The Fortunes of Feminism. Nancy Fraser

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СКАЧАТЬ what follows, I will presuppose the conception of Critical Theory I have just outlined. In addition, I will take as the actual situation of our age the scenario I just sketched as hypothetical. On the basis of these presuppositions, I want to examine the critical social theory of Jürgen Habermas as elaborated in The Theory of Communicative Action and related recent writings.² I want to read this work from the standpoint of the following questions: In what proportions and in what respects does Habermas’s theory clarify and/or mystify the bases of male dominance and female subordination in modern societies? In what proportions and in what respects does it challenge and/or replicate prevalent ideological rationalizations of such dominance and subordination? To what extent does it or can it be made to serve the self-clarification of the struggles and wishes of feminist movements? In short, with respect to gender, what is critical and what is not in Habermas’s social theory?

      This would be a fairly straightforward enterprise were it not for one thing. Apart from a brief discussion of feminism as a “new social movement” (a discussion I shall consider anon), Habermas says virtually nothing about gender in The Theory of Communicative Action. Given my view of Critical Theory, this is a serious deficiency. But it need not stand in the way of the sort of inquiry I am proposing. It only necessitates that one read the work from the standpoint of an absence; that one extrapolate from things Habermas does say to things he does not; that one reconstruct how various matters of concern to feminists would appear from his perspective had they been thematized.

      Here, then, are the steps I shall follow. In the first section of this essay, I shall examine some elements of Habermas’s social-theoretical framework in order to see how it tends to cast childrearing and the male-headed, modern, restricted, nuclear family. In the second section, I shall consider his account of the relations between the public and private spheres of life in classical capitalist societies and reconstruct its unthematized gender subtext. In section three, finally, I shall examine Habermas’s account of the dynamics, crisis tendencies, and conflict potentials specific to contemporary, Western, welfare-state capitalism, so as to see in what light it casts contemporary feminist struggles.

      1. THE SOCIAL-THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK:

      A FEMINIST INTERROGATION

      Let me begin by considering two distinctions central to Habermas’s social-theoretical categorial framework. The first is the distinction between the symbolic and the material reproduction of societies. On the one hand, claims Habermas, societies must reproduce themselves materially: they must successfully regulate the metabolic exchange of groups of biological individuals with a nonhuman, physical environment and with other social systems. On the other hand, societies must reproduce themselves symbolically: they must maintain and transmit to new members the linguistically elaborated norms and patterns of interpretation which are constitutive of social identities. For Habermas, material reproduction is secured by means of “social labor.” Symbolic reproduction, on the other hand, comprises the socialization of the young, the cementing of group solidarity, and the transmission and extension of cultural traditions.³

      This distinction between symbolic and material reproduction is in the first instance a functional one. It distinguishes two different functions that must be fulfilled more or less successfully if a society is to survive and persist. At the same time, however, the distinction is used by Habermas to classify actual social practices and activities. These are distinguished according to which one of the two functions they are held to serve exclusively or primarily. Thus, according to Habermas, in capitalist societies, the activities and practices which make up the sphere of paid work count as material reproduction activities since, in his view, they are “social labor” and serve the function of material reproduction. By contrast, the childrearing activities and practices which in our society are performed without pay by women in the domestic sphere—let us call them “women’s unpaid childrearing work”—count as symbolic reproduction activities since, in Habermas’s view, they serve socialization and the function of symbolic reproduction.⁴

      It is worth noting that Habermas’s distinction between symbolic and material reproduction is open to two different interpretations. The first takes the two functions as two objectively distinct natural kinds to which both actual social practices and the actual organization of activities in any given society may correspond more or less faithfully. On this view, childrearing practices simply are, in and of themselves, oriented to symbolic reproduction, whereas the practices that produce food and objects are, by their essential nature, concerned with material reproduction. And modern capitalist social organization—unlike, say, that of archaic societies—would be a faithful mirror of the distinction between the two natural kinds, since it separates these practices institutionally. This “natural kinds” interpretation, as I shall call it, is at odds with another possible interpretation, which I shall call the “pragmatic-contextual” interpretation. The latter would not cast childrearing practices as inherently oriented to symbolic reproduction. Yet it would allow for the possibility that, under certain circumstances and given certain purposes, they could be usefully considered from that standpoint—if, for example, one wished to contest the dominant view, in a sexist political culture, according to which this traditionally female occupation is merely instinctual, natural, and ahistorical.

      Now I want to argue that the natural kinds interpretation is conceptually inadequate and potentially ideological. It is not the case that childrearing practices serve symbolic as opposed to material reproduction. Granted, they comprise language-teaching and initiation into social mores, but also feeding, bathing, and protection from physical harm. Granted, they regulate children’s interactions with other people, but also their interactions with physical nature (in the form, for example, of milk, germs, dirt, excrement, weather, and animals). In short, not just the construction of children’s social identities but also their biological survival is at stake. And so, therefore, is the biological survival of the societies they belong to. Thus, childrearing is not per se symbolic reproduction activity; it is equally and at the same time material reproduction activity. It is what we might call a “dual-aspect” activity.⁵

      But the same is true of the activities institutionalized in modern capitalist paid work. Granted, the production of food and objects contributes to the biological survival of members of society. But such production also and at the same time reproduces social identities. Not just nourishment and shelter simpliciter are produced, but culturally elaborated forms of nourishment and shelter that have symbolically mediated social meanings. Moreover, such production occurs via culturally elaborated social relations and symbolically mediated, norm-governed social practices. The contents of these practices as well as the results serve to form, maintain, and modify the social identities of persons directly involved and indirectly affected. One need only think of an activity like computer programming for a wage in the US pharmaceutical industry to appreciate the thoroughly symbolic character of “social labor.” Thus, such labor, like unpaid childrearing work, is a “dual-aspect” activity.⁶

      It follows that the distinction between women’s unpaid childrearing work and other forms of work from the standpoint of reproduction cannot be a distinction of natural kinds. If it is to be drawn at all, it must be drawn as a pragmatic-contextual distinction for the sake of focusing on what is in each case only one aspect of a dual-aspect phenomenon. And this, in turn, must find its warrant relative to specific purposes of analysis and description, purposes which are themselves susceptible to analysis and evaluation and which need, therefore, to be justified via argument.

      But if this is so, then the natural kinds classification of childrearing as symbolic reproduction and of other work as material reproduction is potentially ideological. It could be used, for example, to legitimize the institutional separation, in capitalist societies, of childrearing from waged work, a separation which many feminists, including myself, consider a mainstay of modern forms of women’s subordination. It could be used, in combination with other assumptions, to legitimate the confinement of women to a “separate sphere.” Whether Habermas uses it this way will be considered shortly.

      The second СКАЧАТЬ