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A Politics of the Ordinary: Wittgenstein and New

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A Politics of the Ordinary: Wittgenstein and New A POLITICS OF THE ORDINARY: WITTGENSTEIN AND NEW FAMILIAL PRACTICES by Mark E. Peter Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Vanderbilt University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in Philosophy May, 2015 Nashville, Tennessee Approved: Jose Medina, Ph.D. Gregg Horowitz, Ph.D. John Lachs, Ph.D. Idit Dobbs-Weinstein, Ph.D. Naomi Scheman, Ph.D. ACKNOWLEGEMENTS To my director and mentor, Jose Medina, I am indebted to you for introducing me to new intellectual paths in political thought, for pressing me to think more contextually, and above all, for supporting me so thoroughly in the more difficult moments. To the rest of my committee, Gregg Horowitz for interrogating the scope of politics, John Lachs for his insistence of linguistic clarity, Idit Dobbs-Weinstein for her emphatic reminders of history, and outside reader Naomi Scheman for her thoughtful questions about identity, I am thankful for everyone’s intellectual generosity during my philosophical quest. To the Vanderbilt Philosophy Department, I am profoundly grateful for the generous fellowship support I received which helped me pursue my research, for the opportunity and freedom to learn what life as a teacher would be, as well as for all of the vastly underappreciated administrative support that helped me along the way. I would like to thank my entire family for their years of support and confidence. To my wife, Lesly, whose spirit has upli fted my soul when work has been challenging. My sister, my uncle, aunt, cousins, and little ones all share in bringing joy to my life. To my mother in particular, whose faith and support sustained me for years. And lastly, to my late father, for the sake of whom the doctoral family curse has now been lifted. I could not have achieved even this small contribution without the collection of each one of these extraordinary people in my life. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ................................................................................................. iii INTRODUCTION: THE PROBLEMATIC OF THE ORDINARY ...................................1 Chapters 1. DEEP AGREEMENT: THE CONSERVATIVE ORDINARY ....................................13 Embedded in Ordinary Discourse ........................................................................16 The Authority of Ordinary Discourse ....................................................................21 Therapy and Positivism ..........................................................................................27 Marcuse’s Empiricism of the Ordinary ..................................................................33 2. DEEP DISAGREEMENT: MOUFFE’S POLITICAL ORDINARY ............................41 Reminders of the Ordinary .....................................................................................43 Material Consensus ................................................................................................51 3. DEEP DISAGREEMENT: MOUFFE’S POLITICAL ONTOLOGY ...........................59 Terms of Wittgensteinian Discourse ......................................................................62 Dissensus or Ontological Agonism ........................................................................69 Family Resemblances ............................................................................................78 4. CAVELL ON THE FRAGILITY OF DEMOCRATIC ORDINARY ..........................86 Pitkin on Therapy and Bureaucracy .......................................................................88 Rawls on Rules and Agreement ...........................................................................92 The Apparent Insignificance of the Ordinary ......................................................102 Remarriage and the Postponement of Consent ....................................................108 The Non-Generalized Human ..............................................................................120 5. THE ORDINARY AS MICROPOLITICS ..................................................................127 Micropolitics of the Ordinary ..............................................................................130 Practices of Freedom ............................................................................................141 6. POLITICAL IDENTITY AND ADOPTION PRACTICES ........................................152 iii Adopting Identity as Anti-Essentialism ...............................................................155 Use and Contingency ...........................................................................................160 The Micropolitics of Home ..................................................................................163 Cosmopolitan Humanitarianism and Governmentality .......................................170 CONCLUSION ................................................................................................................185 BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................192 iv INTRODUCTION: THE PROBLEMATIC OF THE ORDINARY It is as though I had lost my way & asked someone the way home. He says he will show me and walks with me along a nice smooth path. This suddenly comes to an end. And now my friend says: ”All you have to do now is to find the rest of the way home from here. ---Wittgenstein, Culture and Value 1 Inhabiting our relation to the ordinary, therefore, are opposed drives toward both its acceptance and its overcoming. ---Eldridge, “Introduction: Between Acknowledgment and Avoidance” 2 This dissertation argues that Wittgenstein’s appeal to return to the everyday and ordinary is instructive as a model form of political inhabitation. This may seem a surprising suggestion given that he never explicitly spoke about politics in his philosophical writings. But following a number of recent political thinkers, I believe his work can be instructive in elucidating a set of basic issues within the tension between embeddedness and critique in defining our new form of political inhabitation, as well as the place where this activity ought to occur. This sort of proposal is especially needed in light of our contemporary mode of democratic membership. The therapeutic return to the “ordinary” aims to register how we inhabit unresolved, ultimately groundless, and yet critical practices, which is the very basis of what modern political inhabitation must be like today. And to achieve this difficult mode of political engagement, Wittgenstein’s 1 Wittgenstein, Culture and Value. Trans. Peter Finch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 53. See footnote 33 for different translations. 2 Richard Eldridge, “Introduction: Between Acknowledgment and Avoidance,” Stanley Cavell, ed. Richard Eldridge2 Richard (Routledge, Eldridge, “Introduction: 2003), 15. Between Acknowledgment and Avoidance,” Stanley Cavell, ed. Richard Eldridge (Routledge, 2003), 15. 1 work aims to dismantle the link between forms of inhabitation and a fixed, coherent customariness, and as such suggest how critical thought has requires that we engage more directly with our specific concrete practices, precisely so that it is possible for us to begin to live the fragile form of inhabitation that our modern life presents us with. The majority of the Wittgensteinian scholarship has, for obvious reasons, focused on his attempt to ground in a Kantian fashion the bounds of sense in the Tractatus, or exploring our language usage that leads us into metaphysical confusions in the Philosophical Investigations. Indeed, it is widely accepted that Wittgenstein is chiefly concerned with epistemic and linguistic illnesses that the philosopher has contracted,3 not with assessing typical political concepts like the state, power, or justice. As Janik and Toulmin rightly remind us, “at a conscious level, Wittgenstein was barely interested in socio-political issues and certainly gave them no sustained or sophisticated attention.” 4 His relevance within political thought has therefore been indirect; not as directly supporting an ideology, political concepts, or institutional arrangement, but in his perceived participation in a broad attack on philosophical justifications that some believe can lead to terrible political consequences. This concern has continued for the past few decades, and is what Alice Crary calls the “ongoing debate…about the significance of his work for political thought.”5 However, I believe we are now better able to reevaluate this otherwise calcified historical debate to consider more positive renderings of the political 3 Although some have used biographical information to suggest an ideological reading of his rather non- political writing. John Moran, “Wittgenstein and Russia,’’ New Left Review 73 (1972): 85–98. 4 For instance, he did not seem to express a concern over “whether a Danubian federation should be preserved or whether, on the contrary, the rival ethnic cultures of the region should secure their wholly sovereign states, each dedicated to the protection and maintenance of its own national culture.” Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna (Touchstone Press, 1973), 74, 85. 5 Alice Crary, “Wittgenstein’s Philosophy in Relation to Political Thought,” The New Wittgenstein, ed. Alice Crary and Rupert Reed (London: Routledge, 2000), 118-146. Although Crary reminds us of Wittgenstein’s cryptic remark: “Our only task is to be just. That is, we must only point out and resolve the injustices of philosophy,
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