William Rodney Herring

Mary Poovey, "The Social Constitution of 'Class': Toward a History of Classificatory Thinking." Rethinking Class: Literary Studies and Social Formations. Ed. Wai Chee Dimock and Michael T. Gilmore. New York: Columbia UP: 1994.

Mary Poovey's oft-cited article traces the history of the concept we now denote by the term "class," but it's more than a simple genealogy of the term; it's a historicization of the term by way of examining the available epistemologies that gave rise to "classificatory thinking." Her description of this "awkward phrase" is telling:

By "classificatory thinking" I mean to designate an epistemology that was gradually consolidated in the late seventeenth century and elaborated during the course of the next two centuries alongside, and in complex relationship to, the development of the material conditions we generally associate with "class." Classificatory thinking combined tow modes of understanding the natural and social worlds. The first, which dates back to Aristotle and finds its characteristic modern form in taxonomy, makes sense of the discrete particulars of the world by grouping them into categories (or classes) that foreground and isolate a single feature or group of features as definitive. The second, whose origin is probably equally ancient, conceptualizes "value" in terms of features that can be quantified, then commodified. When these two modes of understanding were brought together under the particular conditions of seventeenth-century England, they provided the terms for some of the characteristic concepts of modern Western societies—including the notions that quantity is more important than quality and that some kinds of activities are more "productive" (hence both more valuable and significant) than others. (16)

The critical point is that from this same point of origin, political economy and Marxist critique, like two sides of the same coin, sprang forth. Thus, however antithetical these two positions may be, they're bound to share some of the same blind spots, just as they share some of the same conditions of possibility and some of the same assumptions. The key blind spot is what to do with the feminine: "women have never been included in the classificatory scheme by which quantification has rendered the rest of modern society comprehensible" (48). And this same quote reveals one of the shared assumptions, the notion that quantification is objecivizable. To the point here, Poovey demonstrates how objective or "disinterested" observation as a condition of epistemology always had to be supplemented by "approximation" (Adam Smith's term [369-370]). In the Age of Reason, if Hobbesian "political rationality" always stood in opposition to Baconian "scientific rationality," what Poovey calls the emergent "economic rationality" assumed the rhetoric of "disinterest" advanced by the latter to "lend prestige to a political theory that purported simply to describe a realm of behavior that was outside of politics but within nature" (17).

What's not clear is what other than the exclusion of women is at stake in this observation. I mean neither that the exclusion of women is unimportant, nor that Poovey's historicist work is less than useful as a result, but rather that since she spends (admittedly) little time fleshing out this exclusion ("a process I can only sketch briefly..." [45]), it's tough to see how damaging it is to Marxism's observations about class. Clearly these observations are historically bound, but seeing what (all) that means deserves considerably more attention.