Adventures in a Culture of Thought

Genealogies, Narratives, Process

'If a woman counts on making a living with her needle, she will either die of hunger or go into the street', Jules Simon gloomily predicted in his 1860 influential study L'Ouvrière, a publication that presented and indeed constructed women's labour as the nineteenth-century social problem par excellence (1860, 193). Although differently configured, women's work is still a problem, while the seamstress is a central figure in the assemblage of antagonistic power relations, discourses and material practices that have been interwoven around this problem during the last two centuries. It is thus genealogical analytics in the study of the seamstress that I chart in this chapter. But how is the genealogical approach to be understood?

Questions of truth are at the heart of Foucauldian analytics, which have been motivated by the Nietzschean insight that truth cannot be separated from the procedures of its production. Consequently, genealogy is concerned with the processes, procedures and apparatuses, whereby truth and knowledge are produced, in the discursive regimes of modernity. Drawing on the Enlightenment suggestion of 'emancipation from self-imposed immaturity' (Rajchman 1985, 56), the Foucauldian genealogy writes the history of the present: it problematizes the multiple, complex and non-linear configurations of the sociopolitical and cultural formations of modernity. What are the conditions of the possibility for needlework to emerge as the feminine labour problem par excellence, how has the seamstress been marginalized in the social and political movements in modernity and why is women's work still a riddle even among feminist theorizations and debates?

In addressing the historicity of such present questions and problems, genealogy conceives subjectivities and social relations as an effect of the interweaving of discourses and practices, which it sets out to trace and explore. As Foucault has clearly put it, 'I set out from a problem expressed in the terms current today and I try to work out its genealogy. Genealogy means that I begin my analysis from a question posed in the present' (1988a, 262). But instead of seeing history as a continuous development of an ideal schema, genealogy is orientated to discontinuities. Throughout the genealogical exploration there are frequent disruptions, uneven and haphazard processes of dispersion, that call into question the supposed linear evolution of history. In this context of reversal, our present is not theorized as the result of a meaningful development, but rather as an event, a random result of the interweaving of relations of power and domination. Genealogy as a method of analysis searches in the maze of dispersed events to trace discontinuities, recurrences and play where traditional historiography sees continuous development, progress and seriousness. Women's work in the garment industry is a paradigmatic case of uneven historical developments and its study seriously deviates from the canon of analysing the industrial formations in modernity. As Coffin has aptly pointed out, 'In many instances, concerns to preserve gender hierarchies trumped economic rationality, technological efficiency or political self interest' in the economic histories of the garment industry (1996, 6).

In this light, Foucault's take on genealogy as 'eventalization' is particularly pertinent, not only to the study of needlework, but also to the relations between labour and political activism, which is at the heart of this study. Eventalization is a different approach to the ways in which traditional historians have dealt with the notion of the event. It begins with the interrogation of certain evidences in our culture about how things should be: 'making visible a singularity at places where there is a temptation to invoke a historical constant, an immediate anthropological trait, or an obviousness which imposes itself uniformly on all' (Foucault 1991, 76). This breach of self-evidences also requires a rethinking of the various power relations that at a certain historical moment decisively influenced the way things were socially and historically established. As Foucault notes, this rethinking reveals 'a sort of multiplication or pluralisation of causes' (ibid.). This means that the genealogist does not regard singularity as simply an isolated piece of data to be added to his/her documents. The event under scrutiny is to be analysed within the matrix of discursive and material practices that have given rise to its existence, but also in the light of its effects in the historical course and the historical imagination.

Take for example 'the ephemeral newspapers' that the seamstresses edited and published between 1830 and 1850 that I will further discuss in Chapters 3 and 5. If considered simply as short-lived publication events, they are stripped of their forceful and unprecedented intervention in the political histories of nineteenth-century France, as well as the history of feminism overall. 'Feminism failed in France [because] it came early [and] burned itself out', historian Theodore Zeldin has argued (cited in Moses 1984, 230). Feminist historians have successfully refuted such evaluations: 'It is now clear that feminism which indeed came early in France, was frustrated at the start and that its progress was slowed — not because it "burned itself out" but because repressive governments repeatedly burned feminism', Claire Moses has responded (1984, 230). But what does 'coming early' mean? It certainly presupposes a linear process where things happen when their conditions are mature — a Hegelian and Marxist understanding of the historical process par excellence.

But the event within the genealogical approach is not just something that happens. Rather it is something that makes new things happen, disturbing the order of what we do, the certainty of how we perceive the world and ourselves. Philosophers of the event have seen it as a glimpse into the unreachable, the yet to come (Nietzsche 1990), a transgression of the limitations of the possible (Foucault 1963), a flash in the greyness of the virtual worlds that surround us (Deleuze 2001). As Gilles Deleuze has poetically put it, 'The event is not what occurs (an accident), it is rather inside what occurs, the purely expressed. It signals and awaits us. ... It is what must be understood, willed and represented in that which occurs' (2001,170). Departing from good sense, the event sticks out from the ordinary, marks historical discontinuities and opens up the future to a series of differentiations. But how are such ruptures and differentiations to be...