Importing Feminist Criticism
reinvented the problem in a sentence and transformed it into the object
of a simple semiosis. What does this sentence mean? ',
This can certainly also be read as an instance of the fetishization of
language and its abuse. It is as though once you deconstruct the mutually
constituting opposition between language and other real social practices one is
thus enabled to inaugurate a way of thinking that posits solutions at the level of
language as solutions at the level of other real social practices. I am not of course
saying that there is a way of apprehending reality other than through language,
nor am I disregarding the very real power of words. What I am objecting to here
is the treatment of language as autonomous, which makes one believe that by
turning a problem into a sentence one has solved it. This can turn the radical
feminist into the ‘ideal’ opposition from the point of view of the current order:
since all radicalism is reserved to rhetoric, the job of maintaining the social order
of things can go on without much disturbance.
And even in terms of the theory itself this severance from social reality
shows its effects. Carried away by the intoxicating power of words over
things, an impelling theorist like Spivak can produce the following
sentences: A position against nostalgia as a basis for Counterhegemonic
ideological production does not endorse its negative use. Within the
complexity of contemporary political economy, it would, for example, be
highly questionable to urge that the current Indian working-class crime
of burning brides who bring insufficient dowries and of subsequently
disguising murder as suicide is either a use or abuse of the tradition of
sati-suicide. The most that can be claimed is that it is a displacement on
a chain of semiosis with the female subject as signifier, which would lead
us back into the narrative we are unraveling. Clearly one must fight the
crime of bride burning in every way. If however this work is
accomplished by Unexamined nostalgia or its opposite, it will assist
actively in the substitution of race/ethnos or sheer genitalism as a signifier
in the place of the female subject.(313)
Once one has crossed the boundary that prevented one from talking
about the murder of women in terms of a ‘displacement in the chain of semiosis
with the female subject as signifier’ one is always-already on the road that leads
from exorbitance to irrelevance to any practical end: in which ways opposing
crime can be affected by a nostalgia for lost origins? Of course one could say
that there is a (always this word) difference: if you oppose bride burning as an
abuse of sati (nostalgically craving true sati) then you are implicitly celebrating
as oppressive practice which could be revived. If you oppose it as a use of sati
14 Spivak, Gayatri5tCan the Subaltern Speak?’ in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, Nelson, C., :
Grossberg, N. (eds.), BasingstokeZLondon, Macniillan51988, 296.
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