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Saving Objectivity for Feminism: MacKinnon, Marx, and Other Possibilities

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Jennifer Ring
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Extract

The article argues that feminist theory needs a concept of objectivity as part of its working epistemology. “Objectivity” is not, as has been argued by some contemporary feminists, inevitably a “dichotomist male epistemological construct,” leading to psychological distance and the hierarchies of “knower” and “known” that have victimized many groups in liberal society. The article analyzes Catherine MacKinnon's critique of “objectivity” as one of the most explicit, sophisticated and compelling theories demonstrating current feminist mistrust of “objectivity.” It finds that even MacKinnon uses “objectivity” in a one-dimensional manner, equating epistemological objectivity with political objectification.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 49 , Issue 4 , Fall 1987 , pp. 467 - 489
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1987

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References

Notes

1 Part 1: “Feminism, Marxism, Method and the State: An Agenda for Theory,” Signs 7, no. 3 (Spring 1982)Google Scholar; Part 2: “Feminism, Marxism, Method and the State: Toward Feminist Jurisprudence,” Signs 8, no. 4 (Summer 1983)Google Scholar. Part 1 appears in the anthology Feminist Theory, A Critique of Ideology, ed. Keohane, N. O., Rosaldo, M. Z., and Gelpi, B. C. (University of Chicago Press, 1982)Google Scholar, and citations to it here are from the anthology. Part and page references will be given within parentheses in the text and notes.

2 “Method in this sense organizes the apprehension of truth; it determines what counts as evidence and defines what is taken as verification. … The challenge is to demonstrate that feminism systematically converges upon a central explanation of sex inequality through an approach distinctive to its subject yet applicable to the whole of social life, including class” (1:13, 14).

3 In her 1984 essay “Difference and Dominance” (in Feminism Unmodified, Harvard, 1987)Google Scholar, MacKinnon does offer a more specific suggestion which may amount to a working example of “consciousness raising.” She offers a shift in focus away from egalitarian legal theory which attempts to guarantee “equality” to women by legally ignoring differences between men and women, which means women must “measure up” to the male model upon which the legal system is based. In other words, women will invariably be unjustly handicapped in such a system because the privileges of society go to men just the way they are, where women have the impossible task of trying to be as good a man as a man in order to “earn” those privileges. MacKinnon argues for a focus that understands “difference” as a euphemism for the legal dominance of men (or the male model of life) over women. “If you follow my shift in perspective from gender as difference to gender as dominance, gender changes from a distinction that is presumably valid to a detriment that is presumably suspect. The difference approach tries to map reality; the dominance approach tries to challenge and change it” (p. 44).

4 “Having defined rape in male sexual terms, the law's problem, which becomes the victim's problem, is distinguishing rape from sex in specific cases. The law does this by adjudicating the level of acceptable force starting just above the level set by what is seen as normal sexual behavior, rather than at the victim's or women's point of violation” (2:649).

5 As an overview of the scholars who focus on the continuity of thought between Hegel and Marx, see:

Tucker, Robert, in Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969)Google Scholar, argues for the unity of Marx's thought in response to Hegel. Tucker cites Marx's early preoccupation with formulating a response to Hegel's idealism, and then argues that economic theory is the solution that permitted Marx to maintain a commitment to dialectical theory, without the idealism of Hegel. Tucker notes, “The drive of Hegelian spirit to aggrandize itself to infinity in terms of knowledge becomes a drive of Marxian man to aggrandize himself to infinity in terms of money” (p. 142). And “Marx founded Marxism in an outburst of Hegelizing. He considered himself to be engaged in no more than a momentous act of translation of the already discovered truth about the world from the language of idealism into that of materialism” (p. 123).

Ollman, Bertell, in Alienation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976)Google Scholar, argues that the unifying core of Marx's thought is the “theory of alienation.” The early writings, which in their philosophical concerns are more directly a response to Hegel, are thus not so different from the later economic writings, which Ollman takes to be a variation on the theme of alienation. And alienation can certainly be regarded as a Hegelian concern. “The theory of alienation offers the ideal perspective from which to treat the labor theory of value, since it is the actual line of thinking on which its components are strung” (p. 169).

Seigel, Jerrold, in Marx's Fate: The Shape of a Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978)Google Scholar, draws an intricate psychoanalytic portrait of Marx's life and work and (rather predictably) finds Marx caught in an intense and ambivalent relationship with Hegel. Capital is treated by Seigel as a sort of regression to Marx's earlier Hegelianism: “Marx now stood closer to philosophy than he had in the Paris Manuscripts. … In 1857 … Marx was no longer fleeing from Hegel, but, quite the contrary, finding himself drawn back again into a close and powerful — albeit ambivalent — relationship with him” (p. 323).

Warren, Scott, in The Emergence of Dialectical Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, argues that Marx's dialectic is actually something of a throwback to Kant, in that Marx seeks to recapture the “concrete objective” world that Hegel neglected. “Alienation is now isolated as the key to the Hegelian dialectic, and social labor, which includes both knowing and acting, is established as the key to the resolution of that alienation. In this sense, the epistemological synthesis of subject and object, of reason and the senses, is given a practical and radically human dimension” (p. 60). “The Hegelian knowing subject is alienated by objectivity itself, while the Marxian knowing subject is offended only by alienated objectivity” (p. 56).

6 In Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich, Collected Works (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975), vol. 3Google Scholar. Hereafter cited as MECW. Volume and page references will be given within parentheses in the text and notes.

7 “It goes without saying that all forms of state have democracy for their truth and that they are therefore untrue insofar as they are not democracy” (MECW, 3:31).Google Scholar

8 “The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates” (MECW, 3:272).Google Scholar

9 That MacKinnon is vaguely aware of a grammatical dimension to the terms is revealed in her eloquent “Man fucks woman; subject verb object.” The matter is not pursued as such in her text. But there are other instances of ambiguous usages of the terms that point to the necessity of MacKinnon's looking more carefully at the variety of meanings. Consider, for example: “Sexual objectification is the primary process of the subjection of women” (1:27).

10 It is true, for example, that John Stuart Mill apologized for his use of the male generic as early as 1851. So some people were aware even in the mid-nineteenth century of the political implications of such grammatical callousness. In a foot-note in the second volume of his System of Logic Mill observed, “The pronoun he is the only one available to express all human beings; none having yet been invented to serve the purpose of designating them generally, without distinguishing them by a characteristic so little worthy of being made the main distinction as that of sex. This is more than a defect in language; tending greatly to prolong the almost universal habit of thinking and speaking of one-half of the human species as the whole” (Mill, J. S., A System of Logic [London: John W. Parker, 1851], 2:406).Google Scholar

11 I thank Hanna Pitkin for drawing this to my attention.

12 See Taylor, Charles's description of empiricism in “Marxism and Empiricism” in British Analytic Philosophy, ed. Williams, Bernard and Montefiore, Alan (London and New York: Routledge, Kegan Paul, 1966), esp. pp. 233–34Google Scholar. “This theory [traditional empiricism] essentially looked on knowledge as passive rather than active. Originally knowledge came through sense perception which was the reception of impressions on the mind. This contrasts with an alternative theory of perception and knowledge, one which has mainly been put forward by idealist theories, to the effect that perception is a form of activity, that it essentially involves some structuring of the phenomena or interpretation.”