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

Preface

Preface In imagining alternatives to our present social order, discourses of social transformation express two different but related orientations toward existing conditions. The first seeks a position from which to envision a radical, qualitative break with these conditions; the second seeks to disrupt society's claim to unity and legitimacy by teasing out the contradictions andfissureswithin these conditions. The first might be defined as Utopian, the second as critical.1 In itself, each impulse is burdened by a limitation: to the extent that Utopian constructions posit a self-contained and inaccessible ideal "elsewhere " where social contradiction has always already been resolved, they abandon a critical connection to contemporary conditions; to the extent that internal critiques confine themselves to a negative hermeneutics of exposure, they fail to present a positive alternative. If internal critique must confront its inability to escape the social structures of oppression or do more than merely describe existing conditions, Utopia must confront its disengagement—as a mere escape —from these conditions. In one sense, then, the limitation of the one impulse is precisely the absence of the other: without a Utopian horizon, the critical impulse can achieve no distance from existing conditions and no normative point from which to launch a critique; without the engagement of the critical impulse, the Utopian impulse becomes totally disconnected from the historical conditions of its production. This book is about a contemporary shift in the way discourses of ix Preface social transformation articulate the relationship between the Utopian and critical impulses, a shift that can be broadly defined as the rejection of the Utopian impulse in favor of internal critique.2 I examine this shift in the context of a transformation in how discourses represent the relationship between subject and social space: for example, how figures of individual subjectivity are used to fund images of the social space; how a subject's experience of oppression and position relative to dominant power structures is understood to affect its ability to resist oppression and imagine alternatives. Although my primary focus is on contemporary feminist thought, I situate my analysis of feminism within the larger tradition of social discourses that, in attempting to break with existing conditions, reject the Utopian impulse toward escape or idealism in favor of a "standpoint approach " that derives social transformation from a group's position within existing conditions. In examining this larger tradition, I identify those Marxist conceptions from which feminism drew and those that feminism rejected, as well as that which feminism anticipated and shares with postmodern conceptions of the relation between subject and social space. My account of the relationship between subject and social space within sociopolitical discourse emerges through an analysis of how the informing logics of this relationship are played out in a series of contemporary feminist Utopian novels. Although Utopian literature is a genre with distinct formal characteristics, its explicitly political and didactic language invites us to examine it in conjunction with social theories of transformation. Until recently, this invitation has been taken up primarily by Marxist critics, whose characteristic contempt for Utopian literature is equaled only by their sense of ownership of the genre. The more or less socialist nature of literary Utopia's ideal societies—from the genre's inaugural moment with Thomas Mores Utopia through the end of the nineteenth century—provides one explanation for Marxism's claim to the genre. Another explanation for this sense of ownership, I will argue, comes from a set of assumptions about the ideal social space that Marxism, in spite of its materialist origins, shares with utopianism. In spite of its predominance , socialism as the informing vision of Utopias has been interrupted on two occasions: once in the late nineteenth century, around x Prefac the time of the "first wave" of American feminism, and again in the 1970s, in conjunction with the evolution of contemporary feminism. Although both the nineteenth- and the twentieth-century feminist Utopias express explicitly feminist beliefs, the second wave of feminist Utopias is distinguished by the way it inaugurated a revolution in the Utopian form in literature, which began to incorporate conflict ,imperfection, difference, and transgression into representations of an ideal social space that traditionally had been defined by its harmony and its stature as a sutured totality. Recent interest in the contemporary literary "critical Utopias" has already sponsored a series of attempts to define how their representations of the "ideal" space diverge from those of traditional Utopian literature...