Preliminary Notes on Monique Wittig

As I've mentioned before, I've been learning to read French through the act of translation, and in this, I have discovered that shared epistemic ground simplifies the process of translation. Now, I did say I would read French science fiction to get to grips with the language, but I have unexpectedly remembered that I spent a lot of my late teens and early twenties reading the work of French feminists in English. A little time has passed since then, and I maintain that I can only recollect the content of a theoretical text for a period of five years, so I think the time has come to revisit those works, but this time, I've resolved to read them in the original French. And so, over the weekend, I sat down and translated Monique Wittig's preface to her most famous collection of theoretical works, La Pensee Straight, which is traditionally and officially translated as The Straight Mind, but I choose to translate it as Straight Thought. So, as I did last time, allow me to share an excerpt;

La dialectique nous a fait faux bond. C’est la raison pour laquelle la compréhension de ce que sont le «matérialisme» et la matérialité nous appartient. Je vais citer une liste de quelques noms, les noms de celles sans qui je n’aurais pas eu le pouvoir d’attaquer le monde straight sur un plan conceptuel. Nicole- Claude Mathieu, Christine Delphy, Colette Guillaumin, Paola Tabet, Sande Zeig, par ordre de publication, ont été mes influences politiques les plus fortes pendant la rédaction de ces essais.

Mathieu a été la première à établir les femmes comme entité sociologique et anthropologique dans les sciences sociales, c’est-à-dire à les considérer comme un groupe à part entière et non comme les annexes des hommes. Elle est à l’origine de ce qu’elle a appelé l’anthropologie des sexes. Mais Mathieu est aussi bien philosophe qu’anthropologue dans la tradition française. Son essai sur la conscience est incontournable. En procédant à une analyse de la conscience opprimée - ce qui ne veut pas dire aliénée elle établit le maillon manquant dans l’histoire de la conscience.

Nous devons à Delphy la dénomination de «féminisme matérialiste» et une modification du concept marxiste de classe dont elle a montré l’obsolescence à partir du moment où il ne tient pas compte d’un type de travail qui n’a pas de valeur d’échange, un travail qui représente les deux tiers du travail à l’échelle mondiale selon les chiffres récents des Nations unies.

This is how I translated it;

Dialectics has left us in the lurch. This is why the understanding of "materialism" and materiality is our own. I will cite a list of some names, the names of those without whom I would not have had the power to attack the heterosexual world on conceptual grounds. Nicole-Claude Mathieu, Christine Delphy, Colette Guillaumin, Paola Tabet, Sande Zeig, in order of publication, have been my strongest political influences while writing these essays.

Mathieu has been the first to establish women as an anthropological and sociological entity in the social sciences, that is to say, as a group apart from, and not as an appendage to men. She originated what is now known as the anthropology of the sexes. But Mathieu is also a philosopher of anthropology in the French tradition. Her essay on the consciousness is indispensable. Proceeding from an analysis of oppressed consciousness — one that does not imply an alienated consciousness — she established the missing link in the history of consciousness.

We owe to Delphy the naming of Materialist Feminism and a modification of the Marxist concept of class which she demonstrated as obsolete from the moment it could not account for the type of work with no exchange value, work that represents two thirds of work on a world scale, according to recent statistics from the United Nations.

Needless to say, once again, any mistakes are my own, but I'd like to take a moment to comment on that last paragraph, because since the last time I read this work, as a naive young adult, willing to accept the words of the great feminists of Europe, my reading of Marxism has also grown, and I take issue with the assertion that the Marxist concept of class might be rendered obsolete by the fact that "it could not take into account of the work with no exchange value". My argument against it is two pronged, first, allow me to refer to Lise Vogel, for Wittig is quite obviously speaking to the question of unpaid domestic labour performed by women hailing from both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, though in this extract, Vogel focuses on the latter;

At issue in the domestic-labour debate was the problem of how the commodity labour-power gets produced and reproduced in capitalist societies. Differences arose over the precise meaning and application of Marxist categories in carrying out an analysis of this problem. In particular, discussion centred on the nature of the product of domestic labour, on its theoretical status as productive or unproductive labour, and on its relationship to the wage and to work done for wages.

Many suggested, following Benston, that domestic labour produces use-values – useful articles that satisfy human wants of some sort – for direct consumption within the household. The consumption of these use-values enables family-members to renew themselves and return to work the next day; that is, it contributes to the overall maintenance and renewal of the working class. While various relationships were posited between this process of use-value production and capitalist production as a whole, the linkages remained somewhat vague.

Others claimed, along with Dalla Costa, that domestic labour produces not just use-values but the special commodity known as labour-power. In this way, they seemed to tie women’s unpaid household-labour more tightly to the workings of the capitalist mode of production, a position that many found, at first encounter, very attractive.

A particular position on the product of domestic labour naturally had some bearing, in the domestic-labour debate, on the view taken of the theoretical character of that labour. The notion that domestic labour creates value as well as use-value suggested to some, for example, that it could be categorised in Marxist terms as either productive or unproductive, meaning productive or unproductive of surplus-value for the capitalist class. For those who argued that domestic labour only produces use-values, no obvious Marxist category was at hand. Neither productive nor unproductive, domestic labour had to be something else. Most of the initial energy expended in the domestic-labour debate focused on the question of whether domestic labour is productive or unproductive. Among those who followed the controversy, theoretical underdevelopment combined with a certain moralism and strategic opportunism to create a great deal of confusion. Again and again, the terms productive and unproductive, which Marx used as scientific-economic categories, were invested with moral overtones.

After all, to label women’s work unproductive seemed uncharitable, if not down- right sexist. Furthermore, the argument that unpaid labour in the household is productive suggested that women perform a certain amount of surplus-labour, which is expropriated from them by men for the benefit of capital. In this sense, women could be said to be exploited, sex-contradictions acquire a clear material basis, and housewives occupy the same strategic position in the class-struggle as factory-workers. For those wishing to reconcile commitments to both Marxism and feminism, this implication acted as a powerful magnet. Few participants in the women’s movement or on the Left had the theoretical and political ability to grasp, much less propose, a convincing alternative.

— Lise Vogel, in, A Decade of Debate, from, Marxism and the Oppression of Women (p. 22-23, emphasis mine).

It would appear that Wittig and her contemporaries fell victim to the ascription of moral value to the categories of productive and unproductive labour, with domestic labour lacking "exchange value", a phrase notably absent from Vogel's disquisition on it, but why? Well, quite simply because,

(iv) The simple form of value considered as a whole. A commodity's simple form of value is contained in its value-relation with another commodity of a different kind, i.e. in its exchange relation with the latter. The value of commodity A is qualitatively expressed by the direct exchangeability of commodity B with commodity A. It is quantitatively expressed by the exchangeability of a specific quantity of commodity B with a given quantity of A. In other words, the value of a commodity is independently expressed through its presentation as 'exchange-value'. When, at the beginning of this chapter, we said in the customary manner that a commodity is both a use-value and an exchange-value, this was, strictly speaking, wrong. A commodity is a use-value or object of utility, and a 'value'. It appears as the twofold thing it really is as soon as its value possesses its own particular form of manifestation, which is distinct from its natural form. This form of manifestation is exchange-value, and the commodity never has this form when looked at in isolation, but only when it is in a value-relation or an exchange relation with a second commodity of a different kind. Once we know this, our manner of speaking does no harm; it serves, rather, as an abbreviation.

— Karl Marx, in, Commodities and Money: The Value Form, or Exchange Value, from, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One (trans. Ben Fowkes, p. 152, emphasis mine).

The fact is, Marx does account for value, and criticizes capitalism for its exploitation of labour, the source of value under capitalism, and emphasises that wage labour is the chief source of labour exploitation under capitalism, but not the only one. Exchange value is, strictly speaking, a category introduced into Capital to explicate the two-fold character of the commodity, one that is discarded half way through the first chapter for more precise terms. A serious Marxist theorist would have avoided these errors, but we can give Wittig the benefit of the doubt, for at no point does she claim that she is a Marxist theorist, serious or otherwise, only that she finds the category of class too limiting, and that too in terms of the wisdom she has received from Christine Delphy. As for myself, I would thoroughly immerse myself in the theory I intend to oppose or correct. Make no mistake, I do respect Wittig for her early contribution in bringing disorder to the category of sex, but in light of my more recent studies, I must approach these works from a more critical perspective, lest I find myself mired in the pauper’s broth of eclecticism which is ladled out in the universities [...] under the name of philosophy.

But this is not the end of my problem with that particular paragraph, and the second prong of my contention stems from the practical difficulty capitalism imposes to estimating the value of unpaid household labour under the capitalist mode of production, and the resistance to its inclusion in the calculation of GDP from economists. To begin with, the inclusion of household labour in the calculation of GDP (I'm not sure which school of economics GDP originates from, but rest assured, I will find out + I think GDP exists in terms of bourgeois economics) was only introduced as guideline in the System of National Accounts, published by the United Nations Statistical Commission 1993 (only 32 years ago!) and the calculation of India's GDP does not yet account for it, though experiments in including it are afoot,

The inclusion of unpaid household activities in the framework of national accounts has stirred interest among policymakers and academics for a long time. These activities mainly involve cleaning and cooking, fetching water and ﬁrewood, caring for the children and the elderly, taking care of the domesticated animals, shopping for the family members, and community services that are generally ignored in the measurement of national income. Since the release of the fourth edition of the System of National Accounts (SNA) in 1993, household production has been included in gross domestic product (GDP) calculations. The SNA 1993 suggested building satellite accounts to capture household production activities. The activities which can be “marketed” fall under the ambit of SNA activities and involve the production of goods mainly for the consumption of the household members.

SNA includes these activities, namely the collection and production of agricultural commodities, production and processing of agricultural and mineral products, water, and other processing activities such as weaving, pottery, tailoring, handicrafts, wood works, and so on, as part of the production boundary. Unpaid care work, however, has not been included as part of the production boundary. The recognition and incorporation of unpaid work have also become an integral component of the global development agenda. The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 5—“achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls”—recognises the value of unpaid care and domestic work. Target 5.4 of SDG 5 pursues to “recognize and value unpaid care and domestic work through the provision of policies and the promotion of shared responsibility within the household and family” in low and middle-income countries (UN 2015).

Assessment of the value of unpaid household work in India has been carried out mainly using time use surveys (TUS). However, such surveys are mostly occasional and provide the valuation for a particular year.

— Satyananda Sahoo, Kaustav K. Kumar, and Amit Kumar, in, Valuation of Unpaid Household Activities in India, from, Economic and Political Weekly LIX No. 39 (p. 190).

Now, I haven't had a moment to read the entire paper, but from the preliminary account I have quoted, it is clear that the process of estimating household labour is quite difficult, methodologically fraught, and the authors are unsure how their findings would effect the calculation of GDP in India or of how exactly it would be implemented beyond conducting regular household surveys. This is not an aberration, the inability to quantify certain forms of labour actively contributes to the structures of exploitation that constitute capitalism. Regardless, the attempt to include domestic labour in the GPD calculation of India is reform that I support, for by calculating the degree of exploitation, steps can be taken to remedy it, and failing that, contribute to the rising demand for economic and political revolution on communist terms. And while I understand that Marxism, especially in the inchoate form that Capital apprehends Capitalism in, has its blindspots — Vogel's entire study focuses on precisely this — for Wittig to judge an entire analytic form obsolete on such feeble terms is rather unjustifiable. I also understand that I am nitpicking an otherwise innocuous preface to an important text, but I do believe I am within my rights to do so, because the convergences and divergences of Marxism and Feminism is a subject that is interesting to me and I wish to systemise their intricacies, to some extent, in order to keep them from driving me mad, while knowing full well that the systemisation itself is a form of madness.

But let me look on the bright side, I seem to have improved my reading knowledge of French over the past four months, that counts for something, right?