As it happens, I did once have a look at the Fraser article, but about ten years ago, when I just wasn't up to the job. Some bits very sympathetic of Habermas in there, as I remember - a sign that the criticisms will be worth thinking about. Certainly, if H stands for anything, it is that a limited-entry public sphere gets you hell via good intentions. If we do not coordinate action intersubjectively, we objectify even those whose interests we seek to serve - coz we are, in effect making of people passive objects of administration (see also Foucault's 'Governmentality' essay - easily my favourite of his often problematic outpourings). Census et censorum - we must police you and you must pay us to police you.
As Oz's own Michael Pusey says, we are rapidly replacing communicatively coordinated action with systemically coordinated action, and what concerns Fraser is that women are the major category likely to be objectified (as objects for policy). That's 100% okay with H, I think, who asserts somewhere that he believes that feminism is the greatest political movement of our time because women's systemic marginalisation has effectively moved feminism to put the lifeworld, and its residual power in our modern epistemic take, back into our consciousness. I don't necessarily see this potential in either the liberal feminism of our female political/economic leaders or the radical pomos of the academy (whose representative in Canberra seem rigorously to de-essentialise everything but some almost ontologically imposed 'female subjectivity' to go with the one thing they share with all the postal types I know, the uncritical ontologisation of the 'will to power'), but I do see it in some of our think tanks (among whom one Eva Cox is salient) and in both our small leftish parties (the Democratic Socialists and the Progressive Labour Party). You gotta watch this stuff though, because uncritical nostalgia and a simplistic lurch back to woman-as-essentially-&-exclusively-cooperative-nurturing-other is always available, and that'll put everything back a long way.
Was it also Fraser who questioned the procedure Habermas so carefully formulates for the public sphere and its ideal speech (it may have been someone called Lisa McCulloch)? I think the idea was that women may not be at home at all in a procedure based on an initial procedure of proposition confronting antithesis. Habermas universalises from all language, yet may be ignoring that his notion of arriving at 'the best argument' is but one potential that lies in language - and one not privileged in the communicative practices of other groups. Habermas's citizen has a formal status but is, after all, very much a disembodied and materially decontextualised subject. Not Marxian currency at all - and not an expression of Adorno's take on what critical theory is all about - ie. its deliberate appeal to historical specificity.
Cheers, Rob.
>Thanks for posting that, Rob. I have not yet gotten through the whole
>thing yet, but I'd like to recommend to you Nancy Fraser's excellent paper
>on Habermas. The title is "What's so Critical About Critical Theory?"
>It's in the volume edited by Seyla Benhabib, _Feminism as Critique_, as
>well as Fraser's volume, _Unruly Practices._ She points out the gender
>implications in Habermas' lifeworld/system opposition.
>
>Cheers,
>Frances Bolton