Feminism and the Spaces of Transformation Author(s): Jenny Robinson Source: Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New

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Feminism

and

the

spaces

of

transformation

Jenny Robinson
Feminist political theory draws on particular spatial imaginations in elaborating a politics of transformation. This paper establishes this in relation to two familiar accounts of feminist transformation - those of Judith Butler and Luce Irigaray. Respectively I read their work as suggesting that transformation of gender relations takes the form of ubiquitous revolution, taking place everywhere, or a distant dream of an (im)possible future - elsewhere. The paper then turns to discuss the work of Julia Kristeva, often dismissed as not feminist and conservative. I read her work politically, within the frame of feminist theory. She offers a different, heterogeneous account of transformation, as both possible in the present and also limited by the existence and need for social and symbolic orders. In exploring the heterogeneous spatial imagination of her work, the paper suggests that the spatialities of abjection are diverse and productive. Abjection is not simply about devising territories and borders. Moreover, dominant spatialities cannot be described as simply masculine. Finally, drawing links with Lefebvre's account of representational spaces, I argue that Kristeva's work can be extended to inform our understanding of how spaces themselves can be transformed. key words abjection feminist theory feminist politics spatiality transformation gender

Faculty of Social Sciences, The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA email: J.D.Robinson@Open.ac.uk revised manuscript received 24 March 2000

Feminism's defining ambition is to transform gendered power relations. This might involve reshaping socially determined categories of masculinity and femininity, addressing dominant forms of (hetero)-sexuality and contesting material inequalities associated with gendered differences in employment, in institutional representation and in household and personal relations. As with most political projects, there has been much internal debate as to how these various aims might be achieved and how the possibilities for change could be predicted and understood. It is this commitment to transformation, though, which distinguishes the thinkers discussed here, as well as my own approach, as feminist. I will be considering two contrasting feminist political imaginaries that consider transformation to be either ubiquitous or, alternatively, a distant

impossibility. Here the work respectively of Judith Butler and Luce Irigaray is exemplary. I then turn to the work of Julia Kristeva as offering an alternative political imaginary that might address some of the problems inherent in the views of transformation offered by both Butler and Irigaray. This reading of Kristeva draws on the heterogeneous spatial imagination which shapes her work to offer a different account of the possibilities for a feminist politics and a feminist politics of space. I am especially concerned, then, to interrogate the spatial thinking that underpins these different feminist imaginaries of transformation. I am asking how the particular views of transformation offered by the three writers - Irigaray, Butler, Kristeva - depend upon different spatial imaginations. This is a novel way to approach their work - although one that necessarily includes some familiar descriptions of their positions.

TransInst Br Geogr NS 25 285-301 2000 ISSN 0020-2754 ? Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers) 2000

286 Of course it is not only feminists who are concerned with transformation. In the wake of a radical critique of spatial science, the task of transforming society has been incorporated into the research and practice of many aspects of geography (Harvey 1973). Geographers now participate in theoretical and empirical analysis of social and political processes which provoke, enable or resist social transformation, as well as occasionally working in and with social and political movements to bring about that change. As David Harvey writes, for example, 'The language of historicalgeographical materialism has much to teach concerning the transformative possibilities embedded in processes of production of space, time, place and nature' (1996, 435). In Harvey's analysis, social change is intimately bound up with the spatiality of social life. Processes of uneven development, the production of settled places, as well as the spaces of flows and fluidity all play a part in shaping the possibilities for social change. There are other geographies to transformation, though, which we have paid much less attention to, and these involve the spatial metaphors which underpin our hopes and theories of change. I am exercised by the way in which writers often use a spatially laden vocabulary to theorize, and how different formulations of spatiality in these contexts can limit or extend their analyses. This has been specifically debated in relation to the work of Ernesto Laclau, for example, where his explicit definition of space as fixed and static was quite at odds with a richly spatialized vocabulary of political change (see Massey 1995a; Natter and Jones 1997; Robinson 1998a). Examples of such uses of a spatial vocabulary abound in theories of social transformation. Accounting for change often involves making assumptions about where newness is located, or where change is likely to be coming from (see Butler 1990, 30, 36; Bhabha 1993). Political imaginaries might locate the desired social relations nostalgically in the past, as in a romantic rural idyll, or in pre-patriarchal gender relations, or in a pre-colonial indigenous tradition. They might locate the possibility of transformation in a particular spatial form, as in the urban utopias Harvey describes as 'degenerate' utopias of 'spatial form' (1996, 435-6). An imaginary of social transformation could also predict a utopian social order, as in many feminist science fiction novels. More theoretically, newness could be figured as likely only in

JennyRobinson distant and currently unimaginable future states, as in Luce Irigaray's attempts to provoke, rather than prefigure, a new relation between masculinity and femininity. In Judith Butler's assessment, possibilities for transformation are produced by instabilities within the present social order: If sexuality is culturallyconstructedwithin existing power relations,then the postulationof a normative 'outside',or 'beyond'poweris sexualitythatis 'before', a culturalimpossibility and a politicallyimpracticable dream,one that postpones the concreteand contemporary task of rethinkingsubversivepossibilitiesfor sexualityand identitywithin the termsof power itself (1990,30). Theories of transformation, and transformation itself, suggest a movement, a shifting of things from 'here' to 'there' - whether 'there' is imagined to be 'before' or 'beyond' or to inhere in certain elements 'within' the present (see also Desbiens 1999). It involves a movement from a form or place we might recognize to something or somewhere else - or in some pessimistic accounts, quite simply straight back 'here' again, as if there had been no change at all. Political ambitions and theories often lead writers to postulate and rely on a specific form of this relationship between here and there, between the present and the future, between social spaces of 'before', those of the present or those we dream of. They might feel the future to be unimaginable in the present, seeing a huge divide between then and now - the dreamed of future as impossible to realize. Or they might consider that 'somewhere else' is already with us - transformation is everywhere - as Judith Butler is arguing. These imaginative spatial relations of change embedded in our political theories and practices are important, I want to suggest, for (at least) two reasons. Firstly, I argue that the imaginative spatialities with which we describe processes of transformation shape our sense of political possibilities and hence our political choices. Both future possibilities and current predicaments are to some extent therefore determined by the spatialities of how we imagine transformation. Secondly,exploring these spaces of the political imagination can also help us to question how we understand (social) spaces in general and their significance within a transformative politics. This leads us to the political question as to whether space is a dead weight on the future, or whether it is itself generative of future political possibilities.

Feminism and the spaces of transformation

287 almost impossibly difficult to attain. At times it seems as if we are trapped in a situation we cannot change. Masculine dominated gender relations are entrenched, and the dangers of simply reinforcing them through our various political efforts are acute. I have set these positions out as extremes: individual theorists draw these topographies of change in distinctive, and usually more subtle ways. But contemporary (Western) feminist political theory is very concerned with understanding how, and where, change is going to come from. My own wanderings through feminist texts have left me feeling tossed back and forth from moments of intense and immediate hopefulness to desperate dreams of a very distant elsewhere. I have been swayed from a hopeful spatial imagination of change as everywhere possible, such as articulated by Judith Butler, to one where somewhere else is nowhere in sight, in the work of Luce Irigaray, for example. This section reviews these two writers in terms of how they understand the possibilities for transforming gender relations. The following section shows how Julia Kristeva's work can be read within the same rubric of feminist accounts of political change, and how her thought can add to the analyses offered by Irigaray and Butler. Luce Irigaray: distant futures The topography of transformation implicit in Luce Irigaray's writing, especially in her earlier work, is deeply pessimistic - even as she calls for various kinds of interventions in an inspiring and revolutionary tone. As she writes, 'I am militating politically for the impossible, which doesn't mean I am a utopian' (in Whitford 1994, 382). Her pessimism is about the limited opportunities for changing what she calls masculinist discourse. Transformation, while it is clearly the aim of all her writing, seems to be an almost impossible task. Nonetheless, even though a future, an elsewhere, a new language or discourse, may be barely imaginable for Irigaray, she does hold on to the idea that there are strategies (and writing) we could adopt with this (impossible?) goal in mind. In Irigaray's view philosophy and society are seen as products of a male subject. The masculine subject produces a self-referential, limited knowledge, reflecting only who he (imagines he) is. Irigaray's strategy is to bring the feminine (which she uses to figure both the ground and the beyond

It seems to me that thinking about the spaces, or topographies, of different transformative imaginations could make a difference to the politics we both dream of and do. Indeed, our sense of what is possible partly sets the form and horizon of our political action. I want to think then about how the spaces implicit in imagining political change within different forms of feminist theorizing shape the possible futures such a project might strive for and the kinds of present activities it might find useful to engage in. Considering these spaces of transformation also contributes to how space itself can be thought potentially adding to our understanding of how space can be productive of social change and addressing the question as to whether and how space itself, and our imaginings of space, can be changed. Although this paper is more to do with the spatialities, or topographies of theoretical imaginations, the spaces of our political and theoretical imaginations draw on the spaces we live through as their chief resource. Interrogating the spaces of theory then can potentially also re-make how we think of and live everyday spaces.

Distant futures, ubiquitous revolution: feminist theory's imaginative spaces of transformation Joan Cocks ends her (1988) account of the 'Oppositional Imagination' by reminding her readers that, most of the time, societies are not in a phase of revolutionary change. In 'normal' times, she suggests, we can only expect small, even if significant, changes. By contrast, rare 'revolutionary times' might offer the opportunity for much more substantial shifts in gender power relations. Cock's cautionary note helps to bring into perspective two opposing (if extreme) imaginaries of transformation, both of which have exerted a strong influence on feminist writing, and on feminist geographers. One might be thought of as permanent 'revolution(ary times)' - figuring transformation as almost everywhere possible and always going on. In this formulation gender identities and gendered power relations are fundamentally unstable, and the ubiquitous sources of their possible transformation are to be found within the present moment. At the other extreme is an imaginary of change which envisages an 'impossible utopia', a future which is barely imaginable and

288

Jenny Robinson

of this male subject's imaginings) into view and into play within the space of knowledge - and politics. The feminine, for example, is aligned with the conditions of production of knowledge, or sight. In her critical analysis of Plato's familiar cave scene the feminine is characterized as the burning fire causing shadows to be cast, the mirror which reflects light, or the concave mirror which could reflect light in such a way as to cause burning, and fire. The role of the sensible (the maternal) is recovered and revalued within the apparently self-generating paternal/masculine scene of the production of knowledge. All this matters, of course, for far more than the philosophical narratives she is challenging - for these devaluings of the feminine in philosophy are reflective of the (un)conscious denial of the feminine within a broader social order, and substantially affect women's position in society (Whitford 1991, 170). This is no direct ontological or biological recovery of the feminine, though. Rather her strategy is to provoke a transformation in masculine knowledges and practices by bringing the feminine into view within the space of the production of masculine knowledges. In Irigaray's opinion, the resources for transforming masculinism are located in this (feminine) 'elsewhere' (1985a (1974), 146). Her diagnosis of the subordination of the feminine, and of women, within language (her 'destitution within language' (1985a (1974), 143)), symbolization and the social is powerful, and motivational. Her tactic is to postulate the feminine as the ground, or the excluded other, of masculine knowledge and to put this into play in relation to the persistent masculinities of knowledge and politics. Her ambition is to stimulate a future where an exchange between sexual difference is possible, where there would not be a hierarchical relation between difference, and where sexual difference, rather than (masculine) sameness, would characterize the symbolic, including language, philosophy, theory. Irigaray's argument is that without putting a feminine imaginary into play (albeit one emerging in and framed by a masculinist discourse), the subversion of masculinist imaginaries would not be possible. This is to take a calculated risk, though. A risk that despite the creative transformation induced by the feminine she plays (with), its origins in a masculine imaginary will mean that these particular performances could limit, rather than expand, the futures we could make.

The consequences of such a risky strategy are apparent, for example, (and this is only one example from many in her work - see Rose 1996) in an evocation of the feminine where Irigaray explores the experiences and language of female mystics (and the feminine mystical) in relation to masculinist religion and philosophy. She writes (1985a (1974)): And the road she will have to take in orderto flee the logic thathas framedher thus is not nothing.Moreover she doesn'tknow where she is going, and will have to wanderrandomlyin darkness(p. 193)... Thoughthe one, she is impatientto path she is cuttingis a difficult set everythingelse aside and pleads to go on. But she cannotspecifyexactlywhat she wants.Wordsbegin to failher.Shesensesthatsomethingremains besaidthat to resists all speech that can at best be stammeredout. (p. 193)... Whatis beginningto happentakesplace in such secrecyand deep oblivionthatno intelligence, no commonsense, can have preciseknowledge of it... All also (p.194). surfacesand spatialconstructions colthat and lapse in a conflagration pushesfurther further back the depths of a gulf where now everythingis burning... (p.195) This extract is part of an extended engagement with the partially historical experiences of the feminine/female 'mystic' (Berry 1994). The feminized mystical space (the soul) of the religious' love for God figures the possibility of an/other place, another kind of space-time, another type of knowing and a different relationship with an/other - if provisionally and very precariously. This is symbolized by the ecstasies of losing self, selfabasement, self-cutting/abuse, in the identification of the mystic with the suffering of God himself and by the space which this experience makes for the silenced feminine hysteria/orgasm. This is a space that has collapsed, which is wild and savage, without form. The possibilities of knowing or understanding are at least temporarily lost here, though, in this feminine space which is both beyond and yet enables knowledge of the self and others. But it is the particular feminine/s which are played with in her performative attacks on the boundaries of masculinism which are disturbing. These are the fantasy feminine/s which these masculine subjects and forms of knowledge have depended upon and constructed themselves, those which they themselves have defined or permitted as feminine. In her language, it is the 'other of the same' which she is mobilizing. In trying to

Feminism and the spaces of transformation

289 there is no other' (1985b (1977), 140). It crosses my mind to recall that the masculine in general, and this account of it in particular, is a fantasy (Silverman 1992). Irigaray speaks of an allpowerful, ubiquitous masculinity whose outside and demise remains perilously distant. And an almost silent femininity, whose only words at the moment are masculine, whose form and spaces are so unfathomable that we can only begin to speak of them through male fantasies. The revolutionary strategy proposed by Irigaray - mimicking the 'other of the same', the feminine, in the form of its degraded and yet fundamental supporting position within unremittingly masculine knowledges and power - has a powerful effect in exposing masculine power and masculinedominant knowledges. It also has effect in insisting that the future needs to take notice of the devalued feminine, while taking care not to essentialize the feminine or simply preserve its current forms. As a strategy for a feminist transformation of gender relations, it validates and brings into play (albeit masculine-defined) feminine knowledges, experiences and imaginaries. It cautions us that masculinity is entrenched, insidious, and going to be hard to change and suggests that we should be creative in our search for alternatives. It sets itself up, though, for an eternal struggle, for a persistent anticipation. It is a spatial imaginary of transformation that pushes the possibility for change into the very distant future. Transforming masculinist knowledge seems impossible, especially since Irigaray does not propose an historical account of how masculinism has already been changed. Judith Butler: revolutionary re-iterations Judith Butler (1990; 1993) makes the argument that 'gender identities' are produced in the performative (re)-iteration of culturally specific understandings of masculinity and femininity. In the process these gender discourses are both re-inscribed and displaced, locating transformation in the present, rather than in some distant future. As we make our own gender identities out of the fictions of the time and place we inhabit we are also displacing and transforming these collective practices and understandings of gender. In even the most hopeless of situations, women (and men) are busily re-making themselves, and at the same time they are also reproducing the gender relations which (as) feminists (we) feel inclined to try and change:

represent these within the space of philosophy, Irigaray draws on a wide range of images, including, the unknowable, the mystical, darkness, unspeakable, silences, cuts/slits and tears, the back/ground upon which knowledge and sight are erected, dazzling sunlight, sea, ecstasy, self-abuse. Speaking with/in this feminine space, 'writing (as) woman', her challenge to the weight of masculine tradition is enormous - and amusing (although clearly not to those criticized, as her expulsion from various official positions testifies) (Burke 1994, 40). Margaret Whitford (1991) suggests that Irigaray's work is appropriately engaged with not only as a conventional text, something we understand as a communication, but also as a dialogue. This could allow something new to emerge from the interaction between the reader and the text, perhaps as in a psychoanalytic transference relationship (see also Rose (1996)). Her texts stimulated me to question the kinds of feminine that were being valued in this strategy of writing (as) woman, and those which were not being valued. Irigaray has little time for phallic mothers (1985a (1974), 236), femininities over-invested in the idea of woman or in a 'fetishized' idea of sex (p.229), women who buy into the masculine discourses of their fathers and who, according to her, are then simply men and not women at all. She suggests that these types of femininity have 'already frozen into phallomorphism' (p.229). Instead, the femininities that are valued - those that can't find their way, can't see, hurt themselves - are valued in terms of her strategy of putting the masculinedefined feminine into play, differently. This is undertaken as a provisional move in her attempt to 'secure a place for the feminine within sexual difference' (1985b (1977), 159). However, these are the femininities that have been both defined and devalued by a masculine imaginary. In this process it seems to me that some of the historical gains of women, and of feminists, are being undervalued.1 Similarly, some of the femininities which make sense to me, and perhaps even some forms of 'femininity' which have already found a way of being articulated within, and therefore potentially transforming, 'masculine' discourse, are disavowed. It is difficult to accept that all discourse can be characterized as 'masculine'. A student's comment to Irigaray in a seminar, 'I don't understand what 'masculine discourse' means' drew the rather curt response, 'Of course not, since

290 re-placing power relations, in both senses of the term. While Irigaray can only find hope in a distant 'elsewhere' which she dreams might provide the resources for transforming entrenched power relations, Butler is more optimistic that power itself is productive of change. In her reading of Irigaray, Butler approvingly observes that her 'textual practice is not grounded in a rival ontology, but inhabits - indeed, penetrates, occupies and redeploys - the paternal language itself' (1993, 45). However, where Irigaray uses this strategy in an attempt to stimulate change in an entrenched masculine symbolic, Butler argues for a symbolic order which is already profoundly dynamic and contingent. Pursuing a Foulcauldian analysis she asks whether 'the law' is juridical and repressive, or whether 'it inadvertently create(s) the possibility of its own cultural displacement' (1990, 38). Butler also links her argument to accounts of the heterosexual positions generated by the Symbolic (as in 'being' or 'having' the phallus) which stress the impossibility of successfully performing these positions (see Rose, J. 1986; Silverman 1992). The 'comedy' of heterosexual identities is exposed, since on Butler's account gender identities are constituted through performance and do not arise 'naturally' as a priori characteristics of individuals. The symbolic produces both the heterosexualities it approves of, and the possibility of outlawed homosexual or bisexual identities. These latter may be marginalized in given societies, but are not excluded. They are produced by the very law which marginalizes them. For Butler, the subversive and transformative potential of unstable gender identities replaces the category 'women' as the foundation of a feminist politics. As with all identities that of the category women, which it had been hoped would ground a feminist politics, is impossible to sustain. No longer able to rely on a representative or representational form of politics, she proposes that feminists make a virtue out of this. Butler argues that 'The possibilities of gender transformation are to be found precisely in the ... possibility of a failure to repeat, a de-formity, or a parodic repetition that exposes the phantasmatic effect of abiding identity as a politically tenuous construction' (1990, 141). She hopes that this will enable the proliferation of gender configurations 'outside the restricting frames of masculinist domination and compulsory

JennyRobinson While her vision is to disheterosexuality' (ibid.). place the gender norms that enable the performance of what she calls 'culturally intelligible' gender identities, she also expresses a desire to 'redescribe those possibilities that already exist, but which exist within cultural domains designated as culturally unintelligible and impossible' (1990, 148-9). Her political ambition is to change - not to abolish - what gets to count as culturally intelligible. This involves changing the 'dominant fictions' which regulate social life, while at the same time recognizing that power relations and dominance are unlikely to be abolished. There is a distinctive spatiality, then, to Butler's vision of gender transformation. We have seen that for Butler, there is no place beyond the Law. Change is always going to be implicated in the power relations (the 'Law') against which it is directed. But it is the Law itself which is generative of the possibilities of change - and seemingly endlessly so. This account of gender relations suggests that the very way in which gender is produced/performed enables its subversion. The possibility of freedom, it seems, is everywhere. This offers a sense of hopefulness about political practice in the present which, in the context of feminist practices within geography, Caroline Desbiens (1999) has described as an 'elsewhere within.' Butler herself is unsure, though, as to when exactly the instabilities involved in the repetitious production of gendered identities are likely to be subversive (see Bell et al 1994 for an interesting
reflection on this). She asks: '... what makes cer-

tain kinds of parodic repetitions effectively disruptive, truly troubling, and which repetitions become domesticated and recirculated as instruments of cultural hegemony... What performance where will compel a reconsideration of the place and stability of the masculine and the feminine?' (1990, 139). A wider theory of the institutional location of gendered power relations could help to identify those aspects of the instabilities of gender identities and gender relations that are most likely to be productive of change. Such a broader sense of power relations could also alert us to elements of gender identities and relations which are more clearly fixed and demarcated, and which are likely to prove very difficult to change. Irigaray's sensitivity to the long historical stretch over which Western forms of knowledge have been produced within a masculinist frame,

Feminism and the spaces of transformation

291 and now rather than in the distant future. She also imagines change to be ongoing and already happening, without implying that we are in a state of permanent revolution and instability. This political reading of Kristeva's work is partly made possible by paying attention to the spatial imagination embedded in her account of transformation. Feminists and Geographers have had a deeply ambivalent attitude towards Julia Kristeva's work. On the one hand she forms part of a trilogy of women writers in France whose work is revisited in almost every major Anglo-American feminist text. On the other, she is widely criticized for not being feminist, and for being politically conservative. In Geography, her exploration of 'abjection', has offered a conceptual underpinning for a broad range of social and cultural geographies of exclusion (see especially Sibley 1995). But feminist geographers have not engaged with her work at all (although see Reichert 1994). Unlike some feminist writers I suggest that Kristeva's analyses have much to offer a feminist political imagination.2 I also suggest that the spatial imagination at work in Kristeva's writing can reinforce and extend geographers' work on the theorization of space.

for example, might invite us to exercise some caution in relation to Butler's claims. Similarly, we might also recall her anxiety that in writing and thinking within a historically masculinist symbolic we run the risk of simply re-playing, rather than replacing, this order.

Topographies of transformation These alternative topographies of transformation ubiquitous revolution; distant futures - rely on particular spatial imaginaries. On the one hand, Judith Butler's assessment of the radical instability of gendered identities poses a spatiality of transformation as happening everywhere, all the time, albeit within the constraints of historical forms of power relations. On the other hand, Luce Irigaray's pessimistic but revolutionary vision posits a spatiality where the future is elsewhere, (almost) unreachable. In her view, a huge divide separates us from the political possibilities we (can't even) dream of. Nonetheless, she works hard to devise tactics in the present for undermining masculinism and, especially in her later work, searches out resources for stimulating the possibilities generated by new kinds of engagements between the masculine and the feminine (see Schwab 1994). Magaret Whitford (1994) makes the point that in political terms, '(w)hile stability immobilizes, perpetual disruption is immobilizing and also destructive' (p. 395). There are difficulties with both positions I have explored so far. Politically it is quite demobilizing to postulate that the masculine symbolic is so stable it is almost impossible to imagine it changing. Equally, thinking that power itself is radically unstable and a constant source of political possibilities could lead to a political complacency, undermining a sense of the value of organizing for change. Nonetheless, both writers have pointed in different ways to the evident tensions between the desire or potential for change, and the entrenched power relations which make this difficult, unpredictable, or unlikely. Julia Kristeva is involved in exploring the same set of political dilemmas, drawing, as with Butler and Irigaray, on a set of approaches informed by psychoanalytical traditions. She too tries to imagine how it is that entrenched power relations are likely to be changed, and what the potential resources for these changes might be. On her account it seems possible to imagine a feminist politics of transformation which is happening here

Julia Kristeva: heterogeneity transformation

and

Since her 1970s involvement in the avant-garde literary group, Tel Quel, Kristeva has been motivated by a desire for political transformation. Her work in this period was concerned to understand how different forms of writing could effect change in the reading subject and in social relations more generally (see Hill 1990; Lechte 1990). Reflecting perhaps the same heady revolutionary enthusiasm that inspired Irigaray's writing of the 1970s, Kristeva in this period is eager to explain how the Symbolic (and for her this psychoanalytic term refers to a necessarily historical and social symbolic - involving language, social relations and cultural practices) can be 'shattered'. In her topography of transformation this 'shattering' would be stimulated by elements which are both constitutive of and threatening to the social/ linguistic order - elements which are near at hand and yet productive of new possibilities. These elements would both sustain powerful social relations, and be a source of their potential transformation. 'Shattering' the symbolic and reconstituting

292 subjects takes place within the space of the symbolic. At no time is a place beyond the symbolic imagined, even though the process is assumed to give rise to a new symbolic order. In this her understanding of change is similar to that of Butler's (although Butler herself does not read Kristeva in this way). It is Kristeva's sense that for personal sanity as well as for social cohesion, an individual needs to assume a more or less comfortable place in the symbolic order, in the realm of language and in relation to others. Transformingthe symbolic is an ongoing historical process that is immanent in, and a product of, existing subjects and social relations. Kristeva links a philosophical account of the nature of the dynamism inherent in signifying subjects and in social relations with psychoanalysis. In doing this, she brings together the idea of transformation in both its social and its subjective aspect. She suggests that in a Hegelian philosophical world, both pre-Marxist and pre-Freudian, it was not possible to assign a materiality to the force of 'negativity' she identifies within the logic of the dialectic. And because Marxism read the necessary dynamism, or negativity, of the dialectic as referring to social and material processes, it overlooked the ways in which 'subjects themselves are split and symbolization divided so as to constitute potential sources of social transformation internal to the subject' (pgs 138-9). Thus Kristeva turned to explore the internal dynamism of subjects and their relations to language and society. Psychoanalysis offered a useful vocabulary for this and led her to her particular account of transformation, at once social and personal. In the context of the post-Freudian signifying subject, then, the pre-Symbolic space of drives and rejections is, for her, a source of dynamic movement and change shaping the signifying practices of subjects within the symbolic. One set of possibilities for transformation in subjects and society is linked to this space - which she labels the semiotic. In some ways this may seem similar to the more familiar space of the unconscious - but her account of the semiotic is somewhat different from a Freudian account of the unconscious. Rather than the site of repressed emotional experiences (although, significantly, aspects of the semiotic may be subject to repression), the semiotic refers partly to a particular period in an individual's development - a pre-linguistic, pre-Oedipal phase. Elements of experiences from the semiotic persist

JennyRobinson within the post-Oedipal linguistic subject. This point is most clearly developed in her work in relation to language. The ability of subjects to acquire language depends partly upon their experiences of the notyet-symbolized non-linguistic drive-related proximities, rejections and spacings which characterize emerging relationships between the (non)subject and (non)objects in the (usually) maternallydominant semiotic phase. According to Kristeva, semiotic drive-related energies and relations persist into the operations of language - for example, as silences, murmurings, repetitions, intonation and many other non-symbolic yet meaningful attributes of communication and language. Since the space of the semiotic is already social (ie it involves the (pre)subject in relations with others who already inhabit a social world of language), the symbolic is also involved in the organization of the semiotic. The dynamism which results from this mutual presence of the semiotic in the symbolic and vice versa is, for Kristeva, exemplified in the coexistence of both semiotic and symbolic elements in literature and language. This coexistence can function to stimulate change in both subjects and the social order, putting them 'on trial', bringing their (symbolic) unity and particular socialization into question, forcing a confrontation with those elements of feeling and relations which particular historical social symbolic orders attempt to exclude. Without a form of symbolic order, language or literary form, though, the drives and relations associated with the semiotic can find no expression, can have no social representation. It is not possible to access (or indeed, even to identify) the semiotic without the symbolic; but neither could the symbolic exist without the semiotic. The driverelated spacings and clumsy separations of the semiotic set the foundations for and enable the emergence of the more ordered spaces and social relations, including language, of the symbolic. The thetic, which is the boundary between the semiotic and the symbolic, is a necessarily 'traversable boundary' (Kristeva 1984 (1974), 51). The symbolic and the semiotic are both heterogeneous: 'Because the subject is always bothsemiotic and symbolic, no signifying system he3 produces can be either 'exclusively' semiotic or 'exclusively' symbolic, and is instead necessarily marked by an indebtedness to both' (p. 24). It is this heterogeneity of the subject, and of the social order, which ensures

and Feminism thespacesof transformation the possibility of dynamic change. Not only is the spatial imaginary of transformation heterogeneous; heterogeneity is itself part of the conditions of possibility of transformation. If this seems to indicate a rather compromised view of transformation, we might bear in mind Jacqueline Rose's comment in this context that 'resistance must finally be articulated in a voice which can be heard' (1986, 147). What Kristeva's heterogeneous spatial imaginary of transformation implies, though, is that this articulation of resistance within the spaces of the symbolic is never entirely determined by it. There is a real possibility for something else to emerge in the present, precisely because the present is a place of multiplicity and of the co-existence of elements of the social order alongside those elements that it seeks to define and exclude, but cannot.

293 what feminism in this context might entail. Her interviews and papers suggest that while she is interested in transforming gender relations she is sceptical about 'feminism'. This is based on her discomfort - shared with most feminist theorists about categories such as 'women' or 'feminine' (see especially 'Women's Time', in Moi 1986). She is more likely to refer to the specific experiences and conditions of individual women or to the dynamics of child-parent relations than she is to the 'feminine' or 'masculine'. She is eager to point out that the feminine is a fantasy (for both men and women) - borne partly of historically specific, complex and ambivalent experiences of the maternal relation. Feminist criticisms of her work - and they have at times been vitriolic5 - have centred around her alleged elision of the maternal and the semiotic (Grosz 1990; Butler 1990; Braidotti 1991; De Lauretis 1994). She is criticized for confining women to this apparently unchanging, pre-historic and pre-linguistic space. In my view this misses the dynamism and heterogeneity of the semiotic and also misrepresents the place of adult women within this space. The difficulty has emerged, I think, because historically (in both social and personal history) the figure of the mother looms very large within what Kristeva has termed the semiotic. However, although she uses the term chora(a term feminized in its original Platonic formulation) to characterize the semiotic phase, she is ambivalent about its association with women/the feminine.6 Kristeva recognizes that the characteristics of the semiotic have been feminized: 'Indifferent to language, enigmatic and feminine, this space underlying the written is rhythmic, unfettered, irreducible to its intelligible verbal translation' (1984 (1974), 29). But she also makes it clear that these characteristics represent social fantasies - of both sexes - borne partly of the semiotic. In addition, and especially in Tales of Love (1987) she questions the Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic narratives which gender the law or the symbolic as paternal, and the semiotic as maternal. She places the intervention of a diversely gendered ('is it he or is it she?' (p. 34)) 'paternal' law, or 'Third Party', before the oedipal triangle. 'The archaic inscription of the father seems to me a way of modifying the fantasy of a phallic mother playing at the phallus game all by herself, alone and complete...' (1987 (1983), 44). Both the semiotic

Feminism and Kristeva Can we recruit Kristeva's heterogeneous imagination of transformation to a feminist and perhaps wider political cause? Many would think not at all. Kristeva has attracted substantial criticism from a number of feminist writers. Their reasons are diverse, but in my opinion being attentive to the spatial imagery of her arguments exposes much of the criticism as based on substantial misreading of her work. I discuss this below. Other criticisms, especially those developed in the 1980s, are based on rather outdated political sensibilities and sound very strange to intellectuals working after the 1990s. Toril Moi, for example, summarizes some critics who accuse Kristeva of a 'subjectivist' politics, and complain that she is sceptical of a politics which prioritizes the collective (1985, 168-170). Added to this is the complaint that the cultural practices of the avant-garde are 'peripheral in the sense that they have no crucial function in the economic order' (p.172). These are complaints which seem to have little place in a post-1990s post-structuralist intellectual landscape. Collective oppositional politics in the West is in crisis, in the face of a fragmenting and sceptical politics of identity operating primarily on the terrain of culture.4 And few - especially amongst feminist writers - would suggest that political initiatives to transform the cultural sphere are irrelevant. In this context, the multiple crises of contemporary Western feminist politics make Kristeva's work potentially enormously helpful in imagining

294

and the symbolic involve both 'paternal' and 'maternal' elements; each distributed across both genders. Kristeva's position insists that as fully social beings, women have already participated in and shaped the symbolic. Along with one of her harshest critics, Teresa de Lauretis (1994), she is able to postulate the possibility of a transition into the social and public realm of language and space that is not dependent upon a specifically masculine or paternal law. In addition to this shifting of gendered psychoanalytic narratives, which in my view advances contemporary feminist criticism, Kristeva understands that the social relations which mean that the mother is usually the primary caregiver during the infant's experiences of the semiotic are subject to historical changes (and, we might add, substantial geographic variability). This has significant consequences for how these experiences come to be socially symbolized and sublimated (Kristeva 1996, 120). With a less clear heterosexual ordering of childcare and paid work, there is a lot of potential for gendered associations to be differently distributed within the symbolic order. But we certainly do not need to wait for this eventuality to intervene in and transform dominant cultural and social representations within the symbolic order. We can act now on what she identifies as 'women's desire to lift what is sacrificial in the social contract from their shoulders' ('Women's Time' in Moi 1986, 207). More than this, at no time in her analysis of the semiotic is it suggested that it is mothers who are experiencing these emotions. Mothers are (more or less) firmly inhabiting their own world within the symbolic.7 It is children who are experiencing the strange and fearful dynamics of the semiotic (see below), and mothers who are re-imagined in fantasy worlds - personal and social - as a way for

Jenny Robinson of the feminine psyche for which that represenaspects tation of motherhood does not provide a solution or else provides one that is felt as too coercive by twentieth-century women? ('Stabat Mater' in Moi 1986, 161, 182)

both men and women to cope with the horrors and pleasures of these archaic memories (Smith 1998). Kristeva is unequivocal that these cultural forms of fantasy abjecting or sublimating femininity should change - a distinctly feminist position.
... we live in a civilization where the consecrated(religious or secular) representation of femininity is absorbed by motherhood. If, however, one looks at it more closely, this motherhood is the fantasy that is nurtured by the adult, man or woman, of a lost territory; what is more, it involves less an idealized archaic mother than the idealization of the relationshipthat binds us to her, one that cannot be localized - an idealization of primary narcissism... what are the

For Kristeva, neither the myth of the Virgin mother nor the abjection of the feminine in sacrificial or religious beliefs/rites/taboos (Kristeva 1982 (1980)) are acceptable, although she acknowledges that at different times these myths have worked, in different ways, for both women and men, to make sense of complex emotional and social dynamics. Instead, Kristeva turns to the distinctive experiences of adult women as mothers8 in an attempt to elaborate a new fantasy of a maternal ethics from the position of the mother, rather than the child. She reads motherhood as another heterogeneous space (like poetry, art, music, depression, love) holding the potential for transformation insofar as for various reasons mothers, like all post-Oedipal subjects, inhabit the precarious transverse space across the symbolic and the semiotic. Contrary to Teresa de Lauretis (1994, 174), then, who suggests that Kristeva has developed an 'anti-feminist and patently reactionary view of motherhood', I would argue that Kristeva is trying to intervene in a way which places women and mothers firmly within the changing symbolic. Her intention is to recover a politics of motherhood from semiotically influenced and masculine-dominant cultural imagineries. In her view we need to find other ways to express or sublimate the loss and violence associated with the necessary separations from caregivers and the environment which are involved in becoming a subject. Kristeva's vision is that individuals would find ways to internalize the difficult emotions that surround the founding separations of individual and social identity, rather than externalizing them in gendered social myths. She hopes then 'that the habitual and increasingly explicit attempt to fabricate a scapegoat victim as foundress of a society or a counter-society may be replaced by the analysis of the potentialities of victim/executioner which characterize each identity, each subject, each sex' ('Women's Time' in Moi 1986, 210). Being able to put into words and symbolize the pain and difficulty of our early (semiotic) separations without needing to violently hate, denigrate or idealize women in the process should be an important part of any feminist politics (see 'Stabat Mater' in Moi 1986).

and Feminism the spaces transformation of Although the symbolic is shot through with gendered power relations, inequalities, exclusions and destructive (maternal) fantasies, Kristeva's analysis does not suggest that we can helpfully label it as masculine. Men and women may have somewhat different relations to the symbolic - 'a woman (is) more vulnerable within the symbolic order' ('Womens' Time', in Moi (ed) 1986, p. 204) but both sexes inhabit and shape the form of the symbolic, and have the potential to transform it. (On this see also her Black Sun 1989, ch 3; and Interviews1996, ch 9.) Kristeva argues that women as social beings, as well as women as intellectuals, have already played a part in shaping the symbolic order. Creed (1993), for example, draws on Kristeva and readings of various genres of horror movies to argue that women are also agents of entry into the symbolic - in fantasy, then, not just the castrating father, but also the castrating (and in horror movies, murderous) mother. In terms of a transformative feminist politics Kristeva, like Butler, is concerned with the difficult relationship between gendered power relations, which are hard to change, and the diverse opportunities which already exist in the present for transforming these. And like Irigaray, she dreams of new forms of gender relations and new types of cultural imaginaries of femininity. But Kristeva also has a sense that the productivity of power relations lies not only in their capacity to generate change (as Butler implies), but in their ability to offer the rudiments of symbolization and stability necessary for personal sanity and a collective social life. It is this claim which some see as profoundly conservative: although as we have seen this coexists with a strong desire for radical change in the form of the symbolic. For Kristeva changes in gendered power relations can and do take place now, and have already taken place in the past. We have no need to yearn for a future that is never going to arrive, as Irigaray seems to suggest. In the final section I consider the consequences of this heterogeneous spatial imagination of gendered transformation for a feminist politics of space. Abjection, feminism and space Rose (1996) examines what she calls the 'male geographical imaginary' and in an Irigarayan voice, argues that within this imaginary, 'woman... is only a more or less obliging prop for the enactment of man's fantasies ... And she is a spatialized prop:

295 matter, earth, nature, interval, ground, envelope, container. And while he fantasizes a universe from the implosion that is his study, she is both infinite matter and an envelope or mirror, always carrying his meaning' (p. 71). Her concern is to work what she sees as the phallocentric discourse of geography 'against itself from the inside', arguing that despite the risks, parodying the place of the feminine within this imaginary constitutes a 'hinge into another spatiality'. She wants to write 'as if the mirrors had bled', even though she acknowledges this move might be assimilated into a 'masculinist discourse as just another example of feminine superficiality' (p. 73). This Irigarayan analysis suggests that dominant spatialities are masculine, and that it is not possible to imagine an alternative to them. Based on the reading I have offered of Kristeva's account of transformation, I'd like to suggest that we can be more optimistic than that about the opportunities for transforming spatialities and spaces. Kristeva's work encourages us to look elsewhere than the masculine or the feminine for explanations of why certain experiences and interpretations of social space might exist, and for understanding how they might change. On some accounts, Cartesian perspectival space, for example, is seen to be characteristic of the symbolic, and characteristically masculine (Rose 1993; 1995a). Following Kristeva, though, we might be inclined to question the extent to which this is a specifically masculine space. We might ask whether this particular spatiality emerged as a consequence of a distinctive masculine subject, or whether it is the product of a wide variety of historical forces9 as well as a generalized requirement for the constitution of subjectivity across genders. Included in such an alternative account might be the historically specific ways in which subjects come to gain a sense of their separateness from others and from their environment. Rose (1995a) suggests that the form of Cartesian spatiality enables us to see objects as separate from ourselves, distant and superficial in contrast to our own experiences of interiority and completeness. Rather than this being a feature of a specifically masculine subjectivity,10 we could argue that a failure to achieve this form of visual or perspectival relation with the world could mean an insufficient sense of our separation from others and a painful and difficult life on the indistinct borders of our self.

296
Many people - women and men - may experi-

Jenny Robinson

ence difficulties with setting boundaries between themselves and others.11 All subjects carry with them to a greater or lesser extent memories of borders of the self which are far from settled or secure.l2 Kristeva suggests that this is partly a residue of the semiotic. More specifically we could suggest that this pre-symbolic phase is governed by very different spatial relations from those which shape the symbolic. Rather than the clear borders and distinct separations which mark the subject in the symbolic, her analysis suggests that in the semiotic there are no distinct subjects or objects and no clear separations between fragments of self and others. These unclear relations are accompanied by intense and often overwhelming emotions including fear and aggression, dependence and
attachment.13

The spatial relations of the semiotic - its 'topological spaces' - '... connect the zones of the

fragmented [pre-symbolic] body to each other and also to 'exteral' 'objects' and 'subjects' which are not yet constituted as such' (Kristeva 1984 (1974), 28). Semiotic spatialities are formed prior to separation from a primary caregiver, prior to the demarcation of a separate self and the identification of objects as distinct from the self. The spatial relations of the semiotic are fundamentally different from those constituted during the mirror stage and the thetic break which ushers in the Symbolic (on this see Pile 1996, Chapter 5). The semiotic is where a not-yet subject deals with objects and spaces that are not-yet demarcated. This is a space of 'fluid demarcations of yet unstable territories, where an 'I' that is taking shape is ceaselessly straying' (1982 (1980), 11), where the not-yet-subject experiences 'above all ambiguity', 'perpetual danger' and is engaged in a 'violent, clumsy breaking away' from the mother. The mapping of the body, then, its initial territorialization, takes place in this primary ('maternal') arena, already social and meaningful (at least partly because the mother is a social subject), but not yet linguistic, that is, prior to the subject's advent into language and the ('paternal') law. The space which is figured here is one in which the subject 'strays'14incoherently attempting, and generally failing to deal with the threatening presence of others in this 'not yet a place', this 'no grounds' (38). Feelings of fear, disgust, hatred - abjection are a result of this archaic inability to separate oneself off from that which one fears. Equally, these

uncertain spatialities are associated with the loss of self which accompanies deep and often overwhelming emotional attachments such as love (Kristeva 1987 (1983)). Both of these represent a failure of demarcation and an archaic emotional investment (which is not the same as desire) in this failure. Abjection, a form of semiotic relation, has been associated in geography with the exclusion of 'others', the drawing of boundaries to effect social and spatial purification (see Sibley 1988; 1995; 1998; Hooper 1995; Wilton 1998; Gandy 1999). Experiences of abjection, Kristeva suggests, are certainly associated with societies and personalities who might be described as 'deviser(s) of territories', demarcating divisions (1982 (1980), 6). But if this is so, it is as an attempt, usually unsuccessful, to formulate a response to the 'strange spaces' and intense emotions of the semiotic. Kristeva suggests that we consider that the 'demarcating imperative, which is subjectively experienced as abjection, varies according to time and space, even though it is universal' (1982 (1980), 68). She also indicates that those in the thrall of abjection might well seek out situations 'in order to experience abjection' (180). The 'abject' aspect of hatred of certain objects and others which results in various efforts at demarcation lies, then, in its necessary subjective failure. Furious efforts to separate from those who we have learnt within a particular society to designate as dangerous or fearful by means of historically specific social and spatial strategies (and spatial separation is only one possible strategy here) signal their inevitable failure in their very fury. The danger, the fear, is within; and the emotional energy, if it is indeed a product of abjection, signals the perpetrators' knowledge that the threat will persist, both subjectively and quite possibly socially, despite their best demarcating efforts. The spatiality of abjection and of the semiotic, then, is precisely about the persistentfailure of borders, distinctions and separations. In terms of language, we noted that the relations and dynamics of the Semiotic are important in making possible the constitution of subjects within Symbolic spaces of representation and language. Their persistence within the memories of the subject and their traces in various elements of language and representation mean that while the semiotic functions as a precondition of the symbolic, it is also ever-present and potentially destructive/re-constructive of the symbolic order.

Feminism and the spaces of transformation

297 feminist concern with transforming gender relations. I have argued that she advances a politics in the present, in which transformation happens within already existing social and cultural forms. This may not always be dramatic - as I noted at the very beginning of this paper (Cooks 1988). In terms of a feminist politics of space I have suggested that reading Kristeva's work spatially opens up another sense in which the heterogeneity, or openness of space (Massey 1995b) can be understood to be politically transformative. Kristeva's analysis directs us to the archaic emotional and spatial dynamics of the semiotic coexisting alongside the spaces of the symbolic, as one specific source of this transformative potential. The apparently ordered spaces of the symbolic are never securely achieved, and are always in danger of being re-shaped. They are 'in-progress', partly as a result of the heterogeneity of our subjective experiences of them. There is not time here to develop the implications of this heterogeneous imagination for a politics of space at length or in relation to examples but, as a start, there are some connections between the argument I have developed here and Lefebvre's (1991) account of social space, and especially with his concern for transforming space. Indeed, he is adamant that if we wish to change society, we need to change space! For me, Lefebvre's concept of representational space is central to thinking about how a psychoanalysis of space (Pile 1996) can help us understand the transformation of space. Alongside spatial practice (how space is produced and used in particular societies) and representations of space (conceived space, the space of scientists, planners, urbanists etc), representational space is described as space as directlylived throughits associatedimages and symbols,and hence the space of 'inhabitants' and 'users',but also of some artistsand perhapsof those, suchas a few writersand philosphers, who describe and aspireto do no more than describe.This is the dominated- and hencepassivelyexperienced spacewhich the imagination seeksto changeand appropriate. (p.39) The concept of representational space postulates a spatiality which draws on cultural and historical resources. This evokes the possibility and memory of other ways of living in spaces than those dictated by the dominant order, that is, by representations of space.

The nature of spatial relations in the semiotic might therefore point towards alternative spatialities that coexist with and shape the character of the space/s of the symbolic. As Victor Burgin attempted to capture in a conference discussion, geometry and abjection are related; Kristeva suggested that this be expressed as abjection being the 'precondition' of geometry - the 'degree zero of spatialization', and that 'abjection is to geometry what intonation is to speech' (Burgin 1990, 115; note 39, 122).15 Based on the reading I have offered of Kristeva, a feminist analysis of the character and transformation of particular spatialities would not be about finding a feminine alternative (in an apparently maternal chora associated with the spaces of abjection) to masculine spaces of the symbolic (see Reichert 1994). Also, it is not possible within her psychoanalytic narrative to read certain spatial imaginations as resting entirely on the side of the masculine (see Rose 1996). In gendered terms, semiotic and symbolic spaces are both heterogeneous, produced and experienced by both men and women, of course within contested and historical gendered power relations. Kristeva's account of the heterogeneous spatiality of the semiotic and the symbolic reminds us that the potential for transforming the spatialities of the symbolic is with us now. Such transformations have already been happening and have already shaped the emergence of particular historical spatialities. Alternatives are already being formulated, are in existence and have already changed the ways in which we see and experience space and others. As a feminist politics of space, then, her account encourages us to celebrate past gains, and to look for transformative potential within the present. We can and should speak now of a symbolic, or even perhaps of cartesian/perspectival, space which is not masculine, but already heterogeneous. Kristeva encourages us to read psychoanalytic narratives within a socio-historical frame, and to question their gendered assumptions. We can and should challenge cultural symbolizations of space which sacrifice women's ongoing historical contributions to tales of their destitute wanderings in wild spaces of self-loss.

Conclusions:

transforming

spaces

My ambition in this paper has been to read Kristeva's work politically, within the frame of a

298 In a characteristically unreferenced comment which seems to owe something to Kristeva's work, which he does mention elsewhere, Lefebvre offers us grounds for a close link between the heterogeneous spatiality of the semiotic and the transformative potential of representational space. He is writing about the way in which language intervenes in the development of a child, in his view a 'lethal zone thickly strewn with dusty mouldering words... it is what allows meaning to escape the embrace of lived experience, to detach itself from the fleshly body.' (203). He suggests that the interplay between language and the body constitutes a

Jenny Robinson

is to find acceptable, ethical ways to express and sublimate the powerful archaic emotions that contribute to the formation and transformation of gendered subjects, spaces and societies. The hopeful aspect of this analysis, though, is that we can do this now, and that we can acknowledge and build on the achievements of those who have gone before us.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank the three anonymous referees who made excellent and helpful comments on the paper. They certainly don't agree with everything I have written, but they have been generous in 'mixed' space - still natural yet already produced- of the first year of life, and, later,of poetry and art. The helping me to write a better paper. Other people have helped along the way, including Steve representational space, in a word, of representations: Pile, David Sibley, Garth Myers and a number of space (203). participants at seminars in South Africa and Kristeva's analysis encourages us to consider Britain, who challenged me to think again about how the coexistence of these elements of our ex- what I wanted to argue. The paper began from a periences of spatiality, the heterogeneity of social reading group at the University of Natal in space, is potentially transformative. Lefebvre Durban, on feminism and postmodernism, and tends to privilege political-economic processes as Rob Morrell, Debby Bonnin and Cheryl Walker key motors in the emergence of what he calls are the most inspiring colleagues to have started 'differential space', which is how he imagines a learning about feminist political theory with - I space beyond the abstract (symbolic) space of owe them a very big debt. I would also like to capitalist social relations. My reading of Kristeva thank some of my 'comrades' in Durban, who encourages us to expect 'differential space' to be shared the joys and despairs of a very particular with us already. Also, my account of the signifi- transformation with me in the first part of the cance of heterogeneous spatialities in enabling 1990s. This shared experience is the origin of this transformation should also inspire us to look more paper. closely at 'representational space' as a resource for political and feminist challenges to dominant spatialities. One final and important point to make, though, Notes is that the nature and direction of transformation is 1 Toril Moi (1985, 148) makes a similar point about inherently unpredictable. This is as true of psycho'Irigaray'sfailure to consider the historical and economicspecificityof patriarchal analytic accounts, as it is of economic, social or power'. She also work offersa more satisfacpolitical analyses of transformation. In terms of suggests that Kristeva's Kristeva's account, the traces of the semiotic gentory accountof the historicityof power relations. work on 2 It is relativelyuncommonto readKristeva's erate both the aggressive relations characteristic of the side of a radicalpolitics- but therearesignificant the semiotic and the possibilthe fearful spaces of writerswho do so - Moi (1985),Rose (1986),Oliver ity for openness and loss of clear personal bound(1993ab) and Smith (1998),for example. It is my aries that we often capture in the term, love. opinion that attentivenessto the spatiality of her of dynamic Insofar as the semiotic is a source this claimsreinforces readingand enables theoretical potential, then, it could just as easily provoke a critiqueof Kristeva's many feministcritics. racist hatred or misogynist attitudes - as shown in use 3 Kristeva's of the masculinepronounhas drawn Kristeva's analysis of Celine (1982 (1980)) - as it fromher feministcritics.In her criticism considerable could support enthusiasm for negotiating differbut laterworksshe changesthis practice Anne-Marie Smith(1998,10) arguesthatit may have been due to ence, exploring porous borders and enabling openness to strangers (1993). The challenge for feminists poor translationof the use of a generic masculine

Feminism and the spaces of transformation pronoun with the French language. However, this still constitutes a failure to contest the masculine norms of the language. This is not the case every where in the world, but is certainly pertinent in Western countries, which are usually the only grounds every offered for these claims in Western intellectual debates. This is not to suggest that cultural politics and post-structuralist theory is irrelevant in other kinds of places - far from it. Indeed, my writing this paper is an attempt to insist that engaging with these theoretical debates (from some strange angle, like transformation... !) is also the right and appropriate preserve of intellectuals in these (other) places. How exactly these debates travel and work in places beyond those which spawned them is testimony to the fact that the West does not own its theory (Spivak 1992). And Kristeva herself has been caught in deep controversy around her attempt to write within her own analytical frame about Chinese women after a brief trip to China in the 1970s (Spivak 1988, ch 9). Although such an exercise was very common amongst French intellectuals, her text reveals a clear orientalist reading, based on very little knowledge or insight. Elizabeth Grosz describes Kristeva as a 'dutiful daughter', contrasted with Irigaray's more challenging (defiant) responses to their common Lacanian paternal inheritance (Grosz 1990, 150). This criticism is levied despite Kristeva's decision not to join the Lacanian professional psychoanalytic society (Kristeva 1996, 151-2). Rosi Braidotti (1991), for example, also enters the fray as she comments: 'I do think that Kristeva's relationship to psychoanalysis and to feminism is one of the greatest attachment to the former and the strongest ambivalence to the latter. In her more recent work, it seems to me that the dutiful Lacanian daughter takes the upper hand over the critical feminist theorist' (238). Teresa de Lauretis (1994, 174) asks of Kaja Silverman, 'What is at stake for Silverman, a feminist, when she tries to reclaim Kristeva's anti-feminist and patently reactionary view of motherhood?' We could compare this to Irigaray's (1985a (1974)) critique of the chora. In formulating the semiotic/ chora as mobile and dynamic Kristeva is recovering the active role of the chora in the production of meaning, which Irigaray argues masculine theorists have occluded and imagined as passive femininity. And here I would need to disagree with Reichert 1994, who suggests that their association with the chora makes women a privileged site for the imagining of alternatives to the existing order. The chora may be fantasized by men and women 'on the side of the mother', but this is not to suggest that it reflects women's experiences of self any more than men's. Similarly, Rose's (1996, 71) claim that 'there is no

299 spatiality which would allow the mother to become a subject' is at odds with this analysis. This is not the only source for her understanding of women's specific positionings within the symbolic, as she also thinks about women as intellectuals (1996), within various clinical settings (1989 (1987)), and as authors (eg 1989 (1987), ch 8). See Lefebvre (1991, 47), for example, on the changing political economy of renaissance Italy and the emergence of perspectival space. As Nash (1996, 167) suggests - 'Certain forms of visual representation may support patriarchal power relations, but looking is never only or just masculine.' 'The logical operation of separation ... which preconditions the binding of language which is already syntactical, is therefore the common destiny of the two sexes, men and women. That certain biofamilial conditions and relationships cause women (and notably hysterics) to deny this separation and the language which ensues from it, whereas men (notably obsessionals) magnify both and, terrified, attempt to master them - this is what Freud's discovery has to tell us on this issue' ('Women's Time' in Moi,1986, 198) This concern with the uncertain borders of subjects is widespread within psychoanalysis, and has attracted the attention of geographers interested in psychoanalysis (eg Pile 1996; Lukinbeal and Aitken 1998; Nast 1998; Bondi 1999). My entry point for this paper is through feminist politics and I personally have not explored the many different psychoanalytic contributions which might add to the account I am offering here. I am conscious that telling a story about the spatialities of the semiotic is to build upon a particular set of psychoanalytic accounts whose provenance is only loosely related to social scientific methodologies. Issues of substantiation and proof are complex, in a world of mutually affecting fantasies - here the semiotic can only be captured in a post-hoc fashion from traces within the symbolic (Butler 1990, 88). And anyway, like all narratives and categories, those of psychoanalysis are provisional and contested. No doubt there should be a lively debate about this within Geography as we increasingly turn to think through interiority and subjectivity in psychoanalytic ways (see for example, Pile 1996; Lukinbeal and Aitken 1998; Bondi 1999; Nast 1999 for different psychoanalytic takes). Kristeva's use of this term is reminiscent of a Situationist 'derive', which might be another route for exploring the consequences of her work for a politics of space, as discussed in the conclusion. Elsewhere, Kristeva writes that 'Although our theoretical description of the chora is itself part of the discourse of representation that offers it as evidence, the chora, as rupture and articulations (rhythm),

10

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300 precedes evidence, verisimilitude, spatiality, and temporality' (1984 (1974), 26).

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