Generational Time
OEDIPUS INTERRUPTED
The recent debates around feminist ‘generations’ have drawn vital critical attention to the divisive, anxiety-inducing effects that generational and matrilineal symbolism can have within feminism, and moreover, compel a thoroughgoing critical analysis of ‘generations’ and ‘generational time’ as cultural conceptions. A specific kind of generational paradigm is problematic, aligned to Oedipal models of relationality, and patriarchal, traditionalist, linear models of historical time. Yet, whilst the concept of generations can bolster patriarchal and linear models, it is not necessarily bound to them. As an initial means of reducing the influence of these dominant models, I have suggested that the notion of historical generations can be understood in its broadest sense as a conceptual or symbolic means of linking overlapping lives through time, which is open to various kinds of temporal configuration. Once we have opened out the field in this way, it becomes possible to consider a different kind of generational or genealogical order, outside of patriarchal, Oedipal and linear determinations.
To explore the possibility of a different generational dynamic between feminists, and hence, a different generational temporality, this section turns to the work of Luce Irigaray on female genealogies.117 Irigaray, like Roof, is critical of the dissipation of debate among women into hierarchies of social power ‘tied to a prevalence of genealogical familial authority’ (Irigaray 1996:13-14). Yet unlike Roof, Irigaray stresses that the problem is with patriarchal monopolisation and colonisation of the genealogical, rather than with the concept of ‘genealogy’ or ‘generations’ per se. Indeed, she insists that female genealogies and a sense of ‘verticality’, or connection through time, are crucial components in building strong female
117I want to acknowledge here the problem of conflating ‘female’ and ‘feminist’. Addressing the issue
of ‘between-women sociality’ is a crucial dimension of the feminist project to rethink generational communication; yet, depicting the ‘receiver’ of feminist legacies as de facto female runs the risk of capitulating to the notion that feminism is a women-only affair that does not need to trouble or implicate men. As such, I move towards a broader approach to generational time towards the end of the chapter, advocating a hermeneutic of ‘repetition with variation’ which is non-gender specific.
identities and relations between women (Irigaray 1993a:94; see also Cornell 2002). As such, she seeks to subvert and challenge the dominance of patriarchal generational and genealogical models, through a series of psychoanalytic interventions, and performative engagements with mythic representations of female relations. This aspect of Irigaray’s work, I suggest, is useful to feminist historiography in its affirmation and demonstration that it is possible to think outside patriarchal and linear determinations of generational and genealogical symbolics and imaginaries. Yet, towards the end of the section, I argue that Irigaray does not fulfill her own promise, due to her monolithic treatment of the ‘western symbolic order’ and ‘cultural imaginary’.
2.1
Psychoanalytic Interventions
In Sexes and Genealogies (1993b), Irigaray begins by painting a rather gloomy picture of female genealogies and ‘woman-to-woman sociality’. Relations between women are stifled, even impossible, within patriarchal culture and society, she claims, because its kinship structures separate women from one another and subordinate them to male authority. In a culture structured upon patriliny and patrimony, women’s own genealogy is severed and lost, as they are ‘abducted from their ancestors’, ‘torn away’ from their own mothers, and transplanted into the genealogy of male partners. ‘It must be made apparent’, she stresses, ‘that we live in accordance with exclusively male genealogical systems… Patriarchal power is organised by submitting one genealogy to the other… Mother-daughter relations in patrilinear societies are subordinated to relations between men’ (Irigaray 1993b:16). In je, tu, nous (1993c), Irigaray paints a similar picture, explaining that the Oedipal paradigm is the emblem and mechanism of this genealogical and reproductive order because of its division of genealogy into ‘one or two family triangles, all sired by the male’. As the patriarchal family serves the interest of male power and property, the female is reduced to the realm of raw ‘nature’ and ‘uncultured’ reproduction (1993c:3).
For Irigaray, then, the ‘between-men culture’ of patriarchy can offer no suitable ways of symbolising and cultivating ‘between-women’ cultures, socialities and genealogies. From this perspective, the ‘political matricide’118
that pits younger feminists against older feminists arises because there is no adequate cultural alternative to the patriarchal, hierarchical rules and meanings governing genealogical and inter-generational relations. That is, to conduct themselves in social life, women are forced to mimic patriarchal kinship patterns and relationships modelled on genealogical descent, Oedipal rivalry and debt. Women ape these patterns and paradigms, Irigaray contends, because ‘we lack values of our own’ (1993c:4). Despite painting this seemingly bleak picture of genealogical relations between women under patriarchy, however, Irigaray goes on to make an enticing claim, which is that ‘the Oedipal paradigm only seems like the only order possible because it refuses to regard itself as myth’ (1993b:23). Granted, the Oedipal myth is not simply a fantasy, but rather, can be seen as a ‘symptom’, in that it has a ‘symbolic logic that accounts for a real mode of functioning, a real structure of relations’ (Felman 1987:151). Nevertheless, Irigaray’s claim here dramatises the vital idea that whilst Oedipal modes may well have dominated familial and generational relationships under patriarchal conditions, their symbolic logic and mythic manifestations can, in principle, be interrupted and unsettled.
Irigaray’s work undertakes such interruptions in two key ways. The first is through a psychoanalytic intervention. One of her guiding ideas is that if social relations between women are to improve, we must look at psychic determinations of the social, rather than taking a purely socioeconomic perspective119. In fact, for Irigaray, feminism has ‘failed’ precisely because it has failed to adequately investigate and unravel the symbolic structures, imaginary identifications and psychic attachments that underpin social organisation
118
Madeline Detloff attributes the term ‘political matricide’ to Louise Bernikow (Detloff 1997). 119 Friedrich Engels, for example, argues that patriarchal kinship systems are determined solely by economic shifts and the introduction of private property, and therefore that patriarchal cultural norms and genealogical systems based on patrimony and patriliny are an effect of this economic organisation (Engels 2010).
(1993b:10-11). From Irigaray’s psychoanalytically-oriented perspective, then, if intergenerational relations between feminists are manifesting Oedipal tendencies, we can read this as symptomatic of a deeper problem of women’s relationship to ‘the symbolic’: i.e. the set of linguistic, sociocultural rules and norms that order, support and regulate our sense of reality and cultural intelligibility, including gendered relations and kinship structures. ‘How can we govern the world as women if we have not defined our identity, the rules governing our genealogical relations, our social, linguistic, cultural order’? (1993c:51). Women’s repositioning of themselves as socio-symbolic subjects, Irigaray argues, must first take place by questioning our symbolic and imaginary relation to the mother. This, above all, requires us to challenge the psychoanalytic idea, as entrenched by both Freud and Lacan, that entry into the ‘symbolic’ order of language and culture depends upon the paternal intervention and thus the exclusion and ‘forgetting’ of the maternal.
In Lacan’s account, the mother and child initially exist in a relation of fusion and undifferentiation, a state which needs to be broken up by the ‘Paternal Metaphor’ and the ‘Law of the Father’ if the child is to enter into the cultural order, to represent and conduct themselves through language, and thus to become an individuated, encultured subject to themselves and others.120 Lacan, it must be registered, insists that it is the father’s name or ‘paternal metaphor’ that is the fundamental ‘support of the symbolic system’, rather than the literal father. This marks a decisive shift away from the biologistic orientation of Freud’s account of Oedipalisation, where it is the literal father that prohibits the desire for the mother
120
The child, Lacan claims, is born into the order of the Real, a realm of ‘pure plentitude’ and fullness, a continuum in which there are no boundaries and no lack. The child has no sense of its own corporeal boundaries, and no sense of inside and outside, subject and object, self and other. In this phase, the child exists in a syncretic unity, a joyous fusion, with the mother. This ‘hermetically sealed unit’ of fullness and completeness begins its dissolution with the onset of the ‘mirror stage’, in which the child begins to recognise lack or absence (of the mother or gratification of needs) and concurrently, to recognise its distinction from the mother and its environment. This is the realm of the Imaginary, in which the ego is primitively established through fantasised identification with others, particularly the mother. Lacan associates this dyadic, mutually defining, identificatory structure primarily with the mother–child relation in the mirror stage, which, if left to itself, ‘would entail a vicious cycle of imaginary projections, identifications, internalisations, fantasies and demands that leave no room for development or growth’ (Grosz 1990:50). Exchange is impossible because there is no third term, hence the equation of entry into the symbolic order of language and culture through the paternal.
and ensures entry into the cultural order of prohibitions and taboos121. However, feminist theorists have argued that the Lacanian account is equally problematic from a feminist perspective, because it still depends upon the idea that the mother-child relation has to be mediated via a third term if the child is to successfully enter cultural life. That is, although Lacan shifts the grounds of our understanding of patriarchal power relations and their social reproduction away from the biologistic orientation of Freud towards socio-linguistic processes, he nevertheless formulates this structure on the basis of a universal or ‘inevitable law’ that the maternal relation always has to be sacrificed and left behind. Thus, in Lacan’s work, as Elisabeth Grosz argues, ‘patriarchal dominance is not so much challenged as displaced, from biology to the equally unchangeable socio-linguistic law of the father’ (Grosz 1990:15). Like Freud’s Oedipus complex, then, the Lacanian account of ‘Oedipalisation’ is premised upon the necessity of the ‘paternal’ or ‘third-term’ intervention into the mother- child relation, as the condition for culture and communication. The idea that the Name and Law of the Father is a necessary regulator of desire and inter-subjective communication therefore makes patriarchal authority and patrilineal/patrimonial kinship structures seem inevitable.
121In Freud’s account, the Oedipal complex describes a transition in the (boy) child’s life whereby his
primary attachment to, and desire for, the mother must be regulated and re-directed. It is the father that prohibits the boy’s (sexual) access to the mother, and thus the boy perceives the father as an unbeatable rival, and moreover, construes the father’s prohibitions as castration threats. In the (successful) resolution of this complex, the boy represses his primal desire for the mother, deferring or redirecting his desire towards the future when he will be rewarded, by having a woman of his own. In Totem and Taboo, Freud attempts to account for the origins of this ‘patriarchal pact’, through reference to the
‘primal myth’ of parricide: the killing of the father figure by the fraternal horde (Freud 1950:141). This ‘original sin’ founds an inexorable law of debt ‘through which the subject binds himself for life to the Law’, as founded on the Oedipal incest taboo and patriarchal kinship structures which regulate desire and familial relationships. As Lacan points out therefore, the power of the Oedipus complex in Freud’s system rests not so much upon the personage of the father figure, but rather on the authority of the dead or absent father (Grosz 1990:69). Indeed, Lacan stresses that paternal authority is always already symbolic, because paternity (at least traditionally) is uncertain and thus requires representation through the naming of the father. The ‘Law-of-the-Father’ refers to the kinship systems which forbid sexual access to those who have been named as family. It is the ‘Name-of-the-Father’ which thus becomes central to Lacan’s reinterpretation of Freud’s psycho-biological Oedipus model in linguistic and socio- cultural terms.
For Irigaray, Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory is useful in that it helps to demonstrate the fundamentally patriarchal foundations of western culture. ‘What is now termed the Oedipal structure as access to the cultural order is already structured within a single, masculine line of filiation which doesn’t symbolize the woman’s relationship to her mother’ (Irigaray 1993b:16). Yet, although psychoanalytic theory has propped up the patriarchal symbolic order by making it seem inevitable, Irigaray argues, it in fact offers valuable tools for the task of rethinking female relationships and genealogies and challenging the ‘erasure of the maternal’. Thus, instead of simply accepting the story of originary mother-child fusion, and the need for separation from the mother,122 Irigaray uses psychoanalytic concepts and methods to try and find a place for maternal genealogy within the symbolic and assert that ‘there is a genealogy of women’ (1993c:19).
One example is Irigaray’s postulation of a ‘maternal order’ founded on a ‘placental economy’ (1993b). Whilst the patriarchal imagination has represented the relation between mother and child in utero as one of fusion that needs to be broken up and regulated by the paternal function, Irigaray suggests that by paying attention to the mediating role played by the placenta, we can formulate an alternative psychoanalytic account whereby the mother and child are already separate, though conjoined. Irigaray draws here on the work of biologist Helène Rouch, who likens pregnancy to a ‘natural transplant’ (1993b). The difference between pregnancy and an organ transplant, she explains, is that the placenta stops the defence mechanism against the (half-foreign) foetus. It thereby facilitates ‘regulating exchanges’ between mother and foetus, negotiating between the mother’s self and the ‘other within’. So whilst Lacan claims that genuine exchange depends upon the intervention of the paternal third term, the figure of the placenta implies that the ‘third term’ is already there.
‘Culture’ is yet to give ‘interpretation to the model of tolerance of the other within and with a self that this relationship manifests’, Irigaray claims, and as such has failed to recognise or appreciate the ‘almost ethical character’ of the fetal relation and the placental economy (1993b). But it provides a promising ground for a ‘maternal order’ which does not
depend upon the intervention of ‘Paternal Law’ for the formation of subjectivity and intersubjectivity, and hence for the conditions of communication. The ‘placental economy’, Irigaray states, is an organised economy ‘which respects the one and the other’, and is far removed from the economy of patrimonial and patrilineal exchange. As such, the posited ‘maternal order’ does not need to be transcended in order to make cultural relations possible, but rather, contains the seeds of communication and psychic relations already within:
‘Were there a way for a child to symbolise its relations to the mother’s body, and were that relationship imagined as always already separate and at the same time life sustaining, the whole fantasy of fusion, triangulation, law, loss, and refusal of loss would be interrupted…’ (Weed 2010:27).
The idea of a ‘maternal order’ and ‘placental economy’ is not developed in much detail in Irigaray’s work, but its value lies in gesturing towards an alternative psychoanalytic account which does not depend upon a transcendence of the maternal. Through psychoanalytic interventions such as this, which open up alternative models of relationality, individuation and enculturation, Irigaray thus begins to interrupt and unsettle the Oedipal dynamic, showing that it is one possible account among many. Moreover, as Howie posits, her postulation of a ‘maternal order’ can help reorient and introduce a different ethical sensibility into intergenerational relations between feminists (Howie 2010b). If Oedipal psychoanalytic theory seals and shores up patriarchal genealogical orders, then the maternal order offers a way of re-imagining the maternal relation, where the maternal does not need to be sacrified or negated, but rather, plays a vital role within psychic development and cultural life. By removing the necessity for daughters to turn away from their mothers, the notion of a maternal order invites a non-conflictual understanding of the mother-daughter relation and relations between women more generally, thereby initiating new ‘pathways through feminisms and between feminists’ (ibid: 10). As Howie argues, this can inaugurate a relational and communicational model that has a different logic and temporality: an
antecedence of an ethical relationship, or a ‘new covenant’ for a woman-to-woman sociality that ‘offers a way to hear the past in light of the new without anxious displacement’ (ibid: 8).
This is not to say that we must ‘embrace the truth of the placenta’ as an emblem for woman-to-woman sociality, or that all forms of relations between women should be reduced or assimilated to an idealised version of the maternal relation (Weed 2010:27). The point, rather, is that the theory of ‘Oedipalisation’ is not incontrovertible, that it is possible to think beyond patriarchal paradigms and imagine genealogical relations and temporalities in a way much more conducive to forging productive feminist relationships.
2.2
Mythic Reimaginings
Irigaray’s psychoanalytic interventions interrupt and unsettle Oedipal and patriarchal paradigms, by opening up alternative accounts of individuation and enculturation which do not depend upon a suppression of the maternal, and as such, do not equate culture with patriarchy, or genealogy with patriliny and patrimony. In this regard, her work demonstrates that taking a pragmatic approach to psychoanalytic theory can be beneficial to feminist theory and historiography, as we seek to develop more constructive and adequate models of genealogy and intergenerational communication123. Alongside Irigaray’s psychoanalytical interventions, there is a second dimension to Irigaray’s work on female genealogies which operates on the level of the ‘cultural imaginary’, as she explores different ways of culturally representing female genealogies through myth.
The ‘Imaginary’ is a term used by Lacan to describe the realm of identification and imagistic representation of relations, in which the ego is primitively established through
123
As stated in the introduction, the pragmatic approach to truth is based upon the question of what practical difference it would make to think in a particular way. Taking a pragmatic approach to psychoanalytic theory, then, is to regard different theories and methods as ‘toolkits’, rather than as fixed theories which have a universal applicability.