Tradition and the Black Atlantic

by Henry Louis Gates

  Then there’s another paradox. In a critique of liberal individualism, we decry the instability of the individual as a category, and yet we sometimes reconstitute and recuperate the same essential stability in the form of a “group” that allegedly exhibits the same regularities and uniformities we could not locate in the individual subject. Conversely, as John Guillory writes, “the critique of the canon responds to the disunity of the culture as a whole, as a fragmented whole, by constituting new cultural unities at the level of gender, race, or more recently, ethnic subcultures, or gay or lesbian subcultures.”11 Perhaps in this vein, John Brenkman ventures that “the neoconservative and neoliberal mania for insisting that all questions regarding citizenship merely concern individuals as individuals, not as members of social groups, is a bid to forestall struggles over these social requirements of citizenship.”12 Skepticism about the status of the individual is surely chastening, but there may be a danger in a too easy invocation of the correlative group, the status of which may be problematic in another way.

  Finally, to complete our overview of the limits of culturalism, we should take account of the critique of multiculturalism put forward by influential French anthropologist Jean-Loup Amselle, who contends that the very notion of discrete ethnicities is an artifact of his discipline. Warning against what he dubs ethnic or cultural fundamentalism, Amselle maintains that the notion of a multicultural society, “far from being an instrument of tolerance and of liberation of minorities, as its partisans affirm, manifests, to the contrary, all the hallmarks of ethnological reason, and that is why it has been taken up in France by the New Right.” But Amselle’s concerns are not merely political; they are ontological as well. “Cultures aren’t situated one by the other like Leibniz’s windowless monads,” he argues. Rather, “the very definition of a given culture is in fact the result of intercultural relations of forces.”13 On the face of it, Amselle’s considerations are yet another blow against what I’ve referred to as the bubble model of cultures. Insofar as this was a necessary feature of the culturalism promoted by multiculturalism, it might have to be discarded. I return to this challenge a little later.

  Identity Versus Politics

  Even though the discourse of identity politics and that of liberation are often conflated, on a more fundamental level they may be in a mortal combat. Identity politics in its purest form must be concerned with the survival of an identity. By contrast, the utopian agenda of liberation pursues what it takes to be the objective interests of its subjects, but may be little concerned with cultural continuity or integrity. More than that, the discourse of liberation often hinges on the birth of a transformed subject, the creation of a new identity, which is, by definition, the surcease of the old. And that, at least in theory, is the rub.

  To take an example I touched on in Chapter 3, if colonialism, let us say, inscribes itself upon the psyche of the colonized, if it is part of the process of colonial subject formation, then doesn’t this establish limits to the very intelligibility of liberation? That, more or less, was the critique that, as we have seen, Tunisian philosopher Albert Memmi made about the would-be Algerian Fanon’s anti-colonial rhetoric. After all, how are we to prize apart the discourse of the colonized from the discourse of the colonizer? Recall that Memmi suggested that Fanon—for all his own ambivalences—somehow believed that “the day oppression ceases, the new man is supposed to appear before our eyes immediately.” But, Memmi reminded us, “this is not the way it happens.” The utopian moment that Memmi decries in Fanon is in his depiction of decolonization as engendering “a kind of tabula rasa,” as “quite simply the replacing of a certain ‘species’ of men by another ‘species’ of men,” so that the fear that we will continue to be (as he puts it) “overdetermined from without” was never reconciled with his political vision of emancipation. Certainly, it would be hard to reconcile with any recognizable version of identitarian politics.

  And it’s a lesson we can easily retrieve from the hot sands of Algeria. Any discourse of emancipation, insofar as it retains a specifically cultural cast, must contend with similar issues. That’s the paradox entailed by a politics conducted on behalf of cultural identities when those identities are in part defined by the structural or positional features that the politics aims to dismantle.

  Return, for a moment, to Carby’s insistence that the “paradigm of multiculturalism actually excludes the concept of dominant and subordinate cultures.” Is this so? Or, rather, in what sense is this so? I think Guillory, whose work on the canon debate was plainly the best of its kind, provides the gloss when he writes that “a culturalist politics, though it glances worriedly at the phenomenon of class, has in practice never devised a politics that would specifically address class ‘identity.’ For a while it is easy enough to conceive of a self-affirmative racial or sexual identity, it makes very little sense to posit an affirmative lower-class identity, as such an identity would have to be grounded in the experience of deprivation per se,” the affirmation of which is “hardly incompatible with a program for the abolition of want.”14 And yet class may provide just a particularly stark instance of a more general limitation. Obviously, if being subordinate were a constitutive aspect of an identity, then a liberation politics would foreclose identity politics, and vice versa. Such is stipulatively the case for Guillory’s example of a “lower-class identity.” But might it not, at least contingently, prove the case for a host of other putatively “cultural” identities as well?

  The point I want to return to is that identity politics cannot be understood as a politics in the harness of a pre-given identity. The “identity” half of the catchall phrase “identity politics” must be conceived as equally labile and dynamic as the “politics” half. The two terms must be in dialogue, as it were. Otherwise, we should be prepared for the phrase to be revealed to be an oxymoron.

  Multiculturalism and Democracy

  Having taken note of the ways in which identity and politics may actually be in battle with each other, we might now ask how the two are best reconciled. Can multiculturalism—often depicted as a slippery slope to anarchy and tribal war—actually support the sort of civil society we might want? Given my skeptical account of the temptations of political posturing, I think I had better proceed modestly here, reining in the rhetoric as best I can.

  Distinguished historian John Higham once complained that “multiculturalism has remained for two decades a stubbornly practical enterprise, a movement within an overall theory, justified by urgent group needs rather than long range goals. . . . Still, it is troubling that twenty years after those convulsive beginnings, multiculturalism has suddenly become [in the early 1990s] a policy issue in America’s colleges, universities, and secondary schools without yet proposing a vision of the kind of society it wants.”15 Multiculturalism may or may not have political consequences, in Higham’s rather persuasive diagnosis, but it did not have a political vision.

  What makes John Brenkman’s essay on the subject among the most intriguing I’ve read is that it took up Higham’s challenge, explicitly addressing what we might, to coin a phrase, call the “vision thing.” For this reason, I think it repays a certain amount of attention.

  In a provocative and unusual attempt to connect the multicultural agenda to the program of democracy, Brenkman argues thatcitizens can freely enter the field of political persuasion and decision only insofar as they draw on the contingent vocabularies of their own identities. Democracy needs participants who are conversant with the images, symbols, stories and vocabularies that have evolved across the whole of the history. . . . By the same token, democracy also requires citizens who are fluent enough in one another’s vocabularies and histories to share the forums of political deliberation and decision on an equal footing.16

  I find this an attractive and heartening formulation, even if, in its instrumental conception of cultural knowledge, it may have unsuspected affinities with E. D. Hirsch. But there are two other points I want to draw out here. First,
a caveat: To say that citizens can “freely enter the field of political persuasion and decision”—which is to say, the field of politics, tout court—“only insofar as they draw on the contingent vocabularies of their own identities” is to suppose that one exists, in some sense, as a cultural atom, that one’s identity exists anterior to one’s engagement in the field of the political. It is to suppose that one arrives to this field already constituted, already culturally whole, rather than acknowledging (as I think Brenkman does move toward later on) that the political might itself create or contour one’s cultural or ethnic identity. Second, though, notice that this formulation does not itself entail what we might call “group” multiculturalism, which is devoted to the empowerment of crisply delimited cultural units, and which conceives society as a sort of federation of officially recognized cultural sovereignties. We’ve already registered the sorts of criticisms that have been raised against the model, but they needn’t arise just yet.

  Brenkman is no Pangloss. He remarks a tension between multiculturalism and democracy, but he proposes a tradition of civic republicanism or civic humanism by which the tension might be resolved. The emphasis of this tradition, which was a particular influence in the early history of this republic, is on civic participation over liberalism’s privatism; individual development (here he cites British historian J. G. A. Pocock) is seen as intrinsically linked to a person’s participation as a citizen of an “autonomous decision-making community, a polis or republic.”17 Even so, Brenkham concedes, civic humanism also always assumed the homogeneity of those who enjoyed citizenship. As Michael Warner has shown, for example, the republican representation of citizenship in revolutionary America tacitly depended upon the exclusion of women, African slaves, and Native Americans from the forms of literacy that were the emblem and the means of the patriots’ equality. To evoke the republican tradition in the context of multicultural societies quickly exposes those elements of civic humanism that run directly counter to diversity and plurality.18

  The charge that this civic humanism depended on the homogeneity of its citizenry is easily supported, but is cultural homogeneity precisely the issue? As I noted before, the exclusion of women is not, at least customarily, depicted as a matter of cultural distance. And although both Native Americans and African slaves would doubtless be marked by cultural differentia, what was criticized here, recall, was the perpetuation of such difference by the withholding of the tools of assimilation, namely, English literacy.

  What is at stake is not the eradication of difference—by, for example, the unwanted imposition of English literacy, which is a grievance that has arisen in some non-Western settings. We cannot, then, conclude that cultural distance motivated the exclusion of African slaves and Native Americans; on the contrary, their exclusion was achieved by enforcing their cultural distance. And so what we come up against, once again, are the limits of the culturalist model, its tendency to occlude the categories of race.

  However symptomatic these slippages—and I cite them as cautionary—I believe Brenkman’s elaborated vision of the “modern polity [as] a dynamic space in which citizenship is always being contested rather than the fixed space of the pre-modern ideal of a republic” was a signal contribution to the debate surrounding multiculturalism.19

  Multiculturalism Versus Relativism

  One last obstacle remains to the articulation of a multicultural polity, and that is the specter of relativism, which continues to haunt many of multiculturalism’s friends and outrages its enemies. For the cultural conservatives, from William Kristol and Roger Kimball to Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin, it has totemic significance, a one-word encapsulation of all that is wrong with their progressive counterparts. If all difference deserves respect, how can morality survive and governance be maintained? Progressives find the doctrine equally unsettling: The righting of wrongs, after all, demands a recognition of them as wrongs. And the classic 1965 handbook by Herbert Marcuse, Barrington Moore, and Robert Paul Wolff, A Critique of Pure Tolerance, should remind us that critiques from the left are far from exceptional. Indeed, it seems scarcely plausible that relativism has anything like the currency that some critics have imputed to it. “‘Relativism,’” Richard Rorty has stated, “is the view that every belief on a certain topic, or perhaps about any topic is as good as every other. No one holds this view,” he says flatly, except, he allows, “the occasional cooperative freshman.”20 In truth, as we see, this is an overstatement, though in the present climate, probably a salutary one.

  To be sure, relativism comes in many different flavors—moral and aesthetic as well as epistemological—and what actually follows from relativism of any particular variety is seldom very clear. But there is one kind of relativism—of the epistemological or cognitive variety (I revisit value relativism later on)—that has achieved a certain limited currency among some anthropologists, whose business is, as it were, culture, and that might be supposed to make an occasional appearance in the multicultural context.

  The Wittgensteinian Peter Winch, for example, in his classic book The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy, has argued that “our idea of what belongs to the realm of reality is given to us in the language that we use.”21 John Beattie has decried a similar cognitive relativism in, for example, the writings of F. Allan Hanson (Meaning in Culture) and Roy Wagner (The Invention of Culture).22 For Winch, there is no reality independent of our conceptual schemes, which may differ in incommensurable ways.

  This is a curious view, one that has been rebutted most vigorously by intellectuals from just those non-Western cultures that relativism would consign to hermetic isolation. As distinguished Ghanaian philosopher Kwasi Wiredu writes: “Relativism . . . falsely denied the existence of interpersonal criteria of rationality. That is what the denial of objectivity amounts to. Unless at least the basic canons of rational thinking were common to men, they could not even communicate among themselves. Thus, in seeking to foreclose rational discussion, the relativist view is in effect seeking to undermine the foundations of human community.”23

  The general problem of relativism of this sort is that it makes the project of cross-cultural understanding unintelligible. (As Martin Hollis observes, “Without assumptions about reality and rationality we cannot translate anything, and no translation could show the assumptions to be wrong.”)24 So let me put the argument at its strongest: If relativism is right, then multiculturalism is impossible. Relativism, far from conducing to multiculturalism, would withdraw its very conditions of possibility.

  Pluralism: The Sequel

  By way of a return to politics, and a rounding out of my critical overview, I want to enlist Isaiah Berlin, whom we might describe as the paterfamilias of liberal pluralism, and whose utter and complete banishment from the debate was a matter of puzzlement, unless the fear was that adducing Berlin’s lifelong argument would compromise our claims to novelty. For Berlin stresses—and, as I say, his is an argument that was largely overlooked in the debate over multiculturalism—that “relativism is not the only alternative to what Lovejoy called uniformitarianism.” 25 In what Berlin describes as pluralism, “we are free to criticize the values of other cultures, to condemn them, but we cannot pretend not to understand them at all, or to regard them simply as subjective, the product of creatures in different circumstances with different tastes from our own, which do not speak to us at all.”26 He writes, and because this is one of my favorite passages of his, I’d like to quote him at length:What is clear is that values can clash—that is why civilizations are incompatible. They can be incompatible between cultures, or groups in the same culture, or between you and me. . . . Values may easily clash within the breast of a single individual; and it does not follow that, if they do some must be true or others false. [Indeed,] these collisions of values are of the essence of what they are and what we are. If we are told that these contradictions will be solved in some perfect world in which all good things can be harmonized in principle, then we must answer,
to those who say this, that the meanings they attach to the names which for us denote the conflicting values are not ours. We must say that the world in which what we see as incompatible values are not in conflict is a world altogether beyond our ken; that principles which are harmonized in this other world are not the principles with which, in our daily lives, we are acquainted; if they are transformed, it is into conceptions not known to us on earth. But it is on earth that we live, and it is here that we must believe and act.

  The notion of the perfect whole, the ultimate solution, in which all good things coexist, seems to me to be not merely unattainable—that is a truism—but conceptually incoherent; I do not know what is meant by a harmony of this kind. Some among the Great Goods cannot live together. That is a conceptual truth. We are doomed to choose, and every choice may entail an irreparable loss.27

  To be sure, Berlin’s pluralism is radically anti-utopian. Perhaps it is not the sort of thing likely to inspire one to risk one’s life or the lives of others. But I don’t think it is a flaccid or undemanding faith for all that. And in the essay from which I’ve quoted, entitled “The Pursuit of the Ideal,” he anticipates the complaint:Of course social or political collisions will take place; the mere conflict of positive values alone makes this unavoidable. Yet they can, I believe, be minimized by promoting and preserving an uneasy equilibrium, which is constantly threatened and in need of repair—that alone, I repeat, is the precondition for decent societies and morally acceptable behavior, otherwise we are bound to lose our way. A little dull as a solution, you will say? Not the stuff of which calls to heroic action by inspired leaders are made? Yet if there is some truth in this view, perhaps that is sufficient.28