The Power of Tolerance

A Debate

Wendy Brown, Rainer Forst, Luca Di Blasi, Christoph Holzhey

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780231537964
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Filosofia politica

We invoke the ideal of tolerance in response to conflict, but what does it mean to answer conflict with a call for tolerance? Is tolerance a way of resolving conflicts or a means of sustaining them? Does it transform conflicts into productive tensions, or does it perpetuate underlying power relations? To what extent does tolerance hide its involvement with power and act as a form of depoliticization?

Wendy Brown and Rainer Forst debate the uses and misuses of tolerance, an exchange that highlights the fundamental differences in their critical practice despite a number of political similarities. Both scholars address the normative premises, limits, and political implications of various conceptions of tolerance. Brown offers a genealogical critique of contemporary discourses on tolerance in Western liberal societies, focusing on their inherent ties to colonialism and imperialism, and Forst reconstructs an intellectual history of tolerance that attempts to redeem its political virtue in democratic societies. Brown and Forst work from different perspectives and traditions, yet they each remain wary of the subjection and abnegation embodied in toleration discourses, among other issues. The result is a dialogue rich in critical and conceptual reflections on power, justice, discourse, rationality, and identity.

THE POWER OF TOLERANCE

A Debate between Wendy Brown and Rainer Forst

ANTKE ENGEL: Good evening and a warm welcome to everyone. It is wonderful to have Wendy Brown and Rainer Forst as our guests of tonight’s Spannungsübung, and I’m very enthused to see that so many of you are here, looking forward to an inspiring evening. We invited Wendy Brown, who is Emanuel Heller professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley, and Rainer Forst, who is professor of political theory and philosophy at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt as well as co-director of the Research Cluster ‘Formation of Normative Orders’, because both have written major and very decisive books on tolerance as a political category.

Wendy Brown’s Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire makes an argument that tolerance is – among other things – an instrument of liberal governance and a discourse of power that legitimizes white Western supremacy and state violence.¹ Brown is particularly interested in the question as to how tolerance as a discourse of power has decidedly depoliticizing effects. Rainer Forst’s Toleration in Conflict provides a genealogy of tolerance as a phenomenon that indicates socio-historical conflicts and suggests specific forms of conflict resolution that may reinforce as well as decrease social hierarchies and inequalities.² Forst is interested in figuring out how and when tolerance turns out to be a repressive attitude or practice, and under which conditions it expresses respect and contributes to social justice.

While there are similarities between Brown’s and Forst’s critique of tolerance as an attitude of superiority and a social practice of domination, tensions can be found in their assessment of liberal discourse and civic practices of deliberation. For both of them toleration is a discursive phenomenon that materializes in social practices and political technologies, a phenomenon that is geopolitically and culturally specific, that undergoes historical change, and as such also leads into conflicts about the concept of tolerance itself. Yet, concerning the question of how tolerance is used as a token in multicultural discourses, how it is activated in politics of justice, and whether it is a promising stepping stone towards recognition, Wendy Brown and Rainer Forst disagree. Forst argues for the norm of reciprocity in tolerance conflicts and he interprets the interactive dimension of these conflicts as resulting from contradictory convictions that call for the virtues of toleration and respect despite irresolvable differences. Brown, by contrast, stresses the continuous reproduction of the position of ‘the other’ structurally inherent to the discourse of tolerance, which stabilizes unequal positions between those tolerating and those tolerated. So there is plenty of material to feed a Spannungsübung. My hope is that at the end of this evening we will have various and differing views as to whether tolerance may nevertheless function as an instrument in political fights for emancipation and justice.

Before I hand over to our speakers let me say a few words about the structure of tonight’s event. We will now start with short inputs by both Wendy Brown and Rainer Forst. After that they will have approximately twenty minutes’ time to react to their respective talks, and then I would like to open the discussion for the audience. My moderation will be guided by the overarching question as to whether you see tolerance discourses as suited for modifying existing social and societal power relations. There are three major topics that I hope will be covered in the discussion. The first one is the topic of subject constitution: How does tolerance actually constitute specific subjectivities of those tolerating and those tolerated? The second one relates to conflicts: To what extent and how can conflicts be understood as productive tensions? Thirdly, I would like us to focus on the role of the state, on tolerance as a discourse of governmentality, and the question as to what extent tolerance depoliticizes the social field. And, of course, I am curious as to which modes and topics of tension will arise during the next two hours. And with these remarks I will end my little introduction and give the floor to Wendy Brown.

WENDY BROWN: It is a pleasure to be in Berlin, and it is a profound pleasure to be in the gorgeous Institute for Cultural Inquiry, which I have never seen before but plan on returning to. Before I begin, I have to thank Rainer, and this isn’t a trick, it goes like this: Rainer is actually responsible, as he knows, for my work on tolerance. He invited me, some ten years ago, to contribute to an edited volume he was putting together on tolerance and he had a very specific assignment for me.³ He asked if I would revisit Marcuse’s little essay on ‘repressive tolerance’ and consider it in light of Foucault – to think about disciplinary dimensions of repressive tolerance.⁴ That would have been a wonderful essay, and somebody probably still should write it [audience laughs]. I thought it sounded interesting enough that I decided to say yes to Rainer. But when I read Marcuse’s essay I was saddened to find that it didn’t actually withstand the test of time very well, for a variety of reasons that I don’t have to go into since I didn’t write the essay and no one has yet. But, I didn’t write that essay – instead I started thinking about tolerance, and I wrote a different essay and then I wrote a book. And, in some ways, Rainer probably thinks that he created a Frankenstein because the book I wrote, as you will see this evening, will quarrel with Rainer’s own views on tolerance. It does not quarrel with his expertise – he is without question the expert in the intellectual history of tolerance and I won’t even begin to compete with him there; that is not the kind of work I did. But we do have some arguments.

Now, in thinking about this conversation, I was looking for a way to avoid two things. One was a debate in which I was positioned as being against tolerance and Rainer was positioned as being for it. That would be possible; we could get positioned there and I felt Antke almost pressing us in that direction as she concluded her introduction – you see, in the end what is going to happen is the tension is going to be with Antke. I felt her almost pushing us in that direction as she concluded by suggesting that where we might really differ is in our views about the possibilities for what tolerance could do in modifying existing power relations towards more justice-oriented directions. But the work I’ve done on tolerance is not against tolerance; rather, it is intended to be a critique of existing tolerance discourse. Here, critique does not mean being against and does not mean rejecting, but rather, it means examining the ground and the presuppositions, the internal tensions, the internal constituents as well as the external constitution of particular formations or problematics. So critique does not amount to a rejection, but is an effort at examining especially the powers that are often latent and often concealed in a particular political formation.

One thing I wanted to avoid, then, was a discussion in which Rainer is for tolerance and I’m against it. But the other thing that I want to avoid is the tired Habermas–Foucault debate, and I want to avoid it because it is tired. I worry that we’re at a very severe risk of ending up in that debate so in the remarks that follow (I know I’ve already taken my ten minutes, but here I’m now starting my ten minutes) I’m going to try to avoid that. I don’t think we actually disagree that much about tolerance, but we do approach it differently, we do have very different angles of vision on it and we do think about its place in politics differently. I’m going to try to focus on those differences in order to avoid the Habermas–Foucault framing, which is, admittedly, lurking.

First, briefly, I think the things that Rainer and I appreciate in common about tolerance include the following: We appreciate the richness, complexity, and variation in the term as both a concept and a practice. We both regard its history as a potted one, and we both regard its operations as reversible – sometimes emancipatory, sometimes subordinating, sometimes both at once. We also share a concern with the capacity of tolerance to wound – what Rainer tends to locate more often at the level of insult or stigma and what I tend to talk about more in terms of subordination or abjection. But both of us recognize that tolerance does not simply reduce conflict, or promote collective thriving. We’re both aware that tolerance is not only or always what it says it is. We also share an appreciation of tolerance as a nested notion or practice, one that never stands by itself, but whose specific contextualization always matters for its operation and for its effects. And we share an appreciation, above all, of the inseparability of power from both the occasion of tolerance and the operation of tolerance. Tolerance tends to operate discursively as if it has nothing to do with power, but both of us have our eye on the extent to which it is always imbricated with power.

So in all of these ways, we’re much closer together as students of tolerance than either of us are to, for example, analytic philosophers who tend to treat tolerance purely conceptually, or boosters of tolerance who simply cheer it as a benign individual virtue or a benign politics in multi-religious, multicultural or conflictdriven societies. This much we share. There are many ways, though, as I said, that we are not only operating in different analytic registers about tolerance, but often, I think, are not even referring to the same phenomenon in our critical engagement with tolerance. Rainer speaks of different stories or conceptions of tolerance. He opposes, most strenuously, what he calls the ‘permission conception’ to the ‘respect conception’. He wants to promote the respect conception, where mutuality and equality inhere; and he objects to the permission conception where you’re tolerated on a set of conditions, where you’re given permission to exist but all the power is in the hands of the one who grants this permission: this is where domination and stigma take shape for him. He speaks of tolerance most often in contemporary terms as a virtue or an ethic made necessary by collisions in ethical or religious beliefs; thus, the case for toleration arises when one has an ethical, but not a justified moral objection to something. This is the distinction Rainer draws forth from Bayle and successfully renders as a contemporary formulation of tolerance that makes tolerance look pretty good.⁵ Here, tolerance properly employed helps you achieve an understanding in which people different from you in their beliefs or practices still have the right to these beliefs or practices, even if you find them wrong or objectionable. Following Bayle, Rainer argues that non-repressive toleration occurs when one knows that one’s own ethical or religious judgment is a matter of faith rather than reason. Tolerance is necessitated, Rainer says, because one has a negative judgment in the first place: you don’t like or believe what the other person does or believes, but you tolerate it because faith rather than reason is at stake in your judgment and your differences. That is it in a nutshell, yes?

Okay, all well and good, I actually don’t disagree with any of this. I do wonder about the ease with which the reason–faith distinction can be drawn, especially outside the realm of religion – and much tolerance discourse today takes place with regard to beliefs or practices that have nothing to do with religion, that is to say, the object of our tolerance is less and less at the level of beliefs – religious or otherwise. When we’re speaking of tolerating certain people, things, practices, cultures, sexualities, we’re not talking about those objects of tolerance as beliefs, at least I hope we are not. I do wonder as well about the normative background implicit even within these moments of tolerance. That is, even if you decide that your belief in the naturalness of heterosexuality or white supremacy is but a matter of faith, it remains the Arab or the homosexual who is the candidate for tolerance, not the heterosexual or the white Englishman or Frenchman. So I wonder what happens to the normative regime of power in this particular organization of tolerance as respect. And I also wonder why and how Rainer’s case for tolerance, in the end, is more than an argument for expanding individual rights on the one side and a commitment to a more robust secularism and multiculturalism on the other. Why do we even need tolerance for the work that Rainer describes? Why not just rights?

But, that said, I’m not in profound disagreement with the formulation that Rainer’s offering here. I think tolerance can and does work as an ethos of respect for others’ right to exist, and to believe or to practise as they do, even if you object to elements of their existence, belief, practice. I think tolerance can and does work that way personally, ethically, and individually. Early in my own book I actually make clear that tolerance of this kind, which primarily operates at the level of individual virtue, is a regular and crucial part of life. This is tolerance or toleration of another’s practices or beliefs that I might object to strenuously as distasteful, wrong, even heinous, but cannot rationally justify challenging at a moral–political level. This kind of tolerance is of course how, for example, my teenager and I survive each other’s tastes in music; it is how devout Hindus, Muslims, Christians and Jews can be peaceful neighbours. It is, I think, the basis of the constitutional principle – that we have in the United States and that some other constitutions have as well – that guarantees freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom of conscience. The whole idea of that principle is that there are individual differences – beliefs, habits, tastes, ways of life, desires – that cannot be brokered at a rational, reasonable, political, moral level and that do not need to be.

That said, I don’t think this exhausts the problem of tolerance today and my concern with tolerance is with the remainder: the part that isn’t dealt with by Rainer’s formulation of the respect version of tolerance. My focus is contemporary discourses of tolerance in politics and cultural life today and with the political operation of tolerance. In other words, I’m not so concerned, in my own research, with tolerance as an individual ethic or virtue and I’m not so concerned with tolerance that is mainly aimed at the religious or ethical principles of others. My focus is on contemporary normative discourses of tolerance that circulate from state to society, to individual to neighbourhood association; and it is on discourses that have as their objects ethnicities, sexualities, and cultures. Today we speak of tolerating particular groups, particular cultural practices, people of particular sexualities. In turn, these discourses do not just refer to, but constitute political identities ranging from the very identity of the West as a tolerant civilization to that of the homophobe who is against gay marriage but for tolerance.

So I’m interested in, for example, why the New York Times declared the election of Barack Obama [in 2008] a triumph of tolerance, an utterance that discursively re-marginalizes the object, Black personhood, that it pretends to absorb, equalize, or emancipate. I’m interested in the ultra-Zionist Museums of Tolerance in Los Angeles, New York and soon, Jerusalem, and how they use the mantle of tolerance for their ex...