Page 132 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

FEMINISM AND CULTURAL POLITICS

a sense, after our revolution, and it reveals the tensions in the women’s
movement between those who would stay outside the academic
establishments and the institutions of criticism and those who would
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enter and even conquer them”. This is, perhaps, fair comment on
the difference between those such as Showalter, who have certainly
stooped to conquer, and those other American writers such as Mary
Daly, who most certainly have not. But it fails to explain that between
Showalter and Kristeva, for both of whom a central frame of reference
was that provided by the intellectual norms of the relevant national
intellectual culture and the relevant national academic institutions.
As to the politics of cultural realism and modernism, it seems to
me that no necessary relationship actually exists between either and
feminism, or, for that matter, between either and socialism. Both are
capable of subversive effect, but neither inherently so. As Juliet Mitchell
quite rightly observes, Kristeva’s choice of exclusively masculine, and
often proto-fascist, texts, was essentially apolitical: “Disruption itself
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can be…from the right as easily as from the left”. The political
potential of representational and non-representational cultural forms
is much more obviously determined by their immediate socio-political
context than by any immanently textual properties they may each
possess. The gendered nature of our cultures seems to me indisputable,
but this is as true of our modernismsas of our realisms. As Janet Wolff
has astutely observed, the feminine stroller, the “flâneuse” as distinct
from the Baudelaire’s masculine “flâneur”, has no place in literary
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modernism. And the “founding monuments” of modernist painting
appear similarly masculinist in provenance. In any case, the Kristevan
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programme at its fullest reach, in its positive insistence on the necessarily
subversive powers of the semiotic, seems to me clearly misleading.
For, as Mitchell argues: “the only way you can challenge the church,
challenge both the Oedipal and its pre-Oedipal, is from within an
alternative symbolic universe… So that politically speaking, it is only
the symbolic, a new symbolism, a new law, that can challenge the
dominant law”. 64
For Mitchell herself the decentring of the (bourgeois/patriarchal)
subject produces, not the end of the subject as such, but “a heterogeneous
area of the subject-in-process”. She adds: “in the process of becoming
what? In deconstructing…history, we can only construct other histories.
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What are we in the process of becoming?”. The short answer is that
different feminists are in the process of becoming different things,

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