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Blesok no. 23, October-November, 2001
Reviews
Politics and Poetics of Hélène Cixous
The notion of writing as liberation is the basis for Hélène Cixous’s concept of l’écriture féminine. The whole concept has political implications, to say the least. Cixous herself comes from the academic/literary feminism of the 70's, as do some other French writers that became part of the "mandatory", or "classic" women's studies reading list: Monique Wittig, Luce Irigaray, Catherine Clémment, Julia Kristeva. Although they are all strong individuals that do not necessarily share the same politics, poetics and theories, one thing they have in common is that they all clearly express the need to put an end to patriarchy once and for all. That is how these writers sharpened their political edge. Their demand was to destroy patriarchy, not to reform it, ‘soften’ or ‘diminish’ it, or, for that matter, replace it with matriarchy (if matriarchy would be patriarchy in reverse, its opposite, where roles would be switched and nothing else). Their idea was to imagine and create (at least in writing) a world with a completely different kind of economy, human relations, language. It is a life long project is to figure out – how? This is a short commentary on and an interpretation (hopefully, not a simplification) of Cixous's essays: "Sorties", "The Laugh of the Medusa" and "Coming to Writing". The complexity of Cixous's vision itself suggests that the task in front of us – to put an end to patriarchy – is anything but easy.
In Cixous’s writing, we find a word phallocentrism1, not patriarchy. Phallocentrism is a much wider concept that includes discourses such as philosophy. The critique of phallocentrism does not leave anything out, saying that nothing, not even philosophy, is "above" the social and historical conditions that we live in, but rather everything is either a result or a preconditionn of these conditions. The world of ideas apperas to be both a result and a precondition. In “Sorties”, as in “The Laugh of the Medusa”, Cixous sees the system of phallocentrism as "a machine turning out its Truth", a machine that functions this way: “The philosophical constructs itself starting with the abasement of woman. Subordination of the feminine to the masculine order which appears to be the condition for the function of the machine.” (Sorties, 289) I find the following view very important as well:
"Phallocentrism is. History has never produced, recorded anything but that. Which does not mean that this form is inevitable or natural. Phallocentrism is the enemy. Of everyone. Men stand to lose by it, differently but as seriously as women. And it is time to transform. To invent the other history". (Sorties, 291)
Based on the masculine/feminine opposition, phallocentrism produces other hierarchized binary oppositions in order to encompass each and every aspect of being into its system of domination and subordination.2 Here are the binary oppositions that Cixous lists in “Sorties”, and another similar list can be found in Donna Haraway’s “Manifesto for Cyborgs”:
| Cixous: | Haraway: |
| activity/passivity | self/other |
| seed/receptacle | mind/body |
| culture/nature | culture/nature |
| head/heart | civilized/primitive |
| logos/pathos | reality/appearance |
| form/matter | whole/part |
| intelligible/sensitive | agent/resource |
| convex/concave | right/wrong |
| Sun/Moon | truth/illusion |
| day/night | total/partial |
| Father/Mother | God/man |
| man/woman | male/female |
We are all taught to think in this dialectical sytem. The oppositions seem “natural”. “Naturally”, man is superior to woman, as Father is superior to Mother, mind to body, culture to nature, and so on. Colectivly or individually, we remember nothing but the history of opressions. All the discourses, including literature, carry on the message that this history is our destiny, that it always has been and always will be. “The same thread, or double tress leads us, whether we are reading or speaking, through literature, philosophy, criticsm, centuries of representation, of refelction.” (Sorties, 287) The language itself is a language of hierarchized binary oppositions as long as signifiers come in couples and they too often do. And so do our metaphors, revealing an opressing reality. According to my understanding, what Cixous is saying is that we learn to accept this "reality", and therefore we can "unlearn" it. As a start, we can make an effort to reject the language of oppression, tell the stories differently and the reality will start to transform too. Cixous definitely made this effort – her experimental essays reject genre classification, subvert phallocentrism and offer liberating ideas about women and the practice of writing. Here I will present the most important points.
The main implication of Cixous's metaphor of phallocentrism as a machine3, as I see it, is that those who are subordinated in that “machine” of phallocentrism, as are women, are actually themselves parts of the machine, they keep it going too, and only they are capable of breaking it, not those who are privileged. The breaking starts when we become conscious of the way we are inferiorized and used in the symbolic and the social hierarchy and when we act against the hierarchies themselves. In Cixous’s opinion, a way to act is to write, which women, at the point when Cixous was writing, had not yet done as women.
"I shall speak about women’s writing: about what it will do. Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies – for the same reasons, by the sam law, with the same fatal goal. Woman must put herself into text – as into the world and into history – by her own movement." (Medusa, 245)
In the quoted opening lines of “The Laugh of the Medusa”, we can read most of Cixous’s central points about l’écriture féminine, the points she repeats in “Coming to Writing” as well.
1) Woman must write her self – even though it includes writing about women, it is not enough to have a woman’s life story as a topic, the most important thing is to constantly invent the self and therefore not to conform to stereotypes, never forgeting that the self is multiple and ultimately indefinable (Cixous sees it as an “ensemble”).
2) Writing should be (and is) close to the body, and the desire. “I, too, overflow; my desires have invented new desires. My body knows of unheard-of songs.” (Medusa, 246). The self and the body are so closely interrelated, that the body cannot be reduced to the biological. As our selves, our bodies are also historically, socially and culturally determined (constructed), and although it seems that we constantly resist that determinaton, the final goal (dream?) is to break free and, again, invent.
3) Cixous sees the main difference between traditional male creativity and l’écriture féminine in the "libidinal economy". The term itself is inclusive of traditionally two completely separate things: libido and economics. Indeed, what is the connection? First, it is necessary to understand libido as more than the sexual urge, it is rather – "lust for life". Economics should be understood as something more than the distribution/exchange of material wealth, it is rather an exchange of power and pleasure. A libidinal economy can be calculated so that the return is greater that the gift, or it can be process-oriented, rejoicing in giving, without thinking about the end result – the return; without conuting on the return.
4) New women’s writing could be understood as a metaphor for action, rebellion in the larger liberation movement, and therefore we can have l’écriture féminine in literature, arts, academia, politics, economics etc.
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1. Cixous ofter refers to Lacan and Freud, therefore the symbolic "phallus". Additionally, critics (see: Toril Moi) notice that Cixous ows a lot to Derrida, namely his analysis of binary thinking characteristic for logocentrism (Derrida's term), and also his concept of differance. Cixous often invents neologisms, and phallocentrism is one. Another one is the verb that is translated into English as "to hierarchize" and I use this word my text too.
2. I would like to add at the very beginning one thing, very obvious and yet very obscured. At present times, in the feminist critique of the system, we should never fail to address the subordination of the people of color to the white people (racism), as well as the older condition of the subordination of the poor people to the rich, the persistant subordination of the gay/lesbian/queer people to the heterosexuals and the curious subordination of both the young and elderly people to the people "in their prime". You cannot address one problem and leave another one "for later". In that respect, no one is "innocent", not those who critique the system or those who support it. Sexism/male chauvinism, racism/white supremacy, classism/exploitation of the poor, ageism/putting the young down and heterosexism all work together to "maintain the machine". This could, ideally, be the platform for solidarity among all of the opressed. In practice, it works as a dividing force.
3. Of course, it is a metaphor which is not at all uncommon in human imagination before and after Cixous.
Cixous says, in her prophet’s voice: “Write your self. Your body must be heard.” Cixous thinks of sensual and sexual pleasures that should be inscribed in women’s texts, but the pains of the body and writing remain on the margin of her “teaching”. She argues that feminine sexuality has been socially repressed together with feminine writing (or artistic expression, or articulation of women’s political and social liberation for that matter). Cixous argues that, since feminine sexual pleasure has been restricted within society throughout history, it has to be reclaimed and inscribed into writing. Her pieces “The Laugh of the Medusa” and “Coming to Writing are manifestos of this poetical and political ideal of women's self-empowerment, and they are at the same time very personal and intimate. The idea is that through the new writing, my pleasure becomes my power. In these manifestos, she develops complex relations between the self/body/unconscious and the speech/writing. She successfully avoids dichotomies and creates l’écriture féminine as a genre of its own. I would argue that in Cixous’s world of deconstructed oppositions, where words have new definitions, pain is not absent. It is implicit in the struggle to reclaim the pleasure and the language. And at one point, Cixous even says: “A deep pain dictated my first letters from hell.”
Sometimes she writes in short sentences in the second person, to pass her urgent message (“Your body must be heard”). Other times her text becomes a flow of long, thick sentences. These vivid changes of rhythm and of tone suggest intensity of the (inner) life experience and signify the connection between the writing and the body, with breathing as in song or orgasm, or birth-giving. In any case, it is a power within that is getting released.
"I enter into myself with my eyes closed, and you can read it. This reading is performed here, by the being-who-wants-to-be-born, by an urge, something that wants at all costs to come out, to be exhaled, a music in my throat that wants to resound, a need of the flesh then, that seizes my trachea, a force that contracts the muscles of my womb and stretches my diaphragm as if I were going to give birth through my throat, or come. An it’s the same thing." (CTW, 52)
Cixous’s texts can be read as utopian, they can sound like sermons or prophecies, they can be read as philosophy, poetry or manifestos. All this is present in her writing, her l’écriture féminine, through the play with different styles, which is also a way to cross limits. Although she stresses the importance of writing, she is aware that the speech/writing dichotomy4 that we acquire with the language has to be overcome, together with the body/intellect opposition. L’écriture féminine, therefore, should keep in touch with the sounds we make when we utter words, as in poetry, and the more we play with these “sounds”, the closer we are to the song. Cixous also tries to overcome the old division between the conscoius and the unconscious: Cixous’s texts may be “a song of the unconscious”, but the politics behind it, as well as the style and the form, show how (self)consciously that song is composed. Why did she choose writing then, and not music or speaking? For one main reason: writing is more visible and potentially permanent: “Speaking (crying out, yelling, tearing the air, rage drove me to this endlessly) doesn’t leave traces: you can speak – it evaporates, ears are made for not hearing, voices get lost. But writing! Establish a contract with time. Noting! Making yourself noticed!!!” (CTW, 15)
Cixous's concept of libidinal economy is not without its problems, especially if you are suspicious – like I am – of psychoanalysis, be it Freud, Lacan or a feminist critical revision of psychoanalysis. Nevertheless, it is a challenging, complex concept that also has its parallels in the literary theory.
The point of intersection of Cixous's theory and the literary history is the notion of writing as almost a bodily endeavour. Even in the Western tradition of dualism, the strict division of body and intellect was not always forced when it came to the artistic practice. As Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar showed in their study of 19th century literature “The Madwoman in the Attic”, artistic practice, including writing, was often metaphorically or almost literally connected with sexuality – traditionally, with male sexuality. In the opening chapter of their book, Gilbert and Gubar asked this question: “Is pen a metaphorical penis?” The problem is that the pen/penis metaphor, according to Gilbert and Gubar, is not necessarily about the justifiable relation of the pleasure of writing to the sexual pleasure, but it is rather about the symbolic power over the text similar to the power of the Father.
“Because he is an author, a ‘man of letters’ is simultaneously, like his divine counterpart, a father, a master or ruler, and an owner: the spiritual type of a patriarch, as we understand that term in Western society.” (Gilbert & Gubar, Queen’s Looking Glass, 7). In this scheme, Gubar and Gilbert find, representation of women was reduced to images of either angels or monsters that came from the mighty author’s imagination. Again, the problem is not the imagination, but the reality behind it, and the fact that the partiarchical idea of the author intentionally worked against women-writers, and consequently against more diverse and liberating representations of femininity. In the end, we face the fact that the Western literary heritage is as poor when it comes to femininity, as the patriarchy behind is unyielding.
Just like Gilbert and Gubart start their study from the absence of "real" feminity in male texts in English, so does Cixous’s concept of libidinal economy start from the absence of femininity in the French literary tradition. Cixous notices this asbence even in women’s texts (with a few exceptions, including two male writers). We can all agree that in the Western literary tradition, there have too often been misrepresentions of women as angels or monsters – a reflection of the repression of women in the society. Cixous speaks almost in unision with Gilbert and Gubar when she says:
"Nearly the entire history of writing is confounded with the history of reason, of which it is at once the effect, the support, and one of the privileged alibis. It has been one with the phallocentric tradition. It is indeed that same self-admiring, self-stimulating, self-congratulatory phallocentrism." (Medusa, 249)
It is important to stress that there is not a unified category “women”, but nevertheless in all the known history, there is one thing a woman shares with all women: a struggle, on an everyday basis and throughout history, to keep her integrity in spite of losing her “right to herself”, her right to creativity, and her body. In the process of assembling of her strengths, a woman acquires knowledge of a new kind of economy, based on principles different from the principle of phallocentrism that operates with the balance between the gift and the return. Cixous calls this other economy “feminine libidinal economy”. The “balance” that the masculine libidinal economy is based on is an illusion invented to justify the imbalance of power and wealth. Feminine libidinal economy subverts phallocentrism, as if with a defiant “logic”: if it is possible to remain whole in spite of everything denied to women, it is possible to be the “desire-that-gives”: “The woman arriving over and over again does not stand still; she’s everywhere, she is the desire-that-gives”. With a lot of precaution, Cixous uses the metaphor: “mother”. Aware of the role the society reserves for the Mother: to pass on patriarchy to a new generation, Cixous wants to decontaminate mother’s milk: it becomes the white ink women write in, languelait , and takes us to the Realm of Gift.5
For Cixous, the feminine gift is always like mother’s milk: it is a good exchange, because the return is in the gift itself, in the pleasure of giving. “Writing, too, is milk. I nourish. And like all those who nourish, I am nourished. (....) The more you give, the more you take pleasure.” (CTW, 49) And then she asks: “How could it be that they don’t know that?” Obviously, “they” take more pleasure from something which is typical for phallocentrism: control. Masculine libidinal economy expects the return of the gift: I am going to give in order to gain more. It is a calculation: ultimatelly, in order for me to have the power, even a kind of power that is the result of an artistic effort, the other has to remain powerless. The desire for control is manifested in the following concept/deduction: (1) a writer is the “father” of his text, just as (2) God fathered the world, and just like God, (3) the writer owns and controls his work. This familiar literary/political/theological/economical analogy reveals the male Western tradition behind it, in tune with the linear thinking and the ideal of ownership and control. The problem is that all the other traditions have been repressed to a very critical point.
Luckily for all of us, some women gathered what prototypes of feminine writing they could find, including some male slippages away from patriarchy, and they started expanding a world of “new insurgent writing”. Anyone playing with l’écriture féminine, anyone ready (lucky?) to completely reject patriarchy and live, becomes involved in exploring the complexity of her self, with a vision of invention. At that point, all the oppositions will have turned to simply differences, including the gender differences and differences will not have become the ground for new oppositions. The invention starts from the self and the body and manifests itself in writing. Femininity and all its aspects are inscribed into writing.
However, there is the persistant issue of language. It is a great question if we are really able to avoid all the traps of the language, if we are able to invent another base for the language, different from the phallocentric one, and still be able to reach a mutual understanding in an imagined (current?) transitory period. In Cixous’s work, it is crucial:
"If woman has always functioned “within” the discourse of man, a signifier that has always referred back to the opposite signifier which annihilates its specific energy and diminishes or stifles its very different sounds, it is time for her to dislocate this “within”, to explode it, turn it around; and sieze it." (Medusa 257)
Hélène Cixous invented, and her essays prove it, a language able to cross boundaries, a language that does not recognize boundaries anymore. Those boundaries that need to be crossed stand between “theoretical/critical” and “creative” writing, between cultures and between particular languages. Cixous says that all of these boundaries initially prevented her from writing. “Everything in me joined forces to forbid me to write: history, my story, my origin, my sex. Everything that constituted my social and cultural self.” (CTW, 12) Cixous literally invents words: neologisms appear in her roller-coasterlike texts every time the inherited vocabulary fails her (e. g. chaosmos, Jewoman, twomorrow, sexcusing oneself, languelait).
The language of experimental writing, like Cixous’s, certainly is a new language we desperately need. Poetry can also be a safe refuge. However, in the long run, hiding in a refuge of discourse of your choice from time to time should not mean neglecting the vision of the radical changes in the society. After all, the grasp of knowledge and the sophistication that enables us to play with the language in a such way, is a privilege of a very, very small group of people scattered in libraries and academia around the world. As much as I believe in the power of writing, I am aware that it takes many texts of a certain type, and they have to widely circulate for a significant period of time, to bring about change. These texts have to be radical in their resistance to the comfort of a simplified reality of ruling divisions and hierarchies. Is that so difficult? It does seem that just to uncover the complexity of your self probably takes a lifetime. In the meantime, hopefully, the liberating power of a symbolic l’écriture féminine may saturate all our endeavors with the desire to change, and no one will be spared.
One cannot but doubt and hope.
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4. Another one of binary oppositions.
5. And here we come to an important footnote. "Mother's milk" is "the white ink" as much as "penis" is a a pen. Those are just metaphors. It does not mean that a writer who is biologically able to breastfeed is able to "do" l’ecriture feminine. It does not mean that she cannot write masculine texts. Also, it does not mean that a male writer can only inscribe masculine libidinal economy into his writing. On the individual level, many social conventions, such as the female/male oppositions, are challanged, consciously or unconsciously. However, in the overall picture, both historically and at present times, l’ecriture feminine (and its prototypical variants) was and still is mostly written by women and the traditional male wrtiting was/is signed mostly by men. Increasingly however, it seems that the boundaries between old divisions are blurred, as the postmodern and some recent feminist writers have noticed. I believe that it would be counterproductive to forget what led to the new conditions. Also, because the old is persistant, and appropriation can and does take place, as well as the well-known backlash, our critical edge needs to ramin sharp.
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