The ideology of oblivion and dematerialisation
The tendency of groups to forget or “kill” their origins is by no means an isolated case, specific to Germany. We find the same in the USA and in the UK, from where under the banner of postmodernism this tendency spread throughout the whole world. Postmodern feminism has become the dominant theoretical stream in most Women’s Studies departments, particularly in the Anglo-Saxon world. Feminist scholars who do not follow this stream experience problems in finding a position in Women’s Studies programmes.
The discourses on identity and difference, on gender and power are heavily influenced by postmodern thinking. Postmodernism is not only the “newest” in feminist theory but it is used to legitimise political about-turns like the one described above. At the same time it helps the process of forgetting the beginnings of the women’s movement, because its ideology is based, as Füssel remarks, on five “strategies of oblivion”, namely:
- Everything is only surface and appearance. Reality is like an onion, consisting of peel after peel of appearances. There is no essence under these appearances.
- Everything is of the same value. Everything is questionable. Hence everything is basically valueless and arbitrary. Due to this indifference there is no reason why one should choose one option and not any other.
- There is no relationship between input and output in the production process. What counts is the result in the form of money. It is forgotten who is at the helm of this process and in whose interest it is maintained.
- Class differences are forgotten. They are substituted for by consumerism which homogenises masses and elites within a globalised culture. Following the market, “tradition’ or ‘ethnicity”, or modernity may be propagated.
- Nobody takes a position on anything. There is only a plurality of different opinions, one of which is as valid as any other. They are private and without consequences. “The main thing is that conflict is avoided. The confrontation of contradictions is replaced by the side by side arrangement of differences”. There is no unifying vision and strategy [1].
The concept “postmodern” was coined by the French philosopher Jean Francois Lyotard in his book La condition postmoderne (1979). In this book Lyotard presents a thorough critique of “modernity”, the concept by which he and all his followers characterise the period of the Enlightenment, beginning with the eighteenth century and, supposedly, coming to an end in our days. Above all, postmodernists question the Enlightenment concept of rationality, namely that human beings are responsible subjects guided by reason, and that they are also subjects of their history. At the same time the postmodernists do not accept that there is a material or ‘essential’ reality of the world, a “real” history that is not just a linguistic construct or narrative. For postmodernists there is no given reality which can be understood. Reality is what time-bound, context- bound and space-bound discourses have constructed. According to postmodernism there cannot be a universal grand theory valid for all people from all cultures, for all times.
We have asked why feminists, particularly in North America, were attracted by the ideas of these (male) French philosophers. Why did they adopt the postmodern ideas of Lyotard, Derrida, and particularly Foucault as their theoretical framework for the explanation of women’s oppression?
From the outside there seem to be certain similarities in the feminist and the postmodern critiques. Both criticise the dominant concept of rationality. But both come to this critique from different practices. The French philosophers came to their theoretical position from their critique of Marx and Freud. The feminists, at least in the seventies, came to their critique from their experiences in the women’s movement, from their objection to patriarchal violence, to militarism, to nuclear and gene technology, in short, from their rejection of Cartesian hubris, an epistemological paradigm which was based on dominance of men over nature and over women [2].
In the United States, however, this connection between the women’s movement, its various campaigns and feminist philosophising was soon forgotten. This happened, it seems, around the eighties, when Women’s Studies departments were established as a regular feature at most US universities. The institutionalising of women’s studies not only went along with the separation between the movement and women’s research but also with a shift from the earlier feminist theorising to postmodern philosophising. Nancy Fraser and Linda J. Nicholson write about this shift:
“Since around 1980, many feminist scholars have come to abandon the project of grand social theory. They have stopped looking for the causes of sexism and have turned to more concrete enquiry with more limited aims. One reason for this shift is the growing legitimacy of feminist scholarship. The institutionalisation of women’s studies in the United States has meant a dramatic increase in the size of the community of feminist inquirers, a much greater division of scholarly labour, and a large and growing fund of concrete information. As a result, feminist scholars have come to regard their enterprise more collectively, more like a puzzle whose various pieces are being filled in by many different people than like a construction to be completed by a single theoretical stroke. In short, feminist scholarship has attained its maturity.” [3]
It is interesting that Fraser and Nicholson in the United States, like Holland-Cuntz in Germany, characterise feminist scholarship as “mature” only after it has been accepted by mainstream academia, institutionalised, with full-fledged departments, professorships and budgets, and after it has been “purified” of its radical “universalist”, “essentialist” beginnings. The effect of this theoretical shift is not only that postmodernists are no longer able to recognise links and commonalities in the plurality of people, cultures and issues, they also do not know what is important and what is not. Political activity is reduced to “political correctness”, a mere verbal enumeration of “gender”, “race”, “culture”, “sexual orientation”, “ethnicity”. Most postmodernist feminists are afraid of taking sides. They are afraid of “essentialising” any social category, be it “woman” or “mother” or any other. In particular the discourse on gender, as part of postmodern feminism has contributed to the depoliticisation of the women’s movement.
Essentialism – the new original sin
In spite of all their differences and their rejection of any “grand theory”, postmodern feminists unanimously reject one theoretical sin: essentialism. Much of the theoretical writing of postmodern feminists consists of tracing this sin in the works of other feminists. But they are also very careful in their own texts not to step into the trap of essentialism.
What is essentialism? If you ask postmodernist feminists they usually denounce something that earlier feminists had called “biological determinism”. This is the idea that the anatomy of men and women is the cause of patriarchal gender relations and not social, politico-economic, cultural or historical relations. For postmodernists, categories like gender, class, race, etcetera are just differences. The criticism of essentialism means that such differences should not be considered as universally valid or quasi-nature-ordained. There is no “male” or “female” essence, only different constructions of maleness and femaleness, dependent on time, culture, history, space, class, race, sexual orientation.
According to postmodern feminists, essentialism is not only restricted to the biological differences between the genders; there can also be cultural or social essentialism in so far as certain localised and time-bound experiences are universalised in a metanarrative. Fraser and Nicholson criticise Chodorow’s analysis of’mothering’ as essentialist, because it:
“stipulates that this basically unitary activity gives rise to two distinct sorts of deep selves, one relatively common across cultures to women, the other relatively common across cultures to men.” [4]
From a postmodern perspective, all of these assumptions are problematic because they are essentialist.
Our problem with the postmodern criticism of essentialism is not that it rejects biological determinism which legitimises dominance relations as nature-ordained. This we have done from the beginning of the movement. But postmodern feminists seem to be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. In their anxiety to avoid essentialism and any universalistic “grand narrative” they step into several traps. First, they practically deny that there is any material and historical reality to the categories “women”, “men”, “mothers”, etcetera. Thus there are only individual differences, which then, however, are seen as the only feature of human societies. On the basis of such individual and increasingly individualistic differences it is difficult to perceive any commonalities among people and to develop a notion of solidarity. Moreover, the radical constructivism that considers maleness and femaleness as only the result of cultural manipulations not only repeats the old Enlightenment dualistic and hierarchical division between nature and culture but also continues with the old valuation of this division: culture, anything made by humans, is superior to anything given by nature. This split is most acutely felt in our female bodies. According to postmodern feminists, women can never live in peace in and with their bodies. They are either cyborgs [5] or they are animals. This dualistic view has been particularly promoted by the Anglo-Saxon discourse on gender, in which a split was introduced between “sex” as supposedly only biological and “gender” as supposedly cultural [6].
One of the most negative results of this postmodern feminism is that on the basis of this ideology struggles for women’s liberation – or for the liberation of any other oppressed group or class – become virtually impossible. First, there are only differences, and these are not seen as enriching diversity, but as competing or antagonistic interests. There is no commonality, no common cause, no common ethics, no common vision. In order to become politically active, however, a somewhat larger perspective than one’s own experience is necessary.
On the other hand, if women want to become politically active, they must at least have a sense of reality of themselves, they must be able to consider themselves as subjects and their cause as real, important and part of a long-term perspective. Otherwise they will not have the necessary motivation and strength even to start getting involved in political action. This means they have to consider some issues as essentially important.
Such essentialism, however, is not allowed by postmodern feminism. This dilemma has also been observed by some of the spokeswomen of postmodernism. Judith Butler, referring to Julia Kristeva’s analysis that “women” actually do not exist, asks how such persons, who do not exist, can still be politically active. Her solution is interesting. She proposes to use the category ‘woman’ as a political instrument, but without granting it some ontological integrity. Butler quotes Spivak who argues that feminists should construct an operational essentialism, a false “ontology of Woman” as a universal category in order to be able to start their political programme [7].
This means, if women want to act politically they have to erect the pretence that the category ‘woman’ has any universal, ontological essence. If they want to theorise, however, they have to avoid such essentialism by all means. This schizophrenic situation of postmodernist feminist thought is precisely the result of the new idealism that postmodernism represents. Somer Brodribb was one of the first to criticise this new idealism in feminist theorising. She points out that this new Platonism is based on the elimination of matter and history in postmodern, poststructuralist and existentialist theory and its replacement by discourses and narratives or language games which, for their part, can be traced to the ‘murder’ of the mother, matricide, as the beginning of human life. In her book Nothing Mat(t)ers: A Feminist Critique of Postmodernism [8] Brodribb reminds us of the common Latin root of mater (mother) and materia (matter). She shows that the male cultural heroes of postmodernism – Nietzsche, Lyotard, Lacan, Derrida, Foucault – could not really accept that we are all born by women and that we die like other organic creatures. She identifies the “murder of the beginning” [9] factual or symbolic killings of mother or woman, as the main impetus of postmodern philosophy. Without this murder of mat(t)er, without this dematerialising, obscuring and devaluing of our beginnings, our arche in this world, it would not have been possible to establish man as the creator of culture, of technology, of the symbolic order, and eventually of life. It would not have been possible to separate culture from mat(t)er and to subordinate the latter to the former and women to men. Postmodern men and women who want to move up into the symbolic order of capitalist patriarchy have first to forget that they are of “woman born” [10]. Only after this can they conceive of themselves and of other humans as “self- constructed”, as cyborgs or hybrids between organic “systems” and machines [11].
This postmodern murder of mat(t)er has produced a new idealism which not only reduces all reality to a “text” but also eliminates our sense of history – our sense both of our individual history and also of our social history. Moreover, it condemns to oblivion the awareness of the link that binds us to other organic creatures on this planet. The awareness that in spite of all technological manipulation nature is first something given, and not constructed, disappears.
We do not understand why women, particularly in the centres of industrial capitalism, embrace this new idealism and even propagate it in the name of women’s emancipation. As we saw, this happens not only in gender studies but also in politics. How was it possible that feminists forgot their roots in the women’s movement and the centrality of “body polities”? How could they forget the link between the women’s movement and women’s studies, between practice and theory [12]? Why did they no longer understand that their enemies were not “mothers” but global capitalist patriarchy? Why did they – again – believe that technology/science could “emancipate” them from their real and symbolic mothers, from Mother Earth, and their organic bodies? This emancipation means, as Renate Klein put it, that they can eventually “float bodyless in cyberspace” [13]. Only in “virtual reality” can they feel free and equal. Postmodern feminists’ criticism of “essentialism”, for example of ecofeminism, has its roots in this denial of our own origins as “of woman born”, of real mothers and the symbolic order of mothers and of the female body. For women this denial is self-destructive. Gene and reproductive technologies are then the only means to “emancipate” women from the “wilderness” of their female body. Barbara Duden, in her criticism of Judith Butler, calls this postmodern, dematerialised woman the “woman without abdomen” [14].
The denial of material individual and social histories goes hand in hand with the hope that it will give women, at last, access to the technocratically and patriarchally defined realm of the men. This realm is seen as the “realm of freedom” and of culture. The old dream of all oppressed people, to move up into the house of their masters – instead of breaking down this house – is also many women’s dream. In politics as well as in women’s studies some women have indeed been able to move up in that house. But they were accepted by the “Male-Stream” [15] only after their denial of the origins, the separation from the women’s movement and a re-academisation of Women’s Studies had taken place [16].
In the Anglo-Saxon countries this re-academisation of Women’s Studies was promoted largely by the discourse on gender. This gender discourse, though started earlier, culminated with postmodernism and the institutionalisation of Gender Studies departments in the universities. The effect of the shift from “Women’s Studies” to “Gender Studies” was not simply to eliminate essentialism and biological determinism but rather to make Women’s Studies respectable for the academic male-stream. With the disappearance of the category “woman” from the academic discourse, other “radical” concepts such as patriarchy, capitalism, exploitation, and oppression also disappeared. To talk of gender was decent, and it threatened no one. Gender neatly divided sexuality –supposedly linked to our organic female body – from the abstract and supposedly higher spheres of culture, society and history. We have already pointed out (in 1986) that human sexuality is not only an anatomical but also a social and historical category. To divide the two opens up this most intimate sphere of human experience to the technocratic and commercial manipulations of the one pole (sex) and to the romanticising and idealising of the other pole (gender) [17].
Gender discourse did not reach Germany until around 1990. But then a similar process of killing of origins happened. The beginnings of German Women’s Studies in the late seventies were ignored or ridiculed. Whereas translations of American feminist writings were hailed as the origins of Women’s Studies, the relationship between the German women’s movement and Women’s Studies was totally obscured [18]. And history was turned upside down: the women’s movement was now said to have emerged out of Women’s Studies. In the established German Women’s Studies departments, meanwhile, it came to be considered progressive to talk of “Gender-Studien” instead of using the German translation: Geschlechterstudien.
Yet the killing of origins is not only a problem of “forgetting” certain writings. It has hit a number of internationally known German feminist scholars who are among the pioneers of German Women’s Studies and who were not able to find positions in German universities. Among these are Luise Pusch, Senta Tromel-Plotz, Heide Gottner-Abendroth, Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen and Claudia von Werlhof [19].
This process of eliminating the “mothers” and of killing the origins seems to follow the stages that Catherine Keller has identified as the secret of establishing patriarchal dominance. For her the patriarchal “myth of origin” is the Sumerian myth of Marduk and Tiamat. Marduk, the warrior son, has to kill his mother Tiamat, the ruler of the seas and of “chaos”. Then he has to cut her body into pieces and to distribute them throughout the land. These places, where pieces of Tiamat were buried, then become centres of the new patriarchal civilization [20].
This schema of murdering the mothers is used not only by men time and again if they want to establish themselves as the origin of things but also by women. Matricide – the destruction of the origins and of female genealogies, the deconstruction and reconstruction of women’s history into new narratives – is today a matter of a few hours’ work at a word processor. Postmodern idealism legitimises this matricide, because there is no reality anyway any more.
We are surprised, however, that postmodern feminists ignore one important postulate of constructivism. This is the postulate to contextualise one’s narratives, to ask in which historical moments which discourses are initiated by which actors and in whose interests. Had the postmodernist feminists asked these questions they would have discovered that the rise of postmodernism as the dominant theory in the universities, particularly in Women’s Studies departments, coincided with the rise of neoliberal economic politics in the USA and UK in the eighties – Reagonomics and Thatcherism – and later, after the breakdown of socialism, in the whole world. Obviously, they do not realise that there is an exact fit between postmodern idealism, its attack on essentialism and on “grand narratives”, its neoliberal pluralism and political indifference, and neo-conservatism. These postmodern feminist scholars were and are not a threat to patriarchal capitalism. Indeed, words like “patriarchy” or “capitalism” do not appear in the postmodern discourse. Postmodernist ideology has effectively depoliticised large masses of people, particularly young people, so that they are not even aware of the connection between economy, politics and ideology: much less do they feel concerned about the growing inequality and social and ecological devastation produced by neoliberal economic policy. Seyla Benhabib rightly warns that the political alternatives that follow from Lyotard’s philosophy, namely neoliberal pluralism and contextual pragmatism, will not be able to counter the onslaught of neoliberal politics and, as its results, growing inequality and ecological destruction. Postmodernism instead is “motivated by a desire to depoliticize philosophy” [21].
Since women worldwide are the main victims of neoliberal policy it is a tragedy that Western feminists are among the torch-bearers of an ideology according to which “anything goes and nothing mat(t)ers” [22].
Text taken from the book
Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen & Maria Mies
The Subsistence Perspective,
Beyond the Globalised Economy
Zed Books, Londres, 2000.
Chapter 8:
Women’s Liberation and subsistence,
p. 194-201.
[1] Kuno Füssel, « Es gilt, absolut plural zu sein, Kritische Überlegungen zum Diskurs der Postmoderne », in Kuno Füssel & al., Die Sowohl-als-auch-Falle : eine theologische Kritik des Postmodernismus, Lucerne, Exodus, 1993, p. 35-81.
[2] Carolyn Merchant, The death of Nature: woman, ecology and the scientific revolution, New York, Paperback, 1980; Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1985; Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1978; Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1982.
[3] Nancy Fraser & Linda Nicholson, «Social Criticism without Philosophy: An Encounter between Feminism and Postmodernism», in Linda Nicholson (ed.), Feminism/Postmodernism, New York – Londres, Routledge, 1990, p. 31-32.
[4] Fraser and Nicholson, op. cit., p. 30.
[5] Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women. The Reinvention of Nature, 1991.
[6] Gayle Rubin, «The Traffic in Women», in Rayna R. Reiter (ed.), Toward an Anthropology of Women, New York – Londres, Monthly Review Press, 1975, p. 157-210.
[7] Judith Butler, «Gender Trouble», in Linda Nicholson, Feminism/Postmodernism, op. cit., p. 325.
[8] Somer Brodribb, Nothing Mat(t)ers: A Feminist Critique of Postmodernism, New York, New York University Press, 1992.
[9] Suzanne Blaise, Le Rapt des origines ou le Meurtre de la Mère, Paris, autoédité, 1988 ; Julia Kristeva, Black Sun, depression and melancholia, New York, Columbia University Press, 1989.
[10] Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, New York, Norton, 1976.
[11] Donna Haraway, «A Manifesta for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s», in Linda Nicholson (ed.), Feminism/Postmodernism, op. cit., 190-233.
[12] Maria Mies, «Methodische Postulate zur Frauenforschung – dargestellt am Beispiel der Gewalt gegen Frauen», Beiträge zur feministischen Theorie und Praxis, Heft 1 und 11, 1978.
[13] Renate Klein, «Dead Bodies Floating in Cyberspace: Postmodernism and the Dismemberment of Women», in Diane Bell & Renate Klein (ed.), Radically Speaking: Feminism Reclaimed, Melbourne – Londres, Spinifex – Zed Books, 1996, p. 346-358.
[14] Barbara Duden, «Die Frau ohne Unterleib : Zu Judith Butlers Entkörperung. Ein Zeitdokument», Feministische Studien, vol. 11, n°2, 1993, p. 24-33.
[15] Mary O’Brien, Reproducing the World: Essays in Feminist Theory, Boulder, Westview Press, 1989.
[16] Maria Mies, «Liberating Women, Liberating Knowledge: Reflections on Two Decades of Feminist Action Research», Atlantis, vol. 21, n°1, 1996, p. 10-23.
[17] Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour, Londres, Zed Books, 1986.
[18] Hannelore Bublitz, «Feministische Wissenschaft: Patriarchatskritik oder Geschlechterforschung?», in Ingeborg Stahr (ed.), Wenn Frauenwissen Wissen schafft: 10 Jahre Frauenstudien und Frauenforschung an der Universität GH Essen, Essen, Hochschuldidaktisches Zentrum, Bereich Frauenstudien, Frauenforschung, 1992, p. 23-36.
[19] Claudia von Werlhof, Mutter-Los: Frauen im Patriarchat zwischen Angleichung und Dissidenz, Munich, Frauenoffensive, 1996.
[20] Catherine Keller, From a Broken Web: Separation, Sexism and Self, Boston, Beacon Press, 1987.
[21] Seyla Benhabib, «Epistemologies of Postmodernism: A Rejoinder to Jean-François Lyotard», in Linda J. Nicholson (ed.) Feminism/Postmodernism, op. cit., p. 107-130.
[22] Somer Brodribb, Nothing Mat(t)ers: A Feminist Critique of Postmodernism, Melbourne, Spinifex, 1992.
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