The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism (excerpt)
Craig Owens
Postmodern knowledge [le savoir postmoderne] is not simply an instrument of power. It refines our sensitivity to differences and increases our tolerance of incommensurability.
—J. F. Lyotard, La condition postmoderne
A la recherche du récit perdu
“No single theoretical discourse …”—this feminist position is also a postmodern condition. In fact, Lyotard diagnoses the postmodern condition as one in which the grands récits of modernity—the dialectic of Spirit, the emancipation of the worker, the accumulation of wealth, the classless society—have all lost credibility. Lyotard defines a discourse as modern when it appeals to one or another of these grands récits for its legitimacy; the advent of postmodernity, then, signals a crisis in narrative’s legitimizing function, its ability to compel consensus. Narrative, he argues, is out of its element(s)—“the great dangers, the great journeys, the great goal.” Instead, “it is dispersed into clouds of linguistic particles—narrative ones, but also denotative, prescriptive, descriptive, etc.—each with its own pragmatic valence. Today, each of us lives in the vicinity of many of these. We do not necessarily form stable linguistic communities, and the properties of those we do form are not necessarily communicable.”1
Lyotard does not, however, mourn modernity’s passing, even though his own activity as a philosopher is at stake. “For most people,” he writes, “nostalgia for the lost narrative [le récit perdu] is a thing of the past.”2 “Most people” does not include Fredric Jameson, although he diagnoses the postmodern condition in similar terms (as a loss of narrative’s social function) and distinguishes between modernist and postmodernist works according to their different relations to the “‘truth-content’ of art, its claim to possess some truth or epistemological value.” His description of a crisis in modernist literature stands metonymically for the crisis in modernity itself:
At its most vital, the experience of modernism was not one of a single historical movement or process, but of a “shock of discovery,” a commitment and an adherence to its individual forms through a series of “religious conversions.” One did not simply read D. H. Lawrence or Rilke, see Jean Renoir or Hitchcock, or listen to Stravinsky as distinct manifestations of what we now term modernism. Rather one read all the works of a particular writer, learned a style and a phenomenological world, to which one converted. … This meant, however, that the experience of one form of modernism was incompatible with another, so that one entered one world only at the price of abandoning another. … The crisis of modernism came, then, when it suddenly became clear that “D. H. Lawrence” was not an absolute after all, not the final achieved figuration of the truth of the world, but only one art-language among others, only one shelf of works in a whole dizzying library.3
Although a reader of Foucault might locate this realization at the origin of modernism (Flaubert, Manet) rather than at its conclusion,4 Jameson’s account of the crisis of modernity strikes me as both persuasive and problematic—problematic because persuasive. Like Lyotard, he plunges us into a radical Nietzschean perspectivism: each oeuvre represents not simply a different view of the same world, but corresponds to an entirely different world. Unlike Lyotard, however, he does so only in order to extricate us from it. For Jameson, the loss of narrative is equivalent to the loss of our ability to locate ourselves historically; hence, his diagnosis of postmodernism as “schizophrenic,” meaning that it is characterized by a collapsed sense of temporality.5 Thus, in The Political Unconscious he urges the resurrection not simply of narrative—as a “socially symbolic act”—but specifically of what he identifies as the Marxist “master narrative”—the story of mankind’s “collective struggle to wrest a realm of Freedom from a realm of Necessity.”6
Master narrative—how else to translate Lyotard’s grand récit? And in this translation we glimpse the terms of another analysis of modernity’s demise, one that speaks not of the incompatibility of the various modern narratives, but instead of their fundamental solidarity. For what made the grands récits of modernity master narratives if not the fact that they were all narratives of mastery, of man seeking his telos in the conquest of nature? What function did these narratives play other than to legitimize Western man’s self-appointed mission of transforming the entire planet in his own image? And what form did this mission take if not that of man’s placing of his stamp on everything that exists—that is, the transformation of the world into a representation, with man as its subject? In this respect, however, the phrase master narrative seems tautologous, since all narrative, by virtue of “its power to master the dispiriting effects of the corrosive force of the temporal process,”7 may be narrative of mastery.8
What is at stake, then, is not only the status of narrative, but of representation itself. For the modern age was not only the age of the master narrative, it was also the age of representation—at least this is what Martin Heidegger proposed in a 1938 lecture delivered in Freiburg im Breisgau, but not published until 1952 as “The Age of the World Picture” [Die Zeit die Weltbildes].9 According to Heidegger, the transition to modernity was not accomplished by the replacement of a medieval by a modern world picture, “but rather the fact that the world becomes a picture at all is what distinguishes the essence of the modern age.” For modern man, everything that exists does so only in and through representation. To claim this is also to claim that the world exists only in and through a subject who believes that he is producing the world in producing its representation:
The fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as picture. The word “picture” [Bild] now means the structured image [Gebild] that is the creature of man’s producing which represents and sets before. In such producing, man contends for the position in which he can be that particular being who gives the measure and draws up the guidelines for everything that is.
Thus, with the “interweaving of these two events”—the transformation of the world into a picture and man into a subject—“there begins that way of being human which mans the realm of human capability given over to measuring and executing, for the purpose of gaining mastery of that which is as a whole.” For what is representation if not a “laying hold and grasping” (appropriation), a “making-stand-over-against, an objectifying that goes forward and masters)”?10
Thus, when in a recent interview Jameson calls for “the reconquest of certain forms of representation” (which he equates with narrative: “‘Narrative,’” he argues, “is, I think, generally what people have in mind when they rehearse the usual post-structuralist ‘critique of representation’”),11 he is in fact calling for the rehabilitation of the entire social project of modernity itself. Since the Marxist master narrative is only one version among many of the modern narrative of mastery (for what is the “collective struggle to wrest a realm of Freedom from a realm of Necessity” if not mankind’s progressive exploitation of the Earth?), Jameson’s desire to resurrect (this) narrative is a modern desire, a desire for modernity. It is one symptom of our postmodern condition, which is experienced everywhere today as a tremendous loss of mastery and thereby gives rise to therapeutic programs, from both the Left and the Right, for recuperating that loss. Although Lyotard warns—correctly, I believe—against explaining transformations in modern/postmodern culture primarily as effects of social transformations (the hypothetical advent of a postindustrial society, for example),12 it is clear that what has been lost is not primarily a cultural mastery, but an economic, technical, and political one. For what if not the emergence of Third World nations, the “revolt of nature,” and the women’s movement—that is, the voices of the conquered—has challenged the West’s desire for ever-greater domination and control?
Symptoms of our recent loss of mastery are everywhere apparent in cultural activity today—nowhere more so than in the visual arts. The modernist project of joining forces with science and technology for the transformation of the environment after rational principles of function and utility (Productivism, the Bauhaus) has long since been abandoned; what we witness in its place is a desperate, often hysterical attempt to recover some sense of mastery via the resurrection of heroic large-scale easel painting and monumental cast-bronze sculpture—mediums themselves identified with the cultural hegemony of Western Europe. Yet contemporary artists are able at best to simulate mastery, to manipulate its signs; since in the modern period mastery was invariably associated with human labor, aesthetic production has degenerated today into a massive deployment of the signs of artistic labor—violent, “impassioned” brushwork, for example. Such simulacra of mastery testify, however, only to its loss; in fact, contemporary artists seem engaged in a collective act of disavowal—and disavowal always pertains to a loss … of virility, masculinity, potency.13
This contingent of artists is accompanied by another which refuses the simulation of mastery in favor of melancholic contemplation of its loss. One such artist speaks of “the impossibility of passion in a culture that has institutionalized self-expression”; another, of “the aesthetic as something which is really about longing and loss rather than completion.” A painter unearths the discarded genre of landscape painting only to borrow for his own canvases, through an implicit equation between their ravaged surfaces and the barren fields he depicts, something of the exhaustion of the earth itself (which is thereby glamorized); another dramatizes his anxieties through the most conventional figure men have conceived for the threat of castration—Woman … aloof, remote, unapproachable. Whether they disavow or advertise their own powerlessness, pose as heroes or as victims, these artists have, needless to say, been warmly received by a society unwilling to admit that it has been driven from its position of centrality; theirs is an “official” art which, like the culture that produced it, has yet to come to terms with its own impoverishment. […]
The Visible and the Invisible
[…] Modern aesthetics claimed that vision was superior to the other senses because of its detachment from its objects: “Vision,” Hegel tells us in his Lectures on Aesthetics, “finds itself in a purely theoretical relationship with objects, through the intermediary of light, that immaterial matter which truly leaves objects their freedom, lighting and illuminating them without consuming them.”14 Postmodernist artists do not deny this detachment, but neither do they celebrate it. Rather, they investigate the particular interests it serves. For vision is hardly disinterested; nor is it indifferent, as Luce Irigaray has observed: “Investment in the look is not privileged in women as in men. More than the other senses, the eye objectifies and masters. It sets at a distance, maintains the distance. In our culture, the predominance of the look over smell, taste, touch, hearing, has brought about an impoverishment of bodily relations. … The moment the look dominates, the body loses its materiality.”15 That is, it is transformed into an image.
That the priority our culture grants to vision is a sensory impoverishment is hardly a new perception; the feminist critique, however, links the privileging of vision with sexual privilege. Freud identified the transition from a matriarchal to a patriarchal society with the simultaneous devaluation of an olfactory sexuality and promotion of a more mediated, sublimated visual sexuality.16 What is more, in the Freudian scenario it is by looking that the child discovers sexual difference, the presence or absence of the phallus according to which the child’s sexual identity will be assumed. As Jane Gallop reminds us in her recent book Feminism and Psychoanalysis: The Daughter’s Seduction, “Freud articulated the ‘discovery of castration’ around a sight: sight of a phallic presence in the boy, sight of a phallic absence in the girl, ultimately sight of a phallic absence in the mother. Sexual difference takes its decisive significance from a sighting.”17 Is it not because the phallus is the most visible sign of sexual difference that it has become the “privileged signifier”? However, it is not only the discovery of difference, but also its denial that hinges upon vision (although the reduction of difference to a common measure—woman judged according to the man’s standard and found lacking—is already a denial). As Freud proposed in his 1926 paper on “Fetishism,” the male child often takes the last visual impression prior to the “traumatic” sighting as a substitute for the mother’s “missing” penis:
Thus the foot or the shoe owes its attraction as a fetish, or part of it, to the circumstance that the inquisitive boy used to peer up at the woman’s legs towards her genitals. Velvet and fur reproduce—as has long been suspected—the sight of the pubic hair which ought to have revealed the longed-for penis; the underlinen so often adopted as a fetish reproduces the scene of undressing, the last moment in which the woman could still be regarded as phallic.18
What can be said about the visual arts in a patriarchal order that privileges vision over the other senses? Can we not expect them to be a domain of masculine privilege—as their histories indeed prove them to be—a means, perhaps, of mastering through representation the “threat” posed by the female? In recent years there has emerged a visual arts practice informed by feminist theory and addressed, more or less explicitly, to the issue of representation and sexuality—both masculine and feminine. Male artists have tended to investigate the social construction of masculinity (Mike Glier, Eric Bogosian, the early work of Richard Prince); women have begun the long-overdue process of deconstructing femininity. Few have produced new, “positive” images of a revised femininity; to do so would simply supply and thereby prolong the life of the existing representational apparatus. Some refuse to represent women at all, believing that no representation of the female body in our culture can be free from phallic prejudice. Most of these artists, however, work with the existing repertory of cultural imagery—not because they either lack originality or criticize it—but because their subject, feminine sexuality, is always constituted in and as representation, a representation of difference. It must be emphasized that these artists are not primarily interested in what representations say about women; rather, they investigate what representation does to women (for example, the way it invariably positions them as objects of the male gaze). For, as Lacan wrote, “Images and symbols for the woman cannot be isolated from images and symbols of the woman. … It is representation, the representation of feminine sexuality whether repressed or not, which conditions how it comes into play.”19
Critical discussions of this work have, however, assiduously avoided—skirted—the issue of gender. Because of its generally deconstructive ambition, this practice is sometimes assimilated to the modernist tradition of demystification. (Thus, the critique of representation in this work is collapsed into ideological critique.) In an essay devoted (again) to allegorical procedures in contemporary art, Benjamin Buchloh discusses the work of six women artists—Dara Birnbaum, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, Martha Rosler—claiming them for the model of “secondary mythification” elaborated in Roland Barthes’s 1957 Mythologies. Buchloh does not acknowledge the fact that Barthes later repudiated this methodology—a repudiation that must be seen as part of his increasing refusal of mastery from The Pleasure of the Text on.20 Nor does Buchloh grant any particular significance to the fact that all these artists are women; instead, he provides them with a distinctly male genealogy in the Dada tradition of collage and montage. Thus, all six artists are said to manipulate the languages of popular culture—television, advertising, photography—in such a way that “their ideological functions and effects become transparent”; or again, in their work, “the minute and seemingly inextricable interaction of behavior and ideology” supposedly becomes an “observable pattern.”21
But what does it mean to claim that these artists render the invisible visible, especially in a culture in which visibility is always on the side of the male, invisibility on the side of the female? And what is the critic really saying when he states that these artists reveal, expose, “unveil” (this last word is used throughout Buchloh’s text) hidden ideological agendas in mass-cultural imagery? Consider, for the moment, Buchloh’s discussion of the work of Dara Birnbaum, a video artist who re-edits footage taped directly from broadcast television. Of Birnbaum’s Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (1978–79), based on the popular television series of the same name, Buchloh writes that it “unveils the puberty fantasy of Wonder Woman.” Yet, like all of Birnbaum’s work, this tape is dealing not simply with mass-cultural imagery, but with mass-cultural images of women. Are not the activities of unveiling, stripping, laying bare in relation to a female body unmistakably male prerogatives?22 Moreover, the women Birnbaum re-presents are usually athletes and performers absorbed in the display of their own physical perfection. They are without defect, without lack, and therefore with neither history nor desire. (Wonder Woman is the perfect embodiment of the phallic mother.) What we recognize in her work is the Freudian trope of the narcissistic woman, or the Lacanian “theme” of femininity as contained spectacle, which exists only as a representation of masculine desire.23
The deconstructive impulse that animates this work has also suggested affinities with poststructuralist textual strategies, and much of the critical writing about these artists—including my own—has tended simply to translate their work into French. Certainly, Foucault’s discussion of the West’s strategies of marginalization and exclusion, Derrida’s charges of “phallocentrism,” Deleuze and Guattari’s “body without organs” would all seem to be congenial to a feminist perspective. (As Irigaray has observed, is not the “body without organs” the historical condition of woman?)24 Still, the affinities between poststructuralist theories and postmodernist practice can blind a critic to the fact that, when women are concerned, similar techniques have very different meanings. Thus, when Sherrie Levine appropriates—literally takes—Walker Evans’s photographs of the rural poor or, perhaps more pertinently, Edward Weston’s photographs of his son Neil posed as a classical Greek torso, is she simply dramatizing the diminished possibilities for creativity in an image-saturated culture, as is often repeated? Or is her refusal of authorship not in fact a refusal of the role of creator as “father” of his work, of the paternal rights assigned to the author by law?25 (This reading of Levine’s strategies is supported by the fact that the images she appropriates are invariably images of the Other: women, nature, children, the poor, the insane. …)26 Levine’s disrespect for paternal authority suggests that her activity is less one of appropriation—a laying hold and grasping—and more one of expropriation: she expropriates the appropriators.
[…] There is irony in the fact that all these practices, as well as the theoretical work that sustains them, have emerged in a historical situation supposedly characterized by its complete indifference. In the visual arts we have witnessed the gradual dissolution of once fundamental distinctions—original/copy, authentic/inauthentic, function/ornament. Each term now seems to contain its opposite, and this indeterminacy brings with it an impossibility of choice or, rather, the absolute equivalence and hence interchangeability of choices. Or so it is said.27 The existence of feminism, with its insistence on difference, forces us to reconsider. For in our country good-bye may look just like hello, but only from a masculine position. Women have learned—perhaps they have always known—how to recognize the difference.
