Back in 1985, Gayatri Spivak addressed American Women thus-
I cannot speak of feminism in general.
Everybody can speak of anything in general. It is a particular type of Feminism- e.g. Chilean Feminism under Allende- which only a few people could speak about.
I speak of what I do as a woman within literary criticism.
No. She spoke as a Professor of literature in that field. She wasn't a literary critic because she lacked critical or literary ability. Were this not the case, she would have been asked to review books for leading magazines.
What Spivak meant to say she would speak as a woman, as opposed to a man, about what she did at work. This may have included smiling sweetly, wearing a nice dress, and not sticking her cock in the mouths of students.
My own definition of a woman is very simple:
it is mad. For Spivak, at that time, a woman was a biologically female member of a particular species above a certain age. It wasn't a transvestite or a 'Sadha Suhagin' Hindu man who dressed as a woman for a religious reason.
it rests on the word "man" as used in the texts that provide the foundation for the corner of the literary criticism establishment that I inhabit. You might say at this point, defining the word "woman" as resting on the word "man" is a reactionary position.
It is stupid and ignorant.
Should I not carve out an independent definition for myself as a woman? Here I must repeat some deconstructive lessons learned over the past decade that I often repeat. One, no rigorous definition of anything is ultimately possible,
then why define woman?
so that if one wants to, one could go on deconstructing the opposition between man and woman, and finally show that it is a binary opposition that displaces itself.
But one could equally say that about the binary opposition between deconstructing and not deconstructing stuff. The displaces itself from Being or Becoming or Possibility vs Incompossibility so thoroughly as to make no fucking difference to anything whatsoever.
Spivak, a garrulous Bengali with nothing to say, may think that Derrida has given the Babu a very valuable gift. But it can be equally claimed by the baboon.
Therefore, "as a deconstructivist," I cannot recommend that kind of dichotomy at all, yet, I feel that definitions are necessary in order to keep us going, to allow us to take a stand.
In which case you are recommending it- albeit for a limited purpose
The only way that I can see myself making definitions is in a provisional and polemical one: I construct my definition as a woman not in terms of a woman's putative essence but in terms of words currently in use.
Which have a 'putative essence'- i.e. it is postulated that the word picks out some feature in what it signifies which would be true in all possible worlds.
"Man" is such a word in common usage. Not a word, but the word. I therefore fix my glance upon this word even as I question the enterprise of redefining the premises of any theory. In the broadest possible sense, most critical theory in my part of the academic establishment (Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, the last Barthes) sees the text as that area of the discourse of the human sciences—in the United States called the humanities
No. Economics, Sociology, Political Science, Geography etc. are included under science de l’homme. Here, Positivism and Quantitative methods have salience. Humanities, in the US, are distinguished both from 'Divinity' (i.e. theological study) and the Social Sciences. It is concerned with normative questions humans have always asked themselves. However, the focus is generally on classical or canonical texts or works of art. In Spivak's youth, some French writers- Sartre, Camus etc- expressed philosophical ideas and French literary theory became popular as a counterweight to the Puritanical, dry as dust, 'close reading' approach taken by the Cambridge school. The big attraction was that you could repurpose same the meaningless jargon to write an essay about Sappho or Ernst Hemingway. Also you could pretend you were deeply deeply aggrieved because of your color or your gender or the fact that your Daddy was rich. Why couldn't he be a starving Guatemalan peasant? That would be super cool.
—in which the problem of the discourse of the human sciences is made available.
They aren't made available in literature. Marx wasn't reading Jane Austen. He was plowing through arcane Economic and Sociological texts filled with statistics.
Whereas in other kinds of discourses there is a move toward the final truth of a situation, literature, even within this argument, displays that the truth of a human situation is the itinerary of not being able to find it.
No. Literature can do what it pleases with the 'human situations' it invents. The author can decide that James Bond is gay and actually a double agent. He kept fucking females and shooting SMERSH agents just to maintain his cover.
Still, it may be convenient if you are writing an essay in a shit subject to regurgitate the same shite regardless of whether it is James Bond you are writing about or James Joyce.
In the general discourse of the humanities, there is a sort of search for solutions, whereas in literary discourse there is a playing out of the problem as the solution.
That may be one type of literary discourse. But there can be an equally useless type of Economics- e.g. that of Amartya Sen- or Physics- e.g. that of Karan Barad. Indeed, there are people in all walks of life who talk endlessly without ever saying anything or getting to the point.
The problem of human discourse is generally seen
by cretins
as articulating itself in the play of, in terms of, three shifting "concepts": language, world, and consciousness.
No. The problem of a particular 'human discourse' articulates itself as 'how can we get funding to keep doing this'. The answer has to do with either showing potential utility or else concentrating on cheating the gullible. Back in 1985, American Feminists may have thought Spivak's Derrida would help them bully the boys in the Literature classes they would end up teaching. Hopefully they would all turn gay and bum each other.
We know no world that is not organized as a language
We know of none that is.
— languages that we cannot possess, for we are operated by those languages as well.
No we aren't. We may instruct each other using words. We can't operate or operate on each other in that way.
The category of language, then, embraces the categories of world and consciousness
No. Language is a completely separate category from either the physical or any other sort of world as well as consciousness. Consider the phrase 'the world of language' it is part of language but no language is part of it. In other words, you will not find in the phrase 'the world of the English language' enough information about English to construct even a small part of it. Had Spivak been properly instructed in the Cambridge school- or if she gave a fuck about the shite that came out of her mouth- she wouldn't have talked such utter bollocks.
even as it is determined by them.
If language were determined by the world- there would be only one language in a particular area. The same consciousness can gain or lose knowledge of various languages.
Strictly speaking, since we are questioning the human being's control over the production of language,
Nobody questions this unless they feel they are not able to control what they are saying- perhaps because they have been drugged.
the figure that will serve us better is writing, for there the absence of the producer and receiver is taken for granted.
If you are reading this, you are present. The receiver of anything written is always present at the time of reading. Things may work differently in Calcutta.
A safe figure, seemingly outside of the language-(speech)-writing opposition, is the text
Texts are written. They are inside language. If they were knowingly dictated or transcribed, they are speech as much as writing. This can be important in a law suit.
—a weave of knowing and not-knowing which is what knowing is.
only in the sense that it is the wig of Oprah who isn't Oprah.
(This organizing principle—language, writing, or text—might itself be a way of holding at bay a randomness incongruent with consciousness.)
or, as in Spivak's case, it might be random shite
The theoreticians of textuality read Marx as a theorist of the world (history and society), as a text of the forces of labor and production-circulation-distribution; and Freud as a theorist of the self, as a text of consciousness and the unconscious.
No. They thought the one had a theory of Economics while the other had a Psychiatric theory. Spivak may be unconscious when she does her work or writes this shite, but labor and entrepreneurship are done by people who are awake and conscious.
Human textuality
doesn't exist. People aren't books. Human Sexuality does exist just as Dolphin sexuality exists.
can be seen not only as world and self, as the representation of a world in terms of a self at play with other selves and generating this representation, but also in the world and self, all implicated in an "intertextuality."
No. One can say 'for such and such mystic poet, the scent of a rose and the song of the nightingale were as much in the text as the Saqi or the Nadim/' Sadly, when Zatalli tried to add the smell of a fart to the text, the poet got very angry.
Spivak's mistake is to think that something which may be said about one particular author must also be true of all authors.
It should be clear from this that such a concept of textuality does not mean
anything at all
a reduction of the world to linguistic texts, books, or a tradition composed of books, criticism in the narrow sense, and teaching.
But literary criticism is confined to books. Mention of Zatalli's fart must be excluded from a critical text on Mir.
I am not, then, speaking about Marxist or psychoanalytic criticism as a reductive enterprise which diagnoses the scenario in every book in terms of where it would fit into a Marxist or a psychoanalytical canon.
That is indeed its job.
To my way of thinking, the discourse of the literary text
i.e. what it says as opposed to how it smells
is part of a general configuration of textuality,
I suppose you might say 'the sex I had last night was part of a general configuration of sadomasochistic gay sexuality. This is because, very sadly, the donkey died and so I had to make do with Pedro, his business-partner and amaneunsis.' But nothing informative is added by speaking of configurations. Perhaps Spivak was thinking of a 'configuration space'. We may say any particular text occupies a point in the configuration space of a language. I suppose, if you are running a computer program to identify similarities between authors, or to attribute authorship, this would be a useful thing to do. But Spivak was too stupid to attempt any such thing.
a placing forth of the solution as the unavailability of a unified solution to a unified or homogeneous, generating or receiving, consciousness.
This is wholly untrue of most genres of literature. In the vast majority of detective or romance novels we know who killed or ended up marrying who.
This unavailability is often not confronted.
It very seldom exists.
It is dodged and the problem apparently solved, in terms perhaps of unifying concepts like "man," the universal contours of a sex-, race-, class-transcendent consciousness as the generating, generated, and receiving consciousness of the text.
Why does Jane Austen not write about my cat in her novels? Why does she assume I'd be interested in what some White chicks got up to in early nineteenth century England? Also, how come Shakespeare hasn't written a play about me? Is it coz I iz bleck?
This the sort of question sensible people dodge.
I could have broached Marx and Freud more easily. I wanted to say all of the above because, in general, in the literary critical establishment here, those two are seen as reductive models. Now, although nonreductive methods are implicit in both of them, Marx and Freud do also seem to argue in terms of a mode of evidence and demonstration. They seem to bring forth evidence from the world of man or man's self, and thus prove certain kinds of truths about the world and self. I would risk saying that their descriptions of world and self are based on inadequate evidence.
Marx and Freud had shit for brains. Still, you could pretend 'proletariat' meant pregnant women or 'penis envy' was what White men had for Africans.
In terms of this conviction, I would like to fix upon the idea of alienation in Marx,
babies weren't taken away from Mums in Europe, nor did sons or daughters treat Mums as slaves.
and the idea of normality and health in Freud.
Why should the mother be seen as having been castrated? Anyway, kids who were bathed together would have been aware of that anatomical difference before they could have a concept of castration.
One way of moving into Marx is in terms of use-value, exchange-value, and surplus-value.
But is is useless for Feminism. Engels on the family is the place to start unless you don't have a dick in which case you start with Eleanor Marx.
Marx's notion of use-value is that which pertains to a thing as it is directly consumed by an agent.
In other words, its utility.
Its exchange-value (after the emergence of the money form)
there can be a commodity numeraire.
does not relate to its direct fulfillment of a specific need,
Nor does utility. If you dig up a gold nugget and decide to keep it just in case you can exchange for something you will need later on, you still get utility.
but is rather assessed in terms of what it can be exchanged for in either labor-power or money. In this process of abstracting through exchange, by making the worker work longer than necessary for subsistence wages or by means of labor-saving machinery, the buyer of the laborer's work gets more (in exchange) than the worker needs for his subsistence while he makes the thing.2 This "more-worth" (literally, in German, Mehrwert) is surplus-value.
Marx was translating William Thompson's term 'surplus value' into German. The idea had been expressed in English when he was a child.
One could indefinitely allegorize the relationship of woman within this particular triad—use, exchange, and surplus—by suggesting that woman in the traditional social situation produces more than she is getting in terms of her subsistence, and therefore is a continual source of the production of surpluses, for the man who owns her, or by the man for the capitalist who owns his labor-power.
No one can't. This is because Marx lived under a Queen who had lots of kids all of whom had to swear allegiance to her. Marx would have been laughed at if he suggested that Queen Victoria was getting less than she produced.
Apart from the fact that the mode of production of housework is not, strictly speaking, capitalist, such an analysis is paradoxical.
It is nonsense.
The contemporary woman, when she seeks financial compensation for housework,
is in the same position as a man who does so.
seeks the abstraction of use-value into exchange-value.
Many women did hire domestic help of various types. That 'abstraction' was not far to seek.
But the situation of the domestic workplace is not one of "pure exchange." The Marxian exigency would make us ask at least two questions: What is the use-value of a woman's unremunerated work for husband or family?
It is similar to the unremunerated work of the hubby or the baby or the woofy dog. Why are potted plants not being paid for the utility they produce?
Is the willing insertion into the wage structure a curse or a blessing?
Is having a vagina a curse or a blessing?
How should we fight the idea, universally accepted by men, that wages are the only mark of value-producing work?
This is not accepted by men. What they may object to is the notion that their wives are slaves whom they should pay a salary for the pleasure of being nagged by them.
(Not, I think, through the slogan "Housework is beautiful.") What would be the implications of denying women entry into the capitalist economy?
The implication would be a change in the laws of property such that women could have no control rights over fungible wealth.
Radical feminism can here learn a cautionary lesson from Lenin's capitulation to capitalism.
I suppose the silly bint means the New Economic Policy. But that was after Lenin had conquered the country and was soon reversed. Radical Feminism hasn't conquered shit.
These are important questions, but they do not necessarily broaden Marxist theory from a feminist point of view. For our purpose, the idea of externalization (EntauBerung/VerduBerung) or alienation (Entfremdung) is of greater interest.
Hegel saw Labor necessary to survival in a positive light. Marx thought it could be deformative. Feminism was banging on about how wimmin were being forced to have sex and make babies and then look after those fucking babies. But, if we can bring in immigrants, we don't really need our women to fuck or suckle or give birth.
Within the capitalist system, the labor process externalizes itself and the worker as commodities.
When women go into labor, they tend to end up with a baby. This means they are commodities and have been bought by an evil capitalist. OMG! My drunken unemployable husband is a capitalist! That is why he insists on taking half my pay to spend on booze! Trump says Kamala is a Communist. I'd better vote for her so the Government can pay me a wage for looking after my kids and cooking and cleaning for my boyfriend or pimp.
Upon this idea of the resultant fracturing of the human being's relationship to himself and his work as commodities rests the ethical charge of Marx's argument.
The ethical charge is that the worker is being cheated by his employer. Similarly women could claim that they are being raped and forced to provide domestic services by their husbands or boyfriends or guys who refuse to fuck them unless they are fed a nice dinner first. Sadly, the solution was not far to seek. Become an independent contractor. Buy sperm from the sperm-bank if you want to get preggers.
I would argue that, in terms of the physical, emotional, legal, custodial, and sentimental situation of the woman's product, the child, this picture of the human relationship to production, labor, and property is incomplete. The possession of a tangible place of production, the womb, situates women as agents in any theory of production.
While the possession of testicles and a dick situates men as agents in that theory.
Marx's dialectics of externalization-alienation followed by fetish formation are inadequate because he has not taken into account one fundamental human relationship to a product and labor.
No. As with Hegel, the thing was already baked into his theory. Spivak's mistake was to think that Marx did not know that the Labor theory of value takes into account the amount that must be deducted for the maintenance of the proletariat.
This does not mean that, if the Marxian account of externalizationalienation were rewritten from a feminist perspective, the special interest of childbirth, childbearing, and childrearing would be inserted.
This presented no difficulty. Either there would be bride price and (as in some Islamic jurisdictions) payment for breast-feeding etc. with the child going to the father by the age of about eight, or else there might be dowry or complicated inheritance laws regarding marriage. But stuff of this sort became irrelevant to Western Feminism as participation rates increased and women moved into higher value adding service industries. Incidentally, Marx said his theory did not apply to services.
It seems that the entire problematic of sexuality, rather than remaining caught within arguments about overt sociosexual politics, would be fully broached.
The opposite would be the case. Any 'problematic' of sexuality would be decomposed into a set of transactions with market values. You want to spend a few months as a man- pay for gender reassignment surgery. You find this is a horrible outcome- sue and good luck to you.
Having said this, I would reemphasize the need to interpret reproduction within a Marxian problematic.
Ceaucescu in Romania, at about this time, had banned abortions because he wanted a bigger population. Sadly, this created a problem of abandoned children. China was moving in the reverse direction. Marxian problems could be solved by very brutal methods.
In both so-called matrilineal and patrilineal societies the legal possession of the child is an inalienable fact of the property right of the man who "produces" the child.
No. The biological father might not have any fucking rights. Spivak came from a country where 'niyogi' insemination yielded the father no rights whatsoever. But the footman who got the Duchess preggers so the Duke could have an heir was in the same boat.
In terms of this legal possession, the common custodial definition, that women are much more nurturing of children, might be seen as a dissimulated reactionary gesture. The man retains legal property rights over the product of the woman's body.
Not in America. Perhaps Spivak was ignorant of this. Germany, it is true, did favor the father when it came to custody. But England didn't.
On each separate occasion, the custodial decision—which parent will have custody?—is a sentimental questioning of man's right.
No. The law in America and England and India tended to favor the woman though the wishes of older children might be taken into account. Speaking generally, courts in the English speaking world put the interests of the child first.
The current struggle over abortion rights has foregrounded this unacknowledged agenda.
Spivak thinks women were having abortions so as not to have to hand over little babies to rapists.
In order not simply to make an exception to man's legal right,
to what? taking babies away from Mummies?
or to add a footnote from a feminist perspective to the Marxist text, we must engage and correct the theory of production and alienation upon which the Marxist text is based and with which it functions.
In which case, Spivak would have to know Thompson's theory of surplus value. Marx didn't invent that doctrine. He merely applied it in a stupid manner.
As I suggested above, much Marxist feminism works on an analogy with use-value, exchangevalue, and surplus-value relationships.
Why an analogy? Oh. Marxist feminism doesn't have any use-value or exchange-value or possibility of adding value in any manner. But, in that case, there is no fucking analogy. Either the thing is useful and people will pay for it or it isn't 'labor' it is merely a hobby of a useless sort.
Marx's own writings on women and children seek to alleviate their condition in terms of a desexualized labor force.
What alleviates the condition of children is that they grow up. The plight of working women is alleviated when they are paid more or receive a pension and are able to retire.
If there were the kind of rewriting that I am proposing, it would be harder to sketch out the rules of economy and social ethics;
why? They would remain the same.
in fact, one would see that in Marx there is a moment of major transgression where rules for humanity and criticism of societies are based on inadequate evidence.
All rules and criticisms lack adequate evidence.
Marx's texts, including Capital, presuppose an ethical theory:
No. That may have been Cohen's view but he was wrong. Kantorovich got a Nobel Prize for Econ. Novozhilov got the Lenin Prize. It is their mathematical work which undergirded Marxist economic theory at that period. Spivak was too stupid to understand this.
alienation of labor must be undone because it undermines the agency of the subject in his work and his property.
Nonsense! Marx wasn't saying factories should be broken up or that cottage industries should be revived.
I would like to suggest that if the nature and history of alienation, labor, and the production of property are reexamined in terms of women's work and childbirth, it can lead us to a reading of Marx beyond Marx.
that should be 'beyond mad'.
One way of moving into Freud is in terms of his notion of the nature of pain as the deferment of pleasure,
No. Freud thought there might be a 'reality principle' or even some deeper instinctual drive which led to the courting of intense pain. Why were soldiers suffering torments in the trenches rather than running away? Why were women not getting abortions to avoid painful child-birth? The answer was that Freund's 'pleasure principle' was nonsense. The man was a charlatan who depended on the Barnum principle- viz. a sucker is born every minute. Provided the guy has money, or relatives with money, and isn't schizophrenic (in which case, he might stab you or shit on your couch) defraud him by pretending to be his 'therapist'.
especially the later Freud who wrote Beyond the Pleasure Principle* Freud's spectacular mechanics of imagined, anticipated, and avoided pain write the subject's history and theory, and constantly broach the never-quite-defined concept of normality: anxiety, inhibition, paranoia, schizophrenia, melancholy, mourning. I would like to suggest that in the womb, a tangible place of production, there is the possibility that pain exists within the concepts of normality and productivity. (This is not to sentimentalize the pain of childbirth.)
It also exists within the arsehole and the colon which is the tangible place of production for shit.
The problematizing of the phenomenal identity of pleasure and unpleasure should not be operated only through the logic of repression. The opposition pleasure-pain is questioned in the physiological "normality" of woman. If one were to look at the never-quite-defined concepts of normality and health that run through and are submerged in Freud's texts, one would have to redefine the nature of pain. Pain does not operate in the same way in men and women.
Yes it does. It is a different matter that child-bearing women may experience a type of pain which non child-bearing people do not. Also there's that business of bleeding from the kooch once a month. Apparently, for most women there is no health benefit from this and there is evidence that an increasing number of women are using combined contraception to escape the curse altogether. I suppose, as technology improves, women's lives can be made much much better in a myriad ways. Also, doing so would be very profitable. Perhaps that's what really happened to genuine Feminism while everybody was distracted by the 'Third Wave' nutters. Women rose in productivity and wealth and health and comfort as well as professionally and personally. True, some didn't have children or had much smaller families than their mothers or grandmothers had done. But, speaking generally, children were healthier and happier and better able to access education and instruction.
The sad truth is that equal treatment (or preferential treatment when it comes to pregnancy and child care) of women is good for everybody. There is no way of excluding men from the gains that Feminism has made. Still, some academics back in the Seventies and Eighties made a living by fraudulently cashing the pension checks of dead White nutters like Marx and Freud. Derrida however was a good and decent man who stood up for the right of male professors to force female students to have sex with them. He was, after all, French.
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