Fortunes of Feminism (12 page)

To summarize: in late-capitalist societies, runaway needs that have broken out of domestic or official-economic enclaves enter that hybrid discursive space that Hannah Arendt called “the social.” They may then become foci of state intervention geared to crisis management. These needs are thus markers of major social-structural shifts in the boundaries separating what are classified as “political,” “economic,” and “domestic” or “personal” spheres of life.

3. CONFLICTING NEED INTERPRETATIONS:

ON OPPOSITIONAL, REPRIVATIZING, AND EXPERT DISCOURSES

Let me now propose a scheme for classifying the many varieties of needs-talk in late-capitalist societies. My aim is to identity some distinct types of discourse and to map the lines along which they compete. The result should be an account of some basic axes of needs politics in welfare-state societies.

I begin by distinguishing three major kinds of needs discourses in late-capitalist societies. The first I shall call “oppositional” forms of needs-talk, which arise when needs are politicized “from below.” These contribute to the crystallization of new social identities on the part of subordinated social groups. The second type I call “reprivatization” discourses, which emerge in response to the first. These articulate entrenched need interpretations that could previously go without saying. Finally, there are what I shall call “expert” needs discourses, which link popular movements to the state. They can best be understood in the context of “social problem-solving,” institution-building, and professional class formation. In general, it is the contestatory interaction of these three strands of needs-talk that structures the politics of needs in late-capitalist societies.
²⁰

Let us look first at the politicization of runaway needs via
oppositional discourses
. Here, needs become politicized when, for example, women, workers, and/or peoples of color come to contest the subordinate identities and roles, the traditional, reified, and disadvantageous need interpretations previously assigned to and/or embraced by them. By insisting on speaking publicly of heretofore depoliticized needs, by claiming for these needs the status of legitimate political issues, such persons and groups do several things simultaneously. First, they contest the established boundaries separating “politics” from “economics” and “domestics.” Second, they offer alternative interpretations of their needs embedded in alternative chains of in-order-to relations. Third, they create new discourse publics from which they try to disseminate their interpretations of their needs throughout a wide range of different discourse publics. Finally, they challenge, modify, and/or displace hegemonic elements of the means of interpretation and communication, as they invent new forms of discourse for interpreting their needs.

In oppositional discourses, needs-talk is a moment in the self-constitution of new collective agents or social movements. For example, in the current wave of feminist ferment, groups of women have politicized and reinterpreted various needs, have instituted new vocabularies and forms of address, and, so, have become “women” in a different, though not uncontested or univocal, sense. By speaking publicly the heretofore unspeakable, by coining terms like “sexism,” “sexual harassment,” “marital, date, and acquaintance rape,” “labor force sex-segregation,” “the double shift,” “wife-battery,” etc., feminist women have become “women” in the sense of a discursively self-constituted political collectivity, albeit a very heterogeneous and fractured one.
²¹

Of course, the politicization of needs in oppositional discourses does not go uncontested. One type of resistance involves defending the established boundaries separating “political,” “economic,” and “domestic” spheres by means of
reprivatization discourses
. Institutionally, reprivatization designates initiatives aimed at dismantling or cutting back social-welfare services, selling off nationalized assets, and/or deregulating “private” enterprise; discursively, it means depoliticization. Thus, in reprivatization discourses, speakers oppose state provision of runaway needs and they seek to contain forms of needs-talk that threaten to spill across a wide range of discourse publics. Reprivatizers may insist, for example, that domestic battery is not a legitimate subject of political discourse but a familial or religious matter, or, to take a different example, that a factory closing is not a political question but an unimpeachable prerogative of private ownership or an unassailable imperative of an impersonal market mechanism. In both cases, the speakers are contesting the breakout of runaway needs and trying to (re)depoliticize them.

Interestingly, reprivatization discourses blend the old and the new. On the one hand, they seem merely to render explicit need interpretations which could earlier go without saying. But, on the other hand, by the very act of articulating such interpretations, they simultaneously modify them. Because reprivatization discourses respond to competing, oppositional interpretations, they are internally dialogized, incorporating references to the alternatives they resist, even while rejecting them. For example, although “pro-family” discourses of the social New Right are explicitly anti-feminist, some of them incorporate in a depoliticized form feminist-inspired motifs implying women's right to sexual pleasure and to emotional support from their husbands.
²²

In defending the established social division of discourses, reprivatization discourses deny the claims of oppositional movements for the legitimate political status of runaway needs. However, in so doing, they tend further to politicize those needs in the sense of increasing their cathectedness as foci of contestation. Moreover, in some cases, reprivatization discourses, too, become vehicles for mobilizing social movements and for reshaping social identities. An example is Thatcherism in Britain, where a set of reprivatization discourses articulated in the accents of authoritarian populism refashioned the subjectivities of a wide range of disaffected constituencies and united them in a powerful coalition.
²³

Together, oppositional discourses and reprivatization discourses define one axis of needs-struggle in late-capitalist societies. But there is also a second, rather different axis of conflict. Here, the focal issue is no longer politicization versus depoliticization but rather the interpreted content of contested needs once their political status has been successfully secured. And the principal contestants are oppositional social movements and organized interests like business, which seek to influence public policy.

Consider an example from the US. As day care has gained some increased legitimacy as a political issue, we have seen a proliferation of competing interpretations and programmatic conceptions. In one view, day care would serve poor children's needs for “enrichment” and/or moral supervision. In a second, it would serve the middle-class taxpayer's need to get welfare recipients off the rolls. A third interpretation would shape day care as a measure for increasing the productivity and competitiveness of American business, while yet a fourth would treat it as part of a package of policies aimed at redistributing income and resources to women. Each of these interpretations carries a distinct programmatic orientation with respect to funding, institutional siting and control, service design, and eligibility. As they collide, we see a struggle to shape the hegemonic understanding of day care, which may eventually make its way onto the formal political agenda. Clearly, not just feminist groups, but also business interests, trade unions, children's rights advocates, and educators are contestants in this struggle. Needless to say, they bring to it vast differentials in power.

The struggle for hegemonic need interpretations usually points to the future involvement of the state. Thus, it anticipates yet a third axis of needs struggle in late-capitalist societies. Here, a major issue is politics versus administration, and the principal contestants are oppositional social movements, on the one hand, and social service “experts,” on the other.

Recall that “the social” is a site where runaway needs, which have been politicized in the discursive sense, become candidates for state-organized provision. Consequently, these needs become the object of yet another group of discourses: the complex of
expert discourses
about public policy, which find their institutional base in social service agencies and professional circles.

Expert needs discourses are the vehicles for translating sufficiently politicized runaway needs into objects of potential state intervention. Closely connected with institutions of knowledge production and utilization, they include qualitative and especially quantitative social-scientific discourses generated in universities and “think-tanks”; legal discourses generated in judicial institutions and their satellite schools, journals, and professional associations; administrative discourses circulated in various agencies of the social state; and therapeutic discourses circulated in public and private medical and social service agencies.
²⁴

As the expression suggests, expert discourses tend to be restricted to specialized publics. Associated with professional class formation, they serve to build institutions and to “solve social problems.” But in some cases, such as law and psychotherapy, expert vocabularies and rhetorics are disseminated to a wider spectrum of educated laypersons, some of whom are participants in social movements. Moreover, social movements sometimes manage to co-opt or create critical, oppositional segments of expert discourse publics. For all these reasons, expert discourse publics sometimes acquire a certain porousness. And expert discourses become the
bridge
discourses linking loosely organized social movements with the social state.

Because of this bridge role, the rhetoric of expert needs discourses tends to be administrative. These discourses consist in a series of rewriting operations, procedures for translating politicized needs into administerable needs. Typically, the politicized need is redefined as the correlate of a bureaucratically administerable satisfaction, a “social service.” It is specified in terms of an ostensibly general state of affairs which could, in principle, befall anyone—for example, unemployment, disability, death, or desertion of a spouse.
²⁵
As a result, the need is decontextualized and recontextualized: on the one hand, it is represented in abstraction from its class, race, and gender specificity and from whatever oppositional meanings it may have acquired in the course of its politicization; on the other hand, it is cast in terms which tacitly presuppose such entrenched, specific background institutions as (“primary” versus “secondary”) wage labor, privatized childrearing, and their gender-based separation.

As a result of these expert redefinitions, the people whose needs are in question are repositioned. They become individual “cases” rather than members of social groups or participants in political movements. In addition, they are rendered passive, positioned as potential recipients of predefined services rather than as agents involved in interpreting their needs and shaping their life-conditions.

By virtue of this administrative rhetoric, expert needs discourses, too, tend to be depoliticizing. They construe persons simultaneously as rational utility-maximizers and as causally conditioned, predictable, and manipulable objects, thereby screening out those dimensions of human agency that involve the construction and deconstruction of social meanings.

When expert needs discourses are institutionalized in state apparatuses, they tend to become normalizing, aimed at “reforming,” if not stigmatizing, “deviancy.”
²⁶
This sometimes becomes explicit when services incorporate a therapeutic dimension designed to close the gap between clients' recalcitrant self-interpretations and the interpretations embedded in administrative policy.
²⁷
Now the rational utility-maximizer-cum-causally-conditioned-object becomes, in addition, a deep self to be unraveled therapeutically.
²⁸

To summarize: when social movements succeed in politicizing previously depoliticized needs, they enter the terrain of the social, where two other kinds of struggles await them. First, they have to contest powerful organized interests bent on shaping hegemonic need interpretations to their own ends. Second, they encounter expert needs discourses in and around the social state. These encounters define two additional axes of needs-struggle in late-capitalist societies. They are highly complex struggles, since social movements typically seek state provision of their runaway needs even while they tend to oppose administrative and therapeutic need interpretations. Thus, these axes, too, involve conflicts among rival interpretations of social needs and among rival constructions of social identity.

4. EXEMPLARY STRUGGLES OVER NEEDS:

FROM POLITICS TO ADMINISTRATION AND BACK

Let me now apply the model I have been developing to some concrete cases of conflicts of need interpretation. The first example I want to discuss serves to identify the tendency in welfare-state societies to transform the politics of need interpretation into the management of need satisfactions. A second group of examples serves to chart a counter-movement from administration to resistance and potentially back to politics.
²⁹

Consider, first, the politics of needs surrounding wife-battering. Until the 1970s, the expression “wife-battering” did not exist. When spoken of publicly at all, this phenomenon was called “wife-beating” and was often treated comically, as in “Have you stopped beating your wife?” Classed linguistically with the disciplining of children and servants, it was cast as a “domestic,” as opposed to a “political,” matter. Then, feminist activists renamed the practice with a term drawn from criminal law and created a new kind of public discourse. They claimed that battery was not a personal, domestic problem but a systemic, political one; its etiology was not to be traced to individual women's or men's emotional problems but, rather, to the ways these problems refracted pervasive social relations of male dominance and female subordination.