Notes on Nowhere: Feminism, Utopian Logic, and Social Transformation

5. Acting Out "Lesbian": Monique Wittig and Immanent Critique

5 Acting Out "Lesbian": Monique Wittig and Immanent Critique If ultimately we are denied a new socialorder,which thereforecan only exist in words, I will find it in myself. —Monique Wittig, "On the Social Contract" To this point I have examined how the position, structure, and deployment of a Utopian "elsewhere" inflects relationships between individual subject and social body. I have discussed the connection between the traditional Utopian form in literature (with its emphasis on harmony and purity, its projection of contamination; and its suppression of agency) and a conception of the subject based on principles of unity and self-consistency. I have discussed the consequences when feminist Utopias accept the traditional Utopian form's grounding in a homology between the integrated individual body and the harmonious social space, and the possibilities that present themselves when writers deploy the Utopian form in nontraditional ways to transform conventional conceptions of the relation between subject and social space.While my critical analysis has implicitly understood the relation between subject and social space to be a socially constructed one, I have not examined authors who explicitly foreground the subject's construction in languages part of their strategy for resistance. Although Monique Wittig's use of imaginary female spaces from which a male presence has been virtually effaced reproduces many of the formal characteristics of the feminist Utopias that I have already described, she differs from the writers I have examined 165 Acting Out "Lesbian" so far in the extent to which she emphasizes language as the locus of both oppression and resistance. Through an analysis of Wittig, and her critics, I combine my focus on the relationship between subject and Utopian social space with an exploration of the role that contemporary theory assigns to discourse in constructing and mediating subjective identity. Privileging the role of discourse in identity formation is generally understood to be characteristically postmodern and is associated with poststructuralist analyses of how meaning is constructed—and, more importantly, deconstructed—in language. Thus, it is antithetical to much of the Utopian logic that I have identified: while Utopian logic seeks to shore up boundaries, poststructuralism seeks to undo them; while Utopia seeks to preserve harmony and defend its own purity, postmodern logic seeks to foster disruption and to expose the acts of repression and projection behind this alleged "purity." Because Wittig argues in her essays that the possibilities for resistance lie in subverting the discursive conditions of the gendered subject's emergence, and because her novels are characterized by fragmented narrative and highly self-conscious language play, she is typically designated a"postmodern" writer. As quickly as she is claimed under the rubric of postmodern sexual/textual practices, however, she is condemned for making an unabashedly Utopian gesture in relation tolesbian subjectivity. Critiques of Wittig in the name of postmodernism more often than not contain one or more quotes from "queer theorists "Judith Butler and Diana Fuss. Both Butler and Fuss bring Wittig to task for drawing upon what I have identified throughout this book as the conservative tendencies within Utopian logic; in particular , they attack Wittig for her focus, in theorizing lesbian subjectivity , on establishing it as a space free from contamination. Fuss argues that Wittig essentializes and reifies the category "lesbian" as "a pure space above and beyond the problems of sexual difference" and in the process merely replaces the Lacanian phallus with "lesbian" as transcendental signifier (45). Butler similarly argues that, in claiming lesbians are "not women," Wittig elevates lesbians to a kind of mythic transcendence that is predicated on the fiction that they exist entirely outside of a heterosexual and patriarchal economy. In the process, Butler argues, Wittig suggests that while heterosexual norms 166 Acting Out "Lesbian" are culturally determined, lesbian norms are somehow natural. In creating a constitutive division between lesbians and women, and a binary opposition between straight and gay, critics say, Wittig not only diverges from her own professed understanding of the subject as socially constructed but also reduces "lesbian" to a monolithic and transcendental signifier that disregards important differences among lesbians. Wittig is also frequently cited as an offender by critics who attack contemporary practices that posit a vanguard association between the lesbian and the postmodern. In her introduction to The Lesbian Postmodern, Robyn Wiegman attributes the tendency to claim this association to a temporal association between two "liminal figurations "—lesbian sexuality as the undermining point in relation to heterosexual identity, and...