Fortunes of Feminism (26 page)

In a few bold strokes, then, Kristeva rejects the exclusion of context, practice, agency, and innovation, and she proposes a new model of discursive pragmatics. Her general idea is that speakers act in socially situated, norm-governed signifying practices. In so doing, they sometimes transgress the established norms in force. Transgressive practice gives rise to discursive innovations and these in turn may lead to actual change. Innovative practice may subsequently be normalized in the form of new or modified discursive norms, thereby “renovating” signifying practices.
²⁸

The uses of this sort of approach for feminist theorizing should by now be apparent. Yet there are also some warning signs of possible problems. First, there is Kristeva's antinomian bent—her tendency, at least in this early quasi-Maoist phase of her career, to valorize transgression and innovation
per se
irrespective of its content and direction.
²⁹
The flip side of this attitude is a penchant for inflecting norm-conforming practice as simply negative, irrespective of the content of the norms. Obviously, this attitude is not particularly helpful for feminist theorizing, which requires ethical distinctions between oppressive and emancipatory social norms.

A second potential problem here is Kristeva's aestheticizing bent, her association of valorized transgression with “poetic practice.” Kristeva tends to treat avant-garde aesthetic production as the privileged site of innovation. By contrast, communicative practice in everyday life appears as conformism
simpliciter.
This tendency to enclave or regionalize innovative practice is not useful for feminist theorizing. We need to recognize and assess the emancipatory potential of oppositional practice
wherever
it appears—in bedrooms, on shopfloors, in the caucuses of the American Philosophical Association.

The third and most serious problem is Kristeva's additive approach to theorizing. By this I mean her penchant for remedying theoretical problems by simply
adding
to deficient theories instead of by scrapping or overhauling them. This, I submit, is how she ends up handling certain features of structuralism; rather than eliminating certain structuralist notions altogether, she simply adds other, anti-structuralist notions alongside them.

Kristeva's additive, dualistic style of theorizing is apparent in the way she analyzes and classifies signifying practices. She takes such practices to consist in varying proportions of two basic ingredients. One of these is “the symbolic,” a linguistic register keyed to the transmission of propositional content via the observance of grammatical and syntactical rules. The other is “the semiotic,” a register keyed to the expression of libidinal drives via intonation and rhythm and not bound by linguistic rules. The symbolic, then, is the axis of discursive practice that helps reproduce the social order by imposing linguistic conventions on anarchic desires. The semiotic, in contrast, expresses a material, bodily source of revolutionary negativity, the power to break through convention and initiate change. According to Kristeva, all signifying practices contain some measure of each of these two registers of language, but with the signal exception of poetic practice, the symbolic register is always the dominant one.

In her later work, Kristeva provides a psychoanalytically grounded gender subtext to her distinction between the symbolic and the semiotic. Following Lacanianism, she associates the symbolic with the paternal, and she describes it as a monolithically phallocentric, rule-bound order to which subjects submit as the price of sociality when they resolve the Oedipus complex by accepting the Father's Law. But then Kristeva breaks with Lacanianism in insisting on the underlying persistence of a feminine, maternal element in all signifying practice. She associates the semiotic with the pre-oedipal and the maternal, and she valorizes it as a point of resistance to paternally-coded cultural authority, a sort of oppositional feminine beach-head within discursive practice.

This way of analyzing and classifying signifying practices may seem at first sight to have some potential utility for feminist theorizing. It seems to contest the presumption of Lacanianism that language is monolithically phallocentric and to identify a locus of feminist opposition to the dominance of masculine power. However, on closer inspection, this appearance of feminist potential turns out to be largely illusory. In fact, Kristeva's analysis of signifying practices betrays her best pragmatics intentions. The decomposition of such practices into symbolic and semiotic constituents does not lead beyond structuralism. The “symbolic,” after all, is a repetition of the reified, phallocentric symbolic order of Lacanianism. And while the “semiotic” is a force that momentarily disrupts that symbolic order, it does not constitute an alternative to it. On the contrary, as Judith Butler has shown, the contest between the two modes of signification is stacked in favor of the symbolic: the semiotic is by definition transitory and subordinate, always doomed in advance to reabsorption by the symbolic order.
³⁰
Moreover, and more fundamentally problematic, I think, is the fact that the semiotic is defined parasitically over against the symbolic as the latter's mirror image and abstract negation. Simply adding the two together, then, cannot and does not lead to pragmatics. Rather, it yields an amalgam of structure and anti-structure. Moreover, this amalgam is, in Hegel's phrase, a “bad infinity,” since it leaves us oscillating ceaselessly between a structuralist moment and an anti-structuralist moment without ever getting to anything else.

Thus, by resorting to an additive mode of theorizing, Kristeva surrenders her promising pragmatic conception of signifying practice to a quasi-Lacanian neo-structuralism. In the process, she ends up reproducing some of Lacanianism's most unfortunate conceptual shortcomings. She, too, lapses into symbolicism, treating the symbolic order as an all-powerful causal mechanism and conflating linguistic structure, kinship structure, and social structure in general.
³¹
On the other hand, Kristeva sometimes does better than Lacanianism in appreciating the historical specificity and complexity of particular cultural traditions, especially in those portions of her work that analyze cultural representations of gender in such traditions. Even there, however, she often lapses into psychologism; for example, she mars her potentially very interesting studies of cultural representations of femininity and maternity in Christian theology and in Italian Renaissance painting by falling back on reductive schemes of interpretation that treat the historical material as reflexes of autonomous, ahistorical, psychological imperatives like “castration anxiety” and “feminine paranoia.”
³²

All told, then, Kristeva's conception of discourse surrenders many of the potential advantages of pragmatics for feminist theorizing. In the end, she loses the pragmatic stress on the contingency and historicity of discursive practices, their openness to possible change. Instead, she lapses into a quasi-structuralist emphasis on the recuperating power of a reified symbolic order and thereby surrenders the possibility of explaining change. Likewise, her theory loses the pragmatic stress on the plurality of discursive practices. Instead, it lapses into a quasi-structuralist homogenizing and binarizing orientation, one that distinguishes practices along the sole axis of proportion of semiotic to symbolic, feminine to masculine, and thereby surrenders the potential for understanding complex identities. In addition, Kristeva loses the pragmatic stress on social context. Instead, she lapses into a quasi-structuralist conflation of “symbolic order” with social context and thereby surrenders the capacity to link discursive dominance to societal inequality. Finally, her theory loses the pragmatic stress on interaction and social conflict. Instead, as Andrea Nye has shown, it focuses almost exclusively on
intra
subjective tensions and thereby surrenders its ability to understand
inter
subjective phenomena, including affiliation, on the one hand, and social struggle, on the other.
³³

This last point can be brought home by considering Kristeva's account of the speaking subject. Far from being useful for feminist theorizing, her view replicates many of the disabling features of Lacanianism. Her subject, like the latter's, is split into two halves, neither of which is a potential political agent. The subject of the symbolic is an oversocialized conformist, thoroughly subjected to symbolic conventions and norms. To be sure, its conformism is put “on trial” by the rebellious, desiring ensemble of bodily-based drives associated with the semiotic. But, as before, the mere addition of an anti-structuralist force does not actually lead beyond structuralism. Meanwhile, the semiotic “subject” cannot itself be an agent of feminist practice for several reasons. First, it is located beneath, rather than within, culture and society; so it is unclear how its practice could be
political
practice.
³⁴
Second, it is defined exclusively in terms of the transgression of social norms; thus, it cannot engage in the reconstructive moment of feminist politics, a moment essential to social transformation. Finally, it is defined in terms of the shattering of social identity, and so it cannot figure in the reconstruction of the new, politically constituted,
collective
identities and solidarities that are essential to feminist politics.

By definition, then, neither half of Kristeva's split subject can be a feminist political agent. Nor, I submit, can the two halves be joined together. They tend rather simply to cancel one another out, the one forever shattering the identitarian pretensions of the other, the second forever recuperating the first and reconstituting itself as before. The upshot is a paralyzing oscillation between identity and non-identity without any determinate practical issue. Here, then, is another “bad infinity,” an amalgam of structuralism and its abstract negation.

If there are no individual agents of emancipatory practice in Kristeva's universe, then there are no such collective agents either. This can be seen by examining one last instance of her additive pattern of thinking, namely, her treatment of the feminist movement itself. This topic is most directly addressed in an essay called “Women's Time,” for which Kristeva is best known in feminist circles.
³⁵
Here, she identifies three “generations” of feminist movements: first, an egalitarian, reform-oriented, humanist feminism, aiming to secure women's full participation in the public sphere, a feminism best personified perhaps by Simone de Beauvoir; second, a culturally-oriented gynocentric feminism, aiming to foster the expression of a non-male-defined feminine sexual and symbolic specificity, a feminism represented by the proponents of
écriture féminine
and
parler femme
; and finally, Kristeva's own, self-proclaimed brand of feminism—in my view, actually postfeminism—a radically nominalist, anti-essentialist approach that stresses that “women” do not exist and that collective identities are dangerous fictions.
³⁶

Despite the explicitly tripartite character of this categorization, the deep logic of Kristeva's thinking about feminism conforms to her additive, dualistic pattern. For one thing, the first, egalitarian humanist moment of feminism drops out of the picture, as Kristeva erroneously assumes that its program has already been achieved. In the end, accordingly, she concerns herself with two “generations” of feminism only. In addition, despite her explicit criticisms of gynocentrism, there is a strand of her thought that implicitly partakes of it—I mean Kristeva's quasi-biologistic, essentializing identification of women's femininity with maternity. Maternity, for her, is the way that women, as opposed to men, touch base with the pre-oedipal, semiotic residue. (Men do it by writing avant-garde poetry; women do it by having babies.) Here, Kristeva dehistoricizes and psychologizes motherhood, conflating conception, pregnancy, birthing, nursing, and childrearing, abstracting all of them from socio-political context, and erecting her own essentialist stereotype of femininity. But then she reverses herself and recoils from her construct, insisting that “women” don't exist, that feminine identity is fictitious, and that feminist movements therefore tend toward the religious and the proto-totalitarian. The overall pattern of Kristeva's thinking about feminism, then, is additive and dualistic: she ends up alternating essentialist gynocentric moments with anti-essentialist nominalistic moments, moments that consolidate an ahistorical, undifferentiated, maternal feminine gender identity with moments that repudiate women's identities altogether.

With respect to feminism, then, Kristeva leaves us oscillating between a regressive version of gynocentric-maternalist essentialism, on the one hand, and a postfeminist anti-essentialism, on the other. Neither of these is useful for feminist theorizing. In Denise Riley's terms, the first
overfeminizes
women by defining us maternally. The second
underfeminizes
us by insisting that “women” do not exist and by dismissing the feminist movement as a proto-totalitarian fiction.
³⁷
Simply putting the two together, moreover, does not overcome the limits of either. On the contrary, it constitutes another “bad infinity”—another proof of the limited usefulness for feminist theorizing of an approach that merely conjoins an abstract negation of structuralism to a structuralist model left otherwise intact.

4. CONCLUSION

I hope the foregoing has provided a reasonably vivid and persuasive illustration of my most general point, namely, the superior utility for feminist theorizing of pragmatics over structuralist approaches to the study of language. Instead of reiterating the advantages of pragmatics models, I shall close with one specific example of their uses for feminist theorizing.