NATIONAL IDENTITY & INCLUSION PROJECT Working Paper #2:

Peculiarities of the Multiculturalism Debate1 Catherine Frost, McMaster University The debate over multiculturalism has taken a peculiar form. Critics charge multiculturalists with latent essentialism, yet from the outset most multiculturalists have stressed a non-essentialist concept of culture. Wittgenstein suggests that we can learn a great deal from our misunderstandings and miscommunications and this paper uses a Wittgensteinian approach to explore the peculiarities of the multiculturalism debate. When we look at how culture is explained by the parties to the debate there appears to be no great difference between most theorists. But when we look at how culture works as a word in the debate as well as in our broader way of life, it appears that it works in many of the ways that concern critics. But the critic’s response to multiculturalism is unlikely to help us escape these problems because their emphasis on constructivism tends to naturalise the way that the word culture works to organize the experience of difference.

The debate focuses on the concept of culture and opens with people like Charles Taylor, James Tully, Will Kymlicka and Bhikhu Parekh stressing the importance of cultural recognition and accommodation in the name of fairness. In response, critics like Brian Barry, Susan Moller Okin, and Seyla Benhabib argue that the concept of culture multiculturalists are using is                                                          Comments welcome, please do not cite without permission of the author at [email protected].

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essentializing, and ends up empowering power abuses. The problem, as critics like Nancy Fraser and Christian Joppke explain, is that multiculturalism treats culture as a thing instead of realizing that it is socially constructed (Fraser 2000; Joppke 2004). Policy based on this error does not produce well-adjusted multicultural societies, they say, it produces culturalism – which is a perversion of the ordinary course of cultural development, one that interrupts social progress and/or maintains authority and power structures based on inequality. What makes this debate peculiar is that from the outset most multicultural theorists have stressed a non-essentialist concept of culture. Writing early in the multiculturalist debate, James Tully identifies the idea that cultures can be taken in isolation with a dated form of anthropology that saw culture as “separate, bounded and internally uniform.” This “billiard-ball conception of cultures” has been replaced, he explains, “by the view of cultures as “overlapping, interactive and internally negotiated” (1995, 10). The problem, he thinks, is that our “inherited normative vocabulary misrepresents” cultural diversity as the earlier billiard-ball version, while he advocates an approach to cultures based on the later interactive and constructivist version – what he calls the “aspectival view” (1995, 13). He founds his theory on this alternative vision. He says: “There is no end or exception to this criss-crossing and overlapping of cultures in the world”; that “Cultures are also densely interdependent in their formation and identity”; and that “cultures are not internally homogenous” (1995, 10-11). The kind of constitutional justice he advocates can only be achieved, he thinks, by working on the intercultural ground that is common to citizens’ experiences (1995, 14).

Although he develops his theory with reference to cultural groups, Will Kymlicka shares Tully’s concern that cultures not be taken as isolated units. He insists that the cultural groups he is concerned with are “not defined by race or descent” that membership must be voluntary and open to anyone, and that internal group restrictions are invalid. He believes people can and do move between cultures or live in multicultural settings, and he thinks the job of multiculturalism is to ensure that this process is fair. And he considers the idea that members of a cultural group necessarily share “moral values or a traditional way of life” an unhelpful myth (1995, 22-3, 37, 92). In a similar spirit, Bhikhu Parekh explains that even though we mediate a lot of our moral and social lives through cultural experiences, and even though it is possible to individuate cultures on this basis, still, no culture ever “confronts its members as a homogenous and cohesive whole” (2000, 157).

not the mythical anthropologists who see all cultures from outside, and since our way of life is part of what makes up the structures of meaning, we are all limited by that structure, especially when we remain unaware of it. Taylor is not describing cultural silos, he is trying to remind us to keep our own limitations in view and to use our relations with others who think differently to reveal our own conceptual habits. In other words, his recommendations only makes sense from the point of view of a constructivist account of culture. Taylor (as well as James Tully and Tariq Modood whose work will be discussed below) draws heavily on the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein to develop his arguments about the significance of culture (Taylor 1994; Tully 1995; Modood 2007). But Wittgenstein’s work is resolutely anti-foundationalist and antistructuralist. His discussion of language drives home the impossibility of abstract or a priori conceptual frameworks. Whatever systems of meaning we have, he explains, are grounded in the practical contingencies of everyday life. To the extent that they that draw on Wittgenstein, these theorists are on side with the view of human experience as a function of constructed patterns of living and meaning.

Even further back in the origins of multiculturalism, such as with Charles Taylor’s thinking on the politics of recognition, we still find anti-essentialist themes. Taylor speaks in terms of identity and difference rather than about culture in his major essay on the topic so it’s not clear he’s talking about the same thing. In the final pages of his essay, however, Taylor does talk about cultures as horizons of thought (1994, 72) which seems to raise the specter of closure. But then he also talks about displacing the horizons and says that we are “very far away from that ultimate horizon from which the relative worth of different cultures might be evident” (1994, 73).

Despite this, the essentialist critique of multiculturalism has great staying power. While some writing either disregards or overlooks the qualifications multicultural theorists offer on this point, not everyone makes this mistake. Arash Abizadeh acknowledges that multicultural theorists have as much distaste for essentialist versions of culture as everyone else. Although he is specifically focused on the accommodation of national identity that is associated with a multicultural approach, he explains that the advocates of national identity think they’re using a constructivist

What he is explaining is how the constructedness of every culture constrains our vision – even of the social scientist or philosopher. No matter how enlightened or cosmopolitan we try to be, we are

 

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approach in their efforts to defend culture, when they have actually bought into the essentialist version without realizing it. They can’t see that by advocating the recognition of culture as a basis for nationality, they set off a chain of events and responses that culminates in them “courting a xenophobic politics” (2004, 241). In essence, multiculturalists are suffering from false consciousness. Abizadeh’s thinking on this point is illuminating because he makes overt what is more subtly implied by other theorists

Despite Levey’s attempt to put an end to the controversy, the debate over the role of culture/culturalism in multiculturalism end up feeling unsatisfactory, because it is premised on critics friend and foe alike– rejecting a concept that was never endorsed in the first place. The problem at the heart of multiculturalism is supposedly resolved by a move that has no precursor. So it falls a bit flat, the ending never seems to work – especially if its necessary to inject a claim about false consciousness into the mix in order for the argument to proceed. In short, the problems of multiculturalism – and no doubt it has plenty– cannot be resolved this way.

Although I agree that a lack of consciousness about our own beliefs may explain the peculiarities of the multiculturalism debate, I will argue that the persistence of essentialist thinking may have as much to do with the critics as it does with the proponents of multiculturalism. And it may have as much to do with the near-universal adoption of constructivism, as it does with any failings in the multiculturalist approach.

EXPLAINING CULTURE This is precisely the kind of misunderstanding that can prove enlightening, because it provides an opportunity to get at some of the unspoken assumptions behind this discourse. Wittgenstein uses misunderstanding as a process that highlights how much of language and meaning operates beyond logical and conceptual thinking. When language fails us, when it becomes “nonsense” we are bluntly confronted with what makes language work in the first place – a whole universe of habits and assumptions already encoded in a way of life. Bringing that element to the surface helps us put philosophy in its place, because it should discourage us from seeking a level of truth that language cannot support.

Not everyone wants to use the essentialist critique to reject multiculturalism, however. Some think it can be a means of saving multiculturalism from itself. Included among the latter group is recent writing on multiculturalism that aims to reject the culturalism error and more thoroughly integrate the constructedness element. Recent works by Tariq Modood (2007) and Anne Phillips (2007) promise that multiculturalism can be redeemed by a more conscious awareness of the fluidity of culture and group identity. Geoffrey Brahm Levey used a review of their works to announce the rejection, on behalf of all multiculturalists everywhere, of any association with culturalism, while recommitting himself to the multiculturalist project that takes culture seriously (2009).

 

The moments of misunderstanding Wittgenstein contemplated generally involved examples when a concept proved incommunicable (such as when someone doesn’t understand how to complete a sequence of numbers) or when language was intelligible but what it communicated was absurd. But this misunderstanding is different. In this case the participants in the debate don’t seem to understand that they are basically in

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consensus – that the constructivist view of culture is the basis simultaneously of multiculturalism, its critique and rejection, and its renewal and reformation.

realms, looks like a culture under these terms. Bhikhu Parekh explains culture by how it shapes human life. Pointing out culture involves pointing to “a system of beliefs and practices in terms of which a group of human beings understand, regulate and structure their individual and collective lives.” It is, he explains, “a way of both understanding and organizing human life” (2000, 143).

Wittgenstein was interested in how we come to understand the meaning of a word. Although asking what “culture” means for these various theorists seems like a useful exercise given the form of the debate, the reality, he believed, was you didn’t gain understanding through definitions. Definitions only make sense against an already existing background of shared understanding. However, he does say you can fruitfully ask “how do you explain” a word, or what do you point to when you want to draw someone’s attention toward it. So how do these theorists explain culture. Could this be the basis of their misunderstanding?

What these different accounts have in common is they all explain culture by what it does for people. It is characterized as a way of doing things across the entire social spectrum rather than a particular set of practices (this is what distinguishes the culture in multiculturalism from ideas like business culture, teen culture etc. as Parekh explains [2000, 143]). And it also provides the system by which we interpret what has been done or what we might chose to do. It can operate at an individual level but explaining it almost always involves pointing at a collective and focusing on common behaviors and shared conceptual habits. Kymlicka takes a slightly different approach in that he explains culture in terms of identifiable groups. But these groups turn out to be identifiable based on their way of doing and interpreting things, so it is still closely related. Although they focus their explanation on the practices and interpretative framework being employed clearly Parekh, Taylor and Tully all have groups in mind too.

James Tully explains culture by first explaining what its not – not bounded and isolated. He then explains that culture is a characteristic of our actions and behaviors. It is, he says “a way of relating to others in any interaction, a way of following or challenging a social rule.” If we want to point at culture, he says that “any social relation” will integrate some aspect of culture (1995, 15). Will Kymlicka explains culture by pointing to groups that are intergenerational, “more or less institutionally complete” and sharing a homeland, language and/or history (1995, 18). And he explains culture in terms of what these groups do for people – they provide reasonably comprehensive systems of “embodied practices” (1995, 76) that organize people’s lives through education, economic life, political authority etc.. Most importantly for liberal theory, cultures provide “a range of meaningful options” to help inform individual choice (1995, 83). Any relatively complete system that provide those range of choices and organize shared life along a range of significant social

 

Those who criticize the culturalism in multiculturalism also explain culture to some extent by what it does. Susan Moller Okin’s begins her critique of multiculturalism by explaining that most cultures “have as one of their principal aims the control of women by men” (1999, 5 cite). When Okin wants to illustrate this, she points at cultures that she feels epitomize these behaviors, and what she chooses are “Greek and Roman

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antiquity” and “Judaism, Christianity and Islam” (1999, 5 cite). Indeed she says that culture is “so closely linked with the control of women” that it is “virtually equated” (1999, 7 cite). While they may be associated with other traditions and behaviors then, culture is primarily explained by Okin as way to organize and perpetuate gender discrimination to a greater or lesser degree. The fact that some cultures do so poorly on this measure makes multiculturalism a dangerous policy approach.

ways of thinking common among certain identifiable groups that can be judged as a whole. The problem with multiculturalism is not, therefore, that it associates a given set of behaviors and thinking with a given group – because Barry himself does the same and engages in the debate on this basis. The problem is it fails to judge them based on these behaviors in a properly anthropological way. Christian Joppke picks up on Barry’s explanation of cultures in his own contribution to the multiculturalism debate. Joppke doesn’t explain culture directly but says that cultural differences in the contemporary state generally “challenge mere conventions or customs” (2004, 241) and therefore don’t merit a large overhaul of our political system. This view of culture – as mere convention – is in contrast with another passage where he describes multiculturalism as focused on “involuntary and mutually exclusive statuses” (2004, 238). It’s possible he doesn’t have culture in mind when he uses this phrase but it’s unclear what else he might be trying to explain if that is the case.

When he wants to explain why culture doesn’t have the moral weight multiculturalists suppose, Brian Barry talks about culture in terms of people’s attachment to long-standing behaviors. In explaining his view that “Culture is no excuse” he takes culture to mean: “The fact that you (or your ancestors) have been doing something for a long time” and later uses the phrase “traditional ways of behaving, or “acting in ways that you have become used to” as synonymous with culture. In the same passage, when he has to point to actual cultures, Barry picks the Orange Order in Northern Ireland, the Ku Klux Klan, and slave owners in the ante bellum South because all have long-standing behaviors based on “monopolizing power” (2001, 258-9).

The idea that Joppke does indeed mean to explain culture as involuntary is strengthened by an aside he makes regarding another author. He notes that a particular author (Stephen Fitzgerald) has an Irish background and suggests that his views are coloured by his “Irish (and thus latently anti-British) background” (2004, 246). Whatever the merits of Fitzgerald’s analysis the fact that Joppke believes he can confidently extrapolate Fitzgerald’s views on British society, based solely on what he assumes to be his culture, suggests Joppke sees culture as a powerful determinant of thinking. Culture, in other words, is explained by what it explains. It explains Fitzgerald’s thinking

But in another passage Barry distinguishes what he calls “the anthropological sense of culture.” This view of culture is not the self-serving and morally suspect one he initially outlines. This one enables us – indeed requires us – to judge that “some cultures… are better than others: more just, more free, more enlightened, and generally better adapted to human flourishing” (2001, 267). Indeed he says that cultures have “propositional content” which means “ they distinguish between true and false, right and wrong, beauty and ugly” (2001, 270). So Barry explains culture as a concept that refers to long-standing behaviors and

 

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about British culture, and therefore it is explained as a kind of narrowed and pre-determined view of the world.

that marks difference. She puts special emphasis on the dynamics of culture – how it is developed and modified (2002, 16). When she wants to point at this dynamic in operation, she describes how Kemal Ataturk chose, in “a radically constructivist gesture,” to impose a new script and vernacular on twentieth century Turkey replacing the old linguistic mélange associated with the millet system (2002, 10). She introduces this example by saying it is “an example that would be quite unfamiliar to European and North American students of nationalism” (2002, 9). Since, of course, Benhabib cannot with any certainty know what students of nationalism know based on their geographic or ethnic origins, we can assume that even her introductory statement is further (albeit unconscious?) illustration of a cultural narrative at work.

The way these critics of multiculturalism offer an explanation of culture is worth considering. In some ways it is banal – culture is merely convention, simply the how we do things here. In other ways culture amounts to coherent and powerful systems of thinking and conduct that sometimes (or perhaps often) monopolize power in the interests of a specific subgroup. When seen in this more “anthropological” light, we can deal with culture as we should – by judging it and classifying some cultures – generally those clustered around the North Atlantic – as more desirable than others. So what are we to make of the other critics, who claim that it is multiculturalists who see cultures as bounded things? Benhabib charges multiculturalists base their arguments on a “reductionist sociology of culture” which sees cultures as “clearly delineable wholes” (2002, 4). Although she recognizes that many multiculturalists reject essentialism she says she finds it hard to understand why they do so, whereas her own reasoning on this score is informed by a constructivist=influenced narrative view that stresses the agency of actors and the contingency of cultural outcomes. She explains that “What we call ‘culture’ is the horizon formed by these evaluative stances” (2002, 7). Although she also explains culture as “an identity marker and differentiator” (2002, 1).

Lisa Weeden shares Benhabib’s concerns over how we think about culture. She argues that seeing culture as in reified terms is an occupational hazard of political scientists (2002, 716) and proposes we move to a “semiotic practices approach” (2002, 726) that sees cultural phenomenon as “open to various interpretations and saturated by complicated, contentious relations of power” (2002, 719). Rita Dhamoon seconds Weeden’s prognosis, and suggests if we think about “the cultural” instead of “culture” we’ll avoid the essentializing problems she associates with the thinking of Taylor and Kymlicka (2006). Weeden and Dhamoon promise that because their solution is premised on taking cultural content merely as ways of signifying something we can then reflect on, interpret, and deconstruct it as necessary. In other words they explain culture either as something we do (practices) or something we mean by our practices (signification).

Culture, in Benhabib’s view, is a loose indicator framed by individual and collective agency through narrative-formation activities which can overlap. And as with multiculturalists, culture is a way of thinking about or approaching things, and something

 

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The problem is: a) this isn’t particularly far from how multiculturalists explain culture; and b) these theorists say multiculturalists go wrong when they isolate cultures and see them as wholes rather than as part of complex systems of meaning and power. Yet it’s hard to see how any analysis, interpretation, or narrative construction/deconstruction could take place without seeing cultural practices in the same light. In other words if you can’t isolate cultures from the general flow of power and meaning, you can’t isolate cultural practices either. What they are objecting to is a feature of interpretation that is common to all efforts to understand the world. It is not a unique failing of multiculturalism. Setting up a semiotic or narrative approach as a solution promises we can look at processes of meaning-making without assuming there is what Wittgenstein would call a particular “way of life” that provides the background within with understanding takes place. In fact Wittgenstein himself calls this background a “culture” (1958, 134). And he explains it in terms of relatively regularized – or at least recognizable – practices and ways of thinking that facilitate the interpretation of language. As he put it, “to imagine a language means to imagine a life-form” (2001, §19).

beliefs people have.” As he put it: “The charge of essentialism is itself essentialist” (2007, 97). Modood recommends a pragmatic approach to culture and says we should spend less time philosophizing about the concept of culture and instead “build it up from the specific claims” encountered in multicultural polities. He explains that cultures “matter to people who are marked by ‘difference’” (2007, 35). Indeed the association between culture and the experience of difference is a strong theme for Modood. When he wants to point to the challenges and dynamics of culture at work a common example he offers is the experience of Muslims and non-European ethnic groups in Britain. But he stresses this never represents a fixed group or set of relationships. He says “a culture is made through change” although this also means there has to be “something that has undergone change” (2007, 93). Anne Phillips shares Modood’s skepticism that constructivism provides a solution to the problems of culture. She warns this position can “be seen as worryingly ethnocentric because of the extraordinary potency it attributes to Western anthropology” (2007, 50). She explains: … the notion of culture… has become increasingly exoticised, perceived as something that grips others, not me. In the process, it has become possible to think that the world divides into those at the mercy of their culture and those who have set themselves free (2007, 128).

Tariq Modood responds to charges that multiculturalism reifies groups using a similar logic. He readily agrees that cultures are constructed, but he points out that so are all social phenomena including individualism, citizenship, and class. We cannot substitute anything more concrete for cultures or identity groups, so to attack multiculturalism on that basis borders on hypocrisy. Theorists who treat the claims of culture as if they express an attachment to bounded groups and identities “latch on to the reification in the confused or crude accounts” of social actors and use them as a basis to “over-homogenize and essentialize the

 

Like Modood she opts to explain culture as something that “matters to people in many different ways,” although she warns

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against exaggerating its importance (2007, 52, 64). To help explain further she points to the way that thinking about people as “cultural beings” focuses our attention on the “mediation of everyone’s relationship to their social world” (2007, 52) including the role of social norms. But she elsewhere explains that culture is a kind of cognitive tool “a stereotype… a rough generalization that can be a useful way of condensing information” (2007, 98). When she wants to point to culture in everyday life she talks about parenting practices, specifically how the Irish practice of sending young unwed mothers to a correctional facilities has changed over time. While she uses this example to illustrate what we understand as culture, she also stresses that this doesn’t mean there is a unified culture involved or that changes in that culture are sufficient to explain individual behavior (2007, 53).

unproductive full circle. At this point nearly everyone seems to endorse a constructivist view of culture, and nearly everyone has been charged with ethnocentric or essentialist leanings. Although disagreements over the meaning of culture appear to be at the heart of the multiculturalism debate, looking at explanations of culture leaves this debate in the same peculiar place. Multiculturalists are told to correct their approach by adopting much the same approach they already embrace. And it is the most vocal critics, rather than the multiculturalists, who seem convinced that cultures can be evaluated as wholes and labeled better or worse for humanity. Some who aim at reforming multiculturalism recommend focusing on the interpretation of practices but reject the idea of coherent ways of life, within which practices have meaning. Others recommend focusing on practice and social dynamics but warn that the essentialist drive lies with the constructivist thinkers who believe they have seen culture from a neutral vantage point or who generate the very essentialism they object to by over-interpreting everyday cultural discourse.

So when it comes to explaining culture, the multiculturalism debate brings up an odd exchange. Multiculturalists explain culture as a way of doing things, and in terms of what it does for people. It is linked both to meaning and practices and is capable of change and exchange through these dynamics. For its most severe critics, culture is sometimes banal (in the form of mere convention) and sometimes sinister (in the form of monopolizations of power. But it is clearly something that can and should be evaluated and judged, either as wholes or as individual practices. And for a third group, culture is not completely sinister but it is mishandled by multiculturalists. They argue multiculturalist thinking reifies cultures and the solution lies in understanding culture as a combination of meaning and practices. Some multiculturalists share this thinking, although they caution against embracing constructivism in a way that legitimates ethnocentrism or essentialism. At which point the debate seems to have completed a strange and somewhat

 

Fortunately there is another way to investigate this persistent misunderstanding. Wittgenstein says we can learn about meaning by watching what makes a word work, not just from how it is explained. So the next task is to ask what makes “culture” work as a term, or to put it another way, what does “culture” do when we use it successfully as a term in the debate.2                                                          2

Convention dictates that from here forward I use scare quotes on the word “culture,” to indicate I am examining it as a word doing its work in language. But since the whole point of Wittgenstein’s approach is

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literature. First, culture works when we modify our expectations around interpretation. Charles Taylor talks in terms of culture as a “horizon of meaning,” (Taylor, 1994, 72) and Kymlicka calls it a “context of choice,” (1995, 82-4). The word culture causes us to adapt how we deal with others because we view them as having a different system of meaning and practice, or we expect others to deal with us on this basis too. Phillips also thinks that culture works as a way of explaining people’s actions but that it should be considered a relevant but not determining factor in interpreting conduct (2002, 131).

WHAT DOES CULTURE DO? If we try to approach the multiculturalism debate by asking what culture does – specifically what the word culture does in this debate, we get a slightly different picture. Wittgenstein’s technique says if you want to know whether you have used a word correctly you watch what happens next, what outcomes follow in actual practice because this reveals the existing background of shared understanding that is part of linguistic meaning. When we look at culture in this light, we see that when it is used it does a couple of things and that, to a certain extent, the division between them reflects concerns in the theoretical debate over organizing people into groups, and reification of social meaning. By pulling back even further, to consider how culture works within our entire way of life, we see that this variety collapses into a common functionality. In effect, culture works when it names and thereby organizes the experience of difference. This function – the way culture works in our way of life – does not indicate some deep conceptual essence or sociological inevitability, merely how we are using the word today. And one of the things culture does, when it works, is obscure the hegemonic organization of power that sets up the experience difference in the first place. Because I have already run through a great deal of the discussion and explanation around concepts of culture in this debate, I will summarize fairly briefly the ways I see culture working in this

Culture also works when it identifies a group of people with something in common, something that is not in common among a larger population. It might be history, language, religion, oppression, ethnicity, or any number of markers or characteristics, elective or otherwise. This is at the root of Kymlicka’s definition of groups as societal cultures (1995, 76). This is also the sense in which Barry and Okin use the term. Phillips thinks it sometimes works “as a resource in mobilizing against majority dominance” (2002, 63). And Benhabib thinks culture works when it “generates coherence for the purposes of understanding and control” (2002, 5). However the word culture does not work if we reduce the concept directly to those markers – such as language group, ethnic group, religious group etc. These features point at culture, they do not equate with it. We would be mistaken if we reduced culture to any one of these features. Moreover we lose something of what the word culture can do – which is name an amorphous and changeable social reality. So culture works when it makes it possible for us to conceive of a collectivity that is not definitively bounded in some other way, and which is capable of

                                                         that words don’t work in isolation, I will not follow this convention. Although it may create moments of ambiguity in the text, I think this ambiguity could be productive if it illustrates how culture works both as an isolated focus of analysis and as an element of regular discourse.

 

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changing even the markers by which we recognize it. It has become, as Benhabib puts it “a ubiquitous synonym for identity” (2002, 1).

multicultural theorizing. He starts with Tully’s thinking on culture and argues that while his theory is morally appealing, it is in some ways suspect because it so neatly fits what he calls a “once-upon-a-time” story about the meaning of culture (2003, 101). This story sets up our current understanding of culture – based in a Geertzian idea of culture as constructed and contingent – as a moment of conceptual progress. It inspires us to think: Now at last… we know what culture really is, namely, fluid, heterogeneous, partial and so on. And therefore we can now begin to reconstruct a more adequate political theory of community (2003, 101).

This is probably not the final word on how culture works, however. Culture might work in new ways as a result of the rise of multiculturalism and the changing social practices it initiates. Because operationalizing multiculturalism in the form of cultural accommodations or rights requires us to identify the groups we want to work with, and to assess things as cultural or not. And this development reflects many of the concerns that critics bring up. Because multiculturalism incentivizes whatever gets used as markers of culture. To put it another way, culture works when it influences people’s behavior towards group markers (either affirming or challenging their role as markers) or people’s behavior towards a group (accommodating, judging, rejecting, etc.). Multiculturalists insist they don’t endorse the hardening of boundaries that this pattern describes and this is true. Critics say multiculturalism can’t help but have this effect and they’re right too. But does this help us get a clear view of how the misunderstanding between them happened?

It’s the “curiously just so” quality to the story of culture that Scott wants to problematize (2003, 101). Instead Scott argues that if we start by looking at what culture does in contemporary life, we can put it in historical context. Start, he recommends, by considering how other eras have managed what we would today call cultural difference. In the Renaissance the “difference of the non-European Other” was experienced as a difference in religion, specifically their lack of Christianity. In the Enlightenment, it was experienced as a lack – on their part – of reason. And in the nineteenth century difference was organized through the lens of race. Culture comes at the end of this sequence, he explains:

Wittgenstein thinks the problem with language is we often don’t step far enough back when we want to see how a word works. To truly understand a word, he says, we have to look at the way of life within which we are doing the explaining because this provides the background against which the word is uttered. Wittgenstein’s own use of the word culture affirms its role as an interpretative aid, but it also points us back towards our own social setting to fully interpret its meaning. David Scott tried to undertake this daunting task by asking about the meaning of the term “culture” in political theory with a special eye to its role in

 

In this century ‘culture’ emerges as what accounts for the difference of the Other. Culture now becomes the universal ground and grid and horizon of difference. It

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becomes, so to speak, the commanding natural language of difference (2003, 104)

because we already think of women as prone to submission and these minority cultures as patriarchal (2007, 96). Scott’s analysis brings us face to face with the work that culture does in our way of life. He highlights the way that culture works to organize difference. While he derives his arguments from an analysis of Tully’s work, this concept is not limited to multiculturalism. The constructivist view of culture is found among multiculturalists and critics alike. Yet if meaning is partly dependent on our ways of life, and our ways of life are inevitably riven with relations of power, then we need to be wary of how we work with the concept of culture. Just because difference is now experienced as culture, and just because we have a neat story about the contingent and constructed nature of cultural life, does not mean we should stop thinking about the structures of power that frame our experiences in these ways.

Culture is one of a series of ways in which we have experienced difference. Or as Scott puts it, “We now, literally, experience difference as culture” (2003, 103). As a word, culture serves to name, identify, organize, and perhaps most significantly, naturalize the experience of difference. But its apparent neutrality – the roots of the “just so” quality to Tully’s story of multiculturalism – should not be taken at face value. Because if all concepts work only against a background way of life, and if, as Foucault argues, systems of power infuse the background way of life, then culture can no more be neutral than religion, Reason or race were. This suspicion about the power dynamics hidden in (or by) the concept of culture has already inspired much of the critical thinking about multiculturalism. Scott believes the new constructivist concept of culture can be a double-edged sword if we embrace it unreflectively. Because experiencing difference as culture does nothing to mitigate the costs of difference. As one author observed with regard to the politics of the veil in France, “a girl in a headscarf was a member of a ‘community’, but a girl in a mini-skirt is expressing her individuality” (quoted in Levey 2009, 83). In a similar way, Phillips point out that concerns over the cultural defense are overplayed, not only because cultural claims rarely succeed in mitigating sentences, but also because where courts are sympathetic to such claims it is usually because we see cultural difference through our own prejudices. In other words we can be convinced that a woman in a minority culture was especially susceptible to being browbeaten by their husbands

 

And it’s this worry that may help explain the peculiarities of the multiculturalism debate. Because if multiculturalism is premised on a constructivist view of culture, it’s peculiar to see critics fault its theorists for failing to embrace it, or to see new accounts of multiculturalism appear which aim to introduce constructivism as a fresh element. But the objection that critics have to the way multiculturalism works are valid, it may indeed enable problematic dynamics of power including the organization of people into groups they may or may not endorse. But this is not a problem with multiculturalism per se, it’s a problem with the constructivism upon which multiculturalism is based. And it therefore cannot be solved by the re-introduction of what is already there. CONCLUSION There are problems associated with the concept of culture. But

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we don’t escape these difficulties by substituting a constructivist understanding of culture, because the problems are partly encoded in our background way of life and do not reside in the concept alone. This means the critics are right to be concerned with power dynamics and the use of culture to organize difference, but they are wrong to think this is an issue for multiculturalism alone. The problem is more pervasive than the debate suggests. You can’t solve it by rejecting or reinventing multiculturalism.

be hard to take out of politics. And until difference is taken out of culture, it will be hard to counteract the organizational drive involved in using the word. Yet this is one of the chief objections to culturalism – that is seeks to organize something that has no real structure by imposing a conceptual and experiential order on it. Naming something a culture leads people to start organizing around it like there is something really there. It is reasonable to be concerned by this pattern, but it’s not reasonable to think we can avoid it by modifying how we talk about things.

Difference is experienced as culture in the contemporary world. Or to put it in Wittgensteinian terms culture is explained by pointing at difference, and culture works when it names/identifies/organizes/or naturalizes difference. Wittgenstein’s account of language shows how the words we use provide a way of organizing experience so we can develop understanding. Yet what we organize has no necessary structure – in short we use language to organize the amorphous experience of everyday life. This, for example, is what happens when we name something a ‘game’, without being able to provide a finite account of why all games belong in one category. We even name things we cannot possibly know, such as when we talk about someone else’s pain (Wittgenstein 2001, §23, §281-315). Culture, as Tariq Modood points out, has the same quality as Wittgenstein’s “games”: it organizes without a definition, without positing a final structure (2007, 95-6). I’d add that culture also names – and therefore organizes and makes it possible to work with - the unknowable experience of the other.

The hope that a constructed view of culture will save us from our ideological missteps and the errors of history presents its own problems. It only works if we see it as the right way to view culture and organize ourselves around it. It promises a position of understanding, or neutrality, between cultures or the cultural experience, that we don’t have good reason to believe in. If anything, the readiness to think we have arrived at a clear view of human conduct obscures the Foucaultian power relations that Scott wants to recapture. The problem with the way the multiculturalism debate has unfolded is that it throws us off course. The focus on essentialism gives the sense that we’ve spotted the fatal flaw in multicultural thinking. And it leads us to embrace the constructivist solution without due caution, because we think the problems in how we deal with culture have been resolved, or that they’re avoidable given this new more accurate view of how culture works. As Scott reminds us, this confidence camouflages the contingency and power dynamics in any concept. Wittgenstein also cautions us against too much confidence in our ability to understand - he called it our “craving for generality”

Difference (under the name of culture) has its costs and there will always be some need to make it visible in order to redress unfairness. Until difference doesn’t matter to politics, culture will

 

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(1958, 17). But he offers us ways to unsettle that confidence by examining how we develop understanding. It is, he shows, so grounded in our way of life that it cannot hope to escape its influence.

Fraser, N. (2000) “Rethinking Recognition,” New Left Review (May/June) 107-20. Joppke, C. (2004) “The retreat of multiculturalism in the liberal state: theory and practice,” The British Journal of Sociology 55(2): 237-57. Kymlicka, W. (1995) Multicultural Citizenship. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Levey, G. B. (2009) “What is living and what is dead in multiculturalism,” Ethnicities 9(1): 75-93. Modood, T. (2007) Multiculturalism. Cambridge: Polity. Okin, S.M. (1999) “Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?” in J. Cohen and M. Howard (eds) Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Parekh, B. (2000) Rethinking Multiculturalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Phillips, A. (2007) Multiculturalism without culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Scott, D. (2003) “Culture in Political Theory,” Political Theory 31(1): 92115. Taylor, C. (1994) “The Politics of Recognition” in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, A. Gutmann (ed). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Tully, J. (1995) Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an age of Diversity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weeden, L. (2002) “Conceptualizing Culture: Possibilities for Political Science,” American Political Science Review 96(4): 713-28. Wittgenstein, L. (1958) The Blue and Brown Books. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Wittgenstein, L. (2001) Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

Critiques of multiculturalism are doing something useful when they turn our attention to the power dynamics surrounding the use and abuse of culture. But they have mis-attributed the problem if they think it lies with the latent essentialism of multiculturalists. The fact that so many can convince themselves that it does makes the debate peculiarly unproductive, and threatens to negate the usefulness of their intervention by putting the focus on the intellectual failings of a few, rather than on the practices surrounding culture in everyday life. If the focus can be shifted back towards the everyday– a project that can be undertaken in equal measure by multiculturalists and critics alike – then the debate should yield fruit in terms of an enhanced capacity to recognize and address the power dynamics surrounding cultural difference. REFERENCES Abizadeh, A. (2004) “Liberal nationalist versus postnational social integration: on the nation’s ethno-cultural particularity and ‘concreteness’,” Nations and Nationalism 10(3): 231-50. Barry, B. (2001). Culture and Equality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Benhabib, S. (2002) The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Dhamoon, R. (2006) “Shifting from ‘Culture’ to ‘the Cultural’: Critical Theorizing of Identity/Difference Politics,” Constellations 13(3): 354-73.

 

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