Date: Sat, 27 Sep 1997 14:41:56 +1000
From: Rob Schaap <rws-AT-comserver.canberra.edu.au>
Subject: RE: M-FEM: Habermas, the lifeworld, and the feminine


G'day Malgosia, Margaret and Marsha,

Just squeezing in a quasi-reply before the grand final starts (a
media-induced interstate psychosis - Adelaide Crows are up against
Melbourne's St Kilda - promises all kinds of TV-friendly passion and
carnage).

I'll start with a quote from Habermas's essay on Mead's Theory of
Subjectivity, which is redolent of Marx's loaded use of the phrase 'free'
wage labour (from *Postmetaphysical Thinking*):

'The status of productive wage labour is characteristically bound up with
the ambiguous experience of being released from life conditions that are
socially integrating but also marked by dependencies, that orient and
protect yet restrict and oppress at the same time.'

Now, a sensibility like this makes of 'women' a crucial category for
investigation.  It occurs to me that any woman over forty has lived through
this flurry of ambiguities and transformation - making her a historically
rare being - one whose life experience has made her self-reflection
theoretically, *and generalisably* crucial stuff.  Most men have not
consciously made this trip (except possibly during the child-man
transformation of course).  We were tooled to be system-components from
sentience, and our unease must remain unarticulated at worst or abstractly
theorised at best.

The liberal feminist has little of use to say on this, as far as I'm
concerned.  She is merely more free than she was.  End of story.

But a socialist feminist (as I imagine many on this list would identify
themselves) might agree with Habermas when he opines:

'The systems-theoretic mirror-image of inclusion is therefore the released
and isolated individual, who finds himself [specifically 'herself' for the
purposes of our chat) in diversified roles confonting multiplying
opportunities; of course, [s]he must make the requisite decisions under
system conditions that are not under his [her] control.  As a member of
organisations, as a participant in systems, the individual who is seized by
inclusion [a nice phrase, I think] is simply subjected to another kind of
dependence ... Whoever conceives of the dissolution of traditional
lifeworlds in this way ... must arrive at the conclusion that social
individualisation isolates or singularises but does *not* individuate ... '

The gap between individualisation and individuation is, of course, what I'm
on about.  The former is about making of women what has long been made of
men (Arendt's 'good family man' in her 'banality of evil' thesis?).  The
pessimist in me anticipates a time when we are all equal commodities,
fatally ensnared together (to pinch a Marcusan phrase) in a sub-human
systematised discourse, and with recourse to no-one whose life experience,
and consequent self-definition, is usefully or 'expressably', other than
ours.  Communication shall equal instrumentalism.  Freedom shall equal
alienation from all others.  And lifeworld shall equal system.

This is of concern, because it seems to me we don't have a proletariat
worthy of the name, or a claim that it constitutes an historical subject,
until the vast majority of us qualify objectively (ie until most of the
world's women are objectively situated as wage workers on roughly
comparable terms), but we run the risk of losing a crucial differentiation
of experience, and concomitant subjectivity, as this process unfolds.

I like to think this can not be reduced to the proposition which rightly
concerns Malgosia: 'Is this not simply an expression of longing for the
primitive, the virginal forest, the untilled Earth, the Golden Age, the
Island Paradise -- and phantasizing women into symbols of all that?'

And of Margaret, whose theoretical attitude and sophistication is a little
beyond me until I take a belated peek at Fraser (and hopefully her own
book) to see if I can escape modernist dichotomies, I ask is it possible
for you to start me on the route with a couple of paragraphs on challenging
my (and comrade Jurgen's) dualistic counterpositions?  I point out that
Marx, who needs such an approach to support his dialectic, does not pose
the 'labour'/'interaction' (system/lifeworld) dichotomy as explicitly as
Habermas does.

And anway, gender differentiation on the criterion of ageing strikes me as
an interesting thread to pursue here ...

Cheers,
Rob.



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Rob Schaap, Lecturer in Communication, University of Canberra, Australia.

Phone:  02-6201 2194  (BH)
Fax:    02-6201 5119

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'It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have
lightened the day's toil of any human being.'    (John Stuart Mill)

"The separation of public works from the state, and their migration
into the domain of the works undertaken by capital itself, indicates
the degree to which the real community has constituted itself in
the form of capital."                                    (Karl Marx)

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