The Construction of Knowledge and Epistemologies of Marked Subjectivities

PAMELA Me CALLUM The Construction of Knowledge and Epistemologies of Marked Subjectivities There can be no doubt that the theorizing of those writers who have defined the postmodern movement - Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, Jean-Fran~ois Lyotard, and Richard Rorty, among others - has produced a number of arguments which offer a substantial challenge to the assumptions of traditional Western philosophy. While it would be misleading to suggest that the writings of these critics form a monolithic unity, it is nevertheless possible to point to a number overlapping themes and motifs in their arguments. The body of work which has become known as postmodern theory is suspicious of Western rationalism's claims that a neutral and objective reason can formulate accurate, unbiased knowledge; it is suspicious of any assumption that human reason is homogeneous and universal, unaffected by the specific experiences of the individual knower; it is suspicious of the presupposition that knowledge is generated from a free play of the intelligence and is not bound up with or implicated in fOnTIS of power and systems of domination. To raise such questions is to imply that the goal, purpose, and justification of knowledge can no longer be unreflectively defined as a pursuit of an absolute, timeless truth. Feminists would readily give assent to many of the central points in postmodernism's critique of the Western rationalist tradition.1 For Western epistemologies, or so it seems to many feminist theorists, had spoken about knowledge and knowing with an assumption - sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit - that the investigating mind is male. Feminism and postmodernism appeared to be allied in dismantling similar conceptions about reasoning and the constitution of knowledge. It would not be correct, however, to suggest that feminism appropriates postmodernist theory without reservations. Rita Felski has noted that feminism, as an oppositional politicS and as a radical critique of existing norms, has continued to rely on-the categories of truth, value, and ethics, categories rejected by postmodernist thinkers. 'How ... is feminism to legitimate and sustain its own critique of patriarchy,' she asks, 'once it recognizes the existence of a more general legitimation crisis which questions the grounding and authority of all forms of knowledge?,2 Asimilar and related point is raised by Nancy Hartsock when she wonders why 'exactly at the moment when so many of us who have been silenced UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 61, NUMBER 4, SUMMER 1992 EPISTEMOLOGIES OF MARKED SUBJECTIVITIES 431 begin to demand the right to name ourselves, to act as subjects rather than objects of history ... just then the concept of subjecthood becomes "problematic"? Just when we are forming our own theories about the world, uncertainty emerges about whether the world can be adequately theorized?') What motivates the concerns of both Felski,and Hartsock is the vexing question of how feminist theories might be able to integrate the insights of postmodernist critique while at the same time insisting on the oppositional political transformation which has characterized the ethical claims of feminist critique. To some critics the answer has seemed to involve a 'politicizing' of postmodernism. If postmodernist thought is to be incorporated into feminist theories of knowledge, Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson argue, then it must be supp]emented with the politics it currently lacks.4 What I would like to do in the following discussion is to disentangle some of the issues implicit in these discussions of postmodemism and feminism. I will take as my point of departure some important reflections on these questions by Nancy Hartsock in 'Postmodernism and Political Change: Issues for Feminist Theory.'s Hartsock has reservations about the argument advanced by Fraser and Nicholson. According to her, the epistemological assumptions underpinning the postmodernist critique of Western rationalism have implications which cannot be easily integrated into a more global theory of feminist politics. In an intricate and dense analysis of Rorty and Foucault, she suggests that their critique of Western Enlightenment rationalism unwittingly reincorporates some of the effects of the theories which they consciously claim to reject. The critique of an objective subject of knowledge, the postmodern insistence that 'truth' is only the perspective which has been legitimized by social institutions, has issued into Ithe conclusion that if one cannot...