IN THE days after Hurricane Katrina, the uproar over the lack of disaster preparation and mismanagement of emergency funds dominated political discourse while a less noticed controversy was unfolding over the use of the term “refugee” for the hurricane victims. The Washington Post interviewed some of the victims seeking shelter at the New Orleans convention center and reported that they all felt insulted by the term. Elijah Cummings, democratic representative from Maryland and member of the Congressional Black Caucus, echoed the response: “They are not refugees. I hate that word.” The term even prompted a presidential intervention. Upon visiting the destroyed region and meeting the survivors, President George W. Bush urged the use of alternative phrases to describe the status of those recently made homeless. He even offered a few suggestions: “evacuees,” “victims,” or simply, “displaced citizens.” This last phrase seemed ready-made to address the frustration of Annette Ellis, one of the displaced Baton Rouge residents interviewed by the Washington Post, who insisted in simple and clear words: “We ain’t refugees. I’m a citizen.”1
“Why is the term such a dirty word to some?”—asked the Washington Post.2 After all, it was only a metaphor. However much the victims had lost in the hurricane, they still had their citizenship. To call them “refugees” was to throw into question some of their most important rights. The disaster left its victims homeless, unemployed, and in precarious health. They were dependent on state and federal assistance and the rest of the American citizenry now saw the displaced as a political problem and an economic burden. Their status was not radically different from that of a refugee arriving from Somalia or Rwanda.
More than terms like immigrant or exile, “refugee” emphatically references the foreigner as a noncitizen and an overall rather sorry figure. Public imagination captures this representation well through (often racialized) images of extreme poverty, illiteracy, and disease—features of a diminished subjectivity. The objections of Katrina victims at being identified as refugees show the anxiety created by the subjectivity assigned to them, the subjectivity of the noncitizen deprived of rights, at the mercy of others. The figure of the refugee emerges from historical, political, and policy documents as a “pure victim in general: universal man, universal woman, universal child, and taken together [all refugees] universal family.” “This universalism,” Liisa Malkki claims, “can strip from them (the victims) the authority to give credible narrative evidence or testimony about their own condition in politically and institutionally consequential forums.”3 Even more so it strips from them the authority to draw on their own experiences to offer insight into the politics of their adoptive nation.
Readers looking at Arendt’s picture on the covers of her books did not see a poor refugee in the woman seated comfortably in an armchair and smoking a cigarette. Nor did they see one in television interviews with Herbert Marcuse, a white-haired man in black suits and bow ties. Said’s physical appearance, that of a scholar with a pensive look, hardly inspired Palestinian refugees. Even Solzhenitsyn, a hirsute in Russian peasant garb, looked defiant and self-assured, not destitute and needy. Such intellectuals cannot be refugees, it would seem. If they were poor, their poverty was bohemian; if they were ill, their disease was romantic. They were certainly not illiterate; if anything, it was American students who must have fidgeted under the professorial gaze of these foreigners. Yet all four of them were, or self-identified at some point, as refugees: Arendt and Marcuse in the most straightforward sense of the term, as political refugees from Nazi Germany; Solzhenitsyn as a member of a larger category of refugees from the Soviet Union and Eastern European countries (even though he, in particular, was expelled); and Said as a spokesperson for Palestinian refugees forced to live outside their homeland.
We find it difficult to think of them alongside refugees from the Third World and “the babies in Africa that have all the flies and are starving to death”—to use an image that was especially disturbing to one of Katrina’s victims.4 Intellectuals who have fled their countries, or were forced to leave, are more commonly called exiles rather than refugees or émigrés rather than immigrants. Word choice matters. It could be that the term “refugee” is deemed too unsavory to be assigned to an elite group but even more likely that it is made unavailable. In 1940, as the first waves of middle-class, intellectual Europeans fled to America, Life magazine scorned them as “refugees de luxe,” depicting them as well-to-do foreigners in fur coats at upscale restaurants, living in luxury hotels or vacationing at expensive resorts, while presenting themselves as refugees.5 Fortune magazine was equally dismissive of these refugees’ plight: “The pilgrims of the seventeenth century came here to make their fortune; the émigrés of 1940 have come here to protect theirs.”6 To not identify these intellectuals as refugees is to keep them symbolically at a distance from their new political environment, as their commitment is expected to be to the homeland, and their sojourn, temporary. Intellectual refugees (writers, artists, and academics) once seen as uprooted from their homeland can be in an even more precarious situation than other refugees.
Underlying all other representations of the foreigner in a nation-state—exile, immigrant, refugee, and asylum seeker—is a subjectivity defined by inferiority to the citizen as native born. The litmus test of this inferiority is that foreigners must face racially and morally inflected residence and naturalization requirements (such as passing IQ tests or the expectation to not have been involved in prostitution), which decide if they deserve to be allowed into the national community. At the other end of these requirements for admission is a deportation system designed to eliminate those deemed undesirable to the nation-state. The modern deportation regime emerged from a conception of citizenship as full membership in the constitutional community of the nation, which assumes that the citizens are “the people,” “whereas noncitizens are something less.”7 Deportation decisions can resort to denaturalization if someone who is legally a U.S. citizen is deemed undesirable. The foreign origin, then, makes one vulnerable in a way that can never go fully away. Even when legally drawn into the nation, the foreigner inhabits a precarious position, not just politically, but also ontologically, because citizenship is not simply a political category but also commonly imagined as a natural condition and articulated in a series of metaphorical representations of place and nationhood as roots that ground the citizen. The uprooted, by such logic, falls outside not just a national but also a natural order. “The powerful metaphoric practices that so commonly link people to place,” Malkki argues, “are also deployed to understand and act upon the categorically aberrant condition of people whose claims on, and ties to, national soils are regarded as tenuous, spurious, or non-existent.”8
While they can fulfill some residence and naturalization requirements more easily than others, intellectuals are potentially the most threatening instance of foreignness from the perspective of the nation-state. In 1919, Emma Goldman, a Russian national who had lived in New York since 1885 where she was an active writer and public speaker on women’s rights, social issues, and anarchist politics, was denaturalized without notice and deported to Russia as an “alien radical.” Goldman is not the only case of a foreign intellectual deported on the basis of dangerous political ideas. In 1955, Jamaican writer C. L. R. James was deported after fifteen years of living in New York and being involved in socialist politics. At the height of the Eichmann controversy, Arendt said to friends, more or less jokingly, that she hoped she would not be deported. Marcuse and Said received hate mail that demanded they leave the country. Solzhenitsyn was invited to go back to communist Russia if he did not like American democracy. These intellectuals, like Goldman and James before them, were highly critical of the U.S. government, yet hardly alone in their opposition. They had American-born allies and partners who did not suffer a similar fate because the state could not force them to leave. One can only wonder: “a citizen might be immune from deportation, but how was a refugee to be sure?”9
The noncitizen’s inferiority cuts across other categories, such as race, class, or national origin, even though each of these has been at times deemed inferior for separate reasons.10 What all noncitizens share is their uprootedness perceived as a fall from the national order, which renders them fundamentally deficient and suspect. Being white, Western European, and highly educated has only been a partial remedy to such deficiency. Granted, American immigration law has consistently privileged white European immigrants, especially if they had a Christian, preferably Protestant, religious orientation. These were often seen as the stock America was originally made of, and hence more likely to fit in the fabric of the nation.11 Yet the push and pull of immigration also meant that these white European Christian immigrants belonged to a particular class: they were usually farmers or unskilled laborers who arrived empty-handed and achieved socioeconomic success. Ironically, low class status could facilitate Americanization; as throughout much of the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth, the process of Americanizing immigrants was forged through education.12 By contrast, intellectual migrants came with a completed education and were unlikely enrollers in Sunday school or after work language and cultural programs. Indeed, some encountered other Americans by acting as their teachers rather than students. Challenging Hannah Arendt’s negative remarks on American foreign policy, Nathan Glazer once referred to her sarcastically as “our teacher.”13 While seemingly acknowledging her intellectual authority, Glazer questioned her political wisdom by emphatically putting her on a different level from “regular” Americans and rendering her inassimilable to the community that she was addressing. How could a perspective like hers be other than irrelevant, theoretically sophisticated perhaps, but surely impractical?
Laura Fermi estimates the financial contribution wartime European intellectuals made to American society by being ready to contribute immediately to the workforce at $32 million, without any investment from the U.S. government required for their training.14 Yet, as the label “refugees de luxe” suggests, their reception was far from enthusiastic. As I show in the introduction, American officials suspected many of them of subversive political activity, even as the State Department employed several intellectual refugees in the war intelligence effort.15 Surveys published in popular magazines and newspapers of the time along with articles and letters to the editors indicated a general anti-immigration sentiment in America. Almost 80 percent of the population expressed negative feelings about intellectual refugees from Europe.16 As the Life magazine article shows, intellectual refugees got caught in a double-bind of rejection, on the one hand simply as foreigners, and on the other hand, as impostors. Ironically, then, they were doubly inferior.
Yet no matter how critically they were received at times, Hannah Arendt, Herbert Marcuse, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and Edward Said succeeded in becoming political commentators in the United States and frequently voicing their opinions, even the most critical ones. How did they formulate their ideas and position given the constraints exerted by a political discourse structurally and historically set up to keep foreigners at bay? To begin my investigation, in this chapter I look more closely at the politics of foreignness and its rhetorical valence in postwar America to articulate the general framework in which I examine the particularities of the stranger persona in each of my four case studies. My goal is to conceptualize foreignness at the intersection of political practices of stratecraft and rhetorical practices of de-familiarization (or estrangement), drawing on Victor Shklovsky’s work. These practices converge in the figure of the stranger, which I take from, but also expand upon, the sociology of Georg Simmel and Alfred Schutz.
This chapter, then, lays the foundation for the overall argument of the book: the four foreign intellectuals I study here developed a stranger persona that was not the mere consequence of maladjustment, or a rejection of American mores, but rather a strategy of invention and delivery created in response to the political subjectivity of the foreigner. In their criticism, these intellectuals offered a portrait of the American nation. In their audiences’ responses, we discern a different image of America. Looking at these images side by side, I am less concerned with whose depiction was more accurate and more interested in the tension between the underlying representations. It is this tension that gives us a unique measure of civic engagement in America, of its ambivalence toward plurality and its cautiousness toward ideas that could inspire political renewal.
Political life relies on rhetorical acts: decisions that are made and enforced by the members of the community based on the arguments they find most compelling. Aristotle saw such political-cum-rhetorical activity as the rational byproduct of the natural inclination of human beings to live together and achieve certain goals that are valid and desirable for all, rather than only particular individuals. Politics—and political discourse—brings individuals together in a “sort of partnership.”17 But did foreigners also belong in this partnership? A foreigner himself, Aristotle did not participate in Athenian politics, but he was a key player as advisor to Alexander the Great, whose thinking and policy he influenced directly. What kept foreigners out of political deliberation was not only their inferior social status, but also, and connectedly, their lack of a citizen’s ethos.
In the classical rhetorical tradition, the genre of political deliberation required that in order to convince an audience the speaker display ethos, or moral character, usually associated with a well-defined set of characteristics: practical wisdom, virtue, and goodwill. The complete list of virtues included courage, temperance, magnanimity, liberality, gentleness, prudence, and justice. Greek culture did not define these virtues in the abstract terms of a moral theory but as ethical conventions shared by a community. Practical wisdom, for instance, referred to the capacity to identify what is beneficial for the community in certain circumstances, which, in turn, depended on what the members already took for granted as being “beneficial.”18 Virtues were context- and culture-specific, set up by “an ethics of citizenship to parcel up humanity into different natural types.”19
The classical conception of ethos carries an unacknowledged legacy of ethnocentrism, not only because ancient rhetoric saw the circumstances of a person’s birth as an “intrinsic and essential part of an individual’s identity,” but also by disadvantaging rhetorically those whose status was deemed socially and politically inferior. Moreover, in the Nichomachean Ethics Aristotle implicitly linked ethos to the self-image of a community by claiming that ethos develops through custom and education, in other words through familiarity and adherence to the values and beliefs of a particular community that can consistently recognize and reward behaviors assumed to be praiseworthy.20 Ethos, then, presumes membership in the rhetorical community formed by the speaker and audience and is “virtually co-extensive with the activity of judgment that partly defines citizenship.”21 This judgment almost inevitably left out the foreigner as the ancient Greeks inhabited a moral and political universe that often asserted its identity in contrast to outsiders, the “barbarians.” Roman rhetoric was no different in this regard, as the art of oratory was taught “in the context of a telos—the development in students of the capacity to see themselves primarily as citizen-patriots, dedicated to working on behalf of republican ideals.”22 Romans tended to dismiss non-citizens from the field of rhetorical transactions, and the focus on citizenry comes through in Cicero’s De Oratore in Crassus’s insistence that the orator be familiar with Roman citizenship laws. The very idea that an orator would be ‘ignorant of these . . . laws of his own community” strikes him as “supremely scandalous.” While Cicero considered various qualities that the ideal orator would need, its public significance for the state goes unquestioned. The republic saw itself reflected in the character of the noble orator. In the words of Crassus: “the wise control of the complete orator is that which chiefly upholds not only his own dignity, but the safety of countless individuals and of the entire State.”23
The Romans reluctantly admired some contributions made by foreigners, starting with the rhetorical treatises of the Greeks. Cicero preferred a speaker who would “show, first, as little trace as possible of any artifice, and secondly none whatever of things Greek.”24 Yet he was willing to bow to the Greek’s accomplishments and believed “it would be brutish and inhuman not to lend an ear, and . . . to pick up their sayings by eavesdropping and keep a look-out from afar for their talk.”25 Even at the risk of receiving condemnation from their fellow citizens, the Roman rhetoricians remained receptive to foreign influence, especially when it was Aristotle’s. Cicero was hardly the only one to carry on the Aristotelian legacy over the centuries. It was not only Greek precepts that traveled across time and space in the rhetorical cultures of Europe but also one of their key philosophical dilemmas regarding the moral neutrality of a rhetorical education. Was the ideal orator morally virtuous or only verbally skilled to the point of being able to feign virtue? The answer depended both on the audience’s familiarity with the orator in question and on the particular epistemic climate whether it was committed to the ideals of truthfulness and authenticity or more cynically inclined and constantly alert to the risk of deception and manipulation. Either way, foreigners were at the short end of the stick, whether because they were the ones audiences did not know and therefore did not readily trust or because they were deemed a priori untrustworthy. The regulation of trust within the confines of a political community depends on how that community is structured around individuals, relations among individuals, institutionalized ties, or an abstract system of rules.26 The ancient rhetorical culture was centered on an ideal of civic republicanism that influenced the Anglo-American tradition of civil society.27 In this tradition, civic virtue—or the citizen’s ethos—is predicated on the assumption that the community sees its public values reflected in the private ones of its members so that individuals readily and easily agree with a “General Will,” as Jean-Jacques Rousseau would put it, that reflects their collective consciousness.
In the “transformation from a rhetorical, oratorical style to a modern, bourgeois one,” oratory not only converted ancient civic republicanism to the value of politeness in a Christian aristocracy but also sought to serve an emerging culture of sentiment in which foreignness becomes the measuring rod for impartiality, the principal civic virtue.28 The impartial spectator envisioned by Adam Smith was “characterized by the absence of already existing commitments,” which allowed him to be detached and objective.29 Yet this spectator was still a member of the community whose impartiality represented a cultivated epistemic stance rather than mere consequence of an outsider status. Indeed, the spectator was attached to his fellow citizens not only through shared membership in their nation but also through a faculty of imagination that allowed him to understand and empathize with other members of the community. This imagination, in turn, was activated by the sentiment of sympathy towards one’s fellow citizens. The emphasis placed by Enlightenment political theorists on sympathy as the foundation of the faculty of imagination that allows one citizen to relate to another and Bernard Anderson’s definition of the nation as an “imagined community” are not by accident the same. Sympathy was the byproduct of familiarity, and thus focused on one’s fellow citizens rather than strangers. As Jürgen Habermas puts it, the nation “is Janus-faced. Whereas the voluntary nation of citizens is the source of democratic legitimation, it is the inherited or ascribed nation founded on ethnic membership (die geborene Nation der Volkgenossen) that secures social integration.”30 Whereas ethnic membership, which sustains the everyday life of the nation, leaves foreigners out, the rule of law, which cements the nation around a presumed consensus, is predicated on foreignness or on the figure of an impartial and detached evaluator. Rousseau mentioned approvingly “the custom of most Greek cities to entrust the establishment of their laws to foreigners,” a custom later adopted by the modern republics of Italy.31 When Rome did not follow this practice, it frequently ended up with tyranny, and according to Rousseau, a political framework limiting access to citizens only leads to corruption and destruction.
In Rousseau’s view, the legislator is “in every respect an extraordinary man in the state. If he ought to be so by his genius, he is no less so by his office, which is neither magistracy nor sovereignty. This office, which constitutes the republic, does not enter into its constitution.”32 In this tradition, the foreigner is the figure of a” godlike man . . . able to discover the best rules for a society, see all of men’s passions yet experience none of them; have no relationship at all to our nature yet know it thoroughly.” Cast in positive terms, the foreigner is the ultimate impartial observer with objectivity the very consequence of disinterestedness. From westerns to religious narratives like the Book of Ruth, there are abundant representations of a wise and virtuous outsider who can help the community when its own members fail to do so. Yet at the end of the story, the foreigner either goes native or departs “in a timely fashion.”33 The figure of the foreigner is absorbed into the group or eliminated if it becomes resistant. Thus, the ethos of the foreigner is based on exceptionality, and its tenuous nature comes from the very fact that it lacks the virtues associated with citizenship: disinterested rather courageous, detached rather than magnanimous, and objective rather than gentle. There is no absolute opposition between these virtues but a marked contrast: while one set of values signals connection and inclusion, the other one emphasizes dissociation and distance.
With distance comes danger, as the American deportation system again illustrates. Daniel Kanstroom has shown that the roots of the American deportation law lie in the laws designed to justify the removal of Native Americans from their land and those overseeing the treatment of fugitive slaves from the late eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century. “They all involved the application of majoritarian power,” Kanstroon claims, “against a particular group of people, largely identifiable by race or nationality, to compel their removal from one place to another.”34 Deportation law depicts the foreigner proposed to be deported as a criminal but not just any criminal—no matter how petty the crime, the foreign convict is regarded as more dangerous than the native one. What the legal system deems “criminal,” however, can vary from shoplifting to anti-U.S. government activity, the spectrum wide enough to produce a regime of political rejection designed to detect danger in foreignness.
Historically, foreigners became suspect political subjects in the political landscape created by World War I with the emergence of the modern European nation-state marking the conjunction of sovereignty and territorial control through border-enforcement. As Saskia Sassen explains, “the coupling of state sovereignty and nationalism with border control made the ‘foreigner’ an outsider.”35 The first decades of the twentieth century saw increased movements of foreigners with large refugee flows reaching European borders at the same time as the United States, previously the major in-taker of immigrants, was introducing immigration restriction policies.
America, of course, has historically defined its national identity in relation to foreigners. In the Declaration of Independence, one of the grievances listed against the British sovereign concerns the restrictions imposed on the naturalization of foreigners who came to the American colonies. Thomas Jefferson, however, was making a political rather than moral complaint as he was not concerned with the welfare of foreigners as much as interested in their strategic value as agents of nation-building. As Aristide Zolberg explains, in the United States naturalization procedures “achieved unprecedented practical and theoretical prominence because foreign immigration—as against mere transfers within the empire—made a much greater contribution to its population than had ever occurred in any European nation.”36
In American political and legal discourse, the foreigner is an alien, caught “at the nexus of two legal worlds”: the world of government restrictions, national communities, and border control as well as the world of social relationships among the people present in a territory. In the United States, these relationships define a polis formally committed to norms of equal treatment.37 In the name of such commitments, Michael Walzer has argued that foreigners make important contributions to the community of citizens and therefore must be allowed to have political membership. To deny such membership would amount to relegating foreigners, in Walzer’s view, to a “metic status” that makes foreign residents into the “subjects of a band of citizen tyrants, governed without consent.”38 The very fact that Walzer emphasizes the lack of consent and the tyranny of a citizenry turned against foreigners reveals his commitment to allowing foreigners political membership, effectively making them eligible for participation in the consent of the nation. But Walzer has also argued that nation-states are justified in restricting access to foreigners as a way of preserving their way of life. In his view, the members of a national community express their beliefs and values in the political decisions they make regarding which and when to accept foreigners and when to keep them out. Linda Bosniak explains Walzer’s seemingly conflicted views toward foreigners by pointing out that he endorses both the right of states to restrict admission to foreigners and their obligation to grant them political membership because he subscribes to a conception of justice grounded in the principle of separation. Once inside the political community of a nation-state, foreigners are subject to the principle of equality governing that sphere. The contradiction is further explained by the fact that the American “moral tradition simultaneously embraces external boundedness and internal inclusive equality.” Foreigners heighten this ambivalence by activating the pressures of treating them in accordance with the principle of inclusive equality as well as reminding a community of its own cultural imperatives. But the tension is absorbed in a “nationalist narrative of choiceworthiness” that asks, and indeed assumes foreigners are willing, to assimilate in the land of their dreams to become citizens and adopt the lifestyle of the native.39 American national sentiment is based on immigration as a trope that is “not simply an expression of . . . openness,” but also “operates as continuing reference point for making decisions about membership in the nation and the terms of that membership and ultimately serves to renew American nationhood.”40 Does this symbolic value of immigration also mean that the citizenry is open to assimilating a newcomer’s opinion, no matter how critical it might be? Not necessarily. The American “rhetoric of consensus,” as Sacvan Bercovitch articulates it, is a “strategy for absorption,” for subsuming diversity under a set of ideals.41 Chief among these ideals is that of a chosen nation, a “community of grace” in which the strongest bond consists in the very fact of belonging.42
Already in 1820, John Quincy Adams, while only Secretary of State, urged new Americans—significantly, those of German origin—to
cast off their European skin, never to resume it . . . [to] look forward to their posterity, rather than backward to their ancestors; . . . (to) be sure that whatever their feelings may be, those of their children will cling to the prejudices of this country, and will partake of that proud spirit, . . . that feeling of superiority over other nations . . . (which) arises from the consciousness of every individual that . . . no man in the country is above him.43
Becoming an authentic American was more than a matter of acculturation. It implied acquiring a citizen’s ethos centered on authenticity as a prerequisite for honesty and reliability. Questions of authenticity have been central to American political discourse from the birth of the nation to contemporary media depictions of the character of key political leaders. As Shawn Parry-Giles defines it, political authenticity is a “symbolic, mediated, interactional, and highly contested process” by which the veracity of a political leader’s public character is assessed.44 While the politics of authenticity relies on a complex ideological repertoire of assumptions about race, gender, sexuality, and class, it is first and foremost rooted in an ideology of nationalism. To be authentic becomes entangled with being an authentic American or authentically committed to America. This concern with political authenticity creates a culture defined not only by suspiciousness but also by defensiveness. Tocqueville had noticed that the American citizen “feels a duty to defend anything criticized there, for it is not only his country that is being attacked, but himself.”45 The citizen’s ethos is one with the nation’s ethos. As such, criticism cannot come from outside.
A STRANGER’S EMBRACE
The assimilation of immigrants is not only a benign way of eliminating foreignness; it is also a strategy of re-invigorating national self-enchantment. In Honig’s terms, “the myth of an immigrant America depicts the foreigner as a supplement to the nation, and agent of national re-enchantment that might rescue the regime from corruption and return it to its first principles.”46 The intellectuals I examine in this book were hardly assimilated immigrants, but they believed in America’s founding principles. They were seduced by the idea of America, even though they disliked some of its concrete manifestations. Arendt extolled the wisdom of the Founding Fathers in the making of a nation committed to plurality and held together by civic pride rather than ethnic bonds. Although he spent most of his career criticizing American society, Marcuse maintained a vision of the land of freedom that had greeted him upon arrival from Nazi Germany. Solzhenitsyn saw in the United States a potential rescuer of nations. Even Said hoped that the absence of a history of European colonialism might redeem Americans and inspire them to act differently in the Middle East.
Despite the fact that they nurtured visions of America as an enchanted land—each having his or her own enchanted vision—the intensity of and arguments used in rejecting their criticism suggest that in their audiences’ eyes, they were guilty of anti-Americanism. The accusation is not merely xenophobic or unfair but also an illustration of the paradoxical position of the foreigner: both inside and outside a national community, drawn to and by it, as well as repelled. Their criticism seemed at times detached and uncaring as if it was simply the dismissive reaction of a temporary visitor who was about to return, rather disappointed, to his or her own country. Each of them was not only a foreigner by virtue of having come from another country but also a stranger in the sense defined by Georg Simmel as a “potential wanderer . . . his position in this group . . . determined, essentially, by the fact that he has not belonged to it from the beginning, that he imports qualities into it, which do not and cannot stem from the group itself.”47
The stranger, according to Simmel, embodies a “synthesis of ‘nearness and distance,’ physically present and thus close, but also a vestige of a world that is remote and unfamiliar.” When Montesquieu’s hero Rica arrives in Paris, he is surprised to see the excited reaction of the French to his appearance: “Oh! Oh! Is he a Persian? What a most extraordinary thing! How can one be a Persian?”48 But the interest of the French is only aroused if alerted to the fact that Rica is a Persian. When he starts dressing in European clothes, nobody in Paris notices him anymore. He is a foreigner, whether noticed or not, but he becomes a stranger when the natives interact with him and (re)mark his difference. Simmel explains this phenomenon by stressing that to be a stranger “is a form of interaction. The inhabitants of Sirius are not really strangers to us, at least not in any sociologically relevant sense: they do not exist for us at all; they are beyond far and near. The stranger . . . is an element of the group itself.” The stranger does not share the “peculiar tendencies of the group.” The stranger can observe and assess the society around him because he has no stakes in it, which makes him into an “objective individual . . . bound by no commitments which could prejudice his perception, understanding, and evaluation of the given.” The boldness of a stranger’s reflection is the result of “not (being) tied down in his action by habit, piety, and precedent.” Simmel believed that the “unity of nearness and remoteness” characteristic of strangers makes them attractive to the members of the group who come to value their knowledge, seek their advice, or entrust them with secrets. The stranger “often receives the most surprising openness—confidences which sometimes have the character of a confessional and which would be carefully withheld from a more closely related person.”49
Simmel’s optimistic and indeed cosmopolitan view did not withstand the test of real life. His concept was based largely on an abstraction and inspired by his longstanding interest in the philosophy of economics, which drew his attention to the trader who travels back and forth, never staying long enough to assimilate or to be perceived as a threat. Ironically, though, the ultimate source of inspiration was Simmel himself as an assimilated Berliner Jew. As Pierre Birnbaum has remarked, Simmel “historicize(d) the quality that affected him throughout his own life.50 But he also gave it a positive valence and glossed over the rejection of the stranger before he would have the misfortune of experiencing it directly in his later struggles with the anti-Semitic academic establishment of 1900s Berlin.51
In a 1963 Lecture at Leo Baeck Institute in New York, Albert Salomon, a former student of Simmel’s, questioned the idea that the stranger can receive a legitimate place among those who seem to accept him.52 A Jewish refugee from a Germany even more violently anti-Semitic than Simmel had experienced it, Salomon criticized his former teacher for having offered a politically utopian, if not complacent, conception of the stranger. Simmel had also ignored, in Salomon’s view, that “the world of everyday life, the social world, is as strange to the stranger as it is to the people who live by their social roles for the fulfillment of social goals.”53 Making the stranger into the main figure of modernity, Salomon also brought it into the post-Holocaust conversation about the role of Jews in the international political order. The concept of the stranger became laden with the assumptions of nationalist ideology that maintained a clear separation between the native and foreigner, whether to avoid conflict or to preserve national distinctiveness.
The American sociology of marginality and alienation influenced by Simmel’s concept of the “stranger” shifted in instructive ways from the original sense of the term.54 Robert Park, who uses the concept in his own work to describe immigrants, focuses on their assimilation more than Simmel himself ever did.55 Moreover, Simmel stressed that the stranger is “by nature no ‘owner of soil’—soil not only in the physical, but also in the figurative sense of a life-substance which is fixed.”56 The stranger is a category that includes several characters—the poor, the anarchist, or just the anonymous person in an urban crowd—as all can exist inside a group without being fully recognized by the other members. Simmel’s strangers shared more than a condition of marginality: he called them “sundry ‘inner enemies,’” thus emphasizing their opposition to the group, whether an actualized or a potential one, real or only imagined by the members of the group.57 The stranger would not only be a noncitizen in many countries that restrict property to citizens but also a non-national insofar as the nation is the main provider of a stable “life-substance,” in Simmel’s terms. This makes the stranger bound to suffer restrictions in his or her activity. For Simmel, such a restriction is illustrated by taxation laws imposed on Jews. Arendt, Marcuse, Solzhenitsyn, and Said were “taxed” differently, in their right to criticize America. They were allowed the freedom of speech afforded to any American, but the systematic and intense rejection of their views invoking their foreign origins suggests that this freedom was, for them, limited. Moreover, those who contested their right, or prerequisite knowledge, to criticize saw them as having no stake in the welfare of American society. They were not, after all, “owners of soil,” even in the most literal of senses. Both Arendt and Said rented a small apartment their whole life, Marcuse moved across the country, and Solzhenitsyn built a Russian estate in the heart of Vermont.
It is hardly a coincidence that Simmel’s understanding of the stranger reemerged in the work of an exiled intellectual from Austria, Alfred Schutz, in the very article that debuted his entry to American sociology in a 1944 issue of The American Journal of Sociology. While still dealing with abstractions and using Simmel’s terminology, Schutz narrowed the sphere of application for “the stranger” to a permanent immigrant rather than a traveler. The shift from the sojourner to the permanent immigrant led Schutz to a recasting of the concept of the stranger in less optimistic terms than Simmel. The change is captured by the different take on the synthesis of distance and closeness that fascinated Simmel. For Schutz, this is not even a synthesis anymore but “hesitation” leading inevitably to “uncertainty, and . . . distrust.”58 Foreign intellectuals like Schutz felt caught in the gap between their cultural universe and that of America. The figure of the refugee intellectual lurking in the backdrop of Schutz’s model is important because it explains the double bind of the foreigner in the new world, one who is not a “sundry inner enemy” by choice but by political necessity. This makes Schutz’s stranger, like so many of the immigrants in his cohort and like himself, into someone pining for “an ‘ex-world’” while facing the daunting task of a “breach of cultural and psychological difference” in order to make a new home.59
In a letter that echoes Salomon’s critique of Simmel, philosopher Aron Gurwitch critiqued Schutz’s concept of the stranger in part because it had over-stressed, in his view, the inadaptability of the newcomer.60 One can read between the lines Gurwitch’s irritation that Schutz did not seem to acknowledge the successful assimilation of prestigious immigrants (which both men were). The emphasis on the inadaptability of the stranger, however, had little to do with the question of assimilation as mere ability to function in a new society. It was more a way of stipulating a cognitive imperative. The stranger can understand the new world upon studying its “cultural pattern of group life” that hold together “all the peculiar valuations, institutions, and systems of orientation and guidance (such as the folkways, mores, laws, habits, customs, etiquette, fashions) which . . . characterize—if not constitute—any social group at a given moment in its history.”61
Those inside the group know and follow these values tacitly. Theirs is a “knowledge of acquaintance”—a term borrowed by Schutz from William James—and thus merely “a halo knowledge about what seems to be sufficient.” The members of a group navigate social life based on familiar procedures that they take for granted, forming what Schutz calls “thinking as usual.” Strangers, by contrast, have a fresh perspective on the group in which they seek membership precisely because they have no access to its “thinking as usual.” What the members of the group take for granted, strangers need to ponder and decipher before they can understand. What insiders know tacitly, strangers have to learn, and to learn, they must also analyze and interpret. The group members have “trustworthy recipes for interpreting the social world and for handling things and men in order to obtain the best results in every situation with a minimum of effort by avoiding undesirable consequences.” Lacking such recipes, the stranger “becomes essentially the man who has to place in question nearly everything that seems to be unquestionable to the members of the approached group.”62
By positing such a sharp contrast between the stranger and the group, Schutz reified the cohesion of a group around insiders’ cultural knowledge. It is a strategic reification meant to suggest that the insiders recognize their own insider status by interacting with outsiders. Thus, what makes the beliefs, behaviors, and values of a group familiar to its members is defined by their very lack of familiarity to nonmembers. Put differently: “a stranger, in fact, serves to demarcate, by his or her very strangeness, the boundaries of the familiar and (in that sense) of the real.”63 From the boundaries of the real, “the stranger discerns, frequently with a grievous clear-sightedness, the rising of a crisis which may menace the whole foundation of the ‘relatively natural conception of the world,’ while all those symptoms pass unnoticed by the members of the in-group, who rely on the continuance of their customary way of life.”64
By depicting the stranger as an oracle, Schutz stressed the intellectual superiority of the stranger as one who overcomes the initial ignorance or inexperience of the newcomer and ends with a wisdom that can foresee the future. It seems an apt depiction if we consider that Arendt correctly saw that the desegregation of schools would not be a quick remedy for racist discrimination. Marcuse anticipated not only the collapse of the American Left but also the perpetuation of politically and economically disastrous wars involving the United States in faraway regions. Solzhenitsyn insisted that the post–Cold War political world would remain “split.” Finally, Said thought that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict would continue indefinitely, a verdict that still stands a decade after his death. The clarity of their vision is the result of their ability to de-familiarize, to scrutinize “with care and precision” where the native merely pursues “thinking as usual.”
Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky, the famous theorist of estrangement (ostrenenie), reflected on the effects of what Schutz called decades later “thinking as usual”: taking things for granted, assuming that the way things are is the way they should be, in other words, living life on automatic pilot. “Automatization eats away at things, at clothes, at furniture, at our wives, and at our fear of war,” complained Shklovsky from his German exile, writing to another exiled friend, Roman Jakobson, in America.65 Habits dull our impressions and make “life fade into nothingness.”66 To revive our perceptions, we have to escape routine and habit by creating images that “do not draw our understanding closer to that which (the image stands for), but rather . . . allow us to perceive the object in a special way, in short, . . . lead us to a ‘vision’ of this object rather than mere recognition.”67 Estrangement offers renewal by allowing us to “question how mythical narratives are made, to lay bare the devices and to offer a new architecture and geometry of understanding.”68
For Shklovsky, estrangement was primarily an aesthetic technique associated with formalism, but it also had strong political implications. It was not just art he wanted to renew but also society. One of Shklovsky’s famous examples of estrangement comes from a story by Tolstoy in which the narrator is a horse who can understand human language. The horse observes the institution of property by puzzling over the use of expressions like “my house” or “my wife.” Stripped of their habitual meaning, these phrases reveal the arbitrariness of social life with its practices and institutions. Like Tolstoy’s horse, the stranger persona begins the reflection with a puzzlement caused by not knowing or understanding certain practices and conventions. Unencumbered by “thinking as usual,” the stranger sees that they are not only arbitrary but also noxious. Estrangement becomes a way of revealing a hidden layer of the world, which we no longer notice. By exposing the contrast between alternative meanings of the same act or event—what those caught in routine assume it means and what those unfamiliar with the habituated meaning interpret—estrangement acts as a delegitimizing device, operating at epistemic and political levels.
In Shklovsky’s conception of estrangement, foreignness meets strangeness, as the writer himself reached this understanding while living in exile in Berlin. Banished from Moscow for his involvement with the Socialist Revolutionaries, Shklovsky spent his Berlin years in the company of other prominent Russian artists and writers. From Russian Berlin, he pined for Moscow and observed German life with melancholy, when not with contempt. It is hard to pin down where his criticism of Germany stops being the result of careful reflection and becomes merely an expression of homesickness for Russia. Indeed, the two might be connected, as revealed in Shklovsky’s discovery that the pronoun “we” functions differently in German and, respectively, in Russian: in one, it refers to the speaker and other people while in the other to the speaker and the hearer. This is not a matter of translation but of pragmatic meaning. The German “we” strikes Shklovsky as detached from the interlocutor and thus deceptive by contrast to the Russian “we” signifying solidarity.69 At the same time, such linguistic speculation comes with an air of irony that defines most of Shklovsky’s exile writing. Estrangement is a pose designed to exhibit, as much as to hide, nostalgia for the homeland.
The technique of estrangement was connected, from its initial design by Shklovsky, to striking a pose in the context of a theatrical performance (later developed by Bertolt Brecht as Verfremdung specifically for the performing arts). Taking on a persona defined by cultivated eccentricity becomes “an exercise of thinking the world as a question.” The boldness of this persona has some natural affinity with the American sensibility, especially with the oratorical ideal of a New World Adam, a “self-reliant, unconditionally free and innocent individual.”70 But the American ideal orator has always also been “a sort of representative figure—representative in the sense of being one with, one of the democratic audience.”71 Such a persona requires a citizen’s ethos and demands that it be an authentic one. Through their stranger persona, Arendt, Marcuse, Solzhenitsyn, and Said challenged this assumption of citizenship in the sense of belonging to the nation as to a natural order from the beginning (of one’s life). Their rhetorical (not just political) achievement was to create a vantage point that forced a leveling of the ground for reevaluating arguments and premises that were framed within an ethics of citizenship. American audiences were offered a critique of the U.S. détente policy toward the Soviet Union from the perspective of a Gulag survivor and arguments for a binational Israeli-Palestinian state from the vantage point of a Palestinian-born scholar of the Western tradition. Arendt presented a view of segregation and racism from the perspective of a Jewish pariah refusing to be a parvenue; Marcuse called for a revolution in America’s political and economic system, targeting capitalism as a former German socialist and as a citizen of the world. These personae were not only associated with a different nationality but also with different discursive norms.
The stranger persona of Arendt, Marcuse, Solzhenitsyn, and Said has its origin in estrangement conceived as “depaysement” in a broad sense, not merely being uprooted from one’s homeland, but also not sharing the same discursive resources available to one’s new community.72 In this sense, estrangement creates new perspectives by virtue of employing a different language. This language is poetic not in the aesthetic sense, but in its opposition to the everyday linguistic habits of a community. This language was, as Shklovsky’s friend, Jakobson, would have put it, “not a supplementation of discourse with rhetorical adornment but a total reevaluation of the discourse and of its components whatsoever.”73
In a 1967 interview, at the height of his literary fame in America, Vladimir Nabokov confessed that he considered “the absence of a natural vocabulary” in English to be his greatest stylistic flaw. “My English,” he reflected, “is . . . a stiffish, artificial thing, which may be all right for describing a sunset or an insect, but which cannot conceal poverty of syntax and paucity of domestic diction when I need the shortest road between warehouse and shop. An old Rolls-Royce is not always preferable to a plain jeep.”74 It is hard to imagine a better metaphor for the stranger persona than this image of a foreign luxury car. While ironically performing the very inability he admitted having—efficiency and simplicity—Nabokov pinned down the chief characteristic of the style associated with the stranger persona: it is artful and especially apt for nonmundane matters. His choice of metaphor field is significant: the Rolls-Royce suggests futile luxury against the practicality of a domestic vehicle. This was sagely put for the political visions of the four intellectuals I study in this book were also frequently dismissed as impractical and their vision of American politics utopian.
The stranger persona is indeed utopian for it requires a redefinition of the terms foreign and native as forming a positive relation, as Simmel envisioned it, rather than a dichotomy. It is a difficult task, and one that brought Simmel charges of political utopianism, if not defeatism.75 Nevertheless, his notion of the stranger bespeaks a commitment to a social and political order in which the foreigner gains acceptance, not through assimilation but in a kind of embrace though which the stranger takes hold of, while also trying to adopt, the world of the natives. This is the fundamental stance that I trace in the next four chapters.