"from the very origin of private property and the patriarchal family, social exploitation occurred [. . .] [A]ll the social regimes of "History" are based upon the exploitation of one "class" of producers, namely women" (173).It is important to note that these regimes are not "accompanied" by the exploitation of women, but in fact are "based" on this essential element. She further argues that these two forms of oppression, i.e. the subjugation of women and the subjugation of labor, function on entirely on different levels, by suggesting that despite the passage from capitalism to a superior economic system, "women/commodities would remain, as simple "objects" of transaction among men"(190). She utilizes Marx's language and analysis, but applies it to something that she insists is essential different in nature.
Marx's analysis, like Irigaray's, is an attempt to reduce to language and humanly understandable concepts a reality that any one individual can only experience in the most partial of ways. Marx's conceptualization of the capitalist system is limited by the role and moment in which he participates in it, and by the motivations that lead him to analyze it. Just as the concept in science that the mere observation of a process is enough to alter that process in some way, and therefore raising questions into the validity of that observation, a description of the specific processes of the capitalist system written during the industrial revolution and in the context of social tension is likely to be open to questions as to the "scientific objectivity" of its analysis. But then, scientific objectivity is not the usual criteria for systematic world models, rather, their utility. This is precisely where I begin to have problems with the Irigaray piece. Its agenda is made clear from the beginning, and makes no effort to explain itself, which is probably how it should be. But inherent in this agenda are assumptions about other disciplines and discourses which become necessary for its argument:
"Are men all equally desirable? Do women have no tendency toward polygamy? The good anthropologist does not raise such questions (171).Apparently anthropologists are unable to escape the "sociocultural" horizon that perceives women as commodities, despite what one assumes has been their best effort and the large number of women in the field. (As proof of this, some anthropologists, failing to see the obvious, have argued that polygamy is related to land-tenure, and in particular, to the relative amount of land available to a community. There are some ethnic communities in the mountains of China were a single women will marry an entire set of brothers, since the pressure to maintain a family is so difficult given the harsh environmental conditions. This situation is probably no more pleasant for the woman than being only one of a group of wives of a single man, but then, it is probably not so great for the husbands either. Nevertheless, the point is that the social patterns for that community are adaptations to the biological and physical environment for the maintenance of the community as an organic whole, and not the application of a "phallic" economy.) Irigaray wants us to accept, despite what other researchers and fields have said, that the subjugation of women is the defining element of culture as we know it, stretching from the very cradle of civilization and outliving even capitalism itself.
But what do we do with a model like this? Irigaray would have us accept that the existing culture is the absolute (re)production of men, the very mirror of their desire and mentality. She would have us believe that men have no other nature, and are incapable of seeing the world in any other way, other than by becoming themselves the object of subjugation. She would also have us believe that women, by being limited to the identity that men have imposed upon them, have never seen themselves as they truly are, or ever exercised any sort of power--which also seems to run counter to a significant amount of anthropological work. She seems to say that whatever gains or achievements that have been made by women in the past, even when done in the name of women, are relatively lessened in value given the underlying cultural framework that enslaves women from the very beginning. In other words, Irigaray gives us a world model that pits the genders into perpetual conflict from which they can never escape. But this perpetual conflict was inherent in the very choice of Marx as her model. The Marxist model is one that at the moral level condemns the capitalist, and sees his elimination as a good for the rest of society, a good for the larger human community. Marxian analysis does not allow for the mutually advantageous co-existence of labor and capital (not to the best of my knowledge). What future is there for us, either as men or women, in the analysis of Irigaray? Are we to be eliminated, or just live in separate communities? And how will we maintain the species? Will we even bother? The human community seems to be an impossibility in her world view--the elimination of her "classes" involves at its most basic of levels, the destruction of civilization.
She finishes her article by suggesting that women, once freed from the masculine world view that has enslaved them, will socialize "the relation to nature, matter, the body, language and desire" (191) in a way totally different from that which has been seen since the very creation of civilization. This rather idyllic image of a world expunged of the damnable masculine influence seems to be less a rejection of woman's place in the world today than a total rejection of biological realities.
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