ABSTRACT
As I have discussed in the previous chapter, value is socially produced and culturally predicated. The value attributed to domestic work in society does not represent its genuine and immanent character or quality. Rather, as we have seen, the elements of the value form of domestic work are “social hieroglyphs.” Thus, the devaluation of this labor is symbolically produced through chains of value coding, which situate it at the bottom of the social ladder. Bearing the traces of servitude, colonial and indentured labor, this work is characterized by: (a) the lack of State protection; (b) its social devaluation; (c) the attribution of “inferiority” to its labor force. In the interrelationship of these three levels, domestic work is confi gured as “simple labor” and its labor force as “unskilled labor,” unwaged or poorly paid. In the previous chapter, I asked how such a societally necessary and constitutive labor could be treated as irrelevant. I asserted that the value attached to it has much less to do with its societal function than with the cultural perception and codifi cation of this labor and labor force. Mutually confi guring each other, the labor force and its labor are both codifi ed by processes of hierarchical differentiation, conveyed in the feminization and racialization of its labor force. “Femininity” and “raciality” work here as signifi ers of inferiority, expressed, assigned and negotiated in the private households, particularly when an “(undocumented) migrant” woman is employed. While not directly addressing the fi eld of domestic work, Spivak’s quote incites us to be vigilant of the identitarian codifi cation of the value form. Though not in opposition to identity politics, but conceiving its limitations if the incorporation of its logic into a system of capital production is disregarded, Spivak points to the risks of a reifi cation of identities. Indeed, as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer point out in Dialectic of Enlightenment, the logic of capital operates within identity discourses in order to create an imaginary relationship between commodities and consumers,
engaging with their desires, fantasies, yearnings and emotions.1 In other words, Spivak’s observation leads us to thoroughly interrogate identity politics as the cultural predication of capital accumulation. As the development of identity claims from the 1980s to the governance of diversity in the 1990s in the United States and some European countries demonstrate, identity politics can be incorporated in forms of global governance and strategies of capital accumulation without disturbing the system of exploitation or putting an end to social inequalities.2 The symbolic social and cultural script in which value is produced becomes signifi cant if we are to understand how differences and hierarchies are invoked, performed, enacted and reifi ed in domestic work.
