Gender Theory 4
Monique Wittig part I
Monique Wittig (1935-2003), a radical feminist philosopher, is a unique and often lone voice in French feminist theory. Her works which elaborated a lesbian subject transcending the heterosexual relation with an ungendered and universal ontology have been largely neglected in the context of post-structural feminist debates which purport to critique but in subtle ways reproduce gender as the central category of albeit fractured identities. (Q1) But, for Wittig, gender as sexual difference, however post-structural feminist theories of feminine difference conceptualizes the latter, remains tied to the social reality based upon oppressive discourses of heterosexuality as political and cultural emanations of the straight mind. She contends, heterosexuality as social necessity confuses the theories of feminine difference, and this time, those post-structural feminists justify gender as sexual difference. Whereas French theorists of feminine difference use the feminine to deconstruct the universal, Wittig deploys the universal to deconstruct the "feminine".
The Straight Mind
For Wittig, language relates to a network of powers constantly acting upon, but concealing, the social reality at political stake. (Q2) Those powers are Lacanian language of the Unconscious, Levi-Strauss' language of the exchange of women, and post-structural language of differences where human beings are literally the signs used to communicate. This network of powers conceal the social reality of oppression by denying the materiality of languages and fixing human beings as unchanged by history and class conflicts.
Wittig attacks Lacanian psychoanalysis on which Irigaray and Kristeva base their positions. Once psychoanalyzed, we have no choice but to repeat the language that the licensed professionals want to hear just like the witches under torture, unless s/he does not want to ontologically destroy the contract of ways of communication. Feminist? Lesbian? Gay? Every political situation is turned into an individual, apolitical, psychological illness. (Q3) Wittig says:
"The discourses which particularly oppress all of us, lesbians, women, and gay men, are those discourses which take for granted that what founds society, any society, is heterosexuality."
This implicit and coerced contract is, Wittig coins, the heterosexual contract. The discourses assuming, i.e., concealing this contract prevent us from speaking unless we speak in their terms, denying us every possibility of being the speaking subjects, and thereby, tyranically, politically affecting and cultivating our minds and bodies. They are ontological subjects but we are not. (Q4)
Wittig, then, criticises post-structural language of semiotics by examplifying with pornography. The signified of pornographic signifiers are never deferred as it is for post-structuralists. It clearly signifies the reality that women are dominated. Not only does pornography signify, but also it is part of the strategies of violence upon our humanity. (Q5) Therefore, for Wittig, there is nothing abstract, empty nor deferred. The systems of language like concept, category, and abstraction effect a physical, material violence and political cultivation upon our minds and bodies.
The discourses exert a power upon us with their own ontology. Even though they theoretically failed in incorporating the historical advent of the lesbian, feminist, and gay liberation movements, they are utilized without examination by contemporary science. This ensemble of discourses all kinds of disciplines, theories, and ideas is defined as the straight mind. Those discourses naturalize the categories like woman, man, sex, difference, history and culture. But, Wittig says, there is no such thing as nature. It is no more than universalization, or justification, specifically of heterosexual relationship, producing the difference of the sexes as a political dogma. (Q6)
The concept of difference between the sexes ontologically constitutes 'women' into different/others as the straight mind specifies. Men are not different but universal. But, sex is never natural. It is only political concept of opposition and the copula dialectically uniting and abolishing them. The other way of abolishing woman and man is the class struggle between them. To do this, we must produce our universal ontological concepts which are strategic for us by using another order of materiality of language tightly connected to the political field. (Q7) Our recognition of the social reality of oppression forms the science of oppression to debunk the conscious Unconscious of heterosexuality impudently saying that woman is equal to man by difference, no slavery, everything is reasonable, but the exchange of woman is a necessary condition naturally given by the Unconscious. We must track down the unconscious heterosexual, and make clear with our science that the straight mind creates a myth.
The ensemble of heterosexual myths, i.e., the straight mind, is an empty signifier stealthily justifying and reproducing the heterosexual relation required by the social necessity of economic systems, by concealing the social reality of oppression. But, this time, we can criticise it with our personal, ontological dimension as emerged through women who have struggled since two hundred years ago, with historical consciousness.
"In the meantime in the systems that seemed so eternal and universal that laws could be extracted from them...in these systems, thanks to our action and our language, shifts are happening. Such a model...the exchange of women, reengulfs history in so violent and brutal a way that the whole system...topples over into another dimension of knowledge. This dimension belongs to us, since somehow we have been designated, and since, as L?vi-Strauss said, we talk, let us say that we break off the heterosexual contract."
So, we start to ontologically speak with our science of the reality of oppression and of our breaking off the heterosexual contract. While Kristeva, Irigaray and Cixous presumably push something natural, prediscursive and prior to, and thereby supposedly subverting a masculine signifying economy, claiming the unfounded equality of difference outside of the Symbolic, but actually rather consolidating, than subverting, heterosexual relation, Wittig argues subversion must come from within the cultural, political languages, i.e., from their own internal contradictions, thanks to our ontological action and language as the universal subjects. (Q8) What is woman? Panic, general alarm for an active defense. But, it is a problem that the lesbians do not have. Lesbians beyond heterosexual category are the speaking subjects through their counter-cultural social practices, eventually to open the future possibility of the political and cultural revolt. Lesbians are not women nor live with women. Monique Wittig as a writer proposes her project to revolt the heterosexual relation by defining the lesbian subject as an ungendered universal subject.
Questions
Q1. Feminine Difference as Opposed to Woman's Universal Ontology: Early feminist critiques demanded an inclusive identity of women as the subject to speak a universal language for their political representation. But, representation might also distort what is assumed to be true about the category of women. The normative function of a language might even produce and reproduce the subjects required by the very juridical systems of power against which feminists actually struggle. Thus, post-structural feminist philosophers reject such grand narratives as produced by humanist theories of ontology based upon universalism. They accuse Simone de Beauvoir of being in pursuit of the Hegelian Spirit or the Absolute Subject. Luce Irigaray argues that women are unrepresentable within a masculine signifying economy because women are the "hole" or "lack" that can't be articulated by the discrete phallogo-centric language. Then, Julia Kristeva claims language as social practice presupposes the semiotic as prior to the symbolic. The semiotic is rhythms and intonations as in the first echolalias of infants, later re-activated in the poetic language and maternity. For Kristeva, it supports beneath feminine signifying practices that can't be enunciated by the masculine and structuralistic Lacanian Symbolic, the paternal law. Irigaray, Kristeva and Helene Cixous elaborate feminine difference, in terms of parler femme, the semiotic, and ecriture feminine, as subversive of the masculine signifying economy at the level of micropolitics. In recent days, some sociobiologists say that sex selection is more favorable to female than male for proliferation and evolution, which also comes from female's difference as rather seemingly subversive of male-dominated society. Do you think you are inherently different from men? Are you happy to be born a woman? Do you think you could be equal to men in the current society by the equality of difference without any universal ontology as a "person" struggling and competing with other person (man), for instance, in a supposedly masculine area?
Q2. Materiality of Language: Even though she recognizes language as raw material she can use as a person, for Wittig, inspired by Mikhail Bahktin, a Russian linguist, language works in a material way to construct the social reality of oppression. Although signified is immaterial as Saussure noted, a woman is exchanged as an empty signifier between patrilineal clans as Levi-Strauss argued, or signified is perpetually deferred as Derrida claimed, if you like my expression, language is socially physical, or socially material, affecting the social reality. The term, gender, is one example. What do you know about the function of language? Do you think it is only a naming system, or it has a certain ideological function? Do you find any other example of language to strengthen prejudice and oppression against women or other sorts of people?
Q3. Did you ever imagine your supposedly personal or psychological problem, specifically as a woman or man, would be actually what originates in political or systematical contradiction, whetehr it is at the level of macroscopic society or microscopic family?
Q4. Those discourses become oppressive, requiring people, in order to speak, to participate in the very terms of oppression. In elementary, middle and high schools, there seem to be almost always some classmates excluded, bullied by a purportedly hegemonic group within the class. Not to be bullied, the only personal strategy seems to be to join the group, or implicitly agree with them, upon the oppression of those classmates targetted for bullies. For a woman, as an individual under patriarchy and capitalism, the only strategy of survival may appear to be to participate in patriarchy and capitalistic competition. To strengthen womanliness as specified by patriarchy, to be a successful elite woman within capitalism, etc. You speak in those ways. You may be more beautiful than others. You may be richer than poor female workers at the factory. Just an individual success within the system. But, how do you think these strategies will make you speak? In what terms can you justify such an individual success as not a violence upon other oppressed women?
Q5. Feminist Sex Wars: So, post-structural semioticians see it as a freedom of expression, and simply a language which is immaterial. There had been acrimonious debates within the feminist movement in the late 1970s through the 1980s around the issues of pornography. Anti-pornography feminists like Robin Morgan and Andrea Dworkin argued that pornography is degrading to women, and complicit in violence against women both in its production and consumption, and it eroticizes the domination, humiliation, and coercion of women. However, sex-positive feminists such as Betty Dodson and Gayle Rubin were strongly opposed to the radical feminists in that such a censorship they call for could be used by social conservatives to censor the sexual expression of emancipating sexual pleasure of women and other sexual minorities. Some avant-garde feminist writers and feminist pornographers like Tristan Taormino argue that feminist porn both responds to dominant images with alternative ones and creates its own iconography. What is your political opinion about pornography?
Q6. The ontological straight mind produces or reproduces difference of the sexes forming a dialectical unity. According to Lacan, the ego (man) takes the Other (woman) in the Symbolic order as the other (image of its mother's body) in the Imaginary order, thereby, constituting its own internal coherence. So, you may "be", as a woman, the female Other, i.e., the Phallus, such that he can "have" the Phallus, forming a coherence, even though such project always fails due to discreteness of a masculine signifier, in other words, you can't be his Phallus. But, a lesbian can't even imagine such a project of being the Phallus of a man. So, she can't assume the position of the speaking subject within the linguistic system of compulsory heterosexuality. A woman can't either, but only unconsciously pretends to be a "woman", the Phallus of a man, and so, it is just performative. Why do you think those heterosexual discourses and this society so stubbornly insist on difference of the sexes by even persuading you deceptively with specious concept of equality of difference? What is the social necessity pushing such an ontology?
Q7. Wittig says language as raw material is instrumental. If we become the speaking subjects, we can use it. This view is opposed to Irigaray insisting that woman needs another language against a masculine signifying economy. But, Wittig criticises Irigaray, saying that there is no such thing as feminine writing, and it simply reconsolidates a mythic notion of the feminine. What is your opinion? Do you think we should struggle in terms of the existing language, or develop woman's own language?
Q8. Personally, I took up as surprising Wittig's notion of the revolt by our ontological action and language. Marx notes that the second revolt, rather spontaneously, comes from within the capitalistic system, i.e., from its internal contradiction which is inherent in Lockean value theory of labor and private property right in which, since labor power is purchased by capital, it is capital but not labor who has a proprietary ownership of commodity produced by labor. This dialectical inversion, or the first revolt, inevitably amplifies centralisation of economic power and social inequality, and then, the second revolt violently occurs by the poor multiple, or the working class. However, suppose we give up our humanitarian universal ontology without any of our action. Then, still, will the revolt occur? Wittig's thought is that it is not the case. Yes, shifts come from the internal contradictions of the laws assuming the heterosexual contract. But, we, the subjects, must take ontological actions to start and make successful them. Although Marx is right, we still have something to do, or a certain internal degrees of freedom to choose, and thereby, at least condition our future in the comparable manner as, in theoretical physics, though by and large affected by the external rules of symmetries, physical bodies have internal spaces ruled by their own gauge symmetries, this time, updating, shifting, and even subverting physicist's perspectives of the world. Do you think the world would change itself only spontaneously without your own personal, spontaneous, ontological consciousness and actions? We actually have a very unique tendency to understand others' pain by transforming it into our own coordinates. Consider the recent Occupy Wall Street or some other issues at macroscopic level. Do you think macroscopic politics can occur without any of your ontological, or humanitarian, consciousness and actions?
Works Cited
Linda Zerilli, "The Trojan Horse of Universalism: Language as a "War Machine" in the Writings of Monique Wittig", Social Text, No. 25/26. 1990, Duke UP, p146
Ibid., p149
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, Routledge 2006, p2
Luce Irigarary, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter, Cornell UP 1985: Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian G. Gill, Cornell UP 1985
Julia Kristeva, Desire In Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, Columbia UP 1980, pp133-134
Butler, J., Gender Trouble, Routledge 2006, pp114-115
Karl Marx, Capital Vol I, Oxford UP 1995, pp378-380
I hope to see you all at the meeting,
Kyu Don
© 2011, Kyu-don Choi