Feminism and Critical Theory-- Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Bharathiar University MPhil (English) Study Materials -- PAPER II – APPROACHES TO LITERATURE

Unit V

Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak (Lodge & Wood, pp. 493 -509)

Feminism and Critical Theory

Gayatri  Chakravorty  Spivak

[This is a simplified version of the original]

Dear Scholar, 

In this blogspot, you get another detailed summary of the same essay. but as many students requested a simplified version of the same, I am publishing this summary. This summary will be more useful from the examination point of view. 

Introduction

Gayatri  Chakravorty  Spivak is the translator of Jacques Derrida’s De la Grammatologie (Of Grammatology)  [notes -1].  She introduced deconstructive critical strategies into cultural studies, especially feminism. [notes-2]. Deconstruction underlines the inherent capacity of the language to suggest ‘supplementary’ or excess semantic associations. [notes 3].

Spivak believed that deconstruction alone cannot remove sexist, socio-cultural structures. We have to understand the existing antagonisms between feminist, Marxist and deconstructive readings to realize the issues related to the silenced Third World Women. Spivak’s perspective can be called subaltern. This perspective highlights the fact that the politically underprivileged sections are voiceless in any society. They are written out of historical records. Their achievements are not considered important.

Spivak illustrates that an exclusively textual approach towards understanding non-Western customs is bound to fail. These would duplicate occidental ( x oriental) patterns of understanding.  The subaltern subject has no space to speak. These are some of the points highlighted in the essay, “Feminism and Critical Theory” (In Other Worlds).

At the outset, Spivak summarizes her essay thus:

1   The first section of the essay deals with a talk Spivak gave several years ago.

2    The second section represents a reflection on that earlier work.

3    The third section is an intermediate moment.

4    The fourth is the present moment.

Section 1

[The first section of the essay deals with a talk Spivak gave several years ago.]

Spivak says that she cannot speak of feminism in general. She can only speak about what she does as a woman in literary criticism.  Her own definition of a woman is very simple. That rests on the word ‘man’. Some may say that this is a reactionary (backward looking) position.  But this is the lesson she has learned from deconstruction. No rigorous definition of anything is possible. If one wants, one can go on deconstructing the binary opposition— man/woman— and prove that it is an opposition that displaces itself.

Yet she feels that definitions are necessary in order to keep us going to allow us to take a stand. Her present definition of woman is not based on the ‘putative essence’ (accepted, acknowledged) of woman but in terms of words currently in use. She fixes on the word ‘man’ though she believes that no definition of anything is ever possible.

In many critical theories of the day [Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, Bathes], the text is seen as an area of the discourse of human sciences. In other kinds of discourses [like physics, mathematics, for example] there is an attempt to find out the final truth. However, Literature shows that the truth of a human situation is that it is not possible to find it. In the general field of Humanities there is a search for solutions. But in literary discourse the playing out the problem is the solution.

The Problem of Human Discourse

 The problem is in three shifting ‘concepts’—language, world, consciousness.

              The world we know is organized as a language

              The consciousness with which we operate is structured as a language

              We are operated even by those languages we do not possess.

The category we call the ‘world’ contains the categories of language and consciousness. World itself is created by language and consciousness. When we think about human control over the production of language, the word ‘writing’ is the most suitable figure.

            In ‘writing’ there is the absence of producer and receiver.

Thus ‘text’ is a safe figure. It is a weave of knowing and not-knowing which is what knowing is.

Marx and Freud

Marx is a theorist of the world (history and society). He is read as a text of the forces of labour and production-circulation-distribution.

Freud is a theorist of the self. He is read as a text of consciousness and unconscious.

Spivak is not speaking of Marxist or psychoanalytic criticism as a reductive enterprise which analyses every book in terms of Marxist or a psychoanalytical canon. In her way of thinking the discourse of the literary text is a general configuration of textuality. Here the solution is the unavailability of unified solution to a unified, homogeneous consciousness.  This unavailability is not faced but dodged.  The problem is apparently solved, in terms of unifying concepts like ‘man’ or sex, race or class consciousness.

Marx’s use of use-value, exchange-value and surplus value

Use- value is pertained to a thing as it is directly consumed by an agent.   Exchange-value (money) is not related to direct use, but is assessed in terms of what it can be exchanged for in either labour-power or money.    By making the worker work longer than necessary for subsistence wages or by means of labour-saving machinery, the buyer of the labourer’s work gets more  (in exchange) than the worker needs for his subsistence while he makes the thing. This ‘more worth’ is surplus-value.

Women, use, exchange and surplus.

  Woman in the traditional social situation produces more than she needs for her subsistence.  Thus she is a continual source of production of surpluses for the man who owns her. The contemporary woman, when she seeks financial compensation for housework, seeks to convert use-value into exchange-value. The situation of the domestic workplace is not one of ‘pure exchange’. Here some questions arise:--

What is the use-value of unremunerated woman’s work for husband or family?

Is the willing entry into the wage structure a curse or blessing?

How should women fight the idea, universally accepted by men that wages are the only mark of value-producing work?

What would be the implications of denying women entry into the capitalist economy?

Though these are important questions, they do not broaden Marxist theory from a feminist point of view. For that the idea of externalization or alienation is of more importance. [See notes 4]

Women and alienation

Within the capitalist system, the labour process/ product / worker are commodities. The worker’s relationship to himself and his product are ruptured.

The woman is an agent in any theory of production because she is in possession of a place of production in the womb.

Marx’s dialectics of externalisation-alienation is inadequate to explain the relationship between a woman and her child. This is because a fundamental human relationship to a product and labour is not taken into account. In both 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’. The man retains legal property rights over the product of a woman’s body.

Spivak says that women must engage and correct the theory of production and alienation upon which the Marxist text is based and with which it functions. Much Marxist feminism works on analogy of use-value, exchange-value, and surplus-value relationships.  If there is a rewriting it would be harder to sketch out the rules of economy and social ethics. In fact, deconstruction would question the definitions. In Marx one would find a major transgression where rules for humanity and ethics are based on inadequate evidence. Spivak suggests that if the nature and history of alienation, labour, and the production of property are re-examined in terms of women’s work and childbirth, it can lead us to a reading of Marx beyond Marx.

 Feminist concepts and  Freud

a. Pain/pleasure binary

Freud considered pain as the deferment (postponement, suspension, adjournment, delaying, putting off) of pleasure. [Beyond the Pleasure Principle]. Spivak argues that in the womb, a 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]. 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 submerged in Freud’s texts, one would like to redefine the nature of pain. Pain does not operate in the same way in men and in women. Once again, Deconstruction will make it very hard to devise the rules.

b. Penis Envy & Womb envy

Freud’s best-known determinant of femininity is penis-envy. In an essay in the New Introductory Lectures, Freud argues that the little girl is a little boy before she discovers sex. As Luce Irigaray and others have shown, Freud does not take the womb into account. Woman’s mood, since she carries the womb as well as carried by it, should be corrective.

 Women must highlight womb-envy in the production of a theory of consciousness. [The idea of the womb as a place of production is avoided both in Marx as in Freud].

c. Women and genital stage

In Freud, the genital stage is pre-eminently phallic, not clitoral or vaginal. This particular gap in Freud is significant. Everywhere there is a non-confrontation of the womb as a workshop.

Conclusion of Section  I

Woman cannot ignore these ideas saying that criticism is neuter and practical. Part of the feminist critical enterprise is to see that the great male texts of Marx and Freud do not become adversaries or models from which women take their ideas and revise or reassess.

These texts must be rewritten so that there is new material for the grasping of the production and determination of literature.   If women continue to work in this way, the common currency of the understanding of society will change. This can infiltrate the male academy and redo the terms of our understanding of the context and substance of literature as part of the human enterprise.

Section II

The second section represents a reflection of the First Section.

Spivak says that the dimension of race is missing in her earlier remarks. She would prefer her work to be sensitive to gender, race and class.

The main problem in American feminist criticism is the identification of racism with the racism in America. Therefore any study of Third World remains constituted by the hegemonic First World intellectual practices.

 Spivak’s concern with the production of colonial discourse touches her critique of Freud as well as most Western Feminist challenges to Freud.

 First World response to Spivak’s analysis of ‘the discourse of the clitoris’.

American  lesbian feminists welcomed the discourse of the clitoris.

Spivak sees this position as resulting from giving too much stress on the physiology. Spivak’s attempt to put First World Lesbianism in its place is not because of pride in female heterosexuality. She would like to see the clitoris as a short-hand for women’s excess in all areas of reproduction and practice, an excess which must be brought under control.

Spivak’s attitude to Marxism

Spivak recognizes the antagonism between Marxism and feminism.  Hardcore Marxism at best dismisses and at worst patronizes the importance of woman’s struggle.   Spivak feels that the ‘essential truth’ of Marxism or feminism cannot be separated from their history.

Sexual reproduction and the critique of wage-labour

 If sexual reproduction is seen as the production of a product by a determinate means (conjunction of semination-ovulation) in a determinate fashion then two original Marxist categories would be questioned—use value and surplus value.

 The child is not a commodity. It has no immediate use value. Direct exchange is not possible.  These insights take the critique of wage-labour into unexpected directions.

Wage theory and women’s work

Women’s work has continuously survived within the varieties of capitalism and in other historic and geographical modes of production. 

With psychoanalytic feminism through an invocation of history and politics, Spivak has come to psychoanalysis in colonialism.

From Marxist feminism, through an invocation of the economic text Spivak has come to New Imperialism.

 Spivak says that she is still moved by the reversal-displacement morphology of deconstruction. The deconstructive view keeps her resisting an essentialist freezing of the concepts of gender, race, and class. Deconstruction will not allow the establishment of a hegemonic ‘global theory’ of feminism.

                                    

Section III

The third section is an intermediate moment.

This section of the essay is a re-reading of Margaret Drabble’s novel, The Waterfall. Drabble creates an extreme situation in the novel. The main question here is, ‘Why does love happen?’ Drabble situates her protagonist, Jane, in the utmost privacy, at the moment of birthing, alone by choice. Lucy, her cousin and James, Lucy’s husband are watching over her as she delivers a girl child. Jane looks and smells dreadful. There is blood and sweat on the crumpled sheets and yet love happens as James falls in love with her.  It is possible that Drabble is taking up the challenge of feminine ‘passivity’ as a source of strength.

     There are other views as well. In her monologues Jane analyses the reasons for the love. Drabble considers the problem of making women rivals in terms of the man who possesses them. But some form of female bonding takes place because of the baby. Jane cannot deny the pleasure she gets when she sees James holding the baby in his arms: “The man I loved and the child whom I had given birth”.   

        

     The loose ending of the novel makes it an extreme case. Is this love going to last bringing happiness to Jane and James? At the melodramatic ending of the novel, Lucy understands everything and everything is reduced to a humdrum (dull, boring, unexciting) kind of double life.

Spivak says that the problem is that the entire questioning is going on in a privileged atmosphere. Drabble considers the story of so privileged a woman the most worth telling, a woman whose poems are read on the BBC.  This enclosure is important. It is from there that rules come. First World feminists are always doing it. If they need a morality they will create one, a new virtue. They will invent morality that condones them though by doing so they condemn all that they have been.     

          

Conclusion

Drabble fills the void of the female consciousness with meticulous and helpful articulation. But she does not give any serious presentation of the problems of race and class, and of the marginality of sex.

Drabble presents a micro structural dystopia  (opposite of Utopia). It is a sexual situation in extremes. This seems more and more a part of women’s fiction. Even within those limitations, feminists’ motto cannot be Jane’s ‘I prefer to suffer, I think’.

Section IV

The fourth is the present moment.

Spivak says that essentialism is a trap. The feminist academia that creates the discipline of women’s studies and the students who follow feminism must remember that essentialism is a trap. All the world’s women do not relate to the privileging of essence in the same way.        

Spivak cites an incident that took place in Seoul, South Korea in March 1982.

In a factory owned by Control Data, 237 female workers struck work demanding better wages. Control Data is a Minnesota-based multinational corporation.  Six union leaders were dismissed and imprisoned. The women took two visiting US Vice presidents as hostages demanding the release of the arrested women. The Korean govt. was reluctant. Control Data was willing. The Korean male workers at the factory ended the dispute by beating up the female workers. Many women were injured and two suffered miscarriages.

                      

Spivak gives the narrative’s salient points.

In earlier stages of industrial capitalism, the colonies provided the raw materials so that the colonizing countries could develop their manufacturing industrial base. Indigenous (native, local) production was crippled or destroyed. To minimize circulation time, industrial capitalism needed to establish due process. Hence such civilizing instruments as railways, postal services, and a system of education were established.

The labour movements in the First World and the mechanisms of the welfare state made manufacturing itself be carried out on the soil of the Third World, where labour can make fewer demands, and the governments are mortgaged.  In telecommunications industry where old machinery becomes obsolete at a more rapid pace than it takes to absorb its value in the commodity, this is particularly practical.

The workers in the Seoul factory were women. They are the true army of surplus labour. No one, including their men, will agitate for an adequate wage. In a two-job family, the man saves face if the woman makes less, even for a comparable job.

However, socialized capital kills by remote control. The American managers watched South Korean men decimating the women. The managers denied charges. However active in the production of civilization as a by-product socialized capital has not moved far from the presuppositions of a slave mode of production. In Roman theory, the agricultural slave was instrumentum vocale. One grade above instrumentum semi-vocale (livestock) and two grades above instrumentum mutum (the agricultural implements)

PLATO

Control Data’s radio commercials speak of how its computers open the door to knowledge, at home or in the workplace, for men and women alike. PLATO is the acronym of Control Data’s computer system. PLATO reminds us of the Athenian civilization which thrived on the slave mode of production. The intellectual heights of the civilization were built in the silent depths of the city where the slaves worked unceasingly.

Control Data is praised by bourgeois women as an enlightened corporation that offer social-service leaves. One of the high paid women employee writes thus: - “I commend Control Data for their commitment to employing and promoting women”. Bourgeois feminism is blind to multinational theatre. It can see in Control Data an extender of the Platonic mandate for women in general.

Feminism lives in the master-text as well as in the pores [one of the very small holes in your skin that sweat can pass through; one of the similar small holes in the surface of a plant or a rock] .

Spivak concludes—“I think less easily of ‘changing the world’ than in the past. I teach a small number of the holders of the can(n)on, male or female, feminist or masculist, how to read their own texts, as best as I can”.

Notes 1-Derrida’s book is originally written in French which Spivak translated into English. The translation had the approval of Derrida.

Notes 2—deconstruction emphasizes the fact that binary differences are not ultimate. Binary differences like   ‘good / evil, God / devil, man / woman’ can be deconstructed.  Take the example ‘God/devil’.  We know that God created Satan who was an archangel much liked by God till his rebellion.  Since God created Satan there is an element of God in Satan and vice versa. Deconstruction uses the term ‘trace’ to explain this. Similarly, there is an element of man in woman and vice versa. Thus binary differences are not ultimate.

Notes 3—simply look at the multiple meanings of any word in the dictionary. Which meaning are you going to select. Your selection of one meaning does not rule out the possibility of other meanings. The word ‘cat’ is given here as an example.

cat \'kat\ n, often attrib, [ME, fr. OE catt, prob. fr. LL cattus, catta cat] (bef. 12c)

1 a : a carnivorous mammal (Felis catus) long domesticated as a pet and for catching rats and mice b : any of a family (Felidae) of carnivorous usu. solitary and nocturnal mammals (as the domestic cat, lion, tiger, leopard, jaguar, cougar, wildcat, lynx, and cheetah)

2 : a malicious woman,  3 : a strong tackle used to hoist an anchor to the cathead of a ship, 4 a : catboat b : catamaran,  5 : cat-o'-nine-tails ,  6 : catfish,  7  a player or devotee of jazz , 8. cat vb, cat·ted cat·ting, to search for a sexual mate — often used with around

To bring (an anchor) up to the cathead,   catalog,   catalyst, cat·boat, cat–o'–nine–tails  are other related words/expressions.

Any word we take up from the dictionary will offer you supplementary meanings like the above one.

Deconstruction exploits the capacity of the language to offer semantic supplementary.

Notes 4.  The worker’s alienation from the product of his labour under capitalism is a particular case of alienation. The industrial worker in a modern car factory does not have any relationship with the consumer of his product. There is total alienation between him and his product.

[ this is a simplified version of the same essay published earlier in this blogspot. Please refer to the original for a detailed study]. 

Dr. S. Sreekumar

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