4.9

Likewise in reference to the worlds generated by discourses, the epistemology of Stanley and Wise will not privilege access to an unmediated objective world.  Their discussion of Popper's three world model for example makes this clear (n1).  Smith's standpoint epistemology evolves out of responses to the phenomenological sociology of Alfred Schutz, responses that can be read as a reversal of the hierarchal relation between Schutz's categories of paramount reality and scientific domain.  Measured against Stanley and Wise, Smith's epistemology would appear insufficiently dialectical, insufficiently prepared to begin again.

4.9

4.10

Obviously, the present comparative examination esteems dialectical thinking and self-reflexivity as positive values.  It is a bias.  A style.

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4.11

Let us see what it can do.  Following Patricia Meyer Spacks on Simone de Beauvoir and masculine standards of accomplishment (Spacks 19), Stanley and Wise state:

We are uncomfortably aware that similar remarks can ­­ and should ­­ be levelled at our own style of presentation and mode of argument, as well as that of many other feminist writers.  Words, sentences, writing styles, ways of presenting arguments, arguments themselves, criticism, all these are part and parcel of masculinist culture.  They are among the artefacts of sexism, and their use structures our experience before we can even begin to examine it, because they provide with how we think as well as how we write.  We are in a circle [...] Of course it isn't quite like this.  The social world is neither so determinate nor so relentlessly sexist as this ­­ but that it is presented as such is an important feature of the means by which sexism is perpetuated. (Stanley and Wise 1993, 179)

Fears of contamination bred from an us-them division of discursive property, a simply bipartisan distribution of the terms and styles of argmentation can hamper the transfer of critical theory into political action.  As the example of Stanley and Wise demonstrates, dialectical thinking potentially generates complication.  At every turn, inertia, set ideas, frozen interpretative frames are eluded.  Yet, paradoxically the mind's movement can question the goodness of overcoming inertia.  The value of recursivity is radically contextual.

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4.12

Dialectic is not a forte of other feminists.  Determinism and dyads mark analyses like those of Jane Flax that stem from Nancy Chodorow's The Reproduction of Mothering.  The latter's position has been caricatured as blaming the mother for the production of sexism.  One easily reads such deterministic stances from her text, if one is not careful to remark that parenting and its ideological constructs are only claimed as one site of struggle among others:

An ideology of women as mothers extends to women's responsibilities as maternal wives for emotional reconstitution and support of their working husbands.  Assumptions that the social organization of parenting is natural and proper (that women's child care is indistinguishable from their childbearing, that women are for biological reasons better parents than men, moral arguments that women ought to mother) have continued to serve as grounds for arguments against most changes in the social organization of gender.  ( Chodorow 219)

The text in its use of plural forms intimates that there may be other grounds for the articulation of the resistance to change.  For example, the sartorial industries, the producers of wedding gowns and sex trade accoutrements, certainly do not advocate restructuring the social organization of gender.  Attitudes towards parenting are not an explain-all and Chodorow never claims to build a totalizing theory.

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4.13

Ironically, deterministic postures in their psychoanalytic guise evolve from Chodorow's account.  This is the case of Jane Flax.  She focuses on the male child's relation to the mother to produce a single narrative of separation.  It is a narrative where she emphasizes the inevitability of the developmental outcome:

He must become male.  In order to do so he must become not female, since under patriarchy gender is an exclusionary category. [original emphasis] (Flax 246)

Absent here are a differentiation between gender and sex or an acknowledgement that patriarchy (n2)  under capitalism is very pliant (Gender roles often shift in war economies).  Note under patriarchy in Flax's version man becomes, woman is.  Flax's account seems to replicate the existence of an eternal feminine used to define historical male subjectivity.  How then will patriarchy be dismantled?  The solution rests on the alignment of several psychoanalytic postulates:  the eternal-feminine-coupled-to-male-subjectivity structure depends upon the repression on the part of men of infantile dependence and since this repression is equivalent to an investment of frustrated energies in the figure of the mother which is then cast out and since any woman can signify the mother figure, the structure will be dissolved when men cease repressing feelings of dependence and powerlessness, cease investing energy in figures to be cast away and cease reading all women as incarnations of the Mother figure.  Baldly stated the argument suggests that if men did not grow up, they would not demonize women.  The argument rests on shakey universal premises:  all women are mothers; all men desire mothers.  One might perhaps recognize here the twin premises of heteronormativity.  Psychoanalytic convolutions aside, even an unanxious relation to parent figures is no guarantee against adoption of a cognitive style to which someone somewhere will object because it appears to lack emotion in its commitment to reason.

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4.14

When the repression thesis is applied to the adoption of cognitive styles difficulties arise.  Flax asks what is repressed in philosophical discourse.  She invokes the Oedipal plot and its outcome, the repression of dependence and powerlessness, to find that philosophical discourse represses "the interactive character of early human development" (251).  The connection is not clear unless one fantasizes that the boys doing philosophy are liable to feel threatened if they recognize interaction (read "involvement" according to Arnault's typology) as a valid philosophical topic or as an important factor in philosophical exchange.

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4.15

The existence of philosophers of the male gender who discuss emotion and cognition, reason and passion, in non-exclusive terms before feminist critiques became widespread leads one to question how "philosophy" is constructed in Flax's discourse (n3).  It is telling that her analyses are organized by name not by theme.  This is not attachment to the names of the fathers.  This is the discursive practice of case studies.  They deal with lives not bodies.

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4.16

The use of case studies presents the problem of induction.  However Flax's mode is not one of generalization from particulars.  The case studies illustrate theory.  They do not generate or modify theory.  Within her psychoanalytic framework, case studies have no impact on theory.  Every case is a life.  Every life is marked by the same crescendo organised along the dynamics of the Oedipal plot.  In Flax this is marked by the attribution of unsurpassed intensity to infancy:

This period [infancy] is marked not only by physical and emotional dependency but by an intensity of experience which will never be repeated except in psychosis and perhaps in altered states of consciousness such as religious or drug experiences.  Precisely because it is prerational and preverbal, it is difficult for the infant to screen, sort and modify its experience. (Flax 254)

In this paragraph Flax juxtaposes three elements:  infant difficulty displayed in handling experience;  equation of reason and language;  marginalization of intense experience.  Flax seems unaware that altered states of consciousness are mightily repeatable.  Furthermore, a bit of dialectical thinking would force a bit of modification in the relation of adults to childhood experience.  Questioning the distinction between altered and non-altered states invites a reassessment of margin and infant and the intensity ascribed to them.

4.16