Page 136 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

FEMINISM AND POST-STRUCTURALISM

shift from a discourse of textual value, whether of greatness or political
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correctness, would be a positive step”. Laura Kipnis, the American
feminist video artist, has astutely observed that “the policies of écriture
feminine and its practice of displacing politics to the aesthetic refer us
back to that very modernist tradition that these…theorists are presumed
to transcend; …their repudiation of representation, subjectivity, and
history clearly set up the same antinomies with the popular that
constituted aesthetic modernism from its inception”. Moreover, as
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Kipnis again rather astutely observes, this particular “configuration
of politics, aesthetics, and theoretical autonomy” is not only generally
modernist in character, it also much more specifically replicates the
theoretical contours of an earlier Western Marxist enthusiasm for
modernism. 82
Kipnis herself proceeds to counterpose a postmodernist
“renegotiation of the popular” to the “avant-gardist strategies of
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negation” which underlie French feminist theory; and to argue that
feminism must understand the popular as an access to hegemony
rather than simply as an instrument of domination. The general failure
to explore the political implications of postmodernism as distinct
from modernism, she concludes, has allowed American anti-feminism,
as represented for example by Phyllis Schafly, successfully to re-articulate
the rhetoric of empowerment so as to produce a popular women’s
mobilization against the Equal Rights Amendment. Kipnis’s argument
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seems to me as pertinent to Britain as it is to the United States. Whatever
may be true of malestream post-structuralism, Kristeva, Irigaray and
Cixous remain committed to the archetypically modernist notion that
modern life can indeed be redeemed through high culture, through
writerly writing, in fact. This is an aestheticized redemptive politics,
certainly, but it is still nonetheless a redemptive politics, and is as such
quite distinct from the work both of Derrida and of the later Barthes.
The theoretico-political import of post-structuralist feminism is thus
ironically much more akin to that of the Frankfurt School than to late
Barthesian hedonism: interestingly, Sigrid Weigel has drawn attention
to the theoretical affinities between Kristevan semiotics and Benjamin’s
concept of the “dialectical image”. 85
This kinship is as much contextual as textual, especially so insofar
as their anglophone receptions are concerned, as distinct from their
variously continental European points of origin. In both cases, the moment
of reception is structured by the immediate prehistories of the New

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