Balderdash: Women reading, Theory, [Selective] Reflexivity and Forced Readings - 0 views
-
I agree with Gayatn Spivak that our marginality is important—but there is very little room in the margins when that space has been claimed by Marxists and theorists of all stripes. With all this jostling in the margins, who is in the center?...
-
Shari Benstock challenges us: “Feminist criticism must be willing to pose the question of the differences within women’s writing. . . . Feminist criticism must be a radical critique not only of women’s writing but of women’s critical writing.” She calls for us to “inscribe the authority of our own experience” (147) and to question the assumptions of that authority. I am not sure that Shari Benstock realizes how dangerous this project can be. My own career began with such critiques of feminist criticism and I have concluded that years of joblessness were a direct result of that practice.’ Old girl networks exist; hierarchy is imposed and some feminist journals have “better” reputations than others. Star feminist critics perform their acts on platforms all over the country. The only difference is that we like what they have to say, and fall asleep less easily than at a male critic’s lecture. One feminist critic says that she would not have the “hubris” to criticize Gilbert and Gubar, It is not hubris but a pledge to our collective future as practicing critics to point out differences in theory and practice. I am sure that Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar would be the first to insist that such sisterly criticisms of their work be offered, for they continue to write, to grow, and to change. If feminist criticism has taught us anything, it has taught us to question authority, each other’s as well as our oppressors’. There are some cases in which theorists ignore scholarship at their peril.
-
I suspect it emerges from a flaw in the very project of critical theory. When Marxism, semiotics and the rest burst on the academic scene in the 1960s and ‘70s, they were seen above all as ways to probe beneath the sur- face of reality. The idea was always to unmask the hidden structures of power, dominance, and exploitation that lay below even the most mundane and ordinary aspects of daily life. Certainly such things are there to be found. But if this is all one is looking for, one soon ends up with a rather jaundiced picture of social reality. The overall effect of reading through this literature is remarkably bleak; one is left with the almost Gnostic feeling of a fallen world, in which every aspect of human life is threaded with violence and domination.9 Critical theory thus ended up sabotaging his own best in- tentions, making power and domination so fundamental to the very nature of social reality that it became impossible to imagine a world without it. Be- cause if one can’t, then criticism rather loses its point. Before long, one had figures like Foucault or Baudrillard arguing that resistance is futile (or at least, that organized political resistance is futile), that power is simply the basic constituent of everything, and often enough, that there is no way out of a totalizing system, and that we should just learn to accept it with a cer- tain ironic detachment. And if everything is equally corrupt, then pretty much anything could be open for redemption.10 Why not, say, those creative and slightly offbeat forms of mass consumption favored by upper-middle class academics? Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value, page 30
-
It is by the use of obscurantist language and labelling that formalist critics batter the text and bury it. They assert their egos and insult their own readers by making them feel ignorant. Much as they criticize anti-intellectual bourgeois society, they add to the contempt for art and thought by alienating readers even further. Their jargon, the hieroglyphics of a self-appointed priesthood, makes reading seem far more difficult than it is. In an age of declining literacy, it seems suicidal for the supposed champions of arts and letters to attack and incapacitate readers.