Normative discontinuities

Modern feminism is challenged by the consequences of its abiding critique of a liberal private/public divide. Claiming for itself the commitment to individuality upheld by liberal bifurcations, feminism has struggled with the task of releasing itself from the gender ideologies that cling to liberalism’s faith in a natural private freedom. Undertakings to ‘refill’ the contents of private freedoms modelled on ideals shaped in the public sphere appear to authorize ways of valuing private life that confirm the normative priority of the public. It seems that we need to revisit gendered descriptions of ideals that are supposedly intrinsic to the intimate sphere and determine how they might be reclaimed from naturalizing ideologies as freely chosen values.

We turn to those feminisms that have sought to rehabilitate as values certain frameworks and scales of significance that liberalism has passed off as ‘natural’ feminine dispositions. Beth Elshtain remains one of the most discerning voices in this kind of undertaking (1981, 1982). Elshtain consistently evokes the produced character of values silenced by naturalizing ideologies that might now be discussed, evaluated and chosen in a discriminating fashion. She sees herself as working a conceptual space between several unattractive responses to a troubled liberal divide: rejecting a feminism that seeks to fully politicize the private world, she equally repudiates the ‘privatisation’ of the public realm ‘with politics falling under its standards, ideals and purposes’. Elshtain is keen also to distance herself from a ‘rigid bifurcation’ between the two spheres ‘with the private realm conceived instrumentally, treated as a necessary basis for public life but a less worthy form of human activity'. Against these options, Elshtain is interested in ‘retaining but recasting public and private boundaries as part of an effort to preserve each yet reach towards an ideal of social reconstruction’ (1981, p. 4).

This is partly a recasting of the defensive character of a liberal public sphere which seeks to confine certain needs and capacities ‘sexuality, natality, the human body (images of uncleanness and taboo, visions of dependency, helplessness, vulnerability)’ to a supposedly naturalized status (Elshtain, 1981, p. 15). Whereas Nell Noddings (1984) is determined to reassert a supposed feminine culture against the muteness to which it has been consigned by a liberal public sphere, Elshtain is convinced that, once the dispositions of modern private life are released from naturalizing ideologies and recognized as cultural achievements, we face the task and the opportunity of assessing their valuable aspects to ‘reach towards an ideal of social reconstruction’. This commitment to a creative appropriation needs to grasp the fundaments of the private sphere as ‘the realm of

The rationality potentials of intimacy 115 particularity’. The ‘militant’s single-mindedness’ that draws out only that which makes modern private life ‘exploitative and unjust’ turns its back on the effort that is required to choose what to bring forward from the ‘taken for granted’ to attain recognition as valued human achievements and resources, whereas, as the ‘theater of particularity and everyday concrete meaning,’ this Tittle world’ exudes its own values and imperatives (1981, p. 305). This kind of‘reflective feminism’ proposes a re-evaluation, not repudiation, of contemporary family life. Once we affirm the loving concern for the lives of particular others that is upheld by family ideologies not just as natural attributes but as valuable humanizing achievements, these idealizations can pose themselves as critical needs that are constantly blocked and distorted by exploitative and unjust contexts. Elshtain makes the point that

[t]o attain and affirm an ideal of family life as the locus of humanization is, contrary to certain unreflective radical orthodoxies, to put pressure upon social structures and arrangements, not to affirm them. For to the extent that the public world, with its political, economic, bureaucratic force, invades and erodes the private sphere, it, not the private world should be the target of the social rebel and feminist critic.

(1981, p. 335)

The ‘theater of particularity’ must strive to hold its own. Taking up a theme that we already encountered in Walzer, Elshtain is convinced that ‘particular experiences and spheres of social relations exude their own values and purposes and have ends not attainable by or within other spheres.' However, she also gives the point a critical edge and insists that these are not just given attributes demanding protection from domination but are also the acquired aspirations of particular ways of interacting that require certain kinds of contexts in order to flourish. Elshtain suggests that ideals and purposes nurtured in personal life can critically interrogate the assumptions buried in those descriptions of what counts as freedom that are supplied by a liberal public sphere.

A proposal for a reconstruction of the values of private life that works with the integrity of the ‘realm of the particular’ also appeals to Honneth (2004, 2007, 2014). His contribution promises to take the discussion fotward by addressing a significant difficulty in the undertaking that has not been sufficiently registered by Elshtain. Critics make the point that Elshtain needs to address the problem of how a self-critical orientation can emerge from a private domain whose ‘own values and purposes’ are affirmed and whose separate ends ‘not attainable by or within, other spheres’ remain the only frame of analysis (Rössler, 2005 p. 26). Honneth takes the issue up. He insists that we must learn how best to negotiate between the untransferable normativities that bind the modern private and public spheres (Honneth, 2004).

Like Giddens, Honneth is keen to reconstruct the value that a modern private sphere, struggling to affirm its importance in the wake of the historical detachment of domestic life from the realm of production, gave to an idealized intimacy. Honneth finds Giddens’ concept of the ‘pure relationship’ useful to describe thenormative orientation of new private bonds that are dependent upon feelings alone (Honneth, 2004, p. 148). However, Giddens and Honneth describe the fundamental trends and imperatives of the contemporary intimate sphere differently. Giddens, we have seen, reflects upon a robust trajectory in contemporary intimate life bent on realizing its own democratic concept. Honneth does not dispute the claim that transformations within the intimate sphere have seen a plurality of relationships freed from the singular shape of a nuclear family (2014, p. 133) However, to him, the self-transformations of the intimate sphere must include the narrative of an embattled domain that has been required to call upon its own resources of love and care as it responds to the deep social problems that have been dumped upon it. Sorely tested, family life is showing signs of ‘inner, emotional disintegration’ (Honneth, 2004, p. 146). Amongst the threats, the growing individualization and privatization of working life with ‘more intense pressures to perform' and ‘ever greater pressure to succeed in the workplace’ combine with growing 'flexibility of working life' to further squeeze a ‘time-starved intimate life¹ (2014, pp. 140-41). Reflecting on the way in which these forces threaten the special values and purposes that have shaped the self-understandings of modern intimacy, Honneth agrees with Elshtain that we owe it to ourselves and to the future to ensure that we do not permit ‘through our silence, things to pass as in a dream' (Elshtain, 1981, p. 353).

How might contemporary intimacy stand against the threat posed by overburdening and alienating social contexts? In search of a stronger hand, Honneth sets up a debate between two major paradigms. He is persuaded that Hegel’s critique of a Kantian contractual model of marriage has useful insights. In part, the problem for us with Kant’s advocacy of the contractual underpinnings of modern marriage is its dated investment in ‘the central Christian notion that marriage represents a social arrangement within which human beings can satisfy their sexual desires without losing their moral dignity’ (Honneth, 2004, p. 151). Thinking for a more secular age, Rawls had reintroduced Kant's moral reasoning by arguing that the explicit moral regulation of private life sets the necessary grounds of a self-regulating individuality (Honneth, 2007, p. 172). Hegel’s concern was with the particular character of Kant’s Christian inspirations and what this affirmation of the contractual grounds of modern marriage supposedly leaves out from an appreciation of its distinctive ethical weight. Hegel puts before us the Old Testament view that ‘marriage is a completely novel institution insofar as the mutual love of both partners leads to a fusion that ultimately makes a higher-level unity out of two people’ (Honneth, 2004, p. 151). Honneth is attracted to this ‘affective model’ in which ‘the source of all moral attitudes in the family is not rational insights into rights and duties, but solely the feelings of devotion and love’ (2004, p. 153). However, he insists that both of these paradigms are needed to make sense of the normativities relevant to modern intimate life. An appeal to the rights of autonomous actors cannot alone guide conduct in the ‘realm of particularity’ where individuals are constantly called upon to restrict their pursuit of their own interests and life plans to attend to the needs of loved ones. By the same token, the conviction that the source ‘of all moral attitudes in the family is

The rationality potentials of intimacy 117 not rational insight into rights and duties, but solely feeling of affection and love’ has been exposed as a legitimating ideology for all manner of abuses. Honneth is persuaded, then, that the regimes of affection and justice will always constitute a disputed moral field in which contrasting forms of recognition continually collide (2004, p. 154). He is clear, though, that there can be, in principle, no lines drawn and no charter of trumping claims drawn up. Each intimate unit will have to constantly negotiate ‘where to set limits to the applicability of universal principles of justice’ (2004, p. 160.) When love fails as the grounds for communication of needs and family members feel their personal integrity threatened, ‘rights have to provide a space to which he or she can withdraw for his or her own protection’ (2004, p. 155).

This ‘exit strategy’ is similar to a line of thinking already started by Rawls. It is a proposal for a kind of normative double vision. As a member of a family and as the participant in a web of intimacies, it is expected that individuals will not act as the bearers of formal rights and will limit their engagements to contractual specifications. Only if he or she takes the point of view of the citizen can the family member discover the expectations of justice against which patterns of his or her intimate interactions can appear as abuse. As Honneth sees it, individuals ‘have to be able to lay claims to the principles of universal justice whenever they see themselves as no longer being recognized with the dignity of a legal person in the family community’ (2004, p. 155). The complementary juxtaposition of intimacy’s ‘moral grammar’ that escapes and sometimes questions its institutional contexts with the sanction that legal freedoms afford to the principle private autonomy is to provide the necessary checks and limits of the ‘we’ of intimate life (2014).

There are, as I see it, two things wrong with this analysis. First, a descriptive problem: Honneth overlooks the relevance of expectations of dignity and justice to an assessment of the value of our intimacies as intimacies. Herlinde Pauer-Struder rightly makes the point that ‘ [i]t would be a strange conception of love that explicitly demands excluding considerations of justice from it. The personal integrity of a person is at stake if she loves someone who treats her in ways that seem deeply unjust’ (2004, p. 166). Honneth has taken the criticism on board to an extent and subsequently has suggested that recognition of the other as a moral agent can be extrapolated from an ethics of care. Commenting on the ‘the intersubjective relationships of love’, he affirms that ‘here actions are undertaken for the sake of another person whom we have to regard as being morally worthy’ (Honneth, 2007, p. 178). It is not clear, though, that this line of thought removes the problem. To be sure, a caring love does not like to feel itself wasted and will normally find some way of approving of the beloved. However, the point is not just that judgement can be accommodated into the little worlds set up by affection and love. Rather, the little world has to shoulder different types of normative loads. Rössler finds it hard to see ‘why needs and autonomy, love and respect should not always be equally involved in moral issues within family relations’ (2005, p. 161).

A second, related, criticism is that, by not registering intimate life as a site rent by conflicting descriptions of its value, Honneth has trouble reconstructingcontemporary intimacies as the ground upon which critical motivations and needs can appear. To be sure. Honneth recognizes contemporary intimate life as a site where conflicting imperatives are negotiated. However, as he portrays it, these tensions only produce a schizophrenic personality who is split between the egalitarian respect that he or she expects as a rights-bearing citizen and his or her feeling engagements in the ‘theater of particularity'. This account of contemporary intimacy doesn’t offer much to a feminism that is interested in reflecting on intimate life as a site able to produce aspirations that could offer a critical interrogation of its unchosen institutional contexts. Honneth's search for the distinctive idealizations that underpin modern institutions, states, markets and intimate relationships commits him to the identification of intimacy’s singular moral grammar (Blatterer, 2015, p. 85). These governing theoretical purposes prevent him from addressing the internal tensions within intimate life that might fire up new and critical aspirations.

Giddens’ reconstruction of the democratic trajectory of a self-transforming intimacy also compromises a critical orientation. As already noted, he reflects upon the agency of ‘women—ordinary women, going about their day-to-day lives, as well as self-consciously feminist groups' in pioneering changes of ‘great, and generalizable, importance in contemporary intimate life’ (1992, pp. 1-2). However, we can only recognize these changes as emancipatory gains because they confirm the normativity of interactions upheld by a democratic public. Thus, picked out by normative frame set by the public sphere, there is no register here of new needs shaped within the intimate sphere. Yet the intimate sphere has, as Elshtain insists, not only generated needs for democratic interactions, it has also produced a range of preoccupations whose claims have been silenced by naturalizing ideologies. Needs for authentic self-expression nursed by a sympathetic intimacy may well be alienated by the principled terms in which a democratic public describes generalizable interests. While these needs camiot be simply subsumed into the languages and ideals of the public sphere, they might be able to give them new meanings. We might expect a different account of what counts as reasonable interactions once demands for authenticity that are fired up within intimate life register the limits of an egalitarianism that presupposes a relationship between a certain type of self.