Dear Chris
Well, your response expands all my slapdash worries very
interestingly - you articulate for example the reason I loathe being
called a "lone trader" (and therefore my labour being classed as
"productive labour" by the tax department) and my complaints about
the "arts industry". However, the argument against that
commodification in discussions about what art is, is so often to make
an artist sublime in that romantic sense, a sentimental idea that an
artist just "expresses" art, like an olive does olive oil, because
that is in (usually) his "nature". And that seems to be equally
problematic and equally elides the realities of the making of art. I
dislike both ideas, perhaps equally intensely, they both falsify what
I think the activity is.
Not that I'm sure what that other matrix is which might describe the
activity usefully. The extant models all seem unsatisfactory really.
At 2:41 PM +1000 5/4/03, Chris Jones wrote:
>Finally, be careful with placing Marx's silkworm example next to
>childbearing. It could elide into saying childbearing is woman's nature,
>which then elides into Aristotle's Flower Pot theory of
>(Hetero)Sexuality. (I am not saying you are doing this... more be
>careful with the argument.) To say childbearing should be considered
>productive work in Marx's terms elides precisely into this Aristotlian
>argument. Although it has been some time since I have read Irriguay
>there is an underlying assumption that there is an essential natural
>woman to be found in her writing. I also disagree with her strategy of
>jamming the mechanisms, which in the end is ineffective.
I've always had problems with Luce Iriguay's writings, starting from
the fact that I find a lot of her creative meanderings through
"woman's language" unreadable. And of course I am wary of those
essentialist feminist readings, for precisely the reasons you
identify. At the same time I find myself equally conscious of how
things like childbearing and raising are divested of value by a range
of mechanisms, including and especially the upraising of Motherhood
(I am not too keen on Mother's Day) and all the vaseline on the
camera stuff. To say child bearing and raising is unproductive
labour also vexingly fits neatly into the paradigm which divests it
of value (of course this is the case in capitalist society, as you
say, but it is there nonetheless as a problem and I think it is a
blindness embedded in Marx as well). Practically, too, say, in how
home making is not included in GDP or counted as work in a census,
and how that lack of economic valuing - which is of course a false
value since capitalistic society would collapse without the unpaid
work of women - plays into the low status and secondary social
authority of women whose primary work is this. Which is, I believe,
the primary reason for syndromes like post natal depression, but
that's another story.
The silkworm theory does sound to me very much like the Sublime
Artist or Genius, if perhaps more humbly described than is usual in
such things. As Christine Battersby has shown in her excellent study
Gender and Genius, Genius is a concept heavily weighted against
women: so heavily that one is tempted to think it is a strategy
invented to keep women out of art, though that is probably going too
far; it's probably more that the male ego needs something to define
itself as superior to, and women have always been there handily
providing the material.
Best wishes
A
--
Alison Croggon
Editor
Masthead Online
http://au.geocities.com/masthead_2/
Home page
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