Why is feminism talked about so much? Why does it seem to be an important--sometimes the most important, and sometimes the only--factor to look at? Why does it come in virtually all English classes? And does it have to? Why is it important to incorporate in the early school system, isn't the amount of saturation one receives at the university level enough? My answer has something to do with "feminism", and even more to do with the history of ideas about gender. I'll start with the latter. Historically, thinking about gender happens in cultures where gender configurations--the social meaning systems that encode sexual difference--undergo changes or shifts. The same is true with thinking about race (that race, as a construct becomes apparent when ideas of race are shifting) or economics, or politics, etc.: all of these concepts are reevaluated when social practice shifts. So gender, or masculine and feminine qualities, or male/female social roles, comes up as area for analysis whenever gender roles are shifting. You can trace this back to medieval times (Chaucer's Wife of Bath is certainly an example of questioning gender configurations--note too that questions of gender roles not limited solely to women thinkers and writers). And because gender roles seem to shift in just about every time period, in relation to all kinds of factors (war, for instance, or economics, or notions of morality), gender is often a major focus of thought and writing, in popular culture and in theory. In examining these roles, this paper will investigate their origins, causes and perpetuation. We will investigate their origins historically, hedgemonically, and the familial, as well as the educational perpetuation of these roles. Certainly in the nineteenth century, in Britain and the United States, gender was a matter for much public discussion and debate. "The Woman Question," as it was called, focused on whether gender should be a factor in granting or limiting rights, like voting rights; it also focused attention on men and male social roles, asking questions about the nature and function of gender. Is gender innate and biological? Is it the product of socialization and environment? Is the family structure (one father, one mother, and kids) eternal, universal, divinely-ordained, natural--or socially constructed and thus variable? These were--and are--central questions, not only for politics and economics, but for anthropology, psychology, and all of what we now call the social sciences. So, Why is gender important? The simplest answer is because it's there. "Gender," meaning the differentiation, usually on the basis of sex, between social roles and functions labeled as "masculine" and "feminine," is universal: all societies known to us in all time periods make some sort of gender distinctions. As a central feature of all cultures, gender seems worth some attention. But perhaps the question is not about universality, but about the prominence of gender studies in the university today, where you encounter gender as a topic (if not a preoccupation) in all courses, and particularly in all English courses. This paper will concern itself with Gender, a theoretical analysis of how gender was constructed, historically, how it is perpetuated familial and scholastically, and finally, an evaluation of different approaches to gender and all it's inherent ramifications. We will examine several major theorists, concentrating our investigations on the four major French Feminists. In Anglo-American academic discussion, it is common to refer to Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Dr. Derrida as "the French feminists." This terminology assumes that somehow these theorists represent or speak for ALL feminists who are French, thus silencing the voices and ideas of other feminists who are French, such as Francios Sagan, Giselle Halimi, and many others. To avoid the imperialism inherent in the Anglo-American construction of Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva as "the French feminists," I will refer to these theorists as "poststructuralist theoretical feminists." Gender is so ubiquitous as a topic of study in part because of our capacity, in the twentieth century, to "deconstruct" gender categories, to defamiliarize what has previously been seen as natural (men are naturally masculine, women are naturally feminine). At some point (or at several points) what Derrida would call a "rupture" occurred: a moment (or moments) when it became possible to think about gender as a construct, not as a natural or eternal category. Thus our thought systems, philosophies, and worldviews had to think of gender as a variable system, as something created and alterable, not as a given. And, as Derrida tells us, when our culture is able to think of constructs, to foreground as construction what previously was kept in the background as "natural", as assumed--we do. But perhaps the question of why we have to talk about gender so much comes from a different place. Perhaps the real question is, I'm afraid when we talk about gender we're going to end up talking about feminism, not gender, and that we're going to end up saying women are good, men are bad, and it's going to be an excuse to trash men and talk about how white men are horrible oppressors. And then the real question is, why do we have to talk about all this political stuff, all this stuff about who oppresses whom? It just makes me feel guilty. And I don't want to change the world or march in the streets--all I want to do is teach novels and poetry and learn something about how to do that in a better and more sophisticated way. Let me begin to answer this by talking about the word "feminism" and "feminist" (as in "feminist theory"). What does it make you think of? Angry bra-burning women, man-hating lesbians, political protesters who just make trouble; images that conjure up anger, dissatisfaction, the desire to change, and more specifically, to change me (especially because I'm a man); images of people who aren't tolerant, rational, reasonable, or willing to accept that maybe I'm a person (male or female) doing the best I can, but I can't help having been raised in a culture where I learned to be masculine or feminine in ways that these feminists see as harmful, evil, and bad. My definition of feminism would be in three parts. 1). A "feminist" is someone who is interested in studying and understanding gender as a system of cultural signs or meanings assigned (by various social mechanisms) to sexually-dimorphic bodies, and who sees these cultural signs which constitute gender as having a direct effect on how we live our individual lives and how our social institutions operate. 2). Secondly, a "feminist" is someone who sees the gender systems currently in operation (in our culture and in other cultures) as structured by a basic binary opposition--masculine/feminine--in which one term, masculine, is always privileged over the other term, and that this privileging has had the direct effect of enabling men to occupy positions of social power more often than women. (Note: not all men eligible to occupy these positions of power; other binary oppositions are always also at work, such as old/young, or rich/poor, which will mitigate the effect of gender alone; hence a rich old woman might have more forms of social power that a poor young man. Obviously, too, this formulation depends on the kinds of social power one is discussing. Similarly, some women hold these positions, again dependent on other forms/positions of empowerment (race, class, education, age, physical ability, etc.). But the basic idea is, if you focus only on the male/female distinction, more men will wield social power (historically and cross-culturally) than women. 3). A "feminist" thinks this (points 1 & 2) is wrong, and should be changed. This definition makes feminism into a kind of academic pursuit, where feminists just sit around studying gender relations. And this is an important part of feminism, the idea that one CAN study gender relations and incorporate these ideas into our existing educational systems, that gender exists as a signifying system, as sets of cultural signs that can be, and are, manipulated just as any set of signs is. But there's also a political side to feminism, the side that says let's not just study and analyze these systems, but change them and these changes must begin in the school systems. Derrida certainly invites us to think that philosophical systems are worth thinking about. Derrida's essay begins with the word "perhaps," which signifies that in deconstruction, everything is provisional; you can't make positive/definitive statements. Nevertheless, we'll proceed as if you can. This is another key to deconstruction--even as you come to understand that nothing is stable, that meaning is always contingent and ambiguous, you continue to act as if nothing's wrong... Derrida then introduces the idea that some "event" has occurred. This "event" is some sort of "rupture" or break. What he's talking about is what he sees as a major shift or break in the fundamental structure of western philosophy (the epitome). This break is a moment where the whole way philosophy thought about itself shifted. That shift, or rupture, was when it became possible to think about "the structurally of structure." In other words, this is the moment when structuralism pointed out that language was indeed a structure, when it became possible to think (abstractly) about the idea of structure itself, and how every system--whether language, or philosophy itself--had a structure. An analogy might be (to paraphrase Plato) to think about being in a room--say, your dorm room. At first, you think about how to decorate that room: what posters to put up on the walls, what pictures, where the bed and desk and dresser go, etc. Then one day you might think about the room, not as your room, but as one room in a whole building, as part of a structure; then you might think about the "roomness" of your room, the qualities that (apart from your specific decorations) make it a room, and then about how it relates to other rooms in the structure (my room is my room because it's not the room next door). Anyway, the moment when you start thinking about the roomness of your room is the moment or "event" Derrida is talking about--the moment when philosophers began to see their philosophical systems, not as absolute truth, but as systems, as constructs, as structures. Unlike Saucer, who just looked at structure as linear, Derrida insists that all structures have some sort of center. He's talking mostly about philosophical systems or structures, but the idea applies to almost any structure. There's something that all the elements in the structure refer to, connect to, something that makes the structure hold its shape, keeps all the parts together. (You should note, though, that this model DOESN'T work so well for language-- or not for Saussure's idea of language--where it's difficult to locate or name what "center" might hold the whole structure together). The center, while it holds the whole structure together, limits the movement of the elements in the structure--this movement is what Derrida calls "play." Think again of a building. A central shaft may hold all the wings and floors of a building together, limiting how much the structure as a whole, and any single element, can move--say, in a tornado or hurricane. In a building, this lack of "play" is good. In a philosophical or signifying system, Derrida says, it's not so good. You might also think about a kindergarten classroom. The teacher is the center. When he or she is there, all the kids behave--they act the way the center dictates. When the teacher leaves the room, the kids go crazy--they "play" wildly. Derrida says the center is the crucial part of any structure. It's the point where you can't substitute anything. In the rest of the structure (think of tinker toys) you could substitute blue rods for red, or one size of connector for another. At the center, only the unit that is the center can be there; none of the other units of the system can take the place of the center. A less concrete example of a system with a center would be a philosophical or belief system--say, the Puritan mindset. In the Puritan system of belief, GOD was the center of everything--anything that happened in the world (i.e. any event, or "unit", of the system) could be referred back to God as the central cause of that event. And nothing in the system was the equivalent of God--nothing could replace God at the center as the cause of all things. Refer this back to Saussure's idea that value comes from difference; that idea is based on the exchangeability between units (verbs are not nouns, but both are words, and could be exchanged for each other). The center of a system is something that has no equivalent value, nothing can replace it or be exchanged for it, it's the cause and ultimate referent for everything in the system. Because of this, Derrida says, the center is a weird part of a system or structure--it's part of the structure, but not part of it, because it is the governing element; as he puts it (84) the center is the part of the structure which "escapes structurality." In the Puritan example, God creates the world and rules it, and is responsible for it, but isn't part of it. The center is thus, paradoxically, both within the structure and outside it. The center is the center but not part of what Derrida calls "the totality," i.e. the structure. So the center is not the center. The concept of the centered structure, according to Derrida, is "contradictorily coherent." The idea of a center is useful because it limits play (which Derrida associates with "desire." Don't worry about this now. We'll talk about desire when we get to Freud and Lacan). Derrida says all systems want ultimately to be fixed, to have no play at all, to be stable and become "fully present." So, before this "rupture" he talks about (which happened pretty much with the advent of structuralism in the 1950s), what happened in the history of philosophy was a continual substitution of one centered system for other centered systems. Briefly, if Derrida were to write a history of western philosophy (which of course he wouldn't, because a history also implies a kind of linear ordered system, and Derrida likes play too much to do that), his history would look like this. 1. Early Christian era to eighteenth century: a single god posited as the center and cause of all things 2. Eighteenth century/Enlightenment to late nineteenth century: God kicked out of the center, and human thought (rationality) posited as the center and cause of all things. 3. Late nineteenth century-1966: rationality kicked out of the center, and the unconscious, or irrationality, or desire, posited as the center and cause of all things. 4. 1966: Derrida writes "Structure, Sign, and Play" and deconstructs the idea of a center. His example is to think about the concept of "sign"--as soon as you try to say that all signs are equal, that there is no transcendental signified that holds any semiotic system together, that signifying systems have no centers, and that therefore all signs have infinite play, or infinite ranges of meaning, you have to say that the only way you can even talk about signs is by using the word "sign", and assuming it has some fixed meaning. And then you're back in the system you're trying to "deconstruct." Derrida uses this introduction of ethnology as a way to get to his main topic, which is Claude Levi-Strauss' structural view of the opposition between nature and culture. Remember, Levi-Strauss as a structuralist saw the basic structures of myth (and hence of all aspects of culture) as binary oppositions, pairs of ideas that gave each other value: light/dark (light has value or meaning because it's not darkness, and vice versa), male/female, culture/nature, etc. In looking at the nature/culture dichotomy, Levi-Strauss defines "natural" as that which is universal and "cultural" as that which is dictated by the norms of a particular social organization. The rule of binary opposites is that they have to be opposites, so nature/culture, or universal/specific, have to always be absolutely separate. And here Levi-Strauss discovers what Derrida calls a "scandal"--an element of social organization that belongs to BOTH categories. The prohibition against incest is universal--every culture has one. But, it's also specific--every culture works out the laws of incest prohibition in its own way. So how can something be both universal and particular, both nature and culture? Once you deconstruct a system by pointing out its inconsistencies, by showing where there is play in the system, Derrida says you have two choices. One is that you can throw out the whole structure as no good. Usually then you try to build another structure with no inconsistencies, no play. But of course, according to Derrida, that's impossible--that's just like substituting one center for another and not seeing that the center (or transcendental signified) is just a concept, which has "play" like any other, and not a fixed and stable "truth." The other option, which is Levi-Strauss's choice, is to keep using the structure, but to recognize it's flawed. In Derrida's terms, this means to stop attributing "truth value" to a structure or system, but rather to see that system as a system, as a construct, as something built around a central idea that holds the whole thing in place, even though that central idea (like the idea of binary opposites) is flawed or even an illusion. Derrida and Levi-Strauss call this latter method "bricolage," and the person that does it a "bricoleur." This is somebody who doesn't care about the purity or stability of the system s/he uses, but rather uses what's there to get a particular job done. In philosophical terms, I might want to talk about a belief system, so I refer to God because it's a useful illustration of something that a lot of people believe in; I don't assume that "god" refers to an actual being, or even to a coherent system of beliefs that situate "god" at the center and that then provide a stable code of interpretation or behavior. You might also think of tinker toys. Even though I may not have a complete set, and some of the parts are broken or don't fit together any more, I don't throw the whole set out and buy a new one (or a set of Legos); I keep playing with the tinker toys, and I can even incorporate things that aren't from the original tinker toy set (such as legos, or alphabet blocks, or soup cans) to make what I want to make. That is bricolage. Bricolage doesn't worry about the coherence of the words or ideas it uses. For example, you are a bricoleur if you talk about penis envy or the Oedipus complex and you don't know anything about psychoanalysis; you use the terms without having to acknowledge that the whole system of thought that produced these terms and ideas, i.e. Freudian psychoanalysis, is valid and "true." In fact, you don't care if psychoanalysis is true or not (since at heart you don't really believe in "truth" as an absolute, but only as something that emerges from a coherent system as a kind of illusion) as long as the terms and ideas are useful to you. Derrida contrasts the bricoleur with the engineer. The engineer designs buildings that have to be stable and have little or no play; the engineer has to create stable systems or nothing at all. He talks about the engineer as the person who sees himself as the center of his own discourse, the origin of his own language. This guy thinks s/he speaks language, s/he originates language, from her/his own unique existence. The liberal humanist is usually an engineer in this respect. The idea of bricolage produces a new way to talk about, and think about, systems without falling into trap of building a new system out of the ruins of an old one (88). It provides a way to think without establishing a new center, a subject, a privileged reference, and an origin. Derrida starts talking about the idea of "totalization". Totalization is desire to have a system, a theory, a philosophy, that explains EVERYTHING. The Puritans thought they had totalizing system--God is at the center, is the source and origin of everything, and reference to God explains everything that happens. Derrida says that totalization is impossible: no philosophy or system explains absolutely everything. (You might recall the old sci-fi cliche "there are some things man was not meant to know"). There are two ways in which totalization is impossible: there might be too much to say, too many things to account for; or (Derrida's explanation) there might be too much play in the system--elements can't be fixed and measured and accounted for Think again about the kindergarten class. Totalization would be taking attendance; you can't do it if there are a million kids, even if they're all sitting at their desks. You also can't do it if there are 14 kids all running around all over the place. When a system lacks a center, play becomes infinite; when a system has a center, play is limited or eliminated. All systems fall on a continuum between the two.Derrida talks about the idea of supplementary of the center. The next important thing in this essay is the discussion of "play" (93). Stability--fixity caused by center--is what Derrida calls "presence." Something is fully present when it's stable and fixed, not provisional and mobile. Play is the disruption of presence. There can be two attitudes toward the idea of play as disruption of system/structure: nostalgia and disapproval or approval. You can be nostalgic for fixed systems, and long for a return to simple beliefs (say, in God and the God-given right of male dominance), and can mourn the loss of fixity of meaning. Or you can play along, rejoice in multiplicity and affirm the provisional nature of all meaning. This latter attitude doesn't look for full presence, which would be rest and stability, but revels in flux, in impermanence, in play. Think of the kindergarten teacher who either weeps in frustration because her kids won't behave or who gets down on the floor and starts playing with them. Obviously, Derrida thinks enjoying play is better (and there are political ideas attached to this; they will come up later on). Structuralism made it possible to see philosophical systems as all insisting on a center, though a different kind of center; the event or rupture Derrida talks about is the moment when it was possible to see for the first time that the center was a construct, rather than something that was simply true or there. The assumption that the center (God, rationality) is the basis or origin for all things in the system makes the center irreplaceable and special, and gives the center what Derrida calls "central presence" or "full presence," i.e. something never defined in relation to other things, by negative value. Then he names the idea of a center as a "transcendental signified"--in semiotic terms, the ultimate source of meaning, which cannot be represented (or substituted) by any adequate signifier. Again, the idea of God is probably the best example of a transcendental self. (Note: this is also sometimes called a "transcendental signifier."). God can't be represented (in some religions, there is no speakable or writable name for God) by any signifier, yet God is the thing that all signifiers in a system ultimately refer to (because God created the whole system). He questions how we can think and talk about systems and centers, without making a new system with a center. He mentions here Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger as all trying to do this, and failing to some extent because they all posited their own new systems (with centers). In other words, he says, you can't talk about any system without using the terms of that system: "We have no language--no syntax and no lexicon--which is foreign" to a system; "we can pronounce not a single destructive proposition which has not already had to slip into the form, the logic, and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest." (85) His example is to think about the concept of "sign"--as soon as you try to say that all signs are equal, that there is no transcendental signified that holds any semiotic system together, that signifying systems have no centers, and that therefore all signs have infinite play, or infinite ranges of meaning, you have to say that the only way you can even talk about signs is by using the word "sign", and assuming it has some fixed meaning. And then you're back in the system you're trying to "deconstruct." He then talks about ethnology as an example of a decentering system. Ethnology (or anthropology) began as a way for Western European societies to proclaim themselves as the "centers" of civilization--to compare all other cultures to what Western Europe had accomplished. That's called "ethnocentrism" (to assume your culture is the measure or standard of all other cultures). But then ethnologists started seeing other cultures as autonomous, as existing on their own terms, and not necessarily in relation to Western European culture as the "center." They started to see relative value of each culture, not its relational value. This moment is the equivalent, in ethnology, to the "rupture" Derrida talks about in philosophy. Mostly Derrida uses this introduction of ethnology as a way to get to his main topic, which is Claude Levi-Strauss' structural view of the opposition between nature and culture. Claude Levi-Strauss is a French anthropologist, most well known for his development of structural anthropology. In his book The Elementary Structures of Kinship, Levi-Strauss argued that kinship relations--which are fundamental aspects of any culture's organization--represent a specific kind of structure; you might think of genealogical charts, with their symbols for father and mothers, sisters and brothers, as an example of kinship systems represented as structures. Levi-Strauss is also known for his structural analyses of mythology, in books like The Raw and the Cooked, where he explains how the structures of myths provide basic structures of understanding cultural relations. These relations appear as binary pairs or opposites, as the title of his book implies: what is "raw" is opposed to what is "cooked," and the "raw" is associated with nature while the "cooked" is associated with culture. These oppositions form the basic structure for all ideas and concepts in a culture. In "The Structural Study of Myth," Levi-Strauss is interested in explaining why myths from different cultures from all over the world seem so similar. Given that myths could contain anything--they aren't bound by rules of accuracy, or probability--why is there an astounding similarity among so many myths from so many widely separated cultures? He answers this question by looking at the structure of myths, rather than at their content. While the content, the specific characters and events of myths may differ widely, Levi-Strauss argues that their similarities are based on their structural sameness. To make this argument about the structure of myth, Levi-Strauss insists that myth is language, because myth has to be told in order to exist. It is also a language, with the same structures that Saussure described belonging to any language. Myth, as language, consists of both "langue" and "parole," both the synchronic, ahistorical structure and the specific diachronic details within the structure. Levi-Strauss adds a new element to Saussure's langue and parole, pointing out that langue belongs to what he calls "reversible time," and parole to "non-reversible time." He means that parole, as a specific instance or example or event, can only exist in linear time, which is unidirectional--you can't turn the clock back; langue, on the other hand, since it is simply the structure itself, can exist in the past, present, or future. Think of this sentence again: "The adjectival noun verbed the direct object adverbially." If you read the sentence, you read from left to right, one word at a time, and it takes time to read the whole sentence--that's non-reversible time. If you don't' read the sentence, but rather think of it as being the structure of English, it exists in a single moment, every moment--yesterday as well as today as well as tomorrow. That's reversible time. A myth, according to Levi-Strauss, is both historically specific--it's almost always set in some time long ago--and ahistorical, meaning that its story is timeless. As history, myth is parole; as timeless, it's langue. Levi-Strauss says that myth also exists on a third level, in addition to langue and parole, which also proves that myth is a language of its own, and not just a subset of language (like other literary productions, which are made of language, and which might be thought of as "paroles." (67). Francois Sagan gives this analogy in "Chapitre Premier" of his Un Certain Sourite; in defining his protagonist self image analogously it a "La maison etat longue et gris" (87). In English, The house, symbolic for woman's self, a patriarchal delineation, in the first place, is gray & dank. He explains that level in terms of the story that myth tells. That story is special, because it survives any and all translations. While poetry is that which can't be translated, or paraphrased, Levi-Strauss says that myth can be translated, paraphrased, reduced, expanded, and otherwise manipulated--without losing its basic shape or structure. He doesn't use this term, but we might call that third aspect "malleability." He thus argues that, while myth as structure looks like language as structure, it's actually something different from language per se--he says it operates on a higher, or more complex level. Myth shares with language the following characteristics: It's made of units that are put together according to certain rules and these units form relations with each other, based on binary pairs or opposites, which provide the basis of the structure. Myth differs from language (as Sagan depicts it) because the basic units of myth are not phonemes (the smallest unit of speech that distinguishes one utterance from another, like a letter), morphemes (the smallest unit of relatively stable meaning that can't be subdivided, like a non-compound word), or sememes (the meaning expressed by a morpheme), or even signifiers and signifieds, but rather are what Levi-Strauss calls "mythemes." His process of analysis differs from Sagan's because Sagan was interested in studying the relations between signs (or signifiers) in the structure of language, whereas Levi-Strauss concentrates on sets of relations, rather than individual relations--or what he calls "bundles of relations." His example for this is a musical score, consisting of both treble and bass clefs. You can read the music diachronically, left to right; page by page, and you can read it synchronically, looking at the notes in the treble clef and their relation to the bass clef. The connection between the treble and bass clef notes--the "harmony" produced--is what Levi-Strauss calls a "bundle of relations." Basically, Levi-Strauss' method is this. Take a myth. Reduce it to its smallest component parts--its "mythemes." (Each mytheme is usually one event or position in the story, the narrative, of the myth). Then lay these mythemes out so that they can be read both diachronically and synchronically. The story, or narrative, of the myth exists on the diachronic (left-to-right) axis, in non-reversible time; the structure of the myth exists on the synchronic (up-and-down) axis, in reversible time. In his example of laying out the Oedipus myth this way, he begins to see, in the synchronic bundles of relations, certain patterns developing, which we might call "themes." One such theme is the idea of having some problem walking upright. Levi-Strauss then takes that theme and runs with it, seeing it as an expression of a tension between the idea of chthonic (literally, from the underground gods, but here meaning an origin from something else) and autochthonic (meaning indigenous or native; here, meaning self-generated) creation. He then sees that tension--or structural binary opposition--as present in myths from other cultures. This, to Levi-Strauss, is the significance of the myth: it presents certain structural relations, in the form of binary oppositions that are universal concerns in all cultures. This is the subjective part of Levi-Strauss' analysis. We might come up with different interpretations for what he sees in the bundles of relations. For example, we might notice that, in one column are different ideas about walking upright; we might interpret that as an anxiety about physical ability and disability, which is an expression about fitness for survival versus needing charity and kindness, and then read that tension (between selfishness and altruism) as the fundamental structure the myth is articulating. And here's where you can start to see how this structuralist reading might actually apply to literary interpretation, as we know it. Once you've found the mythemes, the constituent units, of a myth or story, and laid them out in Levi-Strauss' pattern, you can interpret them in an almost infinite number of ways. (And that, of course, raises the idea that what you choose as mythemes, or units, and how you lay them out might well vary from person to person, depending on how you read a story. And this raises the idea that structuralism maybe isn't so "objective" and "scientific" as it hopes to be, since its basic units aren't self-evident. But Levi-Strauss, like Saussure, doesn't admit that). After laying out this basic method, Levi-Strauss goes on to talk about perfecting his system to make it useful to anthropologists. We don't have to worry too much about this section (pp.815b-818b) because the details he discusses aren't as relevant to the analysis of literature as they are to anthropology. In these pages he talks about doing a structural analysis of all possible variations of a myth. This would be desirable because it would prove that all variants really do have the same structure, which goes back to Levi-Strauss' initial point that myth is a language, ` and that structural analysis can account for any version of a particular myth. To prove his point, he goes into a rather lengthy analysis of a Zuni myth; this uses the same methods as his analysis of the Oedipus myth; he also analyzes a Pueblo myth with a similar structure. He concludes that the structural method of myth analysis brings order out of chaos, as it provides a means to account for widespread variations on a basic myth structure, and it "enables us to perceive some basic logical processes which are at the root of mythical thought." This is important to Levi-Strauss because he wants to make the study of myth logical and "scientific" in all its aspects, and not to have to rely on any subjective interpretive factors. Levi-Strauss then talks about the permutations of the myth structures he's just analyzed as algebraic formulae. Don't worry if you don't get this part--it's not important to the main idea. Levi-Strauss puts this in to insist on the scientific/logical nature of his method: if you can express it in purely mathematical terms, it must be right, and universal, and objective. However, the layers, or "slates," aren't identical, even though they repeat key elements in the structure. Because of this, the myth "grows spiralwise," meaning the story it tells unfolds as the myth goes on. In other words, the myth "grows" as it is told. This brings to mind the gender myth depicted by American television of the 1950s. The gender conceptions were, if not dictated by, then surly depicted by TV shows during the Eisenhower years, the telling of which not only perpetuated gender bias, but in fact, caused it to grow to a point where, rather than art imitating life, life imitated art, creating a "spiralwise" situation where "The American Dream" myth had enmeshed within it particular gender biases. Levi-Strauss points out that this growth is continuous, while the structure of the myth, which doesn't grow, is discontinuous. This is a version of the synchronic-diachronic split mentioned earlier, and of the langue-parole distinction. Levi-Strauss compares this aspect of myth, that it both grows and remains static, to molecules (again enhancing the "scientific" nature of his method). He also says that myths function in cultures to "provide a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction." Such a contradiction might consist of believing in two precisely opposite things, such as chthonous and autochthonous origins, or selfishness and altruism. The important thing for Levi-Strauss is that every culture has these contradictions, because every culture organizes knowledge into binary opposite pairs of things, and that these contradictions have to be reconciled logically (and again, he wants everything to be explainable through logic and "science). This is echoed in his third point that the "logic" of myth is just as rigorous and "logical" as the logic of science. It's not that science is somehow smarter or more evolved than myth, but rather that the two modes of understanding and interpreting the world share the same basic structure (that of logic) applied to different things (86). One might critique this view of Levi-Strauss' by pointing out that his own explanations favor science over "myth," as he insists that his method of myth analysis is scientific, and therefore better than other methods. But that's a deconstructive reading, and we'll get to that when we look again at Derrida. Remember, Levi-Strauss as a structuralist saw the basic structures of myth (and hence of all aspects of culture) as binary oppositions, pairs of ideas that gave each other value: light/dark (light has value or meaning because it's not darkness, and vice versa), male/female, culture/nature, etc. In looking at the nature/culture dichotomy, Levi-Strauss defines "natural" as that which is universal and "cultural" as that which is dictated by the norms of a particular social organization. The rule of binary opposites is that they have to be opposites, so nature/culture, or universal/specific, have to always be absolutely separate. And here Levi-Strauss discovers what Derrida calls a "scandal"--an element of social organization that belongs to BOTH categories. The prohibition against incest is universal--every culture has one. But, it's also specific--every culture works out the laws of incest prohibition in its own way. So how can something be both universal and particular, both nature and culture? These things are good, according to deconstructionists, because they deconstruct a structure. If the stability of a structure depends on these binary oppositions, if you shake those oppositions and make them unstable, you shake up the whole structure. Or, in Derrida's terms, you put the elements into "play." Once you deconstruct a system by pointing out its inconsistencies, by showing where there is play in the system, Derrida says you have two choices. One is that you can throw out the whole structure as no good. Usually then you try to build another structure with no inconsistencies, no play. But of course, according to Derrida, that's impossible--that's just like substituting one center for another and not seeing that the center (or transcendental signified) is just a concept, which has "play" like any other, and not a fixed and stable "truth." The other option, which is Levi-Strauss's choice, is to keep using the structure, but to recognize it's flawed. In Derrida's terms, this means to stop attributing "truth value" to a structure or system, but rather to see that system as a system, as a construct, as something built around a central idea that holds the whole thing in place, even though that central idea (like the idea of binary opposites) is flawed or even an illusion. Derrida and Levi-Strauss call this latter method "bricolage," and the person that does it a "bricoleur." This is somebody who doesn't care about the purity or stability of the system s/he uses, but rather uses what's there to get a particular job done. In philosophical terms, I might want to talk about a belief system, so I refer to God because it's a useful illustration of something that a lot of people believe in; I don't assume that "god" refers to an actual being, or even to a coherent system of beliefs that situate "god" at the center and that then provide a stable code of interpretation or behavior. You might also think of tinker toys. Even though I may not have a complete set, and some of the parts are broken or don't fit together any more, I don't throw the whole set out and buy a new one (or a set of Legos); I keep playing with the tinker toys, and I can even incorporate things that aren't from the original tinker toy set (such as legos, or alphabet blocks, or soup cans) to make what I want to make. That is bricolage. Bricolage doesn't worry about the coherence of the words or ideas it uses. For example, you are a bricoleur if you talk about penis envy or the Oedipus complex and you don't know anything about psychoanalysis; you use the terms without having to acknowledge that the whole system of thought that produced these terms and ideas, i.e. Freudian psychoanalysis, is valid and "true." In fact, you don't care if psychoanalysis is true or not (since at heart you don't really believe in "truth" as an absolute, but only as something that emerges from a coherent system as a kind of illusion) as long as the terms and ideas are useful to you. Bricolage is mythopoetic, not rational; it's more like play than like system. It produces a new way to talk about, and think about, systems without falling into trap of building a new system out of the ruins of an old one (88). It provides a way to think without establishing a new center. Derrida reads Levi-Strauss' discussion of myth in The Raw and the Cooked as a kind of bricolage (92). Derrida, like Lacan, and like the Anglo and French feminists, think all this abstract stuff is worth studying, not for some intrinsic "academic" value of its own, but because these philosophical systems determine the conditions, the terms and premises and concepts, on which our daily lives as individuals, and our social institutions, are based. These systems are not so abstract, not so academic, as we once thought--for instance, Rousseau's philosophy (and Plato's, for that matter, and the entire platonic tradition) make possible the concept of individual rights and freedom--and those abstract ideas started revolutions, here and in France, and helped construct the democratic society we now live in every day. My point here is that these ideas that seem so abstract, such as conceptions of signifying systems as structure, or gender as linguistic system, are ways of investigating the fundamental assumptions which form the basis for how we make decisions, how we understand ourselves, how we act (and are acted on) every day, in the real world. A literary text, like a philosophical text, and like TV and film, helps produce me as a subject, gives me the vocabulary and the ideas with which I understand myself, my world, my social relations--in fact, cultural texts supply all the cultural categories that make my individual thoughts possible. I can't think of anything that's not already somewhere in my culture's repertoire of possibilities (one can't think outside of one's own cultural constructs--another version of Derrida's pronouncement that we have no destructive philosophical premises that are outside that which they hope to destroy). So, what I call "politics" is the understanding of how cultural texts--be they literary, philosophical, or physical (in the sense that gender codes are "texts" written on our bodies and in our psyches)--shape our everyday lives. And an understanding of how reading texts, and writing texts, and interpreting texts, can be a means of changing (or reaffirming) the ways in which we understand our world and make decisions about our lives. Politics, in this form, is an inherent and inescapable aspect of every branch of academic study--one can choose either to be conscious and articulate about the "politics" of one's discipline, i.e. how the ideas and concepts and objects of study of one's discipline do shape the categories through which we understand the real world, or one can choose to remain ignorant of that dimension, or not to concern oneself with that--in which case study will remain "academic," abstract, in the ivory tower. In curriculum development however, we either consider these issues in the academic curricula, or perpetuate the "nostalgic" historical stereotype. What this paper is leading to is the idea that we talk so much about gender, feminism, and politics because ultimately we think we're talking, not about abstractions, anger, or revolution, but about the ways we are able to think about our own lives, how we understand and make sense of the world around us and what happens to us. Politics is about change, but first it's about seeing our ideological relations, or the ways we represent (and therefore comprehend) our relations to the material world and to material practices have a "political" dimension, just as feminist theory does. This is sometimes called 'linguistic feminism,' and the big names here are Kristeva and Cixous, the next two French feminists whose theory we will investigate. "These days, who still has a soul?" asks Julia Kristeva in this psychoanalytic exploration. Kristeva reveals a new kind of patient, symptomatic of an age of political upheaval, mass-mediated culture, and the dramatic overhaul of familial and sexual mores. She poses a troubling question: Is the psychic space that we have traditionally known disappearing? Kristeva finds that the psychoanalytic models of Freud need to be reread in light of this new patient, a product of a crisis of values resulting from a loss of ideology and a deterioration of belief. Each patient, she contends, suffers from a unique malady that must be targeted. To better afford us an understanding of Kristiva's psychoanalytic model, we need to review a few of Freud's basic tenements. When Freud looks at civilization (which he does in Civilization and its Discontents), he sees two fundamental principles at work, which he calls the "pleasure principle" and the "reality principle." The pleasure principle tells us to do whatever feels good; the reality principle tells us to subordinate pleasure to what needs to be done, to work. Subordinating the pleasure principle to the reality principle is done through a psychological process Freud calls SUBLIMATION, where you take desires that can't be fulfilled, or shouldn't be fulfilled, and turn their energy into something useful and productive. A typical Freudian example of this would focus on sex. Sex is pleasurable; the desire for sexual pleasure, according to Freud, is one of the oldest and most basic urges that all humans feel. (The desire for sexual pleasure begins in early infancy, according to Freud. We'll get to that in a bit). But humans can't just have sex all the time. If we did, we'd never get any work done. So we have to sublimate most of our desires for sexual pleasure, and turn that sexual energy into something else--into writing a paper, for example, or into playing sports. Freud says that, without the sublimation of our sexual desires into more productive realms, there would be no civilization. The pleasure principle makes us want things that feel good, while the reality principle tells us to channel the energy elsewhere. But the desire for pleasure doesn't disappear, even when it's sublimated to work. The desires that can't be fulfilled are packed, or REPRESSED, into a particular place in the mind, which Freud labels the UNCONSCIOUS. Because it contains repressed desires, things that our conscious mind isn't supposed to want, and isn't supposed to know about, the unconscious is by definition inaccessible to the conscious mind--you can't know what's in your unconscious by thinking about it directly. However, there are some indirect routes into the contents of the unconscious. The first, and perhaps most familiar, is dreams. According to Freud (in his book The Interpretation of Dreams), dreams are symbolic fulfillment of wishes that can't be fulfilled because they've been repressed. Often these wishes can't even be expressed directly in consciousness, because they are forbidden, so they come out in dreams--but in strange ways, in ways that often hide or disguise the true wish behind the dream. Dreams use two main mechanisms to disguise forbidden wishes: CONDENSATION and DISPLACEMENT. Condensation is when a whole set of images is packed into a single image or statement, when a complex meaning is condensed into a simpler one. Condensation corresponds to METAPHOR in language, where one thing is condensed into another ("love is a rose, and you'd better not pick it"--this metaphor condenses all the qualities of a rose, including smell and thorns, into a single image). Displacement is where the meaning of one image or symbol gets pushed onto something associated with it, which then displaces the original image. Displacement corresponds to the mechanism of METONYMY in language, where one thing is replaced by something corresponding to it. (An example of metonymy is when you evoke an image of a whole thing by naming a part of it--when you say "the crown" when you mean the king or royalty, for example, or you say "twenty sails" when you mean twenty ships. You displace the idea of the whole thing onto a part associated with that thing). Another way into the unconscious besides dreams is what Freud calls PARAPRAXES, or slips of the tongue; he discusses these in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Such mistakes, including errors in speech, reading, and writing, are not coincidences or accidents, Freud says. Rather, they reveal something that has been repressed into the unconscious. A third way into the unconscious is jokes, which Freud says are always indicative of repressed wishes. He discusses this route to the unconscious in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. You can probably tell from these three routes into the unconscious--dreams, parapraxes, and jokes--that psychoanalysis asks us to pay a lot of attention to LANGUAGE, in puns, slips of the tongue, displacements and condensations, etc. This suggests how psychoanalysis is directly related to the societal constructed roles, since both kinds of analysis focus on close readings of language Whatever route is taken into the unconscious, what you find there, according to Freud, is almost always about sex. The contents of the unconscious consist primarily of sexual desires that have been repressed. Freud says that sexual desires are instinctual, and that they appear in the most fundamental acts in the process of nurturing, like in a mother nursing an infant. The instincts for food, warmth, and comfort, which have survival value for an infant, also produce pleasure, which Freud defines specifically as sexual pleasure. He says our first experiences of our bodies are organized through how we experience sexual pleasure; he divides the infant's experience of its body into certain EROTOGENIC ZONES. The first erotogenic zone is the mouth, as the baby feels sexual pleasure in its mouth while nursing. Because the act of sucking is pleasurable (and, for Freud, ALL pleasure is sexual pleasure), the baby forms a bond with the mother that goes beyond the satisfaction of the baby's hunger. That bond Freud calls LIBIDINAL, since it involves the baby's LIBIDO, the drive for sexual pleasure. Freud describes the various erotogenic zones in the second of his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality These zones are the ORAL, the ANAL, and the PHALLIC, and they correspond to three major stages of childhood development. They take place roughly between the ages of 2 to 5, though Freud was often revising his estimate of the ages when these stages occurred; later psychoanalysts argue that the oral stage begins soon after birth, with the first experience of nursing, and that the phallic stage ends somewhere between ages 3 to 5. The exact ages at which an infant goes through these stages are less important, in understanding psychoanalysis as theory, than what those stages represent. The oral stage is associated with incorporation, with taking things in, with knowing no boundaries between self and other, inside and outside. The anal stage (which Freud says has a lot to do with toilet training) is associated with expelling things, with learning boundaries between inside and outside, and with aggression and anger. The phallic stage--and Freud argues that "phallic" refers to both penis and clitoris, and is common to both boys and girls--leads a child toward genital masturbation, and hence to the gateway of adult sexuality. It's important to note that the child Freud is describing in these essays is POLYMORPHOUSLY PERVERSE, a term Freud uses to describe a being whose sexual or libidinal drives are relatively unorganized, and are directed at every object that might provide pleasure. The child experiences an erotic, or erotogenic, pleasure any time one of the erotogenic zones--oral, anal, or phallic--is stimulated; these pleasures persist into adult life. In the polymorphously perverse phase of development (which includes the oral, anal, and phallic stages), the infant or child is not a stable or unified subject confronting and desiring a particular object, but a complex shifting field of force, of desire, in which the subject, or child, is caught up. In other words, the child doesn't yet have a central identity or self, no sense of "I"; rather, the child is a mass of seething uncontrolled desires, which pull and push him or her in any direction, toward any object that might provide sexual pleasure. The polymorphously perverse child is pleasure seeking. It is not yet under the sway of the reality principle, and because it doesn't have to repress any of its desires, it has no unconscious. Without an unconscious, or repression, or the reality principle (which is associated with what Freud calls the SUPEREGO), the child has no GENDER. (Freud defines all libidinal drives as masculine, however. More on that later). Because this desiring child will go after anything that might provide pleasure, and because its first experiences of pleasure have come through its contact with its mother, the child is INCESTUOUS, desiring the pleasure that comes from contact with its mother's body. The mother's body becomes pleasurable through oral contact, in nursing, through the mother's making the child aware of its anal region, in toilet training, and through the mother's making the child aware of the pleasure in its genitals, usually through bathing. Polymorphous perversity is the earliest stage of child sexual development, according to Freud; it may last till age 5 or 6. Then the child enters into the LATENCY period, where the instinctual drives and libidinal explorations of the polymorphously perverse phase are put on hold; the child doesn't think about, or go after, sexual pleasure any more. The search for sexual pleasure is revived at PUBERTY, the third--and final--stage in sexual development, according to Freud. At puberty, the instinctual urges from infancy take on "adult" characteristics, and get directed toward "normal" aims. At puberty, sexual drives turn from being AUTOEROTIC (i.e. masturbatory or directed at one's own body as source of pleasure) to being directed at a new OBJECT, another person; these sexual drives also acquire a new AIM, which is not just stimulation but orgasm. If all works well, at puberty all the polymorphously perverse drives of infancy get channeled into reproductive heterosexual intercourse, and all the erotic feeling generated in the erotogenic zones gets subordinated to the genital zone alone. (The old erotogenic zones become places to provide fore-pleasure, which leads up to reproductive heterosexual intercourse--which Freud identifies as the only normal adult form of sexual pleasure). The project of psychoanalysis in general is to chart how this polymorphously perverse incestuous desiring animal turns into a self, or subject, with a firm sense of differentiated gender (masculine or feminine), with sexual or libidinal desires channeled into proper forms (defined as non-incestuous reproductive heterosexuality), and subordinated to the reality principle so that this being can get some work done and not just have sex all the time. The project of psychoanalytic theory is to describe how the gendered and sexual subject is formed. The project of Freud's psychoanalytic practice (and those who followed him) was to cure those who had gone astray in this process, those who had not correctly developed this firm sense of gender, sexuality, and repression of libidinal drives. It is worth noting, however, that Freud wasn't particularly interested in curing what he called "perversions," i.e. sexual behaviors that don't fit into the non-incestuous reproductive heterosexual model. He addresses the question of where "perversions" come from in the first essay in Three Essays. Freud is more interested in the problem of NEUROSIS, which he defines as the negative version of perversion. Perversions might be thought of as libidinal drives that may be socially inappropriate (or even illegal), but which get expressed and acted on; neuroses, by contrast, are libidinal drives that get repressed into the unconscious, but which are so powerful that the unconscious has to spend a lot of energy to keep these drives from coming back into consciousness. The effort required to keep such ideas or drives repressed can cause HYSTERIA, PARANOIA, OBSESSION-COMPULSION, and other neurotic disorders. The main vehicle for the construction of properly gendered and sexual subjects is the OEDIPUS COMPLEX, and since Feminism, particularly French feminism utilizes these constructs a great deal, without, however having to embrace them as "truth"(remember Dieddra), we must review the basic principles. Freud doesn't discuss the Oedipus Complex in his Three Essays; he does lay out in these essays some of the basic ideas that would eventually be explained through the Oedipus Complex. The Oedipus Complex is what ends the phallic phase, and the polymorphous perverse phase in general, and forces the child into the latency phase. Freud hints at the foundations of the Oedipus Complex when he talks about castration and penis envy, and about the infantile idea that both males and females have penises. As Freud describes it, going through the Oedipus Complex as a developmental stage in childhood turns us from incestuous sexual desire to exogamous (outside the family) sexual desire, hence from a state of nature to one of culture or civilization. The Oedipus complex explains how desires get repressed, how these repressed desires form the unconscious, how girls and boys learn to desire objects outside of their families, how each sex learns to desire someone of the opposite sex, and how the SUPEREGO--the reality principle, or what we call "conscience"--gets formed. To understand the operations of the Oedipus Complex, we have to backtrack a bit, and look more closely at what Freud says in "The Differentiation Between Men and Women," which is Section Four of Essay III, "Transformations of Puberty," in Three Essays In this section, Freud defines what is "masculine" as what is active; what is passive is likewise defined as "feminine." Both sexes are "masculine" in regards to infantile sexuality, especially masturbation. "So far as the autoerotic and masturbatory manifestations of sexuality are concerned, we might lay it down that the sexuality of little girls is of a wholly masculine character. Indeed, if we were able to give a more definite connotation to the concepts of 'masculine' and 'feminine,' it would even be possible to maintain that libido is invariably and necessarily of a masculine nature, whether it occurs in men or in women, and irrespective of whether its object is a man or a woman." (p.85) Pay close attention to the upcoming shift in sexuality, as it is very important to feminist's theory. According to Freud, the masculine part of girl is the clitoris, which corresponds to the penis in boys. (In fact, Freud calls the clitoris a miniature penis). With puberty, girls experience a great wave of repression of clitoridal sexuality (masturbation), accompanied by feelings of disgust and shame at the idea of masturbation, and sex in general. This repression of what Freud calls a "masculine" sexuality is necessary for girls to become feminine (i.e. passive). Boys, meanwhile, at puberty experience a great increase in masculine libido, rather than a repression of it. Freud also says that the more girls repress their clitoral feelings, the more excited boys get, as they desire more and more the girls who offer less and less sexual access. In adult sexuality, clitoridal stimulation is part of forepleasure, leading to correct vaginal stimulation/excitation. As an end in itself, clitoridal stimulation is considered infantile and neurotic, in Freudian theory. Thus the girl, or woman, at puberty has the task of switching primary erotogenic zones, from the clitoris which was the focus of her pleasure in the phallic stage, to the vagina, which is to become the focus of her pleasure in adult heterosexual reproductive intercourse, in order to become a "normal" adult. The boy, or man, meanwhile, gets to stick with his phallic zone, and focus his adult sexuality, like his infantile sexuality, on the penis. "The fact that women change their leading erotogenic zone in this way, together with the wave of repression in puberty, which, as it were, puts aside their childish masculinity, are the chief determinants of the greater proneness of women to neurosis and especially to hysteria. These determinants, therefore, are intimately related to the essence of femininity" (p. 87). In addition to having to shift erotogenic zones in order to reach the proper adult form of sexuality, Freud says, women also have to shift objects. Both the boy and the girl take their mother as their first love object (because their experience of the mother's body is associated for them with the first experiences of pleasure); in the transformation from polymorphously perverse infant to sexually proper adult, the boy keeps the female body as his love object--he just switches from mother's body to the bodies of other women, those unrelated to him. The girl, however, whose primary erotic attachment was also to the mother's body, has to shift her erotic feelings to a male body, in order to achieve normal adult non-incestuous heterosexuality. This double-shifting required of girls--from clitoris to vagina, and from a female body as erotic object to a male body--creates the potential for a lot of neurosis. And that's part of Freud's overall view of femininity--that women (those who are "properly" women, i.e. adult non-incestuous reproductive heterosexual women) are pretty neurotic. At some point when the infant is negotiating the three erotogenic zones, usually in the phallic phase (a phase that both girls and boys are in, since girls' focus on the clitoris is defined by Freud as "phallic"), children notice the anatomical distinction between the sexes, or, in Freud's terms, that boys have penises and girls do not. (Previously, according to Freud, each sex thought that the other had the same equipment it did). The boy's reaction to seeing the girl's lack of a penis is first to disavow this new knowledge, and insist that she has one. Eventually, however, he comes to realize that the girl hasn't got one; he sees this as a lack or absence, and decides that her penis had been cut off. At this point, in the phallic phase, the boy has discovered phallic masturbation, and according to Freud, he wants to direct his phallic activity toward his mother, whom he desires/loves, with "libidinal cathexis." Because of this sexual love for his mother, the boy wants to get rid of his father as his rival for his mother's love--more specifically, he wants to kill his father so he can "marry," i.e. have sole sexual possession, of his mother. This is the Oedipus Complex in boys--the desire to kill the father so that he can fulfill his libidinal desire for the mother. Having developed these feelings of sexual desire for his mother and anger/aggression towards his father, the boy perceives the "fact" of the girl's castration, and he develops CASTRATION ANXIETY--the fear that his father, angry at the boy's desire to kill him, will cut off his penis in revenge. He enters into the CASTRATION COMPLEX, which forces him, in fear of his father and in fear of losing his penis, to repress his libidinal desire for his mother. This ends the Oedipus Complex, and creates the unconscious. The first form of repressed desire, which makes this space/place where unfulfillable and inexpressible wishes go, is the repressed desire for the mother. The desire for the mother goes into the unconscious; the fear of the father creates the SUPEREGO, which will be the place where the voices of authority and conscience reside. All subsequent prohibitions on behavior (whether from parents, teachers, laws, police, religious authorities, etc.) will join this initial prohibition in the superego--that's where the boy's sense of morality will come from. Hence the abandonment of incestuous desires (under threat of castration) form the basis of instilling the Reality principle and subduing the pleasure principle. At the instigation of the superego, inexpressible desires/pleasures will be repressed into the unconscious, and emerge in other forms--as sublimations, as neuroses, as "reaction formations," etc. Freud thus charts the human mind as containing three basic areas, or functions, which emerge as a result of the Oedipus Complex: the unconscious, the conscious, and the superego. After this, the path is pretty clear for the boy. He identifies with his father and with his father's prohibition about his mother, and understands that if he's good, he'll get a woman of his own someday; hence he only has to wait to fulfill his libidinal (heterosexual) urges. For the girl, the trajectory is much more complicated, and involves a lot of double shifting, as we've noted--from clitoris to vagina, from mother's body to a male body. And here Freud ties himself up in knots trying to explain how girls do this. (The difficulties Freud had in explaining the female route to adult non-incestuous reproductive heterosexuality should have told him that his model, based on what boys experience, was flawed but it didn't. Psychoanalysis as both theory and method has suffered ever since from these sexist roots). First of all, the girl notices that boys have penises and that girls don't. Freud says that girls instantly recognize penises as the superior counterpart of the clitoris, and fall victim to PENIS ENVY. "She has seen it and knows that she is without it and wants to have it." From that point, the girl can go in a couple of directions. She can deny that she has no penis, and persist in thinking she does--this can lead to psychosis in adult life. She may fixate on the idea of someday getting a penis, by whatever means possible. Or she can take the "normal" route, which is to accept "the fact of her castration." If she accepts this "fact," she develops a sense of inferiority to the male; she decides her lack of a penis is punishment for some wrongdoing (probably masturbation); she gets furious with her mother for not giving her a penis, and for not having one herself; she feels contempt for the entire female sex which is without such an important organ. It is here that the idea of internalized colonization fits so nicely in theories of feminism. Also, she feels the clitoris to be so inferior that she gives up masturbation entirely; F. says clitoridal masturbation is entirely masculine and her recognition of her lack of a penis makes her repudiate all her masculine activities (and to feel greater disgust at idea of masturbation). An important consequence of her penis envy and consequent acceptance of the "fact" of her castration (aside from the internalized inferiority Freud insists on) is a loosening of the bond with her mother. On discovering that her mother doesn't have a penis, and didn't give her one, the girl takes the libidinal desire she (like the boy) felt for her mother and turns it into anger and hatred for not giving her a penis. This moves her toward the necessary shift to taking her father as libidinal object. The girl then decides that, if she can't have a penis, she'll have a baby instead, and takes her father as her love object with the express purpose of having a child by him; her mother then becomes solely the object of jealousy and rivalry. At this point, Freud announces, "The girl has turned into a little woman". This is the Oedipus Complex for girls (in Freud's early works, called the Electra Complex; in later works, called the feminine or negative Oedipus Complex). It starts when the girl begins to desire her father. Hence in girls the castration complex comes first--they first realize they ARE castrated, then they enter into an oedipal relation, desiring to kill the mother and marry the father and have his baby. (For boys, remember, it was the other way around--the castration complex ENDS the Oedipus Complex). With the girl, castration has been carried out, according to Freud, whereas with the boy, it was only threatened. So, If for boys the castration complex ends the Oedipus Complex, and creates the unconscious and the superego, what happens with girls, whose castration complex starts the oedipal relation? Freud is fuzzy on this; he says that oedipal cathexis in girls may be repressed (but he doesn't say how) or abandoned (ditto) or just fade away--or it may persist. The result is that women never really form a strong superego, because they don't have a strong motive to do so. They've already been castrated, so what have they got to lose? The consequence of having a weaker or less-formed superego, according to Freud, is that women are not as moral or just as men (they go by their feelings and not their sense of justice). Freud is also not quite sure how women form their unconscious, since they don't have the castration anxiety as the motive to repress their incestuous wishes; some sort of repression happens, but Freud isn't entirely clear on how it happens. This means that women's unconscious may be less well anchored than men's, that their unconscious wishes are less firmly repressed, and more likely to rise up into consciousness. For Freud, this too explains why women aren't as suitable as men are to be the rulers and shapers of civilization. Freud tries, in subsequent essays, such as "Femininity" and "Female Sexuality," to explain further the female movement through the Oedipus Complex. He never gets very far. He ends up saying that women stay in the Oedipus Complex forever (since nothing ends it for them), and that they always pretty much desire their fathers; somehow they learn, however, to become non-incestuous, and they usually marry men who are like their fathers. Feminist critics, as you might imagine, have a lot to say about Freud's ideas of gender. To him, women were always kind of incomprehensible; he referred to women, finally, as "the Dark Continent," although his patients were almost exclusively women. Freud sets up a system where certain identifications are primary in forming a (gendered) self, and others are secondary; the primary identifications have more power to shape a self than the secondary ones, and are subordinated/subsumed within the primary ones. Hence relations with the mother are primary (for both sexes), while relations with siblings, e.g., are secondary, not as important in the narrative of how the gendered self is formed. The primary/secondary identifications are temporal: the primary ones happen first, the secondary is added on. Without that temporal placement (first this happens, then this happens), you couldn't tell which identifications were more important than others--which were substance and which were attributes. If we could redesign the Oedipal narrative so it wasn't linear/temporal, we'd have all the identifications going on at once, or without ranking--so that all would be equally important, all would be attributes without one being substance (or all would be copies without one being original). In her La Cause Des Femmes, Gisele Halimi evaluates Freud's basic premise on parentage. She begins, "Je ceois que ma mere a mis un certain acharnement, peut-etre inconscient, a maintenie ce clivage" (27) She maintains that parents usually perpetuate this Freudian "pedistale l'homme"(27). Freud sets up a system where certain identifications are primary in forming a (gendered) self, and others are secondary; the primary identifications have more power to shape a self than the secondary ones, and are subordinated/subsumed within the primary ones. Hence relations with the mother are primary (for both sexes), while relations with siblings, e.g., are secondary, not as important in the narrative of how the gendered self is formed. When we identify with someone else, we create an internal image of that person, or, more precisely, who we want that person to be, and then we identify with that internalized and idealized image. Our own identity, then, isn't modeled on actual others but on our image of their image, on what we want the other to be, rather than what the other really is. Halimi wants to understand gendered subjectivity "as a history of identifications, parts of which can be brought into play in given contexts and which, precisely because they encode the contingencies of personal history, do not always point back to an internal coherence of any kind" (33). She then presents the idea that the concept of the unconscious makes any idea of coherence or unity suspect--whether we're talking about a slip of the tongue, or any narrative/story--including the "grand narrative" of psychoanalysis. Freud's story works hard to be unitary and coherent, to tell a connected story about how gender is formed. It does so by repressing certain elements, excluding them from the story. One of the ways it achieves this is to repress or exclude ideas of simultaneity and multiplicity in gender and sexual identity. According to Freud, you either identify with a sex OR you desire it; only those two relations are possible. Thus it's not possible to desire the sex you identify with--if you are a man desiring another man, for instance, Freud would say that's because you REALLY identify with women. Gender, then, as the identification with one sex, or one object (like the mother) is a fantasy, a set of internalized images, and not a set of properties governed by the body and its organ configuration. Rather, gender is a set of signs internalized, psychically imposed on the body and on one's psychic sense of identity. Gender, Halimi concludes, is thus not a primary category, but an attribute, a set of secondary narrative effects. Gender is thus a fantasy enacted by "corporeal styles that constitute bodily significations." In other words, gender is an act, a performance, a set of manipulated codes, costumes, rather than a core aspect of essential identity. Her main metaphor for this is "drag," i.e. dressing like a person of the "opposite sex." All gender is a form of "drag," according to Halimi; there is no "real" core gender to refer to. The primary/secondary identifications are temporal: the primary ones happen first, the secondary is added on. Without that temporal placement (first this happens, then this happens), you couldn't tell which identifications were more important than others--which were substance and which were attributes. If we could redesign the Oedipal narrative so it wasn't linear/temporal, we'd have all the identifications going on at once, or without ranking--so that all would be equally important, all would be attributes without one being substance (or all would be copies without one being original). Halimi wants to understand gendered subjectivity "as a history of identifications, parts of which can be brought into play in given contexts and which, precisely because they encode the contingencies of personal history, do not always point back to an internal coherence of any kind" (131). She then presents the idea that the concept of the unconscious makes any idea of coherence or unity suspect--whether we're talking about a slip of the tongue, or any narrative/story--including the "grand narrative" of psychoanalysis. Freud's story works hard to be unitary and coherent, to tell a connected story about how gender is formed. It does so by repressing certain elements, excluding them from the story. One of the ways it achieves this is to repress or exclude ideas of simultaneity and multiplicity in gender and sexual identity. According to Freud, you either identify with a sex OR you desire it; only those two relations are possible. Thus it's not possible to desire the sex you identify with--if you are a man desiring another man, for instance, Freud would say that's because you REALLY identify with women. JULIA KRISTEVA, a practicing psychoanalyst and professor at the Universite de Paris VII, postulates that these Freudian problems give us tools for self-idealization. She is the author of many highly acclaimed books published in English by Columbia University Press, most recently the novel Possessions and Julia Kristeva Interviews. This particular branch of literary theory depends heavily on gender essentialism, or the idea that there are certain characteristics which belong virtually exclusively to each gender. A lot of people object to this idea, but there is a way around it. Her theories offer the hope that these maladies harbor new creative potential and new hope for the soul--if we can comprehend their effect on the individual and collective experiences of our time. Kristeva, writing in "Stabat Mater," argues that the "virginal maternal" is an effective way of dealing with "feminine paranoia." The Virgin assumes her feminine denial of the other sex (of man) but overcomes him by setting up a third person: I do not conceive with you but with Him. The result is an immaculate conception (therefore with neither man nor sex), conception of a God with whose existence a woman has indeed something to do, on condition that she acknowledge being subjected to it. The Virgin assumes the paranoid lust for power by changing a woman into a Queen in heaven and a Mother of the earthly institutions (of the Church). But she succeeds in stifling that megalomania by putting it on its knees before the child-god. The Virgin obstructs the desire for murder or devoration by means of a strong oral cathexis (the breast), valorization of pain (the sob) and incitement to replace the sexed body with the ear of understanding. The Virgin assumes the paranoid fantasy of being excluded from time and death through the very flattering representation of Dormition or Assumption. The Virgin especially agrees with the repudiation of the other woman (which doubtless amounts basically to a repudiation of the woman's mother) by suggesting the image a Unique Woman: alone among women, alone among mothers, alone among humans since she is without sin. But the acknowledgement of a longing for uniqueness is immediately checked by the postulate according to which uniqueness is attained only through an exacerbated masochism: a concrete woman, worthy of the feminine ideal embodied by the Virgin as an inaccessible goal, could only be a nun, a martyr or, if she is married, one who leads a life that would remove her from the 'earthly' condition and dedicate her to the highest sublimation alien to her body... With all these basic postulations, let's get into the theory of feminism and why school systems must take a curricular approach to it. The first tenet of this theory is that language does not belong to women. Language is a male artifact, part of a male culture, and has been shaped to meet men's needs. Because of this, for a woman to have any kind of power, she had to become a man (need I say more than "George Sand?"). Men's language includes, but is not limited to, the ultimately cold and patriarchal complex of logic and reasoning which has so dominated Western discourse that for a woman to even be understood in literary theory, she has to write in that discourse community and therefore validate it. Men's language is the language of law, of authority, and it is a language that ignores emotion. Women's language, because of this, is mostly limited to nonrational utterances and evocations like laughter, screaming, grunts and moans. However, these theorists are attempting to forge a new tradition of women's writing, and so their writings can be a little hard to read, particularly if you are used to reading standard literary theory. How so? Well, Cixous and Kristeva both talk a great deal about penises, vaginas, orgasms and a whole lot of other things you generally don't expect to see in a literary theory. The idea, as I understand it, is to refute the patriarchal system, not by using logic, which would validate it, but by creating a powerful experience that cannot be explaining using patriarchal language. Such an existence would prove, by evocation, the inadequacy of male dominated discourse. Unfortunately, a lot of people read French Feminism rather dismissively, precisely because it refuses to use the traditional language of the discourse community within which it is writing. This brings us to Dr. Focault, the next major feminist theorists we must consider. Like Derrida, Michel Focault did not believe that there was a central meaning that held a word together, nor did he believe in absolute knowledge. Rather, meaning and knowledge existed, not in language, but in society, and are inextricably tied up with power relations. Focault discusses how ideology works, and how ideologies construct subjects. ----------------------------- Michel Focault is not a Freudian, a Marxist, a structuralist, a phenomenologist, a sociologist, or a historian, but his work draws on ideas and assumptions and methods from all of these areas or disciplines. Rather, think of Focault, like Derrida and like Freud, as the founder of his own "school" of thought. He is a poststructuralist thinker, with affinities to most all the other theorists we've read so far, but he is enough unlike them that we should think of him in a category all his own. Focault starts off this essay, "What is an Author?," by discussing criticisms of a previous book, The Order of Things In this book Focault had started an investigation into the conditions of possibility under which human beings become the objects of knowledge in certain disciplines (what we might call the "human sciences" or the "social sciences"). He was working to discover and explain the rules and laws of formation of systems of thought in the human sciences, which emerge in the nineteenth century. His main method for looking at these disciplines, and how they constitute the objects of their study, was through examining "discourses," or "discursive practices." For Focault, a "discourse" is a body of thought and writing that is united by having a common object of study, a common methodology, and/or a set of common terms and ideas; the idea of discourse thus allows Focault to talk about a wide variety of texts, from different countries and different historical periods and different disciplines and different genres. For example, the "discourse" on blindness would include writings by schools for the blind, writings by doctors who work with vision and blindness, novels with blind characters, and autobiographies of blind people, as well as writing about blindness from other disciplines. In The Order of Things, Focault discussed several naturalists, including Buffon, a French 18th century writer, and Charles Darwin, a British 19th century writer, as belonging to the same "discourse," or discursive family. Critics questioned this association, asking Focault how he could put two authors who were so different, in time and place, together in one grouping. Focault responds, in this essay, by asking why we are concerned with the idea of authors at all, rather than seeing "discourse" as the groupings of texts and ideas. Why, Focault asks, do we always want to trace ideas back to specific authors? Why do we insist that ideas or concepts, or even literary works, are the creations of a single individual? Focault makes a list (on p. 139a) of some questions about authorship, which he will not address directly. Rather, he wants to discuss the relationship between an author and a text, and the manner in which the text points to the author as a figure who is outside the text, and who precedes the text (and creates it). Eventually, Focault will talk about the author as a Derridean "center" of the text; the place, which originates the text yet, remains outside it. (Then, of course, he will "deconstruct" that center/author). But before he does that, Focault talks about Samuel Beckett (the modernist novelist and playwright), and particularly about a line from Beckett, "what matter who's speaking?" Focault sees this sentence as an expression of some of the major principles of contemporary writing, or what Focault calls ecriture. (This ecriture is related to the French feminist idea of "l'ecriture feminine," but Focault doesn't choose to give it a gender). One of the hallmarks of ecriture is the interplay of signifiers; language in this kind of writing is not about reference to a signified, but rather it's about the play among signifiers. The ecriture that Focault is discussing tends toward the monologic, rather than the dialogic, in Bakhtin's terms; it is writing that is self-referential, writing about writing, or about language itself, rather than writing for/about social communication. As such, this writing is always working against the grammatical rules and structures within which meaning (or sense) is made. Because of this, Focault concludes, such ecriture is not about "the exalted emotions related to the act of composition." Writing is not the vehicle for the author's expression of his/her emotions or ideas, since writing isn't meant to communicate from author to reader, but rather writing is the circulation of language itself, regardless of the individual existence of author or reader: "it is primarily concerned with creating an opening where the writing subject endlessly disappears" (p. 139b). Another major theme or principle of ecriture that Focault sees expressed in the Beckett quote is the idea of a connection between writing and death. Throughout most of Western cultural history, writing has been a means of staving off death, of becoming "immortal;" Focault points to the Greek epic, where the hero can die young because his epic feats have guaranteed his immortality, and also to a non-Western text, The Arabian Nights, where Scheherazade's storytelling night after night kept her from being killed. In modern times, however, writing (ecriture) reverses the equation; rather than guaranteeing immortality, or keeping death away, writing "kills" the author. Why? Focault says that a writer's particular individuality is canceled out by the text, by writing, because we now see "writer," or "author," as the function of language itself. In the humanist model, the categories of author, text, and reader seemed self-evident and separate: an author is someone who produces a text, which is then read by a reader; the author was the source and origin of some creative power, which was unique to him or her, and out of which s/he created something entirely new. In the poststructuralist view, however, relations between author, text, and reader are replaced by an understanding of the relations between language (as a structure) and subjects (positions we inhabit within the structure of language). Althusser showed us how we are interpolated as subjects into ideological structures, and we discussed how that applies to literature: as readers, each of us becomes an interpolated subject within one or more textual ideologies. Focault uses the same premises to conclude that "author," like "reader," is the name of a subject position within language, or, more specifically, within a text (or textual ideology). So why does Focault say the author is "dead"? It's his way of saying that the author is decentered, shown to be only a part of the structure, a subject position, and not the center. In the humanist view, remember, authors were the source and origin of texts (and perhaps of language itself, like Derrida's engineer), and were also thus beyond texts--hence authors were "centers." In declaring the author dead, Focault follows Nietzsche's declaration (at the end of the nineteenth century) that "God is dead," a statement which Derrida then reads as meaning that God is no longer the center of the system of philosophy which Nietzsche is rejecting. By declaring the death of the author, Focault is "deconstructing" the idea that the author is the origin of something original, and replacing it with the idea that the "author" is the product or function of writing, of the text. (Focault also borrows the idea of "the death of the author" from poststructuralist literary critic Roland Barthes; his essay "The Death of the Author" appears in a collection of Barthes' essays entitled Image-Music-Text.) An "author" only exists as the product of a text, or of writing. That is primarily what Focault's article explores. What an author produces, according to Focault, is a "work." The task of (humanist) criticism used to be to trace the ties between an author and the work s/he created, by reading the work as an illustration of the author's individual life history, of his or her particular concerns, thematics, etc. Focault says that, once we throw the idea of "author" as individual creator into question, what do we mean by "work"? Another way of putting this is to ask, once we have an author, does everything s/he wrote belong to the idea of her/his "work"? For example, think of that writing we discussed with Bakhtin: "Two pounds ground beef/seedless grapes/loaf bread." If we knew that this was written by T.S. Eliot, would it count as one of his "works"? Would it matter whether we thought it was a poem or a grocery list? Why or why not? Focault says that we need to have some sort of theory to explain or analyze questions about what counts as an author's "work." A related question is whether anonymous writings can be considered "works," even though they have no specific author. Focault then takes a bit of a digression (pp. 140b-141a) to discuss how ecriture, in emphasizing the play of signification over any fixed or stable meaning, doesn't really get rid of the idea of authorship completely, but rather makes authors "transcendental" rather than historically real. Don't worry about this part. Focault takes up the question of "author" as product of "work" again, asking how "the name of the author" serves a function within literary-social relations. The name of the author (not to be confused with Lacan's "Name-of-the-Father") is, first of all, a proper name, a signifier that designates a specific and discrete historical individual (just as your name designates you as a specific historical individual). But an "author's" name does more than that: when we say "Aristotle," or "Shakespeare," or even "Focault," we mean more than just the guy who lived--we also mean the thoughts he is attributed with, the mode of thinking, the objects of contemplation, the methodology, and/or the writings (or forms of discourse) associated with that name. The proper name of an author oscillates between two poles: between designation, which refers to the person, and description, which refers to the ideas, the work, associated with the name. Designation and description are not the same, isomorphous. The proper name, as a signifier, can have either the signified of the actual person (the designation) or the signified of the work/ideas. In each case, the relation between signifier and signified--between proper name and what it either designates or describes--is arbitrary and separable. For example: "Shakespeare" can refer to the guy who lived in Stratford-on-Avon in the seventeenth century, or it can refer to the numerous plays and poems linked under the name "Shakespeare." The idea of the separability of designation and description becomes clear when someone argues that "Shakespeare did not write the plays of Shakespeare"--meaning that the historical figure is not actually the guy responsible for the body of works called "the plays of Shakespeare." Such a sentence makes sense only if "Shakespeare" signifies two separate things. This shows that the author's name serves as a means of identification, not simply as an element of speech. The name "Shakespeare" groups together a number of texts and differentiates them from others: Shakespeare marks what is not G. Eliot and what is not T.S. Eliot, etc. The author's name, according to Focault, characterizes a particular manner of existence of discourse; the texts attributed to an author are given more status, more attention, and more cultural value than texts which have no author. We would read the grocery list we talked about last week differently if we knew T.S. Eliot wrote it. The author's name thus a remains at the contours of texts, Focault says, separating one from another, and characterizing their mode of existence. The name of the author is thus a variable, a signifier, which accompanies only certain texts to the exclusion of others. There are four features of texts or books, which have authors--or, in Focault's terms, texts that create the author function. 1. Such texts are objects of appropriation, forms of property. Speeches and books were assigned to real authors, Focault argues, only when the authors became subjected to punishments for what the speech or book said. When the writing/speech said something transgressive, something that broke rules, then systems of authority had to find some locus from which the transgressive speech came; the cops and courts had to find someone to punish. Focault's example is that of heresy: when heresy was uttered, there had to be a heretic behind the utterance, since you can't punish words or ideas, but only the people who "author" those words or ideas. From this idea of locating authorship in someone held responsible for writing or speech came also the idea of ownership of works, and the idea of copyright rules associated with ownership. 2. The "author function" is not a universal or constant feature of every text. Some texts don't require, or create, an "author:" myths, fairy tales, folk stories, legends, jokes, etc. It used to be that literary texts could be anonymous, whereas scientific texts had to be attached to a name, to an "author function," because the credibility of the scientific text came from the name of the author associated with it: Pliny says, Aristotle says, Hypocrites says, etc. In the 17th and 18th centuries, Focault says, this situation was reversed; scientific texts began to speak for themselves, to be objective, and thus to be judged on the basis of the arguments presented (and the reproducibility of results), and not on the authority of an individual author's name. Literary works, in this era, began to be evaluated on the basis of the notion of the author--hence the emergence of the idea of "Shakespeare" as "author function," not just as some guy who hung out in London theaters in the Elizabethan era. In contemporary society, we see this illustrated in the idea of an anonymous literary work, like Primary Colors, where the goal is to find out who REALLY wrote it--to be able to associate the text with an "author function." 3. The author function is not formed spontaneously, through some simple attribution of a discourse to an individual. Rather, it results from various cultural constructions, in which we choose certain attributes of an individual as "authorial" attributes, and dismiss others. Thus, in creating "Melville" as an author function, it is important to his status as "author" that he actually did go on a whaling voyage; it is irrelevant to his status as author that he worked in a bowling alley in Hawaii (although both are historically true). Because all of these theorists are coming from a Marxist perspective, using ideas and terms developed in Marxist theory, I want to talk a bit about some basic ideas of Marxist theory. Marxism is a set of theories, or a system of thought and analysis, developed by Karl Marx in the nineteenth century in response to the Western industrial revolution and the rise of industrial capitalism as the predominant economic mode. Like feminist theory, Marxist theory is directed at social change; Marxists want to analyze social relations in order to change them, in order to alter what they see are the gross injustices and inequalities created by capitalist economic relations. My capsule summary of the main ideas of Marxism, however, will focus on the theoretical aspects more than on how that theory has been and is applicable to projects for social change. As a theory, Marxism is pretty complicated. You can think of Marxism as being three types of theory in one: philosophy, history, and economics. First, Marxism is a philosophical movement; Marx's ideas about human nature, and about how we know and function in the world come from traditions articulated by Hegel, Feuerbach, Kant, and other German philosophers. All of these guys, including Marx, are interested in the relation between materialist and idealist philosophy. As a philosopher, Marx helps create and define a branch of philosophy called DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM. Materialism in general is the branch of Western philosophy from which science (Aristotelian or Newtonian) comes. Materialist philosophy is based on empiricism, on the direct observation of measurable or observable phenomena; materialist philosophy is interested in studying how the human mind, via the senses, perceives external reality, and particularly with the idea of how we know things "objectively," without the interference of emotions or preconceived ideas about things. Materialist philosophy often wants to ask how we know something is real, or, more specifically, how we know that what is real IS real, and not the product of our mental processes (which are subjective). The "dialectical" part of "dialectical materialism" comes from the Greek idea of "dialogue," which means to argue. Marx's view of the idea of "dialectic" comes from Hegel, who thought that no ideas, social formations, or practices were ever eternal or fixed, but were always in motion or flux (something like Derrida's "play"). Hegel said that this motion or flux or change happens in a certain pattern, which he called a "dialectic." Hegel says, change occurs as the result of a struggle between two opposed forces, which then get resolved into a third entity. Hegel's model of change looks like this: you start with a proposition or a position, which he calls a "thesis;" the thesis then stands in opposition to another position, which he calls the "antithesis" (and thus far it does work like our old friend the binary opposition). But then the struggle between thesis and antithesis is resolved into a third position, or set of ideas or practices, which Hegel calls the "synthesis." Then, of course, the synthesis eventually becomes a thesis, with an antithesis, and the whole process starts over. But that, says Hegel, is how change happens--by the continual struggle between thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. In addition to being a kind of philosophy, Marxism is also a way to understand history. In this sense, Marxism belongs to a kind of historicism called HISTORICAL MATERIALISM, which shows that history, or social change, occurs via human forces, and not because of God, destiny, or some unknown non-human force that shapes events. Historical materialism is "materialist" because it is interested in how humans have created material culture, i.e. tools, objects, the material things that we use to live our lives every day, and in how this material culture has formed the basis for historical change. The historical materialist view of history thus holds that the moving forces of social organizations--the forces that make change, that make "history"--are people and their tools, and the work that people do with these tools; the tools are often referred to as "instruments of production," or as "forces of production." Historical materialism also says that human labor (people and how they use their tools) always has a social character. People live in social groups, not in isolation, and they always organize their social groups in some way (having some form of "government," e.g.). What every social group organizes, according to the historical materialist perspective, is how people work with their tools, or, in other words, how human labor, and forces of production, operates. The organizations that shape how people use their tools (the forces of production) are called the "relations of production." The relations of production (how people relate to each other, and to their society as a whole, through their productive activity) and the forces of production (the tools, and methods for using tools, and the workers available to use these tools) together form what historical materialism calls a MODE OF PRODUCTION. As a historian, Marx identifies five basic historical developments or changes in the mode of production: the primitive community, the slave state, the feudal state, capitalism, and socialism. I won't go into detail about this history, but let me point out a couple of examples. In a slave state, some people are owned and some are the owners; the owned people are the ones that labor, and the owners reap the benefit of that labor. Within the slave "mode of production," the organization of labor and productivity governs virtually all facets of social organization, even those not directly related to labor, such as religion or even aesthetics. The Southern United States in the first half of the nineteenth century stand as a good example of Marx's idea of a slave state: it's easy to see how all aspects of southern culture, including religious beliefs and art, upheld and justified the slave system that was at the heart of the southern economy. Marx sees capitalism as a mode of production emerging from feudalism (which is how labor and life were organized during the medieval period in Europe). He focuses on capitalism as an unequal mode of production; one, which exploits workers, just as the slave state, exploited slaves. According to Marx, this inequality is a fundamental aspect of capitalism, and needs to be changed (through dialectical struggle). Eventually, Marx says, the internal tensions and contradictions of capitalism (which will create an endless series of theses and antitheses and syntheses) will eventually destroy capitalism, and capitalism will evolve into socialism. Socialism, for Marx, is the end result of all this economic evolution/history: socialism would be a utopian mode of production, and would then just remain forever (without evolving into something else). This would pretty much be the end of history, or change, as we have known it. Which leads us to a third dimension of Marxism. Marxism is an economic theory or doctrine, an analysis of how capitalism as an economic system operates. It's based on an analysis of how the forces and relations of production work. In a factory, for instance, a worker performs labor on raw materials, and thus transforms those raw materials into an object; in the process, the laborer adds something to the raw materials so that the object (raw material + labor) is worth more than the original raw material. What the laborer adds is called "surplus value," in Marxist theory. While the laborer is paid for the work he or she does, that payment is figured in terms of "reproduction", of what the laborer will need in order to come back the next day (i.e. food, rest, shelter, clothes, etc.), and not in terms of what value the laborer added to the raw material. The goal of capitalist production is to sell the object made, with its surplus value, for more than the cost of the raw materials and the reproduction of the laborer. This excess in value (in price) comes from the surplus value added by the laborer, but it is "owned" by the capitalist; the factory owner gets the profit from selling the object, and the laborer gets only the cost of his/her "reproduction" in the wages s/he earns. These relations of production, where the laborer does the work and the owner gets the profit from the surplus value created by the laborer, create two social classes, according to Marx: the proletariat, which consists of the workers who have to sell their labor power in order to survive, and the owners of the means of production, or capitalists. There is also a third class in the capitalist mode of production, a middle class, called the bourgeoisie, who do not sell their labor power directly, but who provide services (for the laborers and the capitalists)--merchants, doctors, teachers, etc. --and who identify themselves with the capitalists, and uphold their interests, rather than with the proletariat. For Marxists, history--or social change--thus occurs through the struggle (the dialectical struggle) between the two classes, the proletariat and the capitalists. (The bourgeoisie mostly get counted with the capitalists in terms of identification, even though the bourgeoisie don't own the means of production and don't get the profits created by surplus value). From these economic relations comes a crucially important concept in Marxist thought: the idea of ALIENATION. There are two aspects to the Marxist idea of alienation. The first is that labor, which produces surplus value, is alienated labor. The labor put into an object becomes part of the capitalist's profit, and thus no longer belongs to the laborer. In addition to alienating the laborer from his or her labor power, capitalism also forces the worker to become alienated from him or herself. When a worker has to sell her/his labor power, s/he becomes a COMMODITY, something to be sold in the marketplace like a thing; the worker who is a commodity is thus not fully human, in the philosophical sense, since s/he cannot exercise free will to determine her/his actions. (Yes, this part is coming from a humanist model, where people still have free will to govern their actions). The worker who is forced to exist as a commodity in the labor market is ALIENATED from her/his humanness; in selling one's labor, that labor becomes alienated, something separate from or other than the laborer, something divided from the person that produces it. The double alienation of the proletariat, and their exploitation by the capitalists, form the basic contradictions of capitalism which produce the dialectic (the struggle between workers and owners, labor and capital) which produces social change, or history, and which will eventually synthesize into socialism. From Marx's economic doctrines comes an analysis of how the capitalist system specifically functions; from historical materialism comes a model of how social organizations are structured, which is relevant to all cultures, whether capitalist or not. According to the Marxist view of culture, the economic relations--forces and relations of production, or modes of production--are the primary determining factor in all social relations: everything that happens in a society is in some way related to, and determined by, the mode of production, also called the ECONOMIC BASE (or just "base"). This idea, that the economic organization of a social group is primary and determinant, is a fundamental premise of Marxist thought. The economic base (the relations and forces of production) in any society generates other social formations, called the SUPERSTRUCTURE. The superstructure consists of all other kinds of social activities or systems, including politics, religion, philosophy, morality, art, and science (etc.). All of these aspects of a society are, in Marxist theory, determined by (i.e. shaped, formed, or created by) the economic base. Thus a central question for a lot of Marxist theory is how does the economic base determine superstructure? How, for instance, does the feudal mode of production produce or determine the religious beliefs and practices current during the medieval period? Another way of asking this question is to look at the relations between economic base and a particular aspect of superstructure, which Marxists name IDEOLOGY. Ideology, or ideologies, are the ideas that exist in a culture; there will typically be one or several kinds of religious ideologies, for example, and political ideologies, and aesthetic ideologies, which will articulate what, and how, people can think about religion, politics, and art, respectively. Ideology is how a society thinks about itself, the forms of social consciousness that exist at any particular moment; ideologies supply all the terms and assumptions and frameworks that individuals use to understand their culture, and ideologies supply all the things that people believe in, and then act on. For Marx, ideology, as part of the superstructure generated by an economic base, works to justify that base; the ideologies present in a capitalist society will explain, justify, and support the capitalist mode of production. Again, the example of slavery in nineteenth-century US culture is useful: the economic base of that society was slavery, and all productive labor and economic relations were structured by the master/slave relation; all of the superstructures, such as organized religion, local and national politics, and art (especially literature), worked to uphold slavery as a good economic system. Literature, then, is part of any culture's superstructure, from this perspective, and is determined (in both form and content) by the economic base. Literature also participates in the articulation of forms of cultural ideology--novels and poems (et al.) might justify or attack religious beliefs, political beliefs, or aesthetic ideas (to use just these three examples of ideological formations). Marxist literary critics and theorists are interested in asking a range of questions about how literature functions as a site for ideology, as part of the superstructure. First, they want to examine how the economic base of any culture (and particularly of capitalist cultures) influences or determine the form and/or content of literature, both in general terms and in specific works of literature. They also want to look at how literature functions in relation to other aspects of the superstructure, particularly other articulations of ideology. Does literature reflect the economic base? If so, how? Does literature reflect other ideologies? If so, how? Do literary works create their own ideologies? If so, how are these ideologies related back to the economic base? And, finally, Marxist critics, like feminist critics, want to investigate how literature can work as a force for social change, or as a reaffirmation (or "reification," to use Marxist terminology) of existing conditions. Is literature part of the dialectical struggle that will end capitalism and bring about socialism, or is literature part of the bourgeois justification of capitalism? Let me run through some of the ways Marxist critics have approached these questions about the social function of literature. We'll start by looking a little more closely at how ideology works, since literature is considered a subset of ideology. According to Frederic Engels, ideology functions as an illusion; ideologies give people ideas about how to understand themselves and their lives, and these ideas disguise or mask what's really going on. In Engels' explanation, ideologies signify the way people live out their lives in class society, giving people the terms for the values, ideas, and images that tie them to their social functions, and thus prevent them from a true understanding of the real forces and relations of production. Ideology is thus an illusion which masks the real/objective situation; an example of this would be an ideology that tells you, as a worker, that the capitalists are really working in your interest, which disguises or hides the "objective" reality that the capitalists' interests are opposed to the workers' interests. (Another example might be a politician, whose rhetoric in speeches--whose ideology--tries to persuade you that he's concerned with your tax situation, and this ideology keeps you from seeing how he's really only interested in protecting corporate tax shelters). Anyway, Engels says that the illusions created by ideology create FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS in people, who believe the ideological representations of how the world works and thus misperceive, or don't see at all, how the world really/objectively works (i.e. in terms of the mode of production and the class divisions that mode of production creates). Workers, for Engels, are deluded by various kinds of ideology into thinking they're not exploited by the capitalist system, instead of seeing how they are. In this view, literature is also a kind of illusion, a kind of ideology that prevents people from seeing the real relations of production at work. From the viewpoint of what's now known as "vulgar" Marxism, all literature produces false consciousness, because all literature produced in a capitalist society could only reflect the capitalist ideologies. This view can't account for how or why literature might be able to challenge the ideological assumptions of a society because it can't acknowledge that literature (or other ideologies, for that matter) might be in opposition to the dominant formation of the economic base. In vulgar Marxism, you couldn't speak or think in ways that weren't entirely determined by the economic base. For more recent Marxist critics, however, such "vulgar"` insistence that literature is absolutely determined by the economic base is abandoned in favor of a more complicated idea of how literature relates to economic formations. Rather than simply "reflecting" the values that support capitalism, Marxist critics argue, literature does something more complicated. According to Pierre Macheray, literature doesn't reflect either the economic base or other ideology, but rather it works on existing ideologies and transforms them, giving these ideologies new shape and structure; literature in Macheray's view is thus distinct from, distant from, other forms of ideology (like religious ideology), and thus can provide insights into how ideologies are structured, and what their limits are. This view is also followed by George Lukacs, who argues that Marxist literary criticism should look at a work of literature in terms of the ideological structure(s) of which it is a part, but which it transforms in its art. For other Marxists, including Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, and Louis Althusser, literature works the way any ideology does, by signifying the imaginary ways in which people perceive the real world; literature uses language to signify what it feels like to live in particular conditions, rather than using language to give a rational analysis of those conditions. Thus literature helps to create experience, not just reflect it. As a kind of ideology, literature for these critics is relatively autonomous, both of other ideological forms and of the economic base. You can't trace one-to-one direct ties between literature and any particular ideology, or between literature and the economic base. (When you can, we call it bad literature; literature directly linked to an ideology we call "propaganda," for instance). Hélène Cixous, another of the major French voices, writes to these ideas from many different places. She writes as a novelist, as a literary critic (her doctoral dissertation was on James Joyce), a feminist, a poet. Her criticism is associated with twentieth-century avant-garde writers, especially James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Jean Genet and the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector. However, her writing celebrates canonical writers such as Shakespeare and Stendahl as well. Key issues for feminist critics are her (re) definitions of the unconscious, bisexuality and l'écriture féminine. This latter concept is the one that she is most associated with and that is perhaps the most misunderstood. However it is important to recognize that all three concepts are integrally related. In 1975 she published "The Laugh of the Medusa" and "Sorties," two of the most influential essays in contemporary feminist theory. Both works are best understood if one sees that they are concerned more with poetics than politics although the two notions are clearly entwined. "The Laugh of the Medusa" takes on both the Greek myth and the psychoanalytic interpretation of that myth in order to challenge the orthodoxies of patriarchy. "Sorties" expands her notions of the connections between women's desire and women's language. Cixous' theory of writing is a feminist theory because she recognizes that patriarchy is a specifically cultural and historical context with power relations that are not universal but nonetheless a real condition and that these do not exist separately from aesthetics and poetics. In her "Presidente Lecture Series," she comments on writing and memory as it defines the self Focally spoke of. She says, "The origin of the gesture of writing is linked to the experience of a disappearance, to the feeling of having lost the key to the world, to have been thrown outside. To have acquired all of a sudden the feeling of something precious, rare, mortal. To have to find again, urgently, an entrance, breath, to keep the trace. We have to make the apprenticeship of Mortality." 1 The following excerpts offer further observations on writing and memory, ""It is the whole that makes sense. People either know or don't know that I have four or five forms of written expression: poetic fiction, chamber theater or theater on a world scale, criticism, essays -- without counting the notebooks I write only to myself and which no one will ever read, where I exercise a different style. No one fragment carries the totality of the message, but each text (which is in itself a whole) has a particular urgency, an individual force, a necessity, and yet each text also has a force that comes to it from all the other texts. Dr. Cixous says this is why it is so important to incorporate these necessary linguistic changes into the (French) school systems very early, in order that we will be freed of this linguistic colonization. "For example," she says, "One cannot speak the same type of language or use the same literary form on every occasion or for every scene. I have several French languages. Amongst my languages there is one I prefer, though I shall not say which. Sometimes I experience reading returning to 'the author' I am in the following manner: according to the country of reading, according to the state of cultural dissemination in such a country, in such a language, I am "known," defined, or coded very differently and in a way that is to me unexpected. In France, I am mainly known through my seminars, and most especially through my theatrical works. (My plays have been performed at the Théâtre du Soleil before 150,000 spectators.) Now the theater public may be totally unaware that in other spheres I am the author of things which are not theatrical. Inversely, in the USA, Canada, Japan ... people are unaware that I am an author for the theater, and I am often classed, sometimes even exclusively, in the category of theoreticians. This is how I appear on contemporary scenes as if I were a quarter of myself. Yet it is the whole that makes sense. That which cannot be met on one path, and which I cannot say in one of my languages, I seek to say through another form of expression" (56). To briefly indicate directions: in fictional texts authors work in a poetic form and in philosophical contents on the mysteries of subjectivity. Let us talk about this, for the fin-de-siècle period invites such discussion. It seems -- you have heard this as well as I -- that there are fashionable proceedings, especially in the English-speaking world, on the theme of subjectivity. The trend, the code, the "canon," are in themselves trendy tools for thought (I do not mean "modern," for whatever is "code" is already outmoded and ready to fall into disuse). Now the fashionable code, these days, holds subjectivity, which is confused (unwittingly or not) with individualism, in suspicion: there is confusion -- and this is a pity for everyone -- between the infinite domain of the human subject, which is, of course, the primary territory of every artist and every creature blessed with the difficult happiness of being alive, and stupid egotistic, restrictive, exclusive behavior which excludes the other. Whereas subjectivity is the wealth we have in common and by definition, the subject is the non-closed mix of self/s and others; the human subject who, in the Bible for example, calls himself our like. No I without you ever or more precisely no I's without you's. I is always our like. When I explore I -- I take as object of observation a human sample. There is no true art that does not take as its source or root the universal regions of subjectivity. A subject is at least a thousand people. In the essay "Le rire de la Méduse," (1975) Cixous first explains the invention of a new insurgent writing that will allow women to "transform their history, to seize the occasion to speak." Further on, she challenges her readers: "Écris-toi: il faut que ton corps se fasse entendre. Alors jailliront les immenses ressources de l'inconscient." ("Write yourself. Your body must be heard. Only then will the immense resources of the unconscious spring forth. It is in the school system itself that these beginnings must spring fourth. Until we free the educational approach of the barriers perpetuated in the very language, we cannot approach reality" (8). With the publication of this widely quoted essay/manifesto, Hélène Cixous opened lively debate on how women should break the bonds of rhetoric and myth that have kept them from writing and participating in the public sphere. The essay does not stand alone, however, since its sentiments appear frequently in other texts written by Cixous at around the same time and in her later writing even as she broadened her exploration of difference and its effects. To Cixous, the practice of écriture féminine is part of an ongoing concern with exclusion, with the transformation of subjectivity, and the struggle for identity. This section includes quotes from the essay, followed by comments on its impact - as a text and as part of a larger scheme. The focus of Cixous's discourse is écriture féminine ("feminine writing"), a project begun in the middle 1970s when Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Catherine Dierrida, among others, began reading texts in the particular contexts of women's experience. Their general strategy, at odds with biologically based readings of Sigmund Freud, reflected a notion of femininity and feminine writing based not on a "given" essence of male and female characteristics but on culturally achieved conventions, such as "openness" in feminine texts as a lack of repressive patterning. This theorizing, pursued in the politicized French atmosphere during deconstruction and cultural revolution, prompted questions about how "writing" deploys power, how to read a feminine (nonpatriarchal) text, and, with even greater urgency, what the "feminine" is. "It is in the school system, where we are taught to 'read' that we first learn this role interpetation," Dr Cixous insists (12). In La Venue à l'écriture, perhaps her most strongly Derridean text, Cixous challenges the boundaries between theory and fiction and projects écriture féminine as not necessarily writing by a woman but writing also practiced by male authors such as Jean Genet and James Joyce. "Laugh of the Medusa" and "Castration or Decapitation?" present Cixous's case for the reading of feminine writing against psychoanalysis. In "Laugh" she describes how writing is structured by a "sexual opposition" favoring men, one that "has always worked for man's profit to the point of reducing writing... to his laws" (883). Writing is constituted in a "discourse" of relations social, political, and linguistic in makeup, and these relations are characterized in a masculine or feminine "economy." In this model, patterns of linearity and exclusion (patriarchal "logic") require a strict hierarchical organization of (sexual) difference in discourse and give a "grossly exaggerated" view of the "sexual opposition" actually inherent to language (879). But it is in the apocalyptic scenario that she envisions as preparatory to the venue à l'écriture of woman that Cixous makes her mark. When the "repressed" of their culture and their society returns, it's an explosive, utterly destructive, staggering return, with a force never yet unleashed and equal to the most forbidding of suppressions. For when the phallic period comes to an end, women will have been either annihilated or borne up to the highest and most violent incandescence. ("Laugh" 886) Cixous is aware of the difficulties of envisioning a writing practice that cannot be theorized and whose existence is scanty. She notes how in France none of the inscriptions of the feminine can be found in the school systems and advocates the necessity of change. Cixous claims woman's privileged relationship with the voice as a result of her being never far from "mother. ... There is always within her at least a little of that good mother's milk. She writes in white ink" ("Laugh" 881). But she refuses to conceive of the effects of the past as irremovable, and when she speaks of women's writing -- or, as she later said in Illa, of women's search for a langue maternelle -- she speaks in the future tense: she sets out, not to say what it is, but to speak "about what it will do" (875). The exclusion of women from writing (and speaking) is linked to the fact that the Western history of writing is synonymous with the history of reasoning and with the separation of the body from the text. The body entering the text disrupts the masculine economy of superimposed linearity and tyranny: the feminine is the "overflow" of "luminous torrents" ("Laugh" 876), a margin of "excess" eroticism and free-play not directly attributable to the fixed hierarchies of masculinity. The "openness" of such writing is evident in Cixous's own style both in fictional texts such as Soufflés (1975) and Angst (1977) and in "Laugh," as when she writes that "we the precocious, we the repressed of culture, our lovely mouths gagged with pollen, our wind knocked out of us, we the labyrinths, the ladders, the trampled spaces, the bevies -- we are black and we are beautiful" ("Laugh" 878). In such language Cixous forces exposition into poetic association and controls the excess of imagery through repetition and nonlinear accretions. Virginia Woolf contrasts such writing to "male," "shadowed," or violently imposed writing. This is Kristiva's conception, too, of jouissance, the poetic discourse "beyond" the masculine text of reason and order. For Cixous, Woolf, and Kristeva, there is the key assumption that the feminine economy of excess does not need re-creation, to be made anew, because it persists in the margins and gaps (as the repressed, the unconscious) of male-dominated culture. As a characteristically deconstructive reader, she understands texts as built upon a system of cultural contradictions, especially concerning values. In her reading she strives to focus on those contradictions and then to find the channels of "excess" and violation, accidents of meaning and perversities of signification, through which texts inscribe a feminine writing that goes beyond and escapes the masculine economy of texts. (99). Emerging from the French tradition of "liberal feminism", is a pragmatic feminism interested in looking at how systems of female oppression have been perpetuated and elaborated; such analysis usually pays a lot of attention to the everyday influences on our belief systems, the school system being of major importance. This Liberal feminism often emphasizes understanding origins of social practices, in order to understand how to intervene in them, to change them. That's why I call it "pragmatic": much feminist thought is oriented toward getting things done, toward theorizing so that some kind of social action or change can take place. (This kind of theorizing-for-application has its roots in a number of political movements and theories, including Marxism and socialism, civil rights, and, of course, the "women's liberation" movement). Along with French feminists such as Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, Cixous' work draws on the writings of Jacques Lacan. Jacques Lacan is a French psychoanalyst. He was originally trained as a psychiatrist and in the 1930s and 40s worked with psychotic patients; he began in the 1950s to develop his own version of psychoanalysis, based on the ideas articulated in structuralist linguistics and anthropology. You might think of Lacan as Freud + Saussure, with a dash of Levi-Strauss, and even some seasoning of Derrida. But his main influence/precursor is Freud. Lacan reinterprets Freud in light of structuralist and post-structuralist theories, turning psychoanalysis from an essentially humanist philosophy or theory into a post-structuralist one. The Lacanian model comes out of the work of Freud and French structural linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. The importance of this constellation of theorists is an interest in connecting language, psyche and sexuality. The French feminist found Lacan's writing to be both a ground for analysis and a site for critique. Lacan's theory develops the notion of the development of the (male) ego from PreOedipal (non-linguistic) Imaginary to Symbolic via the castration complex, which is both a sexual and linguistic model. The Imaginary is fashioned as a feminine space (connected to the body, the mother, the breast). The Symbolic is associated with the Law of the Father and is a condition of having acquired language and sexual difference. In his discussion of the absolute division between the unconscious and the consciousness (or between id and ego), Freud introduces the idea of the human self, or subject, as radically split, divided between these two realms of conscious and unconscious. On the one hand, our usual (Western humanist) ideas of self or personhood are defined by operations of consciousness, including rationality, free will, and self-reflection. For Freud and for psychoanalysis in general, however, actions, thought, belief, and the concepts of "self" are all determined or shaped by the unconscious, and its drives and desires. Like Freud, Lacan's infant starts out as something inseparable from its mother; there's no distinction between self and other, between baby and mother (at least, from the baby's perspective). In fact, the baby (for both Freud and Lacan) is a kind of blob, with no sense of self or individuated identity, and no sense even of its body as a coherent unified whole. This baby-blob is driven by NEED; it needs food, it needs comfort/safety, it needs to be changed, etc. These needs are satisfiable, and can be satisfied by an object. When the baby needs food, it gets a breast (or a bottle); when it needs safety, it gets hugged. The baby, in this state of NEED, doesn't recognize any distinction between itself and the objects that meet its needs; it doesn't recognize that an object (like a breast) is part of another whole person (because it doesn't have any concept yet of "whole person"). There's no distinction between it and anyone or anything else; there are only needs and things that satisfy those needs. This is the state of "nature," which has to be broken up in order for culture to be formed. This is true in both Freud's psychoanalysis and in Lacan's: the infant must separate from its mother, form a separate identity, in order to enter into civilization. That separation entails some kind of LOSS; when the child knows the difference between itself and its mother, and starts to become an individuated being, it loses that primal sense of unity (and safety/security) that it originally had. This is the element of the tragic built into psychoanalytic theory (whether Freudian or Lacanian): to become a civilized "adult" always entails the profound loss of an original unity, a non-differentiation, a merging with others (particularly the mother). The baby who has not yet made this separation, who has only needs which are satisfiable, and which makes no distinction between itself and the objects that satisfy its needs, exists in the realm of the REAL, according to Lacan. The Real is a place (a psychic place, not a physical place) where there is this original unity. Because of that, there is no absence or loss or lack; the Real is all fullness and completeness, where there's no need that can't be satisfied. And because there is no absence or loss or lack, there is no language in the Real. The goal then, from a Lacanian position, of feminism is to find that "place", to resituate our world (127). Julia Kristeva says this "resituation" must begin in the family, but, more importantly, in the school system, because Lacan says that language is always about loss or absence; you only need words when the object you want is gone. If your world were all fullness, with no absence, then you wouldn't need language. Thus in the realm of the Real, according to Lacan, there is no language because there is no loss, no lack, no absence; there is only complete fullness, needs and the satisfaction of needs. Hence the Real is always beyond language, unrepresentable in language (and therefore irretrievably lost when one enters into language). When the child has formulated some idea of Otherness, and of a self identified with its own "other," its own mirror image, then the child begins to enter the symbolic realm. The Symbolic and the Imaginary are overlapping, unlike Freud's phases of development; there's no clear marker or division between the two, and in some respects they always coexist. The Symbolic order is the structure of language itself; we have to enter it in order to become speaking subjects, and to designate ourselves by "I." The foundation for having a self lies in the Imaginary projection of the self onto the specular image, the other in the mirror, and having a self is expressed in saying "I," which can only occur within the Symbolic, which is why the two coexist. The fort/da game that Little Hans played, in Freud's account, is in Lacan's view a marker of the entry into the Symbolic, because Hans is using language to negotiate the idea of absence and the idea of Otherness as a category or structural possibility. The spool, according to Lacan, serves as an "objet petit a," or "objet petit autre"--an object which is a little "other," a small-o other. In throwing it away, the child recognizes that others can disappear; in pulling it back, the child recognizes that others can return. Lacan emphasizes the former, insisting that Little Hans is primarily concerned with the idea of lack or absence of the "objet petit autre." The "little other" illustrates for the child the idea of lack, of loss, of absence, showing the child that it isn't complete in and of itself. It is also the gateway to the symbolic order, to language, since language itself is premised on the idea of lack or absence. Lacan says these ideas--of other and Other, of lack and absence, of the (mis)identification of self with o/Other--are all worked out on an individual level, with each child, but they form the basic structures of the Symbolic order, of language, which the child must enter in order to become an adult member of culture. Thus the Otherness acted out in the fort/da game (as well as by the distinctions made in the Mirror Phase between self and other, mother and child) become categorical or structural ideas. So, in the Symbolic, there is a structure (or structuring principle) of Otherness, and a structuring principle of Lack. The Other (capital O) is a structural position in the symbolic order. It is the place that everyone is trying to get to, to merge with, in order to get rid of the separation between "self" and "other." It is, in Derrida's sense, the CENTER of the system, of the Symbolic and/or of language itself. As such, the Other is the thing to which every element relates. But, as the center, the Other (again, not a person but a position) can't be merged with. Nothing can be in the center with the Other, even though everything in the system (people, e.g.) want to be. So the position of the Other creates and sustains a never-ending LACK, which Lacan calls DESIRE. Desire is the desire to be the Other. By definition, desire can never be fulfilled: it's not desire for some object (which would be need) or desire for love or another person's recognition of oneself (which would be demand), but desire to be the center of the system, the center of the Symbolic, the center of language itself. The center has a lot of names in Lacanian theory. It's the Other; it's also called the PHALLUS. Here's where Lacan borrows again from Freud's original Oedipus theory. The mirror stage is pre-oedipal. The self is constructed in relation to an other, to the idea of Other, and the self wants to merge with the Other. As in Freud's world, the most important other in the child's life is the mother; so the child wants to merge with its mother. In Lacan's terms, this is the child's demand that the self/other split be erased. The child decides that it can merge with the mother if it becomes what the mother wants it to be--in Lacan's terms, the child tries to fulfill the mother's desire. The mother's desire (formed by her own entry into the Symbolic, because she is already an adult) is to not have lack, or Lack (or to be the Other, the center, the place where nothing is lacking). This fits with the Freudian version of the Oedipus complex, where the child wants to merge with its mother by having sexual intercourse with her. In Freud's model, the idea of lack is represented by the lack of a penis. The boy who wants to sleep with his mother wants to complete her lack by filling her up with his penis. In Freud's view, what breaks this oedipal desire up, for boys anyway, is the father, who threatens castration. The father threatens to make the boy experience lack, the absence of the penis, if he tries to use his penis to make up for the mother's lack of a penis. In Lacan's terms, the threat of castration is a metaphor for the whole idea of Lack as a structural concept. For Lacan, it isn't the real father who threatens castration. Rather, because the idea of lack, or Lack, is essential to the concept of language, because the concept of Lack is part of the basic structuration of language, the father becomes a function of the linguistic structure. The Father, rather than being a person, becomes a structuring principle of the symbolic order. For Lacan, Freud's angry father becomes the Name-of-the-Father, or the Law-of-the-Father, or sometimes just the Law. Submission to the rules of language itself--the Law of the Father--is required in order to enter into the symbolic order. To become a speaking subject, you have to be subjected to, you have to obey, the laws and rules of language. Lacan designates the idea of the structure of language, and its rules, as specifically paternal. He calls the rules of language the Law-of-the-Father in order to link the entry into the Symbolic, the structure of language, to Freud's notion of the Oedipus and castration complexes. The Law-of-the-Father, or Name-of-the-Father, is another term for the Other, for the center of the system, the thing that governs the whole structure--its shape and how all the elements in the system can move and form relationships. This center is also called the PHALLUS, to underline even more the patriarchal nature of the Symbolic order. The Phallus, as center, limits the play of elements, and gives stability to the whole structure. The Phallus anchors the chains of signifiers which, in the unconscious, are just floating and unfixed, always sliding and shifting. The Phallus stops play, so that signifiers can have some stable meaning. It is because the Phallus is the center of the Symbolic order, of language, that the term "I" designates the idea of the self (and, additionally, why any other word has stable meaning). The Phallus is not the same as the penis. Penises belong to individuals; the Phallus belongs to the structure of language itself. No one has it, just like no one governs language or rules language. Rather, the Phallus is the center. It governs the whole structure, it's what everyone wants to be (or have), but no one can get there (no element of the system can take the place of the center). That's what Lacan calls DESIRE: the desire, which is never satisfied, because it can never be satisfied, to be the center, to rule the system. Lacan says that boys can think they have a shot at being the Phallus, at occupying the position of center, because they have penises. Girls have a harder time misperceiving themselves as having a shot at the Phallus because they are (as Freud says) constituted by and as lack, lacking a penis, and the Phallus is a place where there is no lack. But, Lacan says, every subject in language is constituted by/as lack, or Lack. The only reason we have language at all is because of the loss, or lack, of the union with the maternal body. In fact, it is the necessity to become part of "culture," to become subjects in language, that forces that absence, loss, lack. The distinction between the sexes is significant in Lacan's theory, though not in the same way it is in Freud's. This is what Lacan talks about in "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious," on p. 741. He has two drawings there. One is of the word "Tree" over a picture of a tree--the basic Saussurean concept, of signifier (word) over signified (object). Then he has another drawing, of two identical doors (the signifies). But over each door is a different word: one says "Ladies" and the other says "Gentlemen." Lacan explains, "A train arrives at a station. A little boy and a little girl, brother and sister, are seated in a compartment face to face next to the window through which the buildings along the station platform can be seen passing as the train pulls to a stop. 'Look,' says the brother, 'We're at Ladies!' 'Idiot!' replies his sister, 'Can't you see we're at Gentlemen'" (742). This anecdote shows how boys and girls enter the symbolic order, the structure of language, differently. In Lacan's view, each child can only see the signifier of the other gender; each child constructs its world view, its understanding of the relation between sfr and sfd in naming locations, as the consequence of seeing an "other." As Lacan puts it (742), "For these children, Ladies and Gentlemen will be henceforth two countries toward which each of their souls will strive on divergent wings..." Each child, each sex, has a particular position within the Symbolic order; from that position, each sex can only see (or signify) the otherness of the other sex. You might take Lacan's drawing of the two doors literally: these are the doors, with their gender distinctions, through which each child must pass in order to enter into the Symbolic realm. So, to summarize. Lacan's theory starts with the idea of the Real; this is the union with the mother's body, which is a state of nature, and must be broken up in order to build culture. Once you move out of the Real, you can never get back, but you always want to. This is the first idea of an irretrievable loss or lack. Next comes the Mirror stage, which constitutes the Imaginary. Here you grasp the idea of others, and begin to understand Otherness as a concept or a structuring principle, and thus begin to formulate a notion of "self". This "self" (as seen in the mirror) is in fact an other, but you misrecognize it as you, and call it "self." (Or, in non-theory language, you look in the mirror and say, "hey, that's me." But it's not--it's just an image). This sense of self, and its relation to others and to Other, sets you up to take up a position in the Symbolic order, in language. Such a position allows you to say "I", to be a speaking subject. "I" (and all other words) have a stable meaning because they are fixed, or anchored, by the Other/Phallus/Name-of-the-Father/Law, which is the center of the Symbolic, the center of language. In taking up a position in the Symbolic, you enter through a gender-marked doorway; the position for girls is different than the position for boys. Boys are closer to the Phallus than girls, but no one is or has the Phallus--it's the center. Your position in the Symbolic, like the position of all other signifying elements (signifiers) is fixed by the Phallus; unlike the unconscious, the chains of signifiers in the Symbolic don't circulate and slide endlessly because the Phallus limits play. Paradoxically--as if all this wasn't bad enough! --the Phallus and the Real are pretty similar. Both are places where things are whole, complete, full, unified, where there's no lack, or Lack. Both are places that are inaccessible to the human subject-in-language. But they are also opposite: the Real is the maternal, the ground from which we spring, the nature we have to separate from in order to have culture; the Phallus is the idea of the Father, the patriarchal order of culture, the ultimate idea of culture, the position which rules everything in the world. Kristeva, Irigaray and Cixous have found this model both rich and frustrating. Cixous is perhaps the most optimistic about the possibilities for the Pre-Oedipal or Imaginary phase, which is where she locates feminine writing, écriture féminine. Thus she rejects the notion of a feminine Imaginary which is non-signifying or outside of language. She suggests instead that the feminine is a way of signifying that calls into question or disrupts the Law of the Father. The Pre-Oedipal is a time before the creation of oppositional binaries, therefore prior to the imposition of the categories of male and female. At the same time, this is the period associated with the mother's body. In this way, Cixous' notion of feminine writing can be both feminine and non-essentialist (although this latter assertion is a matter of considerable debate amongst Cixous' critics). Drawing on Saussure and Lacan, but rejecting their binary models that silence women, she revises the Freudian model which defines "woman as lack" and instead celebrates "woman as excess" using Dora, the hysteric, as an example of a woman who speaks her body and threatens patriarchy. She appropriates the Freudian psychoanalytic model wherein the Law of the Father is ruled by the fear of castration. Her definition of "jouissance" is that which operates outside of patriarchy, in the realm of the feminine Imaginary. Jouissance is a crucial concept since for Cixous it is the source of women's writing and of "blowing up" the Law of the Father. Nonetheless, critics have asked how can Dora, the hysteric, be a model for women? How is this useful for feminists? To understand Cixous' use of Dora, we have to see that Dora, like Medusa, is a mythological figure who continues to haunt patriarchy. She continues to blow up the Law of the Father. Her words, coming to us in twisted form, still rise up against the master/author of her story. For Cixous the unconscious is an unmediated space outside of culture. The unconscious is associated with the repressed, and thus with the feminine as well as other colonized places, such as Africa, reminding us of her own position as Jewish-French-Algerian. The European history of war and colonization informs her use of metaphors of conflict, seen especially in the essay, "Sorties." Her autobiographical writings, which stress her own sense of not belonging -- of being the outside of many different cultures -- leads to her nuanced focus on the many forms of Otherness, not just based on gender. Thus, her theory of "feminine writing" provides an escape from systems of cultural, religious, sexual and linguistic oppression. In addition her imagery of war and violence, which continually invades her writings -- including her title "Sorties" -- is an assertion that Cixous' writing is a battle: she is fighting her way out of the limitations placed on her when she is positioned as "other." This focus on struggles connected to class and race as well as gender show that Cixous' has a materialist basis for her feminism as well. An example of this can also be found in her essay "Sorties" in the definition of the Empire of the Selfsame (Propre) as that of patriarchal production based not on sexual difference but on sexual inequality. In contrast, she proposes as an economy of the "gift." Cixous' notion of bisexuality, indebted as much to Jacques Derrida as Lacan or Freud, is situated in poststructuralist concepts (employing the deconstruction of binaries) within a feminist analysis of sexual difference. She argues that language that is based on oppositions (male/female, presence/absence, penis/hole) reproduces a patriarchal order which places the feminine as subordinate to the masculine. This is where she is associated with a critique of concepts such as logocentrism, or phallogocentrism. This postructuralist framework sets up a definition of bisexuality, which is not about the combination of sexualities (androgyny), but the displacement of the terms "masculinity" and "femininity." Bisexuality goes beyond dualism to imagine a multiple subject. Cixous privileges women in achieving this bisexuality because historically and culturally women are more open or accustomed to accepting different forms of subjectivity. Nonetheless, the writer Jean Genet is one of her favorite examples of "l'écriture féminine" (an assertion that has infuriated many of her critics). As a reader, Cixous is able to imagine herself "bisexually" and to identify with both male and female characters. The resisting reader in Cixous refuses to be Dido, the victim. She prefers the sexual ambiguity of a character such as Achilles. Cixous asks women to "think differently" about their histories, not simply in the sense of origins but in terms of language. Drawing on the resources of the imaginary, mining its depths, women must invent another history, one which is outside of narratives of power, inequality and oppression, and which figures itself in our language and on our bodies. Thus, she theorizes women's writing in terms of the physical act of writing, reminding us that writings are created by real bodies. Helene Cixous takes up where Lacan left off, in noting that women and men enter into the Symbolic Order, into language as structure, in different ways, or through different doors, and that the subject positions open to either sex within the Symbolic are also different. She understands that Lacan's naming the center of the Symbolic as the Phallus highlights what a patriarchal system language is--or, more specifically, what a phallo(go)centric system it is. This idea, that the structure of language is centered by the phallus, produced the word "phallocentric." Derrida's idea that the structure of language relies on spoken words being privileged over written words, produced the word "logocentric" to describe Western culture in general. Cixous and Irigaray combine the two ideas to describe Western cultural systems and structures as "phallogocentric," based on the primacy of certain terms in an array of binary oppositions. Thus a phallogocentric culture is one which is structured by binary oppositions-- male/female, order/chaos, language/silence, presence/absence, speech/writing, light/dark, good/evil, etc.--and in which the first term is valued over the second term; Cixous and Irigaray insist that all valued terms (male, order, language, presence, speech, etc.). are aligned with each other, and that all of them together provide the basic structures of Western thought. Cixous follows Lacan's psychoanalytic paradigm, which argues that a child must separate from its mother's body (the Real) in order to enter into the Symbolic. Because of this, Cixous says, the female body in general becomes unrepresentable in language; it's what can't be spoken or written in the phallogocentric Symbolic order. Cixous here makes a leap from the maternal body to the female body in general; she also leaps from that female body to female sexuality, saying that female sexuality, female sexual pleasure, is unrepresentable within the phallogocentric Symbolic order. To understand how she makes that leap, we have to go back to what Freud says about female sexuality, and the mess he makes of it. In Freud's story of the female Oedipus complex, girls have to make a lot of switches, from clitoris to vagina, from attraction to female bodies to attraction to male bodies, and from active sexuality to passive sexuality, in order to become "normal" adults Cixous rewrites this, via Lacan, by pointing out that "adulthood," in Lacan's terms, is the same as entering into the Symbolic and taking up a subject position. Thus "adulthood," or becoming a linguistic subject, for Cixous, means having only one kind of sexuality: passive, vaginal, heterosexual, reproductive. And that sexuality, if one follows Freud to his logical extreme, is not about female sexuality per se, but about male sexuality: the woman's pleasure is to come from being passively filled by a penis (remember, Freud defines activity as masculine, and passivity as feminine). So, Cixous concludes, there really isn't any such thing as female sexuality in and of itself in this phallogocentric system--it's always sexuality defined by the presence of a penis, and not by anything intrinsic to the female body or to female sexual pleasure. If women have to be forced away from their own bodies--first in the person of the mother's body, and then in the person of their unique sexual feelings/pleasures--in order to become subjects in language, Cactus argues, is it possible for a woman to write at all? Is it possible for a woman to write as a woman? Or does entry into the Symbolic, orienting one's language around a center designated as a Phallus, mean that when one writes or speaks, one always does so as a "man"? In other words, if the structure of language itself is phallogocentric, and stable meaning is anchored and guaranteed by the Phallus, then isn't everyone who uses language taking up a position as "male" within this structure which excludes female bodies? Cixous, and other poststructuralist theoretical feminists, are both outraged and intrigued by the possibilities for relations between gender and writing (or language use in general) that Lacan's paradigms open up. That's what Cixous means when she says (p. 309a) that her project has two aims: to break up and destroy, and to foresee and project. She wants to destroy (or perhaps just deconstruct) the phallogocentric system Lacan describes, and to project some new strategies for a new kind of relation between female bodies and language. Lacan's description of the Symbolic places women and men in different positions within the Symbolic in relation to the Phallus; men more easily misperceive themselves as having the Phallus, as being closer to it, whereas women (because they have no penises) are further from that center. Because of that distance from the Phallus, the poststructuralist theoretical feminists argue, women are closer to the margins of the Symbolic order; they are not as firmly anchored or fixed in place as men are; they are closer to the Imaginary, to images and fantasies, and further from the idea of absolute fixed and stable meaning than men are. Because women are less fixed in the Symbolic than men, women-- and their language--are more fluid, more flowing, more unstable than men. It is worth noting here that when Cixous talks about women and woman, sometimes she means it literally, as the physical beings with vaginas and breasts, etc., and sometimes she means it as a linguistic structural position: "woman" is a signifier in the chain of signifiers within the Symbolic, just as "man" is; both have stable meaning ("woman" is the signifier attached to the signified of vagina and breasts (etc.)) because both are locked in place, anchored, by the Phallus as center of the Symbolic order. When Cixous says that woman is more slippery, more fluid, less fixed than man, she means both the literal woman, the person, and the signifier "woman". Cixous' essay is difficult, not only because she's assuming we all know Freud and Lacan's formulations about female sexuality and about the structure of language, but also because she writes on two levels at once: she is always being both metaphoric and literal, referring both to structures and to individuals. When she says that "woman must write herself," "woman must write woman," she means both that women must write themselves, tell their own stories (much as the American feminists say women must tell their own stories) and that "woman" as signifier must have a (new) way to be connected to the signifier "I," to write the signifier of selfhood/subjecthood offered within the Symbolic order. Cixous also discusses writing on both a metaphoric and literal level. She aligns writing with masturbation, something that for women is supposed to be secret, shameful, or silly, something not quite adult, something that will be renounced in order to achieve adulthood, just like clitoral stimulation has to be renounced in favor of vaginal/reproductive passive adult sexuality. For women to write themselves, Cixous says, they must (re) claim a female-centered sexuality. If men write with their penises, as Gilbert argues, then Cixous says before women can write they have to discover where their pleasure is located. (And don't be too quick to decide that women write with their clitorises. It's not quite that simple). Cixous also argues that men haven't yet discovered the relation between their sexuality and their writing, as long as they are focused on writing with the penis. "Man must write man," Cixous says, again focusing on "man" as a signifier within the Symbolic, which is no more privileged than "woman" as a signifier. In an important footnote, Cixous explains that men's sexuality, like women's, has been defined and circumscribed by binary oppositions (active/passive, masculine/feminine), and that heterosexual relations have been structured by a sense of Otherness and fear created by these absolute binaries. As long as male sexuality is defined in these limited and limiting terms, Cixous says, men will be prisoners of a Symbolic order which alienates them from their bodies in ways similar to (though not identical with) how women are alienated from their bodies and their sexualities. Thus, while Cixous does slam men directly for being patriarchal oppressors, she also identifies the structures that enforce gender distinctions as being oppressive to both sexes. She also links these oppressive binary structures to other Western cultural practices, particularly those involving racial distinctions. On 310 she follows Freud in calling women the "dark continent," and expands the metaphor by reference to Apartheid, to demonstrate that these same binary systems which structure gender also structure imperialism: women are aligned with darkness, with Otherness, with Africa, against men who are aligned with lightness, with selfhood, and with Western civilization. In this paragraph, note that Cixous is referring to women as "they," as if women are non-speakers, non-writers, whom she is observing. "As soon as they begin to speak, at the same time as they're taught their name, they can be taught that their territory is black:"--i.e. entry into the Symbolic order, into language, into having a self and a name, is entry into these structures of binary oppositions. Cixous argues that most women do write and speak, but that they do so from a "masculine" position; in order to speak, women (or "woman") has assumed she needed a stable, fixed system of meaning, and thus has aligned herself with the Phallus which stabilizes language. There has been little or no "feminine" writing, Cixous says (p. 311). In making this statement, she insists that writing is always "marked," within a symbolic order that is structured through binary opposites, including "masculine/feminine," in which the feminine is always repressed. Remember here, when Cixous speaks of "feminine," it is both literal and metaphoric--it's something connected to femaleness, to female bodies, and something that is a product of linguistic positioning. So Cixous is arguing that only women could produce feminine writing, because it must come from their bodies, AND she is arguing that men could occupy a structural position from which they could produce feminine writing. Cixous coins the phrase "l'ecriture feminine" to discuss this notion of feminine writing (and masculine writing, its phallogocentric counterpart). She sees "l'ecriture feminine" first of all as something possible only in poetry (in the existing genres), and not in realist prose. Novels, she says on p. 311, are "allies of representationalism"--they are genres (particularly realist fiction) which try to speak in stable language, language with one-to-one fixed meanings of words, language where words seemingly point to things (and not to the structure of language itself). In poetry, however, language is set loose--the chains of signifiers flow more freely, meaning is less fixed; poetry, Cixous says, is thus closer to the unconscious, and thus to what has been repressed (and thus to female bodies/female sexuality). This is one model she uses to describe what "l'ecriture feminine" looks like. (It is worth noting, however, that all the poets and "feminine" writers Cixous mentions specifically are men.) Such feminine writing will serve as a rupture, or a site of transformation or change; she means "rupture" here in the Derridean sense, a place where the totality of the system breaks down and one can see a system as a system or structure, rather than simply as "the truth." Feminine writing will show the structure of the Symbolic as a structure, not as an inevitable order, and thus allow us to deconstruct that order. There are two levels on which "l'ecriture feminine" will be transformative, Cixous argues (p. 311-312), and these levels correspond again to her use of the literal and the metaphoric, or the individual and the structural. On one level, the individual woman must write herself, must discover for herself what her body feels like, and how to write about that body in language. Specifically, women must find their own sexuality, one that is rooted solely in their own bodies, and find ways to write about that pleasure--which Cixous, following Lacan, names "jouissance." On the second level, when women speak/write their own bodies, the structure of language itself will change; as women become active subjects, not just beings passively acted upon, their position as subject in language will shift. Women who write--if they don't merely reproduce the phallogocentric system of stable ordered meaning which already exists (and which excludes them)--will be creating a new signifying system; this system may have built into it far more play, more fluidity, than the existing rigid phallogocentric symbolic order. "Beware, my friend," Cixous writes toward the end of the essay (p. 319) "of the signifier that would take you back to the authority of a signified!" The woman who speaks, Cixous says, and who does not reproduce the representational stability of the Symbolic order, will not speak in linear fashion, will not "make sense" in any currently existing form. L'ecriture feminine, like feminine speech, will not be objective/objectifiable; it will erase the divisions between speech and text, between order and chaos, between sense and nonsense. In this way, l'ecriture feminine will be an inherently deconstructive language. Such speech/writing (and remember, this language will erase that slash) will bring users closer to the realm of the Real, back to the mother's body, to the breast, to the sense of union or non-separation. This is why Cixous uses (p.312) the metaphor of "white ink," of writing in breast milk; she wants to convey that idea of a reunion with the maternal body, an unalienated relation to female bodies in general. Cixous' descriptions of what "l'ecriture feminine" looks like (or, better, sounds like, since it's not clear that this writing will "look like" anything--since "looking like" is at the heart of the misperception of self in the Mirror Stage which launches people into the Symbolic order) flow into metaphors, which she also means literally. She wants to be careful to talk about writing in new ways, in ways that distinguish l'ecriture feminine from existing forms of speech/writing, and in so doing she is associating feminine writing with existing non-linguistic modes. So, for instance, l'ecriture feminine is milk, it's a song, something with rhythm and pulse, but no words, something connected with bodies and with bodies' beats and movements, but not with representational language. She uses these metaphors also to be "slippery", arguing (p. 313) that one can't define the practice of "l'ecriture feminine." To define something is to pin it down, to anchor it, to limit it, to put it in its place within a stable system or structure--and Cixous says that l'ecriture feminine is too fluid for that; it will always exceed or escape any definition. It can't be theorized, enclosed, coded, or understood --which doesn't mean, she warns, that it doesn't exist. Rather, it will always be greater than the existing systems for classification and ordering of knowledge in phallogocentric western culture. It can't be defined, but it can be "conceived of,"--another phrase which works on literal and metaphoric levels--by subjects not subjugated to a central authority. Only those on the margins--the outlaws--can "conceive of" feminine language; those outlaws will be women, and anyone else who can resist or be distanced from the structuring central Phallus of the phallogocentric Symbolic order. In discussing who might exist in the position of outlaw, Cixous brings up (p. 314) the question of bisexuality. Again, she starts from Freud's idea that all humans are fundamentally bisexual, and that the Oedipal trajectory, which steers both boys and girls into heterosexuality, is an unfortunate requirement of culture. For Cixous, "culture" is always a phallogocentric order; the entry into the Symbolic requires the division between male and female, feminine and masculine, which subordinates and represses the feminine. But by erasing/deconstructing the slash between masculine and feminine, Cixous is not arguing for Freud's old idea of bisexuality. Rather, she wants a new bisexuality, the "other bisexuality," which is the "nonexclusion either of the difference or of one sex"--a refusal of self/other as a structuring dichotomy. In essence, rather than scotch-taping masculine and feminine together, Cixous' bisexuality would dissolve the distinctions, so that sexuality would be from any body, any site, at any time. Without the dichotomy of self/other, all other dichotomies would start to fall apart, Cixous says: her other bisexuality would thus become a deconstructive force to erase the slashes in all structuring binary oppositions. When this occurs, the Western cultural representations of female sexuality--the myths associated with womanhood--will also fall apart. Cixous focuses in particular (p. 315) on the myth of the Medusa, the woman with snakes for hair, whose look will turn men into stone, and on the myth of woman as black hole, as abyss. The idea of woman as abyss or hole is pretty easy to understand; in Freudian terms, a woman lacks a penis, and instead has this scary hole in which the penis disappears (and might not come back). Freud reads the Medusa as part of the fear of castration, the woman whose hair is writhing penises; she's scary, not because she's got too few penises, but because she has too many. Cixous says those are the fears that scare men into being complicit in upholding the phallogocentric order: they're scared of losing their one penis when they see women as having either no penis or too many penises. If women could show men their true sexual pleasures, their real bodies--by writing them in non-representational form--Cixous says, men would understand that female bodies, female sexuality, is not about penises (too few or too many) at all. That's why she says we have to show them "our sexts"--another new word, the combination of sex and texts, the idea of female sexuality as a new form of writing. Cixous then moves on to talk about the idea of hysterics as prior examples of women who write "sexts," who write their bodies as texts of l'ecriture feminine. Again, she's following Freud, whose earliest works were on hysteria, and focused on female hysterics. The idea of hysteria is that a body produces a symptom, such as the paralysis of a limb, which represents a repressed idea; the body thus "speaks" what the conscious mind cannot say, and the unconscious thoughts are written out by the body itself. L'ecriture feminine has a lot in common with hysterics, as you can see, in the idea of the direct connections between the unconscious and the body as a mode of "writing". Cixous concludes the essay (starting on p. 318) by offering a critique of the Freudian nuclear family, the mom-dad-child formation, which she sees as generating the ideas of castration (Penisneid, in German) and lack which form the basis for ideas of the feminine in both Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis. She wants to break up these "old circuits" so that the family formations which uphold the phallogocentric Symbolic won't be recreated every time a child is born; she argues that this family system is just as limiting and oppressive to men as to women, and that it needs to be "demater-paternalized." Then she discusses other ways to figure pregnancy, arguing that, like all functions of the female body, pregnancy needs to be written, in "l'ecriture feminine." When pregnancy is written, and the female body figured in language as the source of life, rather than the penis, birth can be figured as something other than as separation, or as lack. She ends with the idea of formulating desire as a desire for everything, not for something lacking or absent, as in the Lacanian Symbolic; such a new desire would strip the penis of its significance as the signifier of lack or of fulfillment of lack, and would free people to see each other as different beings, each of whom are whole, and who are not complementary. These beings, not defined by difference, absence, or even by gender, would begin to form a new kind of love, a love which she describes on 319-320, in the paragraph beginning "Other love . . .. " Irigaray's theoretical vocabulary seems a little more familiar now that we have read psychoanalytic and Marxist critics. "Radical analysis" looks a lot like the superstructure-base diagram we discussed in class for several weeks; a vector of causality connects a society's economic reality to its ideological construct, or vice versa depending upon the critic. Althusser, Gramsci, and even Bourdieu demonstrated that ideology plays a central role in the formation of social reality. Like Julia Kristeva and Helene Cixous, the other two major figures of 1970s French feminism, Irigaray passed briefly through a controversial intellectual circle called "Psychanalyse et Politique." Thus, as a radical *psychoanalytic* intellectual, Irigaray mixes radical analysis with Lacanian and Freudian theory in order to deconstruct patriarchal hegemony in the connected real, symbolic and imaginary orders. Hence her unorthodox prose -- a reaction against and within a symbolic order complicit in domination. a. Texts are eliminated from the list of belonging to a particular author if they are markedly superior or inferior to other texts on the list; hence the "author function" is a label of a certain standard level of quality. (This would keep the grocery list from being part of T.S. Eliot's "work," i.e. a text that generates an "author function," because the grocery list is not as good as "The Wasteland.") b. A text is eliminated from the list of belonging to a particular author when the ideas in that text contradict or conflict with the ideas presented in other texts; thus the "author function" denotes a field of conceptual or theoretical coherence. c. A text is eliminated from belonging to a particular author when the style is different from that of other texts belonging to that author, when it uses words and phrases not found in other texts. Hence "author function" requires a stylistic uniformity. d. Texts are eliminated which refer to events after the death of the author. Hence "author function" means a definite historical figure in which a series of events converge. Focault reiterates these ideas and modifies them only slightly. The author's biography explains the presence of certain events in the text; the author is a principle of unity; the author neutralizes contradictions; the author is a particular source of expression manifested equally well in texts, letters, fragments, grocery lists, etc. (144). The text always bears signs that refer to the author, or create the "author function." The most easily recognizable of these signs is a pronoun, "I," though we know better than to assume that the "I" of a narrator is identical to the "I" of an author. Focault suggests that the author function arises out of the difference, and separation, between the "author function" and the writer signified in the text. This is most easily seen in narrative fiction, but is true of any form of discourse, according to Focault. At the end of the article, Focault talks about the idea of a transdiscursive position, people who are initiators of discursive practices, not just individual texts. Such figures as Marx and Freud (and Focault) radically shift an entire mode of thinking; the discourses they initiate make them more than just "authors" or "author functions" in the ways we've been talking about. I won't go into the details of Foucault's argument about this here; it takes us further into Foucault's own position as the initiator of analysis of discourses. He ends his essay with some questions about the relations of subjects to discourse, so we can end by looking at how Focault transforms the question of any subject's relation to language via Bakhtin's notion of discourse, i.e. the idea that language(s) are social-historical formations, rather than ahistorical structures (as in Saussure's view). In this sense, we can look at a majority of the school systems' approach to discourse, which are traditionally an historic one. This thinking needs revision. We need to change that approach to a socio-historic one. The way we approach literature must be done from a corrective position, re-gendering basic premises. The title of Irigaray's book, "This sex which is not one," makes use of the polyvalence of the French word, "sexe." As in English, in French "sexe" denotes both sexual category and the sexual activity. Irigaray plays on yet a third French meaning for the word -- the sexual organ, usually the penis. By a strange coincidence, the noun with its definite article, "le sexe" may be used to designate either "the fair sex" or "the penis." With such a title, Irigaray is pointing to the slippage between the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic which she plays off of in her resistant re-reading of Freud and the construction of the feminine. Irigaray's critique is more a narrative than a traditional expository analysis. With occasional irony, she retells the theorization of the female body and female sexuality and desire according to a masculine optic. The feminine is figured as an absence within the real as well as the imaginary and symbolic orders. She has neither penis, nor phallus nor the Father's name. Lacan's reading of the subject may de-essentialize gender. Yet, as Irigaray points out, his imaginary and symbolic are figured on a real physical object -- a "sexe" which no woman actually possesses. She has no singular, prized penis to erectly figure her interaction with the outside world. Her multiple, diffuse, tactile sexuality is eclipsed in the predominant phallic scoptophilia of western eroticism. Female desire is repressed from the cultural imaginary much as her physical body, seen in relation to the male sexual organ, is perceived as a passive negative space. Like Marx's money she does not signify independently, but as an exchange value, mediating and signifying male desire. Although she is not talking about the classroom or the intellectual, I think that Irigaray's narration can teach us a few things about our curricula, even beyond the scope of a feminist analysis. With her difficult style she reminds us that no rhetoric is neutral, rather, each rhetoric is fundamentally tied to a larger symbolic order which is in turn related to an imaginary and a real, which, as we know have no claims to impartiality. Although she is perhaps not the stylistic example each of us would wish to follow, Irigaray does exemplify the type of critic who considers and deploys within her own cultural work the theoretical reading which she perceives as influential. But what if the Symbolic could not speak everything of masculine desire? What if there were unspeakable aspects of masculinity, perhaps not officially recognized, but expressed nevertheless, especially in plastic and visual media? Here special semiotic effects could mimic dreamwork and evade conscious censorship by producing poetic, distorted, amusing, and ambiguous figures: the mythic realm of public dreaming, elaborating a cultural unconscious not confined to verbal language. As deconstructionists have shown, 'excess' is a precondition for any mode of inscription whatsoever, being generated in the relations between framing, framed and frame, and inevitably appearing as a partially occluded exteriority within texts. The following discussion clearly touches on this kind of textual excess and on the relations between it and the semiotic processes of the pre-linguistic subject (as theorized most notably by Kristeva). However, my focus here is primarily psychoanalytic and content-oriented, dealing with specific organ-symbols and metaphors which are excessive to the conventional representations of Man as a phallocentric, rational, unitary speaking subject. Insufficient attention has been paid to the limiting consequences of theorizing the unconscious in terms of linguistic principles like phonemic opposition. In claiming to 'return to Freud', Lacan imputes to the unconscious the very principles that Freud considered most alien to primary process thinking: the principles of difference, logical exclusion, noncontradiction. Teresa de Lauretis has convincingly delineated the limits of this model for film theory, arguing that semiotic theories of iconicity and narrativity can be of more use to feminist film critics, especially since binary oppositions (life/death, woman/man, human/non-human) are transgressed in contemporary cultural productions: "Boundaries are very much in question, and the old rites of passage no longer prevail". 4 Laura Mulvey has realized the deficiencies of the Lacanian model for understanding 'carnivalesque' imagery, grotesque, excessive, monstrous figurations and events, which transgress the purities of binary oppositions in the Symbolic, order. 5 Rather than adopt the term 'carnivalesque', I propose the more general word 'Mythic' for those semiotic productions which lay between the fixities of official language and law, and the unpredictabilities of the individual unconscious. Through the Mythic are selectively reproduced the metaphorical constellations that supplement rationalized discourses (the Symbolic). If the official language on gender is all about the differences of men from women, the unspeakable fantasies would likely include identifications of men with women, expressed for example in condensation images of bisexual character. Though bisexual figures are not the only form of masculine excess, they are particularly overdetermined as the underside of an ideology that scrupulously represses any suggestions of femininity in masculine subjects. The Lacanian model entered feminist film theory largely through Laura Mulvey's 1975 article "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema". In the Mulveyan argument, Man, the possessor of the penis, is assured access to the Symbolic and mastery of the gaze (assumed to be phallic), while Woman, defined by her lack of the significant organ, occupies an ambiguous place. Her exclusion from the Symbolic means she is not completely defined by its categories: she is therefore excess to this order. Her placement as the object rather than the agent of the gaze makes passive but also threatening: as the sex which lacks the phallus, the woman, fetishized as image, reminds man of the danger of castration, and may therefore signify the phallus. Not fixed within the Symbolic, woman may be depicted as monstrous, and if she becomes the agent the look, she may be punished for exceeding her confined role as image. According to Williams, the woman's look in horror films raises both of these possibilities: on the one hand, the dreadful sight of the monster seems a punishment for her active looking, but on the other hand - and Williams considers this predominant - a peculiar sympathy may flow between woman and monster, signifying a mutual recognition that each is a threatening potency united in their monstrous difference from phallic masculinity and the Symbolic order each is "powerful in a different way". Rejecting interpretations of monstrosity as an "eruption of the normally repressed sexuality of the civilized male (the monster as double for the male viewer and characters in the film)", Williams is led by the Lacanian scheme to insist that any difference be interpreted as sexual difference. The monster's power, she writes, "is one of sexual difference from the normal male; "it represents the "potency of a different kind of sexuality". Finally, in a move that forecloses inquiry into possible masculine deviations from the sexuality of "the normal male", or into potent sexualities from a time before differences were fixed into a two-gender system, the monster is interpreted as a "double for the woman". (97). Film itself forms part of this elaborated fantasy of rebirth through enlightenment, consisting as it does in the sutured-together remains of past lives reanimated in light-play: cinema as Frankensteinian monster. The lumen is a highly overdetermined cinematic figure, likely to appear in almost any film in one guise or another because of its profound poetic resonances with many aspects of cinema itself. Each cell of film might be considered a lumen, a passage from light to half-life. The screen itself is a lumen, a light-hole in the dark, a window into another (luminous) reality, but at the same moment a screen on which to optically re-activate (by speedy projection from the rear) the photochemical traces of past lives. Mulvey concludes by saying that the language-centered model of sexual difference has helped critics decipher the Symbolic operations mediating gendered subjectivity in realist narratives where 'Woman' constitutes the trouble in the text. But this model obscures more than it clarifies the eroticisms of Mythic texts, where the substitution of a monster or woman-figure for the masculine psyche, and the use of special effects are among the tactics deployed to express masculine fantasies and unspeakable 'truths' excessive to official discourses on gender and cultural production. Excessive aspects of masculinity referred to here include pre-Oedipal significations of the phallus, oral and vaginal associations of vision, fertility fantasies of rebirth through enlightenment, and the perverse pleasures of sublimation. Other areas for investigation include homoeroticism and polymorphous figures that aren't 'bisexual' (164). "Failure to distinguish between feminine and masculine femininities and maternal figures can result in misreadings of masculine perversity as feminist progress. That which is excessive is not necessarily undecidable, and the undecidable need not be subversive. Undecidability and monstrous excess may well strain the fabric of Symbolic representation, and threaten to disrupt official discourses on masculinity, without thereby discomforting adherents to fantasies of artificial regeneration and technological maternity played out by corporate powers. When it comes to matters of technology, sexual difference has been superseded by a spectre of autogamous masculine motherhood, but the two-gender model persists nevertheless as a mystifying cover story to defer and deflect critical scrutiny of socially valued perversions (sublimations). How ideologically convenient it is if even feminist critics compulsively place the undecidable on the side of Woman, and how politically dangerous, if by slipshod thought this undecidable textual femininity is equated with the incoherent discourse of actual women" (197). "Television, particularly American Television, Julia Kristeva says, "works the same way" (129). We have long been indoctrinated toward such gender biases. The change necessary for right-thinking, a disengendered approach must begin with the language itself. The logical place to begin this linguistic endeavor is in the schools. Not at a university level, we have that already, we must begin this linguistic disengendering in the grades. As early as children learn to read, we must teach them to re-interpret what they read, not to change the texts themselves, but to "center" their view of male-female approach. This we must do in order that we may enlighten ourselves and others as to some of literature's more obscure components, so that subsequent cultural interventions can decisively challenge the latencies as well as the manifest surfaces of oppressive and life-destroying cultural tendencies. In any case, we remind ourselves that subversiveness, like beauty - and monstrosity - is less a property of the text than of its beholder. A need to retrain that "beholder" is clearly evident and the point of beginning should be at the earliest opportunity. It is the school's job to teach students to think. Teachers have long directed students in what they think about, that is the nature of curricula. Now however, we need to teach them how to think about that subject matter, especially in literature, where these gender biases are reflected historically throughout our great literature. We must remind ourselves however, of the care we must take in doing such. We don't want to throw the baby out with the bath water. Great care must be taken that we do not subvert the text. We need to empower our students with the ability to internalize this ability of correction. That can only be done with a linguistic approach, as the French Feminists have so ardently and eloquently demonstrated here. A beginning has been made. School curricula have begun concerning themselves with multi-cultural diversity. We need to include this linguistic de-gendering as a part of that impetus. Works Cited Cixous, Helene. "The Laugh of the Medusa." In Elaine Marks and Isabelle De Courtivron,eds.; New French Feminisms. Brighton: Harvester, 1981. Fraser, Nancy and Sandra Lee Bartky, eds. Revaluing French Feminism: Critical Essays on Difference, Agency, and Culture. Bloomington and Indianapolis: 1992, University of Indiana Press. Grosz, Elizabeth. Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists. Sidney: 1989, Allen and Unwin. Irigaray, Luce. The Sex Which is Not One. Ithaca: 1985, Cornell University Press. Irigaray, Luce. Speculum of the Other Woman. Ithaca: 1985, Cornell University Press. Irigaray, Luce. An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Ithaca: 1993, Cornell University Press. Irigaray, Luce. je, tu, nous: Toward a Culture of Difference. New York: 1993, Routledge. Kristeva, Julia. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. New York: 1980, Columbia University Press. Kristiva, Julia.. Revolution in Poetic Language. New York: 1984, Columbia University Press. Marks, Elaine and Isabelle De Courtivron. New French Feminisms. Brighton: 1981, Harvester. Moi, Toril. Sexual/Textual Politics. London: 1985, Methuen. Nye, Andrea. Woman clothed with the sun: Julia Kristeva and the escape from/to language. London: 1987, Columbia. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty."French feminism in an international frame." New York: 1981,Yale French Studies, 62:154-84. Halimi, Gisele. La cause des femmes. Paris: 1973, Grasset & Fasquelle. Sagan, Francoise. Un certain sourire. Paris: 1956, Julliard.