Tom Atchison's Dissertation on False Consciousness (home)

• Chapter 3 - Problems about Truth and Falsehood

  • 3.1 How can anything but beliefs be false?

    • 3.1.1 Wants and desires

    • 3.1.2 Needs

    • 3.1.3 Identities

  • 3.2 Who is in a position to distinguish the true from the false?

    • 3.2.1 Foucault's critique of the notion of ideology

    • 3.2.2 Feminist charges of arrogance and elitism

Chapter 3: Problems about Truth and Falsehood

3.1 How can anything but beliefs be false?

Critical theorists suppose that we live in a world where many people are systematically deluded about how the existing social arrangements work, about what other arrangements are possible and/or desirable, and about how to bring about desired (or desirable) social change. They suppose that these misunderstandings are an important obstacle to the replacement of the present, oppressive social arrangements with better ones. And they set themselves the task of developing a theory which can contribute to people's emancipation by providing a critique of these ideological forms of consciousness.

In some instances the delusion or misunderstanding can be satisfactorily explained in terms of false beliefs -- false consciousness in its simplest form. In other instances, what is required is a critique of people's desires, affections, loyalties, passions, tastes, or even of their senses of identity. Critical theorists presume, then, that these less obviously cognitive aspects of people's lives can be shown to be defective in some sense. Whether they can literally be said to be false, or whether this is a manner of speaking which is meant to indicate some other kind of defect, is not so important as the claim that wants and needs and so on can be subjected to critique.

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3.1.1: Wants and desires

Though there are difficulties in substantiating claims about the falseness of beliefs, and worries about how one can know which beliefs are true and which are false, it might be thought that claims about the falseness of wants and desires face a much more radical difficulty: such claims could not possibly be true, because wants and desires are not the sorts of things that can be false (or true). According to a well-established philosophical tradition, our mental lives should be seen to divide into two very different sorts of phenomena: beliefs, which attempt to represent the world and can thus be true or false, and desires ( preferences, wishes, wants, and so on) which are responses to the world (or attitudes towards it) and cannot be true or false. A statement purporting to express a desire can be false -- it can be a lie, for example -- but the desire itself cannot.

A famous statement of Hume's is often cited to epitomize this tradition: "Reason is . . . the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them."[1] If this is so, then theorists who pretend to offer a rationally grounded critique of people's passions must really be doing something quite different -- they must be merely expressing their own, contrary passions. On this picture, it will be passion which tells us where to go, and with what urgency; reason will contribute only to the discovery of how best to get there.

Even if we accept what I will henceforth call the Humean picture,[2] however, there seems to be some room for criticism of desires. Taken one at a time, perhaps, desires simple are what they are, and cannot be rationally criticized. But when desires are considered jointly, they may be incompatible. They may be logically inconsistent -- a desire for P and a desire for not-P. Or it may, as a matter of fact, be impossible to satisfy one without frustrating others: a desire to lose weight and a desire to spend one's waking hours reading and eating doughnuts. Given these sorts of conflicts between desires, it would seem that reason will be unable to "serve and obey" the passions unless it first sorts them out.

If we want to stick as closely as possible to the Humean picture, we will want to suppose that our desires, for the most part, sort themselves out. That is, we will want to suppose that desires come already ranked into some sort of order of importance. Then, in cases of conflicting desires, the rational decision will be the one that aims at the satisfaction of the more important desires and permits the frustration only of the less important ones. (And where desires of equal 'weight' come into conflict, there will be no rational choice between them.) But how plausible is it to suppose that desires do come already ranked? (What does this mean? Is there some part of my experience of a desire which tells me how important it is to satisfy that desire? Are more important desires felt more intensely? [Surely not.] When I weigh the relative importance of two desires, what am I weighing? If, in the case mentioned above, I decide that my desire to lose weight is more important than my desire to keep reading and eating doughnuts, and I then get up and go for a run, is my decision guided by some difference between the feel of the two desires?)

The Humean picture also needs to accommodate the obvious fact that desires often hinge on beliefs about the objects of those desires. Believing it fresh, I want a drink of milk from the bottle in the refrigerator. Finding that it's gone sour, I no longer want it. Believing in the "Soviet threat," I willingly vote for candidates who promise "a strong defense." Discovering that the threat has been grossly exaggerated, I want my taxes spent on other things. The obvious strategy is to say that many things are desired only as means to further ends, but that this chain of means and ends must somewhere come to a final end (or, more plausibly, a set of final ends) and these final ends will be what we desire simpliciter. Rational criticism of these final ends (and of the desires which aim at their attainment) will be impossible.[3]

The first thing to be said in response to this view is that we can get much more mileage out of a criticism of the effectiveness of people's means than it might at first appear. The concept of primary goods developed by John Rawls provides an example of an especially ambitious attempt along these lines. Rawls argues that there is a fairly extensive list of goods (including rights and liberties, powers and opportunities, income and wealth, self-respect, intelligence, and health) which are useful in furthering anyone's plans whatever their particular ends. People who fail to value liberty must on this view fail to see the extent to which the various political freedoms allow them to pursue many of their goals more effectively. Even if we may doubt that the items on this (or any other) list of goods are always and everywhere useful in pursuing any ends whatsoever, we can acknowledge that Rawls is showing us the possibility of an important kind of argument: Without supposing that there are ends which are intrinsically desirable, it is possible to argue that people are failing to appreciate the desirability of some end as a means to further ends which they do in fact desire. Even if it were impossible to produce a rational critique of ends qua ends, it would not follow that rational conversation must grind to a halt whenever someone declares that he or she simply doesn't want or desire something. One can, in response to such a declaration, try to show that the rejected end ought to be desired for its instrumental value, its utility in pursuing ends which the person does already want to attain.

As an example, consider a claim which is often made by socialists and anarchists of various stripes: that it is a defect of the typical capitalist firm (and the typical public sector bureaucracy) that most workers are positioned at or near the bottom of hierarchical organizations, that they consequently have little scope for exercising their creativity or intelligence, and that their work life consists almost entirely in carrying out activities which are designed and supervised by others. The remedy which is proposed for this defect -- workplace democracy or worker self-management -- is often rejected by workers themselves (or by theorists who claim to be respecting their desires) on the grounds that they do not want the responsibility and the bother involved. (The grounds of this rejection are close to Oscar Wilde's quip that the problem with socialism is that it would take up too many evenings.) One way to respond to this rejection would be to begin a conversation aimed at changing people's evaluation of the activities involved in self-management -- I shall say more about this possibility in a moment. But short of this one could also try to get people to see the bother involved in self-management as a price worth paying for the power to protect themselves against outcomes which they already want very much to avoid: layoffs, speedups, harassment, plant closings, and so on.

One aspect of this topic which is suggested by this last example, but which still needs to be brought out more clearly, is that our wants and desires can change drastically when we change our conception of our future. It is a commonplace observation that a way of life which seems entirely satisfactory can be made to seem hollow and pointless by a brush with death. Here it seems that what we thought we wanted appeared desirable to us only as part of a conception of our life as continuing on through a series of stages of development. Working this boring job is fine as long as I keep hold of the idea that it is a temporary situation, sooner or later to be followed by something more rewarding. Once I am reminded that that process of development may be cut short at any moment, I may feel that the deficiencies of my current situation are intolerable. Or that the complacency with which I had been regarding my situation depended on a promise of later fulfillment of desires which now assume a new urgency.

There is still another kind of criticism we can make of wants and desires. Consider the attitudes of the peasants described by Elvia Alvarado in Don't Be Afraid Gringo. Before, as she puts it, "the Church opened my eyes," she never thought to challenge her miserable circumstances. She was taught that the social structure which assigned her a subordinate position was natural and inevitable, even divinely ordained, and that she and her fellow peasants were temperamentally unsuited to any higher station in life. Her belief in the legitimacy of the social order and of her place in it led her to suppress or ignore any impulses or desires which might have taken her beyond her place. These could burst forth once she was persuaded that the legitimating beliefs were false. Here, if we were to imagine the conversations which led to this transformation of desires, it would not have been a matter of criticizing the means she had chosen to her ends, but rather of changing her ends by way of criticizing the grounds on which she had restricted them.

In all these ways and more there is something like an intertwining of desire and belief. (And "belief" is too flat a term for the variety of 'propositional attitudes' involved: hopes, fears, expectations, regrets, recriminations, etc.) But even if this is so, it might be objected, shouldn't we reserve the terms "true" and "false" for the beliefs and find other words to characterize the desires which depend on them in these various ways? ("Misguided," perhaps.) Well, why should we? (Don't we sometimes speak of "true" or "real" wants in ordinary language?)

Another way around the difficulty we are considering in this section is to accept that desires cannot be literally false, but to say that they can suffer from a defect which is analogous to falseness. Beliefs, we could say, aim at the truth, and desires aim at the good. A 'false' desire, then, would be a desire whose satisfaction was not really good for the desirer. This is close to the strategy pursued by Denise Meyerson in her book, False Consciousness. Meyerson accepts that there is an important dichotomy separating belief and desire, but argues that there are norms on both sides of the divide. Beliefs can go wrong by failing to hit their target, truth; desires can go wrong by missing their target, well-being. (There is a complication, though, arising from the fact that there is nothing wrong with desiring other people's good as well as, or even instead of, your own. The desires which can be criticized for failing to lead towards what is really good for us must, then, be only our 'self-regarding' desires.) But Meyerson does not want to say that the desires which miss their target are false. She would rather say that they are 'unhappy' or 'inappropriate.'[4]

This way of talking depends on having some notion of what is good for people which is independent of what they happen to want -- some notion, that is, of real interests. This notion is not quite as easy to make out as Meyerson seems to think, but I agree with her that it is indispensable. I will explain why I find her approach unsatisfactory, and try to provide a better one, in Chapter 6. Here I would like to express some reservations about her linguistic preference and to defend another way of explaining how desires (etc.) can be false, a way which hinges on the Freudian distinction between manifest and latent content, but which Meyerson rejects for what seem to me to be bad reasons.

First, sometimes I think it does make sense to link what I really want to what is really good for me. These are cases where I choose something largely because I have decided it is the best thing for me, but then it turns out not to be (as I subsequently judge the matter). Perhaps I have carefully selected from some menu of options (in a restaurant, cars on the market). Then, getting what I chose, discovering that it is in some way unsatisfactory, I say "This isn't really what I wanted." There are problems about how exactly to describe what goes on in these cases. Should we say that I was right about what I wanted, but then failed to really get it? Sometimes -- as when I ordered the scrambled eggs and they came to my table cold. (We have already encountered this kind of case, above.) But sometimes I get just what I expected to get, as far as I could have specified in advance, and then when I get it I realize that it's not, as we might say, doing the job. (I was after comfort food. I ordered the meat loaf with mashed potatoes -- normally a reliable choice for this purpose. Perfectly respectable meat loaf and mashed potatoes have appeared before me. I have eaten them, but I have not been comforted. "It wasn't really what I wanted.") This is close to an idea Meyerson attributes to Russell: that our true wants are those which, when we get what we (thought we) wanted, we are satisfied and our discomfort ceases. (If the craving doesn't stop, then that wasn't what I really wanted.) Meyerson admits that this can happen, but she thinks it is irrelevant to the ideological case, because in that case people are satisfied with what they get. (That they are satisfied is just the problem from the point of view of the social critic.) This may sometimes be the situation. Marcuse, for example, in One Dimensional Man, seems to be saying at times that advanced capitalism has so successfully sedated everyone with consumer goods and entertainment that they no longer feel any shred of dissatisfaction with their administered, inauthentic lives. But for the most part, critical theorists speak to felt dissatisfactions whose causes and potential cures may not be fully understood, which may not have been framed as problems calling for a solution, but which are still an identifiable part of people's lived reality. In those cases, anyway, part of the critique may be to suggest that people are pursuing things, and experiencing themselves as wanting things, which are not what they really want, in roughly Russell's sense. This brings us to the distinction between latent and manifest desires.

The Freudian idea is that our felt desires are sometimes only substitutes for other desires, unconscious desires. Our manifest desire provides an acceptable (though not necessarily welcome) outlet for an unconscious desire which is too dangerous or offensive to acknowledge. The neurotic's desire for his ritual handwashing (for literal clean hands) masks a too-dangerous-to-acknowledge desire for expiation of the guilt he feels for desiring his father's death (metaphorical clean hands) -- desire which he cannot consciously acknowledge because he (childishly) fears annihilation if his rage is brought to light.

Meyerson argues that this model of latent and manifest desires is not available in the case of "ideologically false consciousness," because the required motivational structure is not present.[5] She is thinking here of the false consciousness of the oppressed, of the proletariat for example. And she is supposing that the desire which would here count as the manifest one -- the proletarian's desire for more consumer goods, say -- is, by contrast with the Freudian case, of no benefit to the person who experiences it. In the Freudian case, the manifest desire serves the neurotic's interest in avoiding anxiety by covering up something fearsome. In the case of the oppressed person 'suffering' from false consciousness, Meyerson argues, the manifest desire serves no such function. In fact, if the critical theory which calls the desire false or unreal is correct, then that desire makes the person worse off, not better off, brings them frustration, not relief from anxiety. Only the oppressors benefit from the presence of such desires, not the oppressed. Moreover, Meyerson says, in the context of an attribution of false consciousness to an oppressed person, there is no explanatory work to be done by the hypothesis of a latent desire beneath the manifest one. Freud's attribution of an unconscious desire gains whatever credibility it has from the fact that the behavior of the neurotic is so puzzling. The hypothesis of a latent desire, and of a mechanism of repression or avoidance which covers it up with a more acceptable desire, helps to make sense of actions which otherwise seem senseless. The manifest desire (say, for clean hands) can't be the right explanation, because it doesn't account for the behavior (the hands are already clean). But in the case of the falsely conscious, the behavior in question does make sense in light of the manifest desire: the proletarian is pursuing higher wages and more vacation time (as opposed to socialist revolution) because he or she wants more things and more time to enjoy them. There is no puzzle to be solved by hypothesizing unconscious wants or desires.

These arguments, however, miss the psychological complexity of many cases of false consciousness. There are, at least sometimes, puzzles to solve and anxieties to ward off. To continue with the example of 'consumerist' desires in the proletariat, one fact which might generate some puzzlement is that so much effort is expended in the acquisition of things which then receive so little use or, if used, seem to bring so little satisfaction: the boat, purchased with several months wages, which sits in the driveway; the vacation packages from which one returns crabby and exhausted;[6] the expensive stereo system with its attendant discs and tapes which one seldom has time to listen to. (I don't mean to say that it is always this way; but sometimes it is.) And the function served by such desires may actually be quite analogous to that served by the neurotic's manifest desires: to acknowledge that what one really wanted was a work life shorn of the indignities and boredom one currently suffers, that the satisfactions one is pursuing so diligently are hollow -- such acknowledgements, which would raise uncomfortable questions about what one was then prepared to do, and about what the forces opposed to the necessary changes might then do to you, could surely be the locus of considerable anxiety.

Similar phenomena are discussed by feminist writers. Betty Friedan's "problem that has no name" was a vague dissatisfaction felt by women who had pursued and achieved the socially recognized standards of feminine success. The process of consciousness raising is typically held to bring to the surface a host of repressed or unrecognized feelings and desires. In this context too, the plausibility of attributions of latent stuff comes from some problematic features of the manifest surface of people's lives. Why aren't these women happier? (And if they say they are, why don't they act like it?) Why do they seem depressed? Why are their doctor's prescribing tranquilizers for them? And so on. And, again, the utility of the manifest desires can be seen to lie in the way they ward off the recognition of socially forbidden or problematic ones, desires which by taking one beyond one's prescribed "place" might bring one into conflict with one's husband, one's clergyman, one's friends, with the whole male power structure and its cultural aura. To recognize these desires may be liberating, but it may at the same time be terrifying, especially if there is little or no support in one's social world for pursuing them, and if they are met with horror or incomprehension.

So, I think we can make use of a distinction between latent and manifest wants or desires in ideological contexts. And this will have a place among a family of possible criticisms of wants and desires: that what you think you want is not what will satisfy your craving, that what you want is not what is really good for you, that what you say you want is not what your behavior suggests that you want, and so on.

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3.1.2: Needs

Criticism of needs is easier to understand, since needs seem to be more clearly tied to some deleterious effect of failing to satisfying them. If I want something and don't get it, I may be disappointed, but not necessarily harmed. "Need" typically carries the implication that, if I don't get what I need, then I will suffer in some more serious way. (Not always. Sometimes "need" seems to function as nothing more than an intensifier. "I really need a drink" just means I want one badly.) When the doctor says "This man needs surgery, right now," she means to let us know that if he doesn't get it he will die. Less dramatically, if she tells me I need to get my cholesterol level down, she means that, if I don't, I'm more likely to have a heart attack. In these contexts, it is easy to motivate a distinction between what I really need and what I only think I need.

Needs are not always a matter of life and death. Sometimes I need to get more exercise, not to avoid heart attack, but just to feel more energetic. Or I need to lose weight so my clothes will fit. Or I need to pass the bar exam in order to be admitted to the legal profession. This has led some people to suppose that we should think of needs as always relative to purposes and circumstances. "I need x," then, would always be read as shorthand for "I need x in circumstances y to accomplish z." This is often illuminating: If you say you need a chainsaw, I may want to know what you need it for. But I agree with those writers who say that this kind of relativity is out of place when you come down to what may be called our basic or fundamental needs.[7] What you need in order to live (not die) is what you need, period. Things get tricky, though, when we try to go a little bit further and say that among our basic needs are the things without which we will not thrive (or will ail) or that what we need is what we must have to avoid being harmed (or seriously harmed). Clearly we do want to include some such criterion. The observation that, if I spend several hours trudging through the snow in my bare feet, I will not actually die, but will only lose most of my toes to frostbite, does not seem to be enough to show that I do not need warm boots. (My need is conditional on the circumstances, but not on my desire to keep my toes. Keeping my toes is not a special project of mine, for which I happen to need to avoid frostbite.) But how serious must the harm be? And what kinds of harm are we meaning to include?

Braybrooke, for example, wants to say that our basic needs are those required for life, health, and normal functioning. He explains normal functioning in terms of the ability to carry out the tasks involved in "basic social roles, namely the roles of parent, householder, worker and citizen."[8] His list of basic needs, then, includes education, among other items which some might not want to call basic needs (recreation, recognition, sex). But in a society where not all people are citizens, perhaps not all need education. (I am reminded of a story about the Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza, who allegedly said, to a visitor asking why so little of the national budget was spent on education, "We don't want educated people. We want oxen.") Doyal and Gough, reflecting on the logical and psychological requirements for holding people responsible for their actions, conclude that we have a basic need for autonomy and thus for such things as self-confidence and understanding.[9] Some minimal degree of autonomy, they say, is necessary to participation in any human form of life. At first this minimal autonomy seems to be compatible with people having very little education or respect, as long as their social situation gives them some role and some scope for decision within it (as even slavery does).[10] But soon enough it turns out that we are to take literacy, basic math skills, free time, and employment to be required by our basic need for autonomy. Not that they say these things are required for participation in every culture, but they do say that they are required for everyone who is a member of a culture where these things are needed for "full participation." This seems to imply that any culture which deprives some of its members of opportunities, skills, and so on, that are available to a majority or to a dominant group, and are crucial for participation in the activities of that dominant group, is failing to meet their basic human needs. (The concept of a basic human need is strained further when Doyal and Gough expand their definition of autonomy to include what they call "critical autonomy," which is the ability to reflect on and to change the rules of one's culture, a need which can only be satisfied under conditions of political freedom.) I don't think the concept of a basic or fundamental need will bear this much weight.

Nonetheless, however we do understand basic human needs we can take them as a sort of benchmark, against which we could measure other alleged needs. Sometimes this seems to be what is involved in claiming that a need is a false need or not a real need. What is being said is that something which is not a basic need is being treated as if it were one. But this is not necessarily much of a criticism. Since basic needs are minimal (however we want to describe the minimum), there can be no general objection to people wanting more than that. (At the fast food restaurant I say, "Give me a Coke please." "Will Pepsi do?" "No, today I really need a Coke." "But that's not a real need!" So what?) In some contexts, though, the objection that I am claiming basic status for a non-basic need could be pertinent -- arguments about the justice of some proposed welfare scheme, for example. Claims of basic need seem to trump other kinds of claims on resources. So when the distribution of scarce resources is at issue, disputes about which needs are real can have a point.

Marcuse draws a distinction between true and false needs in One Dimensional Man. And it looks like he relies on this strategy. He says, "The only needs that have an unqualified claim for satisfaction are the vital ones -- nourishment, clothing, lodging at the attainable level of culture. The satisfaction of these needs is the prerequisite for the realization of all needs . . .. 'Truth' and 'falsehood' of needs designates objective conditions to the extent to which the universal satisfaction of vital needs and beyond it, the progressive alleviation of toil and poverty, are universally valid standards." 'False' needs include "most of the prevailing needs to relax, to have fun, to behave and consume in accordance with the advertisements, to love and hate what others love and hate." That these needs prevail in our society is "a fact that must be undone in the interest of the happy individual as well as all those whose misery is the price of his satisfaction."[11] Here it seems as though the point is that the 'false' needs are to be condemned for diverting resources from the satisfaction of the more basic needs of others. But Marcuse is usually read as saying that there is something wrong with the needs themselves.

What could it be? Not that their satisfaction is unrewarding. (That is explicitly ruled out on p. 5.) Marcuse's official definition says that false needs "are those which are superimposed upon the individual by particular social interests in his repression: the needs which perpetuate toil, aggressiveness, misery, and injustice."[12] If we read this as meaning his toil, aggressiveness, and misery, then we get a different complaint. False needs are to be condemned because they are bad for the individual who has them in that they lead him or her to continue to cooperate with a social system which imposes toil, misery etc. My desire to keep the flow of consumer goods coming into my household makes me willing to cooperate with a social system which is in some sense "repressive" and which has encouraged me to want those goods. "Repressive" how? Marcuse seems to have in mind the familiar Marxian notion that workers in a competitive market society are not really free, that they are compelled to work under conditions not of their own choosing, that they must compete with one another for work (hence "aggressiveness"), and so on.[13] This makes sense (although one is certainly entitled to doubts about the feasibility of the alternatives), but it still puts the falseness of the needs onto the effects of pursuing their satisfaction -- in this case distracting people from some revolutionary project which would be better for them in the long run. Perhaps after the revolution Professor Marcuse wouldn't mind relaxing and having fun. The need to have fun, then, is false only in the sense that there are other needs, needs of a higher priority, that ought to be satisfied first.

This is what seems to follow from what Marcuse says explicitly. But I can't help feeling that the tone of his remarks implies a different idea: that the false needs are not worth satisfying at all, that the satisfaction they yield is shallow or hollow. "Euphoria in unhappiness," he says. And this reading is confirmed in his later discussion of "repressive desublimation."[14] There he says that our society permits much more sexual freedom than in times past, and that this permits us a kind of satisfaction which makes acceptance of social restraints (work, bureaucracy, etc.) easier. But "the happy consciousness is shaky . . . a thin surface over fear, frustration and disgust."[15] The sexuality which is freed up is a poor substitute for the eroticism which is no longer available in our administered, technologized world. (He compares making love in a meadow, where libido can be diffused over the environment, to making love in a car, where one can only enjoy "localized sensation" -- a comparison which does not seem to me to do the job for which it is intended.) Compared to this shallow sexuality, sublimation (though based on repression) was better.

Can we extract a coherent idea from this? I think so. The genre of criticism here is one which points to some feature of our lives, which we see as answering to a need, and says that it is a poor substitute for what we really need. This is close to the Freudian idea of a substitute gratification. There is a real need there -- for sex, for friendship, whatever. But the need cannot directly and fully express itself in the current context. Instead it is channeled into another outlet -- pornography, the false camaraderie of the bartender. And (to complete Marcuse's picture) it is so channelled not for purely intrapsychic or personally idiosyncratic reasons -- although this too could count as the basis of a charge of 'false need' for some purposes -- but as a result of systematic features of society. (Perhaps 'coming out' after many years of trying to act and feel like a straight person could count as a case of this.) One important feature of this kind of case is that I may have quite a lot invested in my false needs, that is in thinking of myself as the sort of person who needs those things, in my ability to get them, and so on. That is, false needs in this sense may form an important part of my identity (to which we will turn directly). Of course, the critic has to be able to point to something that will count as evidence that the way you are satisfying the underlying need is not working (or not working well). What sometimes seems to count against Marcuse's way of proceeding is that he has made the "repressive" satisfactions so gratifying, and the person who feels the false need so content with those satisfactions, that there is no tension or distress that could warrant the inference to unmet needs. But this is, then, a fault of his application, not of this way of identifying false needs.

So, to sum up, we have identified several ways of drawing a distinction between true and false (or real and unreal) needs: A need can be said to be false or unreal when 1) it is a non-basic need masquerading as a basic need; 2) it is a need which is being given too high a priority relative to other more urgent needs (this is different from 1 in that neither need may be basic); 3) it is a need for an object which is a substitute for some other object which is really needed; and 4) (a case too simple to need discussion) it is a "need" for something which is not really needed (as when a quack convinces me that I need a certain potion to restore my health, but the potion is actually of no value and my health is actually fine).

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3.1.3 Identities

Claims that we have false needs or false desires are hardest to swallow when they are directed at parts of ourselves that seem central to our sense of who we are. Yet radical criticism does want, sometimes, to go this far. We can be mistaken about who we really are.

One kind of case is what could be called "false group identification." I imagine myself to be 'middle class.' In fact, I am a proletarian. I have none of the powers or privileges of the middle class, and, in thinking that I do, I keep myself from joining with my fellow workers to try to get some. In "Pathologies of Deliberation" Susan Stokes describes such a case. She found poor shantytown dwellers in Peru who thought of themselves as "professionals." (Their reasoning: poor people are lazy and stupid; I am not; therefore I am not a poor person like these others around here.) But an element of the professional identity was "decorum." And this was felt to be incompatible with joining a union or going on strike. Similarly, Stokes suggests, welfare recipients are barraged with narratives of dependence and incompetence put forward by both liberals and conservatives arguing in the media about policy issues. They take these in, suppose that most welfare recipients are lazy or incompetent, and conclude "I'm not like those others."[16] A friend who teaches in the public schools makes a similar point about his colleagues: They have been sold an identity as "professionals," which is inconsistent with their actual position in the social structure. They are line workers at the bottom of a bureaucratic hierarchy which manages their work to a degree incompatible with the autonomy definitive of professional status. Thinking of themselves as professionals, though, they take on new tasks uncomplainingly, accept "accountability" for outcomes not under their control, and lose their former union militancy.

These cases seem to contrast with those where the identity in question is disempowering in a more straightforward way: "God made me a slave." "I'm just a peasant, what can I do?" "Nice girls don't raise their voices." The feminist critique of femininity as training in subordination suggests that the very identity itself is disempowering. Of course, one becomes to some extent, perhaps a very large extent, that sort of person. It is who you really are. But it is not who you are 'by nature.' And it may not be in your interest to remain that person. (Assuming there is a process of self repair available.)

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3.2 Who is in a position to distinguish the true from the false?

In this section I want to respond to some criticisms of the notion of false consciousness which come from 'post-modernism' and from some currents of feminism, criticisms which question the epistemological credentials of attributions of false consciousness and also the political implications of claiming to possess this kind of knowledge. All these criticisms allege that the notion of false consciousness carries with it a set of distinctly 'modern' -- and bankrupt -- philosophical assumptions. My strategy will be to argue that it need not bring those assumptions along with it.

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3.2.1 Foucault's critique of the notion of ideology

In a mid-seventies interview with two Italian journalists, Michel Foucault gave a concise statement of his reasons for distrusting the notion of ideology. I think it is clear from what he says that the notion he has in mind is the so-called critical or pejorative conception of ideology and that his criticisms thus apply also to the notion of false consciousness which is my topic:

The notion of ideology appears to me to be difficult to make use of, for three reasons. The first is that, like it or not, it always stands in virtual opposition to something else which is supposed to count as truth. Now I believe that the problem does not consist in drawing the line between that in a discourse which falls under the category of scientificity or truth, and that which comes under some other category, but in seeing historically how effects of truth are produced within discourses which in themselves are neither true nor false. The second drawback is that the concept of ideology refers, I think necessarily, to something of the order of a subject. Thirdly, ideology stands in a secondary position relative to something which functions as its infrastructure, as its material, economic determinant, etc. For these three reasons, I think this is a notion that cannot be used without circumspection.[17]

I will ignore all but the first of these points. What is wrong with opposing the false to the true? Foucault's criticism could be read (and some do read it) as claiming that you can't distinguish between what is true in a discourse and what is false, and thus as expressing a very general sort of skepticism. But it seems to me more directly to be claiming that Foucault thinks it is more fruitful for his purposes to ignore questions about which statements are true and which false and to pay attention to something else -- namely, to the way that even true statements are made possible only by the rules of a discourse which is both structured by power relations and productive of "effects of power." In a lecture from the same period Foucault says:

it is quite possible that the major mechanisms of power have been accompanied by ideological productions. There has, for example, probably been an ideology of education, an ideology of the monarchy, an ideology of parliamentary democracy, etc.; but basically I do not believe that what has taken place can be said to be ideological. It is both much more and much less than ideology. It is the production of effective instruments for the formation and the accumulation of knowledge -- methods of observation, techniques of registration, procedures for investigation and research, apparatuses of control. All this means that power, when it is exercised through these subtle mechanisms, cannot but evolve, organize and put into circulation a knowledge, or rather apparatuses of knowledge, which are not ideological constructs.[18]

Going back to the interview quoted above, we find these further statements (which, characteristically, are presented as "not firm assertions, but simply suggestions to be further tested and evaluated"):

'Truth' is to be understood as a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation and operation of statements.

'Truth' is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extend it. A 'régime' of truth.

. . . The essential political problem for the intellectual is not to criticize the ideological contents supposedly linked to science, or to ensure that his own scientific practice is accompanied by a correct ideology, but that of ascertaining the possibility of constituting a new politics of truth. The problem is not changing people's consciousness -- or what

is in their heads -- but the political, economic, institutional régime of the production of truth. It's not a matter of emancipating truth from every system of power (which would be a chimera, for truth is already power) but of detaching the power of truth from the forms of hegemony, social, economic and cultural, within which it operates at the present time.

The political question, to sum up, is not error, illusion, alienated consciousness or ideology; it is truth itself. Hence the importance of Nietzsche.[19]

Any reading of these remarks is bound to be somewhat speculative, but here is my own: Whereas part of the job of a critical theorist as conceived by Marxism is to formulate a correct account of social reality which then shows up the distortions and falsifications of 'bourgeois political economy,' for example, Foucault sees the discourses of the human sciences as producing truths which are nonetheless repressive, not because they cover up or distort anything but because they participate in the creation and regulation of an oppressive social reality. The disciplines of the human sciences are part of an apparatus of social control. However, they achieve their effects not by hiding from people the true causes of their unhappiness or by legitimating the relationships which exploit them. Instead they produce (true) knowledge which is used to regulate and control and whose conditions of production are themselves dependent on apparatuses of control: bureaucratic surveillance and measurement in 'carceral' institutions.

One difficulty for this reading is that it is hard to square with Foucault's own discussions of such sciences as psychiatry. Throughout he seems to be engaged in a critique which is partly epistemological: there is constant use of quotation marks to question the scientific and objective character of these disciplines and of words like "mask," "disguise" and "conceal." For example: "It seems to me that the real political task in a society such as ours is to criticize the working of institutions that appear to be both neutral and independent; to criticize them in such a manner that the political violence which has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight them."[20] To say "appear to be neutral and independent" seems to imply that the appearance is misleading. And then people who believe in their neutrality and independence believe something false. Indeed Foucault often seems to be engaged in the typical unmasking strategies of 'ideology critique.'

This apparent contradiction is indicative, I believe, of a serious tension in Foucault's later work, between a desire that his work contribute to political struggle -- a desire which seems to require that he know somehow what he is for and what he is against -- and a philosophical position according to which all knowledge is always already caught up in power relations -- a view which seems to make him suspicious of his own beliefs about what he is struggling for or against. When challenged on this point, he tends to retreat from his explicit political commitments to the detached standpoint of the historian -- but this squares poorly with the tone and evident motivation of his work.

It seems to me that this difficulty is rooted in an oversimple conception of the relation between (in Foucault's terms) statements and discourses. His picture seems to be this: on the one hand there are statements, which can be true or false. On the other hand there are discourses, which cannot (and which thus seem to be immune to rational criticism). Moreover, statements can be judged as true or false only according to criteria which are internal to discourses. So where rational criticism is possible it must be carried on in terms which will themselves be shaped by the same forces which have constructed the reigning discourses and the oppressive social reality to which they correspond. To shift terminology: all criticism is either internal or external. It either applies the reigning standards or it applies standards taken from elsewhere. But internal criticism, because it operates with the reigning standards, will largely endorse the status quo; and external criticism, because it imports other standards (a choice which cannot be rationally defended) will be seen as arbitrary or irrelevant.

The way out of this difficulty, I think, is to see that statements are not unequivocally located inside thoroughly boundaried discourses (or conceptual schemes or language games or whatever). Rather, statements are made by people who participate in a variety of discourses, more than one of which may be pertinent to any one statement. And discourses (or whatever) can themselves be made the focus of critical discussion on a variety of levels and from a variety of points of view. (Actually, it is wrong to think in terms of only two levels: statements and discourses. Rather one should think in terms of nested and overlapping linguistic practices, divisible in a variety of ways depending on one's purposes. And among those linguistic practices is the practice of criticizing linguistic practices -- or, better, a variety of diverse practices of criticism.)

To illustrate these remarks, consider the variety of possible response to the claim that a certain wage bargain is fair. Marxism sometimes seems to run into a difficulty here. If one accepts the prevailing (capitalist) standards of fairness, then any freely contracted wage bargain is fair. But the appeal to any other standards seems arbitrary. But the analysis which produces this dilemma is too simple. We have a variety of intellectual resources and perspectives available without per impossible leaving our social location. The 'capitalist line' might be that the bargain is fair because uncoerced. But we can respond to this without transcendental arguments. In Liberalism, for example, L.T. Hobhouse mounted what seemed to me a very effective attack on this sort of argument using fairly commonsensical ideas. 1) That a bargain struck between people who are not equally willing to fail to come to terms is problematic. (If I am hanging from a cliff by my fingernails, he asks, and you offer to throw me a rope if I give you all my wealth, and I agree, have I freely consented?) Employer and employee (though not so drastically unequal as in the example just given) are typically in very different positions in this regard. 2) Recognizing that the threat of firing a person may be as effective a way of forcing his choice as threatening to punch him in the nose, we can ask whether it is consistent to ask the government to prohibit the latter sort of coercion and to insist at the same time that it take no interest in the way the first sort is used. 3) If the answer appeals to property rights, we can point out that the security of those rights is provided by the community which may then have standing to take an interest in how they are exercised to threaten the economic security of others. If the bargain is, instead, justified by appealing to the sort of economic theory which tells us that wages have to be equal to the marginal contribution of the employee to the firm's revenues, we could respond with 4) an institutional analysis of the way executive compensation is determined (arguably, through cronyism, by and large) or 5) by arguing that the production of wealth, requiring as it does a variety of circumstances (law and order, infrastructure, accumulated social knowledge, an educated work force, and so on) has a large social element, which does not necessarily belong to the capitalist by right since he didn't pay for any of these prerequisites.

Now, I don't mean to suggest that any of these arguments is conclusive, or even that some people, thoroughly committed to the discourse of classical liberalism (or, as we would now call it, libertarianism) might not reject them all out of hand. My point is that without leaving the ground, so to speak, we can look at the matter in more than one way. We are imbedded in a social context, to be sure, and all of these arguments bring into play one or another set of unexamined assumptions (so far unexamined, there is still time), but we are not imbedded in the discourse of capitalism to the point where we have no other frame of reference.

Perhaps these complaints are misdirected. Perhaps the claim is not that we cannot know what the critique of ideology claims to know, or that we cannot rationally compare arguments about, say, the fairness of wage bargains. Perhaps the claim is just that, whenever we do that, we are operating in the terms of some discourse or other, and then that discourse must have some sort of power at work in it, so we are just replacing one power with another . Any critique of one misleading or one-sided discourse (say, bourgeois political economy) delivers us up to some other misleading and one-sided discourse (Marxism, say, which is quite properly criticized for its 'productivism' and its reductive approach to sexual and racial politics). Quite possibly. But the misleading and one-sided character of a way of thinking needs to be demonstrated in each case. That is, it needs to be shown, as it often has been shown, that the complaint does not boil down to an impossible demand to talk about everything at once or to produce the mythical "complete description." It needs to be shown that some particular people are privileged and others not and how this is done. Oversimplifying, we could say that Marxism did this for 'bourgeois political economy,' that feminism did this for marxism, and that women of color did this for the feminism created by middle-class white women (to trace one lineage of critique).

Given this history, though, we have to admit that we are never entitled to suppose, as perhaps some Marxists did, that we have finally got hold of the whole truth, finally dissolved the last ideological illusion, dismantled the last oppressive institution. Any liberation achieved, any truth discovered, is provisional and fallible. There is a legitimate criticism of Marxism in Foucault. (Well, I think it's there, anyway.) By supposing that he had grasped the overall direction of human history, and grasped it with 'scientific certainty', Marx put himself in a position to have a hard time hearing the voices of those who were left out of his theory. "Metanarrative," if the term means something like Marx's theory of history, has this danger. The postmodern impulse, then, is to reject all such theories, to condemn them as totalizing. A totalizing theory, say Best and Kellner, is one that "draws all phenomena around a single center."[21] The claim is that this is also 'totalitarian,' evidently because one is then tempted to dismiss people who see other elements as independent or central. But there is a corresponding danger on the other side. We can't stop looking for regularities and patterns, even big ones. And perhaps sometimes a totalizing theory may be just what we need. (Let's talk about the expansion of citizenship and suffrage in Euro-American history.) The danger is in holding on to such a theory through thick and thin, in supposing you don't need to consider what it leaves out, listen to those who say that they are left out. But the problem, then, does not lie in the content of the theory or even its structure. It has to do with how you hold on to it and who you are willing to listen to.

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3.2.2 Feminist charges of arrogance and elitism

So far I have been discussing criticisms which challenge the epistemological credentials of theorists who have claimed to discover false consciousness. Now I want to turn to the charge that attributions of false consciousness are morally or politically objectionable: arrogant, authoritarian, silencing, elitist, and so on. Foucault makes this sort of charge at one point in his discussion of Marxism's pretensions to being 'scientific': "What types of knowledge do you want to disqualify in the very instant of your demand: 'Is it science'? Which speaking, discoursing subjects -- which subjects of experience and knowledge -- do you want to 'diminish' when you say: "I who conduct this discourse am conducting a scientific discourse, and I am a scientist'? Which theoretical-political avant garde do you want to enthrone in order to isolate it from all the discontinuous forms of knowledge that circulate about it?."[22] Indeed the charge of elitism has been often leveled against Marxists, from Bakunin's disputes with Marx in the First International, through the persistent (and justified) fears of "vanguardism" in connection with Lenin's Marxism to Alisdair MacIntyre's denunciation of Herbert Marcuse.[23] But the specific connection of efforts to silence or diminish some while elevating or empowering others with the use of the notion of false consciousness is made more clearly by several feminist writers, and it is in the context of a debate among feminists that I want to situate my own discussion of these charges.

As I mentioned earlier, the centrality of false consciousness to feminism seems to be implied by the common observation that consciousness raising is central to feminist practice. Consciousness raising groups proliferated in the late 60's and early 70's as the so-called 'second wave' of feminism took off. According to the standard accounts[24] small (6-12 members), leaderless, egalitarian groups of women would get together regularly to share and discuss their experiences. The process led, typically, to the discovery of common elements in women's experience and to a recognition that what had formerly seemed to be one's individual bad luck or failure (to have been raped, abused, molested, or harassed; to have had an abortion or a caesarean section; to have hated, sometimes, one's husband, children, body, role, daily activities, life; and so on) was actually a common experience for women, was a consequence of women's pervasive and systematic subordination.

These discoveries (and I have only gestured towards them here) created the possibility of a split, however, between the women who had raised their consciousnesses and those who had not. And here there was some tension. The starting point for consciousness raising was the turn from expert knowledge (socially male) to personal experience, to a practice which placed epistemic authority in the hands of women describing their own lives. But as the process generated new insights, did it not also generate a kind of expertise? Didn't the women who had participated in a CR group now know something that they hadn't known before, something that at least some other women still did not know?

Some feminists had little hesitation in describing the beliefs of non-feminist women as false. The French feminist Christine Delphy, for example, wrote "From this identification [with 'their' men] follows the belief of women born of, or married (legally or not) to bourgeois men that they are themselves 'bourgeois'. This is false consciousness. They do not participate in the privileges of their men's class, whatever they may think." [25] But there was also a reaction against this kind of judgement.[26]

A particularly clear rejection of feminist attributions of false consciousness can be found in the book Breaking Out: Feminist Consciousness and Feminist Research by Liz Stanley and Sue Wise. Stanley and Wise argue that it is a mistake to see consciousness raising as a process that moves from false consciousness to true consciousness. "The idea of 'false' and 'true' consciousness, with 'true consciousness' being what revolutionaries have, is offensively patronizing. It denies the validity of people's own interpretations and understandings" (p.119). In supposing that women with raised consciousnesses have hold of a truth which is unknown to other women, this view of consciousness raising mirrors the Leninist notion of a vanguard, which is "grossly elitist." Moreover, it denies the complexity of both the raised and the unraised consciousness. Pre-feminist consciousness is not merely false; non-feminist women often have considerable insight into the oppressive nature of their society: "Stand in any local shop anywhere and listen to 'falsely conscious' women knowing and talking about the fact that they live in a man's world, and that they're badly done to" (p. 120). And feminist consciousness is not a once-and-for-all achievement but a continuing journey of discovery and change. Feminists should drop any notion of true or false consciousness and instead insist on the egalitarian principle that "every woman's experience is valid."

In a series of articles in Signs (now published in book form as Toward a Feminist Theory of the State ) Catherine MacKinnon has taken up this problem and posed it in a more sophisticated way. MacKinnon recognizes that there is a tension in feminism between the egalitarian impulse to accept every woman's experience as valid and the need to disagree with anti-feminist women. She sees feminist theory as producing two unsatisfactory responses to this tension, each of which denies half of the problem: the 'false consciousness' approach dismisses some women's experience as false and, in so doing, "posits objective ground." The subjectivist approach embraces "any version of women's experience which a biological female claims" while assuming "that women have power and are free in exactly the ways feminism has found that they are not. The way in which the subject/object split undermines the feminist project here is that the 'false consciousness' approach cannot explain experience as it is experienced by those who experience it, and its alternative can only reiterate the terms of that experience" (pp. 115-16). MacKinnon's 'solution' to this dilemma is to see feminism as a mode of theorizing which gives up the 'objectivist' claim to transcend one's particular situation and achieve universality but which also refuses to plead guilty to the charge of subjectivity or partiality. Instead, feminism rejects the distinction between objective and subjective, recognizes objectivity as a (male) strategy of domination, and claims to speak from the perspective of women -- a perspective which reveals the emptiness of male pretensions to objectivity and universality.

I do not, at this point, wish to try to unravel MacKinnon's rather paradoxical methodological pronouncements. But I do want to respond to the identification of "the 'false consciousness' approach" with 'objectivism' and with the dismissal of some people's experience. In making this identification, MacKinnon is accepting half of the Stanley and Wise view (though she clearly rejects the other half).

It is possible to use the notion of false consciousness in the way which these writers criticize, as an excuse for ignoring some people's accounts of their experience and for dismissing their arguments against one's theories. False-consciousness can be attributed to people in an authoritarian or question-begging way. (MacKinnon is right, I think, to say that it is question-begging to dismiss someone's claim that she is not oppressed by saying that she only thinks so because her oppression has given her a false consciousness. One needs to meet the claim with an analysis of 'oppression' and evidence that it applies to the case at hand.) But the notion need not be so used. An attribution of false consciousness is an hypothesis -- discussable, criticizable, revisable, etc. like any other. The critics here seem to be inferring, from the fact that the notion is sometimes used dogmatically, that it has no non-dogmatic use.

Perhaps it could be argued that, unlike most concepts, false consciousness is especially prone to this kind of abuse, because part of the content of an attribution of false consciousness is a claim that the people who suffer from it are not trustworthy interpreters of their own social world. But this claim is not one that need be merely assumed. It should be a conclusion the theorist must work toward. Part of that work will be to give evidence for claims that the social world is not what some people take it to be. Another part will be to give some account of how they have come to misapprehend it. Both of these parts are subject to whatever standards of accuracy and cogency are appropriate for claims about social reality more generally. Nor is an attribution of false consciousness necessarily a claim that someone's experience of the world is wholly false, utterly deluded -- as Stanley and Wise's argument about what one can hear in any local shop seems to suppose. It is only a claim that there is something which the person does not know, some way in which their knowledge has not been properly framed, some inference which could and should be drawn but has not been, and so on. This is perfectly compatible with a falsely conscious person being well acquainted with various oppressive features of their social world. As Bartky puts it: "Women have long lamented their condition but . . .. As long as their situation is apprehended as natural, inevitable and inescapable, women's consciousness of themselves, no matter how alive to insult and inferiority, is not yet feminist consciousness."[27]

There is one way that attributions of false consciousness may seem especially arrogant or patronizing. That is that they often concern, not just any social facts, but facts which are particularly important to people, and to be told that one is mistaken about matters which are of central importance to one's sense of identity and competence may be especially offensive. These are reasons for being tactful when making such claims, but they are not reasons for thinking that no such claims can be true.

Moreover, it is wrong to see the notion of false consciousness as one whose primary use is to stigmatize second or third parties. I want to suggest that second and third person attributions are, in a way, derivative from first person attributions. The feminist debate I have been rehearsing in this section brings this out. It is in the context of consciousness raising that the distinction between true and false consciousness first gets going. It is, in the first place, a retrospective judgement of one's own prior beliefs. It is then a ground of suspicion directed, in the first instance, against oneself. (If I have gradually become aware of internalized sexism, how can I doubt that there is more to discover?) Then it is a part of a common project of exploration in supportive group process -- perhaps gently proposed to a comrade for her consideration. Then, no doubt, it can be deployed manipulatively in the group, turned against outsiders, used as a weapon in polemical debate, and even taken up into a rhetoric of authoritarian avant gardism which tries to justify the Gulag. But these further uses are not inevitable, and their possibility need not count against the legitimacy of the concept. (Delphy writes: "...false consciousness does not really separate us [from antifeminist women] because we have all had it, and we all still have at least some of it. When we are struggling against their 'opinions', we are not struggling against antifeminist women, but against this common enemy -- and thus for them, and for ourselves.")[28] To give up on a distinction between true and false consciousness is to undermine the claim that consciousness raising is a change for the better -- as is evidenced by Stanley and Wise, who can say only that they "prefer" feminist consciousness to the alternatives (p.120).

We can get a sense of how far wrong things can go when the possibility of false consciousness is denied by looking at Christina Sommers' attack on radical feminism. In a series of articles Sommers attacked feminist philosophers for their refusal to accept and respect "the goals that women actually have," for their condescending and elitist attitude toward women who want "traditional families" and who prize traditional femininity.[29] (One of her articles bears the title "Feminist Philosophers Are Oddly Unsympathetic to the Women They Claim to Represent.")[30] Sommers cites feminist writings which support an androgynous or assimilationist ideal "in which sexual differences are minimal or nonexistent." According to these writers,[31] feminists should work toward a world in which gender stereotypes have been eliminated, childrearing is shared by men and women, heterosexuality is not privileged, and families may take a variety of forms. Along with this ideal, according to Sommers, goes a radical critique of existing practices. Marriage is assimilated to prostitution. Wives and mothers are analogized to slaves. If women think that they are happy in these roles or that they have chosen them or want them, then they are deluded. "Here the radical feminist will typically explain that, existentially, women, being treated by men as sex objects, are especially prone to bad faith and false consciousness."[32] They must, then, be re-educated. But, says Sommers, "The goal of restructuring human beings and human society by changing what the average person professedly wants in favor of what he or she 'ought to want' is . . . crudely illiberal and undemocratic."[33] Instead, Sommers recommends a moderately liberal feminism, a "Whiggish" feminism which acknowledges the moral authority of tradition and common sense and contents itself with working to end unfair discrimination.

Sommers' argument has been largely answered by Marilyn Freidman.[34] Friedman points out that Sommers doesn't actually argue for the superiority of traditional family arrangements over any alternatives. She rests her case entirely on what (she thinks) most women want. At the same time Sommers provides no evidence that traditional arrangements are what most women want, and she certainly ignores the many women (lesbians especially) who don't want that. Moreover, she ignores the substance of feminist critiques of the power relationships of the traditional family and of the subordinating deference built into traditional femininity. Worst (for her credibility as a critic of feminism), when Sommers does try to argue for the legitimacy of the choices of the traditionalist women, she commits a fairly elementary blunder. She appeals to Mill's criterion (from Utilitarianism) according to which the value of experiences is determined by the choice of the "competent judges" who have experienced the relevant alternatives and are capable of appreciating and enjoying them. Sommers assumes that this criterion favors her endorsement of the traditionalist women's choices, failing to notice that in most cases they have not experienced the sorts of alternative living and childrearing arrangements advocated by feminists, much less experienced them under conditions that would make possible a full appreciation of their merits. (This last point is important, I think, if we are to seriously try on Mill's suggestion. I would guess that there are some people who have "tried alternative lifestyles," including alternative family and childrearing arrangements, and have rejected them. But this might be not because those arrangements are 'really worse' by Mill's criterion, it might be because they are undermined by the sexist or heterosexist social context, or because the experimenters have brought along emotional and other sorts of baggage that has spoiled the experiment. More on these issues below in Chapter 6.)

Sommers exemplifies a feminism which is completely unwilling to challenge the existing desires and judgements of any women. Consequently it is a feminism limited to "equal opportunity in the workplace and in politics." That is, it can work for this goal as long as most women want it. If they don't, then I suppose she would want to respect that choice too. (Mill and Harriet Taylor, perhaps, must be condemned as premature anti-sexists from Sommers' Whiggish point of view.)

Still, I can't help feeling that Sommers has a point which Friedman has dismissed too quickly. The strongly assimilationist ideal put forward by some radical feminists, and the derogation of child-bearing and even sometimes child-rearing, did repel many people, and more recent feminisms (including those articulated by some of the early radicals) tend to be less enthusiastic about such things as government-run daycare centers and technological substitutes for female reproductive capacity. There is an awfully long way from Rhett Butler and Scarlet O'Hara (one of Sommers' paradigms of traditional sexiness) to a world where sex is no more important than eye color, and it is not at all clear that justice requires that we go all that way or ought to want to. Consequently it is not obvious that women who dissent from some parts of the radical feminist project are therefore suffering from false consciousness or are not 'competent judges' in Mill's sense. To the extent that people caught up in the excitement of a radical vision cut themselves off from those women, refused to consider their point of view, they were making a mistake. On the other hand, I think Sandra Bartky is right to say that the liberal feminist project of abolishing the traditional sexual division of labor while keeping up traditional standards of female body display is incoherent. (Note that this liberal feminism is nonetheless more radical than Sommers', who wants to abolish discrimination in the workplace but fully expects most women to stay home with their children.) The discipline involved in conventional feminine body display is, as Bartky says, a process of "inferiorization" which, in the context of the current structures of power and meaning, marks women as subordinates. (This does not, of course, mean that body display is inherently 'inferiorizing' or anything of the sort, not even that elements of the current discipline of female embodiment could not have a different meaning in a different context.)

Where does this leave us? Some radical feminist dismissals of the validity of the experiences and choices of other women do seem to have been disrespectful and, in retrospect, ill-founded. Some projects sincerely and enthusiastically pursued by many women (to be thin, to be pretty, to be fashionable) do seem to be legitimately subject to feminist critique. If, 'in the last instance', the critique has to win their assent, it still has a ways to go, but I don't think it is inherently disrespectful to raise the issue, and to keep raising it.

I have tried to suggest, in this chapter, that drawing a distinction between 'true' and 'false' elements in consciousness need be neither incoherent (in the case of desires, needs, and so on), nor transcendental or metaphysical (in answer to Foucault), nor arrogant (in answer to Stanley and Wise). Of course, it could be any or all of those things. So the criticisms we have surveyed have provided reasons for caution. But not for despair.

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