The Multivoiced Body: Society and Communication in the Age of Diversity

THE MULTIVOICED BODY

THE MULTIVOICED BODY

Society and Communication in the Age of Diversity

Fred Evans

Columbia University Press   New York

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

New York   Chichester, West Susse

cup.columbia.edu

Copyright © 2008 Columbia University Press

Paperback edition, 2011

All rights reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-231-51936-6

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Evans, Fred J., 1944–

The multivoiced body: society and communication in the age of diversity/Fred Evans.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978–0–231–14500–8 (cloth : alk. paper)—

ISBN 978–0-231–14501–5 (pbk. : alk. paper)—

ISBN 978–0–231–51936–6 (e-book)

1. Mass media—Social aspects. 2. Multiculturalism. 3. Intercultural communication. I. Title.

HMI206.E93 2009

301—dc22

2008033226

A Columbia University Press E-book. CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at cup-ebook@columbia.edu.

References to Internet Web Sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for Web sites that may have expired or changed since the book was prepared.

For Barbara

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments

Part I The Dilemma of Diversity

1.   The Age of Diversity

2.   History of the Dilemma: Cosmos, Chaos, Chaosmos

3.   Society as a Multivoiced Body

Part II The Primacy of Voices

4.   Modernism and Subjectivity

5.   Postmodernism and Language

6.   The Primacy of Voices

7.   Communication and an Ethics for the Age of Diversity

Part III The Political Dimension of the Multivoiced Body

8.   The Social Unconscious

9.   Globalization, Resistance, and the New Solidarity

10. Democracy and Justice in the Multivoiced Body

Notes

Index

Preface and Acknowledgments

The Multivoiced Body is a philosophy book—a theory of society and communication in an age of diversity. But it was initially inspired by personal experiences that occurred in a place far away from the one in which I eventually wrote it. From 1969 to 1974, I worked in Laos under the auspices of a nongovernmental, nonprofit organization, International Voluntary Services. For three of those years, a Lao counterpart and I set up a social worker position at the National Orthopedic Center. The center was filled with civilians and soldiers, children and adults, waiting to receive physiotherapy and prosthetic devices as part of their compensation for being detritus of the struggle for global hegemony between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Besides the shattered bodies at the center and the rest of the devastation in Laos and throughout Indochina, both superpowers (like the French before them) attempted to make the Lao over in their own image. This threatened to eliminate or diminish what I had newly discovered to be one of the greatest assets of the Lao and the rest of the world: diversity of beliefs and practices—of voices—and the creating of new ones through the interplay among the others. In my own case, ingrained beliefs in technological progress, individuality, and self-reliance were disrupted by the Lao ideas of Buddhist serenity, community, and compassion. My exposure to these differences produced a novel voice for me, one within which Lao and Western beliefs continued to contest with each other for increased audibility. Though this transformation often confused me, making me reconsider my ideas on rehabilitation at the center and on development globally, it enriched my life and convinced me that the peoples of the world should welcome and nourish the creative interplay among cultural and other differences. It also allowed me to see that the interplay among diverse voices is always the most salient aspect of any place, including the economically depressed coal mining town where I grew up and the other settings in which I subsequently found myself.

Many would agree with what took me an extraordinary experience to understand. Yet the prevalence of capitalistic globalization, ethnic cleansing, and other forms of political and social exclusion suggest that difference is dismissed by many powerful forces as either an encumbrance to their goals or, much worse, as something to be feared and hated. In order to comprehend and respond to this situation, I found that I had to clarify what I now call the dilemma of diversity, that is, the false choice between unity and heterogeneity, identity and difference, and then go beyond this dilemma by elaborating a new view of society, communication, and justice. This new view characterizes society as a multivoiced body, a unity composed of differences, and seeks within it an antidote to the tendency to reduce us to one voice, to one ideology or system. This philosophical response to the dilemma of diversity cannot by itself solve our social and political troubles; but it can help diminish them by contributing to a new way of thinking about ourselves and society, a way that our times are demanding and for which they have prepared us.

In addressing this dilemma and developing the notion of society as a multivoiced body, I treat figures and themes central to continental and analytic philosophy, modernism and postmodernism, feminism, postcolonial thought, and other views that concern identity and difference. I also draw upon material from many fields outside my own and specify the concrete implications of my views for justice, citizenship, democracy in society and the workplace, globalization, and collective as well as individual rights. In other words, The Multivoiced Body straddles philosophy and political practice. It is therefore relevant to professionals and lay people concerned with social and political policies as well as to scholars in philosophy, communication, cultural studies, and the social and behavioral sciences. Chapter 1 will serve the reader as a brief but comprehensive introduction to the main strategy of the book and the issues and figures it covers.

Besides the time I spent in Laos and other countries, a number of friends and colleagues are responsible for much of whatever value The Multivoiced Body may have (its failings are my own). My partner, Barbara McCloskey, to whom I dedicate this book, critically read draft after draft of the manuscript and was a sagacious sounding board for its ideas. Joy has been sharing work and the other facets of our lives these many years. Two of my closest friends throughout my career as a philosopher, Ed Casey and Leonard Lawlor, took time away from their important work and graciously read the entire manuscript. Their detailed advice resulted in a much improved text; their encouragement, in its completion. Although justice is a key theme in this book, I can only list the names of other friends and colleagues who read all or large parts of the manuscript and helped me improve it: David Alexander, Bruce Fink, Nancy Glazener, Juan Carlos Grijalva, Sabine Hake, Lizardo Herrera, Paul Hopper, Greg Nielsen, Kelly Oliver, Ed Pluth, Joanna Polly, Dan Selcer, Dan Smith, Tony Smith, Tom Sparrow, Richard Williams, George Yancy, and Iris Marion Young, whose voice continues to instruct the rest of us about justice despite her untimely passing. Other friends, too many to name here, have discussed my work with me over the years and indirectly contributed to this book. I am grateful for their friendship and their influence on The Multivoiced Body. This gratitude also extends to the graduate students, faculty, and staff of Duquesne University’s philosophy department and to the members of the professional organizations to which I belong, especially the Radical Philosophy Association, Merleau-Ponty Circle, and Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy. I also thank Columbia University Press’s anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions. I was fortunate to have an editor, Wendy Lochner, who added great patience to her experience and knowledge in order to take this book through the labyrinth of referees, editorial and faculty boards, and the author’s often clumsy articulations of his manuscript’s purpose and character. My thanks to her must also be extended to Christine Mortlock, Susan Pensak, and other members of the Press who helped put this book into print.

PART I

The Dilemma of Diversity

1      The Age of Diversity

The Dilemma of Diversity

Our age is one of diversity. Not because diversity is new—even the earliest communities included differences in perspective and idiom based on at least age, gender, and work responsibilities. But diversity now has a meaning that transcends a plurality of functions or outlooks. It has become a value to many and a threat to others. It has led to constitutional revisions that favor multiculturalism in some societies and to various forms of ethnic cleansing in others. Amy Gutmann, the editor of a seminal volume on multiculturalism, has stated the issue in succinct terms: What kind of communities can justly be created and sustained out of our human diversity, especially when this pluralism is accompanied by a widespread skepticism about the defensibility of any moral principles or perspectives?¹

The skepticism to which Gutmann refers is abetted by the categories we have inherited for imagining society. Traditional thought has left us with two unsatisfactory social-political alternatives. One of them asks the diverse groups of society to submit to a universal doctrine, to a single idea of the good. This good, however, invariably ends up being the specific belief system of one or another of the groups involved.² It is therefore either unacceptable to the rest or eliminates what is distinctive about them and thus robs society of its richness. All too often, it leads to the violent repression of those who are different from the dominant group. As for the second of these two visions of community, it allows the groups to remain separate, but urges them to agree to neutral rules for regulating their mutual affairs. These groups, however, will tend to accept such rules only insofar as they advance their self-interest. As soon as any one of the groups realizes that the rules are no longer to its pragmatic advantage, it will have no reason to continue honoring them.³

In the context of a discussion on European cultural identity, Jacques Derrida has stated the issue in terms that can be extended to any society:

On the one hand, European cultural identity cannot be dispersed…. It cannot and must not be dispersed into a myriad of provinces, into a multiplicity of self-enclosed idioms or petty little nationalities, each one jealous and untranslatable. It cannot and must not renounce places of great circulation or heavy traffic, the great avenues or thoroughfares of translation and communication, and thus of mediatization. But, on the other hand, it cannot and must not accept the capital of a centralizing authority that, by means of its trans-European mechanisms … would control and standardize.⁴

To avoid a mere plurality, the participants in society must share a bond that is translatable into a common notion of the good. But this notion threatens to eliminate the ideas of the good society harbored by the rest. Traditional thought on society, the alternative of heterogeneity or homogeneity, leaves the new age of diversity impaled on one horn or the other of a dilemma that exacts a price in blood as well as alienation from one’s neighbors. The vision of society that avoids this dilemma of diversity must, on the one hand, valorize the unity that postmodernists shun in their penchant for heterogeneity and, on the other, endorse the heterogeneity that modernists efface in their embrace of the universal.⁵ We require, in other words, a notion of unity that affirms the very heterogeneity that would appear to dissolve it. Is such a notion of unity even intelligible, let alone capable of galvanizing diverse groups of people to recognize it as their identity and destiny?

Korot and Reich’s The Cave

We can begin to answer the question of unity in an age of diversity by exploring some works of art and literature that evoke rather than attempt to define the type of unity or identity we are seeking. After taking the counsel of these works, we may assume the task of transforming their suggestions into a philosophical and hopefully politically efficacious understanding of society and ourselves. The success of this undertaking will be measured by the degree to which it allows us to respond satisfactorily to the dilemma of diversity that we have just considered.

A recent work of art both dramatizes the dilemma of diversity and suggests an idea of unity that could avoid its two horns. This work, The Cave, is a multimedia production or video opera, the collaborative efforts of Beryl Korot, a leading video artist, and Steve Reich, a celebrated music composer.⁶ The production is centered on the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron. The cave at Hebron is the burial place of Abraham and his wife Sarah. It is also the place where Abraham’s sons, the half-brothers Ishmael and Isaac, reconcile their differences in order to bury their father. Ishmael (whose mother is Hagar, Sarah’s former handmaid) becomes the progenitor of the Arab Muslims, and Isaac is the first of the Jews. For centuries, this cave has been sacred to Jews, Muslims, and Christians. It is the only place in the world where both Jews and Arabs worship, despite their continuing hostility toward one another.

Although The Cave focuses on a particular place in the Middle East, the conflict there is emblematic of similar disputes—religious or secular—elsewhere in the world and throughout human history. The narrative that accompanies the Cave of Hebron also shares in this universality. Abraham is a symbol of unity or origin; his sons, Ishmael and Isaac, portray a split full of distrust and treachery; and the reconciliation of these half brothers on the occasion of their father’s death represents a return to unity and the redemption of humanity. But how are we to understand the original unity and its rebirth? What possibilities were destroyed by Abraham’s patriarchy, and which of the half-brothers had to concede his identity in order to make reconciliation possible? Or, again, did the sons agree to regulative rules based on expediency, which then unraveled and revived the estrangement within humanity that continues to this day, with horrific consequences, as bombs fall from the sky or erupt just under the ground?

The Cave is wrapped in this biblical and actual history. But from within that context it creates an extraordinary effect. Korot and Reich intermingle visual images of the Hebron area and its people, fragments of different forms of music, and the voices of Jews, Arabs, and Americans responding to the questions Who for you is Abraham? Sarah? Hagar? Ishmael? Isaac? The audience is able to see and to hear the respondents at the same time that they see and hear onstage musicians doubling each respondent with a specific speech-melody. For example, an Arab Muslim answers the question about Abraham/Ibrahim with the father—he’s a fatherly figure, who actually, left something behind him, that’s never really been resolved. In his role as the music composer for the work, Reich transcribes the content and melodious quality of this speech into musical notation for the instruments and vocalists. The result is the speech-melody for that particular respondent (see figure 1.1). Indeed, these musically accompanied responses are used to divide The Cave into three acts, one composed of the replies by Israeli Jews, the second by Palestinian Arabs, and the third by citizens of the United States from various ethnic backgrounds.

Reich points out that transcribing speech into musical notation often forced him, especially when he wanted to combine certain spoken phrases, to make musical modulations that he never would have come up with on his own. These new modulations then entered his harmonic vocabulary for future work.⁷ Reich also captured ambient sounds from the cave, for example, an A-minor drone produced by prayers resonating against the walls. This drone was then reinforced by the musical instruments and linked to Korot’s video footage of the cave. By chance, this musically enhanced drone corresponded to the A-minor, noninstrumentalized chanting of the Koran that accompanied one of the three acts of the video opera. The Cave took on a life of its own, far beyond what its initiators originally had in their heads or could have predicted from the elements with which they began.

For the audience, the presentation of this work takes the form of five large video screens interspersed among the various groupings of musicians. Some of the video screens show the faces of the respondents while they are talking, others simultaneously display their answers in written script. The musical groupings include thirteen instrumentalists, a string quartet, four singers, and two readers who cite passages from the Bible and the Koran throughout the production. The audience also gets to hear a variety of answers to the questions about Abraham and the other figures. The answers reach a level of hilarity in the third act, which focuses on respondents in the United States. Because of their poorer acquaintance with biblical and Koran figures, these respondents often reply to the questions with references to Abraham Lincoln and Moby Dick (Call me Ishmael).

FIGURE 1.1   Steve Reich and Beryl Korot, The Cave, 1995. (Video opera. Photo copyright © Andrew Pothecary. Courtesy of Andrew Pothecary.)

But even these wild replies are part of the work’s point. Korot says that the visual multiples for the piece are to be read as one. But this one does not efface the heterogeneous content, because Korot turned to the ancient programming tool of the loom, and conceived of each channel as representing a thread. This allowed her to make non-verbal narrative works by careful timing and juxtaposing interrelated images, and by creating individual rhythms for each channel.⁸ These visuals are integrated into the composer’s musical scores and production. Some general ordering devices, for example, dividing The Cave into three acts, are also employed within the work. Nonetheless, the unity of the whole seems to be generated by, rather than imposed on, its diverse elements and answers. No single medium or voice dominates. Indeed, The Cave’s images, musical fragments, and contrasting interpretations of biblical figures sometimes give the impression of a contemporary tower of Babel. But the overall effect of the video opera is a type of cohesiveness, an enigmatic identity or unity that consists in the very diversity of the elements that it brings together. It evokes a unity composed of differences or, more dynamically, a unity that holds together and simultaneously separates its heterogeneous elements. It therefore suggests an alternative way in which we, as well as the people who worship at the shrine in Hebron, might be able to understand ourselves and our relation to each other.

Plato’s and Saramago’s Caves

Korot and Reich’s video opera invites comparison with two other works that focus on caves. By exploring them, we can enlarge upon the enigmatic whole, the unity composed of differences, evoked by The Cave, see more clearly its promise and its problems, and also gain a glimpse of forces that contest it from within. In The Republic, Plato describes the famous scene in which prisoners are shackled so that they face the back wall of a cave.⁹ They mistake fleeting shadows on the wall for reality. These shadows have no fixed essences and are therefore impossible for the mind to grasp with any certainty. They are objects of opinion rather than the subject matter of knowledge. More specifically, Plato says of these objects that it is impossible to conceive firmly any one of them to be or not to be or both or neither.¹⁰ For example, one and the same thing may appear beautiful in comparison to something that is ugly, and less than beautiful relative to a thing that is more attractive than it. The thing cannot, therefore, be fixed in the mind as beautiful or as not beautiful, neither both nor neither. Everything within the cave shares this equivocal nature. On the basis of Plato’s well-known disparagement of art, the mixture of sights, sounds, and viewpoints that make up Korot and Reich’s The Cave could only be a copy of what the prisoners see. That is, they are a step below the shadows in the cave, mere imitations of imitations of reality.¹¹

Plato presents his prisoners with a way out of the cave. Before becoming incarcerated, they exist in a disembodied state and are able to experience pure Forms, that is, perfect and permanent standards, such as goodness, beauty, justice, and geometrical shapes. The shadows inside the cave are the distorted reflections of these Forms. Because the prisoners can still dimly recollect what was presented to them in their disembodied existence, it is possible for at least some of them to turn away from the shadows at the back of the cave and make their way along an upward path until they can finally leave the cave and see the Forms in their pristine glory.

Plato’s scenario is an allegory of knowledge and salvation. It assumes that reason is univocal, the same for everyone who uses it without bias, and that each thing in the sensory world, in the cave, is only a pale imitation of the corresponding perfect Form. If everyone adopts this univocal or dialectical form of reason, they will all be able to grasp the Good, the only true standard of what is best, and use this knowledge to establish a perfect republic. Thus Plato adds an ontological and an epistemological dimension¹² to the first of the two sociopolitical alternatives with which we began: the pure Forms and dialectical reason—the road back to the Forms—provide a basis for political thought, that is, for achieving knowledge of the best and most just kind of society. This basis transcends the cave and the plurality of opinions that we adopt toward the good in our usual flirtation with the shadows dancing on the cave wall.

But is Plato’s cave, the world that we live in as embodied creatures, the way he describes it? Is the world a chaotic existence requiring a higher reality to impose order upon it? Or might it not be, like the reality evoked by Korot and Reich’s The Cave, a unity composed of differences, one additionally characterized by chance and the production of novelty? Might not the imitation of an imitation actually be an evocation of the reality in comparison with which all others are judged and not a mere image at all? Whichever way one answers these questions, consideration of Plato’s cave shows that any resolution of the dilemma of diversity will have to speak of epistemology and ontology—knowledge and being—as well as of social and political philosophy. We will have to decide, for example, if reason is one or many, whether there might be a number of legitimate ways to think and more than just one reality to confront.

The Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago also has a penchant for caves. But he wants to find standards of judgment that are immanent in, rather than transcendent of, the reality in which embodied creatures live. Like Korot and Reich’s video opera, his novel is called The Cave.¹³ And, like their work, his story evokes an enigmatic unity composed of differences. But, we will see, it also adds other aspects to the image of society we are constructing.

In his novel, Saramago represents Plato’s realm of Forms as a self-contained, mall-like complex named the Center. Around it sprawls a city, some outlying slums, an industrial park with chimneys belching toxic fumes, a green belt composed of hot houses with dead grass surrounding them, and, on the outer fringe, a number of traditional villages. The Center is constantly expanding, substituting an artificial, partly digital reality and consumer heaven for all the natural and traditional settings it supplants—it has everything from aquariums with cyber fish to replicas of historical periods and a variety of artificial climatic conditions and geographical settings, each maintained for the Center dwellers to enjoy and to rely upon for their daily needs. Indeed, when excavators unearth mummified bodies tied to benches facing a wall under the Center, officials ignore the ironic symbolism of this place and immediately change it into a theme park that they name Plato’s Cave. They do not understand that their technologically perfect Center and its Platonic analogue, the realm of pure Forms, are the real prisons, and that the prisoners in the new theme park represent the occupants of the Center. For Saramago, perfection and regulation are emblems of death, not life. The Center, like Plato’s Forms, will attempt to subordinate or even replace the interplay of heterogeneous and multifaceted beings that is the source of life and novelty.

Saramago wants humanity to escape his cyberage prison just as Plato wants it to escape the cave of shadows. But Saramago has a destination in mind that stands in contrast to the world of Plato’s Forms. He wants us to return to Plato’s cave, but no longer seen through Plato’s dismissive eyes. Saramago’s protagonist in the novel consists of a family—a father in his sixties, Cipriano Algor, a young daughter, Marta, and her equally young husband, Marchal. Father and daughter work as potters in their house on the outskirts of a village. Marchal is a guard at the Center. There is also the father’s newfound, middle-aged love, Isaura, and a stray dog, Found, that the family adopts. After moving into an apartment in the Center (a privilege that Marchal receives as an employee there), the three members of the family come to understand the meaning of the excavated site Plato’s Cave and the implications of adapting to the artificial but commodious Center. They therefore leave the Center and return to the village. With the help of Isaura and in the company of Found, they extract from their potter’s kiln three hundred clay figures that they had made previously but been unable to sell to the people in the Center. They place these figures, including some defective ones, in positions facing their beloved village home, with the kiln behind them, as if to symbolize and celebrate a reality opposed to what the Center represents.

In the final pages of the novel, the family, Isaura, and Found pile into Cipriano’s old van and set off on a journey with no particular destination in mind. The view they now have of life corresponds to Saramago’s long fluid sentences, which are bereft of the usual conventions of punctuation and grammar:

Well Isaura, said Cipriano Algor, is of the opinion that we should let ourselves be carried along on the current of events, that there always comes a time when we realize that the river is flowing to our favor, I didn’t say always, said Isaura, I said sometimes, but take no notice of me, it’s just an idea I had, It’s good enough for me, said Marta, besides it fits in very well with what’s actually been happening to us, What shall we do, then, asked her father, Marchal and I are going to start a new life a long way from here, that much we’ve decided.¹⁴

Life, that is, the current of events that carries us along, is fluid and full of surprises. The events composing it overlap and flow into one another, just like the utterances of Saramago’s characters. What Plato feared in his cave, Saramago embraces and takes as reality. His novel and Korot and Reich’s video opera, their form (Saramago’s sentences, Korot and Reich’s multimedia mixture) as well as their content, evoke a reality that is neither a set of pure Forms imposed upon a domain nor a mere collection of individual elements. Rather, this reality is a unity composed of intersecting differences, a world that constantly generates new forms of life. When we apply it to ourselves, each of us appears to be simultaneously part of the identity and the other or alter ego of the rest. The interplay among us, among our different ideas of the good, generates new visions and, because we are interrelated to one another, our continual metamorphosis.

Saramago’s novel reinforces the type of unity evoked by Korot and Reich’s The Cave. But in conjunction with my comments on Plato, it adds some new aspects to the image of society we are constructing. Plato’s realm of Forms is an example of what I will call an oracle, that is, a discourse that elevates itself above the others by presenting itself as universal or absolute—the absolute truth, the one true God, the pure race, patriarchy, the free market system, or any other doctrine that excludes or demotes those who do not consent to its terms.¹⁵ If society is a unity composed of differences, it is not only that; it also involves an oracular tendency to override this type of unity and to replace it with a single center of power.

Plato presents his oracle of justice as founded upon a transcendent reality, a realm of unchanging and perfect Forms. Saramago counters this claim by suggesting that oracles and the realities upon which they claim to rest are our creations and therefore immanent in rather than transcendent of society. More specifically, Saramago’s Center mimics Plato’s pure Forms and reveals them to be poor imitations of reality, rather than existing outside and above the cave. In turn, the reality that the Center and the Forms imitate is the sensory world Plato rejects and entombs. Through Saramago’s eyes, we now see the world as a unity composed of differences and the standard against which we must judge the Center and all oracles that would try to deny its reality, marginalize its many voices, and diminish the creation of new forms of life. The novel The Cave and the video opera The Cave evoke this alternative way of understanding society. Both, but particularly Saramago’s novel, also make us aware of the oracles that threaten and all too often prevail over this generative and heterogeneous form of unity.

Saramago’s Center helps to enlarge this picture of society even more than I have suggested. Whereas Korot and Reich’s The Cave is haunted by the specter of religious bigotry, Saramago’s novel concentrates on technocratic capitalism or technological rationality as the main threat to the world as a creative interplay among heterogeneous beings. The Center’s use of advanced technology threatens to replace the natural with an artificial world. Oracles can therefore be secular as well as religious. Saramago, moreover, seems to use Found, the adopted stray, as an indicator of the overlap among the species that make up the world. Similarly, the clay figures made by the potter family and the Center made by technocrats are artificial products with vastly different meanings. The first technological form of life,¹⁶ pottery, betokens an accommodation or even a collaboration with nature; the second, the Center, an attempt to dominate natural surroundings. The frontiers between human society, nature, and artificial devices and products are porous and largely uncharted. Any talk of society will therefore also have to consider its relation to the many communities, natural and artificial, that surround and cut across it.

Saramago’s book also reinforces an implicit response of Korot and Reich’s video opera to Plato’s claim that a univocal form of reason is the only route to knowledge. Both the novel and the video opera evoke images of reality that have persuasive force. This suggests that formal reason is not the only way in which we can become legitimately convinced of what is and what should be. The very selection of one term over another to construct a proposition is made against a background of what one thinks is important. Moreover, this background always has the status of something evoked rather than laid out in terms that are exhaustively translatable into the syllogisms of logic books. Formal reasoning plays an often necessary but not sufficient role in our efforts to persuade ourselves and others of the nature of society or the cosmos. When Plato chases art and poetry out of his republic, he has therefore overstepped his bounds and denied part of what is effective in his own, often poetic, ruminations about reality and the good life.

Korot and Reich’s video opera as well as Saramago’s novel have portrayed society as composed and generative of differences. This evoked image of unity, of a bond between us that is neither totalizing nor merely expedient, is encouraging because the age of diversity, the demand for recognition of heterogeneity as a value as well as a reality, requires that we go beyond the two traditional alternative visions of society and hence the horns of diversity’s dilemma. The age of diversity also requires that we understand and challenge the oracles that prevent us from recognizing that society is a unity composed of differences. We must therefore explore and clarify the sort of inclusiveness suggested by the works entitled The Cave and see if it is more than just an invention of art or a dream of philosophy. Only a new social identity, a recognition and embrace of the dynamic intersection of our lives and identities, can provide us with the basis for a social and political unity that escapes the failed paths of totality, on the one hand, and a merely expedient rule-governed plurality, on the other.

Challenge of The Cave: The Argument Ahead

Plato and many other thinkers would argue that Korot and Reich and Saramago are evoking chaos and not any kind of unity or identity. In the rest of part 1 of this book, The Dilemma of Diversity, I will reply to them by providing an initial but compelling articulation of a unity composed of differences that avoids the two horns of the dilemma of the age of diversity. In chapter 2, this articulation will consist of a history of the dilemma, specifically the ancient opposition between cosmos (order) and chaos. Most important, this history will bring to light the aspects of cosmos and chaos that led to an inversion of their hierarchical order, resulting in the favoritism toward chaos that we find in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche and many contemporary thinkers. Indeed, this inversion has produced the concept of chaosmos and the hope that it might take us beyond the exhausted opposition between cosmos and chaos. An analysis of this concept, especially the innovative version of it offered by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, will provide us with a fuller understanding of the kind of unity we seek. But this analysis will also show that society cannot be satisfactorily depicted in terms of forces that are too anonymous and impersonal for us to identify with or to accept as an appropriate description of ourselves and our social setting. From Nietzsche through Deleuze and Guattari, this tendency has marred the otherwise rich ideas they have offered us for grappling with philosophical and social issues.

In order to begin at least the partial personalization of these anonymous forces, an overview of the type of society evoked by The Cave (the video opera and the novel) will be required. The modification of standard syntax in Saramago’s novel provides us with an opening idea of the direction this overview will take. That modification allows the voices of his main characters to blend with one another while still maintaining their distinctness and uniqueness. These voices (like the speech-melodies and other elements of Korot and Reich’s video opera) are part of a dialogic exchange that keeps them together and yet does not nullify their heterogeneity. I will argue that something similar is true for participants in society. Thus chapter 3 will introduce the notion of voices and the idea that society is what I call a multivoiced body. The notion of voices has the advantage of pointing simultaneously to our bodies as the producers of speech and to the discourses that provide these bodies with social and cultural significance. Earth and heaven, so to speak, are brought together in one concept. Voices also make a necessary reference to each other; they exist as addresses or responses to other personalized social discourses and practices. Indeed, their dialogic interplay both separates and holds them together, constituting them as a body, a multivoiced body.

As this brief description suggests, the notions of voice and multivoiced body will push the rigid ideas of purity and univocity to the edge of the political map that they have dominated for so long. More specifically, I will argue that voices are dialogic hybrids, each part of the identity and the other or alter ego of the rest, and that their interplay produces new voices and ultimately the metamorphosis of society. The notion of voice, in other words, promises a type of solidarity that promotes heterogeneity and fecundity without any of these three forces diminishing the other two.

This claim concerning our identity is supported by the observation that whenever we examine our viewpoints we find that they are made up of many strands, many other voices, that continue to contest for audibility within and against the viewpoints they have helped to form. Each voice retains its uniqueness, but each is part of the identity of the rest as well as their other. Many examples, arguments, and other types of considerations will be necessary to clarify this view of ourselves and society and render it compelling. In chapter 3, I will rely heavily on Salman Rushdie’s literary talents and Mikhail Bakhtin’s linguistics and culturology. I will also examine the work of thinkers who contest the idea of society as a multivoiced body (Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and G. W. F. Hegel) as well as the thought of those who are more allied to but still distinct from this view (Jean Luc Nancy, Giorgio Agamben, Emmanuel Levinas, and Adriana Cavarero). I will also consider the positions of some of those who are opposed to the idea that voices are intrinsically hybrid or impure (Immanuel Kant, Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger). The importance of the concerns addressed in this chapter and part 1 cannot be overstated: a new understanding of our identity, and not just utilitarian or deontological arguments about how we ought to act, is necessary if we are to begin moving beyond our fear of difference and the tendency to exclude others in our social and political policies—or so I will argue.

In order to support the identification of society and each of us as multivoiced bodies, we will have to see if voices have priority over that from which they are otherwise inseparable: subjectivity, language, and social structures. In part 2, The Primacy of Voices, I will use the first chapter (chapter 4) in order to examine the modernist notion of the self or subject. This examination will include critical reflection on the classical position of Rene Descartes, the phenomenologically based thought of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and the work of Andy Clark, Paul Churchland, and Daniel Dennett, contemporary analytic philosophers who adopt the view point of cognitive science. These reflections will be followed by others, in chapter 5, on the relation between voice and language. They will concentrate on structuralist (Ferdinand Saussure) and poststructuralist views of language (Derrida, Jean-Frangois Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and, in the context of the philosophy of science, Thomas Kuhn, David Bloor, and Bruno Latour).

With respect to voices and social structures, even Saramago’s Center is inseparable from the role played by ideologues in its establishment and continuation. We cannot overlook that social structures have linguistic as well as nonlinguistic dimensions and then argue (mistakenly) that discourse is determined by mute forces. Nor can we claim that ideas or words constitute reality, that is, we cannot adopt what some thinkers would call linguistic idealism.¹⁷ The challenge, then, will be to see how voices depend upon social structures, yet are the guiding force in the interaction between their linguistic and nonlinguistic dimensions. Moreover, economic systems are social structures. Therefore we will have to consider which system type is most compatible with the interplay and creativity that characterizes the multivoiced body. This task will include assessing the work of Edward Casey on place, Karl Marx and Shoshana Zuboff on economics and the workplace, and Foucault’s novel ideas on power.

This engagement with social structures occurs in chapter 6. But the main issue of that chapter will be to follow up on the reflections of chapters 4 (subjectivity and modernism) and 5 (language and postmodernism) and confirm the claim that voices are the primary unit of society. Even if we grant that voices have primacy over the traditional notion of subjectivity, language, and social structures, what is our relation to these clamorous participants in society? If, for example, we are to identify ourselves with voices rather than with the traditional notion of subject, we will need to know the nature of this identification. Are voices anonymous forces to which we conform—are we merely their vehicles—or are we these very voices, and they us, to such a degree that a strict line between the personal and the impersonal is impossible to draw? If the latter is the case, we will require a new way of thinking about identity—the idea of an elliptical form of identity between ourselves and these voices—and we will need a new way of talking about agency in society.

The claim