Men in shiny top-hats marched ominously up and down the paths. At the sight of them he shuddered closer to the chair. He gladly accepted the protection of the chain. Thus before many of these walks were over a new conception had entered his brain. Setting one thing beside another, he had arrived at a conclusion. Where there are flower-beds there are asphalt paths; where there are flower-beds and asphalt paths and men in shiny top-hats, dogs must be led on chains.
Flush, Virginia WoolfThis a lesser work. By that I mean, there are greater works and there are lesser works, and this is not a greater work. Lesser works are identifiable according to their being directed at, even dependent upon, greater works. They are a sort of traffic that flows towards greater works - having no intrinsic or autonomous significance, they draw energy from the work they refer to. Of course, 'greater' and 'lesser' are always contextual evaluations. In the end, every work is futile - lesser works are relatively more futile than greater works, whilst the futility of greater works is located in sheer and absolute terms. Perhaps, the greatness of greater works lies in their being turned towards their own 'absolute' futility.
A lesser work is distinct from an unimportant work, which may be autonomous from greater works but also isolated and unread. A greater work is only great as long as lesser works are drawn towards it. The work of lesser works consists of a living engagement with the greatness of greater works. Academic works are the quintessence of the lesser work.
This is not an academic work but it is still a lesser work. It is drawn towards a work that is greater. The greater work that it is drawn to is Professions for Women by Virginia Woolf. The greatness of Woolf's work is located in the foundational organisation of its categories (its categories appear, as Woolf says, 'for the first time in history'.) Greater works tend to be the foundational works of their discursive life-worlds. It is more likely that a greater work will appear during the formation of a life-world than later on. There are few late greater works and as a rule, the later the work the lesser its significance to the life-world.
The founding elements of a great work are located in the basic formulation of its categories which in later years, being the source of lesser works, become inscrutable, and endlessly renewable. It is this broad formulation, free of subsequent development and controversies of interpretation, that draws out further responses. Lesser works tend to be more sophisticated than greater works (I also refer here to Flush, one of Woolf's lesser works which proves the rule). However, the task of reading 'the relevant literature' seems burdensome and distracting. It is always preferable to go back to the greater work and develop a new line of research, than to counter-respond to the vast literature of lesser order responses that has already accumulated.
In the text, Professions for Women, Woolf addresses the problematic of irrational cultural fetters on production. It was originally written as a speech to 'The Women's Service League', a non-specialist audience of women careerists. As is conventional with foundational documents, the text is very generalised, and studded with the sort of striking images that are necessary for cutting pathways through unfamiliar ideological territory. These stark, chiaroscuro-like, metaphors (a property of their being generated within a foundational text) are inexhaustible, and draw out a ceaseless traffic of lesser works in response.
The text is liberationist in the sense that it identifies a relation between subjective possibilities and world forces. This liberationist tendency is assumed by Woolf and openly stated, although its 'end' as she also admits is not a given:
And indeed, if I have laid stress upon these professional experiences of mine, it is because I believe that they are, though in different forms, yours also. Even when the path is nominally open — when there is nothing to prevent a woman from being a doctor, a lawyer, a civil servant — there are many phantoms and obstacles, as I believe, looming in her way. To discuss and define them is I think of great value and importance; for thus only can the labour be shared, the difficulties be solved. But besides this, it is necessary also to discuss the ends and the aims for which we are fighting, for which we are doing battle with these formidable obstacles.There is a path and there are obstacles on the path - this is after all the promise of becoming according to liberationist ideology. Through your actions, you may access world forces and in so doing, you may realise yourself more completely in the world - you may deflect objectivity to your advantage. This is obvious, but the obviousness is structurally conventional and internalised - and it is this structuring that is the second order topic of Woolf's discourse. How does liberationist discourse work? Or, more to the point, what structures does liberationism depend on?
We can easily make out the conventions of liberationism simply by substituting some hypothetical extremist, say a swivel-eyed nihilist communist, in Woolf's place as speaker. What could such a speaker say at a meeting of 'The Women's Service League?' The answer is surely, nothing. Evidently, there is no point of contact, no common ground between that group of people and nihilist communism. From 'non-connection' and 'nothing to say', we can infer from this sort of hypothetical incongruity that because she has something to say and she is allowed to say it, there must exist a structural reciprocation between Woolf's message and prevailing forces as represented by the comportment and receptivity of her audience.
The structural possibility of Woolf speaking before those people, as she implies, is only slightly more tenable than that of a nihilist communist giving careers advice. Her comment that a 'novelist’s chief desire is to be as unconscious as possible,' and that her ideal state is a 'trance' must have perplexed the careerists in the room. In effect, she is blithely announcing that writing is a sickness, an outcome of malaise. For the writer, there is only ambivalence towards the virtues of being-for-work (characterised by the noble professions) as writing involves making a profession out of traits that are fundamentally anti-profession. There are no virtues in writing.
She then invokes the external, economic constraints that play upon her writing, preventing its autonomy (like a Luis Buñuel character, she is perpetually interrupted from the full immersion she craves). The main argument of the speech concerns the nature of the hard limit to the imagination. She presents this in terms of her internalised awareness of a repressive taboo-like mechanism by which 'men' always inhibit her from going further. The imagination 'dashes' itself against something hard, and she perceives this as men's severe disapproval of women's autonomy.
The hard limit to Woolf's imaginative possibilities is the 'Real', the traumatising encounter with which she is obliged to represent as 'men' if she is to maintain her contact with the shared symbolic order of 'The Women's Service League'. If Woolf had identified 'work' instead of 'men' as indicating the hard limit to a fully realised existence she would have severed herself from the meeting's ideology of common cause. If she had uttered 'work' at that moment, she would have found herself, like the nihilist communist, with nothing further to say.
In actuality, there is no authentic point of contact between Woolf's lethargically fishing in the lake of imagination and her audience's ideology of liberation by work - they are categorically distinct and exclusive modes of existence. The only link between Woolf the novelist and the careerists of her audience is sustained at the level of the theme of a shared struggle of 'becoming' as this is discursively framed in the context of the repressive gaze of patriarchy. Work is a trap by which the project of liberation is activated - the more one liberates oneself, the more one is integrated into the work system.
Then, we must look at the historical circumstances of this extraordinary meeting, and in the most general terms situate its occurrence within social process. The women in that room did not simply invent their common cause, the conclusions they arrived at as to forces holding them back were not illusory. In their personal lives they would have encountered disapproval and restriction as an everyday occurrence. But this is still not the hard limit of the Real which Woolf metaphorically invokes. Simone Weil makes a distinction between 'suffering' and 'affliction' which seems to apply here. The restrictions to women's economic parity are set within the symbolic order, and as a question of culture, parity appears in terms of adapting to commodified existence (the realist discourse of suffering is symbolic and cultural... it produces the order of grievances which may be addressed at the level of reforms). Certainly, Woolf could not have imagined that in the space of 80 years, the project of liberation would have advanced to the point that women cannot choose against work.
The economic forces which generated the historical possibility of women's emancipation from male domination are not referred to by Woolf and may have passed unrecognised by her and her contemporaries. However, even if they were understood at the time as 'natural', the liberation of forces of production from 'irrational' cultural fetters and the resultant upward spiral of rationalising pressures in mass society were the precondition of 'The Women's Service League', and of women joining the workforce in general during the middle decades of the 20th Century.
By the early 1930's capitalism had reached a natural limit in its continued expansion, this appeared as 'The Great Depression' which was experienced by millions as a crisis in the cost of the reproduction of themselves as the world's workforce. Wage costs had increased in proportion to productivity to the point that the profit system could no longer expand the process of proletarianisation but began expelling workers instead.
The survival of the economic system depends upon the expansion of the workforce and, as its corollary, the increase in general productivity. However, certain, then prevalent, but also economically untenable, cultural norms inhibited any new cycle of expansion - specifically, the persistence of the ideology of 'separate spheres' where the home (the domain of women) was maintained independently of the 'sphere' of work.
The 'separate spheres' ideology had developed in the mid 19th century as a cultural response to the trauma of early industrialisation. The cultural function of 'separate spheres' was to compensate for, and make sense of, the displacement of the location of production from the home to the factory. It also stabilised the consequent further division of labour along gender lines, and thus facilitated the ongoing social reproduction of the male worker. 'Separate spheres' became a complex set of relations, a life-world, which itself recursively adapted to productive relations. The role of women in the separate spheres ideology was idealised and fetishised as 'The angel in the house'. This ideal not only falsified the actual role of women but through its normalisation became a tool of domination.
However, a fatal blow was struck against this arrangement by the Great War, in which the first of two episodes of 'total war' began the process of rationalising the separate spheres life-world. Total war both amplified the contradictions inherent in social production and speeded up the necessity of formulating system fixes in response. World War is the historical term for successfully integrating war aims with social production, it is where competing reserves of national capital achieve an exponential expansion of the workforce through the inclusion of women in the economic sphere. Both world wars were eventually won by the forces with greater productive capacity - and in both, this capacity is attributable to the mobilisation of women.
Although total war successfully burst the constraints of the separate spheres' life-world and the division of labour upon which it depended, the logic of capitalist expansion would have weakened and overcome it anyway. By its nature, the capitalist productive relation undermines immanent cultural forms as modes of social organisation and replaces them with ideological representations (dependent on remote/abstract principles of structuring). The contradictions inherent to capitalist production create conditions of social dislocation and turbulence, and these in turn generate ideologies of adaptation.
The imperatives of capitalist expansion are always contradictory and pull in opposite directions. The necessity of expanding the labour force (as source of surplus value) is set against the requirement of decreasing wage costs relative to expanded productivity; and the imperative of replacing the cost of living labour by machinery is set in antagonistic relation to the necessity of increasing the rate of surplus value extraction (as this is dependent upon expanding the workforce). The expansion of capitalist production must realise at the same time both an increase in the proportion of surplus labour time (its source of profit) and reduce the proportion of necessary labour time (the cost of wages). It must both expand the labour market and also expel living labour from production.
Where an environment is operating according to two fundamental and contradictory principles, the dependent life-forms must adapt at another level, and resolve the contradiction subjectively. This subjective adjustment to, and compensation for, an alienating environment which both incorporates and expels the dependents it reproduces, is the very definition of ideological mystification (for my purposes, I define ideology as the subjective deployment of, and self-identification with, fragments of objectively given abstract categories).
It is little wonder that under hostile conditions which are at the same time 'liberatory' (and reproductive of a vast array of adaptive subject formations) and addictive (dependence inducing) that domesticated life-forms should identify with, and come down on the side of, either the 'conservation' of the energies of social process or the potentialities of production. The impulse to locate the security of existence either with the principle of keeping things as they appear to be, or with gambling on the forces of transformation, is at the least a comprehensible survival strategy.
Both strategies (of identifying either with ideologies of conservation or transformation) rely for their plausibility upon locating 'objective' tendencies within the production of society. The traditional conservative seeks to maintain already existing relations as these are enforced by institutionalised cultural adaptations to productive process. Alternatively, the progressive sees potential for new 'liberated' cultural adaptations in the overcoming of reactionary cultures by the inexorable amassing of productive forces and the rational application of technological developments generated by the productive process.
The progressive identifies with history whilst the conservative identifies with tradition. These contradictory positions are resolved in the ideology of total war: liberation is unified with conservation, and tradition is unified with innovation. The ideological function of patriotism in the Twentieth Century total war was to sell the exigency of transformation to conservatives and the necessity of reactionary measures to progressives. The idea of the just war which all ideological positions could attach to (war as a simultaneous means of progressively overcoming 'enemy' reactionary forces, and defence of abstract traditional core values) was the first adaptive innovation generated within the concept of total war out of which all others proceeded.
Beneath the specific form of patriotism of 20th Century total war (where socialist and conservative battled together in the interest of pseudo-national capitals already freeing themselves from the gold standard) lay the abstracting mechanism of ideological representation - patriotism apparently becomes more motivating of vast social forces and yet at the same time less definable (or rather, becomes an object owned from multiple positions). Bizarrely, mystifyingly, all political ideologies could find a just reason for their involvement in, and for the raised level of their commitment to, war. That is to say all political positions, even anarchists, could find themselves at war, in war and with war.
All strands of politics suddenly suspended their awareness of the fundamental irrationality of patriotic war. They each found a place where they could radically diminish the significance of the lateral (subjective) differences between themselves by identifying with the vertical (objective) goals of war. They discovered between themselves a common cause. They located in total war, both the abstract unity of all political positions and their shared origin in the life-world maintained by the productive process. All political positions came to resemble each other in war (they were suddenly abstractly equivalent and interchangeable). They recognised themselves in each other. Political consciousness, from every position came to see itself, as a representation supported by, and belonging to, the world which produced it.
The radical development within consciousness, wherein it discloses to itself its representational form, also elevates it from a purely 'positional' structure or vehicle of its own values to a post-for-itself form that voluntarily links into, and identifies with, processive forces. Combatants had always invoked God or an equivalent to indicate approval (or at least tolerance) by favouring their cause. However, consciousness as a component of total war historically distinguishes itself from the form which besought the favours and blessings of fortuna at the level of its access to hidden forces. Where abstractions are generated out of immense productive forces, and the forces are directed beyond simple production to the ends of capital capture/destruction, consciousness fractures into multiple mouthpieces for the abstractions which energise them, and which they attempt to speak.
Like patriotism, the discursive life-world of women's liberation is generated as an ideology of adaptation to the forces which set it in motion. Ideology is intrinsic to social reproduction but it is not dependent on the victory of any specific ideology. It will either enable the defence of the nation state form or it will abolish all nations; it will either overthrow patriarchy or retain it. Most likely it will simultaneously allow all ideological positions and permit them to flourish in different locations wherever this contributes to the liberation of productive process from more restrictive cultural alternatives. History abolishes all culture but also induces a proliferation of infinite variations in ideology.
It was against the cultural/ideological formation of 'separate spheres' and the gender imbalance in economic status that the ideology of women's liberation defined itself. But in identifying male privilege as its problematic and gender parity as its goal, it remained constrained to the political/cultural domain, and thus not engaged with its own ideological equivalence (it was constrained to the level of a cultural formation engaged antagonistically with other cultural formations). Women's liberation was locked into the general emergence of ideologies from total war.
The potential for abstract equivalence between male and female workers as sellers of labour time was actualised by total war. The interchangeability of workers became urgently necessary and this objective urgency is all it took to break through cultural barriers (and instigate the corporate manslaughter of the 'angel in the house'). It is this pre-condition of productive relatedness between all and all, this quality of commodity equivalence, which opened the channels of communication between Woolf and 'The Women's Service League', and which permitted her to have something to say to them - the geothermal pressures of capitalist expansion are the hard limit of the Real which Woolf presents culturally as the male gaze.
However, the commonality between 'the professions' and Woolf as writer is not simply passively realised, the stuff of their shared project (the mutual conditioning of abstract representations and the development of productive forces) is manifested within the women's liberationist domain as liberation, as achievement. Woolf's message is the relatedness, the interchangeability, of writer-speaker and the organisational form of her audience - the worker is not simply put to work, but also produces the world around her.
But Woolf in Professions for Women is still not (yet) an ideological mouthpiece of social forces - there is something in her speech which preserves culture against ideology. She may invoke the transformation of the workforce within production as a liberatory process but she is also a carrier of critical consciousness - one who problematises gains, and finds the loss buried within them. Isn't she at the point of articulating that, whilst the Forces of Production are released, and liberated from cultural constraint, workers are thereby maintained in a state of immiseration at the level of the cost of their bare reproduction? The ideological mouthpiece may exalt in the climactic events in which the old order is swept away but critical consciousness, and Woolf (reclining by the deep waters of imagination) also perceives some of the dangers of such liberation. There is something in her work, and in human existence, which she desires to hold back from commodification.
The discourse of liberation always serves some other purpose than the expressed ideal (implying that it facilitates the movement of hidden pressures), but it also has potential, when reflexively engaged by its more conscious proponents, to disclose, even as the argument is made for the overcoming of cultural constraints, the higher order constraints of 'liberation' itself. All social liberation takes the same form - the overcoming of social repression by the institution of social exploitation. Feminism, as an ideology, occurs historically at the moment where women become interchangeable with men at the workplace. The condition of interchangeability, and thus of abstract equality, may be perceived as a 'gain' but only where the deep context of this equality passes unquestioned.
Restrictive cultures are overthrown but the hard limit of the Real is extended deeper into social relations. The identification of these structural and processive constraints, and the abstract principles upon which they are based (the limit of that which overcomes limits) draws critique beyond culturally based confrontations over 'privilege' and towards the problem of the wage system itself. Woolf takes at least a small step beyond simple liberationism in her reference to the domestication of the creaturely 'body' in society.
The body (as creature) is that weight of existence which is not animated by the tendency of forces towards abstraction (the domain of power where the quantity of this specificity is caused to become worth a quantity of that specificity). The creaturely body is left fundamentally unliberated by the forces of production and remains inert (like Elizabeth Barrett in Wimpole Street), languishing, idling.
The first — killing the Angel in the House — I think I solved. She died. But the second, telling the truth about my own experiences as a body, I do not think I solved. I doubt that any woman has solved it yet. The obstacles against her are still immensely powerful — and yet they are very difficult to define.The matter of the creaturely body (and its experiences), the historical savage, is only discovered in contradiction to the abstraction which enables the interchangeability of labour in production. It is not an 'innate' set of character traits but is remaindered as a personal flight into (as Clastres called it) 'the tribal zone' or as Woolf described it, 'a room of one's own' (Ah, Jean Rhys says, 'a room is a place where you hide from the wolves outside and that's all any room is.').
The creature (or savage) appears in history as a by-product of alienation from the means of social production, and thus becomes the true exterior point of contestation with the forces that do not and cannot include it. The creaturely or savage body that Woolf refers to here is not that of useful activity and concrete labour - it is an unemployable, indigestible, irreducibly recalcitrant condition that always remains outside of the ideology of liberation.
Ideologies represent and articulate the employable fragments, the non-creaturely, un-savage characteristics and traits of existence. That portion of life which may be included within the productive process is also that portion which may be represented by ideology - what is animated by ideology is measurable in exchange. The ideologies of liberation (of nation, of ethnicity, of gender) compete amongst themselves as private interests for market share. Their struggle is either for parity or supremacy within the domain of commodification, within the domain of institutionalised relations as they are.
But the remainder that is creaturely corporeality, wretched and eternally traumatised by historical process, that body which may not be usefully employed in the relations of production, also passes unrepresented by ideology as an unflushable matter. The non-useful but universal vulnerability shared by all individual bodies (shared alike by the privileged of historical relations and the oppressed) has no direct presence in the market place, no traction as an exchange value, no point of difference by which its equivalence might be measured against others. Thus, the distinction made by Weil, between (ideological) suffering and (cosmic) affliction:
To listen to someone is to put oneself in his place while he is speaking. To put oneself in the place of someone whose soul is corroded by affliction, or in near danger of it, is to annihilate oneself. It is more difficult than suicide would be for a happy child. Therefore the afflicted are not listened to. They are like someone whose tongue has been cut out and who occasionally forgets the fact. When they move their lips no ear perceives any sound. And they themselves soon sink into impotence in the use of language, because of the certainty of not being heard. That is why there is no hope for the vagrant as he stands before the magistrate. Even if, through his stammerings, he should utter a cry to pierce the soul, neither the magistrate nor the public will hear it. His cry is mute. And the afflicted are nearly always equally deaf to one another; and each of them, constrained by the general indifference, strives by means of self-delusion or forgetfulness to become deaf to his own self.
Human Personality, WeilThe creature is always approached but never located - the savages of the tribal zone may be wiped from the world but they are never colonised by empire (which only furthers the conditions for other flights in relation to its surplus populations). The vulnerability of the creature is always the same for everyone, it is a constant that cannot be distinguished from its background because of its constancy, because it is the background. It is this savage fragility of the body, this unrepresented and unarticulated portion of existence which Woolf comes to muse upon as she contrasts the professions with writing fiction.
As she demonstrates, the 'Angel of the House' is relatively easily slain, as an ideological entity, it exists as a cultural fetter upon the realisation of productive potential - there is an objective necessity in the world for its slaying. But this other thing (our 'own experiences as a body') cannot be 'solved.' The creature cannot be brought into the productive sphere and exchanged against other grievances, causes and agendas. Its flight from power is not identical with liberation - a savage is someone fleeing civilisation not some distant figure existing prior to history.
The creatures and the savages cannot be included in or represented by the ideology of national liberation because their afflicted state is shared equally amongst (and left out of the discourses of) the people of all nations and all traditions; it cannot be articulated by women's liberation because it is as common to those poor little creatures who grow into the terrible strolling men in top-hats from which the dog, Flush shrinks as it is to the women they oppress.
Woolf invokes the headgear of male privilege as a shorthand for male oppression in general but it is Edward Lear who most clearly articulates the castrating, all-devouring force of top-hatted power and intimates the terrible violence in its institutionalisation of little boys: H was Papa's new Hat; He wore it on his head; Outside it was completely black, But inside it was red. The creature lives in uncomprehending terror of the state. The creature will never learn its ABC.
We are conditioned to interpret 'repression' of the body in a sexual framework, and Woolf does refer to unexpressed 'passions'. However, the 'immensely powerful' obstacles to the expression of, and thus to living as, the creature are not simply cultural. The employed body is enabled by abstract social process to be productive - but what is left behind, and goes unexpressed, is the non-sublimated subjective antagonist of the Real. Woolf approaches this shy creature and contrasts it with the possibilities for employment of the being-for-work and finds it cannot be. The nature of the revolt of the savage against the hard limit of the Real cannot be uttered before the Women's Service League - Woolf discovers, precisely, that 'my own experiences as a body' cannot be included and cannot be told.
In Flush, written concurrently with Professions for Women, Woolf begins to approach base corporeality from the perspective of a dog. Sex has its place in the narrative but this is contained within the wider question of the world as constituted by smells (the royal road to creaturely presence). It seems that it is in Flush where Woolf, comparing the plight of domesticated dogs to domesticated women, that she most successfully approaches that which she otherwise was unable to record: what it is to be a non-useful but real body.
So long as Wilson was in the room she fiddled about with her knife and fork. But directly the door was shut and they were alone, she made a sign. She held up her fork. A whole chicken's wing was impaled upon it. Flush advanced. Miss Barrett nodded. Very gently, very cleverly, without spilling a crumb, Flush removed the wing; swallowed it down and left no trace behind. Half a rice pudding clotted with thick cream went the same way. Nothing could have been neater, more effective than Flush's co-operation. He was lying couched as usual at Miss Barrett's feet, apparently asleep, Miss Barrett was lying rested and restored, apparently having made an excellent dinner, when once more a step that was heavier, more deliberate and firmer than any other, stopped on the stair; solemnly a knock sounded that was no tap of enquiry but a demand for admittance; the door opened and in came the blackest, the most formidable of elderly men - Mr Barrett himself.In this text, the reader is less interested in the possibility of Elizabeth Barrett's sexual preoccupations than in the extraordinary physicality of the paralysis that afflicts her before she is liberated by elopement and marriage (It smelled like slow death in there, malaria... nightmares). Woolf records the relations of domination, and the consequent process of exchanges, surrounding Barrett's eating, but we know nothing of the waste products of that process. If the dog Flush ate so much in her room, did it defecate there as well?
And of Barrett's excretions, nothing is recorded. And yet, in a narrative in which the order of smell predominates, it is strange that this fog, this miasmatic doldrums, of flatulence and unhealthy exhalations, of sighing and purging, of languishing and processing, of the crude tang of the caged air, all of this passes unrecorded. But it is this very quality of the befouled nest that defines the writer's room, her own space. What is writing but writing in and through one's filth? The creaturely body, from which writing emerges, desires only to feel at ease in the territory defined by its own odours: making a friend of horror, making a friend of terror.
