Cultural Diversity and the Conversation of Justice: Reading Cavell on Political Voice and the...

Cultural Diversity and the Conversation of Justice: Reading Cavell on Political Voice and theExpression of ConsentAuthor(s): David OwenSource: Political Theory, Vol. 27, No. 5 (Oct., 1999), pp. 579-596Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/192272 .

Accessed: 09/05/2014 07:35

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Sage Publications, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Political Theory.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 169.229.32.138 on Fri, 9 May 2014 07:35:52 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=sage

http://www.jstor.org/stable/192272?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


CULTURAL DIVERSITY AND THE CONVERSATION OF JUSTICE Reading Cavell on Political Voice and the Expression of Consent

DAVID OWEN University of Southampton

IN A RECENT "AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL EXERCISE," Stanley Cavell remarks that if he had been required by the publisher to give a one-clause sense of The Claim of Reason's reason for existing, "it might have been 'to help bring the human voice back into philosophy.' a1 This comment leads one to ask in what sense Cavell thinks that the human voice had gone missing from philosophy? And, further, to ask what the import of this (attempted) act of returning the human voice to philosophy is for philosophical work. In this essay, I sketch a response to these questions in relation to political philosophy and illustrate the implications of this response by reference to the issue of cultural diversity. This response is worked out by attending to the relationship between the constitution of Emersonian perfectionism and the issue of political voice. I will present this response in four stages. In the opening section of the essay, I offer a prima facie case for taking Cavell's concern with the human voice to be a significant issue for philosophy. This case is presented by way of a sketch of the features of Emersonian perfectionism. The second section extends this case by exploring Cavell's reflections on political voice and the myth of the social contract in The Claim of Reason. The third section then shows how these reflections inform his criticisms of Rawls's theory of justice. In the final section, the implications of this response are drawn out by bringing Cavell's voice to bear on the issue of struggles for cultural recognition.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Versions of this paper have been presented to audiences at the University of Wales, University of Leeds, SUNY at Stony Brook, University of Victoria, and University of California, San Diego. I am grateful to all those presentfor their encouragement and criticism. I owe particular thanks to Samantha Asheden, Russell Bentley, DavidBoucher, John Divers, Mark Evans, Andrew Mason, Kelly Oliver, Aaron Ridley, Tracy Strong, and James Tully for their comments on earlier drafts.

POLITICAL THEORY, Vol. 27 No. 5, October 1999 579-596 ? 1999 Sage Publications, Inc.

579



580 POLITICAL THEORY / October 1999

I

Let's begin with a sketch that Cavell offers of Emersonian perfectionism and that will serve as a touchstone for this discussion:

Attention to the aesthetic aspect of (moral) judgement suggests a way of accounting for my speaking of Perfectionism not as a competing moral theory ... but as emphasizing a dimension of the moral life any theory of it may wish to accommodate. Any theory must, I suppose, regard the moral creature as one that demands and recognizes the intelligibility of others to himself or herself, and of himself or herself to others; so moral conduct can be said to be based on reason, and philosophers will sometimes gloss this as the idea that moral conduct is subject to questions whose answers take the form of giving reasons. Moral Perfectionism's contribution to thinking about the moral necessity of making oneself intelligible (one's actions, one's sufferings, one's position) is, I think it can be said, its emphasis before all on becoming intelligible to oneself, as if the threat to one's moral coherence comes most insistently from that quarter, from one's sense of obscurity to oneself, as if we are subject to demands we cannot formulate, leaving us unjustified, as if our lives condemn themselves. Perfectionism's emphasis on culture or cultivation is, to my mind, to be understood in connection with this search for intelligibility.2

How are we to understand this emphasis on intelligibility, on what Cavell refers to as "the absolute responsibility of the self to make itself intelligible"?3 To clarify the nature of this demand, I will begin by focusing on Cav- ell's reference to the aesthetic aspect of (moral) judgment before turning to the relationship between perfectionism and the human voice.

What is at stake in the invocation of the aesthetic aspect of (moral) judgment? To grasp this, we can start with a remark of Wittgenstein's on the concept of understanding:

We speak of understanding a sentence in the sense in which it can be replaced by another which says the same; but also in the sense in which it cannot be replaced by any other. (Any more than a musical theme can be replaced by another.)

In the one case, the thought in the sentence is something common to different sen- tences; in the other, something that is expressed only by these words in these positions. (Understanding a poem.)4

These two uses of the concept of understanding draw attention respectively to the descriptive (i.e., periphrastic) and expressive (i.e., nonperiphrastic) dimensions of our linguistic practices. As Wittgenstein's parenthetic illustra- tions suggest, Cavell's reference to the aesthetic aspect of (moral) judgment points us to the expressive dimension of (moral) judgment and, thereby, to the fact that he is using the concept of intelligibility to mark this expressive dimension of subjectivity. Thus, we can surmise that moral perfectionism is



Owen / READING CAVELL ON POLITICAL VOICE 581

concerned with that dimension of moral life that involves the self's understanding of itself from an expressive point of view (i.e., the self's understanding of itself in its individuality). Cavell's frequent references to Emerson's advocacy of moral perfectionism in terms of an aversion to, or turning away from, conformity stresses the significance of just this expressive aspect of our actions, our sufferings, and our position.5 To clarify what is at stake in this emphasis on expressive intelligibility, we can turn to a recent discussion of Collingwood's philosophy of art.

In The Principles ofArt, Collingwood argues that art "is the community's medicine for the worst disease of mind, the corruption of consciousness."6 The corruption of consciousness is characterized by Collingwood in terms of dishonorably motivated failures of self-knowledge. As Aaron Ridley puts it,

A "false" or corrupt consciousness ... is one which, because it fails to clarify its own thoughts and feelings, refuses to acknowledge its own experiences as its own: it says about them "That ... is not mine," so that the picture it paints for itself "of its own experience is not only a selected picture (that is, a true one as far as it goes), it is a bowdlerized picture, or one whose omissions are falsifications." . . . [T]he corruption of consciousness . . . is an ethical condition-ethical to the extent that one ought not to be like that (the sense of "corruption" that ties it to "vice" and to "lies"), yet a condition to the extent that one's being like that represents a certain sort of calamity (the sense of "corruption" that ties it to "disease" and to "error").7

This concept of "corrupt consciousness" may be aligned with Emerson's concept of "conformity"; in both cases, what is drawn to our attention is the experience of alienation from one's own experience, a failure to experience one's experience as one's own. The sense in which art provides a remedy for this condition in Collingwood's account is given by his declaration that art is expression.8 "Expression" here consists "not merely in making it clear that one is in a certain sort of state, as the betrayal of emotion does, but in making it clear just what this state is":

Expression ... is the activity of getting clear about one's own experience, an activity that transforms the experience as it clarifies it. One's experience is thus fully and completely distinctive only once expression is itself complete.9

It follows that while what is described can be separated from how it is described, what is expressed is not separable from how it is expressed (i.e., that expression, unlike description, is necessarily mediated). This distinction between description and expression is directly related to another distinction drawn by Collingwood:




To describe a thing is to call it a thing of such and such a kind: to bring it under a concep- tion, to classify it. Expression, on the contrary, individualizes.... The poet ... gets as far away as possible from merely labeling his emotions [or thoughts] as instances of this or that general kind, and takes enormous pains to individualize them by expressing them in terms which reveal their difference from any other emotion [or thought] of the same sort.10

Collingwood's point is that while description clarifies by generalizing, expression clarifies by individualizing: "Description ... would yield only 'a thing of a certain kind.' Expression yields the thing itself."'" (Indeed, it is precisely because what and how cannot be separated in expression [i.e., art] that it can individualize, and it is precisely because what and how are separated in description that it can only generalize.) 12

At this stage, the significance of Collingwood's arguments for grasping Cavell's position should now be clear: the failure to try to get clear about one's self (one's thoughts, emotions, actions, etc.) involves the corruption of consciousness, and

a consciousness is corrupt whenever it seeks to discharge its service to self-knowledge through technical means. It is corrupt, for instance, when it misunderstands the medium through which its work is to be done as a mere vehicle for the thought or feeling it is attempting to clarify.'3

The figure who represents this attempt to discharge its service to self- knowledge through technical means is the conformist (in Emerson's sense). A conformist is someone who does not have experiences that are his or her own; that is, the conformist can only recognize his or her experiences as the experiences of a certain type of self rather than the experiences of this, his or her own, self. Consequently, the conformist avoids responsibility for his or her (moral) judgments precisely because these judgments are not, in the relevant sense, his or her own-and to this extent becomes incapable of taking responsibility for himself or herself because, in avoiding getting clear about his or her feelings and thoughts, he or she is left "at the mercy of confused thoughts and thoughtless feeling."'4 The self-knowledge required for self- government is just what the conformist lacks. Thus, when Cavell stresses moral perfectionism as a dimension of moral life, what he is emphasizing is the sense that the absolute responsibility of the self to make itself intelligible to itself is the ground of self-government, of the capacity of the self to take responsibility for itself. It is for this reason that moral perfectionism is not to be seen as a moral theory that competes with other moral theories but rather "as emphasizing a dimension of the moral life any theory of it may wish to accommodate." It is in just this respect that Cavell argues that perfectionism "concerns what used to be called the state of one's soul."'5




En passant, we can note the relationship of Cavell's perfectionism and the Socratic teaching that "a badly formed opinion is like an illness that affects the soul, corrupts it, deprives it of health, and from which we must be cured."16 For Socrates, the remedy is to make people care for themselves, where such care is "the use of one's reason to find out who one is and how one can be best.'"17 As Pierre Hadot, Michel Foucault, and Alexander Nehamas 8 have shown, the topic of the care of the self was, arguably, the central concern of classical philosophy, and it was concerned precisely with the relationship between self-knowledge and self-government that Cavell's moral perfectionism addresses. Nor does one need to look far to see the relationship between self-knowledge and self-government invoked here and the issue of voice, of being able to speak for oneself. To give just one example, we can note that Kant's essay "Answering the Question: What Is Enlightenment?" begins by defining enlightenment as "man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity,"'9 where "immaturity" (Unmiindigkeit) refers to the fact that the immature (Unmiindige) are incapable of relying on their own understanding and, consequently, rely on a guardian (Vormund) to judge on their behalf. As Green notes, "The common root [of Vormund and Unmiindig]-Mund (mouth)-indicates that the underlying meaning of unmiundig is being unable to speak on one's own behalf. For that purpose one has need of a Vor- mund, a legally sanctioned "mouthpiece" to stand in front of (vor) him-or her-as official spokesman."20 Self-knowledge and self-government are inextricably interwoven with finding and exercising one's own moral voice.

How, though, does this advocacy of moral perfectionism bear on Cavell's commitment "to help bring the human voice back into philosophy"? In fram- ing a response to the question, we need to note the deliberate and productive ambiguity of Cavell's remark. On one hand, this statement can be taken to mean getting philosophy to pay attention to the human voice. On the other hand, this statement can also be read as expressing Cavell's commitment to attempting to do philosophy in a human voice. That Cavell intends both of these readings becomes clear if we think about them a little more.

The first reading draws our attention to the contrast between two approaches to philosophical reflection. The first operates in terms of general- ity; it is, broadly speaking, committed to the view that philosophy involves getting it right and that whatever getting it right consists of can be specified independently of any particular it that is being got right. The second operates in terms of individuality; it is also committed to the view that philosophy is about getting it right, yet holds that whatever getting it right consists of cannot be specified independently of the particular it that is being got right. In Collingwood's terms, we are confronted with the distinction between descriptive and expressive approaches to philosophy. For Cavell, since




philosophy is fundamentally a form of reflection on what it is to be human, and it is a feature of the ethology of human beings that they are cultural (i.e., expressive) beings, any approach to philosophy that fails to attend to the human voice (i.e., the expressive character of human engagement in the world) is incapable of guiding reflection on such central philosophical issues as what it is to lead a human life and not simply to have one.

The second reading of Cavell's statement simply applies its own teaching (i.e., the first reading) to itself. Whereas the generalizing style of philosophy- like the natural sciences that influence its self-image-strives for imperson- ality, avoiding "personal style and idiosyncrasy as much as possible,"21 the individualizing style of philosophy-like the arts-expresses personality through its individual style. Cavell's call for the return of the human voice in philosophy, as his own highly individual style indicates, is a call for philosophy to attend to its words-and thereby exhibit the ideal of reflectiveness that informs its activity. As Bernard Williams puts it,

The traditions of the plain style that are familiar in analytical philosophy have much to be said for them, but they can become a dead weight under the influence of the scientific model. One should not approach philosophical writing in the spirit of the analytical philosopher who (in actual fact) said to another when they were writing a book together, "let's get it right first and you can put the style in afterwards."

Why should we assume that it should be like this? When we turn, in particular, to moral and political philosophy, and we look at the canon of past philosophy that even analytical philosophy agrees on, does it look like this? Plato, Hobbes, Hume, Rousseau, indeed John Stuart Mill, not to go into more disputed territory: do we really suppose that their contributions to philosophy are independent of the imaginative and expressive pow- ers of their work? . . .

A philosopher may need to give a picture of life and society and the individual, and to give it in a way that integrates it with what he or she cares about. If a philosophical writer does not solve the problems of how to express those concerns adequately, or, as in many cases, does not even face those problems, he or she will have failed to carry reflection far enough. So the demand that moral and political philosophy should sound right, should speak in a real voice, is not something arbitrarily imposed by those with a taste of litera- ture, or for history, or for excitement. It follows from philosophy's ideal of reflectiveness, an ideal acknowledged in the subject's most central traditions.22

For Cavell, as for Williams, it is not just a question of whether a philosophical account is true but also a question of whether it rings true. The claims of felic- ity (Austin) and perspicuity (Wittgenstein) cannot be denied without damage to the ideal of reflectiveness that the practice of philosophy expresses.

This concludes the prima facie case with which this section has been concerned. For the remainder of this essay, I turn to the task of attending to the object-specific significance of this returning of the human voice to philosophy for political philosophy.




11

In the opening chapter of The Claim of Reason on criteria and judgment, Cavell engages in a brief discussion of political community and the social contract as part of a series of reflections on community and criteria. In the few pages that he devotes to this discussion, Cavell articulates what will later stand as the ground on which, and from which, he expresses his critical reflections on Rawls's theory of justice. Consequently, this brief section will simply set out Cavell's arguments, while the next section will trace their implications in respect of Rawls's theory.

Cavell's starting point is to draw attention to the fact that consent is not simply a question of obedience but also of membership:

What I consent to, in consenting to the contract, is not mere obedience, but membership in a polis, which implies two things: First, that I recognize the principle of consent itself; which means that I recognize others to have consented with me, and hence that I consent to political equality. Second, that I recognize the society and its government, so consti- tuted, as mine; which means that I am answerable not merely to it, but for it. So far, then, as I recognize myself to be exercising my responsibility for it, my obedience to it is obedience to my own laws; citizenship in that case is the same as my autonomy; the polis is the field within which I work out my personal identity and it is the creation of (political) freedom.23

Conceived in this way, the social contract theorists are not providing an answer to the question, "Why ought I obey?" in terms of the general advan- tages of citizenship but, rather, specifying the terms on which, given the imperfections of all actually existing states, the question of whether I should withdraw my consent can be taken up:

What the question ["Why ought I obey?"] in fact means therefore is, "Given the specific inequalities and lacks of freedom and absence of fraternity in the society to which I have consented, do these outweigh the 'disadvantages' of withdrawing my consent?" This is the question the theorists of the social contract teach us to ask, and the beginning of an answer is to discover whom I am in community with, and what it is to which I am obedient.24

What is involved in asking and attempting to answer this question? On one hand, this teaching enjoins that I work out what is involved in consenting to membership with (equal) others in society. This is to clarify the character of political identity as a mode of being-with-others (which can be contrasted to other modes of community). On the other hand, it also instructs me to attend to what it is that I am consenting to, to the content of my membership in this society. This is to clarify the extent to which I am in community with the




society of which I am a member, the extent to which I assent to or dissent from what is said in my name.

With respect to consenting to membership, to what is involved in (any) acts of consent, Cavell argues that

to speak for oneself politically is to speak for the others with whom you consent to association, and it is to consent to be spoken for by them-not as a parent speaks for you, i.e., instead of you but as someone in mutuality speaks for you, i.e., speaks your mind. Who these others are, for whom you speak and by whom you are spoken for, is not known a priori, though it is in practice generally treated as given. To speak for yourself then means risking the rebuff-on some occasion, perhaps once for all-of those for whom you claimed to be speaking; and it means risking having to rebuff-on some occasion, perhaps once for all-those who claim to be speaking for you.25

In this respect, consent is the condition of having a political voice, and claiming a political voice is the expression of consent. As Stephen Mulhall put it,

Possessing a political voice is a matter of claiming to speak for others because it is equivalent to speaking as a citizen, and being a citizen is a matter of being one member of a community of fellow citizens; the extent of that community may be open to empirical investigation, but the implication that your speech is representative of some community or other is not. By the same token, one cannot possess a political voice without allowing that others may speak for you, since being a citizen involves consenting to be identified with the words and deeds of one's fellow citizens; once again, their identity and numbers may be open to dispute, but their existence is not.26

Given, then, that claiming a political voice is to consent to and identify with one's society, what is involved in the withdrawal of consent?

On Cavell's account, it follows from "including 'speaking for others and being spoken for others' as part of the content of political consent, that mere withdrawal from the community (exile inner or outer) is not, grammatically, the withdrawal of consent from it":

Since the granting of consent entails both acknowledgement of others, the withdrawal of consent entails the same acknowledgement: I have to say both "It is not mine any longer" (I am no longer responsible for it, it no longer speaks for me) and "It is no longer ours" (not what we bargained for, we no longer recognize the principle of consent in it, the original "we" is no longer bound together by consent but only by force, so it no longer exists). Dissent is not the undoing of consent but a dispute about its content, a dispute within it over whether a present arrangement is faithful to it. The alternative to speaking for yourself politically is not: speaking for yourself privately.... The alternative is having nothing (political) to say.27




On this view, to dissent is still to exercise one's political voice and, thereby, to speak for others. Indeed, it is precisely in the agonic play of assent and dissent that the content of political consent is negotiated-and, concomitantly, it is in discovering how I stand to the content of political consent that I work out the depth and extent of my community with fellow citizens. This is to say that it is in the process of negotiating the content of political consent that I forge my political identity. On this argument, the meaning of citizenship-and thus of political freedom-cannot be adequately specified in terms of the content of political consent (i.e., specific freedoms, rights, duties, etc.). On the contrary, citizens are free precisely to the extent that they can negotiate and rene- gotiate the content of political consent. As James Tully has put it (in another context), "Engaging in the agonic and interminable public discussions and negotiations, both within and over the conditions of citizenship, constitutes and sustains our identities as 'free citizens."'28

So, on Cavell's reading of the theory of social contract, consent is the condition of having and exercising one's political voice. This consent entails both that you speak for, and are spoken for by, others in mutuality. Conse- quently, the exercise of one's political voice "is at once a means of exploring one's individuality and one's community; it constitutes a mode of establish- ing a form of self-knowledge which is simultaneously a knowledge of others."29 In other words, it is through the exercise of one's political voice that one discovers (ongoingly) where one stands politically (the limits of that to which one can assent) and how one stands politically in relation to others (the depth and extent of one's agreement with others).

III

To draw out the implications of this reading of the theory of social contract for Cavell's criticisms of Rawls's A Theory of Justice, we can begin by noting that the grounds on which Cavell advances his criticisms hang on his account of consent:

I assume that we know in the original position that any actual society will be imperfectly just; I assume, that is, that the theory of A Theory of Justice is composed only with knowledge available in the original position, and it says that existing constitutions are bound to fall short of what is just (p. 360) and that "the measure of departure from the ideal is left importantly to intuition" (p. 246). The idea of directing consent to the principles on which society is based rather than, as it were, to society as such, seems to be or to lead to an effort to imagine confining or proportioning the consent I give to my society-to




imagine that the social contract not only states in effects that I may withdraw my consent from society when the public institutions of justice lapse in favor of which I have fore- gone certain natural rights (ofjudgement and of redress) but that the contract might, in principle, specify how far I may reduce my consent (in scope or degree) as justice is reduced (legislatively orjudicially). But my intuition is that my consent is not thus modi- fiable or proportional (psychological exile is not exile): I cannot keep consent focused on the successes or graces of society; it reaches into every corner of society's failure or ugliness.30

Three questions are raised by this passage. How is Rawls committed to this picture of consent as directed at principles? What does this involve? And, finally, what is the significance of this commitment for Cavell's advocacy of moral perfectionism? Let us address each of these questions in turn.

There are, Cavell notes, two instances of what may be called the conversation of justice in A Theory of Justice. The first conversation concerns the constitution of the original position and involves a process whereby principles and intuitions are matched against one another. This conversation of justice comes to an end in a state of reflective equilibrium. The second conversation concerns the degree of compliance with, or departure from, the principle of justice decided in the first conversation, in which "the measure of departure from the ideal is left importantly to intuition.",31 For Rawls, it seems, this conversation also involves the matching of principles and intuitions, not least in the sense that

if an initial [i.e., intuitive] judgement that an injustice is being perpetuated cannot ulti- mately be backed up by reference to (or articulated in terms of) a principle ofjustice, then it must be rejected; and those of us to whom the accusation was voiced can think of ourselves and "our conduct [a]s above reproach."32

Cavell's suspicion is that "Rawls is taking encouragement from the proof concerning the resolution for the original position, to regard 'above reproach' as a rational response to the question of affirming a plan of life in our actual society."33 But this could only be the case if we could expect that the proof of an optimal resolution in the first conversation also held for the second conversation-and Cavell argues that there is "no such proof to be expected that the conversation of justice has an optimal, or any, resolution, when it is directed to the constitution of our actual set of institutions."34 Cavell's grounds for this claim are articulated by sketching how the appeal to intuition in the second conversation differs from the appeal to intuition in the first conversation:

In the latter case, our "judgements of the basic structure of society" which are to be matched with the principles of justice are, before that matching, made "intuitively, and




we can note whether applying these principles would lead us to make the same judgements ... in which we have the greatest confidence ... or whether, in cases where are present judgements are in doubt and given with hesitation . . . these principles offer a resolution which we can affirm on reflection.". . . But the matching of principles with considered judgements yielding reflective equilibrium does not describe the process of bringing a present perception ... under what Kant describes ... as reflective judgement. In the former case, intuition is left behind. In the latter case, intuition is left in place.35

Cavell acknowledges that there is "an idea or picture of matching in play" in both cases but insists on the difference between them. In arriving at reflective equilibrium, "the picture is that judgement finds its derivation in a principle, something more universal, rational, objective, say a standard, from which it achieves justification or grounding."36 Whereas in reflective judgement, "the idea is of the expression of a conviction whose grounding remains subjective-say myself-but which expects or claims justification from the (universal) concurrence of other subjectivities, on reflection; call this the acknowledgement of matching."37 The failure to mark the distinction between the modes of matching at play in the two conversations-that is, the treatment of the second conversation as involving the same picture of matching as the first-entails that Rawls's principle-based picture of consent is car- ried over from the first conversation to the second. This has two related consequences.

First, it appears that our (rational) consent to society is proportional to the compliance of society to the principles ofjustice. Thus, for Rawls, the degree to which I am joined to society is simply a function of the degree to which it embodies the principles of justice. But this picture precludes the possibility of the experience, highlighted by Cavell's nonproportional account of consent, of being answerable for society as mine. It occludes the sense in which I can experience myself as implicated in, and compromised by, unjust actions or practices performed in my name-the sense that I cannot, in truth, avoid responsibility for such actions and that this is part and parcel of the damage that such unjust actions or practices do. Second, it appears that we are only open to, or obligated to engage with, charges of injustice expressed in terms of these principles. The implication of this claim is that the nature and form of our political identities are (exhaustively) specified and fixed by the principles of justice. Political activity does not concern the exploration, extension, revi- sion, or transformation of our political identities but, rather, the affirmation and reaffirmation of these identities-the depth and extent of our political identities are determined in advance. It is this point to which Cavell is referring us when he comments,




It seems to me that Rawls is taking encouragement from the proof concerning the resolution for the original position, to regard "above reproach" as a rational response to the question of affirming a plan of life in our actual society. Whereas this bottom line is not a response to but a refusal of further conversation.38

Is this refusal justified? Responding to this question requires that we return to the issue of having one's own political voice and, thereby, return to the question of the place of moral perfectionism.

Let us begin by noting that on Cavell's account of the theory of social contract, what calls for response in my expression of a conviction of injustice is not that the conviction of injustice to which I give voice can be articulated in terms of a principle of justice. Rather, in giving voice to this conviction that I speak for you as well as myself, I (claim to) speak for us. In this respect, to refuse to acknowledge the conviction I express as an offer of conversation (if it is not-if it cannot be-expressed by reference to the principles of justice) is to deny me a political voice; it is to render me politically voiceless, mute. It is this experience of voicelessness that Cavell finds expressed by Nora in Ibsen's A Doll's House. In this play, Nora struggles to express, to bring to expression, her inchoate sense of injustice: " 'I could tear myself to pieces' "39 and " 'I must find out which is right-the world or I.' "4" The dilemma in which Nora finds herself is that to speak in the language of the moral consensus, represented by her husband Torvald, who has managed "for the eight years of their marriage, to control her voice, dictate what it may utter and the manner in which it may utter it,"4' is not to be able to give expression to her conviction of injustice. While to find other, new words and ways of speaking capable of expressing this conviction is to be held not to speak in terms that we are required to acknowledge, that is, not to speak (in the relevant sense) at all-as, for example, when Torvald responds to her need to know if she or the world is right-" 'You're ill, Nora-I almost believe you're out of your senses.' ,42 Or, again, when he disqualifies her voice by claiming, " 'You're talking like a child.' "43 What Cavell draws to our attention with the example of Nora (and Torvald) is the way in which the moral consensus of society denies Nora's (political) voice and thus leaves her out of the conversation of justice-her (political) identity remains obscure because the terms on which she could make intelligible (i.e., express) her sense of injustice are denied to her. Thus, as Cavell puts it, Nora has been deprived of a voice in her own (political) history.44

The problem with Rawls's position on Cavell's reading is thus that Rawls's account of our political identities and the field of our political voices, as (contractually) specified and fixed by the principles of justice, entails that his theory of justice is blind to the possibility of the problem that




the whole framework of principles in terms of which [we] must conduct the second conversation of justice is experienced as so pervasively and systematically unresponsive to [our] suffering that it appears to stifle [us], to constitute a vocabulary in which nothing that can be said truly speaks [our] mind, gives expression to [our] experience.45

This is, of course, just to say that precisely to the extent that Rawls's theory of justice specifies and fixes our political identities by reference to a set of for- mal principles, it is aspect blind, unable to see the aesthetic (i.e., expressive) dimension of human identities and thus unable to recognize violations of this dimension of our identities. The place of moral perfectionism is to alert us to the possibility of such violations and, thereby, to the need for openness and responsiveness to claims to injustice expressed in other terms than our own. It is, I suggest, precisely this issue that is raised in and by struggles for cultural recognition. Consequently, to clarify further the nature and significance of Cavell's attempt to return the human voice to (political) philosophy, we can turn to this issue.

IV

Struggles for cultural recognition include such diverse movements as, on one hand, the struggles of nationalist movements for statehood or autonomy with a multinational federation, the pressures on states to recognize and accommodate supranational associations, the struggles (between these two levels) of longstanding linguistic and ethnic minorities for constitutional recognition. And, on the other hand, they also include the intercultural claims of citizens, immigrants, exiles, and refugees for forms of recognition and pro- tection of the cultures they bring to established nation-states; the demands of women's movements for the accommodations of their (multicultural and contested) ways of speaking and acting; and the struggles of Aboriginal peo- ples for the recognition and accommodation of their customary ways. Yet, as Tully has argued, we can specify the salient similarities of such struggles in terms of three related claims:

First, demands for cultural recognition are aspirations for appropriate forms of self- government.... What they share is a longing for self-rule: to rule themselves in accord with their customs and ways.... The second similarity is the complementary claim that the basic laws and institutions of modern societies, and their authoritative traditions of interpretation, are unjust in so far as they thwart the forms of self-government appropriate to the recognition of cultural diversity.... The final similarity I wish to draw to your attention is the ground of both the aspiration to culturally appropriate forms of self-rule and the claim of injustice. It is the assumption that culture is an irreducible and




constitutive aspect of politics. The diverse ways in which citizens think about, speak, act and relate to others in participating in a constitutional association (both the abilities they exercise and the practices in which they exercise them). . . are always to some extent the expression of their different cultures.46

With respect to Cavell's analysis, the fundamental point to note about such struggles is that they do not involve "the undoing of consent" but rather charge that our present arrangements are unfaithful to the convention of consent precisely insofar as these arrangements fail to acknowledge that culture is an irreducible and constitutive aspect of politics. In other words, these arrangements fail to acknowledge that the issue of consent qua the terms and conditions of our constitutional association "becomes the issue of whether the voice I lend in recognizing a society as mine, as speaking for me, is my voice, my own."47 The point to which Cavell directs our attention is the significance of experiencing one's political voice as one's own voice. This aspect of the issue of consent marks out the sense in which one can be estranged from one's political voice, experience it as alien, precisely insofar as the language of self-government in and through which one is constrained to speak-if one is to speak politically at all-is not one's own.

Yet it is precisely this feature of consent that is occluded by periphrastic conceptions of consent predicated on the voice of no one such as that presented by Rawls's account in which the terms of consent are specified by the principles of justice that any rational (A Theory of Justice) or reasonable (Political Liberalism) person can accept (or, more precisely, must accept on pain of not counting as rational or reasonable since these concepts act as

48 moral concepts in Rawls's two accounts of liberal justice). In both A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism, Rawls conceptualizes popular sovereignty- and thus the "office" of citizenship-in such a way as to rule out the claim that culture is a constitutive aspect of politics.49 In A Theory of Justice, those behind the veil of ignorance are essentially acultural creatures, while in Political Liberalism, they are culturally homogeneous beings in all relevant respects. However, in both cases the outcome is the same: the cultural (or expressive) dimension of our political identities is construed as having no bearing on, or significance for, considerations of constitutional justice. It is in just this respect that those engaged in struggles for recognition are caught in the same double bind as Nora in Ibsen's A Doll's House. As James Tully puts it,

How can the proponents of [cultural] recognition bring forth their claims in a public forum in which their cultures have been excluded or demeaned for centuries? They can accept the authoritative language and institutions, in which case their claims are rejected by conservatives or comprehended by progressives within the very languages and institutions whose sovereignty and impartiality they question. Or they can refuse to play the




game, in which case they become marginal and reluctant conscripts or they take up arms.50

Unable to bring their sense of injustice to expression within the language of modern constitutionalism or, to put it another way, unable to describe their sense of injustice by reference to, say, Rawls's principles of justice, the proponents of cultural recognition are denied a voice in their own political history. Their political identities remain obscure to them because the terms on which they could render their civic identities intelligible are obstructed by a modern constitutional language in which the refusal to engage with the offer of conversation at stake in struggles for cultural recognition is construed as "above reproach."

By contrast, Cavell's returning of the human voice to political philosophy is an acknowledgment of what Tully refers to as the "first and often over- looked step in any enquiry into justice"-namely, "to investigate if the language in which the enquiry proceeds is itselfjust: that is, capable of rendering the speakers their due.' In this respect, Cavell's account directs us to two significant general points with respect to struggles for cultural recognition. First, it indicates the sense in which the avoidance of cultural recognition constitutes a harm-namely, that such avoidance fails to acknowledge the significance of not simply having a voice but having one's own voice and thus at best marginalizes and at worst silences the voices of citizens who do not belong to the culturally hegemonic group(s). It is in just this respect that Cav- ell's argument entails that there is "a certain priority" with respect to cultural recognition in comparison with the many other questions of justice that a constitution must address. As Tully puts it, "Since other questions must be discussed and agreements reached by the citizens, the first step is to establish ajust form of constitutional discussion in which each speaker is given her or his due, and this is exactly the initial question raised by the politics of cultural recognition."5 Second, Cavell's argument entails that we reconceive our constitutional association as a process in which the terms of association are always provisional and defeasible. This point follows from Cavell's acknowledgment that citizenship is not, as Rawls would argue, "a special kind of institutionally defined or practice-based office" but "rather a basic dimension of human existence and relationship that is essentially open or partly undefined in advance."53 In other words, because on Cavell's account, the terms and conditions of our association express rather than define the form of our political community, the ongoing process of working out our community with other citizens is also the ongoing negotiation and renegotia- tion of terms and conditions of the constitutional association that sustains our identities as free citizens.




The significance of both of these points is that they reorient our thinking with respect to struggles for cultural recognition-and in so doing reconfig- ure our understanding of ourselves as citizens. By making visible the respects in which Rawls's account can deny speakers the possibility of becoming intelligible to themselves, of acquiring the self-knowledge that grounds the capacity for self-government, Cavell draws out the salience of returning the human voice to (political) philosophy and seeks to cultivate a civic ethos in which we acknowledge the importance of the cultural dimension of our political identities for reflecting on, and exhibiting respect for, others as members of a political community. Indeed, it is in so engaging with culturally diverse others that we acquire both self-knowledge and critical distance with respect to the cultural dimension of our own political identities-giving other speakers their due is integral to becoming what (politically) one is.

NOTES

1. Stanley Cavell, A Pitch of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 58.

2. Stanley Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome (Chicago: University of Chi- cago Press, 1990), xxxi-xxxii.

3. Ibid., xxxii. 4. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell,

1958), s.53 1. This discussion of the concept of understanding is, I think, central to the distinction that Cavell draws between knowing and acknowledging in Must We Mean What We Say? (Cam- bridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1969).

5. The Emersonian theme of aversion to conformity runs through Cavell's reflections on moral perfectionism in Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome. For some salient commentary on this issue, see Stephen Mulhall, Stanley Cavell: Philosophy's Recounting of the Ordinary (Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1994), esp. chap. 11.

6. R. G. Collingwood, The Principles ofArt (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1938), 336.

7. Aaron Ridley, R. G. Collingwood: A Philosophy of Art (London: Phoenix, 1998), 7-9. 8. Ibid., 26. 9. Ibid., 26. 10. Collingwood, The Principles of A rt, 1 2-13. 11. Ridley, R. G. Collingwood, 29. 12. Now, as Ridley notes, Collingwood's account "is a salutary correction to certain standard

accounts of purposeful action":

According to these, an action is purposeful-can be said to have been done for a reason-only if the purpose or reason it serves can be specified independently of the action itself. So, for example, one acts purposefully when one shoots at a goal in an attempt to score. One can say what the purpose of the action is-to get the ball across a particular line in accordance with the rules-without referring to just this shot, or to any particular




shot at all. And such an analysis is no doubt perfectly adequate to the case, as it would be for many kinds of purposeful action. But that analysis is hopelessly inadequate for those other kinds of action, no less purposeful, about which one can say only: "No, that's not quite right ... try again ... no ... Yes! That's what I was after." In such cases as this, no specification of the purpose of the action can be given without reference to the action itself; but one is acting purposefully none the less. (Ibid., 33)

For Collingwood, unsurprisingly, art is paradigmatic of this kind of action, but it extends to mundane activities "such as trying to say clearly what one means." Indeed, while there are no doubt activities that are (almost) wholly intelligible in instrumental terms and activities that are (almost) wholly unintelligible in such terms, we should not be led into thinking that any action must be either instrumental or expressive. Rather, Collingwood, like Wittgenstein, directs us to the recognition that for the vast majority of human activities, we can grasp actions from an instrumental or expressive perspective.

13. Ibid., 36. 14. Ibid., 7. 15. Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, 2. 16. Michel Foucault, cited in Alexander Nehamas, The Art of Living: Socratic Irony from

Plato to Foucault (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 160. 17. Ibid., 166. 18. See Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, translated by Michael Chase and edited by

Arnold Davidson (Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1995); Michel Foucault, The Care of the Self: The History of Sexuality, vol. 3, translated by Robert Hurley (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1988); and Alexander Nehamas, The Art of Living.

19. Immanuel Kant, "Answering the Question: What Is Enlightenment?" in Political Writ- ings, edited by Hans Reiss (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 54.

20. Garrett Green, "Modern Culture Comes of Age: Hamann Versus Kant on the Root Meta- phor of Enlightenment," in What Is Enlightenment? Eighteenth Century Answers and Twentieth Century Questions, edited by James Schmidt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 292.

21. Nehamas, The Art of Living, 3. Nehamas begins this book with a pertinent discussion of the distinction between generalizing and individualizing approaches to philosophy, which has significant resemblances to the distinction that I have drawn from Wittgenstein and Collingwood to characterize Cavell's position.

22. Bernard Williams, "What Might Philosophy Become?" (inaugural lecture for the Centre for Post-Analytic Philosophy, University of Southampton, 1997).

23. Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1979),23. 24. Ibid., 24. 25. Ibid., 27. 26. Mulhall, Stanley Cavell, 62. 27. Cavell, The Claim of Reason, 27-28. 28. James Tully, "Multicultural and Multinational Citizenship: Identity Politics and the

Republican Heritage" (paper presented to the Commune de Siena and European Science Foun- dation network conference, "Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage," Siena, September 1998).

29. Mulhall, Stanley Cavell, 65. 30. Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, 107. 31. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1972), 246. 32. Mulhall, Stanley Cavell, 272.




33. Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, xxv. 34. Ibid., xxv. 35. Ibid., xxv-xxvi. 36. Ibid., xxvi. 37. Ibid., xxvi. 38. Ibid., xxv. 39. Ibid., 109. 40. Ibid., 110. 41. Ibid., xxvi. 42. Ibid., 110. 43. Ibid., 115. 44. Ibid., xxxvii-xxxviii. 45. Stephen Mulhall, "Promising Consent and Citizenship," Political Theory 25, no. 2

(1997): 186. 46. James Tully, Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity (Cambridge,

UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 4-6. 47. Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, 27. 48. See Mulhall, "Promising Consent and Citizenship" for a fuller account of this point. 49. See Tully, Strange Multiplicity, 63-64 for an account of the three conceptualizations of

popular sovereignty in the language of modern constitutionalism. 50. Ibid., 56. 51. Ibid., 34. See also David Owen, "Political Philosophy in a Post-Imperial Voice," Econ-

omy and Society 28, no. 4 (1999) for a full consideration of Tully's argument, which explores aspects of its affinities to Cavell's work.

52. Ibid., 6. 53. Mulhall, "Promising Consent and Citizenship," 189.

David Owen is a senior lecturer in politics and assistant director of the Centre for Post- Analytic Philosophy, University of Southampton. His books include Maturity and Mod- ernity (1994); Nietzsche, Politics and Modernity (1995); and, as coeditor, Foucault con- tra Habermas (1999). He is currently working on issues of ethical therapy and moral perfectionism in Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Foucault.



Date post:	06-Jan-2017
Category:	Documents
Upload:	david-owen
View:	213 times
Download:	1 times

Cultural Diversity and the Conversation of Justice: Reading Cavell on Political Voice and the...

Documents