post-structuralism and the modern age

I found Plant's text extremely engaging, in that dangerous way in which I'm more likely to be carried along its currents than to remember to stop and think critically. Her most interesting proposition, I think, comes on pages 42-43, in which she suggests that women in temperament and skill set might be better prepared for the world in which we now find ourselves, "as though [women] always had been working in a future which their male counterparts had only just begun to glimpse." Plant's examples come from the working world, but many conventional ideas about femininity seem reflected in a number of post-structuralist notions: lack, decenteredness, flow.

Just last night I was discussing with my flatmate differences in the scholastic system and in employment (and the cultural values there reflected) between America, where he went for school from undergrad through (currently) post-doc, and Germany, where he grew up. In Germany, he said, a person studies a very specific field and seeks employment in a very limited margin of difference within this discipline, expecting to work that one job his entire life (and hoping that the job is not far from the town in which he is living). In America, by contrast, he feels people expect to move, certainly expect to change jobs if not careers entire over the course of their lives.

So maybe, talking about contemporary culture as post-structuralist, involves a bit of an American bias; even though the writing to which I'm alluding largely comes out of Europe, I can't speak personally for European culture. But I just remembered this conversation because I just noticed that on the page before the one I quoted, Plant suggests, "women were less willing to define themselves through employment or a single career" (41).

I can't remember the text, but I've seen made before the comparison between femininity and the networks, flow, and disruptions of the digital age, and I think it's a very interesting notion to pursue. If we subscribe to it at all, can we trace this shift? Plant's argument on the chicken or the egg (both female) aside, was the entry of women into the working world and/or academia, even if subjugated to some extent, a propeller of this shift? Or is there a more organic or unexpected course of progress that we might study?

The structure of Plant's text is also fascinating, with its broken, citing, little narratives. Little titles and keywords, promising to be explored, compounds of signifiers to fill. And of course, in addition to the breadth of material referenced and cited in the text, there are the bolded quotations themselves, both a part and inbetween the text. It's a style well suited to her subject matter. In MC15, reading "This Sex Which Is Not One," to which Plant frequently alludes, we discussed the fact that Irigay's writing process is to cite and quote othe texts, augmenting them with her own readings, and thus playing out the multiple nature of femininity that the text itself expounds. Deleuze and Guattari and Agamben follow suit in some of their texts, focused on multiplicity. Admittedly it's also right now a popular style in various kinds of fiction and nonfiction alike (another place in which our culture is implicated in these ideas), but it's interesting to see it at work in Plant's text (which, published in 1997, might predate much of the current vogue). The usual questions of what it does for us as readers in shaping her argument, how we take the nature and genres of what she does cite, &c., continue to apply.