“During the same twenty-five year period that feminist theory and practice have been ongoing, a trend in theory called postmodernism has been working on undoing it. Its main target is, precisely, reality.
Part of the problem in coming to grips with postmodernism is that, pretending to be profound while being merely obscure (many are fooled), slathering subjects with words, its selfproclaimed practitioners fairly often don’t say much of anything. A splendid illustration is the parody of postmodern writing that was in fact gibberish that was accepted and published in a leading postmodern journal (see Alan D. Sokal’s Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.)
Postmodernism as practiced often comes across as style— petulant, joyriding, more posture than position. But it has a method, making metaphysics far from dead. Its approach and its position, its posture toward the world and its view of what is real, is that it’s all mental. Postmodernism imagines that society happens in your head.
What [feminists] said was credible because it was real. Few people claimed that women were not violated in the ways we had found or did not occupy a second class status in society. Not many openly disputed that what we had uncovered did, in fact, exist. What was said instead was that, in society, nothing really exists.
Even questioning in the name of “differences” whether “women” exist and can be spoken of.
Antiessentialism is one facet of this objection: the view that there is no such thing as “women” because there are always other aspects to women’s identities and bases other than sex for their oppressions. The defense of multiculturalism is another facet of it: there is no such thing as women in the singular, there are only women in the plural, many different particularized, localized, socially constructed, culturally modified women, hence no “women” in what postmodernists imagine is the feminist sense.
The postmodern critique of feminism seems to assume that the “women” of feminist theory are all the same, homogeneous, a uniform unit. I do not know where they got this idea either. Not from me. They don’t say. This notion that everyone must be the same to have access to the label “women” is not an idea that operates in feminist theory to my knowledge. Women, in feminist theory, are concrete; they are not abstract. In fact, feminism in one sense started the critique of universality as currently practiced by showing how women are left out of the human episteme.
Domination, postmodernists know exists, but they don’t tell us how or where or why. It is something that no one does. What we used to call “what happened to her,” has become, at its most credible, “narrative”. But real harm has ceased to exist. So whole chapters of books with “pornography” in their titles can be written without ever once talking about what the pornography industry concretely does, who they are, or what is done to whom in and with the materials.
Abuse has become “agency”—or rather challenges to sexual abuse have been replaced by invocations of “agency,” women’s violation become the sneering wound of a “victim” pinned in arch quotation marks. Instead of facing what was done to women when we were violated, we are told how much freedom we had at the time. Postmodernists ought to have to confront the human pain of the ideas they think are so much fun.
Postmodern feminists seldom build on or refer to the real lives of real women directly; mostly, they build on the work of French men, if selectively and often not very well. Feminist postmodernism is far, far away from the realities of the subordination of women. All women should be so fortunate. Postmodernists have to portray women actually having power that men largely have in order to confuse people about power. (That they want to avoid being called sexist in the process, we have accomplished.)
What postmodernists want, I have come to think, apart from to live in their heads instead of in the world (that old dodge), is to vault themselves out of power methodologically. They want to beat dominance at its own game, which is usually called dominating. They want to win every argument in advance.
The reason that it doesn’t appear to men (especially men of the theory class) that the world exists independently of their minds is because they largely do have the power to do whatever happens in their minds.
Women are in a position to know this to the extent that reality does not respond to us. What we know is that the power to make reality be real is a product of social power to act, not just to imagine. We know that reality is about power because we can imagine change all day long and nothing is any different. The reality of people who don’t have power exists independently of what they think. The social constructs that control their lives very often are not their constructs. Any woman who doesn’t know this, in my opinion, has not pushed very hard on the walls around her and other women, or has been, so far, very privileged and very lucky.
This is a criticism; it is not an inevitability. We can collectively intervene in social life, but not if we deny that it is there or what makes it be there.
What does this suggest about their ability to promote change? What is postmodernism’s project? How linear, how teleological, how serious. To whom and what is it accountable? I say it is accountable to academic hierarchy. Who else can afford this theory? Postmodernism appropriates its methodological pretensions and gestures from feminism, but it doesn’t practice them.
So it’s forward to the past: to yet another set of abstractions with no accountability to subordinated peoples’ reality and an implicit but total accountability to power, with familiar if fancier reasons for doing nothing—radicalsounding, but with the same origins, a dislocated elite, and the same consequences, a disengaged theory, that corrodes material resistance to power.
Postmodernism’s analysis of the social construction of reality is stolen from feminism and the left but gutted of substantive content— producing Marxism without the working class, feminism without women. It’s an abstract critique of abstract subjects. The hall of mirrors (that’s plural) that much of postmodernism substitutes for any attempt to grasp a real social world is an ultimate collapse into liberalism’s relativism regresses.
Once postmodernism’s various acts of theft and sell-out are exposed, what is left is a pose, an empty gesture of theatrical anarchism (to which Marx’s critique applies), a Hegelian negation of the status quo (and just as determined by it), liberalism’s terrible child (many liberals look plenty grounded and engaged by comparison), a precious politics of abdication and passivism.
I do know this: we cannot have this postmodernism and still have a meaningful practice of women’s human rights, far less a women’s movement.
Postmodernism, empty as much of it is, is taking up a lot of feminist theoretical energy in this one world that we all go to sleep in and wake up in. Postmodernism is an academic theory, originating in academia with an academic elite, not in the world of women and men, where feminist theory is rooted. In the early 1970s, I (for one) had imagined that feminists doing theory would retheorize life in the concrete rather than spend the next three decades on metatheory, talking about theory, rehashing over and over in this disconnected way how theory should be done, leaving women’s lives twisting in the wind.
My feeling is, if the postmodernists took responsibility for changing even one real thing, they would learn more about theory than everything they have written to date put together. Instead, as practiced by postmodernists, the job of theory, as the blood sport of the academic cutting edge, is to observe and pass on and play with these big questions, out of touch with and unaccountable to the lives of the unequal. Their critically-minded students are taught that nothing is real, that disengagement is smart (not to mention careerpromoting), that politics is pantomime and ventriloquism, that reality is a text (reading is safer than acting any day), that creative misreading is resistance (you feel so radical and comfortably marginal), that nothing can be changed (you can only amuse yourself). With power left standing, the feminism of this theory cannot be proven by any living woman. It is time to ask these people: what are you doing?”
Points On Postmodernism by Catharine MacKinnon
