Between Feminism and Materialism: A Question of Method (Breaking Feminist Waves)

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Between Feminism and Materialism

10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie

Series Editors: LINDA MARTÍN ALCOFF, Hunter College and CUNY Graduate Center GILLIAN HOWIE, University of Liverpool For the last twenty years, feminist theory has been presented as a series of ascending waves. This picture has had the effect of deemphasizing the diversity of past scholarship as well as constraining the way we understand and frame new work. The aim of this series is to attract original scholars who will offer unique interpretations of past scholarship and unearth neglected contributions to feminist theory. By breaking free from the constraints of the image of waves, this series will be able to provide a wider forum for dialogue and engage historical and interdisciplinary work to open up feminist theory to new audiences and markets. LINDA MARTÍN ALCOFF is Professor of Philosophy at Hunter College and the City University of New York Graduate Center. Her books include Visible Identities: Race, Gender and the Self (2006); The Blackwell Guide to Feminist Philosophy (co-edited with Eva Kittay, 2006); Identity Politics Reconsidered (coedited with Moya, Mohanty, and Hames-Garcia, Palgrave 2006); and Singing in the Fire: Tales of Women in Philosophy (2003). GILLIAN HOWIE is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Liverpool. Her previous work includes Deleuze and Spinoza: Aura of Expressionism; Touching Transcendence: Women and the Divine (edited with Jan Jobling); Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration (edited with Stacy Gillis and Rebecca Munford); Menstruation (edited with Andrew Shail); and Gender, Teaching and Research in Higher Education (edited with Ashley Tauchert). Titles to date: Unassimilable Feminisms: Reappraising Feminist, Womanist, and Mestiza Identity Politics by Laura Gillman Further Adventures of The Dialectic of Sex: Critical Essays on Shulamith Firestone edited by Mandy Merck and Stella Sandford Hegel’s Philosophy and Feminist Thought: Beyond Antigone? edited by Kimberly Hutchings and Tuija Pulkkinen Femmenism and the Mexican Woman Intellectual from Sor Juana to Poniatowska: Boob Lit by Emily Hind Between Feminism and Materialism: A Question of Method by Gillian Howie

Forthcoming: The Many Dimensions of Chinese Feminism by Ya-Chen Chen



Breaking Feminist Waves

A Question of Method

Gillian Howie



Between Feminism and Materialism

BETWEEN FEMINISM AND MATERIALISM

Copyright © Gillian Howie, 2010. First published in 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–10269–9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Howie, Gillian Between feminism and materialism : a question of method / Gillian Howie. p. cm.—(Breaking feminist waves) ISBN 978–0–230–10269–9 1. Feminist theory. 2. Capitalism. 3. Materialism. I. Title. HQ1190.H69 2010 306.3⬘4201—dc22

2010012005

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: October 2010 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.



All rights reserved.



For Alfie and Henry



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Series Foreword

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction

1

1 Production

11

2 Objectivity

35

3 Reason

63

4 Essentialism

87

5 Identity

109

6 Non-Identity

131

7 Sex and Gender

155

8

179

Patriarchy

Conclusion

201

Notes

207

Bibliography

247

Index

263



C on ten ts




Breaking Feminist Waves is a series designed to rethink the conventional models of what feminism is today, its past, and future trajectories. For more than a quarter of a century, feminist theory has been presented as a series of ascending waves, and this has come to represent generational divides and differences of political orientation as well as different formulations of goals. The imagery of waves, while connoting continuous movement, implies a singular trajectory with an inevitably progressive teleology. As such, it constrains the way we understand what feminism has been and where feminist thought has appeared, while simplifying the rich and nuanced political and philosophical diversity that has been characteristic of feminism throughout. Most disturbingly, it restricts the way we understand and frame new work. This series provides a forum to reassess established constructions of feminism and of feminist theory. It provides a starting point to redefine feminism as a configuration of intersecting movements and concerns; with political commitment but, perhaps, without a singular center or primary track. The generational divisions among women do not actually correlate to common interpretive frameworks shaped by shared historical circumstances, but rather to a diverse set of arguments, problems, and interests affected by differing historical contexts and locations. Often excluded from cultural access to dominant modes of communication and dissemination, feminisms have never been uniform or engaged within a comprehensive conversation. The generational division, then, can neither represent the dominant divide within feminism nor a division between essentially coherent moments; there are always multiple conflicts and contradictions, as well as differences about the goals, strategies, founding concepts, and starting premises. Nonetheless, the problems facing women, feminists, and feminisms are as acute and pressing today as ever. Featuring a variety of disciplinary and theoretical perspectives, Breaking Feminist Waves provides a forum for comparative, historical, and interdisciplinary work, with special attention to the problems of cultural differences, 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


Ser ies For e wor d

SERIES FOREWORD

language and representation, embodiment, rights, violence, sexual economies, and political action. By rethinking feminisms’ history as well as our present, and by unearthing neglected contributions to feminist theory, this series intends to unlock conversations between feminists and feminisms and to open up feminist theory and practice to new audiences. — Linda Martín Alcoff and Gillian Howie



x

“And I thought of all the women’s novels that lie scattered, like small pock-marked apples in the orchard, about the second-hand book bookshops of London. It was the flaw at the centre that had rotted them. She had altered her values in deference to the opinion of others.” —Virginia Woolf

The amount of extraordinary work already published in the field of feminist theory is a blessing and a curse. One cannot help but ask: why another? I write this to participate in a revival of the feminist movement: theory and practice. I also write to show that something politically relevant follows from the way we think about the relationship between subjects, objects, and their mediation. The hardest thing to do is shake free from academic shackles and to avoid debilitating deference to REF conventions, so I would like to thank Michael McGhee and Simon Hailwood who have shown true collegiality by reading and commenting on various drafts of this work. Innumerable discussions with J’annine Jobling and Margrit Shildrick have shown me the real value of academic and sororal conversation across and through feminist waves. I appreciate the support shown by the University of Liverpool, the expertise and humanity of Nicky Thorpe and Anne Tansley, the joyful spirit of intellectual adventure expressed by Laura Green and Victoria Browne, and the quizzical patience shown by Simon Hughes. Thank you to Paul Harryn for his generosity in allowing us to use his beautiful artwork. Parts of “Conserving the Principle of Identity: Identity, Representation and Equivalence,” first published in Women: A Cultural Review special edition Gender and Philosophy 14:3 (2003), appear in the introduction and chapter five, with permission from Taylor and Francis. Chapter two is drawn largely from Real Essences and Natural Kinds in Feminist Theory: A Revisionist Account, which first appeared in Contemporary Political Theory 5:3 (2006), reproduced with permission from Palgrave Macmillan. 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


Ack now l ed gmen t s




It is intuitively obvious that there are connections between social, religious, and cultural norms, values, and stereotypes that establish, maintain, and justify a sex-based hierarchy. Echoing the words of Kate Millett, from the Indian woman forced to die on her husband’s funeral pyre to the girls abandoned in Chinese orphanages; from the brutalization and rape of tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands of women in the Congo to the girl who has her clitoris cut out; from the uneven distribution of property ownership to the gendered division of domestic labor; from the recent exclusion of women from education in Iran to unsafe sexual practices in Africa; from rates of political participation and representation in Europe to the dowry system; from sexual segregation in Israel to the “rape” law in Afghanistan;1 from the economy of sex-trafficking to the language of sex in Nuts and Loaded, sexual oppression is ubiquitous. With all the usual caveats concerning local practices and without making any claims as to the experience of oppression, it certainly seems as though we are dealing with something that is cross-cultural and transhistorical. To this I add four local and topical anecdotes. There is a report on the radio about a beauty pageant hosted by one of the universities in London. This pageant, the students cry, is a victory for feminism— women can finally feel good about themselves. No longer need they wrap up in duffle coats, cut their hair short, or wear doc martins. Let us celebrate women’s beauty and their confidence, they exclaim, and then they assure us that absolutely no measurements will be taken or used as a means of comparison. The following week, Trevor Phillips, the Equality and Human Rights Commission Chair in the UK, is reported saying that although three million women in Britain suffer rape, domestic violence, and stalking, council provision is unacceptably poor: “In many parts of the country, services for women who have experienced violence are chronically underfunded or simply do not exist. Women should not be subjected to this postcode lottery.”2 Incidentally, there are more pet rescue services in England and Wales than Rape Crisis Centers.3 Campaigns designed to stop a surge in domestic violence during the World Cup 2010 tournament have been 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


Introduction


launched in England, as domestic violence had shown a 30 percent rise on the days that the English team played in the 2006 tournament.4 A well-known social scientist in one redbrick university has her feminist credentials called into question by a colleague because she is not “theoretically sophisticated.” Theoretically sophisticated feminist theory, associated with cultural materialism, postmodernism, and post-structuralism, was in part a response to the experience of conflict within the women’s movement itself. Feminist theory required revision. We had to recognize that there are multiple locations from which to speak, that there is not one but polyvalent causes of oppression, and we came to acknowledge the universalizing racist tendencies of feminist thought. But now we have feminist theories that recognize the diversity of women but are unable to figure out any community or collective goal-oriented activity. We have feminist theories sensitive to the capillaries of power but unable to answer the question “what systematic changes would be required to create a just society?” And we have an entire “feminist theory” academic industry but are unable to communicate with the women’s movement, such that it is. Is (feminist) cultural theory—or postmodernism—a mask for deeper social transformations, and does this explain this theoretical inadequacy? If there is a rich relationship between the social conditions that give rise to theory and the theory itself, then we might expect to find that theories of difference and identity are born in times of fragmentation and diversification. Such experiences became heightened during the 1970s,5 and there certainly seems to be an intricate and complicated relationship between, for example, the rise of Thatcherism in the UK and Conservative Modernism in the United States, free market fiscal policy, left disunity, the demise of feminism as a political force, backlash against feminism, the appearance of identity politics, and then the emergence of theory focusing almost exclusively on questions of sexuality, identity, and “the body.” The fragmentation of the labor market, appropriated and diversified by capital, an aggravated individualism of the 1980s, and a splintered labor movement rather suits utopic—idealist—cognition of differences in terms of philosophies of subjectivities and desires.6 But to be able to interrogate these social conditions we must return to the feminist canon and prize apart its inclusions, exclusions, and genealogy. In need of a theory with adequate epistemological bite, we should recuperate the rich stream of critical social theory that has been produced throughout these last three decades.7 Feminism will only move forward, reconnect theory and praxis, if we can find 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


2

3

a way to bring together the somatic, living and experiencing body with critical social science. To reveal, to make explicit, to investigate, and to change the ways in which situations are organized, we must synthesize objectivist tendencies in social science with subjectivist tendencies within hermeneutics and phenomenology. A theoretical reorientation toward the condition and objects of experience will help to bridge feminist theory in the humanities and empirical research in social sciences. Importantly, such a reorientation is no gesture to a mystical or transcendent “beyond,” but is the recovery of emancipatory critique—the undercurrent of the culture of our times. Political beliefs are unintelligible in isolation from claims about the real states of the world.8 I submit that realism offers a reasonable and useful framework from which to approach the philosophical, scientific, and social challenges of this century. A (re)turn to realism can be detected within feminism theory. Christine Battersby, for instance, although she would distance herself from this designation, argues that “the urgent problem for feminist theory to address is not the problem of the subject but the problem of the object,” not “the epistemology of the subject but the metaphysics of the object.” 9 Elizabeth Grosz, who would likewise distance herself, says that “the thing” is the point of intersection of space and time, the locus of temporal knowing and spatial localization that constitutes singularity or specificity.10 If the problem before us is the relationship between “the subject,” however construed, and “the object,” however construed, then I suggest we should regroup around the idea of dialectical materialism. Dialectical materialism is a rather rusty, and some might say worn out, set of theoretical commitments. It has, as Merleau-Ponty notes, several centers and several points of entry.11 From Ancient Greek philosophy through Hegel to Marx and thence through Gramsci, Lukács, Marcuse, Adorno, and more recently Althusser, Honneth, and Bhaskar, dialectics has sojourned through economic determinism, historical teleology, theories of drives, desire and repression, phenomenology, structuralism, and cultural theory. But for a number of reasons, not unrelated to the hegemonic influence of postmodernism and post-structuralism on the intellectual landscape, during the last few decades the dialectical synthesis of subjective and objective fell apart leaving two terminals: the purely internal and the reductively empirical.12 It is the aim of this book to suggest ways to think differently about this relationship. There are three relevant principal meanings of the term “materialism”: physicalism, realism, and historical or dialectical materialism.13 The first form of materialism is often linked with physicalism and 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


INTRODUCTION


is prevalent in the philosophy of mind and cognitive sciences. It is a worldview with a long history, traceable to Greek atomism, reappearing in unexpected places like Hobbes’ Leviathan. For a physicalist, the real world is the physical world and so s/he would be opposed to ontologies that include abstract objects held to be distinct from physical processes—be those objects numbers, universals, or mental events. In the philosophy of mind this approach tends to identify mental events with physical events occurring in the brain and perhaps the central nervous system. Eliminativists in the philosophy of mind argue that we should abandon the whole “mind discourse,” including terms such as “consciousness,” “self,” “qualia.” By doing this they believe that we also eliminate philosophical problems associated with dualism. I consider this form of materialism to be reductive, and it is not the form of materialism that will help articulate and make sense of an interested and meaningful social world. A second form of materialism can be identified with realism. An initial refinement concerns the relationship between materialism and empiricism, and we should not confuse them. The term “empirical” usually denotes the belief that a proposition can be confirmed or denied by immediate sense experience or that immediate sense experience provides the content for beliefs, ideas, and memory. Empiricism attempts to tie knowledge to experience in such a way that anything that cannot be immediately before the senses or inferred from the class of things observed to be true is not considered a legitimate route of enquiry. A materialist, as opposed to an empiricist, need neither believe that there is direct access to the world nor dismiss the existence of consciousness; they are likely, however, to hold that a number of things exist independently from us and that these are not artifacts of the mind, language, or conceptual scheme. As a consequence, according to a realist we can discover facts about these things, and our beliefs will be appropriately tied to state of affairs. I shall be drawing on and extending Sartre’s notion of synthetic unity to explain how a phenomenologist may also be a realist: we divide the world in the way we do because of matter’s internal relation to the human fleshy organic body—lemons are the color they are due to this primary relation. Starting with this as a primary relation does not mean that we commence with an idea of a “neutral” body. Bodies are not neutral; there is not one body or one type of body. There has been some suggestive work concerning the influence of sex/gender on the conceptualization of matter and on this internal relationship. In this sense, I would say that Judith Butler is right to claim that matter has a history and that the history of matter is in 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


4

5

part determined by the negotiation of sexual difference.14 For Butler, the implication is that matter is fully sedimented with discourses on sex and sexuality that constrain the uses to which the term “matter” can be put. Now, while it is true that a critical approach to the sexless view-from-nowhere, assumed by some scientific hypotheses, opens up avenues of feminist enquiry into the constraints introduced by the contextual values and biases of the scientist, a wholesale rejection of objectivity can degenerate into an unhelpful skepticism whereby every scientific claim is appended by the assertion that sexual difference is the key feature of scientific investigation. This can leave feminists in an awkward position, having to explain how—and in what way—the “hetero-normative matrix” conditions the “yellowness” of a lemon. Does this matter? If we are concerned with grasping and changing patterns of social oppression, then it has to matter. Dialectical or historical materialism is the final form of materialism of interest, and it is not in opposition to, but a development of, realism. We can perhaps distil dialectical materialism down to three principles, upon which we shall draw: the principle of mind-independence, the context principle, and the principle of scientific enquiry. Dialectical materialism was first fashioned by Marx and Engels as a response to Hegelian idealism. They reacted to the suggestion that the world is mind, contrasting this with the commonsense realist view that there is something “out there” independent from the individual perceiver. According to Marx the world is shaped by human activity, but he draws a distinction between this and the claim that the world is given shape through human ideas and concepts. Consciousness, ideas, and concepts emerge from the social experience of productive and active engagement with the world. Production itself takes various forms and changes over time and therefore our social experience changes. The precise relationship of mental content and forms of consciousness to productive relations and economic exchange has, of course, been a matter of much worry within the Marxist tradition. In chapters 2, 3, and 5 I am sympathetic to the account of this relationship that can be found within critical theory. The second aspect of Marx’s materialism relates to his methodology and can be referred to as a “context principle.” Taking from Hegel the idea that each thing needs to be understood in its relationship to other things, Marx performed the infamous inversion of Hegel and argued that the relations between things are not conceptual but social and historical. To grasp what a thing is, therefore, we need to place it in context that is at once social, political, and historical. Any attempt to analyze what a thing is, if abstracted from context, will lead to 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


INTRODUCTION


erroneous and often ideological judgment. Historical materialism is thus a theory of relations such that individual identity can be seen to be a consequence of antecedent social processes. Finally, the term “materialism” in historical materialism conveys a commitment to a scientific method of enquiry. This brings the two previous points together with the beliefs that there is a mind-independent world, that events in the world can only be understood in context, and that the situation, or standpoint, of the knower might affect knowledge claims. The scientific hypothesis includes within its explanatory framework abstract entities such as “the family,” “the state,” and “culture,” and these are taken to designate something actual. Economic, social, and psychological processes are presumed to be open to scientific examination. Because they are processes, only a method that can accommodate change, nonconformity, and difference has sufficient explanatory potential. The appropriate scientific methodology is dialectical, and the underlying epistemic position is fallibilist. I develop this discussion in chapter 4, where I make a case for a weak doctrine of natural kinds. Over the past couple of decades, historical materialism has received bad press. This increasingly hesitant reading of Marxism reflects a refusal and distrust of Engels’s claims in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific that the ultimate cause and moving power of all historical movement is to be found in the economic developments of society, principally in economic production and exchange. Instead, for Butler it is the failure and excess of dialectics that provoke the thought of possibility and movement forward.15 But it has to be said, against economic determinism, that failure and excess are part and parcel of the dialectical method, and that at the heart of critical theory is an aversion to closed systems. C.L.R. James joyfully writes: “In true dialectical fashion, we establish a category only to break it up. That is the point. You no sooner have it fixed than you must at once crack it wide open.”16 Negative dialectics, in particular, offers a way to think about the inadequacy of conceptual, epistemic, and historical claims and to forefront the idea of non-identity—a curious and rich relationship between identity and its “failure.” But it also helps us to make sense of the “given” whilst accepting that nothing is given immediately. At which point critical philosophy can address itself to the appearances of “objects” and their historical and epistemological relations. Retaining both poles, subject and object, dialectics is able to probe the force field between consciousness and being.17 It is possible to use dialectical methods and not be a materialist. It is also possible to be a dialectical materialist and not reference 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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Marxist economic theory. Here, I undertake three difficult tasks. First, I attempt to demonstrate the usefulness of Marxist categories and thereby revive a dialectical method that helps to engage with questions of class, exploitation, alienation, mediation, ideology, and reification. Second, I shall be arguing toward a theory of “patriarchy” that will allow us to identify patterns of discrimination and subjection distinct from a general theory of subject formation. In order to distinguish between a general process of enculturation and constraint and a relationship that may be defined specifically in terms of subjection, I suggest somewhat against the grain that we should bracket Nietzsche, Bergson, Freud, and Foucault. Third, and following from this, I aim to present a convincing account of dialectical materialism that leaves room for—but does not rely on—psychoanalytic theory. My reason for this is threefold. First, psychoanalysis, especially Lacanian, traps the feminine in an eternal play of mirrors and absence. It is of course true that despite its latent misogyny the (Freudian) economic model of the psyche and the cognitive-sexual model of development have contributed to ways in which Critical Theorists, for instance, have explained the emergence of certain personality traits and behaviors. An irresolvable tension between nature and culture, the repression of desire, and the primacy of drives have all featured in it. Having said that, and this is my second reservation, the economic model of the psyche—with its drives, repressions, and cathexes—is only an explanatory hypothesis. As such it is one, but neither the sole nor the primary, model and it needs to take its place alongside other explanatory hypotheses. It will not suffice that this model be merely assumed. Psychoanalysis is not the discourse of the crisis of “the subject” of philosophy or of modernity.18 Third, I consider theory to have become fixated on the economy of desire and excess. It is probable that the concentration on all things “bodily,” as well as on sexuality, drives, and desire, expresses a particular social and historical moment. I have some sympathy with the suspicion that even Critical Theory’s engagement with psychoanalytic theory marks a capitulation to “bourgeois social psychology.” My interest then is less with how to explicate subject formation in terms of identification and sexual object choice than with how to think such identity and—more importantly—non-identity. I acknowledge Adorno’s warning that dialectics is not a method as such—cannot be reified into a set principles or laws that are then applicable to all instances. The method in this current work is similar to that outlined in Search for a Method: it is heuristic—at once regressive and progressive, analytic and synthetic.19 As this calls for a 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


INTRODUCTION


critical exploration of “situation,” the first and second chapters examine the productive activity of a world-making situated subject.20 But we always begin and end with questions and problems. Rather than presenting positive, systematic philosophical statements, I engage in dialogue organized around a number of philosophical problems that have engaged feminists over the past few decades: universals and reason, nature, identity and non-identity, sex and gender, and interests. Expanding them only slightly, I ask: Does the aspiration to “objectivity” reflect the values of masculinity at a particular point in (its) history? In what sense, if at all, are “Enlightenment norms of reasons” rooted in sex/gender and do they facilitate dominating social relationships? Does the concept “woman” depend on asserting essential properties or common natures and prioritizing sameness over differences? Is the philosophical principle of identity implicated in repressive forms of political representation? How can we think against dominant norms and regulative ideals and engage constructively with “world-making”? Is there a way to model body-consciousness, to think outside Cartesian mind-body dualism, without drawing on sex/gender? Can we defend a definition of patriarchy as “the systematic subordination of the interests of women to those of men”? Once we grasp the processes orchestrating the situation of the subject, these problems carry a different sound: a deeper and more vibrant timbre. The problems posed within feminist theory may seem disconnected and fragmented, but they contain a “unity-in-dispersal” and, in a rather ungainly fashion, each chapter in this current work passes through them to reframe their unity.21 Although concerned with “problematics,” this is not to advocate a bricolage approach to philosophical work. The critical character of this heuristic method is at odds with the method advocated by Elizabeth Grosz who, despite drawing upon a wide range of nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinkers and philosophical movements—from Darwin to Nietzsche, through pragmatism and phenomenology—aims to avoid critical gestures. Her type of Deleuzian “tool-kit” approach to philosophy or social theory is supposed not to engage in argument but rather concentrate on “positivities” and “insights” in order to speculate on the “becoming-art” of politics.22 Yet even Nietzsche noted that before affirmation there should be criticism, and, we may add, without this the “becoming-art” of politics may be dully repetitive.23 No theory, of course, escapes the marketplace. Each one is offered as a delectable morsel, the “next new thing” creates a buzz and last year’s fashion is discarded in the highly variegated academic hypermarket. The dialectical method is not protected against this, but it 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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“need not be muted by such rebuke. The name of dialectics says no more, to begin with, than that objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder, that they come to contradict the traditional norm of adequacy.”24 At the same time, every philosophy is practical, even when it seems at its most contemplative: its method a social and political weapon.25 This book is an attempt to stake out experience, not yet on the grounds of politics but first on the ground of political philosophy.26 My guiding principle is that the work of philosophy should be concerned with the intelligibility of the world. This is not because everything can be explained, grasped, or even communicated, but because if, as feminists, we wish to change the world, then we need to know what we are dealing with. Identity, representation, and objectivity may be implicated in an oppressive social real but are actually politically neutral concepts. Without them we are unable to investigate and change relations of oppression, and the point, after all, is to change the world.



INTRODUCTION




1

Production

Introduction There is a paradox at the heart of feminism. Feminism is fundamentally an Enlightenment or modernist project; it concerns the emancipation of morally valuable individual subjects. Yet recent feminist theory rails against the principal tenets of Enlightenment thought: reason, autonomy, identity, universals, science, and—in the end— freedom itself. As a consequence, unable to articulate common grounds of oppression, the rug seems whipped from under our feet— leaving feminism struggling to articulate its relevance and purpose: “a ‘we’ without a ‘we,’ a ‘we’ without (philosophical) community.”1 As a response, we could dissolve the paradox by denying one or other approaches. But this would lead to retrenchment or to post-feminism. Alternatively, we could deny the paradox, viewing it rather as a number of problems produced by the equivocations, ambiguities, and tensions of modernity. Although there is no simple resolution to the “Enlightenment paradox,” there is an often neglected perspective available that illuminates not only the content of the problems—such as: “are Enlightenment norms of reason rooted in sex/gender?”—but also the relationship between the context and content of the theoretical activity. That there is a significant relationship between the activity of philosophical reflection and its content, its content and context, is a matter of contention, but it is at least plausible that social context will impact on the manner and content of reflection. In this and the following chapters I argue that not only is context relevant to the intelligibility of reflective activity but—more trenchantly—that the context of expression is helpfully, if not completely, described in terms political economy. Recently neglected, the labor theory of value is the principal analytic tool by which Karl Marx interprets and explains the dynamics, 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


CH A P T ER


movements, tensions, and contradictions within political economy.2 Recalling Marx’s analysis of relations of production and the labor theory of value, from the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts through to Capital, has something archaic and even tedious about it.3 Ernest Mandel pointed out over forty years ago that Marxist economic theory was already being treated with contempt or indifference in academic circles. He recalls J.M. Keynes description of Capital as an obsolete economic textbook, scientifically erroneous, without interest or application to the modern world, and also that of Raymond Aaron, who alleged that Marxism no longer held a place within the culture of the West.4 Such assessments are echoed within postmodernism. In her revised introduction to Women’s Oppression Today, Michèle Barrett admits that she shelved her original project—the attempt to consider alliances between a nonreductive Marxism and feminism—in response to the impact of postmodernism on the intellectual environment. She cites as her reason for shelving, rather than resolving, the difficult relationship between Marxism and feminism the fact that postmodernism calls into question the status of all “grand projects”; a definition that she saw applying to both socialism and feminism. However, she concludes, because postmodernism was, as she saw it, a cultural climate as well as an intellectual position, a political reality as well as an academic fashion, it was not something she considered possible to avoid. Rather, she judges it to represent the key positions around which a newly invigorated feminist theory would have to revolve.5 Theories are described as “grand projects,” and also rejected for being one, for a number of reasons. In the case of Marxism, the teleological commitment to historical development, the underlying humanism, the centrality of production, and the “entire” ethics along with the “entire” politics are all features that imbricate it in the modernist tradition of grand narratives. Of course, it is not just the fact that there are theoretical problems within Marxism. Marxism as it has been historically embodied in various governments has proved violent and oppressive, and there is neither any good explanation within Marxism itself as to why this is so nor any convincing recommendations for future deployment.6 Yet, in a world that has seen the demise of political Marxism, there is an opportunity to reconsider the contribution of Marx’s philosophical ideas unencumbered by orthodox interpretations.7 I am not here intending to defend a global analysis of Eastern and Western Europe in terms of the rise of capitalism and the fall of bureaucratic regimes and organizations. I shall also not examine the conflicts and 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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contradictions of capitalism and consider the obsolescence (or otherwise) of the proletariat as the subject of history.8 The demise of the meta-narrative of traditional Marxism opens up the possibility of a “post-Marxist,” radical, and democratic politics, but only if we recognize the logic of capital.9 Crucially, if political economy is still considered, if not adequately at least partially, as described and analyzed by Marx, then we would have to infer that we have made no move into postmodernity; what we call the “postmodern” is in a state of uneasy truce with modernity.10 For this reason, by assuming that the logic of capitalism is still the logic of Marx’s Capital, then—through an analysis of underlying systematic economic processes—we will be able to address a number of key problems within feminist theory. Within the neo-Marxist tradition, and related social and cultural theories, various Marxist concepts have become popularized. The concepts of reification, commodification, and fetishism have been widely disseminated and absorbed into the vocabulary of cultural theory. These concepts though have developed in a way that tends to generalize a model of social form from Marx’s theory of value. Along the way, these pivotal concepts have become sanitized, deployed in a manner obfuscating the centrality of the theory of value, particularly theories of surplus-value (exploitation) and accumulation.11 This could be due to an inherited anxiety concerning the reduction of consciousness, ideas, and “superstructural” activities to economic or industrial activity. But an analysis of the extraction of surplus-value and accumulation within capitalism does not (necessarily) lead to economic reductionism or a flattened account of social relations and can instead provide a way to account for historical variations within social reproduction.12 The theory of value can actually help to make explicit the relationship between the context and content of problems concerning feminist theorists, between exploitation, reification, commodification and problems of objectivity, essentialism, and difference. Thankfully, it can do so without a concomitant reduction of forms of consciousness or emergent subject identities to an isomorphic relationship with economic activity.13

An Outline of a Theory of Action The idea that political economy may be relevant to feminist theory— let alone its characterization in terms of the labor theory of value— may seem antiquated, but the steps are few and familiar. The first step is to reprise the feminist critique of the status of the body within the dominant Western intellectual tradition. It is common currency 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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to suggest that within mainstream philosophy the “body” has been bracketed and the thinking-subject presented as though disembodied, and that as a consequence reason, language, and logic have become the main terms of philosophical reflection: the linguistic turn. According to this narrative, our bodies, with sensuous passion and appetites, have been presented as an impediment to the attainment of truth and knowledge.14 The cultural significance of this has been, certainly in philosophy, the persistent association of women and the feminine with excluded or neglected terms. Rousseau’s social contract still provides the most compelling example of the way political theory can embed these contextual values. His social contract happily demarcates a masculine public from the feminine: the consequence of identifying the feminine with unruly passions and the masculine with reason. No culture, he claims, has perished from wine; all have perished from the disorder of women. Redressing this, and although diverse in its conceptions, feminism begins by taking the body into account. This second step usually involves portraying the body in terms of materiality and corporeality. The character of embodiment is numerously exemplified. It relies on the notion of a given and biological body and also calls into question the natural body in favor of “a textual corporeality that is fluid in its investments and meanings.” It is the attempt to theorize the encounter of materialism and semiotics on the terrain of psychoanalysis and also the repudiation of psychoanalytic models.15 Influenced by phenomenology, psychoanalytic theory, and post-structuralism, feminist theorists have come to describe the body in terms of social context and affect, or as a differential and fluid process of construction, or in terms of habitual performance or translate it as desiring— production, lines of flight, and “bodies-without-organs”. Despite her reputation for devaluing the female body, we find in Beauvoir’s Second Sex an account of the body as sexual, desiring, productive, and imaginative. This is a feeling, sentient, perceptual, intentional, and self-fashioning body. Integral to experience and to cognition, this body is better described in terms of “body-consciousness.”16 To apprehend the body in terms of body-consciousness provides a way to think about perspectives, projects, situations, habits, interests, capacities, and pleasures. To extend this description to include productive activity offers a way to think about the located character of an always projecting and engaged subject: affecting and being-affected in the world. To think bodyconsciousness means, despite post-humanism or postconventional postmodernism, to begin with subjects. 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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Let us note this deceptively simple statement found in the introduction to Feminist Theory and the Body: “to say that the body is a discursive construction is not to deny a substantial corpus but to insist that our apprehension of it, our understanding of it, is necessarily mediated by the contexts in which we speak.”17 The embodied subject is sentient and sensuous, in relationship with the world and with other subjects. We could say that subjects and world constitute a synthetic unity. Once grasped as a synthetic unity, we can consider the process of human action as “a double movement of the internalisation of the external and the externalization of the internal.”18 Analysis of the contexts of embodiment extends the phenomenological interest in the body by blending it with more social scientific enquiry, and by paying attention to these contexts we take the third step toward grasping the relevance of political economy. In the Theses on Feuerbach and The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts Marx also presents a picture of human beings as social, productive, sensuous, and engaged with the world. His account of our “species-being” has been thought to be too essentialist, but it merely and minimally commits us to the idea that the human being is productive, affects the world, suffers, and is social: the individual is the social being.19 Thinking and being, he says, although distinct, are in a unity.20 Marx reacquaints us with a Hegelian idea that productive activity is not only the basic condition of human existence but also the way that the human being creates himself or herself.21 Here we have a relational ontology that leads to a theory of action. In intentional action, a subjective end (what is intended) is objectified toward an objective, attainable end (the result of the action).22 Howard and King put this quite succinctly. From distinct stages in the development of social production, there arises in consciousness the awareness of new needs, and through the same faculty arises the recognition of the possibilities of their satisfaction. Social circumstances make people what they are, but what they are involves a certain form of consciousness and purposive action that leads to social and individual change. This model of human social and productive activity may appear to some as rather too “humanistic,” but for many it is an uncontroversial working model; indeed various disciplines embed it, and even antihumanistic or nonhumanistic philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze incorporate the notion of productive activity. Further though, according to Marx the world is apprehended through linguistic and conceptual schemes, and these are related to ways of “productive world-making” we have inherited. Once we focus on the idea that 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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it is human productive activity, rather than language, that mediates “nature” and “consciousness” and then define productivity as not only social but also economic, we move onto less familiar ground. Recent feminist theory hesitates over taking this last step. By defining productive activity as social and economic, we will be able to grasp and evaluate tensions peculiar to modernity and the context for feminist theory and practice. The key with which to unlock the nature of the current system of productive activity is the labor theory of value, and it is to this we now turn.23

Labor Theory of Value There are, of course, scholastic disagreements and disputes within Marxism concerning the laws of historical development, the centrality of productive labor, the economic formulation of a theory of value and price, and the apparently uncritical adherence to scientific method. The difficulties in understanding Marx’s work are enormous and not helped by the distance between Marx’s materialist humanism of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts and the mathematical transformation problems worked through in Capital.24 Rather than leading us to conceive this distance in terms of an epistemological rupture, the centrality of the labor theory of value underscores the unity discernable within Marx’s oeuvre.25 I shall return to appraise the strength of the critical points adumbrated above, in particular the centrality assumed for object-making productive activity. In modern capitalist countries the relationship between capital and labor is difficult to determine. As there is no direct transfer of surplus labor, it is not obvious how profit is created in the system, and the relationship of labor to the production of profit is obscure. The Marxist value theory of labor is a persuasive account of this transfer of labor. It also throws into question the superficial accounts of the relationship of labor to capital in terms of contracts between legally free and equal individuals, the global relationship between states, and the ups and downs of economies reliant on stock market speculation and consumer credit. The problems associated with globalization identified by third-wave feminists—social injustice, structural inequalities, ecological degradation, and “democratic deficits”—exist because global capitalism is driven by systematic imperatives.26 These imperatives include competition, accumulation, expansion, and profit-maximization. The idea that there are “systematic imperatives” does not lead to economic determinism. Unfortunately, the idea that it does has had a detrimental effect on the Marxist tradition, as well as 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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on the theorization of women’s oppression.27 To address the specific problems within feminist theory cited above I will concentrate only on the relationship between the commodification of labor and exploitation, abstraction, and social reproduction. I shall discuss reification and fetishism in the following chapter. Marxist economics focuses on the social relations involved in the production of commodities for profit. The proposition “this hat is £10.99” predicates a property “£10.99” to the hat. In Theories of Surplus Value and Capital Marx terms this type of property a value and distinguishes between use-value and exchange-value.28 Goods have uses dependent on their particular qualities and properties and, because of these uses, a good can enter into exchange relationships. A good becomes a commodity only through an act of exchange, either as a consequence of being exchanged or because it has been identified and produced solely for exchange. Thus, we can speak of commodity production as a particular form of economic organization.29 Marx also claims that only through exchange can uses be realized, and by this he means that no good can be used until it has been produced, given an exchange-value, and then circulated.30 The good, now a commodity, stands in a relationship to other commodities: a ratio of magnitudes. Exchange-value appears first of all as the quantitative relation, the proportion, in which values in use of one sort are exchanged for those of another sort.31 If, for example, two chairs can be exchanged for one table, then the table has twice the value of the chair. Marx’s entire theory of value is an account of how we quantify values so that goods can stand in a specific ratio. A ratio between commodities is a ratio of quantities, in this case 2:1. According to Marx, measurement is only possible because the commodities all share something. As they have differing, sometimes incommensurable, uses, the common feature must be found elsewhere. Signifying the break from market economics, Marx argues that the quality universal to all goods is that they are products of labor. From this he draws the lesson that any ratio in which goods stand to one another is determined by the amounts of labor embodied in each. So, in all cases it is the same thing that is measured—labor— and we can distinguish between amounts of labor. Reformulated, the claim is that although value indicates different quantities of labor, it measures the same quality. Refining this somewhat, Marx investigates how labor can be quantified and suggests that the quantities are amounts of time it takes to produce a commodity. The expenditure of concrete labor explains the basis for the circulation of commodities, but commodity producers 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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may well take different times to produce the same good. Even within the same productive industry, then, the measurement of quantities of labor is not a simple matter of how much labor each unit takes to produce. This measurement, based on general productivity, requires average degrees of intensity and skill, and by abstracting from particular productive endeavors we are left with the average amount of labor measured in units of time. The exchange of commodities thus depends on being able to measure relevant activities by abstracting local characteristics. So while exchange-value is not a measurement of any particular productive endeavor but an abstract or general measurement- the socially necessary labor time taken to produce a use-value under conditions of production common in society-the reduction of labor to a common standard is not a mental construction. Heterogeneous labor and skills are brought into equivalence through the competitive exchange of commodities, aided by the fact that price can deviate from value.32 Only under capitalism is concrete labor metamorphosed into abstract labor for the sake of profit and accumulation. Measurement of value in terms of abstract labor regulates the process of trade: trade is the circulation of commodities, and thus the circulation of value. The capitalist invests a sum of money in the means of production (tools, machinery, raw materials) and labor (skills, knowledge, techniques). During the process of production the raw materials are transformed into new use-values. These are then released on the market as exchange-values. The propositions “this hat is £10.99” and “this chair is £12.99” are related in so far as both predicate value and those values are differing magnitudes of the social labor that is required to make the two goods in question. The apparently simple predication of value, according to Marx, disguises an important social fact. Capitalism is a system of production where, in the process of exchange, value—now converted into money—is generated and accumulated (M1-C-M 2).33 Given that the value of any commodity is only the sum of past and present labor, measured in units of time socially necessary to the production of the object, an explanation has to be offered for the difference in magnitudes, and for the apparent generation of extra values. Marx contends that the value of past labor (machinery, materials) is simply transferred to the new commodity, which would only leave present labor capable of adding value, that is, current labor produces values additional to the value of “dead” labor in the system of production. This would mean that current labor must generate all value, including surplus-values. Crucially, for there to be surplus available 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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in the system, the value of labor must differ in magnitude from the exchange-values of the commodities produced by labor. The value of labor must be worth less than the values that labor produces: exploitation. Without this disparity between the value of labor and the values produced by labor there would be no surplus. Exploitation is not a normative concept: it need not be attached to idealized versions of productive activity. Marx draws a distinction between labor and labor-power, a distinction he viewed as his most important contribution to economic science.34 Labor is the actual exercise of human productive powers to alter the use of, and add value to, commodities. Workers sell labor-power for a money wage. So, labor- power has an exchangevalue. This is described as the commodification of labor. The distinction between labor and labor-power enables Marx to shed light, first, on the social relation between the purchaser of the commodity (employer) and the seller (the worker). Conflicts arise not just around the “price of the commodity” (wages) but also the intensity and conditions of work. Second, this commodity is not produced in the same manner as others commodities. The production of labor-power is an aspect of the (domestic) social and biological reproduction of the worker as a human being.35 Third, the sale of labor-power alienates the worker from her/his own productive capacities. The distinction, lastly, helps explain the production of profit and shows why profit requires exploitation. As with any other exchange-value, the exchange-value of labor is the time taken to produce it. This time tends to be “cashed out” in terms of the values the laborer consumes to sustain himself or herself and his or her family: a family wage. The rate of exploitation is the difference between the value of labor -power (labor’s exchange-value) and the values (use-values transformed into exchange-values) that labor produces. Incidentally, this means that when a worker receives a fair wage, s/he receives a wage equivalent to his or her value, which is the value of the bundle of commodities consumed rather than values equivalent to that which s/he has produced. Labor-power can be sold at its value whilst labor continues to create surplus. For this reason the wage form hides exploitation. The length of the working day is an object of struggle because workers attempt to close the gap between necessary labor (equivalent to that which is returned in the wage) and surplus labor, whereas the capitalist tries to extend the working day in order to extract as much unpaid labor as possible. As with other exchange-values, the measurement of exchange-value is not premised on individual productive endeavors and is socially necessary labor 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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time. This means that the value of labor-power is abstracted from particular relationships of reproduction and determined through contestation and (union) negotiation. All values are the result of productive activity, and surplus-value results when the producing class produces a net product sold for more than they receive in wages. Profit and wages are the forms that surplus and necessary labor take in capitalism. The average rate of profit is the ratio of total surplus-value to total capital advanced for capital as a whole.36 As Marx elaborates in the third volume of Capital, the price of the output can deviate from value. It might appear that production of outputs can be reduced to a technical relationship between output and two inputs (labor/capital advanced), but such a functional description of the production process masks the underlying social conditions of the wage (price of labor) and the length and intensity of the working day.37 To see the process functionally, in terms of input and outputs, mistakes the site of struggle; outcomes of which can impact on both. We have now encountered abstraction in three main places. First, exchange-value—the socially necessary time taken to produce a commodity—is an abstraction from particular productive endeavors. In exchange-value, concrete labor presents itself as abstract labor. Second, exchange-value—through its abstraction of labor—places qualitatively distinct commodities in a ratio. By abstracting from usevalue we can compare and exchange different goods, one for another. In fact, all exchange is mediated through one commodity: gold or its monetary equivalent. Weeks puts the point thus: “In the development of a general equivalent, the abstract labor in each commodity is quantitatively expressed as a weight or volume of the equivalent commodity.”38 “Commensurability is a condition posited by the practice of exchange.”39 Third, we encountered abstraction in the wage-form. Obviously, workers receive wages in the form of money. This mediation helps to disguise the fact that the value of labor is equivalent to that consumed by the worker and his/her family, but this, too, is an abstraction. I shall consider the relationship between conceptual (theoretical) abstraction and social (material) abstraction in the following chapter. Although labor appears to be a private and individual matter, exchanged on the market to satisfy individual needs, the fact that it has an exchange-value at all indicates its fundamentally social character. Further than this, that labor is given a value, like any other object, and exchanged according to its value is to treat productive capacity and potential as a commodity. The commodification of labor 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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is the “thingification” of a person. It permits commensurability to hold between distinct producers and productive endeavors, as well as interchangeability between people. The thingification of a person is, to an extent, true: people are commodities in that they have value— assigned like any other commodity—and are exchanged according their value. Where an individual is the commodity, such as in people trafficking and sex slavery, his or her exchange-value will be the socially necessary labor-time taken to produce or reproduce her. Marx says little about the sex industry really, except that prostitution is one expression of the universal prostitution of the worker. Even Engels, who did say some interesting things about the origin of sex-class and sex-based division of labor, indicated that prostitution is a deviant activity, brought about by the experience of capitalism and the monogamous family unit. Without delving into a theory of sexuality or Wilhelm Reich’s repressive hypothesis, I think we can still pluck out ways to consider the relationship between exploitation and sex, as well as between sexuality and estrangement within capitalism. This would not commit us to any “post-capitalist” claim about the future of either.40 For instance, a sex worker sells a service, directly or indirectly, to a client. Where it is indirect, such as in a brothel, the worker sells labor-power, surplus-value is extracted and there is exploitation. Where it is a direct relationship, there is no deviation between values returned and the values created, and so no exploitation. If we identify exploitation with oppression, then no prostitute working on the streets would be in an oppressive relationship with the men paying for the sexual service. It would be a near impossible task to summarize the ways in which Marx’s political economy has been rebuffed. For the sake of simplicity, I shall distinguish between four: preference for demand-supply economics; (related or unrelated to) inconsistencies within the economic theory; the post-fordist challenge to the description of the mode of production; and the feminist challenge to the principle of production. It is this last point that will open up Marxism in a way that can begin to address both the rather stable features and alterations of the political and social landscape identified in the “third wave” feminist work Catching a Wave. Marx accepted that demand-supply economic models can supplement political economy by explaining why prices and values may differ, as well as why there is market interest in one use-value over another. However, he also maintained that such models, be they on the supply side or demand side, are unable to account for the formation of value, the relation of value to money, the movements of price, 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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the creation of profit, production of surplus, technological innovation, the historical resolution of conflicts, or the transformation of money into capital and capital into money. A skeptic will still not be convinced. The following chapters engage with features of political economy that could be differently explained, and so the general arguments here should not be derailed. The failures of the theory of value have been described as Ptolemaic41 and refuted on the following grounds: (a) an inadequate account of the manner in which value is transformed into price; (b) problems associated with the theory of wages, of monopoly prices, of rent, the falling rate of profit, and of productive and unproductive labor; (c) its crude functionalism, which reduces factors to simple inputs and outputs. I have dealt with the last above. According to Fine, the transformation problem amounts to the claim that the labor theory of value is an adequate theory of price formation only in cases where either workers receive all net product, so profits are zero, or when the ratio of capital as production and wages is the same in every sector. He suggests that we may concede errors both in the way Marx derived prices from vales and his calculation of the rate of profit as the ratio of surplus-value to capital advanced, without that concession invalidating either the labor theory of value or the totality of Marxian economics.42 Even within Marxism, there has been much controversy surrounding the claim that there is a tendency for the rate of profit to fall. Sweezy and Baran argue that due to the oligopolistic organization of the economy this tendency has been replaced by a tendency for surplus to rise. If this were the case, it would increase the ability of capital to stabilize itself and thereby avoid crises. However, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall could coexist with a tendency for surplus to rise if these tendencies are understood as two aspects of the same process. Although the labor process is less central to the analysis presented by Sweezy and Baran, labor still generates value and it is this—rather than any general theory of crisis—that is relevant to my current argument.43 The current form of production has often been described as postfordist and distinguished from fordist modes of production by its greater flexibility and “flat” management structure. New forms of political organization supposedly correspond to this new stage of production and render the principal ideas within Marxism either redundant or at least needing to be rethought. Further, given that capitalism depends upon consumption, it is economically rational to stimulate demand and steer consumption. Marx’s critique of political 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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economy needs to be supplemented by a semiological theory of the sign, to take account of these sign-values. Yet, despite its flexibility, the process of production is growthoriented, and growth in real values rests on the exploitation of living labor. Capitalism is technologically and organizationally dynamic, so it is not surprising to find it adopting new techniques. David Harvey suggests that over-accumulation is one of the outcomes within capitalist production that the culture of capitalism must seek to absorb or to manage. It has managed it through flexible accumulation. It certainly seems as though the conditions of production have been loosely continuous and that, despite new alignments, “post-fordism” does not signify a new mode of production or form of social organization.44 Consequently, a theory of sign-values may enhance the labor theory of value, by broadening our appreciation of use-values, but cannot replace it.45 The logic of capitalism is still the logic of Capital.46

The Productivist Paradigm The description of embodied, world-making, productive, and active subjects is familiar within feminist theory. As we have discussed, Marx’s political economy, as articulated in Capital, explains exchange-values and prices not only of commodities but also of this productive activity. Throughout history, people have worked on raw materials and produced things to sell, but within capitalism goods are exchanged for a price. The price is related to the value of labor required to produce the commodity. Indeed productive activity itself is identified as the production of commodities with exchange-value. According to Marx, the value of labor is measured in terms of the time it takes to make the good. This is worked out as a bundle of commodities the laborer requires for subsistence. Exploitation then depends on the extraction of surplus-value: values produced by the worker over and above those returned to him/her as subsistence wage. The difference between the value of labor (wage) and the values created by labor (commodities produced) is the rate of exploitation. This means that only those who have a remunerated role within production can produce surplus-value and so only those who are paid a wage can have surplus-value appropriated. Therefore, only people who have a remunerated role in production can be exploited. This economic model clearly poses a number of perhaps unacceptable restrictions on our apprehension of what constitutes productive activity. First, it seems to collapse productive activity into 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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industrial work. Second, it omits any sphere of self-other recognition, self-reflection, or self-understanding. Let me first pick up this latter point. According to Habermas, Marx is unable to account for the self-reflexivity of knowledge because he reduces “the self-generative act of the human species to labor.”47 As a consequence, he contends, Marx reduces the process of reflection to the level of instrumental action: all conscious activity is brought within the dialectics of labor such that it is difficult to see how it is anything but reductive and totalizing. Although this leaves room for a conception of the natural sciences, the general effect tends toward an epistemological positivism, instrumental rationalism, and a rather thin view of the social subject that requires an additional theory of symbolic interaction.48 Leaving aside, for the moment, the fact that Habermas considers the technological part of productive forces to generate surplus-value and that this would entail a revision of the theory of surplus- value, alongside the theory of falling rate of profit, theory of crises, class conflict, and imperialism, the point—that consciousness activity appears thoroughly instrumental—is well made.49 It is possible though to note the totalizing tendency of social and economic practices without also claiming that it is an effective totality or that recognition depends a priori on estrangement.50 I shall develop a potential line of response in the following chapters. Three main consequences follow from the collapse of labor into industrial work, and this reduction—of productive activity to labor and labor to work (the production of objects for exchange)— constructs a political landscape that has significant and unfortunate consequences for women. First, drawing some inspiration from Arendt, we can designate three human activities: work, labor, and action. Labor is the activity corresponding to the reproduction of life itself—spontaneous growth, metabolism, and even decay. Often without remnant or surplus, the result of labor is as almost quickly consumed as it is spent.51 Work, on the other hand, produces the world of things and bestows “a measure of permanence on the fleeting character of human time.”52 To labor and to work, to produce independent objects for exchange, are historically and conceptually distinct and, although this distinction is masked, it reappears in Marx’s categories of productive and unproductive labor. This proves to be a problem when women’s labor is characterized as service work or as unproductive.53 A second consequence is that those without remunerated work are defined either as contributing to the reserve pool of labor (and so depressing the value of labor) or as constituting “the lumpen proletariat”; an underclass. 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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Second, by drawing a distinction between labor and labor-power, Marx himself indicates that the attentive and creative investment required to transform use-values into commodities is more expansive than its description just in terms of “the world of work” would have us believe. Exploitation thus crucially identifies the production of surplus-value: the divergence between the values of the producer and the values produced. But the manner or experience of productive activity may be harmful in ways not quite encapsulated in the analytic concept of exploitation. Some productive activities, for example, those within the sex industry, may be more harmful than others even when the relative rate of exploitation is lower. The commodification of these capacities may be even more profound: turning bodies into instruments measured according to abstract socially necessary labor value. The assumption that identity holds between exploitation and oppression distorts this type of manifestation of power. Third, and as a subset of the first, the distinction between productive and unproductive labor maps onto a distinction between production and reproduction. According to Marx every form of social production is at the same time a form of social reproduction. The capitalist process of production, in particular, not only produces commodities and surplus-value, it also produces and reproduces the wagelabor relationship. Capitalism requires its goods to be circulated, exchanged, and consumed, and social reproduction is mostly associated with consumption. The transformation of wages into laborpower requires more than simple and immediate consumption, and sexual reproduction is more than what is meant by this definition of social reproduction. Wages have to be transformed into goods that are then worked on and transformed into things that are useful. In addition, workers have to be fed and clothed and new workers have to be produced, raised, and looked after. The labor that occurs in the family is as necessary to capitalism as the labor in factories. Due to this, the role of sexual reproduction and domestic labor could be said to be at the core of the reproduction of capitalism. But although Marx offers materialist insights into the historical development of reproduction, he neglects the activities whereby people and their labor power are reproduced through the (nonremunerated) labor of women. The family wage, paid to the “head of household,” is supposed to include the values required to (re)produce the new workforce. Sexual (re)production and domestic labor is literally without (economic) value and so does not count as productive labor at all. As it is without 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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economic value there can be no surplus extracted, and therefore no exploitation takes place. Because productive labor is defined in terms of its economic value, domestic labor becomes invisible. Because exploitation is defined in terms of the appropriation of remunerated labor, the ways in which individual men benefit from the distribution of labor within the family also becomes invisible. According to Hennessy: The history of heterosexuality as a discursive ensemble that capitalism makes use of, as a vehicle for the legitimation of a gendered division of labor in the family and in waged work, and as an agent in the development of race and class consciousness has yet to be written, as does the history of hetero and homosexuality’s changing intimate links to commodity production and consumption.54

The political landscape thus created defines all relevant oppression as economic exploitation and all relevant production as remunerated. Marx confines the role of women within capitalism to the provision of cheap labor (reserve pool of labor), or to the realm of consumption, and hides the labor performed by women in the unproductive, nonremunerated “domestic” sphere. In summation, then, the “scientific” approach to history, part and parcel of historical materialism, takes human activity to be the mediating term between “the real” and “consciousness.” But due to the definition of human activity in terms of work, the (re)production of exchangeable goods, the historical materialist account of development focuses on economic relations of production. As a consequence, the exchange mechanism and the wage-relation become primary explanatory principles of historical, social development and change. By identifying exploitation with the extraction of surplus-value, all oppression can be expressed in economic terms, and revolutionary activity is, by definition, action that is designed to change the means and relations of economic production.55 As I said above, in a world that has seen the demise of political Marxism, there is an opportunity to reconsider the contribution of Marx’s philosophical ideas unencumbered by orthodox interpretations, and this is a world desperately in need of a refreshed and revised engagement with Marxism. The question facing us now is whether or not the concepts used within Marxism to make sense of productive activity not only give a partial account of economic exploitation, reification, and alienation, but also occlude oppression that is specific to women. If it does so, then it is irredeemable.



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Since the rise of the women’s movement in the United States, Europe, and UK in the late 1960s and early 1970s, feminism and Marxism have been in tension; in some cases this has been creative but in others it has led to breaks and fissures within the movement itself. Shulamith Firestone is an interesting case in point. Many of her articles trace the history of the Women’s Rights Movement in the United States and identify points where action around women’s liberation was submerged by, or collapsed into, other struggles.56 She believed that even in the liberation movement women’s interests always took second place. One reason for this was that the explanatory framework of liberation movements differently identified underlying causes of oppression and interests. Yet, disagreements as to the identity of primary underlying mechanisms (patriarchy, capitalism, colonialism) and the nature of interests were not restricted to encounters with other movements but were actually reproduced within feminist groups. The Redstockings, for example, were formed in 1969 following a split within the group New York Radical Women between socialist and radical feminists over just these questions. In her introduction to Close to Home, Christine Delphy recalls being told that the oppression of women could not be equal in importance to that of the proletariat since, although women were oppressed, they were not exploited. I remember being informed by a Militant comrade in the mid-1980s that question of rights—women, gay, black, and ethnic—were bourgeois deviations. This dismissal of women from the labor struggle was premised on two basic beliefs arising from the productivist paradigm. First, and as we have seen above, the value theory of labor defines exploitation in terms of the extraction of surplus-value. So, by definition, domestic labor is removed from the exploitation-equation and thus becomes irrelevant to matters of industrial (class) struggle. Second, women’s oppression by men is considered to supervene on economic relations of production and exploitation. The discriminatory character of the productivist paradigm has not gone unchallenged. Emphasizing the discursive character of feminist theory, Vogel notes that issues of sexuality, economic distribution, and the sex-based division of (domestic) labor were always at least implicit within radical feminism. But whereas radical feminists considered men—or male privilege—to be the root of oppression and the main obstacle to liberation, socialist and Marxist feminists dug deep within Marxism to address the demands of women’s liberation.



Feminism and Marxism


That said, as early as 1971, Juliet Mitchell made an incontrovertible case against traditional Marxism: it would have to be a transformed Marxism. A workable account of women’s oppression could not merely attach concepts of oppression to traditional Marxist theories. For the sake of historiography, it is possible to distil Marxist and socialist feminism into unified theory and dual-systems theory. Socialist and Marxist feminists wishing to analyze the material structures of women’s oppression have to first decide whether or not patriarchy can be analyzed as a set of social institutions distinct from capitalism, with its own history and its own causal origins. If capitalism can be defined as the appropriation and exploitation of labor by one class of another, can patriarchy be defined as the appropriation of labor and sexuality by one class (men) of another (women)? If so, what specifically is the relationship between production and reproduction? Is male dominance the creation of capitalism or is capitalism one expression of male dominance? Marxist feminists attempt to identify gender relations in the context of production and reproduction as understood within historical materialism; women are important in the struggle as workers not as women. So, Marxist unified systems theorists argue that theories of capitalism and patriarchy describe aspects of a single social system. Dual-systems theorists, on the other hand, more commonly associated with socialist feminism, argue that patriarchy and capitalism are two distinct systems that contingently intersect and that feminism and Marxism complement one another, each making up for the deficiency in the other. Although Marxist feminism is described as a unified system theory, various unified systems theorists, such as Alison Jagger, Lise Vogel, and Iris Young introduce the idea that gender-distinctive oppression is a necessary feature of capital. Vogel stresses that Marxism is actually inadequate as it stands because it is unable to account for the particular (sexed) dynamics of the laboring process and must be transformed to make it properly adequate. Explaining how sex-benefits are only apparent and not in the long-term interests of working-class men, she offers a convincing account of how capitalism incorporates men through a process of sanctioned domination and privilege. Importantly, though, she emphasizes the point that contradictions may arise within capitalism—and reverberate through the working class—as capitalism strives both to maximize productive labor, and so encourage women into the workforce, and to retain women’s unpaid domestic labor. Substituting division of labor theory for class analysis, Young attempts to develop a theory of gender-biased capitalism where class 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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and gender relations have evolved together. By concentrating on the structured gender differentiation of labor, she believes it possible to be also sensitive to the ethnic distinctions of a racist labor market.57 In addition, she argues that the marginalization of women and our function as secondary labor force is an essential and fundamental characteristic of capitalism: an integrated and virulent capitalist patriarchy. Barbara Marshall concurs, noting that despite variability there is an underlying similarity in the use of female labor in low-wage countries, as capital seeks to maximize profits through the use of cheap female labor while staying in harmony with traditional patriarchal ideologies.58 Ellen Meiksins Woods, a Marxist feminist, argues otherwise, stating that capitalism is uniquely indifferent to the social identities of people it exploits, undermining differences and diluting identities such as race, gender, and even sexualities.59 According to this argument, when the least privileged sectors of the working class coincide with “extra-economic” identities—such as gender and race—it may appear that the cause of the oppression lies elsewhere. But, in fact, racism and sexism function so well in capitalist society because they work to the advantage of some members of the working class in the competitive conditions of the labor market. In other words, the cause of oppression can be explained in terms of economic categories that also indicate the eradication or incorporation of those same identities. An example of such contradictory pulls may be the horrific cases of violence against gay men and women alongside “the pink pound” and civil partnerships. Dual-systems theorists, often referred to as socialist feminists, tend to separate out economic and sex relations, thereby accommodating gender analysis within an exposition of patriarchy, rather than forcing the economic analysis of Marxism to answer the questions outlined above. Patriarchy and capitalism are considered analytically distinct, with their own interests, laws of motion, and patterns of contradiction and conflict resolution. The intersection of the systems is a contingent fact and can be less than smooth. But this twin-track approach can supplement the sex-blind Marxist categories and make explicit the systematic character of oppressive relations between men and women. Marxism cannot answer why women are subordinate to men inside and outside the family and why it is not the other way round, whereas, according to Heidi Hartmann, feminist analysis can expose the fact that patriarchy has a material basis in men’s control over women’s labor power.60 She suggests that, by describing domestic labor in terms of its contribution to capitalism, unified systems theorists neglect that 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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housework exemplifies relationships between men and women. The question is: who benefits from women’s labor? Capitalists, obviously, but also men who, as husbands, fathers, and partners, receive personalized service at home. The content of these services may well vary by class or ethnic and racial grouping, but despite such variations men within each locale have a higher standard of living than women within that locale in terms of luxury consumption, leisure time, and personalized service.61 The family wage debate noted above is one example of the resolution of the conflict over women’s labor power occurring between patriarchal and capitalist interests.62 According to Scott, underlying Hartmann’s dual-systems approach lies a more monocausal analysis: economic causality takes precedence so that patriarchy develops and changes as a function of relations of production. In one of the most well-known articles comparing Marxism with feminism, dual-systems theorist Catharine MacKinnon drafts out a systematic typology of the distribution of power that allows us to read across from one to the other. Famously she coined the saying: “sexuality is to feminism what work is to Marxism: that which is most one’s own, yet most taken away.” Within Marxism, she claims, work has class as its structure, production as its consequence, capital as its congealed form, and its main concern is control. Sexuality within feminism is a similar organizing principle: heterosexuality is its structure, gender and family its congealed forms, sex roles its qualities, reproduction a consequence, and, likewise, its main concern is with the issue of control. Retaining the integrity of each theoretical system, MacKinnon recognizes the limitations of each: “women with feminist sympathies urge attention to women’s issues by left or labor groups: Marxist women pursue issues of class within feminist groups; explicitly socialist feminist groups come together and divide, often at the hyphen.” She suggests that instead of engaging in the debate over which came—or comes—first, sex or class, the task for theory is to explore the conflicts and connections between the methods that found it meaningful to analyze social conditions in terms of those categories in the first place.63 Juliet Mitchell contends that the two systems are theoretically irreducible and argues that there had been a tendency in Marxism toward reductionism: functions (and roles) of reproduction, sexuality, and socialization are considered determined by the economic base. Indeed, in Psychoanalysis and Feminism she suggests that the causes of women’s oppression are buried deep in the human psyche and that psychoanalysis is the way into understanding ideology and sexuality.64 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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It is, of course, the case that cultural-ideological oppression has been prevalent in noncapitalist modes of production. Oppression did not suddenly appear during the early period of modernity—although it has to be said that capitalism certainly takes advantage of a segregated labor market. Can we use these insights from unified and dual systems theory or do we have to consign the debate to the dustbin of modernity? Without doubt, global or transnational labor markets have been undergoing a transformation. In the UK, for example, a long period of restructuring has resulted in a reduction in manufacturing with disproportionate effects for unskilled male workers. Shifts toward a service-economy have resulted in what has been described as feminine flexible working practices: part-time, temporary, and casual work. Julie Macleavy points out another dimension to this “feminization of the economy”: the gender difference in hours worked, variations in rates of pay, and the low percentage of women in management positions.65 Economic migration—legal and illegal—has revealed the manner in which ethnic and racial hierarchies are deployed and managed within a few richer Western economies. It is also the case that “the family” has ceased to be a straightforward analytic category of social reproduction. This is not just to do with the general recognition of cultural, geographic, class, racial, and ethnic variations of kinship relations but also the increasing prevalence of sole-parented families (mainly women, mainly poor) and what might be called “reconstructed” family units. According to Gayatri Spivak “the worst victims of the recent exacerbation of the international division of labor are women. They are the true surplus army of labor in the current conjecture. In their case, patriarchal social relations contribute to their production as the new force of super-exploitation.”66 Despite the new flexibility of capitalism, women, then, do still play a particular role, and men within one locale still benefit from the labor of women within that locale. Does that mean we need to decide between dual and single systems theory? In the following chapters I will argue that we do not have to choose between methods, as MacKinnon advises, and that by revising a number of key terms—for example structure, system, and social practice—we can absorb a number of ideas from both. Guided by the preceding consideration of unified and dual systems theory we can state the following: (i) although women currently constitute almost 50 percent of the workforce and are distributed across different sectors, there is still a segregated labor market; 67 (ii) women still undertake the majority of (unpaid) labor in the 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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family;68 (iii) capitalism strives both to maximize productive labor, and so encourages women into the workforce, and to retain women’s unpaid domestic labor; (iv) primitive accumulation is not neutral (to gender or race) and involves differential treatment;69 (v) even if indifferent to “extra-economic” identities, which I believe it is, capital will pursue differentiated markets and this will exacerbate cultural and sexual differences; (vi) given the multiple roles occupied by women in terms of productive and reproductive labor, globalization and structural adjustment policies, promoted by bodies such as the World Bank and the IMF, have a more emphatic impact on women. Given these systematic imperatives, conflicts, tensions, and crises are woven into the social fabric. It is a matter for social science to deliberate on how contexts limit action, agendas are framed, and particular interests are enhanced to the detriment of others.70 But, given the tendencies pulling in contrary directions, we can perhaps begin to discern some explanation for the appearance of paradoxes on the cultural terrain. During the next few years, as recessions bite down, we will see these tensions and conflicts amplified.

Conclusion Offering a general theory of action, Marx foregrounds real-life sensuous social individuals within relationships, acting on and transforming the world in accordance with various projects. These relationships mediate consciousness and “nature” and are, currently, organized in exploitative ways. The notion of a sensuous subject situated within a web of social relations accords well with the idea of body-consciousness articulated earlier. Previous attempts by feminists to engage with Marxism have focussed almost exclusively on the theory of value and production, thus neglecting his earlier work on the historical, productive, and creative character of the human subject.71 We cannot simply return to the Economic and Philosophical Manuscript to repair this, nor can we merely absorb an industrial model of production. When we begin with sensuous human activity, we are led, if not to reconstruct Marx’s own project, at least to remove the limits placed on it by the productivist paradigm. I would say that the idea of bodyconsciousness leads us to extend or modify Marx’s account of productive activity in three ways.72 First, the production paradigm does restrict the concept of practice. Human activity cannot be completely captured in terms of the production of independent objects; the “world-of-work” is an integral but not sole cultural practice. The production of independent 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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objects is supported by and supports a number of other activities. I have no real problem with limiting the use of the concept of exploitation to the production of surplus-value, but only if that is properly situated within its broader, supporting conceptual network of productive activities and practices.73 This would mean that the relationships of production (of independent objects for exchange) are not the only—nor perhaps the main—source and origin of oppression or social conflict. Or, as Marshall puts it, if, in good socialist tradition, we take labor (productive activity) as the key category of analysis, it is taken with a broader sense: waged labor is only a portion of the total social labor performed in any society.74 But to extend the meaning of oppression in this way requires it to be reformulated. Second, as discussed above, the distinction between labor and labor-power attunes us to the transformational character of productive activity. As we engage with the world, self and world are changed. The attentive and creative investment required to transform use-values into exchange-values exceeds the scope of wage labor. Exploitation crucially identifies the production of surplus-value: the divergence between the values of the producer and the values produced. But the manner or experience of productive activity may be harmful in ways not quite encapsulated in the analytic concept of exploitation. The reverse of this is that there is a wealth of productive activity, also suggested by Marx but somewhat masked in the distinction between productive and unproductive labor, which runs alongside work. This leads to a third point. A fleshed out account of species—being complex, self-conscious, historical, and situated within social relationships—opens up the problem of community and social consensus. There is no guarantee that if we were to overcome exploitation and alienation within the sphere of production, individual interests would be identical to all others: to the universal.75 By expanding the description of productive activity, we no longer strictly identify interests in terms of economic or class interest. It is a problem, of course, central to Habermas’s theory of communicative action and to liberal democratic theory, but it does not undermine anything in the preceding account, and merely alerts us that we need to do some work on the nature of interests and the possibility of coalitions. By modifying the productivist paradigm in these ways, feminist theorists can begin to consider correlations between the context and phenomenology of productive activity and regain a way to talk about the context at least in part in terms of the motions and processes of capitalism. Conversations between unified and dual-systems theorists offer a rich and sadly neglected stream to mine for this. As a 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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way forward, without restricting ourselves to dual or single systems theories, from both we can extract a few pivotal propositions. First, capitalism is indifferent to economic identities—except insofar as they enable the extraction of surplus-value and promote the circulation of commodities. However, second, for the reproduction of capitalism to take place, it is economically rational to exacerbate cultural— racial and sexual—differences and differentiate markets, and therefore socially differentiated markets are pursued and created to enhance the extraction of surplus- value (and this works on, and consolidates, normative identities). Third, this last proposition assumes a history of social practices, habits, and values, which may or may not come to be in tension with the (uneven) efficient extraction of surplus-value and patterns of consumption. Capitalism is a form of social production that is totalizing without being total. Fourth, global restructuring will aggravate the tension between the tendency toward the unhampered free availability of labor power, and thus the equalization of male and female labor power, and the domestic labor required for the reproduction of the labor force. Lastly, capital indifference to extraeconomic identities combined with the exacerbation and entrenchment of hierarchical cultural differences creates additional conflict and tension: absorbed, managed, or reconciled often within the cultural realm. We need to do quite a bit of work on the concept of patriarchy before we can really answer whether or not it is a distinct system that intersects with capitalism. Or whether patriarchy is a distinct social practice that constitutes its subjects as sexed. For now, if capitalism is actually indifferent to “extra-economic” identities, then we need to ask whether any relationships are peculiar to capitalism. Hennessy answers in the affirmative: although relationships of appropriation and accumulation existed in precapitalist production, economic relations of exploitation are functionally unique to capital. Exploitation, like premodern appropriation, is an unequal relationship. According to Hennessy, exploitation never occurs without oppressive forms of consciousness of identity and difference. I think she is right, but she needs an account of reified forms of consciousness to explain what is distinctive about the consciousness of identity and difference within capitalism, and it is to this we turn in the next chapter.



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2

Objectivity

Introduction From epistemology to ontology, from the philosophy of (social) science to aesthetics, from ethics to linguistics, feminist philosophers have taken issue with the notion of objectivity.1 To aspire to objectivity in these fields often means harboring prior beliefs that scientific and epistemic claims about independent “facts of the matter” are produced by disinterested, dispassionate, value-free subjects who inhabit a view-from-nowhere and who engage in adversarial dialogue or knock-down argument.2 Despite these beliefs, no matter how hard we aspire to remove ourselves from claims about the world, something in us determines our picture of the object-world.3 Unfortunately, as a result of the supposition of a view-from-nowhere, interests, values, and background beliefs—which actually do affect enquiry—remain unexamined and distort the activity. Some argue that because vision establishes the relationship between subject and object it also acts as the ground of objectivity.4 Further, within a psycho-dynamic model, vision grounds objectivity within a frame of reference of unconscious desire, drives, anxiety, pleasure, and dread, as well as anticipating future encounters, which turn out to be always-already structured and repetitive. In this way, psychoanalytic theories of development, particularly object-relation theory, are considered to illuminate the structure and meaning of an interacting system of associations, unconscious investment, desires, and interests linking the apprehension of an object-world and the aspiration to objectivity (a cognitive trait) with autonomy (an affective trait) and masculinity (a gender trait). So the “ideology of objectivity” is taken to draw upon an opposition between (male) objectivity and (female) subjectivity and, by denying mediation between the two, distorting enquiry in a manner that favors men.5



CH A P T ER


The risk here is that as a consequence of conceding a subjective base any talk of “objectivity,” which accredits some mind-independent status to objects, becomes negatively identified with realism. Not just with realism but with a “crude realism” that ignores the existence of the self, regards one’s own perspective as certain, and appropriates others into a narcissistic web. In this way, the concession of a subjective base can lead to the argument that we are unable to step aside from our point of view and as a result any belief that we can come close to an outside reality is without foundation.6 As Battersby puts it: “If we start from within an idealist frame (in which the ‘outer’ world is simply constructed as the counterpart—the other—of the subject), it is not possible to speak coherently of a ‘real’ that falls outside that conceptual frame.”7 Thus, with no bridge between the subjective point of view and an object-world, the alternatives to crude realism are subjective relativism and skepticism. Despite intention then, the idea that (unexamined) subjective elements affect our comportment to objects comes to undermine the very idea of objectivity and then a mind-independent world, thus wearing away analytic distinctions between objects, objectivity, objectivism, and objectification. Once this has occurred, what began as a critical activity—the revelation of interests and bias—can no longer continue to perform a critical function. The “ideology of objectivity” follows from the Enlightenment philosophical model of subjectivity par excellence: the Cartesian spectator model of self, where the structure of ordinary and mundane experience in terms of subjects and objects is taken at face value.8 This Cartesian conception of objectivity depends on a degree of fictional force, which is opaque. It works, and works most effectively, because it remains undetected.9 Another Enlightenment model has been discussed in the previous chapter, friendlier to the feminist project, whereby the spectator model is replaced with a historical, intersubjective, productive, and engaged model of subjectivity creating conditions of objectivity: a dialectical model. Unfortunately, as we have seen, the conditions of objectivity are not harmonious in any straightforward sense. They incorporate histories of trouble, conflict, oppression, and exploitation. And in this case, we should expect these conflicts to be reflected in our approach to objects and subjects in the world. Critical reflection on the conditions of objectivity should reveal what is required to maintain the illusion of Cartesian objectivity and neutrality. Thomas Nagel calls the temptation to interpret the objectivity of reasons in too strong a way, “overobjectification,” and names 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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it the “ideology of objectivity.” I suggest that the temptation and its manifestation are related to particular social contexts (to a mind-independent world).10 In this chapter I explore whether the concept of reification can elucidate the component features of what is designated by the phrase “ideology of objectivity.” I take these features to include inter alia the masking of interests; an approach to identity and difference that pays attention to similarity and at times thinks this in terms of sameness; and a tendency to abstract— and try to make sense of—events, roles, human characteristics away from their social contexts. These constituent factors of Nagel’s “ideology of objectivity” are helpfully marshalled together in the term “objectivism,” and in future I shall refer to this phenomenon either as “objectivism” or as “the ideology of objectivism.” By enabling us to disaggregate “objectivism” from “objectivity,” the idea of reification should assist us in securing a feminist methodology comfortable in exploring causal mechanisms (of oppression), bracketed by versions of cultural materialism. A number of feminist epistemologists help us distinguish “objectivity” from “objectivism” and indicate the relation of objectivism to an external (mind-independent) world. The concept of reification, alongside those of alienation and commodity fetishism, orbits that of ideology. Although I believe it possible to demonstrate that the notion of ideology can assist in articulating a link between sensation-affect and meaning-making within local and global contexts, I have to admit that if Marxist political economy seems otiose, “ideology” fares little better—perhaps even worse. Terry Eagleton refines the case against the concept of ideology and schematizes three postmodernist critical challenges. The first, given the postmodern shift in focus from representational content to meaning-in-use, is that Marxist analysis incorporates a form of representational epistemology that depends on a “modernist” ontology of stable and self-identical subjects and objects. The second is that any description of consciousness as either false or ideological must posit a true but somehow inaccessible form of consciousness. Given the first point, there will obviously be a problem with the idea of a “true” consciousness and true correspondence. But, in addition, the postmodern alignment of rationality, power, and interest has been taken to undermine the distinction between ideological and nonideological consciousness.11 However, the concept “ideology” designates neither falsehood nor a coherent and total set of beliefs. Quite the contrary, working at the level of appearance, the term designates something actual but incomplete—a realm of ongoing contestation and negotiation. That 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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said, my primary claim is that (to some extent) commodity exchange, together with its structural consequences, is able to influence the inner and outer life of society. This chapter does not focus on the epistemic relationship between objectivity and the object world, although I will touch on it, but concentrates instead on the problem of objectivity to ask whether or not the concept of reification catches all the component features iterated as objectivism. With an eye to Lukács and Adorno, I begin by demonstrating how we can start with Marx’s economic analysis and then proceed to reveal a cognitive orientation, aligned with fetishism and reification, that does capture the salient features of objectivism.12 The fulcrum of this argument is that reified forms of objectification are connected to “the external world,” which sometimes appears to confirm the reified cognition. We will then have to explain whether there is something particular about sexual objectification. If this is achieved, we will be able to extend the feminist critique of “the ideology of objectivism” in a manner that allows the possibility of distinguishing objective effort from objectivist illusion and realism from idealism. Without these distinctions, every claim or belief is as good as any other, and the description of a belief as “true” will merely be a crown awarded to the winner of an ancient agonistic ritual.

Making Objects Psychoanalytic and indeed phenomenological views regarding objectrelations catches something about the way in which sensations, drives, and desires formulate not only our sensual and cognitive attitudes to objects but also the way we grasp their object-state or their objectivity. By absorbing objects into our projects, the “what it means to be an object-for-us” seems destined to determine the appearance of the object—paying little heed to the object itself and emptying out its content.13 Perhaps this is especially true when the object-for consciousness is another subject. While this is a compelling account of an appropriating and intrusive approach to objects, I hope that by clarifying the distinct senses of the terms “objects,” “objectivity,” “objectification,” and “objectivism” we may avoid slipping from a well motivated distrust with appropriating object-relations, to denying—even without realizing it—the existence of an object-world. The idea of “reification” is not a panacea, and even those within the Marxist tradition are not inured from slipping from one to the other. In his 1967 Preface to History and Class Consciousness, Lukac´s admits that he had mistakenly identified alienation and objectification in his original text and as a consequence had collapsed 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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“externalisation,” “objectification,” and “alienation” into the same social phenomenon that the “proper social conditions” would eliminate.14 By treating these concepts as synonymous, Lukac´s was left without critical epistemic tools and, by his own admission, drifted into idealist waters.15 Feminist theory can avail itself of this insight. If we retain these conceptual distinctions, we can make some headway in developing a historical and materialist perspective concerning the forms and patterns of objectification. First, a quick reprieve of what Marx means by alienation. In addition to the claim that labor, or productive activity, is commodified, Marx introduces the idea of historical and socially induced alienation. When discussing the estrangement of labor, in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Marx—in a rather poetic phrase—writes that estranged labor turns “Man’s species-being, both nature and his spiritual species-property, into a being alien to him, into a means for his individual existence. It estranges from man his own body, as well as external nature and his spiritual aspect, his human aspect.”16 We also find this in the Mill-Excerpts where the suggestion is that private property, markets, and wage labor systematically hamper the realization of, and so estrange the human being from, their speciesbeing. There are four aspects to such alienation: alienation from product, from productive activity, from other producers, and from species-being. There are various ways to reformulate this idea of alienation without drawing on an underlying essential nature or species-being. Alienation can be thought not as a condition but as a process of struggle, the alienation of practical activity.17 For now let us return to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and get to grips with his idealism—instructive when attempting to develop a materialist method suitable for feminist theory. While Hegel does not employ the term reification (Verdinglichung), he distinguishes between “strange or estranged” (Entfremdung) and “making outer, external, or alien” (Entäusserung). In order to know the world and to perceive itself as a separate entity, the “I” grasps independent objects as external. Entfremdung carries a sense of loss of essential being and interpersonal estrangement. Entäusserung implies a process of relinquishment, loss, surrender of oneself, but it also conveys a sense of “making objective” in externalization: Hegel cannot conceive of objectification except as resulting in estrangement—hence he substitutes for the category of objectification (Vergegenständlichung) that of alienation (Entäusserung—which,



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like Vergegenständlichung, has the connotation of positing as objective but which also implies the relinquishment of what is manifested, constituting therefore an alienation). Nonetheless, Hegel sees something positive in this process because in this alienation spirit becomes objective to itself. It is an essential moment in spirit’s self-actualization and self-awareness. Hegel is not, then, opposed to objectification, on the grounds that it leads to estrangement. He certainly thinks that it does lead to estrangement, but this does not mean that he thinks spirit should rest content in itself and avoid the misfortune of alienation from itself. However, instead of a real historical solution we are provided with a displacement of the problem into general philosophical reflection issuing in a solution posed exclusively within philosophy, which preserves estrangement (“otherness as such”) as a moment in the absolute.18

For Hegel, alienation is overcome when consciousness realizes that that which is encountered as an independent object is, in actuality, a part of itself. The problem with this, in effect the idealist move, is that the “making external,” “the alienating,” and “the estranged” are brought together so that alienation is overcome when the object is brought back into consciousness.19 Picking apart the form of objectification from the making of objects, Marx alleges that Hegel confuses the making of objects, or externalization, with alienation per se so that a historical relationship to objects is generalized to all external objects. More pointedly, the Hegelian idealist move resides in conflating the idea of objects with objects themselves. Thus, a historical relationship to objects is generalized to a way of thinking about objects as objects-for-consciousness and the issue becomes surmounting the object and bringing it back into consciousness: “actual estrangement is according to its innermost, hidden nature (which is only brought to light through philosophy) nothing but the manifestation of the estrangement of the real human essence, of self-consciousness.”20 As external objects really are alien, this amounts to endorsing a state of alienation. Far from an esoteric scholastic exchange, the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts offers analytic distinctions revealing aspects of the “ideology of objectivism” whilst the flow of rather aphoristic argument reminds us of the pitfalls of idealism by disaggregating the idea of the object from the object itself. To make it slightly less arcane, I shall follow a typology outlined by Peter Berger and Stanley Pullberg who distinguish between objectivation, objectification, alienation, and reification.21 Objectivation means the process whereby human subjectivity embodies itself in products that are



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available to the self and to others as elements of a common world. This correlates to what we have previously described as the making of objects, or “world-making.” Objectification is the moment in the process of objectivation in which subjects establish distance from producing and products so that they become objects for consciousness. Objectivation and objectification are what Berger and Pullberg call anthropologically necessary. We cannot conceive a human world without making things and those things being available to consciousness. Considered in this way, world-making is part of practical life and there is nothing inherently wrong with objectification. Does objectification involve a “giving-up” or “estrangement”? To answer this question, we need to pursue the precise relationship between objectivation, objectification, and alienation. Alienation refers to the historical process whereby the unity between producing and product is broken. It is where objectivation is appropriated and we “forget” that the world in which we live is produced by us. Reification is the moment in this process of alienation in which the characteristics of independent and self-regulating “thing-hood” become the standard of objective reality: “reification is objectification in an alienated mode.” It operates in society by bestowing ontological (or substance) status on what are social roles, processes, and institutions. Alienation and reification are what Berger and Pullberg call de facto characteristics of the human condition. To explain the sensual and cognitive distortions of the historical form of objectification, captured by the concept of reification, we have to connect them back to political economy. This should help us to pinpoint what is historically specific about the ideology of objectivism and thereby what is historically specific about the problem as it emerges within feminist theory.

Essence and Appearance Reified cognition does not simply mistake the way the world is; it can reflect the way the world actually reveals itself. The conceptual distinction “essence and appearance” explains this. The spectre of “essence and appearance” haunts anyone in nodding acquaintance with Nietzsche. Despite the fact that it is commonplace in various sciences to accept that the way the world appears is at odds with, but can be explained in terms of, an underlying reality, the idea that it is plausible to explain the way reality appears by appealing to an underlying essential reality sets the hares running within Marxian and feminist theory. For some Marxists this type of essentialism raises the problem of economic determinism: if essence is identified with economic 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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relations of production then the economy might be thought to be in a causal or determining relationship with all other social phenomena. Within feminism, essentialism has also been associated with naturalism and universalism; ideas implicated in social hierarchies. In a number of places, Marx specifies a distance between “vulgar economy,” “classical political economy,” and his political economy, which is a critique of the latter. These distinctions are supposed to provide us with one minimum and necessary condition to be satisfied by any work aspiring to scientific status; “namely that it uncovers the reality behind the appearances which conceal it.”22 The distinction between essence and appearance need not lead to economic or, indeed, psychoanalytic or scientific, reductionism but does allow room for competing, maybe complementary, explanatory models and also opens an interrogative space where questions of knowledge and interest can be raised. It also permits the claim that social phenomena may appear to agents as something other than what they are. Stronger than this, for Marx, capitalist society necessarily appears to its agents as something other than what it is. Political economy, with the labor theory of value, is clearly a theory about the social regulation of production, but it is also a theory of why production appears as something other than it is.23 This distinction can contribute to feminist theory a way to acknowledge the “way of the world” and the tools to carve away any explanation for this in terms of essence, nature, or pixie-dust. To recap the salient features of commodity production: superficially, commodities appear to be trivial things, but commodity production inaugurates a change in our relationship to world-making. Admittedly, in feudalism, for example, social relations were “naturalised” and “objectified,” yet they did not appear as relationships between things. Work was, without doubt, hard, but its compulsory nature was not hidden from those working. There was no mystery involved in working to satisfy needs and in producing a surplus to pay land-rent. This relationship did not appear in abstract form. We will be drawing on the idea of abstraction to elucidate the form of objectification closely aligned with “the ideology of objectivism.” Marx’s labor theory of value brings to light that, in commodity-producing societies, all types of labor are reduced to a common standard. Different, incommensurable, instances of concrete labor are brought into equivalence through exchange. As Fine puts it: “price relations between commodities is the form in which an equivalence is established between different concrete labors, the means by which these are reduced to homogenous labor that counts as value, what 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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Marx calls abstract labor.” Understood in this way, the labor theory of value has more to do with how specific social relations make heteronomous concrete labor homogenous rather than with a theory of price. Thus the theory of value identifies ways in which the heteronomous is transformed through a process of abstraction into the homogeneous. It will thereby help us to explain the cognitive inclinations to work in abstraction and to reduce dissimilar things to examples of the same.24 Neither term “appearance” nor “form” ought to be considered synonymous with illusion. This is not a theory of perception and does not seek to explain, for example, why we perceive a straightstick as bent when immersed in water. The way in which our social world appears is its shape. For instance, it is the case that objects have prices, but prices can be translated into values revealed as a particular historical form of production dependant on the appropriation and exploitation of labor. The historical process thereby explains the form that value takes, and thus the underlying process of production, essence, explains the way in which value appears (as price). As neither form nor appearance is illusory, they cannot be spirited away through analysis; analysis is rather “a process of elucidating one reality (price) by disclosing its foundation in and determination by another (exchange-value).”25 However, prices are often taken to be signs of values naturally inhering in the objects themselves—as products of nature. Similarly, capitalism or the division of labor is often presented as a natural state of affairs, corresponding to, sometimes arising from, inherent tendencies (aggression, competition). Fetishism signifies this metamorphosis of the social and economic character of things and processes into supposedly natural characteristics stemming from the things themselves. We shall return to this characteristic when discussing naturalism and objectivism. There is one further distinction to be drawn—one that would upset any analytic philosopher. Marx suggests a way to differentiate between true and false appearances, or appearances that do conform to an objective reality and those that do not. To take the former: “that labor is represented by the value of its product, labor-time by the magnitude of that value and social relations by the value relations between commodities. . . . are not illusory appearances but realities.”26 Hence we can say that whilst the “material shell” of value conceals social relations of production, it is still a “something,” and that although it is absurd that goods are exchanged according to a standard equivalent, it is an absurdity we encounter daily.27 The way 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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value appears, its phenomenal form, is as real as underlying relations otherwise known as essences. There are also appearances that are just that and do not correspond to social reality. One example is that of the wage-form. The wage appears to be a fair and equal exchange of labor for money. However, as we have seen, the transformative power of labor is appropriated, and labor is valued neither in terms of what is produced nor the intensity of the work, but according to the bundle of commodities consumed by the worker and his or her family. This is then parcelled out according to hours in the day. This relationship between labor and value obscures the origin of surplus-value, explains why those who work the longest hours are the most exploited, why there can be no such thing as “fair day’s work for a day’s pay,” and why the relationship between employee and capitalist is not one of a labor contract freely entered. That said, the sale of labor—and hence the wage-form—is an essential mediating form of capitalist relations of production and is constantly reproduced.28 “The objectified forms of practice present themselves as external appearances of internal relations, as phenomenal forms of the essence.”29 While the example of the wage-form may not be entirely convincing (it certainly seems as “true” an appearance as price), the distinction between true and false appearance is fruitful for feminist epistemology. It helps us distinguish between propositions such as “if educated, feminine reproductive organs suffer” and “women are carers.” In our everyday world, profits do not seem to have much to do with the mass of living labor in any one sphere, and increases and decreases in prices appear to evidence a rise and fall of wages rather than a value relationship between commodities. But we can now see why it is that: . . . in competition everything appears upside down. The finished configuration of economic relations, as these visible on the surface of their actual existence, and therefore also in the notions with which the bearers and agents of these relations seek to gain an understanding of them, is very different from the configuration of their inner core, which is essential but concealed, and the concept corresponding to it. It is in fact the very reverse and antithesis of this.30

Lorrain expresses the relationship between inverted consciousness and inverted reality as one “mediated by a level of appearances constitutive of reality as such.” Our understanding of what we mean by “reality” is thus broadened out to include appearances. But these 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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appearances are not illusory. Ideological representation adopts the petrified appearances produced by material practices, and assumes for them an autonomy and independence that they do not actually have. Ideology is thus a term we can use to describe ways we grasp the world. More acutely, ideology is a term we can use to describe the way the world appears. Essence can be understood as that which lies concealed beneath the facade of immediacy and which makes the facts what they are.31 For Adorno, social essence comes to appear swathed in contradiction, recognized only by the contradiction between what things are and what they claim to be. Although this essence is itself a concept, it is not mere conceptuality. Instead the conceptuality expresses “the fact that, no matter how much blame may attach to the subject’s contribution, the conceived world is not its own but a world hostile to the subject.” To deny that there is such essence means to side with appearance, “with the total ideology that appearance has since become.”32 The distinction between essence and appearance is a useful explanatory tool and is not one to be bundled up with naturalism (which is a form of fetishism) and universalism, only to be rejected in a rather sweeping Nietzschean gesture intimating underlying forces.

Fetishism and Reification As we broaden our meaning of “reality” to include appearances, which are not illusions, we need to decipher our relationship to such a world: how we inhabit, move around, sense, and understand it. The labor theory of value explains the origin and appropriation of surplus-value, circulation of capital and labor. It also indicates the lived experience of commodification, alienation, and exchange. These “objective” and “subjective” poles are brought together in the idea of reification. Since its heyday in the 1920s and 1930s, the concept “reification” has fallen rather by the way, but it is currently undergoing something of a revival. Axel Honneth identifies four indicators of such a revival. First, he notes its appearance in literature to suggest both “a creeping commercialisation” and how we interact with others as though they were lifeless objects. It also appears in recent work within sociology and social psychology exploring how individuals feign emotions and feelings. Within ethical and moral philosophy it has been used to designate modes of interaction where subjects are treated as lifeless things, objects, or commodities. Finally, criticism of neurophysiology tends to be in terms of its reductive approach to human subjectivity and thus its violation of moral principles.33 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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Although the concept of reification bears these normative impulses, it is first and foremost dependent on the category of exploitation and to a particular description of a form of world-making. As we saw, for Marx everything appears reversed in competition. If people and their circumstances “appear upside-down, as in camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical-process.”34 The commodity form and the value relation between products of labor have no connection to their physical properties or material relations arising from them: “It is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things. . . . I call this the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labor as soon as they are produced as commodities.”35 Not only does the social relation appear as a relation between things, but also things appear to stand in a social relationship. “Value,” Marx continues, “does not have its description branded on its forehead; it rather transforms every product of labor into a social hieroglyphic.” That social relations appear as things and things appear to have social properties are two sides of the same social phenomenon. Marx treats Verdinglichung and Versachlichung as pretty much synonymous, indicating how a person is “thingified” or reified and things are personified.36 Lukács’s chapter on “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat” in his History of Class Consciousness is a pivotal account of the importance of reification. Indeed, he writes that “the essential feature of capitalism is commodity fetishism and the essential product of such fetishism is reification.” As the abstract, quantitative mode of calculability of commodity exchange, “sinks more deeply into the consciousness of man,” thingification can be extended to social and cognitive relations.37 The world comes into sight and its inverted appearance is affirmed, which means that essential relations of production are naturalized and mystified. The subject as producer reflects in herself the fragmentation of the rationally produced object until “human qualities and idiosyncrasies appear mere sources of error when contrasted with these abstract special laws functioning according to rational predictions.”38 The world appears to be governed by empirically discoverable, natural, and unalterable laws, and individuals apprehend their own activities in terms of quantifiable laws. The thingification of people (reification) presents itself in philosophy as crude materialism, and the personification of things (fetishism) presents itself as crude idealism. Crude materialists tend to regard social relations of production as 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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though they are natural properties inherent in things. Crude idealists regard objects as though they are fashioned and constructed by the mind. It is thus not simply the economic subject but the bourgeois subject in general who is confronted with a reified social reality.39 Explicating Lukács, Honneth describes how subjects are compelled to behave as detached observers rather than active participants in life and how the demand to calculate oneself and others for profit leads to an attempt to regard the world from a purely rational and emotionless stance—a view-from-nowhere. This is accompanied by a reifying perception of all situational elements including ones talents and skills, partners and others, and any element in the world. This habitual and affective behavior constitutes a “second nature.” Although this account does tend to wrap every kind of objectivity into reification and posits a form of praxis that is structurally false (and therefore implies a form of practice that is structurally true), it does bring together the cognitive and the affective dimensions of reification. Hennessy draws on this synergy to show how human potential for sensation and affect has been reified into fixed sexual identities.40 Also bringing together the cognitive and affective dimensions of reification, Adorno describes reification as both a social phenomena and a way of thinking.41 Now freed from opposing “accusations” of not being Marxist enough,42 or even of being too Marxist, we can recuperate Adorno’s account of reification, of how commodity exchange is a “structuring-principle” of capitalist societies.43 Facing the question, “how is Marx’s philosophical treatment of social forms of alienation to be related to empirical laws of capitalist accumulation?” Adorno—and the Frankfurt School—addressed the problematic relationship between the early, but only to them recently available, “humanistic” 1844 Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts and the economic dialectic of Capital.44 Jameson, in his rather anxious assessment of Adorno’s Marxism, insists that the law of value—or at least some general Marxian sense of the dynamic of capitalism and of the tangential laws of development and history—is always presupposed by Adorno’s interpretations.45 Contrary to the suggestion that he moved beyond the concept of reification, Adorno criticizes “reification” in the name of the moment of truth of reification theory.46 I think we can draw out three ideas from Adorno’s complex and beautifully nuanced discussion of reification that will enable us to trace the historical contours of cognition. First, exchange depends on abstract identity whereby unlike things, for example, distinct goods or particular productive endeavors, appear to be alike or 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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equal and quantifiable. In terms of use-values, commodities are incomparable because they possess different objective characteristics and this useful character is abstracted in exchange. The propositions “this hat is £10.99” and “this chair is £12.99” predicate exchange-values, which are measurements of units of production time. The problem of the incomparability of use-values cannot be resolved analytically by merely treating goods as products of labor. This is because the labor that produces these goods is as varied and differentiated as the use-values. The productive work of a weaver and tailor is as qualitatively different as linen and coat.47 “The physical fact that each expenditure of effort occurs in the dimension of time no more indicates the exchange-value of the commodities than the fact that both occupy three-dimensional space.”48 The physical activity of labor—concrete labor—is quite distinct from the labor that is materialized in the exchange-value of commodities and measured in units of time. Exchange-value depends on abstraction, and abstraction homogenizes variation. Identity thinking makes unlike things alike: “The exchange principle, the reduction of human labor to its abstract universal concept of average labortime, has the same origin as the principles of identification. It has its social model in exchange and exchange would be nothing without identification.”49 A second, connected point is that bourgeois society makes the dissimilar comparable by reducing it to abstract quantities.50 Developing this, Frederic Jameson notes that judgments based on sameness are, above all, judgments premised on the equivalence of value: “the possibility we have historically constructed of comparing them when in terms of their use-value they remain incomparable.”51 Quantification and calculability are the characteristics of abstract identity. Careful of our initial distinctions—between objectification and alienation, essence and appearance, (true) appearance and false appearance—we can say along with Adorno that the process has real objectivity and is objectively untrue at the same time.52 Third, this appearance of identity, where dissimilar objects are exchangeable and exchange-value predicated as a natural quality, is also an example of reification. From the predication of price we can deduce (discover) social facts, social relations supporting standard equivalence, and also an explanation for the superficial simplification of these facts. Indeed, this is why Capital begins with an analysis of the commodity form. A simple judgment Fa, where a is a commodity and F its value, predicated as a natural property, is only possible because the object is abstracted from its (productive) relations. The 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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simple predication of exchange-value to an object is an example of reified, or identity, thinking. Adorno suggests that a particular cognitive orientation is a consequence of the experience of this way of living and producing and, from the preceding commentary, we can recognize that naturalization, abstraction, simplification, and a tendency to see the dissimilar as similar, and the similar as identical, are the principal features of this cognitive orientation. That Adorno may or may not have downplayed the commodification of labor is not relevant here, as, for the sake of my current argument, the salient point is that a particular kind of cognitive orientation has an intimate relationship to worldmaking, to a form of production or externalization, as is the move from heterogeneity to homogeneity. The cognitive orientation also enables the interests underlying production to be mystified. These are all the features we have previously identified falling under the “ideology of objectivism.” If we accept this account, then it is possible to make some move toward offering an alternative to a psychoanalytic explanation for the phenomena. We do not need to tread through a psychodrama to explain this cognitive orientation: sometimes a pipe is just a pipe and sometimes the economy of the same is the economy.

Feminism and Reification From Sappho to Virginia Woolf, from Betty Friedan to Judith Butler, women have long since analyzed cultural sex-bias. Radical feminists, such as Kate Millett, have drawn on the concepts of ideology, mystification, and false belief to examine sex-based hierarchies and to explain how “the ruling sex” maintains and extends power over “the subordinate sex.” Rather than turning to psychoanalytic theory to explain subordination and its ideological manifestations, Millett presents a rather excoriating attack on what she considers to be the ingrained misogyny of the principal Freudian, and we may add Lacanian, tenets. This denial of psychoanalytic theory, according to Toril Moi of Sexual Textual Politics, forces Millett into inaccurate and truncated accounts of opposing theories. With no room for the unconscious, repression, or libidinal investment, Millet is unable to make sense of the contradictions, inconsistencies, and dislocations within the symbolic: why women are invested in patriarchy and the impact of the unconscious on apparently conscious and rational choices and actions? Only a concept of ideology, Moi suggests, that is a contradictory construct marked by gaps, slides, and inconsistencies will enable 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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feminism to explain how even the severest ideological pressures will generate their own lacunae.53 We have been pursuing the relationship between objectivism and reification, objects, objectification and objectivity. So far we have concentrated on an idea of ideology inherited from Lukács, Adorno, and Honneth to explain how the commodity form is a structuring principle within capitalist societies and how it links reification and objectivism: such that we now understand objectivism to be a form of objectification in an alienated state. This covers the main features of thought we initially identified as troublesome. The question is now threefold. First, do economic interests exert a determining influence on all forms of objectification or the aspiration to objectivity? Second, does the restrictive Marxist concept of ideology fully explain the “ideology of objectivism”? Third, how do (social) hierarchies (sex/ gender, race/ethnicity, class, and heteronormative interests) relate to objectivity? In order to make some headway with this, we first need to scope the concept of ideology. “Ideology” has a broad and narrow focus, which is often confused. Broadly, ideology can refer to a social superstructure, which includes all forms of consciousness, theories, institutions, and practices within a circumscribed historical period, corresponding to a stage in production and technological development. In his 1859 Preface, Marx includes legal and political structures although not scientific practice. Narrowly, ideology refers to the way the mind attempts to resolve conflicts and contradictions encountered but irresolvable in daily life. It has the precise function of hiding contradictions and of reconstituting on an imaginary level a relatively coherent discourse that then serves as the horizon of an agent’s experience.54 Within Marxism, even the broad account has a restricted and nonrestricted sense—the latter chiming well with theories influenced by Foucault. Whereas Marx restricts superstructure to the politico-legal superstructure and the ideological superstructure (forms of consciousness), a nonrestricted sense opens up the superstructure to include all state-related institutions, such as law, politics, NGOs, health and welfare, education, as well as social practices such as religion and cultural activities, media and film, as well as beliefs, values, norms. Both restricted and nonrestrictive senses endorse a functional description of these parts such that each constituent element functions to secure, protect, and promote class-based interests. Stated in this way, there is some work to be done connecting the functional assumption to the content of distinct practices. For example, how do schools function along with the health service to promote class interest? This is a much 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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easier task if we were to restrict our superstructural definition, but given our attempt in the previous chapter to modify the productivist paradigm, it makes sense to work with the nonrestrictive sense.55 But this will involve clarifying the relationship of various social practices to economic production. Calling cultural activities “superstructural” introduces a distinction between superstructure and base: this distinction rather than begging the question allows us to think more expansively about the constitution of social practices. But the correspondence relationship between spheres of superstructural activity and the sphere of economic activity has, as everyone knows, come under intense scrutiny and radical revision. The spatial metaphor, for that is all it is, represents “determination in the last instance” by the economic base. Pointing out that “the base” indicates real relations of productive activity, Raymond Williams emphasizes the dynamic variation of forces: “When these forces are considered, as Marx considers them, as the specific activities and relationships of real men they mean something much more active, more complicated and more contradictory than the developed metaphorical notion of ‘the base’ could possibly allow us to realise.”56 The “base” and “superstructure” do not name two substances in an inexplicable one-way causal relationship. By revaluing determination, by accepting that “superstructural activities” do not merely reproduce or reflect “base” activities, and by insisting on the dynamic and contradictory nature of the base, it becomes possible both to consider the base and superstructure as an interconnected set of social practices and to ask questions about dependent and ratifying relations. For Rose, Negative Dialectics presents an analysis of cultural form based on the model of commodity fetishism that makes “any crude distinction between substructure and superstructure otiose.”57 Although social practices are distinct, and should not be collapsed into one undifferentiated notion of social practice or productive activity, there must be enough similarities across instances to allow us to describe them as examples of “social practice.” With some modification, we can retrieve Althusser’s definition of practice as the transformation of material through social labor into new objects (which could as well be new concepts and changes to social relations, as pharmaceutical patents and drugs). This idea of social practice maintains the distinctness of each practice (its constitutive values), focuses on the social relations involved in the transformational work (including contextual values), and clarifies outcomes of the processes. The distinctness of each practice is conceived in terms of a site, as a distinct level of social reality. We can borrow this because the idea of a 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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site indicates “a scandalous abstraction” that helps us to articulate the histories of the instances in question, with their rhythms of development and continuities, punctuated by breaks, ruptures, evolutions, and revolutions.58 But these sites are abstractions. Differential histories may be thought as independently constituted practices, but each bears a relative dependence both to others and, in the last instance—according to Althusser—to the economy. It is this claim that is the stumbling block for many feminist theorists, especially those influenced by poststructuralism. Prosaically, though, all it means is that material practices are interlaced with the economy. The pulls and movement of the economy and the distribution of economic benefit affect the setting of agendas, interests, and roles, constrain projects and often the success or otherwise of the constitutive, certainly contextual, activities and values of the practice. In his Remarks on Marx, Foucault indicates something similar: I wanted to indicate how this experience—which constituted madness as an object together with the subject that understands it—could only fully be understood by referring rigorously to certain well-known historical processes: the birth of a particular normalizing society which was linked to practices of confinement, which in their turn were connected with a precise economic and social situation corresponding to the phase of urbanization and growth of capitalism and with the existence of a fluctuating, dispersed population which entered into friction with the needs of the economy and the state etc.59

In addition, as I argued earlier, for the reproduction of capitalism to take place, it is “economically rational” to exploit and exacerbate cultural differences and pursue differentiated markets. Very few social practices are sheltered from the consequences of this. So we have varied and interlocking social practices, bearing relative dependence both to other practices and to the economy. “Baseand-superstructure” names the problem of how cultural particulars (of “consciousness” or “existence”) relate to the (universal) economic system.60 Our second question is whether or not the narrow definition of ideology fully explains what feminists are getting at with talk of objectivism. Let us pick up the narrow definition of ideology to determine how “the ideology of objectivism” has a dependent—if indirect—relationship to the exchange principle and how this dependence relates, if at all, to sexual objectification. Rather than engaging with Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, I shall revisit MacKinnon’s early essay on the methodological relationship between feminism and 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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Marxism, because it spells out quite clearly the relationship of implication between objects, objectivity, and objectification. According to this seminal work, sexual objectification is related to objectivity, and objectivity is the epistemological stance, of which the sexual dominance of women is the social practice.61 And as a consequence of this implication, all claims to objectivity are dismissed as a form of (sexual) ideology. Analyzing the ways in which “sexual desirability is fetishised,” MacKinnon first establishes that women are alienated from their own sexuality: “women have not authored their own objectifications.” From this, she argues that, just like the value of a commodity, women’s sexual desirability is fetishized: it is made to appear as a quality of an object itself. “The alienated,” she says, “who can only grasp self as other is no different from the object who can grasp self as a thing.”62 The attribution of fetishism here indicates both that a social relationship is treated as though it were natural and independent from social relations as well as the thingification of a person. Due to this fetishism, according to MacKinnon the social requirements of sexuality that institutionalize male dominance are naturalized, de-historicized, and hidden from view. She believes that underlying this fetishism is a fundamental “ontological” problem concerning the relationship between subject and object, a relationship Marxism and feminism consider differently: Having been objectified as sexual beings while stigmatised as ruled by subjective passions, women reject the distinction between knowing subject and known object—the division between subjective and objective postures—as a means to comprehend social life. . . . women’s interest lies in overthrowing the distinction itself.

Because estrangement, objectification, and alienation are synonymous from the point of the view of the object, feminism attunes itself to the subject and to critical consciousness in the hope of reconstituting the meaning of women’s experience.63 Marxism, on the other hand, striving to establish its scientific credentials, posits an independent reality that has only “objective,” by which is meant nonsubjective, content. Her specific claim seems to be that objectivity is a methodological (epistemic) stance related to objectification as a social process (reification). Otherwise put, sexed hierarchies produce sexed objectivity, which creates sex objects.64 Being objective makes the subject the “objectifier,” and this is tied not only to sex/gender but also to oppression. Aligning objectification with objectivity—objectification 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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is alienation—MacKinnon polarizes the methods of feminism and Marxism, one being concerned with meaning and consciousness and the other with facticity or things in the world. This is the same move made by Lukács—the collapse of externalization, objectivity, objectification, and alienation—which he identified in his later Preface as a slip into idealism. To recap: objectivation is a way to describe our “world-making” activities, objectivity designates the belief that it is possible to capture the nature of an object-forconsciousness independently from a subject who studies it, and objectification designates an ontological claim that objects and subjects are objects-for-consciousness. While MacKinnon is absolutely right to concentrate our attention on the significant relationship between the sexual objectification of women and the subjection of women, by collapsing sexual objectification into the form of objectification in general and then aligning this with objectivity and externalization, she risks the critical tools required to make sense of, and intervene in, social subjection. Developing the earlier conceptual typology suggested by Berger and Pullberg, we can do two things. We can say some things about the nature of sexual objectification without, as a consequence, having to abandon all claims to objectivity, and, second, we can trace a link between sexual objectification to a particular form of production and exchange. First, let us recall the connection between objectivation and reification: a particular form of world-making creates an inverted world of appearances (for example, objects have prices related to their natural character). A cognitive orientation is aligned with this form of world-making. This cognitive orientation tends to fetishize objects, making of the social and economic character of things natural properties belonging to things themselves, to abstract objects and subjects from context, and to treat each as though it were interchangeable with others. Reification, a particular cognitive orientation, is thus a consequence of historical social practice. Second, we must now ask: how does this relate to sexual objectification and objectivity? Obviously, the aspects of reification, adumbrated above as the ideology of objectivism, play a role in the justification of social inequity. To sexually objectify a person or thing means, amongst other things, to view and treat them as objects for the satisfaction of one’s desires; where one desires a to be F to force it to be so; to believe that a is F (descriptive belief) and to believe that it is so by nature (projective belief).65 I shall for a moment bracket the first two of these and concentrate on the relationship between descriptive belief and projective belief. The sexed 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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relationship between objectivity and objectification here resides both in the detachment assumed for a supposedly neutral description or imagery and a social relationship of domination: disguised in the neutral description. Separating these strands into the epistemic and the social is troublesome and only provisional. The hope is that we can unravel the ideology of objectivism from objectivity in general. By doing this we can resist the suggestion that objectivity in research methodology is nothing more and nothing less than “an excuse for a power relationship every bit as obscene as the power relationship that leads women to be sexually assaulted, murdered, and otherwise treated as mere objects.”66 First, the notion that the world may differ from beliefs about that world does not mean that all beliefs have the same epistemic status. Second, then, a descriptive belief may or may not say something accurate about the world. For example, the propositions “women are hysterical” and “the majority of domestic work is undertaken by women” can be tested against cases refuted or supported and then various explanations offered. Third, where projective beliefs explain the way the world is, there is very likely a cognitive deficit. Cognitive deficit is the consequence of an inclination toward reification, implicit and poorly grounded beliefs, and often motivated by underlying (but hidden) interests. This may be relevant when providing a justification of a (true) belief. For example, women do most of the domestic work (true) because they have a natural tendency to nurture or nest-build (false).67 As a result, even unlikely or unpalatable descriptive beliefs may well be confirmed through experience (women are carers), but the explanation for these appearances can be seen to be false. Thankfully, feminist epistemologists have shown how to make reifying cognitive inclinations and underlying interests explicit: revealing the view-from-nowhere to be a view-from-somewhere quite particular. Thus offering a critical space to explore how our beliefs may be determined by the “facts” of the matter or some other nonarbitrary criteria. In the next chapter I further explore the possibility of rethinking the relationship between a view-from-somewhere and objectivity. Suffice to say here, “objectivity” minimally involves the willingness to let our beliefs be determined by “the facts” (a commitment to mind-independence) or some nonarbitrary criteria rather than by our wishes as to how things are.68 It requires taking into account the dialectical relationship between constitutive and contextual values of social practices, implicit values and beliefs, and quantitative and qualitative research methods. 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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The analytic distinction between appearance and essence helps make sense of the reality of social roles while unwrapping their mystifying shells that act as a protective surround. It provides the tools to drill down and analyze material practices and the distribution of roles and resources whilst at the same time shedding light on their mystification. It also suggests a way to think about how sexual relationships become abstracted from context, naturalized, and made into something that one can “have” or to which one is oriented, how people become substitutable for one another, the dominance of a performance principle, and the imaginary resolution of contradictions and tensions—be that in pornography, chick-lit, or Mills and Boon.69 As a consequence, we can grasp the dismembering, pornographic affects of the new technologies of production.70 Insofar as there is an explanatory role for reification, we have demonstrated a relationship between propositions that claim to be “objective” and political economy. But there is more to say. We initially defined sexual objectification as cases where men view and treat women (merely) as objects for desire and force them to be so. I deal with this more fully in chapter 7. Suffice to state here that the concept of reification also helps disentangle what may be a more general, although historically located, instrumental and appropriating (affective and cognitive) approach to other subjects from its sexed instantiation. However, whilst the concept of reification aids us fathom the process whereby a person is “thingified,” none of the preceding arguments adequately addresses either the sexual feature of objectification or the strong part of the claim, that men force women to be objects of desire, or as mere instruments for the attainment of an end. According to MacKinnon, gender socialization is the process through which women come to identify themselves as social beings, as beings that exist for men. Women then internalize a male image of their sexuality, and through this form of objectification women are alienated from their sexuality. This account of sexual alienation depends on the following claims: (i) a global process of objectification occurs whereby women are characterized as being-for-men [A (men) & ¬A (women)]; (ii) this results in an individual woman giving up or being estranged from what was once hers. The first claim derives from Beauvoir’s sexed interpretation of the phenomenological assertion that every subject is an object for another’s consciousness. Even if we accept that human capacities for sensation, affect, and social intercourse are reified, that sexuality is not something one “has” “naturally” but is a social relationship, it is not yet clear whether desires or subjects are, or why they would be, organized according 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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to such a stark gendered asymmetry.71 We have proffered one explanation for a sex/gender hierarchy. Political economy, characterized by production for profit, makes capitalist relationships inherently unequal, social differences are exacerbated in order to maintain surplus and differentiate markets, and various ways are found to explain, justify, and legitimate these differences.72 But the explanation for this hierarchy as advanced by Hennessy, that heteronormative and asymmetrical identities are directly and solely related to the extraction of surplus-value through the gendered division of labor both within the family’s role in the reproduction of labor power and in the workplace, is not thoroughly convincing. As this explanation is not entirely convincing, it is crucial that we interrogate the [A & ¬A] assumption and reformulate the relationship of “objectification” to particular social practices. Although I have been careful not to commit to any psychoanalytic theory, there are various strands within feminist theory indebted to a modified form of Lacanian analysis that point the way. Lacanianinspired feminists endorse a view that symbolic structures form us as sexed agents and individual subjects and that participation in these structures requires a prior repression of desires and aspects of our experience.73 Luce Irigaray broadens the narrow linguistic definition of the symbolic, inherited from Lacan, to include the linguistically articulated realm of culture and meaning, whereby Western culture is articulated through an understanding of the sexes defined and redefined through the philosophical tradition.74 Some argue that for Irigaray the symbolic realm is simultaneously the imaginary: images, symbols, metaphors, and representations that help to construct subjectivity and organize the understanding of sexual difference.75 Irigaray demarcates the social realm from the symbolic (which includes the imaginary), and this permits a theoretical appreciation that a discordant or contradictory relationship may reside between them—the symbolic can inaccurately portray the social or be resistant to social change.76 Concerned not to isolate social background from cultural formation, Butler risks endorsing an isomorphic relationship between symbolic content and social change. But although she attends to the inseparability of symbolic understanding from social practice, she also advocates a way to think about norms and regulations as they are embedded in social practice. She says that because the symbolic is the sedimentation of social practices, any analytic cleavage, between the symbolic (norms) and distinct social practices, is an intellectual heuristic.77 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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If we allow ourselves Jameson’s scandalous move for a moment and consider feminism as a distinct practice, with constitutive and contextual values, our material must be that which is also the primary contention of Irigaray’s symbolic: the [A & ¬A]; the sexuation of the subject78 or sexual differentiation. As I am not a committed Lacanian, I suggest we think about feminist theory in terms of a plane, similar to that expressed by Deleuze and Guattari as a plane of immanence: an intellectual heuristic through which we can create critical distance to pursue and reflect upon problems of sexual difference, hierarchies, and related imaginaries.79 This would run close to Irigaray’s notion of the symbolic, but her symbolic would be one model populating the field. We approach this plane tentatively. As an abstraction it risks folding reification back in on itself and as practitioners we risk bringing our contextual values to bear on problems of sexuate difference; thereby channeling a partial view of the surface of feminism.80 With these caveats in mind we can traverse the plane that secures conceptual linkages, connections, and ideas concerned with sexual difference and the well-being of women. Now we are encouraged to ask how, whether, and to what extent we constitute our own epistemic object-“sexual difference”: do we discover it or is it an effect of our own practice? As a realist, I also do not believe that “sexual difference” is an object produced by our own theoretical practice, by our concepts or by language. Dualities, binaries, and hierarchy are not the same things—we may have dichotomy without hierarchy and vice versa. In the previous chapter we saw that the plane of feminist theory already includes models of complex and variegated social, political, and economic mechanisms that create and maintain hierarchies and asymmetries as well as the differential distributions of primary goods. With this in mind, I suggest starting with and then departing from Irigaray’s notion of the symbolic: a modified, if not entirely new, line of flight. First, as reason and philosophy do not have a straightforward relationship to sexual difference, they should be detached from, certainly repositioned within, the symbolic. As we can no longer view ourselves as “queen of all sciences,” philosophy takes its place, along with linguistics, literature, advertising, sports, and so forth, as potential cultural material.81 In addition, philosophy is a contested series of arguments, debates, and conversations—there is no single position on reason and passions or on the relationship of the mind to the body. Talk of “Western rationality” is rather a misnomer. Overly compressing philosophical interests makes our task much harder. 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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Second, the discordant, contradictory or erroneous (epistemic) relationship between the symbolic and social, suggested by Irigaray, can be retained without a consequential commitment to a strong separation existing between fields. Third, the notion of a symbolic that incorporates culture, a cultural imaginary, and social practice is quite close to the broad concept of superstructure we discussed earlier, but with (an Oedipal) libidinal economy working as determinant in “the last instance.” “Libidinal economy” acts as an explanatory placeholder (x) for sex/gender asymmetry and hierarchy. It is, though, only one explanatory model amongst many and it should be considered alongside other models. Different contexts may call upon different explanatory models. Fourth, as an intellectual heuristic, the idea of a symbolic—with norms, imagery, and regulations governing sexuate difference—must specify its extension (historical, geographic) and its relation to precise social practices. Thus, intersections with problems within feminism and their relation to ethnicity and race, for instance the problem of the role of the family encountered by Mitchell, will depend on the location (historical, cultural, political, as well as geographic) of the practice.82 Fifth, the general [A & ¬A] assumption must be made to work, or not, across other sites and social practices. Where it does not fit, we revise the scope of our claims, and lose nothing by doing so. Sometimes hierarchies, asymmetries, and forms of subjection do not fit into this duality. Finally, although I find the argument for the (financial) economy working as “determinant in the last instance” convincing, it too is just a working hypothesis. Once modified in this way, the idea of the symbolic will be able to provide historically sensitive, local and global content to the notion of power asymmetry encapsulated in the problem of sexual objectification, thereby supplementing those cognitive features characteristic of the “ideology of objectivism.”

Conclusion Component features of “the ideology of objectivism” can be explained in terms of a reified cognitive orientation and a link demonstrated between this cognitive orientation and political economy. Whilst the economic pursuit of differential markets and the effective extraction of surplus value contributes something to the formation and maintenance of sex/gender hierarchies and interests—so (mis)conceived— there is more to say. Feminist enquiry, taking the social symbolic for its material, will illuminate how social practices are constructed in terms of sexual differentials. 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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To say, though, that objectivity is the language of the powerful is the same as declaiming the complete reification of society. This would be equivalent to the claim that “the domination of the exchange process has increased to such a point where it controls institutions, behaviour, class formation in such a way that it prevents the formation of any independent critical thought.” Similarly, to say that it is impossible to think sexual difference “outside” a Lacanian symbolic is equivalent to trapping women within a [A & ¬A] binary. According to Gillian Rose, the first—and by extension the second—are performative contradictions: if true, critical reflection on the problems they pose would be impossible, feminists engage in such critical reflection and so forth.83 Deploying the term “reification” to describe aspects of our cognitive and affective engagements with the world is not to appeal to a pure, disinterested reason, or to science as arbitrator, or indeed to an idealized non-reified social practice. It is just not the case that each of us always adopts, even if we wish to, an attitude of a detached and emotionless observer, just as it is not the case that we approach all other subjects instrumentally. Care and existential interestedness subtend our practices and encounters with others—this is what makes them so painful and so joyful. It may even be what makes them possible. Such a concession does not also concede that every critical aspiration to speak objectively or every statement describing an object is an example of cognition in an alienated state. The idea of Entäusserung is axiologically neutral. If alterity is characterized in terms of foreignness, distance and proximity, engagement and withdrawal, then Entäusserung indicates a negative moment in identity. The “making strange” suggests a reciprocal relationship between alterity and identity. Sure, it may indicate appropriation and loss, but it can equally well indicate the construction of an intersubjective self or an internal negation of the object of consciousness (intentionality). It is both a condition for objectivity and is what makes instrumentalism or objectivism possible. It can help to explain not only the construction of the self differentially in terms of the external other but also the apprehension of an object as distinct from the self and the displaced fragile unities of the self. But a reified social world incorporates this moment of strangeness: transforming the strange into the alien. The appearance of the world as constituted by hostile and independent objects is not a mere illusion but a lived reality. In such a context, strangeness appears threatening and oppositional, because sometimes, in the here and now, it is. The condition for objectivity is thereby transformed into an alien 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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practice: one often used against women. But relinquishing the aspiration to objectivity, bathing in the ether of subjectivity, is to try to detach oneself and to turn from the world so transformed. What we can hope for, at a critical and reflective level, is not that we might—by virtue of criticism—eliminate these structures or the fictional forces they exert, but, rather, that we can eliminate the opacity, associated with the ideology of objectivism, and thereby render the fictional forces transparent.84



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3

Reason

Introduction Those in the sway of the “ideology of objectivism” persevere with the belief that scientific and epistemic claims can only be produced by rational, dispassionate, disinterested, and value-free methods of inquiry conducted by reasonable subjects.1 Troubled by the relationship between reason and power, particularly reason and masculinity, postmodern and cultural feminist theorists deny that reason has transcendental qualities and question the assertion that reason and philosophy can provide objective, reliable, and universal foundations.2 But their attempt to escape from the heritage of classical rationalism, from the ideology of objectivism, seems to leave us with a stark choice between rationalist humanism and antirationalism.3 Such a choice is only a pseudo-choice though, formulated as it is through a narrative associating reason with masculinity and emotion with femininity.4 This chapter is concerned with the following question: in what sense, if any, are “Enlightenment norms of reason” rooted in sex/ gender? From within psychoanalytic practice, the answer is obvious. Freud is assumed to have established de facto and de jure identification between human subjectivity and rational consciousness so that consciousness and reason are considered to be mechanisms that relay and transform fragments of libidinal life into mental activity.5 Hence, neither consciousness nor reflective and critical reason can be described as “master in its own house.” Further, because libidinal life is rooted in sex/gender consciousness, rational thought must transmit these sexed libidinal pressures, which means that reason and rationality are necessarily rooted in sex/gender. I suggest that feminist critiques of reason or ratio—psychoanalytic and Foucauldian—converge with the attempt by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in the Dialectic of Enlightenment to articulate a history of rationality where “pure” or “disinterested” cognition is 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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entangled with domination.6 By pursuing this line of enquiry we can investigate whether the key problems with reason identified by Jane Flax, Elizabeth Spelman, Genevieve Lloyd, Elizabeth Grosz and others are the problems of instrumental reason: a distinctly historical cognitive orientation to the world of experience. There may of course be more to be said, about motives, desires, and language, or the rationality of specific social practices, but this approach has the advantage of isolating characteristics of a (cognitive and affective) approach to the world and revealing their relationship to a broader social context. As a consequence, the critical move—a move upon which feminism depends—becomes less suspect. To accentuate the historical character of this cognitive orientation we return to the tension in the Dialectic of Enlightenment between a broad historical story of entanglement and a more historically circumscribed account. I believe this tension to be similar to that within certain strands of feminism, between the presentation of reason and power as anthropologically entwined across a broad sweep of human history and a more restricted historical picture of Enlightenment reason.7 Restricting the concept of “instrumental reason” in this way may capture the elements of the cognitive orientation disliked by feminist theorists and allow a historical and local specificity to enter the account without—at the same time—giving up on reason altogether: perhaps without having to give up on Enlightenment hopes and struggles. It would thus be premature to celebrate a post-Enlightenment feminism, which could be said to express the claims and needs of a constituency whose members have already experienced their Enlightenment and are ready to be cavalier about its gains.8

Reason on Trial It is not immediately obvious what it would mean to move beyond “Enlightenment reason.” If “the era of reason” is the title of honor claimed by the enlightened world, it has to be conceded that the concept “reason” has an enormously complex and wide extension.9 This includes transcendental logic, formal logic, the ordering and selection of parts of sentences, modalities, laws for preserving validity, informed ways to move between inferences, deduction, abduction and induction, evidence for claims about the world, practical measures for aligning means and ends, and capacities as well as faculties. It has been variously defined not only in distinction to emotion and as “a charioteer dominating the horses of passions” but also as the “slave of the passions” and as “enhanced by good affects.”10 Actions, beliefs, 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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arguments, and policies may all be described as rational. Rationality may name a faculty or be restricted to mathematical and logical reasoning. Rationalism specifically identifies any philosophy that magnifies the role played by (unaided) reason in the search for knowledge. The Enlightenment critique of reason, undertaken by Kant, is intended to spell out the relationship of formal to transcendental logic, the proper use of concepts and categories, and set limits to what can be asserted about the world of experience.11 The gender critique of reason goes beyond an analysis of the conditions of experience to explore the role of reason in the constitution of experience and the relationship posed between reason and the transcendental subject.12 At the risk of simplifying a rich stream of philosophical and cultural criticism, we can say that there are broadly two critical responses to Kant’s rational project.13 The first considers the preoccupation with rationality, at the expense of emotion, imagination, and matter, to be inherently problematic: not only because these conceptual distinctions drive us into philosophical tangles, epistemic deficit, and skepticism, but also because they make it difficult to think embodiment at all. The second takes the values and norms of rationality to be irretrievably implicated in relations of power. The question, “are reason and rationality gendered?” is often answered by looking at whether a particular norm is gendered and if so in what way. In her groundbreaking work The Man of Reason, Genevieve Lloyd undertakes a gender critique of reason and rationality. Her thesis is that male philosophers have formulated the concept of reason within the Western philosophical tradition. Due to this social bias, rationality has been conceived as the transcendence of all things “bodily” and, due to the association of the feminine with flesh, as a transcendence of the feminine.14 As a consequence, “the feminine” is then defined in a pejorative fashion. The universal character of reason, in terms of its general principles and as a cognitive faculty as well as in relation to transcendental subjectivity, is thought to be defined “surreptitiously,” by identifying the experiences of a particular group of subjects as the paradigmatic case of the human as such. Universal rationality is thus often rejected for being a regulative ideal, which denies differences and the realities of embodied experience. These ideals of reason do not merely reflect their social context but play a part in constituting the terms and content of sexual difference.15 With Lloyd we can see how the first approach to the critique of reason, identified above, relates to the second. She notes that the preoccupation with reason or rationality, to the expense of emotion and imagination, may lead—according to a number of argumentative 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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steps—to the notion that reason is somehow detached from the subject’s position.16 This non-situated detached standpoint lends itself to the idea that belief-forming strategies and inferences are neither related to, nor motivated by, the social interest of the subject. The norm of rationality, which we may describe as assumed objectivity or objectivism, has various sub-norms, including epistemic neutrality and practical neutrality. These norms help to constitute the world of experience by framing “what it means” to be male or be female and by disguising latent interests. In these ways norms and values of reason can be implicated in any form of oppression. By extending our terms of reference from reason or rationality to norms and values of reason and to strategies for forming beliefs, we broaden out the scope of the discussion and can comfortably talk about a form of cognitive rationality.17 This is a more optimal strategy than that pursued by Lloyd because, as we have seen, philosophical approaches to reason and rationality are varied and do not simply define reason against emotion, neglect the role of the imagination, or assume that the role of reason is to control the passions.

The Compulsion of the Universal In Inessential Woman, Elizabeth Spelman elucidates a form of cognitive rationality found dominant in Western Philosophy. Beginning with a reference to Iris Murdoch’s The Nice and The Good, she draws our attention to a passage that paints a tableau of an elderly gentleman, Uncle Theo, sitting by the seashore, with his twin niece and nephew. In acute discomfort, Uncle Theo is overwhelmed by the unmanageability of things around him. He attempts to still the horror of the manyness of surrounding objects by seeing them as instances of a single thing, in this case pebble. Indifferent to the colors, shapes, and textures of individuals, Uncle Theo attempts to structure an otherwise unmanageable world by gathering together individuals according to what is the same or similar about each instance. Frederic Jameson would describe this as a neurotic and desolate return of sameness over and over.18 Drawing on her literary allusion, Spelman makes three broad claims. First, when we reason we employ concepts that identify individuals with types. Second, the use of any universal term, such as “pebble,” is a psychological response to the chaos or unmanageability of the world of experience. It could be said that we are motivated to engage with the world in this way due to an original drive to selfpreservation. Third, in order to subsume particulars under universal 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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terms, to make the world safely conform to categories, similarities between individuals need to be prioritized over differences, and essences—common to all instances—asserted. In this way she elaborates the Platonic quality of Western philosophy as the drive to bring individuals under universal concepts where each thing is supposed to have properties necessarily and these properties are considered common to all instances: primary drives and reason are interwoven. Deference shown to reason conceals these preliminary drives. Myth, reason, and drives are all entwined. The Nietzschean thought behind this is that all concepts equate what is not the same and, because concepts are implicated at a perceptual level, all perception involves a first level of falsification. This claim is stronger than the claim that there is no direct perception and that all seeing is a “seeing-as.” The idea is that to see “x” as a “something” (table, chair) is to obliterate distinctions in favor of what is the same about each instance.19 Commenting on leaves rather than pebbles, Nietzsche writes that “one leaf is never quite like another, so it is certain that the concept leaf is constructed by the arbitrary dropping of differences.” This he believes awakens the idea that there is something in nature besides leaves that would be a “leaf”: an original form, according to which all leaves are woven, drawn, circumscribed, colored, painted. For Derrida, because identification depends on the exclusion of differences, the desire to bring things together into a unity actually generates the logic of hierarchal opposition. It is this schematic relationship between universal concept and form (be that a Platonic form or a scientific account of essence) upon which Elizabeth Grosz draws when she identifies the roles played by universalism, essentialism, and naturalism in the maintenance of the status quo.20 Once the universal, she writes, is shown to be a guise for the masculine and knowledges are shown to occupy only one pole of (sexual) spectrum instead of its entirety, the possibility of other ways of knowing and proceeding—the possibility of feminine discourses and knowledges—is revealed.21 Universalism here means universal concepts and invariant social categories as well as the global extension of norms and values of reason.22 Can we take Lloyd’s dissatisfaction with reason seriously without repudiating all the diverse aspects of reason and rationality? Or Spelman’s without discarding all concepts that apply to more than one individual? Christine Di Stefano wonders what would be left. “What is Reason or Philosophy,” she asks, “stripped of its androcentric content and associations, which is ubiquitous throughout the history of Western philosophical discourse?” Can these terms even be 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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thought of without the residues of that content?23 Once we have conceded that there is some relationship between rationality and power, the way we answer this question can only result in one of two positions: either we concede that there is nothing left—that rationality is a wholly masculine preserve—and so women should aspire to speak or think outside the masculine logic of philosophical reason—or we aim to transform the values and norms of reason.24 To help decide, let us unpack the idea that there is something coercive about the way we use universals to think about the world, and in Spelman’s version we discover four underlying themes: (i) that concepts create order in a chaotic world; (ii) that the use of concepts is motivated by a psychological need to impose order; (iii) that representation neglects differences; and (iv) that norms are set up that reflect particular interests but are presented as neutral, universal, or necessary. For the moment, I shall bracket the first two and distil four relevant ideas from the second two themes. When we group individuals together under universal terms, we tend to neglect differences. The process of categorization masks and thereby neutralizes the interests behind the choice of universal category. Classification according to these interests is harmful in some way. We also naturalize these conventional groups. In summation, the rationalist cognitive orientation, which schematizes individuals under universals, neglects differences, posits essences or forms, naturalizes conventional relations and disguises interests is taken to endorse and justify social hierarchies. Deeper than this, however, underneath the claim that reasoning in this way is problematic, we discover an anxiety and resistance to representation that, I believe, is motivated by a quite reasonable suspicion that between the idea and the reality, between the motion and the act, has fallen a shadow: a compulsion of the universal. By bringing this out from the shadows we bring into focus how representation is related to or reflects an antagonistic social real and can begin to see how cognition may well be implicated in protecting social hierarchies. Resistance to the compelling nature of the universal, though, must not lead us to “throw out the living baby of political and ethical solidarities and similarities across differences with the capitalist-imposed conceptions of sameness and universality.”25 We are looking for a critical method that can denaturalize appearances and provide an analysis of purported generality, disinterestedness, and universality. Initial steps include distinguishing between a general philosophical sense of reason and Enlightenment reason specifically, exploring how universal concepts may reflect social interests, and considering how 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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reason may undertake such critique. We can find a way through these questions in the Dialectic of Enlightenment.

Using reason to critique the category of reason in traditional philosophy, Adorno and Horkheimer tell a tale of history and reason, which articulates dialectical tensions between the extremes of mythology and Enlightenment rationalism—between nonhuman nature and inhumane history.26 The Dialectic of Enlightenment, a collaborative venture, has been described as a sombre and wan account of how Enlightenment reason lost its liberating potential in the age of monopoly capitalism.27 Charting the development of reason toward instrumentality, Adorno and Horkheimer trace the historical implication of reason with capitalism and its irrational underbelly. The central argument is that reason has become irrational precisely because of its attempt “to expel every nonrational element from itself.”28 This historical approach is supposed to demonstrate that, as a consequence of what may be called a process of the “instrumentalisation” of reason, the “Enlightenment Project” was unable to realize its aims. At a more profound level, the purpose of this genealogy of reason is to throw into question the rationality of reason and to criticize the idea that enlightened reason is reasonable or rational.29 But discursive reason does not provide a way out, as it too converges with instrumental reason. Religious and mythical thought both share a rational kernel, and there is a religious strand running through rationality. Adorno and Horkheimer will claim that the identitarian logic of exchange-value is not a distortion of enlightened reason but the realization of it. Before proceeding I would like to pause for a moment on “Enlightenment.” This will prove relevant to thinking about the feminization of the Enlightenment. Throughout the Dialectic of Enlightenment there is equivocation concerning the historical breadth of the notion of Enlightenment. Sheratt contrasts the historically circumscribed definition of Enlightenment, which tends to associate it with modernity (1660–1800), with Adorno’s less historical definition of Enlightenment, which depends on identifying particular values as enlightenment values (freedom, toleration, security, progress). According to Simon Jarvis, they use the description “enlightenment” to designate transhistorical intellectual and practical operations that are “demythologizing, secularizing, or disenchanting some mythical, religious or magical representation of the world.”30 As such, 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


Enlightenment and Reason


enlightenment can overlap with historical Enlightenment but is not identical to it. We will find that this distinction plays a significant role in mapping out historically specific features of instrumental reason. The opening discussion in the Dialectic of Enlightenment identifies key progressive general characteristics of enlightenment, principally the liberation of people from fear and the establishment of their sovereignty. Although the process of enlightenment is conceived against the negative features of mythology, namely animism, domination, fear, barbarism, and regression, for Adorno and Horkheimer myth and enlightenment reason, it turns out, are interlaced. Albeit to different degrees, myth and reason are motivated by the drive for selfpreservation, and self-preservation demands a controlled environment. Related to this is the idea that in a controlled environment things can be identified and reidentified. Myth—metaphor, figure, poetics, or what we might call a social imaginary—facilitates this. Even before what Jay Bernstein designates “overt strategies of Enlightenment,” enlightenment was from the beginning anti-enlightenment: “the myths against which enlightened thinking comported itself were themselves implicated in the strategies of identity and repetition, mastery and domination.”31 Insisting that power and knowledge are this closely related, Adorno and Horkheimer claim that what men want to learn from nature is how to use it wholly to dominate it and other men. Extending this, they describe this cognitive approach to the world of experience as “thoroughly patriarchal.” The relation of man to nature, thus, seems to become a model for all forms of domination.32 Thus, Adorno and Horkheimer provide an account of modern Enlightened reason that demonstrates its anthropological trajectory, suggests a complex relationship between reason, myth, and metaphor, and reveals its purposive character: the (masculine) control and domination of (a feminized) nature. As part of the process of enlightenment, the world became “disenchanted”; which means that myth was dissolved and fancy was replaced by knowledge. The manner of thinking which is tough enough to disabuse us of mythical flights of fancy is ultimately selfdestructive. In tension with the progressive impulse, the fully enlightened earth “radiates disaster triumphant.” The outcome is indeed a kind of rationality, but it is reason as a tool used without capacity to reflect on ends, or to consider the nonrational element on which it relies or to recognize the qualities of the object to which it is applied. In this way, reason becomes thoroughly instrumental. Rationality is a tool “blindly applied without any real capacity either to reflect on 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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the ends to which it is applied, or to recognize the particular qualities of the object to which it is applied.”33 As a way to comprehend this dual character of enlightened thought, Bernstein brings together four principles: disenchantment, rationalization, universalism, and individualism.

Enlightenment and Capitalism The entanglement of myth, domination and labor is preserved in one of the Homeric narratives. The first excursus of the Dialectic of Enlightenment presents an account of Odysseus’s encounter with the Sirens, first told in Book X11 of the Odyssey. Detecting an instance of dialectical reversal, Susan Buck-Morss notes that our recent history is revealed by Adorno and Horkheimer through the first excursus as archaic barbarism: “while the archaic, the epic poem of the Odyssey is read as an expression of the most modern, with Odysseus the prototype of the bourgeois individual.”34 The process of enlightenment is shown to be dependent on the impulse of self-preservation: mutilating reason by making use of it in the form of instrumentality.35 Reason is entangled with domination and a shadow is shown to have fallen between all ideas and reality. When read with the “Concept of Enlightenment,” “Enlightenment and Morality,” and the appendix on culture, we see how they extend the account of this form of instrumental reason to include its recent manifestations in morality, justice, and culture. The term “instrumental” helps to describe a particular cognitive orientation that is a feature in precapitalist and capitalist societies but a structuring principle of the latter. Lying at the intersection of the broad historical process of enlightenment with Enlightenment proper is the imprint of commodity production. The blessing that the market does not enquire into one’s birth, Adorno and Horkheimer say, has its price. This price is extracted when we model potentialities that are ours from birth on the production of commodities. Men are given their individuality as unique in each case, different to all others, so that it might all the more surely be made the same as any other. It is thus apparent that by the time of Enlightenment a cognitive orientation has emerged that bears a specific relation to commodity production. In part this can be summed up as identity thinking (the simple and abstract subsumption of an individual under a concept) and instrumental reason. Meaning for Adorno is a property of the social structure. Drawing together language, cultural forms,36 philosophy, and thinking with the social production of knowledge, Adorno and Horkheimer indicate how 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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thought is implicated in the social real.37 By grasping the specificities of this instrumental cognitive orientation under commodity production, we can throw some light on the coercive character of identification discussed by Spelman and Grosz. Science, language, philosophy, and culture have their own but overlapping dynamics. Nominalism in the philosophy of language develops from that which incorporates and exalts sacred names: “there is said to be no difference between the totemic animal, the dreams of the ghost-seer, and the absolute idea.” After the sacred and universal is expunged from language, all that is left is literal and scientific. Intersecting with this desacralization of language is a scientific way of thinking that lauds the formal over the conceptual, rule and probability over motive and cause. Considering all talk of mystery, inner power, and primal matter to be an archaeological artifact, scientific Enlightenment then asserts that in the authority of universal concepts there is still the discernible fear of the demonic spirits that men sought to portray in magic rituals, hoping thus to influence nature.38 For these reasons, empiricism and logical positivism are in tension with the universal aspirations of the Enlightenment. Despite emptying out mystical content from universal concepts, the Enlightenment does not abandon the aspiration to unity, far from it. The regimentation of concepts into a correspondence system, which aspires to universality, makes the role of concepts central to cognitive activity but also erases the thought of the origin of concepts. Concepts become static, fixed, and rigid. According to Adorno and Horkheimer, even though rationalism and empiricism interpret axioms of unity differently, the structure of scientific unity remains the same. This scientific momentum, registered in both rationalism and empiricism, institutes immediacy as its goal and in the process reduces history to fact, things to matter, and the multiplicity of forms to positions and arrangement. Everything can be grasped through the intellect, known through causal analysis of quantifiable law-like processes and available to experimental manipulation. Herein we can detect a familiar pattern of abstraction and equivalence. Bourgeois society, they write, is ruled by equivalence. “It makes the dissimilar comparable by reducing it to abstract quantities.” Abstraction, quantification, and standardization—the hallmarks of a particular cognitive orientation integral to commodity production—are now detected in philosophy, language, and scientific practice. The separation of language in science and the language of art results in the former losing touch with its content and the latter retreating into formalism: an abstract skating across the surface of 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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things. Scientific rationality comes to dominate all other forms of intellectual life. The skepticism engendered by scientific rationality is one reason why the Enlightenment in unable to realize its own ambitions. Bernstein’s insightful analysis of instrumental rationality draws our attention to the broad consequences of this, as he explains how the convergence of scientific rationality in intellectual life with bureaucratic rationality has resulted in a disenchantment of the world, which drains from the world sources of meaning and significance that traditionally anchored not only ethical practice but also all meaningful goal-directed action.39 Layering another cognitive dimension into this, Adorno and Horkheimer note that nature is transformed into “mere objectivity”; objects to be known and manipulated. An empirical object is perceived as it is classified, when it can be shown to share features with other objects. An event is recognized as such when it is perceived as a repetition of a previous event, occurring in accordance with a rule or law. This results in the detachment of objects and events from the perceiver. Sensory experience becomes objectified and objects are made available for use. The particular quality of an object, its potential, is interesting only insofar as it can be bent to the end of the enlightened engineer, meaningful only so far as the subject bestows meaning. Echoing our account of “the ideology of objectivism,” this objectification is true and false. It is true that classification through subsumption and abstraction distinguishes the object from the perceiver. It is false insofar as, first, the (social) subjective moment of classification is neglected and, second, the social-side of classification appears to belong to the object. The problem is not one of representation, for Adorno and Horkheimer it is quite the reverse: “An atom is smashed not in representation but as a specimen of matter, and the rabbit does not represent but, as a mere example, is virtually ignored by the zeal of the laboratory.”40 Here we can see a particular relationship between subject and object, one that is historically specific. However, because the whole logical order is grounded in corresponding social conditions, in the social division of labor, domination does appear to the individual in the universal. Understood in this way, general or universal concepts indicate a unifying function that—due to the social division of labor—is also a function of social unity, under which the individual suffers from neglect of all that which is distinct and unquantifiable, including labor. This unifying function, which works through abstraction, quantification, and standardization, brings about a mass society rather than classless society, conformism instead 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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of universality: “a parody of the utopian vision.”41 It is the unifying principle of exchange. We can thus sum up the characteristics of enlightened reason as instrumental: “the constituting action of which is abstraction and the consequent identifying and subsuming of different particulars under some common universal (concept or law).”42 The process of enlightenment not only changes the content and object of beliefs but also modes of cognitive interaction, which are ways of relating to objects and other subjects. Expanding on Adorno and Horkheimer’s general account of the disenchantment of the world, Bernstein argues that it is not just objects of ethical esteem that have been eliminated but also certain forms of object-relations. The basis of cognitive interaction, previously manifested in ethical reasoning—experience, knowledge, and authority—have been replaced by the rationalization of reason. Summing up the fault-lines leading to this as empiricism, which undermined justification through direct perception, the privileging of theoretical over justificatory strategies appealing to authority, and the ideology of individualism, which undermined moral claims based on social role, Bernstein describes the new cognitive approach as the convergence of naturalism (disenchantment of the natural world), rationalism (demand for theoretical justification), and universalism (the flip-side of individualism).43 Here we can see the convergence of the two models of domination suggested by Battersby—technological reason (which dominates nature) and social reason (which is directed to the domination of other human beings in the social sphere).44 As mentioned earlier, although myth is already a form of rationality—a way to classify and control the world—enlightenment defines itself against the negative characteristics of myth, in particular of animism: the projection of spirits into the external world and the characterization of objects in such terms. Because animism depends on anthropomorphic projection, it is difficult for the subject to distinguish internal impulses from the comportment of external objects. Due to this, and its clumsy classificatory system, animism fails to control the world and does not provide the tools to help accommodate us in the world. Projection is also at work, however, when instrumental reason conceives the external world through a preexisting conceptual scheme. Rigid concepts, immune to development, actually prevent thought grasping the object. Similarly, the “administrative apparatus of thought” and its laws lose flexibility, become rigid, and impair reason.45 Not unlike the bureaucratic mode of thought, the administrative principles of reason come to dominate thought.46 In the end the inadequacy of instrumental reason to the task in hand, “to securing 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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the substantive goals of Enlightenment,” eventually even undermines instrumental reason. The very features of conceptualization— coherence, unity, comprehensiveness, systematicity—lead to the eventual animistic regress of reason. The process of identification also regresses. Sherrat articulates the characteristics of regression. First, the process of discrimination increases until conceptual refinement becomes fragmentation of the object. At the same time there exists a tendency to conceive objects in a static and rigid fashion. In this relationship, which owes quite a lot to the subject’s phastastical relation to the object, the subject “perceives” the object in a partial manner:, instrumentally. Representation and identification collapse into a modern form of animism. Animism here refers to the projection by the subject onto the object of those reduced characteristics the subject believes the object might have. This final reversal is, according to Buck-Morss, the culmination of the historical dialectic of reason, originating in the negation of myth, only to reverse in modern times into myth itself.47 The historical form of reason, interwoven with social institutions, contains the seeds of its own reversal.48 Failing a revolution in socioeconomic structure, reason duplicates the characteristics of that structure and falls back into myth. This rational incoherence needs to be seen alongside the problems previously mentioned, which emanate from the prevalence of scientific values. With Kantian philosophy, for example, the problem is to find a way to ground the metaphysics of morals given an epistemological skepticism about moral realism framed as the Good or God. The apparently vacuous Kantian system of regulated maxims forces the individual into defending any moral action by stealth. When the grounds for all ethical values are called into question, it is not just moral philosophy that suffers. Enlightenment is a series of reversals that result, in the end, with values unable to orient, regulate, and give meaning to practical life. If, as Bernstein claims, “means-ends” reasoning is not properly rational, as it is only the application of crude causal analysis, we actually lose the practicality of reason and philosophy students will be taught meta-ethics. We can now perhaps concur with his diagnosis that we have reason but it is not practical and we have practice but it is not rational.49 It is the reasonableness and ethical dimensions of practice that feminist theory struggles to make explicit.

Myth and Reason The Dialectic of Enlightenment exemplifies just how many readings can be supported by historical accounts of the entanglement of reason 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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and domination. This work can be read as a Nietzschean-psychological account of Apollinian struggles against Dionysian impulses, or a Nietzschean anthropological account of the impulse to identity, or a Weberian record of principles of rationalization, a Hegelian description of subject-object alienation, a Marxian version of the evolution of social and historical relations of exploitation, or as a series of reversals whose aim is to dismantle the conceptual dualism of enlightenment and myth in order to redeem the hopes of the past. The less historically circumscribed definition of enlightenment discerned in the Dialectic of Enlightenment does appear to rely upon there being a single and totalizing unifying process at work throughout the course of human history. This is echoed in Spelman’s analysis of the way thought working through universals is driven by a selfpreservational inclination to control and organize nature. Mastery over, or repression of, our inner worlds may correlate to this “dominion” over the external world: “even the most modest control over threatening forces in the outside world presupposes all the initial forms of psychic repression.”50 For Bernstein, this is actually a conditional claim: the repression of inner nature is a condition for subjugating external nature, while the inhibition and domination of drives and desires is a condition for the employment of discursive reason. This repression in turn becomes the condition for the individualized self or subject. Taken together, these conditions mean that repression of one’s own “inner nature” and alienation from “external or outer nature” go hand-in-hand (although there is causal priority assumed for the former), and both are required for the survival of the ego. Jameson exhorts a slightly different approach. The place occupied by the apparently original moment of fear and trembling is seen, through a number of dialectical moves, to be not the occasion of history but the trigger of a series of actions whereby the mastery of fear and vulnerability brings temporal succession into being, “along with historical telos.”51 But, as Peter Osborne points out, this reading is premised on a willingness to throw back a natural and social history onto an origin before or outside time. The result of this is to reify the postmodern experience of late capitalism as the perpetual present and to flatten out patterns of domination in cultural modernity. Osborne’s analysis of Jameson is as pertinent to Spelman and Grosz’s version, which also entwine natural and social history, eventually reversing to a Nietzschean will to power or a muted psychoanalytic account of natural instincts. The flattening out of cultural modernity could be a consequence of the way in which Adorno and Horkheimer model their concept 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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of social power as domination according to a model of mastery over nature. Axel Honneth suggests that this conceptual model results in the eventual eclipse of the social realm. If this is a problem for Adorno and Horkheimer, then it is also a problem for the feminist account—although it gives precedence to the patriarchal quality of the domination—it too tends to model it on the relationship between masculine subject and nature. Honneth also links the flattening out of cultural modernity to the supplanting of empirical social enquiry by philosophy conceived in terms of aesthetics. Whatever the fairness of this criticism, it is true that the preface to the Dialectic of Enlightenment adds weight by marking a move away from their earlier belief held in the 1930s that they could fulfil the promises of critical social theory with the methods of social sciences. Given Adorno’s later work on social class and conflict, I do not wish to overplay this. But, in the Dialectic of Enlightenment all cognition does seem to collapse into hyperbolic relationship of domination. Again, just as this is a problem for Adorno and Horkheimer, it is also a problem for feminist accounts of instrumental reason that tend to describe all reason as inherently patriarchal, or embed reason, thought, and meaning in libidinal drives. From the above, I think it fair to say that in the Dialectic of Enlightenment there is some textual ambiguity concerning the precise relationship of instrumental reason to capitalism and that this ambiguity is revealed in the broad and constricted versions of the enlightenment. The equivocation between broad and constricted versions mirrors an equivocation around domination and exchange, where the compulsion to identity is equated historically with the exchange principle—from barter to commodity production. In this case, the will to identity could be equated to a will to self-preservation or could be refined to suggest a historical hermeneutic that would look to explain social variation and continuity through an analysis of political economy, including both production and reproduction. Although Adorno attempts to steer a path between Benjamin’s view of history as the corruption of the world and Lukács’s teleological and reconciled history, it is the historical hermeneutic that shifts the Dialectic of Enlightenment, along the account of instrumental reason therein presented, from hyperbole to productive social analysis. If the Enlightenment ideal of reason is irrational, insofar as it suppresses rather than reflects on its relationship to myth and tradition, critical reason attempts to reflect on this relationship. Nietzsche’s insight into the perception of sameness, noted at the beginning of this chapter, is reworked by Adorno and Horkheimer into the dialectics of 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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Enlightenment, where the individual is subsumed under a coherent, unifying, simplifying, explanatory universal. Although it is certainly the case that Adorno and Horkheimer offer an account of identity thinking, we should resist reducing their version of identity thinking to a Nietzschean impulse or a psychoanalytic drive. They not only stress that identity thinking is a feature of precapitalist and capitalist societies but also consider it to have become an organizing principle of the latter.52 This broad historical approach to instrumental reason allows them to assert that domination is not identical with economic exploitation and is apparent in most (all) forms of exchange. Nonetheless, commodity production excites a particularly virulent form of instrumentality. More profound than this, from a methodological point of view, by working with the idea that money acts as an abstract third term between two incommensurable objects, they are able to trace forms of identity in human history. Whether or not Adorno and Horkheimer have a concept of history, they certainly use the relationship between history and nature, myth and reason, their reversals and dependence to demythologize reality.53 But it is also true that their hyperbole risks the critical historical distance it simultaneously engenders. That it does become a trenchant analysis of the particular constraints of commodity exchange should not disguise an underlying pattern: a pattern that not only helps orient analyses of historical events but also explains why, no matter how subtle or sophisticated our philosophical gestures, we cannot think away the contradictions of identity.

Notes Toward Feminizing the Enlightenment Our problem is to answer how norms of Enlightenment rationality are rooted in sex/gender. Adorno and Horkheimer propose one way into this by aligning instrumental reason with (masculine) control and domination of (a feminized) nature. The broad grasp of the enlightenment, as a process of control and mastery, fits rather well the psychoanalytic story of a masculine psychosexual cognitive and affective orientation originating in the masculine experience of separation from the primordial mother.54 It also fits well with a Foucauldian account of the historical production of knowledge: where the production of knowledge is always bound up with historically specific regimes of power and “therefore every society produces its own truths which have a normalizing and regulatory function.”55 This is not the project of the Dialectic of Enlightenment. The hyperbolic moment—which 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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describes all instrumental cognition as originating in primary drives— needs some revision. It is here that we can recognize the value of Osborne’s criticism that their hyperbolic anthropological trajectory narrated for purposive reason leads to—and may depend upon—the flattening out of social relations. At the fault-line, where broad and constricted meanings attributed to enlightenment meet, are the social relations of modernity. Women and men stand in a different relationship to instrumental reason because, according to Adorno and Horkheimer, they stand in a different relationship to modernity. “Women have no personal part in the efficiency on which this civilisation is based. It is man who has to go out into an unfriendly world, who has to struggle and produce. Woman is not a being in her own right, a subject. She produces nothing but looks after those that do.”56 This sweeping transhistorical and transcultural story contains nuggets of truth but ultimately misrepresents women’s participation, simplifies the complicated relationship of productive and reproductive labor, and places women in an awkward relation to (instrumental) reason. And, as all reason is instrumental, in an awkward relation to reason itself. As a first step in revising their analysis of instrumental reason, in order to discern whether it too is rooted in sex/gender or whether it can aid us in the critique of rational norms, we need to reflect upon the idea of the Enlightenment—which it turns out is an academic invention. The association of the terms “modernity,” “Enlightenment,” and “reason” is so frequent that they are taken to be synonymous. For Barnett, this association—prevalent in postmodernism—is a recycled version of old-fashioned “Enlightenment Studies” whereby Enlightenment is considered to be a homogeneous phenomenon, led by deistic radicals guided by the “false prophet of reason.” But the idea that the “Enlightenment” runs from “Descartes to Kant” is undermined both by the extraordinary diversity of thinkers and disparity of geography and chronology. Indeed, we even struggle to uncover unity amongst thinkers of the Enlightenment on what might be described as “the central plank of Enlightenment doctrine: the role of reason in the future of civilisation.”57 The apparent secularization of intellectual life and social institutions actually coexisted with religious faith and even organized deistic practice. To describe “the Enlightenment Project” or Enlightenment philosophy as rationalist and masculine seems not only fatuous but more importantly overlooks the contribution of many remarkable, and unremarked upon, women.58 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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Diverse intellectual environments and antecedent traditions, geographically nuanced social practices, and uneven development support a variegated approach to any historically circumscribed Enlightenment: an Enlightenment that is said to have occurred in England, Scotland, Italy, France, Sweden, and Germany. I shall bracket the pseudo-history, which supports an overly intellectualist approach to “the Enlightenment,” and just note that: “social and politico-religious processes have been overlooked by historians too concerned to relate their present to the past, forging timelines and traditions where none really existed.”59 Extricating the Enlightenment from processes and events better associated with modernity— industrialization, urbanization, and colonization— allows a more incisive analysis of the relationship between domestic and imperial military and political strategies.60 As long as the theory of modernity takes its orientation from the basic concepts of the philosophy of reflection—from ideas of knowledge, conscious awareness, self-consciousness—the intrinsic connection with the concept of reason or of rationality is obvious. This is not as evident with the basic concepts of the philosophy of praxis, such as action, self-generation and labour.61

The second step in refining the idea of instrumental reason, so that it can address how rationalistic orientation is implicated in oppression, extracts three salient notions from the Dialectic of Enlightenment. First, universal concepts, along with systems, procedures, and regulations are embedded in an antagonistic social reality. Second, the “imprint” of commodity production, including fetishism and reification, inaugurates an instrumental (cognitive and affective) approach to our intersubjective world and to world-making. Third, in order to be critical, reason is reflective about its relationship to myth and tradition as well as on the mediating relationship between subjects and objects and the value(s) of judgment. With these notions in our armory, we can enquire into the social practices that enabled men to take the role of “neutral” but thoroughly interested knowers: into the constitution of modernity as sexed. Enquiry into the emergence not only of specific beliefs about the world but also into the constitutive values of, for example, scientific communities has enabled feminist epistemologists to investigate the curious and complicated relationship between reason, belief, and institutional practice. In “Are Old Wives Tales Justified?,” Dalmiya and Alcoff argue that the root of epistemic discrimination is the



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almost exclusive preference in modern epistemology for propositional knowledge.62 They make a case that propositional knowledge depends on a process of justification that includes reference to indirectly garnered supporting evidence, usually textual authorities. The appeal to authority, rather than disappearing, becomes institutionalized and transformed from the divine to the secular. Through a confluence of social factors, women have not been in a position to frame their beliefs propositionally or justify their beliefs via literary and scholastic authorities. Of course, if the epistemic subject were able to occupy a view-from-nowhere, social exclusion or absence would be unfortunate—may even go against natural justice—but actually have little or no bearing on the conduct of enquiry. But this social exclusion from the community of knowers has resulted in the formation of extremely partial hypotheses. To illustrate the complex relationship between the historical emergence of modern epistemology with social practices and alignment with particular gender interests, Dalmiya and Alcoff survey the nineteenth-century transition from midwifery to obstetrics. In Europe and the United States, midwives had a wealth of experience concerning pregnancy, birthing, and postpartum care. Male physicians, also tending women during pregnancy and birthing, introduced a number of techniques designed to ensure efficiency and safety. These included stirrup births, hanging women from trees to enable swift delivery, and trampling on stomachs to speed up the process. More dramatically, in Europe when physicians finally “wrested obstetrics from the monopoly of midwives” there raged childbed fever, inflicting thousands of women across Europe. The fever was caused not by the “ignorant and dirty” midwives but by the unclean hands of physicians who transferred diseases from patient to patient. Due to their successes, midwives were “entitled to be sure,” that is, to be knowing subjects. They held beliefs that could be justified in terms of reliability and experience but would be hard pushed to explain the reliability of this skills-based knowledge. Midwife knowledge was rarely codified in a written form. The transition from midwifery to obstetrics occurred during the formalization of medical practice and consolidation of traditional medical knowledge. There were two main consequences. First, a coherentist point: in order to count as justified, new ideas would either have to add coherency to the set of medical beliefs or be inferred from existing beliefs. What would count as good reason for believing that p would have been that p was consistent with a prior hypothesis or proved, along with other beliefs, to be a reliable indicator of events. Second, as a result of the consolidation of 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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medical knowledge into a canon, beliefs that could not be presented in propositional form, and a set of entailments or inferences between propositions, no longer counted as properly justified; practical knowledge could be dismissed as “merely” old wives’ tales. It is all too quick to explain epistemic bias and the covert pursuit of interests in terms of psychoanalytic drives or in the philosophical and literary pairing of men with reason and women with emotion.63 There may be a prevalence of these sexed associations, but cultural signification has not been straightforward. Debates over education, reason, and the enlightened mind in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were inflected by changes in social roles and were by no means simply dualistic.64 To explain how men were positioned as “neutral” knowing subjects, we should, as Dalmiya and Alcoff suggest, look to the social nature of the practices in question, their own histories of tensions between constitutive and contextual values related to the uneven processes of urbanization, stratification, and industrialization of modernity. The sociological exclusion of women from scientific practice did result in the formation of highly partial hypotheses—it is improbable that a woman, certainly not a midwife, would have believed that trampling on the abdomen of a woman in labor might aid delivery.65 However, although the social location of the practice and practitioner are relevant to the formation of explanatory hypotheses, they are not sufficient to explain scientific discovery. Even these male physicians were prepared to revise their beliefs, and the identification of “childbed fever,” its diagnosis, and cure were the result of the same scientific practice.66 These two points intersect. In order to grasp the relationship between practical and propositional knowledge we have to be able to identify underlying motivating interests and to discuss the ends of scientific research. Thus, for example, if means and ends were aligned instrumentally for the sake of efficiency, we might be able to explain why male doctors considered the “feel” of birthing to be irrelevant to the matter of delivery. If the end of medical practice was safe and painless delivery, then this belief could be judged unreasonable. The negotiation and visibility of ends is inconsistent with sociological exclusion. The above case study, into the growth of obstetrics, reveals how the determined attempt to force an approach to the material world, despite evidence to the contrary, coupled with a refusal to reflect on the means and ends of practice, not only harmed a significant amount of women but also pushed the practice into unreasonableness: a form of cognitive deficit. The opaque character of interests 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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and values, which motivate the gathering together of individuals under general terms and provoke the formation of hypotheses, can also confound epistemic or scientific enquiry. It is this cognitive deficit, the irrationality of rationlization, that suggests an alternative to “nonrational rebellion”—to the cry to abandon representation and reason. Critical reason can address whose interests are served by which practice and is therefore central to feminist methodology. As a consequence, we need to be quite precise about our objections to “reasoning.” If we allow ourselves for the moment Bernstein’s broad sweep, we can say that as a consequence of the convergence of naturalism (disenchantment of the natural world), rationalism (demand for theoretical justification), and universalism (the flip-side of individualism) the view-from-nowhere became the Enlightenment kite-mark of objectivity. It is not objectivity itself that is the problem but the apparently neutral description of a world of facts that hides the crucial connection between practice, knowledge, and human interest.67 This view-from-nowhere is at one with the mist that distorts social relations and interests. By concealing the way that facts are constituted, this illusion of neutrality prevents consciousness of “the interlocking of knowledge with interests in the life-world.” We have already called this the “ideology of objectivism.” Harvey writes that “the grapes that sit upon the supermarket shelves are mute, we cannot see the fingerprints of exploitation upon them, or tell immediately what part of the world they are from.” But, he continues, “by further enquiry the veil can be lifted on this geographical and social ignorance.”68 Resistance to universalism can be explained by the shadow of the unifying social mechanism of exchange cast over our modes of cognitive interaction alongside our very modern ascent to causal explanation. Because we suffer through the machinations of the universalizing mechanism of exchange, it is quite reasonable to be suspicious, even reject, reason and universals. It may or may not be the case that social criticism needs to begin in exaggeration, but hyperbole speaks to this anxiety in a rather unhelpful way. Despite the dangers of abstraction, it is only through a process of cognitive abstraction that the particular can be revealed within its relations. This is not to ape an epistemological view-from-nowhere but to begin from a particular place and then to uncover social relations of construction, organization, and distribution. Unless the relational and concrete particular can be thus grasped, our moral responsibility remains mute and our vision parochial. “The pattern of control through understanding through 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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subsumption is refined when it is discovered that understanding without the power of intervention is insufficient.”69

In the Homeric epic, the enchanting Sirens, sitting on their beach “piled with boneheaps of men now rotted away,”70 tempt the forewarned adventurer away from the domestic hearth: from wife and children. In the Sirens’ song can be heard a voice of nature, a voice of pleasure, a voice of the past, and a voice of women promising to the adventurer his fortune, to reveal his future.71 But all this is too familiar: erotic promise, the blend of sex and knowledge, tempting but disastrous seduction away from the domestic. And all this places women alongside nature as that which is most dominated (patriarchal knowledge) and that which offers the flight of escape. Caught between the domestic, the wife, and the lure of the other, the seductress, the adventurer finds himself having to control his impulses in order to control the world. Actually not even having to control, certainly not repress, them because the binds that tie allow him to enjoy and endure the Siren song without consequence. This very passive impulse is that of the will to narcissistic self-knowledge. In the same way as Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique of enlightenment aimed to enlighten Enlightenment about itself, the feminist account of the “economy of the same” aims to reveal the embodied character of the narcissistic enlightened subject. But in order to undertake such critique there is reference back to a mythical state of natural instinct, as with the psychoanalytic story, or to a will to power, as with the Nietzschean story, or a blend of both—entrapping critique in a perpetual present. With any “original myth,” such as that of Rousseau, Locke, or Hobbes, the point is to reconstruct the past through the fault-lines of the present. “The present produces the past, and more specifically that immediate past of its own present, which is now stigmatised as archaic, old-fashioned, mythic, superstitious, obsolete or simply ‘natural.’ ” It is a critique made for the sake of the Enlightenment and the rationality that it promised, a critique designed to demythologize the present by throwing into question the hold of the past.72 But we are all-too aware these days how such original myths can leave in place and reflect back, untouched, social relations. When this occurs, the patterns of a nuanced present are further flattened or hidden from view. Adorno writes that the spread of the exchange principle imposes on nonidentical individuals and performances the obligation to become 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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identical, to become total. This too seems to entrap us within an iron-cage of instrumentality. I suggest that by fleshing out the way in which identity thinking is modelled on exchange through relations of social production and reproduction, we can introduce historical variation, identify interests behind classifications, and note the qualitative shift introduced by reification as we move into commodity production. Following this, the Dialectic of Enlightenment may merely look like a critique of bourgeois philosophies of history and, due to the apparent absence of class struggle as a dynamo of change, a turn from Marxism. But at a more profound level, as Buck-Morss argues, the positive message is that when dialectical change takes place within the superstructure alone and leaves the economic relations of production untouched, it falls back on itself and collapses into that which it would least like to be.73 Where there is “superstructural” change, without corresponding change in economic relations of production, cultural forms will endlessly repeat mantras of economic fortitude. Without “the possibility of positive knowledge” such praxis is impossible.74 Similarly, for Habermas, we need to prize apart questions of genesis (power) and validity (knowledge). He believes that the collapse of one into the other has paralyzed the critical move.75 Caught in the purist belief that the devil resides in the internal relationship between genesis and validity, “the critical move has been to exorcise the devil so that theory once cleansed of empirical mixture can operate within pure element.”76 Thus, critique of ideology, for Habermas, unwittingly continues undialectical enlightenment. In the objective of a final unmasking, in the drive to pull back the veil that conceals the confusion of power and reason, the purist intention betrays itself. The only rational outcomes can be nonrational rebellion or the abandonment of representation and thought. Collapsing in the end into a cry for lost plenitude, the world is surrendered to a play of forces, to an irreconcilable struggle between forces. The task before us then is to locate a critique of ideology within Enlightenment rather than totalizing a historical critique of ideology. More particularly, the task is to demarcate the specificity of a cognitive orientation that works through abstraction, quantification, and substitutability as a feature of commodity production rather than as a general anthropological principle of language practice.77 The compulsion of the universal incites all these elements—the gathering of individuals together according to implicit and disguised social interests. It is our job to make these social interests explicit.



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4

Essentialism

Introduction Conservative or patriarchal justifications of traditional roles often invoke ideas of human nature, “In claiming that women’s current social roles and positions are the effects of their essence, nature, biology or universal social position, these theories are guilty of rendering such roles and positions unalterable and necessary and thus of providing them with powerful political justification.”1 As a response to this type of argument, cultural theory of the 1980s and 1990s worked to destabilize previously secure categories and encouraged theorists to analyze meaning and relationships of power in a way that would call into question unitary, universal concepts and radically open discussions concerning subjectivity, sex, sexualities, and gender, thereby inaugurating the “sexual equality versus sexual differences” debate. Explaining how the discourse of rights, prevalent in debates around “equality” and “sexual difference,” actually perpetuates rather than undermines social hierarchy, Elizabeth Grosz observes that the project of sexual equality takes male achievements, values, and standards to be the norm and encourages women to minimize their differences from men in order to become the same as men. In the hope of disturbing a fractured and hierarchal liberal contract, the political discourse of difference was intended to break from that of political equality and Enlightenment rights–bearing moral agency. Through asking whether the concept of “sexual difference” is actually a breakthrough in contesting, or a reassertion of, patriarchal values, Grosz discovered that, despite its ambition, by insisting on women’s difference from men it too poses the problem of “women’s nature.” The political discourses of equality and of difference appeal to human nature and, the argument runs, demonstrate conceptual dependence on four primary terms—essentialism, naturalism, biologism, and universalism—which are also apparent in the traditional 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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justification of social differentiation. Wherever the concepts “woman” and “man” depend upon these four terms, similarities and sameness are imposed on overlapping crosscutting discourses of femininities and masculinities, social relations are confused with fixed attributes, and variable differences are presented as without historic, geographic, and cultural variation.2 Folding this analysis back on feminist discourse, cultural feminist theorists, who pride themselves in resisting “the seductive promise of inclusive identity,” maintain that the feminist second-wave emphasis on commonalities between women, far from providing the grounds for political agency, led to the neglect and suppression of differences. As such, what has the veneer of radical political discourse could be said to be thoroughly implicated in the conservative political contract and the patriarchal social symbolic. The cogency of these “equality versus difference” arguments has produced “an increasingly paralysing anxiety over falling into ethnocentrism or essentialism,”3 pulling “the rug from under the feet of feminism.”4 For, if women cannot be conceived as a distinct group—what we share qua women—then it is hard to see how we might have common concerns or share political goals. Similarly, the concepts of “race” and “class” have been dissolved—often at the expense of racism and class bias.5 Thus, in their effort to resist the seduction of identity, we appear caught between the Charybdis of exclusion and the Scylla of endless openness and “resignifiability.” Dialectical mediation avoids the horns of this particular “empiricist versus idealist” dilemma: either there is a given, essential, unchanging nature, or “nature” is thoroughly contingent, socially produced, and conceptually dependent.6 By avoiding this frugal dichotomy, we can be more precise about the risks associated with the four primary terms. If we reject these terms tout court—because of supposed political entailments—we not only compromise debates concerning the goals and aims of feminism but also undermine arguments relating to the “structural” contexts of power and the conditions of subjectivity; be they economic, social, psychological, or linguistic. In this chapter I pursue a line of argument suggested by Christine Battersby and develop a theoretical model that explains how we can both identify a group of diverse individuals as a kind and deal with sameness-in-difference and difference-in-sameness without either reifying a given female nature or supposing shared female consciousness, similar experiences of oppression, or identical social interests.7 I begin by noting and accepting that there is a relationship between universal terms, such as “woman,” and problems of description and 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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political representation, “all women are x and so should be excluded from y.” However, I argue that this relationship is not primarily metaphysical or ontological but epistemic and political in character. A realist account of group identity is plausibly neutral to such politics. There are no necessary political consequences that follow from the assertion of universal or kind terms, on the contrary, without these terms one is left unable to analyze political conditions or to challenge the content of the general claims. That said, although the mechanisms responsible for political actions and hierarchies are not brought into play or caused by the belief in essential properties, or the use of universal terms, they are certainly facilitated by them. I am thus not disputing that the ideology of objectivism is embroiled in a social imaginary but wish to investigate forms of critical intervention, disposed in main part to make implicit interests explicit. I conclude that there is an ontological model of group membership that not only has high explanatory value but is also sensitive to, and helps to address, the adverse political characteristics identified by cultural or postmodern feminist theorists. The (re)turn to realism within feminist theory should not be, indeed cannot be, a return to “old knowledges.”

The Risk of Essentialism The “essentialist versus anti-essentialist debate” has focused on what appears a deceptively simple problem. The anti-essentialist argument is that the universal term “woman” depends on the assertion of essential properties or common natures between women, that such an assertion prioritizes sameness over differences between women, and that this priority has political consequences. In an attempt to reduce the anxiety over essentialism, Diana Fuss has pointed out that there is nothing inherently “bad” about essentialism, that, indeed, what it means to be “essentialist” is itself a moot point. In a similar vein, Vicki Kirkby argues that the construction of the debate in the mutually exclusive terms of “essentialism” versus “anti-essentialism” not only installs a dubious moral agenda but also oversimplifies the complexities of feminist controversy.8 It is certainly true that the term “essentialism” is much used, and probably overused, within feminist theory. Cressida Heyes, for example, uncovers four distinct ways in which the term is deployed. Thus (i) “essentialism” can designate the metaphysical belief that certain properties are necessary to the identity of a thing or person or that an individual must have the property. The term can also apply (ii) to 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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a biological or scientific account of those properties. Again (iii) it may be used when words or concepts are assumed to have fixed or invariant meanings. Finally (iv) it may be employed to highlight the ahistoric operation of categories of analysis within (social) scientific methodology.9 Having articulated these distinctions as metaphysical, biological, linguistic, and methodological essentialism, Alison Stone argues that historically, within feminist debate, the term “essentialism” has consistently been brought into play to designate metaphysical essentialism, and its scientific counterpart. More particularly, she suggests, metaphysical essentialism insists on the universal nature of necessary properties, even when they are socially constructed. The idea that natures are (diversely) socially constructed, having replaced biological essentialism, thus runs into the same choppy waters. Metaphysical skepticism, concerning general or universal terms, has epistemic consequences that cause direct problems for the political project of feminism. Although there is even a wider range to essentialism than suggested above,10 it is the relationship between essentialism and universalism that is most relevant to establishing a convincing (gender) realism. In one way, and with one version of essentialism, it makes perfect sense to identify essentialism—be that of natural properties or social conditions—and universalism. Hence, there is at least one property that any individual must have to be a woman, this property must to be common to, or shared by, all individuals so classified, thus the property is universal (or common) and membership of the group “woman” is defined accordingly. The attribution of the property can be explained in accordance with common conditions (nature, social forces). But actually the relationship of essentialism to universalism is yet more perplexing—indeed wider ranging—than this within feminist theory, and, I believe, this complication is a result of feminist theory’s postmodern and poststructuralist intellectual culture. To explain, let us return to Spelman’s exploration of essentialism at the beginning of Inessential Woman.11 Any individual—in this case Murdoch’s Uncle Theo—who becomes aware of the multiplicity of things around them responds to this overwhelming variety by attempting to impose order and structure. This is achieved by classifying individual things together into groups. Spelman is making two broad philosophical claims. First, the use of any universal term, such as “pebble,” is a psychological response to the chaos or unmanageability of the world of experience. Second, in order to subsume particulars under a universal term, to make the world safely conform to categories, similarities between individuals need to be prioritized over differences, and essences—common to 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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all instances—asserted. In this way she elaborates the Platonic quality of Western philosophy in terms of a psychological drive to bring individuals under a universal concept where each thing is supposed to have properties necessarily, and these properties are considered to be common to all instances. In tandem with this general metaphysical point, Spelman argues that feminist theory replicates this mainstream metaphysical approach— the subsumption of individuals under universal terms—and that it has reaped the political consequences of doing so. The problem is this. If, when classifying individuals under universal terms, similarities are prioritized over differences, then a particular standard is usually set up concerning which properties count as relevant and which are irrelevant. Within feminism, “the focus on women ‘as women’ has addressed only one group of women—namely, white middle-class women of Western industrialised countries.”12 In other words, interested classification and specific experiences are presented as neutral standards—norms—that are wrongly taken to be common to other individuals of the kind generalized from a particular standpoint. The identities and experiences from a particular standpoint, usually those of privileged women, are generalized as representative of all women. Thus, what it means to “be a woman” is given only a partial articulation. The political strategies and goals of feminism as a movement were affected by this approach, and the result, according to Spelman, was a movement that, having consequently reproduced hierarchies of class, sexualities, and ethnicities, was in a state of collapse. Teresa de Lauretis speaks to this anxiety when she attempts to shift the focus of debate from feminist essentialism as a category by which to classify feminists or feminisms to the historical specificity of the essential difference of feminist theory itself.13 Spelman’s argument draws out a relationship between a specific metaphysical approach to classification and a particular politics, which was an accurate and perspicacious diagnosis of troubles within feminism—both as theory and movement. However, this philosophical analysis lent itself to a rather more general and radical social constructivism, which is what actually “pulled the rug from under the feet of feminism.” Skeptical about metaphysical essentialism and worried about the political impact of arguments that explain the (moral) organization of the world in those terms, feminist social constructionists often argue that far from constituting the raw material or starting point for judgments of identity, “nature” is itself produced through social discourse. Thus, to avoid reproducing hierarchies, it is considered important to argue that the more obviously naturalistic 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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concepts “sex” and “the body” are of the same universal form as “pebble” and as discursively produced. We have seen that, for Grosz, theory using the term “nature” will tend to elide it with essentialist and universal terms, mobilizing all three to rationalize, support, and underpin existing power relations.14 Further, she claims that a body exists as such only through its socio-linguistic construction. In one move, and despite intention, the cultural and symbolic is “privileged” over the corporeal. Describing this as a form of political essentialism, Stone detects a tension within the anti-essentialist arguments, which actually make realist essentialism unacceptable but political essentialism epistemologically cogent and politically radical. She urges us to respond to this tension and rethink how bodily matter is “actively impelled to inflect and modify cultural forms”: how matter, matters.15 In the next section of this chapter I shall develop an account of kinds that can accommodate context and mechanisms of, as well as the interests behind, classification and, at the same time, make sense of the regularities in the world that can be classified. In fact, I will suggest, you cannot have one without the other. A fleshed out realism benefits from feminist insights into the conventional character of classification, and any conventional account of classification relies upon, sometimes hidden, realist commitments. Following Battersby’s recommendations, my hope is that by reconsidering the metaphysics of object classification I will be able to suggest new ways to think about identity—ways that remain faithful to Spelman’s original worries about political representation. Such an analysis depends on unravelling features and properties from conditions and both these from experience to see where the causal relationship might lay, where commonality is being assumed, and the interests implicit in the classificatory process.

Natural Kinds In the following sections I shall be defending the use of natural kind terms. Before I do so, I must first address the question whether or not one must be essentialist to use general terms. The answer I give is in two parts. The first part argues that essentialism is incidental to explanations of kind groupings, which means that one can be essentialist or anti-essentialist and still use terms that have general purchase. The second part gives content to these general terms and argues that classifications are best explained through similarity relationships. The classifications I have in mind are apparently 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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nonarbitrary classifications of individuals into groups, such as male and female, rather than arbitrary classifications: all objects on the desk to my left. Following Jay Bernstein, I accept that “conceptualisation is the determination of an intrinsically indeterminate, but essentially determinable albeit never fully determinate, fine-grained and dense experiential base.”16 In the process of determination, some classifications, for example, separating objects into two kinds “hats” and “frogs,” seem intuitively obvious, whereas other acts of discrimination, for example, separating individuals into groups “men” and “women,” are more controversial. Essences and Kinds It is certainly part of our philosophical history that the essence of a thing provides the minimal necessary and sufficient conditions that enable us to identify and reidentify the individual as (belonging to) one kind, and to say of two individuals that they are (or belong to) the same kind.17 Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam, although part of this tradition and largely responsible for the modern theory of natural kinds, were themselves reacting strongly against Locke’s widespread empiricist influence.18 The focus of their disgruntlement was the assignation of group identity: could it really be justified, they asked, on the basis of the macroscopic observable properties of things, as in Locke, or would it not make more sense to base identity on microscopic, unobservable, and structural properties—real essences? In an attempt to tighten the connection between real essences and the names of kinds, they insisted that the correct extension of a natural kind term is the thing’s internal structure, regardless of whether or not we are ignorant of it.19 Feminist critiques of essentialism often object to the notion that any property, or internal structure, can stand outside sociohistoric processes and to the attendant assumption that individuals have similar (same) internal natural structures. But, despite the philosophical heat generated by these disputes, even if there were such things as “real essences” they actually cannot explain natural kind groupings. I shall briefly look at four reasons why the traditional idea of “real essence” is incidental to the use of natural kind terms, and, if these reasons are convincing, a working barrier can be placed between feminist critiques of essentialism and arguments against “universalism” or group terms. I shall, however, return to essentialism and suggest that, if reconceived, real essences can help to make sense of the coherence of groups. 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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First, any traditional account of the essential common natures of individuals cannot, or at least finds it very difficult to, chronicle change over time. In a post-Darwinian world this is often considered to be a significant explanatory failure. Thus, because essentialism is of little use in explaining natural kind groupings, and how these alter over time, the disputes around essentialism may be put aside, because they are quite incidental. Second, realism about common essential properties tends toward reductionism: the improper attempt to reduce one level of description (or explanation) to another: for example, a mind state to brain state or behavior to biology. Reductionism is arguably at work in the description of essential natures in microstructural terms. Only physics or chemistry would be up to the task, and it could be argued that the definition of an individual’s essence in these terms would overly compress and translate information from one level to another. The third problem is more obvious. The “discovery” of an essence, it could be argued, depends first on the postulation— perhaps even the perception—of the existence of a kind.20 Recognition and classification occur prior to discovery of any essence and for this reason cannot depend on any particular essence. Finally, and leading on from this, the fourth problem is that microstructural properties do not seem to be what determines inclusion into kinds at all.21 One refinement of this argument asserts that if we conceded that there were distinctions at a microstructural or chromosomal level we might then be forced to accept that all primary and secondary properties are equally essential.22 If they were, we would lose the ability to discriminate between accidental and essential properties. Thus, if the argument is that, as genes are essential, sex is genetically determined and therefore sex is essential, it would follow that eye color, weight, height, and so on are also essential. “Sex,” as essential or accidental as everything else, would have no greater role than any other property in explaining membership into kinds. There are then some straightforward reasons for putting aside essentialist explanations of natural kind groupings. John Dupré argues that, in ordinary and scientific language, classification is determined not by the essential properties of individuals but by the aims or goals driving the classification. For example, because sharp distinctions are the exception and intermediate cases commonplace, there is actually no unique way to classify the innumerable and diverse products of the evolutionary process. Any questions regarding the reasons behind the taxonomies actually deployed would have to look to the context as well as aims and goals of the scientist. Let us take another case: the separation of individuals into two kinds “male” and “female.” According to 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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Dupré, although essentialists are keen to show an underlying genetic or chromosomal structure to explain dimorphism, there is scant evidence of anything uniform across species. The most that can be said, across species, is that males and females produce different-sized gametes. Sexual categories then have little explanatory value. In other words, they cannot explain the distribution of distinct behaviors. Thus, even if we did accept the organization of individuals into two classes, these classes would tell us very little, if anything at all. Why then is the world divided into two categories, which apparently have such low explanatory value? In answer to this question, Dupré suggests that the classification of individuals into biological kinds is a reflection of historical similarities and interests as much as anything. He concludes that explanations for individual assignation into kinds would have to begin by specifying the purposes and goals underlying the classification of an object. Offering the example of an apparently straightforward classification of a piston in the general economy of a car, he points out that the unambiguous nature of the classification depends on the fact that the context of the classification is clearly at the foreground. If rather than working on a car in a garage we were at a football match, those on the gate would dismiss our argument that the hard metal object in my hand was a piston and not a weapon.23 Christine Delphy raises a similar point when she notes that distinctions are not necessarily hierarchical or oppositional: vegetables, for example, are not placed on a scale of (use) value. Hierarchies cannot be explained by the simple fact of classification.24 Dupré’s work on biological taxonomy adds weight to the argument that classification is not based on any underlying internal structure of an individual, on any “real essence,” but rather depends on the context, on the aims behind classification, and on interests that might not be altogether obvious. It would seem that someone like Dupré would accept that natural kind membership is dependent in large part on human activity, which is perfectly consistent with social constructivism. But despite defending the thesis that there are countless ways of classifying objects, Dupré is also unapologetically realist about there being countless legitimate and objectively grounded classifications. Resemblances and Kinds Because biological natural kinds are variable kinds—there is little clear categorical distinctness—Dupré describes his thesis as a weak doctrine of natural kinds. I will propose a weak doctrine of natural kinds where membership is determined through resemblances rather 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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than strict identity. A similarity class, as defined by Eli Hirsch, is where anything outside the class is less similar to something inside the class than any pair of things inside the class are similar to each other.25 To the objection that what counts as a natural grouping would have to be extended to include a range of overlapping conjunctions (for example spherical objects that are green and red) and disjunctions (closer to green and red rather than blue and red), Hirsch also concedes what he calls a weak doctrine of natural kinds, based on the classes of, for example, spherical objects. If the similarity class, or family resemblance, is defined in terms of extensively overlapping conjunctions, then kind membership could be explained by a thing satisfying most—but not necessarily all—of the list of conditions. Things so classified differ from one another less than other things. The difference between an account of kind membership based on identical properties and one where membership is defined through resemblances can be nicely illustrated by the example of an organ transplant. In this situation it would be vital to be able to distinguish between organs that are alike in some but not all aspects—here healthy rather than diseased organs. There must be similarity in some respects—that which make it the sort of organ it is—but not strict identity: “to say of organ x that it has properties in common with organ y essential for successful transplant is to make a weaker claim than to claim that these are identical.”26 However, this raises the question whether or not we are talking about resemblances between properties. To put this question in terms relevant to my argument: is it resemblance between properties that defines membership of kind “woman”? That there are difficulties with the property-based account is acknowledged both by Elizabeth Spelman and Natalie Stoljar, but to different effects. According to the former, “race,” “ethnicity,” “sex,” and “class” are not stable properties that one has, and an individual is not a sum of such universal properties. Indeed, Spelman argues that an individual can belong to many different “sets” and that this conjunction affects the properties themselves. This would mean that “sex” and “class” characteristics of one individual in the group “woman” differ precisely because of the influence of these other (external) group identities and it would be an error to think that gender is constructed in isolation from these other factors. This type of argument seems to be behind the intuition that individuals can all be called “women” because they form a series, a series that is layered, mutating, and complex. 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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As we have seen, the idea that kind membership can be determined through resemblances is a workable alternative to the ideas that the term “woman” signifies either a universal “property” essentially or accidentally instantiated by individuals or identical individual microstructures. But there still remain two plausible options for “what” resembles “what.” Stoljar draws the following distinction: (i) “womanness” as a particular property so that there are resemblance classes between properties and (ii) that individuals participate in resemblance structures and form a genuine class or group through participation.27 This latter option would suggest that individuals, rather than their properties, fall under the same predicate or resemble each other in relevant ways: being-a-woman is something we are rather than something we have. If essentialism could be summarized as the idea that there is a property “femaleness” that might be attributed to an individual, it would be rather easily defeated. Instead of treating the term “woman” as a name designating a property, Stoljar proceeds by treating the term “woman” as a cluster concept.28 As a cluster concept it designates a cluster of specifiable features. Individuals, named “women,” demonstrate a conjunction of these features: “the concept picks out different arrangements of features in different individuals who bear ‘a family resemblance’ to each other.”29 Everything useful that can be said in a philosophy of universals can be said in a philosophy of resemblances. And, whereas the philosophy of universals may perceive the world as though basic structures are quite clear and simple, the philosophy of resemblances: delivers us from this danger by reminding us that most of the resemblances we think and talk of are by no means exact ones. It restores to human thought and language the fuzziness or haziness, that absence of hard and fast boundaries, which do belong to them, and even in a way to the world itself.30

It remains to decide whether all elements of the cluster are equally pertinent to the coherence of the cluster.

The Realness of Natural Kinds Without doubt there are as many versions—perhaps even more—of realism as there are of essentialism. Minimally, realism is the thesis that reality is independent from the way it is represented in judgment and that it is always possible that thought gets the world wrong: this stick might not be bent or women’s wombs might not move round their 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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bodies. In this minimal sense, realism is opposed to idealism, which holds that no material objects or external realities exist independently from our knowledge or consciousness of them. Next I am going to investigate how realist we can be about the arrangements of features that, in Stoljar’s account, are the basis of family resemblance. First, I have been arguing for a conventional account of classification. Classification, I have said, depends on a selection of properties (in which ways are x and y similar enough to make them S? How do x and y differ to make them S but not R?). I have also argued that the selection of relevant properties takes place according to criteria related to our interests. Thus, natural kinds are made up of individuals that are similar enough, in relevant ways, to make the group cohere. If relevance is indeed a decision, we are forced to inquire into the criteria in play when deciding why this feature rather than that feature be counted as relevant. Thus attention needs to be focused on the context-bound function of the object, and the theorist needs to make explicit the implicit interests guiding both the selection of a feature as well as the context for relevance. Second, I have also been allowing that even this conventional account of kinds requires there being features that do actually resemble one another. As in our case of the organ transplant, the grouping of individual things into kidneys that are “healthy” and those that are “diseased” is thankfully not arbitrary, but nor is the division of the things into “kidney” and “heart.” The intuition behind this is that although an individual might demonstrate a number of features, there is a limit to the range of possible classifications—x cannot both be an elephant and a tree, trees cannot fly. At this basic level, a commitment to realism should help to explain how classifications are constrained by the things themselves. To put this otherwise, physical phenomena provide the boundaries for legitimately admissible interpretations.31 I am now going to introduce a third step in the argument, which is to develop a realist explanation for resemblances that make sense of the classification of an individual as an individual “woman.” The features identified by Stoljar as designated by the concept “woman” are: (i) biological sex (chromosomes, sex characteristics, general morphology); (ii) a range of phenomenological features (from menstrual cramps to childbirth and fear of walking the streets at night); (iii) social roles (for example domestic labor); (iv) and self attributions and identifications. Individuals known as women demonstrate diverse arrangements of these empirically observable features. The list is suggestive rather than definitive and I use it to illustrate the structure of 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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argument. It can accommodate Gatens’s suggestion that similarity can be explained through the culturally mediated experience of the female imaginary and Battersby’s concern with the underlying sameness of the female predicament. However, because individuals who would not be classified as women can display a number of these features, there is further work to be done. For instance, an individual relevantly similar to other individuals classified as male may undertake all the domestic labor. He may, for sure, be described as womanly or “feminine” but still be male. Similarly, a little boy may be afraid to walk down a street, in fear of gang violence, but that does not warrant the classification of him as female. The phenomenological account holds only because it presumes the experience: “walking down the street as-a-woman.” More extensively, “experience-of-x” is unlikely to provide any grounds for resemblance claims. One component of the cluster, though, cannot be absent in any such classification, and that is the “biological body.” Indeed, this could be the only component demonstrated by an individual, and they would still be classified as “a woman.” That this is the case does not admit a one-way causal relationship between the biological body and other features of the cluster. Nor does it neglect what are in fact political decisions about what counts as “the biological body.” Just as the number of sex-based categories is conventional—although constrained—so too is the classification of trans bodies. Importantly, the clusters will change as social conditions change, and to make sense of current political and conventional organization of the clusters we need to make explicit underlying interests. Thus we have clusters of observable regularities demonstrated by various individuals. The term “woman” is a conventional label for these patterns of resemblances and regularities. There are resonances here of Locke’s account of nominal essences where the macroscopic and observable qualities of an object are the grounds on which judgments concerning group identity are made. Locke also suggested that, on the basis of observed similarity, we group things together into certain kinds and suppose that there must be a real essence of the species. The real essence of a sort is the result of a generally shared opinion, according to which classification created artificially by the nominal essence is based on a real cause. This seems to be the very move that critical realists such as Roy Bhaskar defend. The move from empiricism—the observation of regularities—to realism is the move that looks to explain these regularities in terms of conditions that are deeper and nonobservable. 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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In A Realist Theory of Science, Roy Bhaskar defines the nominal essence of a thing in terms of the properties the manifestation of which is necessary for the thing to be correctly identified as one of a certain type.32 The real essences, he continues, are those structures or constitutions in virtue of which the thing or substance tends to behave in the way that it does, including the manifest properties that constitute its nominal essence. “The real essences of things are their intrinsic structures, atomic constitutions and so on which constitute the real basis of their natural tendencies and causal powers” (my emphasis). Jean-Michel Vienne, offering a revision of Lockean scholarship, picks up and develops a distinction between internal constitution and real essence. He writes that according to Locke’s interpretation there are three different levels relevant to the determination of the meaning of natural kind expressions: internal constitution, nominal essence, and real essence.33 It is my contention that real essence and internal constitution are usually collapsed and that unpacking might help us to develop a realist account of group membership. The internal constitution of a thing is, according to Vienne, the cause or internal principle of the individual thing that appears. For Locke, surprisingly, the more familiar and ordinary use of “real essence,” in contrast, retains a generic meaning and is linked to the existence of species. When the individual is considered from the vantage point of essence, it is only to classify the individual in a sort, and all classification is made on the basis of appearance. The real essence of a sort is the result of a generally shared opinion according to which the classification created artificially by the nominal essence is based on a real essence. But it is still at the level of (i) opinion and convention (ii) generality. It is, in other words, the supposition that there is a common individual underlying structure—or an archetype—and that this archetype would explain regularities and resemblances. In a realist world, the structure designated by the real essence to explain the appearance of regularities would be real even if discerned through the conventional archetype. In one sense, a structure thus designated would be a “generative mechanism,” but an obvious secondary question concerns the nature and domain of the generative mechanism. In the Putnam version of natural kinds, x is a lemon if and only if it has an underlying (physical) structure distinctive of most local cases satisfying the lemon stereotype. As previously noted, feminist anti-essentialists argue that “woman” cannot be such a natural kind because there is no given underlying physical structure, indeed



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the idea that there is, and that it can explain behavior, has been used to justify oppressive political practices. Within feminist theory, Diana Fuss is probably the most well known for working with Locke’s ideas of nominal and real essences.34 Nominal essence, she proposes, allows us to work with “woman” as a linguistic kind. This is true but we need to pursue it further. It is a linguistic kind insofar as it is a name for recurring, empirically observable regularities. But it is the idea of “real essence” that helps to explain what scientists are doing and how different sciences and theories contribute to an understanding of those regularities. In this sense feminist anti-essentialists are right to say that scientific practice is essentialist. However, if we think of “real essence” as an archetype or a model, what we claim about it becomes something that we can revise, and the causal explanations between real essence and regularities are fallible, open to revision, and part of a wider (democratic) discussion. I would agree with Butler that sexual difference is the site where a question concerning the relation of the biological to the cultural can be posed but may not be answered.35 Distinct sciences—biology, physics, psychology, social sciences, psychoanalytic theory— concentrate on different “essences,” each of which designates one or various underlying mechanisms (economy, desire, the unconscious, genetics, language, discourse) and in some cases a relationship between them. This is clearly an epistemological point. Distinct from this, the ontological claim is that these underlying structures or mechanisms really exist and that the different sciences may or may not come to understand, may disagree over, or, indeed, may be quite wrong about them. This sort of distinction between epistemology and ontology is a prerequisite for a realist account of regularities and irregularities. The concept “woman” signifies a cluster of features, only some of which suit the biological sciences. “Sex” then becomes merely one feature amongst many others used to explain observed regularities and may be rather low in explanatory value. The suggestion that biological science will discover causal efficacy between primary, secondary, and tertiary sexual characteristics is a claim that can be treated as part of a healthily skeptical, revisable, and historically sensitive epistemology and no doubt refuted. The biological account of continuities and discontinuities—such as with menstruation—is fallible, open to revision, and part of an ongoing productive and useful scientific debate. If we think of biological science in this way, there is no need either to posit “the body” as the focus of all explanations or, alternatively, to deny veracity to every claim made within biological science. 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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To describe “the body” as an intransitive object is not to claim that it is removed from cultural and social practice, that would be absurd, but to explain how we might say something about it in relation to those practices without conceding, at the same time, that it is only a constitutive effect of meaning and representation.36 To put it slightly differently, a good biological science would make sense of the interaction between the regulatory norms through which our biological understanding of sex is constituted and the recalcitrance of the physical.37 As Fausto-Sterling writes: There are hormones, genes, prostates, uteri, and other body parts and physiologies that we use to differentiate male from female, that become part of the ground from which varieties of sexual experience and desire emerge. Furthermore, variations of each of these aspects of physiology profoundly affect an individual’s experience of gender and sexuality.38

Referencing Butler, she continues by denying that these biological commitments lead to a concept of a body existing outside of or prior to socialization. Such a theoretical approach, she says, comes against ways in which matter is fully sedimented with discourses of sex and sexuality. Two major questions remain: Is there sex dimorphism? If so, just how much do these dimorphic characteristics explain? I have argued that individuals are classified as women due to their participating in structures of resemblances and that these resemblances can be articulated in clusters. Stoljar actually argues that one can explain the limits of the cluster by the fact that having a female sex causes the phenomenology, role, and attribution of womanness. Caroline New says something similar. I have been arguing, instead, that “sex” denotes one archetype active in the biological sciences but this does not take a primary explanatory role for the entire cluster. Each feature within the cluster is on the same level, open to investigation and exploration. This is true even if “the biological body” were the one necessary feature within the cluster. In the model I have been developing, nothing in terms of the social arrangement of labor and power necessarily follows from the fact of sex. In this sense, while there are some biological facts relating, for example, to the capacity to give birth, they are—themselves— politically neutral. The fact this feature has often been central to social organization says nothing about the feature itself: we can always ask “why this feature rather than another?” The condition in which the



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potentiality has been actualized says much more about functional contexts and the particular interests underlying classifications. The point here is “selectivity”: “the way in which from a whole possible area of past and present, certain meanings and practices are chosen for emphasis, certain other meanings and practices are neglected and excluded.”39 When observing the cluster of observable regularities we note that it is women who perform two-thirds of the world’s work and only own 1 percent of the world’s property. Christine Delphy raises the issue of covariance: Why do these features cohere? What is the relationship between them? Her answer is that due to statistical correlation (regularities) the relationship cannot be considered to be coincidental.40 Instead, she advocates turning the relationship upside down and considering that gender determines sex—that “sex itself simply marks a social division.” While I would agree that the relationship is not random, in that it is determined by interests, I do not see the implication that “sex” is nothing but a social division.41 This keeps conceding a causal relationship: there is either a causal relationship or there is nothing to be said about sex except its sociality. The relationship within the cluster, between “being” a female sex, phenomenology, and role attribution, is not a necessary one in a strict sense and so something altogether more superficial and therefore—due to the longevity of many of these features—much more alarming. It is not inconceivable that dimorphic sex-based nominal essences will fall away, leaving only one cluster, or that more sex-based nominal essences are introduced, and it is quite plausible that biological science will introduce as many essences as there are variations of sex-differences. For example, mainstream medicine already segregates intersex cases into four categories: true intersex, male pseudo, female pseudo, and gonadal dysgenesis. As noted earlier, the most that can be said in favor of dimorphism across species is that males and females produce different size gametes. In answer to the question “why then is the whole of nature apparently divided into two categories with such low explanatory value?,” Dupré advises us that any explanation for individual assignation into dimorphic kinds should begin by specifying the purposes and goals underlying classification. This is nowhere more explicit than in cases of intersexuality. Despite the fact that it has been estimated that intersex babies constitute 1.7 percent of all births, there has been a long and protracted medical history of prenatal and postnatal surgical intervention, forcing individuals—who literally embody two sexes—into one or other sex-assigned box. The case for early medical intervention has been 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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supported by four fundamental beliefs. As articulated by FaustoSterling, these are: that there are and should be only two sexes; that only heterosexuality is normal; that intervention facilitates alignment with gender roles or body image, which, in turn, secures the future psychological health; that surgical intervention will prevent significant medical problems.42 To understand early assignment then we must pursue the context, beliefs, and goals of the scientific practice: its constitutive and contextual values. This is not, however, to concede that infants are sex-neutral. There are enough documented cases of traumatic realignment to suggest that biology sets limits to convention. Although biological sex cannot take the explanatory role for dimorphic clustering, in terms of any straightforward naturalistic causal relationship, and despite clusters having altered and mutated, there has been continuity of reference and some continuity of content. It is this continuity that provokes alternative ways of considering group membership (as either a series or genealogy). It is quite compelling to speculate about why the world is hierarchically organized in dimorphic ways. Ontologically, it is possible that there is continuity of reference because we tend to think of the world in terms of bodily unity and so are disposed to interpret our experience in the way we do, which might explain why the visible becomes a significant marker or a marker of significance. But regardless of such speculation, an account of how thoroughly contingent arrangements have sustained this continuity of reference and—unbelievably—continuity in terms of role allocation and distribution of tasks requires us to examine the regularities and irregularities, the selection of specific traits, the relevance of particular traits in relation to social function, and the interests underlying classification and selection. This would amount to “a critical genealogy of complex institutional and discursive means” by which resemblances and similarities are produced, selected, and organized.43 I would expect that the type of analysis of these sorts of historical interests would lead us back to the arguments in second-wave feminism between socialist, Marxist, and radical feminists, reconceived within a “post-colonial” frame of reference.

Internal Constitution and Power The attraction of any theory of essence is its explanatory value. Specifically, the attraction of a social theory of essence is that it elucidates one reality by disclosing its foundation in, and determination by, another. One benefit of this to feminist theory is that it actually 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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inserts a wedge between that which is empirically observable and “nature.” It does this by, on one hand, taking appearances as real but, on the other, refusing to take appearances as evidence of a given nature. We can consider the truth content of propositions—such as women earn less than two-thirds of the average male wage—without also taking this to be necessary and explained by sex-based natural tendencies. The underlying mechanisms and practices can be investigated as the condition for these regularities without this detracting in any way from the (lived) reality of the state of affairs.44 Other claims are simply false—for example, “if a woman is educated her reproductive organs suffer.” There is epistemological benefit to be gained by being able to demarcate claims that are apparently true from those that are false, and then being able to give an account of those that are true by going beyond empiricism.45 A realist feminist theory might wish to stop here, but there is an additional benefit to a critical social theory of essence that comes from its insistence on the concepts of potentiality, power, and uniqueness. In this spirit, the emerging tripartite distinction of essences could be advantageous to feminist theory. To recap. A nominal essence is the attribution of a noun according to ideas of sensible features that have frequently appeared together, or which resemble one another. A real essence is an abstract idea of an archetype or a common cause of those regularities. The internal constitution of a thing is the cause of this being in this way. The internal constitution is conceptually distinct from both nominal and real essence. It refers to something existing, to the characteristics of a singular being, to the organization of the insensible parts that make it the sort of the thing it is. “Although it is impossible to know what the particular constitution of this being is,” writes Vienne, “it is certain that there must be an internal constitution for everything.”46 The internal constitution of a thing is its “thisness,” its singularity and its power. Each subject is thus unique and irreplaceable.47 Real essence and internal constitution are analytically distinct yet can, to a greater or lesser degree, function at a micro and macro level. In A Realist Theory of Science Bhaskar identifies real essence and internal constitution and argues, as previously noted, that the internal structure of a thing constitutes the real basis of its natural tendencies and causal powers. This distinction between structure and power allows him to avoid the problem of reductionism: the description of everything—relations, properties, particulars—simply as “powers.” But this distinction reappears and causes problems within his social science model, where it is legitimate to question, as does Rom Harré, 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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whether or not particular social (i.e., macro) structures and mechanisms are the sorts of things that could have causal powers.48 Thus Harré argues “class” is a term designating a number of practices and activities. Neither it, nor social structure, actually has causal power. For him, one is not trapped by “class” but by “the narratives one has learned to create and live by and the narratives that other people are living and telling round about one.” Bhaskar responds by arguing that, while it is true that social structures cannot be reproduced except by human activity, they cannot be strictly equated: social structures cannot be strictly identified with agent-centered practices. For the sake of this argument let us remain agnostic about whether or not social structures can have causal efficacy. At a minimal level, Bhaskar is not saying anything really controversial, so let us accept that: (i) social structures and mechanisms are the sedimentation of past practice; (ii) the condition of present activity; (iii) and that these provide the context for grasping the internal constitution of a thing, its “thisness.” At this level, the concept “internal constitution” can be distinguished from Bhaskar’s concept of real essence and the concept of essence in phenomenology and from positivism: an internal constitution is historical, unique, individual, and possibly mysterious. Here “internal constitution” is not to be identified with an essence that is independent from external relationships but to be seen as (human) potentiality in relation to social practices. And because these social practices are in a process of change, an individual’s internal constitution, and consequent powers, is neither fixed nor outside the symbolic contract.

Conclusion In this chapter I have argued for a realist but modest account of kind identity where membership is determined according to patterns of similarities and regularities. Individuals, named women, demonstrate a conjunction of features that allow for the attribution of family resemblance. It is important to stress the conventional quality of this account of classification: underlying (social and political) interests guide the selection of features relevant to group organization. Grasping the context of judgment is crucial to understanding why individuals are organized into their specific (functional) groups. I have drawn on a tripartite distinction between nominal essence, real essence, and internal constitution. By keeping the latter two analytically distinct, I have been able to describe real essence as an archetype, an explanation for regularities in terms of underlying 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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mechanisms. The appearance of regularities has to be traced back at some point to these various internal constitutions, but “in place of a static epistemological relationship of essence to fact emerges a critical and dynamic relationship of essence to appearance as parts of an historical process.”49 The close association of the terms “archetypal” and “essential” in critical theory is illuminating.50 It also allows us to preserve the uniqueness of each internal constitution without having to posit that terms precede relations. This is an ontological point that has epistemological consequences. In terms of scientific practice I am advocating an epistemic modesty.51 Each scientific practice—and here I would go further by adding to “natural” and “social sciences,” psychology, philosophy, linguistic, and psychoanalytic theory, despite what they say, abstracts features from an individual and works with an archetype or model (idea of mechanisms that are responsible for these regularities). Each archetype claims something about the micro and macro level and their dynamics. In this way third-wave feminists are quite right to note that social constructivism is essentialist. However, according to my reading, “essentialism” can refer us simply to underlying (social, political, biological, psychologial) mechanisms that explain the appearance of real regularities, similarities, and differences. No discipline can believably claim to grasp the entire story about the relationship between an individual’s internal constitution, real and nominal essences. Perhaps, as Colin McGinn says, some things about our internal constitutions are simply mysterious. I leave this open, but I suspect it is true that at this level “being-a-woman” is necessary to my identity.52



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5

Identity

Introduction The sense of who or what “I am,” which we may call the principle of (personal) identity, has a troubled relationship with the logic of identity and epistemology. The term “personal identity” fluctuates between hard and soft meanings: essentialist connotations and social constructivist qualifiers.1 It can mean that which is given or that which is made, it can refer to self-discovery or self-invention, and it can suggest a self who may or may not be recognized by other selves. Personal identity may be thought of as an extension of, or synonymous with, self-identity, and self-identity may be phrased in terms of the unity of consciousness, a stream of consciousness, a capacity to produce continuity in life history, numerical identity through time, or a loose cohesion of (personal) experiences. It is said to depend on continuity of psychology, consciousness, soul, substance, biological organism, or none of the above. The idea of subject identity can suggest a psychodynamic model of “identifying with” and a politics of being “identified as x” either by oneself or someone else. The “deconstruction” of the concept of subject identity is declared to be one of the great motifs of contemporary philosophical work, especially from France, taking off from the writings of Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Husserl, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein.2 Although the three foundational principles of logic look rather tired nowadays, modern logicians are more concerned with modal logics or the plurality of many-valued logics, the principles of identity (a=a), of noncontradiction (¬(P& ¬P)), and excluded middle (P or ¬P) have become embroiled in theories of gender identity. Subject development is said to operate in all contexts according to a sexuate disjunction: one is either a girl or boy and not both or neither. This rule of disjunction stretches across sexual orientation: “one either identifies with a sex or desires it.”3 These formal principles are 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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said to affect discursive reasoning as well. For example, the principle of contradiction reduces ambiguity, ambivalence, or mulitvalence to a minimum and the principle of excluded middle leads to binary concepts—nature/reason, subject/object, matter/energy, inertia/ movement—“as though everything has to be reduced to one thing or another.”4 From within the psychoanalytic frame of reference these principles of rationality are not “discovered” but are related to how some wish the world to be. Thus, for theorists inspired by Irigaray, the principles of Western rationality are governed by the male imaginary and the motivated belief in the necessity of stable forms, identity, and individuation: “the logic of identity is male, because it is phallomorphic.”5 Although Irigaray’s description of Western rationality in terms of the three principles of logic is rather outdated, the relationship between the principle of identity, the concept of subject identity, and judgments about the world is well established within feminist theory where logical principles of discrimination are considered socially regulative and hierarchical.6 The political problems—associated with dichotomy, dualism, and exclusion—lead to a number of epistemological and metaphysical demands on the principle of identity, which have resulted in the claim that “the feminist logician speaks from a script in which the master always wins.” Because the formal principle of identity is considered implicated in the suppression of differences and is a feature of social regulation, various postmodernist theorists have abandoned it, along with second-wave style “politics of identity.” Dorothy Olkowski, for instance, claims that the principal postmodern move resides in casting off the principle of identity.7 A distinction, though, can be drawn between dichotomies ((P & ¬P) or P&Q)) and dualisms whereby these terms are hierarchically organized. A dualism, writes Plumwood, is an intense, established, and developed cultural expression of a hierarchical relationship, constructing central cultural concepts and identities so as to make equality and mutuality literally unthinkable.8 It is dualism rather than dichotomy to which Simone de Beauvoir alludes when she says that humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him. Because the notion of hierarchy points toward the social context within which such discrimination takes place, this is not really a question of how negation, or otherness, is conceived. These are therefore not (just) linguistic facts, yet deconstruction is (just) conceptual work. Deconstructing the conceptual relation may disclose vital conceptual dependencies but will leave in place the social mechanisms that create, support, and maintain dualism. This 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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is the same point as that made by Descombes when he declares that the quarrel of the subject is, when all is said and done, a scholastic quarrel—it is a critique of the (academic) concept of the subject.9 In this chapter I am not concerned with identification—“how consciousness draws itself up, comforts itself and identifies itself through a comparing and weighing operation that seeks to equate all differences within itself.”10 Nor will I interrogate philosophical concepts of subject identity in terms of mental states, memory, or self-ascription. I will, though, concentrate on responding to the worry that the principle of identity is in an uneasy relationship to discursive thought as well as to the concept of the subject, without following Olkowski by abandoning the principle of identity altogether.11 As an alternative to rejecting the principle of identity, I propose that behind judgments of identity and identification can lie more suitable formal principles of identity and that these are dialectical principles of identity. Formal dialectical principles permit the thought that some integrity is demonstrated at an ontological level and that this integrity may never be fully expressed conceptually. Furthermore, dialectical principles open up the representation of the subject—or object—to political interrogation of hierarchy and dualism without letting go of the simple fact that, in some way, to think is to identify. Apart from securing a realist method that supports social critique, dialectical principles also enable us to understand “political identities” as “relational and grounded in historically produced social facts which constitute social locations.”12 We find in Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, rather than the Dialectic of Enlightenment,13 the conceptual tools to help us move beyond what Peter Dews describes as a rather indiscriminate and politically ambiguous assault on the structures of rationality and modernity in toto.14 At the same time, we resist the temptation to herald the death of the subjective/objective relationship—even when its untimely obituary is stylishly and provocatively written.15 I shall conclude by considering a dialectical approach to identity: speculative identity.

Identity and Non-identity The principle of identity gains its significance due to the various contexts in which it operates: logic, ontology, and epistemology. Alongside, and related to, its involvement with personal identity, the principle of “identity” functions in these three principal contexts: (i) the formal principle of logic that may stand behind reference (logic); (ii) the identity that an object (or subject) manifests over 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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time and throughout change (ontology); (iii) and the identification of an object (or subject) as “such-and-such” (epistemology). This third, epistemological, operation opens up two related but distinct problems. First, in order to identify an individual object “as ‘x,’ ” we must isolate it and then offer a description, which may or may not be accurate. Second, any particular description indicates an act (of apprehension, judgment, cognition) and then a form of judgment in general, whereby individual objects are subsumed under concepts or brought together with predicates by the thinking subject. There is clearly an intimate connection between the object of judgment, the subject who is judging or describing the object, and cognitive principles or concepts. Olkowski’s point is that (i) the formal principle of identity governs (ii) our ontological patterning of the world into discrete objects and (iii) the conceptual representation of individual entities and the predication of properties to individuals. Articulated in this way, it is clearly a critique of Kant’s transcendental logic. But Kant—although an empirical realist—is a transcendental idealist, and this is another form of “political essentialism” identified by Stone in the last chapter. With dialectical principles we should be able to avoid the idealist claim—that bodies are conceptual products—whilst addressing the interesting point that formal logical features affect our ontological apprehension. A dialectical logic will conserve these insights and facilitate a way to talk about “the material world.” By the end we should be able to distil an epistemological style, which will help ground the methodological approach of the proceeding chapter. Before this, we need to pursue the relationship between the subject, who is describing the object (of consciousness), the object, which is being described, and cognitive principles or concepts. We have noticed that the principle of identity operates in the fields of logic, ontology, and epistemology, and its operation across these diverse fields encourages those such as Olkowski to attempt to abandon the principle altogether. To explain how the principle of identity works through these diverse fields, it is pertinent to note that when we are talking about this principle we are referring to the operation of the copula (the “is” in “this is a rose” and “this rose is red”). From Adorno’s comments on the copula in Negative Dialectics and his paper “Subject and Object,” it is possible to draw out three points.16 First, the “is” in a judgment, well-formed phrase, or proposition functions differently in formal logic ((a = a) perhaps translated as an apple is an apple)), in the act of judgment (this is an apple), and within epistemology (this apple is full of vitamin C). Second, 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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if we keep in mind these functional distinctions we will be able to glean and distinguish both a sense of subject involvement and object integrity. Finally, although the “is” does point to the objective element in the predicative judgment, it does not have any independent meaning. If we were to suggest that the “is” in, for example, “this rose is red” signifies independent Being or force, then we lose these two moments in a grand metaphysical abstraction (which would be to reify beings).17 Taken together, these three comments should provide us with the key to unlock the problem of identity. To unwrap this I take each comment separately and begin with the first point, which I examine in three parts: identity related to logic, to judgment, and to epistemology. One of the most primitive logical principles, along with that of the principle of noncontradiction and excluded middle, is the principle of identity, and one could argue that the two other logical principles depend on this: (a = a) or (a is a). The “is” here is a statement of simple identity, which would either be a tautology or analytic proposition.18 In a nonanalytic statement of the form “a is F,” it is assumed that there is a thing a, identical to itself to which something is predicated. In some sense then, and without claiming an ontological or epistemological priority, we can see that there is a relationship between the logical principle of identity and the judgment about that object. The object (in the world) can take its place as the subject of a judgment and as such can be understood to be identical to itself. Such identity can be conceived as simple and abstract logical identity. Turning to the role of identity within a judgment, the “is” in “a is F” can be said to signify three different characteristics of judgment. First the “is” indicates not only the intentional nature of thought but also the objectivity upon which thinking works; it is this objectivity, concerning the preponderance of the object, that helps to distinguish between materialism and idealism.19 From this assertion of primacy follows a second claim that the “is” in a judgment tells us something about the object under consideration and its properties, predicates, or qualities. To be consistent with materialism, we would have to think that this relationship is independent in some way from the individual perceiver. But, that said, third, the “is” also alerts us to the fact that the bringing together of a subject of judgment, (the object), with its property or concept is a subjective act of identification and that this act of judgment involves the comparison and distinction of this individual with, and from, another. It may indeed be the case that the apprehension of an object and its properties can only be expressed in a form simple enough to mimic that of formal logic, but let us, for now, 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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resist collapsing these discrete senses into a causal story. Thus, while we may note that the appearance of identity is inherent in thought itself—that to think is in some sense to identify—we can also concede that that it is unlikely that the formal principle (a = a) causes a simplified presentation of the object. This is to step away from Olkowski’s idealism. Having considered the role of identity within logic and the act of judgment, its epistemological function can be scrutinized. If it is possible to bracket questions of representation and justification for a moment, it does seem that most epistemological claims minimally presume some sort of realist commitment, that it is possible to identify objects and objects of thoughts—such as events, structures, processes—through their concepts and concepts relating to their effects and affects. This has to be as true for internal realists, instrumentalists, and pragmatists as it is for those positing a preconceptual or pre-perceptual level of flux, force, or desire. As true for those who consider objects to have stable properties as for those who think of objects in terms of constant change and those who define an object in terms of its relations. If the possibility of identification over time is conceded, while there are no obvious implications for a specific theory of description, fixity of reference, or meaning, it would enable an interlocutor to question the legitimacy, and perhaps accuracy, of any description: it allows room for error and critical scrutiny. This is enough to facilitate a critical engagement with declarations of neutrality or impartiality. In this way the principle of identity actually enables the analysis of interests behind representation and helps to make visible the relationship of interest, practice, and knowledge. An analysis of how the “is” works in a proposition therefore uncovers three different functions of identity. If we reconsider the second and third points, an interesting ontological feature emerges that takes us beyond logic, judgment, and epistemology, to the relationship between ontology (what is) and judgment (the representation of what is). Clearly, an intricate connection exists between the identity of an object, which is also a subject of a proposition, and a subject, the person who determines, apprehends, and identifies the object. If we concentrate on this connection we can see both that any judgment supposes that there is something about which the judgment is made and that, at the same time, no thing is presented without the involvement of a judgment or a concept. This raises two interesting questions: What type of “something” is it? What is the involvement of the subject? We are now in a position to engage with the second point to be analyzed in our initial analysis of the copula: the distinction between object integrity and 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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A Brief Excursion into the Recent History of Western Philosophy One key theme within feminist theory is the way in which gender specificity in the modern period of philosophical enquiry is masked by the appearance of gender neutrality. For example, Joanna Hodge claims that the Cartesian concept of the subject introduces a separation between rational consciousness and sexed embodiment and that the idea of a sexually undifferentiated body actually affirms and ignores questions of sexual difference.20 Feminist philosophers have responded in a number of ways. Some, such as Battersby, have attempted rehabilitation and reconstruction of the Kantian concept of subject, arguing that it is only the notion of “person” that requires deconstruction in contrast to the transcendental ego, which requires relocating.21 Others, for example Braidotti and Grosz, through engaging with Deleuze, return to and rehabilitate Hume, Spinoza, and Bergson. I have no problem with the rehabilitation, deconstruction, and reconstruction of philosophical positions and arguments— after all, part of my own project is to put Critical Theory to work for feminist theory—but I do think there is a problem with the antidialectical character of the arguments because this will result in naive realism, empiricism, or idealism. The nonreductive realist feature of the dialectical method is related to the object’s own material character, and because of the recalcitrant and stubborn nature of the object, the subject comes to recognize the object’s materiality.22 This unavoidable materiality of the object leads Adorno to distinguish between judgments about objects and the objects themselves, and so, for Adorno at least, the real and its representation are not indissoluble. By stipulating the preponderance of the object, Adorno separates himself not only from the idealism of Kant and Hegel but also from the empiricism of Hume. The dialectical approach to subjects and objects also demarcates his arguments from those of Spinoza, Bergson, and Nietzsche. Hume’s reduction of the object to sensation is described as the philosophical consequence of actually presuming the subject’s preponderance: The naked sense datum divested of its definitions is a product of that process of abstraction with which it is contrasted by Kant’s



subject determination. This is where we can stake out our nonreductive realist ground and it will be on the turf of “mediation.”

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One cannot deny, without contradiction, the materiality of the object. The aim is to construct a philosophy “which would not suppress or dominate objectivity.”24 This response to Hume is relevant to feminist theory because whilst it is commonplace to recognize problems with Cartesian dualism, as well as Kantian and Hegelian idealist philosophical systems, there is a neo-Deleuzian (postmodernist) return to Humean empiricism. Adorno’s negative dialectics returns to Hegel’s critique of Kant and attempts to steer a path between Hegel’s critique of transcendental idealism and Kant’s portrayal of the unknowable object (noumenon).25 Materialist thinking, for Adorno, is defined by its aspiration to appreciate that which escapes conceptuality.26 It assumes the priority of the object whilst retaining the idealist insight that only a subject, through a concept, apprehends the object: the object of thought is just that—an object that is thought. By distinguishing between the “is” of being and the “is” of judgment it is possible to indicate the material nature of the object as well as to retain a commitment to the principle that no object is directly perceived. It is not crude or naive realism. Thus there are objects to which we have no immediate access and these objects constitute a “real,” which has an irredeemably subjective element. This model can be simply stated as having three moments: subject, object, and their interaction. But the interaction is not to be thought as a causal relation. Subject and object are mutually mediated—the object by the subject and the subject by the object. This concept of mediation is borrowed by Adorno from Hegel, covers a number of different conceptual relations, and brings together two main claims: a materialist claim about the priority of nonconceptuality and an idealist claim about the conceptual nature of experience. The subject engenders the object insofar as meaning is contributed by the subject, but the object “occasions the subject in the sense that as an experiencing and thinking entity the subject must respond to the object.” But objects also provide the environment in which the subject is realized.27 This means that while objects are grasped through their concepts, subjects are constituted through objective relationships. In particular, subjects are also objects: of thought and of exchange. However, potentially, if not actually, objectivity can be conceived without a subject, not so subjectivity without an object. Without the moment of objectivity, subjectivity would be “empty”: subjectivity is



epistemological subjectivism. And, indeed, the more purified of its forms, the scantier and more “abstract” the datum.23

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unrealizable without an object.28 The priority of the object is thus a necessary feature of experience.29 The distinction between realism and naive realism, which is so crucial for feminist theory, depends on the workability of this notion of conceptual mediation, which is, it has to be admitted, an uneasy truce between materialism and idealism. Adorno claims that the object is not something to be thought of as a separate entity; it is always already conceptualized. We may pass through concepts to express the object but “the temporal priority of concepts should not be mistaken for logical grounds.”30 Although the object is a conceptual entity, for Adorno it is distinct from individual consciousness and distinct in two ways. First, individuals encounter already conceptualized objects. Second, although only a subject can think an object, there always remains something other than the subject. The problem here is that either the second proposition collapses into the first, into a claim about language and subjectivity, taking us onto Derrida’s terrain, or these two propositions seem to pull us in diverse directions, with the remainder indicating something irreducibly material and preconceptual. For this reason Brian O’Connor believes that Adorno’s attempt to resolve tensions between materialism and idealism with the idea of mediation is unsuccessful.31 This is not quite the same approach as that advocated by Alistair Morgan, who argues that the dialogue between idealism and materialism is productive insofar as it deepens fundamental contradictions.32 I believe Morgan to be along the right lines. If we introduce a number of realist contentions, namely, that there is recalcitrance to materiality and that materiality has a claim on, or sets limits to, possible classifications, then the propositions look at least less contrary. By reading Adorno in this way, by stressing a productive dialogue with realism, we can resolve some of the problems around conceptual mediation and develop a conceptual methodology helpful to feminism. This methodology would account for the history of the object, the location of practice and knower, the situatedness of conceptual schemes and hypothesis formation, as well as interests that provoke inferential patterns. At the same time it could be open to the recalcitrance of the material, even when the material is “social,” which should guide hypothesis formation and systematic enquiry. Assuming the viability of this conceptual framework, different philosophical accounts of the problem of the subjective constitution of the object disguise a tension: a tension less to do with metaphysics than with the historical character of the relationship of subject and object as it presents in social relationships.33 The separation between 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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subject and object is both real and illusory. There is a distinction, writes Adorno, and insofar as objective forces confront the subject, the distinction is a coercive development. But, that said, any a priori dichotomy between “subject” and “object” is false and should not be made into an invariant.34 Naive realism and subjectivism thus walk hand-in-hand: examples of reification. The former eulogizes the object, or material forces, and eliminates subject determination. By remaining inattentive to conceptual determination, naive realists forget their own standpoint, whilst reifying social laws and making of historical and social processes laws of natural necessity. By collapsing objective forces into manifestations of the subject, subjectivists overplay the role of the subject and tend to misapprehend the nature and quality of power, thus abandoning a vulnerable subject to the play of unconceptualized objective forces. Transcendental idealism appears to reverse the problem of constitution, such that the subject “brings forth all objects” and determines their behavior according to general prescribed rules. “The universal domination of mankind by the exchange-value—a form of domination which a priori keeps subjects from being subjects and degrades subjectivity itself to a mere object—makes an untruth of the general principle that claims to establish the subject’s predominance. The surplus of the transcendental subject is the deficit of the utterly reduced empirical subject.”35 It is common to find one slipping into the other: materialism into subjectivism and vice versa. I would argue that a good example of this is Spinoza’s parallelism, and recent attempts to draw from Spinoza’s Ethics an ethical account of passions will always flounder. Rather than dispersing the dialectical moments of subject and object, feminist theory must critically maintain the duality of subject and object— and their mediation—against thought’s inherent claim to be total, thereby neutralizing what is, in effect, a cloaking device.36 Assertions of generality, disinterestedness, and universality disguise their partiality: their thoroughly social interests.

Non-identity Although identity does require the assumption of simple identity, this is—as Hegel indicated—only a first step. Knowledge, the intelligibility of subject experience in the world, enjoins us to move beyond simple identity and then back again. The formal principle behind such judgments is that of dialectical logic. There are almost as many versions of dialectics as dialecticians. From the Socratics 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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to Hegel, from Heraclitus to Derrida, there is a strong tradition of non-Marxist dialectics, and within the Marxist tradition itself there are numerous interpretations of what a dialectical method would entail. In his Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference, David Harvey expresses the meaning of dialectics within eleven propositions. These propositions begin by noting that dialectics is a way to grasp the changing nature of processes, flows, fluxes, and relations. Because the processes constituting things are complex, dialectics is called upon to make sense of tension, conflict, and contradiction.37 Transformation and change emerge from conflict between opposing forces: “In the dialectical view, opposing forces, themselves constituted out of processes, in turn become particular nodal points for further transformative activity.”38 Change and instability are to be expected. Each related thing can be decomposed into other things.39 The example offered by Harvey is that of a city that interacts with other cities but can also be broken down into neighborhoods, zones, and postcodes. These in turn can be broken down into people, schools, factories, and so on. This decomposability leads on to two further claims. First, each can be subject and object, cause or effect. Second, the part makes the whole just as the whole makes the part. Space and time are conceived neither as absolute nor as external to process. They are, in Harvey’s words, contingent and contained within the processes. Contentiously, he claims that there are many spaces and times implicated in different physical, biological, and social processes and that these processes actively construct their own forms of space and time. This, I think, leads nicely to Harvey’s penultimate point. Dialectical enquiry produces concepts, abstractions, theories, and knowledge, which have to be interrogated and grasped within context. The knower, according to the dialectician, does not occupy a view-from-nowhere and broaches the subject matter from a particular point of view. Crucially, because there is no value-evacuated position, dialectical enquiry attunes itself to the ethical, political, and moral choices underlying all theoretical work. Although dialectics cannot be reified into a method with rigid laws of application, as it involves critical reflection on the constitution of thought, we can summarize so far as follows. The dialectical approach attempts to express dynamic interaction between various factors operating within a situation, which—through their interaction—transform the situation.40 The preponderance of the object alerts us to materiality where there is something given to 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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thought, but nothing given immediately. As a way to consider the mutual involvement of subject and object, “mediated immediacy” enables us to retain the materiality of the object but also to accept that the object is represented by the subject. If the subject presents the object within a simple proposition, by mimicking formal logic and abstracting from various qualities or properties a thing has, while naturalizing the conceptual presentation of the thing in question, the object will not be in an identical relationship with its concept. Negative dialectics, far from being a new form of thinking that circumvents the problem of identification—that would be impossible—, is the demonstration of the insufficiency of thought. The idea of nonidentity expresses the mediated nature of an object, as something that both is and is not its concept. Here “non-identity” indicates the fact that every object subsumed under a class term has characteristics not contained in the definition of the class: any individual has a number of appropriate other concepts. Thought is driven to non-identity by its own insufficiency and “by my guilt at what I am thinking.” Morgan puts it thus: “the contradiction of thought is constructed through both a consciousness of an identity between concept and thing and the inevitable difference between the concept and what it wants to express, the truth of the object.”41 Non-identity, notes O’Connor, is a product of meaning itself and “not a mystical alternative to predication.”42 Accordingly we can add to Harvey’s account of dialectics the proposition that dialectics is the logically consistent consciousness of non-identity.43 Objectivity lies in the clustering of these concepts centered on the object.44 On the face of it, the promotion of a constellation of concepts—as a more adequate way to grasp the object—is unproblematic.45 But an adequate thought seems far removed from Adorno’s project. According to Nigel Gibson the claim to adequacy amounts to the same as the assertion that non-identity thinking is a truer, more real, form of identity: “It makes for a better identification of the thing.”46 However, this assessment of “conceptual coherentism” is undermined by Adorno’s insistence that, due to the complexity of the world, we must reject the illusion that the power of thought is sufficient to grasp the totality of the real. It is important to complement the pairing of objectivity and constellation with the declaration that when concepts enter into a constellation this constellation “illuminates the specific side of an object, the side which to a classifying procedure is either a matter of indifference or a burden.”47 As a metaphor, “illumination” does not refer us to an intuitive gaze or 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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the light of reason. The “more” that is indicated is that which remains unclassified: both the object’s sensuous particularity and that which it is incapable of being. The ideal for cognition is to use concepts to unseal the nonconceptual within concepts, without reducing it to that which is conceptualized.48 Thought is not immune from the effects of its social and economic context, which we have already analyzed in terms of the labor theory of value. Now we can say that the exchange relationship is the primary example of identity. Being cognizant that a distinction should be drawn between the logic of commodity and the far more complex and dialectical logic of capital or value that develops on top, let us note that in exchange qualitatively incommensurable use-values are increasingly misidentified.49 In the exchange relationship “that which is not merely quantitatively unequal but qualitatively incommensurable is misidentified as though it were equal and commensurable.” But cognitive closure and atomistic thinking take the world as it appears at face value: independent objects with values inhering in them. Any way of thinking, which manages to grasp both that a concept is (of) a thing and of a conceptual relational network, is a thought against commodity fetishism and reification.50 An appreciation of the insufficiency of identification is also a thought against the exchange principle. Mindful of this, a constellation of concepts strains against simple identification and points out toward the sedimented history carried within the object. The history locked within a concept of an object can only be accessed through an appreciation of the located value of an object in relation to other objects and to the constellation of concepts orbiting it. Dialectics is thus “the ontology of the wrong state of things,” it is ontology of a negated state of affairs—where differences are homogenized and assimilated to an abstract principle. Thought as an act of negation, of resistance to that which is forced upon it, mimics the relation between labor and material.51 However, although the duality of subject and object must be maintained, and the object appears hostile and alien, “no critique of the subjective origin will unify the parts once they have been split in reality.”52 Reconciliation and identity must be opposed because reality itself is not reconciled. Reconcilement would release the nonidentical, would rid it of coercion, including spiritualized coercion; it would open the road to the multiplicity of different things and strip dialectics of its power over them. Reconcilement would be the thought of the many as no longer inimical, a thought that is an anathema to subjective reason.53



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It is important to be clear about the direction of the relationship between the principles of dialectical logic and ontology. From an analysis of the role of the principle of identity in judgment we have established three moments: subject, object, and their mediation. The preponderance of the object led us to acknowledge the materiality of mediation along with the conceptuality of experience. A consistent sense of non-identity, provoked by this mediation, is connected to the relational nature of the object: a nature that can be optimally expressed through conceptual constellations. Dialectical principles of identity open out a relational ontology but are not the condition for those relations. Epistemic skepticism maybe one “reasonable” consequence of describing Western reason as governed by formal (and phallic) principles of logic. Epistemology, as a branch of philosophical enquiry, is associated with the provision of rules and grounds for the justification of beliefs independent from any particular content. Emphasizing the deleterious effects of such formalism, Adorno maintains that content cannot be retrieved by borrowing from other disciplines—as that would lead to dilettantism. As a result, to find an adequate approach to epistemic questions—one that is appropriately sensitive to its content—we must conduct a metacritique of epistemology, which in effect means going beyond rationalism and empiricism.54 Here I am interested to consider how the dialectical model we have been entertaining goes beyond empiricism and rationalism in a way that helps feminist theorists to make claims about political identities as well as the processes and structures of the world. But, and here is an important caveat, this is neither to suggest an already reconciled social totality nor that the promise of rational identity can somehow be delivered now.55 In the Phenomenology, Hegel distinguishes between a dynamic theory of judgment and skepticism, identifying the latter as one moment in the process of knowledge, when we recognize that a concept fails to agree with its object. If this failure of agreement can be described as “negativity,” it is quite different from negativity understood as a ceaseless, restless asking of questions.56 Indeed, pulling the brakes on pyrrhonism, we can see how negativity may be a reasonable response to experience and one “that compels us to seek a more satisfactory judgement.”57 Although any inadequate relationship between object and concept can affect our experience, Adorno remains unconvinced that anything epistemologically productive necessarily follows merely from the recognition of inadequacy, or from determinate negation.



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Such epistemic inadequacy could lead into an account of aesthetic experience, because if we cannot say anything about the world at least we can express something about our experience of it. For Adorno, though, we should not abandon attempts to say something about the world just because nothing epistemologically relevant “necessarily follows from” the recognition of inadequacy, and “a more self-effacing mimetic relation to particulars” should not be seen as exhausting his conception of “negative dialectics.”58 Indeed, if we position mimesis, the artistic expression of particulars, as the only alternative to identity thinking, we lose the impulse to think critically, and it is this that can expose the neglected state of the particular. Criticism of an assumed relation between the universal and particular, of judgments of identification, can indicate whether concepts do justice to their particulars and where particulars do not fulfil their concepts.59 This is to claim something about the world. It is a mistake, I believe, to develop a methodology that does not allow us to question how an embodied and incarnate subject deploys (historically determined) concepts, and entertains and justifies their beliefs about their environment. Simply put, “the production of feminist knowledge should provide specific and accurate accounts of these situations which can be used as effective guides to liberation.”60 A naive causal theory of perception or knowledge presumes immediate acquaintance, either with an object or with constituents of experience—such as sense data—whereas dialectical materialism lays stress on the claim that nothing is given immediately and that the subject is not just a passive recipient: mediation. The idea of mediation encourages an appreciation of the constituted, produced, and represented quality of bodies. However, Adorno’s careful articulation of the (ontological) priority of the object blocks the description of bodies as merely an effect (or affect) of social and cultural practice and facilitates the explanation of appearances in terms of underlying mechanisms and processes whilst explaining the recalcitrance of the material. One further point, before considering how this might help in feminist epistemology, is that the idea of mediation enables us to draw a distinction between realism and naive realism, and this distinction focuses attention on the situated and embedded nature of scientific, psychoanalytic, philosophical discourses and practitioners—all of which make claims as to the constituted nature of the body. Being able to see the role played by theory in the interpretation and assessment of the (concept of) embodied, constitutive, and located subjects helps to reveal the interests underlying hypothesis formation—even our own—and to accept the ultimate revisability of our basic assumptions. 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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In chapter 4 I argued for a weak doctrine of natural kinds. After considering the body as an intransitive object, I suggested that bodies, although not removed from social and cultural practices, are not merely constitutive effects of meaning and representation. We need to be able to investigate the effectivity of historical social practices, mechanisms, and processes that produce regularities, and a working distinction between ontology and epistemology is a prerequisite for a realist account of regularities and irregularities. Finally, I suggested that it makes sense to think of different “sciences” (sociology, psychoanalytic theory, economics) as proposing an archetype (real essence) or explanation for the appearances of regularities that goes beyond surface manifestations. Dialectical principles, sensitive to the mediated nature of the object, assist in this analysis of classification. First, by being able to incorporate the idea that an object is not just one thing or another, a dialectical approach attempts to express the object through an appropriate constellation of concepts. With regard to our previous discussion, the constellation of concepts makes explicit the many other different ways this “woman,” for example, can be classified. The idea of a constellation of concepts also opens up intersections of race, class, and sex—all these concepts indicate features of the conditions of her unique experience.61 Second, constellations are composed through principles of differentiation—pinpointing concrete qualitative differences between apparently similar phenomena. This principle of composition calls the enquirer to attend not only to the fact that resemblances are only resemblances but also to conceptual deficit holding between object and concept. Thus, any resemblance relation can always be interrupted and strain against classification. A second principle of composition involves recognizing the similar in apparently dissimilar concepts. The third relevant feature of conceptual constellations refers us back to the conclusions in chapter 2 and 4 and links together objectivity and essence. Constellations are an attempt to construct a different relationship between subject and object and to “reveal new possibilities for the meaning of objectivity.”62 Although to “think is to identify,” identity thinking only classifies an individual as a token of a type: what something falls under. Adorno suggests that to unlock objects through their constellation, lessons need to be learnt not from philosophy but from science.63 Weber, he writes, showed how to approach objects through “ideal types.” This idea of an “ideal type” resonates with the Lockean idea of “real essence” understood as an abstract idea of a conventional archetype or common cause 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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for regularities. Essence, writes Adorno, passes into that which lies concealed beneath the facade of immediacy, of the supposed facts, and which makes the facts what they are.64 Far from an epistemic colonialism, the idea of essence digs behind appearances and counsels us to attend to the limits of conceptuality: an epistemic modesty. In this way, objectivity is contributed to the constellation without either exhausting the object or extracting it from social, political, and hermeneutical practice. Thought, sensitive to and able to reflect upon subject-object, is able to make explicit the implicit rules, conventions, institutions, practices, and interests governing the determination of groups of objects according to shared properties. This will then be the appropriate methodology for a critical genealogy of the complex institutional and discursive means by which resemblances and similarities are produced, selected, and organized. We are thus able to recognize regularities without the worry that this necessarily implicates us in identity thinking. Dialectical materialism—this model of subject, object, and reciprocity—is a way to consider the social and subjective presentation of our environment without neglecting the pull of objectivity. By separating realism from naive realism, it also hinders the slip from objectivity to objectivism: objectivity without objectivism, subjectivity without relativism. Objectivism, according to Adorno, endeavors to establish what the world, the physical as well as the spiritual world, is, “in fact,” and science, as it is currently practised, merely attempts to register those facts, never going beyond the current state of affairs. In our quantum world, this may seem a rather dated conception of scientific endeavor, but he is right that it is pertinent to consider the normative element in the ends set by the scientific practice or community: why this goal rather than that? To address questions about the role and ends of practice, be it scientific in a straightforward sense or psychoanalytic or even philosophical, we require a broader and deeper exploration. Bringing together, once again, the subject-object dialectical model with social critique, Adorno argues that as society is incompatible with the very goal it posits for itself—the goal of preserving humankind and satisfying needs—it must be confronted by the truth content of this goal that remains unrealized.

Speculative Identity So far I have argued that there is a complicated relationship between formal logic, ontology, and epistemology. I have proposed that behind the formal principle of identity lies the principle of dialectical logic. 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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By working between subjects, objects, and their mediation, dialectical logic offers a way to reflect on ontology and epistemology. This is not a causal relationship—the dialectical principle of logic does not cause or produce material bodies. It does, though, open up epistemology to critical reflection, primarily concerning the nature of description (constellation of concepts) and the act of judgment (conceptual mediation). Now we can fold back these insights and consider the way in which dialectical logic may illuminate the concept of the subject identity such that we can acknowledge social facts of race, gender, class, and sexuality without “reducing individuals to those social determinants” and without expressing complexity in terms of “fractured” identity.65 Related to the dialectical principle of subject, object, and their mediation is the principle of speculative identity. Unlike the principle of formal identity (a = a), the principle of speculative identity contains difference and contradiction within itself. Where there is simple identity, the laws of contradiction and excluded middle are related but distinct laws. So, a is either a or b and not both (an apple is either an apple or a banana and not both). The principle of speculative identity, following from Hegel’s conceptual idealism, states that because any term is what it is through its relation with other terms (a process of elimination, negation and differentiation), it includes those terms within it. Furthermore, because a (concept of) apple is what it is in relation to (concepts of) banana and orange, the (concept) apple contains orange and banana within it. For this reason, identity contains its negations, which are expressible terms (orange, banana), and contradiction is internal to identity. Thus, it would be “ridiculous to say that contradiction cannot be thought.”66 Without detouring into the related poststructuralist philosophy of language and meaning that has gained some academic significance, this principle of speculative identity—with some modification—can do useful work for us.67 For the sake of simplicity, the concept of the subject contains both subjective and objective moments: subjective points of view available to objective description.68 Therefore, I am looking for a way to reflect upon objective description and something that may help subjects express their singular points of view. The idea of speculative identity can assist in bridging the subjective and objective with three attendant concepts: contradiction, non-identity, and dissonance. First, let us consider the concept of contradiction, which has a long and distinguished genealogy. Hegel, returning to pre-Socratic view of ontological contradiction, draws a distinction between objective 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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and subjective contradiction. A subjective contradiction indicates a confused way of talking about the world, whereas an objective contradiction concerns something about the world itself. Adjusting Hegel’s notion of objective contradiction, as we have seen in previous chapters, Marx claims an internal contradiction exists between forces of production and social relations and that this contradiction tends to economic crises. In German Ideology the idea of contradiction also suggests a tension between ideological forms of consciousness and social reality, and in Capital, more specifically, a contradiction within the commodity.69 Contradiction between abstract and embodied labor, between value and exchange-value, emerges with the occlusion of sensuous particularity: use value and differentiated labor. We can become aware of contradiction in two ways—neither of which is the “subjective contradiction” of confusion mentioned above. The first way is through reflection on a simple, descriptive proposition (this is a red apple). The idea that any object has definitions, qualities, and predicates that are not contained within its concept is pretty anodyne and can be easily accommodated by advanced logic. The second moment (or awareness) of contradiction points beyond the (negated) particular to the social “universal.” Each individual is in relation to other individuals (intersubjectivity) and a contradictory social world. As any feminist theorist will attest, this social aspect of contradiction cannot be so easily absorbed into philosophical reflection. If our circumstances can be described in terms of contradiction, tensions, and conflicts, we need a way to express those contradictions and our relationship to them. According to Adorno, contradictoriness is welded together with identity, it is non-identity under the aspect of identity, and total contradiction is nothing but the manifest untruth of total identification.70 The proposal that all identification depends on a nonidentical element recommends a way to express contradiction in the social world and new insights into the concept of subject identity. The example offered is that of the contradiction between the definition that an individual knows as her own and her “role”; the definition society forces upon her. I am a woman insofar as I occupy the (social) role and (symbolic) definition, but I live these in tension with “not-being” fully subsumed. The simple presentation of this as (a = a), (¬(P & ¬P)), and excluded middle (P or ¬P) is the form such tension or contradiction takes in a society compelled to rational identity. It could be argued that non-identity is a necessary feature of the relationship between subject and concept, subject and social role, merely disguised by the appearance of simple identity—an aggravated feature of modernity. 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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Non-identity means more than a promissory note of sensuous particularity or conceptual constellation. It is a relationship of the internal to its external conditions, and because the internal is constituted through its external relationship—it is a relationship to itself.71 Even when reflexively, acutely, and actively aware of tensions, subjectivities carry the weight of conditions of prior discrimination. Analytic somaesthetics offers a way to consider the nature of bodily perceptions and practices, pleasures and pains, and their function in our knowledge and construction of a world driven through with conflict, tension, and contradiction.72 Social location, knowledge, and identity are mediated by the interpretation of experience and conditioned by flesh and blood experience. Paula Moya writes that “flesh is the site on or within which the women of color experiences the painful material effects of living in her particular social location.” Accordingly, thinking is deeply motivated by the suffering body, and a body suffers when it experiences conflicting, impossible, and often violent demands.73 Speculative identity is a way to think about subject experience— identity and non-identity, the interiorization of exteriority, and the exteriorization of interiority—without closure. Expressed within a constellation of concepts, speculative identity remains open and nonidentical but is neither fractured nor many “identities.” Non-identity thinking works through difference and contradiction but is also crucially dependent on the experience of non-identity: whose experience? Mine!74 And where non-identity is imbricated in an antagonistic and hostile world, the idea of dissonance comes into its own. Dissonant experiences of those who no longer have a home in one country and live in a suspended zone in another bear witness to conflicts in objective conditions.75 Dissonant experiences run from the more to less mundane, including those of the American academic feminist theorist still responsible for all the domestic labor within her nuclear family and a Turkish woman deciding whether or not to wear the hijab, but all are testimony to the contradictions between her own definitions and the “roles” she is expected to occupy, and even the most sophisticated feminist theorist cannot on her own eliminate objective contradictions and emanations.76 Experience forbids the resolution of whatever appears contradictory, although there is often an attempt to manipulate these contradictions into a “cover-concept.” An example suggested by Adorno is that of “industrial society”: a concept that manages to reduce social relations to deterministic technical forces of production, thereby making a virtue of the sway of objective forces (which are the sedimentation of 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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past practice and subject action).77 Similarly, we have cover-concepts of varying violence, such as “superwomen” and “honour killings.” Adorno’s rather pessimistic assessment is that the subjective awareness of unbearable contradiction leads to one of two equally impossible outcomes: either the individual strives heteronomously to obey the contrary course of the world—despite her insights—or, loyal to her own definition, must act as though the world’s course does not exist. In all likelihood she will then perish by it.

Conclusion The reification of experience suppresses an apprehension of the dynamic subject-object structure of experience and—for as long as intellectual life remains reified—it is inordinately tough to articulate the complex patterns of dissonance. The very structure of experience contains a critical logic, which has to be retrieved, and the task of philosophical reflection is to reveal the nature and implication of this distortion or dissonance.78 Thought, as resistance to that which is forced upon it, originates in (somatic) negation—a refusal articulated through the speculative moment promised by liberal ideology and postcolonialism. Hidden in the ideological supposition of pure identity is the moment of truth, “the pledge that there should be no contradiction, no antagonism.”79 The end of reification would not be the end of domination. Indeed, Adorno remarks that if comparability as a measure were simply annulled, then the rationality of exchange—implicit as the rule of equality—would give way to direct appropriation. So, although social critique can denaturalize and re-historicize relations, it requires something else to alter those relations. Göran Therborn describes Marxism as a triangulation, the poles of which can be identified as (i) historical social science, focusing on the historical operations and processes of capitalism; (ii) a philosophy of contradiction, or dialectics with epistemological and ethical ambition; (iii) a mode of politics that provides a compass or road map to the overthrow of the existing order.80 It has been my contention in this chapter that if we can see feminism as a similar triangulation, a reinvigorated notion of dialectical materialism will help us to grasp the dynamics of the historical processes of capitalism and this will, in turn, inform, be informed by, and support a radical feminist politics.



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Non-Identity

Introduction The “symbolic,” initially a Lacanian devise to bring together mathematical (formal) and anthropological uses of the term, has become, within feminist theory, a way to discuss culturally intelligible rulegoverned speech and to explain how paternal law structures signification and thereby becomes the ordering principle of culture. In so doing, the “symbolic” elucidates how and why Western culture persistently defines the female as the inferior counterpart of the male.1 Although from another philosophical tradition, this description of culture and language poses a similar problem as that encountered by second-wave feminists: how can we transform cultural practices when the very tools to do so can only be found within the master’s house? Attempts to revalue the feminine within the symbolic, to revalue the feminine with attendant concepts (matter, embodiment, nature), and even to think outside the symbolic have proved unsatisfactory. An alternative philosophy of activism has been excavated from beneath mainstream philosophical and psychoanalytic traditions assembled from the works of Nietzsche, Bergson, Kierkegaard, Spinoza, Derrida, Foucault, Freud, and Lacan. Taking advantage of the “crisis” of classical reason, a crisis that calls into question the structures of the rational subject as guardian and transmitter of discourse, this philosophical trajectory is the problem of political transformation.2 Transformation is supposedly produced by a play of forces, some of which unconscious, which means that when something new occurs it is understood to be the result of activity that precedes the “knowing subject of liberal ontology.” Thus the capacity to transform situations is derived from “a subject multiply constituted and moving in several directions,” without the subject having to reflect on their actions within or without the symbolic.3 The language of multiplicity, difference, affirmation, and positivity is part of a discourse opposed 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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to dialectical logic with its distinct internal rhythm of differentiation through negation. Negation is not only an intrinsic character of dialectical logic but also figures within psychoanalytic theory, appearing as repression, melancholia, mourning, and guilt. As a fellow traveller of Rosi Braidotti, but wishing to allow some room for what might be described the labor of the negative, Judith Butler also advocates a form of political transformation.4 On first appearance, it might seem more obvious how a philosophy of positive and random forces5 might account for change than a philosophy of sedimented practices and second nature, especially one that concedes regulatory power not only acts on preexisting subjects but also shapes and forms those subjects. Yet, for Butler, because bodies not only occupy norms but also exceed and expose them, subjects always live with the constitutive possibility of becoming otherwise.6 Haunted by instability, categories and norms produce in the subject an uneasy sense of standing under a sign to which one does and does not belong—a sense of identity and non-identity. This unconscious psychodynamic of identification and rejection—disidentification—is crucial, Butler believes, to the rearticulation of democratic contestation and ultimately to the undermining of the current socio-symbolic order.7 Reminding us that constructivism is not the same as determinism, she argues that even repetition carries the capacity to alter and transform the social world.8 As a way to pull together and move beyond the binary theory of identification and counter-identification, the cultural politics of disidentification is doubtless fruitful as it conveys something about the messiness of identity expressed through overlapping identity categories, misrecognition, and distance from norms (see, for example, Muñoz, Medina, Martinez).9 Disidentification also suggests a way to restructure feminist historical narrative. According to José Muñoz, feminism itself is plagued by a problematic history of strict identification, creating the feminist subject as a white, straight, middle-class woman, and counter-identification: hailing women in opposition to men.10 As a third mode of dealing with dominant ideology, one that neither opts to assimilate within the structure nor actively opposes it (i.e., counter-identification), disidentification is a strategy on and against dominant ideology: even when that dominant ideology is feminism.11 Occasionally staying within the “theology of lack,” Butler does focus on the labor of the negative in order to communicate something meaningful about melancholia, guilt, terror, survival, and the like. I advocate staying within the labor of the negative to make sense 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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of the complicated relationship between context and content, determination and mediation. In the previous chapter we saw that a dialectical account of non-identity can express a lack of coincidence between subject and concepts without drawing upon a theory of unconscious investment and resistance. In this chapter, through an exploration of philosophical ontology, I develop Butler’s insight that disidentification or non-identity is constitutive of social life and integral to identity formation. However, philosophical ontology not only explains how one can stand under a category to which one does not belong—how “I am what I am not and I am not what I am”—but also fleshes out negation, which is central to reflective and critical thought. Sartre’s phenomenological account of non-identity can contribute something to Adorno’s critical project and help us articulate the demands of identity appropriate for twenty-first century feminism.12 Thus we will be able to elucidate how we can think against an apparently totalizing sex-gender cultural matrix as well as our capacity to engage constructively with meaningful world-making.13 This approach therefore offers a rebuttal to the suggestion that the “personal is economic through and through”: a claim that concedes all to objective forces.14

Negation and Non-identity Any attempt to bring together the idea of non-identity with an existentialist description of the origin of negation is not without its theoretical difficulties: principally, the political character of negation. For instance, Marcuse considers the political character of negation to be the decisive characteristic of critical theory, one that distinguishes dialectical thought from existentialism and other such “pseudo and crackpot opposition, beatnik and hipsterism.”15 If this is really what blocks a productive encounter between critical theory and existentialism, what is political about negation? The answer to this question is also pivotal in separating critical theory from philosophy. Quoting Hegel approvingly, Marcuse begins A Note on Dialectic with the claim that “thinking is, indeed, the negation of that which is immediately before us.” Philosophical thought, he says, must begin with the recognition that concepts and scientific reason do not correspond to the facts: that they somehow abstract from the very process of reality and disregard fatal contradictions. The power of negative thinking is “the driving power of dialectical thought, used as a tool for analysing the world of facts in terms of internal inadequacy.”16 Thought, then, is adequate only insofar as it expresses the contradictory structure of reality. The negation is determinate, according to 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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Marcuse, when it refers the actual state of affairs to basic historical forces that make for its destructiveness. Only logic able to incorporate contradiction is able to express the structure of reality. The function of the negative is to undermine common sense and to reveal the sinister hold of the language of “facts of the matter.” By demonstrating that unfreedom lies at the heart of the real, dialectical analysis is able to indicate qualitative change: the explosion and catastrophe of the established state of affairs. The political character of negation thus lies in the way it facilitates us to think contradiction in external or mindindependent states of affairs as well as the way it enables thought to investigate its own context. Existentialism is, by virtue of its pseudo and crackpot opposition, incapable of doing this. Mainly concerned with political existentialism, Marcuse concentrates on how this theoretical lacuna affects the notion and function of “Folk,” questions of legitimate state formations, and the relationship between philosophical freedom, expressed in terms of autonomy, and rational state organization. He disapprovingly writes that, although existentialism began as the antagonist in a debate between Western rationalism and idealism, looking to inject into conceptual content the historical concretion of individual existence, it ends up by denying its own origin.17 As a result, existentialism gives up on its Hegelian heritage: a heritage preserved in scientific social theory and the critique of political economy.18 Consequently, powerless to determine situations and contexts, thought is incapable of forging meaningful paths: for this reason it comes to matter only that a decision has been made or a path taken. A problem within the philosophical ontology then becomes a problem of political commitment; actions can only be random. Furthermore, in distinction to Braidotti’s line of argument, for Marcuse this “irrationality” signifies existentialism’s preparedness to be absorbed into the social system. Adorno agreed that there is a problem of commitment and freedom in existentialism but mainly thought that existentialism makes its mistake in accepting that natural phenomena are given immediately in experience. If the individual particular that I see here and now is in fact in (a social) relation to other particulars, and the concepts used to classify this individual assume it resembles others, then I need to be attentive to the interested and social criteria of selection and conceptualization. Only the idea of the mediation of conceptual reflection can articulate these relationships—precisely because these relationships are not given immediately in experience. And only a composition of a conceptual constellation can express the individuality of the particular object and its non-identity with its concept. 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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When we identify an object, we identify it as a something. In such a case there is an ontological assumption of simple identity, that an object persists over time, and an epistemological assumption that an object can be represented in propositional form: Fa where F is a property or quality and a an identifiable object. The presentation of an object in a simple propositional form does a number of things. First, qualities and properties, which pertain to the object, are neglected. Second, the object is presented as though it were a mere substratum, waiting around for the assignment of properties. Third, the active (and interested) role of cognition is suppressed. Fourth, (a) is a term abstracted from its relation to other terms and to its own history. The term “non-identity” indicates the fact that every object has characteristics not contained within the definition of a class: any individual has very many appropriate concepts that could suggest characteristics of the object. But, as I noted in the previous chapter, this does not collapse into a conceptual coherentism because the power of thought is insufficient to grasp the totality of the real. When concepts enter into a constellation, this constellation illuminates sides in propositional form. The “more” is that which remains unclassified, which is the object’s sensuous particularity and that which it is incapable of being. Cognition can use concepts to unseal the unconceptual element within a concept without reducing it to that which is conceptualized. The attempt to think an object through its relations—both to concepts (properties) and other objects—reveals its social side. For this reason, thought, which manages both to grasp a concept as a something and to recognize its relationship to other concepts, is, for Adorno, a thought against the prevailing tendency to abstract and isolate individuals. By illuminating that which cannot be conceptually captured, that which is unique, such a cognitive approach also resists the notion that each is substitutable for another. Such a way of thinking is on the side of the thing itself and is a thought against the exchange principle. Non-identity thinking conceives the impossibility of rational identity between concept and object. By contrast, because existentialism considers phenomena to be given immediately it could be said to be committed to identity—which disguises the social side of the object, neutralizes an appropriating and interested consciousness, and takes at face value identity between object and concept. In summation, existentialism, as represented by Sartre,19 is unable to take account of the social aspects of human reality. Such criticisms are, of course, not news to existentialists; Sartre himself describes Being and Nothingness as a monument of rationality 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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that ends up in irrationalism precisely because it neither coordinates interior with exterior experience nor accounts for processes “below” consciousness.20 The Critique of Dialectical Reason is intended as a corrective, articulating intersections between political economy, social science, and phenomenology. The attempt in the Critique to marry existentialism and Marxism introduces a whole new vocabulary, such as praxis, practico-inert, seriality, and group-in-fusion, with which we can interpret and make sense of freedom, history, and injustice. Why then return to Being and Nothingness, when even its author dismisses it for its Cartesian rationality?21 Why even return to a philosopher often seen as a “relic of modernity,” whose voice is “scarcely detectable in the sound waves of postmodernism?”22 With a little reconstruction, the phenomenological argument for the persistence of negation supplies a convincing philosophical explanation for the inner deterioration of identity: for non-identity. Critical thought depends on this. Of course, this is not to say that the phenomenological account of negation is without its problems, and I shall return to a few of these in the last section of this chapter.

The Phenomenology of Ontology Sartre was famously introduced to phenomenology in conversation with Aron when he realized that if you are a phenomenologist you can talk about the smallest, apparently trivial but existing thing—such as an apricot cocktail—and make philosophy out of it.23 Grappling with living reality, Sartre conceives the individual consciousness as the subject of cognitive experience and the work of philosophy to be the expression of what it means to be a human being in a world that, although fashioned by us, is often hostile and unaccommodating. Adorno and Sartre are not so far apart. Here I shall concentrate on the beginning sections of Being and Nothingness, the “Pursuit of Being” and “Problem of Nothingness,” with a few concluding remarks on the somatic character of negation. In the following chapter I turn to “Being-for-Others” and “The Situation” to open up the problem of embodiment and situation. Subtitled “An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology,” Sartre’s Being and Nothingness is influenced by a plethora of philosophical figures, inter alia Descartes, Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger, but for Sartre “phenomenological” refers to Husserl’s phenomenological method of descriptions. The term, although made popular by Husserl, was first introduced a couple of hundred years earlier when Lambert identified a particular philosophical approach as phenomenology.24 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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Taking phenomena to refer to illusory aspects of experience, Lambert considers phenomenology to be the “philosophy of illusion.” In a not dissimilar vein, Kant distinguishes between objects and events as they appear in experience from the way they are in-themselves. The former, phenomena, are mind—dependent whilst the latter, noumena, are mind—independent. There has been much ink spilled over the precise relationship, and the way it is characterized bears on the interpretation of Kant as a positive, formal, negative, or limitative idealist.25 Supporting the latter two interpretations is the point that for Kant we cannot step outside our experience, and thus we are unable to give an account of an object unmediated by imagination, concept, or judgment.26 The Phenomenology of Spirit was to take up this challenge. By bringing phenomena together with noumena, Hegel demonstrated how the object can be mind—dependent but not dependent on any individual mind. Thus, the object is always already intuited with its concept: concepts are differentiated from one another and are supported by the universal mind. Reflective philosophical activity is a temporal, perhaps historical, struggle to find an idea and logic adequate to these relationships. Although concerned with phenomena, Being and Nothingness marks a departure from Kant’s subjective idealism and Hegel’s objective idealism. We can come to understand the human being (subject) in the world (objects) through a study of conscious phenomena, but subjects introduce negation into the world and phenomena are mind-independent or real. But this is a work of philosophical ontology, and ontology refers to a basic descriptive study of being itself, rather than an examination of a restrictive scope of beings. Pierce’s account of phenomenology as the study of different ways that everything can be said “to be” is certainly influential, alongside Heidegger’s Being and Time. Sartre, though, draws a clear distinction between “ontology” and “metaphysics” and in the “Conclusion” to Being and Nothingness explains that the ontological problem of knowledge is finally resolved by the affirmation of the ontological priority of in-itself over for-itself (consciousness). Metaphysics is the speculative attempt to explain how for-itself rises up from in-itself. This, he says, tends to unfold as the explanation of why these individual processes gave birth to this world. Thus, metaphysics is to ontology what history is to sociology. Being and Nothingness begins with a rather dense “Introduction,” laying the grounds for his phenomenological ontology and, I believe, suggests a way to reconstruct a workable realism without damage to his idea of lived experience or the synthetic unity. The “Introduction” 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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is an enquiry into the nature of the phenomenon as it appears to the individual or is perceived by the individual. More generally, it is an enquiry into the relationship between consciousness and reality. In this “Introduction,” Sartre reexamines the question of whether consciousness can apprehend reality and whether what is apprehended is the essential nature of a thing or brute existence. By raising this question he offers a response to naive realists and specifically to representative realists, who argue that the object as it appears is a representation or mental image caused by an external object. He also offers a response to idealists, who argue that the object is just an object-for-consciousness. Sartre’s solution is to argue both that the object is an object-for-consciousness and the perceived object is mind-independent. Its success depends on the coherence of his intentionality thesis. He approaches the first part of this claim through an investigation into dualism within philosophy and can be read in dialogue with Nietzsche’s critique of dualisms in Twilight of the Idols.27 The point is to demonstrate that there is no one thing standing behind, or causally related to, appearances. The object, he claims, just is the series of appearances and the appearances are united by a principle. The genius of Proust is, Sartre suggests, no less equivalent to the infinite possible points of view that one can take on the work of Proust. The phenomenal being manifests itself and is nothing but the well-connected series of its manifestations. These arguments pivot on the success or otherwise of the claim that it is not an act of consciousness that ties together appearances, 28 he therefore needs to assure us that the series of appearances is bound by a principle that does not depend on the subject’s whim: a thoroughly Humean problem.29 I think it would be fair to say that Sartre tackles the second part of the argument— that the object is in some sense mind-independent—in two ways. The first concerns the nature of the phenomenon and the second the nature of consciousness (the intentionality thesis). Drawing these together, he will argue that the subject cannot be responsible for, be the condition of, the object as it is perceived. In order to explain the nature of phenomena, Sartre introduces a distinction between the phenomenon of being and the being of the phenomenon: a distinction that gets to the heart of Heidegger’s ontic-ontological framework. The former he says, and later in Being and Nothingness explores in some detail, is revealed to us directly. The phenomenon of being is simple, self-identical in-itself, and immediately disclosed to consciousness: principally through nausea or boredom. The latter concerns individual objects with this in-itself as their ground and 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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condition. Being, he writes, is simply the condition of all revelation, but it is neither a property of the object nor a meaning of the object.30 The phenomenon of being requires a transphenomenality of being, which is not to imply that something exists behind phenomena or that phenomena exist only qua appearance. This is not, though, causal realism, because, for Sartre, what determines the being of the appearance is the fact that it appears. However, he argues that consciousness is not the condition of these appearances, and consciousness is not exhausted by an account of its contents, if by that we mean appearances, ideas, or impressions. This intentionality thesis introduces us to the pre-reflective cogito, and it is reassuring to note that it requires only a minimum commitment to a cogito, explicitly not the Cartesian cogito. “Being” is not a property or quality that can be perceived, so the philosopher must argue his or her way to any conclusions about the nature of being and does so through an analysis (description) of the (transphenomenal) aspects of consciousness. This is not, for Sartre, primarily an epistemological enquiry, as this would “beg an explanation to the question”: “Knowledge” presupposes a knowing or conscious subject, and the being of consciousness has yet to be explained. Just as there was more to say about the object than its perception, there is more to say about consciousness than “perception-red.” First, consciousness is consciousness of something, every consciousness “posits” an object and is a “positional” or “thetic” consciousness of an object. Due to this definition of consciousness as intentional, Sartre can claim that consciousness actually has no contents: objects exist outside consciousness. Hence the object of perception is not in consciousness, and the world and consciousness are given at “onestroke.”31 Second, I am always conscious of being conscious of the table in front of me. Although there is no “I” at this level, there is an immediate, noncognitive relation of the self to the self: a pre-reflective cogito.32 As Howells puts it, subjectivity is the spontaneous reflexivity of consciousness when it is directed toward something other than itself.33 If we put these two arguments together, they support the claim that an account of consciousness is not exhausted by an account of contents: because consciousness has no contents and because the transphenomenal being of consciousness is the pre-reflective cogito. With a belt-and-braces style of argument, Sartre pursues the relation between perceiving an object and the perceived object, in order to prove that the conscious perception of an object cannot be the condition of the perceived object. The main argument here is a repetition of the thesis that consciousness is empty except insofar as it is 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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consciousness of something “other than itself.” This is the case even when consciousness is aware of an absent object. This takes him to a summary of the three characteristics revealed in the examination of the phenomenon of being, which we can assign to the being of phenomenon: being is, being is in-itself, being is what it is. In this way, from an initial description of appearances, Sartre is led to posit two types of being: the in-itself and the for-itself. The “Introduction” leaves us with the problem of how these two separate regions of being can both be aspects of one being.

The Origin of Negation By linking “the real” and “the conceptual,” Hegel introduces the categories of nothing and negation into being.34 In what follows, it is the articulation of this relationship that proves pivotal. Julia Kristeva identifies within Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit the role of the subject who, submerged in negativity, is no longer outside objective negativity either as a transcendent unity or a specifically regulated monad.35 The subject is positioned as the “innermost and most objective moment of Life and Spirit.” The concept of an object, for Hegel, includes other concepts that determine or negate it at its limit, and conscious apprehension is driven to find adequate ways to grasp this logic of identity. Whether subjects—as conduits of self-consciousness—introduce negation into the logic of identity or merely reflect, through speculative reason, the process of determination through negation remains arguable. We will see, though, that for Sartre the subject introduces negation into the world. If we begin with the synthetic unity that is “person-in-the-world,” we can extract being-in-itself (things in the world) and being-for-itself (consciousness). This incites us to question just how these moments are related to one another. In a brilliant moment of simplicity, Sartre notes that, regardless of the answer to this particular question, by the very asking of it we are doing something philosophically important. At the very moment when I ask “Is there any conduct which can reveal to me the relation of man to the world?” I pose a question and stand before being in a moment of interrogation. From this, Sartre will develop a nonreductive materialism that explains how possibilities arise in and through human reality. According to Sartre, whenever we ask a question we introduce the possibility of negation. First, we can frame any question in such a way that it could elicit a negative response: the nonbeing in the world. Second, if there is this possibility, then the questioner can never be 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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completely sure of the reply: the nonbeing of the knower. Third, any answer is a de facto denial of other possibilities: the nonbeing of limitation. Unlike Kant, who considers nonbeing to be derivative, as the logical negation of a proposition, Sartre posits this “nonbeing” as something actually encountered in our experience and so something that needs explaining.36 Beginning with the possible rejoinder that nonbeings are purely subjective because they refer to our expectations, Sartre gives an account of finding 1300 francs in his wallet rather than 1500. From this, he asks: “Is the absence of the 200 francs completely reducible to his expectation that there would be 1500 francs?” He thinks not. But before he pursues this subjective quality of expectation he asks whether Kant was right and whether negation is a logical matter. Would it be possible, he asks, to reframe the example as: “it is not the case that ‘there are 1500 francs in my wallet’ ”? In response, Sartre first extends the scope of the question and argues that the interrogative attitude exceeds the scope of logic: it can be found in a look, a gesture, an intonation. Second, through the example of a car breaking down, he illustrates the range of experiences through which we encounter negation. This “car-breakingdown” has little to do with the modality of judgment. He extracts from this example what he calls a pre-judicative comprehension of nonbeing. At some level, he suggests, I anticipate the “breaking downess” of the car. Returning to the subjective nature of nonbeing, Sartre offers a rejoinder to the criticism that his method relies on an illegitimate “first-person plural presumption”—that it is permissible to extend and generalize individual mental contents.37 Third, for this reason, Sartre concedes that “the question” just as much, “destruction” or “fragility,” relates in some way to human beings. What we call destruction is merely the rearrangement of mass. But the fact that the fragility of a village, as it faces a Tsunami, refers to a human world of interests and loves does not make its destruction, its nonbeing, a matter of judgment. Destruction coming through human beings is not reducible to a thought. It does, though, demonstrate “a prejudicative comprehension of nothingness and a conduct in the face of nothingness.” Elaborating this further by meditating on the experience of absence which although clearly related to subjective expectation says something meaningful about a fundamental aspect of human reality, Sartre submits a vignette. In this celebrated vignette, he recounts arriving at a café with the expectation of seeing Pierre and, after searching for a while, comes to the conclusion that Pierre is “not here.” On one 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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hand, we could, as Kant may have suggested, frame this as a negated proposition, “it is not the case that ‘Pierre is in the café.’ ” Sartre, however, wishes to draw us into a world that gains its texture and flavor from occurrences such as the experience of the absence of Pierre. The phone “not ringing,” the lover “not being in touch,” the mother “who has died,” are cases where we experience concrete nonbeing, and the world is reordered through them: “Pierre’s absence haunts this café and is the condition for the self-nihilating organization as ground.”38 The absence may be due to expectation but it is real, and the relationship it establishes is real. The empty chair is not a mere void. The entire room takes on a relation to this absence; the entire evening with all its activities is modified by the absence. The negative judgment, he concludes, requires a more original grasp of nonbeing. Indeed, how could it be otherwise? If being is plenitude or positivity, how could even the possibility of logical negation arise? The necessary condition for our saying “not” is that nonbeing is the perpetual presence in us and outside of us, that nothingness haunt being.39 Almost as an interlude, Sartre proceeds by considering the accounts of negation and nothingness offered by Hegel and Heidegger. After obtaining from each that which is valuable to his own project and showing why neither Hegel nor Heidegger can offer a satisfactory account of their origin, he will return to the matter of “the question.” In an interesting reversal of Hegelian logic, Sartre reminds us that he has established the ontological priority of being. Mulling over the role of negation in the Hegelian logic, he argues that for Hegel negation performs a dual function. One is extrinsic to the concept and indicates the movement of consciousness. The other is intrinsic, an upsurge from the depth of being. The former holds sway, and negation is brought into being in so far as each individual concept contains or includes within it that through which it has been determined. Thus, a cat includes within itself all that it is not (dog, horse). This should remind us, according to Sartre, that—because being is plenitude—nonbeing has to be the governance of the for-itself and not the in-itself. To put it otherwise, nothingness is logically subsequent to being.40 Nothingness, he writes, exists only on the surface of being. Heidegger points us in a direction approved by Sartre. When Heidegger conceives human reality as projects-in-the-world, he introduces a “comprehension of nothingness.” Indeed, it is possible for the individual to come face-to-face with this nothingness in anguish. Anguish is the discovery of a perpetual double nihilation: the distance afforded to the human being who surveys human reality and the 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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suspension or contingency of being. Sartre asks whether Heidegger was right to give such priority to nothingness. Instead, he advises that nothingness can be nothingness only by nihilating itself expressly as nothingness of the world: “that is, in its nihilation it must direct itself expressly towards this world in order to constitute itself as a refusal of the world.”41 In this sense, nothingness carries being in its heart. Having stressed the logical dependence of nothingness on being, Sartre continues by exploring the relationship between nothingness and transcendence, the distancing discussed by Heidegger. Deliberating on the nature of distance, he observes that a line between two points can either be seen as a segment limited by two points or as emptiness between two points. The former account of distance as transcendence is insufficient for two reasons. Sartre notes first that the distancing or transcendence discussed by Heidegger is itself born from nothingness and conditioned by it. Second, by making transcendence a “distancing from the world,” Heidegger is unable to explain the appearance of concrete nonbeings within the world. He will slightly later also argue that for Heidegger instrumentality depends on projects, but any project depends on being able to ask questions and this depends on nothingness.42 Sartre’s conclusion is that negation is the cement that realizes the unity between two points. “Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being—like a worm.”43 Given that nothingness cannot nihilate itself and that being in-itself is plenitude, if we wish to explain the origin of negation we must first look to being and then to a being that is something other than in-itself. The being, he says rather cryptically, by which nothingness comes into the world must be its own nothingness; nothingness must be an ontological characteristic of the being. In order to give content to what this being must be like, Sartre returns to his theme at the beginning of the chapter. Even to begin philosophical enquiry we presuppose the possibility of asking a question, any question. That the questioner is able to ask anything indicates a permanent possibility of dissociating the self from a causal series. By asking a question, we demonstrate a withdrawal or detachment from the causal series. Thus, a question indicates a double negation: the thing questioned is placed in a state between being and nonbeing, and the self is detached from the world. It is the human being, then, who must be the being who causes nothingness to arise in the world. Having established that nothingness is introduced into the world by the human being, Sartre turns his attention to the nature of the human being. “What must man be in his being in order that through him nothingness may come into being?” With reference to Descartes 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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and the Stoics, Sartre names this nothingness “freedom.”44 Pushing this further, he considers characteristics of the disengagement that is the condition for nothingness to enter the world. Disengagement can be explained in two ways: the nihilating structures of temporality and the nihilating structures of the pre-reflective cogito. Let us take the first. For Sartre, there is nothing that separates the past from the present, and consciousness continually experiences the nihilation of its past being. Bringing together Kierkegaard’s concept of anguish as anguish in the face of freedom with Heidegger’s notion of anguish as the apprehension of nothingness, for Sartre anguish is anguish before oneself. In one of the most well-known passages in Being and Nothingness, Sartre draws a distinction between fear and vertigo. If I walk along a cliff-top, or along a platform in the underground, or, indeed, stand at the top of the Sacré Coeur, I may well experience fear. I might be fearful that the rocks might give way or that the banister will no longer hold the weight of tourists straining to see the skyline of Paris. In fear I recognize my place as an object in the world; subject to causal processes beyond my control. Vertigo, however, is altogether different. As I look over the balustrade, the upsurge of horror is the horror that my conduct toward my future is not determined. I could just let myself fall. The anguish that I, the gambler, experience is similar. At each moment I am conscious that there is nothing from the past that can govern my present action. My resolution—not to place a bet, not to eat chocolate, not to take that last drink, to go to the gym—is made ineffectual by my consciousness of it. Alone and naked before temptation, “(w)hat the gambler apprehends at this instant is again the permanent rupture in determinism.”45 The permanent possibility of abandoning the resolution to stop gambling is the very condition of making the resolution in the first place.46 Thus, anguish is consciousness of freedom: it is “me.” As I participate in existence, as consciousness of being, I make myself “not to be” the past of all those resolutions that make me who I am. The “distance” or “cleavage” is not a conscious experience but the structure of consciousness itself manifested in anguish. Yet, because it manifests a structure of consciousness, this would lead us to assume that we live in a permanent state of anguish. Refining his account of anguish somewhat, Sartre explains that anguish is the reflective apprehension of freedom by itself. This takes us to the nihilating structures of the for-itself. Having defined the for-itself as a pre-reflective relation of the subject to itself, 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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Sartre then claims that such a relationship is only possible if there is a separation or distance within consciousness. The very fact of having something as its object means that consciousness is separate from its object and capable of distinguishing itself from it: “there emerges a space between the thinking subject and that which is an object of its thought, between the perceiving subject and that which is perceived.”47 The for-itself then has no being because its being is always at a distance. The argument for this is that without such a break within consciousness there would only be simple perception. Every positional consciousness is also a non-positional awareness of itself. Sartre places “the self” in brackets precisely because he is not referring to a single, stable, and unified self.48 True, these orderings and orientations imply a center, and that center is the body-subject.49 But (self) awareness is also why there is no coincidence with oneself, it is a way of escaping identity, and presence is precisely that which prevents identity. Remember, too, this is all at the pre-reflective level and is prior to reflection—indeed, I will argue it is the condition for reflection and critical thought.

Identity and Non-identity Having set out the phenomenological terrain, it is now possible to introduce the idea that “I am what I am not and I am not what I am.” This idea is most readily available through Sartre’s discussion of bad faith—the flight from anguish—and most usefully mobilizes the idea that there is caesura in consciousness. Here I am interested in what we can extract from his account of the structure of the pre-reflective cogito that might help to make sense of non-identity. First, however, it is helpful to refer back to his earlier work The Transcendence of the Ego, where Sartre offers a series of arguments rebutting Husserl’s notion of the subject as transcendental ego. The main point that he wishes to establish is that the subject is not an inner self or source of action and feeling.50 My “I” is not a unifying force, rather it is a synthetic construct held in place by belief. I shall explore this further in the next chapter. Throughout his description of patterns of bad faith, Sartre is at pains to elicit the ways in which the structure of consciousness can be marshalled to defend against the reflective apprehension of freedom. From the fact that, at root, bad faith exploits the double aspect of human reality, we learn that the human being is at once facticity and transcendence and that this internal relation is a double activity at the heart of unity. Human reality is for-itself in the midst of the world. 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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The for-itself is necessarily connected with the in-itself, with its body, the world, and its own past. It is transcendence insofar as the structure of consciousness is that which is at a distance from itself, able to call into question the past and the future, and that which suspends and interrogates being. Transcendence thus refers us to a structural freedom, a cleavage from causal process, which incites a movement beyond the present project. I shall take two examples where, through patterns of bad faith, we can detect the impossibility of identity, which always still remains actual and possible. The first example is the demand for sincerity. Take a case where someone believes that his friend really prefers to conduct sexual relations with younger members of the same sex but is so embarrassed and guilty about it that he denies it to be the case.51 The friend demands that the man admit to his feelings: to identify himself as a particular way of being-in-the-world. In response, the man insists that he is not a pederast, in the way that a table is a table. This is right, says Sartre, insofar as “I am not what I am.” I can call into question at any moment that which I have been as the foundation for that which I will be. It would be wrong in the case were I to attempt to assert a simple negation of identity, such as “an inkwell is not a table.” I cannot simply choose to deny my past actions. However, far worse than this denial is the demand that the man should so identify himself at all. There is latent brutality in the demand that in the name of freedom the man should identify as a thing-in-itself, or that for the sake of freedom he should deny his freedom. The second example is an equally well-known case of the waiter in a café, but it could just as well be a lecturer in front of her class, a mother dropping off her children at school, or a political prisoner.52 The question that is of interest is “how can I be, when I exist as consciousness of being?” As we watch the movements of the waiter, the carefulness of his walk, his deference to the customer, we become aware that in some way the waiter is playing a game. He is playing at being a waiter. It is of course true that the waiter could elect to perform another role, he could even consider turning off the alarm clock as it rings at 5.00 a.m. More profoundly, however, the waiter is both performing the role of waiter and at the same time quite conscious of performing the role. This consciousness of performance disturbs the performance and introduces the possibility that it could always be otherwise. At the point the waiter recognizes himself as waiting, he is separated from himself as subject to object, separated by nothingness. Yet he is still a waiter; he is not a diplomat or a builder. He is a waiter in the mode of being what he is not, and thinking himself 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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otherwise will not alter the facticity of the situation. In this sense, he is what he is not. When the waiter is aware of himself as an object for others and then for himself, his performance is disturbed. But the rupture occurs not just as a subject becomes aware of himself as object for others but within the pre-reflective structure of consciousness itself. Here we find a unity that is always a duality: a perception, which is an act of consciousness, and the consciousness of the perception or a reflection-reflected.53 This is not to posit a Cartesian substance behind all conscious acts but is to focus on the proposition that if there were no duality there would only be simple perception. The self represents, for Sartre, an ideal distance within the immanence of the subject in relation to himself/herself. My “self” is a way of not being my own coincidence while still being present to myself (as not being myself). Presence implies separation and detachment, which in turn refer us to a fissure.54 This fissure, as we now know, is the nothingness and nihilating power of being. But if we seek to reveal it, to capture the thought of the thought, the awareness of the perception, it vanishes and only reappears somehow distorted as an object to be contemplated. With obvious Lacanian parallels, for Sartre the gap or break within consciousness occasions a desire for perfect coincidence. Because there is no coincidence there is desire for identity or completion. We desire the next drink because we want that moment of satiation, the moment when thirst is quenched. A quenched thirst is thirst in the mode of being-in-itself and, according to Sartre anyway, the desire for a drink is a desire for perfect coincidence. It is a desire to be in the moment, for there to be no flight of consciousness, no troublesome awareness of elsewhereness. But this is, of course, necessarily thwarted. As we take the drink we immediately transcend the thirst in the mode of not-being it. As another horizon of possibilities opens up, the drinker facing his disappointment asks: “was it only this?” I may then be a teacher but only in the mode of not being one: there is never simple identity. The non-identity at the heart of identity is not just a matter of being an object either for other subjects or for ourselves but is a structural fact about consciousness. Every role that I perform is already disturbed and every project carries the possibility of interruption. Every belief I hold is already questionable. But that there are roles to perform, situations to be lived, and others to encounter is as much part of the banal yet necessary and hopeful context within which the for-itself is thrown. Human reality is a perpetual surpassing toward a coincidence with itself that is never given.55 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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Despite the fact that it matters little whether one is in good or in bad faith, because bad faith creeps to the very origin of the project of good faith, the infamous footnote in Being and Nothingness tantalizingly promises the possibility of authenticity: a radical escape from bad faith.56 This mystique of authenticity hangs heavy around existentialism, cloaking it in Gitane fog and flavoring it with pernod. In Jargon of Authenticity, written in response to German existentialism as embodied by Jaspers, Kierkegaard and Heidegger, Adorno shares more concerns with Sartre than one would initially suppose. Although Adorno is more intent than Sartre to uncover the ways in which existentialism itself mystifies processes of domination, both wish to rescue the notion of subjectivity from its ideological manifestations in earlier existentialism. A productive encounter between existentialism and critical theory depends on working through the critical philosophical problems of idealism and freedom. Drawing on Benjamin’s notion of “aura,” Adorno explores the idea that existentialism exposes something true and important about our condition but mystifies those conditions by confusing the relationship of language to objects. If we restrict the discussion to Sartre, the nub of the argument concerns the being of the phenomenon and the phenomenon of being discussed at the beginning of this chapter. Sartre’s attempt to separate himself from Berkeleian idealism relies on two points: that the principle of the series of appearances lies within the appearances and that consciousness cannot be responsible for the object. I think that Adorno would have no trouble with this latter point and, as we have previously noted, also considers the object to have logical priority. The remaining difficulty for Adorno lies in the anthropocentric character of this phenomenological materialism within which objects are taken to reveal themselves to the subject in terms of the subject’s projects: as instrumental-complexes. Sartre makes it quite clear that the world is imbued as “my” world; the objects that I encounter daily actually reveal my projects. Even the resistance of an object depends on its relation to my project. The apparently independent coefficient of adversity presented by the steep hill in front of me in fact depends on whether I wish to climb or paint the hill. My breathlessness is equally a consequence of sedentary years spent in libraries rather than running through fields. Despite this, Sartre’s phenomenology is not a strong form of instrumentalism because the object is not completely collapsed into a being-for-me. First, a materialist point, there is a



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residuum that belongs to the in-itself. As Sartre puts it, “this particular crag will be more favourable for scaling and that one not.”57 Second, the situation is neither subjective nor objective, although the partial structures can and must be strictly objective.58 This does not seem so far from Adorno’s notion of subjective and objective unified in the constitutive activity of concrete subjectivity. A situation is total facticity: the contingency of my birth, my place, my environment, and my fellows. But, and here Adorno is absolutely right, my situation—as the organized totality of being-there—is interpreted and lived through “being-beyond.” Sartre would have us believe that there is no situation that could crush beneath its weight the freedom constituting itself as such. And it is this language of transcendence and freedom that is, for Adorno, the way in which existentialism tends to lose the actuality of historical development and mystifies the ways in which the subject is formed and damaged by the objective configurations of social institutions and processes. As such it is the hubris of existentialism that lives on in Being and Nothingness. In his Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sartre pursues the problematic relationship between freedom, which is the structure of consciousness, and limits imposed by conditions within which projects are manifested: that I am free only in a situation and a situation only in freedom. The concepts of praxis, project, and even totalization are intended to recoup the historical field from the point of view of revolution, which is designated as inherently a matter of creativity.59 So without detouring into the Critique, here, I think, all we need to note is that in Being and Nothingness the main problem for Adorno remains that, as with Heidegger, there is a sense in which there is suggested the complete disposal of the person over himself or herself: “as if there were no determination emerging from the objectivity of history.”60 The jargon of existentialism promises the individual that she can achieve or act in free expression of her own individuality, a jargon we “bleat with the crowd.”61 In this way, the formal gesture of autonomy replaces the content of autonomy. For Adorno, the ritual and promise of religious practice survive, cut off from religious content. This problem, identified by Adorno, presents in two ways: the problem of alienation and the problem of commitment. It could be argued, quite convincingly, that existentialism performs a version of philosophical alchemy, transforming a thoroughly social experience of alienation into a philosophical ontology of separation and distance. Alternatively, we might argue that the philosophical account of 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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transcendence, which in Being and Nothingness draws on separation and distance, enables objectivation and world-making to take place. Without being able to stand at a distance from being, to interrogate and question it, the world would not be a human world constituted through action and projects. But this experience of distance need not be embellished, as it is by Sartre and Lacan, as an experience of loss, lack, or even absence. As discussed in chapter 2, Entäusserung is axiologically neutral. It may indicate appropriation and loss but may equally well be the very possibility of an intersubjective self or the internal negation of the object of consciousness (intentionality). As such, the “making strange” of “distancing” suggests reciprocity between alterity and identity and is the very possibility of world-making, of projects, meaning, and value: A certain “negativity” seems to be the engine driving all contemporary critical theory and cultural critique. Negativity in this sense is not opposition or dismissal, but the negativity of a “differencing-from,” the active interval or spacing that is necessary for all distinction, all judgment, all difference, polemical or otherwise. Call it reflection, negation, disinterested objectivity or productive indifference, but there is no critique without a “not.”62

It is, though, also that which can be incorporated by a reified social world. Just because existentialism gives popular expression to this experience of alienation, should not be cause to abandon the project but to concentrate our attention on the manner in which “the strange” is transformed into “the alien.” Second, the problem of commitment, documented by Adorno and Horkheimer, does not actually originate in a quasi-religious appeal to conviction, authenticity, and autonomy but can be located in the way in which all convictions, beliefs, and choices are shown to be necessarily and inherently insecure. This insecurity is exacerbated by the fact that the necessity of freedom, which derives from the structure of consciousness, seems to eliminate any contribution of social and political conditions to the context of action. When this is put together with the problem of bad faith, we can see why Adorno might claim that the subject acts in an ahistorical bubble within which their convictions are already erased. Adorno’s criticism of Heidegger is pertinent here. Heidegger, he believes, with his talk of dwelling and technology, trades on a very contemporary insecurity of employment. The insecurity of unemployment is mystified and traded back to the subject in terms of a utopic “dwelling.” The struggle against meaninglessness is 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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actually a reaction to wide-reaching “freeing from work” taking place in times of social unfreedom and economic depression. This problem of commitment is indeed troublesome. Yet, I would contend, the problem lies in the account of the structure of experience, not with the phenomenological ontology, which is not to deny that the appeal of existentialism can be discerned in the way in which it offers a language within which we can consider a range of attitudes: from ennui to nausea, anxiety to impossible love. Nor is it to refute the claim that, while the jargon overflows with the pretence of deep human emotion, it is just as standardized as the world that it officially negates.63 Adorno is quite right to alert us to the ways in which existentialist motifs resonate with contemporary experience and that this collective agreement ought to make us suspicious. But far from offering a moment of reconciliation, the ceaseless “elsewhereness” of transcendence means that even rational identity contains non-identity within the synthetic unity. There is no authentic recovery of the self, even in the midst of struggles that we may speak of as “decolonisation.” It makes possible the reflective apprehension of non-identity as the philosophical project of “critical reason.”

Conclusion In the previous chapter, I noted that, for Adorno, one, or even a constellation, of concepts cannot express identity, whether that be object identity or constitutive subject identity. Any theory of experience needs to take into account the mediation of subjects and objects, without which we reach a point where one or other pole is neglected. Consequently we either end up with crude materialism or with idealism. He believes that existentialism, certainly in the form found in the work of Kierkegaard and Heidegger, fell fowl and slipped into idealism. Although the same tendencies can be detected in Being and Nothingness, I believe that two moves rescue Sartre’s phenomenology from idealism. The first defense focuses on the argument in the “Introduction” of Being and Nothingness. Here, the assertion of the priority for the object is the conclusion of the argument for why the principle of the series of appearances must lie outside consciousness. It depends on the working definitions of being and consciousness and may seem rather circular: consciousness is empty so the object must be outside consciousness in some way. We can give this argument slightly more content by offering a realist account of this principle of the series of appearances. In chapter 4, I argued that, following Locke, we could 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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take essence to refer to the supposition that there is an underlying common structure that can help to explain regularities and resemblances. This may be immediately discarded for redeploying at least one dualism (essence and appearance) that Sartre was so clear about rejecting. However, I think we can use the distinction between essence and appearance without being trapped by it, and it could be argued that Sartre’s own description of nausea as the revelation of the being of the phenomenon and his account of the residue of the initself all fits quite well with a realist commitment to the recalcitrance of the material. This line of argument is further supported by Sartre’s account of the unnameable residuum that belongs to the in-itself— the brute in-itself.64 Our world is not made up of some primordial goo. As Catalano puts it: “we make matter into a world because our senses highlight and discriminate matter in particular ways that gives us our commonsense world.”65 To refine this, we could also accept that any investigation into the underlying mechanisms or structures would reveal as much about our interests as about the thing in-itself. Second, if we are to avoid idealism, any attempt to protect transcendence must not depend upon the notion of a self-referential subject who can radically choose her own mode of experience.66 An appropriate response to this concern is to develop an analysis of forms of experience situated within object-complexes. By reappraising Sartre’s account of language, belief, and interest, we can reconsider the ways in which a theory of reification might help us to glimpse the myriad ways in which the subject inhabits its situation and the manner in which the situation constitutes the subject. This is not simple social constructivism or determinism. Sartre himself indicates the way when he slips distance between the immediate appearance and the awareness of the appearance. This distance introduces the possibility that the object is always other than it appears. By these two moves it becomes feasible to extract the idea that non-identity is not a cognitive idea, nor is it a perpetual struggle against prevailing forms of thought. Non-identity stands with identity in a synthetic unity: being-in-the-world. Here we can draw a parallel with Kristeva’s notion of a subject or signifying unity in process/on trial. Kristeva similarly identifies the negation of formal logic as secondary to negativity. According to her the negative judgment is thetic; it occurs within syntax linked to a predicative function. But she places this negativity, which is both trans-logical and produces logic, at the border of the unconscious and conscious. In order to understand that which operates in a developmental and logical stage prior to the constitution of the symbolic 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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function, which absorbs the negative within the predicate, she suggests that we look outside the constraints of language to that which produces the verbal function: “So as to understand the process of rejection which pulsates through the drives in a body that is caught in the network of nature and society.”67 Identity and non-identity constitute the synthetic unity at a prereflective level, and the deterioration of identity expresses the ordinariness of experience. Reflective awareness and one’s presence in the world is founded on this. Reflection, for Sartre, is positional consciousness. This does not require an elaborate notion of introspection, merely a shift in attention and focus. We could add a third aspect suggested by Pullberg and Berger, that of theoretical reflection. Various formulations of a situation may arise from reflective awareness, and reification may occur in the last two. But it is important to stress that although “the foundations of theoretical reification lie in the pre-theoretical reification of the world and oneself,” reification is not total and critique is not erased.68 Negation can be reconfigured as the somatic pre-reflective moment that maintains a distance from, but which may also refuse, its place as assigned. The somatic moment of refusal and rejection can engage negation in a critical project and non-identity in a political project. The critical project demands that this pre-reflective moment be carried through to the cognition of non-identity at a reflective level. This is perhaps the political impetus of the synthetic unity that always carries disintegration within itself. It is with this in mind that we should read the footnote in Being and Nothingness together with Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity, where she details the ethical project in terms of the attempt to live with this inner disintegration of being, to appreciate differences, and be alive to the nonidentical.69



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Sex and Gender

Introduction In The Fall and The Happy Death, Albert Camus describes, with kaleidoscopic perspicuity, the fragmentary quality of modern experience and poetically articulates the experience of modernity as a fallen condition. Aamir Mufti draws our attention to the ways in which the perception of modernity as a fallen condition encourages the cultural critic to begin the work of recovery—the recovery of the self and of tradition through tradition itself. Identifying a trend that, referencing Benjamin, he calls “auratic criticism,” Mufti traces the ways in which the concept of religious tradition operates to fulfil this role of recovery. The task, he believes, is to distinguish the commitment to critique, which requires a scrupulous elaboration of the homelessness of modern experience, from the impulse to resolve the crisis of modern culture, through a gesture of recuperation of a lost world.1 Such recuperation might be witnessed in the effort to recall and reproduce an “auratic consciousness” of a precolonial past or, in Camus’ case, a lost connection with a very earthy natural life. Similarly, a romantic recovery of a lost condition is also noticeable in Sartre’s introduction to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, where the “native” seems to stand for a more complete, yet to be attained, humanity. More recently the account of reification as the forgetfulness of a more original recognition can be found in Axel Honneth’s Tanner lecture on reification. The intention behind this chapter is to interrogate approaches to sex/gender that might facilitate coalitions and links between women’s political struggles. The aim is to develop a conceptual approach to the problem of women’s oppression that does not assume women constitute a coherent group with identical interests and desires, regardless of class, ethnic or racial location, 2 as this would be to commit “the homogeneity error.” The first of three analytic assumptions leading 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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to this error is that “women” can be considered only from the viewpoint of their “object-status”—the ways in which institutions, systems, and relations of production constitute an oppressed group. The second analytic assumption is epistemic—that descriptions of global relations of dependency and distribution of resources are plausible. The third rests on unexamined political categories of struggle and power wherein the universal proposition “all women are oppressed” makes sense. By circumventing these assumptions, we might find a way to use “woman” as a category of analysis without also implying that women across all cultures form a homogenous group. Yet, in any inquiry into the relationship between sex and gender, we should also heed Mufti’s warning that it is too easy to attend to crises by gesturing toward a lost world of subject experience, human nature, primary object-relations, or joyful bodily affects. Thus, to avoid the “homogeneity error,” and deal with the first analytic assumption, we need to consider what it means to be a woman without a one-dimensional approach: neither solely from the viewpoint of object-status nor from the viewpoint of “authentic” subject experience. In the fourth chapter I argued that no political consequences necessarily follow from sex-based dimorphism, even from a theory of natural kinds. As an alternative I suggested “woman” be appreciated in terms of a cluster concept, which designates patterns of regularities. With this model, sex—or the biological body—is recognized to be one feature of the cluster with no deep causal explanation for regularities as they might appear. In chapters 5 and 6 I suggested that within identity is an inner deterioration that, with some reservations, can be expressed within a constellation of concepts. Here I shall explore whether it is possible to flesh out this notion of clusters and constellations in a way that probes the problematic relationship between embodiment and gender. This involves thinking of the body as a situation rather than (merely) in a situation.

Sex and Gender From the early appearance of psychoanalytic theory, to the Victorian obsession with reproduction and cleanliness, to A.J. Munby’s collection of data about working women, “the body” has been a site of obsessive interest.3 Recent feminist theory has done little to diminish this privileged focus. On one hand, the reasons for this are obvious. The foundational categories of feminist analysis have for decades included social and biological reproduction, sexual difference, and the concepts “men” and “women.” Further, feminist theorists privilege 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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“the body” as a site of analytic enquiry because we explain the exclusion and marginalization of women from political and academic discourse as a consequence of the conceptual association of reason with masculinity and the association of femininity with the body.4 On the other hand, as Beauvoir identifies, this concentration on the body traps and ossifies feminist theory. The intensified focus on bodily experience is at once a contributing cause and a product of women’s oppression: a confinement to all things “bodily.” Recent feminist theory has been almost entirely dominated by concerns over the material character of the body and whether sex is a biological or (just) a political category. It is time to think the (un)timely thought and leave behind the conundrums of sex and gender.5 The sex/gender distinction has been used by feminists to engage with, and reject, the belief that science in general and biology in particular could and should settle questions about women’s role in society.6 From the outset, those involved in the women’s movement, for example Mary Wollstonecraft, maintained that nothing politically relevant follows from biological difference. Recommending that “reason” and “understanding” not be grasped as biological faculties, she argues—although obviously not using these terms—what appear to be dimorphic characteristics (of biological sex) can be better explained by differences in education and culture, matters of social experience (gender).7 Due to the conventional and social character of education, she was then able to argue that, because men and women are equal in terms of their capacities or potential, it follows that there can be no good reason to exclude women from the political contract or to describe an educated woman as “unnatural.”8 For similar reasons, and if for the moment we can still talk about feminism in terms of waves, second-wave feminists (1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s) were inclined to work with comparable but explicit distinctions between sex and gender. The distinction arose in response to various forms of biological determinism used across the board to “explain,” or rather to justify, discrimination. Sociobiology is just one example, but because its claims are so exaggerated, it is a good example. According to sociobiologists, different behaviors, which are adaptive survival features, become what we call human natures.9 Wilson, for instance, argues that behavior was a genetic adaptation based on natural selection and that these adapted behaviors become human nature. Men have a masculine character, that is, they tend to behave aggressively, especially during breeding season. Included in this nature is male dominance. Women have a feminine, coy, and dependent nature. Trivers contends that because male and female 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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gametes are of different sizes and quantities, the female invests much more in the production of ovaries and during pregnancy than the males invest in the production of sperm. Therefore, he concludes, women are natural nest builders and monogamous whereas men have a natural tendency to polygamy. The argument from nature is then used to explain the distribution of domestic labor and various forms of behavior, which have domestic consequences.10 With these sorts of arguments in place, it would be unsurprising to find men to be aggressive, fickle, undiscriminating, and economically successful, and to find females to be coy and economically dependent. Feminists were able to release themselves from such biological determinism—biology is destiny—by depicting this sort of behavior and psychology as social and cultural. Most adopted the term “sex” to refer to the biological body and the term gender to socialized behavior, dispositions, and roles. The term “gender” also introduces a relational element into analytic vocabulary: the meaning attributed to male and female, masculine and feminine, is relational.11 Radical at the time, the sex/gender theoretical framework has actually caused a number of philosophical problems within feminism. The first and most obvious is that of essentialism. The distinction between sex and gender establishes two terms with an underlying presumption that the biological body is free from social determination and in some sense “essential” to identity as “a woman.” Even if such male-female dualism were plausible, feminists realized that there is nothing straightforward or “innocent” about the biological body. First, it is not the case that primary and secondary sexual characteristics are equally present in all individuals classified as either male or female. The recognition of intersex individuals has given further support to the idea that biological features cannot support biological dimorphism. Second, there is not a one-way causal relationship between sex and gender. For example, cultural and social factors can affect hormonal levels as well as skeletal and muscular development. For this reason we could as well argue that the sexed body is produced by culture, and this makes it more difficult to sustain a distinction between essential nature and acquired or socialized behavior. Third, and as a development of the first two, feminists have subjected scientific and biological claims to textual analysis and located the historical emergence of sex-based (hierarchical) dimorphism.12 The second main problem is one touched on above and concerns how the terms “sex” and “gender” relate to one another. Much like the way in which the problem of interactionism emerged for Descartes because of his distinction between mind and body, this second problem 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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for feminist theory centers on whether or not there is a causal relationship between nature and socially determined characteristics, and, if so, which way it runs. Feminists obviously wish to dispute the attribution of causal primacy to the biological body, yet the connection between body and gender does not seem to be arbitrary. For this reason, as already noted, Christine Delphy argues that the covariance cannot be a coincidence and that gender must determine sex, with sex merely marking a social division. Thus leaving us with the political concept of “sex-class.”13 The final problem that interests me is the one that provokes Toril Moi’s rejection of the concept of gender altogether. What actually is gender? It is interesting to note that the related categories of sex and gender first appeared in the 1950s and 1960s and was introduced by psychiatrists and other medical staff working with intersex and transsexual individuals to explain trauma in terms of a “mismatch.”14 At that point, gender was defined as having psychological and cultural connotations and gender identity as the awareness that one belongs to a particular sex. According to Stoller, the biological sex of an individual may augment—but does not determine—gender identity. For early sex-gender theorists, such as Rubin, the term gender could be then deployed to capture oppressive social norms and the systematic organization of sexual difference. By defining it in this way, gender became something that could be open to systematic cultural analysis and sex could be used to refer to human bodies. One further step, a trace of which can be found within Rubin’s own writing, is where gender means individual subject identity and sex refers to a rather elusive entity that acts as a substratum, uniting an assortment of social and psychological properties, or disappears altogether. This attempt to deconstruct sexual dimorphism as it appears in biological determinism culminates in the claim that the sexual body is discursively produced, that is, engendered. For example, for Haraway the meaning of the term “sex” is unstable and relative to historical context, and for Butler sex is as culturally constructed as gender. Others, such as Jane Flax, clearly state that gender relations create men and women.15 The consequence of this is the extension of “gender” to all social norms that are taken to “produce” (sexual) difference as well as to the “normative” production of individual subject identity. “Gender” denotes the cultural construction of social roles and ideas concerning appropriate social roles. It also refers to the social origin of subjective identity, the social construction of identities, and the social ordering between differently assigned individuals. 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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Gender becomes a structural phenomenon, negotiated and sustained at the level of social interaction and embodied in local contexts. This wide extension empties the term “gender” of any useful meaning. Gender ends up covering distinctions in, amongst other things, social roles, behavior, individual tendencies and dispositions to behave in certain ways, psychology, and language use. It covers social norms, personal identity, and the (compulsory) internalization of (compulsory) social norms. It means both cultural stereotypes and the lived experience of these as manifested in behavior and psychology. As such, it is a catchall, and for all its invocation of multiplicity and variability it has to operate with a number of assumptions concerning the “social matrix.” The term “gender” presumes dimorphism, which it then discovers everywhere. By taking social norms too literally, these accounts reify the concept “woman” and tend to reproduce a clichéd or stereotypical view of women: a total system of domination where the feminine is defined in terms of narcissistic masculine (phantastical) self-image. Falling back into a psychoanalytic explanation for the regulatory norms, social hierarchies are then placed outside history. Further, by describing these practices as “total,” there tends to be an exaggerated portrayal of sexual difference that leads, oddly, to the disappearance of women—who are always already a trick of the light. As Ramazanoglu puts it, the question as to where these norms come from or why they so often produce an imbalance of power no longer seems to be an appropriate question to ask.16 Moi toys with the idea of abandoning the concept of gender because the conceptual dichotomy of sex and gender not only leads to philosophical puzzles (we have identified essentialism, causation and naturalism, as well as meaning), but also ends up with the disappearance of the biological body in favor of a monolithic social matrix. As a response both to sex-based dimorphism and to the troubling nature of the sex/gender conceptual relationship, there has been a tendency within feminist theory, endorsed by Moi, to return to phenomenological enquiry in order to rethink the body as something that is neither given in nature nor as a separate substance from mind or consciousness. Straddling rationalism and empiricism, phenomenology describes how subjectivity is lived and felt in the flesh, and this reaffirms the bodily part of embodiment.17 We need to explore how a phenomenological description of the body brings together object-conditions and subject-experience in a fashion that moves us from the sex/gender problematic whilst satisfying Mohanty’s concern about the first analytic “homogeneity” assumption. 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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Extracting from a plethora of recent “canonical” feminist texts, which explicitly refer to the body in their titles, Ahmed specifies four characteristics of the “common” body: contingency, irreducibility of difference, locatedness, and worldliness of being.18 These latter ideas—locatedness and worldliness—will prove key in helping us to avoid the homogeneity error and, by introducing the notion that the body is inseparable from its situation, will address a number of the puzzles associated with sex/gender. Worldliness, or the inseparability of the body from its situation, avoids the metaphysical postulate that there is a neutral subject waiting to be engendered and also offers an alternative to the hypothesis that biological bodies are simply subjected to processes of social determination. For Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, being-in-the-world is always situated, and situation is understood in terms of embodied location and interaction. Assuming that the body-as-lived is layered through with social and cultural meanings, Beauvoir introduces sexual difference into the constitutive mix. Although some commentators emphasize Beauvoir’s theoretical proximity to Merleau-Ponty, I shall focus my attention on Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. This is in part a personal preference and in part an attempt to link the idea of situation with the anthropocentrism elaborated in the previous chapter. Inspired by Toril Moi’s What is a Woman?, in this section I return to the account of the body in a situation as elaborated by Sartre in Being and Nothingness. Sartre’s chapter on the body-as-lived sits between the chapters “Being-for-Others” and “Concrete Relations with Others,” and it sits there because, for Sartre, the body is always animate; it expresses the Other and it is the expression of us to the Other. In the former chapter he makes a case against philosophical solipsism and argues that there is a pre-reflective, nonthetic awareness of other people. Philosophical arguments about “other minds” always end in conundrums because they are epistemological in focus and begin by taking two individuals as separate and distinct, whereas we are always aware of the subjectivity of others. Along with being-in-itself and being-foritself, being-for-others constitutes a third ontological dimension of being-in-the-world. It is revealed to us through shame, which is our response to our dependency on other subjects who reveal to us how we appear in the world.19 Thus, he says, the profound meaning of my being lies outside me. But I, in turn, make of the Other an object. It is this dynamic oscillation that is explored in the chapter on “concrete relations.” Although this dynamic seems to be inherently tense and



The Phenomenal Body


makes of love an (almost) impossible project, Sartre does consider a range of attitudes to others. Suffice to say here that grasping the idea of the body-as-situation means also apprehending the intersubjective character of embodiment: the body is the context of our concrete relations with others. Consciousness is a relationship between subject and object, and the subject of consciousness is a body-subject who is also an object for other subjects. There are three characteristics of the existential relationship “body-subjectivity” (what I have referred to elsewhere as “body-consciousness”): intentionality, synthetic unity, and situation. As we saw in the previous chapter, reflexivity and intentionality can be grasped within phenomenology in terms of the for-itself and the pre-reflective cogito. The pre-reflective cogito is not to be confused with a subject that is “original to experience”—be that subject conceived in terms of desire, drives, will, soul, or unity of apperception.20 In particular, the pre-reflective cogito must not be confused with a Cartesian cogito. Consciousness is always consciousness of something and the pre-reflective cogito is best summarized as the (self) awareness of object x, or, rather, (self) awareness of in-itself. Sartre’s discussion of the body recalls his account of the synthetic unity of being-in-itself and being-for-itself, as elaborated in the previous chapter. In an effort to move beyond Cartesian dualism, being-for-itself is, for Sartre, wholly body: it is an embodied relation to the world. There is nothing behind the body, nothing to be united with the body. Although not to be confused with “the psychic body,” the body, in this sense, is wholly “psychic”; it is lived. It is definitely not a container that holds a soul nor is it a cipher for agency. Howells contrasts the transparency of consciousness with the opacity of the body, with the facticity and finitude of the subject in the world.21 The existence of the conscious fleshy body is the given from which all our speculations about the world arise.22 In this sense, finitude is the ontological structure that determines freedom. There is, Sartre famously proclaims, no for-itself without a situation and no situation without for-itself. Body-subjectivity is thus always a synthetic unity. Merleau-Ponty’s account of the relationship between touching and being touched has provided a starting point for various feminist interpretations of the body. Sartre argues that these two registers are quite distinct. I touch and I can be touched, but at no point can I sense the touching as a distinct sense. My touch reveals an object-for-me as well as a subject-for-me, which means that through engagement in the world my project or orientation in the world is revealed. Objects reveal our nonthetic, pre-reflective, projects, and they are revealed as 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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structures of the world: potentialities, absences, as well as instrumentalities. Hence, according to Sartre, the world appears as an infinity of instrumental complexes that, in turn, indicate but never present a point of reference. We do not see the structure of this perceptive field: “we are the centre.” “These orientations, this ordering, this perspectivity refer to the centre of the field and that centre is my body.”23 The awareness of pain is indistinguishable from an immediate awareness of “the affective quality of our body.” But this is always already surpassed toward some future project. I touch my foot when I put on my socks or as I change the dressings on a wound. My body indicates my possibilities in the world, which means that the being for-itself exists only as the already surpassed. The nature of the foritself demands that it be body engaged-in-the-world in the sense of always having surpassed it: I change the dressings on a wound on the way to recovery. The body is a point of departure. As a consequence, I do not have a body, in the way I may have a bicycle, I live my body. It is a point of departure and a point of view, but it is a point of view on which I can have no point of view. Positing this as an existential relationship, Sartre attempts to highlight both that the body reveals the world and that, as it does so, it itself is passed over or “neglected.” The revelation of the being-in-the-world takes us to the idea of situation. Along with Sartre, Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty argue that the notion of “situation” avoids the standard philosophical dichotomy “subject/object.” There is no for-itself, on one hand, and a world, on the other; which is what he means by claiming that the for-itself is a relation to the world.24 Sartre has already established that the for-itself cannot be its own foundation and must exist as an engaged, contingent being. As such, the body is not distinct from the situation of the for-itself, since for the for-itself to exist and to be situated are one and the same. And, he continues, the for-itself is also identified with the whole world because the world is the total situation of the for-itself.25 The situation, however, is not a pure given and is revealed only to the extent that the for-itself passes over it. It is a necessary fact that to have a point of view there has to be body, but the fact that it is this body, with this color, height, body mass, is utterly contingent and absurd. My birth conditions the way in which objects are revealed to me. My class, race, nationality, and gender are revealed in terms of barriers, obstacles, attitudes, communities, and places: an organization of object-complexes. These object-complexes appear in relationship to my projects. For example, the hill is too hard to climb only because I want to climb, rather than 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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paint, it. There is of course an unnamable residuum belonging to the thing explaining why, in a world illuminated by freedom, this hill is more suitable for the novice walker. The idea of a residuum is pretty synonymous with “biological fact.” That I have a tumor is a biological fact, but there are no ensuing grounds from this for concluding anything about the meaning and value I will attribute to it. Indeed, the tumor will be revealed in light of my projects, and my future will be revealed in my attitude to the tumor. Strictly speaking, a situation is “the contingency of freedom in the plenum of being in the world.” A thing never appears as brute in-itself, “the hill” or “the tumor,” but is revealed in light of an end that illuminates it, “the hill as scaleable” or “the tumor as removable.” Situation and motivation are the same thing. Although the idea of situation resonates with constructivism, it cannot be reduced to social construction. As noted in the last chapter, social construction tends to strong determinism whereas the idea of situation brings together facticity and freedom (consciousness) so that consciousness of the world is also at the same time a bond with—and distance from—an intersubjective world. He identifies five structures of situation: place, past, environment, neighbor, and death. Place is defined by spatial order and particular “thises.” It covers where I live and the arrangement of object-complexes—objects in relation to me. We have also previously discussed how an object-complex appears in relation to my projects, “the hill that is too far to walk.” For Sartre this is the “existential meaning” of spatiality. In being born I take a place, but I am then responsible for the place I take. His account of past and responsibility for the past is similar and slightly more controversial. First, I have a past and I cannot just choose any past I like. Second, this past is irremediable. I cannot alter my past on a whim. Third, the past does not determine my current choices. But, fourth, my decisions can only be based on my past. Essence, he says, is “what has been.” As Moi puts it, lived experience is sedimented over time through interactions with the world and thus becomes part of my situatedness.26 However, this past is maintained by my projection toward the future, and this projection, in turn, reframes the past. Environment is defined as the given; it is that which will be modified according to future ends but also that which is crystallized in light of the future. To summarize, what sense can we make of the claim that the body is a situation rather than in a situation? It encaptulates something about the locatedness and temporality of experience and ably counters the suggestion that there is a neutral biological body placed or 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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positioned within a social and cultural context. The synthetic unity, of facticity and freedom, means that my situation does not lay outside me, neither is it something to encounter nor something determining my behaviors, beliefs, and actions. My body is a situation in the sense that it founds my experience of myself within the world: it is the medium for having a world. We live, make sense of, and orientate our bodies, as our situation. Past actions, experiences, and interaction become sedimented and part of my situatedness. Each person is a distinctive body, with specific capacities, memories, and drives similar to and different from those of others. Each person is born in a particular time and place, is raised within a particular familial context, and has specific sociocultural and religious histories.27 With this, we can thankfully leave behind the superficial and empiricist description of the body as a surface. Bodies are not mere things over which the social matrix etches its mark.

Sexing the Situation The category “lived body” offers us a way to construct a conceptual approach to the problem of oppression that avoids committing the homogeneity error. The historical and material understanding of diverse bodies and subjectivities is a happy antidote to the assumption that women form a coherent group with identical experiences and interests. Appreciating the body-as-lived offers more refined tools for theorizing sexed subjectivity and the experience of differently sexed men and women than the more blunt category of gender.28 But, the body-as-lived is also located and situations are scored through with sexed specificity: embodied experience is not prior to ideology. Because situations are differentiated according to race, nationality, class, sexuality, mobility, and sex/gender, it might seem that the body disappears “in favour of a more fluid and open embodiment” and we are left with an infinite array of differences.29 If “body” were replaced with “an infinite array of differences,” we would be unable to detect patterns of regularities, and the concept of systematic oppression would be meaningless. But we can detect patterns of regularities. Moira Gatens reveals how the idea of a lived-body-as-situation includes but goes beyond biology, or, indeed, sex. By beginning with a physiology of perception, she conveys the sexed character of the body-as-situation and by doing this draws attention to a politics of sexual difference. Conceding that some bodily experiences and events—although lacking fixed significance—may be privileged sites of significance, she attends to the body-as-lived through dwelling on 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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underlying patterns of social values. To attend properly to the bodyas-lived, then, we must decipher the weave and texture of the pattern of social values, which means interrogating the sexed nature of body, how this bears on character, and how situations are structured according to sex/gender norms and stereotypes. Bodies, Flesh, and Otherness Although the body is a center of reference, it is neither a disinterested nor a neutral point of view. It matters that my body is a female body. Beauvoir has a reputation for her negative description of this messy, reproductive female body, and Battersby calls her description of female biology “horrid,” because it is expressed in terms of the clinging, slimy, flabby, and sticky in-itself.30 Indeed, Beauvoir’s apparently abject response to female biology has led some to comment that she conceives the female body in-itself as a limiting condition. But we need not be constrained by this and can extract from her interpretation of situation something that will help push apart the sex/gender bind. Beauvoir makes five basic claims about biology and the body. The first is that biological facts only take on the meaning they do when they are situated within economic, social, and psychological contexts. Following this, biological facts are still important elements in women’s situation, but, third, they can never define a woman. Fourth, biology is lived, it is made our own. Finally, biology cannot explain the social subordination of women. The recognition of an active, intentional body-subjectivity stands in contrast to a more negative characterization of the female body as reduced to flesh. For Beauvoir, women, like men, are wholly body, but the female body is also somehow other than itself. Women are body and flesh: she is the subject whom patriarchy has made the quintessential object of the male gaze.31 The sexed characteristic of the self-other or subject-object dialectic is not just an empirical fact but, suggests Beauvoir, is also something that has not just occurred. Male and female, thrown together within a primordial Mitsein, constitute a self-Other hierarchical unity. However, as we noted before, a dichotomy need not be hierarchically organized, and even the self-Other relationship need not be dualistic.32 Despite Sartre’s own complicity with this view, we find within Being and Nothingness a way to disturb the sexed subject-object dialectic. Picking up his argument against philosophical solipsism, Sartre argues that, when we encounter other people, we do not encounter first a body and then infer their subjectivity. The Other’s body 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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is given as a center of reference in a situation organized around it. Accordingly, other people are given to me in a situation and that situation is a meaningful relation to them.33 Because the being of the Other’s body is given as a synthetic totality, my perception of the Other’s body is radically different from my perception of things or events. I apprehend the raising of an arm or a kick of the foot as part of the temporal structure of the whole body. We never perceive “a clenched fist,” we perceive someone who, in a particular situation, clenches his fist. It is by virtue of the synthetic totality that the fist is clenched in anger or jubilation. For this reason, the second attitude to others, of indifference, desire, and sadism, is destined to failure.34 However, I still do apprehend subjects as objects-for-myconsciousness. Her body, as a situation, is the facticity of her transcendence, meaning that it is the sum of past actions and choices, as well as indicating future choices. But, as an object-for-me, her body appears as transcendence-transcended. To put it in less Sartrean terms, the Other is an object-for-me insofar as I determine things about this (free) individual based on the context of encounter and through her body-as-situation. Likewise, because I am also an objectfor-the-Other, I find that I do not live my body atomistically: “my body’s depth of being is for me this perpetual ‘outside’ of my most intimate ‘inside.’ ” Others are not first perceived in the world, rather, she or he is first experienced as the alienation of my possibilities and the objectiveness of myself. This outside, or object-state of my body, cannot be experienced as an object but is experienced as a flight. This provokes the first attitude to others: love and masochism.35 When describing the Other as an object, we indicate the nonreductive object-relatedness of consciousness. This means that although each of us is an object for others and others are objects for our consciousness, the term “object” is not flat and should not invoke an inanimate state. The implication of this ontological structure of consciousness is that we apprehend others as persons—be they male or female. Because the Other’s body is not known by me as one thing among many, because the Other’s body-for-me is a revelation of the synthetic relation of her as body-in-situation, we never “forget” that Others are subjects, even though they are objects for my consciousness. From this, we can say two things. First, the commodification of self and Other is in tension with this primordial characteristic of consciousness, but, as we can never eliminate personhood, it is never completely successful. Second, reserving the position of “subject” for men and that of “mere object” for women is not only a philosophical error but also risks excusing the inexcusable. There is therefore a 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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“mutual orientation” between subjects, and this gives rise to a plurality of goal-oriented action.36

Whilst he does not specifically address the notion of the psychic body in The Psychology of the Imagination, Sartre makes a number of suggestive remarks concerning the relationship of images in general to imagination and reflection. When put together with comments in Being and Nothingness, we start to gain a comprehensive and surprisingly subtle view of mental life. The appearance of the imaginary before consciousness permits the transcendence of the given. As a result, the imagination is not an adjunct to consciousness but is the whole of consciousness as it realizes its freedom. The imaginary thus represents at each moment the implicit meaning of the real, and the imaginative act consists in positing the imaginary for itself—that is, in making meaning explicit. Practical and cognitive responsibility are, thereby, a function of the imaginary body. To put it otherwise, transcendence, which is body-consciousness, is an imaginative act. Sartre begins his discussion of the body by making others an integral part of thinking about the body as an object. Other people communicate information concerning our object-state through language, and we apply this knowledge to ourselves or, to be more precise, to our psychic body. Drawing a distinction between pain, illness, and disease, Sartre takes care to distinguish the lived body from the lived body as mediated by the Other. For instance, I live pain and its recurrences and patterns. I watch which foods to eat, I predict days when I will have no cramps and be able to walk without pain. However, once diagnosed, I come to know the illness that has taken hold of my body. I take the Other’s point of view when living this “disease” as an aggravated colon. To think of my body as composed of a heart, glands, ducts, and blood cells is already to frame it through the eyes of another person. I have no direct experience of my veins as they carry my blood or of my appendix sitting there doing very little. When I have a pain or need an operation, I frame that pain in terms of tumors, blood cells, and lungs. I take an objective perspective on the pain-experience. Reflection turns pain into an illness.37 The body-image of a functioning physical system is an external perspective on internal processes. Where pre-reflective consciousness is just pain, for reflective consciousness the “illness” is somehow distinct from the body. It has its own form and comes and goes. It is as a psychic body that the battle is won or lost, where the tumor regresses or 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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metastatises. As such, the discovery of my body as an object is (also) a revelation of its being-for-others. If a woman defines herself through the way she lives her embodied experience in the world, she does not do so in isolation. I am unable to see myself as an object in the world and depend on other people to present to me an image of myself-as-object. When I think about how I appear to others, I can only refer to these images. Conceptual pieces of knowledge acquired throughout my history produce a stratum constitutive of my psychic body.38 The body-image, or psychic body, is a plane with two surfaces. It mediates affective somatic experience and reveals its being-for-other: “my body’s depth of being” is for me this perpetual “outside” of my most intimate “inside.” The psychic body reveals the Other and mediates my experiences of, and actions in, the world. In this sense, the psychic body is always strange, that is, is always external and—insofar as being-for-others is an expression of subjectivity—always externalized. The question to ask here is whether and how body-images carry normative value. It certainly seems that the body-image expresses a relationship to various ideal-types: the healthy body, the racialized body, the able body, the young body. The image is a synthesis of knowledge and affectivity and is an aspect of cognitive-affective consciousness: In consciousness, which is clearly imaginary, there is a zone of semidarkness where almost imperceptible states, empty imaginative cognitions which are almost images and symbolic apprehensions of movement appear and disappear rapidly. Let one of these cognitions fix itself for a moment on one of these movements, and the imaginative consciousness is born.39

However, rather than considering the image to be a fulfilment of meaning, Sartre describes it as debased meaning where the intuitive element is reduced and conscious activity has to increase to compensate.40 Presenting a vague account to the subject of her own capacities, ambiguous consciousness is empty of its relational structure to its object. Imaginative knowledge, on the other hand, is a relation to an outside and posits its content as existing through a certain density of the real serving as its representation.41 Consciousness may produce a mental form “my body” to give stability to various imaginary and possibly overlapping objects: a “desiring-body,” a “biological body,” or a “pregnant body.” But as even this is an outward relationship, we follow rules for detecting relevant signs, pursuing our interests, and associating images that may fall into abstraction or generalization.



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Attention to the sexed body-as-lived requires not only a grasp of the body-as-situation but also of the psychic or imaginary body and its relationship to the ego, and it is this relationship that, according to Sartre, somewhat justifies psychological theories of the unconscious. Judith Butler draws on—and not without reservation—Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to connect the psychic body or body image with the formation of the ego and its marking by sex.42 Within a modified Lacanian framework the morphological body becomes an imaginary formation, which explains how individuation takes place through the unstable dynamics of sexual differentiation. The sense of one’s own body is achieved through a process of differentiation from another (maternal) body and is articulated through necessary self-division and estrangement. The boundaries and contours of this body are thereby produced by sexual taboo and regulation. This morphology relates directly to the formation of the ego, and a number of useful parallels can be drawn with Sartre. I have previously noted that the pre-reflective cogito is not the Cartesian cogito. The nonthetic pre-reflective awareness of an object is accompanied by a (self) awareness of the object. I find it helpful to think of this in terms of apprehension. When discussing apprehension in Kant, Peter Strawson describes it as an “ownership” thesis.43 Without becoming hung-up on this as a property-relation, it means that, in some sense, when I am aware of an object I am aware that it is “my” awareness of the object, my point of view or perspective. Sartre places “self” in parenthesis to highlight that whatever it is we are aware of, it is not an independent, unitary, permanent substance. Such awareness is empty of content apart from that which it qualifies. The subject is then spontaneous reflexivity of consciousness when it is directed toward something other than itself. It is this reflexivity that constitutes the for-itself and personalizes it.44 There is though an “I,” but it is not an a priori structure. Our character and personality are produced in action and then interiorized as a “something,” an objective thing, and my “I” is no more certain that the “I” of other individuals. The “I” that I refer to as “who I am” or “what I am like” is a construct. In his discussion of the third dimension of being and our being-for-others, Sartre brings to our attention the role of other people in this construction of the “I.”45 This is not very far from Butler’s definition of the ego in terms of the cumulative history of imaginary relations, locating the center of the ego outside itself in the externalized image and conferring or producing bodily counters.46 She cultivates the objective character of the ego by leaning on Lacan’s claim that the ego is first and foremost an 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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object that cannot temporally coincide with the subject. But, for her, this ego is neither external nor internal and is the permanently unstable site whereby spatialized distinction is continually negotiated. Due to its relationship to the Other and to the imago, the specular bodily image furnishes a boundary for the ego, and it is on this condition that objects come into perception. Equivocation between narcissism and sociality becomes the epistemological generation of, and access to, objects. There are various benefits gained from thinking about the psychic body and its relationship to the formation of the ego in less psychoanalytic terms. The first obvious benefit is that we can preserve the dual-facing character of the psychic body or bodily image, without reducing epistemological claims to an interpellated position of an already-produced, bounded, anxious, and narcissistic subject position. The second is that it allows a more sensitive grasp of the differences between various body morphologies alongside their dialectical intersubjective negotiation and play. In addition, third, any philosophical account of ways in which an embodied subject interacts with other human subjects and, reflexively, with themselves needs to be supplemented with a more sociological account of ways in which sex/gender, heterosexuality, race/ethnicity are institutionalized, how goods are distributed, and how resources are controlled. Finally, the pre-reflective cogito establishes separation and non-identity at an ontological rather than psychological level. This means that on the occasions where non-identity is suffused with anxiety and alienation we need not draw upon a theory of maternal separation and trauma. By extension, non-identity indicates a way to break apart the apparently monolithic character of the symbolic without calling on a whole ideology of the repressed. It is the dissonance of ordinary lived experience that reveals, more profoundly than social science, discourse analysis, or psychoanalytic therapies ever could, the awkwardness and inappropriateness of many body-images. Object-Complexes, Norms, and the Organization of the Situation To recap: a situation is the for-itself’s engagement with the world. It is the product of both facticity and the way the for-itself acts through its facticity. Facticity is the for-itself’s necessary connection with the in-itself, thus with the world and its own past. It includes everything that pertains, including age, sex, class, body, and race. As Young puts it, each person is a distinctive body with specific features, capacities, and desires that are similar to and different from 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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those of others in determinate respects. Each lives out her unique body in a sociohistorical context of the behavior and expectations of others.47 Antiessentialists are right to point out the radical contingency of the sex-gendered situation, but—although it could have been otherwise—given my place and my situation, this is what I am now and am so necessarily. Thus, one can arrive at a historical and concrete understanding of bodies and subjectivity without privileging either of the terms sex or gender.48 From the above, we can detect that Others constitute my world in one final way—the world is always already provided with meaning. In his discussion of the situation, Sartre notes that I find myself engaged in an already meaningful world. For example, when I discover that the local government can sequestrate my land and bulldoze my property, the meaning is presented with the same indifference as the in-itself. Other signs call my attention to behavior that I should adopt: here I should reduce my speed, there I cannot turn left. I ski according to techniques passed to me through the collective. Objects are part of instrumental complexes determined by functions that I encounter, which mean that when I buy a pen in the newsagents, I know that I can write with it. My appearance in the world then is revealed to me by collective and already constituted techniques, which encourage me to apprehend the world in a form whose meaning has been defined outside of me.49 Much as the idea “my body” produces stability across various imaginary objects, stereotypes link together a constellation of concepts or images, and consciousness can rely on them as it considers its body-for-others. As a matter of imaginative knowledge, this is dual facing: affective and outward facing. This latter component, the outward relationship, indicates the collective and external organization of experience. Stereotypes operate with and through social roles, institutions, and practices, they contour discourses and social practices along with, what Sartre calls, the practico-inert or objectcomplexes. There is room, however, within the intentional imaginative relation to prize open space not only for the inner deterioration of identity but also for the question of epistemology. Although images may fall into abstraction or generalization, the “density of the real” will provide evidence for their adequacy. When we consider the variety of psychological and behavioral characteristics commonly defined as stereotypically feminine and masculine, we can see that there is little that could ever link female and feminine or male and masculine. Indeed, given the wide range of features, the very notion of an integrated and coherent “feminine” or 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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“masculine” disposition seems implausible. In other words, the idea that there could be any individual with all, or only, features identified as either masculine or feminine is extremely unlikely. Anyone who has been coached by or worked with a woman may wonder about describing her as gullible and soft-spoken. Those who have been managed by, or who manage, men may think it a mistake not to pay attention to their emotional states. It takes very little exposure to music, poetry, art, or to any other subject to note the inadequate attribution of emotion to women, or its description as a feminine quality. Commenting on the fact that in most studies the adjectives “shy,” “sympathetic,” and “emotional” are described as “feminine,” Moi says: “Why can’t I just say ‘a subtle mind,’ ‘a forceful mind,’ or whatever it was that I meant? The only useful answer is that when I say ‘feminine mind’ I am referring to some stereotype attributed to women by a certain social group at a certain time.”50 That said, we spend most of our time negotiating, rejecting, and trying to conform to these stereotypes. These theoretical—reified—formulations become real moments in our pre-reflective existential situation: coloring and graining our landscape. But because of their dual character, these stereotypes can be the subject matter for social science. Framing distinct beliefs (women are poor drivers), they can be true or false (men have more accidents). “Gender” denotes these stereotypes and reified formulations. We have begun to see how a phenomenological account of the body-as-situation can ease us away from the problematic distinction sex/gender. A woman is someone with a female body lived as her situation, demonstrating relevant resemblances to other members of the same kind.51 We may still ask whether being-a-woman can be expressed as a pattern of conduct or whether it is just the same as body, height, mass—indicating the throwness of her condition? Being-a-woman remains a fact and is the background against which my actions stand out. This is the case for me as I develop and throw projects into the future, as it is for others who define or reduce my projects according to stereotypes. By further accentuating the practical, active, engaged, and interested character of the situation, we can also say that, given its context, the body-as-situation will also be a pattern of conduct. To pursue this further: In chapter 4 I argued that sex, or the biological body, is one component of the cluster “woman” and is unlikely to explain dualism, political, cultural, and social hierarchies, or social behavior and practice. Here we have noted that gender denotes stereotypes and reified formulations pertaining to women. When discussing 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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individual subjects, given our resemblance theory of natural kinds, it seems appropriate, instead, to talk about men and women and give up all talk of sex and gender. The question—what do we lose in giving up these concepts?—is revealed as a political and terminological problem. Are there patterns of conduct that reveal systematic and relevant differences between men and women? Sartre’s account of constituted techniques and collective practices, with its externalist account of meaning, comes close to Butler’s description of the normative practice of gender. Gender, according to Butler, is a norm that produces and normalizes masculinity and femininity. A norm is neither a rule nor a law, nor indeed a model that individuals seek to approximate but is an implicit standard of normalization. Although normalization may require and draw upon stereotypes (including the general stereotypes “feminine” and “masculine”), the norm “gender” is not itself a stereotype but operates in a subterranean and implicit fashion, governing the intelligibility of action. Regulatory norms, she says, materialize gender through a forcible reiteration.52 Coinciding with our phenomenological description of the subject and the existentialist rejection of the concept of the Cartesian cogito, Butler notes that the subject does not exist prior to its actions but is produced in a cultural gendered matrix, and it is through the matrix that willing and conduct become possible. This version of materialization as a process that stabilizes over time also coincides with our dialectical account of permanences: the sedimentation of practice and action. “Gender” is, accordingly, a broad concept signifying the implicit and general processes of enculturation, sexual differentiation, and patterns of conduct, as well as more narrowly depicting obvious stereotypes and representation. The model of gender we can absorb from Butler thus reflects the model of ideology and superstructural activity, with a wide extension indicating “socialization” and a narrow scope designating “stereotypes.” We may accept the phenomenal account of the body-as-situation as it is traversed and lived, yet still wish to pursue the thought that some general things can be said about barriers, obstacles, attitudes, stereotypes, patterns of distribution, communities, and places. We may accept that the way a woman encounters dominant social norms will depend on her situation and how it interweaves with her age, nationality, race, religion, and class, and we may still wish to make a more abstract claim about the social organization of these norms and stereotypes. We may further insist that the synthetic unity of the for-itself and facticity, which is “woman,” cannot be exhausted by an account of “sexual difference” but still wish to say something 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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about interests that cohere through the organization of the objectcomplexes. This returns us to the symbolic and enquiry focused on the complex and variegated social, political, and economic mechanisms creating and maintaining hierarchies or asymmetries, as well as the differential distributions of primary goods. As we pinpointed in the fifth chapter, the scope of the symbolic may include dichotomy and differentiation but must be particularly tuned to asymmetry and dualism. If we are concerned with tracing paths, obstacles, restrictions, behaviors, and constraints, to make sense of asymmetry, then, perhaps the way to think about it is as a mapping activity that makes the implicit explicit. We can map the ways in which implicit interests cohere through the organization of object-complexes and sedimented activity. As noted above, there are five structures to the situation: place, past, environment, neighbor, and death. Place is a spatial order and integrates where I was born and now live with the revelation of object-complexes. This existential meaning of spatial order introduces a way to think about the personal and the impersonal: a way to map the situation that connects the revelation of object-complexes with similar object-complexes across time: spaces. When mapping the existential meaning of spatial order, social objectification and construction of space are understood through a study of material processes and social reproduction.53 The broad concept of “gender,” as the dimorphic differentiation of subjects, is a useful hermeneutic device to help make explicit and map the interests that underlie and are served by the organization of object-complexes and social practices for the description and explanation of structures and processes that effect differential opportunities and privileges: differences in power between men and women.54 The concept “gender” might in this way perform a helpful, critical function, identifying broad asymmetries and clustering together norms and stereotypes, but it risks reconfirming a sex-gender, or a biological-social, conceptual dichotomy. It would be much simpler to be able to drop both. However, with a shift in meaning and emphasis, the terms “sex” and “gender” still have a role to play in articulating the complex variegations of the situation-as-lived. The body-assituation is a lived body and a synthetic unity, it founds my experience of myself within the world and is the medium for me having a world. A constellation of concepts is the appropriate analytic device to unpick and express the intersecting features of my situation-as-lived, of my identity. My identity is a dialectical relationship of non-identity, deterioration, and noncoincidence; expressible—if at all—through speculative dialectical logic. 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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A woman is someone with a female body lived as her situation, demonstrating relevant resemblances to other members of the same kind. Sex, or the biological body, is one (although possibly the only necessary) component of the cluster “woman” and can explain little about patterns of regularities. Gender is a term that has a wide focus, on asymmetries between men and women, and a more narrow critical focus on, for example, representations, stereotypes, and belief claims. The terms “sexed-specificity,” “sexuate difference,” and “engendering” are all useful if, and only if, it is remembered that we are dealing with analytic distinctions pertaining to singular lived situations and that apparent resemblances witnessed through, and mapped across, these situations draw on diverse explanatory models. My preference is for the nomenclature “sexed” for the very reason that it has almost no explanatory force and therefore highlights the utter contingency of current hierarchical patterns of distribution. Feminism—theory and practice—must begin with this problematic relationship of power between men and women and make implicit interests and benefits explicit.

Conclusion At the beginning of this chapter I mentioned Mufti’s observation that critical social theory should avoid reference to modernity as a fallen condition because such a description presumes that experience is, in some sense, in crisis. This, in turn, implies a more unified or coherent experience that was not, or might not be, in crisis. According to Martin Jay, most of the Frankfurt School’s accounts of experience are informed by the assumption that something historical has happened to undercut the possibility of experience, except in the most distorted form. Although rebuking Lebensphilosophie for positing an immediate form of experience somehow deeper than culture and ideology, Adorno in particular seems to imply something seriously damaged, perhaps even something lost or destroyed in, and by, modern life.55 In chapter 3 we looked at Enlightenment and modernity and described the crisis in modern life in terms of administered systems, prevalence of information technology, capitalist production and exchange, and a fall from “mimesis” into “arbitrary” language. Jay writes that for Adorno the decay of something called experience is an index of this general crisis of modern life. Yet, because within Critical theory the poles of the dialectical moment are retained, experience comes only with an encounter of otherness, and there is no dependence on a pre-individuated, ahistoric experience—as one 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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might find in Lacanian psychoanalysis, for example. Nor is it ever justifiable to “forget” the personhood of other subjects who always stand out against object-complexes. There is, though, the hint of a nondominating encounter between self and other as well as self and object, and this may offer a way to engage constructively with Sartre’s subject-other dialectic. The idea that experience consists of two poles in uneasy alliance also lends content to the idea that experience is a shudder into the new. The idea of the “body-as-situation” is not a response to what Mufti describes as the homelessness of modern experience through an attempt to recuperate a lost world of primary experience. First, any totalizing structure, across actions and situations, will collapse. As Catalano puts it, because we are always “in there,” every totality is already detotalized. Second, we are all located, and the challenge is to interrogate the structure of location without reifying place, or expressing it in psychoanalytic terms or drawing on infantile or primary object-relations. The modern sense of homelessness, if there is such, needs to be explained in relation to this fact of location, and the concept of place is much richer than that of location. It includes a being-with-others, our neighbors and surroundings, our past and environment. Because the disembodied “view-from-nowhere” has been seen to collapse into a view from somewhere-very-particular, as an effort to disguise partial and limited interests, theory that begins with the assumption of embodiment is viewed less suspiciously and carries an aura of integrity. Ideas of “situation” and “location” deliver significant epistemological and political benefits. But, on a slightly more reticent note, the continual focus on the body within feminist theory might be explained not as a better way to ground theoretical abstractions but as a search for more authentic experience.56 The existentialist description of the body-as-a-situation exudes an auratic authenticity that could be a desperate scramble for a place to dwell and a location from which to speak. If so, it is a desperate scramble that reveals something true about the ongoing and very modern political and economic marginalization of women, but it risks camouflaging and submerging social contradictions within what turns out to be unhistorical phenomenological analysis.



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Patriarchy

Introduction In the last two chapters I have shown how phenomenological ontology can be brought together with dialectical materialism to move us beyond the dichotomy “sex/gender.” The phenomenological account of the body-as-situation offers tools for theorizing body-consciousness within intricate and variegated object-complexes. But situations were themselves revealed to be complicated, differentiated according to, inter alia, race, nationality, class, sexuality, mobility, and sex/gender. Patterns of conduct reflect this diversity. For this reason, the problem “what does it mean to be a woman” could be thought to evaporate, leaving a more fluid and open embodiment and “an infinite array of differences.”1 But if this really were the case, if there were insufficient resemblances between individuals to classify them as either men or women, we would be unable to detect patterns of regularities. The concept of systematic oppression would be thereby meaningless. But we can detect patterns of regularities, and the concept of systematic oppression is certainly not meaningless. The idea of the body-as-situation does not remove the theoretical imperative to explore situational regularities in terms of barriers, obstacles, institutional governance, attitudes, patterns of distribution, communities, and places: to articulate abstract claims about the social organization of norms and stereotypes.2 One approach to this is to think about how we may map the ways in which interests cohere throughout the organization of object-complexes via a study of material processes and social reproduction.3 The concept of “gender,” in both its broad and narrow guises, is, I suggested, a useful hermeneutic device to isolate relevant appearances, to then make explicit and map the interests that underlie, and are served by, the organization of particular object complexes.4 In this way it remains a useful way to note the persistent inequalities between women and men.5 The 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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attendant concept “patriarchy” refers to this systematic and oppressive organization of interests: interests that may have multifarious appearances. In this chapter I draw the phenomenological account of the lived body together with a more explicit exploration of underlying factors affecting the situation and argue for a revised but sustainable conceptual model of patriarchy. I offer a definition of patriarchy in terms of subjection and interest such that patriarchy is “the systematic subordination of the interests of women to those of men.”

The Concept of Patriarchy Etymologically, the term patriarchy has Greek roots in “patria,” which means family, and “archy” which means rule. It was initially applied to male heads of families exerting autocratic rule and then, by extension, to scriptural fathers and governments ruled by senior men (patriarches). Weber used the term “patriarchy” to refer to a system of government in which men ruled societies through their position as heads of households.6 Early anthropologists, such as Bachofen, Morgan, and even Engels, have used the term to designate a form of lineage consolidating inheritance and paternity. The term was given political content and resonance within the woman’s movement of the 1970s and was mobilized to make sense of a variety of cultural and historical practices. It came to denote a general system of distribution whereby social practices, institutions (family, state, church), and cultural images organize the power that men exert over women. For Christine Delphy, patriarchy can be simply stated as “the oppression of women, here and now.” 7 Hartmann defines patriarchy as a set of relations between men, which has a material base in the control of women’s labor power, and which, though hierarchical, establishes or creates interdependence and solidarity among men that enables them to dominate women and restrict their sexuality.8 To which Ehrlich adds that the ideology of patriarchy is the belief that men have a right to control the life circumstances of women.9 More recently, we find the recognition that without a concept of patriarchy the depth, pervasiveness, and interconnectedness of different aspects of subordination cannot be captured.10 Attuned to these issues, Christine Battersby develops metaphysical arguments that might allow her to take the female as the norm, thereby toppling the patriarchal view that “thinks the human, sub-human and superhuman essence in androcentric terms.” She defines patriarchy in a fairly straightforward way as a form of social organization that takes male bodies and life-patternings as both norm and ideal in the exercise of 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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power.11 Moira Gatens elucidates the body-as-lived, the imaginary or psychic body, and accentuates the fact that we are historically and culturally situated in a society that is defined and organized according to sex: that the representation and control of women’s bodies is a crucial stake in all other social struggles.12 Butler would rather talk about instances of gender asymmetry than patriarchy.13 Braidotti stylishly catches and expresses the depth and range of cultural phenomena: No-one would deny that the differences between the sexes are cultural, in that they have been constructed into a system of hierarchal domination as the result of thousands of years of exclusion of women from history. It is nevertheless true that this absence, this ancestral exclusion is directly connected to women’s bodies, to feminine sexuality, to women’s juissance and reproductive capacity. Just so many elements that man has colonized, in order to impose his meaning on them. Feminism has revealed the fact that our socio-cultural order rests on the exchange and silence of women.14

In Catching a Wave, “third-wave” feminists Dicker and Piepmeier describe a world of global capitalism, economic decline, changing national demographies, and—they add—structural inequalities. As though little has really changed, the world they describe is one of political, social, and economic inequalities—of patriarchy.15 These are issues of rights and representation, production and reproduction, as well as cultural production and power. Conservative modernization, the toxic mix of neoliberal market economics, conservative values, and managerialism, is the context for the patriarchal dynamics of global capitalism. Undeniably, the concept of patriarchy has come under sustained and powerful criticism. In their attempt to make sense of the experiences of subordination, white middle-class women have often generalized from their own standpoint, thereby failing to recognize that some women are more, certainly differently, oppressed than others, and that situations are geographically, historically, and politically complex. According to Mohanty, feminist discourse reproduces ethnocentric universalism when it rests on the following assumptions: that there is a general subject of feminism or patriarchy, that neutral descriptions of global relations of dependency and distribution of resources are plausible, that power can be articulated in terms of a binary relation and to this we could add imaginary speculations about the source and origin of patriarchy. The purpose of the last four chapters has been to show how phenomenological ontology, with its historical and material understanding of 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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diverse bodies and subjectivities, may provide the grounds for talking about women yet also be an antidote to the assumption that women form a coherent group with identical experiences and interests, regardless of geographic, class, ethnic, racial, or religious locations. The second and third chapters argued that descriptions assuming a view-form-nowhere are examples of reified cognition and will, very likely, schematize individuals under universals, neglect differences, naturalize conventional relations, and—relevantly—disguise interests. Chapters 3 and 5 brought together feminist epistemologies with Adorno’s ideas of non-identity and conceptual constellations and so hedged toward a methodological approach associated with dialectical materialism. There remain obvious dangers when engaging in critical social enquiry, namely, reducing the complexities of social life to a single unifying principle of explanation, in this case explaining classification and organization through interests and then offering one account of those interests. This reductive theoretical approach might be considered to run the same risks as all “grand theories.” Jane Flax flags up a concern that the very search for a root or cause of gender relations (or even male domination) reflects a mode of thinking that is itself grounded in particular forms of gender. The search for a unifying principle of explanation or primary principle of social criticism may well begin from the falsely universalizing perspective of the dominant group.16 To obviate these risks, it makes sense to approach the matter in hand as a critical but also an empirical problem rather than as a set of a priori principles or commitments.17 It also makes sense to consider that the phenomena under investigation might require reference to different explanations. This would mean accepting that every substantial theory is partial in terms of the type and number of phenomena to be explained and the range of explanatory variables addressed. According to Roger Sibeon, nonreductive multifactoral explanatory frameworks have virtues absent in reductionism and in what he calls compound-reductionism.18 An example of the former might be single-systems theory, which explains social organization in terms of an underlying sexed economic system. The latter form of reductionism finds many exponents in dual-systems theory where economic and sex-based interests are considered to be systematic and to form underlying and intersecting systems. With this in mind, it would be helpful to lay the ground for an empirical account of interests that attests to a more complex or nuanced pattern of interests than that encapsulated in dual or single-systems theories whilst making sense of the systematic and sexed character of those interests. 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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While this may assuage some of the worries associated with the second “homogeneity” assumption—global explanations—troubles with the first two are compounded by the third: the binary model of power central to theories of patriarchy. Within this model, men and women are considered to constitute whole populations, possessing already constituted dimorphic categories of experience and interests and to be positioned in terms of having or being subject to power. Power is something either one has access to or one is denied. This model has the unfortunate consequence of presenting all women as powerless, and social struggles as struggles by women for access to (male) power. That said, whenever the term “patriarchy” is deployed, it signifies not just amorphous power but power such that x has power over y. This chapter is concerned with this relationship. It will be helpful to be able to distinguish between a general concept of power and a situation where x has power over y (and that power is unjustly exercised). This parenthesis reflects and extends our earlier distinction between dichotomy and dualism where dualism is a cultural expression of hierarchy. I shall explicate a workable account of hierarchy in terms of interests and make a case for interests as both implicit and explicit. Finally, we require clarity as to what might be meant by system or systematic when applied to the idea of interests and situations. Leaving us in a position where we can assess the interests underlying local object-complexes and make a judgment as to their patriarchal—systematic and oppressive—character.

Power It is pretty much a sociological platitude to say that individuals are socialized, oriented to roles and practices that are given to them, and that they internalize the demands of these roles. Through a Foucauldian lens we may wish to insist that roles are managed through various social practices and that compliance occurs through the process of the internalization and then repetition of rule-governed and habitual behaviors until they become a “second nature.” We can excavate various norms such as madness, sexuality, criminality and extend this to myths of beauty, categories of age, and images deployed through advertising. But through this type of extension, power ends up being conceived as everywhere and is not something we can escape. Because all epistemic claims collapse into a jostle for supremacy, so that there is no way of judging between ways of life as each imposes its own, it is nigh on impossible to think about better alternatives or 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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counterfactual conditions.19 At best, we are left with Foucault’s selfaesthetic or a Nietzschean cry for “power, more power.” It is unconvincing to talk in broad terms about dualism, hierarchy, norms, and positive or negative cultural values without exploring the core point: sometimes these relationships are problematic and they are problematic not because they are relations of “power” but of a specific form of power: domination and subjection. Thus we must prize apart the idea of general processes of enculturation and social practice from the idea of a relationship that may be described specifically in terms of domination and subjection. What it means “for x to dominate y” can be unpacked in terms of the ability of x to constrain the choices of y, coercing y or securing compliance by impeding y from living as his or her own nature and judgment would dictate.20 Moreover, power as domination covers relations of constraint where they further the interests, or at least do not harm the interests, of the powerful and bear negatively upon the interests of those subject to it. We can describe any such power-structured relationship as political. Additionally, there may be cases of power as domination that turn out not to be in the (long-term) interests of the powerful. Interests are clearly central to this taxonomy of power. In the second edition of Power: A Radical View, Lukes positions himself in terms of various arguments, specifically those that may be described as Foucauldian-postmodernist, concerning the nature of power. To clarify his approach, he first notes that definitions of power are hard to pin down.21 Despite this he maintains that there is a generic concept of power common to all cases and develops a concept of power that would actually be familiar to postmodernists, especially those who borrow from Spinoza’s cultivation of the terms “potentia” and “potestas” in his Tractatus Politicus. “Potentia” suggests the power of things in nature to exist and to act, whereas the term “potestas” is used to signify “being in the power” of another.22 Thus, the latter is a subgroup of the former. Lukes believes that this distinction leads to a dispositional definition of power: “power as a dispositional concept comprises a conjunction of conditional or hypothetical statements specifying what would occur under a range of circumstances if and when power is exercised.”23 As a dispositional concept, it identifies a capacity: the potential rather than simple exercise of capacity. At the most general level, this dispositional approach clarifies power as “being able to make or resist change,” which, given that we are not referring to random events but a relationship between subjects, more precisely boils down to (i) the ability or capacity to achieve 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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outcomes through a process of decision-making and action (this may or may not be a matter of resistance), (ii) and an inclination to exercise this capacity. Asking “who does what, to whom, to what end,” Lukes offers what he calls a three-dimensional definition of power, and we shall use this definition in our version of what constitutes a patriarchal relation. The three-dimensional definition fleshes out how x manages to exert power over y. The one-dimensional view defines power in terms of decisionmaking of political actors. Although this first step places to the fore the decision-making process, it simplifies the rationality and success of the decision-making process to concentrate on observable connections between decisions and consequences and thereby ignores or overlooks the ways in which decision-making is affected by the setting of the political agenda. The two-dimensional move attempts to redress this oversight by analyzing ways in which political issues are either pushed from the agenda or refused recognition in the first place. The three-dimensional view, which is the position he adopts, develops the idea that power is exercised through the conditions of decision-making and leads him to consider a form of analysis that is value-laden, theoretical, and—most importantly for us—empirical. Offering a critique of the behavioral focus of the first and second approaches, he asserts that power is exerted through conditions of decision-making, that agendas are controlled and demarcated through processes of non-decision-making, exclusion, and nonrecognition, and that interests are served in the setting of agendas. All sorts of things may be said to “have power,” and power may be exercised in numerous ways—it may be exercised through inaction, it may be “unconscious,” and it may be exercised by groups and institutions. Nevertheless, I can say that I have more power than you if I can bring about outcomes that are more significant than those you can bring about. If that holds, we have to be able to judge significance. I recommend we do so in terms of interests, that power is the present means (capacity) to secure some future interest. If I can bring about outcomes that are more significant than you, in terms of their impact on interests, then we are in an asymmetrical relationship. There are, though, numerous asymmetrical relations (child-parent, police-civilian, teacher-student, manager-employee). Consequently, we must mean something more when we describe an asymmetrical relationship as one of domination. Thus, an asymmetrical relationship is a relationship of domination when the capacity is not only exercised but also exercised unjustly. 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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Here then we must make a stab at defining what would count as an unjust exercise of that power. For the time being, as we have tied significance to interests, the unjust exercise of power in an asymmetrical relationship will occur wherever it furthers or at least does not harm the interests of the powerful and bears negatively upon the interests of those subject to it. Depending on our definition of interest, paternalism, an asymmetrical relationship whereby interests of y or both x and y are supposedly served (I’m doing it for your own good), might also count as an unjust exercise of power. Thus, given our three-dimensional account of power, power as domination can be said to define cases where power is exercised through conditions of decision-making, by means of underlying mechanisms (e.g., setting budgets) that constrain the context of decision-making (cuts have to be made), by shaping preferences, beliefs, and desires and by influencing judgment (if you make x cut you may receive y in exchange), thereby enhancing the interests of those able to exercise such power to the detriment of those subject to it. Now, the subject is not a mere cipher and is—in some sense—responsible for exercising their capacity in this way. The preceding two chapters have advanced a phenomenological description of subjectivity and intentionality. Because non-identity, conflict, and tension are at the heart of the synthetic-unity, identity is always in dissolution and phenomenology can avoid determinist portrayals of subjectivity. But, as pointed out by Adorno, this philosophical strength is also a weakness. With a rather thin story of mental contents and activity, the phenomenal subject seems to be either radically free or to be epiphenomenal—hovering above all processes. As a consequence the philosophical subject remains curiously untouched by their situation and, pertinently, by their capacity to exercise power as it is revealed through the object-complex. By talking about decision-making, rather than power-discourse, we can tie power firmly back to responsibility—after all, the problem for the phenomenal subject is one of commitment rather than decision-making. The principal designation is made by Lukes in terms of counterfactual conditions: it is possible for the subject to act otherwise. This means that although there are structural limits imposed through the context of decision-making, there is still enough openness for the concept of decision-making to be meaningful. Given that we have been talking about constraints and contexts, it may well be that we have to think about degrees of responsibility. But, for now, if the individual could have acted otherwise, s/he is responsible for the way s/he does 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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act. Recall that we have defined the unjust exercise of power in terms of interests: benefits and costs. If an individual benefits from a particular distribution of tasks at the cost of someone else, and such a distribution could have been otherwise, then s/he is responsible for the unjust exercise of power and, as we have said, any such power relationship is political. The fact that women still perform 80 percent of non-remunerated or “domestic” labor should make us look at how tasks come to be distributed between two or more individuals. A patriarchal relation is one where a man has the capacity— exercised or not—to further his own interests in a way that would bear negatively on the interests of a woman. Clearly, there may be a case where a man exercises power, and does so unjustly, that does not count as patriarchal. To account for such cases we must refine our account of capacity, and, because capacities are exercised in context, this leads us to examine how agendas are set. Agendas are framed though a complicated relationship between micro and macro structures of constraint. Structures of constraint include sets of asset distribution, rules, norms, and preferences that afford more freedom to act to some rather than others. Constraints define the range of options available to individuals or the costs of pursuing some options rather than others.24 The distinction then holds in cases where the constraints and freedoms in question enable or facilitate the exercise of power by virtue of x being a man. For this reason, only a weak distinction can be drawn between public and private patriarchy: with the former covering cases where roles and benefits are distributed and composed by institutions (98 percent of CEOs in the UK are men, as are almost all religious “leaders” of all faiths, 99 percent of all land is owned by men). It is a weak analytic distinction, however, because public (patriarchal) institutions arrangements will be in the material interests of individual men—even if composed into groups— and individual material interests are supported by social material practices, institutions, and discourses. Struggles, either public or private, may be articulated in terms of social justice and rights but are, at root, struggles over competing interests, and these struggles are located at particular times and places. Further, there are very few cases within “private” patriarchy where the distribution of benefits and costs could not have been otherwise. Children in father-absent families are five times more likely to be poor, and 38 percent of children living in female householder families live in poverty. Individuals who benefit from the situation—even when they are absent (such as absentee fathers who refuse to make any financial contribution)—are responsible for the harm inflicted. 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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Where there is “power over” so defined, we find an emotional and psychological cost. Dominance produces in the dominated a pervasive sense of inferiority and insecurity. To summarize, we have now defined a patriarchal relation as one of domination, whereby a man has the capacity to further his own interests in a way that bears negatively on the interests of a woman. Given that interests are so central to this account of “power over,” then we need to interrogate the concept of interest.

Interests Every explanatory political theory contains assumptions about persons and interests and, 25 for Lukes, talk of interests provides licence for making normative judgments of a moral and political character.26 The concept “interest” is as contested as that of power and is a compressed cluster term. It is often considered synonymous with ends, goals, will, desires, power, and purposes. We can say that individuals seek to satisfy interests through strategic action, or we can say that in some extended sense all action is interested. An individual’s interest may be identified with an individual’s actual and explicit preferences, or interests may be thought to be the sort of thing that can be deflected, be indirect, or concealed. Interests may be shared or individual, we can aggregate them, as in the case of utilitarianism, or abstract from them, as in Rousseau’s social contract. They may be thought to be essentially collective and form the background against which individuals make their choices, or they may be considered formed by, or as a product of, a system. Interests may provide justifications for action, and referenced if predicting a course of action, or they may be given a functional definition. By ranging across general accounts of social action and functional descriptions of abstract concepts, the concept of interest brings together a range of uses and meanings from the prosaically pragmatic—(if I do not wish to get wet), it is in my interest to take an umbrella outside when it’s raining—to macro-theoretical assertions—(if the aim is to maximize or maintain surplus value), it is in the interests of capitalism to maintain a reserve pool of labor because such a pool of cheap labor exerts a control on the value of labor and thereby on wages. The breadth of this range should alert us to illegitimate semantic correlation. We can draft conceptual distinctions between a phenomenological account of interest (including intention, choice, desire, will), a functional position (including systems, instrumental reason (means and ends), and regularities), 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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and an objective description of positional interest (including benefits and costs that accrue according to social role). The positional version of interest preserves what is useful about the phenomenological and functional accounts and also allows us to make the case that we can incorrectly identify our interests; therefore, following a survey of the strengths of the phenomenological and functional, it is this last version that I pursue. For the phenomenologist, being-for-itself is world-making; objects reveal themselves to the subject as instrumental complexes in terms of projects. Here “interest” means something pretty general, such as “interested,” that the world is formed and framed according to beliefs, concepts, values, desires, and projects of the subject. Due to this, for-itself is interested and in-itself is without interests.27 I call this first dimension of interest “phenomenological” because it relies on an account of action, including degrees of decision-making, self-consciousness, and is first- personal.28 The phenomenological approach is committed to a one-dimensional behavioral account of interest, such that the interest is identified with activity. What matters is the subject’s point of view or self-description of how the world reveals itself to them (according to their projects). This I believe constitutes a tension with which feminism has struggled. The strength of the phenomenological story is that the subject is inserted as a point of reference. Its weakness is that there is no room for any ascription of “real interest” that may diverge from the individual’s own action. Such a one-dimensional account tends to work at the level of appearance whereby “what is” is what is revealed (to the subject) and acted upon (by the subject). Troublesome for feminism is that, as an unintended consequence, phenomenology makes it difficult to claim anything about the systematic organization of interests, especially those that are covert or latent. Society can be viewed as an aggregation of interrelated parts, each part with a function and contributing to an overall function. The question of functional interest requires us to answer a more preliminary question—what sort of thing can be said to have interests? We have previously noted almost glibly that “being-for-itself” has interests. If we remember our materialist commitments, we may wish to say that because we are the beings we are—engaged in practical activity, toolmaking, and language-using—we have an interest in the creation of knowledge, which would enable us to produce material objects, and an interest in (successful) communication. Habermas adds an interest in the reflective appropriation of human life, without which the interest-bound character of knowledge would not be graspable. But 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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these are very general interests, they are underlying modes through which reality is disclosed and acted upon, yielding a viewpoint from which reality is constituted.29 Even if we were to acknowledge these interests, they would not be particularly helpful because they encourage a philosophical analysis of transcendental conditions rather than first-personal witness and do not deliver a sufficiently fine-grained account of conflicting interests. Now we should ask two further questions. Do interests pertain to mechanisms, structures, and systems? Can we give an objective description of interests? By even asking these questions we can see how the functional description of interest might raise the “structure-agency” spectre. Thankfully there are ways to incorporate functional insights to add depth to the phenomenological account of interest without getting trapped into another cul-de-sac.30 A more precise example of the first question might be whether capitalists have interests or whether capitalism is the appropriate subject? If we say capitalists rather than capitalism, then we need to group together various individuals into a semantic class “capitalists.” Can we really talk about them as a group and, if so, can groups have interests? If we were to agree that capitalism, or patriarchy or colonialism, is the appropriate subject, are we assuming that social structures are efficacious? Barry Hindess argues that only agents can have interests, but then includes state agencies, capitalist enterprises, political parties, and interest groups within the set “agent.” Is “patriarchy” of the same semantic type as “the labour party” or an NGO? Rom Harré argues that social structures are not the sort of thing that can have causal powers or interests.31 As a false dichotomy, the structure/agency debate leads to the supposition that social research is either the study of objective coordinates or the study of conduct, motivation, and interests of individual actors. But there is a complex interaction whereby subjects act together and upon one another within groups and organizations, and the explanation for this interaction is unlikely to be completely reducible to individual will or to externally imposed constraints.32 “Social structure,” such as class, capitalism, patriarchy, race, refers to a class of practices by which groups of people are brought together, live, and work. Micro interactions intersect with the macro practices along the axes of constraint and interest. Our first question was “what sort of thing can have interests?,” and the second is “can there be an objective and descriptive account of interest?” It could be argued that as a consequence of the economic argument, discussed in the first chapter, interests inhere in people just by virtue of their membership of taxonomic collectivities, 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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such as “the proletariat.” Class interests are by definition related to the structure of class relations. Reductively, the control, distribution, and mechanism of production is in the interests of the bourgeoisie and not in the interests of the proletariat. These interests are real, stable, objective, are an effect of social structure, and can be given a perfectly neutral and objective description. Here interest still appears to mean something close to “benefit and cost,” but then the problem simply shifts across semantic terrain because we can always ask “in what sense does x benefit individual y.” If an objective account of benefit were permissible, it would follow that any individual could be mistaken about, or quite oblivious to, their real interests. To avoid becoming embroiled in this for the moment, as it slips very quickly into the problem of false consciousness, it is important to say that interests only matter if they enter into an agent’s deliberation and provide reasons for action. While this has the benefit of tying our account to phenomenology it still leaves interests as free-floating and independent from social structure. Margaret Archer’s work on positional interest helps to explain the connection between an agent’s self-formulated interests and social structure. Thus, we can maintain that there is a conceptual link between interest and intentionality but also insist that interests are collectively formed by the logic of the agent’s position. Positional interests are attached to positions, roles, and group membership, and these interests generate strategic guidance for actors and predispose actors to particular behaviors. Social practices provide the conditions for thought and action insofar as they shape positions and roles, along with the particular costs and benefit associated with roles, positions, and group membership, and these organized interests predispose actors to behave in specific ways. The distinctiveness of a social practice can be elucidated in terms of constitutive values, rules, and norms (that make it the type of thing it is), but there are also contextual values brought to the particular social practice by agents who are involved in many and varied practices. For this reason, interests bear a relation to one another. If interests are identified with roles and if agents occupy various roles, then an agent may be said to have various, competing, and occasionally conflicting interests. Second, interests arise within a relational (social) network. As interests arise within such networks, they usually appear to be the result of negotiation, compromise, and adjustment.33 Conflicts tend to be resolved through an appeal to positional interests afforded by the social practice in question. There may be situations where one agent is able to convince other agents to attempt to achieve or attain whatever s/he themselves want. 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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In the process s/he may persuade them to commit resources, be it time, money, or labor, to a particular course of activity. Once committed, the agents may be said to have a positional interest in the continuation of the course of activity. However, just because an agent is committed to a course of action does not mean that it is actually in her interest. To unpick this idea we need to (i) explore what we mean by objective interest, and (ii) take account of the structural or systematic nature of role formation. Let us develop the idea of “objective” interest. Are there not cases where it is perfectly plausible to say that, on one hand, an agent is “invested” in the continuation of a project but, on the other, it is not in their objective interests for it to continue? There are two cases here, both of which mean carving space between preference or decision-making and interest. Both cases mean that we have to add something to the phenomenological account of interest. If we simply identify (deliberative) action with interest, then we eliminate room for error. However, an agent may well act according to what she believes will bring her various benefits but be misguided. I may eat hundreds of oranges believing that the vitamin C will keep any colds at bay but end up with diarrhea, cramps, and nausea. The (interested) goal is to protect against colds and flu, but my interest in oranges was ill-judged. For Hindess, such error makes no difference to the effectiveness of those interests in providing reasons for action—I would still give “protecting myself from colds” as a reason for eating all those oranges, but I would be in error. By grasping underlying structure and mechanism, in this case biological functions, it becomes possible to clarify the error: that which I thought was in my interest actually turns out to be quite the reverse.34 So, where there is the possibility of error and misidentification, there cannot be a straightforward alignment of deliberative action or preference with interest. Let us take a less prosaic and slightly different case, one of female genital mutilation (FGM). I choose this example not only because it is an issue with which we must engage but also because it divides feminists between those who argue that the goal of the practice is to mutilate the sexual pleasure and satisfaction of women to assure men of women’s dependence and subservience and those who believe that this type of feminist analysis defines women as archetypal and passive victims.35 I deliberately choose this example not to “hold the problem at a distance,” but to argue that the women who participate are not passive victims, they pursue their interests, but this does not mean that the practice is actually in their interests. 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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FGM is typically performed on girls between infancy and fifteen years and includes clitoridectomy, excision, infibulations, and a variety of related intrusive practices. A clitoridectomy involves the partial or total removal of the clitoris and in some cases of the prepuce (the fold of skin surrounding the clitoris). Excision requires the partial or total removal of the clitoris. Infibulation refers to the surgical procedure of narrowing the vaginal opening through the creation of a covering seal. This seal is formed by cutting and repositioning the inner, and sometimes outer, labia with or without the removal of the clitoris. However, to describe any of these interventions as a “surgical procedure” would be a misnomer. Although increasingly performed by trained medical personnel, most of the time procedures are carried out without any medical supervision. Instruments used vary from broken glass to tin lids, razor blades to knives and scissors. Side effects include death, HIV infection, abscesses, tumors, hemorrhages, cysts, urinary tract infections, and longer-term gynecological and obstetric problems. An estimated 100–140 million girls and women worldwide are currently living with the consequences of FGM. In Africa alone, three million girls a year are at risk from this procedure.36 Theorists have investigated the relational network that produces the cognitive and emotional investment leading the older female generation to inculcate and propagate this practice. It seems that FGM cements cultural and group identity and supervenes on beliefs about virginity, appropriate female sexual behavior, and female monogamy. But it offers no health benefits whatsoever, indeed quite the opposite. Due to the age of children involved, these are acts performed on them without consent. Given Hindess’ model of deliberation, an infant is unlikely to recognize his or her interest, and therefore the language of interest, benefit, and cost is meaningless. This may be a simple (explicit) case of power as domination. Yet, even when the child may be considered old enough to recognize her interest and withhold or give consent, she is offered a stark choice—genital mutilation or social ostracization and poverty. There are examples of courageous young women who resist the procedure. But where girls and women have no property rights, no formal education, and limited employment opportunities, it would be perfectly reasonable for a young woman to identify the procedure as coinciding with her interests and to give her consent to what is without doubt a barbaric act.37 Consent, either explicitly given or implicitly given by a girl who is merely going along with the procedure, indicates compliance. For Steven Lukes, compliance provokes the question, “how do the powerful secure compliance?”38 In a minimal sense—given the current 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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conditions—one could argue that the girl complies because it is in her interests to do so. But in this example it is because the very formulation of her interests is dependent on definite discursive and other conditions.39 And, in this case, surely we would say that she has conflicting interests: social inclusion or suffering pain and long-term risks to her health. We may ask whether there is something about her discursive conditions that might lead the girl to acknowledge one set of interests rather than another, but to do so we must first disaggregate types of interest inhering in the conditions of action. There are, as noted above, pragmatic interests—in the sense that all action is interested. This covers both means and ends, I have an interest in pursuing these means to achieve this end, which interests me. In this way, practical interest depends on a goal or objective and provides an account of interest from the perspective of the agent. It also calls our attention to the goal or objective itself. I set out with an outcome or goal in mind (interest in warding off colds). Due to this goal I also have an interest in a way to realize that outcome (oranges). In the above case the goal may be to secure marriage and to provide for my family and myself. This, I take it, is what Hindess refers to when he says that any conception of interest needs to be formulated within current forms of assessment and decision-making.40 His explication of interest mitigates the political or theoretical cost attributed to an idea of “objective (real) interest,” with its associated problem of false consciousness, but it still neglects the possibility of error and misidentification and tends to level all interests across the plane so that all are of equal weight whilst collapsing interests into preferences. There are underlying or implicit interests. These can be articulated in terms of cost and benefits (such a well-being) and make sense of the selection of the objective or goal in the first place. If we consider these interests to be implicit rather than absent, then we have a way of bridging a gap between an objective description of reasons for acting in a particular way from a description of “objective” reasons for action, while, at the same time, acknowledging the critical work required to make those interests explicit alongside a theoretical maxim to situate the goal within its limited and contingent context. Let us supplement the idea of positional interest with the proposition that interests provide implicit reasons for action when they relate to the benefit of the agent. If interests provide implicit reasons for action when they relate to the benefit of an agent, then one can always ask of any currently identified interest: is this actually in my interest? This question subjects 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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my interest to assessment and dispute—just because I act in a certain way is not the end of the matter—thereby introducing a comparative element and extending evaluation beyond instances of mere error (as in the example of oranges). The question, “is this actually in my interests?” will always receive a partial and pragmatic response where benefit and costs relate to specific situations (it is in my interest to undergo this procedure so that I can get married). Indeed the more we understand consent behaviorally—an individual consents when they choose a particular course of action—it behooves us to dig deeply into the context and limits of options. Because interests depend on the range of possible action, we can describe them not only as real but also as partial. Given different conditions, alternative courses of action would have been preferred. In the case of the girl facing FGM, her real but partial interest may be as she identifies it—that it is in her interests to go ahead with the procedure. Indeed, this may be the only reasonable action available even though the long-term consequence may be to create and recreate the conditions for her, or her children’s, subordination. The partial character, however, signals the constraints on her decision-making and the contingent nature of this particular situation. Further, we can say that, although satisfying a real, if partial, interest, this course of action is not in her underlying interest. This designation of an underlying or implicit interest introduces a further objective (reason for action): benefits and costs considered in relation to the fleshiness and organic nature of the body, whatever individuals generally need in order to live lives that are satisfactory by their own lights, whatever those lights may be.41 Or may be in terms of the sorts of primary goods that satisfy basic needs or enhance capabilities—either basic or central. Or may simply mean a “worthwhile” life, however that is understood. We can now extend our original definition of patriarchy. Patriarchy is where men have the positional capacity to further their own interests in a way that is to the detriment of, or harms, women even in cases of compliance. But although I use the case of FGM to make the argument that compliance does not erase underlying, implicit, and perhaps competing interests, we are left with a problem: given the role played by “senior” women in the practice, what makes FGM a patriarchal practice? I’m unconvinced that talking in general terms about values, norms, hierarchies, and cultural ideals is sufficient. In answer to the question, “what makes this a patriarchal rather than any other form of social practice?” there are two obvious answers. The first is that men directly or indirectly benefit from the practice. 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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The second is that the context of decision-making is constrained in a context-transcendent and systematic fashion (and that men benefit from and women are harmed by these constraints). Before embarking on any empirical research, Lukes suggests that we need to determine the issue-scope and contextual-range of power. The former concentrates attention on the amount of issues an agent can affect: it may be a single-issue or a considerably broader scope of interests. The latter provides the theoretical tools to differentiate between power that is context-dependent and power that is contexttranscendent. To put this otherwise, context-dependent power is that which can only be exercised given the conditions that obtain at the particular point in space and time, whereas context-transcendent power is power that can be deployed across a number of contexts. Thus far we have been considering particular asymmetrical relations and social practices, context-transcendence invites us to consider that power may be exercised in a more general and systematic fashion.

Systems Up to now I have avoided talking about “patriarchy” as though it were a distinct thing, although I have described various relationships as patriarchal. The description of any relationship as patriarchal implies that there is something about this relationship that is neither unique nor particular to those involved or to their situations. I have claimed that object-complexes are organized in a systematic fashion and systematic organization means more than a rational organization of discrete object-complexes. A patriarchal relationship, interaction, or encounter would thus have systematic extension. Let us not become too embroiled in the language of structures and system. The term “social structure” was probably a metaphor drawn from architecture/anatomy and “system” from biology/physiology.42 “Structure” refers to a nonreducibility of an organism or social organization to its constituent parts and a relative permanency or fixity. A “social structure” is where people are organized in a systematic fashion according to characteristic relationships, which can include enduring bonds or established patterns of interaction regulated through norms and values. These recurrent patterns of behavior influence or limit the choices and opportunities that any subject may possess. The concept, though, acts as a form of social signifier, or, rather, is metaphorical, and signifies the systematic nature of social life without really explaining it.43 A system is characteristically defined through its nonreducibility to external forces. It is a group of independent but 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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interrelated elements comprising or arranged into a unified whole. A “social system” refers to the way people are organized through characteristic relationships and where parts contribute to the functioning of the overall whole through a process of adaptation, integration, pattern-maintenance, and goal attainment.44 Structural properties of a social system designate social conduct as it is reproduced across space and time.45 Sylvia Walby defines structure as the emergent property of social practices and then identifies six main structures that make up a system of patriarchy: patriarchal modes of production; patriarchal relations in paid work; patriarchal relations in the state; male violence; patriarchal relations in sexuality; and patriarchal relations in cultural institutions including religions, media, and education.46 The system of patriarchy is then a system of social structures and practices in which men dominate, oppress, and exploit women.47 For Young, structure denotes the confluence of institutional roles, rules, and interactive routines, mobilization of resources, and physical structures that give rise to the historical conditions within which individuals act. The concept “gender” is a useful tool to help us make sense of an implicit “patriarchal organisation”: for the description and explanation of these structures and processes that affect differential opportunities and privileges. The axes she suggests are exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and violence. Connoll’s four structural elements are power relations, production relations, cathexis, and symbolism.48 Walby and Young supply hermeneutic and analytic guides that help us bring differential patterns into focus and direct the social scientist toward underlying mechanisms (structures, processes) such as institutions, psychology, language, or economic relations of production. Minimally the term “systematic” indicates an assertion of similarity between current patterns of resemblances, be those longitudinal or latitudinal (women do 80 percent of the world’s work and own less than 1 percent of the world’s property). Maximally it looks to explain these patterns of resemblances according to underlying practices that are implied by differential opportunities and privileges. Resemblances become systematic when they are the property of underlying mechanisms, processes, or practices: if we were to change these, we would alter the distribution. The underlying processes or practices, responsible for systematic organization, may not be visible or immediately knowable but are available to the social scientist. Object-complexes, encountered by a subject through her projects, are complicated by—as we noted—race, ethnicity, class, religious conviction and practice, sexualities, mobility, age, and nationality. 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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Experience, as the dialectical interaction between facticity and bodyconsciousness, brings together these objective and subjective features within a synthetic-unity. Consequently, each subject’s point of view, her projecting body-consciousness, is quite unique, and only with some modification can “experience” provide the grounds for political action and impetus to the women’s movement. The notions of “axes” and “fields” point to nodal points, whereby economic factors, psychologies, cultural representations, and sexuality “intersect” within a subject’s situation and provoke certain problems. Almost all struggles begin from singular conflicts concerning problems that arise within experience, and we need to turn from a forensic examination of the conditions and constituent features of experience and identity to problems and conflicts. Political problems can be assessed in terms of “who, does what, to whom and by which means.” Power is the ability or capacity to achieve ends through decision-making, the setting and control of agenda, and imposition of constraints. When the interests of one are satisfied to the neglect or harm of another, the power—thus exercised—is one of domination. When the interests of a number of individuals who can be classified in one way are consistently satisfied to the neglect or harm of individuals in another group, then we would be justified in claiming that power thus exercised extends beyond this particular situation and is contexttranscendent. Classification depends on appropriateness to subject matter and relevance to research question. Critical empirical research should focus on mapping local conflicts of interest, attempt to explain how power is thus exerted, and account for context-transcendent features. The complicated features of situational object-complexes can be illuminated through constellations of concepts, with the understanding that the explanation for the appearance of the problem may be wrong, open to challenge, or to expansion through other explanations. Context-transcendent analysis will also have to use constellations of social categories—such as race, gender, class, sexuality, and mobility—despite their shortcomings, to reveal patterns of inequalities and asymmetries. The sociological concept “class” is distinct from that of economic class, as it is defined in its relationship to ownership of means of production. Due to this distinction we can account for ways that social practices, institutions, and sedimented patterns of conduct bear a relationship to economic activity even when the interests served in a particular situation are not obviously class-based. No empirical research is value neutral, and any evaluation will be built on tacit and normative assumptions. Our first normative assumption is 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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that there is an intricate tension between power, knowledge, and interest, and, because interest is inextricably linked to the well-being of subjects, the second normative assumption is that of emancipation. There is something intuitively sensible about talking about patriarchy as though it were a distinct self-maintaining thing with causal power, wherein its integrated parts adapt in order to attain its goal, which is to promote the interests of men to the detriment of women. Our everyday experience also seems to confirm patriarchal mobilization of bias: “a set of predominant values, beliefs, rituals and institutional procedures (rules of the game) that operate systematically and consistently to the benefit of certain persons and groups to the expense of others.”49 This way of talking, however, has caused friction within the women’s movement. I have argued that we begin with problems, localities, and resemblances between patterns of differential interests and from there investigate the underlying and intersecting practices that constrain or facilitate the attainment of interests. Patriarchy is then not an a priori principle, nor is it a complete concept of an object, nor indeed a complete object. However, if social practices produce enough resemblances, we may begin to think of them cohering in a more systematic fashion. If they mutually enforce one another, adapt to accommodate changes across geographies and histories whilst maintaining patterns of differential relationships, then the designation of “patriarchy” seems less absurd. I recommend that, in this case, we use the term as a regulative idea only, serving as a critical rule for our actions and judgments.50

Conclusion When we say that there is systematic oppression, we mean that across fields of social activity and practices we can detect patterns of resemblances that may be explained through underlying mechanisms. Patriarchal systems are where the pattern of resemblances across various fields shows detriment to one group and benefit to another. If women (and by dint of argument, men) can be taken to constitute a similarity class, then patriarchy is where men have the capacity to further their own interests in a way that bears negatively on the interests of women. Subordination occurs where x has power over y and exerts that power unjustly. Patriarchal subordination is the tendency for men to have power over women and to exercise that unjustly, that is, in a way that is detrimental to women’s interests. Interests are positional, explained in terms of costs (harms) and benefits, provide reasons for action, and may be explicit or implicit. So, patriarchy names 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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resembling social practices wherein men have the systematic positional capacity to further their own interests across various fields detrimental or harmful to women even in cases of compliance. It is the systematic subordination of the interests of women to those of men. Nothing about the account of an unjust and oppressive distribution of roles, duties, and responsibilities detracts from an ethical orientation that also, and at the same time, runs through many household relationships, or those of kinship, friendship, or (sexual) loving relationships. While instrumental goal-oriented competition threatens to overwhelm us and the throwaway “just-in-time” pop culture makes us feel, if not actually be, replaceable, there remains a form of exchange based on gift.51 If social relations can be formed and enervated through the gift of part of oneself to another, we can see how the gift of one’s labor and time—as a part of oneself— provides embodied counter-hegemonic experiences. If it is indeed the case that gifts induce a moral obligation or reciprocity in the recipient to maintain the social bond, then the “familial” economy, which currently depends mainly, but not solely, on the labor and time of women, sustains an ethics of intersubjectivity that, it has to be admitted, is almost always reincorporated back into patterns of instrumental exchange.52 The gift is thus not prohibited by sexual difference but occurs in many cases despite it. Yet, whether or not these individual tasks may be described as duties, responsibilities, or gifts is irrelevant to the archaic yet current distribution of them within male/female households as we move through the twenty-first century.



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We all stand on the shoulders of giants, and Woolf brings to our attention the differential distribution of time: “we have borne and bred and washed and taught, perhaps to the age of six or seven years, the one thousand six hundred and twenty-three million human beings who are according to statistics, at present in existence and that, allowing that some had help, takes time.”1 A complex pattern of diverse priorities, rhythms, and time scales expresses not only “the tension and strain between competing ways of ordering and living lives”2 but also the differential distribution of roles and expenditure associated with those roles. Time is the organizing motif for Julia Kristeva’s essay “Women’s Time.” Situating the problem of women in Europe within an inquiry on time, a time that the feminist movement both inherits and modifies, Kristeva argues that “the feminine” is too often associated with the space of generation and production rather than with the time of becoming and history. Thus, for Elizabeth Grosz, the attempt to reconsider our concept of time will lead to new concepts of nature, culture, and subjectivity. Woolf, though, also draws back “the given” to demonstrate what the naturalistic camouflage conceals of the divided and scorched terrain of sex/gender and shows that the association of the feminine with bounded space resonates across traditions, social practices, texts, and histories. Stepping carefully over the quad at an Oxbridge college, Woolf refracts our historical and positional attention across boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, determining access not just to academic privilege but also to portals of quiet study. As “public” spaces, Oxbridge colleges could be mapped according to who was allowed to walk on the grass, enter the libraries unaccompanied, or even attend lectures. Woolf traces affiliations between these obstacles to learning, the distribution of legal entitlement, property, and the family. The control of space as a way to allow or restrict access to goods, to demarcate power and status, became a fracture of resistance in the Civil Rights movement in the United States. In Afghanistan, Iran, and Iraq, women find themselves excluded from “public” spaces such as universities, schools, cafés, buses, even the roads: an ever-decreasing 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


Conclusion


bounded space. Arguably, it is the stratification of space that produces roles, specifically gender roles. By learning the place of things and commanding the spaces of the household, a woman learns about her “natural” place. Just as interior domestic space and housing design organize a flow of tasks, roles, and behaviors within the household.3 The philosophical discourse of phenomenology, synthetic-unity, and situation will only be politically productive if we think historically and geographically, which means regrouping time with space.4 This is of course not a new call—Anthony Giddens argued the same two decades ago—but, despite the sterling work undertaken by feminist geographers, we seem to have lost sight of the relationship within feminist theory. Different patterns of gendered relations occur in diverse spatial locations and have different spatial and temporal reaches. Complex variations of class, race, and ethnic relations are sedimented over time in local institutions, industrial structures, and political agencies.5 In order to link these localities within a (temporal) constitutive network of relations, we need first to reassess “global,” so that it does not carry the overblown metaphysical costs carried by the concept of the universal but does retain the notion that relations are constitutive and does conserve the aspiration to think (the Hegelian) “co-existence in diversity.” Such reassessment would include three elements: a way to think women in similar contexts across the world in different local geographical spaces rather than all women across the world; an analysis of differential relationships rather than natural characteristics; and a way to make sense of “international” that foregrounds economics, politics, and ideological processes.6 The phenomenological description of the body-as-situation preserves the existential appreciation of place, position, and location: what its like for me, here, now, stumbling with others over these obstacles in an effort to act in a way consistent with my ends, which are continually revised. Place is a spatial order and integrates where I was born and now live with the revelation of object-complexes. We can map the ways in which interests cohere through the organization of objectcomplexes. The existential meaning of spatial order introduces a way to think about the personal and the impersonal: a way to map the situation that connects the revelation of object-complexes with similar object-complexes across time: spaces. When mapping the existential meaning of spatial order, social objectification and construction of space are understood through a study of material processes and social reproduction, through interests, power, and subjection.7 David Harvey hones Raymond William’s idea of militant particularism, which is a form of political activity that has grown up around 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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working-class communities, often centered on large-scale production in particular localities. From it is drawn a place-bound politics arising from the experience of class solidarities and gender relations.8 Extrapolating from his research project bearing on industrial relations at the Rover car plant in Cowley,9 Harvey extracts the problem in moving from local interests to a contextual appreciation of obstacles and wider interests. The move from tangible solidarities understood as patterns of social life organised in affective and knowable communities to a more abstract set of conceptions that would have universal purchase involves a move from one level of abstraction—attached to place—to another level of abstraction capable of reaching across space.10

He believes that the defense and advancement of certain interests, properly brought together, are in fact in the general interest: a move across localities. Each thing, idea, person, or place can only be understood within its relationship to others. A prosaic example is that of a meal. Consider all items used in its production and trace them back to their point of production. This will reveal relations of dependence on the whole world of social labor conducted under definite relations of production and technological development. When we consume a meal it is rarely with a thought about the intricate geography of production or the myriad “social relations embedded in the spatiotemporal system that puts a meal on the table.” Harvey thus invokes a political orientation to situations that glues together this particular place, my situation here and now, within a local and then global network of relations, alliances, and movements. The ideas of power as subjection, interests, and systems provide the bridge between the local and the global. The recognition that dwelling exceeds spatial relations, that place is a function of the social imaginary constituted through competing interests, and that the particular is fastened within a global network of relations, alliances, and movements provides momentum to coalitional feminism. This is not merely an analytic process of abstraction and scale—whether an event has local, national, or international significance—but concerns the nature of the local or particular itself.11 The relationship between the local and the global is not to be defined in terms of geography or territory but as existing simultaneously and mutually constitutive. This does not, though, mean that there is an easy relationship between the local and the global, nor does it mean that there is an obvious way to bring together spatially dissonant, 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


CONCLUSION


place-based groupings—unless forms of political organization can support translocal forms of solidarity.12 Indifferent to extra-economic identities—except insofar as they enable the extraction of surplus value and promote the circulation of commodities—capitalism, if we can anthropomorphize for a moment, also exacerbates cultural differences. Differentiated markets and differentiated labor forces facilitate the extraction of surplus value and increase the range of consumption. This presumes a history of social practices, habits, and values, which may or may not come into tension with the (uneven) efficient extraction of surplus value. Indifference to extra-economic identities, combined with the exacerbation and entrenchment of hierarchical cultural differences, creates additional conflict and tension: absorbed, managed, or reconciled often within the cultural realm. What initially appeared to be paradoxes within feminism turn out to be the expression of pulls and sways, conflicts and maneuvers of modernity. In response to the global economic crises, these tensions and conflicts will become amplified, and history shows us that conservative retrenchment will reinforce hierarchies, stereotypes, and political and social asymmetries. Almost all struggles begin from singular conflicts. “People,” writes Williams, “recognise some conditions or problems they have in common and make the effort to work together to change it or solve it.” There is nothing endemically feminist about such struggles. They can range from a local attempt to get a council, to provide alleygates, to a hunt lobby marching on the UK parliament, and from protests over Shia law, to street demonstrations about rigged elections. Exceptionally feminist about some struggles is the principle that the defense and advancement of these particular women’s interests here and now should be a matter of more general concern. The challenge is to provide a crossing between one woman’s situation and another’s, between this local group of women and other groups. Working out what the connections (the cogrediences) are, is as crucial (it grounds any sense of militant particularism, for example) as it is to social-scientific and literary theory.13

In other words, to form political alliances we need to account for located situated knowledge and to map the systematic nature of interests: we need both a respect for differences and to know which differences are relevant. This is not to suggest an abstract and cognitive leap from one struggle over a local problem to universal conditions, but, rather, 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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to work out how we may draft a dynamic typography of interests and relations and—in some cases—making implicit interests explicit. “Differences and commonalities exist in relation and tension with each other in all contexts. What is emphasized are relations of mutuality, co-responsibility and common interests, anchoring the idea of feminist solidarity.”14 To uncover the basis for similarity relations cohering through numerous places will be to uncover the basis for alliance formation between disparate groups. Dialogue between liberal feminists, radical, Marxist, and postmodernist feminists will enable us to organize around problems as they emerge and impact on diverse situations: breathing life into feminist activism and hauling activism back into the academy. This problem-based, micro-political, and coalitional feminism will need to shake itself free from its political stupor, be flexible and vigilant, attuned to and learn from struggles across localities, ready to respond rapidly to conservative retrenchment, and, at the very least, to defend rights hard won.15



CONCLUSION




Introduction 1. During the Afghan election, Hamid Karzai signed a law that contained articles ruling that a woman cannot leave the house without her husband’s permission, that a woman can only seek work or education and visit the doctor with her husband’s permission, and that a woman cannot refuse her husband’s demand for sexual intercourse. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/mar/31/hamid-karzaiafghanistan-law. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was quoted as saying that one of his top priorities was to “implement sexual segregation in public transport systems and educational institutes.” Iran focus (June 21, 2005). A sex-segregated park was under development in the city of Mashad, northeastern Iran (August 20, 2005). In June 2005, a member of the G.C. was quoted as saying that women lack the intellectual capacity and understanding to stand in elections. Women who violate the dress code will be flogged, announced the Prosecutor’s Office (September 5, 2005). At the same time, Iran is a transit point and also destination for women and girls trafficked for the purpose of sexual and labor exploitation. Annual Trafficking in Persons Report (June 6, 2005). http://www.iranfocus.com/en/women/151.html. 2. He notes that although each year three million women experience violence in the form of rape, threat of rape, assault, sexual abuse, and stalking, only one quarter of local authorities, in England and Wales, offer any services against such sexual threats at all. “The Undeclared War on Women,” Trevor Phillips (March 28, 2008). http://www. newstatesman.com/life-and-society/2008/03/rape-women-violenceequality. 3. There are now only thirty-nine Rape Crisis Centers in England and Wales. Guardian (January 30, 2009). 4. Reported in The Times, June 11, 2010. 5. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (London: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 117. 6. Alexander and Mohanty make a similar point in the U.S. context: “Understanding the various constructions of self and identity during late capitalism—when transnationalization confounds the postcolonial and women’s relationship to it, and when fluid borders permit the mobility of ‘free’ market capital—is a complicated enterprise



No tes

208

7.

8.

9. 10. 11. 12.

13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19.

that cannot be simply invoked by claiming fluid or fractured identities,” introduction to Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures, ed. M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Mohanty (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), xvii. Nancy Harstock, “Foucault on Power: A Theory for Women,” in Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Linda Nicholson (New York and London: Routledge, 1990). Miranda Fricker continues: “What would it mean, for example, to be committed to the eradication of poverty, or of violence against women, without a realist commitment to the empirical proposition that, say, whole communities are periodically wiped out by famine, or that many women suffer domestic violence and other forms of attack by men?” “Knowledge as Construct: Theorizing the Role of Gender in Knowledge,” in Knowing the Difference: Feminist Perspectives in Epistemology, ed. Kathleen Lennon and Margaret Whitford (London: Routledge, 1994), 99. Christine Battersby, Phenomenal Woman: Feminist Metaphysics and the Patterns of Identity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), 127. Elizabeth Grosz, Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005), 132. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Adventures of the Dialectic, trans. Joseph Bien (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 204. These two poles are apparent in Deleuze’s book on Spinoza, where the parallelism carries the weight of the anti-dialectical argument. Gillian Howie, Deleuze and Spinoza: Aura of Expressionism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2002). Andrew Collier identifies three forms of materialism: (i) ontological, (ii) epistemological, and (iii) explanatory. He argues, as do I, that Marxism combines all three. Andrew Collier, “Materialism and Explanation in the Human Sciences,” in Issues in Marxist Philosophy: Materialism, ed. John Mepham and D-H. Ruben (Brighton: Havester Press, 1979), 35–42. Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), 29. Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), 198. C.L.R. James, Notes on the Dialectic: Hegel, Marx, Lenin (London: Allison and Busby, 1980), 47. Jay Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 54. Rosi Braidotti, Patterns of Dissonance: A Study of Women in Contemporary Philosophy, trans. Elizabeth Guild (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 17. This is the same explanatory-diagnostic power attributed to theory by David Harvey, whereby theory helps us discern (i) order in



NOTES

20. 21.

22. 23.

24. 25. 26.

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apparent confusion, (ii) underlying realities that are hidden from view, (iii) ties that bind the apparently disassociated. Noel Castree, “The Detour of Critical Theory,” in The David Harvey: A Critical Reader, ed. Noel Castree and Derek Gregory (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 255. Jean-Paul Sartre, Search for a Method, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 149. This is the same method used by Jameson when approaching the works of Brecht. See Fredric Jameson, Brecht and Method (London and New York: Verso, 2000), 8. Grosz, Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power, 2. The free spirit demands reasons while others demand faith. Friedrich Niezsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. Marion Faber and Stephen Lehman (Penguin: London, 1987), 225. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), 5. Sartre, Search for a Method, 5. This is the stated aspiration of Merleau-Ponty in the preface to Adventures of the Dialectic. 1

Production

1. The remainder of the quote runs “apart from the fake ones of conferences, congresses etc,” Jean-Luc Nancy, introduction to Who Comes After the Subject?, ed. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy (New York and London: Routledge, 1991), 2. 2. It might make more sense to call this “the value theory of labor,” because the “labor theory of value” appears to naturalize value as the thing to be explained. We shall, however, stay with the common use. 3. Jean-François Lyotard, Political Writings, trans. Bill Readings and Kevin Geiman (London: UCL Press, 1993), 114. 4. He also cites Berle, who described Marx’s political economy as outworn and refuted, and Raymond Aaron who wrote that Marxism no longer holds a place in the culture of the West. Ernest Mandel, Marxist Economic Theory (London: Merlin Press, 1977), 13. 5. Michèle Barrett, Women’s Oppression Today: The Marxist Feminist Encounter (London: Verso, 1988), xxxiv. 6. William Dowling, Jameson, Althusser, Marx: An Introduction to the Political Unconscious (London: Methuen, 1984), 12. 7. Tom Rockmore, Marx after Marxism: The Philosophy of Karl Marx (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), xiv. 8. Ibid., 8. 9. Seyla Benhabib, “Epistemologies of Postmodernism: A Rejoinder to Jean-François Lyotard,” in Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Linda Nicholson (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), 120.



NOTES

NOTES

10. There is thus no qualitative break between imperialism (the extension of national sovereignty beyond borders of state) and imperium (series of supernational organisms united under single logic of rule) along the lines suggested by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Empire (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2000). 11. Gillian Rose, Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1978), 28. 12. Rosemary Hennessy, Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism (New York and London: Routledge, 2000), 59, 69. 13. This would counter the influence of Simmel on Lukács’ account of reification. See Gillian Rose, Melancholy Science, 36. 14. See, for example, Margrit Shildrick and Janet Price, introduction to Feminist Theory and the Body: A Reader, 2–13. Also, Richard Shusterman, Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 4–6. 15. Stephen Heath, quoted in Antony Easthope, Privileging Difference, ed. Christine Belsey (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 9. 16. Body-consciousness is a term I have taken from Shusterman to designate the affective, embodied, intentional, and situated character of subjectivity. 17. Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick, introduction to Feminist Theory and the Body: A Reader, ed. Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 7. 18. Mark Poster, Sartre’s Marxism (London: Pluto Press, 1979), 22. 19. For an account of species-being and its textual significance, see Andrew Chitty “Species-Being and Capital,” in Karl Marx and Contemporary Philosophy, ed. Andrew Chitty and Martin McIvor (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 123–142. 20. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (Moscow and London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1981), 93. 21. See M. Howard and J.E. King, The Political Economy of Marx (Essex: Longman, 1975), ch. 1. 22. Michael Quante, Recognition as the Social Grammar of Species Being in Marx’ in Recognistion and Social Ontology, ed. Heikki Ikaheimo and Arto Laitinen (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010). 23. Placing the value theory at the heart of analysis is not uncontroversial, Baran and Sweezy explicitly reject value theory as a main tool of analysis, concentrating instead on monopolies and the price mechanism. Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, Monopoloy Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966), 53. Also see John Weeks, Capital and Exploitation (London: Edward Arnold, 1981), 4. 24. Larrain distinguishes three developmental stages: early 1844 (Hegel and Feuerbach as philosophical reference points); 1845—1857 (break with Feuerbach, development of historical materialism and



210

25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37.

38. 39.

211

introduction of concept of ideology); 1858 onward (begins with Grundrisse and ends with Capital). That there is continuation rather than rupture is underlined by David McLellan who, commenting on the Grundrisse, says that “Marx’s thought is best understood as a continual meditation on themes broached in 1844.” He notes particularly the concept of alienation. Marx’s Grundrisse (London: Macmillan, 1971). Ellen Meiksins Wood, Empire of Capital (London and New York: Verso, 2003), 14. Ann Foreman, Femininity as Alienation: Women and the Family in Marxism and Christianity (London: Pluto, 1977), 35. See Karl Marx, Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan. George Catephores, An Introduction to Marxist Economics (Basinstoke: Macmillan, 1989), 20. Use-value is not a “limit-concept,” except in a minimal sense to explain why some goods enter into exchange successfully and also some movements around circulation and distribution. Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (New York: Routledge, 1994), 160. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol 1 (Middlesex: Penguin, 1986), 126. In this, Marx differs from Proudhon and Engels. See John Weeks, Capitalism and Exploitation, 4–7. Karl Marx, Capital, 247–257. Duncan Foley, “Labor Power,” in A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, ed. Tom Bottomore (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 291. It is this role of domestic labor as the material basis of women’s oppression under capitalism that grounds Marxist feminism. The argument is that productive labor occurs in the family even though domestic labor is not wage labor. See Susan Himmelweit and Simon Mohum, “Domestic Labour and Capital,” Cambridge Journal of Economics 1 (1977): 15–31. John Weeks, Capitalism and Exploitation, 73. “Capitalism can be understood as a system based on the interaction of a distributional struggle between capital and labor and the aggregate demand generated by the resulting levels of wages and profits.” Ben Fine, Economic Theory and Ideology, 29. John Weeks, Capitalism and Exploitation, 100. For a proper discussion of the money form as standard equivalent, see chapter 6. William Roberts, “Abstraction and Productivity: Structures of Intentionality and Action in Marx’s Capital,” in Karl Marx and Contemporary Philosophy, ed. Andrew Chitty and Martin McIvor (London: Palgrave, 2009), 191. His third example of abstraction is connected to the division of labor within the firm and directly alters the material-technological basis of capital relations. Labor itself is abstract because it is not tied to concrete ends.



NOTES

NOTES

40. Where the product is, for example, an image or a film of the individual, we might say that the individual is exploited to the extent that there is deviation between his or her value and the values that s/he produces. For a discussion about the relationship between sexuality, pornography, and capitalism, see Alan Soble, Pornography: Marxism, Feminism and the Future of Sexuality (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986). 41. Roemer, quoted by William Roberts, “Abstraction and Productivity: Structures of Intentionality and Action in Marx’s Capital,” in Karl Marx and Contemporary Philosophy, 188. 42. This can be remedied by calculating capital advanced as well as commodities sold in prices than values, so that both inputs and outputs are bought and sold at prices that diverge from values. Ben Fine, Economic Theory and Ideology, 122. Weeks similarly argues that the theory of the equalization of the rate of profit, which transforms values into prices of production, abstracts from differences among capitals in order to demonstrate the relation between prices and values, but once the differences in productive techniques are considered the centralization and concentration of capital must be brought into the equation. John Weeks, Capitalism and Exploitation, 76. Because of this deviation, he believes that the rate of profit can be calculated in terms of ratio of surplus-value to capital advanced. Ibid., 74. 43. Jarvis considers Bauer’s claim that capitalist accumulation could continue indefinitely and Luxemburg’s response, as well as Pollock’s argument, that the concentration of capital in cartels and monopolies alters the competitive character of capitalism. Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), 56, 57. 44. For a clear and erudite engagement with Negri and Hardt on post-industrialism, see Sean Sayers, “Labour in Modern Industrial Society,” in Karl Marx and Contemporary Philosophy, 144, 150–154. Žižek argues that the central tenets of Empire remain unconvincing in the following ways: (i) over the rise of immaterial labor and the move to social interaction; (ii) the manner in which this would affect politics; (iii) whether this really does lead to a reversal and truer democracy. http://www.lacan.com/zizmultitude.htm. 45. For a study of how a theory of sign-value can complement, or indeed replace, the labor theory of value, see Jean Buadrillard, For A Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (St Louis: Telos Press, 1981). 46. For a statement of the post-fordist fallacy, see Peter Burnham, “Globalisation: States, Markets and Class Relations,” Historical Materialism 1 (1997): 150–159. 47. Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. Jeremy Shapiro (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004), 42.



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48. See Paul Walton and Andrew Gamble, From Alientation to Surplus Value (London: Sheed and Ward, 1977), 46. 49. Due to a causal connection holding between technical interest and communicative action despite the separation of spheres of action— hence the central role played by quasi-transcendental interests. 50. Michael Quante, Recognition as the Social Grammar of Species Being in Marx’ in Recognistion and Social Ontology, ed. Heikki Ikaheimo and Arto Laitinen (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010). 51. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago and London: The Chicago University Press, 1969), 87. 52. Action denotes a “being-with”; a plurality of differences and parallels can be made with Habermas’s sphere of inter-subjective communicative action. See Ibid., 7. 53. According to Habermas, Marx assimilates “work,” purposive-rational action, and technical interest to communicative action (or Arendt’s sphere of action). See Richard Bernstein, The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory (Bristol: Methuen, 1985), 193. 54. Rosemary Hennessy, Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities and Late Capitalism. (New York and Oxford: Routledge, 2000), 97. 55. Baudrillard is thus right to suggest that by placing industrial production at the center of life, Marx naturalizes capitalist organization. See The Mirror of Production (St Louis: Telos Press, 1975). 56. Shulamith Firestone, “The Women’s Rights Movement: New View.” 57. Iris Young, “Beyond the Unhappy Marriage: A Critique of Dual Systems,” in The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: A Debate on Class and Patriarchy, ed. Lydia Sargent (London: Pluto Press, 1981), 52. 58. Barbara Marshall, Engendering Modernity: Feminism, Social Theory and Social Change (Oxford: Polity Press, 1994), 34. 59. Ellen Meiksins Wood, “Capitalism and Human Emancipation,” New Left Review 1, 167 (1988): 2. 60. The material basis of women’s oppression was most obviously identified by Christine Delphy who argued for two modes of production: (a) industrial mode of production, (b) the production of domestic services in the family. For an early rejoinder that domestic labor does not constitute a distinct mode of production, see Michèle Barrett and Mary McIntosh, “Chistine Delphy: Towards a Materialist Feminism?,” Feminist Review (1979): 96, 98–99. 61. Heidi Hartmann, “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union,” in The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: A Debate on Class and Patriarchy, ed. Lydia Sargent (London: Pluto Press, 1981), 6–9. 62. This came to a head in the domestic labor argument in the 1970s and 1980s concerning the origin of sex-based distribution of labor. An early formulation of the argument can be found in Margaret



NOTES

63.

64.

65.

66. 67.

68.

69.

NOTES

Benston “The Political Economy of Women’s Liberation,” Monthly Review 21, 4 (1969), 13–27. She argues that the cause of women’s secondary status is unpaid domestic labor: the production of usevalues without exchange-values. For an early presentation of the argument that the function of the family is to maintain and reproduce labor power, see Peggy Morton, “A Woman’s Work is Never Done,” in From Feminism to Liberation, ed. E. Altbach (Cambridge: Schenkman, 1971). Catharine MacKinnon, “Feminism, Marxism, Method and the State: An Agenda for Theory,” in Feminist Theory: A Critique of Ideology, ed. Nannerl Keohane, Michelle Rosaldo, and Barbara Gelpi (Harvester: Brighton, 1982), 13. Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism (Middlesex: Penguin, 1974). It may be a mistake to strictly define Mitchell as a proponent of dual systems, given that she identifies four separate structures: production, reproduction, sexuality, and socialization. More that 2/5ths of female workforce is employed part-time compared with 9 percent of male workers. Among full-time workers, women earn 17 percent less per hour than men and the earnings for women employed on a part-time basis are 41 percent less than men employed full time. Average hourly earnings are £9.02 for women and £11.44 for men (Women and Work Commission, 2006), 724. Gayatri Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (London: Routledge, 1988), 167. Recent segmentation theory, found in political geography, points out the forces in local markets that re-gender production and reproduction and highlights the discursive and institutional channels in which power is exercised in political economy. Women working full time in the UK earn on average 18 percent less per hour than men (EOC 2005 (W WC 17 percent, see above)). One explanation can focus on gender differences in human capital. Mark Bryan and Almudena Sen argue that there is a direct relationship between housework and wages. “Does Housework Lower Wages and Why? Evidence for Britain,” ISER Working Paper, 2008. Women undertake the majority of domestic labor even when they earn more than their male partners. “Men’s power is preserved in the absence of their traditional economic dominance.” Veronica Tichenor, “Maintaining Men’s Dominance: Negotiating Identity and Power when She Earns More,” Sex Roles 53, 3 (2005): 191–192. Whether or not women are in paid work, they are still responsible for most of the work associated with household maintenance. For a summary of recent work on this, see Barbara Marshall, Engendering Modernity, 33. Hartsock argues that accumulation by expanded reproduction is dialectically intertwined with accumulation as dispossession and



214

70.

71.

72. 73. 74. 75.

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brings together class-based politics with new social movements. Nancy Hartsock, “Globalization and Primitive Accumulation: The Contributions of David Harvey’s Dialectical Marxism,” in The David Harvey Critical Reader. To avoid vapid inductive reasoning, it is a matter for social science whether in the “last instance” economic interests will govern the resolution of conflict and technological innovation will drive forward new agendas and contexts. I suspect we will find out that in almost all cases, short term, medium term, or long term, this will prove to be true. Grant notes that the Althusserian turn was enacted by most feminist Marxists, who concentrated almost entirely on the economic Marx. Judith Grant, “Gender and Marx’s Radical Humanism in The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” Rethinking Marxism 17, 1 (2005): 60. Barbara Marshall, Engendering Modernity, 97. This circumvents the problem of whether or not unpaid (domestic) labor produces use-values in the same way as remunerated labor. Barbara Marshall, Engendering Modernity, 50. See Jean Bethke Elshtain, Public Man, Private Woman, 192–193. 2

Objectivity

1. This is not to confine the scope to feminist philosophy, as feminist theorists in all fields have posed the same questions. 2. For an account of the adversarial, knockdown, method in philosophy, see Janice Moulton, “The Paradigm of Philosophy: The Adversary Method Women,” in Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives in Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology and Philosophy of Science, ed. Sandra Harding and Merrill Hintikka (Netherlands: Springer, 2004), 149–164. 3. “The subjectivity of consciousness is an irreducible feature of reality” and “However often we try to step outside ourselves, something will have to stay behind the lens, something in us will determine the resulting picture, and this will give grounds for doubt that we really are getting any closer to reality.” Thomas Nagel, The View From Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 7–8, 68. 4. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, 3 (1975): 6–18. For an exploration of embodiment and touch without vision, see Claudia Castañeda, “Robotic Skin: The Future of Touch,” in Thinking through the Skin, ed. Sara Ahmed and Jackie Stacey (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 233–235. 5. Evelyn Fox Keller, “Feminism and Science,” in Women, Knowledge and Reality: Explorations in Feminist Philosophy, ed. Ann Garry and Marilyn Pearsall (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 180. 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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6. Thomas Nagel, View From Nowhere, 68. 7. Christine Battersby, Phenomenal Woman, 126. 8. If I were to say “that it is a consequence of” rather than “follows from” would be to concede causal efficacy to cultural elements (ideas). See C.B. MacPhearson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962); and Jonathan Rée, Descartes (Allen Lane, 1974) for accounts of how social context effects (philosophical) form and content. 9. Mark Sachs, Objectivity and Insight (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), 318. 10. Thomas Nagel, The View From Nowhere, 162. 11. Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (London and New York: Verso, 1991), xii. Moira Gatens quoting David Hoy makes three similar points. Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), X. 12. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Merlin Press, 1968), 84. 13. It could be argued that Lyotard also attempts to rescue scientific practice from the complete collapse of one into the other. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), 46–47, 54. 14. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, xxiv. Adorno considered that this confusion led Lukács to relapse into idealism and accounted for his failure to found a materialist dialectic. See Gillian Rose, Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1978), 40. By extension the lapse into idealism can be explained by the failure to accord primacy to the object—be that as recalcitrant material or institutions and social process. 15. On his reconciliation of subject and object and idealism, see Gillian Rose, Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno, 40–42. Brian O’Connor, Adorno’s Negative Dialectic: Philosophy and the Possibility of Critical Rationality (Cambridge, MA; and London: MIT Press, 2004), 8–13. Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction, 190–192. For an alternative perspective, see Gibson, who argues that Adorno was guilty of the same conflation apparent in his suggestion that the only solution to the instrumentality of production would be individual (aesthetic) activity. Nigel Gibson, “Rethinking an Old Saw: Dialectical Negativity, Utopia and Negative Dialectic in Adorno’s Hegelian Marxism,” in Adorno: A Critical Reader, ed. Nigel Gibson and Andrew Rubin (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 274. 16. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, 69. 17. “If alienation is understood not as a state or condition but as an activity, this means that it is not predetermined. Activity implies



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20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

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uncertainty, the possibility of failure, of openness. Alienation understood as activity is always in dispute.” John Weeks, “A Note on Alienation,” Historical Materialism 1 (1997): 146–149. Chris Arthur, “Hegel’s Master-Slave Dialectic and a Myth of Marxology,” in Marx Myth and Legends, http://marxmyths.org/ chris–arthur. Originally published in New Left Review (1983): 67–75. A case could be made that Hegel himself distinguishes between “positive alienation” and “negative alienation”: the former indicating a relation to externalization and the latter to an estranged form of externalization. Arthur contrasts Vergegenständlichung (“good” objectification) to Entäusserung (alienated objectification) to make this distinction. It could be argued instead that Entäusserung is more neutral than this and indicates a historical relationship to alien forms of objectivity, note that Entfremdung is more closely rooted to alienation through its root “frem.” See M. McCloughan, Marx and The Phenomenology of Spirit, Marx and Philosophy Seminar (2007) http:// www.marxandphilosophy.org.uk/assets/files/society/word-docs/ mccloughan2007.doc. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, 69. “Reification and the Sociological Critique of Consciousness,” History and Theory 4, 2 (1965): 196–211. Norman, Geras. “Fetishism in Marx’s Capital,” New Left Review 1, 65 (1971): 31–53. John Weeks, Capital and Exploitation, 41. It is exactly this that makes the Deleuzian abstract body so problematic. I explore this in “Becoming-Woman: A Flight into Abstraction,” Deleuze Studies 2 (2009): 83–106. Norman Geras, “Essence and Appearance: Aspects of Fetishism in Marx’s Capital,” New Left review 65 (1971): 77. Ibid., 75. Karl Marx, Capital: Volume One, trans. Ben Fowkes (Middlesex: Penguin, 1986), 167, 169. Ibid., 1064. Jorge Larrain, The Concept of Ideology (London: Hutchinson, 1979), 56. Karl Marx, Capital: Volume Three, trans. David Fernbach (Middlesex: Penguin, 1981), 311. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), 167. Ibid., 169. Axel Honneth. Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea, ed. Martin Jay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 19–20. “The German Ideology,” in Selected Writings, 164. Karl Marx, Capital: Volume One, 165, 67. Note the translation of fantastic as “phantasmagoric.”



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36. Karl Marx, Capital Volume One, 209, 1054, 1056; and Capital: Volume Three, ch. 48. 37. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, 93. 38. Ibid., 89. 39. Timothy Hall, “Reification, Materialism and Praxis: Adorno’s Critique of Lukacs,” unpublished, 6. 40. Rosemary Hennessy, Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities and Late Capitalism, 104. 41. Gillian Rose, “How is Critical Theory Possible? Theodor W. Adorno and Concept Formation,” Sociology in Political Studies XXIV (1976): 75. This is a more accommodating reading than Gibson’s note that Adorno did not consider fetishism to be a fact of consciousness. See Gillian Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology (London: Verso, 2009), 47. 42. Reasons to question his Marxist credentials range from his later political conservatism, his analysis of the production of surplus value, role of rationality vis-à-vis capitalist accumulation, and universality of the proletariat. 43. Schnadelbach cites this as one reason for Adorno’s deteriorating influence in the Federal Republic. Note other reasons being (i) the critical problem facing philosophers is no longer logical positivism but “philosophies of difference”, (ii) influence of analytic philosophy, (iii) impact of critiques of “mentalism” (Wittgenstein/Ryle) and Jameson’s refutation. Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism Adorno, or, The Persistence of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 1990), 233. 44. See Lou Turner for a discussion of this and the “origins” of the rationality of capitalist development, “Demythologizing the Authoritarian Personality,” in Adorno: A Critical Reader, ed. Nigel Gibson and Andrew Rubin (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 167. 45. Frederic Jameson, Late Marxism, 233. 46. Ibid., 22. 47. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, tran. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1986), 148–151; and “Grundrisse,” in Selected Writings, 367–369. 48. John Weeks, Capitalism and Exploitation, 27. 49. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 146. 50. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. J. Cumming (London: Verso, 1986), 7. 51. Frederic Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno, or, The Persistence of the Dialectic, 23. 52. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 190. 53. Ibid. 54. See Lorrain quoting Polantzas, Jorge Larrain, The Concept of Ideology, 46. 55. This would be the line adopted by liberal feminists to ground equal opportunity and fair-distribution arguments.



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56. Raymond Williams, Culture and Materialism (London and New York: Verso, 1980), 34. 57. Gillian Rose, Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno, 42. 58. “The implication of this is that ‘the ideology of a simple time falls with the ideology of a simple history, to be replaced by the notion of a complex historical time constituted by the ‘differential times’ of the different levels.” Norman Geras, “Althusser’s Marxism: An Assessment,” in Western Marxism: A Critical Reader, ed. New Left Review (London: Verso, 1978), 253. 59. Michel Foucault, Remarks on Marx: Conversations with Duccio Trombardori, trans. R. James Goldstein and James Cascaito (New York: Semiotext(e), 1991), 66. 60. Frederic Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno, or, The Persistence of the Dialectic, 46. 61. Rae Langton, “Beyond A Pragmatic Critique of Reason,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 71, 4 (1993): 365. 62. Catharine MacKinnon, “Feminism, Marxism, Method and the State: An Agenda for Theory,” in Feminist Theory: A Critique of Ideology, ed. Nannerl Keohane, Michelle Rosaldo, and Barbara Gelpi (Brighton: Harvester, 1982), 28. 63. Ibid. 64. See Rae Langton, “Beyond A Pragmatic Critique of Reason,” 365. 65. Susan Haslanger, qtd. in Rae Langton. Ibid., 375. Martha Nussbuam identifies seven criteria: instrumentality; denial of autonomy; inertness; fungability; viability; ownership; denial of subjectivity (or subjugated subjectivity). Sex and Social Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 66. L. Stanley and S. Wise, Breaking Out: feminist consciousness and feminist research (London: Rutledge, 1993); qtd. in Ann Oakley, Experiments in Knowing: Gender and Method in Social Sciences (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), 35. 67. For a refutation of the idea of a true but unjustified belief, see Evangelina Papadaki, “Objectification and Assumed Objectivity,” Episteme 5 (2008): 239–250. 68. Helen Longino, Science and Social Knowledge: Values and Objectivity in Scientific Inquiry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 62. See also Ismay Barwell, “Towards a Defence of Objectivity,” in Knowing the Difference: Feminist Perspectives in Epistemology, ed. Kathleen Lennon and Margaret Whitford (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 79–94. 69. On the pornography of romance, see Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (London: The Woman’s Press, 1979); and Alan Soble, Pornography: Marxism, Feminism and the Future of Sexuality (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 74.



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70. Alan Soble, Pornography: Marxism, Feminism and the Future of Sexuality, 61. 71. Rosemary Hennessy, Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities and Late Capitalism, 103. 72. Ibid., 90. 73. According to Butler, the symbolic became a technical term for Lacan in 1953 and became his way of compounding mathematical (formal) and anthropological uses of the term. It is explicitly linked to regulation. Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), 43. 74. Alison Stone, Luce Irigaray and the Philosophy of Sexual Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 4. 75. Moira Gatens, Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), ix. 76. However, she also writes that women’s exploitation is based upon sexual difference—a cultural interpretation of sexual difference as hierarchical difference. See Stone’s presentation of the discussion between Butler and Braidotti concerning the relationship between the social and the symbolic, Luce Irigaray and the Philosophy of Sexual Difference, 69. 77. Judith Butler, Undoing Gender, 44, 48. 78. Quoting Adrienne Rich, Braidotti links reflection on the sexuation of subjects to the possibility of new ways of thinking. Rosi Braidotti, Patterns of Dissonance: A Study of Women in Contemporary Philosophy, trans. Elizabeth Guild (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 7. 79. “A plane of immanence, as thought by philosophy, is not the ground or foundation of life, the plane of immanence is the thought of that which produces any ground. In the case of the ‘cogito’ or subject for example, which is produced as a ground, Deleuze and Guattari argue that there is presupposed a plane of immanence: relations of doubt, knowledge, certainty, matter and thinking.” Claire Colebrook, Deleuze (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 77. Also Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchill (London and New York: Verso, 1994), 33–60. 80. This is to echo the point made by Susan Bordo—the fact that sex/ gender never exhibits itself in pure form but in the context of lives shaped by multiplicities of influences, and it does not necessarily delegitimate abstractions or generalizations pertaining to sex/gender. Susan Bordo, “Feminism, Postmodernism, and Gender Scepticism,” in Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Linda Nicholson (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), 150. 81. See Rosi Braidotti, Patterns of Dissonance: A Study of Women in Contemporary Philosophy, 23–25, for a brilliantly clear exposition of the reasons why Lacan privileges philosophy and the deflationary psychoanalytic move. It should also be noted that it is just not the case that philosophy is “anchored in values whose rationality is not in question.” 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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82. For an account of different histories of white, black, and thirdworld feminisms in the inheritance of post-fifteenth-century EuroAmerican hegemony, see Chandra Mohanty, Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 49–53. 83. Gillian Rose, Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno, 48. 84. Mark Sachs, Objectivity and Insight (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), 318. 3

Reason

1. Sandra Harding, “Feminism, Science and Anti-Enlightenment Critiques,” in Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Linda Nicholson (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), 87. 2. Jane Flax, “Postmodernism and Gender Relation,” in Feminism/ Postmodernism, 43. 3. Braidotti describes this pseudo-choice as the choice posed by liberals/ neo-humanists between humanism and a void. Rosi Braidotti, Patterns of Dissonance: A Study of Women in Contemporary Philosophy, trans. Elizabeth Guild (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 2. 4. This idea of a pseudo-choice is borrowed from Lloyd. See Christine Di Stefano, “Dilemmas of Difference: Feminism, Modernity, and Postmodernism,” in Feminism/Postmodernism, 73. 5. For a pretty convincing account of this, see Rosi Braidotti, Patterns of Dissonance: A Study of Women in Contemporary Philosophy, 17–25. 6. For a similar approach, see Christine Battersby, Phenomenal Woman: Feminist Metaphysics and the Patterns of Identity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), 125–147. 7. It is a tension within Foucauldian inspired feminism as well as psychoanalytically indebted strands. 8. Christine Di Stefano summarizes the case against postmodernism: (i) postmodernism expresses the interests of white privileged men; (ii) the objects of postmodernism’s various critical and deconstructive efforts have been the creation of a similarly partial constituency; (iii) mainstream postmodernism has remained blind to and insensitive of its own prejudices; (iv) makes feminist politics impossible. Qtd. in Sandra Harding, “Feminism, Science and Anti-Enlightenment Critiques,” in Feminism/Postmodernism, 86. 9. Max Horkheimer, “The End of Reason,” in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978), 27. 10. Spinoza, Ethics and Treatise on the Correction of the Intellect (London: Everyman, 1993), part 5. David Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 2:3:3:4 (415). 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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11. I choose to begin with Kant rather than Descartes for three main reasons: (i) the description of the Cartesian subject as the Enlightenment model of subjectivity par excellence reduces the complexities of the history of (Enlightenment) philosophy; (ii) the assessment of the Cartesian method as premised on a crude distinction between mind and body is undermined from within Descartes’s own texts; (iii) Kant inaugurates critical (and transcendental) philosophy. It would be interesting to compare and contrast Lacan’s psychoanalytic analysis of the Cartesian cogito with Jonathan Rée’s contextual approach. McGhee takes issue with reading Descartes as a crude dualist. Descartes talks about three primitive notions: the soul considered by itself; the body considered by itself; and the human being—une seule personne. This third notion is of a union and thus exempt from problems of interaction associated with the soul in the body thesis. Michael McGhee, “Locations of the Soul,” Religious Studies 32 (1996): 205–221. 12. I shall not be pursuing the relationship between the Kantian transcendental subject and feminist critiques of rationality. For an informed and lucid account of the problematic relationship between Kant’s accounts of the subject and the feminine, see Christine Battersby, The Phenomenal Woman, 61–80. 13. The psychoanalytic approach to language, the production of meaning and effect on rational discourse per se constitutes a third. 14. This narrative—“Western Rationality from Plato–Kant via Descartes”—is very misleading, and it is imperative that we unpick such monolithic appraisals and grand historical flourishes. See for instance Stephen Clark, “Plotinian Dualisms and the ‘Greek’ Ideas of the Self,” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 36, 4 (2009): 554–567. 15. Genevieve Lloyd, The Man of Reason: Male and Female in Western Philosophy (London: Methuen, 1984). 16. In the Kantian case, the illusion of the view-from-nowhere is maintained by (i) the derivation of transcendental concepts from Aristotelian syllogistic forms of reason; (ii) their necessary application to the manifold of sense perception; (iii) the formal “I think that,” which accompanies all experience. However, as concepts and the manifold are brought together through the imagination, it would be ill-advised to say that somehow imagination is neglected. 17. For an exemplary collection on gender and logic, see Representing Reason: Feminist Theory and Formal Logic, ed. Rachel Falmagne and Marjorie Hass (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), especially Val Plumwood, “The Politics of Reason: Towards A Feminist Logic,” 11–43. I shall pursue problems with the principle identity in chapter 5. 18. Elizabeth Spelman, Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought (London: The Woman’s Press, 1988), 1–5. Fredric Jameson, Persistence of the Dialectic, 16.



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19. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” in Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870’s, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale (New Jersey and London: Humanities Press International, 1994), 83, discussed in Peter Dews, “Adorno, Poststructuralism and the Critique of Identity,” in The Problems of Modernity: Adorno and Benjamin (London: Routledge, 1989), 11. 20. Elizabeth Grosz, “Sexual Difference and the Problem of Essentialism,” in The Essential Difference, ed. Naomi Schor and Elizabeth Weed (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), 85. 21. “Bodies and Knowledges: Feminism and the Crisis of Reason,” in Feminist Epistemologies, ed Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), 204. 22. Gellner makes this distinction quite clear in “Relativism and Universals”; W. Newton-Smith demonstrates the implausibility of relativism in “Relativism and the Possibility of Interpretation”; both in Rationality and Relativism, ed. Martin Hollis and Steven Lukes (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988). 23. “Dilemmas of Difference: Feminism, Modernity, and Postmodernism,” in Feminism/Postmodernism, 73. 24. It could be argued that these two positions are adopted by Luce Irigaray and Michelle Le Doeuff. See Michelle Walker, “Silence and Reason: Women’s Voice in Philosophy,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 71, 4 (1993): 401. 25. David Harvey, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1996), 360. 26. Renée Herbele, introduction to Feminist Interpretations of Theodor Adorno, ed. Renée Hebele (Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 6. 27. Ibid., 9. 28. Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), 14. 29. Jay Bernstein, “Art Against Enlightenment: Adorno’s Critique of Habermas,” in The Problems of Modernity: Adorno and Benjamin, 52. 30. Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction, 24. 31. Jay Bernstein, “Art Against Enlightenment: Adorno’s Critique of Habermas,” in The Problems of Modernity: Adorno and Benjamin, 51. 32. This would be a problem for two reasons: (i) modelling social relations of domination on nature disguises nuanced patterns of domination and interests; (ii) women then become the singular bearer of a way out, such as with “becoming-woman” of Deleuze. 33. Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction, 14. 34. Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin Of Negative Dialectics (London and New York: The Free Press, 1977), 59. 35. Jürgen Habermas, “The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment: Re-Reading Dialectic of Enlightenment,” trans. Thomas Levin, New German Critique 26 (1982): 17.



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36. “Culture, exalting the unique as the resistive element amid a universal sameness of things is an ingredient rather than an opponent of mass culture; the unique becomes the shingle of monopoly.” Max Horkheimer, “The End of Reason,” in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, 47. 37. This is the main point of departure from Saussurian/Lacanian inspired accounts of meaning. 38. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, 6. 39. Jay Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics, 4–5. For a way to apply some of these ideas to bureaucracy and the public policy, specifically Higher Education, see a lucid and accessible account by Michael Apple. M. Apple, “Education, Markets and an Audit Culture,” Critical Quarterly 47: 1–2 (2005), 11–29. 40. This is to take issue with Hewitt’s analysis of the Dialectic of Enlightenment as an analysis of structures of representation and domination. Andrew Hewitt, “A Feminine Dialectic of Enlightenment? Horkheimer and Adorno Revisited,” in Feminist Interpretations of Theodor Adorno. 41. Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin Of Negative Dialectics, 173. 42. Jay Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics, 83. 43. Ibid., 78. 44. Although this might be a helpful schematic it does rather misrepresent the critical role of commodity production, which is—as we outlined in the first chapter—a social relationship between people. Christine Battersby, Phenomenal Woman: Feminist Metaphysics and the Patterns of Identity, 128. 45. Yvonne Sherratt, “Instrumental Reason’s Unreason,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 25, 4 (1999): 33. 46. The decisions of bureaucracy are frequently reduced to . . . drafts submitted to it; the bureaucratic way of thinking has become the secret model for thought that are allegedly still “free” Negative Dialectics. 47. Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics, 59. 48. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, xiii. 49. Jay Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics, 22–23. Bernstein introduces four characteristics of the grammar of moral insight. 50. Frederic Jameson, Late Marxism Adorno, or, The Persistence of the Dialectic, 101. This is the point of intersection between Freud, Marcuse, and Adorno. 51. Ibid., 99. 52. Osborne accentuates the relationship between the concept of identity at play and its Nietzschean anthropological roots in the drive to self-preservation. Peter Osborne, “A Marxism for the Postmodern? Jameson’s Adorno,” New German Critique 56 (1992): 180. 53. Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin Of Negative Dialectics, 49.



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54. Karen Green, “Reason and Feeling: Resisting the Dichotomy,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 71, 4 (1993): 389. 55. Lois McNay, Foucault and Feminism: Power, Gender and the Self (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), 25. 56. Quoted in Christine Battersby, Phenomenal Woman: Feminist Metaphysics and the Patterns of Identity, 134. 57. S.J. Barnett, The Enlightenment and Religion: Myths of Modernity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 1–7. 58. For a remarkable and extensive exploration of women’s contribution to this time, see Women, Gender and Enlightenment, ed. Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 59. S.J. Barnett, The Enlightenment and Religion: Myths of Modernity, 4. 60. For an assessment of how the oppression of women in Europe had a direct bearing on the treatment of women in the colonies, see Amina Mama, “Sheroes and Villains: Conceptualizing Colonial and Contemporary Violence Against Women in Africa,” in Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures, ed. M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Mohanty (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), 48–53. 61. In the “Excursus on the Obsolescence of the Production Paradigm,” Habermas traces the way in which the concept of reification became detached from Marxist theories of production and poses his communicative rationality as a way to establish a relationship between practice and rationality. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), 75. 62. “Are ‘Old Wives’ Tales Justified?,” in Feminist Epistemologies, ed. Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), 217–245. 63. For a discussion of “the sentimental man,” see Philip Carter, “Tears and the Man,” in Women, Gender and Enlightenment, 156–173. 64. See section on gender and reasoning in Women, Gender and Enlightenment, 190–258. 65. For a recent account of the value of standpoint epistemology, see Paula Moya, “Postmodernism, ‘Realism’ and the Politics of Identity: Cherrie Moraga and Chicana Feminism,” in Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies and Democratic Futures, 135. 66. This would mean approaching science with a feminist sensibility rather than from separate cognitive principles. Longino suggests the following: ontological heterogeneity; complexity of interaction; applicability to human needs; diffusion or decentralization of power. Helen Longino, “In Search of Feminist Epistemology,” Monist 77, 4 (1994): 476. 67. Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. Jeremy Shapiro (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004), 305. 68. David Harvey, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1996), 233.



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69. Jay Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 90. 70. Richmond Lattimore, trans. and introduction, The Odyssey of Homer (London and New York: Harperperennnial, 2007), 186 (XII: 45). 71. Rebecca Comay, “Adorno’s Siren Song,” in Feminist Interpretations of Theodor Adorno, 41–68. 72. Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin Of Negative Dialectics, 61–62. 73. Ibid., 62. 74. Peter Osborne, “A Marxism for the Postmodern?,” 190. 75. Marianna Papastephanou describes this—where reason has to step outside itself to criticize its effects—as the paradox of reason, which she explains as a consequence of underlying Freudian or psychoanalytic commitments. “ ‘Ulysses’ Reason, Nobody’s Fault: Reason, Subjectivity and the Critique of the Enlightenment,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 26, 6 (2000): 50. 76. Jürgen Habermas, “The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment: Re-Reading Dialectic of Enlightenment,” trans. Thomas Levin, New German Critique 26 (1982): 30. 77. That commodity fetishism, subsumptive thinking, the constitution of the subject and class division together with ideological concealment are already anticipated in sacrificial substitution does not make them the same thing. 4

Essentialism

1. Elizabeth Grosz, “Sexual Difference and the Problem of Essentialism,” in The Essential Difference, 85. 2. Sylvia Walby, Gender Transformations (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 15. 3. Susan Bordo, “Feminism, Postmodernism, and Gender Scepticism,” in Feminism/Postmodernism, 142. 4. Kate Soper, “Feminism, Humanism and Postmodernism,” Radical Philosophy 5, 11 (1990): 13. 5. Chandra Mohanty, Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 107. 6. The term “mediation” appears in anti-essentialist accounts, but according to this view “cultural mediations shape how we inhabit our bodies and so shape how these bodies develop and act. Ultimately our bodies just are something shaped, mediated and inhabited via cultural representations.” Alison Stone, Luce Irigaray and the Philosophy of Sexual Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 35. 7. Christine Battersby, Phenomenal Woman: Feminist Metaphysics and the Patterns of Identity, 16. 8. Vikki Kirkby, “Corporeal Habits: Addressing Essentialism Differently,” Hypatia 6, 3 (1991): 4–24. 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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9. Cressida Heyes, Line Drawings: Defining Women Through Feminist Practice. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000). 10. See, for instance, Uma Narayan, “Essence of Culture and a Sense of History: A Feminist Critique of Cultural Essentialism,” Hypatia (1998): 86–106. 11. Elizabeth Spelman, Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought (London: The Woman’s Press, 1988), 1–5. 12. Ibid., 3. 13. Teresa De Lauretis, “The Essence of the Triangle or, Taking the Risk of Essentialism Seriously: Feminist Theory in Italy, the U.S., and Britain,” in The Essential Difference, ed. Naomi Schor and Elizabeth Weed (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), 8. 14. Elizabeth Grosz, “A Note on Essentialism and Difference,” in Feminist Knowledge: Critique and Construct, ed. S. Gunew (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), 3. 15. Alison Stone, Luce Irigaray and the Philosophy of Sexual Difference, 37. 16. Jay Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics, 296. 17. Christine Battersby, Phenomenal Woman, 25. 18. J. Reid, “Natural Kind Essentialism,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 80, 1 (2002): 62–74. 19. The principle references for this would be Hilary Putnam, Refutation of Conventionalism and Mind, Language and Reality; William Quine, Ontological Relativity and Other Essays; and Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity. In The Disorder of Things, Dupré introduces these issues. See also Christopher Norris, Hilary Putnam: Realism, Reason and the Uses of Uncertainty (New York: Palgrave, 2002). 20. John Dupré, The Disorder of Things: Metaphysical Foundations of the Disunity of Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 63. 21. See Hugh Mellor, Natural Kinds in Matters of Metaphysics (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1991); and J. Reid. 22. L. Wetzel.,” Is Socrates Essentially a Man?” Philosophical Studies 98, 2 (2000): 206. 23. John. Dupré, The Disorder of Things, 5. 24. Although I do not endorse the remainder of her argument, this point is well made against Derridean poststructuralism. Christine Delphy, “Rethinking Sex and Gender,” in Feminist Theory Reader, ed. C. McCann and S.K. Kim (London: Routledge, 2003), 53. 25. Eli Hirsch, The Concept of Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 269. 26. C. Hill. Rethinking Identity and Metaphysics: On the Foundations of Analytic Philosophy (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 48–52. 27. Natalie Stoljar, “The Politics of Identity and the Metaphysics of Diversity: Conceptions of Essentialism in Feminist Philosophy,” in



NOTES

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37.

38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47.

NOTES

The Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy, ed. Daniel Dahlstrom 8 (2000): 24. Lucius Outlaw argues that race is also a cluster concept. Race and Philosophy (London and New York: Routledge, 1995). Natalie Stoljar, “The Politics of Identity and the Metaphysics of Diversity: Conceptions of Essentialism in Feminist Philosophy,” 28. H.H. Price, Thinking and Experience (London: Hutchinson, 1969), 32. J.F. Jones, “A Modest Realism,” Philosophy in the Contemporary World 5, 2/3 (1998): 5–21. Roy Bhaskar, A Realist Theory of Science (London: Verso, 1997), 209. J.M. Vienne, “Locke on Real Essence and Internal Constitution,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 93 (1993): 142. Diane Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference (London: Routledge, 1989). Judith Butler, Undoing Gender, 186. “The duality of subject and object must be critically maintained against thought’s inherent claim to be total” Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 175. For a discussion of materialism within feminist theory, see Momin Rahman and Anne Witz, “What Really Matters: The Elusive quality of the Material in Feminist Theory,” Feminist Theory 4, 3 (2003): 243–261. Anne Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 22. Raymond Williams, Culture and Materialism, 39. Christine Delphy, “Rethinking Sex and Gender,” 62. That male philosophers have claimed all sorts of disreputable things about women’s natures does not lead to the conclusion that women, therefore, have no natures. For a discussion of this sort, see Marjorie Miller, “Essence and Identity: Santayana and the Category ‘Women,’ ” Transaction of the Charles Pierce Society 30, 1 (1994). Bhaskar describes this collapse of the ontological into the epistemological as an epistemic fallacy. Anne Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality, 44, 57. Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution,” in Feminist Theory Reader, 42–45. Catharine MacKinnon, “Feminism, Marxism, Method and State,” 23. For a discussion about truth-values with reference to appearance and essence, see Norman Geras, “Fetishism in Marx’s Capital,” New Left Review, 31–53. J.M. Vienne, “Locke on Real Essence and Internal Constitution,” 150. For an explanation of why this puts an individual in a nonidentical relationship to the universal, see Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin Of Negative Dialectics, 84.



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48. For an example of this argument, see “How to Change Reality: Story vs Structure: A Debate Between Rom Harré and Roy Bhaskar,” in After Postmodernism, 22–39. 49. Herbert Marcuse, Negations: Essays in Critical Theory (London: Free Association Books, 1988), 72. 50. Although I am also using the term “essence” to indicate a more emergent relationship, the term “origin” refers us to historical processes. “The principles of philosophical contemplation are recovered in the dialectic which is inherent in origin”: Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London and New York: Verso, 1998), 45, 46. 51. For a clear articulation of this in feminist epistemology, see Lorraine Code, “Taking Subjectivity into Account,” in Feminist Epistemologies, ed. Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), 15–48. 52. Rosi Braidotti, “The Politics of Ontological Difference,” in Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis, ed. Teresa Brennan (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 415–427. 5

Identity

1. Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper, “Beyond Identity,” Theory and Society 29, 1 (2000): 1–47. 2. Jean-Luc Nancy, introduction to Who Comes After the Subject? ed. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy (New York and London: Routledge, 1991), 4. 3. Judith Butler, “Gender Trouble, Feminist Theory and Psychoanalytic Discourse,” in Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Linda Nicholson (New York and London: Routledge, 1990). 4. Margaret Whitford, “Luce Irigaray’s Critique of Rationality,” in Feminist Perspectives in Philosophy, ed. Morwenna Griffiths and Margaret Whitford (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), 112. 5. Irigaray, This Sex which is Not One, 26, qtd. in Whitford. Ibid. 6. Val Plumwood draws a distinction between dichotomy (P & ¬P) and dualism whereby the terms are hierarchically organized. Val Plumwood, “The Politics of Reason: Towards A Feminist Logic,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 71, 4 (1993): 436–462. 7. For Dorothy Ollkowski, Deleuze is central to the postmodern move because he links the analysis of existing conditions to the critique of the structure of representation in order to produce the ruin of representation. By premising representation on identity, he advocates a general rejection of the principle of identity. Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1998), 2. 8. Val Plum Wood, “The Politics of Reason: Towards A Feminist Logic,” 447. 9. Vincent Descombes, “Apropos of the ‘Critique of the Subject’ and of the Critique of this Critique,” in Who Comes After the Subject? ed. 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


NOTES

10. 11. 12.

13.

14.

15.

16. 17.

18.

19.

20.

NOTES

Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy (New York and London: Routledge, 1991), 133. Chela Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 120–121. I shall bracket the relationship postulated between drives and the principle of identity as it would divert the flow of argument. Paula Moya, “Postmodernism, Realism and the Politics of Identity,” in Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures, ed. M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Mohanty (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), 127. Adorno’s views about ideological critique are fully developed in Negative Dialectics, which is concerned with the connection between identity thinking, liberal ideology (especially positivism), and the exchange principle. Deborah Cook, “Critical Stratagems in Adorno and Habermas: Theories of Ideology and the Ideology of Theory,” Historical Materialism 6 (2000): 67–87. Peter Dews, “Adorno, Poststructuralism and the Critique of Identity,” in The Problems of Modernity: Adorno and Benjamin (London: Routledge, 1989), 3. This is to take issue with the hyperbolic tenor of Nina Power’s otherwise wonderful book, One Dimensional Woman (Winchester and Washington: O Books, 2009), 26. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 100–104. The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, 497. This takes us directly onto Heidegger’s terrain. Although Adorno rejects the ontic/ontological, there is still a sense in which “being speaks” and is differentiated between two poles. This is not, though, a semantic enquiry into the “meaning of Being.” See Alastair Morgan, Adorno’s Concept of Life (London and New York: Continuum, 2007), 47–50. According to Heidegger, “A = A” is also a relationship of one A to another A. “The more fitting formulation of the principle of identity ‘A = A’ would accordingly mean not only that every A is itself the same, but that every A is itself the same with itself. Sameness implies the relation of ‘with,’ that is a mediation, a connection, a synthesis: the unification of a unity.” Overlooking what appears to be a simple equation between “equality” and “sameness,” we will interrogate the claim that mediation is a relationship of sameness. Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Chicago and London: The Chicago University Press, 2002), 25. It could be argued that, for Adorno, as the “is” does not have any reference, or independent meaning, it merely wields the subject of judgment and its predicate together in a state of affairs on an intentional plane. Even if the materialist thesis is not entirely convincing, this is clearly not what Adorno had in mind. Joanna Hodge, “The Exclusion of Women from Philosophy,” in Feminist Perspectives in Philosophy, ed. Morwenna Griffiths and Margaret Whitford (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), 153. 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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21. Christine Battersby, Phenomenal Woman: Feminist Metaphysics and the Patterns of Identity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), 61. 22. This seems to beg the question: can arguments for realism be bolstered by the recalcitrance of the material world in scientific practice? 23. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 187. 24. See Alistair Morgan, Adorno’s Concept of Life, 39. 25. In Hegel: Three Studies, Adorno writes that it is hardly possible to do justice not only to the experience of consciousness but also to the embodied experience of human beings without having incorporated something of Hegel’s philosophy (Translated by Shierry Nicholsen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 2). Hegelian roots of contemporary feminism can be witnessed in feminism’s appropriation of the conceptual nature of the real, in the idea that otherness constitutes identity, and in the claim that (social) relations are historical, determine the relationship of self to other, and to freedom. 26. Note that Kant’s “Refutation of Idealism” seems to suggest this priority. For a discussion of Adorno’s Kant, see Brian O’Connor, Adorno’s Negative Dialectic: Philosophy and the Possibility of Critical Rationality, 20ff. Bozzetti offers a different account and argues that Adorno should be understood not as concerned with the “thingin-itself” but rather as concentrating on the problems of Hegel’s conceptual subjectivity insofar as it fulfils the ideal of objectivity. Maura Bozzetti, “Hegel on Trial: Adorno’s Critique of Philosophical Systems,” 293. 27. Brian O’Connor, “The Concept of Mediation in Hegel and Adorno,” 92. 28. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 186. 29. Brian O’Connor describes this as Adorno’s transcendentalism: experience can only be explained when the priority of the object is assumed. Adorno’s Negative Dialectic: Philosophy and the Possibility of Critical Rationality, 55–57. This transcendentalism fits well with Bhaskar and distinguishes both forms of realism from the transcendental empiricism of Deleuze. For a comparison of Bhaskar and Deleuze, Gillian Howie, “Becoming-Woman: A Flight into Abstraction,” 90–94. 30. Deborah Cook, “Adorno, Ideology and Ideology Critique,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 27, 1 (2001): 2. 31. “The Concept of Mediation in Hegel and Adorno,” Bulletin of Hegel Society of Great Britain, 93. 32. Alistair Morgan, Adorno’s Concept of Life, 56. 33. For direct relevance of this to sex/gender, see Carrie Hull, “The Need in Thinking: Materiality in Theodor W Adorno and Judith Butler,” Radical Philosophy 84 (1997): 25, 32–33. 34. Theodor Adorno, “Subject and Object,” in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, 499. 35. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 178. 36. Ibid., 175.



NOTES

NOTES

37. Ollman defines contradiction as a union of two or more internally related processes that simultaneously support and undermine one another, “Putting Dialectics to Work: The Process of Abstraction in Marx’s Method,” Rethinking Marxism 3, 1(1990): 49. 38. He continues: “Matter and not matter, positive and negative changes, repulsion and attraction, life and death, mind and matter, masculine and feminine, capital and labor are constituted as oppositions around which conceal a whole host of transformative activities that both reproduce the oppositions and restructure the physical, biological and social world.” Ibid., 54. 39. In this way, dialectics could help to make sense of the self as a composite site and host for various life-forms or help find content for claims to intersectionality. 40. Tom Rockmore, Marx after Marxism: The Philosophy of Karl Marx (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 187. 41. Alistair Morgan, Adorno’s Concept of Life, 43. 42. Brian O’Connor, Adorno’s Negative Dialectic: Philosophy and the Possibility of Critical Rationality, 67. 43. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 5. 44. Note here relation to Sartre in Being and Nothingness concerning the objectivity of appearances, which, trying to avoid talk of essence, still needs to explain a particular bundle through “the principle of the series.” 45. First used by Benjamin—who compares ideas of an object to constellations orbiting stars. 46. Gibson cites Buck-Morss’s similar assessment of the hidden positive moment in Adorno’s negative dialectics. Nigel Gibson, “Rethinking an Old Saw,” 267. Brian O’Connor states: “In this respect at least, Adorno offers a conceptualism which simply fails to cohere with the specifically anti-idealist materialism he espouses in subject-object mediation.” “The Concept of Mediation in Hegel and Adorno,” Bulletin of Hegel Society of Great Britain, 94. 47. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 162. 48. Ibid., 10. 49. This is to draw a distinction between exchange (as barter etc.) and the historical moment of the exchange in capitalism. Frederic Jameson, Late Marxism Adorno, or, The Persistence of the Dialectic, 239–241. Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction, 167. 50. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 12. This offers a way to read Adorno that does not reduce his political project in a binary fashion: totality & social/anti-totality & individual. See Nigel Gibson, “Rethinking an Old Saw: Dialectical Negativity, Utopia and Negative Dialectic in Adorno’s Hegelian Marxism,” 274. 51. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 19. Adorno continues by writing that positivity runs counter to thought and that it takes friendly persuasion by social authority to accustom thought to positivity. This



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52. 53. 54. 55.

56.

57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

68. 69.

70.

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idea was the impetus behind my Deleuze and Spinoza book. On the affirmation of life, also see end of Lecture 14 in Metaphysics: Concepts and Problems, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), 111. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 175. Ibid., 6. Ibid., 156. Where rational identity respects the non-identity of concept and object as well as the concept’s longing to be identical to the thing. Deborah Cook, “Adorno, Ideology and Ideology Critique,” Philosophy and Social Criticism, 15. See Belmonte, 19. I shall come back to this when considering phenomenology. Nina Belmonte, “Evolving Negativity: From Hegel to Derrida,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 28, 1 (2002): 19. Brian O’Connor, Adorno’s Negative Dialectic: Philosophy and the Possibility of Critical Rationality, 32–33. Deborah Cook, “Adorno, Ideology and Ideology Critique,” Philosophy and Social Criticism, 4. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 146. Caroline Ramazanoglu, Feminism and the Contradictions of Oppression (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), 23. Sora Hen offers an Adornian account of intersectionality as both an analytical framework for critical approaches to race and gender and a way of reading. “Intersectional Sensibility and the Shudder,” in Feminist Interpretations of Adorno, 173–192. Morgan makes a case against O’Connor’s coherentism. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 164. Ibid., 167. Paula Moya, “Postmodernism, Realism and the Politics of Identity, ” 136. Hegel, Encyclopedia Logic, quoted Tom Rockmore, Marx after Marxism: The Philosophy of Karl Marx, 188. There are, though, some obvious philosophical problems: the assumption that because one term is defined in relation to another it “includes” that term within it; the content of the term is evacuated and reference is incidental; and related to this is conceptual idealism. All this developed by and through Saussure, Derrida, and French post-structuralism. Thomas Nagel, The View From Nowhere, 40. The concept of contradiction is also central to his study of Proudhon, to his analysis of industrial society in the Grundrisse, and between use value and exchange-value elaborated in A Contribution to Political Economy. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 5. For a discussion of Adorno and contradiction, Mauro Bozzetti, “Hegel on Trial: Adorno’s Critique of Philosophical Systems,” in Adorno: A Critical Reader, 297–299.



NOTES

NOTES

71. For Adorno’s account of the way works of art present the relationship between subjectivity and social objectivity, see Gillian Rose, Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1978), 139. 72. Richard Shusterman, Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 23. 73. Alastair Morgan, Adorno’s Concept of Life, ch. 5. 74. Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction, 170. 75. For Braidotti, experiences of dissonance are sites of fracture and mobility, which provide the conditions for new possibilities. 76. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 153. 77. Ibid., 152. 78. Brian O’Connor, Adorno’s Negative Dialectic: Philosophy and the Possibility of Critical Rationality, 54–55. 79. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 149. 80. Göran Therborn, “After Dialectics,” New Left Review 43 (2007): 3. 6

Non-Identity

1. Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), 43. 2. The idea of such a crisis has been around since at least Husserl’s “Philosophy and the Crisis of the European Man” and “The Crisis of Philosophy.” 3. Note Butler’s account of Braidotti’s Metamorphoses in Undoing Gender, 192. 4. “What is it to be displaced at home, which is surely the case for Palestinians at the current time? My wager is that Braidotti would not dismiss these scenes of suffering as suffering but that methodologically she would seek to identify these sites of fracture and mobility as conditions for new possibility.” Ibid., 195, 198. 5. Within Deleuzian scholarship there is a complicated relationship between Humean empiricism, matter, repetition, and regularities. See John Rajchman, The Deleuze Connections (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). James Williams, Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003). Gilles Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature, trans. Constantin Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press), preface 1989, 1991. 6. Undoing Gender, 217. 7. Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), 4. 8. Ibid., 52. 9. See Daniel Martinez Mestiza, Gender: Notes Towards a Transformative Masculinity. http://www.beyondmasculinity.com/articles/martinez. php. Discussed in Jonathan Dean, “ ‘The Lady Doth Protest Too 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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10. 11.

12.

13.

14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23.

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Much?’: Theorizing Disidentification in Contemporary Gender Politics,” Working Paper in Discourse Analysis 24 (2008). José Muñoz, Disidentification: Queers of Colour and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). Žižek argues that it might make more sense to question whether there is first passionate attachment or first primordial dis-attachment latterly expressed in a need for fantasmatic passionate attachment. Slavoj Žižek, “From ‘Passionate Attachments’ to Dis-Identification,” Umbr(a) (1988). http://www.lacan.com/zizekpassionate.htm. Considering similar trajectories, Claudia Leeb attempts to marry Lacan and Adorno, the Real and the nonidentical, in order to retain an outline of a subject that is both open and capable of political transformation. Although interesting, there are a number of irresolvable tensions, such as that between Lacan’s concept of the Real and Adorno’s notion of mediation, and Lacanian or poststructuralist inspired difference and Adorno’s account of meaning and, indeed, intentionality. For us the role of the feminine in Lacanian analysis needs such significant reconstruction that it is doubtful whether much could be left. “Toward a Theoretical outline of the Subject: The Centrality of Adorno and Lacan for Feminist Political Theorizing,” Political Theory 36, 3 (2008): 351–376. Although this is not the place to engage with Derridean deconstruction, I believe that the attempt to blend Lacanian psychoanalysis with poststructuralist accounts of meaning is premised on a flawed account of the relationship between meaning and intentionality. Nina Power, One Dimensional Woman, 26. Herbert Marcuse, “A Note on Dialectic,” in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978), 449. Ibid., 445. Herbert Marcus, Negations: Essays in Critical Theory, trans. Jeremy Shapiro (Free Association Books: London, 1988), 40. “Today the fate of the labour movement, in which the heritage of this philosophy was preserved, is clouded with uncertainty.” Ibid., 42. Sartre famously denied this description. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Itinerary of a Thought,” in Between Existentialism and Marxism. (London: Verso, 1983), 35, 42. For a rejoinder to Derrida’s criticism of the way in which Sartre conceptualizes the totalizing individual, see Mark Poster, Sartre’s Marxism (London: Pluto Press, 1979), 45–47. Katherine Morriss, Sartre (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), xi. Sartre in discussion with Raymond Aron and Beauvoir, as recounted by her in Prime of Life, trans. P Green (London: Deutsch and Weidenfeld, 1960). See Pravasen Pillay, The Black Soul of Jean-Paul Sartre, http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/61/142.html; and Katherine Morris, Sartre, 5.



NOTES

NOTES

24. Richard Schmitt, “Phenomenology,” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Paul Edwards (London: Macmillan, 1967), 135–137. 25. T.E. Wilkerson, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason: A Commentary for Students (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 180–190. 26. Heidegger takes us back to the etymological roots, in Greek, of the word phenomenology: it means the “logos” of the “phenomenon,” or “that which shows itself.” 27. For a discussion of Dennett’s criticism of this attempt to move beyond the appearance/reality dualism, see Katherine Morriss, Sartre, 35–37. 28. Husserl, he writes, attempted to do this by introducing the idea of hyle or pure flux of experience and passive synthesis. 29. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Philosophical Ontology, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York and London: Routledge, 2003), 3. 30. The phenomenology of being is “ontological,” in the sense that we speak of the ontological proof of St Anselm and Descartes. 31. Katherine Morriss, Sartre, 67. 32. This nonreflective cogito is the condition of the Cartesian Cogito. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Philosophical Ontology, 9. 33. Christina Howells, “Sartre and the Deconstruction of the Subject,” in Cambridge Companion to Sartre, ed. Christine Howells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 331. 34. For a useful discussion of negation in Hegel, Adorno, and Derrida, see Nina Belmonte, “Evolving Negation Philosophy: From Hegel to Derrida,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 28, 1 (2002): 18–58. 35. Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), 111. 36. Saury, in his rather Husserlian study of Sartre’s nonbeing, considers the semantic field of negation and introduces two main distinctions: phenomena that suggest the object has been within the reference area at an earlier time (disappearance, removal etc), and phenomena that do not suggest an earlier occurrence of an object (absence, void, hole). He then proposes three essential concepts of negation: (i) lack, (ii) otherness, (iii) obstruction. Jean-Michel Saury, “The Phenomenology of Negation,” Phenom Cogn Sci 8 (2009): 256, 260. 37. For a discussion of this, see Katherine Morriss, Sartre, 28–30. 38. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Philosophical Ontology, 34. 39. Ibid., 36. 40. Ibid., 39. 41. Ibid., 42. 42. Ibid., 48. 43. Ibid., 45. 44. Ibid., 48. 45. Ibid., 57. 46. Ibid., 61. 47. Mary Warnock, “introduction,” to Psychology of the Imagination, by Jean-Paul Sartre (London: Methuen, 1972), ix.



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48. “When I run after a streetcar, when I look at the time, when I am absorbed in contemplating a portrait, there is no I. There is consciousness of the streetcar-having-to-be-overtaken, etc., and non-positional consciousness of consciousness. In fact I am then plunged in the world of objects; it is they which constitute the unity of consciousnesses; it is they which present themselves with values, with attractive and repellant qualities—but me, I have disappeared. There is no place for me on this level. And this is not a matter of chance, due to a momentary lapse of attention, but happens because of the very structure of consciousness.” Jean-Paul Sartre: An Existentialist Theory of Consciousness, trans. Forrest Williams and Robert Kirkpatrick (New York: The Noonday Press, 1957), 49. 49. The notion of embodiment depends on this relationship between a perceptual field and a body-subject. It should not be confused with Kant’s possession thesis—although that too is rather innocuous. 50. Christina Howells, “Sartre and the Deconstruction of the Subject,” in Cambridge Companion to Sartre, 327. 51. Pédéraste, translated as pederast, originates from the Greek usually to refer to a man who has an erotic relationship with a male adolescent. Although the terms are not synonymous, pederasty is often confused with pedophilia but also with “homosexual.” 52. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Philosophical Ontology, 82. 53. Ibid., 100. 54. Ibid., 102. 55. Ibid., 113. 56. Ibid., 94, n 9. 57. Ibid., 504. 58. Ibid., 569. 59. Mark Poster, Sartre’s Marxism, 22–31. 60. Trent Schroyer, “introduction,” The Jargon of Authenticity by Theodor Adorno, trans. Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986). 61. Theodor Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986), 18. 62. Nina Belmonte, “Evolving Negativity: From Hegel to Derrida,” Philosophy and Social Criticism, 20. 63. Theodor Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, 6. 64. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Philosophical Ontology, 504. 65. Joseph Catalano, Thinking Matter: Consciousness from Aristotle to Putnam and Sartre (London: Routledge, 2000), 2. 66. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 76. 67. Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, 122. 68. Peter Berger and Stanley Pullberg. “Reification and the Sociological Critique of Consciousness,” History and Theory, 204. 69. For an exploration of the ethical dimension in negative dialectics and its relation to Levinas, see Asher Horowitz, “ ‘By a hair’s



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breath’: Critique, transcendence and the ethical in Adorno and Levinas,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 28, 2 (2009): 213–248. Sex and Gender

1. Aamir Mufti, “The Aura of Authenticity,” Social Text 64, 18, 3 (2000): 91. 2. This is Mohanty’s first analytic presupposition. I shall focus on the second and third in the following chapter. Feminism Without Borders, 22. 3. A.J. Munby documented his secret but brief relationship and marriage to a domestic servant Hannah Cullwick. His papers contained over 600 photographs of working women. Carol Wolkowitz, “The Working Body as Sign: Historical Snapshots,” in Constructing Gendered Bodies, ed. K. Backett-Milburn and L. McKie (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2001), 88. 4. Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters (London: Routledge, 2000), 40. 5. Given the work of Toril Moi, Iris Marion Young, and Judith Butler, to name but a few, this is of course not so untimely. 6. Toril Moi, What is a Woman: And Other Essays? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 6. 7. That said, the language of justice and liberty were often intertwined with that of maternal care and benevolence. Karen Green, “Reason and Feeling: Resisting the Dichotomy,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 71, 4 (1993): 392. 8. Mary Wollstonecraft, The Vindication of the Rights of Women, ed, Barbara Taylor (London: Everyman, 1992). J.S. Mill, On the Subjection of Women, http://www.constitution.org/jsm/women. htm. For an innovative reading of Wollstonecraft, Ashley Tauchert, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine (New York: Palgrave, 2002). 9. For a helpful discussion of flaws in the sociobiological argument, Alison Assiter, Enlightened Women: Modernist Feminism in a Postmodern Age (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 112–116. 10. Edward O. Wilson, “Man: From Sociobiology to Sociology”; Robert Trivers, “The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism”; and Lionel Tiger and Robin Fox, “The Human Biogram”; all in Arthur Caplan ed. The Sociobiology Debate: Readings on Ethical and Scientific Issues (New York and London: Harper and Row, 1978). Sadly, sociobiology appears to be making something of a revivial. 11. Joan Scott Gender, “A Useful Category of Historical Analysis in Gender and the Politics of History,” American Historical Review 19, 5 (1986): 1053–1075. 12. Moi traces this dimorphism back to Walter Heape, who inferred essential biological differences from structural and functional reproductive dimorphism. 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


7

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13. Read Alison Stone and Stella Sandford for a terrific exchange on French feminist materialism. Radical Philosophy 145 (2007). 14. Richard Stoller first presented this distinction in a paper presented at the 23rd Psychoanalytic Congress in Stockholm in 1963, further expanded in 1968. See Toril Moi, What is a Woman: And Other Essays?, 21–23; and Moira Gatens, Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality, 5–6. 15. Jane Flax, “Postmodernism and Gender Relations,” in Feminism/ Postmodernism, ed. Linda Nicholson (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), 45. 16. Qtd. Stevi Jackson and Sue Scott, “Putting the Body’s Feet on the Ground: Towards a Sociological Reconceptualization of Gendered and Sexual Embodiment,” in Constructing Gendered Bodies, ed. K. Backett-Milburn and L. McKie (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 17. 17. Susan Bordo, “Feminism, Postmodernism, and Gender Scepticism,” in Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Linda Nicholson (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), 133–156. Iris Marion Young, On Female Experience: ‘Throwing like a Girl’ and other Essays (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 7. 18. Bodies that Matter (Butler, 1993), The Bodies of Women (Diprose, 1994), Volatile Bodies (Grosz, 1994), Sexy Bodies (Grosz and Probyn 1995), Flexible Bodies (Martin, 1995), and Imaginary Bodies (Gatens, 1996). I would add Shildrick’s Leaky Bodies (1997). 19. That it is shame rather than sympathy, unease, or empathy is problematic. Sartre deploys shame to indicate a pre-reflective awareness of dependency. This could be developed without incurring the negative penalties associated with shame. 20. Iris Marion Young, On Female Experience: ‘Throwing like a Girl’ and other Essays, 7. 21. Christina Howells, “Sartre and the Deconstruction of the Subject,” in The Cambridge Companion to Sartre, 336. 22. Joseph Catalano, Thinking Matter: Consciousness from Aristotle to Putnam and Sartre (London: Routledge, 2000), 109. 23. Katherine Morris, Sartre, 97. 24. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Philosophical Ontology, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York and London: Routledge, 2003), 330. 25. Ibid., 333. 26. Ibid., 63. 27. Iris Marion Young, On Female Experience: ‘Throwing like a Girl’ and other Essays, 18. 28. Ibid., 19. 29. Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick, Introduction to Feminist Theory and the Body: A Reader, ed. Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 8.



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30. Christine Battersby, Phenomenal Woman: Feminist Metaphysics and the Patterns of Identity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), 36. 31. Richard Shusterman, “Somaesthetics and The Second Sex: Pragmatist Reading of a Feminst Classic,” Hypatia 18, 4 (2003): 118. 32. For an account of Beauvoir’s dialogue with those who became identified as French poststructuralist feminists, Elaine Stavro, “The Use and Abuse of Simone de Beauvoir: Re-Evaluating the French Poststructuralist Critique,” The European Journal of Women’s Studies 6 (1999): 263–280. 33. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Philosophical Ontology, 367. 34. Ibid., 401–434. 35. Ibid., 386–401. 36. Of relevance to this, Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 37. Joseph Catalano, Thinking Matter: Consciousness from Aristotle to Putnam and Sartre, 175. 38. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Philosophical Ontology, 378. 39. Ibid., 94. 40. Psychology of the Imagination (London: Methuen, 1972), 32. 41. Ibid., 72. 42. Two main reservations: the morphological scheme is marked as masculine, and that is the way in which the phallus controls signification in discourse. Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), 73. 43. Peter Strawson, The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (London: Routledge, 1989). 44. Leo Fretz, “Individuality in Sartre’s Philosophy,” in Cambridge Companion to Sartre, 67–100. He also agues that the account of consciousness in Being and Nothingness diverges from that in the earlier Transcendence of the Ego. 45. Sartre goes into more depth about this relation in his psychological portraits, for example, Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983). 46. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Philosophical Ontology, 74. 47. Iris Marion Young, On Female Experience: ‘Throwing like a Girl’ and other Essays, 18. 48. One way to develop the relationship between the internal and the external is through Bourdieu’s notion of habitus as embodied history and second nature, where apparently subjective actions have objective significance. As it is supposed to emerge from the structural socioeconomic position in which the individual finds herself, the idea of habitus also encourages an objectivist description of the



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49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

56.

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field of operation. Although a useful device to articulate various intersections such as power, social relations, beliefs-values-desires, institutions-rituals, discourse-language, and material practices, we must dig more deeply to make sense of the systematic organization of the habitus. For ways to think situation in terms of habitus, see Moira Gatens, Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), ix; Toril Moi, What is a Woman: And Other Essays?, 281, 305–306, 309–310; Anthony King, “Structure and Agency,” in An Introduction to Social Theory, ed. Austin Harrington (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 223; and Lois McNay, “Gender, Habitus and the Field: Pierre Bourdieu and the Limits of Reflexivity,” Theory, Culture and Society 16, 1 (1999): 95–117. Ibid., 533. Toril Moi, What is a Woman: And Other Essays?, 105. Here Dupré’s analysis of the social characteristic of classification is relevant to what counts as “a female body.” Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex,’ 2. David Harvey, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1996), 231. Ibid., 295. Martin Jay, “Is Experience Still in Crisis? Reflections on a Frankfurt School Lament,” in Cambridge Collections, ed. Tom Huhn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 131. David Harvey, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference, 277. 8

Patriarchy

1. Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick, Introduction to Feminist Theory and the Body: A Reader, ed. Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 8. 2. This means that body is not identical to situation. There is facticity, lived and revealed by body-consciousness. 3. David Harvey, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1996), 231. 4. Ibid., 295. 5. Joan Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis in Gender and the Politics of History,” American Historical Review 19, 5 (1986): 41. 6. Sylvia Walby, Gender Transformations (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 19. 7. Christine Delphy, Close to Home (Hutchinson, 1984), 17. 8. Heidi Hartmann, “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union,” in The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: A Debate on Class and Patriarchy, ed. Lydia Sargent (London: Pluto Press, 1981), 15. 10.1057/9780230113435 - Between Feminism and Materialism, Gillian Howie


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NOTES

9. Carol Ehrlich, “The Unhappy Marriage of Feminism and Marxism: Can it Be Saved?” in The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: A Debate on Class and Patriarchy. Ibid., 123. 10. Sylvia Walby, Theorizing Patriarchy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 2. 11. Christine Battersby, Phenomenal Woman: Feminist Metaphysics and the Patterns of Identity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), 15. 12. Moira Gatens, Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 7–8, 11, 17. 13. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1993), 35. 14. Rosi Braidotti, Patterns of Dissonance: A Study of Women in Contemporary Philosophy, trans. Elizabeth Guild (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 139. 15. They write that 99.94 percent of CEOs, 97.3 percent of top earners, 87 out of 100 U.S. senators and 376 out of 435 representatives in the United States are men. Rory Dicker and Alison Piepmeier, Catching a Wave (Northeastern University Press, 2003), 4. 16. Jane Flax, “Postmodernism and Gender Relations,” in Feminism/ Postmodernism, ed. Linda Nicholson (New York and London: Routledge, 1990). 17. The model of psychoanalytic explanation would also be a priori commitment. There is much more to be said about what a critical empirical approach would look like. Of particular use here would be Benhabib’s argument for the reversibility of perspectives and situatedness of communicative ethics, as well as Mies’s study of lacemakers of Narsapur, India, referenced in Mohanty. Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992). Chandra Mohanty, Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 149–152. 18. Roger Sibeon, Rethinking Social Theory (London: Sage, 2004), 3. 19. Steven Lukes, Power: A Radical View (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2005), 91. 20. Ibid., 85. 21. (i) Power is polysemic: it has multiple and diverse meanings, (ii) power denotes a range of different objects or referents that have nothing in common except the name, (iii) different concepts of power have their place in local language games, (iv) power is an essentially contested concept. 22. This distinction cannot be cleanly mapped onto “pouvoir” and “puissance,” as both terms can be used in both senses, although the former is often used to denote the exercise of power and puissance the capacity. 23. Steven Lukes, Power: A Radical View, 63. 24. Young quotes Nancy Folbre, Who Pays for the Kids? Gender and the Structures of Constraint (New York: Routledge), ch. 2. Iris Marion



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25. 26. 27.

28.

29. 30.

31.

32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37. 38.

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Young, On Female Experience: “Throwing like a Girl” and other Essays (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 21. William Connolly, The Terms of Political Discourse (Oxford: Martin Robertson 1983), 73. Steven Lukes, Power: A Radical View, 37. Similar to Arendt’s definition of power, whereby power is the condition enabling a group of people to think and act in terms of a means-ends category. This risks neutralizing the relational aspect of interest: some interests are realized to the detriment of others. Compare this with Hobbes’s argument that power is a matter of instrumentality (means to future ends) but also a matter of profound and perpetual (often zero-sum) competition that needs to be kept in check. In his discussion of power, Lukes describes an equivalent dimension as behavioral, due to the identification of decision-making, action, and interest. David Held, Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas (London: Hutchinson, 1980), 297. This argument is neatly portrayed in the Ralph Miliband and Nicos Poulantzas exchange in the late 1960s, early 1970s. According to Poulantzas, Miliband underestimated the effects of the state as an objective system of regular connections, a structure and system, where men are ciphers or bearers of the structure. Instead, he personalized and individualized social action. In response, Miliband noted that Poulantzas tended toward structural determinism and underestimated the contributory effects of members of the ruling classes. In terms of our problematic, this amounts to an argument about whether patriarchy is an objective system of regular connections, structures, and systems and men merely bearers of that structure, or whether individual men contribute—in a knowing way—to the maintenance of the system. “Debate between Rom Harré and Roy Bhaskar,” in After Postmodernism: An Introduction to Critical Realism, ed. José López and Gary Potter (London and New York: Althone Press, 2001), 24. Steven Lukes, Power: A Radical View, 56. Roger Sibeon, Rethinking Social Theory, 142. The argument suggested by Hindess seems to take the form that, due to specific theoretical costs of believing there to be real interests, we would be advised to consider each interest as “real” as any other. Chandra Mohanty, Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity, 24. WHO website http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheet/fs241/ en/ September 24, 2008. I am ruling out cases where the girl resists but is made to go through with the procedure. Steven Lukes, Power: A Radical View, 90.



NOTES

NOTES

39. Barry Hindess, “Interests in Political Analysis: Power and Belief,” in Power, Action, Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge, ed. John Law (London: Routledge, 1986), 117. 40. Ibid., 122. 41. Steven Lukes, Power: A Radical View, 81. 42. “The word structure comes from Latin word for ‘build’ and it can mean both the act of building something and the end-product of a building process. It was widely used from the fifteenth century to refer to any actual physical building and to the geometrical balance of forces that gave this building its particular shape or form. A structure was a building that owed its distinctive characteristics to the organization of its parts in some specific way.” John Scott, “Where is Social Structure,” 79. See also López, who argues that the concept of structure in social theory was made possible by thinking of social organization in terms of concepts taken from a number of distinct fields: geometry, mechanics and thermodynamics, architecture, and biology. José López, “Metaphors of Social Complexity,” 91. Both in After Postmodernism: An Introduction to Critical Realism, ed. José López and Gary Potter (London and New York: Althone Press, 2001). 43. José López, “Metaphors of Social Complexity,” After Postmodernism: An Introduction to Critical Realism, 91. 44. “The social structure and State are continually evolving out of the life-processes of definite individuals.” Karl Marx, “The Materialist Conception of History,” in Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). 45. Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), xxi–xiii. 46. Sylvia Walby, Theorizing Patriarchy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 177. 47. Sylvia Walby, Gender Transformations (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 5–6. 48. Robert Connell, The Men and the Boys (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000). 49. Morton Baratz and Peter Bachrach, Power and Poverty: Theory and Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970). Discussed in Steven Lukes, Power: A Radical View, 21. 50. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1983), 480. B537/A 509. 51. For a discussion of gift in the context of sexual difference, see Rosalyn Diprose, The Bodies of Women: Ethics, Embodiment and Sexual Difference (New York: Routledge, 1994), 66–72. 52. Derrida, of course, argues that the idea of moral obligation is too contractarian: a gift is a gift and nothing else. It could be argued that, in turn, Derrida’s critique of Mauss depends on a contractarian understanding of moral obligation. See Rosalyn Diprose for an alternative rendering of this. Ibid., 69.



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1. Virginia Woolf, “A Room of One’s Own,” in Selected Works (London: Wordsworth, 2005), 632. 2. Sylvia Walby, Gender Transformations (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 9. 3. David Harvey, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1996), 227. 4. For an account of the gendered and spatialized character of the city, the family and the nation. see Ruth Fincher, “Space, Gender and Institutions,” Gender, Place and Culture 14, 1 (2007): 8. 5. Sylvia Walby, Gender Transformations, 7–9. 6. M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Mohanty, “introduction” to Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies and Democratic Futures, ed. Alexander and Mohanty (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), xix. 7. David Harvey, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference, 231. 8. Raymond Williams, Resources of Hope (London: Verso, 1989), 242–243, 249. There have been a number of critical essays—notably by Deutsche, Massey, Morris—arguing that Harvey falls foul of objectivism and economic reductionism. For a rejoinder, see Nancy Harstock, “Globalization and Primitive Accumulation: The Contributions of David Harvey’s Dialectical Marxism,” in The David Harvey Critical Reader, 171–173. 9. David Harvey, “Militant Particularism and Global Ambition: The Conceptual Politics of Place, Space and Environment in the Work of Raymond Williams,” Social Text 42 (1995): 69–72. 10. David Harvey, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference, 33. 11. There is an argument that Williams and Harvey illegitimately elide the local, the particular, the global, and the universal. As a consequence of this elision, they demand a cognitive leap into abstraction: from this local struggle to universal conditions. I am not convinced by this as both would see that local action is constituted through networks of power and activities, and the preceding spatially extended networks of alliances and networks are central to an adequate grasp of particular struggles. See David Featherstone, “Towards the Relational Construction of Militant Particularisms: Or Why the Geographies of Past Struggles Matter for Resistance to Neoliberal Globalisation,” Antipode (2005): 250–271. 12. Noel Castree, “The Detour of Theory,” in The David Harvey: A Critical Reader, 263. Slavoj Žižek puts this more trenchantly, “Politics without organizationl form of the party is politics without politics, so the answer to those who want just the (quite adequately named) ‘new social movements’ is the same answer as the answer of the Jacobins to the Girondin compromisers: ‘You want revolution without revolution!’ . . . And again, the limit of these movements is that they are not



Conclusion

NOTES

political in the sense of the universal singular: they are just ‘one-issue movements’ lacking the dimension of universality—that is, they do not relate to the social totality.” “Have Michael Hardt and Antonio Negro Rewritten the Communist Manifesto for the Twenty First Century?” Rethinking Marxism 13, 3–4 (2001): 198. 13. David Harvey, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference, 285. 14. Chandra Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity, 242. 15. See Stephanie Gilmore, Feminist Coalitions: Historical Perspectives on Second–Wave Feminism in the United States (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008). The foreword, written by Sara Evans, begins “The essays in this collection offer irrefutable evidence that feminists in the 1970s formed numerous and highly diverse coalitions across lines of race, class and political ideology. They shatter the stereotype of a white middle-class, politically rigid movement and in doing so they make us wonder why that stereotype has had such power across the decades.”



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Abstraction 5, 20, 37, 42, 48, 52, 72, 83, 212n40 Adorno, Theodor 7, 38, 47–49, 63, 69–80, 84–85, 111–129, 134–135, 148–152, 176, 182, 186, 216n15 Dialectic of Enlightenment 63, 69–78, 80, 84, 85, 111 Negative Dialectics 51, 110, 111, 112 see also concepts, dialectics, identity, identity thinking, non-identity, reification Alienation 7, 26, 33, 37, 38–40, 45, 47, 76, 149–150, 167, 171 216n17, 217n19 sexual 53–55 vis reification 39–41 Althusser, Louis 3, 51–52, 219n58 Arendt, Hannah 24–25, 213n52, 243n27 Bad Faith 145–147, 148, 150 Barrett, Michèle 12 Battersby, Christine 3, 36, 74, 88, 92, 99, 115, 180 Beauvoir, Simone de 14–15, 56, 110, 153, 157, 161, 163, 166 Being 6, 15, 39, 105, 113, 116, 137–152, 170 being-for-others 136, 161–162, 166–168, 170 being-in-itself and being-for-itself 137, 140, 144–147, 161, 189 nonbeing 140–143, 236n36

phenomenon of being and being of phenomenon 138–140, 148 Bhaskar, Roy 3, 99–100, 105–106 Bodies 4, 14, 25, 99, 101–102, 112, 123–124, 132, 146, 156–157, 161–171, 180–182 existential relation 163–164 psychic body 162–163, 168–171; Butler and Sartre compared 170–171 as situation 162, 164–165, 167, 170, 173–174, 177, 179, 202 Body Consciousness 8, 14, 32, 128, 162, 166, 168, 179, 198 Bourdieu, Pierre 240n48 Braidotti, Rosi 115, 132, 134, 181, 220n81 Butler, Judith 4–5, 6, 49, 57, 101, 102, 132–133, 159, 170, 174–175, 181 Camus, Albert 155 Capitalism 12–13, 16–34, 43, 46, 52, 69, 76–77, 129, 181, 188, 190, 204 conflicts 19, 20 consumption and sign-value 22–23 exploitation 7, 9, 13, 17, 21, 23, 25–28, 33, 34, 43, 46, 76, 78, 83, 197; defined 19, 23 gender-analysis of 28, 31–32, 214n65 gender and race in 29, 32, 33 postfordism 22–23, 212n46 see also labour theory of value



Inde x

INDEX

Class economic 7, 18–20, 28–29, 73, 85, 96, 155–156, 181–182, 190–191, 202–203 sex 21, 28, 96–104, 159 see also classification, concepts, natural kinds Classification 92–93, 95, 98, 103, 104, 124 as androcentric 66–67, 90–92 and capitalism 73–74 and interests 68, 73, 85, 91–95, 98, 102–103, 198–199 through resemblances 92; defined 95–96, 106 see also class, concepts, natural kinds Commodity 17, 26, 42, 71–72, 78, 80, 85 see also capitalism, production, reification Concepts 66–69, 72, 90–91, 135, 142 cluster 96–97, 101–102, 104 constellation 120–121, 122–125, 134–135, 151; and intersectionality 175, 198, 233n61 cover-concepts 128–129 of ‘woman’ 97–102, 156; homogeneity error 155–156, 181–182, 183 Consciousness 137–140, 146, 147 nihiliating structures of 143–145, 146 patterns of bad faith 146–148 pre-reflective (cogito) 139–140, 144, 145, 153, 162, 170, 171, 237n48 and forms of production 15 see also intentionality, subject, synthetic unity Contradiction 126–128, 198, 211n37, 232n37 Deleuze, Gilles 15, 58, 115, 208n12, 217n24, 229n7, 231n29, 234n5

Delphy, Christine 27, 95, 103, 159, 180, 231n61 Descartes, Renee 36, 79, 115, 136, 139, 143–144, 158, 162, 222n11 Dialectical materialism 3–7, 123, 125, 129, 179, 182, 208n13 Dialectics 6–7, 111–112, 115, 125–126; defined 118–122 mediation 16, 26, 32, 88, 115, 116–117, 123 negative dialectics 116–123; defined 9 subject and object 3, 6, 36, 53, 73, 112–113, 115–118 Difference(s) 90–91, 165, 204 and equality 87–88 vis hierarchies 88–89, 104, 110 see also sexual difference Dupré, John 94–95, 103 Embodiment 13–15, 23, 65, 136, 156–157, 160–162, 177 see also situation Empiricism 4, 72, 74, 88, 98–99, 105, 115–116, 138 Enlightenment 8, 11, 36, 64–66, 69–70, 79–83, 87, 176 and women 11, 79–81 Essence 45, 104, 106–107, 125, 152 and appearance 41, 43–44, 56, 105, 152 essentialism defined 89–91, 105; criticisms of 93–94 nominal essence 99, 100–101, 103, 105 political essentialism 92, 112 real essence 93, 99, 100–101, 105 as social substance; 41–45, 104–105 Ethics 118, 153, 200 and disenchantment 73–74, 75 Existentialism 133–153, 161–172 criticisms of 133–136, 148–151 see also consciousness, facticity, phenomenology, synthetic unity



264

Exploitation 19, 20, 23, 25 defined 33 and oppression 25, 26, 27, 33 in sex industry 21, 25 Facticity 54, 145–147, 149, 164, 167, 198, 241n2 Defined 171 Feminism and Marxism 27–34, 53–54 see also dual and unified systems Feminist Theory 2, 8, 11, 21, 33, 41, 59, 75, 87, 91, 101, 118, 204–205 coalitional 203–205, 246n15 dual systems and unified systems 28–32, 33–34 epistemology 55, 80–82 as ideological 2 and modernity 11–12 as plane of immanence 58, 220n79 postmodern 2–3, 12, 63, 87 as racist 2, 91, 155–156, 181–182 radical 27 ‘second-wave’ 27–32, 157 ‘third-wave’ 21, 181, 242n15 Fetishism 38, 43–46, 51, 53, 80 Firestone, Shulamith 27 Foucault, Michel 7, 50, 52, 63, 78, 183 Freedom 11, 134, 144–146, 148–149, 150–151, 162–165, 187, 199 Gatens, Moira 99, 165, 181 Gender 4, 11, 56, 103, 179 defined 159–160 norms 174–175 and stereo-types 173–174 vis sex 157–160, 175–176 Globalization 22–23, 31–32, 202, 214n69 Grosz, Elizabeth 3, 8, 67, 76, 87, 92, 115, 201

265

Habermas, Jürgen 24, 33, 85, 189, 225n61 Harvey, David 23, 83, 119, 120, 202–203 Hegel, Georg 3, 5, 39–40, 115–116, 118, 122, 126–127, 137, 140, 142, 231n25 Heidegger, Martin 137, 138, 142–143, 144, 149, 150–151, 230n18 Hennessy, Rosemary 26, 34, 47, 57 Historical Materialism 5–6, 15, 26, 28, 33 feminist criticism of 25–27 see also dialectical materialism Honneth, Axel 45, 47, 50, 77, 155 Identity 96, 129 disidentification 131–133 and exchange mechanism 46–48, 121 extra-economic identities 29, 32, 34, 204 logic of 56–59, 109 personal identity, defined 109 principle of identity 110–112, 127; as ideological 127 speculative identity 126–128, 175 see also non-identity Identity thinking 47–49, 78, 112–115, 120–122, 123, 125, 129, 230n13 Defined 71, 124 and exchange mechanism 48–49, 72, 77–78, 84–85 Ideology 5, 24, 37, 45, 49–50, 85, 210n24–26 base and superstructure 13, 50, 51 Imaginary 50, 56, 57, 59, 70, 89, 99, 110, 168–170, 181, 203 see also psychic body Intentionality 138–140 see also consciousness, phenomenology, subject



INDEX

INDEX

Interests 8, 32, 33, 36, 68, 81, 82, 92, 98, 99, 103, 104, 114, 182, 188–192 defined 188–189 functional 189–190 general 202–204 implicit 66, 81, 194–195 masking of 37–38 making explicit 55, 82–83, 175, 204–205 objective 192, 195 phenomenological 188–189 positional 190–191 see also class, classification Irigaray, Luce 57–59, 110 Jameson, Fredric 47, 48, 58, 66, 76 Kant, Immanuel 65, 75, 112, 115–116, 137, 141, 142, 170, 222n11, 222n16 see also enlightenment, viewfrom-nowhere Kristeva, Julia 140, 152, 201 Labour abstract 18–19, 43 commodification of 20–21 concrete 17 domestic 25, 26, 29, 34, 211n35, 213n60, 213n62, 214n68 social 18, 20, 43, 203 and labour-power 19, 25, 33 Labour Theory of Value 11, 12, 32, 42, 212n42 criticisms of 21–23, 212n45 exchange-value 17, 18 explained 16–23 surplus-value 16, 18 use-value 17, 211n31 see also abstraction, Adorno, capitalism, labour, Marx, production, reification Lacan, Jacques 7, 49, 57, 131, 147, 150, 170, 220n81, 235n12

Lukács, Georg 3, 38–39, 46–47, 54, 216n14 MacKinnon, Catherine 30–31, 52–54, 56 Marcuse, Herbert 133–134 Materialism 3–6, 14, 37, 46, 113–114, 117–118, 140, 148, 151, 208n14 see also dialectics, dialectical materialism, empiricism, matter, realism Matter 4–5, 65, 72, 73, 92, 102, 152 Marx, Karl 5–7, 11–23, 32–33, 39–40, 42–43, 46, 50–51, 127 Capital 17–20, 47, 127 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts 32, 39, 40, 47 see also abstraction, dialectical materialism, feminism and Marxism, fetishism, ideology, labour, labour theory of value, production, reification, speciesbeing Method 3–4, 7, 30, 60, 85, 105, 107, 111, 117, 118, 112, 122–123, 125, 129, 133, 208n19 view-from-nowhere 5, 63 and context 2, 11, 13, 16, 216n8 see also dialectical materialism Militant Particularism 202–205 Millett, Kate 1, 49 Mitchell, Juliet 28, 30 Mohanty, Chandra 160, 181, 207n6, 221n82 Moi, Toril 49, 159–161, 164, 173 Natural Kinds 92–100, 124, 156 family resemblances 95–97 ‘woman’ as natural kind term 96–97, 99, 106 see also essence Naturalism 42, 43, 45, 46, 48, 56, 69, 82, 83, 92, 158



266

INDEX

Objectification 9, 38, 42, 73, 175, 202, 217n19 defined 41 sexual objectification 52–56 and estrangement 39–40, 48 see also objectivism, reification Objectivation 41, 50, 54, 150 defined 40 see also production Objectivism 36–38, 40–43, 49, 50, 52, 55, 59–63, 66, 73, 83, 89, 125 defined 37, 40, 50 Objectivity 55, 60–61, 83, 113, 120, 124–125 fact and value 4–5, 55 as masculine 35–36, 55, 63 and capitalism 48, 83 Objects 3, 6, 9, 24, 36, 38–43, 47–48, 54, 60, 66, 73–75, 80, 93, 113, 115–117, 135, 138– 139, 162–164, 171–172 see also commodity, classification, concepts, dialectics, production

Oppression 1–2, 11, 21, 25–26, 28–31, 53, 66, 80, 155, 157, 165, 180, 199–200 Patriarchy 1, 28, 29, 179–200 defined 180, 187 and capitalism 28–34, 197–199 and nature 70 as system 34, 196–199 Phenomenology 3, 14, 15, 33, 39, 99, 102–103, 136–140, 151, 160, 162, 186, 189, 202 see also cogito, consciousness, existentialism, intentionality Philosophy 9, 58, 66–67, 72, 91, 115 as androcentric 14, 35–36 Postmodernism 2, 12, 79, 90, 110, 131–132, 136 as ideological 2–3, 7, 221n8 and ideology 37 in relation to modernity 13 Power 30, 195–196 defined 184–185 as domination 183–188 and reason 63, 68 Production commodity production 17–20 productive activity 14–16 productivist paradigm criticised 23–26 reproduction 24, 25, 26, 32 women and 24 see also capitalism, commodity, labour, labour theory of value Psychoanalytic Theory 7, 14, 35, 110, 171 and ideology 7, 30, 49 Race 29, 32, 50, 59, 96, 124, 126, 171, 228n28 Racism 2, 88 Rationality 58, 65 Realism 3–5, 38, 45, 58, 89, 90, 92, 94–95, 99, 101, 105, 114–117, 125, 137



Nature 7, 8, 16, 39, 47, 67, 70, 72–74, 76–77, 78, 84, 87–90, 94, 103, 132, 159–160, 183, 201 Negation 110, 122–123, 129, 132–134, 140–145, 150, 153, 236n36 Negativity 122, 132–134, 152; compared to affirmation 232n51 see also negation, non-identity, nothingness Negri, Antonio 210n10, 212n44, 246n12 Nietzsche, Fredrich 7, 8, 41, 67, 76, 77, 84, 109, 138 Non-identity 6, 120–121, 127–128, 134–135, 147, 152–153 compared Sartre and Adorno 133, 136, 145, 148–153 Nothingness 141, 142–144

267

INDEX

Realism—Continued defined 97–98, 117 and reification 46–47 Reason 63–85 critical 63, 68, 77, 80, 85, 129, 151 instrumental 64, 69–71, 73–74, 75, 80; as cognitive orientation 49, 54, 64; in relation to capitalism 71–75, 80; as masculine 78–79 as masculine 64–67, 78–79, 82 and drives 63 and myth 70–71, 74, 78 and power 63, 66–68, 70–71 Reification 34, 37–41, 45–47, 118, 121, 129, 152, 153, 155 Adorno on 47–49, 71–75 and identity thinking 48–50, 72, 80 and labour theory of value 13, 26, 46, 85 and objectivity 54–56, 59–60 Representation 8, 37, 45, 57, 68, 73, 83, 89, 92, 102, 112–114, 169, 174, 198 Rose, Gillian 51, 60 Sartre, Jean-Paul 4, 133, 135–153, 161–176 Being and Nothingness 135, 137–148, 161–171 The Psychology of the Imagination 168–170 Sex 4, 92, 94, 96, 98, 101, 102, 103–104, 165–166, 173–174 intersex 99, 102–104, 158 vis gender 103, 156–160, 165, 173–176 Sexual Difference 5, 32, 34, 56–58, 59, 60, 65, 87–88, 101, 109, 114–115, 170, 200 Sexualities 7, 26, 27–28, 29, 30, 53, 56, 126, 180, 192, 197 Situation 3, 8, 119, 136, 147–153, 161–177, 178, 179, 183, 198, 202, 204–205 see also synthetic unity

Social Practice 31, 34, 50–53, 54, 55, 57, 59, 64, 80–81, 106, 124, 175, 183–184, 191, 201 relation to the economy 52 as patriarchal 180, 195–200 and the symbolic 57 Space 3, 48, 119, 175, 196, 197, 201–203 Species-Being 15, 33, 39 Stone, Alison 90, 92, 112 Structure 28, 31, 50–52, 57, 59, 71, 93, 106, 164, 175, 177, 184, 190–192, 196–197, 243n30, 244n42 Subject 3–8, 14, 15, 23, 35, 41, 45, 56–57, 63, 65, 73–76, 80–82, 109, 111, 115, 116, 126 see also body-consciousness, consciousness, Descartes, existentialism, identity, Kant, synthetic unity Symbolic 57–59, 60, 88, 92, 131, 152, 169, 171, 175, 220n73 see also imaginary Synthetic Unity 4, 15, 137, 140, 145–146, 151, 153, 162, 174–175, 186, 198 see also being, consciousness, existentialism, facticity Time 3, 17–21, 43, 76, 80, 109, 114, 119, 164–165, 174–175, 187, 196, 200, 200–201 View-From-Nowhere 5, 35, 55, 81, 83, 119, 177, 215n3 and reification 47 Vogel, Lise 27, 28 Williams, Raymond 51, 202, 204 Young, Iris 28, 171, 197 Žižek, Slavoj 235n11, 245n12



268

Between Feminism and Materialism: A Question of Method (Breaking Feminist Waves)

The Many Dimensions of Chinese Feminism (Breaking Feminist Waves)

Hegel's Philosophy and Feminist Thought: Beyond Antigone? (Breaking Feminist Waves)

Breaking Waves

Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis

Unassimilable Feminisms: Reappraising Feminist, Womanist, and Mestiza Identity Politics (Breaking Feminist Waves)

Feminism and Anthropology (Feminist Perspective Series)

Feminism and Modern Philosophy (Understanding Feminist Philosophy)

Breaking Out Again: Feminist Ontology and Epistemology

Ocean Waves Breaking and Marine Aerosol Fluxes

Feminist Review Issue 56: Debating Discourses, Practising Feminism (Feminist Review)

Rebellious Feminism: Camus's Ethic of Rebellion and Feminist Thought

Love and a Question

A Question of Time

A Question of Identity

A Question of Time

A Question of Pride

A Question of Belief

A Question of Belief

A Question of Upbringing

A Question of Probability

A Question of Intent

A Question of Love

A Question Of Trust

A Question of Intent

A Question of Marriage

A Question of Belief

A Question of Upbringing

A Question of Upbringing

Between Feminism and Materialism: A Question of Method (Breaking Feminist Waves)

The Many Dimensions of Chinese Feminism (Breaking Feminist Waves)

Hegel's Philosophy and Feminist Thought: Beyond Antigone? (Breaking Feminist Waves)

Breaking Waves

Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis

Unassimilable Feminisms: Reappraising Feminist, Womanist, and Mestiza Identity Politics (Breaking Feminist Waves)

Feminism and Anthropology (Feminist Perspective Series)

Feminism and Modern Philosophy (Understanding Feminist Philosophy)

Breaking Out Again: Feminist Ontology and Epistemology

Ocean Waves Breaking and Marine Aerosol Fluxes

Feminist Review Issue 56: Debating Discourses, Practising Feminism (Feminist Review)

Rebellious Feminism: Camus's Ethic of Rebellion and Feminist Thought

Love and a Question

A Question of Time

A Question of Identity

A Question of Time

A Question of Pride

A Question of Belief

A Question of Belief

A Question of Upbringing

A Question of Probability

A Question of Intent

A Question of Love

A Question Of Trust

A Question of Intent

A Question of Marriage

A Question of Belief

A Question of Upbringing

A Question of Upbringing

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