RADICALIZING PLURALISM

Audrey Thompson
University of Utah

In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James recalls an anecdote concerning Margaret Fuller that speaks to the distinction between stoical acceptance of necessity and passionate embrace of the human condition. Margaret Fuller, the New England transcendentalist, was often quoted as saying, “I accept the universe.” “When some one repeated this phrase to Thomas Carlyle, his sardonic comment is said to have been: `Gad! she’d better!’” For Carlyle, of course, Fuller’s statement was merely a grand gesture. We can scarcely refuse to accept the universe, and since resignation to and acceptance of reality is a precondition of meaningful action, Fuller’s proclamation appears absurdly melodramatic — the obvious and unavoidable offered up as thrillingly open-minded. From the standpoint of a grudging submission to necessity, Fuller’s statement appears irrelevant. But her enthusiastic embrace of the universe in fact marks a distinctive moral and spiritual orientation, James argues. Pragmatically and emotionally, it makes a difference “whether one accept the universe in the drab discolored way of stoic resignation to necessity, or with…passionate happiness.”¹ Much the same can be said of pluralism. If pluralism means respecting and protecting difference, and if the meaning we allow pluralism helps decide the meaning allowed democracy, then it makes a great difference whether we conceive of pluralism as tolerance — as “live and let live” — or whether we conceive of it as the appreciation and celebration of difference.

In “Pluralisms for Education,” Ann Diller argues that neither a laissez-faire nor a cooperative conception of pluralism is adequate to “the relational tasks of human communities.” Models of pluralism, if they are to lend themselves to the building of communities, must ask more of us than simply getting along with one another. Pluralism has to mean actively attending to others, appreciating their distinctive perspectives, not just letting them be different. As a student once put it, in a course I taught on literacy and technology, “What’s the good of everyone learning to express themselves better if no one’s listening anyway?” Speaking assumes the presence of a hearing Other — not just someone who knows the language but, as Derrida argues, a friend, a sympathetic and interested interlocutor.²

Diller points out that embracing difference does not mean doing away with conflict. Relationships consist not only in our agreements with one another but also in our differences — Derrida observes, for example, that conflict between friends, for example, is not a problem for friendship but simply a fact about it.³ To become friends is not to erase difference but to bring it into play in fruitful ways. Hearing a friend means something more than recognizing what she says (empathizing), or caring about what she says (sympathizing); it means participating in what she is undergoing, being made party to it. We tend to assume that difference is an obstacle to understanding, yet it is through the very play of differences that meaning is constructed. In the United States, we act on the assumption that if we all agree about something, then it can safely be counted as true — a unanimous jury decision, for example, is a highly desirable outcome because it certifies the decision as unproblematic. But in some countries, a unanimous jury decision is automatically thrown out. If everyone agrees on the verdict, it is assumed, there must be some significant prejudice or foregone conclusion operating that accounts for the coincidence.

Pluralism, then, can be understood as productive of meaning. It is pluralism in this strong sense that Diller wants to claim for flourishing communal relations. Whereas pluralism as tolerance or as cooperation treats difference as a problem to be minimized through mutual respect, pluralism as co-exploring or co-enjoyment approaches difference as a positive value to be embraced — something to be made use of, played with, and celebrated. Diller’s argument seems to me an important one, but while I agree with her claim that tolerance and cooperation are inadequate conceptions of pluralism, and that we need to appreciate and play with difference, I wish to argue that pluralism itself is of limited value in effecting a transformation of social relationships. Indeed, pluralism works above all to inhibit criticism of the “culture” of the group in power. As a distinctively liberal notion that claims freedom of action and of self-expression as its central values, pluralism predicates personal autonomy on simply letting others be — whether that means leaving them alone or appreciating their distinctiveness. In consequence, pluralism finesses the question of how our differences are related.

The differences that divide races, ethnic groups, women and men, gays and heterosexuals, and the rich and poor cannot be understood simply in terms of each group’s distinctive cultural values and practices, for those differences are also a function of power relations. Group experiences in a patriarchal and capitalist society are not only coordinated with and adjusted to one another but structurally interdependent such that the assumptions, needs, privileges and entitlements of dominant groups shape the experience of the groups that they exploit or oppress. In Dorothy Smith’s phrase, they are co-ordered. Being white means what it does because of the specific relations whites in our society have with oppressed racial groups. Insofar as white values are parasitic upon the perpetuation of oppressive social relations, they cannot be treated simply as parallel to those of oppressed groups. Nor are the values of subordinated groups unproblematically autonomous. In Western, liberal societies, those values designated as feminine, for example, help to obscure the shortcomings of liberalism — in effect, they mediate and legitimate patriarchal power. Celebrating women’s emotional responsiveness and sensitivity without asking what role these play in gender relations means ignoring the role women play in perpetuating oppressive social conditions.⁴

A radically multicultural society in which all sub-groups flourish equally cannot be conceptualized in terms of the liberal framework. Liberalism demands a kind of relativism whereby we refrain from passing judgment on others, on the assumption that their realities may be incommensurable with ours; radical multiculturalism, by contrast, would entail co-ordering different forms of experience in recognition of their interdependence. It would mean giving definite structure to social relations such that a dominant group does not set the conditions for others’ participation. In liberal society, on the other hand, members of the dominant groups set the terms that protect their own privileges and ensure their own flourishing; pluralism is the leeway given to other groups to claim their own meanings and values so long as they refrain from challenging the privileges of the dominant group. More importantly, pluralism guarantees protection of the values of the groups in power.

Pluralism is by definition non-coercive — not a mandate but a deliberate stance — and here the metaphor of friendship is instructive, reminding us that profoundly intimate and appreciative relations are rare, in part because they are voluntary but also because they assume equality and mutuality. The white employer who, in the movie Driving Miss Daisy, claims friendship with her black chauffeur, either confuses one-way trust with the mutuality of friendship or else appeals to a sentimental idea of friendship as transcending structured inequality. To be a friendship, such a relation would have to remake its own conditions, not accept them as given. It isn’t enough simply to set aside one’s own belief system for the moment in order to enter imaginatively into the other’s world. Indeed, the notion that we can set aside our existing beliefs, values, entitlements, assumptions, commitments, needs, and expectations in order to appreciate another’s situation from her point of view may itself be ethnocentric. If we set all of that aside, it’s not clear who is left to do the appreciating. (To appreciate someone is surely to respond to her, not to absent ourselves.) What we can do, however, is become critically aware of our own assumptions and sense of entitlement — and be willing to call them into question.

Pluralisms of the liberal ilk challenge us, at most, to appreciate others; at the very least, to tolerate them. The argument of many black, lesbian, and socialist feminists, however, is that those of us with privileges have to be willing to forego them. Appreciating others and enabling them to flourish may call for giving up something from our own stance, not simply affirming all stances. By contrast, appeals to pluralism tend to embrace a form of relativism that endorses the status quo. Relativism assumes that all perspectives have an equal claim to making sense of the world; the problem for relativism is how to reconcile divergent accounts of overlapping experience. Insofar as pluralism is modelled after relativism, it confronts the same problem: how to bridge difference, how to get beyond co-existence to co-knowledge and -acknowledgement. Affirming lesbian, African-American, and working-class experiences as if they were self-contained truths unrelated to our own world-views renders them harmless to challenge the truths we ourselves prefer.

Is a more radical form of pluralism possible — one that valorizes difference, plays with difference, and acknowledges diverse groups without forfeiting political judgment? On the one hand, we cannot afford to ignore the ways in which differences have to do with power. Attempting to foster community in the classroom when schools are profoundly divisive and politically vulnerable as institutions means ignoring the very conditions of communal relations. Nor can we look to an appreciation of “stylistic” differences as a way of fostering community. When Deborah Tannen and Carol Gilligan, for example, identify gendered paradigms in communication and morality as cultural modes, they ignore the structural and political underpinnings and consequences of gendered differences. On the other hand, we cannot reduce all difference merely to functions of power. Some kind of pluralism is surely desirable insofar as it enables us to embrace difference with Margaret Fuller’s passion — but without losing sight of the oppressive dimensions of difference.

If pluralism in some form is a desideratum of free and open social relations, what forms of pluralism can we look to in a society wherein difference has to do less often with parallel than with hierarchical orderings of experience? The approach that Liz Stanley and Sue Wise argue for is a pluralism of material and epistemological standpoints — a form of pluralism that identifies perspectives as co-ordered and not merely co-existing. Particular standpoints never represent the final word, even though some standpoints must be recognized as better than others at explicating experience — indeed, the tensions among various standpoints are testimony to what Sandra Harding calls their “transitional” status.⁵ They are intermediate to knowledge, rather than a guarantee of knowledge. Pluralism in this sense does not require that all social experience be reconciled into a single harmonious framework, but it does demand recognition of political and social situatedness. Even then, we cannot determine a fixed ranking of standpoints, but we can at least recognize a presumption of greater explanatory power of one standpoint over another in some cases. A pluralism of standpoints does not, of itself, constitute a vital embodiment of radical multiculturalism, any more than liberal pluralism constitutes the flourishing of equality and liberty. It is not yet the passionate acceptance of difference amidst equality that I think Ann Diller envisions. But it is, I think, a necessary intermediate stance, the way to get there from here.⁶

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¹ William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Mentor/New American Library, 1958), 49.

² Jacques Derrida, “Philia, Logos, and Polemos: Heidegger and Heraclitus,” (presentation at Loyola University of Chicago, 22 September 1989).

³ Ibid. Here, Derrida echoes Dewey’s point concerning the individual/social dualism, that the relation of the individual to society is a fact, not a problem. To treat the relation as a problem is to assume an imaginary opposition between individuals and the associations in which they find themselves. Similarly, to treat conflict as a problem for friendship is to assume that friendship refers to the achievement of harmony rather than the commitment to living together fruitfully and joyfully.

⁴ See Dorothy E. Smith, The Everyday World as Problematic (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987); and Carole Pateman, “`The Disorder of Women’: Women, Love, and the Sense of Justice,” in The Disorder of Women (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 17-32.

⁵ See Liz Stanley and Sue Wise, “Method, Methodology, and Epistemology in Feminist Research Processes,” in Feminist Praxis, ed. Liz Stanley (London:: Routledge, 1990), 27, 47.

⁶ I would like to express my appreciation to members of the Women’s Studies writing group and the Cultural, Critical, and Curriculum Studies discussion group for their responses to earlier drafts of this response. My thanks to Fred Buchanan, Andrew Gitlin, Georgia Johnson, Larry Johnson, Harvey Kantor, Michelle Kelly, Ranjana Khanna, Sharon LaSalle, Dan McLaughlin, Frank Margonis, Marva Match, Julie Vandivere, Ivan Van Laningham, and Bill Watkins.