The Trouble with Subjects: Feminism, Marxism and the Questions of Poststructuralism ELEANOR MACDONALD Introduction A prominent theme of poststructuralist theory is that the "subject" is a problematic concept. In taking this position, poststructuralism is not alone. 1 The status of the subject has long been at issue in Marxist debates about ideology, agency, structure, interests, and representation, to name only a few. Feminist theory, too, has challenged the notion of the subject in its attention to questions of identity, gender, rationality, and individuality. In the shared questioning of the subject, poststructuralist theorists, Marxists, and feminists have occasionally discovered affinity in their intellectual projects. The common problematization of the subject, then, provides an interesting opportunity to evaluate poststructuralist theory in its relationship to feminist and Marxist political concerns. On the one hand, feminism and Marxism are motivated by a need to resolve certain theoretical questions concerning the subject in order to facilitate social change. Poststructuralism, on the other hand, tends to be cynical about the possibility of social change, or of any link between theoretical understanding and change. But poststructuralist theory is not monolithic either, and the different positions taken by such thinkers as Jacques Lacan, Iulia Kriste'ia, Jacques Demda and Michel Foucault are Studies in Political Economy 35, Summer 1991 43
Studies in Political Economy useful in initiating discussion about the subject which may, in turn, prove useful for feminism and Marxism.s My intention here is to explore the problematization of the subject by examining its implications for Marxist and feminist theory and their relationship to poststructuralist theory. In the first section of the paper, I schematically lay out the reasons why the subject has always been problematic for feminist and Marxist theorists. My concern in providing a brief summation of some of the issues involved is not to enter into the debates within Marxist or feminist theory about the subject, rationality, or social change. Rather, my point is simply to suggest the myriad ways in which the subject has arisen as a concern within these theoretical problematics. The second section of the paper is devoted to explaining the way in which the subject has been theorized by poststructuralists. I found it useful to make a distinction between poststructuralist theories which base their deconstruction of the subject on language (Lacan, Derrida, Kristeva have been chosen for examples), and the work of Foucault, also a poststructuralist, whose ideas concerning the subject are less concerned with the structure of language than with his notions of discourse and his understanding of power. The particular ways in which poststructuralism treats the subject are instructive about the broader themes of poststructuralist thought, and helpful for a discussion of the relationship between poststructuralism and politics. In the final section of the paper, I conclude by indicating some parallel treatments of the subject by poststructuralist theorists on the one hand, and Marxist and feminist theorists on the other. I argue that the recovery of a "subject" in some form is one aspect of all of these theories, but the ways in which this is accomplished and grounded have important political implications which we would do well to recognize. The Subject in Question What is challenged in the poststructuralist, feminist and Marxist critiques of subjectivity is what is often called the "Cartesian subject." Descartes, writing at a time in history when the grounding of the subject in relation to God and Ie\igious\~ sanctioned 44
MacDonald/Subjects social hierarchies had lost its hold, sought to reestablish the subject's self-certainty. He did this by asserting the ability of subjects to reason their own existence. Out of this arose a theory of the subject as unitary, autonomous, individualist, and rational. The subject's use of reason, as Descartes described it, presumed the possibility of an unproblematic relationship between reality and its accurate representation in thought. This reality was not a sensory one, but one dependent upon logic. And Descartes' emphasis on reason corresponded to the self-understanding of the new political actor - the economic maximizer, the rational selfinterested choice-maker. As an autonomous and rational subject, this actor had control over and made the decisions which shaped the political world. Within a liberal model of politics, this view of the subject still prevails. Outside the liberal problematic, the situation is different, and this faith in the subject's autonomy, rationality, and representation has been thrown into doubt. The history of Marxist theory, for example, can be characterized as one of internal debate over such issues as economic and structural determination versus class struggle and revolution, the ideological mystification of commodities and capitalist relations against the scientific truth or critical reflexivity of Marxist analysis, and mass struggle versus the need for a vanguard party or "organic" intellectual leadership. A cursory review of some of the debates within Marxism is useful in revealing some of the implications of a non- Cartesian view of the subject. Marxist theory, for example, in its discussion of ideology, has thrown questions of representation and rationality into doubt. Marx's analysis of commodity fetishism, and of surplus labour, portrayed an essential mystification between reality and appearance, between reality and its representation in thought} This distortion of representation, and the impossibility of disinterested representation, contradicted faith in any unmediated relationship between subjects and their world.f Additionally, the individualism of the Cartesian subject was undermined in Marx's ambivalent positing either of class as the significant agent for social change, or of the dynamics of capital as required for that change. The question 45
Studies in Political Economy of the subject's identity was initially understood as given in Marxist analysis - the subject's class membership settled the issue. But the reluctance of workers to assume the mantle of a revolutionary class raised serious doubts about class consciousness and its role in social change. So, too, did the importance of a Marxist analysis for the Marxist project suggest the importance of the party and of intellectuals in leading revolutionary change. That is, in debates over class consciousness, some theorists suggested that it did not arise spontaneously, but only as a result of party formation, class leadership, or the conscious creation by an enlightened cadre of a successful "counter-hegemonic" position. Lenin's work was seen to privilege some subjects, the revolutionary vanguard, over others.s Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony further developed the theorization of the subject. His discussion of "subjectivities" and of "organic" intellectuals problematized questions of common-sense, individual choice, and individual coherence in the making of revolutionary subjects.f More recently, Adam Przeworski has discussed the significant role of the party in class formation, especially in the weakening of class composition through the alliance building and reformism of the welfare state," When the Frankfurt School attempted to synthesize Freudian psychoanalysis with Marxist politics, new debates emerged. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer despaired of the possibility of a revolutionary subject, and turned instead to theorizing the prospects for a type of reason which could supplant the instrumental reason of the Enlightenment.f Herbert Marcuse still fostered revolutionary dreams but turned to student and Third World movements to find his revolutionary subject.? Louis Althusser adapted structuralism to the Marxist project, theorizing the constitution of subjects through ideological state apparatuses, and positing the relative autonomy of the state from the economy in order to account for the distinction between knowledge (which was ideological) and reality. While Althusser's work apparently deprived the subject-person of an important role in social change, his ideas also transferred the ideal of the subject (its rationality and agency) onto the social and economic struc- 46
MacDonald/Subjects tures.l? E.P. Thompson formulated a "humanist" rejoinder to Althusser which returned agency and reason to the subject (the working class), and which privileged experience and activity as the sources from which a "truer" reason and political action might emerge.u In each of these constructions of the subject, and many others, some aspect of the Cartesian subject is disputed, while belief in the Cartesian subject is often explained as conducive to the maintenance of capitalism. Much feminist theory has also had occasion to question Descartes' view of the subject. Descartes' subject, many feminists point out, is a masculine one, both in his ability to exercise an autonomy and individuality that were only the prerogative of men, and in the values of superiority that were assigned to those terms. 12 Women's experience of reality, according to a wide range of theorists, is more relational and "connected" than men's, and thus gives rise to different values and politics.u Furthermore, since the Cartesian subject can only truly act according to the principles of autonomy and reason in the public world, the affective world of private life is denied or devalued, as are women's lives, generally more embedded in the private sphere. The contention that the Cartesian subject is an already gendered subject has raised another issue of concern to feminists. How do individuals become gendered, and how has a hierarchy of values been assigned to those genders? Not only is the devaluation of women and femininity oppressive, but so is gender itself, since it entails the assignation of social relevance to sexual differences. The problematization of an aspect of the subject's self-understanding at the very basic level of gender identity served to undercut all Cartesian confidence in the subject's origin as lying in herself and not in the world outside. Many feminists have thus taken up a position against the Cartesian subject, precisely because they have not been able to accept the belief in the subject's conscious self-creation, nor the idea that gender identity or gender attributes are grounded in any sexually determined essence.l" One of the most fruitful arenas in which feminism has explored the constitution of gender and of the gendered 47
Studies in Political Economy subject has been psychoanalytic theory. Juliet Mitchell's attempt to "save Freud for feminism" was based on a recognition that Freud's theory of the unconscious provided a useful description of the internalization (in the unconscious) of misogyny, in both men and women, and the consequent implications of that for feminism.p Nancy Chodorow's work, modelled on the object relations school of psychoanalysis, illustrates the ways in which the relations of mothers to infants produce different types of subjects. Women, according to Chodorow, experience the world more in relational terms, as a result of the way in which they were mothered.if They are less likely than men, she suggests, to feel their identity as fixed or autonomous, and are inclined to have a fluid, not wholly determined sense of themselves. Carol Gilligan makes use of Chodorow's work in order to show how the female subject, as a result of this early formation, is predisposed to have ethical interpretations of the world and moral responses which are different from those of men.l? Jessica Benjamin develops Chodorow's ideas to explain how women are likely to become complicit in, even possibly desirous of, their own oppression. IS The issue of identity has also been important for feminist theory as it grapples not only with its relation to class politics, but also the politics of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, location, and so forth. To speak as a feminist has sometimes been to privilege gender politics over other kinds of politics, and has often, therefore, served to exclude other identities.l? To speak as a "woman," on behalf of women, has also been, in many cases to universalize what being a woman is and - most often - to attempt to treat the white, middle class, educated, North American woman as the universal subject of feminist politics. Feminist and Marxist debates about the subject thus reveal the profoundly political implications of discarding Descartes' assumptions about individualism, rationality, autonomy and essential humanism. These theories, in various ways, have problematized some aspects of the Cartesian subject. And yet, it is also plain that feminism and Marxism are not willing to abandon the subject altogether. The project of "putting the subject into question" has a 48
MacDonald/SubJects political purpose, which is often to empower the subject through an increase in his or her ability to act, to reason, to be aware of his or her creation, and therefore to increase the subject's own capacity for self-creation. The criticism of the Cartesian subject is spurred, in part, by a desire still to be a subject, often with the recognition that the ability to act as a subject, however deceptive that may be or has been, is an ability which has rarely been exercised by the majority of people. As radical, therefore, as this subjectcritique may be, the general impulse of Marxism and feminism has been to retain some faith in agency, truth, and the power of collective action. As Nancy Hartsock, speaking from a socialist feminist position, has asked in a trenchant critique of the poststructuralist theorization of the subject, Why is it, just at the moment in Westernhistory when previously silenced populations have begun to speak for themselves and on behalf of their subjectivities, that the concept of the subject and the possibility of discovering/creating a liberating 'truth' become suspect?20 Poststructuralism 1. The Subject in Language While feminist and Marxist theorists debate the political problematization of the subject, it is poststructuralist theory which has become notorious for its depiction of the fractured subject, the death of the subject, the dispersal of subjectivities, the subject traversed by discourses and so forth. The political impetus for these theorizations of the subject is less apparent than in Marxist and feminist accounts, but the determination of the analyses to destroy all faith in the notion of the subject is clearly more intense. Overwhelmingly, the direction of poststructuralist thought has been to emphasize the "constituted" nature of the subject - not merely of aspects of the subject (e.g. its location at the individual level, its supposed autonomy, integrity, or rationality), but the very constitution of subjectivity per se. In locating this process of constitution at the level of language structure and acquisition, poststructuralist theory indicates both the inevitability of experiencing "subject-ness" and also its equally unavoidable emptiness. This 49
Studies in Political Economy double problem of the subject can be seen in a consideration of the poststructuralist theories of Lacan, Derrida and Kristeva, For each of these theorists, language is the point of departure in the formation of the subject. Lacan's reading of Freud is often credited with initiating poststructuralism's recasting of the theory of subjectivity. His work is an attempt to combine Freudian psychoanalysis with Saussurian linguistics, locating the formation of the unconscious in linguistic structures. According to Lacan, the subject is inherently nonidentical with itself, and in a chronic state of denying its own fractured and non-selfidentical existence. Subjectivity, he posits, is a fictional construct of language, the result of two factors. First, the immaturity of the human infant leads it, during its development, to deny its dependence and incoherence by projecting an image of itself onto others (and most specifically onto the mother) whom it sees as being autonomous and complete. This projection of the imagined coherence of the other onto the self creates an "Ideal-I,' a "fictional" subject, and in taking this inevitable step in human maturation, the child enters into the realm which Lacan calls "the Imaginary." This form would have to be called the Ideal-I if we wished to incorporate it into our usual register, in the sense that it will also be the source of secondary identifications, under which term I would place the functions of libidinal normalization, But the important point is that this form situates the agency of the ego, before its social determination, in a fictional direction, which will always remain irreducible alone, or rather, which will only rejoin the coming-into-being of the subject asymptotically, whatever the success of the dialectical synthesis by which he must resolve as "I" his discordance with his own reality.21 This "imaginary" construction of itself and others is supported by structures of language, which reinforce the fiction of the subject by denying the inherent and necessary split in the linguistic representation of objects. That is, in using language, it is always assumed that the word bears some kind of direct relationship to its referent. This assumption came under scrutiny in Saussurian linguistic theory, which made distinctions among the signifier (the word) and the signified (the concept, or the object of reference). The 50
MacDonald/Subjects child's "Ideal-I," or projection of an image onto itself lays the ground for its acquisition of language, and the projection of an ideal completion of the signified in the signifier. Lacan calls the entry of the child into language the entry into the Symbolic. The child represses the infantile Imaginary, in which it is completely identified with the other, and assumes its own subjectivity in the acquisition of language. This shift to the Symbolic occurs because, despite its original identification with the mother, the child cannot help but experience its growing separation from her as a lack. Speech is therefore, first, the expression of demand. And because speech always falls short of what is needed, (the signifier can never fully express the signified, the lacking object), the lack persists. This continuous lack is desire. And it is the cumulative effect of continued unsatisfied and unsatisfiable desire that gives the self its continuity.22 The subject is therefore split - it lacks the completion and sense of wholeness it most wants - and yet it is this very lack, and the continual reinforcement of this lack, which produces something which we recognize as a subject. 23 The order of language, and especially its intrinsic dissimulation (the necessary presentation of words as if they had an unproblematic and direct reference to their objects), determine the structures of the child's unconscious. The desire of the child to be whole and self-certain appears to be accomplished in language (because of language's ability to deny the split between the signifier and the signified) but not without denying and repressing its own sense of a loss of completeness. The project of Lacanian psychoanalysis is not to establish the subject as a freer or less neurotic person, but to recover a knowledge of the uncontrolled, pre-linguistic non-subject, that is the primary condition of all humanity.24 Jacques Derrida's work has also deconstructed the subject through an analysis of language. He differs from Lacan in focussing not on the psychological processes of language acquisition but rather on the dividing and dissembling nature of language itself. According to Derrida, language depends upon the very thing that its appearance of referentiality denies, which he calls differance. Differance refers to what 51
Studies in Political Economy language depends upon - both the need to differentiate among objects (to make distinctions), and the need to defer temporally, across time. That is, language never actually refers to objects or concepts, but can only arise because of the differences among and between objects. Differences among objects are what give them their meaning, and this meaning is in constant flux because of the changing relationships among objects over time and space. Language, however, can never capture differance, since it is constituted as reference, as the reference of a word to an object. 25 Derrida writes differance with an "a" (rather than difference with an "e") because its distinctiveness as a term is then one that can only be registered in writing and not in pronunciation (phonetically). He makes this distinction because he wishes to make a point about language generally, that is that language has a tendency to privilege presence, such as the presence of the speaking subject, over absence, including historical absence or loss. The present speaker gives an authenticity to language's referentiality which, he claims, is diminished in writing, with the loss of certainty as to authorship or audience. As well, language privileges identity (the identification of the signifier with the signified, and the identification of signifieds which have the same signifier, i.e. members of a category) over non-identity or differences - on which indeed the appearance of identity depends. The notion of the subject acts as a foundation in this dissemblance of language concerning itself, its operations and its origins. Subjects are constituted by language and in their constitution as such, contribute to and continue in language's mystification of differance. In writing about his project of "grammatology" (the study of the history of the gramme, or of differance), Derrida shows how his project and its understanding of language is subversive of humanism, scientific epistemology, and linear forms of rationality. Differance, he hopes, will introduce new ways of thinking that are "pluridimensional," "non-linear," and therefore revolutionary in their concepts of humanity. 52
MacDonald/Subjects The access to pluridimensionality and to delinearized temporality is not a simple regression toward the "mythogram"; on the contrary, it makes all the rationality subjected to the linear model appear as another form and another age of mythography. The meta-rationality or the meta-scientificity which are thus announced within the meditation upon writing can therefore be no more shut up within a science of man than conform to the traditional idea of science. In one and the same gesture they leave man, science, and the line behind.26 Julia Kristeva also takes up the project of the subversion of Western thought and of the Cartesian subject. In her writing, Kristeva attempts to link the analysis of language and of signs to the biological drives discussed by Freud, and the biological experiences (especially of being mothered) in early childhood. To do so, she connects the divided subject (conscious/unconscious) of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis to the divided sign (signifier/signified) of Saussurian linguistics. This connection allows her to suggest that there is a possible interplay between unconscious, biological drives and experiences, on the one hand, and signifying operations (naming, providing meaning) on the other hand. The determinant character of signification over experience, in her analysis, precludes any kind of reciprocal, mutual influence. "The point," she maintains, "is not to replace the semiotics of signifying systems by considerations on the biological code appropriate to those employing them - a tautological exercise, after all, since the biological code has been modelled on the language system."27 Nevertheless, the quality of biological drives, both in their multiplicity and heterogeneity, and in their quest for pleasure, indicate that they have the ability to disrupt the dominant signifying system. Kristeva calls this system, after Lacan, the Symbolic, and like Lacan, criticizes the subject which has been constructed in it. But disruption of the Symbolic is possible, she suggests, when the unconscious, biological subject is expressed through other signifying practices, such as rhythm, music, dance, and poetry, a realm of expression which Kristeva calls the Semiotic. The origin of the Semiotic is in the early pre-oedipal attachment to one's mother, re-experienced by the adult woman in her 53
Studies in Political Economy own desire to become a mother. This desire, Kristeva expresses as "a whirl of words, a complete absence of meaning and seeing; it is feeling, displacement, rhythm, sound, flashes, and a fantasied clinging to the maternal body as a screen against the plunge. "28 Kristeva's deconstruction of the Symbolic subject, and her advocacy of a revolution in poetic language is proffered in the hope that poetic language would put a heterogeneous self in the place of the unitary subject. It [poetic language] implicates a knowing subject within an analytic relationship to language, within a constant questioning of the symbolic and its subject, within a perpetual struggle with no possible philosophical relaxation. Such a discourse announces what seems required by an eventual ideological renewal: the awakening of subjects.29 The poststructuralist account of the subject's constitution in language thus takes a variety of forms. There are, however, similarities to be found among all of these accounts. For example, for each of these theorists, the perspective from which the subject is deconstructed must be created from a position outside that subjectivity. They are non-selfreflexive about their ability to theorize outside of the limitations on the subject which they present. Moreover, each deconstructive perspective privileges one element of an "external" subjectivity, as it were, a subject position outside of the recognized borders of the subject. For example, Lacan calls upon a structural explanation, in which the structures of the conscious/unconscious can be known and the ego's subjectivity understood as a product of such structures. Derrida's theory requires that we look at language itself as a system which effaces its origins and the conditions of its own sense. The logic of difrrance, or of the supplement, as he calls it, calls us to partake in a rationality in which our everyday reason, and our everyday subject-ness are implicated. And Kristeva's 'deconstruction of the subject ultimately posits the priority of another subject - one which is heterogeneous and creative, as well as being able to encompass language in its rhythmic, poetic state. 54
MacDonald/Subjects The ability of these theorists to speak from outside subjectivity, from a superior rationality, or from alternative experiences, is interesting on several counts. One problem with these critiques of the subject is, ironically, that they may not be able to withstand their own criticisms of "traditional" theory, and so can themselves be subjected to a form of immanent critique. For example, if Derrida's assertion of a primary condition of language, which language denies, is true, then surely this is also something which could be discovered and demonstrated within the very form of logic and rationality which he denounces (i.e. that of language). He offers an interpretation of reality which he suggests is an accurate account of reality, and therefore he leaves his work open to the same type of critique he makes against Cartesian rationality, that attempts to reflect reality in reason are destined to failure. Similarly, Kristeva's critique of the subject and symbolic meaning asserts that all meaning belongs to the level of signification and the Symbolic. Despite this, her valorization of the Semiotic depends on treating as essential certain meanings in the pre-oedipal experience, meanings that can then be expressed through non-symbolic forms such as music and dance. Lacanian psychoanalysis provides a critique of the subject which, it is hoped, will cause us to question our faith in an original autonomous subject, present at birth. Lacan presents the subject as fiction, the truth of language as a dissemblance of desire - and yet persuades us of the critical necessity of this revelation through traditional logic. This is a logic, moreover, which speaks of the universality of the human condition and its truths. An additional disturbing feature of these critiques, therefore, is that their analysis of the subject is non-historical and culturally non-specified. The type of subject which language creates is inseparable from the fact of language itself, even where it can be differently disguised in different languages. The problem which they are discussing then becomes an endemic feature of the human condition. Indeed, it becomes as universalized, non-relational, and rationally discoverable as the Cartesian subject itself, something which their critiques of the subject do not reflect. 55
Studies in Political Economy The universalization of the Cartesian subject, and its generalization across time has implications as well for the subversive character of the poststructuralist theories which denounce it. Their critiques are both privileged and of dubious effectiveness. While Lacanian or Kristevan psychoanalytic treatment might be capable of producing a "heterogeneous self' who recognizes an inner capacity to experience outside the symbolic, this is unlikely to become a generalizable experience. Even less likely is the prospect that we shall all embark upon Derridean textual deconstructions in order to reveal the production of meanings within texts and the necessity of undermining their arbitrary boundaries. These subversions of the subject are not only limited because of a lack of access. They are also limited because their very nature is reactive. Derrida can only deconstruct texts, he cannot create them. Differance is always only a play on existing texts, and a transformation of them which reveals the "truths" of differance. Kristeva, too, knows that once the heterogeneous biological impulses she postulates are spoken of, they are lost for their radical moment. "As soon as it [the semiotic] speaks about it [these biological operations], it homogenizes the phenomenon, links it with a system, loses hold of it."30 The dominance of significations can be challenged, therefore, but it can never be replaced. There is, outside of logic, no escape from existing texts or existing psychic structures. For Lacan, the relationship to others is given in its significance already. For Derrida, the relationships of difference among things, that differance which language requires but never reveals, is also already established and inaccessible to intervention or critique. Finally, what this suggests is that within the broader critique of the subject, of Cartesian rationality, or of language, no other distinctions can be made. As each text or symbol is scrutinized for its participation in the larger system (and there are unique contributions made on these counts) no evaluation of the particular relationships among texts is attempted. The subjectivity of, for example, a white, North American, male who is head of a corporation is not under- 56
MacDonald/SubJects stood differently from the subjectivities of the immigrant women of colour who are his employees, and who may assert their subjectivity, their agency and rationality, in order to organize for their own class, race, and gender interests against their employer. In the final section of the paper, I will be returning to these critiques. Before doing so, it is useful to consider the work of Michel Foucault, also a poststructuralist theorist who has made unique contributions to the question of the subject. Poststructuralism 2: The Subject in Discourse Michel Foucault's work stands slightly apart from that of the other poststructuralists. For one thing, his work does theorize about the production of different kinds of subjects, and he discusses their production in historical terms. His ability to do this is a result of his use of the concept "discourse," as opposed to the emphasis of the other poststructuralist theorists on language itself. Foucault developed his notion of "discourse" first in his earlier studies of psychology, madness, and health, studies in which he describes his methodology as a form of "archeology." His intent was to suspend the kinds of questions which had been asked about previous discourses, about their truth-value, about scientific progress within them, or about their hidden meanings. Instead, Foucault wanted simply to present discourses as surface phenomena. He proposed discursive analysis as a way of studying how different statements and practices produce different subjectivities. With this aim, he catalogued a history of insanity in Madness and Civilization,31 and a history of medical treatment in The Birth of the Clinic.32 By the time he wrote The Order of Things, he was prepared to argue that the discourses which he was surveying could be grouped into three historical epochs: the Renaissance, the Classical Age, and the Modern Age. Each of these "epistemes," as he referred to them, contained its own internal logic, and obeyed its own rules in the production of discourses and therefore, in the discursive production of subjects. The Renaissance Age was characterized by a logic of resemblance, the Classical Age 57 - ~- -----------------------
Studies in Political Economy by a logic of representation, and the Modern age by the logic surrounding "man," or the subject. This last age, which Foucault dated from the French Revolution, is one already characterized by the antinomies highlighted in poststructuralist (and, as I argued in the early section of this paper, Marxist and feminist) thought. [Ethnology and psychoanalysis never] come near to a general concept of man: at no moment do they come near to isolating a quality in him that is specific, irreducible and uniformly valid wherever he is given experience... Not only are they able to do without the concept of man, they are also unable to pass through it, for they always address themselves to that which constitutes his outer limits... [S]ince Totem and Taboo, the establishment of a common field for these two, the possibility of a discourse that could move from one to the other without discontinuity, the double articulation of the history of individuals upon the unconscious of culture, and of the historicity of those cultures upon the unconscious of individuals, has opened up, without doubt, the most general problems that can be posed with regard to man... [They show that] the signifying chain by which the unique experience of the individual is constituted is perpendicular to the formal system on the basis of which the significations of a culture are constituted,33 The intention of The Order of Things was, however, to delineate the rules of playing out these dilemmas of subjectivity - the possible permutations and combinations of the antinomies faced by the Modern Age. Foucault's attempt to systematize discourses, in this book and in the Archeology of Knowledge, was eventually abandoned. He left the search for discursive regularities when he realized that he could no longer maintain the stance of objectivity required in "archeological" work. He became aware that his perceptions in examining historical discourses, his choice of statements, or of fields for examination, always revealed a "motivated" character. This was the case whether he was motivated in Madness and Civilization to consider the systematic exclusion of the "Other," or in the Order of Things, to privilege the organization of knowledge. Foucault then turned to the aspect of his work he called "genealogical."34 In genealogy, he found a method which CQuldjustify a ~~history of the present." That is, Foucault 58
MacDonald/Subjects used genealogy to observe the detailed occurrences and practices of the past with a view to their productive moment, to witness their effects in the present, without ascribing intentionality to those practices. The effect of this shift on Foucault's work was to bring a new emphasis to considerations of power. He began to theorize the close interrelationship of knowledge with power in the succession of discourses which he had analyzed. In Discipline and Punish, he described how punishment by torture, proper to the Renaissance, involved a public display of the power of the sovereign.3 5 While this was effective, it also required frequent, even constant, reassertion. The punishment of the Classical Age, by contrast, had the prisoner on display, paying dues for the crime committed in the form of public works which were appropriate to the criminal act. This form of discipline involved the instatement of the state's rationality throughout society. The imprisonment of the modern criminal, especially in the Panopticon designed by Jeremy Bentham, is an even more efficient and more pervasive practice of power. The prisoner, unable to know at what moment the guard is on observation, learns to practice a constant self-surveillance. Self-surveillance, self-scrutiny, the incessant production of knowledge about the internal thoughts, desires, fantasies of the individual has been brought to new heights, according to Foucault, in the contemporary discourses around sex. In The History of Sexuality, VoU, Foucault revealed how sexual self-knowledge, and the injunction to pursue it (in order to know the truth of oneself) produce a subject constantly engaged in the process of self-regulation and normalization.js The subject produces him or herself as a normalized subject whose actions and desires are increasingly knowable and predictable. This subject then becomes ever more available to be used and controlled, thus facilitating the connection between knowledge and power. This production of subjects, the encroachment of power into ever more minute areas of the psyche and the body, through discourses which enjoin the subject to participate in his or her own subjection, is Foucault's major contribution to the theory of the subject. It is also a significant 59
Studies in Political Economy feature of Foucault's intellectual enterprise that he was critical of the mechanisms and techniques of power, and that he advocated resistance. Yet this criticism, and the desire to find or produce another form of subjectivity indicate several difficulties in Foucault's work. 37 One of these is the absence of any foundation for an ethical resistance to the normalized subject. Unlike the linguistic poststructuralists whose work calls upon a truth that precedes language (either in the formation of individual subjects or in the formation of language itself), Foucault cannot search outside the truths about the production of the subject which he has revealed for other, better, more complete, or more essentially human subjects. He cannot call the process of normalization a distortion, since he is not able to assume that any form of the subject is anything other than a discursive creation. In addition to leaving his ethical criticisms of the modern subject without a theoretical foundation, Foucault's work on the subject also contains a number of practical difficulties. The subject, as Foucault describes him or her, is produced by discourses (including discursive practices). These discourses would appear to respond to the mechanisms of power - power which is constantly obeying its own internal logic, a logic of increasingly efficient organization, and regularized production of its activities. Within such a system it is difficult to imagine how oppositional discourses could gain any strength. Moreover, it would be hard to argue that once they did, they would not also, of necessity, conform to the very functioning of power which they were intending to resist, thereby extending the normalizing and regulatory function of power rather than escaping or destroying it. Further to this, Foucault cannot explain where such resistance would emerge, or how its discourses would themselves be produced. There are a number of possibilities one can reflect upon in this regard. One is that oppositional discourses would emerge from some type of physical resistance to the technologies enacted upon the body. This option would necessitate theorizing an essential nature to human embodiedness, something which Foucault, despite his interest in the body, never does. Another possibility, apparent 60
MacDonald/Su bj ects in his description of "fields of power relations" is that there would exist sites not yet traversed by the operations of power, which would therefore still be resistant to its imposition. Once again, however, this is problematic. If these sites are not organized into any discourse, any set of meanings or practices, then wherein lies the ability to resist? If they are organized, then how are they, and according to what logic - a previous and outmoded one, or spontaneous, completely arbitrary one? It is not clear whether either of these options are possible. And because Foucault's discourse theory does not suggest that it is subjects or practices which produce discourses, but rather the reverse, he cannot logically locate sites of resistance. A related concern with Foucault's interpretation of the subject in history, is his final depiction of the progress of power in history. It appears that, although he originally denied rational progress, his theory of power/knowledge suggests an inevitable movement in history which the subject cannot alter or affect. This is a movement of increasing rationalization, which differs from the Enlightenment view of progressive reason in two respects. First, the subject has no control over reason's progress, and secondly, the movement of reason, rather than providing greater autonomy, increasinglyrobs the subject of freedom. So, despite the historical and differential production of subjects, which makes Foucault's theory more appealing than, and different from, those of the other poststructuralists, he ends up with similar limits on what can be theorized, and similar restrictions on the effectiveness of theoretical understanding. The Constituted/Constitutive Subject This examination of the theory of the subject in poststructuralism should lend a note of caution to any Marxist or feminist sense of affinity with poststructuralism. The logics of poststructuralism so prohibit the possibility of differently constituted subjectivities, or of a subjectivity which is consciously self- and world-constituting, that the work tends to produce a complete pessimism concerning the possibility for social change. Yet, leaving aside this charge of nihilism which is frequ~ntly (and not unfairly) dliected against the poststruc- 61
Studies in Political Economy turalists, there are ways in which a consideration of poststructuralist ideas can clarify the Marxist and feminist debates about the subject. There are interesting parallels between Marxist and feminist attempts to retheorize the subject in efforts to avoid the problems of the Cartesian subject, and the similar tendencies within poststructuralist theory. These can be roughly categorized into three approaches: the attempt to reintroduce agency, but to accord it a "nonhuman" or "supra-human" status; the desire to retrieve "nonsubjected" experience as an alternative subject model; and the rational overcoming of the Cartesian subject through new forms of logic or an anti-enlightenment rationality. Each of these approaches differently emphasizes the question of the subject's constitution, and the concern with the subject's ability to be constitutive of a changed reality. Within each of these theoretical approaches as well, it is apparent that the poststructuralist formulation of what the subject is able to accomplish has a more restricted and limiting view than either the Marxist or feminist retheorizations. These different possibilities for rethinking the subject also delineate some of the major debates within the different theoretical paradigms: i.e. within Marxism, the structure/agency debate, or within feminism, the conflict over models for social change. Each offers a particular perspective on re-theorizing the subject, some combination of which may be necessary in order to move beyond the present impasse and questions about the subject. 1) Theorization of a type of "non-human subject" or "suprahuman" subject can be witnessed in the work of structuralist Marxists, like Althusser or Godelier who locate agency in the structures of economy and society, in the work of Foucault which locates agency in an amorphous field of power, and in Derrida's proposals which give "texts" a life and determinacy of their own. Admittedly, the terms "nonhuman subject" and "supra-human subject" border on the oxymoronic. And yet what these theorists suggest is a transfer of the kind of power and determination which Enlightenment thought accorded to the subject onto another level of dc\crmi\\ilc~. Further, those aspects of \he Cartesian subject 62
MacDonald/Subjects which are not attributed to the non-human subject, such as self-consciousness, intentionality and responsibility, are also shorn from humans in this theorization. Indeed, to a degree, in reading Derrida, Lacan, and Foucault, it is hard to avoid seeing ascriptions of intentionality in their theorizations of the text, language, or a monolithic "power." These solutions to the problem of the subject have the effect of splitting what is constitutive (the macro-subject) from what is constituted (the micro-subject or various subject-positions). For structural Marxists, this split then requires theorizing a macro-subject which has internal tendencies toward revolutionary change; the movement of history is both positive and determined outside of historically constituted subjectivities. For Foucault, the location of agency in "power" itself, and in the constitutive discourses which are shaped by power's demands, produce negative results - a loss of individuality, and a concomitant increase in the regularization and normalization of human subjects. Derrida's work suggests that language and texts have an independent existence prior to human engagement with them, one which is determinate of human illusions, expressly the illusion of human agency. If there is an advantage in this approach to the analysis of subjectivity, it lies in its emphasis on exploring what is constitutive of human subjects. While this focus has led to charges of economism in Marxism, and of essentialism - i.e. of power or language - in poststructuralist work the attention to "macro-subjects" at least forces us to face the need for close inquiry into those forces which have shaped the human subject, and which have historical influence outside of human subjective control. However much control and power we wish to locate in the subject, there is always the aspect of history. which is not of our own making, and which, indeed, makes us. A significant contribution of poststructuralist theory in this regard has been to indicate the degree to which the language we use and the meanings which are prevalent in our lives, can determine our perceptions, our reasoning and our actions. 63
Studies in Political Economy 2) The desire to retrieve experience which has not been framed by Cartesian rationality can be witnessed in Kristeva's faith in the realm of the "semiotic." The embodiedness of human beings, their experience of being mothered and coming late into language, provide grounds for "other" perceptions of the world, and for a subjectivity which is fluid and changing, and non-rational. Similar features can be found in the Lacanian portrayal of the subject, which has little recourse to the Imaginary, and no recourse to what is actually "real," but which seeks to retrieve, through psychoanalysis, a sense of "pre-subjectivity." This faith in repressed or oppressed experience has a parallel in some feminist literature which finds women's experience to be different from men's, either because of early relations to the mother (i.e. Chodorow, Gilligan), or because of the experience of being embodied as female (O'Brien, Irigaray, Daly). For Marxist theorists like Gramsci, B.P. Thompson, and Raymond Williams, the experiences of an oppressed class can also provide an alternative view of reality. Gramsci's organic intellectuals have a special understanding of the oppression of the working class. Thompson's recourse to the "experience" of being workers occupies a similarly privileged place in his theory. Raymond Williams' work is particularly suggestive in this regard because of its consideration of oppositional subjectivities, as he attempts to theorize the origins of resistant practices in residual and emergent cultures. 38 In both the poststructuralist attention to experience, and in Marxist and feminist corollaries, there is a hope that the Cartesian subject, or Cartesian rationality, can somehow be escaped. For the Marxists and feminists, this escape would be in the form of a historical overcoming, a movement beyond present patriarchal or capitalist structures which entrench certain views of the world, and certain options for subjectivity. The forms of subjectivity which they hope to instate are ones which are more ethical, more accurate reflections of the human condition, and/or more responsive to the differential constitutions of subjectivities. For poststructuralists such as Kristeva and Lacan, however, the promise of an alternative is more transient; pre- 64
MacDonald/Subjects linguistic experience can be retrieved, but can never become a substitute for the dominance of language. This model's recourse to another subjectivity desires the restoration of a "constituting" aspect for subjects, which, for Marxists and feminists would become sufficiently powerful to overcome the previously constituted subjectivities, and for poststructuralists, would simply displace some of the assumptions about the subject, without in fact ever being fully able to displace that subject. Overwhelmingly, the emphasis of all these theorists is on the creation of subjects through the relationships (however biologically, economically, or psychologically determined) between humans, and the latent potential for recognition of undisclosed or unacknowledged relations which could transform the subject, or at least the subject's self-understanding. 3) A final parallel can be located between some poststructuralist theorists and certain Marxist and feminist theorists, who attempt to overcome the dilemma of constituted subjectivity through the exercise of a new form of reason, which nevertheless is discoverable through reason in its present form. The development of an alternative rationality, such as Derrida's logic of differance, or Adorno's negative dialectics, or feminist critiques of instrumental reason, are all representative of a hope to transcend the subject/object relationship as it presently exists, and to accomplish that transcendence through reason. A tension is maintained between the subject constituted by the existing form of reason, and the ability of the subject through reason to surmount his or her limitations and to constitute new forms of subjectivity. Within critical theory's critique of instrumental reason, this new rationality corresponds to an internalization of a new ethical relation between subject and object. In Derrida's work, however, the deconstructive impulse of his logic is limited to the level of critique of existing texts. Once again, the poststructuralist theorization offers a more limited and pessimistic solution. The re-theorization of the subject in these three dimensions need not be reduced to a debate between the different schools in question. In fact, what is useful about the dis- 65