Transcript
I want to thank Professor Briggs for a paper that gathers up so many of the themes of each session of this conference and speaks to them and calls forth our remarks. First, let me call forth the remarks of our respondents, and I'm going to urge them to get us started by launching one or two points in response to this paper, and then if they can do that to bring other points back during the substantive conversation we're
going to have otherwise, but perhaps first Professor Miller and then Professor West. I confess, I'm not altogether sure why I have been asked to respond to Professor Briggs' paper. It may be that it's simply time to get a white male up here. You will not have failed to notice that the white males attending this conference have taken cover and kept a proper silence, hopefully listening intently. I have no particular desire to break that pattern, but having
been conscripted by the planners and forced to do so, Professor Briggs, it is customary in this genre of response to say all sorts of positive words about the paper before us. For the sake of brevity, I will forgo that step. The richness of your paper and its intellectual demand need no confirmation from me. They get some testimony into many hours it took last night even to try to read your paper. I will skip over things, Mark,
having been instructed and jump in a little bit in the paper, and I acknowledge that I pick up and think about and reflect upon some dimensions of the paper that I think are of interest to me, and I'm not at all sure that they represent matters of primary interest to Professor Briggs, but represent where this particular respondent works and thinks, and they also may have to do with what I had time to read and think about
last night within the paper. One of the things that Professor Briggs does, among other things, and many things happen in this paper, I think, by the way, that in some ways the most important contribution to our work in thinking in the conference is not something that I will even comment upon, and that's her analysis of the structural difference in the identities of gender, race and class. Certainly our conversations together in these days have demonstrated the difficulty
of creating a hermeneutical melting pot of gender, race and class, although the effort may be necessary because the fact those identities are not simply distributed among us but are all mixed up within each of us. Within this paper, among the things that happens is that Professor Briggs challenges not just the structures of hierarchicalism, dualism, androcentricity, patriarchy and the like about which we have talked in previous sessions, even those of us who have thrived on these realities
know that they cannot properly withstand challenge. But Briggs goes much further to challenge the whole hermeneutical tradition as a reflection of the power of cultural hegemony and indeed has challenged some of those hermeneutical dimensions that we who work in what one might call traditional biblical scholarship have thought were enduring, valid and beyond dispute or difference. Let me mention a few of those that have been aspects of my own hermeneutical labors with some reflection and response to
the position taken, and one or two of these are very subordinate in her discussion. But she notes that in the shift of hermeneutics from text to social practice that takes place in a liberation hermeneutics, she sees a refutation of the idea that scripture interprets itself, scripture interprets scripture, surely one of the oldest and most revered of hermeneutical principles within the Christian tradition. The refutation is against a biblical positivism and its concomitant authoritarian doctrine of revelation. This
is therefore an understanding of the principle restrictively and as a controlling factor. As such it seems to me the critique is valid. But that is not the only function of the principle. In the work of Phyllis Trible for example or in the paper of Professor Weems yesterday, the principle is a significant aspect of liberation hermeneutics. It is precisely what uncovers the Bible's diversity conflicts, changes, minority voices and abrasiveness to dominant hermeneutics. For Weems for example, it
is the critical tool to expose the problems and dangers of election and to overcome them. A second challenge that arises out of Briggs analysis of liberation hermeneutics to tried and true and confident dimensions of much of biblical hermeneutics is to the authority of the text. A move has been made from the authority of the text to the authority of practice and in the process there is an unmasking of the, this is from her paper, the ideological
character of a search for the grounding of the liberation of the oppressed in something external and supposedly more fundamental to it. Such a request itself can be seen as dependent on a particular social position and its form of knowledge. This move that is under critique is, I must confess, my instinct as one who is grounded and tradition in the text and for whom the text as interpreted in the tradition has not undermined my social position, though
it has always threatened it, a fact that must not be lost I think. It may be therefore that what those in dominant social position have to learn in here is precisely that the critical principle interpreting our sacred text may not be grounded in that text as we have always assumed. This is certainly a significant aspect of feminism's emphasis on the experience of women. Then however, it may be very important if anything is going to happen to
move those in dominant social position if the critical principle that has its own justification out of the experience of the oppressed community, that is, the liberation of oppressed peoples as critical principle. It may be very important if that critical principle is consonant with or resonates with the basic critical principle within the text. The appropriation of the Exodus story has been because it really is a kind of critical principle within scripture. It is echoed in various other
ways, most specifically for example the Sabbath and the sabbatical principle that builds into the system relief from oppressive labor, particularly for male and female slaves or servants. Here therefore the consonance of the principle out of experience and the principle out of text may be an important aspect of the strategy of socially transformative praxis. Third, one that I want to mention is the problematic character of the search for or even more the claim for what is normative.
That term has become a bad word in contemporary liberation and feminist hermeneutics. And those of us who are accustomed to using it easily need to understand why that is so and begin to understand the connections between the normative and the exercise of power about which Professor Briggs talks. What I think I see in the paper however is a search for something that would replace that for the sake of dealing with the multiplication and fragmentation of identity.
It seems to me that it may be that Briggs is seeking that in the notion of continuity, the search for continuity to human experience outside of the social identities or a continuity of women's identity which is not merely the other side of the coin to the enduring cultural traditions of patriarchy. I'm not sure whether that is happening or how much reflection has gone into that interest in continuity. I am drawn to it and interested in it.
I find myself still asking if the text can be not so much normative as a common ground for conversation about our life with one another and God's way with us. What seems clear from these conversations in these two days is that maybe the one thing, maybe the only thing we have in common is these texts whose effects and readings are multiple, destructive, redemptive, patriarchal, critical, revolutionary, ideological and whatever. It may be the text as talked about
in our diversity, our multiple and fragmented identities and the as talked about is as essential as the text in that phrase. It may be that can help create a human common ground that challenges oppression, hierarchalism and the like. I feel the force and the truth of what Professor Tolbert said yesterday about those of us in biblical studies and others too, I guess, liking to turn to the text because it can be a hiding place, but it
is also the case that the text can be as much as anything that unmasks and strips away the hiding places. We do need to remember to whatever extent this may be possible or true that this is a common ground, not a universal common ground. There are those who share identities with us without sharing these texts or with other texts. The reality of that and the difficulty it poses seems to me to have been indicated by Professor
Stein's contribution to the discussion yesterday afternoon. The fourth cherished hermeneutical and theological dimension that I'm mentioning coming under fire is the universal. Let me address it vis-a-vis a very important statement at the beginning of the paper on page three where Professor Briggs says that the acceptance of pluralism is not equivalent to the acknowledgement of difference. Now that seems to me to be a key point, or maybe it's simply one that I am trying to
work with, and that one of the primary challenges to various aspects of contemporary hermeneutics or our working in the task of interpretation is to move beyond the acceptance of pluralism, which is done rather easily, but often quietly, regretfully, and because it is a reality and there's nothing we can do about it, to the acknowledgement of difference. The language here is carefully chosen. Acknowledge means, according to one standard dictionary, and obviously had some fun looking at this,
but it seemed to me carefully chosen language, to confess, avow, or admit the existence, reality, or truth of, to recognize as being valid or having force or power. It goes on to say that the verb in this expression, to acknowledge difference, means to make a disclosure sometimes with reluctance or under pressure. I have discovered or disclosed sometimes with reluctance or under pressure, maybe always, the validity and power of difference. Such acknowledgement means a loss of control,
which I take it is what Briggs means by cultural hegemony, and what I think we have to risk saying to each other is that control must be relinquished and not passed on to somebody else, though for a person like me to say that is possibly to mask a reluctance to relinquish control. Such relinquishment, if it is necessary for all of us, does not mean that we give up assessment or critique, which belongs always to the hermeneutical
enterprise. In this connection, by the way, one of the statements that I would like to hear Professor Briggs elaborate on is in the context of her critique of the universally human effort, when she says one can attempt to redefine the universally human in terms of an authentically universal human interest. I am interested in the difference between those two. My final comment on the paper is to ask if it is not finally nihilistic, and I am trying
to use the term descriptively and not pejoratively, in its conclusion so that much of what persons here and others like them have done and are doing is rendered sufficiently problematic that Professor Briggs finally concludes that the hermeneutical enterprise is incapable of helping women, blacks, and poor with the task of naming and claiming identity as an act of resistance to the cultural hegemony of a society dominated by persons like myself. To be more specific and at the
risk of oversimplification, but perhaps no more so than I think would be the case with Professor Briggs, let me take some of her examples, a universalist definition of the human is seen as problematic, and thus it looks to me as if perhaps the work and proposals of Professor Weems become problematic. An essentialist view of particularity is seen as problematic, and I think I have heard that at times here. I thought I heard it in a comment
yesterday by Professor McDowell, but I may have latched on to a particular comment and not represent her position, so they're just things I've heard in there. Social construction as hermeneutic is also problematic, even though Professor Briggs favors that, but that seems to raise questions about what I think Professor Paris talked about yesterday in conversation with Professor Weems, or if historical reconstruction can generate into a necrophilic alienation of the past, irrecoverable experience of fragmented subjugated yet resisting
identities into a frame of meaning where they're interpreted but fundamentally misknown, this is in the last comments of the paper, then does that mean that the work of Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza is called into question? Or at the bottom of page 27 following that sentence, if the search for alternative traditions and a usable past can also be the inversion but not the abrogation of cultural hegemony, then does that make fundamentally problematic the work of Phyllis Trible or
maybe even the kind of exemplary interpretation carried on by Professor Williams yesterday? I may not have really properly connected these comments to what persons have done, but if so, then to whom do they refer? Maybe all of that, if it is at all correct, is to demonstrate Briggs' point. It makes me want to ask finally, however, about the last two sentences of her paper and where they take us past this impasse. Our way of knowing the
past, this is her last two sentences, must correspond to the multiplicity and fragmentation of identity which are always present in the particularities of race, class, and gender. Identity is inscribed in social practices, but the epistemological access to them is not along the path of hermeneutics. That conclusion forms an inclusio around the paper with a sentence on the opening page to it, one has to account for why one privileges the hermeneutic over other epistemological categories in one's
approach to the biblical text. And I would simply like to hear more about that, and that is by what path is identity best known or found? And I'm confident that Professor Briggs has continued to think about that. Yeah, I'd first like to say that Professor Briggs' paper strikes me as being thoroughly brilliant. I have not seen a comprehensive treatment of these kinds of issues with such clarity and power. I think it's important to note the degree
to which her project does still build upon the problematic of historical consciousness. And what I mean by that is the radical contingency and tentativity and provisionality of our claims and our interpretations and our lives and our struggles and our movements. And the question becomes, and how do you take seriously on the one hand normative foundations, and how do you take seriously on the other what has been handed down to you, i .e. tradition, given this radical
historical orientation? And this goes back in part to Hegel and Marx, it goes back in part to Charles Peirce and John Dewey, but she's using this principle of historical specificity on the one hand, and another principle of materiality of social practices on the other, to turn it against the Eurocentrism, the patriarchy, the racism, the xenophobia, we can go on and on, of the classical highbrow humanist traditions that claim to be serious about history as well as
morality and so forth. Now, the shift that she talks about, this hermeneutical shift, I think it's quite important because it means that she accepts the claim that the Enlightenment was putting forth a myth when it claimed to be enacting a prejudice against prejudice. That is to say, to do away with all conceptions of prejudice and tradition, or associating tradition with the docile, the deferential, the ignorant, and the intolerant. It's exploding that notion of tradition and understanding
tradition as a set of dynamic social and interpretive practices, interlocking, interdependent, and so forth. And it means that I think, and here I slightly disagree with Professor Briggs, that tradition as a term itself, it's not a bourgeois hegemonic concept, it's deployed in a certain way so that it's tradition capital T, the kind of tradition that T. S. Eliot talked about in the powerful 1919 essay, tradition and individual talent. When he said tradition is something you don't
inherit, you have to labor and fight for it, and what he meant was his tradition was in trouble given World War I, and he had to fight for it, he had to reconstitute a civilization in fragments. But that's tradition capital T. There also are traditions, because if you historicize, you must pluralize. There are traditions of people from below, and they can be deployed in subversive ways rather than traditional less ways. And this does surface in the
latter sentences of her paper, where she argued that there's alternative traditions. It reminds one of Raymond Williams' powerful formulation of traditions as dominant traditions, alternative traditions and emergent traditions. And in fact, what I see, given the decolonization of process in this century, is the attempt of subaltern and subordinated peoples to reconstitute their sense of what their tradition is, because traditions themselves are constructed and invented as they extend the very traditions that you're attempting to construct and
invent. Of course, a point that Eric Hobsbawm has made with power in his book, "Tradition is Invention". So this battle over tradition shifting now from texts, understanding of course that texts were nothing but what John Paul Sartre called the practical inert, namely congealed and embodied practices anyway. But this move from text to practices then forces us, and here I think Professor Briggs is on to something that we all must take quite seriously. Namely, what is the
relation between hermeneutics and social theory? And what I mean by that is what is the relation between interpretation and explanation? And she did some explaining when she put forward the structural differences between class and race and gender and so forth. But it means then that we're forced to retool, because if what she's talking about is true, and we put true in inverted commas, because we don't really yet have a conception of truth that we can deploy
at this point given this historical orientation. If it's acceptable, then it means we have to come up with social analytical tools, which means looking back on traditions of social analysis that allow us to explain as well as interpret. What's interesting about Gadamer's work is that he interprets and doesn't explain a thing. And by explain, I mean give an account for. By interpret, I mean produce a meaning. He produces meaning. Producing meanings are different than giving an
account for. And to give an account for is a social theoretical operation. It's not a hermeneutical operation. And when Professor Briggs invokes Anthony Giddens' work, she's invoking someone who has struggled with this relation because he is a social scientist. He is a social theorist who believes that in reading Gadamer and the later Heidegger and others, it forces him into social theoretical analysis given a certain kind of sophistication of philosophical awareness. In addition, it seems to me,
when Professor Briggs talks about the white middle-class male, I'm a bit leery of that term because I think that's also a myth that white middle-class males don't run American society. White well-to-do ruling-class males do, but not white middle-class males. White middle-class males are working-class males with a bourgeois patriarchal identity for the most part, but that's still very different than ruling and dominating. And if we're going to be precise,
or at least as precise as we can be given the old Aristotelian maxim, then we have to deploy our terms in such a way that it reflects our social analysis and reflects our social theoretical explanations. And we can't explain American society by arguing that white middle-class males run the darn thing. They play crucial roles in reproducing it that's different than ruling, because some of us play crucial roles in reproducing the darn thing. We won't get
into that, given our bourgeois status. But at the same time, it doesn't blur the distinction between the privileges of white middle-class males, but that's a different claim that they rule, that they dominate. It forces us then, as I said before, into the wilderness of social theory. And I think this wilderness is something that very few hermeneutical thinkers, let alone biblical scholars, have begun to blaze. Very few indeed. In fact, very few philosophers have. Very few
literary critics have. One last point, and that is the challenge of Habermas here. I think one silence is Habermas, because when we talk about mainstream hermeneutics and mainstream philosophy, certainly one has to grapple with Habermas's challenge to, on the one hand, the traditions of those on the underside of history, and on the other hand, his critique of Gadamer and others. In this fourth section of the eleventh lecture of his recent text, "Philosophical Discourse of Modernity", which
is a powerful text in its own way, he makes the claim that one can no longer hold on to what he calls praxis philosophy, and he has in mind Dewey on the one hand and Antonio Gramsci on the other, who are the two grand embodiments of pragmatism and Marxism. He says we no longer accept linguistic historicism, which is Gadamer. We accept its insights, but we no longer can accept it because they're not interested in explanation, which
is to say he had no theory of action and so forth. But he says we no longer can accept praxis philosophy precisely because it talks about truth and efficacy, but it doesn't talk about validity. Or in his fourfold category, it talks about truth and usefulness, but it doesn't talk about rightness and truthfulness within a dialogical context. And what he's claiming there is, is that there is an incipient relativism, or what Professor Miller calls nihilism, at work
in a project that remains at the level of praxis philosophy. Now this is a challenge to myself as well, because I consider myself a praxis philosopher, and so the grappling with Habermas here in many ways is a mutual kind of affair here. But I do think that Professor Briggs's position has to meet this issue head on. What Habermas is fundamentally claiming, of course, is that there must be normative foundations which themselves in some way transcend the
dynamic social practices, not to say they're not forms of social practices, but you have to be able to transcend it in some sense for a critique to be brought forward, for a critique to have normative power, for reasons to have force. And if it doesn't, then one remains solely within one's own community talking to the true believers, but unable to convince those outside. And this is a challenge, because the question then becomes, how can one in
fact perform that function without going transcendental or quasi- transcendental in the way that Habermas does? This is an old problem, but it's a problem that comes back, and it's a problem that's worth mentioning, even given the kind of powerful and brilliant presentation we've heard. We'll start now and open up for questions. It is now approximately 10:35. Let us again break for coffee, which will be upstairs in the main lounge at the end of the
lobby. Do remember you can bring your refreshments back here so that we can get started again at about 10 minutes or 5 minutes till 11. Thank you. As I intimated in my appreciative remarks concerning Professor Briggs' paper, all of us who convened this conference this year can have been more pleased with the final paper we have had and the issues engaged directly and summarily by her. We have an opportunity to consider, to continue our discussion with
Professor Briggs and among us and with you, I would like to begin, as is customary, to allow our paper presenter to make any responses she feels appropriate and wishes to make to the respondents. Let me turn it back again to Professor Briggs. I've got a very difficult task to respond to the respondents since the responses were so rich in the perspectives and in the queries that they raised. Some of the points I'm going to deal with
now quite summarily because I don't want to take away too much time from the more general discussion which is going to involve the whole of us here, but that does not mean when I seem to skip over certain issues that I do not think that they are of critical importance and which I myself have either or will address in other contexts. Let me begin with Professor Miller's remarks. He began with focusing on the principle of Protestant
exegesis. Scripture interprets and I think that what he brought up here and Professor Rims did that yesterday is that there is a real divergence here between feminists because of the particular denominational backgrounds that they come out of. I think that although, and I will say a little bit more about this, although there are differences between myself and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza in our approach to the biblical text, that we share the fundamentally Catholic position, that the Bible
is the book of the church, therefore from a Catholic perspective and a feminist Catholic perspective there is an inbuilt tendency to go behind the text to the community. Then what I find it most difficult to respond to was the final remarks of Professor Miller. I did not use, I did not at least understand his phrase nihilistic as a tall pejorative, but in fact indicating a very real problem that all of us are faced with today who
wish to break out of the hegemonic categories of theological discourse. What we are in is a between two worlds. One has given up not only an attempt to understand Christian faith in terms of traditional metaphysics, that is not distinctive of liberation perspectives, but one has also questioned, particularly within feminist theology, the very notion of an ontological grounding of human existence and therefore an ontological grounding of human discourse. Now we've questioned that and in many cases we've
rejected that, but we do not have, this is my claim, a language to put in its place and I think that the form of this new language would be an adequate theory of social practices and I see hermeneutics not as providing that, but I also don't think that I have here have also suggested a theory of social practices and so that is a genuine deficit and as long as that deficit is there, then I think the
term nihilistic is applicable because although I do not want to go back to the past categories, I do somehow leave us literally spending. Passing on now to Cornell's rest remarks. Again, as usual, I am just simply impressed by the sheer intellectual power and versatility which can bring literally a moment's notice to bear on any discussion. Again, I'm not going to go into all the points, I will do it summarily. For instance, the issue of white
middle-class males. I myself am not all that happy with the term because in fact the analysis of class society really cannot be done in terms of a dualism. I think there's a certain slippage again from the discourse on gender. There's two sexes and so we often end up talking about two classes and dangerously I think also almost two races, whites and women persons of color, white men and women of color. There's almost the two opposites on
an ontological spectrum, so whereas in fact a social analysis requires a far more complex investigation of social reality. But the two points I want to concentrate on are tradition and then his closing remarks on which are particularly interesting to me. I think the issue of tradition is extremely difficult to get a handle on because in fact within, let's just say within Western society, our cultural hegemony has such pervasive effects that the way any group will try
and perceive a certain continuity will have resemblances to the way in which dominant social groups trace their genealogy. Now the question and unfortunately in a situation of cultural hegemony, this is always going to be a part of the great $64,000 question, is that in this situation it is really difficult to unravel the hegemonic aspects which have been internalized within one's identity and how one understands one's identity and are precisely what at one point I call
the surplus of identity. In some senses I really feel that we are not simply social constructed beings. There is something more but being able to express what that more is is in the situation of oppressive social reality, of marginalization, stigmatization, cultural hegemony are an impossible task or a task which can only occur in precisely within that dialectic of theory and praxis, which again is something that one would need to elaborate more carefully. And so the whole
question of tradition that when we talk, the problem is that when we talk about the cultures of non-elite groups as being traditions, then we tend to slip in to looking at our own cultures in a hegemonic way. One of these is, for instance, if I just take black women's literature, are the whole question of the canon. In black feminist literary criticism, one actually talks about expanding the canon. Now, of course, canon is a hegemonic term
which is actually based on exclusion, not inclusion. So, you know, what is trying to, I think, genuinely to subvert are the notion of canon. But in using it, you can also subvert one's liberative intent. The final remarks on what Cornell said are in terms of Habermas. And one of the things that I would say I'm particularly interested in these remarks, purely personal interest, because what I'm doing here is part of a larger project which is going
to be taken one step further at a conference on Habermas, which will take place in Chicago in the fall. And so today, I was intent upon saying, you know, why I want to get rid of hermeneutics. In October, I'm going to say, why I want to get rid of a Habermas. But let me give you a little preview of that. Some of this I mentioned in section four of the paper is that I actually agree to
a considerable extent with Habermas' critique of hermeneutics. And one of the points which I'd also ask back to Cornell is, in terms of Anthony Giddens, is that Anthony Giddens admires hermeneutics, in part because they have rejected Gadamer, particularly has rejected this distinction between interpretation and explanation. And Giddens admires this aspect of hermeneutics, Gadamerian hermeneutics, because Giddens is a positivistic paradigm for the social sciences. And Giddens actually criticizes Habermas precisely on this point. He says, isn't Habermas,
in his critique of hermeneutics, trying to reintroduce a distinction between interpretation and explanation by actually denying that there's a universal hermeneutical dimension to all knowledge. Now, I think that Cornel West today put his finger on the allergic point of that criticism, is that in terms of a social theory, that to subsume explanation into interpretation actually robs us of a tool for actually seeing how social oppression and resistance to social oppression works. That Habermas' critique of hermeneutics,
that the end result is understanding its agreement with tradition. Gadamer specifically rejects Habermas' emphasis on emancipation, and emancipation as an inevitable result of a certain form of knowledge. Gadamer wants to keep hermeneutics within this fluidity, which allows dialogue and discourse, but I think in the final end does not allow an emancipatory praxis. And I think that this particular debate is very important for biblical studies, because in terms of the politics of biblical studies, and this can
be generalized to the field of religion in general, is that one can be quite happy with a pluralism of interpretations, and that one in fact tries to diffuse the potential of alternative voices being brought to the biblical text by allowing a plurality of interpretations without trying to wish to adjudicate between them in terms of the social effect. Thank you very much. Let me see, first of all, if either of our two respondents would like to engage
Professor Briggs in conversation. Any other responses? I've got a very quick response in defense of counter-canonists, because I mean, I also have been very critical of Henry Lewis Gates and a host of others who are in the process now, of course, of constituting an African-American canon with the Norton Anthology and so forth, and I think that Professor Briggs's point is a good one about canon again being deployed for the most part for hegemonic reasons. But,
because since we live penultimately rather than ultimately, which is to say, in history, the master slaughterhouse of history is, isn't it the case that to engage in counter-hegemonic activity, that is to say, to put forward strategies and tactics that can push what is on one's neck a little further away, not completely off, that you're forced to put forward canons, but you put forward canons in such a way that you make a distinction between principled selectivity
and unwarranted exclusivity. And what that means is, is that the kind of exclusivism that has gone with hegemonic conceptions of canonicity, race-based, was racist and xenophobic and so on, that that can be held at arm's length, but we're forced to engage in some activity of discrimination and selectivity, because what it is to be organisms up against environments is to engage in some kind of selectivity. Similarly so in terms of canons. I mean, my short stories
have a different status than Ralph Ellison's, at least so far. Meaning what? Meaning that there's some other factors and variables that come into play such that we're forced to put forward some, I mean, canons in a certain sense are buffers up against the dominant canons to create some oppositional space. And that counter canon activity, which I think is so very important, must proceed on some kind of selectivity, but it would be very different than the kind of
old-style exclusivity that we've seen in the dominant canons, you see. And there, I think, a word for counter canons, a word for the Black Women's Project, a word for black literature in general, a word for Latin America, I mean, just a whole host of counter canons that's going on now is appropriate. I don't know whether you agree with that. I think I'll leave further remarks on that to the discussion. Only comment to say I think you're absolutely
right in that very specific directive to biblical interpretation. The pluralism of interpretations is a reality. The question is whether we simply are quite happy with it and unwilling to adjudicate not so much right and wrong, but at least in some way to maybe to say better or worse. I think I'm then back again with somewhat maybe the question that was there in the other as to what are the criteria for those decisions about what are better
or worse, but I think we have to search for them and make the judgments. Okay, thank you very much. If there is one theme, there are several here, but if there is one of particular interest to me, it's the notion of the ambiguity of something called hermeneutics. Somewhat facetiously, perhaps in reality, Professor Briggs has mentioned that on the way to getting rid of Habermas, she may also be getting rid of hermeneutics. I would like to ask
just one question, focusing right on that, to see if you would be willing to articulate any kind of continuity at all between the projects that go under that rubric hermeneutics. And that word is very ambiguous itself. The term is, yesterday Dolores Williams said in the heat of discussion, if you remember, I don't like the word, but I use it anyway, hermeneutics, hermeneutical. But under the rubric of hermeneutics, is there any continuity between its discourse and the
kind of discourse we've heard and seen today and in the previous days, where we're trying to give, not to give, but to acknowledge and see often voiceless and marginalized groups coming to voice in the academy in another context, is there any continuity between that effort and the project variously called hermeneutics? Two points. Firstly, to be fair to the mainstream, there's not a single paradigm of what hermeneutics is within the mainstream. For instance, Gadamer, who strongly emphasizes
that reason is traditionally imminent, absolutely rejects the notion of hermeneutics as a method. And the whole reformulation by him of the hermeneutical task over against the older 19th century view, which tried to save the social sciences and humanities from a positivistic paradigm. So within mainstream hermeneutics, there's never really been a clear definition of what hermeneutics, or a single, there's been clear definitions of what hermeneutics as a discipline is, but not one which has ever for a
considerable period of time been undisputed. And what feminists and others who have taken up the term of hermeneutics have done is to take up a category which is attractive precisely because it is ambiguous. That hermeneutics allows a suspicion. I think what Professor Wim said yesterday about the historical critical method and of course hermeneutics as a discipline actually has grown out of reflection on what historians, including biblical exegetes, do. That there is this inbuilt character of suspicion.
Therefore, the hermeneutics of suspicion, which is favored by Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza and others, is an extension of what in fact is, let us say, a core content within modern hermeneutics. There's a suspicion that the past can be appropriated as an objectively available content. I explained this partly in my paper in relationship to the notion of human beings as subjects. If one has a notion of the human being as a subject, then one assumes that in social
and cultural products that you're dealing with subjectivity. You can't sanitize in the way that the older paradigms of natural science did what human beings do in culture and society. There is that continuity within hermeneutics, a basic continuity of suspicion, which makes mainstream biblical exegetes be suspicious about claims who wrote a biblical book. Then, in its much more elaborated form, makes Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza suspicious about what the andro-centric text is hiding. There's that continuity, but what
I'm saying is that that continuity, let us say, hermeneutics as a vehicle of suspicion, gives it a certain usefulness, but that certain usefulness does not add up to viability for what I want and which is a theory of social practices. Thank you very much. I think we do need to turn now to our audience and others here. Could I ask you to please stand and speak very loudly so that people can hear throughout? I think it's
a fascinating paper that I really appreciate, and I agree with you that we need to wrestle with in the language of social practice. I've got two questions that may be moving a little beyond the paper, but still I think they'll be helpful to us. First one is, when you explore an individual identity, and this was a quick run through of the paper and I hope I'm doing justice to it with this question, I had the impression
that you were treating an individual very much within the Western tradition of an isolated entity. But when one makes this kind of analysis, one is still within the level of tradition, and very healthily pointed out the bankruptcy of that tradition, because not only does individual identity fragment and try to analyze it, but it also fragments in society and the capitalistic structure. So anyway, that's one problem. It seems to me that to move to a language means
to begin talking about persons, and talking about persons as relational realities in communities, and communities are communities of tradition and memory, and there are subversive communities as well as hegemonic communities. And you brought this yourself, and you brought in very well in how you opened our way of thinking about physical practice. So anyway, how are you really thinking about person? The second question that is in some ways a little more elusive for me, I get the
sense that you're imposing a kind of disjunction of interpretation of culture and social practice. And it seems to me the kind of crucial problem we face in the language of social practice is to begin to unpack the ways in which ideology and culture and utopian thinking interplay with social structures. And I thought, just as a concrete example of bringing back to our discussion yesterday, I thought this is exactly what we got into in the discussion between
Esther Fuchs and Dolores Williams. Dolores was making, I think, a very important racial and class analysis there of structure. Elizabeth Fuchs, Esther Fuchs, made a fascinating interpretation of the culture of hegemonic patriarchy, and how the two, the issue there was not to disjoin them, but to begin to explore how those two play into one another. So anyway, those two questions of individual identity and this problem of disjunction. Why don't you go ahead and respond if you
wish. Okay, I'm going to try and make my responses a little briefer than I have. In many ways, the best person to answer the first part of your question would be Dolores, because I've learned enormously from his work in which he stresses that within the Afro-American tradition, that one cherishes both individuality and democracy, that the notion of individual versus community rather than individual within community is not an issue, or the same issue for Afro-Americans
as it is for the mainstream culture, and I think there's a real problem with the critique of individualism, which is also historically situated just at the point where blacks and women make it to claiming rights as individuals. People suddenly decide individuals are a bad idea. And I think there's a real danger of a new discourse of repressive community, which I see represented by Walzer, whom I critique in my paper, but also by such people as McIntyre,
Bello and others. Your next point, the disjunction between social practices, cultural interpretation, let me impact that. I think that interpretation, in many cases against itself, at least in the Gadamerian sense, is a political strategy. And if you read Gadamer's essay on hermeneutics and the social sciences, Richie here also has a polemic against Habermas, that the assertion of a universal hermeneutic, hermeneutical dimension to all knowledge is specifically, has a specific political aim, which is a conservative one.
He is in fact bewailing a loss of cultural hegemony, which he sees as traditionally being represented by Christianity. And now, my God, we're in this terrible historical situation, where there's no common political and social ground. And let's just get people to conform to their traditions and to dialogue between traditions, so we can find some manner of common agreement, so that this common ground can be reconstituted. So, hermeneutics is in fact built into certain social practices, certain
political options. What I'm saying is that if one looks at hermeneutics precisely in this light, then one begins to ask how useful it is to stretch the term. I'm not bothered about the terms we use. If people want to talk about what they're doing as hermeneutics, whatever that is, that's fine with me, to a degree. But I think it can create certain confusion, because I think sometimes what somebody like Dolores Williams is saying when she uses
the term reluctantly, hermeneutics, is something which is not on the same spectrum as what in quotes the mainstream has been defined by hermeneutics. And at that point, we get back to what I said earlier, that in terms of canon, there is a use within oppositional discourse of claiming the weapons of the enemy. However, it also has its disadvantages, because when one claims those weapons, those weapons can become tools, very definite tools, with which you can only
rebuild the house of the master which you want to tear down. That, I think, is the difficulty which we are faced with. Another question, another voice. Yes, way in the back. Please stand. From the way you phrase this question, it's using a Foucauldian terminology, and then we're getting into a whole different ball game. What I would say briefly, I think, perhaps it's too specific, but I really want to focus this, is that hermeneutics treats the past
as what Foucault and the school of French historians known as the Nulls would call documents, and not as monuments, that one of the main problems of hermeneutics as a means of talking about what the historian does is to see what remains of the past of documents. Now, when I say documents, at least in the Gadamerian form, you don't believe that the historian goes and relives the past. That was the older hermeneutical position of Dilthey and others.
In fact, Gadamer explicitly denies that, but here precisely the hegemonic notion of tradition comes into play. That although one cannot reenact the experience of the past contained in certain documents, and if we read Paul's epistle to the Romans, we cannot have Paul's experience of the righteousness of God, we can't relive that, but that a document, when it is situated within a tradition, that that tradition mediates the document in such a way that although one doesn't relive
the subjectivity of the past, that nonetheless the text can place an objective claim upon one. This is why we talk about agreement with the text, that the text speaks. It's not the person who wrote the text or the experience of the person who wrote the text speaks, but the text speaks. Now, what I see the danger in that, in this notion of tradition and the text that speaks, is that the voices of the text in the
tradition are always voices, and I'm sure this is going to bring out a lot of comment, but our voices are reconstructed in the image of dominant social groups. I've got my visual and auditory metaphors mixed up here. What I'm saying is that when I approach the past in terms of the past of the press, what I'm looking for is what Foucault defines as monuments, which in fact confronts us with the alien character of the past, that
I just can't go back to the past and have a text of the oppressed speak to me. I think this is the critical point, that the past of the oppressed does refuse to speak, that I cannot parasitically feed my identity upon that, and I think it's precisely this form of parasitism that is implicit in so much historical method and is underpinned by the discipline of hermeneutics, that it seems to me to acknowledge the reality of difference
in the present, then one has to actually be far more aware of the impossibility of knowing the past, obviously in terms of knowing past subjectivity, but that there's a certain integrity to the past, which I think is violated by a certain type of interpretive activity. One of the interesting things about this animal we call hermeneutics, especially if we look at Gadamer as you've been doing, that in spite of the conservative character of his project and the
strong claims he makes for text and for tradition, and perhaps Gadamer works this way for centrist white males, I'm not sure, this was an issue when the advisory council for this project met, but in addition to privileging texts, and this is the way his work has functioned for me, he also sews a suspicion, or puts on the agenda, the reality of the contemporary interpreter who engages the text as past, so that there is, in his language,
a fusion of the horizon of the present with the horizon of the past. Now I think I'm in agreement with you that when all is said and done with Gadamer, there is that primary movement from tradition and text that places the present interpreter in a subordinate position, but it is there. Now that only carries me so far to some of the concerns of this conference. Once I see who the interpreter is, as Renita Weems' paper brought
out, and what the conditions of the interpreter are, are important, then I have to move out of Gadamer's realm of discourse in a way, or through it into encounter with the kinds of discourse we've heard and seen in this particular conference. Again, I'm back to that issue of the ambiguity of hermeneutics and the kind of continuity that might be there, which you were very helpful in illuminating, I think, earlier. Well, where are we with other questions
from the group and issues that need to be addressed? Let me take Professor McDowell here, and then the question at the back. I just have a very quick question. Are efforts to reconstruct the past always consistent with hegemonic practices? The question was, are efforts to reconstruct the past always consistent with hegemonic practices? I'll answer that on two levels. I think that with the historical methods that we have, and I'm not here pleading for an abandonment of
history, don't misunderstand me in that way, but I think that with the historical methods that we have, that there's always the seeds of hegemonic practice within our interpretation. Now, let me add immediately that some of the alternatives proposed to the historical critical method are even more problematic, and quite often I find myself defending that method because some of the supposedly radical alternatives to it I think yield a fertile ground for even worse hegemonic practices. Also, I
think since we are condemned, at least where we are to interpret the past, because the past is a mirror of identity, and that within a culture where historical consciousness is pervaded throughout society, not just within the elite groups, that everybody looks to the past for a mirror. So we are going to reconstruct the past. Now, let me focus this by saying how I arrived at my views initially. And I arrived at my views initially through work
I did on the Gospel of John. And with this text, I was faced, I began to realize that one of the reasons why one cannot understand the Gospel of John is that the author of the Gospel of John did not want that text to be understood by people outside that community. And that realization then became the basis for these broader theoretical reflections. What I'm saying is that when we reconstruct the past, that we're going to do
that, there's going to be seeds of hegemonic practice within that. But alongside that, to keep our historical method with, I think, in the necessary tension, then we have to realize that the oppressed did not in their own context want to be known, and that there is a real way in which one can violate the integrity of the past of the oppressed. And that is what we need to be aware of when we are engaging in historical
reconstruction. Yes, I'll give an example from present reality, but I think there are examples of this in the past. An example is a friend of mine, as a theologian, is going to be in an Appalachian community, and these people actually asked a sociologist and a theologian to go in, because they wanted their experience to be recorded, they wanted it to become part of the public realm. And I think that ties in precisely to what Cornell has
been stressing, that to have a counter-hegemonic practice, that this requires theoretical purity, sometimes taking over practices which derive from hegemonic culture, i .e. the ability to express oneself in the public realm with all the hegemonic content that goes with that. And I think that that is comparable to a certain practice in the past, and that is women's journal writing. That women wrote in the private journals because they didn't have anywhere else to write. And therefore,
the making known of those journals, the publication of those journals, the discussion of those journals, actually give an access to the public realm, which the actual producers of those journals desire. And that, for me, is ample justification. Now, the whole problem, and there's no way around this, is that the way we interpret, the way we mediate the meanings to our particular world, in terms of our particular questions, contains within it a certain amount of distortion. That's
almost inescapable. But, as I say, in this case, I'm not pleading for theoretical purity. You just have to accept a certain compromise with the cultural hegemony. Because I just want to know, where do we go after we've read all of Hayden White's books and anybody else who do it? It usually complicates history and historiography. What do we do once we understand the problem as a historical consciousness? Is there a way to both understand it at the
same time so that we try to do something within those constraints? And this takes back, too, the reference to canon formation with all the properties that we need to integrate with and whatever else we are used to, and that's a good thing. That there is a usefulness, a constructiveness in certain areas that's... Professor West, is this a place where you'd like to come in again? I think the point about theoretical purity here is very important, especially
if we acknowledge the degree to which we reconstruct the historical past as agents, not as spectators. And what I mean by that is, it's in relation to options and alternatives. And if we think historically, that's all we ever have. So that the seeds of the hegemonic are always already shot through. This is where I like what Professor Briggs said about the purity, because I was going to argue, look, there's no pristine space out there. This is
human history. This is the real thing, the ding an sich, right? This is the blood and the sweat and so forth. Now, given that, from an agential point of view, rather than a spectator, because the spectator's still concerned about corresponding and copying, right? The agent's concerned about creating new space, new options, new alternatives. Now, given that, then I think the Hayden Whites are quite understandable. Hayden Whites are late romantic. He valorizes imagination. As did the late romantics, he
no longer believed that you can enact any change in the world. You enact it by means of your imagination, imaginative acts, and so forth. But mediated by rhetorical tropes and a host of other things that he puts forward, you see. But what that means for those who are actually engaged in a praxis that has a materiality and a concentricity is, can information in relation to new possible forms of social insurgency transform this world in which we
live? Now, that's a romantic notion, because who wants to talk about hope and change in fundamental transformation these days? We live in a society that does, indeed, suffer from historical amnesia, which means that it's mediated, but the present and past is mediated by high-tech television practices. It's mediated by the documentary. It's mediated by the doctoral novels that are fragmented and so forth, and history comes back to us in pieces and so forth. And that's part
of what we're up against, you see. And so the very talk about history in this sense renders us very marginal, which is linked to the marginality of our politics, which is to say we're not winning presently, but we hope to do better. A question right here? Would you stand? Yes, thank you. Very good, thank you. Yes, back here, and then up front. Professor, please answer the question. I'm willing to say this is a character on the
museum's implementation of a particular understanding of what's going on in life today. I'm willing to do a social analysis, too, but I'm willing to believe that I'm coming to the end. As a matter of fact, seeing as we are dealing with human lives and that type of thing, how do you think we have to live by acknowledging the task of archaeology and the difficult process of cremating to rescue human life? My question to you is, if
you are faced with reality when people are dying, when you see it in society in the United States, there are still operations that are happening these days. You still have the suppression by people analyzing the paper. My question to you is, how are we going to change this Christian's structural progression? Instruction that is embedded in institutions, especially religious institutions, what strategies are we going to use seeing that we are in front of all these people and
the burdens of injustice in all manners? What are we supposed to do to create a new and responsible environment for society that we can have to become as two pieces of justice where we want? I'd like you to give me the opportunity now seeing that we have a better generation and how should we go beyond this point of social, political and social justice to create a new society? Would you care to choose a part of that
question to respond to briefly? I'm just going to make a very brief comment. Not so much on what I said but on the paper, but what I see in the whole process of this conference is that at this historical moment we have experienced in the society at large and in this particular conference the eruption of various identities and that very eruption challenges the way society is being conceived and because that eruption of identities is linked to
our actual politics, one thinks here of numerous things at present time the campaign of Jesse Jackson that that eruption of identities itself doesn't provide a solution on the political practices that have been created by the company do not provide a solution to a political crisis but it's out of that which a solution to a political crisis will come could come and that although this is in fact a little simplistic that it is engaging in social practices
which do not create some sort of abstract universal humanity but an actual coalition of actual human interests that one then begins to get the theoretical building blocks to replace what I see as inadequate anthropologists be they universalists, be they essentialists be they social constructionists so although it's simplistic you have to have the practice before you can have the theory so I cannot and in fact I'd be falling precisely into the trap of mainstream hermeneutics if I
did attempt to give you some answer of how do we go out there and transform society with our Christian faith when society has been transformed that one can actually say what the theory is very good we have time for just one more question I think right here yes, this is a real question trying to see if I see a connection between what Professor McDowell said together with Professor Jilts on the first night and what was said
later about the story, your analysis of Desi Rose definitely really is doing something with history that is different from what these traditions are and then as someone mentioned the appearance of the trickster and of course the turning of the ways of the oppressor into a movement for the oppressed and I think I'm here and this is not anything I do anything about at all what you were talking about I read the paper I understand but I
don't understand I see a connection and I want to ask McDowell or Gilkes or anyone else who might want to comment on whether there is a connection and I'm throwing it out as a possibility and I'm just trying to learn I don't want to put you on the spot but I think you can do it precisely the question is whether there are connections between the issues and analyses made by Professor McDowell and some of the it's
not Desi Rose as a novel an example of a creative imaginative re-history of the past in other words we have a different story from that novel than we had before that novel about a time that we heard a lot about read a lot about i .e. the era of slavery therefore getting this version which is imaginative which does all kinds of things with what someone might have documented is giving us a new way of understanding
both the oppressor and the oppressed in a time that none of us can know at this time it seems to me that that's related to what you've been saying but it's coming in from the literary and you are here talking about so I thought the whole conference was going to be a holistic thing and therefore I was going to something I thought connected and I was trying to get some kind of verification or some kind of
put another better path from someone who maybe could do that and that's not what I'm able to do as you yourself have articulated some of those connections very well would anything more to... Is that accurate? I mean what I'm thinking is that we're on the right track No, I would just say that it is a novel that prophesies history and how we can know we have very conscious help in that way and that's really all I
would say I think we are in agreement in some particular where some of us are pressing for another step is what do we do realizing that the past is always mediated by the present what do we do after that point I think we're all basically in agreement on that So I didn't get the impression that Williams in a negative sense impacted the story that she wrote in other words I didn't think the present time mediated negatively
in the story that she presented and I heard that there is some possible pejorative results and not necessarily that it's inevitable we know that but somehow it could be judged in a very negative way and I didn't see that novel as manifest in that that's really all I have Just one brief comment on that two brief comments The Trickster I think is an excellent model I think I'm going to think more of it as precisely the
image of the oppressed the stigmatized person who turns the tools of hegemonic culture against itself My second thing I think which I find most impressive about contemporary black women's literature is its self conscious invention of the past is that by actually dealing with an invented past that one actually makes precisely conscious that present mediation of the past and in fact makes us aware that the past as a whole is invented that in fact there is a
real methodological difference between invention and reconstruction but not in terms of the criteria of truthfulness We haven't been able to do justice to every issue surely not the truth questions and the validity questions but I think we have learned something of the vision that somehow truth is caught up with the kinds of conversations and coalitions and new kinds of intersubjectivity we forge and I want to thank all of you there and I hope you will join
with me to thank this particular panel today for leading us in high quality conversation one brief announcement the final year of this three year project will turn to another theme without trying to leave behind the themes of these first two years on social location in interpretation we are laying plans to focus particularly on what these kinds of insights about interpretation mean for theological education particularly pedagogy and curriculum structure when one moves to that level of the
institutional and the political what do these insights mean so please stay in touch with us on those developments and I thank you very much (applause)