Iris Marion Young (1990:3) builds a theory of justice out of the conceptual cornerstones of "domination and oppression." While she concedes that Habermas' account of societal rationalization, advanced capitalism, and communicative action should be retained, she believes that critical theory must be strengthened in a least two ways: first, it must construct a detailed theory of oppression and domination and second, this requires a corresponding practice which she names the "politics of difference."
Liberal theories of justice, Young argues, are inadequate because they begin with the assumption that social goods are reified things to be distributed, rather than as the product of social processes and relations. Liberal theories of justice obfuscate the institutional context within which social goods (such as jobs) are defined and distributed as scarce goods. Moreover, the "distributive paradigm" rests on a conception of humans as essentially atomistic, possessive individuals among whom social goods are distributed.
A more emancipatory theory of social justice must be premised on an explicitly social ontology. Such a theory would gauge contemporary society in terms of which it sustains the conditions for realizing those values which constitute the 'good life.' For Young, the 'good life' is the attainment of the Enlightenment ideals of reason and freedom. As a critical theorist she does not detail exactly what the 'good life' might look like. Instead, she offers the critical concepts of oppression and domination with which to gauge the degree of inequity and injustice in contemporary life. Thus, she offers a structural definition in which oppression is "embedded in unquestioned norms, habits, and symbols" and "in the assumptions underlying institutional rules". Moreover, a structural account of oppression requires a definition of a "group" and hence she turns toward a sociological analysis in which groups are understood as developmental processes which are constitutive of individuals. Young sees social life as an irreducible and continuous process of group differentiation. Accordingly, she defines oppression as a pluralistic phenomenon, rejecting an additive model in which separate systems of oppression are specific to different groups. Working from a social ontology of group differentiation, Young constructs an account of the critical concepts of oppression and domination.
The first three "faces of oppression" are associated with the social division of labor: exploitation, marginalization, and powerlessness. Marx's theory of class exploitation is expanded and redefined as the institutionalized "transfer of energies from one group to another to produce unequal distributions" that enable an elite to "accumulate" at the expense of the multitude of others. Marginalization defines groups of people as incapable of participating in the labor forces based on ascribed characteristics such as age, gender, disability, and race. Powerlessness is experienced as the absence of status, occupational authority, a sense of self, and/or respectability. This form of oppression results from the proliferation of managerial hierarchies that accompany capitalist rationalization: large-scale organizations increasingly require an educated, administrative elite which comprises the professional middle class .
Young distinguishes the two remaining forms of oppression -- cultural imperialism and violence -- from the first three because they do not "delimit people's material life." They are, instead, intrinsically related to the sphere of cultural reproduction. Cultural imperialism involves a "paradoxical oppression" in which the dominant culture singles out groups as deviant while concomitantly rendering them invisible by denying them access to the "means of interpretation and communication". Violence is an extreme form of systematic cultural imperialism and it is a form of injustice that conventional theories of justice have failed to address.
While oppression is defined as institutional constraints on learning and the exercise of one's capacities for reason, domination is understood as institutional practices which bar people from realizing their capacities for freedom and self-determination. Young's analysis draws on, yet also advances, Habermas' theory of the asymmetry of societal rationalization by fleshing out the specific ways in which domination is structured and experienced. Taken-for-granted standards of corporate and bureaucratic management -- proceduralism, professionalism, expertism, and meritcoracy -- tend to depoliticize decision-making. Rationalization entails "a diffusion as well as proliferation of power" in the name of efficiency, standardization, science, and merit.
Young outlines the ways in which "insurgent" or new social movements seek to "repoliticize" public life by expanding the sphere of civil society. Insurgent movements operate within and against the boundaries of civil society or the lifeworld in three different ways: by agitating for the democratic decision-making; through the establishment of alternative, collectively organized services such as health care and housing; and, by politicizing cultural reproduction and representation. Here, Young subtly takes issue with Habermas' concern that new social movements are defensive and regressive. For Young, insurgent movements are offensive and progressive because they implicitly uphold an alternative conception of justice in which democracy "is both an element and a condition of social justice." Thus, they challenge the distributive paradigm of justice because they conceive of justice as the creation of spaces within which oppressed groups might achieve collective autonomy and empowerment. Still, their focus on identity and cultural issues tends to avoid explicit challenges to the hegemony of welfare capitalism and thus she concedes that their activities all too often meet with a "dialectic of democracy and recontainment". Ultimately, insurgent movements fail to challenge the hegemonic logics of the market and state and they tend to become reabsorbed into the politics of interest-group liberalism.
Young believes that this "dialectic of democracy and recontainment" must be countered through a politics of difference. Such a strategy requires a "relational understanding of group difference" which rejects exclusion:
"Difference no longer implies that groups lie outside one another. To say that there are differences among groups does not imply that there are not overlapping experiences, or that two groups have nothing in common. The assumption that real differences in affinity, culture, or privilege imply oppositional categorization must be challenged. Different groups are always similar in some respects, and always potentially share some attributes, experiences, and goals."
A group differentiated politics is posited primarily against Habermas' communicative ethics which requires that participants in dialogic communities come to agreement and act on those claims that express a generalizable consensus. Young thinks that this is a demand which ultimately requires conformity and homogeneity. A politics of difference, in contrast, requires that people come to the public sphere in open acknowledgment of their differences, explicitly recognizing the special needs of historically oppressed groups. And further, a democratic politics of group differentiation requires special representation of oppressed groups through "institutional mechanisms" and "resources" which support the following: self-organization and collective empowerment; the group analysis and generation of policy proposals which decision-makers are obliged to consider in policy formation; and, groups must retain veto power over decisions that affect them directly.
But, a politics of group difference must also address the forms of domination and oppression that are embedded in the division of labor. In the workplace, cultural imperialism operates through the myth of merit and the normative dualism which posits intellectual against physical labor. Cultural imperialism in the workplace can be fought through affirmative action policies and the establishment of workplace democracy. First, affirmative action policies are important because they increase the numbers of white women and men and women of color in the workplace. Their presence, Young believes, challenges the institutions and practices which reproduce domination. Second, workplace democracy would require that workers participate in basic decision-making processes that have generally been the province of a managerial elite: capital investment, workplace safety and health, promotions, and so forth.
Young argues that a politics of difference and democratic justice must jettison the liberal conceptions of the unified, transparent self and community as face-to-face relations in which we become fully transparent to one another. Instead, a model of group differentiation presupposes a conception of the self that is not unified and "cannot be present to itself". Therefore, the ideal of transparent intersubjectivity and community is an impossibility:
If the subject is heterogeneous process, never fully present to itself, then it follows that subjects cannot make themselves transparent.... Consequently, the subject also eludes sympathetic comprehension by others. I cannot understand others as they understand themselves, because they do not completely understand themselves. Indeed, because the meanings and desires they express may outrun their own awareness or intention, I may understand their words or actions better than they.
A politics of difference disrupts the rationally autonomous, unified subject because it is premised on a social ontology in which the subject is inexorably "heterogeneous" (p. 233). The myth of community and mutual self-transparency bars the recognition of a complex social world in which identities and group differences are continually erupting. To acknowledge the inevitability of heterogeneity, Young insists, is to resist the subsumption of difference under the logic of identity and to demand that people confront and take responsibility for difference.
A great deal in Young's account is not only insightful but important to the empirical work of investigating the contours of domination and oppression. And, her use of a social ontology is an advance over much political theory which generally deploys the framework of methodological individualism. My discussion of Young's work assesses the theoretical adequacy of her work in terms of her concepts of self, group, and the status of difference.
Young's self-proclaimed affinity with what she terms "post-modernism" is most evident in her discussion of the self. Initially, she maintains that shifting identities are constituted by membership in various groups. However, her later discussion of the self draws more heavily of the Derridean critique of the metaphysics of presence. Here, the self always involves a certain opacity such that one can never by fully transparent to others or even to oneself. This is reminiscent of Sartre's critique of the Cartesian tradition of reflexivity. For Sartre, the transcendental ego to which the dualism of reflexivity gives rise, has no raison d'etre. Such an ego would "be a sore of center of opacity.... This superfluous 'I' would be a hindrance...would tear consciousness from itself; it would divide consciousness like an opaque blade" (1957:40). Young embraces the fundamental condition of opacity in terms of both individual and group identity: we can never be fully self reflective or transparent to one another.
However, this notion of the self compromises the theoretical adequacy of her work: her notion of the self is conceptually incoherent. Typically, conceptual coherence is measured in terms of the internal, consistency of a theory. However, since Young aligns herself with critical social theory which must be normative, critical, practical, and practicable (Fay 1987:7, 23-26; Jaggar 1983:15-20). Therefore, conceptual coherence can be measured in terms of whether the concepts the theory develops are actually workable in practice (Fay 1987:143-164). The notion of the opaque self may seem compelling enough upon initial inspection, however, the notion involves a "performative contradiction" (Apel, 1984; Habermas, 1990). Despite theoretical pronouncements about the opacity of the self, our actions fundamentally contradict our claims. People, including Young, act as if the self and groups are not opaque and that they are capable of knowing who they are and what they want.
The notion of the opaque self compromises Young's conception of the politics of difference. She posits a self that is incapable of fully knowing itself or representing itself to others. Yet, the heart of her theory relies on the eradication of oppression and domination through the development of autonomous, democratic institutions which enable people to define for themselves who they are and what they need in the context of identification with a group. If Young really took the notion of the opaque self seriously, then her project of emancipation through the representation of group differences would be rendered meaningless and impractical.
<....>