m/f, or Not Reconciled

JOAN COPJEC

           Before the sublime ekphrasis always fails, but—if we are to believe the literature—it fails more miserably in the mouths of women than men. The accidental tourist who accompanies Coleridge on one of those many Romantic expeditions in search of the sublime displays, it seems, not an accidental inability, but a typically female one, when she stumbles in her description of the awesome waterfall that confronts her and her companion. To Coleridge's precise observation that it is a sublime object, "in the strictest sense of the word," which they now behold, this lady traveler assents, while trying to better the description: "Yes! and it is not only sublime, but beautiful and absolutely pretty."¹ The words in quotation stand pathetically, not dazzlingly alone (negative ekphrasis?) as the narration pulls away from them; Coleridge cringes.

           "The logic of soup, with dumplings for arguments,"² Freud will say many years later, as if in reaction to the lady traveler's ill-conceived remark; and he, too, will cringe. According to Freud, the familiar homeliness of feminine logic is a sign of the woman's structural difficulty in giving up the Oedipal bond with the father. Because the father cannot threaten her with the loss of what she knows she does not have, he remains the object of her love. She continues to demand his love in return (this is a simple, household account) and to believe that some other person—her father or a substitute—can give her what she too concretely wants. As she presses her mundane demands, the truly sublime demands of the superego go unheard by her. For she does not—or does not easily—develop a superego, having already located the source of significant power outside herself. The feminine woman, then, experiences neither the morbid pain of ethical accusation, nor the joy of ethical exaltation. The sublime field of the ethical is, in general, closed to her. By this account it would appear that feminism is foredoomed to fail as an ethical project.

           It is, perhaps, the clear and sustained refusal of this prognosis that most defines the work of the British feminist journal, m/f. In ten issues published over nine years (1978-1986), m/f carefully articulated a position that can accurately be called an ethical feminism. This is not to say that the journal ignored the quotidien concerns of women, the malpractices that shape our everyday lives. Analyses of specific practices—legal, political, representational, educational—in their specific historical and geographical times and places are a central part of my's investigation, the putting into practice of its belief that the concrete forms of the limiting and denial of women's accession to social entitlement are essential targets for critique. To insist that feminism must be an ethics is not to propose that the middle regions of basic social existence be forsaken in favor of a contemplation of Mont Blanc; rather, it is to say something specific about the way social existence is to be thought. It is to say first of all that intersubjective relations do not structure social practices but that social practices, instead, decide the structure of intersubjective relations. This being so, the temptations of moralism—the temptations to make one's own or the affections of other people the object of one's political analysis—need to be scrupulously avoided. Moralism is a kind of moraine upon which analysis can only run aground.

           Nor is the appeal to ethics meant to invoke some ideal form of reason that escapes its own embeddedness in the contingencies of social existence. That there is no universal reason that can be ubiquitously deployed, that reason itself has a history—this is one of the guiding principles of m/f's analyses. The principle is now often associated with the work of Foucault, but it was first articulated by others and is, of course, held by a whole tradition of theorists. In "Canguilhem, philosopher of error," for example, Foucault himself sketches the outlines of this tradition. The introduction, around 1930, of Husserl's work into France sparked a research—mainly among historians of science, such as Canguilhem, Cavailles, Bachelard—that would produce powerful arguments against the logicism that then prevailed and would inspire work in fields as diverse as psychoanalysis (Lacan), Marxism (Althusser), history (Foucault), sociology (Bourdieu, Castel). This work, which Foucault describes as a "philosophy of savoir, rationality, and the concept," was radically distinct from that of a simultaneous tradition—developed by philosophers such as Sartre and Merleau-Ponty—described as "a philosophy of experience, meaning, and the subject."³

           It was by isolating the concepts of science (rather than a science's description of the world) as the focus of their research that the historians of science were able to demonstrate the existence of radical discontinuities within the history of any science and among the various sciences themselves. It was argued that each science constructed its own objects of study as well as the procedures for operating on these objects and for ratifying the truth of their findings. In other words, it was argued that there was no general epistemological method, no general practice of observation, no monolithic category of the real upon which all sciences operated. The differences between looking through a telescope, looking through a microscope, and looking through the viewfinder of a camera cannot, in effect, be charted on a continuum of vision.

           One will find this "mode of work," this location of discontinuities, in operation throughout the pages of m/f. The specificity of individual discourses is always respected, the norms of one never imposed on the study of another. In terms of its feminist project, this means that m/f never assumes a general category of woman. Rather, it attempts to determine, through analysis, the specific concept of woman that each discourse constructs and the specific actions it directs toward her. The oppressive notion of "woman's oppression" thus vanishes and is replaced by detailed descriptions of the practices that bring a particular category of woman into being, exclude her, make her visible, invisible, valuable, redundant, dangerous, etc. Vanished, too, is the dream of a total revolution that would deliver woman's freedom. Dreaming is replaced by intervening—one by one—in practices that can only limit power, never totally deny it.

           This labor alone—this "Foucauldian" labor we might call it, subscribing to popular perception—undertaken by m/f in its analysis of a range of practices (legal, cinematic, educational, etc.) has made considerable contributions to feminism. But surely one of the most representative claims of the journal is that this labor is not enough. The analysis of the inscription of the woman in different social practices must be supplemented by a psychoanalysis of the construction of the female subject. Not only a claim, a description of its own theoretical practice, for m/f positions itself—extraordinarily—at the join between social practices and psychoanalytic processes. It is the critical relation between the psychic and the social that is the ultimate concern of this feminist project. By doubling its investigation in this way, m/f effectively argues that the subject position inscribed by a discourse is not the same as the position of the subject who is engaged by that discourse, no more than the "I" of the statement is the same as the "I" who speaks it. It is in light of a widening trend in contemporary feminism that this argument continues to be extraordinary. For it has once again begun to seem to some feminists that psychoanalysis is dispensable, that an analysis of the multiple, often contradictory, positions inscribed by institutional practices can substitute for a psychoanalysis of the woman's relations in the social.

           It is often urged, in short, that the subject must be conceived as "multiple, rather than divided."⁴ Since only psychoanalysis has ever proposed a divided subject, it is clear that this coded exhortation is intended as a challenge to psychoanalysis. What is implied by the proposed substitution is that a social theory such as the one formulated by Foucault (along with the adjustments necessitated by his androcentricism) offers an adequate theory of the construction of the subject. It does not. The problem with believing that it does, of believing that the subject can be conceived as all of those multiple, often conflicting, positions that social practices construct, is that the ex-centric, or equivocal, relation of the subject to these discourses is never made visible and the nature of her conflict in the social is seriously misconceived.

           In order to grasp the difference between the Foucauldian and the psychoanalytic assertion that the subject is always a construction of discourse, it will be useful to return to the introduction to Canguilhem's work to which we referred earlier. As his title indicates, Foucault pinpoints the source of Canguilhem's contribution in the privileged attention that the historian of science gives to the operation of error. Canguilhem treats error not as an accident of life but as its necessary and positive condition, not as an eradicable foible but as "the permanent chance around which coils the history of life and of men" and women.⁵ Life is that which errs.

           Foucault makes the advocacy of this concept of error the distinguishing feature of the tradition of theorists to which he belongs. And, in fact, we do recognize the traces of this advocacy in a mode of "poststructuralist" argument, whereby one term—commonly considered to be the negation or privation of another—comes to be seen as its positive condition. Thus: Derrida will argue that absence is the condition of presence; Althusser will argue that misrecognition provides rather than hides one's relation to the social; Lacan will demonstrate that the failure to remember a dream produces rather than erases the material to be analyzed and that Freud's theory of the death drive—death is the goal of life—is a basic fact of psychoanalysis; Foucault will teach us that transgression is the very implantation of the law.

           Given the fact, then, that Foucault sees this activation of negation as crucial to the kind of work in which he is involved, his well-known rejection of the "repression hypothesis," the denial of the negative force of the law, which is his most ringing refusal of psychoanalysis, would almost (except for the prominence it has in his work) seem anomalous. For when Foucault argues that the law does not operate negatively by forbidding, censoring, or neglecting to acknowledge the subject, its actions and desires, but positively by furnishing the conditions of their possibility, he is not turning a negative into a positive force in the way that Canguilhem recommended; that is, Foucault is not analyzing the positive operation of negation, he is instead eliminating negation and replacing it with the purely positive force of "construction." Negation is here extracted from the process that installs the subject in the social. At this point Foucault jettisons one of his own basic principles and commits himself to the conception of construction as a process that has no internal constraints and that must then always result in its own realization, in the production of determinate properties and positions.

           Only an external force can oppose such a process. This external force seems to be what many who rely exclusively on Foucauldian theory for political analysis count on. It is the discrepancy between different subject positions or between woman as representation and woman as historical being that holds out for them the promise of our being able eventually to discard ideological misrepresentation. The notion that we can cast aside our subject positions, that the terms of a contradiction can work to expose each other or the fraudulence of ideology, depends on our seeing these various positions as external to each other.

           Ironically, Foucault sees things quite otherwise. For according to him, it is the very instability of the system, the discrepancies and anomalies in which it inconsistently consists, that ensures the success of the system's functioning. Here Foucault is "Canguilhemian" again; here he makes negation productive, productive precisely of the internal normativity of the social. The process of normalization—of disciplinary power—is only initiated by the abnormal, by deviations from the norm. The process is caused by failure. Thus, the multiple and contradictory subject positions that women assume do not hold out the hope of our escape from relations of power, they merely cause us to believe there is an outside. It is precisely this belief that catches us up in the normative mechanisms of power.

           It would be unjust, however, to accuse those who celebrate the "multiple (rather than divided) subject" as a liberating notion of basing their position on a misreading of Foucault. In a sense they have read him very well, perceiving in what he tries to say what, in fact, he says. For having cleansed the law of its power of negation, he has himself turned negation, contradiction, error into terms external to the law. It is at least partially because Foucault is thus at odds with himself that his critics are so at odds with each other: some seeing resistance as a possibility he uniquely opens up, others seeing it as a possibility he ultimately denies. Either, as we have observed, the original abolition of negation forces us to read negation as external, or it forces us to read every negation as simply the affirmation of what it would deny, every disavowal as at heart a straightforward avowal. In this latter case negation is taken neither as external nor as internal, but as fundamentally impossible. Every resistance to the law another occasion of its instantiation.

           Psychoanalysis provides a different scenario. It does not deliver the doomful pronouncement that there is no negation that is not an affirmation, but rather the more complex statement that there is no affirmation without a negation internal to it. This difference can be clarified by returning once again to Foucault's dismissal of the repression hypothesis. The law works, Foucault argues, not by forbidding a desire that already exists—an incestuous desire, let us say—but rather by inciting us to speak about incest and thus constructing a desire that had no prior existence. In one respect, psychoanalysis's claim is similar to this, for it also contends that desire is a product of the law. In another respect, psychoanalysis's claim is profoundly different; it states that the subject produced by the law is not one who simply has a desire—who desires incest, say—but one who rejects this desire, who desires not to desire it. Psychoanalysis, in other words, includes in the process of construction the negation Foucault leaves out, and this negation shows in the resulting discordance between the subject and its desire. Though it is, in the psychoanalytic sense, an effect of the law, desire is not a realization of the law. It is by maintaining this crucial distinction between effect and realization that psychoanalysis distances itself from all other theories of the social construction of the subject.

           It is important to see that this distinction is strictly dependent on the concept of repression—not the one Foucault polemically misrepresents, but the one psychoanalysis formulated in light of the philosophical precision of Freud's teacher, Franz Brentano. As is fairly well known, Brentano was one of the founders of the theory of intentionality, or, as we might now say, of the theory of the relation of the subject to the signifier and to the real. The argument that most profoundly influenced psychoanalysis was that in which Brentano insisted that "presentation" and "judgment" had to be seen as separate instances. In presentation, he argued, something (which linguistic science has since taught us to call a signifier) is simply made present or manifest to consciousness. Presentation, or the mere appearance of the signifier, contains in itself neither truth nor error; it is only through judgment that truth or falseness is attributed to presentations. Yet, if the first judgment were conceived as mere affirmation, then judgment would collapse back into presentation, the distinction between them could not be marked and could not practically be upheld. The first judgment, therefore, had to be conceived as negative, i.e., there had to be an original negation for judgment to be able to exist at all.

           This originary negation is then reconceived by Freud as repression—the repression that founds and simultaneously splits the subject. What repression, or negation, denies is the reality of the signifier. This denial establishes the order of the signifier as radically distinct from that of the real. The real is thus "expelled" (as Freud says in his essay on "Negation") from the symbolic order, yet it is this very expulsion that enables the signifier to function as a signifier, to come to designate (rather than be) the real for the subject, or (as Freud says, again in "Negation") this expulsion enables thinking, in general, to begin.

           Two points must now be made with reference to this definition of negation: 1) It is clear that the negative and affirmative judgments that thought may render are of a different, secondary order from the "negative judgment" that precedes and, indeed, is the condition of their possibility. When Foucault rejects that definition of the law that sees it as a negation, his target is negation in its secondary sense: that which is opposed to affirmation. He thus neglects consideration of the originary negation that precedes this symbolic opposition, and his rejection thus misses its psychoanalytic mark. 2) When psychoanalysis says that repression splits the subject, it should now be evident that this split occurs between the symbolic thinking, or consciousness, that signifiers make possible and the real that they expel. To say that the subject is the effect of historical discourses is to say that it is the effect not only of what these discourses make possible, but also of the real that they make impossible through expulsion. In other words, that which a discourse disallows does not merely define the exterior limits of the subject, that which the subject is not, but rather what the subject is: the subject is, in part, the positivization, the interiorization, of that which is impossible for it. The subject includes its own desire, the impossibility or unrealizability of its goals.

           There are some who would argue that psychoanalysis surrenders itself to ahistoricism by centering its analysis on the essential nature of the signifier. But psychoanalysis argues that the signifier is the very source, or material cause, of human history. It is only in the symbolic order that human history is composed. It is its very commitment to the historical determinations of the subject that leads psychoanalysis to consider the signifier and the split subject that is one of its most problematic effects—problematic mainly for those histories that have erected themselves on the elimination of the contradictions this subject implies. The consequences—for history, for political theory, for feminism—of the introduction of the divided subject into history are only now, and only slowly, being articulated.

           Something can be briefly said, however, about the general significance of the split subject for an ethical project. One of the problems of historicising the question of ethics is that one often ends up endorsing some version of a "naturalistic" or relativist theory: a statement about what is right or just is often seen to be merely an empirical generalization about what people at various moments, in various places, of different sexes were interested in, what it was they valued. To conceive the field of ethics in this way, however, is to picture it as little more than a kind of "used clothing store, where the diverse verdicts that have dominated the aspirations of men are displayed. "⁶ As everyone knows, such a position seldom yields the tolerance it is supposed to foster. "Just as well another as this," leads too easily to its contrary: "Just as well this as another"—and why not?

           Once one conceives the subject as cut off from its desire, desire becomes detached from value. What one desires is no longer simply what society currently deems most valuable, some good we would like to have, but rather something society has caused us to lose. Now, an ethics based on this impossible good—lost, irretrievably lost, because it is only as lost, as gone, that it is good, as rejected that it is desired—will be radically different from an ethics based on a good that defines an ideal future. Unlike the latter this other ethics does not crusade for the cause of harmony; it stakes itself neither on the hope that there will be a time when values will be universal, nor on the pluralist conviction that the space that contains contradictory values is itself neutral, devoid of conflict. In brief, this other ethics is not founded on the belief that an ultimate resolution of conflict is possible, but rather on the insistence that the subject's essential conflict with itself cannot be reduced by any social arrangement. Further, that the attempts at such a reduction are the source of some of the worst ethical misconduct. It is, for example, in the attempts to structure the relations between men and women as a resolution of conflict, as a cure for it, that we will find the motivation for the greatest injustices against women. It has always been in the name of harmony (of insuring against woman's being wolf to man) that woman has been conceived as the complement of man, that which completes, fulfills, and heals him. The conception of the sexual relation between men and woman in these terms—man desiring woman and woman supplying with her being the means of his fulfillment—erases the question of her desire and deprives her of the powers and privileges that always, morganatically, revert back to him.

           m/f has never tried to reconcile the split that divides the subject and makes harmony impossible. On the contrary, the journal has successfully made visible to us both the fact of this division and the many unhappy consequences—for women—of the various attempts to ignore it. Placing the desire of the subject—the female subject, particularly—in the forefront of its investigations, m/f has produced some of the most rigorous and powerful work feminism has to offer.

Notes

1. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria; quoted by Frances Ferguson in "The Sublime of Edmund Burke, or the Bathos of Experience," Glyph 8 (1981).
2. Sigmund Freud, "Observations on Transference Love," in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. III, p. 167; see also Catherine Millot, "The Feminine Superego," this volume.
3. Michel Foucault, "Georges Canguilhem: philosopher of error," Ideology & Consciousness, vol. 7 (1980), p. 52.
4. This phrase (emphasis mine) is taken from Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender, Indiana University Press, 1987, p. x. The phrase has often been quoted in support of a new social rather than psychoanalytic position that seems to be gaining wider acceptance in the United States.
5. Foucault, p. 61.
6. Jacques Lacan, L'Ethique de la psychoanalyse, Seuil, 1986, p. 24.