Abstract
Rather than think about citizenship in minimal terms (voting, obeying the law), I argue for a more aspirational “bearing” of the public self, one appropriate for the challenges of globalizing, late-modern political life. For left democratic theory this is hardly an abstract issue, given how successful groups like the Tea Party have been in articulating a right-leaning aspirational portrait. What might a counter-portrait look like that was comparably scripted for the middle classes in affluent liberal democracies? An answer is not immediately clear, given that left democratic theory’s attention has been traditionally focused on an overly simple, two-entity social ontology: elites and demos. The question I consider is what script might be articulated for middle segments of society in relation to how they should bear themselves toward less advantaged segments of society? This does not replace thinking about the demos, but rather supplements it with reflection on the complex alignments of contemporary political life.
Many years ago, the idea of citizenship was pretty much the dullest, least interesting topic in the domain of political theory. Democratic citizens were considered first and foremost rights bearers; beyond that, they were just supposed to listen to political debate and vote in elections. Otherwise, citizenship was pretty much a status concept. Either you had a passport giving you the status of a citizen with a full plate of rights, or you didn’t. In the last couple of decades, everything about citizenship has become more complex and contested. I want to contribute to this drift in the specific sense of suggesting that we think of citizenship less in terms of status and more in terms of an aspiration; that is, as a commitment to a certain “bearing” of ourselves that we might aspire to manifest, as we look out onto the many threats there are to the further realization of democratic values in the twenty-first century, especially in affluent liberal democracies characterized by uneven injustice. My attempt in this essay to provide a richer conception of citizenship might be thought of as a companion to the increasing tendency of political theorists to think of democracy not so much as a settled structure of government but rather as a perpetual leavening of social relations and a creating of angles of pressure on political structures. In this essay, I want to begin to bring at least one dimension of such a complementary, aspirational ideal of democratic citizenship to life. This dimension involves the sort of bearing that we might hope to see from those in the middle segments of society.
Although this specific focus on the middle might seem a little surprising, it should not be, given that one of the significant threats to enhanced democracy resides in those movements of the largely white, middle segments of affluent societies that align themselves in ways that manifest deep hostility to those who are disadvantaged or suffer substantial injustice. 1 The Tea Party is the most prominent contemporary example of this phenomenon in the United States. For the purposes of this essay, what is significant about this group is that it offers not just support for certain policy positions but rather also a broad aspirational ideal of citizen bearing for middle-class individuals who feel increasingly threatened and are attracted to self-images of righteously striking back at the world.
It is against the background of this challenge that I want to speculate about what might function as a counter-ideal of citizen aspiration for middle-class, especially white, individuals. I first elucidate further the character of the threat offered by movements like the Tea Party and the sort of citizen bearing they affirm. Then I sketch what might constitute a persuasive normative core for a more robustly democratic ideal of citizenship. Here I draw on Habermas’s much-criticized communicative action paradigm, although I will heavily revise it in a way that makes it substantially less susceptible to the charges typically leveled against it. Finally, I make use of this normative core to construct the notion of a democratic bearing for middle-class citizens. That bearing has two moments (in a Hegelian sense): ethos and political tack.
The Problem of White Middle Segments in Affluent Liberal Democracies
Consider the recent movement in American politics to pass “Stand Your Ground” laws at the state level. And recall how one of these laws in Florida was at the center of the highly publicized case of Trayvon Martin. On a February night in 2012, Martin, a seventeen-year-old black teenager, who was visiting a relative in a “gated community” in Sanford, Florida, went to a convenience store to buy some snacks. On the way back to his relative’s apartment, he was noticed by George Zimmerman, a middle-class, white resident of this community who was member of a neighborhood watch group. Zimmerman saw a young black man whom he did not recognize as a resident of his community, and he became suspicious. He grabbed his pistol, got out of his car, and confronted Martin on the sidewalk. A scuffle broke out; in the struggle, Zimmerman pulled out his pistol and shot and killed Martin. Only after a huge public outcry was Zimmerman finally arrested and tried for murder. Under Florida state law, Zimmerman could not be convicted, if he believed he was acting in self-defense—if he, in effect, was “standing his ground” and using deadly force to stop an assault on himself. A jury decided that was the case and found him not guilty.
In this case, there is evidence that Zimmerman’s behavior was racially motivated, as was the initial reaction of the police department. 2 It does not take much reflection to imagine that such motivation may be involved in many cases where the “Stand Your Ground” defense is invoked. While acknowledging this, I want to also suggest that there is a disposition entangled with the attractiveness of such laws to many middle-class white people that is not clearly racist, at least not in any intentional sense. My focus on this phenomenon is not intended to imply that we should ignore the issue of racism, but rather explore more carefully an emergent disposition or citizen bearing that, first, is a reaction to social processes with real weight in contemporary life; second, can be understood as manifesting a kind of combativeness that is rooted in otherwise reasonably admirable, traditional American political values; and third, can bolster the conviction of segments of the white middle class who take up that combative stance that their self-understanding is in no way implicated in racism. So, although my trajectory in this essay may take the immediate focus away from racism, the implications of my analysis are relevant to the specific ways in which white America is insulating its consciousness from a fuller democratic sense of responsibility for racism.
In what follows I want to try to tease out the character of this disturbing, emergent form of citizen bearing. Think here of a Tea Party adherent who supports “Stand Your Ground” laws and may have viscerally sympathized with Zimmerman. 3 How would the justificatory script go? People should stand up for their rights and demand that their cultural and political order protect them from those who threaten it: the “undeserving,” the freeloaders, and the illegal immigrants who are trying to undermine the values of the American heartland. 4 And if that order fails to provide the demanded protection, good patriotic citizens are justified in taking matters into their own hands, with guns if they deem it necessary.
We might call the Tea Party’s aspirational ideal one of patriotic “republican self-protection.” 5 While earlier in history this ideal may have had a largely positive political effect, today it threatens to deplete our democratic imagination, as the notion of protection becomes aimed not against monarchs as it was in the eighteenth century but against the least powerful members of society. In order to effectively contest this ideal, a more emphatic democratic bearing would have to be one that draws those in the middle to be resistant to efforts to turn them against their less advantaged or oppressed fellow citizens; it would have to be one that rather encourages them to look to those categories as possibly potential allies in future democratic coalitions, or at least not as continually emergent enemies. And part of this kind of rethinking would involve looking more attentively and honestly at the topic of race in the United States.
So what is the underlying threat I see from this set of loosely affiliated groups referred to as the Tea Party? The group’s name derives from the famous so-called Boston Tea Party in 1774 at the start of the American Revolution, when colonial patriots revolted against their British masters by destroying a shipload of imported tea, rather than pay the hated British tax imposed upon this drink. In the face of such imperial oppression, a patriotic citizen—then or now—should aspire to spring into action in the cause of republican self-protection, a goal that today involves everything from proactively impeding the actions of a “tyrannical” Federal government to blocking border crossings of undocumented aliens. This cause is suffused with rich images of self-righteous patriots, walls, fences, and weapons.
The Tea Party itself may prove resilient or it may fade away relatively quickly. My concern is not primarily with this specific case, but rather with the growing attractiveness of a syndrome of perception and affect that is manifested in this group. That syndrome has its roots in the “silent majority” first invoked by President Nixon in the 1960s and 1970s, and it will likely persist beyond the life of the Tea Party. The middle segments of affluent liberal democratic societies, especially the United States, seem continually—and perhaps increasingly—receptive to such an orientation.
But we need to be careful in assessing the exact nature of the danger represented by such groups. Some observers have taken them to be simply examples of “Astroturf” populism, as opposed to real “grassroots” protests, that is, as somehow essentially fake. 6 Others have warned, more ominously, that they can “rapidly morph into outright fascism.” 7 I find both these characterizations to be unsatisfactory; such movements need to be analyzed more carefully in terms of their own self-understanding, as well as how they fit within the political dynamics of contemporary globalizing societies.
Tea Partyers vividly script their situation as emerging in relation to what they feel to be an invasion or colonization. They see themselves as patriots struggling to protect and preserve their way of life. It is useful here to consider this posture and its underlying dissatisfactions in the light of Habermas’s well-known analysis of a “colonization of the lifeworld.” 8 I want to argue that this notion, when combined with some revisions of the communicative paradigm that offer a better grasp of the identity/difference dynamic than Habermas’s approach alone provides, gives us a perspective from which we can both comprehend this middle segment’s lived experience of feeling colonized and yet do so without automatically accepting their particular interpretation of the character of the pressure they feel. 9 It is this substratum of lived experience that explains why this is a real movement, rather than something like a fake one simply propped up by elite funding.
It is also inappropriate to see this middle segment as merely proto-fascist. This image ignores too much of the complex landscape of affluent, late-modern polities facing novel pressures of globalization. For one thing, it ignores the fact that such movements typically represent themselves as defenders, not opponents, of the rule of law; and as not racists, even if the effects of their political positions clearly entail disadvantages for racial or ethnic minorities. Thus, members of such movements see themselves as advocates for the protection of existing state borders against illegal immigrants, and as defenders of the principle that those who have not contributed substantially to the financial support of the state should not be allowed to draw heavily from its resources. 10
So far, I have been referring primarily to the Tea Party movement in the United States. But this phenomenon is apparent in other affluent societies, such as those in Europe. Segments of the middle class there have also been experiencing a growing sense of social and cultural precariousness. Playing off of the idea of Marx’s proletariat, this segment has been referred to in Europe as a “precariat” that feels itself in a threatened state because of the “unavailability or uncertainty of stable work, social vulnerability, diminishing welfare benefits,” as well as a sense of being dislocated from their familiar, traditional place at the center of their society’s cultural universe. 11 One way in which these European movements, such as Marine Le Pen’s Front National in France, might seem to differ significantly from the Tea Party is that the former do not exhibit the latter’s hostility to a national welfare state. For the Tea Party, that national state is the primary force for a colonization that must be turned back. 12 Although this is a real difference compared to Europe, it is perhaps not as significant as it seems at first glance. Here one might look to how some European movements of the middle raise the colonization issue, but do it in terms not of hostility only to the national state, but also to the growing power of the European Union, or what Le Pen calls “the Soviet Union of Europe.” 13
Whether in Europe or the United States, such movements of the middle cast themselves in the role of ardent patriots who are stepping forward to defend cultural integrity and republican rule of law. The effects of such a citizen bearing may look intentionally racist or hostile to cultural minorities, but the underlying ideals can be expressed in ways that are not explicitly racist or culturally intolerant, at least for the consciousness of the virtual patriot. These new social movements of republican self-protection are not attracting a committed following because of their specific focus on race and ethnicity or their embodiment of fascist hatred (although some adherents may share such attitudes), but rather because of a syndrome of ideas and affects that allows adherents to imagine that their orientations are entirely devoid of such unpleasant entanglements. This involves a low-grade fear of the insistent pressures of a globalizing world that continually threatens real and symbolic borders with unsettling flows of people, money, commodities, diseases, and terror. And the bearing of republican self-protection, with its disciplined, proactive resentment and robust self-righteousness, provides a deeply gratifying balm of the sort that Nietzsche called “affective indulgence.” 14 To sum up, we misperceive the threat to democracy from groups like the Tea Party when we simply label it fascist or egregiously racist. It does indeed carry a threat, but we need to better identify its peculiar character and attractiveness if we want to effectively contest its capacity to deplete democratic energies.
Democratic thought, especially on the left, has tended to ignore the middle of society. It has operated with an implicit two-entity social ontology: elites and demos or bourgeoisie and proletariat. Thus, to think theoretically from a left perspective has meant largely conceptualizing the consciousness and action of the demos, as they challenge elites. My point is not to reject this focus of attention so much as it is to argue that we should broaden it to better include how the middle segments of society might figure into the contestation in more democratically admirable ways. At least that is my claim regarding affluent, late-modern liberal democracies. Here I am speaking primarily of the United States, Western Europe, Canada, Australia, and Japan. For my purposes, what is distinctive about such societies is that severe economic disadvantage is not a shared status among a majority of the people, as it tended to be in many such societies in the nineteenth century, and as it is in other, less affluent societies around the world today. In the affluent societies, injustice and oppression are unevenly distributed across the middle and bottom of the population. There is no demos in the sense of a block of those who are both severely disadvantaged and most numerous. Thus, strategies for addressing injustice and expanding democratic inclusion must involve more complex aims than simply raising the political self-consciousness of the demos, in the sense of those who are the least advantaged and the most numerous, because such a category does not really exist.
In such societies, a crucial question will involve how the broad middle segments perceive and interact with those who are oppressed or less advantaged, economically, racially, and culturally. Groups like the Tea Party give one sort of answer with their idea of a citizen bearing of republican self-protection.
The Normative Core of Communicative Action
A different, more robustly democratic sense of citizen bearing is going to have to draw upon an alternative sense of what is at the normative core of a democratic mode of life. One might think of the articulation of this core as requiring the establishment of a strong philosophical foundation in the traditional sense. This could take the form of everything from the idea of human rights grounded in a divine spark in each soul to Habermas’s idea of a consensus rooted in the essence of language. Or one might just start with a simple list of admired values that seem crucial to democracy. I want to propose that we think about this question in a way that does not, on the one hand, claim to be foundational in a traditional sense but that also does not amount, on the other, to a simple list we just cobble together for a particular purpose. I want to suggest rather that we think about the core of democratic commitments as being best expressed in a “picture” or “exemplary scene” that cogently displays a constellation of normativity we hold to be at the heart of democratic commitments. Here I continue to see value in working from an at least partially Habermasian framework. I want to appropriate the picture that is at the heart of his paradigm of communicative action without embracing either his one-sided orientation to consensus or his sense that this paradigm can claim a kind of foundational philosophical status—in short, the claim that it captures the essence of language as reaching an understanding. For me, we must proceed in what I call a “weak ontological” fashion, rooting our democratic bearing finally in something like our attachment to an underlying exemplary scene of human action that embodies in an admirable way key intuitions and basic values of Western modernity.
A picture or exemplary scene of the sort I am referring to can “hold us captive,” as Wittgenstein said. If it manifests this capacity, it is because it offers powerful conceptual coherence, deep normative resonance with our historically informed moral-political intuitions, and real aesthetic-affective inspiration. We can see such pictures at work in the classics of political thought like Locke’s Second Treatise or Marx’s Economic-Philosophical MSS. Contemporary versions appear in Judith Butler’s modification of the Levinasian scene and in Rainer Forst’s “picture” of justice, sketched not around a scene of goods being distributed but rather around actors demanding an accounting from representatives of a normative structure they find to be unjustified. 15 As I said a moment ago, the picture I wish to both draw upon and depart from in some distinctive ways is the one at the core of the paradigm of communicative action.
In recent years, Habermas has become—at least in the English-speaking world—something of a stock figure of derision among those who affirm more agonistic ways of thinking about democracy. My effort to reconceive the normative core of communicative action is aimed at giving it qualities that incorporate a more agonistic sense of human identity and social life than is expressed in the generic version of communicative action, as well as removing from that core any claim that it rests on a strong ontological foundation. The generation of a more adequate comprehension of agonism will involve reconfiguring communicative action so as to allow it to embody “no-saying” and identity issues, matters that model has never come to terms with adequately in the past.
My effort to articulate an admirable, exemplary scene for the core of democratic normativity is intended to be useful for all aspects of democratic theory, but for present purposes, I want to focus primary attention on its implications for how at least some middle class citizens might embrace it and learn to bear themselves in accordance with it in their public interactions.
The core of the Habermasian exemplary scene involves subjects engaged in ongoing “communicative action.” 16 This refers to linguistic interaction involving multiple actors, in which the intersubjective bond between them reflects the “validity basis” of speech. A crucial feature of this bondedness is that it can be challenged by any actor who comes to feel that the validity claims carried by another’s speech acts cannot be sustained; they seem to be, in short, either untrue, normatively illegitimate, or uttered in an insincere way. Habermas wants his scene to display the action-coordinating and coercion-depleting force of speech. Thus, the scene is intended to reflect the idea of human dignity as rooted in the way linguistic interaction continually displays the equal moral status of all voices.
Unfortunately, there has been an exclusive focus on the consensual, discursive moment of the scene of communicative action—on the part of both critics and Habermas himself—and this has had a somewhat distorting effect on how we understand what exactly is exemplary within that scene. If attention is drawn not to discourse and the “yes-saying” of consensus, but rather to the preexisting contexts of communicative action, then we are led to think more about the interruption of the extant, background consensus; in short, about the conditions and implications of what one might call “no-saying” or a kind of radical linguistic “natality.” 17 If this dimension were to be better fleshed out, it would become apparent that negativity has far more ontological and normative weight in this exemplary scene than is normally thought to be the case. 18 Negativity and its associated concepts like conflict and dissensus now take on a significance beyond that of being merely temporary obstacles on the road to some normative affirmation or “yes-saying.” If I am correct about this status of “no-saying,” it means that Habermasian critical theory provides more footholds for a hermeneutics of suspicion than critics imagine.
The second way in which the communicative paradigm needs to be reconceived involves the question of identity. This challenge emerges in the rich body of thought that philosophers and political theorists have been developing in incisive ways, especially since the 1970s. It involves the relation of identity and difference or, more appropriately, “identity/difference,” with the slash mark highlighting a mutually constitutive relationship between the two. Once identity is understood in this fashion, one can never again imagine communicative space as being occupied by creatures with perfectly discrete and essentially commensurable identities that constitute, in turn, the unproblematic ground out of which claims about interests arise and are contested.
This problematic of identity that must now be productively engaged has been best elucidated by William Connolly. He argues that each of us must give some coherence to our identity over time, if we are to live a recognizably human life. But to do that requires the simultaneous constitution of a field of contrasting entities. This is a fundamental ontological condition of identity. I can construct my identity only through contrasts with that which is different.
Any persuasive exemplary scene must capture this dynamic in some way, but there is one additional quality to the dynamic that is crucial as well. So far, the identity/difference relation fails to incorporate any reference to human mortality, and the fact that this finitude makes humans anxious creatures. As such creatures, the ontological condition of identity/difference creates a central axis around which anxiety revolves. My concern to project at least some stability and security into my identity is fundamentally threatened by my constitutive dependence on that which is different from me. As a result, Connolly says, my ontological condition is always haunted by an existential resentment at how deeply difference is woven into my identity. This resentment toward the extent to which my identity is dependent on that which is outside of me provokes a continual, compensating urge toward efforts to somehow definitively control, denigrate, marginalize or otherwise disempower the “who” that is different. There is no way to eliminate such resentment, given that humans have foreknowledge of their mortality. This means that the specific insecurity I experience in the face of what is different is always redolent of the existential insecurity rooted in my finitude. But even if there is no way to eliminate this resentment, one can nevertheless try to dampen this passion and its destructive effects. As Connolly puts it, we may always be insecure in the face of difference, but we can develop individual and political practices that lessen the propensity to express hostility toward “the other.” 19 Obviously, the prevalence or dearth of such practices in a given society is a matter of central concern for political theory.
It is important to recognize that this way of approaching the issue of identity and difference in political life does not equate to any particular conception of multiculturalism or rights based on something like ethnic group identity. Although the dynamic of identity and difference may help explain why such questions are so intractable, its implications are broader in the sense that it draws attention not just to, for example, ethnicity and race but also to such politically charged binaries as those in a society who are judged as “deserving” and “undeserving,” categories that may not be exclusively identified with, say, particular visual or linguistic differences.
The core problem with Habermas’s scene of communicative action is that it has never included a consensus-disrupting component that is, first, built in at the same fundamental level of figuration as the guiding pull of communicative rationality and that would, second, stand as an obtrusive marker around which the incapacity of humans to realistically expect to progress toward a transparent, fully consensual ideal is to be explained. However, once we imagine the exemplary scene as one that unfolds in a way that embodies not just the force of communicative rationality but also that of identity/difference, then we have just such a necessary marker. 20
When this augmentation is carried through, it transforms the exemplary scene of communicative action into one that embodies far more deep-seated contestation and conflict. It means, in effect, that there will be more agonism in whatever deliberative democratic practices and institutions one might imagine to be prefigured by this revised exemplary scene. Accordingly, there will also now be additional sites around which a hermeneutics of suspicion can fruitfully be deployed. Of special significance here will be what one might call the hermeneutics of self-suspicion. This involves a suspicion of the self that penetrates more deeply than is the case in the orthodox Habermasian scene, and it provides additional existential force to the figure of “no-saying.”
A Democratic Bearing: Ethos and Political Tack
An exemplary scene will embody and display a way of understanding certain core ethical-political values. These are moral sources (in Charles Taylor’s sense) of the actors in the scene. The communicative scene, at least on my reading, displays an understanding of human dignity as constituted by the basic values of autonomy and equality of moral voice. These values operate not as a strong foundation but rather a weak one; that is, they express our sense of the most admirable moral values that we have drawn from the Western experience of modernity. Let me turn first to the notion of individual autonomy, since it is the more straightforward of the two. I would like to interpret it—along the lines advocated by Rainer Forst—as the notion that I can rightly demand an accounting from what appears to me to be an arbitrary normative structure, because I am owed a justification for any normative order of which I am a part. The core sense of this autonomy is my general “demand” that I live only under conditions in relation to which I can raise questions of justification. 21
This way of thinking about the core of modern Western moral-political insight is admirable as far as it goes. But if we imagine an ontological scene containing only actors with mutually raised demands, I think something crucial has been missed. I want to try to capture what is missed with what I am calling the moral equality of voice. Here it is not so much my being pushed by the voice of a claimant who demands something of me, as it is my being ever so slightly pulled by the other’s voice that remains somehow like mine, despite the myriad differences and inequalities that may suffuse the contexts surrounding us. That voice is both infinitely vulnerable, because mortal, and yet somehow of inestimable value. This value is as much a constitutive part of the connectedness that bonds individuals in the exemplary scene of communicative action as is the sense that the structure of intersubjectivity displayed there is normatively justifiable in a communicatively rational sense. The former value of moral equality in Western modernity has traditionally been most fostered and attended to by religion, but that variant of attentiveness is by no means necessarily exclusive.
These two values of autonomy and moral equality of voice suffuse the picture of interacting subjects I have been calling the exemplary scene of the communicative paradigm. They help constitute it as a portrait of intersubjectivity that functions as the conceptual, normative, and aesthetic-affective background in terms of which I experience the drawing power of that explicit ethical-political orientation I refer to as a democratic citizen bearing. The scene and its characteristics animate and motivate me to invest myself in that aspirational model of citizenship.
A citizen bearing that is oriented around the values of autonomy and moral equality of voice has a two-fold character. By this I mean that a citizen who adopts such a bearing will be expected to manifest not just a political tack that reflects his demand that regnant normative orders respect his autonomy, as well as that of all others affected by that order, he will also be expected to manifest a certain ethos—spirit or sensibility—toward others, especially those who appear to challenge or generate friction in relation to his sense of identity. A democratic bearing will flourish only when both of those moments (in Hegel’s sense) display themselves in citizen interactions. The role of a democratic ethos is especially important to emphasize in relation to my present concern with the middle classes, as I will try to make clear in what follows. But it should also be emphasized that a focus on ethos alone, without a clear connection to political tacking, yields a truncated portrait of democratic bearing.
A. Ethos
Here I need to start by returning to the issue of why the moral equality of voice cannot be reduced simply to the picture of making demands and attending to the other’s demand for justification. According to this picture, one is clearly obligated to listen to the other’s demands. In fulfilling this obligation, one is doing justice to the autonomy of the other. But “listening” on this model involves the relatively simple act of construing a demand. A voice is simply the delivery vehicle that carries the content. When I refer to “voice” in relation to the moral equality of voice, however, I have something more multidimensional in mind, something that calls for a more carefully cultivated, receptive capacity on the part of the hearer. The pull to listen here is broader than a duty to listen precisely to the other until you have construed the character of his/her demand. It involves as well sensitivity to the possibility that the very act of construal on my part may inconspicuously or unconsciously reflect desires to marginalize and denigrate the other’s voice.
A world of purely autonomous creatures would be one in which I am obligated to listen and respond to you only insofar as you emit claims and demand justifications. Together, we try to converge on norms that are valid for us as well as—in Habermas’s words—for “all” who are “affected” by those norms. This sweeping gesture toward all others is a quasi-Kantian universalization imperative. A critical democratic theory would then use this source of normativity for evaluating social and economic structures of power and assessing democratic prospects. And, depending on the conjectures those efforts generate, it can decide upon an appropriate direction for political action. This is the kind of account of citizen orientation that emerges from Forst’s exemplary picture. It provides us with a direction toward which we should aim our political questions and actions—in short, a political tack.
My proposal regarding the dual character of a democratic bearing is responding to what I see as the more complex, challenging, and indeterminate character of giving the voice of the other a deeper and more complex resonance in my reflections and affects. By referring to “voice” in this context, I want to forestall the immediate reduction of what the other presents into a discrete demand or claim, and emphasize rather the other as an embodied, vulnerable, and mortal self like me. Further, this voice belongs to a particular, irreplaceable, and ultimately unfathomable self. When voice is construed in this fashion, the pull to listen conscientiously implies the fostering of a sensibility and set of skills that I want to gather under the idea of the ethos of an “attentive traveler-host.” 22 Such listening involves being willing to “travel” outside one’s sphere of comfort (mental, physical, and geographical) into the “neighborhood” of the other and, alternatively, playing the role of host to the other with a kind of generosity that exceeds normal, reciprocal expectations and commitments of the sort autonomous creatures would demand. 23
The ethos of an attentive traveler-host orients us toward the world in a fashion quite different from that of the republican self-protector. The latter figure pictures himself as standing his ground, coiling himself in readiness to strike a righteous blow against the threatening other, just like the famous snake on that revolutionary flag that is so beloved by Tea Partyers. 24 The former, to the contrary, imagines herself as willing to leave home turf, to dislocate herself onto the terrain of the other and to listen “with all deliberate slowness” or, alternatively, to play the host, allowing the other (traveler) to ease her anxiety at being on strange turf. When humans are thought of in this way, the old advice about “not talking to strangers” is reversed.
We see now as well that the traveler-host is continually displaying and weaving together that most slender and fragile of human communities: the one constituted by the negative bond shared by the consciously vulnerable and mortal. 25 Members of such a real but slight community owe no heavy obligation; but they might find acceptable the exercising of an initial, presumptive generosity toward one another. This is not a full or overwhelming generosity, as some religions invoke; rather, it is “merely” an initial affect that resists my persistent and unruly desire to populate the world with emerging sets of hostile and undeserving others. Presumptive generosity not only manifests common vulnerability, it also expresses directly what we might call a faith in democratic talk. As Danielle Allen has so eloquently put it, “talking to strangers” manifests a kind of democratic “sacrifice” that one should be willing to make in the name of fostering a richer public life that more fully articulates the values of autonomy and the moral equality of voice. 26 Here we begin to sense that an embrace of democracy involves, among many other things, acts of nontheistic faith.
What qualities should we cultivate so as to most effectively uncoil ourselves and “talk to strangers”? As I have already suggested to some degree, this kind of talking and listening are thick and slow. One does not affirm this ethos with a fast look and a quick dip into empathetic identification. Think here of what is frequently called “poverty pornography,” epitomized by the thirty-second spot for a charity that presents you with multiple face shots of starving people, especially children, followed by an appeal for donations. Now contrast that with the recent, widely publicized, action of a middle-class, white South African family, who decided to leave their gated community in Pretoria and live for a month in a black squatter camp in the adjacent township of Mamelodi. The Hewitts lived with their one child on ten dollars a day in a shack with no electricity or running water, dependent on expensive and uncertain transportation to get to work.
This family’s actions were both praised and criticized. The New York Times put the story on the front page under the title: “Trading Privilege for Privation, Family Hits a Nerve in South Africa.” 27 From the viewpoint of a democratic bearing, the family’s actions were tentatively quite praiseworthy. Contrasted with the thirty-second dip into empathy, the actions here had the desired thickness of intersubjectivity and unfolded over a significant period of time. 28 Thus, they would seem to constitute an admirable sort of deliberate, generous engagement for which the ethos of traveling-hosting calls.
Criticism of the Hewitts took the form of complaints that they were just “white slum tourists” whose actions amounted to merely a more elaborate version of poverty pornography. 29 But such immediate critical broadsides seem suspiciously confident in their instant capacity to carve up the political world into the admirable and the despicable. If we try, rather, to look more carefully at the Hewitts’ actions, what sort of conclusions might we draw?
The more one examines the case, the more it seems that the family’s motivations remained consciously and predominantly personal. As the husband summarized in a blog posting some weeks after their living experiment, their time in Mamelodi was “about creating a conversation rather than creating action. It has been about changing ourselves, not others. In some ways, this frees us from the responsibility of having to start something, build something, or create something.” Even so, he said, his family would “forever be burdened by knowing that if we sleep in a warm bed, millions won’t.” This personal acknowledgement was followed by an abrupt, highly political declaration that white South Africans need such “stronger bridges” to disadvantaged blacks, not “Higher Tax Burdens to share the wealth around.” 30 “Stronger bridges” seemed to him to be limited to more personal connections and charity, rather than working as well for greater justice. Issues of race and justice are here blithely waved away in a fashion not unlike the attitude of Tea Partyers. 31
The Hewitts’ actions were perhaps admirable as a purely social form of attentive traveling, but they fell short when we use as our criterion an ethos that is also a “moment” in the broader experiential whole of a democratic bearing. Without the connection of the ethos to a political tack, the citizen remains in the orbit of the purely charitable, refusing to entertain the suspicion that the problems that were experienced cannot be divorced from political questions about economic and racial structures of power.
B. Political Tack
The appeal to some sort of ethos in the context of political theory has become quite familiar in recent years. Some political theorists interpret this as a disturbing “ethical turn.” It is unsettling because a turn toward ethics or ethos is a “turn away from politics.” 32 As the Mamelodi example shows, such concerns are always important to raise. But I want to argue that there is no reason to conclude that my way of thinking about the role of an ethos is necessarily and fatally flawed in this way. In what follows, I want to respond to such criticism by elucidating briefly the role of a “political tack” within my notion of “bearing” and showing how it is related to the ethos I have affirmed.
Let me first briefly clarify why my project is badly described as participating in an “ethical turn.” The metaphor of a turn usually implies a turn toward one thing that is also necessarily a turn away from something else on which one’s attention was previously focused. But this is simply an inappropriate metaphor for what I am proposing. The intention of my project, stated most abstractly, is rather to make plausible a richer phenomenology of political reflection and orientation to action than the dominant modern ones that foreground exclusively (and often only implicitly) some sense of autonomous subjects pursuing their desires and interests in a field of actors similarly conceived. My effort imagines the autonomy-claiming subject as functioning against the background of a more complex exemplary ontological scene; that is, her attachment to autonomy is envisioned as continually enriched, constrained, and renegotiated through that value’s entanglement with the moral equality of voice.
Let me try to now sketch what I am calling a “political tack,” and how it is related to the other phenomenological moment of the exemplary scene. I hope to show that my approach looks not to make ethics primary, but rather to locate how an ethos might be admirably interwoven with political judgment and determination within a coherent portrait of engagement with public life and action.
The exemplary scene I am imagining is understood as progressing from an initial context of communicative action to which actors are tied by explicit and implicit normative bonds, continually reproduced through linguistic interaction. Within that initial cooperative context, moments of interruption occur when an actor turns against the context and, in some form, says “no.” This is the moment of what I called “no-saying.” The exemplary scene of communicative action is subject to two primary sorts of interruption to whatever normative orders may be embedded in that presupposed field of cooperation. The “no-saying” may come from another or it may come from me. When it emerges from another, this dissent from normative order confronts me with a challenge. I might take up that challenge, come to see merit in it, and attempt to work through the issues to achieve something like a renegotiated bond of connectedness. But in the present context, I am especially interested in cases where the other’s no-saying confronts me more fundamentally in my identity as a beneficiary of the regnant normative order. There I likely perceive such challenges to be expressing unbidden noise, unjustified disruption, or unwarranted recalcitrance. The voice of the other is construed as, at best, misinformed and, at most, willfully demanding something it does not deserve. This phenomenological moment easily elicits the sort of resentment that I have associated with the Tea Party. But if I can cultivate, however slightly, some sense of shared finitude with the voice of the other, I might begin to be drawn toward considering whether my irritated, resentful reaction is driven by an unconscious dynamic of identity/difference. And I may find that I am perhaps even somewhat ambivalent about always compulsively reproducing such a pattern of resentful thought and action, once I have become aware of its hold on me. If this hesitation can find some resonance with a willingness to try to articulate the consciousness of my mortality into a more subtle companion to my everyday life and judgment, then I might begin to embrace an ethos of traveling and hosting. Within that disposition, I may be drawn to lightly reassess some of my normative commitments, most prominently by questioning whether the other’s no-saying is actually showing me that I may be complicit in the reproduction of traditional orders of, say, racial injustice, or orders that are obliviously pushing forward colonization of the lifeworld. In the context of such reflection and reassessment, the field of possible political tacks may start to constitute itself somewhat differently in relation to the no-saying of that other.
Alternatively, the no-saying may emerge initially from me rather than the other. As I draw upon the basic values underlying modern normative orders that are implicit in the exemplary scene, I begin to constitute myself in opposition to existing structures of injustice. As a consequence, I become more receptive to hermeneutics of suspicion that generate specific critical conjectures about the domination and injustice around me. This process of critical analysis is continually folded back onto intimations drawn from what is essentially a hermeneutic of affirmation animated by the values of autonomy and equal voice. The combination of articulating critical conjectures and following intimations about better avenues toward more inclusive self-governing constitute the core normative sense of what I am calling a political tack. My political judgment and action now acquire a broad orientation into the varying winds and crosscurrents of political life in a society of complex, uneven injustice. This orientation is subject to continual reappraisal and adjustment as conditions change.
The mix of relevant political considerations here will continue to draw as well on insights generated by cultivating an ethos of traveling-hosting. The latter has the capacity to slow down and interrupt the process by which I frame others and myself into purely strategic, opposing trajectories. 33 For constituencies in the middle of affluent, late-modern societies, this cultivation is crucial to interrupting the formation of that syndrome exemplified by the Tea Party, whereby the least advantaged segments are constituted as essentially “undeserving” and in need of disciplinary controls.
If one were to speak in the broadest sense of the “compass” that orients the political tack of such a critical theory, it would be a modified version of the familiar Habermasian question: Is the norm at issue acceptable to “all” those who are “affected” by it? I say “modified” here, because, as I noted earlier, the original version deployed by Habermas has a sweeping Kantian quality. When one tries to understand the criterion in this way as part of a strong ontological foundation, however, it unfortunately names an unending task. As others have noted, there simply is no clear end to tracing chains of possible affects. And if it is unending in practice, this is embarrassing for a strong ontology, because it installs uncertainty in the heart of one’s ethical-political ground. A presumptively clear criterion of practical truth becomes rather a continual generator of uncertainty. In the empirical world, as opposed to a noumenal one, questions about who is really affected, and exactly how much they have to be affected to count, are perpetual issues of interpretation and thus indeterminacy. If we switch, however, from strong to weak ontological terms, things look more promising for the “all-affected” criterion. This standard now establishes an open-ended duty of justice—and thus of a political tack—for me that goes beyond any sense of my simply trying to conscientiously manifest an ethos. The actor who is confronted with the “no-saying” of the other cannot adequately acquit himself through the adoption of an ethos of traveling-hosting, as seems to have been the case with the Hewitt family. The task of responding to the “no-saying” of those who suffer severe disadvantage requires, in addition, orienting oneself to a perpetual duty of justice. One must try to show that problematic norms operative in that condition of disadvantage are valid in relation to those who have contested them and, in addition, in relation to further “others” who may not, in fact, have been able to effectively voice opposition at that point. The duty of justice here is not discharged with sovereign pronouncements of “all” this or “all” that. Rather, this duty directs us to the difficult tasks of continual interpretation and judgment. The achievement of such defensible comprehension requires one to “travel,” although the obligation now is not just that of attending to the persistent pressure of identity/difference dynamics, but rather also that of determining who is substantially harmed by some social or legal norm and which practices or institutions might be responsible.
One must “travel” in the sense of being willing to go out and inform oneself about social relations and institutional arrangements and engage those who are disadvantaged by current structures of power. This means, in short, going beyond the borders of knowledge that are familiar and then asking whether these facts and states of affairs could be deliberatively justified. This kind of ethical-political traveling is not equivalent to the disposition required by the ethos of traveling, although the insights generated by either one are likely to help to better inform the other.
Returning to my extended example of the Hewitt family, one would now have more precise grounds for both praise and criticism. Praise would be warranted for their traveling in the sense called for by the ethos of presumptive generosity, and yet criticism would also be warranted for their thorough failure to recognize any duty to travel in a political sense as well—in other words, to inform themselves about possible injustices, take responsibility if there is indeed injustice involved, and consider various possible political actions to address them. The position the Hewitts took rejecting all such considerations implies that the social status quo is simply a matter of ordained fate, and that attempts to resist it in any way would merely court disaster.
Perhaps the Hewitts’ case is, in the final analysis, best seen as simply extreme. Their extraordinary personal sacrifice involved in experiencing something of the lives of the heavily disadvantaged, when paired with their constitution of a massive, rock-hard ideological wall that resists the slightest political conceptualization of that experience is strikingly peculiar. I see no compelling reason to take it as illustrative of some necessary path of reflection that middle-class people are fated to follow. For those who have no such massive walls solidly in place, it does not require utopian efforts of imagination to consider how even the most tentative, exploratory tarrying with an ethos of traveling-hosting might plausibly open an individual to affects and reflections that inch her onto the terrain of micro-level political effects in ways that might not be entirely insignificant. The slightest willingness to resist the cognitive and emotional rush to resentment and self-recruitment into righteous hostility might inflect the path of one’s interactions in ways that offer small possibilities for thinking differently about proto-political options.
Conclusion
A democratic bearing will be differently construed depending on whether one is speaking of the most disadvantaged and dominated segments of liberal democracies or the middle segments. For the former, the issue of political tack will typically and rightly be first and foremost. Here it is a question of saying “no,” demanding justification for a normative order whose injustice is palpable and pursuing whatever political strategies promise greater inclusion and improvement of this condition. But our thinking about a democratic bearing in this sense must today be supplemented with some way of inflecting it so that it might better engage the concerns of citizens in the middle segment. Just as the political right has embraced a cultural politics and citizen ideal of the middle in countries like the United States, so also should the democratic left give more thought to this segment. But, to repeat, that does not mean in the slightest that the notion of citizenship I have sketched ignores the least advantaged. It merely means that successful paths toward democratic futures will need to foster a variety of interrelated modes of consciousness. It is only by broadening our thinking in this way that we will find better long-term approaches to addressing the complex and uneven injustice that is characteristic of affluent, late-modern, societies.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Earlier versions of this essay were presented at the Political Philosophy Workshop, Brown University, and at the Civil Society, Democracy, and Contestation conference at the Federal University of the South Rio Grande, Porto Alegre, Brazil. I would especially like to thank my colleague Lawrie Balfour for several incisive readings of the essay, as well as Jane Bennett, Bonnie Honig, Sharon Krause, and William Sbach for their suggestive criticisms. I hope my revisions have gone some way toward meeting their concerns.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.