Two

Given its class politics, ludic feminism has attempted to overcome this politico-epistemological crisis by theorising materialism in a way that reconciles its contradictory interests. On the one hand, it is primarily a theory of "upper-middle class" (to use the term of bourgeois social theory) Euroamerican women and, on the other hand, it claims to be interested in social change for all women. These "solutions" have taken two historically determined forms.

In the early phases of its "romance' with post-structuralism — roughly from the early 1970's (as in the writings of He1ene Cixous and Julia Kristeva) to the mid-1980's (as in such early writings of Teresa deLauretis as Alice Doesn't) — ludic feminism understood materialism mostly as a matter of "language" ("sign"). This idea of the material as the "matter" of language is perhaps most comprehensively performed in a book published at the end of this phase of ludic materialism namely, Textualising the Feminine by Shari Benstock (1991). By the time Benstock's book was published, materialism-as-language theory had become institutionalised in feminism. Benstock's conventional reading of what I am calling ludic feminism does not directly engage the question of "materialism," but her book is basically an instance of the emergence (and decline) of the notion of (mostly Derridean-Lacanian) textuality in contemporary feminism. Such feminists as Mary Daly, who are not in any conventional sense post-structuralists, also have a ludic understanding of materialism as a matter of language, as is clear from her tropic books such as Gyn/Ecology.

In theorising "materialism" as a "matter" of language, ludic feminism essentially deployed the concept of "textuality" in Derrida (for example, in Of Grammatology, especially 141-164), the idea of the "sign" in Lacan (Ecrits, particularly, 30-113 and 146-178), and also the notion of language as discourse in Foucault (Archaeology of Knowledge, especially 40-49 and The Discourse on Language). For Foucault "discourse" has an exteriority of its own ("Politics and the Study of Discourse" 60); it is a reality in its own right and not simply a reflection of an independent reality outside it. In his elaboration on this view of "discourse," Ernesto Laclau goes so far as to say that "The discursive is not, therefore, being conceived as a level nor even as a dimension of the social, but rather as being coextensive with the social as such" (Populist Rupture and Discourse 87). Understanding materialism as a matter of language has led ludic feminism to rethink politics itself. If the "matter" of social reality is "language," then changes in this reality can best be brought about by changing the constituents of that reality — namely, signs. Therefore, politics as collective action for emancipation is abandoned, and politics as intervention in discursive representation is adopted as a truly progressive politics. Since language always works in specific contexts, the new progressive ludic politics was also deemed to be always "local" and anti-global. From such a perspective, emancipation itself is seen as a metaphysical metanarrative and read as totalising and totalitarian (e.g., Lyotard, Postmodern Condition). Following the post-Marxism of Laclau, ludic feminists like Judith Butler, proclaim the "loss of credibility" of Marxist versions of history" and "the unrealisability of emancipation." Emancipation for Butler has a "contradictory and untenable" foundation and thus becomes part of a sliding chain of significations ('Poststructuralism and Postmarxism"). Social change, thus, becomes almost entirely a matter of superstructural change, that is, change in significations. Political economy, in short, is displaced by an economy of signs.

With minor local modifications in the works of various ludic feminists, this notion of materialism is maintained in ludic theory from the early 1970's to the mid-1980s. However, from the mid-to-late 1980's (around the time of publication of Jane Gallop's Thinking Through the Body in 1988) the idea of "materialism" as solely a matter of language loses its grip on ludic theory. After the publication of Paul deMan's Wartime Journalism — when questions of "ethics" suddenly become foregrounded in contemporary high theory — an under the increasing pressures from New Historicism, ludic feminism has made new attempts to rearticulate materialism in a less discursive manner. The pressures on reunderstanding "materialism' as a non-discursive force have not been entirely internal to theory. At the end of the 1980's, as a result of conservative social policies in the U.S. and Europe (for example, new tax laws), a massive transfer of wealth from the working class to the owning class has taken place. Moreover, the working of postmodern capitalism has literally affected "everyday" life in U.S. and European cities (homelessness, crime in neighbourhoods devastated by unemployment, abandoned children ... ). In the face of such conditions, the idea of progressive politics as simply a question of changing representations and problematising the "obvious" meanings in culture has become too hollow to be convincing. As part of the emergence of "ethics" in critical theory and the decline of "high theory" itself, ludic feminism has been rethinking its own understanding of "materialism." In the 1990's materialism in ludic feminism is no longer simply the "matter" of language, rather it has become the resisting "matter" of the non-discursive, or as Diana Fuss puts it in her Essentially Speaking, "the body as matter" (52). The main theorists of this new version of materialism" are writers such as Judith Butler and Elizabeth Grosz. (Increasingly the notion of materialism deployed by Eve Sedgewick and other queer theorists is to a very large extent influenced by Butler). The idea of the non-discursive ("the real or primary relations") is, of course, available even in the early work of Foucault himself (Archaeology of Knowledge, for example 45-46; 68-69). Butler, whose recent writings are increasingly marked by her engagement with something called the non/extra-discursive is, of course, a close reader of Foucualt. (Butler's doctoral dissertation, later published as Subjects of Desire, it is helpful to keep in mind, is focused, in part, on Foucault).

What is of great importance in any theory of materialism is the way in which the relation of the material to the non-material is articulated. In his earlier works such as Madness and Civilisation, Foucault had posited a more causal relationship between the discursive and non-discursive. The "innovation" in Archaeology (and in the writings that followed) is that causal explanation (in fact any explanation) is dismissed as a modernist search for origin. In the post-Archaeology writings the discursive and the non-discursive exist side by side without any "necessary" relation between them. The Marxist principle that the extra-discursive explains the discursive ("it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness," Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy 21) is abandoned in favour of indeterminacy. In fact, the "indeterminateness" of the relation between the discursive and nondiscursive is central to the idea of the "material" in ludic feminism. Through indeterminacy, ludic feminism — like all idealist theory — argues for the freedom of agency and proposes a theory of the social in which the bourgeois subject is still the central figure. The subject in ludic feminism does not, of course, always appear in its traditional form. However, it is commonly affirmed through a trope or a practice, such a the practice of performance in Butler: it is, for example, impossible to think of a performance, no matter how performative — without a performer. It is, therefore, important to say here that Foucault and ludic feminism ostensibly reject any causal explanation in order to acquire the freedom of the agent, but in actuality the only determinism that they are opposing is the determinism of the material (labour, class, and the relations of production). In spite of their formal objections to explanation and causality, they, in fact, establish a causal relation in their theories between the discursive and non-discursive in which the Marxist theory of the social is reversed. In ludic theory it is the discursive that silently explains the nondiscursive. Dreyfus and Rabinow (hardly opponents of Foucault!) put it this way:

"Although what gets said depends on something other than itself, discourse dictates the terms of this dependence" (Michel Foucault 64). In other words, not only is also determining: it organises the non-discursive. In is discourse autonomous, it more of a formal(ist) gesture towards an "outside" which short, the non-discursive is might be regarded as "material." The decidability/undecidability of the relation between the discursive and non-discursive — and not the mere acknowledgment (as in both Foucault and ludic feminism) that there is an extra-discursive — is the central issue in theorising materialism.

The result of this ludic positing of a relation of indeterminacy is a materialism that does not act materially; it does not determine anything: it is an inert mass. For the poststructuralist feminist, such as Butler, Cornell, or Fuss, this non-determinate relation is what makes the theory of the non-discursive in postmodern feminism "progressive" and non-reductionist. However, this is a very conservative and constraining understanding of the non-discursive and its relation to the discursive. The indeterminacy that it posits as a mark of resistance and freedom is, in actuality, a legitimisation of the class politics of an "upper-middle class" Euroamerican feminism that is obsessed with the freedom of the entrepreneurial subject and as such privileges the "inventiveness" of the sovereign subject — in the form of what Butler calls "citationality," Cornell calls "remetaphorisation," and what more generally is understood as creativity, agency — over the collective social relations of production. This individuality is materialised in the uniqueness and irreplaceability of each body.

The non-discursive for ludic feminists in the 1990's, thus, becomes more and more a question of not simply that which exists outside the discursive but as that entity which is resistant to the discursive — and the body is put forth as the prime site for this resistance. What I have said so far about the history and theory of materialism" in recent feminist theory should not conveniently be read to mean that, for example, no feminist theorist before the mid-to-late 1980's talked about "materialism" as a matter of the body or that no feminist theorist, at the present time, regards "materialism" to be a matter of language. My point is that, at the present time, the notion of materialism as "language" is, to use Raymond Williams' terms, a "residual" concept (writers such as Barbara Johnson, who have shown an interest in feminism in their more recent writings, for example, still, by and large, regard materialism to be a matter of language). The idea of "materialism" as a matter of body — as, in short, a force resisting the discursive — is an "emergent" theory. We see the effort to suture these two theoretical tendencies together in the work, for example, of Judith Butler.

In his move from the project of "archaeology" (questions of language and knowledge) to "genealogy" (issues of power and practice), Foucault has concluded that the only possibility of social change is through an entity that can resist the all inclusive and all-encompassing regime of the dominant "episteme" that he himself had so thoroughly analysed in The Order of Things. Since the episteme defines and controls all that was intelligible, to move beyond its regime, one has to appeal to an entity that is non-thinking, non-intelligible and has the power to resist the episteme. This entity, for Foucault, is the body, and the power of the body is acquired through its relentless seeking of purposeless pleasure: pleasure not as the reward for performing the task of reproduction. As Foucault elaborated in his later works, such as History of Sexuality and Discipline and Punish, the body has its own materiality that enables it to "exceed" and "escape" discourse and its associated regimes of power-knowledge. This, of course, does not mean that the body is not conditioned, inscribed, and moulded by discourse. However, it does mean that power-knowledge never succeeds in completely overcoming the body: culturalisation is never total and the body always exceeds the power-knowledge that attempts to completely control it. This "exceeding" is possible partly because of the internal conflicts and contradictions among the various discourses that attempt to control the body.

The notion of the body as a resiting site in Foucault, however, is a highly political one and is devised in part to inscribe a bourgeois ludic "materialism" (of pleasure ) in place of historical materialism. Foucault himself is quite clear on this point. In his "Body/Power," Foucault states that

The emergence of the problem of the body and its growing urgency have come about through the unfolding of a political struggle. Whether this is a revolutionary struggle, I don't know. One can say that what has happened since 1968, and arguably what made 1968 possible, is something profoundly anti-Marxist. How can European revolutionary movements free themselves from the 'Marx effect. . . .' This was the direction of the questions posed by '68. In this calling in question of the equation: Marxism = the revolutionary process, an equation that constituted a kind of dogma, the importance given to the body is one of the important, if not essential elements. (Power/Knowledge 57)

The politics of Foucault's theorising of the body as a site of resistance materialism becomes even more clear when he says, "I wonder whether, before one poses the question of ideology, it wouldn't be more materialist to study first the question of the body and the effects of power on it" (Power/Knowledge 58). The materialism of the body in Foucault, then, is specifically designed to oppose collective revolutionary praxis by substituting individual regimes of purposeless pleasure-pleasure as a mode of the Kantian "sublime," a pleasure that is an excess of all systems of representation and an escape from discourse and all social meanings. Social meanings — it is assumed — are all ideological, and the true freedom of the subject is attained by transcending ideology: pleasure deconstructs ideology (the preordained obviousness upon which the metanarratives of a society are founded) and arrives at surprising encounters that can only be called novel "experiences" (Foucault's formal opposition to "experience" notwithstanding).

This legacy of Foucauldian inferential materialism has dominated the ludic feminist notion of the non-discursive and the material. Materialism in ludic feminism (as in Berkeley and other idealist philosophers) is, in fact, more a theological category than a materialist one. It is a form of what Lenin in his critique of Berkeley called "objective idealism" (Lenin, Materialism 23). The masquerading of this objective idealism — or what, in the context of Lenin's discussion of Berkeley, could be called spiritual materialism — as "materialism" in ludic feminism has notescaped the attention of ludic feminists themselves. Kathryn Bond Stockton, herself a ludic feminist theologian, describes the prevailing mode of "materialism" in ludic feminism in this way:

I mean materialism in its strongest sense: the material onto which we map our constructions, 'matter on its own terms that might resist or pressure our constructions, or prove independent of them altogether. This materialism is the nondiscursive something poststructuralist feminists now want to embrace, the extradiscursive something they confess necessarily eludes them. ("Bodies and God" 131)

Unlike historical materialism, which foregrounds the historical praxis of the materiality of labour, materialism, for the ludic feminist in the 1990's, is not an actual historical praxis that determines other practices, rather it is a purely "inferential" entity. It is, in fact, the consciousness of the subject that creates ("invents") this ludic "matter." Any understanding of "matter" as a positive entity (labour) is dismissed in ludic feminism as vulgar determinism/positivism. The "matter" of ludic feminism, in short, is a non-determining matter that depends on the subject and, as such, it is a reinscription of traditional Euroamerican idealism — this time represented as postmodern (non-positivist) materialism — to cover up the contradictions and crisis of patriarchal-capitalist. Materialism becomes (through such practices as .performance") that which exceeds the existing systems of representation — an escapes from socially constructed meanings. In ludic feminism, then, materialism (as a resisting matter) is an "invention." The seemingly "antitranscendental" element that materialism is supposed to bring to bear upon social analysis for ludic feminists, as Stockton herself realises, "only masks their deep dependence" upon "mystic unfathomable Visibilities" (132). Ludic spiritual materialism, in Stockton's words, stands as a God that might be approached through fictions and faith but never glimpsed naked" (131). Stockton's analysis is a conservative and local one: she simply observes the striking similarities that exist between spiritual materialism in ludic feminism and Victorian theological thought. In so doing, she blocks a more global understanding of ludic materialism: ludic materialism is an outcome of the contradictions of the social divisions of labour in class society. Spiritual materialism is, in short, is a strategy for managing the crisis of class relations.

Materialism, in other words, is "invented" in ludic discourses to bring back transcendentalism in a more postmodern and thus convincing rhetoric. Moreover, as I will discuss more fully below, the trope of "invention" and theories of "invention" are introduced in contemporary theory as a means to overcome the impasse of "constructivism." Constructivism effectively combated humanism along with humanist and essentialist notions of the subject, but it also left the subject and subjectivity too determinate: "upper-middle-class" ludic theorists have not been able to accept any theory that circumscribes the freedom of the subject (of capital). However, what is commonly represented, under the guise of invention, as "materialism" in ludic feminism, is merely a re-invention of the very familiar technocratic imagination so valorised in capitalism: materialism as techno-ludism. The most well-known example of techno-ludism — that is, the conjuncture of technocratic fancy, inventionism and spiritual materialism — is Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto which has become for many the manifesto of new, post-socialist ludic materialism. An apt commentary on the writings of Haraway and other feminist techno-theorists is provided by Marx and Engels. In their critique of idealist philosophers, Marx and Engels called them "industrialists of philosophy" who live on "absolute spirit," and this description remains valid for (techno)ludic feminists today (Marx and Engels, The German Ideology 27, Collected Works, Vol. 5). It is necessary to recall that Haraway's essay ends with what Stockton calls the trope of the "Christian Pentecost" ("Bodies and God" 138): Haraway claims that "Cyborg imagery ... is a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia... a feminist speaking in tongues" (Simians 181). This spiritual materialism — this ludic matterism in its various forms from cyborgian techno-ludism to Butlerian "citationality" — is now the dominant theory of materialism in the postmodern knowledge industry. It is a materialism that does not determine the non-material but is, in fact, determined by the consciousness of the subject that infers it and thus constitutes it. ludic materialism, then, whether perceived as the matter of sign/ textuality or as the matter of the body is an invention to overcome the determinism of social constructionism: it is a device to return the freedom of the subject and the contingency and non-necessity of the social with a newly legitimated force to the entrepreneur and patriarchal-capitalism.

Materialism, however, is neither a matter of "language" (sign/discourse/ textuality) nor is it an a-historical, inert, "resisting" mass (of the body) whose existence can be inferred by "faith or fiction," by performativity, resignifications and other ludic rituals. In its most radical rendering, ludic postmodern materialism leads to a form of Feuerbachian materialism about which Marx writes: "As far as Feuerbach is a materialist he does not deal with history, and as far as he considers history he is not a materialist" (Marx and Engels, The German Ideology 41). Materialism, is not a matter of inference. It is the objectivity (of "surplus labour"). Moreover it is an active objectivity: a praxis — the praxis of labour through which humans "act "upon external nature" and change it, and in this way simultaneously change themselves (Marx, Capital I, 284). As a praxis, it is historical, and as labour, it is conflictually structured between the owners of the means of production and those who have nothing but their own labour power to sell. Materialism, in short, is a historical praxis and a structure of conflicts that determines other practices. Unlike the Foucauldian and ludic inert non-discursive, it does not simply exist side by side with the discursive: it make the discursive possible; it "explains" the discursive. Explanation is, of course, the very thing that Foucault's theory of the autonomy of discourse is designed to erase. For Foucault all explanations (why) are ideological: only description (how) of discourse is a legitimate form of knowledge. Materialism is not an inert resistance to discourse, that has to be inferred by "fictions and faith." Instead materialism is (as Marx meticulously describes it in Capital, I, 340-416) what confronts the subject of labour in "the working day": the working day is the site in which the material and historical process of extracting surplus labour from the worker by the capitalist takes place.

Given its class politics, ludic feminism has attempted to overcome this politico-epistemological crisis by theorising materialism in a way that reconciles its contradictory interests. On the one hand, it is primarily a theory of "upper-middle class" (to use the term of bourgeois social theory) Euroamerican women and, on the other hand, it claims to be interested in social change for all women. These "solutions" have taken two historically determined forms.

In the early phases of its "romance' with post-structuralism — roughly from the early 1970's (as in the writings of He1ene Cixous and Julia Kristeva) to the mid-1980's (as in such early writings of Teresa deLauretis as Alice Doesn't) — ludic feminism understood materialism mostly as a matter of "language" ("sign"). This idea of the material as the "matter" of language is perhaps most comprehensively performed in a book published at the end of this phase of ludic materialism namely, Textualising the Feminine by Shari Benstock (1991). By the time Benstock's book was published, materialism-as-language theory had become institutionalised in feminism. Benstock's conventional reading of what I am calling ludic feminism does not directly engage the question of "materialism," but her book is basically an instance of the emergence (and decline) of the notion of (mostly Derridean-Lacanian) textuality in contemporary feminism. Such feminists as Mary Daly, who are not in any conventional sense post-structuralists, also have a ludic understanding of materialism as a matter of language, as is clear from her tropic books such as Gyn/Ecology.

In theorising "materialism" as a "matter" of language, ludic feminism essentially deployed the concept of "textuality" in Derrida (for example, in Of Grammatology, especially 141-164), the idea of the "sign" in Lacan (Ecrits, particularly, 30-113 and 146-178), and also the notion of language as discourse in Foucault (Archaeology of Knowledge, especially 40-49 and The Discourse on Language). For Foucault "discourse" has an exteriority of its own ("Politics and the Study of Discourse" 60); it is a reality in its own right and not simply a reflection of an independent reality outside it. In his elaboration on this view of "discourse," Ernesto Laclau goes so far as to say that "The discursive is not, therefore, being conceived as a level nor even as a dimension of the social, but rather as being coextensive with the social as such" (Populist Rupture and Discourse 87). Understanding materialism as a matter of language has led ludic feminism to rethink politics itself. If the "matter" of social reality is "language," then changes in this reality can best be brought about by changing the constituents of that reality — namely, signs. Therefore, politics as collective action for emancipation is abandoned, and politics as intervention in discursive representation is adopted as a truly progressive politics. Since language always works in specific contexts, the new progressive ludic politics was also deemed to be always "local" and anti-global. From such a perspective, emancipation itself is seen as a metaphysical metanarrative and read as totalising and totalitarian (e.g., Lyotard, Postmodern Condition). Following the post-Marxism of Laclau, ludic feminists like Judith Butler, proclaim the "loss of credibility" of Marxist versions of history" and "the unrealisability of emancipation." Emancipation for Butler has a "contradictory and untenable" foundation and thus becomes part of a sliding chain of significations ('Poststructuralism and Postmarxism"). Social change, thus, becomes almost entirely a matter of superstructural change, that is, change in significations. Political economy, in short, is displaced by an economy of signs.

With minor local modifications in the works of various ludic feminists, this notion of materialism is maintained in ludic theory from the early 1970's to the mid-1980s. However, from the mid-to-late 1980's (around the time of publication of Jane Gallop's Thinking Through the Body in 1988) the idea of "materialism" as solely a matter of language loses its grip on ludic theory. After the publication of Paul deMan's Wartime Journalism — when questions of "ethics" suddenly become foregrounded in contemporary high theory — an under the increasing pressures from New Historicism, ludic feminism has made new attempts to rearticulate materialism in a less discursive manner. The pressures on reunderstanding "materialism' as a non-discursive force have not been entirely internal to theory. At the end of the 1980's, as a result of conservative social policies in the U.S. and Europe (for example, new tax laws), a massive transfer of wealth from the working class to the owning class has taken place. Moreover, the working of postmodern capitalism has literally affected "everyday" life in U.S. and European cities (homelessness, crime in neighbourhoods devastated by unemployment, abandoned children ... ). In the face of such conditions, the idea of progressive politics as simply a question of changing representations and problematising the "obvious" meanings in culture has become too hollow to be convincing. As part of the emergence of "ethics" in critical theory and the decline of "high theory" itself, ludic feminism has been rethinking its own understanding of "materialism." In the 1990's materialism in ludic feminism is no longer simply the "matter" of language, rather it has become the resisting "matter" of the non-discursive, or as Diana Fuss puts it in her Essentially Speaking, "the body as matter" (52). The main theorists of this new version of materialism" are writers such as Judith Butler and Elizabeth Grosz. (Increasingly the notion of materialism deployed by Eve Sedgewick and other queer theorists is to a very large extent influenced by Butler). The idea of the non-discursive ("the real or primary relations") is, of course, available even in the early work of Foucault himself (Archaeology of Knowledge, for example 45-46; 68-69). Butler, whose recent writings are increasingly marked by her engagement with something called the non/extra-discursive is, of course, a close reader of Foucualt. (Butler's doctoral dissertation, later published as Subjects of Desire, it is helpful to keep in mind, is focused, in part, on Foucault).

What is of great importance in any theory of materialism is the way in which the relation of the material to the non-material is articulated. In his earlier works such as Madness and Civilisation, Foucault had posited a more causal relationship between the discursive and non-discursive. The "innovation" in Archaeology (and in the writings that followed) is that causal explanation (in fact any explanation) is dismissed as a modernist search for origin. In the post-Archaeology writings the discursive and the non-discursive exist side by side without any "necessary" relation between them. The Marxist principle that the extra-discursive explains the discursive ("it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness," Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy 21) is abandoned in favour of indeterminacy. In fact, the "indeterminateness" of the relation between the discursive and nondiscursive is central to the idea of the "material" in ludic feminism. Through indeterminacy, ludic feminism — like all idealist theory — argues for the freedom of agency and proposes a theory of the social in which the bourgeois subject is still the central figure. The subject in ludic feminism does not, of course, always appear in its traditional form. However, it is commonly affirmed through a trope or a practice, such a the practice of performance in Butler: it is, for example, impossible to think of a performance, no matter how performative — without a performer. It is, therefore, important to say here that Foucault and ludic feminism ostensibly reject any causal explanation in order to acquire the freedom of the agent, but in actuality the only determinism that they are opposing is the determinism of the material (labour, class, and the relations of production). In spite of their formal objections to explanation and causality, they, in fact, establish a causal relation in their theories between the discursive and non-discursive in which the Marxist theory of the social is reversed. In ludic theory it is the discursive that silently explains the nondiscursive. Dreyfus and Rabinow (hardly opponents of Foucault!) put it this way:

"Although what gets said depends on something other than itself, discourse dictates the terms of this dependence" (Michel Foucault 64). In other words, not only is also determining: it organises the non-discursive. In is discourse autonomous, it more of a formal(ist) gesture towards an "outside" which short, the non-discursive is might be regarded as "material." The decidability/undecidability of the relation between the discursive and non-discursive — and not the mere acknowledgment (as in both Foucault and ludic feminism) that there is an extra-discursive — is the central issue in theorising materialism.

The result of this ludic positing of a relation of indeterminacy is a materialism that does not act materially; it does not determine anything: it is an inert mass. For the poststructuralist feminist, such as Butler, Cornell, or Fuss, this non-determinate relation is what makes the theory of the non-discursive in postmodern feminism "progressive" and non-reductionist. However, this is a very conservative and constraining understanding of the non-discursive and its relation to the discursive. The indeterminacy that it posits as a mark of resistance and freedom is, in actuality, a legitimisation of the class politics of an "upper-middle class" Euroamerican feminism that is obsessed with the freedom of the entrepreneurial subject and as such privileges the "inventiveness" of the sovereign subject — in the form of what Butler calls "citationality," Cornell calls "remetaphorisation," and what more generally is understood as creativity, agency — over the collective social relations of production. This individuality is materialised in the uniqueness and irreplaceability of each body.

The non-discursive for ludic feminists in the 1990's, thus, becomes more and more a question of not simply that which exists outside the discursive but as that entity which is resistant to the discursive — and the body is put forth as the prime site for this resistance. What I have said so far about the history and theory of materialism" in recent feminist theory should not conveniently be read to mean that, for example, no feminist theorist before the mid-to-late 1980's talked about "materialism" as a matter of the body or that no feminist theorist, at the present time, regards "materialism" to be a matter of language. My point is that, at the present time, the notion of materialism as "language" is, to use Raymond Williams' terms, a "residual" concept (writers such as Barbara Johnson, who have shown an interest in feminism in their more recent writings, for example, still, by and large, regard materialism to be a matter of language). The idea of "materialism" as a matter of body — as, in short, a force resisting the discursive — is an "emergent" theory. We see the effort to suture these two theoretical tendencies together in the work, for example, of Judith Butler.

In his move from the project of "archaeology" (questions of language and knowledge) to "genealogy" (issues of power and practice), Foucault has concluded that the only possibility of social change is through an entity that can resist the all inclusive and all-encompassing regime of the dominant "episteme" that he himself had so thoroughly analysed in The Order of Things. Since the episteme defines and controls all that was intelligible, to move beyond its regime, one has to appeal to an entity that is non-thinking, non-intelligible and has the power to resist the episteme. This entity, for Foucault, is the body, and the power of the body is acquired through its relentless seeking of purposeless pleasure: pleasure not as the reward for performing the task of reproduction. As Foucault elaborated in his later works, such as History of Sexuality and Discipline and Punish, the body has its own materiality that enables it to "exceed" and "escape" discourse and its associated regimes of power-knowledge. This, of course, does not mean that the body is not conditioned, inscribed, and moulded by discourse. However, it does mean that power-knowledge never succeeds in completely overcoming the body: culturalisation is never total and the body always exceeds the power-knowledge that attempts to completely control it. This "exceeding" is possible partly because of the internal conflicts and contradictions among the various discourses that attempt to control the body.

The notion of the body as a resiting site in Foucault, however, is a highly political one and is devised in part to inscribe a bourgeois ludic "materialism" (of pleasure ) in place of historical materialism. Foucault himself is quite clear on this point. In his "Body/Power," Foucault states that

The emergence of the problem of the body and its growing urgency have come about through the unfolding of a political struggle. Whether this is a revolutionary struggle, I don't know. One can say that what has happened since 1968, and arguably what made 1968 possible, is something profoundly anti-Marxist. How can European revolutionary movements free themselves from the 'Marx effect. . . .' This was the direction of the questions posed by '68. In this calling in question of the equation: Marxism = the revolutionary process, an equation that constituted a kind of dogma, the importance given to the body is one of the important, if not essential elements. (Power/Knowledge 57)

The politics of Foucault's theorising of the body as a site of resistance materialism becomes even more clear when he says, "I wonder whether, before one poses the question of ideology, it wouldn't be more materialist to study first the question of the body and the effects of power on it" (Power/Knowledge 58). The materialism of the body in Foucault, then, is specifically designed to oppose collective revolutionary praxis by substituting individual regimes of purposeless pleasure-pleasure as a mode of the Kantian "sublime," a pleasure that is an excess of all systems of representation and an escape from discourse and all social meanings. Social meanings — it is assumed — are all ideological, and the true freedom of the subject is attained by transcending ideology: pleasure deconstructs ideology (the preordained obviousness upon which the metanarratives of a society are founded) and arrives at surprising encounters that can only be called novel "experiences" (Foucault's formal opposition to "experience" notwithstanding).

This legacy of Foucauldian inferential materialism has dominated the ludic feminist notion of the non-discursive and the material. Materialism in ludic feminism (as in Berkeley and other idealist philosophers) is, in fact, more a theological category than a materialist one. It is a form of what Lenin in his critique of Berkeley called "objective idealism" (Lenin, Materialism 23). The masquerading of this objective idealism — or what, in the context of Lenin's discussion of Berkeley, could be called spiritual materialism — as "materialism" in ludic feminism has notescaped the attention of ludic feminists themselves. Kathryn Bond Stockton, herself a ludic feminist theologian, describes the prevailing mode of "materialism" in ludic feminism in this way:

I mean materialism in its strongest sense: the material onto which we map our constructions, 'matter on its own terms that might resist or pressure our constructions, or prove independent of them altogether. This materialism is the nondiscursive something poststructuralist feminists now want to embrace, the extradiscursive something they confess necessarily eludes them. ("Bodies and God" 131)

Unlike historical materialism, which foregrounds the historical praxis of the materiality of labour, materialism, for the ludic feminist in the 1990's, is not an actual historical praxis that determines other practices, rather it is a purely "inferential" entity. It is, in fact, the consciousness of the subject that creates ("invents") this ludic "matter." Any understanding of "matter" as a positive entity (labour) is dismissed in ludic feminism as vulgar determinism/positivism. The "matter" of ludic feminism, in short, is a non-determining matter that depends on the subject and, as such, it is a reinscription of traditional Euroamerican idealism — this time represented as postmodern (non-positivist) materialism — to cover up the contradictions and crisis of patriarchal-capitalist. Materialism becomes (through such practices as .performance") that which exceeds the existing systems of representation — an escapes from socially constructed meanings. In ludic feminism, then, materialism (as a resisting matter) is an "invention." The seemingly "antitranscendental" element that materialism is supposed to bring to bear upon social analysis for ludic feminists, as Stockton herself realises, "only masks their deep dependence" upon "mystic unfathomable Visibilities" (132). Ludic spiritual materialism, in Stockton's words, stands as a God that might be approached through fictions and faith but never glimpsed naked" (131). Stockton's analysis is a conservative and local one: she simply observes the striking similarities that exist between spiritual materialism in ludic feminism and Victorian theological thought. In so doing, she blocks a more global understanding of ludic materialism: ludic materialism is an outcome of the contradictions of the social divisions of labour in class society. Spiritual materialism is, in short, is a strategy for managing the crisis of class relations.

Materialism, in other words, is "invented" in ludic discourses to bring back transcendentalism in a more postmodern and thus convincing rhetoric. Moreover, as I will discuss more fully below, the trope of "invention" and theories of "invention" are introduced in contemporary theory as a means to overcome the impasse of "constructivism." Constructivism effectively combated humanism along with humanist and essentialist notions of the subject, but it also left the subject and subjectivity too determinate: "upper-middle-class" ludic theorists have not been able to accept any theory that circumscribes the freedom of the subject (of capital). However, what is commonly represented, under the guise of invention, as "materialism" in ludic feminism, is merely a re-invention of the very familiar technocratic imagination so valorised in capitalism: materialism as techno-ludism. The most well-known example of techno-ludism — that is, the conjuncture of technocratic fancy, inventionism and spiritual materialism — is Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto which has become for many the manifesto of new, post-socialist ludic materialism. An apt commentary on the writings of Haraway and other feminist techno-theorists is provided by Marx and Engels. In their critique of idealist philosophers, Marx and Engels called them "industrialists of philosophy" who live on "absolute spirit," and this description remains valid for (techno)ludic feminists today (Marx and Engels, The German Ideology 27, Collected Works, Vol. 5). It is necessary to recall that Haraway's essay ends with what Stockton calls the trope of the "Christian Pentecost" ("Bodies and God" 138): Haraway claims that "Cyborg imagery ... is a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia... a feminist speaking in tongues" (Simians 181). This spiritual materialism — this ludic matterism in its various forms from cyborgian techno-ludism to Butlerian "citationality" — is now the dominant theory of materialism in the postmodern knowledge industry. It is a materialism that does not determine the non-material but is, in fact, determined by the consciousness of the subject that infers it and thus constitutes it. ludic materialism, then, whether perceived as the matter of sign/ textuality or as the matter of the body is an invention to overcome the determinism of social constructionism: it is a device to return the freedom of the subject and the contingency and non-necessity of the social with a newly legitimated force to the entrepreneur and patriarchal-capitalism.

Materialism, however, is neither a matter of "language" (sign/discourse/ textuality) nor is it an a-historical, inert, "resisting" mass (of the body) whose existence can be inferred by "faith or fiction," by performativity, resignifications and other ludic rituals. In its most radical rendering, ludic postmodern materialism leads to a form of Feuerbachian materialism about which Marx writes: "As far as Feuerbach is a materialist he does not deal with history, and as far as he considers history he is not a materialist" (Marx and Engels, The German Ideology 41). Materialism, is not a matter of inference. It is the objectivity (of "surplus labour"). Moreover it is an active objectivity: a praxis — the praxis of labour through which humans "act "upon external nature" and change it, and in this way simultaneously change themselves (Marx, Capital I, 284). As a praxis, it is historical, and as labour, it is conflictually structured between the owners of the means of production and those who have nothing but their own labour power to sell. Materialism, in short, is a historical praxis and a structure of conflicts that determines other practices. Unlike the Foucauldian and ludic inert non-discursive, it does not simply exist side by side with the discursive: it make the discursive possible; it "explains" the discursive. Explanation is, of course, the very thing that Foucault's theory of the autonomy of discourse is designed to erase. For Foucault all explanations (why) are ideological: only description (how) of discourse is a legitimate form of knowledge. Materialism is not an inert resistance to discourse, that has to be inferred by "fictions and faith." Instead materialism is (as Marx meticulously describes it in Capital, I, 340-416) what confronts the subject of labour in "the working day": the working day is the site in which the material and historical process of extracting surplus labour from the worker by the capitalist takes place.