The Fortunes of Feminism. Nancy Fraser

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СКАЧАТЬ of life? Does it betoken an extension of the political sphere or, rather, a colonization of that domain by newer modes of power and social control? What are the major varieties of needs-talk and how do they interact polemically with one another? What opportunities and/or obstacles does the needs idiom pose for movements, like feminism, that seek far-reaching social transformation?

      In what follows, I outline an approach for thinking about such questions rather than proposing definitive answers to them. What I have to say falls into five parts. In the first section, I break with standard theoretical approaches by shifting the focus of inquiry from needs to discourses about needs, from the distribution of need satisfactions to “the politics of need interpretation.” I also propose a model of social discourse designed to bring into relief the contested character of needs-talk in welfare-state societies. In the second section, I relate this discourse model to social-structural considerations, especially to shifts in the boundaries between “political,” “economic,” and “domestic” spheres of life. In the third section, I identify three major strands of needs-talk in late-capitalist political culture, and I map some of the ways in which they compete for potential adherents. In the fourth section, I apply the model to some concrete cases of contemporary needs politics in the US. Finally, in the concluding section, I consider some moral and epistemological issues raised by the phenomenon of needs-talk.

      1. POLITICS OF NEED INTERPRETATION:

      A DISCOURSE MODEL

      Let me begin by explaining some of the peculiarities of the approach I am proposing. In my approach, the focus of inquiry is not needs but rather discourses about needs. The point is to shift our angle of vision on the politics of needs. Usually, the politics of needs is understood to concern the distribution of satisfactions. In my approach, by contrast, the focus is the politics of need interpretation.

      I focus on discourses and interpretation in order to bring into view the contextual and contested character of needs claims. As many theorists have noted, needs claims have a relational structure; implicitly or explicitly, they have the form “A needs X in order to Y.” This “in-order-to” structure, as I shall call it, poses no special problems when we consider very thin, general needs, such as food or shelter simpliciter. Thus, we can uncontroversially say that homeless people, like everyone else in non-tropical climates, need shelter in order to live. And many people will infer that governments, as guarantors of life and liberty, have a responsibility to provide for this need in the last resort. However, as soon as we descend to lesser levels of generality, needs claims become far more controversial. What, more “thickly,” do homeless people need in order to be sheltered from the elements? What specific forms of provision are implied once we acknowledge their very general, thin need? Do homeless people need society’s willingness to allow them to sleep undisturbed next to a hot air vent on a street corner? A space in a subway tunnel or a bus terminal? A bed in a temporary shelter? A permanent home? Suppose we say the latter. What kind of permanent housing do homeless people need? High-rise rental units in city centers that are remote from good schools, discount shopping, and job opportunities? Single family homes designed for single-earner, two-parent families? And what else do homeless people need in order to have permanent homes? Rent subsidies? Income support? Jobs? Job training and education? Day care? Finally, what is needed, at the level of housing policy, in order to insure an adequate stock of affordable housing? Tax incentives to encourage private investment in low-income housing? Concentrated or scattered public housing projects within a generally commodified housing environment? Rent control? Decommodification of urban housing?²

      We could continue proliferating such questions indefinitely. And we would, at the same time, be proliferating controversy. That is precisely the point about needs claims. These claims tend to be nested, connected to one another in ramified chains of in-order-to relations: not only does A need X in order to Y; she also needs P in order to X, Q in order to P, and so on. Moreover, when such in-order-to chains are unraveled in the course of political disputes, disagreements usually deepen rather than abate. Precisely how such chains are unraveled depends on what the interlocutors share in the way of background assumptions. Does it go without saying that policy designed to deal with homelessness must not challenge the basic ownership and investment structure of urban real estate? Or is that a point at which people’s assumptions and commitments diverge?

      It is such networks of contested in-order-to relations that I aim to highlight when I propose to focus on the politics of need interpretation. Thin theories of needs that do not undertake to explore such networks cannot shed much light on the politics of needs in contemporary societies. Such theories assume that the politics of needs concerns only whether various predefined needs will or will not be provided for. As a result, they deflect attention from a number of important political questions.³ First, they take the interpretation of people’s needs as simply given and unproblematic; they thus occlude the interpretive dimension of needs politics, the fact that not just satisfactions but need interpretations are politically contested. They assume, second, that it does not matter who interprets the needs in question and from what perspective and in the light of what interests; they thus overlook the fact that who gets to establish authoritative, thick definitions of people’s needs is itself a political stake. They take for granted, third, that the socially authorized forms of public discourse available for interpreting people’s needs are adequate and fair; they thus neglect the question whether these forms of public discourse are skewed in favor of the self-interpretations and interests of dominant social groups and, so, work to the disadvantage of subordinate or oppositional groups—in other words, they occlude the fact that the means of public discourse themselves may be at issue in needs politics. Fourth, such theories fail to problematize the social and institutional logic of processes of need interpretation; they thus neglect such important political questions as: Where in society, in what institutions, are authoritative need interpretations developed? And what sorts of social relations are in force among the interlocutors or co-interpreters?

      In order to remedy these blind spots, I propose a more politically critical, discourse-oriented alternative. I take the politics of need interpretation to comprise three analytically distinct but practically interrelated moments. The first is the struggle to establish or deny the political status of a given need, the struggle to validate the need as a matter of legitimate political concern or to enclave it as a nonpolitical matter. The second is the struggle over the interpretation of the need, the struggle for the power to define it and, so, to determine what would satisfy it. The third moment is the struggle over the satisfaction of the need, the struggle to secure or withhold provision.

      A focus on the politics of need interpretation requires a model of social discourse. The model I propose foregrounds the multivalent and contested character of needs-talk, the fact that in welfare-state societies we encounter a plurality of competing ways of talking about people’s needs. The model theorizes what I call “the socio-cultural means of interpretation and communication” (MIC). By this I mean the historically and culturally specific ensemble of discursive resources available to members of a given social collectivity in pressing claims against one another. Such resources include:

      1. The officially recognized idioms in which one can press claims; for example, needs-talk, rights-talk, interests-talk.

      2. The concrete vocabularies available for making claims in these recognized idioms: in the case of needs-talk, for example, therapeutic vocabularies, administrative vocabularies, religious vocabularies, feminist vocabularies, socialist vocabularies.

      3. The paradigms of argumentation accepted as authoritative in adjudicating conflicting claims: Are conflicts over the interpretation of needs resolved, for example, by appeal to scientific experts? By brokered compromises? By voting according to majority rule? By privileging the interpretations of those whose needs are in question?

      4. The narrative conventions available for constructing the individual and collective stories which are constitutive of people’s social identities.

      5. The modes of subjectification: СКАЧАТЬ