Probyn, Elspeth. "Travels in the Postmodern:
Making Sense of the Local." Feminism/Postmodernism. Ed. Linda
Nicholson. NY: Routledge, 1990.
Main purpose:
"In this chapter
I want to explore a central problematic within feminist cultural theory:
Whether the subaltern can speak. I see this problematic
composed of a number of intersecting critical questions: the epistemological
constitution of knowledge, the ontology of the questioning subject,
and the conjunctural question of where and how we may speak.
I will organize this exploration around three current metaphors: locale, location and local. 177
"I want. . .to question the hierarchical ordering of knowledge" (178)
Major Argument: --re-articulating
the locale.
". . .
in thinking of how locale is inscribed on our bodies, in our homes,
and on the streets, we can begin to loosen its ideological affects.
In uncoupling the event of patriarchy from its site, we move beyond
the silent agony of 'the problem that has no name.' In looking
at how location disqualifies certain experiences, we begin to realize
that the knowledge of locale is important and powerful. In rearticulating
the ground that is locally built around us, we give feminist answers
that show up the ideological conditions of certain postmodern questions."
Rich's "Notes toward a
Politics of Location"
--in creating our centers and our own locals, we tend to forget that
our centers displace others into the peripheries of our making.
p. 176
-- Against this totalizing gaze, Rich points out that we need to replace
the assumption of universalism and construct a feminist theory that
starts from the fragments of one's own body. 177
local -- that issuing from or related to a particular time.
指的是特定時間內的地點﹔
location
-- the methods by which one comes to locate sites of research.
Through location knowledges are ordered into sequences which are congruent
with previously established categories of knowledge.將地點定位並連貫成系列(或系統)﹔
-- 在認知層面,「定位」必然含帶對經驗或知識的價值判斷,因此也可能造成對認知對象的知識暴力(epistemic
violence)。
locale -- "a place that is the setting for a particular event.
I take this 'place' as both a discursive and non-discursive arrangement
which holds a gendered event, the home being the most obvious example"
178.
-- 地方與事件的綜合(e.g.家和家庭),既隱含外在的「定位」(location)又代表欲望場所(site
of desires)。
Living in
the Locale
- family as both an event
and a place "This separation of the family into place and
event allows Barret and McIntosh to recognize 'the powerful appeal
of the family, to acknowledge the real satisfactions that it can
offer. . . '" 181
- In recognizing a locale
we see both the regulation of practices and why those practices
in themselves might also be the source of mixed pleasures.
182
Circumventing
Location
- [There are always conflicts
between event and place, although we may not be able to articulate
them.]
- Spivak's argument --
For Spivak the subaltern cannot speak because "the ontology of the
Western subject necessitates and creates the other: the silent subaltern"
(183). "epistemic violence"
- Baudrillard's-- "others
disappear because they are impossible and places become simulacra:
postcards without people.
- Using Foucault -- "In
its hierarchical movement, location insists on a taxonomy of experience.
One doesn't have to scratch the surface very deeply to find that
class, race, and gender have a lot to do with whose experiences
are on top. The classification of experience, moreover,
is indivisible from what came before and which knowledges stand
as previously sanctioned." (184)
- Feminists-- "work between
and among sanctioned categories of knowledge jostles the sequencing
of location" (185).
Making Sense
of the Local
- not
to give up on the local but rather to work more deeply in and against
it.
(external)
Literary
Criticism Databank: Postmodernism and Urban Space ;
Postmodern Theories and Texts ;
Postmodern Space, Postcolonial Resistance Spring, 1999
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