Institutskollo­quium - Tamara Jugov (TU Dresden) - "Strukturelle Beherrschung"

Abstract: The talk “Structural Domination” aims to examine whether agents in systems such as sexism, racism or capitalism are dominated and if yes by whom. Consider an unmarried women living in a sexist society. Although nobody coerces her to do something or interferes with her choices, her capacity for choice might nonetheless be limited and she may feel disempowered as a result of sexist practices and norms. How can we account for this intuition, though, given that the unmarried women does not appear to be dominated by a particular agent, such as by a husband? One way to make sense of such cases is to say that she is dominated by sexist rules and practices. But can social practices dominate? This seems a mysterious statement. To say that someone is dominated by a social practice and that a social practice holds power seems to presuppose that social practices have a will and the ability to act. Alternatively, we can search for individual or collective agents, which dominate the unmarried women. A good starting-point for doing so are neo-republican theories of non-domination and freedom. The standard neo-republican account of domination, however, is bilateral. In this talk, I will show that the bilateral paradigm of domination cannot account for cases such as the unmarried women. This seems to leave us with an unwelcome dilemma: either we have to conclude that the unmarried women in a sexist society is not dominated after all, or we have to accept mysterious sounding language. This talk seeks to overcome this predicament. I will argue that structures co-constitute interpersonal domination, but agents are still the bearers of dominating power. On this revised account cases of interpersonal domination depend on the dominator’s general and robust power to interfere, which in turn is generated and distributed by social practices. This revised account can make better sense of seemingly anonymous cases of domination than the standard bilateral account of domination or alternative attempts to theorize structural domination. Last but not least there is no need for recourse to claims of anonymous structures themselves having power. Even so, my revised account of structurally co-constituted interpersonal domination must not exhaustively cover all types of domination present in systems of racism, sexism, or capitalism. Additionally, there might be instances of what I suggest to call systemic domination and collective powerlessness.