Date: Thu, 29 Aug 1996 23:03:05 +0100
From: "Steve.Devos" <steve.devos-AT-dial.pipex.com>
Subject: Re: Baudrillard and Feminism


Mark, Shemina,

Donna Haraway - Cyborg is in `Simians, Cyborgs and Women' Free association 
Books london 1991..... amongst other places...


After spending a brief time looking around the issue defined broadly as 
baudrillard and feminism I  think that the reason why the it is impossible to 
achieve closure, to derive a position which is sympathetic to feminism and is 
based on Baudrillards work can be understood through looking at  the work 
where he discusses the concept of symbolic exchange.

Alice Jardines text Gynesis (1985) in which she discusses, too briefly, `the 
recognition  that deligitmation, experienced as crisis, is the loss of the 
paternal fiction, the West's heritige and guarantee, and that one of the 
responses to that loss on the part of those engaged by modernity has been to 
look to the future....'  (P67) which accurately I believe defines Haraway (at 
least as I've read her over the past few days...) 

but also she discusses the issue of nostalgia as a response to 
deligitimation. Feminism throughout its history,  which is a multi-century 
spanning occurance, has always functioned as an `attack' upon societies 
symbolic order - though some varities have had reactionary allainces....  In 
this frame she proposes to put Baudrillard along with Lasch and others, (you 
might also place deleuze and guattari but thats another list...)  quoting 
Baudrillard from the seduction text - in which he places femininity as 
seduction.... `And according to him it is woman who are blindest to this 
fact; it is women who are working against the possibilities for true cultural 
renewal. For women to demand autonomy or recognition of sexual difference is 
for them to desire power, to act as men, to lose the female power of 
seduction regarded by Baudrillard as the best way to master the symbolic 
universe....'P67.

This is the core of Jardines' critique of all that generation of french 
socio-cultural  theorists, which can be stated as `the demand for power is in 
essence the attempt to be masculine, to be male...'  P67.  Femininity for 
baudrillard implies passivity and it will inevitably remain as such. 

In  The Mirror Of Production he is particularly nostalgic - for the end of 
`symbolic exchange'  which has been destroyed by the political economy  of 
the sign (exchange value).  This has its difficulties for as capital creates 
disenfranchised groups - race, women, children, refugees and those others 
generally excluded from the social system, are argued to exist external to 
the social at the zero point of code.  Baudrillard   suggests that  speech 
is enabling  because of the supposed ability to transcend the socialised 
limitations of the politically economised sign. Whilst  in symbolic exchange 
there is gain and loss,  in the realm of political  economy (capital) there 
is nothing but growth and exchange value. Symbolic exchange is impossible 
says B in a system which is designed to supplant it with abstraction and 
growth.  

This argument fails it seems to me on a number of counts:  on the requirement 
for the presence of human subjects, (an essentialism I was surprised to read 
in the text this time round),  on the social equality of exchangers, and on 
the `abolition of the imaginary of political economy'. The end result of this 
is an inversion in which woman and other marginalised groups which have been 
brought into existence by capital are potentially left in limbo and through 
an intellectual  sleight of hand blamed for the threat which they produce for 
the residual elements of the symbolic. For they are presented as on the one 
hand the result (victims) of the modernizing forces and on the other as a 
subset of the forces and as such as a threat  to the symbolic order.

I believe its this which contains the essence of what makes the relationship 
between Baudrillard and feminism so difficult. Possibly an anti-humanist 
feminism might make use of the work but I've not found anything which seems 
possible.... As a result I don't think that Haraways work which deliberately 
blasphemes against the social order .....

Finally, finally.... to keep this briefer .... p135...
he argues that the pol econ has resulted in...

`This terroist rationality has produced in the course of centuries the 
radical distinction of the masculine and the feminine with the racial 
inferiorization and sexual objectification of the feminine...'  His 
anti-feminism in the following passage is surprising and is probably based on 
the lack of knowledge of womans place in social systems (i am being 
deliberately generous).  

its late... i think i'll drink something and try and work out why Bs' 
critique of the contemporary social still seems so radical after all these 
years....

Yesterday slumming down the charing x rd i saw that a new edition of Duras 
`Destroy she said' had been republished (always one of my favorite Duras 
novels...great movie too) - i wonder what Baudrillard  - with his general 
inability to reference womens' writing makes of Duras...

steve.devos


Mark Nunes wrote:
> 
> Thanks, Shemina, for the reading list.
> 
> > 3) Donna Haraway, "Manifesto for Cyborgs" (I can not remember where it
> > is).* I don't think she really cites B. but if I remember correctly she
> > does provide an interesting parallel.
> 
> I wonder about Haraway in re: Bauddrillard. Here's why.
> 
> When mulling over the our current question (can one find a way to put B. to
> feminist use or some other wording to your liking), the person I came up
> with was Judith Butler who, like Haraway, positions her feminist critique
> against essentialist notions of "male" or "female" (for Butler, both in
> terms of gender and sex). But is it fair to say that Bulter makes use of
> Baudrillard, or for that matter aligns with him, simply because she takes
> a non-essentialist stance? Butler's thinking seems more caught up in
> Foucault than Baudrillard, especially with her insistence on gender as
> something *produced* and performed (that second term is tricky with
> Butler--it's not as simple as "role-playing" where you are entirely free
> to play or not play the role). B. (late B.) is certainly going to have a
> hard time working within "systems of production."
> 
> But still, there is an affinity between the two in their refusal of
> essentialsim. That seems to be the Haraway parallel too (that final line
> of the manifesto: I'd rather be a cyborg than a goddess.) But is there
> more to a Haraway-Baudrillard connection than that? I don't have my
> _Simians_ text at home so I can't flip through it right now--but can you
> elaborate, shemina, on the connection you see?
> 
> --mark