The 1996 Democratic Convention opened with a performance of "Seasons of Love" from the Broadway musical Rent (Larson 1996), based on La Bohème and set, as one of its lyrics declares, at the end of the millenium. Isolated from the context of the script, the song delivers expected Broadway musical optimism: "Measure, measure your life in love." But this mid-1990s Bohème about artists, writers, and composers in poverty is shadowed not by turberculosis, but by a fatal disease that sunshine, good nutrition, and antibiotics cannot touch. Many of Rent's East Village characters, which include a latino drag queen, a white ex-junkie, a black lesbian lawyer, a performance artist, a latina prostitute, a homeless man, are dying of AIDS in illegal lofts in the East Village. They create songs, film, and performance art while bonding over AZT cocktails. In its context, the gospel-like "Seasons of Love" is a kind of dirge, despite its celebration of love. It begins by counting the minutes in a year--"Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes," poignantly suitable in a play that dwells on the uncertainty of life that may not extend beyond your twenties. The Democratic Party hoped to buy an image of happy diversity with Rent's rainbow cast and the seemingly upbeat lyrics of "Seasons of Love," but it could not shake loose from the play's disquieting context. It seems that Broadway plays can no longer be depended upon to deliver an uncomplicated and definite morality. Unlike Bohème, in which death seems clearly linked to a socially remediable poverty, AIDS gives Rent a more muddled morality, in which blame cannot be fixed. It wraps the play in an impenetrable uncertainty that means to express the times and that invades even meticulously bland media events like a political convention.

     Our understanding of the world in this century has been mediated by moral uncertainty. It is an insistent, though largely unacknowledged, understanding that we resist but keeps resurfacing. In this book we have pointed to a series of historical events such as the Holocaust, Vietnam, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and JFK, and Watergate that in their repeated representations reiterate and strengthen the doubt attached to universal ideas of good and evil. It is largely an ethic of feeling that tentatively cobbles together the fragments from secular and religious received ideas, professionalism and cost-benefit analyses out of which everyone from evangelists to atheists makes moral judgments that consequently have an ephemeral and unstable life.

     Morality is not an isolated uncertainty. Uncertainties invade the categories we rely on to know our world. Uncertainty has also become more strongly attached to realms we rely on to be dependable, such as biology, medicine, and technology, making it difficult to believe that gaps in knowledge are temporary and correctable by science. The vocabulary of probability, relativity, the Uncertainty Principle, black holes, and chaos filters out from contemporary physics and unsettles popular notions of a stable and knowable world, of physical reality itself. Like many physicists, David Lindley in Where Does the Weirdness Go?: Why Quantum Mechanics Is Strange, But Not As Strange as You Think has opted to look at this indeterminacy with a utilitarian eye: ". . . in quantum mechanics nature is, at the most fundamental level, genuinely unknowable, but despite that, the world at large, the world of which quantum mechanics is the foundation, can be known and understood" (1996:226).ⁱ  He writes, "Science still works," despite quantum mechanics (223). But for many, such utilitarianism is an inadequate counter to a sense of fundamental unpredictability, which informs their sense of the world at large.

     Basic questions shadow other categories of knowledge, such as what is history, literature, identity, nation, justice, family; what determines gender; what is my body? Whether these questions get sophisticated analyses in the academy or are simplified in political discourses, they are left unsettled when we act. Also, the connections between moral certainty and sexism, racism, homophobia and totalitarianism have made such certainty less and less acceptable. Moral uncertainty is then the condition of life in the US. Since the immediate future does not seem to include a transformation that would stem moral uncertainty, what we can do is face up to this condition. We can explore its possibilities in ways that are more conscious and deliberate, less accidental than those in many of the instances we have presented.

The Uses of Uncertainty

     Shocks to moral certainty and the welling up of moral anxiety and doubt also move us from old assumptions. Although such shocks give rise to a feeling of strangeness about other people and to the conditions in which we live, they may also nudge us into recognizing a companion strangeness in ourselves. Such strangeness can be productive. It may give us the distance from the familiar required to make overtures to the unfamiliar, to moral uncertainty. Such explorations of the unfamiliar, though, are not only mandated by political circumstances. Much more often, they are commanded by local and personal conditions--a son with AIDS or a daughter who wants you to carry her child. These situations may pull you out of the quotidian and put you into an alien moral zone where you must negotiate moral decisions with few precedents, the results of which may not be measurable against traditional or consensus standards of right and wrong.

     In this uncertain moral zone, contradictions and complications proliferate. At the same time that the Tawana Brawley case gave permission to distrust blacks and women again, on another level, it also complicated categorical moral assumptions made on the basis of race and gender. Although Brawley may not have told the truth about being raped and sodomized, Sharpton worked the racism in the culture as surely as Susan Smith did when she accused a black man of murdering her two sons. Even if Brawley was not the victim of a brutal hate crime, her case raised public understanding of racism's power to victimize. Yet her story also refocused the public gaze on the particular details of a case and made generalizing from one case to another more difficult and more suspect. As the case developed, it threw out lessons about the unpredictable and multifarious relationships between race, gender, family, law enforcement, opportunism, and the white establishment. In the ensuing ambivalence, "Tawana Brawley" ceased to evoke received ideas about race and gender and became about paying attention to the complex factors involved. Here, the moral strangeness and unfamiliarity that sloughed off comfortable assumptions may have yielded a heightened sensitivity to the multiple ethical views one can hold about a case and a greater attentiveness to its particularity--a yield that is transferable to other situations of moral ambiguity.

     Even discourses in complete disarray, in which moral uncertainties can only expand, offer instructive encounters with the ethically unfamiliar. Despite the legal definition spelled out in a 1973 Supreme Court case, the meaning of obscenity became a topic of public controversy in debates on Congressional censorship of the NEA in 1989 (Vance 1990:221).ⁱⁱ Deciding on the definition of obscenity is no small matter since "obscenity" marks moral borders for speech and action. Attempts at definition demonstrated first, emotivism's power to pulverize such issues and secondly, the law's inability to resolve uncertainty, particularly in a pluralistic democracy. Conservative positions varied: Patrick Buchanan saw S & M as evidence of an "explosion of anti-American, anti-Christian, and nihilist 'art';" William F. Buckley reiterated the right of art galleries to "continue to express . . . childish fascination for blackmass profanity or kinky sex," but wanted to protect a "taxpaying Christian heterosexual from finding he is engaged in subsidizing blasphemous acts of homoeroticism;" and Hilton Kramer vaguely called for "public standards of decency." President Bush was characteristically telegraphic: "Barbara and I are bothered about the raunchy stuff...urine...fist up rectum." Beat writer William Burroughs dismissed the issue as a matter of "semantics:" After all, he said, we exalt as great art Greek vases showing sado-masochistic scenes and naked boys and girls chasing each other. Novelist David Leavitt took this argument to an anarchic conclusion: "I don't think anything is obscene," he declared. The artist John Baldessari adopted a purely personal emotional standard, calling the obscene what "offends me," while another artist, Benny Andrews, called porn "whatever is in a person's mind." Privatism also led to some logically questionable distinctions. Liberal Congressman Barney Frank, offended by Serrano's urine but not Mapplethorpe's leather masks and black penises, claimed that "religion is sacred, but sexuality is not."ⁱⁱⁱ

     The volume of this moral cacophony, and the uncertainty it exposed, guaranteed that these opinions were circulated and opportunities for an exchange of meanings were created. The art in question was widely described, reproduced, and viewed. As the record crowds at Cincinnati's Contemporary Art Center's exhibit of Robert Mapplethorpe's The Perfect Moment demonstrated and as t.v. interviews confirmed, people who would not ordinarily come out for such art did (Brookman 1992: 353). The photographs' unfamiliarity and abjectness were now crowded into many people's familiar world. If it did not modify that world, it did make such art less foreign. Where it found resonance with exiled regions of the self, it may have affected the border one drew around morality.

     Confrontational engagements over obscenity led to a congressional amendment introduced by Jesse Helms. This 1989 amendment barred the NEA from supporting "obscene" art that involved sadomasochism, homoeroticism, child sex or any sex, and the denigration of particular religious beliefs. After it was contested by art advocates, the amendment was declawed so that it matched the provisions of the existing obscenity standard of 1973 (Brookman: 347). But in the rhetorical battle that preceded this negotiated moral truce, the application of First Amendment rights was scrutinized, the line between art and pornography inspected and variously reinvented, and the place of art in culture and its relationship to action seriously reviewed. Both parties claimed moral victory: The art community because it had not lost anything while the Helms' contingent could claim that an amendment had passed (Vance: 220). The value of this result, however, is not the stalemate itself and not even the rethinking of received ideas it stimulated.^iv  The point is that many people were forced to grapple with a moral vocabulary that they had not imagined existed but now was becoming part of theirs.^v

     Faced with an unfamiliar moral lexicon, you may begin to acquire that lexicon and perhaps move toward moral negotiation. For instance, the men of color in Paris Is Burning use a language of family that takes in both an ethics of care and of competition. Thus this language opens up the possibility of divisions of interest in a family traditionally conceptualized as a unity. Since socially marked aspects of the body have overtones of deviance and wrongness, the strangeness attached to a black Santa Claus provoked the New York Daily News headline "Ethnic Santa." Although the headline conveyed the uneasiness of such an image, it also delivered a sense of the moral correctness of equal-opportunity Saint Nicks. Ethnic Santa may be a visual oddity, but he is on the front page of a daily tabloid. Framed half as freak and half as news item, he is here to stay. As a secularized, unifying cultural icon, he is invested with explicit commonality and through his emblematic though superficial difference, he is, the paper suggests, black like "you," and white like "me"--a Santa for all of us.  New-style advertising for disability charities shows the disabled body unflinchingly, exhibiting its abnormality, long associated with evil but also establishing it as a presence, usually ignored in representations of the body, and through this presence, endorsing the contemporary disability politics which affirms an identity rooted in physical difference. Associating their party with such a politics, the Democrats brought two speakers in wheelchairs to address their 1996 Convention: James Brady, former President Reagan's press secretary, wounded during an attempt on Reagan's life, and Christopher Reeve, Superman of the movies, paralyzed in a horse-riding accident. Brady, in a gesture evoking Evangelical healing said "I'm cured by the Democratic Party," and arose from his wheelchair and walked to the podium. When Christopher Reeve spoke, the podium was slowly lowered to reveal his immobile body in a high-tech wheelchair. Unlike the ethnic Santa, whose blackness was normalized by the icon he represented, Reeve had another sort of normalizing vehicle: access to top-of-the-line medical care and technology. Speaking with obvious difficulty and the help of a breathing device, he associated his disabled body with his Superman movie role. By quipping about Clinton's campaign train, "I think I can beat it. I'll even give you a head start," he translated his disability into a new claim for Superman status and the public eye. He spoke about F.D.R., implying a similarity. But the appearance suggested, he was better than Roosevelt, who was rarely shown in his wheelchair, and better than the celluloid Superman whose strength is derived from another planet, Reeve sat deliberately, defiantly exposed, stiff, barely able to puff out his words, disabled but still heroic, still humble and morally superior to the citizens of Metropolis, Superman's city. Indeed, for politicians, the disabled seem to represent the "difference" of choice, easier than black or gay to defend against discrimination. In response to a question about gay and lesbian discrimination at the second presidential debate in 1996, Dole, who was severely injured during World War II and lost use of his right arm, said, "I'm against discrimination. We suffered discrimination in the disability community. I'm one myself" (ABC, 16 October).

     Homosexual discourse also became morally complex, and uncertainties spilled out, after "outing," the campaign to reveal the sexuality of closetted public figures who either denied their homosexuality or campaigned against it. Part of the opposition to outing focused on its equation of gay identity with particular acts of the body. What homosexuality means is uncertain (Butler 1991:15).^vi  Does it reduce to one act? Many acts? Do you have to acknowledge you are a homosexual to be one? Can you, conversely, call yourself gay if you have not had gay sex?^vii  Can you, like Brett Anderson of the British rock group Suede, call yourself "a bisexual man who has never had a homosexual experience?" (New York Times: 17 May 1992).
 Some critics, espousing a kind of utilitarian homosexuality, suggested outing should concentrate on people who make a difference on policy. Who cares what an actor, whose views on homosexual marriage have minimal political clout, does in bed? Outers were also challenged: Where did they get the right to speak for all lesbians and gay men and what would they do if they got a person's sexuality wrong? Is a reluctant homosexual, dragged out of the closet really a valuable role model--really "gay" or "lesbian" at all? The shattering of a totalized homosexuality produces not only disconcerting ambiguities but also a more flexible moral lexicon. People on different sides can find themselves saying similar things. A common understanding of "individuality" and "diversity," for instance, may have facilitated "don't ask, don't tell" privatism about homosexuality in the military. These shared terms committed people on both sides of the issues to a consideration of social variability. Sexuality implies a certain freedom within the "personal" realm.

     In the Baby M case, the babel of class, gender, biological, legal, and psychological vocabularies heard through a series of court appeals were finally resolved in an ethical multilingualism that comprehended the fact that one did not have to choose between kinds of parents--biological, surrogate, or adoptive--that a democratic society embracing diverse familial organizations, had room for one more variation. The conclusion of the Baby M case, which legitimized all the parents, was a result of a long and complicated process. It entailed negotiation between moral positions and demonstrated that moral multilingualism, despite the disorderly process of translating across ethical vocabularies, is more compatible with the ambiguities in our world than any of the single ethical vocabularies applied to the case.

     Moral negotiation is often not deliberate, but an accidental result of a process in which elements of the opposition are imported. The stalemates over abortion legislation are symptomatic of the cross fertilization of positions on the right and the left of this issue that have allowed in the opposition's thinking and vocabulary. The process of listening to and answering the opposition's case have left few political or religious stands on abortion uncontaminated by the other's vocabulary despite the very real differences between them. Pro-choice advocates may agree with pro-lifers who believe that life begins at conception, and may even endorse some of the opposition's thinking on restricting federal funding for abortion. Some in each camp base their arguments in a feminine ethics of care. Although the emphasis in defining the care ethic may differ, their differences occasionally seem subdued by a mutual concern with the welfare of women and children. We are suggesting increasing the consciousness of overlap in the negotiation of moral issues. Perhaps there can be no agreement across discourses of pro-choice and pro-life on abortion itself, but it may be possible to find some common ground on issues of pre-natal care, child support, and day care facilities. Here an "ethics of care" can support a pragmatic moral commonality between citizens. Respect for principles of moral judgment that are strange to us can thus help us shape local accords and actions that most people involved agree are moral.

     Commonality among seemingly distinct moral vocabularies is not always a sign that an exchange, much less a negotation, of meanings has taken place. Sometimes the convergence conceals widely different meanings held together by shared assumptions about morality. Noting commonality where it does not seem to belong may produce another kind of estranging awareness, instructive, but not necessarily leading to moral negotiation or agreement. For many the Million Man March declared a new black male solidarity that engaged optimistically with ethical possibility, with the ethical beyond. Its spiritual antecedent seemed to be Martin Luther King's civil rights march on Washington. But Patricia J. Williams recasts the March. Its rhetoric, she argues, is situated somewhere between the Promise Keepers and the Contract with America. The ideologies of these three resemble one another in their ethnic slurs, misogyny, and homophobia. In her view, Farrakhan's and Pat Buchanan's programs of moral purity and patriarchy are not dissimilar. Also Farrakhan's theme of atonement for the past sins of black men repeats the stereotype of criminality and deviance attached to them and may do the right's bidding in having black men concentrate on their guilt rather than on positive programs (1995: 493-4). Although you may not completely buy Williams' association of the Million Man March with the radical right, you may attach some moral significance to the confluence of these vocabularies. If your rhetoric coincides with that of your would-be oppressors, it does not necessarily mean, as with the pro-choice and pro-life confrontations, that an incipient sense of common citizenship has developed. It could mean that your rhetoric is simply oppressive in the same way as theirs is.
 
"The Multitude of Dreams is Irreducible"

     In a democracy, an ethics compatible with moral uncertainty and strangeness requires a new understanding of citizenship, an understanding that lets us make moral agreements across differences. As we have said, this citizenship is not the same as "community." Communitarianism calls on individuals to act in accordance with an agreed upon common good. In this framework, not only individual rights, but also the many and conflicting positions an individual subject may hold in the social world are subordinated to a notion of the "citizen." This citizen is likely to be white, male, and Christian and to define the common good within that particular "universality."

     Even when the common good is defined permissively, communitarianism cannot fully accommodate ethical pluralism. The Free City of Christiania, an experimental Danish alternative community located in Copenhagen, which dates from 1971, was constituted to protect radical individuality and is widely thought to make few sacrifices to notions of citizenship. A self-selected community of a little over 1,000 people, it practices governance by consensus. However, because it is a small, protected enclave within a nation, it can throw out people not in tune with what it sees as the common good--as it did, for instance, in the late seventies when it not only threw out heroin dealers but also addicts who refused treatment. Asterix, a resident since 1971, confesses: "We are very, very conservative really. It's very ironic . . ." (Bellos, 1996: 2). Its existence is thus dependent upon a relatively homogeneous population of the morally like-minded, despite its ideology of non-conformity. Described as a "social dustbin" by its own people, the citizens of Christiania may be different from the citizens in the rest of Denmark; they may be viewed by other Danes as assaulting law and order; a third of their population may receive public assistance; and they may attract Copenhagen's runaways, mentally ill, and other refugees from the middle class; but they nevertheless have a clear sense of who is allowed in and who has to stay out (Bellos 1996: 3). A Guardian reporter describes Christiania as exerting "more control than any other local council in the Western world--they must 'approve' who lives there, they work out who can do what to their homes" (Bellos 1996: 2). A pluralist democracy does not have such options. Indeed in Danish democracy, pluralism is what makes room for Christiania (Kinzer 1996: A4). A society espousing communitarianism, no matter of what stripe, has committed itself to homogeneity. It has not acknowledged as is necessary in a democracy that the "multitude of dreams is irreducible" (Mouffe, 1992, "Preface":5).

     Given this multitude, given the turn to emotivist ethical judgment and the uncertainties such judgment engenders, and given the general moral uncertainty and the multiple contesting forces of a democracy, we need a radical concept of citizenship. But the citizenship we have in mind is only one of the ways in which we are bound to others. It does not jeopardize other identities a person may have, nor does it reconcile them. This citizenship does not compromise other ties we may have, but it does allow us to mediate between them and to negotiate moral judgments that take them into account.^ix  Because such negotiations usually involve a process over time, they do not often make the news, which is more attentive to single, dramatic events. In popular representations citizen morality is more often heroic than mediated, dependent on a character taking personal risks in a well-defined, single moral act rather than negotiating a path through a contested field. Matty Grover, the adolescent orphan-photographer of Synonym for Love, for instance, becomes the citizen-hero when she sends a photograph of a "black man with a white man's dog tearing at his arm," documenting a racial incident in her small Virginia town, to the Washington Post. This act costs her her job and her already fragile standing in the white community (Moore: 111). Similarly, the Nazi Schindler who saved Jews from death camps becomes the focus of a powerful 1990s Holocaust representation in Schindler's List.

     Even acts that look like moral mediation are wrapped in heroism in the movies, where it is easier to be an exemplary citizen than in the world. In order to unite factions of the black community against the destruction of low-income housing, Wynn, the black councilman in City of Hope must mediate a variety of his associations: the conservative council he serves on, a corrupt white city government, a prejudiced police hierarchy, black militants from the Nation of Islam, and a more moderate black constituency. He must also convince a white professor to drop assault charges against a black boy who attempts to escape these charges by accusing the professor of making a homosexual overture to him. A Hollywoodized Reverend Al Sharpton, Wynn, with conventional hair and white speech inflections, is only celluloid: He has a clear moral victory. When the professor drops the charge, the black community unites behind Wynn. What's more, the kid apologizes to the professor. Sharpton's actions with Tawana Brawley, on the other hand, led to muddier moral effects. Meditating on the distance between Wynn and Sharpton, we see the kind of complexities usually left out of fictional representations, where they would sidetrack or derail the plot or artistic necessity, but that must be negotiated in the world.

     This real-world complexity makes for a messier, more contested citizenship where moral agreements across differences are prone to be vexed, transitory, and small. The incident reported by an African-American gang member about the L.A. riots exemplifies such agreement. Here gang members gave up the Mexican-American youth from outside the neighborhood who burned down a popular, neighborhood Japanese-owned grocery store to the police. This one citizenly act does not presage repetition, but it does provide a model of what can be practiced across differences as citizenship. Small instances of citizen morality are of course common, some even inspired by legislation. A California crime bill called "The Street Terrorism Enforcement and Prevention Act" inspired cooperation in Redondo Beach.^x  Police and neighborhood residents got a restraining order against gang members in Perry Park, making the park safe for local children to play in.^xi Elected officials can also facilitate agreement across differences. When Hispanic small grocery store owners in East Harlem united against the mainly black development consortium backing a 53,000 foot Pathmark supermarket in their neighborhood that they feared would put them out of business, Mayor Giuliani forged an agreement that allowed the project to go ahead. In a move to make cheaper groceries available in the neighborhood, the Mayor kept a 49% share in the enterprise for the city, a share that he planned to turn over to an Hispanic East Harlem group, thus counteracting the negative effect of the new Pathmark on the local Hispanic community (New York Times: 3 August 1995).

     However, economic plans such as this one can be undermined or found unsound, just as Perry Park can become a hostile place for children again, while community, press, and mayoral attention turns elsewhere. But this possibility does not lessen the moral authority of the citizenship that was practiced. As Michael Walzer argues, "In democratic politics, all destinations are temporary" (1983:310). Fluidity and pluralism in U.S. democracy resist moral permanence and absolutism. Sometimes such transience means that good moral solutions erode, but it also means that what is no longer a good decision may be qualified or rescinded. The moral debates between citizens can always be reopened, and the formerly persuaded may entertain new doubts.^xii  This citizenship may be regarded as a new kind of universalism, a universalism that does not lay claim to neutrality as the old one did. It is a universalism that is contingent and mediating and responds to changing historical contexts, as well as to personal and community contexts (Schor, 1995: 32-33). It also makes claims for the stranger.

      Such citizenship proposes a "complex equality," what we have been calling equivalence, a notion that embraces difference (Walzer: 308). In contrast, traditional political theory takes citizenship to mean excluding the foreign or alien and largely limiting it to the native-born members of a nation focused on secure borders (Jones, 1994:263).^xiii  The radical citizenship we have been describing, on the other hand, makes use of moral ambiguities, tries to find common ground with the stranger and the foreign, accepts citzens' hybrid, mestiza state and does not recoil from, but negotiates the borderlands.^xiv  Such citizenship can be unconscious as exemplified in some lite phenomena which dwells in the hybrid, in multiple moral allegiances briefly held together. The talk show or the popular magazine feature story offer daily, temporary moral coalitions of say, New Ageism, psychology, medicine, and utilitarianism: A Psychology Today article, for instance, entitled "Kicking the Habit: It's No Longer All-or-Nothing" tells you to use a combination of "holistic" medical techniques to stem drug and alcohol addiction, including massage, hatha yoga, good nutrition, acupuncture, hypnosis, counseling, family and community support--depending on what works for you (Veronsky, 1996: 33-43+). Although such a melange may seem incongruous, incompatible, and emotivist, it sometimes manages a specific moral uncertainty pragmatically, with an attitude of respect to difference, and without recourse to absolutism. Addiction, in the article, is both a disease and a personal problem, something not so far beyond normal personality variance, so that the addict's position as alien is reduced. The article thus makes a citizenly overture to extend democracy without reducing addiction to a mere personal quirk.

     Sometimes opportunities for citizenship are simply made more likely by circumstances. The identical towers of Lefrak City, a cluster of twenty 18-story apartment buildings on 42 acres in Queens, New York, holds a vastly diverse population. Over half is foreign-born, and over 3,000 of the 60,430 residents documented by the 1990 U.S.Census speak languages other than the 19 different languages spoken by 10 or more people there--languages as various as Tagalog and South Slavic (http://mickey.queen.../lk37/demograp.html). At John Bawne High School, which Lefrak students attend, one-third of the students attend English as a second language classes. There are sufficient numbers of students qualified and interested so that the high school offers a bilingual program in Mandarin and Spanish. Last year 55 seniors out of 600 graduating took reading and writing proficiency exams in languages other than English, such as Urdu, Farsi, Hindi, and Haitian Creole. In such an environment, practicing a citizenship of equivalence seems the pragmatic way to co-exist. The Vice-Principal, in fact, said that there is such diversity, no group dominates. Even among the large Spanish-speaking population, there is little solidarity between people coming from many different countries. In Lefrak City, the Muslim-African and Jewish-Central Asian immigrant groups have separate places of worship, but they traverse the same public spaces and have similar moral investments in getting ahead in the U.S., fostering a safe community, and educating their children. Eighty-five per cent of the John Bawne graduating class goes to college.^xv  Aside from undependable neighborliness, formal programs and events call for equivalence between the diverse groups: Their children meet not only in the public schools, but also on Lefrak's soccer field, basketball and tennis courts, as well as in after-school programs, while senior citizens may choose to socialize in the vegetable garden and at the occasional community barbecue (Onishi 1996: B1). Tolerance may be the prince they pay for peace, but may also be that sharing the status of foreigners makes an ethic of equivalence more likely. Of course, moral agreements about education and safety are likely to be less contentious than, say, interracial marriage. But as in the U.S. generally, in Lefrak City, a domain of in-your-face difference, the extension of citizenly equivalence may be the best way to imagine an ethical beyond, of continuous negotiation of morally ambiguous terrain.

________________________

      ⁱThe debate between physicists and intellectuals who use ideas gleaned from physics to substantiate their attack on certainty and objectivity was brought to a head by the physicist Alan Sokal who fooled the editors of Social Text by publishing a joke article parodying such attacks (1996). Once the hoax was revealed, a print war between these two factions ensued.  See Fish (1996), Robbins and Ross (1996), and Weinberg (1996).
        ⁱⁱIn the Miller standard, a work of art must meet all three of the following criteria: (1) "The average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to prurient interest. . . ." (2) the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specified by statute, and (3) the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value." (Vance:221)
     ⁱⁱⁱThese opinion snippets are drawn from Bolton (1992) where the warring rhetoric around NEA funding is gathered.
     ^ivMany in the art world analyzed the total effect of this fracas as negative: The head of the NEA at that time, John Frohnmayer put the amendment in the NEA contracts, where it became known as the "loyalty oath," and denied grants to performance artists whose work supporters of Helms had singled out as obscene (Vance 225).
     ^vPertinent here is Kristeva's idea that a sense of "weness," of overcoming separation and strangeness always begins with separation and strangeness (Kristeva, 1991: 82).
     ^viSee Michaels et al, The Social Organization of Sexuality (1994), which gives an account of the complexities of identifying homosexuals.
     ^viiA University of Chicago study of 3,432 Americans, aged 18-59, concluded that "there is no agreement whether homosexuality is a matter of self-identification, behavior, desire or a combination of these" (New York Times: 18 october 1994).
     ^viiiSee Mouffe's discussion on "civic republicanism" in "Democratic Citizenship and the Political Community" (1992: 226-28).
     ^ixMouffe, paraphrasing Michael Walzer in "The Civil Society Argument" writes of Walzer's notion of "'critical associationalism' in which citizenship, while being only one among our several commitments. . . enables us to mediate among the others and act across them" ("Preface":6).
     ^xCalifornia Penal Code l86.22. Information is based on a telephone conversation on 10 October 1996 with the L.A. Prosecutor's office.
     ^xiWe talked to Marion Lagatree in the Redondo Beach City Prosecutor's office, who reported that residents and police had cooperated to make this park safe for children (October, 1996).
     ^xiiAs Walzer writes, in a pluralistic democracy "No citizen can ever claim to have persuaded his fellows once and for all" (Walzer: 310).
     ^xiiiCitizenship is an idea undergoing interrogation among political theorists. It is not our intent to enter this debate, but rather to limit our discussion to the ethical implications of a certain notion of radical citizenship, which we have been developing throughout this book. Examples of such interrogation may be found in, for instance, Walzer, Mouffe, Jones, Dietz (1987).
     ^xivJones writes: "As an alternative to the exclusionary model of citizenship, I propose a model of the syntehtic or 'naturalized' citizen, ironically named the mestiza- or mulatto-, or even the cyborg-citizen (263).
     ^xvConversation with Vice-principal of John Bawne High School, Glenn Nadelbach on 8 November 1996.