Nancy Fraser

Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy

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Reenquadrando a justiça em um mundo globalizado

A globalizacao esta alterando o modo como discutimos a justica. Debates que costumavam focalizar a questao da justica entre os membros das comunidades se transformam rapidamente em disputas a respeito de quais comunidades sao relevantes e quem sao seus membros. Nao apenas a substância da justica, mas tambem o seu enquadramento esta em disputa. O resultado e um desafio maior para nossas teorias da justica social, que ate o momento falharam em desenvolver recursos conceituais para refletir sobre a questao do enquadramento. Neste artigo, argumenta-se que, a fim de lidar satisfatoriamente com esse problema, a teoria da justica deve se tornar tridimensional, incorporando a dimensao politica da representacao, ao lado da dimensao economica da distribuicao e da dimensao cultural do reconhecimento.Globalization is changing the way we argue about justice. Arguments that used to focus chiefly on the question of what is owed as a matter of justice to community members now turn quickly into disputes about who should count as a member and which is the relevant community. Not only the substance of justice but also the frame is in dispute. The result is a major challenge to our theories of social justice, which have so far failed to develop conceptual resources for reflecting on the question of the frame. The article argues that in order to deal satisfactorily with this problem, the theory of justice must become three-dimensional, incorporating the political dimension of representation, alongside the economic dimension of distribution and the cultural dimension of recognition.

Recognition without Ethics

In the course of the last 30 years, feminist theories of gender have shifted from quasi-Marxist, labor-centered conceptions to putatively ‘post-Marxist’ culture-and identity-based conceptions. Reflecting a broader political move from redistribution to recognition, this shift has been double edged. On the one hand, it has broadened feminist politics to encompass legitimate issues of representation, identity and difference. Yet, in the context of an ascendant neoliberalism, feminist struggles for recognition may be serving less to enrich struggles for redistribution than to displace the latter. Thus, instead of arriving at a broader, richer paradigm that could encompass both redistribution and recognition, feminists appear to have traded one truncated paradigm for another – a truncated economism for a truncated culturalism. This article aims to resist that trend. I propose an anaysis of gender that is broad enough to house the full range of feminist concerns, those central to the old socialist-feminism as well as those rooted in the cultural turn. I also propose a correspondingly broad conception of justice, capable of encompassing both distribution and recognition, and a non-identitarian account of recognition, capable of synergizing with redistribution. I conclude by examining some practical problems that arise when we try to envision institutional reforms that could redress gender maldistribution and gender misrecognition simultaneously.

From Discipline to Flexibilization? Rereading Foucault in the Shadow of Globalization

Michel Foucault was the great theorist of the fordist mode of social regulation. Writing at the zenith of the postwar Keynesian welfare state, he taught us to see the dark underside of even its most vaunted achievements. Viewed through his eyes, social services became disciplinary apparatuses, humanist reforms became panoptical surveillance regimes, public health measures became deployments of biopower, and therapeutic practices became vehicles of subjection. From his perspective, the components of the postwar social state constituted a carceral archipelago of disciplinary domination, all the more insidious because self-imposed. Granted, Foucault did not himself understand his project as an anatomy of fordist regulation. Positing a greater scope for his diagnosis, he preferred to associate disciplinary power with “modernity” simpliciter. And most of his readers, including me, followed suit. As a result, the ensuing debates turned on whether the Foucauldian picture of modernity was too dark and one-sided, neglecting the latter’s emancipatory tendencies. 1 Today, however, circumstances warrant a narrower reading. If we now see ourselves as standing on the brink of a new, postfordist epoch of globalization, then we should reread Foucault in that light. No longer an interpreter of modernity per se, he becomes a theorist of the fordist mode of social regulation, grasping its inner logic, like the Owl of Minerva, at the moment of its historical waning. From this perspective, it is significant that his great works of social analysis – Madness and Civilization, The Birth of the Clinic, Discipline and Punish, The History of Sexuality, volume one – were written in the 1960s and 1970s, just as the OECD countries abandoned Bretton Woods, the international financial framework that undergirded national Keynesianism and thus made possible the welfare state. In other words, Foucault mapped the contours of the disciplinary society just as the ground was being cut out from under it. And although it is only now with hindsight becoming clear, this was also the moment at which discipline’s successor was struggling to be born. The irony is plain: whether we call it postindustrial society or neoliberal globalization, a new regime oriented to “deregulation” and “flexibilization” was about to take shape just as Foucault was conceptualizing disciplinary normalization. Of course, to read Foucault in this way is to problematize his relevance to the present. If he theorized fordist regulation, then how does his diagnosis relate to

Talking about Needs: Interpretive Contests as Political Conflicts in Welfare-State Societies

In late-capitalist, welfare-state societies, talk about peoples needs is an important species of political discourse. We argue, in the United States, for example, about whether the government ought to provide for health and day-care needs, and indeed, about whether such needs exist. And we dispute whether existing social-welfare programs really do meet the needs they purport to satisfy or whether, instead, they misconstrue those needs. We also argue 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, needs-talk functions as a medium for the making and contesting of political claims. It is an idiom in which political conflict is played out and through which 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, needstalk has been institutionalized as a major vocabulary of political discourse.2

Identity, Exclusion, and Critique: A Response to Four Critics

In this article I reply to four critics. Responding to Linda Alcoff, I contend that my original two-dimensional framework discloses the entwinement of economic and cultural strands of subordination, while also illuminating the dangers of identity politics. Responding to James Bohman, I maintain that, with the addition of the third dimension of representation, my approach illuminates the structural exclusion of the global poor, the relation between justice and democracy, and the status of comprehensive theorizing. Responding to Nikolas Kompridis, I defend a view of recognition that prioritizes the critique of institutionalized injustice. Responding to Rainer Forst, I argue that such a critique is better formulated in participation-theoretic than justification-theoretic terms.

To Interpret the World and to Change It: An Interview with Nancy Fraser

N ancy Fraser’s feminist philosophy offers a model for politically engaged scholarship that speaks to some of the most contentious issues facing contemporary feminist politics. While many bemoan the depoliticization of academic feminism, Fraser has consistently applied her philosophical skill to construct a progressive alternative to a disengaged academic feminism—to what Hortense Spillers calls “the impasse of feminist practice and critique” (Lurie et al. 2001). Signs coeditors Sandra Harding and Kate Norberg invited me to interview Fraser and to look for “fresh angles on her work.” Harding and Norberg reviewed the transcript and suggested several themes to highlight as we edited the transcription for publication. In editing the product of our daylong conversation, we tried to retain the rhythm and substance of the original. In some places we have added new text to clarify points raised. In other places we have removed portions of the text to improve the flow of presentation. We came to this conversation from two different disciplinary locations (sociology and philosophy) but with a similar commitment to producing scholarship that critically interprets the world in an effort to change it. Fraser applies her skill as a philosopher and her feminist insights to struggles for social and economic justice. Her critical reflection provides theoretical tools required to address the dilemmas posed by the “postsocialist” condition that dominates our everyday lives. She defines the “postsocialist” condition as “an absence of any credible overarching emancipatory project despite the proliferation of fronts of struggle; a general decoupling of the cultural politics of recognition from the social politics of redistribution; and a decentering of claims for equality in the face of

Sex, Lies, and the Public Sphere: Some Reflections on the Confirmation of Clarence Thomas

The recent struggle over the confirmation of Clarence Thomas and the credibility of Anita Hill raises in a dramatic and pointed way many of the issues at stake in theorizing the public sphere in contemporary society. At one level, the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on Hills claim that Thomas sexually harassed her constituted an exercise in democratic publicity as it has been understood in the classical liberal theory of the public sphere. The hearings opened to public scrutiny a function of government, namely, the nomination and confirmation of a Supreme Court justice. They thus subjected a decision of state officials to the force of public opinion. Through the hearings, in fact, public opinion was constituted and brought to bear directly on the decision itself, affecting the process by which the decision was made as well as its substantive outcome. As a result, state officials were held accountable to the public by means of a discursive process of opinion and will formation. Yet that classical liberal view of the public sphere does not tell the

Injustice at Intersecting Scales: On ‘Social Exclusion’ and the ‘Global Poor’

It is widely appreciated today that injustices can arise on different scales — some are national, some regional, some global. Thus, the notion of a plurality of scales of justice is intuitively plausible. What may be less evident is the idea that some important injustices are best located not on any one single scale but rather at the intersection of several scales. This article argues that this is the case for one of the core characteristic injustices of the present era: namely, ‘the social exclusion of the global poor’.

Reconhecimento sem ética

FOR SOME time now, the forces of progressive politics have been divided into two camps. On one side stand the proponents of ‘redistribution’. Drawing on long traditions of egalitarian, labor and socialist organizing, political actors aligned with this orientation seek a more just allocation of resources and goods. On the other side stand the proponents of ‘recognition’. Drawing on newer visions of a ‘difference-friendly’ society, they seek a world where assimilation to majority or dominant cultural norms is no longer the price of equal respect. Members of the first camp hope to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor, from the North to the South, and from the owners to the workers. Members of the second, in contrast, seek recognition of the distinctive perspectives of ethnic, ‘racial’, and sexual minorities, as well as of gender difference. The redistribution orientation has a distinguished philosophical pedigree, as egalitarian redistributive claims have supplied the paradigm case for most theorizing about social justice for the past 150 years. The recognition orientation has recently attracted the interest of political philosophers, however, some of whom are seeking to develop a new normative paradigm that puts recognition at its center. At present, unfortunately, relations between the two camps are quite strained. In many cases, struggles for recognition are dissociated from struggles for redistribution. Within social movements such as feminism, for example, activist tendencies that look to redistribution as the remedy for male domination are increasingly dissociated from tendencies that look instead to recognition of gender difference. And the same is largely true in the intellectual sphere. In the academy, to continue with feminism, scholars who understand gender as a social relation maintain an uneasy arm’s-length coexistence with those who construe it as an identity or a cultural code. This situation exemplifies a broader phenomenon: the widespread decoupling of cultural politics from social politics, of the politics of difference from the politics of equality.