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\fs24\lang1033\langfe1033\cgrid\langnp1033\langfenp1033 {Leroy F. Searle
\par English & Comparative Literature
\par University of Washington
\par Seattle, WA 98195-4330
\par 
\par 
\par }\pard\plain \s1\qc \li0\ri0\keepn\widctlpar\aspalpha\aspnum\faauto\outlinelevel0\adjustright\rin0\lin0\itap0 \b\fs24\lang1033\langfe1033\cgrid\langnp1033\langfenp1033 {Art, Reason, and Cultural Legitimation}{\cs17\super \chftn {\footnote \pard\plain 
\s16\ql \li0\ri0\widctlpar\aspalpha\aspnum\faauto\adjustright\rin0\lin0\itap0 \fs20\lang1033\langfe1033\cgrid\langnp1033\langfenp1033 {\cs17\super \chftn }{ Essay for \'93Differentiation and Integration of Worldviews,\'94
 Sixth Annual International Congress in Philosophy and Culture, sponsored by UNESCO and The Russian Institute for Cultural Research, St. Petersburg, Russia.  October 28-November 3, 2003.}}}{
\par }\pard\plain \ql \li0\ri0\sl480\slmult1\widctlpar\aspalpha\aspnum\faauto\adjustright\rin0\lin0\itap0 \fs24\lang1033\langfe1033\cgrid\langnp1033\langfenp1033 {
\par \tab The events of the last half-century are not only sufficient to destroy any complacency about the future, they are profoundly resistant to any con
vincing theoretical simplification.  The century just concluded is by any measure the most extraordinary in terms of technical achievements, but it is also the bloodiest and most violent period in recorded history.  Events that a generation ago seemed to 
b
e historical singularities, markers of an epoch in our ethical being in revulsion against genocide, not only have not stopped but have been manifest on every continent, from Bosnia and Serbia, to Laos and Cambodia, Rwanda and Burundi, and so on, seemingly
 
without end, but also without any compelling explanation and certainly without any intellectually sovereign point of view from which to negotiate horrific differences at every level.  The so-called end of the cold war, moreover, has not been accompanied b
y a lessening of tensions or hostilities, which continue as actions of opposition driven by seemingly incommensurable ideas.
\par }\pard\plain \s18\ql \fi475\li0\ri0\sl480\slmult1\widctlpar\aspalpha\aspnum\faauto\adjustright\rin0\lin0\itap0 \fs24\lang1033\langfe1033\cgrid\langnp1033\langfenp1033 {
These are actions that cannot be explained as if they were merely emotional or psychological: they are argued for, defended, often e
laborately theorized, and for a time long enough to authorize a disaster, they are persuasive.  Furthermore, it is not clear what it would mean to call such volatile oppositions \'93political,\'94
 since in many instances, what is missing is a sense of legitimacy that enables institutions to function politically, with the support of an identifiable constituency or }{\i polis}{
.  Instead, arguments are directed to an already convinced faction or group\emdash one might use the common metaphor of \'93preaching to the choir\'94 were it not for fact that it is not at all about devotion or piety, but power\emdash 
justifying extreme actions in the absence of broad-based consensus or ground of popular support.  It is against this practical background that ours has become, with deep irony, a time of 
theory, not with any sense of philosophical solidity through which theories have claimed to serve an explanatory function, but rather as a poorly disciplined dialectical exercise of speculation, a seeking to justify courses of action that are driven prima
rily by an already present (but not necessarily well examined) sense of moral and practical priorities.  This applies, with different consequences, both to affairs of state and the state of intellectual exchange in the academy. 
\par In the United States, for example, the vaguely political tone of much discourse in the humanities derives largely from a commitment to such ideas as equality, social justice, the sanctity of individual, ethnic, or sexual identity\emdash 
at the very same time when an elected government claim
ing only the slenderest thread of technical legitimacy appears bent on following the example set during the administration of Ronald Reagan of dismantling the very governmental infrastructure that might serve to protect such interests.  On every side, the
o
ry comes into play less in the spirit of inquiry than of combat, with the effect that theoretical arguments become rhetorical in a distinctly pejorative sense, in the making of arguments that may forego even the pretense of answering complaints against th
e
m by simply shifting the ground so as to prevent beliefs held dogmatically from being called into question.  The same pattern is evident, with much worse consequences, in the arena of local and international policy, where the focus appears to be how to ma
k
e a case for war.  It is not my purpose to blame theory for these tragedies, but rather to call attention to the practical consequences of hierarchical generalizations which offer simple rules of conduct that lead to and appear to legitimize atrocities, u
s
ually in the name of some fundamental principle or article of belief.  From the arena of academic discourse to urban battlefields throughout the world, dogmatism and fundamentalism are in the ascendancy, at least for the moment, wherever we find an appeal
 to some absolute or universal principle that shapes and conditions an entire frame of reference while it is held to be exempt from questioning.  
\par }\pard\plain \ql \fi475\li0\ri0\sl480\slmult1\widctlpar\aspalpha\aspnum\faauto\adjustright\rin0\lin0\itap0 \fs24\lang1033\langfe1033\cgrid\langnp1033\langfenp1033 {
It would be comforting to say that fundamentalism, whatever its focus, is just bad theory, if it were possible
 for us to say with conviction that we know how to tell the difference between bad theory and good.  The altogether obvious point is that what may appear to one group as lunatic ravings is, to the purported lunatics, the truth, already embedded in a view 
o
f the world and a set of cultural practices that, invisible in itself, provides the ground for arguments that do, in fact, guide action.  In desperate conflicts where just being a Jew or Muslim, a Tutsi or Hutu, or a member of this or that identity group,
 
is cause enough to be killed, it is not that such actions are senseless or without reason: they are intentional; they are the following out of theories; they are the embodiment or outgrowth of some privileged forms of argument.  But just so, they present 
a deeper problem in showing that any fundamental belief in \'93reason\'94
 as a presumably universal faculty is subject to the same stricture, as people from every corner of the world proceed to conclusions that may strike the outsider as monstrous or stupid, whil
e they are accepted and endorsed by the people involved as not only reasonable, but just, compelling, and perhaps even necessary.  While it would be unduly cynical to say that the principle of \'93reason\'94
 may be merely that which conforms to already established beliefs, the activity of }{\i giving}{ reasons for what one does in the name of a collectivity does follow this pattern, all too commonly along a pathway to death.
\par }\pard \ql \li0\ri0\sl480\slmult1\widctlpar\aspalpha\aspnum\faauto\adjustright\rin0\lin0\itap0 {\tab I realize that characterizing this as at once a problem of theory and a matter of fundamentalis
m may itself exemplify, without clarifying, my point.  The distinguishing characteristic of fundamentalism is, as I see it, a demand, even a need, for certainty, coupled with a willingness to act on what one believes without tolerance for criticism, usual
ly in the sincere conviction that the truth, having been reached or revealed, does not require it\endash 
or more often, will not even tolerate it.  In this sense, the faith of the evangelical Christian or the radical Islamist appears to either (and both) as undeni
able and necessary, and any criticism is immediately characterized as the pernicious work of the devil or the detestable act of an infidel.  But this is also the characteristic of \'93rational\'94
 belief as well, with the salient difference that in the latter ca
se, critical questioning is not automatically identified as it is in virtually all religious traditions, with blasphemy, impiety, or infidelity.  The problem of rational belief is subtler by degree, in that the prevailing practice of criticism itself may 
not even allow us to formulate radical questions by ruling them out of bounds in advance as \'93irrational\'94 and indeed, treats }{\i reason }{
itself as the absolute or fundamental principle that is not to be questioned.  While we may choose to be more amused than alarmed at the so-called academic \'93culture wars,\'94
 they are comic only in that they do not usually lead to bloodshed.  But in all seriousness, they demonstrate the naivet\'e9 of thinking that anyone can make a direct appeal to \'93reason\'94 as we have conventionally de
fined it precisely because the battles are being fought out between different and sometimes incommensurable worldviews, with no clearly agreed-upon space or terms for translation.  In this sense, the academic culture wars are on the same continuum with fr
ustrated politicians in Washington, D. C., turning \'93democracy\'94 and \'93freedom\'94 into cheap slogans for justifying violent aggression against apparent enemies, militant settlers appropriating someone else\rquote 
s land as their own divine inheritance, or suicide bombers shouting \lquote God is Great!\rquote  before murdering scores of innocents.  The common thread is a rage against complexity, when one intuits that one\rquote 
s profession, culture, identity, perhaps even one\rquote s very existence may be under immediate threat\emdash with the concomitant feeling that the source of the threat, being incomprehensible, must be evil. 
\par }\pard\plain \s18\ql \fi475\li0\ri0\sl480\slmult1\widctlpar\aspalpha\aspnum\faauto\adjustright\rin0\lin0\itap0 \fs24\lang1033\langfe1033\cgrid\langnp1033\langfenp1033 {
If this is a crisis (and I think it is), I believe there are good reasons to treat it as not directly a crisis of culture, nor of theory, nor even of reason, but of reasoning itself.  We cannot ignore it because it is manifest directly in political form
\emdash or rather, war as the collapse of political form\emdash but neither can we end it by taking direct political action.  The reason is quite simple: political action as inherently civil a
lways presupposes some standard of legitimacy that cannot be imposed by force, but must be elicited and ratified by free assent.  As we now know from repeated and deadly experience, faith in some exemplified political process (whether it takes the form of
 voting, legislation, adjudication under law, democratic consensus, or submission to some sanctioned authority) is neither universal nor Platonic, in the sense that it only needs to be elicited dialectically to be accepted.}{\cs17\super \chftn {\footnote 
\pard\plain \s16\ql \li0\ri0\widctlpar\aspalpha\aspnum\faauto\adjustright\rin0\lin0\itap0 \fs20\lang1033\langfe1033\cgrid\langnp1033\langfenp1033 {\cs17\super \chftn }{  It is worth remembering, in this context, that in the }{\i locus classicus}{
 of this problem, in Plato\rquote s }{\i Republic}{, the argument of Thrasymachus in Book I is }{\i never}{ answered, but only deflected by Socrates\rquote  appealing to the party to agree, among themselves, to be \'93both pleaders and judges,\'94 req
uiring consensus not only as to what claims would be presented and how they would be disposed [348b].  From that moment on, though Thrasymachus stays, he contributes nothing substantive to the ensuing discussion, interjecting only once in Book V (450a), a
n
d being mentioned as not likely to agree in Book VI (498c).  Otherwise, he says nothing,  not even when, at the end of the dialogue, as dawn is breaking, Plato has Socrates return to his decisions to exile the poets and expositors of Homer to reiterate th
em for a new reason: that Homer had never actually held power in any city or state, bearing the unremarked implication that justice is, after all, evidently defined by those in power, as Plato now has }{\i this}{ argument entirely in his grasp [599-601].}
}}{  On the contrary, it is something that has to be meticulously, painstakingly }{\i built}{
, inculcated, and nurtured across the multiplicity of institutions and conventions that make up a functioning society.  The perception of a world shrinking by way of electronic techn
ology or the growth of international business serves primarily, in this context, to underscore the enormous danger of multiplicity, in which the inculcated sense of \'93justice\'94
 in one society may indeed have no translation whatsoever into with what another society takes to be just.  
\par We have so far burdened ourselves with innumerable clich\'e9s about the value of multicultural diversity and the virtue of tolerance, without really taking the measure of how it is that this virtue ever came to be regarded as such o
r what network of dependencies may be necessary to its acceptance.  In a post-colonial world, the agonized liberal conscience is better prepared to see (and passionately oppose) the arrogance and stupidity of the colonial overlords, than to recognize the 
arrogance and stupidity of subaltern peoples coming into possession of their own freedom and sovereignty.  Thus, we may simply presume upon what we take to be rational discourse, calling on others, in the words of Isaiah, \'93
to sit down and reason together,\'94 as if we all followed the same rule of reason when it is obvious that we do not.
\par  In the privileged West, a faith in reason has been, at least since Duns Scotus, as firm, if not more firm, than faith in God; and it has been a primary source of the vast project of modernism since the Renaissance.  What Jean Fran\'e7
ois Lyotard in his discussions of the post-modern has characterized as \'93meta-narratives\'94}{\cs17\super \chftn {\footnote \pard\plain \s16\ql \li0\ri0\widctlpar\aspalpha\aspnum\faauto\adjustright\rin0\lin0\itap0 
\fs20\lang1033\langfe1033\cgrid\langnp1033\langfenp1033 {\cs17\super \chftn }{  See especially }{\i Postmodernism: A Report on Knowledge}{ trans. by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), }}}{
 that have given shape to history and meaning to communal life, have been constructions of reason, narro
wly considered, as the faculty of calculating desire: by two canonical principles, the law of contradiction and the rule of the excluded middle, we form our arguments so as to formally compel conclusions as objective and necessary\emdash 
thereby leaving out of th
e equation any consideration of the purpose or telos of the argument itself.  If we identify that element as ideological and set ourselves the task of providing a critique of it, the principal result, tirelessly reiterated through twenty-five years of cle
ver deconstruction, is the recognition that we have in our hands only the first beads in an infinite necklace.  
\par Scotus understood this problem from the start as a metaphysical puzzle: if the only modes of being we allow are matter and form, the only mode o
f existence proves to be the existence of a thing, thereby leaving us in the orbit of a vicious paradox that cannot identify any mode of being for such diverse ideas as laws of nature and mathematical principles, or virtues such as love, devotion, or fait
h
fulness.  The eventual triumph of nominalism over scholastic realism appears, in this light, to have almost happened by default: having no solution for the metaphysical puzzle of the formally abstract universal, it was far easier to treat such things as a
rbitrary conveniences, mere names, well in advance of Saussure\rquote s simple minded notion of the arbitrary sign.  
\par A faith in reasoning likewise defaults into a faith in objectivity by bracketing out the very element of choice or election that guides us, or following Charles Sanders Peirce, }{\i abducts}{ us concerning where and }{\i how}{ to deploy our attention.}{
\cs17\super \chftn {\footnote \pard\plain \s16\ql \li0\ri0\widctlpar\aspalpha\aspnum\faauto\adjustright\rin0\lin0\itap0 \fs20\lang1033\langfe1033\cgrid\langnp1033\langfenp1033 {\cs17\super \chftn }{  See, for example, Charles Sanders Peirce, }{\i 
Collected Papers}{ (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1931-1958, rpt. 1960), on nominalism, 1.15-26; on abduction, 2.96-104.}}}{
   Ironically, the Catholic Church, in condemning Copernicus and Galileo and burning Giordano Bruno at the stake did more than it reckoned in strengthening a faith in reason by making it evident that the explicit claims of spirituality or moral
 probity by themselves can be profoundly fraudulent and self-contradictory, concerned more with holding power than with promoting virtue.  
\par The modernist meta-narrative of rational progress, however, has gambled everything on a utopian future, in a vision 
of a resolutely secular modern world in which ancient mystification would be replaced by enlightenment and superstition would give way to science\emdash and all the savage, heathen tribes meanwhile would be summarily \lquote civilized\rquote 
 out of existence, usually by the tactics of \'93shock and awe\'94
 to which conquerors have always aspired.  This irony inherent in the modernist vision, moreover, is not something we latter day modernists are the first to have seen, as Montaigne points out with a certain exuberance in discoursin
g upon barbarism in his essay \'93On Cannibals\'94: 
\par }\pard\plain \s15\qj \fi-561\li771\ri720\sl480\slmult1\nowidctlpar\tx561\tx771\tx900\faauto\rin720\lin771\itap0 \fs24\lang1033\langfe1033\cgrid\langnp1033\langfenp1033 {\tab \tab \tab I find that there is noth\-
ing barbarous and savage in this nation, by anything that I can gather, excepting, that every one gives the title of barbarism to everything that is not in use in his own coun\-try.  As, indeed, we have no other level of truth and rea\-
son, than the example and idea of the opinions and cus\-toms of the place wherein we live: there is always the perfect religion, there the perfect government, there the most exact and accomplished usage of all things.}{\cs17\super \chftn {\footnote 
\pard\plain \ql \li0\ri0\nowidctlpar\faauto\rin0\lin0\itap0 \fs24\lang1033\langfe1033\cgrid\langnp1033\langfenp1033 {\cs17\super \chftn }{  }{\fs20 From: }{\i\fs20 The Essays of Michel de Montaigne}{\fs20 
, trans by Charles Cotton, ed. by W. Carew Hazlitt (New York: A. L. Burt, 1892), p. 210. (Original translation, 1685.)
\par }}}{ 
\par }\pard\plain \ql \fi475\li0\ri0\sl480\slmult1\nowidctlpar\faauto\rin0\lin0\itap0 \fs24\lang1033\langfe1033\cgrid\langnp1033\langfenp1033 {The vexation of the modernist project in the West may be, from this perspecti
ve, no more than the radical expansion of contact with other countries and customs, wherein it appears that there are many more kinds of barbarians than even Montaigne could have imagined.  But irony will only go so far: the constant temptation to have an
 end to argument, to come to a conclusion traps even Montaigne into a praise for his cannibal as compared with the civilized European that loses its balance over such questions as whether, having killed a man, it is better to eat him or not.
\par The essential p
roblem is that what guides our thoughts is all too often independent of them, anterior to them, carrying us along a course of reasoning that becomes all the more myopic the longer it is continued.  When Lyotard, for example, fixes his attention on the met
a
-narratives as guides for knowledge, he may very well miss the importance of the primary narrative, the concrete, detailed story, and not its theoretical skeleton, rattling its bones in deadly imitation of what got it started.  The role we accord to knowl
edge notoriously plays down wisdom because our faith in the reasoning that produces knowledge so often seems to us decisive, and itself independent of (if not alien to) our moral sense.  
\par Thus in this era of the postmodern, instead of taking the point to be that our meta-narratives are our theories, plain and simple, and }{\i they}{
 are what has collapsed, we have indulged ourselves, no doubt thinking hard in the proliferation of theories that hold sway not by giving exacting or perspicuous explanations but more si
mply, by tapping into what is already believed, and kept in relentless circulation as a set of quotable phrases, dialectical commonplaces, and simplified analytical strategies, but for all that, getting nowhere.  Deconstruction, launched from a serious in
s
ight into the metaphysical quandary of representation, now may appear primarily as a set of tricks to teach to sophomores still excited by local rebellion; while critical discourse about power in the social field comes to resemble a video game in which th
e objective is to find and obliterate The Oppressor.
\par I will come directly to my major claim in this paper:  we find ourselves in trouble over reasoning primarily because we have defined it so narrowly and dogmatically that it compromises its own proper grou
nd.  In focusing on strictly mathematical criterion of truth, or a narrowly empirical conception of knowledge, we thereby compromise a broader criterion of }{\i legitimacy}{
 by stripping away the multiplicity of factors that enter into complex judgments.  Bearing
 this in mind, it is just as silly to argue that all scientific statements are socially conditioned or determined as it is to deny that social considerations have anything whatever to do with science.  In any particular case, the broader question of legit
i
macy is the result of a complex negotiation that usually starts as an educative process.  Someone who is innocent of advanced mathematics is simply in no position to judge contemporary work in physics, or, for that matter, to really understand it, just as
 
someone who has only heard some rumor about a work of art is not in a very good position to express any opinion about it that commands our respect.  Neither case  consigns the non-specialist to ignorance, but only to an essential modesty about how far one
\rquote s understanding may extend.  In speaking earlier of the \'93proper ground\'94 of reasoning, I take it, following the pragmatic maxim of Peirce, to be a precise imagining of the consequences that may follow from conscious decisions.}{\cs17\super 
\chftn {\footnote \pard\plain \s16\ql \li0\ri0\widctlpar\aspalpha\aspnum\faauto\adjustright\rin0\lin0\itap0 \fs20\lang1033\langfe1033\cgrid\langnp1033\langfenp1033 {\cs17\super \chftn }{ See especially Charles Sanders Peirce, \'93
Issues of Pragmaticism: Six Characters of Critical Common Sensism\'94 in }{\i Collected Papers}{ (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1938-52), 5.438-452.  The original form of Peirce\rquote s maxim was this: \'93
Consider what effects that might conceivably have practical bearings you conceive the objects of your conception to have. Then, your conception of those effects is the whole of your conception of the object.\'94  The later formulation cited here is: \'93
The entire intellectual purport of any symbol consists in the total of all general modes of rational conduct which, conditionally upon all the possible different circumstances and desires, would ensue upon the acceptance of the symbol.\'94}}}{
  Reasoning, in this sense,
 is broader than inference, but it has the same characteristic of allowing us to proceed from what we do know to something which we do not, something that can only be formulated or discovered by careful and meticulous attention to details.  In this view, 
t
here is no virtue in supposing the imaginative to be the counter-factual or the false, just as there is no point is supposing that reasoning grounded on imagining is either opposed to, or can proceed very far without a reliance on a fairly exacting, even 
technical sense of logic.  
\par For something more than two millennia, reason and reasoning have been generally articulated by }{\i opposing}{ them to art, to imagination, to emotion, to religion and politics, under the understandable but mistaken belief that the proc
ess of our thinking can be \'93purified\'94 of the very elements that enable it in the first place.  We could, of course, go back to Plato\rquote s notorious gesture of exiling the poets, but more to the immediate purpose is the doctrine }{\i cum}{
 dogma since the 17}{\super th}{ century that truth must be resolutely stripped of metaphor.}{\cs17\super \chftn {\footnote \pard\plain \s16\ql \li0\ri0\widctlpar\aspalpha\aspnum\faauto\adjustright\rin0\lin0\itap0 
\fs20\lang1033\langfe1033\cgrid\langnp1033\langfenp1033 {\cs17\super \chftn }{ The sources for this commonplace are too many to cite, coming into fullest prominence in the late 17}{\super th}{ and early 18}{\super th}{
 centuries, from Bacon and Hobbes, to Locke.  For a good general introduction to this topic, see Colin Murray Turbane\rquote s classic study, }{\i The Myth of Metaphor}{ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962; rpt Univ. of South Carolina, 1970).
  See also, }{\i Metaphor and Thought}{, ed. Andrew Ortony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).}}}{  If we did that, such expressions as }{\i A=B}{ would drop away in the wash, inasmuch as the idea that one thing
 can be substituted for another depends first of all upon the perception that the two items equated are, after all, similar }{\i in some respect}{
.  All metaphor starts in the same place, along with all attributive predications: when we say that something }{\i is}{ something else (}{\i my shoes are black, the cat is tame, the horse is lame}{
) we are operating in the arena of relations that gain their specificity by refinement, not by ceasing to be inherently }{\i relational}{.  To put the matter simply, if we were deprived of metaphor we would be deprived of thought. 
\par If we begin from the admission that all thinking, all reasoning, is fundamentally imaginative, meaning nothing more by that, for the moment, than that we must picture or represent to ourselves, to our own minds, the subst
ance of what we are thinking about, then reasoning is absolutely dependent on representation, carried out essentially as experiments with diagrams, explorations aided by pictures, inquiries given shape by representations that are chosen (not given) for th
eir perspicuity relative to the subject of our thoughts.}{\cs17\super \chftn {\footnote \pard\plain \s16\ql \li0\ri0\widctlpar\aspalpha\aspnum\faauto\adjustright\rin0\lin0\itap0 \fs20\lang1033\langfe1033\cgrid\langnp1033\langfenp1033 {\cs17\super \chftn }
{ Again, Peirce is particularly useful on this matter.  See especially }{\i CP}{ 2.530; 3.560.}}}{ 
\par }\pard \ql \fi475\li0\ri-180\sl480\slmult1\nowidctlpar\faauto\rin-180\lin0\itap0 {My second claim is therefore that when we consider artifacts and objects that are set aside as paradigmatically imaginative\emdash 
poems and stories, pictures, music, performances\emdash it has been our collective custom to treat them as objects about which to reason (when we do not puritanically condemn them as debased and corrupting), thereby occluding the recognition that im
aginative works are already }{\i primary forms of reasoning themselves}{
.  In cases where the semantic register is relatively accessible (words and words applied to pictures), we may find ourselves abducted (not necessarily in a good sense) by our antecedent sens
e of how words are ordinarily used; but in the harder cases (of dance, sculpture, music) where there is no immediate semantic register upon which to rely (}{\i Eb}{ does }{\i not}{ mean \'93Earth\'94, }{\i pace }{
Mahler), we are less likely to see the reasoning, the examination or inquiry, because it requires time and training to perceive the integuments of relation by which, say, a dance or a musical composition is held together.
\par If we furthermore take the concept of truth to be a specialization of the broader concept of legitimacy (for to say of a statement that it is }{\i true}{
 is to vouch for its legitimacy), then our attention to a work of art, contrary to the massive weight of the tradition that has demeaned it, exiled it, or put it aside as for one\rquote s idle time or entertainment, is as
 important as anything we can do as human beings.  Taking a work of art as an inquiry and an argument, moreover, does }{\i NOT}{ mean taking out the commonplaces from our handy theoretical tool bag and disassembling it or working up a \'93reading\'94
 of it, informed by
 this or that current ideological fashion.  Less abrasively, one might simply say that one cannot say anything interesting about a novel without really reading it, or about a piece of music without hearing and studying it, on the assumption that what has 
been made was made for a reason that we might not be shrewd enough to guess.  From the start, we should accede to the primary intentionality (not the same as \'93meaning\'94
) of the work as a made thing.  (I will take a polemical short-cut here to say that most of what elicits our attention as \'93art\'94
 on this simple criterion fails miserably to hold it.)  Those works that do hold our attention, which cannot be exhausted by a single reading or hearing or viewing, do not require definitions or categorial hedges: they 
simply require our thoughtfulness, our curiosity, our own fund of experience, and above all, our patience. 
\par The theoretical impetus in such cases is all the more problematic since the very richness of a metaphor (does, for example, Robert Burns\rquote s \'93My Love is like a red, red rose / That\rquote s lately sprung in June\'94
 mean that my Love has thorns, is seasonally afflicted by aphids, is vegetative and requires much maintenance?) seems to demand some generalization that will curtail such thematic excesses, but to theo
rize prematurely can only block a recognition of the fact in virtually any poem, any deliberately made literary work, the scope or application of one figure is constrained by another, as in this case, the second line of Burns\rquote s  poem: \'93
My Love is like a melody / That\rquote s sweetly played in tune.\'94}{\cs17\super \chftn {\footnote \pard\plain \s16\ql \li0\ri0\widctlpar\aspalpha\aspnum\faauto\adjustright\rin0\lin0\itap0 \fs20\lang1033\langfe1033\cgrid\langnp1033\langfenp1033 {
\cs17\super \chftn }{ For a fuller analysis, cf. my \'93Technology and the Perils of Poetry: or, Why Criticism Never Catches Up,\'94 in }{\i Institutions and Originality}{: }{\i ICHD 98}{
 (Seattle: Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities), 1998, 47-64.}}}{  The poem itself dynamically limits (without eliminating) apparently vagrant implications\emdash 
even though, in this case, it is entirely apposite and to the point to recognize that love }{\i does}{ have \'93thorns\'94\emdash by setting semantic and structural attributes withi
n a rich, functional matrix for contemplation.  The typical pattern, however, explored very ably by Sandor Goodhart, appears to be that literary critics and theorists systematically reduce the actual details of a text to a much simpler myth, story, or sou
rce\emdash and treat the text as identical in meaning to the very source that the literary author meticulously transforms and criticizes in his or her work.}{\cs17\super \chftn {\footnote \pard\plain 
\s16\ql \li0\ri0\widctlpar\aspalpha\aspnum\faauto\adjustright\rin0\lin0\itap0 \fs20\lang1033\langfe1033\cgrid\langnp1033\langfenp1033 {\cs17\super \chftn }{ Sandor Goodhart, }{\i Sacrificing Commentary: Reading the End of Literature}{
 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).  See also, Leroy F. Searle, \'93The Conscience of the King: Oedipus, Hamlet, and the Problem of Reading,\'94 }{\i Comparative Literature }{49 (Fall, 1997), 316-343.}}}{
  When Chaucer is read almost as if he }{\i were}{ one of the Patristic fathers, or Shakespeare is treated as if }{\i Macbeth }{or }{\i King Lear}{ could be reduced to stories in Hollingshead\rquote s }{\i Chronicles}{
, we may suppose these are the pre-theoretical na\'efve errors of the past\emdash only to miss the close similarity between such simplistic misreading and rhetorically sophisticated theoretical criticism, where a primary text is simply }{\i buried}{
 by the intention to develop a \'94reading\'94 that expropriates the text as an illustration of a principle already decided upon in advance.  By urging that we hold back upon the invocation 
of the meta-narrative so as to see artistic works as primary forms of reasoning, we may enable and invite a different kind of theorizing in which the very point at issue is legitimation, not truth or knowledge understood in an entirely conventional way, s
tarting with a sense of legitimacy in the activity of reading itself.
\par I will illustrate this point briefly by reference to Shakespeare\rquote s }{\i The Tempest}{, a text that has been for decades a target for criticism explicitly committed to principles of social justice, finding Shakespeare\rquote 
s play (and particularly his protagonist, Prospero) to be the very embodiment of imperialist arrogance, colonialist abuse, b
rutal dispossession, and racial demonizing of the natives, as represented by Caliban.  The overarching point of such criticism, to give it its due, is that the founding of colonies, like reports of miracles, covers up untold misery, and that the sense of 
j
ustice grounded in a perceived sense of unfairness seems, if not Platonic, then surely universal in some sense.  As Caliban complains, before the coming of Prospero, he had the whole of the island, without constraint, but since (and notably, following his
 attempted rape of Prospero\rquote 
s daughter, Miranda) Caliban has been confined and punished, dispossessed of the land that formerly was his.  In many respects, this situation (in one of the relatively few plays of Shakespeare with an entirely original plot) enc
apsulates the political pages of any major newspaper, in any region of the globe, for the last half-century or more.  
\par }\pard \ql \fi475\li0\ri0\sl480\slmult1\widctlpar\aspalpha\aspnum\faauto\adjustright\rin0\lin0\itap0 {For the sake of convenience, we may start with a broadly representative case, a reading of }{\i The Tempest }{deployed by Ronald Takaki to shape
 the entire argument of his textbook, }{\i A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America}{
, that consists almost entirely of virtuous commonplaces in the long and hard fought effort to secure fair and equitable treatment of minorities in American culture
.  I note at the outset, moreover, that the very principles Takaki invokes are themselves the result of decades, if not centuries, of cultural, philosophical, and critical negotiation toward the objective of creating a just and decent society in which, as
 Martin Luther King put it, children \'93will not be judged not by the color of their skin, but the content of their character\'94}{\cs17\super \chftn {\footnote \pard\plain \s16\ql \li0\ri0\widctlpar\aspalpha\aspnum\faauto\adjustright\rin0\lin0\itap0 
\fs20\lang1033\langfe1033\cgrid\langnp1033\langfenp1033 {\cs17\super \chftn }{ Martin Luther King, \'93I Have a Dream\'94 address, Washington, D.C., August 28, 1968.  See }{\field{\*\fldinst { HYPERLINK "http://www.stanford.edu/group/Ki
ng/publications/speeches/address_at_march_on_washington.pdf" }{{\*\datafield 
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70006500650063006800650073002f0061006400640072006500730073005f00610074005f006d0061007200630068005f006f006e005f00770061007300680069006e00670074006f006e002e007000640066000000e0c9ea79f9bace118c8200aa004ba90bb800000068007400740070003a002f002f007700770077002e
007300740061006e0066006f00720064002e006500640075002f00670072006f00750070002f004b0069006e0067002f007000750062006c00690063006100740069006f006e0073002f00730070006500650063006800650073002f0061006400640072006500730073005f00610074005f006d0061007200630068005f00
6f006e005f00770061007300680069006e00670074006f006e002e00700064006600000000}}}{\fldrslt {\cs19\ul\cf2 http://www.stanford.edu/group/King/publications/speeches/address_at_march_on_washington.pdf}}}{ .}}}{\emdash 
an objective, significantly, shaped by a literary heritage of narratives showing in concrete and 
material detail the shape and tone of racial and ethnic injustice.  The polemical moment of his argument is a sense of outrage, rightly and widely shared, that the principles of equality, having an essential role in conceptualizing the specific legitimacy
 of a culturally democratic country, are so openly and insidiously violated in practice.  Takaki takes advantage of an already well-developed body of responses to Shakespeare\rquote 
s play to make it into a kind of declarative and insidious testament to colonialist racism against indigenous peoples and cultures.  From the late 1970s to the 1990s, as Deborah Willis has remarked, published criticism of }{\i The Tempest}{
 covered the extremes of Geoffrey Bullough\rquote s view in 1975 that the play \'93is not about colonialism\'94 to the opposite position, \'93from considering colonialism to be a non-issue to considering it to be the only issue.\'94}{\cs17\super \chftn 
{\footnote \pard\plain \s16\ql \li0\ri0\widctlpar\aspalpha\aspnum\faauto\adjustright\rin0\lin0\itap0 \fs20\lang1033\langfe1033\cgrid\langnp1033\langfenp1033 {\cs17\super \chftn }{  Deborah Willis, \'93Shakespeare\rquote s }{\i The Tempest}{
 and the Discourse of Colonialism,\'94 }{\i SEL}{ 29, no. 2 (Spring, 1989), 227-289.}}}{  But both extremes are easily shown to depend not just upon different ideological orientations, but plain and simple misreading of what the text actually says.
\par At either extreme, the tendency to treat the literary text as an object about which to argue instead of as itself already 
a primary form of argument leads readers to substitute for what the text says some analogue, partial source, or item of common knowledge that is both simpler and less subtle.  Thus, Takaki draws upon widely circulated commonplaces, such as taking Shakespe
are\rquote s allusion to the \'93vexed Bermooths\'94 to mean that the play is set in }{\i Bermuda}{, and therefore the New World; or rearranging Caliban\rquote s name as an anagram for }{\i cannibal}{
, or appropriating a possible allusion in the name of his god Setebos to a Patagonian mythic figure, to conclude that Caliban }{\i is}{ an American Indian.}{\cs17\super \chftn {\footnote \pard\plain 
\s16\ql \li0\ri0\widctlpar\aspalpha\aspnum\faauto\adjustright\rin0\lin0\itap0 \fs20\lang1033\langfe1033\cgrid\langnp1033\langfenp1033 {\cs17\super \chftn }{
 Elsewhere Takaki uses the same analogy to urge that Caliban could have been African (50), Irish (149);  Asian  or any person of color (205);}}}{  By such means, }{\i The Tempest}{
 itself is made into a meta-narrative of dispossession and racial injustice, where any oppressed or disadvantaged people are Calibans, while the early English colonists are taken to be like Prospero in viewing \'93native people as savages.\'94
  Thus, according to Takaki, Thomas Jefferson, \'93like Prospero before him,\'94 sees \'93the triumph over the continent and the Indians as the movement from \lquote savagery\rquote  to \lquote civilization\rquote \'94
 (50); and is identified with all slaveholders whose four million black slaves, \'93like Caliban,\'94 \'93served the Prosperos of the master class.\'94 (110)  
\par While there have been more or less hagiological denunciations of such interpretations as a violation of Shakespeare, the great English Bard, along with further justifications, together foregrounding the pe
rhaps inevitable presence of disparate contemporary ideological positions,}{\cs17\super \chftn {\footnote \pard\plain \s16\ql \li0\ri0\widctlpar\aspalpha\aspnum\faauto\adjustright\rin0\lin0\itap0 \fs20\lang1033\langfe1033\cgrid\langnp1033\langfenp1033 {
\cs17\super \chftn }{ See, for example, George Wills\rquote s Will\rquote s \'93Literary Politics: \lquote The Tempest\rquote ? It\rquote s \lquote really about imperialism.  Emily Dickinson\rquote s poetry? Masturbation,\'94 }{\i Newsweek}{
, April 22, 1991, p. 72; and Stephen Greenblatt\rquote s reply, \'93The Best Way to Kill Our Literary Inheritance Is to Turn It into a Decorous Celebration of the New World Order,\'94 }{\i Chronicle of Higher Education}{
, v. 37, no. 39, June 12, 1991, pp. B1, 3.}}}{ the play is incomparable more subs
tantive, coherent, and subtle than such warring readings recognize.  At the simplest level, inattentive readers may place the action of the play in Bermuda only by failing to notice that the allusion comes when Prospero asks Ariel, his magic making spirit
, how he has disposed the King\rquote s ship and the rest of the royal fleet: 
\par \tab \tab \tab \tab \tab Safely in harbor 
\par \tab Is the King\rquote s ship, in the deep nook where once 
\par }\pard \ql \fi475\li0\ri-180\sl480\slmult1\nowidctlpar\faauto\rin-180\lin0\itap0 {\tab Thou call\rquote dst me up at midnight to fetch dew
\par \tab From the still-vexed Bermoothes, there she\rquote s hid;
\par \tab The mariners all under hatches stowed . . . 
\par }\pard \ql \li0\ri-180\sl480\slmult1\nowidctlpar\faauto\rin-180\lin0\itap0 {\tab \tab . . . ; and for the rest o\rquote  th\rquote  fleet,
\par \tab \tab Which I dispersed, they all have met again,
\par \tab \tab And are upon the Mediterranean flote 
\par \tab \tab Bound sadly home for Naples,
\par \tab \tab Supposing that they saw the King\rquote s ship wracked
\par \tab \tab And his great person perish.
\par It could not be more clear that Prospero\rquote s island is in the Mediterranean, just as it is obvious in the structure of the action that Prospero, formerly Duke of Milan was usurped by Alonso, the King of Naples, who has come to marry off his dau
ghter, Claribel, to the King of Tunis.  A moment with a map, even one as inaccurate as Shakespeare and his contemporaries might have used, makes clear that the political ambitions of Alonso, the King of Naples, }{\i not}{
 Prospero, are the very stuff of empire bu
ilding, seeking by treachery and alliance to wield dominating influence not just in Milan, the northern-most city of Italy and Naples, its greatest western seaport, but on the African coast at Tunis as well.  The obvious geographical and political backgro
u
nd of the play, that is to say, is absolutely European, and looking soberly upon its long and deadly imperialist history, encapsulates the enormous risk of a far-flung empire being built by conspiracy, force, including the callous will to offer his own da
ughter almost as a pawn to a marriage she does not want.}{\cs17\super \chftn {\footnote \pard\plain \s16\ql \li0\ri0\widctlpar\aspalpha\aspnum\faauto\adjustright\rin0\lin0\itap0 \fs20\lang1033\langfe1033\cgrid\langnp1033\langfenp1033 {\cs17\super \chftn }
{  See especially the comments on the folly of this later determination by }}}{  But what are the stakes, and what are the implications?  First of all, should he succeed, Alonso would have in place an em
pire greater than Rome (which is, spatially, exactly in the middle of the triangle connecting Milan, Tunis, and Naples) and more profitable by far than Carthage, since it would not only contain Rome but would control access to Europe through Alps and to t
he East by control of the shipping channel between southern Italy and the closest place on the African coast, Tunis.   
\par \tab It is striking that this entirely obvious feature of the setting of the play and the framing of its action has hardly entered critical d
iscussion of the play at all, but even more striking is the handling of Caliban.  He has, indeed, been racially demonized, treated as a dark skinned, sub-human monster, costumed and so presented by directors quite consistently since the 19}{\super th}{
 century on,  but it does not happen  in Shakespeare\rquote s text.}{\cs17\super \chftn {\footnote \pard\plain \s16\ql \li0\ri0\widctlpar\aspalpha\aspnum\faauto\adjustright\rin0\lin0\itap0 \fs20\lang1033\langfe1033\cgrid\langnp1033\langfenp1033 {
\cs17\super \chftn }{ One could hardly find, moreover, a better example in which generations of misreading actually creates the evil that such commentators as Takaki decry.  If, for example, the early colonists\emdash surely not at all l
ikely, being Puritans, to have had any patience or even tolerance for reading a work of Satan\rquote s playground, the Theater, just as they could hardly have seen a play that was never performed in public in Shakespeare\rquote s lifetime\emdash 
actually had }{\i read}{ the play and 
thought about it, it might have acted as a brake upon deadly imperial and racist ambitions.  But that may only imply that they, no less than Takaki, would misread in exactly the same way, assuming that the relevant principle was already known, though the 
principles are contrary to each other: the one assuming the native to be a vile heathen, and the other, assuming the dominant \'93Prosperos\'94 to be oppressive monsters.}}}{  Caliban\rquote s mother, Sycorax, is a \'93blue-eyed hag,\'94
 a malevolent witch (as Prospero is presen
ted as a virtuous magician) marooned but allowed to live only because she was with child.  The all but universal treatment of Caliban as less than human derives from a plain and simple misreading of these lines by Prospero, meant to chasten Ariel, who is 
reluctant to help Prospero carry out his plot of self-discovery:
\par \tab \tab . . . Then was this island
\par \tab \tab (Save for the son that she did litter here,
\par \tab \tab a freckled whelp, hag-born) not honored
\par \tab \tab with a human shape. (I, ii, 281-84)
\par That is, the island was not honored with a human shape, }{\i except for}{
 Caliban, freckled as would be any blue-eyed, fair-skinned person abandoned on a southern Mediterranean island: he may smell bad, but he is just as European as the Italians who encounter him
.  To put the case succinctly, Caliban is not, in this play, judged by the color of his skin, but precisely and exactingly by the content of his character: it is he, after all, who attempts to rape Miranda, using the language in which he learned to curse 
to lament that had Prospero not prevented him, for he would have \'93peopled else / This isle with Calibans.\'94
 (I,ii, 350-51).  For Prospero, moreover, the main concern is not with recovering the kingdom he lost, by his own admission not just to treachery but t
hrough administrative inattention: he is more concerned to secure a husband for his daughter, and thereby a future for his family.  It would be, one might venture, a most peculiar father who would chose her would-be rapist for that role, even though it is
 
striking by the end of the play, with the failure of the multiple insane plots for power by men who, dreaming of being home in Naples or Milan, are actually marooned on a desert island with no hope whatsoever of getting off, that Caliban is the only one w
ho clearly understands what a fool }{\i he}{ had been to pick for his masters a drunkard and a buffoon, and may be the only one who has really been changed by the events of the play.}{\cs17\super \chftn {\footnote \pard\plain 
\s16\ql \li0\ri0\widctlpar\aspalpha\aspnum\faauto\adjustright\rin0\lin0\itap0 \fs20\lang1033\langfe1033\cgrid\langnp1033\langfenp1033 {\cs17\super \chftn }{ Consider, by contrast, the sullen silence of the two treacherous brothers, Seba
stian and Antonio, who, in thinking so well of themselves as civilized gentlemen, do not even seem to register the fact that both are would traitors and murders.  Perhaps the most revealing and tantalizing detail, however, is the fact that when the action
 of the play concludes, Prospero pulls aside the drape to his cell, revealing Ferdinand and Miranda, not just playing the archetypal political game of chess, but Miranda having caught Ferdinand cheating.  He denies it, saying he would not do so \'93
for the world,\'94 to which Miranda replies, \'93Yes, for a score of kingdoms you should wrangle, / And I would call it fair play.\'94
  While there is no question whatsoever that kingdoms governed by Ferdinand and Miranda would be incomparably less vicious than what the rule 
of either Sebastian or Antonio would promise, they represent a real world in which anyone assuming they could claim perfect virtue and still govern would suffer exactly the fate of Prospero, who loses his kingdom in part because he quits doing his job.  C
aliban, on the other hand, recognizing himself to be a \'93thrice double ass\'94 has only shown that acting mainly for the satisfaction of his appetites, wanting both his dinner and a woman, renders him altogether incompetent to govern. }}}{
\par \tab Having gone only this far toward a reading of }{\i The Tempest}{
, I believe it is sufficient to explore the claim that this play, considered as a paradigm of humane reasoning, goes to the very heart of the question of cultural legitimation, by presenting in an essentially diagrammatic 
form a matrix of relations that does not reduce the complexity of social reality and allows us to return, again and again, to its structure and its exact language to think our way through fundamental political dilemmas without confusion\emdash 
and without ignorin
g essential elements that pertain to our own human make-up.  The fact that this claim may seem counterintuitive derives only from the habit of supposing that literary texts are an expression of some simple theory, or a reflection of some ideological commi
tment, instead of looking patiently at the evidence that they are inductive and abductive experiments, which think in and through the precisely embodied figures that constitute them.  
\par }\pard \ql \fi475\li0\ri-180\sl480\slmult1\nowidctlpar\faauto\rin-180\lin0\itap0 {What is most important in this claim is that a text is a carefully const
ructed matrix of relations that is emphatically not dogmatic.  From the perspective of a conventional view of reasoning, this quality appears (and has been so treated) as an objectionable ambiguity, preventing one from affirming a univocal \'93meaning\'94
 for a text, but that is its exact and exacting virtue\emdash and does not in any way mean that where reading is concerned any reading is as good as any other.  A play like }{\i The Tempest}{
, for example, is a thought experiment, in which attention the entire matrix of the play\emdash its characters, setting, structure, syntax, and chains of consequential events\emdash enable one to think through a finite case to consider }{\i 
what happens IF. . .?}{  Viewed in this imaginative and essentially hypothetical mode, all the questions that the text may
 raise have sufficient materials to answer, not categorically but pragmatically.  For example, when Shakespeare places the royal party on a desert island, and then proceeds to show first, the diverse plots to seize power, in almost all cases by murderous 
means, starting from Prospero\rquote 
s brother, Antonio, persuading Sebastian that they should murder his brother, Alonso, King of Naples, going on to the plot among fools, with Stephano, Trinculo, and Caliban, the circumstances in the first instance (murdering a 
king to seize his throne, though it is a thousand leagues away and for all they know, unreachable) make the conspiracy literally an action by madmen who in the most immediate way do not know where they are and have not given a thought to how they might (a
n
d might have to) live there.  In the second instance, the parallel between the cases of the court party and Caliban and the fools, reinforces the point that such undertakings, Machiavelli notwithstanding, are self-defeating in both the short and the long 
run\emdash 
even though Prospero understand with exactitude that his real danger comes from Caliban, whom Prospero acknowledges as his own as both an indication of his intimate knowledge of Caliban, and as a metaphorical juxtaposition that identifies Caliban\rquote 
s }{\i qualities}{
 with Prospero himself, and more to the point, with everyone who may just want to eat his dinner and enjoy his woman.  The point is made all the more solid, moreover, when Prospero, himself having been usurped in Milan, treats Ferdinand (whom we soon 
understand to be the groom most desired for Miranda) as a violent usurper of his island kingdom.  
\par }\pard \ql \li0\ri-180\sl480\slmult1\nowidctlpar\faauto\rin-180\lin0\itap0 {\tab The critical fixation on ambiguity and mulitiplicity of meaning in artistic works as either a scandal, a defect, some kind of intellectual misfortune, stems
 from a model of reasoning that is anything but imaginative: it is, in the strictest sense, dogmatic, even fundamentalist, not by insisting upon decision criteria, but by not recognizing the multiplicity of factors that come into play in even the most ord
inary practical events. In our impatience to assert some fundamental principle of right or wrong, we are more likely to create injury and confusion than to reach any stable sense that justice has been done.  The great irony is that }{\i all}{
 justice is, in a very basic way, poetic\emdash 
meaning by that not that it is unreal or false or unobtainable, but exactly the opposite.  It is that our sense of justice is inculcated as part of education, and is profoundly and deeply shaped by the poems that we privilege, the texts we most revere.}{
\cs17\super \chftn {\footnote \pard\plain \s16\ql \li0\ri0\widctlpar\aspalpha\aspnum\faauto\adjustright\rin0\lin0\itap0 \fs20\lang1033\langfe1033\cgrid\langnp1033\langfenp1033 {\cs17\super \chftn }{ See in this context the claim of Walt Whitman in }{\i 
Democratic Vistas}{ (1871) that the greatness of any culture is to found in, and shaped by, its poems.  In a less extravagant way, Quentin Anderson makes a similar way in }{\i Imagined Communities}{
 (London: Verso, 1983, 1991), that the emergence of national consciousness depends on print literacy.  See chapter 3, 37-46.  In }{\i Beyond Belief:Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples}{
 (New York: Vintage Books, 1998), V. S. Naipaul makes a possibly even more telling point in lamenting the current condition of Indonesia, from a complementary vantage point: \'93
Sustained great writing, rather than polemic, can only come out of societies that offer true human possibility; and in Indonesia we have, instead, a
 pastoral people who have lost their history; who have been involved in prodigious, often tragic, events, but are without the means\emdash the education, the language, and above all the freedom\emdash to reflect on them\'94
 (71).  The reciprocity between great, undogmatic, writing and true human possibility extends, I would argue, much farther than we are presently disposed to acknowledge. }}}{
  Whenever we are tempted to suppose that there are universal human rights, or inviolable principles of policy, it should be our first 
tactic to consider the stories used to illustrate them, that show us concretely, why it is wrong to allow gratuitous suffering, why it is impermissible and damaging to our own nature as persons to use superficial appearances as a basis for treating anothe
r
 group badly, and so on.  Perhaps the most fierce academic irony of our times is that in the interest of such virtues, the main tendency has been to show increasing impatience with the literary, even, as in the cases briefly examined here, to treat the li
terary as if it were complicit with if not itself the cause of the very evils against which literary texts themselves are the best and perhaps the only arguments.  
\par \tab Correspondingly, when we consider the alarming rise of terror in our own world, I would arg
ue that our greatest risk lies in the dogmatic insistence upon principles whose specific consequences are not concretely imagined.  For at least a half-century, we have enacted for ourselves a drama on the world stage, worrying about the hegemonic ambitio
ns or deadly potential of another, opposing group, forgetting all the while that hegemony also means, as Gramsci was among the first to insist,}{\cs17\super \chftn {\footnote \pard\plain 
\s16\ql \li0\ri0\widctlpar\aspalpha\aspnum\faauto\adjustright\rin0\lin0\itap0 \fs20\lang1033\langfe1033\cgrid\langnp1033\langfenp1033 {\cs17\super \chftn }{ See especially, Antonio Gramsci, }{\i Selections from the Prison Notebooks}{
 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971, 1991), 330-333; and recent work by Chantel Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, especially }{\i Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Toward a Radical  Democratic Politics}{ (London: Verso, 1985).  }}}{
 gaining assent without coercion.  If a political party means to actually gain and hold power, it will never do to neutralize or exterminate all one\rquote 
s enemies, for the very effort to do so creates an unending spiral of enmity.  But this contemporary drama, with its escalating deadliness, is a thoroughly wretched, abysmal }{\i play}{.  It is bad
 art, not even recognizing its own inherent characteristics as such, because the stage on which it is played out does not permit rehearsal, reconsideration, contemplative consideration of consequences.  A model of imaginative reasoning, seen not as some p
i
ece of magic reminiscent of Prospero, but as honoring the mental space in which we examine, contemplate, and imagine a future, is, and always has been, the primary mechanism for reaching assent without coercion.  The immemorial work of poetry is to teach 
us to think, to teach us to come to agreements without dogmatic exclusion, so as to act as human beings, not as Calibans in an endless succession of costumes.  It is time to return to it.  
\par \tab \tab 
\par }}