I’ve been doing some reading on the Left critique of multiculturalism.  Scholars like Stanley Fish and Slavoj Zizek have taken multiculturalism to task for its denial of universality.   In this essay, Fish sees multiculturalism as a logical impossibility.  One cannot both embrace universal principles and be geniunely tolerant, he argues, because once an external cultural system violates one of your core tenets, your tolerance becomes a defacto acceptance of that external cultural system.  Put simply, if you tolerate female genital mutilation, you accept that culture’s view of the practice and have thus become a universalist.

Zizek makes a different argument, suggesting that the claim to universality has an intrinsic political power.   Universality is a precondition of politics proper which he defines as:

a phenomenon that appeared for the first time in ancient Greece when the members of the demos (those with no firmly determined place in the hierarchical social edifice) presented themselves as the representatives, the stand-ins, for the whole of society, for the true universality (“we — the ‘nothing,’ not counted in the order — are the people, we are all, against others who stand only for their particular privilieged interest”).

The ability of those not included in the polity to appeal to “politics proper” is the the halmark of liberal progress.  We see this in the civil rights movement’s appeal to universal principles of equal rights and justice.  Multiculturalism mutes the ability to use the universal in politics proper.  When nobody is able to claim the universal, we enter into a post-political moment.

Timothy Powell does an interesting job of challenging thse critiques from the left by highlighting  multiculturalism’s two great strengths.  First, the late 1960’s activist phase was central in the forwarding of recognition claims to a variety of groups including American Indians and gays and lesbians.  Second, the  era of “multicultural critique” of American exceptionalism and Eurocentric hegemony in academia has produced a more acccurate and blended view of American and Eurpoean cultural history.  Wht Takaki calls a “shared retelling of history.”

He criticizes Fish and Zizek for engaging in what Kosofsky Sedgewick calls a (I love this phrase BTW) “hermeneutics of suspicion” in which any project must be deconstructed regardless of their utility.  Powell contends that this “hermeneutics of suspicion” describes the current phase of academic multiculturalism.  His article in Critical Inquiry asks how we pull ourselves out of this spiral of endless critique.

In my work, I’m using Aristotle’s concept of phronesis as a potential way forward.  Phronesis, put simply is the mode of knowledge concerned with wisdom.  This form of knowledge is opposed to epistemological or technical knowledge which is equated with universal knowledge.  Phronesis, instead emphasizes particularity.  Take this passage from Nicomachean Ethics:

Whereas young people become accomplished in geometry and mathematics, and wise within these limits, prudent young people do not seem to be found. The reason is that prudence is concerned with particulars as well as universals, and particulars become known from experience, but a young person lacks experience, since some length of time is needed to produce it (Nichomachean Ethics 1142 a).

rather that viewing multiculturalism in terms of the universal vs. the particular, I argue is should be seen as a complement to it…as the development of wisdom through a diversity of experience, separate from a pursuit of universal truths.  Put another way, one can hold whatever ethical system one chooses (universal), but one needs to understand how to simultaneously stand for what one believes but at the same time be able to exist with difference.   A synchronous toggling between one’s sense of the universal and one’s ability to engage with particularity.