Between Consensus and Deconstruction: A Feminist Reading of Dialogue

5 Between consensus and deconstruction

A feminist reading of dialogue

MART I N L E E T AND RO L AND B L E I K E R

Dialogue has become one of the most central and intensely debated

issues in political and moral philosophy. The implications that these

debates have for our understanding of gender and identity are parti-

cularly important, though they are neither clear nor uncontested.

Feminist scholars have, indeed, been rather ambivalent about the role

and nature of dialogue. Dialogue is generally seen as a crucial element

of an emancipatory approach, for it can provide women with a voice

and thus create the preconditions for engendering a more just social and

political order. But many feminist scholars are, at the same time, scep-

tical about how prevailing approaches to dialogue are conceptualised.

They are particularly worried about framing dialogue as an effort to

reach a global consensus, for many previous modern attempts to estab-

lish universal norms have been based on explicit but linguistically

masked value systems that define the male as norm and the female as

deviant.

To understand the importance of these linkages between dialogue,

identity and gender it is necessary to take a step back and consider how

dialogue became such a central philosophical issue in the first place. The

history of philosophy is sometimes divided into three general periods:

the ontological, the subjectivist, and the linguistic.1 The ancient philo-

sophies and world religions provided comprehensive accounts of the

cosmos in which humans were situated; modern philosophy was born

with the ‘discovery’ of subjectivity by thinkers such as Descartes and

Kant; while present-day philosophy is defined by ‘the linguistic turn’, a

recognition that language practices set out what we can know about

Roland Bleiker would like to acknowledge the grant support of the NationalResearch Foundation for Korea (NRF-2010-330-B00151).1 See Dieter Freundlieb, Dieter Henrich and Contemporary Philosophy: TheReturn to Subjectivity (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003).

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ourselves and the world.2 As with all such categorisations, this one is

contentious, and closer examination of individual theorists and tradi-

tions reveals a complexity that confounds the threefold division. It does,

however, help us understandwhy dialogue has become such a dominant

concept in contemporary political theory.

The idea of the linguistic turn has a cognitive connotation insofar as it

outlines a methodology for gaining insight and knowledge. It emphasises

the way in which subjectivity is far from complete and autonomous,

but is instead constituted by social practices. Nancy Fraser describes it as

‘an epochal shift in philosophy and social theory from an epistemological

problematic, inwhichmind is conceived as reflecting ormirroring reality,

to a discursive problematic, in which culturally constructed social mean-

ings are accorded density and weight’.3 Terrell Carver writes in this

volume of gender being ‘a property of language’, meaning that indivi-

duals live and think throughmeanings that are always already embedded

in and constituted through language.4

The linguistic turn has a clear ethical import that is brought out more

explicitly by another widely used expression, ‘the dialogical turn’. The

movement away from subjectivity is not simply a register of the cognitive

deficits of the Cartesian paradigm. It is also a reaction in horror at the

violencewrought bymodernity’s emphasis upon the self at the expense of

the other. The turn to dialogue represents a systematic effort to learn

from and somehow reverse the troubling experience of a reason reduced

to the calculation of the best means to achieve a selfishly defined end.

Modernity, in its celebration of subjectivity, appears to have released a

self that aims to secure its objectives at any cost. The insistence on

dialogue is a halting of the logic of this process, a process that continues

to have a powerful momentum across the domestic and global political

scenes. Yet whilst the dialogical turn now forms a general horizon of

progressive politics, its nature and potential are hotly contested. There is

no clear agreement about what dialogue means and what it can achieve.

When scrutinised from a gender-sensitive perspective, one feature

stands out in particular: just as the self released by modernity has

2 See Michael J. Shapiro, Language and Political Understanding: The Politics ofDiscursive Practices (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981).

3 Nancy Fraser, Pragmatism, Feminism, and the Linguistic Turn, in FeministContentions: A Philosophical Exchange, ed. Seyla Benhabib et al. (London:Routledge, 1995), p. 157.

4 See Chapter 4 above.

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typically had masculine characteristics, so, too, the turn to dialogue has

often been cast in masculine terms. We thus begin this chapter by exam-

ining how this has been the case.We note, in particular, that dialogue and

its possibilities have been repeatedly compromised because it has often

been put forward in the terms of the modernist longing for certainty.

Whilst dialogue is presented as a pluralising force able to open up to

difference, this potential is contained and denied by the counter-movement

of a demand to anchor dialogue in a universal foundation that could

provide the basis of an overarching consensus. We examine this tendency

by focusing on the work of Jürgen Habermas. We also note that the

ensuing restrictions of dialogue have spawned a series of critiques that

seek to clear the ground of the warping influence of various assumptions,

categories and expectations. What can be described as a ‘responsibility to

otherness’5 animates this movement of critique. It is an attempt to realise

fully the potential of dialogue to allow for difference, to include the voices

of others, such as those of women, who tend to become marginalised

through universal and almost inevitably masculine consensual models.

The main objective of this chapter is to draw upon feminist theory in

order to assess the potential and limits of such engagementswith dialogue.

Feminist theorists have continually sought to contest the concepts and

categories that inhibit discussions and discourse among women of differ-

ent class, racial, ethnic and spatial backgrounds. Dialogue has had to

repeatedly break free of a priori restrictions and throw away theoretical

baggage time and again. Here we examine the work of Judith Butler as an

illustration of how post-structural approaches deal with the challenge of

dialogue. We show how feminist theory has made a key contribution by

bringing identity back into discussions of dialogue. But rather than

assuming a preconceived – and thus inevitably male – universal subject,

feminist theory problematises subjectivity. It draws attention to how the

constitution of identities is part of prevailing masculine forms of exclu-

sion. It also stresses how an appreciation of identity and its potential can

become an important aspect of a progressive dialogical turn.

The negative orientation of these post-structural critiques, however,

tends to leave behind a devitalised conception of dialogue. Whilst sensi-

tivity to and awareness of the exclusion of difference are themselves forms

of political practice, there are still some needs for identity and shared

5 See Stephen K. White, Political Theory and Postmodernism (CambridgeUniversity Press, 1991).

122 Martin Leet and Roland Bleiker



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understanding in politics. In addition, the selves engaging in dialogue are

often left out of discussion in light of the linguistic and dialogical turns,

and yet the motivations and orientations of these selves are critically

important to the course of dialogue. What more can we say about these

issues? Is it possible to theorise further about the relations of identity and

difference, as well as how to bring about the subjective qualities of

sensitivity and ethical mindfulness needed at the intersection of gender

and politics?

The last two sections of this chapter consider these questions. We

argue that an aesthetic approach to the issues allows for further theoret-

ical explorations. First, an aesthetic model of dialogue between diverse

constituencies provides an alternative to both a consensus-oriented

approach as well as to a post-structuralist focus on exclusionary effects.

We argue that there is more room for both identity and difference in

politics when contrasting interpretations and understandings are consid-

ered in aesthetic terms. Second, aesthetic considerations are able to

incorporate issues of the ethical formation of selves without falling into

the traps of fundamentalism and thus address a lacuna in many concep-

tions of dialogue. For not only is there a multiplicity of voices in con-

versations among diverse constituencies, there are also the variety of

voices competing for attention within ourselves. The typical emphasis

on dialogues with others needs to be complemented by an aesthetic

concern for these dialogues within. Feminist sources are particularly

important here, for they show how navigating between a person’s multi-

ple identities can open up space not just for critique of existing exclu-

sionary practices but also for productive dialogues across difference.

A brief disclaimer is in order beforewe start.We consider our approach

to be feminist even though we depart from one of the key principles of

feminist theory: that analysis of social and political phenomena should

start with the concept of gender rather than add it to existing debates

that are already framed in masculine terms. Some of the most compelling

feminist insights have, indeed, been reached in this manner. Consider

how some of the leading feminist contributions to international relations

scholarship have emerged not from critiquing prevailing scholarly

debates, but from sidestepping them, from theorising the international

by starting with voices from the margins. Scholars such as Cynthia Enloe

and Marie Mies have sought to understand how world politics looks if

conceptualised from the vantage point of women situated in households,

assembly lines, sweat shops, farms, secretariats, guerrillawars and brothels




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that have sprung up around foreign military bases. By doing so, these

scholars have shownhow ‘relations between governments depend not only

on capital and weaponry, but also on the control of women as symbols,

consumers, workers and emotional comforters’.6 In view of these com-

pelling inquiries, we have long debated about how to best engage the

links between dialogue, gender and identity. In the end, we decided

that the issues at stake cannot be appreciated fully without first under-

standing the unusually strong association of dialogue with amasculine

quest for certainty.

1 In the slipstream of masculine modernity: dialogueand the quest for certainty

Utopian dreaming is an addiction of modernity. For centuries, many

theorists and practitioners have been propelled by a burning ambition

to find a universalism upon which a just social order could be built.

The background of the search for utopia in modernity, for reassurance

about the future, is the loss of certainty. Anxiety has propelled the

progressive impulse to seek out a compelling truth that can compensate

for the breakdown of a homogenous culture. Every so often, this

impulse tires and suffers moments of resignation, but it is continually

kept alive and nourished by repeated bouts of nausea and vertigo. We

still live with what Nietzsche described as ‘the death of God’. William

Connolly offers one of the most illuminating contemporary interpreta-

tions of the long struggle in a modern world where there is no longer a

God that serves as a unifying centre for humanity. He shows that while

successive attempts to ground certainty in other external sources run

into grave difficulties, the insistence that such foundations must be

found has remained a prominent modern theme.7

The turn to dialogue within contemporary political theory challenges

this deeply entrenched modern quest for certainty but remains caught

within it at the same time. It can be seen as an attempt to interrupt the

violent logic of a self, whether at the individual or collective level, that

6 For instance, Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making FeministSense of International Politics (London: Pandora, 1989), p. xi; Maria Mies,Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women and the InternationalDivision of Labour (London: Zed Books, 1986).

7 William E. Connolly, Political Theory and Modernity (Ithaca, NY: CornellUniversity Press, 1993 and 1988).




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reduces everything to its own terms, the terms of sameness. Dialogue

is the alternative to an unimaginative and patronising monologue. It is

an opportunity to disturb a dogmatic slumber, to engage rather than

silence, to contest rather than submit.

We are learning from past mistakes, but it is still difficult to extricate

ourselves from the network of philosophical concepts supporting the

impulse for utopia. Feminism, and progressive politics more broadly, has

had to become more attentive to the injuries it has incurred in the course

of its struggles, and yet it is still prone to reiterating these same injuries.

Wendy Brown notes that ‘ostensibly emancipatory or democratic political

projects’ can often ‘problematically mirror the mechanisms and configu-

rations of power of which they are an effect and which they purport to

oppose’.8 It can come as little surprise, then, that ‘dialogue’, seen as a way

of remedying the exclusion of difference, has also been caught up in the

slipstream of the sometimes violent longing for an ideal state.

The nature and potential of dialogue is generally framed within

broader accounts of intersubjectivity. Hegel is a pivotal figure in this

regard. Beatrice Hanssen notes that ‘as the ally of . . . left-leaning lib-

erals, Hegel’s chapter on self-consciousness, especially the section on the

master–slave dialectic from the Phenomenology of Spirit, has been

mined for its models of recognition, intersubjectivity, and alterity,

which, it seems, never have been more popular than at present’.9 As

Hanssen alludes, though, Hegel’s account is interpreted in a variety of

ways. For Habermas, it describes a momentous shift from ‘the philo-

sophy of the subject’ to communicative rationality as the foundational

support of social and political theory.10

We focus onHabermas here because he is not only the most influential

contemporary contributor to debates on dialogue, but also the one that

epitomises most explicitly the struggle between renewing and breaking

free from the modern quest for certainty. Contrary to many simplistic

critiques of his work, Habermas does not anticipate that dialogue will

ever be pure and ideal. Habermasian dialogue takes place amongst

power, interest, conflict and the general array of human conditions that

8 Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity(Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 3.

9 Beatrice Hanssen, Ethics of the Other, in The Turn To Ethics, ed. Marjorie Garber,Beatrice Hanssen and Rebecca Walkowitz (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 128.

10 Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans.Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987).




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limit severely our potential to discuss openly. Diana Coole (in Chapter 7

below) points out how his notion of an ‘ideal speech situation’ combines

a particular value – the content has emerged out of dialogue – with an

inevitably more complex real-life situation (see also Barbara Fultner in

Chapter 2 above). But there is still an idealising force in play, which

accompanies our attempts to communicate. This dynamic of idealisation

occurs in terms of the ‘validity claims’ we cannot avoid raising in lingui-

stic interaction. These claims, according to Habermas, anticipate a con-

sensus among participants and it is this counterfactual anticipation that

acts as a centripetal force holding polities together, in spite of all the

factors that contradict and deny actual consensus.

The search for truth and universalism, in this account, cannot be

suppressed since it is virtually an anthropological feature of being

human. Despite the proliferation of difference and pluralism, a unifying

force remains intact. However far we drift apart inmodernity, in terms of

our ‘backgrounds of biographical and social-cultural experience’, argues

Habermas,11 we must still reproduce our social lives through language.

And since linguistic communication has built into it a normative content,

we are ‘forced’ to keep a dialogue going in which the hope for consensus

lives on. Habermas, himself, admits these claims may sound dogmatic,

but they are, in his words, ‘“dogmatic” only in a harmless sense’.12

The problem with Habermas’s harmless dogmatism is that it tends

to truncate the potential of dialogue to open up to the other. Instead

of cultivating an ethics of difference, Habermasian dialogue is shot

through with an overriding need to reach consensus for the sake of

the more highly regarded value of social integration. Romand Coles’

reading of Habermas detects an anxiety about the need to have widely

accepted forms of knowledge govern social life. We get the impression,

he says, that there is a relentless ‘pressure to adapt’ to uncertainty

built into the very conditions of human life, a pressure which makes it

crucial for human beings to agree about appropriate courses of action.

Individuals exist ‘under conditions of finitude and scarcity’ and so

meaning that is identical for participants in interaction is vital ‘in

order to facilitate the speedy and precise coordination of complex

11 Jürgen Habermas, Questions and Counterquestions, in Habermas andModernity, ed. Richard Bernstein (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1985), p. 192.

12 Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a DiscourseTheory of Law and Democracy, trans. William Rehg (Cambridge: Polity Press,1996), p. 446.




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interactions’.13 Even with the move from action to discourse, which in

Habermas’s theory is supposed to suspend the pressures of everyday

life, the compulsion to agree and adapt in response to intersubjective

uncertainty maintains the telos of consensus as the defining principle

and motivation. In Coles’ words, ‘like an overly flexed muscle or a

muscle formed through a singular kind of flexing, the structure of the

pressurised “normal” defines the operation’.14

2 Feminist engagements with debates about dialogue

The notion of dialogue is undoubtedly appealing to many feminist

theorists, not least because it breaks open discussions about how the

modern self has traditionally been marked by masculine characteristics.

Marie Fleming notes that ‘there is considerable support among feminists

for a dialogical model of understanding. In looking to dialogue, feminists

reject the Western image of the individual knower intent on purifying

himself of bodily and historical distractions in the pursuit of value-

neutrality and objectivity.’15 Bice Maiguashca, likewise, sees dialogue

as one of the key features informing feminist theorising.16

At the same time, many feminists are sceptical about how dialogue

has been conceptualised. They are particularly worried that a global,

consensus-oriented approach to dialogue implicitly revolves around

masculine values, thus further entrenching the marginalisation of

women from political and social life. The issues at stake become partic-

ularly problematic when cross-national and cross-cultural dynamics are

at play. This is why Kimberly Hutchings (in Chapter 3 above) warns of

the type of ‘assimilative universalism’ that is entailed in Habermasian

approaches to ethics. They risk subsuming a great variety of different

identities and life experiences into a hierarchy of power that revolves

around a common notion of being: one that is based on western and, in

particular, liberal values.

13 Romand Coles, Rethinking Generosity: Critical Theory and the Politics ofCaritas (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), p. 141.

14 Ibid., p. 170.15 Marie Fleming, Gadamer’s Conversation: Does the Other have a Say?, in

Feminist Interpretations of Hans-Georg Gadamer, ed. Lorraine Code(Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), p. 109.

16 Bice Maiguashca, Making Feminist Sense of the ‘Anti-Globalisation Movement’,Global Society 20:2 (2006), p. 123.




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These recent critiques of procedural universalisms are part of a much

longer tradition of feminist scholarship – a tradition that shows convin-

cingly how historical attempts to establish neutral, objective and global

systems of values and political actions are often based on subtle, gen-

dered systems of exclusion.17 Feminist theorists have demonstrated how

the very idea of ‘epistemological objectivism’ – knowledge independent

of a subject – is often intrinsically linked with a particular and often

masculine world-view. DonnaHaraway, for example, analyses scholar-

ship on primatology and shows how scientific discourses interweave

fact and fiction. Looking at such aspects as research design or data

interpretation, she suggests that this interweaving produces clear west-

ern and sexualised values.18

Feminist scholars have thus paid particular attention to how some

voices and forms of representation tend to become universalised while

others remain marginalised. Catherine Eschle does so by stressing

that there is a long history of women being marginalised by the type

of dialogical practices that are operating within democratic ideas and

institutions. Attempts to establish a consensus-oriented and globally

anchored framework for dialogue thus also risk replicating the same

processes of exclusion on a larger scale.19 Eschle points out that this

scepticism is particularly strong among feminists from the third world,

who reject the idea that women around the globe share enough experi-

ences to make a common, global position possible or even desirable.20

17 Suzanne Bergeron, Political Economy Discourses of Globalization and FeministPolitics, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 26:4, special issue(2001), p. 984.

18 Donna J. Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World ofModern Science (London: Routledge, 1989), and Simians, Cyborgs, andWomen:The Reinvention of Nature (London: Routledge, 1991). See also Sandra Harding,The Science Question in Feminism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986).

19 Catherine Eschle, ‘Skeleton Women’: Feminism and the AntiglobalizationMovement, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 30:3 (2005),p. 1742, and Engendering Global Democracy, International Feminist Journal ofPolitics 4:3 (2002), p. 316.

20 Eschle, EngenderingGlobalDemocracy, p. 329. See alsoChandraTalpadeMohanty,Feminist Encounters: Locating the Politics of Experience, in Feminism and Politics,ed. Anne Phillips (Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 254–72; ArienMark, ed., TheStatus of Women in the Developing World, Social Research 69:3, special issue(2002); Payal Banerjee and Moushumi Shamnam, Ten Years after Beijing,International Feminist Journal of Politics 8:3 (2006), pp. 430–7; Amrita Basu,Inderpal Grewal, Caren Kaplan and Liisa Malkki, eds., Globalization and Gender,Signs: Journal ofWomen inCulture and Society26:4, special issue (2001), pp. 943–8.




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Dialogue is, of course, not the only form of power that strives for

universal validity and in doing so, establishes a regime of inclusion and

exclusion. Power insinuates itself in all aspects of human relations – a

recognition that has become well accepted at least since Nietzsche and

was then rendered more popular through Foucault. Terrell Carver (in

Chapter 4 above) extends this line of thought and stresses that power is

an inevitable aspect of language, and, as a result, can be ‘intersubjec-

tively negotiated but not abolished’. Since dialogue cannot take place

outside language, power is an inevitable part of all attempts to bring

multiple voices into a conversation that strives for consensus or, at least,

for mutual understanding.

It is thus not surprising that feminist theorists influenced by discourse

ethics have often sought to retain the general orientation of Habermas’s

approach while modifying it to account for the tendency to privilege

male over female, identity over difference. Seyla Benhabib, for example,

seeks to better ‘situate’ the self and reason in order to compensate for

Habermas’s abstract formalism and proceduralism;21 in doing so, she

appeals to the idea of the ‘concrete other’ as the partner of dialogue in

contrast to the ‘generalised other’ of Habermas.22 Other feminists read

the linguistic turn and dynamics of dialogue quite differently and argue

that merely modifying, rather than abandoning, a Habermasian notion

of dialogue is insufficient. The orientation to agreement invites a move-

ment of abstraction and generalisation that generates categories insen-

sitive to difference. GeorgiaWarnke notes that this is one of the reasons

that feminists have found major problems with utilising the category of

‘women’.23 It is a concept that falsely generalises the different experi-

ences and circumstances of actual women, obfuscating the impact of

sexuality, race, ethnicity, locale and other factors. Warnke also fears

that the category of ‘women’ constructs an identity that oppresses and

imprisons rather than serves women in the struggle against discrimina-

tion. The very use of the category implicates one within already preju-

diced and oppressive understandings, reiterating domination rather

than challenging it.

21 Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self (London: Routledge, 1992).22 Seyla Benhabib, Critique, Norm and Utopia (New York: Columbia University

Press, 1986).23 Georgia Warnke, Hermeneutics and Constructed Identities, in Feminist

Interpretations of Gadamer, ed. Code, p. 57.




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This latter critique is particularly well developed by theorists influ-

enced by post-structuralism. They see the self in terms of its generation

within a system of meaning that establishes identity according to a logic

of exclusion. They see dialogue as a vortex of struggle and conflict in

which ‘validity claims’ are simply another ruse of power.

We focus on Judith Butler here, because she is one of the most prom-

inent feminist scholars who exemplify such post-structural critiques of

dialogue. Butler speaks of a ‘post-liberatory insight’.24 She believes we

can no longer engage in a naive politics of liberation and emancipation,

for there is no essence of subjectivity to liberate; there is only the reiter-

ation of power in different ways. Agreement, or the reliance upon con-

sensus and foundations to orient critique and practice, limits the

politicisation of identity and difference. Butler observes that the meth-

odological demand ‘[t]o expose the contingent acts that create the appear-

ance of a naturalistic necessity’ has been felt at least since Marx.25 But

she wishes to take things further than the ideological critique of critical

theory by mobilising innovations in this tradition of suspicion, such

as Foucault’s procedure of ‘genealogy’ and Derrida’s method of ‘decon-

struction’. For Butler, these more recent approaches are useful precisely

because they unsettle the very motivations supporting a progressive

impulse launched by the search for freedom and certainty. We can no

longer be content, she claims, with a critique aimed at questioning norms

that, by being naturalised, have restricted the freedomof subjects. Rather,

we must go further and question the nature of subjectivity itself.

Butler insists that the postulation of a ‘before’, ‘outside’ or ‘beyond’ of

subjectivity or power is both a ‘cultural impossibility’ and a ‘politically

impracticable dream’.26 This is why she pursues a Nietzschean critique

of ‘the metaphysics of substance’ intent on exposing how grammatical

conventions are turned into statements about ‘reality’. This critique, in

Butler’s view, deconstructs ‘the very notion of the psychological person

as a substantive thing’.27 The ‘I’ which accompanies our thoughts

and actions refers not to an ontological order but merely sustains illusions

about the locus of control and responsibility in our lives. Politically spea-

king, Butler maintains that the employment of the subject as foundation

24 Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (StanfordUniversity Press, 1997), p. 17.

25 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity(London: Routledge, 1990), p. 33.

26 Ibid., p. 30. 27 Ibid., p. 20.




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has limited the possibilities of progressive struggle. She claims: ‘it is no

longer clear that feminist theory ought to try to settle the questions of

primary identity in order to get on with the task of politics’.28 Feminists

have often sought such foundations; for example, Simone de Beauvoir

tried to ground critical practice ‘in the sexed specificity of the female

body’.29 But to presume the female body as given – or anything as given

and indisputable, for that matter – in order to provide a starting point

for practice is to limit the possibilities of politics. More precisely, it is to

circumscribe those possibilities within the very dominant regime one is

seeking to subvert.

3 The limits of deconstructing dialogue

It may seem, given Butler’s account, that the very basis of feminism

dissolves since it becomes difficult if not impossible to speak of women

at all. However, in her view, the disavowal of foundations frees up

political practice. For Butler, a politics without ontological illusions

involves ‘affirm[ing] identities that are alternately instituted and relin-

quished according to the purposes at hand’.30 Identities are employed,

abandoned and resignified depending on how well they serve a political

practice placed in particular times and places. The implication is that

dialogue should not be constrained by the ambition of liberation but

should take place outside of these pressures. The desire for freedom, the

desire for mutual understanding, place expectations upon dialogue that

limit its political potential.

From such a perspective, categories such as ‘woman’ have lost their

meaning in a philosophical sense, as we have become more attentive

to how they elide and exclude rather than clarify, and to how they

construct rather than represent identities. Butler is by far not alone in

making this point. Trinh Minh-ha believes that there is no permanent

essence of wo/man, that, indeed, ‘women can never be defined’.31Kathy

Ferguson too eschews the search for an ‘essential reality to which our

28 Ibid., p. xi.29 Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (London:

Routledge, 1993), p. 28.30 Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 16.31 Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other (Bloomington: Indiana University

Press, 1989), pp. 95–6.




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representations correspond’.32 These assumptions about being’s elusi-

veness are probably best captured in Donna Haraway’s metaphor of

women as cyborgs. A cyborg is a hybrid of machine and organism,

something that lies between social reality and fiction. In today’s mythic

and high-technological age, she argues, we all live as chimeras, we are all

cyborgs, a ‘condensed image of both imagination andmaterial reality’.33

Drawing attention to the social construction of a concept like woman

enables us to see the danger of employing such concepts politically, even

while their employment is unavoidable. Insofar as solidarity and com-

monality exist, they need to be constructed consciously and given a

provisional character. In other words, constant dialogue needs to be

the means and medium of political struggle in which identities are, in

Butler’s words, ‘instituted and relinquished according to the purposes at

hand’. The methodology of deconstruction, however, does not, of itself,

provide the guidance and insight required to conduct political practice

in this way. Some go as far as arguing that deconstruction engenders its

own exclusions even while it searches out relentlessly for exclusionary

effects. From such a vantage point, it does not seem to matter how

far deconstruction goes; there always lies beyond its activity a series of

differences that are left unattended, and thus a set of assumptions that

obstruct genuine dialogue.

Butler would undoubtedly counter such critique of post-structuralism,

stressing that the point is tomove out of the foundationalism problematic

of politics and to see norms and categories as contingent vehicles for the

struggle against existential challenges. The category of women may, in

some sense, disappear as a substantive point of reference, but the raison

d’être of gender politics does not dissolve with it. What remains are

the ‘objective’ problems in respect to which gender politics was first

animated: the fact that women in many parts of the world remain

oppressed, excluded and prejudiced in a variety of ways. The seeking of

normative foundations for political struggle has always been a response

to the perception of these problems rather than the motivating impulse of

radical thought and action. Yet a process of forgetfulness often then sets

in and we come to see foundations as the starting point and as deserving

of the most attention.

32 Kathy Ferguson, The Man Question: Visions of Subjectivity in FeministTheory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 154.

33 Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, pp. 149–50.




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In fact, Butler does not abandon the notion of foundations as such.

She recognises that they are indispensable in a world of clashing inter-

ests. She even advocates the need for universals – or, rather, sees them as

an inevitable aspect of claims to power and legitimacy (see Chapter 3

above). But to remain adequate, legitimate and fair, foundations need to

be submitted to periodic scrutiny and readjustment. Butler thus speaks

of ‘cultural translation’ and of the contingent nature of foundations.

But, for her, the recognition that power pervades all aspects of society

does not necessarily lead into a nihilistic abyss. It merely shows that

political closure occurs through attempts to establish foundational

norms that lie beyond power. Likewise, to reopen this political domain

is not to do away with foundations as such, but to acknowledge their

contingent character; to illuminate what they authorise, exclude and

foreclose.34

4 Aesthetics and dialogue: is there a space betweenconsensus and radical deconstruction?

The lesson to be learned from the trajectory of various conceptions of

gender and dialogue is that the search for foundations and a universal

consensus is an inadequate response to political problems. This insight

is, of course, not new. Foundations have long come under scrutiny,

whether they are universals or not. And scholars put forward extensive

attempts to find compromises between the extremes of objectivism

and relativism.35 Those that search for a middle ground between these

poles generally recognise that the search for stable foundations creates

all kinds of difficulties and dilemmas that take energy and insight away

from the actual conduct of political practice. ‘Foundations’ come into play

automatically when we engage with political problems. But the ethical

qualities and sensibilities required to use themwell do not. These qualities

and sensibilities need to be cultivated. A post-structural critique alone

may, however, not be enough to advance such a cultivation.

34 Judith Butler, Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of‘Postmodernism’, in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and JoanW. Scott (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 3–7.

35 For instance, Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. R. Nice (StanfordUniversity Press, 1980); Richard Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism:Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983).




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We now draw on aesthetics to offer a way forward in debates about

dialogue and feminist theory. Aesthetics has become a prominent theme

throughout contemporary political theory. In the context of this chapter,

we explore two major dimensions of the relationship between aesthetics

and dialogue. First, aesthetics provides a model of how dialogue can

be conducted which is an alternative to both the consensus-oriented

dialogue of Habermas and his followers, and to the characterisation of

dialogue as a vortex of struggle and exclusion by Butler and other post-

structural feminist theorists. Second, aesthetics draws attention to the

importance of the cultivation of the self as a precondition of productive

dialogue. This dimension of the aesthetic focuses on the significance of

the dialogues that take place within ourselves, as well as with others.

First we turn to aesthetic attempts that seek to locate a middle ground

between the consensus model of Habermas’s discourse ethics and

Butler’s radical deconstruction of it. Georgia Warnke opens up a prom-

ising route here. She argues that an aesthetic model of interpreting our

moral and political conflicts, in which the requirement to agree is not

central, offers a very productive way of negotiating difference.

She advances her argument as a critique of the consensus model of

Habermas’s discourse ethics.36 Warnke argues that the possibilities

for actual agreement in social and political life are minimal. She notes

that even when there is agreement on the validity of abstract norms,

individuals and constituencies will interpret these norms differently,

along with how to understand and apply the relationship of various

norms to one another. Warnke refers to the example of contract preg-

nancy or surrogate motherhood, in which different groups of women in

the debate may agree on a variety of abstract principles such as human

dignity, equality and freedom and yet their concrete and practical evalua-

tion of these norms brings them into fundamental conflict. A dialogue

aimed at consensus in such disputes will never reach a fruitful conclusion.

The different parties simply disagree and consensus-oriented discussion is

likely to drive them further apart.

A dialoguemodelled along aesthetic lines explores an alternative set of

possibilities. In the domain of works of art and literature, interpretations

are neither right nor wrong. Moreover, the differences of interpretation

36 Georgia Warnke, Discourse Ethics and Feminist Dilemmas of Difference, inFeminists Read Habermas: Gendering the Subject of Discourse, ed.Johanna Meehan (London: Routledge, 1995).




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here are expected – ‘they are not ones that we simply tolerate’.37Warnke

emphasises that the potential of dialogue is not contained in the possi-

bility of consensus but in the prospect of participants coming to see things

differently and expanding their horizons of understanding: ‘the fruit-

fulness of our discussions are less dependent on the force of the better

argument than on the insights intomeaningwe gain fromone another’.38

Embracing difference, plurality and contingency in this way does not

undermine feminist solidarity. Warnke argues that such a conclusion is

based on false premises: differences between women ‘lead to the self-

destruction of feminism only if they are assessed in terms of a practical

discourse in which consensus is the goal and the point of articulating

differences is to overcome or transcend them’.39

From the other end of the theoretical spectrum, we can also see how an

aesthetic modelmollifies the post-structuralist construction of a zero-sum

game between identity and difference in dialogue. The aesthetic approach

encourages us to see how difference can broaden the understandings of

participants rather than simply be an alternative to identity. In this

context,Marie Fleming warns against an instrumentalisation of dialogue

for the sake of expanding understanding. She argues against Gadamer’s

model of dialogue on this score.40 Gadamer, she notes, promotes con-

versations with others who are different from one’s self because it is

these differences that allow the self to discover its prejudices, and thus

to expand its horizons. Conversations with those who are similar,

however, simply act to confirm assumptions and entrench an already

existing world-view. Fleming insists that Gadamer is not a friend of

feminist dialogue because his model is oriented exclusively around the

self’s need for understanding, read as a masculine character, rather than

of genuinely opening up to and understanding the other. But another

reading of Gadamer, one we are inclined to favour, might at the same

time point towards themore radical potential of aesthetics. Gadamer sees

aesthetics as a form of knowledge that can neither be ‘attained in any

other way’, nor be verified through scientific means, nor, for that matter,

be rationalised away.41 Aesthetics, then, is not something that belongs

37 Ibid., p. 256. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid., p. 258.40 Fleming, Gadamer’s Conversation.41 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd rev. edn, trans. J. Weinsheimer

and D.G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1999), pp. xxii–xxiii. See alsoHans-Georg Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, trans.N. Walker (Cambridge University Press, 1986).




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solely to the realm of art, literature or religion. It touches upon the very

essence of dialogue and, in a general sense, the political (see Judith

Squires, Chapter 9 below).42At the same time, it is important to recognise

that an aesthetic model of dialogue is not enough on its own. Whilst

robust, it can always be manipulated by a self incorrigibly marked by a

desire for appropriation rather than understanding. It is in this respect

that aesthetics has had a major impact on recent theory in terms of

thinking about the theoretical and political significance of practices of

self-cultivation. In the context of the linguistic turn, the self sometimes

seems to disappear. We are left only with an analysis of the rules and

structures of interaction, whether from a modernist or post-structuralist

perspective. The self appears, if at all, merely as a product of these

rules and structures, without any weight or density of its own. Alison

Weir argues that it is important for feminism to maintain a sense of the

capacities of selfhood:

We need to make a space for an understanding of self-identity and autonomy

which will not clash with our conviction that individuals must be understood

as embedded, embodied, localised, constituted, and fragmented, as well as

subject to forces beyond our control. We need to understand ourselves clearly

as actors capable of learning, of changing, of making the world and ourselves,

better.43

5 From dialogue between to dialogue within

Anaestheticmodel offers an excellentway of understanding the potential

of the self to have agency without falling into fundamentalist or essen-

tialist traps. The concept of the aesthetic draws our attention to practices

of self-cultivation that are always already taking place. It remedies

the cognitive bias of many philosophical debates in which it seems

the construction of knowledge is purely a theoretical affair. Numerous

commentators draw attention to the way in which the accumulation of

knowledge is never simply theoretical, but always as what StephenWhite

42 For our own takes on this, see Martin Leet, After Effects of Knowledge inModernity: Politics, Aesthetics and Individuality (Albany, NY: SUNY Press,2004), and Roland Bleiker, Aesthetics and World Politics (London:Palgrave, 2009).

43 Alison Weir, Toward a Model of Self-Identity: Habermas and Kristeva, inFeminists Read Habermas, ed. Meehan, p. 263.




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calls ‘an aesthetic–affective quality’.44 It shapes, that is, not only how

we interpret the world, but also how we engage with it emotionally and

affectively. In this respect, theorists such as Julia Annas, Pierre Hadot

and Martha Nussbaum indicate how the interest of the ancient Greeks

in theory was guided by a more fundamental orientation towards ethical

self-formation, revealing important assumptions ofmodern approaches.45

Influential and iconoclastic modern thinkers such as Montaigne,

Nietzsche and Foucault have drawn upon the ancient Greeks for this

reason.46 It is thus not surprising that scholars are now increasingly

exploring these issues – as exemplified inMark Chou’s attempt to explore

the contemporary relevance of the seemingly long lost but potentially very

important links between democracy and tragedy in ancient Greece.47

In general, the idea of knowledge being bound up with the individu-

al’s entire mode of being helps make sense of the claim, put forward by

Bennett, that there can be ‘no ethics without aesthetics’.48 That is, ethics

understood as a code or set of principles must remain ineffective and

contradictory without attention being paid to dispositions and sensibi-

lities. If the affective levels of being remain undisciplined and untutored,

then the adoption of abstract rules or deconstructive strategies will act

merely as a noble mask, a mask usually exposed in practice by the mean

andmiserly application of these rules and strategies. Aesthetic practices,

in Bennett’s view, make a more genuine and spirited ethics possible

because they work on the dimension of sensibility and extend ‘the range

of possibility in perception, enactment, and responsiveness to others’.49

The ever-present dialogues within ourselves, then, shape our potential

to engage in dialogue with others, for they have a large impact on our

range of sensitivities and capacities for action. Many feminist theorists

44 Stephen K. White, Sustaining Affirmation: The Strengths of Weak Ontology inPolitical Theory (Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 10.

45 Julia Annas, The Morality of Happiness (Oxford University Press, 1993);Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates toFoucault, trans. Michael Chase (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), andMartha Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in HellenisticEthics (Princeton University Press, 1994).

46 See Alexander Nehamas, The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato toFoucault (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

47 Mark Chou, Greek Tragedy and Contemporary Philosophy (New York:Continuum, 2012).

48 Jane Bennett, ‘How is it, then, that we still remain barbarians?’ Foucault, Schiller,and the Aestheticization of Ethics, Political Theory 24:4 (1996), p. 656.

49 Ibid., p. 654.




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have, indeed, shown us how our individual identities are internally

fractured and various elements jostle with one another for supremacy.

Dialogue, then, takes place not only among people, but also within

them. Paying attention to the latter, some point out, can offer important

opportunities to recognise practices of domination. The terms ‘fractured

identities’ or ‘hyphenated identities’ are most commonly used to convey

the theoretical starting point for this innovative approach to difference.

Rosi Braidotti speaks for many feminists when she argues that the

synthesising power of the term ‘I’ is nothing but a grammatical necessity,

a theoretical fiction that holds together the collection of differing layers,

the integrated fragments of the very-receding horizon of my identity.50

Women (and men) have multiple, fractured and ambivalent subjectivities

that move back and forth between such terrains of identity as class, race,

gender, nationality, language and sexual preference.51

Opening up a constructive dialogue among these internal identities is a

way of cultivating the self towards external forms of dialogue. Ferguson

employs the term ‘mobile subjectivities’ to capture the possibilities for

transformation that arise from moving back and forth among a whole

range of hyphenated identities and their corresponding mental resting

places. Transformative potential emerges because this process not only

entails travelling across and along axes of power, domination and resist-

ance, but also destabilises the regulatory norms that have been con-

structed through the delineation of these identities.52 By being aware

of the arbitrariness and excluding tendencies embedded in identity con-

structions, such as class, race or gender, subjects become empowered

and can take part in daily processes that slowly but constantly redraw

the political boundaries of identities. Haraway makes a similar point

through a slightly different terminology that relies upon her cyborg

metaphor. She talks of ‘situated knowledges’, of how moving back and

forth between various subjectivities can open up multiple visions. The

point is, Haraway emphasises, not to ground one’s knowledge in stable

standpoints, but to explore visions of change that unfold through multi-

dimensional, shifting and always eluding hyphens of identity.53

50 Rosi Braidotti, The Politics of Ontological Difference, in Between Feminismand Psychoanalysis, ed. Teresa Brennan (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 93.

51 See also the various discussions on Butler and identity in this volume, for exampleChapter 9, and also Chapter 6 on a Nietzschean interpretation of the self.

52 Ferguson, Man Question, pp. 158–63.53 Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, pp. 183–201.




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If, by contrast, we allow one fragment to assume authority for the

whole, then we suppress the dialogue within ourselves for either the

illusory benefits of certainty, or the strange consolation of cynicism. But

the other voices cannot be silenced for long before they erupt again in a

cacophony that unsettles and sometimes overwhelms. The only way of

managing this raucous scene is to allow the fragments, which can never

be united, to carry on their conversation with one another.

The vitality of this internal dialogue is a precondition for the health of

communication with others. Conversely, the nature of familial, social

and political communicative practices serves as a model for how we

relate to ourselves. There is plurality both within and without. Helen

O’Grady talks about the gendered significance of self-policing as a

practice of the self that Foucault identified as a crucial part of modern

systems of power.54 Individuals think and act as though they are being

constantly observed, thus regulating their potential and defining their

identity in limiting ways. Women tend to engage in a destructive form

of these practices since ‘factors such as the legacy of subordinate status

and a frequent imbalance between care for others and care for the

self render women especially vulnerable to debilitating practices of

self-surveillance, evaluation, recrimination, and isolation’.55 However,

O’Grady believes that the always ongoing status of these practices can

be turned around to provide women with more freedom to move and

have control over their own lives. Shifting the dynamic of these intra-

subjective relations has radical potential at the micropolitical level. For

example, O’Grady advances the notion of ‘friendship with the self’ in

order to help overcome the often recriminatory relations women have

with themselves and which contribute to self-blame and isolation. It

is often the case that ‘women reveal qualities of acceptance, tolerance,

patience, compassion, and support toward others that are absent in

relations with the self’.56

These qualities of an ethic of care can be expropriated by women for

themselves, and can thus dismantle the traditional dynamics of gender

relations. William Connolly, even though not writing from an explicitly

feminist perspective, outlines why this is the case. He observes that

this kind of micropolitics is better conducted without certainties and

54 Helen O’Grady, An Ethics of the Self, in Feminism and the Final Foucault, ed.Dianna Taylor and Karen Vintges (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004).

55 Ibid., pp. 109–10. 56 Ibid., p. 107.




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without a teleological purpose. ‘Ethical artistry’, he says, has an element

of naivety and innocence. One is not quite sure what one is doing. The

challenge of change is an experiment. It is not locked up in a predeter-

mined conception of where one is going. It involves tentatively exploring

the limits of one’s being in the world, to see if different interpretations are

possible, how those interpretations might impact upon the affects below

the level of conscious thought, and vice versa. It entails drawing upon

multiple levels of thinking and being, searching for changes in sensibilities

that could give more weight to minor feelings or to arguments that

were previously ignored.57 Opening up oneself to change in this way

allows one to listen to voices within oneself that may have typically been

repressed or ignored. It gives leeway to demure feelings that now feel

more courage to express themselves and come into direct contactwith the

voices that had said ‘no’ to them. And in turn, in the conduct of actual

dialogues, the self may see and hear other people differently because

they can now see themselves in the other. In this way, the effects of

micropolitics extend beyond the private engagement with self on to the

terrain of political relationships.

6 Concluding remarks

It is sometimes the case that, in the relentless search for progress and

liberation, we forgo an element of gratitude towards what has gone

before. The liberal tradition and its immanent critiques have expanded

dialogue as well as refined the sensitivities of the selves engaged in

dialogue. We should acknowledge what liberalism allows us to do. It

remains the case, however, that dominant modes of political dialogue

subsumewithin them undisclosed elements of violence and exclusion. In

this chapter, we have sought to navigate through various attempts to

respond to these limitations of dialogue from a feminist point of view.

Dialogue never appears spontaneously without reason or cause.

Interests and motivations ‘outside’ of dialogue bring it into play. It is

laden with expectations from the very beginning. The loss of certainty

has made dialogue a key category. But it easily becomes a new guise for

the drive for certainty when it is cast within a particular set of sensibi-

lities and dispositions. InHabermas’s narrative, dialogue is portrayed as

57 William Connolly, Why I am not a Secularist (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1999), p. 148.




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a parachute that will finally give us the soft landing we desire after we

have fallen out of so many erstwhile certainties. The experience of

modernity, which shatters beliefs and foundations of all kinds, exposes

us and leaves us naked. When dialogue comes to the rescue, it is often

the desire for certainty dressed up as an embrace of difference and

contingency. It seeks to deny the experience of modernity in the name

of accepting it. Meanwhile, dialogue can also become the means for a

negative deconstruction of every proposal put forward. It can be a way

of contesting for the sake of contesting, even if in the name of difference

and the other. Here, dialogue is wrapped up inside a different set of

sensibilities and dispositions, and once again its potential is limited and

distorted.

In order to reconsider the place of dialogue within the political imag-

ination, it is necessary to step back a little and ask some fundamental

questions. What do we want from dialogue? What urges and demands

do we hide from others, and perhaps ourselves, before embracing the

rhetoric of dialogue? Are we too keen to resolve difference and disagree-

ment, thus placing a bias within dialogue before it has even begun? Or

havewe uttered a silent ‘no’ to dialogue, engaging in itwith only sophistic

intentions? It is the assumptions and imperatives surrounding and

launching dialogue that need to be considered as well as dialogue itself.

Fleming argues that

In a feminist dialogue, the partners are interested rather than disinterested,

speak from positions of social situatedness rather than gaze at the world from

no place in particular, engage in the flow of historical events rather than yearn

for the certainty of a ‘totalising’ truth, aim to make room for cultural differ-

ence rather than try to contain it, understand successful communication as

more than mere preservation of one’s self, and in every case understand that

our responsibility is not to some transcendent truth, but to the other person

who is in dialogue with us.58

We have argued in this chapter that aesthetic approaches allow us

to ask these questions and approach traditional debates somewhat

differently. To get to this point, we have first sought to do justice to

the complex links between gender, identity and power by questioning

how dialogue has come to be seen and theorised. We highlighted the

problematic features of attempts to frame dialogue as a process that

58 Fleming, Gadamer’s Conversation, p. 110.




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either explicitly or implicitly leads to a global consensus. Drawing upon

the work of Judith Butler, we emphasised the need to deconstruct power

relationships that operate in such attempts to anchor dialogue in foun-

dations that could bring certainty. We also recognised that foundations

are both indispensable and contingent.

We have sought to show how an aesthetic orientation tends to avoid

the positing of false dichotomies between identity and difference, con-

sensus and struggle, intersubjectivity and subjectivity. In using artistic

representation and interpretation as an exemplar, an aesthetic approach

allows us to see the productive effects of difference that can generate, if

not a rational consensus, then a shared ethos of understanding. It also

brings attention to the importance of practices of ethical self-cultivation

and their impact upon dialogue. Ultimately, dialogue depends upon the

participants engaged in it, and if they are able to gain ameasure of insight

into the conversations going on within themselves, then they have a far

greater opportunity to contribute effectively to public dialogues.

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Between Consensus and Deconstruction: A Feminist Reading of Dialogue

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