Of all Habermas’s feminist critics, Benhabib is perhaps most optimistic that “the discourse model, precisely because it proceeds from a fundamental norm of egalitarian reciprocity and precisely because it projects the democratization of all social norms, cannot preclude the democratization of familial norms and of norms governing the gender division of labor. Once this is granted, the distinction between matters of justice and those of the good life, between generalizable interests and culturally interpreted needs, can be reconceptualized.”73 Benhabib is confident that once practical discourse is “feminized,” the emancipatory aspirations of new social movements such as the women’s movement can be best served by the radical proceduralism of the discourse model. In a more critical vein but with many of the same objectives in mind, Fraser exhorts that we need “a post-bourgeois conception that can permit us to envision a greater role for (at least some) public spheres than mere autonomous opinion formation removed from authoritative decision-making.74
By problematizing Habermas’s initial conception of enlightened opinion and public space, I have sought to underscore just how radical the revisions proposed by Benhabib and Fraser would have to be in order to arrive at a process of deliberation and opinion formation from which no subject or person is barred. On the other hand, my intention is not to discount but rather to join in their efforts to democratize and feminize the public sphere. For Benhabib’s discursive conditions to obtain, the constraints placed on opinion formation by the authoritative structures of a non-egalitarian polity and economy would need not only to be bracketed but eliminated entirely. Nor could the gendered construction of an embodied subjectivity and the body politic remain an unexamined premise. Likewise, we would have to allow for the intersecting and multiple media of representation in any given setting.
ПО / Joan В. Landes
These are utopian but not impossible goals. There is ample evidence, despite the barriers posed by the hegemonic order, that a democratic politics in the present would have been from the outset a politics of the public sphere, not of the state. Habermas’s alertness to a zone of democratic participation— neither state, economy, nor family—is as pertinent to today’s circumstances as to those of the late eighteenth century. Paradoxically, we seem to be once again in a period where iconic relations on the model of the older “re-presen- tative” public sphere count for more stylistically and substantively than the symbolic, predominantly textual relations promoted by the early bourgeois public sphere. Yet, our task is surely not to resort to texts in place of images, but instead to comprehend and deploy all means of representation in a coun — terhegemonic strategy against established power wherever it resides.