Mute Vol 2 #2 - Dis-integrating Multiculturalism

In the lead up to the May local elections in the UK, the selection of a Greek-Armenian candidate by the British National Party (BNP) has seen the party descend into turmoil. The admission of ‘ethnics’ to the party, hardliners have claimed on bulletin boards and in the national press, has destroyed one of the last bastions of white working class racists. The party’s ‘modernisers’, responsible for the selection of Sharif Abdel Gawad, are defending their choice using the new rationale of post-multiculturalism: this man is a ‘totally assimilated Greek-Armenian’, they say, and ‘not a Pakistani Muslim’. Ever since the advent of multiculturalism in the 1970s, race has increasingly been defined in cultural rather than biological terms. But if this era also saw respect for cultural difference come to the fore in official culture, the fallout from 9/11 and 7/7 has put an end to the widespread promotion of tolerance. Assimilation is back on the agenda, however this time around the onus is not on the ‘host’ culture to accommodate immigrants, but on individuals to integrate themselves (see Hari Kunzru, p.14, and Matthew Hyland, p.44).

In a biopolitical era which, as Luciana Parisi states in this issue, ‘has always dealt with the transformation of bios – organic life – into politics’, it may seem an irony that science has, by and large, rejected the notion of a biological basis for race (see p.54). But, as Matthew Hyland observes, ‘while either “race” or “culture” may be projected onto someone in order to assign them to a group only culture can then be attributed to the will of the presumed group members. Unlike race, they can be held answerable for it.’ This new culpability of the other for the social conditions which produce and oppress them as (cultural/racial) other, is the logic of biopolitics writ large. In the name of producing harmonious co-existence, everyday life, indeed life itself, is opened up to scrutiny and exposed to the arbitrary rule of law. Against this reframing of racism along cultural lines, whose intent is to breed panic over the mass migrations of globalisation and rekindle the clash of Islamic and Christian civilisations for geo-strategic ends, this issue of Mute attempts to read the evident crisis of multiculturalism geo-politically, economically, in class terms and in relation to developments in science.

The signs of multiculturalism’s demise are often stark – pace the introduction of citizenship tests across Europe, in the name of promoting ‘shared values’, as a new form of border control (see Hari Kunzru, Melancholic Troglodytes, p.22, and Eric Krebbers, p.96). The head scarf ban in French schools and the drastic new immigration laws in Holland which have stopped legal economic immigration dead and practically abolished the right to asylum are just a few cases in point. In the UK, the Terrorism Act has been upgraded, albeit with the collusion of so-called ‘community leaders’, to proscribe many Islamic organisations and speech acts which ‘glorify’ terrorism. But the rising intolerance was highlighted more worryingly, because more pervasively, by the Danish cartoons furor (see Daniel Jewesbury, p.66, and Benedict Seymour, p.88) where media pundits of all political hues, and using quite different rationales, jumped on the opportunity to argue for the accelerated integration of Muslim populations into social democracies. Amidst all the column inches this generated over the problems of multicultural societies, the underlying economic conditions which produce their tensions were seldom challenged and all too easily deflected by the limited discourse of free speech.

In this issue, many of the contributors have tried to think beyond the traps of multiculturalism and its flawed concepts of culture and race. Tracking multiculturalism to its limit point, Benedict Seymour, Daniel Jewesbury and Angela Mitropoulos (p.34) focus on capital’ underlying unfreedom and inequality which make a mockery of the concept of rights and equality. Luciana Parisi and Marek Kohn discuss signs of crisis in science’s culturalist rejection of race and debate whether or not biology’s distinction between species is, in any case, intrinsically racist. The networked and mutant development of evolution across species, proposed by Parisi, finds a parallel in the Melancholic Troglodytes’ discussion of the proletarian production of mutant and subversive systems which contest the bourgeois notion of respect. Disrespecting the false pieties of multiculturalism seems to be a popular occupation all round!

Josephine Berry Slater <josie AT metamute.org>

 

For a government waging a War on Terror based on the clash between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ values, multiculturalism is losing its appeal, says Hari Kunzru. Shifting its emphasis from tolerance to the need to impose ‘shared values’, New Labour is enforcing nationalism with the carrot of ‘belonging’ and the stick of exclusion

After 9/11 the British consensus around multiculturalism began to shift. In the wake of the 7/7 London bomb attacks, this process of change has accelerated sharply. Scanning the last nine months of media and government pronouncements, it appears the issue of the relationship between immigrant communities and our historically white Anglo-Saxon Protestant State is no longer primarily viewed as an economic or social issue; it’s a question of national security. So they’re here, they’re cleaning our toilets, nursing our old people and tiling our kitchen floors (good), still in Bombay but stealing our back-office jobs (mixed), scamming the NHS and being assigned prime council houses for their improvidently large families (bad), but mainly they’re settling among us and we have no guarantees about what they think. Any one of them might secretly be trying to murder us. Some of them definitely are (very very bad indeed).

The notion of a ‘War on Terror’ (WoT) is the intellectual framework now used by almost all commentators to understand both international relations and internal security. It’s worth remembering that as a theoretical construct, (as opposed to what Dick Cheney likes to call the ‘facts on the ground’) the WoT is the co-creation of two highly ideological groups – Bin Laden’s Islamists and the US Neo-Cons, both of whom have promoted the conflict as largely or wholly one of values, as opposed to a struggle over resources and access to political power. So instead of Bush reminding Americans that they have strategic goals in the Middle East or that Bin Laden started out as part of a popular religious movement dedicated to the overthrow of the House of Saud (a concrete political goal), he employs moral language (famously, the ‘axis of evil’) and talks about his enemies in what might be thought of as cultural terms: ‘Remember, these are – the ones in Guantánamo Bay are – killers. They don’t share the same values we share.’ (2002) [http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/ENGAMR510492002]

Lately (all quotes are from his press conference on 21 March, 2006), Tony Blair appears to be conducting a doomed rearguard action against the overwhelming binary logic of the WoT, a logic his own Iraq policy has done so much to reinforce. So it’s down with Samuel Huntingdon (‘This is not a clash between civilisations, it is a clash about civilisation’) and up with values:

The only way to win is to recognise this phenomenon is a global ideology; to see all areas in which it operates as linked and to defeat it by values and ideas set in opposition to those of the terrorists … This terrorism, in my view, will not be defeated until its ideas, the poison that warps the minds of its adherents, are confronted, head-on, in their essence at their core.

So, given that no one in charge appears to want to talk about any of the possible structural reasons poisonous ideology might start to eat away at the mind, we’re stuck with the theory that it’s the theory which is the problem: terrorism as bad meme. If (as a terror warrior) this is your approach, then you’re likely to see the question of culture as a crucial battlefield.

The OED gives culture, among senses concerning plants, microbes, physical training and personal growth as ‘a particular form or type of intellectual development. Also the civilisation, customs, artistic achievements, etc. of a people, esp. at a certain stage of its development or history.’ This OED definition has a couple of interesting inflections. The first is the notion of ‘a people’. The second is that of ‘stages of development’. They make it clear that when we think about culture (at least in official British English) we’re in the territory of 19th century Romantic Nationalism. Kultur is what defines the Volk, what makes it more than an aggregation of individuals, and what gives it the right to occupy a particular geographical space, the landscape which has reciprocally formed it, and so on and so forth. The idea of culture was geopolitical in origin, and remains so today.

Peculiarly, given its subsequent history, multiculturalism first emerged in Canada as a response to tensions between its English and French-speaking populations. Enshrined in the Canadian Multiculturalism Act of 1971, it was quickly implemented elsewhere, and initially acted as a powerful ideological corrective to the injustices of state nationalism, which insists (often against evidence) on the existence of unitary national cultures and demands absolute assimilation and the erasure of difference as the price immigrants must pay to gain admission. Current Canadian legislation aims to ‘ensure that all individuals receive equal treatment and equal protection under the law, while respecting and valuing their diversity.’ The Canadian government runs a multiculturalism website, which lists the benefits as follows:

Multiculturalism ensures that all citizens can keep their identities, can take pride in their ancestry and have a sense of belonging. Acceptance gives Canadians a feeling of security and self-confidence, making them more open to, and accepting of, diverse cultures. The Canadian experience has shown that multiculturalism encourages racial and ethnic harmony and cross-cultural understanding, and discourages ghettoisation, hatred, discrimination and violence.[1]

Multicultural politics have undoubtedly proved useful in reconfiguring the public discourse of former colonial powers such as Britain as they adapt to mass immigration, particularly in opening up institutions and providing a framework by which those who have no direct social experience of immigrants (and their second generation kids) can interact with them/us. No doubt about it, ‘Chicken Tikka Masala’ is a genuine step forward from ‘no blacks, no dogs, no Irish’. However in recent years, many of the more challenging aspects of multiculturalist discourse (in particular its celebration of hybridity and the formation of new identities) have been sidelined in favour of those aspects which are easy to deliver as policy (‘community relations’ conducted as a dialogue between the centre and notional representatives of supposedly stable and fixed ‘minorities’), or which suit prevailing political fashions. It’s difficult, for example, to square ‘respecting and valuing diversity’ (a quintessentially information-age activity, performed largely through the production and consumption of various kinds of media, from street festivals to television advertisements) with the concrete realities of Britain’s ruthless (and very popular) immigration policies. No amount of Benetton-style image making can negate the impact of dispersal, detention camps and forced removals. Multiculturalism is, in this respect, just a mask for the border police. Without accompanying action to combat social and economic inequality, it looks increasingly threadbare.

Now we face a Prime Minister who is declaring war on bad values, which means that ‘respecting and valuing diversity’ looks (from the 360 degree point of view of a terror-warrior) less like an unproblematically good thing (the way it used to, say, in the GLC chamber in 1984) than a girly-man weakness a modern social-democratic combatant government can ill afford. The message is that (rather like Middle Eastern democracy) diversity is good, as long as it’s our kind of diversity: confined to those aspects of culture (food, music, dress and so on) which increase the array of consumer choices without challenging the fundamentals. Middle England wants its Asian babes in bikinis, not burqas.

There is in circulation a right-wing critique of multiculturalism which is exploiting the WoT to attempt to regain ground lost in the culture wars of the ’80s. If terrorism is a bad meme and terrorism is the product of Islamic culture, then we can say with confidence that Islam is worse than whatever we’re proposing as ‘our’ culture. In saying this, we accept the validity of making value judgements about culture in general, something which the right has always claimed the Stalinist commissars of multiculturalism specifically disallow. Leaving aside the truth or otherwise of such a characterisation, the secret desire (what Slavoj Žižek might call the ‘obscene supplement’) of this school of thought is that once we’ve loosened up on this issue, we’ll start re-embracing other value judgements and developing a taste for the juicy treats beloved of a certain strand of social conservatism, dishes which have been off the menu for some years: black people’s tendency to crime, homosexuality’s destructive impact on the family-which-is-the-bedrock-of-society and suchlike. Then (oh happy day!) it’ll be like the horrible ‘60s never happened.

Certainly, from a WoT perspective, if you ignore social, political and economic reasons for terrorism and concentrate purely on values, it’s easy to make the initial Islam/terror case to the average British voter. Because of the fear of terrorism the field is open in a way it hasn’t been for ten years for a reassertion of monocultural dominance. The new name for it is ‘shared values’ and it’s present around the edges of such cultural sharp objects as the newly-introduced ‘Life in the UK Test’ [http://www.lifeintheuktest.gov.uk/] for immigrants, which asks coyly about Christian festivals and saints days and the queen’s ceremonial duties and trial by jury. Oh, and quangos. The test introduces the concept of a minimal standard of shared values as the price of admission to Britain. The political conversation now appears to be all about ownership of those values. This notion, which has obvious appeal to conservatives, is also attractive to the mainstream social democratic left, a tradition which in Britain now consists of three layers, rather like a Victoria sponge cake – a bottom spongy layer of methodist piety, a thin red jammy spread of second international socialism and most recently (1980’s onwards) an overbaked top layer of communitarianism. All three layers lead social democrats to believe that the area of values is their natural terrain, good ground to pick a fight with the centre right and its founding model, the atomised individual of classical liberalism, so very silent about what happens when that individual comes into relationship with others.

It’s worth remembering that Osama Bin Laden is also operating on the terrain of shared values:

It is to this religion that we call you; the seal of all the previous religions. It is the religion of Unification of God, sincerity, the best of manners, righteousness, mercy, honour, purity, and piety. It is the religion of showing kindness to others, establishing justice between them, granting them their rights, and defending the oppressed and the persecuted. It is the religion of enjoining the good and forbidding the evil with the hand, tongue and heart. It is the religion of Jihad in the way of Allah so that Allah’s Word and religion reign Supreme. And it is the religion of unity and agreement on the obedience to Allah, and total equality between all people, without regarding their colour, sex, or language. [Letter to the American People, November 2002]

In Britain, multiculturalism (the make-shift post-imperial doctrine of diversity as the route to equality, of unity through managed disagreement) is under attack, not only from its traditional monocultural opponents, or from the classical liberals who’ve always disliked its whiff of groupthink, but from those who previously supported it most staunchly, the mainstream social democrats now scrambling to abandon it and sit on the high hillock marked shared values. Multiculturalism was, for many on the centre left, always a second-best option. Along with feminism and associated positions it grew in strength just at the time when the economic argument was being won hands down in Britain by the Chicago School monetarism of Keith Joseph, Margaret Thatcher and the Institute of Economic Affairs. In the ’70s, traditional Keynesianism had ceased to produce good outcomes and by the mid-‘80s the right was holding all the economic policy cards, so the left retreated to the terrain of language, visibility and culture, ground appropriate to its stronghold in the universities, the arts and the media. It was from this ‘red base’ that those of an egalitarian bent made forays into areas like social policy: multiculturalism, diversity and anti-discrimination legislation was the result. In doing this they ceded the economic ground entirely. Not much has changed. Thatcherism became Blairism. Management of inflation is still the primary goal. Redistribution remains a dirty word. However, New Labour now feels it ‘owns’ economics again and diversity can safely be dropped for a more muscular approach to community. David Blunkett’s combative style as Home Secretary was particularly telling in this respect. The big stick was always lurking behind his talk of ‘belonging’. Join in, Pakis, or we’ll put you in Belmarsh.

Lacking belief in the power of their politics to produce fairness (the market being the mechanism of choice for that) our politicians are offering up the pageantry of respect as a consolation prize. Islam will be valued in law, on government websites and in glossy brochures as part of the tapestry of British diversity, but individual Muslims will remain poor and marginalised. A hyper-sensitivity to issues of language and representation (exploited by cultural conservatives of all stripes and encouraged by religious offence legislation) is the pessimistic remnant of the multiculturalist dream. Instead of a new hybrid culture, we’re offered what Amartya Sen has called ‘plural monoculturalism’, with power in the hands of self-identified community leaders who are defensive, patriarchal, hide-bound and antagonistic to change. Women, homosexuals and the young all suffer.

Perhaps the picture isn’t all gloomy. Once upon a time the terrain of argument about difference was biology. Little by little, biological racism was demolished and culture became the main battle-ground. Even the BNP (which does cling to biology) now uses multiculturalist language to make its case. Its monthly magazine is called Identity and its defence of ‘native British culture’ is presented as a protectionist bulwark against a coffee-coloured global capitalism which wishes to erase difference to assist the transnational flow of labour, goods and services. Cultural essentialism is now in play everywhere from Nick Griffin’s pamphlets to the pages of Prospect. The notion of shared values (as opposed to the crude group identity of ‘culture’ in its current political incarnation) as the basis for community is far from stupid. However, within the context of the war on terror (and that’s the only context we’re going to have for the next generation or so) the pressure will all flow in one direction. Immigrants will have to prove their right to belong, not just by hard work, but by displaying the approved set of values. Gordon Brown is already getting misty-eyed about flags on lawns and the pledge of allegiance. British Muslims are undergoing a near-constant media interrogation. If we’re to avoid shared values becoming assimilation by the back-door, we need to ensure that the smug guardians of the mainstream put their own idées reçus under the spotlight, primarily the notion that bad values are an adequate explanation for the alienation many (not just young Muslims) feel from the current dispensation of things.

FOOTNOTES

[1] http://www.canadianheritage.gc.ca/progs/multi/what-multi_e.cfm

Hari Kunzru <hari AT metamute.org> is the author of the novels The Impressionist and Transmission, and the short story collection Noise. He’s been on the editorial board of Mute since you were in short trousers

 

 

The term ‘respect!’ has gone from rude boy subcultural slang to reactionary Third Way spin, from grassroots contestation of power, to tool for disciplining the new dangerous classes. Melancholic Troglodytes offer a critical genealogy of the strategies used by proletarians to challenge bourgeois dignity and respectability and call for some new (use) values of our own

‘Give respect, get respect!’ – British government’s action plan

It is essential to understand at the outset that Tony Blair’s latest moral crusade based on returning respectability to cities and villages is not a gimmick or a quick fix but part and parcel of a protracted attack on the working class.

The aim of this text is twofold: first, to analyse the nature of this attack by showing the antagonism between bourgeois respectability and proletarian respect; and second, to demonstrate how this conflict is related to the demise of two of capital’s most pernicious ideologies – that of religious fundamentalism and secular multiculturalism.

Perhaps understandably, some readers may baulk at our contention that the journalistic inanity known as (eastern) fundamentalism and its flip side of (western) multiculturalism are in crisis. After all, are we not subjected in the media to a daily barrage of mullah-morons self-righteously preaching the finer points of Shari’a law? Do we then not have to endure the gormless liberal multiculturalist paternalistically tut-tutting his uncivilised interlocutors? Has not Hamas secured a major victory for fundamentalism in Palestine? Is not religion calling the shots in Iraq? Is there not sufficient evidence that the world has gone completely insane? Should we not adopt a bunker mentality and hide until this tempestuous madness has run its course? By tracing the vicissitudes of the notion of respect we hope to offer a more nuanced – as well as optimistic – assessment of the current state of class struggle.

‘Is there no respect of place, persons, nor time, in you?’ William Shakespeare Twelfth Night

Class society has always made use of both ideology (Marx) and discursive practice (Foucault) in order to secure the status quo. These mechanisms of regulation have in turn relied on nodal values through which respectability has been policed. These nodal values exist in a chain of signification and the study of their evolution can be instructive.

During what is lazily referred to as pre-modernity (more accurately slavery, serfdom, feudalism, etc.) the nodal value greasing the wheels of society was honour. The gladiator in ancient Rome, the crusader during the Middle Ages and the knight during feudalism accrued honour through a mixture of courage, skill and sacrifice. Their lower class counterparts – the slave, the serf and the peasant – remained in a permanent state of shame.[1] Only occasionally could a lower class person wipe away the shame associated with their social status and gain honour. This required a superhuman endeavour. Spartacus stands as an archetypal example of such a move. Outside this cosy polarity between shame and honour, respect began to make a tentative appearance amongst the populace. Artisans and craftsmen who managed to monopolise certain trades began to be granted a grudging respect by the aristocratic elite.

From the 17th century onwards, with the gradual advent of the formal phase of capitalist domination, absolute surplus value extraction became the norm in many industries. Exchange value was characterised by the regulation of punctuality, sexuality and discipline. The nodal value that became associated with this phase was dignity, which implied that identity is independent of birth, institutional roles and hierarchy. The Dutch national liberation movement of 1579-1581, the English Revolution of 1640-60 and the French Revolution of 1789 represent a series of historical ruptures which transformed society’s nodal value from honour to dignity.

To turn up at work punctually, engage in the production process conscientiously, look and sound orderly and discharge one’s sexual duties spartanly (in other words to be a good citizen) were characteristics of dignity. By default, remaining unemployed, dirty and promiscuous became a sign of undignified behaviour, punishable by poverty and stigmatisation. The English Ranters were an early victim of bourgeois indignation. Naturally most radicals have been deeply suspicious of dignity. F. Palinorc has dismissed it as a shibboleth of bourgeois thought:

[Dignity is an] absurd, utopian cry under a system of total value
domination, analogous to the battle cries of democracy and liberty.[2]

Later we will attempt to show how the situation is somewhat more complicated, but for the time being let us pursue the historical development of capital further.

Those societies that have negotiated the passage from formal to real domination have experienced a more flexible form of surplus value extraction and a greater disparity between the private and public spheres of human behaviour. Also, in this phase, workers begin to enter the economy as consumers of leisure and the bourgeoisie is keen to control leisure’s ‘moral misuse’. Dignity began to display its limitations and was gradually marginalised by a more sought after nodal attribute – authenticity. This is an individualised attribute which encourages political engagement based on the notion of identity. The ability to be oneself in public now becomes an ideal only available to a handful of clowns, method actors and ‘mad’ individuals who require neither dignity nor honour since they know no shame. The rest of us are reduced to purchasing tourist-authenticity in far off, ‘uncontaminated’ lands in the form of Nicaraguan coffee, Turkish whirling dervishes and the occasional divine miracle.

This historical chain of signification (honour – dignity – authenticity) is roughly aligned with pre-capitalism, formal capital domination and real capital domination. However, this schematic association breaks down on closer inspection. Raymond Williams, for instance, talks of three types of cultural artifacts: the dominant, the residual and the emergent.[3] All three usually co-exist in any one period of development. For instance, the dominant cultural node in contemporary India is dignity which corresponds to the formal phase of capital domination. But India is a complex society which also evolves around residual cultural artifacts like honour and emergent ones such as authenticity. Most Indians require a mixture of honour-dignity-authenticity for obtaining respectability but depending on their specific cultural-economic status, they prioritise this chain of signification differently. But, and here is the key question for us, what happens if you are a caste member who is denied access to this chain of signification? In other words, what if you are not considered a full citizen with a delineated set of rights and duties? How do you then seek self-worth and social status as a prelude for interaction with the rest of society?

‘Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.’ Albert Einstein

The proletariat has historically employed three main strategies for overcoming the problems cited above. These three strategies correspond to varying degrees of proletarian empowerment:

1. Re-accentuation of respectability

The first strategy re-accentuates the meaning of nodal values when the proletariat does not feel strong enough to reject them (Bakhtin). For example, in the 1960s US ‘blacks’ defined dignity according to class markers. Bourgeois blacks, such as Martin Luther King, understood dignity to mean upright citizenship and demanded equal employment and educational opportunities. Under their scheme black dignity was to be guaranteed by enlightened leaders and enshrined in the law. The law may not be able to police racist prejudice but its admirers believe it is capable of changing discriminatory behaviour and that this in time might lead to cognitive alterations.

Other blacks, such as the Black Panthers, were also seeking reforms although in their case extra-legal actions were used in order to pressurise legislatures. Black Panthers understood dignity as full citizenship and since blacks were only considered three-fifth citizens, the strategy aimed to obtain the remaining two-fifths of rights denied them by the Constitution. Meanwhile, black welfarism would restore dignity to black lumpenproletarians left out of the circuits of capital accumulation.

Lastly, proletarian blacks had a simpler and more radical conception of dignity which was shaped by their everyday confrontation with racism. Proletarian dignity confronted both racist behaviour (e.g. discrimination in the shape of Jim Crow laws or segregation) and racist attitude (e.g. personal prejudice). The stable dictionary ‘meaning’ of the term, dignity, remained the same but the personal ‘sense’ in which it was employed had shifted dramatically (Vygotsky). Proletarian dignity, therefore, cannot simply be ignored or dismissed as bourgeois. It must be understood in its concrete context and as part of a dialectical supercession of all values.

It is essential to understand that proletarian demands for dignity, whether expressed by black American workers in the 1960s, Russian workers in 1905 or Palestinian workers crossing Israeli check-points are not a static entity, for they can fast evolve in one of two directions. Dignity can either solidify into reactionary pride or evolve into proletarian respect. Examples of the former include the notion of black pride promoted by fascists such as Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam, Ahmadi-Nezhad’s Iranian brand of Strasserism or perhaps even the BNP’s opportunistic slogan of ‘rights for whites’.[4] Examples of the latter include the solidarity amongst British black proletarians during the 1970s and 1980s centred on respect. A similar phenomenon was witnessed amongst Native Americans in the 1970s during their struggle for land and an end to poverty, or during the first Palestinian Intifada when fighting both the Israeli army and Palestinian leaders simultaneously generated mutual respect within and between refugee camps.

2. Collective rejection of respectability

There are occasions when due to strength or sheer desperation, we manage to go beyond mere re-accentuation of bourgeois respectability and a deep seated rejection sets in. A minority faction within the anti-war movement in the run up to the war on Iraq achieved this in some measure (the rest, be they secularist or religious, remained within the bounds of bourgeois respectability). The honour and glory of war was rejected sometimes through rational arguments and sometimes through collective laughter and irony; the dignity of anti-Saddam victims who were opportunistically paraded in the media was exposed as a propaganda ruse and nullified. The authenticity of evidence put before us to justify the war was also queried at every turn. Some further examples of rejection of respectability may concretise the point: during a one-minute silence in a demo against the First Gulf War, bourgeois respectability was compromised when a group of radicals insisted on shouting, ‘No War but the Class War’; at the beginning of the Second Gulf War an American protestor whose husband was killed in Vietnam said, ‘I learned the hard way there is no glory in a folded flag.’ Similarly, a sizeable minority of Iranian proletarians have rejected the concept of martyrdom and warfare as a route to heaven as is evident in the struggle against the burial of the ‘unknown soldier’ within university campus grounds. ‘Queer carnivalesque’ would be another instance where we have witnessed a break with heteronormative notions of sexual respectability as well as gay/lesbian essentialism.

Proletarian resistance creates a gap between reality and official ideology. This gap has to be filled by rhetoric. The further decomposition of the art of rhetoric in the speeches of Bush, Blair, the Pope, Ahmadi-Nezhad and Bin Laden is itself an indication that the chain of signification is losing its shine everywhere. The first canon of classical rhetoric as practised in ancient Greece was ‘invention’. With the demise of the Sophists, invention was eclipsed by one or more of the other divisions, namely; ‘arrangement’, ‘style’, ‘memory’ and ‘delivery’. Today’s politicians have conveniently dispensed with memory and delivery, leaving arrangement and style as the only two vehicles for rhetorical discourse.

There are also moments of desperation which lead to a frontal assault on bourgeois respectability. Refugees and asylum seekers who are being forcefully removed have been known to go on hunger strike or strip to their underwear at airports as a final act of defiance against immigration authorities. Here, respectability which works through raising the threshold of shame (Goffman) is marginalised by the grotesque collective body (Bakhtin). Similarly, prison revolts undermine in a matter of hours the systematic work of chaplains, social workers and prison staff whose programme is to instil prisoners with etiquette and dignity.

3. Creation of new concepts like respect for by-passing respectability

When the balance of class forces is in our favour and we have the luxury of time and space, use value may temporarily eclipse exchange value. These preconditions not only make possible a rejection of bourgeois respectability but also foster proletarian respect. Moments of social rupture are usually preceded by a preponderance of mutual respect amongst the proletariat. This is not simply a case of positing our morality against theirs as Trotsky would suggest. Rather it is a case of rejecting exchange value and morality as the regulator of the private-public split in favour of a qualitatively different form of immeasurable value based on human need and solidarity. For instance, the term ‘respect’ finds its origins in Jamaica as part of the ‘rude boy’ slang subculture and is transported to Britain where it is picked up by the ‘white’ working class.

‘Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear.’ Albert Camus

So far, we have postulated that respect is foregrounded among those sections of the proletariat traditionally denied access to the rulers’ chain of signification. We have also suggested that its appearance is a sign of proletarian strength since it is generated from below.

Conversely, if proletarians today are not creating autonomous, organic concepts such as respect (strategy three) and if they are not effectively rejecting capital’s nodal values (strategy two), and if re-accentuation of honour-dignity-authenticity (strategy one) is usurped by reactionaries and turned into pride, then it is logical to assume that capital is enjoying unprecedented hegemony over us.

Yet things are not as hopeless as they seem. In recent years, the two ideologies that have most effectively shackled proletarians world-wide have been fundamentalism and multiculturalism. Significantly, both emerged at times of massive structural crisis for capital. Fundamentalism (and we beg the reader’s forgiveness for over-generalising here), whether in its early 20th century US manifestation or its late 20th century Middle Eastern variety, was suitable for overseeing the transition from formal to real capital domination. However, it failed in both arenas. At the risk of oversimplification we could state that religious fundamentalism in both the US and the Middle East emerged partly as a response to the failures of modernism and yet instead of replacing the latter, it ended up forging an uneasy alliance with modernism (especially in places where fundamentalism gained power). In the US it was military Keynesianism that ultimately completed the transition and in the Middle East a kitsch cocktail of military Keynesianism (in industry) is being employed in conjunction with neo-liberalism (in finance and banking), and populism (in agriculture), to bring forth the real phase of capital domination.

Both fundamentalism and multiculturalism prefer winning the cultural battle in the domestic sphere prior to restructuring the production of values in the public sphere. However, whilst fundamentalism is proudly monologic, multiculturalism is falsely dialogic (Bakhtin). It pretends to take the addressee into account, respecting difference and heterogeneity. In truth secular multiculturalism is as haughty as religious fundamentalism. It listens but does not hear. And now that its project of integrating the foreigner-within has reached an impasse, it has left the western bourgeoisie without a recognisable strategy for continued hegemony. The crisis of multiculturalism reflects the failures of both secularism and postmodernism. The so-called separation of the Church from the state was always a mirage. Secularism took the hibernation of religiosity for its destruction and lulled itself into a false sense of security. Marx observed this bourgeois self-deception with uncanny clarity:

even when man proclaims himself an atheist through the mediation
of the state […] he still remains under the constraints of religion
because he acknowledges his atheism only deviously, through a
medium.[5]

What Marx is saying is that ideological atheism (or if you prefer bourgeois humanistic atheism) is merely the negation of theism. The synthesis is something else which is yet to emerge. This ‘something else’ we have characterised as organic atheism since it will be a product of everyday proletarian self-activity and not secular legislation or rationalistic discourse. The crisis of the (western) secular state is tied in with the falling out of favour of postmodernism within academia and also with the failure (so far) of western capital to complete its transition from real domination to what we have provisionally termed surreal domination.[6]

The slow death agony of fundamentalism and multiculturalism has left bourgeois respectability devoid of efficacy. The slowness of this process and the absence of new proletarian values may have obscured this tendency but the stench of bourgeois values is becoming harder to ignore everyday.

‘We may not pay Satan reverence, for that would be indiscreet, but we can at least respect his talent.’ Mark Twain

Satan may be worthy of both reverence and respect but the bourgeoisie has lost the plot.[7] In this final section, we will provide examples related to our masters’ inability to maintain respectability over us.

Let us take the ‘naming and shaming’ campaign against paedophiles initiated by News of the World and taken up by the British government to tackle disrespect. Note that whilst the News of the World’s crusade was (largely) against white working class men, the government’s Anti-Social Behaviour Orders campaign is (largely) against children wrongdoers who in the past were not usually named for legal reasons. Shaming, as we have seen, is traced to pre-capitalism. Its modern bourgeois version never possessed the impact it needed for controlling proletarian behaviour. Today, this inappropriate usage of shaming has the ironic effect of granting disrespectful children a badge of honour amongst their peers. One final irony is that ‘naming and shaming’ was a tactic used by the radical plebeian press in the 18th and 19th centuries against the ruling class. If an impropriety (usually of a sexual kind) amongst the rich and famous was discovered, the radical press would blackmail the culprit for a hefty sum. Once the ransom was paid, the next issue of the paper would carry a titillating account of the sordid affair anyway in order to undermine bourgeois respectability. The News of the World’s campaign seems an exact reversal of this original impetus.

Our next example is even more ominous for British capitalism. The inability of both Labour and Tory parties to reanimate a sense of modern nationalism has alienated a sizeable minority of the population who now voluntarily identify themselves as the ‘other’. The other consists of two main camps: firstly, the alienated and atomised proletarians who attempt to regain their self-respect individually and, secondly, proud and self-righteous ‘Muslims’, ‘Asians’, ‘country warriors’ and ‘White fascists’. Ex-Home Secretary David Blunkett and his faithful sidekick Trevor Phillips clumsily attempted to impose British values on people only to expose this ‘imagined community’ (Benedict Anderson) for the sham it has always been. Gordon Brown’s recent call for a ‘British Day’ indicates his thinking runs along similar lines. Their new citizenship deal is an American rewriting of the social contract: once British values have been sufficiently inculcated and citizens have been coached in public displays of patriotism, the liberal state will graciously shower them with tolerance.[8]

The fact that a once secure sense of Britishness increasingly relies on ritualistic displays of patriotism is a sign of weakness not strength. Ironically, the state is relying on a colonial strategy for internal control at a time when that pernicious species of vultures known as community leaders are no longer in charge of their constituencies because they have lost the respect of the proletariat. It is arguable whether this atavistic cadre of vote-hunters ever enjoyed any genuine community support. Meanwhile, vacuous old multiculturalists are still harping about ‘equal dignity under the law’, ‘recognition of difference’ and the finer distinctions of ‘integration’ (which is good) and ‘assimilation’ (which is not). Multiculturalists are still in denial, they will need time to acknowledge the gravity of their defeat. Poor, pitiful hacks are still ‘multi-ing’ and ‘hybrid-ing’ our cultures in the hope of covering up the fact that an increasing number of us already feel trans-cultural.

One final example will suffice. The case of the Danish cartoons revealed cracks in both multiculturalism and fundamentalism (see Benedict Seymour’s article in this issue of Mute, p.88). Danish capitalism demonstrated the thin line separating tolerance from intolerance when Danish racists were given the green light to provoke their Muslim counterparts. Over a number of months Muslim hate-mongers were in turn given carte blanche by Saudi Arabia and Iran to whip certain sections of their constituencies into frenzy. Once a number of scores were settled and political points underlined, the furore died down as mysteriously as it had been initiated.[9] In the process, European multiculturalism exposed its inherent intolerance and the might of Islam shook with trepidation before a few second-rate cartoonists!

‘They cannot take away our self-respect if we do not give it to them.’ Mahatma Ghandi

Official ideologies in the form of fundamentalism and multiculturalism have fought (old) proletarian values to a stand still. Community generated respect has been marginalised in the process. Organisations such as George Galloway’s Respect Party and New Labour’s ‘respect campaign’ based on ASBOs have discredited the very term. This much we grudgingly admit. But significantly, both religious and secular respectability have lost their momentum, partly due to individual and collective proletarian resistance and partly due to their own inherent contradictions. We are, therefore, in a face-off situation with the ruling class over values. Old monologic (exchange) values have been shunned and new dialogic (use) values are yet to emerge. Since proletarians from different parts of the globe will generate these new values from within different linguistic and cultural environments, our task is to make sure their commonalities are made recognisable to all. Meanwhile, we should remain vigilant against reanimated versions of bourgeois respectability and expose their anti-working class agendas before they have become embedded within culture.

Acknowledgements: Melancholic Troglodytes are indebted to comments by Richard Barbrook, Loren Goldner, Anthony Iles, Josephine Berry-Slater, Nils, Vahid and Fabian Tompsett

FOOTNOTES

[1] ‘The concept of honour implies that identity is essentially … linked to institutional roles’ P.L. Berger et al., The Homeless Mind, Penguin Books, 1973, p.84. Once premodern institutions gave way under the relentless march of capitalism, honour became embourgeoisfied and emptied of its substance. Cervantes’s Don Quixote captures the demise of the knight-errant and his chivalric code magnificently.

[2] F. Palinorc, Annual Review of Critical Psychology, 3, 2003, p.183, Manchester: Manchester Metropolitan University.

[3] See Raymond Williams, ‘Base and superstructure in Marxist cultural theory’, New Left Review, 82, 1973.

[4] Whilst hating the Nation of Islam and the Iranian theocracy, the BNP is happy to learn strategy from them. The BNP’s recent success in infiltrating the anti-Jerry Springer Opera campaign has prompted them to try to set up a church in Lincolnshire, under the name of the Christian Council of Britain. The head of this new church is a ‘reverend’ Robert West who believes that ‘The mixing of races challenges the glory of god’, http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/content/news_syndication/article_060316bnp.shtml

[5] Karl Marx, ‘On the Jewish Question’, p. 218, Early Writings, Penguin Books and New Left Review, 1984.

[6] The surreal phase we have postulated will come to replace the real phase of capital domination. What is interesting about this emerging phase is that it consists of four methods of surplus value extraction thus giving both capital and labour more flexibility. The two common forms of surplus value extraction (formal and real) are now becoming sandwiched between two more, provisionally named the pre-formal and post-real methods of extraction.

[7] You want to know how badly the stupid bastards have lost the plot? Get a load of this: Kevin Roberts is a high ranking bureaucrat with SAATCHI & SAATCHI. Recently he gave US Defence Intelligence Agencies a talk where he argued ‘brand America’ is failing because it is a ‘High Respect, Low Love’ kind of product. In contrast, he argues, there are brands that have ‘High Love, High Respect’ quotients such as Harley Davidson, Apple and JFK! So the trick is to make ‘brand America’ more like Harley Davidson and Apple and the rest of the world will fall in love with the USA (See M. Grimshaw, ‘Religion, Terror and the End of the Postmodern: Rethinking the Responses’, International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, 3(1), Jan 2006).

The conspiracy nut may interject here that the Sa’atchi (literally, clock-maker) brothers are originally from Iraq! Could theirs be a long-term Sufi strategy of undermining the efficacy of the US military ‘intelligence’ through subtle counter-productive spin? Are the Sa’atchi brothers Iraq’s revenge on US colonisers?

[8] Regarding the generation of a British identity it is worth noting that outside the country various agencies, such as embassies, train prospective refugees in British culture before accepting them. Perhaps myths about British identity are easier to fabricate at a distance; in Africa, Middle East and the ex-colonies.

[9] The comparison with Rushdie’s Satanic Verses is instructive. Then Khomeini’s fatwa found an immediate and widespread echo, the reverberations of which are still with us today. The Danish cartoon controversy only managed a partial mobilisation of the Islamic ummah and even that needed months of preparation by ‘flying mullahs’.

Following the recent acrimonious split within Melancholic Troglodytes, the splitting minority have formed themselves into the outfit Sad Cave-People. The majority can still be contacted at <meltrogs1 AT hotmail.com>

 

The 'race riots' in Cronulla at the end of last year made it clear that all is not well in Australia's multicultural paradise. Here, Angela Mitropoulos examines the racism, mechanisms of border control and changing conditions of work underneath the beach utopia

If for a certain imaginary, the beach has often evoked a realm of authenticity hidden under the concrete strata of urban development, capitalist spectacle and exploitation, the relentlessly iconised Australian beach has, in addition, been put to use as proof of egalitarian sentiment and vast democratic horizons. Here, the generic vista of the Western frontier is shorn of its embarrassing wars over land, the guns and forts lined up against the natives, and redrawn as pre-economic, pre-political idyll. Never quite acknowledged as urban but, even so, presented as more urbane and civilised than either rural, uncultivated or desert lands, the space of the beach is assumed to have shaken off the dissensions of politics and economics much as the figurative beachgoer is presumed to effortlessly shed clothing. Like Rousseau’s state of nature, the mystical space-time of the beach operates as both a denial of the nation-state – the presupposition of the contrat social in its legal, political and not least, economic senses – and its naturalisation. And no more pronounced are these projections than in post-colonial spaces such as Australia, where persistent anxieties about unruly savages mingle with dreams of being closer to nature.

Popcultists have long campaigned for ‘the beach’ to be recognised as Australia’s eminent utopia. Some five years ago, Craig McGregor argued that the beach represents ‘our yearning for a world different from the concrete pavement universe that most of us inhabit for most of our lives. The beach today represents escape, freedom, self-fulfilment, the Right Path. It represents the way our lives should be.’ Similarly, John Fiske contended that the beach ‘is the place where we go on holidays (Holy Days), a place and time that is neither home nor work, outside the profane normality.’ It is perhaps not surprising that such homilies have become more pious just as coastal areas have become more developed, increasingly the scene of bloated property values, mortgage anxieties and a burgeoning tourist industry run mostly on precarious labour. Indeed, these hymns to ‘the beach’ are a crucial affective support in this political economy and these industries. And they leverage affection all the more fiercely when deployed as eulogies or calls to restoration. Therefore, it is in part because beachside suburbs do not provide for an indifferent repose – longed for as both fortress and refuge against difference – that they have become the scenes of overt violence, riot police and emergency ‘lockdown’ laws that seek to restore, by force, the order on which seaside utopics were assembled.

The enchantment of ‘the beach’ began in Australia in the late 1940s – which is to say, in the immediate post-WWII period and at the ideological high point of Fordism and the Keynsian settlement. That post-war accord between unions and employers took shape as a nationalist compact between descendants of the English upper classes and working class Irish. Persuaded by clerical anti-communism, promises of property and class mobility – in the form of the post-war housing ownership boom and university admissions – the latter were seduced into forgetting their genealogy as convicts deported from Britain under policies justified by their depiction as a separate ‘race’. This particular racialisation was set aside with the post-WWII Anglo-Celtic compact, which is the precise meaning of the figure of the Aussie and its egalitarian ethos – which is also an ethnos – of the ‘fair go’. Frozen in that dehistoricised and dreamlike zone after colonisation had been accomplished and before the collapse of the ‘White Australia’ policy in the early 1970s, the ostensible peace and contracted civility of the emblematic beachside has always depended on violence and separation, borders and fencelines, property and expropriation.
 
In the final month of 2005 in Sydney, it was these contingencies that would be laid bare and, with recourse to emergency laws, reasserted as necessary for the restoration of what was deemed natural. It is not clear what the immediate inducement was. Lifeguards were assaulted, it is said, because they made racist slurs while attempting to stop people playing football (soccer) on Cronulla beach and, in the ensuing fight, came off second best. Cricket and Australian Rules (i.e., Celtic) football are commonplace on beaches and elsewhere – soccer, on the other hand, is regarded as the ‘wog’ game. Moreover, lifeguards are drawn from local residents, and their role is just as much concerned with beach safety as it is with enforcing the bonds between property and propriety. Yet, their authority on this occasion, derived as it is from a customary consensus over their iconic status, faltered. And so, this apocryphal confrontation over land use and the perceived failure of Aussie supremacy would converge with earlier tales in Sydney of ‘organised ethnic gangs’ rapes of Australian women’ and fears of miscegenation (in which women’s bodies are considered above all as racial property) to produce what, elsewhere, would be called a lynch mob.

As is more or less well known, around five thousand people gathered in Cronulla on December to ‘Take Our Beaches Back’ or, as it was put less obliquely in other circulating leaflets and SMS, ‘bash wogs and lebs’. Slogans such as ‘ethnic cleansing’ and ‘Aussies fighting back’ were prominent enough, on placards, posters and scrawled on skin, given force with punch and kick. Draped in Australian flags, singing Waltzing Matilda, large parts of the crowd rampaged around the suburb beating anyone they assumed to be a ‘wog’ or a ‘Leb’, including one woman whose parents migrated from Greece and a Jewish man. Such is the populist version of racial profiling – officiated more recently by the phrase ‘of Middle Eastern appearance’ – that has become standard in Sydney and at a time of a global biowar. It might be noted here that the women who were raped in the most prominent of recent cases in Sydney would not so easily have ‘passed’ as Australian in Cronulla that day, and yet their attackers would not have been given such unprecedented sentences if they had not been identified in court and the media as a ‘Lebanese gang’ targeting ‘Australian women’. Indeed, given that migration officials have deported or interned over a hundred people whom they incorrectly assessed to be ‘illegal non-citizens’ – such as Vivian Solon, a permanent resident deported to a hospice in the Philippines from her hospital bed after being hit by a car –  suggests that this moment in Cronulla was, despite all the denials, continuous with the normative inclination of public policy and the racialising demeanour of the rights-bestowing, and rights-denying, state.

Since the events at Cronulla, there have been numerous accounts from the commentariat whose affective range is distinctly more elitist than anti-racist, demonstrating far more shock at the appearance of an unruly mob than the pogrom it enacted. But contrary to that perspective, which can only elicit demands for the restoration of law and order, the vulgar calls to reclaim ownership were merely the coarse, volunteerist expression of, most notably, the Prime Minister’s civic declarations of sovereignty (‘We will decide who comes here and the circumstances under which they come’), the more than decade-long policy of the internment of undocumented migrants by successive governments and, more recently, a war that is legitimated on racist grounds. As border policing became central to the conduct of elections and government policy throughout this period, the border was bound to proliferate across social relations and spaces, and in circumstances both casual and administered. This is why the worst of the attacks occurred in the train station. That train takes people from Sydney’s Central railway station to the nearest beach and, given the composition of Sydney as a whole, this includes people from the suburb of Lakemba, which has a high proportion of migrants from the Middle East. Cronulla, for its part, is notable for being the most Anglo-Celtic of suburbs in Australia. The Prime Minister once described the area as ‘a part of Sydney which has always represented to me what middle Australia is all about.’ Responding to the events at Cronulla, he would quickly deny that it was racism at work, adding: ‘I do not believe Australians are racist,’ and going on to propose that those who did believe such a thing lacked a cheerful disposition.

Over the subsequent three nights, there were retaliations. Hundreds of cars were smashed, people beaten and shops destroyed, as Cronulla and surrounding beachside suburbs were made unsafe for those whose belonging there had never before been threatened. One of the calls to retaliate declared:

Our parents came to this country and worked hard for their families. We helped build this country and now these racists want us out. [...] Time to show these people stuck in the 1950’s that times have changed. WE are the new Australia. They are just the white thieves who took land from the Aboriginals and their time is up.

 In the midst of this, the NSW Police Commissioner remarked that the Cronulla rally to ‘Take Our Beaches Back’ was a ‘legitimate protest’. It was, according to him, born of a ‘frustration’ with the failure of the police and the state to do their job, which is to say, to ensure the Australian border remained secure within Sydney. The Prime Minister insisted that the problem of ‘ethnic gangs’ – which he unequivocally denied those at Cronulla might be regarded as – should be left to ‘policy’, ie, the state. On the third day of rioting, the NSW Premier announced emergency laws to give police, among other measures, the power to ‘lockdown’ those beachside suburbs under threat. This was, he declared, a ‘war’ and the state would ‘not be found wanting in the use of force’. And so the task of the Cronulla pogrom was more smoothly accomplished by the police acting as border guards, refusing entry to the beaches to those who could not prove that they belonged there. The ‘lockdown’ laws, in summary, allow the state to remove entire suburbs from the ostensibly normal functioning of the law for periods of 48 hours. Among other things, and within the designated ‘lockdown’ zone, the laws remove the presumption of bail for riot and affray, allow for the area to be cordoned off to prevent vehicles and people from entering it, empower police to stop and search people and vehicles without warrant or the standard criterion of suspicion, and to seize cars and mobile phones for up to a week.

In some respects, this could be viewed as a sequel to the so-called ‘anti-terror’ laws; recast here as an explicit attempt to reterritorialise the ‘moving mêlée’ – as one journalist described those engaged in the retaliatory riots. Yet, just as the failures of border controls have prompted recourse to measures both militaristic and ferocious they have also reanimated the search for ‘social solutions’. If the culture industry and its disciples remain enthralled by a depoliticising understanding of ‘the beach’, there is no shortage of more conventional disciplinary approaches that, for instance, have found renewed impetus in psycho-sociological clichés: deviancy, crisis of masculinity, youth alcohol abuse and, not least but most comically, ‘ethnic gangs’ who listen to rap music and use mobile phones. All of these constructs do not simply deny the existence of racism. They practically deploy racism through the assumption that the problem is a failure of integration. In other words, they reiterate the classical sociological preoccupation with social or, more accurately, national cohesion. Here, having assumed the nation-state as a natural entity – often by obliquely rendering it as ‘community’ or ‘society’ – it is the appearance of divisions that are not expedient for and normalised by the very assembly of national unity which are registered as a problem to be solved. That such a perspective has been echoed by much of the Left, in their calls for a renewal of multiculturalism as a response to recent events, should in no way surprise, given that much of the Left continues to aim for representing the nation and its people. And, as it implicitly denounces both pogrom and retaliations alike as the abetting or cause of ‘racial disharmony’, this is ironically where the Left discloses the affective pull of its overwhelmingly Australian identification – an identity which is assumed to bestow rights universally and without exceptions that are legitimated through racism.

What is, however, remarkable is the extent to which multiculturalism continues to be idealised as a way of managing the exercise of ‘difference-in-unity’ that the nation-state at certain moments requires without, presumably, having to resort to either violence or criminalisation. Which is to say, it was precisely alongside the much-touted apex of multiculturalism as official state policy in the early 1990s that the policy of automatic and extrajudicial internment of undocumented boat arrivals was introduced. In that moment, internment camp sat comfortably alongside tributes to Australia’s diverse cultural mosaic, just as the most recent regime of border controls around the world were ushered in along with the ‘globalisation’ of trade and finance. For if multiculturalism was initially tendered as a better form of governance at the time of lengthy wildcat strikes by migrant workers in the early 1970s, this is because it offered an improved means of assimilating certain differences while criminalising those that did not align with the imperatives of national labour market formation. This is what the paradigmatic post-Fordist border has sought to realise: the filtering of antagonism into competition, difference into niche markets, and the recapitulation of an ostensible consensus over the nation as household firm vying for position in the world market. And it is on these questions that the part of the Left which retains some commitment to notions of class struggle has been either silent or expressed its bewilderment. Coming just days after the introduction of the ‘Workchoices’ policy (which principally seeks to restrict, if not entirely abolish, any remaining non-individuated work contracts), the inclination here has been to understand recent events as a distraction, much like racism – and indeed sexism – are routinely theorised as the diversions of an apparently otherwise unified class consciousness.

Yet there is no experience of labour in capitalism that occurs outside a relation to the border. This association does not arise simply because migration controls create legally-sanctioned segmentations within and between labour markets that, in turn, condition or ‘socialise’ the labouring circumstances of both immigrant and citizen. Nor does it occur only because, for instance, it is possible to show that the recent tendencies toward temporary residence permits and that of so-called ‘flexibilisation’ were both responses by employers and governments to a similarly coincident and prior exodus from the Fordist factories and the ‘Third World’ in the 1970s. Nor is it solely due to the fact that jurisdictions, currencies and the hierarchical links between them are manifest in every pay packet – although this is so obvious and therefore naturalised that it often needs emphasising.

While all of these are crucial in illustrating the significance of the border to the labouring experience, they are not quite sufficient to explaining the force of that relation, its acquiring a necessary disposition. To put this another way: the particular – which is to say, capitalist – nexus between labour and border comes about because the asymmetrical wage contract only acquires the semblance of a contract through the delineation of the figure of the foreigner. Put simply, without the foreigner, the notion and practice of the social (or wage) contract – as a voluntary agreement between more or less symmetrical agents – falls apart. There are three aspects worth considering here, and certainly in more detail: the conversion of the chance encounter into naturalised ‘origin’, the transformation of imperatives into individual choice, and the punctuated temporality of the contract which normatively distinguishes wage labour from slavery.

Firstly, capitalism acquires a ‘law-like’ character through the establishment of borders, whether those of nation-states or, more generally, enclosures. For while Marx’s ‘discovery’ of the surplus labour that lies behind the formally equivalent wage contract is more or less well known, it is the border that permits the chance historical ‘encounter between the man with money and free labourers’ to ‘take hold’ – as Marx noted, and Althusser would emphasise in his later writings.
 
Secondly, the contract functions as the conventional mark of capitalism’s distinction from feudalism, asserting that individuals have the power to organise their lives, against the pressures of inherited inequalities, if not strictly as a matter of will, then at the very least, as performativity. The contract is a theory of agency and self-possession. It formally asserts indeterminacy (or freedom) by explaining and rationalising the substance of any given contract as the result of a concordant symmetry. Consider here the Australian Government’s ‘Workchoices’ policy that aims to replace ‘collective’ wage rates and conditions in particular occupations with individual contracts – that is, it is an instrument which seeks to generalise the conditions of precariousness that have existed outside the perimeter of the post-WWII ‘settlement’ referred to earlier. Responding to charges that this amounted to the reintroduction of coercion, since refusing to sign an individual work contract would entail not having the means to live, the Prime Minister responded: ‘Everyone who wants a job will have one.’ For the Prime Minister, the existence of coercion does not refute the contractual nature of waged work; it merely obliges a reassertion of contract theory.
 
Let us, then, consider Rousseau’s argument that the ‘social compact’ requires ‘unanimous consent’ –  or, more specifically, that ‘no one, under any pretext whatsoever, can make any man a subject without his consent.’ While this is often read as a foundational democratic argument against slavery and involuntary submission, it is more accurately the democratic substitution of the figure of the ‘born-slave’ with that of the ‘foreigner-by-choice’. In this way, the existence of submission (or slavery) is redefined as the consequence of an individual’s choice to reside within borders in which they do not belong – and they do not belong because they do not agree to the contract. In the Social Contract, after positing the natural foundations of the nation state in voluntary agreement, Rousseau goes on to argue:

If then there are opponents when the social compact is made, their opposition does not invalidate the contract, but merely prevents them from being included in it. They are foreigners among citizens. When the state is instituted, residence constitutes consent; to dwell within its territory is to submit to the Sovereign.

Just as Rousseau’s perfect circle of democratic despotism cannot do without the ‘foreigner’, there is no semblance of the wage, as wage contract, without the border. This is the contingency of a specifically democratic capitalism, relating as it does to a certain axiom of money as universal equivalent and seemingly competent measure of all things, while preserving all the ambiguities through which repression, inequality, slavery and, not least, surplus labour-time are explained and stabilised. Given that there is no way in which someone might profit at the expense of another through an agreement that is indeed symmetrical, as the wage contract is asserted to be, racism (and sexism, which is never far away) prepares us for, distributes and rationalises asymmetry. The contractarian braces the contingent world of capitalist exploitation by ascribing it to individual authorship. Where this risks destabilisation, either by dissent or in the undeniable presence of inequality where all are born equal, the figure of the foreigner is put into service in the guise of the unpatriotic, the unassimilable and those deemed to be, for reasons of biology or ‘culture’, incapable of signing a contract, of the very capacity of individual authorship. It is the latter that most clearly emphasises the bond between exploitation and racism, between the surplus as understood by political economy and the extrinsic (the foreign) as conceived by demography.

Thirdly, while the punctuated duration of the wage contract customarily distinguishes wage labour from slavery, the ‘normal working day’ was always demographically and geopolitically rationed. Cronulla did not simply represent ‘middle Australia’, but also the ‘normal working day’. Seen from outside this limited perspective, borders have long operated as a form of detainment, beyond which the conventional (and perhaps simply Fordist) delineation between the time of life and that of work is suspended. In this sense, the distribution of racism (and sexism) is also the distribution of a particular temporality. Yet, today, the ‘regular’ tempo of work more closely approximates the temporality of slavery (and, not least, of housework), in that no firm distinction operates between the time of working and not working or, better: in the sense that unpaid labour time is laid bare as the condition of capital and the linear time of progress comes to a standstill.
 
The question then is, as it always was perhaps, how unpaid labour (or exploitation) is distributed, as well as whether it is counted or not. The Cronulla pogrom was as much about space, belonging and property as it was about relative advantage: about who is counted and who is detained, who might be said to possess one’s labour such that they might contract for its sale and who might be said to be a slave. Here, one might note the ways in which certain migrants are held up at the border, airport and detention centre, no less than the ways in which the banlieues have existed as a de facto space of internment. In this time of detainment, it is not labour (as something that might be disassociated and ‘sold’ by one’s self) that is stolen, but whole lives. It is not surprising, then, that the moving mêlée emerged here, as both description of a response to the Cronulla pogrom as well as apparition of chaos. Neither discernible as individuals nor enumerated as collective, with an emphasis on motion that is as spatial as it is temporal (appearing as quickly as it disappears), the moving mêlée had a whirlwind temporality that provisionally cut through the time of detainment even while it failed to escape it.

Not surprising, either, that the ‘lockdown’ came into being here, as a reconfiguration of the mechanisms of detainment. And, it did not take long for a ‘lockdown’ to be invoked a second time. On January 1st in the country town of Dubbo, after indigenous teenagers fought with police against their attempt to arrest suspected car thieves, the police (as with the lifeguards in Cronulla) came off second best, and a lockdown was subsequently put into effect. Nevertheless, given the aim of halting movement through a shifting definition of lawlessness and a mobile decree of emergency zones, it needs to be emphasised that the form of the ‘lockdown’ predates the monumental pretext of 9/11. In a more direct sense, the ‘lockdown’ echoes the (offshore) internment camps and the excision of territories from the ‘migration zone’ that have characterised post-1992 Australian migration policies – a model that has since been explored by UK and other European governments. Moreover, much like the state of emergency declared in France after the riots of the banlieues, the suspension of the putatively normal functioning of the law duplicates the colonial encounter in a metropolitan context. For these reasons, it would be a mistake to construe this resort to emergency laws, such as the ‘lockdown’, as a mark of the triumph of border policing or, more generally, as cause for pessimism. Such instances do not signal a decline in our fortunes so much as they suggest the potentiality of a world that has surmounted its division into ‘First’ and ‘Second’, openly struggling with and against all the senses in which ‘our’ fortunes are dependent upon the expropriation of ‘others’.

Angela Mitropoulos has been involved in xborder, and written on borders, class composition and migration, including ‘Precari-Us?’ (Mute) and, forthcoming, ‘Cutting Democracy’s Knot’ (co-authored with Brett Neilson, in CultureMachine), and ‘Migration, Recognition, Movement’ (Constituent Imagination, AK Press)

The term integration has been turned upside down. Once it was the demand for the white majority to integrate the racial other into ‘society’ by abolishing formal racism within the state and its institutions. Now, writes Matthew Hyland, the (culturally) racialised other is required to ‘integrate’ into the majority

At some point following the ‘riots’ late last year in France, that country’s interior minister and aspiring president Nicolas Sarkozy is reported to have threatened kicking out ‘those families who refused to integrate’. Regardless of whether he actually uttered it, the phrase exemplified a sleight of ideological hand that’s become all too familiar.[1] I mean the one where the terms of a question about what institutions do are inverted to make it sound like it’s about the behaviour or the character of single subjects. The point being, of course, to hold people retrospectively responsible for what has happened to them. The statement attributed to Sarkozy amounted to a proposal that the state should make use of its borders to distinguish which foreigners were adequately     : henceforth, those whom the interior ministry had not chosen to expel would by virtue of this be shown (provisionally) not to have ‘refused to integrate’. It never would have been announced in quite that way, but it was already de facto policy thanks to the Sarkozy-ordered emergency provision of fast-tracking for deportation any non-citizen arrested (note: not convicted) near the ‘disturbances’.

As well as showing the workings of a mechanism commonly used in the rhetorical production of false social problems, the story also drew attention to a remarkable upheaval in the usage of ‘integration’, a term that has lately become a key banality of racial politics.

The racial integration famously demanded and gradually obtained by the American Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and ‘60s had a strictly circumscribed meaning: the abolition of formal racial segregation in institutions such as electoral politics, schooling, public transport and local administration in general. Integration in this sense could have been imagined by no-one but its stubbornest opponents to imply the breakdown of the wider economy of racism. (That is the object of the older, bloodier and ongoing struggle of which the limited Civil Rights/integration victory should be seen as one important episode.) There can be no doubt, though, that at the moment when the term entered popular political vocabulary, the sense – i.e. the direction – of the imperative to ‘integrate’ was clear. It was obviously directed at a racial majority: self-constituted ‘white’ America was forced to suffer a change of circumstances not willed by it, and the agent of alteration was the racial other whose minority (in the sense of ‘childhood’: supposed incapacity for rational, effective exercise of power) was a myth essential to that of whiteness.[2] It’s also crucial that at this stage the meaning of ‘integration’ entailed logically that it be demanded not of individuals, however personally bigoted, but of institutions in a chain of responsibility ultimately leading up to the nation-state itself.[3]

Returning to the Europe of 2006, in which the Sarkozy-phantom cited above and countless others warn foreigners to integrate or leave, we find that the sense (i.e. direction) of the integration-imperative has been upended over the last 40 years. The command to integrate is now incessantly delivered to presumed ‘others’ in the name of a majority. This reversal implies that of the other essential characteristic of the earlier meaning: the imperative is now delivered by the state and its secondary agencies to single subjects. (It makes no difference, incidentally, if a multitude of loudmouthed freebooters joins in the admonishing. Whether they notice or not, every time they talk about ‘getting tough’ they’re identifying with the state and invoking its protection.)

What was a transitive verb (e.g. ‘the state must integrate the school’), then, becomes intransitive, or implicitly reflexive (‘the alien must integrate [herself]’). Integrate herself into what? Into ‘society’, ‘the community’, ‘democratic values’, etc. That such names which aspire to the universal are standard aliases for the nation state, as Angela Mitropoulos has observed, is spelled out clearly in this case, where the act of (self-)integration required by ‘society’ is defined only negatively, by the state action policing its omission.[4] Rephrased this way, the Sarkozy doctrine at least reminds us that lack of intelligible content in a command certainly does not mean it isn’t backed up by (police) force. Rather, the law’s content remains permanently provisional, to be revealed only retrospectively in each particular instance by the agency delivering the consequences of non-compliance.

There is a widely noted tendency for ‘culture’ to replace biological ‘race’ in British government discourse and the debate around it, with an ensuing confusion of ethnic, religious, linguistic and biological categories. In attempting to understand this phenomenon, it should be remembered that, while either ‘race’ or ‘culture’ may be projected onto someone in order to assign them to a group, only culture can then be attributed to the will of the presumed group members. Unlike race, they can be held answerable for it. This exposure to the blackmail of ‘responsibility’ makes culture a more useful category than race for a complex of formal and informal policies and public discourses revolving around a term like ‘integration’, which positively designates nothing less than (certain) subjects’ open-ended obligation to the state and its proxies.

How this works can be seen in almost any mainstream British political party statement or ‘serious’ media/think tank commentary on identity, migration, security, anti-sociality, etc. Between supporters and opponents of particular policy initiatives there reigns a remarkable consensus that (a) something called ‘we’ or ‘society’ exists, (b) its perpetuation is desirable, but (c) is threatened by the cultural self-marginalisation of certain subjects who (d) must therefore be made to change their behaviour. The only disagreement is about which particular outbreaks of alienation do or do not threaten ‘us’, and what combination of enticement, coercion and expulsion should be used to bring about the change desired.

Recently in Europe such language has mostly been directed at ‘Muslims’ (recast as a culture, and, even more absurdly, a unitary one), but there can be no doubt that it is ripe for wider application. By now the logical stitch-up has acquired a fairly regular rhetorical form. First a fact is invoked that lays claim to the utmost moral gravity (the diaspora of Oriental bombs in Western metropoli being the obvious but by no means the only example), followed by some observations on the dis-integration of cultural behaviour (preferably a fusion of anecdote and dislocated statistics, as in: ‘only x per cent of Muslims born here think of themselves as British, and in parts of town nobody speaks English’). The necessary causal relation between one set of phenomena and the other is presumed to be too obvious for statement, and the Expert moves straight on to consider what, in particular, should be done in order to induce self-identification with ‘society’ among culturally dis-integrated subjects. Only around the latter, almost technical question can there be any debate: all commentators solemnly and question-beggingly agree that failure to do something, i.e. to intervene in some way on this (cultural) territory, would be tantamount to accepting bombs, gang war, sweatshops or whatever other (material) social evil was cited in the first place.

In bourgeois democracies a degree of personal autonomy is generally imagined to come with submission to state power (i.e. acceptance of individuation for criminal liability and taxation purposes). But although the ingrate (as we shall henceforth call the dis-integrated subject, the culturally-profiled recipient of intervention) is already as much exposed to the law as anyone, her intimate subjectivity is regarded as public property pending a satisfactory performance of national identification. Private individuality must be earned through public subordination of other group attachments. Unlike anyone else, the ingrate is called on to demonstrate subjective commitment to ‘society’ through supplementary gestures beyond those specifically prescribed by law. Thus not only is she asked to adjust cultural practice to the preferences of an imagined majority, the ingrate is expected to assume responsibility for her already-existing subjection to the state, to will it retrospectively.

All this falls squarely into the mainstream of institutional racism in the post-formal-integration period, despite the recent downplaying of ‘race’ within some racist discourses. Whether spuriously classified by ‘race’ or ‘culture’, the same combinations of skin colour, geographical background, language and religion still systematically receive a gross disproportion of institutional invasions like criminal profiling, compulsory mental health treatment or confinement to the informal labour market. That is, the law is literally the same for everyone, but the ingrates have to do (or do without) more to avoid falling foul of its force. As has always been the case, the effect is the violent internal stratification of the wider working-and-policed class.

In the essay Under the Beach, the Barbed Wire (this issue, p.34) Angela Mitropoulos precisely diagnoses the role of such racism in the ‘free’ labour market. At the heart of classical social contract theory, and in particular the individual labour contract as conceived in classical economics and revived with eschatological vigour in recent years, lies the coercing of constrained subjects (or as Mitropoulos puts it, those on the losing side of an asymmetrical relation) into the formal, retrospective willing of their condition. Whether it is income that is ‘chosen’ over destitution or residence over statelessness, responsibility for the terms of the decision is assumed – or rather received – by the subject those terms are imposed on. Of particular importance here is the way the coercive power of the contracting regime (whether citizenship in general or employment in particular) depends on its border and the horror of the barely-subjective life beyond it:

Put simply, without the foreigner, the notion and practice of the social (or wage) contract – as a voluntary agreement between more or less symmetrical agents – falls apart.[5]

This is so because of the essential historical role of borders and jurisdictions in the elevation of private property into uniformly enforced law, but also because of accumulation’s dependence on a global division of labour, which in turn depends on national and supranational (e.g. EU, British Commonwealth) borders and all the secondary stratifications internal to them. In order that anyone should willingly contract a losing deal, what lies outside the arrangement must be kept conspicuously worse. Hence the fundamental role of the abject foreigner, the extra-legal alien, who has no power to contract anything but remains at the disposal of institutional and/or illegal arbiters of subsistence.[6] The irremediable foreigner’s legally-created ‘inability’ to contract is blamed, of course, on her innate racial, deep-seated cultural and/or plain moral incapacity. The usefulness of this figure of the alien lies in the fact that its condition can be extended provisionally to millions of partial or potential foreigners to the social/wage compact: all the ingrates from whom supplementary unwaged effort for the privilege of contracting is expected. The long-term benefit claimant, the ASBO-candidate and the non-compliant mental patient, for instance, along with the cultural foreigner who strives insufficiently to integrate, are made aware that in failing to adjust their subjectivity willingly to whatever terms are offered they run the risk of a kind of reverse assimilation, absorption into the abstract foreigner, whose incapacitating otherness supposedly threatens society’s integrity and is therefore perpetually exposed to pre-emptive policing and material dependence.

Supplementary contracts-you-can’t-refuse for the wilfully uncontracting and dis-integrated have become a popular institutional tool in Britain, used in welfare crackdowns, school discipline, mental health, public housing and the widening margins of ‘criminal justice’. The device’s relative normalisation is perhaps not surprising given the longer-term spread of conditions once clearly identified with the ‘foreign’ side of the border around the national/wage contract. As Mitropoulos writes, the wage contract customarily distinguishing wage labour from slavery ‘was always demographically and geopolitically rationed’, but with the unlimited interpenetration of labouring and unwaged temporalities, today’s ‘“regular” tempo of work more closely approximates the temporality of slavery (and, not least, of housework).’[7] The spectre of the absolutely incommensurable foreigner still mobilises aggressive cross-class national identification in some people and forces a desperate scramble to be counted on the right side of the border among many others, but those ‘on the inside’ are no longer usually distinguished and rewarded by a stable waged position with ‘life’-time separate from work. Visible and permanent success at ‘integrating’ tends to disappear along with the regular employment status that used to announce it. Meanwhile, provisional, ad hoc and personalised contracts or pre-contracts proliferate, requiring unreserved pledging of subjectivity to prevent their unilateral foreclosure. In this sense the ‘demographic rationing’ of forms-of-life and work is less simply demarcated than before, but it distributes privation and coercion more extensively than ever.

Of course the development of complex hierarchies of provisional ‘foreigners’ should on no account be mistaken for the ‘democratisation’ of anything, even of wretchedness. As the Sydney pogroms and the current projection of ‘terror’ onto culture in Europe suggest, the phenomenon is likely to entail more rather than less ideological deployment than before of the abstract foreigner and the threat to national-social integrity.[8] More fundamentally, nothing whatsoever has happened to alter the extreme racial concentration of exposure to (and, at the opposite pole, relative shelter from) particular forms of exploitation and material constraint. ‘Equal opportunities’-bound institutions such as private job markets or public police forces are instantly betrayed by any statistical breakdown of WHO stands WHERE in relation to them: the present-day demographics of their clientele reveals their shared origin in a directly racial organisation of work and slavery. The consciously articulated racist sentiment to which official antiracism restricts its reference (psychologising it even when calling it ‘institutional’) emerges almost as an epiphenomenon of these gross, long-standing material facts.[9]

In fact the extension and intricate subdivision of ingrate status will probably only provide new opportunities for those inclined to do so to invert responsibility for the worst effects, in best Malthusian fashion, attributing them to the subjective deficiency of the afflicted. (Obviously, the idea of ‘culture’ is particularly useful for explaining such mass outbreaks of personal moral pathology.) Thus, for example, following the Paris fighting, many right-wing bloggers (the qualification is probably redundant) and other commentators didn’t bother to deny the supplementary difficulty encountered by young ‘Africans’ and ‘Arabs’ of all educational levels in trying to find work. They simply blamed the candidates’ cultural eccentricity: they may or may not be technically competent, but they are unemployably unintegrated. A more complex but similar logic seems to run through a recent, highly publicised sociological work on the East End of London.[10] The book addresses inter-cultural hostility around perceived English-Bangladeshi competition over housing allocation. However, quantitative facts, i.e. the drastically reduced volume of council housing stock available due to the ‘right to buy’ policy and the lack of new building, are played down due to survey respondents’ apparent lack of interest in ‘the economy’. Instead, the interpretive focus is on ‘Bangladeshi claims on the welfare state, their rights and entitlements’, an alleged ‘encouraging of dependency’ among those ‘who had put nothing into the pot’,[11] which is attributed to a welfare system based on need rather than on a somewhat less concretely defined ‘national culture of responsibility, mutuality and solidarity.’[12] Thus the authors perform the neat trick of simultaneously displacing responsibility for racism onto the Bangladeshis, while, inasmuch as more of the final blame falls on the state which should have ignored their material need in favour of abstract ‘family’ and ‘reciprocity’, they are denied agency even in relation to what they are held responsible for.

The integration imperative can be said to traverse a polarity with the multicultural utopia of full, ‘economically active’ assimilation into the national first person plural at one extreme and at the other the abstraction of the socially pathogenic foreigner, who is unassimilable to the state and therefore subject to its unlimited force. The toxic foreigner is a fiction, but it is concretely embodied in the mechanisms whose existence it justifies: first the border enforcement and detention system itself, then all the other lockdown regimes that pullulate across the social body (entrapping ‘ethnic minorities’ disproportionately but not exclusively) from secure wards and special and ordinary prisons to dispersal areas and ASBOs. In the zone of permanent provisional administration between the poles of ‘diverse’ assimilation and hunted illegality, invocation of the Unassimilable (and therefore of its deadly institutional embodiment) functions as an implicit but punctual command to those whose admission to the ‘ownership society’ remains undecided, suspended or revocable.[13] Galvanised by rational fear, potential ingrates are expected to improvise gestures repudiating the abstract alien and distancing themselves from it, in order to keep its very real pursuers away. Exactly what is required is indecipherable, as the Thing to be repudiated has no concrete existence and therefore no particular attributes, but the penalties are real enough. This is the immediate, practical meaning of the doctrine that integration must be defined only negatively by the forces policing it, apparently expounded in veiled (so to speak) terms by Sarkozy. And it is in this way that the ingrate confronts in its most acute form a logical impossibility which operates throughout capitalism and its legal appendages, in that she is commanded to assume responsibility for her condition.

Backdated Epilogue

In mid-November 2005, in the immediate aftermath of the streetfighting, Sarkozy was interviewed by Denis Jeambar of right-wing French weekly L’Express.[14] The interviewer took the minister to task for his notorious reference to those fighting the police as racaille, a word usually though not altogether satisfactorily translated into English as ‘scum’. Unlike the recipients of the epithet and some self-proclaimed supporters on the liberal left, Jeambar had no problem with the insult as such. Instead he complained that Sarkozy had failed to declare anyone guilty: because the word racaille is used ‘every day’ in the banlieues in a collective sense, it is ineffectual against ‘individuals who have lost all sense of personal responsibility’. From this point, unsurprisingly, interviewer and interviewee went on amicably and earnestly to discuss ways of restoring guilt and personal responsibility in the ghetto, both as psychological ‘sense’ and juridical fact. Might they, however, inadvertently have called forth a new figure of non-integration to counterpose to that of unlimitedly liable, state-saturated ‘illegal’? From another point of view, is it possible without falling into the trap of uncritical riot-celebration to formulate the political question of how to draw on and develop strategically a refusal of impossible personal ‘responsibility’ so unyielding that it can only be insulted in collective terms?

 

 

[1] Neo-Habermasian sociologist Ulrich Beck thought he heard it at least, and he repeated it in The Guardian. Protracted searching yielded no further trace. But, as belaboured at length above, the trace is not the point here.

[2] A majority self-constituted precisely through active practices of exclusion, both formal and informal. The fluidity of the majority’s border and its constitution through these practices is attested to by the transitions-into-whiteness from outside it of immigrant groups such as the Irish, Jews and Southern Europeans in countries including the US and Australia. The cross-class Anglo-Celtic ‘Aussie’ compact described by Angela Mitropoulos in Under the Beach, the Barbed Wire in this issue of Mute, p.34, is an instructive example of this process.

[3] Related struggles – against endemic casual racist violence in the South, or the overwhelmingly racialised structure of labour exploitation and the ‘criminal justice’ complex – are also institutional, but ‘integration’ is in no way adequate to describe their stakes.

[4] Mitropoulos, ibid: ‘They practically deploy racism through the assumption that the problem is a failure of integration. In other words, they reiterate the classical sociological preoccupation with social or, more accurately, national cohesion. Here, having assumed the nation-state as a natural entity – often by obliquely rendering it as ‘community’ or ‘society’ – it is the appearance of divisions that are not expedient for and normalised by the very assembly of national unity which are registered as a problem to be solved.’

[5] Mitropoulos, ibid.

[6] A position today stereotypically inhabited by the ‘asylum seeker’ or the illegal ‘economic migrant’, but the same role in the formation and discipline of (contracting) ‘society’ has been occupied in the past by the barbarian, the savage, the slave etc. The mainstream Italian insult ‘extracomunitario’, where ‘community’ refers literally to the EU but also retains a ring of ‘community’ in the sense of village-like shared social identity, as in English, is indicative of the entwining of institutional fact and folk superstition in modern racist practice.

[7] Mitropoulos, ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] As in the ‘Stephen Lawrence Report’ by Sir William MacPherson of Cluny, which simultaneously introduced ‘institutional racism’ to institutional discourse and drained all particular meaning from the category, by making it refer to the amount of anomalous personal racism among an institution’s employees, rather than the racism – i.e. the racial distribution of material possibility – that its structure administers when functioning normally.

[10] Geoff Dench, Kate Gavron and Michael Young, The New East End: Kinship, Race and Conflict, Profile Books, 2006.

[11] Geoff Dench, promotional summary of The New East End: Kinship, Race and Conflict, in The Guardian, February 8 2006: http://society.guardian.co.uk/socialexclusion/story/0,,1704158,00.html

[12] The new East End: kinship, race and conflict, quoted in review by Jenny Bourne, IRR News, February 22 2006: http://www.irr.org.uk/2006/february/ha000021.html

[13] To use the perfectly apt term coined for George W. Bush’s re-election campaign (and echoed in mainstream British political discourse on housing in particular) for a national state tending towards a property qualification for full citizenship.

[14] http://www.lexpress.fr/info/societe/dossier/banlieue/dossier.asp?ida=435791

 

 

Matthew Hyland, a refiner of symptoms and founder of the Journal of Childish Psychology [www.c8.com/wolverine/], insists that there’s nothing wrong with observation that blindness wouldn’t improve

For decades the notion that race has any grounds in biology has been taboo. Ethnic and racial characteristics are cultural constructs, and science has tended to confirm this view. However, with the return of scientific racism in the 1990s (notoriously Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve which argued that black people are inherently intellectually inferior to whites), the gap between biology and culture is being put into question again. But does the notion of a continuum between biology and culture have to produce a racist essentialisation of cultural traits? Or can a non-racist evolutionary science help us tackle the return of scientific racism by engaging its claims head on? Or is science itself intrinsically racist? Marek Kohn and Luciana Parisi, two very different proponents of a critical engagement with scientific evolutionary theory, took up Mute’s invitation to discuss these issues

Mute: If scientific appeals to race as the basis for physical or cultural traits have been taboo since the end of World War II, is the multicultural notion of a hard break between biology and culture now itself in crisis and, if so, what does this mean? Are we regressing, returning to Victorian notions of racialised identity - cf The Bell Curve - or is there something progressive about a return to the notion of ongoing intercourse between culture and biology?

Marek Kohn: As time and controversies go by, I become ever more convinced that progress in understanding the human condition depends on the ability to synthesize biological and cultural ways of looking at humankind. We have an intellectual cold war instead of a constructive engagement. Both sides are looking the worse for it.

The contested ground extends far beyond race, but race remains the awful warning against mixing biology and culture. It might not be where you’d want to start on a re-integration of the two perspectives, but it’s the issue that needs to be addressed if the taboo is to be examined.

This entails engaging with hereditarian and racial claims on their own terms as well as in terms of their context. Pointing out that an idea is Victorian in heritage does not falsify it. And a Victorian context is not necessarily a misleading one. Marx recognised that Darwin had discovered a fundamental process of life, while observing ‘how Darwin rediscovers, among the beasts and plants, the society of England.’ Today’s hereditarians – the intellectual descendants not of Darwin but of his cousin Francis Galton – consider their claims to be independent of context. Those claims have to be examined within the framework of science as well as from outside.

Luciana Parisi: Although the crisis of multiculturalism may be thought as the crisis of the cultural relativism in definitions of difference – sexual as well as racial differences – it may be that a more subtle notion of crisis defining a limit point or transformation of such a notion points to the way multiculturalism is in the first place not without racism. As argued by Michel Foucault and recently by Giorgio Agamben and Antonio Negri (although through very distinct arguments), the biopolitics of control of species and populations necessarily operates by racism – the division and classification now operating less on the integrity of the organism and more on the integrity of genetic units.

In this context, multiculturalism, which has politically fought for the achievement of human rights, has at the same time indirectly acted for a state legalisation of Victorian forms of racism, since it has not questioned the biology of evolutionary science so as to reopen the question of how to account for material differences without predetermination. Through the lens of relativist culturalism it has rather avoided altogether an engagement with what materiality is.

Thus, rather than a hard break between biology and culture, since it has not challenged these givens in their own right, multiculturalism has used biological givens as a source of cultural constructions.

The crisis of multiculturalism therefore also points to a crisis of biopolitics based on racism. This means that rather than progressing or regressing we are facing the complexity of biopolitics, which has always dealt with the transformation of bios – organic life – into politics.

In this sense we cannot account for a linear progression or regression but only for the transformations of power that takes bios as its object of investment. The distinction between nature and culture entails not exclusively epistemological change but also more importantly, the ontological question of what is a human body and what counts as being under certain conditions? This is the question that multiculturalism had to face in an age of advanced bioinformatic capitalism where the distinction not only between populations of the same so-called species – humans – but between species (human, animal and machines) is put in crisis by molecular biology, and indirectly biotechnology, questioning the centrality of hereditary evolution in eukaryotic cells – based on the transmission of chromosomes or nucleic DNA – through an investment in bacterial and viral colonies that transversally connect plants, animals and humans, organic and inorganic matter.

MK: It seems we have to discuss bacteria before we can discuss race! But we seem to see them rather differently. The world of bacteria certainly looks very different to the worlds of other organisms. They don’t have proper species and their sexual arrangements are far less clearly defined. They stretch our ideas about life. But they don’t cast any doubt on the standard account of heredity or natural selection in our own species; nor does molecular biology. I’m not aware of any sense of crisis among biologists. Molecular biology has extended and largely confirmed pre-existing descriptions of the relationships between living organisms, so if anything its effect has been to consolidate rather than to challenge.

For ideological projects based on ideas about cultural diversity and equality, the role of biology is to affirm the invalidity of race as a biological concept, and thereby to discredit claims that innate mental characteristics vary between populations. This seems to be one area where science is invoked as a reliable source of authority, in contrast to the sceptical stance that is adopted in other contexts. Since the 1960s science has provided the required reassurance, and nowadays does so without being prompted when seeking to reassure the public about its activities, such as sequencing the human genome. Recently, however, this position has been challenged by authors arguing that race is biologically real after all, and that studying it may be beneficial in terms of public health as well as scientific understanding. So the basis of the belief that race is biologically meaningless is now being explicitly contested.

Whether this will cause any problems for multiculturalist positions remains to be seen. Their advocates can still pick out the authorities whose views fit their beliefs better. That will have the effect of strengthening the hereditarian camp, by failing to challenge it, and by feeding its self-perception that its adversaries lack intellectual integrity. If that state of affairs carries on, we certainly will end up with a crisis.

LP: The point that bacteria cannot be rigidly classified into species with a corresponding race and sex does not mean that the recent rethinking of the importance of bacteria – for example the theory of endosymbiosis[1] – and of the difference between eukaryotic and prokaryotic cells[2] does not contribute to questioning what biology is and how bacterial genetic variation does indeed affect the eukaryotic realm. If we want to discuss why biology is coming back to define difference it may not be sufficient to say that the old eugenic discourse is revitalised in current debates. It may be important to open biology and the notion of biological heredity to the networks of relation amongst genomes where the distinction between eukaryotic and prokaryotic DNA is in question. Here heredity is not just accounted for by chromosomes but also by mitochondrial DNA. Mitochondrial DNA lies outside the nucleic DNA and, according to Lynn Margulis among others, splits like bacteria. Indeed research on mitochodrial DNA does sustain the argument that eukaryotic cells are symbiotic assemblages of bacteria.

On the other hand, however, the fact that talking about race is no longer meaningless and that as you suggest there is some fundamental scientific truth about race may need more careful elaboration in the redefinition of biological race if we do not want to just attribute an essence or a trait to the complexity and nonlinearity of biological difference. I agree that it is important to contest the ideological silence about race, but we don’t need a re-essentialisation of biological difference to do it. The point for me is to consider the biopolitical organisation of life and see how such organisation aims to restrict the field of variation of biological difference into individual traits on a predetermined grid. Thus, biopolitics – appealing to science – works both to restrict biological difference to a set of possibilities – genes, traits, characteristics – and to open up the question of what counts as biological difference under certain circumstances.

MK: Sure, everybody has accepted that mitochondria (energy-generating structures within cells) were once free-living bacteria. But I’m not at all clear why this phenomenon, fundamentally important as it was, is significant for questions about variations between human populations. Mitochondria have a dozen genes, presumably devoted to their own replication; the chromosomes in the nucleus contain tens of thousands.

On race, one of the issues we need to address is that people arguing for its biological reality (and I think I should point out that I am not one of them; I am simply calling attention to their claims) might well say that their vision is not essentialist. Contemporary enthusiasts for racial science don’t claim that races are strictly bounded units that can be defined by a set of characters possessed by, and unique to, all their members. They say that races are ‘fuzzy sets’ whose boundaries aren’t clear, and that have plenty of overlap with other sets, but are nonetheless real. This view fits neatly with the claim that their vision has no policy implications: the only requirement is that individuals have the opportunity to fulfill the potential indicated by their IQ scores.

I’d be interested to hear how you would see this individualist position in terms of biopolitics. It’s an ideology which urges the state to get out of racial organisation – affirmative action is utterly anathema to it – and to let what it sees as natural capacities determine individual performance through market processes. It affirms that race is biologically real but socially meaningless.

LP: The point that I wished to highlight is that hereditary variation and the famous germline discussed by Weismann should be enlarged to mitochondrial transmission as well. Although such transmission involves a smaller quantity of genes, it does not mean that such quantity is less qualitatively important than nucleic DNA. Indeed, the understanding of junk DNA as useless has actually been questioned in molecular biology. The transmission capacities of these portions of a chromosome or genome’s DNA sequence for which no function has yet been identified are not at all known yet. The point is that genetic variations between populations do not only obey a tree logic of evolution (variation with descent) since genetic heredity occurs through parallel strings of DNA – nucleic, mitochondrial, but also transversally through the continual effects that bacterial populations and viruses (and retroviruses) have on eukaryotic DNA. Thus, the point is not that these amplified genomes can explain the distinction between populations but that they can question the separation between human and nonhuman populations in the first place. For me the important point is to engage with the materiality of difference without re-appealing to the essentialism of nature. Not the reduction to one code but the opening of the human so called species to populations of microbodies, to entire genomic networks that render the biological distinction between populations problematically ideological.

I see your point: the emphasis on fuzzy sets of genes does not preclude claims about race. This may be because such sets, although more flexibly combined and recombined, are still pre-defined unities. Thus rather than one individual fixed unit you have smaller individual yet mobile units. The point is that such a pluralist argument happens to be a more sophisticated essentialist argument, but is in the end very essentialist indeed. These claims are metaphysically and ontopolitically rooted in a logic of individuality – formed substance – that will always reduce the indeterminate materiality of the body to biological facts.

Biopolitics entails how power is already invested in the organisation of life, the action of forces on forces in nature, which produce certain material effects directly activating the body: the activation of the body in relation to sex – sexual reproduction – and race – skin colour – for example. I am not sure if you think that biopolitics is an ideology but for me it produces certain effects of power rather than representing certain interests or repressing certain ideas. However the operation of biopolitics is definitely twofold: on the one hand, it organises a field of equity – where all humans are equal and have equal rights – on the other, it su