Symposia on Gender, Race and Philosophy

[Pages:5]Symposia on Gender, Race and Philosophy

Volume 13, number 1. Spring 2019



"Multiplicitous Selves": Comments on Mariana Ortega's In-Between: Latina Feminist Phenomenology, Multiplicity, and the Self

Linda Mart?n Alcoff Department of Philosophy CUNY Graduate Center New York, NY 10016 lmartina@hunter.cuny.edu

The normative position on the self in most of the western philosophical discussions, in all but the most recent continental work, has taken a coherent, unified self to be a normative goal, a criterion of adequacy for agency and self-respect. As Edwina Barvosa showed in her 2008 book Wealth of Selves, philosophical accounts of the self have tended to treat multiplicity and internal difference as a problem to be overcome, a sign of moral weakness or poorly developed agential capacity. Alasdair MacIntyre argued, for example, that

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a divided self is a serious challenge to moral agency: since to have a divided self is to "lack those virtues of integrity and constancy that are prerequisites for exercising powers of moral agency"(quoted in Barvosa 2008, 87). A multiplicitous self, on this sort of view, would be a self that is not striving for constancy or coherence, and indicative of the sort of person who settles for expediency and utility without striving to develop one's own considered judgment. For MacIntyre, the normative standard of responsible selfhood should be to strive to act the same, or present the same self, in every circumstance, because to do otherwise is to dissemble, or to play-act. On this sort of view, a multiplicitous self may be caused by psychological dysfunction or social oppression, and thus not subject to moral approbation, and yet it is certainly not any kind of normative state.

One of the most striking distinctions in Latina feminist theory is the 180-degree turn from this trend of thinking. Most notably, Gloria Anzald?a, Mar?a Lugones, others such as Edwina Barvosa, and now Mariana Ortega have developed extensive accounts of complex and pluralist notions of personhood. In her book, Ortega charts this trend, thoroughly and deeply investigates and challenges the articulation of multiplicity among Latina feminist authors, and significantly advances the discussion.

There are certainly many in our discipline who might be skeptical about categories such as "Latina philosophy" or "Latina feminist phenomenology," as a philosophical trend marked by an apparently unified ethno-racial category. (It's like suggesting there is white metaphysics, or western ways of knowing.) Yet it is striking that Latina philosophers, myself included, have been exploring for some decades the possibility of thinking through difference and sociality in the core of the self.

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In these remarks I want to explore the sort of normative questions that MacIntyre raises but put them into more of a political framing: if multiplicity is an effect of marginalization, social oppression, the inability to express ourselves fully in dominant spaces and contexts, then what is the normative condition, here, that we want to struggle toward?

The thematic focus of Ortega's important book is to think philosophically and systematically through the common experience of self-differentiation for many immigrants, marginalized, and colonized peoples. Their/our experience both in public and private contexts often disallows constancy of character, or consistency in self-expression. As Ortega suggests, the ready-to-hand nature of conventional and acceptable norms and practices are disrupted when one must learn to inhabit multiple worlds. Ortega makes productive use of the Heideggerian concept of "world" here as meaningful, constituted through a relation between self and context. For Heidegger the idea that a world is made up of objects in spatial relation is symptomatic of the alienated condition of western techne. It can be useful to speak of worlds as an ontic totality of the present-to-hand, but our most primordial state is the existential mode of meaning-laden, concernful relationality. If the world and self are co-constituting, then to travel worlds has a self-constituting implication.

The concept of traveling does not, of course, always imply this kind of existential shift. A privileged western tourist can bring their worldhood with them, framing its new content through their existing values and concepts without experiencing rupture. But here is where we need a political analysis of the conditions that make such self-maintenance and worldmaintenance possible: the smiling servants, cushioned travel apparatus, familiar logos, and so forth that renders the privileged self secure, most importantly, by segregating them from the subjective viewpoint of the natives or locals.

Commentary on Ortega

But a forced march of world traveling can produce critical consciousness, when the unconscious habits of the ready-tohand are displaced and one gains a more reflexively aware sense of the worldhood of the world. This can expand agency rather than retracting it. Hence, agency, both moral and epistemic, would be enhanced, not diminished, by the rupture of enforced multiplicity.

There are several questions that come to the fore here: (1) how should we best characterize, and understand, in an ontological and existential sense, the experience of multiplicity in the self, or at what level the multiplicity is located; (2) how can we best understand the nature of agency and self-formation in this instance; and (3) is this an account that suggests the need to revise the standard general ideas about the nature of the self? Or are selves like Ortega's and my own--multi-national, diasporic, immigrant--fundamentally constituted differently than those who stay rather than move?

For Ortega, the multiplicitous self is unified by temporal continuity. This is the core of her disagreement with Lugones, who initially described world-traveling as the constitution of multiple selves. For Ortega, a more Heideggerian approach to the self can accommodate the multiplicity of the self without positing, as Lugones does, multiple selves because it understands Dasein as a formation in process that undergoes constant change. More than Sartre, Heidegger emphasizes the receptive and passive nature of the self, rather than a self that is always constituting. So the process and making aspects of selfhood in the Heideggerian approach are more Bergsonian than Kierkegaardian, and I share Ortega's view that with Heidegger one gets an account of the self more cognizant of the ways we are attuned to worlds without exercising any kind of mastery. This is really important, since the `making' imagery in Nietzsche or Butler can lend itself to an excessive agential volition, especially when it resonates with liberal ideals of

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autonomy and what are perhaps western and masculinist assumptions about separability of selves. But note that this renders the multiplicitousness of the self at a deeper level: it is a self that is thrown, and hence produced in a co-constituted relationality.

What Ortega also gains from Heidegger is an interesting focus on the affective variations in self-world relations, from being at-ease to thrownness to the anxiety of alienation. These concepts helpfully convey the everyday sensations of the marginalized immigrant. But this also raises the question about how far a Heidegger/Ortega fusion can go in order to provide an existential analytic of power differences. The Heideggerian/Kierkegaardian tradition portrays anxiety in generic terms in relation to universal conditions of thrownness, being towards death, the judgments of the they (das Man) who disciplines non-conformers.

Alternatively, we might ask whether the existential tradition is as generic as it believes itself to be. European philosophers in this tradition tended to present their analyses as descriptive of universal conditions of human experience, without need of specification in terms of social or cultural location. For example, Heidegger's critique of modernity's love affair with techne is explained in universal terms as motivated by the fear of death rather than by any specific colonial subject-formation that may be wedded to mastery over nature. This motivates me to ask Ortega to speak more to Heidegger's limitations than she does in this text, and to the more general question of how we move from the generic existential to a more effective historical consciousness.

Many other feminists prefer the work of Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir, and Sartre given their more situated reflections. Merleau-Ponty develops an account particularly useful for feminism and critical race philosophy of the way in which

Commentary on Ortega

one's perceptual apparatus and sensibilities can be socially shaped, and how our capacity to become reflective about this can enhance a critical consciousness. Just to give one example, he explored how WWII rendered his previous individualist assumptions about the irrelevance of group identities more visible (Merleau-Ponty 1964, 139-152). But note that in making this point, Merleau-Ponty is not simply offering a relativist take on contrasting conventions, but a normative comparison. The fact that previously he did not believe in the relevance of group identities wasn't because of the vagaries of his neural mechanism, but rather because of the type of education he had received, what we might today call a learned ignorance, a white and male and majoritarian entitlement to the belief in one's own volitional control, or in one's objective or nonspecific way of being in the world.

From this I want to raise the question of the epistemic benefits of world-traveling as well as the evaluative comparisons we might make of contrasting worlds.

Lugones's account of world traveling was initially introduced as an anti-racist intervention within feminist theory. Her project was to explain to dominant groups how deeply they need to delve into their self-formation in order to understand the spaces that the marginalized inhabit. Similarly, Anzald?a's analysis of multiplicity was motivated by a concern to destabilize the normative status of the unified and harmonious. So (unlike Heidegger) their work is embedded within historically specific liberatory projects.

I find the concept of a multiplicitous self very helpful in this moment of transnational migrations of peoples but also of practices and ideas and cultures. There is a wave of resistance against authoritative canons and unified gatekeepers, a sense that liberation should not simply replace dominant texts or ideas so much as pluralize our spaces and our disciplines, in

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which difference is understood at the core and not simply at the periphery of a discipline such as philosophy or a nation such as the United States. What effects does this trend have on our ability to formulate critique and resist a facile pluralism that would replace canons with apolitical inclusions?

In this context it is important to note that Anzald?a's writing was not a simple celebration of multiplicity but also an account of the open wound of the border, the painful dislocations, alienations, misunderstandings, invisibilizations. Fragmentation and internal differentiation can be experienced as a dismembering. Hence, Anzald?a endeavored to chart a way toward healing and integration, claiming that the spiritual self can integrate the whole. And Anzald?a articulates, as Ortega shows, the need to continue to use group labels, so that the varied aspects of herself will not be ignored and diminished. Anzald?a's is a complex account, affirming and honoring multiplicity, multiple allegiances and multiple forms of relationality, while acknowledging the concomitant difficulty and pain. She can affirm group identity categories as having a purchase on the reality of her life even while she criticizes oppositional identity politics and notes the "different ways in which nos/otras becomes nosotras" (1987, 22). The new tribalism, Anzald?a writes, needs to remain open-ended to new interactions.

Ortega's tone unites with Anzald?a's very materialist concept of border identities, bristling when the border is taken up in a metaphorical sense by people who in actuality occupy "spaces in academic institutions informed by and promoting privilege [and who] do not need to actually cross the border to survive, to get educated, to sell goods" (Ortega 2016, 31). It is this material approach to identity that makes us both refrain from wholly endorsing Angela Davis's idea that one should base identity on politics rather than politics on identity (Ortega 2016, 163).

Commentary on Ortega

Against Davis, Ortega argues that, although Davis's claim is "an important response to narrow conceptions of identity politics [...] we need to recognize the intertwining of politics and identity. Coalitional politics recognize the importance of not only common location for members of groups but also of relations-with others" (2016, 163). Identities are not simply volitional constructs; a deeper understanding of our existential condition will reveal the way our being is always already being-there, in relation to worlds.

For me, Ortega's approach to multiplicitous selves provides a realistic rendering of the metaphysics of our condition, both universal and particular. Thus, I find it compatible with the view Ortega criticizes in her book, Paula Moya's (2002) postpositivist realism about identity. Ortega worries that by arguing that some renditions of identity (such as "Chicana" against `Spanish") are epistemically better, Moya's approach would curtail the fluidity of selves in the making, and that a realist view in general, even a post-positivist one, cannot but fail to appreciate multiplicity. In my view, Ortega has made a powerful case that multiplicitous selves are real. The realist language that Moya and I use is compatible with the claim that identities are historically constructed, fluid, and multiplicitous, but it helps to deflect overly volitional and individualist characterizations of identity formation. Identities operate in worlds of sense, and to transform identities we must transform these worlds. Both Moya and Ortega, however, remind us that the political conditions that constitute selves under all circumstances need to be central features of philosophical analysis.

Bibliography

Anzald?a, Gloria. 1987. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Press.

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Barvosa, Edwina. 2008. Wealth of Selves: Multiple Identities, Mestiza Consciousness, and the Subject of Politics. College Station: Texas A&M Press.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1964. "The War Has Taken Place." In Sense and Non-Sense, translated by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus, 139?52. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

Moya, Paula. 2002. Learning from Experience: Minority Identities, Multicultural Struggles. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Ortega, Mariana. 2016. In-Between: Latina Feminist Phenomenology, Multiplicity, and the Self. Albany: SUNY Press.

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