REPLY TO ROBERT GOODING-WILLIAMS

Judith Butler
I am especially pleased to be responding to Robert Gooding-Williamss paper,
and to be continuing this dialogue, one that we have been having for at least 15
years. Im not one to engage the confessional mode, but it seems relevant to the
argument at hand here, one that has everything to do with the possibility of
dialogue 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 studied
philosophy at Yale in the early 80s, and for the most part I remember that we
debated about Hegel and Nietzsche and about which part of the Frankfurt School
was more to our liking, and I suppose as well that there was between us an
assumption that hermeneutics remained an important and hopeful conception of
philosophy: a notion of thinking as conversation seemed crucial to us both. At that
time, I read feminist theory and taught it, but on the side. And Gooding-Williams
read widely in cultural theory, including works on race, but that also did not
appear in the classes that we took, in the papers that we wrote or, indeed, in the
dissertations that we finally completed. It was only some years later that we both
found ourselves teaching parallel courses at different universities on gender and
race, and I well remember the excitement of moving between a philosophical
tradition 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, for
instance, the appropriation and revision of Hegels 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 profound
and abiding sense of identification with him, but also to explain the occasion in
which I invoke the we in something of the sense that he proposes toward the
end of his paper. But I also offer this context to raise some questions about what
this identification consists in, and how identification more generally relates to
questions of race, multiculturalism, and the task of hermeneutical conversation
that he raises in his excellent essay. Indeed, I have just sought to give a narrative
in which I offer some insight into who we are, we who after all go back a long
way, indeed were born within a mile of each other. That mile is the stretch of
Cleveland, Ohio around West 105th street where for a time the black middle class
lived not far from the Jewish middle class, where much of Clevelands artworld
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and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
exists, where my synagogue was, where Bobs father taught, where beautiful
brick homes lined the streets, a stretch that is now plagued by poverty, populated
with 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 think
that separation, and whether the hermeneutical solution that Bob proposes is
enough to help us with this difficulty. Indeed, the more general philosophical
problem 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 difference
between 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 of
the we; thus the ethical problem posed by multiculturalism is not, strictly
speaking, that of coming to understand the Other, but, rather, of revising and
expanding 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 Charles
Taylor, but also for those who think that it is by appropriating a Levinasian view
of 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 Other
as 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 the
ways in which the other may well be more properly a constitutive part of the
self than first appears? If one takes the argument that Gooding-Williams
advances, namely, that contemporary culture is itself syncratic, if not hybrid, then
the very distinction between self and other appears not only arbitrary, but belated
and imposed, deflecting from the kind of inquiry that interrogates the complex
cultural sources of the self that multiculturalism demands of us.
There are, of course, ways of realizing that the other is part of the self which
simply reinstate a colonizing notion of the self in which every moment of alterity
is recast as an always already internal feature of the self, a situation in which no
confrontation with difference, and no transformation in light of that confrontation
is demanded or undergone.
Gooding-Williams proposes that we revise and expand the we and come to
understand that black culture is not foreign to mainstream culture, but constitutes
it essentially. Here he seems to be in favor of a certain conception of cultural
hybridity. And he also is right, in my view, to continue the critique of Charles
Taylor, who uses the notion of our culture and their culture as if they are
sociological givens, without even inquiring into what composes those cultures
and the appearance of their external difference to one another. His essay on
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Reply to Gooding-Williams: Judith Butler 43
multiculturalism does not include the question of whether such cultures are
composed in ways that make them radically inextricable from one another.
If we accept Gooding-Williamss thesis that the putative alterity of black
culture needs to be rethought as part of the mainstream American culture, which
it 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 to
emphasize the problem of exclusion and marginalization if we begin with the
heuristic that black culture is not a minority culture, but part of the majority from
the start? What does Gooding-Williams think of those critiques of the category of
the we, such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivaks, in which its invocations can
work in the service of a suppression, in which the very expansion of the we
constitutes an imperialist gesture whereby cultural differences are subordinated
precisely through the strategy of an ever-expansive inclusion? Is there a way to
distinguish between the revision and expansion of the we that avows the ways
in which cultural alterity is part of the majoritarian self, as it were, without
that very revision and expansion becoming a new form of domination?
The quasi-religious invocation of alterity that the Levinasian view supports
seems 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. Is
there 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 not
unitary, 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 view
of a multiplicitous black identity that he also wants to affirm.
Gooding-Williams defines black identity, for instance, as the the effect of a
rule-governed social practice of racial classification, and uses this definition to
clarify the sense of social construction that he means to defend. He distinguishes,
with Stuart Hall, black identity from an African-American identity, and points out
that there are several historical and cultural contexts for blackness in the United
States that are not necessarily the same as that denoted by African-American. He
names Afro-Caribbean and Latin American routes of descent, as well as African
origins 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-unitary
notion of blackness is the singular effect of a rule-governed social practice of
racial 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 racial
classification? Is race the effect of a single such social practice, and is that
social practice always that of racial classification, one that can be traced to a
distinct periodization within European history? Are there less official and less
overt forms of racial construction that are not reducible to such schemes of racial
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44 Constellations Volume 5, Number 1, 1998
classification or that cannot be traced back to them historically? In particular, I
am reminded of the problem with Sartres view in Anti-Semite and Jew that the
Jew is one who has been called a Jew, constructed as a Jew within the terms of
anti-semitism. Is not the Jew also something other than what the anti-semite says
the 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 that
produce their own social and cultural values that are black but not in the same
sense 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 is
produced as a result of such classificatory schemes, but he also adds that one
becomes black only if one begins to identify as black [and] one begins to make
choices, to formulate plans, to express concerns in light of ones identification of
oneself 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? Some
psychoanalytic accounts of identification argue that identification is never fully
complete and never fully successful, and that this failure constitutive of identifi-
cation is precisely what distinguishes it from identity. Can the identification with
blackness that Gooding-Williams mentions ever be complete? And if one must
identify 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 the
blackness with which one identifies a cultural value or norm? Is it an idealization
or, 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 failure
to 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 exposure
of that incommensurability not open up possibilities for a rearticulation of the
norm itself? What is Gooding-Williamss 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 purposes
of social theory? If identification only becomes possible when identity is not fully
achieved, 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 of
any possible identity? If identification undermines identity in this sense, then it
would 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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Reply to Gooding-Williams: Judith Butler 45
voluntaristically engaged? The demand for a theory that accounts for race as an
effect that is at once lived and transformed in the course of its being lived
suggests a move away from those mechanistically formulated versions of social
construction 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 stay
with 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 not
be fully constrained from its putatively classificatory origins; the possibilities for
its meanings must exceed the original purposes for which it was designed. I
would expect Gooding-Williams to accept this basically Nietzschean view that
such terms form a sign-chain in which the original purposes for which they are
devised 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 be
dialogue, does there not have to be a certain notion of distance, one that cannot
be 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 I
identify with you does not mean that I am the same as you, or that I think that the
analogies between us make our experiences radically interchangeable with one
another. But it does give me the chance to speak to you and to hear you, a chance
that may be as much conditioned by what separates us as by any common set of
presuppositions 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 implicitly
binds them together? Does the hermeneutical view stress the existence of
common presuppositions to such a degree that it domesticates the differences that
animate conversation, predicating the notion of conversation that it promotes on
that very domestication? Here I am not only referring to differences that are
necessarily enabling of conversation, but those that impede and stop conversation
as well (indeed, a multicultural conversation might well have to run into such
breaks and ruptures in order to enter into radical reflection on the presuppositions
that foreclose conversation from the start). What place is there within the
hermeneutical dialogue for the expression of such a difference that produces a
break in common understanding or epistemic rupture to use Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivaks term? Such ruptures are significant, challenging, galvaniz-
ing, even necessary in order to call the racial presuppositions of conversation into
question, in order to force a revaluation of an abiding schema of understanding
that has exclusionary or marginalizing moves built into it. One of the reasons that
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46 Constellations Volume 5, Number 1, 1998
multicultural conversation often seems so difficult is that it often turns on such
moments, 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 to
resist this encounter, the break in question looks like irrationalism, but it is only
the exposure of the contingent limits of an available rationality scheme. Others,
still, who resist that important rupture will understand this epistemic hiatus as a
permanent 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 in
order to begin it again. Importing this sort of violence into the hermeneutic
scheme may well allow us to develop a view that prizes the we as a condition
and effect of dialogue without sacrificing the mobilizing force of difference.
NOTE
1. See Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 223232.
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Reply to Gooding-Williams: Judith Butler 47