2024-2 Feminist Ethics
Reconciling Bartky’s feminist consciousness and the Marxist notion of contradictions
In her article, “Toward a Phenomenology of Feminist Consciousness,” Bartky offers a fascinating picture that combines Marxist analysis―i.e., their theory of contradictions―with feminist consciousness―i.e., an anguished consciousness characterizes human subjectivity in periods of social change―to explain how one can become a feminist [428-429]. Although Bartky seems to endorse the Marxist thesis that social change and development are occurring when contradictions are generated by changes in the mode of production, she simultaneously points out that the subjective experience of concrete individuals is neglected in such accounts [427].
As Bartky acknowledges, however, Marxists have not paid sufficient attention to human consciousness, precisely because they believe that consciousness is nothing more than a reflection of material conditions. Thus, they would respond to her suggestion by arguing that it is illusory to assume a dialectical relationship between human consciousness and the material modes of production. As a representative of anti-humanists, Althusser already attacked the very same idea ferociously. For him, “economism’s ‘theoretical complement’, the humanism which, putting a ghost in the economic machine, cast it as the motor of the continuous self-realization of a universal ‘human spirit’, thus tending to the same end, ‘negation or attenuation’ of class struggle. But these were bourgeois ideologies” (Althusser 2003: XXIV). Therefore, how can she respond to this challenge? I think one way to maintain her claim without engaging in the humanist controversy is to appeal to the notion of woman as a social construction. Specifically, the contradictions that are necessary conditions of the emergence of feminist consciousness are not purely material, as they are generated not only by changes in the mode of production but also by socially constructed factors which are irreducible to material conditions.
References
Althusser, Louis (2003). The humanist controversy and other writings, 1966-67. New York: Verso. Edited by François Matheron.
Bartky, Sandra Lee (1975). Toward a Phenomenology of Feminist Consciousness. Social Theory and Practice 3 (4):425-439.