To even suggest that there is a feminist conception of solidarity might seem presumptuous. Therefore I will first consider what “feminist solidarity” might mean.
Feminism is an unprecedented social, political, economic, and cultural movement in its scope and ambitions. It is not geographical, ethnic, racial, national, class, religious, sexually-oriented, or physiological by identity, and its own parameters is therefore constantly in question (who is simply a woman?). The identity (identities?) and commitments of the feminist movement are still in the making. Our conceptions of desirable forms of political association (nation-states, anarchist decentralization, consensually operated communities, all-women communities, feminist political parties, tribal self — determination, urban coalitions) have not gelled into a world-historical manifesto on behalf of all women or, for that matter, all women from Manhattan. Unlike Marxist proletarianism, sisterhood is sceptical of guarantees of historical-rational progression; nor does it place its unquestioning confidence in ideals (such as a female “essence”) defined as prior to or outside of such a progression. Many of us, then, are not sure how important it would be to have such a manifesto. Is it because the demands of working from within, for difficult but clearly visible changes like those called for in the fight against sexual harassment, founding a women’s economic development network, keeping a women’s clinic open, or regaining our sanity with a cherished group of friends, are simply too distracting?
It is worth exploring the possibility that this apparent lack of clarity concerning ideals of political and social association disguises the clearest of intentions. Perhaps, in our myriad engagements and affiliations, we are practicing an unfamiliar rational competence, one that is attuned to the undeniable complexity of what is right in front of us. We are aware that changes are accomplished with a thousand tiny steps, and that the consequences of each step can multiply in unpredictable directions, for better and for worse. We have seen, in the history of modernism and colonialism, how sweeping changes in the name of liberation have sullied the hands of the liberators with ruin in countless unforeseen ways. These are not grounds for rejecting the use of any form of critical systemic analysis, but they are grounds for caution, for working from where we are, with what we have, remembering the variety of the incredible stories told by individual women.
In her book, Justice and the Politics of Difference, Iris Young voices one such (very important) cautionary note, a protest against the anti-urban character of so many feminist (as well as neoconservative) ideals of community and friendship.
Contemporary political theory must accept urbanity as a material given for those who live in advanced industrial societies. Urban relations define the lives not only of those who live in the huge metropolises, but also of those who live in suburbs and large towns. Our social life is structured by vast networks of temporal and spatial mediation among persons, so that nearly everyone depends on the activities of seen and unseen strangers who mediate between oneself and one’s associates, between oneself and one’s objects of desire.30
Moreover Iris Young argues, the desire for community among the members of radical organizations “channels energy away from the political goals of the group,” “produces a clique atmosphere,” often “reproduces homogeneity,” and may pose as a reason to disband any group that fails to achieve it.31 She proposes instead an ideal of city life nurturant of diversity while cooperative in providing infrastructural services justly conceived, distributed, and administered. Her intention is not to deny the need for community and friendship, but to express doubt that sustainable forms of political association can require the transparency and affection of face-to-face relationships.
Many questions persist concerning the viability of the city and its reciprocal complements: suburbs, exurban housing tracts, large corporate agriculture and the demise of the farm town, massive waste of resources, massive transport costs, and so on. But at least one of Young’s implicit points proves useful in focusing the ideal of feminist solidarity: one can love a city, love the fact of its diversity, contribute to the mutual support of its diverse populations, without sustaining affectionate and personally supportive relationships with all of the individual people whose paths one crosses. (At the same time, it is unlikely that mutual support can be sustained without many relationships that cross communal boundaries.) It suggests a vision of solidarity in which the enclave or project one is most devoted to is recognized at the same time as uniquely appropriate for her or him as an individual, and as one among uncountably many foci of devotion and belonging that deserve mutually cooperative attention. Solidarity need not be conceived as a one-dimensional,
all-or-nothing relationship. In recognition of the diversity and complexity of the feminist movement, there must be room in the idea of solidarity for multiple identification with diverse projects, while each of us is focally committed to the integrity of our own.
Young’s reflections on the politics of polis may also be helpful in working out the dimensions of the activity of feminist thinking, as other feminist ideals of association have been. Unlike institutional approaches to urban and regional planning and management, which begin and end with issues of revenue sources, her critique follows the structures of urban decision-making into their phenomenological consequences. For example, she describes how the zoning of businesses and residences plays itself out in time spent in a car; the privatization of the suburban household (and consequent loss of opportunity for spontaneous interaction with others); the proximity or remoteness of grocery stores, the availability of public space for a quiet walk or a lunch hour outdoors; the loss of neighborhoods to a stadium, freeway, or business park; and the withdrawal of resources from the inner cities. She proposes that city-dwellers have the opportunity to participate in regional planning:
Social justice involving equality among groups who recognize and affirm one another in their specificity can best be realized in our society through large regional governments with mechanisms for representing immediate neighborhoods and towns.32
Her critique bears some similarities to Habermas’s critique of the colonization of the lifeworld, or the encroachment of the imperatives of profit — oriented and centralized management upon our cultural and social resources. However, unlike Habermas’s fatalist view that the functioning of the economic-bureaucratic “system” is phenomenologically opaque, her proposal for regional governance insists on the transparency of cause and effect between the functional imperatives of the business and administrative system and their social, aesthetic, political, and economic projections in the lifeworld.33 This insistence is especially plausible when its focus is local or specific rather than global. It is paralleled in the work of feminist writers such as Nancy Fraser (in her critique of the management of Aid to Families with Dependent Children or AFDC) and Dolores Hayden (in her historical documentation of feminist urban planning and architecture, and in her own urban activism in Los Angeles).34 Interestingly, and as Young does not point out, one of the motivations for her’s and Hayden’s proposed changes to regional decision-making is the desire to preserve or establish the preconditions of community and friendship, by rescuing public space, and instituting the possibility of collectively designing the landscapes of our “immediate neighborhoods and towns.” While community may not be the basis of political action, it is certainly one of its ends.
Within the framework of Habermas’s theory of rationality, such thought and analysis might be characterized as “interpretive” thought (“aesthetic — cultural” discourse), since it involves so much identification and interpretive analysis of needs and interests from within the holistic experience of one’s particular locale in the lifeworld. But categorizing it as distinctly value-interpretative discourse ignores the insistent linkage of questions of justice, cause and effect, bureaucratic functional organization, quality of life, with the need for community in feminist analysis and practice. In our concern for our diverse and mostly local projects, we cannot afford to ignore the logic of profit, the functional logic of administrative organizations, or the causal consequences of our choices when discussing such things as what services to offer through a campus women’s center. Answers to concerns about the justice of serving some needs and not others may hinge on the possibility of opening bureaucratically closed doors or raising funds, and answers to concerns about racial exclusion in a local women’s organization may depend upon what ways are available to overcome geographical and economic racial segregation.
The conception of feminist thinking that emerges here and in the previous section is a multifaceted one, but always one that is derived from the nature and complexity of the forms of association that we work within and those we are attempting to realize. Because our projects develop within diverse contexts to meet diverse needs, it seems at first glance hardly appropriate to identify any one set of “principles of reason” to frame their rationality. We specialize: the skills of a feminist therapist of victims of abuse are not those of a feminist urban planner. However, moving forward means developing synthetic perspectives on the nature of these projects and the needs that spawn them. The planner needs to think about the indirect contributions to violence of architecture, landscape, and land use planning, and the therapist needs to understand the patterns of traffic in her client’s locale. Our specialties need the enrichment of cross-talk. For this reason, it might be appropriate to call this kind of thinking “communicative thinking.”
The synthetic and communicative mapping of the dimensions of our work certainly branches into many of traditional domains of rational procedure, both theoretical and organizational. There would be no feminist microbiology, philosophy, critical legal studies, and urban planning if it did not. Communicative thinking is no wholesale abandonment of the resources of what Habermas calls communicative and functional rationality, or of the resources of the specific rationalized procedures and techniques comprised in the institutions with which we must interact. To the contrary, these are resources necessary to our survival. But survival is not success, and the successes that these traditional and institutional rational procedures are designed to achieve are not, by and large, the aims of feminism. Thus, while
making the necessary use of these resources, we must also forge analytic, imaginative, and synthetic resources of our own. I conclude with a few suggestions.
First, as in Young’s analysis of urban planning, communicative thinking insists upon the transparency of the multiple causal projections of the institutions of the welfare state into our lives, and on possible ways of reworking these institutions to meet the needs of women. Understanding these patterns of cause and effect is not a matter of distilling mathematically elegant and parsimonious laws of human nature, as it tends to be for modern science’s vision of the human sciences, but of analyzing the confluence of the multiple and changeable consequences of institutional choices that make their appearance in our lives.
Second, if we are to make these causes and effects transparent, we need to resist one of the concomitants of specialization: identification with the mainstream aims of the institutions in which we work and upon which we depend. As anyone knows, this is far easier said than done; few of us enjoy the privilege of being paid for advocating the destruction of patriarchy or racism, and few of us can afford to retreat forever to a cabin in Vermont. Many of us have no choice but to contribute indirectly to patriarchy in some of our actions, and the cognitive and moral dissonance this brings with it is weighty. Communicative thinking must address these issues with imagination and flexibility, and specifically, provide a mode of communication that recognizes the reality of the effects this dissonance has on our thought and motivation, while supporting our efforts to reduce our dependence upon hegemonic structures.
Third, our lives are positioned differently, and thus it is also essential to communicative thinking, as communicative, to recognize the different ways the institutions of welfare state capitalism impact women. The functional rationality of the AFDC program, for example, appears differently in the life of a working single mother a stone’s throw away from unemployment and poverty, than in the life of the professor of social work who studies the program. The labyrinthine red tape and paramilitary organization of the Immigration and Naturalization Service may enforce the boundaries of existence for a garment worker in Los Angeles, while the California Assemblywoman’s office analyes immigration statistics. In tracing the multidimensional projections of our institutions into the lives of women, we need also to recognize that the proportions and intensity of those projections vary greatly.
Fourth, for this reason, communicative thinking is rooted in the myriad details of the stories of women’s lives. When the remarkable stories of women’s lives are kept in mind, it is not so easy to forget the powerless and the silenced in formulating analyses, and in generalizing from experience.
Communicative thinking is thinking that not only seeks out these stories at conferences, in feminist journals, novels, magazines, and galleries, but remembers them and reflects upon them. Remembering and synthesizing from women’s stories also creates the bonds of solidarity that Young discovers in the ideal of city life. Though we find each other’s stories sometimes overwhelmingly unlike our own, our knowledge of them creates the possibility of mutual support.
Fifth, as feminist thought has always been defiantly holistic, communicative thinking is holistic, but this holism is not one that seeks to offer a univocal axiomatic structure or a regimented semantics. It seeks intricacy, complexity, and multidimensionality, not as ends in themselves, but because understanding the nature and contexts of our real ends, however specific, requires it. While this holism is opposed to reductive unity, it is also opposed to the fragmentation of women. This holism is a defiant attitude towards the alienation and value-confusion imposed by fragmenting logics of consumerism, the profit imperative, and bureaucratic procedure. It is opposed to the segregating logic of distribution of opportunity by race, “management” and zoning of race in city bureaucracy, and stereotyping of race by conceptual opposition to the police, law, and order.
Sixth, the test of the epistemic rationality of communicative thinking is not principally of the formal virtues of its structure or in any narrowly instrumental success but of the integrity of its ideals of solidarity and community, as they are assessed and tested in the course of practice. Knowledge of contemporary society that succeeds only by virtue of capturing “laws of behavior” is not enough; a critical understanding of the “causal structure of the social world” must be reflectively aware of the role of existing and ideal forms of association in shaping that understanding.
Seventh, it follows that communicative thinking approaches the values of truth and of the just social life as interarticulated values. As the work of Evelyn Fox Keller and Helen Longino suggests, the form taken by our knowledge of the world is constrained and informed by social ideals, and the imagined range of possible forms of association is shaped by one’s enculturated consciousness of the natural and social world. Mindfulness of issues of justice thus animates a critical understanding of the contemporary social world. Communicative thinking cannot (and need not) ignore questions about justice that happen to be formal or general. Feminists engaged in their projects cannot often afford to dither with the formal virtues of abstract principles of justice, when there is a need for substantive norms of justice formulated from within those projects. The feminist movement needs to focus on issues of the substantive content of justice as Young does, for example, in challenging the presumption that justice is a question of distribution rather than of oppression and domination.35
Finally, I should point out that this essay does not repudiate Habermas’s theory of communicative rationality. Indeed, I have set some important questions relevant to this issue aside: 1) whether communicative thinking might not be encompassed within Habermas’s ‘aesthetic-cultural’ domain of discourse; 2) how the substantive constitutive ideals of feminist thinking interact with the formally defined ideals of traditional epistemology; and 3) whether substantive ideals of social association must or need not be rejected as grounds for conceptions of reason just because they are “substantive.” Although these questions require further debate, I have presumed that their answers are not crucial here. First, Habermas’s conception of aesthetic — cultural discourse has received little of his attention and is delineated only in extremely vague terms.36 Second, the holism of communicative thinking is consonant with dialogue and correction from diverse domains of discourse, so long as they do not entail a commitment to the substantive values of patriarchy. Third, it is not clear that the constitutive values of epistemic enterprises aimed specifically at axiomatizable forms of theory must be as privileged as they have been in twentieth-century epistemology. It could be argued that conceptions of truth and justice as axiomatic systems of principles and observations are no more or less committed to substantive values (such as “creating a normativity” for a society committed to overcoming Cartesian scepticism) than conceptions that begin with social-ecological ideals, to construct visions of truth and justice grounded in the multiple experiences of subjects who need and offer each other cooperation and respect.
I have chosen Habermas’s theory as a participant in dialogue, in order to focus the image of feminist epistemology as part of a feminist critical theory. Along the way, I have employed several of Habermas’s insights and distinctions. Perhaps the most crucial of my Habermasian premises is adapted from his sociological interest in distinguishing domains of rationality as the bases of distinct domains of action, less concerned with the technical details of successful probability assignment (as in standard Anglo-American theories of rationality) than with the characteristic aims of distinct types of rational action. My principal point of departure from Habermas is in suggesting that substantive feminist ideals of solidarity and community can be constitutive ideals of a feminist rational discourse.