Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics, and: Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (review)

reviews 151 I say despite himself precisely because his book's central project is to catapult the highly reified theoretical conglomerate from its bird's-eye perspective on hegemony. The fact that Jameson will not posit a Utopian space outside the textual field is in part what underwrites his notion of the ubiquity of the "cultural dominant" so strongly contested by Pfeil. Another Tale to Tell points beyond the signifying arena at the same time that it is trapped within it; it is an avatar of the predicament of every politically committed intellectual who is issuing a serious challenge to theoretical discourse from within, on the grounds that the "postmodernism of problcmatization" (212) is not the genuine locus of liberation from postmodernism itself. In this sense, Pfeil is dispensing with the seductive Althusscrian niche of Marxist scicntificity and cutting the foundation from under his own assertions. This move, however, is a crucial first step in the creation of the kind of communal text that no longer serves only a specialized, professional community. Although what form this "communal text" might take has not been (any maybe cannot yet be) announced by Pfeil, it would be fruitful to locate a few suggestive remarks in his own writing that broach the question. As mentioned earlier, in "Postmodernism and Our Discontent" Pfeil envisages a dialectic between, for instance, the marginalized culture of the urban ghetto (represented through break-dancing, rapping, hip-hop) and the white intellectual elite. What this dialectic entails, it seems to me, is a new definition of text altogether—one that abdicates the monopoly of the printed page and, with that, the monopoly of the literary/visual. It requires not only the symbolic but the physical crossing of boundaries: "some cither altogether new or radically revised public spaces—meaning 'spaces' here in its most literal sense" (137). This is the kind of project that would make use of the society of the spectacle without succumbing to it. Perhaps it is also for the sake of this dialectic that Pfeil repeatedly stops short of making a "grand theoretical pronouncement" (214) and uses his insights rather for contcxtualizing specific texts under discussion. The effect of these self-consciously aborted theoretical itineraries is symptomatic of the book's predicament. Given the theoretical vantage point the book has assumed, the reader feels somewhat cheated out of the "theoretical pronouncement" that so much of Pfcil's writing seems to lead up to (especially since the alternative communal language that Pfeil is calling for still remains absent). To some extent, his ironic jab at the postmodern decentered subject—"Certain connections must remain repressed, certain insights must stay local" (274)—characterizes, as well, the double bind outlined above. Having said that, I don't believe that the current double bind Pfeil and other politically committed theoreticians find themselves in constitutes a Gordian knot, the undoing of which will require the dualistic move of abandoning the textual field as the site of radical praxis. While as it currently stands, the book is still another theoretical talc to tell, it already signals toward an other talc, as yet untold. Despite its strategic ambiguities, or maybe precisely because of them, Another Tale to Tell is an indispensable contribution to the weaving of new "Plot Devices in the Occupation" (265). ANNEMARIE KEMENY Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics, by Christine Battcrsby. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press. 200 pp. $25.00 (cloth); $9.95 (paper). Primate Visions: Gender. Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science, by Donna Haraway. London: Routlcdgc, 1990. 486 pp. $19.00 cloth. There's a well-known desk statuette—you'll sec it in tourist shops, or junk catalogues— that parodies Rodin's "The Thinker": a little fake-bronze chimpanzee sitting, head on hand, brow furled. The works under review converge in the relationship between Rodin's original and 152 the minnesota review its kitsch parody. Christine Battersby's study of the representation of genius in Western thought, as if faced with the original Rodin statue, asks: Why is Genius characteristically represented as male? What changes would be required to be able to imagine a female genius? Donna Haraway's history of the construction of primatology...