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C H A P T E R 3 DWELLING TOGETHER: IDENTITY, DIFFERENCE, AND RELATION Difference exists within identity. Otherwise identity would not be identity.Thought contains deferral and distance. Otherwise, thought would not be thought.1 As chapters 1 and 2 have shown, our postmodern context requires a normative picture of pluralism. Thus far, however, I have sought to attend to the felt reality of sociocultural plurality, exploring its implications. The portrayal of “pluralistic consciousness” is not, in itself, a prescriptive proposal about how human beings ought to live in the world. It is a reflective portrait: an attempt to describe a predominant way that human diversity has been experienced and accounted for during the past fifty years or so—that is, in the mode of a hyper-reflexive historical consciousness, dramatized by the postmodern celebration of difference and critique of totality. Of course, this is sharpened within a globalizing social, economic, and political context. In my view, this concept helps to uncover and make sense of an operative (even while unnoticed) cognitive filter that shapes how we perceive differences, thus motivating behaviors and thoughts. Through pluralistic consciousness, we experience ourselves as belonging simultaneously to multiple worlds, an “other” placed on the margins among equally placed others without a shared sense of place. The other is not far off, but is immediately at hand, “in here,” “with us.” Such proximity intensifies the experience of differences. Plurality is, in this sense, a sociocultural fact conditioning how we understand ourselves and others. In today’s postindustrial, postcolonial situation, it is an unavoidable given. And it calls for response. Thus plurality is also a challenge forcing us to reconsider our place in the world. Indeed, today’s globalizing context makes it impossible to avoid taking a position toward difference, whether seen as a threat or as a promise. The question that besets us then is this: how should we address the pluralistic situation in which we live, resisting what denigrates or 77 trivializes diversity and finding new ways to cultivate a more humane planet for all, not in spite of but amidst and through our differences? This is not an abstract philosophical question regarding the relation of the One and the many; it is an unavoidable praxis. For we cannot help but live out “answers” in the various ways we dwell together. We must, then, distinguish between plurality and pluralism , the former being a sociohistorical given and the latter being an ethical vision of differences in relationship. This chapter develops the line of critique presented in chapter 2, pushing further toward outlining the possibility of a distinct way of sharing amidst genuine heterogeneity. This possibility is pluralism; and it is rooted in the already plural nature of human dwelling-together. Toward this end, my overall aim is now prescriptive, focused on building a theoretical framework that both acknowledges differences and gives access to their positive value. Such a framework seeks to engender solidarity and foster reciprocity among localized differences over and against forces that would fragment, trivialize, suppress, or nullify those differences. Whether as bigoted xenophobia, relativistic indifference , separatist ethnocentrism, or homogenizing universalism, distortions of genuine plurality involve dangerous fallacies against which correctives must be offered in order to promote a wider peace. Recall, however, that true peace is not the tension-free state of stasis, but rather, as Theodor Adorno aptly characterizes it, “the state of distinctness without domination, with the distinct participating in each other.”2 It is pluralism. To be sure, pluralism forces an encounter with the “other” that is decentering . It ruptures taken-for-granted and stable senses of what it means to dwell and to be at home in the world. It signifies a broken whole. Yet this broken whole is not finally destructive to all meaning and value. For in it also lies the promise of new possibilities that call us (1) into affirming the concrete, difference-bearing, and relational character of human life in the world; and (2) into the drama of mutuality, the result of a praxis of reconciliatory dialogue between differences that brings out as well as brings together what is vital and most creative in each participant. I suggest—with a certain nod to Rorty—that this constructive possibility is nothing more than a praxis of solidarity, an openended and vigorously conversational dwelling together amidst differences, one that creates a shared space of relational attunement. However, neither reducing diversity to repressive homogeneity nor dispersing it into sheer heterogeneity, the vision of pluralism I...

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