MacKinnon v. MacKinnon: ontology,science,politics

In the late 1980s, as the US public was embracing ‘chaos theory’ (Hayles, 2018; Sobchack, 1990) – an interdisciplinary body of work that showed that outcomes could be unpredictable even in a deterministic world – feminist lawyer, philosopher and provocateur Catharine MacKinnon was completing the book-length elaboration of a socio-political theory that made it difficult to believe that the future of gender relations could be anything but predictable. Fast forward to 2017. In Butterfly Politics, MacKinnon turns to chaos theory to argue that even small actions can set into motion dynamics that lead to major transformation.

This Interchanges piece considers the arc of one of the most prominent feminist thinker-activists, highlighting what has changed in MacKinnon's philosophy and what has stayed constant. Why MacKinnnon now? MacKinnon's feminism, always influential in terms of both thought and action, is arguably having a renaissance (Srinivasan, 2021). And yet, the fact that the latest iteration of her socio-political theory involves a substantial change in worldview seems to have escaped widespread attention. What questions does this change raise about MacKinnon's feminism – and for those feminists informed by it?

MacKinnon's most recent work also represents a departure in terms of methodology. While she criticises formal and natural science in her earlier philosophy (MacKinnon, 1991: 97–98), in her later philosophy MacKinnon turns to a specialised field of science in order to illuminate social/political ontology. What promise and pitfalls are associated with this move? How do we assess its value for feminist scholarship and action?

In what follows, I make the case that MacKinnon's understanding of the world has evolved to the point where it can no longer sustain her politics. If you take MacKinnon seriously, then, it's worth asking: which MacKinnon?

In Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (1991), the most comprehensive expression of MacKinnon’s earliest philosophical work, she lays out a feminist theory deeply inspired by Marxism. Whereas Marx centres his analysis on the means and relations of production, MacKinnon centres on sexual relations (and says she is presenting the ‘higher truth’ about society in doing so (MacKinnon, 1991: 125)). According to MacKinnon (1991: 131), ‘the feminist theory of sexuality is its theory of politics, its distinctive contribution to social and political explanation’. Sexuality in contemporary society is forged through the eroticisation of unequal power. Indeed, MacKinnon (1991: 113) claims this dynamic creates ‘men’ and ‘women’. Women’s submissiveness is not just sexy, it is what defines and makes ’woman’. As gender is the ‘congealed form’ of the ‘sexualization of inequality’ (Mackinnon, 1987: 6), sexuality is at the root of ‘every injustice and injury suffered by women’ (Brown, 1995: 81).

While Marxism is known for its dynamism, MacKinnon’s socio-political theory really leans on its account of structural domination. When power is at its most effective, women are so totally shaped by ideology that they take pleasure in their subjugation. Others simply cannot see violations as violations, no matter how harmful actions may feel. Physical intimidation, identity invalidation, material indulgences, and deprivations prevent women from claiming what they do see as violations. Even when a violation is claimed, however, state institutions ensure individual men have the advantage. The law, written by men, embeds the male perspective as right, reasonable, neutral (Mackinnon, 1987: 162–263).

Consciousness raising, stemming from an inchoate discontent with experience as ‘woman’, enables women to critically engage dominant ideology, make feminist life decisions, and see common cause. But ‘male dominance’ is painted as ‘the most pervasive and tenacious system of power in history […] it is metaphysically near perfect’ (MacKinnon, 1991: 116). While the proletariat hold productive power and have the contradictions of capitalism to stimulate their transformation into a class ‘for itself’, no such catalyst exists and no such power source is identified in MacKinnon's Toward (Brown, 1995). What faith there is to be had in transformation, MacKinnon places in the very liberal system that she presents as resolutely, monolithically masculine. Law itself must be used to transform law, but only law that recognises men’s dominance over women (rather than sex difference) and seeks equality of outcome (rather than equal treatment) for women can make a meaningful dent.

While the system is ‘closed’ (MacKinnon, 1991: 121) and arguably ‘static’ (Brown, 1995) in Toward, by the time Are Women Human? is published in 2006, MacKinnon sees more transformative possibility. The state is still depicted as ‘an institution of male dominance’ (MacKinnon, 2006: 3). But women – particularly those who leverage the NGO form – have shown that they can alter international law and compel individual states to treat them as human. ‘In supplementing or even at times supplanting the state as international law's historically nearly exclusive unit, women have pushed for the formal changes they need to secure their substantive rights’ (MacKinnon, 2006: 2) and advanced ‘recognition of sex equality as a peremptory international norm’ (MacKinnon, 2006: 9).

The international system ‘has … produced gains for women unavailable elsewhere’ (MacKinnon, 2006: 12). Still, the possibility for significant change in sexual relations is muted. International law lacks its own enforcement mechanisms, and is still largely a function of male priorities and perspective. The possibility of real transformation in one country, moreover, is contingent on what happens in others: ‘no more than clean air can women's equality be successfully achieved in one country’ (MacKinnon, 2006: 13).

Butterfly Politics, published 11 years after Are Women Human?, thus seems less like the next step in a gradual evolution and more a (discontinuous) leap. Here, sexual relations, far from intransigent, are portrayed as ‘unstable’ (MacKinnon, 2019: 3). MacKinnon (2019: 1) asserts that her own career demonstrates that a ‘small human intervention in an unstable political system can sooner or later have large complex reverberations’. A single legal innovation – such as establishing sexual harassment as a form of sex discrimination – can be ‘the crucial precondition’ of a worldwide social movement like #MeToo (MacKinnon, 2019: ix). Riffing off the famous hypothetical introduced by ‘father of chaos theory’ Edward Lorenz in a 1972 paper entitled ‘Does the flap of a butterfly's wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?’ (Dizikes, 2011), she deems this ‘butterfly politics’.

With ‘butterfly politics’ as the ‘organizing metaphor and central conceit’ (MacKinnon, 2019: 1) of the volume, MacKinnon (2019: 4) suggests that the law is like a chaotic dynamic system. Law is sensitive to initial conditions (think here of precedent), and is recursive (the outcome of earlier calculations continues to be fed back into the system) (MacKinnon, 2019: 5). Therefore, ‘unconventional and unprecedented approaches or arguments’ (MacKinnon, 2019: 3) can ‘open a complex flood tide in a distinctive direction’ when ‘a single breakthrough [is] … iterated through many variations’ (MacKinnon, 2019: 5). This chaotic behaviour can in turn effect transformation in the complex system that is sex inequality (MacKinnon, 2019: 3) by both undermining the legal basis of ‘male supremacy’ and animating social movements that re-make our ideas about sex.

MacKinnon insists that feminist legal efforts will only ‘break through’, however, if they are based on what she refers to as the ‘correct’ diagnosis of the ‘nature’ and ‘substance’ of the system. Undoing gender inequality through law requires ‘facing the key dynamic of sexism – hierarchy, specifically of men over women and other men – [and] its key site […] – sexuality’ (MacKinnon, 2019: 4) and ‘properly targeting’ actions (MacKinnon, 2019: 1). In other words, her political prescriptions in 2017 remain the same as they did in 1989 and 2006: subversively use legal guarantees of equality to target the institutions (e.g. the porn industry) and practices (e.g. rape and domestic violence) that construct sexuality (eroticised dominance/submission), the root cause of sexism.

MacKinnon's move from new starting point to her old politics is at least plausible. The right (chaotic) ‘formula’ – a precedent-setting decision that targets ‘the most sex differential abuses of women as a gender’ (MacKinnon, 1991: 242) – promises both the control of determinism as well as the radical change that eventuates from non-linear behaviour. You may not be able to predict the exact outcome, but you are guaranteed disproportionately large change of the right kind.

She is also far from unique in looking across the science divide for inspiration, and in using metaphor to aid theorising (Cohen, 1994; Stepan, 1986). Analogical reasoning like this has produced ‘fruitful advances in social thought’ (Cohen, 1994: 65). Such advances don’t even depend on textured knowledge of the metaphor's source; they can occur even when ‘the original concept or principle may not be fully understood’ (Cohen, 1994: 65).

Not every use of analogical reasoning is fruitful, however. Just as metaphor can enable us to ‘pay attention to details hitherto unnoticed’ (Stepan, 1986: 268), it can cause us to ‘neglect or even suppress information about human experience of the world that does not fit the similarity implied by the metaphor’ (Stepan, 1986: 272). The question to be asked, then, is: does this metaphor illuminate or distort the subject matter (Rosenthal, 1982: 295)?

Understanding the origins of MacKinnon's metaphor helps us see its utility to MacKinnon … as well as its problems. Lorenz, the man who introduced the idea of ‘the butterfly effect’, ‘discovered’ chaos through a relatively simple simulation of the weather (Dizikes, 2011). This was possible through this method because ‘chaos’ can emerge even with a small number of variables and the deterministic equations of chaos ‘can be most easily thought of as describing a closed […] system’ (Bar-Yam, 2011).

The chaotic system that MacKinnon conjures in Butterfly Politics is like Lorenz's simulation. Relatively few variables feature prominently in the analysis: activism, law, and sex. And in comparing legal activism to a recursive equation that ‘if set … up right from the beginning’ (MacKinnon, 2019: 5) will produce the ‘right outcome’ that ‘repeats and extends’ (MacKinnon, 2019: 6), she depicts law as if it is made and implemented in a vacuum. As with a simulation, everything not deemed key is placed out of bounds. MacKinnon can promise that certain kinds of precedent – those she has long been arguing for – will have transformative effects on sexual relations because MacKinnon's metaphor-inspired model is of a simple and closed system.

We see here the limitations – and perils – of using natural or formal science in a social context. MacKinnon, drawing upon a branch of study that involves the construction of what critics have referred to as ‘artificially controllable realities’ (Oakley, 1998: 711), presents law as machine-like (‘it will repeat and extend’). These impossibly tractable realities, critics argue, are both animated by and used to support the foolhardy and dangerous belief that there are social laws or fundamental dynamics that can be known, and that this knowledge will enable human mastery. For MacKinnon, there are ‘right’ levers to pull, and as we (now) know them, we should focus our energy on pulling them.

Unlike Lorenz's simulation, however, the kinds of systems MacKinnon is talking about are neither simple nor closed. We know that legal victories aren’t automatically implemented (for a current example, see the recent history of Bostock v. Clayton County), and they don’t automatically ‘extend’ (see Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization). Law is affected by ‘internal’ elements beyond precedent, including language (choice and meaning), judicial philosophy, and judicial composition. Its effect is predicated on interpretation, the ability of different actors to implement, and more. And factors that one might represent as ‘external’ – sexism, racism, homophobia, yes, but also technological systems, capitalism, national politics, even the climate – also influence legal outcomes. The ultimate outcomes of legal victory, in other words, depend on interactions between numerous variables, including those that many may see as far afield of the law. One may win a case, but one is far from ensuring an outcome.

Rather than approaching social transformation through chaos, MacKinnon (2019: 3) would be much more justified in approaching the law (and activism in relation to it) as she does sexism: that is, through complexity. Like chaotic systems, complex systems exhibit non-linear behaviour. But unlike chaotic systems, complex systems necessarily have many interacting parts, each potentially systems in and of themselves (Rickles et al., 2007). While complex systems can have chaotic phases, they also can self-organise in ways that increase stability (Rickles et al., 2007: 935) and have ‘memory’ which tends to keep them on the same trajectory (Ladyman et al., 2013). They are thus ‘coherent units in a way that chaotic systems are not’ (Rickles et al., 2007: 935). Finally, most complex systems are open to their environment rather than closed, and so must continually adapt in relation to external as well as internal changes.

This is not just semantics. The difference between characterising law as a complex system (in an environment of complex systems) as opposed to a chaotic one turns out to be significant when it comes to the question of political implications. MacKinnon’s political prescriptions are predicated on the assertions that you can identify ‘what is driving things’ and that the most important drivers remain the same across time and contexts; if these are true, you can therefore identify forms of activism that will be consistently effective. But a complex world is one in which history matters: an effective challenge when a system is just coalescing may no longer be effective after it has coalesced. Context matters: system change is always a function of a causal configuration, and we can’t say one element of a configuration is more important than another because the effect emerges through interaction (Hoffmann and Riley, 2002: 310; Walby, 2007). By focusing us on chaos rather than complexity, then, MacKinnon deflects questions that reveal problems with her politics.

While having an accurate understanding of the ‘source science’ may not be necessary for generating good socio-political theory, knowing it is helpful when it comes to assessing theory which uses science (or maths) metaphorically. In addition to providing ‘the critical resources to challenge [the] assumptions’ (Sullivan-Clarke, 2019: 160) of MacKinnon's metaphor, such understanding may help us identify better resources to think with – in this case, resources that MacKinnon herself offers.

Given where she started, I find it significant that MacKinnon has come to embrace a vision of the world in which non-linear change is possible. And she is far from alone in doing so. New materialists (Coole and Frost, 2010: 13), ecofeminists (Cudworth, 2005), socio-political theorists (Walby, 2007), and combinations thereof have found in complexity an alternative to the ‘machine-like universe’ paradigm that has been deeply criticised by feminists (not to mention abandoned by the physical sciences) (Oakley, 1998). This framework has helped them to make sense of both dramatic change as well as long-term stasis, to re-conceptualise systems of power and how they relate, to keep non-humans fully in sight in social and political analysis, to think systemically at different scales (and to see the relations between them), and to practise the kind of intellectual humility that (they claim) is both ethical and has positive political effects.

I am particularly interested in what we can know about activism – and more specifically, effective activism – if we assume this framework. From my perspective, MacKinnon does illuminate something important with the frame ‘butterfly politics’. The action of just one person (a Rosa Parks, or a Mohamed Bouazizi) can have an outsized effect on a system as a whole – indeed, systems – if the right conditions are in place. I agree that knowing this can inspire action (Snyder, 2021). But just what kind of action will have an outsized effect is – pace MacKinnon – not something we can know, and thus prescribe, in advance.

If complexity is at odds with MacKinnon's politics, what does it support? Critics have noted that feminists working with complexity theory have developed and advocated for an ethic of vital materialism (Bennett, 2010), have contributed to the theorisation of intersectionality (Cudworth, 2005; Walby, 2007), and have prepared the theoretical ground and an agenda for a posthuman international relations (Cudworth and Hobden, 2013) – but they have not articulated a positive politics (Clare, 2016; Washick et al., 2015: 64 and 71). Some assert that this is because adopting this view of the world leaves us with nothing to guide our action (Sobchack, 1990; see also Finlayson, 2018). The work of feminists like Rom Coles (2016) and adrienne marie brown (2017), however, belies this. They have made compelling arguments, grounded in real world experience, about the what and how of more effective activism in a complex world. And in stark contrast to MacKinnon's (implicit) claim that she has the source code for triggering revolutionary dynamics, they argue that engaging effectively in a complex world requires ‘knowing not to know too well how or where our politics is headed’ (Coles, 2016: 129). That is, it requires experimentation and the kind of open mind that allows for adaptation.

I agree that with Coles that the struggle to change the world could benefit from ‘a far sharper analysis of complex system dynamics’ (2016: 119). What structures allow us to be more efficacious in an ever-changing world? How do we build the capacity for adaptation in ourselves and our work? Might the study of various kinds of complex adaptive systems suggest new strategies or allow us to re-think old ones? How do we better work with complexity, understanding our limitations as well as our powers?

The changes in MacKinnon's perspective over the course of her career signify a (laudable) intellectual openness that I think many fail to see in her. In future work, I hope she and those who co-sign her vision reckon further with what the ontology she embraces in her latest work means for how to think and talk about politics. More generally, I hope this Interchanges piece makes more feminists more interested in complexity. MacKinnon, of course, did not intend to argue for a complexity-informed politics; but, as complexity teaches us, we can’t guarantee the effects of our interventions.