Post-structural feminism, also referred to as French feminism, uses the insights of various epistemological movements, including psychoanalysis, linguistics, political theory (Marxist and post-Marxist theory), race theory, literary theory, and other intellectual currents for feminist concerns.[110] Many post-structural feminists maintain that difference is one of the most powerful tools that women possess in their struggle with patriarchal domination, and that to equate the feminist movement only with equality is to deny women a plethora of options because equality is still defined from the masculine or patriarchal perspective.[110][111]
Postmodern feminism is an approach to feminist theory that incorporates postmodern and post-structuralist theory. The largest departure from other branches of feminism is the argument that gender is constructed through language.[107] The most notable proponent of this argument is Judith Butler. In her 1990 book, Gender Trouble, she draws on and critiques the work of Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan. Butler criticizes the distinction drawn by previous feminisms between biological sex and socially constructed gender. She says that this does not allow for a sufficient criticism of essentialism. For Butler "woman" is a debatable category, complicated by class, ethnicity, sexuality, and other facets of identity. She states that gender is performative. This argument leads to the conclusion that there is no single cause for women's subordination and no single approach towards dealing with the issue.[107]
In A Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Haraway criticizes traditional notions of feminism, particularly its emphasis on identity, rather than affinity. She uses the metaphor of a cyborg in order to construct a postmodern feminism that moves beyond dualisms and the limitations of traditional gender, feminism, and politics.[112] Haraway's cyborg is an attempt to break away from Oedipal narratives and Christian origin myths like Genesis. She writes, "The cyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family, this time without the oedipal project. The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust."[112]
A major branch in postmodern feminist thought has emerged from the contemporary psychoanalytic French feminism. Other postmodern feminist works highlight stereotypical gender roles, only to portray them as parodies of the original beliefs. The history of feminism is not important in these writings—only what is going to be done about it. The history is dismissed and used to depict how ridiculous past beliefs were. Modern feminist theory has been extensively criticized as being predominantly, though not exclusively, associated with Western middle class academia. Mary Joe Frug, a postmodernist feminist, criticized mainstream feminism as being too narrowly focused and inattentive to related issues of race and class.[113]
In criminology the Postmodernist School applies postmodernism to the study of crime and criminals, and understands "criminality" as a product of the power to limit the behaviour of those individuals excluded from power, but who try to overcome social inequality and behave in ways which the power structure prohibits. It focuses on the identity of the human subject, multiculturalism, feminism, and human relationships to deal with the concepts of "difference" and "otherness" without essentialism or reductionism, but its contributions are not always appreciated (Carrington: 1998). Postmodernists shift attention from Marxist concerns of economic and social oppression to linguistic production, arguing that criminal law is a language to create dominance relationships. For example, the language of courts (the so-called "legalese") expresses and institutionalises the domination of the individual, whether accused or accuser, criminal or victim, by social institutions. According to postmodernist criminology, the discourse of criminal law is dominant, exclusive and rejecting, less diverse, and culturally not pluralistic, exaggerating narrowly defined rules for the exclusion of others.
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A crime might be defined on the basis that the behaviour represents a danger to society and it is designated as such in the penal code (nullum crimen sine lege the Latin presumption that there can be no crime without a law defining it as such). Human activity extends its range as society develops, and any of these activities (with or without reason) may be considered harmful for people and are therefore “extinguished” by society either through informal moral condemnation or by the state when formal legal restrictions are infringed. There are overlapping explanations of criminality:
This difficulty in defining the basic concept of criminality applies equally to questions concerning its causes; even in physical and biological systems it is difficult, although not impossible, to isolate the cause-effect link from its context of interrelationships. It is more difficult for social systems. Indeed, some argue that Chaos Theory may provide a more appropriate model for what is termed the "social sciences". Thus, for postmodernism, the key “criminogenic” factor is the change in society from hierarchical relationships to ones based on differentiation with the meta-codes for identity as the determinant for social inclusion/exclusion (Gilinskiy: 2001).
Postmodernism is associated with the decline of the left's credibility, specifically in the failure of state socialism to offer an attractive and, later, even a viable alternative to western capitalism. Both Marxism and Socialism derived their philosophical foundation from the Enlightenment. Postmodernism is a critique of the Enlightenment and of scientific positivism which has argued that the world can be understood and both "truth" and "justice" can be discovered by applying the universal linear principle of reason (see Milovanovic who describes the shift from Hegelian to Nietzschean and Lacanian thought). The idea that the application of scientific principles to social life will uncover the laws of society, making human life predictable and social engineering practical and possible, is discounted. Postmodernists argue that this claim for the universality of reason was ethnocentric in that it privileged one Western view of the world while discounting other views (Kiely, 1995: 153-154). and truth claims were part of a relationship of domination, a claim to power. Given the history of colonialism and globalisation in both the physical and the intellectual world, this critique asserts righteous indignation and moral superiority. In postmodernism, "truth" and "falsity" are purely relative; each culture has its own standard for judging truth that is not inherently superior to any other. Postmodernist analysis is a method to uncover how the world is made to appear real, "thereby questioning that it is real in truth or fact, or that there is any way of making such judgements". No truth claim, and certainly not Enlightenment scientism, rests on any more secure foundation than any other. No knowledge claim is privileged.
The main weakness of relativism is that it offers no basis for evaluation. Henry and Milovanovic (1996) posit that all claims are to be considered valid, all social practices merely cultural variations, neither inherently inferior nor superior to any other. This may be potentially progressive because it challenges the absolutist assumptions of the superiority of, for example, Western economics and capitalism. But it does not challenge the status quo. On the contrary, as Kiely (1995: 155) argues, appeals for tolerance and pluralism "at its worse . . . simply ignores, or even becomes an apology for, all kinds of oppressive practices" that violate any sense of human and social rights.
The human subject is said to be one or a number of ideological constructions which are transient, multifaceted works-in-process. The discourse has the power to create a convincing truth claim about the reality of any subject that is historically conditioned, particularly when depicting human action. Subjects are continually recreating themselves while simultaneously continually recreating the social context that shapes their identity and potential for action as well as the identity and potential of others to act. Human agents are all "investors" in constructing their version of reality. Praxis is defined as purposive social activity born of human agents' consciousness of their world, and mediated through the social groups to which they belong". It assumes dualistic forms, such as negation/affirmation. Hierarchies are often reconstituted through negation; they are subject to deconstruction through affirmation.
The human subject is a "role-maker", an agent who can occupy situations and may act contingently in relation to others to affirm or negate their representations. Whereas early conceptions of structure posited an underlying "reality" which could be understood empirically, postmodernism, considers structural contexts to be constituted by the discourse to produce culturally and historically specific representations which are imbued with object-like reality and attain relative stability. In this process, other representations are silenced or denied and the human agency that constituted the contingent and transitory "reality" may be hidden. At any instance, however, certain depiction's gain ascendancy and are strengthened by social action which is undertaken in relation to them. Social actors "invest" in these depictions; they organise action to defend specific representations, giving them the appearance of stability and producing the dynamics of subordination and oppression. Social change creates competing discourses and, for a time, alternative realities. When change begins, initial states are always uncertain and through iteration over time, produce outcomes. Inevitably, as change is occurring, cracks and slippage exist, providing the basis for strategic intervention. Action is then organised to defend or deny the representation. In the end, structures as well as subjects possess "relative autonomy" while being co-dependent.
Crime and the identifiication of harm are categories constituted by the discourse but they are, nevertheless, "real" in their consequences. There may be harms of reduction, which occur when a social agent experiences a loss of some quality, and harms of repression, which occur when a social agent experiences a restriction preventing the achievement of a desired end. Crime is the outcome of an agent's "investment" in constituting a difference which, through the exercise of "disrespecting" power over others, denies their full humanity and, thereby, renders them powerless to constitute their own differences. Far from being confined to "law", in this expanded view, the exercise of power is the genesis of harms of all types and, hence, of crime. Law merely legitimises existing social relations of power. Crime, then, is a contingent "universality": Victims are numerous but are constituted contingently, relative to historically specifiable relations of power. Power itself is produced and maintained through ideology, through discursive practices. While all humans invest in their respective constructions of reality, some become "excessive investors", conflating socially constructed differences with differential evaluations of worth, reinforcing a social hierarchy while suppressing others' co--production, rendering them silent.
Postmodernism is a tendency in contemporary culture characterized by the rejection of objective truth and global cultural narrative. It emphasizes the role of language, power relations, and motivations; in particular it attacks the use of sharp classifications such as male versus female, straight versus gay, white versus black, and imperial versus colonial. Postmodernism has influenced many cultural fields, including literary criticism, sociology, linguistics, architecture, visual arts, and music.
Postmodernist thought is an intentional departure from modernist approaches that had previously been dominant. The term "postmodernism" comes from its critique of the "modernist" scientific mentality of objectivity and progress associated with the Enlightenment.
These movements, modernism and postmodernism, are understood as cultural projects or as a set of perspectives. "Postmodernism" is used in critical theory to refer to a point of departure for works of literature, drama, architecture, cinema, journalism, and design, as well as in marketing and business and in the interpretation of law, culture, and religion in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.[1] Indeed, postmodernism, particularly as an academic movement, can be understood as a reaction to modernism in the Humanities. Whereas modernism was primarily concerned with principles such as identity, unity, authority, and certainty, postmodernism is often associated with difference, plurality, textuality, and skepticism.[citation needed]
Literary critic Fredric Jameson describes postmodernism as the "dominant cultural logic of late capitalism." "Late capitalism" refers to the phase of capitalism after World War II, as described by economist Ernest Mandel; the term refers to the same period sometimes described by "globalization", "multinational capitalism", or "consumer capitalism". Jameson's work studies the postmodern in contexts of aesthetics, politics, philosophy, and economics.[2]
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The term was first used around the 1870s in various areas. For example, John Watkins Chapman avowed "a Postmodern style of painting" to get beyond French Impressionism.[3] Then, J. M. Thompson, in his 1914 article in The Hibbert Journal (a quarterly philosophical review), used it to describe changes in attitudes and beliefs in the critique of religion: "The raison d'etre of Post-Modernism is to escape from the double-mindedness of Modernism by being thorough in its criticism by extending it to religion as well as theology, to Catholic feeling as well as to Catholic tradition."[4]
In 1917 Rudolf Pannwitz used the term to describe a philosophically oriented culture. His idea of post-modernism came from Nietzsche's analysis of modernity and its end results of decadence and nihilism. Overcoming the modern human would be the post-human. Contrary to Nietzsche, Pannwitz also includes nationalist and mythical elements.[5]
The term was used later in 1926 by B. I. Bell in his "Postmodernism & other Essays". In 1921 and 1925 it had been used to describe new forms of art and music. In 1942 H. R. Hays used it for a new literary form, but as a general theory of an historical movement it was first used in 1939 by the historian Arnold J. Toynbee: "Our own Post-Modern Age has been inaugurated by the general war of 1914-1918."[6]
In 1949 the term was used to describe a dissatisfaction with modern architecture, leading to the postmodern architecture movement.[7] Postmodernism in architecture is marked by the re-emergence of surface ornament, reference to surrounding buildings in urban architecture, historical reference in decorative forms, and non-orthogonal angles. It may be a response to the modernist architectural movement known as the International Style.
The term was then applied to a whole host of movements, many in art, music, and literature, that reacted against a range of tendencies in the imperialist phase of capitalism called "modernism," and are typically marked by revival of historical elements and techniques.[8] Walter Truett Anderson identifies Postmodernism as one of four typological world views. These four worldviews are the Postmodern-ironist, which sees truth as socially constructed; the scientific-rational, in which truth is found through methodical, disciplined inquiry; the social-traditional, in which truth is found in the heritage of American and Western civilization; and the neo-romantic, in which truth is found through attaining harmony with nature and/or spiritual exploration of the inner self.[9]
Postmodernist ideas in philosophy and the analysis of culture and society expanded the importance of critical theory and has been the point of departure for works of literature, architecture, and design, as well as being visible in marketing/business and the interpretation of history, law and culture, starting in the late 20th century. These developments — re-evaluation of the entire Western value system (love, marriage, popular culture, shift from industrial to service economy) that took place since the 1950s and 1960s, with a peak in the Social Revolution of 1968 — are described with the term Postmodernity,[10] as opposed to Postmodernism, a term referring to an opinion or movement. Whereas something being "Postmodernist" would make it part of the movement, its being "Postmodern" would place it in the period of time since the 1950s, making it a part of contemporary history.
Influencer Years Influence Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) Rejected the philosophical basis of the concepts of "subjectivity" and "objectivity" and purported that similar grounding oppositions in logic ultimately refer to one another. Instead of resisting the admission of this paradox in the search for understanding, Heidegger requires that we embrace it through an active process of elucidation he called the "Hermeneutic Circle". He stressed the historicity and cultural construction of concepts while simultaneously advocating the necessity of an atemporal and immanent apprehension of them. In this vein, he asserted that it was the task of contemporary philosophy to recover the original question of (or "openness to") Dasein (translated as Being or Being-in-the-World) present in the Presocratic philosophers but normalized, neutered and standardized since Plato. This was to be done, in part, by tracing the record of Dasein's sublimation or forgetfulness through the history of philosophy which meant that we were to ask again what constituted the grounding conditions in ourselves and in the World for the affinity between beings and between the many usages of the term "being" in philosophy. To do this, however, a non-historical and, to a degree, self-referential engagement with whatever set of ideas, feelings or practices would permit (both the non-fixed concept and reality of) such a continuity was required - a continuity permitting the possible experience, possible existence indeed not only of beings but of all differences as they appeared and tended to develop. Such a conclusion led Heidegger to depart from the Phenomenology of his teacher Husserl and prompt instead an (ironically anachronistic) return to the yet-unasked questions of Ontology, a return that in general did not acknowledge an intrinsic distinction between phenomena and noumena or between things in themselves (de re) and things as they appear (see qualia): Being-in-the-world, or rather, the openness to the process of Dasein's/Being's becoming was to bridge the age-old gap between these two. In this latter premise, Heidegger shares an affinity with the late Romantic philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, another principal forerunner of Post-structuralist and Postmodernist thought. Influential to thinkers associated with Postmodernism are Heidegger's critique of the subject-object or sense-knowledge division implicit in Rationalism, Empiricism and Methodological Naturalism, his repudiation of the idea that facts exist outside or separately from the process of thinking and speaking them (however, Heidegger is not specifically a Nominalist), his related admission that the possibilities of philosophical and scientific discourse are wrapped up in the practices and expectations of a society and that concepts and fundamental constructs are the expression of a lived, historical exercise rather than simple derivations of external, apriori conditions independent from historical mind and changing experience (see Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Heinrich von Kleist, Weltanschauung and Social Constructionism), and his Instrumentalist and Negativist notion that Being (and, by extension, reality) is an action, method, tendency, possibility and question rather than a discreet, positive, identifiable state, answer or entity (see also Process Philosophy, Dynamism, Instrumentalism, Pragmatism and Vitalism).
Thomas Samuel Kuhn (1922-1996) Located the rapid change of the basis of scientific knowledge to a provisional consensus among scientists; coined the term "paradigm shift" in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and in general contributed to the debate over the presumed neutrality and objectivity of empirical methodology in the Natural Sciences from disciplinarian or cultural bias.
Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) Re-examined the fundamentals of writing and its consequences on philosophy in general; sought to undermine the language of 'presence' or metaphysics in an analytical technique which, beginning as a point of departure from Heidegger's notion of Destruktion, came to be known as Deconstruction. Derrida utilized, like Heidegger, references to Greek philosophical notions associated with the Skeptics and the Presocratics, such as Epoché and Aporia to articulate his notion of implicit circularity between premises and conclusions, origins and manifestations, but - in a manner analogous in certain respects to Gilles Deleuze - presented a radical re-reading of canonical philosophical figures such as Plato, Aristotle and Descartes as themselves being informed by such "destabilizing" notions.
Michel Foucault (1926-1984) Introduced concepts such as 'discursive regime', or re-invoked those of older philosophers like 'episteme' and 'genealogy' in order to explain the relationship between meaning, power and social behavior within social orders (see The Order of Things, The Archaeology of Knowledge, Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality). In direct contradiction to what have been typified as Modernist perspectives on epistemology, Foucault asserted that rational judgment, social practice and what he called 'biopower' are not only inseparable but co-determinant. While Foucault himself was deeply involved in a number of progressive political causes and maintained close personal ties with members of the far-Left, he was also controversial with Leftist thinkers of his day, including those associated with various strains of Marxism, proponents of Liberalism (e.g. Noam Chomsky) and Humanism (e.g. Jürgen Habermas), for his rejection of what he deemed to be Enlightenment-derived concepts of freedom, liberation, self-determination and human nature. Instead, Foucault focused on the ways in which such constructs can foster cultural hegemony, violence and exclusion. In line with his rejection of such 'positive' tenets of Enlightenment-era Humanism, he was active, with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, in the Anti-Psychiatry Movement, considering much of institutionalized psychiatry and, in particular, Freud's concept of repression central to Psychoanalysis (which was still very influential in France during the 1960s and 70s), to be both harmful and misplaced. Foucault was known for his controversial aphorisms, such as "language is oppression", meaning that language functions in such a way as to render nonsensical, false or silent tendencies that might otherwise threaten or undermine the distributions of power backing a society's conventions - even when such distributions purport to celebrate liberation and expression or value minority groups and perspectives. His writings have had a major influence on the larger body of Postmodern academic literature.
Jean-François Lyotard (1924-1998) Identified in The Postmodern Condition a crisis in the 'discourses of the Human Sciences' latent in Modernism but catapulted to the fore by the advent of the "computerized" or "telematic" era (see Information Revolution). This crisis, insofar as it pertains to academia, concerns both the motivations and justification procedures for making research claims: unstated givens or values that have validated the basic efforts of academic research since the late 18th Century might no longer be valid (particularly, in Social Science & Humanities research, though examples from Mathematics are given by Lyotard as well). As formal conjecture about real-world issues becomes inextricably linked to automated calculation, information storage and retrieval, such knowledge becomes increasingly "exteriorised" from its knowers in the form of information. Knowledge is materialized and made into a commodity exchanged between producers and consumers; it ceases to be either an idealistic end-in-itself or a tool capable of bringing about liberty or social benefit; it is stripped of its humanistic and spiritual associations, its connection with education, teaching and human development, being simply rendered as "data" - omnipresent, material, unending and without any contexts or pre-requisites [11]. Furthermore, the 'diversity' of claims made by various disciplines begins to lack any unifying principle or intuition as objects of study become more and more specialized due to the emphasis on specificity, precision and uniformity of reference that competitive, database-oriented research implies. The value-premises upholding academic research have been maintained by what Lyotard considers to be quasi-mythological beliefs about human purpose, human reason and human progress - large, background constructs he calls "Metanarratives". These Metanarratives still remain in Western society but are now being undermined by rapid Informatization and the commercialization of the University and its functions. The shift of authority from the presence and intuition of knowers - from the good-faith of Reason to seek diverse knowledge integrated for human benefit or truth fidelity - to the automated database and the market had, in Lyotard's view, the power to unravel the very idea of 'justification' or 'legitimation' and, with it, the rationale for research altogether - esp. in disciplines pertaining to human life, society and meaning. We are now controlled not by binding extra-linguistic value paradigms defining notions of collective identity and ultimate purpose, but rather by our automatic responses to different species of "language games" (a concept Lyotard imports from JL Austin's theory of Speech Acts). In his vision of a solution to this "vertigo," Lyotard opposes the assumptions of universality, consensus, and generality that he identified within the thought of Humanistic, Neo-Kantian philosophers like Jürgen Habermas and proposes a continuation of experimentation and diversity to be assessed pragmatically in the context of language games rather than via appeal to a resurrected series of transcendentals and metaphysical unities.
Richard Rorty (1931-2007) Argues, in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature that contemporary Analytic philosophy mistakenly imitates scientific methods. In addition, he denounces the traditional epistemological perspectives of Representationalism and Correspondence theory that rely upon the independence of knowers and observers from phenomena and the passivity of natural phenomena in relation to consciousness. As a proponent of anti-foundationalism and anti-essentialism within a Pragmatist framework, he echoes Postmodern strains of Conventionalism and Philosophical Relativism, but opposes much Postmodern thinking with his commitment to Social Liberalism.
Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) In Simulacra and Simulation, introduced the concept that reality or the principle of the "real" is short-circuited by the interchangeability of signs in an era whose communicative and semantic acts are dominated by electronic media and digital technologies. Baudrillard proposes the notion that, in such a state, where subjects are detached from the outcomes of events (political, literary, artistic, personal or otherwise), events no longer hold any particular sway on the subject nor have any identifiable context; they therefore have the effect of producing widespread indifference, detachment and passivity in industrialized populations. He claimed that a constant stream of appearances and references without any direct consequences to viewers or readers could eventually render the division between appearance and object indiscernible, resulting, ironically, in the "disappearance" of mankind in what is, in effect, a virtual or holographic state, composed only of appearances.
Fredric Jameson (b. 1934) Expostulated one of the first expansive theoretical treatments of Postmodernism as a historical period, intellectual trend and social phenomenon in a series of lectures at the Whitney Museum, later expanded as Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991). Eclectic in his methodology, Jameson has continued a sustained examination of the role that Periodization continues to play as a grounding assumption of critical methodologies in Humanities disciplines. He has contributed extensive effort to explicating the importance of concepts of Utopianism and Utopia as driving forces in the cultural and intellectual movements of Modernity, and outlining the political and existential uncertainties that may result from the decline or suspension of this trend in the theorized state of Postmodernity. Like Susan Sontag, Jameson served to introduce a wide audience of American readers to key figures of the 20th Century Continental European intellectual Left, particularly those associated with the Frankfurt School, Structuralism and Post-Structuralism. Thus, his importance as a 'translator' of their ideas to the common vocabularies of a variety of disciplines in the Anglo-American academic complex is equally as important as his own critical engagement with them.
The term "Postmodernism" is often used to refer to different, sometimes contradictory concepts. Conventional definitions follow:
While the term "Postmodern" and its derivatives are freely used, with some uses apparently contradicting others, those outside the academic milieu have described it as merely a buzzword that means nothing. Dick Hebdige, in his text ‘Hiding in the Light’, writes:
When it becomes possible for a people to describe as ‘postmodern’ the décor of a room, the design of a building, the diegesis of a film, the construction of a record, or a ‘scratch’ video, a television commercial, or an arts documentary, or the ‘intertextual’ relations between them, the layout of a page in a fashion magazine or critical journal, an anti-teleological tendency within epistemology, the attack on the ‘metaphysics of presence’, a general attenuation of feeling, the collective chagrin and morbid projections of a post-War generation of baby boomers confronting disillusioned middle-age, the ‘predicament’ of reflexivity, a group of rhetorical tropes, a proliferation of surfaces, a new phase in commodity fetishism, a fascination for images, codes and styles, a process of cultural, political or existential fragmentation and/or crisis, the ‘de-centring’ of the subject, an ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’, the replacement of unitary power axes by a plurality of power/discourse formations, the ‘implosion of meaning’, the collapse of cultural hierarchies, the dread engendered by the threat of nuclear self-destruction, the decline of the university, the functioning and effects of the new miniaturised technologies, broad societal and economic shifts into a ‘media’, ‘consumer’ or ‘multinational’ phase, a sense (depending on who you read) of ‘placelessness’ or the abandonment of placelessness (‘critical regionalism’) or (even) a generalised substitution of spatial for temporal coordinates - when it becomes possible to describe all these things as ‘Postmodern’ (or more simply using a current abbreviation as ‘post’ or ‘very post’) then it’s clear we are in the presence of a buzzword.[15]
British historian Perry Anderson's history of the term and its understanding, 'The Origins of Postmodernity', explains these apparent contradictions, and demonstrates the importance of "Postmodernism" as a category and a phenomenon in the analysis of contemporary culture.[16]
The movement of Postmodernism began with architecture, as a response to the perceived blandness, hostility, and Utopianism of the Modern movement. Modern Architecture, as established and developed by people such as Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, and Philip Johnson, was focused on the pursuit of a perceived ideal perfection, and attempted harmony of form and function,[17] and dismissal of "frivolous ornament."[18][19] Critics of modernism argued that the attributes of perfection and minimalism themselves were subjective, and pointed out anachronisms in modern thought and questioned the benefits of its philosophy.[20] Definitive postmodern architecture such as the work of Michael Graves rejects the notion of a 'pure' form or 'perfect' architectonic detail, instead conspicuously drawing from all methods, materials, forms and colors available to architects. Postmodernist architecture was one of the first aesthetic movements to openly challenge Modernism as antiquated and "totalitarian", favoring personal preferences and variety over objective, ultimate truths or principles. It is this atmosphere of criticism, skepticism, and emphasis on difference over and against unity that distinguishes many postmodernisms.
Literary postmodernism was officially coronated in the United States with the first issue of boundary 2, subtitled "Journal of Postmodern Literature and Culture", which appeared in 1972. David Antin, Charles Olson, John Cage, and the Black Mountain College school of poetry and the arts were integral figures in the intellectual and artistic exposition of postmodernism at the time.[21] boundary 2 remains an influential journal in postmodernist circles today.[22]
Although Jorge Luis Borges and Samuel Beckett are sometimes seen as important influences, novelists who are commonly counted to postmodern literature include William Burroughs, Giannina Braschi, Kurt Vonnegut, John Barth, Donald Barthelme, E.L. Doctorow, Jerzy Kosinski, Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, Kathy Acker, Ana Lydia Vega, and Paul Auster.
In 1971, the Arab-American scholar Ihab Hassan published The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature, an early work of literary criticism from a postmodern perspective, in which the author traces the development of what he calls "literature of silence" through Marquis de Sade, Franz Kafka, Ernest Hemingway, Beckett, and many others, including developments such as the Theatre of the Absurd and the nouveau roman.
The postmodern impulse in classical music arose in the 1970s with the advent of musical minimalism. Composers such as Terry Riley, Bradley Joseph, John Adams, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and Lou Harrison reacted to the perceived elitism and dissonant sound of atonal academic modernism by producing music with simple textures and relatively consonant harmonies. Some composers have been openly influenced by popular music and world ethnic musical traditions. Though representing a general return to certain notions of music-making that are often considered to be classical or romantic[citation needed], not all postmodern composers have eschewed the experimentalist or academic tenets of modernism. The works of Dutch composer Louis Andriessen, for example, exhibit experimentalist preoccupation that is decidedly anti-romantic. Eclecticism and freedom of expression, in reaction to the rigidity and aesthetic limitations of modernism, are the hallmarks of the postmodern influence in musical composition.
One of the most popular postmodernist tendencies within aesthetics is deconstruction. As it is currently used, "deconstruction" is a Derridean approach to textual analysis (typically literary critique, but variously applied). Deconstructions work entirely within the studied text to expose and undermine the frame of reference, assumptions, and ideological underpinnings of the text. Although deconstructions can be developed using different methods and techniques, the process typically involves demonstrating the multiple possible readings of a text and their resulting internal conflicts, and undermining binary oppositions (e.g. masculine/feminine, old/new). Deconstruction is fundamental to many different fields of postmodernist thought, including postcolonialism, as demonstrated through the writings of Gayatri Spivak.
Structuralism
was a broad philosophical movement that developed particularly in
France in the 1950s, partly in response to French Existentialism, but is considered by many
to be an exponent of High-Modernism,[by whom?]
though its categorization as either a Modernist or Postmodernist trend
is contested. Many Structuralists later moved away from the most strict
interpretations and applications of "structure", and are thus called "Post-structuralists"
in the United States (the term is uncommon in Europe). Though many
Post-structuralists were referred to as Postmodern in their lifetimes,
many explicitly rejected the term. Notwithstanding, Post-structuralism
in much American academic literature in the Humanities is very strongly
associated with the broader and more nebulous movement of
Postmodernism. Thinkers most typically linked with Structuralism
include anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan, Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser and literary theorist Roland Barthes. Philosophers commonly
referred to as Post-structuralists include Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes and Jean Baudrillard (who also began their
careers with a Structuralist background), Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Pierre Bourdieu, Jean-François Lyotard, Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, Luce
Irigaray and, sometimes, the American cultural theorists, critics
and intellectuals they influenced (e.g. Judith
Butler, Jonathan Crary, John
Fiske, Rosalind Krauss).
Though by no means a unified movement with a set of shared axioms or
methodologies, Post-structuralism emphasizes the ways in which
different aspects of a cultural order, from its most banal material
details to its most abstract theoretical exponents, determine one
another (rather than espousing a series of strict, uni-directional,
cause and effect relationships - see Reductionism
- or resorting to Epiphenomenalism).
Like Structuralism, it places particular focus on the determination of
identities, values and economies in relation to one another, rather
than assuming intrinsic properties or essences of signs or
components as starting points[23].
In this limited sense, there is a nascent Relativism
and Constructionism
within the French Structuralists that was consciously addressed by them
but never examined to the point of dismantling their reductionist
tendencies. Unlike Structuralists, however, the Post-structuralists
questioned the division between relation and component and,
correspondingly, did not attempt to reduce the subjects of their study
to an essential set of relations that could be portrayed with
abstract, functional schemes or mathematical symbols (as in Claude
Lévi-Strauss's algebraic formulation of mythological
transformation in
"The Structural Study of Myth"[24]).
Post-Structuralists tended to reject such formulations of “essential
relations” in primitive cultures, languages or descriptions of
psychological phenomena as a subtle forms of Aristotelianism, Rationalism or Idealism
or as more reflective of a mechanistic bias[25]
inspired by bureaucratization and industrialization than of the
inner-workings of primitive cultures, languages or the psyche.
Generally, Post-structuralists emphasized the inter-determination and
contingency of social and historical phenomena with each other and with
the cultural values and biases of perspective. Such realities were not
to be dissected, in the manner of some Structuralists, as a system of
facts that could exist independently from values and paradigms
(either those of the analysts or the subjects themselves), but to be
understood as both causes and effects of the each other.[26]
For this reason, most Post-structuralists held a more open-ended view
of function within systems than did Structuralists and were sometimes
accused of circularity and ambiguity. Post-structuralists countered
that, when closely examined, all formalized claims describing
phenomena, reality or truth, rely on some form or circular reasoning
and self-referential logic that is often paradoxical in nature. Thus,
it was important to uncover the hidden patterns of circularity,
self-reference and paradox within a given set of statements rather that
feign objectivity, as such an investigation might allow new
perspectives to have influence and new practices to be sanctioned or
adopted.
As would be expected, Post-structuralist writing tends to connect
observations and references from many, widely varying disciplines into
a synthetic view of knowledge and its relationship to experience, the
body, society and economy - a synthesis in which it sees itself as
participating. Stucturalists, while also somewhat inter-disciplinary,
were more comfortable within departmental boundaries and often
maintained the autonomy of their analytical methods over the objects
they analyzed. Post-structuralists, unlike Structuralists, did not
privilege a system of (abstract) "relations" over the specifics to
which such relations were applied, but tended to see the notion of “the
relation” or of systemization itself as part-and-parcel of any stated
conclusion rather than a reflection of reality as an independent,
self-contained state or object. If anything, if a part of objective
reality, theorization and systemization to Post-structuralists was an
exponent of larger, more nebulous patterns of control in social orders
– patterns that could not be encapsulated in theory without
simultaneously conditioning it. For this reason, certain
Post-structural thinkers were also criticized by more Realist,
Naturalist or Essentialist thinkers of anti-intellectualism or
anti-Philosophy. In short, Post-structuralists, unlike Structuralists,
tended to place a great deal of skepticism on the independence of
theoretical premises from collective bias and the influence of power,
and rejected the notion of a "pure" or "scientific" methodology in
social analysis, semiotics or philosophical speculation. No theory,
they said, was capable of reducing phenomena to elemental systems or
abstract patterns, nor could abstract systems be dismissed as secondary
derivatives of a fundamental nature –systemization, phenomena and
values were part of each other.
While many of the so-called Post-structuralists vehemently disagreed on
the specifics of such fundamental categories as "the real", "society",
"totality", "desire" and "history", many also shared, in contrast to
their so-called Structuralist predecessors, the traits mentioned.
Furthermore, a good number of them engaged in a re-assessment (positive
or negative) of the philosophical traditions associated with Hegel,
Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. Because of its general skepticism of
analytical objectivity and mutually exclusive oppositions in logic, its
emphasis on the social production of knowledge and of knowledge
paradigms, and its portrayal of the sometimes ambiguous
inter-determination of material culture, values, physical practices and
socio-economic life, Post-structuralism is often linked to
Postmodernism.
Recently the notion of the "death of postmodernism" has been increasingly widely debated: in 2007 Andrew Hoborek noted in his introduction to a special issue of the journal Twentieth Century Literature titled "After Postmodernism" that "declarations of postmodernism's demise have become a critical commonplace". A small group of critics has put forth a range of theories that aim to describe culture and/or society in the alleged aftermath of postmodernism, most notably Raoul Eshelman (performatism), Gilles Lipovetsky (hypermodernity), Nicolas Bourriaud (Altermodern), and Alan Kirby (digimodernism, formerly called pseudo-modernism). None of these new theories and labels has so far gained widespread acceptance.
Formal, academic critiques of postmodernism can be found in works such as Beyond the Hoax and Fashionable Nonsense.
The term postmodernism, when used pejoratively, describes tendencies perceived as relativist, counter-enlightenment or antimodern, particularly in relation to critiques of rationalism, universalism or science. It is also sometimes used to describe tendencies in a society that are held to be antithetical to traditional systems of morality.
Much of the most well-known criticisms of postmodernism have come from various thinkers and artists within the Remodernism cultural movement. Billy Childish in an interview with John LeKay in Heyoka magazine said:
"JL: : Do you think post modernism is on it's last legs or even dead?
BC : Not sure cos its cheep and nasty and has no regard for human sensibilities. Consumerism is post modernism. post modernism will only die when its root is dead. Could be a week or a centaury"[27].
The Stuckism art movement declared in their Stuckists Manifesto:
"Post Modernism, in its adolescent attempt to ape the clever and witty in modern art, has shown itself to be lost in a cul-de-sac of idiocy. What was once a searching and provocative process (as Dadaism) has given way to trite cleverness for commercial exploitation. The Stuckist calls for an art that is alive with all aspects of human experience; dares to communicate its ideas in primeval pigment; and possibly experiences itself as not at all clever!"[28].
Jesse Richards, the founder of the Remodernist film movement dismissed postmodernism as superficial and external in an interview published on the Subvex website:
"Postmodernist cinema in my opinion is a superficial cinema where filmmakers that love filmmakers and films make surface-ey films that reference other films and filmmakers; but fail to make deeper connections, fail to be personal"[29].
and later:
"The difference seems to be that postmodernism and “altermodernism” which looks like the same thing to me, is pretty much an external, surface thing, while early modernism and remodernism are more internal, and come from beneath the surface"[30].
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Look up postmodernism in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. |
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The notions of culture, power and gender/subject formation that dominate Bordo’s writing arise in some degree from poststructuralist thought. Susan Hekman points out that “[l]ike an increasing number of contemporary feminist theorists [Bordo] argues for a selective use of postmodern theories”[6] and one way Bordo’s work can be seen in a poststructuralist/postmodernist light is through her usage of Foucauldian methodology. Bordo appropriates the ideas of Michel Foucault in critiquing, analyzing and bringing to light “the normative feminine practices of our culture”.[13] As Bordo points out, Foucault saw power not “as the possession of individuals or groups” but “as a dynamic or network of non-centralized forces”,[14] and such a depiction of power relations is therefore useful in a critique of gender formation/regulation. If, in a Foucauldian sense, power works from below, then “prevailing forms of selfhood and subjectivity (gender among them) are maintained, not chiefly through physical restraint and coercion (although social relations may certainly contain such elements), but through individual self-surveillance and self-correction to norms”.[13] Foucault’s theories of power and discipline along with theories on sexuality serve contemporary feminist aims in revealing how cultural normative practices, expressed through popular media, work to influence femininity (and gendered bodies in general) into homogeneity while at the same time seeming freely chosen. “Like Foucault, [Bordo] focuses on the discourses through which society produces, understands, defines, and interprets the female body.”[15]
The Flight to Objectivity represents what Bordo refers to as a “fresh approach” to Descartes’ Meditations. She critiques the stable notion of objectivity and knowledge inherent in Cartesian thought, notions that, in our contemporary society, have become critically distanced, for “[t]he limitations of science and the interested, even ideological nature of all human pursuits now seem unavoidable recognitions”.[16] Bordo sees that, rather than viewing Descartes from a “coherent abstract or ahistorical” perspective, we need to approach Descartes' philosophical arguments within “the context of the cultural pressures that gave rise to them”.[17] Susan Hekman notes that Bordo’s The Flight to Objectivity, while not overtly dealing with theorizations of the body, does point to the fact that “the origin of our culture’s text for the body, and particularly the female body, is the work of Descartes”.[18] The Cartesian division of the mind and the body, where the body is the “prison that the mind must escape to achieve knowledge”,[19] guides Bordo’s further analyses of culturally influenced bodies and the shaping of the female body in particular.
Bordo’s Unbearable Weight presents a collection of essays that focus on the body’s situatedness and construction in Western Society and offers “a cultural approach to the body”.[1] Bordo looks at “obsessive body practices of contemporary culture” and claims that her aim “is not to portray these obsessions as bizarre or anomalous, but, rather, as the logical (if extreme) manifestations of anxieties and fantasies fostered by our culture”.[20] Practices such as cosmetic surgery, obsessive dieting and physical training represent, for Bordo, how cultural “representations homogenize” and how “these homogenized images normalize”.[21] Unbearable Weight also traces the connection between culture and female disorders and Bordo emphasizes the fact that disorders such as anorexia nervosa and bulimia cannot simply be defined from medical and psychological standpoints but must be viewed from within a cultural context, as “complex crystallizations of culture”.[1] It is through such female disorders that resistance to dominant ideological constructs are seemingly played out; however, such a resistance reveals the devastating effects of culture on the contemporary female body.
Twilight Zones represents Bordo’s continued preoccupation and study of cultural images and their saturation within contemporary culture. She utilizes Plato’s parable of the cave, where images are projected onto the back of the cave presenting the illusion of a reality its inhabitants identify with and accept as real, claiming that such a metaphor depicts a particular contemporary concern. She writes that “[f]or us, bedazzlement by created images is no metaphor; it is the actual condition of our lives”.[22] Bordo alludes to constructed images of bodily perfection in contemporary consumer culture such as the portrayal of reconstructed physical bodies in magazines and advertisements as presenting false ideals for the viewers who identify with such images and use them as standards for their own bodies and lives. She writes that “we need to rehabilitate the concept of “truth” for our time . . . focusing on helping the next generation learn to critically see through the illusions and mystifications of the image dominated culture they have grown up in”.[23] Twilight Zones also takes up, in various essays, the connection and conversation between academic and non-academic institutions,[24] for while not anti-academic herself, Bordo sees academic and intellectual thought as proclaiming itself “‘outside’ the cave of cultural mystification,” as raised up onto “a loftier perch, scrutinizing the proceedings below”.[25] Bordo wants to “bring theory down to earth”.[26]
With The Male Body Bordo shifts her focus from looking specifically at female and feminized bodies to looking at the male body from a female perspective. She includes analyses of the male body that take into consideration the representation of the male body in popular cultural modes of communication such as movies, advertisements and literature, revealing how anxieties over bodily form and beauty are not limited to women but are of concern for men also. She also analyzes attitudes surrounding the penis and gay culture in the twentieth century.
Bordo lives in Kentucky with her husband, Edward Lee, who is a pianist and a professor of Russian literature at the University of Kentucky. They have one daughter, Cassie, whom they adopted as a newborn in 1999.
What is evident, therefore, is that a feminist IR involves looking at how international politics effects and is affected by both men and women and also at how the core concepts that are employed within the discipline of IR (e.g. war, security etc) are themselves thoroughly gendered. It should also be noted that feminist IR has not only concerned itself with the traditional focus of IR on states, wars, diplomacy and security - feminist IR scholars have also emphasied the importance of looking at how gender shapes the current global political economy. In this sense, there is no clear cut division between feminists working in IR and those working in the area of International Political Economy (IPE).
Feminist IR emerged largely from the
late 1980s onwards. The end of
the Cold War and the re-evaluation of traditional IR theory during the
1990s opened up a space for gendering International Relations. Because
feminist IR is linked broadly to the critical project in IR, by and
large most feminist scholarship has sought to problematise the politics
of knowledge construction within the discipline - often by adopting
methodologies of deconstructivism associated with
postmodernism/poststructuralism. The growing influence of feminist and
women-centric approaches within the international policy communities
(for example at the World Bank and the United Nations) is more reflective of the
liberal feminist emphasis on equality of opportunity for women.
Daphne Patai (born 1943, daughter of Raphael Patai) is a feminist scholar and author. She is a professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her PhD is in Brazilian literature, but her early work also focused on utopian and dystopian fiction. She is a leading critic of the politicization of education, in particular of the decline of free speech on college campuses as programs conform to pressures from feminists and other identity groups.
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After spending ten years with a joint appointment in women's studies and in Portuguese, Patai became highly critical of what she saw as the imposition of a political agenda on educational programs. In Patai's view, this politicization not only debases education, but also threatens the integrity of education generally. Having done, earlier in her career, a good deal of research using personal interview techniques, she drew on these techniques in her book Professing Feminism (1994, written with philosophy of science professor and novelist Noretta Koertge). Their research included personal interviews with feminist professors who had become disillusioned with feminist initiatives in education. Drawing on these interviews and on materials defining and defending women's studies programs, the book analyzed practices within women's studies that the authors felt were incompatible with serious education and scholarship — above all, the explicit subservience of educational to political aims.
A recent enlarged edition of this book provided extensive documentation from current feminist writings of the continuation, and indeed exacerbation, of these practices. Routinely challenged by feminists who declare that "all education is political," Patai has responded with the claim that this view is simplistic. She argues that a significant difference exists between the reality that education may have political implications and the intentional use of education to indoctrinate. The latter, she argues, is no more acceptable when done by feminists than when done by fundamentalists.
Patai's thesis is that a failure to defend the integrity of education, and a habit of dismissing knowledge and research on political grounds, not only seriously hurts our students but also leaves feminists helpless in trying to defend education against other ideological incursions (such as intelligent design). Only positive knowledge, respect for logic, evidence, and scrupulous scholarship not held to political standards, Patai contends, can lead to a better future. Twentieth-century examples of contrary educational practices have a sordid history, one that has hardly promoted women's rights (or any other human rights).
Prominent among Patai's concerns are what she sees as draconian sexual harassment regulations as implemented in the academic world. She argues that contemporary feminism is poisoned by a strong element of "heterophobia": a pronounced hostility to sexual interaction between men and women and an effort to suppress it through micromanagement of everyday relations. This thesis is developed at length in her 1998 book Heterophobia: Sexual Harassment and the Future of Feminism. Patai has also written about the negative impact of Theory on the study of literature. Together with Will H. Corral she edited Theory's Empire: An Anthology of Dissent (Columbia University Press), a collection of essays by fifty scholars taking issue with Theory orthodoxies of the past few decades. Here, Patai critiques postmodernist attacks on notions of logic, reason, and evidence.
Although considered an enemy by some feminists, Patai insists that to criticize feminism and women's studies is not to seek to turn the clock back. From her perspective, she is still addressing her critiques to other feminists, especially to educators, in the hope that they will see the importance of defending education from those who want to force it into a particular political mould.
In addition to her work on women's studies and feminism, she continues to write about utopian studies, oral history, Brazilian literature and culture, translation studies and literary theory. Many of her opinion pieces have appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education. She serves on the Board of Directors of The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE; at [1]), a non-profit organization devoted to protecting First Amendment rights on college campuses. Patai's most recent book is What Price Utopia? Essays on Ideological Policing, Feminism, and Academic Affairs (Rowman and Littlefield, 2008) -- which brings together her writing on the culture wars of the past two decades and also includes a few new pieces.
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The examples and perspective in this article may not represent a worldwide view of the subject. Please improve this article and discuss the issue on the talk page. |
Critical Criminology
"... can be said to be a perspective where crime is defined in terms of the concept of oppression. Some groups in society - the working class (particularly, the poorer sections), women (especially, those who are poor, sole parents and socially isolated) and ethnic minorities (especially, those from non-English-speaking backgrounds and refugees) - are seen to be the most likely to suffer oppressive social relations based upon class division, sexism and racism."[1] More simplisticly, critical criminology can be defined as any criminological topic area that takes into account the contextual factors of crime or simply goes beyond the scope of topics covered in mainstream criminology. In North America, critical criminology challenges the status qua.
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It can also rest upon the fundamental assertion that definitions of what constitute crimes are socially and historically contingent, that is, what constitutes a crime varies in different social situations and different periods of history.
For example, homosexuality was illegal in the United Kingdom up to 1967 when it was legalized for men over 21. We might want to ask, if the act itself remained the same, how could its ‘criminal qualities’ change such that it became legal? What this question points out to us is that acts do not, in themselves, possess ‘criminal qualities’, that is, there is nothing inherent that makes any act a crime other than that it has been designated a crime in the law that has jurisdiction in that time and place. Whilst there are many variations on the critical theme in criminology, the term ‘Critical Criminology’ has become a cynosure for perspectives that take to be fundamental the understanding that certain acts are crimes because certain people have the power to make them so. This leads us to question the reliance on what has been seen as the oppositional paradigm, ‘Administrational Criminology’, which tends to focus on the criminological categories that governments wish to highlight – mugging and other street crime, violence, burglary, and, as many critical criminologists would contend, predominantly the crimes of the poor. The gap between what these two paradigms suggest is of legitimate criminological interest, is shown admirably by Stephen Box in his book Power, crime, and Mystification where he asserts that one is seven times more likely (or was in 1983) to be killed as a result of negligence by one’s employer, than one was to be murdered in the conventional sense (when all demographic weighting had been taken into account). And yet, to this day, no one has ever been prosecuted for corporate manslaughter in the UK. The effect of this, critical criminologists tend to claim, is that conventional criminologies fail to ‘lay bare the structural inequalities which underpin the processes through which laws are created and enforced’ (Taylor Walton and Young 1973) and that ‘deviancy and criminality’ are ‘shaped by society’s larger structure of power and institutions’ (ibid). Further failing to note that power represents the capacity ‘to enforce one’s moral claims’ permitting the powerful to ‘conventionalize their moral defaults’ legitimizing the processes of ‘normalized repression’ (Gouldner 1971). Thus, fundamentally, critical criminologists are critical of state definitions of crime, choosing instead to focus upon notions of social harm or human rights.
According to criminologists working in the conflict tradition, crime is the result of conflict within societies that is brought about through the inevitable processes of capitalism. Dispute exists between those who espouse a ‘pluralist’ view of society and those who do not. Pluralists, following from writers like Mills (1956, 1969 for example) are of the belief that power is exercised in societies by groups of interested individuals – businesses, faith groups, government organizations for example – vying for influence and power to further their own interests. These criminologists like Vold (Vold and Bernard 1979 [1958]) have been called ‘conservative conflict theorists’ (Williams and McShane 1988). They hold that crime may emerge from economic differences, differences of culture, or from struggles concerning status, ideology, morality, religion, race or ethnicity. These writers are of the belief that such groups, by claiming allegiance to mainstream culture, gain control of key resources permitting them to criminalize those who do not conform to their moral codes and cultural values. (Selin 1938; Vold 1979 [1958]; Quinney 1970 inter alia). These theorists, therefore, see crime as having roots in symbolic or instrumental conflict occurring at multiple sites within a fragmented society.
Others are of the belief that such ‘interests’, particularly symbolic dimensions such as status are epiphenomenological by-products of more fundamental economic conflict (Taylor, Walton & Young 1973; Quinney 1974, for example). For these theorists, societal conflict from which crime emerges is founded on the fundamental economic inequalities that are inherent in the processes of capitalism. Drawing on the work of Marx (1990 [1868]); Engels, (1984 [1845]); and Bonger (1969 [1916]) among others, they suggest that the conditions in which crime emerges are caused by the appropriation of the benefits others’ labor through the generation of what is known as surplus value, concentrating in the hands of the few owners of the means of production, disproportionate wealth and power.
There are two main strands of critical criminological theory following from Marx, divided by differing conceptions of the role of the state in maintenance of capitalist inequalities. On the one hand instrumental Marxists hold that the state is manipulated by the ruling classes to act in their interests. On the other, structuralist Marxists believe that the state plays a more dominant, semi-autonomous role in subjugating those in the (relatively) powerless classes (Sheley 1985; Lynch & Groves 1986). Instrumental Marxists such as Quinney (1975), Chambliss (1975), or Krisberg (1975) are of the belief that capitalist societies are monolithic edifices of inequality, utterly dominated by powerful economic interests. Power and wealth are divided inequitably between the owners of the means of production and those who have only their labor to sell. The wealthy use the state’s coercive powers to criminalize those who threaten to undermine that economic order and their position in it. Structural Marxist theory (Spitzer 1975; Greenberg 1993 [1981]; Chambliss & Seidman 1982) on the other hand holds that capitalist societies exhibit a dual power structure in which the state is more autonomous. Through its mediating effect it ameliorates the worst aspects of capitalist inequalities, however, it works to preserve the overall capitalist system of wealth appropriation, criminalizing those who threaten the operation of the system as a whole. As such this means that the state can criminalize not only those powerless who protest the system’s injustices, but also those excessive capitalists whose conduct threatens to expose the veneer of the legitimacy of capitalist endeavor.
Whereas Marxists have conventionally believed in the replacement of capitalism with socialism in a process that will eventually lead to communism, anarchists are of the view that any hierarchical system is inevitably flawed. Such theorists (Pepinsky 1978; Tift & Sulivan 1980; Ferrell 1994 inter alia) espouse an agenda of defiance of existing hierarchies, encouraging the establishment of systems of decentralised, negotiated community justice in which all members of the local community participate. Recent anarchist theorists like Ferrell attempt to locate crime as resistance both to its social construction through symbolic systems of normative censure and to its more structural constructions as threat to the state and to capitalist production.
In a move diametrically opposed to that of anarchist theorists, Left Realists wish to distance themselves from any conception of the criminal as heroic social warrior. Instead they are keen to privilege the experience of the victim and the real effects of criminal behaviour. In texts such as Young 1979 & 1986, Young and Matthews 1991, Lea and Young 1984 or Lowman & MacLean 1992, the victim, the state, the public, and the offender are all considered as a nexus of parameters within which talk about the nature of specific criminal acts may be located. Whilst left realists tend to accept that crime is a socially and historically contingent category that is defined by those with the power to do so, they are at pains to emphasise the real harms that crime does to victims who are frequently no less disadvantaged than the offenders.
All of the above conflict perspectives see individuals as being inequitably constrained by powerful and largely immutable structures, although they to varying degrees accord to humans a degree of agency. Ultimately, however, the relatively powerless are seen as being repressed by societal structures of governance or economics. Even left realists who have been criticised for being ‘conservative’ (not least by Cohen 1990), see the victim and the offender as being subject to systems of injustice and deprivation from which victimising behaviour emerges.
It is important to keep in mind that conflict theory while derived from Marxism, is distinct from it. Marxism is an ideology, accordingly it is not empirically tested. Conversely, conflict theory is empirically falsifiable and thus, distinct from Marxism (Cao, 2003).
Conflict Criminologies have come under sustained attack from several quarters, not least from those – left realists – who claim to be within the ranks. Early criminologies, pejoratively referred to as ‘left idealist’ by Jock Young 1979, were never really popular in the United States, where critical criminology departments at some universities were closed for political reasons (Rock 1997). These early criminologies were called into question by the introduction of mass self report victim surveys (Hough & Mayhew 1983) that showed that victimisation was intra-class rather than inter-class. Thus notions that crimes like robbery were somehow primitive forms of wealth redistribution were shown to be false. Further attacks emanated from feminists who maintained that the victimisation of women was no mean business and that left idealists' concentration on the crimes of the working classes that could be seen as politically motivated ignored crimes such as rape, domestic violence, or child abuse (Smart 1977). Furthermore, it was claimed, left idealists neglected the comparative aspect of the study of crime, in that they ignored the significant quantities of crime in socialist societies, and ignored the low crime level capitalist societies like Switzerland and Japan (Incardi 1980).
Feminism in criminology is more than the mere insertion of women into masculine perspectives of crime and criminal justice, for this would suggest that conventional criminology was positively gendered in favour of the masculine. Feminists contend that previous perspectives are un-gendered and as such ignore the gendered experiences of women. Feminist theorists are engaged in a project to bring a gendered dimension to criminological theory. They are also engaged in a project to bring to criminological theory insights to be gained from an understanding of taking a particular standpoint, that is, the use of knowledge gained through methods designed to reveal the experience of the real lives of women.
The primary claim of feminists is that social science in general and criminology in particular represents a male perspective upon the world in that it focuses largely upon the crimes of men against men. Moreover, arguably the most significant criminological fact of all, namely that women commit significantly less crime than men, is hardly engaged with either descriptively or explanatory in the literature. In other words, it is assumed that explanatory models developed to explain male crime are taken to be generalizable to women in the face of the extraordinary evidence to the contrary. The conclusion that must be drawn is that not only can those theories not be generalized to women, but that that failure might suggest they may not explain adequately male crime either (Edwards 1989, Messerschmidt 1993, Caulfield and Wonders 1994)
A second aspect of feminist critique centers upon the notion that even where women have become criminologists, they have adopted ‘malestream’ modes of research and understanding, that is they have joined and been assimilated into the modes of working of the masculine paradigm, rendering it simultaneously gender blind and biased (Menzies & Chunn 1991). However, as Menzies and Chunn argue, it is not adequate merely to ‘insert’ women into ‘malestream’ criminology, it is necessary to develop a criminology from the standpoint of women. At first glance this may appear to be gender biased against the needs and views of men. However, this claim is based on a position developed by Nancy Hartsock known as standpoint feminism.[2] Based on the work of Marx, Hartsock suggests that the view of the world from womanhood is a ‘truer’ vision than that from the viewpoint of man. According to Marx (Marx 1964, Lucacs 1971) privilege blinds people to the realities of the world meaning that the powerless have a clearer view of the world – the poor see the wealth of the rich and their own poverty, whilst the rich are inured, shielded from, or in denial about the sufferings of the poor. Hartsock (1983 & 1999) argues that women are in precisely the same position as Marx’s poor. From their position of powerlessness they are more capable of revealing the truth about the world than any ‘malestream’ paradigm ever can. Thus there are two key strands in feminist criminological thought; that criminology can be made gender aware and thus gender neutral; or that that criminology must be gender positive and adopt standpoint feminism.
Cutting across these two distinctions, feminists can be placed largely into four main groupings: liberal, radical, Marxist, and socialist (Jaggar 1983). Liberal feminists are concerned with discrimination on the grounds of gender and its prevalence in society and seek to end such discrimination. Such ends are sought through engagement with existing structures such as governments and legal frameworks, rather than by challenging modes of gender construction or hegemonic patriarchy (Hoffman-Bustamente 1973, Adler 1975, Simon 1975, Edwards 1990). Thus liberal feminists are more or less content to work within the system to change it from within using its existing structures.
Critical feminists – radical feminists, Marxists, and socialists – are keen to stress the need to dispense with masculine systems and structures. Radical feminists see the roots of female oppression in patriarchy, perceiving its perpetrators as primarily aggressive in both private and public spheres, violently dominating women by control of their sexuality through pornography, rape (Brownmiller 1975), and other forms of sexual violence, thus imposing upon them masculine definitions of womanhood and women’s roles, particularly in the family. Marxist feminists, (Rafter & Natalizia 1981, MacKinnon 1982 & 1983) however, hold that such patriarchal structures are emergent from the class producing inequalities inherent in capitalist means of production. The production of surplus value requires that the man who works in the capitalist’s factory, pit, or office, requires a secondary, unpaid worker – the woman – to keep him fit for his labours, by providing the benefits of a home – food, keeping house, raising his children, and other comforts of family. Thus, merely in order to be fit to sell his labour, the proletarian man needs to ‘keep’ a support worker with the already meagre proceeds of his labour. Hence women are left with virtually no economic resources and are thus seen to exist within an economic trap that is an inevitable outcome of capitalist production. Socialist feminists attempt to steer a path between the radical and the Marxist views, identifying capitalist patriarchy as the source of women’s oppression (Danner 1991). Such theorists (Eisenstein 1979, Hartmann 1979 & 1981, Messerschmidt 1986, Currie 1989) accept that a patriarchal society constrains women’s roles and their view of themselves but that this patriarchy is the result not of male aggression but of the mode of capitalist production. Thus neither capitalist production nor patriarchy is privileged in the production of women’s oppression, powerlessness, and economic marginalization. Socialist feminists believe that gender based oppression can only be overcome by creating a non-patriarchal, non-capitalist society, and that attempting merely to modify the status quo from within perpetuates the very system that generates inequalities.
Of significant importance in understanding the positions of most of the feminists above is that gender is taken to be a social construct. That is, the differences between men and women are not by and large biological (essentialism) but are insociated from an early age and are defined by existing patriarchal categories of womanhood. In the face of this pacifying or passive image of women, feminist criminologists wish to generate a discursive and real (extended) space within which expressions of women’s own views of their identity and womanhood may emerge.
There are many forms of criticism leveled at feminist criminology, some ‘facile’ (Gelsthorpe 1997) such as those of Bottomley & Pease (1986), or Walker (1987) who suggest that feminist thinking is irrelevant to criminology. A major strand of criticism is leveled at what it is argued is its ethnocentrism (Rice 1990, Mama 1989, Ahluwalia 1991), that is, that in its silence on the experience of black women it is as biased as male criminology in its ignorance of the experience of women. Criminology, claim these writers is sexist and racist and that both errors need to be corrected. A significant number of criticisms are leveled at feminist criminology by Pat Carlen in an important paper from 1992 (Carlen 1992). Among Carlen’s criticisms is that of an apparent inability of feminist criminology to reconcile theoretical insight with political reality, exhibiting a ‘theoreticist, libertarian, separatist and gender-centric tendenc[y]’. She suggests that this libertarianism reflects itself in a belief that crime reduction policies can be achieved without some form of ‘social engineering’. Further criticizing feminism's libertarian streak, Carlen suggests that feminists injunction to allow women to speak for themselves reveals a separatist tendency, arguing that what feminists call for is merely good social science and should be extended to let all classes of humans speak for themselves. This separatism, claims Carlen, further manifests itself in a refusal to accept developments in mainstream criminology branding them ‘malestream’ or in other pejorative terms. Perhaps the most damning criticism of feminism and of certain stripes of radical feminism in particular is that, in some aspects of western societies, it has itself become the dominant interest group with powers to criminalize masculinity (see Nathanson & Young 2001).
In criminology the postmodernist school applies postmodernism to the study of crime and criminals, and understands "criminality" as a product of the power to limit the behaviour of those individuals excluded from power, but who try to overcome social inequality and behave in ways which the power structure prohibits. It focuses on the identity of the human subject, multiculturalism, feminism, and human relationships to deal with the concepts of "difference" and "otherness" without essentialism or reductionism, but its contributions are not always appreciated (Carrington: 1998). Postmodernists shift attention from Marxist concerns of economic and social oppression to linguistic production, arguing that criminal law is a language to create dominance relationships. For example, the language of courts (the so-called "legalese") expresses and institutionalises the domination of the individual, whether accused or accuser, criminal or victim, by social institutions. According to postmodernist criminology, the discourse of criminal law is dominant, exclusive and rejecting, less diverse, and culturally not pluralistic, exaggerating narrowly defined rules for the exclusion of others.
| Part of a series on |
| Feminism |
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 |
 Feminism portal |
Several movements of feminist ideology have developed over the years. They often overlap, and some feminists identify themselves with several branches of feminist thought.
Contents[hide] |
Liberal feminism asserts the equality of men and women through political and legal reform. It is an individualistic form of feminism, which focuses on women's ability to show and maintain their equality through their own actions and choices. Liberal feminism uses the personal interactions between men and women as the place from which to transform society. According to liberal feminists, all women are capable of asserting their ability to achieve equality, therefore it is possible for change to happen without altering the structure of society. Issues important to liberal feminists include reproductive and abortion rights, sexual harassment, voting, education, "equal pay for equal work", affordable childcare, affordable health care, and bringing to light the frequency of sexual and domestic violence against women.[1]
Anarcha-feminism (also called anarchist feminism and anarcho-feminism) combines anarchism with feminism. It generally views patriarchy as a manifestation of involuntary hierarchy. Anarcha-feminists believe that the struggle against patriarchy is an essential part of class struggle and of the anarchist struggle against the State.[2] In essence, the philosophy sees anarchist struggle as a necessary component of feminist struggle and vice-versa. As L. Susan Brown puts it, "as anarchism is a political philosophy that opposes all relationships of power, it is inherently feminist".[3][4]
Important historic anarcha-feminists include Emma Goldman, Federica Montseny, Voltairine de Cleyre, Maria Lacerda de Moura, and Lucy Parsons. In the Spanish Civil War, an anarcha-feminist group, Mujeres Libres ("Free Women"), linked to the Federación Anarquista Ibérica, organized to defend both anarchist and feminist ideas.
Contemporary anarcha-feminist writers/theorists include Germaine Greer, L. Susan Brown, and the eco-feminist Starhawk. Contemporary anarcha-feminist groups include Bolivia's Mujeres Creando, Radical Cheerleaders, the Spanish anarcha-feminist squat La Eskalera Karakola, and the annual La Rivolta! conference in Boston.
Socialist feminism connects the oppression of women to Marxist ideas about exploitation, oppression and labor. Socialist feminists think unequal standing in both the workplace and the domestic sphere holds women down.[5] Socialist feminists see prostitution, domestic work, childcare, and marriage as ways in which women are exploited by a patriarchal system that devalues women and the substantial work they do. Socialist feminists focus their energies on far-reaching change that affects society as a whole, rather than on an individual basis. They see the need to work alongside not just men but all other groups, as they see the oppression of women as a part of a larger pattern that affects everyone involved in the capitalist system.[6]
Marx felt that when class oppression was overcome gender oppression would vanish as well;[7] this is Marxist feminism. Some socialist feminists, many of Radical Women and the Freedom Socialist Party, point to the classic Marxist writings of Frederick Engels[8] and August Bebel[9] as a powerful explanation of the link between gender oppression and class exploitation. To some other socialist feminists, this view of gender oppression is naive and much of the work of socialist feminists has gone towards separating gender phenomena from class phenomena. Some contributors to socialist feminism have criticized these traditional Marxist ideas for being largely silent on gender oppression except to subsume it underneath broader class oppression.[10]
In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, both Clara Zetkin and Eleanor Marx were against the demonization of men and supported a proletarian revolution that would overcome as many male–female inequalities as possible.[11] As their movement already had the most radical demands of women's equality, most Marxist leaders, including Clara Zetkin[12][13] and Alexandra Kollontai[14][15] counterposed Marxism against feminism, rather than trying to combine them.
Radical feminism considers the male-controlled capitalist hierarchy, which it describes as sexist, as the defining feature of women's oppression. Radical feminists believe that women can free themselves only when they have done away with what they consider an inherently oppressive and dominating patriarchal system. Radical feminists feel that there is a male-based authority and power structure and that it is responsible for oppression and inequality, and that, as long as the system and its values are in place, society will not be able to be reformed in any significant way. Some radical feminists see no alternatives other than the total uprooting and reconstruction of society in order to achieve their goals.[16]
Over time a number of sub-types of radical feminism have emerged, such as cultural feminism, separatist feminism, and anti-pornography feminism, the last opposed by sex-positive feminism.
Cultural feminism is the ideology of a "female nature" or "female essence" that attempts to revalidate what they consider undervalued female attributes.[17] It emphasizes the difference between women and men but considers that difference to be psychological, and to be culturally constructed rather than biologically innate.[18] Its critics assert that, because it is based on an essentialist view of the differences between women and men and advocates independence and institution building, it has led feminists to retreat from politics to "life-style".[19] One such critic, Alice Echols (a feminist historian and cultural theorist), credits Redstockings member Brooke Williams with introducing the term cultural feminism in 1975 to describe the depoliticisation of radical feminism.[19]
Separatist feminism is a form of radical feminism that does not support heterosexual relationships. Lesbian feminism is thus closely related. Separatist feminism's proponents argue that the sexual disparities between men and women are unresolvable. Separatist feminists generally do not feel that men can make positive contributions to the feminist movement and that even well-intentioned men replicate patriarchal dynamics.[20] Author Marilyn Frye describes separatist feminism as "separation of various sorts or modes from men and from institutions, relationships, roles and activities that are male-defined, male-dominated, and operating for the benefit of males and the maintenance of male privilege—this separation being initiated or maintained, at will, by women".[21]
Black feminism argues that sexism, class oppression, and racism are inextricably bound together.[22] Forms of feminism that strive to overcome sexism and class oppression but ignore race can discriminate against many people, including women, through racial bias. The Combahee River Collective argued in 1974 that the liberation of black women entails freedom for all people, since it would require the end of racism, sexism, and class oppression.[23] One of the theories that evolved out of this movement was Alice Walker's womanism. It emerged after the early feminist movements that were led specifically by white women, were largely white middle-class movements, and had generally ignored oppression based on racism and classism. Alice Walker and other womanists pointed out that black women experienced a different and more intense kind of oppression from that of white women.[24]
Angela Davis was one of the first people who articulated an argument centered around the intersection of race, gender, and class in her book, Women, Race, and Class.[25] Kimberle Crenshaw, a prominent feminist law theorist, gave the idea the name Intersectionality while discussing identity politics in her essay, Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics and Violence Against Women of Color.
Chicana feminism focuses on Mexican American, Chicana, and Hispanic women in the United States.
Multiracial feminism (also known as "women of color" feminism) offers a standpoint theory and analysis of the lives and experiences of women of color.[26] The theory emerged in the 1990s and was developed by Dr. Maxine Baca Zinn, a Chicana feminist, and Dr. Bonnie Thornton Dill, a sociology expert on African American women and family.[26][27]
Postcolonial feminists argue that colonial oppression, particularly racial, class, and ethnic, has marginalized women in postcolonial societies. They challenge the assumption that gender oppression is the primary force of patriarchy. Postcolonial feminists object to portrayals of women of non-Western societies as passive and voiceless victims,[28] as under one application of Orientalism, and the portrayal of Western women as modern, educated, and empowered.[28] Among these critics are Chandra Talpade Mohanty,[29] whose criticism of Western feminism includes homophobia, and Sarojini Sahoo. Transnational feminism is closely related.
Postcolonial feminism emerged from the gendered history of colonialism: colonial powers often imposed Western norms on colonized regions. In the 1940s and 1950s, after the formation of the United Nations, former colonies were monitored by the West for what was considered "social progress". The status of women in the developing world has been monitored by organizations such as the United Nations and as a result traditional practices and roles taken up by women—sometimes seen as distasteful by Western standards—could be considered a form of rebellion against colonial oppression.[30] Postcolonial feminists today struggle to fight gender oppression within their own cultural models of society rather than through those imposed by the Western colonizers.[31]
Postcolonial feminism is critical of Western forms of feminism, notably radical feminism and liberal feminism and their universalization of women's experiences. Postcolonial feminists argue that cultures impacted by colonialism are often vastly different and should be treated as such. Colonial oppression may result in the glorification of pre-colonial culture, which, in cultures with traditions of power stratification along gender lines, could mean the acceptance of, or refusal to deal with, inherent issues of gender inequality.[32] Postcolonial feminists can be described as feminists who have reacted against both universalizing tendencies in Western feminist thought and a lack of attention to gender issues in mainstream postcolonial thought.[33]
Third-world feminism has been described as a group of feminist theories developed by feminists who acquired their views and took part in feminist politics in so-called third-world countries.[34] Although women from the third world have been engaged in the feminist movement, Chandra Talpade Mohanty and Sarojini Sahoo criticize Western feminism on the grounds that it is ethnocentric and does not take into account the unique experiences of women from third-world countries or the existence of feminisms indigenous to third-world countries. According to Chandra Talpade Mohanty, women in the third world feel that Western feminism bases its understanding of women on "internal racism, classism and homophobia".[29] This discourse is strongly related to African feminism and postcolonial feminism. Its development is also associated with black feminism, womanism,[24][35][36] "Africana womanism",[37] "motherism",[38] "Stiwanism",[39] "negofeminism",[40] chicana feminism, and "femalism".
Since the 1980s, standpoint feminists have argued that feminism should examine how women's experience of inequality relates to that of racism, homophobia, classism and colonization.[41][42] In the late 1980s and the 1990s, postmodern feminists argued that gender roles are socially constructed,[43][44][45] and that it is impossible to generalize women's experiences across cultures and histories.[46]
According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Classical liberal or libertarian feminism conceives of freedom as freedom from coercive interference. It holds that women, as well as men, have a right to such freedom due to their status as self-owners."[47]
There are several categories under the theory of libertarian feminism, or kinds of feminism that are linked to libertarian ideologies. Anarcha-feminism combines feminist and anarchist beliefs, embodying classical libertarianism rather than contemporary conservative libertarianism. Recently, Wendy McElroy has defined a position, which she labels "ifeminism" or "individualist feminism", that combines feminism with anarcho-capitalism or contemporary conservative libertarianism, and she argued that a pro-capitalist and anti-state position is compatible with an emphasis on equal rights and empowerment for women.[48] Individualist anarchist-feminism has grown from the United States-based individualist anarchism movement.[49]
Individualist feminism is typically defined as a feminism in opposition to what writers such as Wendy McElroy and Christina Hoff Sommers term political or gender feminism.[50][51][52] However, there are some differences within the discussion of individualist feminism. While some individualist feminists like McElroy oppose government interference into the choices women make with their bodies because such interference creates a coercive hierarchy (such as patriarchy),[53][54] other feminists such as Christina Hoff Sommers hold that feminism's political role is simply to ensure that everyone's, including women's, right against coercive interference is respected.[47] Sommers is described as a "socially conservative equity feminist" by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.[47] Critics have called her an anti-feminist[55][56]
Post-structural feminism, also referred to as French feminism, uses the insights of various epistemological movements, including psychoanalysis, linguistics, political theory (Marxist and post-Marxist theory), race theory, literary theory, and other intellectual currents for feminist concerns.[57] Many post-structural feminists maintain that difference is one of the most powerful tools that women possess in their struggle with patriarchal domination, and that to equate the feminist movement only with equality is to deny women a plethora of options because equality is still defined from the masculine or patriarchal perspective.[57][58]
Postmodern feminism is an approach to feminist theory that incorporates postmodern and post-structuralist theory. Judith Butler argues that sex, not just gender, is constructed through language.[44] In her 1990 book, Gender Trouble, she draws on and critiques the work of Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan. Butler criticizes the distinction drawn by previous feminisms between biological sex and socially constructed gender. She says that the sex/gender distinction does not allow for a sufficient criticism of essentialism. For Butler, "woman" is a debatable category, complicated by class, ethnicity, sexuality, and other facets of identity. She states that gender is performative. This argument leads to the conclusion that there is no single cause for women's subordination and no single approach towards dealing with the issue.[44]
In A Cyborg Manifesto Donna Haraway criticizes traditional notions of feminism, particularly its emphasis on identity, rather than affinity. She uses the metaphor of a cyborg in order to construct a postmodern feminism that moves beyond dualisms and the limitations of traditional gender, feminism, and politics.[59] Haraway's cyborg is an attempt to break away from Oedipal narratives and Christian origin myths like Genesis. She writes, "The cyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family, this time without the oedipal project. The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust."[59]
A major branch in postmodern feminist thought has emerged from contemporary psychoanalytic French feminism. Other postmodern feminist works highlight stereotypical gender roles, only to portray them as parodies of the original beliefs. The history of feminism is not important in these writings—only what is going to be done about it. The history is dismissed and used to depict how ridiculous past beliefs were. Modern feminist theory has been extensively criticized as being predominantly, though not exclusively, associated with Western middle class academia. Mary Joe Frug, a postmodernist feminist, criticized mainstream feminism as being too narrowly focused and inattentive to related issues of race and class.[60]
French feminism is a branch of feminist thought from a group of feminists in France from the 1970s to the 1990s. It is distinguished from Anglophone feminism by an approach which is more philosophical and literary. Its writings tend to be effusive and metaphorical, being less concerned with political doctrine and generally focused on theories of "the body."[61] The term includes writers who are not French, but who have worked substantially in France and the French tradition,[62] such as Julia Kristeva and Bracha Ettinger.
In the 1970s, French feminists approached feminism with the concept of écriture féminine, which translates as 'female', or 'feminine writing'.[63] Hélène Cixous argues that writing and philosophy are phallocentric and along with other French feminists such as Luce Irigaray emphasizes "writing from the body" as a subversive exercise.[63] The work of the feminist psychoanalyst and philosopher, Julia Kristeva, has influenced feminist theory in general and feminist literary criticism in particular. From the 1980s onwards, the work of artist and psychoanalyst Bracha Ettinger has influenced literary criticism, art history, and film theory.[64][65] However, as the scholar Elizabeth Wright pointed out, "none of these French feminists align themselves with the feminist movement as it appeared in the Anglophone world."[63][66]
Ecofeminism links ecology with feminism. Ecofeminists see the domination of women as stemming from the same ideologies that bring about the domination of the environment. Western patriarchal systems, where men own and control the land, are seen as responsible for the oppression of women and destruction of the natural environment. Ecofeminists argue that the men in power control the land, and therefore they are able to exploit it for their own profit and success. Ecofeminists argue that, in this situation, women are exploited by men in power for their own profit, success, and pleasure, and
Ecofeminists argue that women and the environment are both exploited as passive pawns in the race to domination. that those people in power are able to take advantage of women and the environment distinctly because they are seen as passive and rather helpless. Ecofeminism connects the exploitation and domination of women with that of the environment. As a way of repairing social and ecological injustices, ecofeminists feel that women must work towards creating a healthy environment and ending the destruction of the lands that most women rely on to provide for their families.[67]
Ecofeminism argues that there is a connection between women and nature that comes from their shared history of oppression by a patriarchal Western society. Vandana Shiva claims that women have a special connection to the environment through their daily interactions with it that has been ignored. She says that "women in subsistence economies, producing and reproducing wealth in partnership with nature, have been experts in their own right of holistic and ecological knowledge of nature's processes. But these alternative modes of knowing, which are oriented to the social benefits and sustenance needs are not recognized by the capitalist reductionist paradigm, because it fails to perceive the interconnectedness of nature, or the connection of women's lives, work and knowledge with the creation of wealth."[68]
However, feminist and social ecologist Janet
Biehl
has criticized ecofeminism for focusing too much on a mystical
connection between women and nature and not enough on the actual
conditions of women.[69]
| Part of a series on |
| Feminism |
|---|
|
|
| Feminism portal |
Several movements of feminist ideology have developed over the years. They often overlap, and some feminists identify themselves with several branches of feminist thought.
Contents[hide] |
Liberal feminism asserts the equality of men and women through political and legal reform. It is an individualistic form of feminism, which focuses on women's ability to show and maintain their equality through their own actions and choices. Liberal feminism uses the personal interactions between men and women as the place from which to transform society. According to liberal feminists, all women are capable of asserting their ability to achieve equality, therefore it is possible for change to happen without altering the structure of society. Issues important to liberal feminists include reproductive and abortion rights, sexual harassment, voting, education, "equal pay for equal work", affordable childcare, affordable health care, and bringing to light the frequency of sexual and domestic violence against women.[1]
Anarcha-feminism (also called anarchist feminism and anarcho-feminism) combines anarchism with feminism. It generally views patriarchy as a manifestation of involuntary hierarchy. Anarcha-feminists believe that the struggle against patriarchy is an essential part of class struggle and of the anarchist struggle against the State.[2] In essence, the philosophy sees anarchist struggle as a necessary component of feminist struggle and vice-versa. As L. Susan Brown puts it, "as anarchism is a political philosophy that opposes all relationships of power, it is inherently feminist".[3][4]
Important historic anarcha-feminists include Emma Goldman, Federica Montseny, Voltairine de Cleyre, Maria Lacerda de Moura, and Lucy Parsons. In the Spanish Civil War, an anarcha-feminist group, Mujeres Libres ("Free Women"), linked to the Federación Anarquista Ibérica, organized to defend both anarchist and feminist ideas.
Contemporary anarcha-feminist writers/theorists include Germaine Greer, L. Susan Brown, and the eco-feminist Starhawk. Contemporary anarcha-feminist groups include Bolivia's Mujeres Creando, Radical Cheerleaders, the Spanish anarcha-feminist squat La Eskalera Karakola, and the annual La Rivolta! conference in Boston.
Socialist feminism connects the oppression of women to Marxist ideas about exploitation, oppression and labor. Socialist feminists think unequal standing in both the workplace and the domestic sphere holds women down.[5] Socialist feminists see prostitution, domestic work, childcare, and marriage as ways in which women are exploited by a patriarchal system that devalues women and the substantial work they do. Socialist feminists focus their energies on far-reaching change that affects society as a whole, rather than on an individual basis. They see the need to work alongside not just men but all other groups, as they see the oppression of women as a part of a larger pattern that affects everyone involved in the capitalist system.[6]
Marx felt that when class oppression was overcome gender oppression would vanish as well;[7] this is Marxist feminism. Some socialist feminists, many of Radical Women and the Freedom Socialist Party, point to the classic Marxist writings of Frederick Engels[8] and August Bebel[9] as a powerful explanation of the link between gender oppression and class exploitation. To some other socialist feminists, this view of gender oppression is naive and much of the work of socialist feminists has gone towards separating gender phenomena from class phenomena. Some contributors to socialist feminism have criticized these traditional Marxist ideas for being largely silent on gender oppression except to subsume it underneath broader class oppression.[10]
In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, both Clara Zetkin and Eleanor Marx were against the demonization of men and supported a proletarian revolution that would overcome as many male–female inequalities as possible.[11] As their movement already had the most radical demands of women's equality, most Marxist leaders, including Clara Zetkin[12][13] and Alexandra Kollontai[14][15] counterposed Marxism against feminism, rather than trying to combine them.
Radical feminism considers the male-controlled capitalist hierarchy, which it describes as sexist, as the defining feature of women's oppression. Radical feminists believe that women can free themselves only when they have done away with what they consider an inherently oppressive and dominating patriarchal system. Radical feminists feel that there is a male-based authority and power structure and that it is responsible for oppression and inequality, and that, as long as the system and its values are in place, society will not be able to be reformed in any significant way. Some radical feminists see no alternatives other than the total uprooting and reconstruction of society in order to achieve their goals.[16]
Over time a number of sub-types of radical feminism have emerged, such as cultural feminism, separatist feminism, and anti-pornography feminism, the last opposed by sex-positive feminism.
Cultural feminism is the ideology of a "female nature" or "female essence" that attempts to revalidate what they consider undervalued female attributes.[17] It emphasizes the difference between women and men but considers that difference to be psychological, and to be culturally constructed rather than biologically innate.[18] Its critics assert that, because it is based on an essentialist view of the differences between women and men and advocates independence and institution building, it has led feminists to retreat from politics to "life-style".[19] One such critic, Alice Echols (a feminist historian and cultural theorist), credits Redstockings member Brooke Williams with introducing the term cultural feminism in 1975 to describe the depoliticisation of radical feminism.[19]
Separatist feminism is a form of radical feminism that does not support heterosexual relationships. Lesbian feminism is thus closely related. Separatist feminism's proponents argue that the sexual disparities between men and women are unresolvable. Separatist feminists generally do not feel that men can make positive contributions to the feminist movement and that even well-intentioned men replicate patriarchal dynamics.[20] Author Marilyn Frye describes separatist feminism as "separation of various sorts or modes from men and from institutions, relationships, roles and activities that are male-defined, male-dominated, and operating for the benefit of males and the maintenance of male privilege—this separation being initiated or maintained, at will, by women".[21]
Black feminism argues that sexism, class oppression, and racism are inextricably bound together.[22] Forms of feminism that strive to overcome sexism and class oppression but ignore race can discriminate against many people, including women, through racial bias. The Combahee River Collective argued in 1974 that the liberation of black women entails freedom for all people, since it would require the end of racism, sexism, and class oppression.[23] One of the theories that evolved out of this movement was Alice Walker's womanism. It emerged after the early feminist movements that were led specifically by white women, were largely white middle-class movements, and had generally ignored oppression based on racism and classism. Alice Walker and other womanists pointed out that black women experienced a different and more intense kind of oppression from that of white women.[24]
Angela Davis was one of the first people who articulated an argument centered around the intersection of race, gender, and class in her book, Women, Race, and Class.[25] Kimberle Crenshaw, a prominent feminist law theorist, gave the idea the name Intersectionality while discussing identity politics in her essay, Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics and Violence Against Women of Color.
Chicana feminism focuses on Mexican American, Chicana, and Hispanic women in the United States.
Multiracial feminism (also known as "women of color" feminism) offers a standpoint theory and analysis of the lives and experiences of women of color.[26] The theory emerged in the 1990s and was developed by Dr. Maxine Baca Zinn, a Chicana feminist, and Dr. Bonnie Thornton Dill, a sociology expert on African American women and family.[26][27]
Postcolonial feminists argue that colonial oppression, particularly racial, class, and ethnic, has marginalized women in postcolonial societies. They challenge the assumption that gender oppression is the primary force of patriarchy. Postcolonial feminists object to portrayals of women of non-Western societies as passive and voiceless victims,[28] as under one application of Orientalism, and the portrayal of Western women as modern, educated, and empowered.[28] Among these critics are Chandra Talpade Mohanty,[29] whose criticism of Western feminism includes homophobia, and Sarojini Sahoo. Transnational feminism is closely related.
Postcolonial feminism emerged from the gendered history of colonialism: colonial powers often imposed Western norms on colonized regions. In the 1940s and 1950s, after the formation of the United Nations, former colonies were monitored by the West for what was considered "social progress". The status of women in the developing world has been monitored by organizations such as the United Nations and as a result traditional practices and roles taken up by women—sometimes seen as distasteful by Western standards—could be considered a form of rebellion against colonial oppression.[30] Postcolonial feminists today struggle to fight gender oppression within their own cultural models of society rather than through those imposed by the Western colonizers.[31]
Postcolonial feminism is critical of Western forms of feminism, notably radical feminism and liberal feminism and their universalization of women's experiences. Postcolonial feminists argue that cultures impacted by colonialism are often vastly different and should be treated as such. Colonial oppression may result in the glorification of pre-colonial culture, which, in cultures with traditions of power stratification along gender lines, could mean the acceptance of, or refusal to deal with, inherent issues of gender inequality.[32] Postcolonial feminists can be described as feminists who have reacted against both universalizing tendencies in Western feminist thought and a lack of attention to gender issues in mainstream postcolonial thought.[33]
Third-world feminism has been described as a group of feminist theories developed by feminists who acquired their views and took part in feminist politics in so-called third-world countries.[34] Although women from the third world have been engaged in the feminist movement, Chandra Talpade Mohanty and Sarojini Sahoo criticize Western feminism on the grounds that it is ethnocentric and does not take into account the unique experiences of women from third-world countries or the existence of feminisms indigenous to third-world countries. According to Chandra Talpade Mohanty, women in the third world feel that Western feminism bases its understanding of women on "internal racism, classism and homophobia".[29] This discourse is strongly related to African feminism and postcolonial feminism. Its development is also associated with black feminism, womanism,[24][35][36] "Africana womanism",[37] "motherism",[38] "Stiwanism",[39] "negofeminism",[40] chicana feminism, and "femalism".
Since the 1980s, standpoint feminists have argued that feminism should examine how women's experience of inequality relates to that of racism, homophobia, classism and colonization.[41][42] In the late 1980s and the 1990s, postmodern feminists argued that gender roles are socially constructed,[43][44][45] and that it is impossible to generalize women's experiences across cultures and histories.[46]
According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Classical liberal or libertarian feminism conceives of freedom as freedom from coercive interference. It holds that women, as well as men, have a right to such freedom due to their status as self-owners."[47]
There are several categories under the theory of libertarian feminism, or kinds of feminism that are linked to libertarian ideologies. Anarcha-feminism combines feminist and anarchist beliefs, embodying classical libertarianism rather than contemporary conservative libertarianism. Recently, Wendy McElroy has defined a position, which she labels "ifeminism" or "individualist feminism", that combines feminism with anarcho-capitalism or contemporary conservative libertarianism, and she argued that a pro-capitalist and anti-state position is compatible with an emphasis on equal rights and empowerment for women.[48] Individualist anarchist-feminism has grown from the United States-based individualist anarchism movement.[49]
Individualist feminism is typically defined as a feminism in opposition to what writers such as Wendy McElroy and Christina Hoff Sommers term political or gender feminism.[50][51][52] However, there are some differences within the discussion of individualist feminism. While some individualist feminists like McElroy oppose government interference into the choices women make with their bodies because such interference creates a coercive hierarchy (such as patriarchy),[53][54] other feminists such as Christina Hoff Sommers hold that feminism's political role is simply to ensure that everyone's, including women's, right against coercive interference is respected.[47] Sommers is described as a "socially conservative equity feminist" by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.[47] Critics have called her an anti-feminist[55][56]
Post-structural feminism, also referred to as French feminism, uses the insights of various epistemological movements, including psychoanalysis, linguistics, political theory (Marxist and post-Marxist theory), race theory, literary theory, and other intellectual currents for feminist concerns.[57] Many post-structural feminists maintain that difference is one of the most powerful tools that women possess in their struggle with patriarchal domination, and that to equate the feminist movement only with equality is to deny women a plethora of options because equality is still defined from the masculine or patriarchal perspective.[57][58]
Postmodern feminism is an approach to feminist theory that incorporates postmodern and post-structuralist theory. Judith Butler argues that sex, not just gender, is constructed through language.[44] In her 1990 book, Gender Trouble, she draws on and critiques the work of Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan. Butler criticizes the distinction drawn by previous feminisms between biological sex and socially constructed gender. She says that the sex/gender distinction does not allow for a sufficient criticism of essentialism. For Butler, "woman" is a debatable category, complicated by class, ethnicity, sexuality, and other facets of identity. She states that gender is performative. This argument leads to the conclusion that there is no single cause for women's subordination and no single approach towards dealing with the issue.[44]
In A Cyborg Manifesto Donna Haraway criticizes traditional notions of feminism, particularly its emphasis on identity, rather than affinity. She uses the metaphor of a cyborg in order to construct a postmodern feminism that moves beyond dualisms and the limitations of traditional gender, feminism, and politics.[59] Haraway's cyborg is an attempt to break away from Oedipal narratives and Christian origin myths like Genesis. She writes, "The cyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family, this time without the oedipal project. The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust."[59]
A major branch in postmodern feminist thought has emerged from contemporary psychoanalytic French feminism. Other postmodern feminist works highlight stereotypical gender roles, only to portray them as parodies of the original beliefs. The history of feminism is not important in these writings—only what is going to be done about it. The history is dismissed and used to depict how ridiculous past beliefs were. Modern feminist theory has been extensively criticized as being predominantly, though not exclusively, associated with Western middle class academia. Mary Joe Frug, a postmodernist feminist, criticized mainstream feminism as being too narrowly focused and inattentive to related issues of race and class.[60]
French feminism is a branch of feminist thought from a group of feminists in France from the 1970s to the 1990s. It is distinguished from Anglophone feminism by an approach which is more philosophical and literary. Its writings tend to be effusive and metaphorical, being less concerned with political doctrine and generally focused on theories of "the body."[61] The term includes writers who are not French, but who have worked substantially in France and the French tradition,[62] such as Julia Kristeva and Bracha Ettinger.
In the 1970s, French feminists approached feminism with the concept of écriture féminine, which translates as 'female', or 'feminine writing'.[63] Hélène Cixous argues that writing and philosophy are phallocentric and along with other French feminists such as Luce Irigaray emphasizes "writing from the body" as a subversive exercise.[63] The work of the feminist psychoanalyst and philosopher, Julia Kristeva, has influenced feminist theory in general and feminist literary criticism in particular. From the 1980s onwards, the work of artist and psychoanalyst Bracha Ettinger has influenced literary criticism, art history, and film theory.[64][65] However, as the scholar Elizabeth Wright pointed out, "none of these French feminists align themselves with the feminist movement as it appeared in the Anglophone world."[63][66]
Ecofeminism links ecology with feminism. Ecofeminists see the domination of women as stemming from the same ideologies that bring about the domination of the environment. Western patriarchal systems, where men own and control the land, are seen as responsible for the oppression of women and destruction of the natural environment. Ecofeminists argue that the men in power control the land, and therefore they are able to exploit it for their own profit and success. Ecofeminists argue that, in this situation, women are exploited by men in power for their own profit, success, and pleasure, and
Ecofeminists argue that women and the environment are both exploited as passive pawns in the race to domination. that those people in power are able to take advantage of women and the environment distinctly because they are seen as passive and rather helpless. Ecofeminism connects the exploitation and domination of women with that of the environment. As a way of repairing social and ecological injustices, ecofeminists feel that women must work towards creating a healthy environment and ending the destruction of the lands that most women rely on to provide for their families.[67]
Ecofeminism argues that there is a connection between women and nature that comes from their shared history of oppression by a patriarchal Western society. Vandana Shiva claims that women have a special connection to the environment through their daily interactions with it that has been ignored. She says that "women in subsistence economies, producing and reproducing wealth in partnership with nature, have been experts in their own right of holistic and ecological knowledge of nature's processes. But these alternative modes of knowing, which are oriented to the social benefits and sustenance needs are not recognized by the capitalist reductionist paradigm, because it fails to perceive the interconnectedness of nature, or the connection of women's lives, work and knowledge with the creation of wealth."[68]
However, feminist and social ecologist Janet Biehl has criticized ecofeminism for focusing too much on a mystical connection between women and nature and not enough on the actual conditions of women.[69]
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| Alfred Adler | |
|---|---|
 Alfred Adler |
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| Born | February 7, 1870 Rudolfsheim, Austria |
| Died | May 28, 1937 (aged 67) Aberdeen, Scotland |
| Residence | Austria |
| Nationality | Austrian |
| Ethnicity | Jewish |
| Occupation | Psychiatrist |
| Known for | Individual Psychology |
| Spouse(s) | Raissa Epstein |
| Part of a series of articles on |
| Psychoanalysis |
|---|
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| Psychology portal |
Alfred Adler (February 7, 1870, Mariahilfer Straße 208, Rudolfsheim, Rudolfsheim-Fünfhaus[1] – May 28, 1937) was an Austrian medical doctor, psychologist and founder of the school of individual psychology. In collaboration with Sigmund Freud and a small group of Freud's colleagues, Adler was among the co-founders of the psychoanalytic movement as a core member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. He was the first major figure to break away from psychoanalysis to form an independent school of psychotherapy and personality theory. This was after Freud declared Adler's ideas as too contrary, leading to an ultimatum to all members of the Society (which Freud had shepherded) to drop Adler or be expelled, disavowing the right to dissent (Makari, 2008). Following this split, Adler would come to have an enormous, independent effect on the disciplines of counseling and psychotherapy as they developed over the course of the 20th century (Ellenberger, 1970). He influenced notable figures in subsequent schools of psychotherapy such as Rollo May, Viktor Frankl, Abraham Maslow and Albert Ellis. His writings preceded, and were at times surprisingly consistent with, later neo-Freudian insights such as those evidenced in the works of Karen Horney, Harry Stack Sullivan and Erich Fromm.
Adler emphasized the importance of equality in preventing various forms of psychopathology, and espoused the development of social interest and democratic family structures for raising children. His most famous concept is the inferiority complex which speaks to the problem of self-esteem and its negative effects on human health (e.g. sometimes producing a paradoxical superiority striving). His emphasis on power dynamics is rooted in the philosophy of Nietzsche. Adler argued for holism, viewing the individual holistically rather than reductively, the latter being the dominant lens for viewing human psychology. Adler was also among the first in psychology to argue in favor of feminism making the case that power dynamics between men and women (and associations with masculinity and femininity) are crucial to understanding human psychology (Connell, 1995). Adler is considered, along with Freud and Jung, to be one of the three founding figures of depth psychology, which emphasizes the unconscious and psychodynamics (Ellenberger, 1970; Ehrenwald, 1991).
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Alfred Adler was the second child of seven children of a Hungarian-born, Jewish grain merchant and his wife.[2] Early on, he developed rickets, which kept him from walking until he was four years old. He almost died of pneumonia when he was five and it was at this age that he decided to be a physician.[3]
Alfred was an active, popular child and an average student who was also known for his competitive attitude toward his older brother, Sigmund.
In 1895 he received a medical degree from the University of Vienna. During his college years, he became attached to a group of socialist students, among which he found his wife-to-be, Raissa Timofeyewna Epstein, an intellectual and social activist from Russia studying in Vienna. They married in 1897 and had four children, two of whom became psychiatrists.
He began his medical career as an ophthalmologist, but he soon switched to general practice, and established his office in a lower-class part of Vienna, across from the Prater, a combination amusement park and circus. His clients included circus people, and it has been suggested[4] that the unusual strengths and weaknesses of the performers led to his insights into "organ inferiorities" and "compensation".
In 1902 Adler received an invitation from Sigmund Freud to join an informal discussion group that included Rudolf Reitler and Wilhelm Stekel. They met regularly on Wednesday evenings at Freud's home, with membership expanding over time. This group was the beginning of the psychoanalytic movement (Mittwochsgesellschaft or the "Wednesday Society"). A long-serving member of the group, Adler became President of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society eight years later (1910). He remained a member of the Society until 1911 when he and a group of supporters formally disengaged, the first of the great dissenters from Freudian psychoanalysis (preceding Carl Jung's notorious split in 1914). This departure suited both Freud and Adler since they had grown to dislike each other. During his association with Freud, Adler frequently maintained his own ideas which often diverged from Freud's. While Adler is often referred to as a "a pupil of Freud's", in fact this was never true; they were colleagues. In 1929 Adler showed a reporter with the New York Herald a copy of the faded postcard that Freud had sent him in 1902. He wanted to prove that he had never been a disciple of Freud's but rather that Freud had sought him out to share his ideas.
Adler founded the Society of Individual Psychology in 1912 after his break from the psychoanalytic movement. Adler's group initially included some orthodox Nietzschean adherents (who believed that Adler's ideas on power and inferiority were closer to Nietzsche than were Freud's). Their enmity aside, Adler retained a lifelong admiration of Freud's ideas on dreams and credited him for creating a scientific approach to their clinical utilization (Fiebert, 1997). Nevertheless, even with dream interpretation, Adler had his own theoretical and clinical approach. The primary differences between Adler and Freud centered on Adler's contention that the social realm (exteriority) is as important to psychology as is the internal realm (interiority). The dynamics of power and compensation extend beyond sexuality and the arena of gender and politics are important considerations that go beyond libido. Moreover, Freud did not share Adler's socialist beliefs. Trotsky's biography mentions his having discussions with Alfred Adler in Vienna.
Following Adler's break from Freud, he enjoyed considerable success and celebrity in building an independent school of psychotherapy and a unique Personality Theory. He traveled and lectured for a period of 25 years promoting his socially oriented approach. His intent was to build a movement that would rival, even supplant, others in psychology by arguing for the holistic integrity of psychological well-being with that of social equality. Adler's efforts were halted by World War I, during which he served as a doctor with the Austrian Army. After the conclusion of the war, his influence increased greatly. In the 1930s, he established a number of child guidance clinics. From 1921 onwards, he was a frequent lecturer in Europe and the United States, becoming a visiting professor at Columbia University in 1927. His clinical treatment methods for adults were aimed at uncovering the hidden purpose of symptoms using the therapeutic functions of insight and meaning.
Adler was concerned with the overcoming of the superiority/inferiority dynamic and was one of the first psychotherapists to discard the analytic couch in favor of two chairs. This allows the clinician and patient to sit together more or less as equals. Clinically, Adler's methods are not limited to treatment after-the-fact but extend to the realm of prevention by preempting future problems in the child. Prevention strategies include encouraging and promoting social interest, belonging, and a cultural shift within families and communities that leads to the eradication of pampering and neglect (especially corporal punishment). Adler's popularity was related to the comparative optimism and comprehensibility of his ideas. He often wrote for the lay public—unlike Freud and Jung, who tended to write almost exclusively for an academic audience. Adler always retained a pragmatic approach that was task-oriented. These "Life tasks" are occupation/work, society/friendship, and love/sexuality. Their success depends on cooperation. The tasks of life are not to be considered in isolation since, as Adler famously commented, "they all throw cross-lights on one another".[5]
In his bestselling book, Man's Search for Meaning, Dr. Viktor E. Frankl compared his own "Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy" (after Freud's and Adler's schools) to Adler's analysis:
According to logotherapy, the striving to find a meaning in one's life is the primary motivational force in man. That is why I speak of a will to meaning in contrast to the "pleasure principle" (or, as we could also term it, the will to pleasure) on which Freudian psychoanalysis is centered, as well as in contrast to the will to power stressed by Adlerian psychology.[6]
In the early 1930s, after most of Adler's Austrian clinics were closed due to his Jewish heritage (although he had converted to Christianity), Adler left Austria for a professorship at the Long Island College of Medicine in the USA. Adler died from a heart attack in Aberdeen, Scotland during a lecture tour in 1937. At the time it was a blow to the influence of his ideas although a number of them were taken up by neo-Freudians. Through the work of Rudolf Dreikurs in the United States and many other adherents worldwide, Adlerian ideas and approaches remain strong and viable more than 70 years after Adler's death.
Around the world there are various organizations promoting Adler's orientation towards mental and social well-being. These include the International Committee of Adlerian Summer Schools and Institutes (ICASSI), the North American Society for Adlerian Psychology (NASAP) and the International Association for Individual Psychology. Teaching institutes and programs exist in Austria, Canada, England, Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Switzerland, the United States, Jamaica, Peru, and Wales.
Adler was influenced by the mental construct ideas of the philosopher Hans Vaihinger (The Philosophy of As If / Philosophie des Als Ob) and the literature of Dostoevsky. While still a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society he developed a theory of organic inferiority and compensation that was the prototype for his later turn to phenomenology and the development of his famous concept, the inferiority complex.
Adler was also influenced by the philosophies of Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, Rudolf Virchow and the statesman Jan Smuts (who coined the term "holism"). Adler's School, known as "Individual Psychology"—an arcane reference to the Latin individuus meaning indivisibility, a term intended to emphasize holism—is both a social and community psychology as well as a depth psychology. Adler was an early advocate in psychology for prevention and emphasized the training of parents, teachers, social workers and so on in democratic approaches that allow a child to exercise their power through reasoned decision making whilst co-operating with others. He was a social idealist, and was known as a socialist in his early years of association with psychoanalysis (1902–1911). His allegiance to Marxism dissipated over time (he retained Marx's social idealism yet distanced himself from Marx's economic theories).
Adler (1938) was a very pragmatic man and believed that lay people could make practical use of the insights of psychology. He sought to construct a social movement united under the principles of "Gemeinschaftsgefuehl" (community feeling) and social interest (the practical actions that are exercised for the social good). Adler was also an early supporter of feminism in psychology and the social world, believing that feelings of superiority and inferiority were often gendered and expressed symptomatically in characteristic masculine and feminine styles. These styles could form the basis of psychic compensation and lead to mental health difficulties. Adler also spoke of "safeguarding tendencies" and neurotic behavior long before Anna Freud wrote about the same phenomena in her book The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense.
Adlerian-based scholarly, clinical and social practices focus on the following topics:
From its inception, Adlerian psychology has always included both professional and lay adherents. Indeed, Adler felt that all people could make use of the scientific insights garnered by psychology and he welcomed everyone, from decorated academics to those with no formal education to participate in spreading the principles of Adlerian psychology.
Adler's book, Über den nervösen Charakter (The Neurotic Character) defines his earlier key ideas. He argued that human personality could be explained teleologically, parts of the individual's unconscious self ideal work to convert feelings of inferiority to superiority (or rather completeness). The desires of the self ideal were countered by social and ethical demands. If the corrective factors were disregarded and the individual over-compensated, then an inferiority complex would occur, fostering the danger of the individual becoming egocentric, power-hungry and aggressive or worse. Common therapeutic tools include the use of humor, historical instances, and paradoxical injunctions.
Adler maintained that human psychology is psychodynamic in nature, yet unlike Freud's metapsychology that emphasizes instinctual demands, human psychology is guided by goals and fueled by a yet unknown creative force. Like Freud's instincts, Adler's fictive goals are largely unconscious. These goals have a "teleological" function. Constructivist Adlerians, influenced by neo-Kantian and Nietzschean ideas, view these "teleological" goals as "fictions" in the sense that Hans Vaihinger spoke of (fictio). Usually there is a fictional final goal which can be deciphered alongside of innumerable sub-goals. The inferiority/superiority dynamic is constantly at work through various forms of compensation and over-compensation. For example, in anorexia nervosa the fictive final goal is to "be perfectly thin" (overcompensation on the basis of a feeling of inferiority). Hence, the fictive final goal can serve a persecutory function that is ever-present in subjectivity (though its trace springs are usually unconscious). The end goal of being "thin" is fictive however since it can never be subjectively achieved.
Teleology serves another vital function for Adlerians. Chilon's "hora telos" ("see the end, consider the consequences") provides for both healthy and maladaptive psychodynamics. Here we also find Adler's emphasis on personal responsibility in mentally healthy subjects who seek their own and the social good (Slavik & King, 2007).
The metaphysical thread of Adlerian theory does not problematise the notion of teleology since concepts such as eternity (an ungraspable end where time ceases to exist) match the religious aspects that are held in tandem. In contrast, the constructivist Adlerian threads (either humanist/modernist or postmodern in variant) seek to raise insight of the force of unconscious fictions– which carry all of the inevitability of 'fate'– so long as one does not understand them. Here, 'teleology' itself is fictive yet experienced as quite real. This aspect of Adler's theory is somewhat analogous to the principles developed in Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) and Cognitive Therapy (CT). Both Albert Ellis and Aaron T. Beck credit Adler as a major precursor to REBT and CT. Ellis in particular was a member of the North American Society for Adlerian Psychology and served as an editorial board member for the Adlerian Journal Individual Psychology.
As a psychodynamic system, Adlerians excavate the past of a client/patient in order to alter their future and increase integration into community in the 'here-and-now'. The 'here-and-now' aspects are especially relevant to those Adlerians who emphasize humanism and/or existentialism in their approaches. It also changes the way of how we look at life.
Metaphysical Adlerians emphasise a spiritual holism in keeping with what Jan Smuts articulated (Smuts coined the term "holism"), that is, the spiritual sense of one-ness that holism usually implies (etymology of holism: from ὅλος holos, a Greek word meaning all, entire, total) Smuts believed that evolution involves a progressive series of lesser wholes integrating into larger ones. Whilst Smuts' text Holism and Evolution is thought to be a work of science, it actually attempts to unify evolution with a higher metaphysical principle (holism). The sense of connection and one-ness revered in various religious traditions (among these, Baha'i, Chrisitanity, Judaism, Islam and Buddhism) finds a strong complement in Adler's thought.
The pragmatic and materialist aspects to contextualizing members of communities, the construction of communities and the socio-historical-political forces that shape communities matter a great deal when it comes to understanding an individual's psychological make-up and functioning. This aspect of Adlerian psychology holds a high level of synergy with the field of community psychology. However, Adlerian psychology, unlike community psychology, is holistically concerned with both prevention and clinical treatment after-the-fact. Hence, Adler cannot be considered the "first community psychologist", a discourse that formalized in the decades following Adler's death (King & Shelley, 2008).
Adlerian psychology, Carl Jung's Analytical Psychology, Gestalt Therapy and Karen Horney's psychodynamic approach are holistic schools of psychology. These discourses eschew a reductive approach to understanding human psychology and psychopathology.
Adler (1956) developed a scheme of so-called personality types. These 'types' are to be taken as provisional or heuristic since he did not, in essence, believe in personality types. The danger with typology is to lose sight of the individual's uniqueness and to gaze reductively, acts that Adler opposed. Nevertheless, he intended to illustrate patterns that could denote a characteristic governed under the overall style of life. Hence American Adlerians such as Harold Mosak have made use of Adler's typology in this provisional sense:
These 'types' are typically formed in childhood and are expressions of the Style of Life.
Adler often emphasized one's birth order as having an influence on the Style of Life and the strengths and weaknesses in one's psychological make up. Birth Order referred to the placement of siblings within the family. Adler believed that the firstborn child would be loved and nurtured by the family until the arrival of a second child. This second child would cause the first born to suffer feelings of dethronement, no longer being the center of attention. Adler (1956) believed that in a three-child family, the oldest child would be the most likely to suffer from neuroticism and substance addiction which he reasoned was a compensation for the feelings of excessive responsibility "the weight of the world on one's shoulders" (e.g. having to look after the younger ones) and the melancholic loss of that once supremely pampered position. As a result, he predicted that this child was the most likely to end up in jail or an asylum. Youngest children would tend to be overindulged, leading to poor social empathy. Consequently, the middle child, who would experience neither dethronement nor overindulgence, was most likely to develop into a successful individual yet also most likely to be a rebel and to feel squeezed-out. Adler himself was the second in a family of six children.
Adler never produced any scientific support for his interpretations on birth order roles. Yet the value of the hypothesis was to extend the importance of siblings in marking the psychology of the individual beyond Freud's more limited emphasis on the Mother and Father. Hence, Adlerians spend time therapeutically mapping the influence that siblings (or lack thereof) had on the psychology of their clients. The idiographic approach entails an excavation of the phenomenology of one's birth order position for likely influence on the subject's Style of Life. In sum, the subjective experiences of sibling positionality and inter-relations are psychodynamically important for Adlerian therapists and personality theorists, not the cookbook predictions that may or may not have been objectively true in Adler's time.
Adler's ideas regarding non-heterosexual sexuality and various social forms of deviance have long been controversial. Along with prostitution and criminality, Adler had classified 'homosexuals' as falling among the "failures of life". In 1917, he began his writings on homosexuality with a 52-page brochure, and sporadically published more thoughts throughout the rest of his life.
The Dutch psychiatrist Gerard J. M. van den Aardweg underlines how Alfred Adler came to his conclusions for, in 1917, Adler believed that he had established a connection between homosexuality and an inferiority complex towards one's own gender. This point of view differed from Freud's theory that homosexuality is rooted in narcissism or Jung's view of inappropriate expressions of contrasexuality vis-a-vis the archetypes of the Anima and Animus.
There is evidence that Adler may have moved towards abandoning the hypothesis. Towards the end of Adler's life, in the mid 1930s, his opinion towards homosexuality began to shift. Elizabeth H. McDowell, a New York state family social worker recalls undertaking supervision with Adler on a young man who was "living in sin" with an older man in New York City. Adler asked her, "is he happy, would you say?" "Oh yes," McDowell replied. Adler then stated, "Well, why don't we leave him alone."[7] On reflection, McDowell found this comment to contain "profound wisdom". Although, there must be some misunderstanding on Adler's answer. Adler was offering his help only to those who were asking for it in person. His therapy process could be applied only to those who feel themselves in a deadlock, fallen "at the bottom of a well", and are looking for help to get out. Even though, homosexuality was considered as one of the most difficult cases, needing long experience of the psychotherapist and not only many consequent sessions but also long time of personal work by the individual, depending on the "maturity" of his problem. Success could not be guaranteed.
According to Phyllis Bottome, who wrote Adler's Biography after Adler himself laid upon her this task: "Homosexuality he always treated as lack of courage. These were but ways of obtaining a slight release for a physical need while avoiding a greater obligation. A transient partner of your own sex is a better known road and requires less courage than a permanent contact with an "unknown" sex." (...) "Adler taught that men cannot be judged from within by their "possessions," as he used to call nerves, glands, traumas, drives et cetera, since both judge and prisoner are liable to misconstrue what is invisible and incalculable; but that he can be judged, with no danger from introspection, by how he measures up to the three common life tasks set before every human being between the cradle and the grave. Work or employment, love or marriage, social contact." [8]
Adler emphasized both treatment and prevention. As a psychodynamic psychology, Adlerians emphasize the foundational importance of childhood in developing personality and any tendency towards various forms of psychopathology. The best way to inoculate against what are now termed "personality disorders" (what Adler had called the "neurotic character"), or a tendency to various neurotic conditions (depression, anxiety, etc.), is to train a child to be and feel an equal part of the family. This entails developing a democratic character and the ability to exercise power reasonably rather than through compensation. Hence Adler proselytized against corporal punishment and cautioned parents to refrain from the twin evils of pampering and neglect. The responsibility to the optimal development of the child is not limited to the Mother or Father but to teachers and society more broadly. Adler argued therefore that teachers, nurses, social workers, and so on require training in parent education in order to complement the work of the family in fostering a democratic character. When a child does not feel equal and is enacted upon (abused through pampering or neglect) they are likely to develop inferiority or superiority complexes and various accompanying compensation strategies. These strategies exact a social toll by seeding higher divorce rates, the breakdown of the family, criminal tendencies, and subjective suffering in the various guises of psychopathology. Adlerians have long promoted parent education groups, especially those influenced by the famous Austrian/American Adlerian Rudolf Dreikurs (Dreikurs & Soltz, 1964).
In a late work, Social Interest: A Challenge to Mankind(1938), Adler turns to the subject of metaphysics, where he integrates Jan Smuts' evolutionary holism with the ideas of teleology and community: "sub specie aeternitatus". Unabashedly, he argues his vision of society: "Social feeling means above all a struggle for a communal form that must be thought of as eternally applicable... when humanity has attained its goal of perfection... an ideal society amongst all mankind, the ultimate fulfillment of evolution."[9] Adler follows this pronouncement with a defense of metaphysics:
"I see no reason to be afraid of metaphysics; it has had a great influence on human life and development. We are not blessed with the possession of absolute truth; on that account we are compelled to form theories for ourselves about our future, about the results of our actions, etc. Our idea of social feeling as the final form of humanity - of an imagined state in which all the problems of life are solved and all our relations to the external world rightly adjusted - is a regulative ideal, a goal that gives our direction. This goal of perfection must bear within it the goal of an ideal community, because all that we value in life, all that endures and continues to endure, is eternally the product of this social feeling."[10]
This social feeling for Adler is Gemeinschaftsgefühl, a community feeling whereby one feels he or she belongs with others and has also developed an ecological connection with nature (plants, animals, the crust of this earth) and the cosmos as a whole, sub specie aeternitatus. Clearly, Adler himself had little problem with adopting a metaphysical and spiritual point of view to support his theories. Yet his overall theoretical yield provides ample room for the dialectical humanist (modernist) and separately the postmodernist to explain the significance of community and ecology through differing lenses (even if Adlerians have not fully considered how deeply divisive and contradictory these three threads of metaphysics, modernism, and post modernism are).
Alfred Adler's key publications were The Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology (1927), Understanding Human Nature (1927) and What Life Could Mean to You (1931). In his lifetime, Adler published more than 300 books and articles.
The Alfred Adler Institute of Northwestern Washington has recently published a twelve-volume set of The Collected Clinical Works of Alfred Adler, covering his writings from 1898-1937. An entirely new translation of Adler's magnum opus, The Neurotic Character, is featured in Volume 1. Volume 12 provides comprehensive overviews of Adler's mature theory and contemporary Adlerian practice.
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The Critical Psychiatry Network is a group of British psychiatrists who first met in Bradford, England in January 1999. Most people associated with the group are practicing consultant psychiatrists in the United Kingdom National Health Service (NHS). A number of non-consultant grade and trainee psychiatrists are also involved with the network.
The first meeting came about in response to proposals by the British government to amend the 1983 Mental Health Act (MHA). There was concern within and without the profession about the implications of the proposed changes for human rights and the civil liberties of people who use mental health services. Since its first meeting, the group has met twice a year - in London in March, and in the North of England (usually Sheffield) in September. Meetings are open to any psychiatrist interested in finding out more or getting involved.
The network is primarily intended for psychiatrists, and is not open to other groups. It works closely with service users/survivors, carers, and other professional groups in areas of common concern. CPN is also considering international links with like-minded psychiatrists in other countries.
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CPN is concerned with a number of issues, including the problem of coercion and the role of psychiatry in social control, the role of biological science in psychiatry, and the implications of the decontextualisation of experience in psychiatry.
CPN recognises that the practice of
psychiatry in Britain involves a
delicate balance between respecting individual rights and freedoms, and
the need to protect other people. The publication of the British
Government’s green paper containing proposals to amend the 1983 MHA
raised serious concerns within the CPN that the balance would shift too
far in the direction of public protection, thus emphasizing the social
control function of psychiatry. The green paper contained two proposals
that raised particular concern for members of CPN. One involved the
introduction of new legislation to enable psychiatrists to detain
indefinitely people with so-called dangerously severe personality
disorders (DSPD), even though they had not committed or been convicted
of an offence.
The other involved the introduction of community treatment orders
(CTOs) to make it possible to treat people against their wishes in the
community. CPN submitted evidence to the Scoping Group set up by the
government under Professor Genevra Richardson.[1]
This set out ethical and practical objections to CTOs, and ethical and
human rights objections to the idea of reviewable detention. It was
also critical of the concept of personality disorder as a diagnosis in
psychiatry. In addition, CPN’s evidence called for the use of advance
statements, crisis cards and a statutory right to independent advocacy
as ways of helping to sustain autonomy at times of crisis. CPN also
responded to government consultation on the proposed amendment,[2]
and the white paper.[3]
The concern about these proposals causes a number of organizations to
come together under the umbrella of the Mental Health Alliance[4]
to campaign in support of the protection of patients’ and carers’
rights, and to minimise coercion. CPN joined the Alliance’s campaign,
but resigned in 2005 when it became clear that the Alliance would
accept those aspects of the House of Commons Scrutiny Committee’s
report that would result in the introduction of CTOs.[5]
Psychiatrists not identified with CPN shared the Network’s concern
about the more coercive aspects of the government’s proposals, so CPN
carried out a questionnaire survey of over two and a half thousand
(2,500) consultant psychiatrists working in England seeking their views
of the proposed changes. The responses (a response rate of 46%)
indicated widespread concern in the profession about reviewable
detention.[6]
and CTOs[7]
There is a general concern in CPN about
the dominant role played by
biological science in contemporary psychiatry. It is concerned with two
aspects of the use of science in psychiatry. One relates to the
improper use of scientific evidence by the pharmaceutical
industry and those psychiatrists with links to it. The other concerns
the limitations of biological science in understanding distress and
madness.
There is a strong view by CPN that contemporary psychiatry relies too
much on the medical model, and attaches too much importance to a narrow
biomedical view of diagnosis.[8]
This can, in part, be understood as the response of an earlier
generation of psychiatrists to the challenge of what has been called
‘anti-psychiatry’. Psychiatrists such as David Cooper, R.D Laing and
Thomas Szasz (although the latter two rejected the term) were
identified as part of a movement against psychiatry in the 1960s and
70s. Stung by these attacks, as well as accusations that in any case
psychiatrists could not even agree who was and who was not mentally ill,[9]
academic psychiatrists responded by stressing the biological and
scientific basis of psychiatry through strenuous efforts to improve the
reliability of psychiatric diagnosis based in a return to the
traditions of one of the founding fathers of the profession, Emil
Kraepelin.[10]
This signalled the rise of what has been called neo-Kraepelinianism as
evident in DSM-III and DSM-IV.
The use of standardized diagnostic
criteria and checklists may have
improved the reliability of psychiatric diagnosis, but the problem of
its validity remains. The investment of huge sums of money in Britain,
America and Europe over the last half-century has failed to reveal a
single, replicable difference between a person with a diagnosis of schizophrenia
and someone who does not have the diagnosis.[11][12][13]
The case for the biological basis of common psychiatric disorders such
as depression has also been greatly
over-stated.[14]
This has a number of consequences:
First, the aggrandisement of biological research creates a false
impression both inside and outside the profession of the credibility of
the evidence used to justify drug treatments for disorders such as
depression and schizophrenia. Reading clinical practice guidelines for
the treatment of depression, for example, such as that produced for the
UK National Health Service by the National Institute for Health and
Clinical Excellence (NICE), one might be fooled into believing that the
evidence for the efficacy of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors
(SSRIs) is established beyond question. In reality this is not the
case, as re-examinations of drug trial data in meta-analyses,
especially where unpublished data are included (publication bias means
that researchers and drug companies do not publish negative findings
for obvious commercial reasons), have revealed that most of the
benefits seen in active treatment groups are also seen in the placebo
groups.[15][16][17]
NICE itself says that the difference between antidepressant medication
and placebo is not clinically significant, yet continues to recommend
them.
As far as schizophrenia is concerned, neuroleptic drugs may have some
short-term effects, but it is not the case that these drugs possess
specific ‘anti-psychotic’ properties, and it is impossible to assess
whether or not they confer advantages in long-term management of
psychoses because of the severe disturbances that occur when people on
long-term active treatment are withdrawn to placebos. These
disturbances are traditionally interpreted as a ‘relapse’ of
schizophrenia when in fact there are several possible interpretations
for the phenomenon[18].
Another consequence of the domination of psychiatry by biological science is that the importance of contexts in understanding distress and madness is played down[19][20]. This has a number of consequences. First, it obscures the true nature of what in fact are extremely complex problems. For example, if we consider depression to be a biological disorder remediable through the use of antidepressant tablets, then we may be excused from having to delve into the tragic circumstances that so often lie at the heart the experience. This is so in adults and children [21]. To disregard the reality of suffering in this way is ethically unacceptable both for critical psychiatrists and many patients, who reject the idea that their experiences are to be explained in terms of psychiatric symptoms, and putative biochemical disturbances.
There is a common theme, here, with the
work of David Ingleby whose
chapter in Critical Psychiatry: The Politics of Mental Health [22]
sets out a detailed critique of positivism (the view that epistemology,
or knowledge about the world is best served by empiricism and the
scientific method rather than metaphysics). A common theme running
through Laingian antipsychiatry, Ingleby’s critical psychiatry,
contemporary critical psychiatry and postpsychiatry is the view that
social, political and cultural realities play a vital role in helping
us to understand the suffering and experience of madness. Like Laing,
Ingleby stressed the importance of hermeneutics and interpretation in
inquiries about the meaning of experience in psychiatry, and (like
Laing) he drew on psychoanalysis as an interpretative aid, but his work
was also heavily influenced by the critical theory of the Frankfurt
School [23].
Both critical and post psychiatry are concerned with the way in which
interest in hermeneutics has waned in late twentieth century
psychiatry. There is within critical psychiatry a variety of views
about the relevance of psychoanalysis. One strand of thought is that
psychoanalysis itself does not possess any special knowledge of the
mind; others value the hermeneutic role of psychoanalytic theory, if
not practice, as a way of taking social and cultural factors into
account in understanding experience. There are many factors responsible
for the waning of interest in hermeneutics in mainstream psychiatry,
including the ascendancy of clinical neuroscience, the preoccupation
with an increasingly narrow, ‘neo-Kraepelinian’ view of diagnosis, and
the waning influence of psychodynamic and other forms of
insight-orientated psychotherapy. In addition, there is a
long-established tradition in clinical psychiatry that sees limits in
the extent to which it is possible to understand experience in
schizophrenia. In part this may be traced back to the work of the
German psychiatrist and philosopher, Karl Jaspers, and his
interpretation of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology.
Jaspers’ work was enormously influential in twentieth century
psychiatry. His view of phenomenology is one that dwells on the ‘form’
of experience rather than its content, and thus separates it from the
contexts that help to render experience meaningful. Thus it has been
argued that the ‘un-understandability’ of some psychotic experiences
primarily relates to the way in which psychiatrists, informed by
Jaspers, approach experience . If we regard phenomenology as a
‘rigorous science’ of human experience as did Jaspers, and focus on the
form of experience, then it will be inevitable that meaning and
understandability will be of lesser consequence.
The most forceful critic of this view was R. D. Laing, who famously
attacked the approach enshrined by Jaspers’ and Kraepelin’s work in
chapter two of The Divided Self [24],
proposing
instead an existential-phenomenological basis for
understanding psychosis. Laing always insisted that schizophrenia is
more understandable than is commonly supposed. Mainstream psychiatry
has never accepted Laing’s ideas, but many in CPN regard The Divided
Self as central to twentieth century psychiatry. Laing’s influence
continued in America through the work of the late Loren Mosher, who
worked at the Tavistock Clinic in the mid 1960s, when he also spent
time in Kingsley Hall witnessing Laing’s work. Shortly after his return
to the USA, Loren Mosher [25]
was appointed Director of Schizophrenia Research at the National
Institute of Mental Health, and also the founding editor of the journal
Schizophrenia Bulletin.
One of his most notable contributions to this area was setting up and
evaluating the first Soteria House, an environment modeled on Kingsley
Hall in which people experiencing acute psychoses could be helped with
minimal drug use and a form of interpersonal phenomenology influenced
by Heidegger. He also conducted evaluation studies of the effectiveness
of Soteria [26].
A
recent systematic review of the Soteria model found that it achieved
as good, and in some areas, better, clinical outcomes with much lower
levels of medication (Soteria House was not anti-medication) than
conventional approaches to drug treatment [27].
Peter Campbell first used the word
‘postpsychiatry’ some years ago
in the anthology Speaking Our Minds, in an attempt to imagine what
would happen in a world after psychiatry.[28]
Independently, Patrick Bracken and Philip Thomas coined the word a year
later and used it as the title of a series of articles they wrote for
Openmind. This was followed by a key paper in the British Medical
Journal , and a book of the same name.[29]
At the same time Bradley Lewis, a psychiatrist based in New York,
published Moving Beyond Prozac, DSM, and the New Psychiatry: The Birth
of Postpsychiatry.[30]
One of the most significant developments in the field of mental health
over the last thirty years has been the emergence of a vocal and
critical service user / survivor movement, and in large part we may
understand British postpsychiatry as an attempt to respond to the
challenges of service users, survivors, and increasingly carers. (There
is an excellent website devoted to the history of the survivor movement
in Britain [2],
which sets out a very clear time-line for the movement, with many
resources.) These groups have not always seen eye-to-eye with
psychiatry and in broad terms organizations like Survivors Speak Out,
the National Self Harm Network, Mad Pride, Mad Women and the Hearing
Voices Network reject the way in which psychiatry identifies, defines
and responds to their experiences. At the same time they seek a new,
more equal relationship with mental health services. In this they were
assisted by the importance attached by the Labour government to
democracy and accountability in the NHS on its election in 1997. This
created a political environment in which doctors and nurses in all
areas of health care were expected to relinquish paternalistic ways of
relating to patients and relatives, and to work with them on a more
equal footing.
For Bracken and Thomas, postpsychiatry represents an attempt to move
beyond the dichotomies that characterised the anti-psychiatry era, and
to engage constructively and positively with the concerns of service
users and carers. Postpsychiatry identifies the central problem of the
mental health field not necessarily in psychiatry, but in the modernist
search for technical solutions to life's problems. This modernist
impulse drives not only psychiatry, but also many allied disciplines in
the field, especially psychology and nursing. It existed before the
biological/DSM shift of the 1980s, and has been skillfully manipulated
by the pharmaceutical industry subsequently.
Progress in the field of mental health is presented in terms of
'breakthrough drugs', ‘wonders of neuroscience', ‘the Decade of the
Brain’ and 'molecular genetics'. These developments suited the
interests of a relatively small number of academic psychiatrists, many
of whom have interests in the pharmaceutical industry, although so far
the promised insights into psychosis and madness have not materialized.
Some psychiatrists have turned to another form of technology - CBT.
This does at least draw attention to the person’s relationship with
their experiences (such as voices or unusual beliefs), and focuses on
helping them to find different ways of coping. However, it is based on
a particular set of assumptions about the nature of the self, the
nature of thought, and how reality is constructed. The pros and cons of
this have been explored in some detail in a recent publication.[31][32]
Framing mental health problems as 'technical' in nature involves
prioritising technology and expertise over values, relationships and
meanings, the very things that emerge as important for service users,
both in their narratives, and in service user-led research.[33]
For many service users these issues are of primary importance. Recent
meta-analyses into the effectiveness of antidepressants and cognitive
therapy in depression confirm that non-specific, non-technical factors
(such as the quality of the therapeutic relationship as seen by the
patient, and the placebo effect in medication) are more important than
the specific factors.[34][35][36][37][38]
Postpsychiatry tries to move beyond the view that we can only help
people through technologies and expertise. Instead, it prioritises
values, meanings and relationships and sees progress in terms of
engaging creatively with the service user movement, and communities.
This is especially important given the considerable evidence that in
Britain, Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) communities are particularly
poorly served by mental health services. For this reason an important
practical aspect of postpsychiatry is the use of community development
in order to engage with these communities.[39]
The community development project Sharing Voices Bradford is an
excellent example of such an approach.[40]
There are many commonalities between critical psychiatry and
postpsychiatry, but it is probably fair to say that whereas
postpsychiatry would broadly endorse most aspects of the work of
critical psychiatry, the obverse does not necessarily hold. In
identifying the modernist privileging of technical responses to madness
and distress as a primary problem, postpsychiatry has looked to
postmodernist thought for insights. Its conceptual critique of
traditional psychiatry draws on ideas from philosophers such as
Heidegger,[41]
Merleau-Ponty,[42][43]
Foucault[44]
and Wittgenstein.[45]
Postpsychiatry is not anti-science, but is critical of the dualisms
implicit in Cartesianism, body-mind, mind-society, and body-society,
and thus the failure of medical science to engage fully with the
embodied and encultured reality of human experience in disease and
illness. The Critical Psychiatry Network or movement on the other hand
encompasses a range of philosophical positions and is not conceptually
wedded to postmodernism. Members of the Network are particularly
concerned with the political and ethical basis of the clinical practice
of psychiatry, and countering the influence of the pharmaceutical
industry on the psychiatric profession and mental health care in
general. At root, there is a conceptual issue about the nature of
mental illness. Critical psychiatry and postpsychiatry maintain that
psychiatry can be practiced without postulating brain pathology as the
basis for functional mental illness.
This is a list of notable thinkers that have been influenced by deconstruction.
| Contents | Top · 0–9 · A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z |
The thinkers included in this list are published and satisfy at least one of the three following additional criteria: he or she has
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|
| Full name | Jacques Marie Émile Lacan |
|---|---|
| Born | April 13, 1901 |
| Died | September 9, 1981 |
| Era | 20th-century philosophy |
| Region | Western Philosophy |
| School | Psychoanalysis, Structuralism |
| Main interests | Psychoanalysis |
| Notable ideas | Mirror Stage, The Real, The Symbolic, The Imaginary |
| Part of a series of articles on |
| Psychoanalysis |
|---|
|
| Psychology portal |
Jacques Marie Émile Lacan (French pronunciation: [ʒak lakɑ̃]) (April 13, 1901 – September 9, 1981) was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who made prominent contributions to psychoanalysis, philosophy, and literary theory. Giving yearly seminars in Paris from 1953 to 1981, Lacan influenced France's intellectuals in the 1960s and the 1970s, especially the post-structuralist philosophers. His interdisciplinary work is Freudian, featuring the unconscious, the castration complex, the ego; identification; and language as subjective perception, and thus he has made an impact on critical theory, literary studies, twentieth-century French philosophy, sociology, feminist theory and clinical psychoanalysis.
Contents[hide] |
Lacan was born in Paris, the eldest of Emilie and Alfred Lacan's three children. His father was a successful soap and oils salesman. His mother was ardently Catholic, and his younger brother went to a monastery in 1929; Lacan attended the Jesuit Collège Stanislas. During the early 1920s, Lacan attended right-wing Action Française political meetings and met the founder, Charles Maurras. By the mid-1920s, Lacan had become dissatisfied with religion and quarrelled with his family over it.[1][2]
In 1920, on being rejected as too thin for military service, he then directly entered medical school, and, in 1926, specialised in psychiatry at the Sainte-Anne Hospital in Paris. Academically, he was especially interested in the philosophies of Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger; and attended the seminars about Hegel given by Alexandre Kojève. Sometime in that decade, and until 1938, Lacan sought psychoanalysis by Rudolph Loewenstein.
In 1931, Lacan was a licensed forensic psychiatrist; in 1932 he was awarded the Doctorat d'état for the thesis: De la Psychose paranoiaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité (On paranoiac psychosis in its relations to the (paranoiac) personality). Although it was acclaimed beyond psychoanalytic circles, especially by surrealist artists, psychoanalysts mostly ignored it. Despite that, in 1934 he was a candidate to the Société Psychoanalytique de Paris. In January of that year, he married Marie-Louise Blondin and they had their first child, daughter Caroline; their second child, a son named Thibaut, was born in August 1939.
In 1936, Lacan presented his first analytic report, about the "Mirror Phase" at the Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association, in Marienbad. The congress chairman, Ernest Jones, interrupted and ended Lacan's reporting, unwilling to extend his slated presentation time. Insulted, Dr Lacan left the congress, to witness the Berlin Olympic Games. Unfortunately, no copy of the original lecture remains.[3]
Lacan was an active intellectual of the inter-war period; he associated with André Breton and Georges Bataille, Salvador Dalí and Pablo Picasso. He attended the mouvement Psyché founded by Maryse Choisy. He published in the Surrealist journal Minotaure and attended the first public reading of Ulysses. "[Lacan's] interest in surrealism predated his interest in psychoanalysis. Perhaps Lacan never really abandoned his early surrealist sympathies, its neo-Romantic view of madness as ‘convulsive beauty’, its celebration of irrationality, and its hostility to the scientist who murders nature by dissecting it".[4]
The Société Psychoanalytique de Paris (SPP) was disbanded due to Nazi Germany's occupation of France in 1940 and Lacan was subsequently called up to serve in the French army at the Val-de-Grâce military hospital in Paris, where he spent the duration of the war. His third child, Sibylle, was born in 1940.
The following year, Lacan fathered a child, Judith (who kept the name Bataille) with Sylvia Bataille (née Maklès), estranged wife of his friend Georges. There are contradictory stories about his romantic life with Sylvia Bataille in southern France during World War II. The official record shows only that Marie-Louise requested divorce after Judith's birth, and Lacan married Sylvia in 1953.
Following the war, the SPP recommenced their meetings, and Lacan visited England for a five-week study trip, meeting English analysts Wilfred Bion and John Rickman. He was influenced by Bion’s analytic work with groups and this contributed to his own later emphasis on study groups as a structure with which to advance theoretical work in psychoanalysis. In 1949, Lacan presented a new paper on the mirror stage to the sixteenth IPA congress in Zurich.
In 1951 Lacan started to hold a private weekly seminar in Paris, urging what he described as "a return to Freud" concentrating upon the linguistic nature of psychological symptomatology. Becoming public in 1953, Lacan's twenty-seven year long seminar was very influential in Parisian cultural life as well as in psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice.
In 1953, after a disagreement over the variable-length session, Lacan and many of his colleagues left the Société Parisienne de Psychanalyse to form a new group the Société Française de Psychanalyse (SFP). One of the consequences of this was to deprive the new group of membership within the International Psychoanalytical Association.
Encouraged by the reception of "the return to Freud" and of his report – "The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis" (Écrits) – Lacan again returned to Freud, re-reading the canon in relation to contemporary philosophy, linguistics, ethnology, biology and topology. From 1953 to 1964 at Sainte-Anne Hospital, he held his Seminars and presented case histories of patients. During this period he wrote the texts that are found in Écrits, a selection of which was first published in 1966. In his seventh Seminar of 1959–60, 'The Ethics of Psychoanalysis', Lacan defines his ethical foundations of psychoanalysis and constructs his "ethics for our time"; according to Freud, an ethics that would prove to be equal to the tragedy of modern man and to the "discontent of civilization". At the roots of the ethics is desire: analysis' only promise is austere, it is the entrance-into-the-I (in French a play of words between 'l'entrée en je' and 'l'entrée en jeu'). 'I must come to the place where the id was', where the analysand discovers, in its absolute nakedness, the truth of his desire. The end of psychoanalysis entails 'the purification of desire'. This text functioned throughout the years as the background of Lacan's work. He defends three assertions: that psychoanalysis must not have a scientific status; that Freudian ideas have radically changed the concepts of subject, of knowledge, and of desire; that the analytic field is the only place from where it is possible to question the insufficiencies of science and philosophy.
Starting in 1962 a complex negotiation took place to determine the status of the SFP within the IPA. Lacan’s practice—with his controversial indeterminate-length sessions in which he charged a full fee for truncated sessions, had his hair cut during sessions,[5] and Lacan's critical stance towards psychoanalytic orthodoxy—led, in 1963, to a condition being set by the IPA that registration of the SFP was dependent upon removing Lacan from the list of SFP training analysts. Lacan left the SFP to form his own school which became known as the École Freudienne de Paris (EFP)
With Lévi-Strauss and Althusser's support, he was appointed lecturer at the École Pratique des Hautes Etudes. He started with a seminar on The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis in January 1964 in the Dussane room at the École Normale Supérieure (in his first session he thanks the generosity of Fernand Braudel and Claude Lévi-Strauss). Lacan began to set forth his own teaching on psychoanalysis to an audience of colleagues who had joined him from the SFP. His lectures also attracted many of the École Normale’s students. He divided the École de la Cause freudienne into three sections: the section of pure psychoanalysis (training and elaboration of the theory, where members who have been analyzed but haven't become analysts can participate); the section for applied psychoanalysis (therapeutic and clinical, physicians who either have not started or have not yet completed analysis are welcome); the section for taking inventory of the Freudian field (it concerned the critique of psychoanalytic literature and the analysis of the theoretical relations with related or affiliated sciences (Proposition du 9 octobre 1967 sur le psychanalyste à l'Ecole).
By the 1960s, Lacan was associated, at least in the public mind, with the far left in France.[6] In May 1968 Lacan voiced his sympathy for the student protests and as a corollary a Department of Psychology was set up by his followers at the University of Vincennes (Paris VIII). Echoing this sentiment, "Shortly after the tumultuous events of May 1968, Lacan was accused by the authorities of being a subversive, and directly influencing the events that transpired."[7] In 1969 Lacan moved his public seminars to the Faculté de Droit (Panthéon) where he continued to deliver his expositions of analytic theory and practice till the dissolution of his School in 1980.
Throughout the final decade of his life, Lacan continued his widely followed seminars. During this period, he focuses on the development of his concepts of masculine and feminine jouissance, and puts special emphasis on his concept of "The Real" as a point of impossible contradiction in the "Symbolic Order". This late work had the greatest influence on feminist thought, as well as upon the informal movement that arose in the 1970s or 1980s called post-modernism.
Lacan's "return to Freud" emphasizes a renewed attention to the original texts of Freud and a radical critique of Ego psychology, Melanie Klein and Object relations theory. Lacan thought that Freud's ideas of "slips of the tongue", jokes, et cetera, all emphasized the agency of language in subjective constitution. In "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud" (Écrits, pp. 161 – 197) he argued that "the unconscious is structured like a language"; it was not a primitive or archetypal part of the mind separate from the conscious, linguistic ego, but a formation as complex and structurally sophisticated as consciousness itself. If the unconscious is structured like a language, he claimed, then the self is denied any point of reference to which to be 'restored' following trauma or 'identity crisis'.
Lacan's first official contribution to psychoanalysis was the mirror stage which he described "as formative of the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience". By the early fifties, he no longer considered the mirror stage as only a moment in the life of the infant, but as the permanent structure of subjectivity. In the paradigm of The Imaginary order, the subject is permanently caught and captivated by his own image. Lacan writes, "[T]he mirror stage is a phenomenon to which I assign a twofold value. In the first place, it has historical value as it marks a decisive turning-point in the mental development of the child. In the second place, it typifies an essential libidinal relationship with the body-image".[8]
As he further develops the concept, the stress falls less on its historical value and more on its structural value.[4] In his fourth Seminar, La relation d'objet, Lacan states that "the mirror stage is far from a mere phenomenon which occurs in the development of the child. It illustrates the conflictual nature of the dual relationship".
The mirror stage describes the formation of the Ego via the process of objectification, the Ego being the result of feeling dissension between one's perceived visual appearance and one's perceived emotional reality. This identification is what Lacan called alienation. At six months the baby still lacks coordination. However, he can recognize himself in the mirror before attaining control over his bodily movements. He sees his image as a whole, and the synthesis of this image produces a sense of contrast with the uncoordination of the body, which is perceived as a fragmented body. This contrast is first felt by the infant as a rivalry with his own image, because the wholeness of the image threatens him with fragmentation, and thus the mirror stage gives rise to an aggressive tension between the subject and the image. To resolve this aggressive tension, the subject identifies with the image: this primary identification with the counterpart is what forms the Ego.[4] The moment of identification is to Lacan a moment of jubilation since it leads to an imaginary sense of mastery, yet the jubilation may also be accompanied by a depressive reaction, when the infant compares his own precarious sense of mastery with the omnipotence of the mother.[9]
Lacan calls the specular image "orthopaedic" as it leads the child to anticipate the overcoming of its "real specific prematurity of birth". The vision of the body as integrated and contained, in opposition to the child's actual experience of motor incapacity and the sense of its body as fragmented, induces a movement from "insufficiency to anticipation".[10] In other words, the mirror image initiates and then aids, like a crutch, the process of the formation of an integrated sense of self.
In the Mirror stage a misunderstanding – "méconnaissance" – constitutes the Ego—the 'moi' becomes alienated from itself through the introduction of an imaginary dimension to the subject. It must be said that the mirror stage also has a significant symbolic dimension. The Symbolic order is present in the figure of the adult who is carrying the infant: the moment after the subject has jubilantly assumed his image as his own, he turns his head towards this adult who represents the big Other, as if to call on him to ratify this image.[11]
While Freud uses the term "other", referring to der Andere (the other person) and "das Andere" (otherness), Lacan's use is more like Hegel's, through Alexandre Kojève.
Lacan often used an algebraic symbology for his concepts:[12] the big Other is designated A (for French Autre) and the little other is designated a (italicized French autre). He asserts that an awareness of this distinction is fundamental to analytic practice: 'the analyst must be imbued with the difference between A and a,[13] so he can situate himself in the place of Other, and not the other'.[14] As Dylan Evans has said:
"1. The little other is the other who is not really other, but a reflection and projection of the Ego. He [autre] is simultaneously the counterpart and the specular image. The little other is thus entirely inscribed in the imaginary order.
2. The big Other designates radical alterity, an other-ness which transcends the illusory otherness of the imaginary because it cannot be assimilated through identification. Lacan equates this radical alterity with language and the law, and hence the big Other is inscribed in the order of the symbolic. Indeed, the big Other is the symbolic insofar as it is particularized for each subject. The Other is thus both another subject, in his radical alterity and unassimilable uniqueness, and also the symbolic order which mediates the relationship with that other subject."[15]
Lacan states, "The Other must first of all be considered a locus, the locus in which speech is constituted".[16] We can speak of the Other as a subject in a secondary sense, only when a subject may occupy this position and thereby embody the Other for another subject.[17]
When he argues that speech originates not in the Ego nor in the subject, but in the Other, Lacan stresses that speech and language are beyond one's conscious control; they come from another place, outside consciousness, and then 'the unconscious is the discourse of the Other'.[18] When conceiving the Other as a place, Lacan refers to Freud's concept of psychical locality, in which the unconscious is described as "the other scene".
"It is the mother who first occupies the position of the big Other for the child, it is she who receives the child's primitive cries and retroactively sanctions them as a particular message".[4] The castration complex is formed when the child discovers that this Other is not complete, that there is a Lack (manque) in the Other. This means that there is always a signifier missing from the trove of signifiers constituted by the Other. Lacan illustrates this incomplete Other graphically by striking a bar through the symbol A; hence another name for the castrated, incomplete Other is the 'barred Other'.[19][20]
Feminists thinkers have both criticized and utilized Lacan's concepts of castration and the (Symbolic) Phallus. Many feminists believe that Lacan's phallocentric analysis provides a useful means of understanding gender biases and imposed roles. Some feminist critics, notably Luce Irigaray,[21] accuse Lacan of maintaining the sexist tradition in psychoanalysis. For Irigaray, rather than the Phallus defining a single axis of gender by its presence/absence, gender has two positive poles. Like Irigaray, Jacques Derrida, in criticism of Lacan's concept of castration, discusses the phallus in a chiasmus with the hymen, as both one and other, as Derrida returns to Freud's case of the Wolf Man in The Dissemination.[22] Other feminists, such as Judith Butler,[23] Jane Gallop,[24] and Elizabeth Grosz,[7] have each interpreted Lacan's work as opening up new possibilities for feminist theory.
Lacan thought the relationship between the Ego and the reflected image means that the Ego and the Imaginary order itself are places of radical alienation: "alienation is constitutive of the Imaginary order".[16] This relationship is also narcissistic. So the Imaginary is the field of images and imagination, and deception: the main illusions of this order are synthesis, autonomy, duality, similarity.
The Imaginary is structured by the Symbolic order: in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis Lacan argues how the visual field is structured by symbolic laws. Thus the Imaginary involves a linguistic dimension. If the signifier is the foundation of the Symbolic, the signified and signification are part of the Imaginary order. Language has Symbolic and Imaginary connotations; in its Imaginary aspect, language is the "wall of language" which inverts and distorts the discourse of the Other. On the other hand, the Imaginary is rooted in the subject's relationship with its own body (the image of the body). In Fetishism: the Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real Lacan argues that in the sexual plane the Imaginary appears as sexual display and courtship love.
Lacan accused major psychoanalytic schools of reducing the practice of psychoanalysis to the Imaginary order by making identification with the analyst the objective of analysis (see Écrits, "The Directions of the Treatment"). He proposes the use of the Symbolic as the way to dislodge the disabling fixations of the Imaginary: the analyst transforms the images into words. "The use of the Symbolic is the only way for the analytic process to cross the plane of identification."[25]
In his Seminar IV "La relation d'objet" Lacan asserts that the concepts of Law and Structure are unthinkable without language: thus the Symbolic is a linguistic dimension. Yet, he does not simply equate this order with language since language involves the Imaginary and the Real as well. The dimension proper of language in the Symbolic is that of the signifier, that is a dimension in which elements have no positive existence but which are constituted by virtue of their mutual differences.
The Symbolic is also the field of radical alterity, that is the Other: the unconscious is the discourse of this Other. Besides it is the realm of the Law which regulates desire in the Oedipus complex. We may add that the Symbolic is the domain of culture as opposed to the Imaginary order of nature. As important elements in the Symbolic, the concepts of death and lack (manque) connive to make of the pleasure principle the regulator of the distance from the Thing (das ding an sich) and the death drive which goes "beyond the pleasure principle by means of repetition"—"the death drive is only a mask of the Symbolic order."[12]
It is by working in the Symbolic order that the analyst can produce changes in the subjective position of the analysand; these changes will produce imaginary effects since the Imaginary is structured by the Symbolic.[4] Thus, it is the Symbolic which is determinant of subjectivity, and the Imaginary, made of images and appearances, is the effect of the Symbolic.
Lacan's concept of the Real dates back to 1936, a term which was popular at the time, particularly with Émile Meyerson who referred to it as "an ontological absolute, a true being-in-itself".[26] Lacan picked up again on the theme of the Real in 1953 and continued to elaborate on it until his death. The Real, for Lacan, is not synonymous with reality. Not only opposed to the Imaginary, the Real is also located outside the Symbolic. Unlike the latter which is constituted in terms of oppositions, i.e. presence/absence, "there is no absence in the Real."[12] Whereas the Symbolic opposition presence/absence implies the possibility that something may be missing from the Symbolic, "the Real is always in its place."[25] If the Symbolic is a set of differentiated elements, signifiers, the Real in itself is undifferentiated, it bears no fissure. The Symbolic introduces "a cut in the real", in the process of signification: "it is the world of words that creates the world of things – things originally confused in the "here and now" of the all in the process of coming into being.[27]
Thus the Real is that which is outside language, resisting symbolization absolutely. In Seminar XI Lacan defines the Real as "the impossible" because it is impossible to imagine and impossible to integrate into the Symbolic, being impossibly attainable. It is this resistance to symbolization that lends the Real its traumatic quality. In his Seminar "La relation d'objet", Lacan reads Freud's case on "Little Hans". He distinguishes two real elements which intrude and disrupt the child's imaginary pre-oedipical harmony: the real penis which is felt in infantile masturbation and the newly born sister.
Finally, the Real is the object of anxiety in that it lacks any possible mediation, and is "the essential object which is not an object any longer, but this something faced with which all words cease and all categories fail, the object of anxiety par excellence."[12]
Lacan's désir follows Freud's concept of Wunsch and it is central to Lacanian theories. For the aim of the talking cure – psychoanalysis – is precisely to lead the analysand to uncover the truth about their desire, but this is only possible if that desire is articulated, or spoken.[28] Lacan said that "it is only once it is formulated, named in the presence of the other, that desire appears in the full sense of the term."[29] "That the subject should come to recognize and to name his/her desire, that is the efficacious action of analysis. But it is not a question of recognizing something which would be entirely given. In naming it, the subject creates, brings forth, a new presence in the world."[12] "[W]hat is important is to teach the subject to name, to articulate, to bring desire into existence." Now, although the truth about desire is somehow present in discourse, discourse can never articulate the whole truth about desire: whenever discourse attempts to articulate desire, there is always a leftover, a surplus.[28]
In The Signification of the Phallus Lacan distinguishes desire from need and demand. Need is a biological instinct that is articulated in demand, yet demand has a double function, on one hand it articulates need and on the other acts as a demand for love. So, even after the need articulated in demand is satisfied, the demand for love remains unsatisfied and this leftover is desire.[30] For Lacan "desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction nor the demand for love, but the difference that results from the subtraction of the first from the second" (article cited). Desire then is the surplus produced by the articulation of need in demand. Lacan adds that "desire begins to take shape in the margin in which demand becomes separated from need." Hence desire can never be satisfied, or as Slavoj Žižek puts it "desire's raison d'être is not to realize its goal, to find full satisfaction, but to reproduce itself as desire."
It is also important to distinguish between desire and the drives. If they belong to the field of the Other (as opposed to love), desire is one, whereas the drives are many. The drives are the partial manifestations of a single force called desire (see "The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis"). If one can surmise that objet petit a is the object of desire, it is not the object towards which desire tends, but the cause of desire. For desire is not a relation to an object but a relation to a lack (manque). Then desire appears as a social construct since it is always constituted in a dialectical relationship.
Lacan maintains Freud's distinction between Trieb (drive) and Instinkt (instinct) in that drives differ from biological needs because they can never be satisfied and do not aim at an object but rather circle perpetually round it, so the real source of jouissance is to repeat the movement of this closed circuit. In the same Seminar Lacan posits the drives as both cultural and symbolic (discourse) constructs, to him "the drive is not a given, something archaic, primordial". Yet he incorporates the four elements of the drives as defined by Freud (the pressure, the end, the object and the source) to his theory of the drive's circuit: the drive originates in the erogenous zone, circles round the object, and then returns to the erogenous zone. The circuit is structured by the three grammatical voices:
The active and reflexive voices are autoerotic, they lack a subject. It is only when the drive completes its circuit with the passive voice that a new subject appears. So although it is the "passive" voice, the drive is essentially active, "to make oneself be seen" instead of "to be seen." The circuit of the drive is the only way for the subject to transgress the pleasure principle.
Lacan identifies four partial drives: the oral drive (the erogenous zones are the lips, the partial object the breast), the anal drive (the anus and the faeces), the scopic drive (the eyes and the gaze) and the invocatory drive (the ears and the voice). The first two relate to demand and the last two to desire. If the drives are closely related to desire, they are the partial aspects in which desire is realized: again, desire is one and undivided whereas the drives are partial manifestations of desire.
Jacques-Alain Miller is the sole editor of Lacan's seminars, which contain the majority of his life's work. Although Lacan is a major figure in the history of psychoanalysis, some of these seminars still remain unpublished. Since 1984, Miller has been regularly conducting a series of lectures, "L'orientation lacanienne." Miller's teachings have been published in the US by the journal Lacanian Ink.
Lacan claimed that his Écrits were not to be understood rationally, but would rather produce an effect in the reader similar to the sense of enlightenment one might experience while reading mystical texts.[31] Lacan's writing is notoriously difficult due to the repeated Hegelian/Kojèvean allusions, wide theoretical divergences from other psychoanalytic and philosophical thinking, as well as his obscure prose style. The broader psychotheraputic literature has little or nothing to say about the effectiveness of Lacanian psychoanalysis.[32] Though a major influence on psychoanalysis in France and parts of Latin America, Lacan's influence on clinical psychology in the English-speaking world is negligible, where his ideas are best-known in literary theory.[4]
Lacan incorporates terms from mathematical fields such as topology. However, some scientists outside the fields of psychoanalysis claim Lacan misunderstands or misuses mathematical terms.[33][34]
Other critics have dismissed Lacan and his work wholesale. François Roustang called Lacan's output an "incoherent system of pseudo-scientific gibberish," and quoted linguist Noam Chomsky's opinion that Lacan was an "amusing and perfectly self-conscious charlatan".[35] In Fashionable Nonsense, Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont accuse Lacan of "superficial erudition" and of abusing scientific concepts he does not understand.[34] Dylan Evans, formerly a Lacanian analyst, eventually dismissed Lacanianism as lacking a sound scientific basis and for harming rather than helping patients, and has criticized Lacan's followers for treating his writings as "holy writ"[4] and Richard Webster has decried what he sees as Lacan's obscurity, arrogance, and the resultant "The Cult of Lacan".[36]
The largest departure from other branches of feminism is the argument that sex is itself constructed through language, a view most notably propounded in Judith Butler's 1990 book, Gender Trouble. She draws on and critiques the work of Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan. Butler criticises the distinction drawn by previous feminisms between (biological) sex and (socially constructed) gender. She asks why we assume that material things (such as the body) are not subject to processes of social construction themselves. Butler argues that this does not allow for a sufficient criticism of essentialism: though recognizing that gender is a social construct, feminists assume it's always constructed in the same way. Her argument implies that women's subordination has no single cause or single solution; postmodern feminism is thus criticized for offering no clear path to action. Butler herself rejects the term "postmodernism" as too vague to be meaningful.[1]
French feminism from the 1970s until now, with the psychoanalytic theory writers Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray has forged specific routes in postmodern feminism and in feminist psychoanalysis. Although postmodernism resists characterization, it is possible to identify certain themes or orientations that postmodern feminists share. Mary Joe Frug suggested that one "principle" of postmodernism is that human experience is located "inescapably within language." Power is exercised not only through direct coercion, but also through the way in which language shapes and restricts our reality. However, because language is always open to re-interpretation, it can also be used to resist this shaping and restriction, and so is a potentially fruitful site of political struggle.
Frug's second postmodern principle is that sex is not something natural, nor is it something completely determinate and definable. Rather, sex is part of a system of meaning, produced by language. Frug argues that "cultural mechanisms ... encode the female body with meanings," and that these cultural mechanisms then go on explain these meanings "by an appeal to the 'natural' differences between the sexes, differences that the rules themselves help to produce."[2] Rejecting the idea of a natural basis to sexual difference allows us to see that it is always susceptible to new interpretations. Like other systems of meaning, it is less like a cage, and more like a tool: it constrains but never completely determines what one can do with it.
Kate Bornstein, transgendered author and
playwright, calls herself a postmodern
feminist, which is not the same as a post-feminist.
Hélène Cixous (French pronunciation: [elɛn siksu]; born June 5, 1937) is a professor, French feminist writer, poet, playwright, philosopher, literary critic and rhetorician.[1] She received honorary degrees from Queen's University (Canada), University of Alberta (Canada), University of York (U.K.), Georgetown University, Northwestern University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 2008 she was appointed as A.D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University until June 2014. In 2009, she was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Literature by University College London and in 2010 by University College Dublin.
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Hélène Cixous was born in Oran, Algeria, to a German Ashkenazi Jewish mother and Frenc Pied-noir Sephardic Jewish father. She earned her agrégation in English in 1959 and her Doctorat ès lettres in 1968. Her main focus, at this time, was English literature and the works of James Joyce. In 1968, she published L'Exil de James Joyce ou l'Art du remplacement (The Exile of James Joyce, or the Art of Displacement) and the following year she published her first novel, Dedans (Inside), a semi-autobiographical work that won the Prix Médicis. She is a professor at European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland and the University of Paris VIII, whose center for women's studies, the first in Europe, she founded.[1]
She has published widely, including twenty-three volumes of poems, six books of essays, five plays, and numerous influential articles. She published Voiles (Veils) with Jacques Derrida and her work is often considered deconstructive. In introducing her Wellek Lecture, subsequently published as Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, Derrida referred to her as the greatest living writer in his language (French). Cixous wrote a book on Derrida titled Portrait de Jacques Derrida en jeune saint juif (Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint). Her reading of Derrida finds additional layers of meaning at a phonemic rather than strictly lexical level.[2] In addition to Derrida and Joyce, she has written monographs on the work of the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, on Maurice Blanchot, Franz Kafka, Heinrich von Kleist, Michel de Montaigne, Ingeborg Bachmann, Thomas Bernhard, and the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva.[1]
Along with Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, Cixous is considered one of the mothers of poststructuralist feminist theory.[3]
In the 1970s, Cixous began writing about the relationship between sexuality and language. Like other poststructuralist feminist theorists, Cixous believes that our sexuality is directly tied to how we communicate in society. In 1975, Cixous published her most influential article "Le rire de la méduse" ("The Laugh of the Medusa"), translated and released in English in 1976. She has published over 70 works; her fiction, dramatic writing and poetry, however, are not often read in English.
Some of the most notable influences on her writings have been Jacques Derrida, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan and Arthur Rimbaud.
Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud established the initial theories which would serve as a basis for some of Cixous' arguments in developmental psychology. Freud's analysis of gender roles and sexual identity concluded with separate paths for boys and girls through the Oedipus complex, theories of which Cixous was particularly critical.
Contemporaries, lifelong friends, and intellectuals, Jacques Derrida and Cixous both grew up as French Jews in Algeria and share a "belonging constituted of exclusion and nonbelonging"—not Algerian, rejected by France, their Jewishness concealed or acculturated. In Derrida’s family "one never said 'circumcision' but 'baptism,' not 'Bar Mitzvah' but 'communion.’" Judaism cloaked in Catholicism is one example of the undecidability of identity that influenced the thinker whom Cixous calls a "Jewish Saint."[4] Her book Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint addresses these matters.
Through deconstruction, Derrida employed the term logocentrism (which was not his coinage). This is the concept that explains how language relies on a hierarchical system that values the spoken word over the written word in Western culture. The idea of binary opposition is essential to Cixous' position on language.
Cixous and Luce Irigaray combined Derrida's logocentric idea and Lacan's symbol for desire, creating the term phallogocentrism. This term focuses on Derrida's social structure of speech and binary opposition as the center of reference for language, with the phallic being privileged and how women are only defined by what they lack; not A vs. B, but, rather A vs. ¬A (not-A).
In 2000, a collection in Cixous' name was created at the Bibliothèque nationale de France after Cixous donated the entirety of her manuscripts to date. They then featured in the exhibit "Brouillons d'écrivains" held there in 2001.
In 2003, the Bibliothèque held the conference "Genèses Généalogies Genres: Autour de l'oeuvre d'Hélène Cixous". Among the speakers were Mireille Calle-Gruber, Marie Odile Germain, Jacques Derrida, Annie Leclerc, Ariane Mnouchkine, Ginette Michaud, and Hélène Cixous herself.
This text, originally written in French as Le Rire de la Meduse in 1975, was translated into English by Keith and Paula Cohen in 1976.[5] Cixous is issuing her female readers an ultimatum of sorts: either they can read it and choose to stay trapped in their own bodies by a language that does not allow them to express themselves, or they can use their bodies as a way to communicate.
"The Laugh of the Medusa" is an
extremely literary essay and
well-known as an exhortation to a "feminine mode" of writing; the
phrases "white ink" and "écriture féminine" are
often cited, referring to this desired new way of writing. It is a
strident critique
of logocentrism and phallogocentrism, having much in common with
Jacques Derrida's earlier thought. The essay also calls for an
acknowledgment of universal bisexuality
or polymorphous perversity, a
precursor of queer theory's later emphases, and swiftly
rejects many kinds of essentialism
which were still common in Anglo-American feminism at the time. The
essay also exemplifies Cixous's style of writing in that it is richly intertextual, making a wide range of literary
allusions.[1]
In homage to French theorists of the feminine, Laughing with Medusa
was published by Oxford University Press in 2006.
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This article includes a list of references or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it has insufficient inline citations. Please help to improve this article by introducing more precise citations where appropriate. (February 2010) |
Autonomism refers to a set of left-wing political and social movements and theories close to the socialist movement. As an identifiable theoretical system it first emerged in Italy in the 1960s from workerist (operaismo) communism. Later, post-Marxist and anarchist tendencies became significant after influence from the Situationists, the failure of Italian far-left movements in the 1970s, and the emergence of a number of important theorists including Antonio Negri, who had contributed to the 1969 founding of Potere Operaio, Mario Tronti, Paolo Virno, etc.
It influenced the German and Dutch Autonomen, the worldwide Social Centre movement, and today is influential in Italy, France, and to a lesser extent the English-speaking countries. Those who describe themselves as autonomists now vary from Marxists to post-structuralists and anarchists.
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The term autonomia/Autonome is derived from the Greek "auto–nomos" referring to someone or something which lives by his/her own rule. Autonomy, in this sense, is not independence. While independence refers to an autarcic kind of life, separated from the community, autonomy refers to life in society but by one's own rule. Aristotle thus considered that only beasts or gods could be independent and live apart from the polis ("community"), while Kant defined the Enlightenment by autonomy of thought and the famous "Sapere aude" ("dare to know").
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Unlike other forms of Marxism, autonomist Marxism emphasises the ability of the working class to force changes to the organization of the capitalist system independent of the state, trade unions or political parties. Autonomists are less concerned with party political organization than other Marxists, focusing instead on self-organized action outside of traditional organizational structures. Autonomist Marxism is thus a "bottom up" theory: it draws attention to activities that autonomists see as everyday working class resistance to capitalism, for example absenteeism, slow working, and socialization in the workplace.
Like other Marxists, autonomists see class struggle as being of central importance. However, autonomists have a broader definition of the working class than other Marxists: as well as wage-earning workers (both white collar and blue collar), autonomists also include the unwaged (students, the unemployed, homemakers etc.), who are traditionally deprived of any form of union representation.
Early theorists (such as Mario Tronti, Antonio Negri, Sergio Bologna and Paolo Virno) developed notions of "immaterial" and "social labour" that extended the Marxist concept of labour to all society. They suggested that modern society's wealth was produced by unaccountable collective work, and that only a little of this was redistributed to the workers in the form of wages. Other Italian autonomists - particularly feminists, such as Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Silvia Federici - emphasised the importance of feminism and the value of unpaid female labour to capitalist society.
Autonomist Marxism - referred to in Italy as operaismo, which translates literally as "workerism" - first appeared in Italy in the early 1960s. Arguably, the emergence of early autonomism can be traced to the dissatisfaction of automotive workers in Turin with their union, which reached an agreement with FIAT. The disillusionment of these workers with their organised representation, along with the resultant riots (in particular the 1962 riots by FIAT workers in Turin - "fatti di Piazza Statuto") were critical factors in the development of a theory of self-organised labour representation outside the scope of traditional representatives such as trade unions.
In 1969, the operaismo approach was active mainly in two different groups: Lotta Continua, led by Adriano Sofri (which had a very significant Roman Catholic cultural matrix) and Potere Operaio, led by Antonio Negri, Franco Piperno, Oreste Scalzone, and Valerio Morucci. Mario Capanna was the charismatic leader of the Milan student movement, which had a more classical Marxist-Leninist approach.
Through translations made available by Danilo Montaldi and others, the Italian autonomists drew upon previous activist research in the United States by the Johnson-Forest Tendency and in France by the group Socialisme ou Barbarie. The Johnson-Forest Tendency had studied working class life and struggles within the US auto industry, publishing pamphlets such as "The American Worker" (1947), "Punching Out" (1952) and "Union Committeemen and Wildcat Strikes" (1955). That work was translated into French by Socialisme ou Barbarie and published, serially, in their journal. They too began investigating and writing about what was going on inside workplaces, in their case inside both auto factories and insurance offices.
The journal Quaderni Rossi ("Red Notebooks"), produced between 1961 and 1965, and its successor Classe Operaia ("Working Class"), produced between 1963 and 1966, were also influential in the development of early autonomism. Both were founded by Antonio Negri and Mario Tronti.
Pirate radio stations also were a factor in spreading autonomist ideas. Bologna's Radio Alice was an example of such a station.
The Italian student movement, including the Indiani Metropolitani, starting from 1966 with the murder by neo-fascists of student Paolo Rossi at Rome University, engaged in various direct action operations, including riots and occupations, along with more peaceful activities such as self reduction, in which individuals refused to pay for such services and goods as public transport, electricity, gas, rent, and food. Several clashes occurred between the students and the police, during the occupations of Universities in the winter 1967-1968, during the Fiat occupations, in March 1968 in Rome during the Battle of Valle Giulia.
On March 11, 1977, riots took place in Bologna following the killing of student Francesco Lorusso by police.
Starting from 1979, the state effectively prosecuted the autonomist movement, arbitrarily claiming it protected the Red Brigades, which had kidnapped and assassinated Aldo Moro. 12,000 far-left activists were detained; 600 fled the country, including 300 to France and 200 others to South America.[1]. This was during the period known as the Years of lead.
In France, the marxist group Socialisme ou Barbarie, led by philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis, could be said to be one of the first autonomist groups, as well as having importance in the council communist tradition. Socialisme ou Barbarie drew upon the American Johnson-Forest Tendency's activist research inside US auto plants and carried out their own investigations into rank and file workers struggles - struggles autonomous of union or party leadership.
Also parallel to the work of the Johnson-Forest Tendency, Socialisme ou Barbarie harshly criticised the Communist regime in the USSR, which it considered a form of "bureaucratic capitalism" and not at all the socialism it claimed to be. Philosopher Jean-François Lyotard was also part of this movement.
However, the Italian influence of the operaismo movement was more directly felt in the creation of the review Matériaux pour l'intervention (1972–1973) by Yann Moulier-Boutang, a French economist close to Toni Negri. This led in turn to the creation of the Camarades group (1974–78). Along with others, Moulier-Boutang joined the Centre International pour des Nouveaux Espaces de Liberté (CINEL), founded three years before by Félix Guattari, and assisted Italian activists accused of terrorism, of whom at least 300 fled to France.
The French autonome mouvement organised itself in the AGPA (Assemblée Parisienne des Groupes Autonomes, "Parisian Assembly of Autonome Groups"; 1977–78). Many tendencies were present in it, including the Camarades group led by Moulier-Boutang, members of the Organisation communiste libertaire, some people referring themselves to the "Desiring Autonomy" of Bob Nadoulek, but also squatters and street-wise people (including the groupe Marge). French autonomes supported captured Red Army Faction former members. Jean-Paul Sartre also intervened on the conditions for the detention of RAF detainees.
The militant group Action Directe appeared in 1979 and carried out several violent direct actions. Action Directe claimed responsibility for the murders of Renault's CEO Georges Besse and General Audran. George Besse had been CEO of nuclear company Eurodif. Action Directe was dissolved in 1987.
In the 1980s, the autonomist movement underwent a deep crisis in Italy because of effective prosecution by the State, and was stronger in Germany than in France. It remained present in Parisian squats and in some riots (for example in 1980 near the Jussieu campus in Paris, or in 1982 in the Ardennes department during anti-nuclear demonstrations). In the 1980s, the French autonomists published the periodicals CAT Pages (1981–1982), Rebelles (1981–1993), Tout ! (1982–1985), Molotov et Confetti (1984), Les Fossoyeurs du Vieux Monde, La Chôme (1984–1985) and Contre (1987–1989).
In the 1990s, the French autonomist movement was present in struggles led by unemployed people, with Travailleurs, Chômeurs, et Précaires en colère (TCP, "Angry Workers, Unemployed, and Precarious people") and l'Assemblée générale des chômeurs de Jussieu ("General Assembly of Jussieu's unemployed people"). It was also involved in the alter-globalisation movement and above all in the solidarity with illegal foreigners (Collective Des Papiers pour tous ("Permits for all", 1996) and Collectif Anti-Expulsion (1998–2005)). Several autonomist journals date from this time: Quilombo (1988–1993), Apache (1990–1998), Tic-Tac (1995–1997), Karoshi (1998–1999), and Tiqqun (1999–2001).
From July 19 to July 28, 2002, a No borders camp was made in Strasbourg to protest against anti-immigration policies, in particular inside the Schengen European space.
In 2003, autonomists came into conflict with the French Socialist Party (PS) during a demonstration that took place in the frame of the European Social Forum in Saint-Denis (Paris). At the end of December, hundreds of unemployed people helped themselves in the Bon Marché supermarket to be able to celebrate Christmas (an action called "autoréduction" (of prices) in French). French riot police (CRS) physically opposed the unemployed people inside the shop. Autonomes rioted during the spring 2006 protests against the CPE, and again after the 2007 presidential election when Nicolas Sarkozy was elected.
In 2008, on the 11th of November, the french police arrested ten people, including five living in a farmhouse on a hill overlooking Tarnac, and accused them of associating with "a terrorist enterprise" by sabotaging TGV's overhead lines. Nine out of ten were let go and only Julien Coupat the alleged leader remain in custody, charged with "directing a terrorist group" by the Paris Prosecutor's office.
In Germany, Autonome was used during the late 1970s to depict the most radical part of the political left. These individuals participated in practically all actions of the social movements at the time, especially in demonstrations against nuclear energy plants (Brokdorf 1981, Wackersdorf 1986) and in actions against the construction of airport runways (Frankfurt 1976-1986). The defense of squats against the police such as in Hamburg's Hafenstraße was also a major "task" for the "autonome" movement. The Dutch anarchist Autonomen movement from the 1960s also concentrated on squatting.
Tactics of the "Autonome" were usually militant, including the construction of barricades or throwing stones or molotov cocktails at the police. During their most powerful times in the early 1980s, on at least one occasion the police had to take flight.
Because of their outfit (heavy black clothing, ski masks, helmets), the "Autonome" were dubbed der schwarze Block by the German media, and in these tactics were similar to modern black blocs. In 1989, laws regarding demonstrations in Germany were changed, prohibiting the use of so-called "passive weaponry" such as helmets or padding and covering your face.
Today, the "autonome" scene in Germany is greatly reduced and concentrates mainly on anti-fascist actions, ecology, solidarity with refugees, and feminism. There are larger and more militant groups still in operation, such as in Switzerland or Italy.
In Greece, the "anarcho-autonomoi" ("anarchist-autonomists") emerged as an important trend in the youth and student's movement, first during the 1973 Athens Polytechnic uprising against the military dictatorship which at that time ruled the country. After the collapse of the dictatorship in 1974, the "anarcho-autonomoi" became considerably influential, firstly as a social trend within the youth and then as a (very loose and diverse) political trend. The definition "anarcho-autonomoi", itself, is much debated. One reason for this is that it was originally coined by opponents. However, it was also quite quickly adopted by many adherents, used as a generic term.
Before 1973, in Greece, there was very little tradition in Anarchism or Libertarian Socialism in general. An exception to this was Agis Stinas, an early comrade of Cornelius Castoriadis. Castoriadis belonged to Stinas's small Council Communist group (before he emigrated to France) and was influenced by it (later these roles were turned around). Such small groups which existed, were almost (physically) eliminated by the Nazis, the local establishment and the stalinist communist party during the Nazi occupation and the Greek Civil War that followed, with Castoriadis and Stinas, themselves, being two of the few survivors.
Thus, the radical Greek youth in the 70s, having very little relative background to refer to, resided to an extensive "syncretism" of multiple trends originating in the respective movements in other European countries. Anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist trends did converge with situationist, workerist or other autonomist trends and even with radical (non-autonomist) marxist trends. - The "anarcho-autonomoi" made a very strong stand during the 1978-80 student movement, coming also into violent confrontation with the police and the (also, of considerable influence) stalinist communist youth (K.N.E). Such stands were repeated again and again whenever the student's, the worker's and the youth movement were at a rise (in 1987, in 1990-91, in 1998-99, in 2006-07). However, their intensity has been falling since after 1990-91.
Parallel to such participation in social movements a large number of social-centers (many of them squatted) exist, to the day, around Greece and many of them participate in social struggles on a more local level. These social centers, whether they identify, now, as "Autonomist" or not (most use more generic terms as "anti-authoritarian", some identify as "anarchist" ), function in the ways that historically emerged through "Autonomia". - There is also a multitude of small political groups which identify as "Autonomist" (ranging from workerist to post-modernist). Most of them are still connected to the respective groups that identify as "Anarchist".
The Autonomist Marxist and Autonomen movements provided inspiration to some on the revolutionary left in English speaking countries, particularly among anarchists, many of whom have adopted autonomist tactics. Some English-speaking anarchists even describe themselves as Autonomists. The Italian operaismo movement also influenced Marxist academics such as Harry Cleaver, John Holloway, Steve Wright, and Nick Dyer-Witheford. In Denmark, the word is used as a catch-all phrase for anarchists and the extraparliamentary extreme left in general, as was seen in the media coverage of the eviction of the Ungdomshuset squat in Copenhagen in March 2007.
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Autonomism refers to a set of left-wing political and social movements and theories close to the socialist movement. As an identifiable theoretical system it first emerged in Italy in the 1960s from workerist (operaismo) communism. Later, post-Marxist and anarchist tendencies became significant after influence from the Situationists, the failure of Italian far-left movements in the 1970s, and the emergence of a number of important theorists including Antonio Negri, who had contributed to the 1969 founding of Potere Operaio, Mario Tronti, Paolo Virno, etc.
It influenced the German and Dutch Autonomen, the worldwide Social Centre movement, and today is influential in Italy, France, and to a lesser extent the English-speaking countries. Those who describe themselves as autonomists now vary from Marxists to post-structuralists and anarchists.
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The term autonomia/Autonome is derived from the Greek "auto–nomos" referring to someone or something which lives by his/her own rule. Autonomy, in this sense, is not independence. While independence refers to an autarcic kind of life, separated from the community, autonomy refers to life in society but by one's own rule. Aristotle thus considered that only beasts or gods could be independent and live apart from the polis ("community"), while Kant defined the Enlightenment by autonomy of thought and the famous "Sapere aude" ("dare to know").
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Unlike other forms of Marxism, autonomist Marxism emphasises the ability of the working class to force changes to the organization of the capitalist system independent of the state, trade unions or political parties. Autonomists are less concerned with party political organization than other Marxists, focusing instead on self-organized action outside of traditional organizational structures. Autonomist Marxism is thus a "bottom up" theory: it draws attention to activities that autonomists see as everyday working class resistance to capitalism, for example absenteeism, slow working, and socialization in the workplace.
Like other Marxists, autonomists see class struggle as being of central importance. However, autonomists have a broader definition of the working class than other Marxists: as well as wage-earning workers (both white collar and blue collar), autonomists also include the unwaged (students, the unemployed, homemakers etc.), who are traditionally deprived of any form of union representation.
Early theorists (such as Mario Tronti, Antonio Negri, Sergio Bologna and Paolo Virno) developed notions of "immaterial" and "social labour" that extended the Marxist concept of labour to all society. They suggested that modern society's wealth was produced by unaccountable collective work, and that only a little of this was redistributed to the workers in the form of wages. Other Italian autonomists - particularly feminists, such as Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Silvia Federici - emphasised the importance of feminism and the value of unpaid female labour to capitalist society.
Autonomist Marxism - referred to in Italy as operaismo, which translates literally as "workerism" - first appeared in Italy in the early 1960s. Arguably, the emergence of early autonomism can be traced to the dissatisfaction of automotive workers in Turin with their union, which reached an agreement with FIAT. The disillusionment of these workers with their organised representation, along with the resultant riots (in particular the 1962 riots by FIAT workers in Turin - "fatti di Piazza Statuto") were critical factors in the development of a theory of self-organised labour representation outside the scope of traditional representatives such as trade unions.
In 1969, the operaismo approach was active mainly in two different groups: Lotta Continua, led by Adriano Sofri (which had a very significant Roman Catholic cultural matrix) and Potere Operaio, led by Antonio Negri, Franco Piperno, Oreste Scalzone, and Valerio Morucci. Mario Capanna was the charismatic leader of the Milan student movement, which had a more classical Marxist-Leninist approach.
Through translations made available by Danilo Montaldi and others, the Italian autonomists drew upon previous activist research in the United States by the Johnson-Forest Tendency and in France by the group Socialisme ou Barbarie. The Johnson-Forest Tendency had studied working class life and struggles within the US auto industry, publishing pamphlets such as "The American Worker" (1947), "Punching Out" (1952) and "Union Committeemen and Wildcat Strikes" (1955). That work was translated into French by Socialisme ou Barbarie and published, serially, in their journal. They too began investigating and writing about what was going on inside workplaces, in their case inside both auto factories and insurance offices.
The journal Quaderni Rossi ("Red Notebooks"), produced between 1961 and 1965, and its successor Classe Operaia ("Working Class"), produced between 1963 and 1966, were also influential in the development of early autonomism. Both were founded by Antonio Negri and Mario Tronti.
Pirate radio stations also were a factor in spreading autonomist ideas. Bologna's Radio Alice was an example of such a station.
The Italian student movement, including the Indiani Metropolitani, starting from 1966 with the murder by neo-fascists of student Paolo Rossi at Rome University, engaged in various direct action operations, including riots and occupations, along with more peaceful activities such as self reduction, in which individuals refused to pay for such services and goods as public transport, electricity, gas, rent, and food. Several clashes occurred between the students and the police, during the occupations of Universities in the winter 1967-1968, during the Fiat occupations, in March 1968 in Rome during the Battle of Valle Giulia.
On March 11, 1977, riots took place in Bologna following the killing of student Francesco Lorusso by police.
Starting from 1979, the state effectively prosecuted the autonomist movement, arbitrarily claiming it protected the Red Brigades, which had kidnapped and assassinated Aldo Moro. 12,000 far-left activists were detained; 600 fled the country, including 300 to France and 200 others to South America.[1]. This was during the period known as the Years of lead.
In France, the marxist group Socialisme ou Barbarie, led by philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis, could be said to be one of the first autonomist groups, as well as having importance in the council communist tradition. Socialisme ou Barbarie drew upon the American Johnson-Forest Tendency's activist research inside US auto plants and carried out their own investigations into rank and file workers struggles - struggles autonomous of union or party leadership.
Also parallel to the work of the Johnson-Forest Tendency, Socialisme ou Barbarie harshly criticised the Communist regime in the USSR, which it considered a form of "bureaucratic capitalism" and not at all the socialism it claimed to be. Philosopher Jean-François Lyotard was also part of this movement.
However, the Italian influence of the operaismo movement was more directly felt in the creation of the review Matériaux pour l'intervention (1972–1973) by Yann Moulier-Boutang, a French economist close to Toni Negri. This led in turn to the creation of the Camarades group (1974–78). Along with others, Moulier-Boutang joined the Centre International pour des Nouveaux Espaces de Liberté (CINEL), founded three years before by Félix Guattari, and assisted Italian activists accused of terrorism, of whom at least 300 fled to France.
The French autonome mouvement organised itself in the AGPA (Assemblée Parisienne des Groupes Autonomes, "Parisian Assembly of Autonome Groups"; 1977–78). Many tendencies were present in it, including the Camarades group led by Moulier-Boutang, members of the Organisation communiste libertaire, some people referring themselves to the "Desiring Autonomy" of Bob Nadoulek, but also squatters and street-wise people (including the groupe Marge). French autonomes supported captured Red Army Faction former members. Jean-Paul Sartre also intervened on the conditions for the detention of RAF detainees.
The militant group Action Directe appeared in 1979 and carried out several violent direct actions. Action Directe claimed responsibility for the murders of Renault's CEO Georges Besse and General Audran. George Besse had been CEO of nuclear company Eurodif. Action Directe was dissolved in 1987.
In the 1980s, the autonomist movement underwent a deep crisis in Italy because of effective prosecution by the State, and was stronger in Germany than in France. It remained present in Parisian squats and in some riots (for example in 1980 near the Jussieu campus in Paris, or in 1982 in the Ardennes department during anti-nuclear demonstrations). In the 1980s, the French autonomists published the periodicals CAT Pages (1981–1982), Rebelles (1981–1993), Tout ! (1982–1985), Molotov et Confetti (1984), Les Fossoyeurs du Vieux Monde, La Chôme (1984–1985) and Contre (1987–1989).
In the 1990s, the French autonomist movement was present in struggles led by unemployed people, with Travailleurs, Chômeurs, et Précaires en colère (TCP, "Angry Workers, Unemployed, and Precarious people") and l'Assemblée générale des chômeurs de Jussieu ("General Assembly of Jussieu's unemployed people"). It was also involved in the alter-globalisation movement and above all in the solidarity with illegal foreigners (Collective Des Papiers pour tous ("Permits for all", 1996) and Collectif Anti-Expulsion (1998–2005)). Several autonomist journals date from this time: Quilombo (1988–1993), Apache (1990–1998), Tic-Tac (1995–1997), Karoshi (1998–1999), and Tiqqun (1999–2001).
From July 19 to July 28, 2002, a No borders camp was made in Strasbourg to protest against anti-immigration policies, in particular inside the Schengen European space.
In 2003, autonomists came into conflict with the French Socialist Party (PS) during a demonstration that took place in the frame of the European Social Forum in Saint-Denis (Paris). At the end of December, hundreds of unemployed people helped themselves in the Bon Marché supermarket to be able to celebrate Christmas (an action called "autoréduction" (of prices) in French). French riot police (CRS) physically opposed the unemployed people inside the shop. Autonomes rioted during the spring 2006 protests against the CPE, and again after the 2007 presidential election when Nicolas Sarkozy was elected.
In 2008, on the 11th of November, the french police arrested ten people, including five living in a farmhouse on a hill overlooking Tarnac, and accused them of associating with "a terrorist enterprise" by sabotaging TGV's overhead lines. Nine out of ten were let go and only Julien Coupat the alleged leader remain in custody, charged with "directing a terrorist group" by the Paris Prosecutor's office.
In Germany, Autonome was used during the late 1970s to depict the most radical part of the political left. These individuals participated in practically all actions of the social movements at the time, especially in demonstrations against nuclear energy plants (Brokdorf 1981, Wackersdorf 1986) and in actions against the construction of airport runways (Frankfurt 1976-1986). The defense of squats against the police such as in Hamburg's Hafenstraße was also a major "task" for the "autonome" movement. The Dutch anarchist Autonomen movement from the 1960s also concentrated on squatting.
Tactics of the "Autonome" were usually militant, including the construction of barricades or throwing stones or molotov cocktails at the police. During their most powerful times in the early 1980s, on at least one occasion the police had to take flight.
Because of their outfit (heavy black clothing, ski masks, helmets), the "Autonome" were dubbed der schwarze Block by the German media, and in these tactics were similar to modern black blocs. In 1989, laws regarding demonstrations in Germany were changed, prohibiting the use of so-called "passive weaponry" such as helmets or padding and covering your face.
Today, the "autonome" scene in Germany is greatly reduced and concentrates mainly on anti-fascist actions, ecology, solidarity with refugees, and feminism. There are larger and more militant groups still in operation, such as in Switzerland or Italy.
In Greece, the "anarcho-autonomoi" ("anarchist-autonomists") emerged as an important trend in the youth and student's movement, first during the 1973 Athens Polytechnic uprising against the military dictatorship which at that time ruled the country. After the collapse of the dictatorship in 1974, the "anarcho-autonomoi" became considerably influential, firstly as a social trend within the youth and then as a (very loose and diverse) political trend. The definition "anarcho-autonomoi", itself, is much debated. One reason for this is that it was originally coined by opponents. However, it was also quite quickly adopted by many adherents, used as a generic term.
Before 1973, in Greece, there was very little tradition in Anarchism or Libertarian Socialism in general. An exception to this was Agis Stinas, an early comrade of Cornelius Castoriadis. Castoriadis belonged to Stinas's small Council Communist group (before he emigrated to France) and was influenced by it (later these roles were turned around). Such small groups which existed, were almost (physically) eliminated by the Nazis, the local establishment and the stalinist communist party during the Nazi occupation and the Greek Civil War that followed, with Castoriadis and Stinas, themselves, being two of the few survivors.
Thus, the radical Greek youth in the 70s, having very little relative background to refer to, resided to an extensive "syncretism" of multiple trends originating in the respective movements in other European countries. Anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist trends did converge with situationist, workerist or other autonomist trends and even with radical (non-autonomist) marxist trends. - The "anarcho-autonomoi" made a very strong stand during the 1978-80 student movement, coming also into violent confrontation with the police and the (also, of considerable influence) stalinist communist youth (K.N.E). Such stands were repeated again and again whenever the student's, the worker's and the youth movement were at a rise (in 1987, in 1990-91, in 1998-99, in 2006-07). However, their intensity has been falling since after 1990-91.
Parallel to such participation in social movements a large number of social-centers (many of them squatted) exist, to the day, around Greece and many of them participate in social struggles on a more local level. These social centers, whether they identify, now, as "Autonomist" or not (most use more generic terms as "anti-authoritarian", some identify as "anarchist" ), function in the ways that historically emerged through "Autonomia". - There is also a multitude of small political groups which identify as "Autonomist" (ranging from workerist to post-modernist). Most of them are still connected to the respective groups that identify as "Anarchist".
The Autonomist Marxist and Autonomen movements provided inspiration to some on the revolutionary left in English speaking countries, particularly among anarchists, many of whom have adopted autonomist tactics. Some English-speaking anarchists even describe themselves as Autonomists. The Italian operaismo movement also influenced Marxist academics such as Harry Cleaver, John Holloway, Steve Wright, and Nick Dyer-Witheford. In Denmark, the word is used as a catch-all phrase for anarchists and the extraparliamentary extreme left in general, as was seen in the media coverage of the eviction of the Ungdomshuset squat in Copenhagen in March 2007.
