A labial art-politics

In this article we focus on the potential for an alignment of certain feminist artistic practices and

poststructuralist conceptions of critique that may enable ways of theorising practices of resistance

and engender ways of practicing resistance in theory, without the lurch back into masculinist

forms of dogmatism. It will be claimed that an ontological conception of art, considered as that

which makes a difference in the world, can not only challenge the primacy of the dogmatic and

masculine ‘subject who judges’, but also instil ways of thinking about, and ways of enacting,

feminist artistic encounters with the capacity to resist dogmatism. The theoretical stakes of this

claim are elaborated through complimentary readings of Deleuze and Guattari’s constructivist

account of philosophy and Irigaray’s feminist explorations of what it means to think from within

the 'labial', rather than from the position of the dominant phallic symbolic order. We argue that

this creative conjunction between Irigaray, Deleuze and Guattari provides the resources for a

conceptualisation of both feminist artistic practice and the critical practice of poststructuralist

philosophy as forms of resistance to the dominant patriarchal order, in ways that can avoid the

collapse back into masculinist forms of dogmatism. Revel’s discussion of the role of constituent

rather than constituted forms of resistance is employed to draw out the implications of this

position for contentious politics. It is concluded that constituent practices of resistance can

be understood as a challenge to the phallogocentric symbolic order to the extent that they are

practices of a labial art-politics