Postmodern Space, Postcolonial Resistance, '99 -- Postmodernism -- Literary Criticism -- IACD
Subjectivity &
the Politics of Location


Mapping Subjectivity --
"to conceptualise body, self, person, identity, subjectivity in terms of both structures and agency."  (3)

Territories of the subject:
 

Body
  • as a part of a general temporal and spatial logic, an 'order of connection'
  • as part of a prediscursive realm through an emphasis on bodily movement. (e.g. Merleau-Ponty)
  • as an origin (e.g. Irigaray)
  • a site of cultural consumption (e.g. Grosz; women's clothes inscribing 'maternity' on their bodies).  * the physical extension of capacities
  • re-constructed, re-presented (e.g. 'medically')
Self
  • a continuum of Lockean-Humean understanding of human identity -- a series of experience
  • Katian-Cartian understanding -- a distinct self
  • Freud as a mixture of the two trends.
Person
  • description of the cultural framework of the self.
  • not absolutely necessary as a category.
Identity/
identification
  • psychoanalytic -- 'one needs to identify with something because there is an originary and insurmountable lack of identity.'
  • dynamic --e.g. Butler, Deleuze and Irigaray
  • spatial metaphors e.g. diaspora. 
Subject/
Subjectivity
  • Nowadays, the subject and subjectivity are more likely to be conceived of as rooted in the spatial home of the body, and therefore situated, as composed of and by a 'federation' of different narrative, and as registered through a whole series of senses, . .  .
Probyn, Elspeth. "Travels in the Postmodern: Making Sense of the Local." Feminism/Postmodernism.  Ed. Linda
Nicholson. NY: Routledge, 1990.
  Main purpose:
"In this chapter I want to explore a central problematic within feminist cultural theory: Whether the subaltern can speak.   I see this problematic composed of a number of intersecting critical questions: the epistemological constitution of knowledge, the ontology of the questioning subject, and the conjunctural question of where and how we may speak.   I will organize this exploration around three current metaphors: locale, location and local.  177
"I want. . .to question the hierarchical ordering of knowledge" (178)
  Major Argument: --re-articulating the locale.
". . . in thinking of how locale is inscribed on our bodies, in our homes, and on the streets, we can begin to loosen its ideological affects.  In uncoupling the event of patriarchy from its site, we move beyond the silent agony of 'the problem that has no name.'  In looking at how location disqualifies certain experiences, we begin to realize that the knowledge of locale is important and powerful.  In rearticulating the ground that is locally built around us, we give feminist answers that show up the ideological conditions of certain postmodern questions."

Rich's "Notes toward a Politics of Location"
--in creating our centers and our own locals, we tend to forget that our centers displace others into the peripheries of our making.  p. 176
-- Against this totalizing gaze, Rich points out that we need to replace the assumption of universalism and construct a feminist theory that starts from the fragments of one's own body.  177


  local -- that issuing from or related to a particular time.  指的是特定時間內的地點﹔
  location -- the methods by which one comes to locate sites of research.  Through location knowledges are ordered into sequences which are congruent with previously established categories of knowledge.  將地點定位並連貫成系列(或系統)﹔
         -- 在認知層面，「定位」必然含帶對經驗或知識的價值判斷，因此也可能造成對認知對象的知識暴力(epistemic violence)。
  locale -- "a place that is the setting for a particular event.  I take this 'place' as both a discursive and non-discursive arrangement which holds a gendered event, the home being the most obvious example" 178.
         -- 地方與事件的綜合(e.g.家和家庭)，既隱含外在的「定位」(location)又代表欲望場所(site of desires)。

Living in the Locale

Circumventing Location Making Sense of the Local