4.36

The objection may be raised that telling stories is not reasoning, not objectifying the world.  The point here is that knowledge production of whatever sort passes through social relations.  There is no unmediated access to a world.  Access, by participation or by detachment, involves power.

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4.37

In situations where the ethical argument holds, where appeals are made to the character of a speaker or interpreter, be they in book-learning or oral cultures, mnemonic devices are never very far from the person of the knowledge producers, the epistemic interlocutors.  Such tools are important attributes of all persons involved.  Havelock's lone rhapsode may equally be controlled by collective constraints.  Indeed his account by stressing agonistic features acknowledges the claims of counter- memories.

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4.38

Just as counter-memories imply counter-narratives or in less polarized accounts, variations, the paradigm stories of psychoanalytic discourse itself are subject to variant readings of its own condensations and displacements, its own dreamwork tropes.  A space is opened for rhetorical analysis.

4.38

4.39

The Oedipal paradigm centres on the acquisition of language.  It matters little if separation anxiety as postulated by object relations theory precedes or follows the achievement of linguistic ability.  In one case it is a reaction, a result; in the other, motive or cause.  Language is like a fence against denied psychic content or like a knife cutting off the repressed content, instituting the denial.  These similes highlight the axiomatic status within object relations theory of an instrumental concept of language.  Object relations theory itself does not employ these similies of knife or fence.  In psychoanalytic narratives of separation anxiety or stories of castration menace, language does things.  Language acquisiton is comparable to the grasping of a tool to cut and contain.  But language is also done.

4.39

4.40

Language as material product is worked upon.  Language is practised.  Language also refers to the site where practices and products meet.  Technical vocabularies attempt to control this polysemy.  For example, the structuralist terminology of language, langue and parole corresponds to faculty, rules and acts of expression.  These distinctions work well in considering the relation of system to performance.  They work well in theorizing the actualization of potentials.  They offer points of departure and arrival.

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4.41

They do not alleviate tendencies to conflate place and means when language is considered as a medium.  The conflation is inevitable.  A place is a means.  Places are prepared.  Wisdom of sacred sites.  The uncanny energy of domestic arrangements.  The house of language.  The analogies are potent and have consequences for thinking language's relation to the body.

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4.42

If language is a tool for the fashioning of self and the construction of an other, it is the body and its zones that facilitate the entry into language.  Is the body, this means to an end, a tool?  An instrument upon which the infant plays?  A tantalizing alignment ensues:  text as instrument, text as infant.

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4.43

The jump from language to text through those teasing unvoiced dentals and their alliteration (text tantalizing infant instrument) issues from the seduction of the signifier.  Already the rearrangement implies text as agent of a pleasurable irritation, on the infant-instrument, of the infant- instrument, in the infant-instrument.  The difficulty in ascribing a preposition matches the difficulty of ascribing agency:  the text?  the infant?

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4.44

With Flax is reached the limit of the infant as patient.  With Bordo, the limit of the agency of the instrument.  It is the limit of insertion that guides Dorothy Smith's discourse.  Unlike the feminists inspired by psychoanalysis, Smith does not invoke interiorization as a developmental mechanism.  In fact, her standpoint epistemology is not developmental.  However the dynamics of inside/outside structuration shape her claim for the suppression of bodily consciousness upon entry into the "abstracted conceptual mode".

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4.45

Following Marx and Engels, in particular The German Ideology, Smith relates consciousness to what people do, not what they are.  The social division of labour places constraints on action and hence on consciousness.  The ways people think about and express themselves depend upon their embeddedness in an everyday world.  When Smith grafts phenomenological sociology on to this materialist base, her analyses shift towards meditations on spheres of activity.  Consciousness becomes spatialized.  One enters a cognitive mode.  As well she also situates both practices of knowledge production and spheres of activity in a sexual division of labour.

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4.46

Grossly, her argument depends upon a mapping of private and public space onto physical and conceptual activity respectively.  This mapping is mediated by an implicit reading of social reproduction as woman's work and management or ruling as men's.  Women by analogy are in a position similar to the working class (n9).  The limits of the analogy remain unexplored.  When she further argues that the arrangement's perpetuation depends upon its unacknowledgement by those whom it benefits, that is, the ruling class, her epistemology, like that of psychoanalytic feminists, hinges upon repression as a prerequisite for abstract reasoning.

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4.47

Although she makes no explicit reference to the difference between class consciousness and class analysis, between knowing one's place in a system and knowing the system, it is such a distinction that informs her assessment of material and conceptual labour as epistemological stances.  The values she assigns are of course informed by considerations of gender.  What she calls acting in the "abstracted conceptual mode" is associated with ruling.  The physical labour that supports this mode is "done typically by women" (Smith 1977, 165).  The one is ignorant;  the other, all-knowing.

4.47