Toward a Feminist Postmodern and Postcolonial Interpretation of Sin-2 - 中国人民大学 - 佛教与宗教学理论研究所 
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Toward a Feminist Postmodern and Postcolonial Interpretation of Sin-2

作者: 佚名 来源:本站原创 点击数:2036 更新时间:2004-05-25 19:37:49

Much of Foucault's work investigates how individuals and whole communities have been regulated in a myriad of ways by the discursive mechanisms of power. Discourses of medicine, jurisprudence, sexuality, religion, and so forth, constitute powerful forces determining the true, the right, the normal. These discourses and their mechanisms of implementation do not merely impinge on the individual as a "pre-given entity which is seized by the exercise of power. [Rather, the] individual ... is the product of a relation of power exercised over bodies ... movements, desires."19 The individual is constituted as a subject by being "subjected to" the apparatuses of truth-conveying power discourses, referred to in a kind of Foucauldian shorthand as "power/knowledge."20 Foucault's point about power is that even in the midst of a subjugating process, an agential subject is being produced. Individuals "are always in the position of simultaneously undergoing and exercising ... power. They are not only its inert or consenting target; they are always the elements of its articulation" and, hence, there follows the possibility if not the actuality of what he calls an "insurrection of subjugated knowledges."21 These knowledges are marginalized discourses that emerge to resist society's dominant discourses. Thus, related to the notion of the discursive constitution of subjects is the notion that power is not only coercive but also productive: "Power must be analysed as something that circulates. ... [Moreover] there are no relations of power without resistances."22

     This theory of power has positive applications for decentering the essentialism of a dominator/dominated opposition. The theory enables us to go beyond the truism that everyone is to some extent both oppressor and oppressed—a truism that, taken alone, could suggest the dangerously relativistic notion that all oppressions are equal. My use of poststructuralism to decenter the label "oppressed" is not focused on exposing banally that a subjugated person in some set of power relations may be a dominating subject in another; rather, I want to focus attention on Foucault's claim that power/knowledge presupposes a relationship with an other who is "an acting subject" and who, therefore, as we will see below, is a subject with potentially insurrectional knowledge.23 One never speaks simply of power but rather of power relations. Hence, according to this theory, the oppressed person is also always an agent to some extent, and the oppressor is not the sole possessor of a commodity called power.

     A critique that white feminist liberation theologians, womanist theologians, and others might raise is that the notion of an oppressed subject who acts is vacuous in light of the extent of the unjust structures that oppress women, people of color, the poor, and so on. Ruether speaks of the "universal cultural structure" of sexism that posits female nature as inferior to male nature, and Williams speaks of how the "American national conscience is thoroughly saturated with the idea of ... white racial narcissism."24 They are correct to indicate the repressive intensity and insidious pervasiveness of the mechanisms of sexism and racism. Neither theologian, however, would want to imply that these oppressions constitute a totalizing monopoly, crushing all forms of resistance, since both Ruether and Williams point to a history of resistance to racism, sexism, classism, and so forth. Here Foucault's genealogical approach to history is helpful in accounting for how structural oppression can be seen as pervasive yet nonmonolithic and nontotalizing.

     "Genealogy" is Foucault's term for the type of analysis of history that traces power from its localized and "infinitessimal mechanisms."25 No trajectory of the movement of power or its centralization is presupposed; indeed, what is uncovered is a complex and "unstable assemblage of faults, fissures and heterogenous layers" of historical events.26 Genealogical investigation is oriented to uncovering not only an "endlessly repeated play of dominations" but also the breakthrough of resistant power/knowledge.27 Genealogy unmasks (1) how putatively monolithic power structures are disseminated in local social and institutional networks (some feminists call this a microlevel analysis of power, helpful for analyzing complex and context-dependent social and legal problems such as flirting, as opposed to sexual harassment) and (2) how broad-ranging cultural meanings are inscribed on psyches and bodies to create macrolevel power/knowledge regimes, which are then used to label whole groups of subjects as, for example, delinquents, insane, or sexual deviants.28 From this genealogical perspective, what liberation theology calls social or structural sin could be analyzed for how those structures of domination subjugate on micro- and macrolevels. Furthermore, because this theory also exposes how power circulates (nearly) everywhere, it would not thereby essentialize women as victims of these various subjugating "isms." Quite the contrary. Genealogy's interest in subjugated knowledges can open up possibilities for perceiving the disruptive emergence of women's liminal identities and transgressive practices.29

     This poststructuralist appeal to the circulation of power, however, must be held accountable to the realities of unremitting structural oppression. Although some, or even many, oppressed individuals can be seen as positively accessing subject-forming power, nevertheless, the overall disciplinary effects of certain power/knowledge mechanisms on whole communities of people require the theologian to affirm that an identity-politics invocation of the labels of "oppressor" and "oppressed" is often rhetorically appropriate because they are politically necessary. Hence, I would argue that something like Spivak's notion of strategic essentialization is needed in addition to poststructuralism for the task of theorizing selfhood and agency. Originally directed to a subaltern studies group of postcolonial historians in India who were analyzing insurgency against Western colonial encroachment, Spivak's term is meant to resist the erasure of the politically engaged, oppressed subaltern subject, while also acknowledging that agents of resistance must also be presented in their discursive complexity. Spivak suggests that the revolutionary consciousness of the subaltern be seen as a kind of "theoretical fiction" invoked for "strategic use ... in a scrupulously visible political interest," such as liberation from tyranny.30 Hence, in specific situations, appealing to an oppressed identity is necessary when oppression creates subaltern subjects for whom the circulation of power has been effectively cut off.

     Spivak provides a category that affirms what is strategically essential for womanists, for example, to claim about the ongoing and debilitating oppressions suffered by whole communities of African American women, men and children.31 Williams's term "demonarchy" can be interpreted (as Spivak does using subaltern studies analysis) as "an interventionist strategy" on the part of the theorist that reads back into history the presence of a generalized hegemonic force (demonarchy) that provokes a collective consciousness of resistance among a particular oppressed group (African American women). This is not a luxury according to Spivak: "the unified consciousness of the subaltern must inhabit the strategy of ... historians."32 To say it is a political strategy is not to eclipse the reality of the oppression; it is to acknowledge, as Williams and other womanists in fact do in their historical and sociological analyses, that demonarchy is not one thing but a widely dispersed and historically changing network of white racist mechanisms, ranging from enslavement to exploitation of wage-labor to racist eugenics, and so on.

     Social sin is a dominant category for feminist discussions of sin; however, as suggested by Williams above, the category of so-called individual sin continues to be important for understanding women's moral agency. In the section that follows, I will attempt to demonstrate how Butler's Foucauldian notion of performativity provides a fruitful approach to theorizing the self who sins—without, however, falling into a privatized view of individual sin or inscribing a male/female binarism.



II.  DECONSTRUCTING THE SEX BINARISM IN FEMINIST THEOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

     It has been noted that theological anthropology as a distinct doctrinal locus "is relatively new to the theologian's agenda," having received much of its impetus as Christian theologians endeavored to respond to the secularism in the Enlightenment's turn to the subject.33 An important figure in this stream of modern theology is Søren Kierkegaard, whose existentialist starting point typifies an anthropological approach to sin found in thinkers as diverse as Reinhold Niebuhr and Judith Plaskow.34 Kierkegaard's writings are explicitly being retrieved by a number of current (mostly white) feminist scholars who find in his discussions of sin an anthropology they believe has great potential for gender equality and for addressing more fully female and male experiences of sin. I flag the Kierkegaardian feminists' interpretations of sin because they constitute an example of how scholars who focus a critical eye on issues of sexism and androcentrism in the tradition can, nevertheless, overlook the problematic entailments of sex binarism.

     Kierkegaard identifies two types of sinful ways of responding to the inability to synthesize "infinitude and finitude": the despair of weakness and the despair of defiance.35 Though the despair of weakness (one form of which Kierkegaard describes as "not to will to be oneself") is culturally identified as a feminine trait, in contrast to the defiantly masculine "despair to will to be oneself," both sins are intermeshed and found in women and men.36 Neither weakness nor defiance (theo)logically predominates. Kierkegaardian feminists approve of the way Kierkegaard maintains a fruitful "dialectical tension" between the two kinds of gendered sin.37 They conclude that there is a "complementary wholeness" in the way he specifies that the path to overcoming sin requires implementing the opposite mode of being (in an attitude of faith): the person caught in the despair of weakness needs masculine self-assertion, and the person caught in the despair of defiance needs feminine self-giving.38 They find a positive kind of androgyny in his view of selfhood that "includes both masculine and feminine modes of relating," because this "common structure of selfhood" could potentially foster "a fuller development of individuality and relatedness in both sexes" that avoids damaging hierarchies.39 Some feminist interpreters of Kierkegaard conclude that sexist statements of his such as "the woman actually relates to God only through the man" should be interpreted in light of Kierkegaard reflecting societal gender conventions that he "personally wished to avoid." His deeply held belief, they claim, was that "the distinction man-woman vanishes" in relation to God.40

     I am not at all opposed to feminist critical retrievals of the views of male theologians in the tradition (even ones whose sexist comments cannot be mitigated in some way).41 Nevertheless I have a number of reservations about the Kierkegaardian anthropological model, not the least of which is a male/female binarism. Let me first demonstrate that a sex binarism is at play here and then give arguments for why such a binarism entails heterosexism. The Kierkegaardian feminist appeal to binary sex differentiation is part of an effort to promote an androgyny model of selfhood where masculine and feminine gender attributes can be combined. This approach is based on the assumption that gender is culturally constructed, as compared with sex, which supposedly is not. One writer comments that, "without negating sexual differences, one can ultimately look beyond them to a common model of selfhood not defined by gender."42 That is, gender stereotypes are seen as open to cultural redefinition, but sex is seen as a self-evident bodily given. Sex differentiation is, in other words, natural: "One of the things that we inevitably are ... is male or female."43 I would argue that however much one tries to complicate male and female selfhood (e.g., saying that men can despair in womanly weakness or women can despair in manly defiance), one still has not adequately addressed the assumed natural male/female sex differentiation structure. Why is the assumption about a natural sex binarism so problematic? Isn't it enough to show that gender is culturally constructed and hence open to resignification? An increasing number of feminist theorists are contesting the viewpoint that gender fluidity is enough. Many of these theorists draw from the groundbreaking poststructuralist analysis of Judith Butler that any claim about natural male/female sex differentiation inscribes a discursive regime of normative "naturalized heterosexuality," which functions prejudicially toward sexualities that deviate from that norm.44

     Butler critically retrieves Foucault's analysis of gender, sex, and sexuality in order to deconstruct the idea, so dear to Western (biblically shaped) culture, that sex is a natural attribute. Early feminists, such as Simone de Beauvoir, began a hard-fought battle to gain acceptance for the idea that "one is not born a woman, but, rather, becomes one."45 The notion is now broadly accepted that gender (masculine and feminine) is culturally constructed. Butler pushes feminist thinking to its next (poststructuralist) level, arguing that "`sex' is as culturally constructed as gender."46 That is, there is no natural sexed subject prior to the discursive regimes that subject bodies to certain gender-specific regulations and that promote certain sexual practices and affectivities. These discursive regimes do not just influence persons who stand in some way outside of discourse; they regulate self-knowledge and "contour the materiality of bodies."47 In our culture, the dominant discourse of heterosexuality constructs male and female sex as opposites that attract. That is, man is constructed as the male sex who desires the female; woman is constructed as the female sex who desires the male. Sexed bodies, in other words, are seen as "`a cause' of sexual ... desire." According to this view, any other form of desire is a noncoherent sexuality, an unnatural inversion of a putatively natural heterosexuality. Butler argues the exact reverse: that the so-called cause (sex) is actually "`an effect,' the production of a given regime of sexuality."48 Heterosexuality is a pervasive cultural regime whose hegemony is a factor of its multiple, localized disciplinary mechanisms. The discourse of heterosexuality is dispersed in a myriad of societal institutions (advertising, education, religion, medicine, etc.) and shapes our understanding of natural/unnatural in order to produce normalized subjects who conceive of themselves as having a coherent heterosexual identity secure in the intermeshing of biology and libido. Foucauldian theory discursively decenters the assumed coherence of sex and sexuality as cause and effect; Butler further analyzes their perceived naturalness in terms of performativity.

     Performativity is a notion Butler derives by combining Foucault's view of discursively constructed identity with the theories of speech-acts by philosopher J. L. Austin and deconstructive philosopher Jacques Derrida. Butler states that a "performative act is one which brings into being or enacts what it names" (Austin's classic example of a performative utterance is the vow "I do," which constitutively inaugurates a marriage). Derrida takes this idea of words constituting a reality in an intertextual direction. Inherent in any discursive performance is the "citation and repetition" of (con)textual convention; when one acts, one is "citing" previous "texts" (with "texts" meaning not just writings but any signifying activity).49 Hence, to be discursively constructed is to be "performatively constituted."50 Performativity is not analogous to theatrical or dance performance—if one is presupposing an actor or dancer apart from the "stage" of discursive relations. Performativity means the way things are constituted in the saying/doing. It is not performance as playacting.51 A poststructuralist focus on the performative is meant to deconstruct philosophical assumptions about a pre-given "doer [or playactor] behind the deed." Agency is not defined in terms of a core self prior to cultural and linguistic structures to which one might attach certain attributes (e.g., will, intention, freedom); rather, agency is constituted in a process of negotiating multiple cultural discourses about such attributes. The poststructuralist theorist engages in "the difficult labor of deriving agency from the very power regimes which constitute us" and form our understanding of ourselves as centers of will, intention, freedom, and so forth.52 The agential power of the postmodern subject is analyzed in terms of performatives (i.e., bodily performative acts) situated in terms of societal conventions that one both cites and resignifies in one's utterances or actions. (There can be both complicity and sometimes "parodic" resistance to those conventions.)53 Men and women can be spoken of poststructurally as embodying particular societal conventions of maleness and femaleness when performing their sex, gender, and sexuality. Performativity theory emphasizes that the sexed body has no substantial "ontological status" but rather is constituted in performative acts.54 Thus, the notion of discursive performance reinforces Foucault's critique of the idea that sexuality is naturally caused by a pre-given sexed body.

     In light of this theory of discursive performativity, I want to propose a poststructuralist reformulation of sin from a theological anthropological starting point in order to show how one could avoid the sex binarism problem I have noted in Kierkegaardian feminist writings. (There are other theological benefits from such a reformulation as well.) If selfhood is constituted and reconstituted performatively, and if sin (very formally) is some kind of action or attitude impeding one's relationship with God, then sin poststructurally speaking would be the self engaging in discursive relations in distorted ways that impede godly performativity. It is difficult to find the appropriate overarching metaphor for this spiritually distorted discursive relationality. For the sake of argument, let me call it a "narrowing" of relationality. This sinful discursive narrowing can be thought of as happening in two modes: as undue cooperation with disciplinary power and as underdeveloped cooperation with disciplinary power.55 Let me explain what I mean by undue and underdeveloped cooperation and how they can be characterized as a sinful narrowing of relationality.

     Both undue and underdeveloped cooperation with power/knowledge must be understood against the backdrop of Foucault's theory of how selves are constituted through relations with normalizing discursive regimes. As discussed above, Foucault analyzes some classic normalizing disciplines with a focus on particularly oppressive power/knowledges in prisons, insane asylums, and hospitals of past centuries. However, one should also think of discourses that shape us with what we hope would be less frightening institutional manifestations: academe, religion, child rearing, sports and exercise, patriotism, and so forth. A normalizing disciplinary power can and does entail levels of "pleasure" for the subject who is being performatively normalized. Foucault explains: "If power were never anything but repressive, if it never did anything but to say no, do you really think one would be brought to obey it? What makes power ... accepted, is simply the fact that it ... induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse."56 My use of the term "cooperation" attempts to get at this often misunderstood aspect of Foucauldian power theory. That is, power is not simply imposed. It produces something: a subject whose agency is constituted in the process of interacting performatively with power/knowledge.

     Given this analysis of power relations, there would seem to be a temptation (as the theologian might say) to maximize one's pleasure in cooperating with a particular discursive regime with the result that one's identity performativity mimics to an extreme the disciplinary power with which one has unduly cooperated. We can describe this performativity in terms of what has classically been called sin against God. For example, undue cooperation with any of the power/knowledge regimes mentioned above (e.g., academe, religion, patriotism) makes what (religiously speaking) should be a relative good (the pleasure of scholarship, a practice of piety, or love of country) into the supreme good. Not only is the relation among relative goods disordered, but what should be the supreme good (allegiance to God) is supplanted by another allegiance. Undue cooperation with a discursive regime can also be seen as a sin against one's neighbor. An undue pursuit of any of the three disciplinary discourses listed above might yield something like this: an ivory tower academic, a religious fanatic, or a xenophobe. The performativity in these examples entails the risk of an abuse of power with repressive (sinful) effects on others, such as, respectively, the less educated person whom one treats condescendingly, the nonbeliever whom one condemns, the foreigner whom one viscerally mistrusts.

     This construal of sin as undue cooperation with a disciplinary power presupposes the notion mentioned previously that power circulates, so that the cooperation cannot be simply explained away as unavoidable coercion or cultural brainwashing. Some feminists have referred to Foucault's notion of the disciplined "docile" body as descriptive of the way women are dominated and victimized by the mechanisms of patriarchal culture with which they are forced to cooperate.57 If one analyzes power only in this way, one could not call undue cooperation with disciplinary power a sin; it would be an instance of being structurally sinned against. However, if one accepts Foucault's claim that the normalizing process necessarily entails (except in cases of extreme domination) some circulation of power, then agency (not just victimization) is constituted.58 Moreover, one can speak of a morally accountable agent. After all, North American society may pressure a woman toward, for example, obsession with dieting, but (with the exception of very dominated docile bodies where the obsession degenerates into anorexia or other eating disorders) no one is really forced to go to Weight Watchers. One can choose to submit unduly to a normalizing regime such as this. One has the choice to broaden one's discursive relationality in order to avoid letting the "pleasure" of cooperating with dieting become a narrow, rigid obsession that is destructive to self and others. A broader, more fluid relationality could counteract a tendency toward undue cooperation with a particular discursive regime, because one's performativity in one discursive context would be counterbalanced by negotiations with other power/knowledges, both dominant and insurrectional. The obsessive dieter would benefit from widening her discursive relations to include medical discourses of healthy body weight. These might help, but feminists would argue that medical discourses do not go to the root of the problem. One needs to contest the patriarchal male gaze that insists on sculpting the female body as thinly and docilely as possible, thus inscribing her body with conventions of femininity (gender) and female allure (sexuality). To address the oppressive effects of that male gaze, one would need to include insurrectional power/knowledges, such as critiques of the dieting industry from thealogical, womanist, and other circles.59

     The other mode of sin is the flip side of the first: underdeveloped cooperation with disciplinary power. In light of what has just been said about the first mode, the question arises: why should discursive underdevelopment be labeled sin? Wouldn't resistance to the dominant discourses of our sexist, racist, consumerist, violent society be laudable? Yes, of course. However, from a Foucauldian perspective, underdeveloped performative cooperation with power/knowledge is not resistance; it is in fact the avoidance of the conditions for resistance—namely, negotiation with power relations. Resistance arises only in and through normalizing discursive processes. Insurrectional discourses do not happen outside of discursive relations with dominant discourses; they happen as a result of relational interactions where control, discipline, and normalizing are in effect. Hence, to leave relations with a disciplinary discourse underdeveloped would be to miss the opportunity to enter that power/knowledge loop. It would be to evade power/knowledge in that context and thus avoid the conditions necessary for resistance practices to emerge.

     This construal of sin as underdeveloped cooperation with disciplinary power makes no sense if one is operating with the notion that power is bad, that it only corrupts, that it is what my oppressor has taken from me. If Foucault's analysis is correct, power is not something one group or institution possesses but is something that is dispersed in a network of mechanisms, institutions, and technologies (many of which may well be dominating). Leaving relations with a normalizing regime underdeveloped would be to stall the circulation of power. This could have several effects. Underdeveloped cooperation with certain kinds of disciplinary power risks becoming an evasion of what Foucault calls technologies of "care for the self"—that is, knowing oneself in relation to others, in particular, knowing what one's ethical power role should be toward others.60 Parenting provides one example.

     Think of a mother in a very patriarchal household who is erratic in enforcing rules and setting limits for her children and whose most prevalent response to her children's misbehaving is "wait until your father gets home." One could say that she has left underdeveloped her cooperation with the disciplinary discourses of parental authority that specify the importance of maternal as well as paternal authority. (Correlatively, she can be seen as unduly cooperating with patriarchal power/knowledge.) One can imagine that somewhere in her societal interactions, this mother will have been exposed to the normalizing effects of maternal authority discourses as they are disseminated by school officials, social service agencies, church pastors, and so on. Her underdeveloped cooperation with those discourses is an agential choice, resulting in a sin against others—namely, her children, who are instilled with patriarchal notions of parental authority. The voices of victims of abuse within patriarchal family models would function as an insurrectional discourse relevant to this mother's parenting flaws.61 This example also illustrates sin against God, if one sees inadequate development of her own power and authority as stunting her ethical and spiritual development. With the exception of, for example, a battered wife or a woman whose own childhood might have been one of abuse that thoroughly scarred her, one can speak of a morally accountable agent who has the ability to widen and more fully develop her parental performativity in relation to other dominant and insurrectional discourses, thus enabling her to care for both herself and her children with the proper exercise of power.

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  • 方立天教授

    教授、博导,创所所长。研究方向:中国佛教、中国哲学。

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    教授、博导,所长。研究方向: 佛教与中国传统哲学,尤其致力于中国佛教天台宗及魏晋南北朝佛教思想史研究。

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