comprise the MIC in late-capitalist, welfare-state societies. To grasp their function, one must recall that such societies harbor a plurality of forms of association, roles, groups, institutions, and discourses. Thus, the means of interpretation and communication are not all of a piece. Far from constituting a coherent, monolithic web, they form a heterogeneous field of polyglot possibilities and diverse alternatives. In welfare-state societies, moreover, discourses about needs typically make at least implicit reference to alternative interpretations. Particular claims about needs are “internally dialogized,” resonating implicitly or explicitly with competing need interpretations.5 They allude, in other words, to a conflict of interpretations. For example, groups seeking to restrict or outlaw abortion counterpose “the sanctity of life” to the mere “convenience” of “career women”; thus, they cast their claims in terms that refer, however disparagingly, to feminist interpretations of reproductive needs.6
On the other hand, late-capitalist societies are not simply pluralist. Rather, they are stratified, differentiated into social groups with unequal status, power, and access to resources, traversed by pervasive axes of inequality along lines of class, gender, race, ethnicity, and age. The MIC in these societies are also stratified, organized in ways that are congruent with societal patterns of dominance and subordination.
It follows that we must distinguish those elements of the MIC that are hegemonic, authorized, and officially sanctioned, on the one hand, from those that are non-hegemonic, disqualified, and discounted, on the other hand. Some ways of talking about needs are institutionalized in the central discursive arenas of late-capitalist societies: parliaments, academies, courts, and mass circulation media. Other ways of talking about needs are enclaved as socially marked subdialects and normally excluded from the central discursive arenas.7 Until recently, for example, moralistic and scientific discourses about the needs of people with AIDS, and of people at risk of contracting AIDS, were well represented on government commissions, while gay and lesbian rights activists’ interpretations were largely excluded. To change that distribution of discursive power, it was necessary to wage a political struggle.
From this perspective, needs-talk appears as a site of struggle where groups with unequal discursive (and extra-discursive) resources compete to establish as hegemonic their respective interpretations of legitimate social needs. Dominant groups articulate need interpretations intended to exclude, defuse, and/or co-opt counter-interpretations. Subordinate or oppositional groups, in contrast, articulate need interpretations intended to challenge, displace, and/or modify dominant ones. In neither case are the interpretations simply “representations.” In both cases, rather, they are acts and interventions.8
2. ENCLAVED AND RUNAWAY NEEDS: ON THE
“POLITICAL,” “ECONOMIC,” AND “DOMESTIC”
Let me now situate the discourse model I have just sketched with respect to some social-structural features of late-capitalist societies. Here, I seek to relate the rise of politicized needs-talk to shifts in the boundaries separating “political,” “economic,” and “domestic” dimensions of life. However, unlike many social theorists, I shall treat the terms “political,” “economic,” and “domestic” as cultural classifications and ideological labels rather than as designations of structures, spheres, or things.9
I begin by noting that the terms “politics” and “political” are highly contested and have a number of different senses.10 In the present context, the two most important senses are the following. There is, first, an institutional sense, in which a matter is deemed “political” if it is handled directly in the institutions of the official governmental system, including parliaments, administrative apparatuses, and the like. In this sense, what is political—call it “official-political”—contrasts with what is handled in institutions like “the family” and “the economy,” which are defined as being outside the official-political system, even though they are in actuality underpinned and regulated by it. In addition, there is, second, a discursive sense of the term “political” in which something is “political” if it is contested across a broad range of different discursive arenas and among a wide range of different publics. In this sense, what is political—call it “discursive-political” or “politicized”—contrasts both with what is not contested in public at all and also with what is contested only by and within relatively specialized, enclaved, and/or segmented publics. These two senses are not unrelated. In democratic theory, if not always in practice, a matter becomes subject to legitimate state intervention only after it has been debated across a wide range of discourse publics.
In general, there are no a priori constraints dictating that some matters are intrinsically political and others are intrinsically not. As a matter of fact, these boundaries are drawn differently from culture to culture and from historical period to historical period. For example, reproduction became an intensely political matter in the 1890s in the US amid a panic about “race suicide.” By the 1940s, however, it was widely assumed that birth control was a “private” matter. Finally, with the emergence of the women’s movement in the 1960s, reproduction was repoliticized.11
Yet it would be misleading to suggest that, for any society in any period, the boundary between what is political and what is not is simply fixed. On the contrary, this boundary may itself be an object of conflict. For example, struggles over Poor Law “reform” in nineteenth-century England were also conflicts about the scope of the political. And as I shall argue shortly, one of the primary stakes of social conflict in late-capitalist societies is precisely where the limits of the political will be drawn.
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