Si la resolución impugnada no fuera recurri-

After arguing for a dual analysis of recognition/ gender and redistributive/ economic politics, I now ask to what extent the main theorist of this model, Fraser, deconstructs (and thus, opens possibilities to reconstruct) the economic. To open this discussion, I first outline the politics of deconstruction mobilised in this thesis.

A post-structural politics

While Fraser avows her use of deconstruction for problems of recognition, she does not apply this thinking technique to a politics of redistribution. In this section

I interrogate this choice and ask whether deconstruction could potentially be a thinking tool to transform economic politics. Fraser suggests that deconstructionists such as Butler deny the possibility of human agency, and thus erode their own ability to make normative claims, by attributing all social outcomes to environment or context. She claims to draw on a more limited version of deconstruction to attend to problems of recognition. By showing the use of this thinking technique for a political conception of activism, I rehabilitate its use in her wider schema as a strategy to transform economic politics.

Deconstruction of gender and sexual binaries has been a hallmark of ‘gender studies’ in recent decades, perhaps typified by the work of Judith Butler (1990; 1993) and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1990). In deconstructing the characteristics often deemed necessary to constitute a subject as male, female, heterosexual or homosexual, these theorists question the foundations of the human subject and of social relations. Deconstructions of social ‘facts’ such as gender have implications for the possibilities of lived lives. Those who deviate from socially prescribed characteristics are often at risk of harm, exclusion, or death (Chambers and Carver 2008: 76-77). If what are considered acceptable characteristics of race, gender and sex can be deconstructed and more iterations safely proliferate, then that risk is lessened.

Judith Butler’s deconstruction of the norms that enforce and perpetuate gender and sex – normative violence – is political because it opens greater space for queer lives. More recent interpretations have argued that her work is deeply political in its approach to power and agency (Chambers and Carver 2008). Butler argues that regulatory social norms such as gender and race are based on powerful social practices and that they are enacted every day through complex systems of language and meaning, performativity and citation, whilst being socially and historically contingent (Chambers and Carver 2008: 6-10). This insight has been expanded in the gender studies area to transgender lives (for example Serano 2007 and 2013), and can also be used to examine the predominance of capitalocentrism in politics and economy.

Butler’s conception of power and norms – that which she seeks to deconstruct - is useful for understanding both change and stagnation in totalising social ‘structures’ such as gender, class and also capitalism (Swanson 2007). Reiteration is

the concept she uses to explain the broader shape of performativity as “ritualised production,” the idea that social categories such as gender or race must be constantly reaffirmed by human subjects to maintain their status as naturalising discourses (Butler 1993: 95). In other words, in order to continue as such, structures must be continuously cited and re-performed, which means they are both constantly reinforced but also constantly at risk of change (Butler cited in Swanson 2007: 9). A process of constant potential for change in social norms and institutions, however small, underlies Butler’s conception of reiteration (Butler 1993: 95). This is despite critics, including Fraser, arguing that her work erases the subject and human agency and thus lacks the normative foundations of political theory.

This concept of reiteration extends beyond gender and sex norms to economic norms. Swanson argues that reiteration is important for understanding resistance to social structures, political change and also ‘sedimentation’ or stagnation of norms. Particularly, she argues that the idea provides a useful tool with which to understand resistance to the deeply sedimented institutions of capitalism, which are often perceived as static and homogenous, even within post-structural theory (for example Laclau and Mouffe cited in Swanson 2007: 4). In Butler’s conception of politics, and Swanson’s reiteration, the subject is conceptualised as totally historically and socially constituted (Butler 1995). However, given these structures are also contingent, the individual and collective can resist at any time. The subject is intensely vulnerable to the disciplining function of normative violence and the ‘weight’ or power of sedimentation, and this contingency and vulnerability helps explain the difficulty of resistance (Butler 1993: 95). Swanson insists that, given this power, agency can only result in change if it is collective (Swanson 2007: 18).

A deconstructive approach can in fact enable a collective politics that relies on agency in the individual. Rather than reducing the importance of agency, as Fraser claims, Butler constitutes the subject as both more and less responsible for change: if reiteration is the means through which norms are continued, then they are vulnerable at every reiteration. So while norms constrain agency, they cannot totally determine its outcomes (Butler 1993: 95). This non-voluntaristic conception of agency, Swanson argues, is particularly important in relation to resistance to the

powerfully naturalising discourses of capitalist markets, and therefore of class exploitation (2007: 19). Thus, contrary to Fraser’s concern that deconstructive strategies can erode human agency, agency and its difficulties are very much part of Butler’s work. A gap in Fraser’s work is that it does not adequately deconstruct economy, or questions of redistribution, despite her avowed transformative approach to economies, perhaps because of her concerns with the results of deconstructive politics.

Deconstructing Fraser’s ‘socialism’

A deconstructive approach to economy leads me to question the transformative economic aspect of Fraser’s schema. As I explain further in Chapter Two, if culture and economics are necessarily intertwined, and culture is by definition specific and diverse, economies must also be diverse, embedded, and specific. Fraser’s analysis systematically presents two alternative kinds of economic or redistributive policy, which she calls the liberal welfare state and socialism. She describes socialism as a remedy that would “transform the underlying political economic structure… restructuring the relations of production”, in contrast to the liberal welfare state which makes constant end-state reallocations (Fraser 1997: 25). However, Fraser also notes that this is differently played out in the varieties of socialism currently in existence, as “virtually no one” remains standing in defence of pure state-run economies, and there is not a programmatic view of the place of state-based ownership in socialist thinking (37). Therefore, there is no “precise content” to her socialist program (37).

There is however, content to the redistributive politics of state based programs she makes reference to on numerous occasions, in both her critiques of the fallibility of the liberal welfare state of the United States (Fraser and Gordon 1997: 121) and in her critique of Young’s Justice and the Politics of Difference (1997: 189). In a 1993 article that seems somewhat eerie on the eve of another Clinton run for the US Presidency, entitled Clintonism, Welfare and the Anti-Social Wage, Fraser articulates some of the tenets of what she believes needs to occur to counter the previous iteration of ‘Clintonism’. With respect to a social wage, public goods, visibilising the contributions of unrecognised labour and the dependence of those typically considered ‘independent’, reclamation of entitlement to public provision as a right, and promotion of social responsibility to the detriment of both individual and

mutual responsibility. While in the concept of social wage, Fraser mentions “the human need to participate in the making of culture and in other socially valued and recognized activities that are conducive to self-development”, but she does not mention any need to participate in production or procurement of those things we might consider necessary to survival. Perhaps we could expand here and say that people have a need to participate in work and production, as well as leisure and cultural creation (which are also economic).

Therefore, Fraser’s writing on socialism and the welfare state infers that the socialism she discusses is one of state redistribution of income or profit through state-ownership or taxation. I concur with Fraser that the scale and increased dominance of neoliberal markets and thinking requires a programmatic response. But is there room in such a response for thinking differently about economic practices, in a way that goes beyond the typically represented binary of state ownership and redistribution versus capitalist enterprise? Is state control the only alternative that fits into Fraser’s schema? Why does Fraser limit socialism to state ownership, redistribution and taxation? Might not a broad conception of socialism be compatible with redistribution of ownership and income, or co-operative ownership of production, to workers and communities themselves? Where might the practices of family and community production and consumption, unionism, community controlled services, commoning, and social enterprises with multiple outcomes in their bottom line, fit into her schema? These ideas are taken from Gibson-Graham’s (1999, 2006) community economies framework, expanded upon by Gibson, Cameron and Healy in 2015. Fraser’s focus is not on the details of a proposed democratic socialist, or redistributive program. I suggest that the deconstruction of economy promised in Fraser’s work could be expanded and perhaps rehabilitated with a deconstructive politics of a diverse economy (Gibson- Graham 1999).

There is nothing in Fraser’s work that suggests an opposition to community ownership or production, though these are not mentioned, and I argue that her deconstruction of the economic is incomplete and could be expanded. In Figure 1.2 below, I modify her original diagram to include deconstruction as a strategy for economic transformation as well as transformation of identities.

Affirmation Transformation A politics of (re)distribution to address economic inequality Liberal welfare state leads to surface redistribution of resources to existing identity groups, such as maternity leave; further embeds group differentiation and further sediments misrecognition/ difference Deconstruction of relations of production, transaction, enterprise, and labour, blurs/ queers distinctions between formal and informal economy, blurs group differentiation A politics of recognition to address gender inequality Identity focused feminism leads to surface redistribution of respect such as valuing women as sisters, daughters etc., furthers group difference, politics of gender also economic Deconstruction of relations of recognition and destabilisation or queering of group differentiation, deconstruction of economic identity, which is also gendered

Figure 1.2: Affirmation and transformation applied to economic and gender inequality, with deconstruction of economy, source: modified from Fraser 1997: 27

I suspect that community control of services, and social enterprises, or organisations that create and distribute profit with social goals in mind, also fit into Fraser’s framework. Similarly, while Fraser does not explicitly discuss the politics of community production, unionism, community controlled services, commoning, and social enterprises, she does state that there is an imperative to challenge “technocratic understandings of the welfare state” and to expand upon “democratic, participatory alternatives.”

Fraser’s insight that restructured economic relations are compatible with deconstructive approaches to race and gender is valuable for my thesis, even though she does not apply deconstruction to economic relations. What she does do well is make space for deconstructive gender or race analyses, which are often presented as taking away from a more ‘universal’ class analysis, in a left redistributive politics. Thus, while mention of diverse non-capitalist activities is absent from her descriptions of transformative restructuring of economy, I aim to rethink her schema to include such activities. Firstly, however, I look to another theorist of the period whose deconstruction of worker identity proves a useful addition to Fraser’s uncompleted economic deconstruction.

Ressentiment: A deconstruction of economic