Language and Sexual Difference by Susan Sellers

 Language and Sexual Difference by Susan Sellers [from the Introduction to the book]

Introduction

How can women analyze their own exploitation, inscribe their own demands, within an order prescribed by the masculine? - Luce Irigaray

In this introductory section, Susan Sellers outlines the recent linguistic debates, as these have developed in and influenced the French-speaking world, by presenting the work of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and the theories of three French cultural interpreters, Claude Levi-Strauss, Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes, so as to provide a context for the very different interpretations of French feminism.

In the second half of this section, she introduces the writings of Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva to show how their work both draws on and challenges these theories.

The Problem in Women’s ‘Expression of their Experience’

Language has been a major area of intellectual inquiry in the twentieth century. The impetus for this new interest has come from the realisation of the crucial role language plays in our lives.

Language is intrinsic to the way we think, to the way we construct our group and self-identities, to the way we perceive the world and organise our social relationships and political systems. Language encodes our experience, and because of the particular vision on which our language system depends, the problem for women is that we can only express ourselves in the language that symbolises the way man has perceived the world to be, says Susan Sellers.

DIFFERENCE IN LANGUAGE | Saussure

Saussure split language into two basic categories: the word - or signifier - and the concept - or signified - for which it stands. The letters c-a-t, for instance, or the sound of these letters as they are pronounced, constitute the signifier of the animal 'cat'. It is the consensus of agreement amongst English speakers that c-a-t should designate a feline quadruped.

An illustration of Saussure's theory can be found in the way different languages distinguish colours. Colours are not distinct, separate bands, but part of a continuous spectrum of light which we divide for the sake of convenience into red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet.

The Construction of the Other: Michel Foucault

The French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault has similarly developed Saussure’s theory that meaning is a product of differences, and these differences help in the creation of group identities!

So in order for a group to form, I, as a potential member, must perceive a resemblance between myself and the other group members. He argued that one of the ways in which a group's identity is forged (and mine as part of it) is through its recognition of its differences from other groups.

He believed these distinctions underlie all social hierarchy, as well as the structure of language and logic of thought. They operate as the fundamental organising principle in the way we think, speak and define ourselves in relation to others.

Georg Hegel’s Model of the ‘Master and his Slave’ Metaphor

The nineteenth century German philosopher Georg Hegel provided a metaphor for the way in which identity is created through the opposition and hierarchical ordering of differences in his model of a master and his slave.

The model refers to the way in which masters define themselves in relation to their slaves, good in the context of evil, black in terms of white. Simone de Beauvoir, in her study The Second Sex, develops the metaphor to show how the identity of the individual subject is created in relation to an object or 'other'; and she extends the argument to demonstrate how men have made use of women in order to guarantee their position as masters.

The written text: Roland Barthes

Like Michel Foucault, the French critic Roland Barthes has explored the ways in which the prevailing ideology of the dominant power group works to conceal the processes by which it has attained power through an appeal to 'truths' presented in such a way that they appear natural, logical or inevitable.

Like Foucault, Barthes argued that these processes are nevertheless revealed in the discourse and other cultural activities of the ruling group.

In Mythologies he shows how the prevailing ideology infuses even such apparently neutral texts as photographs. Citing the example of a photograph of a black soldier in uniform saluting the French flag on a front cover of the magazine Paris-Match, Barthes demonstrated how the picture means more than a French soldier's loyal salute.

Appearing as it did at the time of the Algerian war for independence, the photograph implies the justice of the French cause. Its signified, Barthes suggests, is also French Imperialism, and an appeal for the continuation of French colonial rule.

In his work on literature, this insistence prompted Barthes to focus not on what texts mean, but on the processes by which meaning is achieved.

His belief that a signifier can have several signifieds led him to develop a mode of criticism that would take into account the plurality of meanings in texts. He challenged those critics who attempt to fix a single, 'correct' meaning on a text, arguing instead for a practice of reading that would explore how meanings are created.

He distinguished two different types of writers - the ecrivant - or writer who believes they have something to say and uses language to say this as unequivocally as possible - and the ecrivain - or writer who explores the potential of language to generate (multiple) meanings. He condemned the first type of writer, who like the old-style critic holds on to an illusory belief in intrinsic meaning and whose attempt to dictate how a work should be interpreted reveals his own ideological bias and desire for power, concentrating increasingly on the second type of writer or ecrivain.

Continuing this distinction, Barthes also distinguished between two types of text. He described the text of the ecrivant as lisible - or readable - since the role of the reader is reduced to passively following the words on the page. An ecrivain's text, by contrast, he referred to as scriptable - or writable - since the participation of its reader is actively sought to co-produce meanings. Barthes suggested that the scriptable text frees the reader from the tyranny of imposed definition, offering instead the possibility of 'other' meanings.

Drawing on the psychoanalytic theories of Freud, Barthes argued that the pleasure a reader experiences in reading a scriptable text is linked to the primary pleasures of infancy. The word Barthes uses to describe this pleasure is jouissance, a word which it is difficult to translate into English since it means sexual as well as other forms of pleasure, but which may be thought of as the pleasure a reader feels in embracing the multiple, richly-textured and exploding layers of meanings in a scriptable text.

For Barthes, the relationship between reader and text is an erotic one, and he suggested that what is offered in a scriptable text is the intimate body of the writer 'in process' - as it moves from a concern with meaning and nomination to the creative, merging pleasures and possibilities of language - an inter-play which is in turn offered to the participating (body of the) reader.

WRITERS OF THE FEMININE 

The theories of the structural linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and those of their French interpreters Claude Levi-Strauss, Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes offer a context for the works of the French feminist theorists Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva. Drawing on post-structural accounts of the vital role of difference in language, subjectivity and the way we organise the world, their writings reflect, extend and radically challenge these accounts.

The philosophical ploy: Luce Irigaray

In her study Speculum of the Other Woman, the philosopher, linguist and psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray examines the way in which our concept of difference depends on a single, male viewpoint. She suggests our entire system of thinking in the West has been determined by men for their own benefit.

She explores the premises that underlie the theories of the 'great' philosophers from Plato on, revealing both their masculine bias, and how this bias has become encoded in our language and culture to reduce women to silence.

Irigaray devotes almost a third of Speculum of the Other Woman to the work of the third century BC Greek philosopher Plato. The following account of Irigaray's work on Plato is taken from the essay in Speculum of the Other Woman entitled 'Plato's Hysteria.'

Irigaray suggests that the purpose of Plato's philosophy is to create a system of differences, determined in relation to a single idea, capable of leading 'man out of the cave' of his origin to a state of order.

Confronted by the male gaze, woman's sex apparently presents 'nothing to see’. Anything which cannot be defined by man's law, she stresses, has been branded as alien, and subjected to prohibition and denial.

Irigaray believes Plato's philosophy has had devastating consequences for women and men. 'By excluding the gaze of the other', she writes, his system has organised the world into 'a paralyzed empire', with disastrous effects on both sexes. Plato's insistence on the primacy of the father - that it is the father alone who is responsible for procreation ('will alone sow the good seed and be able to give it a proper name') - has, she argues, relegated the mother's function to that of 'mere receptacle'. From Plato on, she stresses, it is the father who has held all rights to property, whilst women have been reduced to a position of muteness or mimicry.

To this day Irigaray believes women's problem remains one of achieving definition within a male-demarcated schema. Woman, Irigaray continues, has no gaze or discourse of her own that can render her own image, and thus no means of breaking the chain of identification that continues to hold women prisoner. Her role as 'male Other' ensures that woman's desire remains without expression. Irigaray suggests that it will be by exploring our desire that women may begin to undermine the power of the masculine state.

The linguist, psychoanalyst and critic Julia Kristeva has been an important figure on the French intellectual scene since her arrival in Paris from Bulgaria in 1966. She spent her first years in Paris working with such influential thinkers as Roland Barthes, until the publication of two books, and then her doctoral thesis Revolution in Poetic Language in 1974. Like Luce Irigaray, Kristeva has developed accounts of how Western society is founded on the recognition and appropriation, repression or destruction of difference from a feminist viewpoint.

Like Luce Irigaray, she believes the monotheism of Western society is sustained by a radical split between the sexes. In About Chinese Women for example, she highlights the role of sexual difference in the creation of linguistic and social order.

As an example of the patriarchal process, Kristeva rereads the biblical account of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. She illustrates how, within this scene, the serpent is made to symbolise not only evil, but everything that is outside the paternal code. She suggests that Eve is made to stand as the polar opposite to God-the-Father's Ward as 'the other race' - embodying transgression and jouissance, as well as their punishment in death.

Only by listening to what is unspoken, she writes, by attending to what is repressed, new, eccentric, incomprehensible and therefore threatening to the paternal code, can women hope to disrupt its order and acquire our own voice. It is in this sense that Kristeva sees language as potentially revolutionary. Only through language, she insists, in an essay entitled 'A New Type of Intellectual: The Dissident', can we hope to bring about the multiple and necessary 'sublations of the unnameable, the unrepresentable, the void'; only by dismantling the very bases of patriarchy, beginning with its language, and working from language to its culture and institutions, can we hope to initiate social and political change.

Woman's abasement: Helen Cixous 

Like Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, Helene Cixous, novelist, playwright, critic, professor of literature at the University of Paris and Director of the Centre for Feminine Studies, which she founded in 1974, sees women's relegation to the role of other as a result of the binary structure of masculine thought. 

Like Julia Kristeva, Cixous believes that the established pattern of perception and classification in the West is organised 'through dual, hierarchical oppositions'. 

Like Luce Irigaray, she believes man's 'desire to be (at) the origin' has initiated a process of separation in which the 'Selfsame' - 'the ownself (- what is mine, hence what is good)' - is differentiated from whatever 'menaces my own-good': 'is "other'" - a pattern to which 'all concepts, codes and values' have subsequently been subjected.

 

She describes how at the age of three or four, she was confronted by the knowledge that 'the world is divided in half and that 'the great, noble, "advanced" countries' had constructed their position by enslaving whatever they had deemed to be 'strange'. 

Just as the 'master-slave dialectic' requires 'what is strange' to be 'conquered and returned to the master', so, she writes, the oppressed peoples of the world are employed by those in power to create and perpetuate their dominion. 

Like Irigaray, she argues that our system of thinking in the West has been constructed 'on the premise of woman's abasement', on the 'subordination of the feminine to the masculine order'. 

She sees man's will for power as the mainstay of Western ideology, founding and perpetuating our social, political and cultural status quo. Even knowledge, she suggests, is caught in this system of binary logic, rendering it inaccessible and sacred, and thus preventing those it subjects from questioning its authority. She concludes that the only way forward is to tear down this 'vast membrane' fabricated by the masculine, overcoming its repressions through the inventive possibilities of language. 

Unlike the current '(Hegelian) scheme of recognition', she stresses, in which there is 'no place for the other': 'for a whole and living woman', she sees the new 'feminine economy' as engendering a love relation in which 'each one would keep the other alive and different'. 

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