On Community and Incommensurability

ALL IN THE FAMILY ALL IN THE FAMILY on community and incommensurability Kennan Ferguson Duke University Press Durham and London 2012 © 2012 Duke University Press All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ∞ Designed by Heather Hensley Typeset in Arno Pro by Copperline Book Services, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book. CONTENTS vii Acknowledgments 1 1. FAMILIAL INTENSITIES 13 2. THE FUNCTIONING FAMILY 33 3. COMMUNITIES AGAINST POLITICS 63 4. SILENCE: A POLITICS 83 5. I ♥ MY DOG 107 6. THE SpacES OF DISABILITY 125 7. FAMILIAR LaNGUAGES 153 Notes 179 Bibliography 193 Index AckNOWLEDGMENTS We feel both enlarged and implicated by our families. A child’s sartorial choices, a parent’s embarrassing outburst, a partner’s professional reputation: we instinctually feel that each reflects on ourselves as members of their families while being in many ways outside of our individual control. A book’s authorship has the same complexity of commitments and responsibilities, since we each exist in composite networks of influence, usu- fruct, conversation, contestation, and glad handing. The cus- tomary apologia about those acknowledged, that “their con- tributions are substantial while the mistakes are my own,” is such an overt lie that it invites the more psychologically minded to inquire into the roots of such denial. So my acknowledgments here are as much an indictment as a recognition of gratitude. The following people are responsible for this book in much the same way as family members are responsible for one another: thus the admixture of pride, embarrassment, resentment, requital, and possibly rage they will no doubt feel at being included in such a motley and extensive community. And, as with any extended family, others remain excluded, probably (though not entirely) due to being inadver- tently forgotten: my apologies to you. Valuable comments and brutal critiques of the first three chapters of the book came from Cheryl Hall, Steven Johnston, Carolyn DiPalma, Michael Gibbons, Pat Boling, Libby Anker, J. Donald Moon, Mika LaVaque-Manty, Sandy Schramm, Lilly Goren, Dustin Howes, Elizabeth Markovits, Christina Beltrán, P. J. Brendese, Robyn Marasco, Char Miller, Mary Hawkesworth, Laura Grattan, John Tambornino, Simon Stow, Timothy Kaufman-Osborne, and Kam Shapiro. Chapter 4 emerged from discussions with Melissa Orlie, Kathy Fergu- son, Carolyn DiPalma, William Connolly, Verity Smith, Matthew Moore, Raia Prokhovnik, Cheryl Glenn, and Crista Ratcliff, whose commentaries (and occasional silences) helped form this chapter. (My thanks also to Pendle Hill and Swarthmore College, whose collections of Quaker lit- erature proved invaluable.) My gratitude to Verity Smith, Jane Bennett, Caroline Winterer, and Stephen White for providing their animal spir- its for chapter 5. Margaret Price both inspired chapter 6 and proved its most trenchant critic. And the final chapter benefited from the wisdom of Marla Brettschneider, Michael Shapiro, Mort Schoolman, and Kathy Ferguson. Finally, I engaged in early discussions of the ideas under- pinning the book with Tom Dumm, Neal Milner, Sankaran Krishna, Nevzat Soguk, Erin Manning, and Larry George. I am also indebted to two anonymous reviewers of this book (anonymous to me, though not to the reader, since their encomia likely appear on the back cover) whose serious and measured judgments on the origi- nal manuscript led to extensive revisions. And, of course, to the careful shepherding of the book by the staff at Duke University Press, especially my editor Courtney Berger, whose suggestions were no less essential and helpful, and by Christine Choi, Robert Demke, and Fred Kameny. Shannon Kolpin, supported by the Department of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, and Nancy McCann also provided valuable editorial assistance. Earlier portions of chapter 4 and 5 appeared as “Silence: A Politics” in Contemporary Political Theory 2, no. 1 (2003), 49–65, and “I ♥ My Dog” in viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Political Theory 32, no. 3 (2004), 373–95. My thanks to Palgrave Macmillan and Sage Publications, respectively, for publishing these earlier versions. Finally, my own family has proven central to my thought in this book. Dick and Jean Ferguson, Rona Ferguson, and Danny Collins; Susan Eichner, Tom Considine, and Tess Eichner Considine; and Elizabeth Kennan, Michael Burns, and Alex Kennan have all taught me more about family than has any book of political philosophy. Others who have welcomed me to the practices and passions of their families have included Mary and Richard Price; Elizabeth Garland and Judith Frank; Steven Johnston and Judy Gallant; Kamuela, Jan, Mason, Puna, and Pila Young; Cheryl Hall and Denise Roemer; Fred Mogul; Valerie Morignant; Ivy Ratafia and Scott McLeod; Jim Snyder and Scott Plummer; Tamara Zwick and Matt Leish; Kristie Hall; Jasmine Alinder and Aims McGuinness; Tom Mertes and Lissa Wadewitz; Mary Zerkel and Ian Morris; Nancy Lou Bochan; Robert Lawrence and Anda Iamnitchi; Cristina Kerner; Steven Tauber and Megan Hogan; Dean Chadwin and Alleen Barber; and Justin, Edie, and Mose Wolfe. Finally, this book has been shaped by the memory of family members no longer alive, especially Corrine Bochan Eichner and Norman Eichner, Gladys Ferguson, and Violet Kennan. And my deepest and most heartfelt gratitude goes to Carolyn J. Eichner, whose guidance, editorship, and inspiration make her a co-conspirator of the ideas herein. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix Chapter 1 FAMILIAL INTENSITIES why family? The pull of the family strongly affects its members, both in its contemporary Western idealized nuclearity and in its less at- omized historical antecedents or culturally multivarious con- ceptualizations. People often feel their families to be the locus of their true identities, where the falseness of their social selves can fall away. Others, less sanguine, find their families oppres- sive but somehow inescapable, often attempting to build their own, better familial structures. Nor can this importance be escaped by leaving a family behind. Doctors as well as psy- chiatrists, states as well as strangers, demand answers about individuals’ families in the hope of better understanding those individuals. Structurally, politically, and personally, families function as the most important determinant for most people.1 And yet contemporary political theorists spend relatively little time on the roles that families play.2 As befits a culture based on the ideology of liberal individualism, family life usually seems better left to anthropologists, sociologists, and public policy experts. The ideological use of a deliberately normativizing discourse of “family values” forms one major exception, of course, but even this approach tends to be used unproblematically: deployed by poli- ticians or attacked and discounted by its opponents. Few inquire into the power and status that such uses attempt to draw upon. The particularities of familial experiences, and the relative importance such engagements have for people in their quotidian existence, get left behind. The critique of the family as a patriarchal institution has been done elsewhere.3 Some of what follows dovetails with those familiar feminist criticisms, in large part because the history of the family as the exemplary touchstone of political life remains closely tied up with the genealogy of sex and gender. The authority of the patriarch and the patriarchy of the state mutually constitute one another, as many of these feminist theorists have pointed out. But this book is less concerned with these particular models of the family (though it is difficult to disentangle the contemporary Western imaginary from the nuclear heterosexual child- rearing model) than with the generality and commonality of imbricated communal oft- trans- generational relationships. whose families? “Imbricated communal oft- trans- generational relationships”? In the com- mon nomenclature, these locales are “families.” Children get raised, by someone, and develop bonds with and make demands on them. Adults choose people to fall in and out of love with, live with, travel with, invest and get old and play with. Love, envy, gratitude, anger, jealousy, helpful- ness, violence, caretaking, and sharing play their own important roles in these connections. Each of us is imbricated in networks of these ties, from our childhoods to our individual lives to our chosen relationships to our institutional dependences. Each of these families, of course, has its particular form. One might consist of a man, woman, son, daughter, dog, and station wagon; another could be a twelve- year- old boy, his aunt, and her lover; still another could be a gay man, his ex- wife, and his current boyfriend. A grown woman who has cut all ties with her controlling mother but remains close to her step- grandfather and his daughter- in- law’s daughter from a previous marriage 2 CHAPTER 1 has her own peculiar and specific relationship. It is not the form of each family that is significant, for the purposes of this book, but the concrete and pragmatic reality of familial life, of the intimacy and attention and feeling and interest that we feel for those close to us. Families matter because they matter to those within them (and often to those excluded from them), and those matterings have infinite variety and organization. In an academic work about the family, one might expect a careful and precise definition of which

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