Serious question: are there good reasons why an individual’s background or cultural positioning should provide that person more authority in a political argument?
I ask, because as I read the incredibly predictable debates about the nightmare unfolding in Gaza, I keep seeing people say things like, “Well, I’m a Jew, and I think what Israel is doing is wrong/immoral.” The implicit points apparently are: 1) “My Jewishness should insulate me from charges of anti-Semitism. So don’t go there.” And 2) “My Jewishness provides me with a window, through which the goyim can’t possibly see, into this intractable problem.” I’m slightly sympathetic to the former point. Maybe. (Really, though, I’m more sympathetic to the argument that so long as someone isn’t an anti-Semite, they probably shouldn’t be labeled as such by people who are looking to score easy points in a fight.) The latter argument, though, leaves me shaking my head. I’m not entirely sure it’s wrong. But I don’t like its implications at all. And if it’s valid, I’d like someone to explain why.
It gets more complicated. I’m also reading people saying some version of, “I used to live in Israel. And violence, even insofar as it leads to massive civilian casualties, against Hamas is necessary.” The implicit argument here, if I’m getting this right, seems to be, “You can’t understand Israel’s security needs until you’ve lived in the region.” Again, there may be a kernel of truth here. But the logical extension of this kind of argument, as with the one above, seems dangerous to me. It suggests that outsiders, no matter how thoughtful, can never be on equal footing with insiders.
In the end, I’m increasingly tired of people claiming they have a secret decoder ring that allows them to make sense of an impossibly complicated situation. But I still wonder about the validity of cultural authority in policy disputes. I should note: I know this post runs the gamut from inchoate to incoherent. It’s also intentionally vague. The thing is, I don’t feel like linking to Marty Peretz, professional asshat, or the incensed commenters weighing in on the Gaza incursion in various corners of the blogosphere. Sorry. I’m both a bit flummoxed by the whole thing and also, as this post notes, more focused here on the broader question of argumentation.
The Edge of the American West 
85 comments
January 7, 2009 at 9:31 am
Ahistoricality
are there good reasons why an individual’s background or cultural positioning should provide that person more authority in a political argument?
There’s a huge gray area between a kind of essentialist exclusion — which I don’t buy as valid — and the sense of understanding that comes with experience. Experience can be wrong (misleading, etc.), but it’s still real, and people generally weigh direct knowledge over general knowledge, long engagement over recent interest. I think for good reason, too, but that doesn’t automatically make it an epistemological trump card.
January 7, 2009 at 9:37 am
ari
Yeah, that’s my sense. Also, I buy DuBois’s notion of double consciousness. But I don’t think that my Jewishness, such as it is, means that Vance* can’t argue with me about Israel/Palestine. Or something.
* Someone named Maverick can’t be Jewish, right?
January 7, 2009 at 9:40 am
JRoth
I realize you want a broader discussion, and I surely don’t want to turn this into any kind of disquisition on Judaism and anti-Semitism, but: it is certainly the case that some Jews will explicitly base their judgments about the arguments of others on their own innate antiSemite detection abilities. In particular, I’ve read (not on the internets, where people can be so half-cocked) good, liberal Jews basically accusing all European leftists of closet antiSemitism as the basis for their Palestinian support – basically saying, “You, poor Gentile, may not see it, but I do.” Which is an irrefutable claim – except by another Jew.
And I can say this, because I have a last name widely perceived as Jewish.
January 7, 2009 at 9:42 am
kid bitzer
there’s just going to be no illuminating general thing to say about this question.
certainly experience counts in arguments. it’s good to know stuff, and some stuff you can only know in some ways, sometimes by being some place or living through something.
at the same time, the appeal to privileged knowledge is often abused.
it’s just all going to get down to cases: what’s the question, what’s the knowledge, what’s the experience, etc.
that’s not a helpful answer. but there is not going to be a helpful answer.
January 7, 2009 at 9:44 am
JRoth
But I still wonder about the validity of cultural authority in policy disputes.
Agreed, as long as you weight “policy” heavily – it’s certainly the case that an African-American* will have insights into A-A culture that will escape me, but those insights are pretty flimsy in the face of determining actual policy.
* Even one with a SES and upbringing similar to mine
January 7, 2009 at 9:44 am
ari
Sure, I see the same thing all the time. But I’m asking if there’s any validity to such claims. In other words, is there some reason that I shouldn’t reject that sort of argumentation? Because my inclination, increasingly, is to say: “Um, you’ll need a more convincing argument than birthright or essential traits, pal, or you’ve lost me.”
January 7, 2009 at 9:47 am
ari
but there is not going to be a helpful answer.
I feared and expected that this was the case. Alas.
it’s certainly the case that an African-American* will have insights into A-A culture
Right. I’d even go so far as saying that smartly made claims about why minority groups have special insights into the dominant culture ring true for me. This is why I mentioned DuBois above.
January 7, 2009 at 9:49 am
ekogan
are there good reasons why an individual’s background or cultural positioning should provide that person more authority in a political argument?
Yes.
There is a difference between “more authority” and “absolute authority”. If someone is better informed about a subject, their statements about the subject are more likely to be correct, but not with 100% probability.
If you heard the statement “I’m from Israel, and the traffic in Tel Aviv is terrible”, you, who probably have no prior opinion on the subject, would assign a high certainty to “Traffic in Tel Aviv is terrible”, and a higher certainty than if you heard “I’m from Cleveland, and the traffic in Tel Aviv is terrible”.
When you hear the statement “I’m from Israel, and the attacks on Gaza were necessary”, since you already have a strong opinion on the subject, this doesn’t change your opinion that much, but still more than if you’ve heard “I’m from Cleveland and the attacks on Gaza were necessary”.
Bayesian reasoning applies
January 7, 2009 at 9:50 am
kid bitzer
i’m glad you conceded the truth of my reply. based on my authority.
the same question comes up in structuralist linguistics sometimes.
you just want to ask, “what makes you saussure of yourself?”
January 7, 2009 at 9:50 am
kid bitzer
i’m from chicago, and the attacks on cleveland are long overdue.
January 7, 2009 at 9:52 am
ekogan
I don’t respect any Cubs fan’s authoritah
January 7, 2009 at 9:52 am
dana
I am perfectly willing to believe that someone’s experience and/or cultural background might give them insight into a topic. That’s an entirely different question from whether such insight need not be expressible in language (there’s a difference between “I grew up in Israel and I can report the fear and anger people feel over the rockets, so this speech strikes me as tone deaf” and “No one who isn’t a Jew could possibly understand” and it’s the same for all topics like this) or whether it can be outweighed by actual knowledge of the non-cultural details.
“I care more” tends not to mean all that much when it comes to setting policy.
January 7, 2009 at 10:03 am
JPool
There was a version of this with fairly wide currency in the late 1980s/early 1990s, exemplified in bell hooks’s application of Engels’s parable of the slave knowing more about the master than the master does about the slave. The bowdlerized version of this took a key insight about generalized power and knowledge and turned it into a universalized epistemological principle, in which oppression became a special truth revealing machine (rather than something with varied epistemological costs and benefits). I find this manuever much less common these days. The problem I saw them was not just the rhetorical cudgel that this could be turned into, but the way it let both sides of whatever identity divide off the hook from the hard work of critical self-awareness.
kb, that was exquisitely horrible.
January 7, 2009 at 10:06 am
JRoth
Because my inclination, increasingly, is to say: “Um, you’ll need a more convincing argument than birthright or essential traits, pal, or you’ve lost me.”
A laudable response, but I’m not sure an effective one.
As I said, I’m not thinking about bloggers trying to score cheap points; it’s more like blacks explaining to whites* that there’s lots of discrimination that whites are oblivious to. When a Jew tells a gentile that he recognizes antiSemitism in anti-Israel sentiment, it’s very hard for the gentile to gainsay that. Of course, there’s no reason for the gentile to concede policy points on this basis, but it skews the debate.
* Or women to men, gays to straights, etc.
January 7, 2009 at 10:08 am
ekogan
Jews will explicitly base their judgments about the arguments of others on their own innate antiSemite detection abilities.
So that’s why my gaydar stinks – it’s been replaced by an anti-Semite detector
January 7, 2009 at 10:18 am
Charlieford
Maybe it would be worth while to go back and re-read Joan Scott’s essay on “Experience.”
January 7, 2009 at 10:23 am
SEK
So that’s why my gaydar stinks – it’s been replaced by an anti-Semite detector
Same here. Not a day goes by I don’t ask myself “Is that guy gay, or does he think the Jewish people are an abomination?” You’d think the hot pants would give away the game, but alas …
January 7, 2009 at 10:24 am
dana
JRoth, I think I’d draw a distinction between explaining discrimination or experiences, and thinking of the mere fact of having had those experiences as a trump card. Someone like Peretz seems to be doing the latter.
January 7, 2009 at 10:26 am
kid bitzer
and we should listen to someone whose christian name is “scott”?
January 7, 2009 at 10:34 am
JPool
“Is that guy gay, or does he think the Jewish people are an abomination?”
Can’t it be both?
January 7, 2009 at 10:36 am
Vance
Someone named Maverick can’t be Jewish, right?
I happen not to be, but obviously the name is passed mainly patrilineally and the, uh, membership mainly matrilineally.
And was “Christian name” another intentional groaner, kb?
January 7, 2009 at 10:38 am
silbey
The equivalent in military history is “you haven’t served in the military/been in combat so you can’t really understand war.” There is some weight to this particular argument, but my response (as someone who has neither served, nor been in the military) is essentially that this is partly true, but *not* having served or been in combat gives other kinds of useful insights. Someone who spent an entire battle face down in their fox hole is likely to have less of an understanding than someone who watched from a distance.
January 7, 2009 at 10:39 am
Vance
I’m remembering a strange discussion about La Vita è Bella; I said I thought it was bad, citing among other things its “benign Holocaust denial” (Denby), and my (non-Jewish) colleague responded that some Jews he knew had said it was OK. I didn’t pursue it, but (needless to say?) I don’t accept that form of argument.
January 7, 2009 at 10:46 am
Marc Bloch
… methodical study of testimony reveals an extremely serious consequence, one that has been little remarked — it delivers a cruel blow to picturesque history. Guillaume de Saiunt-Thierry, in his Life of Saint Bernard, reports that when Bernard was a monk of Cîteaux he did not know for a long time how the chapel was lit; he was surprised one day to learn that three windows shed light on his altar, and not only one, as he had hitherto believed. On this point and others like it, the hagiographer expresses surprise and admiration: what a holy man to have such indifference to the vanities of this earth! But we know today that to be mistaken concerning things that should — it seems — be familiar, one does not need to be a Doctor of the Church and a prince of mysticism. The students of professor Claparède proved, during famous experiments, that they knew as little about the architecture of the hall of their University as Bernard the vault or the refectory of his convent. In a normal statement — i.e., mixed truth and falsehood — nothing is more inaccurate than all the small material details; everything happens as if most men walked around with eyes half-closed in a world they scorn to look at. How can we now take seriously the descriptive pieces of history — the colored costumes, the gestures, the ceremonies, the incidents of war, all these odds and ends the romantics love so much — when all around us not a single witness is able to retain correctly the scenes we devour so greedily when we find them in the medieval chronicles?… M. Graux gathered the reports of the various newspapers on the answers M. Malvy gave to the final question of the president of the High Court on the death of Bolo-Pasha, the last hearing of the Toqué lawsuit; the contradictions are striking and amusing; we shall probably never know if Bolo’s hat were maroon or black, of round or soft shape, if M. Malvy pronounced his testimony in a sharp or weak voice; le Matin and la Petite République give widely differing texts.
January 7, 2009 at 10:52 am
Farah
“Well, I’m a Jew, and I think what Israel is doing is wrong/immoral.” The implicit points apparently are: 1) “My Jewishness should insulate me from charges of anti-Semitism. So don’t go there.”
No, it means “I’m not going to let the State of Israel be the only representative of Jewishness on the block, and I’m not going to let my Jewish relatives demand of me a solidarity I regard as immoral.”
That’s the mildest I can manage. Those of us who are Jewish who oppose the behaviour of Israel are too easily counted in with those who support. Silence is not enough.
January 7, 2009 at 11:33 am
Knecht Ruprecht
Well, I’m a Jew, and I think what Israel is doing is wrong/immoral.
I think it is possible to credit the interlocutor with a certain measure of additional credibility based on something akin to the legal doctrine of declaration against interest. Not for nothing do Republicans like to make their attacks on affirmative action through spokespeople like Shelby Steele and Thomas Sowell. Conversely, one can apply a measure of discount to the utterances of in-group members when they take sides with their fellows, unless they have a previously established reputation for viewing the issues dispassionately and calling fouls on their own team.
January 7, 2009 at 11:43 am
Bitchphd
Sure. The validity of such claims depends on the ideas that identty is an important part of experience in the real world and that experience is an important part of understanding. Both of such are, I think, true.
That said, such claims aren’t automatic trump cards and when they’re played that way they suggest that identity is ALL the player has–even without experience. And in order for an argment to be taken seriously, it has to be actually presented. “I’m a woman, and I think that’s sexist” isn’t an argument without any attempt to explain why.
January 7, 2009 at 11:46 am
ari
I heart you, Professor Bloch.
January 7, 2009 at 11:49 am
eric
Me, too. There’s nothing so incredible as the testimony of someone who was there.
January 7, 2009 at 12:02 pm
ari
I knew that was coming.
January 7, 2009 at 12:04 pm
eric
I knew that was coming.
What? Whitman?
January 7, 2009 at 12:33 pm
Buster
More than that Cliopatria Award, the fact that you started this conversation and it didn’t go somewhere horribly wrong in the first 31 comments–that’s the real tribute to the goodness of EotAW.
On the topic of the post, as someone who works in the borderlands of Ethnic Studies, Area Studies and History, I’ve never come up with an easy answer to your general query (are there good reasons why an individual’s background or cultural positioning should provide that person more authority in a political argument?). It depends, I think, on the specific background, cultural positioning and line of argumentation in question. I think kid bitzer & Ahistoricality already got this point, actually.
January 7, 2009 at 12:34 pm
zunguzungu
It’s interesting that we don’t see it the opposite way. After all, being (whatever you are) gives you a particular perspective, but it doesn’t give you an argument for why that perspective is *right.* This is why judges recuse themselves and why we screen juries for bias; in this case, it seems just as logical to say that one should follow “Well, I’m a (whatever)” with “so maybe I’m biased on the subject of (thing of interest to whatevers)” as the implicit suggestion that one is right. But we rarely do the former.
(obvious counter example being when a highly decorated general and former secretary of state crosses party lines and endorses the democratic candidate for president; then, obviously, The Racialism has clouded his thinking)
January 7, 2009 at 12:55 pm
SEK
and we should listen to someone whose christian name is “scott”?
My Hebrew name’s “Eliahu,” if that helps.
Someone named Maverick can’t be Jewish, right?
I have a student whose first name is Maverick, and as he introduced himself to the class yesterday, he held up his hands palms-forward and said “I know, I know, it’s been a long year.”
January 7, 2009 at 1:09 pm
heydave
That said, such claims aren’t automatic trump cards and when they’re played that way…
I’d say that comment encapsulates the wariness with which one should approach claims of experience. As soon as a comment is prefaced, or played, we’re moving beyond logic and adding color commentary to artificially influence an argument.
Or tilt the deck, as it were.
January 7, 2009 at 1:43 pm
andrew
There is a line of thought that strangers are better-positioned to develop insights into a particular society. Thought that line of thought may turn out to be made up almost entirely of people talking about Tocqueville.
January 7, 2009 at 1:46 pm
JPool
Or tilt the deck, as it were.
Too much stacking or is this ship sinking?
January 7, 2009 at 3:46 pm
rosmar
There is an article by Laura Stoker on why discounting someone’s belief because they are “interested” tends to give more authority to those who are seen as “disinterested,” which tends to be those already privileged in the status quo. I don’t remember all the details of her argument, but it is good.
I also think these questions of experience and epistemology are complicated–on the one hand, those in a privileged position are often blind to their privilege. On the other hand, that doesn’t make those who are less privileged automatically right. On the third hand, nearly all of us simultaneously occupy positions of privilege and of non-privilege. On the fourth hand, we are all also simultaneously individuals and members of groups, and there is something fundamentally dehumanizing (to me) about treating someone only as a member of a group.
(On that last point, my girlfriend was recently in a conversation with a lawyer who kept saying that she should become a lawyer, because we need more black women lawyers. The fact that Tiff repeatedly said she wasn’t interested in becoming a lawyer had no effect on this lawyer–she was only reacting to Tiff as a black woman, not as an individual.)
January 7, 2009 at 3:59 pm
ari
Someone thinks we need more lawyers? Now that’s troubling.
January 7, 2009 at 4:14 pm
andrew
As if you know what it’s like to be a lawyer.
January 7, 2009 at 4:19 pm
kid bitzer
i sympathize with tiff. when people react to me as a black woman, i never feel that they are really seeing me as an individual.
January 7, 2009 at 4:23 pm
ari
My parents still — still — occasionally suggest that I should go to law school.
January 7, 2009 at 4:25 pm
andrew
Irvine is free, isn’t it? A cousin e-mailed me about that.
January 7, 2009 at 4:26 pm
ari
So you’re saying you think I can’t get into Davis?
January 7, 2009 at 4:27 pm
ari
I mean, you’re probably right. But still.
January 7, 2009 at 4:39 pm
Josh
So you’re saying you think I can’t get into Davis?
The fact that you didn’t say “Boalt” indicates you’ve adjusted your expectations appropriately, ari.
January 7, 2009 at 4:41 pm
ari
I was aiming for the top, Josh, and ignoring hoary tradition in favor of modern circumstances. You’d be wise to do the same.
January 7, 2009 at 4:48 pm
grackle
Agricultural Law is a fascinating field, Ari. Your folks would be proud.
January 7, 2009 at 4:49 pm
bitchphd
Do you know how much money lawyers make, Ari? Compare what you make for two recommendation letters to what my lawyer is charging me for two threat letters (written by a paralegal, no less): $550. Probably more now that I’ve had a couple of phone calls and emails with the paralegal today.
January 7, 2009 at 4:51 pm
ari
Agricultural Law is a fascinating field, Ari.
You’re saying I like to have sex with sheep, aren’t you? And you’re conspiring with Josh. I won’t stand for this. I really won’t. Plus, you’re upsetting Dolly.
January 7, 2009 at 4:52 pm
ari
And now B’s conspiring with my mom and demented grandmother. Fine, I’ll go to law school already — if you people will leave me alone.
January 7, 2009 at 5:06 pm
bitchphd
I think I’m going to make PK go to law school.
January 7, 2009 at 5:22 pm
Vance
Ari (and B), if it’s any consolation, I will never cease regretting that I didn’t make it in academia.
January 7, 2009 at 5:24 pm
ari
Why?
January 7, 2009 at 5:25 pm
ari
I shouldn’t have asked that, because I can’t stick around for the answer. Sorry.
January 7, 2009 at 6:59 pm
Knecht Ruprecht
Since the thread is veering off topic anyway, howzabout the folks who lay claim to additional authoritah for their present positions based on their having once held, and then repudiated a contradictory position? Leave aside the easy cases, like David Horowitz (who once told lies in the service of a lunatic left-wing movement and now does the same in the service of a lunatic right-wing movement) and the ex-communist anti-communists like Whitaker Chambers. Do the views of a Josh Marshall or Matthew Yglesias on the Iraq war deserve extra weight because they once supported the war? This line of reasoning makes Atrios tear his hair out, but I’m not sure it’s all wrong in this case, inasmuch as Marshall and Ygles supported the war on a narrow preponderance of evidence based on plausible beliefs held in good faith. But what of the former Bush supporters turned apostate, like Andrew Sullivan and John Cole? In their case, I’m inclined to give their present views less credence for their having been taken in by such an obvious charlatan.
January 7, 2009 at 7:00 pm
Carl
Just wanted to second the referral to Joan Scott’s “The Evidence of Experience,” (1991, i.e. at the height of the debate recalled by JPool, on which she went all meta) in which she concludes (in pertinent part, as the lawyers say):
“Experience is not a word we can do without, although, given its usage to essentialize identity and reify the subject, it is tempting to abandon it altogether. But experience is so much a part of everyday language, so imbricated in our narratives that it seems futile to argue for its expulsion. It serves as a way of talking about what happened, of establishing difference and similarity, of claiming knowledge that is “unassailable.” Given the ubiquity of the term, it seems to me more useful to work with it, to analyze its operations and to redefine its meaning. This entails focusing on processes of identity production, insisting on the discursive nature of “experience” and on the politics of its construction. Experience is at once always already an interpretation and
something that needs to be interpreted. What counts as experience is neither self-evident nor straightforward; it is always contested, and always therefore political. The study of experience, therefore, must call into question its originary status in historical explanation. This will happen when historians take as their project not the reproduction and transmission of knowledge said to be arrived at through experience, but the analysis of the production of that knowledge itself. Such an analysis would constitute a genuinely nonfoundational history, one which retains its explanatory power and its interest in change but does not stand on or reproduce naturalized categories. It also cannot
guarantee the historian’s neutrality, for deciding which categories to historicize is inevitably political, necessarily tied to the historian’s recognition of his or her stake in the production of knowledge. Experience is, in this approach, not the origin of our explanation, but that which we want to explain.”
Scott here shifts the politics from knowledge to knowledge formation, citing Foucault among others. Laura Stoker as also cited above does the same thing, recalling Bourdieu’s hermeneutic suspicion of the sneaky power play contained in scholarly “interest in disinterest.” How’s that for some hasty name droppin’.
Anyway, I’m teaching sophomore historiography right now and one of the things newbies gotta get clear on right away is that when we study, say, 18th century Italy, personal experience is not available as an immediate foundation of knowledge. So if that’s the only way we can know stuff with any authoritah, then, y’know, so much for our whole profession.
Even in the present, however, there’s a self-defeat in the claim that only experience produces adequate knowledge. I sometimes hear, for example, that as an X it is impossible for me to understand what it’s like to be a Y. To which my reply is, ok, if that’s true, shut up about it. You’re wasting your breath. Strict identity epistemology is a conversation killer.
January 7, 2009 at 7:05 pm
Carl
OK, here’s Bruno Latour. Wow, I’m becoming tiresome even to myself:
“I’ve never believed in this argument of multiple points of view. The study of science is an immediate counteraction of that. Because if you have a standpoint, then you can change that standpoint with an instrument. So if there is one thing that does not lock you in a point of view, it is the point of view. Point of view is just the n – 1 station into a trajectory which has many more stations…. The question is not one of multiplicity of points of view, the question is about the judgment of the accuracy of the account, and that is of course an open question depending on lots of other things.” Interview in Arch Literary Journal, #1, Winter 2008.
January 7, 2009 at 8:00 pm
ari
Thanks, Carl. That’s excellent stuff, even if you find it tiresome.
And KR, I don’t quite know what to say about your examples. I tend to be fond of people who are able to change their minds as new evidence suggests that old views should be discarded. I think that kind of flexibility, coupled with a willingness to admit one was wrong, is a sign of an enlightened mind and a mature character. On the other hand, I’m not sure that such people get extra points in policy arguments.
January 7, 2009 at 8:09 pm
bloodred
I’m a human, and all of this fucking killing is disgusting. Everyone who does it is a criminal. Israel is the largest perpetrator of the very systematic killing that was enacted on them during the years of the Third Reich. The Israelis who create and carry out their military and foreign policies are hypocrites, and they hide behind the “Jew” label to deflect criticism, enabling them to cry “anti-semite” to anyone who dares to cry foul. The state of Israel is run by criminals, no matter what their ethnic background.
January 7, 2009 at 8:18 pm
ari
Sixty comments until Godwin showed up. That’s really not too bad, if you think about it.
January 7, 2009 at 8:19 pm
Charlieford
I had a great encounter with experiential authority a few years back. I was talking about slave religion, and describing the limitations slave preachers might have worked under: no Bibles, no commentaries, no encyclopedias, charts, histories, maps–indeed, often illiterate. Most of the things any of us couldn’t do without if we wanted to give a talk on something–texts–they didn’t have. So I went on, you can imagine they might have been a bit confused about what Biblical personages did what, about chronology, or about who a certain Abraham might be. I was going to go one and talk about the other side–orality, memory, etc. But I didn’t get there. An older–quite older–balck woman was taking the class, and her hand shot up. “Well, professor, you may have all your degrees and books, but my grandparents were born into slavery down in Mississippi, and you don’t know nuthin’ about those sermons!” She had misinterpreted what I was trying to get across, and I’m not sure if I was doing all that good a job anyway, but I was happy to have her exert her authority. The class, all of the rest of whom were of typical college age, were just stunned at this unexpected intrusion of the real past into their supposedly safe class-room.
January 7, 2009 at 8:37 pm
Artemis
I’m not sure if this helps the conversation, but I always like quoting the Wife of Bath, who begins her prologue by saying:
Experience, though noon auctoritee
Were in this world, is right ynough for me
To speke of wo that is in mariage:
For lordinges, sith I twelf yeer was of age–
Thanked be God that is eterne on lyve–
Housbondes at chirche dore I have had five
(If I so ofte mighte han wedded be),
And alle were worthy men in hir degree.
But me was told, certain, nat longe agoon is,
That sith that Crist ne wente nevere but ones
To wedding in the Cane of Galilee,
That by the same ensample taughte he me
That I ne sholde wedded be but ones.
Not content to rest on arguing by experience, Alison supplements with textual and flirtatious examples both. In this case, I find her experience convincing–she’s knows much more about marriage than I or Christ. But her knowledge is still limited and not a guarantee of authority. I agree with Bitch.
That said, my family hates when my perspective (“over-educated” as it is) contradicts their experiences. As a way to shut me up, they tell me all the time that I don’t live in the “real” world. They infuriate me and “win” the argument, but no real conversation or “truth” or authority is gained by either side in such cases. I say that people who rely on experience to the exclusion of all other authority are not arguing/conversing in good faith. Same to people who completely reject experience without consideration. I think this applies to conversations about Gaza, too, though as far as the Wife of Bath, such thinking would no doubt have bored the other pilgrims as I probably have done here :)
January 8, 2009 at 12:51 am
andrew
Someone who spent an entire battle face down in their fox hole is likely to have less of an understanding than someone who watched from a distance.
Another Bloch quote:
January 8, 2009 at 1:06 am
herbert browne
re “my family hates when my perspective… contradicts their experiences. As a way to shut me up, they tell me all the time that I don’t live in the “real” world…”
Sounds a lot like my own seasonal familial ‘discussions’… except that, when I pause to take a breath during the development of my perspective, the claim is occasionally made that I’m simply having an acid flashback… ^..^
January 8, 2009 at 4:44 am
kid bitzer
artemis reminds us of one backdrop to the issue of authority, namely the scholastic codification of certain sources as authoritative.
the bible is an authority; augustine is an authority; st. denys is a lesser authority, even the pagan cicero is an authority to some extent. these are people or texts whose views have to be incorporated into your sic et non discussions. or in the case of revelation, views that trump any competitors. (except then we need a sic et non to argue about what the bible passage actually means).
what gives them auctoritas? sometimes experience, but not exactly empirical: could be mystical, or just direct contact with god. may not be easily effable, to get back to a point dana made.
still, i think in the scholastic context, it is exactly because it is st. paul, that person, and because he had that experience, on the road to damascus, that you are supposed to respect his authority.
whether this is a model we want to imitate….
January 8, 2009 at 4:45 am
silbey
Another Bloch quote:
It’s a good quote. I should amend my statement above to say rather than ‘less of an understanding’, ‘a different understanding.’ *Everyone* has things that shape what they understand, in one way or another.
January 8, 2009 at 5:52 am
[process] Another shot at thinking about the Other | jlake.com
[…] Edge of the American West has a post up today about speaking from cultural authority and presumed expertise. As is sometimes the case, a lot of the interesting action is in the comments section […]
January 8, 2009 at 5:59 am
Vance
To follow up on an exchange with Ari far up the thread, I think my regret at missing out on academia can be broken down into
1. Well-grounded liking for what academics do. For the usual reasons, and not naively rosy.
2. Personal reasons for finding #1 compelling — notably an extremely academic family. Both parents, my brother, both grandfathers and an uncle were professors; even both my grandmothers had advanced degrees (and another uncle was an almost-academic like me).
3. A character formed for regret. Given a desire to excel in academia, and difficulty in doing so, you’d think I would either buckle down and work hard to achieve the goal, or failing that, reformulate the goal to something achievable, but no. In other areas of life too I’m afflicted by zombie goals.
Of these, #1 is the only one germane to the moment of my interjection above. I wanted to assure you there are people out there for whom academia is the real world and the reference point.
January 8, 2009 at 6:04 am
kid bitzer
in light of 3, i can pretty much guarantee you that you would now regret having gone into academics, had you done so.
i regret to inform you.
January 8, 2009 at 6:07 am
Vance
Quite right, but in light of 3, I’m sure you can understand that it doesn’t make me feel any better.
January 8, 2009 at 6:16 am
kid bitzer
no, no–feeling better is not even under consideration.
it’s not even advisable.
you might feel better for a bit, but you’d come to regret it.
January 8, 2009 at 7:17 am
JPool
As long as we’re playing Greatest Hits Mixtape, the Latour piece Carl offers practically begs for this Donna Haraway response:
January 8, 2009 at 7:18 am
Elizabeth
In defense of “I’ve lived in Israel, and I think…”
Partisan politics in the U.S. have altered the Israel/Palestine debate such that it’s difficult to find reasonable “middle ground” positions. Some familiarity with political discourse in Israel is much more enlightening than the lightening rod “Israel are like Nazis!” “Well, Hamas are worse than Nazis!” exchanges that pass for debate in too many U.S. circles. Israeli leftist Zionists offer far more complex arguments than the current American leftist villification of Israel. Their criticisms of Israel are more helpful, in general, than ones here. Living there would give one more familiarity with that discourse (though not the only way), and I think that’s healthier than familiarity with U.S. discourse on the topic.
January 8, 2009 at 7:44 am
ari
Yes, but who are the Nazis in the story, Elizabeth? Seriously, I think you’re right. Before I began to find the whole situation unbearable, I used to read Israeli periodicals. And it seemed then that the level of discussion really was much more interesting than the sound and fury we have here — not that they didn’t have their own sound and fury.
And JPool, do you have a cite for the Haraway, perchance? Otherwise, I’ll just assume you made it up.
January 8, 2009 at 8:03 am
Knecht Ruprecht
On the other hand, I’m not sure that such people get extra points in policy arguments.
But they often claim title to those extra points! The neo-conservatives played the “When I was young and foolish, I thought like them, but wisdom and experience have changed me” card for all it’s worth.
Just like identity and personal experience, a conversion experience can lend some small measure of additional authority under certain circumstances, but I’m not prepared to define what those circumstances are.
January 8, 2009 at 8:29 am
grackle
Those who are telling you that their view is privileged by the circumstance of their experience, such that you “can’t understand,” or that, by virtue of their gender, ethnicity, skin color, etc. they have a perspective that trumps yours, are merely telling you in no uncertain terms that discussion with them is futile (see KB , above, his first comment.) This seems to me, to be a kind of short-hand advising me that I shouldn’t waste my energy with any attempts at engagement. A graceful response is, “You are probably right,” and I am freed from yet another doomed enterprise. I am better off without any policy arguments with them.
January 8, 2009 at 8:41 am
sirkraab
. . . discounting someone’s belief because they are “interested” tends to give more authority to those who are seen as “disinterested,” . . .
Bless you, rosmar, for upholding the honor of “disinterested.” It almost makes it worth hanging out with academics.
January 8, 2009 at 8:42 am
sirkraab
Back on topic, this discussion reminds me of a moment from my earnest undergraduate days when I said to my professor in a class on women and development, “Can I really comment on [subject at hand]? After all, I’m white, middle-class, 1st world, etc., etc.” To which she responded, “Yes, but you also have an analysis.”
January 8, 2009 at 9:10 am
JPool
Always assume that I just made it up. But yeah,
“Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspectives.” Feminist Studies. 1988, pp. 575–599.
It was originally published as a response to Sandra Hardings The Science Question in Feminsim and has been reproduced a variety of places. I first read it in John Agnew, David Livingstone, Alisdair Rogers eds. Human Geography: An Essential Anthology. Blackwell Publishers, Oxford. 1996
January 8, 2009 at 9:28 am
chingona
At the same time, I’ve frequently seen someone’s identity thrown back at them as a reason to invalidate their point of view. Which is just as weak as using your identity as a trump card. On other blogs recently, I have seen commenters who have not explicitly done the “Well, I’m Jewish and …” thing but who were clearly Jewish from their handle and/or by posting things like “This link I got from my temple list serve might be interesting to people” be accused of “having a dog in the fight” while “pretending” to be neutral. (For the most part, the Jewish commenters being so attacked were strongly condemning Israel’s actions but also saying bad things about Hamas so we’re not talking someone being a shill for AIPAC.)
This kind of thing happens all the time. Blacks aren’t objective enough to discuss affirmative action. Latinos cannot be objective about immigration, etc.
January 9, 2009 at 11:27 am
Carl
Awesome JPool, I was also thinking of Haraway and Harding for the mixtape but it can be so rude to bring your own music to other people’s parties so I self-edited. Maybe if we just go out to the garage we can throw down some brewskis and mosh.
Do we agree in reading Haraway’s and Latour’s arguments as complementary? In We Have Never Been Modern Latour develops his own critique of the god trick as part of the modernist detour from the constitutive networks and hybridities that Haraway and others hurl at the masculinist Enlightenment. He makes fun of the moderns for fretting about their failures of omniscience but saves his most withering ire for the postmodernists who think that means all bets are off. In the interview above his point is that vulgar standpoint epistemologies act as though we’re each trapped within a single perspective, when in fact nothing is easier or more natural than changing our points of view – learning to see otherwise, not from above and outside but from various insides.
January 9, 2009 at 1:00 pm
JPool
I definitely see their work overall as complementary (Harraway, who has a working science background, tends to live in representation land, while Latour, who doesn’t, tends to be more materialist and ethnographic), but here I think they have the same goal, but a real argument about what it would mean/take to get there. I like Latour’s point about representing multiple interiorities and feeel like it’s probably the more relevant point for historians (I’ve also used Bettina Aptheker’s phrase “pivoting the center,” from the same period, to get at issues of narrative representation). Harraway’s point, however, is that, whatever wonderful imaginative capacities we have to understand and represent the insides of others, we only get one corporeal self at a time to do that imaginative work from. Whatever cybernetic assistance we have to shift our point of view or capacity for viewing, it’s still particular socially constituted us-es doing so.
Like Latour, Haraway’s arguing with both false universalism and with the collapse into relativism. Where I think she goes further than Latour, in a good way, is in insisting that, rather than simply being a critique of the hubris of modernist objectivism or a collapse into radical subjectivity, situated knowledge is the basis for objectivity. To bring it back around to ari’s point up top, being soandso from thusandsuch doesn’t of itself give us more or less access to the truth of a situation, but truth is only ever gotten at by someones from somewheres.
January 9, 2009 at 2:24 pm
Carl
Neat! I think Latour is in turn trying to go further than Haraway when he says that “[t]he question is not one of multiplicity of points of view, the question is about the judgment of the accuracy of the account, and that is of course an open question depending on lots of other things.” But I, and he, have to suspend this assertion pending specification of both the account and the lots of other things, which also brings us back to ari’s point, which in this frame is about attempts to close the lots of other things down to only the one thing of personal or categorical experience.
From late in the same era of critical epistemology it’s also worth questioning the first premise that personal experience can or should be reduced to the body, the ethnicity or any other singular determinant — what Appiah called the “imperialism of identity” as against the multiple, fragmentary and even contradictory components of actual lived lives. “I see how the story goes. It may even be historically, strategically necessary for the story to go this way. But I think we need to go on to the next necessary step, which is to ask whether the identities constructed in this way are ones we can all be happy with in the long run” (Appiah and Gutmann, Color Conscious, 1996, pp. 98-9). So it may be possible to win battles in particular interactions by fronting up with a big chunky standpoint claim, but to lose the war when that standpoint turns out to be a nasty trap.
January 10, 2009 at 12:14 pm
herbert browne
“So it may be possible to win battles in particular interactions by fronting up with a big chunky standpoint claim, but to lose the war when that standpoint turns out to be a nasty trap…”
Like the opprobrium I bore for defending Palestinian land claims to the face of a Brooklyn native (& former kibbutz member) who convinced a small gathering that I was anti-Semitic, despite my assertion that Palestinians were Semites, too? ^..^