C90 Project

There is a complex relationship between gender construction and patriarchal relations of power. Prior to the development of an adequate set of theories, feminists could only rationalise these inequalities by drawing upon explanations of biological differences. In the mid-70s poststructuralist/postmodern theories of culture offered feminism more complex understandings of women's oppression and the representation of 'natural' femininity. Central to these developments was Sigmund Freud's proposition of the unconscious. This developing relationship between feminism and postmodernism around psychoanalytic theory is problematic. Nonetheless, there is no doubt that some (post)feminism drew productively upon poststructuralist (Lacanian) theories of the unconscious in order to gain an understanding of patriarchal culture's workings.

The psychoanalytic work of Freud placed gender and gender formation at the very centre of the formation of the patriarchal subject. Whilst few feminists ¹ had sympathy for Freud's theories, his contribution to a developing theory of gendered subjectivity was immense. In France a new wave of French psychoanalytical theory emerged which has influenced both feminist cultural theory and creative production. It is to the work of Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) (who radically challenged the biological determinism of traditional Freudianism) that many feminists have been drawn.

Briefly, Lacan's reworking of the Castration/Oedipal complex proposed a distinction between the penis as an organ (Freudian) and the Phallus as a sign ² . He also theorised a more fluid path to the formation of a gendered subject. This reworking offered a 'logical' rather than biological explanation of patriarchy whereby it is not the having or not having of the physical penis which organises gendered subjectivity under patriarchy, but rather the way in which its presence or absence (lack) functions as a linguistic signifier. That is, the way in which subjects can make sense of sexual difference is by their possession of the 'sign' (phallus) of patriarchal power, which allows them to place themselves within the order of patriarchal culture--the Law of the 'Father'. Thus male fear of castration and of the 'lacking' woman is a fear of the loss of that power which the phallus as signifier and 'maker' of language promises men.

Lacan also proposed that this moment (the acquisition of language and entry into patriarchy) was only the final stage of a series of moments in which the subject is formed. It is to these 'early' stages that feminists looked, for they suggest that, if the child starts to become aware before entry into patriarchy, then a different type of 'awareness' must exist. In the development of visual culture, it was Lacan's proposition of 'the mirror stage' ³ which was of specific interest ⁴ because this moment was based on specular rather than 'spoken' relationships. This is the moment when the child misrecognises an image of itself as its self, structuring all further misrecognitions of images as reality (the Imaginary). Also of significance is that this moment is the moment when the child begins to recognise itself as separate from the mother and realises it must split from her.

However, as Kaplan notes, "the child/adult never forgets the world of the Imaginary, and he/she continues to desire, unconsciously, the illusionary oneness with the mother he/she experienced" ⁵ . It is this proposition, that the child clings to those 'heady pleasures' of the 'bliss' of pre-Oedipal fusion with the mother, that has been central to the development of certain areas of feminist creative thought. Lacan believed that the child never forgets its illusionary oneness with the mother or the'jouissance' that this moment entailed--a moment before the intervention of paternal law which requires both the control of 'self' and the denigration/abjection of the feminine (mother) and the pleasures associated with her emotions, feelings, love.

In visual terms, feminists applied these theories to identify the ways in which patriarchal culture naturalises its relationships of power through its symbolic representations of women, as well as exposing how the unconscious of patriarchal culture structures the very forms these representations take. Mulvey demonstrated how the visual style of classical Hollywood film is closed and fixed rather than open and is marked by the conventions of realism which 'hide' the processes of signification and are structured around male scopophilic pleasures (or fears). Over the last twenty years such feminist theoretical developments have "demonstrated the comprehensively patriarchal nature of culture--its institutions and ideologies of production and reception, its regimes of representation, and its formal and textual characteristics" ⁶ .

In French literary theory, écriture féminine was raised as a possible way of recalling the suppressed 'maternal' and as a strategy for disrupting the rules and conventions of the patriarchal symbolic. In literary terms écriture féminine is based on the idea that "literary forms can be radically altered in order to accommodate and express women's experience" ⁷ . As a form of experimental writing, its impetus is to inscribe femininity at the moment of reading through its 'difference' to patriarchal/masculine forms. It does this through "play, disruption, excess, gaps, grammatical and syntactic subversion, ambiguities; by endless shifting register, generic transgressions; by fluid figurative language and myths. They are anti-authoritarian, questioning, unsettling." ⁸ Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray ⁹ promote a more essentialist perception of écriture féminine by 'writing from the body', drawing upon female sexuality and libido. Julia Kristeva ¹⁰ proposes a subtle but significantly different relationship between écriture féminine and the pre-Oedipal which she terms the 'semiotic chora'--a 'space' which holds the presignifying impulses , drives, feelings and sensations which predate the subjects entry into the symbolic and gendered subjectivity.

Therefore the gender of the producer is not the issue. She discusses the potential of poetically disruptive uses of language in relation to modernist male writers and visual abstractions by male artists, who have been "able to evade the apparently monolithic control of the symbolic" through "texts which are produced from rhythms and pulsions of the semiotic chora--the pre-linguistic, pre-Oedipal experience" ¹¹ . Kristeva perceives the semiotic as structural--that is, its 'role' is to make a space (the chora) on which language (the organisation of social [symbolic] interaction) can work. The recalling of this semiotic chora is potentially disruptive to the patriarchal symbolic because it ruptures the latter's normality by recalling a different sense of self in which the mother of the Imaginary (feminine), and feelings associated with 'her', are central and compelling rather than peripheral and debased. ¹²

These 'feelings' (bodily drives, rhythms, pulsions, pleasures, bliss) are never lost and their memory is held precariously in check by the patriarchal symbolic. They can be seen to rise to the surface through cultural forms in different ways. For instance they have been retrieved in readings of artistic work where their resisting quality may be 'accidental' ¹³ . Alternatively feminists have revealed how such memories remain to 'trouble' patriarchy. Films, rituals ,fairy stories and myths ¹⁴ have all been exposed for the way in which they contiually rework the moment of patriarchal culture's formation (the Oedipal moment) in order to repress and displace any threat of 'difference'.

Kristeva believes that the subject can gain access more readily to the semiotic through creative, musical, poetic practices ¹⁵ or through vibrant use of colour ¹⁶ . She sees these as having their origins in the semiotic chora, recalling a more fluid, plural and less fixed perception of meaning and self which reactivates 'feelings' (love) lost in the patriarchal 'rational'. However, Kristeva also makes it clear that the semiotic is not something outside or beyond language. She states, 'if the feminine exists, it only exists in the order of significance or signifying process, and it is only in relation to meaning and signification, positioned as their excess or transgressive other that it exists, speaks, thinks (itself) and writes (itself) for both sexes'. Thus it is 'different or other in relation to language and meaning, but nevertheless only thinkable within the symbolic' ¹⁷ . Thus feminist interventions that wish to rupture the patriarchal symbolic by recalling this lost 'feminine' cannot assume some form of privileged access to it which will unconsciously 'show' itself in the text or image. Instead a more conscious attempt at manipulating the symbolic, which has been made possible by an informed knowledge of its workings, has begun to emerge ¹⁸ .

Photography and the Self

Photographic representations of the self hold a strange relationship to both the Symbolic and the Imaginary. Each photograph always recalls that first moment of misrecognition--believing that the representation of the self is the self. How this functions in relation to family photographs and Kristeva's proposition of the semiotic requires a moment's reflection. Cultural theorist and practitioners have exposed the role played by the family photograph in the construction of modern patriarchal family life. However, my interest is slightly different. I wonder about the role which the photograph of the child plays in fixing and marking a set of signs that stand in for the self; creating a memory, sometimes even before a memory can be held, a fixed set of signs of a self that displaces the memory of a more fluid, less static and feeling 'self' of the semiotic chora.

Does photography 'steal the soul'? Balzac verbalised this feeling as the stealing of a thin layer of skin with each photograph taken. For Metz the snapshot of a person works like death by being "an instantaneous abduction of the object of the world into another world, into another time" ¹⁹ . In his book Camera Lucida Roland Barthes searches through photographs that "move him," "wound him," "prick him," "sting him," "pierce him," photographs that hold a key, a detail, a space, that ruptured his body into "feeling" and thus perhaps agency: "I then realised that there was a sort of link (or knot) between photography, madness, and something whose name I did not know. I began by calling it: the pangs of love...Yet it was not quite that. It was a broader current than a lover's sentiment. In the love stirred by Photography (by certain photographs), another music is heard, its name oddly old-fashioned: Pity." ²⁰

¹ Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism, London: Allen Lane, 1974, cites Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer, and Kate Millett among others.
² Jacques Lacan, The Signification of the Phallus in Ecrits, trans. Alan Sheridan, New York: Norton, 1976.
³ Jacques Lacan, The Mirror phase as formative of the function of the 'I', New Left Review, No. 51, pp. 71-77, 1968.
⁴ Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier, Screen, Vol. 16, No. 2, 1975, pp. 14-72; Laura Mulvey Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Screen, Vol. 16, No. 3, 1975, pp. 6-18.
⁵ E. Ann Kaplan Motherhood and Representation: The Mother in Popular Culture and Melodrama, London and New York: Routledge, 1991, p. 30.
⁶ Janet Wolff, Feminine Sentences: Essays on Women and Culture, 1990, Oxford: Polity Press, p. 68.
⁷ ibid, p. 67.
⁸ Elizabeth Wright (ed.) Feminism and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Dictionary, Oxford: Blackwell, 1992, p. 75.
⁹ Luce Irigaray, This Sex which is not One, trans. C. Porter and C. Burke, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985; Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. C. Porter, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press; Hélène Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa, in New French Feminisms, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivran, New York: Schocten Books. 1981. ¹⁰ Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. ¹¹ Wolff 1991 op.cit, p. 74.
¹² Kristeva describes the 'space' of the semiotic chora in the following way 'drives hold sway and constitute a strange space that I shall name after Plato (Timaeus, 48-53), a chora, a receptacle' 1982, p14.
¹³ See Lindsay Smith, The Politics of Focus: Feminism and Photography Theory, in Isabel Armstrong and Lindsay Smith (eds) New Feminist Discourses, London:Routledge 1992 ; Carol Mavor, Julia Margaret Cameron's Photographs of Altered Madonnas, in Pleasures Taken, London: I. B. Tauris & Co. Ltd., 1996 and Griselda Pollock, Painting, Feminism, History, in Michèle Barrett and Anne Phillips (eds.), De-stabilizing Theory Contemporary Feminist Debates, Oxford: Polity Press, 1992.
¹⁴ See Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde: on fairy tales and their tellers, London: Challo and Windus, 1994; Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, London: Routledge, 1993; Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez, New York: Columbia University Press, 1992.
¹⁵ Kristeva, op. cit., 1984.
¹⁶ Julie Kristeva, Motherhood According to Bellini, in Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. L. S. Roudiez, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980.
¹⁷ Cited in Tori Moi, The Kristeva Reader, Oxford: Blackwell, 1986, p. 11.
¹⁸ I am thinking here of the later photographic works of Cindy Sherman, Helen Chadwick's art pieces and, in the cinema, Jane Campion's recent film The Piano, 1993.
¹⁹ Metz 'Photography and Fetish' in The Critical Image, ed. C. Squires, Seattle: Bay Press, 1990, p. 158.
²⁰ Roland Barthes Camera Lucida, London: Jonathan Cape, 1982, p. 116.

Sarah Edge is a lecturer in Media Studies at the University of Ulster in Coleraine.

  Reproduced from CIRCA 90, Winter 1999, pp. 30-35