mative reasons behind this skeptical reaction are well-known, and I will only briefly mention them for the sake of completeness in section two. Instead, I shall pay particular attention to the strategies and, from the multiculturalist viewpoint, the analytical costs of the endeavor of
“writing against culture” (Abu-Lughod 1991). As it appears, the elim-ination of the culture concept from the vocabulary of the social theo-rist creates an array of new problems. Perhaps the most obvious one, at least for the multiculturalist, is that she loses her main analytical category. From the moment cultural phenomena can only be studied as ‘fictions’ or ‘imaginations’, people cannot reasonably be expected anymore to be bound in any normatively significant way to such a con-struction. The skeptical account of hybridity, insofar as it rejects cul-tural individuation, leaves room only for a highly ironic kind of social science, one that de facto excludes the possibility that indeterminacy may ever be rendered determinate.
The pressing question is this: can advocates of the skeptical ap-proach to hybridity make meaningful normative statements about phenomena of culture? In the third section, I turn to the “cosmopol-itan alternative” (Waldron 1992) coined by thinkers like Jeremy Wal-dron, Salman Rushdie, and Homi Bhabha, which I take to offer an affirmative answer to this question. What these authors suggest, I believe, is a normative way of life within the framework of a strongly deflationary account of culture. However, even though their emphasis of the potential for “newness,” creativity, and self-fulfillment a hybrid way of life brings about seems, at first sight, appealing from a liberal standpoint, I am not persuaded by their argument. My worry is that such an alternative, which values cultural unsettledness more than cultural embeddedness, comes at the cost of becoming dangerously uncritical regarding the political realities and the sources of conflict in human life. Moreover, it is unclear to me how the absolutization of ex-periences of ‘border-crossing’ and ‘liminality’ can leave enough room for a meaningful critique of modernity. I presume, as I argue in the last section, that similar problems occur in Anne Phillips’s proposal of a
“multiculturalism without culture” (Phillips 2007).
In the second chapter, I turn towards what I have termed the polit-ical account of hybridity. This account, in a nutshell, holds that an an-ti-essentialist commitment need not be accompanied by skepticism regarding the possibility of cultural individuation. Anti-essentialism does not entail anti-realism. My aim here is to show that this is a more promising realization of anti-essentialism. When multiculturalists re-flect upon the normativity of culture, they are not falling prey to some pervasive epistemological mistake, as the skeptical account presumes.
Political theories of hybridity rightly assume that culture is no less real than other symbolic constructs like paper money, constitutions, or languages. Drawing on anthropological theory (section one) and lit-erary theory (section two), I sketch the contours of a distinct culture
concept that strongly emphasizes the political character of culture.
The metaphor that best characterizes the politically-hybrid account of culture is that of an unstable equilibrium; encultured persons are per-manently confronted with alternating experiences of (symbolic) deter-minacy and indeterdeter-minacy, security and insecurity, freedom and con-straint, etc. The passage from one experience to another is, according to the equilibrium view of culture, both hermeneutical and contested.
There is no hope that culture has ever reached or will ever reach an ulti-mate equilibrium, a harmonious state of symbolic purity and stability.
In section three, I turn to the case of the Rhaeto-Romansh standard-ization movement in the Swiss Canton of Grisons in order to offer a practical illustration of how the ‘political’ operates in the equilibrium conception of culture. In the final section, I make a preliminary assess-ment of the arguassess-ment and wonder whether the political reading of hy-bridity is capable of discounting the dilemma of essentialism.
I shall continue examining this point in the third chapter. I begin the discussion by addressing what I believe is the main anxiety under-lying the second horn of Patten’s dilemma, which is the presumption that the cultural normativity thesis requires a culture concept that is not intrinsically contested. In the first two sections, I want to clarify this suspicion. I invoke the legal literature on collective rights to ex-amine the question whether groups are, generally speaking, the right kind of entity to bear value (section one) and to furnish reasons for act-ing (section two). I show that the concern of determinacy and unified agency indeed plays a non-negligible role for the definition of legiti-mate value- and right-holders.
In section three, I examine the weight of these two considerations for the normative premises of multiculturalism. To this purpose, I go back to Kymlicka’s and Taylor’s theories of cultural normativity. Both theorists proceed from the assumption that participation in culture is either an instrument (Kymlicka) or a constitutive condition (Taylor) for the realization of some pre-defined good: autonomous choice in Kym-licka’s case, and a secure horizon of meaning in Taylor’s case. Regard-less of the philosophical differences that exist between their theories, both authors share a commitment to a goodness criterion which they derive from a transcendental moral standpoint. In their justifications of multiculturalism, both authors then subsume cultural groups un-der their respective goodness criterion. I shall argue that this pattern is particularly vulnerable to the challenge posed by indeterminacy. Ky-mlicka’s and Taylor’s subsumption, as it appears to be, becomes un-avoidably problematic in the context of politicized culture concepts.
Their accounts are indeed caught up in the dilemma of essentialism.
In the final chapter, I turn to the argument that John Dewey’s naturalist conception of ethics furnishes an unorthodox way out of the dilemma. Dewey is largely unknown in multiculturalist thought, which, as I intend to explain, is a missed opportunity. In stark contrast
to the stunning resurgence of Dewey’s pragmatism in democracy the-ory during the last years, his writings have never systematically been brought into contact with multiculturalism. I am hoping that the pres-ent study might constitute a modest contribution to changing this state of affairs.
Drawing on Dewey’s ethics, I defend a theory of cultural norma-tivity that regards situations of symbolic indeterminacy not as an im-pediment to, but the starting point of norm-yielding processes. The philosophical terrain for the rehabilitation of cultural hybridity in nor-mative multiculturalism, I shall argue, is prepared by Dewey’s anthro-pocentric metaphysics, that is, by the fact that Dewey sees normativity not as derivative of fixated, disengaged moral theory, but as an out-come of human efforts to transform “indeterminate situations” into
“determinate” ones (Dewey 1938, LW 12: 108). Seen from a Deweyan viewpoint, the circumstances of symbolic and hermeneutical instabil-ity that characterize hybrid cultures no longer seem unnatural or oth-erwise obstructing normative quality. In democratic contexts, the con-dition of indeterminacy described by thinkers as diverse as Rushdie, Benhabib, and Dewey carries in itself the potential for the transforma-tion of presently disrupted experience into a more balanced one. Each culture is, in the context of its ever-evolving webs of significance, a site of problem-solving inquiry and therefore a potential source of norma-tivity.
Suppose that the “challenge of multiculturalism” for liberal democra-cies consists in the task to accommodate cultural difference in a mor-ally defensible way (Gutmann 1993). If the term ‘cultural difference’ is to be meaningful at all, those who inquire into morally attractive ways of its accommodation have to be able to specify what counts as a cul-ture and what does not. Multiculturalists, in other words, must furnish criteria of individuation that make a given culture C identifiable as an empirically intelligible concept, allowing inferences of the kind: ‘C is shared by X, but not by Y’, ‘Z identifies with both C1 and C2’, or yet ‘C1 demands to be recognized by C2’. Put more abstractly, the requirement of individuation can be seen as a sub-condition for context-transcend-ing intelligibility, namely to ensure that an instance is reidentifiable as the same entity in different contexts (Spinosa and Dreyfus 1996, 742).18 Much could be said here about other approaches of individuation. Al-ternative cues for the criterion of individuation could for example be derived from Wittgenstein’s “family resemblance” 19 or from Zadeh’s
“fuzzy-sets.”20 While these cues are certainly important, they cannot
18 Spinosa and Dreyfus put the criterion of individuation on a level with Derrida’s concept of citationnalité, which, in their view, is a characteristic of entities, saying something about an en-tity’s identifiability in an infinitely large number of contexts. As these authors further remark, individuation contrasts with another, less specific criterion for conceptual intelligibility, namely what Derrida has called itérabilité, which is a characteristic of types, saying something about the context-transcending identifiability of an instance as being a part of the same type (1996, 742).
Following Merleau-Ponty, Spinosa and Dreyfus believe that that “if organisms could not recog-nize instances of the same type in many different contexts, they would not have any intelligence at all. If they could not recognize the same entity in various contexts, they would not have human or higher mammal intelligence” (1996, n. 26 original emphasis).
19 Several authors find the remarks of the later Wittgenstein (esp. 1953) – after his renunciation of the essentialist assumptions underlying the Tractatus (1922) – on the unity and continuity of language congenial to the problem of individuation in cultural theory. Richard Amesbury (2005, chap. 6), Kwame A. Appiah (1998), Tariq Modood (1998) Linda Nicholson (1999), and Natalie Stol-jar (1995), explicitly invoke the authority of Wittgenstein’s language philosophy in the context of culture-related conceptual inquiry. For a skeptical view of the pertinence of Wittgenstein’s “fam-ily resemblance” concepts in the context of culture, see Mason (2007, 222–223).
20 In his seminal 1965 article, Lotfi Zadeh defines fuzzy-sets as a “class of objects with a con-tinuum of grades of membership” (Zadeh 1965, 338). The degree of unity required for a class of entities to be identified as individuated is, on this account, thought to be quantifiable. The conception of culture as a fuzzy-set would imply that we could name for all constitutive traits a