Toward Eccentric Techniques

Abstract

I have chosen the three words of this chapter title with particular care. Toward indicates a going, but not an arrival — I do not believe that any exploration like this one can be teleological. It is a suspension of the pretense of producing truth. The biasses in subject representation, readily revealed in current standards and their application, are outgrowths of the fundamental presumption that a language for universal application is necessary to make information findable. To try to find some other universal truth-producing presumption would be falling into the same trap. We cannot simply exchange one dominance for another and expect all-encompassing improvement. Drucilla Cornell describes what she calls “the delimitation of ontology”— that is, the process of revealing that a system cannot be universal, cannot include all of existence, by identifying the limits of that system.² She proposes that the idea of différance is “the trace of what differs from representational systems and defers indefinitely achievement of totality.”³ Différance unbalances the notion that a universe can be encompassed — it “disrupts the claims of ontology to fill the universe.”⁴ So with subject representation we can move toward solutions, but cannot find a magic formula that will represent all of existence, or even all of recorded information, all of the time, in all contexts, without marginalizations and exclusions.

In other words, the issue is not one of elaborating a new theory of which woman would be the subject or the object, but of jamming the theoretical machinery itself, of suspending its pretension to the production of a truth and of a meaning that are excessively univocal.¹

Luce Irigaray