Hiding from History: Politics and Public Imagination 9781501717840

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction. The History Debates as a Crisis for Liberalism
1. Eliding Public Imagination: Habermas's Isolation of Principles from History
2. Avoiding Judgment: Structuralist and Poststructuralist Approaches to History
3. Reasoning through Public Imagination
4. The Politics of Race and Imagination: Arendt versus Ellison on Little Rock
5. Globalization and the Clash of Cultures
Conclusion. Is There No Such Thing as Principle?
Notes
Works Cited
Index

Citation preview

Hiding from History

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History

P O L I T I C S A N D P U B L I CI M A G I N A T I O N

Meili Steele

Cornell University Press C3

Ithaca and London

Some material from this book has been published elsewhere in somewhat different versions. A revised version of "Hiding from History: Habermas's Elision of Public Imagination," Constellations 12 (2005): 409-436, appears as chapter i. Parts of "Ricoeur versus Taylor on Language and Narrative," Metaphilosophy 34 (20031:224-246, appear in revised form in chapters 2 and 3. A section of "Three Problematics of Linguistic Vulnerability: Gadamer, Benhabib, and Butler," Feminist Interpretations ofHans-Georg Gadamer, ed. Lorraine Code (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), 335-366, appears in revised form in chapter 2. The essay "Ellison versus Arendt on Little Rock: The Role of Language in Political Judgment," Constellations: A Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory 9 (2002): 184-206, has been revised as chapter 4. Copyright © 2005 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2005 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Steele, Meili, 1949Hiding from history : politics and public imagination / Meili Steele. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-I3: 978-0-8014-4385-5 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-io: 0-8014-4385-7 (cloth : alk. paper) i. Public history.

2. Historiography.

3. History—Philosophy.

I. Title

016.163.584 2005 901—dc22

2005016120

Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetablebased, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu. Cloth printing

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Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction The History Debates as a Crisis for Liberalism 1 1 Eliding Public Imagination: Habermas's Isolation of Principles from History 17 2 Avoiding Judgment: Structuralist and Poststructuralist Approaches to History 42 3 Reasoning through Public Imagination 76 4 The Politics of Race and Imagination: Arendt versus Ellison on Little Rock 104 5 Globalization and the Clash of Cultures 124 Conclusion Is There No Such Thing as Principle? 141 Notes 149 Works Cited 185 Index 201

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Acknowledgments I have many people to thank for their help with this book. At Cornell University Press, I would like to thank Bernie Kendler, Candace Akins, and the two readers of the manuscript. For their excellent copyediting, I want to thank Kay Scheuer and Brittany Powell. For research support, I would like to thank Robert Newman and Steve Lynn, who served as my department chairs during the book's gestation. I tested early versions of the ideas for the book in Prague at the annual meetings of the Philosophy and Human Sciences group. I give special recognition to Alessandro Ferrara, Linda Alcoff, Maeve Cooke, Martin Sauter, and Johanna Meehan. I also greatly benefited from an NEH seminar on French philosophy run by Thomas Pavel, then at Princeton University. At the University of South Carolina, I want to thank the Walker Institute and Don Puchala for inviting me to participate in colloquia on international relations and Peter Sederberg and the Honors College for asking me to develop a new course on inquiry in the humanities. Larry Rhu, Naeem Inyatullah, Kate Brown, Greg Forter, Nina Levine, Chris Tollefson, Pascal Michon, and Eduardo Mendietta took the time to read sections of the book and offer invaluable feedback. John McGowan put his finger on several crucial ambiguities in my exposition and gave me the opportunity to lay out the entire argument of the book before an audience at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Michael Halberstam has given me years of challenging conversation on every aspect of this book. His insight and encouragement have been indispensable to me. My wife, Cassie Premo Steele, has read every word and offered the stylistic advice that only a writer can offer.

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Hiding from History

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ways that religion continues to inform the languages of public imagination are not important. Second, this reading of secularization blocks out an interrogation of whether this "sublimation" account is the best way to show how we want norms to guide public reason.14 My point on both of these issues is not to criticize the norms per se but to criticize a way of reasoning that hides rather than airs transitions in public historical meanings so that they can be subjected to continuous re-examination. These buried transitions are the background of differences that continue to shape the contested subject positions in contemporary debate. The need for such an opening of historical meanings becomes even more acute when the conversation is between communities with different religious inheritances, where the opportunities for conflict and mutual enrichment are greater. Thus, Habermas's version of Critical Theory rejects Marxist attempts to ground politics on the truth of history or human nature. Having abandoned the psychoanalytic model of critique in his early work, he now joins liberals in not seeking an epistemological unmasking of everyday practices, preferring the more limited emancipatory ideal of Kantian autonomy—that is, formal self-determination through rules. However, there is an important difference between grounding a politics in history in the Hegelian or Marxist sense, and having an interpretive historical account of how a society's history informs practical reason. Habermas does not make this distinction, and he shows little interest in recent historiography and the concrete histories informed by these considerations. Instead, he points toward three unacceptable views: Marxism, hermeneutics, and poststructuralism. Hermeneutics, for Habermas, ignores the discontinuities of history and the political failures of traditions: "Philosophers of history and hermeneuticians" share a premise in their reading of history, "namely, that we learn from history only if it tells us something positive, something worth imitating. [ . . . ] [However,] we learn historically chiefly from the way historical events challenge us, showing us that traditions fail" (i997a, 44). In the 19705 in his well-known debate with Gadamer, Habermas argued that the hermeneutic view of language and history gives "ontological priority of tradition over all possible critique" and ignores how language is a medium not just of mutual understanding but "of domination and social power" so that "it serves to legitimate relations of organized force."15 While he was certainly right to point out Gadamer's neglect of power and symbolic violence, Habermas never develops a philosophy of language that is sensitive to the historicity and diversity of language.16 22

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Because these presuppositions are inevitable, they are ideals not imposed from the outside but discovered "already operating in everyday communicative practice. True, claims to prepositional truth, normative Tightness and subjective truthfulness intersect here within a concrete linguistically disclosed horizon; yet as criticizable claims that also transcend the various contexts in which they are formulated and gain acceptance" (1992^ 50). These ideals are then turned into dialogical procedures, which serve as tests for the outcome of the rational and legitimate exchange.21 The idealizing presuppositions of formal pragmatics try to put a ring around the content of a cultural or political community so that the basic terms of dialogical validity—speaker, truth, claim—can be defined independently of the practices of a political community. What are the steps by which Habermas arrives at his conclusions? Although I can hardly reconstruct Habermas's elaborate arguments with philosophers of language—as other commentators have done22—the issue in question boils down to the coordination of his concept of background with his theory of discursive argument. Habermas maintains that there are two different kinds of linguistic idealization relevant to public reasoning, one at the level of semantics (theory of meaning) and the other at the level of pragmatics (theory of use). The theory of meaning that subtends this theory of action combines the semantic approach with the pragmatics of speech-act theory. Habermas draws on semantic approaches to meaning in order to prevent validity claims from being circumscribed within the conventional validity of particular forms of life. "The ideal character of semantic generality shapes communicative action inasmuch as the participants could not even intend to reach an understanding with one another about something in the world if they did not presuppose, on the basis of a common (or translatable) language, that they conferred identical meanings on the expressions they employed. Only if this condition is satisfied can misunderstandings prove to be such" (iggGa, 19). The apparently innocuous idealizing presupposition about identical meaning comes from a very particular school of philosophy of language that focuses on the semantics of the proposition, on the validity claim of the isolated assertoric sentence about the natural worlds He argues for the superiority of this conception against a philosophy of consciousness, but the relevant argument is with an alternative philosophy of language that does not isolate propositions and utterances from the ideological, interpretive contexts and their backgrounds, or from the dialogical dynamics of a living, historical language.24 24 Hi & I M t* f & O t«1 si I & T C ft Y

The requirement of some common conceptual meaning cannot sever sentences from their background preunderstandings, from their connection to public imagination. When Habermas says that "we understand an utterance when we know what makes it acceptable" (iggab, 77), he ignores, as Christina Lafont points out, that "the conditions of acceptability are dependent on background knowledge, on particular and contingent linguistic world-disclosure that is constitutive of the processes of understanding. Given this, the universality claim of the theory of communicative action definitely appears to be indefensible" (213-214).25 The next level of idealization is in the pragmatics of use, for the prepositional content of the sentence does not tell us whether an utterance is true: "The affirmation of a thought or the assertoric sense of a statement brings into play a further moment of ideality, one connected with the validity of the judgment or sentence" (19963, 12). We have now moved from formal semantics to the intersubjective relations of speakers. The idealization condition here is that the speaker who raises a validity claim implicitly agrees "to vindicate the claim with the right reason" (18), not just to a particular interpretive community but to "the ideally expanded audience of the unlimited interpretation community" (19). While I would agree that "participants must consider themselves mutually accountable" (20), I would expand what giving an account means so as to include the kind of historical vindication of the languages of debate. In order to clarify what such a historical vindication means, we need to examine the most important idea in Habermas's elision of public imagination, his understanding of the background and action coordination. In the theory of communicative action, speech acts as well as other social actions move within a background understanding of the lifeworld: "Insofar as speakers and hearers straightforwardly achieve a mutual understanding about something in the world, they move within the horizon of their common lifeworld; this remains in the background of the participants—as intuitively known, unproblematic, unanalyzable holistic background" (1987, 298).2& i! i s Y c it v

apparently opening the interpretive horizon of citizenship beyond the constitutional imagination. He wants to consider Goldhageris book as if it were a film or art exhibit, as part of "the public discourses of self-understanding."60 Unlike the legal context, where the question is guilt or innocence, the public sphere is concerned with "trying to bring about some clarity concerning the cultural matrix of a burdened inheritance, to recognize what they themselves [citizens] are collectively liable for; and what is to be continued, what revised" (i997b, 5). While Habermas seems to be suggesting precisely what the initial quotation in this chapter denies—that is, how "a collective actor like a nation" works through the past—he quickly boxes out such a reading. First, his attempt to isolate the controversy over Goldhageris work in the public sphere from the historians' professional debates won't hold. The worth of Goldhageris argument for the citizen needs to be assessed in terms of the long line of historiographical debate surrounding the question he raises— how should we understand the relationship of modernity to the Holocaust. For instance, Goldhagen criticizes Arendf s claim that the perpetrators had lost a world. "Contrary to Arendf s assertions," Goldhagen tells us, "the perpetrators were not such atomized, lonely beings. They decidedly belonged to their world and had plenty of opportunities, which they obviously used, to discuss and reflect upon their exploits" (1996, 581). The argument here between Arendt and Goldhagen is not just about the explanatory concerns of the professional historian. Arendf s analysis, which implicates the modern conception of freedom as emancipation from tradition in the arrival of totalitarianism, problematizes not only Goldhageris explanation but his understanding of the relationship of past and present. Arendf s line of reading has been developed by structural-functionalists, such as Zygmunt Bauman, Omer Bartov, and Christopher Browning, who take on the intentionalist position directly. For structural-functionalists, interpreting the Holocaust requires that we reexamine Western modernity and its social/economic institutions. As Bauman says, "I propose to treat the Holocaust as a rare, yet significant and reliable, test of the hidden possibilities of modern society" (1989, i). Intentionalists, on the other hand, focus on the anti-Semitic ideologies of the perpetrators that were released by the turmoil of the Third Reich. The site of judgment for intentionalists is unproblematically in the democratic and economic institutions of the West as they are currently constituted. The implicit assumption is that the German story is so different from that of the rest of Europe and America E it DIM P y S L i e

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that it can be narrated and evaluated from the outside without calling into question the cultures of the subject of historical judgment. It is this refusal to interrogate the site of judgment that troubles the structural-functionalist. BartoVs Murder in Our Midst, published in the same year as Goldhageris book, 1996, proposes to counteract the simplistic story "in which antisemitism led to Nazism, Nazism practiced genocide, and both were destroyed in a spectacular 'happy end'" (iggGa, ft).61 Such an account "fails to recognize that this extreme instance of industrial killing was generated by a society, economic system, and civilization of which our contemporary society is a direct continuation" (8). Goldhageris book thus participates in a long-standing argument: to what extent can the historical forces that shaped these events can be localized in an ideology and worked on (Goldhagen's perspective) and to what extent are they the products of forces and self-understandings that continue to damage us today? These are not matters just for professional historians but for citizens trying to decide what politicians to vote for and what kinds of textbooks should be used. Goldhagen himself is not reticent on the connection between history and democracy: "The development of an appropriate general framework for understanding the past has been critical in the development of a responsible democratic political system" (1998, 277). Although Habermas may well agree with this statement, he has no way of incorporating this idea into his model of practical reason. While he occasionally flirts with an interpretive problematic for political judgment,62 what he means by "working through" is the elimination of anti-Semitism and cultural nationalism, the establishment of constitutional democracy, and the remembrance of those killed. What seems to underlie his praise of Goldhagen is the nature of the latter's political solution to Germany's historical baggage: Root out the long-standing strains of anti-Semitism in public life and install constitutional democratic institutions so that history and public imagination can disappear from the political horizon. Even the content that Habermas does give to public imagination—remembrance of those killed—shows how he wants to reduce memory to individuals and thereby to ignore, for instance, the claims of the Jewish traditions and literature on German public life and imagination. Remembrance is complex and culturally specific, demanding not just constitutional principles but the identities of those remembering and those remembered. Remembrance demands that citizens engage with who they are and not just with what principles they hold dear, as Habermas at times suggests. 4O

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The eruption of history in politics, such as we find in the disputes over the Confederate Flag and the Holocaust, is not a passing crisis that a universal theory of communicative action will be able to put behind it through public memorials. Instead, these debates offer us the opportunity to enrich our vision of political dialogue. Before developing how practical reason can address demands of history, we need to look at the radically different understandings of subjectivity and historicity that we find in the structuralist and poststructuralist theories.

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