{"id":5424,"date":"2010-04-06T13:23:04","date_gmt":"2010-04-06T17:23:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=5424"},"modified":"2010-04-20T18:02:31","modified_gmt":"2010-04-20T22:02:31","slug":"response-to-asad-and-mahmood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2010\/04\/06\/response-to-asad-and-mahmood\/","title":{"rendered":"response to asad and mahmood 1\/4"},"content":{"rendered":"

Asad, Talal. Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, Saba Mahmood. Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech.<\/a> <\/em>California: The Townsend Center for the Humanities University of California Berkeley, 2009.<\/p>\n

The point is not simply to expand our capacities for description or to assert the plurality of frameworks, although it is doubtless a \u201cgood\u201d to know the cultural range of moral discourses on such questions if we are to be thoughtful and knowledgeable about the world in which we live. Nor is the point to embrace a cultural relativism that would attribute equivalence to all moral claims and position oneself as an outsider to the normative issues at hand. Rather, it seems most important to ask,<\/p>\n

what would judgment look like that took place not \u201cwithin\u201d one framework or another but which emerged at the very site of conflict, clash, divergence, overlapping? <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It would seem a practice of cultural translation<\/strong> would be a condition of such judgment, and that what is being judged is not only the question of whether a given action is injurious but also whether, if it is, legal remedies are the best way to approach the issue, and what other ways of acknowledging and repairing injury are available.<\/strong><\/p>\n

In my view, the point is to achieve a complex and comparative understanding of various moral discourses, not only to see why we evaluate (and value) certain norms as we do, but also to evaluate those very modes of evaluation. We do not merely shift from an evaluative position to a descriptive one (though I can see why taking a descriptive tone might work to defuse polemics on all sides), but rather seek to show that every description is already committed to an evaluative framework<\/span>, prior to the question of any explicit or posterior judgment. We may think that we first describe a phenomenon and then later subject it to judgment, but if the very phenomenon at issue only \u201cexists\u201d within certain evaluative frameworks, then norms precede description\u2014<\/span>as is surely the case when we think about the presumptive cultural and moral frameworks brought to bear on the discussions of blasphemy against Muhammad as well as those frameworks, mainly Muslim, that were not <\/em><\/strong>brought to bear. … secular terms should not have the power to define the meaning or effect of religious concepts<\/strong>. This is an important argument to make in order to combat a kind of structural injury, emblematized by events like the Danish cartoons, inflicted on religious and racial minorities (especially when religious minorities are racialized).<\/p>\n

… the point is to try to clarify why so many Muslims were outraged, and why something other than an attack on free speech by religious populations was at issue.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

… secular terms should not have the power to define the meaning or effect of religious concepts. This is an important argument to make in order to combat a kind of structural injury, emblematized by events like the Danish cartoons, inflicted on religious and racial minorities (especially when religious minorities are racialized). This last is a strong normative claim, and I want to suggest that it becomes possible to consider the injustice of this situation of hegemonic secularism<\/strong> only when we pass through a certain displacement of taken-for-granted modes of moral evaluation, including certain established juridical frameworks. A certain critical perspective emerges as a consequence of comparative work. An inquiry that understands that competing and converging moral discourses <\/strong>require a mode of cultural analysis, perhaps anthropological, affirms cultural difference as a constant point of reference in the effort to \u201cparochialize\u201d<\/strong> certain absolutist and monolithic conceptions of normativity that serve, implicitly or explicitly, forms of cultural ignorance, racism, conquest, and domination\u2014 or, as Asad puts it, the \u201cEuropean revulsion against Muslim immigrants and Islam.\u201d
\nAsad effectively poses the question,<\/p>\n

why is it that aggression in the name of God shocks secular liberal sensibilities, whereas the art of killing in the name of the secular nation, or democracy, does not?<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He points out that this kind of discrepancy or schism may well constitute a \u201ctension\u201d at the heart of the modern subject<\/strong>. And this is a useful and persuasive argument, in my view. But clearly something more is at stake. We would not be alarmed by the kinds of comparisons made explicit in Asad\u2019s questions if we did not ourselves undergo some moral horror or shock at the obvious inequalities demonstrated by the comparison. Asad\u2019s questions derive their rhetorical force from a sense that it is unacceptable to respond with righteous outrage to deaths caused by those who wage war in the name of religion and with moral complacency to deaths caused by those who wage war in the name of the nation-state. There are many reasons why one might oppose various forms of death dealing, but it is only on the condition that we do, in fact, oppose violence and the differential ways it is justified that we can come to understand the normative importance of the comparative judgment that Asad\u2019s work makes available to us.<\/p>\n

Asad\u2019s work not only provides new modes of description and understanding but also makes an intervention into evaluative frameworks and norms of evaluation themselves. By showing how normative dispositions (mainly secular and liberal) enter into stipulative claims (concerning objectionable violence and grievable death) that circumscribe the domain of \u201cunderstanding\u201d contemporary cultural and military conflict, Asad facilitates a critique of this parochial and consequential circumscription of operative evaluative frameworks.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Through a certain kind of comparative interrogation, one framework is interrupted by another, and thus opens up a new horizon for judgment. On the On the basis of this comparative and interruptive work, we can conclude that there is no reason to assume that justified violence, when it happens, is the sole prerogative of states, and that unjustified violence, when it happens, is the exercise of illegitimate states and insurgency movements. Such a conclusion not only has consequences for how we proceed normatively but also constitutes itself as a strong normative claim.<\/p>\n

If Asad\u2019s comparative questions upset us, as I think they do, that is because we become aware of the contingent conditions under which we feel shock, outrage, and moral revulsion. And since we can only make sense of why we would feel so much more horror in the face of one mode of death dealing than in the face of another through recourse to implicitly racist and civilizational schemes organizing and sustaining affect differentially, we end up feeling shocked and outraged by our lack of shock. <\/strong><\/p>\n

The posing of the comparative question, under the right conditions, induces new moral sentiments that are bound up with new moral judgments. We realize that we have already judged or evaluated the worth of certain lives over others, certain modes of death dealing over others, and that realization is at the same time a judgment, an evaluation, namely, that such differential judgments are unjustified and wrong.<\/strong><\/p>\n

For Benjamin, the principles of homogeneity, substitutability, and continuity that come to structure temporality and matter under conditions of capitalism have to be actively interrupted by the way in which the premodern erupts into the modern. Would this notion of critique not be useful to those who seek to show how the progressive conceits of secularization are confounded by animated anachronisms, fragments from the premodern that disrupt the claims of modernity, and prove central\u2014and potentially fatal\u2014to its operation?<\/p>\n

As a mode of living and even a mode of subject constitution, critique is understood as a \u201cpractice\u201d that incorporates norms into the very formation of the subject. The subject does not own itself, but is always dispossessed by the norms by which it is formed. Is this conception of no use to the critique of secular presumptions?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Even in Kant<\/strong>, it is important to note that critique is not precisely a judgment, but an inquiry into the conditions of possibility that make judgment possible<\/span>. That inquiry is, and must be, separate from judgment itself. The Kantian position is that our ways of knowing are structured prior to the possibility of our judgment<\/strong>, and that these form conditions of possibility for any judgment. Kant, of course, sought to understand the universal and timeless features of cognition in his effort to articulate the preconditions of judgment, but it is surely possible to transpose a Kantian procedure onto a historical scheme, as Foucault sought to do.<\/span> When that happens we can ask, how is our knowledge organized by specific historical schemes prior to any possibility of judgment, and how do our judgments rely upon those prior organizations of knowledge?<\/strong> If this is right, and if this constitutes a certain historical transposition of the Kantian project of \u201ccritique,\u201d then<\/p>\n

critique would be an inquiry into the ways that knowledge is organized prior to the specific acts of knowledge we perform, including the kinds of judgments we make.\u00a0 In this sense, following Kant, critique is prior to judgment and perhaps closer to Asad\u2019s project than would at first appear.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

When we ask what historically formed schemes of evaluation<\/strong><\/em> condition and inform our shock and outrage over suicide bombing and our righteous coldness in the face of statesponsored violence, it seems to me that we are trying to delimit the historical conditions of possibility for affective and evaluative response.<\/span> Asad and Mahmood both have tried to show how secularism functions tacitly to structure and organize our moral responses within a dominant Euro-Atlantic context, and in so doing they seem to be asking us to call into question the taken-forgranted ways that such schemes inform and move us.<\/p>\n

Comparative work, perhaps anthropology itself, seeks to displace us from that taken-for-granted set of presumptions, ones that assume a certain process of secularization as yielding universal truths, and that therefore parochialize a very specific, sometimes lethal, tradition within the West.<\/p>\n

It seems to me that critique designates the process of trying to delimit knowledge, indicating not so much a completed or successful action as an ongoing task to fathom and describe the various ways of organizing knowledge that are tacitly operating as the preconditions of various \u201cacts\u201d of knowledge.<\/span> This incomplete effort to delimit and name the conditions of possibility is not itself a judgment; it is an effort to fathom, collect, and identify that upon which we depend when we claim to know anything at all.<\/em> The ways to do this are various:<\/p>\n

through tracing internal contradictions, through comparing and contrasting alternative cultural lexicons for similar concepts, through offering a historical account of how a set of culturally specific assumptions became recast as universal and postcultural. <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If this is one set of critical practices, how different is \u201ccritique\u201d from Asad\u2019s own critical procedure, finally?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Asad, Talal. Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, Saba Mahmood. Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech. California: The Townsend Center for the Humanities University of California Berkeley, 2009. The point is not simply to expand our capacities for description or to assert the plurality of frameworks, although it is doubtless a \u201cgood\u201d to know the … Continue reading “response to asad and mahmood 1\/4”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[78,120,55],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5424","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-butler","category-frames","category-normative"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5424","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5424"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5424\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5426,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5424\/revisions\/5426"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5424"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5424"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5424"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}