SOURCE: Knight, Deborah. “The Rhetoric of Theory: Responses to Toril Moi.” New Literary History 26, no. 1 (winter 1995): 63-70.

[In the following essay, Knight analyzes the antithetical relationship between “theory” and “feminist theory,” comparing the critical practices of both kinds of thought.]

In “Women, Subjectivity, and the Rhetoric of Anti-Humanism in Feminist Film Theory,” I investigate some of the ways in which feminist (film) theory relates itself to, and distinguishes itself from, theory in general. If one imagines that feminist theory is something that is distinct from theory due to a specifically political causal history, then feminist theory will be inclined to relate itself to theory confrontationally. If on the other hand feminist theory is understood as something which follows from, or responds to, work done in a prior or dominant theoretical domain, then it might be condemned in perpetuity to being asymmetrically dependent upon that prior domain. Both these possibilities—that feminist theory confronts another theoretical discourse, or that feminist theory is inevitably subordinated to a prior theoretical discourse—risk leaving feminist theory in just the sort of disadvantaged, marginalized position vis-à-vis that prior domain that women occupy within patriarchy. One of my objectives in this paper is to dissolve the exclusionary, dichotomized opposition between theory and feminist theory by indicating just the degree to which, by engaging in feminist theory, we also engage in, and modify, theory.

More specifically, I offer a symptomatic account of a critical strategy which one encounters generally, both in theory and in feminist theory. This strategy involves organizing a debate around two antithetical positions. Moreover, the privileged position—the anti-humanist position, in the particular case I consider—creates its antagonist through the use of oversimplifying and reductive caricaturizations of that position. Anti-humanism, under one description or another, is the positively valued term of a binary pair, and humanism, as the antagonist of anti-humanism, becomes the negatively valued term. Now, anti-humanism is a framework which organizes and directs much recent and contemporary theoretical work, including work by feminists. There are various anti-humanisms on the market these days, just as there are various modernisms, various postmodernisms, and so forth. Nevertheless, part of what distinguishes the construction of the debate around an apparently self-evident opposition between anti-humanists and humanists is a governing set of directive ideas about what marks the difference; that there are identifiable directive ideas shared by various anti-humanists does not require that all anti-humanists be involved in exactly the same critical or theoretical project.

What interests me here is not how particular anti-humanisms differ—though that could be the topic of another paper. What I am interested in here is how, at a certain level, different anti-humanisms participate in the same, or at least very similar, styles of argument. Thus I draw attention to the critique of a certain conception of agency, subjectivity, and reasoning which anti-humanists portray as characteristically humanist. This conception of agency, subjectivity, and reasoning is described as masculine, or in Derrida's vocabulary as phallogocentric; and nearly everyone points to Descartes—or at least to something rather more vaguely described as Cartesianism—as the source of and continuing support for this masculinist, phallic understanding of a centered, unified, self-originating, intentional subject, fully in control of his meanings.

This phallic subject is an immediate object of critique; it could not be otherwise, since the relationship between anti-humanism and humanism is not simply a descriptive carving up of a field but more fundamentally a normative, evaluative demarcation. From the perspective of feminist theory, it is hard to imagine what could be a more obvious and immediate signal of negative valuation than modifiers like “masculine” and “phallic.” The tendency to celebrate the phallic subject's Other—conceived variously as a decentered, ex-centric, or fragmented subject, or as a discursive subject, or as a subject in process—is a consequence of this oppositional pattern of evaluation.

I draw attention to this because the very framework of the debate risks cutting off possibilities for theoretical and critical investigation. For instance, it is far from clear that the description of the subject attributed to humanists is actually generally held any longer (if indeed it was ever generally held). So to continue to characterize the humanist subject in these general terms, where the attributes of the humanist subject are themselves subjected to a negative evaluation, means that any analysis of subjectivity and agency which wants to think in terms of some sort of unity, some sort of relationship between the subject and what she means or intends, and so forth, puts one at risk of being condemned by those working within an anti-humanist framework. To such an anti-humanist, talk about unity and so forth might well be condemned as not being political, or not political enough, or not political in the right way. In Krauss's terms, one might be condemned for engaging in a masculinist practice, for “using language to do business as usual.”

The object of my criticism, then, is a rhetorical tendency with a built-in technique of self-legitimation, where part of what is involved in the self-legitimation is precisely the exclusion of those who challenge the normative presuppositions of the framework. To give up the oppositional framework ought to allow feminist theorists to engage in a profitable reexamination of concepts like subjectivity, power, reason, equality, and so forth. My interest in the interconnection between directive ideas and critical practices may betray that I am a philosopher, but this interest is anything but a case of “purely abstract speculation.”

Given my position, I fail to see the relevance or the appropriateness of the militaristic metaphors in terms of which Toril Moi casts her account of feminist theory “according to Deborah Knight.” Nor do I agree with her implication that my work fails to address itself to issues of ideology. Finally, if I understand her, I am far from persuaded by her recommendation that we employ a Sartrean gambit in order to do away with “purely abstract speculations” about subjectivity, agency, and the self. In what follows I will address these three concerns.

THE VIEW “ACCORDING TO DEBORAH KNIGHT,” ACCORDING TO TORIL MOI

As I have indicated, the militaristic rhetoric is Moi's. The “vamp” camp and the “mirror” camp, qua camps battling it out against one another, are Moi's invention. The idea of “mirror” criticism and “vamp” criticism is due, of course, to Gilbert and Gubar. Their important insights about “mirror” critics and “vamp” critics, to which I have drawn attention, include these: (1) each critical position is partly defined by its rhetorical style and strategy; (2) it is part of the style and strategy of “vamps” to underplay the degree to which authorship and tradition are paradoxically used to legitimate their rejection of certain conceptions of authorship and tradition, or even to reject certain authors and certain traditions; and (3) both “mirror” critics and “vamp” critics have a feminist political agenda.

I certainly do not say, claim, imply, argue, believe, or think that feminist theory is a simple dichotomy between two neatly opposed factions of feminists. As I have indicated, I am particularly interested in the way in which feminist theory interconnects with theory, so the first sort of connection I have considered does not even involve different groups of feminists, but differing ways in which feminist theory interacts with theory. As for the idea that feminist theorists belong to mutually exclusive camps, surely this is, as Moi remarks, simplistic. What I am interested in are certain rhetorical strategies and tendencies, and these can and do appear across a very broad field (which is not a battlefield) of actual critical practices.

Not only is the militaristic rhetoric Moi's, the description of the opposition between the two “camps” is hers as well. I certainly do not imagine that the humanist/anti-humanist rhetorics which I analyze cash out in anything like a group of humanists who “believe in politics, social change, agency, and the existence of women,” and another group of anti-humanists who “have no sense of history or tradition, and [who] believe that female subjectivity does not exist.” If this were a legitimate description of anti-humanism, it is hard to see what could persuade anyone to take it seriously. Though Moi is totally silent on my reasons for examining the opposition between humanism and anti-humanism, I am happy to agree with her about the singular pointlessness of engaging in an argument about her “two camp” description, since it is one that neither of us agrees with or would care to defend.

Even so, it is little wonder Moi believes that there is at least one tradition of anti-humanist feminism which cannot be fitted into either of these “camps” she has burdened me with. I'd be amazed to find anyone who did fit into either camp as Moi has characterized them. But by drawing attention to socialist-feminists and (ex-) Marxist-feminists, Moi reminds us that critical rhetorics are not the only features of theoretical practice worthy of extended investigation. We should not fail to recognize the significance of the interconnection between rhetorical strategies and routines, on the one hand, and particular critical schools, on the other. I submit that Moi and the other socialist or (ex-) Marxist feminists to whom she refers are, precisely, members of a critical school. But this school is in turn part of the broader theoretical movement known as poststructuralism—a movement inflected, of course, with Althusserian and/or Maoist politics in France, and with socialist and neo-Marxian Left political developments in the United Kingdom. And since it is no part of my argument that anti-humanism entails anything like what Moi claims I maintain, it is also little wonder that the school of socialist and (ex-) Marxist feminists would not recognize themselves under the description of anti-humanism that Moi has provided.

IDEOLOGY AND/AS RHETORIC

Poststructuralism dominated film theory in the seventies and eighties, and much attention was paid to the interconnections between subjectivity and ideology, to the determinative role of language and perception, and to the work of Althusser as well as Lacan. So Moi has perhaps been hasty to suggest that I am unfamiliar with the centrality accorded to the investigation of the ideological effects of various dominant forms of representation.

It is precisely because I too have felt the influence of the ideological and symptomatic criticisms which characterized much of the theoretical work of that period that I am engaged in my current critique of rhetorical strategies. Where Moi wishes to focus attention on the dominant representations of subjectivity and in particular the ideological effects of liberal notions of subjectivity and agency in the period of late capitalism, I am interested in the ideological effects of rhetorical strategies in various theoretical and academic practices. I do not see that this is any less a political undertaking than her own.

It seems, however, that Moi uses the term “ideology” in several different senses which need to be more clearly distinguished. “Ideology” is a notoriously multivalent term, of course, as has been pointed out by virtually everyone who has written on the subject, especially since the term came back into vogue thanks to Althusser and Gramsci. Moi uses “ideology” as both a descriptive and an evaluative term, and so we find, played out again, just the sort of tendency that I have drawn attention to in my examination of the descriptive-evaluative use of terms like “subject” and its various attendant modifiers. Indeed, Moi's various uses of the term “ideology” shift between thinking of ideology as a certain sort of cause, as a certain sort of effect, as a certain political agenda, as a set of publicly scrutinizable ideas, as a set of ideas that can only be discovered through a symptomatic reading of social, political, or cultural practices, and as a term of abuse or criticism. I admit I don't use the term “ideology” much these days. I have used it much less frequently since it occurred to me, some years ago, that I was extremely dubious that there was “a dominant ideology,” except of course as a theorist's fiction. Overreliance on the term “ideology” can produce strange arguments. If I understand Moi, she holds that the dominant representation of the bourgeois subject is itself an ideology (as well as being an effect of ideology), which in its turn is at the center of patriarchal ideology in the twentieth century. I am not sure how explanatory it is to posit an ideology at the center of an ideology.

But if we can restate this point without reference to ideologies, Moi's concern is with a conception of liberalism which sees humans atomistically, as individual locuses of responsibility and individual possessors of rights and obligations. She is concerned about the consequences of sociopolitical and economic arrangements which hold the individual responsible for herself, and which refuse to acknowledge that individuals might be rendered unequal or subjected to comparative disadvantage by the gender-biased assumptions (about individualism, responsibility, and so on) which undergird the system in the first place. Such concerns are indeed valid. What I do not agree with, or accept, is that all characterizations of subjects in terms of some degree or other of unity, and so on, either lead to or follow from this sort of liberal conception of atomistic individualism. Which is why I argue for the centrality of intersubjectivity and the importance of historical and social contextualization for our understanding of particular agents and their actions.

So I am perplexed when Moi returns, at this point in her commentary, once again to attribute to me belief in a two-camp, either/or vision of the feminist battlefield. She says of me that “it is as if [I believe] that the only two alternatives around are either to accept the liberal humanist story of unchallenged individual power and integrity or to believe that agency, memory, or women do not exist.” I have not said that these are the only two alternatives around. What I have said, however, is that all arguments that become polarized in this sort of extreme dichotomization are counterproductive and moreover probably false. This particular dichotomy is certainly false. What we want to do is abandon the dichotomy.

WHY WE WON'T LEARN MUCH ABOUT SUBJECTIVITY BY DIGGING

Subjectivity and the self have been directive ideas throughout modernity, which for present purposes can be dated back to the sixteenth century. In our contemporary intellectual context, we find ourselves working with or responding to conceptual frameworks that have their roots in (to name some representatives) the traditions of rationalism and empiricism, romanticism, idealism, Marxism, Freudian psychoanalysis, and Nietzschean nihilism—not to mention the literary and artistic modernisms and avant-gardes of the last hundred years or so. With such a rich and varied history, it is little wonder that subjectivity and the self are still concepts we find intensely fascinating.

But subjectivity is no signpost, and even if it were, why would we imagine that the best thing to do upon discovering the signpost is to dig? The metaphorics Moi uses here imply that only by getting down into the messy empirical depths of things will we find clues or answers to questions about the self. Only by going deeper will we discover the truth about subjectivity. Subjectivity on this account sounds like buried treasure. But of course subjectivity cannot be a “signpost”—except of course, metaphorically—since subjectivity is not a sign. Subjectivity is a concept, and we can only make sense of it by considering the interconnections between it and other central concepts (including among many others concepts such as self and agent, understanding and interpretation, individual and community) that form the basis of the intentional vocabulary by means of which we talk about ourselves and each other.

Certainly one is not going to be able to dig down in the self to the point where one uncovers one's subject—a point long acknowledged in modern philosophy, and stated with admirable clarity by philosophers as diverse in outlook as Descartes, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, Sartre, and Wittgenstein (the list is scarcely exhaustive). If “we”—and I'm not sure who all Moi is including here—are more anxious and self-centered today than Sartre was, that may in part be explained because it is no longer clear that there are selves at all, at least not in the way “we” might have previously imagined, as what Daniel C. Dennett calls “selfy” selves. I think there is every reason to believe that Hume and Kant were both right to acknowledge that the self or subject is not something we will find as an object in the realm of experience. The subject is not there to be experienced; it is what experiences. So certainly the self or subject is not going to be unearthed or dug up. I cannot dig up my self as subject through autobiographical activities, anymore than I can dig up another's self as subject through biographical activities. What we discover on such archaeological expeditions might be a wealth of information and data, but as information and data it presupposes the very thing that Moi suggests we were hunting for in the first place: the subject which we were supposed to be digging for under the signpost. What is presupposed during the dig reveals that the self or subject is an organizational category. It is a means of ordering experience in terms of a persisting experiencer.

So it is not clear to me that Moi offers a significant alternative to my own position when she opts for what I want to call the Sartrean gambit, which it seems is intended to forestall “purely abstract speculations on the topic” of subjectivity. As I understand Moi—and I phrase it this way because the view I now attribute to her is not the one I originally understood her to be advocating, so I might well be mistaken—the Sartrean gambit is to replace the theoretical or critical study of the concept of subjectivity with the practical investigation of some actual person or other. The Sartrean gambit enjoins us to give up philosophy and instead to take up (auto)biography. It encourages us to stop splitting hairs in the abstract domain of concepts and to focus instead on the concrete cases of real people.

Autobiography and biography may lead us to a better understanding of some individual or other. They can do this because both autobiography and biography subscribe to views about what subjective experience is like, and how it is made meaningful through the production of a storied life. But the storied life is just another, more extended, means of ordering experience. And the sort of ordering in question, as I indicate in my paper, is fundamentally narrative. To throw our energies into “digging down” into someone else's life (as Sartre did with Flaubert), or even to “dig down” into one's own life, will not allow us to discover anything about the concepts and categories that organize our thinking—we use those categories to direct our “digging.” The metaphorics of signpost and the metaphorics of digging at a signpost are both wrong. The examination of concepts like “subject” and “self” is not comparable to archaeological investigation (in the non-Foucauldian sense of archaeology).

Reflection on the meaning of concepts is still the purview of philosophical and theoretical inquiry. This might seem to some to be a pointlessly abstract sort of undertaking. But as I have attempted to indicate in the account of the interconnection between subjectivity and narrative at the end of my paper, a better understanding of the terms that frame our investigation has direct implications for how actual persons understand each other. And this is not “purely abstract speculation”; it is in fact an account of a concrete and political social practice.