Feminism, Ideology, and Deconstruction: a Pragmatist View

Most intellectuals like to find ways of joining in the struggle of the weak against the strong. So they hope that their particular gifts and competences can be made relevant to that struggle. The term most frequently used in recent decades to formulate this hope is "critique of ideology." The idea is that philosophers, literary critics, lawyers, historians, and others who are good at making distinctions, redescribing, and recontextualizing can put these talents to use by "exposing" or "demystifying" present social practices.

But the most efficient way to expose or demystify an existing practice would seem to be by suggesting an alternative practice, rather than criticizing the current one. In politics, as in the Kuhnian model of theory-change in the sciences, anomalies within old paradigms can pile up indefinitely without providing much basis for criticism until a new option is offered. "Immanent" criticism of the old paradigm is relatively ineffective. More specifically, the most effective way to criticize current descriptions of a given instance of the oppression of the weak as "a necessary evil" (the political equivalent of "a negligible anomaly") is to explain just why it is not in fact necessary, by explaining how a specific institutional change would eliminate it. That means sketching an alternative future and a scenario of political action that might take us from the present to that future.

Marx and Engels make this point in The German Ideology when they criticize Feuerbach for changing "the word communist', which in the real world means the follower of a definite revolutionary party, into a mere category" (Tucker 1978, 167). Their confidence that their criticisms of the German philosophical tradition substituted reality for illusion, science for fantasy, was greatly strengthened by the fact that they had a revolutionary party and a program - a concrete proposal about how to provide empirical verification of their claim that certain contemporary evils (e.g., income differentials, unemployment) were unnecessary ones. The difference between their situation and ours is principally that no one now wants the revolution they had in mind; no longer does anyone want to nationalize the means of production or to abolish private property. So the contemporary Left lacks the sort of party and the sort of scenario that backed up Marx and Engels's claim that their thought was "scientific" rather than "utopian" - the voice of reality rather than fantasy.(1)

The closest we leftist intellectuals in the rich democracies come nowadays to having such a party and a program is the feminist movement. But on its political side feminism looks like a reformist rather than a revolutionary movement. For its political goals are fairly concrete and not difficult to envisage being achieved; these goals are argued for by appeals to widespread moral intuitions about fairness. So contemporary feminist politics is more analogous to eighteenth-century abolitionism than to nineteenth-century communism. Whereas it was very difficult in the nineteenth century to envisage what things might be like without private ownership, it was relatively easy in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to envisage a world without slaves and to see slavery as just a left over of a barbarous age - morally repugnant to widely held intuitions. Analogously, it is relatively easy to envisage a world with equal pay for equal work, equally shared domestic responsibilities, as many women as men in positions of power, etc., and to see present inequities as repugnant to widely-shared intuitions about what is right and just. Only insofar as feminism is more than a matter of specific reforms is it analogous to nineteenth-century communism.

Feminists are in the following situation: like Marx and Engels, they suspect that piecemeal reforms will leave an underlying, and unnecessary, evil largely untouched. But unlike Marx and Engels, they cannot easily sketch a revolutionary political scenario or a post revolutionary utopia. The result is a lot of talk about philosophical revolutions, revolutions in consciousness; these revolutions, however, are not reflected at anything that Marx and Engels would recognize as "the material level." So it is easy to imagine Marx and Engels making the same kind of fun of a lot of contemporary feminist theory that they made of Hegel, Feuerbach, or Bauer. The feminist theorists, they might say, have made "feminist" into "a mere category"; nor can they hope to do more, as long as the term does not signify "follower of a definite revolutionary party."

These considerations lead one to ask whether feminists can keep the notion of "critique of ideology" without invoking the distinction between "matter" and "consciousness" deployed in The German Ideology. There is a large and depressing literature about the equivocity of the term "ideology," the latest example of which is the first chapter of Terry Eagleton's Ideology.(2) Eagleton rejects the frequent suggestion that the term has become more trouble than it is worth and offers the following as a definition: "ideas and beliefs which help to legitimate the interests of a ruling group or class specifically by distortion and dissimulation." As an alternative he suggests "false or deceptive beliefs" that arise "not from the interests of a dominant class but from the material structure of society as a whole" (Eagleton 1991, 30).(3) The latter formulation incorporates the material/non-material contrast central to The German Ideology. But it is difficult for feminists to appropriate this contrast, which got whatever concrete relevance it had from the explication of "material change" by reference to Marx's eschatological history of changes in the organization of mechanisms of production. That history is largely irrelevant to the oppression of women by men.(4)

If, however, we drop the matter-consciousness distinction and fall back on the first of the two definitions of "ideology" I quoted from Eagleton, we come into conflict with the philosophical views about truth, knowledge, and objectivity held by most of the contemporary feminist intellectuals who hope to put their gifts and competences to work criticizing masculinist ideology. For "distortion" presupposes a medium of representation which, intruding between us and the object under investigation, produces an appearance that does not correspond to the reality of the object. This representationalism cannot be squared either with the pragmatist insistence that truth is not a matter of correspondence to the intrinsic nature of reality, or with the deconstructionist rejection of what Derrida calls "the metaphysics of presence."(5) Pragmatists and deconstructionists agree that everything is a social construct and that there is no point in trying to distinguish between the "natural" and the "merely" cultural. They agree that the question is which social constructs to discard and which to keep, and that there is no point in appealing to "the way things really are" in the course of struggles over who gets to construct what. Both philosophical schools can agree with Eagleton that "if there are no values and beliefs not bound up with power, then the term ideology threatens to expand to the vanishing point" (Eagleton 1991, 7). But, unlike Eagleton, both find this a reason to be dubious about the utility of the notion of "ideology" (at least if it is supposed to mean more than "a set of bad ideas").

The distinction that runs through The German Ideology between Marxist science and mere philosophical fantasy is an excellent example of a claim to have reached what Derrida calls "a full presence which is beyond the reach of play" (1978, 279). As a good Marxist, Eagleton has to echo the standard right-wing criticisms of Derrida when he says that "the thesis that objects are entirely internal to the discourses which constitute them raises the thorny problem of how we could ever judge that a discourse had constructed its object validly" and goes on to ask "if what validates my social interpretations are the political ends they serve, how am I to validate those ends?" (Eagleton 1991, 205). You cannot talk about "distorted communication" or "distorting ideas" without believing in objects external to discourses, and objects capable of being accurately or inaccurately, scientifically or merely fantastically, represented by those discourses.

Something, therefore, has to give. Feminist intellectuals who wish to criticize masculinist ideology, and to use deconstruction to do so, must either (1) think of something new for "ideology" to mean; or (2) disassociate deconstruction from anti-representationalism, from the denial that we can answer the question "have I constructed the object validly (as opposed, for example, to usefully for feminist purposes)?" or (3) say that the question of whether their criticisms of masculinist social practices are "scientific" or "philosophically well grounded," like the question of whether masculinism has "distorted" things, is beside the point.

The best option is the last one. The first option is simply not worth the trouble, and I do not think that the second can be done at all. It seems to me unfortunate that some people identified with deconstruction have tried to reconstitute the Marxist matter-consciousness distinction - as when de Man said that "it would be unfortunate to confuse the materiality of the signifier with the materiality of what it signifies" and went on to define "ideology" as "the confusion of linguistic with natural reality, of reference with phenomenalism" (de Man 1986, 11). The way to rebut the accusation that literary theory, or deconstruction, is "oblivious to social and historical reality" is to insist that "constitution of objects by discourse" goes all the way down, and that "respect for reality" (social and historical, astrophysical, or any other kind of reality) is just respect for past language, past ways of describing what is "really" going on.(6) Sometimes such respect is a good thing, sometimes it is not. It depends on what you want.

Feminists want to change the social world, so they cannot have too much respect for past descriptions of social institutions. The most interesting question about the utility of deconstruction for feminism is whether, once Nietzsche, Dewey, Derrida, et al. have convinced us that there is nothing "natural" or "scientific" or "objective" about any given masculinist practice or description, and that all objects (neutrinos, chairs, women, men, literary theory, feminism) are social constructs, there is any further assistance that deconstruction can offer in deciding which constructs to keep and which to replace, or in finding substitutes for the latter. I doubt that there is.