Normativizing hybridity/neutralizing culture

Political Theory

Volumn 33, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 318-343

  Kompridis, Nikolas ^a  

^a YORK UNIVERSITY   (Canada)

Author keywords

Culture; Democracy; Hybridity; Identity; Modernity

Indexed keywords

EID: 18844431359     PISSN: 00905917     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0090591705274867     Document Type: Article

References (43)

1. Christian Lenhardt, 'Anamnestic Solidarity,' Telos, no. 25 (Fall 1975): 154.
2. James Tully, Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 5.
3. I believe we are looking at an intellectual situation in which an incautious anti-essentialism about culture reproduces the same metaphysical errors as has an incautious antirealism about the physical world. Both deny connection.
4. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993);
5. Homi Bhaba, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1995);
6. Gloria Anzaldua, Border-lands/La Frontera (San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987); and
7. James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988).
8. Bhaba, The Location of Culture, 225.
9. Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, 95.
10. Jeremy Waldron, 'Minority Cultures and the Cosmopolitan Alternative,' University of Michigan Law Review 25, nos. 3/4 (Spring and Summer 1992): 763.
11. Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, 95, my emphasis.
12. Waldron, 'Minority Cultures and the Cosmopolitan Alternative,' 763, my emphasis.
13. That the positions in 1-4 make it very hard normatively to endorse cultural hybridity without endorsing capitalist culture is quietly ignored.
14. Ayelet Schachar, 'Should Church and State Be Joined at the Altar? Women's Rights and the Multicultural Dilemma,' in Citizenship in Diverse Societies, ed. Will Kymlicka and Wayne Norman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 223.
15. Seyla Benhabib, The Claims of Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), 4-5. All further references to this text will be cited as CC in parentheses.
16. For a useful discussion of the differences between weak and strong holism, see James Bohman, 'Holism without Skepticism: Contextualism and the Limits of Interpretation,' in The Interpretive Turn, ed. David Hiley, James Bohman, and Richard Shusterman (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), 129-54.
17. On this, see Allison Weir, Sacrificial Logics: Feminist Theory and the Critique of Identity (London: Routledge, 1996);
18. and also Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Spinosa, 'Two Kinds of Anti-Essentialism,' Critical Inquiry 22 (Summer 1996): 735-63.
19. Sociological constructivism does not suggest that cultural differences are shallow or somehow unreal or 'fictional'. Cultural differences run very deep and are very real. The imagined boundaries between them are not phantoms in deranged minds; imagination can guide human action and behavior as well as any other cause of human action. (CC, p. 7) Besides begging all the questions, this distinction is much too subtle. What all this really comes down to is the bifurcation of reason and imagination, the bifurcation of reason and its 'other,' and, at the same time, the bifurcation of morality and culture.
20. In connection with his critique of 'Romantic irony,' Hegel described the essence of this relation as one in which the subject 'knows himself to be disengaged and free from everything, not bound to anything, because he is just as able to destroy as to create the bonds that bind him.' G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über Ästhetik I, vol. 13 of his Werke (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986), 95.
21. For an analysis of the sceptical implications of ironist theory, see Nikolas Kompridis, 'Reorienting Critique: From Ironist Theory to Transformative Practice,' Philosophy and Social Criticism 26, no. 4 (2000): 23-48.
22. Notice how the old Marxist distinction between base and superstructure resurfaces as the distinction between morality (as a product of reason) and culture (as a product of the imagination - mere Überbau).
23. One of the valuable insights of Schachar's paper, 'Should Church and State Be Joined at the Altar?' (cited above), is that it shows just how gendered are processes of cultural preservation and conservation. Rather than offering one-way tickets out to women vulnerable to oppression within their communities of origin, Schachar's 'joint governance' model looks to provide women 'the leverage to renegotiate oppressive family law traditions from within their cultural communities, armed with their hard-won rights as state citizens' (p. 223).
24. This last phrase is from Charles Taylor's essay, 'What's Wrong with Negative Liberty?' in Taylor, Philosophical Papers, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 216.
25. Although sympathetic to Schachar's 'joint-governance' approach ('amongst the most imaginative institutional proposals put forward to deal with the paradox of multicultural vulnerability'; CC, 127-28), Benhabib is nonetheless convinced that it can foster the 'balkanization' and 'refeudalization' of the law. Given Benhabib's intention of understanding the otherness of the other, I think there is good reason to regret Benhabib's choice of words here, especially 'balkanization.' For a trenchant critique of the monistic, monoglot view of law that James Tully calls 'modern constitutionalism,' a view that perforce must regard even reasonable forms of legal pluralism as risking the 'balkanization' and 'refeudalization' of the law, see Tully's Strange Multiplicity.
26. In 'New Facts, Old Norms,' Bonnie Honig offers some persuasive criticism of Benhabib's tendency (which she shares with Habermas) to normatively privilege the law over democratic politics. This paper was originally presented at University of California, Berkeley, on March 18, 2004, in response to Benhabib's Tanner Lecture (also at Berkeley), 'Reclaiming Universalism: Negotiating Republican Self-Determination and Cosmopolitan Norms,' Tuesday, March 16, 2004, and 'Democratic Iterations: The Local, the National, and the Global,' Wednesday, March 17, 2004.
27. For an approach to the issue of cultural preservation that is willing, and compellingly so, to put into play a genuine dialectic between liberal principles and the claims of culture, see Joseph Carens, 'Democracy and Respect for Difference: The Case of Fiji,' in Joseph Carens, Culture, Citizenship, and Community: A Contextual Exploration of Justice as Evenhandedness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 200-59.
28. Of course, the kind of intercultural understanding that figures here supposes the very holistic interpretive perspective that Benhabib rejects, lacking which the intelligibility of the 'whoness' or otherness of the other is rendered opaque, inaccessible.
29. In her ethnographic work in Japan, Ruth Benedict demanded of the Japanese the cultivation of detachment from their own cultural values in order to achieve a flexible reflective assessment of them - to regard them, in other words, as infinitely renegotiable. It amounts to the demand that the Japanese learn to view their culture with a certain scientific detachment and to see their received values as relative and therefore open to revision in the service of consciously chosen ends. Ultimately, the imperial vision of Benedict's 'world made safe for differences' lies not only in any covert imposition of American values on the Japanese but in the overt and uncompromising call for the subordination of all cultures to the demands of individual choice. (Christopher Shannon, 'A World Made Safe for Differences: Ruth Benedict's The Chrysanthemum and the Sword; American Quarterly 47 [1995]: 659-80,
30. cited in David Scott, 'Culture in Political Theory,' Political Theory 31, no. 1 [February 2003]: 110) Readers of David Scott's very fine paper will see that he and I are motivated by similar worries concerning the place of culture in politics.
31. Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History,' in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969).
32. Jürgen Habermas, 'Consciousness-Raising or Rescuing Critique,' in On Walter Benjamin: Critical Essays and Recollections, ed. Gary Smith (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988), 123.
33. For compelling criticism of the Habermasian distinction between values and norms (a distinction that appears in the distinction Benhabib draws between moral and cultural discourses; CC, pp. 39-40), see Hilary Putnam, The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 111-34.
34. For Habermas's response, see Jürgen Habermas, 'Norms and Values: On Hilary Putnam's Kantian Pragmatism,' in Habermas, Truth and Justification (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003), 213-36.
35. Jürgen Habermas, 'Struggles for Recognition in the Democratic Constitutional State,' in Multiculturalism. Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutman (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), 130.
36. Listen, for instance, to the harsh overtones in Habermas's remark concerning the cultural dynamics of modernity: 'The accelerated pace of change in modern societies explodes all stationary forms of life'; ibid., 132. Leaving aside the question of what 'stationary' form of life can mean, and whether any form of life can actually be described in this way, is this really the way we would like to frame the issue of cultural preservation, as though the contents of culture were subject to quasi-natural processes of destruction?
37. Hannah Arendt, 'Hannah Arendt: From an Interview,' New York Review of Books 25, no. 16 (October 26, 1978): 18.
38. Bela Bartok, Essays (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 27.
39. Bartok, Essays, 32.
40. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogical Imagination (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 245.
41. I explore this possibility in a forthcoming paper, 'On the Identity and Non-Identity of Culture with Itself.' For a discussion of alternative ways to think the relation between new and old, see my 'The Normativity of the New,' in Philosophical Romanticism, ed. Nikolas Kompridis (London: Routledge, 2005).
42. Cited in Tully, Strange Multiplicity, 14.
43. Ibid., 14.