REPLY TO ROBERT GOODING-WILLIAMS

Judith Butler

I am especially pleased to be responding to Robert Gooding-Williams’s paper,and to be continuing this dialogue, one that we have been having for at least 15years. I’m not one to engage the confessional mode, but it seems relevant to theargument at hand here, one that has everything to do with the possibility ofdialogue within multiculturalism, to review for a moment my professional friend-ship with Gooding-Williams: it raises some of the very points that are themati-cally pursued in his paper.

Although he was slightly ahead of me in graduate school, we both studiedphilosophy at Yale in the early 80’s, and for the most part I remember that wedebated about Hegel and Nietzsche and about which part of the Frankfurt Schoolwas more to our liking, and I suppose as well that there was between us anassumption that hermeneutics remained an important and hopeful conception ofphilosophy: a notion of thinking as conversation seemed crucial to us both. At thattime, I read feminist theory and taught it, but on the side. And Gooding-Williamsread widely in cultural theory, including works on race, but that also did notappear in the classes that we took, in the papers that we wrote or, indeed, in thedissertations that we finally completed. It was only some years later that we bothfound ourselves teaching parallel courses at different universities on gender andrace, and I well remember the excitement of moving between a philosophicaltradition that we knew and engaging a cultural and political set of texts pertain-ing to the question of identity. Gooding-Williams explored in Du Bois, forinstance, the appropriation and revision of Hegel’s view of reciprocal recognition,and I offered a theory of gender performance that remained indebted to a phenom-enological notion of constituting acts. We were, as it were, both in the philosoph-ical canon and yet strangely outside of it at the same time.

I tell this story to give you some sense of the reasons for my rather profoundand abiding sense of identification with him, but also to explain the occasion inwhich I invoke the “we” in something of the sense that he proposes toward theend of his paper. But I also offer this context to raise some questions about whatthis identification consists in, and how identification more generally relates toquestions of race, multiculturalism, and the task of hermeneutical conversationthat he raises in his excellent essay. Indeed, I have just sought to give a narrativein which I offer some insight into who “we” are, “we” who after all go back a longway, indeed were born within a mile of each other. That mile is the stretch ofCleveland, Ohio around West 105th street where for a time the black middle classlived not far from the Jewish middle class, where much of Cleveland’s artworld

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exists, where my synagogue was, where Bob’s father taught, where beautifulbrick homes lined the streets, a stretch that is now plagued by poverty, populatedwith poor and working-class blacks, where Jews arrive and leave from the hospi-tal and the synagogue in great haste, and integration is a lost dream.

There is much, then, that binds us together, and there is much, from the start,that separates us. The question, I suppose, has to do with how we come to thinkthat separation, and whether the hermeneutical solution that Bob proposes isenough to help us with this difficulty. Indeed, the more general philosophicalproblem might be understood as the problem of identification in politics (Lacoue-Labarthe suggests that identification is the central question of the political) and,more specifically, whether identification does not require a constitutive differencebetween those who are said to identify with one another.

At the very close of his essay, Gooding-Williams asks us to replace the “we-they” framework that governs some ethical reflections on the problem of multi-cultural understanding with a more expansive and internally fractious notion ofthe “we”; thus the ethical problem posed by multiculturalism is not, strictlyspeaking, that of coming to understand the Other, but, rather, of revising andexpanding an understanding of who “we” are. I take this to be an important point,not only for the reasons that Susan Wolf points out in her response to CharlesTaylor, but also for those who think that it is by appropriating a Levinasian viewof the ineffability of the Other that multicultural understanding might be signifi-cantly advanced. After all, what does it mean to continue to conceive of the Otheras radically Other, as beyond the reach of reason, as some Levinasians maintain?Does such a casting of alterity beyond the domain of the thinkable not reconsti-tute the radically alien character of “the other,” and continue to cover over theways in which the “other” may well be more properly a constitutive part of theself than first appears? If one takes the argument that Gooding-Williamsadvances, namely, that contemporary culture is itself syncratic, if not hybrid, thenthe very distinction between self and other appears not only arbitrary, but belatedand imposed, deflecting from the kind of inquiry that interrogates the complexcultural sources of the self that multiculturalism demands of us.

There are, of course, ways of realizing that the other is part of the self whichsimply reinstate a colonizing notion of the self in which every moment of alterityis recast as an always already internal feature of the self, a situation in which noconfrontation with difference, and no transformation in light of that confrontationis demanded or undergone.

Gooding-Williams proposes that we revise and expand the “we” and come tounderstand that black culture is not foreign to mainstream culture, but constitutesit essentially. Here he seems to be in favor of a certain conception of culturalhybridity. And he also is right, in my view, to continue the critique of CharlesTaylor, who uses the notion of “our culture” and “their culture” as if they aresociological givens, without even inquiring into what composes those culturesand the appearance of their external difference to one another. His essay on

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multiculturalism does not include the question of whether such “cultures” arecomposed in ways that make them radically inextricable from one another.

If we accept Gooding-Williams’s thesis that the putative “alterity” of blackculture needs to be rethought as part of the mainstream American culture, whichit seems imperative to do, ought we then to do away fully with the notion of the“they” and with the problem of alterity that it poses? How do we continue toemphasize the problem of exclusion and marginalization if we begin with theheuristic that black culture is not a minority culture, but part of the majority fromthe start? What does Gooding-Williams think of those critiques of the category ofthe “we,” such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s, in which its invocations canwork in the service of a suppression, in which the very expansion of the “we”constitutes an imperialist gesture whereby cultural differences are subordinatedprecisely through the strategy of an ever-expansive “inclusion”? Is there a way todistinguish between the revision and expansion of the “we” that avows the waysin which cultural alterity is part of the majoritarian “self”, as it were, withoutthat very revision and expansion becoming a new form of domination?

The quasi-religious invocation of alterity that the Levinasian view supportsseems to be the extreme alternative to the project that seeks to redefine the prob-lem of alterity as a problem of the constitutive cultural complexity of the self. Isthere a way to navigate between these two views?

Gooding-Williams not only understands mainstream U.S. culture to be an irre-ducible multiplicity of cultures, but he also insists that “black culture” is notunitary, and that it must be thought in terms of its complex cultural articulations.He defends his view through recourse to a specific version of social construc-tionism. And yet, the definitions he offers seem not fully to accord with the viewof a multiplicitous black identity that he also wants to affirm.

Gooding-Williams defines black identity, for instance, as the “the effect of arule-governed social practice of racial classification,” and uses this definition toclarify the sense of social construction that he means to defend. He distinguishes,with Stuart Hall, black identity from an African-American identity, and points outthat there are several historical and cultural contexts for blackness in the UnitedStates that are not necessarily the same as that denoted by African-American. Henames Afro-Caribbean and Latin American routes of descent, as well as Africanorigins that are not mediated by the institution of exported slavery. In this respect,Gooding-Williams insists in general on a non-unitary character of blackness.

My question then is this: how is it that an internally complex and non-unitarynotion of blackness is the singular “effect of a rule-governed social practice ofracial classification”? In other words, does not a non-unitary conception of black-ness require a non-unitary conception of a rule-governed social practice of racialclassification? Is “race” the effect of a single such social practice, and is thatsocial practice always that of racial classification, one that can be traced to adistinct periodization within European history? Are there less official and lessovert forms of racial construction that are not reducible to such schemes of racial

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classification or that cannot be traced back to them historically? In particular, Iam reminded of the problem with Sartre’s view in Anti-Semite and Jew that theJew is one who has been called a Jew, constructed as a Jew within the terms ofanti-semitism. Is not the Jew also something other than what the anti-semite saysthe Jew is? Is not the black something other than what racialist forms of race clas-sification “say” that the black is? Are there not traditions and communities thatproduce their own social and cultural values that are “black” but not in the samesense that a racial classification scheme deems someone to be black?

The next two questions follow from the last, and they have to do with conceiv-ing race as an “effect.” At times, Gooding-Williams seems to claim that race isproduced as a result of such classificatory schemes, but he also adds that “onebecomes black only if one begins to identify as black [and] one begins to makechoices, to formulate plans, to express concerns in light of one’s identification ofoneself as black.” What is the theory of identification at work in such a formula-tion? In other words, what does it mean to make such an identification? Somepsychoanalytic accounts of identification argue that identification is never fullycomplete and never fully successful, and that this failure constitutive of identifi-cation is precisely what distinguishes it from identity. Can the identification withblackness that Gooding-Williams mentions ever be complete? And if one mustidentify with blackness to be black, what is the blackness with which one identi-fies? Is it prior to the identification, or is it, in some sense, also its result? Is theblackness with which one identifies a cultural value or norm? Is it an idealizationor, indeed, a fantasy of some sort? To what extent does the process of identifica-tion postulate the very norm that then functions as the model it seeks to approxi-mate?

If efforts to make such identifications are never fully successful, is the failureto identify that results from every such effort a significant one? In other words,does the failure to achieve the norm of identity not itself expose the incommen-surability between the norm and any of its embodiments, and does the exposureof that incommensurability not open up possibilities for a rearticulation of thenorm itself? What is Gooding-Williams’s view on the distinction between iden-tity and identification? Is there some significant use to be made of identification,as Stuart Hall suggests, as it is appropriated from psychoanalysis for the purposesof social theory? If identification only becomes possible when identity is not fullyachieved, and identification requires an insuperable difference or incommensura-bility between the one who identifies and that with which identification is made,then is identification a prerequisite for identity, or is it rather the internal limit ofany possible identity? If identification undermines identity in this sense, then itwould seem that, in a sense that Fanon clearly understood, it is not possible to“be” black and, indeed, not possible to “be” white either.1

Moreover, if race is not only an “effect” of a classificatory scheme, but also,as Gooding-Williams suggests, a mode of choice and indeed, a choice of identi-fication, how is race to be understood as both produced by social norms and

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voluntaristically engaged? The demand for a theory that accounts for race as aneffect that is at once lived and transformed in the course of its being livedsuggests a move away from those mechanistically formulated versions of socialconstruction to one in which norms are understood to have a revisable tempo-rality. Indeed, it is unclear to me that Gooding-Williams wants finally to staywith the notion of race as an “effect” if he also wants to make room for an agen-tial contruction of race. Does the very meaning of race change as its status as“effect of a social practice of classification” is altered, that is, as the “effect”becomes taken up and transformed as a result of that appropriation? For “race”to become a sign of agency and cultural self-affirmation, its historicity must notbe fully constrained from its putatively classificatory origins; the possibilities forits meanings must exceed the original purposes for which it was designed. Iwould expect Gooding-Williams to accept this basically Nietzschean view thatsuch terms form a “sign-chain” in which the original purposes for which they aredevised are sometimes reversed and superseded by subsequent usages.

Finally, then, I have a question about the hermeneutical dimension of Gooding-Williams’ normative views concerning the future of multicultural understanding.Gooding-Williams puts forth a view of cultural dialogue that involves the self-transformation of those who engage in such a dialogue. But for there to bedialogue, does there not have to be a certain notion of distance, one that cannotbe overcome through the revision and rearticulation of the “we”? In other words,does the dialogic form of hermeneutical self-understanding and self-transforma-tion that Gooding-Williams proposes not require a subject and its Other? That Iidentify with you does not mean that I am the same as you, or that I think that theanalogies between us make our experiences radically interchangeable with oneanother. But it does give me the chance to speak to you and to hear you, a chancethat may be as much conditioned by what separates us as by any common set ofpresuppositions we might have. Is it not the case that what divides two interlocu-tors may be as necessary to the possibility of conversation as what implicitlybinds them together? Does the hermeneutical view stress the existence ofcommon presuppositions to such a degree that it domesticates the differences thatanimate conversation, predicating the notion of conversation that it promotes onthat very domestication? Here I am not only referring to differences that arenecessarily enabling of conversation, but those that impede and stop conversationas well (indeed, a multicultural conversation might well have to run into suchbreaks and ruptures in order to enter into radical reflection on the presuppositionsthat foreclose conversation from the start). What place is there within thehermeneutical dialogue for the expression of such a difference that produces abreak in common understanding or “epistemic rupture” to use GayatriChakravorty Spivak’s term? Such ruptures are significant, challenging, galvaniz-ing, even necessary in order to call the racial presuppositions of conversation intoquestion, in order to force a revaluation of an abiding schema of understandingthat has exclusionary or marginalizing moves built into it. One of the reasons that

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multicultural conversation often seems so difficult is that it often turns on suchmoments, ones that can quickly become paralyzing, tempting the “rational”speaker back into his or her own linguistic stable. But the risk of such conversa-tion may well be in leaving available schema of rationality behind or, at least,forcing them into radical transformation. From the point of view that seeks toresist this encounter, the “break” in question looks like irrationalism, but it is onlythe exposure of the contingent limits of an available rationality scheme. Others,still, who resist that important rupture will understand this epistemic hiatus as apermanent obstruction to dialogue. But this break can operate as a violent inau-guration of a new understanding as well, one that must break with dialogue inorder to begin it again. Importing this sort of violence into the hermeneuticscheme may well allow us to develop a view that prizes the “we” as a conditionand effect of dialogue without sacrificing the mobilizing force of difference.

NOTE

1. See Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 223–232.

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