Chapter One

Self-Affiliation and the Management of Confusion

What Is Situatedness? If and when the next round of dictionaries is compiled, situatedness will show up as one of the buzzwords of the late twentieth century. Its meaning is not yet quite commonplace or self-evident, but it is creeping into familiar use in academic and professional language and may well spread more widely. It has a lot to do with the much more familiar locution I have taken for my subtitle; people are always telling us where they are coming from. But the gesture is as puzzling as it is familiar. It is used mostly as a prelude to telling us where someone is going with their opinions and pronouncements. The claim to be coming from somewhere is usually a precursor to going somewhere else, getting somewhere or something. No one ends a sentence by saying where they are coming from. The declaration works teleologically: it says "let me tell you where I am coming from in order that I may pursue the goal I am about to articulate." So we are seldom invited to ponder very deeply where people are coming from when they tell us where they are coming from. This has something to do with the intuition that we really do not know much about it even as we assert that we do. The phrase is common but not at all clear.

If situatedness is not quite a familiar word, then its aura of approximate signification is surely apparent. It has to do with being in the world, in place and time, in a way that is at once unignorable but also a bit provisional. The situations that give rise to one's situatedness can be counted as outside forces that influence subjectivity and one's view of subjectivity, elements of what is otherwise called determination, ideology, environment, history, discourse, and so on. But they are also open to the sorts of responses or reactions that can change one condition into another, act back on the world in the way that has sometimes and traditionally been described as a gesture of freedom or agency. Situations, and the dwelling in situations that is situatedness, then denote a measure of the unstable and indecisive, in descriptive and philosophical terms, at the same time as they signal a measure of comfort and manageability. They are given to us but also open to amendment; we occupy a situation but can move on or imagine moving on to others. The term situation appealed to Jean-Paul Sartre in just this way, as something between the doggedly empirical, about which very little can be said, and the general or social-historical, about which too much had been said.

I will take up Sartre later in some detail. For now I want to register situatedness as a slippery term, whose slipperiness I hope to expound. I take it to designate an instability or obscurity in the language describing our way of being in the world. It is meant to preserve rather than to resolve the tension we experience between being in control and out of control, between seeing ourselves as agents of change and as passive receivers of what is already in place. This imprecise and somewhat ungainly word situatedness , almost but not quite familiar, can be read as the designation of an antinomy or aporia. In other words I want to question the integrity of the solutions that arguments from situatedness have claimed to provide to problems in epistemology, jurisprudence, social science, and other spheres in which people have set out to prove or deduce the nature of their relation to the world. For reasons that will become clear enough I have no privileged vocabulary to put in its place, so that I write propaedeutically, to clear the ground, hoping that we might be at the point where other rhetorics might be almost visible and sustainable by other dispositions of forces than those traditional to the definitive triad of capitalism, individualism, and liberal democracy, which is not to predict imminent escape from or clean passage beyond those terms, as if in pure revolution, although it is to ponder intimations of alternatives and critical rearrangements. Moreover I have no wish to discredit many of the policies that arguments from situatedness have been used to legitimate. The idea that we are significantly made by impersonal circumstances and not by free will has been crucial to the justification of the interventionist programs that I fully believe in and would indeed wish to see expanded.

Similarly, the compensatory notion that we can indeed do something about our place in the world is not to be lightly disregarded. But the strains and stresses that are becoming increasingly apparent in the use of arguments from situatedness suggest that the model may be on the point of falling apart, imploding into its own aporetic logic. If this should happen then the policies that have been explained by way of those same arguments will become vulnerable to attack and perhaps displacement for lack of a better way to formulate them. The radical Right has long been waiting in the wings and has not infrequently occupied center stage with its simplifying notions of moral choice and simple identity as alternatives to the dream of a benevolently administered society. I will argue that the rhetoric of situatedness holds together these antagonists in a persistent dialectic wherein the hyperbolic statement of one enables the reentry of the other. I see signs that this unholy but very intimate alliance is undergoing some strain, and that it may be time to anticipate other ways of making and explaining decisions that have significant consequences.

So it is very much to the point that the word situatedness is not to be found in the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary , which was first published in 1989 and reprinted with corrections in 1991. The word is just about recognizable without yet being exclusively (if still always provisionally) defined. The OED does give situate, situated , and situation , in both first and second editions. And the various senses there listed are significant in their differences. A situation can refer to a permanent location of a place or thing, in itself or in relation to its surroundings, as in the situation for siting) of a city or a building; but it can also describe a place where some thing or person "happens to be for the time," impermanently, or a "position in life" held by a person "in relation to others" or "with regard to circumstances." This is the sense in which we look hopefully to the newspaper for "situations vacant" and in which we think of improving our situations. This same application of the word has taken on a pejorative spin in the black English of South African townships, which according to the dictionary uses (from 1963) situation to denote "an educated or professional black person, esp. one considered to be a social climber." A tension or difference of emphasis between the permanent and the provisional is built into the uses and definitions of situation and situated . The same tension and the same difference is apparent in situatedness .

But familiarization may be imminent, not least because of our fondness for the word situation itself. Kenneth Wilson's The Columbia Guide to Standard American English notes just this fondness: "We have built this generally useful word into a number of cliché phrases, such as a conflict situation ... or a no-win situation ... and we also find it an easy-to-use, nonspecific, all-purpose word ... as a result, we now overwork situation ." Wilson also lists the linguistic definition of situation utterances , dating from 1952. The OED second edition also includes a new crop of compounds coming into use since the first edition: situation comedy, situation report , and situation(s) room (in military use), and Situationist International . This last, a revolutionary movement founded in Paris in 1957 by Guy Debord and others, took up precisely the activist, opportunist sense of the word situation , so dear to Sartre, in calling for an alternative to the passive consumption of the spectacle by way of "the construction of situations, that is to say, the concrete construction of momentary ambiances of life and their transformation into a superior passional quality." A much more domesticated alternative appeared in the anglophone situation ethics , which emphasized a pragmatist openness to revising one's attitudes and practices in the face of new experiences. More recently, in 1983, Jon Barwise and John Perry initiated a project in situation semantics as a prototype for a more general situation theory bringing mathematical, philosophical, and linguistic methods into mutual relation, one governed by the view that "finds meaning located in the interaction of living things and their environment." They declared that "reality consists of situations--individuals having properties and standing in relations at various spatiotemporal locations" (p. 7). Since then, the province of situation theory has come to include information modeling and artificial intelligence research along with linguistics and mathematicallogic. In the words of one writer, "in situation theory an organism's way of understanding the world is modeled by a scheme of individuation " inducing "a classification of different parts of the environment, called situations ." The analysis includes a "scheme of individuation" and a "collection of constraints" as well as the invocation of a "perspective" (pp. 148, 151). It seems to describe, in other words, albeit in very technical language, the same pattern of predictable and unpredictable opportunities for being in the world that Sartre and others intend to describe in using the same term. It offers an apparently describable and manageable segment of experience to make up for the ungraspable complexity of the whole: "Situations are contrasted with worlds; a world determines the answer to every issue.... A situation corresponds to the limited parts of reality we in fact perceive, reason about, and live in."

Situation was one of the keywords of eighteenth-century literary and philosophical diction in both English and French, from whence it made its way into German. Indeed, the word appears somewhat obsessively in late-eighteenth-century writings (novels for instance) describing the place of persons in the world. And it is a word concerned above all and originally with the specification of place . According to Edward Casey's important book The Fate of Place , this preoccupation has not been typical of the more technically philosophical self-projections of modernity, so that its emergence from latency in the common language to rhetorical prominence in contemporary philosophy may be taken to indicate an important shift of emphasis. According to Casey we have long been governed by "site-specific models of space stemming from the early modern era" and effecting a reduction of place to simple coordinates of space and time; at last, in the postmodern moment, "space is being reassimilated into place," with its local and particular profile now emphasized. In this narrative, Aristotle maintained a sense that " where something is constitutes a basic metaphysical category" (p. 50). This understanding was steadily eroded as place was reduced to point, situs to position, in a mathematicization of experience: points have position but no place, just as souls and minds aim to have no body. The corresponding category is that of space, unlimited and open-ended, with no relation to boundary or location (p. 77). By the end of the eighteenth century place "vanished altogether from serious philosophical discourse in physics and philosophy" (p. 133); it has become "a reduced residuum with no inherent ability to alter the course of things in the naturalworld" (p. 141). To situate something is to give it simple location as a point in space and time. Leibniz's "situation," for example, "does not really situate ; it merely positions in a nexus of relations" (p. 183). The refiguring of this constraint occupies much of twentieth-century philosophy through Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty and into the postmodern. Place is brought back to life as an unignorable condition of being, albeit never as "simple presence" (p. 337) but always in its "stubborn, indeed its rebarbative, particularity" (p. 338).

Casey's book makes a learned and comprehensive argument for the disappearance and reappearance of place. It thus offers a crucial context for any effort (such as mine in this volume) at plotting the history and function of our current fondness for situating ourselves. But the story Casey tells about the history of philosophy does not work or work in the sameway for other language registers. The novel, for example, as we will see, shows in the late eighteenth century a huge commitment to specifying situations as local, embedded predicaments that are by no means reducible to punctilious definition; but at the same time it can be argued that the pressure of the philosophical vocabulary, especially on the Jacobin novel, does contribute to a high level of confidence that the situations of characters can be accurately specified, almost as if they were simple space-time locations. The term, in other words, is definitively labile and unstable, and goes in different directions. In our late-twentieth-century vocabularies an affinity for situations has become very apparent in the social sciences and of course in the humanities. In these fields there has been a visible emphasis on solving, or seeming to solve, residual problems in the epistemology of subject-object relations by the invocation of an in-place and in-time practical attitude to living in the world, something that can be assumed or defined by ostension. This is the language of "let me situate myself / my argument" and "let me tell you where I am coming from." It commonly comes with an embrace of the rhetoric of action, of change, of political progress. Donna Haraway's influential essay "Situated Knowledges" is in this sense a classic of its kind. Here, situated knowledge is a knowing that is at once contingent and objectively real, in that it can be "partially shared" (p. 187). Being located or "situated" in the world allows us as much access to objectivity as is needed for changing the world and keeps us at a distance from the temptation to subscribe to outright relativism. At the same time it confesses and apprehends its own partiality; indeed, only "partial perspective promises objective vision" (p. 190). In this "embodied objectivity" (p. 194) Haraway finds prospects of "rational conversations and fantastic imaginings that change history" (p. 193). She gives us permission to see ourselves, once again, as agents and progressives.

Here the invocation of the term situation has become methodologically affirmative, a way of preserving or reinventing a function for agency, for human effort, in the face of all the familiar forces--the state, ideology, the sex-gender system, the economy--that have seemed to threaten such agency with extinction. And it is, I think, typically the intellectuals on the Left who find it helpful or obligatory to keep on situating themselves and appealing to situatedness. There is a longstanding pressure at work here. Sometime after the French Revolution the rhetoric of place and patriotism, locality and belongingness, was taken over by the conservatives. Edmund Burke was the most important figure in this capturing of in-placeness conditions for the political Right. He quite brilliantly identified a static or slowly evolving rural England as the last best hope against rootless cosmopolitanism and detraditionalizing radical republicanism; only the true-born Englishman was adequately situated, leaving the opposition looking for a home. And to this day one is unlikely to hear many if any of the denizens of the conservative think tanks appealing to their situatedness. The pathos of the Left is that it is committed at once to a celebration of the liberating functions of theory, of universalization, and of freedom from origins and disabling traditions--all the things we call Enlightenment values--while at the same time suspecting the unwholesome applications of these same values and gesturing toward a locatedness that prevents them from becoming sublimely impersonal and destructive. In short, an unstable situation.

Explaining every detail in the long historical origins of the rhetoric of situatedness is not my aim in this book, although I will attend to some of the most important developments. But for the modern left-thinking intellectual it is safe to speculate that the influence and example of Habermas has been paramount, to the point that history before Habermas (in Sartre, in Jaspers, and elsewhere) risks being forgotten or undiscovered. It is Habermas who takes up the usefulness of the situation as something tending toward closurewhile always remaining open, as a term that can mediate between the equally indefensible extremes of reification and formlessness, thus offering a bewildered left-thinker the opportunity to imagine agency without culpability. Habermas's theory of "communicative action" is founded on a "cooperative negotiation of situation definitions" in such a way that all participants are deemed " capable of mutual criticism ." The inherited "lifeworld" provides a repository of previously agreed on situations so that we do not have to begin in some sort of primal confrontation (p. 70), but within this nexus of the inherited and the new everything is negotiable. Individual needs and desires are thus bound to encounter and come to terms with what is in place and up for inspection, so that persons must "harmonize their plans of action on the basis of common situation definitions" (p. 286). The process is interactive and democratic, task-oriented and tending to consensus, so that its very exercise contributes to the social norming process on whose previous results it also depends.

There is much to say about Habermas, and much to suspect in his status as fashionable authority figure; at the very least one must ponder the degree to which this conversational model premises its democratic credentials on equal access to speech and equal ability to speak when one has access. Here I shall only record the qualifications that Habermas himself records, which are so often omitted by those who make use of his positions. Although it is true that "the very situation that gives rise to the problem of understanding meaning can also be regarded as the key to its solution" (p. 120)--so that there is an appealing air of problem solving at work here-- it is also clear that the ideal communicative interaction event is either trivial or utopian. In other words it works best when it is least noticed, in routine exchanges where nothing much is at stake, or it shows up as most necessary when it fails, when consensual situations are not successfully negotiated and differences remain unmodified. And Habermas says that the more "decentered" and detraditionalized the world becomes, the more stress is attached to communicative action, because there is less that is given and more to be negotiated (p. 70). Even in ordinary interactions he does not assume a resultant stability, but rather a "diffuse, fragile, continuously revised and only momentarily successful communication in which participants rely on problematic and unclarified presuppositions and feel their way from one occasional commonality to the next" (pp. 100-1. Again, "under the microscope every understanding proves to be occasional and fragile" (p. 130).

This said, then the stability of outcomes must seem to depend on a belief in some psychological motivation toward the creation of stability, a compulsion to normalize of the sort that Adam Smith long ago proposed in his Theory of Moral Sentiments . And the analysis of what really is the case, under the microscope, looks very much like that of a number of other popular cases in the world we know: flexible employment patterns, short-term contracts, temporary emotional alliances, gender identities, and so forth. But it could be that human nature can in fact put up with this fragility and uncertainty when it is persuaded, economically and ideologically, to do so; and that it can even be made to celebrate it, as it does in various contemporary theories about various things. Hence the appetite for invoking and referring to "situated action," as Jerome Bruner calls it ( Acts of Meaning , p. 19), tends either to obscure the fragility of the situation (as qualified by Habermas) by sheer terminological assertiveness, the way in which it can so readily be named, or to propose it in a tone of pragmatist bluster as the way the world really is, and oneself in it.

So it is a positive message we get from Haraway's situated knowledge, one that is very appealing on moral and practical grounds. But it resolves rather too neatly the muddle and indecisiveness I want to preserve in my use of the related term, situatedness --the term that is not yet in the dictionary. Situatedness, as I see it, does not give rise to a method. Nor does it yet deserve, if it ever can deserve, invocation in a litany of approved vocabularies, as if to pronounce someone or something as "situated" is somehow to answer the questions one might have or to resolve the uncertainties one might experience. We are all under various pressures to produce solutions, to direct or defend social policies, to offer "outcomes" with actual or imagined empirical consequences, and ultimately to authenticate ourselves. The pressure is both external and self-imposed. It is not to be denied (for who does not want to be thought of as making a difference?) but it is to be monitored at those points where we find ourselves too hasty in proposing solutions. Take the following claim by the editors of a book of essays appealingly titled Situated Lives : "We view our own knowledge as critical feminist ethnographers as partial and situated, and, in analyzing women's and men's lives, we view our subjects as positioned actors who forge 'situated knowledges' in order to act within their material circumstances." The implication here is that the declaration of one's own situatedness gives permission for an account of the actions and agency of others, and sets acceptable limits on the claims made for this account. But the "situated" lives of others seem to acquire an objective status, open to inspection. It is not clear what is being claimed or by whom. To position someone seems to be to pin them down, even when their position might be temporary or unrepresentative. The declaration of one's situatedness is often an admission of one's limits rather than a claim to authority. But its language of easeful (even when stressful) exculpation can then itself become a covert affirmation whereby the subject secures itself precisely in confessing its insecurity. Here is Dominick LaCapra, describing the difficulties of deciding who gets to talk about the Holocaust: "Certain statements or even entire orientations may seem appropriate for someone in a given subject-position but not in others. (It would, for example, be ridiculous if I tried to assume the voice of Elie Wiesel or Saul Friedlander. There is a sense in which I have no right to these voices ... Thus, while any historian must be "invested" in a distinctive way ...) ... not all statements, rhetorics or orient are equally available to different historians." Being situated, then, places limits on what one can say, or on one's credibility in making certain statements. LaCapra is understandably sensitive here to what is surely one of the most morally fraught inquiries open to the historian. But what does it mean to say what he does say, that some things cannot be said by him? And to imply that what is said by him is credible as long as it does not replicate or imitate what others, such as Friendlander and Wiesel, are saying? The confession of situatedness seems to be at once denying LaCapra some kinds of authority but permitting him other kinds -- those not said by Friedlander and Wiesel. What kinds of statement are preempted by the admission of not being a Holocaust survivor, and what other kinds are permitted? And why? Why does a moral discrimination ("I have no right") transform itself into an epistemological one ("one ... equally available")? Why are so many of us willing to agree with this type of statement?

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Situatedness, or, Why We Keep Saying Where We're Coming From by David Simpson. Copyright © 2002 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.