I’m currently reading Sharon Krause’s Freedom Beyond Sovereignty: Reconstructing Liberal Individualism. It’d been sitting on my (Kindle) shelf for a couple years but I finally decided to read it in preparation for her Eco-Emancipation: An Earthly Politics of Freedom, coming out in a couple weeks. Freedom Beyond Sovereignty is about how agency isn’t something entirely localized within the individual. If you’re alone on a desert island (or even in your garden or gym, whatever) then sure, agency adheres to you. You exercise your reasoning and act accordingly and you have only physical reality to help or hinder your projects. But in the social world—and most important things in life at least touch on the social realm—you require some interpretive collaboration with others. Your actions have to have some “social uptake” to have the effects you intend.
If I lay five dollar bills—like, the old-fashioned paper kind—on the counter and take the latté that’s sitting there, then presumably we’d say I bought the latté that you sold to me. But if we split up these actions, there are a lot of assumptions going on here. We’re agreeing that the slips of paper have some value we agree on. We’re agreeing that I am paying you the money and not littering scrap paper. We’re also agreeing that the latté is now legitimately mine and that I’m not stealing it. The whole affair is actually a collaborative project.
Maybe this is a convoluted example. Another approach is to think about the different roles we play. The same actions are interpreted very differently if they’re performed by someone coded as a parent or woman or vendor or patient, etc. We all collaborate in interpreting our actions and upholding the norms and routines associated with these roles.
But sometimes we are misinterpreted and there’s a failure of social uptake that prevents the faithful execution of our agency. We’re unable to effect the change we intend and we’re unable to see ourselves in the effects our actions actually produce. This can be an isolated phenomenon. A crazy person shouting on the street corner may understand themselves to be playing some role and doing a bang-up job of it. The problem is nobody else recognizes the role and so they fail to play their respective parts.
But the more interesting cases are systemic. Krause gives the example of a pair of gay lovers in a homophobic society.
By way of illustration, picture a pair of lovers (two men) walking down the street one evening, hand in hand, quietly enjoying the feeling of their joined bodies moving in step through the night air, affirming with every stride the abiding love for one another that is central to each one’s personal identity. Now imagine that their neighborhood is riven by homophobia, so that what other people see when they pass this pair is not a quiet affirmation of abiding love but an aggressive assertion of perversion, a hostile attack on sacred family values, an anarchical challenge to civilized social order. The couple’s action offends and outrages their neighbors, and it is not much of a stretch to think that under such conditions it may well elicit a violent response, or at least insults and threats. What other people think the couple has done—and, in fact, the effect they really have had on the world—is very different from what the couple themselves think they have done. Their understanding of the action is deeply at odds with its social reception.
[…]
Our couple will find that for them the two parts of action do not—cannot—come together successfully. As the meaning of their action morphs in the field of social understanding onto which it falls, they find that they are not actually affirming their subjective existences concretely in the world, and their experience will be one of failed or frustrated agency. The agent’s subjective perspective on his action is as important to the lived experience of agency as the intersubjective perspective of those who bear the action and the ostensibly objective perspective of the historian. To locate the meaning of an action exclusively in sources that may be blind and deaf to the agent’s own understanding of it—however incomplete this understanding may be—is to put the actual experience of agency systematically out of reach for those who are socially marginalized and whose understanding of their actions is therefore unlikely to register with others.
Krause is careful to argue that the individual and their will isn’t completely lost in this. The individual is the impetus for action even as their actions require social uptake to authentically reflect their agency. And even in oppressive circumstances, like the gay couple above and other examples she takes from Black American experiences, she argues that the individual can find “counterpublics” where social uptake is not distorted. She quotes James Baldwin, reminiscing about the church suppers of his youth, where “we ate and drank and talked and laughed and danced and forgot all about ‘the man.’ We had the liquor, the chicken, the music, and each other, and we had no need to pretend to be what we were not.”
This idea of a counterpublic offers an alternative rationale for the “safe spaces” that conservatives love to denigrate. So-called safe spaces may be more like counterpublic communities, and are less about protecting college students from ideas they find harmful or offensive and more about providing a space where they can more easily find social uptake that doesn’t constantly reflect marginalization and oppression back on them.
I would finally note that Krause’s non-sovereign agency reminded me very much of Frederick Douglass’s ideas about the intersubjectivity of dignity, as argued by Nick Bromell in the Powers of Dignity. Nothing can ever completely erase the individual’s dignity. But the individual’s dignity only finds its full flourishing when recognized by others. And, indeed, Krause has a chapter on Douglass’s non-sovereign freedom in Melvin Rogers and Jack Turner’s big blue tome, African American Political Thought.
Reminds me of Wittgenstein’s “language games”