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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