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Nancy Hartsock Postmodernism and Political Change Issues for Feminist Postmodernism and Political Change: Issues for Feminist Theory Author(s): Nancy Hartsock Source: Cultural Critique, No. 14, The Construction of Gender and Modes of Social Division II (Winter, 1989-1990), pp. 15-33 Published by: University of Minnesota Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1354291 Accessed: 24/10/2010 20:45 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=umnpress. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. University of Minnesota Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Cultural Critique. http://www.jstor.org Postmodernism and Political Change: Issues for Feminist Theory Nancy Hartsock T hroughout the eighties, white North American feminist the- orists have been responding to arguments originating from radical women of color that feminist theory must take more ac- count of diversity among women. Too much feminist theory was written from a perspective in which white middle-class women were seen as the norm and women of color were excluded and devalued. This exclusion had important effects on the theories white feminists developed. To give just one example, white femi- nist theory assumed a split between the private world of the fam- ily, on the one hand, and public life on the other. Yet black femi- This article builds on and may be read in conjunction with "Rethinking Mod- ernism: Minority vs. Majority Theories," Cultural Critique,no. 7 (Fall 1987): 187- 206, and "Foucault on Power" A Theory for Women?" in The Genderof Power, ed. Monique Leyanaar et al. (Leiden, Netherlands: Vakgroep Vrouwenstudies, 1987), reprinted in FeminismlPostmodernism,ed. Linda Nicholson (New York: Routledge, 1989), 157-75. I would also like to thank those who responded to the paper at the conference on "Marxism Today" in December 1989 and groups at York University, the University of Chicago, and UCLA. The problems that re- main are, of course, my own. ? 1990 by Cultural Critique. 0882-4371 (Winter 1989-90). All rights reserved. 15 16 Nancy Hartsock nists have pointed out that in the black community there is no private sphere protected from state intervention. Social workers, police, courts, and other state agencies all intervene on a scale that does not allow for a private familial world insulated from the state.' Feminist theory must take account of these structurally different situations. Note, too, that given this example, it is not a matter of simply adding women of color and their situations to the list of things feminist theory is concerned about. The inclusion of many different women will and must affect the concepts and theories themselves. I believe that it was in response to these arguments that a number of feminist theorists found postmodernist theories attrac- tive. Here were arguments about incommensurability, multiplicity, and the lack of definitive answers. These writings, many of them by radical intellectuals, ranged from literary criticism to the social sci- ences. The writers-Foucault, Derrida, Rorty, Lyotard, and others- argue against the faith in universal reason we have inherited from European Enlightenment philosophy. They reject stories that claim to encompass all of human history. In its place they propose a social criticism that is ad hoc contextual, plural, and limited. Although feminist theorists have noted that postmodernist theories may contribute to the development of less totalizing theo- ries, they have also recognized that postmodernism develops only an "anemic" politics and therefore that postmodernist approaches need to be supplemented with feminist politics.2 My own view, however, is that postmodernist theories suffer from a number of epistemological difficulties that cannot be fully remedied by the addition of a dose of feminist politics. The Enlightenment Tradition Postmodernism is reacting against a particular body of thought that postmodernists argue is characterized by several im- 1. Aida Hurtado, "Relating to Privilege: Seduction and Rejection in the Sub- ordination of White Women and Women of Color," Signs 14, no. 4 (Summer 1989): 833-55. 2. See, for example, Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson, "Social Criticism Without Philosophy," in Feminism/Postmodernism,ed. Linda Nicholson (New York: Routledge, 1989), 19-38. Postmodernism and Political Change 17 portant features. Most frequently, this body of thought is termed "the Enlightenment." This specifically modernist and Western tra- dition of political thought, which emerged in western Europe over the last several hundred years, is characterized by several distinc- tive epistemological features. First, the "god-trick" was pervasive, and the tradition depended on the assumption that one can see everything from nowhere, that disembodied reason can produce accurate and "objective" accounts of the world.3 Second, and re- lated, the Enlightenment was marked by a faith in the neutrality of reasonedjudgment, in scientific objectivity, in the progressive logic of reason in general and of science in particular. Third, it claimed to assume human universality and homogeneity, based on the common capacity to reason. Differences were held to be funda- mentally epiphenomenal. Thus, one could speak of human nature, truth, and other imperial universalities. Fourth, all this had the effect of allowing for transcendence through the omnipotence of reason. Through reason, the philosopher could escape the limits of body, time, and space and could therefore contemplate the eternal problems related to man as knower. Finally, Enlightenment political thought was characterized by a denial of the importance of power to knowledge and concomitantly by a denial of the cen- trality of systematic domination in human societies. The subject/ individual and power were held to be distinct.4 It is worth remembering that these fundamentally optimistic philosophies both grew out of and expressed the social relations of the expanding market/capitalist societies of Europe.5 At the same time, many of the philosophers who were central to Western political thought also contributed to the development of ide- ologies that supported colonialism, the slave trade, the expansion 3. I owe the phrase "god-trick" to Donna Haraway, "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective," Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (Fall 1988): 575-99. 4. This is a case made about Enlightenment epistemology. Clearly there were other world views extant, but this is the one that seems to have come down to us as the dominant one and the one against which postmodernists argue. 5. See Chantal Mouffe, "Radical Democracy: Modern or Postmodern," trans. Paul Holdenraber, in Universal Abandon: The Politics of Postmodernism,ed. Andrew Ross (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 31-45. See also my critique of the ways assumptions express the epistemology of the commodity in chapter 5 of Money, Sex, and Power: Toward a Feminist Historical Materialism (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1984), 95-114. 18 Nancy Hartsock of Western patriarchal relations, etc. One can recall J.S. Mill's statements about despotism being a proper government for sav- ages or Montesquieu's views about the effects of climate on human nature-to the detriment of those who lived in the tropics-and his use of women in the harem as symbols of human depravity. Thus, despite a stated adherence to universal principles, the epistemological and political thought of the Enlightenment de- pended on the dualistic construction of a different world, a world onto which was projected an image of everything that ruling-class, male Europeans wanted to believe they were not. Edward W. Said names the fundamental dynamic of the process clearly when he states that the creation of the Orient (and one might add, the creation of various other racial, gender, and even class categories) was an outgrowth of the will to power. "Orientalism," he said, is "a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient."6 It must be remembered that this Eurocentric, masculinist, and capitalist world was constructed not only in theory but also in fact through such practices as the Atlantic slave trade, the devel- opment of plantation agriculture in the New World, the introduc- tion of markets and private property in Africa, the colonization of large parts of Asia, Latin America, and Africa, and the introduc- tion of European forms of patriarchal and masculinist power. These were the means by which the duality and the domination of Europe, and later North America-the "rich North Atlantic de- mocracies" as Richard Rorty has termed them-were institution- alized in fact as well as in thought. Duality, inequality, and domina- tion were established in the name of universality and progress; ironically, power relations were institutionalized in and through a mode of thinking that denied any connections between knowl- edge and power or between the construction of subjectivity and power. The philosophical and historical creation of devalued Oth- ers was the necessary precondition, then, for the creation of the transcendent, rational subject who can persuade himself that he exists outside time and space and power relations.
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