Accueil
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gillian_Howie
"Theoretically sophisticated feminist theory, associated with cultural materialism, postmodernism, and post-structuralism, was in part a response to the experience of conflict within the women’s movement itself. Feminist theory required revision. We had to recognize that there are multiple locations from which to speak, that there is not one but polyvalent causes of oppression, and we came to acknowledge the universalizing racist tendencies of feminist thought. But now we have feminist theories that recognize the diversity of women but are unable to figure out any community or collective goal-oriented activity. We have feminist theories sensitive to the capillaries of power but unable to answer the question “what systematic changes would be required to create a just society ?” And we have an entire “feminist theory” academic industry but are unable to communicate with the women’s movement, such that it is.
Is (feminist) cultural theory—or postmodernism—a mask for deeper social transformations, and does this explain this theoretical inadequacy ? If there is a rich relationship between the social conditions that give rise to theory and the theory itself, then we might expect to find that theories of difference and identity are born in times of fragmentation and diversification. Such experiences became heightened during the 1970s, and there certainly seems to be an intricate and complicated relationship between, for example, the rise of Thatcherism in the UK and Conservative Modernism in the United States, free market fiscal policy, left disunity, the demise of feminism as a political force, backlash against feminism, the appearance of identity politics, and then the emergence of theory focusing almost exclusively on questions of sexuality, identity, and “the body.”
The fragmentation of the labor market, appropriated and diversified by capital, an aggravated individualism of the 1980s, and a splintered labor movement rather suits utopic—idealist—cognition of differences in terms of philosophies of subjectivities and desires. But to be able to interrogate these social conditions we must return to the feminist canon and prize apart its inclusions, exclusions, and genealogy. In need of a theory with adequate epistemological bite, we should recuperate the rich stream of critical social theory that has been produced throughout these last three decades. Feminism will only move forward, reconnect theory and praxis, if we can find a way to bring together the somatic, living and experiencing body with critical social science. To reveal, to make explicit, to investigate, and to change the ways in which situations are organized, we must synthesize objectivist tendencies in social science with subjectivist tendencies within hermeneutics and phenomenology." (pp.2-3)
"Political beliefs are unintelligible in isolation from claims about the real states of the world." (p.3)
"A (re)turn to realism can be detected within feminism theory. Christine Battersby, for instance, although she would distance herself from this designation, argues that “the urgent problem for feminist theory to address is not the problem of the subject but the problem of the object,” not “the epistemology of the subject but the metaphysics of the object.” Elizabeth Grosz, who would likewise distance herself, says that “the thing” is the point of intersection of space and time, the locus of temporal knowing and spatial localization that constitutes singularity or specificity. If the problem before us is the relationship between “the subject,” however construed, and “the object,” however construed, then I suggest we should regroup around the idea of dialectical materialism." (p.3)
"For a physicalist, the real world is the physical world and so s/he would be opposed to ontologies that include abstract objects held to be distinct from physical processes—be those objects numbers, universals, or mental events. In the philosophy of mind this approach tends to identify mental events with physical events occurring in the brain and perhaps the central nervous system. Eliminativists in the philosophy of mind argue that we should abandon the whole “mind discourse,” including terms such as “consciousness,” “self,” “qualia.” By doing this they believe that we also eliminate philosophical problems associated with dualism. I consider this form of materialism to be reductive, and it is not the form of materialism that will help articulate and make sense of an interested and meaningful social world.
A second form of materialism can be identified with realism. An initial refinement concerns the relationship between materialism and empiricism, and we should not confuse them. The term “empirical” usually denotes the belief that a proposition can be confirmed or denied by immediate sense experience or that immediate sense experience provides the content for beliefs, ideas, and memory. Empiricism attempts to tie knowledge to experience in such a way that anything that cannot be immediately before the senses or inferred from the class of things observed to be true is not considered a legitimate route of enquiry. A materialist, as opposed to an empiricist, need neither believe that there is direct access to the world nor dismiss the existence of consciousness; they are likely, however, to hold that a number of things exist independently from us and that these are not artifacts of the mind, language, or conceptual scheme. As a consequence, according to a realist we can discover facts about these things, and our beliefs will be appropriately tied to state of affairs.
I shall be drawing on and extending Sartre’s notion of synthetic unity to explain how a phenomenologist may also be a realist: we divide the world in the way we do because of matter’s internal relation to the human fleshy organic body—lemons are the color they are due to this primary relation. Starting with this as a primary relation does not mean that we commence with an idea of a “neutral” body. Bodies are not neutral; there is not one body or one type of body. There has been some suggestive work concerning the influence of sex/gender on the conceptualization of matter and on this internal relationship. In this sense, I would say that Judith Butler is right to claim that matter has a history and that the history of matter is in part determined by the negotiation of sexual difference. For Butler, the implication is that matter is fully sedimented with discourses on sex and sexuality that constrain the uses to which the term “matter” can be put. Now, while it is true that a critical approach to the sexless view-from-nowhere, assumed by some scientific hypotheses, opens up avenues of feminist enquiry into the constraints introduced by the contextual values and biases of the scientist, a wholesale rejection of objectivity can degenerate into an unhelpful skepticism whereby every scientific claim is appended by the assertion that sexual difference is the key feature of scientific investigation. This can leave feminists in an awkward position, having to explain how—and in what way—the “hetero-normative matrix” conditions the “yellowness” of a lemon." (pp.4-5)
"Dialectical or historical materialism is the final form of materialism of interest, and it is not in opposition to, but a development of, realism. We can perhaps distil dialectical materialism down to three principles, upon which we shall draw: the principle of mind-independence, the context principle, and the principle of scientific enquiry. Dialectical materialism was first fashioned by Marx and Engels as a response to Hegelian idealism. They reacted to the suggestion that the world is mind, contrasting this with the commonsense realist view that there is something “out there” independent from the individual perceiver. According to Marx the world is shaped by human activity, but he draws a distinction between this and the claim that the world is given shape through human ideas and concepts. Consciousness, ideas, and concepts emerge from the social experience of productive and active engagement with the world. Production itself takes various forms and changes over time and therefore our social experience changes. The precise relationship of mental content and forms of consciousness to productive relations and economic exchange has, of course, been a matter of much worry within the Marxist tradition. [...]
The second aspect of Marx’s materialism relates to his methodology and can be referred to as a “context principle.” Taking from Hegel the idea that each thing needs to be understood in its relationship to other things, Marx performed the infamous inversion of Hegel and argued that the relations between things are not conceptual but social and historical. To grasp what a thing is, therefore, we need to place it in context that is at once social, political, and historical. Any attempt to analyze what a thing is, if abstracted from context, will lead to erroneous and often ideological judgment. Historical materialism is thus a theory of relations such that individual identity can be seen to be a consequence of antecedent social processes.
Finally, the term “materialism” in historical materialism conveys a commitment to a scientific method of enquiry. This brings the two previous points together with the beliefs that there is a mind-independent world, that events in the world can only be understood in context, and that the situation, or standpoint, of the knower might affect knowledge claims. The scientific hypothesis includes within its explanatory framework abstract entities such as “the family,” “the state,” and “culture,” and these are taken to designate something actual. Economic, social, and psychological processes are presumed to be open to scientific examination. Because they are processes, only a method that can accommodate change, nonconformity, and difference has sufficient explanatory potential. The appropriate scientific methodology is dialectical, and the underlying epistemic position is fallibilist." (pp.5-6)
[Chapter 1 : Production]
"There is a paradox at the heart of feminism. Feminism is fundamentally an Enlightenment or modernist project; it concerns the emancipation of morally valuable individual subjects. Yet recent feminist theory rails against the principal tenets of Enlightenment thought: reason, autonomy, identity, universals, science, and—in the end— freedom itself. As a consequence, unable to articulate common grounds of oppression, the rug seems whipped from under our feet— leaving feminism struggling to articulate its relevance and purpose: “a ‘we’ without a ‘we,’ a ‘we’ without (philosophical) community.”." (p.11)
"Although there is no simple resolution to the “Enlightenment paradox,” there is an often neglected perspective available that illuminates not only the content of the problems—such as: “are Enlightenment norms of reason rooted in sex/gender ?”—but also the relationship between the context and content of the theoretical activity. That there is a significant relationship between the activity of philosophical reflection and its content, its content and context, is a matter of contention, but it is at least plausible that social context will impact on the manner and content of reflection. In this and the following chapters I argue that not only is context relevant to the intelligibility of reflective activity but—more trenchantly—that the context of expression is helpfully, if not completely, described in terms political economy." (p.11)
"It is common currency to suggest that within mainstream philosophy the “body” has been bracketed and the thinking-subject presented as though disembodied, and that as a consequence reason, language, and logic have become the main terms of philosophical reflection: the linguistic turn. According to this narrative, our bodies, with sensuous passion and appetites, have been presented as an impediment to the attainment of truth and knowledge. The cultural significance of this has been, certainly in philosophy, the persistent association of women and the feminine with excluded or neglected terms. Rousseau’s social contract still provides the most compelling example of the way political theory can embed these contextual values. His social contract happily demarcates a masculine public from the feminine: the consequence of identifying the feminine with unruly passions and the masculine with reason. No culture, he claims, has perished from wine; all have perished from the disorder of women. Redressing this, and although diverse in its conceptions, feminism begins by taking the body into account. This second step usually involves portraying the body in terms of materiality and corporeality.
The character of embodiment is numerously exemplified. It relies on the notion of a given and biological body and also calls into question the natural body in favor of “a textual corporeality that is fluid in its investments and meanings.” It is the attempt to theorize the encounter of materialism and semiotics on the terrain of psychoanalysis and also the repudiation of psychoanalytic models. Influenced by phenomenology, psychoanalytic theory, and post-structuralism, feminist theorists have come to describe the body in terms of social context and affect, or as a differential and fluid process of construction, or in terms of habitual performance or translate it as desiring—production, lines of flight, and “bodies-without-organs”.
Despite her reputation for devaluing the female body, we find in Beauvoir’s Second Sex an account of the body as sexual, desiring, productive, and imaginative. This is a feeling, sentient, perceptual, intentional, and self-fashioning body. Integral to experience and to cognition, this body is better described in terms of “body-consciousness.”16 To apprehend the body in terms of body-consciousness provides a way to think about perspectives, projects, situations, habits, interests, capacities, and pleasures. To extend this description to include productive activity offers a way to think about the located character of an always projecting and engaged subject: affecting and being-affected in the world. To think body-consciousness means, despite post-humanism or postconventional postmodernism, to begin with subjects.
Let us note this deceptively simple statement found in the introduction to Feminist Theory and the Body: “to say that the body is a discursive construction is not to deny a substantial corpus but to insist that our apprehension of it, our understanding of it, is necessarily mediated by the contexts in which we speak.” The embodied subject is sentient and sensuous, in relationship with the world and with other subjects. We could say that subjects and world constitute a synthetic unity. Once grasped as a synthetic unity, we can consider the process of human action as “a double movement of the internalisation of the external and the externalization of the internal.” Analysis of the contexts of embodiment extends the phenomenological interest in the body by blending it with more social scientific enquiry, and by paying attention to these contexts we take the third step toward grasping the relevance of political economy.
In the Theses on Feuerbach and The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts Marx also presents a picture of human beings as social, productive, sensuous, and engaged with the world. His account of our “species-being” has been thought to be too essentialist, but it merely and minimally commits us to the idea that the human being is productive, affects the world, suffers, and is social: the individual is the social being. Thinking and being, he says, although distinct, are in a unity. Marx reacquaints us with a Hegelian idea that productive activity is not only the basic condition of human existence but also the way that the human being creates himself or herself.21 Here we have a relational ontology that leads to a theory of action. In intentional action, a subjective end (what is intended) is objectified toward an objective, attainable end (the result of the action). [...] From distinct stages in the development of social production, there arises in consciousness the awareness of new needs, and through the same faculty arises the recognition of the possibilities of their satisfaction. Social circumstances make people what they are, but what they are involves a certain form of consciousness and purposive action that leads to social and individual change.
This model of human social and productive activity may appear to some as rather too “humanistic,” but for many it is an uncontroversial working model ; indeed various disciplines embed it, and even anti-humanistic or nonhumanistic philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze incorporate the notion of productive activity. Further though, according to Marx the world is apprehended through linguistic and conceptual schemes, and these are related to ways of “productive world-making” we have inherited. Once we focus on the idea that it is human productive activity, rather than language, that mediates “nature” and “consciousness” and then define productivity as not only social but also economic, we move onto less familiar ground. Recent feminist theory hesitates over taking this last step. By defining productive activity as social and economic, we will be able to grasp and evaluate tensions peculiar to modernity and the context for feminist theory and practice. The key with which to unlock the nature of the current system of productive activity is the labor theory of value." (pp.13-16)
-Gillian Howie, Between Feminism and Materialism. A Question of Method, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, 268 pages.
"Theoretically sophisticated feminist theory, associated with cultural materialism, postmodernism, and post-structuralism, was in part a response to the experience of conflict within the women’s movement itself. Feminist theory required revision. We had to recognize that there are multiple locations from which to speak, that there is not one but polyvalent causes of oppression, and we came to acknowledge the universalizing racist tendencies of feminist thought. But now we have feminist theories that recognize the diversity of women but are unable to figure out any community or collective goal-oriented activity. We have feminist theories sensitive to the capillaries of power but unable to answer the question “what systematic changes would be required to create a just society ?” And we have an entire “feminist theory” academic industry but are unable to communicate with the women’s movement, such that it is.
Is (feminist) cultural theory—or postmodernism—a mask for deeper social transformations, and does this explain this theoretical inadequacy ? If there is a rich relationship between the social conditions that give rise to theory and the theory itself, then we might expect to find that theories of difference and identity are born in times of fragmentation and diversification. Such experiences became heightened during the 1970s, and there certainly seems to be an intricate and complicated relationship between, for example, the rise of Thatcherism in the UK and Conservative Modernism in the United States, free market fiscal policy, left disunity, the demise of feminism as a political force, backlash against feminism, the appearance of identity politics, and then the emergence of theory focusing almost exclusively on questions of sexuality, identity, and “the body.”
The fragmentation of the labor market, appropriated and diversified by capital, an aggravated individualism of the 1980s, and a splintered labor movement rather suits utopic—idealist—cognition of differences in terms of philosophies of subjectivities and desires. But to be able to interrogate these social conditions we must return to the feminist canon and prize apart its inclusions, exclusions, and genealogy. In need of a theory with adequate epistemological bite, we should recuperate the rich stream of critical social theory that has been produced throughout these last three decades. Feminism will only move forward, reconnect theory and praxis, if we can find a way to bring together the somatic, living and experiencing body with critical social science. To reveal, to make explicit, to investigate, and to change the ways in which situations are organized, we must synthesize objectivist tendencies in social science with subjectivist tendencies within hermeneutics and phenomenology." (pp.2-3)
"Political beliefs are unintelligible in isolation from claims about the real states of the world." (p.3)
"A (re)turn to realism can be detected within feminism theory. Christine Battersby, for instance, although she would distance herself from this designation, argues that “the urgent problem for feminist theory to address is not the problem of the subject but the problem of the object,” not “the epistemology of the subject but the metaphysics of the object.” Elizabeth Grosz, who would likewise distance herself, says that “the thing” is the point of intersection of space and time, the locus of temporal knowing and spatial localization that constitutes singularity or specificity. If the problem before us is the relationship between “the subject,” however construed, and “the object,” however construed, then I suggest we should regroup around the idea of dialectical materialism." (p.3)
"For a physicalist, the real world is the physical world and so s/he would be opposed to ontologies that include abstract objects held to be distinct from physical processes—be those objects numbers, universals, or mental events. In the philosophy of mind this approach tends to identify mental events with physical events occurring in the brain and perhaps the central nervous system. Eliminativists in the philosophy of mind argue that we should abandon the whole “mind discourse,” including terms such as “consciousness,” “self,” “qualia.” By doing this they believe that we also eliminate philosophical problems associated with dualism. I consider this form of materialism to be reductive, and it is not the form of materialism that will help articulate and make sense of an interested and meaningful social world.
A second form of materialism can be identified with realism. An initial refinement concerns the relationship between materialism and empiricism, and we should not confuse them. The term “empirical” usually denotes the belief that a proposition can be confirmed or denied by immediate sense experience or that immediate sense experience provides the content for beliefs, ideas, and memory. Empiricism attempts to tie knowledge to experience in such a way that anything that cannot be immediately before the senses or inferred from the class of things observed to be true is not considered a legitimate route of enquiry. A materialist, as opposed to an empiricist, need neither believe that there is direct access to the world nor dismiss the existence of consciousness; they are likely, however, to hold that a number of things exist independently from us and that these are not artifacts of the mind, language, or conceptual scheme. As a consequence, according to a realist we can discover facts about these things, and our beliefs will be appropriately tied to state of affairs.
I shall be drawing on and extending Sartre’s notion of synthetic unity to explain how a phenomenologist may also be a realist: we divide the world in the way we do because of matter’s internal relation to the human fleshy organic body—lemons are the color they are due to this primary relation. Starting with this as a primary relation does not mean that we commence with an idea of a “neutral” body. Bodies are not neutral; there is not one body or one type of body. There has been some suggestive work concerning the influence of sex/gender on the conceptualization of matter and on this internal relationship. In this sense, I would say that Judith Butler is right to claim that matter has a history and that the history of matter is in part determined by the negotiation of sexual difference. For Butler, the implication is that matter is fully sedimented with discourses on sex and sexuality that constrain the uses to which the term “matter” can be put. Now, while it is true that a critical approach to the sexless view-from-nowhere, assumed by some scientific hypotheses, opens up avenues of feminist enquiry into the constraints introduced by the contextual values and biases of the scientist, a wholesale rejection of objectivity can degenerate into an unhelpful skepticism whereby every scientific claim is appended by the assertion that sexual difference is the key feature of scientific investigation. This can leave feminists in an awkward position, having to explain how—and in what way—the “hetero-normative matrix” conditions the “yellowness” of a lemon." (pp.4-5)
"Dialectical or historical materialism is the final form of materialism of interest, and it is not in opposition to, but a development of, realism. We can perhaps distil dialectical materialism down to three principles, upon which we shall draw: the principle of mind-independence, the context principle, and the principle of scientific enquiry. Dialectical materialism was first fashioned by Marx and Engels as a response to Hegelian idealism. They reacted to the suggestion that the world is mind, contrasting this with the commonsense realist view that there is something “out there” independent from the individual perceiver. According to Marx the world is shaped by human activity, but he draws a distinction between this and the claim that the world is given shape through human ideas and concepts. Consciousness, ideas, and concepts emerge from the social experience of productive and active engagement with the world. Production itself takes various forms and changes over time and therefore our social experience changes. The precise relationship of mental content and forms of consciousness to productive relations and economic exchange has, of course, been a matter of much worry within the Marxist tradition. [...]
The second aspect of Marx’s materialism relates to his methodology and can be referred to as a “context principle.” Taking from Hegel the idea that each thing needs to be understood in its relationship to other things, Marx performed the infamous inversion of Hegel and argued that the relations between things are not conceptual but social and historical. To grasp what a thing is, therefore, we need to place it in context that is at once social, political, and historical. Any attempt to analyze what a thing is, if abstracted from context, will lead to erroneous and often ideological judgment. Historical materialism is thus a theory of relations such that individual identity can be seen to be a consequence of antecedent social processes.
Finally, the term “materialism” in historical materialism conveys a commitment to a scientific method of enquiry. This brings the two previous points together with the beliefs that there is a mind-independent world, that events in the world can only be understood in context, and that the situation, or standpoint, of the knower might affect knowledge claims. The scientific hypothesis includes within its explanatory framework abstract entities such as “the family,” “the state,” and “culture,” and these are taken to designate something actual. Economic, social, and psychological processes are presumed to be open to scientific examination. Because they are processes, only a method that can accommodate change, nonconformity, and difference has sufficient explanatory potential. The appropriate scientific methodology is dialectical, and the underlying epistemic position is fallibilist." (pp.5-6)
[Chapter 1 : Production]
"There is a paradox at the heart of feminism. Feminism is fundamentally an Enlightenment or modernist project; it concerns the emancipation of morally valuable individual subjects. Yet recent feminist theory rails against the principal tenets of Enlightenment thought: reason, autonomy, identity, universals, science, and—in the end— freedom itself. As a consequence, unable to articulate common grounds of oppression, the rug seems whipped from under our feet— leaving feminism struggling to articulate its relevance and purpose: “a ‘we’ without a ‘we,’ a ‘we’ without (philosophical) community.”." (p.11)
"Although there is no simple resolution to the “Enlightenment paradox,” there is an often neglected perspective available that illuminates not only the content of the problems—such as: “are Enlightenment norms of reason rooted in sex/gender ?”—but also the relationship between the context and content of the theoretical activity. That there is a significant relationship between the activity of philosophical reflection and its content, its content and context, is a matter of contention, but it is at least plausible that social context will impact on the manner and content of reflection. In this and the following chapters I argue that not only is context relevant to the intelligibility of reflective activity but—more trenchantly—that the context of expression is helpfully, if not completely, described in terms political economy." (p.11)
"It is common currency to suggest that within mainstream philosophy the “body” has been bracketed and the thinking-subject presented as though disembodied, and that as a consequence reason, language, and logic have become the main terms of philosophical reflection: the linguistic turn. According to this narrative, our bodies, with sensuous passion and appetites, have been presented as an impediment to the attainment of truth and knowledge. The cultural significance of this has been, certainly in philosophy, the persistent association of women and the feminine with excluded or neglected terms. Rousseau’s social contract still provides the most compelling example of the way political theory can embed these contextual values. His social contract happily demarcates a masculine public from the feminine: the consequence of identifying the feminine with unruly passions and the masculine with reason. No culture, he claims, has perished from wine; all have perished from the disorder of women. Redressing this, and although diverse in its conceptions, feminism begins by taking the body into account. This second step usually involves portraying the body in terms of materiality and corporeality.
The character of embodiment is numerously exemplified. It relies on the notion of a given and biological body and also calls into question the natural body in favor of “a textual corporeality that is fluid in its investments and meanings.” It is the attempt to theorize the encounter of materialism and semiotics on the terrain of psychoanalysis and also the repudiation of psychoanalytic models. Influenced by phenomenology, psychoanalytic theory, and post-structuralism, feminist theorists have come to describe the body in terms of social context and affect, or as a differential and fluid process of construction, or in terms of habitual performance or translate it as desiring—production, lines of flight, and “bodies-without-organs”.
Despite her reputation for devaluing the female body, we find in Beauvoir’s Second Sex an account of the body as sexual, desiring, productive, and imaginative. This is a feeling, sentient, perceptual, intentional, and self-fashioning body. Integral to experience and to cognition, this body is better described in terms of “body-consciousness.”16 To apprehend the body in terms of body-consciousness provides a way to think about perspectives, projects, situations, habits, interests, capacities, and pleasures. To extend this description to include productive activity offers a way to think about the located character of an always projecting and engaged subject: affecting and being-affected in the world. To think body-consciousness means, despite post-humanism or postconventional postmodernism, to begin with subjects.
Let us note this deceptively simple statement found in the introduction to Feminist Theory and the Body: “to say that the body is a discursive construction is not to deny a substantial corpus but to insist that our apprehension of it, our understanding of it, is necessarily mediated by the contexts in which we speak.” The embodied subject is sentient and sensuous, in relationship with the world and with other subjects. We could say that subjects and world constitute a synthetic unity. Once grasped as a synthetic unity, we can consider the process of human action as “a double movement of the internalisation of the external and the externalization of the internal.” Analysis of the contexts of embodiment extends the phenomenological interest in the body by blending it with more social scientific enquiry, and by paying attention to these contexts we take the third step toward grasping the relevance of political economy.
In the Theses on Feuerbach and The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts Marx also presents a picture of human beings as social, productive, sensuous, and engaged with the world. His account of our “species-being” has been thought to be too essentialist, but it merely and minimally commits us to the idea that the human being is productive, affects the world, suffers, and is social: the individual is the social being. Thinking and being, he says, although distinct, are in a unity. Marx reacquaints us with a Hegelian idea that productive activity is not only the basic condition of human existence but also the way that the human being creates himself or herself.21 Here we have a relational ontology that leads to a theory of action. In intentional action, a subjective end (what is intended) is objectified toward an objective, attainable end (the result of the action). [...] From distinct stages in the development of social production, there arises in consciousness the awareness of new needs, and through the same faculty arises the recognition of the possibilities of their satisfaction. Social circumstances make people what they are, but what they are involves a certain form of consciousness and purposive action that leads to social and individual change.
This model of human social and productive activity may appear to some as rather too “humanistic,” but for many it is an uncontroversial working model ; indeed various disciplines embed it, and even anti-humanistic or nonhumanistic philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze incorporate the notion of productive activity. Further though, according to Marx the world is apprehended through linguistic and conceptual schemes, and these are related to ways of “productive world-making” we have inherited. Once we focus on the idea that it is human productive activity, rather than language, that mediates “nature” and “consciousness” and then define productivity as not only social but also economic, we move onto less familiar ground. Recent feminist theory hesitates over taking this last step. By defining productive activity as social and economic, we will be able to grasp and evaluate tensions peculiar to modernity and the context for feminist theory and practice. The key with which to unlock the nature of the current system of productive activity is the labor theory of value." (pp.13-16)
-Gillian Howie, Between Feminism and Materialism. A Question of Method, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, 268 pages.
