J A C Q U E L I N E R O S E ......

What Does Feminism Want?

want to address, as my way of responding to this conference, the problem of collective identifications, of how to form a collectivity. Socrates once said Ithat hardly anybody ever acts sanely in public affairs. The psychoanalyst Ernest Jones commented that, even after a lengthy period of analysis which may have quite dramatic effects on a patient’s erotic proclivities and preferences, their sexual life and their dream life, there will be absolutely no change in their public identities or in how they behave when they go out into the collective world. If we are thinking about the future of feminism, one central issue we have to address is the kind of political movement we think we can be part of, not just in terms of the challenge posed to any such collectivity by differences between women, crucial as these are, but in the sense of what we think a collectivity can be. Perhaps our experience as feminists puts us in a unique position for thinking about the difficulties of identification with a collective to which so many of us have belonged but which is also seen by many as in some sort of crisis today. One way of approaching this issue might be through another question, one which has also emerged very clearly from this conference. To use, but modify, a well-worn phrase: `What does feminism want?’ We could start with the following list: equality, justice within or beyond the law, freedom, pleasure (even pain has slipped in at moments as a part of freedom, as in the whole range of psycho-sexual possibilities), recognition or civil sexuality. But if each of these have emerged in the course of the conference, we have demonstrated again how hard it is for us to think or talk about the collective dimension of our psychic self-imaginings, that is, the process of group ...... Women: a cultural review Vol. 11. No. 1/2. ISSN 0957-4042 print/ISSN 1470-1367 online # 2000 Taylor & Francis Ltd http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals 140 . WOMEN: A CULTURAL REVIEW ...... identification through which we formulated those demands in the first place and by means of which, at least partly we assume, they will have to be achieved. The psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion, discussed by Mary Jacobus, is one of the few analysts to have written extensively about group psychology after Freud. We have heard much about difference and about division internal to subjects, but about the divisions between subjects as a problem of how to constitute a viable collectivity, politically and ethically much less, although that is something in fact about which psychoanalysis has just as much to say as it does about the vagaries of sexual identity and difference. Even if, as my opening reference to Ernest Jones is there to remind us, what it does have to say is not always easy or encouraging. When we think about the loss of a singular, unified women’s movement under the pressures of race, sexuality and class, do we not also need to think about the difficulty of group identification? Our project has been one of justice, hence of recognition and ethics. `Ethics’, Freud wrote, `is to be regarded as a therapeutic attempt, as an endeavour to achieve by means of a command of the superego something which has not so far been achieved by means of any other cultural activity’. We could pause here, at the image of the superego `in command’, as it were, because it brings us straight to the heart of the problem. Blairism, which has been very present at this conference as the context in which feminism in Britain now has to place itself, of course prides itself on its `ethics’ (and not just in Robin Cook’s famous and now discredited promise of an `ethical’ foreign policy). We are faced with the increasingly vociferous moral demands of our, to cite Cora Kaplan, `relentlessly conservative and modernizing government’.* Let’s remember that Tony Blair shot to the top of the Labour Party on the back of his truly punishing formula `Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’ which now Gordon Brown, in his new biography, is claiming as his own (which also says something about the power of the leader, and of group identifications). But in psychoanalytic terms, the problem here is not just the socially punitive nature of these moral demands emanating from the Blair government but the form of the injunction itself, the kinds of internal, almost sadistic coercion to which they make their appeal. It is a problem rarely addressed by those who try to personalize the effects of inequality, by demanding for example that parents be penalized for their children’s absence from school, that a moral imperative is a knife that cuts both ways. Feminism in Britain and the United States has, I believe, suffered from this, from the very strength of the call to collective identifica- * Cora Kaplan’s tion. What can you do about the factÐwhich all calls to parental severity conference paper, `Spectres of Class: should considerÐthat the voice requiring us to be nice might not be a nice Socialist Feminism’s voice, that when we tell ourselves what to do, however noble the imperative, Undead’, is not what might be working at a deeper level is a profound distrust always on the included in these pages [ed.]. ready to be provoked at the hint of any collective demand. Has it perhaps WHAT DOES FEMINISM WANT? . 141 ...... been a problem for feminism that its call to a different type of collectivity for women has been unable to by-pass the oppressive, domineering weight of the superego? When we say `feminism’ it seems to me we are talking at least partly about not just a grand narrative to which we may or may not choose to affiliate ourselves but also of a collective identification which for some good (recognition of differences) and some not so good reasons (the perils of group life) at least partly failed. Today the issue for psychoanalysis and politics might not, then, be so much desire as identification: `The hardest thing’, as Regenia Gagnier so evocatively put it, although she crucially qualified it in class terms, `is to identify with another’s pleasure’. I want then to take just a few instances where it seems to me that the question of identification has been central to our contemporary political climateÐdeliberately chosen in response to Elaine Showalter’s, for me extraordinary, suggestion that two of these might be some kind of role model for feminism in our time. First, the for many of us frightening or chilling identification of Tony Blair with Margaret Thatcher. More powerful or disturbing, I would argue, precisely because she was a woman, more phallically masquerading than any man today would allow himself or dare himself to be. We are then confronted with a reality which, while belonging to the axis of identification, goes to the heart of questions of sexual difference which have been so central to one strand of feminist analysis over the past years. We are confronted, that is, with an extraordinary acting out in our public life of the force of sexual identification, across the barrier of sexual difference, with the power of a sexual ideal: Blair who seems able to permit himself certain relentlessly conservative policies on the back of what is obviously a partial idealization (or even idolization) of Thatcher as woman prime minister. Second, Diana, who can, surely, also be seen partly as a symbol of Thatcherism. You can identify with benevolent, charitable, kind, loving, feeling acts, you seek your self-worth in them becauseÐor rather in direct proportion to the extent you believe or have been persuaded to believe thatÐsociety and collective accountability has ceased to exist. The question that Diana carried on behalf of the collective was how to feel good when you (meaning the `you’ who voted in the Conservative tax- and welfare-slashing government which has left so many people so tangibly worse off) are feeling so mean. And just to run the two together, we could see as the ultimate legacy of these two figures combined: the disturbing image of Tony Blair cuddling up to the monarchy on the fiftieth anniversary of the other royal wedding, on exactly the day that the benefit cut to single women was announced and put into place (even if he subsequently had to climb down). We might then say that, for those of us who have been involved in the dialogue between psychoanalysis and feminism, we have made it too easy by subordinating identification to desire, by seeing the problem almost exclusively as that of liberating a complex, non-normative sexuality from the 142 . WOMEN: A CULTURAL REVIEW ...... straitjacket of a heterosexist culture, crucial as that move was. It was too easy when the opposition was between, let’s say, a phallic, masculine over- confident ego and the vagaries and uncertainties of unconscious sexual ambiguities and desire. Things become much more difficult if you bring in the question of the superego and of collective identifications, that is, if you bring in the question of how collective identitiesÐand Blair with his moralism and Diana with her benevolence are there as reminders of the dangersÐare made and unmade. Or to put it another way, the idea of unconscious sexuality struggling against the dominant has an immediate political appeal; the idea of the no less complex, peculiar investments we make in collective identifications far less. If we are trying to pull psycho- analysis in the direction of a radical politics, it is simply harder in relation to the collective to be sure you will always be on the right side. The question of sexual difference, however, has not gone away (it was the focus of John Fletcher’s paper). In fact today I think we should acknowledge that the debate got terribly stuck. What you decide about this internally embroiled argument about psychoanalysis (if it interests you at all) is likely to depend on whether you think feminism is advanced by a theory of how sexual difference is produced, that is to say, how people come to recognize themselves, if only partially and erroneously, as men and women. That difference I would argue is still a founding difference for human subjects’ recognition of themselves, however muchÐas psychoanalysis also insistsÐit is also fraudulent and oppressive as regards the complexities of any one individual’s sexual identity. When I was asked last night how many men there were at the conference I said about 5 per cent, about fifteen men amongst the 300 here. Psychoanalysis, one might say, offered us a theory of how, given that things unconsciously are so much more muddled, I could nonetheless be so sure (which I realize is not to address the issue of transsexuality or the extent to which I may have got it wrong). That has been one part of the dialogue between psychoanalysis and feminism. But when Griselda Pollock asked from the floor for a `theory of femininity’, she was, as I see it, giving voice to the theoretical imperative which came from the other side of the debate. Not how sexual difference is produced, but what a woman is. It was at this point that the debate stalled because these are different desires, which are not, nor, as I see it now, ever were, capable of theoretical resolution. So there is also a point to be made here about the limits of theory, or about how psychoanalysis, for a long time, while being part of one feminist discussion, presented itself or failed to present itself to the wider feminist constituency outside. In relation to feminism, the relevance of psycho- analysis will be decided, not just in relation to the content of its theories, but its form, that is, in terms of language. How does, or should, psycho- analysis speak about itself? Psychoanalysis boasts that it knows how to listen in. Is there a risk that anyone talking about psychoanalysis in public treats WHAT DOES FEMINISM WANT? . 143 ...... the audience as if they were in some sense the analyst (the French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, made this a matter of principle), assuming that, however estranged and estranging the discourse, listening in is what the audience should also do? We need another formÐand here I agree with Elaine Showalter although obviously I am not buying her examplesÐof public speech. The question of language seems crucial. Feminism still has much to gain from what psychoanalysis might have to say about how subjects bind themselves into their social identities, the ones we like, the ones that we don’t. As well as from a theory, to cite Cornelius Costoriades, of the disreputability of human subjects. Disreputable as opposed to infinitely multipliable or increasingly plastic, dissolute as opposed to dissolved. What does feminism want a subject to, or think a subject potentially can, be? A final question which seems to emerge strongly from this conference: Do we, as we enter the new millennium, want something to serve in the place of some kind of truth? Listening to Elisabeth Bronfen, I was struck that the language of the hysteric against the master was functioningÐin a way that takes us back, although with different emphases, to the opening dialogue between psychoanalysis and feminism in the 1970sÐin some sense as the discourse of truth. But if the hysteric is no longer the candidate then what are the alternatives? We might list a few which have presented themselves here: the feminist S&M practitioner who is willing to admit that she gets pleasure from sadism, the transsexual, the shopper or shoplifter, the trickster or the trauma. On this latter we might ask, if we generalize trauma, what does that do to the historical specificity of trauma in the century of which we now take our leave? The Hungarian emigre analysts, Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, whose concept of `transgenerational haunting’ has come up at several points in the psychoanalytic papers, have said in public discussion that they developed the concept in order to deal with the unconscious repetition of Holocaust memory in the fantasies and dreams of second- generation Holocaust survivor patients. To end with an extract from a poem by the Pulitzer Prize winning woman poet Jorie Graham from her latest collection The Errancy (last week the Times Literary Supplement published a poem about Graham by David Lehmann called `Big Hair’ which spoke volumes about the risks for women, still today, of public self-presentation, the problem with which Elaine Showalter began). In the title poem, she is talking about UtopiasÐthe opening poem is called `The Guardian Angel of the Little Utopia’Ðand she uses an expression, the `cadaverous swallowings of the dream of reason gone’, which I think strongly evokes, as does the whole poem in which it appears, the crisis in self-imagining for feminism as collective identity which I have, in these brief summary remarks, been trying to evoke for us today. These lines are from the title poem, `The Errancy’: 144 . WOMEN: A CULTURAL REVIEW ...... Utopia: remember the sensation of direction we loved, how it tunnelled forwardly for us, and us so feudal in its wakeÐ speckling of diamond-dust as I think of it now, that being carried forward by the notion of human perfectabilityÐlike a pasture imposed on the rising vibrancy of endless diamond-dust . . . And how we would comply, someday. How we were built to fit and complyÐ as handwriting fits to the form of its passion