The Fortunes of Feminism. Nancy Fraser
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Laclau and Chantal Mouffe in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, New York: Verso, 1985.
43 I develop this notion of the “socio-cultural means of interpretation and communication” and the associated conception of autonomy in “Toward a Discourse Ethic of Solidarity,” Praxis International, 5:4, 1986, 425–9. Both notions are extensions and modifications of Habermas’s conception of “communicative ethics.”
44 My own recent work attempts to construct a conceptual framework for a socialist-feminist critical theory of the welfare state that meets these requirements. See “Women, Welfare and the Politics of Need Interpretation,” “Toward a Discourse Ethic of Solidarity,” and, especially, “Struggle over Needs” (Chapter 2 in this volume). Each of these essays draws heavily on those aspects of Habermas’s thought which I take to be unambiguously positive and useful, especially his conception of the irreducibly socio-cultural, interpretive character of human needs, and his contrast between dialogical and monological processes of need interpretation. The present chapter, on the other hand, focuses mainly on those aspects of Habermas’s thought which I find problematical or unhelpful, and so does not convey the full range either of his work or of my views about it. Readers are warned, therefore, against drawing the conclusion that Habermas has little or nothing positive to contribute to a socialist-feminist critical theory of the welfare state. They are urged, rather, to consult the essays cited above for the other side of the story.
Need is also a political instrument, meticulously prepared, calculated and used.
—Michel Foucault1
In late-capitalist, welfare-state societies, talk about people’s needs is an important species of political discourse. In the US we argue, for example, about whether the government should provide for citizens’ needs. Thus, feminists claim that the state should provide for parents’ day-care needs, while social conservatives insist that children need their mothers’ care, and economic conservatives claim that the market, not the government, is the best institution for meeting needs. Americans also argue about whether existing social-welfare programs really do meet the needs they purport to satisfy, or whether these programs misconstrue the latter. For example, right-wing critics claim that unconditional income support programs destroy the incentive to work and undermine the family. Left critics, in contrast, oppose workfare proposals as coercive and punitive, while many poor women with young children say they want to work at good-paying jobs. All these cases involve disputes about what exactly various groups of people really do need and about who should have the last word in such matters. In all these cases, moreover, needs-talk is a medium for the making and contesting of political claims, an idiom in which political conflict is played out and inequalities are symbolically elaborated and challenged.
Talk about needs has not always been central to Western political culture; it has often been considered antithetical to politics and relegated to the margins of political life. However, in welfare-state societies, needs-talk has been institutionalized as a major idiom of political discourse. It coexists, albeit often uneasily, with talk about rights and interests at the very center of political life. Indeed, this peculiar juxtaposition of a discourse about needs with discourses about rights and interests is one of the distinctive marks of late-capitalist political culture.
Feminists (and others) who aim to intervene in this culture could benefit from posing the following questions: Why has needs-talk become so prominent in the political culture of welfare-state societies? What is the relation between this development and changes in late-capitalist social structure? What does the emergence of the needs idiom imply about shifts in the boundaries between “political,” “economic,” and “domestic” spheres of life? Does it betoken an extension of the political sphere or, rather, a colonization of that domain by newer modes of power and social control? What are the major varieties of needs-talk and how do they interact polemically with one another? What opportunities and/or obstacles does the needs idiom pose for movements, like feminism, that seek far-reaching social transformation?
In what follows, I outline an approach for thinking about such questions rather than proposing definitive answers to them. What I have to say falls into five parts. In the first section, I break with standard theoretical approaches by shifting the focus of inquiry from needs to discourses about needs, from the distribution of need satisfactions to “the politics of need interpretation.” I also propose a model of social discourse designed to bring into relief the contested character of needs-talk in welfare-state societies. In the second section, I relate this discourse model to social-structural considerations, especially to shifts in the boundaries between “political,” “economic,” and “domestic” spheres of life. In the third section, I identify three major strands of needs-talk in late-capitalist political culture, and I map some of the ways in which they compete for potential adherents. In the fourth section, I apply the model to some concrete cases of contemporary needs politics in the US. Finally, in the concluding section, I consider some moral and epistemological issues raised by the phenomenon of needs-talk.
1. POLITICS OF NEED INTERPRETATION:
A DISCOURSE MODEL
Let me begin by explaining some of the peculiarities of the approach I am proposing. In my approach, the focus of inquiry is not needs but rather discourses about needs. The point is to shift our angle of vision on the politics of needs. Usually, the politics of needs is understood to concern the distribution of satisfactions. In my approach, by contrast, the focus is the politics of need interpretation.
I focus on discourses and interpretation in order to bring into view the contextual and contested character of needs claims. As many theorists have noted, needs claims have a relational structure; implicitly or explicitly, they have the form “A needs X in order to Y.” This “in-order-to” structure, as I shall call it, poses no special problems when we consider very thin, general needs, such as food or shelter simpliciter. Thus, we can uncontroversially say that homeless people, like everyone else in non-tropical climates, need shelter in order to live. And many people will infer that governments, as guarantors of life and liberty, have a responsibility to provide for this need in the last resort. However, as soon as we descend to lesser levels of generality, needs claims become far more controversial. What, more “thickly,” do homeless people need in order to be sheltered from the elements? What specific forms of provision are implied once we acknowledge their very general, thin need? Do homeless people need society’s willingness to allow them to sleep undisturbed next to a hot air vent on a street corner? A space in a subway tunnel or a bus terminal? A bed in a temporary shelter? A permanent home? Suppose we say the latter. What kind of permanent housing do homeless people need? High-rise rental units in city centers that are remote from good schools, discount shopping, and job opportunities? Single family homes designed for single-earner, two-parent families? And what else do homeless people need in order to have permanent homes? Rent subsidies? Income support? Jobs? Job training and education? Day care? Finally, what is needed, at the level of housing policy, in order to insure an adequate stock of affordable housing? Tax incentives to encourage private investment in low-income housing? Concentrated or scattered public housing projects within a generally commodified housing environment? Rent control? Decommodification of urban housing?2
We could continue proliferating such questions indefinitely. And we would, at the same time, be proliferating controversy. That is precisely the point about needs claims. These claims tend to be nested, connected to one another in ramified chains of in-order-to relations: not only does A need X in order to Y; she also needs P in order to X, Q in order to P, and so on. Moreover, when such in-order-to chains are unraveled in the course of political disputes, disagreements usually deepen rather than abate. Precisely how such chains are unraveled depends on what the interlocutors share in the way of background assumptions. Does it go without saying that policy designed to deal with homelessness must not challenge the basic ownership and investment structure of urban real estate? Or is that a point at which people’s assumptions and commitments