The Cunning of Recognition: A Reply to John Frow and Meaghan Morris

Abstract

John Frow and Meaghan Morris offer two major criticisms of my approach to Australian multiculturalism as outlined in my essay The State of Shame: Australian Multiculturalism and the Crisis of Indigenous Citizenship (Critical Inquiry 24 [Winter 1998]: 575-610). They critique what they see as assumption on my part that the state can or should be viewed as a singular, unified, and intelligent agent and that the juridical branch shares an intentionality with the government (John Frow and Meaghan Morris, Two Laws: Response to Elizabeth Povinelli, Critical Inquiry 25 [Spring 1999]: 627). And they critique how I write off the multicultural project-or at least the certainty with which I supposedly do so (p. 627). Frow, Morris, and I could expend much critical energy arguing which institutions of liberal democratic nations are part of the state and which are not. For their part, Morris and Frow draw a recognizable liberal distinction between the functions and discourses of parliamentary and juridical institutions (the High Court is a judicial, not a political (let alone a 'critical') institution [p. 628]). As should be apparent from The State of Shame, I do not share this perspective, nor its critical social or analytical implications. In The State of Shame, as in other related essays, I presume that Australian citizens, inside and outside governments and courts, rely on and invoke a shared commonsense ground of meaning from which agreements and disagreements are made possible and sensible, in which juridical, governmental, and public (or private) debates