The Unsettled and Unsettling Claims of Culture: A Reply to Seyla Benhabib

Author(s): Nikolas Kompridis

Source: Political Theory, Vol. 34, No. 3 (Jun., 2006), pp. 389-396
Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20452465
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 - 00 ; 19-396
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of Culture
A Reply to Seyla Benhabib
Nikolas Kompridis
York University, Toronto, Canada

Jn "Normativizing Hybridity/Neutralizing Culture", I raised some questions

about the application of an insufficiently self-critical and prematurely
normativized understanding of cultural hybridity to the ongoing debates on
the political claims of culture. I am by no means denying the reality of cul
tural hybridity;1 hybridity is a very real and very distinctive feature of cul
tural interactions and cultural change, and has been from the start. I do not
see it as a threat to the putative purity of culture, against which minority cul
tures, especially, should be defended. And I do not think that the experience
of oppression and marginalization can "guarantee" a progressive or just pol
itics: Nothing can guarantee that, not even a liberal constitution (as recent
U.S. politics makes abundantly clear). Nor do I assume, as Seyla Benhabib
claims, that "contestability and hybridity are merely arbitrary acts of inter
pretation". Most certainly I do not hold the view that "the predicament of
minority cultures" is "a consequence of the wrong theories of culture". My
quarrel with Seyla Benhabib's The Claims of Culture concerns, first of all, the
normative implications which she draws from the phenomenon of cultural
hybridity (1). Second, it concerns the limitations of her proposed model of
cultural dialogue in and through which the political claims of culture are
supposed to be thematized and adjudicated (2). And third, it concerns the
unaccommodating scope of her modernism (3).
(1) Benhabib very confidently asserts that she has "put forth a philo
sophically adequate and social-scientifically defensible concept of culture".
However, she seems not to have given sufficient weight to the fact that the
concept of culture is itself highly contestable, as are the theoretical languages
in which it is formulated. There can be considerable disagreement framed by
very different assumptions over what counts as culture, and to what it can be
applied.2 As it is, Benhabib's proposed concept depends far too much for its
persuasiveness upon an invidious contrast with an implausibly strong view of

389

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390 Political Theory

cultures as seamless, impermeable wholes that she ascribes to multicultural

theorists in general.3 While this excessively holistic view of culture is one that
can be found in Will Kymlicka's theory of multiculturalism, essentialism
about culture is not essential to multicultural theory, as the work of James
Tully, Joseph Carens, and Bikhu Parekh proves.4
My suggestion that we think of culture as both identical and non-identical
with itself was an attempt to frame conceptually the continuities and dis
continuities of culture in a way that is independent of essentialist and anti
essentialist frameworks and their respective limitations. Whereas Benhabib in
her book is worried about the normative implications of essentializing the
idea of culture, in my essay I'm worried about the normative implications
that follow from essentializing hybridity and fluidity. In her reply, Benhabib
claims to be puzzled by my use of Bela Bartok's ethnomusicological research
to support the idea of culture as both identical and non-identical with itself,
since she sees that idea to be very much what she has in mind, and proceeds
to redescribe her own position in my terms. But that is not the view of cul
ture she asserts and defends in her book. Throughout The Claims of Culture,
Benhabib repeatedly and emphatically stresses the ways in which cultures
are not identical with themselves. Nowhere in her book does she formulate
the idea of culture in terms that stress both its identity and non-identity with
itself. Perhaps, if she had begun with this more capacious understanding of
culture, she would have drawn very different normative implications.
For example, she could have approached questions of cultural preserva
tion very differently, and more open-mindedly. It doesn't have to be pre
sented (and easily rejected) as demanding the right to "freeze" existing
cultural differences (which, in any case, is not a real possibility); it can be
presented instead as a matter of fairly and sensitively enabling the free inter
play between what is identical and non-identical in a culture with itself-a
matter that requires a sensitive and reflective attunement to context as well
as appeal to democratic and constitutional norms, which must themselves
be open to contestation and revision. Benhabib's position that minority cul
tural identities "should seek public recognition of their specificity in ways
that do not deny their fluidity" (The Claims of Culture, 184), exemplifies the
one-sidedness of her position, since it unfairly imposes upon minority cul
tural identities a standard of reflexivity and openness to change that major
ity cultures do not impose on themselves.5 Yes, reflexivity and openness to
change (change we can reflectively endorse and freely will) are good things
indeed, but they are not nearly as good when they function as coercive or
unfair normative expectations under asymmetrical conditions of power and
influence.6

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 Kompridis / Reply to Seyla Benhabib 391

Presented as a corrective to the essentialist view of culture, Benhabib

overstates the fluidity and hybridity of cultures, and supports it with an anti
holistic view of culture that is no less problematic than the excessively holis
tic view she criticizes.7 I suggested that rather than having to choose between
strong holism and anti-holism, we can take up a weaker form of holism-one
that allows us to bring into view the ways in which cultures are both identi
cal and non-identical with themselves-and that also makes room for partial
incommensurability between different cultural and normative perspec
tives, and between different practices and standards of justification. In fact,
Benhabib's anti-holism is inconsistent with her essentially holistic (but
overly discursive) view of the narrative constitution of cultures, the consti
tution of which depends on the capacity of these narratives to form "an
epistemically plausible whole" (Benhabib, this issue).8 Similarly, her total
rejection of incommensurability is inconsistent with her recognition of cul
tural hybridity and fluidity. Incommensurability can occur in the horizontal
dimension of historical time as well as in the vertical dimension of cultural
space. Processes of semantic and cultural change, especially under modem
conditions of time acceleration, can create a situation in which our sense
making narratives and frameworks break down or become exhausted,
prompting an "epistemological crisis."
Although Benhabib is right to claim that there is an important distinc
tion to be made between the participant's and observer's perspective (The
Claims of Culture, 5), we should not absolutize that distinction, and treat
either of these perspectives as determinate and context-independent. Setting
aside the point that most ethnography is undertaken from the standpoint of
the participant-observer, and that under conditions of expanding pluraliza
tion and globalization this distinction is becoming harder and harder to sus
tain, it is not necessarily and not always the case that the emphasis on the
homogeneity and internal unity of a culture is a function of the observer's
perspective. The observer's perspective can stress continuities as well as
discontinuities. One has only to think of the work of early and middle
period Foucault, whose archaeologies and genealogies were often criticized
(especially by Habermas) both for overemphasizing discontinuities and for
privileging the perspective of the observer. The "stranger" in our midst will
likely see things we do not, or cannot; things we simply take for granted.
There is nothing built into the observer's perspective that dictates that it will
emphasize continuities at the expense of discontinuities. Which of these get
emphasized will depend on who the observer is, and what strikes her as rel
evant, as well as on the particular interpretive and epistemic circumstances in
which she finds herself. Conversely, the participant's perspective presupposes

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392 Political Theory

a holistically structured background understanding of her culture against

which she can contest various features of it, making certain discontinuities
more salient against a background continuity. Because the participant can
presuppose those background continuities, she does not need to seek "for
more unity and coherence". In cases of epistemological crisis, when some
part of that holistic background itself dissolves, participants must search for
new continuities in order to create a new "epistemically plausible whole".
(2) Benhabib believes I completely misunderstand her because I failed
to recognize the place of narrative in her concept of culture. On the con
trary, I recognize the place of narrative in her view of culture; I just don't
think it coheres with her anti-holism and her anti-essentialism. For that
matter, I don't think it coheres with the cognitive and moral forms of uni
versalism she thinks must be defended-her basically Habermasian view of
law, morality, and justification. A more consistent and coherent position
would be the Hegelian one in which narrative is not only the medium of cul
ture and identity but also of the explanation and justification of our norms,
institutions, and practices. What we would have is not a quasi-transcendental
account of normative legitimacy, but a historical narrative of legitimation,
which is open-ended since it takes normative change as basic.9
It is the limitations of her universalism in face of deep cultural pluralism
and the irreducibility of reasonable disagreement that render her account of
"complex cultural dialogue" unconvincing. These limitations are most clearly
visible in her insistence upon the non-negotiability of "constitutional essen
tials". As James Bohman so aptly summarizes the problem, this ex ante
decision has the unwelcome effect of making "all criticism of constitutional
democracy internal".'0 With that move, we get under-complex cultural dia
logue because it has to be conducted under the game rules of a single and
non-negotiable normative perspective." The non-negotiability of constitu
tional principles blocks rather than initiates a "dialectic between constitutional
essentials and actual politics of political liberalism" (The Claims of Culture,
130). As I argued in my essay, we cannot here speak of a dialectic in any
meaningful sense if we 'restrict in advance the mutual transformation of its
respective parts, the possible transformation of which first sets any dialec
tical process in motion.'2 And when we block this dialectic, when we con
clude that one of its parts is not subject to reflexivity and change, we also
neutralize and depoliticize the critical freedom to contest and revise the
principles by which we govern ourselves. How curious that Benhabib can be
firmly opposed to freezing cultural differences, yet firmly in favour of freez
ing constitutional principles. It seems that hybridity is very much welcome
if it is confined to the domain of culture, but unwelcome if it trespasses

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 Kompridis / Reply to Seyla Benhabib 393

upon and unsettles the domain of constitutional principles. Really complex

cultural dialogue should not be so defensive; it should not asymmetrically
distribute the risk of decentering, reflexivity, and openness to change, either
between minorities and majorities or between democratic politics and con
stitutional principles. As a medium of normative as well as cultural change,
hybridity goes all the way up and all the way down, encompassing consti
tutional principles as well as the democratic practices they constrain and
enable. If culture is "an irreducible and constitutive part of politics","3 then
it can't be kept in its proper place, which is where Benhabib appears for the
most part to want it kept.14
(3) Toward the end of "Normativizing Hybridity/Neutralizing Culture",
referring to Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin, I suggest we are in need for
a more reflective and more capacious modernism that does not preclude the
possibility "that arguments for cultural preservation can arise from critical
and not just politically conservative impulses" (333). It was part of a larger
point about the need to engender a different relation to our cultural traditions,
and to become more aware of the depletion of the semantic and cultural
resources upon which the realization of our democratic ideals and hopes
depends. Benhabib's modernism is unwilling to accommodate such a stance
toward the past. To her ears it sounds too romantic, too Herderian.'5 She
thinks I've got Benjamin all wrong. Benjamin had a "faith" in the capacity of
cultures "subject to decentering, reflexivity and pluralization" to "regenerate
from within themselves novel semantic resources of resistance" (Benhabib,
this issue). I think this idea of modernity as a normatively self-creating and
self-sustaining epoch is deeply flawed, as did Benjamin and other critics of
modernity, including Hegel. I also think that Benhabib's view of Benjamin as
someone who "celebrates the creative impulses of modernism" is one-sided
at best. Benjamin was no cheerleader for modernism. It is true that he recog
nized new possibilities of meaning-making in the products of modernist cul
ture; but he always regarded these possibilities as deeply ambiguous, not as
reliable markers of progress. The chance to realize these possibilities is an
opportunity given to us at a particular moment in our history-possibilities
given without guarantees of success, and in danger of vanishing forever.
I would be interested in hearing just what Benhabib believes the author of the
"Theses on the Philosophy of History" is celebrating. I would be even more
interested in hearing whether Benhabib thinks that the linear model of uni
versalism she espouses evades the critique of historicism and the idea of
progress that Benjamin develops in his "Theses". If so, how?
As I came to the end of Benhabib's reply, I found it was my turn to be
puzzled, for I was quite surprised to find Benhabib invoking the idea of

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394 Political Theory

"alternative modernities" at the end of her reply. Is Benhabib prepared to

"provincialize" Western modernity? Will the "search for alternative moder
nities" also be a search for alternative universalisms? Or will we find Benhabib
insisting that the cognitive and moral universalism she takes to be essential
to, inseparable from, Western modernity is as non-negotiable as "constitu
tional essentials"? If we are really serious about a critical relation to the
present that does not ineluctably naturalize it, treating its most "progres
sive" features as non-negotiable standards of evaluation, shouldn't we put
in question, and, thereby, expose, the coercive underbelly of the tendencies
of the times-even those that seem to represent our highest ideals? The
exhortation to adapt to global conditions of hybridity, fluidity, renegotiabil
ity, contestation, and uncertainty does sound like a call to go along with the
"flow of history." As Arendt once pointed out, to go with the flow of history
is to regard ourselves as so "totally caught up" in its "free flow" that we
"can no longer obstruct it but instead become impulses for its accelera
tion".16 I wonder just how much room her modernism can make for alter
native modernities.
I would not be surprised if the "search for alternative modernities" has
to be conducted under conditions which reflected a very particular norma
tive conception of modernity, conditions set in advance of the search. But
I could be wrong. Perhaps, there is an awakening of genuine normative
pluralism here, and Benhabib just might surprise us after all.'7

Notes
1. The phenomenon is not unfamiliar to me. My father's mother tongue is Turkish, my
mother's is Macedonian, and mine is Greek. The history of the Balkans is an internal part of
my family history, and I'm intimately acquainted with both the purifying and the hybridizing
impulses of its cultures.
2. A lot hangs on what counts as belonging to "culture", and on when something requires
a "cultural explanation". For example, Uma Nurayan asks why it is that dowry murders in
India are given cultural explanations, but domestic violence murders in the United States are
not. See Uma Nurayan, "Cross-Cultural Connections, Border Crossings, and 'Death by
Culture,"' in Dislocating Cultures (New York: Routledge, 1997), 99-105.
3. "The democratic theorist is concerned with the public manifestation of cultural identi
ties in civic spaces; the multiculturalist is interested in classifying and naming groups and then
in developing a normative theory on the basis of classificatory taxonomies" (Seyla Benhabib,
The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 2002], 18).
4. Although Benhabib acknowledges that Carens, Tully, and Parekh are "non-essentialists"
about culture (Benhabib, The Claims of Culture, 5), she nonetheless continues to identify multi
culturalist theory with essentialism, as the citation in the previous note shows.

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 Kompridis / Reply to Seyla Benhabib 395

5. Does jumping out of a burqa onto the stage of Girls Gone Wild constitute a growth in
independence and freedom for a young woman liberated from her "traditional", non-Western
"culture"? For the tendency of critics of multiculturalism and minority rights to treat cultural
issues as foreign rather than domestic problems, see Joseph Carens and Melissa Williams,
"Islam, Immigration, and Group Recognition", Citizenship Studies 2, no. 3 (1998): 475-500.
6. My general objections to Benhabib's account of "complex cultural dialogue" arise from
its lack of complexity, and its insufficient attention to the conditions of asymmetry within which
she inserts the normative conditions of such "dialogue". Of course individuals should have a right
to exit their communities of birth if they find them oppressive; but Benhabib understands the avail
ability of exit as some kind of solution to the problem of "minorities within minorities". But I do
not see how her suggestion that "you can take leave of your religion and your ethnicity and try to
pass as white, assimilate, dissimulate, or more positively... become a 'self-conscious pariah'"
does anything more than displace the problem. The transition she is talking about is no less "heart
wrenching' than the situation from which the exit option offers an escape. Assimilation, dis
simulation, passing?these are not attractive alternatives, and indeed, not easy to think of as
expressions of one's freedom and agency. And Benhabib's suggestion that one can choose to
become a "self-conscious pariah" betrays a form of existential decisionism. She is certainly right
to say that I did not myself offer a solution to this problem, besides advocating greater "sensitiv
ity to culture": It was not my intention to solve the problem, but to problematize the putative solu
tion. Still, these days it is hard to argue that our intercultural dealings with one another display an
overabundance of sensitivity or an overabundance of attentiveness to the conditions of asymme
try under which majorities engage minorities. On the ways in which majorities have illegitimately
intervened and transformed minority traditions, see Audra Simpson, "Paths toward a Mohawk
Nation: Narratives of Citizenship and Nationhood in Kahnawake", and James Tully, "The
Struggles of Indigenous Peoples for and of Freedom", both in Duncan Ivison, Paul Patton, and
Will Sanders, eds., Political Theory and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000).
7. For example, it is safe to say that in the past two decades, cultural polarization has
advanced much further than cultural hybridization in American political culture.
8. You could say that Benhabib's anti-holism is full of wholes.
9. For details of a Hegelian view such as this, see Robert Pippin, Idealism as Modernism
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 157-84. But such a Hegelian narrative has to
be balanced by, and reciprocally tested against, the kind of genealogical narratives generated
by Nietzsche and Foucault.
10. James Bohman, "Rights, Cosmopolitanism, and Public Reason", Philosophy and
Social Criticism 31, no. 7 (2005): 715-26.
11. Under these rules, as Bonnie Honig notes, "the universal stays universal, the particu
lar stays particular" (Bonnie Honig, "The Displaced Politics of Universalism: Response to
Seyla Benhabib's Reclaiming Universalism", 7, in press).
12. Nikolas Kompridis, "Normativizing Hybridity/Neutralizing Culture," Political Theory
33, no. 3 (June 2005): 318-43, here 330.
13. James Tully, Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in the Age of Diversity (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995), 5.
14. "The law provides the framework within which the work of culture and politics go on. The
laws, as the ancients knew, are the walls of the city, but the art and passions of politics occur within
those walls and very often politics leads to the breaking down of those barriers or at least to
assuring their permeability" (Seyla Benhabib, Reclaiming Universalism, lecture II, 22, in press).

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396 Political Theory

For the way in which Benhabib makes the law (constitutional principles) logically and
normatively prior to culture and politics, see Bonnie Honig's reply to Benhabib's Reclaiming
Universalism in Honig, "The Displaced Politics of Universalism".
15. For a very different view of romanticism, see the essays collected in Nikolas Kompridis,
Philosophical Romanticism (London: Routledge, 2006).
16. Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics (New York: Schocken, 2005), 121.
17. For reasons of space and out of the wish not to repeat myself, I've not been able to
respond to all of Benhabib's criticisms of my essay and her restatements of her position?for
example, the differences in our view of the role of political philosophy and, more generally,
the task of critical theory. For my own position, see Nikolas Kompridis, Critique and Disclosure:
Critical Theory between Past and Future (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006).

Nikolas Kompridis is an assistant professor of philosophy at York University in Toronto. He

is the author of Critique and Disclosure: Critical Theory between Past and Future (MIT Press,
2006) and Philosophical Romanticism (Routledge, 2006).

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