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Article Excerpt
In examining familiar things we come to such unfamiliar conclusions that our very language is twisted and bent even as it guides us. Writing "under erasure" is the mark of this contortion. (1)
What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors metonymies, anthropomorphisms ... truths are illusions of which one has forgotten that they are illusions coins which having lost their stamp, are now regarded as metal and no longer as coins. (2)
Yet a gaze averted from the beaten track, a hatred of brutality, a search for fresh concepts not yet encompassed by the general pattern, is the last hope for thought. In an intellectual hierarchy which constantly makeseveryone answerable, unanswerability alone can call the hierarchy directly by its name. (3)
Sexual difference is one of the major philosophical issues of ... our age. According to Heidegger, each age has one issue to think through, and one only. Sexual difference is probably the issue in our time which could be our "salvation" if we thought it through. (4)
I. INTRODUCTION: POSTRUCTURALISM AND LAW
In 1967, Jacques Derrida published three philosophical works that altered the critical and philosophical landscape of the late twentieth century. Those works--Of Grammatology, Speech and Phenomena, and Writing and Difference--attempted to rethink the very fabric of thinking itself, and aimed at displacing a mode of reasoning that Derrida argued intrinsically required dominance as a condition of its operation. (5) In brief, Derrida argued that Western philosophy, and by inference Western modes of rationality and being, were based on a desire to suppress difference in the name of identity. Reason, for Derrida, was a form of desire, and was intimately linked with perpetual violence. (6)
Derrida's philosophical investigations undermined the idea of reason as a neutral mechanism which could lead to universalizable and "true" conclusions. Indeed, Derrida showed that Western thought was based upon a logical hierarchy. Rather than discovering that our supposedly value-free conceptual terms could be applied without bias, Derrida showed that bias was part of their very structure. (7) He spent much of his career illustrating the ways in which a series of conceptual terms repeated themselves in Western thought and lived experience, delimiting our very capacity to think in novel ways. (8) For Derrida, concepts are things, as tactile in their effect as earth and water, as restrictive as chains, and yet as invisible as ether. (9) His project makes the invisible structures of thought, inquiry, and self-identity visible, showing us how what we often hold to be a condition of freedom in fact turns out to be a yoke of enslavement. (10)
This insight is at the foundation of postmodern philosophy, a critical strategy (not a system or method) aimed at unsettling all modes of transcendental, fixed, or essentialist thought. It attacks the hegemonic foundationalism that lies at the base of Western thought. This strategy, also called deconstruction, is thus a kind of philosophical, critical and social practice aimed at rethinking the world. For many, this is deeply threatening. But, as a means of exposing the structurally embedded power relations that inhere in the deepest tissue of our daily lives, deconstruction is also a method of reinventing the world. To some, it is thus deeply utopian. (11) Moreover, deconstruction rethinks the very foundations of thought, not merely its various "superstructural" (surface) manifestations. It is this deep radicalism that has attracted many feminist theorists, who saw in the universalist, egalitarian, and entirely noble promises of modern liberal-democratic thought a troubling distortion of the experience of being a woman. (12)
Among contemporary legal philosophers, no one has more thoughtfully engaged in the ongoing discussion surrounding these issues than Drucilla Cornell. She has attempted to bring together postmodernism and legal feminism in an effort to radically re-imagine what it is to be a woman. In pursuit of this goal, she powerfully criticizes the essentialism of law professor Catherine MacKinnon's equally ardent critique of sexual difference in the legal arena, and argues that it is only with a new form of utopianism that women will be able to move beyond the constraints of masculine legal and social theory. (13) But Cornell also argues that it is impossible to merely reject the contemporary construction of the feminine--precisely the position MacKinnon seeks to promote. As such, Cornell argues for a unique brand of utopianism: one that recognizes the limits of imagination in its very effort to think in new and transgressive ways. It is this dialectic--between "alterity" (thinking otherness) and "embeddedness" (our restriction to historical circumstances)--that gives life to Cornell's work. (14)
This discussion is divided into three distinct sections. First, I shall attempt to outline the issues that distinguish modern from postmodern thought, a description that will also outline some of the major tenets and limitations of liberalism. Second, I will describe the ways in which postmodern thought is attractive to many feminist thinkers. Third, I will outline Cornell's project in more specific terms, particularly with reference to her dialectical understanding of utopianism. This will entail a discussion of what it means to "rethink" what it is to be a woman, as well as a discussion of some of the central elements of her disagreements with Catherine MacKinnon. In that section I hope to describe the ways in which such attempts to avoid the dominating effects of male-centered reason underscore the difficulties of such a project.
II. MODERN AND POSTMODERN THOUGHT
A. Origins of Modernism and Modernist Thought
What is postmodernism? In the most general sense, it is a philosophical and critical posture that has ceased to aim at the articulation of a universal conception of truth. This is a marked departure from traditional conceptions of philosophy and social criticism--a posture I will describe as the classical approach. From Plato to Rousseau and beyond, the aim of philosophy has been to articulate a conception or method of truth that would be free from contingency. (15) All truth-claims in such a classical system would be intersubjective--applicable with equal validity in any context. To reach such a goal, philosophical discourse sought again and again to subject itself to critical doubt in order to discover a site of critical and interpretive certainty. This is most fully evidenced in Descartes' promulgation of the cogito, where the philosopher, subjecting himself to radical thought, discovers that his own subjective capacity for doubt remains stable even as all else is placed in question. This "residual" fact leads the philosopher to reconstruct the world on the basis of the certainty of subjective experience. Hence the cogito: "I think therefore I am," from which an entire world, based in rational thought, was held to follow. (16)
This quest for universal truth often led to an inquiry into the "nature" of human beings: again and again, philosophical discourse sought to uncover and explain the fundamental truths of such entities as political life, personhood, and reason itself. (17) Such a tendency (which Theodor Adorno suggests is nothing more than a desire to master nature and control things around us) reaches its apex in the Enlightenment. In that period--one whose effects are still felt today--a model of gender-neutral reason assumes predominance). (18) Philosophical discourse is transformed from critical inquiry into Reason itself. (19) Reason comes to be understood as an instrumental methodology aimed at discovering unalterable truth. Most importantly, as Reason is made universal, it is also made unassailable. In this new formulation, the connection of reason with power--and thus with the position of the male--is disguised. As a result, any complaint against "reasoned" decision-making becomes a kind of "unreason," madness, or (in the age of medical science), a mode of insanity. (20)
B. Modernism Realized: Characteristics and Consequences
The full flowering of Enlightenment rationality (Reason in the transcendental sense) occurs when the methods of inquiry most suited to the totalizing imperatives of Enlightenment thought--the transcendental impulse, one might call it--intersect with the development of various technological powers to give rise to what Foucault has called the "human sciences." (21) This is the advent of the modern era, which begins around 1800. (22) Here, thinking embraces technology, in the name of progress, to form the fundamental grid in which we still live today. Utilitarian thought prevails, and technocratic "expertise" becomes a standard for thinking through the important issues of social life. (23)
The actual causes of the birth of the modern era are manifold and beyond the scope of this analysis. But certain features of the modern period are apparent and are in need of brief elaboration. As suggested above, perhaps its primary feature is the tendency to assume the intercontextual validity of truth claims. A claim about "man," for instance, would automatically be understood to be a claim about people in general. Initially, such a claim might exclude women. (24) Later, especially in liberal thought, such a claim might include women, but only as a subset of men. The language of rights, so vital to the constitutional history of the United States and liberal-democratic political philosophy, is a powerful legacy of such thinking. The idea that universal claims about "man" might be gendered, or skewed by the position of the speaker, or by the product of social, racial, or class affiliation was not merely unconsidered, but unthinkable. As Foucault puts it, there was simply no epistemic space for such considerations. (25) Further still, the methodology of Reason would prevent non-universalizable claims from attaining the status of being "true." Only certain kinds of statements could be made if they were to be taken seriously. All else was nonsense: "womanly," as Wordsworth might say. (26) Foucault describes the disciplinary and coercive character of modern reason in striking fashion in his famous essays, The Discourse on Language:
[I]n order to belong to a discipline, a proposition must fit into a certain type of theoretical field.... In short, a proposition must fulfill some onerous and complex conditions before it can be admitted within a discipline; before it can be pronounced true or false it must be, as Monsieur Canguilhem might say, "within the true." (27)
Foucault's point is to illustrate the simultaneously constructive and restrictive powers of disciplines. Disciplines not only prevent one from saying certain things (a judge granting a directed verdict because the sun is shining), but they also grant the very ground of speaking itself (the very authority of the judge to speak the language of the law). An example of the latter is seen in the language of rights itself: to make a claim of right is to make a claim in the name of a form of essentialist conclusions about what it is to be a person. The very transparency of that claim--the fact that it is a mode of arguing that even the layperson engages in--is illustrative of its productive force, as well as of the scope of modern thought. Modern thought has colonized the field of that which is "in the true." As a result, we not only speak, but think that language.
Jean Francois Lyotard has further illustrated the contours of modernism in his short book, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. (28) Like Foucault, he points out that modern thought tends towards transcendental claims. As evidence of this, he cites the work of such 19th century thinkers as Hegel, Marx, and later, Freud. In the case of each of these thinkers, we find the assertion of fundamental truths about the essential nature of human being. For Hegel, this truth resided in Reason itself. The movement of all human history was understood as the unfolding of reason on the path absolute truth--or what Hegel refers to as "thought knowing itself." (29) For Marx, human nature was linked to productive power. (30) One's laboring capacity was the essence of personhood, and the truth of the individual could only be realized through recapturing this primary power. (31) Finally, for Freud, all human experience was linked to the unfolding of desire. To be, for Freud, was to be in the midst of desire and its Other--repression. (32)
All three thinkers--so emblematic of 19th century thought--share an important tendency: they all presume to speak of the essential nature of human being. As such, they invoke the tendencies of modern thought described above. Lyotard, however, suggests that what distinguishes such thinkers, and what marks them as modernists, is their tendency to engage in the production of "grand narrative" or what he elsewhere calls "metanarrative." (33) For Lyotard, metanarrative is...
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