From: CPeebles-AT-aol.com
Date: Sun, 30 Jun 1996 09:56:03 -0400
Subject: Re: de(con)struction


Sharon wrote:
I know of no F-F (or deconstructionist) who has created. Perhaps
artistic creativity has been deconstructed too? 

There's no literature, music has been reduced to dissonant wails on one
chord, and Feminist art is still setting itself _against_ the tradition -- a
reaction as you say (Judy Chicago, etc). Postmodernism has spent all its
energies on breaking down Modernism (see Pollock's "Screening the 70's:
Sexuallity and Representation in Feminist Practice"); all artists are
drawing heavily on existing representations, rather than inventing new
styles. I can't think of anyone who is, as Cixous says, entering the "dark
continent". Anyone else?
sharon

Irigaray, for one example, has created on both the theoretico-poetical level
and on the political level (such as her alliances with Italian feminists and
political movements, see *J'aime a toi*). Derrida and others have brought
feminist thought into a productive and creative (wildly so, at times)
relation with the works of philosophers from Plato to Nietzsche (especially
Plato AND Nietzsche). And is the complaint about contemporary music less a
critique than it is an inability to listen to it in the context out of which
it is growing (quite vibrantly, quite beautifully, many woud claim)?
What is it that is being asked for in this demand for creating? The "new
order"? The answer? As I see it, to find creation, all one need do is
read/listen to /engage with what is now being created, perhaps tentatively,
but nonetheless with passion and complexity. This creation may take place
within the context of that which it moves against/away from, but to think
that it could do otherwise, would be, I'm afraid to say, both dangerous and
naive.
With apologies for a perhaps petulant tone.
--Catherine