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CHAPTER 10 Bachmann and Materialist Feminism GENDER AND THE COLD WAR Probably no one believes any more that writing literature takes place outside of the historical situation—that even a single writer exists whose starting point isn’t determined by the conditions of the time. —Ingeborg Bachmann, Werke Two apparently contradictory arguments underwrite this book which I want to address explicitly here. On the one hand, I have maintained that Bachmann’s writings should be read historically, though they often are not; on the other hand, I have asserted that all readings of Bachmann are necessarily historical: that is, informed by the historically specific concerns of readers, whether or not readers are aware of it. Walter Benjamin again helps to reconcile this apparent contradiction. His “Theses on the Philosophy of History” helps us to understand that all readings are necessarily “presentist” in that they take from the text that which “flashes up in a moment of danger” (255); that is, they appropriate the text in a way that corresponds to the reader’s present needs. But Benjamin seems to insist in addition that the “historical materialist” (the reader of history who understands the past as Benjamin recommends) needs to recognize the pastness of the past, for he or she is called upon to redeem the past, to prevent it from being lost forever by retrieving it for the present. Hence the danger of a reading that is only presentist: readers find in the text what is familiar but not what is strange or genuinely historical or different from the present. In my own view, readings that do not acknowledge the pastness of products of the past are something like ethnocentric readings that find only the familiar in other cultures’ artifacts: they betray, do violence to, the past because they do not permit the past its otherness. Benjamin writes: “Nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history. To be sure, only a redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past—which is to say, only for a redeemed { 297 } mankind has the past become citable in all its moments” (254). “A redeemed [hu]mankind” I take as a (utopian) description of the state to which humanity accedes after “our” efforts to achieve qualitative social change have succeeded (“after the revolution,” as we used to say, or “when the Messiah comes”). The “historical materialists” of Benjamin’s “Theses” have, as he puts it, “a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim” (254). Our charge as “historical materialist” historians or literary scholars is to fulfill our ethical obligation to the past by redeeming as much of the past as our “weak Messianic power” allows. Though we will always read historically in the one sense, producing readings informed by the historical situations in which we are embedded (as I hope I have shown in part 2 of this book), in the other sense reading texts historically will always only be the outcome of a great effort to understand the historical situation from which they derive and to which they respond. In this final chapter I want to read Bachmann’s texts historically, using the methodology of “materialist feminism,” a contemporary approach to cultural analysis that I regard as most akin to the historical materialism that Benjamin advocated and as best equipped to help us understand texts within their historical contexts. An approach calling itself materialist feminism first emerged in the late 1970s, often designating efforts to turn Marxist-derived methods to feminist ends, but by the 1990s the term had come to refer to a methodology that combined post-Althusserian Marxism with postmodern discourse theories. Committed to a multifactor analysis of women’s complex social positioning, contemporary materialist feminists refuse to privilege gender oppression over other forms of domination under which women (and men) suffer. Materialist feminism distinguishes itself from Marxist feminism in its refusal to construe the economic sphere as the prime mover of social change “in the last instance.” Instead, materialist feminists insist upon the crucial work done by discourse/ ideology, defined as “the array of sense making practices which constitute what counts as ‘the way things are’ in any historical moment” in constituting, calling into being, or “interpellating” human subjects within particular social relations (in the words of Rosemary Hennessy [14], a prominent materialist feminist). Materialist feminists would, however, also insist that discourse/ideology cannot be detached from material practices and conditions or even, except perhaps heuristically , be understood as separate “spheres...

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