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Her appeal to Hegel confirms the class-gender-knowledge schema.  Drawing on the master-servant narrative in The Phenomenology of Mind, she explains:

That organization [of the relation between master and servant] itself is not visible from the standpoint of the master.  Within the consciousness of the master there is himself and the object and a servant who is merely a means.  For the servant there is the master, the servant's labour producing the object, and there is the simplicity of the relation between the master and the object.  The totality of the set of relations is visible. (Smith 1977, 164)

Undoubtedly, Hegel's narrative can be read as depicting the relation of particular social classes.  However, Hegel does not particularize consciousness in terms of vision.  As a consequence of Smith's visual idiom, in a move Hegel cannot underwrite, unmediated experience is poised against a conceptual mode.  Smith states that the "abstracted conceptual mode of ruling exists in and depends upon a world known immediately and directly in the bodily mode" (Smith 1977, 165-166).

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Oddly, within the perspective of standpoint epistemology, the bodily mode of knowing appears centred on a single sensory modality:  sight.  Smith links total knowledge to visibility.  This affects her reading of Hegel.  As an automatic consequence of position, the servant is conscious of the totality of relations between master and servant.  The servant is no agent.  No work is necessary to access consciousness.  This is certainly not what Hegel's text indicates to be the case.  One suspects the equation of agents to standpoints depends on a possible confusion in Smith between sensation and perception thus assigning an unqualified measure of passivity to sight.  Smith seems to forget that most bodies are conferred locomotion. 

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Standpoints are either points of view or blindspots.  The characterization depends upon which world a subject occupies.  Smith builds upon a distinction imported from phenomenological sociology:

Beginning from the standpoint of women locates a subject in a material and local world.  It shows the provinces of meaning described by Schutz not as alternatives ­­ a paramount reality on the one hand and the scientific domain on the other ­­ but rather as a bifurcation of consciousness, with a world directly experienced from oneself as center (in the body) on the one hand and a world organized in the abstracted conceptual mode, external to the local and particular places of one's bodily existence. (Smith 1977, 169)

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She continues:

The abstracted mode of the scientific province is always located in the local and material actualities.  Participation in the "head" world is accomplished in actual concrete settings making use of definite material means.(Smith 1977, 169)

This poses no problems.  Except it suggests a type of nesting almost like that of interiorization.  Headwork is done inside a setting.  Such a suspicion is not allayed when she continues by moving from many settings to a singular one:

Suppression of interest in that setting is organized in a division of labor which accords to others the production and maintenance of the material aspects of a total process. (Smith 1977, 169)

A possible plurality of settings and means is lost.  Without this discursive move the link between the suppression of interest and division of labour could not be so strong.  The concrete and abstract would not confront each other across a divide.

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From the suppression of interest, she argues for the emergence of greater consciousness on the part of those employed in material work:

To those who do this work, the local and concrete conditions of the abstracted mode are thematic.  But women's standpoint locates a subject in the fundamental "item" of the two fold basis of knowing the world.  The organization which divides the two becomes visible from this base.  It is not visible from within the other. (Smith 1977, 169)

Smith implies rulers are blind to the system as the ruled are not.  Somehow the agents get lost.  Consciousness is read off structure.

To exist as subject and to act in this abstracted mode depends upon an actual work and organization of work by others, who make the concrete, the particular, the bodily, the thematic of their work and who also produce the invisibility of that work. (Smith 1977, 166)

There is no mention in this passage or elsewhere of the vagaries of exchange value and the participation of the ruling class in determining comparable worth.  Smith implies that docile labour and self-denial on the part of those that do material work produce its invisibility.

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Oddly, the same qualities of bad faith are applied to the conceptual mode of action.

It is a condition of anyone's being able to enter, to become and remain absorbed, in the conceptual mode of action that she does not need to focus her attention on her labors or on her bodily existence.  The organization of work and work expectations in managerial and professional circles both constitutes and depends upon the alienation of members of this class from their bodily and local existence. (Smith1977, 166)

One need not dream up golfing doctors and surfing lawyers to recognize that these circles too are not so alienated from the body and its impact on job performance.

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Replace "conceptual" by "physical" and Smith's account reads like a description of factory work:

The structure of work in this mode and the structure of career assume that individuals can sustain a mode of consciousness in which interest in the routine aspects of bodily maintenance is never focal, and can in general be suppressed.  It is taken for granted in the organization of this work that such matters are provided for in a way which will not interfere with action and participation in the conceptual mode. (Smith 1977, 166)

Indeed, the whole difference between manual and intellectual labour collapses.

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In her later work, the sharp division between abstract and concrete modes inadvertantly limits the permeability of textual zones.  Smith's unintended legitimation of the mind-body opposition results from her constitution of text as an implement of a ruling apparatus.  In a preface to a collection of essays Smith outlines her project.  Again a shift from plural to singular is notable and leaves its imprint on her take on text:

Texts are analyzed to display what the subject knows how to do as reader and what the subject knows how to do in reading, and in so doing also displays the organizing capacity of the text, its capacity to operate as a constituent of social relations. (Smith 1990, 5)

In this scheme, text is a site that is entered or an institution that governs a series of practices.  This rich notion of text is not a matter for quarrel.  However, the syntax here betrays a one-way movement from text to reader.

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