Date: Fri, 26 Sep 97 01:58:45 UT
From: "Margaret Morganroth Gullette" <mgullette-AT-classic.msn.com>
Subject: RE: M-FEM: Habermas, the lifeworld, and the feminine


Rob Schaap writes:
... For Habermas, the historical subject is not the proletariat
(historically dissolved) but human reason.  History is not dynamic from
class in-itself to class for-itself but reason in-itself (distorted
communication) to reason
for-itself (undistorted communication).  Communicative reason is
universally human, so it always already immanent in our inevitable
intersubjectivity.

Agnes Heller sees in Habermas a fighter for emancipation as a 'collective
affair depending on the emancipatory interest of the dominated' who
perceives a logical crisis in the constrained communication characteristic
of corporate capitalism.

So we're left with a problem:  (and the reason Habermas has been retreating
ever further of late?) - capitalism commodifies the currency of social
being as it never has before, corporate mediation pertains everywhere we
communicate (I'm nervously - morosely - awaiting 'Next Generation' Internet
as I write: Capitalism rebuilding the net from scratch because it can't
satisfactorily domesticate the net we have today - a technology currently
significant precisely because it was not built for capitalist ends), *and
women, in whom H had expressed some confidence as the sacred carriers and
harbingers of communicative action in 1984 (*TCA*), are being dragged into
commodity labour and concomitant
instrumental self-definition at ever increasing rates*.

A quick note, I don't say the shift to wage labour does not constitute
material (and otherwise, for that matter) advance for women - I merely say
that I think Habermas was basing his faith in the historical role of women
on their traditional location in an unsystematised (uncommodified,
uncolonised by predominant instrumental rationality) 'life world'.  In
short, society's 'residual' cultural elements (Raymond Williams's wording)
or, in this context,  practical/intersubjective/communicative rationality
(Habermas's wording) - upon which social transformation depends - resides
in those least colonised (read marginalised) by 'the system': women.
Margaret Gullette replies:

	One text you might want to look at is Nancy Fraser's chapter on Habermas in 
Unruly Practices. She describes what she's doing in her Introduction. "His 
social theory reproduces androcentric bias at the level of its basic 
categorial [sic] framework. It presupposes rather than challenges dualistic, 
ideological ways of counterposing 'family' and 'economy,' 'private' and 
'public,' symbolic reproduction' and 'material reproduction,' 'system' and 
'lifeworld.'" (Elsewhere Martin Kohli, an expert on age theory, says that 
integrating system and lifeworld is a major challenge for a critical sociology 
that wants to understand human development. 

	Fraser is to Habermas here as Sandra Bartky is to Foucault in Femininity and 
Domination: the respectful feminist critic who points out the neglects of the 
thinker who has not taken gender into account and thus opens up an entire 
world of analysis and social understanding. And in her chapters on oppressed 
women providing their own form of "needs interpretation" (the last chapters of 
the book) she does come directly to the point Rob and Malgosia are discussing, 
about how women can be communicative challengers to the system. 

BTW, Fraser gives me a way to think about why age theory has been so difficult 
for the left and left feminists who should find it so exciting a project. I 
paraphrase or rather rewrite from p. 168 of Unruly Practices.
	If midlife aging, for example, is enclaved as a 'personal' or 'domestic' 
matter and if public discourse about this phenomenon, if any, is canalized 
into specialized publics associated with, say, gerontology, private therapy, 
the psychology of development or "midlife crisis," autobiography, biography, 
then this serves to mask the work middle-ageism is doing through downsizing, 
the media war between the boomers and the Xers, the recreation of empty-nest 
discourse, the reconsolidation of menopause discourse, and in general the 
increasing power of capital over the entire institution of the life course 
through its devaluation of the middle years. 

This is too compact, but then it's a summary of my book. One last BTW, 
Declining to Decline is reviewed in the NY Times this Sunday, without of 
course any mention of any of these issues.