The Mismeasure of Woman

On today’s New York Times op-ed page, financial editor Joanne Lipman asks how it is that women finally make up half the work force and are the major breadwinner in 40 percent of families and yet are still treated as either witches or bimboes.

Op-Ed Contributor

The Mismeasure of Woman

By JOANNE LIPMAN

Published: October 24, 2009

Somewhere along the line, especially in recent years, progress for women has stalled. This isn’t simply a woman’s issue; it affects us all….

Women in Philosophy

Kathryn Norlock of St. Mary’s College notes some interesting pieces that have sprung up all at once about the situation of women in philosophy.  Took them a while…

Here’s her post, copied with her permission from a message sent to the Society for Women in Philosophy email list:

Philosophers,

It’s a great day when the Philosopher’s Magazine, the New York Times, and the Leiter blog all notice that the situation for women in philosophy is in the news.  Note that some reports are more sympathetic than others, but as my president says, I’m looking forward!

The New York Times blurb is here:
http://ideas.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/02/a-dearth-of-women-philosophers/

It draws its admittedly “women are put off by adversarial culture” –focused angle from a longer and more complex argument in the TPM:
http://www.philosophypress.co.uk/?p=615

And Brian Leiter notes its circulation as well:
http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2009/10/situation-for-women-in-philosophy-makes-the-ny-times.html

Enjoy,

Kate Norlock

I welcome comments on the pieces Kate points to and on this topic in general.

Town Hall Democracy?

Here’ s a recipe for debate rather than deliberation.  Throw a town hall meeting and put a politician in the middle of the room.  In that setting, the people generally come to blame and beseech.  They don’t come to do the political work of deliberation, which is to ask themselves, on whatever the issue at hand is, what are we going to do about this?

Was it Bill Clinton who took the town hall meeting and put it to the political use of meeting and greeting the public?  The language of “town hall” invokes the ideal of face-to-face political decision making.  But when there’s a politician in the room, all the energy goes to “what are you going to do about this?” With his political gifts, Bill Clinton could turn this into an opportunity to charm the room into seeing things his way. But that’s not what a town hall meeting is supposed to do.

In a real town hall meeting, the power is in the room, not on the stage.  I attended a volatile town hall meeting in Andover, Massachusetts, when I lived there. The issue had to do with development and there were a lot of strong feelings in the room. But the energy was directed toward each other, and the live question was, what are we going to do?  How will we decide?  And are we going to be able to live with each other peaceably after we’re done?  Someone stood up and reminded everyone that years ago, on a similar issue, what “the town had decided.” We were all here trying to work out what the voice of the town was going to be on this issue, too.

That is hard work.  In deliberating, there are usually several things we want but we can’t have them all.  We have to decide what to give up, and how much we’re willing to give up, to get something else. If there’s a politician in the room, it’s easy to shrug off this work and demand that the politician fix it.  Worse, it’s easy to start demonizing and name-calling.

This summer of “town hall” fiascoes made me ill and the fall is turning out no better.  We have this sham democracy. Politicians need to meet and greet their constituencies in order to get reelected. And on the volatile issue of health care reform, citizens have nary an opportunity to think through and work through the quintessential political question of “what should we do.” Instead they’re invited to a town hall where the only opportunity to weigh in is to voice an opinion or ask a question, not to deliberate. At its best, this is a recipe for an illusion of democracy. At its worst it’s an invitation for a mob mentality, the kind we witnessed with Rep. Joe Wilson heckling Barack Obama at a joint session of Congress and then later witnessed when hordes of right-wingers descended on the National Mall to demonize Obama and all the ills they imagined.

We need to find ways to start deliberating together, to ask ourselves, what should we do and what are we willing to give up to get what we want. We need to think about the myriad consequences and effects of various courses of action. There are people trying to do this, including folks with the National Coalition on Dialogue and Deliberation and with the National Issues Forums.  Be we need more spaces for deliberation, especially online.

Digital Dialogue on Democracy and the Political Unconscious

My book Democracy and the Political Unconscious is the subject of a podcast by Christopher Long’s  Socratic Politics in Digital Dialogue:
Cultivating a Politics of Dialogue in a Digital Age.

In episode 8 of the Digital Dialogue, I am joined by Shannon Sullivan, Professor of Philosophy, Women’s Studies and African and African American Studies here at Penn State. Shannon is also the Head of the Department of Philosophy.

She has written extensively on American pragmatism, psychoanalysis, feminist philosophy and critical race theory, including two excellent books, Living Across and Through Skins: Transactional Bodies, Pragmatism and Feminism and Revealing Whiteness: The Unconscious Habits of Racial Privilege.

She joins me on the Digital Dialogue to discuss the recently publish book by Noëlle McAfee entitled Democracy and the Political Unconscious.

We focus on three specific issues:

1. McAfee’s understanding of the public sphere as a “semiotic happening” (p. 132)
2. The meaning of the political unconscious.
3. The notion of a political posture McAfee introduces briefly ( p. 84).

In the course of the discussion, we touch upon McAfee’s recognition that social media opens important possibilities for political community.

Also in the podcast they discuss how the book helps explain what’s going on in this past week’s town hall “discussions” on health care.  Check back in a day or so for a post from me on this.  For the podcast, go here.

Civil Society, or the Public Sphere?

I am ready to come clean with my worry about these two terms, “civil society” and “the public sphere.”  My political theorists friends (trained in political science departments) act and talk as if the difference between the two is patently obvious.  I just nod, a bit hesitant to admit that I don’t quite get it. Many others use the terms interchangeably to denote a NONGOVERNMENTAL arena.  Okay, yeah, I get that

Between the state and the mass of individuals there is this other, nongovernmental realm.  Hegel aside, let’s suffice it to say that by the late 20th century people were returning to the idea of civil society to point out the political importance of the nongovernmental arena of associations such as labor unions, civic clubs, higher ed, churches, bowling leagues, choral societies, garden clubs, you name it.  Some theorists included the market; others didn’t.  (This seems to me to be a huge question that didn’t get enough attention.)

At the same time, or really earlier, with Habermas’s publication of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, the term public sphere came into vogue. Habermas’s book was originally published in the 70s, if memory serves me (this is a blog so I don’t feel compelled to look it up just now). It was translated into English in the early 1990s, just when the term civil society was hitting it big.

Both terms seemed to hit the zeitgeist in the same way.  But there were some key differences. Various arenas of civil society may, at any given moment, be attending to things political, or not.  But the public sphere seems to be defined as an arena that is all about political matters.

Moreover, civil society is a demarcation of entities, asssociations, not activities. But “the public sphere” is something else. In the popular imaginary, the public sphere may be a space waiting in the wings upon which people can enter and attend to things political. But in Habermas’s conception it was something else altogether. He described it (in Steven Seidman’s 1989 volume) as the space that arises whenever two or more people come together to talk about matters of common concern.

In this sense, the public sphere is not a space but an occurence. It’s not an entity; it is a phenomenon. It is the effect of two, three, or more people coming together to figure out what to do on matters of common concern.

Where civil society seems to map formal and perhaps informal associations, the public sphere maps activities. We have here the difference between substance and process ontology. In philosophy, substance ontology focuses on the essence of things, which it generally sees as having essences and properties, with things being relatively static or at least continuous over time. It might move from a focus on a thing to its relations between things, but in general it attends to the thing itself. Process ontology doesn’t see things as fixed or having essences. It sees beings as matters of being, as phenomena. The desk upon which my hands rest isn’t a table so much as it is some matter TABLING.  Likewise, we could say that the public isn’t an entity but a phemonenon of people in relation taking up matters of common concern.  One day they might do that, and we call them a public, and another they don’t, and we don’t call them much of anything.

I still think that civil society is a useful notion, but I don’t think it should ever stand in for the more robust and specific conception of the public sphere. Perhaps we should attend to how, in a particular moment, under certain kinds of conditions, entities of civil society, and even those not seen as qualified members therein, morph into the public sphere.

if we think of the public sphere as a process and a phenomenon, as an effect of political engagement among people who may not in any way be “authorized’ to act, we can see it as a really poweful and potentially transgressive space for politics. The idea of civil society might contain that, but only the idea of the public sphere makes this manifest.

Random Summer Thoughts

1. It’s odd that no one paid attention to the adjective “wise” in Sotomayor’s comment, “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would, more often than not, reach a better conclusion.” If “wise” means anything, then all she said was a tautology.

2. It’s good that some companies are making a profit, but obscene that they’ll be handing out huge bonuses.

3. The Wall Street Journal increasingly looks like USA Today.

4. The steadiest ritual in my life, for more than 20 years, is morning with the New York Times and a cup of French roast coffee and this makes life very good indeed.  I don’t think it would be the same with an online version.

5. The social effects of Facebook have yet to be seen.

6. Twitter is the anti-Facebook.  Where Facebook is about creating a tight circle of friends, however big, Twitter is all about broadcast with a big disconnect between who one follows and who follows you.

7. It’s not as hot this summer as it was last summer, but then again I don’t live in Texas anymore.

8. Did California ever repeal Proposition 13?  Now would be a good time.

9. We want Sen. Franken to be funny, not boring.

10. And that’s the way it is, so far, in some measures, this summer of 2009.

11. Rest in peace, Walter Cronkite.

Analytic & Continental Philosophy

Yesterday the Australian philosopher Paul Patton was featured on Australia’s Philosopher’s Zone radio program. First, let’s give a huge round of applause to Australia for having a radio program devoted to philosophy.

APPLAUSE!

I’ve met Paul Patton a few times and I have always been impressed.  The main point he makes here is that the analytic / continental division in philosophy is part and parcel of the larger division in intellectual circles between science and the humanities. Patton notes that as a higher ed administrator in a research university he has come up against the perplexity of scientists who wonder just what new knowledge the humanities are discovering.  At the same time, Patton makes an impressive case that the humanities’ sort are much more engaged in the real world problems of actual peoples, especially those who have been marginalized, like the Australian aboriginal people.

Patton also notes a difference between analytic and continental philosphers over what is taken as given and taken for granted.  Analytic philosophers often take rights as given, and then they worry — quite rightly — over how such rights ought to be distributed.  [Edit: should read how goods should be distributed on the basis of these rights, not rights distributed.] Continentals worry about how such rights might, or might not, emerge at all, especially in contexts where “the other” is barely recognized as worthy of recognition.

I have been working between these traditions, mostly from the continental side but also mostly trying to engage the issues that analytic political philosophers care about more than continental philosophers seem to do.  This always gives me a sense of vertigo or imbalance. Currently I am finishing up an article on democratic “epistemology” though I feel like I am hardly getting off the ground because I can hardly recognize what epistemology, in the usual sense, has to do with democratic deliberation. I have to constantly do a self-check: am I on Neptune or are these other folks on Neptune?  Fortunately I have had lots of experience on planet earth with people actually engaged in democratic life so that I can pause and say to myself: I have something to say here.

In the end, the analytic / continental divide is best checked by  lived experience — not a seminar in modal logic.

Open Government Initiative

The Obama administration is holding an online brainstorm session on as part of its open government initiative.

How can we strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness by making government more transparent, participatory, and collaborative?

Anyone interested can go to the site, register, and then vote on ideas and add new ideas.

The Permanent Campaign

The Obama administration’s outside arm, Organizing for America, is now adding the Sotomayor Supreme Court nomination to its roster of issues that it is calling on the American people to lobby for. We the people are being called on to help the administration pass its health care and Supreme Court battles.  These are good fights; I’m all for them.  But once again I’m disappointed in the model. As I posted back in January, organizing and mobilizing are two different things.  To mobilize the public is to get the public active in supporting a given proposal. To organize the public is to help the public for so that it can decide and articulate public will and create civic capacity for change.

As it stands, Organizing for America is trying to use the campaign model that worked so well to elect Barack Obama to work again to lobby for issues.  But this isn’t going to work.  In an electoral campaign people are being asked to do something, to focus on specific action for a specific day.  Albeit limited, this is public action. Now people are being asked to hold house meetings to talk about Obama’s health care policy, to learn about it, tell stories about what that policy would mean for them, get excited about it, and maybe write their members of Congress.

They are not being asked to deliberate.  They are not being asked to think through the issue and come up with their own ideas about what kind of health care policy would work.  They are not being asked to think outside the box that is being handed to them.  (Single payer, anyone?)

Okay, this may be better than nothing.  It is nice that government is paying attention to the people.  But I worry that this lack of imagination and playing it safe will be counterproductive and give the impression that all citizens can or need do is latch on to the policies that their favorite leaders have proposed when in fact it is important that people  work through and think through issues themselves, ideally in the company of others.  House meetings would be a great place to start.  But the agenda should not be how to get policy x to win; it should be to start from scratch and think through a variety of alternatives, including, for example, single payer or any other that seems at all promising.

There’s little like this to do on a Supreme Court nomination.  That issue is a straight up issue of lobbying.  There’s nothing wrong with that.  (And I’m proud I was part of an important campaign twenty years ago to block the nomination of one especially conservative Supreme Court nominee.) A house meeting on Supreme Court issues could have a very general agenda of thinking through the role of the courts, of how representative judges should be, about the hold of past precedent versus new thinking.

Public discussion, deliberation, and organizing is good for generating public will, and if that will happens to coincide with proposed public policy, then it can be an important engine for creating civic capacity for change.

Community Organizing as a White House Strategy – To the Point on KCRW

Community Organizing as a White House Strategy – To the Point on KCRW

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