Subject: difference
From: fred isseks (fisseks@warwick.net )
Date: Sun Feb 27 2000 - 09:05:57 CST
The selection from the readings that seems to best address my
rantings from last time - about time, the millennium, and a sense of
continuous selfhood - is from Julia Kristeva's "Women's Time." She writes
of "a certain conception of time: time as project, teleology, linear and
prospective unfolding: time as departure, progression and arrival - in
other words, the time of history..." She describes other reckonings of
time as well: cyclical and monumental. But this linear subjectivity of
time is what marks our civilization: she calls it "masculine" and
"obsessional." "A psychoanalyst would call this 'obsessional time,'
recognizing in the mastery of time the true structure of the slave."
Okay, no argument from me. Now, how to deal with that masculine,
obsessional, linear, and slave-like subjectivity at the dawn of the
new...cycle.
I like what Luce Irigaray wrote: "Sexual difference is one of the
major philosophical issues, if not the issue, of our age...Sexual
difference is probably the issue in our time which could be our 'salvation'
if we thought it through." Perhaps she is right. She calls for a
"revolution in thought and ethics," which would involve a rethinking, a
rewriting, "of everything concerning the relations between the subject and
discourse, the subject and the world, the subject and the cosmic, the
microcosmic and the macrocosmic."
The masculine is aligned with the modern; the feminine with the
postmodern. The task is to make the feminine manifest and knowable; to
make clear the difference and move towards a less masculine subjectivity
sometime soon before we completely pollute or blow up the planet.
What is sexual difference? Is there sexual difference? According
to Irigaray, there is a difference that is fundamental and that cannot be
denied: "I will never be in a man's place, never will a man be in mine.
Whatever identifications are possible, one will never exactly occupy the
place of the other - they are irreducible one to the other."
Helene Cixous even attempts to describe the difference: "If there
is a self proper to woman, paradoxically it is her capacity to depropriate
herself without self-interest: endless body, without 'end,' without
principal 'parts'; if she is a whole, it is a whole made up of parts that
are wholes, not simple, partial objects but varied entirety, moving and
boundless change, a cosmos where eros never stops traveling, vast astral
space."
All three women writers - Cixous, Kristeva, and Irigaray - agree
that it is writing that will move us into an epoch more mutually beneficial
to both men and women. What is required is a new writing, yet to be fully
discovered, that will enable new subjectivities. For Irigaray it is a
sexual or carnal ethics that can help reconstruct a "genesis of love
between the sexes..." Men and women can meet in the "remainder," or the
"mucous," the "interval that cannot be crossed," but they can meet "in
wonder." Cixous maintains that feminine writing cannot be defined, "for
this practice will never be able to be theorized, enclosed, coded, which
does not mean it does not exist. But it will always exceed the discourse
governing the phallocentric system; it takes place and will take place
somewhere other than in the territories subordinated to
philosophical-theoretical domination."
For Kristeva, sexual difference is, in part, "a difference in the
relationship of subjects to the symbolic contract which is the social
contract: a difference, then, in the relationship to power, language, and
meaning." The struggle will take place on this "terrain," as we remake the
symbolic/social contract. Kristeva thinks that it is now time to
"emphasize the multiplicity of female expressions and preoccupations so
that from the intersection of these differences there might arise more
precisely, less commercially and more truthfully, the real fundamental
difference between the two sexes..."
Now...how to place Sandy Stone in this context. Help me with this,
and tell me if I am off the mark.
Isn't Sandy doing what Helene Cixous describes in the new writing
which cannot be defined? Cixous writes that the new feminist practice
"will not let itself think except through subjects that break automatic
functions, border runners never subjugated by any authority." This sounds
to me like Sandy's method: transsexuals, decentered selves, multiple
personalities, vampires, and monsters - border runners creating new
discourse that cannot be contained within the old phallocentric discourse,
and that therefore function to break subjectivities into new dimensions.
In "Empire Strikes Back," for example, Sandy writes of transsexuals
who attempt to "pass" as genetic naturals, and how this misses the point.
"For a transsexual, as a transsexual, to generate a true, effective and
representational counterdiscourse is to speak from outside the boundaries
of gender, beyond the constructed oppositional nodes which have been
predefined as the only positions from which discourse is possible." If I
am reading Sandy correctly, it is through the multiplicity of gender
possibilities and manifestations that a new discourse of difference can
develop.
Julia Kristeva writes almost the same thing when she writes of the
multiplicity of female expressions. But I think there is a difference in
this writing about difference. Correct me if I am wrong, but I think that
what Sandy is getting at takes the argument further than Kristeva, in that
multiplicity can be used to obliterate the difference rather than reveal
the fundamental difference.
For Kristeva, sexual difference is "at once biological,
physiological, and relative to reproduction." All of this translates into
a different position in the symbolic contract, but it is still linked to
the physical. Kristeva writes of an inseparable conjunction of the sexual
and symbolic, but points to a rewriting of the social contract in an effort
to discover "the specificity of the female, and then, in the end, that of
each individual woman."
Sandy Stone seems to be trying to transcend the physical/sexual
body, pointing to a multiplicity that renders the old difference
meaningless. It appears to be an effort, not to "specify" the female, but
to "despecify" what it means to be male or female.
Both the body and the internet are sites for reconfiguration of
self. Again, from "Empire Strikes Back": The disruptions of the old
patterns of desire that the multiple dissonances of the transsexual body
imply produce
not an irreducible alterity but a myriad of alterities, whose unanticipated
juxtapositions hold what Donna Haraway has called the promises of
monsters-- physicalities of constantly shifting figure and ground that
exceed the frame of any possible representation."
What happens to physical difference when difference is altered?
Does difference reside in the "self" despite the disruptions of the body?
What sends me over the edge is the notion, made clear by Sandy's writing,
that the self, in cyberspace for example, can be "decentered" from the
body.
From Sandy's "Violation and Virtuality:" "If we consider the physical map
of the body and our experience of inhabiting it as socially mediated, then
it should not be difficult to imagine the next step in a progression toward
the social -- that is, to imagine the location of the self that inhabits
the body as also socially mediated -- not in the usual ways we think of
subject construction in terms of position within a social field or of
capacity to experience, but of the physical location of the subject,
independent of the body within which theories of the body are accustomed to
ground it, within a system of symbolic exchange, i.e., information
technology."
Now that I have thoroughly confused myself, I go back to the
statement by Luce Irigaray about the fundamental sexual difference and the
impossibility of one being in the place, or knowing the place, of the
other. Is this still true?
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