Power, Desire, Difference - Essay Example

Power, Desire, Difference There are four dormant issues between feminism and psychoanalysis, and how to move beyond them. The issues are: the prominence of Lacan's 'symbolic', sexual difference and knowledge, the bearing of essentialism on feminist politics, and the relation between psychical reality and the issues on women (Chodorow: 1998). Of course any notion of opposition between psychoanalysis and politics has to be qualified: psychoanalysis is a thoroughly political entity. The question here is one of context and emphasis. If psychical processes are emphasized, as they are in the context of Lacan's theory of the symbolic, this contextual emphasis needs to be taken into account before a political critique can be fully elaborated, before politics can figure in a productive way, taking account of psychical issues, rather than closing its eyes to them. The specific psychical concerns of the symbolic may have been played down in some feminist writing, political issues have been played down (and deeply confused with psychical ones) in recent critiques of essentialism. The thing is, the challenge to Lacan is often read as, or reduced to, the challenge to patriarchal structures of language and phallogocentrism, which of course in part it is. Lacan's theory also covers the psychical organization, the argument that the symbolic is the condition of sanity; it is not purely about the patriarchal order of language (Chodorow: 1998:167). It should become evident that this facet of Lacan's theory has also received attention in French difference feminisms, especially from Irigaray. Moreover, it is only when this aspect of Lacan's theory is taken into account that the British feminist defence of him makes any sense. The symbolic's patriarchal nature relies on the interlocking functions of the symbolic father, and the notorious phallus. Lacan says the symbolic father intervenes in the imaginary ties between mother and child (Withford: 1986). For Lacan the actual father matters infinitely less than his structural, symbolic position as an intervening third party. In the imagination, the father's place is similar to the occupied by language, in that language intervenes in the imaginary dyad as the symbolic words that rupture the threads of phantasy that hold lack at bay and the illusion of union in place. To borrow the vocabulary of mainstream psychoanalysis for a moment, this intervention is critical to the process of psychical differentiation, to the subject's differentiating itself from others; and this is one reason why sanity relies on the symbolic (Withford:1988). How changing the sex of either the intervening third party or the primary care-giver, or the actual father's social spot, would affect the process of differentiation is another matter; but real changes in either parenting models or the social position of women and men must have consequences for the symbolic. The phallus is the mark of need, and diversity in general and sexual difference in particular. As the mark of need, it pertains to the fact that the subject is not complete unto itself. It is here that the symbolic father and phallus connect; the former breaks up the illusion of unity, the latter represent that break (Withford: 1986:7). As the mark of difference in general, the phallus is allied with the logos, with the principle that the identification of difference is the condition of logic and language alike. That is to say, thinking as such requires difference. This brings to a critical Lacanian claim that sexual difference is the crucial one in being able to speak, thus think; and, mutatis mutandis, that speaking is critical to sexual difference. The visual recognition of sexual difference is a channel connecting the heterogeneous experience of the feeling, sensing body to something that is strange to it: the differential structure of language; in turn, that language allows it name the difference. In short, Irigaray, like Mitchell, may have a clinical issue in mind: the idea that the phallus is represented by the penis implies, according to some thoroughly criticized Lacanian accounts, that men are more capable of differentiating themselves (Irrigaray:1985). For those same Lacanians, this explains the empirically greater incidence of psychoses amongst women: women are more likely to be undifferentiated, goes this reasoning, thus psychotic. The patriarchal symbolic is a condition of sanity for both sexes, women excepted. Irigaray, like Mitchell and others, is also partaking of the broad Derridean critique of metaphysics. For one can criticize Lacan on the grounds of his metaphysics alone, as Derrida does when he argues that Lacan privileges sexual difference and ties sexuality to a knowledge dependent on binary oppositions, where masculinity dominates by presence, and rationality is established through the exclusion of the feminine (Whitford:1988:10). Lacan's explanation of phallic dominance partakes of the logic of presence; indeed it is a prime exemplar of it. The fact that one sex appears more visible than the other will confer privilege in a world where presence itself is privilege. It can seem that the choice is between being rational or logical, and being feminist, that the choice is between reason and revolution. These considerations take us into debates on epistemology, the dependence of western metaphysics on presence and on the exclusion or absence of woman; debates that are crucial both in terms of their own trajectory, and in their relation to psychoanalysis (Irigaray: 1985:15). They are one means of facing the notion that femininity has no content, that it is the negative term; that sexual difference is difference from the phallus. But given that, for Lacan, the negativity of the feminine is a symbolic psychical necessity, the question remains: can a reformulation of the terms of sexual difference take account of the issue of psychical organization: can this issue, and that of the metaphysical critique, the knowledge issue, be brought together There have been many readings of Irigaray, for example, which interpret her as an essentialist of one kind or another, and some of these readings. Although, broadly speaking, that these readings are misconceived. There are two main readings of Irigaray current in feminism. One is that she is a biological essentialist, that she is proclaiming a biologically given femininity in which biology in some vague manner simply 'constitutes' femininity (Irigaray: 1985:72). The other is the Lacanian reading of Irigaray is considered as a 'psychic essentialist'. This reading argues that Irigaray has misunderstood or misrepresented the implications of Lacan's theories, that she interprets the feminine to be a pre-given libido, previous to language, in which specific female drives are grounded, thus positing two separate libidos a masculine and a feminine. Against this pseudo-Irigaray, it is then argued that Lacan has revealed that 'there is no feminine outside language' and that Irigaray has not grasped the Lacanian Symbolic dimension and what it means for the construction of sexual difference. There is a third reading, which seems to be mostly found in North American feminism, according to which Irigaray is celebrating relationships between women in which identities are merged and indistinct (Irigaray:1985:75). Women are abandoned outside the symbolic order; they lack mediation in the symbolic for the operations of sublimation. Irigaray explains clearly in Speculum, by means of Freud's thought on femininity as an exemplary text, why the difficulty for women of performing the operations of sublimation arises precisely from the unsymbolized relation between mother and daughter. The practical question for feminism, as Irigaray sees it, is how to construct a female sociality (les femmes entre-elles), a female symbolic, and a female social contract: a horizontal relation between women, so that women are no longer left in this state of dereliction (Chodorow:1998:170). Attempts to do so have revealed the discrepancy between the glorification of women's character found in some radical feminist writing and the actual hostilities and dissensions engendered within the women's movement itself. Irigaray suggests that it may be unworkable to negotiate the problems thrown up by the horizontal relationship without attending to the vertical relationship, that prototypical relationship between mother and daughter. And it may be impossible to do the absolute at any rate within the present symbolic order. Here first are some of the features, which Irigaray enumerates of the problems which women face in attempting to create a female social and symbolic order. It will be seen that she does not, unlike certain radical feminist accounts, attribute any special 'natural' merits to women, and that there is no suggestion that communities of women at least within the present order and before any changes are made will automatically be idyllic or ironical spaces from which conflict, aggression, or destruction have been excluded (Chodorow:1998:172) . So women are prey to: interminable rivalry between women (even if undeclared). This is the reason why: 'since the place of the mother is unique, to become a mother would mean occupying this place, but without a relation with her in this place.' 'Love for the mother, for women, perhaps must only or could only exist in the structure of a substitution Permanent risk of destruction in the absence of a female symbolic and the cruelty which takes place when relations are not mediated by anything, whether by rites, by exchanges or by an economy, so women often become the agents of their own oppression and mutual self-destruction, various forms of pathology: flight, explosion, implosion (Chodorow: 1998:174). Murder: 'therefore a genus of global dispute is set up, present more or less everywhere, which disorientates the female populace, the groups and micro-societies which are in the development of being formed. Real murders take place as an element of it, but also (insofar as they can be distinguished), cultural murders, murders of minds, passions and intellect, which women continue amongst themselves.' One could say that women endure from 'forces without any probable representations', which, for Irigaray, is another way of saying that the relation between mother and daughter is unsymbolized (Irigaray: 1985:82). The problems do not arise from immutable characteristics of women's 'character', but are an impact of women's place comparative to the symbolic order as its 'residue', or its 'waste'. A picture which superficially resembles a stereotypically misogynistic version of women's psychology is in fact attempting to state the conditions under which, say, hate or envy or rivalry might be both operative and inescapable in relations between women because a way of negotiating them symbolically was not available and to attribute such unmediated feelings directly to the way in which 'woman' figures in the discourses of metaphysics and society (Chodorow: 1998:176). A more familiar way of putting the issue would be so say that women suffer from inability to separate themselves, from 'uncertainty of uniqueness between them', from the deficiency of respect for, or more often lack of perception of, the other woman as different. Irigaray accepts the clinical view that women have difficulty in separating from their mothers that they tend to shape associations in which identity is merged, and in which the limitations between self and other are not clear (Irigaray:1998:86). However, she presents this psychoanalytic data as a symptom or consequence of women's place in the symbolic order, and it is this order, which she is primarily concerned to expose. She argues for example that the clinical picture also applies to metaphysics; in metaphysics, too, women are not individuated: there is only the position of the mother, or the maternal function. Irigaray is trying to elucidate what we are to understand by the ideas of a female imaginary, female symbolic, female language, female rationality, and so on. In the imaginary, the problem can be stated as follows: if identity is imaginary, and if identity as Irigaray insists is male, then either the idea of a female imaginary is self-contradictory, or else the female imaginary in so far as it attributes identity to the female side of sexual difference, would still fall within the parameters of male thought, i.e. would be a male definition of the female (Irigaray: 1998:92). Some writers on Irigaray have tried to deal with this difficulty too summarily, by a precipitate celebration of the female imaginary, which bypasses the problem of its existence within the present symbolic order. The imaginary can be described in more than one way (Irigaray: 1998:102)... (a) The female imaginary can be seen as the unconscious of western (male) thought the unsymbolized, withdrawn underneath of western philosophy. It may make its occurrence felt in the structure of 'somatic complaints', (b) although there is a new sense in which the female imaginary could be understood as something which does not yet exist, which still has to be created. This would be a non-essentialist thesis; the female imaginary would be, not something lurking in the depths of women's unconscious, but a possible restructuring of the imaginary by the symbolic which would make a difference to women. The problem here of stating what it is that women need which would not leave them in dereliction unsymbolized but which would not be thought of either simply in terms of identity, since an identity that is equivalent to sameness is an integral part of the metaphysics which represses the female (Irigaray:1998:105).. Irigaray has been criticized for flaw to make a apparent difference between the two, but this may be because the two go hand in hand, (c) It is clear then that it is difficult to limit the term 'imaginary' to the unconscious phantasy of any one individual, even if the term is used in this way in Speculum. But as soon as Irigaray begins to use the term more extensively, in This Sex, and Ethique, it is applied to a social, cultural, and philosophical fantasy, implied by the symbolic order in which we live: the unconscious phantasies of the dominant discourse and their concrete embodiments (Irigaray: 1998:107)... One should conceive of the creation of a female imaginary, then, as a collective process. According to Irigaray, the symbolic can be read in several manners, it can be taken as a developmental sense. The symbolic can be an order of discourse and meaning, the order which all human beings have to fit themselves where they can go before and go beyond individual subjectivity (Irigaray: 1998:109)... It is what enables the subject to break out of the imaginary mother-child unity and become a social being. But more importantly, it can be interpreted in a structural sense, as that which enables the break from the imaginary to be made at all, at any time. It is clear that the social human being continues to function for most of the time in an imaginary register, locked into various unconscious phantasies, which may or may not find support in one's social or interpersonal world. Irigaray makes this point when she writes for example that the present symbolic order is completely imaginary: 'The symbolic that you impose as a universal, free of all empirical or historical contingency, is your imaginary transformed into an order, a social order.' She makes a similar point when she writes that the 'subject of science', the epistemological subject, has not made the break, but is still dominated by a male imaginary (Irigaray: 1998:115)... The crucial problem then becomes: how to affect the break from the imaginary. It can be affected in two ways; either external reality obstinately refuses to match the phantasy, or, in psychoanalysis, the analyst refuses the imaginary projections of the analysed. It is relatively easy to see how the analyst might carry out this function. It is rather more difficult to see how a female symbolic might be created which would serve the function of 'break' to the male imaginary in external reality It looks, then, as though one needs to think two things simultaneously. The first is that the female symbolic depends upon a female imaginary. If one attempts to bypass the question of the female at the level of the imaginary, by moving directly into the symbolic stating for example that women are capable of reason too, or pointing out that the fact that the phallus is the signifier of difference does not imply any inevitable oppression of women within the symbolic and social order then one is relying upon a most precarious position; the break from the imaginary, which is the structural sense of the symbolic, may not have any support in the social; social institutions continue to support the phantasies of the male imaginary (Irigaray:1998:119).. If one abandons the imaginary to the male, women will still be left without representations or images or, one might add, institutions, to serve as identificatory support. But if a female symbolic depends upon a female imaginary, it is also the case that a female imaginary depends upon a female symbolic. The imaginary is an effect of the symbolic; it is the symbolic which structures the imaginary, so that there is a sense in which the imaginary does not exist if it is unsymbolized one may not even be able to say that it is repressed: 'can one speak at this stage of repression when the processes that make it possible have not yet come into being' The idea of a female symbolic is obviously problematic, even if it is put in social and philosophical rather than psychoanalytic terms; some people would say it is not even coherent. For Irigaray, the symbolic, that is to say, that break with the imaginary in which one is capable of thinking about one's own imaginary instead of being thought by it, is unlikely to take a social structure so long as there is no real other (Irigaray: 1998:120)... In other words, for men to make the break the chain with their imaginary, another word would be needed women as symbolic. So long as women go on with to be things of exchange inside that imaginary, they cannot be the name that affects the break. There is a symbolic castration, which men have until now to achieve: cutting the umbilical cord which associates them to the mother. It is only possible to differentiate between the mother and the woman, when the relation between mother and daughter is symbolized. The male imaginary, or what Lacan describes the 'psychical fantasy of women', or the child's belief that there is only one sex, that all these are transhistorical issues. Then one way for action would have to be the assembly of social relations, which oppose this imaginary, for instance the construction of a women's sociality, or demonstrations of women, which directly counter it (Irigaray: 1998:125)... There is no reason why the social should automatically be no more nor would less than the psyche writ large, and to assume so be to collapse the social into the psychic. The crucial question, of course, and one, which can only be addressed collectively, is that of how to make changes in the symbolic. So the question of the imaginary and its relation to the symbolic, however one interprets these terms, directly raises the question of change, and how it force be conveyed about. For Irigaray, it is not a question of knowledge but, above all, a question of change. Science is male, meaning that male language, the epistemology of the sciences, knowledge which leads to control, mastery, and domination, are all subtended by the male imaginary, whatever the actual sex of the knower. Female language on the other hand, like the language of the psychoanalyst, should be language which has a consequence: 'to introduce the importance of desire, pain, joy, the body. These are living values and not discourse of mastery.' Women were asked to refuse, like the psychoanalyst, the imaginary constructions of the 'male' subject. Irigaray is attempting to restore the link between knowledge and its origins in the passions, raising the question: 'What is the importance of knowledge' Her project, then, which she defines in very broad terms as 'psychoanalysing the philosophers' is to utilize the techniques of the analyst as a heuristic and epistemological tool, in an attempt to change the social imaginary of the west by dismantling the defences, undoing the work of repression, splitting and disavowal, restoring links and associations, and placing the 'subject of science' in contact with the unacknowledged mother. Without doubt, there are troubles with the effort to use the psychoanalytic conceptual framework to make cultural diagnoses and this is one area that further discussion of Irigaray's work could well focus on, bearing in mind that, whatever the status of psychoanalytic theories, psychoanalysis as therapy works to bring about change in the unconscious itself. Irigaray's diagnosis: in psychoanalysing the philosophers, she claims to have discovered that the order of discourse in the west, its rationality and epistemology, are supported by an imaginary that is in effect governed unconsciously by one of the 'sexual theories of children', the phantasy that there is only one sex, that that sex is male, and that therefore women are really men, in a defective, 'castrated' version. In this imaginary, the mother is at best only a function. Irigaray suggests that symbolizing the mother/daughter relationship, creating externally located and durable representations of this prototypical relation between women, is an urgent necessity, if women are ever to achieve ontological status in this society. References Irigaray, Luce. (1985) Speculum: Of the Other Women, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca and New York: Cornell University Press. pp. 71-130. Chodorow, Nancy. (1998). The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender. Berkeley: University of California Press. pp. 166-285. Whitford, Margaret. (1986) Luce Irigaray and the female imaginary: speaking as a woman'. Radical Philosophy 43. pp. 3-8. Whitford, Margaret. (1988). 'Luce Irigaray's critique of rationality', in Morwenna Griffiths and Margaret Whitford (eds), Feminist Perspectives in Philosophy London: Macmillan, 1988. Read More