Susan Ross

Department of Speech Communication
Pennsylvania State University
<sxr5@psuvm>

 

Flax, Jane. Thinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary West. Berkeley: U California P, 1990.

 

In the opening chapter of her book, Thinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary West, Jane Flax states that “the conversational form of the book represents my attempt to find a postmodern voice, to answer for myself the challenge of finding one way (among many possible ways) to continue theoretical writing while abandoning the ‘truth’ enunciating or adjudicating modes feminists and postmodernists so powerfully and appropriately call into question.” Flax does many things with her book, but she never attains such a voice, a problem which I think is related to the difficulty of resolving the relationship of the chosen themes and to the absence of personal experience within the book.

 

What it seems Flax wants to do is something akin to what Chris Weedon did in her foundational book, Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory–explicate and critique the three schools of psychoanalysis, feminism, and postmodernism, and show how they interrelate to achieve a kind of cohesive whole. What Flax lacks, particularly in comparison with Weedon, is any political agenda that spurs the arguments in some positive direction. Her aptly named final chapter, “No Conclusions,” seems sadly accurate as she weaves aimlessly in her “search for intelligibility and meaning.”

 

Flax’s seeming lack of focus is, ironically, rooted in the strength of the book, which is the comprehensive treatment of the writings of Freud, Winnicott, Lacan, Chodorow, Lyotard, Derrida, Rorty, Dinnerstein, and Foucault to show how each has contributed to Western thinking and culture. Thinking Fragments is exhaustive in fleshing out the basic tenets and contradictions of each thinker. Flax also understands and reminds us of the tension of the postmodern writing task: the tendency, in the process of presenting theoretical constructs, of reifying them in the very way postmodernist thinking encourages us not to.

 

If Flax wishes us to use the book as a basic primer in the origins of poststructuralist thinking, it would be helpful for her to provide more explicit signposts for the reader, such as chapter/book part headings that match the chosen theoretical categories, and more guidelines for the reader as to what purpose the incessant questioning serves. In other words, if the sections “The Selves Conceptions,” “Gender(s) and Dis-contents,” and “Knowledge in Question” carried the more explicit and accessible titles of “Psychoanalysis,” “Feminism,” and “Postmodernism,” then the book would serve as a more useful reference and less like a wandering journey. If the book is indeed intended to be an open-ended, less organized journey of sorts, then the form needs to be opened up more completely. Flax swims somewhere in between, and it is not always clear what the issues are, except that she allows each sentence to bounce off of itself–the book is riddled with disclaimers of “yet,” “however,” and “but” that follow firm assertions.

 

Flax claims in her early chapter on “Transitional Thinking” that her muddiness results from the fact that when she discusses one theoretical category “the other two voices will interrogate and critique the predominant one.” Thus, she excuses herself from rigorous, decisive explication of the “voices” and of inherent issues. How psychoanalysis fits into “transitional thinking,” given its conservative tradition of biological focus, seems an important issue to address–feminists have been questioning such essentialist viewpoints for awhile. The tension of Enlightenment-based theories and the feminist deploring of rationalism and its rigidity needs also to be addressed. It is not that Flax is unaware of these tensions, but she assumes that they have been addressed elsewhere, finished, and discarded. Her assumption, for instance, that the reified categories of Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism justify themselves as a chosen framework for such a book is unspoken and suspect. Why do they represent “our own time apprehended in thought” and why are they the crucial “voices” necessary to address issues of self, gender, knowledge, and power?

 

One of the most important questions for women, and yet one of the hardest for them to answer, is WHAT DO YOU WANT? Since the impetus of feminism originally grew out of women’s need to have choices and options in response to that question, any book that claims to be feminist should follow that spirit without resorting to what may look on the surface like an appropriately postmodern, open-ended, but actually despairing uncertainty of purpose. Flax’s final chapter, “No Conclusions,” is so convoluted and directionless that it is difficult to pull any sound philosophical or even interesting basis out of it. She says, “a fundamental and unresolved question pervading this book is how to justify–or even frame–theoretical and narrative choices (including my own) without recourse to “truth” or domination. I am convinced we can and should justify our choices to ourselves and others, but what forms these justifications can meaningfully assume is not clear to me.” That’s a good question. Does the reader have the right to call Flax to account and try to answer it? While her admission of her own lack of clarity is healthily postmodern, it lacks commitment. Does a dynamic, pluralistic sense of self imply that it disappears totally? The implications for women, whose selves have long been absent from discussions of society, history, and thought, seem ominous.

 

Perhaps my insistence on such a goal-oriented focus might be rooted in comparison with other postmodern articles where women’s issues don’t disappear under the rubric of seemingly “neutral” categories that actually themselves carry baggage resembling the “absolute” forms of knowledge and power Flax supposedly denounces. Flax herself wrote, for instance, an essay in 1980 which appeared in The Future of Difference. The essay described mother-daughter relationships, and offered a personal case history which excitingly showed the political implications of private struggles for women. The article also matched in form as well as content the feminist notion that personal struggles are indeed political realities. Similarly, Teresa Ebert’s recent article in College English, “The ‘Difference’ of Postmodern Feminism,” describes the search for an ideal feminist model, one that incorporates the notion of social struggle within language, and serves to demonstrate the global implications of combining feminism and postmodernism. Ebert discusses the exciting potential for using language and all its inherent significations to dissect social conflicts. Ebert’s skepticism of the “uncritical rejection of totality” because of its lack of global perspective seems more productive for feminists than Flax’s reluctance to look too far beyond established postmodernist categories and discussions, seemingly in order to avoid any hint of totalization in her discourse. In short, Flax lacks the necessary political element of a feminist work, perhaps because of her stated lack of belief in “inexorable, inner logic,” or more ominously, perhaps because her commitment to the idea of “these transitional times” leaves no room for any overarching sense of meaning other than the endless open-endedness of things.

 

In these exciting times of theoretical upheaval, a book like Flax’s should take advantage of its multidisciplinary grounding and move beyond the level of explication of theoretical bases, particularly since her explanations are not clear-cut enough to serve the beginning user (she isn’t strong on definition of terms, for instance) and are too stream-of-consciousness to be of much use to seasoned fans of postmodernist thinking. Since deconstruction seeks to unearth the nature of power relations, a postmodern work is allowed the loose style of Flax’s book only if it adapts a future-oriented focus necessary for any feminist work–that of reclaiming power and creating alterantive sources of knowledge/power relations. Postmodernism should not be used as an excuse to avoid commitment to a political vision, nor should its emphasis on absences be used to side-step the validity of our own personal experiences (particularly a feminist project) or our responsibility of coming to terms with crises in our society.

 

Works Cited

 

• Ebert, Teresa L. “The ‘Difference’ of Postmodern Feminism.” College English 53 (December 1991): 886-904.
• Flax, Jane. “Mother-Daughter Relationships: Psychodynamics, Politics, and Philosophy.” The Future of . . .. Hester Eisenstein and Alice Jardine Eds. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1980. 20-40.
• Weedon, Chris. Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987.