- Nietzsche (trans. R.J. Hollingdale), Beyond Good and Evil, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973, aphorism 6, 19.
- See Ronald Dworkin, Law's Empire, Cambridge: Belknap, 1986.
- See Stanley Fish, Doing What Coma Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies, Oxford: Clarendon, 1989. See also Sandra Berns, Concise Jurisprudence, Sydney: Federation Press, 1993, 60–74 for a concise summary of Fish's position and his criticisms of Dworkin, op. at, n. 2, and the determinate Text.
- Robin West, ‘Adjudication is not Interpretation: Some Reservations About the Law-As-Literature Movement’ (1987) 54 Tenn LR 203.
- Sandra Harding, The Science Question in Feminum, New York: Cornell University Press, 1986.
- As noted above, this discussion in the context of the discipline of jurisprudence serves firstly as a focus for a more general argument in favour of a reconstitution of “left” politics from a postmodern perspective, but also secondly for an examination of the nature of “truth” after postmodernism. Hence the subtitle. If Truth is a cross-dresser, does this mean Truth is in fact False (after all, it has a penis), or is it still, after all, True (everyone thinks of it as True, and it thinks of itself as True, therefore in every meaningful sense it is True); or does the cross-dressed Truth become something else again? To adapt a phrase of Nietzsche's, does it/do we pass Beyond Truth and Falsehood?
- Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women, London: Free Association Books, 1991, 189.
- Encyclical Letter Veritatis splendor, 1993.
- See Richard Weisberg, Poethics and Other Strategies of Law and Literature, New York: Columbia University Press, 1992, especially 174–5 and Robin West, op. cit, n.4, especially 209.
- Understand that these modes of argumentation are not essentially different merely for their having been fought out on different battlegrounds i.e. utilising different language. The same issues are in question. It is true perhaps that different terminology does open one to different arrangements of words and so different truths—one might say the ‘truth potentiality’ of the two battlefields differs.
- It is here that I beg to differ with Chomsky, who claims that there exists a grammar for human language, that the apparent variation between human languages is in fact quite superficial, and that this meta-grammar is in fact a function of or grounded in the biological structure of the human organism, more specifically, the human brain. Two species of objection appear to me immediately. Firstly, one should be wary of any attempt to reduce what can be described as a cultural or sociological event (e.g. language or speech) to a “biological base. It seems but a short step from claims about language grounded in biology to claims about gender or sex object choice grounded in biology. Secondly, a Nietzschean would note that Chomsky's grammar itself embodies earlier-order assumptions about meaning, for example rules of modern logic which lend meaning and intelligibility to his explanatory structure. Chomsky then is not telling us anything about what “really is out there” (or “in there”), but is merely postdating a more plausible explanatory system, or mythology, of human language. This is not to devalue his work. It is merely to assert the creative nature of human thought and to deny that we make discoveries about the world. On this general issue, see Paul Rabinow's overview of the famous ‘Human Nature: Justice versus Power’ debate between Chomsky and Foucault at the start of his introduction to Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader: An Introduction to Foucault's Thought, New York: Penguin Books, 1984.
- While both Nietzsche and Fish may be read to argue that language is mere rhetoric, they appear at first blush to differ in their criteria for truth (by which I mean how the word is or is to be used in the postmodern moral/lingual universe). Fish seems to consider x to be true in so far as it persuades others and false in so far as it fails to do so, while Nietzsche considers x true in so far as it is conducive to survival and false in so far as it hampers the flourishing of life. It is interesting to note however that this distinction may wink out of existence should a meme-style model of human language, debate and moral discourse be adopted; see section 3.1.
- It is dear that essentialist epistemology is one of the most successful meme-defences to have evolved—it is reasonable to expect that, until some superior/incompatible meme-defence evolves, essentialist constructions of reality will persist in human culture, the efforts of postmodernists notwithstanding.
- See John Rawls, ‘The Idea of an Overlapping Consensus’ (1987) 7 Oxford Journal of Ligal Studies 1. On Rawls' aspirations to the metapolitical, see his ‘Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical (1985) 14 Philosophy and Public Affairs 223–51.
- It is as appropriate here as anywhere to note the curious recursive nature of the postmodernist thesis. Nietzschean perspectivism clearly is itself a perspective; the theory of memes, the perspectivist epistemological construct posited below, is itself a meme; and Fish's writings advocating interpretivism must themselves be read. A postmodern politics then not only threatens traditional forms of queer and feminist theory—it also constantly threatens itself.
- Nietzsche (trans. W. Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale, ed. W. Kaufman n), The Will to Power, New York: Vintage Books, 1967, aphorisms 535, 547–9, 290 and 294 respectively.
- West is correct in her observation that the perspectivist cannot claim for her truth the same certainty that the essentialist can claim for hers, op. cit, n.4. But what ultimately is the value of “truth” anyway? That is, if truth is truly a tool, then saying “truly” before “tool” in the previous phrase is an assertion of my moral power as a possessor of language, a definer, a moral agent, and as valid as one could possibly wish an assertion to be.
- The use of the masculine gender here is of course intentional.
- I intend the term “transiphobe” to denote fear or hate of the transgendered—‘transgendered’ encompassing the range of crossing behaviours, from drag to passing to erotic crossdressing to sex reassignment surgery (SRS).
- Nietzsche, op. cit., n. 13, aphorism 534, 290.
- Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989, 195.
- Ibid., 191–2.
- Ibid., 332.
- His suggestions as to exactly why God is possessed of such longevity are, at least to me, somewhat less than entirely convincing Ibid., 193. On this issue of God, see also 330 where Dawkins indulges himself with a tirade against (memes of) religious faith (he states at one point: “[F]aith appears to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness). The notion that the memes could “take over” the self fails of course to problematise the notion of the modern self in the first place. I would argue, were I attempting to rearticulate the postmodern within Dawkins' terminology, that the Self is composed of memes, that is, is itself a (and a hardy) meme complex. (Speculating on the model of the Self as, and epiphenomenal of, a battleground for memes recalls for me Nietzschean texts regarding will-to-power and the biology of the body. Unfortunately there is not the space here to pursue this line of thought).
- Unfortunately, Dawkins is unaware of such possibilities, and his language betrays a commonsensical model of truth—the kind of course upon which the scientific project is predicated. It is somewhat amusing to observe the extent to which Dawkins' speculations are reminiscent of West, despite his advocating a model which so suits Fish. “I'd hate it if this were taken, “he writes, in the context of an application of meme-theory to the discipline of science, “to mean that ‘catchiness' was the only criterion for acceptance of a scientific idea. After all, some scientific ideas are actually right, others wrong!” Ibid., 325.
- See for example Foucault's essay ‘The Subject and Power’ in Hubert L Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (eds), Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutia, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1982, 208–26.
- See Deleuze and Guattari (trans. Brian Massumi), A Thousand Plateaus: Volume II of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, London: The Athlone Press, 1988, 9–10.
- There is “real” oppression, are “real” mechanisms which perpetuate the domination and control of one gender by and over another. The task of the feminist on this account is to identify, locate and physically and ideologically combat these dynamics; and to aid others of the oppressed to become cognisant of the true nature of their situation and (perhaps) to convince the oppressors of their complicity in these injustices.
- Sandra Harding, op. cit., n. 5, 191.
- It may be wise to explain briefly the sense in which the term “read” is used above. Nietzsche argues that we have no direct access to reality, and that all data is digested by biological and psycho-social or cultural perceptual systems. Gender is understood by our culture (patriarchy) to be absolute. The most common defence of a proposition so trivial that argument in favour of it is really superfluous, is that gender is a “biological fact”’ Feminist, race and queer scholarship, among others, have engaged “gender” or “sex” with a vengeance, and generated manifold categories which common-sense notions of “sex” conflates, e.g. reproductive systems, sex object choice, erotic style, mode of dress, (sub)cultural identification and so forth. In observing the political dimensions of cross-dressing and other transgressive behaviours (i.e. man passing as woman, black passing as white, poor passing as wealthy, and vice versa) it becomes apparent that what is important is how people are “read” by their culture, how our perceptual systems (in this case, we may describe them as cultural) interpret and order the direct (”direct“?) sense data, and not what the person is “in themselves”.
- Responses to a phone poll regarding the LSP (‘Poll shows split on trany ban’ (1994) 4 Lesbians on the Loose 8. See also Kat Costigan, ‘Confest Expels Tranys (1994) 5 Lesbians on the Loose 1.
- Hence the focus on counselling services by anti-gay groups such as Exodus in the United States, and its Tasmanian spin-off, For A Caring Tasmania.
- Wayne Scott, ‘Coming Out Both Ways’ (1993–4, Summer) XY: men, sex, politics 16.
Australian Feminist Law Journal
Volume 4, 1995 - Issue 1