21 Gender in Critical Theory

Habermas and the two critical theories

Jürgen Habermas’s (HAH-ber-mahss; /ˈhaːbɐmaːs/) contributions split critical theory in two. Is Habermas a continuation of the main movement, or something else entirely?

Marx had already said what was at stake. The problems that bourgeois culture and its ideals articulate, the problems of bourgeois society, are not ones that can be solved within the bourgeois framework. The first generation of critical theory kept to that: the bourgeois order makes promises it cannot keep, and critique holds it to them. Habermas, on this reading, social-democratized and liberalized critical theory. He focused on what bourgeois society promises, and on how those promises could be redeemed, more than on how they are systematically left unfulfilled.

There is a saving grace. Habermas insists that critical theory is itself a learning enterprise: fallible, open to correction, falsifiable. He also wrote that in a process of enlightenment “there can be only participants.” But what does that mean if his own theory leaves out the post-colonial critics and others whom the European tradition never counted as participants? Habermas has been the vehicle of a philosophical Weltgeist (VELT-guyst; /ˈvɛltɡaɪ̯st/), a “world spirit,” or at least a European one. Did he betray critical theory? He mellowed it, made it less radical, reformist.

He was certainly more open than his teachers to Anglophone philosophy: to American pragmatism, and to John Rawls. Politically he embraced the Westbindung (VEST-bin-doong; /ˈvɛstˌbɪndʊŋ/), West Germany’s binding of itself to the West and to America after the war. After the onset of the Iraq War he no longer did, and with the rise of Trumpism he became disillusioned with the European–American alliance as such.

Inclusion and exclusion

Adorno had made a darker point about bourgeois ideals: even their utopian inclusiveness requires exclusion. Think of Beethoven’s setting of Schiller’s (SHIL-er; /ˈʃɪlɐ/) “Ode to Joy.” “All men become brothers,” it says, and then: whoever has never managed to rejoice with them, der stehle weinend sich aus diesem Bund (dair SHTAY-leh VY-nent zikh owss DEE-zem BOONT; /deːɐ̯ ˈʃteːlə ˈvaɪ̯nn̩t zɪç aʊ̯s ˈdiːzəm bʊnt/), “let him steal away weeping from this union.” The brotherhood is defined by those it sends away.

So: why can’t we simply modify, reform, the theory so that it includes the excluded groups? Or is it the case that the framework itself requires excluded and oppressed groups? Well, yes: think of imperialism and colonialism.

Nancy Fraser

Nancy Fraser (born 1947) is one of the major voices in critical theory. At a seminar for Habermas’s ninetieth birthday she spoke, and criticized him deeply; Habermas welcomed it. Fraser is a neo-Marxist feminist rather than a liberal or an identity-centered feminist: a focus on identity alone, she worries, distracts from structural change.

What’s critical about critical theory?

Fraser starts from the young Marx’s definition, in an 1843 letter: critical theory is “the self-clarification of the struggles and wishes of the age.” Note the self. Critical theory does not clarify the age’s struggles from above, through intricate philosophical inquiry; it lets those struggles and wishes clarify themselves. A critical theory is to be judged by how well it serves the social movements of its time, and one of the great movements of Fraser’s time is feminism.

Judged that way, both Marxist and Habermasian theory fail at the same place. Women’s household labor, and much of their labor in general, is hidden from view in both (though Engels, to his credit, did see it).

Lifeworld and system

Fraser’s target is Habermas’s central distinction between lifeworld and system. The lifeworld (in German Lebenswelt (LAY-bens-velt; /ˈleːbn̩sˌvɛlt/)) is the domain of shared meanings, norms and identities, reproduced through communication: family, culture, the public sphere. The system is the domain coordinated by the impersonal media of money and power: the economy and the state. The pathology of modernity, for Habermas, is that the system threatens and colonizes the lifeworld; we could also say that it reifies it.

Fraser argues that this distinction does the same work as the liberal distinction between “private” and “public.” The public sphere sits in the lifeworld, and it is supposed to be open, but it is exclusionary (the homeless, for instance, are not welcome in it; think of how people regard the homeless in public libraries). Is this incidental, or is it built into the framework? Habermas is blind to the way gender cuts across all of his distinctions.

Marx made the economic base the most consequential site for any change in the superstructure. But what if the base is wider: educational, gendered, and so on? What if formation itself, Bildung (BIL-doong; /ˈbɪldʊŋ/), is part of the base? Answering that would tell us what to do.

The deeper fault, in Marxism and in much of Western philosophy, is universalism and unidirectionalism: one base, one direction of causation, one story for everyone. Fraser seems to criticize the very idea of the base, by noting what happens to the family. In the orthodox picture the family belongs to the lifeworld, on the receiving end of colonization. Fraser shows that the family is already a site of money and power, of unpaid work and of domination: the lifeworld–system distinction is already all system. It has already taken over.

Two kinds of pathology

So we have to distinguish two pathologies: the modern pathologies (colonization of the lifeworld by the system) and trans-historical ones (like male dominance, which is older than capitalism and the modern state).

A question to carry forward

There are orders of philosophy, a “first-order” philosophy and philosophy about it. And Habermas’s idea of critical theory as a learning, evolving enterprise raises a question: does the very idea of a “learning” critical theory imply a ranking of cultures and philosophies, with some further along than others? That is Amy Allen’s question, next time.