266 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW, toward an authoritarian stress on “correctness.” A better example, I think, is the consciousness-raising group, that small-scale, demo- cratic, collective enterprise of renaming the world that suddenly appeared and spread like wildfire across the American scene in the late 1960s and early-to-mid 1970s. In fact, it was in consciousness- raising groups that many of the most important feminist redescrip- tions were gestated: “sexism,” “sexual harassment,” “marital rape,” “date rape,” “the double shift” — these are perhaps the best feminist examples of the ways in which renaming things facilitates new moral assessments of them and mobilizes new social movements and collectivities. But these were the products less of individual self- fashioning or poetizing than of the collective practice of consciousness-raising. In fact, consciousness-raising represents a major linguistic innovation not only at the level of the meanings it has generated, but also at the level of the invention and institution- alization of a new language game or discursive practice. Informed by the democratic aspiration of empowering women to speak for themselves, consciousness-raising helped transform the nature of private life, public life, and their relation to one another. One could also speak of the institution over the last twenty years in the United States of a feminist counterpublic sphere, a network of bookstores, journals, film and video distribution networks, confer- ences, festivals, local meeting places, and the like. This concept of a counterpublic sphere, with its institutional and sociological dimen- sion and its outward-looking agitational thrust, better captures the political character of the feminist movement than does Rorty’s image of the separatist community or club. It also links feminism as a discursive enterprise to the best of the democratic tradition. At its best, the feminist counterpublic sphere is a discursive space where “semantic authority” is constructed collectively, critically, and dem- ocratically, rather than imposed via prophetic pronouncements from mountaintops. I can sum up the thrust of my remarks as follows. By teasing out some connections between feminism and pragmatism, Rorty’s lec- ture represents the beginnings of a major new positive development in his own thought. It also represents a potential contribution to feminist theory. But Rorty fails fully to develop the political implica- tions of his insight. We need to continue on the path “From Irony to Prophecy to Politics.”