What might a postmodern ethic look like? If a culture's ethics and its aesthetics are bound together, as semiotic cultural critics and some literary critics demonstrate, then what might an ethical postmodern poetic look like? Would such a notion remain hopelessly theoretical and utopic, limited to the level its textuality? To answer those questions, which notion of postmodernity must I think through? The broadest definition of the postmodern as historical moment affords the most room for these questions because within it I can rudely include the ideas of thinkers such as Paul Ricoeur and Antony Easthope, as well as the poststrucutral psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan and Luce Irigaray, none of whom are necessarily postmodern in their sentiments. I can also include the ideas of Richard Kearney concerning a specifically postmodern ethics of imagination, and apply all of that to reading the work of a contemporary (if not postmodern) poet, Jorie Graham--a pastiche without parody. Including work on ideology and utopia and work on subjectivity with notions of "poetry as discourse" and a notion of ethics for living will allow me to introduce the possibility of a "more than imaginary, utopic," or a more than simply textual, notion of poetics. My claim is that a postmodern (if (c)overtly feminist) ethic has been proposed, that some of its poetic manifestations are already being practiced; and to learn to practice this poethic we need to learn, as Carole Maso urges in Ava, to "Listen hard," to our others.

In his Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, Paul Ricoeur finds in Althusser's concept of ideology is "a system," as in a problematic, also a "system of representation," which has "historical existence . . . [that] is a part of the process of overdetermination," that as he quotes Althusser, "'ideology is a matter of the lived relation between men and their world'" and "all of these concepts overlap" (135). Connected in these concepts is everything about human being, including our sign systems, our psychoanalytic theories, our poetics, our notions of gender and otherness, as well as our ethical and political systems of relation and power--the relation between men and their world. For Ricoeur, ideology's function is to "legitimate a system of authority" on every level (17); it functions in order to maintain a particular (historically patriarchal, Eurocentric) system of domination and identity.

In opposition to ideology is posited utopia, a metaphoric nowhere which offers the possibility not of escaping ideology in favor of some regressive perfect moment, but of creating tension/pressure between/on what we live/think/write and what we might. Further, utopia is eccentric, out of center; it offers "imaginative variations on the topics of society, power, government, family, religion," may function to "cure the pathology of ideological thinking, which has its blindness and narrowness precisely in its inability to conceive of a nowhere" (16-7; emphasis mine). Utopias are "the moment of the other," and for Ricoeur are as entirely concerned with authority and power as are ideologies. In a psychoanalytic reading of Lacan's (post)structural order, ideology cannot imagine the nowhere, the now-here, of the other, because the subject or ideological identity cannot accurately define or imagine its Other. Actually, this works both ways, ideology and psychoanalysis function to inform and support each other. In my concerns for a poethic here, Ricoeurıs third level of ideology and utopia, at the level of the imaginative, is linked with what he identifies as the fourth level of alienation in Marx, "estrangement of human being from human being, estrangement at the level of intersubjectivity" (44), which functions like and with alienation from one's labor, from the capacity to produce and from one's humanity (41-2). This estrangement fosters the need for the imaginative because this alienation in ideology is so permeating. I, following Irigaray, will concentrate on the most basic level of intersubjective and gendered estrangement. This, and by implication the other, forms of estrangement are precisely what Irigaray challenges in her work and most recently, most utopically, in An Ethics of Sexual Difference. It is an estrangement not challenged in the psychoanalytic theories of Lacan, and the implications of those theories for (poetic) discourse and ethics.