Politics and Connolly’s Ethics: Immigrant Narratives, Racism, and Identity’s Contingency

Introduction

As the ethical turn in political theory inaugurated by such thinkers as William Connolly (1999; 2002), Judith Butler (2005), and Stephen White (2000) has spread its roots and gathered momentum, it has also come under sharp criticism. These theorists have led others in elaborating practices of “self-cultivation” as prerequisites for deep forms of democratic life, in ways often inspired by the late Foucault’s writings on the “care of the self” and construed as strategies that enact freedom by enhancing the individual’s responsiveness to alterity (Myers 2008). In response, theorists attempting to stake out positions to the left of the protagonists of democracy-as-ethos have expressed skepticism and even dismay at what they see as the latter’s abandonment of the critical sensibilities and tools vital to a radically oppositional politics. Some critics suspect that proponents of the ethical turn harbor a covert “stoicism,” relinquishing the hope for a radical break with the existing society and instead placing a halo on politically timid strategies for coping with the depredations of the current imperial age (Finlayson 2007; Wenman 2007). Others argue that the ethicists needlessly and dangerously renounce the language of “condemnation” along with a vast historical legacy of oppositional discourses that “resist framing their concerns as contestable” but have been central to democratic politics (Vázquez-Arroyo 2004, 11; Dean 2007). Democratic theorists who place ethical self-development in the foreground also come under attack for neglecting to theorize adequate collective responses to the suppression of “associative relations among individuals” by contemporary mechanisms of power, especially in the modes of discipline and bio-power that Foucault himself analyzed (Myers 2008). For all these critics, the basic problem with a universal imperative that individuals generously affirm the contingency of their ideas and identities is that following this ethos de-politicizes crucial arenas of struggle and re-entrenches inherited, structural relations of power.

The detractors of theory’s recent preoccupation with ethics rightly sense a certain conceptual blockage and a potential contraction of political ambitions in this intellectual shift. Yet as I show in this essay, focusing on Connolly’s work, it is possible to imagine fruitful, even symbiotic linkages between cultural strategies for cultivating more courageous and creative engagements with identity and direct political challenges to structural, institutionally anchored arrangements of power. By the latter I mean principally the official policies and unofficial procedures of state and capitalist entities that contribute to the production of racial, class, and gender domination.¹ The complementarities of ethical and political action come into view when we probe more deeply and concretely the historical conditions of possibility for realizing the embrace of identity’s contingency that Connolly advocates instead of simply dismissing it as an “ahistorical” normative principle tantamount to a Rawlsian standard of justice (Vázquez-Arroyo 2004, 11). This article thus engages in a thought experiment to begin working out a mutually invigorating relation between Connolly’s ethic and current conditions faced by exploited and marginalized groups, re-reading Connolly’s theory through lenses shaped by the experiences and narratives of immigrant workers. This exercise clarifies the historical reasons why the affirmation of contingency in identity is both possible and desirable for this particular subaltern group. It also provokes a sense of how the means Connolly proposes for cultivating this ethical orientation could be folded into a more capacious repertoire of strategies for radically democratizing political life.

Below, I first argue that the everyday working lives of immigrants in the US contain unheralded and encouraging prospects for nourishing the approaches to identity and difference that Connolly recommends – and that the current politics of immigration raises a historically specific demand for these ethical exertions. Xenophobia in popular culture, public policy, and citizens’ voluntary activism has been on the rise in the US since at least the 1980s (Perea 1996; Chavez 2001; Welch 2002). Meanwhile, the multiculturalist project of identity stabilization and assertion has emerged as the predominant discourse for fostering more open and inclusive orientations toward “diversity,” as human resources curricula for corporations, colleges, and government agencies alike illustrate. Since both these ideological formations tend...