Heads Up
- Monday’s (9/16) reading from Barker & Jane is 58 pages
- Next Wednesday’s (9/18) reading from Simon Malpas is the first part of a 132-page book
- We’ll probably still be discussing Barker & Jane on Wednesday
- The syllabus has Malpas over three class periods
- Speech-Debate General Interest Meetings
Thursdays: 5:30-6:30pm
Colvard 3140 - Charlotte Debate Team
Mondays: 5:30-6:30
Fridays: 5:00-6:00 {of course, there may be travel days on Fridays to tournaments}
Fretwell 219 - Less than three weeks to prepare for the 9/29 online, synchronous tournament–no travel needed
Question for Today
How might Devo’s lyrics below relate to the Habermas and Nacy Fraser readings?
Freedom of choice
Is what you got
Freedom from choice
Is what you want
Devo. “Freedom of Choice.” Freedom of Choice, Warner Bros., 1980.Definitions for Discussion
Often when dealing with philosophy, rhetoric, and theory, the terms we use aren’t universally understood across disciplines. Meaning(s) is (are) entwined with word usage and history. Therefore, dictionary definitions are often inadequate to grasp the meaning of a term fully. The definitions below are to guide you in ways of thinking about culture as opposed to regurgitating in casual conversation.
- Critical Theory: [definition not in the reading] often referred to as “theory,” an umbrella term for the many analyses of culture; examining society and culture and their products to understand how culture mediates a society’s ideology. Uncovering the ideology of a culture.
- Critical Rhetoric: this perspective is in contradiction to an assumed universalist sense of reason in the formation of a discursively constructed reality. “The perspective is useful both for the political speaker, as heuristic in composing discourse, and for the rhetorical critic or audience member responding to that discourse” (Sloane, Encyclopedia of Rhetoric, p. 619). Traditional rhetoric (and all speech acts) persuades if both sender and receiver agree upon logic and reason–they’re “universal.” Critical rhetoric recognizes contexts and situations.
- Welfare state capitalism: a term for a late and post-industrial economy where businesses provide “welfare” type benefits (retirement, health care, insurance, etc.) to employees.
- Please show me that you’re able to point to a contemporary example of this…
Over all goal: Recognize the value (capitalism) underlying American culture. Male-dominated public sphere privileges profits: if it doesn’t make money, it’s not real work. Political preferences are irrelevant because media (specifically soundbite media on TV and non-public radio*) create/capture audiences for marketing products. Work is exchanging labor for wages, which then allow citizens–trained by ideology–the freedom to consume.
Comment on Two-Party System
There’s a critique of the two dominant American political parties essentially being a monoparty. Of course, and last night’s debate underscores this, there are differences between Democrats and Republicans, but, because they hold all the power in the United States, we can consider their totality as a monoparty. Additionally, third parties have almost no chance (especially on the national level) to effect change and win elections. By living in this two-party system, we’re immersed in the assumptions that they’re all that’s possible. The media focus predominantly (almost exclusively) on Democrats and Republicans, which reinforces their normalcy. Political scientists will tell us that the winner-takes-all system is why we have two parties and will point to parliamentary forms of government to demonstrate how proportional representation (percentage of votes) better allows for multiple parties. But that’s only part of the story. Similarly to our discussions on technology, once a system is in place, it’s difficult to conceive of an alternative, so the two-parties continue being entrenched. Disrupting this system would be a monumental, revolutionary task.
The two parties and the vast federal, state, and local bureaucracies maintain the status quo. The monoparty is conservative in that only small, incremental changes will happen, and there will be some back and forth (Roe v. Wade and Dobbs). Our cultural studies approach is to think of the prevailing norms that holds society together. There are always exceptions, so it’s good to avoid universals; however, when you see patterns, it’s unethical to claim that those observations are unexamined assumptions.
Fraser, Nancy. “What’s Critical about Critical theory? The Case of Habermas and Gender?” (1991)
Fraser doesn’t directly react to Habermas’s article “The Public Sphere” but a later work, titled The Theory of Communicative Action (1981): Volumes 1 (465 pages) and 2 (457 pages). I didn’t think we had time for those this semester. However, the discussion of the “public sphere” is germane (pun intended) to Fraser’s critique of the underlying masculine embodiment of these spheres. This essay first appeared in New German Critique, Spring-Summer, 1985 https://www.jstor.org/stable/488202.
- Marx’s definition derived from his letter to Arnold Ruge: “Critical Theory [is] ‘the self-clarification of the struggles and wishes of the age’” (p. 253). {Note: the online translation is different–scroll to the very bottom.}
- “A critical theory…frames its research in the light of contemporary social movements with which it has partisan though not uncritical identification” (p. 253).
- Material reproduction: “societies must reproduce themselves materially; they must successfully regulate the metabolic exchange of groups of biological individuals with a nonhuman, physical environment and with other social systems” (p. 254).
- Symbolic reproduction: “societies must reproduce themselves symbolically; they must maintain and transmit to new members the linguistically elaborated norms and patterns of interpretation that are constitutive of social identities” (p. 254)
- Childrearing falls outside of Habermas’ social-theoretical framework: “childrearing is not per se symbolic reproduction activity; it is equally and at the same time material reproduction activity. It is a ‘dual-aspect’ activity” (p. 255).
- Therefore, children must be born (material reproduction) in appropriate ways so as not to be a social burden and must be socialized (symbolic reproduction) to abide by the norms of the dominant culture.
- material reproduction: the artifacts of a culture, including technologies, that are significant to society or a smaller community’s existence.
- symbolic reproduction: the assumptions, attiudes, and myths, including common sense and conventional wisdom, that shape the character or culture…ideology.
- Socially integrated action contexts: “…are those in which different agents coordinate their actions with one another by means of an explicit or implicit intersubjective consensus about norms, values, and ends” (p. 255).
- p. 255: “[The classification of childrearing as symbolic and other work as material reproduction] could be used…to legitimate the institutional separation of childrearing from paid work,” which is “a linchpin of modern forms of women’s subordination.”
- Similar statement on p. 259: “…linchpin of modern women’s subordination…”
- System-integrated action contexts: “…are those in which the actions of different agents are coordinated by the functional interlacing of unintended consequences, while each individual action is determined by self-interested, utility-maximizing calculations in the “media” of money and power” (p. 255-256).
- Consider this in light of my point about being programmed by a culture through invisible forces. When you’re immersed in a culture, you don’t always recognize the ways in which the culture shapes your worldview.
- Also, we’re individuals collectively performing actions that support the system, and we perform based on ideology and behaviors we’ve internalized as members of a culture.
- Capitalist “exchanges occur against a horizon of intersubjectively shared meanings and norms” (p. 256).
- p. 257: “Habermas’s categorical divide between the ‘private sphere of the lifeworld’ and the ‘private economic system’ faithfully mirrors the institutional separation of family and official economy, household and paid workplace, in male-dominated, capitalist societies.”
- “It directs attention away from the fact that the household, like the paid workplace, is a site of labor, albeit of unremunerated and often unrecognized labor…”
- “…women are assigned distinctively feminine, service-oriented and often sexualized occupations. And it fails to focalize the that fact that in both spheres women are subordinate to men.”
- To Fraser, the capitalist context is not free of ideology (although, really, nothing is non-ideological) because it is maintained by cultural assumptions and social practices; after all, the a marketplace requires participant acceptance. Ask yourself, “Why does the latest high-end TV cost the same as when the previous high-end model when it came out?”
- Not related to this article, but, if you’re interested in a history of video game prices, check out Sam Naji’s “Are Video Games Really More Expensive?”
Public and Private Spheres
- Private sphere: “the nuclear family” (p. 257).
- Public sphere: “the space of political deliberation” (p.257).
- Habermas separates family from economy (p. 257).
- Fraser’s main argument: “[Habermas] fails to focalize the fact that in both spheres women are subordinate to men” (p. 257).
- Family units are sites of coercion and male dominated (p. 257).
- Normatively secured forms of socially integrated action: “…are actions on the basis of a conventional, prereflective, taken-for-granted consensus about values and ends, consensus rooted in the precritical internalization of cultural tradition” (p. 258).
- Communicatively secured forms of socially integrated action: “…are actions coordinated by explicit, reflectively achieved consensus, consensus reached by unconstrained discussion under conditions of freedom, equality, and fairness” (p. 258).
- “What is insufficiently stressed [by Habermas], however, is that actions coordinated by normatively secured consensus are actions regulated by power” (p. 258).
- Fraser’s linchpin of modern women’s subordination: “the separation of the official economic sphere from the domestic sphere and the enclaving of childrearing from the rest of social labor” (p. 259).
Patriarchy or just Androcentric Bias Pervades Capitalism
Fraser is critiquing Habermas’ social-framework theory not because she thinks he’s dead wrong but because it doesn’t allow for a feminist-centered perspective, which would change the capitalist system (in her mind). Habermas is socialist-leaning, and Fraser seems to be also. This article is not a simple “for” or “against” discussion. Fraser is pointing out that male domination is so entrenched in the capitalist system that any critique must be able to confront Patriarchy. She isn’t explicitly advocating the solution; instead, she’s devising a way to approach a feminist conscious critique of capitalism and the superstructures (institutions: family, government, religion, etc.) built up in support of the system.
- p. 261: Masculine subtext of worker, but feminine subtext for consumer.
“…the consumer, the other role linking the official economy and the family in Habermas’s scheme, has a feminine subtext….preparing goods and services for domestic consumption.” - p. 262: “In Habermas’s view, citizenship means participation in political debate and public opinion formation.”
- A well-informed, engaged public voting…
- p. 262: “…another aspect of citizenship not discussed by [Habermas] is….the soldiering aspect of citizenship, the conception of the citizen as the defender of the polity and protector of those–women, children, the elderly–who allegedly cannot protect themselves.”
- p. 263: “…male dominance is intrinsic rather than accidental to classical capitalism, since the institutional structure of the social formation is actualized by means of gendered roles.”
- p. 264: “…some form of dedifferentiation of unpaid childrearing and other work is required….as long as the citizen role is defined to encompass death-dealing soldiering but not life-fostering childrearing, as long as it is tied to male-dominated modes of dialogue, then it, too, will remain incapable of including women fully.”
- What does Fraser mean when she claims (separates Habermas into six theses, and this is the 2nd):
“work[ers] are compensated by enhanced commodity consumption” and “there is a major decline in the importance of the citizen role as journalism becomes mass media, political parties are bureaucratized, and participation is reduced to occasional voting” (p. 265). - p. 266: “Decolonization encompasses three things:
- …the removal of system-integrated mechanisms from symbolic reproduction spheres;
- …the replacement of (some) normatively secured contexts by communicatively achieved ones;
- …the development of new, democratic institutions capable of asserting lifeworld control over state and (official) economic systems.”
- p. 267: “welfare state capitalism does inflate the consumer role and deflate the citizen role, reducing the latter essentially to voting–and, we should add, also to soldiering.”
- “[Habermas] overlooks that it is overwhelmingly women who are the clients of the welfare state.”
- p. 268: “Welfare measures do have a positive side insofar as they reduce women’s dependence on an individual male breadwinner. But they also have a negative side insofar as they substitute dependence on a patriarchal and androcentric state bureaucracy.”
- p. 272: “Habermas’s account….fails to theorize the systemic, money- and power-mediated character of male dominance in the domestic sphere of the late-capitalist lifeworld.”
Her point is that gender discussions need to be a part of any critique in order to uncover “the evil of dominance and subordination” (p. 273) intrinsic to both the public and private spheres.
- While one could simply belabor the point that capitalism rules because capitalism rules, that would be utterly unproductive. The point of our inquiry should be to recognize the tenets of a system under which we live.
- What is the division of labor? Are there male jobs and female jobs?
- What is a goal of Fraser repeatedly mentioning that childrearing is unpaid?
- What are the ways families socialize their members into the capitalist system?
- What are some attributes of capitalism, especially gendered ones, that pervade the media? In other words, because the media are a product of the culture from which it comes, what marks it as capitalist?
- Is “decolonization”–removing the systemic biases from capitalism–possible?
- How does the media reinforce, thwart, or ignore the systemic bias of capitalism?
Next Week
Keep up with the reading. On Monday, we have a long reading: Barker, Chris and Emma A. Jane. “Ch. 9: Sex, Subjectivity, and Representation.” Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice. 5th ed., Sage, 2016, pp. 342-399. It’s 58 pages, so you ought to carve out time this weekend to read. Remember, your Midterm and Final Exams are based mostly on the reading, and the Final Exam is cumulative. You’ll also have to turn in your Critical Analysis of Culture Essay by Thursday, 9/19, 11:00pm.
Of course, don’t forget to respond to the Weekly Discussion Post #4 on Canvas before Friday, 9/13, 11:00pm (in at least 250 words).