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Multiculturalism, Identity Formation, and the Nomadic Ethics: A Deleuzean Perspective on the Contemporary Deliberative Democracy

SUH, You-Kyung (Professor, Kyung Hee Cyber University. sykphil@khcu.ac.kr)

I. Introduction

According to a multiculturalism theorist Bhikhu Parekh, multiculturalism “is about cultural diversity or culturally embedded differences,” and "the term 'multicultural' refers to the fact of cultural diversity, [and] the term 'multiculturalism' to a normative response to that fact" (2000: 3, 6). For them cultural diversity matters because one of those cultures in a political community appears to subordinate the rest of them and consequently renders those who belong to the cultural minority groups lesser citizens being deprived of their equal cultural rights and human dignity.

During the 1960s there arose a variety of social movements ranging from anti-war and anti-nuclear protest, black civil rights movement, women’s liberation movement to environmental campaign. Each of those social initiatives sensitized the political equality of minority groups based on their respective identities. “Since the late 1970s demands for the recognition of identities based on gender, race, language, ethnic background, and sexual orientation have been challenging the legitimacy of established constitutional democracies” (Benhabib 2002: viii).

Against this background a vast array of discourses for the politics of recognition―that is, identity politics, politics of difference, gender politics, and so on―has emerged and so has a variety of multiculturalism theories brought about. In this context, multiculturalism as "a normative response" took up the task of making such unjust situations intelligible with a view a peaceful coexistence of different cultural groups within a multicultural society. Its three important conceptual themes have been recognition, identity, and social justice. In practice, it also has sought to present some effective policy recommendations to help represent the interests of cultural minority groups on an equal footing within any given multicultural society.

Among those multiculturalism theories, that of Charles Taylor (1994), Will Kymlicka (1995, 2002), Axel Honneth (1996), Bhikhu Parekh (2000, 2008), Nancy Fraser & Axel Honneth (2003) have drawn much attention from the readership. In spite of their differing disciplinary backgrounds and methodological approaches, they all seem to have some theoretical emphases in common; the respect for culture understood in terms of cultural essentialism, the culture-embedded identity both on the individual and the group level, and on the urgent need to devise a universal ethics to animate the multicultural policy-making as well as its everyday practices.

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During the last 20 years the multiculturalists achieved quite a lot but their discourses presently appear to have turned a full circle. Perhaps, it may be too early to say that multiculturalism has reached its end. From my theoretical point of view, however, this claim is not without ground. For one thing, that multiculturalism’s key proposition and its actual fight force, namely, the concept of the coherent cultural identity of the acting subject, can be readily abstracted from and effectively represented by a person, a group, or society is now turned out to be untrue. It is because, as Nietzsche observed, “there is no ‘being’ behind doing, effecting, becoming; ‘the doer’ is merely a fiction added to the deed” (Nietzsche 1989: 45).

Drawn from this Nietzschean insight, this paper casts a doubt on the multiculturalism’s common assumption that one can find a definite cultural identity in an individual, a group or in a political community in this increasingly hybridizing world. Nevertheless, if we still want to keep the multiculturalist term ‘cultural identity’ intact, then we should first admit that it cannot be a homogeneous entity but an overlapping multiple whole which seems to betray the multiculturalism’s basic position of cultural coherence specific to a cultural body. This constitutes a need to think over the concept of cultural identity, its formation and representation in a new theoretical light.

Hence, I venture out to diagnose some theoretical predicaments of the present multicultural discourses and then try to rescue them from their present cul-de-sac. In order to do so, I need to come to terms with some Deleuzean concepts of difference, repetition, and nomadic thinking, making extensive use of the two prominent Deleuzean thinkers such as Judith Butler and Rosie Braidotti. These two thinkers appear to provide food for a new type of multicultural thinking, that is the anti-essentialist multiculturalism and the nomadic ethics applicable to the contemporary deliberative democracy respectively.

In this paper I will conclude that this anti-essentialist multiculturalism shares a common reasoning with the existing multicultural discourses that cultural differences should be paid due respect and that any discrimination or social injustice caused by them should be eliminated and overcome by virtue of public deliberation. On the contrary, I argue that it differs sharply from them on the point that it focuses on the nature of political agency which denies the preexisting fixed identity while accepting the political effect of performativity in public deliberation where a kind of nomadic ethics centered on the common category of the human would be constituted to serve social justice. I shall begin with an examination of the present state of multicultural discourses.

II. Multicultural discourses at the Cul-de-sac

1. Some Theoretical Weaknesses of multicultural discourses

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Charles Taylor with his "The Politics of Recognition" (1994) opened up the first door to the multiculturalism discourses. According to him any individual who belongs to a cultural group, whether it being a dominant one or not, is inseparable from his culture because it is the fundamental source for him to obtain his self-understanding from and also for others to define him by. In his view culture or Kultur in Herder’s word in specific “represents the shared values, meanings, linguistic signs, and symbols of a people, itself considered a unified and homogeneous entity.” In this sense, “the individual’s acquisition of culture involves a soul’s immersion and shaping through education in the values of the collective” (Benhabib 2002: 2).

Thus, having Herder's famous phrase that "a specific way a man becomes a human being is keeping one's own ways" (1994: 30) in mind, Taylor argued that one's unique identity should be respected and "disregarding or neglecting one's uniqueness or trying to assimilate his cultural identity to the dominant cultural identity should be considered a grave evil done to the ideal of human authenticity" (38). Accordingly, nonrecognition or misrecognition of one's authenticity and on its extension identity is not only a serious violation of societal justice but a form of repression because it tends to imprison the person in a state of distorted psychological reduction (25). And then he from the dominant culture's point of view concluded that "we have to allow not only their[minorities] culture's survival but their values" (64).

In reality, however, this kind of moral appeal from the dominant group’s vantage point of view is not likely to be substantiated for two crucial reasons. First, every nation-state cannot do away with its foremost objective, that is, its nation-building or put differently its rai·son d’é·tat. For this reason the laws and institutions in most liberal multicultural societies are meant to serve as legitimate excuses for having their cultural minorities assimilated to or integrated into the mainstream culture. Behind this rationale lies a worry that if various cultural minority groups insist on their differentiated cultural rights, then divisiveness and separatism will rattle the very foundation of the nation-state.

In this vein, another liberal multiculturalist Kymlicka based on his personal experience in the North America takes a similar dominant cultural stance and argues, “liberals can only endorse minority rights in so far as they are consistent with respect for the freedom and autonomy of individuals” in liberal democratic nation-states. This means that any minority culture that does not qualify for this principle is not to be officially recognized. Hence he goes on to inform us that the “societal culture” based on the liberal principle “provides its members with meaningful ways of life across the full range of human activities, including social, educational, religious, recreational and economic life, encompassing both public and private spheres” (Kymlicka 2002: 327~376; 1995: 75).

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In this manner of speech Kymlicka’s multicultural discourse seems to come very close to a ‘transculturalism’ which seeks to transcend various cultural differences by reinventing of a new overarching holistic common culture. Apart from his “cultural essentialism” based on the “static and preservationist” concept of culture (Benhabib 2002: 61, 67) which he obviously shares with Taylor, Kymlicka’s utmost concern with national integration seems to speak, however implicit its tone might be, for the interests of the dominant groups in the existing liberal democracies when we see it from the minority groups’ point of view.

Second, the political institution of citizenship which links “citizens to the state in an identical manner” by way of providing them with “equal status, identical rights and obligations” on the basis of its constitution is undoubtedly a homogenizing mechanism for all in any sovereign state. “To be a citizen is to transcend one’s ethnic, religious and other particularities, and to think and act as a member of the political community” (Parekh 2000: 181). Speaking in a crude manner, educational institutions, public offices, mass media are to a certain extent expected to serve as the state functionaries operating to nurture the identical citizen ideal in every individual citizen.

As a consequence, the modern state, unlike the pre-modern one, is perfectly capable of directly relating to its citizen on an individual basis and becomes “an association of individuals” (Parekh 2000: 181). The state is the space where the state-citizen relation has a priority over all other personal as well as communal relations within the constitutional jurisdiction. Hence, the primacy of constitutionalism or patriotism for the nation-state tends to replace the communal feelings or cultural allegiance for minority or regional groups. This constitutes an occasion for us to cast a reasonable doubt that multiculturalism has not arrived at a cul-de-sac.

2. Multiculturalism as the Politics of Cultural Recognition

Nancy Fraser in Redistribution or Recognition?: A Political‐Philosophical Exchange (2003) introduces her 'status model of recognition' founded on the two social hierarchies causing injustice to the modern society. One is economic hierarchy and the other is cultural hierarchy which repeatedly reproduce themselves on their respective organizing principles, i.e., redistribution and recognition. Her main thesis can be summarized in that neither economic redistribution without cultural recognition nor cultural recognition without economic redistribution is a sufficient condition of substantiating justice (9).

To rationalize this claim she directs us to see the specific nature of injustice found in the relatively low status held by various cultural minorities of ethnic, religious, sexual differences which tends to affect their low economic status directly or indirectly. Having done so, however, she qualifies this observation by giving two conflicting cases in the Western liberal democratic societies. The first case is a 'white male heterosexual Christian

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physical laborer' whose low economic status within the society does not necessarily coincide with a low respect in its cultual hierarchy. By contrast, the second case is a person affiliated with a minority culture who can hardly enjoy a superior position on the cultural hierarchy even if he is a very wealthy person. It is only because the former can capitalize on and at the same time be supported by the mainstream cultural symbols while the latter cannot in their societies.

In this way Fraser ends up reaffirming the multiculturalist position that cultural differences really matter with regard to social injustice and joins forces with the struggle for recognition or the politics of cultural recognition put forward by her Hegelian moralist colleague, Axel Honneth (1996). So she argues, “cultural questions are internally relevant to all struggles for ‘recognition,’ inasmuch as the application of principles of recognition always takes place in light of cultural interpretations of needs, claims, or abilities” (Fraser 2003: 158). Yet, unlike Honneth’s normative approach focussing on the method of emancipatory critique, she is more interested in remedying social injustices with practical measures applicable to the contemporary deliberative democracy.

With this purpose in mind she adopts a political concept “participatory parity” for her status model of recognition, which is obviously derived from the ancient Greek polis (its political form of isonomia in specific) and gives an account for it as follows:

For me ... ‘parity’ means the condition of being a peer, or of being on a par with others, of standing on an equal footing. I leave the question open exactly what degree or level of equality is necessary to ensure such parity … According to this norm, justice requires social arrangements that permit all (adult) members of society to interact with one another as peers. For participatory parity to be possible, I claim, at least two conditions must be satisfied (Fraser’s Italics. 2003: 101 n39, 36).

At the end of the quote above, Fraser speaks of the two specific conditions for the realization of her participatory parity: one is the “objective” condition which will be guaranteed by the participants' economic independence and voice and the other is the “intersubjective” condition which will be actualized by the institutionalized cultural value system demanding all participants to pay due respect to one another and treat one another on an equal footing. In her view the former will help prevent some behaviors associated with economic subordination and inequality, whereas the latter will preclose some people's cultural attributes and values to be systematically undermined. As a result, they together guarantee some decent opportunities for the minorities to interact with others in the wider society.

After these two conditions being secured, “the norm of participatory parity must be applied dialogically and discursively through democratic processes of public debate” so that “only the full, free participation of all the implicated parties can suffice to warrant claims for recognition” (43). And this participatory parity serves as a precondition to bring forth

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justice because it “is not an externally imposed requirement, determined over the heads of those whom it obligates. Rather, it binds only insofar as its addresses can also rightly regard themselves as its authors” (44). What is important in Fraser’s viewpoint here is that justice, if it was to be binding, would have to be derived from “the democratic procedures of public deliberation.”1)

In sum, Fraser’s parity principle appears to have created a theoretical framework for “a deliberative democratic model” (Benhabib 2002: ix). It can differently be called a deliberative multicultural model from our vantage point of view. Unfortunately, however, this model is not without a critical theoretical problem. To understand the nature of the problem we need first to take a close look at her position on the group-person linkage which she sees working in the process of recognition.

To distribute X (goods, services, entitlements) to Y (persons) always implies recognizing Y to be a certain kind of Gm (group member) in virtue of which Y is entitled to X. In any society, we are entitled to health benefits by virtue of being wage earners, senior citizens, welfare mothers, and so forth. (Fraser 2003: 71)

As Fraser rightly says “Y is entitled to X” as a Gm in a distributive nexus. But does it

necessarily hold true for a deliberative nexus where ‘Y is expected to represent G as a Gm’? I do not think so because there might be some obstacles preventing Y from behaving as a loyal Gm. What I mean to say here is that Fraser overlooks the possibility that a group’s collective identity may not be directly translated into its individual member’s identity. I shall explain the reason in the next section.

III. Some Problems of Cultural Identity and Identity Formation

1. Rethinking the Homogeneity of Cultural Identity In multiculturalism, culture is defined as "a body of beliefs and practices in terms

of which a group of people understand themselves and the world and organize their individual and collective lives," and one’s identity is "embedded in and sustained by“ the given culture (Parekh 2000: 2-3). Viewed in this way, one's membership in a

1) At this juncture, one may recall Rawls' "original situation" in which the veil of ignorance is drawn to equalize all the participants’ positions and also of Habermas' "ideal speech situation" in which the universal pragmatics is employed to govern its democratic deliberative procedures. In a similar fashion, Fraser’s parity principle is designed to produce a kind of ‘ideal speech’ situation which both Rawls and Habermas have theorized to create a better communicative setting conducive to social justice and/or communicative rationality.

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cultural community is decisive in structuring and shaping his identity in a certain way, for it gives a content or identity which in turn can be shared by other members within that community (Parekh 2000: 156). In short, one's identity is not thinkable without recourse to his culture. This is why one’s culture should be duly respected by other members in the wider society.

Although the term identity is sometimes inflated to cover almost everything that characterizes an individual or a group, most advocates of these [multicultural] movements use it to refer to those chosen or inherited characteristics that define them as certain kinds of persons or groups and form an integral part of their self-understanding. These movements thus form part of the wider struggle for recognition of identity and difference or, more accurately, of identity-related differences. (Parekh 2000, 1)

As Parekh correctly observed most advocates of multiculturalism tend to understand the concept of identity to be closely interconnected with culture and one’s identity to mean one’s cultural identity. This manner of thinking is called cultural essentialism which lies most of the existing multicultural discourses. But this essentialist position appear to produce some theoretical perplexities for them. In this connection it seems to be sensible to raise the following two purposeful questions about the nature of culture: (1) Is culture static by nature? (2) Is a culture a coherent whole that can give its cohorts a uniform identity?

First, is culture static by nature? Knowing that a culture is comprised of language, belief system, rules and norms, institutions, manners and customs and so forth and that all of those cultural constituents are subject to change, no one can say that it is static. But a trickiest thing about culture is that its changing speed and rate tend not to be the same in all aspects of it. Within a society there are some areas undergoing a rapid sea-change while some other areas are considerably lagging behind.

Take South Korea as an example, it is argued that its economy, science and technology, fashion, cosmetics and sport sectors have fast caught up with those of advanced societies while politics, education, religion and discourse areas appear to have undergone a relatively slow and partial change. And people belonging to the more advanced sectors are more likely to be multicultural or, if you prefer, polycultural in thought and manners than those belonging to the less advanced sectors. In this respect, one can imagine that the Korean culture to the Koreans is not likely to be the same thing depending on their affiliations with the unevenly evolved working sectors.

Now let us pose our second question: Is a culture a coherent whole that can give its cohorts a uniform identity? Taking a closer look into a culture, it has various heterogenous cultural elements gradually added up to the indigenous culture by intercultural and transcultural exchanges taken place willingly or unwillingly or even unwittingly during the course of its history. In this sense Parekh argues, “cultures

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are not the achievements of the relevant communities alone but also of others, who provide their context, shape some of their beliefs and practices, and remain their points of reference” (Parekh 2000: 163).

Even if we concede that each culture looks to have an identity on its own as most multicultural discourses assume its "identity is never settled, static and free of ambiguity" (Parekh 2000: 148). It is basically because a cultural identity is being subject to time, space, age, sex, and social position and therefore neither static nor homogeneous by nature. Consequently, one may have a reasonable doubt that a culture can give its cohorts a uniform identity. This certainly presents a theoretical challenge to the multicultural discourses based on cultural essentialism. Is there any theoretical strategy to cope with this anti-essentialist challenge?

2. Identity Formation and a Collective ‘We’

If culture is not a homogeneous whole but a hybridized complex by nature, then an attempt to discern a uniform identity from it seems to be a futile effort to make. On the contrary, however, the culture of a society is still capable of providing a coherent cultural identity for its members on certain occasions. Suppose when in situations like the World Cup games or the Olympiad where, metaphorically speaking, the Schmittian dichotomy of friend-enemy is manifest, the national identity of the political community suddenly and glaringly breaks out into the open and works magnificently into uniting all its nationals in a ‘we’ against ‘them.’

Hence the proponents of multiculturalism agree that forming a we is a prerequisite condition for any battle against the rest of the society where a dominant cultural group seems to reign over the rest of the society with its relatively well-established group identity that is the mainstream political culture. It is “the foundationalist reasoning of identity politics” which promotes that “an identity must first be in place in order for political interests to be elaborated and, subsequently, political action to be taken” (Butler 1999: 181). In other words, a minority group needs to identify or form a group identity as a we before it comes to the cultural battles against other groups so that such a group identity becomes the basis of claiming social recognition from other groups in the wider society.

With this in mind let us consider a situation where there is no cultural warfront set for a serious fight as a collective ‘we,’ leaving the cultural cohorts left as atomized individuals. In this case a culture in its hybridized complexity would not possibly engender a uniform identity embracing all their idiosyncrasies. Moreover, as Parekh argues, if a culture is practically not the achievement of the concerned community alone but an accumulated mixture of many cultural contexts, beliefs and practices from other communities over time, then, technically speaking, the members of the community can choose whatever suits him best from its various cultural

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layers and preserve it in their personal cultural reservoir. Or differently they may choose to be exposed to some selective parts of the

entire culture on purpose. Today we tend to experience considerably more of foreign cultures than our previous generations through travelling, studying abroad, working at global companies and organizations, participating in international conferences and shopping overseas and so on. On top of that, even in our country we live in a myriad of foreign cultural materials such as films, concerts and plays, radio, TV, internet, YouTube etc. on a daily basis. Not only that, but we are more and more in constant contact with foreign things and people in our own multiethnic and multicultural society. So the individuals can enjoy maximum freedom to become acculturated in a specific chosen way.

Under the circumstances, an individual in this kind of mixed cultural community, too, must be thought as a polyculturally constituted self-chosen multicultural entity which endlessly makes connections with, disconnections from, and reconnections with other likewise entities wherever and whenever possible. Can we expect this individual to be or act like a coherent representative of a culture or an identity? I very much doubt it. Thus I agree with Braidotti when she observed, "the body of the subject" resists being defined by any particular kind of cultural attribute or essence but represents “a point of overlapping” cultural axes of differentiation. Let us listen to her view on this undefinable subject.

The body, or the embodiment, of the subject is to be understood as neither a biological nor a sociological category but rather as a point of overlapping between the physical, the symbolic, and the sociological.... In so far as axes of differentiation such as class, race, ethnicity, gender, age and others intersect and interact with each other in the constitution of subjectivity, the notion of nomad refers to the simultaneous occurrence of many of these at once (Braidotti 1994: 4. Emphasis added.)

Since a culture has many different cultural layers and its cultural identity denies a homogeneous identification for that reason, a person who is a complex cultural entity is more than likely to act upon many social and cultural “axes of differentiation” in a selective manner depending on the situations where he is expected to interact with the like-minded people. This is particularly so because one’s identity can only be identified by those who are in proximity with the person and also because his identity can only emerge when others in his proximity identify or define him through his bodily characteristics, speech-acts, and even facial expressions. Thus, one can argue that there is no concrete monolithic fixed identity behind this person, but his identity is constantly being constituted by others retrospectively (Braidotti 1994: 14).

For the multiculturalists this concept of ‘retrospectively constituted identity’ may pose a fundamental problem. First of all, their ethical claim to the respect for cultural differences

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and their struggles for recognition will loose its foundation in reality, that is a preexisting fixed identity. This explains why the need of forming a group identity of ‘we’ is often stressed in identity politics including the multicultural politics. Unfortunately, however, this ‘we’ is not without a problem in both theory and practice as Butler points out from the gender politics point of view: “The feminist ‘we’ is always and only a phantasmatic construction, one that has its purposes, but which denies the internal complexity and indeterminacy of the term and constitutes itself only through the exclusion of some part of the constituency that it simultaneously seeks to represent” (Butler 1999: 181).

Second, the deliberative democratic model whose main political strategy is mutual persuasion and negotiation through speech-acts in the public sphere misses out on the point that not the entire group members but only one or two representatives of the given group take part in the process of public deliberation. In other words, the participating group’s interest is most likely to be represented not by a collective actor but by an individual whose self-chosen partial identity may not exactly coincide with the group’s collective one and become contingent and transitional depending on the people who are supposed to identify his identity in the given context. If this is the case, then Fraser’s assumption that ‘Y is expected to represent G as a Gm’ falters.

In this connection, one cannot help but admit that the contemporary multicultural discourses based on cultual essentialism are really in trouble. If a culture cannot provide its cohorts with a homogeneous cultural identity, would this mean the end of the multicultural discourses? Is there any theoretical solution to rescue them? In the following section we will see if a Deleuzean approach can offer a tenable solution for it.

IV. Political Representation without a Fixed Cultural Identity

Multiculturalism does not get us very far if it is understood only as a difference between cultures. It should rather be taken as a difference within the same culture, that is to say within every self. (Braidotti 1994: 13. Emphasis added.)

To begin with, let us first share the rich multicultural experience of a real person. This person presently works in the Netherlands but was born in Italy, moved to Australia and grew up there, went to a college in the United Kingdom and then received a doctoral degree from a French university. This personal history belongs to Rosie Braidotti, the Deleuzean nomadic polyglot feminist, who decided to share her personal experience with us in her book, Nomadic Subjects.

Regarding her cultural identity (or identities) one may be curious to know what could be her real or sovereign cultural identity. Could it be Italian because she was

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born in Italy, an Australian because she spent most of her youth there as a full citizen, or a continental European because she was not a British immigrant whose culture got the upper hand in that former British colony? This pattern of questioning can go on for some time against her multifarious cultural background.

To our relief, however, she put an end to this regression by claiming herself to be a “nomad”: “I chose to become a nomad, that is to say a subject in transit and yet sufficiently anchored to a historical position to accept responsibility and therefore make myself accountable for it” (1994: 10). According to her own explanation, the nomad is her anti-essentialist conceptual figuration of “a situated, postmodern, culturally differentiated understanding of the subject,” largely implying the Deleuzean “nomadic becoming,” that is “neither reproduction nor just imitation but rather emphatic proximity, intensive interconnectedness” (5, 6). It follows that being a polyglot she sees her position “as structurally displaced in between different languages” and her “being in between languages constitutes a vantage point in deconstructing identity” (12). This is all possible because a polyglot “is capable of some healthy skepticism about steady identities and mother tongues” by keeping critical distance from all of them at all times.

As a Deleuzean theorist2) she calls this critical mental state the “nomadic consciousness” (13) and characterizes it as the following: “This form of consciousness combines features that are usually perceived as opposing, namely the possession of a sense of identity that rests not on fixity but on contingency. The nomadic consciousness combines coherence with mobility” (31). While putting herself together with her polyglot’s experience in this paradigmatic subject’s position, Braidotti takes the nomad to be a real living entity with flesh and desire and then her concept, the nomad, allows for a new possibility to be reinterpreted as someone else, that is a citizen living in a deliberative democracy.

As far as the deliberative democracy is concerned it expects the citizen, no matter who he is, to be constantly in transit from one deliberation site to another while playing out the political role of representation vis-à-vis others in presence either for himself or for the group of his affiliation. No doubt, the polyglot who is “structurally displaced in between different languages” and therefore has a strong need to constitute “a vantage point in deconstructing identity” can be likened to this citizen in a deliberative democracy who needs to be adapted to each new deliberative scene of his choice.

For Braidotti this kind of fluid and flexible state of mind of the nomad or the polyglot is construed as “the possession of a sense of identity” or equaled to the nomadic consciousness. From the conventional understanding of the term identity,

2) Being a professed Deleuzean thinker Braidotti appears to make extensive use of Deleuze’s conceptual categories such as desire, difference, lines of escape, becoming, rhizome, deterritorialization/reterritorialization, assemblage, repetition, simulacra, minoritarian consciousness, subjectification, becoming-minority etc. Nevertheless, I do not intend to explain all of them except for some chosen here due to the limited space of this paper.

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however, it cannot possibly be an identity per se but an ‘acting’ identity at best. Nevertheless this acting identity or the nomadic consciousness is seen to govern the nomad in his transit from a place to another meeting and making friends with new people, having talks with them using different languages, trying to adjust to the new social protocol of procedures in different discursive scenes, devising a new set of practical norms and rules to abide by, and so on. Here the nomad’s identity or, to be more precise, his sense of identity is not necessarily understood as being subordinate to his preexisting fixed identity or purpose.

In a similar vein, this acting identity can be explained in terms of Deleuze’s simulacra. According to him “all identities are only simulated, produced as an optical ‘effect’ by the more profound game of difference and repetition” (Deleuze 1994: xviii). And in this game of difference and repetition, “repetition already plays upon repetitions, and difference already plays upon differences.” It is because “the simulacra exists in and of itself, without grounding in or reference to a model: its existence is ‘unmediated’” (Deleuze 1994: 29). If we accept that the represented identity or the acting identity can be thought as a simulacra, which is not the original identity but a copy of it, then perfect representation is an impossible goal to achieve. Hence Deleuze claims, “the identity of the subject” does not survive “the failure of representation” (Deleuze 1994: xviii).

Returning to our nomadic citizen in public deliberation, I think, his represented identity is still relevant for the interaction with others in any given context because no one including himself in it can have full access to his original identity due to the possible failure of representation even if it exists at all. Therefore those deliberative citizens are to appear as their simulacras in the specific space and time. Placed under the same condition, however, they shall try to identify one another on an equal footing. It is because what the nomadic citizen is most interested to do is trying to construct a contingent foundation to anchor himself by virtue of cooperating with others who also need it for themselves and therefore are ready to take up the common task with him.

As a result, a sense of solidarity based on mutual recognition and reciprocity will emerge in each deliberative situation. This implies that the nomadic citizen may end up being an ethical entity guided by a set of values, rules, and procedures specific to the situation. We may call this particular brand of ethical system the ‘nomadic ethics’ composed of a special array of nomadic values. According to Braidotti a strong sense of interconnectedness, intersubjectivity, personal responsibility and accountability for one’s speech-acts, respect for minoritarian consciousness, nonfixity of boundaries, anti-essentialist attitude towards culture and social groups, and “a sharpened sense of territory but no possessiveness about it” can be such values for this nomadic ethics.

Supposing these values are at work, can we expect to see that the present multicultural discourses’ cultural essentialism be overcome and thereby social justice

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be brought about through public deliberation? It would be too premature to give a definite answer to this question until we examine how citizens’ political participation, that is their political agency, to be more exact, in public deliberation comes into realization. So we now move on to examine the peculiar nature of political agency in public deliberation.

V. The Peculiar Nature of Political Agency in Public Deliberation

1. Language as the Exclusive Medium for Political Agency

Language is the exclusive medium for the speaker to constitute an identity by giving account of himself and for the audience to figure out the speaker’s view and position on the issue under consideration. As discussed earlier one’s identity is not a fixed one and can be constructed anew as a simulacra in every new discursive situation. It is particularly so because one’s identity does not appear until he starts to speak out and others in turn identify him as a specific person by way of looking at him in person and listening to what he has to say.

In other words, the speaker is not to be considered as a sovereign subject but as an agent who is required to actualize its agency of the embodied entity. The body of the speaker therefore is “the agency or the site where ‘doing’ and ‘being done to’ become equivocal.” In this sense Butler argues that the speaker’s “body has its invariably public dimension,” that is to say “the dimension of sociality.” And this sociality means “a primary and unwilled physical proximity with others” and thereby engenders endless chains of interactions with them (Butler 2004: 21).

Nevertheless, the body will not forge the relations by itself unless it is aided by language. To be more specific, the primary implication displayed by the body will remain in a state of indeterminacy until someone, whoever he is, gives it a reality or recognizes it as a person by virtue of addressing him in a linguistic form. “That one comes to ‘be’ through a dependency on the Other ... must be recast in linguistic terms to the extent that the terms by which recognition is regulated, allocated, and refused are part of larger social rituals of interpellation” (Butler 1997: 26). According to Butler, it is exactly the ontological function of interpellation that “inaugurates the possibility of agency.”

If the subject who speaks is also constituted by the language that she or he speaks, then language is the condition of possibility for the speaking subject, and not merely its instrument of expression. This means that the subject has its own “existence” implicated in a language that precedes and exceeds the subject, a language whose historicity includes a past and future that exceeds that of the subject who speaks. And yet, this “excess” is what makes possible the speech of the subject. (Butler 1997: 28)

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As Butler argues, in order to ‘be’ or to become ‘real’ the speaker has to speak, but then his speech tending to ‘exceed’ him prevents him from remaining or becoming a sovereign subject. How does this ‘exceed’ happen? It is because the language he makes use of in delivering his speech has its own historicity. And this historicity of language has two different dimensions; one is the individualized dimension specific to the speaker and the other is the socialized one applicable to the discursive site where the speaker communicates with other likewise speakers. In making sense of his speech, however, the speaker has to recourse to the latter, the socialized historicity, which “exceeds in all directions the history of the speaking subject. And this excessive historicity and its structure makes possible that subject’s linguistic survival as well as, potentially, that subject’s linguistic death” (Butler 1997: 28).

Accordingly, Butler argues that “speech is always in some ways out of our control” and it is not simply because, as Austin correctly observes, “actions in general (not all) are liable, for example, to be done under duress, or by accident, or owing to this or that variety of mistake, say, or otherwise unintentionally” (Austin 1975: 21). But more importantly because the speaker “acts precisely to the extent that he or she is constituted as an actor and, hence, operating within a linguistic field of enabling constraint from the outset” (Butler 1997: 28). In this sense, one can say that the speaker is not a sovereign subject but a mere agent of linguistic performance. Can this linguistic agent still be considered to carry out any meaningful political functions? So Butler asks:

Does the assertion of a potential incommensurability between intention and utterance (not saying what one means), utterance and action (not doing what one says), and intention and action (not doing what one meant), threaten the very linguistic condition for political participation, or do such disjunctures produce the possibility for a politically consequential renegotiation of language that exploits the undetermined character of these relations? (Butler 1997: 92)

Butler’s concern above is two-fold in character. Firstly, if one’s speech tends to be out of control or at best performed by a non-sovereign speaker, then can the political participant ever expect his speech to result in his intended political effect or purpose of whatsoever nature by performing such unreliable speech-acts? And secondly, if the speech would be conditioned by the “enabling constraint from the outset” or subject to the context in which it takes place, then what kind of political consequence could this possibly have?

Related to the first question, let us imagine a discursive situation in which more than two persons are engaged in the process of trying to make sense of their reciprocal communicative exchanges. In this situation a mere slip of the tongue, for example, is able to be made up for by additional corrective speech-acts or could

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simply be nullified by audience’s dismissal. More importantly, however, a speech-act can have an enduring effect either by eliciting further speech-acts of others or by simply being remembered by others in the audience who may later reflect it on their own speech-acts on different speech occasions. As such, a speech-act “is not a momentary happening, but a certain nexus of temporal horizons, the condensation of an iterability that exceeds the moment it occasions” (Butler 1997: 14). Thus Butler summarizes the situation as follows:

In such a case, the subject is neither a sovereign agent with a purely instrumental relation to language, nor a mere effect whose agency is pure complicity with prior operations of power. The vulnerability to the Other constituted by that prior address is never overcome in the assumption of agency (one reason that “agency” is not the same as “mastery”). (Butler 1997: 26)

Related to the second question above, however, one can readily think of the norms as well as the facts that govern the actual scene of communicative exchanges. Provided linguistic acts neither spring from a fixed identity of the speaker nor are they commensurate to the intention of him, it is more than likely that utterances can go astray from time to time and become highly anarchical. In order to prevent this situation they need to be regulated or ordered by a common frame of reference and it should be possible for the participants engaged in the same deliberation to come to reach some sort of common understanding. Habermas in this respect speaks for the inevitability of validity claims as follows:

Participants, in claiming validity for their utterances, strive to reach an understanding with one another about something in the world... the everyday use of language does not turn exclusively or even primarily on its representational (or fact-stating) functions: here all the functions of language and language-world relations come into play, so that the spectrum of validity claims takes in more than truth claims. (Habermas 1996: 16; Butler 2004: 220)

According to Habermas, the actors who orient their action to validity claims can construct and preserve social orders which exist through the recognition of normative validity claims (1996: 17). So he assigns the action-coordinating role to the social norms which exist prior to the communicative action and at the same time functions as part of the actual reasoning process. But the social norms which Habermas calls the universal pragmatics are external to the deliberation site and therefore they would not function properly unless they are somehow informed or even internalized by the participants in advance of deliberation.

One immediate technical problem here is that there is no way to guarantee the same level of informedness or internalization of such externally imposed norms among the participants. This also presents two additional problems for the multicultural discourses. First, the universal pragmatics is likely to reflect the

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dominant group’s vantage point of view while alienating the cultural minorities. Second, if the same level of informedness or internalization of such external norms is not guaranteed, then such participatory parity for discursive equality as Fraser suggests will in no way be sufficed.

This brings us to compare it with the nomadic discursive situation where a tentative, all-participating, internally devised contingent procedures rather than the external social norms are at work in coordinating all the speech-acts. In this connection, one can carefully tap on “the possibility for a politically consequential renegotiation of language” as Braidotti does it with her theory of becoming-subject.

2. The Becoming-Subject and the Nomadic Ethics

According to Braidotti, the polyglot with the nomadic consciousness has a strong desire to differentiate and assert herself in her new transit point. It is because she needs to survive the spatio-temporal moment in her life journey and also because that moment is where her permanent abode is presently located as long as her next transit is not decided yet. Being in this state of tentative but permanent transit she is a temporary, situated actor in want of pursuing not only “stable and reassuring bases for identity” but also “situated connections that can help her to survive” (Braidotti 1994: 33).

Needless to say, the kind of identity that she seeks here is not one for a permanent subject but one for a becoming-subject having desires for knowledge, speech, thought, representation as well as recognition. In this sense, every deliberation site can become the place where a subject (or an identity) is being newly constituted. For this reason the “nomad’s identity is a map of where s/he has already been, s/he can always reconstruct it a posteriori, as a set of steps in an itinerary” (Braidotti 1994: 14). How can this subject (or identity) be constituted? Braidotti explains as the following;

Given that language is the medium and the site of constitution of the subject, it follows that it is also the cumulated symbolic capital of our culture. If it was there before ‘I’ came to be and will be there after ‘I’ disappears, then the question of the constitution of the subject is not a matter of ‘internalization’ of given codes but rather a process of negotiation between layers, sedimentations, registers of speech, frameworks of enunciation. (Braidotti 1994: 14. Emphasis added.)

As we have discussed earlier, one’s identity is not monolithic but multiple and tends to emerge as a simulacra in “a process of negotiation” between many cultural attributes including ones with foreign origins. In addition, we have our concrete and material body that absorbs and interacts with “a multiplicity of impersonal forces” in

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the social context including the actors’ delicate expressions on their faces and of their bodies. Let us listen to Baidotti’s elaborate account of the embodiedness of the subject and its role in the subject formation.

The embodiedness of the subject is for Deleuze a form of bodily materiality, not of the natural, biological kind. He rather takes the body as the complex interplay of highly constructed social and symbolic forces. The body is not an essence, let alone a biological substance; it is a play of forces, a surface of intensities; pure simulacra without originals. The embodied subject is a term in a process of intersecting forces (affects), spatio-temporal variables that are characterized by their mobility, changeability, and transitory nature ... The differences in degree between them mark different lines of becoming, in a web of rhizomic connections. (Braidotti 1994: 113)

Should this Deleuzean explanation be accepted, the present multiculturalism’s careless teleological presupposition that minority groups’ cultural identity can be effectively represented through intentional speech-acts in political deliberation needs to be given a second thought. There appear to be at least two reasons to justify this claim. First, such purpose-driven “action almost never achieves its purpose” because the web of human relations is filled “with its innumerable, conflicting wills and intentions” (Arendt 1958: 184). It is most likely to be so because “we are undone by each other” at all times (Butler 2004: 19).

Second, from the Deleuzean bodily materiality’s point of view, the multicultural theorists must take heed of the fact that the phenomenon of speech-act is far more than a linguistic act pure and simple but one usually aided by various other bodily acts. While the speaker reveals who he is through words and deeds those who are in his proximity will be trying to identify him in the light of whom he appears to them. Hence what equally matters here is the “dokei moi” or the it-appears-to-me, as Hannah Arendt perceptively points out:

In acting and speaking, [...] it is more than likely that the “who,” which appears so clearly and unmistakably to others, remains hidden from the person himself, like the daimon in the Greek religion... Because of its inherent tendency to disclose the agent together with the act, action needs for its full appearance the shining brightness we once called glory, and which is possible only in the public realm... [But] the impossibility, as it were, to solidify in words the living essence of the person as it shows itself in the flux of action and speech has great bearing upon the whole realm of human affairs, where we exist primarily as acting and speaking beings. (Arendt 1958: 179, 181)

Thus what appears to others is not just the speaker’s words but his bodily expressions as well. So “the impossibility to solidify in words the living essence of the person” which Arendt noticed can certainly be complemented by the positivity of his bodily acts which usually coincide with one’s speech-act.3) Hence the “dokei moi” is what probably helps determine the speaker’s identity upon which others might

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interact with him. On the other hand, the consequence or result of the speech-act is evaluated by “the story” in which the narratives of speech-act associated with the “dokei moi” of an actor are compiled into a frame of reference. This is precisely what Arendt meant in her remark, “the living essence of the person as it shows itself in the flux of action and speech has great bearing upon the whole realm of human affairs.” Yet, “the stories, the results of action and speech, reveal an agent but this agent is not an author or producer” (Arendt 1958: 184).

In this Arendtian vein, Butler argues that any “discursive performativity” should be considered as “not a discrete series of speech acts, but a ritual chain of resignifications whose origin and end remain unfixed and unfixable” (Butler 1997: 14). What she implies here is the potential performative power of repetitive discursive action that might even lead as far as to a point of the subversion of the status quo. If cultural minority groups wanted to change the existing unjust cultural signification structure of their society, then this political strategy would be second to none to take. For this reason the deliberative democratic model of multiculturalism also adopts this strategy.

According to Benhabib the model’s central proposition is that “members of the polity attempt to influence each others’ opinions by engaging in a public dialogue in which they examine and critique, in a civil and considerate manner, each other’s positions while explaining reasons for their own views.” Yet, it has been criticized for its “social positionality” problem. The critics argue that having a specific social position tend to have “a certain perspective on the world” causing “incommensuration” between the people who occupy certain social positions and those who have never occupied such positions before (Benhabib 2002: 134, 137). Hence they conclude that the model does not necessarily produce its expected political effect.

Hence, recalling our earlier discussion on the nomad and nomadic consciousness, we can say that this criticism has made a couple of unnecessary mistakes: one is that it assumed the preexistence of a fixed homogeneous cultural group identity and in its extension of the member’s based on cultural essentialism. And the other is its misunderstanding that a group identity can be automatically transferred to an individual so that he can effectuate a perfect representation of his group’s interest or weltanschauung. In short, cultural essentialism does not explain one’s identity which is not homogeneous by nature and political representation in public deliberation is short of being perfect.

In this connection Parekh’s “human identity” thesis in his recent book, A New Politics of Identity, seems to me to be worthy of mention. According to him the human identity is a kind of “universal identity” which is derived from the very fact that “we have certain distinctive capacities and needs by virtue of being human”

3) Taking drag for example, his womanish clothing style may speak for itself more than what he can actually deliver by linguistic means.

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(2008: 3). In a similar vein, Butler, too, inquires about “the category of the ‘human’” (2004: 13). Both theorists see that the category of the human can be regarded as an overarching identity embracing all other individual identities and which therefore tends to pave a fresh road towards a new type of multiculturalism bypassing the cultural essentialism of the present multicultural discourses. One may call this the anti-essentialist multiculturalism.

This new brand of multiculturalism is anti-essentialist in character because it does not adhere to any fixed type of cultural identity on the ground that cultural identity per se is neither homogeneous nor static. But it is still a kind of multiculturalism because it shares a common reasoning with the existing multicultural discourses that cultural differences should be paid due respect on the basis of the sameness of being human. It also shares with them the same objective that any discrimination or social injustice caused by them should be eliminated and overcome by virtue of public deliberation where not the concerned groups but their individual representatives appear to become new subjects with the help of the others in presence trying to found an ethics specific only to the scene. It is this kind of nomadic ethics centered on the common category of the human would be conducive to social justice because it can discriminate none.

VI. Conclusion: The Anti-essentialist Multiculturalism and Its Political Implication for the Deliberative Democracy

As we know, the central theoretical aim of the multicultural discourses is to remedy for the social injustice resulted from the fact that a dominant cultural majority group enjoys its superior cultural position and privilege at the expense of the rest of cultural minority groups within the liberal democracies. And a number of political thinkers has endeavored to devise various multicultural theories in support of the minorities’ cultural rights and their cultural differences which have to be properly recognized by the wider society. Hence they argue for the cultural identity politics by which those cultural minorities equally represent in public deliberations to redress the culture-related social injustice in liberal democracies.

How does the cultural identity politics work? It is argued that the cultural differences have to be represented in the form of group identity by the concerned cultural groups in the public deliberation sites. Unfortunately, however, this political representation scheme appears to give rise to two practical problems in reality. First, the multiculturalists’ assumption that culture is a homogeneous whole turns out to be untrue because most cultures have been evolving into what they presently are over time by virtue of voluntarily or involuntarily accepting various alien cultural elements including non-nationals from other cultures. This makes us wonder if a clearly differentiated cultural identity specific to each cultural group can be identified

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at all unless you are forced or biased to do so.The second problem is its false assumption of perfect representation. In public

deliberation, a group cannot play out the actor’s role itself but usually trust it with a member who will thereby represent his group’s collective identity and interest in front of the other groups’ representatives. Even if those representatives are the authorized affiliates well-informed of their groups’ collective identity and interest, this does not necessarily guarantee that they will actualize perfect representation for their respective groups. It is primarily because they are not the sovereign subjects but the agents or acting subjects. These acting subjects might interpret their collective group identity and/or interest differently depending on their personal idiosyncrasies and/or the specific conditions of deliberation.

Hence, my contention is that the present multicultural discourses are entrapped in both cultural essentialism and the specific misunderstanding of political agency. On the contrary, however, these problems can help us see a fresh opportunity for an anti-essentialist multiculturalism, that is a new brand of multiculturalism operable on the individualized dimension in public deliberation where each participating group representative pays due respect to one another on the basis of the category of the human and is eager to negotiate with the different cultural layers both of themselves and of others following the tentative rules and procedures which they have adopted for the given communicative setting.

To recall our nomadic citizen once again, he is as much a self-asserting speaking subject as an other-regarding political actor abiding by the nomadic ethics. He is well aware of the fact that he is not able to achieve his intended objective unless others agree to it. This will have an important political implication for our deliberative democracy in the sense that social justice which is the ultimate goal of most multicultural discourses may have a better chance to come to realization. In conclusion, a multiculturalism without the premise of a fixed cultural identity in both individual and group level and with the kind of nomadic ethics founded on the sameness of being human can truly fulfil its political goal of social justice. It may be a contentious argument but worthy of consideration.

References

Arendt, Hannah, 1958. The Human Condition, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.Austin, J. L. 1975. How to Do Things with Words. Eds. by J. O. Urmson & Marina Sbisa.

Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2nd Edn.Benhabib, Seyla, 2002, The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era, Princeton

& Oxford: Princeton University Press.

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Braidotti, Rosi, 1994. Nomadic Subjects, NY, Chichester, West Sussex: Columbia University.

Butler, Judith, 1997. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, NY & London: Routledge.

Butler, Judith. 1999. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge.

Butler, Judith. 2004. Undoing Gender, New York & Abington: Routledge. Deleuze, Gilles. 1994, Difference and Repetition. (1968). Paul Patton Trans. New York: Columbia

University Press.d'Entrèves, M. Passerin, 1989. "Agency, Identity, and Culture: Hannah Arendt's Conception of

Citizenship," PRXIS International, issue: 1+2 / 1989, pages: 1~24.Fraser, Nancy & Honneth, Axel, 2003, Redistribution or Recognition?: A Political‐Philosophical

Exchange. London: Verso.Habermas, Jürgen, 1996. Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of

Law and Democracy. Translated by William Rehg. Cambiridge, MA: MIT Press.

Honneth, Axel, 1996. The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, Translated by Joel Anderson, Cambridge: The MIT Press.

Kymlicka, Will, 1995, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights. Oxford: Oxford University Press,.

Kymlicka, Will, 2002, “Multiculturalism,” Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Introduction. Second Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 327~376.

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 1989. On The Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, Trans. by Walter Kaufmann & RJ Hollingdale. New York: Vintage Books.

Parekh, Bhikhu, 2000. Rethinking Multiculturalism: Cultural Diversity and Political Theory, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Parekh, Bhikhu, 2008. A New Politics of Identity: Political Principles for an Interdependent World, New York & London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Taylor, Charles, 1994, “The Politics of Recognition,” in A. Gutmann, Ed, 1994, Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 25~74.

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[Abstract]

Multiculturalism, Identity Formation, and the Nomadic Ethics: A Deleuzean Perspective on the Contemporary Deliberative Democracy

SUH, You-Kyung (Kyung Hee Cyber University)

During the last 20 years the multicultural theorists achieved quite a lot but their discourses presently appear to have turned a full circle. Perhaps, it may be too early to say that multiculturalism has reached its end. From my theoretical standpoint of view, however, this claim is not without ground. This paper casts a doubt on the multiculturalism’s common assumption that one can find a definite cultural identity in an individual, a group or in a political community in this increasingly hybridizing world. Nevertheless, if we still want to keep the multiculturalist term ‘cultural identity’ intact, then we should first admit that it cannot be a homogeneous entity but an overlapping multiple whole which seems to betray the multiculturalism’s basic position of cultural coherence specific to a cultural body. This constitutes a need to think over the concept of cultural identity, its formation and representation in a new theoretical light.

Hence, I venture out first to diagnose some theoretical predicaments of the present multicultural discourses and then try to rescue them from their present cul-de-sac. In order to do so, I have decided to adopt such Deleuzean concepts as difference, repetition, and nomadic thinking with the help of the two prominent Deleuzean theorists, Judith Butler and Rosie Braidotti. In my view, they appear to provide food for a new type of multicultural thinking, that is composed of an anti-essentialist multicultural discourse and a nomadic ethics for the contemporary deliberative democracy.

In conclusion, I argue that this anti-essentialist multiculturalism shares a common reasoning with the existing multicultural discourses that cultural differences should be paid due respect and that any discrimination or social injustice caused by them should be eliminated or overcome by virtue of public deliberation. Nevertheless, it differs sharply from those discourses on the point that it purposefully focuses on the nature of political agency which denies the preexisting fixed identity while accepting the political effect of performativity in public deliberation where a kind of nomadic ethics centered on the common category of the human would be constituted in the cause of social justice.

Keywords: multiculturalism, identity formation, nomadic ethics, deliberative democracy, Giles Deleuze, anti-essentialism