Sewing, Fighting and Writing
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Sewing, Fighting and Writing

Radical Practices in Work, Politics and Culture

Maria Tamboukou

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Sewing, Fighting and Writing

Radical Practices in Work, Politics and Culture

Maria Tamboukou

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About This Book

Paris, along with New York, was one of the main centres of the fashion industry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But although New York based garment workers were mobilized early in the twentieth century, Paris was the stage of vibrant revolutions and uprisings throughout the nineteenth century. As a consequence, French women workers were radicalized much earlier, creating a unique and unprecedented moment in both labour and feminist history. Seamstresses were central figures in the socio-political and cultural events of nineteenth and early twentieth century France but their stories and political writings have remained marginalized and obscured. Drawing on a wide range of published and unpublished documents from the industrial revolution, ‘ Sewing, Fighting and Writing’ is a foucauldian genealogy of the Parisian seamstress. Looking at the assemblage of radical practices in work, politics and culture, it explores the constitution of the self of the seamstress in the era of early industrialization and revolutionary events and considers her contribution to the socio-political and cultural formations in modernity.

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Chapter 1
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 studied?
Taking eventalization as a mode of understanding, the genealogist does not look beyond or behind historical practices to find a simple unity of meaning or function. The aim is rather to look more closely at the workings of those practices in which norms and truths have been constructed. Instead of going deep, looking for origins and hidden meanings, the analyst is working on the surface, constructing ‘a polygon or rather a polyhedron’ (Foucault 1991, 77) of various minor processes that surround the emergence of the event. What is to be remembered is the fact that the more the analysis breaks down practices, the easier it becomes to find out more about their interrelation, while this process can never have a final end.
As the genealogical turn to the past can never reach an origin—it rather encounters numberless beginnings—an important task of the genealogist is to identify points of emergence, critical historical moments when ‘dissonant’ events erupt in the course [and discourse] of history. Emergence refers then to a particular historical moment when things appeared as events on the stage of history. It is in the context of intense power relations at play that Foucault stabilizes this ‘moment of arising’ (1986a, 83). In this light, emergence is not the effect of individual tactics, but an event, an episode in a non-linear historical process. The analysis of emergence is not about why, but about how things happened; it is about scrutinizing the complex and multifarious processes that surround the emergence of the event. The publication of the first feminist newspaper La Femme Libre in August 1832, is a genealogical emergence par excellence: it erupted in the middle of the young seamstresses’ engagement in the material conditions and restraints of their needlework. It also emerged as an effect of their political involvement in the glorious July days1 as well as their association with the Saint-Simonian circles, which took up ‘the social question’ that had been neglected by the 1830 bourgeois revolution.
In tracing and analysing this complex nexus of power relations, discourses and practices that surround the emergence of the event, the genealogist has taken up the methodological move of charting a dispositif. As Foucault sees it, a dispositif is a system of relations that can be established between heterogeneous elements, discursive and non-discursive practices, ‘the said as well as the unsaid’ (1980, 194). As a diagram of power par excellence, the dispositif relates to certain types of knowledge, which derive from it, but also condition it and includes ‘discourses, institutions, architectural arrangements, regulations, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophic propositions, morality, philanthropy, etc.’ (ibid.). Women’s work in the garment industry in the beginning of the nineteenth century is thus configured as a genealogical dispositif par excellence: it includes antagonistic labour relations and fierce gendered discourses embedded in the old hierarchies and structures of the clothing trades, the new economic forces of the early industrial era, as well as the radical technological changes that took the trade by storm. Such economic changes are related to a series of uprisings and turmoils in the political arena of the July Monarchy; they further make powerful connections with the romantic socialist movements of the nineteenth century, which opened up paths for feminist ideas and practices to emerge and unfold. In charting lines of this powerful dispositif what has also emerged is an assemblage of forces of desire and imagination that have to be considered alongside restraining discourses and structures of domination. Here Gilles Deleuze’s and Felix Guattari’s intervention in the philosophies of the dispositifs has been crucial.
In reading Foucault, Deleuze has underlined two important consequences arising from the concept of the dispositif: the rejection of universals, and a drive away from the Eternal and towards the new. As he has written, ‘The new is the current. The current is not what we are but rather what we are in the process of becoming—that is the Other, our becoming other’ (1992, 163–64). He therefore concludes that in each dispositif it is necessary to distinguish the historical part, what we are (what we are already no longer) and the current part, what we are in the process of becoming. Deleuze has further described the dispositif as ‘a tangle, a multilinear ensemble’ (ibid., 159), composed of lines and zones that are difficult to determine and localize. These lines are usually deployed in unforeseen directions, while it is amidst crises that new lines are created, and new directions open (ibid., 160). As Deleuze sees it, in each dispositif, the analysis has ‘to untangle the lines of the recent past and those of the near future: that which belongs to the archive and that which belongs to the present’ (ibid., 164). But how can lines of an open, radical future be traced? It is here I argue that Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the assemblage2—a configuration that is more directed to future becomings—makes fruitful connections with the Foucauldian dispositif, a diagram of existing power relations, ‘the stubborn fact of the present’ for Alfred Whitehead (1958, 44) as I will further discuss.
Unlike closed organisms, structural systems and fixed identities, assemblages do not have any organizing centre; they can only function as they connect with other assemblages in a constant process of becoming. An assemblage is defined as a conjunction ‘of bodies, of actions and passions, an intermingling of bodies reacting to one another’ on the level of content, but also as a nexus ‘of acts and statements, of incorporeal transformations attributed to bodies’ on the level of enunciation (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 88). The assemblage thus allows for the possibility of open configurations, continuous connections and intense relations, incessantly transforming life. Given their polyvalent form as conjunctions of heterogeneous elements and as sites for the interplay of intense forces, the dispositif and the assemblage create a plane where Foucault’s and Deleuze and Guattari’s analytics can make connections.
As I will further discuss throughout the book, desire as a social force producing the real was at the heart of how the seamstresses immersed themselves in the revolutionary events of the July Monarchy. In this light, the seamstresses’ radical practices in the beginning of the nineteenth century can be seen as a plane for multiplicities to emerge and make connections, as a contested site for power relations and flows of desire to be enacted, in short as both a dispositif and an assemblage, on the grounds of which unknown landscapes emerge in a future that was open and in the process of ‘becoming other’. But how are we to understand process?
Process and Becomings
It is well-known that in writing about ‘becomings’ and ‘events’ Deleuze drew heavily on Whitehead’s philosophy, wherein process and transformation are central ideas.3 ‘The actual world is a process and process is the becoming of actual entities’, Whitehead has famously written in his major philosophical work Process and Reality (1985, 22). Process is constitutive of experience for Whitehead and ‘involves the notion of a creative activity belonging to the very essence of each occasion’ (1968, 151). Being at the heart of Whitehead’s philosophy, process has to be conceptually differentiated from what we usually understand as ‘the historical process’. As Whitehead has pointed out, process should not be taken as ‘a procession of forms’, but as ‘forms of process’ (ibid., 140). What he means by making this distinction is that process in his conceptual vocabulary is not about a series of transformations of pre-existing forms but actually a mode ‘of eliciting into actual being factors in the universe which antecedently to that process exist only in the mode of unrealised potentialities’ (ibid., 151).
Whitehead also differentiates his own approach to process from the long philosophical tradition of flows and fluxes that goes back to Heraclitus: ‘All things flow [but] what sorts of things flow? [...] what is the meaning of the many things engaged in this common flux, and in what sense, if any, can the word “all” refer to a definitely indicated set of these many things’? Moreover, how does this state of flux relate to its antithesis, ‘the permanences of things—the solid earth, the mountains, the stones, the Egyptian Pyramids’, Whitehead has critically asked (1985, 208). In responding to such questions, Whitehead has noted that there are two kinds of fluency: the fluency of becoming a particular existent, which he calls ‘concrescence’ and the fluency whereby ...

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