POLITICAL
10.1177/0090591705274867
Kompridis
/ NORMATIVIZING
THEORY / June 2005
HYBRIDITY
NORMATIVIZING HYBRIDITY/
NEUTRALIZING CULTURE
NIKOLAS KOMPRIDIS
York University
This essay takes issue with the way the highly fashionable concept of hybridity has been used to
skew our understanding of cultural identity, and render conceptually and normatively indefensible the political claims of culture. It also challenges the current ‘anti-essentialist’ orthodoxy
about what culture ‘really is,’and shows that neither ‘essentialism’nor ‘anti-essentialism’helps
us get right the place of culture in politics, because both fail to recognize the identity and nonidentity of culture with itself.
Keywords: culture; identity; hybridity; democracy; modernity
True critical theory must not fear the stigma of conservatism, least of all in an age when
the wholesale revaluation of what is critical and what is conformist seems to be gathering
1
momentum.
—Christian Lenhardt
I. ON THE PLACE OF CULTURE IN POLITICS
Summarizing one side of an ongoing debate, James Tully unhesitatingly
announces that culture is ‘an irreducible and constitutive part of politics.’2
This relatively new view of culture rejects completely the long-held view of
culture as an autonomous domain, independent of and isolatable from the
rest of social and political life. But even among those for whom the ‘cultural
turn’ is an irreversible feature of political theorising today, the question of
what it means to say that culture is an irreducible and constitutive part of politics is by no means settled. Unfortunately, just what culture is, what it means,
even by the lights of the new view of culture, is still up for grabs.
Notoriously impossible to define, culture is a concept whose semantic
extension overlaps with the concepts of identity, language, lifeworld, form of
POLITICAL THEORY, Vol. 33 No. 3, June 2005 318-343
DOI: 10.1177/0090591705274867
© 2005 Sage Publications
318
Kompridis / NORMATIVIZING HYBRIDITY
319
life, background, horizon, tradition, and the like. When we use such concepts, we are obviously not using concepts whose meaning can be fixed or
rendered fully explicit and determinate; rather, we are dealing with concepts
which serve as semantic and epistemic access points for one another, and for
their overlapping object domains. Just as obviously, these access points are
not given to us once and for all, but must be discovered and rediscovered, for
their respective meanings are not only subject to semantic and historical
change, but are also the concepts through which we understand semantic and
historical change.
It is thus very much a matter of concern just which working concept of culture we choose to employ and endorse. So, in what follows, I wish to probe
more carefully than I believe has generally been done, the implications of an
insufficiently self-reflective construal of culture particularly favoured today
by a number of political theorists and critical theorists. I find this construal
worrisome because it can only make room for culture in politics so long as
culture can be put in its ‘proper’ place. This transparently Kantian strategy
(of conducting culture to its ‘proper’place) is supported by a construal of culture that is assumed to be empirically superior to the much-belittled
essentialist view of cultures as internally consistent and clearly bounded
wholes.
More than that, however, it is a construal that claims to clear away all the
needless normative congestion produced by various theorists of multiculturalism (Will Kymlicka and Charles Taylor, among others) whose justification
of the political claims of culture rests on essentialist premises. It is argued
that the status of these claims looks to be altogether different when we
approach cultures as radically internally hybridized and polyvocal—as fluid,
permeable, and ever-renegotiable constructions of meaning and signification. While I think that this anti-essentialist view of culture has much to recommend it, the incautious version currently in favour has a number of empirical and normative shortcomings that are in need of critical reassessment.
Because it often exaggerates the fluidity, permeability, and renegotiability
of culture, it is a view of culture that tends to obscure the empirical complexity of the phenomena it claims to illuminate. What we are offered is a concept
of culture that undermines its own application, such that nothing empirical
can actually conform to it.3 If cultures really are as fluid, porous, unbounded,
and ever-renegotiable as they are made out to be, there would be nothing ‘out
there’ that could correspond to such a concept, nothing to get right or wrong,
and nothing deserving of the name. Let us not forget that one of the multiple
meanings of culture refers to activities, practices, and achievements we wish
to affirm in some form, and wish to pass on to succeeding generations, not
blindly, but self-critically. Even if we grant, as we must, that many of us are
320
POLITICAL THEORY / June 2005
members of and have attachments to more than one culture, it remains a question how we could even get attached, let alone remain attached, to what is
fluid, porous, unbounded, and ever-renegotiable. Given such a view of culture, it is very hard to see how one could ever be in a position to have a culture
one could claim as one’s own, in a position of having something with which
one sufficiently identifies and about which one sufficiently cares to want to
pass it on.
If the conceptual limitations of the essentialist view of culture are such
that it is incapable of understanding and explaining cultural change, the conceptual limitations of the anti-essentialist view of culture are such that it is
incapable of understanding and explaining cultural continuity. That particular limitation is a consequence of essentializing (and, as we shall see,
unreflectively normativizing) fluidity, permeability, and renegotiability. If
cultures really are as fluid, porous, renegotiable, and unbounded as they are
said to be, it is very hard to see how their political claims could have become a
problem for us. Surely, anything so fluid, negotiable, porous, and unbounded
should not be something capable of generating rather distinctive political
claims on its own behalf. So, if this is the true view of culture as it ‘really’ is,
then in light of all the swirling controversies surrounding the (apparently
baseless) claims of culture, we seem to be facing, and not without some considerable embarrassment, a case of massive epistemic error on a global scale.
We can only avoid such an obviously implausible conclusion if we are considerably more careful about how we incorporate anti-essentialism about
culture into theorising about the political claims of culture, mindful of the
limitations of essentialist anti-essentialism. Otherwise, we will find ourselves committed to a normative perspective that is predisposed to take a disengaged stance towards endangered cultural resources and cultural practices,
and so unable to make fine discriminations between those cultural resources
and cultural practices we would wish to pass on and those we would not.
II. THE PREMATURE NORMATIVATION OF A CONCEPT
At the centre of the anti-essentialist view of culture is the highly fashionable concept of hybridity. Although it is a concept neither uniformly understood nor uniformly applied (it figures differently, for example, in Paul
Gilroy and Gloria Anzaldua than it does in Homi Bhaba and James Clifford),4
it is predominantly deployed as a boundary-subverting, unquestionably
transgressive, critical tool (‘Hybridity is heresy,’as Salman Rushdie put it).5
The fact that theorists who differ strongly in all other respects nonetheless
find this concept so utterly congenial to their purposes is reason enough to be
Kompridis / NORMATIVIZING HYBRIDITY
321
suspicious—reason enough to look into whether it is doing a lot of unexamined and overrated work. For example, consider the following representative
characterizations of the hybridity of contemporary culture. In the first, James
Clifford draws out the ironist implications of our ‘syncretic, “post-cultural”
situation.’6 In the second, Jeremy Waldron claims that this situation constitutes convincing proof that the ‘hybrid lifestyle of the true cosmopolitan is in
fact the only appropriate response to the modern world.’7
An intellectual historian of the year 2010, if such a person is imaginable, may even look
back on the first two-thirds of our [i.e., the twentieth] century and observe that this was a
time when Western intellectuals were preoccupied with grounds of meaning and identity
they called ‘culture’and ‘language’(much the way we now look at the nineteenth century
and perceive there a problematic concern with evolutionary ‘history’ and ‘progress’). I
think we are seeing signs that the privilege given to natural languages and, as it were, natural cultures is dissolving. These objects and epistemological grounds are now appearing
as constructs, achieved fictions, containing and domesticating heteroglossia. In a world
with too many voices speaking all at once, a world where syncretism and parodic invention are becoming the rule, not the exception, an urban, multinational world of institutional transience—where American clothes made in Korea are worn by young people in
Russia, where everyone’s “roots’ are in some degree cut—in such a world it becomes
increasingly difficult to attach human identity and meaning to a coherent ‘culture’or ‘lan8
guage.’
We live in a world formed by technology and trade; by economic, religious, and political
imperialism and their offspring; by mass migration and the dispersion of cultural influences. In this context, to immerse oneself in the traditional practices of, say, an aboriginal
culture might be a fascinating anthropological experiment, but it involves an artificial
dislocation from what actually is going on in the world. That it is an artifice is evidenced
by the fact that such immersion often requires special subsidization and extraordinary
provision by those who live in the world where culture and practices are not so sealed off
from one another. . . . From a cosmopolitan point of view, immersion in the traditions of a
particular community in the modern world is like living in Disneyland and thinking that
one’s surroundings epitomize what it is for a culture really to exist. Worse still, it is like
demanding the funds to live in Disneyland, while still managing to convince oneself that
9
what happens inside Disneyland is all there is to an adequate and fulfilling life.
Both of these characterizations express that all too ‘knowing’ modernist
attitude, confidently trusting in its ability to single out what is au courant
from what is passé. Often, as in Clifford’s case, it is an attitude that entails an
ironic detachment towards all that is impure and transient, and thus a reluctance to identify with anything other than one’s own (typically unavowed)
project of self-purification (the preservation one’s authenticity in an
inauthentic world). Just as often, as in Waldron’s case, it involves some considerable condescension towards those who have nothing better to do than to
worry about how to preserve what is no longer viable in the modern world, at
322
POLITICAL THEORY / June 2005
least not without unjustifiable recourse to ‘special’ subsidies and ‘extraordinary’ provisions.
Now what interests me here is how this concept of hybridity has undergone a premature, largely unnoticed normativization, thereby making available a framework within which the political claims of culture can be tamed
and domesticated. I want to single out the following normativized aspects:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
The normativization of cultural fluidity and change, such that to be against them, and to
fail to recognise that in the modern world such processes are ineluctable, is to be anti10
modern and guilty of primitivism, exoticism, backwardness, and childlike naïveté;
The normativization of the infinite contestability and renegotiability of cultural identity,
making it nigh impossible to resist the pressure to contest and renegotiate one’s cultural
identity without appearing to be unreasonable from the start—unreasonable to believe
that there may be—horrible dictum!—features of one’s cultural identity or one’s cultural practices that one might wish to rescue and pass on;
The normativization of a disengaged or ironic stance towards cultural materials and
resources such that one cannot be enjoined to preserve or rescue them, to pass them on,
transformed, both with an eye on the future and on the past;
The normativization of a radically individualistic relation to one’s culture’s attachments
and identifications, such that, ultimately, it is entirely up to the individual how and to
what extent he binds himself to or is bound by them; and, finally,
The normativization of an attitude towards minority cultures and languages that
amounts to cultural Darwinism: minority cultures that cannot survive without ‘special’
subsidies and ‘extraordinary’ provisions do not deserve to survive.
Through this process of normativization, hybridity turns into a differenceerasing concept, negating the foreignness of the foreigner, the otherness of
the other. Indeed, this capacity to ‘normalize’cultural difference, and thereby
to neutralize the political claims of culture, explains its appeal: it subverts any
normatively compelling non-instrumental grounds for preserving cultural
differences and rescuing endangered cultural resources. Thus, for those
political theorists whose scepticism towards the political claims of culture
inclines them to frame those claims as requiring citizens of multicultural
democracies to choose between their ‘rights’ and their ‘culture’ (as Ayelet
Schachar so aptly puts it),11 hybridity is the ideal conceptual tool for
neutralising those claims.
III. NEUTRALIZING THE CLAIMS OF CULTURE
One such theorist is Seyla Benhabib, and in her recent book, The Claims of
Culture, she employs the concept of hybridity in the service of just this end.
In light of the conceptual and normative issues I raised above, I want to exam-
Kompridis / NORMATIVIZING HYBRIDITY
323
ine in some considerable detail how the concept of hybridity figures in her
proposal for putting culture in its proper political place. Before I begin, however, I would like to explain why I have chosen to focus on Benhabib rather
than continue with my analysis of Waldron and Clifford. There are two reasons. First, Benhabib is both a political theorist and a critical theorist, and
since my own political-theoretical perspective is indebted to the critical theory tradition, my objections to Benhabib’s proposal for dealing with the
claims of culture are meant as an internal critique. Her construal of culture
and her reliance on a normatively skewed conception of hybridity make her
view of the place of culture in politics much too indistinguishable from
Waldron’s and Clifford’s. It is a view of culture that I think critical theorists
should be resisting, not embracing, not even partially. Second, independently
of her affiliations to critical theory, the problems that beset Benhabib’s
attempt to neutralize the claims of culture are not specific to her approach, but
are in general the problems faced by any such attempt beginning from the
premises of essentialist anti-essentialism.
In this section of my essay, I am going to discuss the various inadequacies
of hybridity as a view of culture, and then I’m going to show how Benhabib
depends on this deeply flawed concept to bolster the normative conditions
she sets for ‘complex cultural dialogue’. In the following section (IV), I’m
going to take a closer look at some of the claims that Benhabib makes on
behalf of her model of complex cultural dialogue, arguing that it is normatively inflexible in the face of the political claims of culture. Next (V), I’m
going to raise some questions about Benhabib’s ‘modernist’ attitude towards
the issue of cultural preservation, arguing that we need to see this issue in a
very different way, one which escapes the double bind of being either for or
against modernity. Finally (VI), in connection with the ethnographic
research of the Hungarian composer Bela Bartok, I’m going to make a suggestion for thinking the identity and non-identity of culture, such that neither
essentialism nor anti-essentialism has the final word.
Staking out a position between Brian Barry and Will Kymlicka, Benhabib
lays out the argument of her book by first harnessing her anti-essentialist
view of culture to the proceduralist view of law and democracy she shares
with Jürgen Habermas. She sets her ‘sociological constructivism’ against the
‘naïve’ and ‘reductionist sociology of culture’, the ‘faulty epistemic premises’ of which lead to an essentialist view of culture that ‘has grave normative political consequences for how we think injustices among groups should
be redressed and how we think human diversity and pluralism should be furthered.’12 These ‘grave normative political consequences’ follow from the
holistic understanding of culture which the essentialist view promotes,
324
POLITICAL THEORY / June 2005
endangering our capacity to think with sufficient critical distance about culture’s place in politics. The holistic understanding of culture fundamental to
the essentialist view gives culture too big a place and grants it too big a say in
our lives, putting it out of critical reach. Rather than essentializing cultures as
distinct, internally homogeneous, and tightly bounded entities, Benhabib
pleads for an anti-holistic view that recognizes ‘the radical hybridity and
polyvocality of all cultures,’ and grasps them as ‘multilayered, decentered,
and fractured systems of action and signification’ (CC, p. 26).
Unfortunately, by rejecting outright a holistic understanding of culture
(and, therefore, of language, social practice, tradition, form of life, etc.),
Benhabib must do without any means by which one culture could be individuated from another. Thus, she commits herself to a view of culture which
makes culture radically nonidentical with itself—a view that so exaggerates
the fluidity and hybridity of cultures that no culture could ever be identical
with itself long enough to be identified as one. Instead of a wholesale repudiation of holism, we need to distinguish between strong forms of holism
which essentialize the identity of culture from weak forms of holism which
allow us to recognize cultural differences without reifying them.13 One’s
approach to culture can be happily holistic and historicist: holism about culture (and meaning, in general) does not reduce to, and is distinct from,
essentialism.
In its proposed form, then, it is entirely unclear to what one could apply
Benhabib’s anti-essentialist and anti-holistic concept of culture. Perhaps, the
concept of culture no longer has an application; perhaps, it has become obsolete. If, however, we are going to continue to use it (and Benhabib has not
given any reason why we and she should not), then we have to accept that for
the concept of culture to have a domain to which it can be meaningfully
applied, that domain must display a sufficient degree of continuity and stability—continuity and stability enough to fall under its concept, to be identified
as such. The identity of whatever falls under such concepts can be weak,
complex, internally heterogeneous, open to change, and so on; but it must
also be minimally identical with itself to be identified as itself. Thus, what we
are in need of is a weakly holistic concept of culture that incorporates both the
identity and non-identity of culture with itself. Otherwise we will find ourselves working with a conceptually incoherent view of culture.
When we unreflectively subscribe to essentialist anti-essentialism, when
we allow our talk of ‘construction’ to distort its object, we come uncomfortably close to a position which fictionalizes culture and identity, turning into a
mere ‘construction.’ In this respect, we reproduce a metaphysical position
popularised (but later repudiated) by Friedrich Nietzsche. That metaphysical
position begins from a correct anti-essentialist premise that there can be no
Kompridis / NORMATIVIZING HYBRIDITY
325
fixed or ‘fixable’ identities, no categories or distinctions impervious to historical change, to the erroneous conclusion that all identities are fictions and
all distinctions necessarily repressive and exclusionary.14
Benhabib appears to be reproducing this mistake when she proposes to
treat cultures ‘as constant creations, recreations, and negotiations of imaginary boundaries between “we” and the “other/s”’ (CC, p. 8).15 By treating the
‘imaginary’ boundaries of cultures as fictional creations, imaginary constructions, it would seem that we gain considerable methodological freedom
and considerable normative distance from culture. Methodologically, we are
released from the holistic constraints operative in our attempts to understand
ourselves and others. As a consequence we need not think of ourselves as in
any way bound by, embedded in, or dependent on the system of action and
meaning which, according to the kind of holism espoused by Martin
Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Clifford Geertz, sets the conditions of
intelligibility upon which all sense-making necessarily relies. Since what we
are dealing with is a ‘fractured system of action and signification,’ we, (presumably) standing whole and unfractured, as though outside it, come to
enjoy a considerable semantic as well as methodological freedom, such that
we can move with relative ease amongst the multiple cultural identifications
and attachments that configure our practical identities. Thus, on this antiholistic view, just as we cannot be epistemically and semantically dependent
on ‘fractured systems of action and signification,’ we cannot be normatively
bound to or bound by them in particularly demanding ways. And so we seem
to be situated in relation to culture, empirically and normatively, in precisely
the way Clifford and Waldron claim we are.16 Now this should come as no
surprise, for it is an unavoidable outcome of using the language of
‘construction’ without fully appreciating its implications.
Benhabib does not employ this language in a sufficiently sceptical and
cautious manner, which is why she is much too quick to chastise ‘strong
multiculturalists’ for failing to ‘face the embarrassing fact that most individual identities are defined through many collective affinities and through
many narratives’(CC, p. 16). While this ‘liberating’fact is undeniable, it does
not by any means dissolve the political problems of cultural identity. Some
narratives, some affinities, some identifications and attachments are, rightly
or wrongly, stronger, more authoritative than others—but how is one to
decide which to endorse or which to resist, which to preserve and which to
abandon, when they conflict with one another? Having committed herself to
an anti-holistic and anti-essentialist view of culture, Benhabib is forced to
treat cultural identifications and attachments as imaginary constructs that can
be as easily constructed as deconstructed. She thus obscures the problem
rather than confronting it on its own terms. To emphasize repeatedly the fact
326
POLITICAL THEORY / June 2005
that culture and identity are hybrid and fluid is simply to ignore, if not to wish
away, that it is these very conflicting attachments and identifications that
make culture all the more stubbornly an irreducible and constitutive part of
politics.
Moreover, by ‘fictionalising’culture, treating it as a product of the ‘imagination,’ Benhabib renders cultural preservation normatively indefensible.17
That outcome is reinforced by a view of cultural boundaries as inherently
repressive and exclusionary tout court. Once again Benhabib infers from a
correct premise to a false conclusion.
The demarcations of cultures and of the human groups that are their carriers are
extremely contested, fragile as well as delicate. To possess the culture means to be an
insider. Not to be acculturated in the appropriate way is to be an outsider. Hence the
boundaries of cultures are always securely guarded, their narratives purified, their rituals
carefully monitored. These boundaries circumscribe power in that they legitimize its use
within the group. (CC, p. 7)
I’m not interested here in directly challenging this one-sided view of the
work that the boundaries of culture do. What interests me here is another
implication of this view, viz., that in virtue of their inherently repressive and
exclusionary nature we do not have any pressing normative obligation to
maintain or preserve the boundaries of culture in one form or another. Once
we have exposed cultures as imaginary constructs and the boundaries that
maintain them as inherently exclusionary and repressive, we no longer have
any (good) reason to preserve our cultural identifications and attachments.
The loss of those identifications and attachments is made up by a gain in freedom. But what kind of freedom are we talking about here—a repackaged version of negative freedom? Notice that we are not talking about setting ourselves free from particular identifications and attachments (from which we
may have good reason to break free) but from identifications and attachments
as such. Notice, too, that once we have finally seen through them, we would
retrospectively be forced to regard all our attachments and identifications as
self-generated illusions. And so, like James Clifford, we would find ourselves occupying a Humean universe in which we must regard our practical
identities, our identifications with and attachments to what matters to us, as
‘necessary fictions,’‘fictions’we cannot practically do without, but which we
cannot truly ‘believe,’ and which we cannot truly endorse. Ironic detachment
and self-alienation would then become the permanent ontological conditions
under which we form and transform our identities, and appropriate and pass
on ‘our’ culture/s.
In order to make as clear as possible that these consequences are not just
contingent features of Benhabib’s approach, but built into it, I want now to
Kompridis / NORMATIVIZING HYBRIDITY
327
turn to Benhabib’s procedural solution to the problem of adjudicating the
political claims of culture. It is a procedure that consists of three normative
conditions that constitute the necessary and sufficient conditions of ‘complex
cultural dialogue.’ They are (1) egalitarian reciprocity, (2) voluntary selfascription, and (3) freedom of association and exit. On its own, there is nothing to be said against the first, but in combination with the second and third
conditions, what we have is a normative framework that, rather than enabling
‘complex cultural dialogue,’ facilitates a particular kind of outcome, thereby
violating its putative procedural impartiality. Here, I will restrict my analysis
to the second normative condition, since much of what is wrong with the
whole proposal is most visible in it.
In consociationalist or federative multicultural societies, an individual must not automatically be assigned to a cultural, religious, or linguistic group by virtue of his or her birth. An
individual’s group membership must permit the most extensive forms of self-ascription
and self-determination possible. There will be many cases when such self-identifications
may be contested, but the state should not simply grant the right to define and control
membership to the group at the expense of the individual; it is desirable that at some point
in their adult lives individuals be asked whether they accept their continuing membership
in their communities of origin. (CC, p. 19, my emphasis)
At best, this normative stipulation would seem to have a very limited range
of applicability, making one wonder why it needs to be so all-embracing, and
so powerful a determinant of ‘complex cultural dialogue’. Apparently, what
Benhabib has in mind here are circumstances in which communities (e.g.,
indigenous communities) granted some degree of political autonomy within
a federative political structure (e.g., Canada) make use of that autonomy to
exercise illiberal control over their members, or the membership conditions
of their community. Now it would be hard to find anyone among those who
Benhabib identifies as ‘multicultural theorists’ who would not defend the
right of any individual seeking to discontinue legal membership in their community of origin, if and when they experience that community as oppressive.
So the question that needs to be posed is whether this normative condition is
doing the right kind of work in facilitating cultural dialogue that is both complex and fair. At the same time, we need to ask whether it rests on faulty
assumptions about culture and identity, assumptions which make implausible the expectation that one can change one’s cultural identity at one and the
same time as one ends, by the stroke of a pen, one’s official membership in
one’s community of origin. Isn’t it obvious by now that the identity that we
are is not something we can change overnight, not a ‘construction’ we can
take apart and put back together again at will? As Benhabib herself holds, our
identities are formed within and mediated by intersubjective relationships
328
POLITICAL THEORY / June 2005
and cultural significations. We can alter or transform our identity only to the
extent that we can alter and transform those intersubjective relationships and
cultural significations in and through which it is constituted. Legal mechanisms alone are not sufficient for bringing about such change, and for that
very reason often provoke resistance to it, strengthening rather than weakening existing cultural identities.
The way in which Benhabib formulates her second normative stipulation
may in fact undermine its plausibility. Precisely under what conditions can
we meaningfully say of ourselves we are no longer Jews, Arabs, or First
Nations peoples? Under what conditions would we be prepared to discontinue membership in our communities of origin? Well, we can imagine some
extreme cases where this would be necessary. But is it wise to generalize
from such cases, as Benhabib does, giving the state regulatory powers which
we might one day regret putting in its hands? Benhabib’s proposal does not
seem to represent a real social possibility for those for whom their community of origin has become deeply problematic; it is merely a notional one. For
example, should Germans after 1945 have collectively discontinued their
membership in their community of origin? Or did they make the better choice
when they collectively decided to transform their German identity, breaking
with what could not be continued, and rescuing and preserving in some new
form what was worth rescuing and preserving? Is it necessarily in the interest
of Muslim women to cancel membership in their communities of origin
rather than organizing to change the conditions of membership?18 Is it not the
case that most of those who have intensely conflicting cultural identifications
and attachments are far more inclined (as so many historical and contemporary examples show) to find ways to transform their communities of origin,
rather than to break all ties with them? Our yearning for freedom is not necessarily incompatible with our need for belonging, which is reason enough to
reject all attempts that would force us to choose one over the other.
My impression is that there is an assimilationist logic at work in
Benhabib’s normative framework for ‘complex cultural dialogue,’ a framework which might be acceptable in ‘melting pot’ political cultures, but not in
all democratic political cultures. It implicitly promotes discarding ‘unwanted’ or disadvantageous minority identities for far more acceptable and
advantageous majority identities. But how is this type of encouragement consistent with the first normative condition of egalitarian reciprocity? The second normative condition seems to ignore or take as brute fact the existing cultural and political asymmetry between minority cultures and the majority
culture, an asymmetry it helps to fortify rather than challenge.
Kompridis / NORMATIVIZING HYBRIDITY
329
Undeniably, the capacity for self-definition is internal to the notion of selfdetermination, and the widest possible range of opportunities for such projects of individual self-definition is a central promise of democracy.
Benhabib’s second normative condition responds to an entirely legitimate
and pressing concern: the power of others to name us, through which power
we can be oppressed and controlled. But in resisting third-person ascriptions
that hem us in and oppress, in seeking to rename ourselves and thereby to
exercise our own agency, we need to be careful not to succumb to a seductive
but illusory notion of self-ascription. We are never, ever, in a position in
which our acts of self-ascription are unconstrained by the cultural conditions
under which such acts take place and from which they get their sense and
their point. Moreover, there is no state of freedom in which we can be identical with our names; nor conditions of social life under which we can exercise
total control over first- and third-person ascriptions.
As Benhabib states the content of the norm of voluntary self-ascription, it
sounds too much like voluntaristic self-ascription, expressing an ideal of
unconstrained freedom of self-ascription. But I suspect that it also reflects an
undeclared motivation that can be stated as follows: there can be no ‘We’over
which the ‘I’ cannot dispose—no attachments, contingent or otherwise, from
which it cannot detach itself when it so wishes. The ‘I’ must be the final
authority concerning its freedom.19 I regard this motivation as arising from
the desire to deny and evade the conditions of our dependence on the very
phenomena that Benhabib is so intent upon treating as imaginary constructs:
culture, language, traditions, worlds, forms of life. But we never come level
with these, because our dependence on them is not something that we can
outgrow, the way, for instance, we as children outgrow our dependence on
our parents. Nonetheless, our never-ending dependence upon our inherited
cultural traditions and forms of life is perfectly compatible with our capacity
as agents to alter and transform what we contingently inherit. Of course, this
is a difficult and complicated process, involving considerable semantic
(which is also to say political) struggle, the success of which does not eventuate in semantically independent, fully autonomous self-ascription. The goal
should not be an illusory mastery of the language of self-ascription, but a
more open and more reflective understanding of the relations of dependence
and independence through which we acquire the words that speak us, the
words that reveal and distort who we are (which is why the semantic and
political struggle to articulate who we are is an open-ended, incompletable
project).
330
POLITICAL THEORY / June 2005
IV. SURVIVING THE CONDITIONS OF
‘COMPLEX CULTURAL DIALOGUE’
Throughout her text, Benhabib reiterates her belief that she has found the
perfect balance between a strong universalism and a radical antiessentialism; call it the perfect balance between monotheism about morality
and polytheism about culture. Thus, she feels entitled to assert that ‘sensitivity to the politics of culture and a strong universalist position are not incompatible’ (CC, p. x). On the face of it, her normative framework seems prepared to admit a great deal of diversity—but only on the condition that any
arising political claims meet—and survive—her normative conditions,
which is more or less to play the game by one’s own rules. Her sympathetic
but wary response to reasonable legal pluralism20 makes it very clear that
when it comes to the conditions of ‘complex’cultural ‘dialogue,’some things
are negotiable and some are not, and we need to draw the line between them
in advance of inquiry and dialogue.
Without establishing very clear lines between nonnegotiable constitutional essentials
and those practices, rights, and entitlements that may be governed by different nomoi
groups; and without specifying the capacity of constitutional principles to trump other
kinds of legal regulations, we may not be resolving the paradox of multicultural vulnerability but simply permitting its recirculation without resolution throughout the system.
(CC, p. 128, my emphasis)
The attempt to treat constitutional essentials as strictly non-negotiable
seems to be in violation of the fallibilism which supposedly defines the normative content of modern reason (CC, p. 27). Fallibilism should apply as
much to normative principles as it does to truth claims; by shielding our normative principles from challenge and criticism, we undermine the basis of
our trust in them. Furthermore, Benhabib does not offer any explicit or compelling justification of why there must be a final resolution of the ‘paradox of
multicultural vulnerability,’ forcing a choice between our culture and our
rights. Through her insistence on the non-negotiability of constitutional
essentials, Benhabib also makes suspect her appeal to a ‘dialectic between
constitutional essentials and the actual politics of political liberalism’ (CC, p.
130).21 What kind of ‘dialectic’ could this be? Not a dynamic, open-ended
dialectic, since she restricts in advance the mutual transformation of its
respective parts, the possible transformation of which first sets any dialectical process in motion. The promised dialectical interaction would be
thwarted from the outset by conditions that seek, most undialectically, to plot
an unerring path to a pre-set goal. 22
Kompridis / NORMATIVIZING HYBRIDITY
331
Consider the normative inconsistency at the heart of Benhabib’s proposal
for how ‘we’ should make sense of and evaluate the claims of minority cultures (a ‘we’ that is invariably the we-perspective of the majority culture, or
the we-perspective of modernity itself—i.e., Western modernity). On one
hand, there is an admirable condition of intelligibility that she sets not just for
‘understanding’ the other, but also, morally more ambitious, for understanding the ‘otherness’ of the other:
I can learn the whoness of the other(s) only through their narratives of self-identification.
The norm of universal respect enjoins me to enter the conversation insofar as one is considered a generalized other; but I can become aware of the otherness of others, of those
aspects of their identity that make them concrete others to me, only through their own nar23
ratives. (CC, p. 14)
There is an entirely justifiable normativizing aspect of this reference to the
‘otherness of the other,’ for what we become aware of in becoming aware of
the ‘otherness of the other’ is an aspect of their humanity to which we would
not otherwise have access if we relied only on the norm of universal respect.
I am completely sympathetic to and in agreement with this normative
approach, but find myself puzzled by and disappointed with Benhabib’s further stipulation that the evaluation of the political claims made by minority
cultures requires that ‘our focus should be less on what the group is but more
on what the political leaders of such groups demand in the public sphere’
(CC, p. 16). The move from what is required to make sense of the ‘otherness
of the other’ to what is required to evaluate its specific political implications
is so abrupt we can hear the normative gears loudly grinding. Somehow, it no
longer really matters who the other is; what matters is what they (in the person
of their ‘leaders’) are demanding from us. But how, by Benhabib’s own standard of intelligibility, are we going to judge to which part/s of their cultural
identity they are entitled if we must proceed by ignoring or downplaying
‘those aspects of their identity that make them concrete others’ to us in the
first place? Can we justly judge, for example, the cultural claims of First
Nations peoples if we bracket their ‘whoness’? Wouldn’t that render their
cultural claims virtually unintelligible? Surely, we could not possibly understand and evaluate those claims independently of understanding and evaluating the identity of the claimants themselves, their so-called otherness, their
difference from us. And just as surely we could not do that if we did not also
notice that it is we who seem always to be occupying the privileged political
ground. Benhabib should be truer to her own normative intuitions: the moral
and cognitive obligation to understand the other/s in terms of their own narrative identifications cannot simply be set aside the moment we resolve to
332
POLITICAL THEORY / June 2005
judge the political legitimacy of their cultural claims, for in cases such as
these the question of who is making those claims is not independent of the
question of their legitimacy. Let us not make it too easy on ourselves by making too neat and tidy a separation between the intelligibility of others and the
validity or legitimacy of their cultural claims.
All the more troubling about Benhabib’s normative inconsistency is the
manner in which the issue of cultural conservation and preservation comes to
be elided in the very moment when we see that it is fatefully entwined with
the ‘norm of universal respect.’As Benhabib shows, that norm is conjoined to
a norm of understanding the ‘otherness’ of others, an understanding made
possible by ‘narratives of self-identification’ through which, and only
through which, others become intelligibly concrete others to us. But what
access will we have to their concrete ‘otherness’ under conditions in which
their ‘narratives of self-identification’ are under threat from asymmetrical
hybridization that results from forced or voluntary contact with us? If our
access to their ‘otherness’ depends on the integrity and availability of their
narratives of self-identification, what obligation are we under to foster conditions that provide those narratives some Lebensraum or access to cultural
resources that help them resist conditions that hasten their demise? Morally
speaking, just how much hybridizing pressure should societies allow their
majority cultures to exert on their minority cultures? Democratic theorists do
not sufficiently address this question when they ‘accept that the political
incorporation of new groups into established societies will result most likely
in the hybridization of cultural legacies on both sides’ (CC, p. x). We need
also to see that such hybridization can’t possibly be reciprocal and
symmetrical under conditions of political and economic inequality between
and among cultures.
Finally, democratic theorists need also to address the question of whether
we are asking minority cultures to open themselves to processes of hybridization to such an extent that we impose upon them a norm of absolute selferasing openness, a norm that we clearly do not impose on ourselves.24 If that
is the case, maybe we should not rest content with exposing immigrants to
hybridic processes of ‘boundary crossing, boundary blurring, or boundary
shifting between dominant and minority cultures’ (CC, p. x). Maybe we
should not rest content with a view that makes the only good boundary a
blurred boundary. Maybe we should reject a view that occludes the other
work that boundaries do—for example, in making meaningful distinctions
possible—in making distinctiveness itself possible. And so, when we say that
‘intercultural justice between groups should be defended in the name of justice and freedom and not of an elusive preservation of cultures’ (CC, p. 8),
maybe we also need to consider the possibility that in failing to take the ‘pres-
Kompridis / NORMATIVIZING HYBRIDITY
333
ervation of cultures’ seriously, no matter how ‘elusive,’ we just might bring
about circumstances in which we can no longer speak meaningfully about
‘intercultural justice between groups.’ Who would these groups be? What
would be left of them that would require or demand ‘intercultural justice’?
Since the construction of Benhabib’s entire argument, contrary to her
stated aims, devalues and neutralizes the claims of culture, it fails to balance
strong universalism with ‘sensitivity’ to the politics of culture. What she
offers is a normatively one-sided perspective that does not allow for the possibility that arguments for cultural preservation can arise from critical and not
just politically conservative impulses. That possibility is excluded from the
start by an identification of conservationist impulses with politically
conservative impulses:
Culturalist movements can be critical and subversive to the degree that they are motivated
by other than conservationist impulses. It matters a great deal whether we defend
culturalist demands because we want to preserve minority cultures within the liberaldemocratic state or because we want to expand the circle of democratic inclusion. (CC,
pp. ix-x)
What requires careful scrutiny here is the way in which Benhabib makes cultural criticism and cultural preservation mutually exclusive. She not only
dichotomizes critical impulses and conservationist impulses, thereby closing
off an invaluable source of normative criticism; she also dichotomizes cultural preservation and democratic inclusion (contrary, again, to her stated
claims).
So far as Benhabib is concerned, ‘in complex, pluralist democratic societies’ we are entitled to expect public recognition of the ‘specificity’ of our cultural identities only if we do so ‘in ways that do not deny their fluidity’(CC, p.
184). This formulation rings oddly, to my ear. How could you establish the
‘fluidity’of a cultural identity or cultural tradition if not against a background
of continuity and stability? I don’t see how one can even begin to identify the
cultural ‘specificity’ of anything if one does away with that background. Of
course, it also matters a great deal from which and from whose standpoint/s
cultural fluidity is assessed. In any case, cultural fluidity is something to
which we have reflective access only retrospectively; any assessment of the
fluidity of one’s culture’s identity will necessarily be open and indeterminate. It is very hard to see how something necessarily open and indeterminate
could play, as Benhabib suggests, a determinate normative role in decisions
about whether some feature of our cultural identity should be preserved. I
think that here Benhabib mistakenly assumes that an acknowledgment of the
fluidity of one’s cultural identity entails a weakening of one’s attachment to
334
POLITICAL THEORY / June 2005
it. However, nothing in principle makes our commitment to our cultural identities incompatible with an acknowledgment of their fluidity. Her insistence
on such acknowledgment, guided by the implicit expectation that it will act as
a brake on the claims of culture, keeping them within the proper limits set by
complex cultural dialogue, explains why she wants also to normativize fluidity. Revelatory in this respect is Benhabib’s remark following the introduction of the three normative conditions constitutive of such dialogue:
‘Whether cultural groups can survive as distinct entities under these conditions is an open question’ (CC, p. 20). But how can it be an ‘open’ question
when these normative conditions partially decide the ‘question’ in advance,
thereby actively reducing the chances of survival?
V. UNYIELDING MODERNISM
Benhabib understands the stringency of her normative conditions as a
necessary corrective to the tendency of ‘multicultural theorists’ such as
Kymlicka and Taylor to place far too much emphasis on ‘the continuity and
preservation of cultures over time as opposed to their reinvention,
reappropriation, and even subversion’ (CC, p. 68). But I think such stringency is unwarranted. If Kymlicka and Taylor have erred in overemphasizing
continuity and preservation, then Benhabib errs in the other direction, overemphasizing reinvention, reappropriation, and subversion. Once again, if the
problem with essentialists is that they are unable to account for discontinuity,
the problem with anti-essentialists is that they can’t account for continuity.
And so we continue to pay the price for one-sided, undercomplex understandings of the relationship between continuity and discontinuity. What we
need is a conceptual and normative perspective that grasps both continuity
(identity) and discontinuity (non-identity), without one-sidedly favouring
one over the other.
Perhaps, it is because of the unavailability of such a balanced and comprehensive perspective that we succumb to the misplaced and exaggerated worry
that any normative defence of cultural preservation necessarily involves
‘freezing existing group differences’(CC, pp. viii-ix). Let’s call this the argument against purity. While purity is not something we can or should aim for,
distinctiveness is most certainly something for which we should and must
aim. The two should not be conflated. If we fail to aim for distinctiveness, we
would not only be resigning ourselves to the levelling of cultural meaning
and significance; we would also be hastening its demise. So much of the work
of culture, especially today, is about preserving and expanding the realm of
Kompridis / NORMATIVIZING HYBRIDITY
335
distinctiveness, the realm of meaningful significance, and it is work undertaken under conditions most unfavourable to its success.
Benhabib’s appeal to hybridity and fluidity occludes this side of culture,
making the preservation and the facilitation of distinctiveness seem peculiar,
psychologically and politically immature. Here’s an example: ‘Identity/difference politics is afflicted by the paradox of wanting to preserve the purity of
the impure, the immutability of the historical, and the fundamentalness of the
contingent’ (CC, p. 11). But what if such a desire arises not from a lack of
psychological and political immaturity, but from an awareness of the fragility
and vulnerability of the semantic contents of cultural practices and cultural
traditions for which, and about which, we ought to care? What if it is not the
purity of the impure that we are trying to hold on to, but, rather, the semantic
resources upon which our sense-making, meaning-creating, justice-endorsing
capacities depend? Once such resources are lost, they can no longer be contested, renegotiated, or renewed. They are gone for good. The question that
Benhabib’s normative framework is incapable of answering is the question of
whether we will have made a mistake in failing to preserve certain cultural
resources (of whether we have lost the good as well as the bad).
Thus, it is a deep problem for Benhabib that her proposal is incapable of
discriminating finely, sensitively, between values and practices we should
want to continue and those we should want to discontinue. Partly, this is
because Benhabib has an instrumentalist view of culture. She’s not unlike
Kymlicka in this respect, since for her as much as for Kymlicka, culture is
instrumental to individual autonomy. ‘Members of cultural groups cannot be
autonomous if they are unable to participate in cultural reproduction and cultural struggle, including the transformation of some cultural traditions’ (CC,
p. 66). But I believe it is mostly because of Benhabib’s professed ‘modernism.’ Walter Benjamin, a key thinker of the critical theory tradition to which
both Benhabib and I belong, had a very different view of the issue of cultural
preservation, a view developed with a heightened sensitivity to the meaningdestroying forces of modernity. For Benjamin, conservationist impulses
were essential to the practice of ‘rescuing critique,’ critique normatively
enabled and dependent upon the threatened semantic contents of cultural
practices and cultural traditions—practices and traditions ready to be
exploited, marginalized, or discarded by a progress-obsessed modernity.25
The moral significance of this kind of critique has not gone unnoticed,
least of all by Habermas. In an essay, now some three decades old, Habermas
tried to confront the challenge posed by Benjamin to a modernity hell-bent
on annihilating the past, and, along with it, the semantic contents of cultural
traditions.
336
POLITICAL THEORY / June 2005
Is it possible that one day an emancipated human race could encounter itself within an
expanded space of discursive will formation and yet be robbed of the light in which it is
capable of interpreting its life as something good? . . . Without the influx of those semantic energies with which Benjamin’s rescuing critique was concerned, the structures of
practical discourse—finally well established—would necessarily become desolate.26
We are perhaps farther than ever from the day when we can talk about an
emancipated human race, but much closer to a situation in which we can see
Benjamin’s question in a different light. It is not the Kafkaesque possibility
that an ‘emancipated’ human race, having thoughtlessly depleted the semantic contents of its cultural traditions, will find itself incapable of interpreting
its achievement as something good, incapable even of understanding the
question. If Benjamin is right, we will never have to face that question.
Rather, what we face now is the very real possibility that our attempts to fashion just political institutions within the framework of democratic forms of
life will be in vain if we proceed as though we can do so without drawing
upon and at the same time renewing the semantic contents and cultural energies upon which they ultimately depend—put differently, if we proceed as
though we can put culture in its political place, denying our dependence upon
its semantic light (which, unfortunately, cannot be had without the darkness
it also casts). What we should be worried about, then, is a view of liberal justice and impartiality that aims in the first instance to ensure the maximization
of pluralism while, at the same time, blindly, ‘unknowingly’ contributing to
the erasure of the cultural and semantic resources in light of which individuals and groups can choose from among genuine alternatives and possibilities.
If we are to preserve the possibility of a future different from the past, we
must also preserve possibilities that we inherit from the past.
Since she has conceded so much to the sceptical anti-essentialist view of
culture, Benhabib is left in the position of being unable confidently to
endorse passing on any of our cultural traditions or cultural practices, for they
cannot be seen as containing anything in which we can place our trust. All
that can be confidently passed on are ‘rights.’But how can rights be passed on
independently of that which gives them their meaning and their point? Without the thick value terms that are the work and result of cultural practices and
cultural traditions, just what sense can we make of, what point can we give to,
those rights?27
Benhabib’s unyielding attitude towards the question of cultural preservation and conservation means letting ‘nature’ take its course. She is extremely
dismissive of ‘ecological’arguments that make the case for cultural preservation on analogy with the preservation of biodiversity. Although she rightly
argues that such a naturalistic argument cannot settle moral and political
questions of cultural preservation, her own argument becomes naturalistic.
Kompridis / NORMATIVIZING HYBRIDITY
337
Like Habermas, Benhabib is of the view that forms of life and cultural traditions which cannot motivate and convince their members to reproduce them
do not deserve to survive.28 But, once again, this is to ignore that under conditions of modernity, some cultures and traditions are more vulnerable than
others, less capable of motivating and convincing their members in the face
of considerable ‘competition’from majority cultures and traditions. So, morally and politically speaking, it may be that cultures that ‘deserve’ to survive
will fail to survive for all the wrong reasons. Moreover, under contemporary
historical conditions of deep diversity and globalization, processes of cultural reproduction are not simply (nor were they ever) a matter of rationally
convincing and motivating the members of a form of life or cultural tradition
to appropriate and continue them. A lot of other factors play a decisive role—
power, ideology, contingency, and chance, to name a few. So this is an empirically false and normatively unpersuasive view, which, because it is so
opposed to the very idea of cultural preservation, inadvertently reverts to a
form of cultural Darwinism.29
Thus, the argument against purity put forward by Benhabib treats cultural
hybridity as part of modernising and globalising processes which cannot be
held back. In her various references to modernity, she indicates that she is
willing to let processes of modernisation ‘take care’ of the problem of cultural preservation (i.e., only the most modern survive). Contrary to all her
repeated strictures against ranking cultures, she does not even bother to
explain or justify her appeal to modernity as the normative standard against
which all other cultures must be measured. Her position all too easily lends
itself to upholding the ‘law of progress,’a law, as Hannah Arendt pointed out,
that ‘holds that everything now must be better than what was before.’ To
uphold this law is to deny that anything that came before is worth holding on
to. And, as Arendt goes on to warn, in a Benjaminian spirit, ‘Don’t you see, if
you want something better, and better, and better, you lose the good. The
good is no longer even being measured.’30
Perhaps the time has come to ask whether there is not something coercive,
even repressive, about all this talk exhorting hybridity, fluidity,
renegotiatibility, etc. Perhaps, it is time to take a much closer look at this
‘modernist’ attitude according to which opposition to ‘a globalized world of
uncertainty, hybridity, fluidity, and contestation’ (CC, p. 186) is supposed to
be a symptom of an anti-modern attitude typical of modernity-rejecting fundamentalists (who, it must be said, are as much the products of modernity as
the rest of us). There are good reasons to wish for another kind of modernity,
one not so arrogant, not so intent on forcing us to choose whether we are for it
or against it. Deliberative democrats and critical theorists must guard against
naturalizing processes of modernization and globalization that make resis-
338
POLITICAL THEORY / June 2005
tance to them seem ‘unnatural.’ The last thing we want to do is encourage an
attitude of mind that regards them as unstoppable. We can put our foot on the
brake. We do not have to keep it pressed down on the accelerator, while trying, impossibly, to steer safely through the piling wreckage. We need to
imagine alternative modernities for ourselves, modernities in which braking
is not antimodern, in which asking for more time is not antimodern, in which
slowing time down is not antimodern—and, above all, in which stopping
long enough to salvage something from the wreckage is not antimodern. The
description of ‘a globalized world of uncertainty, hybridity, fluidity, and
contestation’ sounds far too much like the ideal conditions necessary for the
expansion of global capital, conditions under which the only kind of
hybridity encouraged and fostered is the kind that syncopates nicely with the
jaunty rhythms of consumer capitalism. But to all those who cannot count on
the availability of sufficient material and symbolic resources with which to
negotiate through times of uncertainty, fluidity, etc. (e.g., the rising number
of people working longer and longer hours for lower and lower wages), all
this talk is not only going to sound glib, it is also going to sound oppressive.
And it may well represent one more way that this particular modernity undermines the very freedom it promises, one more way that it exposes itself as a
promise-breaking form of life.
VI. CODA: THINKING THE IDENTITY
AND NON-IDENTITY OF CULTURE
In the early decades of the twentieth century, the already renowned Hungarian composer Bela Bartok set out to record, and thereby preserve, ‘authentic’ Hungarian folk music. In undertaking this project, he was responding not just to an (ethno)musicological need, but also to the long-recognized
and much-discussed need for Hungarian national self-definition. To his considerable surprise, Bartok discovered something else entirely—he discovered musical and cultural hybridity. Long before Bhaba, Gilroy, Rushdie, and
others, he discovered the quintessential hybridic process: the crossing and
recrossing of cultural styles, genres, and materials, which, with each crossing
and recrossing, were newly and individually inflected. While this dismantled
his own essentialist assumptions about the ethnic and national purity of Eastern European and Balkan folk music, because of Bartok’s musical authority,
it also infuriated nationalists and chauvinists across the region. Nobody
wanted to hear about the impurity of their cultural traditions in the very
moment when culture had become an essential and irreplaceable instrument
of nationalist self-consciousness. Remarking with tart irony on the politically
Kompridis / NORMATIVIZING HYBRIDITY
339
charged results of his research, in this case in connection with the odd-metred
‘Bulgarian rhythm’ and the highly melismatic ‘long song’ (or ‘long
melody’), Bartok writes,
Up till now it seemed that this kind of rhythm is a Bulgarian peculiarity. But the most
recent researches disclose that it is known also among the Rumanians and the Turkish
peoples. Should further researches verify that one can really find its origin in Bulgaria, it
might very well happen that the poor discoverer would be stoned—only in effigy, of
course—by the opposite side; on the other hand, if the researcher arrives at a contrary
result the Bulgarians would stone him. Similarly, another very interesting question is the
origin of the so-called ‘long song’. It has been established up till now that this kind of
melody is spread in Persia, Iraq, Middle-Algeria, Old Rumania, and the Ukraine, that is,
among peoples of four different nationalities. It is difficult to presume that these four peoples have produced the identical melodic type entirely independently of each other (such
coincidences do not exist): by all means we should give priority to one of the four. Well,
now how could an honest researcher pronounce judgement? For if the above-mentioned
example would found a Rumanian school, the researcher could never again set foot on the
31
soil of the three insulted countries.
Bartok did not recoil in ironic detachment upon discovering musical
impurity and cultural hybridity; rather, that discovery became the occasion
for re-envisioning the relationship between identity and non-identity, and the
relationship between the old and new. Take, for instance, Bartok’s conclusions about the formerly echt-Hungarian Rákóczi March, which turns out to
be both very un-Hungarian and very Hungarian. If
we analyse the Rákóczi March we find in it elements originating from the Arabic-Persian
“long melody”, Eastern European-Hungarian elements, and ornamental motives of Central European art music: quite a collection of the most heterogeneous elements. Nevertheless, the way they are transformed, melted, and unified presents as a final result a masterpiece of music whose spirit and characteristics are incontestably Hungarian.32
Usually, Bartok’s repudiation of the ardent nationalism of his youth is
treated as a story of moral and political progress that begins in nationalism
and ends in cosmopolitanism. But this is much too simplistic. To those of us
seeking to think differently about the political claims of culture, Bartok was
actually on to something much more interesting and much more valuable.
Bartok not only discovered musical hybridity; he also uncovered the
‘sociohistorical heterogeneity of one’s own country,’33 and, thereby, the
identity and non-identity of culture.
On another occasion, in a more appropriate context, Bartok’s music might
serve as a model for how we can integrate the new and the old, and how we
can interact with ‘the otherness of the other’ without erasing it.34 In anticipation of that exploration, I want to refer to a remark of Jacques Derrida, which
340
POLITICAL THEORY / June 2005
James Tully congenially cites in Strange Multiplicity: what is ‘proper to a
culture is not to be identical with itself.’35 As I have tried to show throughout
this paper, this gets it only half right. In order to avoid the traps of essentialist
anti-essentialism, we need to recognize that a culture can only be non-identical with itself to the extent that it remains identical with itself. If a culture is
deeply discontinuous with itself, it cannot even begin to experience its own
difference with itself, cannot recognize that difference as its own, as ‘proper’
to it. So if we are going to insist that there is ‘no culture or cultural identity
without this difference with itself,’36 we must not forget that there can be no
meaningful difference without sufficient identity, no intelligible discontinuity without sufficient continuity. A culture that is strictly nonidentical with
itself would be a culture without a past. It should be pretty much self-evident,
but obviously not self-evident enough, that a condition of self-critically
transforming the culture to which we complexly belong is that we claim it as
our own, take responsibility for its history, its rights and wrongs. The lack of
any identification with our culture renders us indifferent to its fate,
indifferent to its future possibilities as much as to its past injustices.
NOTES
1. Christian Lenhardt, ‘Anamnestic Solidarity,’ Telos, no. 25 (Fall 1975): 154.
2. James Tully, Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995), 5.
3. I believe we are looking at an intellectual situation in which an incautious anti-essentialism
about culture reproduces the same metaphysical errors as has an incautious antirealism about the
physical world. Both deny connection.
4. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993);
Homi Bhaba, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1995); Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera (San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987); and James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988).
5. Bhaba, The Location of Culture, 225.
6. Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, 95.
7. Jeremy Waldron, ‘Minority Cultures and the Cosmopolitan Alternative,’ University of
Michigan Law Review 25, nos. 3/4 (Spring and Summer 1992): 763.
8. Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, 95, my emphasis.
9. Waldron, ‘Minority Cultures and the Cosmopolitan Alternative,’ 763, my emphasis.
10. That the positions in 1-4 make it very hard normatively to endorse cultural hybridity without endorsing capitalist culture is quietly ignored.
11. Ayelet Schachar, ‘Should Church and State Be Joined at the Altar? Women’s Rights and
the Multicultural Dilemma,’ in Citizenship in Diverse Societies, ed. Will Kymlicka and Wayne
Norman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 223.
12. Seyla Benhabib, The Claims of Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
2002), 4-5. All further references to this text will be cited as CC in parentheses.
Kompridis / NORMATIVIZING HYBRIDITY
341
13. For a useful discussion of the differences between weak and strong holism, see James
Bohman, ‘Holism without Skepticism: Contextualism and the Limits of Interpretation,’ in The
Interpretive Turn, ed. David Hiley, James Bohman, and Richard Shusterman (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), 129-54.
14. On this, see Allison Weir, Sacrificial Logics: Feminist Theory and the Critique of Identity
(London: Routledge, 1996); and also Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Spinosa, ‘Two Kinds of AntiEssentialism,’ Critical Inquiry 22 (Summer 1996): 735-63.
15.
Sociological constructivism does not suggest that cultural differences are shallow or
somehow unreal or ‘fictional’. Cultural differences run very deep and are very real. The
imagined boundaries between them are not phantoms in deranged minds; imagination
can guide human action and behavior as well as any other cause of human action. (CC, p. 7)
Besides begging all the questions, this distinction is much too subtle. What all this really comes
down to is the bifurcation of reason and imagination, the bifurcation of reason and its ‘other,’and,
at the same time, the bifurcation of morality and culture.
16. In connection with his critique of ‘Romantic irony,’ Hegel described the essence of this
relation as one in which the subject ‘knows himself to be disengaged and free from everything,
not bound to anything, because he is just as able to destroy as to create the bonds that bind him.’
G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über Ästhetik I, vol. 13 of his Werke (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986),
95. For an analysis of the sceptical implications of ironist theory, see Nikolas Kompridis, ‘Reorienting Critique: From Ironist Theory to Transformative Practice,’ Philosophy and Social
Criticism 26, no. 4 (2000): 23-48.
17. Notice how the old Marxist distinction between base and superstructure resurfaces as the
distinction between morality (as a product of reason) and culture (as a product of the imagination—mere Überbau).
18. One of the valuable insights of Schachar’s paper, ‘Should Church and State Be Joined at
the Altar?’(cited above), is that it shows just how gendered are processes of cultural preservation
and conservation. Rather than offering one-way tickets out to women vulnerable to oppression
within their communities of origin, Schachar’s ‘joint governance’model looks to provide women
‘the leverage to renegotiate oppressive family law traditions from within their cultural communities, armed with their hard-won rights as state citizens’ (p. 223).
19. This last phrase is from Charles Taylor’s essay, ‘What’s Wrong with Negative Liberty?’in
Taylor, Philosophical Papers, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 216.
20. Although sympathetic to Schachar’s ‘joint-governance’ approach (‘amongst the most
imaginative institutional proposals put forward to deal with the paradox of multicultural vulnerability’; CC, 127-28), Benhabib is nonetheless convinced that it can foster the ‘balkanization’and
‘refeudalization’ of the law. Given Benhabib’s intention of understanding the otherness of the
other, I think there is good reason to regret Benhabib’s choice of words here, especially
‘balkanization.’ For a trenchant critique of the monistic, monoglot view of law that James Tully
calls ‘modern constitutionalism,’a view that perforce must regard even reasonable forms of legal
pluralism as risking the ‘balkanization’ and ‘refeudalization’ of the law, see Tully’s Strange
Multiplicity.
21. In ‘New Facts, Old Norms,’Bonnie Honig offers some persuasive criticism of Benhabib’s
tendency (which she shares with Habermas) to normatively privilege the law over democratic
politics. This paper was originally presented at University of California, Berkeley, on March 18,
2004, in response to Benhabib’s Tanner Lecture (also at Berkeley), ‘Reclaiming Universalism:
Negotiating Republican Self-Determination and Cosmopolitan Norms,’ Tuesday, March 16,
342
POLITICAL THEORY / June 2005
2004, and ‘Democratic Iterations: The Local, the National, and the Global,’ Wednesday, March
17, 2004.
22. For an approach to the issue of cultural preservation that is willing, and compellingly so,
to put into play a genuine dialectic between liberal principles and the claims of culture, see
Joseph Carens, ‘Democracy and Respect for Difference: The Case of Fiji,’in Joseph Carens, Culture, Citizenship, and Community: A Contextual Exploration of Justice as Evenhandedness
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 200-59.
23. Of course, the kind of intercultural understanding that figures here supposes the very
holistic interpretive perspective that Benhabib rejects, lacking which the intelligibility of the
‘whoness’ or otherness of the other is rendered opaque, inaccessible.
24. In her ethnographic work in Japan, Ruth Benedict demanded of the Japanese the cultivation of detachment from their own cultural values in order to achieve a flexible reflective assessment of them—to regard them, in other words, as infinitely renegotiable.
It amounts to the demand
that the Japanese learn to view their culture with a certain scientific detachment and to see
their received values as relative and therefore open to revision in the service of consciously chosen ends. Ultimately, the imperial vision of Benedict’s ‘world made safe for
differences’lies not only in any covert imposition of American values on the Japanese but
in the overt and uncompromising call for the subordination of all cultures to the demands
of individual choice. (Christopher Shannon, ‘A World Made Safe for Differences: Ruth
Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword,’ American Quarterly 47 [1995]: 659-80,
cited in David Scott, ‘Culture in Political Theory,’ Political Theory 31, no. 1 [February
2003]: 110)
Readers of David Scott’s very fine paper will see that he and I are motivated by similar worries
concerning the place of culture in politics.
25. Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History,’ in Illuminations, ed. Hannah
Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969).
26. Jürgen Habermas, ‘Consciousness-Raising or Rescuing Critique,’ in On Walter
Benjamin: Critical Essays and Recollections, ed. Gary Smith (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1988), 123.
27. For compelling criticism of the Habermasian distinction between values and norms (a
distinction that appears in the distinction Benhabib draws between moral and cultural discourses;
CC, pp. 39-40), see Hilary Putnam, The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 111-34. For Habermas’s response, see Jürgen
Habermas, ‘Norms and Values: On Hilary Putnam’s Kantian Pragmatism,’ in Habermas, Truth
and Justification (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003), 213-36.
28. Jürgen Habermas, ‘Struggles for Recognition in the Democratic Constitutional State,’ in
Multiculturalism. Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutman (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1994), 130.
29. Listen, for instance, to the harsh overtones in Habermas’s remark concerning the cultural
dynamics of modernity: ‘The accelerated pace of change in modern societies explodes all stationary forms of life’; ibid., 132. Leaving aside the question of what ‘stationary’ form of life can
mean, and whether any form of life can actually be described in this way, is this really the way we
would like to frame the issue of cultural preservation, as though the contents of culture were subject to quasi-natural processes of destruction?
30. Hannah Arendt, ‘Hannah Arendt: From an Interview,’ New York Review of Books 25, no.
16 (October 26, 1978): 18.
31. Bela Bartok, Essays (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 27.
Kompridis / NORMATIVIZING HYBRIDITY
343
32. Bartok, Essays, 32.
33. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogical Imagination (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981),
245.
34. I explore this possibility in a forthcoming paper, ‘On the Identity and Non-Identity of Culture with Itself.’ For a discussion of alternative ways to think the relation between new and old,
see my ‘The Normativity of the New,’ in Philosophical Romanticism, ed. Nikolas Kompridis
(London: Routledge, 2005).
35. Cited in Tully, Strange Multiplicity, 14.
36. Ibid., 14.
Nikolas Kompridis is an assistant professor of philosophy at York University, Toronto,
and the author of Critique and Disclosure: Critical Theory between Past and Future (MIT
Press, 2005) and Philosophical Romanticism (Routledge, 2005).