Post-Structuralism, Critical and Conflict Theory

Habermas critical theory

Jürgen Habermas is the leading figure of the second generation of the Frankfurt School. His critical theory combines social critique with a normative account of rational communication. In his theory of knowledge-constitutive interests, he distinguished empirical-analytic sciences, which serve technical control, hermeneutic sciences, which serve mutual understanding, and critical sciences, which serve emancipation. Within this scheme, reconstructive sciences rationally reconstruct the implicit, rule-governed knowledge that competent speakers and actors already possess. A linguist or a developmental psychologist makes explicit what a competent subject knows intuitively. The method is therefore neither a purely empirical description of behaviour nor an interpretation of meaning alone, but a reconstruction of the competences that make speech and action intelligible.

Habermas's most influential sociological idea is the public sphere, a space between the state and private life where citizens meet as equals and debate matters of common concern through rational-critical argument. The bourgeois public sphere of coffee houses, salons and literary societies is his historical model, and the concept also applies to voluntary associations in which members deliberate openly on shared affairs. Ceremonial display, in which rulers or religious authorities present themselves before an audience, belongs instead to what he calls representative publicness. Representative publicness is a display of status and authority, not discursive deliberation among private persons.

Key terms:

• reconstructive science — a discipline that rationally reconstructs the implicit competences of competent subjects. e.g. A theory of how speakers generate grammatical sentences is a reconstructive account.
• public sphere — a arena of rational-critical debate among private persons on public affairs. e.g. A reading society in which townspeople argue about a new law forms part of such a sphere.
• representative publicness — the display of power before an audience, without open debate. e.g. A coronation staged before the crowd shows representative publicness.

Do not confuse Habermas's critical theory, which aims at emancipation through communicative reason, with Marxist critique, which centres on class and the mode of production.

Intersectionality

Intersectionality is a framework developed by the American legal scholar Kimberle Crenshaw. It holds that social identities such as race, caste, class, gender and religion are multi-layered, overlap with one another and are not discrete, self-contained categories. Because these categories interact, the experience of a woman who is also a member of a disadvantaged caste or community cannot be explained by adding a gender analysis to a race or caste analysis. Each axis of disadvantage shapes and transforms the others.

Crenshaw's challenge was directed at single-axis analysis, in which gender alone was treated as the primary factor determining a woman's fate. She showed that the experiences of Black women were not captured by analyses organised around race or gender separately. Crenshaw distinguished three dimensions. Structural intersectionality concerns the different ways in which women of colour experience conditions such as domestic violence compared with white women, because of their position at the crossing of race and gender. Political intersectionality concerns how laws and policies framed around a single axis, although intended to advance equality, may reduce the visibility of violence against women of colour. Representational intersectionality concerns how cultural images construct and subordinate women of colour. It is about the way images produce and reinforce subordination, not a claim that the lived experience of these women is inauthentic.

Key terms:

• non-discrete identities — identities that cannot be separated into independent, additive parts. e.g. A caste-gender identity is not the sum of a caste identity and a gender identity.
• single-axis analysis — an approach that examines one category of disadvantage in isolation. e.g. Studying only gender in a labour market survey, while ignoring caste, is single-axis analysis.
• structural intersectionality — the differential material conditions created by overlapping identities. e.g. Unequal access to shelters for women from marginalised communities.

Subaltern studies and Spivak

Subaltern studies is a historiographical project that began in the 1980s under the editorship of Ranajit Guha. Its volumes of essays rewrite South Asian history from the standpoint of subordinate groups, such as peasants, workers and tribal communities, whose actions are often absent from elite and nationalist narratives. Historians such as Dipesh Chakrabarty and Partha Chatterjee are associated with the project. However, they are not the author of the essay 'Can the Subaltern Speak?', which is the work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Spivak's essay, published in 1988, asks whether subordinate groups can express their own consciousness within structures of representation dominated by elites, and it became one of the most discussed texts in postcolonial theory.

The term statism is used in subaltern studies to criticise historiography that treats the state as the principal subject of history. Under statism, the dominant values of the state are authorised as the criteria by which historical events are judged and recorded, and history is understood as the life of the state. The counter-approach is to build knowledge of the past from voices at the margins of official records. Statism is therefore the target of the subaltern method, not its method. Statism has no connection with the idea that history is static.

Key terms:

• subaltern — a person or group of subordinate status, excluded from hegemonic power. e.g. Landless labourers whose protests were recorded only by colonial officials are subaltern in this sense.
• statism — a historiographical position that makes the state the subject and measure of history. e.g. A national history that narrates only the policies of the central government reflects statism.
• history from below — a method that reconstructs the past from the perspective of marginalised groups. e.g. Reading peasant petitions to understand a rebellion.

Bourdieu habitus

Habitus is Pierre Bourdieu's concept for the system of durable, transposable dispositions through which individuals perceive, judge and act. Habitus is structured by the social conditions in which a person grows up, and it in turn structures practice. These dispositions are generated and co-ordinated without any conscious plan or conductor directing them, so that people's everyday choices appear natural and spontaneous while reproducing wider social patterns. Habitus is thus Bourdieu's way of linking structure and agency, avoiding both pure structuralism and pure voluntarism.

Habitus must be distinguished from the related concepts in Bourdieu's sociology. A field is a structured social space of positions and relations in which actors compete for valued resources, such as the art world or the academic world. Capital refers to the resources, economic, cultural, social and symbolic, that agents bring to a field. Habitus is the embodied disposition that agents carry, and it determines how they engage with a field and its capital. Culture, in the broad sense, is not defined by Bourdieu as a set of durable generative dispositions in this way.

Key terms:

• durable dispositions — lasting tendencies to perceive and act in certain ways. e.g. A habit of speaking softly in formal settings, learned in childhood, is a durable disposition.
• structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures — a phrase Bourdieu used to say that social structures shape dispositions that in turn shape social life. e.g. Class background shapes taste, and taste reproduces class distinctions.
• field — a structured space of competition. e.g. A university department is a field in which scholars compete for recognition.

Gramscian hegemony

Hegemony is the concept introduced by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci to explain how a dominant group maintains social order. Rather than relying mainly on coercion, the dominant class secures the consent of subordinate groups through cultural and ideological leadership exercised in civil society, including schools, churches, media and everyday common sense. In situations of hegemony, people accept, internalise and help reproduce values and norms that do not serve their own best interests. Gramsci's account thus explains why exploitation can persist without constant force, and why the subordinate often participate in their own subordination.

Hegemony should be distinguished from several concepts in other traditions. Marx's concept of alienation describes workers' estrangement from their labour, products and species-being under capitalist production. Foucault's governmentality describes the rationalities and techniques through which populations and individuals are governed. Putnam's social capital refers to networks, norms and trust that facilitate cooperation. None of these concepts is defined by consent to values that work against one's own interests.

Key terms:

• consent — the active or passive acceptance of a social order by subordinate groups. e.g. Workers who accept that long hours are a sign of diligence are giving consent.
• civil society — the sphere of institutions, such as schools and media, through which ideas are spread. e.g. A school curriculum that presents a particular national history can be a site of hegemony.
• common sense — everyday, uncritical beliefs that express hegemonic values. e.g. Assuming that poverty results only from personal failure.