Normative continuities

Modern feminism has always struggled to settle accounts with liberalism. Carole Pateman’s The Sexual Contract (1988) offered a path-breaking feminist critique of the idea of a pre-political realm of freedom upon which a liberal construction of a private/public split rested. On her account, a liberal public sphere drew free and equal men together to defend their paternal power in a private realm that was organized around the subordination of women in marriage. Pateman’s radical critique of the sexist practices and patriarchal ideologies that propped up the ‘natural freedoms’ protected by a public of men attacked the oppressive gender ideologies that seemed to be inherent within liberal private/public divisions. As Wendy Brown later observed though, ‘liberalism has become one with modernity rather than a position within it’ (Brown, 1995, p. 138). She made the point that feminism typically recognizes its indebtedness to the principle of individuality that was built into liberalism’s private/public divide and so too accepts that it needs to find new ways of describing our private freedoms. Rössler referred to the challenge as a matter of a symbolic ‘re-filling’ of the contents of private freedom once the ideological load carried by liberalism’s naturalizing constructions had been exposed (200, p. 33)

Susan Moller Okin’s Justice, Gender and the Family ( 1989) still occupies a key place in feminism's attempt to reconstruct private freedoms in the wake of its critique of liberalism’s faith in their givenness. Okin insisted that this reconstitution would require more than an attempt to ‘read back’ into the private sphere democratic, egalitarian norms that had been forged in public life. Her understanding of what was involved was partly shaped in response to a critique of the repressive gender assumptions that seemed to cling to John Rawls’ account of social justice. Its prejudicial assumptions of justice as the self-regulation of interactions between autonomous subjects who were assumed to have the responsibilities of ‘heads of households’ meant that this account could not provide a normative floor for the private sphere that feminism might live with. Despite promising beginnings, Rawls’ theory as a whole did not, Okin complained, ‘depart from the liberal tradition’s failure to perceive the family as a political institution, to which principles of justice should apply’ (Okin, 1991, p. 47). Taking a step back from this search for normative continuities, Okin found that Michael Walzer's reflections on liberal democratic societies divided into distinct ‘spheres of justice’ had much to offer to a feminism keen to reflect upon the special normativities of the private sphere. Walzer’s open-ended distributive principle according to which ‘[n]o social good x should be distributed to men and women who possess some other good y merely because they possess y and without regard to the meaning of x’ (Walzer, 1983, p. 20, italics in original) seemed attractive. In the end, though, the ‘separate spheres' framework only offered a general heuristic that would still need to be filled out with a feminist reflection on the ‘meaning of x’. The particular ‘goods’ that had to be negotiated in a normatively reconstructed private life would have to be scoped. Here Okin encountered difficulties. In the end, expectations invested in public justice still provided the normative framework for her deliberations on the significance of private life. In particular, Rawls' persuasion that private interaction acquired their general significance by providing the moral training ground for citizens reappeared in Okin's reworking.

By the early 1990s, Giddens’ explorations into the transformations taking place in contemporary intimacies seemed to push the discussion forward in an important way. He described the intentions of The Transformation of Intimacy as follows:

I don’t attempt to analyse how far gender inequalities persist in the economic and political domains. I concentrate instead upon an emotional order where women—ordinary women, going about their day-to-day lives, as well as selfconsciously feminist group have pioneered changes of great, and generaliseable, importance.

(1992, pp. 1-2)

Giddens undertook to reflect upon normative bridges that were being built, in everyday innovations, between the private and the public spheres. On this narrative, intimate life had been transforming itself towards the realization of its own highest potentials as it edged towards a confirmation of commitments outlined in an egalitarian, democratic public sphere. Contemporary intimacy ‘implies a wholesale democratising of the interpersonal domain in a manner fully compatible with democracy in the public sphere’ (Giddens, 1999, p. 3).

Hannah Arendt reflects upon the emergence of the intimate sphere from the struggle to determine the value of a private life whose functionalized significance had been eroded as activities of the domestic life were subsumed under the exchange imperatives of the social (1958). When Giddens takes up this theme of the fashioning of the specific value of intimate life, he begins with the important place of romantic love. The passionate, unwilled attraction for the other of an individualized romantic love opened up a cultural space for a new intimacy. For the first time, love was associated with freedom. Romantic love’s promise of ‘at first sight’ compulsive, once and for evermore dedication to the beloved challenged conventional and instrumentalizing bonds and placed love at the service of a nascent, self-realizing personality. Romantic love presumes that ‘a durable emotional life can be established with the other on the basis of qualities intrinsic to the tie itself (1992, p. 40). The reflexivity of a self-preoccupied romantic love thus gives love a central role in the emergence of what Giddens called the ‘pure relationship’, a relationship that subordinates itself to no external purposes.

In search of its own concept, the evolutionary unfolding of the intimate sphere was pushed along under the impetus of a romantic idealization of the pure

The rationality potentials of intimacy 113 relationship. However, to reach its highest concept of ‘confluent love’, this evolutionary development first had to clear away certain aspects of a romantic legacy to allow the essentially democratic imperatives of a mature intimacy to flourish. In particular, a self-referring ‘projective identification’ that wrapped the lover in his/her own feelings and so blinded him/her to the concrete particularity of the beloved had to be unseated. ‘Opening oneself out to the other, the condition of ... confluent love is’, Giddens remarks, ‘in some ways the opposite of projective identification, even if such identification sometime sets up a pathway to it’ (1992, p. 61). This is a self-transformation that encounters losses as well as gains. Confluent love jars with the ‘forever’ and ‘one and only’ promises of romance and instead insists on the negotiated mutuality of its interactions. ‘The more the finding of the "special person” recedes the more it is the special relationship” that counts’ (1992, p. 62). However, Giddens is certain that a self-transforming intimacy that has been moving towards the clear and generalizable norms of mutuality and reciprocity between equal partners is on an emancipatory track that reproduces the expectations of civic freedom. The norms of a confluent love articulate the ‘overwhelming concern with how individuals might best determine and regulate the conditions of their association’ that is ‘characteristic of virtually all interpretations of democracy’ (1992, p. 185).

It might seem that Giddens completes a story that Okin began to tell and even resolves some of the narrative’s earlier difficulties. In both cases, we recognize an ambition to model the freedoms of intimate life on the democratic, egalitarian norms of the modern public sphere. At least in Giddens, these ideals of democratic mutuality encountered in an evolving intimate life acquire their own distinctive modalities. However, problems reappear in this attempt to reconstruct normative continuities between a self-transforming intimacy and the value commitments of a democratic public. For one, Giddens suggests an overly normative account of the processes reshaping intimate life. ‘Projective identification' is, as empirical studies by Eva Illouz and others confirm, no superseded episode in the narrative of intimacy. It continues to make its claims upon ‘ordinary’ and ‘self consciously feminist’ women alike (Illouz, 1997). Indeed, it has been plausibly argued that the romantic construction of love as a ‘mere feeling', constantly re-energized by a consumer culture, has actually wound back the sober intelligence of a confluent love (Evans, 2003). It seems that our reflections on the cultural significance of intimate life need to make room for both the pull of unaccountable, romantic passion and the push of expectations of mutuality and reciprocity between equals.

Giddens’ account of the transformation of intimacy is not just too normative. From another point of view, it is not normative enough. On his account, a selftransforming intimacy tracks a path whose worth is confirmed by values shaped outside it. There is no room here for an account of intimate life as a crucible for needs that contest conventions encrusted onto democratic norms affirmed by a liberal public. Rather, the democratic give and take of a confluent love is presented as the normative terminus for an evolving intimate sphere and promises to stabilize the unruly, inchoate passions that set it in motion. Suspicions that this teleological history of progress towards a well-managed intimacy hides someimportant losses seem to be confirmed when Giddens recommends ‘therapeutic works and self-help manuals’ as a guide to ‘accurate accounts of the changes affecting personal life’ (1992, p. 64). At odds with his announced intention to reflect on the process of contemporary intimacy towards its own highest cultural potentials, Giddens’ evolutionary narrative ends up confirming a framework that is principally invested in the reduction of existential complexity.