The Fortunes of Feminism. Nancy Fraser

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ “socially integrated” and “system integrated action contexts.” Socially integrated action contexts are those in which different agents coordinate their actions with one another by reference to some form of explicit or implicit intersubjective consensus about norms, values and ends, consensus predicated on linguistic speech and interpretation. By contrast, system-integrated action contexts are those in which the actions of different agents are coordinated with one another by the functional interlacing of unintended consequences, while each individual action is determined by self-interested, utility-maximizing calculations typically entertained in the idioms—or, as Habermas says, in the “media”—of money and power.⁷ Habermas considers the capitalist economic system to be the paradigm case of a system-integrated action context. By contrast, he takes the modern, restricted, nuclear family to be a case of a socially integrated action context.⁸

      This distinction is a rather complex one, comprising what I take to be six analytically distinct conceptual elements: functionality, intentionality, linguisticality, consensuality, normativity, and strategicality. However, three of them—functionality, intentionality, and linguisticality—are patently operative in virtually every major context of social action and so can be set aside. Certainly, in both the capitalist workplace and the modern, restricted, nuclear family, the consequences of actions may be functionally interlaced in ways unintended by agents. Likewise, in both contexts, agents coordinate their actions with one another consciously and intentionally. Finally, in both contexts, agents coordinate their actions with one another in and through language.⁹ I assume, therefore, that Habermas’s distinction effectively turns on the elements of consensuality, normativity, and strategicality.

      Once again, I shall distinguish two possible interpretations of Habermas’s position. The first takes the contrast between the two kinds of action contexts as an absolute difference. On this view, system-integrated contexts would involve absolutely no consensuality or reference to moral norms and values, while socially integrated contexts would involve absolutely no strategic calculations in the media of money and power. This “absolute differences” interpretation is at odds with a second possibility, which takes the contrast rather as a difference in degree. According to this second interpretation, system-integrated contexts would involve some consensuality and reference to moral norms and values, but less than socially integrated contexts; in the same way, socially integrated contexts would involve some strategic calculations in the media of money and power, but less than system-integrated contexts.

      I want to argue that the absolute differences interpretation is too extreme to be useful for social theory and that, in addition, it is potentially ideological. In few, if any, human action contexts are actions coordinated absolutely non-consensually and absolutely non-normatively. However morally dubious the consensus, and however problematic the content and status of the norms, virtually every human action context involves some form of both of them. In the capitalist marketplace, for example, strategic, utility-maximizing exchanges occur against a horizon of intersubjectively shared meanings and norms; agents normally subscribe at least tacitly to some commonly held notions of reciprocity and to some shared conceptions about the social meanings of objects, including about what sorts of things are exchangeable. Similarly, in the capitalist workplace, managers and subordinates, as well as coworkers, normally coordinate their actions to some extent consensually and with some explicit or implicit reference to normative assumptions, though the consensus may be arrived at unfairly and the norms may be incapable of withstanding critical scrutiny.¹⁰ Thus, the capitalist economic system has a moral-cultural dimension.

      Similarly, few if any human action contexts are wholly devoid of strategic calculation. Gift rituals in noncapitalist societies, for example, once seen as veritable crucibles of solidarity, are now widely understood to have a significant strategic, calculative dimension, one enacted in the medium of power, if not in that of money.¹¹ And, as I shall argue in more detail later, the modern, restricted, nuclear family is not devoid of individual, self-interested, strategic calculations in either medium. These action contexts, then, while not officially counted as economic, have a strategic, economic dimension.

      Thus, the absolute differences interpretation is not of much use in social theory. It fails to distinguish the capitalist economy—let us call it “the official economy”—from the modern, restricted, nuclear family. In reality, both of these institutions are mélanges of consensuality, normativity, and strategicality. If they are to be distinguished with respect to mode of action-integration, the distinction must be drawn as a difference of degree. It must turn on the place, proportions, and interactions of the three elements within each.

      But if this is so, then the absolute differences classification of the official economy as a system-integrated action context and of the modern family as a socially integrated action context is potentially ideological. It could be used, for example, to exaggerate the differences and occlude the similarities between the two institutions. It could be used to construct an ideological opposition which posits the family as the “negative,” the complementary “other,” of the (official) economic sphere, a “haven in a heartless world.”

      Which of these possible interpretations of the two distinctions are the operative ones in Habermas’s social theory? He asserts that he understands the reproduction distinction according to the pragmatic-contextual interpretation and not the natural kinds one.¹² Likewise, he asserts that he takes the action-context distinction to mark a difference in degree, not an absolute difference.¹³ However, I propose to bracket these assertions and to examine what Habermas actually does with these distinctions.

      Habermas maps the distinction between action contexts onto the distinction between reproduction functions in order to arrive at a definition of societal modernization and at a picture of the institutional structure of modern societies. He holds that modern societies differ from premodern societies in that they split off some material reproduction functions from symbolic ones and hand over the former to two specialized institutions—the (official) economy and the administrative state—which are system-integrated. At the same time, modern societies situate these “subsystems” in the larger social environment by developing two other institutions that specialize in symbolic reproduction and are socially integrated: the modern, restricted, nuclear family or “private sphere,” and the space of political participation, debate, and opinion formation or “public sphere,” which together constitute the two “institutional orders of the modern lifeworld.” Thus, modern societies “uncouple” or separate what Habermas takes to be two distinct but previously undifferentiated aspects of society: “system” and “lifeworld.” And so, in his view, the institutional structure of modern societies is dualistic. On one side stand the institutional orders of the modern lifeworld: the socially integrated domains specializing in symbolic reproduction (that is, in socialization, solidarity formation, and cultural transmission). On the other side stand the systems: the system-integrated domains specializing in material reproduction. On one side, the nuclear family and the public sphere. On the other side, the (official) capitalist economy and the modern administrative state.¹⁴

      What are the critical insights and blind spots of this model? Attending first to the question of its empirical adequacy, let us focus, for now, on the contrast between “the private sphere of the lifeworld” and the (official) economic system. Consider that this aspect of Habermas’s categorial divide between system and lifeworld institutions faithfully mirrors the institutional separation of family and official economy, household and paid workplace, in male-dominated, capitalist societies. It thus has some prima facie purchase on empirical social reality. But consider, too, that the characterization of the family as a socially integrated, symbolic reproduction domain and of the paid workplace as a system-integrated, material reproduction domain tends to exaggerate the differences and occlude the similarities between them. Among other things, it directs attention away from the fact that the household, like the paid workplace, is a site of labor, albeit of unremunerated and often unrecognized labor. Likewise, it occults the fact that in the paid workplace, as in the household, women are assigned to, indeed ghettoized in, distinctively feminine, service-oriented, and often sexualized occupations. Finally, it fails СКАЧАТЬ