 1980s brought “a break away from universalizing, totalizing perspectives and a move toward local, fractured systems and modes of analysis (1990, 2), in other words, toward theories of complexity. In contrast to a TOE, a theory of complexity reveals the messiness behind the illusion of unified narratives about the world by restoring information—what I shall call noise—previously marginalized and excluded by those narratives. It attempts to expose the “ficticity"—or the constructed nature—of facts.
Consider disorder. Ordinarily we think of disorder as the absence of order and assign a negative value to it. Theory, in this mindset, exists to make the disorderly orderly, to discover order in it—or impose order on it. One of the insights of chaos theory, however, is that disorder is perhaps more productively conceived of as the presence of information. In the sciences, chaotic or complex systems turn out to be far more prevalent than we might at first suspect—from dripping faucets and the smoke swirls produced by a cup of hot coffee to epidemics, the weather, and even the complicated rhythms of the human heart. Although the sciences of chaos are primarily quantitative, their implications for theory are far more suggestive than the “application” of a few odd principles to feminist theories or even (though I recognize that this assumption is implicit in scientific descriptions of chaos) for promoting a deep structural explanation for disorder. My concern is to enable feminism to account for more information from those sources that have most often been marginalized by dominant systems of “order” and to create new ways of discussing and using this new information to challenge the political repression of complexity.
In this respect, I prefer to think of complexity as a trope occupying a site somewhere between an evaluative standard and a self-justifying and self-sustaining theory. To suggest briefly something of the explanatory power of this trope let me return to the dilemma of social constructivism I raised at the beginning of this chapter. The concept of complexity enables us more completely to articulate what we mean when we say that culture is the collective means by which societies represent themselves to themselves. In political theory, it is customary to think of society as a collection of preexistent individuals who relate to one another either randomly and voluntarily (the perspective of the social contract) or in ways that are overdetermined and coercive (the perspective of dialectical Marxism). But we might more productively envision society and culture as complex and interrelated systems that link individuals, institutions, discourses, texts, and material objects in relations of interdependence—of alliance and solidarity as well as struggle and conflict—which confer meaning on them but which are neither predetermined by some fixed laws of history nor existentially "free.” None of these constituents of society exists before it or independently of it; they have meaning only in relation to it and to one another. A society, then, is not a fixed and stable entity but an always shifting, always changing process. In fact, a considerable amount of cultural work is required to maintain the illusion of stasis and permanence, to deny the workings of complexity in and through society. In a more complex, “disorderly” model, societies both maintain themselves and change through elaborate feedback mechanisms by which their cultural productions—individuals, genders, class identities, and written texts—feed back into them, reorganizing and reproducing social structures and the strategies that maintain and refashion them.
Complexity, as Hayles notes, insists on local applications rather than global laws or principles. An individual assumes a gendered identity, in this regard, only within a set of social practices specific to a historical time, place, and culture. There are no universal roles or meanings attached to male or female, no “eternal feminine” or masculine principle, only networks of differential relations that construct men and women, masculine and feminine, in culturally and historically specific ways. Uncovering the full range of social meanings attached to gender within any particular cultural formation, then, requires a method sensitive to the historical particularities of time and place, as well as to the heterogeneity of socioeconomic formations, the intersecting and competing interests of different groups, and the hegemonic practices that work to smooth over or to suppress these conflicts.
The intersections, collisions, and perturbations created by the many different agents, institutions, and discourses at work within a society create patterns that cannot be resolved into coherent narratives. The unidirectional laws of cause and effect—of history—which have traditionally been used to explain social relations are inadequate to represent the complexities of the production we call society, but so too are the very images I have employed—networks, for example. Attempts to produce totalizing representations of society, culture, and history risk mistaking local contingencies for global patterns. Any understanding we may have of the formation of gender identity within a particular society, consequently, will always be incomplete and fragmentary, limited to partial representations of local networks. This recognition of our contingency, however, does not need to be disabling; it can create the impetus to challenge hegemonic, totalizing constructions of self and society.
Those cultural practices, meanings, and values that attempt to bring together power and knowledge to create order and hierarchy may be examined by drawing on something like Foucault’s notion of the disposatif, or “grid of intelligibility.” The disposatif locates a set of specific practices that organize some aspect of social life. It establishes links among such disparate practices as “discourses, institutions, architectural arrangements, regulations, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophic propositions, morality, philanthropy, etc.” (1980, 194) as a means of demonstrating how societies construct, organize, and control their constituent subjects.4 But those practices that serve to create “docile” subjects have to be continually “renewed, recreated, and defended” and therefore can be challenged, resisted, and modified (Williams 1977, 112). Michel de Certeau uses the term “poaching” to describe those strategies that parasitically undermine hegemonic cultural practices and enable the disempowered to manipulate the conditions of their existence. “Everyday life,” he writes, “invents itself by poaching in countless ways on the property of others” (1984, xii).5 These appropriations of the dominant social order deflect its power without challenging it overtly. Poaching is neither staightforward conformity nor rebellion but a dialogic and destabilizing encounter between conflicting cultural codes. If we accept this complex model of social relations, the dilemma for feminists becomes not how to overturn the oppressive social relations of gender but, how to poach most effectively, how to influence the direction and velocity of change in a social formation that is constantly in flux.
Subsequent chapters of this book attempt to suggest rather than demonstrate authoritatively an analytic of complexity by examining the conflicts and struggles that have gone into the production of the “woman writer” as a critical concept for feminism, looking at specific historical instances of that production: in the Middle Ages, the Enlightenment, at the turn of the twentieth century. Each chapter builds on the recognition that both gender identity and the cultural authority conveyed by authorship are socially produced within a specific grid of intelligibility and that the subjects they produce—the woman writer and her texts—in turn contribute to the reproduction of the system of gender relations. But before turning to those specific instances, I would like to outline three “propositions,” or key assumptions, that will guide this study and then elaborate on each of them in subsequent sections of this chapter.
(1) A feminist theory of complexity must be dialogic, doublevoiced, in that its explorations of social and cultural phenomena will be “half-ours, half-someone else's” (Bakhtin 1981, 345).
(2) Dialogic complexity restores the history of conflict and struggle that went into the making of the “fact” but was suppressed to create the appearance of unquestioned “fact."
(3) History, conceived of as an unresolvable tension between "what really happened” and the multiple and dialogic narratives about it, provides a means by which feminists might destabilize oppressive representations of gender and locate on the margins of discourse—in the “noise” of history—possibilities for more egalitarian cultural formations not yet even recognizable as representations.
"There is no utterance without relation to other utterances, and that is essential,” writes Tzvetan Todorov in his introduction to the work of Mikhail Bakhtin (1984, 60). Elsewhere, I have suggested that Bakhtin’s conception of the “dialogic” word provides feminist theory with a critical rhetoric that enables feminists to examine the complex social relations of gender and to engage in contemporary theoretical debates without falling into either essentialist argumerits about a “women’s language” uncontaminated by “male thought” or a too uncritical assimilation of literary theory (Finke 1986). Because the field of utterance is the space in which feminist theories must be contested, a feminist theory of complexity might usefully begin with a dialogic notion of the utterance to counter the totalizing structuralist concept of the sign which has dominated contemporary literary theory almost as thoroughly as it has dominated contemporary linguistics.
To provide a model for the historical transformation of social values and ideologies we must understand the utterance as an ideological construct produced through conflict and struggle within a specific social and historical context. The dialogics described by Bakhtin and members of his circle, most notably V. N. Vološinov and P. N. Medvedev, provides the impetus for a more complex understanding of how discourse functions. Bakhtin argues that all discourse is inherently dialogic and double-voiced, that it involves "intense interaction and struggle between one’s own and another's word, . . . in which [these words] oppose or . . . interanimate one another” (1981, 354).6 In using the term double-voiced I am not implying that this dialogue is structured around such binary oppositions as male speech/female speech; rather, language that is double-voiced calls into question the fiction of authoritative or monologic discourse. Every utterance is always inhabited by the voice of the “other,” or of many others, because the interests of race, class, gender, ethnicity, age, and any number of other related "accents” intersect in any utterance. These perturbations in the theoretically linear flow of speech are not simply additive; we cannot just append them to conventional structural descriptions of grammar and syntax. Instead, they create labyrinthine complexities that are masked by traditional linguistic concepts. For this reason, the dynamics of this complex system might be better represented by the term heteroglossia, a rough translation of Bakhtin's raznojazychie for the ideologically contested field of utterances.
Bakhtin rejects the Saussurean distinction between langue and parole central to contemporary linguistics, arguing that language exists not as an abstract, holistic entity but only as a series of utterances in a “dialogically agitated environment.” He liberates language from the constraints of structuralist abstractions and returns it to the realm of cultural activity, where it participates in the historical, social, and political life of its speakers—the powerless no less than the powerful—as both a production and a producer of social relations. In “Discourse in the Novel” he writes, “Any concrete discourse (utterance) finds the object at which it was directed already as it were overlain with qualification, open to dispute, charged with value, already enveloped in an obscuring mist—or, on the contrary, by the 'light' of alien words that have already been spoken about it” (1981, 276). This formulation of language as a struggle among competing codes, interpretations, and reconstructions of meaning, offers feminists a radical critique of language which calls attention to the ideological and discursive bases of identity (the woman writer) and experience (women’s experience), as well as the values we assign to these constructs. The dialogic utterance is never simply citation, never an uncritical or passive acceptance of the other’s words, because what both speaker and listener must grasp in any utterance is not, as Saussure suggests, what is invariant in all its uses but what is different, novel in its use in particular situations. It is the context, a particular social and cultural situation, that creates the sign’s provisional, local meaning. Repetition can never be repetitiousness.
The other’s speech in our own is open, unfinished; it may become assimilated to our voices, but it is always the occasion for the struggle with another’s words which Bakhtin sees as crucial to ideological consciousness. We learn from the other’s speech, but we also “take it into new contexts, attach it to new material, put it in new situations in order to wrest new answers from it, new insights into its meaning, and even wrest from it new words of our own (since another’s discourse, if productive, gives birth to a new word from us in response)” (1981, 346–47). Bakhtin’s notion of the dialogized word is useful to feminist critics precisely because it refuses to see the oppressed or marginalized as passive victims of their oppression; it returns to them a culturally specific agency and the power to participate in defining their struggles, in turning the oppressor’s words against him. In this respect, feminist theorists might see their encounters with poststructuralist thought, including Bakhtin's, not as the imposition of another “master” discourse but as the opportunity to engage in a productive, complex exchange with the other’s words.
Because all language is dialogic, it can never be the sole property of any individual group, any more than it can of any man or woman. In Vološinov/Bakhtin’s words, “Class does not coincide with the sign community, i.e., with the community which is the totality of users of the same set of signs for ideological communication. Thus various different classes will use one and the same language. As a result, differently oriented accents intersect in every ideological sign. Sign becomes an arena of the class struggle” (1986, 23). The sign is also an arena of the sexual struggle. Both sexes use the "same” language, or more radically, both sexes contest the “same" language. For Bakhtin, the struggle for and within language is ongoing. If patriarchy has created the illusion of monologic utterances monopolized by men, then feminists can dispel that illusion by appropriating the notion of heteroglossia, highlighting the dialogic nature of all discourse, insisting that those contested voices be heard. In doing so, feminists substitute for the dream of a “common women’s language,” or écriture féminine, what Haraway has called “a powerful infidel heteroglossia” (1985, 101).7 Hetero-glossia, according to Bakhtin, is “another’s speech in another’s language, serving to express [the speaker's] intentions, but in a refracted way” (1981, 324). Feminist discourse is by its very nature the model of a complex heteroglossia because it always contains and struggles against another's—in this case masculinist—speech. To invoke “the female” in any sign is automatically to invoke “the male.” The female contains the male not monologically, as the universal masculine is said to contain the female, but dialogically, as the possibility of politically refracting the utterance of the other.
Bakhtin’s notion of the dialogic word has not been without its recent critics, and I am far from urging an uncritical acceptance of his work. Two objections in particular have been raised. The first, and perhaps more obvious, is that Bakhtin ignores the workings of gender in articulating his notion of dialogism.8 This criticism can hardly be overlooked in any feminist appropriation of the dialogic, but it is worth pointing out, as I have done elsewhere (1986), that all the theories feminists have drawn upon—both explicitly and implicitly—ignore the workings of gender. Indeed, that is the whole point of feminism: to call attention to the marginalization of gender relations, and of the feminine, in Western cultural narratives about order. The feminine, as Dale Bauer suggests, becomes a "disruptive excess,” the voice of gender, which cannot be accounted for in Bakhtin’s dialogic model but which provides the basis for a feminist dialogics (1988, 6). We can apply the notion of dialogism to Bakhtin’s own thought, using it as a means to stage an encounter between Bakhtinian heteroglossia and feminist theory. Feminism can encounter Bakhtin’s words not as authoritative but as “internally persuasive discourse,” discourse from which we can wrest our own—feminist—meanings. Forms of poaching, I would add, are always complex.
The second important critique of the dialogic is that Bakhtin somehow promises dialogic exchanges that are “free, natural, spontaneous, informal, or lively” as a natural, “human” condition, when, in fact, one could point out many instances in which speech is coercive and highly unequal or in which individuals have been completely silenced.9 This criticism, which domesticates Bakhtin, making him into a weak-kneed pluralist, is based on a liberal humanist misreading of the dialogic. It is all too easy for Western commentators to lose sight of Bakhtin’s “otherness.” He writes in what for all but a small elite of Western literary critics is a strange and exotic language. His work, for most of us, must be mediated through translations that are not without their own political agendas. Because he is a Soviet writer, translations of his work into Western languages have been mediated by the academic politics of the cold war, by the attempts of Western Marxists and liberals to appropriate the concept of the dialogic for their own purposes. However dead the cold war may be in international politics, in academia the question of the success or failure of Marxist analytics is far from settled.
Rather than suggest that the dialogic is a natural and essential element of the “human condition,” conceived of as some static and universal entity, Bakhtin argues that the dialogic is a function of language conceived of as a thoroughly social and inter subjective phenomenon. For this reason, any analysis of the dialogic must account for the elements of coercion and constraint, of power as well as solidarity, which are obviously at play in any social encounter. Bakhtin does not say that dialogue is always spontaneous or informal; his illuminating essay on speech genres suggests that virtually all speech is governed by social conventions and institutions that dictate the style of any utterance, from the tritest social conventions of salutation to highly complex literary genres (1986). Therefore, no dialogue is ever free and equal. Rather, the notion of the dialogic requires precisely an investigation of the power relations that inform and shape any discourse. It calls for an investigation of the social institutions that control who speaks, in what situation, and with what force.10 That Bakhtin did most of his writing during the years of Stalinist totalitarianism, that much of his writing was censored and went unpublished during his lifetime, that during the years he was interned in a labor camp, Bakhtin used his writings to roll cigarettes—all suggest that he is sensitive to the ways in which the operations of power shape the dialogic and limit its “Tree play.” Yet despite the inequalities involved in discourse, Bakhtin insists that within the dialogic the powerless are not simply passive and silenced victims of their oppressors. However totalitarian the oppression, the powerless construct more or less subversive forms of agency; they are capable of defining their own struggles and of acting in—as well as against—their own interests. That is why Bakhtin says that the sign is the arena of the class struggle. However powerful the oppressor and however constrained the dialogue, Bakhtin argues, all classes within a sign community use and contest the same language, and their interests and “accents” contend within it. In this regard, he is talking not about opposition or oppression but about the materialist complexity of discourse.
It is theoretically and politically crucial, then, to hold onto the term dialogic (and its complement heteroglossia) despite these criticisms because its emphasis on the power relations that govern discourse offers a means to recast feminist debates in terms of complexity. Dialogics facilitates the movement toward a nonlinear and nondeterministic model of cultural analysis which enables feminists to move beyond ritualistic invocations of global concepts such as “difference” and “diversity” to an investigation of the specific local and historical conditions that govern discourse and culture. Unlike the New Critical paradox or the Hegelian dialectic, the dialogic refuses to synthesize and thus erase opposition. Unlike the binary oppositions of some forms of American deconstruction, the dialogic insists on the local and particularistic nature of the utterance. Finally, unlike the pluralism that has figured so prominently in feminist literary criticism, Bakhtin’s dialogics insists upon exposing the power relations that govern discourse, including the mystifications of power implicit in pluralism’s philosophical commitment to diversity. The feminist analysis of dialogic speech genres begins to examine the complex dynamics of social relations by unpacking this largely invisible, yet powerful network of social relations and institutions that both promote and limit hetero-glossia. In such an analysis, every utterance partakes of both the centripetal forces that impel societies toward order, centralization, and control—toward the monologic—and the centrifugal forces that impel it toward chaos, heteroglossia, and change.
The superimposition of the dialogic and complexity raises the question of my own “authority.” If I have argued persuasively in the previous section, I have now created a “fact": all languages are dialogic. The form of this statement—its simplicity and the absence of any markers of ownership or fabrication—conveys a high level of confidence in its truth-value. My fact would seem to be selfcontradictory, however, in that I am now in the position of declaring monologically that language is dialogic. I want to embrace this contradiction and exploit it as an example of the second aim of this book, which is to investigate the constructedness of what we call facts and to call attention to the processes involved in their construction.
Common sense tells us that fictions are made, but facts are discovered. Traces of this distinction are sedimented in the words themselves and their etymological relation to each other. Fiction comes from the active present of the Latin root, which emphasizes the process of making, whereas fact comes from the past participle, which masks the generative processes that go into making fact (Haraway 1989, 3). If fiction is open to possibilities, facts are finished. Facts appear to be monologic; they show no traces of fabrication, construction, or ownership. “The facts speak for themselves.” “You can't dispute the facts.” These truisms, like all cliches, have some element of truth in them. All academic disciplines deal in facts; without them discourse of most kinds would be impossible. But like most of what we call common sense, these cliches also mask their own hegemony, their own complicity in perpetuating certain preferred interpretations of the world, in particular the belief that there is a preexistent “reality” that the objective observer encounters, discovers, and then records as facts.
Following the extremely suggestive work of Bruno Latour and feminist adaptations of it by Haraway (1989), I offer a provisional or heuristic account of the processes by which facts take on qualities that appear to place them beyond dispute, that erase the history of their making. Latour and Woolgar’s description of the creation of scientific facts is significant because it challenges a scientific practice that, more than any other area of our culture, defines itself by its allegiance to the monologic, authoritative discourse of fact in opposition to, say, the consciously “political” orientation of feminism. According to Latour and Woolgar, however, in science an utterance becomes a fact only when it has been cut off from the circumstances of its production, “when it loses its temporal qualifications and becomes incorporated into a large body of knowledge drawn upon by others” (1986, 106), that is, when the utterance presents itself as finished rather than in the process of becoming. Despite such attempts at forging universals—an ongoing project of both science and culture—facts are always embedded in history and in the particular, local practices of a dialogic culture.
What Latour’s work suggests is that we do not encounter a ready-made world through objective observation. “We” “make" "it.” This we is radically heterogeneous, the making is contentious, dialogic, and its products are complex. To control the destabilizing implications of this process, science traditionally presents for consumption tidy narratives of discovery. Latour’s analysis of the semiotic processes by which we sort through the complexity and chaos of our competing fabrications suggests a radical theory of complexity, which insists that facts have histories and that these histories include alliances, associations, conflicts, struggles, and negotiations among competing interpretations of the real.
What we call a fact is really a kind of “black box,” an utterance that has effaced, at least for the moment, the history of its construction. In cybernetics, a black box designates a piece of machinery or a set of commands too complex to be repeated when the only information needed for a particular operation is the input and output. The complexities of its working, the networks that hold it in place, and the histories and controversies that went into its construction can and often must be temporarily ignored (Latour 1987, 2–3). One purpose of this book is to examine facts while they are in the making, to open up the black boxes and explore the networks of associations and alliances that hold them in place, as well as the controversies that threaten to dislodge them. Exposing the fact as a thing made and not discovered, the chapters that follow explore the “ficticity” of facts about women’s writing. At the same time, it would be naive to assert that I could undertake to expose the constructedness of facts without asserting any facts myself, without falling prey to the same practices of erasure I am unmasking. Like everyone else, I must write from within my particular social, historical, and institutional situation, using those discourses that are available to me and the speech genres that govern their deployment. My provisional, heuristic assertions must be subject to the same scrutiny in a process that is, at least in theory, endlessly complex and endlessly recursive.
The linguistic practices of modality offer one means to examine how facts are rhetorically constructed. Modality is the term used for those linguistic markers that designate the status, authority, and reliability of an utterance, markers that confer upon or deny an utterance value as truth or fact.11 Consider the following three sentences:
(1) All language is dialogic.
(2) Because [all language is dialogic], it follows that statements of fact are utterances that have temporarily suppressed the dialogues, the histories of conflict and struggle that went into their making.
(3) In one of his later essays, “Discourse in the Novel,” Bakhtin claims that the utterances that make up [language are dialogic], but others (notably Aaron Fogel and Michael Andre Bernstein) contend that this formulation ignores the institutional inequalities among speakers which silence the powerless.
The first sentence states a fact. All traces of fabrication or ownership have been suppressed; the utterance is cut off from its production and its producers. This sentence has a high or positive modality because it leads us away from the conditions of its production and presents itself as already made. Like a prefabricated brick, it can now be used in the construction of other larger and more complex structures. Because the conditions of its production have been removed, it is free to form alliances with other utterances, as in the second sentence. In this sentence, through the process of embedding, the fact allies itself with another, less potent utterance and lends the force of its high modality to strengthen the weaker statement. A statement with a high modality can ally itself with statements that are either stronger or weaker than itself to create ever stronger and more complex structures.
But other stresses might work in the opposite direction, to undercut the modality of any fact by highlighting the struggles that went into its production. Consider sentence 3. This utterance has a low or negative modality because it calls attention to the processes of its construction. The statement is produced by a particular person in a particular place at a particular time. It no longer carries universal force. Furthermore, the reader or listener is invited to question the authority of the speaker by the ''but"—a marker of low modality—that begins the second clause. Other authorities who could contest, modify, or utterly deny the validity of the statement are ranged against the speaker. Those authorities form alliances that undercut the force of the original utterance, isolating its speaker and rendering it considerably weaker than it is in either of the first two sentences. In this sentence, the fact with which I began has been obscured by conflict, controversy, and the struggles among competing interpretations of the real.
Theoretically the processes that create high and low modalities can proliferate endlessly, creating more complex structures of argument, counterargument, documentation, and citation. As these structures accumulate, they are organized into a paradigm; as they grow more elaborate, a field, specialization, or discipline begins to emerge from the chaos, defining what questions can be asked and what counts as evidence in answering those questions. The complex structures of argumentation which circulate around these questions can then, once again, be “black-boxed.”
Feminism, I would claim, has been created as a black box in this way. Its name gives it, if not a sense of solidity, at least a sense of solidarity, even though most recognize that feminism is hardly a single, unified movement or ideology. It is a term without a single referent, a complex network of conflicts and struggles, alliances and negotiations which many parties contend to appropriate. The complexities contained within the black box of feminism are designated by such terms as “female oppression,” “women’s experience,” the “woman writer,” and more recently, “the lesbian,” the "third-world woman,” and the “woman of color.” If we think of these concepts as homogeneous or total—as finished “facts"—we are in danger of mythologizing them, of shoving them into their own black boxes to create an illusion of “sisterhood.” This book attempts to restore to only one of these terms its historical complexity. Arguing that feminism has “black-boxed” the woman writer as a critical “fact,” the chapters that follow trace the complex networks of institutions, power relations, resistance, and cooptation which have been effaced in the creation of the woman writer as an object of study for feminist literary criticism.
Implicit in my first two points about the dialogic nature of both utterances and facts is a shift in what we mean by history. At the same time that it insists upon the contingent and historical nature of the semiotic practices of gender, a feminist theory of complexity requires that the historical fact, no less than any other, be conceived as a site of political and social struggle. History of the kind I am envisioning depends on two completely interdependent and opposing formulations: the textuality of history and the historicity of textuality.
Claude Lévi-Strauss notes that the past is never experienced in any unmediated way simply as “what really happened.” “What really happened,” the raw unprocessed data of the past, is unattainable, and even if we could somehow obtain it, we would not be able to process it. Instead, history is always created by particular individuals for particular purposes. As Lévi-Strauss puts it, “The historian and the agent of history choose, sever and carve [historical events] up, for a truly total history would confront them with chaos. . . . Insofar as history aspires to meaning, it is doomed to select regions, periods, groups of men [sic] and individuals in these groups and to make them stand out as discontinuous figures, against a continuity barely good enough to be used as a backdrop. A truly total history would cancel itself out—its products would be nought. . . . History is therefore never history, but history-for" (1966, 257). Historical events come into being already fully textualized, their cultural “meanings” already the subject of disputation and competition. This intertextual field of conflicting and competing meanings hardens into historical “fact” when the dialogical interplay of competing versions of reality is suppressed in favor of a synthetic narrative that masks competing versions through the deployment of the markers of modality I discussed in the last section. When the utterance has enough positive modality to erase the process of its own production it becomes a historical fact.
It has become almost routine among contemporary historiographers to admit that history cannot give us any privileged access to “what really happened."12 They recognize that the historian’s task is to divide the present from the past and make order and meaning out of the chaos presented by the “past” and its discourses. History is a set of narratives that, as Hayden White has observed, create a past from which we would like to be descended (1987). It resides in the essential tension between “what really happened” and the multiple and shifting narratives about it. In the words of Roland Barthes, “Historical discourse does not follow the real; rather, it only signifies it, endlessly reiterating that it happened, but without having this assertion be anything other than the obvious underside of all historical narrative” (1967, 65). Reference to the real, however, has not been entirely obliterated; it has been displaced into narrative and inserted within a particular, historical economy of social production. That is, an acceptance of the textuality of history does not imply a flattening out of its particularities in favor of a universalized theory of the text. We cannot now posit a univocal genre of “the historical” over the ages. Instead, the text is radically historicized, its production and reception governed by specific relations among individuals, other texts, and events.
History, then, for Lévi-Strauss, as for many other contemporary historiographers, is what gets constructed as meaningful narratives. History comes to us through documents, through texts of various kinds; we have no immediate access to the events themselves. Even if we did, those events are already bound up in textuality and intertextuality, in the competition among discourses to define what they mean. Even as they are occurring, historical events—battles, coronations, inventions, marriages, social revolutions, conquests, and palace coups—are filled with contested meanings and with a variety of dialogically agitated semiotic practices and utterances: rituals, ceremonies, rationalizations, speeches, pamphlets, sermons, tax rolls, charters. It is the historian’s task to make order out of the “chaos” produced by these discourses, to “choose, sever, and carve up” the raw data of the past to produce a meaningful narrative. The selection of one interpretation always implies the suppression—the exclusion—of other interpretations, of other sources of information. However unfortunate such exclusions may be, historians claim, they are the price we pay to keep chaos at bay.
But a crucial insight of chaos theory is that chaos is not disorder and meaninglessness but a form of complex information. The apparent randomness of that information results from the inadequacy of our linear representations of historical narrative to comprehend, to represent, complexity. The conception of history as competing discourses, as contested meanings, produces patterns of interference, patterns we might refer to as “noise,” following Michel Serres’s use of the term (1982). Drawing on mathematical theories of information, Serres defines noise as “anything that survives as part of the message, but which was not part of the message when sent” (Paulson 1988). Noise is information that is not in itself meaningful, that resists being coerced into meaning, but against which meaning must emerge. A message—say, a narrative about the past—can emerge only by distinguishing itself from background noise, from details that are deemed irrelevant or unnecessary. But Serres argues that this noise is not parasitic on or secondary to the message: it is always an integral part of it. A message, a discourse, or a text can have no positive value, no meaning in and of itself, but must define itself differentially as that which is not noise. The transmission of noise along with information leads to more complex forms of organization so that noise becomes a positive factor in the organization of more complex representations of systems: society and history, for example.
In one respect, the chapters in this book examine what has traditionally been defined as the noise of history. Translating these notions about information to the site of discourses about history, I argue that noise is central to any dialogic conception of history. My purpose, in this regard, is not to create oppositional counternarratives out of either feminist theory or women’s writing, but to foreground that which has been defined as noise and then marginalized or excluded as nonmeaningful, to make complex that which has traditionally been considered “true” or “factual.” As Alice Jardine has suggested, noise in Western history—that against which the meaning of Western history has fashioned itself—has often been troped as the feminine. “The space 'outside of' the conscious subject has always connoted the feminine in the history of Western thought—and every movement into alterity is a movement into that female space; any attempt to give a place to that alterity within discourse involves a putting into discourse of 'woman'” (1985, 114–15). What Jardine calls alterity I am calling noise. Because, as I demonstrate in Chapter 4, the conscious subject of Western history has been constructed as male, the examination of historical noise most often requires the “putting into discourse of 'woman.'” The chapters that follow examine the ways in which subjects gendered as women in different cultures at different times have practiced poaching, using whatever means were at hand to struggle against their oppression and to wrest their own meaning from patriarchal cultural practices designed to keep them in their places. This book, then, can be neither a straightforward narrative of linear “progress” nor a reiteration of an abstract, ahistorical women’s solidarity; instead, it must be an exploration of the cultural and historical specificity of oppression, resistance, co-optation, and subversion which marks writing by and about women. It is an essay in the politics of complexity, which seeks to resist narrative—and critical—tropings of coherence, linear causation, and “definitive” interpretations.
The texts I examine in the following chapters have all been characterized, in one or more ways, as noise, as that which violates the integrity of dominant patriarchal narratives. The texts produced by the female troubadours of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the medieval mystics, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Kate Chopin represent styles, ideologies, speech genres, perspectives, and sentiments that have been, until recently, marginalized within or excluded from literary history. There is no historical “continuity" among these texts, no linear progress to chart. Any “tradition” that might emerge from their conjunction is constructed by the historical and cultural contexts of feminist scholarship at the end of the twentieth century. My interest in them is to foreground the noise, the dissonances among the texts. Rather than offer pat syntheses of these works, I explore their dialogic relations of intersection, resistance, and conflict, looking at where they form alliances, part company, and modify each other. The argument of this chapter, then, extends itself both synchronically and diachronically in later chapters as a series of encounters between theoretical issues raised by complexity and texts that illuminate these issues in new and potentially disruptive ways. To focus on the dialogues these texts create calls into question in some respects the ideologies of specialized “periods” which dominate professional literary studies. I seek, then, not a continuous history that links literary developments between the twelfth and the nineteenth centuries but a series of disruptive moments—discontinuities—that call into question those standard narratives of literary history and its arbitrary division into periods.13
Chapter 2 examines the emergence of the trobairitz—the women troubadours of twelfth- and thirteenth-century Provence—from the system of gender and class relations we have come to call “courtly love.” Usually considered only as a literary phenomenon, courtly love provides a grid of intelligibility through which to examine the complex interrelations among historical discourses about economics, politics, genealogy, kinship, patronage, and love which ordered both gender and class relations in feudal society. My examination of the trobairitz’s poetry illustrates the ways in which women’s self-representations both encode and resist hegemonic narratives about female desire and sexuality.
Chapter 3 moves from erotic love to spiritual love. The discourses of medieval mysticism provide an opportunity to revise the narratives of disempowerment that mark many feminist accounts of female authorship. This chapter examines the religious technologies of the Middle Ages, which were designed to produce docile female bodies, as well as the various ways in which certain oppressed subjects, primarily women, were able to poach, to use their visionary experiences to reconstruct their oppression as a form of power. Traditionally, the mystics' excesses of religious fervor are constructed as noise against the scholastic rationalism that is the historical legacy of the medieval Church, but the interactions among repression, power/knowledge, and the resistances of the repressed suggest that mysticism produced forms of empowerment for women which both challenged and accommodated a masculinist theology
Chapter 4 examines the creation of an explicitly feminist discourse in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which is nonetheless marked by traces of the masculinist ideologies it rebuts. As Wollstonecraft herself admits, style in a political treatise must be constructed as noise; it conveys significations apart from the “content” which in eighteenth-century political philosophy are supposed to be effaced in favor of a universal ideal of rationality. But style is also, for Wollstonecraft, a polemical instrument that challenges the hegemony of “meaning.” The style of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, then, both strains against and fails to recognize this ideal.
In the final chapter I return to the dialogic conception of history to consider what it does to the literary canon and to our beliefs about aesthetic value. Much of gynocriticism, the recovery of lost women writers, has been concerned with the recovery of texts we might consider cultural noise, ephemeral texts that supposedly lack the universality and permanence of canonical texts. The question is whether those texts will simply be valued as meaningful and appended to the canon—without fundamentally challenging its hegemonic power—or whether our interest in these texts will force us to rethink the ideology of aesthetic value. Will the canon finally simply exclude that noise which cannot be co-opted into its linear structure, or will texts of the kind represented in this book require more complex structures through which to articulate cultural and aesthetic values?
My method in this study is to work by parataxis, juxtaposing different representations of women not to show that they are ultimately similar but to study the myriad forms gender relations have assumed in Western culture and the kinds of social functions it has performed at different times and in different places. My aim is to suggest a dialogical and nonauthoritarian theoretical orientation and method for feminist literary criticism. My purpose, in this sense, is not to provide authoritative readings or methodological imperatives but to suggest something of the complex ways in which the symbolic representations of gender that figure in art and literature interact with, shape, and are shaped by the social institutions that organize gender roles. The chapters that follow, then, attempt to articulate a series of heteroglossic narratives, to describe a polyphonic practice of history and literary criticism which exposes the complexity behind the “unified truth” of the facts.
1Elaine Showalter called this activity “gynocritics” (1981).
2There is no indication that this argument will be decided any time soon. For other voices in the debate, see Treichler 1986; Finke 1986; the 1988 issue of Feminist Studies with essays by Leslie Rabine, Joan Scott, and Mary Poovey; Straub in Davis and Finke 1989, 855–76; Malson et al. 1989; and Kauffman 1989.
3Thomas Laqueur has even suggested that biological notions of sex, which seem so fundamental to twentieth-century consciousness, may not be as stable and unchanging as we tend to think they are (1990).
4For a discussion of Foucault’s use of disposatif, see Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982, 120–25.
5Foucault uses the term “technologies of the self” to describe the same process of resistance (Blonsky 1985, 367); Williams refers to these practices, meanings, and values as “counterhegemonic” (1977).
6I have drawn primarily upon the essay “Discourse in the Novel” for my discussion of dialogism because it seems to me Bakhtin's most accessible discussion of that term. The concept informs all his work, however, and that of the Bakhtin circle, including those works signed by V. N. Vološinov and P. N. Medvedev, which some scholars attribute to Bakhtin. Many of the same points are made in Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics and Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, which is usually attributed to Vološinov. To call attention to the dialogic nature of Bakhtin's own work, I adopt Todorov's practice of citing the texts associated with Bakhtin which were published under someone else's name by keeping the name under which they were published and following it with a slash and Bakhtin's name: e.g. Vol-osinov/Bakhtin. For the sake of clarity, I have followed the same practice in the bibliography. I have chosen this typographical convention for the ambiguity it conveys about the relationship between the “authors.” I do not have the space here for a long digression on the politics of the Bakhtin authorship controversy, although in themselves they provide a fascinating study of the dialogic nature of discourse as well as of Foucault's notion of the author function (1979). For discussions of the problems of authorship, see Todorov 1984, 6-13; Clark and Holquist 1984, 146-70; Godzich, Foreword to Medvedev 1985, vii-xiv; and Morson and Emerson 1989, 31-48. I tend to agree with Clark, Holquist, and Godzich that if he did not write it entirely himself, then Bakhtin had a large hand in the writing of Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. I disagree with Clark and Holquist that the Marxism in the book is superficial and only added to get the book by the censors. The book's Marxist philosophy seems to me an integral part of its linguistics.
7For a Bakhtinian reading of the notion of women’s language see Yaeger 1984, 955.
8See Booth 1982; Yaeger 1984, 959, 971 n.6; Mary Russo, “Female Grotesques: Carnival and Theory,” in de Lauretis 1986, 218–21; Bauer 1988, 6; and Bernard Duyfhuizen, “Deconstruction and Feminist Literary Theory II,” in Kauffman 1989, 179.
9See the essays by Fogel (173–96) and Bernstein (197–223) in Morson and Emerson 1989; the quotation is from Fogel, 174. Bauer to some extent shares this belief, although she at least credits Bakhtin for some analysis of the institutional forces that limit the dialogic (see 1988, 5–13). For a critique of liberal readings of Bakhtin see Hirschkopf 1985.
10A related problem is Todorov’s concern that Bakhtin is inconsistent, claiming all language is dialogic and yet making use of the term monologic to distinguish certain kinds of speech situations (1984). All language is dialogic, but the powerful are able to create the illusion that their discourse is monologic. They are able, at least intermittently, to enforce the social consequences of their power of utterance. It is the task of a dialogic criticism to expose this authoritative pose as one of the fictions held in place by the particular deployment of power within a social formation.
11My argument about modality is indebted to the insightful analyses of Hodge and Kress 1988, 121–61; and Latour 1987, 22–26.
12See, for instance, Barthes 1967; White 1987; de Certeau 1988. For a feminist perspective, see Scott 1988b.
13In “Women’s Time, Women’s Space,” Elaine Showalter warns against uncritical acceptance of traditional historical periodization, which she sees as an imposition of a masculine and patriarchal perspective upon history (1984).