The Discourse of Others:
Feminists and Postmodernism
by Craig Owens
from Foster, Hal, ed. The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture.
Seattle: Bay P, 1983.
I. Introduction | II. "A Remarkable Oversight" | III. A la recherche du recit perdu |
IV. The Visible and the Invisible | V. Conclusion | VI. Questions |
Postmodern knowledge [le savoir postmoderne] is not simply an instrument of power. It refines our sensitivity to difference and increase our tolerance of incommensurability. ¡VJ.F. Lyotard, La condition postmoderne
Thesis: I have chosen to negotiate the treacherous course between
postmodernism and feminism, it is in order to introduce the issue of sexual
difference into the modernism/ postmodernism debate¡Xa debate which
has until now been scandalously in-different (59).
I. Introduction
1. What is at stake, then, is not only the hegemony of Western culture,
but also (our sense of) our identity as a culture (58).
E. It is precisely at the legislative frontier between what can be represented and what cannot that the postmodernist operation is being staged¡Xnot in order to transcend representation, but in order to expose that system of power that authorizes certain representations while blocking, prohibiting or invalidating others. Among those prohibited from Western representation, whose representations are denied all legitimacy, are women. . . . This prohibition bears primarily on woman as the subject, and rarely as the object of representation, for there is certainly no shortage of images of women (59).
2. I had overlooked something¡Xsomething that is so obvious, so ¡§natural¡¨ that it may at the time have seemed unworthy of comment. It does not seem that way to me today. For this is an image of sexual difference or, rather, of sexual differentiation according to the distribution of the phallus¡Xas it is marked and then re-marked by the man¡¦s right arm, which appears less to have been raised than erected in greeting (60).
3. Like all representations of sexual difference that our culture produces, this is an image not simply of anatomical difference, but of the values assigned to it.
4. If I return to this passage here, it is not simply to correct my own remarkable oversight, but more importantly to indicate a blind spot in our discussion of postmodernism in general: our failure to address the issue of sexual difference¡Xnot only in the objects we discuss, but in our own enunciation as well <«Å§G, µoªí(²z½×¡B¥D¸qµ¥)> (61).
* recit=±Ôz, ¬G¨Æ; perdu=¥¢¥hªº, ³à¥¢ªº
B. "Most people"¨ does not include Fredric Jameson, although he diagnoses the postmodern condition in similar terms (as a loss of narrative's social function) and distinguishes between modernist and postmodernist works according to their different relations to the "'truth-content' of art" (65).
C. Symptoms of our recent loss of mastery are everywhere apparent in cultural activity today¡Xno where more so than in the visual arts. The modernist project of joining forces with science and technology for the transformation of the environment after rational principles of function and utility (Productivism, the Bauhaus) has long since been abandoned; what we witness in its place is a desperate, often hysterical attempt to recover some sense of mastery via the resurrection of heroic large-scale easel painting and monumental cast-bronze sculpture¡Xmediums themselves identified with the cultural hegemony of Western Europe (67).
b. More importantly, Rosler has refused to photograph the inhabitants of Skid Row, to speak on their behalf, to illuminate them from a safe distance. For ¡§concerned¡¨ or what Rosler calls ¡§victim¡¨ photograph overlooks the constitutive role of its own activity, to be merely representative (the ¡§myth¡¨ of photographic transparency and objectivity) (68-9).
c. Despite his or her benevolence in representing those who have been denied access to the means of representation, the photographer inevitably functions as an agent of the system of power that silenced these people in the first place. Thus, they are twice victimized: first by society, and then by the photographer who presume the right to speak on their behalf. In fact, in such photography it is the photographer rather than the ¡§subject¡¨ who pose¡Xas the subject¡¦s consciousness, indeed, as conscience itself (69).
d. In this work, . . . she has nevertheless pointed negatively to the crucial issue of a politically motivated art practice today: ¡§the indignity of speaking for others. Rosler¡¦s position poses a challenge to criticism as well, specifically to the critic¡¦s substitution of his own discourse for the work of art (69).
B. That the priority our culture grants to vision is a sensory impoverishment is hardly a new perception; the feminist critique, however, links the privileging of vision with sexual privilege (70).
2. Levine collaborates with Louise Lawler under the collective title ¡§A Picture is No Substitute for Anything¡¨¡Xan unequivocal critique of representation as traditionally defined (E.H. Gombrich: ¡§All art is image-making, and all image-making is the creation of substitutes.¡¨) (73).
3. When Lawler shows ¡§A Movie without the Picture,¡¨ as she did in 1979 in Los Angeles and again in 1983 in New York, is she simply soliciting the spectator as a collaborator in the production of the image? Or is she not also denying the viewer the kind of visual pleasure which cinema customarily provides¡Xa pleasure that has been linked with the masculine perversions voyeurism and scopophilia (73)?
4. When Cindy Sherman, in her untitled black-and-white studies for film stills (made in the late ¡¥70s and early ¡¥80s), first costumed herself to resemble heroines of grade-B Hollywood films of the late ¡¥50s and early ¡¥60s and the photographed herself in situations suggesting some immanent danger lurking just beyond the frame, was she simply attacking the rhetoric of ¡§auteurism by equating the known artifice of the actress in front of the camera with the supposed authenticity of the director behind it¡¨? Or was her play-acting not also an acting out of the psychoanalytic notion of femininity as masquerade, that is, as representation of male desire (73-5)?
5. When Barbara Kruger collages the words "your gaze hits the side of my face" over an image culled from a '50s photo-annual of a female bust, is she simply "making an equation . . . between aesthetic reflection and the alienation of the gaze: both reify"? Or is she not speaking instead of the masculinity of the look, the ways in which it objectifies and masters (75-7)?
B. The existence of feminism, with its insistence on difference, forces us to reconsider. For in our country good-bye look just like hello, but only from a masculine position. Women have learned¡Xperhaps they have always known¡Xhow to recognize the difference (77).
2. Can you think of other examples applicable to the term "The Visible and the Invisible" Owen used in the essay to discuss postmodern feminist¡¦s artwork?
3. Can you think of any other possible oversight to fit in the discussion of postmodern feminism?