Fortunes of Feminism (10 page)

15
See, for example,
Rethinking the Family: Some Feminist Questions
, ed. Barrie Thorne and Marilyn Yalom, New York and London: Longman, 1982, and Michele Barrett and Mary McIntosh,
The Anti-Social Family
, London: Verso, 1982.

16
TCA I, 85–6, 88–90, 101, 104–5; TCA II, 179; McCarthy, “Translator's Introduction,” ix, xxx. In presenting the distinction between normatively secured and communicatively achieved action, I am again modifying, or rather stabilizing, the variable usage in
Theory of Communicative Action
. See note 7 above.

17
Pamela Fishman, “Interaction: The Work Women Do,”
Social Problems
25:4, 1978, 397–406.

18
Nancy Henley,
Body Politics
, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1977.

19
TCA II, 523–4, 547; “A Reply to my Critics,” 237; Thompson, “Rationality,” 288, 292.

20
McCarthy pursues some of the normative implications of this for the differentiation of the administrative state system from the public sphere in “Complexity and Democracy.”

21
McCarthy makes this point with respect to the dedifferentiation of the state administrative system and the public sphere. Ibid.

22
TCA I, 341–2, 359–60; TCA II, 256, 473; “A Reply to my Critics,” 280; McCarthy, “Translator's Introduction,” xxxii; Thompson, “Rationality,” 286–8.

23
The following account of the masculine gender subtext of the worker role draws on Carole Pateman, “The Personal and the Political: Can Citizenship Be Democratic?,” Lecture 3 of her “Women and Democratic Citizenship” series, The Jefferson Memorial Lectures, delivered at the University of California, Berkeley, February 1985.

24
Ibid., 5.

25
Barbara Ehrenreich,
The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment
, Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1984.

26
The following account of the masculine gender subtext of the citizen role draws on Carole Pateman, “The Personal and the Political.”

27
Ibid., 8.

28
Judith Hicks Stiehm, “The Protected, the Protector, the Defender,” in
Women and Men's Wars
, ed. Judith Hicks Stiehm, New York: Pergamon Press, 1983.

29
Pateman, “The Personal and the Political,” 10.

30
Insofar as the foregoing analysis of the gender subtext of Habermas's role theory deploys categories in which gender and political economy are internally integrated, it represents a contribution to the overcoming of “dual systems theory” (see note 6 above). It is also a contribution to the development of a more satisfactory way of linking structural (in the sense of objectivating) and interpretive approaches to the study of societies than that proposed by Habermas. For I am suggesting here that the domestic sphere has a structural as well as an interpretive dimension and that the official economic and state spheres have an interpretive as well as a structural dimension.

31
TCA II, 505ff;
Legitimation Crisis
, 33–6, 53–5; McCarthy, “Translator's Introduction,” xxxiii.

32
TCA II, 522–4;
Legitimation Crisis
, 36–7, McCarthy, “Translator's Introduction,” xxxiii.

33
TCA II, 530–40; McCarthy, “Translator's Introduction,” xxxiii–xxxiv.

34
TCA II, 540–7; McCarthy, “Translator's Introduction,” xxxi.

35
TCA II, 275–7, 452, 480, 522–4; “A Reply to my Critics,” 226, 280–1;
Observations
, 11–12, 16–20; McCarthy, “Translator's Introduction,” xxxi–xxxii; Thompson, “Rationality,” 286, 288.

36
TCA II, 581–3;
Observations
, 18–19, 27–8.

37
TCA II, 581–3;
Observations
, 16–17, 27–8.

38
For the US social-welfare system, see the analysis of male vs. female participation rates and the account of the gendered character of the two subsystems in Fraser, “Women, Welfare and the Politics of Need Interpretation,”
Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy
2:1, 1987, 103–21. Also, Barbara J. Nelson, “Women's Poverty and Women's Citizenship: Some Political Consequences of Economic Marginality,”
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society
, 10:2, 1985; Steven P. Erie, Martin Rein, and Barbara Wiget, “Women and the Reagan Revolution: Thermidor for the Social Welfare Economy,” in
Families, Politics and Public Policies: A Feminist Dialogue on Women and the State
, ed. Irene Diamond, New York: Longman, 1983; Diana Pearce, “Women, Work and Welfare: The Feminization of Poverty,” in
Working Women and Families
, ed. Karen Wolk Feinstein, Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1979, and “Toil and Trouble: Women Workers and Unemployment Compensation,”
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society
, 10:3, 1985, 439–59; and Barbara Ehrenreich and Frances Fox Piven, “The Feminization of Poverty,”
Dissent
, Spring 1984, 162–70. For an analysis of the gendered character of the British social-welfare system, see Hilary Land, “Who Cares for the Family?,”
Journal of Social Policy
7:3, 1978, 257–84. For Norway, see
Patriarchy in a Welfare Society
, ed. Harriet Holter, Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1984. See also two comparative studies: Mary Ruggie,
The State and Working Women: A Comparative Study of Britain and Sweden
, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984; and Birte Siim, “Women and the Welfare State: Between Private and Public Dependence” (unpublished typescript).

39
Carol Brown, “Mothers, Fathers and Children: From Private to Public Patriarchy,” in Sargent, ed.,
Women and Revolution
. Actually, I believe Brown's formulation is theoretically inadequate, since it presupposes a simple, dualistic conception of public and private. Nonetheless, the phrase “from private to public patriarchy” evokes in a rough but suggestive way the phenomena for which a socialist-feminist critical theory of the welfare state would need to account.

40
At the time this essay was written, US data indicated that sex segmentation in paid work was increasing, despite the entry of women into professions like law and medicine. Even when the gains won by those women were taken into account, there was no overall improvement in the aggregated comparative economic position of paid women workers vis-à-vis male workers. Women's wages remained less than 60 percent of men's wages. Nor was there any overall improvement in occupational distribution by sex. Rather, the ghettoization of women in low-paying, low-status “pink collar” occupations was increasing. For example, in the US in 1973, women held 96 percent of all paid childcare jobs, 81 percent of all primary school teaching jobs, 72 percent of all health technician jobs, 98 percent of all Registered Nurse jobs, 83 percent of all librarian jobs, 99 percent of all secretarial jobs, and 92 percent of all waitperson jobs. The figures for 1983 were, respectively, 97 percent, 83 percent, 84 percent, 96 percent, 87 percent, 99 percent, and 88 percent (Bureau of Labor Statistics figures cited by Drew Christie, “Comparable Worth and Distributive Justice,” paper read at meetings of the American Philosophical Association, Western Division, April 1985).

41
See note 38 above.

42
Cf. Zillah Eisenstein,
The Radical Future of Liberal Feminism
, Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1981, especially Chapter 9. What follows has some affinities with the perspective of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe in
Hegemony and Socialist Strategy
, New York: Verso, 1985.

43
I develop this notion of the “socio-cultural means of interpretation and communication” and the associated conception of autonomy in “Toward a Discourse Ethic of Solidarity,”
Praxis International
, 5:4, 1986, 425–9. Both notions are extensions and modifications of Habermas's conception of “communicative ethics.”

44
My own recent work attempts to construct a conceptual framework for a socialist-feminist critical theory of the welfare state that meets these requirements. See “Women, Welfare and the Politics of Need Interpretation,” “Toward a Discourse Ethic of Solidarity,” and, especially, “Struggle over Needs” (Chapter 2 in this volume). Each of these essays draws heavily on those aspects of Habermas's thought which I take to be unambiguously positive and useful, especially his conception of the irreducibly socio-cultural, interpretive character of human needs, and his contrast between dialogical and monological processes of need interpretation. The present chapter, on the other hand, focuses mainly on those aspects of Habermas's thought which I find problematical or unhelpful, and so does not convey the full range either of his work or of my views about it. Readers are warned, therefore, against drawing the conclusion that Habermas has little or nothing positive to contribute to a socialist-feminist critical theory of the welfare state. They are urged, rather, to consult the essays cited above for the other side of the story.

2

Struggle over Needs: Outline of a
Socialist-Feminist Critical Theory
of Late-Capitalist Political Culture
^*

Need is also a political instrument, meticulously prepared, calculated and used.

—Michel Foucault
¹

In late-capitalist, welfare-state societies, talk about people's needs is an important species of political discourse. In the US we argue, for example, about whether the government should provide for citizens' needs. Thus, feminists claim that the state should provide for parents' day-care needs, while social conservatives insist that children need their mothers' care, and economic conservatives claim that the market, not the government, is the best institution for meeting needs. Americans also argue about whether existing social-welfare programs really do meet the needs they purport to satisfy, or whether these programs misconstrue the latter. For example, right-wing critics claim that unconditional income support programs destroy the incentive to work and undermine the family. Left critics, in contrast, oppose workfare proposals as coercive and punitive, while many poor women with young children say they want to work at good-paying jobs. All these cases involve disputes about what exactly various groups of people really do need and about who should have the last word in such matters. In all these cases, moreover, needs-talk is a medium for the making and contesting of political claims, an idiom in which political conflict is played out and inequalities are symbolically elaborated and challenged.

Talk about needs has not always been central to Western political culture; it has often been considered antithetical to politics and relegated to the margins of political life. However, in welfare-state societies, needs-talk has been institutionalized as a major idiom of political discourse. It coexists, albeit often uneasily, with talk about rights and interests at the very center of political life. Indeed, this peculiar juxtaposition of a discourse about needs with discourses about rights and interests is one of the distinctive marks of late-capitalist political culture.

Feminists (and others) who aim to intervene in this culture could benefit from posing the following questions: Why has needs-talk become so prominent in the political culture of welfare-state societies? What is the relation between this development and changes in late-capitalist social structure? What does the emergence of the needs idiom imply about shifts in the boundaries between “political,” “economic,” and “domestic” spheres 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: the ways in which discourses position interlocutors as specific sorts of subjects endowed with specific sorts of capacities for action—for example, as “normal” or “deviant,” as causally conditioned or freely self-determining, as victims or as potential activists, as unique individuals or as members of social groups.
⁴

All these elements comprise the MIC in late-capitalist, welfare-state societies. To grasp their function, one must recall that such societies harbor a plurality of forms of association, roles, groups, institutions, and discourses. Thus, the means of interpretation and communication are not all of a piece. Far from constituting a coherent, monolithic web, they form a heterogeneous field of polyglot possibilities and diverse alternatives. In welfare-state societies, moreover, discourses about needs typically make at least implicit reference to alternative interpretations. Particular claims about needs are “internally dialogized,” resonating implicitly or explicitly with competing need interpretations.
⁵
They allude, in other words, to a conflict of interpretations. For example, groups seeking to restrict or outlaw abortion counterpose “the sanctity of life” to the mere “convenience” of “career women”; thus, they cast their claims in terms that refer, however disparagingly, to feminist interpretations of reproductive needs.
⁶

On the other hand, late-capitalist societies are not simply pluralist. Rather, they are stratified, differentiated into social groups with unequal status, power, and access to resources, traversed by pervasive axes of inequality along lines of class, gender, race, ethnicity, and age. The MIC in these societies are also stratified, organized in ways that are congruent with societal patterns of dominance and subordination.

It follows that we must distinguish those elements of the MIC that are hegemonic, authorized, and officially sanctioned, on the one hand, from those that are non-hegemonic, disqualified, and discounted, on the other hand. Some ways of talking about needs are institutionalized in the central discursive arenas of late-capitalist societies: parliaments, academies, courts, and mass circulation media. Other ways of talking about needs are enclaved as socially marked subdialects and normally excluded from the central discursive arenas.
⁷
Until recently, for example, moralistic and scientific discourses about the needs of people with AIDS, and of people at risk of contracting AIDS, were well represented on government commissions, while gay and lesbian rights activists' interpretations were largely excluded. To change that distribution of discursive power, it was necessary to wage a political struggle.

From this perspective, needs-talk appears as a site of struggle where groups with unequal discursive (and extra-discursive) resources compete to establish as hegemonic their respective interpretations of legitimate social needs. Dominant groups articulate need interpretations intended to exclude, defuse, and/or co-opt counter-interpretations. Subordinate or oppositional groups, in contrast, articulate need interpretations intended to challenge, displace, and/or modify dominant ones. In neither case are the interpretations simply “representations.” In both cases, rather, they are acts and interventions.
⁸