Introduction
A never-ending question in philosophy is that posed by the dilemma: do differences exist in the world and that is why we trace them, or do we trace differences and that is why they can be said to exist? Differences become manifest in language: we distinguish colours, phenomena, objects, activities and living beings by means of different terms and, naïvely, assume that we do this because there are different colours, phenomena, objects, activities and living beings. But as soon as we leave our naïve everyday perspective, it becomes clear that the conceptual distinctions that we as humans or speakers of a language make are just one perspective among many others: Why should animals who orient themselves mainly by their olfactory or auditory organs distinguish between different colours? Or why should people who live in a climate that is always warm and pleasant have a concept like the Norwegian hygge, meaning a certain kind of cosiness related to cold, dark, and rainy weather that calls for warm and cosy gatherings inside?
It is these and similar considerations that lead to the contention that the very differences we see, hear, feel and think do not exist independently of us—that is, in nature per se—but are somehow constructed and exist because we make them. These considerations are currently relevant in feminist discussions, which were initially sparked by Simone de Beauvoir’s thesis that “one is not born, but rather becomes, woman” (Beauvoir 2010, 357). This is what the concept of “gender” in its various interpretations is supposed to emphasise, that is, that gender differences are not naturally or biologically given but are socially constructed or discursively performed. As Donna Haraway says:
Gender is a concept developed to contest the naturalization of sexual difference in multiple arenas of struggle. Feminist theory and practice around gender seek to explain and change historical systems of sexual difference, whereby “men” and “women” are socially constituted and positioned in relations of hierarchy and antagonism. (Haraway 1991a, 131)
This might result in a somewhat paradoxical situation for feminists who, on the one hand, champion the importance of “women” as a category and, on the other, aim at its disappearance (cf. ibid., cf. also Butler 2007, esp. ch. 1). In other words, if one broadly defines feminism with bell hooks as a “movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation and oppression” (hooks 2015, xii), sexual differences, exploitation, and oppression can only be overcome and ended by fighting against the oppressors and exploiters or by fighting for the oppressed and exploited. However, in doing so one maintains and perhaps even reinforces those very sexual differences. What might be called the paradox of feminism is thus that the subject of feminism, in its ambiguity as agent and as patient, consists in its own overcoming. Formulated in this way, the enterprise of “feminism” does not sound very promising. In order for it to succeed, I argue, the “We” that is the subject of feminism must constitute itself beyond conventional conceptual distinctions: as a “We” without a “They.”
This essay is an experimental attempt to explore the “We” of feminism by commuting between Ludwig Wittgenstein’s and Donna Haraway’s views on the relation between nature and meaning. In the area thus staked out, I will first draw upon Wittgenstein’s reflections on the connection of nature and the formation of concepts, bringing out its inherent phallogocentrism, that is, generally speaking, the dominance of the male perspective in the construction of meaning. To overcome this phallogocentrism and thus gain a positive conception of what a feminist “We” might be, I will follow Haraway’s path, in particular as outlined in “The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others” (1992). This path leads not back to an untouched, pre-found nature but through and within a made, social nature that is both fact and fiction. Finally, I will deploy Haraway’s figure of the monster as a creature shimmering between fact and fiction, outside prevailing measures and norms, to propose a feminist “We” beyond the binary structures of phallogocentrism. This “We” is that of an embodied language, aware of its history, its bodies, and its political dimension. It is a doing rather than a group of subjects: in short, it is a “We” of a monstrous form of life.[1]
Wittgenstein on Concept Formation and Facts of Nature*
Before we turn to the question of the “We” of feminism, let us first begin with Wittgenstein’s very general reflections on the relationship between nature and the formation of concepts.
Throughout his philosophical work, Wittgenstein was concerned with questions regarding how words can relate to things in the world, what the meaning of a concept is, and why we have the concepts we have in the first place. If we are to investigate the meaning of a feminist “We,” it is particularly interesting to examine the question of whether, or to what extent, our concepts and the way we use concepts—what Wittgenstein calls the “grammar” of a word—are related to nature or natural factors. Wittgenstein spells out this query as a question about the extent to which there is a “correspondence between our grammar and general (seldom mentioned) facts of nature” (RPP I, 46). By this, he does not mean a causal explanation of our grammar from facts of nature (cf. PPF, xii, 365). Rather, Wittgenstein is interested in the significance of facts of nature for our grammar and the extent to which our concepts are thus part of our life (cf. LWPP II, 72).
One of the examples that Wittgenstein repeatedly considers in this context is that of colours. For instance, we have the colour concepts “red,” “blue,” “yellow,” and “green” and also speak of a “yellowish red,” a “bluish green,” but we do not generally speak of a “reddish green” and would not really know what was meant by this. Should we say here, as Wittgenstein asks, that it is “in the nature of the colours green and red that they have no intermediate colours” (cf. Ms 137, 5a; my transl.)? In a certain sense, this seems to be true, for a “yellowish red” and a “bluish green” can indeed be produced by mixing colours, whereas mixing red and green only produces a brownish hue that no longer has much in common with red and green (cf. Ms 137, 7b f.). So, in the case of “reddish-green,” it seems that we do not have this concept precisely because there is no “reddish-green” in nature. But is this true? What about the colour of olives or leaves that turn from green to red in autumn? What would it be like if “red” and “green” only occurred in this way in nature, that is, in olives or autumn leaves? Wittgenstein imagines it like this:
Red and green the same. I am imagining there being only one shade of red and green. In nature they always blend into each other (as certain leaves do in autumn). They are everywhere found together, one being a variation of the other. The distinction between them is no greater than the one between lighter and darker.
But don’t the people see the difference?! Of course they do. But they have a word, say, “leaf-colour,” which is fairly analogous to our colour names, and means red or green; and they have two modifiers, “sharp” and “blunt,” more or less analogous to our “light” and “dark,” which separate red from green. […] (LWPP I, 220)
So how would these people differ from us? Obviously, they can see colours and also distinguish red from green, only this distinction plays the same role for them as our distinction of “light” and “dark.” That is, if these people then came into our world and learned our language, they could use our concepts of “red” and “green” just as we do. In their world, however, “red” and “green” are only different shades of what they call “leaf-colour.” What we can learn from this example, according to Wittgenstein, is: “The difference between red and green is just not as important to them as it is to us” (LWPP I, 221).
There can thus surely be connections between our concepts and certain natural factors, but only mediated by what is important to people in their practice and lives, i.e., what they are interested in. Nevertheless, this does not mean that our concepts are justified by nature. Already in the early 1930s, Wittgenstein thought that grammar—that is, the logic of use of concepts—is not accountable to any reality. The rules according to which we use terms constitute meaning and are therefore arbitrary in a sense (cf. BT, 233r). He explains how this claim is to be understood as follows: “When one talks about the arbitrariness [Willkürlichkeit] of grammatical rules, this can only mean that the justification that is inherent in grammar as such does not exist for grammar” (BT, 235r). For any such justification would be circular (cf. BT, 238): grammar constitutes the rules of a language and not of “nature.” Far from contradicting the earlier mentioned correspondence of grammar with certain facts of nature, what this means is that the role our concepts play in our lives—that is, their use, which amounts to their grammar—is based on what is important to us or our interest. Hence, when our interest changes, the grammar of concepts might also change. As Wittgenstein writes:
Do I want to say, then, that certain facts are favourable to the formation of certain concepts; or again unfavourable? And does experience teach us this? It is a fact of experience that human beings alter their concepts, exchange them for others when they learn new facts; when in this way what was formerly important to them becomes unimportant, and vice versa. (One finds, e.g., that what formerly counted as a difference in kind, is really only a difference in degree.) […] (RPP II, 727; mod. transl.)
So, even if grammar or concept formation corresponds to general facts of nature, this does not mean that grammar can be explained causally, nor that it can be justified by “nature”—it merely means that grammar does not seem to be completely random in a trivial sense. Grammar is, as Wittgenstein says, autonomous (cf. BT 236r)—autonomy, however, is not absolute independence as it is not a “complete detachment.” We might have as well other terms and make other conceptual distinctions. As Wittgenstein emphasises, both in the 1930s (cf. BT, 236r) and in his later investigations, our concepts cannot be justified as the “right” ones or as corresponding to “nature”: they are neither “reasonable” nor “unreasonable,” neither “right” nor “wrong.” As he puts it, the belief that “our concepts are the only reasonable ones consists in […] [t]hat it doesn’t occur to us that others are concerned with completely different things, and that our concepts are connected with what interests us, with what matters to us” (LW II, 46). With this, however, Wittgenstein does not want to set up a hypothesis:
I am not saying: if such-and-such facts of nature were different, people would have different concepts (in the sense of a hypothesis). Rather: if anyone believes that certain concepts are absolutely the right ones, and that having different ones would mean not realizing something that we realize—then let him imagine certain very general facts of nature to be different from what we are used to, and the formation of concepts different from the usual ones will become intelligible to him. (PPF, xii, 366, mod. transl.)
If, as Wittgenstein ponders, a certain group of people lived in a world where “all objects around them were rapidly coming into being and passing away,” these people “could not learn to count” (Ms 136, 48a, cf. RPP II, 191; my transl.). Indeed, it would be highly “unnatural” or absurd if people in such an environment nevertheless had number words, for the language game of counting objects would have no point here (cf. PI, 142). There is a trivial sense, indeed, in which our language-game of counting is not random insofar as it is (also) related to the constancy of objects. But there is also a non-trivial sense in which our language-game of counting is arbitrary (willkürlich), for instance, insofar as our number system is related to the number of our fingers (cf. Ms 137, 61a). That this is arbitrary is shown by the fact that there are indeed cultural differences here: in German languages, for example, only the fingers are used, whereas in Japanese and French, the direction of counting on each hand up to ten is also included, so that counting here is based on 20 (so the French word for 80 is quatre-vingt, which means “four times twenty”). Other cultures even include other parts of the body (cf. Voß 2012, 119 f.): among the members of the Yupno tribe in Papua New Guinea, men count up to 33, starting with the little left finger, then counting the fingers on the right hand, then the left and right foot, the ears, eyes, nostrils, then the nose and nipples, the navel, the left and right testicles and finally the penis (cf. Semenza 2008, 221). The women of the Yupno tribe, on the other hand, do not count or only very little (cf. ibid.).
In addition to these different number systems, however, there are also significant differences in the role of numbers, which is expressed, in one instance, in differences in the complexity of size of the number system itself—in the Aboriginal languages of Australia, for example, numbers are counted up to three or five (cf. Voß 2012, 120). And this shows that one cannot say “in the sense of a hypothesis” that “[i]f the facts of nature were different, people would have different concepts” because different cultures and peoples do have different concepts without this being causally related to different facts of nature. The fact that counting plays the extremely important role it does in our lives is rather related to our specific interests, to how we organise our lives. If we, as Wittgenstein says, wanted to “explain concepts to ourselves from the need for them,” this would actually be “only the need for a certain way of life, which includes the use of the concept in itself” (Ms 137, 61b; my transl.).
At the same time, the immense spread of counting as such, as well as, for example, certain elementary colour terms, also reveal cultural constants that, in a trivial sense, admittedly depend on certain very general facts of nature such as the constancy of objects. In other words, the idea of the human construction of meaning—and thus radical constructivisms—is limited by the “resistance” of nature or what Wittgenstein calls “very general facts of nature.” Anticipating Haraway, this resistance need not be grasped in the sense of the inertia of bodies but may well be conceived as an active resistance of bristling, stubborn, cunning withdrawing (cf. Haraway 1991b, 198). On a similar note, as Wittgenstein remarks, “[i]n a country where the sky is almost constantly cloudy, people would not get the idea of doing astronomy” (Ms 136, 48b; my transl.). In this way, “our interest is connected with particular facts in the outer world” (LW II, 46). Conversely, other people make much more conceptual distinctions or even completely different kinds of grammatical distinctions than we do: in Japanese, for example, in addition to the basic number words, there are different category words that are added to the basic number words. That is, different number words are used depending on whether it is people, thin flat things, machines, small round objects, small or large animals that are counted. But it would also be conceivable, as Wittgenstein ponders, that other people might have a verb “meaning to write in the first person, to love in the second, and to eat in the third” (LW I, 328) or that “a word means something different every day of the week” (LW I, 331). To us, such differences would seem unnatural, exaggerated, perhaps capricious; they do not correspond to our nature, to what we naturally are concerned with. But, as Wittgenstein says, “[f]or a world of a different kind”—and this may only be a different lifeworld within our world—“one would find the use of different linguistic instruments natural” (Ms 137, 61b; my transl.).
These reflections come to show, on the one hand, the intertwining of language and life and, on the other, that and how values are intrinsically woven into language—or as Wittgenstein puts it: “We could say people’s concepts show what matters to them and what doesn’t” (ROC II, 293). For Wittgenstein, the fact that we have the concepts and conceptual differences that we have, and that they play the role they play in our lives—in short, the fact that we use these concepts in this way—is related to “what interests us, what matters to us” (LW II, 46). Furthermore, as quoted earlier, “our interest is connected with particular facts in the outer world” (LW II, 46). This is the ambiguity of the term “meaning” as both reference and importance—we refer to something with a word because it is important to us and, conversely, something is important to us because we refer to it with a word. Instead of saying that life is reflected in our concepts, it would probably be more accurate to say that “[t]hey stand in the middle of it” (LW II, 72). The “facts of nature” that are interesting or important to a particular language community manifest in its concepts.
Phallogocentrism
In Wittgenstein’s reflections on the connection between concepts and nature, there was much talk of “our concepts,” “our interest in nature” and “our language and culture” as distinct from other languages and cultures. But who is this “us,” how is this “us” constituted and what is its relationship to those who are not “us”?
Although it pervades almost all of his philosophical writings, Wittgenstein never explicitly explained this “us” or “we”: he speaks of this “we” as that of a form of life, but it remains unclear and is disputed in research whether by ‘form of life’ he means a culture, a language community, particular language games or even “we humans” as a whole.[2] And he seems even less interested in the moral and political implications of such a “we”—especially as conceived opposite to a “they.” I will return to Wittgenstein’s concept of form of life later—for now, I want to turn to the moral and political dimensions of linguistic meaning.
If interests and values in the perception and structuring of natural factors play a constitutive role in the formation of concepts or manifest themselves in our concepts, then those interests and values are intrinsically inscribed in language. Language can thus be rendered a political instrument of power whose conceptual distinctions draw boundaries that include and exclude. We saw this earlier with the example of counting in the Yupno tribe: on the one hand, the number system is based, among other parts of the body, on male genitals; on the other hand, the female members of this tribe do not count, or count only very little. But it does not take such examples, which are rather exotic for us, to see that many conceptual worlds are saturated with male interests and values, that prevailing views of “nature” and life are presented from a male perspective. We also see it in the languages of so-called Western civilisations, where salutations for women proclaim their marital status or female job titles are formed by adding a suffix to the male job title, to name just the most obvious moves. It is not the task of philosophy to clarify possible causal relationships here—that is, whether, for example, women of the Yupno tribe do not count because the number system includes male genitals or whether this number system is the way it is because women, for whatever reason, did not get the idea to count. What interests us as philosophers is the connection of patriarchal structures with languages as such, i.e. phallogocentrism, and the possibilities of overcoming it.
The term “phallogocentrism,” broadly understood, describes this preference of the masculine in the construction of meaning or, more precisely, it describes the perception, structuring and conceptual appropriation of “nature” according to masculine desire and interest.[3] As pointed out in the previous section, this is reflected in the meaning of concepts as both reference and importance. In Western cultures in particular, phallogocentrism is characterised by (but not limited to) profound dualisms: those “primal divisions” of nature into binary, hierarchical conceptual oppositions in which the one is understood as original and the other as derivative of it, e.g.: true/false, subject/object, human/animal, culture/nature and, of course, man/woman (cf. Haraway 2004b, 34). Within the phallogocentric construction of meaning, “woman” represents the absolute Other (cf. Beauvoir 2010, 115). It is not an original gender, so much as the male gender itself, which only appears differently, namely, as the deficient figure of a castrated man (cf. Davis 1995, 126).
Many feminists have protested against this phallogocentric conception and, in a gynocentric move, have sought to reverse its binary hierarchies by emphasising the value of traditionally female experiences (cf. ibid., 127). Flipping privilege by emphasising traditionally female experiences, but also other gynocentric measures such as introducing female quotas and women’s supporting programmes, was and is an important part of the struggle against sexist oppression. However, this enterprise is only successful to the extent that it questions, critiques and ultimately dissolves traditional hierarchies, for a gynocentric enterprise may simultaneously confirm the very binary conceptual oppositions that constitute phallogocentrism (cf. ibid.). In this sense, gynologocentrism may ironically be no less phallic than phallogocentrism, as Diane Davis puts it (cf. ibid). The reason is that the supreme law obeyed by the binary, hierarchical conceptual oppositions of phallogocentrism is the tertium non datur, i.e. the either-or structure which allows for no “third,” no “neither-nor,” and even less for a “both” (cf. ibid.). Sexist oppression has many roots, but phallogocentrism is perhaps the deepest, reaching to the bottom of all meaning and significance. If this is so, then ending sexist oppression requires overcoming phallogocentrism’s inherent either-or structures of binary conceptual hierarchies that condemn women to the absolute Other and are enmeshed with the various material and everyday forms of oppression. Feminism as a struggle against sexist oppression is thus confronted with the paradox mentioned earlier that its commitment to women as a category consists in the dissolution of this category, that the subject of feminism as agent and as patient consists in its own overcoming. As Judith Butler notes,
there is the political problem that feminism encounters in the assumption that the term women denotes a common identity. Rather than a stable signifier that commands the assent of those whom it purports to describe and represent, women, even in the plural, has become a troublesome term, a site of contest, a cause for anxiety. […] If one “is” a woman, that is surely not all one is; the term fails to be exhaustive, not because a pregendered “person” transcends the specific paraphernalia of its gender, but because gender is not always constituted coherently or consistently in different historical contexts, and because gender intersects with racial, class, ethnic, sexual, and regional modalities of discursively constituted identities. As a result, it becomes impossible to separate out “gender” from the political and cultural intersections in which it is invariably produced and maintained. (Butler 2007, 4 f.)
This question of the “We” of feminism and thus also the question of what constitutes a “woman” beyond the binary structures of phallogocentrism has led to heated discussions and fierce accusations: at the extreme points of these frictions are those who hold, with Butler, that not only gender but also biological sex is constructed and “being a woman” is a discursive performance and, on the other hand, there are feminists who “do not acknowledge transition-to-women persons neither as women nor as subjects of feminisms” (Gamero-Cabrera 2022).[4] There are, of course, countless other positions that form a dispute in which the paradox of the subject of feminism seems to materialise.[5] So how can feminism succeed when its own subject, the “We” of feminism, is constituted by what it is supposed to dissolve?
One way around the paradox would be to see feminism—to borrow an image from Wittgenstein—as a ladder that, once climbed, we can throw away. But this view is, I think, naïve because wherever and whatever that higher place is that we have climbed by means of the ladder, it always stands on the ground of oppression and of that phallocentric notion of “woman” that we sought to escape.[6] Feminism is not a tool that becomes obsolete once it is used. If we want to say, with hooks, that feminism is a movement to end sexual oppression, then it must be much more than a single-use tool like Wittgenstein’s ladder may be. Indeed, on the one hand, it is an ongoing movement against ever new forms of oppression and, on the other hand, it changes our lives in quite profound ways and, with it, ourselves. We cannot and should not escape history—our history—for, as Haraway writes, “[e]very being that matters is a congeries of its formative histories” (2004a, 2). We cannot escape phallogocentrism by means of amnesia nor undermine its roots in the hope of encountering an untouched nature and starting anew, as it were, from a tabula rasa. “Where we need to move,” says Haraway, “is not ‘back’ to nature, but elsewhere, through and within an artifactual social nature” (2004d, 90).
In the following section, I will explore Haraway’s concept of an artifactual nature, by means of which phallogocentrism cannot be undermined, but can be overcome. Artifactualism in this sense is not so much a tunnel as a bridge from which we can reach a new “We” beyond phallogocentrism.
Haraway’s Artifactualism
In her essay The Promises of Monsters, Haraway writes that for her,
[n]ature is one of those impossible things characterised by Gayatri Spivak as that which we cannot not desire. Excruciatingly conscious of nature’s discursive constitution as “other” in the histories of colonialism, racism, sexism, and class domination of many kinds, we nonetheless find in this problematic, ethno-specific, long-lived, and mobile concept something we cannot do without, but can never “have.” (Haraway 2004d, 64)
Later in the text, she continues:
We must find another relationship to nature besides reification, possession, appropriation and nostalgia. No longer able to sustain the fictions of being either subjects or objects, all the partners in the potent conversations that constitute nature must find a new ground for making meanings together. (Haraway 2004e, 126).
If we are willing to give up the nature of phallogocentrism, but not a nature, or rather any nature, then we must first of all find a relationship to nature beyond objectification, possession, appropriation and nostalgia. Such a nature is, Haraway says, “not a physical place to which one can go, nor a treasure to fence in or bank, nor an essence to be saved or violated” (ibid., 65). Rather, it is an artifactual nature, meaning that “nature for us is made, both as fiction and fact” (ibid.). At first glance, this seems contradictory: after all, by “fact” we commonly understand something that is found and discovered, something that is, while “fiction” is something invented and imagined, something that is not. So, what does Haraway mean when she says that nature is both fact and fiction, insofar as both are made?
I think it means that every fact is not only “made of” but always also “made-up” and that every fiction is not only “made-up” but always also “made of.” Haraway herself gives the example of organisms that are not simply found or discovered, but made, insofar as they “emerge from a discursive process,” namely biology, which is a discourse and not the living world itself (ibid., 67). Conversely, fictions are never purely invented, but in some way “made of” something found: the mythological figure of the one-eyed cyclops, for example, is not purely invented, rather it is said to be based on early findings of elephant skulls, where the large nasal opening of the skull was interpreted as a single large eye socket.[7] In artifactualism, fact and fiction are not mutually exclusive; rather their juxtaposition and overlapping creates a shimmering like the pointed colour contrasts in impressionist paintings. Nature in the sense of artifactualism is thus always made, in the sense of “made of” and “made-up” as fact and fiction—it is, as Haraway says, “a commonplace and a powerful discursive construction, effected in the interactions among material-semiotic actors, human and not” (ibid., 68).
This artifactual nature forms, as she puts it, “a new ground for making meanings together” (2004e, 126). But this ground is neither an empty screen waiting for our projections nor patient resource ready to be deciphered by us—artifactual nature is not passive (cf. Haraway 1991b, 198). Rather, Haraway’s artifactual nature between fact and fiction is meant to illustrate how meanings are made in conversation and mutual irritation with an active, “witty” nature (cf. ibid.; cf. Hoppe 2022, 52 f.). This also means that the concepts, theories and other carriers of meaning, are always already embodied through their reference to the artifactual nature as made: “Theory is not,” as Haraway writes, “about matters distant from the lived body; quite the opposite. Theory is anything but disembodied” (ibid.). The phallogocentric view of nature, on the other hand, is assumed to be the gaze of a disembodied, glassy subject, which is a godlike view from nowhere that sees everything (cf. Haraway 1991b, 189). To the divine eye, nature presents itself undistorted and untouched. Accordingly, phallocentric theories and concepts claim to be the true mirror of a passive nature. Haraway and other feminists have criticised this view from nowhere by emphasising the situatedness and particularity of each gaze and proclaiming instead a view from somewhere (cf. Haraway 199b). Unlike the view from nowhere, the view from somewhere does not reproduce the same thing in terms of reflection; rather, its situatedness and particularity implies inflections and refractions that produce patterns of interference (cf. Haraway 2004d, 70). The view from somewhere thus offers a particular, historical, and, precisely because of this, politically accountable perspective. “Embodiment” in this sense does not mean the fixed binding of concepts or theories to an objectified body, so much as their temporal and local situatedness as well as a “responsibility for difference in material-semiotic fields of meaning” (Haraway 1991b, 195).
The Feminist “We” as a Monstrous Form of Life
So how can Haraway’s idea of an artifactual nature help us in our search for the feminist “We”? As an alternative to a phallogocentric conception of nature, the idea of an artifactual nature overcomes binary and hierarchical conceptual oppositions: in the oscillation of fact and fiction in embodied carriers of meaning, inclusive contrasts emerge in place of the exclusionary contradictions of either-or-structures and interference patterns through inflections come to replace reproductions through reflections. To return to Wittgenstein’s first example, to see nature as made is to get rid of the compulsion to describe leaves as either red or green, as olive green or brownish red: rather, the leaves of artifactual trees turn reddish green at times.
In relation to the question of the subject of feminism, what this means is first of all that against the background of an artifactual nature, the phallocentric concept of “woman” must be shown to be a fiction. What phallocrats called “woman” was the absolute Other mediated by their interests and desires—a conception that is not completely random, just as no fiction is completely random. However, it is arbitrary in as much as it is made and invented. Artifactualism here means drawing the consequences from the fact that “man” and “woman” are invented: they are myths, stories, and becoming history. To say that the conventional concept of “woman” is a fiction is not only to be understood in the sense of de Beauvoir’s thesis that one is not born a woman, but in the more radical sense that, as Haraway says, “any finally coherent subject is a fantasy, and that personal and collective identity is precariously and constantly socially reconstituted” (Haraway 2004c, 58).
To accept that the conventional notion of woman, and that of subject in general, is a fiction means that the “We” of feminism does not denote a subject or several subjects. It is an age-old superstition of grammar that suggests that every activity involves someone who is active, as Nietzsche puts it (cf. Nietzsche, BGE, § 17). According to this view, the subject is the condition of the predicate and to this subject as a noun corresponds a self-contained, coherent thing. In accordance with this superficial grammatical structure, one could thus, as Wittgenstein suggests, also “speak of an activity of butter when it rises in price,” further noting: “and if no problems are produced by this it is harmless” (PI, 693). But what if it produces problems when we naïvely assume that to each grammatical subject corresponds a doer and a thing—for who is it that rains when we say ‘it rains’? It is this superstition about grammar that philosophy of language seeks to combat or, as Wittgenstein puts it in that often-quoted passage, “Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language” (PI, 109). In the same way, I think, it is a bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language to believe that the “We” of feminism must denote a group of actors or subjects, whose commonality, expressed in the “We,” consists in a firmly defined identity feature or characteristic—this is precisely the fiction to be overcome. But then, what or who else could the “We” of feminism be?
Let’s go back to our example of the cyclops: if it is correct that the myth of the cyclops was not just plucked out of thin air, but was rather based on the findings of elephant skulls, it does not seem such a wild fantasy anymore, so much as an attempt at an explanation. Similarly, it is not difficult to see the phallocentric interests and desires that were the basis for certain anatomical features to set female bodies as the absolute Other. But instead of going “back to nature” and saying that the skeleton actually belonged to an elephant and that what was thought to be an eye was actually a nose, I will take Haraway at her word and move through this artifactualism between fact and fiction to elsewhere, by asking what now becomes of the cyclopes. For they continue to exist in the stories we tell ourselves, in art and poetry, they are part of ancient religion and history. But they do not exist in the same sense that elephants exist, they are not living beings but fictional figures that populate our stories, images, dreams and nightmares as “monsters.” To consider cyclops not as creatures found in nature, but as fictional figures, is to liberate them from their elephantine skeleton: as artifactual monsters, they can take on all kinds of forms.
Monsters are creatures that fail to meet prevailing measures and norms by radically exceeding or falling short of them—more precisely, it is those contingent norms of power that produce and sustain inappropriate, inadequate monsters.[8] By its being outside a power norm, the artifactual figure of the monster stands between a “not-anymore” and a “not-yet,” and can thus instruct on modes of multiplicity and banishment from the pure and light self (cf. Leigh Star 1991, 29). This is one of the reasons why some feminists—most notably Susan Leigh Star and Donna Haraway—have used the figure of the monster, and in particular that of the half-human, half-machine cyborg, as a tool of analysis for a better understanding of technoscientific cultures (cf. Leigh Star 1991, Haraway 2004b).
Following on from the more general figure of the monster as standing between a “not-anymore” and a “not-yet,” I would like to suggest that the “We” of feminism can be seen as such a monstrous form of life. I do not say, or at least I want to avoid saying, that “We” are monsters, because the word “monster” is a noun and thus again a potential subject that is to be overcome. I call it a “monstrous form of life” because I understand Wittgenstein’s concept of a form of life in the sense of what he once formulated as “pattern[s] in the weave of life” (LW II, 42), which is characterised on the one hand by regularity, on the other hand by variability and is interwoven with countless other patterns (cf. RPP II, 672 f.; cf. Majetschak 2010). For example, there are recurring forms of sexual oppression and violence, but they vary depending on whether the people experiencing it live in Europe, Asia or Africa, whether they are cis-women, trans-people, homosexual, or black, and patriarchal oppression and violence are linked to other social factors, such as education, health care, religion, science, and power differentials between classes. So, just as there are regularities and variations in sexual oppression and connections to other forms of oppression, there are also regularities, variations, and connections to other social factors in the struggle against sexual oppression. To understand the “We” of feminism as a form of life is to consider these similarities and differences equally.[9] A form of life thus means a recurring pattern with room for variation (cf. Majetschak 2010, 279) in which, as Wittgenstein puts it, “words and actions connect and hold each other like the longitudinal and latitudinal threads of a weave” (cf. Ms 137, 41b; my transl.). In this way, a form of life is not constituted by subjects who share certain characteristics, but by the fabric of certain patterns of speech and action: “It is thus possible, perhaps even desirable, to have an unstable, albeit constrained category of ‘women,’ one that is mindful of its changing implications in political theory and activism” (Treviño 2022). In order to resolve the paradox concerning the subject of feminism, we must reject the grammar that imposes itself and “make a radical break with the idea that language always functions in one way” (PI, 304). “We,” then, are not monsters, but a monstrous form of life, and in calling it “monstrous” I wish to recall the etymological origin of the word in the Latin verbs monstrare and monere, which mean “to admonish” or “to remind,” and “to show” and “to prophesy.”
The “We” of feminism is thus not to be understood as a noun but as a verb, that is, not as a name but a doing. Similarly, Butler suggests alluding to Nietzsche, that in political activism “there need not be a ‘doer behind the deed’, but that the ‘doer’ is variably constructed in and through the deed” (2007, 195). But unlike Butler, I do not want to construct a doer in and through the deed, but would rather see the whole reference of the feminist “We” as a verb, much like what the Sámi poet Nillas Hilmberg expressed by saying: “God is a verb.”[10] Accordingly, the grammatical function of the “We” is not that of the subject, but that of the predicate, which indicates an action and is always already located in time, that is, in the past, present or future. As a verb, it is not a group of subjects that distinguishes itself from other subjects, it is not a “We” as opposed to a “They.” Rather, it is the “We” of a language without subject, without the reinforcing resonance of binary conceptual oppositions. The “We” of feminism does not mean one or more monsters, but what might be called “to monster,” which in the sense of its Latin origin is to be understood as “admonishing,” “showing,” and “prophesying.” The meaning as reference and importance of the feminist “We” is, I think, precisely to admonish, show and prophesise what and who “we” were, are and will be. The answer to the question of who “we” are thus consists to some extent in negotiating this question itself over and over again because, as Haraway says, the question “who are ‘we’? […] is an inherently […] open question, one always ready for contingent, friction generating articulations. It is a remonstrative question” (Haraway 2004d, 106).
Such a monstrous form of life is not homogenous and smooth; its language is not a common and transparent one; it is not the unanimous and harmonious sound of angelic tongues. For, as Haraway says, “[t]he feminist dream of a common language, like all dreams for a perfectly true language, of perfectly faithful naming of experience, is a totalizing and imperialist one” (Haraway 2004b, 31). Instead, to “speak in monster tongues” is to celebrate polyphony, heteroglossia, which is full of friction and noise, because only in plurality can our language truly be aware of its history, its bodies, and the political dimension of its articulation (cf. ibid., 39).
We hear it, to give a few examples, in Sojourner Truth’s famous remonstrative question “Ain’t I a woman?” 170 years ago, claiming the status of humanity for black women and criticising white feminists (cf. Haraway 2004c, 53)—a critique which has been resumed and further developed since the 1980s by black feminists such as Audre Lorde, Patricia Hill Collins and bell hooks, to name but a few. We also hear it in the protesting statement “We had an abortion!” signed by several hundred women 50 years ago to oppose patriarchal control over abortion, which sparked a debate that continues to this day. And we hear it in the strong virtual chorus of #MeToo, which brought down many powerful perpetrators, as a protest against the silence about sexual harassment, sexual assault and rape—and yet, the #MeToo movement was also criticised by feminists for both obscuring the structural problem of sexism by emphasising individual cases and only having been able to move something because it was powerful, wealthy, and mostly white women who came forward (cf. Rottenberg 2017).
But we also see it in examples that are not quite so far-reaching, such as when the Polish-German rapper Schwesta Ewa relentlessly recounts her former life as a prostitute, speaking of violence, brutality and rape, or we see it when a male engineer refuses his invitation to be a keynote speaker unless at least half of the speakers are female, or when someone finally reports their partner after years of abuse. These are all examples of powerful monster tongues that not only protest sexual oppression but, by doing so, also negotiate the “We” of feminism in polyphonic frictions: they show what and who “we” were, are and will be as the “embodied others, who are not allowed to have a body, finite point of view,” as Haraway puts it (1991b, 183).[11]
The “We” of feminism can thus be seen as the “we” of a monstrous form of life and an embodied language. Simultaneously fact and fiction, it draws on its three meanings—admonishing, showing and prophesying—to unite its historical and remembered pasts, demonstrating and protesting presents, and prophesying future visions.
* This section is based on parts of my doctoral dissertation (cf. Trächtler 2021, ch. 5.2).
[1] Obviously, by linking Wittgenstein’s philosophy with Haraway’s feminist reflections, I do not want to claim or imply that Wittgenstein was a “feminist.” As is well known, Wittgenstein did not have a high opinion of women, and neither do his writings as a whole show any particular interest in ethical or political issues (cf. Monk 1991, 72, 498; Szabados 1997; Heyes 2003, 1). Rather, with this attempt, I would like to join recent efforts (cf. Lovibond 1983, Diamond 1991, Crary and Read 2000, Heyes 2000, Mouffe 2000, Scheman and O’Connor 2002, Zerilli 2005, Provost, Trächtler and Laugier 2022) that have shown that and how Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language can be used in quite fruitful ways for feminist philosophy.
[2] Cf. the debate between Newton Garver (1984) and Rudolf Haller (1986) on the concept of “form of life,” as well as Stefan Majetschak’s critical review of both conceptions and his own interpretation (2010).
[3] The term “phallogocentrism” was coined by Jacques Derrida (cf. 1982) as a critique of Jacques Lacan’s “transcendental signifier”: “that which supports all signification as its condition for possibility” (cf. Feder and Zakin 1997, note 1). For Lacan, the phallus marks that space “in which the role of Logos is wedded to the advent of desire” (Lacan 2006, 693). The phallus in this sense is neither a fantasy, imagination nor the object or organ it symbolizes (cf. ibid., 690). Rather, as Lacan puts it, the phallus can be understood here according to its function as “the signifier that is destined to designate meaning effects as a whole” (ibid., 691).
An exemplary consequence of phallogocentrism as the conceptual appropriation of “nature” or the experienced world, in general, is what Miranda Fricker called “hermeneutical injustice,” a phenomenon that occurs “when a gap in collective interpretative resources puts someone at an unfair disadvantage when it comes to making sense of their social experiences” (2007, 1). For a critical discussion of Fricker’s “hermeneutical injustice” from a Wittgensteinian perspective, cf. Lobo (2022).
[4] Cf. Gamero-Cabrera (2022) for a more detailed discussion of the cis-/trans-debate from a Wittgensteinian perspective.
[5] Another way of phrasing one of the core questions of this dispute is by attending to the issue of the sexed body in feminist philosophy. As Heyes writes: “Simultaneously afraid that our bodies would be erased, that we would be reduced to our bodies, or that our bodies would over-determine ourselves, we have struggled with how to locate the sexed body in feminist philosophy” (2000, 88).
[6] Cf. Wittgenstein, TLP 6.54. Cf. also Butler’s refusal to keep the category of “woman” for “strategic” purposes (2007, 6).
[7] This is at least one plausible theory for the origin of the myth of cyclops. For a more detailed discussion of this, cf. Mayor (2011, 6 f.; ch. 5; app. I).
[8] Cf. Daston and Park (1998, ch. 5) for a historical overview of the (shifts in) meaning(s) of “monster” in modern times.
[9] For a similar view on this and a related discussion focusing on transfeminism as a “political form of life,” cf. Treviño (2022).
[10] Translation from North Sami: “ipmil lea vearba” (in: Niillas Holmberg, Juolgevuođđu).
[11] Haraway’s feminist “We,” especially as she described it in the figure of the “cyborg,” has been criticized in part (and the proposal of a feminist “We” developed here could also be accused of this) for itself making a universalist and unifying claim and thus undercutting the particular methodologies and epistemologies of e.g. black feminisms (cf. Schueller 2005; cf. also Hoppe 2022, 64 f.). Schueller, in particular, criticized overly simplistic analogies between sexual and racial oppression for blurring important distinctions and thereby reproducing “the paradigmatics of imperialism wherein the colonizers speak for all humanity” (2005, 64). While I believe this critique of simplistic, hasty analogies is justified and very important, I think it overlooks, in the case of Haraway’s cyborg figure, that it is precisely the heterogeneous polyphony and constant negotiation of this feminist “We” which is emphasized by Haraway (and this essay)—because, as hooks has put it to the point: Feminism is for Everybody.
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