Symposium: Comparative Relativism

RAISING THE ANTI- , OR RELATIVISM SQUARED

Martin Holbraad

One way to read Barbara Herrnstein Smiths subtle paper is as a robustly fairminded valedictory on debates and controversies that raged in academia in the past few decades under the banners of culture wars, science wars, and other such military- sounding denominations. These battles concerned such notionsby- proxy as relativism, positivism, and so onnotions, that is, to which no one would own up these days without wishing to append the kind of subtlety of argument Smith herself displays here but that plenty still are happy to bandy around as terms of academic abuse. To point this out in all of its tragicomic effect, as Smith does, is of course also to take a position within these often sensenumbing position- takings. Smiths lesson, in other words, can be read as that of showing how taking a position can be done more intelligently than it often has been in these disputes, by making explicit some of the chimeras from which dismally bellicose position- takings have drawn their strength. Taken together with Smiths past oeuvre on the topic, the charge of relativism being chosen for this kind of intelligent treatment would bear out the idea that Smiths intervention stakes out a position within the coordinates of the disputes it so elegantly seeks to defuse. While I have little doubt that Smith would happily recognize that a similar treatment could be proffered to the putatively opposite charge of, say, positivism, there is also no doubt where her heart would lie on such an
Common Knowledge 17:1 DOI 10.1215/0961754X-2010-032 2011 by Duke University Press

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all- too- simple axis. Indeed this, to my mind, profoundly fecund tension between intelligence and commitment is reflected also in Smiths language: the paper is as laudable in its conciliatory tone as in taking a deliberate stand against the distortions and improper paraphrase of the relativism- refuters language and the unfair thoughts that they have so often expressed. Hers, if you like, is the fair- minded stance of the anti- anti, recalling Clifford Geertzs famous essay, written with a not- dissimilar purpose.1 Part of the fun of Geertzs joke, of course, was its own dose of tragedy namely, that of the included middle: properly speaking, either you are anti-or you are not. What I want to suggest here, however, is that, read in the vicinity of this symposiums concern with that other apparently uncomfortable coupling comparative relativism, Smiths paper allows us to imagine a way out of this logical tragedy (or, as Smith would say, scandal) and, with it, a different way of behaving in academia, to borrow an expression from Isabelle Stengerss paper in this same symposium. Radicalized in a particular direction, I would argue, Smiths position yields to an ethos of argument that makes a merit of, and takes pleasure in, oppositional differentiation at all levels, including the level of first methodological principle at which the tribal deadlocks on which she comments have played themselves out. We may imagine, in other words, a pluriverse of thinking (to borrow Stengerss borrowing from William James) in which academic papers would seek not to shield themselves from the anti-but to embrace it. Taking the anti- , that is, as a compliment rather than a rebuke or, better, as a compliment through a particular quality of rebuke. Such a pluriverse might be part of the promise of a properly comparative relativism. In imagining further installments to Smiths account, I take my cue from two points she makes herself. First, the acrimony of the wars of the 1980s and 1990s has abated somewhat in more recent yearsa point from which one may infer that her own spot- on responses to what she calls contemporary sites of antirelativist energy are offered as a kind of rearguard action. To compound the military hyperbole, Smiths intervention could, as she also indicates, be described as a blast at arguments that are to some degree past. Second, she points out that one of the forms of violence perpetrated by the antirelativism industry is that of distortion by way of oversimplification. There is no single and identifiable thesis called relativism, only a heterogeneous range of arguments and approaches whose main common denominator is the fact that to militant antirelativists they all appear merely as negative instances of what they hold dearest. So- called relativism is in this sense an anti- t hesis par excellence. We may conclude from these two

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1. Clifford Geertz, Anti Anti- relativism, American Anthropologist 86.2 (June 1984): 2677.

points that there are indeed further installments to be spun out of Smiths story and that these may pertain to the internal differentiation of what from the outside looks like a relativist bloc. The matter goes back to the relativism- busting charge of self- refutation: if all claims to truth are relative, goes the familiar thought, then so is that claim itself, so why should we accept it? Smith does not seek to unload this charge explicitly in her present paper, though she has done so in an eponymous article published in this journal years ago, and her position can be gleaned from much of what she says here too.2 Her response can perhaps be glossed as follows. If so- called relativism is self- contradictory, then the charge is itself a tautology. Only if you have assumed, to start with, that claims to truth must be absolute can you present the relativist claim as a self- contradiction. But the very point of the positions that opponents brand as relativist is to dispute that truth is only worth the name if it is absolute in the way that antirelativists assume. The whole point of projects as diverse, for example, as pragmatism and constructivism has been to formulate accounts of how variable claims to truth may variously be accepted or rejected on grounds that may be nonabsolute (read: contingent, contextdependent, goal- dependent, or, in short, relative). In her Unloading article, Smith mentions criteria such as applicability, coherence [and] connectabilty as alternatives to objective (read: absolute) standards of truth, adding that these will depend on matters of perspective, interpretation and judgment, and will vary under different conditions.3 The move certainly takes the sting out of the self- refutation chargeindeed it bites its bullet. There is clearly no contradiction in claiming that all truthclaims are relative if the truth of that claim is itself intended as relativethat is just being consistent. But still, how consistent do we want to be here? The question turns on an issue of what logicians (quite helpfully in this case) call scope ambiguity. When Smith asserts that the truth of the claim that all truth claims are relative is itself relative, is the logical scope of relativity meant to extend just to the truth of the claim or also to its relativity? Put more slowly: we can imagine two variant ways of arguing, and both of them would be successful in defusing the self- refutation charge as it stands. The first would be to stick to the letter of the argument I have ascribed to Smith and say that what is relative about the view that all truth- claims are relative is its truth and assume that, in saying so, we have a good story to tell about what we mean by relativefor example, because we

2. Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Unloading the SelfRefutation Charge, Common Knowledge 2.2 (1993): 8195; reprinted with changes in Belief and Resistance: Dynamics of Contemporary Intellectual Controversy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).

3. Smith, Belief and Resistance, 7778.

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have some independent argument about the nature of relativity, whether philosophical, sociological, cognitive, or what have you. Alternatively, we could put the notion of relativity itself into the mix. On this view, one of the reasons for which the view that all truth- claims are relative is itself relative is because it varies depending on what we take relative to mean, and its meaning is just as contingent and provisional as that of truth. Now, when put in this way, it seems obvious that the latter option is the more enticing one, at least if we are playing the Be consistent! game. On what grounds, after all, would one exclude the notion of relativity from its own scope? Would doing so not be another instance of self- refutation, albeit one order removed? (That is what the antirelativist would want to say, of course, though this is not my main point here.) Nevertheless, I would suggest that anti- antirelativist moves have often tended toward the first option, and I do think this tendency is occasionally in evidence in Smiths argument. For example, she points out that claims to relativity are not typically made as metaphysical assertions about truth, value, and reality taken as autonomous entities or properties, but rather they emerge in the course of the observation of human variety (the observation, for example, by ethnographers and historiographers). So the suggestion is that appeals to relativity are founded on good and solidly empirical groundsfor instance, the observation that claims to truth are demonstrably correlated to the social conditions of their production and that different accounts of reality and value can be shown up as a function of their genealogy. The notion of relativity is first established, founded empirically, and then applied variably (that is, relatively) to sundry claims about truth, value, and reality. If this is a fair interpretation, then Smiths account in this respect exemplifies a discernible tendency in anti- antirelativist arguments, which, as the very term would suggest, is to oppose the content of antirelativist arguments while duplicating their form or (returning to the military idiom) their strategy. Note the symmetry: antirelativists muster arguments about things like nature, reality, or common sense to establish a basis for the utter reasonableness of absolute criteria of truth; anti- antirelativists muster arguments about things like culture, representation, or imagination to establish a basis for the always wiser insight that such criteria are ultimately relative. And this foundational move, much as in the construction of a building, is meant to render the logically subsequent arguments robustto make sure they are strong enough to withstand the pressures of challenge and attack. The purpose in both cases, in other words, is to elicit the readers approving nods. The difference lies mainly in the degree of modesty with which the two sides pursue this goal of assent: where the antirelativist aspires to incontrovertibility, the anti- antirelativist admits, albeit incontrovertibly, that this is a chimera. So, in short, while the agendas of the anti- and the anti- anti are diametrically opposed, their game is pretty much the same.

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Now, as mentioned earlier, there is no prima facie reason to assume that this symmetry is unsustainablealthough to make sure it is not would involve finding a way to reconcile the relativizing content of anti- antirelativist arguments with their foundationalist form. Still, the position does suffer from a basic image problem: it is, if you like, half- measured. If the whole point is to show in one way or another that truth- claims are inherently relative, contingent, and provisional, then why, having admitted it, do so- called relativists join in the macho game of nevertheless showing that they are, in one way or another, hard enough to stand up to challenge? Why insist on measuring what you have admitted is fragile and perishable on a scale of relative endurance? Would it not be better to go the whole hog and, as they say, embrace relativity in all of its (these) implications? This is what I mean by subjecting the concept of relativity to its own scope. Consider the prospect: a concept of relativity that is itself relative. This is no contradictionquite the contrary: it is what logicians call a virtuous circle. For what it implies is that every time you set out to show how the concept of relativity is relative, you in the very act have to change the concept of relativity itself. What you thought counted as relativity when you started off cannot be what you end up with. What you took to be the premise of your inquiry turns up, transformed, as a novel conclusion. Squared in this way, then, relativity becomes a motor for the creative generation of conceptual differences. This kind of radicalized relativismone that operates upon itself to yield thinking that is in perpetual motionarguably lies at the heart of notions that have become familiar to us thanks in large measure to the work of contributors to this symposiumRoy Wagners obviation,4 Marilyn Stratherns recursivity,5 Stengerss humor,6 Eduardo Viveiros de Castros controlled equivocation,7 as well as Smiths own concern with the dynamics of incommensurability.8 All I would add, in closing, is that part of what makes this mode of inquiry so radical is that its motion is peculiarly backward or, better, downwardto the root. Which is to say that its orientation is in profound conflict with the habitual intellectual impulse of eliciting assentthe ethos of the pro- and its anti- . If the productivity of rendering relativism comparative to itself is in the incessant potential of undermining ones own initial assumptionsthe risk of having ones rug pulled from under ones feetthen the desired outcome must be an iterative
4. Roy Wagner, The Invention of Culture, rev. ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). 5. Marilyn Strathern, The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 6. Isabelle Stengers, The Invention of Modern Science, trans. Daniel Smith (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).

7. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Perspectival Anthropology and the Method of Controlled Equivocation, Tipit 2.1 ( January 2004): 322. 8. Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Microdynamics of Incommensurability: Philosophy of Science Meets Science Studies, in Mathematics, Science, and Postclassical Theory, ed. Smith and Arkady Plotnitsky (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997).

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Common Knowledge

anti- . Such an anti- , however, in its iteration, would indicate not so much a No, rubbish! as a Yes, but what next? Deleuze, famously, had his own metaphor for just this kind of activityone that is too rude to repeat here.9 But I guess the message would be that if you like doing a Deleuzeand who doesnt?then you must also like having one done to you.

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9. See Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 6.