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Women, Culture, and International Relations, by Vivienne Jabri and Eleanor O’Gorman (eds.)
7. “Supposing Truth to Be a Woman”? Pragmatism and the Feminist Problematique
Supposing truth to be a woman—what? is the suspicion not well founded that all philosophers, when they have been dogmatists, have had little understanding of woman? that the gruesome earnestness, the clumsy importunity with which they have hitherto been in the habit of approaching truth have been inept and improper means for winning a wench?—Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil 1
If woman is truth, she at least knows that there is no truth, that truth has no place here and that no one has a place for truth. And she is a woman precisely because she herself does not believe in truth itself, because she does not believe in what she is, in what she is believed to be, in what she is thus not.—Jacques Derrida, Spurs 2
In contrast to the other contributions to this volume, and before making a step into the international, this chapter raises the central concern of all the contributors to the project but does so in an oft–overlooked location. Although it inquires as to the nature of difference, it does so within the context of what Richard Rorty has called the “North Atlantic liberal democracies.” Not only has liberal democratic culture become the only dominant international political project considered suitable for all developed and developing nation–states, but these democracies are also home to the white male majority of educated and active practitioners and scholars of international relations, and it is thus to them that the invitation and challenge of supposing truth to be a woman is addressed.
In supposing truth to be a woman, however, it is not simply being suggested that the voice of women should be heard and believed, although this is still a necessary reminder in many an (inter)national locale; rather it asks that such scholars and practitioners take seriously the challenge of a feminist problematique. In searching for a truth in the subject of women, one is necessarily taking up a position of interrogation from where the claims of liberal democracies freedom must face the critical inquiry of their female citizens. But not only female citizens, for what is being proposed is that woman not be conceived as a single, all–encompassing, and solitary definitional category—on the contrary; and just as with truth, woman must admit to the multiplicity of meanings and inscriptions that she has come to host and might yet come to create. What this signifies is that difference itself must be recognized as that which is enfolded inside the very heart of feminist discourse.
Supposing truth to be a woman therefore becomes better understood as an epistemological stance, a stance that is exclusive to neither women nor men. Philosophical pragmatism as a school of thought that claims to hold just such an antiessentialist and antifoundationalist position thus provides this chapter with its theoretical orientation. By placing two of its foremost practitioners—one a man and one a woman—in a dialogical setting, I hope to explore the possibilities offered by pragmatist philosophy for feminist thought. I therefore proceed by allowing Rorty, as one of America’s most seductive advocates of liberal democratic government, to explain how he interprets the challenge of feminism in today’s advanced liberal societies. In response, Nancy Fraser, a veteran of the “woman’s struggle,” and also a self–professed democratic–pragmatist, proposes an alternative construal of our current democratic culture, one that remains very much at odds with that of Rorty.
In attempting to untangle the nature of the disagreement between the two theorists, I further hope to highlight the often uncontested experience in advanced liberal societies of the practices of freedom—and in particular to consider the role of women as they find themselves implicated within such practices. For Fraser it is through contestation of the classic liberal division between the public and the private domains that the character of her definition of a feminist politics takes shape. Unlike Rorty, who hopes to exploit the unsettled relation between the public/private, Fraser wishes to open such classifications to a greater degree of democratic scrutiny. The democratic method thus becomes integral to Fraser’s conception of a feminist political movement, this being so because the adoption of such a process is seen as the best available means to justly and fairly mediate among the diverse and multiple positions inherent in a feminist politics. In contrast, rather than wishing to settle the inherent tension between plural feminist viewpoints, Rorty negates the salience of the liberal–democratic process and looks instead toward the cultural practice of linguistic self–description as the principal means to escape and reconfigure our present cultural understandings of woman. Rorty thus posits an understanding of self that has the capacity to resist the cultural dominance of existing descriptions of woman—descriptions that act to both limit the political and social possibilities available in our contemporary liberal culture.
Both political theorists might therefore be fairly described as concerned with unraveling the complex relationship between freedom and difference as now understood within advanced liberal societies. Nonetheless, it is through the course of their academic exchange that the costs and consequences of adopting a particular conceptual style begin to make themselves more clearly visible. The conclusion of this chapter therefore assesses such social and political costs and consequences and suggests how they might be both explained and best avoided. The very parameters of modern liberal freedom and practice thus come to be seen as both positive and negative, an insight that hopes to provoke a more sensitive appraisal of such liberal practices in place of an almost overwhelming, and uncritical, international assumption of their global applicability.
Rorty on Feminism
Richard Rorty has elaborated on the cultural and political role a philosophical pragmatist can play in support of a contemporary social issue that calls for radical cultural transformation. 3 In focusing on the feminist problematique in his 1991 Tanner Lecture on Human Values, Rorty has clearly identified feminism as the contemporary social issue with the greatest revolutionary potential of resulting in positive moral and ethical change in the existing liberal communities of the North Atlantic democracies today. However, in keeping with his pragmatic historicist perspective, Rorty does not approach feminism in the manner of a free–floating sociopolitical project; on the contrary, feminism is firmly located as the latest in a long line of harbingers of intellectual and moral progress. And as such, Rorty comes to situate feminism within the broader historical parameters of a much larger, and continually evolving, political and ethical project—one that could ironically be called Rorty’s postmodern liberal humanism. 4 Feminism viewed from this perspective thus avoids what Rorty believes would be the pitfalls of an essentialist movement, that is, a movement concerned solely with the emancipation of the female subject. This is because, from in the setting of a postmodern liberal humanism, feminism plays a much more inclusive sociocultural role—one that goes beyond gender distinctions and aims instead at “the production of a better set of social constructs than the ones presently available, and thus at the creation of a new and better sort of human being.” 5
In regarding feminism in such an evidently progressive light, Rorty clearly indicates that his postmodern liberal humanism bears very little relation to the classical universal liberal construct of the rational male individual, a construct that feminist theory, among others, has done so much to deconstruct. Rorty’s humanism is metaphysically hollow; it does not claim to be universal in any useful sense. Rather, its content derives solely from the cultural and social context within which a human being might attempt to make the nature of her humanity intelligible. Such a stance therefore recalls the unavoidably ethnocentric nature of any human construction of identity; as a consequence, Rorty’s postmodern humanism denies the validity of questions concerning the absolute ontological, or metaphysical, constitution of the human subject. In this respect, modernist ideologies, including liberal metanarratives, that base their political agenda on such metaphysical constructs are similarly dismissed. 6 Without an intrinsic nature, the question of human identity becomes a highly contested issue, yet such contestation shares a contingent reliance upon the cultural, social, and historical resources within which rival interpretations can only make themselves understood. Rorty’s humanism is thus firmly situated within a pragmatic philosophical tradition that provides no extrasocial or extracultural perspective from where the nature of its humanity could be settled once and for all.
It is the very open–ended nature of Rorty’s humanism that also informs the character of his liberalism. In much the same way that his humanism cannot be addressed without recourse to ethnocentrically situated historical and cultural resources, so too does liberalism come to function as the minimal sociological structure within which such resources might have the political space to coexist and blossom. Rorty’s liberalism thus stands as a loose political framework within which various human natures might have the freedom to pursue their various self–interpretations, untrammelled by the imposition of one version of what humanity can be shown to be. Contrary to the liberalism of the Enlightenment, Rorty does not seek justification for democracy by an appeal to transcultural criteria of rationality. Rather, in the spirit of liberal philosophers such as John Stuart Mill, John Dewey, and Thomas Jefferson, Rorty gives priority to the pragmatic and procedural nature of democracy over and above any philosophical claims. 7 However, unlike the cold utilitarian rationale of Benthamite liberal democracy, Rorty’s democratic impulse recalls the romantic and aesthetic aspect of Mill’s more sensitive political liberalism. 8 Liberal democracy in this respect functions as a means of limiting the interference of the state in the personal life projects of the individual. The logic runs that if there is no one correct way of being, then individuals should be free, in a romantic manner, to “create themselves anew.” The liberal structure does, of course, impose limits upon the influence such life projects can assume. These limits, considered as both community and individual safeguards, manifest themselves in the classic liberal construct of an institutional division between the realms of the public and the private. The private domain in this analysis provides the cultural space within which philosophers and poets can continue to work freely on the creation of novel self–descriptions of what it means to be a human being. The public domain in contrast demands that the role of creativity adopt a self–consciously pragmatic and communal nature. Public politics thus comes to adopt the reformist and practical character appropriate to a political ethos whose contemplation of social problems does not include the radical restructuring of the central mechanisms of governmental organization within which its diversity finds its protection. 9
Rorty’s liberalism and humanism are thus closely interlinked, making little attempt to describe life within a postmodern North Atlantic democracy bar endorsing the necessary double bind of the sociological distinction between the public and the private. Necessary because if there is no ahistorical human being whose potential could be fully realized if only we were to apply the correct plans and policies, government and politics must be limited to a self–consciously defined public space. A double bind because many of the life projects of individuals are concerned with creating stories about who we are, stories that because they cannot be considered true or valid in any strong metaphysical sense must have their cultural impact limited to the private domain of their creators. Pragmatic liberals thus hope to insulate the central political institutions of the state from the adoption of exclusionary political vocabularies that run the risk of subverting a liberal pluralism in the name of an extracultural or ahistorical truth. Nevertheless, although Rorty’s postmodern conjuncture of a liberal humanism might provide a convincing antifoundationalist framework with which support for our existing liberal democracies might continue in lieu of a better alternative, it is still far from clear how this pragmatic perspective can explain the achievement of the moral and social progress implicit in his support for a feminist attempt to create “a new and better sort of human being.”
At first glance it might appear that pragmatists, in forgoing the supposed ethical clarity of a moral realism, have also reduced the prospects of societal change, which could be considered progress, to an inherently chancy affair. However, in understanding the social world in a nonrepresentationalist manner, pragmatists have also come to question the supposed limits of our existing systems of representation. In ceasing to understand representation as objective or true in any nonculturally relative sense, pragmatists have come to regard the manner in which phenomena are named as holding far greater importance than whether such names can be considered accurate or not. Thus, from the pragmatic historicist’s perspective, it is the fashioning of new names, and their subsequent effect on our existing linguistic practices, that comes to shape our relations within the social world. This is to say, along with Susan Hurley, that “the existence of certain shared practices, any of which might not have existed, is all that our having determinate reasons... to do anything rests on.” 10 It is also to take seriously the idea, “made familiar by writers such as Charles Taylor, that interpretation goes all the way down: that what a human being is, for moral purposes, is largely a matter of how he or she describes him or herself.” 11 As a result, linguistic practice and its possible alteration becomes the engine of social and moral progress. Novel linguistic practices, or new names, do not, however, come to be adopted in light of their intrinsic logic or rationale. Such an assumption would, for pragmatists such as Rorty, suggest the existence of a fictitious “rational” community upon whose consensus new descriptions or redescriptions would become widespread. Rather, and in contrast to a realist account, change comes about only because of the creation of a new vocabulary that, in its provision of a new description, renders a new self–understanding possible.
Thus, in recognition of the possibility of change implicit in the fashioning of new names, Rorty has come to consider feminism as functioning in a culturally poetic manner and in this respect possibly even in a socially prophetic mode. Feminists, in finding new descriptions for the people they believe themselves to be, make themselves anew. It is therefore in supporting Marilyn Frye, when she rallies her fellow feminists to “dare to rely on ourselves to make meaning and... to imagine ourselves capable of... weaving the web of meaning which will hold us in some kind of intelligibility,” that Rorty can be seen to take seriously the role of psychological agency inherent in the practice of feminist redescription. 12 He therefore advocates a feminism that is creative, echoing Catherine MacKinnon when she describes feminism as “evoking for woman a role that we have yet to make, in the name of a voice that, unsilenced, might say something that has never been heard.” 13 Admiring feminists not for their revelation of truth but for their creativity and imagination, Rorty interprets such feminist pronouncements as a means of saying that “women are only now beginning to put together a moral identity as women.” 14
Such a statement may strike some as peculiar, for surely women have always had a moral identity and it has been the role of feminism to struggle for the recognition and respect that such an identity should command. But for Rorty, this type of response is both a misconstrual of the nature of a moral identity and consequently a misunderstanding of the sociocultural role that feminism might fulfill. Furthermore, it is the very impulse that makes such sentences seem strange that serves to highlight the philosophical service that pragmatism might render on behalf of feminism. “For pragmatism redescribes both intellectual and moral progress by substituting metaphors of evolutionary progress for metaphors of progressively less distorted perception.” 15 So rather than criticize past social practices for their failure to respect a preexisting and fully formed moral identity, pragmatists instead “identify most of the wrongness of past male oppression with its suppression of past potentiality, rather than in its injustice to past actuality.” 16 Pragmatism thus functions as a philosophical road clearer for the far more heroic and ingenious task that contemporary feminist “poets and prophets” have undertaken. Regarded less as radicals and more as utopians, feminists come to be viewed as social and cultural visionaries. The inventive and courageous attempt to create a moral identity as woman is for Rorty “indistinguishable from the imagination it takes to hear oneself as the spokesperson of a merely possible community, rather than as a lonely, and perhaps crazed, outcast from an actual one.” 17 It is therefore Rorty the philosophical pragmatist who volunteers himself as an academic Sancho Panza for the more daring cultural crusader of a feminist Don Quixote.
Like Don Quixote, feminists are encouraged to break away from the dominant linguistic practices that currently give womanhood its sociocultural content and to take it upon themselves to fashion the language of a “new being.” This is because, after exhausting all the available political and moral space afforded by the existing linguistic practices, feminist separatism presents itself as a temporary strategy whereby women might escape the restrictive gaze of the “arrogant eye” of the moral realist and be free to engage in the linguistic experimentation necessary for the creation of new self–descriptions. The creation of a “new language,” however, is not concerned solely with the invention of new words but also with the “creative misuses of language—familiar words used in ways which initially sound crazy.” 18 Eventually, however, such words and descriptions will become assimilated into wider society whereby their popularity will serve to extend the previously available logical and psychological space “by making descriptions of situations which used to seem crazy seem sane.” 19 Thus, feminist separatism, paraphrasing lesbian activists like Adrienne Rich, has little to do with sexual preference or civil rights and a lot to do with making things easier for the women of the future to define themselves in terms not now available. 20 Yet the prophetic nature of feminism cannot be solely about the role of women, “for roles require a community—a web of social expectations and habits which define the role in question.” 21 Prophetic feminists like MacKinnon and Frye thus envision a totally “new being” not only for women but for society. And the society they foresee is one in which “the male–female distinction is no longer of much interest.” 22 But whether their vision will be realized can only be determined by the fallibility of an as yet unknown future, a future that Rorty’s postmodern liberal humanism hopes to engender but cannot guarantee.
From Irony to Politics?
Because Nancy Fraser regards her roles as both feminist and academic as not only compatible but politically interdependent, it comes as no surprise to find that she remains fundamentally dissatisfied with Rorty’s characterization of feminism in a prophetic light. More unexpected, however, are the grounds upon which Fraser has chosen to contest Rorty’s division of philosophical and cultural labor. It is Fraser’s contention that her disagreement with Rorty is a disagreement within pragmatism. Fraser thus argues for a more “politically engaged” conception of the feminist movement—one that not only stems from a “zero degree” pragmatist stance but in doing so also offers a greater prospect of social change than that of Rorty’s poetic separatism. But before we turn our attention to Fraser’s self–proclaimed, pragmatic socialist–feminism, we must first ask if this is the result of a pragmatic stance—a stance Rorty takes to result in a politics conceptualized in a fragmented, localized, and issue–specific manner—and what Fraser might mean when she claims to take Rorty’s analysis a step further from “prophecy to politics.”
Fraser’s conception of politics is most clearly articulated when she introduces the reader to her book of collected essays, Unruly Practices. It is in outlining the ground upon which her own essays might be considered as examples of intellectual political engagement that Fraser comes to defend a broad conception of politics—a conception based not on pragmatist philosophy but on a “quasi–Gramscian view, in which struggles over cultural meanings and social identities are struggles for cultural hegemony, that is, for the power to construct authoritative definitions of social situations and legitimate interpretations of social needs.” 23 Although Fraser cites Antonio Gramsci as the principal inspiration for her construal of political activity, her characterization of politics as an activity concerned with struggles over cultural meanings and identities might possibly also describe Rorty’s feminist attempt to alter the effects of dominant linguistic practices. However, it is the very question of the priority of pragmatist philosophy to politics that comes to divide Fraser and Rorty.
Whereas Rorty’s feminist politics is constrained by the logic of his pragmatist antifoundations, Fraser’s feminist politics is empowered through the adoption of what I shall call a “politically pragmatic” approach. In this way, Fraser takes “political issues—as opposed to metatheoretical issues about, say, ‘totality’ or ‘foundationalism’—as [her] point of departure.” 24 She thus claims “not to affect a stance of supposed archimedian neutrality but rather to speak out of a sociologically specific, explicitly gendered, and practically engaged situation.” 25 In this respect, she considers her academic endeavors to be “exercises in situated theorizing.” 26 In other words, that in comparison to her male colleagues, she, being both a woman and a feminist academic, is placed in a different position with respect to the levers of social power and consequently to the movements that oppose them. 27 Fraser’s approach is therefore pragmatic in the sense that her engagement with both theory and society starts from a perspective that places her “involvement as a feminist at the centre”; thus her assessment of different philosophical positions is based upon their ability to bring about the kind of social changes that she, as first and foremost a woman and a feminist, feels are necessary. 28 It is this politically pragmatic stance that makes it possible to accuse Michel Foucault of being both “normatively confused” and subsequently “conservative” in his own intellectual endeavors. 29 Furthermore, it is only this self–avowed political perspective that allows Fraser to question both the political utility of the French Derrideans and the critical bite of Habermasian critical theory. 30 It should therefore come as no surprise that when Fraser turns her attention to Rortian pragmatism, she does so in a manner that treats it “pragmatically,” judging it on its ability to induce the type of political change that she believes feminism requires. 31
In an essay written before Rorty made his stance toward feminism explicit, Fraser took issue with what she called the “partition position” of what I have referred to as Rorty’s postmodern liberal humanism. The partition position relates to Rorty’s classically liberal separation of society into the public and the private domain. Fraser’s concern in this instance is that Rorty’s sociological division leads to a narrow conception of politics as that which is conducted only within the domain of the public. This is because Fraser believes that the partition position does not function as a politically liberal insulation against the life projects of particular individuals from the state and vice versa, as Rorty initially intended, but rather that the public/private distinction has come to enforce a gender subtext within the contemporary U.S. social structure. The private sphere for Fraser has come to delimit the family–related domain, resulting in its implicit codification as feminine, whereas the public sphere has come to be associated with labor–oriented issues and as such becomes implicitly masculine in its social codification. 32 As such, Fraser argues, both domestic and personal issues come to be deemed inappropriate for discussion in the officially designated political arena, with the unpalatable consequence that many of the central claims of the feminist movement would also be deemed private and apolitical. It is Fraser’s characterization of feminism as a social movement that is important here, because in addition to feminism, “a whole range of New Left social movements, as illuminated by Gramscian, Foucauldian, and... Althusserian theory, have taught us that the cultural, the medical, the educational—everything that Hannah Arendt called ‘the social,’ as distinct from the private and the public—that all this, too, is political.” 33 For Fraser then, it has been the “social movements of the last hundred or so years [that] have taught us to see the power–laden, and therefore political, character of interactions that classical liberalism considered private.” 34 From this broad sociohistorical perspective, the very act of classifying an issue as private is a “political” act, an insight that Fraser feels Rorty’s partition position ignores, leading us instead to “turn our backs on the last hundred years of social history.” 35
Fraser would certainly have a strong case if Rorty had actually been in the business of classifying issues as either public or private. Furthermore, in suggesting that such domains are essentially contested domains, she might even find evidence in Rorty’s own work that supports such a position. 36 However, what she will not find is a strict elaboration of the formal relationship between the private and the public. This is because Rorty’s partition position is a loose and ill–defined framework that derives its content from the historical and cultural contestation of various social issues as they have come to be articulated at different times in the past. Thus, although Fraser’s charge that all manner of diverse social institutions are political may well be true; for Rorty such a broad–ranging conception of politics is at best banal and at worst of little use in answering questions concerning just how the contemporary educational system is to be improved or how current medical treatment might be made better. It is probably best in this instance to recall Rorty’s endorsement of John Rawls’s method of reflective equilibrium, for his use of the public/private distinction is more akin to an essentially ambiguous relationship—that is, a relationship involving the “give–and–take between intuitions about the desirability of particular consequences of particular actions and intuitions about general principles, with neither having the determining voice.” 37 It is Rorty’s pragmatic historicism that refuses the temptation to dictate in any final or ahistorical manner what issues are to be considered either public or private. And as if to illustrate this very point, we may well regard Rorty’s contemplation of the feminist problematique as a contemporary example of an issue that refuses the straightforward classification of an issue to be addressed in either the private or the public domain. In fact, it is Rorty’s call for a feminist separatism that underlines his belief in the transitory nature of what a society might consider an appropriate political classification for both women and men. Although Fraser clearly recognizes the implications of Rorty’s characterization of feminism for her strict interpretation of a public/private partition, she nevertheless regards such implications as a radical departure from, rather than a further elaboration of, Rorty’s postmodern liberal humanism. She thus views his Tanner lecture as “an instance of the sort of paradigm–breaking transformation that feminists have long said must occur whenever androcentric modes of understanding are forced to confront the problematic of gender.” 38 Furthermore, and in recognition of the “new” social space in which Rorty has situated feminism, Fraser feels that the structure of his thought has come so close to a profound transformation as to nearly warrant the shift being acknowledged as the long–awaited transition from “Irony to Politics,” but not quite. 39
The Needs of a Feminist Politics
Having already defined the political as that which is coeval with what Arendt called the social, Fraser’s wish to create a feminist politics with “a more sociological, institutional and collective spin” is at least consistent with her own definition of how political change has come to manifest itself throughout history. 40 Unlike Rorty, Fraser considers “the agents of historical change to be social movements rather than extraordinary individuals,” and as such she takes issue with the individualizing aspect of Rorty’s characterization of the feminist project as poetic and possibly even prophetic. 41 With this in mind, it is entirely in keeping with Fraser’s approach that she should choose to “advance” Rorty’s interpretation with the help of both a historical and an empirical correction. However, it is Fraser’s further claim—to provide a more consistently pragmatic approach than Rorty’s—that appears incompatible with her socialist–feminist theory of political engagement. Although Fraser claims to hold “the historicist view that feminists are engaged in creating new moral identities and sensibilities rather than in realising or discovering latent or pre–existing ones,” her very first correction of Rorty’s existing approach clearly suggests the contrary. 42
Correcting Rorty on his “empirically false” statement—that a positive moral identity was unavailable to woman prior to the advent of feminism—Fraser lays claim to “discoveries” in feminist scholarship that have proved that positive identities for woman have indeed existed in the past. This discovery is of no small consequence, for “if it turns out that there are usable traditions in which the term woman has figured as a positive moral identity, then we will need another way of characterizing the innovation of feminist movements.” 43 On the basis of this unreferenced historical evidence, Fraser dismisses Rorty’s characterization of the feminist movement as concerned with the creation of a positive moral identity. Instead, she suggests that a more historically appropriate characterization for the innovation of the contemporary feminist movement would be to view them as involved in creating a “collective political identity.” 44 However, Rorty’s ignorance of feminist history does not end here, for Fraser continues to advance her own politically pragmatic (as opposed to philosophically pragmatic) project by showing how Rorty’s ideas have already proved obsolete for the existing feminist movement. In this respect, Rorty’s second mistake is in fact linked to his first, leading his pragmatism to lose its political bite. This is because, although Rorty’s characterization of feminism as engaged with the creation of new descriptions of woman as woman “was a plausible initial response to the discovery that the supposedly human identities constructed by men were actually androcentric, it has not proved a workable political tool.” 45 The reason for this, Fraser flatly asserts, is that “feminism is at base not an exclusive club of prophets, but a mass democratic social movement.” 46 In light of these empirical corrections, feminism for Fraser can be viewed politically, as continuing a pragmatic democratic tradition concerned with the creation of a “discursive space where ‘semantic authority’ is constructed collectively, critically, and democratically, rather than imposed via prophetic pronouncements from mountaintops.” 47 But before we congratulate Fraser on her move from prophecy to politics, we may wish to ask on what grounds she makes her claims to empirical knowledge. And can such grounds be considered, as she claims, to be both coherent to a zero–degree pragmatism—that is, an “antiessentialism with respect to traditional philosophical concepts like truth and reason, human nature and morality” and, at the same time, constitutive of a feminist politics? 48
Let us consider Fraser’s first criticism of Rorty’s claim that a positive moral identity was unavailable to women prior to the advent of feminism. We might ask whether, in this instance, Fraser has reified the role of empirical historical evidence over and above the language and methodological conventions that give such “evidence” meaning. In accusing Rorty of being “empirically false,” Fraser bases her correction on recent feminist scholarship, which she writes “involves retrieving and revaluing marginalized traditions of women’s power and agency that androcentric scholars have neglected and denigrated.” 49 However, if Rorty’s claim is “empirically false,” then it necessarily follows that evidence, provided by feminist scholarship, is “empirically true.” But surely such a claim serves to highlight Fraser’s failure to account for the very historicity of feminist scholarship’s claims to truth and falsehood. If we invoke Ian Hacking, we can, in a classic positivist manner, claim that a sentence or a statement is neither true nor false except insofar as such a statement is a “candidate for truth or falsehood.” 50 The very laudable fact that there now exists a community of feminist scholars concerned with the description of women’s history says much about the advance of “woman” as an academically legitimate category for historical inquiry without laying claim to an advance in any nonacademically relative domain of truth. 51 Such an admission merely admits that the institutional success of feminist scholarship is relative to the concerns and preoccupations of a particular group, in a particular place, during a particular period of time. In claiming that “we now know quite a lot about the cultural construction of womanhood in various periods as a moral identity,” Fraser appears to privilege this latest form of historical knowledge in a manner that fails to reflect on the very contemporary cultural constructions that make such claims to knowledge possible. 52
By accusing Fraser of failing to historicize her own claims to knowledge, we strike right at the core of her feminist project, and as such we are drawn back toward some of her earlier claims for a situated theory. This is because, although Fraser claims to agree with Rorty that social criticism does not require philosophical foundations, she nonetheless does not base her social criticism on empiricism alone; rather, she hopes to underpin social criticism with her own version of a critical social theory. 53 This necessity for a theory is in itself due to Fraser’s self–confessed nonpragmatic conception of politics as that concerned with “struggles for cultural hegemony—that is, for the power to construct authoritative definitions of social situations and legitimate interpretations of social needs.” 54 In accordance with this conception, if Fraser wishes to empower feminists, she must first identify an existing cultural hegemony and then define the grounds upon which her own definitions can be considered authoritative or legitimate, in contrast to those that already exist. Although her corrections of Rorty’s work give some clue as to how this might be attempted, it is in Fraser’s outline of a socialist–feminist theory of late capitalist political culture that we find a more explicit account of her feminist politics. 55
After identifying the manner in which social needs have come to be interpreted in North American capitalist society as an existing cultural hegemony, Fraser sets about defining the terms of the political contestation of those needs. Because Fraser’s definition of “situated” appears to suggest situated with regard to an existing cultural hegemony, her recognition that “needs are culturally constructed and discursively interpreted” nonetheless does not mean that “any need interpretation is as good as any other.” 56 This should come as no surprise, for it is once again Fraser’s conception of politics that requires her counterhegemonic need interpretation to be both authoritative and legitimate; she thus needs to “underline the importance of an account of interpretative justification.” 57 Fraser, in moving away from an account that concentrates on social needs in themselves, turns her attention to providing an explanation of the considerations any justification of a need interpretation should take into account. First, an interpretation of social needs should consider the consequences of holding such an interpretation. Fraser explains that “this means comparing alternative distributive outcomes of rival interpretations.” She continues, “For example, would widespread acceptance of some given interpretation of a social need disadvantage some groups of people vis–à–vis others?” 58 But is it really possible to have needs that do not disadvantage anyone? And if so, from what theoretical perspective could such an assessment be made? However, if such a question suggests the specter of a socialist realism lurking behind Fraser’s theoretical stance, then the uncontested sociological position from where Fraser situates her next questions can only compound the suspicion. In asking “does the interpretation conform to, rather than challenge, societal patterns of dominance and subordination,” Fraser appears to already know what it is that counts as either dominance or subordination in capitalist North American culture. This is also true when she asks if “need interpretations... [are] more or less respectful, as opposed to transgressive, of ideological boundaries that delimit ‘separate spheres’ and thereby rationalize inequality.” 59 Fraser’s position cannot help but look increasingly circular in light of the unreflective manner in which political assumptions function within her rhetorical stance.
However, it is when we consider Fraser’s second stipulation for a justified need interpretation that her earlier claim not to adopt a position of archimedian neutrality appears most in jeopardy. Fraser writes, “All other things being equal” (a situation that previously Fraser argued just being a woman made impossible), “the best need interpretations are those reached by means of communicative processes that most closely approximate the ideals of democracy, equality and fairness.” 60 Admittedly Fraser is aware of the transcendentalist implications of such an “interpretative justification.” Nonetheless, although she acknowledges the Habermasian inspiration of her account, she nevertheless maintains that her pragmatism does not involve the transcendental or quasi–transcendental metainterpretation of which Habermas has fallen foul. She claims instead that, “whereas Habermas purports to ground ‘communicative ethics’ in the conditions of possibility of speech understood universalistically and ahistorically, I consider it a contingently evolved, historically specific possibility.” 61 But surely Fraser is both ambivalent and mistaken in making such a claim. She is ambivalent about whether the United States has either “evolved” a communicative ethics or whether it is just a “possibility”; and she is mistaken in thinking that even if the concept of “communicative ethics” is made culturally and historically specific, it no longer carries any transcendental connotations. Is it not a metaphysical deceit to believe that democracy might attain, rather than bravely strive after, a linguistic exchange that is free from the influence of power, or any other divisive cultural influences, and as such could provide the grounds upon which “equality and fairness” might be decided—in a language that could communicate everything that might want to be said?
If we are to take Rorty’s pragmatism seriously, in the manner that he takes MacKinnon’s feminism seriously, we will need to recognize “that unless women fit into the logical space prepared for them by current linguistic and other practices, the law”—or in this instance communicative ethics—“does not know how to deal with them.” 62 The very idea that we might reach a situation whereby we have achieved linguistic totalism and thus hold all the possible descriptions of woman within our grasp is once again to believe that we will finally hold a satisfactory description of what a woman is. Although Fraser has encouraged the pluralism implicit in the practice of “feminisms” in the past, 63 it is due to her own theoretical construction of politics as hegemony that when confronted with Rorty’s poetic characterization of feminism she nonetheless cannot free herself of the essentialist impulse to ask, “Which new descriptions will count as ‘taking the view point of woman as woman’?” and, “Which women will be empowered to impose their semantic authority on the rest of us?” 64 And it is in her refusal to accept Rorty’s chancy and falibilistic account of how new descriptions for woman might come about that Fraser reveals a transcendentalist “need” to find a means of settling the issue once and for all. It is therefore in her own characterization of feminism as “a mass democratic movement” that Fraser provides an answer to a question that Rorty feels there is no need to ask.
Although Fraser may hope for the creation of an “institutional framework of a classless, multicultural society without racism, sexism or hetrosexism—an international society of decentralised, democratic, self–managing collectivities,” 65 it is far from clear that her own critical social theory does, as she hopes, “help to clarify the prospects for democratic and egalitarian social change by sorting out the emancipatory from the repressive possibilities of needs talk.” 66 In fact, there is a sneaking totalism present in Fraser’s attempt to cook up a sociological stirfry—evident in her ever lengthening self–descriptions (e.g., democratic–socialist–feminist–pragmatist)—that informs her desire to hold society and culture in all its “multivalent diversity” within the grasp of one large “politically useful” critical social theory. 67 And even if you share the utopia that serves to animate Fraser’s hopes, it in no way follows that a critical social theory is required to engender its realization. Furthermore, what seems most apparent is that Fraser’s claim to adopt a pragmatic approach in her social criticism has little to do with the pragmatic philosophical tradition and a lot to do with a utilitarian approach to theory construction, a construction founded upon an uncontested and self–fulfilling Marxist–inspired conception of what politics is. 68 We can thus argue that it has been Fraser’s consistent endorsement of an unswerving identification of the political with struggles over cultural hegemony that has forced her to adapt and alter all manner of divergent theoretical and philosophical insights, sewing them into a unified body that might serve as a replacement for the Marxist working–class struggle in which she was once an active participant. Her hopes thus appear directed at the provision of a theoretical basis upon which to raise a feminist consciousness, a consciousness that might then join with others in a united social movement—one that finds solidarity under the one all–encompassing banner of a Feminist Politics. 69 All this I fear betrays Fraser’s project as one more attempt to reclothe an old Marxist dummy in the latest feminist garb; such clothes, however, no longer fit comfortably with the diversity and pluralism of contemporary sites of cultural contestation. Surely Rorty is at least right in thinking that theory should no longer feel obligated to tailor its requirements to the now outmoded political template of sociologically clumsy structures, such as the apparatus of the ideological state. 70
Nonetheless, before concluding that Rorty alone can lay claim to the insights of a pragmatist–feminist conjuncture, we would do well to recall that it is Fraser who has the greater personal experience of feminism, and this should not be quickly dismissed. Throughout Fraser’s work we find examples of the type of change a feminist sensibility has already brought about—change that has occurred in a local and noncoordinated manner, like the creation of battered women’s shelters, the provision of women’s support groups, and the refusal to accept the sexual exclusion of various workplace practices and hierarchies. Feminists can also be seen to take on issues raised by the new reproductive technology, the right to life, sexual abuse, and sexual harassment—which in a politically oblique manner leads to an engagement with the more conventionally understood political issues, such as the organization of work and child care. Such feminist activities call for action from official political authorities and, more subtly and yet more important, for transformations in the ethical sensibilities of society in general. It is only Fraser’s theoretical conception of the political that forces her to combine all these diverse activities into one social movement, leading her to identify transformations in power and morality with large institutional changes instead of considering the revolutionary impact of the small, personal, and incremental effects of existing feminist causes on a more loosely yet historically specific understanding of the relationships of freedom and practice as currently experienced in liberal democratic culture.
The Fantasy of Feminist Freedom
However, in refuting Fraser’s “politically” pragmatic attack on Rorty’s thought, are we forced to conclude that Rorty’s feminist analysis stands uncontested as the sole inheritor of a pragmatist perspective? Possibly not, and on what better grounds to reconsider Rorty’s position than his own? Although he encourages his fellow academics to read the historical record in the manner of Burke’s comic frame to free them from “the idea that a materialism and a sense of historicity more radical than Marx’s will somehow provide a brand–new, still bigger (albeit still blurrier) object—an object perhaps called Language or Discourse—around which to weave our fantasies,” has not Rorty himself failed to heed what he has advocated for others? 71 And even though his intention may well have been to continue a process of cultural disenchantment, might not his own feminist poetics reveal the weaving of a Rortian linguistic fantasy?
Although Rorty agrees with Chris Weedon that “one should not view language as a transparent tool for expressing facts but as the material in which particular often conflicting views of facts are constructed,” Rorty nevertheless wishes to claim that such conflicts occur in a positive dialectical manner. 72 This is because it has been Rorty’s contention that moral and intellectual progress will be achieved only if “the linguistic and other practices of the common culture... come to incorporate some of the practices characteristic of imaginative and courageous [feminist] outcasts.” 73 In light of this belief, feminists have to break away from mainstream linguistic practices because, as with other progressive movements of the past, “had there been no stage of separation there would have been no subsequent stage of assimilation.” 74 Rorty cannot, however, provide reasons why a new feminist language might come to be assimilated into wider U.S. culture, and this is because he has forgone the once “comforting belief that competing groups will always be able to reason together on the basis of plausible and neutral premises.” 75 As such, “prophecy... is all that non–violent movements can fall back on when argument fails.” 76 Yet for feminist prophecy to be confirmed, our approach to the history of the future must also conform to Rorty’s whiggishly dialectical account of how historical change, via the role of language, has come to take place. As a consequence, Rorty cannot provide any analysis of how “the new language spoken by the separatist group may gradually get woven into the language taught in the schools,” at least not one that does not start to look increasingly circular. In fact, all he can offer on the back of his antifoundationalist pragmatism is hope.
Is it possible that Rorty has overplayed the extent of cultural agency available within the “fashioning of new names”? In holding that “all awareness is a linguistic affair,” does not Rorty suggest the presence of a cultural and linguistic idealism at work within his analysis—that is, an individualist idealism that exaggerates the moral and social possibilities of freedom within his project of redescription? Even without adopting Fraser’s Gramscian analysis of the political, we might nonetheless have more than a little sympathy with her attempt to engage with some of the institutional structures that influence the realm of possible redescriptions for contemporary woman. Might not woman be especially subject to the limitations of identifications determined by the U.S. welfare state? And even if we refuse to make an invidious distinction between appearance and reality “in favour of a distinction between beliefs which serve some purposes and beliefs which serve other purposes—for example, the purposes of one group and those of another,” might we still not wish to contest that the playing field upon which such groups confront each other is not one of equality but one permeated with the differential effects of power? 77 After all, is Fraser not correct in thinking that some of our cultural institutions and social practices do have more power in the fashioning of names than others? And although Rorty might provide a convincing explanation of how language comes to shape our thoughts about ourselves (a position, borrowed from Wilfred Sellars, that he calls psychological nominalism), he fails to provide any account of how such social practices and personal thoughts have come to interact.
Interestingly, it is also Sellars who appears to recognize the sociological failings present in Rorty’s, and possibly even Fraser’s, oscillating philosophical stance when he writes, “One seems forced to choose between the picture of an elephant which rests on a tortoise (what supports the tortoise?) and the picture of a great Hegelian serpent of knowledge with its tail in its mouth (where does it begin?).” Dissatisfied with either of the options available, Sellars concludes that “neither will do.” 78 So, might there be another route through the philosophical minefield of history and metaphysics? Hacking believes there is. Calling attention to Rorty’s own reliance on the historical influence of Descartes for his subsequent explanation of the dominance of a particular style of philosophical reasoning—that is, one preoccupied with the search for foundations—Hacking wonders whether “perhaps Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, with its central doctrine of ‘conversation,’ will some day seem as linguistic a philosophy as the analysis emanating from Oxford a generation or two ago.” 79 Although Rorty’s linguistic stance is the result of a historicist approach to the practice of philosophy, Rorty has failed to recognize that a historicist approach to other cultural and social practices may yet reveal the durability of other historically specific styles of reasoning. Although not claiming to reveal any ahistorical truths, such historicist accounts may nonetheless provide novel descriptions of how it is that certain social practices have come to dictate what might count as the institutional parameters for the possibility of redescription in the present. 80 One such example that Hacking has provided is the history of statistics. 81
Redescribing Freedom
Hacking writes, “The bureaucracy of statistics imposes not just by creating administrative rulings but by determining classifications within which people must think of themselves and of the actions that are open to them.” 82 Hacking’s disagreement with Rorty is therefore not with his claim that a new type of being can be created through a project of redescription (the very project with which Rorty has come to characterize feminism), for Hacking too believes that “categories of people come into existence at the same time as kinds of people come into being to fit those categories, and there is a two–way interaction between these processes.” 83 However, Hacking would have to contest Rorty’s extension of the new philosophical freedom created by the acceptance of the pragmatist tradition within the discipline of philosophy to the whole of society. Although it would be difficult to identify limits in the creative and imaginative attempt to redescribe woman in the uninhibited realm of language, Fraser may well have a strong case for arguing that all the self–redescription in the world will not transform the governmentally mediated relationships of power within which many women find themselves subject.
I suspect that the answer lies in the tension between Rorty’s picture of the self as a centerless and contingent web of beliefs and desires and his separate endorsement of the overriding desire of women to unite such contingencies into a unifying story about oneself. 84 In this respect it seems appropriate to think of the writing of Marie Cardinal, whose international best–seller, The Words to Say It, describes her personal experience of seven years of psychoanalysis. 85 It is Cardinal, in a similar way to Rorty, who writes of the personal freedom she has come to value through creating a personal vocabulary from within that she has been able to articulate what it means to be a woman. Like Rorty, however, Cardinal then goes on to extend this very personal experience of the liberating effects of language, as discovered through countless hours of therapy, to the more collective enterprise of a feminist politics. She writes, “Speech is an act. Words are objects. Invisible, palpable, revealing.... Men hermetically sealed these words, imprisoned women within them. Women must open them if they want to survive. It is an enormous, dangerous and revolutionary task that we undertake.” 86
Cardinal’s writing thus makes explicit what Rorty assumes. It is clear that Cardinal’s very conception of freedom derives directly from the comparatively recent “discoveries” of psychology and psychoanalysis. That the sense of self understood by such “psy sciences” (as Nikolas Rose refers to them) is taken for granted by Rorty says much for the cultural prevalence of the psy effect and little for Rorty’s narrowly focused philosophical historicism. In much the same way that Hacking has come to approach the history of statistics and probability, Rose has provided a cultural history of the sciences of psy. 87 Like Hacking, Rose has attempted to redescribe the history of psychiatry, psychology, and psychoanalysis in order to understand how such linguistic innovation has enabled us to think and act in new ways, to fashion a new human existence, and as such to treat ourselves and others in new and historically particular ways. In this respect, Rose does not deny the freedom of which Cardinal writes and that Rorty takes for granted; rather he hopes to increase the prospects of freedom not by endorsing the practices of psy but by attempting to describe the manner in which such practices have become central to the government of human conduct in advanced liberal democracies. 88
The subjectifying effects of psy are not simply a matter of the symbolic violence of a particular meaning system: language is structured into variegated relations which grant powers to some and delimit the powers of others, which enable some to judge and some to be judged, some to cure and some to be cured, some to speak truth and others to acknowledge its authority and embrace it, aspire to it or submit to it. And if, in our vernacular speech, we think of ourselves in psy terms, we do so only through the relations we have established with this truth regime: for we each play our own part, as parents, teachers, partners, lovers, consumers and sufferers, in these contemporary psychological machinations of the self. 89
From this historicist perspective we might profitably view both Rorty and Cardinal as principally concerned with the creative freedom and individual agency possible within a psychologically and thus self–contained conception of the self at the expense of the very “public” languages, practices, and techniques that have come to constitute such a psychological understanding of personal agency in the first place. Freedom might therefore be redescribed in terms that neither privilege the psychological agency of the modern self nor underestimate the political relationships of power within which such selves are inextricably woven. International relations could therefore benefit from a distinction already proposed in sociology—that is, a distinction between “freedom as a formula of resistance and freedom as a formula of power.” 90 Thus, the ubiquity of freedom as presented in both the expansion of the “free market” and the “free world,” of liberal economies and liberal democracies, may come to be better understood as containing certain ethical and political costs, costs that might be better approached from an internal and “untimely meditation” upon our contemporary practices of freedom—freedom understood as constituted both economically, psychologically, and as such inextricably socially.
For international relations, such a distinction offers the possibility of separating “our” internal liberal political inquiries from the many international struggles whose participants may never have been subject to our particular historically specific brand of liberal freedom. This is important, because through invoking such a distinction we might remain at conceptual liberty to investigate the diverse international political and ethical issues presented by such struggles, without obscuring the “different” cultural and historical traditions within which such “foreign” struggles find their distinctive character. Far from discouraging empathy for the plight of fellow humans, such a distinction encourages us to contemplate the long–term and political effects of our actions without obscuring such inquiries under the knee–jerk responses of a normative liberal sentiment. We might then stop to ask questions concerning the cultural constitution of freedom before suggesting such freedom as the obvious solution to conflicts we may not yet fully understand. Moreover, such a perspective would not breed paralysis as some have argued, and although not immediately attributable to any one political persuasion, it may yet encourage the intellectual oxygen within which novel redescriptions of our contemporary international transformations may avoid making overeager normative judgments as to the rightness or wrongness of political change. Alternatively, academics may well come to expel greater energy on questions concerning how such foreign struggles for freedom might also be struggles of resistance from the increasingly dominant power of liberal (or, more appropriately, neoliberal) freedom as it is currently being promoted by our international liberal institutions. 91 Greater attention might also be paid to considering relationships of obligation and commitment rather than encouraging the often emotional, sentimental, and short–lived political and ethical interventions that currently masquerade under the normative neutrality of “humanitarian assistance.” 92 In this respect too, feminists might also benefit from such a distinction, allowing questions of women’s empowerment to take on a more culturally sensitive international perspective, without denying the existence of what Christine Sylvester has called “empathetic co–operation,” in the face of deep–seated, and possibly little understood, cultural differences. 93
Proscribing such an “untimely meditation” within the practices of liberal democracy thus recalls the philosopher upon whose supposition this chapter takes its title, for it was Friedrich Nietzsche who first suggested that history might fulfill such a “political” task. 94 Such histories, in their attempt to redescribe our contemporary practices of freedom, hope to create new opportunities for future understandings—understandings that might herald a time in which women and men may have greater freedom from the current truths within which they often unhappily find themselves subject. Rorty, in supposing women to be the creators of their own truth, can be charged with overlooking the historical manner in which our contemporary linguistic practices have enmeshed themselves with our contemporary practices of power. Fraser, although not guilty of Rorty’s linguistic idealism, and although keen to engage with a more detailed analysis of liberal political culture than that presented by Rorty’s postmodern liberal humanism, nevertheless fails to account for the “positivity” within many contemporary governmental practices and subsequently falls into a metaphysical trap of believing that we will one day not merely make things better but get them right. Fraser, in trying to be all things to all women, thus comes to posit a sociological truth—one that results in a totalizing feminist politics, which, despite all her claims to do the contrary, fails to assist feminists in their exploration of the often sociologically discrete links between the very personal experience of women in liberal culture and the larger political history of how our current neoliberal governmentality attempts to give such experiences sociological and political authority.
In conclusion, I would like to draw attention back to the quotes with which I prefaced this essay, for I hope to have demonstrated—although not in sufficient detail—that Rorty’s characterization of the conjuncture between pragmatism and feminism is not the only possible means by which an interpretation of philosophical pragmatism can be of use to feminism. Although I consider Fraser’s “politically pragmatic” approach to be philosophically self–destructive, I would nevertheless hope to have made some preliminary suggestions that will go some way to contesting Rorty’s claim that “Deweyan pragmatism when linguistified... gives you all that is politically useful in the Nietzche–Heideggar–Derrida–Foucault tradition.” 95 There is still plenty of work for politically inspired academics to pursue, and although our conception of politics may have radically altered from the Marxist–Leninism of old, it is in continuing to suppose truth to be a woman that we develop an ethos that both inspires intellectuals to create new possibilities for the future and guards against the dogmatism that both litters the past and requires our continued contestation in the present.
Endnotes
Note 1: Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, p. 31. Back.
Note 2: Derrida, Spurs, p. 53. Back.
Note 3: Another good example of Rorty’s reply to the charge of social conservatism raised by Hilary Putman can be found in his “Does Academic Freedom Have Philosophical Presuppositions?” Back.
Note 4: Feminism thus comes to be placed alongside such esteemed company as, “for example, Plato’s Academy, the early Christians meeting in the catacombs, the invisible Copernican colleges of the Seventeenth century, groups of working men gathering to discuss Thomas Paine’s pamphlets”; see Rorty, “Feminism and Pragmatism,” p. 138. Back.
Note 5: Rorty, “Feminism and Pragmatism,” p. 140. Back.
Note 6: As an example of his evenhanded antifoundationalist approach, consider Rorty’s “Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality.” Also see “Priority of Democracy to Philosophy” and “Postmodern Bourgeois Liberalism” in Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth. Back.
Note 7: See Rorty’s essay “Priority of Democracy,” in his Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, for a full account of the ongoing “experiment” that liberal democracy comes to represent once foundationalist philosophical liberalism has been abandoned. In particular, see pp. 192–193 for the resigned admission that such a stance might entail an unavoidable condition of paradox and self–referentiality. Back.
Note 8: See Rorty’s essay “Method, Social Science, Social Hope,” in Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, pp. 203–208 (especially footnote 16), for an explicit account of his endorsement of the liberalism of Mill and Dewey. See also Rorty’s “Moral Identity and Private Autonomy: The Case of Foucault,” in Rorty, Essays on Heidegger and Others, for a further elaboration of the procedural role of the public/private distinction. In this instance there might also be good reason to assume that Rorty’s conception of freedom remains particularly enamored of Mill’s project of self–realization as expressed in On Liberty. In this respect, see Morris, Versions of the Self: Studies in English Autobiography from John Bunyan to Stuart Mill. Clearly Mill’s early feminist thoughts are also of relevance here; see J. S. Mill, “The Subjection of Woman” (1861). Back.
Note 9: See Rorty, “Private Irony and Liberal Hope,” in Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, pp. 73–95. Back.
Note 10: Rorty, in his “Feminism and Pragmatism” (p. 127), quotes from a review of Susan Hurley’s Natural Resources by Samuel Scheffler in the London Review of Books. Back.
Note 11: Rorty, “Feminism and Pragmatism,” p. 135. Back.
Note 12: Frye, The Politics of Reality, p. 80 (quoted in Rorty, “Feminism and Pragmatism,” p. 132). Back.
Note 13: MacKinnon, “On Exceptionality,” in her Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law, p. 77 (quoted in Rorty, “Feminism and Pragmatism,” p. 125). Back.
Note 14: Rorty, “Feminism and Pragmatism,” p. 134. Back.
Note 18: Ibid., p. 127. We might also consider Nancy Fraser’s examples of date rape, sexual harrassment, etc., as examples of just such words; see Fraser, “From Irony to Prophecy to Politics,” p. 158. Back.
Note 19: Rorty, “Feminism and Pragmatism,” p. 127. Back.
Note 20: Ibid., p. 137. See Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence, p. 17. Back.
Note 21: Rorty, “Feminism and Pragmatism,” p. 140. Back.
Note 23: Fraser, “An Apologia for Academic Radicals,” in her Unruly Practices, p. 6 (italics added). Back.
Note 24: Fraser, Unruly Practices, p. 7 (italics in original). Back.
Note 29: Ibid., chapters 1, 2. Back.
Note 30: Ibid., chapters 4, 6. Back.
Note 31: Ibid., chapter 5. Back.
Note 33: Ibid., p. 102, in particular, footnote 24. Back.
Note 36: See Higgins, “A Question of Style,” pp. 32–34. Furthermore, and in direct relation to the objective of this article, although I would still argue that identity remains an “essentially contested” human condition, I would also hope to emphasize that after coming to such a philosophical conclusion, the next step is to try and elaborate just how such contestations currently take place. See the section “Redescribing Freedom” in this article for some suggestions as to how this might be done with regard to feminism. Back.
Note 37: See Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, p. 183, especially footnotes 20 and 21. Back.
Note 38: Fraser, “From Irony to Prophecy to Politics,” p. 156. Back.
Note 40: It is important to realize that Fraser’s use of the term social differs significantly from Arendt’s own use of the term in The Human Condition. Fraser writes, “Arendt and I both understand the social as a historically emergent societal space specific to modernity. And we both understand the emergence of the social as tending to undercut or blur an earlier, more distinct separation of public and private spheres.” Revealingly, Fraser does not choose to criticize Rorty’s use of the public/private distinction in such a straightforwardly historical and empirical manner when she deals with the matter in her “Singularity or Solidarity” (Fraser, Unruly Practices); this I believe is because Fraser wishes to judge and co–opt the idea of the “social” rather than merely assert its empirical existence as a specific historical event. Thus, although agreeing with Arendt that “one salient defining feature of the social is the emergence of heretofore ‘private’ needs into public view,” Fraser goes on to explain that Arendt’s own negative interpretation of this occurrence was simply a consequence of her assumption that “needs are wholly natural.” In contrast, Fraser’s own assumption (informed by her own reading of Foucault) “that needs are irreducibly interpretative and that need interpretations are in principle contestable” makes her consider the event as “a generally positive development.” Fraser thus considers the emergence of the social as heralding the “(possible) flourishing of politics,” unlike Arendt who views the events as leading to “death of politics.” However, whereas Arendt’s interpretation is also based upon a more empirical claim—that the social has led to “the triumph of administration and instrumental reason”—Fraser’s optimism is premised upon the belief that there is another possible outcome from such events, namely: “an alternative socialist–feminist, dialogical mode of need interpretation and a participatory–democratic institutionalization of the social.” See Fraser, Unruly Practices, p. 160, footnote 32. I make this point simply to illustrate the manner in which Fraser approaches both historical and empirical information. This is because I believe she conflates two approaches that do not sit easily together. For although Fraser has argued that feminists can still embrace both “large historical narratives” and what she calls “analyses of societal macrostructures” because of the need for “large theoretical tools... to address large theoretical problems,” Fraser’s own interpretation of the historical event of the emergence of the “social” merely illustrates the imposition of a theoretically prescriptive analysis onto a decontextualized empirical historical “fact.” I suspect that in Fraser’s haste to build a large theoretical feminist edifice, she has only increased the locations in which problems can occur. For treating the “social” as an idea without due care to historical context, see Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas.” Also, for a more recent and broad–ranging defense of the uses and abuses of history, see Skinner, “Reply to My Critics.” Also for an alternative, and in my view more historically sensitive, account of the social, see Donzelot, The Policing of Families. Also see Riley, who concentrates explicity on the relationship of women to the social, in her Am I That Name? (chapter 3). In relation to the last two references, it is not that Fraser is unaware of the scholarship surrounding the social, but it is her claim that such work can be made consistent with her own critical social theory that is being questioned. Back.
Note 41: Fraser, Unruly Practices, p. 107. Back.
Note 42: Fraser, “From Irony to Prophecy to Politics,” p. 156. Back.
Note 44: Ibid., p. 157 (italics in original). Back.
Note 45: Ibid., p. 158 (italics added). Back.
Note 48: Fraser, Unruly Practices, p. 106. Back.
Note 49: Fraser, “From Irony to Prophecy to Politics,” p. 157. Fraser does not provide references for such scholarship, but this may be because the article is a published version of a conference lecture. Nonetheless, the use of history and empirical “evidence” within her other publications remains questionable: see note 48. Back.
Note 50: See Hacking, “Language, Truth, and Reason.” Back.
Note 51: This community of inquirers is by no means a homogenous group, and the very plausibility of a research methodology based on the category of woman is in itself contested; see Riley, Am I That Name? Also see the impressive series, edited by Duby and Perot, A History of Women. Fraser’s more recent attempts with Linda Gordon to co–opt historical research for the feminist cause do not escape the criticisms raised here. See Fraser and Gordon, “A Genealogy of Dependency.” Also see Fraser and Gordon, “Reclaiming Social Citizenship: Beyond the Ideology of Contract Versus Charity,” in the same volume, for an example of how the same old metanarrative of capitalism and ideology come to undermine any claims to a Foucauldian genealogical method. Back.
Note 52: Such possibilities are what Rorty views as one of the advantages of liberal democratic culture, for Rorty claims his ethnocentric stance is still one that offers “a lot of opportunities for self–criticism and reform.” See Rorty’s introduction to Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, p. 15, especially footnotes 28 and 29, for direct mention of Fraser. Back.
Note 53: See Fraser and Nicholson, “Social Criticism Without Philosophy.” Also see note 47 with regard to the following criticisms of Fraser’s approach. Back.
Note 54: Fraser, Unruly Practices, p. 6 (italics added). Back.
Note 55: See Fraser, Unruly Practices, pp. 161–187. Back.
Note 57: Ibid. For how such a final account stands in direct contradiction of a pragmatist philosophy, see Fish, “What Makes an Interpretation Acceptable?” pp. 253–266. Such interpretive criteria also recall the methodological criteria of Karl Popper; for why such criteria only inhibit experimentation and progress rather than guarantee it, see Hacking, “Language, Truth, and Reason.” Back.
Note 58: Fraser, Unruly Practices, p. 182. Back.
Note 61: Ibid., p. 187 (italics added). Back.
Note 62: See Rorty, “Feminism and Pragmatism,” p. 126. Back.
Note 63: See Fraser and Nicholson, “Social Criticism Without Philosophy.” Back.
Note 64: Fraser, “From Irony to Prophecy to Politics,” p. 157 (italics in original). Back.
Note 65: Fraser, Unruly Practices, p. 108. Back.
Note 67: In fact, it is probably fair to say that Fraser does not regard the charge of totalism as in itself negative; however, Fraser’s position has altered slightly since she promoted that the practices of “feminisms” (plural) in her article with Linda Nicholson, “Social Criticism Without Philosophy,” and more recently in “Pragmatism, Feminism, and the Linguistic Turn,” she has taken to criticizing other feminists (in this particular instance Judith Butler—see pp.163–164) for not providing the theoretical equipment necessary to “conceptualise the social totality.” And Fraser now also makes the further claim that what she currently labels her neopragmatist approach can “encompass the full range of processes by which the sociocultural meanings of gender are constructed and contested” (p. 158). Once again, however, she also reveals exactly why feminism needs such an all–encompassing theory, for “it would maximize our ability to contest the current gender hegemony and to build a feminist counter hegemony” (p. 158). Clearly, Fraser’s neopragmatism still requires a Gramscian conception of the political to provide the foundations for her feminist “politics.” As such, Fraser’s approach remains pragmatic only in an everyday sense, one that determines her reading of other feminist theorists insofar as she approaches each text already knowing what it is that feminists need. In this respect I would firmly support Butler’s call “For a Careful Reading.” Back.
Note 68: Fraser is in some ways very upfront about her Marxist roots; see Unruly Practices, p. 2. Back.
Note 69: See Rorty’s “Movements and Campaigns,” in Dissent (winter 1995), pp. 55–60; and his later dispute with Steven Lukes in the following issue (spring 1995), pp. 263–265, for a good discussion of why the left wing feels a “political” requirement for movements rather than campaigns. Back.
Note 70: See Fraser, Unruly Practices, especially footnote 26, p. 160, for how Fraser’s “JAT,” a juridical–administrative–therapeutic state apparatus, relates to an Althusserian Ideological State Apparatus (ISA) and how all this sociological structuralism relates to a particular reading of Foucault, one that Rorty explicitly contests in “Moral Identity and Private Autonomy: The Case of Foucault” in his Essays on Heidegger and Others. See especially p. 198 for reference to Fraser. Back.
Note 71: See Rorty, “The End of Leninism and History as a Comic Frame,” p. 225. This idea is what Rorty considers to be Stanley Fish’s antifoundationalist theory hope, the very position with which he has labeled Nancy Fraser in the past; see Rorty, “Pragmatism and Feminism,” notes 15 and 17, pp. 142–143; and Fish, Doing What Comes Naturally, pp. 322–323. Back.
Note 72: Rorty, “Feminism and Pragmatism,” p. 146. Back.
Note 78: Sellars, “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,” p. 170 in Sellars, Science, Perception, and Reality. Back.
Note 79: Hacking, “Five Parables,” p. 109. I would like to thank Quentin Skinner for directing me toward this particular article; naturally, however, the fruits or failings of its subsequent interpretation are my own responsibility. For a similar use of Hacking’s insights for the discipline of anthropology, see Rabinow, “Representations Are Social Facts,” p. 237. Back.
Note 80: For an excellent introduction to the political role of histories of the present, upon which my own perspective is based, see Burchell, Gordon, and Miller, The Foucault Effect; and Barry, Osborne, and Rose, Foucault and Political Reason. Back.
Note 81: See Hacking, The Emergence of Probability and The Taming of Chance. Back.
Note 82: Hacking, “How Should We Do the History of Statistics?” p. 194. Back.
Note 83: Hacking, “Five Parables,” p. 122. Back.
Note 84: See footnote 22 on p. 144 of Rorty’s “Feminism and Pragmatism”; and Rorty’s “The Contingency of Selfhood” in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, as examples of this tension. Back.
Note 85: Cardinal, The Words to Say It. Back.
Note 86: Cardinal, In Other Words, p. 41. Back.
Note 87: See Rose, The Psychological Complex: Psychology, Politics, and Society in England 1869–1939; Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self; and Rose, Inventing Ourselves: Psychology, Power, and Personhood. For a clear example of Hacking’s similar methodological approach as well as a revealing overlap in their research interests, see Hacking, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory. Back.
Note 88: In this regard, while Cardinal may represent the “positivity” within the freedom of “psy,” we would do well to remember the negativity that such sciences also create. See Kate Millett’s moving account of her experience of psychiatric treatment—treatment that, possibly unlike in America or France, is still very much an unpleasant reality within British medical institutions. See The Loony Bin Trip. The facts that Millett was a high–profile feminist before she was put into psychiatric care (see Millett’s best seller, Sexual Politics), and that Cardinal only became a feminist after her literary treatment of psychoanalysis may also remind readers of the manner in which feminists are very much situated within the relations of power that our contemporary practices of freedom entail—thus the need to try and conceptualize such freedom in a more politically sophisticated manner. Back.
Note 89: Rose, “Assembling the Modern Self,” pp. 241–242. Back.
Note 90: Rose, “Towards a Critical Sociology of Freedom,” p. 3. Back.
Note 91: As an example of the type of conflict to which I refer, consider the struggle of Mexico’s Mayan Indians as they confront the internationally sanctioned neoliberal reform of the PRI government. In this regard, see Higgins, “Lessons from the Indigenous.” Back.
Note 92: See Escobar, The Making and Unmaking of the Third World; and Higgins, “Non–governmental Organisations.” Back.
Note 93: Sylvester, Feminist Theory and International Relations in a Postmodern Era. Back.
Note 94: Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations. Back.
Note 95: Rorty, “Feminism and Pragmatism,” p. 129. Back.
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