Analogies between limits and violent exclusion are faulty—argumentative exclusion is inevitable, but topicality ensures it occurs around reciprocal lines.

My recent book, The Way We Argue Now, has in a sense two theses. In the first place, the book makes the case for the importance of debate and argument to any vital democratic or pluralistic intellectual culture. This is in many ways an unexceptional position, but the premise of the book is that the claims of reasoned argument are often trumped, within the current intellectual terrain, by appeals to cultural identity and what I gather more broadly under the rubric of ethos, which includes cultural identity but also forms of ethical piety and charismatic authority. In promoting argument as a universal practice keyed to a human capacity for communicative reason, my book is a critique of relativism and identity politics, or the notion that forms of cultural authenticity or group identity have a certain unquestioned legitimacy, one that cannot or should not be subjected to the challenges of reason or principle, precisely because reason and what is often called "false universalism" are, according to this pattern of thinking, always involved in forms of exclusion, power, or domination. My book insists, by contrast, that argument is a form of respect, that the ideals of democracy, whether conceived from a nationalist or an internationalist perspective, rely fundamentally upon procedures of argumentation and debate in order to legitimate themselves and to keep their central institutions vital. And the idea that one should be protected from debate, that argument is somehow injurious to persons if it does not honor their desire to have their basic beliefs and claims and solidarities accepted without challenge, is strenuously opposed. As is the notion that any attempt to ask people to agree upon processes of reason-giving argument is somehow necessarily to impose a coercive norm, one that will disable the free expression and performance of identities, feelings, or solidarities. Disagreement is, by the terms of my book, a form of respect, not a form of disrespect. And by disagreement, I don't mean simply to say that we should expect disagreement rather than agreement, which is a frequently voiced—if misconceived—criticism of Habermas. Of course we should expect disagreement. My point is that we should focus on the moment of dissatisfaction in the face of disagreement—the internal dynamic in argument that imagines argument might be the beginning of [End Page 281] a process of persuasion and exchange that could end in agreement (or partial agreement). For those who advocate reconciling ourselves to disagreements rather than arguing them out, by contrast, there is a complacent—and in some versions, even celebratory—attitude toward fixed disagreement. Refusing these options, I make the case for dissatisfied disagreement in the final chapter of the book and argue that people should be willing to justify their positions in dialogue with one another, especially if they hope to live together in a post-traditional pluralist society.

One example of the trumping of argument by ethos is the form that was taken by the late stage of the Foucault/Habermas debate, where an appeal to ethos—specifically, an appeal to Foucault's style of ironic or negative critique, often seen as most in evidence in the interviews, where he would playfully refuse labels or evade direct answers—was used to exemplify an alternative to the forms of argument employed by Habermas and like-minded critics. (I should pause to say that I provide this example, and the framing summary of the book that surrounds it, not to take up airtime through expansive self-reference, but because neither of my respondents provided any contextualizing summary of the book's central arguments, though one certainly gets an incremental sense of the book's claims from Bruce Robbins. Because I don't assume that readers of this forum have necessarily read the book, and because I believe that it is the obligation of forum participants to provide sufficient context for their remarks, I will perform this task as economically as I can, with the recognition that it might have carried more weight if provided by a respondent rather than the author.)

The Foucauldian counter-critique importantly emphasizes a relation between style and position, but it obscures (1) the importance or value of the Habermasian critique and (2) the possibility that the other side of the debate might have its own ethos to advocate, one that has precisely to do with an ethos of argument, an ideal of reciprocal debate that involves taking distance on one's pre-given forms of identity or the norms of one's community, both so as to talk across differences and to articulate one's claims in relation to shared and even universal ideals. And this leads to the second thesis of the book, the insistence that an emphasis on ethos and character is interestingly present if not widely recognized in contemporary theory, and one of the ways its vitality and existential pertinence makes itself felt (even despite the occurrence of the kinds of unfair trumping moves I have mentioned). We often fail to notice this, because identity has so uniformly come to mean sociological, ascribed, or group identity—race, gender, class, nationality, ethnicity, sexuality, and so forth. Instances of the move toward character and ethos include the later Foucault (for whom ethos is a central concept), cosmopolitanism (whose aspiration it is to turn universalism into an ethos), and, more controversially, proceduralist ethics and politics (with its emphasis on sincerity and civility). Another version of this attentiveness to ethos and character appears in contemporary pragmatism, with its insistence on casualness of attitude, or insouciance in the face of [End Page 282] contingency—recommendations that get elevated into full-fledged exemplary personae in Richard Rorty's notion of the "ironist" or Barbara Herrnstein Smith's portrait of the "postmodern skeptic." These examples—and the larger claim they support—are meant to defend theory as still living, despite the many reports of its demise, and in fact still interestingly and incessantly re-elaborating its relation to practice. This second aspect of the project is at once descriptive, motivated by the notion that characterology within theory is intrinsically interesting, and critical, in its attempt to identify how characterology can itself be used to cover or evade the claims of rational argument, as in appeals to charismatic authority or in what I identify as narrow personifications of theory (pragmatism, in its insistence on insouciance in the face of contingency, is a prime example of this second form). And as a complement to the critical agenda, there is a reconstructive agenda as well, an attempt to recuperate liberalism and proceduralism, in part by advocating the possibility, as I have suggested, of an ethos of argument.

Robbins, in his extraordinarily rich and challenging response, zeroes in immediately on a crucial issue: who is to say exactly when argument is occurring or not, and what do we do when there is disagreement over the fundamentals (the primary one being over what counts as proper reasoning)? Interestingly, Robbins approaches this issue after first observing a certain tension in the book: on the one hand, The Way We Argue Now calls for dialogue, debate, argument; on the other, its project is "potentially something a bit stricter, or pushier: getting us all to agree on what should and should not count as true argument." What this point of entry into the larger issue reveals is a kind of blur that the book, I am now aware, invites. On the one hand, the book anatomizes academic debates, and in doing so is quite "debaterly." This can give the impression that what I mean by argument is a very specific form unique to disciplinary methodologies in higher education. But the book is not generally advocating a narrow practice of formal and philosophical argumentation in the culture at large, however much its author may relish adherence to the principle of non-contradiction in scholarly argument. I take pains to elaborate an ethos of argument that is linked to democratic debate and the forms of dissent that constitutional patriotism allows and even promotes. In this sense, while argument here is necessarily contextualized sociohistorically, the concept is not merely academic. It is a practice seen as integral to specific political forms and institutions in modern democracies, and to the more general activity of critique within modern societies—to the tradition of the public sphere, to speak in broad terms. Additionally, insofar as argument impels one to take distance on embedded customs, norms, and senses of given identity, it is a practice that at once acknowledges identity, the need to understand the perspectives of others, and the shared commitment to commonality and generality, to finding a way to live together under conditions of difference.

More than this: the book also discusses at great length and from several different angles the issue that Robbins inexplicably claims I entirely ignore: the [End Page 283] question of disagreement about what counts as argument. In the opening essay, "Debatable Performances," I fault the proponents of communicative ethics for not having a broader understanding of public expression, one that would include the disruptions of spectacle and performance. I return to and underscore this point in my final chapter, where I espouse a democratic politics that can embrace and accommodate a wide variety of expressions and modes. This is certainly a discussion of what counts as dialogue and hence argument in the broad sense in which I mean it, and in fact I fully acknowledge that taking distance from cultural norms and given identities can be advanced not only through critical reflection, but through ironic critique and defamiliarizing performance as well. But I do insist—and this is where I take a position on the fundamental disagreements that have arisen with respect to communicative ethics—that when they have an effect, these other dimensions of experience do not remain unreflective, and insofar as they do become reflective, they are contributing to the very form of reasoned analysis that their champions sometimes imagine they must refuse in order to liberate other modes of being (the affective, the narrative, the performative, the nonrational). If a narrative of human rights violation is persuasive in court, or in the broader cultural public sphere, it is because it draws attention to a violation of humanity that is condemned on principle; if a performance jolts people out of their normative understandings of sexuality and gender, it prompts forms of understanding that can be affirmed and communicated and also can be used to justify political positions and legislative agendas.

Robbins claims that I violate my own ideal of dialogue by failing to engage those who, according to him, are "[my] most significant antagonists": Jean-François Lyotard and Jacques Rancière. But it is simply not true that I fail to address the fundamental concerns that neither of these thinkers owns in any absolute sense. I might have addressed their work particularly (there are significant differences between them), and I think the example of Rancière is a particularly fruitful one, especially given his own critique of sociological reductionism (and identity politics), and his universalism, which shares affinities with the forms of poststructuralist universalism (notably, Etienne Balibar's) that I address in the third chapter of my book. But the relevant issues of incommensurability of language games or cultural perspectives, and the question of intractable or "hardwired" exclusion, are adduced and repeatedly critiqued throughout the book, across a range of disciplines. The debate between the accommodationist position of Thomas McCarthy and the universalist position of Habermas addresses these issues straight on, and the discussion of Habermas clearly maps out the two main alternatives to his position as (1) incommensurable perspectives and (2) overlapping consensus. The analysis of Satya Mohanty and Martha Nussbaum is also directly relevant: Mohanty situates his project with respect to a well-known and parallel debate in anthropology represented by the opposed positions of Ernest Gellner and Talal Asad. My emphasis on the newer discussions of accommodation, [End Page 284] rather than the incommensurability theorists (e.g., Lyotard), is meant to argue for the Habermasian position against its newer and more interesting challengers, and I also wanted the book to move beyond the parochial reference points of literary and cultural studies to engage relevant work in political theory and political philosophy. And of course I do discuss the work of many influential theorists and literary critics who oppose the approach I take in the book generally. But I'm not going to reproduce my complete range of references: readers are free to decide for themselves how comprehensive and various the theoretical landscape is in my book. But I will say in response to Robbins that my "primary antagonist" considered as a position rather than a set of proper names is consistently present in the book, and taken on in a number of different ways.

There is a deeper issue at play in Robbins's invocation of Lyotard and Rancière, especially given where his discussion of what he calls my "argumentative normativity" ends up. On the one hand, Robbins wants to say that the argument I am taking up is no longer relevant, that "thankfully" literary critics have moved past the critique of Enlightenment. On this account I am sadly unaware that my earlier books have actually had some influence, and seem to be stuck in an agonistic position that has no traction, and that at this point constitutes a regression toward a naively pro-Enlightenment position that is likely to invite—and that at some level deserves to invite—a strong reiteration of the critique of Enlightenment. The moves need to be replayed in slow motion here to discover exactly what is going on, since the argument is quite kinetic, and involves a dubious framing of my own project. It is certainly the case that in diagnosing the state of academic argument in the humanities today, I invoke, as one of the contributing factors, the excesses involved in the critique of Enlightenment. It is not the only factor I invoke, but it is certainly adduced as a major contributing factor to the denigration of reason, critical distance, and formal argument. I do agree with Robbins that there are many critics challenging the critique of Enlightenment. There are also, as it happens, many critics who have walked away from the debate to do other things. But it remains the case, as Robbins's own response makes clear, that the stronger version of the critique has a kind of staying power, particularly as a way of asserting political pedigree in the last instance. Indeed, Robbins must insist that I resurrect a version of the very form of Enlightenment that was once the whipping boy of poststructuralism, in order to himself reintroduce a high-stakes political allegory that will imagine cultural criticism to be an immediate actor in the current international political landscape.

Let's first examine the claim that my book is "unwittingly" inviting a resurrection of the "Enlightenment-equals-totalitarianism position." How, one wonders, could a book promoting argument and debate, and promoting reason-giving practices as a kind of common ground that should prevail over assertions of cultural authenticity, somehow come to be seen as a dangerous resurgence of bad Enlightenment? Robbins tells us why: I want "argument on my own terms"—that [End Page 285] is, I want to impose reason on people, which is a form of power and oppression. But what can this possibly mean? Arguments stand or fall based on whether they are successful and persuasive, even an argument in favor of argument. It simply is not the case that an argument in favor of the importance of reasoned debate to liberal democracy is tantamount to oppressive power. To assume so is to assume, in the manner of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, that reason is itself violent, inherently, and that it will always mask power and enforce exclusions. But to assume this is to assume the very view of Enlightenment reason that Robbins claims we are "thankfully" well rid of. (I leave to the side the idea that any individual can proclaim that a debate is over, thankfully or not.) But perhaps Robbins will say, "I am not imagining that your argument is directly oppressive, but that what you argue for would be, if it were enforced." Yet my book doesn't imagine or suggest it is enforceable; I simply argue in favor of, I promote, an ethos of argument within a liberal democratic and proceduralist framework. As much as Robbins would like to think so, neither I nor the books I write can be cast as an arm of the police.

Robbins wants to imagine a far more direct line of influence from criticism to political reality, however, and this is why it can be such a bad thing to suggest norms of argument. Watch as the gloves come off:

Faced with the prospect of submitting to her version of argument—roughly, Habermas's version—and of being thus authorized to disagree only about other, smaller things, some may feel that there will have been an end to argument, or an end to the arguments they find most interesting. With current events in mind, I would be surprised if there were no recourse to the metaphor of a regular army facing a guerilla insurrection, hinting that Anderson wants to force her opponents to dress in uniform, reside in well-demarcated camps and capitals that can be bombed, fight by the rules of states (whether the states themselves abide by these rules or not), and so on—in short, that she wants to get the battle onto a terrain where her side will be assured of having the upper hand.

Let's leave to the side the fact that this is a disowned hypothetical criticism. (As in, "Well, okay, yes, those are my gloves, but those are somebody else's hands they will have come off of.") Because far more interesting, actually, is the sudden elevation of stakes. It is a symptom of the sorry state of affairs in our profession that it plays out repeatedly this tragicomic tendency to give a grandiose political meaning to every object it analyzes or confronts. We have evidence of how desperate the situation is when we see it in a critic as thoughtful as Bruce Robbins, where it emerges as the need to allegorize a point about an argument in such a way that it gets cast as the equivalent of war atrocities. It is especially ironic in light of the fact that to the extent that I do give examples of the importance of liberal democratic proceduralism, I invoke the disregard of the protocols of international adjudication in the days leading up to the invasion of Iraq; I also speak [End Page 286] about concerns with voting transparency. It is hard for me to see how my argument about proceduralism can be associated with the policies of the Bush administration when that administration has exhibited a flagrant disregard of democratic procedure and the rule of law. I happen to think that a renewed focus on proceduralism is a timely venture, which is why I spend so much time discussing it in my final chapter. But I hasten to add that I am not interested in imagining that proceduralism is the sole political response to the needs of cultural criticism in our time: my goal in the book is to argue for a liberal democratic culture of argument, and to suggest ways in which argument is not served by trumping appeals to identity and charismatic authority. I fully admit that my examples are less political events than academic debates; for those uninterested in the shape of intellectual arguments, and eager for more direct and sustained discussion of contemporary politics, the approach will disappoint. Moreover, there will always be a tendency for a proceduralist to under-specify substance, and that is partly a principled decision, since the point is that agreements, compromises, and policies get worked out through the communicative and political process. My book is mainly concentrated on evaluating forms of arguments and appeals to ethos, both those that count as a form of trump card or distortion, and those that flesh out an understanding of argument as a universalist practice. There is an intermittent appeal to larger concerns in the political democratic culture, and that is because I see connections between the ideal of argument and the ideal of deliberative democracy. But there is clearly, and indeed necessarily, significant room for further elaboration here.

There is a way to make Robbins's point more narrowly, which would run something like this: Anderson has a very restricted notion of how argument should play out, or appear, within academic culture, given the heavy emphasis on logical consistency and normative coherence and explicitness. This conception of argument is too narrow (and hence authoritarian). To this I would reply simply that logical consistency and normative coherence and explicitness do not exhaust the possible forms, modes, and strategies of argumentation. There is a distinction to be made between the identification of moves that stultify or disarm argument, and an insistence on some sort of single manner of reasoned argument. The former I am entirely committed to; the latter not at all, despite the fact that I obviously favor a certain style of argument, and even despite the fact that I am philosophically committed to the claims of the theory of communicative reason. I do address the issue of diverse forms and modes of argument in the first and last chapters of the book (as I discuss above), but it seems that a more direct reflection on the book's own mode of argumentation might have provided the occasion for a fuller treatment of the issues that trouble Robbins.

Different genres within academe have different conventions, of course, and we can and do make decisions all the time about what rises to the level of cogency within specific academic venues, and what doesn't. Some of those judgments [End Page 287] have to do with protocols of argument. The book review, for example, is judged according to whether the reviewer responsibly represents the scholarship under discussion, seems to have a good grasp of the body of scholarship it belongs to, and convincingly and fairly points out strengths and weaknesses. The book forum is a bit looser—one expects responsible representation of the scholarship under discussion, but it can be more selectively focused on a key set of issues. And one expects a bit of provocation, in order to make the exchange readable and dramatic. But of course in a forum exchange there is an implicit norm of argument, a tendency to judge whether a particular participant is making a strong or a weak case in light of the competing claims at play. Much of our time in the profession is taken with judging the quality of all manner of academic performance, and much of it has to do with norms of argument, however much Robbins may worry about their potentially coercive nature.

From time to time I myself have wondered whether my book is too influenced by the modes of academe. But when I read a piece of writing like the one that Elspeth Probyn produced, I find myself feeling a renewed commitment to the evaluative norms of responsible scholarship, and to the idea that clearly agreed-upon genres and protocols of fair scholarship benefit from explicit affirmation at times. Probyn's piece does not conform at all to the conventions of the forum response. She may herself be quite delighted that it does not. Robbins may find himself delighted that she represents a viewpoint that does not agree on my (totalitarian) fundamentals of forum responses. But I would simply say that here we do not have fair or reasoned argument, which is one of the enabling procedures of forum exchanges. Indeed, I hear a different genre altogether: the venting phone call to a friend or intimate. In this genre, which I think we are all familiar with, one is not expected or required to give reasons or evidence, as one is in academic argument. Here's how the phone call might go: "Ugh. I have to write a response to this awful book. I agreed to this because I thought the book had an interesting title; it's called The Way We Argue Now. But I can't get through it; it isn't at all what I expected. I find myself alternately bored and irritated. It's so from the center—totally American parochial, and I just hate the style: polemical in a slam-bam-thank-you-ma'am way—really quite mean-spirited. She's so arrogant. And you wouldn't believe the so-called critique of Foucault. I don't know, I think I'm just sick of abstract theory—I mean, aren't we past this? It's so stultifying. I wish there were some way to get out of the commitment. I don't know how I'm ever going to get to it anyway, with all my journalism deadlines." The friend: "That sounds awful. But just use the occasion to write about something else, something you think is important. Write about yourself. Direct attention to a book that you do like. Whatever you do, don't spend too much time on it. And definitely call her out on the American centrism."

Do we really want to overhear this kind of conversation when we turn to the review section of a journal like Criticism? Of what intellectual value is it to know [End Page 288] Probyn's casual reactions to a book she won't bother responsibly to describe or engage, unless of course we accord to Probyn some sort of authority in advance that makes argument unnecessary. That she herself believes in such argument-by-authority is evident when she tells us, "As Stuart Hall would say, along with any undergraduate in my classes, 'A discourse is a group of statements that provide a language for talking about a particular kind of knowledge about a topic.'" This is the extent of Probyn's searing critique of the problem with advocating debate generally. But note that it relies, first, upon the invocation of an authority, Stuart Hall, and then upon the implication that her students have all entirely absorbed her own channeling of that authority. Probyn is entirely unbothered, moreover, that the undergraduates in her classes unblinkingly accept this empty statement without protest or challenge or further inquiry into its aimless specificity.

Probyn's piece is a mixture of affective fallacy, argument by authority, and bald ad hominem. There's a pattern here: precisely the tendency to personalize argument and to foreground what Wendy Brown has called "states of injury." Probyn says, for example, that she "felt ostracized by the book's content and style." Ostracized? Argument here is seen as directly harming persons, and this is precisely the state of affairs to which I object. Argument is not injurious to persons. Policies are injurious to persons and institutionalized practices can alienate and exclude. But argument itself is not directly harmful; once one says it is, one is very close to a logic of censorship. The most productive thing to do in an open academic culture (and in societies that aspire to freedom and democracy) when you encounter a book or an argument that you disagree with is to produce a response or a book that states your disagreement. But to assert that the book itself directly harms you is tantamount to saying that you do not believe in argument or in the free exchange of ideas, that your claim to injury somehow damns your opponent's ideas.

When Probyn isn't symptomatic, she's just downright sloppy. One could work to build up the substance of points that she throws out the car window as she screeches on to her next destination, but life is short, and those with considered objections to liberalism and proceduralism would not be particularly well served by the exercise. As far as I can tell, Probyn thinks my discussion of universalism is of limited relevance (though far more appealing when put, by others, in more comfortingly equivocating terms), but she's certain my critique of appeals to identity is simply not able to accommodate the importance of identity in social and political life. As I make clear throughout the book, and particularly in my discussion of the headscarf debate in France, identity is likely to be at the center of key arguments about life in plural democracies; my point is not that identity is not relevant, but simply that it should not be used to trump or stifle argument.