Constituting Feminist Subjects by Kathi Weeks

Author:Kathi Weeks
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

This thoroughly immanent and highly complex conception of totality (taken not from History and Class Consciousness but from a later text, written in a very different historical context) is, unfortunately, not that which underpins the concept of the identical subject-object of history. This ideal of a single, unified subject of history is simply inconsistent with such a complex web of social and historical forces. One must presume a highly unified social formation in order to imagine that the “general will” could be concentrated within the will of one group that could then represent the rest.

Although feminist standpoint theories do not posit women as the identical subject-object of history, there are, I would argue, residues of the same formula in some versions of this feminist project. In particular, the affirmation in some of the original feminist standpoint theories of a single feminist standpoint, “the” feminist standpoint, resonates with Lukács’s idea of the subject-as-totality. That is, the notion of a single feminist standpoint suggests that it in effect contains within itself the “general will” of all feminists, or perhaps even the unrecognized interest of all women. Conceived in these terms, unity takes precedence over multiplicity and the project is conceived in terms of the construction of a single feminist standpoint rather than multiple, overlapping standpoints.20 The concept of a single feminist standpoint conflates what are, from my perspective, two contradictory conceptions of the subject, both of which we found in Lukács: a subject as group or collectivity and a subject as unity modeled after the figure of the individual. Before I can build on the former notion of a collective subject, I must first eliminate all traces of the latter formulation of the total subject. This requires an alternative conception of the totality of social forces, one that can recognize the presence of a multiplicity of subject positions from which a multitude of feminist subjects could emerge.

Lukács presents his project as an attempt to separate out and release that which is still living in Hegel (1971, xlv). What he found and tried to reclaim was a dialectical perspective, one that restores to Marxism a conception of reality as a process constituted through the interaction between collective subjects and the structural and historical terms of their social existence. Although this is, I would argue, part of the remedy for those forms of thinking that would exclude the constitutive force of subjectivity, such as the various forms of positivism, determinism, and functionalism, Lukács unfortunately did not restrict his return to Hegel to this limited conception of dialectics. As his problematic analysis of the potential role of the proletarian subject suggests, he was not as selective in his reappro-priation of Hegel as we might wish. In addition to—and even in contradiction to—that more minimal conception of dialectics that focuses on mutually constitutive interactions among social forces, Lukács also recovers certain dimensions of the Hegelian Dialectic, that grand narrative of history with its closed, predetermined dynamic and its transcendental subject. In this case the role is

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