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

3. Speaking Parts: Internal Dialogic and Models of Agency in the Work of Joanna Russ and Octavia Butler

3 Speaking Parts: Internal Dialogic and Models of Agency in the Work of Joanna Russ and Octavia Butler Possessing a disempowered position within society, oppressed groups need something more than a stabilizing of the social space that consolidates their position on the margins. The traditional Utopian goal of projecting an ideal space free from ideological conflict, however, is incompatible with the goal of exposing and exploring the contradictions and double binds that inflect female subjectivity. If marginalized groups retain this strategy, challenges to the status quo tend to reproduce the logic of stable difference and create "utopias of reversal ." To the extent that contemporary feminists address the ways in which women have been denied the opportunity to establish themselves as empowered subjects, their goal is first to establish women as individual agents and to expose the ways in which they have been excluded from this position. This goal requires a narrative form that emphasizes the connection between social change and female agency while rejecting innocence as a precondition for a positively transformed society. The traditional Utopian logic of difference stabilizes individual and collective identity through a process of negativity and opposition , constructing everything beyond the limits of a given identity as "that which it is not." As Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe point out, this logic underwrites acts of cultural domination by allowing the colonizer to construct itself as antithetical to the object of colonization and to suppress any similarity between colonizer and colonized (127). Against this "logic of opposition," Laclau and Mouffe 87 Speaking Parts offer what they call the "logic of antagonism," which aims to expose the impossibility of stable difference between two self-consistent and unified things, and points instead to "the presence of the other that prevents me from being fully myself" (125). This logic can be deployed against a dominant society's ambition to constitute itself as a full presence at the expense of a host of subjects who come to be defined as its negation. In an expression of this second logic, Donna Haraway argues for a relation between subject and social space organized around "a network of ideological images, suggesting the profusion of spaces and identities and the permeability of boundaries in the personal body and the body politic" (1990: 212). Like Jameson, Haraway associates this permeability with the postmodern breakdown between inside and outside and the resulting contamination of identity and loss of purity. Instead of lamenting this profusion of spaces and erosion of boundaries as Jameson does, Haraway welcomes it for the way it contributes to the "failure" of dominant discourse by disrupting the legitimacy of its myths of transcendence. She explains: "I am arguing for politics and epistemologies of location , positioning, and situating, where partiality and not universality is the condition of being heard to make rational knowledge claims" (1991: 195). Like Paul Smith and Judith Butler, Haraway suggests that the precondition for agency lies not in the older notion (and experience ) of the unified for which Jameson expresses nostalgia, but rather in the disturbance of self-certitude that is in conflict with the logic of unification. Instead of using the figure of a "unified" female subject to provide a structural resolution to ideological contradictions, feminist critical Utopias tend to reverse the relationship between individual and collective , strategically drawing on the Utopian imagination—not to project an ideal collective, but to explore ways in which women can constitute themselves as subjects. Here, the relationship between individual and collective body in critical Utopias is based on antagonism rather than homology, and the disjunctive experiences of the female protagonists are deployed against society's holistic and inclusionary claims. The contradictory ideologies that construct the female subject are played out upon the female body, which is not represented as existing prior to or outside the social body, but rather in 88 Speaking Parts dialogic relation to it. In critical Utopias, a structural and ideological permeability begins to characterize the boundary between Utopia and dystopia: "dystopian" moments of dissatisfaction and conflict now occur within the Utopian society, and female protagonists move back and forth between dystopian and Utopian social space, both altering and being altered by their social environment. Formal Utopia, which now occupies only part of the social potentialities explored in the novel, is enlisted in an activist program to engage with oppressive forces that still dominate parts of the social space. A subversive impulse expressed as desire replaces, as the...