On Mastering Master Discourses

Author(s): Linda Alcoff

Source: American Literary History, Vol. 5, No. 2 (Summer, 1993), pp. 335-346
Published by: Oxford University Press
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On Mastering Master
Discourses
Linda Alcoff

In a conversation I recently had with a distinguished Ox- Discerning the Subject

ford don, he remarked that it was perfectly understandable to By Paul Smith
him why every Russian and Eastern European he knows is University of Minnesota
Press, 1988
today an advocate of the free market, and why every Central
American he knows is something of a Marxist. I wondered Unruly Practices:
what ideas were perfectly understandable for an Oxford don to Power, Discourse,
possess. Ideology, in its narrow pre-Althusserian sense, exists and Gender in
not only "among foreigners," not only in the factory or the high Contemporary
Social Theory
school, but in the academy as well, in its "high theory" no less
By Nancy Fraser
than in its "sciences of Man."
University of Minnesota
It is also the case that the resistance to theory, as Trinh T. Press, 1989
Minh-ha tells us, is "often the result of a nostalgic desire for a
return to 'normalcy'"-where the relevant "normalcy" con- Woman, Native, Other:
sists of colonialism, racism, and sexism (When the Moon 228). Writing Postcoloniality
and Feminism
Any critique of theory as obscurantist presupposes an Other of By Trinh T. Minh-ha
theory, a "common sense" that conceals its own complex theo- Indiana University
retical appeals in a self-presentation as the mundane. Thus an Press, 1989
effective critique of theory must not be antitheory per se but
must trace the specific mechanisms of power and desire opera- When the Moon Waxes
Red: Representation,
tive in a given theory, even while recognizing that no theory
Gender and Cultural
(indeed, no assertion) can claim an absolute autonomy from Politics
some such mechanisms. By Trinh T. Minh-ha
This essay explores the hyperreal, postbourgeois "high Routledge, 1991
theory," the new, master discourses within the heart of the
academy that get alternately described as reactionary, nihilistic
individualism or the vanguard of politically adroit cultural
analysis. Many who work in this terrain, and who are more in-
clined toward the latter description, believe that this tendency
contributes to the development of social theory, that ideally
this theoretical work could have a positive impact outside the
academy, and that its obscurity and Western genesis will not
prove to be decisive obstacles. Are we fooling ourselves? Is
poststructuralism or even critical theory an elite conversation
in the Rortyan mode, a closed, bourgeois club dedicated to the
edification and entertainment of its members, and to making a
space for "genius"?
 336 On Mastering Master Discourses

Are we fooling We need to adopt a critical distance, a Hegelian-inspired,

ourselves? Is determinate skepticism, with respect (or, rather, without it) to
poststructuralism or these discourses. Those of us not interested in a conversation
even critical theory an
elite conversation in the for conversation's sake need to differentiate the possible
Rortyan mode, a closed, modes of mastering these discourses. One mode would involve
bourgeois club competently negotiating and traversing that body of texts con-
dedicated to the sidered central to the field, becoming a knowledgeable
edification and enter- acolyte, even creating new moves in the language game. An-
tainment of its members,
and to making a space other, very different mode would be to retain an outsider stance
for "genius" ?
and maintain our relations with more and diverse discourses
and agendas alongside those in the academy. From here one
could use high theory without being caught within its confines.
One could master it without being mastered by it.
Four recent books pose themselves as possible models of
such a critical mastery. In exploring the status of subjectivity
as an object of textual discussion and representation, Paul
Smith works exclusively within the discourses of post-Freud-
ianism, poststructuralism, and a primarily literary subsection
of feminist theory. But his stance toward them is politically in-
terested and critical, and he offers astute diagnoses of the
moral indifference concealed within poststructuralism's pro-
liferation of differences and of its one-sided valorization of
negativity and rupture. More originally, he critiques the retreat
from experience found in the hypertheoretical conception of
subjectivity that is "removed almost entirely from the political
and ethical realities in which human agents actually live"
(xxix). (Here I take him to posit, not a pretheoretical or nonide-
ological "lived reality," but a different reality from the kind
posited in most academic texts.) Reducing subjectivity to the
interpellation of subject-positions by discursive formations
leaves out "the activity of a person ... in response to an ideo-
logical message" (39), or what has come to be called agency.
By reading through an impressive array of influential theorists,
Smith pursues a theory of the discursively constructed subject
that can account for the possibility of political resistance.
A more familiar articulation of the problem Smith tackles
is the dilemma between an account of the subject as the bearer
of ideology, in which there seems no way to explain resistance,
and an account that posits an excess outside of ideology, in
which we become mired (according to Smith) in false distinc-
tions between the ideological and the "real." Smith tries to put
a new spin on this tired formula by suggesting that the problem
lies in a "cerned," an abstracted and enclosed, subjectivity.
Both liberal individualism and its poststructuralist obverse
cern the subject in this way, enclosing it either in a sovereign
 American Literary History 337

consciousness or in the domain of discourse and the realm of

the social-hence Smith's title and his project of dis-cerning
the subject from any totalized enclosure. Subjectivity is too
much associated with cernmentand wholeness, however, and
like Lacan, Smithprefersto thinkof subjectivityas an attribute
not an entity. Smith's concluding thesis is neithernew nor par-
ticularly insightful: he asserts that subjectivity is heteroge-
neous and contradictory,that as agents we are both active and
acted upon, that "self-interest"is never fixed, and that we are
constantly negotiating multiple subject-positions and histo-
ries. Reciting such a poststructuralistcatechism may not ad-
vance us very far, but this is not in any case the book's major
strength, which lies instead in Smith's nuanced, multidimen-
sional readings of the formulationsof subjectivity throughout
the "new wave" humanities.
Two points kept troublingme throughoutthese chapters,
however. Smith assumes that all binaries can and should be
dispensed with, including the distinctions appearance/reality
and true/false. He says at one point that "[w]hatis needed is no
longer a theoretical truth/falsity distinction but a practice
which will work the contradictionsof ideology, exacerbateand
exploit them in orderto produceradical change"(67). This bit
of Derridadaismis neitherpolitically nor epistemically defen-
sible. If divested of their Manichaeanovertones, transformed
binaries as value-laden oppositions are sometimes still neces-
sary. And a properly Hegelian binary would acknowledge the
interdependenceof terms and reject a strategyof simple rever-
sals, yet maintain the ability to describe oppositional stances
and contradictoryinterests. A bettercritiqueof binarieswould
be directedat unnecessarydichotomies (e.g., male/female) and
overly absolutist, nondialectical formulations. Dispensing
with a truth/falsitydistinction recalls the Vienna Circle's dec-
laration that the only meaningful propositions are those con-
tainedin science: in both cases the very assertionbelies its own
claim. The repudiationof false concepts of reference as con-
tained in, for example, correspondencetheories of truthdoes
not necessitate dispensing with all epistemic evaluations. A
truth/falsity distinction operates in Smith's text, as in any
other, and to repudiatethe need for a theoretical formulation
merely secures its immunityfrom epistemic (as well as politi-
cal) scrutiny.
My second difficulty with Smith's orientation might be
attributedagain to our differentcomfort levels in the company
of a full-bodied deconstruction.Though Smith himself makes
some telling criticisms of Derrida,his underlyingstrategyand
338 On Mastering Master Discourses

his orientation toward subjectivity instantiate the kinds of val-

orization of the negative associated with deconstruction. Fi-
nally, Smith can offer only a negative construal of agency: the
subject subsists, he tells us, in a process of negativity; the col-
ligation of subject-positions is effected through a negativity;
and he even asserts that negativity "produces the human agent"
(150). One hears an echo of Sartre in this minimalist vision of
the core of subjectivity as essentially a negating and disembod-
ied (and therefore paradigmatically masculine) movement; the
only difference is that Sartre's subject is accountable for its ac-
tions! Moreover, in terms of political strategy, Smith exclu-
sively valorizes a resistance that includes neither advocacy nor
construction nor the building of alliances. His own theoretical
movement through the many discourses and texts he explores,
and through the multiple theoretical possibilities in conceptu-
alizing subjectivity that he considers, resembles an awkwardly
choreographed backward dance, always moving away from
proffered positions and conceptual offerings. One can also
hear Adorno in the insistence and uniformity of his emphasis
on negation and resistance. But where Adorno was motivated
by the belief that late capitalism so overflows with affirmative
culture that only a totalizing "No!" can pierce its effective sub-
limations, Smith seems more caught up in the Derridean-in-
duced nihilism of meaning and, in his own phrase, a "logic of
continual deferral." Perhaps it is not a coincidence that this lat-
ter strategy shares with the much-publicized masculine flight
from commitment an obsessive fear of pledging oneself to a
position.
Despite the fact that he subjects every writer he covers to
damning critique, Smith is too loyal to the master discourses
he works within, allowing them to dictate the formulation of
his problematic without a hint that it might be reconceptual-
ized very differently elsewhere. Smith's book begins encour-
agingly with his declaration that he will judge theories of the
subject in relation to their connection to the lived realities of
actual human agents rather than simply in relation to other aca-
demic theories. But this promise is at odds with the discursive
practice he actually carries out: he refers to no other discourses
except high theory ones, his formulation of the problem
emerges entirely from within a high theory context, and thus he
replicates a theory/practice hierarchical binary where theory
occurs in the academy, separate from "real life" but capable of
sitting in judgment on it. This effectively confers on high theo-
ry a dangerous hegemony over the construction of the prob-
lematic.
 American Literary History 339

Nancy Fraser's Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and

Gender in Contemporary Social Theory is less tightly orga-
nized around a single topic and is more a collection of recent
essays plotting the trajectory of her thought. In the beginning
Fraser acts as the expert eavesdropper on high-powered con-
versations among the great theorists, explicating the issues,
commenting on the political and theoretical stakes involved,
the telling lacunae in the various positions offered, while pro-
viding us with symptomatic readings that delve below the sur-
face topics. Toward the end of the book, she shifts from com-
mentator to theorist-at-work in applying her own social theory
in the context of a specific problem: the interpretation of needs
in the "welfare war" of late capitalism. In the last two chapters,
she begins to make good on the projections she outlines for us
in the introduction about what we need in a critical theory, pro-
jections that call for a new approach of "situated theorizing,"
where the goal is not so much to be theoretically correct as to
be politically useful by finding productive ways to intervene in
dominant discourses for the purpose of social change. She sug-
gests we take political issues as opposed to metatheoretical de-
bates as our point of departure and that we avoid functionalist
or other kinds of accounts that make it difficult "to devise an
approach capable of representing human agency, social con-
flict, and the construction and deconstruction of cultural mean-
ings" (9). The resultant theory she calls a "democratic-social-
ist-feminist pragmatism."
Fraser uses this approach as a guideline for her readings
of Foucault, Habermas, Derrida, and Rorty. She asks: Do they
provide a possibility for normative claims and thus social cri-
tique? Do they assist or undermine currently efficacious politi-
cal strategies for liberation, including the articulation of global
or "big diagnostic" analyses of our social situation? Are their
own discursive interventions enabling of progressive social
movements? As these questions reveal, this book is a holdout
against the attacks from all sides on the academic Left. Fraser
has the chutzpah to insist on such antediluvian demands as ac-
countability to social movements, though she instructively re-
vises the form such demands take. Borrowing from Foucault,
she shifts the debate from a sterile concern over what these
texts "really mean" or whether they are ultimately "good or
bad" to whether any of the multiple and conflicting interpreta-
tions to which they are open lend themselves to radical politi-
cal uses.
For example, even while she shares with Habermas a con-
cern with normativity, and aspects of her theory of needs-inter-
340 On Mastering Master Discourses

pretation borrow from his work, Fraser's analysis of his gender

blindness establishes the dangers his social theory can pose for
feminism. She argues that the system of relations in capitalist
society, as Habermas describes it, works and reproduces itself
(to the extent that it does) largely because the roles involved in
these relations are gendered: worker and citizen roles are gen-
dered male, and the consumer and state client roles are gen-
dered female, meaning not simply that most of the persons fill-
ing these roles are of that gender but that the cultural meanings
of the roles, the way they are understood, are connected at very
deep levels to cultural conceptions of masculinity and feminin-
ity. Acknowledging this fact is crucial for an adequate account
of the intransigence of these roles and their interrelations.
Moreover, Fraser shows the political stakes in recogniz-
ing this gender subtext. For example, Habermas distinguishes
between socially integrated action contexts, in which agents
coordinate their actions by reference to "explicit or implicit in-
tersubjective consensus about norms, values, and ends," and
system-integrated action contexts, in which actions are coordi-
nated by the "functional interlacing of unintended conse-
quences" (117). He takes the modern family as paradigmatic of
a socially integrated action context and the capitalist economic
system as paradigmatic of a system-integrated action context.
Habermas's critique of modern society concerns the encroach-
ment of system-integrated contexts on terrain that was previ-
ously socially integrated. This encroachment occurs when the
state or the economic sphere takes over areas such as child
rearing, for example. Fraser shows that this analysis works to
reinstate a public/private dichotomy that has been the linchpin
of women's oppression. Concretely, it is an attack on commer-
cial day-care centers and oddly echoes right-wing rhetoric
even to the extent of calling such a system of child care patho-
logical. But Fraser's argument is not simply that Habermas's
analysis supports antifeminist conclusions but that it is based
on mistaken premises. One such mistake is the assertion that
the family is a sphere of social integration that is norm gov-
erned rather than mediated through money and power. Fraser
argues that families "are sites of egocentric, strategic, and in-
strumental calculation as well as sites of usually exploitative
exchanges of service, labor, cash, and sex-and, frequently,
sites of coercion and violence" (120). This also calls into ques-
tion Habermas's correlation of public and private spheres and
the spheres of norm- and power-governed relations. A great
deal hangs on this mistake, not only an evaluation of day-care,
but the conceptualization of privatized family space as oppres-
 American Literary History 341

sive or liberatory for women, the invisibility of women's effec-

tive exclusion from public arenas of communication, and the
strategies of feminist and socialist movements.
Fraser's critique of the versions of poststructuralism
found in Foucault, Rorty, and the French Derrideans is simi-
larly trenchant. Their inability to sustain normative claims re-
sults in part from their tendency to efface the political realm
by collapsing it into a one-dimensional totalitarianism and to
offer repeatedly one-sided appraisals of the effects of human-
ism and Marxism as discursive strategies. In a provocative
move she argues that deconstruction can only be aligned with
a tragic sense of doom, given that any other effect is likely to
imply the invalidity of deconstruction itself. Perhaps this can
explain why Smith, despite his political intentions, ends up
with only negativity. In the case of Rorty, Fraser argues that
his romantic pragmatism aestheticizes and individualizes po-
litical discourse to such an extent that it renders his rhetorical
commitment to democracy incoherent. According to his
"ironic" understanding of contingency, the sole criterion of
evaluation is that which can make for new poetry, but it must
be a poetry that conforms to the language of bourgeois liberal-
ism. Fraser shows that this conflicts both with the adoption of
a political criterion "for the invention of new idioms" and
with the development of any genuinely "oppositional solidari-
ties" (105).
One of the most important contributions of this book is
Fraser's sensitive analysis of the systematic retreat from the
political among poststructuralist theorists. The stance of polit-
ical assertion is replaced by the stance of interrogating the po-
litical, deconstructing it, refusing its intimidation, and so on.
She argues not that such an interrogation "is in itself useless or
irrelevant" but that for poststructuralists it functions "as a
means of avoiding the step into politics to which the logic of
their own hopes and thought would otherwise drive them"
(86). Their position is ultimately an unstable and self-defeat-
ing one in that it makes impossible the production of new polit-
ical insights.
Unruly Practices helps to combat the chic cynicism that
reverberates in too much high theory these days, a posture that
excuses its comfortable retreat from political practice by criti-
cizing the conceit of engaged intellectuals. Perhaps Fraser's
suggestion that we situate our problematics not in metatheoret-
ical debates but in political issues and social movements will
prove the most effective antidote to such a retreat. Consider
this in relation to Smith, for whom the problematic of agency is
342 On Mastering Master Discourses

to find a conception of agency that does not involve a stable,

coherent subjectivity but that is still efficacious. In essence, his
goal is to articulate a conception of resistant agency consonant
with the canonical restrictions of poststructuralist theory. But if
we change the locus of the problem from high theory to the dis-
course of, for example, the survivors of sexual violence, the
problem shifts to the question of how to retrieve the possibility
of agency once it has been beaten and terrorized out of one.
Sexual violence produces atrophied sensibilities and incapaci-
tated imaginations and reduces the ability to imagine oneself as
a person with some measure of autonomy over one's body or
life-choices. Sexual violence appears to be a kind of practice
that reorients the experienced and imagined subjectivity of the
victim from potentially self-determining to a receptacle or in-
strument for the use of another. A rape survivor writes, "I felt
worthless, like I was shit. I felt like somebody had just kicked
me, as though I was completely nothing" (Kelly 171). An incest
survivor says, "He definitely sapped my confidence over the
years . . . and I got to believe in the end that I was hopeless at
everything, which is another reason why I didn't leave, because
if I was that hopeless how on earth was I going to exist on my
own without him... " (Kelly 131). Here the problem of agency
is not the need to develop a better theoretical articulation of it
but to assist in its material creation. The issue becomes how to
discursively or practically intervene in current practices of gen-
der domination to reestablish the possibility of an imaginary for
victims/survivors in which they can engage in self-definition
and self-determination. And our criterion of theory-choice
shifts from compatibility with high theory to fruitfulness as an
intervention in this specific discursive practice, undercutting
the hegemonic authority of high theory. Fraser's call for situat-
ed theorizing suggests just this sort of repositioning of our
problematics by encouraging a move out and alongside the tra-
ditional discourses of the academy.
This leads me to wonder, however, about the metaethical
and perhaps metaphysical foundation Fraser believes is neces-
sary to have in place before we can generate political critique.
She asserts that we need to justify a preference for struggle
over submission and for resistance to domination. Who needs
this? For some, what is needed is not a justification for resis-
tance but simply a hope that resistance might succeed. Fraser
may have missed this point because, apart from the final two
chapters, her book, like Smith's, remains primarily within the
realm of elite debates only tenuously connected to nonacadem-
ic discourses and social movements.
 American Literary History 343

Trinh T. Minh-ha's work, by contrast, mixes lyrical narra-

tives and extensive theoretical discussions with third-person
ruminations of her portraiture as the "foreign worker" and the
"inappropriate Other." Her stylistic strategy is the detour and
the wander, but she is careful to keep the reader from catego-
rizing this as simply "Eastern" by reminding us of the consum-
mate Western wanderers, Wittgenstein and Nietzsche. The
style is a calculated strategy to resist recuperation or reterrito-
rialization of her writing into a set of universal maxims colo-
nizable within the terms of Western theory. She does not want
her work to be reduced to a "site for pilgrimage by the Master
and his heirs" (When the Moon 186). By maintaining a stylistic
complexity and incessantly problematizing all claims to domi-
nance, Trinh's writing instantiates a form of guerrilla theory,
powerful in its very elusiveness.
In both Woman, Native, Other and When the Moon Waxes
Red, as well as in her films, Trinh develops forms of antihege-
monic, anti-imperialist cultural production that resist recu-
peration as far as possible. She rejects strategies of reversal
when these are taken as end points rather than points of depar-
ture, and she refuses to displace the center by essentializing
the margin or by appealing to authenticity in representation.
This is not done out of a metaphysical idealism or repudiation
of materiality but out of her insistence on the irreducible sep-
aration between representation and lived experience. What
must be repudiated therefore is "not only the Master as sover-
eign subject of knowledge, but also the fantasized Other as
authoritative subject of an other knowledge" (When the Moon
186).
Trinh sometimes seems like the dutiful daughter of de-
construction in her rejection of all binaries and her insistence
on irreducible difference, narratives without closure, and the
instability of all boundaries and meanings. But alongside dif-
ference she asserts sameness and identity, and alongside
ceaseless interrogation she affirms political commitment and
the necessity to continue working from the "visible" even
while the hegemony of the visible is displaced. She neither
valorizes "pure negativity" nor retreats from the political but
proffers a politics without (Western) mastery. She takes the
dictum "everything is dangerous" as applicable in all direc-
tions, including self-reflexive ones, but she also reminds us of
its converse: everything is possible. The still reproductions
from her films serve as corollary texts: the focus is a Third
World human context, but the images of people are always cut
off by the frame of the lens, thus foregrounding representation
344 On Mastering Master Discourses

and dispelling the illusion of full presence, pointing to the ab-

sences and intervals between image and reality.
"She, of the Interval," is the Third World woman, the
other or inappropriate Other, the "not-quite-second-sex"
(When the Moon 14). Binaries cannot represent this complexi-
ty, so Trinh slips between them, endlessly crossing their bor-
ders and unraveling their boundaries. I found this phenomenol-
ogy of rootlessness immensely helpful as an exploration of the
mixed race and culture, in-between First World/Third World,
of my own autobiography: she articulates this condition of per-
manent outsider not as a "compromise" or "melting pot" but as
the indecipherable, the symbolic gap. Trinh critiques the no-
tion of the naturalized, authentic Other on the ground that it is
subsumed and commodified within colonial space and there-
fore incapable of serving as a stable site of resistance. Again, I
found this lesson powerful. If one lacks a solid identity, the
aura of authenticity can lure one into a quest for harmonious
belonging and create an experience of profound loss in the ab-
sence of the ability to claim one of the available categories of
social identification. Reading Trinh released me from this
longing by encouraging the "fearless assumption of the hy-
phen" (When the Moon 166) and by describing an alternative
subjective imaginary. She also argues that holding onto the
"sense of specialness" (Woman 86) conferred by playing the
role of the privileged margin conspires with the Master's
voyeuristic desire to "know" the Third World Other. "The
search and the claim for an essential female/ethnic identity-
difference today can never be anything more than a move with-
in the male-is-norm-divide-and-conquer trap" (Woman 101).
Although everything may be dangerous, some dangers are
more potent in our context. Western mastery reveals itself not
only in the desire to erase the Other but in the desire to sub-
sume the Other within Western symbolic maps. The chapter on
anthropology in Woman, Native, Other ("The Language of Na-
tivism") is an especially forceful explanation of the many lay-
ers of Western privilege. As long as anthropology is guided by
the myth that "Science is Truth," it will be blind to its own con-
tributions to colonialism. This can recur even when anthropol-
ogists try to identify racism and colonialism in Third World lo-
cations, by assuming that "they can go on formulating criteria
for us" (Woman 59). Thus Trinh critiques both the content of
representation and the "constituted authority" of representa-
tional claims; her goal is not to increase accuracy but to sub-
vert "the colonizer's ability to represent colonized cultures"
(Woman 71). She concurs with African Stanislas S. Adotevi's
 American Literary History 345

view that "today . . . the only possible ethnology is the one

which studies the anthropophagousbehaviorof the white man"
(Woman 73).
Here as elsewhere Trinh offers apparentcontradictions.
She disclaims the possibility of accuratelydepicting the Third
Worldyet calls for a depiction of the white man. She rejects the
portrayalof the Otheras authenticdifference while criticizing
the inability of Westernuniversalistcategories to recognize ir-
reducible difference. And again, she criticizes both the (con-
servative) white man's claim that ThirdWorldfilmmakersare
not "objective"enough to make films about the Third World
and the (liberal) white man's desire for films about the Third
Worldmadeby filmmakersfrom the ThirdWorld.
But these apparentcontradictions are designed to work
both sides of the Westernbinary schema and to disable the im-
perialism of its categories of legitimation and identification
that presume to map and order all difference. So it is not the
irreducibilityof difference she repudiatesbut the West's pre-
sumptionin colonizing difference andits use of dualistic struc-
tures in doing so. The West's own binaries create liberal/con-
servative contradictorypositions, neither of which transcends
the presumptionsof authority.
Trinhalso rejects the dialogic, participatorycommunica-
tion model sometimes offered as the solution to the hierarchy
of knower/knownbut thatshe sees as reducinghumanrelations
to mercantileexchange. To embarkon a dialogue between man
and woman, East and West, or marginand center will leave in-
tact the very categories that require deconstruction.More ef-
fective, in her view, is to reconceptualize the very basis for
meaning and representation,to "challengethe fixity of realism
as a style and an arrestedform of representation"(When the
Moon 164). This requiresneither a denial of reality and mean-
ing nor the adoption of a kind of metaphysical and epistemo-
logical skepticism but the acknowledgmentof the plurality of
meaning, the limits to all representation,the mutation of all
boundaries,and the intertextualityof all surfaces. In this way
the center is displaced throughthe destabilizing of all bound-
aries, not throughthe privileging of marginality.
In any creative context this view would mean, not an end
to narrative,but an end to narrativeswithout sufficient ambi-
guity and open-endedness to invite the "perceiver/readerto
follow what the creative gesture has traced, therefore render-
ing visible how it can be unmade,restoredto the void, and cre-
atively re-made"(When the Moon 195). It is not rootlessness
per se that Trinhvalorizes but the creative movement she be-
346 On Mastering Master Discourses

lieves it can yield. She echoes Edward Said's admiration for

the Saxon monk who valued most highly the ability to perceive
the entire world, including his own community, as a foreign
land. Fixity and stability, the at-homeness in the world Heideg-
ger longed for, are precisely what get in the way of achieving
critical distances and creative transformations.
Trinh's sustained attack on binaries in these two volumes
follows from her view that they reduce the possibilities for re-
organization and constrain the plurality of constructive oppo-
sitions into a singularity of reversal. A resistance without bina-
ries is more difficult, since it displaces the authenticity and
authority of one's "place" and disallows "alternate, homoge-
nized strategies of rejection, affirmation, confrontation, and
opposition well-rooted in a tradition of contestation" (When
the Moon 229).
But Trinh does not end with this rejection of binaries or a
valorization of movement, negation, and the infinity of differ-
ence. She moves forward to a ternary system invoked from
Chinese thought. The Yin-Yang system, she explains, contains
an interval term, the "Void," which, though suggesting Noth-
ingness, is also synonymous for the "This." Because of its in-
between character-in between fullness and nothingness, pos-
itivity and negativity-this third term can play a more creative
role. More mobile than a fixed construction, more determinate
than a pure absence, the "plural void" stands as a new form,
more resistant to recuperation and colonization, which also
makes possible the letting go "of the (masterly) 'hold' as one
unbuilds and builds" (When the Moon 199).
Fraser and Trinh exemplify disparate strategies for devel-
oping an anti-imperialist, antipatriarchal theory. They take dif-
ferent positions with respect to the possibilities of poststruc-
turalism and the limits of binary thinking. But, unlike Smith,
they each successfully disauthorize the hegemony of high the-
ory, even in their use of it, by displacing its status as source of
all problematics and arbiter of all suggested alternatives. They
each move outside the academy, Fraser to welfare agencies and
Trinh to "folkloric" narratives, putting high theory off balance,
divesting it of its magisterial position. High time.

Works Cited
Kelly, Liz. Surviving Sexual Vio-
lence. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota
P, 1988.