THE RADICAL FEMINIST PERSPECTIVE IN (and/or On) THE FIELD OF SOCIOLOGY a metatheoretical excursion Allan D. Hunter * unpublished * copyright 1989, 1990, 1992-3. _ May be freely distributed as long as authorship and copyright information is included _ email version. contact author at ahunter@sbccvm bitnet or ahunter@ccvm.sunysb.edu internet or overland mail c/o Sociology Department State University of New York at Stony Brook USA 11794-4356 Preface CONFLICT Marxism, Radical Feminism, and Sociology AWARENESS Ideology, Theory, and Consciousness-raising POWER Fluid-essentialism and Weberian Sociology MEANING Robert Pirsig, Emotions, and Radical Feminism OPPRESSION Feminism, Constraint, and Radical Interactionist Theory HISTORY Freedom, Structure, and the Passage of Time Work Cited ============================================ PREFACE I did not decide to become a sociology student lightly. My undergraduate education was in women's studies, and I have a strong fondness for what is called radical feminist theory as a world-view and explanatory framework. At first glance, the notion that I want to study society from a theoretical framework would seem to make sociology the ideal place for me, but I had been worried that perhaps feminist theory would not be welcome, that the discipline and its various departments would have a tendency to exclude it from the range of viable theoretical paradigms. After all, I was warned! A fundamental primer for first-year undergraduate students of women's studies includes the observation that feminist studies programs have had to utilize the euphemistic term "women's studies" precisely because such programs, ...both academic and nonacademic, are often met with derision or intolerance, if not outright hostility. The same forces that limit the freedom, status, and power of women in the wider world limit women within academe...a pro-woman stance is very threatening to traditional attitudes and structures. The very word feminism carries fearful connotation for many people and evokes a defensive response. (Ruth, 1980, p. 5) Well, one of the first sociology classes I took was a class in feminist theory, and for that class I wrote a paper for the professor in which I utilized radical feminist theory to derive my perspective on the subject matter, and received comments that ran something like this: You show a good comprehension of radical feminist theory, but what is odd is that you chose it in the first place. Radical feminist knowledge depends on women's intuition, an emotional body-based process of transcending patriarchal ideology that is available only to women, who are blessedly in touch with nature because they have wombs and menstruate and give birth--hardly a scientific basis for social knowledge! There's no point of entry for men, the universal oppressor, so it can't be used as a tool for understanding and addressing men's oppression. It ignores the power of structured class interests and encourages liberation through essentially apolitical personal individual action instead of focusing around collective social change efforts. The reason we teach radical feminist theory is because it makes such a good critique of classical Marxism, which is grounded in the limited notion that class stratification is the source of all oppression. But radical feminism is just as much a mono-theory, since it posits sex stratification as the source of all oppression, and, furthermore, it's a bad mono-theory. Not only does it ignore the fact that what we feel and how we interpret feelings in certain situations is socially constructed and certainly not objective, it also represents another form of the naturalistic fallacy of Rousseau in that it sees woman as nature and man as culture, labels all social problems "culture", and then advocates overthrowing culture for the liberation of women. This is clearly presociological thinking. You should take a closer look at socialist feminist theory. I think you'll find it much less problematic. "In other words", I thought to myself, "we'll pretend that we're acknowledging feminist theory in sociology as long as everyone agrees that we actually mean repackaged Marxism. We'll make no attempt to use feminism's own distinctive theory, which puts feminist analysis at the root of social understanding. On the other hand, at least the door is open now. Radical feminist theory was discussed in the class, and I can write my next paper as a reply to his charges and objections." This paper is the result of that attempt to address the areas of disagreement between conventional sociological perspectives and the perspectives of radical feminism as I understood them. It has been completely rewritten four times since the original version, and even this fifth version has been modified and edited on several occasions to a lesser degree. Version four was accepted by the abovementioned professor and the department as a "track paper" (something along the lines of a miniature Master's thesis). Version five was my first real opportunity to write the paper with no distracting concern about the need to meet informal criteria for a theoretical track paper. Freed from the pressure to make a single, well-defined assertion that can be explained in the first paragraph and then developed and defended in subsequent pages (the linear declarative paper model), I returned to the original project of defending an entire world-view as an alternative to the operant world-view that informs sociology, because the answers that a radical feminist might give to almost any one of the professor's objections would invite further objections unless they were developed along with answers to the other objections, all more or less at the same time. From the level of major theoretical visions of what the social world is all about to the level of largely unexamined axioms about what makes good theories good in the first place--indeed, even the criteria for what constitutes a good, well-developed, properly-written academic paper--one's responses to a theorist's assertions may depend in large part upon which of these two world-views comes closest to that which one happens to hold. This has made the process of explaining difficult. It is my hope that in this fifth version I've succeeded in finding a starting place where most of those who read this can follow from the beginning, and that from there I've chosen a pathway through the heart of this world-view that will enable you to see what I'm trying to say. --------------------------------------- CONFLICT Marxism, Radical Feminism, and Sociology In order to gain a stronger sense of how radical feminist theory would fit in among the explanatory theories commonly accepted by the discipline of sociology, I decided to seek out a normative, highly conventional overview of sociological theories. Along the walls of the office I share with other graduate students in my department are many textbooks for introductory classes in sociology. Large, mainstream publishing companies tend to supply us with free "professional copies" in hopes that we will order them for our undergraduate classes. An analysis of ten randomly chosen introductory sociology textbooks (Robertson 1987; Johnson 1989; Conklin 1984; Hess, Markson and Stein, 1982; Wallace and Wallace, 1985; Goode 1984; Babbie 1980; Shepard 1984; Stokes 1984; Tichsler, Whitten and Hunter 1986) reveals a widely used categorical system for introducing and describing social theory. Perspectives and their originators are divided up into functionalists (or sometimes structuralist- functionalists, or structuralists), who analyze the whole of status quo society in terms of its analytically distinguishable components and their functions; conflict theorists, who start with the assumption of adversarially poised social factions and an analytically distinguishable power relationship defining them, and then analyze social relationships in terms of their meaning to that power struggle; and interactionist theorists, who examine the processes by which small number of people acting and reacting to one another are able to utilize symbols to communicate, to establish and rely upon patterns which become roles and structures, and so forth. Historically, radical feminism started with the assumption that the sexes are adversarially poised, that men have power over women, and that society and its various social relationships can be best understood in terms of their relationship to that situation (Eisenstein 1983). Thus, within this framework, radical feminism is a conflict theory. For the purposes of introducing radical feminists and sociologists to each other's theoretical domain, it seems most important to compare and contrast radical feminism with other forms of conflict theory. The conflict theorists most commonly cited in the textbooks are Karl Marx and Max Weber. Since radical feminist theory was originally inspired by the political theories of Marx, radical feminism shares with Marxism not only the intention of transforming society rather than merely studying it, but also other related concerns, although many of these are resolved differently. Marxism, like radical feminism, starts with a theory of adversarially poised social factions with a fundamental distinguishable power relationship defining them, and then analyzes all of society in terms of that power struggle. Unlike radical feminism, Marxism identifies its formative power relationship of material wealth, most centrally of ownership/control of the means of production of still further material wealth, and describes two adversarially poised classes--the working class and the class of owners of the means of production--as the opponents in the power struggle. In both cases, although the process of oppression is thought to be accomplished in part by the direct and coercive application of violent force by the oppressor category against insubordinate members of the oppressed category, it is necessarily maintained in part by the internalization by members of the oppressed category of a world-view that tells them that their subordination is natural, that the sociopolitical system in which they find themselves is a good and just one. This internalized world- view, called ideology, serves the function of causing the members of the oppressed category to believe that although their situation as individuals may be different from that of individuals who belong to the other category, there is something intrinsic and natural about the categorical distinction, rather than something socially constructed and perhaps unfairly so. Both Marxism and radical feminism identify, as the weak point in the systems of oppression that they speak of, the fact that the oppressor's success depends on not having to perpetually resort to violent force at every turn in order to subdue the oppressed (Marx 1844; Hanisch 1970). In the case of the Marxist analysis, the vastly superior numbers of the oppressed alone is thought to make a violent confrontation with virtually universal participation by class-conscious members of society a guaranteed win for the oppressed, and therefore violent revolution by the working class has been directly proposed within the Marxist tradition as an ideal solution to the problem of oppression (e.g., Marx 1872). Other variations on Marxist theory point more to the inability of the system of oppressors and oppressed to continue to function if the oppressors are forced either to accept the need to negotiate for the voluntary cooperation of the formerly oppressed or to resort to time-consuming and energy-consuming violent coercion at every turn (e.g., Marx 1888). Within feminist analyses, the numerical advantage of the oppressed category (women) is slight and does not imply a superiority of physical strength, and a call to arms and violent revolution is not a seriously considered tactic, but again the system of oppressors and oppressed is thought to be unable to survive a successful piercing of ideology and the raising of consciousness on the part of the oppressed so that the individuals in the oppressed category (women) no longer conspire in their own oppression. Analytically, radical feminism can be distinguished from feminism that is not called "radical" according to the degree to which this particular power struggle and situation--patriarchy, the rule by men, in which women are the oppressed category--is understood to be the root of all further inequalities, oppressions, and injustices. This perspective is widely, but not universally, shared by feminists whether they make fine distinctions between types of feminism or not. The individual woman who perceives that society is unfair to and exploitative of women may not be philosophically inclined to see this social problem as "the root of all further oppression" without necessarily having thought about and rejected it as a theoretical possibility. The term "liberal feminism" is often used to designate feminism that does not concern itself with society and its institutions except in terms of gender parity (Jaggar and Rothenberg 1984). Presumably a liberal feminist could have a critical perspective on matters such as housing for the homeless in New York, child sexual abuse in California, or despotism in China--but if so, they are not likely to be feminist perspectives any more than they are anti-racism perspectives. In the sense of being able to provide an analytical framework through which to view society, liberal feminism is not, therefore, a major social theory. (It is, in fact, an application of an ethical perspective called "liberalism", a product of the enlightenment that opposes automatic social privilege on the basis of caste, status, class, and other categories that should not logically be associated with distinctions in privilege. Some feminists do argue that, when applied to sex / gender, liberalism is a radical tactic, but liberal feminism itself does not include that assertion.) The other major category of feminist thought from which radical feminism is usefully distinguished is Marxist feminism. This is a trickier distinction, because Marxists have a tendency to abrogate the term "radical" for themselves (Eichler 1980). Many of the modern American women's liberation movement's early theorists were young women associated with Marx-inspired male-dominated groups such as the Students for a Democratic Society, and as they became tired of their feminized, marginal status within these leftist groups, female activists utilized Marxist theory to critique those practices and address women's political situation in capitalist society. Some theorists, irritated and disillusioned with the limitations of Marxism, especially its political practice by the "male left" (Morgan 1978), took the process a step further and began to wonder if sexual inequality could be a more fundamental key to oppression than class and the dialectic of materialism, and thus radical feminism started to emerge. Marxist theory was often used by early radical feminist thinkers of the women's movement as a sort of theoretical template--thus, some early radical feminism such as that of Firestone (1970) tends to have a "cut and paste" feel to it, as if "class" were replaced with "sex", "production" with "reproduction", and so forth in order to see if it would provide the growing movement with its own manifesto. Soon there was a body of papers and books that developed radical feminist theory in directions and forms of its own. Radical feminism, for instance, did not center upon a single and specific theoretical equivalent to material wealth and what it represents in Marxism: the Thing that the opponents are fighting over. Instead, men are more often perceived as oppressing women for ultimately unnecessary reasons (Morgan 1982) or at least pathologically irrational ones (Daly 1978). Similarly, since there is no Thing concerning which radical feminism finds a power struggle to be inevitable, feminist theorists have often regarded the valuing of power over other people as theoretically problematic, whereas Marxism tends more towards an implicit acceptance of this type of power as desirable, explaining oppression in terms of opportunity to oppress. This becomes an important theoretical distinction. Meanwhile, because determined and committed feminists had at their disposal two conflict theories that attempted to explain how to end women's oppression, they used them both and developed both of them further. The women who continued to work mainly within a Marxist framework to critique the limited Marxist perspectives and oppressive tendencies of the male left developed Marxist feminism, which was a furthering of dialectical materialist conceptualizations of women's oppression (a previously acknowledged but long-neglected topic in Marxist literature- -Morgan 1982). Later, as radical feminism deepened and broadened its scope, feminists and theoreticians who appreciated aspects of both perspectives made efforts to unify the two conflict theories in such a way as to provide a better world-view than either theory could provide alone, and this project, along with the resultant hybridized theories, is often called socialist feminism (Jaggar and Rothenberg 1984; Stacey and Thorne 1985). Both "Marxist feminism" and "socialist feminism" are terms which imply the inclusion of specifically feminist perspectives and theories along with the Marxist perspective, thus giving the impression that these perspectives provide one with as much of a feminist analysis as is likely to be useful in understanding society. But instead what usually happens is that the two theories are reconciled by placing feminist subject matter into a specifically Marxist framework of analysis. Thus, a socialist feminist complains of "Marxist feminism"-- The marriage of marxism and feminism has been like the marriage of husband and wife depicted in English common law: marxism and feminism are one, and that one is marxism. (Hartman 1981, p. 2) --but similar complaints have been lodged against "socialist feminism". Radical feminists who are not particularly impressed with Marxism as an equal theoretical partner have had difficulty asserting the distinctive existence of their theory independent from Marxism and its feminism-incorporative stepchildren. Although socialist feminists continually claim that they are trying to unite the theories as equally relevant and important social paradigms, it remains largely true that feminist perspectives are shoved into Marxist frameworks and called socialist feminism, but when the opposite reconciliation is proposed, the results is invariably called radical feminism instead. For instance, the following passage would not be likely to be introduced as socialist feminism: [An article supporting the socialist feminist project, titled] "The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism" attempts to expose the interrelations between patriarchy and capitalism but fails in one important respect. It accepts uncritically, and from the outset, the widely-held belief that patriarchy and capitalism, although interrelated, are conceptually (or ideologically) independent...Such a view of patriarchy and capitalism does not reach the heart of the matter... Conceptually, capitalism is an advanced stage of patriarchy. Given that framework, the assessment of marxism and its relationship to feminism, patriarchy and capitalism emerges with surprising clarity... Strategically, then, the struggle against capitalism, racism, imperialism and any other product of man's attempt at domination of the Other must be based on an understanding of their basic patriarchal nature, and must be therefore regarded as part and parcel of the feminist struggle. (Al-Hibri 1981, pp. 166-7, 190) Stacey and Thorne (1985) charge that feminism becomes "ghettoized" (p. 302) in sociology within presentations of Marxist conflict theory. The perspective of feminists on education, for instance, or the economic system or nationalism, are simply not provided alongside of Marxist perspectives, even if the individual feminists have been called (or call themselves) socialist feminists. Publications, conferences, literature, and courses in the socialist-feminist theoretical format abound, but they are organized, presented, and attended by women almost exclusively; meanwhile, the overall presentation of the conflict perspective on such-and-such an issue--the stuff that the men teach, attend, read, pay attention to, learn about, and make mandatory for incoming students of the field--remains untouched. The underlying assumption is that "feminist theory" means women's stuff, i.e., feminine subject matter, rather than a different major theory of society in general. Feminists have a tradition of disinterest in divisions and barriers and boundaries if those distinctions serve to separate women from women, and many feminists therefore have come to resent or reject the overuse of these analytical distinctions between types of feminism (Eisenstein 1983). At the same time, there definitely seems to be a specifically feminist conceptual framework, which is not reducible to or easily deduced from Marxism or any other extant theoretical perspective, and which explains the world from a beginning cut of the analytical knife along the gender axis rather than explaining women's oppression or the relationship of the sexes in terms of something else. It is this that I refer to as radical feminism. ---------------------------------------- AWARENESS Ideology, Theory, and Consciousness-Raising As with Marxism, the key to liberation identified by the radical feminist analysis is consciousness raising, the process by which the oppressed become aware of their oppression, their role in perpetuating it, and of the possibility of paralyzing the system of oppressor and oppressed by refusing to voluntarily participate in its perpetuation any further. Marxism, however, was a theory developed and proposed by intellectuals who were not of the working class themselves, and attempts to spread the theory to its intended beneficiaries have been attempts to introduce Marxist concepts from the outside. In contrast, the feminist social movement has from the start generated theory as part of the process of consciousness-raising, and the concepts have originated from the self-described oppressed themselves, from the inside. Women concerned about women's position in society coming together to speak and listen to each other came to understand that women were oppressed as women, through the operation of the social construction of gender, and furthermore in many cases came to understand that there was something fundamental to the complete understanding of society and oppression in this realization. This understanding did not tend to develop from studying gender as an analytical category and comparing date on gender to a definition of "oppression"; instead, for the most part feminism and its theory of oppression grew from individual women comparing notes about the qualities of their lives (Johnson 1987). Such women discovered that in a variety of ways their experiences were common among women but tended to differ sharply from what they had previously considered to be normative experiences, which they now realized were only generalizations about the experiences of men. As they spoke, and compared experiences, a good portion of what they spoke of dealt with their experiences with men, and the commonality of collective experience led to the realization that "the personal is political": Both of these [women's consciousness-raising] groups have been called "therapy" and "personal" groups by women who consider themselves "more political". So I must speak about so-called therapy groups from my own experience... I believe at this point, and maybe for a long time to come, that these analytical sessions are a form of political action. I do not go to these sessions because I need or want to talk about my "personal problems"... ...the reason I participate in these meetings is not to solve any personal problems. One of the first things we discover in these groups is that personal problems are political problems... This is not to deny that these sessions have at least two aspects that are therapeutic. I prefer to call even this aspect "political therapy" as opposed to personal therapy. The most important is getting rid of self-blame. Can you imagine what would happen if women, blacks, and workers...would stop blaming ourselves for our sad situations? It seems to me the whole country needs that kind of political therapy... We also feel like we are thinking for ourselves for the first time in our lives... (Hanisch 1970, pp. 152-154) The politics of their lives included and quite often centered on their oppression as women, and they found that from that beginning point, they could make sense of everyday life as well as the global political issues and the turmoil of the time with an unprecedented clarity. The process of reaching these understandings was described as intuitive and sudden, rather than linear and derivative. Women began to understand, in a process described as "clicking", that events and incidents that they might have previously accepted as normative, everyday, and unproblematic were parts of an overall pattern: Recently one of the feature stories on the Kansas City news was whether women should be allowed to play golf on a public course on Saturday mornings, when the course is usually invaded by several hundred men. One of the men interviewed voiced this opinion: "Well, if she's got the meals cooked, kids dressed, and all the housework and marketing done, I guess she can be out there on the course at 7 A. M. with me, too!" CLICK! --Margaret Guntert (1973 Ms. Magazine letter to the editor, p. 4) The resultant theory expanded, growing from the most specific and immediate experiences to the most global; and as it did so, feminists began to understand that they were, in fact, gaining an understanding of the entire world and all of its problems in the process of understanding their own lives and their oppression as women: Growing up Mormon gave me a distinct advantage over those feminists who grew up in "liberal" churches...for them, patriarchy as a habit of mind, a system of values, a method of operating in the world, has been camouflaged, rendered murky and ambiguous, hard to pin down... Mormonism is patriarchy at its most arrogant and blatant... As I looked about myself with new eyes, I lost all illusions about organized religion as a means to moral ends. I saw that all churches were the Mormon church...I saw clearly that religion was the central pillar of patriarchy, the means through which male supremacy became and remains dogma... One day, shortly after I recognized all churches as the Mormon church in various guises, I was surveying the national and international scenes through my new wide- angle lens when suddenly everything clicked into place. Of course! I should have known! The whole world is the Mormon church! ...Having studied these habits of thinking and acting for so long and so thoroughly in the microcosm of the Mormon church, I found their extrapolation to the macrocosm a simple matter. (Johnson 1987, p. 3, 5, 8) This process of arriving at understandings in sudden little intuitive clicks meant that many feminist assertions about patriarchy were defended by the women making them on the grounds that they felt them to be true. Along with a general revalorization of human characteristics that have been associated with the "feminine", feeling came to be valued as a way of knowing (French 1985). Women saw that denying the validity of feelings was crucial to maintaining patriarchy, since only through emotion-driven processes was patriarchal oppression discernible. No one had access to a non-patriarchal social system in order to make comparisons, and therefore only through intuitive realizations could the connections be made. Schaef (1981) compares patriarchy to pollution, noting that "when you are in the midst of pollution, you are usually unaware of it...you are not aware that pollution is not natural until you remove yourself" (pp. 4-5). Leaving New York City and going to the mountains gives one a perspective on pollution, but getting away from patriarchy isn't such a simple matter. Therefore, the processes by which a person might realize that omnipresent conditions form a pattern that is not inevitably embedded in any social scheme are not likely to be simple processes. Intuition is a word commonly used for such a process when it involves the conceptual interpretation of feelings. "To define a judgment as one based on intuition draws attention...[the agent's] ideas and judgments are not reducible to a straightforward description of the situation about which [the agent] is thinking" (McMillan 1982, p. 41). Intuition, which is particularly associated with women, is commonly devalued (Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, and Tarule 1986). Schaef (1981) and McMillan (1982) consider the valuing of so-called "rational", "logical", and "objective" thinking over emotionally-based ways of knowing to be an intrinsic part of patriarchy. Comparing experiences with other women constituted an informal type of qualitative research, to be sure, but it was not as if no one had ever before noticed that men dominated women sexually, or got paid more to do the same work. The assessment was made that the patterns of male- female interaction that they noticed were, in fact, patterns of oppression rather than expressions of natural differences between the sexes, i.e., the natural result of the free interaction of free individuals (male and female) whose freedom has always been (and by necessity always will be) limited by the context of interaction with other, equally free individuals. There was a realization that interaction should not ordinarily produce patriarchy, with all of its hierarchical structures that limit interaction. "Should" in this sense implies lack of inevitability as well as lack of desirability (Fisher 1979). This was not a deductive conclusion. In summary, radical feminism asserts that intuition is a viable process of emotional cognition by which individuals can transcend the environment in which they were socialized, and that society as we know it is revealed by that process to be a pathological condition of deviation from the natural behavior of our species. Such assertions, embedded in radical feminist thinking and theorizing, raise questions which are ultimately metaphysical and epistemological: are individuals innately capable of developing independent concepts of reality and then comparing notes, negotiating towards a consensus? If so, how do some individuals manage to cause others to internalize the propaganda that leads them to accept oppression? How do some individuals manage to pierce the veil of ideology and transcend false consciousness and become aware of their oppression? To what extent are the conceptual interpretations that any individual gives to reality (especially social reality) at any given time simply the result of "shared conceptual structures"--the belief systems that one harbors as a result of socialization, in other words? And what is this "reality" which is the subject matter of those "shared conceptual structures"? If "culture", and perhaps the entirety of "society", consists of "shared conceptual structures", where do the concepts come from? Do the concepts give reality meaning, or does reality contain meaning itself? Is it meaningful to distinguish between reality and concepts of reality? If reality has self-evident meaning, where do mistakes and differences of interpretation come from? If reality has a more problematic relationship to meaning, what is the process by which people--individually or in collusion-- arrive at meaning? These questions are unavoidable for any theory that seeks to do what both radical feminism and Marxism set as their task: explain oppression and plan for its demise. Oppression could be intrinsic to certain situations as an objective (and therefore definable) phenomenon, and that to be completely unaware of one's own oppression as a result of socialization is not necessarily the same as being free of it. It could also be that oppression is an individually subjective matter, in which inconsistencies exist between our concepts of proper interaction and actual interactive experience, so that oppression cannot be said to exist except where people consider themselves to be oppressed; or perhaps in some way oppression has characteristics that make it both objectively real and inevitably perceivable, and that we are naturally inclined in such a way that we cannot be socialized to accept certain oppressive conditions without experiencing resentment. Sociology, generically speaking, has placed a heavy stress on the role of culture and socialization in determining the thoughts, values, and concepts of reality of each individual. An extreme position was taken by structuralist theorist Orville Brim (1960) who rejected the notion that an individual could bring anything into an interactive setting which was anything other than the composite results of previous socialization. Like a social onion, the individual self was described as layer upon layer of socialization with no core personality, intrinsic values, or other sources of behavior that could not be explained in terms of social structure and socialization processes. This was echoed by the behavioral determinist B. F. Skinner (1971) who identified environment as the sole cause of individuals' behaviors, and who denied the existence of intentions, values, or individual free will as relevant factors. Oppression, according to the Skinner model, is subjective and corresponds to experiences with unpleasant aversive forms of behavioral control. Those who are not aware of and resentful of the forms of control to which they are exposed are not oppressed. Structuralists are criticized for promoting theories which cannot address or explain social change (Sternberg 1977). Their theories emphasize stability and equilibrium, and they tend to take the larger social context for granted while considering the function of phenomena within that context for its structural stability (Erikson 1985). Brim's denial of the existence of an independently cognizant and critically conscious individual, while especially explicit, is reflected in structuralist theory generically. Skinner, on the other hand, moved beyond status quo conservatism and called for social change in the form of planned total social control by means of deliberate macrosocial behavior modification (arguing rather inconsistently that by some method we, who are but passive puppets of our environment and who lack intentions, values, or free will, can assess human behavior and "induce people not to be good but to behave well" (p. 63) by intentionally redesigning the system of behavior reinforcements). Marxism, like structuralism, works at a composite level of analysis (classes of people) which makes individual consciousness of oppression a problematic construct. Nevertheless, as a conflict theory, it attempts, by necessity, to explain consciousness of oppression. Consciousness is generally conceptualized as caused by the social environment, as in structuralism and behaviorism, but under certain circumstances people attain class consciousness which allows them to pierce through the veil of ideology and see matters as they really, materially, are (Marx 1844; 1872; 1888). (Material reality is asserted to be self-evidently, unproblematically real.) The distinction between false consciousness and accurate class consciousness explains both oppression and the ability of oppressive systems to exist unrecognized, but the explanation of the distinction between falsity and accuracy of consciousness is thin enough to be considered tautological: false consciousness is that which corresponds to internalization of capitalist ideology, and class consciousness liberates the proletariat from that ideology so that they see their circumstances as oppressed people. The qualitative difference in consciousness lies in the correctness of the latter and the falsity of the former, which can be discerned by those who have attained the latter but not by those who are in the grips of the former. The macrosocial level of analysis makes an interactive analysis of oppressed person, oppressive social context, individual assessment of reality, and ideological socialization difficult. The trend towards social determinism within conventionally accepted sociological theory is strongest in the structure-oriented "macro" theories. Exceptions that offer more of a role for individual consciousness in explaining human behavior are most common among the class of theories called "interactionist", which are "micro" theories focusing on small groups of people and generalities about their interaction. Among the interactionist theories, on the other hand, there are none which purport to explain the particular social systems that form the backdrop against which individuals must do their interacting; analysis of the specific structures of modern society which our interaction has formed, and the effect of those structures on our consciousness and further interactive processes were not a part of the first wave of interactionist theories (Coser 1977) and for the most part have not played a major role in the theories of their more modern conceptual offshoots (Turner 1986). And yet, faced with the political problem of how one might either be oppressed by ideology or come to recognize ideology as a tool of oppression, we find ourselves in need of a sociological approach to individual conceptual activity that does not depend solely on exterior causes. Such can be found among the interactionist theories. For example, Homans (1964) took note of the socialized-puppet model of the individual as a trend in sociology and traced it back to the Durkheimian tradition of insisting (for reasons having to do with the staking out of academic turf) that sociology not be conceptualized as a mass form of psychology. Posing the question "If there are norms, why do men conform to them?" (p. 814), Homans rejected the reductionisms of functionalist sociology and formulated his exchange theory on the premise that individuals acted and reacted as conscious rational creatures with wants and intentions from which independent value judgments could be made. "I now suspect that there are no general sociological propositions, propositions that hold good of all societies or social groups as such, and that the only general propositions of sociology are in fact psychological" (p. 817). Socialization, including the process of indoctrinating subject peoples towards an acceptance of oppressive conditions, would have to occur as a process of interaction in which independently cognizant individuals participated, and oppression could easily be discerned. The principle of interaction in Homans' theory is rational calculation of the desirability of the results of that interaction. The shortcoming of this formulation is that it attributes an amazing degree of innate analytical ability and an intrinsic taken-for-granted understanding of reality to the individual. Psychological propositions are considered to be adequate for explaining how a person is able to interpret a range of complex experiences and calculate outcomes, make predictions, and behave accordingly. Meaning is considered unproblematic: a teacup is a teacup, oppression is oppression. Reducing sociological processes to a matrix of calculated exchanges between psychologically constituted individuals is as much of a simplistic strategy as reducing individual tendencies to the results of socialization. Neither of these opposed binary positions provides a convincing explanation for the struggle between feminism and patriarchy, in which periods of omnipresent and consistent patriarchal world-views (Schaef 1981) have been periodically challenged by interrupted and discrete waves of feminism (Morgan 1982), in which women have risen up against oppression. Structurally based social determinism cannot convincingly explain feminism, or conceptualize oppression beyond subjectivity, and rational-choice exchange theories such as that of Homans cannot explain the possibility of patriarchy, or any complex system of oppression. The classic interactionist Mead establish the microsociological tradition of social behaviorism, in which the temporal and logical location of the social process prior to the self-conscious individual sets the stage for interaction. Meaning and knowledge are produced in the individual through interactive processes in which the body of shared conceptual structures, which exist prior to any given individual, are passed along but not simply internalized whole; the individual search for gratification operates as a critique which allows for flux, growth, and change in the socially shared conceptual structures. This model could account for social change from the conceptual level onward, but needs elaboration. It is not apparent how the individual searching for gratification is to recognize it, or know where to search for it, apart from concepts learned along with (and embedded in) the language to which Mead attaches so much importance. Radical feminism, with its emphasis on emotionally- driven intuitive processes and validation of experience through small-group interactive processes such as the consciousness-raising group, can be understood as an interactionist theory; certainly, it is qualitatively different from Marxism and structuralism, which do not effectively focus on microsociological processes. Going back to the three categories of sociological theory used by the introductory textbooks, we could place radical feminism along with other interactionist theories, whereas Marxist theory would be categorized as "conflict" theory (and structuralist theory represents the third major category itself). But in the beginning, I said that radical feminism was most easily understood by analogy to Marxism, since both are self-evidently conflict theories. Radical feminism is, in fact, both of these things. It is a conflict theory with a microsocial focus that is lacking in most other conflict theories; and, more than that, it is actually a radical interactionist theory. Clearly, then, radical feminism has the potential for offering to the discipline of sociology an explanatory framework that addresses important issues in a way that other, more conventional sociological theories do not do well. There is reason, however, to believe that sociologists would find two aspects of this model problematic: the centrality of emotions and intuition in the model by which individuals are said to be able to transcend ideology and see the circumstances of their oppression; and the apparent contradictions of causality implied by trying to simultaneously explain social structure as the result of the interaction of individuals whose perceptions are not necessarily determined by socialization and social- contextual location, and yet explain the circumstances of individual social experience in terms of a massively global system called patriarchy, which is said to be the cause of all subsequent oppression. One simple solution to the latter problem, which is to see patriarchy as the result of the intentional behavior of men but the exterior cause of women's oppression, is widely associated with radical feminists and their alleged tendency to hate men and blame men for everything. This solution does in fact exist in the form of a branch or sphere of thought within radical feminism; but, as I shall shortly proceed to show, it is not the only one, nor, I daresay, the most elegant one. --------------------------------------- POWER Fluid-Essentialism and Weberian Sociology Radical feminist theory is not a completely unified body of concepts and assertions. I find it necessary and useful to make an analytical distinction which will allow me to focus on the sub-form of radical feminist theory to which my assertions apply and from which they derive. Radical feminists differ in the degree to which they conceive of oppressive male tendencies as intrinsically and inseparably part of the expression of maleness by males. For male theorists, this is a critical theoretical point (although women may be inclined to consider it tangential). For discussion purposes, I will describe this distinction throughout this paper as if it were always a vividly polarized opposition, cleanly categoriziing radical feminist theories according to whether they a) assert that patriarchy is a system of oppression in which males behave and think like "men" (but patriarchal tendencies are neither inevitable in nor ideal for males, who must also live constricted lives because of patriarchy, so feminism will probably free and benefit males as well as females) or b) assert that patriarchy is a system of oppression caused by maleness expressing itself to a self-satisfied and unrestrained conclusion in which men oppress women (and men, far from being oppressed, benefit from patriarchy, which is why it is there). For the duration of this paper, I will use new terms (there are no old ones since the distinction made here is not a traditional one): fluid-essentialism, to describe the radical feminism that falls into category "a" above, since it posits a fluid connection between maleness and "masculine" political motivation or behaviors even as it asserts that "masculine" values and their expression are the essential root cause of all social oppression (e.g., Morgan 1982; French 1985; Johnson 1987); and rigid-essentialism to describe radical feminism described in category "b", where the connection between maleness and "man-ness" is asserted to be self-evidently rigid (e.g., Solanas 1971; Daly 1978). The important theoretical point, I think, is that rigid- essentialism posits a category of people as enemies in a conflictual power-struggle, in a way analogous to Marx's identification of the bourgeoisie as enemies against whom a violent revolution is entirely ethical and perhaps necessary. Or, as Mary Daly (1978) puts it, This book is about the journey of women becoming, that is, radical feminism... This will of course be called an "anti-male" book. Even the most cautious and circumspect feminist writings are described in this way...Thus, women continue to be intimidated by the label anti-male. Some feel a need to draw distinctions, for example: "I am anti-patriarchal but not anti-male." The courage to be logical--the courage to name--would require that we admit to ourselves that males and males only are the originators, planners, controllers, and legitimators of patriarchy... The use of the label is an indication of intellectual and moral limitations...Even feminists...are intimidated into Self-deception, becoming the only Self-described oppressed who are unable to name their oppressor, referring instead to vague "forces", "roles", "stereotypes", "constraints", "attitudes", "influences". This list could go on. The point is that no agent is named--only abstractions... This book...is absolutely Anti-Androcrat, A-mazingly Anti-male, Furiously and Finally female. (pp. 1, 27-28) I have, of course, drawn the very distinction that Daly objects to, and it is precisely the development of a conflict theory that names "vague forces" rather than human culprits which leads me to find radical feminism of the fluid-essentialist variety to be highly interesting. (That I, a male, do so and think so would probably not surprise Daly in the least.) Not all radical feminists blame men for patriarchy, or attribute its existence to the inherent nature of men: ...Blame has no part in the agenda of the women's movement...Though men regard and treat us as their deadliest enemy, men are not our enemy. Feminism, as the biophilic philosophy and world view that it is, has no place for the concept of "enemy"... To assume that men and women have totally different, even opposing, natures, thus fitting them for altogether different ways of being in the world, is to accept patriarchy's most basic rationale: biology is destiny. Many people do not like how men think and behave, but to lay this solely at the feet of their gender is profoundly patriarchal; to see half the human race as "other" is the imperative of that old, deadly mind. (Johnson 1987, pp. 263, 282) Furthermore, to be a radical feminist is not necessarily to assume or propose a permanent antagonism between the sexes, either as an inevitable state of affairs or as a revolutionary strategy: ...Feminism is a human movement; the future of all of us--girls, women, boys, and men--depends upon our all comprehending and realizing feminist principles. Repudiation of the male world may be a principled and felicitous position for the short term, but it is not enough for the long term. (French, 1985, p. 448) This is the theoretical position I am calling fluid- essentialism as it exists within radical feminism. Fluid- essentialist radical feminists Morgan (1982), French (1985), Johnson (1987) and Fisher (1979) depart from conflict theorists who blame a category of oppressors for maintaining a system of oppression. The effect of removing inevitable struggle with the enemy from the conflict model of social theory is that it questions the sources of hunger for power and the will to oppress, rather than taking these tendencies for granted. All of the fluid-essentialist theorists have identified the urge to have power over other people as an aspect of patriarchy that is not "natural", i.e., inevitably a factor in human interaction or as a principle of human social organization. Schaef (1981) notices that it is a myth of the system that domination is desirable and that power is a zero-sum linear commodity--in order for one to have more power, someone else must have less. Marilyn French (1985) made the notion of power and its desirability the central focal point of her treatise, seeing in it the essence of patriarchy and targeting the concept as most central of the abstract enemies with which feminism must content. Like Schaef, and like Elizabeth Janeway (1980), who makes many similar points, French reconceptualizes power in interactionist terms: Power is a process, a dynamic interaction. To have power really means to have entry to a network of relationships in which one can influence, persuade, threaten, or cajole others to do what one wants or needs them to do. Although no other syntax is available to us, it is in fact false to speak of "having power". One does not possess power: it is granted to the dominator by hosts of other people and that grant is not unretractable... Coercion seems a simpler, less time-consuming method of creating order than any other; yet it is just as time-consuming and tedious and far more expensive than personal encounter, persuasion, listening, and participating in bringing a group into harmony. (p. 509) At some point, my model of a clear distinction between fluid-essentialists and rigid-essentialists falls apart, or at least becomes less clear. French's assertion that power over other people is not intrinsically desirable and therefore that the desire for it cannot explain patriarchy is not shared by all people who deny that dominance per se is ingrained into the male package by nature, or for that matter that submissiveness and subserviency is somehow a part of female nature. Randall Collins, who would hardly be described as a feminist, posited an explanation of sexual inequality by concentrating on physical morphological differences in physical strength at close intimate range between males and females and concludes that, although there need be no inborn differences in terms of personality and behavioral tendencies, there are certainly differences in typical muscle mass and frame size, and that this alone explains patriarchy from a microsocial focus upward (1972). There are also feminists who engage in this sort of pseudo- biological explanation, seeing in women's reproductive biology a handicap in a presumed struggle for control and supremacy which left men in charge of things (Firestone 1970) or in the differences in genital morphology the key to women's subordination due to the non-reciprocal power of the male to force sexual congress (Brownmiller 1975; Dworkin 1987). The limitation of my analytical distinction between fluid-essentialism and rigid-essentialism lies here, in the complexities of bodily existence and the implications of physical sexual dimorphism itself: I can be quite abstract and choose to regard the body itself as part of the context in which a person lives, or I can be rather down-to-earth and regard the body as being self-evidently an aspect of the self. If, however, the female body and the male body are different in such a way that the female experience of any reality differs markedly and intrinsically from the male experience, it doesn't matter which view I take--the socially gendered selves having the experiences are rigidly connected to the context of physically sexed bodies, or they are gendered/sexed people, irreducibly so, in their interaction. Therefore, in continuing to emphasize a meaningful distinction between fluid-essentialist and rigid- essentialist feminists, I am drawn further into an exposition of the fluid-essentialist view of the tendency to seek power as a socially constructed human pattern rather than an inevitable and natural human characteristic. Having suspended the normative concepts of power and of oppressors as successful "culprits", radical feminist theorists who have denied rigid-essentialism sometimes find it problematic to conceptualize men in terms of their relationship to patriarchy: If we cannot use the word "oppression" to describe men's plight, how can we speak of it? That, of course, is the point: we cannot. Because patriarchy does not recognize the ultimate destructiveness of tyranny to tyrants, the fathers have no word--and therefore no concept--for the kind of dehumanization, the severe characterological damage, done to men by their use of violence of all kinds to dominate women and all "others". Men who are becoming conscious must find their own language for their experience. (Johnson 1987, p. 290) By taking the model of conflict theory and removing intrinsic conflict and power struggle from the picture while insisting on the current real-life existence of their oppression, radical feminists found themselves looking at the interactive processes that we identify as oppressive and considering the exchanges and communications that we call power rather than merely studying the effect that unequal power relationships have on interaction. For one thing, there was the matter of how males become men. Although feminist theory is for the most part composed of the testimony and insight of women working from their own experiences as females, it had not totally escaped the attention of feminist theorists that little boys were under more severe social pressure to conform to the "male sex role", i.e., to become masculinized and socialized into participation in the patriarchal system, and that this pressure begins at a much earlier age than corresponding pressure on females to internalize and accept the strictures and obligations of femininity (see Hartley 1974; Hart and Richardson 1981). If patriarchy were the tool of males expressing themselves to an unrestrained and self-satisfied conclusion at the expense of female self-determination, why the massive effort to force young males to adopt the very behavior that should come natural in the absence of counterbalance and constraint? Another important factor was the growing awareness on the part of feminist women, who were so often baited by being accused of wanting to be men, that in fact they did not envy men their positions as oppressors and did not see those positions as desirable (Schaef 1981; French 1985). As the above quote from French alludes, establishing power over other people is time-consuming and requires as much energy expenditure as other modes of attaining cooperation from others, which tends to negate the notion that oppressing others is in one's short-term interest. Then, if the overall experience of being in a position of hegemony and domination holds no ongoing attraction once established, the notion that power over others is intrinsically desirable becomes yet harder to defend. Finally, as the workings of patriarchal power hierarchies were increasingly blamed within feminism for the purposeless destruction of the natural environment, the bureaucratic nonresponsiveness to individual and systemic needs, and the adversarial posturing evidenced by the ongoing threat of nuclear confrontation (e.g., see Fisher 1979; Morgan 1982; French 1985; Ruth 1980), the notion that this type of power structure in any meaningful (functionalist) way serves the interests of society in the transcendental very-long-range sense seems indefensible as well. In this growing light of critical fluid-essentialist consideration, the existence and original genesis of patriarchy began to be seen as due to some kind of all- encompassing constraint on individuals' interaction in a way that controls us but only through our retractable cooperation. Patriarchy oppresses, but not to the advantage of anyone, and actually to the detriment of all life on this planet, and although it oppresses us individually insofar as we are in it (men as well as women; despite Johnson's comment above, the word "oppression" is sometimes used to refer to men's experience of patriarchy, e.g., Ruth 1980), the immediate source of that oppression is not external, for collectively speaking, it is in us as well. In other words, social structures might be better understood as shared conceptual structures located only in our collective individual heads, despite their reality and the reality of how they oppress us. These perspectives on power and oppression represent a challenge to orthodox sociological theory, a challenge which is probably best explained to feminists by taking a moment to look at the theoretical contribution of sociology's other major conflict theorist, Max Weber, and the effect that he had on the overall sociological perspective. A meaningful overview of Weberian concepts is more than I want to attempt at the moment, and would be largely tangential to the things I'm talking about, but the major lasting legacy he left the discipline is more important, for it sheds some light on the reception that sociology has given radical feminism. Weber developed a theory of ongoing conflictual power struggles occurring in several different domains of authority. In some ways, this concern with power and the dynamics of inequality mirrored the theories of Marx, which is why Weber is often placed alongside of Marx as a conflict theorist. Yet, in another important way, Weber stands as sociology's favorite critic of Marx and his monocausal theory of oppression, in which oppression revolves around one axis and one axis alone: material possession and control of the means of production. By illustrating the different ways in which individuals can have different sources of social power over other people, and theorizing about the inability of a single pat explanation to set these forms of power in a precise hierarchy so as to establish which persons in a social setting would necessarily possess the most power, Weber set in motion two trends within sociological thinking: that meaningful social phenomena, rather than having single explanations, might better be explained by a simultaneous consideration of multiple variables; and that, since power and access to power seems to occur across the axes of many different structured social distinctions, the universal constant relevant to understanding oppression is not class or any other explanatory categorical distinction setting people apart from each other but rather the omnipresence of power struggle itself. Certainly, Weber said many other things that individual sociologists might find more memorable, but he is particularly representative of and associated with these ideas. The assertion that power itself is a fundamental human social organizing force has taken on the authority of an axiom within sociological theory, in contrast to which the social construction of virtually every other shared human tendency, experience, etc., is posited. Thus, power and the intrinsic struggle for it forms the inner framework, and all other human behaviors wrap around that framework in largely arbitrary, reshapable, culturally and historically contingent ways for sociology to explain through causal analysis of chosen variables. Radical feminism is therefore contra-Weberian, operating from a different axiomatic beginning in which emotional responses to a situation (if not necessarily the intellectual interpretation thereof) are posited as innate, and power, or the desire for it, joins the rest of the malleable clay that remains to be explained by events and circumstance. --------------------------------------- MEANING Robert Pirsig, Emotions, and Radical Feminism Fluid-essentialism, being a "two-way street" approach to understanding causation processes that link individuals and society, seeks to explain the nature and origins of the particular social context (patriarchy) and the types of constraint that it imposes upon interaction, while also attempting to unravel the processes by which individuals interact with reality (including social reality, i.e., each other) in such a way as to arrive at individual and socially shared understandings. By the nature of the questions and in keeping with the integrated and unified nature of the fluid model, the answers to these questions are largely inseparable; that is, they tend to imply each other. Of the two explanatory tasks, the existing body of radical feminist theory compares favorably with other macrosocial theories in the extent to which it describes and explains the social context (patriarchy). In developing models for depicting the interactive processes by which meaning is established, radical feminism is comparatively underdeveloped, with other microsocial theories providing more succinct, more crisply defined (though not necessarily more accurate) models for addressing these questions. Emotions are the key to knowledge: this is the essence of radical feminist epistemological theory. Since emotions are usually considered to be subjective, and to base knowledge on entirely subjective criteria would seem to make it difficult to argue for the accuracy of a critical consciousness of society over a more conservative one held by someone else, the process by which feminists claim that people can transcend the immediate social environment of patriarchy and its ideologies and see things as they actually are is a process that could use further explanation. Epistemologies in general tend to be connected to metaphysical theories, which define reality and meaning. A coherent, integrated metaphysical system would seem at first glance to require that ultimate meaning be located somewhere, and if meaning does not lie in material things themselves, it tends to be located outside of them, in the socially constructed systems of interconnected signifiers such as language, or, more broadly, in some combination of individual and collective subjectivity that generates meaning and projects it onto the otherwise formless world. Thus, social theories tend to fall prey either to the weaknesses of materialist realism (which has trouble explaining anything other than the unproblematic apprehension of reality as it self-evidently exists) or the radical subjectivist accounts such as poststructuralism (which has trouble making claims for the accuracy of any one apprehension of reality over any other). As I said, an emotion-based epistemological system is unorthodox. Most students of philosophy are far more likely to be exposed to epistemological accounts of how we perceive, attach meaning, come to know things, etc., which would, if they were accurate formulations, discredit radical feminist theory because of its way of knowing. For example, theories of phenomenology (Kockelmas 1967; Wolff 1978) represent a serious challenge to feminist epistemology. Utilizing the philosophical metaphysical and epistemological formulations of Edmund Husserl to answer questions of meaning and knowing, the phenomenological school seeks to derive the microdynamic processes of social interaction. Objects in the physical sense are thought to have intrinsic meaning which can be perceived by bracketing off the socially shared associations and valuations, but the process of doing so is rare because we tend to accept conventional interpretations and complex social constructs as unproblematically self-evident. Given the impetus to do so, however, individuals have the ability to go "back to the things", as Husserl advised (Wolff 1978, p. 501)--to suspend those everyday "natural attitude" conceptualizations (Kockelmas 1967, p. 27) and rely only on the self-evidently irreducible objective elements of reality, inside of which no ideological distortions can exist. This irreducible meaning of "things", or eidetic meaning, is said to derive from intuition (Kockelmas 1967, p. 29), and pursuit of intuition is thus asserted to result in knowledge of truth which otherwise remains concealed in layers of social illusion. The challenge to phenomenologists would be to study the processes by which edifices of understanding and meaning are (or are not) properly built up from the eidetic meaning of things themselves. What this means, despite the attentive focus on the processes by which people come to see situations as having a certain meaning (a process also known as ethnomethodology), is that phenomenology is ultimately rooted in an attempt to ground a kind of objective criticism of social form in an objective material reality. The intuitive process described by Husserl and adopted by the phenomenological school is basically a radical empiricism asserting the existence of absolute objectivity and intrinsic meaning in the world, and that when reduced to the non-abstract sensory input level "there is no consciousness except consciousness of something (Wolff 1978, p. 503), the eidetic meaning of which is immediate and self-evident. This type of radical empiricism, in which sensory impression is asserted to provide one directly with the understanding of meaning in the absence of illusory distractions, has its supporters but is far from being considered unassailable. The irreducible location of meaning in things and the direct sensory impressions that they provide, which depends on the notion that a person can "bracket" the conceptual structures of categories and labels and meanings and directly experience "things" and know them for what they are, has been criticized as indefensible by skeptics who believe in the social-construction-of-reality models (discussed in Wolff, 1978, p. 507). Meanwhile, for those seeking a way out of the socialized-puppet models, which tend to deny the individual any capacity to discern independently or see through ideologies to which she or he is socialized, phenomenology has its attractions. This "intuition" of phenomenological interactionist theory is not, however, the same as the intuition to which radical feminists refer. This conceptualization of the relationship between perception and meaning is entirely incompatible with radical feminism insofar as there is no place for emotions and emotionally-driven intuitive processes here except for the discard pile of "everyday" (illusory) meanings which, insofar as they cannot be clearly seen to stem from direct sensory input, are being bracketed out of the way. In fact, a closer consideration of the tight dependency of accurate knowledge upon sensory observation of which one is conscious makes phenomenology's "intuition" start to look a lot like that old sacred icon of positivist science, concrete empirical data. It also looks weak in light of common-sense considerations of how people arrive at meaning--certainly, it would seem that if objects have compelling eidetic meanings which are apparent when social constructs are bracketed and pulled back out of the way, then infants should be immediately cognizant of their environments, and very young children fully acquainted with the ultimate meaning of things. As with rational choice and exchange theories, it becomes difficult to understand how to explain the success of the social illusions of ideology. The shortcomings of epistemological theories which challenge feminist theory, or are at best incompatible with it, do not negate the need for a more convincing model with which to replace them. I have always felt (intuited) that the radical feminists were right about intuition, emotion, and cognition, but the explanation of how the process works was incomplete and therefore hard to explain, defend, or propose as a counter-argument (though there may be good feminist accounts I haven't been exposed to). Charles Taylor (1971) delineates the parameters of a theory which seems to point in a useful direction. Hermeneutics, the science of interpretation, describes the relationship of meaning and knowledge in such a way that the object (text) being interpreted has authentic meaning which can be clear and apparent or vague and unclear, and which can be construed or misconstrued by the subject to whom it has these meanings. Hermeneutics seeks to clarify through interpretation, in such a way that the meaning of the object becomes more apparent to the subject. The meaning does not lie objectively in the objects, though, for the meaning that the objects have is meaning to a subject. In other words, the reader of a text (or "experiencer" of a situation or reality) has a relationship to that text such that the text has meaning to her or him whether he/she understands that meaning fully or not. In cases where understanding is missing or incomplete, hermeneutic interpretation translates the meaning of the original text into another form that expresses that meaning so as to make the original text understandable. Meaning is for a subject but not located in the subject either, so much as in the relationship of subject and object. Meaning is distinguished from understanding, allowing us to speak of accurate or false consciousness of a situation. Understanding and meaning are also distinguished from forms of expression, particularly the embodiment of meaning in language, since by definition if one's text's meaning is to be clarified through the writing of another text that interprets it, the same meaning must be said to exist (for the subject) in two different texts. A relative, elastic relationship between meaning and expression is understood to exist rather than a tight, rigid correspondence. The hermeneutic process only begins to take on full meaning when plural subjects are considered, since the occasions for a single observer to engage in an act of interpretation and re-expression for his or her own clarification are more limited and the importance of the process is less apparent. In the social setting, when an object (text) becomes a topic of debate or consideration due to ambiguities of meaning or different readings of its meaning (including different opinions as to its clarity and the extent to which it makes sense at all), those who perceive the meaning that it has for them render their understanding into new words through which to convey that meaning. Similarly, when the object serving as text is the social setting itself, the meaningful activities of what Taylor refers to (in prefeminist terminology) as "the sciences of man" revolve around that same process of translating the meaning of the social context into another text of interpretation for the purposes of clarifying, for other subjects involved, the meaning that the social context has for them. Taylor's version of hermeneutics has troublesome implications for academia which would be mirrored by the implications of radical feminist theory were it to receive more serious consideration. Hermeneutic social science can only exist outside of the conventional realm of scientific standards of certainty. There are no exterior standards from which to judge the accuracy of a given act of interpretation. What if someone does not "see" the adequacy of our interpretation, does not accept our reading? We try to show him [sic] how it makes sense of the original non- or partial sense. But for him to follow us he must read the original language as we do, he must recognize these expressions as puzzling in a certain way, and hence be looking for a solution to our problem. If he does not, what can we do? The answer, it would see, can only be more of the same...We cannot escape an ultimate appeal to a common understanding of the expressions, of the "language" involved. This is one way of trying to express what has been called the "hermeneutical circle." (p. 6) On the basis of this state of relative and self-referential certainty, I'm inclined to consider hermeneutics an "art" process rather than a "science" process, and in accordance with Taylor's assertion that the social sciences should proceed hermeneutically, to assert that there is no valid social science, but rather good social art. Although this approach does not claim that the "knowledge" that any one of us possess is merely a set of beliefs and ideas that have been instilled within us through social construction, it will probably be unappealing to sociologists of a more positivist inclination; and it should be noted that even the proponents of social construction tend implicitly to exclude themselves and other social scientists when they advance their theories of meaning and knowledge, as evidenced by their tendency to behave as if there really were a difference in accuracy and quality between their "knowledge" and that of their undergraduate students. Nevertheless, the hermeneutic model seems to accurately describe the process of trying to convey sociological understanding, both within the classroom and through the process of writing social theory-- ...Today's facts are embedded in today's situation. We accept them as being self-evidently true, as signifying what they are; or at least, we try to. We are unhappy with puzzles and ambiguities, uneasy with shifting roles and mysterious behavior. Why? Because they demand something from us. Present events act on us and call for action by us. Since we can change them, not simply define or describe them, they acquire a moral presence. They pose a question of responsibility, and by doing so they change the way we look at them...So valuing invades description, moral judgment confounds analysis. ...The most illuminating reaction occurs when a statement is made which runs counter to the customary attitudes of any given audience. Sometimes it is directly upsetting; that is, the audience takes in its significance and disagrees. But more often the meaning is separated from the fact of the statement. Then people say, "Oh, I suppose this absurd and disgusting thing you tell me is true enough, but it doesn't matter because it's just an aberration." It may be true, that is, in the particular instance cited, but it isn't true importantly, because it doesn't link up with the overall pattern. It can, and should, be ignored... Clearly, even apparently scientific and objective data do not operate in the social world in the same way that they operate in the physical world. A "fact" can't be pinned down simply by being correct in the sense that, Yes, it did happen. In the physical world, hypotheses that don't work have to be abandoned. In the social world, hypotheses will swallow up "facts" that challenge them over and over again. As long as the emotion invested in them can keep them plausible, they will "work" well enough to get by. (Janeway 1971, pp. 135-6, 143-4) In the classroom, one presents content to one's students, which must be integrated into the preexisting background of what they already know or believe, and if comprehension does not take place, it is necessary to move back to more general subject matter until one reaches common ground, a mutual agreement as to what is so. From there, one introduces interpretations and explanations that purport to clarify some aspects of social life, perhaps by providing new information about other human experience within the overall social context (data), but always and necessarily by describing matters according to a schematic pattern that attempts to make sense of things (theory). Unless one can offer up that which clarifies life as one's students know and experience it, they may take notes and remember the "right answers" long enough to write them down on a test paper, but this will have little if any effect on what they understand and know about life, and, therefore, on their behavior, political or otherwise. Taylor's perspective integrates agency into a social framework in which people share (and expect each other to share) a conceptual framework of social (and, for that matter, physical) reality. While avoiding the deterministic sense of individuals as "programmed" by the surrounding culture, Taylor places them each in an idea-context of intersubjectively shared beliefs which provides them with the tools for interpreting experience--what he calls "proto- 'interpretation'" (p. 16). But whereas a social constructionist would see individuals as entirely constrained by an inability to experience anything except in those terms, there is nothing in Taylor's schema that limits individuals' understandings to the confines of those beliefs and concepts. What we are left with is the question of what this understanding consists of, and what its characteristics are. In separating understanding from language, Taylor implicitly theorizes a class of meaningful thought that does not depend on processing signifiers as terms. This would certainly tend to eliminate rationality from consideration, since rational thinking is dependent upon terminologies in order to set temporary axioms for consideration and so forth. It sets the stage for revalorizing emotional processes. Taylor, however, does not develop this sense of unlanguaged cognition, and therefore now his model needs elaboration. I have found, in the theory-laden fiction of Robert Pirsig, an excellent and detailed explication of epistemological processes that pick up where Taylor leaves off, and which fits the radical feminist paradigm like the proverbial glove. Like Husserl, Pirsig grants that when the measure of an object is reduced to the sensory impression of it, socially maintained concepts (and possible ideological distortions) do not play a role, and there is a sense in which one is making a clean, new "back to the things" assessment. Unlike Husserl, Pirsig does not claim that a deliberate and rare process of "bracketing" is necessary; instead, one is inevitably "back to the things" on a constant basis. Using the example of seeing a tree, Pirsig notes that ...At the cutting edge of time, before an object can be distinguished, there must be a kind of nonintellectual awareness, ...called awareness of Quality. You can't be aware that you've seen a tree until after you've seen the tree, and between the instant of vision and instant of awareness there must be a time lag... Quality is shapeless, formless, indescribable. To see shapes and forms is to intellectualize. (Pirsig 1974, pp. 221, 224) In contrast with the Husserl model, Pirsig is saying there is nothing compellingly meaningful about those visual sensory impressions that automatically tells the person that its source is a tree. If you have seen trees before, you have past experiences with similar visual sensory impressions which are cross-indexed with other experiences, sensory impressions, concepts, social attitudes, and so forth, all of which taken together represent "treeness" to you. But before these sensory impressions can be cross- referenced and interpreted, they have to be felt. This experience, which is nonverbal, nonanalytical, nonconceptual, is entirely located in the present moment, and consciousness consists of "feelings" in both senses of the word--sensation (in this case, visual sensations) and emotion. Pirsig refers to this mode of knowing as the "romantic" mode. McMillan (1982) notes that rationalists who try to put a wedge between reason and emotions and assign validity only to the former "fail to see that what makes bodily states and sensations emotional is the presence of evaluations or cognitions. Although feelings involve bodily processes, they are nevertheless distinguishable from them" (p. 28). This experiencing of self-in-relation-to- tree, which is the romantic mode of knowing as opposed to the classical mode, is also preverbal and preanalytical. A classical analytical response, in its simplest form, is necessary to distinguish between self and tree. Analytical categorization identifies the tree as a tree and assigns objectivity to it, identifies the emotional-preverbal impressions as subjective reactions to the tree, makes separate observations about the appearance of the bark and the length of the branches and color of the leaves or needles, and given sufficient familiarity with trees perhaps makes the determination that the tree is a pine tree; or, for that matter, that it is a seventeen-to- eighteen-year- old Ponderosa pine with a mild case of tree blight. The newborn infant would not only be incapable of identifying the object in her field of visions as a tree, she would be incapable of knowing immediately that these strange new sensory sensations have something to do with an object that she could touch if she could move in the direction her head is pointed, or even that visual impressions of a certain sort imply the existence of an object in her line of vision. It seems compellingly obvious to anyone who has been around a baby for a couple of months that an infant's mind is filing sensations and emotions and noticing patterns with startling rapidity. The patterns formed, which allow for the infant to predict occurrences based on previously connected patterns and so forth, constitute what Pirsig calls "analogues of reality". Prior to language acquisition (which itself depends on a preverbal ability to notice patterns), the process of recognition and the fitting of feelings into existing patterns is a limited one, and the patterns are limited patterns. The process at this point is entirely intuitive. Intuition, therefore, is the simplest, most basic form of comparative analysis, a feeling for and recognition of pattern that forms a bridge between the totally nonanalytical split-second here-and-now "romantic" experience and the classical analysis which uses language- based categorical systems. Actually, the process of analysis always requires a level of emotional involvement. The process of fitting a new experience into preexisting analogues of reality involves a consideration for the elegance and beauty of its fit, a consideration that is made manifest through feeling: [Jules Henrm Poincari used to say that]...Mathematics...isn't merely a question of applying rules, any more than science. It doesn't merely make the most combinations possible according to certain fixed laws. The combinations so obtained would be exceedingly numerous, useless and cumbersome...the subliminal self, Poincari said, looks at a large number of solutions to a problem, but only the interesting ones break into the domain of consciousness. Mathematical solutions are selected by the subliminal self on the basis of "mathematical beauty", of the harmony of numbers and forms, of geometrical elegance... Poincari made it clear that he was not speaking of romantic beauty, the beauty of appearances which strikes the senses. He means classic beauty, which comes from the harmonious order of the parts...It is the quest of this special classic beauty, the sense of harmony of the cosmos, which makes us choose the facts most fitting to contribute to this harmony...It is this harmony, this quality, if you will, that is the sole basis for the only reality we can ever know. (Pirsig 1974, pp. 240-241) Once our hypothetical infant becomes verbal, language makes complex communication and comparison of analogues with those of other people possible. The analogues of reality which are formed and modified by this process become extremely complex, as do her mind's analytical processes themselves. Analogues rendered in words are shared and are expected to be shared with other people experiencing the same world (Newcomb, Turner and Converse 1965), and we depend on consultation with other people to double-check our comprehension of the universe we live in: What guarantees the objectivity of the world in which we live is that this world is common to us with other thinking beings. Through the communications that we have with other men we receive from them ready-made harmonious reasonings... (Pirsig 1974, p. 241) The complex patterns of verbally coded analogues of reality are social analogues, and now we are speaking of a level of interaction that includes the elements of individual, external reality, cognition, and society and socialization. Now it is possible of conceptualize a discrepancy between reality perceptions of the individual and social analogues of reality utilized by the surrounding culture, and to account for both awareness and lack of awareness of oppression, if it were to exist, is an easy matter. Pirsig mentions in his introduction of the concepts of classical and romantic esthetic that the classical mode of understanding (analytical and reductionistic) tends to be associated with masculinity and the romantic esthetic (intuitive and holistic) with femininity. Although he deemphasizes the gender connection, the thesis of his book concerns the degree to which Quality has been disregarded, both in the romantic and the classical mode, and that the world has for a long time operated on the erroneous premise that analysis and rationality can be detached from subjectivity and emotion, that science can be separated from art. Radical feminist Robin Morgan makes a similar point: Unfortunately, technology as we have come to express and experience it exists in quite a different context, one split off from [art and poetry]...and often posed as actively antagonistic to art. (Morgan 1982, p. 270) A central part of what patriarchy means to interaction is that feeling has been surgically separated from thinking, and such a separation not only neglects and maligns the validity of feeling, it also destroys the validity of thought. The interactive nature of all meaning, and the role of feelings in arriving at objective as well as subjective meaning, are denied as part and parcel of the process of separating feeling from meaning, which constrains cognition. In a context of interaction comparatively free of such constraints, the fact that we all share the ability to recognize patterns and make sense of reality would mean, more often than not, that the social check of communication would reveal compatibility between our individual images of reality and the images that other people have. Individuals would not be exposed to a constant denial of the validity of their personal reality-assessing processes. Knowledge would not be viewed so exclusively as something that one learns from people who know better. Thus, the radical feminist indictment of the patriarchal myth of value-free emotionless rationality is an identification of distinctively central political characteristics. I began by considering cognitive social analogues of simple physical realities such as trees in my examples because simple models are easier to present and discuss, but as Newcomb et. al. (1965) pointed out, evaluative norms concerning social reality work according to the same principle. The sharing of a perception constitutes a cognitive norm, an element of the social analogue of reality. Values, ethics, and moral priorities--those cognitive norms that most consciously determine behavior-- are among these. Behavior-indicative systems take the form "You (I, he, we,...) ought to do such-and-such", which is a perception of what a person ought to do, and why; these form the social-context version of a cognitive norm; that is, they are cognitive norms that are shared and expected to be shared which address the subject matter of which behaviors are desirable. Social reality, whether it be a procedure or a morality, may seem far more abstract (and more arbitrary) than physical reality such as trees. Under conditions of relatively unconstrained interaction, what individuals are doing when they socially interact, however, is not constructing social reality in the same sense that a potter constructs vases out of clay, but rather comparing their analogue-models of human social needs in a physically natural context, and individual needs in a physical and social natural context. Therefore, within abstractions about how things ought to be is an assertion that should not be considered to be arbitrary. The essence of social reality is not arbitrary, to be shaped as compromise and chance circumstance determine, but is rather geared towards the "discovery" of objectivity. In relatively unconstrained interaction, as a result of the elasticity of language and perspective differences, there would be a relative, rather than absolute, certainty that the rest of the people in one's world were seeing the same world. This elasticity, this fluid rather than rigid condition of interconnectedness, would probably soften the "edges" of objectivity to permit a sense of individuality, although it would be an individuality not so dramatic in its separateness as the individuality we know. Newcomb et. al. (1965) cite a study by Kitt and Gleicher demonstrating what they call "pulling"--the tendency for people to skew their estimation of other people's behavior in the direction of their own. We can extend this understanding to include estimates of all of the cognitive processes of other people as well as those most directly responsible for behavior-- this would be what I'd expect to find in a relatively constraint-free interactive world as the normative and functional adaptation to the elasticity of different individual experiences. In contrast to relative elasticity and the assumption of shared reality, oppression correlates with a pattern, qualitatively different from those little discontinuities, in which an individual feels (and perhaps but not necessarily comprehends and analyzes) a rigid and ongoing tension between his or her experience of reality and the social definition thereof. --------------------------------------- OPPRESSION Feminism, Constraint, and Radical Interactionist Theory To separate feeling from thinking constrains interaction between individual and the entirety of the rest of reality, and between each individuals' experience of reality and the socially shared analogue of reality. Patriarchy has self-perpetuating tendencies which can be understood as products of the severe constraints placed on interaction as it would otherwise occur. These constraints exist in our minds; they themselves, with their proscriptions on taking individual feelings seriously as a basis of knowledge, exist as shared conceptual structures (Johnson 1987) which, insofar as they form the basis of behavior and of the interpretation of behavior for most people who form our environment, are quite vividly real. Oppression, the result of (or the experience of) this self-perpetuating form of interactive constraint, is a situation in which the apparent social consensus, the culturally shared and expected analogue of reality, would come into unresolved conflict with experience-based emotionally-informed assessments of reality made by the individual. This illustrates an interesting relationship between the existence of objective reality and experience of oppression--not that oppression is caused by or causes lack of objectivity in the structuring of shared cognitive norms, but that they coincide as part of the same pattern of reality (a type of constrained epistemological and social interaction). Oppression is an interactive phenomenon; it is felt, or sensed by the input of emotion, which precedes interpretation. The intellectual sense of harmony and elegance can guide the interpretation of those who dare to interpret, moving feeling into perception, or intellectual awareness, and one has consciousness of oppression. Oppression does not exist only in the individual's mind (subjective reality) or in the world external to the mind of the oppressed individual (objective reality), but in the abstract epistemological relationship of self to context and to interpretation and expression, and it has an effect on the individual independent of whether the individual successfully analyzes the situation and conceives of it as an oppressive one. Inequality, a dimension of oppression created by the competitive exerting of control, does not (as linear models of power imply) mean that the most successful oppressor- controller "wins"; no one is free. This is the essence of fluid-essentialism--a conceptualization of oppression without a class of "culprits" who are successfully oppressing to their own benefit. Patriarchal oppression is characterized as an immobilization contest in which men compete with each other in an attempt to paralyze and rigidify the behavior of as many people as possible. The "winners" are at best less tightly constrained than the "losers", but are nevertheless considerably more immobilized themselves than they would be in the absence of this enterprise. The interactive processes of patriarchal oppression explain and are explained by the specific system of shared belief and concepts which delineate patriarchal society. Although all human social activity is constrained in certain universal ways, and presumably any social system would come with its own specific forms of interactive constraint, the patriarchal system happens to be a constraining system which limits interaction and communication in such a way as to create and maintain inflexibility, which is experienced as oppression. (Since the processes and the structures are actually aspects of each other, and both of them aspects of the overall phenomenon of specifically constrained interaction, the apparent tautology and paradoxical cause-and-effect loop is entirely legitimate; the conceptual distinction between process and structures is an artificial human convenience that makes description easier, but they do not actually have separate existence). I have been describing constraint in gender-neutral terms, but the specific pattern of oppressive constraint is necessarily gender-specific. That is, the value system of patriarchy constructs the experience of and meaning of emotion differently for men and women, diverting the currents of sexual expression into differently constrained patterns in such a way that the desire to express sexuality is harnessed to polarized concepts of sexual viability. The operation of patriarchal constraint focuses on us sexually. It works by polarizing society by gender, defining the genders rigidly according to sex-appropriate behavior, and then tying the intensity of sexuality to these constraints-- I think that sexual desire in women, at least in this culture, is socially constructed as that by which we come to want our own self-annihilation. That is, our subordination is eroticized in and as female; in fact, we get off on it to a degree, if nowhere near as much as men do. This is our stake in this system that is not in our interest, our stake in this system that is killing us. (MacKinnon, 1987, p. 54) Sexuality is a powerful force which may have a tendency to help individuals transcend social constraint; but when tightly constrained itself, it can also work as a conservative constraint-preserving force, as when access to sexual experience is socially organized so as to be readily available only to those who conform to the behaviors delineated by their prescribed role. This has profound effects upon the gendered construction of goodness and properness of thought, mood, personality, and behavior. These patterns are intricate, but key among them is the major pattern in which constraints upon women put a more emphatic discouragement on analytical thinking and input into the social analogue (i.e, women are considered even less than men to be capable of seeing anything for themselves, or having thoughts worth hearing) whereas the constraints upon men are more emphatic in setting restrictions on the acknowledgement, expression, and interpretation of feelings. Women are emotionally exploited as sources of empathy and rapport, for feelings as commodities separated from meaning and power and self- determined purpose. While less thoroughly distanced from feeling, females are methodically disregarded and trivialized for what they think, and are also didactically instructed in how to be in ways that emphasize feelings as commodities and emotional interaction (with men, especially) as duties and virtuous behavior, thus preserving some of the pleasant aspects of emotional existence while rendering them "safe". The advantages of having interconnected emotional rapport and interpersonal communication are thus partly preserved but separated from the social-analogue- refreshening processes (French 1985). Radical feminist observations to the effect that men parasite off of women's energies like so many vampires at a blood-feast (see Daly, 1978, for example) refer to this phenomenon. Feelings, therefore, should join sexuality and reproduction in feminist analysis of what is most thoroughly women's own, but from which they are most alienated. (MacKinnon used that phrase construction to centralize sexuality in "Feminism, Marxism, Method and the State", 1982.) Men, less discouraged from lofty cognitive processes and less behaviorally constrained in action, are tightly constrained in emotional terms. Due to the epistemological centrality of emotion, this cuts men off from a clear sense of the meaning of things. Deprived, therefore, of a good part of the information necessary for an understanding of their circumstances, men's implementation of the authority to act and the responsibility for determining action through analysis pits their authority against their lack of good comprehension of the very area of which they have charge. Although one use of the authority to act in an area about which one has very little understanding is to decide not to act at all, the situation is inherently frustrating and tends to encourage behaviors that seek control--that which can be controlled can perhaps be at least partially understood, and then at least the capacity to act may be of use. When a gendered value system that actively values the male possession of control (French 1985) exists alongside of this dynamic situation, or perhaps gives rise to it, the tendency is increased. Men, therefore, function as the agents of the prime directive of the patriarchal constraint system: establishing and maintaining control for its own sake. Under such conditions, the degree to which norms can be stretched or experimentally abandoned is sharply curtailed, and rigidly disciplined predictability is attained at the expense of flexibility and responsiveness (French 1985). I have been giving an overview of the "micro" / interactive component of radical feminist theory of oppression. On a more "macro" level, fluid-essentialist radical feminist theorists have explained themselves more often and more completely, so people are more likely to be aware of the tenets involved. This is not to say that the "macro" level is an area in which radical feminist thought is less open to attack. In seeking to understand the origins of patriarchy, radical feminist theorists confront a difficult task, since patriarchy seems to be as old as recorded history. This implies that any rendering of historical processes by which human society became patriarchal is likely to be hypothetical and beyond the scope of verification by the data available to us, now and possibly forever. Fisher (1979) and French (1985) both construct theoretical models for the origins of patriarchy, each of which contend that prior to patriarchy we existed and interacted as a social species in a manner that did not oppress women or, for that matter, anyone else. The social change that led to patriarchy is described in both hypothetical reconstructions as involving social responses and interpretations of a materially real sexual difference-- the reproductive capacity of women. I described earlier the sense in which compliance with gendered patterns can be eroticized for individuals, thus effecting constraint. On a more utilitarian and practical level, constraining sexuality directly addresses the process of reproduction, a crucial area that would probably be targeted for control by a society facing survival threats--a small, unexpected fluctuation in the birthrate in either direction or of the social circumstances of birth, for that matter, could constitute a crisis for small and precarious societies. The focus upon the politics of reproduction thus makes gender political, due to essential biological sex differences (thus making such theorists "essentialists"). The social meaning of that difference, on the other hand, is definitely not an automatic one (thus making their essentialism "fluid"), since it was different before patriarchy, and since patriarchy was not necessarily an inevitable phase anyway: If we consider that our species existed for some two hundred thousand years without imposing burdens on a subject class, and that the phenomena discussed in these pages have existed only for a little over five thousand years, during which survival has been rocky and imperfect, it is clear that the stages [of patriarchy] traced [in this book] were not inevitable in form. At the moment, it looks as if even the liberality of the evolutionary process has been stretched...patriarchy had a long run for its money...but the point of no return is close. Apocalypse or change are our only alternatives. Given the long prehistory of our species, I imagine the second will prevail. (Fisher 1979), p. 405) There is not a widely agreed-upon "myth of origin" among radical feminists, though. Marilyn French conceptualizes a historical changeover to patriarchy as the result of the tension between matrifocal society and the male desire to be more important in the overall scheme of things (which would have been a "timeless" tension until the rise of patriarchy). Elizabeth Janeway (1971) looked in the same direction as Nancy Chodorow and identified the cause of patriarchy as the psychodynamics of infant and mother or child and mother, seeing patriarchy as the (ahistorical, ongoing) male response to fears of female power which originate in each man's childhood. Robin Morgan (1982), although she does not give a specific account, strongly implies that women were for the most part responsible for leading us into the social arrangements which became patriarchy, although at the time they did so those arrangements were not destructive or oppressive to us. My favorite theorist of patriarchal origins, Elizabeth Fisher, described a historical set of conditions revolving around the social pressures of material necessity that arose during the "neolithic revolution" when we changed from hunting and gathering to farming and the domestication of animals, and posits that reproductive control came to displace reproductive capacity, both symbolically and materially, and ended up largely in the hands of men. Ultimately, verification is difficult if not impossible, but knowing the origins of patriarchy is not critically necessary for a theoretical rejection of its inevitability or goodness for the species. There is actually considerably more agreement on form and effect. Most radical feminists say that women's oppression is a fundamental model for men's pursuit of power over other people--the process of dominating women was expansively broadened to oppress category after category of men, too. The urge to dominate must exist as part of the effect of patriarchy on men; and the liberation of women from this systematic oppression is a fundamental prerequisite for the liberation of all people from what is actually a universally destructive social pattern. Once established, patriarchy has an equilibrium all its own. Deprived of input into the social analogue, individuals spend their lives disregarding their ability (and that of others) to see matters for themselves; they tend to accept this situation as normal, and even those who listen to their intuitive sensibility find interpreting what they intuit to be a difficult project. Meanwhile, patriarchy has long since come to include a self- perpetuating value system that condones physical as well as other social violence towards deviants from conceptual and behavioral norms. Patriarchy, the control-obsessed response (French 1985) of the human species to certain forms of stress (Fisher 1979), maintains a specific social analogue of reality by constraining interaction as if the elimination of individual perception (or at least the sharing of it with other individuals) were the only "reality check' keeping society functioning instead of dissolving into a meaningless collection of randomly behaving individuals holding dangerously warped concepts and behaving in destructive and unpredictable ways. Military attitudes towards individual free will and the role of individual thinking is a particularly vivid example (Slater 1991). Just as the military mode of order and control is thought to be more appropriate than democracy on the battlefield, patriarchy in general may be an adaptation to a crisis requiring order and control for similar reasons of urgency outweighing the advantages of freedom, flexibility and experimentation. French and Fisher consider the possibility that the rigidity of patriarchy may have had some utilitarian use within a limited context of scarcity and physical-environmental duress. They imply that patriarchy may be best understood as the response of the species to survival-threatening stress, a reactive valuation of control and preservation of the status quo in the face of threatening contextual situations, but that it has long since outlived that context. The worship of Control-as-God forms a closed system. Orthodoxy for its own sake is the quintessentially patriarchal process, and control of the social analogue-- which means prevention of change--is the product. The traditional patriarchal religious concepts of social order attributed order to a transcendent masculine control- obsessed God (French 1985; Johnson 1987) and denied the possibility that mere individual humans (especially women) could make improvements by contributing any new insights or meaningful critique of the existing concepts of social or physical reality. There is a modern Godless version, too-- the "monkey fallacy" (Watts 1966): According to the deists, the Lord had made this machine and set it going, but then went to sleep or off on a vacation. But according to the atheists, naturalists, and agnostics, the world was fully automatic. It had constructed itself, though not on purpose. The stuff of matter was supposed to consist of atoms like minute billiard balls, so small as to permit no further division or analysis. Allow these atoms to wiggle around in various permutations and combinations for an indefinitely long time, and at some time in virtually infinite time they will fall into the arrangement that we now have as the world. The old story of the monkeys and typewriters. In this Fully Automatic Model of the universe...[human] beings, mind and body included, were parts of the system, and thus were possessed of intelligence and feeling as a consequence of the same interminable gyrations of atoms. But the trouble about the monkeys with typewriters is that when at last they get around to typing the Encyclopaedia Britannica, they may at any moment relapse into gibberish. Therefore, if human beings want to maintain their fluky status and order, they must work with full fury to defeat the merely random processes of nature. (1966, p. 58) Therefore, preservation of the status quo and conformity to the social consensus takes a high priority; since meaning and order are believed to have arisen spontaneously rather than as the result of individual cognition and communication, people's feelings about the quality and meaning of things, including their own experiences, are relegated to the discard barrel of dismissible and dangerously volatile subjectivity. Social change is possible at all only because successful identification and elimination of deviant nonconformists, who begin to trust their own abilities to figure out life and the universe for themselves, has not been a perfect process but rather a statistically operant one. To deviate has meant to gamble. Some gambles paid off in the sense that communication of new ideas and concepts made it past the barriers of doctrine, and in chaotic, jerky spasms interaction has apparently demonstrated a long-range tendency towards loosening of constraint. When power is thought about in terms of the need for control as a response to crisis, it is possible to consider circumstances under which control / power-oriented ways of constructing social relations might be desirable without necessarily seeing power as inherently desirable and therefore inevitably sought. This makes it possible to explain its presence as the central motif in society as we know it while leaving room to theorize an alternative social configuration in which oppression would not be endemic. And oppression is intrinsic to any social system that is designed around power. Control requires inequality and tends to require hierarchical stratification, which would again be a useful adaptation to a crisis situation, since centralization of authority is a means of acquiring short- term efficiency and control at the expense of flexibility, creativity, and long-range effectiveness). Plainly, though, say the radical feminists, patriarchy has no redeeming features as a way of being for us at this point, however utilitarian it might or might not have been for us in the past-- The only true revolution against patriarchy is one which removes the idea of power from its central position, and replaces it with the idea of pleasure. Despite the contempt in which this quality has been held for several millennia, pleasure, felicity--in its largest and deepest sense--is actually the highest human good... To restore pleasure to centrality requires restoring the body, and therefore, nature, to value... If women and men were seen as equal, if male self- definition no longer depended upon an inferior group, other stratifications would also become unnecessary... The foregoing is a sketch of feminist beliefs...the movement is not aimed at overthrow of any particular government or structure, but at the displacement of one way of thinking by another...Feminism increases the well-being of its adherents, and so can appeal to others on grounds of the possibility of greater felicity. Integration of the self, which means using the full range of one's gifts, increases one's sense of well- being: if integration of one's entire life is not always possible because of the nature of the public world, it is a desirable goal. Patriarchy, which in all its forms requires some kind of self-sacrifice, denial, or repression in the name of some higher good which is rarely (if ever) achieved on earth, stresses nobility, superiority, and victory, the satisfaction of a final triumph. Feminism requires the entire self in the name of present well-being, and stresses integrity, community, and the jouissance of present experience. (French 1985, pp. 444-5) --------------------------------------- HISTORY Freedom, Structure and the Passage of Time By questioning, and then discarding the easy notion that the patriarchal oppression of women within a system that worships male power exists because men benefit from it being that way and therefore caused it on purpose, feminists found themselves moving from the old, mechanistic understandings of power, which were based on the notion of a rigid, innate connection between actors and their social location within a fossilized social structure. This was new; some of the women who thought along these lines and reached theoretical insights such as those outlined here began to realize that these theories they were formulating bore an interesting resemblance to concepts in modern theoretical physics-- Space-time is really timeless; all events are interconnected but not causally, and can be interpreted as part of a process of cause and effect only when they are read in a single direction. Thus the world of subatomic phenomena, that which underlies everything in the universe, is "feminine"--nonhierarchical, fluid, transient, many-sided, and eternal. If we apply the metaphor of subatomic phenomena to human existence, we discover an exciting new model. Interconnection, interplay, is the cause of everything that exists. Power is neither substance nor force precisely but the coming together of particular things in a certain way, at a certain moment. (French 1985, p. 499) --and-- That everything is energy, that everything moves, that everything is somehow discrete or separate, and interrelated or interconnected--these seem rather vital scientific facts that politics would do well to examine. Furthermore, as Arthur Koestler wrote, "The nineteenth-century model of the universe as a mechanical clockwork is a shambles and since the concept of matter itself has been dematerialized, materialism can no longer claim to be a scientific philosophy. Nor, I might add, can materialism any longer claim to be a political philosophy. Both quantum physics and feminism are "second generation" critiques of the old order, going even further than those "first generation" revolutions which acted against the dominant theory of determinism. (Morgan 1982, p. 291) Traditional sociological concepts have posited social structures as the determinants of the political situation of individuals, and emphasized the deterministic quality of social composite categories such as gender and class, which were seen as the fundamental "building blocks" of the social structure. Feminist theorists equated these concepts with "wave" concepts of matter and energy, to which the new theories of radical feminism were adding the "particle" understanding and including them both (Morgan 1982). Traditional "clockwork" structural-functionalist views and political-social concepts were equated with classical celestial mechanics, Newtonian and Cartesian mechanical physics, whereas radical feminism was seen to resemble the dynamic theories of Faraday, Maxwell, Einstein, and Capra (French 1985; Morgan 1982). This altered not only the vision of oppression, but also the vision of possible social transformation. While retaining the revolutionary intent and adversarial stance implied in previous conflict theory, radical feminists reconceptualized revolution, seeing in individual initiative and personal participation in the interactions of which society is formed the locus for revolutionary social change. Beneath every sociopolitical organization lies a more or less flexible morality, an interwoven set of values in which certain qualities are central...Patriarchal structures will alter as human ends change, and it is impossible to predict what new forms will supersede them. (French 1985, pp. 535, 537) --and, ultimately-- ...Though the men own the outer world, that world is merely a reflection of their totally reversed inner reality. Their having persuaded us to internalize this chimera, to let them dominate our inner as well as our outer world, is the triumph of a mirage, a sleight-of- spirit... A corollary to this...is that since reality is only what we give the energy of our belief to, what we feel as real, all systems are internal systems: patriarchy does not have a separate existence outside us; it exists only inside us and we project it onto our external screen. It follows, then, that the instant patriarchy ceases to exist inside our hearts and minds, it dies everywhere. (Johnson 1987, p. 320) The problem with these contentions for most sociologists will probably be their resemblance to "presociological" popular assumptions about people's freedom to live and behave as they see fit (and, therefore, their personal accountability for how they do behave). Agency has indeed been reintroduced here, in such a dramatic way that oppression again becomes a difficult concept. Social structure has ceased to play the coercive role of denying people their freedom and determining their circumstances. In the worst spirit of New Age mysticisms, social reality would seem to be redefined as whatever we (collectively) conceive it to be. In a sense, these are not misconstruals of feminist theory, at least not entirely. The spirit of optimism, and the conviction that social change lies within our grasp as agents who can act freely, is very much a part of the feminist vision. And yet, it is also important to see that radical feminism does not denigrate or diminish the enormity of the problem, and the real existence of structure and its capacity to oppress people is central to its theoretical tenets--indeed, is central to its theoretical origins. Philosophers may be equally bothered by the tendency of theorists to speak as if the transformation from patriarchy to a feminist future is an inevitable and irreversible process, outside of which the species could not survive for much longer, and of such intrinsically perceivable value to all people at all stations in life that its success would seem virtually preordained. And yet, feminists are deeply concerned about the need to awaken people to the priorities at hand, and engage them with these perspectives lest silence and the lack of exposure take their toll. As I said before, an intersubjectively shared but incorrect world-view of society that separates feelings from analytical thought, once established, denies people's actual lived experiences at the same time that it shapes them in particular by lying about them generally, in terms of what things mean and how they fit together. In contrast, in a context of interaction free of the cognitive restraints created by (and as) the patriarchal world-view, the fact that we all share the ability to assess our experiences and use that ability to construct and update our intersubjectively shared patterns of understanding would mean, more often than not, that the social check of communication would reveal compatibility of our individual images of reality with the images that other people have. These are two different possible situations, with aspects and elements of each situation involved in our present-day social reality. Their coexistence being ultimately irreconcilable, this implies that our current situation is a bit of a battlefield of world-views and world-possibilities. The enormity of patriarchal oppression seems to exist, paradoxically, alongside of the vitality of our capacity for deliberate social change and the virtual inevitability of eventual social transformation. One thing that may clear up these apparently contradictory assertions is a more thoughtful inclusion of the Einsteinian fourth dimension, the passage of time. Our normative notions of social arrangements, structure and power do tend to be three-dimensional: static and materialist (describing the state of being as a thing in itself). To move towards the post-materialist vantage point advocated by French and Morgan, it is necessary to do some conceptual housecleaning, altering social theories wherever they depend on descriptions of reality that do not include the unfolding of relationships over time as well as across other dimensions. The first of these conceptual housecleaning chores I wish to address myself to is a critique of Pirsig's "instantaneous" (p. 233) romantic quality experience. The hypothetical person seeing a tree cannot really experience a preanalytical timeless sense of self-in-relation-to-tree after all, since nothing occurs simultaneously. Pirsig's own critique of intellectuals who believe that events and things can only be experienced through intellectual concepts that interpret them begins with their tendency to overlook the time lag between sensory reception and intellectual awareness: You can't be aware that you've seen a tree until after you've seen the tree, and between the instant of vision and instant of awareness there must be a time lag. We sometimes think of that time lag as unimportant. But there's no justification for thinking that the time lag is unimportant... The past exists only in our memories, the future only in our plans. The present is our only reality. The tree that you are aware of intellectually, because of that small time lag, is always in the past and therefore is always unreal...Reality is always in the moment of vision before the intellectualization takes place...This preintellectual reality is what Phaedrus felt he had properly identified as Quality. ...[Intellectuals] usually have the greatest trouble seeing this Quality, precisely because they are so swift and absolute about snapping everything into intellectual form. The ones who have the easiest time seeing this Quality are small children, uneducated people and culturally "deprived" people. (pp. 221-222) Since light does not travel from place to place instantaneously, but instead has a velocity, the tree that is preintellectually sensed is also already in the past. In fact, impulses travel down human nerve fibers at a much slower rate, so the time lag between light leaving tree and light hitting eyeball is followed by a much larger time lag between light hitting eyeball and brain receiving it as visual sensory stimulation. This does not mean that Pirsig's distinction between romantic and classical Quality assessments is based entirely on faulty foundations, though. It is still reasonable to theorize that sensation and emotion precede comparison with memory and intellectual categorization of one's experiences. Thus, while the mystical authority of immediate here-and-now realness that Pirsig claims for the romantic Quality assessment does not hold up, the notion of a sensory and emotionally-driven response to reality prior to intellectual interpretation retains its political implication for sociological purposes: it can explain perception and knowledge that is not fully enslaved by culturally shared notions and ideological distortions of reality. Not all social theories survive a consideration for the passage of time with their original implications unscathed. Traditional structurally-based theories have viewed the social order, which forms the backdrop for any individual's behavior, as if it were a static, timeless entity to which the individual must respond. It is as if the patterns of human behavior that form structures were things in themselves, formed of mindless concrete like a fortress, rather than patterns of individual people who act and respond in the same time frame as the single hypothetical individual whose behavior is being explained. Traditional interactionist theories, meanwhile, have conceptualized individual human beings as if the universe had been brought into being the very instant before the micro-level interactions under consideration start to take place, so that the objectives, perceptions, and values of individuals are treated as rationally derivable from analysis of the immediate situation or else built into the human package as drives and instincts. It is as if no individual had the capacity to observe human interaction and notice patterns that would enable her to predict outcomes that would result from various possible behavioral choices. Both structuralist and interactionist perspectives, therefore, tend to be "flat", lacking a fully integrated sense of the passage of time. A more accurate perspective acknowledges that history is real and tends to be taken into account by interacting people; and that social structures are structures of dynamic motion rather than being static, and are visible only over a period of time, during which all of the individual participants can act. Social structures are the afterimages of the behaviors and interactions of individuals who have the capacity to independently perceive reality and behave with agency and purpose. The historically emergent patterns called social structure allow for predictions about outcomes of behavior which can be taken into account by individual actors in their interaction with other people because they all have locations and roles within that structure. The patterns that form those structures are alterable through the process of altering one's own individual behaviors and, especially, by intentionally affecting other individuals so as to encourage them to alter their behaviors as well. Thus, social structure patterns are both recreated and yet modified by the composite total of individual behavioral patterns. Social structure and micro-level interaction between individuals are two aspects of the same thing: they exist in a relationship with each other that is itself interactive; and as a unified thing, this relationship between individual interaction and social structure describes the human social condition as neither aspect alone can sufficiently do. These assertions may not represent an obvious revolutionary departure from conventional sociological perspectives. That human interaction and social structure are aspects of a unified whole is actually a cornerstone concept of the discipline. But, to paraphrase Heidi Hartman, the marriage of structure and interaction within sociology is like the old English common law marriages: structure and interaction are one, and that one is structure. Individual behavior is accounted for by reference to location in the social structure and exposure to the cultural milieu of ideas and concepts. Social structure is seldom accounted for by reference to individual beliefs, perceptions, observations, and resultant interactive behavior patterns. One direct result of this unquestioned belief in the primacy of structure is the widely shared and seldom questioned belief that social order, if it is to exist at all, must be imposed and enforced. Social structure, rather than something that emerges from the communication and interaction of equal and unoppressed people, is thought to require (or even consist of) a hierarchy of decision-makers in which those above have authoritative power over those below. The sociological perspective may lack the direct insistence on a necessary agent to impose social order, but in a more indirect fashion tends to see social structure as primarily causative of adequate social functioning, and since it is not seen as emergent, the imperative of having viable social structure translates into the same requirement of a hierarchy of decision-makers to maintain social order. Radical feminists do not share this assumption. French (1985, p. 500) posited that "Anarchy--order without dominance--may be a possible form for human life as well as subatomic phenomena...anarchy is not the absence of order, but a delicate interaction." By necessity, in order for such a program of interactive social change to be realized, with or without a structural blueprint for the postpatriarchal world, order of some meaningful sort adequate to address the communicative and interactive problems of individuals for which societies exist must occur without reference to any type of structured authority, without the existence of power over other people. The ability and innate tendency of individual free human beings to observe and notice patterns in the world around them directly implies that they would make predictions about the behavior of other people on the basis of social patterns that they observe, and that they would take these predictions into account in determining their own behavior. Call those observable patterns "social structure", and this becomes an assertion that individuals will notice and adapt to social structure without any formalized system of norm enforcement or systematic organization of hierarchical authority. Call this system "anarchy" and it becomes an assertion that anarchy will seek its own stable social structures without anyone having to impose them upon anyone else. It may be true that some sort of formal structure would be necessary to organize communication patterns if a highly efficient and densely populated society is to function as an anarchy. The important point is that the processes by which informal social norms constrain people's behaviors do function and do play a major role in establishing and preserving social order, and do not depend on authority, coercion, and official mechanisms for punishing nonconformity as do laws. Although existing societies may differ in the extent to which people are individually intolerant of nonconformity in general, a certain degree of cohesiveness or social gravity tends to arise from the fact that people do need each other physically, emotionally, and intellectually, and from the fact that ultimately we all share the same world and are capable of understanding each other's experience. Not everyone considers themselves to be oppressed, and among those who do, there are a great many who would have objections to the assertion I've made here, that under patriarchal constraints we are all oppressed, albeit to different degrees. In a world where the most powerful are disposed to preserving the status quo in general and deliberately accumulating more power over other people for themselves in particular, it is easy and feels right (at least some of the time) to blame them for maintaining patriarchal oppression. If they were not deliberately oppressing us, there would be nothing between us and the freedom we seek, the oppressed might say. It may be true that being oppressors does not benefit the oppressors, but they certainly seem to think it does, and they behave accordingly, with great zeal. In the face of ideology that denies the existence of oppression and social inequality, it can be very liberating to give voice to the righteous anger that the oppressed feel, and anger tends to seek a target. No culprit oppressors? It's not their fault? Such claims can easily sound as they do to Mary Daly, who accuses feminists who don't blame men of intellectual cowardice; such claims can sound like apologist ideology that negates the validity of anger and the energizing effect it can have on those who seek liberation. A third and final bit of conceptual housecleaning of the temporal-dimension sort contends with this phenomenon. There is a tendency for the less oppressed, more powerful people in the system (adults, especially men, especially materially wealthy men; etc.) to see themselves as benefiting from maintaining power over other people, despite the fact that it costs them in the long run to do so. This is important, since the tendency to see their hegemony as desirable leads to power-seeking and counter-revolutionary anti-feminist behaviors on their part (e.g., see Faludi 1991). I have already said that the sexual polarization process distances men from their own emotional sensitivities, which greatly cripples their ability to critique the social analogues of reality that are passed on to them even when these analogues do not mesh with their actual felt experiences. However, there is another major factor operating in harmony with that tendency. There would have to be: men in general may be strongly alienated from their feelings when compared to women, but no one would be able to make even simple decisions if they were completely divorced from feelings, and history shows that men are in fact able to interpret their own feelings of being oppressed by other men, despite ideologies to the contrary, and often rise up in rebellion. The simple term for it is attention span. To use force and coerce another person in order to realize one's will does, in the very long run, contribute to a global pattern of destructiveness that endangers the species as well as many other of our companion species on this planet-- patriarchy is ultimately very dangerous. Even in the middle span of one's own life from year to year and decade to decade, a person is far better equipped to get what he or she wants through the non-violent forms of communication and the building of trust and cooperative networks, because the cost and energy expenditure of coercion is so high (especially in those areas of human need that are most obvious only over a period of years: emotional belongingness, the good will of one's neighbors even under conditions of vulnerability, etc.). But in the immediacy of a situation in which one's will is at least momentarily thwarted by other people's opposition or disinclination to voluntarily cooperate, coercion may indeed seem to be less time-consuming, and if one could coerce without long-term consequences, it would be. Sometimes, such is the case. Sometimes, indeed, small-scale social conflicts may be best addressed by adrenalin-backed flight or fight response. As Marilyn French warns, it is most likely impossible to completely eliminate coercive power from human interaction, although it is probably possible to cease to base our entire social apparatus on it as the central principle. The politics of attention span, therefore, are critical to maintaining a false sense of the advantageousness of oppression. Whenever non-coercive tactics can be made to work without very high short-term costs, they tend to be far more efficient tactics because of the much more expensive results of coercion in the long run. Attention span in the general sense is a gender issue. Some researchers and theorists attribute patriarchy and coercion to a male tendency to be irritable, easily frustrated, and impatient, and declare these to be innate biological characteristics of the sex. Others are more inclined to deny the importance of hypothetical predispositions of this type in males, and emphasize that irritability and impatience are culturally constructed as "masculinity" (e.g. see Miedzian 1991). Where attention span becomes politically crucial is in the process of interpreting one's feelings, the mechanism by which one gains first-hand knowledge of one's social circumstances. Immediate situations yield immediate and visceral sensations and corresponding emotions, but social situations of great complexity cannot be felt immediately because the pattern that carries their meaning can only be observed over a long period of time. A person who has been effectively taught that feelings are ignorable and dismissible as valid sources of cognition is probably not much less likely to have immediate emotional reactions to being attacked and bitten by a pit bull, and to react on the basis of those feelings. They are, however, less likely to pay serious attention to more vague, complicated feelings full of ambivalences and curiosities and uneasinesses if those feelings don't seem to have anything to do with obvious and immediately understandable circumstances. Such a reduced emotion-driven attention span is a widespread condition under patriarchy, and particularly so among men. Situations that a woman might see as consequentially connected to behaviors of months or years before and the feelings that they caused in other people might be perceived by a masculinized man strictly in terms of the more immediate events and attitudes in evidence in the current situation. Ongoing discrepancies between actual experiences and the social analogue of expected experiences and their supposed meanings can be recognized as a pattern, but only if one has the attention span to notice them over time and make the connection. The type of non-goal-directed, introspective, feeling-oriented thinking that is necessary for these processes is not encouraged in men, and does not mesh well with the defensive strategic considerations of competitive endeavors that are. Since the desirability (for men) of power and authority over other people is directly promoted by the social analogue of patriarchal society as a fact, the process by which oppressor males would come to recognize that oppressing others is not in their best interests would involve their long-term engagement with their own feelings about the life they are living (which would be a deviant process for them). Even if it led them to question what they have been taught about the desirability of having power over other people, that desirability is closely tied in with explicitly sexual notions of masculine viability (i.e., sex as domination of women), which would imply having to question the entire conceptual construct system of what masculinity is, what heterosexuality is, and what a woman is. The process by which an oppressed male might come to recognize that another group of men have power over him is far less complicated, since it doesn't necessitate questioning the desirability of power over other people, but only of the fairness of the circumstances under which some category of men exist in power over him. Indeed, it is worth noting that male revolutions against male oppressors have abounded, but have mainly tended to replace the old bosses with new bosses, leaving the patriarchal system of power over other people, and the belief in its desirability, intact. Nevertheless, if we respond to willful oppression and oppressors' belief that they benefit from oppression by blaming them and believing that they do indeed benefit from the situation, we allow them to project their oppressive world-view as reality. Angry and determined revolutionaries who decry the injustices of the world are everywhere to be found, but so long as they concede the desirability of power over other people, they convey little besides the jealous conviction that they'd like the world better if they were the ones running it, and even though their tirades against the injustices perpetrated by the powerful often fall on sympathetic ears, they ultimately have little to offer as an alternative. The rhetoric of cynicism about those in power, so long as it is still coupled with a cynical affirmation of the desirability of such power, is the voice of those who would exchange old bosses for new bosses. The possibility of liberation lies with a different vision and a decentralized, perpetual individual politics of everyday interaction. Without a widely shared vision, and its activist expansion through communication, individual changes in interaction will accomplish little. However, each individual commands resources in the form of energy and the potential for cooperative endeavors, and if those resources are deployed in such a way as to support non- archist egalitarian interactive arrangements, and are made available most commonly to other individuals whose interactive modality is in keeping with such a vision, the energies of our agency and our belief systems goes increasingly towards realizing a feminist world and moving beyond the patriarchal one. Each individual must move against the backdrop of the social structure, and the system of social rewards and punishments leads each of us to make decisions and participate in endeavors that are profoundly patriarchal, at least some of the time. Nevertheless, at any given moment, each of us is part of what the rest of us experience as the social structure, and can make a difference in the outcomes of another's behaviors. This is rendered effective through communication, so that the likely behavior of people with the different vision of feminist interaction is known and can be predicted; therefore just as the personal is political, the theoretical is tactical. In the absence of real shifts in the ways that people make themselves available to each other, though, radical feminism is just another set of idealistic dreamware; the personal is political, it is the political, it is where politics is located for all practical purposes. There will be no meaningful opportunities to "overthrow a structure", because the problematic structures are maintained in reverberating interaction, constantly, through our everyday and moment-to- moment behaviors and belief-systems. Freedom begins with spontaneity and initiative. I can write of the inevitability of feminist transformation with confidence because I am, in fact, writing about it, and so know that action is being taken. Whatever predestination evinces a feminist outcome to the modern struggles may be evokes to explain my participation in the feminist enterprise, and in this sense it is true that the social context in which I live, when taken in its entirety and in all its complexity, can be said to be causing my behavior. However, that is not how we experience it. Ultimately, when agency is removed from consideration, causation tends to depart with it, leaving one with correlated conditions. There is much to be said for speaking from one's personal experience--that is the point from which one attains one's perspective on things--and although structure and interaction are unified and need to be understood as unified if we are to comprehend society, our perspective is the perspective of the particles that are doing the interacting. From our vantage point, structure is a verb and every one of us is engaged in its activities. History, and revolution, are ours. We make it happen. And so it is and shall continue to be. As Robin Morgan says (1978, p. 306), "May your insurrection and your resurrection be the same". --------------------------------------- References Azizah Al-Hibri. "Capitalism is an Advanced State of Patriarchy; But Marxism is not Feminism". in Lydia Sargent. Ed., Women and Revolution: A Discussion of the Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism. Boston: South End Press 1981 Earl Babbie. Sociology: an Introduction. Second Edition. 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