Syntax: @dig <new-space>

Twenty years ago Hèlene Cixous pronounced that "woman has always functioned 'within' the discourse of man . . . and it is time for her to dislocate this 'within'" (291). Her point was not that woman should "appropriate their instruments, their concepts, their place, or to begrudge them their position of mastery," nor "to take possession in order to internalize or manipulate, but rather to dash through and to 'fly'"(291). She wrote that "[f]lying is woman's gesture -- flying in language and making it fly" (291). Women "take pleasure in jumbling the order of space, in disorienting it, in changing around the furniture, dislocating things and values, breaking them all up, emptying structures, and turning propriety upside down" (291). When I hear these words I imagine women in classrooms all over the world moving furniture into circles, removing lecturns from the room, raising windows, opening blinds, unlocking the theaters of masculine drama and pouring onto the stage in mass numbers. Cixous' vision has become a reality, or to be more accurate, a virtuality. For some feminists in the classroom have realized that turning pedagogy upside down will take more than moving a few chairs, it means "flying the coop" altogether.
In a 1992 article, Susan Jarratt and a collective of feminist graduate teaching assistants ask whether there is "a truly 'safe space' in or out of the classroom" (Eichhorn 300). Like many feminist teachers, they call for "visions of the 'not yet' " (297). To pair the conceptual space of Cixous' flight and the collective's shared vision allows us to imagine something new in teaching, namely, a "virtual pedagogy" informed by actual feminist concerns. As I have explained, this essay adds the loci of 'new spaces,' 'new movements,' and 'new identities' to the challenge of new strategies and new words by theorizing a space where women are virtually inside the teaching machine, dashing through it by flying within it.
Space is a common topos frequently hailed in the name of feminism. Feminists stake claims on various spaces in an effort to analyze their place in the academy and to specify particular sites of contention. For example, Diana Fuss notes that in debates among feminist teachers who argue over whether experience counts as grounds of knowledge, the resulting essentialist/constructionist dichotomoy has produced an impasse between feminists who believe in innate essential difference and those who ground difference in social and cultural influences. Either way, Fuss argues that the politicization of experiential knowledge produces narratives that bear investigating. According to Fuss, "we need both to theorize essentialist spaces from which to speak and, simultaneously, to deconstruct these spaces to keep them from solidifying" (118). In response to Fuss's challenge, and in order to sketch a brief taxonomy of diverse feminist priorities, I offer the following brief and provisional schema of feminist spatial addresses: epistemological, moral, political, and technological. My aim is to challenge the often unproblematic notion of 'space' in feminist theory in general and feminist pedagogy in particular, and to question feminist investments in technological space that are undertheorized in my view.
According to Susan Hekman, when feminists challenge epistemological foundations, they argue that "the epistemology that is definitive of Enlightenment humanism, if not all of western philosophy, is fundamentally misconceived" (1). Put simply, Hekman argues, feminists reject the "defining characteristerics of modernism: the anthropocentric definition of knowledge" (1-2). Though feminists share similar goals with postmodernists in their attack on Enlightenment humanism, namely its rationalism and dualism, the 'space' from which they attack is uniquely situated within a gender problematic (5). Thus, feminist space is established in much the same way that any conceptual property is claimed, through theoretical displacement of prior knowledges. Feminists characterize their goals in terms of displacement, that is, they seek to displace one epistemology and install a different one. Indeed, as Spivak characterizes it, the space of displacement becomes itself inscribed and deployed through various determinate reversals (Outside 78). Unfortunately, by establishing an inside/outside spatial boundary, displacement often results in the same kind of exclusionary politics that installs a hierarchical relation between those with knowledge and those without it. [3] The web becomes tangled even further when we consider political and moral responsibilities of feminist pedagogy.
Dale Bauer suggests that an impasse occurs in the dialectic of resistance and identification in the feminist classroom unless students begin to challenge the teacher as agent of the agenda of the class. Citing Spivak, Bauer agrees that too often students accept the split between "moral speculation" and decision-making rendering them resistant to and insulated from "collective moral and ethical rhetoric" (387; see Spivak's In Other Worlds 99). Instead, Bauer argues, we should work "from a notion that the classroom is a place to explore resistances and identifications, a place also to explore the ambiguous and often ambivalent space of values and ethics" (387).
One particular example of this ambivalence can be found in the recent trend in composition studies toward the feminization of pedagogy, in particular, a maternal feminization. Michelle Ballif argues that the composition classroom has become a "site of social cooperation, connectedness, and nurturance" due to compositions's investment in collaborative learning theory, social constructionist theory, and the moral psychology studies of Carol Gilligan and others (1). In effect, Ballif suggests, such investments lead to characterizations of the classroom space as maternal, as a " 'womblike matrix' " (1; see Gearhart 199). Diane Davis reminds us that if feminist pedagogies are looking to the 'feminine' for a place to challenge phallic domination, we would do well to remember that the "Mother is, in fact, no closer to a feminine space than the Father" (4). According to Davis (citing Eva Keuls), "she is a creation, a function of the same structures of power, the same 'scepter of sovereignty' " (4; see Keuls 2). In short, to associate moral space in feminist pedagogy with a maternal matrix engenders many of the same problematic relations between teachers and students as phallocentric ethics does.
In practice, however, much of the feminist theoretical abstraction of space loses its political currency. That is, the stakes of feminist politics are waged in terms that often define feminist agendas as situated, grounded, located, colonized, fixed, determined, and encumbered -- terms that evoke restrictive sites or addresses, rather than open space. The 'political' has probably been the space in which feminists feel most at home. And well they should. The 'political,' and to some extent even the ethico-political, as space is dependent upon its constituents agitating for some place called home, whether that home is conceptual or physical. It is no coincidence that women have been historically allocated a place in the home, but it is precisely a political home that feminists seek. In other words, the disjuncture of public (polis) and private space maintains (and perpetuates) the spatial fixation that has pinned women to a 'home' address. Thus, when feminists labor for the space of the polis, it is not without some irony that they are often blind to their exchange of one set of limits for another. To speak from within the domain of the political is not to speak "freely," though it is to speak politically.
That is the central problem with inscribing the classroom as yet another political space. Unfortunately, in my view, this is a reflection of having bought the masculinist argument that demands a grounded politics. But Elam claims, we need to develop a feminist community as "groundless solidarity," by which she means "not the working out of a particular politics but rather the insistence that the nature of the political must remain open to question, to modification" (68). Similarly, in her 1992 essay, "Post-Critical Pedagogies: A Feminist Reading," Patti Lather works against the old feminist political model arguing that we must "resituate our emancipatory work" (127). Lather aims to look beyond "old critical premises," to move "beyond the sedimented discursive configurations of essentialized, romanticized subjects," and to deconstruct "emancipatory space" (131). While she argues for opening that space up, Lather also acknowledges that to call for post-foundational thinking from a "place where there is no innocent discourse of liberation"(132) is (at best) to recognize a paradox at work in feminist political struggles. Lather's acknowledgement echos Spivak's argument in Outside in the Teaching Machine, namely, that in the space of difference from which reversals operate to gain political independence, "there is always a space in the new nation that cannot share in the energy of this reversal" (78). The deconstructions of Lather, Spivak, and Elam signal a feminism given not to quietism or post-feminist capitulation, rather to voicing a basic lament with Donna Haraway, who asks: "Is there anything other than a despairing location?" (Penley and Ross 6). Feminist deconstruction moves to negotiate the space of difference, rather than merely politicize, essentialize or reject it.
Feminists who employ spatial metaphors would do well to take into account this brief history of feminist spaces and reconsider whether their use of space and displacement is unquestionably a sign of power. I argue that unless feminist space is given conceptual and physical properties of movement, speed, and unrestricted access, it will continue to bind feminism to the notion of a fixed, hence closed, site or address. That only allows the dominant ideology to 'know' where we are, to get a 'fix' on us at all times. Technological space offers new forms of movement and identity construction.
While postmoderism feminisms rightly seek to articulate the limits of dominant ideologies, a new modality called bimodernism has emerged that bypasses the impasse between postmodernism and modernism over terms, terrain, and tactics and in which the cycle of political and ethical scapegoating (of which feminisms are also guilty) is most effectively subverted with technology. As I earlier noted, Arthur Kroker defines bimodernity as "living at the violent edge of primitivism and simulation" (Possessed 18). In his analysis of French accounts of technology, Kroker suggests that identities emerge as "an image of the individual as a bimodern minotaur: a technically constituted self which is both a condition of the preservation of, and a constitutive justification for, technological society" (14). Basically, he discovers in contemporary French philosophical thought a response to the question of what to do "when technology is no longer an object that we can hold outside of ourselves but now, in the form of a dynamic will to technique which enucleates technè and logos in a common horizon, is itself the dominant form of western being -- possessed individualism" (14).
In my view, if technè and logos have formed the violent edge of primitivism, simulation and possessed individualism, then feminist teaching is where technè and ethos converge to form the ethical horizon of authenticity, negotiated space, and dis/possessed individualism. Without the intervention of something meta-logical, like techno-ethos (electronic ethos), these goals would be mere abstractions. In other words, we should be asking what can enter the space of the classroom that is capable of intervening in the scapegoat cycle and in logocentric pedagogy. If technè is the answer, it must be a technè reconceived. When feminism and technè collide, logos can no longer hold sway over difference, nor can it continue its cycle of linkage between the subject and morality in such a way that traditions and counter- traditions perpetuate the scapegoat mechanism in order to maintain their dominance. In a 1994 oral address, Renè Girard made the remarkable statement that technology is the "anti-scapegoat." In essence, what happens in the age of technè is that we stop asking who is to blame and begin to acknowledge that the machine is not working, in this case, the teaching machine. Technology does not link ethos and morality, it simply demands that we answer the call, it does not demand how we answer it.
The bimodern age will have forced us to concatenize our notions of a feminist pedagogical space by the arrival of sociotechnical theories and practices. Feminist compositionists are riding the threshold of a new horizon, even as they resist the very fonts of their newfound ethos. Electronic textuality, nomad subjects, cyborg anthropology, consensual hallucination, post-symbolic communication, and delegated morphic personae have all arrived and are being written into the new spaces where modes of information have opened the floodgates of accessibility. Surely, we are not in the business of restoring primivitism. This, as least, is the hope of the remainder of my analysis.

[Introduction] [@dig] [@move] [@gender] [Conclusion] [Biblio]