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)

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”.