Between Freedom of Speech and Cultural Diversity of Expression: Bureaucratizing the Multicultural Imagination

Nathaniel I. Córdova, Ph.D.

What, then, after all, is that “great primal act of imagination through which liberalism establishes its essence and its existence”É For me it is the insistence, in the face of all that divides and distinguishes us, that in some fundamental sense we are all equally worthy of moral respect, and that in treating each other as beings entitled to equal respect and concern, we accept the regulative principle that the conditions of our collective existence are always subject to our critical contestation and rejection, reinterpretation and elaboration (Benhabib 1999, 411).

Demographic changes experienced as a result of globalization processes have underscored the undisputable fact that citizens in democratic societies live in increasingly heterogeneous communities that intersect along dimensions of race, ethnicity, class, religion, gender, and culture. Such cultural pluralism, and the intersections central to the modern democratic polity, have resulted in political claims for recognition and accommodation by cultural minorities, and thus in the advancing of claims to justice not only by groups historically marginalized by dominant social and cultural structures, but by more recent identity groups. The resulting multiculturalism finds grounding in the recognition, and protection of, minority rights in a multicultural society that otherwise takes dominant group values as desideratum. Hence, as a distinct model for managing the proliferation of cultural identities and diversity in democratic multiethnic societies, multiculturalist policies attempt to manage diversity as a way to include marginalized and minority voices in public life.

Alongside these changes, the last few decades have also seen the emergence of great concern over multiculturalism as a response to such claims for equality and recognition of cultural identity, as a reply to the pressures to understand diverse others in our society, and thus as accommodation of claims of cultural difference. From the purview of political theory the dilemma raised by such claims to recognition can be described in terms of traditional debate over how liberalism should recognize the role of cultural differences in democratic society. Traditional liberal democratic theories are quite suspicious of claims to identity and difference as based on particularist interests over the needs and duties owed to the larger community. More recently, these issues have taken the form of debate over the relative merits of distributive models of justice versus the claims of a cultural identity politics or “politics of difference.”

Unfortunately, the language in which multiculturalism as an umbrella term for cultural diversity is expressed has become so slack in the past few decades that crucial distinctions and understandings among concepts such as diversity, inclusivity, and cultural pluralism are difficult to ascertain. We are deluged with talk about cultural diversity, pluralism and inclusivity, and with the attendant issues of identity, prejudice, freedom of expression, and discrimination to such an extent that many have become exhausted and inured to successive appeals in this vein, and threatened by the seemingly unstoppable claims to recognition of cultural difference that globalization has engendered. For many others, multiculturalism has resulted in our being “confronted by a bewildering, fleeting multiplicity of possible identities” and an accelerated proliferation of systems of meaning and cultural representation (Hall 1992, 277). The proliferation of these multiple discourses and demands for recognition, far from resulting in cultural homogenization, has frequently elevated tension and resentment directed at both external audiences, and internally at those who deviate from the cultural norm. In turn, substantive public discussion about issues of cultural difference has suffered. Hence, as Thomas R. West has noted, in discussing the rhetorical power of the contemporary discourse of multiculturalism and difference we end up avoiding substantial discussion about the formation of difference, for a philosophy of tolerance best characterized as a “harmonious, empty pluralism” (2004, 2).

It should come as no surprise that we are befuddled by discourses of multiculturalism to the extent of reiterating over and over again, the same conversations that we’ve had for at least the last thirty years about the meaning of diversity. As a constellation of terms, “multiculturalism,” “diversity,” “inclusivity,” and “cultural pluralism” much too often provide rhetorical cover for divergent political and social agendas without a concomitant engagement with the substantial issues of difference that are otherwise presumed addressed. In short, in public forums this set of terms has become a discursive apparatus increasingly deployed in either a self-congratulatory pat-on-theback fashion for being responsive to an increasingly multicultural society and demands for cultural recognition, or in self-satisfied dismissal of such concerns as nothing but irrational, and illiberal, identity politics. Much of the time comprehensive engagement with issues of oppression, domination, and structural inequality is not taken up, or if at all, only in a cursory manner. In some activist circles this constellation of terms evokes feelings similar to those described by Zygmunt Bauman regarding the term “community:” “To start with, community is a ‘warm’ place, a cosy and comfortable place. It is like a roof under which we shelter in heavy rain, like a fireplace at which we warm our hands on a frosty dayÉ” (Bauman 2001, 1). Indeed, one of the features of contemporary discourse of multiculturalism most taken for granted is the almost ritualistic way in which adherents come together as collectivity, under the banner of solidarity. Much too frequently, little conscious attention is paid to the resulting community as formed through “compositions of difference,” or to the way in which this culturalist vocabulary often fails to effectively expose the workings of power to maintain privilege (West 2004, 3).

For us in academia, these challenges underline the importance of preparing students to live in increasingly diverse communities, and the need of institutions of higher education, as centers of cultural vitality, to nurture an understanding of how our lives require the ordering of plural and conflicting values (Kekes 1993, 11). Considered by many to be a microcosm of society, the college campus has become one of the central fronts in the cultural struggle regarding intergroup relations, education of diverse others, development of a diverse workforce, rectifying the legacy and history of past injustice, reducing intercultural conflict, the generation of knowledge about issues of identity, and the necessity of social justice to democratic life.

In this essay I explore difficulties that arise as a result of the terministic tension with the discourse of multiculturalism and a politics of difference, especially when connected to issues of freedom of expression. I am most interested in how such tension is visible and consequential in some efforts regarding diversity in my campus, although I suspect the concerns apply broadly to other university campuses. It is my contention that the slackness in the language of multiculturalism is a result of a “bureaucratization of the imagination,” a phrase Kenneth Burke used to describe what happens when we “try to translate some pure aim or vision into terms of its corresponding material embodiment” (Burke 1937, iii). My concern is that we in the university have reduced the vision of multiculturalism and freedom of expression as ends of social justice into “utilitarian routines” which become part of a technicist narrative that we, in turn, take as the amoral epitome of rational efficiency. In the end, that technicist logic only separates us further from the lives of those whose rights we ostensibly seek to protect. In short, we in the university(ies) have bureaucratized the multicultural imagination with a lack of self-reflection, engaging in essentialist practices, collapsing a politics of difference within a politics of cultural recognition, and conflating cultural diversity with freedom of expression in the process reducing freedom of expression to a dualistic mode of what can or cannot be said. The resulting atherosclerotic notions of multiculturalism, diversity, and freedom of expression limit the development of a refurbished vocabulary and rapprochement that could help us dispense with the reified notions that beset us and move forward with an inclusive and just conception of a plural community. Perhaps Anne Phillips, in her recent Multiculturalism Without Culture (2007), puts it best when she argues for:

a multiculturalism that dispenses with the reified notions of cultureÉyet retains enough robustness to address inequalities between cultural groups; a multiculturalism in which the language of cultural difference no longer gives hostages to fortune or sustenance to racists, but also no longer paralyses normative judgment (Phillips 2007, 8).

In what follows I frame my remarks in four main sections. First, relying primarily on the work of Iris Marion Young, I provide a succinct description of the distinction between a politics of difference and a politics of cultural recognition, and how to our loss we’ve tended to muddy the distinction.

Second, I explore the bureaucratizing consequences of our current discourse of multiculturalism in the university. Third, I look at the complications brought about by claims to freedom of expression, and how freedom of expression straddles a fine line between a politics of difference and claims to cultural recognition. Finally, I rehearse a brief response to a series of campus events that took place on our campus between 2006-2007 and that served as a catalyst to this collection. I conclude with some suggestions for enhancing the conversation on campus.

On the Limits of a Politics of Cultural Recognition

In addressing the conundrum over claims to justice in liberal democracy and the role of cultural difference, Iris Marion Young drew a distinction between a politics of cultural recognition and a politics of difference (Young 1990). In a politics of cultural recognition particular groups base claims to social justice on narrow conceptions of identity. A politics of difference is primarily concerned with how dominant norms and expectations in society create conditions of inequality as a result of the structures of privilege and disadvantage that they instantiate. While dominant institutions support ruling norms that privilege some groups over others, not all such norms and expectations are cultural. In fact, Young notes that “most group-based political claims to justice” will be responses to other norms of “capability, social role, sexual desire, or location in the division of labor” (Young 1999, 415). A politics of difference thus claims:

That hegemonic discourses, relations of power, role assignments, and the distribution of benefits assume a particular and restricted set of ruling norms, even though they usually present themselves as neutral and universal. The given economic, social, and political arrangements assume that social members and rights bearers either have or ought to have certain capabilities, desires, forms of reasoning, language, values and priorities, or plans of life. They have certain expectations of what is a “normal,” or usual, life, and have certain standards, or norms, against which they evaluate individuals (416).

Thus, claims to justice based on cultural recognition (identity) are only one species of a politics of difference.

However, lest we believe that it is only structural inequality that creates injustice, Young reminds us that it is a challenge to oppression and domination, and not just to distributive inequality, that we must attend to in securing social justice. In other words, equalizing opportunity is only a first step toward eliminating oppression. The elimination of oppression and domination requires not just that we allocate resources more evenly but that we dismantle and reform the social structures, assumptions, and processes that sustain categories of oppression. Perhaps the primary category of oppression, according to Young, is the belief in a neutral or universalizable political morality advocated by liberalism (Young 1990, 206-10).

Therefore, as a response to a politics of cultural recognition, a politics of difference calls us to focus less on individual claims to corporate identity, and more on an expansive notion of privilege and injustice enabled by values and policies that, by claiming to treat all equally, dismiss precisely the careful addressing of many forms of oppression and domination experienced by individuals within socially disadvantaged groups. Young describes five “faces of oppression” that are not reducible or alleviated solely by developing an optimum calculus for distributing resources equally. These faces of oppression are exploitation, cultural imperialism, violence, marginalization, and powerlessness (Young 1990, 39-65). To be sure, the relationship between a politics of difference and distributive justice is not that simple. Issues of difference, distribution of resources, equity, and oppression are complex. The point is however, that oppression and domination are not merely matters of the distribution of resources, or of equity. Neither redistribution, nor policies that aim to render a “level playing field” can eliminate the historical imbalances created by sustained domination and oppression. In sum, Young calls us to recognize the differences that exist in the effects ruling norms and expectations, as well as structural inequalities, have for members of socially disadvantaged groups. Her point is that a politics of difference is “broader than a politics of cultural recognition,” and furthermore that it is primarily “criticalÉ as opposed to self-assertive” (1999, 416).

Much of the slackness in the language of multiculturalism is a result of a double move that levels the distinction that Iris Marion Young sought to draw between a politics of cultural recognition and a politics of difference. First, opponents of multiculturalism (or a culturalist perspective), tend to reduce a politics of difference to an identity politics. These challenges to a politics of difference revolve around how the focus on difference inherently undermines the basis for social solidarity needed for a redistribution of resources, how a politics of difference might not be different than a politics of redistributive justice, and how featuring difference over equality only serves to fragment and undermine social solidarity. Secondly, proponents of multiculturalism have indeed much too often resorted to an identity politics that reduces difference merely to its cultural dimensions, separating it from sociopolitical contexts, reifying difference as particularistic claims to knowledge/power relations, and foregrounding problematic notions of representation rather than the constitution and composition of difference.

The polarization and entrenchment of both camps does serious disservice to a productive engagement with the question of what difference “difference” really makes. By their reductions, opponents of multiculturalism in this debate avoid deliberation over a set of broader social problems that, albeit related to distribution, encompass a far larger set of social relations, and undercut a careful look at how oppression is sustained by cultural forms of interaction and communication that do not disappear solely by our subsuming them and ourselves into a mildly differentiated social whole (“celebrating diversity”). To the extent that they turn into an identity politics proponents of multiculturalism become obnoxious to the very claims of difference they seek to institute, and enact a lack of self-reflexivity characteristic of the hegemony they seek to dethrone. Both responses unfortunately miss Young’s point about the necessity to communicate as equals within positions of difference: “we require real participatory structures in which actual people, with their geographical, ethnic, gender, and occupational differences, assert their distinct voices” (Young 1990, 116).

A real engagement with multiculturalism requires that we not put aside difference for a politics of impartiality, that we build democratic spaces and opportunities for the substantive exploration of difference, in particular the exploration of how recent globalization pressures open the possibility for a reconsideration of what cultural difference entails within structures of global domination. Moreover, it requires that we expand our conceptualization of ourselves as global citizens, rather than citizens curtailed by the particularities of a narrowly-defined cultural location. It also requires a self-reflexivity to the implications and complications of our own claims to power. Finally, it necessitates that we keep alive what Young called a “differentiated solidarity” an attitude of respect and mutual obligation that “does not presume mutual identification and affinity as an explicit or implicit condition for attitudes of respect and inclusion” (2000, 221). I impose my own slant on this concept: solidarity is not to be expected solely on the basis of cultural identity. Participation in corporate identity varies to the extent that the group holds a politics to which I can subscribe. The following section expands on the repercussions of losing sight of a politics of difference.

Losing Difference:
The Transformation of Multiculturalism into an Identity Politics

Subsuming difference within a politics of cultural recognition further bureaucratizes the multicultural imagination by rendering multiculturalism into an identity politics said to impose a victimizing essentialism that reinforces inequities of power both internally and externally by homogenizing cultural tradition, promoting relativism, and forcing members into a regime of cultural authenticity. Criticized for what some say is a fragmentation of the body politic by hampering assimilation, proponents of multiculturalism are taken to task for a supposed lack of egalitarianism and the imbalance that can ensue when a group is supposedly granted special privileges. Aided and abetted by the events of September 11, 2001, and the xenophobia of an emergent security state, multiculturalism has seen a renewed challenge that centers on how it weakens social cohesion by “corroding the common core of citizenship, undermining the bases of social unity, and making it impossible for citizens to sustain a strong sense of national identity” (Phillips 2007, 2). A positive assessment contends that, under the banner of multiculturalism and diversity, the identity politics that emerge are a type of defense mechanism, and seek to “replace the institutionalized forms of knowledge that oppress certain communities or social groups” (Escoffier 1998, 43). Although a full rehearsing of the perils or benefits of identity politics is beyond the scope of this essay, it is important to address briefly some of the basic difficulties that sit at the crux of a blindness we now face.

While a case can be made for why these critiques fall short of the mark, and indeed take only narrow instances for the whole, I contend that subsuming difference only into a politics of cultural recognition results in a slackness in the discourse of multiculturalism that tends toward either an aestheticized version of cultural diversity or a hyper-radicalized version of an activism blind to its own hegemonic claims to power. In short, academic multiculturalism divorced from self-reflexivity, and caught up in a politics of authenticity, has tended toward cultural identity solely as transgressive aesthetic. A new language of liberation, one that does not eschew broader engagement, and one that, as Linda Alcoff and Satya P. Monhanty remind us, “does not enshrine any previous period as holding the key to our pressing political needs today” is needed (2006, 3).

The Wounded Attachments of Multiculturalism as Identity Politics

A multiculturalism that emerges into an unreflective and fetishistic identity politics ultimately reinscribes, through demands for protection, the very oppressive system that it seeks to overcome. Wendy Brown puts this quite cogently when she notes in ,i>States of Injury (1995) that the inscription and emergence of identity politics not only reaffirms the historical injuries constitutive of those identities, but repositions either the state or the dominant institution as legitimizer of the injury, the identity, and the resolution of the problem. This is what Brown dubs a “wounded attachment” of an identity politics, one that is not only based on the injury, but which maintains the injured status as basis for civic participation (55). The unfortunate byproduct of those practices is an identity politics that talks about resistance, but which devolves into reactionary actions, sentimentalism, and lack of progress and vision. The positions to which an identity politics give rise are “prefigured and contained by the very power they purport to oppose,” hence the constant dissatisfaction and struggle within such camps about the possibilities of constructing new transformative social imaginaries free from the antinomies of identity politics that feature victimization.

I am persuaded by Brown’s contention that ultimately such identity politics, through their own investment in their history of injury, have the paradoxical effect of shoring up structures of domination rather than undermining them. Understandably, an oppositional movement that emerges out of a history of how dominant structures have caused injury cannot easily let go of the injury that is ultimately constitutive of its own identity. However, the over-reliance on such wounded attachments create tragic frames through which we pose our politics of difference, and reaffirm the very unifying and assimilationist powers we seek to oppose. In that loop we remain victims of a state or dominant group whom we continue to validate through our tragic frame to grant us freedom and legitimize our identity. The issue of course is more complex. In current political contexts, claims to personhood might have to be attenuated by claims to a collective sense in order to make coherent claims to law. And yet, a pluralistic orientation that is not based on such tragic frames might go farther toward helping us step outside of the dilemma of generating a productive politics of difference that eschews the tragic and negative attitudes about the possibilities of social change which, along with anger and despair, seems to infect so many students.

Unfortunately, much too often we believe that in asserting an identity politics we nurture a strategic anti-essentialism, or even a strategic essentialism. That position, we believe, allows us to balance a recognition of the essentialism of identity politics as a pernicious part of our identity politics, with its necessity in specific situations to make “both politics and identity possible” (Hall 1987, 45; Spivak 1987, 205). Part of the problem is that, in a campus setting, students often miss the purported anti- and strategic essentialism because they are easily disposed to the comforts of trying on identities they have perhaps not had the chance to explore before arriving on campus. The resulting positions are hard-lined concretizations of identity taken up without much critical self-awareness. A multiculturalism that does not deploy an epistemic agnosticism about its own claims is akin to what Plato criticized as the unreflective reiteration of formulaic thought.

The Tragic Frame of Melancholy

Moreover, the tragic frames that a politics of cultural recognition turned identity politics frequently constructs are reminiscent of what Walter Benjamin called “left melancholy,” the attachment or devotion to a political perspective, and perhaps even to its failure, rather than to an ability to seize and generate opportunities for change (Benjamin 1994, 305). Wendy Brown again is helpful here in her encapsulation of this problem:

left melancholy represents not only a refusal to come to terms with the particular character of the presentÉ It signifies, as well, a certain narcissism with regard to one’s past political attachments and identity that exceeds any contemporary investment in political mobilization, alliance, or transformation (Brown 1999, 20).

This mournful kind of attachment, when connected to a fetishized multiculturalism as identity politics, severely limits our ability to imagine the liberal arts university as an incubator for progressive social change, as well as our capacity to be effective advocates in responding innovatively to emergent social demands.

The transformation of multiculturalism into an identity politics and tragic frame of melancholy is reinforced by a kind of rhetorical intoxication with the terms multiculturalism, diversity, and inclusivity. These words form a cluster that orbits around that morphed notion of multiculturalism, and which ends up increasingly used to account for the failure of the tragic frame to generate innovative possibilities for change. The artificiality of the language is ameliorated by the real concerns expressed by all involved, but nevertheless, in dutifully following the conventions of a multiculturalism turned into an identity politics, the language used only affirms the tragic frame of melancholy.

To be fair, I am convinced that the deployment of this melancholic discourse, and the solidification of an identity politics, is partly the result of the inability to suppress our disappointment with the persistent inequities that continue despite tremendous efforts at combating social injustice. Hence, it behooves us all to acknowledge the tension between the conditions on the ground experienced by many, the pervasive feeling of dislocation, frustration, and fear for our lives, with the move to rally behind a discourse that reaffirms essentialized identities and cultural authenticity as a defense mechanism. Despite such rationales, however, those who would turn multiculturalism into an identity politics must address the increasing privatization and disconnect that such melancholia provokes, even as it might initially motivate a resurgence of “activism.” A politics of liberation that relies on such a melancholia is ill-equipped to sustain serious challenges, can eventually lead to the learned helplessness of despair, and cannot provide sustenance for the innovative, alternative, and positive visions needed for social change. Very simply put, an identity politics premised or supported by such melancholia remains politically unreliable for the challenges that face us.

Diversity as Technicist Rationality

Another example of the bureaucratization of the multicultural imagination is the narrow circumscribing of multiculturalism into the technicist rationality of “diversity” supporting the institutional concern for “counting” and measuring how “we are doing” from limited perspectives such as visibility and numbers. A technicist rationality renders ambiguous just what “diversity” might mean and has the effect of postponing full engagement with difference, if it only directs itself to that which it finds “measurable.” In a university setting such “measurables” are articulated as a concern over number of minority students, faculty, and staff members recruited and retained, and also over number of workshops designed to enhance multicultural literacy and competence. What might be missed as a result is how such “diversity” encompasses sensitivity to the multiplicity of cultural groups in our society, recognition of their different ways of being, and a commitment to the fact that we are all equally worthy of moral respect. The work of “diversity” also entails an understanding that in order to protect minority rights, and to compensate for the disadvantages that a dominant ideological regime belief in the “neutrality” of its values engenders, measures to supplement dominant group decisions might be necessary. Diversity understood as a strong case for the rectifying of unfairness is not invidious nor inimical to, and in fact might be required by, a commitment to social justice.

Often deployed within an economic narrative of scarcity that emphasizes how it is a valuable but scarce resource that we must compete for, “diversity” becomes difficult to obtain, and is obtainable only through certain people and sources. Again, the technicist rationality of diversity understood from the point of view of scarcity narrows the circumference and scope of our conversation by playing into the hands of definitions that feature diversity as something we don’t have, hence narrowing our vision. It hinders forward movement on social justice issues by keeping our attention diverted from difference, increases frustration by pitting us in competition with each other, marks some members of the community as bearers of the scarce resource (increasing their burden and at the same time excusing others), and keeps us constantly dissatisfied with, and melancholic about, our efforts.

In an environment that fetishizes diversity in such ways, calling into question the homologies established between diversity, multiculturalism, inclusivity, justice, and pluralistic values is not often welcome by any side. Diversity as technicist rationality aids institutional laggardness by rendering it a “difficult” issue that we must treat in carefully measured ways so as to not cause too much dislocation. It also polarizes a community that does not understand why diversity occupies such a central point in our conversations, and that supposed that we to to great lengths in order to be politically correct.

It is not surprising that operating from such a limited understanding of diversity, we encounter arguments about the “dumbing down” of the student body by seeking to recruit members of minority populations, or that hiring faculty members of historically underrepresented groups results from less than meritorious evaluation. By the same token, reaffirming diversity as technicist rationality has two seemingly contradictory libidinal effects: it reiterates the melancholy felt by advocates about the futility of initiatives undertaken, while it continues to feed the perverse pleasure some find in continuing an increasingly fruitless academic debate.

The point is not that we are missing diversity, but that when we transform the notion of difference into diversity as technicist rationality we eschew full engagement with it as constituted by the three main strands of active engagement with difference, inclusivity of historically or traditionally marginalized and underrepresented groups, and the foregrounding of an understanding of how structures, habits, institutions, and modes of discourse support oppression, privilege, and injustice. As an initial step we ought to think of diversity as encapsulating those three domains and associated issues that would expand an authentic multicultural ethos on campus. Diversity conceived through the lens of “visible diversity” or only as scarce resource, abets an academic multiculturalism that is all too happy to remain caught up in discussions regarding whether diversity is pedagogically valuable or not. A reorientation of the notion of diversity will help us be more critically minded about the twin poles of either overemphasizing difference, or pretending cultural differences away, that we find when we fetishize diversity.

None of this means that we should not look at our recruitment and retention practices regarding members of historically underrepresented communities, or that we should not measure and manage enrollment and faculty hiring with an eye toward diversifying our population. It should remind us however, that we need to be much more sensitive to how the narrowing of a politics of difference limits our understanding of how race, ethnicity, identity, culture, religion, and sexual identity are themselves defined and shaped by a wider political environment that we ought not ignore or dismiss.

Between Freedom of Expression and Multiculturalism

Among the many value orientations that multiculturalism entails, we find a call for recognition of the right to enunciation and representation of cultural difference. This call is often coupled with the expectation of the protection of civil liberties by democratic regimes. Consequently, such a right to enunciation of cultural difference is, in effect, often a demand for freedom of expression, an individual or collective right to speak. Difficulty arises, however, when we mix our traditional understanding of freedom of speech with a notion of freedom of expression as the right to enunciation and representation of cultural difference. Potential difficulties are exacerbated when we conceive of freedom of expression within the popular language of the “free flow of ideas” and, thus, as part of a “national” culture rather than referring to difference and its demands for recognition (Albro 2005).

Conversations about the right to an enunciation of cultural difference get narrowly circumscribed and polarized by our focus on freedom of expression within a dualistic mode of what can or cannot be enunciated (most often driven by legal concerns). Far from a nuanced exploration about difference and cultural diversity, the conversation about freedom of expression devolves into who or what is offensive or not. What gets occluded or marginalized is how cultural difference and its expression might be recognized as integral to an individual’s and a community’s understanding of the available range of options for both examining and pursuing, that is, co-constructing a good life.

Besides the unhealthy circumspection about what we feel we can say, a further consequence of the reduction of freedom of expression to what can or cannot be said, is a failure to recognize the essential embeddedness of individuals in social communicative contexts. Conversations about freedom of expression conceived within the realm of an abstract individualism tend to arise at the limits, at those moments in which a challenge occurs. Yet, it is precisely at this point, as important as it is, at which questions of social embeddedness and difference are easily forgotten. What’s more, the usual end to these conversations remains the deployment of the freedom of speech trump card traditionally articulated either by reminding ourselves of legal dicta, or by a customary repetition of the vocabulary of “free speech.” Neither of these approaches explores substantially, questions about the limits of speech in a community, how we can respond to the claims of a politics of difference, nor how notions of enunciation of cultural difference might help us understand the communicative transactions that make possible the complex relationship between liberal democratic political ideals and their contextual implementation.

Conceived within this dualistic mode, freedom of expression stands in opposition to a multiculturalist emphasis on a politics of difference. Such a politics of difference challenges liberal theory notions of impartiality precisely because those notions tend to deny the embeddedness of the self in social relationships (Benhabib 1992). A long history links this concern over inclusion with discriminatory and oppressive policies and attitudes that emerge when dominant groups feel uncomfortable about difference. Claims to recognition of difference are basically claims to the relevance of the relationship between individual and community, and the significance of cultural identity as a primary good for democratic life (Kymlicka 1989). When we take freedom of expression in the mode of what can or cannot be said we tend to reduce our understanding of how the articulation of cultural membership is important to community life, and with freedom of expression as the representation and enunciation of cultural difference and what difference that might make. This is a significant point, for in our contemporary world, issues of democratic life and social futures are indelibly connected to fundamental assumptions about cultural identity, privilege, inclusivity, democratic principles, and the deepening complexity between and across increasingly intertwined cultural groups.

Hence, the dualistic mode in which we often take freedom of expression is also a sign of the bureaucratization of our multicultural and democratic imagination. Among the dangers brought about by that bureaucratization we find a privatization of the self, the cultivation of a narrow version of a politics of cultural recognition, increased bitterness and lack of vision for a broader politics of engagement, and the diminution of difference to a passionless (and often legalistic) formalism. Three serious concerns that emerge as the price of such bureaucratization include the reaffirmation of multiculturalism in the university as celebratory assertion of cultural identity solely as transgressive aesthetic, a continued entrenchment of abstract liberal individualism rather than a substantive investment in interdependence, and the concomitant formation of students into consuming subjects of just such an understanding of cultural identity.

Implicit in Practices: Commitment to a Politics of Difference

One of the challenges that the bureaucratization of the multicultural imagination, and the identity politics that emerge as a result, pose for us, is that the quality of our conversation on campus suffers tremendously when we become too circumspect about these subjects. The willingness to sustain a productive conversation is lost when participants are representatives of fixed camps, judgment is quickly rendered, personal attacks follow, and an attitude of avoiding the discomfort of delving into difficult matters reigns. If we wish to participate in a community that values rational ethical reflection, we need to establish traditions, practices, and spaces that sustain the ethical reflection we desire, and include difference. The challenge of communicating across difference is not lightly taken, but neither are we free to ignore it because of whatever difficulty it might raise. What’s more, our attitudes cannot just be embodied in practices, but must also be supported and sustained by institutions.

A campus culture committed to multiculturalism and freedom of expression, especially a small liberal arts campus, would do well to cultivate an agonistic culture that not only optimizes the opportunities for all members to express disagreement, but actively features differences of perspective. Discursive contestation is crucial for developing, and modeling for our students, a healthy and democratic participatory culture. An agonistic culture stands in opposition to antagonism, preferring a view of principled disagreement by strong adversaries, than quarrels by enemies. However, while agreement or consensus are not necessarily the top priorities of agonism, it recognizes that discursive contestation is less about fighting an enemy, and more about having the opportunity to engage in the kind of deliberation that might increase our chances at gaining adherence for our positions. However, within an agonistic framework the assumption exists that we cannot take deliberation as the panacea for all that ails us. Conflicting positions, the grief over whatever sacrifices the adjustments of pluralism demand of us, do not stand to disappear if we just pour enough time into rational deliberation. There are no easy answers, we must commit ourselves to an open-ended and humble revision of our communicative practices and our positions if we truly are committed to a meaningful pluralism or multiculturalism.

In our own campus, the incidents of the past year and a half, while obtaining much attention from the point of view of the demand for a disciplining of particular voices, saw relatively little sustained discussion of the issues at stake. The public conversations that ensued, either via email or through other venues, were quite short-lived. In some instances, the language used pushed the boundaries of civil engagement. The disruption brought about by the unrest on campus effectively rendered electronic forms of communication unhelpful at best in allowing good deliberation to flourish. Faced with such a lack of deliberative spaces, individuals quickly retreated from public conversation, or the conversation became individual, secretive, and circumspect rather than broad and inclusive. What’s more, although living under an ideal of the university campus as a bastion of cultural vitality and freedom of speech, very little engagement or support for the disruptive voices was forthcoming. Sadly, the result of this lack of communicative venues, and the lack of strong support for a culture that valued discursive contestation, was the drawing up of battle lines between students and faculty, students and other student groups, and faculty and other faculty, not to mention staff and administrators. The lack of communication led to wild speculation and unfriendly assumptions about motives and secret agendas. In short, our inability to sustain the conversation increased, rather than reduced the confusion and uncertainty of the moment.

Some of the responses to the “Most Offensive Halloween Party Ever” event during the Fall 2006 semester might help to elucidate the need to foster an agonistic culture on campus that values a politics of difference. Response to the Halloween party was swift and strong. Many members of the campus community were offended by the insensitivity seemingly displayed by some students as these purportedly attempted to enact a satirical performance. Various voices decrying the situation were raised, but some in particular tried to make sense of why student members of socially disadvantaged groups would participate in such a party. Apparently, there was an expectation that because of both, the particular group membership of some of these students, as well as their supposed self-identification with a larger solidarity group, no participation in the party by these students should have taken place. In short, the expectation was that an inter-group affinity would somehow trump the diversity present individually. This perspective granted too little weight to local circumstances and attachments, homogenized the diversity of membership (i.e., membership in multiple groups or hybrid identities), and dismissed the explanations of the participants that they were engaged in an act of creative transgression. The situation could be read as harboring more than a little elitism in the response to a student vernacular understanding of diversity as protection of freedom of expression. The fact that a video had been produced and published online exacerbated the feelings of victimization and offense, and the fear of the damage such a video would have for the university’s reputation.

Judging from the video publicly posted online, the “Most Offensive Halloween Party Ever” was distasteful, poorly conceived as a creative act of transgression, and falling well short of the standard for satire. It was rude, crude, insensitive, and an example of the ways in which the participants internalized some of the worst stereotypes of dominant culture. The participants failed to critically examine a crucial component of rhetorical sensitivity: what is it that rhetoric (discourse) wills as it works. Furthermore, they failed to take into consideration any sense of responsibility for the reasonable consequences of their actions, especially since they claimed the party was a strategic performance. The initial response by participating students, and the subsequent response by other students on campus that responded adversely to the call for disciplining the organizers of the party, provides further evidence of the negative effects of the reduction of difference into an identity politics. In their reactionary call of any questioning about the insensitivity of the party, the overwhelming attitude was to assume a position of victimage by claiming that others were attempting to silence them through attitudes of political correctness. Those who expressed offense at the antics of the participants in the party were quickly dubbed humorless, politically correct, and attempting to curtail freedom of expression. The responses by both sides reveal a tragic outcome of the devaluation of difference as a community (political) resource. Both sides responded by playing identity and freedom of expression trump cards to challenge legitimacy and silence each other.

The Conscious Tension activities during the Spring 2007 semester, in particular the displaying of lynching effigies hanging from various trees on campus, also caused the campus community to erupt in a cacophony of claims to political correctness and freedom of expression. The response to the lynching effigies, if anything, was more forceful than to the “Halloween Party” as all of a sudden campus was confronted with quite a complex symbolic entanglement to parse. The same limiting pattern of communication ensued, with brief electronic mail surges, and much conversation apparently taking place, but little substantive engagement as a whole with issues such as what might constitute appropriate limits to expression within the community, within a liberal arts tradition, and in a university campus that is not just responsive locally but committed to the development of responsible global citizens.

In my estimation, however, neither the party, nor the case of the lynching effigies should be taken as example of Willamette as a bastion of racism, discrimination, and insensitivity. Nor should these events be launching pads for calls to mute voices that somehow don’t meet the threshold of a politics of cultural authenticity. As a result of these events various initiatives were undertaken to enhance communication and promote awareness of multicultural issues. A Council for Diversity and Social Justice, and a series of initiatives, one of which this volume of essays on multiculturalism and freedom of expression is a part, were instituted. If there was a common denominator to all these events, however, it was the lack of an ethos of agonism in the engagement. Many of the conversations to which I was privy were prefigured as, or ended in, antagonistic encounters, thus reinforcing suspicion and distrust. What complicated matters also was that the discourse deployed by both sides, emerging as it was out of a context in which multiculturalism and cultural diversity had become bureaucratized into an identity politics, tended toward the strategy of trumping the other’s identity, and painting others into corners, thus refusing outright to encounter the other as co-constructor of a common ground from which the possibility of social justice could arise. In addition, missing from all these events was a lack of understanding of civic voice, an inability to “foster cross-cultural communication in places of identification, disidentification, and non-identification,” and ignorance about how to listen metonymically to public debate (Ratcliffe 2005, 78).

Conclusion: Learning to Dwell

Understanding the challenges posed by multiculturalism and freedom of expression in today’s world, with the attendant notions of civic engagement, identity, citizenship, inclusivity, and diversity, requires rhetorical sensitivity over just how we construct our dwelling spaces with others, to questions of human existence in the midst of difference. It also requires that we not bureaucratize the multicultural imagination in ways that limit our understanding of who we are as individuals and members of collectives. After all, a concern about how we ought to live, Heidegger reminded us, follows from questions concerning who we are (Heidegger 1996, 51).

Explicit attention to matters of human existence and just lifeworlds requires that we reconsider the notion of ethos as the essential character of human being-in-the-world. This view of ethos, however, is not the traditional understanding of the concept. In the rhetorical tradition, for example, ethos has customarily been understood as “credibility” and, thus, moral character or ethics, which along with logos and pathos form Aristotle’s three artistics proofs (pistis) as central components to argumentation. As Michael Hyde notes in The Ethos of Rhetoric (2004) however, ethos has a primordial meaning as dwelling place, different from its familiar use by rhetoricians:

Abiding by this more ‘primordial’ meaning of the term, one can understand the phrase ‘the ethos of rhetoric’ to refer to the way discourse is used to transform space and time into ‘dwelling places’ (ethos; pl. ethea) where people can deliberate about and ‘know together’ (con-scientia) some matter of interest. Such dwelling places define the grounds, the abodes or habitats, where a person’s ethics and moral character take form and develop (Hyde 2004, xiii).

This primordial meaning, Hyde reminds us, gives presence to the architectonic nature of rhetoric which helps us understand it best as an art of invention, or the design of dwelling spaces and landscapes of being with others: “[t]he ethos of rhetoricÉ mark out the boundaries and domains of thought that, depending on how their specific discourses are designed and arranged, may be particularly inviting and moving for some audience” (xiii). Hyde further locates this understanding of ethos in Heidegger’s consideration of Aristotle’s Rhetoric as the ‘the first systematic hermeneutic of the everydayness of Being with one another” (Heidegger 1962, 178).

In order to have a robust multiculturalism, and an agonistic culture on a campus that values difference we must attend to some foundational rhetorical concerns quite explicitly as architectonic practices through which ethos is understood as revealing the “open region in which man [sic] dwells” and thus from which he/she launches transformative ethical projects (Heidegger 1977, 233). This re-cognition of ethos gives primacy to the multiply layered practices of cultivating the relationships essential to building diverse communities. In our recognition of difference and multiple ways of meaning-making, we must understand how our discourse “transforms the spatial and temporal orientation of an audience, its way of being situated or placed in relationship to things and others” (Hyde, xviii). Heidegger already points to the same relationship, albeit by reminding us of the distinction between building, a technical endeavor, and dwelling: “These buildings house man. He inhabits them and yet does not dwell in them, when to dwell means merely that we take shelter in themÉdo the houses in themselves hold any guarantee that dwelling occurs in them?” This distinction is of critical importance because it calls us to a critical multiculturalism full of self-reflexivity and that explicitly engages its own contingency as a way to facilitate dwelling with others. It also calls on us to reject freedom of expression as comprised by a dual mode of what can be said or not. A bureaucratized multicultural imagination as identity politics, much like a crippled notion of freedom of expression, does not facilitate our recognition of the other as co-constructor of the landscapes we inhabit, and does not help us make our community a dwelling place.

A sensitivity, and perhaps a pre-requisite, to the deep connection to which Hyde and Heidegger commend us, requires that we learn to listen metonymically, the taking up of the challenge that a “text or person is associated with—but not necessarily representative of—an entire cultural group” (Ratcliffe, 78). Krista Ratcliffe encourages us to adopt a practice of listening metonymically as a way to break out of what she calls a rhetoric of dysfunctional silence: “such dysfunctional silence is not happenstance; it functions via a rhetorical structure that plays out again and again, reinscribing a powerful cultural desire in the U.S. not to talk publicly and cross-culturally about how gender and race intersect” (79). We can highlight how the rhetorical structures that keep us in dysfunctional silence are those that set us apart by bureaucratizing our vision and imagination and, thus, isolating and prefiguring the resulting conversations as unproductive antagonistic encounters that we are doomed to repeat. These dysfunctional silences and encounters continue to harm us by reading the call to dialogue, or agonistic exchange, not as invitation to reconsider our epistemic ground, but as blame for privilege and identity. In order to listen metonymically we must recognize difference, be explicitly self-conscious and open about the contingencies of our claims to power, offer “rhetorical stances of recognition, critique, and accountability,” and work at developing a civic voice that does not amount solely to the supposed introduction of new principles while “theoretically remaining faithful to old principles” (Burke 1937, 229).

At the outset of this monograph I expressed a concern for how we in the academy, and especially in the liberal arts, could contribute to a refurbished vocabulary, a new language of liberation that recognized the importance of cultural diversity, minority rights, and social justice, while rejecting essentialism and separatism. Some of the questions that animate my thinking include: In what way can the liberal arts university strengthen its role as incubator of an agonistic culture that seriously challenges us to live a pluralism that finds productive potential in subverting and disrupting rather than securing binary oppositions? How might we best dispense with the reified notions that beset us, and move forward with an inclusive and just conception of a plural community? The answers, if any, were focused on the local level as I developed a critique of academic multiculturalism and our own practices. And yet, a proper response to these questions requires that we address ourselves to the role higher education ought to play as global citizen. These issues must be addressed within conceptual frameworks that directly focus on what kind of civic engagement we nourish, what kind of citizens we produce, what is the global social responsibility of higher education, and what kind of pedagogy best responds to the needs of an emerging global society. We cannot get at the substratum of what makes for an inclusively excellent campus, one with a multicultural ethos, if we do not address ourselves beyond the blinders we have imposed on these issues.

The bureaucratization of the multicultural imagination fails to generate the promise of restorative justice and liberation that we need in pluralistic society and in our community. The liberal arts university stands well poised to be the cultural incubator for carrying out and modeling the conversations that will help us break through the current impasse in which the slack in the discourse of multiculturalism has placed us. We need to re-orient ourselves to a strong pluralism that still seeks to protect the least among us, and that shuns the essentialist moves that hinder our ability to see, and listen to, each other as co-constructors of liberatory social landscapes.

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