Valuing nature: Teresa Brennan's Economic Theory.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Author: Mattison, Michelle Renee
• Date: 22 December 1999

Despite academic turf wars among US feminist theorists between the 'high theory' of those in the humanities and the 'in the field' activism of those in the social sciences, there are fortunately still feminist theorists who creatively defy disciplinary mandates. One example of this creative scholarship is a recent book by J. K. Gibson-Graham titled The End of Capitalism (as we knew it) that combines post-structuralist feminist and queer theory with political economic analysis, seeking new ways to combine class analysis with the new social movement concerns of race/ethnicity, gender and sexuality. (1) The main purpose of the book is to show that various critical discourses about capitalism negatively influence our conceptions of possibilities for resistance. Gibson-Graham warns against the 'globalization script' that constructs people as victims of a mystifying and all-powerful new global capitalist order. She argues that this globalization script may be contributing to the very problem of mass political acquiescence that left activists and intellectuals are seeking to solve.

Any theorist who acknowledges that discourse plays an important role in constructing political subjects and thus political possibilities can appreciate the main thesis of Gibson-Graham's work. But there are also limits to her argument. Consider the recent protests against the World Trade Organization conference in Seattle. Despite Gibson-Graham's claim that the globalization script is politically disempowering, we may very well see a sustained international protest movement invigorated by a critique of the totalizing ambitions of the World Trade Organization and the global economy more generally. Resistance to such totality is the motivation behind some of the most vibrant protests that the United States has witnessed in years. Gibson-Graham argues that a general focus on totalizing, capitalist processes 'discursively produces' disempowered political subjects, but the World Trade Organization protests suggest that this is not necessarily the case.

Another feminist theorist who, like Gibson-Graham, provides an interesting new direction for feminist political economy is Teresa Brennan. Brennan combines an awareness of social differences with a theory of large-scale economic developments and draws from a wide range of academic disciplines, especially psychoanalysis, sociology, philosophy and marxist theory. Additionally, like Gibson-Graham, Brennan also incorporates a variety of post-structuralist feminist concerns, including the delusive foundations of the modernist, self-willed subject, and the classical marxist tendency to subordinate gender, race and ethnicity to the 'more important' category of class. Responding to these concerns, but without abandoning the use of technical marxist concepts, Brennan theorizes a structural connection among race, class, gender and nature that finds commonalities below the surface of seemingly fragmented and opposed social identities and political concerns. Like Gibson-Graham, Brennan does not abandon class analysis in the attention she gives to race, gender and nationality, but, unlike Gibson-Graham, she centralizes the issue of nature in her work and has opted to theorize large-scale capitalist processes as opposed to focusing on the negative discursive and political consequences of such theories.

The range of groups represented at the recent World Trade Organization protests in Seattle indicates the practical interconnectedness of various forms of oppression. This interconnectedness is frequently alluded to in theory but rarely witnessed on a concrete political level. For years, labour and environmental activism have been opposed, as in cases where environmentalist struggles to protect endangered species in old growth forests conflict with the need to preserve logging jobs. Brennan's economic theory helps explain that globalization has created new and complicated conditions, possibly resulting in the formation of new political alliances (as witnessed in Seattle) with the express purpose of democratizing this globalization process.

Although she is theoretically sophisticated and contributes much to recent debates in feminist philosophy and critical theory, Brennan clearly does not remain on the level of abstraction. In fact, she is able to account for many concrete developments. In this article, an explication of her more recent economic theory will follow a brief discussion of the psychoanalytic theory of her first two books. I hope to show, through a detailed discussion of Brennan's theory, that feminists cannot afford to abandon entirely attempts to theorize the totality. More at issue is how we proceed to generate uniquely feminist theories about capitalism without reproducing the problems that other marxist/socialist feminists, and their post-structuralist feminist critics, have encountered. (2)

The Foundational Fantasy and the Subject/Object Dualism

In The Interpretation of the Flesh and History after Lacan, Brennan focuses primarily on developing a psychoanalytic theory of energetic relationality. (3) She speculates that an intrauterine communication exists between a pregnant woman and her foetus, which she terms an 'intersubjective economy', where energy flows in an unbounded fashion. After birth, this communication is interrupted by the delayed satisfaction of needs that the infant experiences. In order to compensate for the harsh reality of this delay, the infant hallucinates gratifying objects. Eventually, these hallucinations lead to a 'foundational fantasy', where the infant fantasizes that she is the autonomous centre of her own universe without any dependencies on the mother.

According to Brennan, this narcissistic foundational fantasy is responsible for binary thinking, including mind/body and subject/object dualisms. Brennan attributes the psychic emergence of the subject/object distinction to this need for the 'autonomous subject' to have a distinct other against which she can define herself. Avoiding the complicated chicken or the egg question about causal relationships between the psychic fantasy and objective enactment of this fantasy--through mass commodification, gender oppression, colonization, racism, and ecological destruction--Brennan notes that a certain degree of fantasized separateness is inevitable in any culture or historical epoch. This fantasy, however, has intensified in the West over time, resulting today in what Jacques Lacan calls 'ego's era'.

Whatever one makes of the complications of this psychoanalytic theory, for the purposes of this essay it is enough to recognize that Brennan's account of the psychic emergence of dualistic thinking shares much in common with feminist theorists who explore the connections between the objectification of women and the destruction of nature. Although there are many important differences to account for among ecological-oriented feminist thinkers, a critique of dualistic thinking is common to all such feminist thinkers. (4) In Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, Val Plumwood, for example, like Brennan, traces dualistic thinking to a denied dependency:

A dualism, I have argued, results from a certain denied dependency on a subordinated other. This relationship of denied dependency determines a certain kind of logical structure, in which the denial and the relation of domination/subordination shape the identity of FILL IN MISSING TEXT?? By means of dualism, the colonised are appropriated, incorporated, into the selfhood and culture of the master, which forms their identity. The dominant conception of the human/nature relation in the west has features corresponding to this logical structure. (5) In many ways, Brennan's argument about the psychic origins of dualistic thinking in the foundational fantasy complements Plumwood's...