Gutterman
A Critique of His Critique
. . .
Or Poor PoMo Masculine Speculations

Lecture
March 26, 1997
University of Toronto - Erindale

The first heading to be found in David Gutterman's piece "Postmodernism and the Interrogation of Masculinity" encapsulates the severe limitations of the piece. Although Gutterman invokes the name of Michel Foucault to authoritatively establish that "systems of power in a given society produce social subjects discursively" (219), he is woefully unacquainted with the effect of his own discursive practices, to wit the obvious impact of grammar on the conceptual categories that he manipulates for our readerly contemplation. The alliteration is not quite catchy. There's a glitch:

Shifting Subjects, Indeterminate Identities, Ascribing Agency

"Shifting Subjects" is a good way to begin for Gutterman is trying to argue that shifts in Western concepts of the subject have opened up possibilities for the revamped subject to shift social relations. "Shifting" works well to convey the sense of the shifters shifted. Gutterman abandons the gerund in the next pair "Indeterminate Identities" which is of course a gloss on the loss of fixed subject positions. As you will see, my resistive reading of Gutterman's piece runs along a rewritten script: identifying indeterminacies. (It may not be what he had in mind when he concludes the essay with a call to rewrite the scripts of normative masculinity.) And again the rewrite preserves that delicious ambiguity: the indeterminacies both identify and are identified.

Well when it comes to agency the rewrite has to be a tad more extensive. Gutterman has dropped the plural! Of course, the Agency that ascribes agency is the single author's own agency. The invitation to reread Gutterman's piece in the autobiographical mode is triggered by the last line of the last footnote "I am trying to open up these categories of identification rather than close them around me like a protective shield." (236, n. 20) Let us resist the temptation to leave Gutterman's words as is, that is to forgo any rewrite and accept the rules of an autobiographical game of feints and revelations.

The authorial voice is earnest. And even if it were ironic to read the final sentence is also to recall that it tells a story inscribed from the inception: a story of blocked alternatives. The heading, which acts as an incipit can be take to have a predicative structure, can be taken as a sentence that tells a story and selects certain alternatives over others. The alliterative heading is parsable: shifting subjects and indeterminate identities are ascribing agency. In other words agency is rendered possible because identity shifts.

This is not quite what Gutterman is saying. He offers more a correlation between multiple identity and agency rather than a causal relation. This is partly due to his positioning the Postmodern as a coming after. He is not alone in adopting a descriptive label and using it as a tag for periodization (contra some very paralogical moves of more able commentators and theorists). But let us do a bit of grammar work ourselves to understand just how discourse can construct subjects.

Grab a piece of paper or open a text application window or follow this in your head as we go along. Either write the word "me" or write your name. Those of you who are paranoid of your neighbours or don't trust where this exercise is going can be smart and write "your name" for your name. [Pause] Whatever you write can be interpreted as an identifier. But for an identification to occur the identifier has to be applied to some body... [Pause]

Now those of you who wrote a name write "me" and those who wrote "me" write some name, yours or anybody's. You should now have two identifiers. When talking to someone else you could easily use either of the identifiers. What happens when you talk to yourself. Where did that voice come from, YOU ask. Write down "you", along with your "me" and your "name". WHERE did you write that last item? Do you have a vertical list? a row? a triangle? [PAUSE]

What we have done so far is to demonstrate that attention to identification can split. This, however, is not the same thing as saying identification is splitable. The split is in the attention to the identification not in the identification itself. All this may mean is that the speaker is moving too fast through a set of identifiers for the listener to keep up.

Woah! Let's make this simpler. Let's just put aside the question of identification which is a relation between an object of identification and an identifying subject. With "me," "you" we have a self in dialogue. [ADD WE To the diagram]

No trace of this borderline schizophrenic in Gutterman. No sense of process. There is a series of terms substituted as if they were synonyms: subject, individual, agent. And there is some reference to the forces set against not the classic self-determination of the subject but the multiplication of individual identities. If your propensities, especially your political inclinations, lead you to resist multiple identities for yourself, then in the Gutterman scheme of things you risk not only inauthenticity but also being the enemy because your non-multiple identity according to Gutterman via William Connolly would be based on demonizing difference as other.

Well, let's bring Mr. Gutterman's story into our pronoun game. The bad guys are "they". At first, "they" are placed on top where the oppressive meanines usually are. Then, when "me-you-we", the so-called oppressed, are suitably indoctrinated in Gutterman's strategy of resistence through multiple identities, the subject positions shift. "They" are on the bottom: vanquished. As if...

What I want to demonstrate here by this caricature is the manner in which Gutterman short circuit's the accomplishment of very laudable intentions and to offer ways of re-wiring the AC/DC current he seems to want to tap into. First the branding and shield metaphors he invokes are complicit with a topography of the subject where there is a clear barrier between inside and outside. Identities are placed upon (branded) or hidden behind (shield). Admittedly he wants to get away from that.