(always wrong) then you can fall into a colonial complacency and provide an
alibi for colonial violence. It is a bit harder to explain what difference all this
would make to the actual bride being burnt.
The abuse of the role of language seems to go hand in hand with the
hypostatizing of theory: rather than as a useful way of exploring and defining the
variations of practice, theory begins to be regarded as an end in itself, an absolute.
It is as if once we are able to word the correct theory, which would not be the
one with the greatest explanatory power but the one least prone to be attacked
on the grounds oflogocentrism or essentialism, our problems will be solved. On
the one hand this radical interest in theorization has increased the debate among
feminist theorists. On the other, it has turned most of their interventions into an
alien speech whose possible connections to the practice they set out to transform
are hard to see. It is instructive to notice how those practices end up by isolating
the radical feminist, who seems to assign herself the impossible task of effecting
change in strictly theoretical terms.This can either turn the theoretician into the
sole bearer of a transformation that is, by definition, social, thus reversing her role
to that of an essentially romantic heroine, or, if she is honest, to disappointment
and despair. A good example of this can be found in Catharine MacKinnon’s
outburst:
Sometimes I think to myself, MacKinnon, you write. Do you remember
that the majority of the world’s illiterates are women? What are γou doing?
I feel that powerfully when I think about what brings us all here - which
is to make the changes we are talking about. When someone condemns
someone else for the use of jargon, they tend to suppose that they
themselves speak plain plate-glass. I’m not exempting myself from this
criticism but saying that I see it as fundamental to developing a politics of
language that will be deconstructive.'5
I am very sympathetic to the feelings expressed by those sentences but
cannot fail to point out to my students, when we read MacKinnon’s useful
article, that her uneasiness stems from the fact that she starts out from the premise
that theory can effect change by itself. This position presupposes an overvaluing
of the role of theory - and of the theorist - which is made possible, in her case,
by the poststructurahst supervaluation of language. Having been trained in the
1 newspeak of language as the last determining instance, a brilliant member of a
prestigious American university like MacKinnon has unlearned to recognize her
own text both as a response and as a symptom of her situation.
15 MacKinnonjCatharineZDesire and PowerzA Feminist Perpective’in Marxism and the Interpretation
of Culture, 206.
183