[Gesth-l] Feminizmus, Ideolgia és Dekonstrukció: egy pragmatikus szempont

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Feminism, Ideology, and Deconstruction: a Pragmatist View

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Rorty, Richard.
Feminism, Ideology, and Deconstruction: a Pragmatist View. (Special
Issue: Feminism and Pragmatism)
Hypatia v8, n2 (Spring, 1993)
COPYRIGHT Hypatia Inc. 1993

Most intellectuals like to find ways of joining in the struggle of the weak
against the strong. So they hope that their particular gifts and competences
can be made relevant to that struggle. The term most frequently used in
recent decades to formulate this hope is "critique of ideology." The idea is
that philosophers, literary critics, lawyers, historians, and others who are
good at making distinctions, redescribing, and recontextualizing can put
these talents to use by "exposing" or "demystifying" present social
practices. 

But the most efficient way to expose or demystify an existing practice would
seem to be by suggesting an alternative practice, rather than criticizing
the current one. In politics, as in the Kuhnian model of theory-change in
the sciences, anomalies within old paradigms can pile up indefinitely
without providing much basis for criticism until a new option is offered.
"Immanent" criticism of the old paradigm is relatively ineffective. More
specifically, the most effective way to criticize current descriptions of a
given instance of the oppression of the weak as "a necessary evil" (the
political equivalent of "a negligible anomaly") is to explain just why it is
not in fact necessary, by explaining how a specific institutional change
would eliminate it.
That means sketching an alternative future and a scenario of political
action that might take us from the present to that future. 

Marx and Engels make this point in The German Ideology when they criticize
Feuerbach for changing "the word communist', which in the real world means
the follower of a definite revolutionary party, into a mere category"
(Tucker 1978, 167). Their confidence that their criticisms of the German
philosophical tradition substituted reality for illusion, science for
fantasy, was greatly strengthened by the fact that they had a revolutionary
party and a program - a concrete proposal about how to provide empirical
verification of their claim that certain contemporary evils (e.g., income
differentials, unemployment) were unnecessary ones.
The difference between their situation and ours is principally that no one
now wants the revolution they had in mind; no longer does anyone want to
nationalize the means of production or to abolish private property. So the
contemporary Left lacks the sort of party and the sort of scenario that
backed up Marx and Engels's claim that their thought was "scientific" rather
than "utopian" - the voice of reality rather than fantasy.(1) 

The closest we leftist intellectuals in the rich democracies come nowadays
to having such a party and a program is the feminist movement.
But on its political side feminism looks like a reformist rather than a
revolutionary movement. For its political goals are fairly concrete and not
difficult to envisage being achieved; these goals are argued for by appeals
to widespread moral intuitions about fairness. So contemporary feminist
politics is more analogous to eighteenth-century abolitionism than to
nineteenth-century communism. Whereas it was very difficult in the
nineteenth century to envisage what things might be like without private
ownership, it was relatively easy in the eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries to envisage a world without slaves and to see slavery as just a
left over of a barbarous age - morally repugnant to widely held intuitions.
Analogously, it is relatively easy to envisage a world with equal pay for
equal work, equally shared domestic responsibilities, as many women as men
in positions of power, etc., and to see present inequities as repugnant to
widely-shared intuitions about what is right and just. Only insofar as
feminism is more than a matter of specific reforms is it analogous to
nineteenth-century communism. 

Feminists are in the following situation: like Marx and Engels, they suspect
that piecemeal reforms will leave an underlying, and unnecessary, evil
largely untouched. But unlike Marx and Engels, they cannot easily sketch a
revolutionary political scenario or a post revolutionary utopia. The result
is a lot of talk about philosophical revolutions, revolutions in
consciousness; these revolutions, however, are not reflected at anything
that Marx and Engels would recognize as "the material level." So it is easy
to imagine Marx and Engels making the same kind of fun of a lot of
contemporary feminist theory that they made of Hegel, Feuerbach, or Bauer.
The feminist theorists, they might say, have made "feminist" into "a mere
category"; nor can they hope to do more, as long as the term does not
signify "follower of a definite revolutionary party." 

These considerations lead one to ask whether feminists can keep the notion
of "critique of ideology" without invoking the distinction between "matter"
and "consciousness" deployed in The German Ideology.
There is a large and depressing literature about the equivocity of the term
"ideology," the latest example of which is the first chapter of Terry
Eagleton's Ideology.(2) Eagleton rejects the frequent suggestion that the
term has become more trouble than it is worth and offers the following as a
definition: "ideas and beliefs which help to legitimate the interests of a
ruling group or class specifically by distortion and dissimulation." As an
alternative he suggests "false or deceptive beliefs" that arise "not from
the interests of a dominant class but from the material structure of society
as a whole" (Eagleton 1991, 30).(3) The latter formulation incorporates the
material/non-material contrast central to The German Ideology. But it is
difficult for feminists to appropriate this contrast, which got whatever
concrete relevance it had from the explication of "material change" by
reference to Marx's eschatological history of changes in the organization of
mechanisms of production. That history is largely irrelevant to the
oppression of women by men.(4) 

If, however, we drop the matter-consciousness distinction and fall back on
the first of the two definitions of "ideology" I quoted from Eagleton, we
come into conflict with the philosophical views about truth, knowledge, and
objectivity held by most of the contemporary feminist intellectuals who hope
to put their gifts and competences to work criticizing masculinist ideology.
For "distortion" presupposes a medium of representation which, intruding
between us and the object under investigation, produces an appearance that
does not correspond to the reality of the object. This representationalism
cannot be squared either with the pragmatist insistence that truth is not a
matter of correspondence to the intrinsic nature of reality, or with the
deconstructionist rejection of what Derrida calls "the metaphysics of
presence."(5) Pragmatists and deconstructionists agree that everything is a
social construct and that there is no point in trying to distinguish between
the "natural" and the "merely" cultural. They agree that the question is
which social constructs to discard and which to keep, and that there is no
point in appealing to "the way things really are" in the course of struggles
over who gets to construct what. Both philosophical schools can agree with
Eagleton that "if there are no values and beliefs not bound up with power,
then the term ideology threatens to expand to the vanishing point" (Eagleton
1991, 7). But, unlike Eagleton, both find this a reason to be dubious about
the utility of the notion of "ideology" (at least if it is supposed to mean
more than "a set of bad ideas"). 

The distinction that runs through The German Ideology between Marxist
science and mere philosophical fantasy is an excellent example of a claim to
have reached what Derrida calls "a full presence which is beyond the reach
of play" (1978, 279). As a good Marxist, Eagleton has to echo the standard
right-wing criticisms of Derrida when he says that "the thesis that objects
are entirely internal to the discourses which constitute them raises the
thorny problem of how we could ever judge that a discourse had constructed
its object validly" and goes on to ask "if what validates my social
interpretations are the political ends they serve, how am I to validate
those ends?" (Eagleton 1991, 205). You cannot talk about "distorted
communication" or "distorting ideas"
without believing in objects external to discourses, and objects capable of
being accurately or inaccurately, scientifically or merely fantastically,
represented by those discourses. 

Something, therefore, has to give. Feminist intellectuals who wish to
criticize masculinist ideology, and to use deconstruction to do so, must
either (1) think of something new for "ideology" to mean; or (2)
disassociate deconstruction from anti-representationalism, from the denial
that we can answer the question "have I constructed the object validly (as
opposed, for example, to usefully for feminist purposes)?"
or (3) say that the question of whether their criticisms of masculinist
social practices are "scientific" or "philosophically well grounded,"
like the question of whether masculinism has "distorted" things, is beside
the point. 

The best option is the last one. The first option is simply not worth the
trouble, and I do not think that the second can be done at all. It seems to
me unfortunate that some people identified with deconstruction have tried to
reconstitute the Marxist matter-consciousness distinction
- as when de Man said that "it would be unfortunate to confuse the
materiality of the signifier with the materiality of what it signifies"
and went on to define "ideology" as "the confusion of linguistic with
natural reality, of reference with phenomenalism" (de Man 1986, 11). The way
to rebut the accusation that literary theory, or deconstruction, is
"oblivious to social and historical reality" is to insist that "constitution
of objects by discourse" goes all the way down, and that "respect for
reality" (social and historical, astrophysical, or any other kind of
reality) is just respect for past language, past ways of describing what is
"really" going on.(6) Sometimes such respect is a good thing, sometimes it
is not. It depends on what you want. 

Feminists want to change the social world, so they cannot have too much
respect for past descriptions of social institutions. The most interesting
question about the utility of deconstruction for feminism is whether, once
Nietzsche, Dewey, Derrida, et al. have convinced us that there is nothing
"natural" or "scientific" or "objective" about any given masculinist
practice or description, and that all objects (neutrinos, chairs, women,
men, literary theory, feminism) are social constructs, there is any further
assistance that deconstruction can offer in deciding which constructs to
keep and which to replace, or in finding substitutes for the latter. I doubt
that there is. 

It is often said that deconstruction offers "tools" which enable feminists
to show, as Barbara Johnson puts it, that "the differences between entities
(prose and poetry, man and woman, literature and theory, guilt and
innocence) are shown to be based on a repression of differences within
entities, ways by which an entity differs from itself" (Johnson 1980,
x-xi).(7) The question of whether these differences were there (huddled
together deep down within the entity, waiting to be brought to light by
deconstructing excavators), or are only there in the entity after the
feminist has finished reshaping the entity into a social construct nearer
her heart's desire, seems to me of no interest whatever. Indeed, it seems to
me an important part of the anti-metaphysical polemic common to
post-Nietzscheans (pragmatists and deconstructionists alike) is to argue
that this finding-vs.-making distinction is of little interest. So I do not
see that it is to any political purpose to say, as Johnson does, that
"[d]ifference is a form of work to the extent that it plays beyond the
control of any subject"
(Johnson 1980, p. xi). It just doesn't matter whether God ordains, or "the
mass of productive forces" dialectically unfolds, or difference plays,
beyond the control of any of us. All that matters is what we can do to
persuade people to act differently than in the past. The question of what
ultimately, deep down, determines whether they will or will not change their
ways is the sort of metaphysical topic feminists can safely neglect. 

To sum up, anything that philosophy can do to free up our imagination a
little is all to the political good, for the freer the imagination of the
present the likelier it is that future social practices will be different
from past practices. Nietzsche's, Dewey's, Derrida's, and Davidson's
treatments of objectivity, truth, and language have freed us up a bit, as
did Marx's and Keynes's treatments of money and Christ's and Kierkegaard's
treatments of love. But philosophy is not, as the Marxist tradition
unfortunately taught us to believe, a source of tools for path- breaking
political work. Nothing politically useful happens until people begin saying
things never said before thereby permitting us to visualize new practices,
as opposed to analyzing old ones. The moral of Kuhnian philosophy of science
is important: there is no discipline called "critique" that one can practice
to get strikingly better politics, any more than there is something called
"scientific method"
that one can apply in order to get strikingly better physics. Critique of
ideology is, at best, mopping-up, rather than path-breaking. It is parasitic
on prophecy rather than a substitute for it. It stands to the imaginative
production of new descriptions of what has been going on (e.g., of what men
have been doing to women) as Locke (who described himself as "an
under-laborer," clearing away the rubbish) stood to Boyle and Newton. The
picture of philosophy as pioneer is part of a logocentric conception of
intellectual work with which we fans of Derrida should have no truck. 

One reason why many feminists resist this pragmatist view of the political
utility of philosophy is that masculinism seems so thoroughly built into
everything we do and say in contemporary society that it looks as if only
some really massive intellectual change could budge it.
So lots of feminists think that only by taking on some great big
intellectual evil of the sort that philosophers specialize in spotting
(something on the scale of logocentrism, or "binarism," or "technological
thinking") - interpreting this evil as intrinsically masculinist and
masculinism as standing or falling with it - can they achieve the radicality
and scope their task seems to demand. Without such an alliance with a
campaign against some large philosophical monster, the campaign against
masculinism seems to them doomed to some form of complicity in present
practices.(9) 

This view seems to me to get the relative sizes all wrong. Masculinism is a
much bigger and fiercer monster than any of the little, parochial, monsters
with which pragmatists and deconstructionists struggle. For masculinism is
the defense of the people who have been on top since the beginning of
history against attempts to topple them; that sort of monster is very
adaptable, and I suspect that it can survive almost as well in an
anti-logocentric as in a logocentric philosophical environment. It is true
that, as Derrida has acutely noted, the logocentric tradition is bound up in
subtle ways with the drive for purity - the drive to escape contamination by
feminine messes - symbolized by what he calls "the essential and essentially
sublime figure of virile homo-sexuality."(10) But that drive for purity and
that "sublime figure" are likely to survive in some still more highly
sublimated form even if we philosophers somehow manage an overcoming (or
even just a Verwindung) of metaphysics. 

Pragmatism - considered as a set of philosophical views about truth,
knowledge, objectivity, and language - is neutral between feminism and
masculinism. So if one wants specifically feminist doctrines about these
topics, pragmatism will not provide them. But feminists who (like
MacKinnon) think of philosophy as something to be picked up and laid down as
occasion demands, rather than as a powerful and indispensable ally, will
find in pragmatism the same antilogocentric doctrines they find in
Nietzsche, Foucault, and Derrida. The main advantage of the way pragmatists
present these doctrines is that they make clear that they are not unlocking
deep secrets, secrets that feminists must know in order to succeed. They
admit that all they have to offer is occasional bits of ad hoc advice -
advice about how to reply when masculinists attempt to make present
practices seem inevitable. Neither pragmatists nor deconstructionists can do
more for feminism than help rebut attempts to ground these practices on
something deeper than a contingent historical fact - the fact that the
people with the slightly larger muscles have been bullying the people with
the slightly smaller muscles for a very long time. 

NOTES 

The first version of this paper was prepared for a conference - "The Future
of Deconstruction: Reading Marx's The German Ideology" - held in February
1992 at the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center of the University of
California at Santa Barbara. It was also presented to my seminar at the 1992
session of the School of Criticism and Theory of Dartmouth College. I am
grateful to both groups for comments and criticisms that led me to make
revisions. 

1. For a good expression of this fantasy-realty contrast, see Engels's
"Socialism: Utopian and Scientific" in Tucker 1978, 693-94. 

2. For a deflationary account of the Marxist use of "ideology," see Bell
(1990,1-54). This article helps make clear why Marx would have found the
phrase "Marxist ideology" objectionable, and how inseperable Marx's use of
"ideology" was from his characterization of his own thought as "scientific."


3. I cite the fifth and sixth in Eagleton's series of progressively fuller
and sharper distinctions. For further discussion of this book see Rorty
(1992b). 

4. As Catherine MacKinnon says, the history of the relations between men and
women (unlike the history of sexuality - "the history of what makes
historians feel sexy") is flat. "[U]nderneath all of these hills and
valleys, these ebbs and flows, there is this bedrock, this tide that has not
changed much, namely male supremacy and the subordination of women."
(MacKinnon 1991, 6). That subordination runs though the centuries like a
monotone (and so usually inaudible) ground bass - the sound of men beating
up on women. No dramatic orchestration seems possible. 

5. I offer an account of pragmatism as antirepresentationalism in a forward
to Murphy (1990) and also in the introduction to Rorty (1992a).
For the parallels between Davidson's antirepresentationalism and Derrida's
antimetaphysics, see Wheeler (1986, 477-94). 

6. Wallace Stevens said that the imagination is the mind pressing back
against reality. Derrida and Dewey both help us see that this amounts to
pressing back against the imagination of the past. 

7. See the use made of this passage from Johnson by Joan Scott in her
"Deconstructing Equality-vs.-Difference: Or, the Uses of Poststructuralist
Theory for Feminism" in Hirsch and Keller (1990, 137-38). 

8. I develop this analogy between contemporary feminism and the New Science
of die seventeenth century at somewhat greater length in Rorty (1991,
247-50). 

9. A good example of this charge of complicity is Drucilla Cornell's
criticism of Catherine MacKinnon in Cornell (1991, chap. 3). Cornell thinks
that although MacKinnon "superficially rejects the dream of symmetry, which
measures us against the male norm," she nevertheless "cannot but fall into
that very old dream given the limits of her own theoretical discourse, which
necessarily repudiates the feminine as femininity because she can only see'
from the masculinist perspective"
(151). Cornell thinks that more philosophical reflection (of a specifically
deconstructionist sort) than MacKinnon wishes to engage in will be needed to
avoid complicity with masculinisn. She also thinks that MacKinnon betrays
feminism's distinctive ethical standpoint by reducing feminism to a power
grab. My sympathies are with MacKinnon. I cannot see anything wrong with
power grabs and am less sanguine about the political utility of
deconstructionist philosophy than is Cornell.
(For more doubts about this utility see Thomas McCarthy 1989. For
MacKinnon's view that "men are the way they are because they have power"
and that "women who succeed to male forms of power will largely be that way
too," see MacKinnon 1987, 220). 

10. I agree with Cornell that one of Derrida's central contributions to
feminism is that "he explicitly argues that fundamental philosophical
questions cannot be separated from the thinking of sexual difference"
(Cornell 1991, 98). Indeed, I should go further and say that Derrida's most
original and important contribution to philosophy is his weaving togther of
Freud and Heidegger, his association of "ontological difference" with gender
difference. This weaving together enables us to see for die first time the
connection between the philosophers' quest for purity, the view that women
are somehow impure, the subordination of women, and "virile homosexuality"
(the kind of male homosexuality that Eve Sedgwick calls
"homo-homosexuality", epitomized in Jean Genet's claim that "the man who
fucks another man is twice a man"). Compared to this insight (which is most
convincingly put forward in Derrida's "Geschlecht I"), the grab bag of
easily reproduced gimmicks labeled "deconstruction" seems to me relatively
unimportant. 

REFERENCES 

Bell, Daniel. 1990. The misreading of ideology: The social determination of
ideas in Marx's work. Berkeley Journal of Sociology 35: 1-54.
Cornell, Drucilla. 1991. Beyond accomodation: Ethical feminism,
deconstruction and the law. New York and London: Routledge. de Man, Paul.
1986. The resistance to theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1978. Writing and difference.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press. _____. 1988. The politics of
friendship. Journal of Philosophy 85: 632-44. Johnson, Barbara. 1980.
The critical difference. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
MacKinnon, Catherine. 1987. Feminism unmodified. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press. _____. 1991. Does sexuality have a history? Michigan
Quarterly Review 30. 1-11. McCarthy, Thomas. 1989. The politics of the
ineffable: Derrida's deconstructionism. The Philosophical Forum 21:
146-68. Murphy, John. 1990. Pragmatism: From Peirce to Davidson.
Boulder: Westview Press. Rorty, Richard. 1991. Feminism and pragmatism.
Michigan Quarterly Review 30: 231- 58. _____. (1992a). Objectivity,
relativism & truth. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
_____. (1992b). We anti- representationalists. Radical Philosophy 60:
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