Irigaray and Feminist Writing

My first encounter with Irigaray was in my women in world literature class where we discussed feminist writing and rewriting. Considering her ideas regarding the elsewhere of feminine pleasure, Irigaray appears to be in a way rejecting Helene Cixous’ concept of feminist writing. Irigaray states that “feminine pleasure has to remain inarticulate in language, in its own language, if it is not to threaten the underpinnings of logical operations. And so what is most strictly forbidden to women today is that they should attempt to express their own pleasure” (571). Cixous, on the other hand, works with the idea that feminist writing should reject logic, proper organization, and really all things that men put into their writing. She speaks of times “when you are lost, beside yourself, and you continue getting lost, when you become the panicky movement of getting lost, then, that’s when, where you are unwoven weft, flesh that lets strangeness come through… it’s in these breathless times that writings traverse you, songs of an unheard-of purity flow through you, addressed to no one, they well up, surge forth, from the throats of your unknown inhabitants, these are the cries that death and life hurl in their combat.” She works with this idea that real feminist writing comes from within. Irigaray, however, does later discuss the way the “feminine finds itself as lack, deficiency, or imitation… a disruptive excess” (571). After this she gets more into feminist writing more as I understand it. The only part that I am not completely clear on is the mimesis. I feel like it doesn’t fit well with the way I thought feminist writing rejects the masculine ways.

Thoughts on unity and economy in Irigaray and Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale (and also some Derrida).

I was recently reading Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and as we were talking about Irigaray today, a certain sequence from that novel came to mind: Offred, the main handmaid in the story, is speaking with the Commander—the head of the household, for those unfamiliar with the story—and he comments, (supposedly) “jokingly,” that “women can’t add…for them, one and one and one and one don’t make four.” Offred is initially taken aback: “What do they make? I said, expecting five or three. … Just one and one and one and one he said” (186). Shortly after this, though, Offred decides that “what the Commander says is true. One and one and one and one doesn’t equal four. Each one remains unique, there is no way of joining them together. They cannot be exchanged, one for the other. They cannot replace each other” (192).

But so, in some ways, I see Offred’s flipping of the Commander’s “joke,” and her recognition of the un-exchangeable quality of each individual piece as an example of Irigaray’s move to “undo the power of [each word, utterance, or sentence’s] teleological effect,” to break the “discursive economy” of language (Irigaray, 797). (The fact that Offred takes/repeats the Commander’s words, mimicking, but with a difference—an addition, a continuation—seems to be a sort of “critical mimesis.” [Though I’m admittedly still a bit fuzzy on what exactly that term encompasses, so maybe not.]) The language of economy here is, I think, particularly important, as in both cases, there’s a move away from the concept of exchange value. Irigaray states that, ideally, “there would no longer be either a right side or a wrong side of discourse,” a move which breaks down any sense of hierarchical value, therefore squelching the “teleological effect,” the ability to add individual pieces/fragments of anything (a sentence, a story, Atwood’s string of 1s, etc., etc.) up to any greater object/concept/narrative, one supposedly more valuable in its unity (797). In maybe a strange turn, it seems to me that (at least for Atwood; I’m not sure if it’s explicitly there in the few pages of Irigaray we read) there already exists a unity, in each individual object itself; though, surely, not the “transcendental,” “centering,” “teleological” unity that is the goal of much masculine discourse (797). So, then, for Atwood(/Irigaray?) a “dichotomizing break” perhaps isn’t such a violent “break” at all; or, say, the splitting of the Lacanian subject at the mirror stage might not be as much of a problematic experience of loss as it was originally theorized. Each side of the binary, or each part of a subject (or sentence, narrative, etc.) is somehow also a whole in itself, not needing anything additional.

Finally, turning a bit away from Atwood, all the emphasis here on the rejection of “either a right side or a wrong side” in some ways brings me back to Johnson’s summary of Derrida, and the whole hierarchical-binary-leveling project of deconstruction (and, quickly skimming back over Johnson’s essay, I see that she, indeed, makes this connection: “a critique of logocentrism can enable a critique of ‘phallocentrism’ as well,” then specifically citing Irigaray [347]). But, what ultimately strikes me about this link is that Irigaray claims to also want to do away with linearity’s “deferred action,” apparently attempting to take the “deferment” out of Derrida’s differance, leaving just plain difference, keeping the power of simultaneity that exists in the concept of the supplement. Actually, following her logic, it seems to be the idea of “supplementarity” itself that finally leads to the injunction against “deferred action” (797). The “supplementarity of…reversal” leads to the breakdown between “a right side or a wrong side,” which then calls into question the ‘privileging’ of a certain directionality in reading, which, she argues, has thus far overlooked the “retroactive impact of the end…upon its beginning” (797). At the moment, I’m really not exactly sure what to do with this… Even though I think I follow her logic, it also seems to me that the action of deferment is a necessary part of the function of Derrida’s concept of the supplement, insofar as it’s (i.e. the supplement) the “logic of writing” (345), which is the very form which emphasizes the illusive nature of immediacy. So, deferment and difference seem inextricable; attempting to keep the supplement, while rejecting the deferment seems impossible. Though, of course, maybe that’s exactly what Irigaray is trying to get at with “the possibility of a different language” (797).

Irigaray through “Tootsie”

In order to better understand what Irigaray was proposing, I decided to look at her essay in connection to Sydney Pollack’s 1982 comedy Tootsie. The film seems to begin with the main character taking Irigaray’s proposed “path” into the feminine as he deliberately creates his female alter-ego “Dorothy Michaels.” Irigaray writes that the mimicry necessary to assume the feminine role means to “convert a form of subordination into an affirmation and thus begin to thwart it” (795). Perhaps, in the case of Tootsie, this can be seen by Michael Dorsey’s acceptance of the feminine acting roles and his drive to thrive in the bit part that Dorothy Michaels lands. However, he also seems to embody the challenge to this condition that Irigaray proposes, in that he does demand “to speak as a (masculine) ‘subject’” and to “postulate a relation to the intelligible that would maintain sexual difference” (795). As a woman, Dorothy Michaels establishes herself as a figure that will not be talked over: we see this in her interactions with the cast members and crew of the television show. Dorothy Michaels tells off the star of the show when he makes advances on set and doesn’t submit to the director’s every whim, as she often stops production to go wildly off script. While Michael is a man pretending to be woman, he still maintains the language and sense of self of a masculine subject; thus his entire act is to postulate this relation with his alter-ego that maintains a sexual difference.

Irigaray writes: “To play with mimesis is thus, for a woman, to try to recover the place of her exploitation by discourse, without allowing herself to be simply reduced to it.” The whole premise of Tootsie seems to be rooted in mimesis, as a man attempts to navigate the same questions that Irigaray poses: what is a woman and where does female pleasure lie. Dorothy Michaels’ whole assumption of the female role is based in mimesis as Michael must mimic or act how a woman looks, acts and feels despite his life experience as a man. As Irigaray builds her argument about the feminine style, it seems that perhaps the Dorothy Michaels persona is a depiction of this phenomenon – a fluid exercise that resists the definition of masculine, but continually touches it and plays off of it. Or it is possible that I may be misinterpreting Irigaray’s essay and that the persona of Dorothy Michaels may subvert her claims, demonstrating a lack of difference between the masculine and feminine roles. Still possible, we may be able to interpret this relationship between film and essay both ways. It may simultaneously reinforce and subvert Irigaray’s ideas.

Irigaray, Mimesis, and Binary Systems

This one was tough for me. I don’t know if it’s the fact that this was translated, or that I had to think about masculine and feminine in different ways than usual, but I’m pretty sure I still don’t fully understand. So this will just be me trying to sort through what I read rather than making some really cool outside connection like a lot of posts have been doing. I thought that the main idea seemed to come from the point that women need a way to make themselves known, understood, and valued in a system where even the language works for masculine participants in the system. The essay argued that we must do this through a sort of mimesis, which makes sense when mimesis shows up everywhere else in our lives too: to get ahead, women have to act like men (but do it ten times better), and there’s also the literal mimesis of creating more people through pregnancy and birth. But the feminine take on mimesis reminded me a little of the Signifying Monkey in one particular way: in that they are both tricksters. For femininity, the trick happens when the use of mimesis exposes the fact that there might actually be feminine workings in language. Irigaray explains this much better than I can: “To play with mimesis is thus, for a woman, to try to recover the place of her exploitation by discourse, without allowing herself to be simply reduced to it. It means to resubmit herself. . . to “ideas,” in particular to ideas about herself, that are elaborated in /by a masculine logic, but so as to make “visible,” by an effect upon playful repetition, what was supposed to remain invisible – the cover-up of a possible operation of the feminine in language” (795). So, women must go to the root of their problem in order to destroy it without succumbing entirely to the problem. Sort of like killing the root of a weed that happens to have a black hole in it. So this transgression, while essential to female pleasure, destroys the masculine ability to pretend that nature (people often associate nature with femininity, probably because women are involved with childbearing/the creation of life) mirrors man. He might not be the blueprint of the universe, the only way to function. At first I thought this article mean that women needed a separate language/system/space, whatever, but that wouldn’t seem to solve any problems. Irigaray seems to be saying that we need to forget the way language has been functioning so far, on a dichotomy, and try something else. Instead of two spaces, we might try one big, nebulous space where “feminine” and “masculine” don’t really apply enough to constitute a binary because binaries in language, as in almost everything else, do not work. Binaries simply don’t allow for the kind of flux and variation that occurs in life and trying to define language, which builds the world around us, by such a narrow system, is silly and honestly dangerous. Maculinity/femininity, truth/falsity, none of these really exist in such a one-or-the-other way. Opening up the system to allow femininity to flourish alongside masculinity would be difficult and I have no idea how we’d get there, but it seems critical to making any progress.

Reconfiguring an Ideology

Connecting the pieces. This seems to be an entrance into a new level in our analysis of meaning and our relationship to individualized perceptions of meaning. The course study began with an unconscious level of association with signifiers (Bourdieu and Lacan). Yet, now the specimen under review is the strategic acceptance of particular signifiers and the complexity entailed by conscious acceptance-choice-agency through recognition. And I like this. It reminds me of a chess game. An increase in the level of expertise does not yield a higher short-term memory capacity, but rather, the bits of information are unified so that one bit contains many different patterns and thus more information per bit. Therefore, a chess player can postulate what the other player will do and already strategize her or his next three moves if that one move is taken because there is a recognized pattern. This level of conscious decision indicates recognition of the ideology at hand. When one recognizes the ideological scheme, she or he can chose whether or not they want to take the position of what Althusser would call the Subject of the ideology. So, there is a choice in interpellation. The choice is how one responds to the hailing and how conscious she or he is about the “Subject” position of the ideology. In a patriarchal society, the Subject of the ideology is reserved for a man (and all accompanying masculine qualities deemed by society as masculine and superior). The woman could hypothetically identify with the position of the man, but this identification is not complete and contradictory, because her attainment of the “Subject” position in the ideology renders its collapse. Therefore, how can women exist or have power within a patriarchal ideology?

In “The Power of Discourse and the Subordination of the Feminine,” Luce Irigaray explains, “The issue is not one of elaborating a new theory of which woman would be the subject or the object, but of jamming the theoretical machinery itself, of suspending its pretension to the production of a truth and of a meaning that are excessively univocal” (796). Therefore, the solution is not to create an entirely separate ideology for the existence of women in society. Rather, since women are the masters of mimicry (both created from man in a Biblical sense and perpetuator of mankind in a childbearing sense), women can mimic the patriarchal ideology, yet secure a sub-space that contradicts the entire set of ideas and allots power to women. Changing ideological mindsets takes time, but recognition of the ideologies existence is the first step. This is a classic case of turning the tables- stacking the deck- playing the system- securing a loophole. Irigaray explains, “Which does not mean that it lacks style, as we might be led to believe by a discursivity that cannot conceive of it. But its “style” cannot be upheld as a thesis, cannot be the object of a position” (797). Irigaray establishes that “the style resists,” demonstrating that the style, the subspace in the patriarchal ideology, is slowly diminishing its power by resisting. Therefore, Bourdieu’s observations of taste could be debatable. What happens when an individual accepts an ideological position, attains an excess of qualities that are aside from the subject set, secures a subset in that ideology that uses an association of taste in order to destroy the entity that perpetuates such tastes? Highly ideological ideologies are the most difficult to pinpoint according to Althusser. However, what if an ideology slowly becomes more recognizable and recognition lends itself to power in choice, will the ideology continue to be pervasive in the material existence of society?

I am not sure that my analysis is correct in what Irigaray was attempting to convey. I may have used her argument in a way that tangents away from the essence of her argument- I did not even delve into the discourse aspect. Nonetheless, her writing inspired this line of thought on my own behalf.

-Kaylie Fougerousse

Sorting Through Irigaray

Although I found this essay relatively difficult to decode, like many of the other texts we have read that have been translated into English, based on what I was able to glean from “The Power of Discourse and the Subordination of the Feminine” was entirely unexpected. Here, Luce Irigaray makes an argument for what she believes to be the most effective way for women to advance the feminist cause and to, at the very least, allow for common discourse concerning gender. It is not, as many feminists today would likely propose, by waging a confrontational war against the system of hegemonic masculinity currently in place, but rather by employing a much more subtle campaign to “reveal,” or shed light upon, the current state of gender inequality. According to Irigaray, this can be done by mimetically “assuming the feminine role deliberately” in order “to thwart” subordination. She doesn’t advocate fighting back, as much as she proposes outward submission and identification with the roles imposed on women since birth.  It seems that Irigaray is saying that through identifying with the presuppositions imposed on them, women are trying to compensate for the lack of a penis. I really just don’t see the connection here, but continuing on her logic, by recognizing that truly compensating for this lack is impossible, a woman can use this “lack” to create an opportunistic space for existence. So instead of desperately trying to “speak as a masculine subject,” which is essentially a losing battle that only serves to weaken her position, a woman should work within the limits of the phallocracy to affirm themselves.

I’m not too sure if that was exactly what Irigaray was trying to say, but if it was then I think her argument is almost like the women’s version of some of Henry Louis Gates’ ideas on challenging hegemonic authority. They both seem to call for an elusive, indirect resistance that transforms or twists whatever limitations have been imposed on the subjects into strengths. They “play the game” in a way that smartly uses the “letter of the law” to their advantage against their oppressors.

Anyway I’d be great if someone could clarify any misunderstandings that I may have had in this post because, as I mentioned, I found this reading bearable and somewhat able to be deciphered only because of its length.

Reversing Irigaray?

In class we discussed Irigaray’s definition of critical mimesis. I then spent the entire length of my shift at work thinking about this, and well trying to understand it. In class the example given was from Vertigo, where Midge’s painting was representing the desire the male had with another female. But, after that I came up with nothing. I could not think of another example.

But then I was thinking how this theory does not work. As just a few weeks after Halloween, it occurred to me that women dressing up is an example of critical mimesis. When women dress up as other figures it is a representation of that figure. For example, women dressing up as a police woman, teacher, librarian etc, are representations of that figure in society. Yet, the troubling/confronting/complicating of this is when women “sexualize” the outfit. This sexualization complicates the figure of the police woman because the officer is an authoritative figure. However, sexualizing the costume fits into the desires of the male.

Does this adhere or reverse Irigaray? Are we just playing into male desires even more than usual?

 

Reading Irigaray Through Bourdieu

Luce Irigaray, in her essay “The Power of Discourse and the Subordination of the Feminine,” suggests that language, as it sits now, is a dichotomy between masculine and feminine. This dichotomy functions on the masculine overriding the feminine, continually suppressing and censoring the feminine (796). This dichotomy resembles the societal structures described in Bourdieu’s “Distinctions,” where classes and groups of people are continually struggling against each other. In this case, the masculine is the upper class that possesses the ability to determine taste, or in this case the “logic” (796) between masculine and feminine discourse, and the feminine is the lower class that is subject to the upper class’ tastes, or “logic.” Yet, Irigaray suggests that women need to break from this structure and create a new structure, because even if they reach a position of power in the old dichotomy they are still “within a logic that maintains [the feminine] in repression, censorship, nonrecognition” (769). Therefore, women need to break from this dichotomy to fully realize the feminine’s logic. In this new way of thinking “there would no longer be either a right side or wrong side of discourse, or even of texts” (797). Yet, I think that transition into this new form of thinking/discourse is more difficult than Irigaray presents. If we read Irigaray’s text alongside Bourdieu’s text, women would need to gain a position of power to implement this new form of thinking/discourse, since its those groups and people in power that are able to set the rules for society (according to Bourdieu). Yet, Irigaray does not think that gaining power in the traditional dichotomy would help form this new discourse since women would still be “within a logic that maintains [the feminine] in repression, censorship, nonrecognition.” Yet, Irigaray does not fully establish a way in which discourse can break from the masculine/feminine dichotomy, making me question on how she hoped to achieve this new form of discourse. If it is not through the traditional way of class and group struggle that Bourdieu discusses, how does Irigaray hope to reach the new form of discourse?

– Sean Ettinger