This scandal is everywhere known, everywhere repressed—un secret de tous connu. It is, for example, instructive that the text of Tolstoy upon which the Russian formalists founded their canonical theory of artistic defamiliarization should be a text about work—indeed, contemporary feminism makes the recognition of this labor as housework, women’s work, the oldest form of the division of labor, quite unavoidable:
I was cleaning a room and, meandering about, approached a sofa and couldn’t remember whether or not I had dusted it. Since these movements are habitual and unconscious, I could not remember and felt that it was impossible to remember—so that if I had dusted it and forgot—that is, had acted unconsciously—then it was the same if I had not. If some conscious person had been watching, then the fact could be established. If, however, no one was looking, or was looking on unconsciously, if the whole complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been. (1)
This waste of human life—what Tillie Olsen has called the silences into which such large parts of so many people’s lives, and not merely women’s lives, disappear—is evidently not rectified by the self-consciousness by which the formalists (and perhaps Tolstoy himself) proposed to recuperate it. The whole classical doctrine of aesthetics as play and nonfinalizable finality, as well as the persistent ideological valorization of handcraft production are also desperate attempts to think away the unthinkable reality of alienated labor. The later finally grounds the phenomenon of reification itself, described for instance, by the Tel Quel group as the “effacement of the traces of production on the object”: yet even here the category of “production” remains a still too tolerable and recuperable one, which in a pinch any modernist would be willing to salute. The deeper hold of reification lies in its promise to obliterate from the object world that surrounds us the dizzying and culpabilizing presence of the stored alien labor of other people.
- Marxism and Historicism, Fredric Jameson, 1979; New Literary History
Vol. 11, No. 1, Anniversary Issue: II (Autumn, 1979), pp. 41-73 (33 pages)