Source
Walsh (2021), “The Phenomenology of Ritual Resistance: Colin Kaepernick as Confucian Sage”, LIT-209 (Dao), read in full in NOTE-164 from the accepted manuscript.
What was actually shown
An interpretive argument; no data.
- The register (§2). Critics grant Kaepernick the right and charge disrespect. On Walsh’s reading that shows “widespread implicit approval of a basic principle of Confucian statecraft”: using ritual to inscribe values on the body politic. Rights-talk is the wrong register for the dispute.
- The licence (§3). Classical Confucianism endorses remonstrance (Analects 13.15, 14.22; Mengzi 4B:3, 5B:9) and incivility aimed at harmonization (he 和) rather than mere agreement (tong 同) (Analects 13.23; Kim 2011). The reading rates this strong as textual exegesis. The concept is Kim’s, not Walsh’s.
- The extension (§§3–4). Existing scholarship treats only discursive incivility. Kaepernick’s case shows incivility “functioning at the bodily level within ritual itself” (p. 11). It also “democratizes” incivility, which the classical texts reserve for ministers, and has “mimetic force”, being readily imitated at the visual centre of the ritual.
- The mechanism (§5). Habits are normative, a “tension that oscillates around a norm”. Ritual meaning is sedimented and can carry oppressive norms. Style allows modification within mastery. Ritual action is “motivated”, between “absolute mechanism and absolute voluntarism”.
- The gesture (§§6–7). Kneeling keeps reverence, deference and humility, unlike the raised fist. It honours the American ideal as one “we necessarily will fail to live up to”.
What could have come out otherwise: the Confucian texts might have licensed only verbal remonstrance by officials. They do license remonstrance; whether they reach a bodily gesture by anyone is Walsh’s extension.
What this does not say
- That kneeling means reverence. That is an interpretation of how the gesture reads. The paper reports critics who read it as disrespect and gives no way to settle between the readings beyond Kaepernick’s stated aims (NOTE-164, limitations).
- That uptake makes a gesture sagely. §5.5 says sagely authority “just is his power to institute new body language that others take up”. Walsh also cites Analects 13.24 against popular approval as a measure. No criterion separates sagely citational force from virality. The constraints that do the work, aiming at harmonization, fidelity to what is central, reverence, are asserted of this case (§§3, 6).
- That Kaepernick is a sage in the full sense. “Sage” is deflationary: Walsh is “certainly not arguing” that Kaepernick embodies perfect morality (§1, p. 3). The gesture is sagely because it institutes a new ritual form.
- That patriotism is valuable. Walsh takes no position (§1, p. 2). The claim of compatibility with American ideals rests on MacIntyre’s account of patriotism.
- That sagehood is a collective, diachronic project. Walsh adopts Nivison’s and Hutton’s reading of Xunzi while conceding it is “not definitive” (§4), and uses the case both to apply it and to support it.
- The empirical claims. The post-9/11 ritualisation of sport and the Department of Defense spending rest on journalism and a Senate report whose year is cited two ways (2015 and 2017).
Connections
- Bunton (LIT-174) treats the same protest as speaking out and asks when a celebrity’s speech is justified. On this account the act is not speech but bodily ritual, and its force comes from that difference.
- Archer & Robb (THEORY-525) concern the audience’s response when a public figure changes a presented self. Walsh’s critics are such an audience, and on that account their refusal of uptake would be a wrong.
- The phenomenology of habit as normative, and of action “between absolute mechanism and absolute voluntarism”, bears on accounts of embodied, habitual agency elsewhere in the record. The paper does not engage them.