. You both use a robust phenomenology that looks inside and outside
the self and in between selves to do critique. How/Why did you settle on that
way of doing critique?
Alcoff: That's a
flattering comparison. Marilyn is a good analytic philosopher who often starts
from linguistic usage to do critique and has the ability to come up with
wonderfully concrete and memorable examples. I have learned from both elements
of her work. It is fairly common in some parts of analytic philosophy to use concrete
examples to do philosophical analyses. Often, however, those examples are made
in the form of wild thought experiments (the violinist tied to one's back, the
brain in a vat), or excessively simple descriptions (Descartes' wax, or
Wittgenstein's bricklayers). Marilyn makes use of more real world examples of
social interaction (meeting a person of ambiguous gender and not knowing how to
act). I try to do that as well. The point is not to make a real event the
absolute judge and jury of philosophical ideas, but to have a dialogue between
the event and philosophical analysis—where each interrogates the other. In
this case, her concrete examples have layers of complexity fruitful to
unpack. I did not consciously settle in on any one way of critique.
My philosophical training was pretty much split evenly between analytic and
continental traditions, and I actually find the two work very well together. I
do believe in exploring how things look from "inside" the self, as
you put it, but that is never sufficient. Because what is "inside" is
constitutively related to what is "outside."
Marquez: Your
approach is not only phenomenological but also post-structuralist. However, in
opposition to many post-structuralists, you want to preserve a notion of truth
as something more than justified belief, and a normative dimension that goes
beyond the notion of "this is how we do it here". Why is that so? And can you
explain from your philosophical point of view how one takes that middle road
between absolutism and relativism that seems to escape most
post-structuralists?
Alcoff: Truth has
a referential aspect to it, and it is a mistake to think that if we reject
naive referentialism then we have escaped reference altogether. I disagree with
those in the pragmatic tradition, such as Putnam, who argue that the concept of
truth is built out of our understandings of justified beliefs, and does not go
beyond this. It's easy to demonstrate that ordinary linguistic usage does not
sustain such a view. Lots of times we hold out the possibility that a
completely justified claim may yet not be true. What we want in seeking truth
is not simply justification, but to know what is really the case. Consider the
example of the sexual abuse of children. In some of these cases, there is a lack
of sufficient evidence even for the victim herself to know for sure all of what
happened. But the truth matters enormously. This is not to deny that that truth
may have multiple layers, that it may be open to a certain variability in
interpretation. But the basic facts of touching, feelings, words spoken,
actions taken, have less variability and have a referentiality to events that
we aim for in aiming for the truth. The middle road between absolutism
and relativism allows for interpretation that is indexed to historical and
cultural context, but this doesn't give us a dysfunctional relativism.
Contexts, if I can put it like this, can speak to each other, can question each
other, and can even be unified. Relativists like Rorty think that cultures are
like linguistic prisons with no escape; he's apparently never met a person
fluent in more than one language.
Marquez: Your
relationship to Foucault is strong and deep but not devoid of conflict. Can you
briefly explain what you consider to be the richness and the limitations of
Foucault's (rather than "a Foucaultian") perspective?
Alcoff: Foucault
is enormously important to me. Foucault provided a critical analysis of
European modernity almost as useful as Marx's critical analysis of European
capitalism. His account of discipline helps us to see modernity's
"freedoms" very differently; his critique of the pathologization of
the modern subject helps us gain some distance from the hegemonic psychological
discourse of our own time; and his account of the interweavings of power and
knowledge points the way forward to reviving and resuscitating an impotent
epistemology. That said, I also find Foucault very problematic; he was
androcentric and Eurocentric and shamefully unconcerned about the particular
forms of violence suffered by women and children. And I am worried about the
way in which Foucault's work has been taken up in feminist theory and LGBT
studies to justify the repudiation of identity politics and identity based
political movements. But you want me to stick to Foucault himself, and not the
Foucaultian institution. I have found Foucault particularly useful for my own
philosophical work because he combines two of my main interests: the analysis
of subjectivity, and the analysis of knowledge, and he approaches both with an
effective historical consciousness (to import Gadamer's phrase) of the
political context within which both develop. Lyotard and Habermas are the other
two principal continental philosophers who do epistemology, but Lyotard's
account is too one-dimensional and focused on the challenges to knowing, and
Habermas's early wonderful work has been left behind in an increasingly
untenable pure procedural model. Foucault has many problems as well—he does
not pay enough attention to reference especially—but as I said before, he
gives us a good place to begin by announcing the equal importance of the
power and the knowledge aspects, without reducing power to mere strategy or
opportunism. I think Foucault gives us an invaluable starting point for reconfiguring
the problematic of epistemology, but it is only a starting point.
Marquez: Martha
Nussbaum, Amartya Sen, and Alasdair MacIntyre all have tried in their different
ways to reformulate an Aristotelian naturalized perspective in order to avoid
the very same problem of relativism that you seek to avoid. How does your own
immanent perspective differ from their Aristotlelian naturalized points of
view?
Alcoff: I am less
familiar with Sen's than with Nussbaum's or MacIntyre's accounts, but my sense
of all three is that they try to develop a minimal common denominator in order
to provide a means for cross-cultural critique, so that we can have a yardstick
to judge various practices by. And they do have a naturalized approach to what
that common denominator is. My problem is not so much with their naturalized
approach but with the ahistorical and decontextualized way of finding and
presenting the natural. In other words, Sen and Nussbaum take Aristotle to be
in a sense timeless and culturally universal. In contrast, I think the
applicability of Aristotle should be on the table, not set aside as the grounds
for being able to be at the table in the first place. This might seem to
put me in the camp of the proceduralists, but your question assumes (rightly)
that what I do share with the group of three you mentioned is their critique of
pure proceduralism. I don't think such a beast exists, and that we are always
putting forward substantive values in setting out procedures. Those values need
to be open to critical reflection, and historical and cultural self-awareness
(which calling them universal absolutes tends to foreclose). Sen seems to me to
be closer to proceduralism than Nussbaum because he doesn't give a list of the
actual human capabilities' attributes as she has done. I agree with much of Eva
Kittay's critique of Nussbaum's list and listmaking. The issue of cognitive
disability is a good case, as Kittay points out. Nussbaum uses our historical
and cultural moment's understanding to suggest that people with severe
cognitive impairment cannot exercise human capabilities, but this is just the
kind of claim we need to be careful to remain open about as we are able to
learn more from the cognitively disabled themselves (I'm thinking about the
astounding changes in the way we think of autism now that some persons with
severe autism have been able to write down their thoughts—on this see Doug
Biklen's amazing work). So we need a substantive universalism that will
not close the door to its own cultural and historical locatedness. Two good
examples of this are Satya Mohanty's discussion of moral objectivism and Edward
Said's work at the end of his life on humanism. Mohanty suggests that at this
historical stage we really have no idea whether there are moral universals
because, given the pattern of colonialism, we have never truly tried to find
out through real dialogues across difference. So he suggests we start the
process. I think he is right to make this at least partly an empirical
question. Said suggests that humanism involves the capacity of self-critique
and that that critique must involve a consciousness about power as well as
history and culture. This approach seems to me to be smarter than the
capabilities approach alone, which can devolve into dogmatism. Humanism can be
universally applied, but this means simply that critical and reflexive
dialogues are universally applied. Relativism is not entailed from recognizing
something's cultural embeddedness. One must be honest about one's own
embeddedness and be open to learning something new. The anthropologist Renato
Rosaldo is very good on showing why cultural relativism (which he supports) in
no way entails ethical relativism (which he rejects). There may be some
versions of cultural relativism that do entail ethical relativism, but this is
not the kind that Rosaldo, Said or many others including myself would support.
In fact, the whole point of developing a critical self-awareness of one's own
positionality is to aim toward greater truth and understanding, not to stop the
process of critique by claiming a relativism born of the particularity of one's
intellectual foundations. The more one comes to understand that particularity
(i.e. one's embeddedness), the more expansive and reliable one's judgements can
become.
Marquez: Your
immanent approach uses concrete, particular data, and descriptions of instances
of daily life to develop philosophical positions. In this regard, it is very
empirically informed. However, you do not use much data coming from the natural
and social (a.k.a., human sciences). Are there reasons beyond sheer contingency
why you do not use contemporary scientific knowledge in your work?
Alcoff:
I'm not a philosopher of science and so I don't trust myself to say original things about
the natural sciences. I wanted at one time to go into philosophy of science—I
wrote an M.A. thesis on Kuhn, and I had originally been a physics major in
college—but good work in philosophy of science really requires one to have a
high level of knowledge in at least one field. I have heard physicists and
other scientists make fun of the work by some of our leading philosophers of
science who seem to many of us to be really well-informed! But I do read
widely in the social sciences and try to use that to inform my work. Probably
over half of the bibliographical entries in the book on identity I am finishing
up now come from the social sciences. In working in women's studies and in
critical race theory in particular, our work has to be informed by the
empirical work on social movements, history, and so on. In fact, one of the
main ways I criticize the critics of identity politics is their amazing
inattention to any real empirical studies of identity politics in action, of
which there are now quite a few and some very good ones. Instead, the critics
will share personal anecdotes or simply move to idealized representations. But
when we are trying to think about something like social identities, it is not
enough to do conceptual analysis without relating concepts to real practices.
Marquez: What is
your take on the notion of human nature? Do you think that there are universals
(temporal or atemporal) that apply to our species and that philosophers should
take into account as data or horizon in their analyses?
Alcoff: My answer
to the previous question on neo-Aristotelian approaches relates to this. If
there is such a thing as human nature, I believe like Marx that it is
historical and dynamic. Thus it cannot play the absolute yardstick role that it
has in much European modernist philosophy. It's such an ideologically laden
concept that it seems to be more dangerous than it is useful.
II. Identity,
Knowledge, Politics
Marquez: Can you
talk about your Panamanian background?
Alcoff: I was born
in Gorgas Hospital, in Ancon, Panama. My father, Miguel Angel Martín, was from
a very interesting and kind of well known family in Panama City. His father had
owned a pawn shop in Balboa, and his brother and sisters (my aunts and my
uncle) all were teachers at the main high school in the city. They were middle
class but far from wealthy, and the neighborhood where my father grew up looks
like a very poor neighborhood by U.S. standards. Family legend has it my aunt
Ida demanded that the President of Panama give the family a loan so they could
finally purchase a home, and he did it. She was quite a beauty, with a strong
personality. My father had apparently been something of a troublemaker as a
teenager, so the family did what is often done in such cases, which is to send
him to live with friends somewhere far away. In this case it was Florida, where
he finished high school and then went to Florida State University. There he met
my mother, a white Floridian from a poor family who had made it to college on a
scholarship. They married immediately after she finished her B.A.
My parents had my sister Vicki in Florida, but my father was having trouble
finding work. With both a B.A. and an M.A. from FSU, he was only able to get a
job driving an ice cream truck. So they moved to Panama, which was back to
Panama in my father's case. And there I was born. My mother worked as a
secretary at the U.S. base there known as the Southern Command—the seat of
operations for all U.S. military activity in Latin America. She was the
secretary to a General (she had majored in business, but in those days that was
the equivalent to secretarial school for women). My father did not work that I
know of. They had a difficult relationship and she felt very alone. So when I
was still a baby, my mother decided to leave him and return to Florida. I thus
grew up in Florida with her and my older sister. My father has now passed away.
He eventually got his Ph.D. from the London School of Economics and became a
Professor of History at the University of Panama, where he taught his whole
career except during a period of the Torrijos dictatorship in which he lost his
job for almost ten years. Besides my older sister, I have two younger sisters,
Leslie and Aleika, and a younger brother, Rafael (we all have different
mothers). When the Twin Towers fell on 9-11, my husband and I spent the day on
the couch watching CNN and trying to get through to his family in New York (it
turned out they were all ok, but traumatized). I had not felt so close to war
since 1989, when I spent another day on the couch watching CNN and trying to
get through to my family in Panama the day after the U.S. invaded. When I
finally did get through on that day, I spoke to my brother who was crouching
under his dining room table watching U.S. planes hitting targets in his
neighborhood. I remember a colleague in Syracuse saying to me later that week
that I must have felt so glad to be in the U.S.—but I didn't at all. It felt
like being behind enemy lines. The demand that has become more insistent since
9-11 that Latinos here in the U.S. should assimilate and be loyal is so
clueless about the conflicting feelings we so often have about living in the
north. How can one be loyal to a country that oppresses our families?
Marquez: Speaking
of conflicting feelings, there appears to be at least two big ideas about what
America is: (1) "White America" (in this case borrowing the term from Eminem)
and (2) the "America" of Walt Whitman's Democratic Vistas. The two Americas can be simplistically contrasted saying that one
is antiliberal and the other one is liberal in J. S. Mill 's sense of the term.
We could say that the first one is not much different from any other so-called
closed, traditional society. While the second one is conceived by some as the
first true open society (a la Popper) that self-consciously engages in collective
"experiments in living" (like Mill puts it) and that allows for individuals to
do likewise. To me, the United States' present external War on Terrorism is a
reflection of an internal war between two camps adhering to these opposing
visions of America—camps that unfortunately seem to be evenly divided and thus
deadlocked.
At
least from our particular historical standpoint, an experimentalist,
fallibilist epistemology, a democratic politics, and an open society seem to be
mutually implicated in a constellation plotting the basic reference points for
a form of life that would be congenial with the vague vision of America (2).
And perhaps Latinos in the U.S. can be seen as representative of a kind of epistemological
subject who on average can feel the division between these two Americas more
intensely than the average monocultural white American.
Do
you see epistemological subjects as being differently useful/capable to perform
certain epistemological tasks? And if so, do you perceive this to be presently
the case with regards to Latinos at this particular historical point in the
U.S.? I am not suggesting that Latinos will save the world, but only that
perhaps different experiences of being-in-the-world embody different
epistemological ways that enable and nourish different political and social
forms of life. And that Latinos' hybrid, mestizo, syncretic nature has on
average an advantage when it comes to promoting the form of life of America (2)
at the dawn of the 21st century.
Alcoff: I believe
identities matter epistemologically, and their political salience is actually
derivative on their epistemic salience. Identities do not determine one's
political judgement or orientation (Latinos are politically all over the map),
but they are rough and ready ways to categorize experiences, and from
experiences we develop perceptual practices, what Gibson called affordances and
Merleau-Ponty called habits of perception. That is, we are attuned to different
elements in any given event or object. For Latinos, speaking very broadly,
immigration issues, and having a dual citizenship of the heart, if not of the
passport, are never far from the surface of our perspective on what happens in
the United States. Also there is tremendous poverty and discrimination, which
convey an emotional valence to our responses to political leaders who promise
to help the underclass.
So, yes, I
do think Latinos will make a positive difference. Perhaps the most significant
potential we have to offer is the idea of an open-endedness to what it means to
be "American." Because "America" encompasses a lot of territory, two
continents, a plethora of nations, and several languages and cultures. Latinos
are less likely than any other minority group to shed completely their old
identities. Our nationalities are closer in geographical location to the U.S.
than any other grouping save Native Americans. There is an inordinate amount of
movement of bodies and monies between the U.S. and "home."
Chauvinists
like Samuel Huntington can only see this as a threat. He seems to believe as
Woodrow Wilson said that "Any man who carries a hyphen about him has a dagger
that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of the republic." They can't imagine
a patriotism that extends beyond a single nation, a love that crosses borders.
Their humanism is at best a colonial humanism, but what we hearken after is a
decolonized humanism.
The
idea that cultural identity cannot be transcended and that identities matter is
less threatening if we think beyond mono-cultural terms and embrace and
acknowledge the reality of multi-cultural identities. Monocultural identity
politics can become fundamentalist, but multicultural identity politics is
expansive, internally heterogeneous, and thus not at all antithetical to open
and critical debate. This is what Mignolo and others mean by calling for a
pluritopic hermeneutics, an account of multicultural horizons of
intelligibility and meaning. I think that the late great Gloria Anzaldua's book
Borderlands was taken up so widely precisely
because it manifested a reflective pluritopic hermeneutics: a reflective
engagement with her own heterogeneous identity without falsely smoothing over
the conflicts but without a hopeless or fatalistic attitude about being
multiple (as one got with the image of the "tragic mulatto" a generation ago).
The
treatment of Barack Obama who is just now emerging onto the national political
scene is interesting to watch as the pundits grapple with his complex identity.
There are two salutary lessons that Latinos should learn from the treatment of
Obama: first, that we are not the only ones with complex identities, and we
need to recognize this and make alliances with others, and second, that even
multiple identities can get co-opted by the power structure and used for the
purpose of maintaining the status quo.
So there is
definite positive potential in Latino experience for refashioning the imagery
and self-understanding of the United States. But that potential is only a potential:
we need leaders who will make coalition with others, as well as intellectuals
who will formulate the full political fruits of the potential that exists.
Marquez: Can you
tell me something about your current work on identity, in particular, as it
relates to the construction of Latina identity/identities in contemporary U.S.?
Alcoff: I am
finishing up a book on identity, race, gender and the self right now (perhaps
it will be in press when this interview comes out—it will come out with Oxford
UP). I have three chapters in the book that address Latino issues: the question
of Latino identity in relation to racial categories, the relationship between
Latino identity and the black/white paradigm of racial politics so dominant in
the U.S., and the implications of mixed race and mestizo identity. The book as
a whole is an extended look at social identities—race and gender in
particular—and the way in which identity has become suspect in both political
and philosophical discussions. For at least fifteen years now, identity
politics has been criticized as reifying, constraining, irrational, and
politically retrograde, and this critique has flowed from a certain
characterization of what identities are. I am taking on the critiques both of
identity and of identity politics in this book, and developing an account of
what identities really are (as against their caricatured portrayal by critics).
My account is a broadly realist one, so I develop a realist account of race and
of gender identity. Then at the end I discuss the idea of a decolonized
humanism.
Marquez: What do
you see yourself pursuing next in philosophy?
Alcoff: I already
have the next book half done, but at my rate of writing that only means I may
finish it in five rather than ten years! But this book will be going back to
epistemology, to chart and analyze the development of a political epistemology
that would do to, and for, epistemology what Marxian political economy did to,
and for, the study of economics. I want to lay out what a research programme of
political epistemology would look like, and address its most serious
challenges, which involve the question of truth and of reference in my view.
And I try to bring into being a canon of work that already exists within this
rubric, and then analyze the contributions of this work, from Horkheimer and
Adorno, to Habermas, Foucault, feminist epistemologists, especially Helen
Longino, and some of the new work relating post-colonial theory to
epistemological questions such as Mignolo pursues.
Marquez: Thank you
very much for your time.
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