from Hypatia Volume 17, Number 1At the Table with Arendt: Toward a Self-Interested Practice of Coalition Discourse
Katherine Adams
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This article draws from Hannah Arendt's theory of "interest" to formulate a model of coalition discourse that can coarticulate difference and commonality and approach them as mutually nourishing conditions rather than as polarities. By disrupting the normative fantasies of unified, a priori subjectivity and universal truth, interest-based discourse facilitates political interactions that neither rely on sameness nor reify difference to the exclusion of connection.
Then, too, let us not forget la mierda between us, a mountain of caca that keeps us from "seeing" each other, being with each other.
(Gloria Anzaldúa, "Bridge, Drawbridge, Sandbar or Island: Lesbians-of-Color Haciendas Alianzas")
To live together in the world means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it in common, as a table is located between those who sit around it; the world, like every in-between, relates and separates men at the same time.
(Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition)
I was angry: why should I be left with this: I didn't want it; I'd done my best for years to reject it: I wanted no part of what was in it: the benefits of my privilege, the restrictions, the injustice, the pain, the broken origins of the heart, the unknown horrors. And yet it is mine: I am my father's daughter in the present, living in a world he and my folks helped to create.
(Minnie Bruce Pratt, "Identity: Skin Blood Heart")
As progressive activists continue to look beyond identity politics and toward coalition structures that will link diverse identities and agendas, the need for new models of political discourse becomes ever more apparent. Coalition work brings us face to face with the absence of universal truths, the danger of safe assumptions, the falsity of common sense—or the lack of any supposed common basis in reason or rationality that promises to simultaneously transcend and unite difference. Rather, today's diverse political communities require approaches to discourse that will promote negotiation among divergent identities, voices, histories, and desires. They demand that every "truth" be considered alongside its foundation in a particular material context and in light of the differences in power and privilege that produce—and, in turn, are produced by—differences in knowledge. Yet, at once, coalitions also seek ways to address differences without reifying them or falling into binary logics. They must, above all, reconcile attention to difference with the equally vital desire for—and urgent necessity of—connection and alliance.1 In what follows, I consider the problem of cross-difference negotiation by exploring the potential value of what I will describe as "self-interested" discourse. If rightly understood, I shall argue, self-interest can promote a practice of coalition discourse that accommodates diverse truths and centers their constitution in material culture. Further, it can open those truths—along with the identity positions that produce them—to ongoing negotiation and transformation, encouraging political actors not merely to articulate different identities and agendas, but to instrumentalize those differences toward formulation of new identities, new agendas, new alliances, and new political forms.
As it is commonly understood, the political function of self-interest is to promote the power and well-being of one individual or group over those of others. It is not susceptible to change, nor does it generate change in the world—or its structures of privilege, power, and oppression—but, instead, seeks to advance the self to a better position within that world. Self-interest, it is generally assumed, seeks to enlarge material advantage and expand power so as to maintain and preserve the self. Here, I want to to denaturalize the sorts of assumptions described above and to propose a different way to imagine self-interest. Self-interested discourse as I shall theorize itrequires, on the one hand, a willingness to take position as a subject of one's desires and perceived needs—that is, to speak a "self" that is interested on its own behalf. On the other, it requires a high level of critical, skeptical interest in that desiring self —its unity and stability— so that, by interrogating one's own positionality from within, one can transform it. This twofold practice of self-interest, performed in the context of desire for alliance and for justice, can contribute a vital and radicalizing element to coalition discourse.
A wide range of scholars have already considered the second part of the self-interest process to great effect. Over the past fifteen years, the figure of the unified, autonomous, and stable self (described as the "disembedded cogito" by Seyla Benhabib 1992, 5) has been refocused as a complex of fragmentary and conflicting identifications. New approaches portray a subject constituted within multiple, simultaneous, and overlapping contexts, fundamentally intersubjective in its identity—or constituted through rather than in advance to association with others—and constantly open to revision.2 Feminist poet and scholar Gloria Anzaldúa offered one of the earliest and most influential discussions of the "who" of coalition politics when, addressing the 1988 meeting of National Women's Studies Association, she opened by remarking, "This morning I looked in the mirror to see who I was (I keep changing)." Anzaldúa's topic was the need to forge alliances without subordinating differences—or, in her words, without forgetting "la mierda between us." Yet, throughout the talk, she returned often to the issue of self-difference—the dynamic, fragmentary, conflicted nature of her own subjectivity. Invoking her now famous figure for political subjectivity, she said, "The mestiza-queer is mobile, constantly on the move, a traveler, callejera, a cortacalles. Moving at the blink of an eye, from one space, one world to another, not comfortable in any one of them, none of them home, yet none of them not home either" (1990, 216–18). Anzaldúa juxtaposes the problems of coalition work and mestiza subjectivity in this way to make the point that cross-difference alliances must predicate themselves upon an understanding of identity as always fractured by multiple, shifting, and contradictory identifications with and against surrounding material contexts and people. In this, she dramatizes the virtue of an interested-in-self approach to coalition, showing that interest in the indeterminacy of "selfhood" grants the mestiza queer awareness of the shifting, situational nature of her differentiation from others, and so enables her more fully to explore and enter the work of alliance.
More than a decade after Anzaldúa first linked coalition work with mestiza subjectivity, interest in the self remains a central focus of feminist analysis. Scholars continue to explore the terrain of complex identity, with varying approaches and aims, but with conviction similar to Anzaldúa's that attention to self-difference will generate the occasion and basis for new conceptions of political association.3 In her 1998 book, Mappings, Susan Stanford Friedman considers how various "narratives of relationality" help to destabilize the absolutes of difference and sameness within coalitions. The notion of "relationality," or "relational positionality," she argues, posits identity "as situationally constructed and defined and at the crossroads of different systems of alterity and stratification" (1998, 47). Thus, subjects differentiated by one set of identity constructs may be simultaneously connected by others that offer points of contact and "genuine connection." A relational perspective, Friedman argues, promises to "break the logjam of belligerence and apology that paralyzes so many of our classrooms, organizations, and conferences" (1998, 65). Critic Diane F. Fowlkes develops such reasoning a step further. Taking Anzaldúa as her normative case, Fowlkes argues that the perception of "[oneself] and others as differently and complexly identified" leads to the crucial recognition that oppression acts upon subjects in multiple and overlapping dimensions. The result is a clearer grasp of what is most "practical" in politics. From the viewpoint of complex identity, it no longer appears most effective to organize around single dimensions of identity, or to take on aspects of oppression in isolation from each other. Instead, "the fight against complex domination becomes a more complex fight" requiring coalitions to organize around multiple aspects of identity to work upon interlocking oppressions (1997, 107). Seyla Benhabib addresses the situation at its most basic level when she discusses the ways in which challenges to the notion of singular and unified subjectivity have destabilized traditional forms of political universalism (1986 and 1992). It becomes impossible to posit a homogenous political "We"—the "collective singularity" of politics—after abandoning faith in the Cartesian specter of autonomous, unencumbered, pre-political, pre-social selfhood (1986, 347). To banish the privatized, Cartesian "I" is to deprive universalist fantasies such as "We the People" or "The Women's Movement" of their imaginary origin. It is to understand that, rather than expressing the collective needs of like-minded individuals, every political sphere produces its own, specific forms of private individuality—complete with the illusory sense of pre-political unity, autonomy, and need. As Benhabib shows, the complex identity model can thus invite new understandings of political action, political identity, and their mutually constitutive relation with the private sphere (1992, 68–89).
With Anzaldúa, Friedman, Fowlkes, and Benhabib, I believe that efforts toward cross-difference organization call for an understanding of identity as fragmentary, unstable, inter-subjective, and inter-contextual. This essay aims to build upon their insights concerning the norms and possibilities of political subjectivity. In particular, I will focus on four aspects of complex identification that they discuss: (1) its openness to processes of revision, (2) its constitution within overlapping material contexts, (3) its ability to exceed and disrupt the sameness/difference binary, and (4) its resistance to the notion of a priori subjectivity (and the public/private binarism that supports it). These four features of the "new" political subject seem especially critical to me for reconceptualization of political action.
Yet, if complex identification reports to the problem of who speaks, that still leaves the question of how. What mode of discourse will effectively mobilize those four aspects of complex identity? One difficulty here is that the play of self-difference is precisely that which resists translation into acts of speaking, and that which acts of speaking work to elide. How does one speak as a complex subject without succumbing to the strong tendencies of political rhetoric—of language itself and of the very notions of "speaking" and "voice"—to constantly produce and affirm the fantasy of a unified and stable speaker? More practically, how does one reconcile the structures of complex identification with the need for a place from which to speak, the necessity of categories like "I," "me," "you," and "we" in order to act and communicate within a common grammar? The very act of stating this question, with its presumption of disjuncture, its binary logic, and its history of contention within feminist theory, enacts the problem posed.
Further, if self-interest is susceptible to the reunifying effects of speech, it is also prone to the seductions of excessive abstraction and discursive play. Here the challenge is to bring complex identity into discourse without disengaging from a materialist perspective. Discussions of complex identity can tend to break free of the divisive contingency of material context, preferring the utopian freedom of infinite play. Friedman observes something like this when she notes that some narrations of relational identity mimic the "rhetoric of . . . cultural relativism" and work to "obscure important power differentials between individuals and peoples." There is danger, she warns, of relational discourse becoming (and here she quotes R. Radhakrishnan) "a pure concept, an end in itself" (1998, 64). For her part, Friedman responds to that danger by grounding herself in the thingness of identity and inter-relationships, asserting "[m]y own brand of feminism is too materialist and historicist to believe that a revolution in the linguistic/symbolic order can, by itself, transform the world" (1998, 64). Friedman's goal, then, is to discover discursive modes that move "beyond difference." This is not to say that she aims to leave difference and its material contexts behind; rather, she seeks a discursive approach that will "[travel] back and forth in the space between difference" (1998, 76). I heartily second that motion, and I want to linger a moment on how it will best lead toward what Friedman seeks for the concept of difference: "its deployment in newly constituted combinations" (1998, 78).
A good illustration of how Friedman deals with the tension between discursive utopian sameness and material difference is her discussion of two works by Anna Deavere Smith. Friedman admires the playwright, performer, and academic for her belief that "theater epitomizes the desire for connection of one difference to another," and for the two pieces that illustrate this belief, Fires in the Mirror (1998) and Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (1994) (Friedman 1998, 78). To develop these works, Smith interviewed cross-sections of people involved in the 1991 conflict between the black and Jewish communities of Crown Heights, N. Y. and in the 1992. uprising in L.A. She then created a series of monologues in which, according to Friedman, Smith "becomes" each interviewee in turn, "using only their words" and reproducing "accents, speech patterns and body language" in order to "inhabit their bodies and speech" (1998, 78). Friedman ably demonstrates the significance of this art that presents an array of identities that "insist upon their difference," and brings them together in "the contact zone" of her own performance. I grow uneasy, however, at the point where Friedman asks,
if she, as an African American woman, can suppress the racial/gender markers of her body to become in performance all these others—man/woman, rich/poor, white/black, Korean/Chicano, professor/minister/rapper/truck driver, and so forth, then how fixed can these difference be? (1998, 78–79)
The emphasis of this question falls, of course, on its final phrase, and on the implied response—that difference is never fixed and that the codes that signal difference are not continuous with bodies. However, the corresponding de-emphasis on the first part of the question—prefaced as it is by that rhetorical "if"—raises concerns. For this serves to bracket and defer a series of problems regarding the materiality of difference and the limits of discursive and performative migrations. Can Smith suppress the racial/gender markers of her own body in a surveillance culture that maps particular codes onto particular bodies insistently, persistently, and in ways that are violent and oppressive and that invite further violence and oppression? Can she "become"—even within the terms of this performance and this audience—"all of these others" as though identity codes transfer symmetrically from one body to the next?
Friedman comes back to some of these queries and answers no—Smith cannot simply suppress her own racial/gender markers, nor can she fully "become" the other (1998, 80). Yet, in that first movement of the discussion, in order to imagine the un-fixing of difference, she has had to answer with an implied provisional yes. The discomfiting implication is that it is only possible to center the discursive construction of identity by suppressing material context, making space for contact by displacing difference. Moreover, when Friedman turns attention to the ways in which the materiality of Smith's body does obtain within the space of the performance, she invokes a binary between the "performing body" and "literal body"—a binary that again disengages the material basis of difference from the discursive effect of commonality.
As Anzaldúa and Friedman both point out, the desire to move "beyond difference" is essential to coalition building. Yet it also threatens to pull us free from the materiality of bodies and their contexts and histories, and gestures toward a place where difference disappears altogether. Friedman's reminder of the "materialist and historicist" facts of life exerts a kind of counter pull against that utopian movement. I wonder, however, if such cautionaries recondition the utopian urges of discourse, or if they instead establish a polarity, so that the negotiation among political actors veers between the poles of materiality and discourse, difference and sameness, crisis and utopia, tracing a kind of frustrated dialectic that never generates its synthesis. Here I will argue that within "self-interested" discourse, difference and sameness can act mutually within one syntax, one grammar—not taking turns as the subjects of contradictory sentences that must displace each other in order to make meaning. Focus on the material bases of difference need not become deterministic, nor does it preclude an exploration of what Friedman calls "the contact zone." Rather, a "self-interested" engagement with materiality can provide the very basis of expressing and activating complex identity. It can disrupt the static binary logic of difference and sameness in the way Friedman describes, while keeping the two in tension with each other. It can engage material context without suppressing the flexibility, fluidity, and multiplicity of complex identity, thus allowing difference to be more fully considered but not hypostatized—the illusion of a priori difference disappearing along with that of a priori selfhood. Thus, it helps to center the areas of contact and commonality in order to effect alliance and transformation. To demonstrate how this can be, I will next outline a theoretical model of self-interest, drawing upon the notion of "interest" that Hannah Arendt outlines in her masterwork, The Human Condition (1958), and considering its application to coalition discourse. Following that, I offer a more concrete approach to what self-interested coalition discourse might actually sound like, by examining a widely known demonstration of complex identity, Minnie Bruce Pratt's essay "Identity: Skin Blood Heart" (1984). The first part of this discussion concerns how a more self-interested approach would provide what seems crucially missing in Pratt's effort to transform difference and privilege. I conclude, however, by looking within Pratt's essay for a glimpse of self-interested discourse at work.
I. Interest, Arendt, and the Limits of Binary LogicGenerally, self-interest has not been favorably regarded as a principle on which to base political action in democratic contexts.4 In the United States, self-interest has been long associated with factionalism, anti-republicanism and partisanship. Thus, while James Madison recognizes interest as integral to democratic politics, he poses it against the telos of national unity. Factionalism, declares Madison in Federalist Paper Ten, has "divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good" (1964, 18). His argument, firmly embedded in the principles of republicanism, draws on a supposed opposition between the divisive, particularized desires of individuals and the universal, unified, and "permanent" values of public good (1964, 17). He thereby justifies strong mediating institutions and presents the ideal citizen as one who transcends self-interest to pursue the disinterested end of public good. As republicanism changed and gave way to the sorts of liberal values that dominate contemporary political rhetoric (that is, sanctity of the individual and private rights), the emphasis on cooperative public action diminished. Yet the universalist ideal of disinterest continued to hold sway, and the Republican binarism of interest and disinterest changed into an opposition, wherein self-interests were represented as inimical to political process and cohesion. We see as much in contemporary political debates, where the term "interest" is most frequently invoked as a form of indictment and defined as the antithesis of public good—as in the condemnation of "corporate interest" by progressives, or of so-called "special interest groups" by conservatives who decry the demands of disenfranchised people as anti-democratic. Certainly, self-interest is now seldom understood as a mechanism for building political alliance. As political scientist Jane Mansbridge points out, contemporary interest-based politics are usually theorized as a kind of "adversary democracy" in which "fundamentally conflicting interests" compete and "the vote serves as a weapon" (1993, 92).
As currently conceptualized in the United States, the category of self-interest seems of little use to coalition groups. Options for political association are reduced to two antithetical models. On one side there is the interest-based model, wherein association is driven by the antagonistic forces of unresolvable difference. On the other side stands the disinterest-based model, where association is a transcendent and unified condition of sameness expressed through "rational" consensus on common good. This picture offers no middle ground. The choices divide between self-interest or disinterest, faction or unity, conflict or consensus, particularity or universalism, difference or sameness. Neither side of the dichotomy communicates with the other. Nor does either hold the possibility of change: the interests of individuals are understood as unchanging reflections of stable, immutable differences in need and desire; disinterest speaks for an equally fixed unity of "common good" determined by eternal laws of "reason." Neither self-interested nor disinterested discourse appears capable of transforming itself, or the subjects who participate in it. Furthermore, both models rely on the notion of an a priori subject. Interests—and the differences they express—are formed in advance to political association, arising from the unencumbered subject as features of his essential uniqueness. While disinterest is specifically achieved by transcending, or suspending, a priori subjectivity and its component interests, in being so defined it likewise relies fully on that initial, originary position. With such a reputation, the category of interest hardly seems conducive to complex identification or compatible with coalition work, where the goal is to allow difference and relation to coexist and to foster negotiation rather than dispute or consensus.
Indeed, certain interests are habitually linked with certain identity positions in the public sphere to such an extent that interest and identity come to seem interchangeable (as in "women's issues" or "the black agenda"). In such cases, the interest stands in for the identity in public discourse, and the latter appears not as an active and interactive agent of political life, but as an entrenched and inert position. Such conflation of interest with identity elides the ways in which subjectivity mediates between the two, and thereby frames interests as mandates, or even compulsions—reflexes of desire, hardwired into identity. Under this rubric, an expression of interest can only be received as a demand or ultimatum, rather than as information for negotiation and mutual consideration. More, while interest is conceived of as fixed, anchored or natural, the work of interest-in-self cannot get far. Until we retheorize interest, there is always the probability that notions of complex identity will ultimately reunify, restabilize and renaturalize around its present inertia.
Marxism would seem to pose an important exception to the concepts of interest described above. Karl Marx theorizes interests as emerging from position in the social structure, and develops formal methods for materialist analysis of their emergence from various institutions. More, he presents interests as subject to, and productive of, change: in the theory of dialectical materialism, transformations are brought about by contradictory mass interests that change, in turn, as the contexts of production evolve via dialectical process. Marx also argues that interest, once properly recognized, is the very basis of political alliances and activism. Yet, here too, interest can be seen as ultimately a means of forming unanimity beyond itself, in the form of classless, stateless socialism. Nor does Marx provide for an analysis of interests, as these differently constitute individual subjects and undergo revision at that same level. Thus, for a model that deploys interest as a constitutive feature of normative political life and as integral to an exploration of difference, I now must turn to Hannah Arendt, for whom interest is the chief means by which political agents express and explore their heterogeneity toward the formation of dynamic relationality. In her arguments, interest can be recognized as directly useful for imagining new approaches to coalition discourse.
If the concept of interest seems an unlikely resource for coalition politics, the theories of Hannah Arendt may seem even more so. With recent (and important) exceptions, her philosophy has been considered complicit with assumptions about political organization that center the power elite at the expense of women and other minorities.5 This has been especially true of feminist critics, represented most famously by Mary O'Brien, who dubbed Arendt a "female male supremacist" (1981, 9), and Adrienne Rich, who found in The Human Condition "the tragedy of a female mind nourished on male ideologies" (1979, 212). These responses can be attributed, in part, to Arendt's refusal to espouse any form of gender-based political action (a concept she would have deemed oxymoronic).6 Much more concerning to some, however, is her insistence upon a strict division between private and political domains. O'Brien and Hanna Fenichel Pitkin argue that Arendt reinscribes the authority of masculinist political models and the marginalization of a feminized private world (Pitkin 1995, O'Brien 1989). Pitkin focuses, in particular, on Arendt's failure to consider bodies in any context but privacy, reasoning that this signals a refusal to allow for any politicization of material oppression or of interests: "And what is it," asks Pitkin, "that they talk about together, in that endless palaver in the agora?" She answers herself further on: "Arendt's citizens begin to resemble posturing little boys clamoring for attention" (1981, 336 and 338).
These critiques are not without basis. Arendt does heavily emphasize a boundary between the private and political. Drawing on classical models, she theorizes distinct domains in which distinct modes of human existence are carried out. Privacy, the "sphere of household and family," comprises all activities "related to the maintenance of life." All private existence concerns the endlessly repeating cycles of the body ("life process") and all private activity is compelled, unfree and un-unique because it is determined by nature. Privacy is the domain of "necessity" and repetition. In stark contrast, one comes to public life specifically by virtue of having risen above physical necessity (generally, Arendt acknowledges, by compelling others to labor for you). Only in the polis is it possible to be free—for freedom is defined as freedom from physical necessity—or to become a self—for selfhood is achieved by escaping the homogeneity of the life-world and appearing before others in the public "common world" (1958, 28). In the public realm, one exchanges the "what" of privacy for the "who" of political identity by virtue of being seen. That is, in public life, one becomes visible and individual because one enters a realm of plurality and interaction within which to enunciate one's unique position in the world.
Undeniably, then, Arendt posits a fundamental and hierarchical difference between the two realms—a difference between activity that serves nature and activity that transcends and poses mastery over nature, a difference between necessity and freedom. She even goes so far as to describe the citizen as one who daily crosses a "gulf" to "transcend the narrow realm of the household and 'rise' into the realm of politics" (1958, 33). And, although Arendt acknowledges that this distinction predicates a caste system where, historically, women and slaves have attended to bodily needs so as to free male property holders for the privilege of political discourse, she expresses little concern over the fact. I do not mean to dismiss this problem in Arendt's theory of political association. Yet I will argue that it is a mistake to map gender difference onto her public/private distinction—a move that confuses her theory for a kind of separate spheres ideology, wrongly attributes determinism to her view of the subject, and obscures what is valuable in her thinking. Also, I mean to show that Arendt can be read against her own shortcomings. For she proposes a model of political action that, far from suppressing diversity (in the manner of separate spheres), relies upon and instrumentalizes it in the form of the political discourse which Arendt describes as "interest."
While Arendt insists upon a distinction between the public and private realms, she does not fix or divide identities into one or the other. Rather, she maintains that it is impossible to be fully human without an interaction between private and public conditions within the self.7 Thus, although she does identify publicity as a higher and more "human" level of being, she also describes it as having "profound connection" with privacy, and remarks that "[m]an cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity, because his freedom is always won in his never wholly successful attempts to liberate himself from necessity" (1958, 61 and 121). This principle of multilayered identity is most clearly represented in the three-part organization of the "human condition" that Arendt theorizes. This includes "labor," which denotes the privatized activities devoted to sustaining life; "work," the public activity of creating the "artificial world" of manmade things; and "action," the political activity of expressing (and thereby becoming) oneself through "togetherness" with other political actors. This system of activities or modalities overlays the spatial scheme of private and public, yet refuses to be disciplined by it into separate spaces. As Kimberly Curtis argues, "[i]t is critical to note . . . since it is the source of much misunderstanding of this text, that these figures do not represent whole persons or classes of persons" (1999, 41). Instead, all three human modalities are copresent or copotential within the individual as she moves from one realm to the other, and mutually condition her position throughout. By this token, Arendt would dismiss claims that the public/private distinction is anti-woman, because she refuses to undertake gender and class as static structures by which labor, action, and work could be organized.8 Her model suggests, rather, that the three conditions together produce identity as a dynamic and indeterminate state that takes on differently gendered and class-inflected shapes. Moreover, this three-part structure disrupts the diadic logics traditionally generated from the public/private distinction—including oppositions between male and female, civility and nature, sameness and difference, disinterest and interest.
The copresence of these impulses is especially important in terms of political identity. For the three-at-once subject is the normative Arendtian citizen. As Bonnie Honig puts it, "[Arendt] sees this inner multiplicity of self as a source of its power and energy, as one of the conditions of creative performative action" (1995b, 142). She imagines not the self-identical essence that has moved out of nature and into abstract, rational space where it displays its preestablished attributes and interests, but the subject-in-process that circulates through all three "orientations to the world": labor, work, and action (Curtis 1999, 41). In that subject, these "competing, conflicting, and interdependent" orientations become a source of inherent instability, so that, as Honig, Curtis, and others argue, the political subject is characterized by constant change and upheaval (Curtis 1999, 41). The laboring modality plays a large role here, for the body is demanding and greedy and constantly tries to exceed its private realm. The political subjects are always conditioned by their private, embodied selves. Honig describes the process in this way: "Driven by the despotism of their bodies . . . they are never really in control of what they do in the public realm. . . . Action is spontaneous . . . Arendt's actors do not act because of what they already are, their actions do not express a prior, stable identity; they presuppose an unstable, multiple self that seeks its, at best, episodic self-realization in action and in the identity that is its reward" (Honig 1995b, 140–41). The identity of the political actor changes from one self-positing "action" to the next as she wrests a series of selves from her chaotic body. And that internal plurality is compounded—as Curtis points out—by the fact that each articulated "self" is a function of audience. One comes into identity only through the perceptions of a plural and heterogenous public. Thus, a plurality of selves is generated with each new self-realization. With this emphasis on the internal and external multiplicity of the political actor, Arendtian theory clashes with the concept of identity politics. By Arendt's logic, politics based on predetermined identity categories are impossible because political identities arise from the occasions that demand them. The heart of her political philosophy is the fundamental agency of political subjects, the nondeterminate nature of being.
As the preceding discussion demonstrates, the Arendtian theory of political identity strongly resembles the feminist concept of complex identification.9 Both models reject the unique, unified, a priori self for an internally multiple, changing, and situated self that comes into being (over and again) through relation to others. Also, both approaches resist binary oppositions between sameness and difference. Arendt's usefulness to feminist theory begins to be apparent here, for by overlaying the spatial binary logic with a three-part structure of copresent and contending modalities, Arendt rethinks traditional oppositions—such as private and public, materiality and discourse—as interdependencies. She also makes it possible to think in terms of copresent impulses (impulse to sameness, impulse to difference, impulse to contention, impulse to agreement) that struggle with and build upon (rather than exclude) each other in political discourse. Finally, both feminist and Arendtian theories view the subject as constituted in materiality. I want to emphasize this last point especially, for the presence of materiality in Arendtian action is often overlooked, and vital to understanding her conception of interest. While it is true that Arendt describes action as "the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter" (1958, 7), she also describes action as "always rooted in a world of men and of manmade things which it never leaves or altogether transcends. Things and men form the environment for each of man's activities, which would be pointless without such location" (1958, 22). Material context is absolutely essential to Arendtian politics, because it is the basis of producing a heterogenous public. Like today's coalition activists, Arendt does not imagine that political action should strive toward consensus or unity. Rather she calls for a place where individuals may distinguish themselves from one another and where their difference is exactly that which drives them to act together. That place is "the world of things" where "the location of one [subject] can no more coincide with the location of another than the location of two objects" (1958, 57). If for no other reason, Arendt is significant to the work of cross-difference discourse in this insistence that political action requires a heterogenous public situated in materiality. To see why this heterogeneity is not only central, but also dynamic, changeable, and key to relation, it is necessary to understand the discursive practice that she terms "interest."
II. "something which inter-est"Arendtian political action relies upon a material world that at once differentiates and relates subjects and permits them to act, and interest is the central mechanism of this process. This is not an uncontentious claim. Hanna Pitkin, for instance, makes the opposite case when she reasons that Arendt's distinction between privacy and politicality rules out the conditions for interest-based discourse. Pitkin argues that Arendt necessarily "believes that material concerns (and bodily functions as well) must be excluded from the public realm" and therefore cannot provide for interest in politics (1981, 336). Yet, this argument elides the fact that Arendt identifies two distinct types of interest, and excludes only one—mass interest—from her normative political model. Arendt's understanding of mass interest is, as Pitkin says, that it represents an invasion of the political by the private: it is an unmediated, unchanging expression of life-world impulses that blots out individuality and difference as though all of humankind were members of one enormous family which has only one opinion and one interest" (1958, 39). But this is not the only kind of interest that Arendt theorizes. In contrast to mass interest that functions as a monolithic, monological expression of "the people," Arendt promotes a form of interest that is diverse and agonal, produced from and productive of plurality: "the intentions of several individuals" (1958, n. 44). Nor is mass interest the only condition under which "material concerns" may enter political life. Pitkin appears to presuppose, as Arendt does not, that materiality and material concerns are categorically private, and thus depoliticized. On the contrary, Arendt makes explicit that material concerns are not exclusively private and are the very origin of interest-based deeds and speech in the political realm: "[Political a]ction and speech go on between men, as they are directed toward them, and they retain their agent-revealing capacity even if their content is exclusively "objective," concerned with the matters of the world of things in which men move, which physically lies between them and out of which arise their specific, objective worldly interests" (1958, 182). In this, Arendt takes materiality and association—contexts viewed as mutually exclusive within the traditional private/political binarism—and brings them together. Their conjunction provokes the language of "interest," as the subject articulates her uniquely desiring relation to the world, and to others in it, in order to become visible to herself and to others.
Importantly, interest is not solely a reaction to the material "in-between." It responds to the "common world" as a whole, which comprises not only the artificial "world of things," but also a discursive "web of relations." Arendt explains: ". . . the physical, worldly in-between along with its interests is overlaid and, as it were, overgrown with an altogether different in-between which consists of deeds and words and owes its origin exclusively to men's acting and speaking directly to one another. This second, subjective in-between is . . . no less real than the world of things we visibly have in common. We call this reality the "web" of human relationships, indicating by the metaphor its somewhat intangible quality" (1958, 182–83). Interest responds to the object-thingness of the world, an act that necessarily implicates the body through its senses, as Arendt herself acknowledges. At once, it responds to the accumulated patterns and history—the intangible "web"—of past acts and speech. Arendtian interest thus engages both the world of things and the interests of other subjects with whom the actor finds herself in a state of "togetherness." This dual character of the "common world" means that material concerns are very much present in public-political action, but in a manner that resists the fixity of privatized interest models. Here, interest is not the expression of prepolitical experience, but is generated by the need to present oneself to, and distinguish oneself from, others in the midst of political life. It is not the stable and absent referent of political identity, but an immediate process by which political identity is postulated and articulated (and repostulated and rearticulated).
With this new way of understanding interest—its different relation to the private/political split and its different relation to identity—Arendt points to a discursive practice that has power to activate the full play of complex identity in the political settings of coalitions. To begin, it provides a means of centering difference and separation without shutting out the possibility of commonality. For Arendt understands the differentiating function of materiality and interest as fundamental to relation. While interest is an expression of material separation, it is never merely adversarial, but always also a postulate of association, a comparison of outlooks upon a common world. "[I]nterests," Arendt claims, "constitute, in the word's most literal significance, something which inter-est, which lies between people and therefore can relate and bind them together" (1958, 182). In this light, interest (or, as Arendt's hyphen emphasizes, that which "between-is") must be understood less as a series of sparring demands than as a comparison of perspectives. Curtis describes Arendtian interest as "mutual provocation among plural beings in an appearing world" and points out that Arendt later connects it to a kind of "tragic pleasure" in The Life of the Mind (1978)—which Curtis explains as "our pleasure in the feeling of reality intensified through the provoking presence of particular others and the recalcitrant and plural quality of the world thus engendered" (1999, 93 and 38). Lisa J. Disch goes so far as to describe Arendtian interest as a kind of "articulated solidarity" that "denotes a web of commitments forged by speech and action" (1995, 288). Interest does not just promote, but is connection among subjects, in that it constitutes a state of intimate reliance on others: interest, after all, is only secondarily about desire and need.10 Its first function is as a statement of self—a "disclosure of the acting and speaking agent"—which cannot be achieved without recognition by others (Arendt 1958, 183). In fact, Arendt elsewhere notes that the "who" that comes into being with interested action is not accessible to its speaker (1958, 206). It is what Honig calls a "self-surprising" self who emerges and exists only through the grace of other onlookers (1995,140). Going back to Arendt's play on words, then, we can think also of inter-est as a beingness that occurs only between, so that relation is as fully constitutive of political identity as differentiation.
To make clear the interdependence of differentiation and relation and their derivation from the common world, Arendt asks her reader to imagine political life without its setting of materiality and interest:
The weirdness of this situation resembles a spiritualistic séance where a number of people gathered around a table might suddenly, through some magic trick, see the table vanish from their midst, so that two persons sitting opposite each other were no longer separated but also would be entirely unrelated to each other by anything tangible. (1958, 53)
Without the common world to separate them, subjects collapse into each other; both individuation and relation are lost. In their place arises a condition in which, Arendt warns, subjects "have been deprived of seeing and hearing others, of being seen and being heard by them. They are all imprisoned in the subjectivity of their own singular experience, which does not cease to be singular if the same experience is multiplied innumerable times" (1958, 58). Far from facilitating connection and spaces of contact, freedom from material context erases space and deprives actors of each other, and therefore, of themselves. Without materiality, without difference, there is no contact or commonality, only the paradoxical isolation of sameness. This responds importantly to anxieties that coalition members might get mired down in materiality, and not find each other across "la mierda." Arendt shows that, unless we do remain embedded in the world, we will lose ourselves and one another altogether. Her image of a table-less gathering offers a crucial corrective for an identity politics that searches for solidarity in fantasies of common identity or belief. Sameness is not commonality. It brings radical isolation and removes us from the reality of each other.
It is possible to find a utopian suggestion in the image of political actors who suddenly hail each other across their common table—as though Arendt offers materiality as a connective "objectivity" that will bypass epistemic disjuncture. Yet her theory is not a fantasy of symmetrical and unbiased perception. Indeed, it must be assumed that Arendt's table can never be the same table for any two of the people sitting around it. Each person produces her own table from the specificity of her own situated consciousness and produces, as well, her own subjective version of the others sitting around it.11 However, this difference in apprehension of materiality should be understood as yet another level of articulating difference, an elaboration of positionality. The articulation of that doubled difference (in position and apprehension of position) does provide a measure of communication. As a mechanism of simultaneous differentiation and relation, interest might perhaps be considered not so much a mode of contact as its approximation within a vocabulary of comparative positionality and desire. As a discourse that draws on that vocabulary, Arendtian interest offers an alternative to the universalized subject of disinterested discourse and the polarized subjects of sparring identity groups. It creates the conditions for reaching toward others and trying to become visible to them, and so avoids both the deadlock of adversarial democracy and the paralysis of collective singular subjectivity.
Perhaps most exciting for purposes of coalition work is the fact that Arendtian interest-discourse constantly alters its own basis and terms. That is, it is a mode of articulating self, position and desire that inherently brings about a reconsideration of those "truths." As I have argued above, one trouble with the "adversarial democracy" model is that it assumes interests are formed a priori and reported only in the absence of their material contexts. In this case, political discourse can only reify interests, pointing backwards to the preexisting "facts" of interest, difference, identity, and materiality. Arendt, by placing materiality and political discourse within the same space, makes it possible to deploy interests as provisional relations to materiality that are revealed and formulated through political discourse—that is, through deliberation, in relation, collectively (which is not to say consensually), contextually, and transiently. Interests are not tediously repeating expressions of prior and continuing positionality, but performances of difference that are determined intersubjectively and embedded in materiality. They are contingent articulations of differing positions, always conditioned by the presence of others.
At this juncture, the previous point regarding the nonobjectivity of materiality comes to bear on the nondeterministic character of materially constituted difference—and on the value of its articulation as a form of political discourse that can reenvision self, alliance, and the world in which they occur. Interests are not produced by material context alone, but by perception of position within it. Nor is this perception unambiguous or determinate. It must be discursively clarified, articulated, and defined. Moreover, because other subjects also compose a part of the world of things for the individual subject, the (perceived) composition of that world constantly changes with comings and goings around the table, and with the multiple "appearances" of those who stay. This introduces yet another dynamic of constant change to the subject's position and interests: relation to other political subjects constantly revises and resignifies the subject's identity. As already seen, as it emerges from materiality, interest-based discourse becomes, itself, another matrix that both separates and relates the political actors who produce it. Relation to discourse becomes yet another position that revises those actors' initial sense of position and provokes new revelations of interest. In this, interest-based discourse is self-transforming and self-propelling, constantly driving actors deeper into consideration of their relations to each other within material contexts.12
Empirical evidence supports the Arendtian model of interest. According to political scientists Jane Mansbridge and John Kingdon, studies of groups ranging from informal grassroots organizations to congressional, judicial, and economic decision makers show that the operation of self-interest is far from the univocal and inflexible promotion of selfish causes it is often imagined to be. The interests of any one party are always "manifold," often complicated by internal contradictions, and always conditioned by ideas concerning moral and ethical good (1993, 94). More important, researchers find that in most processes of decision-making and agenda-setting the individuals involved seem not to know in advance what their interests are—an observation that coincides with Arendt's assertion that interests are produced within political rather than private settings. As Mansbridge puts it, "An important part of politics," (Arendt would say the whole of politics) "consists in trying to clarify one's interests" (1993, 97). Both Mansbridge and Kingdon emphasize the potential of interested discourse to transform self and policy. "Through deliberation, action, and reflection, members of a group or potential group not only can discover that their underlying interests differ from their previous preferences but also, by creating themselves anew, can create new interests" (1993, 96). Negotiation, then, consists less of reporting than of forming, clarifying, and transforming interests.
That said, some will still object that Arendt's model of interest-based politics fails to account for power imbalances that inflect any relational dynamic and encode some interests as more legitimate than other. As Benhabib points out in her critique of Habermasian communicative ethics, there is no reason to expect that communication of interests will somehow lead to consensus, unless those interests were the same to begin with or that communication consists of one side persuading the others to change their views (1986, 310–11). Here I wish to reiterate that Arendt envisions not consensus, but rather, a form of relationality that continually investigates and transforms its own basis—a process where, as Anzaldúa puts it, "you may have to accept that there may be no solutions, resolutions, or even agreements ever" even as you work to build solidarity (1990, 227). There is a critical distinction between the two norms—one univocal and the other heteroglossic, one teleological and the other not. In contrast to consensus-driven discourse, the effect of interest discourse is not to elide the very real and protracted histories of unjust and violent domination by some interests over others. Rather, it is to reopen those histories to an array of possible meanings and implications. When a materialist analysis of difference is postulated in the Arendtian world of things, it can be seen that, although material contexts of difference endure, their meanings (the differences they produce) can be understood as always mediated (even as they are discovered) by the context of political discourse.
The point remains, however, that whether consensus-driven or not, any negotiation involves power difference. Every discursive context favors some viewpoints over others; every cross-difference communication reinvokes cultural histories of oppression, silence, and resistance. And at every table there will appear some interests that have prevailed by suppressing the interests and being of others for too long, with too little change. As poet and scholar Minnie Bruce Pratt writes of her white, Christian ancestry: "We have gotten our jobs, bought our houses, borne and educated our children by the negatives: no niggers, no kikes, no wops, no dagos, no spics, no A-rabs, no gooks, no queers" (1984, 39). This is precisely the situation, I contend, that calls for self-interested discourse. For, in a culture where those in privileged positions continue to acquire jobs, houses, and education "by the negatives," it becomes urgently necessary for coalition activists who come from privilege to confront and reimagine interest. This will first require acknowledgment of wanting those jobs, houses, and educations, fearing their loss, even enjoying the privilege of access—all modes of attachment that reproduce systems of privilege and ourselves as subjects of them. As I shall argue, those interests will not disappear if simply dismissed or judged contemptible. Nor do I call for a confessional atmosphere, where women's desires are yet again constructed as transgressive, but rather an interested one in which it is possible to approach desire and attachment as inevitable, and yet not immutable if recognized in conjunction with the companion interests in justice and alliance.
To more closely examine these problems concerning privilege and power difference as they relate to interest-based, cross-difference discourse, I turn to Pratt's well-known essay, "Identity: Skin Blood Heart" (1984). The piece offers a practice of mestiza or complex identification specifically dedicated to interrogating the ways in which the simultaneously material and intersubjective bases of privilege structure cross-difference alliance. I choose it both to demonstrate a need for self-interested discourse, and to illustrate the potential forms this may take. For, where it lacks a grounding in self-interest, Pratt's narrative obscures, and even protects the very operation of privilege it aims to counteract. At other moments, however, Pratt points us toward what self-interested coalition discourse could look like and what it could accomplish.
III. The Politics of Un-Interest: Pratt's Home away from HomeOf the many first-person explorations of complex identification to be published during the eighties and early nineties such as Michelle Cliff (1980), Barbara Smith (1983 and 1984), Elly Bulkin (1984), Carol Thomas Neely (1993), Linda S. Kauffman (1993), and Adrienne Rich (1986), Pratt's is probably the best known. "Identity: Skin Blood Heart" is highly regarded among coalition activists and scholars; and although more than ten years old, it is still widely cited by critics and taught in Women's Studies curricula. In the essay, Pratt takes the category of home as a central metaphor for complex identity, using "home" to simultaneously thematize and confront the fantasy of unified self-hood, and to investigate how the material and ideological architectures of white, middle-class, Christian, and (for a time) heterosexual privilege have identified her with and against other women. Pratt's narrative circulates among three geographical homes: Alabama, where she grew up and married; North Carolina, where she came out as a lesbian, divorced her husband, and joined the local women's movement; and a predominantly black neighborhood in Washington, D.C., which is the present-tense location of the narrative. In each case, she contemplates her identity in relationship to the history, geography, and politics that sustain it. Her reflections demonstrate that if self-identity is a home, then it is always a place defined by walls, a place that creates itself through exclusions, a place where "I" am because the "other" is not. Working from this premise, she conducts a constant surveillance of her interactions with people and places. "When I walk out in my neighborhood," writes Pratt, "each speaking to another person has become fraught, for me, with the history of race and sex and class; as I walk I have a constant interior discussion with myself, questioning how I acknowledge the presence of another, what I know or don't know about them, and what it means how they acknowledge me" (1984, 12). Through this exploration of her own complex identity, a process that remains wonderfully interested-in-self, Pratt seeks an alternative to narratives of selfhood that reenact, by ignoring, the modes of psychological, economic, and physical violence that underwrite them. She warns that, if women from differing cultures are to communicate productively and honestly in coalition, they must start the work at home by interrogating the manifold ways in which self-identity and epistemology are always effects of difference.
It is clear why critics like Biddy Martin and Chandra Talpade Mohanty promote "Identity: Skin Blood Heart" as an exemplary practice of cross-difference discourse (1986). It provides a thoroughgoing demonstration of what Uma Narayan calls a "methodology of humility and caution" for women who come to coalition from positions in dominant culture; in it, Pratt persistently interrogates her assumptions and cultivates openness to different perspectives (1988, 37). At once, the essay dramatizes the instability of identity as Pratt investigates the constant fluctuations of identification with and against others that modulate her experience of subjectivity from one moment to the next. Like Anzaldúa and Arendt, Pratt bases her notion of political interaction on the perception that identity is constantly in process, constantly produced and reproduced by its passage through simultaneously material and inter-subjective contexts. In this way, she strives to maintain attention to the "reality" of the "common world"—the things and people and histories that have built up around herself and others. Furthermore, Pratt reveals that every "action"—each moment of identification—implicates her in some power differential, always constituted by relations of privilege or disadvantage. This becomes most clear, of course, when portrayed from the latter position. Only upon losing privilege does Pratt understand that its security had extended into all regions of her life. She discovers, for instance, that leaving a heterosexual domestic arrangement deprives her of privilege in juridical and economic systems. Without favored legal status or her husband's financial support, she loses her children and community (1984, 26). With such revelations, Pratt denaturalizes privilege and effectively strips self-identity of its insulating illusions of autonomy and unencumberment, and shows how it is produced from structures of material relations.
Pratt's essay is most valuable for its insistence that work toward coalition be shifted away from abstraction and into the site where difference obtains: interaction. Truly, she joins theory to practice by acting upon her understanding that bigotry is embedded in processes of identification and manifested in relation. Her essay is more than an argument. It is a refusal of privileged un-knowing and a courageous investigation of the racist and classist bases of her own complex identity as a white woman. Yet, in the end, Pratt's investigation falls short, specifically because she shrinks from confronting her own desiring, interested relation to materiality. Pratt's discourse demonstrates deep interest in her self—its construction, its history with and against others. Yet, the narrative seems to lose interest (curiosity, courage, openness) at the point where the self begins to have interests (desires, wants, attachment). Pratt herself points to the crucial importance of this second sort of self-interest when she describes its role in the formation and intransigence of identity: "if we threaten our folks' or self-interest, or definition of self, then there is the risk of being thrown out. . . . This is a fear that can cause us to be hesitant in making fundamental changes or taking drastic actions" (1984, 47). Here, Pratt identifies interest as the fragile and intolerant heart of identity: if you risk self-interest, you risk self; if you betray group interest, you risk expulsion from that group. In other words, as the defining condition of identity, interest presents itself as the very place to go in an attempt to destabilize and reimagine identity.
By exploring and destabilizing her white womanhood without accepting, articulating, and owning her own self-interested stake in it, Pratt initiates a chain reaction of effects that works against the aims of her essay. As I will argue below, her hesitation to "act," in the Arendtian sense of naming interest in order to name one's self into the "common world," produces a tendency to withdraw from that combination of things and human relations. One consequence is that she stops short of creating the conditions for releasing those interests into the coalition process where they can be transformed. Another is that her narrative of complex identification narrows to a revelation of singular subjectivity, and a fantasy of privatized unity in self-sameness and sameness among subjects. This disappointing vision of "common good" is, perhaps, inevitable in that it is based on a notion of self that has not successfully articulated itself into new being—as the individual shapes the citizen, self-interest shapes common good. Yet, the places that mark this pattern are also those that indicate the essay's potential for more powerful exploration and transformation of self, alliance, and commonality. They mark opportunities for extending the important work Pratt's essay already accomplishes, opportunities for acknowledging, exploring, and negotiating attachment to material privilege.
The pattern that I describe begins early in the essay, where Pratt recounts two encounters in her Washington, D.C. neighborhood in order to investigate the inter-subjective constitution of her self within them. The first involves a Mr. Boone who works as janitor in her building and who, we learn, comes from "the Yemassee in South Carolina—that swampy land of Indian resistance and armed communities of fugitive slaves." Pratt narrates:
When we meet in the hall or on the elevator, even though I may have just heard him speaking in his own voice to another man, he "yes, ma'ams" me in a sing-song: I hear my voice replying in the horrid cheerful accents of a white lady: and I hate my white womanhood that drags between us the long bitter history of our region. (1984, 12)
The second encounter occurs between Pratt and "a white-headed white woman coming with difficulty down the walk." When Pratt smiles and says "hey," the other woman spits at her and shout-sings nonsensical verse. Pratt walks on, interpreting the woman's actions as "disdain for the uselessness and childishness of my manners in a world where she labored down the sidewalk." Pratt asks herself, "Why should she give me the approval of her smile?" (1984, 14).
These passages offer important insight into the web of injustice and struggle that conditions Pratt's position in the world. With her closing question, Pratt extends these insights by confronting the way power difference inflects her desire for recognition and approval. Indeed, the question begins to investigate of the self-interested nature of that desire. Yet, the tone of self-denigration that accompanies it signals a dead end to investigation. For it represents a kind of inversion of self-interest—both a disavowal of her interested stake in the situation, and a failure to maintain full interest in self, by examining the play of desires that connects her to and divides her from this other woman. The statement, "I hate my white womanhood," and the self-chiding tone of that question mark a refusal fully to excavate the meaning, in that moment, of her desire for approval and the complexity of her identification with white womanhood. The meetings position her within the world of things—the economic security that separates her from and relates her to the white-haired woman, the difference in cultural authority, the history of racial injustice that she shares with Mr. Boone, the immediate exchange of labor. But without exploring her attachment to those contexts—that is, without an expression of interest—she cannot create the conditions for reimaging the attachment or context.
The immediate result of this reticence—this failure to "act" by speaking herself fully into the moment—is that the speaker seems to leave material contingency while the other remains (falsely) locked within it. The history of Mr. Boone's birthplace does not illuminate his subjectivity at the moment of this meeting so much as it reduces his identity to a sign for resistance against white oppression ("that swampy land . . . of communities of armed fugitive slaves" [1984, 12]) and reduces him to a cue for Pratt's shamed revelations. If she has many homes and many identities in this essay, his identity is unified and objectified by reference to his one originary home. Likewise, she is alienated and distant from her "white womanhood": it is a discursive label, a cultural script. He, however, is conflated with skin color; it is an ontological fact: "he is a dark red brown man" (italics added). And, while she frames her "horrid, cheerful accents" as scripted, situational, nonessential, she—now the privileged interpreter of authenticity—contrasts Mr. Boone's false "sing-song" with his one true voice: "his own voice" (italics added).
In an actual coalition setting, this retreat would inevitably also shut down the possibility of transformative, "self-surprising" political discourse. There is no space made for exchange, no opportunity to generate new meanings from the "in-between" of her self-interested desire for approval, recognition, and safety. Instead, in the encounter with the white-haired woman, disavowal of self-interest operates to recenter Pratt in the narrative as the contrite but dominant focus of investigation. Although the goal of self-appraisal is to open herself to the "white-headed woman's" reality, the outcome seems to be that Pratt takes position as the focus, even the purpose, of that conversation as she reflects on "[t]he stark truth spoken in public, the terror of what is said about my place on the other side of the chasm between me and another" (1984, 14). In this scene, the "stark truth" may be spoken by the other, but its translator and subject is Pratt. More, in stating it, she seems to retreat to a place outside of the narrative. Here again, by absenting herself from interest, she leaves the encounter, evacuating the desiring subject position to pose as a transcendent observer who looks upon the scene from some place beyond. With this, Pratt reinscribes the very effect she elsewhere exposes and condemns: that is, the habit of economic privilege to erase material context, pretending freedom from material desire, bodily needs, or economic fear just as whiteness pretends absence of ethnicity or race. Such abdication or disavowal of advantage implies that privileged identity is merely discursive, or, at least, divides the discursive construct from the material context in the manner that Friedman and others have persuasively criticized. As a result, the identities of Mr. Boone and the white-haired woman seem increasingly determined by materiality, even as Pratt's retreat into self-condemnation distances her own subject position further and further from its own place at the table.13
Yet, as Arendt theorizes and Pratt herself demonstrates, the interests that divide the subject of white middle-class privilege from Mr. Boone and the other woman also relate it to them. These are moments where confrontation across the world of things—"that which separates and lies between"—invites a more thorough exploration, discovery, naming, invention, and revision of interested, desiring relation to materiality and to others through it. Mansbridge argues that "[u]nderstanding one's own needs requires gaining insight into why one fears, hates, loves, feels sorry for, and feels proud of aspects of oneself and other individuals and groups" (1993, 99). The reverse is true as well: beginning with one's needs and the self-interests that generate from them can open unto a wealth of information about multi-valent differences from and connections to the common world. To activate relation as a form of connection, it will be necessary to acknowledge, accept (which is not to say affirm or endorse), and remain curious about the in-betweenness of identity, interests, even privilege. Only by so doing can a speaker like Pratt keep her place at the table. She does not merely hate that white womanhood. She does not merely despise the desire for connection that led her to smile at the homeless woman. What is at stake? What drives Pratt's identification with those differences that she names and shuns in one motion?
There is much to be learned at this table, in a discourse that is about desire for change, concerning what leads Pratt to look for approval and recognition in those encounters—the cultural scripts about the underclass, the way that gaining approval and acceptance from others sometimes reconfirms power difference and exploits others to maintain (rather than reveal and transform) self. In an actual coalition setting there will be the opportunity to hear from Mr. Boone about his relation to the inter-est of Pratt's interested self, once it is no longer withheld. By appearing before others, it is possible to discover what cannot be accessed from the customary ways of seeing oneself. Arendt writes that the "revelatory quality of speech and action comes to the fore where people are with others and neither for nor against them—that is, in sheer human togetherness. Although nobody knows whom he reveals when he discloses himself in deed or word, he must be willing to risk the disclosure. . . ." (1958, 180).
The crucial difference here lies between denouncing a position and changing it. To accomplish the latter, it is necessary to fully occupy and take possession of the position as one's own. In this case, that means naming the interests that define self (legally, politically, economically), tether self (psychologically, affectively) and can be the means of better understanding and mobilizing self (collaboratively, progressively). By speaking interest, we speak ourselves—at least ourselves in that moment of time, the self from which to make the beginning. Pratt promises to do just this when she commits herself to staying "at the edge between my fear and outside, on the edge at my skin, listening, asking what new thing will I hear, will I see, will I let myself feel, beyond the fear" (1984, 18). Yet, within a page she describes herself "jumping from my edge and outside myself, into radical change, for love: simply love: for myself and for other women" (1984, 19). Radical change—as she has just stated—is only possible by staying at the edge, by altering the position from within rather than evacuating it. When she imagines love for other women as a new position—a transposition—the forces of radical change fall slack.
That "jump" suggests another disavowal of interest, this time supported by reification of gender difference. That is, if this other "home" exists—feminine, free and "simple"— then the first home was never her own. It is as though white womanhood was merely a form of false consciousness imposed on behalf of masculine interests: "I had no understanding of the limits that I lived within, nor of how much my memory and my experience of a safe space to be was based on places secured by omission, exclusion, or violence, and on my submitting to the limits of that place" (1984, 26). Here, Pratt is only slightly implicated in the home of heterosexual, white womanhood: she inhabits it by submission, not by volition or on behalf of her own interests. When she later describes her involvement as a sort of "entombment" of the white female body on behalf of white supremacist patriarchy, even the agency of submission falls out (1984, 36). Here again, I want to push the analysis further, to get at her stake and her agency in the arrangement. The analyses vividly demonstrate how acculturation works upon us from the very beginning, from before we make conscious choices. Yet, such acculturation does not happen to a priori subjects who are innocent and whole in advance to being acted upon. Acculturation is the means of coming into subjectivity, and is therefore never merely passive, never only a victimization, but always already volitional. Thus, where Pratt says, "I was shaped by my relation to those buildings and to the people in the buildings," Arendt would have the line read, "I shaped myself [italics added] by my relation to this world. I came into being [italics added] through it" (Pratt 1984, 17). The stakes here are high, as we see when, as if by necessity, disavowal of identity follows soon after disavowal of interest. Pratt (1984) describes herself as "caught within the narrow circle of the self" (18) and then repeatedly imagines that self as a thing to be torn off and shed: it is a shell to be broken through (19), a shroud to be unwound (39), layers to be stripped away (43). This motif suggests it will be possible to strip away the white, middle-class heterosexual self, to strip off the past, to strip away difference itself. For by its logic, difference is the opposite of connection; it is a kind of scar tissue left behind by the injustice of men.
It would be reasonable to protest at this point that self-interest is simply not part of Pratt's project: the essay is explicitly about dismantling the home of unjust privilege. It ably and famously condemns and rejects the oppressive and violent conditions of privilege. Yet the significance of those moments of leaving the table, of leaving home, is evident in that they directly undermine what Pratt herself sets out to accomplish: discovery of a new place. As argued earlier, interests and common good are mutually defining. Unless interests are spoken and thereby transformed (not transcended), the relations they establish will not change. Hence, the most serious implication of this refusal to inhabit and thereby transform the "narrow circle of self" is that it generates a utopian movement toward sameness: "I'm trying to get a little closer to the longed-for but unrealized world" (13). Taking leave from an embedded and disunified home nourishes a prelapsarian fantasy of home in which women are restored to unity, "where with understanding and change, the loneliness won't be necessary" (19). By removing herself from the material world that divides her from other women instead of speaking herself into that material world, Pratt enters a place "like a memory of childhood . . . a place of mutuality, companionship, creativity, sensuousness, easiness in the body . . . safety, and love" (24). Although Pratt calls it a "new place," it is a place we have been before in the form of identity politics. This is the place that Benhabib describes as "the politics of collective singularity" and Arendt as "the suffocating sameness" of the political sphere without its differentiating intermediaries (Benhabib 1986, 347; Arendt 1958, 58). The language of this fantasy echoes jarringly with Arendt's dystopian vision of a world from which the go-betweens of materiality and interest have disappeared, where subjects "are deprived of seeing and hearing other, of being seen and being heard by them" (1958, 58). Both Pratt's and Arendt's visions demonstrate that withdrawal from the world of things and separation leads to the eradication of difference and relation; Arendt adds the warning that the cost of such withdrawal is profound isolation, profound silence.
IV. Toward a Self-Interested Coalition DiscourseTo dismantle privilege in coalition discourse requires acknowledging the desire and fear that attach one to advantage, economic security, and public-political authority. It means inhabiting the home(s) of complex identity fully—particularly those that implicate one in oppression, because how else to change them? Although her narrative abdicates self-interest in the ways I have shown, Pratt also often points the way to it, as when she describes a dream in which her father comes to her carrying a heavy box:
I was angry: why should I be left with this: I didn't want it; I'd done my best for years to reject it: I wanted no part of what was in it: the benefits of my privilege, the restrictions, the injustice, the pain, the broken origins of the heart, the unknown horrors.
And yet it is mine: I am my father's daughter in the present, living in a world he and my folks helped to create. (1984, 53)
In claiming the box as her own, Pratt steps toward the twofold process of self-interested discourse. What might happen if she opened that box? We find out in another passage, where Pratt addresses herself to other feminist activists as a lesbian. In this, she opens a very different sort of box, containing marginalized rather than oppressive interests, contents both more and less difficult to reveal at the coalition table.
It is another kind of breaking through to even write this, to put these words before you. I anticipate the critical voices that say, "Your sexuality is irrelevant to the serious issues of racism and anti-Semitism;" that say, "You are being psychologizing, individualistic;" the voices that say, "You should want to work on these issues because they are right, for justice, for general principles." I anticipate the other, perhaps subvocal, words: "Disgusting." "Perverted." "Unnatural". . . . (1984, 19–20)
Pratt speaks her lesbian identity through an array of interests—her sexual desires, her desire for recognition and for love, her need to fight and her need for allies: all of these come together in an expression of self that is at once situated in the world and aware of and curious about its own aspect and situation. Pratt fears this "action,"—not only because she fears homophobia, but also because she fears expressing something "individualistic," separate, and selfish. That is, she fears the traditional understanding of self-interest: that it will be perceived as competing with—or not contributing to—the common good. This is a fear trained into us as coalition participants, as subjects of liberal democracy, and as women. Yet, notice that even as she voices something as personal as sexuality, the interests that stem from it lead her to interest in united struggle.
But in this writing, I can not hide myself, because it is how I love that has brought me to change . . . So I speak here of how I came to my own fight, and to an understanding of how I am connected to the struggle of other women and other people different from me. (1984, 19–20)
Pratt's self-interest is not hostile to, nor even very separable from, desire for common justice and good. More, her self-interest coexists with group interest, each conditioning the other. This responds importantly to the perception of interests as unchangeable, natural, imperative—and therefore inherently antagonistic.
As the narrative proceeds, Pratt is constantly gaining awareness about and revising her perceived self-interests as a lesbian. Because she maintains interest in that interested self and refuses to evacuate it, she reveals how that mode of identification interacts with other identities—how other minority identities are left out, how class and race also condition sexuality and how her practice and pursuit of safety, recognition, and peace as a lesbian all implicate her in a world made up of things and of other subject positions affected by that practice and pursuit. Pratt gains that awareness, and becomes better able to understand and reimagine her interests only because she voices them—because owning and articulating them drives her into that world of things that lies between, connecting and dividing. Thus, even the natural, personal articulation of herself as a lesbian functions as a form of "inter-est"—a beingness that exists between, that distinguishes her from but also relates her to others, and that changes as those modes of separateness and connection articulate and reform themselves around her.
Coalition discourse calls for remaining completely self-interested—not only articulating self through interest, but also staying interested in self, curious, observant, open to the full play of motivation and desire, and willing to negotiate all aspects of this self across the coalition table. We find this in Pratt's expression of how love for other women brought her to coalition. We find it in Arendtian interest, which provides a mechanism for centering difference without reifying or stabilizing it in a way that limits politics to a fixed opposition of competing demands. Arendt suggests, moreover, a way to illuminate and transform the material logic of difference, privilege, and injustice. So that, through interest discourse, difference and alliance remain in tension, and identity remains always open to revision, never permitted to settle down into that home away from home in a priori unity. Self-interested discourse will not resolve the tensions of alliance with others, or close the epistemic gaps that separate positions in culture. Nor does it promise to equalize power imbalances among speakers. Yet I believe self-interest is vital for maintaining those tensions, gaps and imbalances in joint consideration, and potentially key to their transformation.
Notes
This essay has benefited immensely from a long series of generous and astute readers. I would like to thank in particular Susan Stanford Friedman, Emily Hall, Lisa Shreibersdorf, Bruce Burgett, Jim Neighbors, Carole Chabries, Kathleen McSharry, and the three anonymous reviewers for Hypatia.
Ý 1.Ý From the clarion call of Audre Lorde's "Open Letter to Mary Daly" (1981) to Susan Stanford Friedman's recent Mappings (1998), much has been written over the past two decades regarding the ethical and practical problems of cross-difference discourse. For discussions that analyze and propose alternatives to the universalist frameworks that structure discursive norms, see Patricia Hill Collins (1990); Seyla Benhabib (1992) (chapter 3 in particular); Nancy Hartsock (1990); Linda Alcoff (1991); and Sharon Welch (1991). For more micro-level analyses and discussions of the immediate concerns of the coalition setting, see Cherríe Moraga (1981); Maria Lugones and Elisabeth Spelman (1983); Bernice Johnson Reagon (1983); Ellie Bulkin et al. (1984); Biddy Martin and Chandra Talpade Mohanty (1986); Gloria Anzaldúa (1987 and 1990); Uma Narayan (1988); Joyce Trebilcot (1988); Marnia Lazreg (1990); and Ann Russo (1991).
2.Ý For analyses of the intersubjective constitution of political subjectivity see Benhabib (1992) and Lugones (1987). For materialist standpoint theories of identity see Hartsock (1983) and Sandra Harding (1986). For treatments of cultural hybridity see Anzaldúa (1987) and Susan Stanford Friedman (1998) (see pages 82–93 in particular for an encyclopedic review and taxonomy of these theories). For various combinations of the above, see Alcoff (1988); Alison M. Jaggar and Susan R. Bordo (1989); Minnie Bruce Pratt (1984); Adrienne Rich (1986); Caren Kaplan (1990); Donna Haraway (1991); and Diane Fowlkes (1997).
3.Ý I borrow the term "complex identity" from Diane Fowlkes (1997) as an economical way of bringing together—as she does—related models of intersubjectivity, cultural hybridity, and subjectivity-in-process.
4.Ý The brief history of theories and attitudes concerning self-history in the United States which follows is, of course, much simplified to frame Arendt's theory of interest and my revised notion of self-interest. It is not intended as a comprehensive account.
5.Ý For feminist critiques of Arendt's theories, see Mary O'Brien (1981), Rich (1979), Hanna Fenichel Pitkin (1981) and (1995), and Benhabib (1992) (chapter 3). For work reflecting the more recent interest in mining Arendt for structures useful to feminism, see Kimberly Curtis (1999); Linda Zerilli (1995); Bonnie Honig (1995b); Lisa Disch (1995); Susan Bickford (1995 and 1996); Jean Bethke Elshtain (1995); and Benhabib (1995). Several of the above appear in Bonnie Honig's edited collection, Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt (1995). Honig's introduction and Mary Dietz's essay, "Feminist Receptions of Hannah Arendt," which also appears in the collection, provide excellent overviews of the various problems in Arendt's work and responses to them by feminist critics. For an annotated bibliography on Hannah Arendt and feminism, see Patchen Markell, also in Honig (1995a).
6.Ý The oxymoron here would consist not in the combining of politics and women, but in the attachment of political action to any predetermined coordinate of identity. Bonnie Honig explains this problem eloquently: "From Arendt's perspective, a political community that constitutes itself on the basis of a prior, shared, and stable identity threatens to close the spaces of politics, to homogenize or repress the plurality and multiplicity that political action postulates" (1995b, 149). I discuss Arendt's views on this matter in more detail below. For other discussions of Arendt on identity politics see Honig (1995b), Benhabib (1995), Disch (1995) and Bickford (1995).
7.Ý Linda Zerilli argues that although Arendt insists on separating publicity and privacy, she does not present them in opposition. In a manner that Zerilli likens to Julia Kristeva's theory of embodiment, the private Arendtian body alternately compels and effaces the production of political identity. The privatized modality of "life process" is thus present in the political construct. It not only nourishes but also contests and reconfigures that construct. What this means is that embodiment and identity, work and action, privacy and publicity "are not in fact so much opposed as interdependent. For Arendtian action and speech would be empty without the bodily drives that animate them" (Zerilli 1995, 180). In Zerilli's words, Arendtian action is "both illusory and empty" when "bought at the price of disavowal" of privacy and the body. Bonnie Honig also focuses on what she calls "cross-fertilization" (1995b, 225) between the private and political domains, but from the opposite standpoint. Her interest is the strain placed on the boundary from above, as the performative modality of public-political action threatens to take over the other domains and render all modes of identity performative. She develops from this tendency a theory of performative labor and embodiment.
8.Ý See Honig (1995b, 221–22) for a review of the debate on this point. I base my claim on Linda Zerilli's argument from the same volume. Zerilli reads Arendt in relation to Kristeva to show that bodies in Arendtian privacy precede gender coding and constantly resist the imposition of identity categories.
9.Ý Susan Bickford makes an almost identical claim in her essay, "In the Presence of Others: Arendt and Anzaldúa on the Paradox of Public Appearance" (1995). Her focus, however, is on the performative dimension of Arendtian political identity, while I will focus on the twin settings of that performativity: "the world of things" and interest.
10.Ý In political action "[m]an . . . communicate[s] himself and not merely something—thirst or hunger, affection or hostility or fear" (Arendt 1958, 176).
11.Ý For another treatment of this problem, see Iris Marion Young's discussion of "asymmetrical reciprocity" (1997, chapter 2). Young is also concerned with Arendt's table and the importance of keeping it there as an "interval" that separates and relates subjects. She emphasizes, in particular, the importance of recognizing symmetrical reciprocity (that is, full exhangeability of perception, full understanding of the other) as an impossibility, even while continuing to desire connection and reach toward others.
12.Ý Arendt writes, "The impact of the world's reality upon human existence is felt and received as a conditioning force. The objectivity of the world—its object- or thing-character—and the human condition supplement each other; because human existence is conditioned existence, it would be impossible without things, and things would be a heap of unrelated articles, a non-world, if they were not the conditioners of human existence" (1958, 9). We are not simply in our own idiosyncratic worlds, without stability or common context. At once, we actively create our world—and in a manner that makes it possible not only for us but also, potentially, for others to inhabit it. We choose how to remake this world over and over again.
13.Ý For a reading that is almost directly opposed to mine see Martin and Mohanty (1986, 198). They emphasize the ways in which Pratt's invocation of this "history of resistance"— in combination with her general attention to suppressed histories and her own implication in them—subverts "all memories of a safe, familiar southern home." I do not disagree. My focus, however, is on the home of self-concept and how these histories avoid an involvement with the materiality and historicity of the moment she occupies. For this reason, I do disagree with Martin and Mohanty when they remark upon Pratt's "refusal to allow guilt to trap her within the boundaries of a coherent 'white' identity" (1986, 198). I find that guilt does trap Pratt in that it compels her to evacuate that very positionality.
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