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Reply to Joan Scott

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Laura Downs
Laura Downs
Affiliation:
University of Michigan
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CSSH Discussion
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Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 35 , Issue 2 , April 1993 , pp. 444 - 451
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1993

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References

I would like to thank Alice Echols, Susan Johnson, and David Mayfield for their astute and helpful criticism of the arguments set forth in this essay.

1 Thus, “the project of making experience visible precludes critical examination of the working of the ideological system itself.” These are different endeavors, to be sure, but are they necessarily opposed? See Scott, Joan. “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry, 17 (Summer 1991), 778 (emphasis added)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Jacobs, Harriet, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Written by Herself (Boston: Negro History Press, 1861; reprinted by Harvard University Press, 1987)Google Scholar. See also Keckley, Elizabeth, Behind the Scenes, or Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House (Boston: 1868; reprinted by Oxford University Press. 1988)Google Scholar.

3 Hence, Walkowitz writes: “Women … do not simply experience sexual passion and ‘naturally’ find the words to express those feelings, nor do they experience sexual danger and naturally find the words to express the threat. In the simplest sense, women of different classes and races all have to rely on cultural constructs in order to tell their ‘truths,℉ but the cultural constructs available in different social situations vary” (my emphasis). Here, Walkowitz maintains a kind of creative tension between the discursive/cultural construction of subjects and the notion that stories (experiences) are told from particular subject positions (Walkowitz, J.. City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London [Chicago, 1992], 9CrossRefGoogle Scholar). See also Clark Hine, Darlene, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West: Preliminary Thoughts on the Culture of Dissemblance,” in Ruiz, V.L. and Dubois, E., ed., Unequal Sisters (New York, 1990)Google Scholar; Roper, Lyndal, “Will and Honor: Sex, Words and Power in Augsburg Criminal Trials,” Radical History Review, 43 (Winter 1989), 45–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Clark, Anna, Women's Silence, Men's Violence: Sexual Assault in England 1770–1845, (London, 1987)Google Scholar.

4 Though Foucault himself periodically worried about the consequences of this closed system linking language to power/knowledge. Thus, in 1972, he wrote that “a history of the referent is no doubt possible, and I have no wish to exclude at the outset any effort to uncover and free these ‘pre-discursive’ experiences from the tyranny of the text” (Foucault, Michel, The Archeology of Knowledge [New York, 1972], 47Google Scholar). In his later work, Foucault sought to break the closed power/knowledge circuit with concepts such as “subjugated knowledges,” “low-ranking knowledges … popular knowledge”that somehow struggle into being outside the power-knowledge topos. See Foucault, M., Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–77, Gordon, Colin, ed. (New York, 1980). 82Google Scholar.

5 See de Saussure, Fernand, Course in General Linguistics, Baskin, Wade, trans. (New York, 1966)Google Scholar; Derrida, Jacques, Of Grammatology, Spivak, G., trans. (Baltimore, 1976)Google Scholar; de Man, Paul, Allegories of Reading (New Haven, 1979)Google Scholar, and Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (London, second ed., 1983)Google Scholar. I thank David Mayfield for reminding me of the importance of this distinction. See Mayfield, David and Thorne, Susan, “Social History and its Discontents: Gareth Stedman Jones and the Politics of Language,” Social History, Vol 17:2, 166–188Google Scholar, and their “Reply to ‘The Poverty of Protest’ and ‘The Imaginary Discontents,’” forthcoming in Social History, for a fuller discussion of the difficulties created by historians' frequent confusion of referent and representation for the development of theoretical approaches in history grounded in linguistics.

6 Hobbes's Leviathan offers a compelling early statement of the chaos that ensues―in moral meaning and in human relationships―when the arbitrary bond linking one sign to another comes unstuck. His solution, of course, is to implant an absolute sovereign whose task is to fix those relations for all time and so ensure the fulfillment of contracts. See Book I, Leviathan. See also Mayfield, David, “Language and Social History,” Social History, Vol 16:3 (10 1991), 353–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar, on current confusions about language “overcoming” politics, versus its being just one more arena of struggle. See also de Man, Paul, Allegories, 135–301Google Scholar, for a discussion of the complex relationships among text, metaphor, and the social relations of civil society in the political philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

7 Steedman, Carolyn. “Bimbos From Hell” (review essay), London Review of Books, 01 1993, 10–11Google Scholar.

8 Hence langue (as structure) becomes “an enabling condition” of parole,” which is never more than a “defective rendition of the structure, forms and meanings always already implicit in Iangue.” The humbler parole thus captures the fleeting instances of a culture's more all-encompassing langue. See Mannheim, Bruce, “Popular Song and Popular Grammar, Poetry and Metalanguage,” Word 37:1–2 (04–08 1986), 45–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for an exceptionally clear and intelligent account of some of the methodological and ontological “paradoxes” which the Saussurean distinction between langue and parole has produced in those human sciences in which it has been adopted.

9 After all, “speakers share talk; meaning is the consequence of complex inferences from particular instances of talk … shared representations … are a product of shared practices.” Mannheim, , Popular Song and Popular Grammar, 69–70Google Scholar.

10 Mannheim's own work on verbal art (including riddles, songs and poetry) in southern Peruvian Quechua suggests a fascinating (and convincing) explanation for this development in modern western thought. Since the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, western nation-states have tended to institutionalize metalanguage (grammar, langue) in various Academies de la Langue. These academies have historically pushed for the replacement of vernacular knowledges with a single, standardized national language frozen on the pages of dictionaries and grammatical texts. In southern Peru, by contrast, speakers acquire their metalingustic skills through engaging in the verbal arts of riddling and word play. In other words, grammar can also be conveyed socially and interactively (and, this is, of course, true for European-derived cultures as well) and not only through an explicit training imparted through compulsory education in grammar and “language arts” (Mannheim, , Popular Song and Popular Grammar, 67Google Scholar).

11 One unfortunate outcome of this elision between society and text is that it generally dulls a theory's capacity for social critique. Of course, not all post-structuralists make such an elision. Roland Barthes, for instance, uses Derrida's insight that the sign is always a matter of social and historical convention as the basis for a relentless critique of the tendency within any ideology to “naturalize” social reality. See Barthes, R., Mythologies (London, 1972)Google Scholar, and S/Z (New York, 1975)Google ScholarPubMed.

12 I have borrowed the term “binary extremism” from Judy Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delights, 247n. See Halperin, David, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality (London, 1990)Google Scholar, and di Leonardo, Micaela, “White Lies,” Village Voice (09 22, 1992)Google Scholar, on the point that socially constructed phenomena are no less real for all that they are constructed.

13 And here I am thinking of Habermas, Jurgen's distinction between system and life-world as elaborated in Knowledge and Human Interests (London, 1972)Google Scholar; “Technology and Science as Ideology,” in Towards a Rational Society (London, 1971)Google Scholar, and, more recently, in his Theory of Communicative Action (London, 1981)Google Scholar. Throughout this work, Habermas insists on the existence of a qualitative distinction between the “empirical-analytic language” of system (industry, hospitals, schools, bureaucratic structures) and the hermeneutic knowledge produced in intersubjective encounters. The former dovetails nicely with Foucault's dominating languages of technology and science. The language of the life-world describes something entirely different, for it is produced in the reciprocal engagement of subjects and not by the one-way objectifying glare of power beaming steadily from the panopticon. Of this kind of knowledge, Habermas writes: “It is a singular achievement of this ideology to detach society's self-understanding from the frame of reference of communicative action … and to replace it with a scientific model. Accordingly, the culturally defined self-understanding of a social life-world is replaced by the self-reification of men under categories of purposive-rational action and adaptive behavior” (“Technology and Science as Ideology,” 105–6). In his later work, Habermas came to doubt that the two kinds of knowledge could ever be reconciled and so insists on the connection of each to a specific kind of social environment: system for the technical and life-world for the normative/ethical knowledges produced in intersubjective encounter.

14 These internal relations are of course important; after all, they do determine some parts of meaning. But this is not the whole story, as Evelyn Higginbotham (by way of quoting Bakhtin) reminds us. ” ‘the power of the word to mean …’ evolves from concrete situational and ideological contexts, that is, from a position of enunciation that reflects not only time and place but values as well” (Higginbotham, E.B., “African American Women's History and the Metalanguage of Race,” Signs [Winter 1992], 17:2, 256CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

15 The term is from Eagleton, Terry's Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minnesota, 1983), 141Google Scholar. In warning us of the dogmatisms to which the new, local “politics of the fragments” is prone, Eagleton explains that this position “was born of a specific political defeat and disillusion [1968 and its aftermath in France; perhaps the Reagan-Bush era is this country's farcical analogue]. The “total structure” which it identified as the enemy was an historically particular one: the armed, repressive state of late monopoly capitalism, and the Stalinist politics which pretended to confront it but were deeply complicit with its rule” (Eagleton, , Literary Theory, 144Google Scholar).

16 Sandoval, Chela, “U.S. Third World Feminism: The Theory and Method of Oppositional Consciousness in the Postmodern World,” Genders, 10 (Spring 1991), 1–24Google Scholar. See also Childers, Mary and hooks, bell, “A Conversation about Race and Class,” in Conflicts in Feminism, y, Marianne and Fox Keller, Evelyn, eds., (New York. 1990), 60–81Google Scholar; Talpade Mohanty, Chandra, “Cartographies of Struggle: Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism,” in Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, Talpade Mohanty, Chandra, Russo, Ann, and Torres, Lourdes, eds. (Indiana, 1991), 1–47Google Scholar.

17 Alcarón, Norma, “The Theoretical Subject(s) of This Bridge Called My Back and Anglo-American Feminism,” in Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Women of Color, Anzaldua, Gloria, ed. (San Francisco, 1990), 360Google Scholar.

18 Barkley-Brown, Elsa, “Polyrhythms and Improvisation: Lessons for Women's History,” History Workshop Journal, no. 31 (Spring 1991), 85–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar; also Barkley-Brown, E., “Womanist Consciousness: Maggie Lena Walker and the Independent Order of Saint Luke,” Signs, 14 (Spring 1989)Google Scholar; Fields, Barbara, “Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America,” New Left Review, 181 (05–06 1990), 95–118Google Scholar; Higginbotham, Evelyn B., “African American Women's History;” bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (Boston, 1984)Google Scholar, also hooks, , Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (Boston, 1988)Google Scholar; Lorde, Audre, Sister Outsider (Boston, 1984)Google Scholar; Simson, Rennie, “The African-American Female: The Historical Context of the Construction of Sexual Identity.” in Snitow, A. and Stansell, C., eds., Powers of Desire (New York, 1983), 229–35Google Scholar.

19 Carby, H., “The Politics of Difference,” Ms Magazine (09/10 1990), 84–5Google Scholar.