Page 69 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

NAMING THE PROBLEM 63

versions in effect cash out the unconscious into the rational and the deliberate,
producing a deterministic and thoroughly efficacious portrait of social agency.
‘What distinguishes psychoanalysis from sociological accounts of gender,’
writes Jacqueline Rose, ‘is that whereas for the latter, the internalization of
norms is assumed roughly to work, the basic premise and indeed starting-point
of psychoanalysis is that it does not’ (1986:90). What Rose’s position suggests is
that there should no longer be an unproblematic adherence to conspiracy theories
of patriarchal history, for the concept of the unconscious will always implicitly
call into question the picture of a conscious, coherent and entirely efficacious
conspiracy. In this way, the accusation of using a conspiracy theory has joined that
list of untenable feminist positions which includes essentialism and
functionalism, marking a boundary between sophistication and vulgarity—
indeed, the very mention of the word ‘conspiracy’ is often enough to end
discussion.
Viewed from the other side of the divide, however, it is academic feminism
which is the problem. Some feminists have even characterized post-structuralism
itself as a cunning conspiracy by male theorists and their female dupes. Just
when women as subjects were beginning to receive attention from historians, the
argument goes, along came poststructuralism which ‘conveniently’ announced
that the subject was a fiction anyway (Moore and Looser, 1993; Waugh, 1992).
The accusation of a conspiracy of theory speaks of the divide between feminists
who concentrate on the literal and material dimensions of male oppression in
cases such as pornography and rape, and those theorists whose emphasis is on
the figurative and the representational. In the introduction to Bodies that Matter,
Judith Butler talks about ‘the exasperated debate which many of us have tired of
hearing’. Butler is referring to stock criticisms of poststracturalism—such as ‘If
everything is discourse, what about the body?’—in which the kind of insistence
on the literal which we saw in Wolf prevents any discussion of the way in which
the very construction of the limit category of the material is caught up in a series
of powerful political exclusions (1993:6). For Butler, what is to count as the
material can never be guaranteed in advance.
What really exasperates Butler, however, is ‘when construction is figuratively
reduced to a verbal action which appears to presuppose a subject’, leading
‘critics working within such presumptions…to say, “If gender is constructed,
then who is doing the constructing?” ‘In other words, ‘where there is activity,
there lurks behind it an initiating and wilful subject’, and, Butler continues, on
such a view ‘discourse or language or the social becomes personified’ (1993:6–
9). In effect, Butler is taking issue with the tendency of feminists like Wolf to
find deliberate conspirators lurking behind any social processes. Butler’s focus
on the trope of prosopopeia is, as we have seen, born out in the case of The
Beauty Myth. Yet what Butler fails to take into account in her argument against
the personification of agency is any sense of the narrative pleasures which it
affords. The prose of Friedan, Wolf and Faludi offers some of the dramatic
popular pleasures associated with the plots, characters and scenarios of thrillers.