| Which are the requirements for the emergence of multiple accounts of the world? To think the income guaranteed through the history of the fights of the women and the feminist theory |
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by Antonella Corsani
Source: http://multitudes.samizdat.net/spip.php?article2798
They spoke about me, but at the same time, they were unaware of me. They striped me chart of the human ones. I was a non-being. Invisible. More invisible than the invisible ones, because they at least hold a capacity that each one fears. Staggered, Tituba did not have more reality but that which these women wanted to concede to him well.
Maryse Condé, I, Staggered witch…
The claim of a dissociated income of employment does not act like factor of convergence of the social movements. Asserted in France by the movement of the unemployed of 1997-98, “an individual guaranteed income making it possible to live in dignity, without any discrimination of age, sex, origin or another type” is, certainly, the first claim of the European of unemployed and precarious Steps. However, it is far from constituting a common horizon of the fights, lowest common denominator for extremely heterogeneous realities of movement, but which express all, each one with its own tools for fight forged in concrete and singular practices, resistance to logics néolibérales of government.
From the critical point of view for the speech on the guaranteed income, I draw here the traces of a course leading me to perceive some limits of them. Income guaranteed like problem. Like object to be questioned. At the same time, while crossing the borders of the disciplines, and in particular in one beyond the political economy and of his criticism, I find within the feminist theory the traces of another course which leads me to affirm the thesis whereby the guaranteed income is a requirement, although, certainly, nonsufficient. Guaranteed income as arms mental with displacement of the binary categories which control us: employment-unemployment, credit-inactive, employable-unusable. But also, income guaranteed like requirement (but not sufficient) so that other accounts of the world, other forms of life can exist.
Bioeconomy with the biorevenu
In an article gone back to 2002, and cosigné with Maurizio Lazzarato, the guaranteed income, conceived like constituting process, was thought starting from the assumption of a displacement of the capital report/ratio/work, towards a capital report/ratio/life. This assumption translated what seems to us exchange in contemporary capitalism: in the middle of capitalist valorization there are all the fields of the human activity devoted to the reproduction of the biological and social life, the production of the bodies (health, biotechnology, genetics, etc) and of the social body (education, research, communication, culture, leisures, etc). The guaranteed income was then defended, in coherence with a certain Marxist tradition in which the category was forged returned guaranteed, like “recognition” of the “work of the life”, like counterpart of a productivity rising from the simple fact of living.
But the history of capitalism is always an économico-institutional history, and the displacement about which we spoke cannot be seized under a strictly economic angle, and not either under the only angle of the exploitation. It is in the fitting between the economy and its institutions, between economy, company and policy that a new relationship between capital and life is preceded.
In the work of Foucault, in particular in the courses at the Collège de France of 1978-1979, we find elements to interpret these fittings in the concept of biopolitic. The possibility of seizing what is the biopolitique one, explains Foucault, imposes as a preliminary a comprehension of what is the mode of government called liberalism. Foucault distinguishes liberalism from the neoliberalism. The neoliberalism, it is not the commercial company, the neoliberal policy has nothing to do with laissez-faire of the first liberalism; the neoliberalism implies on the contrary an intervention permanent and generalized in all the fields of the life. What one can define with Foucault as the American neoliberalism is the extension of the rationality of the market to all the “economic” fields not immediately (the family, birthrate, delinquency, etc). There is in this direction a true change of the liberal design inherited the 18th century, something radically again. In coherence with the definition of the field of the economy given by Robbins, the object of investigation of the economy is “the human rational behaviour”. The institutions néolibérales guarantee, as for them, the techniques of government of the human ones. The interventions do not aim any more the markets (and their imbalances), but directly the population, the life. The subject of the neoliberalism is not any more, as recalled by Valerie Marange, the homo œconomicus which one “let make”, but, I would say, constrained the “creator œconomicus” with virtuosity, creator, contractor of itself, constrained to make conspicuous itself, with being mobile, flexible like the young branch of a tree.
Since the end of the year 1970, when Foucault held his courses, our relationship with the life and the body, taken between the economy and the biopolitique one, did not cease being reinterrogated. Biotechnology and data processing reconfigure the inspecting devices of the “living organisms”, they are in the center of what Foucault invited to biopouvoir. But the intuitions of Foucault on the biopolitique one must be reconsidered in a context where, as Donna Haraway shows it, new technologies confuse the borders between “naturalness and artificial”, between “body and spirit”. The capacity (as to biopouvoir) functions through multiple connections, through relations between prosthetic bodies being done.
In a work published in 2006, entitled Biocapital: the Constitution off Postgenomic Life, Kaushik Sunder Rajan speaks about biocapital, to indicate an emergent mode of coproduction of direction, values and body, by thus seizing the relation capital/life.
Technologies of production of the bodies, technologies of government of the populations, capitalist valorization by the energization of the life in the production of the life, it is thus in a context of permanent changes of (bio) the economy and the biopolitique one that the guaranteed income becomes, under the feather of Christian Marazzi, biorevenu. An income which “recognizes” the productive power of the life in a production process of the man by the man, a kind of model of production who generalizes the reproduction, by erasing the borders between production and reproduction.
feminist Production-reproduction and fights for (bio) returned
For a woman of my culture, there were only three directions towards which to turn itself: towards the church as nun, towards the street like prostitute, or the house like mother. Nowadays, some among us, far from many, let us have a fourth possibility: us to integrate in the world through education and the professional path, to convert us into autonomous people.
Gloria Anzaldua, “Movimiento of rebeldia there tired will culturas that traicionan”
In “Damping of the body machine”, Christian Marazzi seizes, in the fights of the women of the years 1970, the first claim of an income guaranteed like biorevenu, in the form of domestic wages, “recognition” of a work (of reproduction) that the women make within the framework of the “family hearth” without wage counterpart, while contributing to the capitalist accumulation.
In 1972, the work the Capacity of the women and the social subversion of Mariarosa Paved Costa and Selma James, translated in several languages, had provided the theoretical foundations for a Marxist feminism which aimed at an extension of the concept of class and which asserted the “recognition” of the invisible work made by the women. A work which would be at the same time material and immaterial (the work of the affect), which would define also the “condition common” to all the society women. Genevieve Mills, philosophizes and historian which devoted the majority of its works to the question of the women, locates in the claims of “monetary recognition” of the value of the house work of reproduction the character subversive of these feminist analyses: by showing the analogy between production and reproduction, these analyses reveal the exemption from payment of the house work and its functional character with the capitalist accumulation.
However, as Donna Haraway underlines it, in these Marxist feminist approaches, the unit of the women is founded on an epistemology which is based on the ontological structure of work. And it is in this ontological structure of the work (and its analogue that is the activity of the women) which rests the essentialisation. If there is not “nature” of the women which would found their unit by identity, the construction of the unit is thought starting from subject-work.
In 1979, we find the claim of a domestic income in Jamais content! , the newspaper of the autonomous women published in France. The context is already different: that concerns a strategy of emancipation by work or of a strategy of survival (forced monetary), which occurs is a true upheaval of the company, carried by the feminization of the “active” population, or more precisely of wage-earning. In France, between 1968 and 2000, one counts five million women moreover, whereas the male active population remains practically stable. It is thus in this context that the claim of “wages woman against the housework” is articulated with a denunciation of the double day's work, but also with a criticism of the Women's Liberation by work: “that starts to be known that work liberator releases only the appreciation”.
A category, that of work, all the more problematic as the Occidental culture carries in oneself all the ambiguity of the statement: “work it is freedom”. Ambiguity rests on the fact that work (and the access of the women to paid work) are a condition of the emancipation and, at the same time, a factor of control (as a paid work). Thus, in the history of the women, the access to work (heard in its modern meaning, therefore like paid work), namely the conquest of a right to work (thus with an employment), would be what at the same time makes it possible to make sure the means of subsistence, therefore the conquest of an economic independence, and émanciper, within the meaning of the possibility of reaching autonomy. Autonomy and independence with respect to the institution of the family, though at the price of control to the company. It is in this direction, and this direction only, that of the conquest of an autonomy and an independence, which it is then possible to include/understand the positive direction of a statement as ambiguous and disturbing as “work, it is freedom”.
Why the strategies of emancipation by work did erase the claim of domestic wages, of a biorevenu?
The capacity is not in only one place
“By summarizing all the social oppositions in terms of class struggle only, Marx and Engels all the conflicts reduced in the two terms. It is an operation of reduction which made the saving in a whole series of conflicts which could be arranged under the Marxist name of
Monique Wittig, “Homo sum”
To Marx, work, insofar as he is exerted in a given historical situation (capitalism), was returned “other thing” that it by what is carried out the life of the man. And if it defended the idea that the emancipation of the women passes by work, it is that work keeps this double face: factor of alienation, but also factor of emancipation. For the women, as still Genevieve Fraisse underlines it, this tension does not operate inside the sphere of the production, as for the men, but between the two spheres of the production and the reproduction. And in the sphere of the reproduction, which is concerned, it is the freedom of the women. This is why the analogy between production and reproduction, base theoretical of a certain Marxist feminism asserting the “recognition” of invisible work, does not hold, or holds only partly.
If, in the sphere of the production, wage-earning comprises the transfer with the capital of the labour force, of an availability to work, a time life placed at the disposal of the company, in the sphere of the reproduction it only one work not remunerated did not have there, it did not have there only the exploitation: the body of the woman, belonged to him with her husband.
The feminist fights, in Europe of the years 1960 and 1970, were not concerned obtaining domestic wages, it did not act to assert the monetary recognition of a produced richness, but well rather to conquer the conditions of freedom, including through the paid work. It was not a question of asserting the recognition (monetary) housework: it was necessary to leave the house! By killing the “angel of the hearth”, the feminist movements of years 1970 destabilized the institutional compromise tied around Welfare State and which arranged the capitalist company, the State, and the family.
Thus, if it is true that the emancipation of the women by work reinforces the standard of wage-earning and the culture of work, this culture by which our socialization is done by work, she upsets at the same time the order instituted at the XIXe century, order based on the opposition private-public, family-company.
Of these movements of the Western history, a new relationship between production and reproduction are configured. The borders between production and reproduction seem to grow blurred, as if the production became reproduction of the life, or the reproduction of the life became production (capitalist). Can one analyze the reproduction of the life by transferring by analogy the categories worked out to analyze the lawsuit of work in the factory? How to analyze the activity of reproduction in the bioeconomy globalized while moving away sufficient the abstract assumptions, mystifying and universalizing/essentialisantes on sexuée and coloured human “nature” and on the “nature” of its activity?
I will not develop here these questions, I will indicate those which seem to me possible ways to try to approach them:
1 reproduction like model: the reproduction, not less than the production, is historically but also locally given: to precede a single model, a form which would be claimed paradigmatic, to abstract the analysis from the concrete practices, the forms singular and located whereby organize themselves, and the tasks carried out are distributed would still concern the universalizing claim of the speech Western, unable to recognize its irreducible partiality.
2 the work of the care: the “release” of the women of enfermement in the oikos and the change of the relationship between production and reproduction does not mean the going beyond of the division of the labour. On the contrary, it duplicates today division of the labour between women. The work of reproduction, the work of the care, the “concern of the others”, to take again the title of the work coordinated by Patricia Paperman and Sandra Laugier, is a sub-contracted work following the order symbolic system of the hierarchy of the activities. The racial division of work is the form which the division of the labour in the work of reproduction takes sub-contracted. Just like the sexual division of work is not based on the alleged natural difference of the sexes, but well rather constitutes a device (bio) policy of production of the binary order of the masculine and the female one, the racial division of work is immediately political.
3 the factory of the bodies: the bodies, wrote off Donna Haraway in The Biopolitics Postmodern Bodies, are not born, one manufactures them: “natural for custom is made, ace both fiction and fact. Yew organisms are natural objects, it is crucial to remember that organisms are not born; they are made in world-changing technoscientific practices by particular collective actors in particular times and places.” The medical manufacture of the sexués bodies is not, as recalled by Elsa Dorlin, a metaphor. The body, the living organism resulting from technologies of the life and data-processing technologies is a made complex whole of organics and mechanical. And one could wonder about what it occurs of the marxienne category of “work living” at the time of the technoscientific manufacture of the prosthetic bodies.
4 production of the life: the lives do not have all the same value. In the systems biopolitic of production of the life, there exists a hierarchy, and not only of class. The distribution of the funds devoted to the various fields of the medical research is a major indicator of the hierarchy of the lives which count. The precariousness of the lives has a sex, a color, not always a work.
Salarisation and precarisation of the life
Where it there the fear, there is capacity.
Saying of the witches
If the Western feminism of the years 1970 showed that the dominations of kind and sex cross the class, it had itself to face the dispute interns carried by the “coloured women”, by baffled, just like by the lesbians, the transgenres and the transsexuals. It had to make the accounts with the presence of relations of being able which could not be apprehended by the concepts of kind and sexual difference. “Simultaneity of oppressions” (Barbara Smith), crossing/superposition of the relations of being able, “transversality of oppression” (Beatriz Preciado), the category “woman” is also awkward (Monique Wittig) that unstable (Teresa de Lauretis). The feminist theory is then brought to define the figures of feminist subjectivity by a nonexhaustive series of qualifiers returning in the class, the color, the ethnos group, sexuality, etc the list is not never buckled, said Judith Butler.
Under the blows of the feminist political theory and criticism postcoloniale, the unit of the subject of Western humanism émiette. Fragmented subjectivitys which emergent of historical and political processes located are irreducible with the subject-work and any other attempt at totalization. A construction is never total.
As Beatriz Preciado underlines it, the construction of political subjectivity moved traditional categories of the class, work and sexual division of work towards other transverse constellations: the body, sexuality, the race, nationality, the language.
It is by traversing this way, since the claim of the domestic wages until new fragmented subjectivitys acting in the fights here and elsewhere, yesterday and today, that I believed to be able to find some limits of the speech, like métadiscours, on the income guaranteed founded on the subject-work and the principle of “recognition” of a wide and invisible productivity.
However, if work does not found our ontology, we undergo all the monetary constraint of the wages: the present is that of an increasing salarisation on a worldwide scale, a salarisation destroying any form of organization of the activity which resists to him. But a salarisation which proceeds of the same step as the precarisation: extension of wage-earning like mode of production of the dependence, the precarisation like device of government by the fear. What is concerned it is the precarisation of the life. But it is not a question any more of leaving the house, and not either of the factory, it is about réapproprier the life.
Is it possible to build another guaranteed incomes policy, a policy of affinities, “a policy relational” to take again the terms of Avtar Brah, a policy of alliances in discontinuity and built in a partial way around the guaranteed income?
In “Proclamation cyborg”, Donna Haraway saw in the “data processing of the domination” a mode of precarisation generalized of the life and, in a kind of guaranteed income, the place of an alliance minor and yet necessary: “Many more women and men will contend with similar situations, which will make cross-country race-gender and race alliances one resulting off BASIC life support (with gold without jobs) necessary, not just mice.”
The biorevenu like requirement
By arranging the English middle-class feminism of the beginning of the 20th century and feminism postcolonial of the end of the century, I would like to trace here another way to think the income guaranteed like biorevenu, but in this direction: an income for réapproprier life while withdrawing itself collectively from the constraint and the fear.
The bond is given by a room to oneself of Virginia Woolf, work that Gayatri Spivak reads again in the second chapter of its Death book off has Discipline devoted to the constitution of the community.
For Virginia Woolf, the emancipation of the women passes by the writing. It there not at Virginia Woolf “the woman”, but of the women, a forced population, subjugated, to which one gives this name of “woman”. A name which one can have to carry enough: “Women… but aren't you weary until the nausea of this word? I can guarantee that I am it, me to you.”
But why are there no women writers? Such was the question that Virginia Woolf was posed. Its answer was clear: the women never could reach the requirements to be able to write poems, to be able to write works.
“Which are the requirements with the creation of works of art? (…) It is necessary to have five hundred books of revenue and a room with which the door is equipped with a lock if one wants to write a work of fiction or a poetic work.”
An income, but like income ex-handle, ex-nihilo, like prerequisite, “necessary but not sufficient” to be able to write.
“I also think that you can reproach me for having made the too large part with the material things (...) They are terrible facts, but look at them opposite. It is certain - although it has been dishonouring for us like nation - that in consequence of some defect in our community, the poor poet does not have nowadays, and did not have for two hundred years, the least chance of success (...) a child low in England hardly has more hope than did not have any the son of a slave in Athens to arrive to an emancipation which enables him to know this intellectual freedom which is at the origin of the philosopher's stones. It is that even. Intellectual freedom depends on the material things. Poetry depends on intellectual freedom”.
By radically breaking with the romantic image which bound body suffering, misery and spirit of the genius, which is concerned here they are the material conditions of intellectual freedom. What is it of our freedom, and our intellectual freedom in particular, when we are taken by the constraint and the fear? Between the constraint of wage-earning and the fear of the precarisation? Precariousness is the state which Virginia Woolf describes us:
“Before, I earned my living while begging for strange work to the newspapers, by making here a report on an exposure of donkeys, there a report on a marriage; I touched some books, by writing addresses, by making the reading with old women, by manufacturing artificial flowers, by teaching the alphabet with the small children in a kindergarten… I want to speak to you about what these days left in me, of this feeling worse than the poison of the fear and the bitterness which they gave birth to in me. And first of all this work that one makes like a slave while flattering or while dropping by flatteries, sometimes perhaps useless, but which seem necessary because the stakes are far too important so that one risks anything…”
“Before” returns to an event which occurred: the aunt of this woman about which Virginia Woolf speaks to us, and who names Mary Beton, left him while dying a heritage. She learns the news the evening even where has just been adopted the law which gives the right to vote with the women. Of the two news, the first seems much more important to him.
Subjective autonomy or collective representation? The question of a guaranteed income does not go from oneself, but it can be the occasion of a new questioning on the direction which we give to the word democracy in a context of precarisation, new hierarchisations and exclusions, just like on the institutional forms that one gives to the democracy.
And it is perhaps difficult to think the democracy when we are controlled by the fear and that our lives do not have all the same value.
“Really, I thought, slipping the part into my purse and remembering the bitterness of the days spent, what a changes a fixed income can operate in a character! No power of this world can remove me my five hundred books: food, house and clothing, I have them forever. This is why it is not any more question of effort and sorrow, but also of hatred and bitterness. I do not need more to flatter which it is; nobody can nothing any more give me (…) my fear and my bitterness disappeared and I known this major delivery which is freedom to think of the things in themselves.”
Gayatri Spivak will analyze another aspect: but where this revenue was thus constituted from which will profit Mary Beton? Aunt de Mary Beton, which bears the same name, died while falling from horse in Bombay, and if there had not been two wars (the Crimean War and the war of Europe), the possibility of obtaining this revenue would have been very weak. Mary Beton which inherits the richness of his/her aunt, observes Gayatri Spivak, recognizes whereas this revenue comes to him from the imperialism. Gayatri Spivak, referring in a critical way to American transnational feminism, seizes in this “clause” of Virginia Woolf the criticism of any political discourse making of the unit (the class, the “woman”) a data in oneself. There is no unit which would be natural, founded on a common gasoline; the relations of being able cross the class, just like the relations between women of the South and the North of the world, and within the South and of the North of the world. Any policy who wants to be constitutive of the community must always take into account the clause of Virginia Woolf.
I would like to finally develop a last point to which Gayatri Spivak draws our attention: the sister of Shakespeare about which Virginia Woolf speaks to us. The sister of Shakespeare, the died poetess very young and which forever written the least mot.
“But, I have the conviction that this poetess, which written forever a word and which was buried with this crossroads, still saw. She lives in you and me, and of many other women who are not present here this evening, because they are washing the crockery and to lay down their children. But she saw (…) Because here my conviction: if we still live a century approximately - I speak here about the real life and not about these separate lives which we live as individuals - and which we have all five hundred books of revenue and the rooms which are with us alone; _ if we acquire the practice of freedom and the courage to write exactly it that we think… then himself present the occasion for the poétesse dead which be the sister of Shakespeare to take this human form to which it him have so often be necessary give up… I you ensure that it come if we work for it and that work thus, even in the poverty and in the darkness, be thing which be worth the sorrow”.
But the word work, observes Gayatri Spivak, is clearly used here to mean something which does not return to its economic dimension (it by what one reaches the currency), and it invites us to work the word “to work”. In a provisional way, it will call “research on the field with open project” what it makes in the associative structures in the South of the world. We need another word to mean what we do, following of other desires that the need to reach to the average monetarists of survival. We have others go with the company that employment, its hierarchies and its exclusions, its myths of the creator œconomicus.