Читать книгу The Future of Difference - Sabine Hark - Страница 7

Preface: Other and Rule

‘When time stops, truth can be declared.’

– Joan Wallach Scott¹

The night of New Year’s Eve 2015 in Cologne, it is supposed, simply ‘speaks for itself’. ‘Cologne’ – the incident – has become an epochal signifier. All of us claim to know exactly what transpired that night. Now, when we speak of ‘Cologne’, we are invoking an event generally understood to have a clear, well-defined shape. We all know, don’t we, that women were sexually harassed en masse on the streets of a German metropolis. Furthermore, the harassment was carried out by non-German men, that much seems certain: by migrants or foreigners. Some would even confirm it was carried out specifically by ‘Nafris’, the North Rhine-Westphalia Police Department’s internal designation and radio shorthand for ‘criminals of North African descent’.²

Yet, at the same time, ‘Cologne’ is the name for an infamously ill-understood occurrence: a cipher freighted with resonances, circulating persistently through time and space, generating fresh meanings. It is a node in which, to borrow a formula from Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, the event itself merges and coalesces together with our speech about the event, becoming a discourse: a ‘differential system of positions’ made up of a mix of linguistic and non-linguistic elements.³ Ultimately, what happened on the night in question remains uncertain. But this uncertainty is precisely why ‘Cologne’, as a blank surface, has lent itself so well to projections – projections such as those encouraged by Zeitmagazin’s editorship when, in June 2016, it simply printed the loaded question: ‘What REALLY happened?’.⁴ ‘Cologne’, then, is simultaneously an empty signifier and one brimming with meaning.⁵ It can act as a disciplining power, and it even transforms prevalent discourses retroactively.

Predictably, in this moment, we are hearing proclamations on all sides of the inevitable collapse of the (supposedly naive and misguided) Willkommenskultur in Germany. Didn’t Cologne prove plainly that these individuals ‘we’ had hitherto welcomed in were neither willing nor able to respect ‘our’ values? (Our values, by the way, means equality between men and women.) Cologne is supposed to have definitively laid bare the fact that Germany’s excessive tolerance vis-à-vis men from ‘the Arab world’ (whatever that is) poses a danger and a threat to ‘our’ liberal, egalitarian, Western consensus. And particularly to ‘our’ women.

In other words, ‘Cologne’ has come to stand for the assertion that certain migrants cannot be integrated – they do not want to integrate themselves – simply because, in the end, there are insuperable differences between the cultures in question. Furthermore, Cologne establishes (or so it would appear) the need for comprehensive CCTV surveillance. It can be deemed responsible for the resurgence of populist political parties and for the erosion of civil society across Germany. Finally, Cologne seems to have secured a far greater degree of cultural receptivity to feminist concerns, although this new regard for feminism is intimately entangled with the culturalization of social inequalities, that is to say, with new forms of racism.

Paradoxically, we are seeing the mobilization of feminism and women’s rights by nationalist, nativist, xenophobic and populist parties and platforms – as well as by right-wing governments such as Hungary’s, Denmark’s or Poland’s – in justification of Islamophobic and anti-migrant policies. ‘Cologne’, in this sense, epitomizes the ambiguous inter-imbrications that exist in our present moment between racism, sexism and feminism. It symbolizes the urgent necessity of grappling uncompromisingly with these three terms, teasing out their differences and, perhaps, inherent entanglements.

In this book, we seek to do just that. We ask: How did this notion of an ‘incompatibility’ – between Islam and feminism, feminists and migrants, Germanness and sexism – come into being? What role has Cologne played here? What is the nature of the cultural fight this cipher mediates – sometimes tacitly, sometimes explicitly? And how is it that Cologne became what Jacques Lacan calls a ‘point de capiton’, a quilting point of signification in which the normal ambiguity of linguistic reference is stopped? Because that is exactly what Cologne now is: a privileged signifier; a static fixture within a xenophobic security discourse; a matter on which everyone supposedly agrees, even if elsewhere – about other matters – there can still be discussion and uncertainty.

The initial impetus to dwell with these questions came from our perception that Cologne had much to do with the rapid and radical polarization of public speech in Germany. We wanted to find out if our hunch was right and get a handle on the phenomenon, if so. At the time of writing, even those preconceptions about the event ‘Cologne’ now seem somewhat problematic – that is, they have become problematic in our eyes. But the book that follows tries to treat this difficulty as a challenge and an opportunity. It seeks to advance the (feminist) enlightenment of the present, in a time of increasing discursive nebulousness. Committed to a politics of intersectionality, informed by sociological insights, we argue against the narrowing of the window of political debate in the hope of contributing to the revival of ‘debate culture’ worthy of the name. Our goal is, in the first instance, to determine what our attitude should be vis-àvis the aforementioned phenomenon and all the questions it raises. We do not ask after the ‘objective truth’ of the night in Cologne. Our text is neither a piece of reportage nor a properly academic study. Rather, it is an explicitly speculative reflection on what ‘Cologne’ stands for in the political domain of the Federal Republic of Germany. We certainly do not pretend to have exhausted the topic, nor to have avoided any glaring gaps.

One such gap, a troubling one, is the fact that we, too, have largely ignored the experience of those who were subjected to sexualized violence on the New Year’s Eve in question. This omission comes down to our being primarily concerned with the tenor of public conversation about ‘Cologne’ and the question of the social and epochal shifts reflected therein. Once again, ‘the women’ had to be deemed irrelevant. This, of course, reproduces the social treatment of sexualized violence generally – and that it does so is not something we wish to downplay.

How are the voices of those who have survived sexual abuse – domestic, public or military sexual violence – to be made audible? This is a hugely important question. And although we do not explicitly pursue it here, we believe our text has something to contribute to the articulation of conditions of possibility for this audibleness. We firmly believe these voices deserve more of a platform, more care, and more attention generally – far more than the structure of this book allows. What follows simply pursues a different question, namely that of the violent, fundamentalizing logic of differentiation: the logic we call ‘other and rule’.

By ‘fundamentalizing’, we mean those discourses that routinely close down meaning itself through generalization and authoritarian reductionism: speech which tries to immunize itself against ambiguity and self-reflection. We are designating – to take up Lacan’s terminology again – those ‘quilting points’ in language where something has been firmly anchored as though through multi-layered tissue. In the context of Cologne, this involved setting up (implicitly, at least), a priori, the essential valences of groups of people, and the alleged ‘reality’ of their relating. By pre-establishing such commonsense knowledge, the mechanism generates useful shortcuts for reading causality into events: the actions of any given player can easily be extrapolated from the type. Basically, discursive fundamentalization is all about shoring up fixed cultural identities and their intrinsic connection to specific values – for example, the assertion that freedom, democracy, equality and enlightenment are exclusively Western values, and that the Islamic or Arab worlds, conversely, constitutively lack the ability to emerge, politically speaking, beyond their self-incurred minority.

The essentializing force characteristic of ‘fundamentalizing’ discourse becomes all intensified when it is oriented towards the active construction of difference. It is obviously at its most intense when the framework for distinguishing between things is restricted to, for example, them and us, foreigner and native, black and white. That is to say, selective specification in the description of a situation goes hand in hand with an equally selective de-specification of the complexity that is always – at least potentially – at the heart of any matter.

In the construction of these Manichaean differences, what is perhaps most striking is the heightening of polarized and polarizing attributions – what Gudrun-Axeli Knapp theorizes in terms of ‘reduction to a characteristic’. When the media reported on issues regarding the politics of sexuality, freedom of movement, gender, migration and culture, in connection with Cologne, they often did so in the terms – noted by Hedwig Dohm (on whom more later) – of a mass typologization of populations. As such, we were always hearing about ‘the’ refugees, ‘the’ women, ‘the’ Arab men, and ‘our’ culture.

The use of such terms obstructs our ability to perceive internal differences. Relationships, modes of existence and experiences that don’t fit into their typescript – because they are of a more inherently complex (which is to say, intersectional) nature – are rendered invisible, even though they are, empirically speaking, in the vast majority. But there is much else that these static, simplistic concepts of difference render invisible, namely the dynamics of differentiation as a process. Our vocabularies of difference tend to depict, as though already accomplished, the fact of one thing being different from another. They do not represent that thing coming into being. Depending on context, then, a decision to speak about gendering rather than gender, or about culturation rather than culture, can make a big difference.

This is not to say that concepts denoting difference are wrong, per se. Differentiation is neither meaningless nor dangerous in and of itself. It is, in fact, vital that we differentiate! We constantly rely on differences in order to operate on the most basic level, for without them, thinking and acting would be impossible. Differences are the product of social practices, and, as such, they form the basic structure for whole societies, which in turn makes them the enabling framework for social practices. However, there are fundamentally different kinds of differential assertion, and contrasting modes of differentiation, that need to be distinguished from one another – that is to say, differentiated.

Furthermore, the contexts in which differences are (differentially) put to use differ as well. Whether it is trivial or meaningful, merely informative or existentially freighted to articulate a single marker of difference – for example, male and female, young and old, hetero- and homosexual, native and foreign, self and other – will very much depend on the context and on the agency and powers of interpretation of the people or groups involved (whose own ‘differences’ are, as such, rendered relevant). What it means to designate somebody as gay or lesbian, for example – and make them publicly legible in this way – is entirely context-dependent. It could be vital information, an instance of discrimination, an irrelevant detail, or even a death sentence.

In order to understand how reality itself is constituted by means of markers of difference, we must grasp the mechanism by which subjects (in all their social complexity) merge into only one difference. This is to say, we should ask ourselves: What single difference is it that all the actors typically mentioned in connection with Cologne are supposed to embody? In answering this, we propose to apprehend ‘Cologne’, following Mouffe and Laclau, as a nodal point – that is, a nexus linking linguistic and non-linguistic elements, discourses, and practices in such a way as to call us into being as subjects according to a set of sexual, gendered and racializing hierarchies.⁶ What options for subjectivization, then, does Cologne call up? Which people does this ‘node’ render perceptible, visible, socially recognizable, audible – and as who, or as what? And how does that, in turn, end up shaping the potential for solidarity? What moral obligations does it establish, and towards whom?

We regard this book as a contribution to the understanding of culture and society initiated by Birgit Rommelspacher in her theorization of the matrix of domination. Her term Dominanzkultur refers to the structuring of the social as a vast network of – multitudinous, intertwined – dimensions of power, organizing our entire way of life into the binary categories of superiority and subordination and thereby determining our very actions, attitudes and feelings. One of our main emphases, in this book, is on the fact that there is no such thing as ‘Arab’, ‘patriarchal’, ‘Christian’, ‘Western’, ‘German’ or ‘liberal-democratic’ culture: that is to say, a cultural ‘status quo’ never actually exists in any homogeneous or secure sense. Culture is better regarded, instead, as the social space in which meaning arises and the process through which meaning gets generated. And, as a process of meaning production, it even includes all negotiations and contestations about signification and meaning. Culture is our making sense of the world and, thus, of ourselves. Culture, in other words, is contexts. And, once again, the contexts in question are culturally produced. They are, as we all know, ambiguous and ill-defined. They are without beginning or end, without clear boundaries, and without authenticity. Yet they cannot be silenced.

As glib as this riff on ‘culture’ may seem, we believe its substance is all-important. It is our duty to really grasp that culture is not the essential property, spirit or nature of a region, religion, ‘race’ or gender. For whenever we claim that something, say, a piece of our past, some quality or essence, is ‘our property’, we have already, in that moment – as the historian Joan Wallach Scott says – forsaken the future. Any attempt to ‘revise or reinterpret’ the identity thus suspended can then only be perceived as a threat to the very existence of ‘a national or racial or ethnic or sexual or individual self’ and not as an opening, that is to say, a possibility containing the promise that things could be different.⁷

We set forth our polyphonic thoughts against all those who think that the diversity of the world is, in and of itself, already marked by clear distinctions, clear divisions between good and evil, right and wrong, black and white, male and female, hetero- and homosexual. We seek to blast our ‘basso continuo’ of sheer scepticism – scepticism about the validity of any and all differential assertion – in targeted opposition to the unanimous refrain of all the different currents of fundamentalism that imagine themselves today as victims of some kind of censorship, aggressively corralled into a ‘political correctness’ by a fantasy feminist or hegemonic gay ‘lobby’. (Such fundamentalisms are typically religious, nationalist, white-supremacist, conservative and right-wing, but they can also be left-wing or progressive-identitarian.)

Our commitment to polyglossia – and to an attitude of consistent scepticism – thrives on the fact that we, as authors, espouse different perspectives. We have, in fact, consciously allowed these different points of view to remain visible in the text, instead of downplaying and restraining them in our composition and editing processes. They are interesting differences, differences shaped by our different institutional affiliations, personal affinities and social positions: our disparate ways of being in the world. They are in themselves very much a part of our political and personal relationship, our professional and collegial friendship, which has matured over the course of many years, and whose most important distillation is, we believe, this very experiment in ‘common thinking’ in different voices.

It is the experimental character of our collaboration that comes across most clearly in our essayistic writing. It is explorative, tentative, incomplete. It was an exercise in ‘thinking without a banister’, as Hannah Arendt put it⁸ – the results of which, we hope, are pleasurable to read. Created on paper and on screens, but also through chatting both online and across the kitchen table; in concentrated solitude; and through talking simultaneously, in parallel, with others, as well as to one another. Ours was a thought process actualized in the ‘in-between’: in the space between us two authors by the light of those differences that distinguish us (but do not separate us). It represents a merging of our thinking, our speaking, our writing, while we tried out ideas. What a risk for us academically trained as social scientists. What a departure, too, from our academic training as social scientists that would have us bolster every argument from all sides with ‘hard’ (empirical) evidence.⁹ What’s more, while writing, we found we could barely keep up with the accelerative dynamic of contemporary politics, and we felt dismayed by the shrinking duration of any given event or debate’s ‘half-life’.

What else have we learned through trying to not mutually silence one another; trying to actualize a commitment to tarrying with complexity instead of striving (even with the best critical intentions) to reduce it and square it away? Once again, that differences, distinctions and categories per se are not the problem. On the contrary. It is precisely because we value differences that we must pinpoint how they are deployed for the purposes of domination, how they get pressed into service in the reproduction of social inequalities, of the uneven distribution of precariousness.

What function does the state-authored production and politics of cultural difference serve? It seems to have become, once more, central to how societies make and remake themselves. This is the question to which we hope to contribute a partial answer, and its range cannot be overestimated. We are acutely aware that if this book were to set out to, somehow, comprehensively reconstruct the phenomenology and internal mechanisms of two constitutive configurations of power – racism and sexism – as well as their ambiguous link with feminism – it would constitutively fail.¹⁰

What we do hope to contribute, however, is a reminder that racism and sexism cannot in any way be extrapolated from the various groups or individuals their prejudice designates. Neither race nor gender are realities inherent to bodies, even though they are coupled with specific physical traits, written (and read) into bodies, and ontologized as corporeal.¹¹ The challenge is to understand sexism and racism as highly agile, heterogeneous, dynamic, constantly mutating figurations; expansive representations; power practices that can be linked together in diverse and even contradictory ways.¹² With this challenge in mind, we direct our inquiry into the power-freighted business of the production of differences in contemporary German society. What are the circumstances in which they are made ‘relevant’?

Above all, it is important for us to remember that cultures are ‘humanly made structures of both authority and participation, benevolent in what they include, incorporate, and validate, less benevolent in what they exclude and demote,’ as Edward Said contends in Culture and Imperialism.¹³ Dissident imaginations grow – like politics – in the field of power. Culture is not, after all, an ‘iron cage’¹⁴ that condemns us to behave in accordance with the rule. Culture can be, among other things, reflective, sceptical and critical; it comprises not just conformity but dissident action. Instead of thinking about identity in terms of difference, then, we want above all to differentiate between differences and think about differences within difference. In this sense, it would be a gross (and, it has to be said, symptomatic) misunderstanding if our criticism of ‘fundamentalist’ language were to be read as a plea for silence or an endorsement of censorship. On the contrary: take this as a call to talk … about the way we talk.