" National
Interest
(Summer 1989): www.
The Public Work of Rhetoric_nodrm
When liberal democrats genuinely feel their hegemony or security threatened, they will no longer advocate demo- cratic toleration.
Hence the dubiousness of democracy when its material limi- tations are not acknowledged.
I am, of course, not defending a shrinking of minority rights but presenting the material conditions, or root conditions, that allow--or disallow--people to think and act according to "democratic virtues.
"
Spahiu's analysis raises some further issues. It seems that democracy can only be understood as some sort of mixed system. In the case of Serbia, the immaturity of its democracy allowed it to mix readily with forms of totalitari- anism. Readers might recognize here Agamben's analyses of the state of exception and the sort of equivalence that it makes between democracy and totalitarianism. 20 This latter point, which may disturb many readers since it opens the door to certain forms of unrestrained power, simply acknowledges
Democracy and Its Limitations 109
110 Ralph Cintron
that democracy as a set of conceptual ideals cannot be easily materialized in a real state with real needs facing the push and pull of internal and external forces. That is, no state can wear the ideals of democracy comfortably, for the state is a remarkably different animal. Democracy is a thought system that many have tried to institutionalize but has yet to arrive; the state, in contrast, wields pragmatic power, and if its self-preservation becomes desperate enough, it will break the shackles of restraint, including those imposed by democracy, and it will do so "democratically" with the full permission of the "people. " A people struggling under the raw anxiety of survival will look first for a cure to their material desperation and will modify and even dismiss with easy aban- don the niceties of their ideals. From this perspective, there are no aberrations, distortions, or perversions of democracy; these darker conditions are simply part of the potential of any democratic power, even if only rarely deployed.
And if a state should claim that it observes a set of principles, such as the rule of law or democratic transparency, but acts in wholly opposite ways, it is strange to call such a state hypocritical. The charge is strange because it mis- perceives the nature of the state as wielder of pragmatic power. That is, it mis- perceives the gap between theory and practice. Theory attempts to control practice by giving it meaning, high purpose, a telos in order to curb its poten- tial brutality. Practice will abide by theory and more or less follow its rules as long as conditions permit. It is the breaking point, then, the state of emer- gency, that always proves most interesting, that moment when practice must overthrow whatever theory gives it meaning in order to save the theory itself. In other words, the unseemly practices that at the breaking point suddenly become sanctioned are given full reign because they can be dressed with the last vestige of hope: the salvation of our virtuous theory. But this breaking point simply tells us what has been in place all along, namely, that theory is constantly under assault because it disables and hinders the power of human desire and real needs.
This conundrum is faced by Kant in his essay "On the Common Saying: 'This May Be True in Theory, But It Does Not Apply in Practice. '"21 His goal here is to embody the transcendental principles of moral order, reason, and justice inside republican constitutions. Through such means natural law (the- ory) can become human law (practice) that will tame the all too human pro- clivity for force and cunning. Via a number of brilliant arguments--such as the fact that incessant violence exhausts a people, which brings them back to reason--he makes his case that humans have and will continue to wend their way toward a morally superior state, that is, a public sphere based on reason and empathy, not coercion. This model, in which theory and practice come into reasonable alignment, is picked up by Rawls and Habermas in their own models of a just society but also by their critics who patch up the injustices overlooked by both authors in order to offer an even fuller, more encompass- ing justice. Theory and practice, then, in all these models can be brought
together, and from this perspective the calling out of shortcomings and hypocrisies are legitimate strategies by which the virtues of democracy can be widened and improved and brought back into practice; that is, these theorists and defenders of the public sphere claim that more democracy can repair the damage that democracy has created if we can just point to who or what caused its virtue to slip and fall in the first place.
The reason why I maintain a genuine fondness for Kant, Rawls, and Haber- mas is because these writers know the potential human tragedy that their arguments try to keep at bay. Nevertheless, the approach taken here regard- ing the anthropology of democracy and the analysis of democratic rhetorics foregrounds material conditions. It does not background them, as does the idealist tradition. Perceived need or real need, perceived fear or real fear-- when people feel subject to these lacks, they assume that material conditions are the causes of their woe, and from that base rhetors search for the avail- able arguments that have the power to win what is needed or defeat what is feared. And those topoi that carry a history of virtue have particular power; hence rhetors evoke democratic rhetorics in the hope of locating some irre- futable sense of goodness and justice--Recht, as Kant called it--that will defend their claim. But this irrefutability is often checkmated by arguments and virtues derived from the same democratic rhetorics.
Final Thoughts on the "Public Good"
How, then, do we determine the public good? A related question: how might we improve the quality of the public sphere? These are some of the more common questions raised within liberal democracy. My earlier discussions of Sharon Crowley and James Aune indicated also their deep interest in revi- talizing the public sphere. Similarly, in a talk titled "The Lure of Extreme Rhetoric," political theorist and president of the University of Pennsylvania Amy Gutmann, well known for her work with Habermas, examined the "increasing allure of extremist rhetoric in public discourse and its perils for democracy. " The central peril was the erosion of a sense of compromise and mutual respect that tends to distort and corrupt democracy. The cure? An "economy of moral disagreement" in which advocates stand passionately for what they believe but do not argue down their adversaries or argue for more than what is necessary. 22 But can democracy be distorted, corrupted, or put into peril? And how does one encourage advocates to stand passionately for what they believe but also to restrain themselves from arguing down adver- saries and arguing only for what is necessary? My answers to these questions will hopefully be a fitting conclusion to this essay.
I have been arguing from the beginning that democracy is too large and too abstract to be institutionalized. If anything, democracy is a topos along with a whole host of related topoi that act as storehouses of social energy. They are particularly powerful topoi because they reflect a history that has become
Democracy and Its Limitations 111
112 Ralph Cintron
sacrosanct, and hence they evoke an instant or automatic virtue to be deployed by rhetors in whatever scene or for whatever cause they choose. Of course, one rhetor's deployment may seem utterly unacceptable to another's, but because the topoi themselves are packed with virtue both camps will probably rely on the same topoi.
If this first point is trivial enough, perhaps the second one is less so. For what is even more at stake is not just how democratic rhetorics are available equally to all parties in the public sphere but to the extent to which demo- cratic governance, because it is not realizable except as an energeia, represents a mixed system that I am calling oligarchic democracy. If democracy is, indeed, a mixed system, then it cannot be distorted or corrupted because, in effect, whatever the critic is complaining about is integral to the system itself. Return- ing to Gutmann's example, the boorish voices that want to trample the voices of opponents and to claim much more than is necessary are not examples of a distorted democracy but part of the expectations and desires that have been unleashed by a special subjectivity that is now filled with the topoi of rights, freedoms, and individual will that mark democracy. Democracy, of course, does not in all cases give birth to boorish passions, but it provides an inter- pretive lens that can rationalize and legitimize actions and words that I too find reprehensible. Gutmann idealizes democracy because there is no alterna- tive that can realize the sort of public good and public sphere that she desires. She is right that no other alternative has been theorized, but why should she also ignore the ways in which democracy generates the very world that makes her uncomfortable?
Let me inquire more deeply into the motives for asking questions like "how do we determine the public good? " or "how do we improve the public sphere? " First, I cannot imagine a program that could in any pragmatic way improve public deliberation. Second, I suspect that most calls to improve the public sphere reflect the specific motives of some group that feels shut out of the deliberative process. That is, a call to improve the public sphere, whether from a left-leaning or right-leaning group, is a synonym for "let me in" and not really a call to genuinely improve the public sphere. In most cases, the group in power, whether left or right and very much like the Chicago alder- man described earlier, seeks to stymie the other, while the group out of power calls for improvements to the public sphere. Such calls, then, sound the tones of virtue, but if either group should come to power it may cease to believe its former words if such calls should lead to political suicide. Third, such ques- tions as "how do we determine the public good? " or "how do we improve the quality of the public sphere? " idealize the concept of the public good by sug- gesting that there is some determination or improvement that will somehow escape the paradoxical conditions of exclusion/inclusion. Certainly there are on occasion win-win conclusions to a public dispute, but the public sphere,
particularly when deliberating the most serious of social issues, is mostly a space of limited inclusion and not one that excludes exclusion.
Finally, a more significant, if controversial, point is that such calls are in some instances false emergencies built on a mistaken conflation of democracy with the interests of the nation-state. Conjecture: When we say that democ- racy is in peril or that our freedom or the constitution or the public sphere is in danger, are we thinking metonymically, that is, substituting the term "democracy" for the state itself? If so, then to call for the preservation of democracy is actually a call to preserve the social order as embodied by the state. I suspect that false emergencies are manufactured out of metonymic magic and that calls to action in the name of saving the constitution or democ- racy or the public sphere mobilize subjects to rise up in defense of the state by using the bullhorn of virtuous democracy. Such calls are meant to stymie the revolutionary, unruly, destabilizing "red" spirit, whether right-leaning or left-leaning, that constitutes much of the history of democratic movements in order to emphasize the more conservative defense of the status quo inter- ests of the state.
Perhaps a keener way to explore this point is to observe that democratic rhetorics, as suggested earlier, overproduce expectations and desires that gen- erate unrealistic claims of equality, freedom, and rights that are difficult for any social order to realize and manage. The questions "how do we determine the public good? " and "how might we improve the public sphere? " are, par- ticularly in Gutmann's case, about the management of that proliferation, the fear that something has gotten out of hand and now must be righted. That is, they apply one kind of brake on the enthusiasms that democracy births; for most "threats" to the constitution or democracy or to the public sphere are the result of someone's claim to excessive freedom and the like. The social order typically manages this proliferation by working double time to produce an economy of material abundance that substitutes for the abstractions and desires that its politics cannot satisfy. As long as this material abundance con- stitutes the norm and dire necessity does not threaten, the human propensity for fairness works.
A Hesitation at the End
Even as this essay deontologizes democracy, it seems to ontologize power by putting it at the center of politics, particularly the mixed system of oligarchic- democracy. All contemporary governance, I suspect, is a ratio of these two terms, these two forces. Curiously enough de Tocqueville saw some of this: "American society has . . . a surface covering of democracy, beneath which the old aristocratic colors sometimes peep out. "23 I do not have the space here to elaborate the proposition of the mixed system. But it should be clear that my argument relies on a strong reading of that proposition as well as a strong
Democracy and Its Limitations 113
114 Ralph Cintron
reading of human anxiety as seen in statements like "fear rules. " Consider: contemporary rhetoricians favor social theorists who shatter the social order via radicalized versions of the topos of democracy--from Marx and Nietzsche to Foucault, Derrida, Habermas, and the most recent work of Rancie`re, Agam- ben, Negri, Badiou, and others. Such work requires an idealized version of democracy, one that rests on a fundamental cleavage between actual existing democracy and democracy itself. My own version of this cleavage has been to call actual existing democracy oligarchic-democracy, a more revealing term, and the other democracy an energeia that functions largely in the symbolic and rhetorical. As an energeia, democracy is not meant to be realized, and that is what provides it with propulsive force. Up to this point, then, my analysis remains within this specific tradition, but then I seem to be raising questions about the "other" democracy as well, for I am wondering about those instances when the energeia of democracy does little to cure perversity but actually insti- gates it (the Serb case mentioned earlier) or raising questions about an era that we may be entering, namely, the exhaustion of democracy strapped to an exhaustion of nature. The end of my essay hesitates, then, because I do not like this reappearance of determinism.
Notes
1. De Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 244.
2. Fukuyama, "End of History? "
3. Linz and Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition, 5; Trimcev, Democracy; Nodia,
"How Different," 10.
4. Moss, "Commonplaces. " 5. Kennedy, Introduction, 7. 6. Aristotle, On Rhetoric, 249.
7. Hall, Introduction, 21. See also Weber, Economy and Society. 8. Crowley, Toward a Civil Discourse.
9. Aune, Selling the Free Market.
10. Paley, "Toward an Anthropology"; Cruikshank, Will to Empower.
11. Agamben, Homo Sacer; Agamben, State of Exception.
12. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms; Rawls, Theory of Justice.
13. These last four points have been greatly aided by conversations with Candice Rai.
They began as her marginal comments to my paragraph.
14. See Canfora, Democracy in Europe; Cintron, "Democracy as Fetish. "
15. For a more optimistic scenario, see Sachs, Common Wealth.
16. Linz and Stepan, Problems, 5; Trimcev, Democracy; Nodia, "How Different," 10. 17. Spahiu, Serbian Tendencies, 7. As Yugoslavian Communism collapsed, a variety of
internal struggles wracked the region. Internally, the political leadership in Serbia was unable to articulate a replacement ideology for Communism (say, a version of demo- cratic socialism resting on civic identity as opposed to ethnic and/or religious identity) that might keep nationalist forces at bay. Externally, the independent entities that had constituted Yugoslavia began to assert their statehood. Serbia, which saw itself as the natural inheritor of the old federation, struggled against the centripetal forces through a resurgent nationalism strongly inflected by religious (Orthodox) sentiment. In some cases, such as Slovenia, the Serbs did not put up much of a fight, but in other cases, such
as Bosnia and later Kosova, where sizable numbers of Serbs lived, Serbian paramili- taries, aided by the Serbian army, began to claim territory by expelling non-Serbian populations. In Kosova, the majority Albanian population developed parallel and underground political and social institutions as the Serbs clamped down on a province that they considered theirs. The Albanians also adopted a pacifist ideology advocated by their leader, Ibrahim Rugova, in order to avoid the "ethnic cleansing" occurring in Bosnia. The stalemate was ruptured with the emergence of the Kosovar Liberation Army and increasing repression from the Serbs. By 1998-99 the Serbs, in their hunt for the KLA, initiated massacres and forceful expulsion. The KLA retaliated with their own nastiness, and the growing war quickly became unacceptable to the international community. A combined NATO and U. S. force launched an air war that encouraged even more Albanian refugees but defeated and eventually ended the Milosevic regime in Belgrade. Starting in June 1999 Kosova became a protectorate of the United Nations. In February 2008 Kosova became independent but still under international supervi- sion.
18. Thomas, Serbia under Milosevic.
19. Ananiadis, "Carl Schmitt," 152.
20. Agamben, Homo Sacer; Agamben, State of Exception.
21. Kant, Kant.
22. Gutmann, "Lure of Extreme Rhetoric. "
23. De Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 45.
Works Cited
Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller- Roazen. Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, 1998.
------. State of Exception. Translated by Kevin Attell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.
Ananiadis, Grigoris. "Carl Schmitt on Kosovo, or, Taking War Seriously. " In Balkan as Metaphor: Between Globalization and Fragmentation, edited by Dusan I. Bjelic and Obrad Savic, 119-61. Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 2002.
Aristotle. On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse. Translated by George A. Kennedy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Aune, James A. Selling the Free Market: The Rhetoric of Economic Correctness. New York: Guilford Press, 2001.
Canfora, Luciano. Democracy in Europe: A History of an Ideology. Translated by Simon Jones. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006.
Cintron, Ralph. "Democracy as Fetish. " Politicum 1, no. 2 (May 2008): 9-12.
Crowley, Sharon. Toward a Civil Discourse: Rhetoric and Fundamentalism. Pittsburgh: Uni-
versity of Pittsburgh Press, 2006.
Cruikshank, Barbara. The Will to Empower: Democratic Citizens and Other Subjects. Ithaca,
N. Y. : Cornell University Press, 1999.
De Tocqueville, Alexis. Democracy in America. Translated by Henry Reeve. Edited by
Phillips Bradley. New York: Everyman's Library, 1994.
Fukuyama, Francis. "The End of History?
" National Interest (Summer 1989): www. wesjones
. com/eoh. htm.
Gutmann, Amy. "The Lure of Extreme Rhetoric. " Craig S. Bazzani Lecture in Public
Affairs, University of Illinois at Chicago, November 2006.
Habermas, Ju? rgen. Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law
and Democracy. Translated by William Rehg. Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 1998.
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116 Ralph Cintron
Hall, John R. "Introduction: The Reworking of Class Analysis. " In Reworking Class, edited by John R. Hall, 1-40. Ithaca, N. Y. : Cornell University Press, 1997.
Kant, Immanuel. Kant: Political Writings. Edited by H. S. Reiss. Translated by H. B. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Kennedy, George A. Introduction. In Aristotle on Rhetoric, A Theory of Civic Discourse, 3-22. Translated by George A. Kennedy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Linz, Jaun J. , and Alfred Stepan. Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation:
Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1996.
Moss, Ann. "Commonplaces and Commonplace Books. " In Encyclopedia of Rhetoric,
119-124. Edited by Thomas O. Sloane. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Nodia, Ghia. "How Different Are Postcommunist Transitions? " In Democracy after Com- munism, edited by Larry Diamond and Marc F. Plattner, 3-17. Baltimore: Johns Hop-
kins University Press, 2002.
Paley, Julia. "Toward an Anthropology of Democracy. " Annual Review of Anthropology 31
(2002): 469-96.
Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice, rev. ed. Cambridge, Mass. : Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 1999.
Sachs, Jeffrey D. Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet. New York: Penguin
Press, 2008.
Spahiu, Nexmedin. Serbian Tendencies for Partitioning of Kosova. Budapest: Central Euro-
pean University, 1999.
Thomas, Robert. Serbia under Milosevic: Politics in the 1990s. London: Hurst, 1999. Trimcev, Eno. Democracy, Intellectuals and the State: The Case of Albania. Tirana: Alban-
ian Institute for International Studies, 2005.
Weber, Max. Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. Edited by Guenther
Roth and Claus Wittich. New York: Bedminster Press, 1968.
[ part2 ]
Rhetorical Interventions
? Rhetorical Engagements in the Scientist's Process of Remaking Race as Genetic
Celeste M. Condit
On July 30, 2002, a New York Times headline read, "Race Is Seen as Real Guide to Track the Roots of Disease. "1 The credibility of this article rested squarely on the research of a biologist. Neil Risch, of Stanford University, is cited as the source of the claim that "genetic differences have arisen among people living on different continents and that race, referring to geographically based ances- try, is a valid way of categorizing these differences. "2 This article is part of a substantial trend in current genetic research, which links differences in human social groups to differences in genetics.
Here we go again. Every other generation or so, a group of scientists masks flawed methodology and self-aggrandizing assumptions with the latest scien- tific trend in order to produce "data" showing that other races are inferior3: phrenology bolstered slavery in the nineteenth century;4 the poorly conceived and biased data of Charles Davenport bolstered eugenics in the Progressive Era;5 Cyril Burt's manufactured intelligence test of twins backed up segrega- tionism in the mid-twentieth century. 6 All of these, of course, pale in compari- son to the Nazi physicians' brutal "experiments" and their broad-reaching claims to superiority in the blood of their Volk. 7 Most rhetoricians readily con- demn this recurrent tendency, but is there anything that rhetoricians can do to preclude scientists from constructing these racist statements in the guise of scientific truth?
Rhetorical theorists have, no doubt, long been entangled in efforts for so- cial change. Cicero was both the foremost rhetorical theorist of his era and an active Roman politician, elected Consul in 63 B. C. Like Cicero's activism, most efforts by rhetoricians to participate in social change processes have been directed at the public sphere. Humans, however, have become a thoroughly technologized species, and recent research in science and technology studies have highlighted the powerful influences exerted by the technical sphere upon paths of social change. 8 An enormous variety of scholars have shown that the
120 Celeste M. Condit
technical sphere, like the public sphere, is at least partially shaped by rhetori- cal factors. 9 It might similarly, therefore, be susceptible to intervention through discursive efforts guided by rhetorical theory.
Even when addressing topics raised by science and technology, however, most rhetoricians have directed their discourse at other rhetoricians or at a presumed reading public inhabiting the public sphere. With regard to the topic of race and genetics, there are, for example, numerous analyses that show the problematic metaphors and categorizations of genetics,10 or reveal the rhe- torical strategies by which the linkage between "race" and "genetics" is con- structed in scientific discourses or reportage on science. 11 While there are some exceptions to the tendency to focus on technical communication as it plays out in the public sphere, the heavy publication slant suggests that it is likely that more activist interventions are also directed at the public sphere rather than involving engagement within the technical (or scientific) sphere. 12 To try to enter the scientists' own conversations, to argue with them within the ven- ues and rubrics of science, is a somewhat different enterprise. To broach the feasibility of the practice and some of the challenges, I recount four different episodes in which I engaged geneticists in scientific venues on the subject of the relationships between "race" and "genetics. " I describe some of the major reasons for the varying levels of success I had in each different situation. I conclude that, if my own experience is at all representative, then the funda- mental variables influencing persuasiveness in the scientific venue are remark- ably similar to those in the public sphere: you persuade people if you talk their language, but it is more difficult to persuade someone the more his or her highly interested worldviews are at stake.
My Coming to Terms with Race and Genetics:
The Human Genetic Variation Consortium
Until I moved to New Orleans, I reacted to race in most of the ways the aver- age white professional American today reacts to race. I wanted to be "liberal" and "tolerant," not a "racist," but these were mere platitudes with no depth or breadth of meaning. When I moved to New Orleans, however, I moved to an area called "the black triangle" because I did not want to commute an hour each day to teach at Tulane University, because I was a teacher who could not afford to live in a "white" area, and because my liberal platitudes told me that there was no reason to be prejudiced and avoid a "black" area of town. Liv- ing there gave me experiential lessons about the meanings of racialization in America, and it also led me to modify my research agenda to focus on race. Periodically I have become overwhelmed and despondent and "stopped work- ing on race. " But race in contemporary America is not something you can ever really walk away from.
Consequently, though I had "stopped working on race" half a dozen years earlier and turned to studying genetics, in 1998 I found myself submitting a
The Process of Remaking Race as Genetic 121
proposal to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to study how laypeople, especially African Americans and Whites, understood the relationship between race and genetics. When that proposal was eventually funded, I was included in a group called the Human Genetic Variation Consortium. This was a group of researchers working in various ways on social, ethical, or legal issues re- lated to race and genetics. Most notably, the group discussed the "Haplotype Map" project (described below) and advised some of that project's advisers. At the close of the term of my cohort of members, a group of its members published a position paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association on the lack of relevance of genetic research to the amelioration of health dis- parities. 13
The consortium meetings during the first year were devoted to familiariz- ing ourselves with the new trend in genetics toward taking account of race in genetics and health studies. We were told that there were two major forces generating this trend. The first was a need for geneticists to account for popu- lation substructure in their work. Through several expensive and embarrass- ingly errant studies, geneticists had discovered that differences among the geographic ancestry of control and experimental populations could produce spurious findings that "a gene" was related to a particular health condition. 14 The simplest way of correcting that problem appeared to be to provide rela- tively rigorous controls on the boundaries among the "racial" groups that com- posed research populations.
The second concern was more compelling to the humanists and social sci- entists in the consortium. It was the issue of health disparities. There can be no denial that there are clear health disparities between groups that are under- stood as "racial" groups in the United States. Compared to people who self- identify as "White," people who self-identify as Black or African American, American Indian, or Hispanic American die younger and suffer more and worse disease across many common diseases, including cardiovascular dis- eases, diabetes, and several kinds of cancer (the situation is more complex for Asian Americans due to different historical and economic positionings of dif- ferent nationalized subpopulations. )15 Many doctors and researchers, includ- ing minority physicians, have come to believe that a part of these disparities is due to differences in biology, specifically in genes.
This rationale for attending to the possibility that "race" is "genetic" was compelling to many members of the consortium, because it meant that dis- missing biological accounts of race was not a move with positive, or even merely neutral effects, but might be positively harmful to minority groups. For example, ignoring race results in the recruitment of predominantly white pop- ulations to research studies, and it produces medicine that is tailored to white bodies and therefore may be less helpful to the bodies of members of other groups. If there is substantial biological variation among the bodies of ethnic or racial groups, then to ignore that variation is to promote "the invisibility
122 Celeste M. Condit
of whiteness," which is simply the contemporary route to privileging white people. 16 It is to mistake whiteness as the universal version of humanity.
The members of the Human Genetic Variation Consortium exhibited a range of reactions to these presentations. My own reaction was to be deeply troubled and indecisive. On the one hand, I was profoundly skeptical of the idea that race was biological. As a rhetorician, I understood that words made categories, and that the structure of material reality in the world did not sim- ply and neutrally require a particular set of labels. I wrote, and continue to write, rhetorical analyses designed to show the constructedness of race with regard to human genetic variation. 17 On the other hand, I had come to take seriously the fact that race could not be simply ignored, denied, or swept under the carpet. Health disparities were undeniable, and minority researchers and physicians I respected insisted that they saw important differences between average members of different groups. While it was clearly true that the "aver- age" member of a group was an imprecise construct, it might also be true that denying such average differences would merely reinforce a medical system that served white people well and other people not so well. Moreover, I had something of a consistency problem, as my own research required me to explicitly invite people to participate based on something like their "race. " If I were to be able to provide a sufficiently robust input from people other than white southerners, then I had to explicitly invite people into my research proj- ect based on their identity as "African Americans. " If this was a good, even essential, practice for the research I thought I should pursue, then how could I insist that it was not a good thing for people doing other types of research?
I took this profound uncertainty as an initial question for my research process. I decided to trust the community of people who would be most affected by a race-based medical research endeavor, African Americans. So, in conjunction with a fabulous group of graduate students and coresearchers, I designed and conducted focus groups to find out what ordinary people thought of these possibilities. 18 The answer African American participants in this research gave was overwhelmingly opposed to race-based medical ap- proaches. White participants tended to oppose them as well, though not as vehemently. Having learned to distrust my own white-based instincts on issues of race, I determined to trust these people's judgments. The effort to amplify their voice became the basis of my first attempt at engagement with the sci- entific community.
Engagement #1: Publish Data About the Challenges and Costs of Race-Based Medicine in Scientific Journals on Genetic Medicine
My goal was to engage medical geneticists who were being encouraged to par- ticipate in a paradigm of race-based medicine. It seemed to me that the flow of medical science was such that it was better to prevent the formation of an errant consensus by these experts rather than to contest that consensus once
The Process of Remaking Race as Genetic 123
it reached the public sphere, so I determined it best to engage in the process by which the medical consensus on race and genetic medicine was being for- mulated. All I had to offer by way of argument, however, was the fact that a substantial group of laypeople did not like the idea. How could that fact be made of relevance to the medical community?
Medical research in genetics, like all medical research, is largely bereft of attention to many of the issues of how a particular medical regime will be implemented in practice. Medical research is conducted in highly selective locations under near-ideal conditions. When a medical procedure or drug is approved, it is diffused for use under very different conditions. This, I thought, was exactly the problem for a race-based medicine. In an ideal world, where everyone was enlightened, using a social grouping such as "race" as shorthand for mild tendencies for human biology to vary might be acceptable. In the real world, as my participants clearly indicated, it just would not work. Since race-based medicine was being promoted primarily as an economic necessity-- due to the presumed expense of doing individualized genetic testing--showing the economic and other barriers to implementation seemed like a reasonable line of argument. 19
So I and my research team wrote "Attitudinal Barriers to Delivery of Race- Targeted Pharmacogenomics among Informed Lay Persons," and we were suc- cessful in publishing it in Genetics in Medicine. 20 The article and its companion article were written and published within the generic norms of a scientific article. 21 Its sections are "methods," "data," and "discussion. " It uses quanti- tative presentation of findings and employs the objectivating procedure of intercoder reliability assessments. As Kenneth Burke has noted, you persuade a person insofar as you speak his or her language, and because we wanted to be persuasive to an audience of scientists, we presented our research in the language and conventions of science (even though we were mostly a group of rhetoricians). 22
The contents of the article indicate that the effectiveness of a race-based medical approach would have to be assessed based on a variety of costs and challenges not presently included in the arguments in favor of its implemen- tation. These additional costs included the inability of doctors to assign peo- ple to discrete and accurate ancestries, the lack of knowledge of the biology of one's grandparents especially among African Americans, and very high levels of distrust of such medicines by their users, which is likely to lead to low com- pliance with prescriptions as well as a potential backlash against prescribers, pharmaceutical companies, and medical research institutions if ever such a drug turns out to have serious harmful side effects (which seems probable over the long run, especially given the contemporaneous tragedy of Vioxx and related cox-2 inhibitors). In other words, we gave the medical experts scien- tific evidence that race-based medicine was unlikely to be cheap or particu- larly effective.
124 Celeste M. Condit
The impact of this pair of articles was, so far as we can tell, virtually zero. Citation indexes showed only three citations of either article. A wide variety of sources that should have cited it because they were addressing costs of race- based medicine or feasibility did not. My first intervention was apparently a total failure.
Engagement #2: Going Live to Genetics Researchers on the Harmful Impact of "Race as Genetic"
The opportunity for a second intervention presented itself as a matter of both serendipity and foresightful preparation. One of the major arguments that humanists and social scientists use for arguing against geneticization of racial categories is that such geneticization makes race appear absolute and perma- nent. The technical term for this is that it tends to "reify" race. In contrast, a nonreified understanding of existing labels for groups sees these labels as leaky and imprecise and as a temporary product of historical and social confluences. Indeed, the historical evidence is quite clear that racial group labels and racial groupings vary considerably through time and space. 23 In contrast, assigning a scientific basis for a grouping is believed to suggest that such groupings are permanent and absolute, because we tend to think of scientific categories as universal and rigid. Therefore, a scientific grounding for race should produce more "racism" than would an understanding of race as a product of social and historical forces.
Is this presumption correct, however? Having become skittish about the link between genes and racism, I wondered whether we humanists were really right to claim that people who saw health as differentially distributed by race and who saw race as distributed by genes would be more racist than people who did not. If ignoring race was tantamount to universalizing whiteness, perhaps recognizing race was necessary to overcome racism. And if that were true, then perhaps people who thought of health disparities as a simple matter of biological difference would not therefore conclude that everything about racial groups (for example, class distribution or IQ scores) was a matter of genetics and was therefore fixed forever.
I continue to puzzle over this issue. However, one way of addressing the question, and of addressing it in a way that would have credibility with the scientifically based genetics community, is to run an experiment to see if peo- ple exposed to messages linking health, race, and genetics increase the racism level of their attitudes as composed to people who do not hear such messages. So this is what my research team did. The results of the experiment seemed to me shocking and frightening. We exposed people to a very tame message about health disparities, one that simply mentioned genetics in passing as one possible basis for health variation. People who heard this message increased their level of racism an average of almost a full point on a five-point racism scale. 24 We had expected no effect at all, because we had used a very mild
The Process of Remaking Race as Genetic 125
message. We were quite concerned about the ethics of increasing people's lev- els of racism through an experiment, given that we were not sure that the debriefing message we would give them at the end would actually return their levels to preexperimental levels, so we had decided to start below the level where we thought we would create change and inch our way upward to a modest level of effect. The effect of a 20 percent increase that occurred from our first modest level message is unusual in message-design research, so this very large effect convinced us that messages about race, genes, and health most certainly would cause "reification" of attitudes about race and would amplify racism.
So that was the foresight. Serendipitously, around this time, because of my work with the Human Genetic Variation Consortium, I was invited to make a presentation to the sixth International Meeting on Single Nucleotide Poly- morphism (SNP) and Complex Genome Analysis. 25 This is a meeting of a group of researchers who participate in projects designed to track down details of variation in the human genome in order to produce the basis for identifying genes that are associated with common diseases and identifying medicines that might address those genetic variations. I presented the results of the mes- sage experiment in my fifteen-minute presentation close to the beginning of the conference.
The impact of the talk was, I believe, relatively substantial--among those present, for the duration of the conference. The audience was attentive, and later speakers evidenced awkwardness, discomfort, and attempts at circumspec- tion in labeling groups in their presentations. Moreover, the award-winning poster for the conference was one that indicated that apparent clusters of hu- man genetic variation by continents was an artifact of sampling procedures that left large gaps in samples between continental groups rather than using a continuous sampling procedure. I heard the winner being told that "as soon as I heard that talk, I knew you were going to win. "
I might well be exaggerating my own influence here. At the least, my pres- entation was one straw on a growing pile on an invisible camel (though there were no other presentations of this sort at the conference). I have to admit to being heartened and hopeful. It is important, however, to note the audience that evinced this effect. Most of these researchers do work that is well "up- stream" from actual medical applications on live human beings.
Spahiu's analysis raises some further issues. It seems that democracy can only be understood as some sort of mixed system. In the case of Serbia, the immaturity of its democracy allowed it to mix readily with forms of totalitari- anism. Readers might recognize here Agamben's analyses of the state of exception and the sort of equivalence that it makes between democracy and totalitarianism. 20 This latter point, which may disturb many readers since it opens the door to certain forms of unrestrained power, simply acknowledges
Democracy and Its Limitations 109
110 Ralph Cintron
that democracy as a set of conceptual ideals cannot be easily materialized in a real state with real needs facing the push and pull of internal and external forces. That is, no state can wear the ideals of democracy comfortably, for the state is a remarkably different animal. Democracy is a thought system that many have tried to institutionalize but has yet to arrive; the state, in contrast, wields pragmatic power, and if its self-preservation becomes desperate enough, it will break the shackles of restraint, including those imposed by democracy, and it will do so "democratically" with the full permission of the "people. " A people struggling under the raw anxiety of survival will look first for a cure to their material desperation and will modify and even dismiss with easy aban- don the niceties of their ideals. From this perspective, there are no aberrations, distortions, or perversions of democracy; these darker conditions are simply part of the potential of any democratic power, even if only rarely deployed.
And if a state should claim that it observes a set of principles, such as the rule of law or democratic transparency, but acts in wholly opposite ways, it is strange to call such a state hypocritical. The charge is strange because it mis- perceives the nature of the state as wielder of pragmatic power. That is, it mis- perceives the gap between theory and practice. Theory attempts to control practice by giving it meaning, high purpose, a telos in order to curb its poten- tial brutality. Practice will abide by theory and more or less follow its rules as long as conditions permit. It is the breaking point, then, the state of emer- gency, that always proves most interesting, that moment when practice must overthrow whatever theory gives it meaning in order to save the theory itself. In other words, the unseemly practices that at the breaking point suddenly become sanctioned are given full reign because they can be dressed with the last vestige of hope: the salvation of our virtuous theory. But this breaking point simply tells us what has been in place all along, namely, that theory is constantly under assault because it disables and hinders the power of human desire and real needs.
This conundrum is faced by Kant in his essay "On the Common Saying: 'This May Be True in Theory, But It Does Not Apply in Practice. '"21 His goal here is to embody the transcendental principles of moral order, reason, and justice inside republican constitutions. Through such means natural law (the- ory) can become human law (practice) that will tame the all too human pro- clivity for force and cunning. Via a number of brilliant arguments--such as the fact that incessant violence exhausts a people, which brings them back to reason--he makes his case that humans have and will continue to wend their way toward a morally superior state, that is, a public sphere based on reason and empathy, not coercion. This model, in which theory and practice come into reasonable alignment, is picked up by Rawls and Habermas in their own models of a just society but also by their critics who patch up the injustices overlooked by both authors in order to offer an even fuller, more encompass- ing justice. Theory and practice, then, in all these models can be brought
together, and from this perspective the calling out of shortcomings and hypocrisies are legitimate strategies by which the virtues of democracy can be widened and improved and brought back into practice; that is, these theorists and defenders of the public sphere claim that more democracy can repair the damage that democracy has created if we can just point to who or what caused its virtue to slip and fall in the first place.
The reason why I maintain a genuine fondness for Kant, Rawls, and Haber- mas is because these writers know the potential human tragedy that their arguments try to keep at bay. Nevertheless, the approach taken here regard- ing the anthropology of democracy and the analysis of democratic rhetorics foregrounds material conditions. It does not background them, as does the idealist tradition. Perceived need or real need, perceived fear or real fear-- when people feel subject to these lacks, they assume that material conditions are the causes of their woe, and from that base rhetors search for the avail- able arguments that have the power to win what is needed or defeat what is feared. And those topoi that carry a history of virtue have particular power; hence rhetors evoke democratic rhetorics in the hope of locating some irre- futable sense of goodness and justice--Recht, as Kant called it--that will defend their claim. But this irrefutability is often checkmated by arguments and virtues derived from the same democratic rhetorics.
Final Thoughts on the "Public Good"
How, then, do we determine the public good? A related question: how might we improve the quality of the public sphere? These are some of the more common questions raised within liberal democracy. My earlier discussions of Sharon Crowley and James Aune indicated also their deep interest in revi- talizing the public sphere. Similarly, in a talk titled "The Lure of Extreme Rhetoric," political theorist and president of the University of Pennsylvania Amy Gutmann, well known for her work with Habermas, examined the "increasing allure of extremist rhetoric in public discourse and its perils for democracy. " The central peril was the erosion of a sense of compromise and mutual respect that tends to distort and corrupt democracy. The cure? An "economy of moral disagreement" in which advocates stand passionately for what they believe but do not argue down their adversaries or argue for more than what is necessary. 22 But can democracy be distorted, corrupted, or put into peril? And how does one encourage advocates to stand passionately for what they believe but also to restrain themselves from arguing down adver- saries and arguing only for what is necessary? My answers to these questions will hopefully be a fitting conclusion to this essay.
I have been arguing from the beginning that democracy is too large and too abstract to be institutionalized. If anything, democracy is a topos along with a whole host of related topoi that act as storehouses of social energy. They are particularly powerful topoi because they reflect a history that has become
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112 Ralph Cintron
sacrosanct, and hence they evoke an instant or automatic virtue to be deployed by rhetors in whatever scene or for whatever cause they choose. Of course, one rhetor's deployment may seem utterly unacceptable to another's, but because the topoi themselves are packed with virtue both camps will probably rely on the same topoi.
If this first point is trivial enough, perhaps the second one is less so. For what is even more at stake is not just how democratic rhetorics are available equally to all parties in the public sphere but to the extent to which demo- cratic governance, because it is not realizable except as an energeia, represents a mixed system that I am calling oligarchic democracy. If democracy is, indeed, a mixed system, then it cannot be distorted or corrupted because, in effect, whatever the critic is complaining about is integral to the system itself. Return- ing to Gutmann's example, the boorish voices that want to trample the voices of opponents and to claim much more than is necessary are not examples of a distorted democracy but part of the expectations and desires that have been unleashed by a special subjectivity that is now filled with the topoi of rights, freedoms, and individual will that mark democracy. Democracy, of course, does not in all cases give birth to boorish passions, but it provides an inter- pretive lens that can rationalize and legitimize actions and words that I too find reprehensible. Gutmann idealizes democracy because there is no alterna- tive that can realize the sort of public good and public sphere that she desires. She is right that no other alternative has been theorized, but why should she also ignore the ways in which democracy generates the very world that makes her uncomfortable?
Let me inquire more deeply into the motives for asking questions like "how do we determine the public good? " or "how do we improve the public sphere? " First, I cannot imagine a program that could in any pragmatic way improve public deliberation. Second, I suspect that most calls to improve the public sphere reflect the specific motives of some group that feels shut out of the deliberative process. That is, a call to improve the public sphere, whether from a left-leaning or right-leaning group, is a synonym for "let me in" and not really a call to genuinely improve the public sphere. In most cases, the group in power, whether left or right and very much like the Chicago alder- man described earlier, seeks to stymie the other, while the group out of power calls for improvements to the public sphere. Such calls, then, sound the tones of virtue, but if either group should come to power it may cease to believe its former words if such calls should lead to political suicide. Third, such ques- tions as "how do we determine the public good? " or "how do we improve the quality of the public sphere? " idealize the concept of the public good by sug- gesting that there is some determination or improvement that will somehow escape the paradoxical conditions of exclusion/inclusion. Certainly there are on occasion win-win conclusions to a public dispute, but the public sphere,
particularly when deliberating the most serious of social issues, is mostly a space of limited inclusion and not one that excludes exclusion.
Finally, a more significant, if controversial, point is that such calls are in some instances false emergencies built on a mistaken conflation of democracy with the interests of the nation-state. Conjecture: When we say that democ- racy is in peril or that our freedom or the constitution or the public sphere is in danger, are we thinking metonymically, that is, substituting the term "democracy" for the state itself? If so, then to call for the preservation of democracy is actually a call to preserve the social order as embodied by the state. I suspect that false emergencies are manufactured out of metonymic magic and that calls to action in the name of saving the constitution or democ- racy or the public sphere mobilize subjects to rise up in defense of the state by using the bullhorn of virtuous democracy. Such calls are meant to stymie the revolutionary, unruly, destabilizing "red" spirit, whether right-leaning or left-leaning, that constitutes much of the history of democratic movements in order to emphasize the more conservative defense of the status quo inter- ests of the state.
Perhaps a keener way to explore this point is to observe that democratic rhetorics, as suggested earlier, overproduce expectations and desires that gen- erate unrealistic claims of equality, freedom, and rights that are difficult for any social order to realize and manage. The questions "how do we determine the public good? " and "how might we improve the public sphere? " are, par- ticularly in Gutmann's case, about the management of that proliferation, the fear that something has gotten out of hand and now must be righted. That is, they apply one kind of brake on the enthusiasms that democracy births; for most "threats" to the constitution or democracy or to the public sphere are the result of someone's claim to excessive freedom and the like. The social order typically manages this proliferation by working double time to produce an economy of material abundance that substitutes for the abstractions and desires that its politics cannot satisfy. As long as this material abundance con- stitutes the norm and dire necessity does not threaten, the human propensity for fairness works.
A Hesitation at the End
Even as this essay deontologizes democracy, it seems to ontologize power by putting it at the center of politics, particularly the mixed system of oligarchic- democracy. All contemporary governance, I suspect, is a ratio of these two terms, these two forces. Curiously enough de Tocqueville saw some of this: "American society has . . . a surface covering of democracy, beneath which the old aristocratic colors sometimes peep out. "23 I do not have the space here to elaborate the proposition of the mixed system. But it should be clear that my argument relies on a strong reading of that proposition as well as a strong
Democracy and Its Limitations 113
114 Ralph Cintron
reading of human anxiety as seen in statements like "fear rules. " Consider: contemporary rhetoricians favor social theorists who shatter the social order via radicalized versions of the topos of democracy--from Marx and Nietzsche to Foucault, Derrida, Habermas, and the most recent work of Rancie`re, Agam- ben, Negri, Badiou, and others. Such work requires an idealized version of democracy, one that rests on a fundamental cleavage between actual existing democracy and democracy itself. My own version of this cleavage has been to call actual existing democracy oligarchic-democracy, a more revealing term, and the other democracy an energeia that functions largely in the symbolic and rhetorical. As an energeia, democracy is not meant to be realized, and that is what provides it with propulsive force. Up to this point, then, my analysis remains within this specific tradition, but then I seem to be raising questions about the "other" democracy as well, for I am wondering about those instances when the energeia of democracy does little to cure perversity but actually insti- gates it (the Serb case mentioned earlier) or raising questions about an era that we may be entering, namely, the exhaustion of democracy strapped to an exhaustion of nature. The end of my essay hesitates, then, because I do not like this reappearance of determinism.
Notes
1. De Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 244.
2. Fukuyama, "End of History? "
3. Linz and Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition, 5; Trimcev, Democracy; Nodia,
"How Different," 10.
4. Moss, "Commonplaces. " 5. Kennedy, Introduction, 7. 6. Aristotle, On Rhetoric, 249.
7. Hall, Introduction, 21. See also Weber, Economy and Society. 8. Crowley, Toward a Civil Discourse.
9. Aune, Selling the Free Market.
10. Paley, "Toward an Anthropology"; Cruikshank, Will to Empower.
11. Agamben, Homo Sacer; Agamben, State of Exception.
12. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms; Rawls, Theory of Justice.
13. These last four points have been greatly aided by conversations with Candice Rai.
They began as her marginal comments to my paragraph.
14. See Canfora, Democracy in Europe; Cintron, "Democracy as Fetish. "
15. For a more optimistic scenario, see Sachs, Common Wealth.
16. Linz and Stepan, Problems, 5; Trimcev, Democracy; Nodia, "How Different," 10. 17. Spahiu, Serbian Tendencies, 7. As Yugoslavian Communism collapsed, a variety of
internal struggles wracked the region. Internally, the political leadership in Serbia was unable to articulate a replacement ideology for Communism (say, a version of demo- cratic socialism resting on civic identity as opposed to ethnic and/or religious identity) that might keep nationalist forces at bay. Externally, the independent entities that had constituted Yugoslavia began to assert their statehood. Serbia, which saw itself as the natural inheritor of the old federation, struggled against the centripetal forces through a resurgent nationalism strongly inflected by religious (Orthodox) sentiment. In some cases, such as Slovenia, the Serbs did not put up much of a fight, but in other cases, such
as Bosnia and later Kosova, where sizable numbers of Serbs lived, Serbian paramili- taries, aided by the Serbian army, began to claim territory by expelling non-Serbian populations. In Kosova, the majority Albanian population developed parallel and underground political and social institutions as the Serbs clamped down on a province that they considered theirs. The Albanians also adopted a pacifist ideology advocated by their leader, Ibrahim Rugova, in order to avoid the "ethnic cleansing" occurring in Bosnia. The stalemate was ruptured with the emergence of the Kosovar Liberation Army and increasing repression from the Serbs. By 1998-99 the Serbs, in their hunt for the KLA, initiated massacres and forceful expulsion. The KLA retaliated with their own nastiness, and the growing war quickly became unacceptable to the international community. A combined NATO and U. S. force launched an air war that encouraged even more Albanian refugees but defeated and eventually ended the Milosevic regime in Belgrade. Starting in June 1999 Kosova became a protectorate of the United Nations. In February 2008 Kosova became independent but still under international supervi- sion.
18. Thomas, Serbia under Milosevic.
19. Ananiadis, "Carl Schmitt," 152.
20. Agamben, Homo Sacer; Agamben, State of Exception.
21. Kant, Kant.
22. Gutmann, "Lure of Extreme Rhetoric. "
23. De Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 45.
Works Cited
Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller- Roazen. Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, 1998.
------. State of Exception. Translated by Kevin Attell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.
Ananiadis, Grigoris. "Carl Schmitt on Kosovo, or, Taking War Seriously. " In Balkan as Metaphor: Between Globalization and Fragmentation, edited by Dusan I. Bjelic and Obrad Savic, 119-61. Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 2002.
Aristotle. On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse. Translated by George A. Kennedy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Aune, James A. Selling the Free Market: The Rhetoric of Economic Correctness. New York: Guilford Press, 2001.
Canfora, Luciano. Democracy in Europe: A History of an Ideology. Translated by Simon Jones. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006.
Cintron, Ralph. "Democracy as Fetish. " Politicum 1, no. 2 (May 2008): 9-12.
Crowley, Sharon. Toward a Civil Discourse: Rhetoric and Fundamentalism. Pittsburgh: Uni-
versity of Pittsburgh Press, 2006.
Cruikshank, Barbara. The Will to Empower: Democratic Citizens and Other Subjects. Ithaca,
N. Y. : Cornell University Press, 1999.
De Tocqueville, Alexis. Democracy in America. Translated by Henry Reeve. Edited by
Phillips Bradley. New York: Everyman's Library, 1994.
Fukuyama, Francis. "The End of History?
" National Interest (Summer 1989): www. wesjones
. com/eoh. htm.
Gutmann, Amy. "The Lure of Extreme Rhetoric. " Craig S. Bazzani Lecture in Public
Affairs, University of Illinois at Chicago, November 2006.
Habermas, Ju? rgen. Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law
and Democracy. Translated by William Rehg. Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 1998.
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116 Ralph Cintron
Hall, John R. "Introduction: The Reworking of Class Analysis. " In Reworking Class, edited by John R. Hall, 1-40. Ithaca, N. Y. : Cornell University Press, 1997.
Kant, Immanuel. Kant: Political Writings. Edited by H. S. Reiss. Translated by H. B. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Kennedy, George A. Introduction. In Aristotle on Rhetoric, A Theory of Civic Discourse, 3-22. Translated by George A. Kennedy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Linz, Jaun J. , and Alfred Stepan. Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation:
Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1996.
Moss, Ann. "Commonplaces and Commonplace Books. " In Encyclopedia of Rhetoric,
119-124. Edited by Thomas O. Sloane. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Nodia, Ghia. "How Different Are Postcommunist Transitions? " In Democracy after Com- munism, edited by Larry Diamond and Marc F. Plattner, 3-17. Baltimore: Johns Hop-
kins University Press, 2002.
Paley, Julia. "Toward an Anthropology of Democracy. " Annual Review of Anthropology 31
(2002): 469-96.
Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice, rev. ed. Cambridge, Mass. : Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 1999.
Sachs, Jeffrey D. Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet. New York: Penguin
Press, 2008.
Spahiu, Nexmedin. Serbian Tendencies for Partitioning of Kosova. Budapest: Central Euro-
pean University, 1999.
Thomas, Robert. Serbia under Milosevic: Politics in the 1990s. London: Hurst, 1999. Trimcev, Eno. Democracy, Intellectuals and the State: The Case of Albania. Tirana: Alban-
ian Institute for International Studies, 2005.
Weber, Max. Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. Edited by Guenther
Roth and Claus Wittich. New York: Bedminster Press, 1968.
[ part2 ]
Rhetorical Interventions
? Rhetorical Engagements in the Scientist's Process of Remaking Race as Genetic
Celeste M. Condit
On July 30, 2002, a New York Times headline read, "Race Is Seen as Real Guide to Track the Roots of Disease. "1 The credibility of this article rested squarely on the research of a biologist. Neil Risch, of Stanford University, is cited as the source of the claim that "genetic differences have arisen among people living on different continents and that race, referring to geographically based ances- try, is a valid way of categorizing these differences. "2 This article is part of a substantial trend in current genetic research, which links differences in human social groups to differences in genetics.
Here we go again. Every other generation or so, a group of scientists masks flawed methodology and self-aggrandizing assumptions with the latest scien- tific trend in order to produce "data" showing that other races are inferior3: phrenology bolstered slavery in the nineteenth century;4 the poorly conceived and biased data of Charles Davenport bolstered eugenics in the Progressive Era;5 Cyril Burt's manufactured intelligence test of twins backed up segrega- tionism in the mid-twentieth century. 6 All of these, of course, pale in compari- son to the Nazi physicians' brutal "experiments" and their broad-reaching claims to superiority in the blood of their Volk. 7 Most rhetoricians readily con- demn this recurrent tendency, but is there anything that rhetoricians can do to preclude scientists from constructing these racist statements in the guise of scientific truth?
Rhetorical theorists have, no doubt, long been entangled in efforts for so- cial change. Cicero was both the foremost rhetorical theorist of his era and an active Roman politician, elected Consul in 63 B. C. Like Cicero's activism, most efforts by rhetoricians to participate in social change processes have been directed at the public sphere. Humans, however, have become a thoroughly technologized species, and recent research in science and technology studies have highlighted the powerful influences exerted by the technical sphere upon paths of social change. 8 An enormous variety of scholars have shown that the
120 Celeste M. Condit
technical sphere, like the public sphere, is at least partially shaped by rhetori- cal factors. 9 It might similarly, therefore, be susceptible to intervention through discursive efforts guided by rhetorical theory.
Even when addressing topics raised by science and technology, however, most rhetoricians have directed their discourse at other rhetoricians or at a presumed reading public inhabiting the public sphere. With regard to the topic of race and genetics, there are, for example, numerous analyses that show the problematic metaphors and categorizations of genetics,10 or reveal the rhe- torical strategies by which the linkage between "race" and "genetics" is con- structed in scientific discourses or reportage on science. 11 While there are some exceptions to the tendency to focus on technical communication as it plays out in the public sphere, the heavy publication slant suggests that it is likely that more activist interventions are also directed at the public sphere rather than involving engagement within the technical (or scientific) sphere. 12 To try to enter the scientists' own conversations, to argue with them within the ven- ues and rubrics of science, is a somewhat different enterprise. To broach the feasibility of the practice and some of the challenges, I recount four different episodes in which I engaged geneticists in scientific venues on the subject of the relationships between "race" and "genetics. " I describe some of the major reasons for the varying levels of success I had in each different situation. I conclude that, if my own experience is at all representative, then the funda- mental variables influencing persuasiveness in the scientific venue are remark- ably similar to those in the public sphere: you persuade people if you talk their language, but it is more difficult to persuade someone the more his or her highly interested worldviews are at stake.
My Coming to Terms with Race and Genetics:
The Human Genetic Variation Consortium
Until I moved to New Orleans, I reacted to race in most of the ways the aver- age white professional American today reacts to race. I wanted to be "liberal" and "tolerant," not a "racist," but these were mere platitudes with no depth or breadth of meaning. When I moved to New Orleans, however, I moved to an area called "the black triangle" because I did not want to commute an hour each day to teach at Tulane University, because I was a teacher who could not afford to live in a "white" area, and because my liberal platitudes told me that there was no reason to be prejudiced and avoid a "black" area of town. Liv- ing there gave me experiential lessons about the meanings of racialization in America, and it also led me to modify my research agenda to focus on race. Periodically I have become overwhelmed and despondent and "stopped work- ing on race. " But race in contemporary America is not something you can ever really walk away from.
Consequently, though I had "stopped working on race" half a dozen years earlier and turned to studying genetics, in 1998 I found myself submitting a
The Process of Remaking Race as Genetic 121
proposal to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to study how laypeople, especially African Americans and Whites, understood the relationship between race and genetics. When that proposal was eventually funded, I was included in a group called the Human Genetic Variation Consortium. This was a group of researchers working in various ways on social, ethical, or legal issues re- lated to race and genetics. Most notably, the group discussed the "Haplotype Map" project (described below) and advised some of that project's advisers. At the close of the term of my cohort of members, a group of its members published a position paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association on the lack of relevance of genetic research to the amelioration of health dis- parities. 13
The consortium meetings during the first year were devoted to familiariz- ing ourselves with the new trend in genetics toward taking account of race in genetics and health studies. We were told that there were two major forces generating this trend. The first was a need for geneticists to account for popu- lation substructure in their work. Through several expensive and embarrass- ingly errant studies, geneticists had discovered that differences among the geographic ancestry of control and experimental populations could produce spurious findings that "a gene" was related to a particular health condition. 14 The simplest way of correcting that problem appeared to be to provide rela- tively rigorous controls on the boundaries among the "racial" groups that com- posed research populations.
The second concern was more compelling to the humanists and social sci- entists in the consortium. It was the issue of health disparities. There can be no denial that there are clear health disparities between groups that are under- stood as "racial" groups in the United States. Compared to people who self- identify as "White," people who self-identify as Black or African American, American Indian, or Hispanic American die younger and suffer more and worse disease across many common diseases, including cardiovascular dis- eases, diabetes, and several kinds of cancer (the situation is more complex for Asian Americans due to different historical and economic positionings of dif- ferent nationalized subpopulations. )15 Many doctors and researchers, includ- ing minority physicians, have come to believe that a part of these disparities is due to differences in biology, specifically in genes.
This rationale for attending to the possibility that "race" is "genetic" was compelling to many members of the consortium, because it meant that dis- missing biological accounts of race was not a move with positive, or even merely neutral effects, but might be positively harmful to minority groups. For example, ignoring race results in the recruitment of predominantly white pop- ulations to research studies, and it produces medicine that is tailored to white bodies and therefore may be less helpful to the bodies of members of other groups. If there is substantial biological variation among the bodies of ethnic or racial groups, then to ignore that variation is to promote "the invisibility
122 Celeste M. Condit
of whiteness," which is simply the contemporary route to privileging white people. 16 It is to mistake whiteness as the universal version of humanity.
The members of the Human Genetic Variation Consortium exhibited a range of reactions to these presentations. My own reaction was to be deeply troubled and indecisive. On the one hand, I was profoundly skeptical of the idea that race was biological. As a rhetorician, I understood that words made categories, and that the structure of material reality in the world did not sim- ply and neutrally require a particular set of labels. I wrote, and continue to write, rhetorical analyses designed to show the constructedness of race with regard to human genetic variation. 17 On the other hand, I had come to take seriously the fact that race could not be simply ignored, denied, or swept under the carpet. Health disparities were undeniable, and minority researchers and physicians I respected insisted that they saw important differences between average members of different groups. While it was clearly true that the "aver- age" member of a group was an imprecise construct, it might also be true that denying such average differences would merely reinforce a medical system that served white people well and other people not so well. Moreover, I had something of a consistency problem, as my own research required me to explicitly invite people to participate based on something like their "race. " If I were to be able to provide a sufficiently robust input from people other than white southerners, then I had to explicitly invite people into my research proj- ect based on their identity as "African Americans. " If this was a good, even essential, practice for the research I thought I should pursue, then how could I insist that it was not a good thing for people doing other types of research?
I took this profound uncertainty as an initial question for my research process. I decided to trust the community of people who would be most affected by a race-based medical research endeavor, African Americans. So, in conjunction with a fabulous group of graduate students and coresearchers, I designed and conducted focus groups to find out what ordinary people thought of these possibilities. 18 The answer African American participants in this research gave was overwhelmingly opposed to race-based medical ap- proaches. White participants tended to oppose them as well, though not as vehemently. Having learned to distrust my own white-based instincts on issues of race, I determined to trust these people's judgments. The effort to amplify their voice became the basis of my first attempt at engagement with the sci- entific community.
Engagement #1: Publish Data About the Challenges and Costs of Race-Based Medicine in Scientific Journals on Genetic Medicine
My goal was to engage medical geneticists who were being encouraged to par- ticipate in a paradigm of race-based medicine. It seemed to me that the flow of medical science was such that it was better to prevent the formation of an errant consensus by these experts rather than to contest that consensus once
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it reached the public sphere, so I determined it best to engage in the process by which the medical consensus on race and genetic medicine was being for- mulated. All I had to offer by way of argument, however, was the fact that a substantial group of laypeople did not like the idea. How could that fact be made of relevance to the medical community?
Medical research in genetics, like all medical research, is largely bereft of attention to many of the issues of how a particular medical regime will be implemented in practice. Medical research is conducted in highly selective locations under near-ideal conditions. When a medical procedure or drug is approved, it is diffused for use under very different conditions. This, I thought, was exactly the problem for a race-based medicine. In an ideal world, where everyone was enlightened, using a social grouping such as "race" as shorthand for mild tendencies for human biology to vary might be acceptable. In the real world, as my participants clearly indicated, it just would not work. Since race-based medicine was being promoted primarily as an economic necessity-- due to the presumed expense of doing individualized genetic testing--showing the economic and other barriers to implementation seemed like a reasonable line of argument. 19
So I and my research team wrote "Attitudinal Barriers to Delivery of Race- Targeted Pharmacogenomics among Informed Lay Persons," and we were suc- cessful in publishing it in Genetics in Medicine. 20 The article and its companion article were written and published within the generic norms of a scientific article. 21 Its sections are "methods," "data," and "discussion. " It uses quanti- tative presentation of findings and employs the objectivating procedure of intercoder reliability assessments. As Kenneth Burke has noted, you persuade a person insofar as you speak his or her language, and because we wanted to be persuasive to an audience of scientists, we presented our research in the language and conventions of science (even though we were mostly a group of rhetoricians). 22
The contents of the article indicate that the effectiveness of a race-based medical approach would have to be assessed based on a variety of costs and challenges not presently included in the arguments in favor of its implemen- tation. These additional costs included the inability of doctors to assign peo- ple to discrete and accurate ancestries, the lack of knowledge of the biology of one's grandparents especially among African Americans, and very high levels of distrust of such medicines by their users, which is likely to lead to low com- pliance with prescriptions as well as a potential backlash against prescribers, pharmaceutical companies, and medical research institutions if ever such a drug turns out to have serious harmful side effects (which seems probable over the long run, especially given the contemporaneous tragedy of Vioxx and related cox-2 inhibitors). In other words, we gave the medical experts scien- tific evidence that race-based medicine was unlikely to be cheap or particu- larly effective.
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The impact of this pair of articles was, so far as we can tell, virtually zero. Citation indexes showed only three citations of either article. A wide variety of sources that should have cited it because they were addressing costs of race- based medicine or feasibility did not. My first intervention was apparently a total failure.
Engagement #2: Going Live to Genetics Researchers on the Harmful Impact of "Race as Genetic"
The opportunity for a second intervention presented itself as a matter of both serendipity and foresightful preparation. One of the major arguments that humanists and social scientists use for arguing against geneticization of racial categories is that such geneticization makes race appear absolute and perma- nent. The technical term for this is that it tends to "reify" race. In contrast, a nonreified understanding of existing labels for groups sees these labels as leaky and imprecise and as a temporary product of historical and social confluences. Indeed, the historical evidence is quite clear that racial group labels and racial groupings vary considerably through time and space. 23 In contrast, assigning a scientific basis for a grouping is believed to suggest that such groupings are permanent and absolute, because we tend to think of scientific categories as universal and rigid. Therefore, a scientific grounding for race should produce more "racism" than would an understanding of race as a product of social and historical forces.
Is this presumption correct, however? Having become skittish about the link between genes and racism, I wondered whether we humanists were really right to claim that people who saw health as differentially distributed by race and who saw race as distributed by genes would be more racist than people who did not. If ignoring race was tantamount to universalizing whiteness, perhaps recognizing race was necessary to overcome racism. And if that were true, then perhaps people who thought of health disparities as a simple matter of biological difference would not therefore conclude that everything about racial groups (for example, class distribution or IQ scores) was a matter of genetics and was therefore fixed forever.
I continue to puzzle over this issue. However, one way of addressing the question, and of addressing it in a way that would have credibility with the scientifically based genetics community, is to run an experiment to see if peo- ple exposed to messages linking health, race, and genetics increase the racism level of their attitudes as composed to people who do not hear such messages. So this is what my research team did. The results of the experiment seemed to me shocking and frightening. We exposed people to a very tame message about health disparities, one that simply mentioned genetics in passing as one possible basis for health variation. People who heard this message increased their level of racism an average of almost a full point on a five-point racism scale. 24 We had expected no effect at all, because we had used a very mild
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message. We were quite concerned about the ethics of increasing people's lev- els of racism through an experiment, given that we were not sure that the debriefing message we would give them at the end would actually return their levels to preexperimental levels, so we had decided to start below the level where we thought we would create change and inch our way upward to a modest level of effect. The effect of a 20 percent increase that occurred from our first modest level message is unusual in message-design research, so this very large effect convinced us that messages about race, genes, and health most certainly would cause "reification" of attitudes about race and would amplify racism.
So that was the foresight. Serendipitously, around this time, because of my work with the Human Genetic Variation Consortium, I was invited to make a presentation to the sixth International Meeting on Single Nucleotide Poly- morphism (SNP) and Complex Genome Analysis. 25 This is a meeting of a group of researchers who participate in projects designed to track down details of variation in the human genome in order to produce the basis for identifying genes that are associated with common diseases and identifying medicines that might address those genetic variations. I presented the results of the mes- sage experiment in my fifteen-minute presentation close to the beginning of the conference.
The impact of the talk was, I believe, relatively substantial--among those present, for the duration of the conference. The audience was attentive, and later speakers evidenced awkwardness, discomfort, and attempts at circumspec- tion in labeling groups in their presentations. Moreover, the award-winning poster for the conference was one that indicated that apparent clusters of hu- man genetic variation by continents was an artifact of sampling procedures that left large gaps in samples between continental groups rather than using a continuous sampling procedure. I heard the winner being told that "as soon as I heard that talk, I knew you were going to win. "
I might well be exaggerating my own influence here. At the least, my pres- entation was one straw on a growing pile on an invisible camel (though there were no other presentations of this sort at the conference). I have to admit to being heartened and hopeful. It is important, however, to note the audience that evinced this effect. Most of these researchers do work that is well "up- stream" from actual medical applications on live human beings.
