Social imaginaries and the theory of the normative utterance

I Thrownness and social imaginaries

In the hermeneutic perspective initiated by Heidegger, we are thrown into the world, into social imaginaries so that morality builds on norms that are already in place, on norms that are not constructed. In other words, normativity emerges through the social imaginary in a way that is logically prior to the conceptual formulations of ethical and political philosophy. ⁵ What Taylor and the other philosophers of the imaginary cited above have done is take this transcendental hermeneutic point made by Heidegger and Gadamer about worldhood and refined the historiography with the help of work by historians and sociologists in order to examine the emergence and modification of particular collective historical shapes.

Taylor says: ‘The social imaginary is not a set of ideas’; rather, the imaginary forms the background that makes sense of…the practices of a society […Thus,] the notion of a moral order goes beyondsome proposed schedule of norms that ought to govern our mutual relations and/or political life[…] The image of society carries not only a definition of what is right, but of the context inwhich it makes sense to strive for and hope to realize the right. ⁶

The social imaginary concerns the ways that ‘ordinary people “imagine” their social surroundings and this is often not expressed in theoretical terms but in images, stories, legends, etc.…The social imaginary is that common understanding which makes possible common practices and a widely shared sense of legitimacy.’ ⁷ These imaginaries form the background out of which we think and act but ‘which we do not entirely understand. To ascribe total personal responsibility to us for these is to want to leap out of the human condition.’ ⁸

Such a conception of normativity demands a very different form of questioning than the constructivist approach. In understanding and defending normative claims, we must locate ourselves in the space of historical imaginaries and argue through these imaginaries rather than finding principles to which all should agree. Hence, ‘the task of reason is to articulate this background, what we presuppose when we make a judgment that a certain form of life is truly worthwhile, or place our dignity in a certain achievement’. ⁹ These are the conditions of intentionality. ¹⁰

We can see the relationship of the ontological background (the political) to politics in Taylor’s work by looking quickly at A Secular Age. At the beginning of A Secular Age, he distinguishes three kinds of secularism. The concerns of philosophers of public reason are placed in ‘Secularity 1’, which focuses on the retreat of religion from the common institutions and practices ‘most obviously, but not only, the state’. ¹¹ This is the normative, political secularism of public reason that addresses controversies such as the wearing of headscarves to school or the display of religious symbols on state grounds. A second sense of secularity refers to the decline of religious belief and practice – people no longer going to church, synagogue or mosque, for instance. This sociological approach is often called ‘secularization’. The third and most important sense of secularity for Taylor concerns the shift in ‘the conditions of belief’ since this sense gives a place to the ontological history he finds important. In this view, the ‘shift to secularity consists of a move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and unproblematic to one in which it is understood to be one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace’. ¹² In other words, Taylor wants to examine the shift ‘which takes us from a society in which it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, to one in which faith, even for the staunchest believers, is one possibility among others’. ¹³ Taylor’s claim for Secularity 3 is not simply that this is a better description of contemporary society’s understanding of religion and secularity. His claim is philosophical. Although we may have much to learn from researchers in Secularity 1 and Secularity 2, they have left out the worldhood of the world. Sociologists may focus on gathering statistics about church or synagogue attendance as evidence of secularization, while political philosophers may assert the uncontroversial ‘fact of pluralism’ in order to focus on the construction of norms of mutual accommodation. ¹⁴ But before these facts or norms can appear, they require a background that lets them show up for us as phenomena. Of course, people can bring different ideas and attitudes to a secularity,

…but what they do not bring into the negotiations is the set of ideas and norms constitutive of [secularity itself]. This must be the common property of society before there can be any question of [debate]. Hence, they are not subjective meanings, the property of one or some individual, but rather intersubjective meanings, which are constitutive of the social matrix in which individuals find themselves and act. ¹⁵

Hence, Taylor’s question is: what are the background assumptions, practices, languages, etc., that make the contemporary experience of the secular and the religious possible, for believers, agnostics and atheists? We stand in a normed world of social imaginaries that cannot be set aside to get clear about particular normative concepts.

Taylor does a genealogy of western secularity that gives a new account of how our current background assumptions emerged, drawing out new historical richness and complexity that become available and normatively relevant through this problematic. We cannot just toss in a vague, schematic historical tale about how secularity emerged from the wars of religion and modern science in order to focus on the principles of public reason. ¹⁶ Rather,

…our sense of where we are is crucially defined in part by a story of how we got there…And just because we describe where we are in relating a journey, we can misdescribe it grievously by misidentifying the itinerary. That is what the subtraction accounts of modernity have in fact done. To get straight where we are, we have to go back and tell the story properly. ¹⁷

The articulation of background social imaginaries brings in the third-person point of view that is excluded by the constructivist view, and it joins up with Taylor’s long-standing objection to such theories of practical reason because they cannot articulate ‘the background understanding surrounding any conviction that we ought not to act in this or that way’. ¹⁸ However, we need to distinguish two kinds of articulations or ‘world disclosures’ that Taylor sometimes conflates. ¹⁹ On the one hand, there is articulation ‘of an already interpreted, symbolically structured world; the world, that is, within which we always already find ourselves’, ²⁰ and, on the other hand, there is the utterance, the ‘reflective disclosure’. The articulation of background is concerned with our passive relationship to structures of intelligibility, such as we find in Taylor’s discussion of the public sphere, popular sovereignty in Modern Social Imaginaries, or Secularity 3 in A Secular Age. Here the language of articulation is a socio-historical language of social imaginaries. These structures can be characterized in various ways, and Taylor slides – much as the narrator of a third-person novel does – between sociological explanations, what he calls ‘neo-Durkheimian moments’, and articulations that are close to phenomenological description of individual and collective experience displayed through everyday speech.

The utterance or ‘reflective disclosure’ – and here I modify Kompridis’ definition – is the intervention in the pre-reflective practices and structures of meaning by an utterance, a work of art, a film, a historical or philosophical text, etc. The individual makes claims through and against the social imaginaries in which she finds herself. Reflective disclosure reworks the languages and structures used to make sense of ourselves and the world, and these interventions can take the form of normative arguments, as we will see. The transcendental argument against constructivist arguments does not just show the relevance of background structures to our self-understanding; it authorizes new forms of argument. We are now ready for Taylor’s debate with Brandom over just this issue.

II Problems with intervention as world disclosure

In a recent debate on language and rationality, Taylor and Brandom agree on many of the holistic assumptions of hermeneutics – what Brandom calls ‘Gadamerian platitudes’ – but differ on the relationship of world disclosure to conceptual understanding and the exchange of reasons. ²¹ Brandom insists that we ‘draw a bright line between conceptual understanding and other kinds of symbolic disclosedness’. ²² In this view, ‘broadly symbolic [dimensions of language] in Cassirer’s sense, are not conceptual in the narrow propositional sense that I render in terms of inference and reasons’. ²³ He clarifies this by drawing on Wittgenstein’s well-known analogy of language as a city: ‘Language for [Wittgenstein] is all suburbs, merging imperceptibly into the surround and supporting countryside of linguistic practices, and having no downtown. But I think language does have a downtown, and that is the practice of giving and asking for reasons.’ ²⁴ The practice of giving and asking for reasons swings free not only of symbolic uses but of particular forms of life.

Taylor, on the other hand, does not think we can isolate reason from giving disclosure in this way, ‘I remain convinced that the articulative [disclosive] cannot be peeled off from the public giving of and asking for reasons.’ ²⁵ Any exchange over ‘the factual state of things’ can make sense only if we set them ‘in the context of our ability to operate through the whole range of symbolic forms’. ²⁶ Hence,

…there are certain matters which can’t be properly explored without recourse to the disclosive dimension. There couldn’t be an intelligent discussion of the beauty of landscape which didn’t either deploy or draw on our familiarity with, say, certain paintings. There couldn’t be a discussion of Christian piety which didn’t draw on, say, the music of Bach, or certain hymns, or Chartres cathedral or an evocative life of Saint Francis.’

Although Brandom and Taylor share a holistic critique of the Kantian understanding of the concept – according to which the institution of conceptual norms is separate from their application – they develop different kinds of holism. ²⁸ For Brandom, the key is Hegelian reconstruction:

[T]he rationality of the current decision, its justifiability as a correct application of a concept, is secured by rationally reconstructing the tradition of its applications according to a certain model – by offering a selective, cumulative, expressively progressive genealogy of it. At each stage in its development, it is insofar as one takes the tradition to be rational, by a Whiggish rewriting of its history, that one makes the tradition be and have been rational…This is reason’s march through history. In this way, as Hegel puts it, contingency is given necessity. ²⁹

Taylor focuses his attention on the Heideggerian point – that logical forms of language depend upon a background – rather than connecting background and normativity into an adequate conception of language and argument. In theorizing the individual utterance, Taylor makes a move that is all too typical of both defenders and critics of world disclosure by defining disclosure against everyday speech and normativity. In lumping together various aesthetic works and ignoring the disclosive power of everyday language, he fails to address the normative claims of ‘disclosive’ writing that could answer disclosure’s critics. It is one thing to respect the insights provided by literary language: ‘We delude ourselves if we think a philosophical or critical language is somehow more hard-edged and more free from personal index than that of poets or novelists’; ³² however, it is another to give literature blanket insight beyond challenge, ignoring the ways that literature can often be misleading, repulsive, or just stupid. By giving literature this vatic status, he gives weight to Cristina Lafont’s charge (cited in note 3 above) that ‘world disclosure seems unrevisable from within and inaccessible from without’, a charge to which I will respond directly. ³³

Taylor follows the German hermeneutic tradition here, in placing art, particularly poetry, against prose and everyday speech. Wolf Lepenies notes that ‘the antithesis of literature and poetry has been maintained in all its severity only in Germany, where it has been exacerbated through an asociality of poetical production in principle, that even sees its chief task as being the “refutation of the social”’. ³⁴ Gadamer, for instance, for all his emphasis on dialogue, still gives art privileged disclosive access to our being in the world in a way that exempts art from normative claims: ‘Prior to all conceptual scientific knowledge, the way in which we look upon the world, and upon our whole being-in-the-world, takes shape in art.’ ³⁵ Gadamer opposes poetry and philosophy to everyday language: ‘Poetry and philosophy are both set off from the exchange of language as it takes place in practical activity and in science.’ ³⁶

The opposition of poetry and prose has meant hostility to the distinctive genre of modernity, the novel. The novel is attentive to the dynamic interplay of the multiple languages of public life, languages ignored by Heidegger and Gadamer. Taylor views the novel mostly through a sociological lens, in which the novel helps shape the modern sense of space and time and establish the dignity of everyday life (Sources of the Self, part III). The language of literature is a poetic language for Taylor, a language tied to the search for spiritual significance, not to its relevance to public, normative debates. Much of his discussion of disclosure has a religious character to it, and we can see this in his emphasis on the connection between disclosure and epiphanic poetry in Sources of the Self and his emphasis on ‘fullness’ in A Secular Age.

In his new book, The Language Animal, the closest he comes to connecting imaginaries and normativity is when he discusses ‘accessive’ and ‘existential’ disclosure. Accessive disclosures ‘open a new range of phenomena to us, for instance terms to classify animals or trees’. ³⁷ Existential disclosure offers ‘a new way of describing, or a new model for understanding, our human condition and the alternatives it opens for us…We may come to this existential insight through meeting, or hearing about, some paradigmatic figure (the Buddha, St. Francis), or by reading a book about ethics or the meaning of life or (more often) by seeing a film’. ³⁸ Existential disclosures are made available through the language of ‘portrayal’ rather than the language of assertion – e.g. Dostoevsky’s Devils (2016: 78). A ‘portrayal can be an alternative way of offering models to understand human life, alternative, that is to description’. ³⁹ He calls this mode ‘regestalting’, but this way of talking takes away any argumentative or normative claim. In my view, such ‘regestalting’ can be understood as normative revision that can play on the same field with principled argument.

Taylor similarly characterizes narratives by opposing them to assertions. He emphasizes how narratives cannot be translated into assertions rather than showing how narratives are woven into assertions and can challenge them: ‘Everybody would probably grant my first assertion above, that narrative constitutes a way of offering insight into causes, characters, values, alternative ways of being and the like. But many would baulk at the second affirmation that this form is unsubstitutable.’ ⁴⁰

In addition, Taylor blocks out the power of imaginaries to shape the concepts, with which they are imbricated. When speaking of the interaction of concepts and imaginaries, he describes concepts ‘trickling down’ into imaginaries but does not examine the ways that imaginaries shape concepts:

When a theory penetrates and transforms the social imaginary…people take up, or are inducted into new practices. These are made sense of by the new outlook, the one first articulated in theory…but this process isn’t just one sided; a theory making over a social imaginary. The theory in coming to make sense of the action is glossed, as it were, given a particular shape as the context of these practices. Rather like Kant’s notion of an abstract category becoming ‘schematized’ when it is applied to reality in space and time, the theory is schematized in the dense sphere of common practice. ⁴¹

For all the richness of his two most recent books, The Language Animal and Retrieving Realism, Taylor never moves to integrate his views on language with social imaginaries. In fact, the idea of social imaginaries never appears in these works. ⁴² These works are complex and interesting – I can hardly summarize them here – but they say nothing to contradict the critique I have advanced. In my view, social imaginaries inform our most basic practical engagements with the world and their relationship to particular utterances can be made visible and provide a space for a new conception of disclosure and practical reasoning.

III Reasoning through the social imaginary in Glaspell’s ‘A Jury of Her Peers’

Susan Glaspell’s short story ‘A Jury of Her Peers’ (1917) offers a phenomenology of interpretation in a straightforward everyday language that opens the boundaries of art and everyday speech and shows how narratives can make normative arguments. The story dramatizes a ‘world historical’ shift in the normative imaginary of gender, a shift that goes far beyond the formal political inclusion of women through the extension of the principle of equality, which was achieved three years after the story was published, through the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. The title of the story alludes to the debates that preceded its passage.

The tale begins when Mrs Hale is called from her work in the kitchen to join her husband, Mr Peters (the sheriff) and his wife. Mrs Hale, the center of focalization for the third-person narrative, learns that Mr Wright, the husband of an old friend, has been killed. The sheriff suspects that Mrs Hale’s friend Minnie has killed her husband. The group proceeds to the Wrights’ home, where it splits up. The men go out to the barn to look for evidence that can establish a motive for Minnie, while the women wait in the kitchen. While sitting there, they encounter the ‘text’ of Minnie’s life – the dirty towels, the mishandled stitching on her quilt, the act of violence of which she is suspected, and so on. That is, the dominant tradition that the women bring to Minnie’s house, a tradition that they share with their husbands, forms pre-understandings that do not help them reconstitute the self-understanding of the text. The men have called Minnie ‘mad’, and the women at this point can articulate no other reading, even though they sense that more is at stake here for them.

Slowly the women start to put together an explanation of the strangeness of Minnie’s text – the systematic psychological torture to which her husband subjected her, a torture that culminated in the strangulation of Minnie’s double, her pet bird. The process of coming to this explanation forces them to transform the understandings of their own lives and indeed the gendered imaginaries of the time. Minnie’s text asks them disturbing questions, not just the other way around.

They discover that Minnie’s husband was not just ‘a cruel man’ but also a typical one and that Minnie’s response differs only in degree, not in kind, from the ones they have had but ignored or repressed. It is important that Mr Wright commits no actionable offense. He merely brings into relief the norms that are already there, norms that inform the actions within many marriages. The story’s off-stage narrator shows their complex interaction with the text – sometimes it grabs them and sometimes they push it away – that is rarely made explicit in their consciousness or in dialogue. The women are not exchanging claims in discursive dialogue in which they use the constructed political concepts to unmask ideology. They are experiencing a challenging rupture – and Glaspell is displaying it – in the reigning package of concepts and imaginaries surrounding marriage and gender. The context of their reading – their moments of isolation interrupted by their husbands’ condescending remarks about the triviality of women’s occupations – helps foster their transformative reading. The women come to understand that the values and textures of their own lives are neither read nor recognized by their husbands and that the forces that drove Minnie mad operate around and within them as well. The women discover the narrow social space in which they have been channeled to live and the anger that they have been socialized to ignore.

The boundaries of their selves have been unraveled as Minnie’s text not only speaks to them but for them: ‘It was as if something within her not herself had spoken, and it found in Mrs. Peters something that she did not know as herself.’ ⁴³ Interpretation in this story is dramatized as an event, not an act. When Mrs Peters discovers the strangled bird, she does not just solve a detective’s riddle; she reworks the fabric of her memory and identity. As she recalls and revises the story of what a boy with a hatchet had done to her cat many years ago, she gets back the rage of the past moment: ‘“If they hadn’t held me back, I would have…”’ Minnie’s text forces the women to see themselves and their husbands in a way that requires a new language that gives distinctiveness and worth to their lives and that goes unread by the dominant culture. The women do not empathize with Minnie, for empathy implies a subject-to-subject model of reading that ignores the normative work of the story. The text develops a descriptive/normative language that did not yet exist so that we do not have normative principles on one side and the facts on the other. New normative languages make new facts and meanings available. ⁴⁴

Unlike Minnie, they are able to create a way of speaking that unites them with each other and separates them from the men. They have formed a powerful normative language that gives them reasons to do something they never could have imagined before they arrived at the Wrights’ house. They have created a ‘new space of reasons’, to use Sellars’ famous phrase. ⁴⁵ The story implicitly takes a stance with regard to existing imaginaries and in doing so creates its own space in which existing norms are engaged and modified.

Their interpretations open a new, hitherto unthinkable space of action: they choose to hide the bird (conceal evidence), betray their husbands and break the law. There is nothing ineffable about this disclosure, but the reasons of the argument do not appear in terms of the principles of public reason, such as justice and equality. Certainly, such notions inform the background, but these conceptual principles are woven into the textures of their shared imaginaries. Indeed, concepts and imaginaries worked together to form an imprisoning discursive package that Minnie’s text calls into question and pushes them to revise. The third-person narrator articulates the new space of understanding that emerges for them without ever reducing it to a conceptual label.

Thus, in answer to Brandom’s charge that world disclosure does not offer reasons, I would say that this story is Susan Glaspell’s disclosive, argumentative reasoning. It offers a complex account of the discovery of violence embedded in one configuration of norms and meanings, of one configuration of reason-giving. How does one go from not seeing domination to seeing it? Not through the application of a constructed principle, but by attending to the normative articulations made by Minnie’s text, articulations that open up new ways of being in the world. The women are not ‘finally’ understanding what the constructed principle of ‘equality’ or ‘justice’ means. They reason by tacking between accounts of their ontological background and the interpretive normative intervention that they make. In displaying the women’s transformation in a story, Glaspell shows us how normative argument always depends on contestable assumptions in the background imaginaries and how we can thematize these assumptions and show their normative, argumentative relevance through narrative. This text also illustrates what is left out by thinking of the inclusion of women as the application of a principle that lets them vote and serve on juries, while not addressing the social imaginaries that shape their lives and society as a whole. The understanding of narrative in my analysis is quite different from Taylor’s and from Paul Ricoeur’s, which Taylor frequently cites. Since Ricoeur’s view is widely accepted – and misleading – I will make a short critique of his view that builds on my analysis of the story.

IV The narrative utterance and argument: Ricoeur’s mistake

In Time and Narrative, Ricoeur divides mimesis into three moments. Mimesis 1 (M1) addresses the pre-understandings of ‘the world of action, its meaningful structures, its symbolic resources, and its temporal character’. ⁴⁶ Mimesis 2 examines the emplotment, which mediates pre-understandings and readings (M2), while Mimesis 3, the reading, addresses ‘the intersection of the world of the text and the world of the hearer or reader’. ⁴⁷ The reader’s response to the text, M3, folds back into M1 as part of the new pre-understandings in the lifeworld, thus completing the hermeneutic circle.

In Mimesis 1, Ricoeur drives a wedge between narrative and experience in the world at the same time that he freezes the historical and dialogical character of language and literature. Ricoeur does not place the subject in language and narratives so that inchoate narratives already inform experience. To be sure, Ricoeur acknowledges that history and fiction ‘are preceded by the use of narrative in daily life’. ⁴⁸ However, ‘prefiguration’ is a cognitive capacity that stands against the experience of time, which in itself is ‘confused, unformed, and, at the limit, mute’. ⁴⁹ For Ricoeur, we are not thrown into the narratives of the social imaginary. Thus, Mimesis 1 is ‘a structure of human praxis prior to the work of configuration by the historical or the fictional narrative’. ⁵⁰ This structure is informed by past narratives, past configurations.

Mimesis 2, or emplotment, is not an interpretive act through which the subject intervenes in the social imaginaries. Ricoeur develops his conception of the novel as emplotment without reference to imaginaries, the languages of public life or an ontological conception of meaning; instead, he draws on Aristotle’s Poetics and on Kant’s reflective judgement. Ricoeur isolates and reduces the configurational act to an ordering by the individual imagination: ‘I cannot overemphasize the kinship between this “grasping together” power to the configurational act and what Kant says about the operation of judging.’ ⁵¹ Emplotment ‘extracts configuration from a succession’ in the same way that a reflective judgement ‘reflects upon the work of thinking at work in the aesthetic judgment of taste and the teleological judgment applied to organic wholes’. ⁵² In a stroke, Ricoeur has reduced the author’s engagement with worth and truth of the languages of social imaginaries to a formal aestheticism. ⁵³ Thus, when he says that emplotment is the ‘synthesis of the heterogeneous’ – that is, ‘the diverse mediations performed by the plot: between the manifold of events and the temporal unity of the story recounted between the disparate components of the action’ ⁵⁴ – the substantive epistemological, normative and ontological issues that narratives engage become a merely reflexive ordering. By looking at narrative as the emplotment of the heterogeneous, Ricoeur blocks out the way in which emplotment is always a normative re-engagement with the narrative and symbolic shapes the subject inevitably already inhabits. Ricoeur keeps novelists out of the argument business, limiting them only to emplotment. ‘Historians are not simply narrators: they give reasons…Poets also create plots that are held together by causal skeletons. But these…are not the subject of a process of argumentation. Poets restrict themselves to producing the story and explaining by narrating…[Poets] produce, [historians] argue.’ ⁵⁵ Glaspell is not the only counter-example to this claim. Proust – one of the novelists he discusses at length in Time and Narrative – makes extensive arguments against his realist predecessors both by explicit proposition and by narrative practice.

Since he conceives of narrative as the act of an isolated imagination, it is not surprising that Ricoeur’s discussion of the novel in Time and Narrative and Oneself as Another is remarkably ahistorical. Despite the fact that the rise of the novel is embedded in issues of modernity itself, such as individualism, liberty and language, Ricoeur ignores them all in his discussions of literature. For Ricoeur, novels are just examples of how the aporias of cosmic and experienced time are mediated by plot, or they are ‘thought experiments’ in the Husserlian mold of imaginative variation in which our thrownness is ignored: ‘Literature proves to consist in a vast laboratory for thought experiments in which the sources of variation encompassed by narrative identity are put to the test of narration.’ ⁵⁶ We are now ready for a very different example of how arguing through the social imaginary works, one that does not narrate the transition from one normative framework to another; instead, we see an aggressive confrontation of a dominant imaginative framework by alternative.

V Obama and the discursive constraints of racial politics

I will begin with Barack Obama’s famous ‘race speech’, ‘A More Perfect Union’, and show the ways that it is tied to the discursive form of normativity laid down by Brown v. Board of Education. I then examine how the work of Ta-Nehisi Coates exposes the ways this discursive form protects the majority from addressing the normative demands of African Americans.

When Obama himself addressed questions of race in his speeches, his language and reasoning were tied to the normative model of constitutional principles applied to particular situations, and this model harbors within it the tradition of silence on race that began with the gag orders prior to the Civil War. The model was given its modern discursive form in Brown v. Board of Education. ⁵⁷ In this argument for the American conception of equality, an admirable principle was bound with certain discursive constraints that occlude the world that Ta-Nehisi Coates, and his predecessors, such as Ralph Ellison, tried to expose. During the Brown deliberations, Chief Justice Earl Warren gave explicit recommendations to the other justices on the language of the decision: it ‘should be short, readable by the lay public, non-rhetorical, unemotional and, above all, nonaccusatory’. ⁵⁸

The Brown decision was not only shaped by the silence about the perpetrators of racist acts, but by three other features of the discursive landscape. One was the way social scientific evidence was gathered and used. The court cited Kenneth Clark’s research, showing that adolescent black girls preferred white dolls to black ones, and Gunnar Myrdal’s American Dilemma. Both were used to establish the ‘damage hypothesis’ and the language of victimhood as the appropriate lenses for addressing race. While these languages may have been effective in breaking down legal segregation, they were also effective in reinforcing condescension and inequality. The white majority could treat blacks as an object of pity, an approach that did little to challenge their own self-understanding. The American imagination could not conceive of injustice without victims, and whites did not recognize that they, not just African Americans, were damaged by racism. This disempowering condescension can be seen in the structure of many ‘progressive’ literary works, such as To Kill a Mockingbird, in which we see black characters only from the point of view of whites, only as the objects of pity. The fact that this work served as a racial epiphany for many whites reveals how ‘recognizing’ the evils of segregation can, at the same time, reinforce domination and misrecognition. ⁵⁹

In addition, Myrdal’s work established a pattern of disregarding African American voices and seeing their culture as a pathological product of the slavery system. He claimed that African American culture ‘is a distorted development, or a pathological condition, of the general American culture’. From this he concluded that it is to the advantage of African Americans as individuals and as a group to become assimilated into American culture. ⁶⁰ Myrdal’s text encouraged white leaders to ignore the voices of African Americans and to urge blacks to abandon their culture and adapt to the dominant culture.

The third feature of the hegemonic American imagination was interest convergence – that is, blacks gained social justice primarily when their interests converged with the interests of the white majority. ⁶¹ At the time of Brown, as is well-known, the United States’ racial practices were a source of embarrassment in the cold war because they undermined America’s image abroad. ⁶² These forces joined the first two elements mentioned to push the court and other elites to support desegregation without recognizing African Americans’ autonomy or their voices. Interest convergence was not just a sociological phenomenon of domination; it became part of a discursive form that systematically silenced other forms of writing and living.

These three dimensions of American society hardened into a gag rule that continues today not only for the court but for mainstream media, though not for African American media, the black public sphere and the black church. The mainstream media ignore these languages, for the most part, until such languages touch a person who is trying to succeed in the mainstream, such as a presidential candidate.

The exclusion of black voices from the mainstream media did not mean that African Americans did not speak out. From the time of the Civil War, the black public sphere has split in many ways from the mainstream public sphere. ⁶³ Black writers have taken up the political responsibility of writing in ways that challenge the dominant narratives of American public life. The first writer to respond directly to Myrdal’s book was Ralph Ellison, and he directed his attack at Myrdal’s reading of black culture: ‘Myrdal sees Negro culture and personality simply as the product of a “social pathology”.’ While acknowledging that ‘Negro’ culture has some undesirable features, Ellison insists in ‘An America Dilemma: A Review’ that ‘there is much of great value and richness, which because it has been secreted by living and has made their lives more meaningful, Negroes will not willingly disregard’. ⁶⁴ Myrdal’s misreadings lead him to assume that, in Ellison’s words, ‘it is to the advantage of American Negroes as a group to become assimilated into American culture, to acquire the traits held in esteem by the dominant white Americans’. ⁶⁵ For Ellison, neither white nor black culture can be affirmed in an unqualified way, for they are both damaged and imbricated in ways that go unnoticed: ‘What is needed in our country is not an exchange of pathologies but a change in the basis of society. This is a job which both Negroes and whites must perform together. In Negro culture there is much of value for America as a whole.’ ⁶⁶ Hence, American society needs neither mere integration of bodies into the same public spaces nor gathering statistics about inequality but a transformation of the social imaginary into which whites and blacks are integrated. Not surprisingly, Ellison saw the novel not as an ‘ordering of the heterogeneous’, as Ricoeur would have it, or the disclosure of what cannot be said through conceptual assertions, in Taylor’s view, but as an argument: ‘All novels of a given historical moment form an argument over the nature of reality and are, to an extent, criticisms of each other.’ ⁶⁷ Moreover, Ellison understood that revising the social imaginary (though he never used such a term) is a multidisciplinary affair. He not only took on Myrdal’s sociological analysis of race, but also Howard Zinn’s historical work, and Richard Wright’s literary theory and practice. ⁶⁸

Thematizing the social imaginary as part of the deliberative process requires a new model for political deliberation, a model that calls the self-understanding behind Brown into question and brings new features of the world out of the background. This alternative way of understanding normativity is implicit in the works of Ellison, Wright, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison and Ta-Nehisi Coates when we read them through this ontological perspective. These writers are not advocating a ‘politics of identity’ or recognition but challenging the borders of America’s normative imagination – precisely what Obama was compelled to avoid.

Obama’s ‘race speech’ in 2008 veers away from writings that challenge America’s collective self-understandings and resorts to an updated version of the Brown model. The speech came after the media criticized the sermons given by Obama’s minister, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, in which Wright expressed rage at America’s failures. A Wright sermon was in the form of a ‘jeremiad’, which has a long history in American and African American culture. From the Puritans to Frederick Douglas to Martin Luther King, this form has been used to criticize the promise and failures of America.

Reverend Wright’s sermons were not part of a marginal, radical fringe. They were very well-known in the African American community and were even used as models for black divinity school. ⁶⁹ The criticism of Wright by the media displayed not only ignorance of the genre but, more importantly, a willful ignorance of African American speech and writing, whose normative claims challenged the dominant white identities and the historical understandings that underpin them. Obama alludes to the fissure between the discursive universes of blacks and whites in his speech: ‘The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright’s sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning.’ ⁷⁰ The oblivion of whites to Reverend Wright’s form of speech is symptomatic of widespread oblivion about the reality of black lives. ‘Black lives matter’ not only when they are being profiled and tasered – the focus of attention in the news media – but also when black people are speaking, acting and laughing. ⁷¹ When people respond to the cry of ‘Black lives matter’ with ‘All lives matter’, they are simply repeating the legacy of Brown by offering an abstract normative principle while refusing to acknowledge the forceful normative structuring of American life.

Since black people appear in the collective imagination as a group that must be contained, pitied and ‘helped’ but never listened to, it is no wonder that Darren Wilson, the police officer in Ferguson, Missouri who shot the unarmed Michael Brown, told the jury that he shot Brown because he looked ‘like a demon’, a force pushing back against the system. ⁷² When mainstream media finally paid attention, their only question was to ask how anyone running for president could listen to such words regularly rather than asking how responsible media could ignore so many voices that challenged their self-understanding and conception of the world.

In his speech following the release of Wright’s sermons, Obama does give voice to the anger and disappointment of blacks, but he is careful to balance it with the feelings of unhappy whites. Moreover, Obama recasts the long and brutal history of systemic and institutionalized racism as mere moral lapses. ⁷³ He must affirm his patriotism and distance himself from language such as Wright’s by placing this language and its rage at a historical distance from the present:

For the men and women of Reverend Wright’s generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white coworkers and white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or the beauty shop or around the kitchen tables…and occasionally it finds voice in church on Sunday. ⁷⁴

Thus, when Obama notes that the constitution ‘was ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation’s original sin of slavery’, he quickly adds that ‘the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution – a Constitution that had at its very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law’. ⁸⁰ From his beginning with ‘we the people’ to his anecdote of racial unity, Obama affirms what Jack Balkin calls the grand progressive narrative that dominates America’s self-understanding:

America is continually striving for democratic ideals from its founding and eventually realizing democracy through its historical development. In this narrative, the constitution reflects America’s deepest ideals, which are gradually realized through historical struggle and acts of political courage. The basic ideals of America and American people are good, even if Americans sometimes act unjustly. ⁸¹

Empathy follows from the constructivist understanding of equality because it depends on the capacity of the individual subject to project himself or herself into another’s life. Defining it succinctly as a successful attempt to ‘stand in somebody else’s shoes and see through their eyes’, Obama regards empathy not as an exceptional gesture but an organizing principle for ethical behavior and even a preferred way of being. ⁸³ By cultivating our capacity for empathy, he says, we are forced beyond ‘our limited vision’, making it possible to overcome what divides us, allowing us to ‘find common ground’ even in the face of our sharpest disagreements. Obama makes empathy ‘the heart of my moral code’ and ‘a guidepost for my politics’ in The Audacity of Hope and in ‘A More Perfect Union’. ⁸⁴ He ends his speech with the story of Ashley, in which a black man draws inspiration from a young white woman. The model of empathy fits well with thinking of normativity as the application of constitutional principles since it is organized around equal respect and concern for individuals. But this way of understanding normativity has failed to come to grips with the transsubjective normative structuring of the world. We need to grasp this understanding of normativity if we are to bring into view the racial structuring of society.

VI Coates’ challenge to America’s dominant racial imaginary

Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book has been looked on as a direct reply to Obama’s discussions of race. ⁸⁵ Coates makes this challenge not by a competing argument organized around principles of justice or equality. Instead, he reveals the normative languages that imprison African American lives, languages that include narratives, images and characters. Against America’s ‘progressive narrative’ that Balkin identifies, Coates tells his son: ‘The entire narrative of this country argues against the truth of who you are.’ ⁸⁶ To Coates, these structures are the tissues of rationalization that encase the subjectivity of a privileged group that Coates calls ‘the Dreamers’, alluding to the subtitle of The Audacity of Hope: Reclaiming the American Dream, as well as other versions of this dream. The dreamers are a self-contained community that does not think of itself as a community, but whose inhabitants live in a distinctive normative universe. Because their privilege, empowerment and normative insularity are invisible to them, this universe is the site for pronouncements about ‘justice’ and ‘equality’ for society as a whole.

To capture the self-understanding of the Dreamers, Coates cites Solzhenitsyn’s well-known remark that ‘to do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good, or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law’. Coates then comments:

This is the foundation of the Dream – its adherents must not just believe in it but believe that it is just, believe that their possession of the dream is the natural result of grit, honor, and good works. There is a passing acknowledgment of the bad old days, which, by the way, were not so bad as to have any ongoing effect on our present. The mettle that it takes to look away from the horror of our prison system, from police forces transformed into armies, from the long war against the black body, is not forged overnight. This is the practiced habit. ⁸⁷

Thus, when he speaks of the police violence and of talk about sensitivity training, he is dismissive because such localization of the problem misses the point. It is not the police who commit the crimes but the American people locked in the dreamer imaginary:

The truth is that the police reflect America in all of its will and fear, and whatever we might make of this country’s criminal justice policy, it cannot be said that it was imposed by a repressive minority. The abuses that have followed from these policies – the sprawling carceral state, the random detentions of black people, the torture of suspects – are the product of democratic will. ⁸⁹

Coates’ argument here works in a very different way than we find in much legal and political theory on race, which, for my purposes here, can be conveniently divided into anti-discrimination and anti-domination approaches. The anti-discrimination argument maintains that the law should be color-blind. ⁹¹ The anti-subordination thesis, on the other hand, argues that there are large patterns of racial subordination made available through sociological analysis, patterns that the anti-discrimination thesis systematically occludes by focusing on the intentions behind laws. Between the World and Me, by contrast, takes aim at the normative weight and shape of America’s collective imagination that drives research in both of these popular conceptions but which is thematized by neither one. This is not to say that Coates’ position is beyond challenge by any means. Rather, my point is that he provides a kind of normative argument that is unavailable by other approaches to normativity.

Coates’ text is one in a long line of African American writings that have sought to shake readers loose from their frameworks. However, people do not give up frameworks easily, particularly frameworks of long standing such as the one which makes its reappearance yet again beneath the eloquence of Obama’s speech, a reappearance that displays the contemporary form of America’s continuing gag order about race.

Conclusion

The ontological turn in political philosophy has offered important new approaches to the deep structures of past, present and future societies. However, this line of thought has not produced a viable theory of the normative utterance that follows from this approach, leaving itself open to criticism for abstracting from the agency of particular actors and for adopting the ambiguous language of world disclosure. ⁹² In this article, I have proposed a way of thinking about the relationship of background structures to particular utterances that expands the ways we think about normativity and argument. Rather than splitting off normative claims from sociological and narrative approaches to political philosophy, I propose to look at normativity from the perspective of social imaginaries, the ontological background structures of a given society. In this view, normativity is inflected by the particular shapes of forms of life but those shapes are never simply social facts; rather, they are the contestable background of speech and action into which we are thrown. Prior to questions of principle or fact are the ontological questions that emerge from social imaginaries and through which we orient ourselves in the world. We cannot point to the normativity of social imaginaries through the lens of constructivist theory or through the language of political realism for the context in question is neither empirical nor ideal.

This ontological conception responds to the dilemmas that emerge in arguments between constructivists and realists. Realists complain that constructivist conceptions of normativity are detached from reality, while constructivists complain that realists and contextualists do not give an adequate place to normativity. ⁹³ The ontological conception makes normativity historical and contextual but the context starts with the macro structures that make the world and normativity itself possible. In the work of Glaspell and Coates, we find not just concrete situations presented phenomenologically but also external description that engages the discursive structures that display the actors and their dilemmas. However, the texts do not just direct us to facts we already know; instead, they urge us to look at the background structures that make certain facts possible and that lock the characters in to their preconceptions – in ‘Jury’, the women’s understandings of gender, marriage, etc., and in Between the World and Me, the conflicting worlds of Dreamers and African Americans. In both texts, we saw how the understanding of normativity for a community at any given moment must be understood not just as the slow emergence of macro-structures imaginaries that we find in Taylor’s analysis – public sphere, popular sovereignty, etc. – which is done from great historical height with attention to longue durée, for this view implies that imaginaries are simply the nourishing background for principles or the shared background that makes debate possible. Instead, we need to attend to the language the texts use to bring our attention to the ways imaginaries feed ontological divisions within a political community, divisions that are covered over by the received understandings of both the real world and how it should be evaluated. As the texts make these structures surface through the phenomenological presentation of the characters, the reader is encouraged to connect them not by pointing to particular individuals – ‘I know someone just like that’ – but to patterns, just as Mrs Peters finds in Minnie’s text not only a parallel with her own life but an articulation of violence toward women that has been systematically silenced by the structures of the imaginary. These structures are both realistic and normative since they make possible what world is available and the assessment of this world. ⁹⁴ Normative argument relies on bringing aspects of the world into view, not only on the application of principles.

In a similar way, Coates’ Between the World and Me attacks the dominant American framework of understanding race for its failure to grasp the structures of black life, structures that are brought out through a phenomenological narrative. Coates’ argument reveals insulating moral narratives – including constitutional ones – that protect the majority from facing the cruelty that is reproduced daily. Coates shows that the failure to understand is at once epistemic and normative, a house of privilege that is invisible to the inhabitants at the same time that it makes those outside invisible. Coates is being ‘realistic’, but he is not presenting sociological facts and then arguing for why these facts indicate injustice. Rather, he is striking at the ontology that generates facts and norms and therefore opening a space for new historical and sociological questions that can follow up on his insights. Coates’ text makes clear that the people holding on to identity politics are not African Americans asking for recognition; rather, the people playing identity politics are the Dreamers whose identity defines the boundaries and blindnesses of their world. Coates shows how principles enable Dreamers to assume that they have access to all the normatively relevant aspects of the world and to rationalize their contented inaction. Persuading the Dreamers means getting them to change the imaginaries that sustain their identities. The depth of resistance to Coates’ argument can be seen not just in his critics but in the effusive praise for a speech that conforms to America’s template for deliberation about race, Obama’s ‘A More Perfect Union’.

My argument for a new understanding of the normative utterance and social imaginaries is not just a matter of isolated examples. By showing the link between normativity and realism, my understanding of the problematic of the social imaginary provides a way to bring together and mediate the languages of history, literature and sociology so that they can work together in normative argument. ⁹⁵ I have focused here on the ways that a short story, a Supreme Court decision, a speech and a letter can illuminate the ways the social imaginaries install meanings and norms and at the same time provide resources for their revision. ⁹⁶ However, arguments through the imaginary can also be done at the level of macro background history, such as we see in the competing accounts of secularism in the work of Taylor, Gauchet, Michael Allen Gillespie and Mark Lilla. ⁹⁷ These arguments seek to change the background history, which, in turn, will affect many local debates. The problematic of the social imaginary enables us to understand that the normative utterance cannot be hived off from the worldhood of the world and that normativity is woven into the imaginary. The normative utterance is first and foremost an engagement with the languages and practices of the social imaginary, for the background is logically prior to normative propositions and sociological explanations. This means that normative argument must concern itself with the articulation of this background and the discursive structures through which it is instantiated and challenged. Such arguments will not be as neat as a Supreme Court decision, but they will give us a lot more to argue with and about than in thought experiments to produce principles. Although I have developed these two examples to show some of the possibilities opened by the problematic of social imaginaries, I am not arguing for the abandonment of the language of principle in all situations; rather, this article asks for the inclusion of new kinds of normative arguments that can hear and articulate the world’s complexity by means that other ways of thinking and writing cannot.