Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture (review)

Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture. Rita Felski. New York: New York University Press, 2000. Pp. vii + 214. $55.00 (Cloth) $18.50 (Paper).

Virginia Woolf's famous interregnum in To The Lighthouse, "Time Passes," presents the Great War from the vantage point of an empty house and the repetitive, doleful activities of its housekeepers. This image suggests the core intervention in Rita Felski's new book. Placing women of all stripes (from artists and women of color to petit bourgeois suburbanites) at the center of her analysis, Felski argues that the cultural and political perspectives of women alter how we periodize cultural history. Similarly, the Great War, as Woolf presents it, is still History, yet she decenters it, giving historical weight to the everyday rhythms of women's lives that "time" often passes over. She draws our attention to the multiple rhythms of temporality, but we might still see Mrs. McNab, the housekeeper, as outside history and less than modern.

Not so for Felski; she argues that we must widen our measure of the modern:

Time is a concept of enormous complexity, including questions of measurement, rhythm, synchronization, sequence, tempo, and intensity. It spans the personal and the public, work and leisure, the instantaneous and the eternal, intimate relations and global structures, everyday life and conditions of extremity. It exists at many different levels and is experienced in radically divergent ways. [16-7]

Doing Time argues forcefully for a historical perspective that is multiple and nonsynchronous, yet contemporaneous. Using postcolonial, feminist, and anthropological theories, Felski demonstrates the stakes of dismantling linear, progressive time and affirming the coevality of subjects who are often characterized as premodern.

Anyone interested in the question of historical periodization and the relation of modernism to modernity would find this study a useful, though broad, intervention. Once we begin to consider women writers and artists, popular and middlebrow authors, as well as writers from the Harlem Renaissance and the African diaspora, the coherent sense of "modernism" itself comes into question. Can the term incorporate an aesthetic or a critical stance toward modernity articulated from a range of positions? The debate becomes even more contested when we throw postmodernism into the mix. Felski intervenes in debates about historical periodization, claiming that it makes little sense to think of the modern and postmodern as unified terms that exist in an antithetical relation to one another. She argues instead that critical emphasis on the chaotic nature of postmodern time works to establish differences between epochs, yet such a narrative fails to explore the historical differences that exist within epochs. Drawing our attention to such contemporary differences, Doing Time examines a range of themes that are central to debates about postmodern culture, including the changing significance of class, the status of art and aesthetics, the crisis of the intellectual, the politics of popular culture, and the ends of both sex and history.

In addition, Felski believes that there is little value in distinguishing between modernism and postmodernism in terms of literary periodization: if we consider the historical avant-garde as well as high modernism, then we encounter difficulty identifying any postmodern stylistic feature that does not already exist somewhere in modernism. High modernist aesthetic productions capture the uneven nature of modern temporalities:

Joyce's exuberant verbal experiments, Picasso's splintered forms and figures, Woolf's deft rendering of unconscious murmurings, the anarchic eruptions of Dada and surrealism. . . . The polyglot languages, skewed forms, and fragmented images of modern literature and art offer an authentic window into the nature and meaning of modern experience. [58]

Given that modern art and literature have already articulated the ambiguity of identity, disjunctive temporalities, polysemantic signification that postmodernism celebrates, the most significant contribution of this collection of essays is its location of the ways in which "less-than-modern" subjects (who are usually feminized and associated with everyday life) challenge how we think about modernism and postmodernism.

Conversely, Felski intercedes in recent debates from the perspective of...