Radical Philosophy Issue: 83

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83 Editorial collective Chris Arthur, Ted Benton, Nadine Cartner, Andrew Collier, Diana Coole, Peter Dews, Roy Edgley, Gregory Elliott, Howard Feather, Jean Grimshaw, Kathleen Lennon, Joseph McCarney, Kevin Magill, Peter Osborne, Stella Sandford, Sean Sayers, Kate Soper Issue editor Jean Grimshaw

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MAY/JUNE 1997

COMMENTARY Who Are My Peers? The Research Assessment Exercise in Philosophy Sean Sayers ................................................................................................... 2

ARTICLES Generations of Feminism

Reviews editor Sean Sayers

Lynne Segal.................................................................................................... 6

Contributors Sean Sayers teaches philosophy at the University of Kent, Canterbury.

Diana Coole .................................................................................................. 17

Lynne Segal is Professor of Gender Studies at Middlesex University. Diana Coole teaches political theory at Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London. John OʼNeill teaches philosophy at the University of Lancaster. Anne-Marie Smith teaches in the Department of Government at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. Typing (WP input) by Jo Foster Tel: 0181 341 9238 Layout by Petra Pryke Tel: 0171 243 1464 Copyedited and typeset by Robin Gable and Lucy Morton Tel: 0181 318 1676 Design by Peter Osborne Printed by Russell Press, Radford Mill, Norton Street, Nottingham NG7 3HN Bookshop distribution UK: Central Books, 99 Wallis Road, London E9 5LN Tel: 0181 986 4854 USA: Bernard de Boer, 113 East Centre Street, Nutley, New Jersey 07100, Tel: 201 667 9300; Ubiquity Distributors Inc., 607 Degraw Street, Brooklyn, New York 11217, Tel: 718 875 5491; Fine Print Distributors, 500 Pampa Drive, Austin, Texas 78752-3028. Tel: 512-452-8709 Cover: Feminist Mothers, Islington, 1975. Published by Radical Philosophy Ltd. http://www.ukc.ac.uk/cprs/phil/rp/

Feminism Without Nostalgia Feminist Activism and Presidential Politics: Theorizing the Costs of the ‘Insider Strategy’ Anne-Marie Smith ....................................................................................... 25

Thinking Naturally John O’Neill ................................................................................................. 36

REVIEWS Michael J. Sandel, Democracyʼs Discontent Avishai Margalit, The Decent Society David Archard............................................................................................... 41 John R. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality Kevin Magill ................................................................................................. 43 John Keane, Reflections on Violence Anthony Arblaster ....................................................................................... 45 Kevin Anderson, Lenin, Hegel and Western Marxism Michael Löwy............................................................................................... 46 Richard J. Bernstein, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question Anne Seller................................................................................................... 48 Maurice Blanchot, The Most High Julian Cowley .............................................................................................. 49 Régis Debray, Media Manifestos Hugh Dauncey ............................................................................................. 50 Simon Critchley and Peter Dews, eds, Deconstructive Subjectivities Gideon Calder .............................................................................................. 51 Philip Goodchild, Gilles Deleuze and the Question of Philosophy Jean-Jacques Lecercle .............................................................................. 52

NEWS Forum for European Philosophy Peter Dews ......................................................................................... 53

Honouring Levinas Robert Vallier ..................................................................................... 54

XVIIth German Conference for Philosophy

Stephan Meyer .................................................................................. 56

© Radical Philosophy Ltd

COMMENTARY

Who are my peers? The Research Assessment Exercise in Philosophy Sean Sayers

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ritish universities have just gone through their third Research Assessment Exercise (RAE). The ʻresearch outputʼ (i.e. publications) of every participating department has been graded by panels of ʻexpertsʼ on a seven-point scale. The purpose of this massive operation is to provide a basis for distributing funds for research. In theory, the idea of allocating these scarce resources according to the standard of the work produced seems fair and reasonable; but in philosophy, at least, that is not how things work out in practice. The assessment process is supposed to be one of ʻpeer reviewʼ. This sounds reassuringly cosy and communitarian; however, it is doubtful whether it operates that way in a subject as divided as philosophy. What assurance is there that the panel adequately represents the diversity of contemporary British philosophy and is competent to undertake a peer review of the field? The short answer is: none. The panel is a quango, with all the secretive and undemocratic features typical of such bodies. How its members are chosen is a mystery. Little attempt is made to present them as representative of the different schools and approaches in the field. It is only a few years since a number of prominent philosophers opposed the award of a Cambridge honorary degree to Derrida (see Jonathan Rée, ʻMassacre of the Innocentsʼ, Radical Philosophy 62, Autumn 1992, pp. 61–2). Are such philosophers suitable to conduct a ʻpeer reviewʼ of the work of the followers of Derrida? Indeed, what constitutes a ʻpeerʼ group in a subject like philosophy? Questions like these must be answered before the title of ʻpeer reviewʼ can have any credibility. The panel, so it is claimed, assessed the work submitted to it objectively and impartially. In the previous exercises quantitative data were collected. This time the assessment was purely qualitative. How ʻqualityʼ was judged is shrouded in Kafkaesque obscurity. The panel does not explain or justify its decisions; nor is there any appeals procedure. The criteria it employs are specified only in the vaguest fashion. ʻInternationalʼ and ʻnationalʼ excellence are the key terms. According to one member of the panel, however, these were not treated as geographical but rather as ʻvalue conceptsʼ. Assurances are constantly given about the care and scrupulousness with which the task was undertaken. Nevertheless, at the end of the day, we are simply required to have faith in the panelʼs judgements. In typically British fashion, we are expected to defer to the wisdom of authority. And, in typically British fashion, we do. This extraordinarily opaque and undemocratic system has been accepted with scarcely a murmur of dissent (though the demoralized state of the universities in Britain has doubtless contributed).

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The ‘oxygen of competition’ The exercise is designed to inject the ʻoxygen of competitionʼ into philosophy by rewarding ʻexcellenceʼ wherever it is found. It is most unlikely to have this effect. ʻOf course, Oxford and Cambridge will get 5sʼ (the top mark), one member of the panel is reported to have said, even before the submissions were in. Of course they did. Of course Warwick and Essex (the main centres for ʻcontinentalʼ philosophy) will not get 5s, he could well have added. Of course they did not. As regards the standards of ʻinternationalʼ excellence, a colleague was assured: ʻonly the US and Australia count.ʼ In short, what is regarded as philosophy in Oxford, Harvard and Sydney is the standard. If you want a high rating, you would be well advised to follow that model. There can be no doubt that all this will have a deeply conservative impact on the subject. Instead of promoting ʻexcellenceʼ, it will impose a narrow orthodoxy and stifle innovation and creativity. Assuming that the RAE is going to be repeated, the system should be opened up and made publicly accountable. In the first place, the panel should be selected by an open process with the aim of representing the diversity of approaches and schools in the subject as a whole. In the USA this could be achieved through the machinery of the American Philosophical Association, whose membership covers virtually the whole profession. Unfortunately, there is no similar organization of philosophers in Britain. Second, the rating criteria should be specified more precisely, and the reasons for the panelʼs decisions explained and opened up to appeal. There is nothing particularly radical in these suggestions. Apart from anything else, they are matters of elementary justice which simply echo the recommendations of the Nolan Committee on Standards in Public Life. Given the divisions within philosophy, however, it is difficult to see how they could be implemented without taking some account of more objective – that is to say, more quantitative – standards. Scepticism about the value of these is very widespread, and not just among defenders of the status quo. Sheer quantity of output – a concern in previous exercises – is crude and unsatisfactory (and it engenders a deluge of pointless publications). However, there are other indicators, such as frequency of citation and even market success, which could help the system respond more fairly to the diversity of approaches in the subject. No doubt, as criteria of ʻqualityʼ, these measures are crude too, and I am not suggesting that they should be used mechanically or on their own. No doubt they would generate their own distortions, as authors would be motivated to cite and be cited rather than to say anything worth saying. But rating philosophical work on a seven-point scale is an inherently crude business. At least such criteria offer some objective indication of academic standing, relatively free of the personal opinions of a few individuals; and what they reveal is illuminating. Citations 1981–97 The very idea of consulting citation rates and Name Humanities Social sciences Total the like is often treated with disdain. According to Professor Hepburn, reporting on the work of Derrida, J. 1,867 578 2,445 Habermas, J. 1,493 1,291 2,784 the 1989 panel in philosophy which he chaired, Gadamer, H.-G. 884 284 1,168 ʻwe made no use of mechanical aids such as Rorty, R. 720 428 1,148 frequency of citation; a notably unsatisfactory Levinas, E. 680 93 773 Putnam, H. 647 382 1,029 attempt on a philosophical problem can be cited Davidson, D. 646 333 979 repeatedly in the early pages of books or articles Quine, W.V. 552 254 806 Rawls, J. 328 342 670 that aspire to a more adequate theory!ʼ This well Dummett, M. 284 112 396 illustrates the complacent amateurism which has Singer, P. 238 364 602 so far characterized the whole exercise. Actual Source: BIDS ISI Humanities and Social Science Citation Indexes. citation figures tell a very different story. The most frequently cited philosophers include Rorty,

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Putnam, Davidson; Derrida, Habermas, Gadamer (see Table, previous page). It would be absurd to suggest that any of these writers has gained his position merely by being repeatedly refuted. Rather, it is clear that the most cited philosophers are on the whole the best known and most influential ones. The high citation rates for ʻcontinentalʼ philosophers like Derrida and Habermas are striking. There can be no doubt that Derridaʼs work is cited not only by philosophers but also in literary theory, cultural studies and many other areas, mainly in the humanities. Habermas has a similarly wide influence, though more in the social sciences. To those who regard philosophy as a narrow and self-contained specialism, such influence is at best an irrelevance to their standing as philosophers, perhaps even grounds for suspicion on this score. Market success arouses similar distrust. To quote Hepburn again, ʻa substantial published work could be of a semi-popular nature, perhaps summarising the research of others rather than breaking new ground, and might well not qualify as research at all in this context.ʼ The concept of ʻresearchʼ at work here may apply well enough in the sciences, but it is far more debatable in philosophy. The idea that ʻgenuine researchʼ is written only for a tiny band of specialists, and that the ʻsemi-popularʼ is suspect, has had a lamentable impact on the style and content of contemporary professional philosophy (of both the analytic and continental varieties); one of the most harmful aspects of the RAE in its present form is that it enforces this conception of philosophy on the profession as a whole. A huge flood of such work has poured forth as a result of the obsession with ʻresearchʼ dictated by the present system. Much of it is pointless from a philosophical point of view; its main raison dʼêtre is to gain a research rating and/or promotion. It remains unread and undiscussed on library shelves; it has no other market. Philosophers like Derrida and Davidson can scarcely be accused of being ʻsemi-popularʼ. And yet their work is very widely read and discussed, and sales of their books, I am sure, are healthy. I do not suggest that frequency of citation or market success alone should be adopted as measures of research quality. I do suggest that they should not be so complacently disregarded in the assessment process. For there is every reason to believe that they provide an indication of ʻqualityʼ less liable to partiality and prejudice than the personal judgements of panel members.

A dead hand of conformity To anyone of my generation, the situation in philosophy being fostered by the current RAE system will be familiar. We have been there before. When I was a student in the 1960s, philosophy in Britain was entirely dominated by the narrow conception of the subject which then prevailed in Oxford and Cambridge. There were virtually no courses in British universities on Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger or Freud. Even Sartre, I was told by one of my teachers at Cambridge, was ʻnot a philosopherʼ. Philosophy was treated as an entirely distinct and separate subject. The idea that philosophical insights could fruitfully be derived from, or applied to, other subjects or concrete practical issues was alien. It was to combat this situation, and to provide a forum for an alternative and broader conception of philosophy, that journals like Radical Philosophy were founded. These attempts to widen the subject were resisted by the established authorities. Mercifully, this resistance was largely overcome and the subject has broadened very greatly in the last thirty years, even if such resistance continues, particularly in those departments rated as most ʻexcellentʼ by the RAE. Oxford and Cambridge remain almost untouched by these changes. Elsewhere, the subject has been transformed. New approaches and ideas have been introduced and taken up. They have won an audience, they are cited in the literature, they have gained a market. Citation rates and market forces have proved far more

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responsive to innovation and diversity in the subject than the judgements of senior academics of the sort typically chosen for the RAE panels. Such indicators demonstrate the reality of the changes that have occurred in philosophy in Britain, and its resulting diversity, in an empirical and objective manner that cannot plausibly be dismissed. This is their significance in the present context. Until this diversity is duly recognized, the RAE system, so far from introducing new oxygen, will impose a dead hand of conformity on the subject and stifle its development. The sooner it is changed, the better for British philosophy.

Society for European Philosophy

The results of the recent assessment of philosophy departments within the UK clearly demonstrated the marginalisation of European philosophical traditions. In order to counter this marginalisation we believe there is a need for an organisation which would affirm the expanding influence and vitality of European philosophical traditions. We therefore propose that a society be founded to provide a forum in which all those working within these traditions – whether within philosophy departments or not – could meet, further their own work and defend their common interests.

In order to found the Society an inaugural conference will be held at Birkbeck College, Malet Street, London WC1 from 10.30am–4.30pm on Saturday June 28. All those interested in participating in the Society are invited to attend. Panels will include: ʻTraditions in European Philosophyʼ and ʻThe Philosophical Geography of Europeʼ

For further information write to: Society for European Philosophy, c/o Department of Philosophy, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL

Dr Christine Battersby, University of Warwick Professor Andrew Benjamin, University of Warwick Professor Geoffrey Bennington, University of Sussex Professor Howard Caygill, Goldsmiths College, University of London Dr Simon Critchley, University of Essex Professor Peter Dews, University of Essex Dr Joanna Hodge, Manchester Metropolitan University Professor Salim Kemal, University of Dundee Dr Peter Osborne, Middlesex University Mr Jonathan Rée, Middlesex University Dr Kate Soper, University of North London Professor Margaret Whitford, Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London

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Generations of feminism Lynne Segal

Politics makes comics of us all. Or we would weep. Sheila Rowbotham1

I have been thinking for some time now about political generations.2 Indeed, I began my last book, Straight Sex, with a reflection upon the enduring impact of those formative moments which first enable us to make some sense of the world, and our place within it – an unjust and shabby world, whatever our personal circumstances. Such moments remain all the more powerful if, like many of my own generation who became students in the 1960s, you have hoped – with whatever levels of scepticism and self-mockery – to participate in the making of history. They leave their mark, even as changing times cause one to rethink, perhaps even to renounce, oneʼs formative political presumptions. Yet, what often leaves erstwhile political crusaders with little more than mournful and confusing feelings of loss and regret – whatever our capacities for irony – is the way in which new narratives emerge as collective memories fade, writing over those that once incited our most passionate actions. So it has been with Womenʼs Liberation, that second wave of feminism which arose out of the upsurge of radical and socialist politics in the late 1960s. It grew rapidly as a mass social movement, peaking in the mid-seventies before dissolving as a coherent organization by the end of that decade. If only indirectly, it affected the lives of millions of women. Now, however, a quarter of a century later, the sparse amount of thoughtful scholarship analysing the distinctiveness of that movement struggles for attention amidst a glut of texts delineating its contemporary academic progeny – largely scornful of its rougher parent, and the motley basements, living rooms, workplaces and community centres in which it was hatched. This is not just a female Oedipal tale, as disobedient daughters distance themselves from their mothersʼ passions, seeking recognition for themselves. It is also a sibling affair, as feminists contend with each other: fearful, perhaps, of

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being overlooked should we fail to keep abreast of new theoretical fashions; or unable to admit the tensions and contradictions of past attachments. A small band of feminist historians, mostly in the USA, who are trying to recapture the diversity of the movement in which they participated, declare that they cannot recognize themselves, or others, in what they see as the distorting accounts of Womenʼs Liberation circulating in contemporary feminism. Rosalyn Baxandall and Linda Gordon, for example, are gathering material for a multi-volume collection of literature from the movement in the United States. They are joined by others interested in archiving the local histories of Womenʼs Liberation, such as Patricia Romney, documenting a group of fifty women of colour based in New York and Oakland, California, who – with other Black activists in the sixties and seventies – became the forgotten women who ʻfell down the wellʼ (as Carolyn Heilbrun puts it) in subsequent rewritings of Womenʼs Liberation as exclusively white.3 These historians are aware of the dangers of their proximity to their own research, of how memories are muted or reshaped by subsequent perspectives and interests – whether oneʼs own, or those of younger recorders. At a recent symposium on the history of Womenʼs Liberation in the United States, Margaret (Peg) Strobel recounted that even when rereading her own diaries and letters she is amazed at their failure to match her current recollections of the events she has recorded there.4 Reading our histories through the interpretations of others can be more unsettling again. Contemporary texts reviewing recent feminist history provide sobering examples of how the past is inevitably read through the concerns of the present, often invalidating earlier meanings and projects and erasing their heterogeneity. The displacement of former struggles and perspectives, however, is all the more disconcerting when contemporary theorists start off

from a critical fascination with problems of ʻexperienceʼ, ʻmemoryʼ and the ʻsilencingʼ of other voices, alongside a formal abhorrence of binary logics and apparent scepticism about generalization of all kinds. Yet, it is precisely the reckless generalization and false contrasts which astonish me when I read accounts of the distance self-proclaimed ʻninetiesʼ feminism has travelled from Womenʼs Liberation, and what now appears newly homogenized as ʻseventiesʼ feminism.

Dubious contrasts A recent British collection, edited by Michèle Barrett and Anne Phillips, Destabilizing Theory, was put together to highlight what it refers to as ʻthe gulf between feminist theory of the 1970s and 1990sʼ. It opens with the conviction: ʻIn the past twenty years the founding principles of contemporary western feminism have been dramatically changed, with previously shared assumptions and unquestioned orthodoxies relegated almost to history.ʼ5 Perhaps so. But just what is being dispatched here? Was it all of a piece? And is it equally anachronistic for contemporary feminists? ʻSeventiesʼ feminism is criticized for its ʻfalse certaintiesʼ; its search for structural causes of womenʼs oppression (indeed for its very notion of ʻoppressionʼ); its belief in womenʼs shared interests (and its very attachment to the notion of ʻwomenʼ or ʻwomanʼ); and so forth.6 ʻNinetiesʼ feminism, in contrast, has replaced what is seen as the naive search for the social causes of womenʼs oppression with abstract elaborations of the discursively produced, hierarchical constitution of an array of key concepts: sexual difference in particular, binary oppositions in general, and the hetero/sexualized mapping of the body as a whole. However, it does tend to have a few generalizations of its own, not least its totalizing dismissal of ʻseventiesʼ feminism, and the reduction of dissimilar projects to common ground. A somewhat similar tension can be found in a parallel American collection aiming ʻto call into question and problematize the presumptions of some feminist discourseʼ: Feminists Theorize the Political, edited by Judith Butler and Joan Scott, which, like the British text, was published in 1992.7 Its introductory essay shows greater caution in drawing comparisons between different phases of feminism, and it is more aware that contrasting ʻpostmodernʼ feminism with an earlier ʻmodernistʼ feminism buys into precisely the conceits of modernity itself, sharing all its enthusiasm for identification with the ʻnewʼ and overconfident renunciation of the ʻoldʼ. (Although it is surely a hostage to fortune to insist, on the opening page, that ʻ“post-

structuralism” indicates a field of critical practices that cannot be totalized.ʼ8) Circumspect and equivocal as Butler characteristically is, always preferring the interrogative to the more vulnerable affirmative mode, her influential writing is always read as primarily deconstructive, privileging regulatory semiotic or semantic issues around ʻsubjectivityʼ, ʻidentityʼ and ʻagencyʼ, in insisting, as she does here, that: ʻTo recast the referent as the signified, and to authorize or safeguard the category of women as a site of possible resignifications is to expand the possibilities of what it means to be a woman and in this sense to condition and enable an enhanced sense of agency.ʼ9 Butler is certainly right to stress that ʻwhat women signify has been taken for granted for too longʼ. But, in calling for ʻthe conditions to mobilize the signifier in the service of an alternative productionʼ, she delineates a project that is distinctly distanced from the close attention to social structures, relations and practices which an earlier feminist project prioritized in pursuit of political-economic restructuring, and the transformation of public life and welfare. Butler even suggests here: ʻParadoxically, it may be that only through releasing the category of women from a fixed referent that something like “agency” becomes possible.ʼ10 Only? However ʻfictitiousʼ or ʻfixedʼ the category of women, feminists did once manage successfully to mobilize them (and not just signifiers) onto the streets and into campaigns in support of demands for nurseries, reproductive rights, education and skill training; to assist women fighting discrimination at work, violence at home, militarism world-wide; to work within Third World development projects; found the womenʼs health movement, and so on and so forth: just as if ʻsomething like “agency”ʼ – womenʼs agency – was there all along. A feminism that seeks primarily to re-theorize subjectivity is one that is incommensurate with, as well as distanced from, the perspectives and practices of Womenʼs Liberation. It is simply not the same project, however sympathetic to those earlier goals someone like Butler may be. As others have noticed, the commitment to heterogeneity, multiplicity and difference underlying recent feminist theorizing can anomalously disguise a hegemonizing dismissal of theoretical frameworks not explicitly informed by poststructuralism.11 Joan Scott exemplifies this form of exclusion of theoretical diversity when attacking ʻresistance to poststructuralist theoryʼ as resistance to ʻtheoryʼ itself: ʻSince it is in the nature of feminism to disturb the ground it stands on, even its own ground, the resistance to theory is a resistance to the most radical effects of feminism itself.ʼ12

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Here is the problem. Contemporary feminist theorizing rarely acknowledges the time and the place of political ideas. It addresses only abstract theories and their refutation. It operates with an idea of the history of feminism as the evolution of academic theory and debate. Tellingly, both the British and North American feminist collections I have mentioned offer their readers a full index of names – in which, incidentally, extraordinarily few of the influential feminist names of the 1970s appear – but no index of topics. In the recent Blackwell textbook Feminist Thought, by Patricia Clough, dedicated to ʻWomen Around the World Resisting Oppression, Domination, and Exploitationʼ, there is a context index, but interestingly neither hint nor whisper of abortion or reproductive rights, housework, childcare, nurseries, welfare provision, immigration, marriage, the family, poverty, the state, employment, trade unions, healthcare or violence against women. There is pornography, autobiography, film theory, literary criticism, Woman, Native, Other. However you cross-reference it, just a few aspects of womenʼs actual resistance ʻaround the worldʼ seem to have gone missing.13 Almost no effort is made in these texts to refer back to the activities and goals of Womenʼs Liberation, only an attempt to contrast theoretical positions as ideal types. The reason is, of course, that this is an easy way to teach feminism as an academic topic. But you cannot translate the time of theory and its fashions into political history without absurd caricature. Thus early Womenʼs Liberation becomes, for example, a ʻfeminism of the subjectʼ, when it was not a theory about subjectivity at all. It is almost always described as a theory of equality rather than of difference, when it was neither of these things – the one usually presented as merely an inversion of the other. Both of these descriptions miss the point. Womenʼs Liberation in its heyday was a theory and practice of social transformation: full of all the embroiled and messy actions and compromises of political engagement. It endlessly debated questions of priorities, organization and alliances in the attempt to enrich womenʼs lives (heatedly discussing the varied – often opposed – interests of different groups of women). In the process, it transformed the very concept of the ʻpoliticalʼ, giving women a central place within it. My sense of the recent history of feminism, in particular of the socialist-feminist strand of Womenʼs Liberation flourishing in the early seventies, conflicts with Julia Kristevaʼs often cited stagist mapping of three generations of feminist thought, in her famous essay ʻWomenʼs Timeʼ, first published in 1979. There

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she depicts the first wave of feminism as a time when women, using a ʻlogic of identificationʼ, pursued liberal, egalitarian ends, followed by the emergence of a militant second phase, which rejected all ʻpatriarchalʼ thought and practice, attempting to create ʻcounter societiesʼ constructed around mythical notions of womanhood. This is the now familiar account of ʻequalityʼ feminism followed by a strictly alternative, ʻdifferenceʼ feminism: with women first seeking inclusion in, and later exclusion from, the masculine symbolic order. Drawing on Derrida, Kristeva proposes a third generation of feminism which is critical of the binary of sexual difference itself. Yet, as I hope to show, although they never used the rhetoric of deconstruction, this is precisely where many secondgeneration feminists came in. The contrasts are not as significant as recent re-tellings suggest.

Rowbotham’s ‘seventies’ feminism In my view, the most useful – and perhaps the only meaningful – way to think about the similarities and differences between different generations of feminism is by reflecting upon what defines a political generation and what smashes its hopes and dreams. On an International Womenʼs Day march in the early seventies, Sheila Rowbotham carried a placard that read: ʻEqual Pay is Not Enough. We Want the Moon.ʼ (File under equal-rights feminism? Perhaps not. Is the moon here a symbol of female difference? I think not.) We got neither, as she wrote a decade later; but the radical heritage of Womenʼs Liberation continues, she argued, whenever feminists work to realize the dream ʻthat all human beings can be more than present circumstances allowʼ.14 That vision is not one of equal rights. It was called ʻsocialismʼ and it was being reshaped to service feminism. I want, for a moment, to focus on Sheila Rowbothamʼs writing, as she has been one of the most careful chroniclers (and continuing exponents) of Womenʼs Liberation in Britain, in the hope that it may be, as she puts it, ʻneither falsely valued nor undervaluedʼ, but that feminists might reflect back upon ʻthe hurly-burly of battle, draw clarity from real muddles and learn from our mistakesʼ.15 (Dream on!, one might feel, in these new mean-spirited times.) Since memories only find resonance at certain times, Rowbotham adds, if you ʻignore the humdrum you fall into arroganceʼ.16 It was Rowbotham, one of the many inspirational voices of seventiesʼ feminism, who proposed the very first Womenʼs Liberation conference in Britain at Ruskin College in 1970; importantly for my purposes here, her books were read by tens of thousands of feminists in

the 1970s. They were hugely influential in the initial years of Womenʼs Liberation. Rowbotham would be criticized, early on, as representing a seventiesʼ feminism, unformed by psychoanalysis or structuralism.17 Today, of course, her failures would be seen as an inattention to poststructuralism or ʻpostmodernityʼ – that paradoxical twist of modernity, contrarily repudiating linear narratives while depending on one. Joining the game of textual analysis, I recently reread some of Rowbothamʼs books from the seventies and early eighties: something I do often to prevent my own long-term memories from dissolving (there seems nothing to be done about the crashing of shortterm memory). Ironically, what is extraordinary about Rowbothamʼs writing is usually quite the reverse of what critics of seventiesʼ feminism imagine. It conveys an openness, a chronic lack of certainty, an almost infuriating tentativeness, reiteratively asserting: ʻWhat we have developed through action and ideas has always to be subject to reassessmentʼ; or ʻI am too encumbered by the particular to move with grace and delicacy between subjective experience and the broad sweep of social relationships.ʼ18 From her earliest reflections, Rowbotham describes the search for the roots of womenʼs subordination as a ʻperilous and uncertain questʼ.19 Her texts always stress what she calls ʻthe differing forms and historically specific manifestations of the power men hold over women in particular societiesʼ.20 They focus sharply on the diversity and situational specificity of women: whether of class, race, employment, domestic situation (although not at first, as she herself soon notes selfcritically), sexual orientation: ʻOur own indications are only tentative and incomplete … Womenʼs liberation is too narrow in social composition to comprehend the differences between middle class and working class, black and white, young and old, married and unmarried, country and townswomen.ʼ Moreover, she writes in 1972, ʻit is clear that most of the isolated gains we can make can be twisted against women and that many partial gains are often a means of silencing one group at the expense of another.ʼ21 She emphasizes the role of language as one of the crucial instruments of domination: As soon as we learn words we find ourselves outside them … The underground language of people who have no power to define and determine themselves in the world develops its own density and precision … But it restricts them by affirming their own dependence upon the words of the powerful … There is a long inchoate period during which the struggle between the language of experience and the language of theory becomes a kind of agony.22

Ignorant of ʻpoststructuralismʼ Rowbotham may have been (writing these words in the early 1970s, in her mid-twenties), but not so ignorant, I would suggest, of the issues it addresses. She tussles (a favourite word) endlessly with the problems of relying on direct experience, seeing it as both a strength and a weakness – again not so unlike, but less theoretically fine-tuned than, the recent essay by Joan Scott on the same topic in the collection from the USA mentioned above.23 She continuously affirms the pointlessness of attempting to pin down the nature of either ʻwomenʼ or ʻmenʼ, adding that, ʻAll revolutionary movements create their own ways of seeing … But this is a result of great labour.ʼ24 Her writing, like the forces which drew many women together in the early years of Womenʼs Liberation, reflects the radical Left (largely Marxist) thought of the day: ʻAn emergent female consciousness is part of the specific sexual and social conjuncture, which it seeks to control and transform.ʼ25 So, while questions of subjectivity and identity are not ignored (and, when they appear, they are quite as shifting, provisional and contingent as any postmodernist might desire), the goal is always to transform society, to make it a better place for all its members, especially the neediest, and, in her words, ʻgradually accumulate a shared culture of agitationʼ. She writes: There is democracy in the making of theories which set out to rid the world of hierarchy, oppression and domination. The act of analysis requires more than concepts of sex and class, more than a theory of the subject, it demands that in the very process of thinking we transform the relations between thinker and thought about, theory and experience … Analysis is not enough alone, for we enter the beings and worlds of other people through imagination, and it is through imagination that we glimpse how these might change.26

Many seventiesʼ feminists have recalled, like Rowbotham, the imaginative leap when they first began to turn outwards to other women, generating an almost open-ended desire for solidarity with just those women they had hitherto distanced themselves from: ʻThe mainspring of womenʼs liberation was not a generalised antagonism to men but the positive assertion of new relationships between women, sisterhood.ʼ27 Socialist feminists argued that while capitalist societies had changed the relative power and privileges of men, they had also consolidated womenʼs inferior status, along with that of a multitude of other historically subordinated groups – predominantly along racialized and ethnic lines. So while it was not inconceivable

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that women might gain equality with men in existing capitalist societies, this would require such deep levels of cultural, economic and political change that they would already have become societies which were fundamentally different from any we have known.28 The state, in socialist-feminist analyses like those of Elizabeth Wilson or Mary McIntosh, was seen as not strictly ʻpatriarchalʼ, but serving to regulate, and occasionally to restructure, the often contradictory and conflicting needs of a male-dominated market economy and the still intrinsically patriarchal arrangements of family life.29 It was from such analyses that they set about shaking out and making visible the separate and distinct needs and interests of women (kept hidden by familial rhetoric); campaigned against state policies and discourses which defined and enforced womenʼs dependence on men; demanded an end to social neglect of women and children at risk from menʼs violence; fought for more and better social provision and community resources – all the while seeking alliances with other oppressed groups. Strategic priorities were usually paramount, whether making demands on the state or the trade unions, and even when elaborating utopian visions of communities and workplaces compatible with choice and flexibility, where the needs of all dependent people would not hidden away in idealized, yet neglected and isolated, often impoverished, family units.30 This socialist-feminist strand of Womenʼs Liberation, chronicled in books like Rowbothamʼs The Past Is Before Us, remained until the mid-eighties an active and influential source of ideas and strategies for promoting womenʼs interests, usually working in diverse radical and reformist coalitions with other progressive forces.31 However, the frustration and defeats of a second term of Conservative rule (1983–87), which targeted and weakened precisely those nooks and crannies in local government, resource centres and collective spaces that feminists (and other radicals) had managed to enter, gradually exhausted not only the political hopes, but even the dreams of many. In recalling the early achievements of the womenʼs movement in re-launching femi-

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nism, we also need to consider its limitations. But the precarious presumptions and faltering visions of the seventiesʼ feminism I knew have, as I see it, little to do with dogmatic certitudes, conceptual closure, binary thinking, identity politics or false universalism, and much more to do with the floundering fortunes of grassroots or movement politics in harsh and unyielding times. And I am not forgetting the many painful clashes, at the turn of the 1980s, as a strengthening Black feminism challenged Eurocentrism in the priorities of much white socialist-feminist analysis, which privileged sexism over racism and ignored the particularities of ethnic difference. But trying to learn to listen to, and act upon, Black feminist perspectives was not initially a decisive factor in the fading away of socialist-feminism. On the contrary, Black feminists then occupied the same political spaces, and pursued largely similar or parallel strategic campaigns for expanding the choice and resources open to Black women and their families. The political limitations they saw in what they defined as ʻEuro-Americanʼ feminism, at that time, as Valerie Amos, Gail Lewis, Amina Mama and Pratibha Parmar made clear in 1984, was that it has ʻcontributed to an improvement in the material situation of white middle-class women often at the expense of their Black and working class “sisters” … The power of sisterhood stops at the point at which hard political decisions need to be made and political priorities decided.ʼ32

The death knell of the seventiesʼ feminism I dwelt within was not simply the fall-out from internal conflict and divisions, whether over race or sexuality – much as they turned feminist political spaces into stressful combat zones. Rather, coming together as agitators, of whatever sex, race or ethnic specificity, to pursue goals which require, among other things, a more egalitarian and caring world, brought us up against a ferocious, if contradictory and erratic, political opponent – something a new generation of officially licensed theorists, turning inwards rather than outwards, often prefer to ignore altogether. Over the last two decades, the ever more deregulated, ever more universalized, interests of capital have produced deepening social inequalities, nationally and internationally. In the process, they have ensured a significant increase in womenʼs poverty. Meanwhile the fickle, unintended effects of market forces and new technologies, alongside the arduously pursued, intended consequences of feminist thought and campaigning, have ensured more paid work, autonomy and choice for other women, at least in the First World (as well as more insecurity for some men). Twenty years ago it would have been hard to find a single self-respecting feminist in Britain who had not trekked out to the Grunwick factory in West London, in support of the predominantly Asian women on strike, or at least considered such action. In the nineties, as Melissa Benn has noted, it would be hard to find a self-respecting feminist who had even heard of the predominantly Asian women on strike at Burnsall in Birmingham over an almost identical set of issues: refusal of union recognition, low pay, and the use of dangerous chemicals; or who would have contemplated supportive action, if they had.33 For sure, Rowbotham and like-minded socialist-feminists, working to help organize support for women in struggle against the harshest effects of global market forces, had for a while a certain naiveté about the nature and potential of ʻrevolutionaryʼ movements. The legacy of seventiesʼ feminism, seen as a movement of social transformation aiming to increase the power and self-determination of women everywhere, is contradictory and diverse. But serious consideration of its full significance is grievously absent in recent appraisals.

Theoretical assaults

There is another twist in this tale of two generations of feminism. In terms of the later writing over of earlier feminist narratives, the painful irony is that just as deconstruction and other forms of poststructuralism imprinted themselves on the academic feminism which had graduated from its lowly seventiesʼ birthplace in

adult education into professional status in the universities – promoting conceptual uncertainty, political indeterminacy and subjective fluidity – opposing forms of feminist fundamentalism, moral certainty and psychic essentialism now really were entrenching themselves as the wisdom of the more accessible activist feminism of the eighties. The voices of feminism – like those of Robin Morgan and Andrea Dworkin – which survived and intensified in the new decade were no longer analysing the specific historical contexts, shifting institutional arrangements, particular social practices or multiple discourses securing womenʼs inequality and marginality. Instead, they denounced the ageless dominance of ʻmasculineʼ values over ʻfeminineʼ ones. A new and complacent romance around the feminine took precedence as essentially nurturing, non-violent and egalitarian; there was an accompanying condemnation of men and masculinity as ineluctably dominating, destructive and predatory, rooted in the performance of male sexuality. It was this form of so-called ʻcultural feminismʼ that I criticized in Is the Future Female? in the late 1980s. The original subtitle of my book, ʻArguments for Socialist Feminismʼ, was rejected by my publisher, Virago Press, as already too unpopular to promulgate, leading to the more neutral ʻTroubled Thoughtsʼ of its published subtitle.34 Politically, Dworkin and MacKinnon ushered in the simplistic and reductive anti-pornography campaign as the single most visible and highly funded feminist struggle in recent years. The pessimistic corollary of the rejection of historical specificities in this feminist discourse is the dismissal of the significance of womenʼs political struggles and victories: ʻOur status as a group relative to menʼ, MacKinnon declared, ʻhas almost never, if ever, been much changed from what it is.ʼ35 Without buying into backlash anti-feminism, or the howls of anguish we currently hear from and about men, I think we might agree that this is not a very accurate picture of the gender changes and turmoil that have occurred throughout this century, and especially of the shakeups over the last three decades. Meanwhile, as the 1980s progressed, it was either those, like Catharine MacKinnon, who offered some version of an increasingly totalizing and sanctimonious feminism (clinging to the moral high ground of womenʼs marginality and helplessness), or others, like Camille Paglia, with equally totalizing inversions of this position (caricaturing feminism as prudish and puritanical) who found favour with the media. Neither offered any challenge to traditional gender discourses. It is hard to summarize the illuminations and provocations of academic feminismʼs current embrace of poststructuralist critiques of universalizing thought

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and emancipatory narratives without courting the danger of homogenizing contemporary theorizing, much as it has erased the complexities of seventiesʼ feminism. The appropriation of poststructuralist priorities would inspire what has become known as ʻfeminist postmodernismʼ – although this conceptually confused and confusing label would not be accepted by all those placed under its banner. At least three separate strands of thinking are usually lumped together under this heading – deriving from Lacan, Derrida and Foucault, respectively – despite their very different implications for feminism. The first and for a while the most influential postLacanian strand, often simply called ʻFrench feminismʼ, restricts its focus to the idea of sexual difference effaced by the spurious unity or wholeness of the Western ʻsubjectʼ (Man): the white, male bourgeois subject of history who hides behind the abstract universals of the philosophical tradition. It stresses the need to fracture the universal or humanist self through attentiveness to its repressed or marginalized other: ʻfeminineʼ difference. Subversively imagined and rewritten as positive, the decentred side of the silenced and repressed ʻfeminineʼ is thought to enable women to ʻforesee the unforeseeableʼ, and escape the dichotomous conceptual order in which men have enclosed them.36 This new focus upon images of female corporeality has been seen by its exponents as presenting a fresh purchase on the old essentialism debate, transcending earlier forms of historical, sociological or psychoanalytic anti-essentialist arguments. The ʻfeminine feminineʼ, Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous suggest, can emerge only once women find the courage to break out of the male imaginary and into a female one; once women begin to speak and write their sexuality, which is always plural, circular and aimless, in contrast to all existing singular, linear and phallocentric, masculine forms of symbolization.37 Such feminist reclaiming of the body unfolds here as always culturally and psychically inscribed female experience, not anatomical destiny, and is perhaps best seen as a form of aestheticized, high modernist, ʻavantgardismʼ.38 It is nevertheless still narrated in terms of a universal corporeal subjectivity for women. The attraction of such difference theory, which allows the feminist to speak ʻas a womanʼ, is obvious. The revaluing of those aspects of womenʼs lives and experiences previously ignored or demeaned in male-centred theorizing was, and remains, crucial to feminist research and practice. But there is still a problem which it cannot easily tackle (even if we

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ride with its own cheerfully embraced contradictions), once we turn from the academic to the political realm. As I have argued elsewhere, it is precisely ideas of sexual difference encompassing the experiences supposedly inscribing our distinctive ʻfemalenessʼ which most dramatically divide, rather than unite, feminists attempting to fight for womenʼs interests.39 It is easier for women to join forces around issues on the currently unfashionable economic front (demanding parity in wages and training), or social policy (demanding more and better publicly funded welfare resources), than it has ever been for women to unite around issues of sexuality and the meanings we attach to the female body. Creatively exciting as the project of re-imagining female corporeality has proved to be to some feminists,40 its neglect of issues of class, race, ethnicity and other forms of marginality as equally constitutive of womenʼs subjectivity and destiny has seemed exclusionary and disempowering to other feminists. Such criticism has been most forcefully expressed by Black and ethnic minority feminist theoreticians – from Gayatri Spivak to Barbara Christian or Deborah McDowell.41 Some academic feminists like to quote Gayatri Spivak in support of their view that women today must ʻtake “the risk of essence” in order to think really differentlyʼ.42 Spivak herself, however, has reconsidered her earlier suggestion for a ʻstrategicʼ use of a positive essentialism. Since such a move is viable only when it serves ʻa scrupulously visible political interestʼ, she now warns: ʻThe strategic use of essentialism can turn into an alibi for proselytizing academic essentialisms.ʼ43 And it has. Spivak leads us to the second, more rigorous, Derridean strand of feminist poststructuralism, which is critical of the monolithic Lacanian version of difference theory. It questions all universalizing or totalizing theoretical tendencies, deconstructing every discursive patterning of the self, including that of ʻwomanʼ.44 Here, in tune with the input of Black, Third World, lesbian, and other feminisms, every generalization about women, including the feminist search for the causes of womenʼs subordination or any generalized expressions of womenʼs difference – whether seen in terms of responsibility for child-rearing, reproductive and sexual experience, menʼs violence, phallogocentric language, a female imaginary, or whatever – is regarded with suspicion. This position is summed up by Donna Haraway: There is nothing about being ʻfemaleʼ that naturally binds women. There is not even such a state as ʻbeingʼ female, itself a highly complex category constructed in contested sexual scientific discourses and

social practices … The feminist dream of a common language, like all dreams for a perfectly true language, of a perfectly faithful naming of experience, is a totalizing and imperialistic one.45

Haraway wants to replace this dream with her own one of ʻa powerful infidel heteroglossia … building and destroying machines, identities, categories, relationships, spaces, storiesʼ, seeking a place for women in a future ʻmonstrous world without genderʼ.46 Her dream is full of playful optimism about the future. For other more strictly deconstructive feminists, however, there is no theoretically defensible affirmative position, but only a reminder of the limits of concepts, as Spivak explains: ʻthe absolutely other cannot enter into any kind of foundational emancipatory projectʼ.47 Such a deconstructive feminism certainly avoids the perils of generalizations about female subjectivity. But it courts the danger that its own interest in endlessly proliferating particularities of difference, and the partial, contradictory nature of womenʼs identities, endorses a relativity and indeterminacy which works to undermine political projects. The third, Foucauldian, strand of poststructuralist feminism returns us to the body – to its ʻsexualityʼ rather than to sexual difference – but only as a site or target of ubiquitous technologies of classification, surveillance and control. Foucaultʼs warning that oppositional discourses are inevitably caught up in the relations of domination they resist has been important in highlighting the traps facing emancipatory movements: of reproducing rather than transcending traditional frameworks of subjection. And his arguments about meaning and representation have proved particularly productive for lesbian and gay theorists. Here, feminists can learn much from Foucaultʼs insights about the genealogy of discursive regulation, but next to nothing about how organized resistance might impinge on such all-encompassing regimes of power, other than through the discursively disruptive, micro-political strategies favoured by some lesbian theorists. Judith Butler, for example, suggests ways of making ʻgender troubleʼ by subverting the masculine/feminine binary producing sexuality as heterosexuality. Emphasizing the multiplicity of sexual acts which occur in a non-heterosexual context can, she concludes, disrupt and disturb dominant heterosexual/reproductive discourses, ʻthrough hyperbole, dissonance, internal confusion and proliferationʼ.48 But despite its influence on some feminists, others respond with sheer bewilderment or exasperation at what they see as the staging of battles at a strictly semiotic level.49 And while some

ʻqueer theoristsʼ have understood Butler to be suggesting a type of individual transgressive ʻperformanceʼ as the most relevant way of undermining existing gender dynamics, it is an interpretation she herself now rejects.50 Meanwhile, some feminists have used Foucault to reject earlier feminist analysis of power in relation to key structural and institutional sites. Again, as often noted, the problem here is that it discourages analysis of where and how women are best placed to combat the authority and privilege men commonly wield over them – by entering those sites which are most expedient or have proved receptive to change, and supporting strategies to undermine or transform those which remain most rigid and resistant to change.51

Political agendas Poststructuralism, especially in its Derridean and Foucauldian forms, has provided feminists with fresh (if not unique) conceptual tools for problematizing identities and social differences. It usefully emphasizes their hierarchically imposed and coercive nature, and the multiplicity of intertwining, destabilizing and exclusionary discourses or narratives in which subjectivities are historically enmeshed. It suggests the possibility (however difficult) of categorial re-significations or reconfigurations, as well as the need for acceptance of paradox and contradiction in conceptualizing change. Feminists need to pay heed to the normativities and exclusions of discourse, especially as they construct differences between women. But in a world of intensifying inequality, any concern with either gender justice or the fate of women overall must also direct us to issues of redistribution, alongside issues of identity and recognition.52 It is a socialist imaginary, combined with feminism, that has always stressed the sufferings caused by the material exploitation, deprivation and social marginalization of women and other oppressed groups around the world. These cannot be either superseded or replaced by battles over discursive marginalization and invalidation. The two objectives, though relatively distinct, are also intricately interwoven: the one turning feminists outwards towards women in struggle; the other directing us inwards towards refiguring a hitherto abjected ʻfemininityʼ. Once we address both sets of issues, then some differences will matter more than others in generating political interventions. However plural and irreducibly complex our characterization of the social, any politics seeking the most inclusive transformation of socio-economic and cultural marginalization must seek to challenge the major systems of domination. This means seeking

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to understand just what they are at this historical moment: uncovering why, and how, they persist, as well as their interaction with whatever specific location we occupy. Fearful of totalizing generalizations we may be, and cautious we must be, but the central global axes of economic exploitation and cultural oppression continue to construct and reconstruct themselves in the interrelated terms of ʻgenderʼ (tied in with sexual orientation), ʻclassʼ (tied in with nationality and ethnicity), and ʻraceʼ (tied in with nationality, ethnicity and religion), within what is currently the ever more totalizing control of a transnational capitalist market. The invocation of specific differences can only serve broadly based transformative ends as part of some wider political project seeking to dismantle these basic structures of domination. The Anglo-American reception of poststructuralism, with its central place in ninetiesʼ feminist theory, came to prominence at a political moment far removed from that which generated the confident hopes Womenʼs Liberation took to the streets. (Ironically, some explications and critiques of ʻpostmodernismʼ present it as responsible for putting feminism on the political agenda, as in Eagletonʼs recent The Illusions of Postmodernism;53 while others would see its influence as quite the reverse.) Distrustful, when not dismissive, of traditional forms of collective action and reformist political agendas, especially when class-based, feminism faces inhibiting dilemmas in describing how either attention to the discursive specificity of ʻfeminineʼ difference, or the proliferation of categorial heterogeneity and transgressive display, might ever again bring women together in any transformative feminist project. We need to remember that the word ʻfeministʼ has a history. Sometimes feminists have focused directly on issues of sexual difference; at other times feminism has been more a movement for the transformation of the whole of society. At the close of the nineteenth century, ʻfeminismʼ first appeared in English to describe the movement of women campaigning for the right to vote, but within a few decades the concept had expanded to include a variety of different types of moral, economic, social and political campaigns waged by women. The second wave of Western feminism has similarly drawn upon different meanings, at times stressing social transformation (especially in its early days), at others emphasizing gender-specific issues.54 The difficulties of generalizing from womenʼs experiences (or ʻcorporeal existenceʼ, through whatever mode of representation) are not hard to document. Nevertheless, it is premature to downplay the signifi-

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cance of gender in favour of a plurality of differences. The tenacity of menʼs power over women means that feminists must just as tenaciously seek to emphasize the diverse and multiple effects of gender hierarchy on the lives and experiences of women. But if feminism is to address the problems of the many women who need it most, it must see that the specificities of womenʼs lives do not reduce to gender, which means working in alliance with other progressive forces combating class, racialized, ethnic and other entrenched social hierarchies. Interestingly, one of the continuing threads between seventiesʼ and ninetiesʼ feminisms (and there are many such threads, although we may not read about them in a significant number of ninetiesʼ feminist texts) is the continuing growth and vision of the international human-rights movements, now often in the form of NGOs.55 Even there, however, as Suzanne Gibson and Laura Flanders have described, it has proved far easier for women to get their demands taken seriously by the United Nations when they have addressed gender-specific, apparently fashionable, issues like rape and violence against women, than when they have addressed employment rights, illiteracy or poverty.56 Back in Britain, there will be little significant change in the situation of the women who are worst off until public resources are shifted to provide far greater welfare provision, without the constraints of market considerations. Yet todayʼs Foucauldian-informed feminists who write about the state reject earlier feminist analysis of its structures and functions, claiming, like Rosemary Pringle and Sophie Watson, that ʻ[i]n poststructuralist accounts of the state, “discourse” and “subjectivity” rather than structures and interests become the key terms.ʼ57 But such re-theorizing only leads us further away from any analysis of the state itself, and the way in which it has been changing in recent years. The state now embraces market forces in most of the areas from which they were previously excluded, and precisely against the interests of, in particular, women, children and all dependent people. Britain, like North America, has been moving as fast as it can in quite the opposite direction to that which might assist those women in greatest need of economic and social support. This is why I remain a socialist-feminist: still hoping for more dialogue than I find at present between different generations of feminism. Sometimes, as one of my colleagues writes, recalling his own formative moments in Northern Ireland, you need to have the ʻcourage of your anachronismsʼ.58

Notes 1. Sheila Rowbotham, ʻReclaim the Moonʼ, in Dreams and Dilemmas, Virago, London, 1983, p. 348. 2. This is a revised version of a talk given at the Radical Philosophy Conference, ʻTorn Halves: Theory and Politics in Contemporary Feminismʼ, London, 9 November 1996. 3. Patricia Romney, unpublished notes prepared for roundtable discussion, ʻWriting about a Visionary Movement in the “Get Real” World of the ʼ90s: The History of Womenʼs Liberation in the United Statesʼ, at the 10th Berkshire Womenʼs Conference, North Carolina, June 1996. 4. Margaret Strobel, in ibid. 5. Michèle Barrett and Anne Phillips, eds, Introduction, Destabilizing Theory: Contemporary Feminist Debates, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1992, p. 2. 6. A few years earlier Michèle Barrett had expressed her reservations about her own ʻseventiesʼ thinking in Womenʼs Oppression Today – in a new preface – indicating (accurately) that recent feminist debate has problematized the notion of ʻwomenʼ and ʻwomanʼ, while suggesting that the notion of oppression ʻlooks decidedly dated todayʼ. 7. Judith Butler and Joan Scott, eds, Feminists Theorize the Political, Routledge, London, 1992. 8. Ibid., p. xiii. 9. Butler, ʻContingent Foundationsʼ, in ibid., p. 16. 10. Ibid. 11. See, for example, Linda Gordon, ʻReview of Gender and the Politics of History by Joan Wallach Scottʼ, Signs 15, Summer 1990. 12. Joan Wallach Scott, ʻResponse to Gordonʼ, Signs 15, Summer 1990, p. 859. See also the measured and thoughtful account of the erasure of feminist theoretical heterogeneity in Susan Stanford Friedman, ʻMaking Historyʼ, in Diane Elam and Robyn Weigman, eds, Feminism Beside Itself, Routledge, London, 1995. 13. Patricia Clough, Feminist Thought, Blackwell, Oxford, 1994. 14. Rowbotham, Dreams and Dilemmas, p. 354, emphasis added. 15. Ibid., pp. x, 351. 16. Ibid., p. 351. 17. Sally Alexander and Barbara Taylor, ʻIn Defence of Patriarchyʼ, in Raphael Samuel, ed., Peopleʼs History and Socialist Theory, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1981. 18. Rowbotham, Dreams and Dilemmas, pp. 353, 2. 19. Rowbotham, Womanʼs Consciousness, Manʼs World, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1973, pp. 66, 34. 20. Rowbotham, Dreams and Dilemmas, p. 83. 21. Ibid., pp. 59, 75. 22. Ibid., pp. 32–3. 23. Joan Scott, ʻExperienceʼ, in Butler and Scott, eds., Feminists Theorize the Political. 24. Rowbotham, Womanʼs Consciousness, Manʼs World, p. 27. 25. Ibid., p. x. Rowbotham prefers, as she writes in 1972, the idea of ʻconsciousness movingʼ to ʻconsciousness raisingʼ, since ʻyour own perception is continually being shifted by how other women perceive what has happened to them … The main difficulty, still, is that while the social composition of womenʼs liberation remains narrow it isnʼt possible to move naturally beyond certain

26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38.

39. 40.

41.

42.

43.

limitations in perspectiveʼ (Rowbotham, Dreams and Dilemmas, p. 59). Rowbotham, Dreams and Dilemmas, pp. 74, 208, 218. Ibid., p. 83. Ibid., p. 82. Elizabeth Wilson, Women and the Welfare State, Tavistock, London, 1977; Mary McIntosh, ʻThe State and the Oppression of Womenʼ, in Annette Kuhn and AnnMarie Wolpe, eds, Feminism and Materialism: Women and Modes of Production, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1978. Some later commentators, though sympathetic to the accounts of the state provided in this writing, would suggest, I think correctly, that they diminished the intrinsically male-dominated structures, practices and discourses of the many differing sectors of the state (S. Franzway, D. Court and R.W. Connell, Staking a Claim: Feminism, Bureacracy and the State, Paladin, London, 1989). Michèle Barrett and Mary McIntosh, The Anti-Social Family, Verso, London, 1982. Sheila Rowbotham, The Past Is Before Us: Feminism in Action since the 1960s, Pandora, London, 1989. Valerie Amos, Gail Lewis, Amina Mama, Pratibha Parmar, Editorial of Many Voices, One Chant: Black Feminist Perspectives, Feminist Review 17, Autumn 1984. Melissa Benn, ʻWomen and Democracy: Thoughts on the Last Ten Yearsʼ, Women: A Cultural Review, vol. 4, no. 3, 1993, p. 237. Lynne Segal, Is the Future Female? Troubled Thoughts on Contemporary Feminism, Virago, London, 1987. Catharine MacKinnon, ʻPornography, Civil Rights and Speechʼ, in Catherine Itzin, ed., Pornography, Women, Violence, and Civil Liberties, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1992, p. 456. Hélène Cixous, ʻThe Laugh of the Medusaʼ, in E. Marks & I. de Courtivron, eds, New French Feminisms, Schocken Books, New York, 1981, p. 256. Cixous,ʻThe Laugh of the Medusaʼ; Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, Cornell University Press, Ithaca NY, 1985, p. 32. See, for example, Laura Kipnis, ʻLooks Good on Paper: Marxism and Feminism in a Postmodern Woldʼ, in Ecstasy Unlimited: On Sex, Capital, Gender, and Aesthetics, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1993. Lynne Segal, ʻWhose Left? Socialism, Feminism and the Futureʼ, New Left Review 185, January–February 1991. For imaginative political appropriations of ʻFrench feminismʼ, see for example Drucilla Cornell, Beyond Accommodation: Ethical Feminism, Deconstruction and the Law, Routledge, London, 1991; Moira Gattens, Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality, Routledge, London, 1996. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ʻFrench Feminism in an International Frameʼ, in In Other Worlds, Routledge, London, 1988; Barbara Christian, ʻThe Race for Theoryʼ, in Linda Kaufman, ed., Gender and Theory: Dialogues on Feminist Criticism, Basil Blackwell, New York, 1989; Deborah McDowell, ʻThe “Practice” of “Theory”ʼ, in Elam and Weigman, eds, Feminism Beside Itself. See, for example, Alice Jardine, ʻMen in Feminism: Odor di Uomo Or Compagnons de Route?ʼ, in Alice Jardine and Paul Smith, eds, Men in Feminism, Methuen, London, 1987, p. 58. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Outside in the Teaching

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15

Machine, Routledge, London, 1993, p. 4. 44. See, for example, Denise Riley, Am I That Name? Feminism and the Subject of ʻWomenʼ in History, Macmillan, London, 1988. 45. Donna Haraway, ʻA Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980sʼ, in L. Nicholson, ed., Feminism/Postmodernism, Routledge, London, 1990, pp. 197, 215. 46. Ibid., p. 215. 47. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ʻRemembering the Limits: Difference, Identity and Practiceʼ, in Peter Osborne, ed., Socialism and the Limits of Liberalism, Verso, London, 1991, p. 229, emphasis in original. 48. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Routledge, London, 1990, p. 33. 49. See Tania Modleski, Feminism Without Women: Culture and Criticism in a ʻPostfeministʼ Age, Routledge, London, 1991. 50. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ʻSexʼ, London, Routledge, 1993, p. 231; see also Peter Osborne and Lynne Segal, ʻGender as Performance: An Interview with Judith Butlerʼ, Radical Philosophy 67, Summer 1994. 51. See, for example, Gregor McLennan, ʻFeminism, Epistemology and Postmodernism: Reflections on Current Abivalenceʼ, Sociology, vol. 29, no. 3, August 1995, pp. 391–401. 52. See, for example, Nancy Fraser, ʻFrom Redistribution to

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53. 54. 55. 56.

57. 58.

Recognition? Dilemmas of Justice in a “Post-Socialist” Ageʼ, New Left Review 212, July–August 1995. Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism, Blackwell, Oxford, 1996, p. 22. See Sheila Rowbotham, Women in Movement: Feminism and Social Action, Routledge, London, 1992, pp. 8–15. See Julie Peters and Andrea Wolper, eds, Womenʼs Rights Human Rights: International Feminist Perspectives, Routledge, London, 1995. See Suzanne Gibson, ʻOn Sex, Horror and Human Rightsʼ, Women: A Cultural Review, vol. 4, no. 3, Winter 1993; Laura Flanders, ʻHard Cases and Human Rights: C. MacKinnon in the City of Freudʼ, The Nation, 9–16 August 1993, pp. 174–7. For an important and stimulating commentary on the challenge of human-rights internationalism to the recent philosophical embrace of a ʻpolitics of differenceʼ, see Bruce Robbins, ʻSad Stories in the International Public Sphere: Richard Rorty on Culture and Human Rightsʼ, Public Culture, vol. 9, no. 2, Winter 1997. Rosemary Pringle and Sophie Watson, ʻ“Womenʼs Interests” and the Post-Structuralist Stateʼ, in Barrett and Phillips, eds, Destabilizing Theory, p. 65. Francis Mulhern (quoting Jonathan Rée) in Francis Mulhern, Introduction, The Present Lasts a Long Time: Essays in Cultural Politics, Cork University Press, Cork, forthcoming.

Feminism without nostalgia Diana Coole

The title of the recent Radical Philosophy conference, ʻTorn Halves: Theory and Politics in Contemporary Feminismʼ, implied that two things which should be joined – theory and politics – have come apart; indeed have been ripped apart rather violently and now need stitching back together. Is it, then, the case that two processes which were, and should be, united, have been severed? If this is indeed our situation, then it suggests that some sort of crisis has befallen us, whereby feminist theory and the womenʼs movement have moved off in different directions: or even worse, that one of the pair (and presumably the movement would be the prime candidate here) has suffered a premature demise. This certainly raises a number of pressing questions: what was, or should be, the nature of this connection? Why has it been broken? Should we try to repair it, and if so, along what lines? In trying to respond to these questions, I realized that the very meanings of politics and theory have become unclear in feminism. So I will begin by considering each in turn, before addressing their linkage and suggesting a particular relationship as exemplary.

Feminism and the political In considering what feminism might mean by the political, I have distinguished between two senses, which I will call the topographical and the dynamic. In the topographical sense, politics is located within three different domains, each of whose differential effects on women have been a source of theory and of particular practices. Most explicitly, this spatial understanding of the political concerns the state as the pinnacle of power, where on the one hand feminists demand equal representation and where on the other we regard processes of legislation and policy-making with a mixture of hope and suspicion. In a rather obvious way, anything we do in this context can be regarded as political, and we may well feel that our

interventions and successes have recently fallen short here, for reasons broadly connected with the ideological climate and an attenuation of the democratic process. Paradoxically, the response by many feminist political theorists – especially in the United States – has been to focus on processes of a highly idealized model of discursive democracy, while paying little attention to how its preconditions for fair and equal participation might be realized. At the next level down, feminists identify a series of structures and processes within civil society – such as economy and family – which reproduce sex roles and gender hierarchies in ways that have formerly been designated oppressive. Intervention is deemed political here, since its aim is to eliminate various forms of discrimination and injustice. Arguably this space has seen the major staging of second-wave feminism, where the state was more obviously targeted by the first. Now, it is at these two levels, where there is a massive and resilient institutionalization of more or less crude and visible patriarchal power, that women have been able to situate a politics most unequivocally. It is in these contexts that an earlier discourse was able to refer to womenʼs oppression and to its opposition as the Womenʼs Liberation Movement. Here, then, was a clear and binary confrontation between the massive power of what Habermas calls steering media – state and economy – on one hand, and a relatively unified and militant force on the other. When we lament the demise of our politics, I suspect that it is on these levels that we situate its loss. But as feminists, we also locate politics in a third realm, that of personal life, and although this is both re-enforced by, and in turn re-enforces, the other two levels, the kind of strategies it implies have been quite different from those recognized conventionally as political. It is surely here that our analyses and practices have been most innovative and specific to gender struggle, although they do not necessarily rely on a

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mass movement since strategies are more individual and targets more local. Yet my impression is that politics has recently waned here, too, with confrontations over, for example, the division of domestic labour and sexual practices either resuming their personal but apolitical nature, or being displaced by a crisis in the household economy. The alternative, dynamic, model of politics construes it not spatially but as a process of circulating and unstable power relations. If one were so inclined, one could trace it to Machiavelli, Nietzsche and Foucault, but I think it is also encouraged by feministsʼ own theoretical excavations, which show the powers reproducing sexual inequality and gender hierarchy moving through all domains of the political and indeed overflowing them into the discursive, linguistic, aesthetic and psychological. This suggests that it is never sufficient to pursue inclusion in government or equal treatment in civil society: instead politics must involve an ongoing engagement wherever power is present, via deployment of a whole variety of tactics which cannot be formulated in advance. This understanding of politics is most appropriate to the third topographical space of the personal, but it has tended to politicize culture as such. There is a certain irony here, since, while many feminist philosophers have been intellectually enthusiastic about this politics, its significance and efficacy for a womenʼs movement have been difficult to theorize. The diverse, often aesthetic or performative, strategies, fragmented support and ambiguous goals deployed are not obviously connected to a mass movement and do not self-evidently achieve the sort of outcomes we might expect from a successful politics. Indeed I would surmise that it is precisely because this often seems to be the only politics we are currently engaged in that some women might wonder whether we still have a politics at all, or if everything in fact takes place within the realm of the theoretical. At this stage, however, I only want to question a tendency prevalent in this last approach, to collapse politics into power relations as such. Power is indeed ubiquitous, but not all power is political. To become so, it must be structured, conflictual and at least minimally open to change. And, even more importantly, it must also be articulated in such a way that its presence engenders some political mobilization. Where power remains merely habitual and mute, or uncontested, it is at best only latently political and awaits its theoretical disclosure and practical resistance to become manifestly so. This, then, brings me to the question of theory in relation to the political.

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Feminism and theory I find it helpful to begin here with a distinction between empirical studies, theory and abstract philosophy. There are limits to how far this is sustainable, but it allows me to associate theory with a specific political task, even if for feminism all three have political import. Finding out about womenʼs lives and building up empirical data bases has been an essential task in overcoming womenʼs social and academic invisibility, and we have succeeded brilliantly here. At the other end of the spectrum, engaging in philosophical questions regarding, for example, epistemology or metaphysics, has given feminism its own grounds for debating the foundational nature of gender differentiation. However, it is in the middle realms of theorizing, where conceptbuilding and empirical data are brought together, that the connection between intellectual work and political intervention is drawn the tightest, and it is here that I think we must be concerned if the two part company or if theory collapses into either empiricism or abstract philosophy. This does not mean that the only important theory is political theory, but it does suggest that for feminists, whose theorizing was from the start directed at changing the world, theory is oriented to political tasks. In this sense it is both instrumental in guiding and inciting practice, and is itself a participant in power struggles at a discursive level. Feminism is part of a tradition that never sees ideas as innocent. Political theory, for example, has both legitimized womenʼs exclusion from public life and expounded the norms that have constituted and disciplined gendered subjects, while it has also been used by feminists as a vehicle for framing and legitimizing our own demands. Yet, although theories have often acted as crude ideologies, masking and sustaining patriarchal interests, they also work more insidiously to represent reality in ways that are riddled with gender privileges and exclusions. This means that their demystification or deconstruction is a political act. Although it is not easy to point to concrete results, this is an activity that many feminist theorists and philosophers have been engaged in over a long period of time. Presumably it is an ongoing task we still value, although it may be helpful to pause every now and then, and to make explicit the strategic aims it bears. Where the theory–practice link is more evident, however, is where theory directs its gaze onto what, for want of a better phrase, I will call the real world. Now, I have already argued that power becomes political only when it is articulated such that conflict becomes explicit and a spur to action. But thematizing effects

of power that were previously only lived is itself a political process. For it is not the case, as we formerly tended to believe, that inequalities are hidden truths simply awaiting representation. Power is also involved in the way – and whether – we problematize our situation and the conceptual framework we bring to bear on the myriad experiences of everyday life. For example, the public/private distinction is not a self-evident opposition simply spread out before us, but a wonderfully fecund conceptualization that feminism has developed to structure the real in ways that explain our exclusions and focus our transgressions. By representing a complex socio-cultural world from a particular perspective, we engage in an ideological/discursive struggle of reality-construction, whereby lines of conflict, and hence the political itself, are configured. I would not, however, want to claim that this process is reducible to the exercise of naked power or sheer fantasy, since thematizations of oppression or discrimination are only resonant to the extent that they are already materially and existentially suffered prior to their discursive representation. The lived world is sufficiently open to accommodate a variety of interpretations and silencings, and for women the way it is presented is crucial in giving our politics both a normative basis and strategic direction. But representation is never just relative, since it is anchored in experience. Moreover, the clarity with which the disadvantages bestowed by gender at any given time can be articulated must have a bearing on womenʼs politicization and mobilization, since if theory is to inspire action, it must be felt to be ʻtrueʼ and consequential, not just abstract or ideological posturing. Yet this is where I think we do confront a dilemma today. Our own studies have increasingly shown sexual inequality to be extremely complex and diffuse, as well as revealing gender identity as a diverse and ambiguous phenomenon. In one sense we can use this knowledge politically, to deconstruct vulgar notions of binary sexual difference. But at the same time, our more sophisticated theorizing has tended to dilute a formerly more incisive representation of opposition and oppression, which makes collective action difficult in the political and economic domains – that is, precisely where the power that sustains sexual inequality regarding rights and resources is most massive and consolidated. In part it is true that postmodernization has rendered those realms more difficult to understand comprehensively, and therefore more immune to any obvious oppositional strategy. But we have also been seduced by discourses that distrust structural

analysis and emphasize fragmentation instead. We are well schooled in antipathy towards Marxian-style totalizations or reductionism. Yet there has also been a certain retreat from engagement with the real, in light of our epistemological scepticism and its political intransigence. This needs redressing, whatever its difficulties, if the material and structural bases for either equal citizenship, or equal opportunities to be gender-complex, are to be constructed. In this sense I think there is a political problem with the postmodernization of feminism – if I can put it this way – in that our pursuit of both diversity and consensus has distracted us regarding the nature of political struggle as requiring risky and audacious acts, where to theorize politically or to intervene effectively does ultimately require acts of conflict and closure, even a certain militancy. For no matter how much we might aspire to fulfil the ideals of discursive democracy or to accommodate difference and complexity, we still occupy a social field where violence and inequality require definitive responses which do not fade into impotent openness and multiplicity. These latter may be, and I believe are, potent strategies on a cultural level. But in the socio-economic domain, where there are more or less veiled conflicts of interest, structured inequalities and zero-sum games, more definitive analyses and mobilizations are necessary. So far I have been considering what politics and theory mean for feminism, and I would now like to be clear about the conclusions I derive from this. A topographical approach to the political locates it in a variety of domains, where the nature of power and of appropriate strategic engagement with it vary. In so far as we both sense an eclipse of womenʼs political practice and feel some urgency regarding its resuscitation, I would situate these specifically in the realms of state and civil society, where I have suggested that highly organized structures of power sustain more or less experiential, explicit and visible forms of discrimination which require collective action and political mobilization on a significant scale if they are to be effectively challenged. To render the power that operates here political, however, its theorization is required, and this involves both a direct involvement in discursive struggles and a reading of events that takes their density and inertia seriously by thematizing a complex field of forces where different lines of strategy and defence are, if not determined, at least circumscribed. It follows from this that a crucial role for feminist theory is to engage in a dialectical reading of the present in order to formulate tactics and opportunities and to mobilize its forces.

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Indeed it is here that I want to locate an exemplary theory–practice relationship, and I would suggest that it is its demise that has resulted in our current sense of crisis and torn halves. In order to illustrate what I have in mind, I want to go back twenty-five years or so, to a brief reconsideration of one of modern feminismʼs founding texts: Juliet Mitchellʼs Womanʼs Estate (1971).

Woman’s Estate In the preface to this work, Mitchell offered a list of political actions which provided a legacy for 1960sʼ feminism. The suffragettes, she recalls, burnt down houses, smashed shop windows, destroyed buildings, blew up letter boxes and cut telegraph wires. Here was an unambiguous confrontation negotiated through direct action; and although Mitchell never associates herself with this type of violence against property, she does present the movement early in its second wave as comparable and revolutionary. She also explains its re-emergence and radicalism as a consequence of two factors: the contemporary situation (in which women were at the forefront of acute contradictions within capitalism) and the simultaneous explosion of other radical political movements which forged important alliances with feminists. She further traces the womenʼs movementʼs own political influences in anarcho-syndicalism, anarchism, the Situationists, the anti-psychiatry movement and even terrorism, as well as in Marxist and liberal political thought. In short, Mitchell is in no doubt that the womenʼs movement is born out of an activist, even revolutionary, past, and that it will continue its trajectory. This does not, however, prevent her from worrying about its politicization. In contrast to our own anxieties that theory has overtaken practice, she sees the movement in 1971 as tending towards a practice which is not yet adequately theorized. ʻThe Womenʼs Liberation Movementʼ, she writes, ʻis at the stage of organizing our “instinct” of our oppression as women, into a consciousness of its meaning.ʼ1 Mitchell insists that this cannot be done in abstraction but is a historical and dialectical process in which theory and practice are interwoven at every level. The renewed movement had, then, begun as series of complaints, derived from experience but at first manifest only in spontaneous protest. This aspect must not be lost: ʻWe do have to experience the implications of our own oppression.ʼ2 But in order to render this political, it had to be transformed into a political challenge to social institutions generally. The organizational aspect of this challenge was in

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fact crucial, Mitchell argued, in two ways. First, it was prefigurative: that is, it might be described as a form of unmediated political engagement in so far as small womenʼs groups perform a new mode of intersubjectivity and a new political style that is consonant with feminist values – ʻcollective workʼ, as she says, ʻis part of the processʼ, although it cannot be an end in itself since then it would be a merely moral, rather than political, solution. Secondly, then, it is important that small groups should coalesce into revolutionary collectives. This is strategically necessary, but more importantly, as far as theory is concerned, it is at this level that a general theorization of womenʼs oppression, as well as strategies for liberation, are forged. The small group allows women to discuss personal experience, and through discussion to recognize that the personal is political. This does not mean for Mitchell that politics is a micro-matter, reduced to the level of the individual, but that personal experiences of oppression come to be understood as instances of a more general, structural oppression whose resolution can only be collective. The broader groups then work on analysing these structures, but it is crucial that they are not imposing some pre-existent formula. Theory grows out of personal experience and interprets it by eliciting generalities which are then related to structural forces. Politics is strategically guided by such theory, and theory mobilizes the individuals to whom it speaks to collective acts. In so far as change occurs, then the new conditions call for new theorization, different strategies, and so on. In this dialectical linkage, there is, then, no question of having to seek the political implications of a theory subsequently, or of developing an abstract theory whose connection with lived experience might remain elusive. Experience is never taken simply as raw empirical data; nor does theory seek some complete formulation: they are continuously and mutually refined through their interaction. Women are not presupposed as some latent political agency just waiting to be set in motion, but nor do they have to be conjured up subsequently out of the complexities of theory. My reason for returning to Mitchell is that her work suggests what I consider to be an exemplary way of holding theory and practice together. Much of her work during the 1970s was just such a reading of dominant structures in terms of their contradictions, articulations and the weak spots at which they were vulnerable to change. The details of her analysis, as well as her commitment to scientific socialism, may seem dated in the 1990s, but the point is that if we are to act

strategically; if we are to strike a resonance among the many and diverse women who suffer various forms of violence, discrimination, exploitation and oppression and to incite a further wave of feminist politics; then we too need an ongoing analysis of contemporary conditions and the political opportunities they allow. This surely means turning again to the sort of political economy and sociology we have largely abandoned. Of course, for us post-poststructuralists the cultural and discursive structures that construct gendered identities remain an important site of analysis and contestation. But we also need to consider afresh the roles and deprivations that are imposed by a system which does identify us as female subjects inhabiting womenʼs bodies; and granted the anachronism of Mitchellʼs analyses, do we not urgently need a new theorization of where women (as opposed to genders) stand as the century draws to a close? Should this not be the central role for our theory as a guide to an engaged practice in public life? For example, Mitchell wrote of womenʼs exclusion from the workforce, but today we witness its feminization. Of course women still occupy worse-paid jobs under worse conditions, but the complexities of our location in an economy that is both post- and premodern; the growth of a substantial underclass, of which women constitute a significant proportion; the effects of information technology on the home/work distinction that has underpinned capitalism thus far, as well as our own public/private opposition; the simultaneous collapse of the family and a renewed support

for so-called family values; a popular culture that itself celebrates gender-crossing and which only in its cruder forms exhibits the sort of blatant sexism bemoaned by Mitchell – these are all structural changes calling for new analysis, perhaps new paradigms, regarding their differential effects on women and the feasibility of response. What is needed, then, is an audit of where women, in our commonality and diversity, stand in the context of the field of forces which constitutes our situation. This does not mean relying on unmediated accounts of everyday life, forgetting that our lives are already structured by ideology and power, but it does involve taking account of the specific forms of subordination and power that strike us, since it is impossible to mobilize people on the basis of theory alone. Strategically, then, I am suggesting two levels of theorizing. First, we need to look once more at womenʼs actual experiences in order to elicit generalities. This was once perceived as intrinsically political, when it took the form of consciousness-raising and organizing via the proliferation of networks of small groups. Should we try to reactivate this process (perhaps via the Internet?), or is it strategic work that might adequately be undertaken from a distance by researchers using interviewing techniques or opinion polls? The problem with the latter option is that, although it conveys a sense of objectivity, it ignores a dimension that was crucial to Mitchellʼs dialectic, where it was women themselves who collectively articulated the lacunae they suffered. It is surely not just a matter

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of acquiring knowledge, as if it were already there but hidden, but of a process of coming-to-knowledge which also changes us and our (self-) perceptions on the way. In other words, it is a praxis, not simply an exercise in data collection. Second, we need to locate these findings in a broader structural context, always remembering that this analysis, too, must be resolutely political. Dynamically, the question of the political is one of strategy: of reading the present as a shifting field of forces. By this I mean that power does not just circulate randomly, passing through players who are its conduits. It is often exercised with hierarchical intent, but in any case it runs into clots, nodal points, where it undergoes a certain ossification and closure whereby some groups are consistently more powerful than others. The field of forces may be agonistic, but not all players are equal. A political movement cannot, then, afford to go all the way with a Nietzschean–Foucauldian description of power flows: it must also focus on the way techniques of power are captured by institutions; colonized by privileged groups whose collective acts may indeed result in unintended consequences but whose result is nevertheless the reproduction of inequalities and exclusions. A political theorizing must accordingly identify these concentrations of power: not as congealed centres of domination that would paralyse opposition, but as relatively closed (or open) force-fields that must be engaged with strategically, in light of their strengths and gaps. It is in this sense that we continue Mitchellʼs work, if without the language of contradiction or ambition of liberation. To theorize politically, dialectically, is to ask where resistance might be effective; where prefigurative alternatives might leave their mark; where power is experienced as especially intolerable and whether it thereby incites refusal or complicity. If, for example, we conclude that state and economy are especially closed and oppressive but that any truly radical negation is impracticable, then we might invoke our powers as voters and consumers, both having potentially immense leverage but one dependent on effective organization. What this leaves us with is not, at least under current circumstances, any grand politics. It does not talk of Patriarchy or Capitalism with capital letters, because it understands that there is no mobilization currently powerful enough to negate these structures, even if theory could pin them down. But it does involve a critical engagement by locating all our piecemeal and diverse strategies in a larger field of relatively unstable relations where sometimes small transgressions, and

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sometimes collective assaults, are effective. For this sort of theorizing must also be resolutely realistic, taking into account the status of feminist forces as they wane or grow; the potential for mass mobilization; the endurance – or not – of a latent feminism that might be preserved and reactivated; the existence of small and piecemeal but nevertheless committed groups of activists and academics. It has some mobilizing capacity in its explications of oppressive structures, and it takes an overview of the myriad acts of resistance women still collectively perform, but it is neither naive nor unduly pessimistic about the state of womenʼs organization at any one time, recognizing that, like all movements, it will go through different cycles according to its own inner logic and changing external circumstances. The challenge is to match efficacious and appropriate strategies to the possibilities of the times, while recognizing that womenʼs politics and hardships are themselves constituents of those times, which do not therefore have to be passively borne. It is not pragmatism but it is strategic.

Two waves, no nostalgia! The reason for calling my article ʻFeminism without Nostalgiaʼ, despite an appeal to a 1960sʼ praxis, was to insist that when we express concern over our politics we must not imagine that we are inhabiting the same world. Mitchell was writing during one of those rare and privileged moments in history when theory and practice do seem able to correspond and reinforce one another. Lived experience, as an experience of disjunction and discrimination, was relatively homogeneous and explicit in a context of systemic oppressiveness yet disarray. In other words, there seemed to be a certain clarity to the situation which was in step with its articulation by radical groups whom it further served to mobilize and orientate. Today nothing seems transparent: there are masks, ambiguities, complexities and reversals that make the disclosure of oppression much more complicated and much less immediately resonant with experience. All this opacity and multiplicity makes the dialectical approach, which is what I do want to relearn from Mitchell, so much more difficult and mediated, although I am arguing that we must attempt it both in terms of immediate strategy, and in order to make sense of the movementʼs fortunes in a broader historical context. From this point of view, it seems to me that the real crisis for feminist politics is that while we are now passing into a historical situation where our

ʻinstinctsʼ tell us that state and economy – those spaces where the movement has always arisen most dramatically – should again be our target, we no longer have the theory or the political organization to respond efficaciously, since our models of theory and practice in these domains are now several decades old and we do not inhabit a privileged moment in history. We are suddenly lamenting a loss of politics not because women have not been acting politically, but because what we have been doing is not effective in the upper topographical regions of power where we now want to engage more dramatically. It would be much too complicated to try to work out here why this is, but I would suggest that a worsening economic situation has reached a tipping point, and also that it has become evident that what many of us believed would be a temporary phenomenon that could be rectified by a change of government is clearly not after all going to be challenged by parties of the so-called Left. As an example of some of these developments, I would like to cite a recent comment in The New Yorker by Betty Friedan.3 The authorʼs identity is significant, since Friedan has long been associated with liberal feminism and the powerful National Organization of Women in the United States. She was an icon of early second-wave feminism alongside Mitchell, since she identified ʻthe problem with no nameʼ that was besetting American housewives. But she was also consistently criticized by socialist feminists for ignoring the economic obstacles to sexual equality. In 1996, however, we find her supporting a Stand for Children rally modelled on the Million Man March which had taken place several months earlier, and writing that it ʻis likely to bring out some new thinking that has been quietly bubbling under the surface of the various and too often fragmented movements for American social renewalʼ. The rallyʼs specific target was draconian cuts in welfare, which critics saw as disproportionately affecting women and children, although its momentum was by no means exclusively associated with feminism. Nevertheless, Friedan focuses on the womenʼs movement to argue that among many of its supporters there is a growing sense that the time is ripe to go beyond ʻgender issuesʼ that lately have been the movementʼs prime concerns – abortion, date rape, sexual harassment, pornography, and the like – to such larger matters as economic distress and social disintegration.

Although we might pause at Friedanʼs distinction between gender issues and social disintegration, or her implied relegation of them to smaller issues (especially since in Britain we may well feel that we have become insufficiently political even here), I think her emphasis on economic questions is indeed symptomatic of the times. It is not a question of adopting her as an icon, but of noting that, significantly for a liberal feminist, she refers to the limits of an old paradigm of identity politics and rights, presenting in its place a new concern for ʻextreme income inequality, and the concentration of wealth in the top one-half of one per centʼ. Unsurprisingly, she does not go so far as to mention class struggle, but she does look to ʻa new kind of powerʼ wielded by the combined strength of ʻforces for equalityʼ, which might mobilize support if government and corporations fail to respond to polling evidence that the most urgent concerns are those of families and jobs. In other words, even Friedan is arguing for a shift in politics from the personal realm to that of civil society, and she is also anticipating a new mobilization of forces under the banner of economic equality. In the British context, I would like merely to refer to an article in The New Statesman and Society,4 which reported an extraordinary 81 per cent of respondents to a recent Gallup poll agreeing that there is a class struggle in Britain. Interpreting the responses, the analysts refer to a common-sense view of class derived from a sense of increasing conflict, predicated upon what is happening to people ʻon a day to day basisʼ: an ʻidea in actionʼ as one calls it, that concerns ʻthe bonds between people that we experience everyday as realʼ. The article notes the lack of any political machinery for reflecting this view, as well as the elusiveness of the concept of class for theory. These two articles do not, of course, add up to any adequate theorization of the times, but they are symptomatic, I would argue, of a general feeling that the political question for the millennium is one of resource distribution, which calls for more radical responses than the state is willing even to contemplate. The growth of an underclass, shifts in the job market, the decline of welfare support and extensions of commodification and market relations are all part of a resurgence of capitalism which affects all women, regardless of our race or class and despite our different situations, and which also affects us more generally as workers and providers. Of course, we have been here before, but in our post-Marxist climate everything

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surely needs to be thought through again, including our political responses and interventions which were clearly inadequate the first time round. Finally, I would also like to situate this problem more historically, and to do so let me take up feminist historiansʼ metaphor of waves. This is quite appropriate, because the two explosive moments of the womenʼs movement – in the latter part of the nineteenth century and again in the late 1960s – were indeed what I am calling privileged moments, when women rode the crest of a wave and theory and practice were in sync. But between waves there must be troughs – times such as our own, when solidarity wanes because lines of oppression are too complex and dispersed or invisible to allow experience and theory to gel sufficiently to mobilize mass response. In this context, the small but multiple transgressions and resistances, the defences and refusals that diverse women have sustained, are appropriate to the configuration of forces; and our recent cultural bias is also strategically sensible (although perhaps it is a lack of theory we suffer here, in its inability or refusal to represent these fragments in terms of an overall political significance). But the movement itself shifts into crisis when the situation changes, as the previously cited evidence suggests it has: when a more organized confrontation with the massive forces of the steering media is called for, yet where the kind of organized practices that might be efficacious are barely evident in the current field of forces. To put all this in a different language: we might associate the crests of waves with a politics of liberation, and the responses appropriate to troughs with what Foucault calls practices of liberty. Or, alternatively, we might align the language of liberation and oppression with the sort of mass politics that economy and state require, and the more individualist or grouplet idea of practices of liberty with small resistances and experiments that sustain cultural gains during periods of reaction and closure. It is interesting that, although Foucault himself saw a weakness of liberation struggles lying in their inability to establish the practices of liberty which would succeed them, he also conceded that liberation struggles may well be their precondition – specifically, under conditions of domination such as those of nineteenth-century patriarchy5 – because they open up the requisite spaces. Under patriarchal domination, women could not reverse the situation. Their limited freedom to resist allowed only ʻtricksʼ: ʻthe problem is in fact to find out where resistance is going to organize.ʼ In

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other words, the question is how to move from tricks to tactics; from domination to agonism, where the ethics Foucault associates with practices of liberty are replaced by collective, political acts. In a sense this is only repeating what I have already said, but, since I am broadly trying to synthesis Marx and Foucault within a dialectical approach to history, it is important to realize that Foucault also supports organized struggle under certain historical conditions. While it appears to be true that women in the West no longer suffer the degree of oppression evident in previous centuries, we might surely claim nevertheless that our escape from domination remains hazardous since we have achieved only an incomplete liberation, where power is neither wholly closed nor open and reversible. Accordingly, our dialectical approach to history is also needed to tell us what sort of historical cycle we are entering and what kind of strategies are appropriate. It is not necessarily an approach unique to women (since we are not claiming to be historyʼs privileged agents in any teleological sense), but it does summon a reading of the present which might locate allies. Moreover, it avoids the false universalizing that was a tendency criticized in previous, more overtly political, feminisms, in so far as it is an approach applicable to diverse groups of women as well as to women in general, although its focus is on connections and overlappings between them, since it is here that a general theory is constituted out of (and alongside) difference. If we are indeed entering a new period where civil society is again experienced as the most significant, then we need to think about how to mobilize and how to act as women. We cannot just assume that new forms of power will incite their own counter-forces, but we can read peopleʼs experiences in the context of our objective situation and begin to theorize and mobilize on this basis. We can re-politicize our theory. Bringing theory and practice back into a dialectical rapport and inciting an efficacious politics in the real world will be no easy task, but if we do want to repair the tear, then this is where we must begin.

Notes 1. Juliet Mitchell, Womanʼs Estate, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1971, p. 92. 2. Ibid., p. 93. 3. Betty Friedan, The New Yorker, 3 June 1996. pp. 5–6. 4. The New Statesman and Society, August 1996, pp. 12–14. 5. Michel Foucault, ʻThe Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedomʼ, Philosophy and Social Criticism, vol. 12, no. 1, Spring 1987, p. 123.

Feminist activism and presidential politics Theorizing the costs of the ‘insider strategy’ Anne-Marie Smith

The 1996 presidential election will be remembered by political analysts in the USA for its ʻgender gapʼ. Polls show that women backed Clinton over Dole by 59 to 35 per cent, while men split their vote almost evenly, 43 to 44 per cent. Many assume that this gap emerged because Dole and the Christian Coalition that shapes much of Republican policy are viciously opposed to reproductive choice for women, while Clinton is a staunch defender of womenʼs rights. Prominent feminists such as Gloria Steinem called on women to cast their vote for Clinton, declaring that there were significant differences between his positions and those of Dole, and that it is our job as feminists to move Clinton to the left. The situation, however, is much more complicated than this. We will only be able to deal with the challenge of pursuing feminist activism in a world that is profoundly shaped by transnational capital and hybrid racist sexisms to the extent that we develop much more sophisticated theories about power, identity and ideology. Clintonʼs Centre-Right has succeeded in part because it has effectively deployed strategies of neutralization, appropriation, co-optation and colonization. Feminist rhetoric was used by the Clinton camp to sell his Centre-Right agenda, in spite of the fact that it includes several major anti-feminist elements. Clinton himself was skilfully constructed as pro-feminist while his campaign deliberately pre-empted and censored his feminist critics. American feminists have almost completely lost the power to define their own discourse and to explore what Eisenstein once optimistically called the ʻradical future of liberal feminismʼ.1 Now, more than ever, we need to develop feminist theories that can analyse the neutralizing articulation of feminist discourse, for this operation is threatening to eliminate

the very possibility of a truly subversive form of feminist activism.

Representational strategies and feminist discourse Clinton was not, of course, the only presidential candidate who deployed complex ideological strategies. When the Republican campaign learned during the summer of 1996 that many voters were offended by the extremism of the religious Right, they adopted a fundamentally contradictory strategy. Within the party, every effort was made to accommodate the extremist demands of the Christian Coalition into the official party platform. In this moment, the Republican Party constructed America as an all-out war between two great chains of equivalence, the ʻgoodʼ versus the ʻevilʼ. While the North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA) found its most eloquent opponent in Mexico among the Zapatistas, that same role was claimed by right-wing figures in the USA. Republican presidential primary candidate Pat Buchanan blended his religious fundamentalist, racist and xenophobic discourse together with explicit attacks on corporate greed. Buchananʼs specific version of the ʻgoodʼ versus ʻevilʼ antagonism constructed a chain of equivalence that united rightwing moral authoritarians with unemployed white working-class males in opposition against not only the usual enemies of the religious Right – feminists, homosexuals, ʻpermissiveʼ liberal officials, the so-called leftist news media, and so on – but blacks, immigrants, and the chief executive officers of Americaʼs largest corporations as well. Buchananʼs bid enjoyed a substantial groundswell of popular support among white workers until the Republican leadership and

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the politically astute Christian Coalition leadership ensured his defeat.2 When addressing audiences outside the party, however, Republican discourse took the form of the logic of difference. Dole attempted to take the moral high ground as he constructed the Republican Party as a site in which Americans from all ʻwalks of lifeʼ were welcome and respected. Dole worked for months, with limited success, to include in the partyʼs extremist platform language that recognized the legitimacy of pro-choice Republicans. Explicit extremist language about abortion and gay rights was almost completely dropped from Doleʼs public discourse,3 and he waited until his defeat was certain before emphasizing his anti-affirmative action and anti-immigration positions. Women, people of colour and the handicapped were prominently featured in the partyʼs convention and campaign materials. We should mention in passing that religious-Right activists are clearly frustrated with the Republicansʼ dual strategy because it failed to work for Dole. The religious Right, unlike the neo-conservative Republicans, cannot take any solace in the fact that Clinton has embraced a basically neo-conservative approach to social policy. Their priority remains the imposition of a right-wing moral agenda, and they view Clinton as a dogmatic defender of leftist permissiveness and secular humanism. We should anticipate more tensions within the coalition between the religious Right and the neo-conservatives; tensions between the more pragmatic leadership of the religious Right and its more dogmatic grassroots membership; an enormous surge in grassroots religious-Right activity in school boards, local and state government, petition drives, and ballot initiatives; and the expansion of new extremist social movements such as the right-wing militias and the all-male Promise Keepers.4 Although the Republicans made at least some attempt to juxtapose their exclusionary logic of discourse with an inclusionary logic of difference, the Clinton camp deployed much more effective techniques with respect to the centring of right-wing extremism. Eisenstein contends that Clintonʼs articulation of feminine and feminist signifiers played a key role in his campaign. Clinton was constructed as a ʻcaring and sharingʼ voter-friendly leader for the 1990s: he promised that he ʻfelt the painʼ of the voters, and struck a responsible pose by pledging action on popular symbolic issues such as teen smoking, school uniforms, violence on television and crime. The Republicans themselves laid much of the groundwork for this construction of Clinton as Doleʼs feminine ʻotherʼ; they created the

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room for the blatant extremism of Newt Gingrich, Pat Buchanan, the Christian Coalition and right-wing terrorists; they shut down the government during their 1995 budget standoff with Clinton; and they chose a stiff and elderly Washington insider as their presidential candidate. Eisenstein argues that Clinton, by positioning himself as the spouse of an empowered woman, and by staking out the pro-choice position, won pseudo-feminist credentials. She offers a fascinating analysis of the way in which Hillary Rodham Clinton has been masculinized to symbolize feminist excess precisely to create a safe space for the construction of Bill Clinton as her compassionate feminine counterpart.5 Women of all races are less likely than men to view the budget deficit as an urgent priority, and they are more likely than men to support education spending, affirmative action, civil rights, gay rights, health-care reform, and welfare programmes.6 Through his symbolic promises, and his appropriation of feminist discourse on abortion, Clinton won just enough support from women voters. Clinton also masterfully transformed his small set of progressive accomplishments into solid evidence of his principled leadership against the Gingrich–Dole Republican Congress. He vetoed the ban on lateterm abortions, and saw that the act that provides for unpaid family leave was passed, along with the Violence Against Women Act and the ban on assault weapons. Pollitt nevertheless described these accomplishments as a ʻshort, narrowly tailored listʼ.7 Clinton also established an impressive record with respect to the appointment of women and minorities to his administration. Underneath his apparent inclusiveness, however, Clinton actually abandoned many of these candidates and appointees – such as Zoë Baird, Lani Guinier and Jocelyn Elders – when they threatened to interrupt his Centre-Right agenda. Throughout his first term, and in the early days of his second, Clinton has chosen to establish a traditional male-dominated work environment and to surround himself with increasingly right-wing advisors.8 While Clinton did speak out in support of affirmative action, he carefully qualified that support to allow himself plenty of room for future capitulations. During the campaign, he and his party remained almost completely silent about the antiaffirmative-action ballot initiative in California until he had obtained a safe lead over Dole in the state.9 The initiative passed with 54 per cent support. As the Republicans gave more and more authority to the Christian Coalition, Clinton and the conservative Democrats knew very well that they offered the only

credible discourse that could articulate the pro-choice position. Cockburn points out that this situation gave Clinton enormous leeway in his judicial appointments. He was assured of feminist support for his appointees simply because they were pro-choice; he knew in advance that the fact that they were extremely probusiness would be ignored.10 Clinton had already made significant efforts to foreclose feminist criticism before the final days of the campaign. Progressive advocates had been lured by government appointments and access to the White House to the extent that they had already abandoned the option of expressing oppositional dissent.11 Marian Wright Edelman, leader of the Childrenʼs Defence Fund, remained silent after Clinton signed the draconian welfare bill; environmentalists praised the administration, in spite of its anti-green record; and gay rights groups endorsed Clinton even after months of Democratic heterosexist nuclear-family rhetoric and Clintonʼs signing of the bill that allows states to ban gay marriages. Feminists and progressives who did criticize Clinton were marginalized and censored at the Democratic Convention by Clintonʼs campaign machinery.12 The effects of these strategies are profound. We should consider, first, the ways in which Clintonʼs political tactics have reconstituted feminist activism. Feminists have been encouraged to seek gains for narrowly defined single-issue campaigns, such as abortion, without any consideration of broad-based coalition-building. Further, they have been ʻrewardedʼ for choosing to work within the terms established by the Clinton administration; those who fail to do so have been excluded. Piven argues that womenʼs groups and social-welfare advocacy groups chose to pursue what she calls the ʻinsider strategyʼ, even though they knew very well that it entailed the surrender of their right to autonomous critique and oppositional activism.13 Pollitt contends that these developments have seriously weakened the feminist movement, as more and more feminist leaders succumb to the ʻfantasy of access and influence: to the siphoning off of energies into wishywashy “advocacy,” Beltway schmooze [Washington lobbying] and fundraising for “moderate” Democrats who happen to be women or minorities.ʼ14 Eisenstein, Piven or Pollitt do not ignore the fact that feminists must deploy a complex combination of struggles both within and against the predominant structures of electoral politics in the United States. Feminist activism must continue to take the form of a mobile war of position that shifts back and forth between infiltration, constructive engagement and sub-

version from within dominant institutions on the one hand, and vigorous principled opposition on the other, where the price of normalization and institutionalization is too high. They are not, in other words, calling for a feminist activism that would occupy a position of pure exteriority; at this point in the struggle, serious feminist activists no longer think politics in terms of a simple choice between pure insider and pure outsider positions. What they are recognizing, however, is that the Clinton forces, and much of the neo-conservative Centre-Right and Right in general, have ʻhegemonizedʼ feminist discourse. They have learned how to appropriate key feminist slogans and turn them to their advantage, even though they have done little to advance concrete feminist struggles, and have actually pursued many specific policies that contradict feminist principles. The Clinton Democrats and other neo-conservatives have also learned how to construct their colonized version of feminism as the only legitimate form – such that it seems to exhaust the totality of acceptable feminist discourse.

The rightward migration of Clinton’s ‘Centre’ The charge that Clinton engaged not only in an attempt to redefine feminist positions, but in a bid to hegemonize feminist activism while pursuing a fundamentally reactionary agenda, can only be substantiated by examining his concrete policies in detail. While Clinton did veto the ban on late-term abortions, his policies left the status quo on abortion largely intact. That status quo is structured according to a class-differentiated system of access. As many as 84 per cent of American counties have no abortion providers. States are free to impose mandatory counselling, waiting periods and parental approval for women under the age of eighteen. In a country in which there is no national health service, the states are also allowed to exclude coverage for abortions by Medicaid, the health-care plan for the poor.15 Clintonʼs articulation of conservative ʻfamily valuesʼ rhetoric has also contradicted the broader feminist goal of securing not just abortion rights for the wealthy, but the right for every women to determine her reproductive choices freely. In contemporary American politics, the pursuit of this goal must include the defence of poor womenʼs right to have children in the first place. Clintonʼs claim that ʻteen pregnancyʼ constitutes nothing less than an ʻepidemicʼ that threatens the ʻnational interestʼ corresponds too neatly with right-wing anxieties about the ʻexcessiveʼ fertility of the poor. Poor single mothers on welfare have been

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grossly demonized; they are widely portrayed as hedonistic agents of a dysgenic population boom among the mostly black and Latino ʻunderclassʼ. Allegations of this nature by the media and mainstream political figures alike have remained immune to empirical refutation. The reproduction rate among black teenage women has actually declined, and it only appears to be growing because the reproduction rate among older black women has declined more rapidly. Under the current law, the states are free to experiment with any number of official welfare measures that interfere with poor womenʼs right to have children. In some localities, teenage mothers are being charged with fornication or coerced by public officials into marriages. While right-wing commentators such as Murray express – in pseudo-feminist terms – a deep concern about the availability of abortion, birth control and adoption services for ʻunderclassʼ mothers,16 the eugenicist spectre of women on welfare being forced to take Norplant lies on the horizon. Clintonʼs own discourse has only exacerbated these assaults on the reproductive freedoms of all but the most wealthy women. Clintonʼs support for free trade is devastating for American workers; his anti-terrorist legislation marks a significant setback for civil liberties; his pledges of support for the inner cities are meaningless without a substantial jobs creation programme; his inaction on campaign finance reform perpetuates the corporate grip on Washington;17 his record on the environment is appalling;18 his pandering to conservative CubanAmericans has resulted in the strengthening of the Cuban blockade;19 and the much-hyped increase in

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the minimum wage still leaves a family of four under the poverty line. Through his policies, fundraising practices and personal conduct he encourages voters to lower their expectations about what governments can accomplish.20 He has normalized the right-wing campaign against illegal immigration with escalated border patrols and harsh legislation.21 He has abandoned his own moderate proposals to reform health care; not only will he not promote a single payer scheme, he will not even take on the for-profit Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs) that now dominate the healthcare industry. He promised to support gay rights, but capitulated on the issue of gays in the military, gave no power to his AIDS ʻczarʼ, distanced himself from his gay supporters, enthusiastically embraced the ideology that children should only be raised by married heterosexual couples, and signed a bill that allows states to ban gay marriages.22 Eisenstein, Piven and Pollitt view Clintonʼs approval of the welfare law that was passed in August 1996 as his greatest betrayal of feminist principles. This law changes welfare from a national entitlement programme to a system of block grants that allows the states to decide how to spend the funds. It eliminates the right of the poor to federal assistance, and gives a free rein to the very level of government that is notorious for its exclusionary policies and closed-door deal-making. No state will be able to provide benefits after two years, or to provide benefits to a recipient who has been on welfare for more than five years during her entire lifetime. The bill does not include any new provisions for job creation, job training or child-care. The United States already had the greatest, as well as the fastest growing, gap between the rich and the poor, and the worst record for aid to the poor in the entire ʻWesternʼ world before this bill was passed. Poor people will be forced to seek work in a country in which the Federal Reserve is deliberately controlling interest rates to maintain a high un-employment level, which currently stands at seven million. In Americaʼs inner cities, there are fourteen

applicants for every job in a fast-food restaurant. Automation, globalization, specialization according to comparative advantage, and government cutbacks are rapidly eliminating the jobs in the industrial manufacturing and government service sectors. These are precisely the sectors in which Americans with only a high-school education could find a skilled or semiskilled unionized job that paid a living wage. Today, these same Americans are experiencing a dramatic decrease in wealth as they become massively grouped in the low-paying, unskilled and non-unionized service sector. As the August 1996 welfare law is put into effect, 3.5 million children will be dropped from public assistance by 2001, and a million more children will be thrown into poverty. This will take place in a country in which one out of four children already lived under the poverty line in 1994; in which over 4,200 babies below twelve months of age already died every year as of 1996 because of low birth weight and other problems related to the poverty of their mothers. For reasons stemming directly from historical traditions in which blacks, Latinos and some Asians were systematically excluded from accumulating the resources necessary for upward class mobility, racial minorities remain overrepresented among the population that is experiencing the greatest decreases in family income. In 1991, the typical white household was ten times more wealthy than the typical black household. Compared to whites, African-Americans have a 100 per cent greater infant mortality rate, a 176 per cent greater unemployment rate, and a 300 per cent greater poverty rate.23 Clintonʼs repeal of welfare rights coincides with other public policies that have only exacerbated the growing inequalities in the distribution of wealth. With its strict time limits, the implementation of the welfare law will require extensive inter-state recordkeeping, which will in turn open up a huge new market for the capital-intensive information technology sector. Keynesianism is not entirely dead, even though the Reagan administrations made the maintenance of government programmes impossible by deliberately running up huge deficits. There is a covert boom in the military, policing, penitentiary and public-surveillance sectors within the budgets of the federal, state and local governments, while overt campaigns against governmental health, education, poverty and housing expenditures have been launched with full force. In the first days of his second term, Clinton attempted to construct himself as a pro-public-education president, but his major initiative in this area was a tax break that will mostly benefit the middle class. While the

repeal of welfare rights was justified in terms of balanced-budget rhetoric, private corporations have never paid such a small share of federal taxes, and they have never received more public subsidies; corporate welfare is four times greater than aid to the poor; middle-class home-owners continue to receive nonmeans-tested mortgage subsidies; and little is said about the savings-and-loan bail-outs and the bloated Pentagon budget.24 Meanwhile wealthy Americans – a class in which whites are vastly overrepresented – are pursuing an increasingly segregationist agenda which fundamentally erodes the notion of collective responsibility. Federal taxes for the rich are cut, necessitating not only massive cuts in government programmes but also increases in the state and local taxes that are less fair for the lower middle class, workers and the poor. Public transportation cuts reduce the mobility of the poor, school zoning boundaries are drawn to isolate the middle class, school voucher programmes that would use public funds to subsidize wealthy childrenʼs private school tuition are proposed, while gated suburban communities cut themselves off from the inner-city tax base. The Republican Congress approved an experimental plan that sets up government subsidies for individuals who want to opt out of private group health insurance to obtain their own personal coverage. More and more corporations are eliminating the pension plans that used to cover their entire workforce and replacing them with generous tax-subsidized plans for the highest-paid managers.25 For the rich, privatization is not enough; they are now demanding explicitly segregationist forms of privatization.

Passive revolution and expansive hegemony Our analysis of the Democratic Partyʼs bid to hegemonize feminism can be clarified with reference to Gramsciʼs distinction between the ʻpassive revolutionʼ and ʻexpansive hegemonyʼ. A ʻpassive revolutionʼ portrays itself as a popular and democratic movement, but it actually engages in profoundly anti-democratic strategies. It neutralizes social movements by satisfying some of their demands in a symbolic and reformist manner, and shifts authority towards disciplinary apparatuses. Strictly speaking, Gramsci makes a clear distinction between ʻpassiveʼ revolution and hegemony, for a traditional ʻpassiveʼ moment is largely statist and bureaucratic; the ʻmassesʼ do not take an active part, and brute force, rather than the organization of consent, becomes predominant. Further, Gramsci insists that the ʻpassive revolutionʼ includes substantial economic

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intervention by the state, a dimension that is almost anachronistic in contemporary globalizing economies. Gramsciʼs conception of the ʻpassiveʼ revolution nevertheless contains the provocative image of a pseudo-popular movement that wins some small degree of consent by responding to some of the popular demands from the grassroots, but uses that appearance of popular consent only to gain strategic ground for its fundamentally anti-democratic project. It seeks to absorb and to assimilate democratic forces by appropriating key elements of alternative popular world-views, neutralizing their critical potential by redefining them, and then articulating these colonized elements into its world-view.26 Authoritarian forms of hegemony remain fundamentally contradictory, for they attempt to represent themselves as popular democratic movements, even though they engage in all sorts of containment strategies, and pursue initiatives that perpetuate the unequal distribution of power. While maintaining the façade of a popular mobilizing force, they do not hesitate to demobilize key sectors of the populace by engaging in blatant disenfranchisement tactics, or by dragging the political centre so far to the right that more and more people have no reason to participate in the political system. We are now witnessing extensive efforts to lower political participation in the United States. The Clinton Democrats have worked together with the other forces on the right to lower popular expectations about what governments ought to achieve. Clinton has also indirectly benefited from the promotion, on the part of the far Right and the religious Right, of a popular paranoia about the evil forces that lurk within state apparatuses. In spite of their different rhetoric, the far Right, the religious Right, the neo-conservative Right, and the neo-conservative Centre-Right have constructed a lasting consensus: public programmes – with the exception of the military, the police, public surveillance and the penitentiary system – are suspect; concepts of collective responsibility are obsolete. There is nothing in the contradictions within authoritarian hegemonies, however, that will by themselves lead to their self-destruction. Not only can contradictory political discourses remain brutally effective;

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they can also make their contradictions a source of strength. As Hall argued with respect to Thatcherism, an authoritarian hegemonic project does not actually need to construct a fully mobilized majority of enthusiastic supporters. It only needs to achieve the disorganization of the potential opposition and the minimum degree of mobilization necessary for the construction of a ʻpopularʼ façade for the regime.27 Gramsci contends that where authoritarian ʻpassive revolutionsʼ have become institutionalized, democratic forces will have to wage a protracted ʻwar of positionʼ and struggle to advance an ʻexpansive hegemonyʼ. Multiple struggles that are plural and contextually sensitive in form will have to be deployed at each of the various sites throughout the social in which the ʻpassive revolutionʼ has become entrenched. Where a ʻpassive revolutionʼ seeks to neutralize the democratic opposition and to construct a simulacrum popular movement while perpetuating structural inequality, an ʻexpansive hegemonyʼ seeks to promote a genuinely democratic mobilization of progressive social movements.28 Authoritarian hegemony aims to achieve a maximum disciplining of difference; even as it pretends to endorse pluralism, it can only promote a fake multiculturalism. By contrast, the radical democratic pluralist approach – expansive hegemony – attempts to construct the sorts of unifying discourses that enhance and promote democratic forms of plurality and difference. Confronted with a plurality of progressive struggles already in motion, it seeks to release the democratic potential within each of them, while bringing them into mutually constitutive articulatory

relations. It values the autonomy of each democratic struggle as a good in itself, and in a pragmatic sense: autonomy facilitates the sort of contextually specific contestation of oppression and exploitation that is needed in todayʼs complex and hybrid social formations. Where authoritarian hegemony strictly regulates the development of political contestation, radical democratic pluralist hegemony multiplies the points of contestation and seeks to broaden the terrain of politicization or reactivation.29 The relatively universalistic effects of the radical democratic pluralist horizon seeks to institutionalize deeper and deeper recognition of the plurality and autonomy of the public spaces created by democratic struggles, while perpetually postponing the final definition of the good.30 To the extent that the specific discourses of the relatively autonomous progressive struggles are successfully articulated with a radical civic sense, the multiplication of these public spaces becomes a source of strength for democratic society.31

Passive revolution and feminist strategy Clintonʼs political linkages with the Democratic Leadership Council situated him squarely within the part of the Democratic Party that has traditionally embraced a ʻpassive-revolutionʼ strategy. The direction and structure of his leadership did nevertheless seem to be open to alternative possibilities when he defeated Bush in 1992. Throughout his first term, however, Clinton distanced himself more and more from progressive positions and prioritized neo-conservative policies. Feminist leaders, for the most part, failed to adjust their strategies accordingly. In a key article that was published in Ms., the flagship feminist magazine, just before the 1996 election, Steinem declared that women ought to vote for Clinton and then work hard to make his positions more progressive. She rightly pointed out that right-wing victories depend on a contradictory populism: the mobilization of right-wing voters and the demobilization of everyone else. She could have also pointed out that the rich vote in overwhelmingly larger numbers than the poor in the USA.32 But Steinem also claimed that the Republicans gain whenever we argue that there is little difference between them and the Democrats, because this argument makes the Republicans appear more moderate and discourages Democratic voters from going to the polls. To her credit, she did argue that Clinton failed on welfare, gays in the military and gay marriage, but she asserted that Clinton will only differ from the Republicans

where he has the popular support to do so, and that it is the task of progressive movements to create that support.33 Steinem assumed that the prevailing political structure actually does correspond to the pluralist interest group modelʼs predictions; that the system remains ready to respond to a feminist popular mobilization. She depicted Clintonʼs capitulation to the neo-conservative Right not as the fruit of his own convictions but as the product of the Republican-weighted balance of power. In this and other similar representations, Clinton is figured as a vulnerable victim of Republican power who reluctantly supports right-wing positions when he would secretly prefer to take a much more progressive stance. Considerations about co-optation, neutralizing articulations and colonization were absent from her argument. Steinem therefore laid most of the burden with respect to the advance of the feminist struggle at the door of feminists. Because the existing system ʻworksʼ, we feminists only have to redouble our efforts. New strategies and radical transformations of the entire political structure are not required. The article reproduced the arguments used by Congresswoman Waters, Smeal, Steinem, Abzug, and other leading feminists at the 1996 Democratic Convention. They called for feminists to vote for Clinton. They also argued that Clinton was forced into signing the welfare bill; they contended that because of the electoral strength of the Republicans, his bid for a second term would have failed if he had opposed the repeal of welfare rights. From their perspective, feminists had to campaign to put Clinton back into office so that he would be able to reverse the welfare bill during his second term.34 Clintonʼs feminist supporters, however, ignored the fact that Clinton had maintained a substantial and steady lead over a Republican contender since the Republicans had shut down the government during the budget stalemate in 1995.35 Clinton had nevertheless vetoed two other welfare bills during that period. Some of the Democrats who were up for re-election in the House and the Senate voted against the welfare bill and then easily won their races. There is also substantial evidence that Clinton agreed with the basic provisions in the bill. Not only had he adopted the Republican terms of the welfare debate years before he signed it; he had joined with other neo-conservatives in a consistent campaign to get the attack on welfare rights onto the mainstream political agenda. On the 1996 campaign trail, Clinton explicitly championed the repeal of welfare rights before conservative audiences. In other campaign venues, he promised to ʻfixʼ some

Radical Philosophy 83 (May/June 1997)

31

of the bill during his second term, especially the provisions that stop legal immigrants from receiving benefits. Welfare policy experts predicted, however, that Clinton would fail if he attempted to change the fundamental aspect of the bill, namely the basic repeal of welfare rights.36 In any event, Clinton reversed his position after his re-election; he now promises merely to introduce small changes to the new welfare policy. Behind the scenes, conservative Democrats are planning to privatize social security.37 The most damning evidence about Clintonʼs decision-making process on the bill comes from a participant in a White House advisorsʼ meeting that took place in August 1996. He states that when Morris, Clintonʼs infamous pollster, argued that the president needed to sign the welfare bill to win the November 1996 election, everyone else completely disagreed with him. Morrisʼs pro-welfare-repeal side ultimately won the debate in the White House, but its prevailing argument was based on Clintonʼs political values, rather than reluctantly deployed electoral tactics. Writing on the eve of the election, Hitchens concluded that, ʻThe Clinton Administration does not do what it does because it is constrained, by a first term or an impending election or anything of the kind, to do so. It does these things out of conviction.ʼ38 Women voters who chose Clinton over Dole because they believed that he would be a staunch defender of the welfare safety net were therefore misled. Clintonʼs ʻgender gapʼ was built on his neutralizing appropriation of feminist and feminine symbols, rather than his underlying convictions. But Patricia Ireland, the president of the National Organization of Women (NOW), stood virtually alone as a major feminist leader when she called for massive opposition against Clintonʼs support for the welfare bill. To her credit, she went on a well-publicized hunger strike after the bill was passed, and declared that, although she would vote for Clinton, she would not campaign for him in any way. NOW directed its campaign support exclusively behind the House Democrats and the one senator running for re-election, Paul Wellstone, who voted against it.39 NOW also worked with civil rightsʼ organizations, progressive unions and radical students in the ultimately unsuccessful campaign to defeat the anti-affirmative action Proposition 209 in California. When Ireland tried to bring her oppositional campaign to the Democratic Convention, she was prevented by party officials from launching a significant protest.40 Pollitt, like Eisenstein, fundamentally questions the assumption held by Steinem and other pro-Clinton feminists that Clintonʼs decisions are merely the product

32

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of tactical decision-making in the face of Republican power. She states that instead of blaming Clintonʼs neo-conservatism on the Republican Congress, we should see the leading politicians of both parties as symptoms of a global phenomenon: ʻthe slashing of the welfare state, the lowering of the working classʼs standard of living and the upward transfer of wealthʼ. She asserts that we can ʻplausibly argue that Clinton prepared [the] way [for the Republican Congress] by accepting Republican terms of debateʼ. Pollitt concludes that although a second Bush administration might have introduced worse measures in some policy areas, only Clinton had the strategic position that allowed him to neutralize democratic opposition within and outside Congress with such a devastating effect.41 Many progressive feminists are rejecting Steinemʼs approach, and are advocating a much more sceptical approach towards the Democratic Party. They are exploring alternative strategies such as third parties and more autonomous oppositional movements. Burk and Hartmann, for example, contend that American feminist activism has concentrated too exclusively on the single-issue campaign to defend the status quo on abortion; that it must do more to link abortion rights to economic rights; and that it must pay more attention to the issues that concern women the most – namely, pay equity, pensions, health care and violence. Burk and Hartmann point out that feminist leaders have not done enough to construct feminism as one of the transnational sites of resistance against the escalation in economic exploitation in the globalizing economy. They claim that this shift in strategy would make the womenʼs movement more relevant to working-class women of colour.42

Popular feminist intellectuals and neoconservatism Neo-conservative discourse often successfully seizes upon the weaknesses of single-issue reformist feminist identity politics. Many right-wing forces subversively borrow identity-politics strategies from the Left and either promote right-wing elements within existing social movements or invent their own versions of grassroots activism and ʻdiversityʼ. Anti-feminist women intellectuals, for example, are celebrated as the spokespersons for the attack on womenʼs studies that is launched in the name of vague pseudo-feminist principles. Blacks and non-Anglo immigrants have emerged as the prominent leaders for anti-affirmative action and anti-multiculturalism movements. Identitypolitics discourse legitimated the validity of discourse that is located with respect to the experience of women

and minorities. This argument undoubtedly had a progressive effect in so far as it promoted a critique of sexist and racist discourse that passed itself off as universal. But neo-conservatives have begun to turn the logic of identity-politics discourse to their advantage. Speaking from what they call their special black and ethnic-minority perspectives, these right-wing women and people of colour condemn affirmative action and multiculturalism for promoting racist divisions, thereby identifying the anti-racists as the worst racists. These tactics not only contribute to the legitimation of rightwing policies, but also threaten to redefine the entire terrain of feminist and anti-racist politics. Further, neo-conservative politicians and corporate marketing strategies have successfully normalized an astonishingly reactionary definition of feminism in the United States. Feminist success is now widely equated with any socio-economic gain that is achieved by any individual woman by any means necessary. Two recent popular films, First Wivesʼ Club and Waiting to Exhale, portray womenʼs liberation in crassly consumeristic terms. Nikeʼs sports shoe advertisements embrace womenʼs athletics on explicitly feminist grounds, while their $140 shoes are made by women in Indonesia working for $2.20 a day, and by women in China and Vietnam working for $30 a month.43 A recent notice on Cornell Universityʼs Womenʼs Studies Programmeʼs list-serve advertised an event that was simply called ʻWomenʼs Leadership Seminarʼ. The notice described the women speakers only in terms of their affiliations with the World Bank and private corporations. The term ʻfeministʼ was noticeably absent. Among middle-class girls and young women, there are ambiguous signs of backlash and rebellion. In her excellent book, Reviving Ophelia,44 Piper, a therapist who works with young teenage women, reports on the extremely hostile environments that they confront on a daily basis in their schools, relationships and families. I myself am seeing more and more intelligent young middle-class women struggle against the cultural forces that encourage them to ʻdumb downʼ their public speaking performance; sometimes, their brilliance comes through only obliquely or only in their writing. If we wade carefully through the Disney–ABC/ Time Warner–Turner–CNN/General Electric–NBC/Westinghouse–CBS/Murdoch–Fox/Viacom–Paramount–MTV/ Bertellsman swamp of media oligopolies that almost completely defines American ʻpopular cultureʼ,45 we can find promising moments of young womenʼs rebellion. It is the anger of Courtney Love, Queen Latifah, Alanis Morissette and Ani di Franco, and not the co-depend-

ence of Janis Joplin, that turns these women on. But their tattoos and piercings are barely healed before they are stolen from them by powerful media interests. They may find their way into political activism through indirect and unconventional routes; they are more likely to enter progressive activist discourse via animal rights and vegetarianism than via feminism, for they can more easily identify with the innocence and helplessness of small animals, or the beauty and dignity of an old growth forest, than they can insist on their own rights. Some of my women students are participating in new and exciting multiracial coalitions to fight the attack on affirmative action; others are going to the new labour organizing summer schools. But these young women are confronted with something that we never had to deal with – namely, the false image that we already inhabit a post-feminist terrain, as feminist demands are appropriated by right-wing forces and private corporations and bent to serve their reactionary interests.46 If feminist leaders have, for the most part, failed to grasp the dynamics of contemporary politics in which the possibilities for the genuine advance of feminist struggle have been sharply curtailed, and ʻfeminismʼ has been given a reactionary and anti-feminist meaning, popular feminist intellectuals have not, on the whole, done much better. The idea that ʻfeminist successʼ means virtually any socio-economic gain for any individual woman that is achieved by any means necessary is explicitly promoted by Wolf. In her individualist ʻpower feminismʼ theory, she attacks radical feminism for its portrayal of women as ʻvictimsʼ and contends that ʻweʼ – read wealthy, healthy, white, straight, college-educated women – should construct a ʻfeminismʼ that celebrates ʻourʼ power.47 The structural analysis of oppression, exploitation and the responsibility of the overempowered to the disempowered is entirely foreclosed. This evisceration of feminism will only encourage more and more white wealthy women to look out for their own interests – and to invoke the name of ʻfeminismʼ when it suits them in doing so – and to forget the needs of disadvantaged women. In concrete terms, we should remember that several of the women elected to the House of Representatives with support from feminist political action committees voted for the welfare bill that is going to condemn over a million additional children to poverty and throw millions of poor mothers with no childcare, no job training, and no job prospects off the welfare rolls.48 This displacement of radical democratic feminism by non-feminisms or even anti-feminisms that masquerade as feminism could not be more disastrous, especially now as automation and globalization ensure economic

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33

opportunities for a small highly educated elite – which includes many college-educated white women – and increasing exploitation for the rest. The anti-feminist feminism of Paglia, Hoff Sommers, and Roiphe49 has also emerged as a popular intellectual school. These ʻtheoriesʼ attack virtually every feminist position but borrow liberal individualist feminist rhetoric such that they can represent themselves as more ʻdemocraticʼ and more ʻfeministʼ than feminism. Many younger women are strongly attracted to them, and to Wolfʼs so-called ʻpower feminismʼ, because of their apparent irreverence. These discourses have been masterfully constructed as the rebellious underdog voices against an omnipotent ʻGoliathʼ – the mythical ʻfeminist establishmentʼ – when they are, of course, serving the hegemonic neo-conservative and anti-feminist forces quite nicely. And, because neo-conservative values predominate in American academia, students are not being given the critical tools that are needed to evaluate these texts and are therefore vulnerable to their false promises of rebellion. In an instrumentalist sense – and I donʼt think that our instrumentalist interests should be used to define the totality of legitimate feminist discourse – I have argued that we need to develop much more sophisticated analyses of power and the neutralizing effects of ideological appropriations. Since Britainʼs Labour Party leadership has distanced itself from its progressive grassroots and the trade-union movement at every opportunity, this theoretical and political problem has now become an urgent priority on both sides of the Atlantic.

Notes I would like to thank Zillah Eisenstein for her inspirational work, Peter Osborne for editorial assistance, and Patty Zimmermann for mapping out the monopolistic patterns of ownership that are predominant in American popular culture. 1. Z. Eisenstein, The Radical Future of Liberal Feminism, Longman, New York, 1981. 2. F. Rich, ʻDoleʼs Unpaid Debtʼ, New York Times, 9 March 1996, p. 23; ʻHappy New Year?ʼ, New York Times, 18 September 1996, p. 23. 3. A. Nagourney, ʻOn Volatile Social and Cultural Issues, Silenceʼ, New York Times, 9 October 1996, p. 1. 4. F. Rich, ʻThank God Iʼm a Manʼ, New York Times, 25 September 1996, p. A21; J. Conason, A. Ross and L. Cokorinos, ʻThe Promise Keepers Are Comingʼ, The Nation, 7 October 1996, pp. 11–15. 5. Z. Eisenstein, ʻTheorizing and Politicizing the 1996 Electionʼ, in Clarence Lo, ed., Clinton and the Conservative Agenda, Blackwell, Oxford, forthcoming. 6. G. Steinem, ʻVoting as Rebellionʼ, Ms., September/October 1996, p. 61; C. Goldberg, ʻSoccer Moms Step onto Political Playing Fieldʼ, New York Times, 6 October 1996, p. 24; A. Nagourney, ʻDemocrats Seek Votes of Women with a Focus on their Familiesʼ, New York Times,

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29 August 1996, p. B13. 7. K. Pollitt, ʻWe Were Wrong: Why Iʼm Not Voting for Clintonʼ, The Nation, 7 October 1996, p. 9. 8. T. Purdum, ʻThe Second Clinton Term: Promise, Pitfalls and Perilsʼ, New York Times, 6 November 1996, p. B2. 9. M. Cooper, ʻLetter From California: What Cost, Victory?ʼ, The Nation, 4 November 1996, pp. 12–14; B. Ayres, ʻAffirmative Action Measure Nears a High-Profile Finishʼ, New York Times, 4 November 1996, p. B6. 10. A. Cockburn, ʻDonʼt be Fooled Againʼ, The Progressive, November 1996, p. 20. 11. Ibid., p. 21. 12. D. Corn, ʻWhatʼs Left in the Party?ʼ, The Nation, 23 September 1996, p. 20. 13. B. Ehrenreich, ʻFrances Fox Pivenʼ, The Progressive, November 1996, p. 34. 14. Pollitt, ʻWe Were Wrongʼ, p. 9. 15. New York Times, ʻStatesʼ Wrongs on Abortionʼ, editorial, 3 September 1996, p. 22. 16. R. Herrnstein and C. Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, The Free Press, New York, 1994. 17. Election experts estimate that a record amount of $1.6 billion was raised and spent on the 1996 election. Some $800 million was spent on the presidential election alone, a figure that is three times greater than the 1992 spending level (The Nation, ʻMoney Votesʼ, editorial, 11 November 1996, p. 5). A recent poll found that the largest political donors were more supportive of free trade and large corporate interests, and more opposed to government spending and government regulation, than the electorate as a whole (B. Borosage and R. Teixeira, ʻThe Politics of Moneyʼ, The Nation, 21 October 1996, pp. 21–2). 18. A. Cockburn, ʻLadies and Gentlemen, I Give You the Presidentʼ, The Nation, 9–16 September 1996, p. 10; A. Cockburn, ʻThe Kevorkian in the White Houseʼ, The Nation, 14 October 1996, p. 9. 19. S. Erlanger, ʻTough Talk Aside, Helms Barely Alters Foreign Policyʼ, New York Times, 3 November 1996, p. 18. 20. J. Nichols, ʻJoel Rogersʼ, The Progressive, October 1996, p. 30. 21. E. Schmitt, ʻMilestones and Missteps on Immigrationʼ, New York Times, 26 October 1996, p. 1. 22. D. Kirp, ʻPolitics Out of the Closetʼ, The Nation, 9–16 September 1996, pp. 3–4. 23. K. Bradsher, ʻGap in Wealth in U.S. Called Widest in Westʼ, New York Times, 17 April 1995, p. 1; B. Herbert, ʻThe Issue is Jobsʼ, New York Times, 6 May 1996, p. 23; B. Herbert, ʻSupply Side Seducerʼ, New York Times, 12 August 1996, p. 25; M. Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America: Problems in Race, Political Economy and Society, South End Press, Boston MA, 1983; R. Takaki, A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America, Little, Brown, Boston MA, 1993; R.M. Williams, ʻAccumulation as Evisceration: Urban Rebellion and the New Growth Dynamicsʼ, in R. Gooding-Williams, ed., Reading Rodney King, Reading Urban Uprising, New York, Routledge, 1993; M. Harrington, Socialism: Past and Future, Pluto Press, London, 1993; Justice For All, Straight Talk About the Real Issues, pamphlet, 1996; B. Herbert, ʻOne in Fourʼ, New York Times, 16 December 1996, p. 25; Cockburn, ʻThe Kevorkian in the White Houseʼ, p. 9; Z. Eisenstein, The Color of Gender, University of California Press,

24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

Berkeley, 1994, p. 183; M. Parenti, Democracy for The Few, St Martinʼs Press, New York, 1995, p. 27. T. Weiner, ʻClinton as a Military Leader: Tough On-thejob Trainingʼ, New York Times, 28 October 1996, p. 1; The Nation, editorial, 8 April 1996, p. 7. New York Times, ʻThe Secret Attack on Have-Notsʼ, editorial, 20 October 1996, p. 24. C. Buci-Glucksmann, ʻState, Transition and Passive Revolutionʼ, in C. Mouffe, ed., Gramsci and Marxist Theory, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1979, pp. 216–17, 224; C. Mouffe, ʻHegemony and Ideology in Gramsciʼ, in Mouffe, ed., Gramsci and Marxist Theory, p. 182; E. Laclau, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory: Capitalism, Fascism, Populism, Verso, London, 1977, p. 161; A.M. Smith, ʻWhy Did Armey Apologize? Hegemony, Homophobia and the Religious Rightʼ, in A. Ansell, ed., Discourses of Divisiveness: The Agenda of the Conservative Movement, Westview Press, New York, forthcoming. S. Hall, The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left, Verso, London, 1988. Buci-Glucksmann, ʻState, Transition and Passive Revolutionʼ, pp. 228–9; Mouffe, ʻHegemony and Ideology in Gramsciʼ, pp. 182–3. E. Laclau, ʻPower and Representationʼ, in E. Laclau, Emancipation(s), Verso, London, 1996, p. 99. Ibid., p. 100; C. Mouffe, The Return of the Political, Verso, London, 1993, pp. 4, 6. E. Laclau, ʻCommunity and Its Paradoxesʼ, in Laclau, Emancipation(s), pp. 120–21. With voting participation rates of about 45 per cent in non-presidential elections, and between 48.8 per cent (1996) and 55.2 per cent (1992) in presidential elections, the USA is the least participatory democracy in the world. Steinem notes that 70–80 per cent of the members of right-wing extremist groups cast ballots in every election, and that American voters routinely make up their minds based on their vague perceptions of a candidateʼs image rather than accurate knowledge about his or her actual positions. Fewer than 10 per cent of the voters in 1994 had even heard of Gingrichʼs extremist Contract With America, and fewer than 1 per cent could identify one of its goals (Steinem, ʻVoting as Rebellionʼ, p. 56). In the 1994 election, there was a sharp decline in the turnout of low-income voters. Sixty per cent of American voters with incomes of more than $50,000 went to the polls, an increase of almost one percentage point from the turnout in 1990. For voters with incomes under $5,000, the turnout was only 19.9 per cent, down from 32.2 per cent. The decrease in turn-out of voters with incomes between $5,000 and $10,000 was from 30.9 per cent in 1990 to 23.3 per cent in 1994. The proportion of voters from the highest income groups as compared to the total voting population rose from 18 per cent in 1990 to 23.4 per cent in 1994. Turnout rates for the eligible electorate as a whole in congressional elections that do not include a presidential race are relatively stable – 46

33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

per cent in 1986, 45 per cent in 1990 and 44.6 per cent in 1994. It is only in the distribution of voters according to income that sharp transitions in turnout are taking place. According to Gans of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, the data suggests that upperincome voters ʻsaw an opportunity for the Republicans to get inʼ and responded (ʻLow-Income Votersʼ Turnout Fell in 1994, Census Reportsʼ, New York Times, 11 June 1995, p. 22). Only 27 per cent of eligible voters with incomes less than $15,000 voted in 1994 (A. Keyssar, ʻKeep Out the Voteʼ, The Nation, 11 November 1996, p. 6). In 1992, 54 per cent of participating voters were women, as opposed to 51 per cent in 1994 (R. Toner, ʻParties Pressing to Raise Turnout as Election Nearsʼ, New York Times, 27 October 1996, p. 28). The voter turnout in 1996, 48.8 per cent, was the lowest since 1924. Analysts are divided as to whether Clintonʼs commanding lead over Dole or the nature of the campaign itself is to blame for voter apathy. Steinem, ʻVoting as Rebellionʼ, pp. 58–61. R. Coniff, ʻNo More Angry Feministsʼ, The Progressive, October 1996, p. 23. New York Times/CBS News, ʻTrial Heats Throughout the Campaignʼ, New York Times, 4 November 1996, p. B8. D. Corn, ʻThe Fix Ainʼt Inʼ, The Nation, 7 October 1996, p. 5. ʻGrapes of Wrathʼ, editorial, The Nation, 26 August–2 September 1996, p. 3; Cockburn, ʻDonʼt be Fooled Againʼ, p. 19. C. Hitchens, ʻThe Greater Evilʼ, The Nation, 18 November 1996, p. 8. R. Borosage, ʻToward Democratic Renewalʼ, The Nation, 9–16 September 1996, p. 20. Corn, ʻWhatʼs Left in the Party?ʼ p. 20. Pollitt, ʻWe Were Wrongʼ, p. 9. M. Burk and H. Hartmann, ʻBeyond the Gender Gapʼ, The Nation, 10 June 1996, p. 20. Z. Eisenstein, ʻTransnationalismʼs New Politics: Restructuring Work, Family and Stateʼ, work in progress. M. Piper, Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls, Putnam, New York, 1993. A. Miller and J. Biden, ʻThe National Entertainment Stateʼ, The Nation, 3 June 1996, pp. 10–14. Z. Eisenstein, Hatreds, Routledge, New York, 1996. N. Wolf, Fire With Fire, Random House, New York, 1993. K. Pollitt, ʻThe Strange Death of Liberal Americaʼ, The Nation, 26 August–2 September 1996, p. 9. C. Paglia, Sexual Personae, Yale University Press, New Haven CT, 1990; C. Paglia, Sex, Art and American Culture, Vintage, New York, 1992; C. Paglia, Vamps and Tramps, Vintage, New York, 1994; C. Hoff Sommers, Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1994; K. Roiphe, The Morning After: Sex, Fear and Feminism, Little, Brown, Boston MA, 1993.

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35

Thinking naturally John O’Neill

The richness of the debates about the environment has its source not just in the importance of the issue, and the significance for the future of radical politics of dialogues between socialists and greens, but also in the fact that it lies at a point of convergence between a number of other arguments: between realism and constructivism, Enlightenment and its critics, humanism and anti-humanism; on the relation of economy, culture and nature; on the future direction of feminist thought and action. This richness is represented in Tim Haywardʼs and Kate Soperʼs recent books.* Both are important contributions. Both are likely to have a wide readership and a large influence on current debates in environmental politics. Both certainly deserve to do so. They combine intellectual clarity and rigour with political commitment and purpose. The arguments amongst socialists and greens about the political and social implications of our current environmental crisis will be the richer for them. Kate Soperʼs What is Nature? is engaged in a project of reconciliation between two conflicting perspectives on nature to be found in social theory. On the one side stand broadly ʻnaturalistʼ or ʻrealistʼ approaches which take the concept of nature to refer to a concept-independent reality – a natural world that has been the object of human exploitation and destruction, and which we have good reason to protect from further spoliation. On the other side stand postmodernist and post-structuralist approaches that are standardly anti-realist and relativist in orientation, and that focus upon the ways in which different conceptions of ʻnatureʼ are culturally constructed and employed to legitimate a variety of social and sexual hierarchies and cultural norms. As Soper notes in outlining these conflicting perspectives, they do not map directly onto two theoretically and politically self-contained oppositional blocs. Green, Marxist and feminist positions exist which both reject the antiTim Hayward, Ecological Thought, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1995; Kate Soper, What is Nature? Culture, Politics and the Non-Human, Blackwell, Oxford, 1995. *

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realism of postmodernism and accept the significance of the ways in which the concept of ʻnatureʼ has been used for ideological purpose. Soperʼs own position occupies that political space. Her strategy is to carve out more clearly this position between the ʻnature-endorsingʼ perspectives of naturalists and the ʻnature-scepticalʼ perspectives of constructivists, by exploiting what are taken to be the strengths in one position to highlight the weaknesses in the other. In general, against the postmodernist focus on cultural construction of nature, she insists upon the importance of recognizing the existence of a discourse-independent natural world on which humans have real impacts that have to be addressed, and defends critical realism as the necessary basis for a coherent political project of social change. At the same time, she criticizes the tendency of the natureendorsing positions for their insensitivity to the ways in which the concept of nature has been historically shaped for ideological effects, some of which have implications for the environmental cause itself. The argument is played out over a wide range of topics, from the use of the concept of nature to exclude or downgrade those associated with the natural – the primitive, corporeal, feminine – through to examination of the ways in which the modern conservation movement appeals to an ideological representation of the ʻruralʼ. In each case the anti-naturalist tendencies in constructivism are set against what is defensible in the ecological naturalist and realist positions. The discussion is always rich, and much of the argument it will engender will concern the detail. To take just one example, Soper makes a useful demarcation between different levels of nature, pointing out that the source of aesthetic pleasure and value is the ʻsurfaceʼ lay nature of our everyday encounters and not the ʻdeepʼ level of causal powers and processes to which the scientific realist refers. The point is an important one and is broadly right. However, the two-way contrast between surface and deep tends to invoke a picture of natural science as physics. There are more layers to the nature we encounter than the division of

surface and deep might suggest: it is not clear to me where the work of the biologist, geologist or ecologist fits. To the extent that their work generates knowledge of the deeper structures, it can transform our ways of experiencing the surface order. For example, when I walk in marshland with one of my botanist friends I am constantly aware of how much more she sees, and am rewarded by the details she can add to my experience: what is initially aesthetically dull becomes a more interesting place. While part of the strength of the book lies in the detail, its distinctiveness resides in the general project of reconciling the different approaches. Judgements about its success will tend to be different depending upon oneʼs starting point. In a footnote to the first chapter Soper notes that some on the realist side of the divide in radical theory might find the argument too even-handed: ʻThey will object that postmodernist theory is the vehicle of reactionary forms of neo-liberalism which have nothing to offer a green movement committed to radical social changeʼ (p.13). The passage captures my own initial reaction exactly, and my worries were not entirely allayed by the rest of the book. To some extent, I think postmodernism gets an easy ride. My worry is not what is said but what is left out – in particular, the degree to which some forms of postmodernism have ended up as celebrations of market capitalism and the modes of consumption it fosters, which are incompatible with ecological imperatives. This said, Soperʼs openness to what is valuable in the specific claims made about the cultural construction of ʻnatureʼ from within postmodern theory is to be welcomed. What is Nature? is a book I would recommend to constructivist friends and colleagues who would be less inclined to listen to realists like myself because we are less inclined to listen to them. It conveys the strong sense of having seriously considered what both sides have to say. Relatedly, while I think there is nothing in realism that rules out an acknowledgement of the ways in which the concept of nature has been historically employed for ideological functions, there has been a fault of omission from within the realist framework which Soper rightly identifies. I suspect that part of the reason for this is that the argument between realists and constructivists is to some extent a sublimated version of an old argument about the relative significance of political economy and culture in understanding the forms of social oppression and ecological crisis that beset us. While there is no reason why one shouldnʼt be an ontological realist, and hold that the main determinants of social life are cultural

rather than economic, it is the case that those who are realist tend to hold on to materialist explanations of social life, which constructivists tend to reject. Now while I would be in the same camp both in respect of realism against constructivism, and the emphasis on the explanatory importance of the material and economic against the cultural turn in much recent social and political theory, there is a need for more clarity in separating out the different components of the argument.

Ecological humanism In the terms that Soper uses, Tim Haywardʼs Ecological Thought belongs in the main within the realist camp. However, it also illustrates the complexities in the possible positions that can be taken, and the book occupies a portion of the intellectual and political space between nature-endorsing and nature-sceptical positions. Whilst realist, and conscious of the very substantial damage done to the environment, normatively it develops a sophisticated anthropocentric approach to the natural world. The book defends an ecological humanism according to which the full development of the human good is bound up with the good of nonhuman nature. Our environmental crisis requires not the rejection of humanism for an ecocentric position, but rather a rejection of the impoverished Promethean forms that humanism has taken. Haywardʼs ecological humanism attempts to defend the position that humans are at once natural and cultural beings. Haywardʼs book is also in many ways an exercise in reconciliation. It aims to show that the defensible core of the radical ecological critique of modern societies can be stated without abandoning the emancipatory values of the Enlightenment. The proper response to tensions within the Enlightenment project highlighted by the environmental crisis is not to give up on it, but to renew it. In the end the radical ecological critiques of Enlightenment themselves depend upon the emancipatory values of the Enlightenment. The defence of that thesis calls upon and contributes to recent work within the Frankfurt tradition, especially by Benhabib and Habermas. In developing the theme, the book also provides a clear and accessible overview of most of the major recent currents in ecological ethics, economics and politics. To the student and the general reader it will prove an invaluable introduction to recent ecological thought. The enterprise in which Hayward is engaged is to be welcomed against recent anti-Enlightenment trends in social theory. One of the virtues of his book is that it deals with the Enlightenment in its historic

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complexity, and not as a slogan on which a variety of either banal or implausible-looking claims are set up for praise or condemnation. Consider, for example, the question that has long been at the centre of much radical social theory: whether the language of rights is the appropriate discourse in which to express the emancipatory aims of radical politics. Hayward claims that the language of rights is one part of the Enlightenment legacy which we can and ought to retain. We ought to retain ʻrightsʼ because they secure protection of individuals from abuse – protection that will always be necessary, in so far as the circumstances of justice cannot be overcome. We can hold on to the rights discourse since, while their specific liberal and individualist form may be open to criticism, it is possible to defend a conception of rights which recognizes with socialist, feminist and communitarian critics that we are embodied beings constituted by relationships to other persons and ecological conditions. However, I remain unconvinced that these kinds of move do justice to the traditional radical worries about the very use of rights language to express basic ethical and political concerns. While the significance of the content of the rights claims can be accepted – they are used, as Hayward notes, to formulate basic requirements of justice – there remain real issues about the normative adequacy of the language employed to express them. While I think the issue is still open, there is a thinness and abstractness to rights discourse and an implicit possessive individualism which lend weight to the traditional radical scepticism. Where, however, I have the greatest problems with Haywardʼs position is just where it most explicitly and self-consciously converges with Soperʼs – that is, in their common criticism of naturalism about the human good. Both Hayward and Soper reject the kind of naturalism defended, for example, by Ted Benton. This insists upon an account of the specific species powers and needs of humans as natural beings that will allow us both to criticize various social practices and structures as incompatible with a flourishing human life, and to recognize that other animals have their own essential species powers and needs, enabling us to criticize conditions and modes of life imposed upon them. Hayward argues against such naturalism that its reproach to non-naturalist theories of human nature – namely, that they lack a determinate characterization of human nature which would provide ʻa normative standpoint to criticize late capitalist society and envisage a preferable futureʼ – could be turned against naturalism itself: it fails to provide any clearer guidance for social critique (p.82). The problem is taken

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to be particularly acute given the additional claim that human powers and needs have developed in the course of human history. Soper concurs with Haywardʼs criticism of naturalism. To it she adds an additional point. Not only can we not expect a naturalistic theory of the human good to provide a determinate answer to the question of what the good life should be. Given our ecological constraints, such an answer is not even helpful to an ecological politics: ʻ“Flourishing” is what we ought to be re-thinking in the light of current and future resources; it is not an a priori given of human nature whose “true” needs nature can be expected to fulfilʼ (p.168).

A flourishing life Both Haywardʼs and Soperʼs criticisms point to a real difficulty with any universalist conception of human flourishing of the kind offered by the naturalist – that it has to steer a course between vacuity on the one hand, and an implausibly narrow specification of flourishing on the other. Yet that is a difficulty, not an impossibility: a course can be steered. The objections of Hayward and Soper play on an implausibly overdeterministic account of what a naturalistic theory of human flourishing has to deliver in order to avoid vacuity: they assume that a naturalistic account of human flourishing must provide ʻdeterminateʼ answers to the nature of particular social forms and provisions. However, no account of our human powers and needs could determine an answer to the details of a flourishing life. As Martha Nussbaum has noted, any defensible theory of the human good should be thick, but ʻvague in a good senseʼ: it will allow that there are a variety of different specifications of ways in which humans can lead a flourishing life.1 However, an account of the powers, capacities and needs that make us the kind of being we are does delimit the target of what a flourishing life can be. As such it still has real work to do. For example, to take a standard (and I think true) claim found in naturalistic theories of the human good dating back to Aristotle, as humans we are beings that need intimate relations to particular others. That claim does not determine some particular form such relations have to take: it allows of variability. The relations can take a variety of specific forms in different social and cultural settings. As such it might provide one part of what Michael Sandel calls a substantive justification of homosexual relations, which appeals not just to the value of autonomy, but to the specific goods and virtues of intimate relations that homosexual unions can realize, in contrast to

a liberal-voluntarist justification appealing solely to free choice.2 At the same time, the existence of a variety of specific cultural forms in which intimate relations can be realized does not entail that the account has no negative work to do. If we have a society like our own, in which those who are old and without wealth are excluded from ties of affiliation with others, then there is room for criticism from within a naturalist account of the good. Naturalist accounts of our human powers and predicaments have work to do of both a positive and negative kind, without providing a ʻdeterminateʼ answer to particular questions. Similarly, the indeterminacy of the kinds of historicized naturalismʼ3 that are to be found in Hegel and Marx can be overplayed, by assuming that a theory of the human good has the job of providing ʻdeterminateʼ specification of the human good. There is a danger in any historicized naturalism of setting history against biology, and seeing our powers as completely open, while ignoring those features of our nature as biological beings that are fixed and which put real limits on what counts as the development of our human powers. This said, it might be, as Marx and Hegel have it, that specific powers have developed through human history which entail new needs. For example, the development of certain kinds of power for autonomous choice might be peculiarly modern. Given the beings we are with the history we have, these become necessary for our flourishing; and where the possibility for their exercise is denied, there are needs, and not just wants, that are being denied. This is compatible with the claim that there are a variety of ways in which the powers of autonomous choice can be realized. It is quite consistent with a naturalist theory to ask what modes of realizing a flourishing human life are compatible with real ecological constraints. In particular, one needs to question theories of the human good that tie it too closely to the high consumption of material goods. The claim that specific modes of flourishing might need reconsideration should be kept distinct, however, from the claim that we can and should redefine the concept of flourishing itself, to fit whatever ecological constraints there happen to be. Taken in the second sense, Soperʼs claim that ʻ“flourishing” is what we ought to be re-thinking in the light of current and future resources … not an a priori given of human natureʼ, gets things the wrong way round. If we are considering our relations to future generations, it would be an ethical mistake to think that the concept of flourishing can be redefined to fit any constraints: it is because we know now

that there are givens of human nature – discovered empirically and not a priori – that we have room to criticize the consequences of current social arrangements. If we could not say now that a flourishing human life requires clean air and water, topsoil for sustainable agriculture, conditions for literacy and human companionship, and so on, we would have no place from which to criticize the unsustainable nature of capitalist society. Humans may be able to survive amidst poison and natural squalor – witness life in the worst shanty towns in the Third World. They cannot flourish in such conditions. We need an account of flourishing, grounded in our nature, that is able to transcend our immediate place and time, if we are to make sense of our specific obligations to future humans and distant strangers. It is the forms a flourishing life can take that need rethinking, not the concept of human flourishing as such. None of this is to claim that there isnʼt a danger in naturalist theories. Consider Kant, a major source of the historicized naturalism of Hegel and Marx: ʻthe history of the human race as a whole can be regarded as the realisation of the hidden plan of nature to bring about an internally … perfect political constitution as the only possible state within which all the natural capacities of mankind can be developed completely.ʼ4 The picture of history as a hidden plan bringing the full realization of human development can and has served as a justification for the colonization of ʻprehistorical peoplesʼ; and the story of inevitable human progress certainly looks much less plausible today than it did in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. However, the aims of the Enlightenment as a social ideal can be divorced from such progressivism and the generalization of local conceptions of the good. As Hayward notes, it is from within its own emancipatory values that much of the criticism of these features of the Enlightenment can be made.

Notes 1. M. Nussbaum, ʻAristotelian Social Democracyʼ, in R. Douglass, G. Mara and H. Richardson, eds, Liberalism and the Good, Routledge, London, 1990, p. 217 and passim. 2. M. Sandel, ʻMoral Argument and Liberal Toleration: Abortion and Homosexualityʼ, in G. Dworkin, ed., Morality, Harm and the Law, Westview Press, Boulder CO, 1994. 3. I borrow the phrase from Allan Wood, Hegelʼs Ethical Thought, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990, pp. 33–5. 4. Kant, ʻIdea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purposeʼ, in Political Writings, edited by H. Reiss, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1977, p. 50.

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REVIEWS

A political philosophy that is honest, decent and true Michael J. Sandel, Democracyʼs Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA and London, 1996. xi + 417 pp., £16.50 hb., 0 674 19744 5. Avishai Margalit, The Decent Society, translated by Naomi Goldblum, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA and London, 1996. xi + 304 pp., £21.95 hb., 0 674 19436 5. In Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (1982) Michael Sandel offered an influential critique of John Rawlsʼs A Theory of Justice which constitutes one strand in the ʻcommunitarianʼ challenge to contemporary Anglophone philosophical liberalism. Notoriously, Sandel, along with other communitarians, was charged with a failure to spell out the political implications of his philosophical views, or of doing no more than gesturing towards an illiberal politics of the common good which ignored the painfully acquired rights of individual citizens. In his new book Sandel recapitulates his critique of Rawlsianism. But he does so by construing a political philosophy as the public philosophy implicit in a set of institutions and practices. His concern is to expose the failure of the liberal public philosophy which animates contemporary American political life, and to contrast this inadequate philosophy with that earlier, authentically republican public philosophy which liberalism has supplanted. Sandelʼs previous critique was largely an ʻinternalʼ one. It sought to show that Rawlsʼs philosophical project failed on its own assumptions and ideals. Thus, for instance, a Rawlsian self, defined as one which could exist prior to its ends, could not choose the terms of its political relations with others in its society. Such a self could not, properly speaking, be said to choose anything. Or, again, Rawlsʼs difference principle required that everyone regard the natural assets of each as communally owned. But the principle operated within a context that not only lacked any sense of community, but precluded its very possibility. The new critique is more of an ʻexternalʼ one. It seeks to expose the gap between theory and reality, between that which a given political philosophy promises and the reality which its instantiation in a particular society delivers. Sandel starts from the American publicʼs current discontent – with its lack of political

control over its life and with the erosion of moral community. He ascribes this discontent to the failure of the liberal political philosophy by which America presently lives. That philosophyʼs defining – and recognizably Rawlsian – ideal is that government should be neutral between the lives that its citizens endorse, thereby giving proper (and equal) respect to these citizensʼ free choices, as autonomous ʻunencumberedʼ selves. ʻUnencumberedʼ here means without communal or moral ties which have not been chosen. This understanding of liberalism is familiar from Sandelʼs earlier work. But he now seeks to show how such a liberalism became Americaʼs public philosophy. He does so by tracing its increasing influence in the judgements of the Supreme Court on religious liberty, freedom of speech, privacy and family. At the same time he strives to retrieve an earlier public philosophy, that of the republican tradition, which emphasizes the interdependence of individual liberty and self-government, the need to cultivate the virtues of citizenship, a concern with the common good, and the importance of acknowledging the ties and loyalties – the ʻencumbrancesʼ – of selves. In the part on ʻThe Political Economy of Citizenshipʼ, Sandel displays the fundamental shift in discussion of wage labour, employeesʼ rights, manufacturing, and consumersʼ interests, from arguments couched in terms of the civic good and the dangers of concentrated economic power for self-government, to ones that speak only of prosperity and the fair distribution of its fruits. The shift is from civic republicanism to liberal Keynesianism. The discussion is masterful. Sandel yokes his defence of the main philosophical claim to a seemingly effortless command, and clear presentation, of the broad historical developments he thinks significant. Moreover, his conclusion could not be clearer or more unequivocal. The liberal public philosophy is deeply

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flawed and inadequate to the tasks of contemporary American political life. The republican tradition must be restored. However, as he recognizes towards the end of his book, the doubts about his claim will be both practical and moral. Whilst acknowledging these, Sandelʼs response to them is not entirely convincing. The moral concern is that the republican tradition could be revived only at the cost of a loss of individual freedom and tolerance of difference. Republicanism sees a place for ʻsoulcraft in statecraftʼ, to use Sandelʼs suggestive language – that is, according the government the formative role of encouraging certain civic virtues and moulding people to the living of certain kinds of lives. He is certainly right to insist – and the point is an important, often neglected one – that such a politics inclines to coercion not on account of its formative ambition alone, but because of an assumption that the common good is single and agreed. But then the clear onus is on Sandel to specify the range of virtues and kinds of worthwhile lives that a republican government should play its part in forming. Instead, he merely repeats that the liberal account of free citizenship is empty and lists the ʻgropings, however partial and inchoateʼ in recent American political debate which gesture towards some revival of republican themes. It is all rather insubstantial and unpersuasive. The practical concern is how to revive a republican tradition of confident moral community and robust self-government in the modern world, marked by a hugely increased scale and complexity of interaction at all levels. Here Sandelʼs reply seems even more vague and thin. He cautions against finding the appropriate basis for a new democratic politics in either the national or global community. He is right to insist that a globalized economy and politics is eroding the role of the nation-state at the same time as it is failing to realize a plausible cosmopolitan citizenship. But then the game might seem to be up for any kind of realistic politics of morally assured, popular self-rule. Sandel talks of the possibility of a revitalized civic life in the more particular communities in which we live, and of the increased importance of the ʻpolitics of neighbourhoodʼ. But this sounds and looks like a retreat from – not a rediscovery of – real politics. Insisting on community and urban projects, when even the most powerful of the worldʼs states must submit to the imperatives of a world economy, does appear to be a case of urging the tending of oneʼs own back garden whilst the new enlarged highway is built out front. Notwithstanding these difficulties, there is a further worry about Sandelʼs project. This is that he offers no account of why the republican tradition was supplanted

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by the liberal public philosophy. It surely cannot be merely an unhappy accidental outcome of the vagaries of Supreme Court jurisprudential reasoning. One would like to think that the Courtʼs judges have given expression, in their own way and in their own time, to ideas and ideals, however partial and inchoate, forming in the American public mind. It is tempting to see the republican public philosophy as appropriate to the formation of a young republicʼs social, economic and political institutions, when such a society was striving to give itself a clear, assured identity robust enough to cope with the various interests and competing forces it recognized as inhabiting its boundaries. Liberalism is the philosophy of a polity that has learned to live with difference, that is confident of its ability to tolerate the varied lifestyles which are the inevitable outcome of an individual freedom it has also learned to value and encourage. This may be too simple a story. But it would suggest that there is no going back (and Sandel acknowledges the dangerous lure of nostalgic republicanism). It might also suggest that the way forward is unattractive, as liberalismʼs very success has destroyed the conditions for a revival of a successful democratic public philosophy. Whatever is the case, Sandel needs to tell some sort of plausible story as to why (and not just how) America has travelled from the civic to the merely ʻproceduralʼ republic. He needs to do so not least because otherwise Americaʼs search for a public philosophy will be aimless and fuel the very discontent with politics his book seeks to address. He also needs to do so because otherwise communitarism will continue to be stigmatized – not unfairly – as a political philosophy of protest, parasitic on the limits of liberalism, and not itself a constructive vision of an alternative politics. Avishai Margalitʼs The Decent Society also starts from a worry with Rawlsianism: is justice enough? At the outset of A Theory Rawls famously described justice as the first virtue of society and left his readers with the impression that it is probably the only virtue. Critics have wondered whether a society that is merely just need be ideal. Margalit suggests one possible alternative measure of evaluation: a societyʼs decency. Decency is characterized as not humiliating people, and humiliating people is defined as excluding them from the ʻfamily of manʼ. The defence of this claim is made by a philosopher who is undoubtedly decent, in every sense of that word. There are many worthwhile discussions of important distinctions – between selfrespect and self-esteem, dishonouring and humiliating, decent and civilized, and so on. There is much to commend in Margalitʼs treatment of decency in the

provision of welfare, punishment, employment, protection of privacy, and multiculturalism. One suspects that there are societal virtues, beyond justice, which need to be assured by a societyʼs institutions, and that something very like decency is certainly one of them, if not the main one. Yet if Margalitʼs account is largely unexceptionable, this may be due to the fact that there just is little to which exception can be taken. It really is hard to disagree with sentiments like, ʻA decent society is … one that provides all its members with the opportunity to find at least one reasonably meaningful occupationʼ (p. 254); or, ʻA decent society cares about the dignity of its prisonersʼ (p. 270). Much of the discussion is at this

kind of level, and unfortunately oneʼs confidence in the authorʼs understanding of the real world of politics is not helped by finding the ʻBogsideʼ transported from Derry to Belfast (p. 133). Both Sandel and Margalit are writing in the shadow of Rawls and both are acutely conscious of the need to make political philosophy politically adequate – that is, to construct a public philosophy that can, as well as should, animate the institutions of actually existing societies. In their own ways each reveals how far English-speaking political philosophy has travelled since the publication of A Theory, and yet how much road there still is to cover. David Archard

Collective intentions John R. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality, Allen Lane, London, 1995. xiii + 241 pp., £20.00 hb, 0 713 99112 7. If, as John Searle remarks, ʻWe live in exactly one world, not two or three or seventeenʼ, and if the basic features of that world are physical in nature, how can it also contain, as it seems to do, objective phenomena that are not obviously physical? Searleʼs previous work attempted to answer this question in respect of consciousness, intentionality and language. Here he turns his attention to the existence of institutional facts such as money, property, governments and marriage. Institutional facts are characterized as those which are dependent on human agreement for their existence, in contrast to ʻbrute factsʼ such as Mount Everest having snow and ice near its summit, or hydrogen atoms having one electron, which are true independently of what anyone says or thinks. Searleʼs basic theory of institutional facts is summarized in the formula ʻX counts as Y in context Cʼ, where X may be some physical object such as a lump of gold or a piece of printed paper, Y its assigned functional status as money, and C will presumably restrict how it is produced and how and where it can be used. In general, the assigned status of such an object cannot be explained entirely in terms of its physical properties alone. In addition to the assignment of status, the creation of institutional facts also requires collective intentionality and constitutive rules. The latter are the kind of rules that define a particular practice, rather than merely regulating it, such as those of chess. Collective intentionality entails that people

intend and do things collectively, and understand what they are doing in that way: it cannot be reduced to a mere aggregate of individual actions and intentions. The basic theory of the creation and structure of institutional facts is set out in the initial chapters, and largely illustrated by the example of money. Searle next examines the dependence of institutional facts on language, and completes his preliminary account of institutional ontology. This is then elaborated to describe the logical structure, interdependence, hierarchy and maintenance of a much wider range of institutional facts, including politics, power, property, marriage and war. Searle next deals with the problem of how, if institutions are structured by constitutive rules, and if the social agents who participate in institutions are unaware of or mistaken about those rules, the latter can have any causal role to play in the behaviour of those agents. He rejects the suggestion that agents somehow follow the rules unconsciously, and argues instead that in learning to operate in social institutions (whether playing baseball or using a bank account) agents acquire dispositions or background abilities that are sensitive to the rules, enabling them to operate skilfully within institutions without conscious (or unconscious) intentions to follow rules. Searleʼs analysis of institutional facts is clear and meticulous throughout and supported by clear arguments and examples. But the arguments and examples are very much of his own choosing, and little attempt

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is made to relate them to wider arguments about method and ontology in the social sciences. This is odd, since the claim that institutional facts rest on some form of collective acceptance is hardly new, and Searleʼs arguments about background capacities are, as he acknowledges, clearly related to well-known work in the hermeneutic tradition. The overall impression given is that the enterprise is one of tidying up the ontological details of Searleʼs own metaphysical world-view and assuming that their relevance will be apparent to others. The assumption of shared wonder at metaphysical mystery is no doubt justified in respect of those problems about mind, body and language which have been the subjects of Searleʼs previous work. Yet if those problems are set aside, much of the metaphysical mystery he perceives in the social world will, I think, have been discarded with them. The real mysteries of the social world have to do with why we have the kinds of social arrangements we do rather than others we can imagine – what possibilities are open to us for change and what possibilities are denied us. Perhaps Searleʼs model of institutional facts can throw some light on these problems, but he makes no attempt to do so. There are, nevertheless, some points at which Searle does touch on substantive disagreements within the social sciences, and these are indicative of serious difficulties with his analysis. Searleʼs claim that all institutional facts count as such only if they have a functional status assigned them by collective intentionality – in other words, that money, power, property, war and so on only count as such if people continuously believe and accept that that is what they are – leads him to argue that the armed might of the state in democratic societies ʻdepends on the acceptance of constitutive rules much more than converselyʼ (p. 90). We cannot assume, Searle thinks, that a system of acceptance is backed by a system of force, since the system of force presupposes other systems of collectively accepted status functions. This is chickenand-egg stuff. What is required for people to cease to recognize or accept a system of status functions such as the state, the army or the police is that they can see some alternative to it, and can see themselves as having the collective power to resist and overcome the system of force with which they are 44

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confronted. In the absence of such realistic alternatives, the state is no more dependent on acceptance than are the laws of thermodynamics. Likewise with money: in a trivial sense it is true that for money to be money people must believe that it is; but if most people cannot realistically hope to bring it about that money is no longer regarded as such, it is nonsense to suggest that the status or value of money rests on some form of common intention or acceptance on their part. Moreover, even for governments, bankers and currency speculators who have some degree of control over the value of money, there are objective constraints on their control over it. No one has the power to determine for any significant length of time that a hard currency has whatever value they see fit to give it; and no one, collectively or individually, has the power intentionally to bring about an enduring state of affairs in which money does not exist. The crucial questions for social scientists and political agents alike are about how alternatives to existing institutions can occur and how they can be recognized or foreseen; and it is difficult to see how Searleʼs model provides even the beginnings of answers to such questions. It is a fundamental assumption of Searleʼs analysis of institutional facts that there is a real distinction between the class of institutional facts, which are dependent on human thought and language, and the unproblematic class of brute facts which are independent of what anyone thinks or says. This distinction is threatened, according to Searle, by contemporary relativist arguments which deny the existence of a reality independent of human representations. In response, Searle sets out and defends what he describes as ʻexter-

nal realismʼ (ʻthe world … exists independently of our representations of itʼ [p. 150]) and a version of the correspondence theory of truth. Defending the validity of the distinction between institutional and brute facts is the only substantive reason given for including these chapters, and their arguments add nothing of substance to the real subject of the book. (Searle does also say that he has presupposed throughout that in general our statements, when true, correspond to the facts: one shudders at the thought that everyone who presupposes this should feel obliged to include a treatise on the correspondence theory of truth in their books.) The anti-realist claims opposed by Searle are familiar enough, but as with the earlier chapters, and beyond the odd fleeting reference to Goodman, Rorty and Derrida, there is little sense of engagement with real opponents, other than Putnam – himself a kind of realist – who, in Searleʼs view, makes the mistake of treating realism as an epistemological thesis, rather than an ontological one. Kevin Magill

Meandering in a moral maze John Keane, Reflections on Violence, Verso, London and New York, 1996. 200 pp., £39.95 hb., £9.95 pb., 1 85984 115 5 hb., 1 85984 979 2 pb. We have lived through what John Keane reasonably calls ʻa long century of violenceʼ, which, as far as killing, cruelty and suffering are concerned, is by no means over. Indeed, Keane cites estimates which suggest that internal (un)civil wars are currently much more widespread than they were, say, thirty years ago. The post-Communist disintegration of Yugoslavia has brought such conflicts into Europe on a scale of destruction and brutality not seen here for nearly half a century. Yet political theory, as he points out, has been oddly – indeed, scandalously – reluctant to investigate violence, whether the concept or its nature and causes. Academics have generally preferred to analyse ʻtheories of justice, communitarianism or the history of half-dead political languagesʼ (p. 6). If political theory avoids the difficult and disturbing, it merely confirms the popular judgement that it is an irrelevant pursuit. What Adrian Mitchell once said about poetry could all too easily be said about political theory

(not to mention a few other academic disciplines): ʻMost people ignore most poetry, because/ Most poetry ignores most people.ʼ So all credit to John Keane for venturing onto this treacherous terrain. And he is right to see that his own cherished project of a ʻcivil societyʼ is imperilled if it is continually threatened by a resurgence of violence, or of the plurality of groups within civil society adopting violent means to conduct their disputes. But his analysis of the problem is far from clear. He is at great pains to dissociate himself from anything ʻteleologicalʼ, like the idea of a gradual progress towards civility involving a steady decline in levels of violence and disorder. This he regards as a cosy myth, which denies the uneven dialectic of civility and aggression that is the real history of humanity. Keane may well be right. But then we have to ask, why does violence persist? Is it an ineradicable feature of social life or of human nature, as some pessimistic commentators suggest? For his part, Keane rejects any ʻessentialistʼ thesis which proposes, à la Hobbes, that human beings are incorrigibly egoistic and competitive. Fine. But he doesnʼt get a lot further when it comes to offering alternative explanations for the alarming persistence of cruelty, aggression and violence. There are, I think, reasons for this. The first is that, in the best postmodern manner, Keane is all too anxious to disown any kind of comprehensive or fundamental explanation as being ʻessentialistʼ and ʻclosedʼ. Otherwise, he would surely have paid some attention to Freudʼs argument, in Civilization and its Discontents, that civilized social life is based upon the repression of basic urges – a repression that may, in turn, generate tensions which sometimes explode into violence. Or he might have considered a more limited version of the same dichotomy which connects, say, the violence associated with football matches with the dreary, routinized, unfulfilling character of daily working life. Surprisingly, Keane pays little or no attention to the mechanization of violence – a development which allows not only those who instigate it, but even its direct perpetrators, to remain at a distance from the sufferings they cause. Studies of violent individuals – murderers, torturers and sadists – cast little light on the psychology of men like Adolf Eichmann, as Hannah Arendt well understood, or on those who, in Stanley Milgramʼs famous experiments, were willing to obey orders (or even authoritative requests) to inflict pain on their fellow human beings. No study of what makes violence possible will get very far unless it takes into account the structural factors which enable

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individuals to evade both the actual consequences of what they do, and any sense of responsibility for doing it (ʻI was only obeying ordersʼ). If Keaneʼs title – borrowed from Sorel – suggests something a bit meandering, rather than a rigorously pursued argument, that, regrettably, is not misleading. There are odd hiatuses, and there are too many digressions. We are a third of the way through the book (p. 65) before he turns to the definition of violence, and the ensuing brief discussion is far from satisfactory. Keane wants to hold on to the traditional conception of violence as ʻthe unwanted physical interference by groups and/or individuals with the bodies of othersʼ (p. 67). But while he dislikes attempts to extend the meaning of the term, he does not discuss the problem raised by his narrow definition. What constitutes ʻphysical interferenceʼ? Are policies which result in death by starvation or hypothermia examples of such interference? If not, why not? And why are ʻbodiesʼ the only object of violence? Modern methods of torture, as employed by British forces in Northern Ireland in the 1970s, may involve no direct physical assault on their victims, yet can do terrible damage to the mind and personality, as well as the body. If this is not violence, then the adequacy of Keaneʼs definition is called into question. Given the huge emotive power of the word ʻviolenceʼ, these cannot be regarded as merely semantic questions. Nor, I think, does Keane do sufficient justice to the pacifist case against all violence. Personally, I

agree with him that there are occasions when recourse to violence is justified as having less terrible consequences than passive resistance. But the argument that justifiable violence can breed unjustifiable violence is not taken seriously enough. Keane slips too easily into calling violence of which he approves ʻcounterviolenceʼ or ʻcivil violenceʼ. But it is one thing to regard violence as a sometimes regrettable necessity and quite another to claim that the killing or injuring of people can be dignified as ʻcivilʼ. Keaneʼs Reflections, though manifestly serious and enterprising, lack rigour and thoroughness, and the book shows many signs of having been hastily composed. A diatribe against nationalism, which he claims has ʻa fanatical coreʼ (p. 126), is quite inadequate in dealing with such a complex subject, and, significantly, makes no mention of any of the British nationalisms. Are Scottish nationalists really ʻdriven by the feeling that all nations are caught up in the animal struggle for survivalʼ (p. 127)? I think the question answers itself. There are many unnecessarily long and convoluted sentences – the section on the definition of violence (pp. 65–7) is particularly bedevilled by them; and too many throw-away asides and unexplained references. What, for instance, is the ʻnear dominant Westphalian model of interstate powerʼ which we suddenly encounter on page 45? Or am I the only reader of Radical Philosophy not to know? Anthony Arblaster

The first Hegelian Marxist Kevin Anderson, Lenin, Hegel and Western Marxism: A Critical Study, University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago, 1995. xviii + 311 pp., $49.95 hb., $15.95 pb., 0 252 02167 3 hb., 0 252 06503 4 pb. Thanks to its impressive argumentation and wide scholarship, this book brings to life a new and unexpected Lenin, poles apart from both wooden ʻMarxism-Leninismʼ and dismissive Western scholarship. A follower of the Hegelian Marxist Raya Dunayevskaya, Kevin Anderson gives us a sympathetic but critical assessment of Leninʼs attempt to assimilate Hegelian dialectics into revolutionary politics. The starting point for Andersonʼs argument is Leninʼs Notebooks on Hegel of 1914–15, a series of abstracts, summaries and comments, mainly on Hegelʼs Science of Logic. In spite of their fragmentary and unfinished nature, these constitute Leninʼs philosophical and methodological break with Second International ʻorthodoxʼ Marxism, and, therefore, with his own earlier views, as codified in his crude and

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dogmatic polemical piece of 1908, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. The Lenin who emerges from the Notebooks – a Marxist fascinated with Hegelian logic – eludes the usual distinction between ʻWesternʼ and ʻEasternʼ (or Russian) Marxism. Closely following Leninʼs extracts and comments, Anderson persuasively shows how his attitude changes with his reading of Hegel: from an initial ʻmaterialistʼ diffidence, to a growing interest in subjectivity and self-movement, finally coming to the surprising conclusion that ʻan intelligent (dialectical) idealism is superior to a stupid (vulgar) materialismʼ. Even if he did not take into account the plenitude of Hegelʼs dialectic, the Lenin of the Notebooks can be considered the first ʻHegelian Marxistʼ of the twentieth century, and the first to emphasize the Hegelianism of Marxʼs

Capital: ʻIt is impossible fully to grasp Marxʼs Capital and especially its first chapter, if you have not studied through and understood the whole of Hegelʼs Logic. Consequently, none of the Marxists for the past half century have understood Marx!ʼ – a famous aphorism with quite obvious ʻself-criticalʼ implications. Leninʼs public writings on dialectics were much less explicit than the Notebooks: shot through with philosophical ambivalence (Raya Dunayevskayaʼs expression), they refuse to choose between Hegel and Plekhanov. The call, in 1922, for a ʻsystematic study of Hegelian dialectics from a materialist standpointʼ is the nearest Lenin came to a public expression of the ideas advanced in the Notebooks. On the other hand, the reissuing of Materialism and Empirio-Criticism in 1920, without a critical introduction, indicates the extent of his ʻambivalenceʼ. However, if one goes beyond Leninʼs strictly philosophical statements, one will discover, according to Anderson, that some of his most significant post1914 theoretical and political writings were variously grounded in his Hegel Notebooks. His interest in subjectivity and self-movement, as well as in the dialectical transformation into opposites, contributed to his understanding of national liberation movements as new revolutionary subjects produced by imperialism, and of grassroots spontaneous democracy (the soviets) as the alternative to the centralized bureaucratic state. Curiously enough, Anderson fails to mention a more obvious example of the impact of the Hegel Notebooks on Leninʼs dialectics of revolution: the ʻApril Thesesʼ of 1917, where, for the first time, he called for the transformation of the bourgeois-democratic revolution into a socialist one. This major turn – a radical break with the Russian Marxist tradition, common to Mensheviks and Bolsheviks – was only possible because of Leninʼs emancipation, thanks to Hegel, from the strait-jacket of Plekhanovite Marxism, with its rigid, pre-dialectical notion of ʻstagesʼ prescribed by the ʻlawsʼ of historical ʻevolutionʼ. The idea at the heart of the ʻApril Thesesʼ of revolution as a dialectical process owes much to the Notebooks. The last section of the book deals with Leninʼs Notebooks and Western Marxism – a category that Anderson does not challenge, even though his data show that the opposition between dialectical and vulgar-materialist Marxism does not coincide with any geographical distinction between ʻEastʼ and ʻWestʼ. Leninʼs Notebooks were published in the USSR in 1929, but Soviet Marxism nearly buried them, canonizing Materialism and Empirio-Criticism instead.

While some Western Marxists, such as Lukács, Bloch, Goldmann, Lefebvre, Marcuse and, above all, Dunayevskaya, showed interest in them, others (e.g. Colletti and Althusser) either ignored or misinterpreted them, from a materialist/positivist standpoint, hoping to drive Hegelʼs shadow ʻback into the nightʼ (Althusser). Henri Lefebvre is an interesting example: having discovered Hegelʼs Science of Logic thanks to André Breton – whose place in the history of Hegelian

Marxism deserves to be studied one day – he became very much attracted by Leninʼs Notebooks, which he translated into French (1938). However, as long as he remained a member of the French Communist Party, he tried to reconcile Leninʼs Hegelianism with the mechanistic views of Materialism and EmpirioCriticism. Only in 1959, after his expulsion from the Party, did he dare to state that up to 1914 Lenin did not understand dialectics. Of all Western Marxists, only Dunayevskaya made the Notebooks central to her overall theoretical project, with an extensive – and increasingly critical – series of writings, from the 1950s to the 1980s. Her Marxism and Freedom (1958) is the first serious discussion in English of the Notebooks, and the first to try to relate them to Leninʼs views on imperialism, national liberation, state and revolution. In Philosophy and Revolution (1973) the issue is taken up again, but this time emphasizing Leninʼs philosophical ambivalence. Finally, in a new preface for this book (her last writing), Dunayevskaya insisted on Leninʼs too narrowly materialist reading of Hegel. A similar conclusion is drawn by Anderson in conclusion: while Leninʼs study of dialectics took him well beyond the limits of Second International materialism, in spite of occasional critiques of Engels in the Notebooks, he still remained imprisoned within the confines of Engelsian Marxism. Michael Löwy

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An existentialist Jew Richard J. Bernstein: Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1996. xv + 233 pp., £45.00 hb., £13.95 pb., 0 7456 1706 9 hb., 0 7456 1707 7 pb. This is an extremely readable book which advances a straightforward and ungainsayable thesis: Hannah Arendtʼs concern with the Jewish question was central to the development of her theories. It is thus an interpretation of Arendt through the lens of her Jewish experience and has the freshness and vitality that Bernstein claims to have felt when he read her from such a perspective. That said, there is the question of what precisely this reading has to offer. I completely agree that many interpretations of Arendt miss the mark precisely because they fail to take account of her Jewish experience. For example, a way of beginning to understand her distinction between the social and the political is to read about her frustration with the Parisian Jewish community in the 1930s, which persisted in both renouncing political action and disassociating itself from the growing émigré population, because

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they feared that its unFrench manners and dress would prompt xenophobia and jeopardize their social standing. They saw only a combination of beggars, left-wing troublemakers and backward peasants at a time when they needed to build Jewish solidarity and become ʻconscious pariahsʼ. But that is only part of the story: Arendtʼs evaluation of political action is also heavily informed by her particular reading of German existentialism. According to this, human beings can act in the political sphere, initiate new beginnings, be together in all their plurality and hence be fully human, while in the social sphere they merely behave or conform. Of course, Bernstein knows this, but he is not writing a book about Arendtʼs determination to come to terms with being Jewish and the long history of Jewish victimhood in Europe, without abandoning her fundamental belief in responsibility and freedom of action as the basic conditions of our humanity. If he were, it would probably be a more difficult volume. So is this a fair criticism, especially given that his study is the outcome of an invitation to think about Judaism and Jewishness? Yes and no. Yes, because Bernstein goes on to explain Arendtʼs commitment to freedom as rooted in her reflections on the concentration camps, which attempted to eliminate plurality and action and to destroy not just human bodies, but human beings. This is undoubtedly one of Arendtʼs crucial and original insights into the totalitarian machine, but I suspect she saw it not just because she was concerned about Jews, but because she was a Jew whose existentialist orientation made her look in a certain way. No, because again, that is a different book. Yes, because of one of the main sub-texts of the book: what does it mean to be a secular Jew, one who affirms their Jewishness but rejects Judaism, as both Arendt and Bernstein do? Existentialist concepts of being-in-the-world and being-with-others might begin to provide an answer: perhaps one is a Jew by consciously affirming certain facts of birth and social position. The category of ʻconscious pariahʼ appealed not only to Arendtʼs Jewishness,

but to her existentialism. Yet Bernstein sidesteps all of this, seeking something that almost looks like essentialism. Arendt speaks of her Jewishness as a given for which she can only be grateful, and Bernstein finds his and her Jewishness in this gratitude ʻfor every thing that isʼ, in her care for the world and the people in it. But this is unpersuasive, for it equally characterizes many non-Jewish people. Indeed, one can find in this gratitude and love for the world something very akin to what I would call a religious or spiritual attitude, which is certainly not confined to Jews. I am not a Jew, but, thinking about comparable questions of identity without belief, I find a far more plausible answer in terms of simply being a member of the family: a given that you can walk away from or affirm in a variety of ways. Membership is not constitutive of identity and most of us belong to many such ʻfamiliesʼ. When that

particular identity is under attack, however, it tends to become the most important identity we have. As Arendt says: ʻWhen I am attacked as a Jew, I must respond as a Jew.ʼ This is not carping. Bernsteinʼs book is a fascinating read, and I have raised these questions because one of its pleasures is the way that it opens the discussion. It does much else besides – for example, a re-examination of Arendtʼs concepts of the banality of evil and radical evil. Whatever you think of the arguments, you will enjoy the read, whether you are using the book as an introduction to her thought, or are looking for fresh insights into Arendt. It is a real accomplishment to have written a study that works on both levels. Anne Seller

Fiction as fiction Maurice Blanchot, The Most High (Le Très-Haut), translated by Allan Stoekl, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln NE and London, 1996. xxxii + 254 pp., £32.95 hb., 0 8032 1240 2. Blanchot the novelist has suffered at least partial eclipse by Blanchot the theorist, so it is good to have a new translation of his third novel Le Très-Haut (1948). Translator Allan Stoekl makes it clear in his introduction that this is a ʻdifficultʼ novel; the nature of the difficulty is evidently not linguistic, but pertains to establishing appropriate grounds for interpretation. The story is easily summarized. Although it lacks specific details of time and place, the book is in effect a journal, written in the first person by Henri Sorge, a minor bureaucrat who aspires to conform to the norms of a totalitarian state. He returns to work after illness, finds his commitment weakened, and leaves the job to recuperate further. The narrative focus broadens to reveal a city hit by plague, the efforts of the authorities to stop the epidemic spreading, and the attempt by insurgents to seize the opportunity offered by this increasingly chaotic situation. The tenement where Sorge resides becomes, in effect, a clinic. The revolutionaries engineer their own rise within the state apparatus, only to be absorbed by the system they sought to overthrow. Finally, Sorge meets his death at the hands of the woman who has nursed him. In an essay, ʻSur Maurice Blanchotʼ, published in Les Temps modernes in 1949, Pierre Klossowski noted the German meaning of Sorgeʼs name, and linked it directly to the novelʼs title: ʻGod deprived of his name, or existence deprived of being because it is deprived of Godʼs name, would become “anxiety”.ʼ From this lexical clue, Klossowski pursued the textʼs ʻnegative

theophanyʼ. In a rather less complex reading, Leon Roudiez, in French Fiction Revisited (1991), suggests that ʻthe narrator has become the metaphor of God, whose creation has become his illness or perhaps his sin, and whose disappearance is suggested at the end.ʼ Such an interpretation is tenable in much the same way that comparable readings of Kafka are tenable. But Stoekl signals that an overtly political reading (of the kind Roudiez explicitly rejects) is appropriate; for him Camusʼ The Plague and Orwellʼs 1984 (both exactly contemporaneous) provide more ready terms of comparison. Roudiez notes a surreal ambience; Stoekl recognizes the realities of postwar Europe in a landscape of ruins and collapsing buildings, peopled by the homeless, prostitutes and black marketeers. Still, beyond this, Sorge the civil servant is simultaneously, and paradoxically, the embodiment of living death, and God, the Most High. At the end of the novelʼs first chapter, Sorge writes: So, I asked myself, what is this State? Itʼs in me, I feel its existence in everything I do, through every fiber of my body. I was certain then that all I had to do was write, hour by hour, a commentary on my activities, in order to find in them the blossoming of a supreme truth, the same one that circulated actively between all of us, a truth that public life constantly relaunched, watched over, reabsorbed, and threw back in an obsessive and deliberate game.

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In his 1966 essay ʻThe Thought from Outsideʼ, Foucault manoeuvres deftly through the entanglement of paradox, noting that ʻwhen Sorge leaves state service … he does not go outside the law.ʼ Rather, ʻhe forces it to manifest itself at the empty place he just abandoned. The movement by which he effaces his singular existence and removes it from the universality of the law in fact exalts the law.ʼ Indeed, ʻhe has become one with the law.ʼ The real significance of the novelʼs opening declaration (ʻI wasnʼt alone, I was anybodyʼ) becomes apparent in this light: the singularity of that ʻIʼ is converted into ʻthe gray monotony of the universalʼ. John Gregg, in Maurice Blanchot and the Literature of Transgression (1994), devotes a chapter to analysis of Le Très-Haut. Stoekl cites it as an excellent discussion, while taking issue with some of its fundamental claims. Greggʼs account ends with the

helpful observation that those opening words are actually preceded by the narratorʼs ʻincomplete deathʼ, a structural loop feeding the repetitious and fragmentary journal back into itself: Sorge the user of language fails to gain possession of himself through his literary creation. If his book gets away from him, which means in turn that he gets away from himself, it is because their common denominator of language is also a victim of an incomplete death.

Gregg aptly names his chapter ʻWriting the Disasterʼ; Blanchotʼs enduring theoretical concerns clearly inform this fiction. Stoekl reminds us of Kojèveʼs legacy to Blanchot and his contemporaries; this is apt, but the larger challenge raised by this publication is to read the philosopherʼs fiction as fiction, with the distinctive mode of understanding that entails. Julian Cowley

More than a charming rhetorical cloud Régis Debray, Media Manifestos: On the Technical Transmission of Cultural Forms, translated by Eric Rauth, Verso, London and New York, 1996. viii + 179 pp., £39.95 hb., £12.95 pb., 1 85984 972 5 hb., 1 85984 087 6 pb. Régis Debray is arguably one of the most stimulating current French thinkers on media analysis and the problems of French society. Perhaps still best known in and outside France as the sometime friend of Castro and Che, and as a left-wing intellectual troubled by the usual difficulties that affiliation entailed in Mitterrandʼs France, since the late 1970s he has elaborated a complex approach to the interrelations between dominant modes of communication and cultural and intellectual activities. The discipline has been created cumulatively through works such as Teachers, Writers, Celebrities (1979), The Scribe (1980), Critique of Political Reason (1983), Courses in General Mediology (1991), A History of the Western Eye (1992), and The Seducer State (1993). To further this approach, Debray has recently created a new journal, Les Cahiers de médiologie, which promises to catalyse further mediological research. Media Manifestos is a translation of part of Debrayʼs submission to obtain the authority to direct research in French universities, presented at the Sorbonne in 1994. In reflection of this very French procedure, it is itself very – perhaps too – French in style and structure for what Debray and his co-nation-

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als persist in describing as ʻAnglo-Saxonʼ readers. Thus Debray makes many allusive attempts to explain what mediology is and is not, claiming that it is to do with replacing the word ʻcommunicationʼ with ʻmediationʼ in the study of the power of signs; that it is the study of the ways and means of symbolic efficacy, not a version of the history of ideas tweaked to cover ʻcommunicationʼ. Although a short glossary is provided at the end of the book because ʻa commitment must be made to being preciseʼ, and ʻa rudimentary lexicon will always prove a less grievous flaw than a charming rhetorical cloudʼ, there is no entry for ʻmediologyʼ. We learn that mediology draws selectively from sociology, the history of mentalities, historical psychology, the history of symbolism and cultural history, to become ʻa discipline that treats of the higher social functions in their relations with the technical structures of transmissionʼ – a discipline whose ʻmethodʼ determines correlations between the ideology, religion, art, literature and other symbolic activities of a society and its structures and methods of using and storing ʻtracesʼ or signs. Charming rhetoric with an important message.

Debrayʼs innovation is to have subverted traditional approaches to the history of ideas, aiming at a cultural meta-history of the visible (A History of the Western Eye), and of verbal communication (Courses in General Mediology), in which attention focuses on ʻthe “becoming-material” forces of symbolic formsʼ. This is, of course, where the importance of ʻtechnical transmissionʼ arises, in the analysis of interactions between culture and the technologies which transmit and structure it. Technical transmission is the ʻmediumʼ (procedure of symbolizing, code, supporting material system or recording device) in an expanded sense, building on McLuhanʼs construction of ʻthe ground floorʼ of an understanding of historically and geographically defined ʻmediaspheresʼ. This analysis draws inspiration from Benjamin, Barthes, Eco, Peirce, Foucault and Althusser, identifying the three primary mediaspheres of ʻlogosphereʼ (diffusion by writing and orality), ʻgraphosphereʼ (diffusion by printed text), and ʻvideosphereʼ (diffusion by audiovisual media). Media Manifestos and mediology in general are more than another contribution to ʻmedia studiesʼ, since Debrayʼs new discipline implies a historical and philosophical perspective on communication/mediation necessary to trace developments in dominant forms of technical transmission. This is more than a postmodern celebration of the endless possibilities of technology, offering fruitful insights into current developments in virtuality and multi-media. Hugh Dauncey

Changing the subject Simon Critchley and Peter Dews, eds, Deconstructive Subjectivities, SUNY Press, Albany NY, 1996. vii + 257 pp., $64.50 hb., $21.95 pb., 0 7914 2723 4 hb., 0 7914 2724 2 pb. One way of looking at the modern history of the idea of subjectivity reduces it to a simple opposition. Either you are for ʻthe subjectʼ – the fixed, stable, rational self that was just the place from which to build the edifice of metaphysics for Descartes and Kant – or you are against it. Continental thinking since structuralism has come up with more and more reasons for being against it. Hence the widespread urge to kick over the last traces of the unifying Cartesian subject and celebrate the unpindownability of difference and the very impossibility of subjectivity as conceived in Enlightenment humanist discourse. It is this sort of easy dichotomy (subject bad, no subject good) that Deconstructive Subjectivities sets out to undermine. Though broadly sympathetic to the critique of the subject in Heidegger and in so much recent continental philosophy, its various contributors reject the conclusion that the topic is thereby somehow exhausted, or deconstructed out of meaningful existence. This rejection need not mean, as Critchley and Dews put it in their useful introduction, ʻa naive attempt to return to a pre-deconstructive, pre-Heideggerian, or, indeed, pre-Kantian positionʼ. But it does demand that subjectivity be taken with the sort of seriousness befitting an issue which, far from being outmoded, arises with new urgency just as the traditional, foundational philosophical quest comes up against its limits. As a collection the essays have, I think, two main points to make. One is that recent thinking in (for example) post-structuralism, psychoanalysis and Frankfurt Critical Theory has been just as fixated as the ʻmainstreamʼ philosophical tradition with a certain view of the subject: as autonomous, rational, worldobjectifying, and thus as the universal ground for epistemic certainty, the very starting point of all philosophy. So it is this Cartesian heritage – sustained by Kant and, ironically enough, by its supposed gravediggers in twentieth-century continental thought – that has been thrown into question, rather than the notion of subjectivity itself. What has largely been ignored is another, less familiar current, to be found in early responses to the Enlightenment (in Friedrich

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Heinrich Jacobi, for example, and in Schelling) which subverted the Cartesian model and disrupted the sure path of metaphysics long before Heidegger wrote Being and Time. According to the pieces by Andrew Bowie and Manfred Frank, Schelling in particular invoked a subjectivity quite divorced from that which provides the simplistic target of postmodernist critiques, one ranging beyond the Kantian model of thought as representation and the ideal of the self-grounding philosophical system. The other main theme, already suggested, is that there is a real imperative, existential and ethical, to avoid simply dropping all talk of the subject as necessarily wrongheaded, reactionary or oppressive. This registers itself in various ways. In his own piece Simon Critchley presents Levinasʼs work as a response to the post-structuralist and anti-humanist critique, rooting subjectivity in material lived experience (and in the relation to alterity), rather than in abstract, deconstructable models of consciousness or rationality. Peter Dews argues that Lacanian psychoanalysis can be seen as a return to the good old philosophical questions of who we are and what we ultimately desire, and involves a model of intersubjectivity which defies the fashionable tendency to presume that ʻcontext is allʼ when it comes to questions of truth. Meanwhile, half the essays explore the legacy of Heideggerʼs critique of the subject, concentrating for the most part on the general question of whether Heidegger is (as he called Nietzsche) the ʻlast metaphysicianʼ, or whether Being and Time should rather be treated as the very starting point for any post-metaphysical subjectivity. The pieces by Dominique Janicaud and Rudolf Bernet are especially helpful, the former demonstrating the failure of Heideggerʼs attempt to destroy the subject, and the latter incorporating insights from psychoanalysis and Derrida into a fresh account of self-experience. In common, they seek to show that ʻthinking the subjectʼ after Heidegger, though fraught with ambiguities, is by no means a simple contradiction in terms. This collection is for specialists, and for those who already have some sympathy with its purpose. Anyone approaching it with reservations about the force of the anti-humanist critique of the subject in the first place is not likely to be persuaded of the need to ʻrethink the subjectʼ in its wake. But that is probably beside the point: the agenda here seems set precisely for those who are by and large convinced by the post-structuralist angle, but wonder what is left once traditional views of the subject have been overcome, or

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have deconstructed themselves. And on this score the book provides a rich resource, with many of the essays finding illuminating links between otherwise incongruous thinkers, most of them providing valuable insight in mapping the resultant new terrain, and almost all of them displaying a refreshingly reconstructive approach to the topic. All of this adds up to a valuable diagnosis, as well as a useful prognosis. Gideon Calder

Quirky Philip Goodchild, Gilles Deleuze and the Question of Philosophy, Associated University Presses, Cranbury NJ and London, 1996. 194 pp., £25.00 hb., 08 386 3634 9. Interpretation is translation. For it to work, the distance between the source language and the target must be maximal. An interpretation of Heidegger in Heideggerese is about as much use as A.L. Rowseʼs translation of Shakespeareʼs sonnets into English prose, for the American market. In the case of Gilles Deleuze, the main interpretive danger is stylistic mimicry, for the result is not clarification, but obfuscation. One dreams of an interpretation that would wrongfoot the master and proceed more geometrico, in the manner of Spinoza or the early Wittgenstein. At first it seems that Philip Goodchildʼs account provides just that. The first three chapters expound the early Deleuzeʼs basic concepts with admirable vigour and clarity. I have long wished for a short and methodical introduction to Deleuze for my non-specialist students, and I thought I had found it. Unfortunately, the book gets bogged down in the fourth chapter, where mimicry takes over and the exposition becomes convoluted and unconvincing. By contrast, the final chapter is a translation of Deleuze into another language, but since that language is the language of theology, one cannot help thinking the translation misguided: there is a vast difference between pointing out Deleuzeʼs vitalism, in the line of Bergson, and crowning oneʼs exposition of Deleuzeʼs conception of philosophy with the category of ʻspiritʼ, whatever the contents one seeks to impose upon it. The book turns out to be a highly interesting, but quirky and idiosyncratic version of Deleuze, in which, to speak like the French, the Deleuzian cat will fail to recognize her offspring. Jean-Jacques Lecercle

NEWS

A funny thing happened… The Forum for European Philosophy

T

he last few years have seen some signs of a significant historical shift in the intellectual posture and self-understanding of analytical philosophy in Britain. One such indication has been the recent spate of publications and conferences concerned with the origins of analytical philosophy as a distinctive theoretical tradition – a belated, albeit implicit, recognition of cultural relativity. Another is the increasing openness among less parochially minded analytical philosophers towards other traditions of European philosophy. Institutionally (or proto-institutionally) this second development has recently been reflected in the announcement of the creation of a ʻForum for European Philosophyʼ. The proclaimed aim of the Forum, which as yet has no formal organization or constitution, is to ʻpromote dialogue between philosophers in Britain and the rest of Europeʼ. Its inaugural meeting was held on the premises of the Royal Institute of Philosophy in London on 20 February this year. Alan Montefiore of Balliol College, Oxford, one of the founders of the Forum, opened the proceedings by announcing that the Collège Internationale de Philosophie in Paris had generously donated the sum of £1,500 to assist the formation of an organization in Britain devoted to aims similar to its own. He introduced François Jullien, President of the Collège Internationale, who spoke about the origins of his own institution, its aims and modus operandi, as a locus of philosophical discussion outside the established framework of the university. Jullien then spoke interestingly about his own philosophical work, which involves in-depth comparisons of the Chinese and Western philosophical traditions, with the aim of elucidating what is distinctive about our own European modes of thought. Brief responses by Alison Denham (Oxford) and Garbis Kortian (Paris and Vienna) were followed by François Jullienʼs replies and some questions from the audience. Monsieur Jullien spoke in French – as was of course his privilege – but unfortunately, as the evening wore on, the arrangements for periodic translation began to break down. This must have left a considerable proportion of the audience without much clue as to what was happening in the discussion, which was unfortunate for an inaugural meeting intended to draw people in. The evening concluded, as intended, with a general debate on the future format and role of the European Forum. Alan Montefiore and the other organizers present (Nick Bunnin, Marion Hobson and Jonathan Rée) welcomed the written submission of suggestions and proposals from all interested parties. During the concluding debate high passions were aroused. Some of those hoping that the Forum might function as a gathering place for the dispersed and often beleaguered commmunity of non-analytical philosophers in Britain were disappointed as it became apparent that the crucial interface of the Forum would be between British analytical and European non-analytical philosophy. As a result, by the end of the evening, two organizations were being proposed: an organization of ʻcontinentalʼ philosophers in Britain, part of whose aim would be to combat the institutional hegemony of analytical philosophy in Britain and its intellectual consequences (see the advertisment on p.5, above), plus the European Forum, whose membership and goals would be more inclusive. As one member of the audience remarked, the notion of two organizations in Britain devoted to European phil-

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osophy seemed rather lavish, given that only half an hour previously there had been none. It remains to be seen how these projects will develop, and how they will interrelate. It seems clear that there is now a need for some kind of association in Britain for teachers and research students working in the various non-analytical traditions of European philosophy. It is time for some assertion of collective self-confidence – a confidence which must surely be boosted by the increasing pressure from students for courses on these philosophical traditions, which even staunchly analytical departments are now finding it difficult to ignore. At the same time, an organization – such as the Forum – with the financial resources to stage significant encounters between British philosophers and their European counterparts may also be able to play a role in the pluralization of philosophical voices. However, the fact that the Forum is being established under the aegis of the Royal Institute of Philosophy will debar it from being a single-member organization with a democratic structure. Clearly, some potentially positive developments are on the horizon. But how long will it be before the power-brokers of the analytical establishment feel ashamed to announce – as Ted Honderich did when introducing Donald Davidson to an audience in London a couple of years ago – that analytical philosophy is the ʻonly philosophy that mattersʼ? Peter Dews

Honouring Levinas ‘Visage et Sinaï ’, Collège International de Philosophie, 8–9 December 1996 Since Emmanuel Levinasʼs death in December 1995, the philosophical community has mourned one of its most fecund thinkers. A memorial symposium in Paris, organized by the Collège International de Philosophie on 8–9 December 1996, brought together a number of speakers to reflect on Levinasʼs most important contributions to contemporary philosophy. It was organized around the theme of ʻVisage et Sinaïʼ. In his opening remarks, Jacques Derrida revisited his readings of Levinas, reorganizing them around an ʻethics of hospitalityʼ or the ʻwelcome of the otherʼ (lʼacceuil de lʼautre). He followed the thread of Levinasʼs reflections on subjectivity, from the image of the subject as host/guest in Totality and Infinity to that of the hostage in Otherwise than Being. The figure par excellence of receptivity and hospitality – he suggested – is the figure of the feminine, a theme that will be familiar to Derridaʼs readers. Finally, in turning to Levinasʼs ʻTalmudicʼ texts, Derrida linked the question of hospitality to the question of peace and considered the possibility of an ʻethical politicsʼ, a politics that would be founded on the irreducible and unthematizable welcome of the other in hospitality – a politics of mourning, then, because the other welcomed has always already been thematized (cannibalized, said Derrida, recalling his seminar title, ʻManger lʼautreʼ, of a few years ago). In contrast to Derridaʼs emphasis on the feminine, Jean-Luc Marionʼs presentation, ʻLa voix sans nomʼ, focused on the question of God the Father. Arguing that the faceto-face relation between Father and son is the philosophical nucleus of Levinasʼs work, Marion examined the questions of fecundity, transcendence, infinity and the ethical relation developed in Totality and Infinity, and their reinscription in Otherwise than

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Being, and attempted to link them to his own project outlined in his study Réduction et donation. For Marion, the paternal relation of Father to son is structurally the same as that of infinity to the finite; the voice of the Father remains as a trace, an echo, of the originary donation. The Father, however, remains inexorably withdrawn from that which is given by Him, and hence cannot be said. Paul Ricoeur traced the path of Levinasʼs hermeneutics of language in his presentation ʻDire et Dedireʼ. Following the path opened in Totality and Infinity, Ricoeur concentrated on the important transitional essays ʻMeaning and Senseʼ and ʻLanguage and Proximityʼ, where Levinas first articulates the notion of ʻsubstitutionʼ. This notion is taken up again in an important chapter of the same title in Otherwise than Being, which Ricoeur considered at length, especially in relation to Levinasʼs thought of ʻilleityʼ. The infinite substitution of oneself for an other is the ethical itself, and as such is the condition of possibility of all ʻcommunicationʼ and hermeneutics, precisely because in substitution ʻthe destitution and desituation of the subject do not remain without significationʼ. Signification – language – continues to modulate and moderate the relation of the subject to alterity, and my relation to the other, a relationship of responsibility, is always a hermeneutical one. Developing a theme implicit in Derridaʼs presentation, Simon Critchley sought to situate ʻLevinas avec la psychanalyseʼ in his contribution. The welcome of the other, the impingement of the other upon me – what Derrida names ʻhostipitalityʼ – was analysed by Critchley in terms of the ʻoriginal traumaʼ. As with psychoanalysis, where the ego is a secondary process of the id suffering the traumatic experience of civilization, so too is the subject in Levinas the result of a trauma, and hence epiphenomenal to something more fundamental. Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben devoted his lecture to a reading of Levinasʼs first published essay – not ʻDe Lʼévasionʼ, as one might suspect, but rather a little-known piece on the sense and meaning of Nazism in Europe. His own ongoing project concerning the question of concentration camps and political refugees was already sketched out, albeit differently, by Levinasʼs short meditation, in which he argues that the politicization of life is the hidden agenda of the modern state, here the Nazi state. For Agamben, this agenda – the technologization of bio-power by the oppressive state – was already clearly foreseen by Levinas, and remains a paradigm that crosses all modern sovereign spaces, be they totalitarian or democratic. Thus Levinasʼs oeuvre was appropriately honoured in its richness and diversity. Memorials were also offered by Catherine Chalier, Pierre Bouretz, Miguel Abensour, Jacques Colleony, Jacques Rolland, Shmuel Trigano and Stephane Moses. The papers of the colloquium will appear in a volume published by the Collège International, though no publication date has yet been set. They should be read in conjunction with Derridaʼs recently published essay ʻÁ-dieuʼ, the text of the oration he pronounced at Levinasʼs funeral. Another conference devoted to Levinas is scheduled to take place on 20–22 May 1997 in Namur, Belgium. Organized by the Faculté Universitaire Notre-Dame-de-laPaix in Namur, the colloquium is devoted to ʻLevinas et lʼhistoireʼ, and will welcome Jacques Taminiaux and Catherine Chalier, among other scholars of note. Robert Vallier

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Cogito humana: dynamics of knowledge and values XVIIth German Conference for Philosophy, University of Leipzig, 23–27 September 1996 With this conference the Society for Philosophy in Germany honoured the historical contribution of Leibnizʼs Rationalism to modern philosophy and science – his birth in Leipzig 350 years ago, the time he spent there at the university – as well as the birth of his French Rationalist counterpart Descartes. However, the conference was not primarily of a historical nature and did not focus exclusively on these two important figures. Where they did feature, it was not in the context of unchanging, or even past, constructs. Thus, for example, workshops devoted to Descartesʼ morale provisoire emphasized the provisional nature of ethics under the pressure of rapid changes in knowledge and technology, foregrounding the contemporary orientation and subtitle of the conference – the dynamics of knowledge and values. Problems of legitimation were considered in the context of the pressures exerted by globalization and intercultural encounters. In his treatment of Hannah Arendt, Albrecht Wellmer praised the importance of freedom and the possibility of starting afresh, which are inherent in action as a central concept in her political philosophy, but was sceptical of the applicability of her version of republicanism in the modern world, Changes in the international activity of multinational companies, NGOs and communications networks led Onora OʼNeill to argue in favour of legitimation processes which are not restricted to a Hobbesian fixation on the state. Friedrich Kambartel held that it is the hermeneutic problem of understanding in the face of polysemy which is of prime importance in ever-expanding and intensifying intercultural encounters. Bernard Williams argued against Kambartel on the grounds that the latterʼs reliance on Wittgenstein resulted in him buying into a problematic hermetic relativism. Williamsʼs own position was that modernity has produced a legitimation demand on states, which means that they have to ʻhave a story to tellʼ as to why their actions are legitimate; and that this story has to be acceptable to each and every person whose welfare is influenced by these actions. Williams expressed serious doubt as to whether the booming efficiency economies can meet this demand. Jürgen Habermas also dealt with the ʻefficiency economiesʼ in Asia, and the encounter between religious fundamentalism and the postmetaphysical state. He asked whether the modern Occidental form of legitimation and its accompanying entrenchment of human rights are a European idiosyncrasy, and whether a demand that these be internationally respected is consequently masked imperialism. According to him, they are one possible solution to the problems typical of modernity which non-European cultures also have to deal with in the face of their increasing involvement with modern technologies and economy. The choice of Leipzig University as the first place in the former GDR to host this conference is significant. It was one of the centres of popular uprising leading to the German Wende, or turnabout, in 1989. The university takes pride in its fully refurbished philosophy department. At the same time it was from within this department that the still-raging debate about the winding up (Abwicklung) of former GDR philosophy departments arose. These growing pains are reminiscent of the period after the war when Hans-Georg Gadamer was briefly rector of the university. In this context, his award of an honorary doctorate could not avoid the ambivalent tension of a troubled relation to a fractured past. Stephan Meyer

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