| Hartsock criticizes Foucault for his lack of specificity about who are the powerful in the ceaseless struggles and confrontations of force relations (169). While Foucault’s assertion seems to be that the individual or group that controls the power one minute may be in a subordinate position in the next, this position does not mitigate his responsibility in not naming the dominant power in these interrelations: what Hartsock equates to the colonizer—the one (group) who is the Subject. Seemingly, this paradigm, which I think that Foucault implicitly criticizes, allows for the continuation of the subject/object position that keeps the Other subjugated. Foucault analyses (and generalizes) about these systems of power, but does not articulate a course of action; this error cannot be overlooked by Hartsock (who directly implicates Foucault) or Suleiman. Both Hartsock and Suleiman call for a feminist response to postmodernism: a call for political action. It seems one trait of feminism, then, would be action, a necessary step in the realization of theory. While Hartsock advocates a modernist (re)construction of the subject based on historically marginalized voices—what seems to me a localized truth, Suleiman suggests a continued resistance to dominate voices that seek to control through the absolute truths of grand narratives—she can be comfortable in a world of hetroglossia. Hartsock questions the necessity of questioning subjectivity, illustrating an attempt to distance herself from postmodern critics and maintaining a necessity for a subjective position/construction (163-64). Suleiman calls for an ethics of postmodernism based on irony; she posits that there can be beliefs worth dying for, but they must always fall under a rhetoric of resistance (Epilogue 231-33). Yet, if we are caught up, as Foucault suggests, in established paradigms of power based on “the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organization” based on “ceaseless struggles and confrontations” (92), it seems that there is no escape and that these marginal voices already have a role in power relations other than that of supporting their own subjugation. This construction, as Hartsock points out, maintains the order of the colonizer by radical dichotomy: “Evil is necessary to Good, Matter to Idea, and Darkness to Light” (quoting de Beauvoir 160); Foucault agrees that the power constructions behind sexuality are “governed by the interplay of whole and part, principle and lack, absence and presence, excess and deficiency, by the function of instinct, finality, and meaning, of reality and pleasure” (154). Hartsock’s critique of this radical dichotomization lies in the colonizer’s construction of the colonized based on what the former is not. Foucault offers no solution to the continuing (and somewhat ineffable) relation of sexuality, power, and the construction of reality. Hartsock’s answer leaves me dubious: her call for “an account of the world as seen from the margins” to assure local groups of something that is knowable (belief?) in order to build their own understanding of the world based on their own conceptions of themselves seems problematic (171-72). While I agree with her general call for critique and construction, I think Suleiman’s conclusion is the most tenable presently: where a private conception of self (like Hartsock’s “nurturing space”) mingles necessarily with a public notion of ethics (where the self is questioned) and political action (234). Perhaps Suleiman’s conclusion does not differ that much from Hartsock’s: “We need to develop our understanding of difference by creating a situation in which hitherto marginalized groups can name themselves, speak for themselves, and participate in defining the terms of interaction, a situation in which we can construct an understanding of the world that is sensitive to difference” (158). The debate on nature versus nurture continues. |