Multicultural Controversies : Political Struggles, Cultural Consumerism and State Management 9781935790907, 9781934542446

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Multicultural Controversies

Multicultural Controversies Political Struggles, Cultural Consumerism and State Management

Imanol Galfarsoro

The Davies Group, Publishers Aurora, Colorado

Copyright © 2014, Imanol Galfarsoro All rights reserved. No part of the contents of this book may be reproduced, stored in an information retrieval system, or transcribed, in any form or by any means — electronic, digital, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise — without the express written consent of the publisher, and the holder of copyright. Submit all inquiries and requests to the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Galfarsoro, Imanol, 1960Multicultural controversies : political struggles, cultural consumerism and state management / Imanol Galfarsoro. pages cm Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-1-934542-44-6 (alk. paper) 1. Multiculturalism--Philosophy. 2. Multiculturalism--Political aspects. 3. Collective identity. I. Title. HM1271.G354 2014 305.8--dc23 2014015449

Printed in the United States of America Published 2008. The Davies Group, Publishers 1234567890

CONTENTS Acknowledgments Introduction

vii xv

Part I Multiculturalism as Struggle: Society Chapter 1 Culture is (not) ordinary Culture and community Double consciousness Structures of feeling Chapter 2 Hegemonic articulations Infinite dispersal & arbitrary closure Discourse and constitutive exteriors There is no society

1 5 6 10 16 21 22 27 31

Part II Multiculturalism as Consumption: Market Chapter 3 Others for sale Indifference to difference Ideological form of global capitalism Boutique multiculturalism Chapter 4 “It’s the economy, stupid!” Tolerance and respect Universal, particular, singular The market (and the) economy

37 41 42 46 51 57 58 61 65

Part III Multiculturalism as Management: State Chapter 5 Nation and Migration Border Theory DissemiNations Implicit assumptions Chapter 6 The State is death, long live the State! “Sophisticated” multiculturalism Post-nationalisms State of affairs

71 75 76 80 84 91 92 96 99

Conclusion Endnotes Works Cited Index

107 115 151 177

Acknowledgments I have the feeling that my books get written through me and that once they have got across me I feel empty and nothing is left. [ . . . ] That is, my work gets thought in me unbeknown to me. I never had, and still do not have, the perception of feeling my personal identity. I appear to myself as the place where something is going on, but there is no ‘I,’ no ‘me.’ Each of us is a kind of crossroads where things happen. The crossroads is purely passive, something happens there. A different thing equally valid happens elsewhere. There is no choice; it is just a matter of chance.

— Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1978

Albeit never in an overly apocalyptic way, conservative philosophers and politicians have accustomed us to all kinds of end games: the end of modernity, the end of ideology, the end of society, the end of history . . . It is no surprise then that conservative ideology should also be at the forefront of social trends when coming to proclaim the end of multiculturalism. This book began to be written some years ago while the three leaders of the three main State-powers in the European Union announced almost simultaneously the end of multiculturalism. I am referring to British Prime Minister David Cameron’s (2011) attack against “state multiculturalism” and his defense of a “more active, muscular liberalism”; I am also referring to German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s (2010) claim that multiculti politics in Germany had “failed, utterly failed”; and I am also referring to (the then) French president Nicholas Sarcozy who spent the best part of 2009 promoting a “great national debate on French identity.” Obviously, this book is not dedicated to the heads of the three major European nation-states always so keen to reduce the meaning of multiculturalism to the question of emigration and what is always narrativized as its epitome: religious fundamentalism. This book is rather dedicated to all of those who helped me to present a wider and more critical view of multiculturalism while pursuing my research work at the School of Sociology and Social Policy (University of Leeds). Thank you Salman Sayyid, Paul Taylor, Ian Law, Katy Sian and Kishore Budha.

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I also want to thank Brian Klug, Joseba Gabilondo, Mary Earnshaw, Santiago Zabala and James K. Davies for their encouragement and assistance. I cannot even begin to express my gratitude to the many friends and colleagues who have entered into dialogue and discussion with me and with my work and without whom I would have accomplished but a fraction of what I have done. I will not name any. To all of them, many thanks! A final heartfelt thank you to my family, my parents, brothers, sisters and relatives and obviously to my four children, Miren, Lawrence, Antton and Kattalin for the huge amount of cheering up that they have offered me along the way, to my wife Donna Lucy for her unending support and encouragement through thick and thin.

Introduction The key witness to the fact that our societies are obviously in-humane is nowadays the illegal proletarian alien: he is the mark, immanent to our situation, of the fact that there is only one world. Treating the proletarian alien as if he came from another world is the specific task of the “Ministry for National Identity,” which has its own police force (the “Border Police”). Stating, against such a State device, that any illegal worker comes from the same world as me and drawing the practical, egalitarian and militant consequences of this, is an example of provisional morality, a local orientation which is homogeneous to the communist hypothesis, within the global disorientation which only its reinstallation can ward off. — Alain Badiou, 2010

There is an obvious trend and interest in reducing the meaning of multiculturalism in order to address issues of emigration only. This is often carried through more or less frightening narratives of race, ethnicity and religious difference. A consequence of such reductionism is that the question of multiculturalism and (cultural) difference together with their main subjects and causes (present emigration certainly, but also past colonialism, for instance) fail to be seriously accounted for, and critically engaged with. In this book, while seeking to challenge representations of otherness understood as an abject object of contempt, the question of multiculturalism is addressed in a rather more expansive and all-encompassing manner. To do so this book is organized around three main dimensions of multiculturalism. Three rather lengthy extracts are instrumental to situate the notion of multiculturalism in the very parameters upon which this book bases the whole enquiry. From an explicitly stated defense of multiculturalism in its liberal forms Bhikhu Parekh (2006, 349) sustains the following: Multiculturalism is not a homogeneous body of thought. As a political movement it is just over thirty years old, and as a theoretical exploration of it only half as old. Unlike liberalism, it has neither

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| multicultural controversies founders nor canonical texts. It is also not so much a substantive political doctrine laying down political goals and institutional structures as a philosophical perspective drawing its inspiration from a variety of sources. In addition to the widely known liberal forms of multiculturalism, there are also its conservative, Marxist, socialist and even racist versions. European multiculturalism is quite different from the American, and both again from the Indian. Unlike the United States, European states have long seen themselves as nation states, demand a close relation between culture and state, are hospitable or hostile to different kinds of differences, and have built up a distinct discourse on multiculturalism. Some advocates of multiculturalism are relativists, some other universalists, yet others reject this tired and dubious dichotomy. Some again are individualists, some other communitarians, yet others straddle both. Just as liberals disagree about their basic values and challenge each other’s liberal credentials, so do multiculturalists. When a writer attacks multiculturalism, we need to be on our guard, for he is likely to homogenize its different forms, equate it with one particular strand of it, and end up misunderstanding those who do not fit his simplistic version of it.

From quite a different perspective to Parekh’s liberal multiculturalism, Barnor Hesse (1999, 1) offers another historical outlook and panoramic view of multiculturalism within the context of radical identity politics: Throughout the 1990s the concept of ‘multiculturalism’ entered the American and British lexicons of western cultural studies in various portentous ways. Previously it had been a vaguely western political ideal. Between the 1960s and 1980s the dominant vague sense of multiculturalism had been one which valorized the incidence of harmonious cultural differences in the social, particularly where this meant the decontestation of ‘race’ and ethnicity and their conflation with the individualist ethos of nationalist liberal-democracies. From the mid-1980s onwards, this distinctive transatlantic configuration became increasingly unsettled by ethnically marked and cross-culturally mobilized interrogations of the nation’s imagined communities. Whether inflected in celebratory or condemnatory idioms, the undulating, urban vernaculars of multiculturalism were gradually transformed into a critical concept. Multiculturalism had become a contested frame of reference for thinking about the quotidian

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cohesion of western civil societies uncertain about their national and ethnic futures.

In addition, Barnor Hesse (1999, ix) states that this framing of multiculturalism in contesting terms “bears the traces of an uneven British/American dialogue” and accounts for a ”rarely acknowledged progeny, Black British Cultural Studies.”1 Finally, in an attempt to resituate the multiculturalist debate in its social and economic context, Walter Benn Michaels (2008, 33) speaks of the market dimension of multiculturalism. This he does in a rather ironic yet informative way by specifically referring to the relationships between the labor market and multiculturalism as follows: One of the great discoveries of neoliberalism is that [racism, sexism, homophobia . . . ] are not very efficient sorting devices, economically speaking. If, for example, you are looking to promote someone as Head of Sales in your company and you are choosing between a straight white male and a black lesbian, and the latter is in fact a better salesperson than the former, racism, sexism and homophobia may tell you to choose the straight white male but capitalism tells you to go with the black lesbian. Which is to say that, even though some capitalists may be racist, sexist and homophobic, capitalism itself is not.

Multiculturalism appears thus to be a complex conceptual entity conveying several overlapping and contradictory meanings. Yet the intention of this book is not to dwell too long on building an in-depth genealogic account of multiculturalism as a concept. Like any other concept, multiculturalism is an empty signifier. That is to say: the meaning of the concept of multiculturalism is always open to contestation. As a concept, multiculturalism has been defined as an all-fitting portmanteau (Bhabha, 1998) and as a shorthand umbrella term (Kymlicka, 2009). In other words, multiculturalism is a convenient buzzword and the source of highly contested controversies (West, 1990). This is indeed echoed in academia as the tradition of liberal multiculturalism is conventionally studied, mainly albeit by no means only, in the realms of the social sciences and political theory. Meanwhile what is known as identity politics is linked to more radical traditions associated with cultural, gender and post-colonial studies. To all accounts, however, multiculturalism now constitutes an

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institutionalized discourse in the broad fields of the humanities and the social sciences (including political theory and philosophy, educational and media studies, cultural and social theory etc).2 As an intellectual project linked to concrete theoretical developments and academic explorations, discourses on multiculturalism are organised around a broad spectrum of legal, social, political, historical and ethical themes as well as technical and bureaucratic issues. As a practice, multiculturalism accounts nowadays for a wide repository of interdependent cultural, social, economical and institutional processes and dimensions where everybody participates in varying degrees and forms. Another key distinction that must be established is also between multiculturalism as such and the fact that all societies are multicultural nowadays. That is to say: on the one hand even the most traditional of possible ‘mono-cultural’ communities that may exist will still be ‘multicultural’; this is so to the extent that awareness exists of the various anthropological splits along the lines of gender, generation etc which make up such a community. On the other hand, ‘multiculturalism’ as such is understood, by and large, as a normative response to the ‘problem’ posed by cultural diversity and ‘minority’ groups. Yet only some nation-states, certainly not all, take on board such a problem through a variety of explicit policy making initiatives [Hall, 2000, 210–215; Parekh, 2000, 6]). As described by Parekh and Hesse, multiculturalism is a notion contested along a relatively classic political divide. In concrete political terms, unlike post-colonial and activist approaches to multiculturalism from below, the aims of liberal multiculturalism are clearly to frame and indeed to narrow-focus, as it were, the actual realm of multicultural policy intervention from above. In other words: on the one hand, activist and radical activist approaches to multiculturalism tend to articulate questions of identity politics in militant terms whereby ‘race’ and ethnicity are also related with gender issues as well as other struggles (pro-civil rights, anticolonial struggles, ecology . . . ) carried out by social movements, single issue groups, etc. Liberal multiculturalism, on the other hand, tends to associate multiculturalism solely with the management dimension of multicultural policy making. Will Kymlicka (2009), for instance, is rather clear in this respect. While praising liberal multiculturalism and stating that it “is still perceived as a high-risk venture in some Western counties” (21),

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effectively, he is far from embracing any risky adventure—which is misleadingly implied in the metaphor used for the title and subtitle of his book Multiculturalist Odyssey: navigating the new international politics of diversity. What he rather embraces is the ideology of liberal multiculturalism that had already become an officially sanctioned political reality from above both in Canada and Australia in the 1970s.3 Hesse, on the other hand, identifies what are known to be the main critical and/or radical approaches to multiculturalism from below, and he does so at both ends of the Anglo-Atlantic divide (anti-racist struggles in Britain, culture/sex wars in the United States). Hesse’s approach speaks thus of radical multiculturalism expanded in the USA and the UK as a rather more unofficial and parallel ideology through the 1980s and ’90s.4 In short, what is often referred to in this book as militant multiculturalism speaks of struggles for social and political recognition. These struggles are both specifically linked to ongoing anti-racist as well as feminist struggles for racial and gender equality as well as historically related to former civil disobedience, civil rights and anti-colonialist struggles. There is, secondly, a more visibly acknowledged as well as socially and politically ‘practical’ or indeed ‘technical’ approach to multiculturalism. As in the first case, the practice of this kind of management multiculturalism certainly involves all institutions of civil society: schools, universities, churches, media . . . but also the bureaucratic institutions of the state: judicial system, the army, the police, which all have vested interests in the administration, supervision and governance of intercultural relations. Then, thirdly, there is also the ubiquitous—albeit arguably seldom accounted for and often avoided—economic and consumerist dimension of what is named as market multiculturalism, and which forms an integral part of this book. Hence this threefold context of multiculturalism is accounted for by means of a specifically which as said, is organized into, and is to be presented in, three main sections already loosely headlined and conceptualized as follows: (1) Militant multiculturalism (activist/radical/critical) (2) Market multiculturalism (consumerist), and (3) Management multiculturalism (administrative, expert).

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Furthermore, a precise procedural framework is also established in a parallel manner, whereby, as a matter of emphasis,5 significant correspondences can be established between three contemporary moments hinging around two events that have acquired iconic status: (i) the fall of the Berlin Wall (November 9, 1989) and (ii) the Al-Qaeda attacks of September 9, 2001 (in United States shorthand respectively 11/9 and 9/11); three distinct but overlapping spheres of public activity encapsulated within the classical liberal model of social organization as well as in the Marxist notion of ‘social formation’6: (i) civil society, (ii) the field of the economy, and (iii) the state; and, three main intersected binaries through which culture is mainly understood: (i) dominant vs. subordinate and/or oppositional cultures, (ii) high/elitist vs. popular/ mass/ consumer cultures; and (iii) culture as ‘a whole way of life’ vs. culture as aesthetic creation (as in literary production and the arts). Finally, to this three-fold (historical, social and cultural) approach another ‘speculative’ line of enquiry is also added which remains central to the study of multiculturalism in this book. This key line of enquiry speaks of what is also referred to as the ‘paradox of universalism’ (Butler, Laclau, and Žižek, 2000) whereby ‘universalism’ is understood as both necessary but impossible in its relationships with the notion of ‘particularism.’7 Despite Parekh’s rejection of “this tired and dubious dichotomy,” the discussion regarding the relations between the universal and the particular is to remain prevalent throughout this enquiry. Hence, it is convenient to summarily introduce the kernel of this tension between the universal and the particular. One relevant example that illustrates the poignancy of this tension stems from Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (2001, xiii) who frame the terms of this key debate in such a way that their own position (p)arts company with a conception such as that of Habermas, for whom universality has a content of its own, independent of any hegemonic articulation. But it also avoids the other extreme— represented, perhaps, at its purest in the particularism of Lyotard[’s] conception of society as consisting in a plurality of incommensurable language games. The relevance of this debate spills over into specific concerns regarding this enquiry. This becomes apparent through another question, which Laclau (1996, 48) formulates in these terms: Is a pure culture of difference possible, a pure particularism that does away entirely with any kind of

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universal principle? To find answers to this question becomes a task in itself. Consequently, the discussion on the relations between universalism and particularism is present across many parallel debates taking place in this book. Over all, the enquiry developed in this book performs the function of displaying a large problem, and so offering clues for further reflection and collective action. In addition, this book is based on forms of social and cultural research in which the rigor intended cannot be mistaken for a sense of false neutrality.8 In this introduction, a preliminary, tentative point of departure has been set forward with which to advance in the study of broad issues related to the general topic of multiculturalism. To do so a threefold historical, socio-political and cultural descriptive model and analytical framework has been presented with which to approach the various dimensions of radical, consumerist and liberal multiculturalism. The task of the first section is to analyze what is understood as multiculturalism as struggle.

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Part I Multiculturalism as Struggle Society

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part 1 multiculturalism as struggle: society

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A main theme of part I, central also to the entire book, refers to the questions of subject formation and political subjectivity. The main argument is that the possibility of protecting oneself in the security of a unique/unified identity is limited. In this context, the focus on multiculturalism as struggle (militant/activist/radical multiculturalism) was (and still is) related to a broad definition of civil society and the public sphere. This moment in Western post‐ WWII political and intellectual history, particularly the last third of the twentieth century, accounts for a twofold activist and intellectual movement: the emergence/irruption of key pro‐civil rights, protest and social movements (‘second wave’ feminism, ecology etc) together with the uneven handling in the West of the process of de‐ colonisation in the Third World; and, the parallel emergence of various crucial paradigm shifts and/or breaks within the academic fields of the humanities and the social sciences, which by and large accompanied the new political developments and cultural and identity formations above. If anything, multiculturalism as struggle is linked to the struggle over the meaning of a particular word, notably: culture, the study of which together with other notions such as community, is brought into the core of chapter 1. The critical study of concepts such as culture and community also account for a specific intellectual and activist structure of feeling whereby the idea of double consciousness permits a move away from rooted (organic, homogenizing, elitist) cultural politics to routed understandings of a political culture, which is global and trans‐national: diaspora politics, exile identities, foreignness, migration . . . In chapter 2, the trans‐national understandings of cultural politics come together with ideas of multiculturalism as struggle. Multiculturalism here is linked to the formation of myriad political subjectivities and pluralized identity politics (gender, ethnicity, class, etc). This generates intrinsic theoretical problems. A main problem is that by privileging sheer particularism, diversity and pluralism the risk of infinite dispersal in political practice must be faced. In this context, notions such as arbitrary closure and unity‐in difference speak of modes of addressing this issue. Central to this chapter are also the notions of discourse and articulation and hegemony. By insisting on the idea that political meaning is always contingent and relational it will be shown how statements such as there is no society acquire different meanings in different contexts.

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Chapter 1

Culture is (Not) Ordinary

For Marxist cultural critic Raymond Williams (1976) culture was “one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language.” Although he never went on to say explicitly what the other one or two might possibly be, the concept of “community”—“that difficult word” (1976, 23)—could well fall into this category.1 The study of culture is central to any relevant discussion on multiculturalism. So too is the necessity of developing some working definitions of community. An overview of what such key words as culture and community stand for is the task of the first part of this chapter. Williams’ seminal approaches and insights into such concepts are presented both historically and in terms of their strategic uses within the context of studying multiculturalism. In addition, it is commonly argued that, in the context of an increasingly globalized world during the late twentieth century views on culture changed dramatically. In this way, traditional views of cultural authenticity (rooted, organic) and communal homogeneity (cohesion, unity) were confronted with the formation of trans-national, deterritorialized and heterogeneous cultures and communities (traveling cultures, diaspora communities). As a consequence, key authors (Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, James Clifford etc) and works are brought forward in the second part of this chapter. In doing so notions of diaspora, nomadicism, hybridity, foreignness and exilic consciousness are also linked to certain ideas of multiculturalism and radical identity politics organized around complex cross-articulations of gender, ethnicity, class, etc. Particularly relevant to this first part of the book, in general, and this chapter, in particular, are discussions structured around the topic of the formation and construction of a multiplicity of cultural identities and struggles for recognition from a variety of perspectives. In this context, cultural, postcolonial and subaltern studies, together with critical theory, are considered to be fundamental along a specific line and tradition of

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academic and intellectual engagement with, and commitment to radical cultural politics. Likewise, an initial mention is made to the new ways of studying culture and politics that emerged accordingly. Finally, as it will be shown next, Raymond Williams established a division between the extended and restricted definitions of culture. At the end of this chapter another key notion by Williams is presented, notably that of structure of feeling. This will also serve to put an argument forward, which is to be repeated in a variety of ways throughout the book, i.e., that the political discourses, ideals and utopias, as well as, the resulting desires (and fantasies) invested in multiculturalism at this time, had, like culture itself, some extended domains of intervention (geographically global and theoretically radical). With liberal multiculturalism, this domain of intervention has since been restricted and narrowed down to the managerial and/or administrative dimension of the nation-state. Culture and Community The notions of culture and community not only constitute a main object of study in disciplines such as anthropology, sociology and cultural studies; they are also central to any understanding of multiculturalism. As Raymond Williams put it in his books Keywords, (1976) and Culture (1981) culture is ordinary. Culture is ordinary in the sense that we all are endowed with culture, and it is not only for a selected elite. This is perhaps why, as we are all part of culture and as we all participate in culture, so we feel we have something to say and can have an opinion about culture. Yet, at the same time, it is also obvious that as an object of study, culture is a complicated word. The complexity or, more concretely, the ambivalence of culture as a concept becomes clear as, always according to Williams, the overall meaning of culture is organized and articulated around a twofold line. (1) First there are the notions and visions of culture that are related to the ‘whole way of life’ of a community, society or country. These account for an extended definition and understanding of culture, usually examined through the intellectual apparatus of knowledge provided in the humanities by the social sciences, particularly anthropology and sociology. Here, for instance, Bronislaw Malinowsky’s classic anthropological definition comes to mind. According to this definition

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“the essential fact of culture we live, experience and perceive scientifically is that humans organize themselves in lasting groups” (1944, see also 1931). More recently, Paul Willis’ definition also resonates with this approach, which sees culture as the very material stuff of our everyday lives, the bricks and mortar of our common understanding (1977). Culture in these extended views and definitions, is made of human customs, languages, representations, attitudes and ideas; it consists of both the material components and symbolic resources any organized social group inherits, uses and transmits. Simultaneously, however, as culture accounts for a continuous process it also transmutes. Hence it is fair to argue from the outset something that will become clearer later, namely that culture too is always in transit. (2) In addition to the understanding of culture as the process defining ‘normal’ and ‘ordinary’ daily life experience, culture as a concept also expresses another more restricted meaning. This narrow definition, as it were, limits culture to the realm of aesthetic creation, to the world of the fine arts and literature. This is an idea that has traditionally tended to place emphasis on the necessity of culture being nurtured by a ‘cultivated minority’ or expert cultural elite as well as privileging the idea of the individual artistic ‘genius.’ In Britain, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s position (1976 [1830]) comes to mind according to which, culture is the harmonious evolution of the qualities and capacities that our humanity displays. Likewise, Mathew Arnold’s enduring cosmopolitan canon and vision of culture (1965 [1869]) is memorable as he sees culture being made up of the best that has been shown and told. As a matter of fact, there is no problem whatsoever with these visions, definitions and attributes whereby acquiring the taste for culture (the fine arts, literature etc) amounts to acquainting ourselves with “the history of the human spirit”; there is no problem, that is to say, were it not for the fact that, some 70 years after Arnold and 100 years after Coleridge, Frank Raymond Leavis (1930) would unveil the very essence hiding behind such apparently pristine positions; namely that the discerning abilities of art and literature remain at all times in the hands of a very small minority (see also Leavis and Thompson, 1933). In this regard, it is no coincidence that for Matthew Arnold the fundamental struggle defining modernity was not as Marxism would have it, for example, a “class struggle” between rich and poor but a “class struggle” between the guardians of culture and the philistines.

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What is imperative here is taking into account the timing of most of these definitions. For in order to understand how culture as a gift of educated taste comes to be used as a notion mostly of containment, culture must also be linked to the efforts to redefine it in the face of the new conditions brought about by modernization throughout the nineteenth century. In a context of rapid industrialization and urbanization, it is important to notice that mass and popular culture were increasingly taking over the new (modern) societies emerging in the West. In turn, this new development was seen as a significant threat for those who defended the restricted, elitist understanding of culture. This threat did not stem only from the repetitive noises of the new industrial and mechanical reproduction of goods and commodities, which were perceived as challenging the high status of fine artistic delivery and the aura of individual works of art (Benjamin, 2008 [1936] 1973a/b). At the same time, the threat of modernization and another of its effects, the expansion of Western/European imperialism, were also a source of concern voiced in defense of the traditional or pre-modern ways of life both in Europe (ethnology, romanticism) as well as the development of a distinct anthropologic narrative of the good old noble native in the colonized world. There, along with the military campaigns and commercial enterprises associated with all colonial ventures, a surplus of subordinating orientalist discourses proliferated as a result of splitting (high) civilization from (low) culture. Considering all of the above, it is not difficult to understand why Raymond Williams thought culture to be a most complicated word in the English language. For Williams, in addition, the concept of “community”—much like culture—also fell into the category of being both very much taken for granted and difficult to define at the same time. The heart of the matter lies in the very slippery nature of “community” as a concept unable to encapsulate or capture the realities of ‘communal’ life in all its diversity. It is from this difficulty that idealized, operative (‘pragmatic’), taken for granted and un-problematized assumptions and definitions of community often follow. According to Williams community is a “binding” (suture) and an “indicative” (descriptive) word, which has been deployed in language for at least five hundred years. Like culture, Williams argues that community also carried a range of senses. It first came to denote actual

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groups (for example commoners) and to connote specific qualities of social relationship (as in communitas). Historically, community speaks of membership and identity in which interest and shared meanings were at issue. Then, as it happened to culture, with the advent of industrialization there is also a rupture in its usage: community is felt to be more immediate than society and by the nineteenth century, community is invoked as a way of theorizing modernity itself. Community—and its sister concepts of tradition and custom—stand in sharp contrast to the more abstract, instrumental, individualist and formal properties of state and society in the modern sense.2 The twentieth century, then, encountered a comparable shift in usage. Community is thus invoked as a way of discussing a particular style of politics distinct from the formal repertoires of national and local politics. Here, according to Williams, the reference is direct action, direct community participation and organization, and embraces, typically, a notion of working with and for “the people”: grassroots initiatives, social movements, etc. In this respect, the semantic complexities of community account for a tension between the “is” and the “ought,” the positive and the normative. The community can refer to what exists (often under threat or about to be lost) but also to what Williams calls “experiments,” that is, to more speculative forms of group living and to utopian alternatives. As a consequence, attempting to reach a conclusive and definitive understanding of what constitutes a community can be a self-defeating task; although as Williams (1976, 76) states: Community can be the warmly persuasive word to describe an existing set of relationships, or the warmly persuasive word to describe an alternative set of relationships. What is most important, perhaps, is that unlike all other terms of social organisation . . . it never seems to be used unfavourably, and never to be given any positive opposing or distinguishing term.

To summarize, what Williams shows is how the concept of community feeds from a long tradition of labeling and overlapping, even contradictory meanings. Community assumes a strong sense of locality (location) and togetherness, of tradition, true collective bonding and authenticity, of history and continuity, but also of voluntary association and common interest, purpose and potentiality. In addition, unlike

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other forms of social organization (e.g. the state) community seems to be used in favorable terms. However, this way of thinking of the communitarian or the communal through a general framework where notions of authenticity and homogeneity prevail must be confronted with its own limits. These limits are twofold: they first refer to the question of internal splits and divisions within a given ‘stable’ community. Secondly, they refer to the issues that arise from dealing with the question of globalization and the formation of de/re-territorialised and heterogeneous global diaspora communities, cultures and identities within the contemporary world system (Cohen, 1997, King (ed) 1998).

Double Consciousness Within the context of discussing multiculturalism, community as a notion can be used in practically all of its historical senses. These are divided along two main axes: 1/ communitas: tradition(al), custom, common good, etc, and 2/ commoners: grass root activity, social movements . . . As to culture, the anthropological, extended definitions of culture (which overlap with communitas) prevail over the restricted sense of culture as aesthetic production.3 Hence there is always a strategic dimension to defining culture and community. In terms of their use and utility for multiculturalist debates, this all-encompassing approach to such notions as community and culture already anticipates the following; namely that the complexities of community formation require quite an informed and contrasted perspective on culture. An informed perspective that avoids understanding the concept of community as referring to a homogeneous category of people within a culture sharing common interests and meanings; a contrasted perspective, which assumes instead the reality of divisions and variations in worldviews in spite or even because of a common geographic reference of origin; a critical perspective, as a consequence, that must look at the various tensions, representations and modes of cultural and social reproduction (traditions, customs . . . ) arising within the community. In this context, in order to formulate a more complete vision of culture and community within the confines of multicultural politics, it is always worth shifting the attention to a whole critical literature, which

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emerged in the late 1980s and the last decade of the twentieth century. This was a critical literature, which proliferated within the context of what came to be known as cultural studies, mostly, and functioned as a counterpoint to such views relying on un-problematized notions of organic communities, cultural authenticity and timeless belonging to a given geographical location. This was also a literature, through which concrete political desires were invested and articulated at the time in terms of relating community and culture to processes of traveling and transnational diaspora formation. Against traditional visions of rooted cultures and communities, seminal works of scholars, among many others, such as Stuart Hall on diaspora politics, Paul Gilroy on the Black Atlantic or James Clifford on traveling cultures contended that the formation of new routed cultures and communities across the world also brought about new possibilities of critical enquiry and research. Likewise, the works of Edward Said and Julia Kristeva on the split nature of exile and foreign experience were (and still are) instrumental to understand what, early in the twentieth century, W.E.B. DuBois (1989 [1904]) meant by double consciousness: It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

Stuart Hall’s depiction of what he understood and named as the new diaspora cultures (1993, 359) offers a first (theoretical) approach, which captures DuBois’ insight. Hall is critical of such views of culture and community understood as fundamentally stable and a-temporal. For Hall, facing the constraining visions and structures of the modern State, diaspora communities are not (and never will be) culturally unified along the lines of a straightforward, single identity membership. Instead, Stuart Hall claimed, the diaspora subject is the product of different and interrelated cultures and histories, and inhabits different “homes” at the same time. Diaspora cultures produce new subjects who must face the issue of modern identity, understood as always under construction, always open, complex and unfinished.

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In this sense, diaspora identity is both a burden and a gift. The second (this time practical) insight by Hall (362) is that the formation of such new diaspora cultures across the world brought about the possibility of studying new discourses of departure, resettlement and return4. This, in turn, required the (methodological) deployment of what Paul Gilroy (2003, 66) defined as “an explicitly transnational and inter-cultural perspective”; a point stated in his seminal The Black Atlantic, Modernity & Double-Consciousness (1993). Paul Gilroy defines the black Atlantic through a desire to transcend state/national identifications. This desire, which is also relevant to understanding the need of cultural criticism and political “interventionist” practice, calls for a critique of cultural insiderism (52). According to Gilroy, cultural insiderism defines the explanations of modernity developed in Western thought by means of which identity is ‘fixed’ through privileging nations (or camps) as the main container for cultural and political identification. This brings about “the problem of weighting the claims to national identity against other contrasting varieties of subjectivity and identification” (66). For Gilroy, the question of allegiances along national lines is not only a problem that can be found in standard hegemonic understandings of national identity; it is also found in subordinate re-articulations of counter-hegemonic political and cultural intervention. In this context, Gilroy’s overall political aim and ideal is to transcend “both the structures of the nation-state but also the constraints of ethnicity and national particularity” (66). This is why Gilroy’s position remains very critical of English cultural studies, as he put it, as well as the politics of the New Left that preceded it. For Gilroy, not only did the cultural politics of the English Left rely on “the statist modalities of Marxist analysis that view modes of material production and political domination as exclusively national entities” (52). At the same time, the New Left and early cultural studies were explicitly framed within the view or “dream of socialism in one country” (62). What this brought with it at a more implicit level was the fact that: [T]he quiet cultural nationalism [crypto-nationalism] which pervade[d] the work of some radical thinkers [was] more evasive but nonetheless potent for its intangible ubiquity (52).

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In addition to this critique that Gilroy directed against the fathers, as it were, of cultural studies (e.g., Raymond Williams, Edward P Thompson, Richard Hoggart) and the then emerging New Left, it is important to remember that his best-known and perhaps harshest criticism deals more particularly with the forms of ethnic absolutism he identifies within black communities themselves.5 It is in fact by setting himself against both ethnic and state-national absolutist temptations of fixing identity that Gilroy suggests taking “the Atlantic as one single, complex unit of analysis” (66) instead of locating any particular tradition within the confines of particular territorial boundaries. As a consequence, this approach also calls for the already alluded to deployment of “an explicitly transnational and intercultural perspective,’ (66) which seeks de-homogenising difference. This requires producing alternative readings of globalised modernity or modernization understood as a dynamic, fluid and nomadic process. For Gilroy the Atlantic accounts for “temporary experiences of exile, relocation and displacement” (65). These experiences of movement are not only crucial to the understanding of concrete black historical struggles (for emancipation from slavery, for political and social rights, for seeking an independent space); they are also crucial to understand modernity itself, a process which is not restricted to black experiences alone. Finally, Gilroy looks for a tradition that may better underpin the notion of the Atlantic through both the marginal politics of black nomadicism and emancipatory consciousness. He thus finds that W.E.B. Du Bois’ notions of double consciousness but also Richard Wright’s double motion reflect the extent to which peoples (black and otherwise) live in-between nations and nationalisms. This state of in-between-ness also speaks of the nomadicism inherent to the migrant, exile and diaspora experience of double consciousness. This Gilroy represents both metaphorically and literally, by focusing on the image of the ship, for according to Gilroy: The ship embod[ies] the Middle Passage between territories as epitomised by the Black Atlantic. The ship is the first of the novel chronotopes presupposed by my attempts to rethink modernity via the history of the black Atlantic and the African diaspora into the Western hemisphere (64).

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By speaking of the ship in this manner Gilroy also states specifically that he follows “the venturesome spirit proposed by James Clifford in his influential work on travelling culture.” As Gilroy points out, Clifford is known for his work on the topic of Traveling Cultures (1989, 1992, 1997). Yet if Gilroy focuses on the image of the ship, Clifford (1992, 105) invokes instead the image (chronotope) of the hotel as closely and especially intertwined with travel vocabularies and metaphors: The hotel epitomizes a specific way into complex histories of travelling cultures (and cultures of travel) in the late twenty century. The hotel is a place of transit, not of residence. It is both a “launching point for strange and wonderful voyages ( . . . ) a place of collection, juxtaposition and passionate encounter” and “somewhere you pass through, where the encounters are fleeting, arbitrary ( . . . ) as a station, airport terminal, hospital and so on” (96).

Clifford specifies that the concept of the hotel does not refer only to a simple description of a physical space; it also works as a research tool for interpretation. Although at the same time, this metaphor of the hotel as an organizing research-image is necessarily ambivalent: On the one hand it represents the moving and provisional nature of the traveling experience understood as a process; on the other hand, it allows looking to the past and recollect traces and vestiges of travel histories whereby class, gender and race relations of inequality and privilege become pervasive.6 What transpires here is that the object of traveling cultures is to rethink culture in terms of journey and movement while the subject of the traveling experience conveys the idea that the notions of mobility, fluidity, and process are more suitable than the notions of stability, solidity, and fixity in order to express the dynamic character of human cultural practice. Straightaway, these views collude with certain standard multicultural ideals; most notably those based on seeking frictionless harmonious co-existence among communities through the integration of the different other within the structures of a given nation-state or indeed host society. In this respect, what both (late) Palestinian exile and scholar Edward W. Said as well as France-based Romanian literary

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critic and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva add(ed) to the debate must also be clearly point out: the structures of nation-states and their corollary ideal of sustaining stable societies can hardly account for the various conflicting identities informing migrant and exilic experiences of fragmentation and withdrawal. According to Edward Said (1994, 36) the foreigner, the diaspora subject, or, more concretely, the exile lives in a state of inbetweenness (43), that is to say, “in a median state, neither completely at one with the new setting nor fully disencumbered of the old” (36). Said comes together here with Stuart Hall’s view in that they both disagree with the mistaken assumption that being exiled is to be totally separated and isolated from the place of origin. Yet when referring to the receiving end of the journey, Said qualifies slightly Hall’s overall optimistic diasporic proposition, for: [O]nce you leave your home, wherever you end up you cannot simply take up life and become just another citizen of the new place. Or if you do, there is a good deal of awkwardness involved in the effort, which scarcely seems worth it (45).

On this particular issue Edward Said thus comes closer to Julia Kristeva. Certainly Kristeva’s point of view is not very distant from Hall’s when she sustains that “the foreigner is lost in the kaleidoscope of his multiple identities,” (1988: 57). Yet as Kristeva theorizes Hall’s new diaspora subject through the image of the foreigner this has also its own specific implications; namely that foreignness is certainly related to the idea of inhabiting several identities (Hall) but this also implies (unlike in the case of many diaspora communities) that other languages must be learned; and, for Kristeva, this very process of negotiation and translation between languages becomes, inevitably, a constant source of estrangement—a source of disaffection, disenchantment, split and withdrawal eventually leading to the silence of the polyglot. Placing special emphasis on this particular aspect related to the linguistic problematic, Kristeva reminds us (48–49) that for the foreigner, once deprived of the attachment to the maternal tongue, the newly learned foreign languages remain altogether artificial languages, like algebra or solfeggio. As if in a hallucination, the verbal constructions of the foreigner roll on empty space, dislocated from his/her body and passions, and taken

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hostage by the mother tongue. According to Kristeva, the foreigner does not really know what (s)he says in the new language. His/her subconscious does not inhabit his/her thoughts and feelings. As a consequence, the language of the foreigner becomes one of an absolute formalism, of an exaggerated sophistication. This is why for Kristeva the voice of the foreigner rests on the single strength of his or her naked rhetoric or else it turns, as said, into silence; but not the kind of structural silence, which is imposed upon him/her from the outside and will be discussed later when dealing with the notion of subaltern silence. Instead, this silence of the foreigner refers back to an inner state of being. In a nutshell so far, by rethinking culture through traveling, diaspora and exile identities, certain naturalizing preconceptions conventionally associated with the concept of culture as an organic entity (cultivation etc) are definitely contested. As Raymond Williams himself informed us, culture is not a coherent and rooted organism that grows and lives in one place, territory, nation, etc, according to some pre-ordained or permanently ordered laws of nature. In this context, the limits of conventional approaches to multiculturalist integration will have to be drawn. Yet, at the same time, some over-optimistic visions and theories surrounding traveling, diaspora and exile identities will have to be critically addressed also in due time.7 Structures of Feeling Scholars such as Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, James Clifford or Edward Said, among many others, publicly and explicitly acknowledged the immense heuristic creativity of Raymond Williams’ critical work and capacity for reworking old concepts as well as generating new ones. On this account, Williams is also credited with the creation of another important notion, that, namely, of structures of feeling, which is most helpful in defining and framing concrete epochal and generational cultural moods. Williams brought to the fore the notion of structure of feeling in order to better capture the overall political and social coordinates of any given cultural and/or social formation. As Jenny Bourne Taylor points out (1997) Williams first used this concept8 to refer to the lived experience or the quality of life at a particular time and place. It is, Williams argued, “as firm and definite as ‘structure’ suggests, yet it operates in the most

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delicate and least tangible part of our activities.” In short, a structure of feeling is the culture of a particular historical moment, though in developing the concept, Williams wished to avoid idealist notions such as that of the “spirit of the age” (Zeitgeist.) Structure of feeling suggests, according to the same entry, a common set of perceptions and values shared by a particular generation, and is most clearly articulated in particular artistic forms and conventions.9 Hence each generation lives and produces its own structure of feeling. Williams’ seminal insights into such concepts as culture and structure of feeling can be extended further. Historically speaking, first of all, it can be safely argued that a whole intellectual structure of feeling emerged in the late 1950s and 1960s Britain, which has been conventionally credited with pioneering British (qua English) Cultural Studies. They were so credited because they offered a direct generational contestation against the elitist views of the previous generation, best epitomized in the works of Frank R. Leavis in the 1930s. This is why Williams will always place emphasis on another dimension of culture distinct from literature and the fine arts, namely education; recall also Richard Hoggart’s (1966, 1970 [1957]) concern with the low literacy of the working classes at the time of a further rise of American mass popular culture in the 1950s and ’60s. In such a context, adding to the key distinctions already alluded to between the restricted notion of culture as artistic/aesthetic production and the extended notion of culture understood as a whole way of life (or alternatively as a whole way of struggle, according to Edward P. Thompson—1966 [1963]), other distinctions become operative with Williams’ work, which aimed at breaking away from the rigidity of the dichotomy between high / elitist vs mass / popular / consumer culture. Furthermore, Williams must also be credited with another key distinction he established between the dominant, the emergent and the residual in culture, and which, in turn, opened the gates to what will invariably be conceptualized as oppositional, subordinate and subaltern cultures, countercultures and subcultures by the next generation of cultural studies scholars.10 Certainly, Williams’ decisive inroads into the various notions of, and distinctions regarding culture point to the emergence of yet another new potent intellectual structure of feeling in the 1970s and 1980s; a new generation of scholars (and activists) who will now reach out beyond

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the properly British realm of Marxist-leaning cultural studies into other realms in which cultural studies converge with other disciplines and area studies: feminist, post-structuralist, post-colonial, subaltern studies etc.11 While the processes (intellectual, academic, social . . . ) sketched above will be discussed in the next chapter, it is now time to summarise the main contents of this chapter. *** The primary focus of this first chapter was to present the notions of culture and ‘community.’ The cultural critique of Raymond Williams was of particular importance in this respect. Williams’ study of culture and also of the notion of community is relevant to any discussion on multicultural(ist) questions. In other words, Williams’ work is instrumental for the understanding of culture beyond previous definitions, which tended to define culture as homogeneous, organic and/or territorially rooted. By privileging instead the idea of culture as yet another heterogeneous, shifting and flexible site of contestation and negotiation, he also opened the way to the question of how different (alternative) cultural practices operate and compete among themselves. Radical cultural critique was also able to address more effectively the issue regarding the different approaches and ways through which conceptual boundaries (e.g.: culture/nature; culture/nurture; history/ myth; authentic/artificial) are maintained (and/or broken) according to specific strategic approaches of clear political intent. Beyond Williams, the notions of culture and community also constituted a specific source of intense critical scrutiny for an array of well-known academics (and activists) such as Hall, Gilroy or Said among others, who advocated their thesis from specific diasporic / exile subject positions. Because these are considered central to the overall multicultural debates, a critical bibliographic review has also been included with summary accounts of scholarly books and essays ordered according to a minimal narrative strategy further defining the contours of a particular structure of feeling around some general themes: border-crossing, diaspora, displacement, emigration, exile, foreignness, hybridization, heterogeneity, nomadicism, re-location, traveling cultures . . .

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This intellectual structure of feeling has finally been located in the emergence and posterior development of cultural studies in the Anglophone world. This must be understood not only as a key moment in apprehending contemporary cultural and social history critically. It is still central and of practical use nowadays for the purposes of understanding multiculturalism and identity politics in ways that will become clearer next.

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Chapter 2

Hegemonic Articulations

In chapter 1, an initial conceptual framework was built around the notions of culture and community upon some, now well-established, theoretical premises given by Raymond Williams and cultural studies. Simultaneously, a succinct literature review was presented on various radical structures of feeling mostly understood through the narratives of diaspora politics, nomadism and traveling cultures.1 The overall idea conveyed was one that in order to undermine notions of fixity and stability in culture human practices were better served by being represented through the concepts of process and movement. In chapter 2 mention is made first to the obvious risk that such mere emphasis on process and movement may actually become ineffective politically; and more so if a sense of infinite proliferation of unrestrained pluralization and open-ended difference is added to the mix of identity politics. This leads to an important theoretical point being discussed, in which in order to tackle the risk of political agency being dispersed ad infinitum the necessity of establishing contingent closures through discursive and/or hegemonic articulations is advocated. In order to further explain and clarify the meaning of these concepts, the second part of this chapter continues with a theoretical discussion on identity politics. This is mainly carried out through Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s neo-Gramscian approach to the formation of political identities and social subjectivities. Here the alluded-to notion of discourse or discursive articulation is crucial in order to convey the idea that nothing is fixed per se in any of the relations by social agents / actors taking place in society. The application of this theory of discourse takes more concrete shape in the final section of this chapter where two different (and opposed) meanings are studied of a legendary sentence: “There is no (such thing as) society.” First ‘There is no society’ refers to Laclau and Mouffe speaking of hegemonic relations. This can be done only in so far as society does not exist as an ultimately fixed or rational and intelligible

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system. If such was the case that ‘society exists’ in all its plenitude, say, it would then be impossible to find ways of re-articulating the space of the social in different ways. Then we have the better-known notion of ‘There is no society’ in terms of its ideological value for neoliberal (cultural) politics as particularly expressed by Thatcherism. The main purpose of this exercise is to equate Thatcherism with the hegemonic politics of (neo) liberalism by looking at the concrete problematic of race and ethnicity in Britain through Stuart Hall’s Gramscian critique, among others; that of the notoriously “anti-multiculturalist” moment of Thatcherism and the simultaneous rise of anti-racist politics in Britain. As to the historical background of this second chapter, it remains within the main contextual confines as chapter 1. While it speaks of the profound transformations that took place with the post-war provision of the welfare state, it refers also to the later emergence and configuration of what are known as post-industrial, post-revolutionary global network societies (Bell, 1973; Tourain, 1990; Castells, 2000). In other words, this chapter remains within the historical time-span prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In this respect, the study continues its task by both complementing some aspects left underdeveloped in the previous chapter as well as progressively contributing new material to the overall debate on multiculturalism, the key word of the whole exercise being: articulation. Infinite Dispersal and Arbitrary closure A main theme of chapter 1 revolved around how notions of fixity and solidity in culture and identity may be challenged and re-channeled, as it were, through more dynamic understandings of be(long)ing. From this critical position regarding cultural and social agency, a theoretical and practical point follows: the possibility of protecting oneself in the security of a unique and unified form of social-political subjectivity and/ or cultural identity is rather limited. In this context, the very process of identity formation must be understood as being shaped by historically given conditions (of domination and subordination). Likewise the formation of political subjectivity is the outcome of heterogeneous engagements and often disruptive entanglements with, and between, an array of dominant, subordinate, marginal, residual, emergent,

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subcultural (etc) representations of gender and sexuality, class, race and ethnicity, culture and language . . . The ensuing relationships between culture and identity, or political subjectivity and agency, must thus be theorized as complex and contradictory since different combinations come into play in different moments and locations, and degrees of engagement also differ. Hence the very impossibility also arises of giving unique universal answers to multiple but concrete questions such as: which components of identity are deep and which superficial? Which are central and which marginal? Which are community based and which are individual, private or public? How do these components of identity intersect, through antagonism and tension or through dialogic combinations? How do struggles for hegemony take place within the context of such diversified forms of political, social and cultural agency? How are the relationships between the concrete and the universal relevant to the particular of one’s own socially pluralized collective subjectivities or the singular of our own individual identity? At this moment in time, another major argument, particularly in Europe, also revolved around the process of critical engagement that a new intellectual and activist mood prompted in regards of ‘Marxist orthodoxy’ (historical determinism, economicist reductionism, class as unique revolutionary subject). This critical engagement with Marxism began much earlier (i.e., Frankfurt School’s claims in favour of the autonomy of culture) and culminated with the deconstructing and disrupting of both conventional notions built around (i) a unified, homogeneous and universalized Subject and (ii) the de-centering of the West and the challenging of dominant Eurocentric epistemologies (of which Marxism was also seen, in post-structuralist and post-colonial theory, as a mere radicalized counterculture). Yet, simultaneously, it also became clear that, in the intellectual and academic debates that took place within the wide terrain of critical theory and cultural studies, certainly not all that glitters is gold. Before engaging with the main political problematic stemming from an overly celebratory approach to open-ended pluralist identity politics, let us consider first a legitimate critical concern pitted against the travelling, diaspora and nomadic motive studied earlier. At the time, feminist scholar Janet Wolff (1992, 235) asked a very relevant question to a problem that still remains:

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How is it that metaphors of movement and mobility, often invoked in the context of radical projects of destabilizing discourses of power, can have conservative effects?

It seems only legitimate to think that, then as much as today, whatever remains of a possibility to develop coherent projects of social change could only benefit from participating in a critique of stasis. However, the issue once was, and still remains nowadays, that for a political critique to take place it must be also located somewhere. As Wolff continued: I think that destabilizing has to be situated, if the critic is not to selfdestruct in the process. The problem with terms like ‘nomad,’ ‘maps’ and ‘travel’ is that they are not usually located, and hence (and purposely) they suggest ungrounded and unbounded movement— since the whole point is to resist fixed selves / viewers / subjects. But the consequent suggestion of free and equal mobility is itself a deception, since we don’t all have the same access to the road.2

The problem and shortcoming with the traveling motive that became so fashionable at that time was this: it vastly contributed to the proliferation and dispersal of identity politics. Obviously, this was not only a problem inherent to discussions on traveling cultures and diaspora politics. It affected all areas of political practice (recall the legendary factionalism of the Left), and it was particularly acute also, albeit simultaneously enriching, in the house of difference (Teresa de Lauretis, 1987) of the global feminist movement.3 In regards to standard debates around the question of multicultural engagement, therefore, this question highlights a specific theoretical issue central to discussions on identity, culture and political agency. As already alluded to, an unavoidable theoretical struggle and argument within the specific context of identity politics was the following: one’s own subject position, cultural identity or social subjectivity should be understood and located in a way more complex than was habitual when politics around the notion of social class and the centrality of class agency were paramount. The willingness to foster theory and knowledge could not be underpinned any longer by attitudes and discourses led by a uniquely privileged collective social agent. To move forwards in any critical analysis the different permutations stemming from class, gender, nationality, religion

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and other identity formations had to be explored in depth. To deal with social and cultural conflict there was no unique main axis (class, national . . . struggle) able to articulate the different strings of domination and resistance taking place in contemporary fragmented societies. In short, radical identity politics was based upon the premise that social actors occupy a variety of subject positions all at the same time. As Chantal Mouffe (1988, 89–90) put it most clearly: Within every society, each social agent is inscribed in a multiplicity of social relations—not only social relations of production but also the social productions, among others, of sex, race, nationality, and vicinity. All these social relations determine positionalities or subject positions and every social agent is therefore the locus of many subject positions and cannot be reduced to only one.

Within the context of such debates, identity became to be seen as plural and changeable and hence what was understood to be the homogeneous and centered Cartesian subject of Western Eurocentrism came under a sustained attack. Simultaneously, the critique of any form of totalization became the norm, including those of Marxism but also, again, of feminism. For instance, Katharine A. MacKinnon (1988, 107) expressed clearly where the terms of the difficulty for an entente cordiale between feminism and Marxism had to be found: Both Marxism and feminism are theories of power and of its unequal distribution. They both provide accounts of how social arrangements of systematic disparity . . . are internally coherent and internally rational and pervasive yet unjust. Both theories are total theories. That is, they are both theories of the totality, of the whole thing. The problem of the relation between Marxism and feminism then becomes how both can then be true at the same time.

MacKinnon thus speaks here of both Marxism and feminism being total theories and the ensuing problematic arising also from both claiming being true at the same time. However, this theoretical paradox or contradiction, did (does) not prevent in practice that the totalizing narratives of class or gender oppression and struggle against capitalism and patriarchalism developed by Marxism and feminism end(ed) up overlapping frequently. In fact, the critical vocabularies of feminism

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and Marxism did not only intersect between themselves, albeit in very problematic ways; simultaneously, feminism established the same kind of problematic relationships with other areas of cultural and political theory and practice.4 In short, (post-)Marxism and feminism could be accused of both being total and essentialist theories and promoting the dispersal of political agency at the same time. The debate, nevertheless, is always relevant and remains acute in that a critique of totalizing (and essentialist) paradigms also brings about the issue of how to contain the opposite tendency towards the infinite dispersal of identity politics. Likewise this also reverts us to the question Ernesto Laclau (1996, 48) formulated at the introduction of this book as to knowing whether “a pure culture of difference (is) possible, a pure particularism that does away entirely with any kind of universal principle,” which by its own nature will tend toward establishing some form of totalizing and essentialist principle. Paul Gilroy also contributed to the debate. Whilst he was never a friend of the “well-policed borders of particularity” and “exceptionalism” anyway (1993, 6, 27), he also recognized elsewhere that some form of totalizing procedure must ensue in order to pursue “effective politics”; hence: A political understanding of identity and identification—emphatically not a reified identity politics—points to other more radical possibilities in which we can begin to imagine ways of reconciling the particular and the general. We can build upon the contribution of cultural studies to dispose of the idea that identity formation [ . . . ] is a chaotic process and can have no end. In this way, we may be able to make cultural identity a premise of political action rather than a substitute for it (1996, 48).

Gilroy’s line of argument (ways of reconciling the particular and the general, cultural identity as a premise for political action) followed Stuart Hall’s steps (1987) regarding the ineffectiveness of political activity stemming from cultural and social agency, theorized as infinitely dispersed in a chaotic process of identity formation with no end. According to Hall, the risks of constantly invoking identity politics in terms of the obvious ‘impossibility of (a full and fixed) identity’ (117) “may be philosophically insightful but it is not useful politically—the

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politics of infinite dispersal is not politics at all.” As a result, Hall called elsewhere (1990) for a strategic cut, for a (temporary) acceptance, in other words, of a more fixed (but only partial) identity that allowed political alliances and political action. Hall pointed out that theoretically and intellectually this is one way to go about the construction of politics around unity-in-difference. Put differently, the politics of unity-in-difference constitute a way to go about identity politics in such a way that it requires “not only to speak of languages of dispersal, but also the language of contingent closures of articulation.” This can be achieved by establishing “temporary and partial arbitrary closures of meaning” or by provisionally producing “temporary stabilizations of meaning.” With the creative articulation of the necessary arbitrary closures (S. Hall: 1987, 1992, Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay 1996) political subjectivity can be constituted through contingent yet stable communities of identification and articulation for specific political objectives and reasons. To sum up, the obvious risk that mere emphasis on pluralization and diversity poses is that it leads to an infinite proliferation and dispersal of identities, which then become ineffective politically. It is against such background that notions of ‘temporary stabilization,’ ‘arbitrary, contingent closure of articulation,’ ‘unity in difference,’ ‘etc, speak of the necessity of overcoming through political practice what have become philosophical contradictions of difficult, if not impossible theoretical solution. Likewise, Teresa de Lauretis’ conceptualization above of the house of difference of global feminism or Gayatri Spivak’s use of the notion strategic essentialism within the context of subaltern studies to be revisited later, speak of the same concerns in regards of pursuing effective politics in the various struggles for hegemony that different actors may be engaged in. Discourse and Constitutive Exteriors In their new introduction to a new edition (2001) of the seminal work Hegemony and Socialist Strategy [1985] Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe indicated how their approach is grounded in privileging the moment of political articulation through the central category of analysis borrowed from Gramsci. This category, obviously, is that of hegemony. They then (xi) also pointed to:

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[P]ost-stuctruralism [as] the terrain where we have found our main source of our theoretical reflection, and within the post-structuralist field, deconstruction and Lacanian theory have had a decisive importance in the formulation of our approach to hegemony

Through the notion of hegemonic articulation, the works of Laclau (alone, or together with Mouffe) further the possibility of placing an important methodological emphasis on the idea of discourse (and/or discursive articulation). As already pointed out, this notion of discourse or discursive articulation is equally crucial to conveying the idea that nothing is fixed in any of the relations by social actors that take place in society. As Laclau and Mouffe (90) state: The concept of discourse describes the ultimate non-fixity of anything existing in society and the social relations [and] is the terrain on which a concept of hegemony can be constructed.

Or as Mouffe (1988, 90) emphasized further: The subjectivity of a given social agent is always precariously and provisionally fixed, or, to use the Lacanian term, sutured at the intersection of various discourses.

Laclau and Mouffe’s perspective displays how, in principle, concepts are empty and open for anyone to fill them in with meaning (i.e.: hegemony is never established conclusively). To explain this with concrete examples Laclau and Mouffe speak of the genesis of the Western liberal-democratic articulation and the discourse of universal human rights that accompany the rise of modernity. Laclau and Mouffe explain how the various democratic revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries emerged as the outcome of contingent historical articulations between the values of democracy (rule of law, human rights), liberalism (individualism, freedom) and socialism (equality, solidarity). As they state: On the one side we have the liberal tradition constituted by the rule of law, the defence of human rights and the respect of individual liberty; on the other the democratic tradition whose main ideas are those of equality, identity between governing and governed and

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popular sovereignty. There is no necessary relation between those two distinct traditions but only a contingent historical articulation (Mouffe, 2000, 2–3).

The key moment of the beginnings of the democratic revolution can be found in the French Revolution [because] this break with the ancien régime, symbolized by the Declaration of the Rights of Man, would provide the discursive conditions which made it possible to propose the different forms of inequality as illegitimate and anti-natural, and thus make them equivalent as forms of oppression. Here lay the profound subversive power of the democratic discourse, which would allow the spread of equality and liberty into increasingly wider domains and therefore act as a fermenting agent upon the different forms of struggle against subordination. Many workers’ struggles in the nineteenth century constructed their demands discursively on the basis of struggles of political liberty [ . . . ] The socialist demands should therefore be seen as a moment internal to the democratic revolution [ . . . ] and the irradiation effects multiply in a growing variety of directions. (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985, 155–156) Laclau and Mouffe’s own “project of ‘radical and plural democracy’ [is] conceived as a new stage in the deepening of the ‘democratic revolution,’ as the extension of the democratic struggles for equality and liberty to a wider range of social relations” (1985, xv, see also Mouffe (ed) 1983). In this context, Mouffe (1988, 95) gives a good historical example relevant to our overall debate in this chapter: Consider the case of the suffragist movement, or, more generally the question of why is it that, although women’s subordination has existed for so long, only at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century did subordination give rise to a feminist movement. [ . . . ] With the democratic revolutions of the nineteenth century the assertion that “all men are equal” appears for the first time. Obviously, “men” is ambiguous because it refers to both men and women, so women found themselves contradictorily interpellated. As citizens women are equal, or at least interpellated as equal, but that equality is negated by their being women. [ . . . ] So [it is] the emergence of a section of equality [which then] allows women to extend the democratic revolution ( . . . ) The same analysis could be given for the emergence of the black liberation movement.

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This quote, in passing, complicates French Marxist Louis Althusser’s (1976 [1971], 1983) notion of interpellation5 and demonstrates a limit to Alain Badiou’s ethical position on human rights (which will discussed in the next chapter). According to Mouffe and Laclau, human rights should be understood as yet another empty signifier or a political sign, the signifier or container of which, as it were, is always open to be filled with new meanings precisely as the outcome of the struggles that take place over the meaning of such a political sign among different social actors. By being contradictorily interpellated, social actors occupy different subject positions while simultaneously trying to fix (albeit provisionally) the meaning of human rights, in this case, as they are struggled over through and around concrete issues and antagonisms. In this context, Laclau develops his theory of the political by making use of a linguistic ontology in which objectivities and identities are both constituted and constructed through differential and equivalential relations. The fact that objects and subjects are defined positionally within a system of differences follows the general de-substantialization (Hegel, 1979) of the external reference, which takes place with the linguistic turn in philosophy. Laclau’s theoretical framework is based on sustaining the simultaneous necessity and impossibility of the representation of social totality. However sought for, a final closure of the symbolic order (Lacan, 1956, 1993, 1997) operating in any society is impossible because identities are defined as differential positions—following here Saussure’s definition of the signifier as obtaining meaning only through difference with respect to other signifiers. Laclau must postulate for a limit that avoids pure dispersion and makes signification possible; very much like Stuart Hall did earlier when speaking of arbitrary closures to avoid the infinite dispersal of agency—although Laclau does so with a twist and a vengeance, as it were, which are central to understand what and how standard multicultural discourses often omit. According to Laclau, in order to define a limit that makes signification possible it is necessary to establish or to fix something (fictional), which is placed beyond the established limit. This is what he understands as the constitutive outside / exterior of the system. In Laclau’s ontology there are only pure differences, there are no positive/substantial identities. As a consequence, if the system is made up of particular differences such constitutive outside or exterior

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to the system must once again be a difference, and in order not to be confounded with internal differences, it must be an even more radical difference (without particular features: generic—e.g., the Muslim threat; the foreign migrant. There is no Society Following Laclau, political antagonism emerges from the tension generated by the simultaneous necessity and impossibility of closure of the social order: the impossibility of a fully constituted, fixed identity and the necessity of constructing partial identities. It is in this manner that the partiality of political identities configures the logic of the hegemonic articulation. The notions of hegemony and articulation highlighted here suggest the process whereby the part (the French particular, for instance) represents the whole (human universality, say). Likewise these notions are instrumental in establishing that meaning is never pre-given and it is precisely in this respect that not only the meaning of the word society is shaky but also that society never actually exists because ‘society’ constitutes an unstable order of a system of differences in which no meaning is fixed forever. For Laclau and Mouffe (1985, 254): Society as a sutured space [ . . . ] does not exist because if it did meaning would be fixed in a variety of ways. Society is an ultimate impossibility, an impossible object: and it exists only as the attempt to constitute that impossible order or object.

In the same vein as Laclau and Mouffe, Stuart Hall also shared the basic approach to discourse, hegemony and articulation. For instance, the case of Thatcherism in Britain that Hall analysed in depth offers a good example to illustrate how this neo-Gramscian conceptual framework can be put to work. It has been pointed out previously that the emergence of social movements and new forms of identity politics were the outcome of a pluralization of political subjectivities through the engagement with various post-WWII struggles and antagonisms. According to Mouffe (1988, 91–92) these arose in response to the increased state interventionist bureaucratization of the Keynesian model, the standardization of labour

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processes (Taylorism, Fordism) and the renewed commodification and homogenization of (mass—popular- mediated) culture. Most particularly in Britain, this post-WWII space articulated around the Keynesian social democratic consensus is challenged and ultimately hegemonized by an altogether different way of understanding that “there is no society.” Stuart Hall corroborates this analysis when he claims that Thatcher’s was an extensive work of ideological reconstruction (1988, 39–41), which functioned, obviously, as a synonym for a kind of ideological articulation needing first to dismantle the underlying post-War II consensus or settlement in British politics. According to Hall (36): Basically, a new kind of unwritten social contract emerged [in the 1940s] through which a bargain, a historic compromise, was struck between the different conflicting interests in society. The Right—marginalizing their more reactionary and free-market elements- settled for the welfare state, comprehensive education, the Keynesian management of economic policy, and the commitment to full employment as the terms of peaceful compromise between capital and labor. In return, the Left accepted to work broadly within the terms of a modified capitalism and within the Western bloc sphere of strategic influence.

According to Hall the historical sequence is as follows: first, in the immediate post-war period of ‘restoration’ the fundamental capitalist coordinates are ‘restored’ within the framework of US world hegemony. This US hegemony Hall describes as both the days of the dark 50s (46) but also as the affluent 50s (36) and is mainly led in Britain by Conservatism e.g., Harold Macmillan); then the important transformations in the British ‘society’ of the 1960s take place, which occur mostly through the working of Labour’s social democratic governments (notably Harold Wilson); but then finally, as Hall (37) continues, in the early 1970s: The social-democratic dominated consensus that had stabilized the British political scene up to that point began to evaporate. Both in the heartland of economic life—wages, production, strikes, industrial conflict, union militancy and so on—and in the emergent arenas of social life—crime, permissiveness, race, moral and social values, traditional social roles and mores—the society declined into crisis.

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As society declined into crisis it also entered into an era of contestations and new alarms and moral panics, which as Hall recalls, often go hand in hand with struggles for the formation of a new hegemonic moment; and this was, according to Hall “the moment of the New Right” (37), the moment, in other words, when Thatcherism finally emerged both as either radically different from older versions of conservatism or as a means to re-combine and rearticulate different elements of conservatism in a radically distinctive and original way (39). For Hall, the most novel aspect of Thatcherism was the very way in which it combined the new neo-liberal doctrines of the free-market and the free individual with some of the traditional Tory emphasis on the ‘organic’ community in order to reconstruct social life as a whole around the return of the old values: philosophies of tradition and respectability, patriarchalism (traditional role of women in the family), Englishness as the core of the nation (39). In this sense, a main argument by Laclau and Mouffe is also confirmed that, like anything else, adhesion to the nation as such does not necessarily belong to one particular political side but rather, at different moments and in different places, such adhesion is able to adapt to, and be inflected towards different political traditions and forces. Hence in the same way as Mouffe claims that “The progressive character of a struggle does not depend on its place of origin [ . . . ] but rather on its links to other struggles” (1988, 100), the very adhesion to the nation(al idea) can turn itself into a framework that enacts the possibility for more general emancipations (say: equality legislation etc); although the same cannot be said of the general character as well as the links / relationships with the idea of the nation around which the discourse of Thatcherism is articulated. It is indeed in this sense that the oft-repeated Thatcherite motto “There is no society” not only goes together with yet another paradoxical slogan (“Free market and strong State”6); but both these catchphrases also capture the contradictory structure of ideas around which Thatcherism organized, articulated and managed to cohere a semblance of ideological unity around the idea of Britishness and British national identity. As a consequence, following Laclau and Mouffe, a retrospective look at the rise, and above all, legacy of Thatcherism can be read in terms of a new contingent hegemonic articulation that takes place at a particular time (1980s) between neo-conservatism and neo-liberalism in the Anglophone world. This new historically contingent hegemonic

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articulation stems principally from a mixture of three main factors and processes: (a) a fundamental critique of, and challenge against the Keynesian welfare state (corporatism); (b) an emphasis on traditional values (family, nation) and (c) the promotion of individualism as the source of prosperity. Certainly, what is known as Thatcherism casts a long shadow extending beyond the confines of British politics as well as the very historic moment studied here.7 Yet through the main neo-Gramscian theoretical and conceptual framework presented previously by Laclau and Mouffe’s anti-foundationalist perspective (theory of empty signifiers, discourse articulation), and particularly through the works of Stuart Hall, the limits of Thatcherism’s own hegemonic articulation can be outlined also. In other words, the rise and dominance of neoliberalism as articulated mostly with traditionalist neo-conservatism and based on the ideology of the free market economy, individualism and the nation constitutes a source of various ambivalent effects. For instance, the famous individual vs. society debate can also speak of at least one resounding failure of Thatcherism since it is precisely the inescapable social context within which the so-called autonomous subject of liberalism evolves which must be clearly highlighted here.8 As Laclau himself would certainly put it ‘society does not exist as something pre-given’ but it certainly does exist as a field of forces whereas at the same time a symbolic order (Lacan) can also be theorized. A symbolic order is something that may not be able to be grasped physically and may even constitute an intangible structure or a kind of immaterial social repository of collected and projected beliefs which may not be fought over any longer (Gramscian common sense), but these beliefs (and values etc) have a concrete impact on the lives of any individual in any given society.9 In addition, the new logic of the market—and the emphasis on deregulation, privatization, reduction of the welfare state and decreased state intervention in the economy—is matched with the neoconservative emphasis on dominant culture and the use of the state for specific nationalist purposes (promotion of language, narrow sense of Britishness, etc). This, in turn, also exposes the cultural underbelly of neoliberalism, as it were, as the politics of nation, race and ethnicity also speak of the difficulties arising from post-WWII and post-colonial race relations in Britain.10 In this respect, British Conservative politics, in

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general, and Thatcherism, in particular, also serve, as a consequence, to centre the debate, as Barnor Hesse, does on the “ubiquitous [and] highly dubious yet conventional race-relations narrative of governance [which eclipses] Britain’s unresolved post-colonial condition” (11).11 *** Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s but also Stuart Hall’s post-Marxist reappraisal of Gramsci’s notion of hegemony contributes to giving critical theory a distinctively idiosyncratic shape, particularly with the notion of the social conceived as a discursive space open to a whole variety of potential articulations. Likewise, Laclau and Mouffe’s overall approach is also the product of debates that emerge within the Western political and intellectual Left in certain historical conditions: [Since] the early 80s [and then] the end of the Cold War and the disintegration of the Soviet system [ . . . ] the major debates which have absorbed the intellectual reflection of the Left have been those around the new social movements, multiculturalism, the globalization and deterritorialization of the economy and the ensemble of issues linked to the question of post-modernity (2001, vii).

Part II of this book engages with the debates on multiculturalism that arise after the fall of the Berlin wall.

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Part II Multiculturalism as Consumption The Market

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part 1 multiculturalism as struggle: society

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In Slavoj Žižek’s “Introduction: Lessons of the First Decade” explicit mention is made of the two main epochal markers, which are to determine much of what is discussed in the remaining of this book: Twelve years prior to 9/11, on November 9, 1989, the Berlin wall fell. This event seemed to announce the beginning of the “happy 90’s”: Francis Fukuyama’s utopia of the “end of history,” the belief that liberal democracy had, in principle, won out, that the advent of a global liberal community was hovering just around the corner, and that the obstacles to this Hollywood-style ending were merely empirical and contingent (local pockets of resistance whose leaders had not yet grasped that their time was up). September 11, in contrast, symbolized the end of the Clintonite period, and heralded an era in which new walls were seen emerging everywhere: between Israel and the West Bank, around the European Union, along the US-Mexico border, but also within nation states themselves (2009, 3).

While in historical terms the fall of the Berlin wall comes to announce the end of the previous Cold War era, this in-between 9/11 and 11/9 moment, as it were, which is to remain the main epochal reference for this Part II, is also linked to the ever growing process and unprecedented geographical spread of mass and consumer culture on a global scale (East Europe, China . . . ). As a result, an argument is put forward in this Part II that a clear link can be found between market capitalism and multiculturalism. This does not go unnoticed among acute cultural theorists and radical philosophers such as Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek, among others. In chapter 3, Badiou’s universal ethics of indifference to difference is presented first; then we continue with Žižek’s view that multiculturalism is the ideal ideological form of global multinational capitalist; then, finally, Stanley Fish’s notion of boutique multiculturalism is confronted with the division Will Kymlicka establishes between ‘social movement’ vs. ‘corporate’ multiculturalism. Multiculturalism as consumption is thus linked as well to the wellknown slogan by Clinton himself It’s the economy, stupid! This slogan is instrumental to chapter 4: it paradoxically serves to place emphasis again on the post-Marxist critique of economic determinism contesting the idea that the logic of the economy is absolutely independent and determinant of all other domains (society/culture, state . . . ). Laclau’s

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critique (the economy is also a discursive construct) of Žižek’s position (in favour of a return to political economy) is introduced within this context. In addition, the market is understood as both an abstract configuration (financial speculation, free/fair trade) as well as a concrete location (from the labour market and on to the marketplace, shopping malls, high streets). In regards of the market, therefore, multiculturalism acts on labour relations (equal opportunity, positive discrimination) and patterns of multicultural consumption also inform the interaction and exchange between crowds and goods (‘ethnic’ food/fusion music, etc). Illustrative to understand the logic of this entire section on market multiculturalism is the case of Thales of Miletus (around 624 BC). The story goes that he was first a merchant before being a philosopher. This would explain the double-edged meaning of the word “to speculate”: financially and philosophically, which is exactly how this Part II of the book is organized that now proceeds.

Chapter 3

Others For Sale

Multiculturalism means business! A central argument that runs through and is developed in this chapter accounts for a fundamental shift in emphasis from the pluralization of radical identity politics theorized earlier into a rather depoliticized normalization and commodification of multiculturalism. It is argued that the hegemonic idea of multiculturalism after the fall of the Berlin wall fits perfectly well within a market-led approach to the hedonistic consumption of the other’s culture. The notion of market multiculturalism relates to a specific moment whereby together with the celebratory discourses of the postmodern global village, the simultaneous loss of political urgency within the ranks of the Western intellectual and militant left is paramount. By refocusing the question of cultural autonomy and diversity through the understanding of multiculturalism as consumption, the consumption of cultural diversity is related both to the widening process of globalization as well as the decreasing urgency of political activism, which results from the collapse of really existing socialism. In the previous chapter, the theoretical tools provided by Ernesto Laclau, among others, have shown that the analysis of discourse and ideological critique originate from a position that is neither neutral nor located in a transcendent outside or exteriority but is rather intrinsic to the very symbolic order that structures society discursively. Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou also share with Laclau this sense of contingent undecidability (Jacques Derrida) against any idea of structural determination (or indeed any notion of ‘end of history, politics, ideology’ etc or inevitable civilizational wars as claimed by liberal and/or conservative thinkers such as Francis Fukuyama or Samuel P. Huntington).1 In addition, with his theory of hegemony and discursive articulation, Laclau has also enriched conceptually this enquiry on multiculturalism, which he embraced in its radical, struggling forms. Just as much as

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the work of Laclau was central in the previous chapter, both Badiou’s and Žižek’s insights are central to this chapter on at least one shared account: they both address the question of multiculturalism directly and capture the tight relationship existing between the ethical and political dimension informing the discourses of the other and the globalized, consumerist, market-driven dimension of multiculturalism. From a slightly different angle, Stanley Fish’s notion of boutique multiculturalism offers yet another compelling critique of the politics of difference, which is two-fold: On the one hand he looks at the, so to speak, selling difference orientation of market multiculturalism; on the other hand he speaks of the ultimate impossibility of multiculturalism keeping its inherent promise of respecting and/or tolerating the other’s difference. Indifference to différance To better frame Badiou’s position on multiculturalism the following bibliographic point ought to be made: despite the huge amount of critical studies and the obvious relevance they retained (and still retain) at the time of the fall of communism in wide sections of academia, if anything the two major global intellectual bestsellers of this postBerlin wall period stemmed from the liberal and conservative end of the political spectrum. The first was Francis Fukuyama’s End of History (1989, 1991), the main thesis of which is based on a then re-invigorated belief that there was no viable alternative to the liberal model of open parliamentary democracy and the free market economy; the second was Samuel P. Huntington’s direct response to Fukuyama in The Clash of Civilizations (1996) where Huntington advances a key argument for posterior accounts about globalization and multiculturalism; namely that he foresaw cultural qua religious identities to be the main source of global conflict in the post-Cold War world.2 Fukuyama’s work was further criticized from another angle by Jacques Derrida’s hauntology. Derrida’s response to Fukuyama’s end of history thesis was his own theory of specters that haunt history. By this he meant that the death of a particular social and political system (really existing socialism) does not entail the death of the thinker(s) and thought(s) that inspired it (Specters of Marx, 1994). Yet beyond his hauntology, it is rather Derrida’s ethical turn through his readings of Emmanuel Lévinas’ alterity of the other, which becomes relevant to

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the multicultural controversies, particularly in regards of Badiou’s own critical position on such ethics. Peter Dews (2004, 107) frames well this ethical turn within the temporal and spatial coordinates but also intellectual and/or epistemological structures of feeling, which coincide with the one elaborated in this enquiry: The recent history of cultural theory in the Anglophone world offers a salient example [of the new attitudes towards the value of ethics]. If one recalls the take-off of post-modern theory, back in the 1970s, there was an unmistakable sense of exhilaration in the air. The decentering of subjectivity, the unleashing of the forces textuality, corporeality and desire, the jettisoning of the critic’s role as guardian of values, were experienced as a liberation. Fashionable thinkers were thrilled to lose themselves in a maze of proliferating rhizomes, to ride the rollercoaster of the will-to-power. ( . . . ) The mood of the moment was ’jouissance now, pay later.’ Yet a decade or so later, questions of conscience and obligation, of recognition and respect, of justice and the law, once dismissed as the residue of an outdated humanism, have returned to occupy, if not center stage, then something pretty close to it. The so-called ‘ethical turn’ of deconstruction, the popularity of Emmanuel Levinas’s thought, the surge of interest amongst Lacanian theorists in such matters as ‘radical evil’ Pauline agapê and Kierkegaardian faith, are only the most obvious manifestations of this trend.3

According to Badiou, noticeable in this ethical turn is not only how it manifests itself in the discourses privileging the idea of the alterity of the other; but how it works on the standard discourse of human rights where, as it were, Evil always runs the show.4 In addition Badiou’s attack on the contemporary discourse of human rights is based on his belief that the abstract universalism of such discourse only offers well-meaning asseverations, which are powerless to alter the actual state of the world (Dews, 108). More importantly, it is the unambiguously ideological function of the discourse of human rights (and multiculturalism) that Badiou despises most. As Dews states (109): In the opening pages of Ethics Badiou expatiates vehemently on his conviction that the language of human rights, multiculturalism and respect for the alterity of the other are merely the means by which

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the white, affluent, West seeks to assure its own good conscience, whilst continuing to ravage and exploit the rest of the world. The discourse of human rights, Badiou asserts, not only debases human beings, treating them primarily as subjects of corporeal need. It splits the supposedly ‘universal Subject of rights’ between ‘the haggard animal exposed on our television screens,’ on the one hand, and the ‘sordid self-satisfaction’ of ‘the good-Man,’ the ‘white-Man’ on the other (E 14/13).

As a counterpoint, Dew himself is to call for a slight correction of Badiou’s position on human rights, which is open to an obvious criticism. Dew points to the fact that Badiou is not mistaken in suggesting that the discourse of human rights has ended up providing “crucial ideological cover for economic and cultural imperialism, not to mention outright military intervention.” In this respect “no one doubts the murderous hypocrisy with which the Western powers, led by the US, have invoked the language of human rights in recent years.” But, and this is an important “but,” according to Dew (109): ‘Human rights’ have also been a rallying call for many activists around the globe. In the form of the Helsinki Accords, they were a major focus for the East European opposition in the years leading to 1989. They were equally important tactically for Latin America’s struggle against the dictatorships, and continue to provide a vital political point of leverage for many indigenous populations, not to mention the Tibetans, the Burmese, the Palestinians. [Moreover] The United States, as is well known, continues to refuse recognition to the recently established International Criminal Court, fearful, no doubt, that members of its own armed forces, and perhaps of former administrations, could be amongst those arraigned before it.

Dew is quick to acknowledge that behind this approach hides “a defense of human rights discourse primarily in terms of its political utility” (109). That is to say, following Laclau’s and Mouffe’s earlier arguments, human rights constitute an empty signifier worth fighting for in order to avoid the original emancipatory meanings of universal human rights to be fully co-opted by dominant Western powers rather than by subordinate/subaltern peoples. In any case, Badiou’s critique against multiculturalism and/or “the bogus humanitarian ideology of victimage, otherness and ‘human

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rights’” rests on the fact that they refer to notions of ethics (and culture) that ultimately displace, if not dispose of politics as such, let alone of emancipatory politics; that is to say, of collective political projects articulated around recognized antagonisms. For Badiou, the blackmailing effect of this very moral terrorism shows itself at its best, precisely when the universal reality of the market economy meets with the ethics of alterity and the relativistic fantasies of both post-modern and liberal multiculturalism already alluded to.5 In short, if Badiou’s ethics leave no room for any innocent or pious approach to the discourses of good old human rights, likewise the aesthetics of multiculturalist difference do not find a better fortune. For Badiou multiculturalism wants to respond to the apparent complexity and multiplicity of being and “its great ideal is the peaceful coexistence of cultural, religious and national ‘communities,’ the refusal of ‘exclusion’” (2001, 26) but, all in all, the world is not as complex as we are often made to believe. If fact (2003, 9–13) our world is perfectly simple: On the one side, the rule of abstract homogenization imposed by capital has finally configured the world as a vast, extended market (world-market). On the other side, a culturalist and relativist ideology accompanies the ongoing process of fragmentation into myriad-closed identities. For Badiou, this affirmation of identity always refers back to language, race, religion or gender, and demands the respect and recognition of one’s own communitarian-cultural singularities. Yet the false universality of monetary abstraction and homogeneity has absolutely no difficulty in accommodating the kaleidoscope of communitarianisms—of women, homosexuals, the disabled, Arabs! In other words, both processes, i.e.: financial globalization, or the absolute sovereignty of capital’s empty universality and identitarian celebration of particularist differences, are perfectly intertwined: The two components of this articulated whole are in a relation of reciprocal maintenance and mirroring. According to Badiou, through the infinite combinations of predicative traits, communitarian identities are turned into advertising selling points—Black homosexuals, disabled Serbs, moderate Muslims, ecologist yuppies . . . It is in this way that, certainly, the empirical existence of differences cannot be denied as such: “there are differences. One can even maintain that there is nothing else” (2003, 98). In fact:

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Infinite alterity is quite simply what there is. Any experience at all is the infinite deployment of infinite differences. Even the apparently reflexive experience of myself is by no means the intuition of a unity but a labyrinth of differentiations, and Rimbaud was certainly not wrong when he said: ‘I am another.’ There are as many differences, say, between a Chinese peasant and a young Norwegian professional as between myself and anybody at all, including myself (2001, 25–26).

Hence, when according to Badiou (26) “Contemporary ethics kicks up a big fuss about ‘cultural’ differences: [W]hat we must recognize is that these differences hold no interest for thought, that they amount to nothing more than the infinite and self-evident multiplicity of humankind, [as obvious in the difference between me and my cousin from Lyon as it is between the Shi’ite ‘community’ of Irak and the fat cowboys of Texas].6

Badiou’s provocation here resides in his claim that what is required in this debate is indifference to difference: Only a truth is, as such, indifferent to differences. This is something we have always known, even if sophists of every age have always attempted to obscure its certainty: a truth is the same for all” (2001, 27). Yet, simultaneously, in this argument difference is not dispensed with altogether. Instead for the universal of truth itself to verify its own reality, universality must expose itself to all differences. Universality must show that differences are capable of welcoming the truth that traverses and transcends them (2003, 106). Ideological form of global capitalism Terry Eagleton (2003a, 248) summarized neatly the themes and tensions explored so far with regard to Alain Badiou: Denouncing the ideology of Man in deliberately old-fashioned, theoretically anti-humanist terms, [ . . . ] Badiou characterises the

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political situation today as ‘the unrestrained pursuit of self-interest, the disappearance or extreme fragility of emancipatory politics, the multiplication of ‘ethnic’ conflicts, and the universality of unbridled competition.’ If this is scarcely an original portrait, his assault on the conventional ethical response to this dispiriting condition is more striking. The ideology of human rights divides the world between helpless victims and self-satisfied benefactors, and implies a contempt for those on whose behalf it intervenes. The idiom of difference and otherness that accompanies it reflects a ‘tourist’s fascination’ for moral and cultural diversity; it accepts only those others who are ‘good’ others—which is to say, those like myself; which is to say, no other at all.

Žižek’s discourse on multiculturalism tends to agree almost entirely with Badiou’s critique of “the idiom of difference and otherness.” The task now is to bring forward this critique. According to Žižek (2006, 170–1) multiculturalism constitutes a form of identity politics defining a specific postmodernist cultural logic, which all too “simply designates the form of subjectivity that corresponds to late capitalism.”7 In Žižek’s words: The ideal form of ideology of global capitalism is multiculturalism, the attitude which, from a kind of empty global position, treats each local culture as the colonizer treats colonized people—as ‘natives’ whose mores are to be carefully studied and ‘respected.’ [ . . . ] In other words, multiculturalism is a disavowed, inverted, self-referential form of racism, a ‘racism with a distance’—it ‘respects’ the Other’s identity, conceiving of the other as a selfenclosed ‘authentic’ community towards which the multiculturalist maintains a distance made possible by his/her privileged universal position. Multiculturalism is a racism which empties its own position of all positive content [while] retain[ing] this position as the privileged empty point of universalism from which one is able to appreciate (and depreciate) other particular cultures properly— multiculturalist respect for the Other’s specificity is the very form of asserting one’s own superiority.

Following on from Žižek’s argument above, 8 multiculturalism does not conform to a recipe containing any kind of subversive potential for progressive, let alone radical identity politics. In other words, the

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ongoing and largely self-serving celebration of dispersed, fragmented, plural and hybrid or hyphenated identities does not conform with effective forms to challenge fundamentalism, to contest essentialism or to disrupt fixed identities. To add insult to injury, for Žižek the question is not only that the celebratory dimension of un-fixed diversity as predicated in (radical) multiculturalist identity politics is ineffective. It is rather the reasons for such lack of efficiency which are more damaging. Žižek’s position is set against the entire project of cultural studies which, with the celebrated ascendancy of contemporary post-structuralist, post-colonial, postMarxist and post-national discourses, rests, as shown in Part I, on the radical pluralization of cultural identities. For Žižek, this form of identity politics amounts “ultimately (to) fight(ing) a straw-man” (27). It amounts to fighting a straw-man because the empty point of universality to which Žižek alludes in clear reference to Laclau and Mouffe’s work (1985) is already occupied or filled by a particular content, which functions as a disavowed absent center (S. Žižek, 1999), as the unmarked political sign of a particular identity, as “the empty signifier, the norm, against which ‘difference’ (ethnicity) is measured” (S. Hall, 2000, 221).9 Most importantly, there is another reason why, according to Žižek, challenging, contesting or disrupting whatever forms of essentialist fundamentalism also amounts to fighting a straw-man; namely, the widespread claim on, and belief in multiculturalism’s ability to combat prejudice and intolerance rests ultimately on forms of engagement that fall under the rubric of what Žižek describes as politics without politics—a form of politics, that is to say, whose main purpose is to avoid confrontation and to dispense with the very central notion of antagonism. A form of politics, in short, that rests on the hope (and fantasy) of a frictionless, harmonious society based on negotiation and consensus.10 In this context not only liberal multiculturalism but even the alternative and participatory engagement of post-modern cultural critique and identity politics constitutes another variation of politics without politics (coffee without caffeine, beer without alcohol, sweeteners without sugar or milk without fat). As celebratory resistances are reduced to the pursuit of particular—ethnic, sexual, etc—lifestyles, the prospect of a truly radical politics is deprived of its malignant supplement. In other words, the sting of antagonism is substituted with a politics of identity

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pluralisation not involving a logic of struggle but a logic of resentment: the logic of acknowledged victimhood, “of proclaiming oneself a victim and expecting the dominant social Other to pay for the damage” (203). For Žižek, neither the calls for consensual, pragmatic and reformist improvements within the liberal-democratic framework, nor those (theoretical) positions that lean towards taking steps to favor an alternative participatory democracy from a more radical multicultural perspective, offer an appropriate account of the fundamental(ist) ‘threat’ (racial, religious, national) that is to be warned against. According to Žižek, addressing the issue in terms of: [M]ulticulturalist openness versus a new fundamentalism is a false dilemma: they are the two faces of today’s post-political universe’: ( . . . ) the consensual form of politics of our time, that is, which offers the appearance of a choice where essentially there is none (28).

Accordingly, the hope, first of all, that in such a fundamentally choice-less frame of reference, the ‘true’ liberal-democratic society will arise out of gradual reforms, which will eventually do away with all forms of intolerance and fundamentalism: [F]ails to account for their interconnection. It fails to account for the way the supposedly neutral (and normal) liberal-democratic framework produces fundamentalist closure as its inherent opposite (205).

In this context, which echoes Badiou’s predicament (recall how the two components of this articulated whole are in a relation of reciprocal maintenance and mirroring,) so-called post-modern cultural critique and identity politics also fit the bill of the current depoliticized notion of society: a post-ideological notion of society whereby every particular group is accounted for and has its specific status acknowledged through affirmative action or other measures destined to guarantee freedom from strife and avoid social unrest (for which, Žižek also points out, “an intricate police apparatus is required” (203). Effectively, post-modern identity politics is the end of politics proper. Likewise it is the product and outcome of globalization without universalism (204): a product, in other words, where the uncontested realm of the contemporary global market and new world order’s smooth

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transnational circulation and functioning of Capital can do without the properly political domain of universalizing one’s particular fate as representative of global injustice. What arises thus from the permissive coexistence of a multitude of ways of life within the global capitalist framework is de-politization, and it is pitted against such an end-of-ideology post-politics that Žižek insists on the necessity of overcoming the procedural framework of pluralist negotiation and consensual regulation, which remain at the base of such multicultural notions as ‘understanding’ and ‘respecting’ the Other. Instead, we should strive to: [O]pen the way for a return of the political proper, that is, the reassertion of the dimension of antagonism that, far from denying universality, is consubstantial with it (198).

In short, according to Žižek, what is required is to invent a new mode of re-politization that questions the undisputed reign of global Capital; to “invent forms of political practice that contain a dimension of universality beyond Capital” (27). Although, to reiterate, these forms of political practice do not imply that one should place too much emphasis on ‘transformative’ forms of ‘radical,’ ‘participatory’ and ‘alternative’ democracy as we understand them today; on forms of ‘engaged’ political practice, that is to say, in which “we are active in order to make sure that nothing will happen, that nothing will really change” (212). Actual change, if anything, can only stem not from proposing radical alternatives in an attempt at “keeping the dream alive” through standard modes of ‘committed’ participation in socio-ideological life. Žižek defines this form of participation as agonic antagonism, probably drawing from Chantal Mouffe (2002) who establishes a clear distinction between antagonism (struggle between enemies) and agonism (struggle between adversaries) and sides with the later conception of agonistic struggle in order to develop a strong sense of participative democracy. In contrast to such a position, for Žižek, the proper political gesture is not giving in to the urge to act, to avoid, in other words, the compulsion to do something in the times where the function of all imaginable forms of active and localized “resistance” and “subversion” is “to make the system run more smoothly.”

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Boutique Multiculturalism Žižek’s provocative thoughts constitute a full-scale attack on the waterline of the multicultural ship (dialogism, community engagement, critical participation . . . ). For Žižek, in fact, the truly difficult thing to do today is just the opposite, that is, to withdraw from activity.11 Another staunch critic of multiculturalism is Stanley Fish who, as it will be now shown enters into robust polemics with those who defend it, including Will Kymlicka (in this chapter) or Jürgen Habermas (in the next). In the influential article “Boutique multiculturalism, or why liberals are incapable of thinking about hate speech,” Stanley Fish (1997, 1) spoke of multiculturalism coming in at least two versions, boutique multiculturalism and strong multiculturalism. First of all, Boutique multiculturalism is the multiculturalism of ethnic restaurants, weekend festivals, and high profile flirtations with the other in the manner satirized by Tom Wolfe under the rubric of “radical chic” [1970]. Boutique multiculturalism is characterized by its superficial or cosmetic relationship to the objects of its affection. Boutique multiculturalists admire or appreciate or enjoy or sympathize with or (at the very least) “recognize the legitimacy of ” the traditions of cultures other than their own; but boutique multiculturalists will always stop short of approving other cultures at a point where some value at their center generates an act that offends against the canons of civilized decency as they have been either declared or assumed.

Unlike boutique multiculturalism, which ultimately places emphasis on a vacuous universalism over insisting on the tolerance of diversity proper, what Fish means by strong multiculturalism is the politics of difference, which is “strong because it values difference in and for itself rather than as a manifestation of something more basically constitutive.” In this respect, A strong multiculturalist will want to accord a deep respect to all cultures at their core, for he believes that each has the right to form its own identity and nourish its own sense of what is rational and humane. For the strong multiculturalist the first principle is not rationality or some other supracultural universal, but tolerance (3).

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The trouble with tolerance becoming the central principle is that a strong multiculturalist cannot be faithful to it. According to Fish this is so, [B]ecause sooner or later the culture whose core values you are tolerating will reveal itself to be intolerant at that same core; that is, the distinctiveness that marks it as unique and self-defining will resist the appeal of moderation or incorporation into a larger whole. Confronted with a demand that it surrender its viewpoint or enlarge it to include the practices of its natural enemies—other religions, other races, other genders, other classes—a beleaguered culture will fight back with everything from discriminatory legislation to violence (3).

First of all, therefore, the boutique multiculturalist does not take difference seriously because the signs of this difference (quaint clothing, ethnic music, curious table manners) while enigmatic and picturesque, belong nevertheless to the realm of a particular(ist) lifestyle—something, which “should not be allowed to overwhelm the substratum of rationality that makes us all brothers under the skin” (4). Secondly, beyond this fragile if not false universalism (Badiou, 2003) of liberal multiculturalism writ large, the problem with strong multiculturalism is that the general principle in favor of difference is taken so seriously that it then fails to do so when coming to the real nittygritty of allowing particular differences the possibility, even imperative of their full realization in a political program.12 In this context, it is important not to lose sight of the fact that the boutique multiculturalism Fish alludes to is not only related to open and often unsolvable ethical-political questions; at the same time, another fundamental factor of multiculturalism as a whole, strong multiculturalism included, is this; namely that it is intimately related, both in the West and elsewhere in the world, to the global dimension of capitalism (or the universalism of capital as both Badiou and Žižek have already pointed out) as well as the hegemonic rise of neo-liberal political economy. With regard to the consumerist, market dimension of multiculturalism, another critic who is well aware of both Stanley Fish’s as well as Badiou or Žižek’s rather derogatory approaches to the idea of cultural difference is Will Kymlicka. Kymlicka’s aim, in this context, is to

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broaden the meaning of multiculturalism away from its understanding as economic phenomenon mainly, or merely, linked to the consumption of cultural diversity: A number of terms have been developed to capture this phenomenon: critics have talked about ‘corporate multiculturalism,’ ‘consumerist multiculturalism’ ‘boutique multiculturalism,’ ‘neoliberal multiculturalism’ or ‘Benetton multiculturalism’ (after one of the multinational corporations that most successfully branded itself as a purveyor of commodified cultural diversity) (2009, 131) Kymlicka explicitly refuses to buy, so to speak rather appropriately, the argument exposed earlier by the likes of Badiou and Žižek for whom these two domains are related in such an intimate way that “indeed, according to Žižek, ‘the ideal form of this global capitalism is multiculturalism’” (129). According to Kymlicka, on the contrary, it is true that, on the one hand, “the emergence of multiculturalism in the past thirty to forty years more or less corresponds in time with the era of intense economic globalization, welfare state retrenchment, the privatization of public-owned companies and resources and the deregulation of the markets” (128). Yet, on the other hand, this view that sees multiculturalism as serving the purposes of global capitalism rests on a mistaken analysis. Although it is true that multiculturalism has been affected by these larger changes in the global political economy, it is no less true, that according to Kymlicka, “multiculturalism has quite different origins from neo-liberal economics.” In fact, The idea that multiculturalism emerged as a tool of global capitalism is simply not born out by the facts. [ . . . ] Multiculturalism was first introduced by left-liberal or social-democratic political parties, in response to popular mobilization by non-dominant groups. It was in short ‘social movement multiculturalism’ (129).

As Kymlicka continues, at the beginning the corporate and political forces that supported the re-structuring of the economy proposed by neo-liberal orthodoxy (Reagan / Thatcher . . . ) opposed multiculturalism in ways also explained at the end of the part I (no society, non-state intervention on the cultural marketplace, no subsidizing special interests, no supporting minority languages, etc). So in ways that have also been explained already, multiculturalism first emerged, according

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to Kymlicka, “from popular mobilization in the face of resistance from business elites and neo-liberal ideologies” (129); although as Kymlicka is keen to acknowledge, Over time, it is fair to say that the corporate world has made its peace with multiculturalism, and indeed that a distinct form of ‘corporate multiculturalism’ has emerged which interacts in complex ways with the earlier ‘social movement multiculturalism.’ (129)

All in all, it is worth remembering that Kymlicka further corroborates, indeed together with Fish, the broad areas of intervention under which this book is being organized (1/ Militant qua ‘social movement’ / activist / radical / strong multiculturalism; 2/ Market qua corporate / consumerist / boutique multiculturalism; 3/ Management qua liberal, mosaic multiculturalism). In addition, Kymlicka further explains how, over time, social movement and corporate multiculturalism have come to “draw on each other” in ways, it must be reasserted, not unlike those explicitly criticized earlier by Žižek and Badiou; notably when they established a straightforward relationship of both dependency and commonality between corporate transnational globalization and postmodern relativist identity politics. On the one hand, from the point of view of abstract neo-liberal economics put into concrete practice, so to speak, Kymlicka confirms that “the neo-liberal push for decentralization, for example, originally done in the name of economic efficiency, became more popular when it was linked to multiculturalist arguments about accommodating diversity” (129.) On the other hand, from the point of view of social movement multiculturalism, Kymlicka also confirms that one of the main tasks of pro-multiculturalist activism was always to try to convince the corporate world that, among other things, multiculturalism means business, a phrase purported to be popular in Canada and Australia in the 1980s and 90s (130) In other words, the point here is that in order “to reaffirm the underlying moral argument that multiculturalism extends and furthers the logic of human rights,” one should also prove, at the same time, that multiculturalism pays. In this respect the most common strategy would be to highlight the economic spin-offs from multiculturalism; and these would range from companies placing emphasis on ‘productive diversity’

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(which reaffirms the strong value of inter-cultural and linguistic skills in innovative corporate practices seeking to succeed in an increasingly globalized economy) to nations and cities ‘branding’ themselves as multicultural (ethnic cuisine, music, etc) in order to attract tourists, elite highly-skilled immigrants and foreign investment (130). Kymlicka faces here the obvious political impasse, and perhaps also moral dilemma, deriving from social movement multiculturalism being devoured, as it were, by corporate multiculturalism. It is then not surprising that he reacts against the ultimate validity of, and intentions behind the marketing ploys carried out by (transnational) corporate organizations seeking to market commodified forms of cultural difference as a consumer good. Himself a self-defined liberal multiculturalist,13 Kymlicka opts for taking a dignified position in favour of the original aims of multiculturalism. For, in fact, This [process of co-option] is hardly unique to multiculturalism. We see a similar dynamic with other movements for progressive social reform, including feminism and environmentalism. These movements initially emerged in the face of resistance from corporate elites and neo-liberal ideologues, but capitalism has attempted to recuperate these movements, and find ways to repackage them as brands and commodities. And so we see ongoing struggles by social movement activists to retain control over the agenda of these movements, to preserve their original reformist goals (131)

As can be noticed, it is worth remembering here that Kymlicka regards social movements such as feminism, or indeed environmentalism, as constituting separate realms from the multiculturalist struggles. This is a point he reinforces throughout his works since for Kymlicka the locus (and ultimate arbiter) of multicultural polity and citizenship is first the (liberal) state (1989, 1995) and then of late (2009), the institutions of the international community at a supra-state level. As a consequence, the aim of all multicultural leaning, as it were, liberal states and suprastate international institutions should be to secure the enforcement of universal—individual and collective, civic and political—human rights, albeit with a rather pronounced cultural twist. In this context, the realm of multicultural intervention proper, about which national states and international institutions (legal, political etc) should take (integrated) decisions, is three-fold: a/ minority, sub-state ‘ethno-

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cultural’ linguistic groups/nations; b/ indigenous populations or ‘first peoples/nations’; and c/ migrants.

*** To summarize: The notion of market multiculturalism accounts for the evidence of a clear shift from the moment of multiculturalism’s irruption as a political transformative tool to this new moment during which multiculturalism becomes normalized and cultural difference is depoliticized into consumerist patterns of hedonist and corporate commodification. In this chapter Badiou and Žižek have converged in their critique of both post-modern identity politics and liberal multiculturalism while they simultaneously articulate fundamental questions on the subject, truth and the sense of politics proper. The aim of Fish was to show the limits of multiculturalism writ large. Kymlicka’s on the contrary, to place emphasis on the virtues, regardless of multiculturalism’s obvious shortcomings. The aim of chapter 4 is to continue to speculate both philosophically and in terms of the economic determinations of multiculturalism. In doing so the relations between universalism and particularism will be explored further and so will the discussion on the notion of the market pursued further.

Chapter 4

It’s the Economy, Stupid!

Through the study of the notion of market multiculturalism, the entire part II of this book accounts for the modes by which multiculturalism is irretrievably linked to cultural consumption and the practice of monetary and financial speculation in various realms of the market economy, including the realms of ‘ethnic’ businesses. Also at the center of chapter 3 was the idea that philosophical and critical speculation can help unveiling this link. This was shown through the positions on multiculturalism of Alain Badiou, (false abstract universalism of capital, indifference to difference, politics of truth,), Slavoj Žižek (multiculturalism as ideological form of global and multinational capitalism, logic of resentment) and Stanley Fish (boutique and strong multiculturalism). Fish, in particular, dismissed all ‘strong’ progressive multiculturalist claims such as Will Kymlicka’s liberal approach. As will be shown in this chapter, Fish also directs his critique against Jürgen Habermas’ own mark of dialogic, universalist and rationalist approach to dealing with the Other, particularly in regards of such key notions as tolerance and respect. Habermas’ views and motivations behind his own post-national predicament (of which more in part III) serve then to extend his compensatory universalizing vision on intercultural relations to the domain of the political economy. Here the engagement with the universalism/particularism issue is placed at the center of our attention again, which leads, in turn to a discussion between Laclau and Žižek on the status of the economy, both as a concept and a ‘reality.’ Finally, it is also argued that although notions of ‘the market’ are usually understood through its narrow, abstract configuration (i.e., financial speculation, free / fair trade, etc), patterns of mass consumption also encompass notions of the market in concrete locations (marketplace, shopping mall, high streets, etc). The concept of ‘the market’ is thus

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apprehended through both these standard (narrow) as well as extended (and wider) meanings. Tolerance and respect Stanley Fish’s highly unfavorable evaluation of boutique multiculturalism is linked to the notion of market multiculturalism, which also accounts for the evidence of a new mood and moment in the study of multiculturalism as consumption.1 Yet, Terry Eagleton, for instance, refuses to accord Fish the status as a critical intellectual and indeed loses any sense of decorum as he embarks in the following angry tirade: That Stanley Fish is thought to be of the Left is, one of the minor symptoms of the mental decline of the United States [which] is perhaps not wholly unpredictable ( . . . ) in a nation so politically addled that ‘liberal’ can mean ‘state interventionist’ and ‘libertarianism’ letting the poor die in the streets.” Eagleton goes on to say that “what Fish has in fact done is to hijack an apparently radical epistemology for tamely conservative ends.” Then Eagleton claims that Fish remains “an old-style, free-booting captain of industry [ . . . ] a brash, noisy entrepreneur of the intellect who pushes his ideas in the conceptual marketplace with all the fervor [required to] fanc[y] himself as an intellectual boot-boy, the scourge of wimpish pluralists and Nancy-boy liberals.” In this sense, Fish the entrepreneurial academic remains much “unlike today’s corporate executive who has scrupulously acquired the rhetoric of consensus and multiculturalism” (2003a, 171).2 Yet, it is still worth reminding that Fish’s point regarding the question of multicultural difference was once at the center of a heated debate. Very much along the lines Slavoj Žižek adopts (as seen in the last chapter) Fish’s critique to the all-fitting multicultural process of respecting the different Other is that it only reverts to a kind of benign tolerance. As this tolerance is only addressed to external difference, ultimately it only accords a superficial respect to cultures other than one’s own. In other words, one’s own dominant culture is read as being not only the culture of civilized universalism, humans rights and rationality; as a direct and logical consequence, one’s own dominant culture is the very culture from which to decide when respect and tolerance can be accorded or otherwise withdrawn when the practices of the Other’s culture are found to be irrational or inhumane.

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This is why Fish was particularly sceptic with Amy Gutmann and Jürgen Habermas’s approaches (1994) to this precise question. In reference to Gutmann the question for her was how can we speak of mutually respectful cultures when the propensity is well known for members of one culture to vilify members of others? (14). Gutmann seemed to find a solution for what usually appears to be a thorny issue and indeed an intractable problem. She did so by establishing a distinction between differences one merely tolerates and differences one respects. A difference is respected when one can appreciate that such difference can be a candidate for serious moral debate; that is to say, when there is a relevant and serious point in the argument even though it does not agree with one’s own point or position. Yet for Gutmann some differences are asserted in such an irrational manner that debate is foreclosed. In these cases, while those differences must be tolerated in a free society, they also have to be denounced by all right-thinking persons. Here Gutmann was joined by Habermas who also declined to admit religious fundamentalists into his postnational constitutional state because they “claim exclusiveness for a privileged way of life” and are therefore unfit for entry into “a civilized debate . . . in which one party can recognize the other parties as co-combatants in the search for authentic truths”(16). The point Fish makes here against such positions is that . . . [O]f course, religious fundamentalists begin with the conclusion that the truths they hold are already authentic, but that is precisely why they will be denied entry to the ideal-speech seminar when it is convened. (I hear you knocking but you can’t come in.) Fundamentalists and hate speakers might seem an odd couple; what links them and makes them candidates for peremptory exclusion is a refusal to respect the boundaries between what one can and cannot say in the liberal public forum. (You can’t say kike and you can’t say God.) Although the enemies named by Gutmann and Habermas are different, they are dispatched in the same way, not by being defeated in combat, but by being declared ineligible before the fight begins. (8).

In “Liberalism, Religion and the Unity of Epistemology” Larry Alexander (1993, 782) adds to Fish’s argument by pointing out that “an actual dialogue test is, in effect, a requirement of unanimity.” That is,

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participants must already agree as to what is appropriate and what is not; but if agreement is supposedly the goal of the dialogue and if it is made a requirement for entry (in the manner of Gutmann and Habermas) the goal has been reached in advance by rigging the contest. Success is then assured, but it is empty because impediments to it have been exiled in advance, even though they surely exist in the world. In other words, the key notion to sustain this western, scientist, universalist, rational approach to dialogue between the different (which are ultimately the same—Badiou) is precisely “reason.” For Gutmann, Habermas and also for Kymlicka earlier, “reason” works as a valid context-free standard—abstract, universal, transhistorical—able to cross cultural boundaries and being recognized by all sections of the population in all cultures (except, one should conclude, those who are irrational and fundamentalist). According to Fish, “reasons of the kind liberals recognize are precisely what the members of many so-called illiberal cultures reject. The application of “reason” in an effort to persuade is not the opposite of imposition but a version of it” (4). In this respect, it could also be that the very notion of tolerance that strong multiculturalism adheres to is vitiated right from the start. For tolerance not only constitutes itself as a tokenistic gesture of good will, at best3; in addition, while respect, for instance, could be said to be established between equals, tolerance remains a vertical concept, typical of a stance that believes itself to be superior—a stance entitled to mark out the boundaries of what is tolerable and thus impose its views of what is permissible on the tolerated. Although according to Fish, not even this distinction between vertical tolerance and horizontal respect, as it were, does the trick: In the end, the distinction between what is to be respected and what is tolerated turns out to be a device for elevating the decorum of academic dinner parties to the status of discourse universals while consigning alternate decorums to the dustbin of the hopelessly vulgar (6).

To sum up, for Stanley Fish, civilized boutique multiculturalists must necessarily confront the limits of their ornamental tolerance of, and shallow affiliation with, the ethnic recipient of their fondness. This

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is how, out of this confrontation/realization, in the face of the particular other it is universalism, which also becomes their last line of defence; a universal identity, in other words, that ultimately prevents a boutique multiculturalist taking the core values of the cultures he tolerates seriously.4 Universal, particular, singular Habermas’ communicative theory is key to debates around liberal multiculturalism’s calls to the dialogic understanding of the Other, etc. The limits of Habermas’s overall positions on multiculturalism are twofold. These limits are not only related to the already alluded-to predicament for consensus-seeking dialogic negotiation. In addition Habermas’s position on national identity and how his notion of Constitutional Patriotism impinges upon the respective roles assigned to civil society and the State will also come under attack—as it will be shown in the next section.5 For the time being, a main criticism that Habermas must face has to do with his overall philosophy of language. Habermas’ dialogic approach is considered to be far too ‘angelically metaphysical’ as it were, since his central objective is to discern how to establish forms of mutual understanding between opposite parts via non-forced and hence voluntary agreement and consensus. In the opposite side, it is worth mentioning here the ‘diabolic’ nature of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics. Gadamer points out how Habermas’ approach relies on a vision of reality that is external to language. Recall his approach to universalism, which also relies on an external quasi-transcendental view of an abstract entity devoid of any particular content. Yet against Habermas, in the same way that universalism can only be if and when appropriated by some particular content, so does Gadamer contend that there is no way of addressing any social problematic as if it was external to, or could exist outside language itself: “Reality does not occur on the back of language [ . . . ] reality occurs within language” (1976, 35). In regards to Habermas and the relationships between universalism and particularism, it is worth recalling the concrete terms of this key debate as they were framed in the introduction of this book. There Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe positioned themselves between and against both Habermas’ modernist defense of universalism and

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Lyotards’ postmodernist leaning towards relativistic particularism. On the one hand, Habermas’ conception was refuted because the hermeneutical claim to universality he proposed (1983) was seen to possess an independent content of its own, free of any contingent hegemonic articulation. On the other hand, the particularism of Lyotard’s (1979, 1984, 1992) conception of society as consisting in a plurality of incommensurable language games was also avoided. The relevance of this debate between those proposing to perfect the ideals of the Enlightenment project through rational communicative action and those adhering to the relativist post-modern condition of pure heterogeneity and difference spills over our specific concerns regarding multiculturalism. This became apparent through a final question Laclau formulated in the following terms: is a pure culture of difference possible, is it possible to claim a pure particularism that does not rely on some universal principle? To this question not only Laclau and Mouffe but also Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek responded in one degree or another. Indeed albeit they were all too aware of the inherent impossibility of universalism they all agree, nevertheless, in the necessity of articulating a coherent discourse around the question of universalism. For Laclau, to begin with, instead of operating at the rather futile yet never innocent level of searching for blissfully context-free universals privileged by Habermas, such universal-particular pairing comes into being through concrete antagonistic qua hegemonic operations / struggles of all sorts. According to Laclau ([1996] 2007, 14): “In an antagonistic relation, that which operates as a negative pole of a certain identity is constitutively split.” In other words, it is the constitutive split of any identity, which displays the emergence of the universal within the particular. Yet, at the same time, this shows as well that the relation between particularity and universality is an essentially unstable and undecidable one. For Laclau (14–15) the universal results from a constitutive split in which the negation of a particular identity transforms this identity in the symbol of identity and fullness as such. As a consequence, with Laclau’s (and Mouffe’s) evocative notion of contaminated universalism: the universal has no content of its own; but is an absent fullness or, rather, the signifier of fullness as such, of the very idea of fullness;

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the universal can only emerge out of the particular, because it is only the negation of a particular content that transforms that content in the symbol of a universality transcending it; since the universal—taken by itself—is an empty signifier, what particular content is going to symbolize the latter is something which cannot be determined either by analysis of the particular in itself or of the universal.

In other words, the relation between the universal and the particular depends on the context of the antagonism and, it is, in the strict sense of the term, an hegemonic operation in which a struggle over the meaning of key terms takes place. In this sense, universalism will always be contaminated with some specific particularism (Laclau, Žižek, Butler, 2000). Laclau’s own brand of contaminated universalism is thus relevant to discussions on multiculturalism since he seeks the impossible of universalism (from) within the struggles carried out by concrete and particular cultural identities and / or political subjectivities. As to Alain Badiou, while his reliance on Saint Paul’s call for struggling universalism (in the last chapter) speaks of a bold and staunch anti-relativist approach, his apparently unequivocal siding with universalism is more nuanced than it appears at first. In other words, for Badiou universality only arises once a truth has emerged through our fidelity to this singular process, the claim of which makes this singular process part of the universal. By calling upon the universality of a concrete faithfulness to a specific truth-event, Badiou’s position opens the way for a critique of false universality, that is, the abstract universalism of capital. As discussed in chapter 3, Badiou’s critique of multiculturalism stems from his struggling universalism which can also link up with Fish’s critique of liberal multicultualism. In this sense it is worth recalling Terry Eagleton’s summary of Badiou’s position according to which, the language of difference and otherness (particularism) only reflects a sort of tourist’s fascination for moral and cultural diversity—a fascination for a kind of superficially picturesque mosaic multiculturalism that accepts, nevertheless, only those others who are ‘good’ others, who are ultimately like myself, that is, not other at all. Less paradoxically that it seems again, Slavoj Žižek also appeals to the Kantian call in his classic An Answer to the Question: “What is

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Enlightenment? [1784] for the public use of reason (universal dimension) as opposed to the private use of reason (our particular, personal and cultural idiosyncrasies). This is why, in addition, Žižek (2011, 109) calls for the articulation of the Hegelian triad of the Universal, the Particular and the Singular—a triad in which each element can both be kept in touch with but also separated from the other two: the universal thought prevents individual / singular idiosyncrasies from remaining trapped in the social substance (to each one’s hobbies: you can, if you want, mix red wine with Coke, you might prefer Virginia Woolf to Daphne du Maurier, choose which you want); personal idiosyncrasies prevent social substance from colonizing the universal thought; and social substance prevents the universal thought from becoming an abstract expression of personal idiosyncrasy. Likewise, Žižek (2008, 132) brings both Laclau and Badiou together as he provides a telling background in regards of the relationships between universal capitalism and particular cultures as follows: It is not only that every universality is haunted by a particular content that taints it; it is that every particular position is haunted by its implicit universality, which undermines it. Capitalism is not just universal in itself, it is universal for itself, as the tremendous actual corrosive power which undermines all particular lifeworld, cultures and traditions, cutting across them, catching them at its vortex.

In other words, for Žižek, the universalizing impetus of capitalist liberalism and the extensive emphasis placed on the economy and hence the market manages to ‘devour,’ as it were, all sense of cultural particularity. In this sense the proper slogan would be: It is not particular cultures stupid, it is universal capitalism! And yet it is worth recalling that for both Žižek and Badiou the current trends of global homogenization and the corollary universality of capital do not necessarily impinge negatively upon the diversity and heterogeneity of cultures, but instead complement one another. To sum up, in one way or another, the views of Žižek, Badiou and Laclau rely on a position in regards of the relations between the universal and the particular stemming from contingent articulations. Hence all three are opposed to Habermas, for whom the values of universalism and particularism are allocated beforehand.

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The market (and the) economy Let us now consider the phrase the economy. It is worth recalling that Bill Clinton’s famous slogan “It’s the economy, stupid!” came to epitomize last century’s (happy, saxophone-playing) 1990s victory of the market economy-led, liberal democratic political proposition of the Western First World over the communist emphasis on the centralist state planning of the economy in the Second (Eastern Europe’s) World. Ironically, this Clintonian emphasis on the economy ran against the grain of the very post-Marxist critique developed to counteract the economic determinism of classical Marxism. Against the characteristic it is the economic base you silly idealist of classical Marxism, the post-Marxist critique of such economic reductionism contested precisely the idea that the logic of the economy is absolutely independent and determinant of other domains (society / culture, state), which would then be quasidismissively located at the level of the ideological superstructure. Laclau and Mouffe’s (1985, 75–85) position is paradigmatic of such a critique of the economy, understood as “the last redoubt of essentialism in classical Marxism,” for all in all, “It is not the case that the field of the economy is a self-regulated space subject to endogenous laws” (86). It has already been duly pointed out that for Laclau and Mouffe’s antifoundationalist perspective, in addition to some key concepts (metaphor, rhetoric, discourse, hegemony, chains of equivalence/difference), a main point of their overall argument rests on the following idea: concepts are always empty and are as a result open to different processes of meaning construction through various hegemonic articulations and struggles. This explains why hegemony is never established forever. Following this thread also leads to the argument that the economy is yet another such empty signifier. In other words, the economy is also an empty notion, which is open to the hegemonic struggle over its meanings through the various modes of discursive articulation which constitute the economy (or society, or the state) within the various fields of conservative, liberal, Marxist . . . feminist . . . discursivity. Highly informative, in this respect, is a debate Laclau engages in with Žižek on this specific subject. Laclau presents Žižek as a desperate defender (2005, 236) of the classical Marxist tenet regarding the determination of the economy in the last instance, as Engels’ legendary quip stipulated. Laclau’s further point is that Žižek puts together two

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incompatible ontologies (deriving from Marx and Freud) to defend his position on the primacy of the economy—a claim, Laclau’s, it must be said, which is most surprising when coming from the very theorizer who emphasizes the arbitrary nature of discursive articulations. Regardless, Laclau’s position (236–7) on the centrality of the economy is this: The irony is that Žižek did not need this clumsy eclectic discourse to show the centrality of economic processes in capitalist societies. Nobody seriously denies this centrality. The difficulties arise when he transforms ‘the economy’ into a self-defined homogeneous instance operating as the ground of society [ . . . ] The truth is that the economy is, like anything else in society, the locus of an overdetermination of social logics, and its centrality is the result of the obvious fact that the material reproduction of society has more repercussions for social processes than do other instances. This does not mean that capitalist reproduction can be reduced to a single, self-defining mechanism.

Hence, not only Žižek but also Clinton is/are both wrong and right. As Žižek (2009, 78) puts it, “The symbolic efficiency [efficacy] of illusions regulates activity which generates social reality.” In this sense, while it is true that all instances (cultural, political, etc) have more or fewer repercussions for social processes, it is no less true that the symbolic efficiency of such an illusion as believing the economy to be the center of it all works also in ways of producing such social reality. In fact, if we go back to Thatcherism for a second, it is worth remembering that the utopian core of neoliberal economy rested and relied on the symbolic efficiency of a central belief—the staunch, ultra-extreme belief and quasireligious faith, that is, that unregulated markets would somehow always produce the best possible results. This was the case regardless of two contiguous facts: one is that the other half of the Thatcherite discourse was based on the neo-conservative defence of a strong State to promote the sense of national belonging and traditional cultural values, family, etc.; and the second is that this very state, denigrated as too interfering, is the institution legislating accordingly in order to promote the neo-liberal policies, which seek the de-regulation of markets- more on this shortly. In the meantime, it is clear that the field of the discussion between Laclau and Žižek is also open for a discursive competition on the various narratives surrounding the issue of the economy and the question of the relationships between the market, the state and society. But is Žižek’s

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call for a return to political economy as economo-centric as it appears to Laclau? Or is it instead that the debate between Laclau and Žižek remains yet another symptom accounting for a specific intellectual process; one whereby the ground of analysis is shifting from identity and cultural politics back again to political culture, including a newly re-invigorated critique of political economy? And then, therefore: is it the economy or is it ideology, stupid? What is the market, really? Are consumer and labor markets only part of the economy or are they all too simply ideology? These questions lead to the following point: the theme and critique of consumerism and consumer culture was always central in the tradition of Marxism and critical theory. This is why we now turn again to this theme in order to conclude with a further discussion on the very concept of the market. When discussing the market, there is this almost ingrained tendency to consider it as the locus of a bodiless and abstract—indeed nebulous— entity, where ghost-like unscrupulous financial speculators feel at home. This vision forgets that the market is also a concrete place/space in a way that Marxist critical theory understood only too well!6 Marxist critical theory stemming from the tradition of the Frankfurt School offers two main opposing views on this issue: There is the rather devastating critique by Theodor Adorno and Horkheimer (1972) of culture industries understood as mass deception; and there is the rather more lenient, as it were, but certainly more nuanced approach to the dream-like effects of early mass consumer culture, such as that explored by Walter Benjamin in the Arcades project (1999, 2002). Arguably, the style and contents of the latter will win over the former in contemporary critical and cultural studies as, in addition, this particular theme of the market will become central, predominantly in the 1990s. This is how the market will even come to be invoked as a potential locus and space of resistant and liberatory politics. Recall, for instance, Jon Fiske’s (1989, 1992) description of youth (radical, punk) subcultures (Dick Hebdige, 1981 [1977], 1988) hanging around in shopping malls constituting acts of defiance and resistance to authority, etc. In this debate, the point of departure of the cultural and critical studies approach to consumerism and consumer culture will still mostly take an overall critical and sceptic view. For instance, Mike Featherstone (1990) situated consumption at the individual level of narcissistic performance:

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Within consumer culture, which approximately coincides with the culture of narcissism, the new conception of self which has emerged, which we shall refer to as the “performing self ” places greater emphasis upon appearance, display and the management of impressions.

From a feminist position, Meaghan Morris (1988; 1992, 469) accepted an incommensurable level of ambiguity with regard to the shopping centers themselves: Shopping centers are overwhelmingly and constitutively paradoxical. On the one hand, they seem so monolithically present—solid, monumental, rigidly and indisputably on the landscape, and in our lives. On the other hand, when you try to dispute with them, they dissolve at any one point into a fluidity and indeterminacy that might suit any philosophers’ delirium of an abstract deminity.

Yet, paradoxically, Don Slater (1993) moved the debate from the notion of individual consumption to that of the crowds resulting from anonymous individuals coming voluntarily together in the market. Hence Slater understood the market as a space of consumption and hedonist distraction: By considering the market as a specific kind of experience— that of being a place where crowds of desiring individuals are presented with the most diverse objects of stimulation—with a long cultural history and dynamics, we can see that this rebellious and creative subject can be found not only at the moment of consumption, but prior to that it the market itself. In going to the market for the material means to sustain and develop ways of life, we become embroiled in the game of distracted and playful hedonism. Indeed, and ironically, the market as a place of desire without obligation, of intimate fantasy in the minds of impersonal anonymity, of spectacle, entertainment and play, as a place where dreams can flow across a multitude of objects without yet being faced permanently on any one probably still provides the single most potent space in Western societies in which one dreams alternative futures and is related (utopicly) from the unthinking reproduction of cultural life.

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On these accounts, the study of the market as a physical space seems to be squeezed between two positions: on the one hand, the manipulation thesis privileged in critical theory, and on the other hand, the over-celebratory views of the market understood not only as the locus for hedonistic consumer transactions but also for potential cultural resistance even. Beyond such celebrations and away from conspiratorial views of the market, Mary Douglas (1996, 106–125) offered, from the point of view of structuralist anthropology, a more nuanced and indeed pragmatic approach to consumption. Douglas spoke of a consumer revolt and claimed that she was not defending consumerism but rather putting the question of conscience in context. In this way, together with the idea of consumer rationality she argued that the association of the consumer society with capitalist production should be questioned (109). In this context, Douglas certainly took the anti-consumerist approach of critical theory into account: Mindless consumerism is part of a trend that has made our culture victim of commodification and exposed us to predatory advertisers and the media (108)

Yet, beyond “some consumers accusing others of practicing mindless consumerism, or worse than mindless, of morally wrong consumerism” (106) for Douglas “there must be some other ways than opting out” (109) for “if consumerism is bad, do we have no responsibility as consumers?” (108) Hence, it is within this framework that her theory of the rational consumer must be understood, not least because “the idea of the consumer as weak-minded and easily prevailed upon is absurd” (86). For Douglas, to the contrary, “protest is the aspect of consumption which reveals the consumer as a coherent, rational being” (81), for which reason: We have to make a radical shift away from thinking about consumption as a manifestation of individual choices. Culture itself is the result of myriads of individual choices, not primarily between commodities but between kinds of relationships. The basic choice that a rational individual has to make is the choice about what kind of society to live in. According to that choice the rest follows. Artefacts are selected to demonstrate the choice. Food is eaten, clothes are worn, cinema, books, music, holydays, all the rest are choices that conform with the initial choice for a form of society (82).

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Notions of multiculturalism and multicultural consumption are part and parcel of these choices. This is very much the case as consumers are often called to perform the role of good multiculturalist subjects in a commercialized world. Yet when Douglas locates consumer power, as it were, as the source of individuals making a choice of society her position also seems to be, as a consequence, guilty of wishful thinking—her position, in other words, is clearly the outcome and product of mauvais conscience in the face of post-modern societies’ invitation to an all-out consumerism.

*** By looking into the ambivalent notion of the market this chapter has further reflected on the multiculturalism means business motive. Together with a critique of this consumerist dimension of multiculturalism, an in-depth discussion has extended to the ethical and political domain through questions surrounding the universalism/ rationality vs. particularism/relativism debate; one that eventually advocates for some concrete ethics of truth and is complicated through contingent articulations taking place between the singular (individual identity), the particular (cultural identity) and the universal (political identity). On this account, the universalist approach of Habermas was pivotal to certain debates around liberal multiculturalism’s calls to the dialogic engagement with the other, etc. However, the limits of such theory were also considered via Fish’s (and also Laclau, Žižek and Badiou’s) critique. Habermas’ approach to multiculturalism is this chapter was addressed through his predicament for consensus-seeking dialogic negotiation. In section III Habermas’ relation with multiculturalism is to be dealt with through the question of national identity (post-nationalism) and how his key notion of Constitutional Patriotism impinges upon the respective roles assigned to civil society and the State, which becomes now the center of analytic attention.

Part III Multiculturalism as Management The State

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This is what, in the heat of the debate around the 9/11 attacks Žižek (2002, 46–47) had to say: So what about the phrase that reverberates everywhere: ‘Nothing will ever be the same after September 11’? Significantly, this phrase is never further elaborated—it is just an empty gesture of saying something ‘deep’ without really knowing what we want to say. So our first reaction to it should be: Really? What if, precisely, nothing epochal happened on September 11?

Žižek (2009, 45–46) further illustrated some of the pitfalls inherent in the present global conjuncture with the following example: As if in an ironic nod to Giorgio Agamben’s theory of the state of exception, in July 2008 the Italian government proclaimed a state of emergency throughout Italy in order to cope with the problem of the Neighbor in its paradigmatic contemporary form: the illegal entry of immigrants from North Africa and Eastern Europe. Taking a demonstrative step further in this direction, at the beginning of August, it deployed 4,000 armed soldiers to control sensitive points in big cities (train stations, commercial centers . . .) and thus raise the level of public security. There are also now plans to use the military to protect women from rapists. What is important to note here is that the emergency state was introduced without any great fuss: life goes on as normal . . . Is this not the state we are approaching in developed countries around the globe, where this or that form of the emergency state (deployed against the terrorist threat, against immigrants, and so on) is simply accepted as a measure necessary to guarantee the normal run of things?

In light of the above passages, it can be added that the fall of one particular wall (Berlin) has also contributed to the building of many others (Fortress Europe, American-Mexican border, Israel-Palestine). Likewise, following Agamben’s theories of the state of exception (2005) and most notably of the homo sacer (1998), it could be said that this process brings about the formation of a collective subject corresponding with that constitutive outsider Laclau considered necessary for the functioning of the State. The aim of Part III is to reflect on these issues of migration, national identity and the role of the State, and to do so dialectically.

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The notion of multiculturalism as management refers to this state of affairs whereby the more it is said that the state is dead the more it remains alive and kicking, as it were. In this sense, despite explicit statements to the contrary (cosmopolitanism, openness . . . ), the main implicit assumption remains that the State, as the epitome of defensive Western dominant grand-national identity, is still the most powerful mediating structure for the integration of subordinate difference. This is the main theme of chapter 5, where the well-known category of post-nationalism is read through post-colonialism and border theory. In chapter 6 the meaning of post-nationalism varies, as the link (or articulation) is no longer with forms of radical and confrontational identity politics. Instead, what are privileged are forms of “sophisticated” multiculturalism (Giddens, 2008) and calls to dialogic negotiation (Habermas, 2001) both contained within the framework of the liberal-democratic Nation-state.

Chapter 5

Nation and Migration

The liberal-democratic sense of a victorious, celebratory, optimistic (“happy ’90s”) and consumerist laissez faire attitude presented in the previous section is dramatically transformed following the 9/11 Al Qaeda attacks against the highest (symbolic) institutions of the United States. These attacks came also to symbolize the moment after which cultural and political perceptions were almost universally said to have shifted dramatically forever. One effect of the new geo-political and symbolic frontier built around the anti-terror war against the global Muslim threat is clearly that a substantial shift does indeed take place regarding the ways of understanding multiculturalism. In such a context, the main celebratory post-national discourses, which emerged in the 1990s are in need of being reviewed and readjusted to a new situation. This is the case as globalization does not bring about the waning let alone weakening of nation-states as was widely announced and predicted in that decade. Far from disappearing, on the contrary, nation-states take directly on the renewed task of building ever so taller and secure walls against the threat posed by increasing migratory flows. The notion of management multiculturalism is thus linked here to the re-nationalization of multicultural politics and the reduction of statepolitics to the administration and supervision (governance, policy making and legislation, criminal justice system) of the ways of life of minority ‘ethnic’ cultures. In short, following 9/11 global geopolitics are reduced to a new international logic structured around the ‘War on Terror’ and the construction of a new demonized subject of hate (the Muslim question). This key geopolitical shift accounts for the ensuing management of difference under the auspices of a permanent State of exception and emergency whereby the very sovereign state (Schmitt [1922] 2004 [1933] 2001)reinforces notions of the Other as a source of fear, (Sayyid [1997} 2003). In this context, celebratory approaches to multicultural diversity and difference presented previously in this book seem now too benevolent

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and a reassessment is needed of multiculturalism in the age of postnationalism—itself a highly ambiguous terms if ever there was one. In this chapter post-nationalism is read through post-colonial theory, and particularly though what is known as border theory. Therefore, post-colonial theory becomes again the point of departure and the perspective from which the topic of multicultural otherness is viewed as located in the margins (homo sacer, migrants). The presentation of border theory leads then to discussions of the scholarly literature on nationalism where the limits of imagined communities (Anderson, 1983/9) are shown through an understanding of the nation as narration (Homi Bhabha, 1990). Finally, border theory is applied to explain the different borders (local, European, global) within which dominant national imagined communities are narrated as unmarked (Hall, 2000, 2003) and through forms of banal (state)-nationalism (Billig, 1995) in the main European nation-states, notably, France, Germany and Britain. In Britain, particularly, following the 2001–9/11 Al Qaida attacks on the United States and particularly after the 2005–7/7 London bombings, a perceived crisis of multiculturalism is believed to be prevalent. This sense of crisis of multiculturalism is discussed within the context of both border theory as well as the theories of nationalism and globalization. In short, border theory serves here to challenge the legitimacy based on the perceived historical stability and durability of now, often, neo-imperial Western nation-states. Border theory Globalization speaks of a re-organization and adaptation of Western (imperial/colonial) nation-states into the present and pressing requirements of transnational cultural and economic flows. In a context of liquid modernity (Bauman, 2000) a variegated array of hybrid cultures (Garcia Canclini, 1995, 2000; Werbner & Modood (eds) 1997) must proceed under the disjunctive conditions (Appadurai, 1990, 1996) of a global transnational culture, which must certainly be apprehended within the overarching coordinates of an all-embracing world system qua capitalist-world economy (Wallerstein, 1974, 1979; Featherstone, 1990). Simultaneously, post-colonialism speaks of a transnational intellectual structure of feeling, which aims at developing a critique of a period posterior to centuries-long material domination of the

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West over the Rest, and its corollary: a more notoriously (in)famous symbolic structure or discursive master narrative of domination based on establishing, as Edward Said put it, “the difference between the familiar (Europe, the West, ‘us’) and the strange (The Orient, the East, ‘them’)” (1978, 43).1 In such a context, just as critical multiculturalism cannot escape the grasp of radical identity politics, so it is impossible for multiculturalism to escape the effects deriving from this distinction between the West and the Rest. This, according to Salman Sayyid ([1997] 2003, 47) is most fundamental because: [I]t is this distinction that underpins the post-colonial world. Attempts to overcome the West / Rest distinction by pointing to empirical multiculturalism (that is, the existence of many cultures and the impossibility of thinking of one culture) and valorizing hybridity (the normative celebration of multiculturalism) fail because they ignore the way in which the West / Rest distinction is played out as the distinction between the hegemonic and the subaltern and between the culturally unmarked and culturally marked.

Likewise, talking of Western hegemonic powers means seeing the West as one entity but also understanding that European forms of both neo-imperialism and neo-nationalism constitute an attempt to compete with a powerful US not hiding its thrust for global hegemony. What remains clear altogether is that these two separate but complementary Western geo-political realities are built upon the re-enforcement of gates, both symbolic and physical, of a new global divide, a barbarian divide, which merits examination. In this way, Žižek (in Butler, Laclau, and Žižek (ed.), 2000, 313) directs us to look at the fate of migrants in the first person while he also mobilizes the notion of the universal: I perceive the shadowy existence of those who are condemned to lead a spectral life outside the domain of the global order, blurred in the background, unmentionable, submerged in the formless mass of ‘population’ [ . . . ] I am tempted to claim that this shadowy existence is the very site of political universality; in politics, universality is asserted when such an agent with no proper place, ‘out of joint,’ posits itself as the direct embodiment of universality against all those who do have a place within the global order.

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As Western European and North American gates keep global immigrants from other (sub)continents and fundamentalist Muslim terrorists out of the eternal (city-)states, a geopolitical way to look at this whole new globalized state of affairs is by mobilizing the old biopolitical trope of the barbarians vs. the civilized. It is here that against them—the barbarians, we—the civilized are always—already claiming for ourselves an enlightened humanist history of cosmopolitanism dating back to the very ancient beginnings of Western civilization.2 At this juncture one should be aware that the new divide between global barbarians and Western civilized citizens can only be sustained by a process of overlooking and indeed forgetting a distinctly modern colonial and grand-nationalist history. In addition to a convenient forgetting of the past, what is also required is a re-organizing of the present along clear narrative strategies. This discursive re-organization takes place by aiming both outside and inside: not only, hence, by hiding the necessity felt of expanding in a neo-imperialist fashion over their former areas of influence (colonies, protectorates, neighboring states, etc) under the veil of humanitarian intervention; but also exhibiting an equally misleading predisposition to deny the fundamentally neonational(ist) character of the universalist discourses mobilized—this being the case more particularly in regards of Western Europe’s main established nation-states also mobilized against the particularistic national minorities sitting within their borders. This is why the new reorganization of both culture and the economy in globalization requires that the dominant narratives inherited from Western hegemonic powers be re-examined. For more often than not, both state-nationalism and empire are presented to us as a long foregone events, as something that took place in the far-off nineteenth century and no longer have any bearing on the twenty first.3 Still relevant to the purposes of this re-examination is, without a doubt, Gloria Anzaldua’s border theory (1987). Anzaldua reflected particularly on the border between Mexico and the USA, and focused on the Reagan era, from which neo-liberalism emerged. In that context, Anzaldua clearly stated that the formation of border culture and economy becomes a reality, a “country” of its own: Barefoot and uneducated, Mexicans with hands like boot soles gather at night by the river where two worlds merge creating what

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Reagan calls a frontline, a war zone. The convergence has created a shock culture, a border culture, a third country, a closed country (11).

As Anzaldua concluded, the workings of double consciousness in border history also alter human reality and thinking: Not only was the brain split into two functions but so was reality. Thus people who inhabit both realities are forced to live in the interface between the two, forced to become adept at switching modes (37).

Although initially operative within the concrete American / Mexican context of feminist qua lesbian chicana studies in the Reagan era, border theory can be extended, incorporated and reworked to account for other divides and frontiers (both internal and external) between ‘the West and the Rest.’ In this way, border theory can be instrumental to de-construct narratives of a Western/European history that at best forget and at worst re-write its violent colonial / imperialist past while hiding, at the same time, the current neo-imperialist impulses to dominate over former colonies. Border theory also allows showing in the European context how borders work as limits defining and structuring standard European qua metropolitan-civilized discourses on the Other. Yet the Other here is not solely understood as external and non-European; at the same time, the Other is also internal to Europe yet externalized as a not-sophisticated-enough Other such as is the case with small sub-state national formations.4 In short, border theory5 challenges discourses based on the construction of new walls between the dominant West/Europe and all kind of global but also local barbarians. Border theory works at the interstices of established nation states and speaks of the fact that as much as borders are gates that divide and separate people, they are also zones of interaction and hybridization. Border theory serves thus to set a certain counterpoint to rigid narratives of national belonging; although, at the same time, theories of nations and nationalism also speak of political, social and cultural realities, which are themselves complex. In this context, opposing

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questions of national identity and nationalism to one’s self-belief in the idea of universal citizenship within the context of multiculturalist controversies may often constitute a distraction to critical analysis also. DissemiNations Like border theory, theories of nationalism also agree in the complex nature and also fluidity of the object under study. Although often understood as stable and rigid structures, when discussing nations scholars agree that nationalism is a complex object of study. Nationalism is complex because, as both Benedict Anderson (1983/9) and Peter Alter (1989) emphasize respectively, the very concept of nation is a fluid notion that has proved “notoriously” and “extremely” difficult to define. Peter Alter says that nationalism is ambiguous because it is polymorphic and multiform, and conceals within itself “extreme opposites and contradictions: it can mean emancipation and it can mean oppression.” Nationalism is then a controversial object because, as a conclusion of the aforesaid ambivalence, it can be considered as an anomalous historical development or even as a political aberration, which becomes, he continues, “synonymous with intolerance, inhumanity and violence; ( . . . ) and yet at the same time, it could just as often engender hopes for a free and just social order” (2–5). This is why, Alter’s main proposal remains that “only with reference to a concrete historical context can we say what the term actually does or should signify;” and this is indeed also why, Anderson adds to Alter’s suggestive invitation for individualized inquiry the following supportive appeal; namely to “do our best to learn the real, and imagined, experience of the past” (146, emphasis added). In other words: the real or indeed the imagined nation (as Benedict Anderson’s felicitous adjective goes) is both ambivalent and ambiguous. From this it also follows that national claims do not necessarily mean claims to superiority as the standard cliché goes. Hence, following the methodology again of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe with regard to how political articulations operate, national claims can be articulated in conservative ways (recall remarks on Thatcherism and Britishness on an earlier chapter) but also become the possibility for more general emancipations (Laclau, 2007). This is so in the sense that, and extent to which, adhesion to the national idea as such does not necessarily belong

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to one particular political side or another. According to either different moments in history or the variety of forms, a national idea can take in the same conjuncture, such adhesion is able to adapt to, and be inflected towards different political positions, traditions, discourses and forces.6 No matter what the status of the nation was as either / both liberatory and / or oppressive, approaches to nations and nationalism shifted in the 1990s. At that time, within the context of a (post)modern globalization perceived as an increasing and unstoppable phenomenon, an intellectual belief in the bleak future of nation-states became ever so widespread. For instance, Arjun Appadurai (1996, 7) claimed the following: The nation-state has entered a “terminal crisis” and an “important new feature of global cultural politics . . . is that state and nation are at each other’s throats, and the hyphen that links them is now less an icon of conjuncture than an index of disjuncture.7 Appadurai’s work was also particularly instrumental not only in the understanding of how diaspora, migrant and exile ethnoscapes re-position themselves in and around the world; but also because it articulated a view of cultural processes understood as the outcome and product of the imaginary—a notion which encompasses both the image (say, of mediascapes) and the imagined (of ideoscapes), and which according to Appadurai (31, 29) constituted “terms that direct us to something critical and new in global cultural processes: the imagination as a social practice.” In other words, in order to understand the cultural and historic development of exilic and diaspora communities Appadurai built on Benedict Anderson’s idea that national formations constitute imagined communities. Anderson’s central argument is that the nation is an imagined community.8 The nation or for that matter nationality, nation-ness and/ or nationalism constitute cultural artefacts of a particular kind; a nation is an imagined creation, something that is invented and fabricated as Ernest Gellner (1983, 1987) and Eric Hobsbawn (1999, with Ranger, 1983) often pointed out. Yet what really matters in order to understand the construction of a particular national identity is not that a nation is merely imagined and invented; rather than dwelling on issues of falsity or genuineness, what is crucial for Anderson is the ways and style in which the nation is imagined and narrated—the ways and style, in

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other words, in which nation-ness is retold and rediscovered: the nation is reinvented through history and memory; the nation is narrativized through imaginative literature, the nation is re-articulated through ideological and political work, et cetera. In this respect Anderson’s appeals quoted earlier to “do our best to learn the real, and imagined, experience of the past” (146) is key to Homi Bhabha (1990), who also deals with the specific issue related to the ways in which present national narratives are articulated around memories of the past.9 Bhabha himself states the following right from the outset: “Nations, like narratives, lose their origins in the myths of time” (1) which linked to the idea of nations’ nebulous past also refers to loosing their origins in the mists of time. In addition, Geoffrey Bennington’s contribution to the same volume edited by Bhabha (Nation and Narration) also revolves around the proposals that (i) “the idea of the nation is inseparable of its narration” (132) and that (ii) “at the origin of the nation we find the history of the nation’s origin” (121).10 Within the contemporary context of studies in multiculturalism, Bhabha’s postcolonial cultural critique also brings forward the idea that exilic / migrant identities, nation and colonialism are inextricably linked in modernity. As he points out in the concluding paper (1990, 291) with the suggestive title of “DissemiNation”: The emergence [ . . . ] of the modern nation [ . . . ] is also one of the most sustained periods of mass migration within the west, and colonial expansion in the east.

Certainly, in one way or the other the nation remains a bête noire of critical studies on radical identity politics. For instance, when Stuart Hall (1993) dealt with national identity and diaspora qua migrant politics within the context of globalization, he also addressed several multicultural themes directly (the home and away dialectics of diaspora/migrant subjects, hybridization and cultural diversity in the global world) as a means of undermining the politics of nationalism. If for Hall the nation-state was a terrible historical hurdle, (361) this was so because following Anderson, historically, the nation-state constitutes a symbolic formation, a “system of representation” which produced the idea of nation as imagined community. The nation-state hence constituted for Hall an imagined, or invented / fabricated, community

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and within the present historical moment of increased globalization, Hall then also contended that alongside the weakening of the nationstate, unprecedented opportunities were also offered for smaller national movements to bring about their aspirations of self-government in new, more effective political arrangements. As Hall is concretely referring to the case of the small nations located within the British Isles / borders, he was also adamant in insisting that cultural diversity is here to remain the fate of the modern world. As a result, a greater danger arises, he argued, from forms of national and cultural identity—be they emerging national movements and / or old state formations—which attempt to secure their identity by adopting closed versions of culture and community, and refuse to engage—even in the name of an oppressed minority—with the difficult problems that arise from trying to live with difference: National movements that in their struggle against old closures, reach too closed, unitary and homogeneous a reading of ‘culture’ and ‘community’ will have succeeded in overcoming one terrible historical hurdle only to fall at the second (361).

As with Appadurai, Hall also reminds us of the global era we all live in and where unprecedented financial, technological, cultural, ideological and human exchanges take place all around us. This speaks of a world that has irremediably opened up into a never-ending, borderless network(ed) society (Manuel Castells, 2000). Yet the very ambiguity of the nation (dominant/subordinate; state/stateless; oppressive/liberatory) as discussed so far in this chapter also calls for a very specific and distinct two-directional critique: not only of the standard liberal (and liberal-multiculturalist) position on the nation but also those stemming from ‘radical’ multiculturalism and the left. For in the context of standard multiculturalist debates elicited from within the frameworks of well established nation-estates, explicit statements that express noble ideals such as integration, respect and reciprocity, intercultural dialogue and tolerance, equality in diversity, social cohesion, etc, also risk being constructed on political and cultural visions with built-in implicit assumptions and prejudices.

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Overall, when dealing with the question of nations and nationalism, a de-nationalisation of the State, as it were, becomes part and parcel of a standard anti-nationalist qua post-national rhetoric. We are referring here to discursive articulations that privilege facile appeals of cosmopolitan world citizenship and, more often than not, display a sense of superiority (and also often of deplorable arrogance) when assuming, that is, taking for granted a kind of non-nationalist status of traditional or historical European nation-states. Slavoj Žižek is adamant as to the suspicious nature of such selfvindicating cosmopolitan and anti-nationalist intellectual propositions. Not least within the Western, and more particularly European context where those cosmopolitan and anti-nationalist claims stem from precise intellectual contexts situated in strong nation-states.11 Among these, three are, without the shadow of a doubt, the main state-national formations around which European cultural politics and political culture have revolved so far: Britain, Germany and France. Despite intellectual anti-nationalist fantasies to the contrary, when talking about multiculturalism, certainly in Europe but also globally, the focus cannot be removed from the strength of the influence still exerted by the highly idiosyncratic national predicaments (or existential attitudes and political positions) privileged and nurtured in these three main grand-national states (German idealism and contemplation, French politics and revolution, and Anglo-American pragmatism and economic zeal).12 Accordingly, a similar matching exercise could be suggested here with regard to some admittedly broad ideological and existential attitudes to multiculturalism and cultural diversity. These could be encapsulated as follows: German segregation, French assimilation, and English integration. In the wake of this analogy, it is obvious that France’s classical revolutionary politics come to symbolize the ultimate abstract universal values of freedom, equality and justice. In turn, these universal values also stand for the principle that it is not (sub)cultural groups or collective communitarian entities but citizens who belong to, and participate in the unity of the civic and republican nation directly as individuals, that is, without any particular communal or identitarian mediation; hence the specifically assimilationist cultural

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politics with regard to migrant communities stemming from, and privileged in, French political culture. Yet, in the face of such Jacobin tradition informing French official anti-multiculturalism, it would also be a mistake to take the German approach as any better in regards to cultural difference (recall Chancellor Merkel’s rather pejorative handling of the multiculti question and her explicit assessment that multiculturalism has “utterly” failed in Germany). The question however would be: but was there any official German multiculturalist policy in the first place, for it then to fail? In reality, Germany never applied a consciously multiculturalist policy but instead thought about the Other (i.e., mostly Turkish migrants) in terms of a segregated, that is, separated and distant Orientalist object of simultaneous contemplation and rejection. This is precisely why Will Kymlicka refuses to count the German case as multiculturalist.13 For Kymlicka, together with some complementary issues related to what are known as identity politics (gender, class, ethnicity), multiculturalism is mostly about three main areas of intervention: immigration, indigenous peoples and other cultural / national minorities, all of these being dealt with, needless to say again, within the context seldom challenged of already established nation-states. In this respect, it is worth insisting on the idea that, in fact, multiculturalism constitutes a rather idiosyncratically utilitarian and pragmatist technique of social engineering best defining the liberal Anglo-Saxon integrative approach towards the management and governance/governmentality of cultural diversity.14 Much unlike the French case, which consists of over-affirming the idea of French (linguistic, secular, republican) identity, the AngloSaxon approach hinges instead on the opposite attitude, that is to say: on understanding that the best pragmatically and symbolically efficient way to go about the business of dealing with multicultural diversity is not over-emphasizing but rather under-stating the yet normative source of the dominant unmarked identity (Englishness) against which all other differential identities (African-Caribbean, Muslims, Gay and Lesbian, people with disabilities, Scots, Welsh, Irish . . . ) become visible only as marked and hence subordinate formations (or at least so was the case until recently).15 Paradoxically, this overall “multiculturalist” approach which, as it will be now shown, relies on a clear link with discourses of national

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identity, weighs heavily as well on the British left’s own engagement with, and commitment to identity politics—always-already rooted within the very national confines of British political culture.16 This is clear for Sarah Ahmed (2008) who from a black feminist perspective looks at the local context of British politics, left, right and center. Ahmed does so as she attempts to answer a public interpellation by Žižek according to which, it is an empiric fact that liberal multiculturalism is hegemonic.17 In her response to the challenge Žižek extended to anyone to prove the opposite, Ahmed reasserted the need for a critical reappraisal of contemporary multiculturalist politics as she simultaneously developed a critique of British multicultural politics and hidden racism under New Labour. Yet on reading Ahmed’s response to Žižek, it can be argued that one does not think that there is, or perhaps better put, one does not see a major difference between Žižek’s insistence on the empirical fact that “liberal multiculturalism–is hegemonic” and Ahmed’s response according to which, “[t]he fantasy that multiculturalism is the hegemony” would amount to a kind of language game concealing the Real of “monocultural hegemony.” For, after all, the central argument does not revert so much to knowing whether the hegemony of multiculturalism is an empiric fact or not—one should think of Žižek using this term in a very commonsense way (empiric meaning overwhelming and obvious matter of fact). As both Žižek and Ahmed explore the conditions of (im)possibility of (British) liberal (democratic) multiculturalism, it also seems that both agree with the fact that noble ideals such as anti-racism, to name only a very visible one, often end up constituting discursive strategies leading to social practices that serve to conceal dominant-culture led hegemonic politics. This is why Ahmed associates the notions of diversity and multiculturalism with the realm of British ‘monocultural’ fantasy. In such a fantasy, as she puts it: Racism is ‘officially prohibited.’ This is true. We are ‘supposed’ to be for racial equality, tolerance and diversity, and we are not ‘allowed’ to express hatred towards others, or to incite racist hatred. I would argue that this prohibition against racism is imaginary, and that it conceals everyday forms of racism, and involves a certain desire for racism.18

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According to Ahmed, the prohibition of racist speech should not be taken literally since it functions as a way of imagining ‘us,’ good multicultural subjects, as placed beyond racism: “By saying racism is over there–‘ look, there it is!”—Ahmed continues- “in the located body of the racist—other forms of racism remain unnamed.” Following from the validity of this argument, however, does not Ahmed’s position converge with Zizek’s point that “multiculturalism is a disavowed, inverted, selfreferential form of racism, a ‘racism with a distance’”?19 In other words, this experiences of racism which support the hegemony of whiteness necessarily include the almost invariably tokenistic nature involved in the gracious liberal desire to positively engage with the different Other. As both Stanley Fish and Alain Badiou put it in their own terms on an earlier chapter, this is a desire, ultimately, to engage with someone other who must be brought to be the same as me; a desire, hence, that underpins the very, in Ahmed words, [ego]ideal(ist) discursive fantasies, which are invariably based on the promise of a frictionless and harmoniously integrated (multicultural) society so long as the dominant (universal, monocultural) point of view is the initial point of comparative departure. So long, that the main national identity at stake, that is, is never put into question. In this respect, Ahmed’s engagement with Žižek must be framed within a concrete temporal framework corresponding to the post7/7 (2005) London bombing (Recall Tony Blair’s lapidary statement: “The rules of the game have changed”).20 One of the consequences of such bombings was that they prompted renewed calls such as Tariq Modood’s for Remaking Multiculturalism after 7/7. This was then seen as necessary and urgent because, according to Modood (2006, 1) “the London bombings of 7 July led many analysts, observers, intellectuals and opinion formers to conclude that multiculturalism has failed; even worse, that it can be blamed for the bombings.” Following the 7/7 London bombings, what was understood to be an all-out “anti-multiculturalist” backlash took place in Britain, one of the consequences being a generalized call for abandoning multiculturalism and embracing some form of interculturalism instead. In other words, with this move from multiculturalism to interculturalism, the aim was to shift emphasis from the celebration of difference and pluralism to insisting on integration and building bridges between communities; to underline, as a popular sound bite went at the time, what unites us and

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not what separates us. Trevor Phillips from the Commission for Racial Equality summarized this new mood well when he said that: “In recent years we’ve focused far too much on the ‘multi’ and not enough on the common culture” (quoted in Tariq Modood, 3). In short, the multiculturalism vs. interculturalism debate in the wake of the 7/7 (2005) bombings in London corresponded to the classical liberal-national(ist) debate, which attempted to articulate the equality in difference motto in such a way that respecting difference and celebrating diversity could be achieved by praising (national) unity (national unity in difference, as it were) The point is, nevertheless, that this debate did not substantially alter the main coordinates of the issue at hand. In this sense Ahmed is right again when she criticizes: The explicit argument of New Labour that multiculturalism went ‘too far’: we gave the other ‘too much’ respect, we celebrated difference ‘too much,’ such that multiculturalism is read as the cause of segregation, riots and even terrorism (italics added).

As said, the post-London 7/7 bombings debate was re-situated along the lines of the new reading of multiculturalism as failure. This sense of policy failure brought about the necessity felt to redefine the relationships between multiculturalism and national identity in Britain. Yet, in the light of such debates, central to the argument was not so much knowing whether the hegemony of multiculturalism is an empiric fact or not—it was rather that the main parameters or the central questions at hand did not change substantially anyway. For instance, when told that a shift hat to take place from celebrating and respecting the difference of the other to placing more emphasis on integration and building bridges between communities, the evidence of the discursive articulation that took place with New Labour between the necessity of respecting diversity, on the one hand, and promoting integration, on the other, suggests that the gap separating these two apparently irreconcilable positions was quite easy to bridge; that, ultimately, the bridge between multiculturalism and national identity is not so hard to cross. Important as it may be to Ahmed, this division merely reverts to a question of detail; a detail, which refers to the often hidden relationships existing between anybody’s explicit statements and the implicit

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assumptions that sustain those statements—a point she clearly captures in the quote above. In this sense, what is fair to say is that the supposedly ‘new’ post7/7 context only provoked the pre-7/7 implicit assumptions of British multiculturalism becoming the explicit statements of the British nationstate. For neither before nor after the 7/7 attacks British (liberal) multiculturalism as a tool and process for celebrating difference was ever meant to challenge and undermine the common culture guaranteed by the unifying structures and institutions of the British state. What changed, admittedly to worse, is the new pervasive insistence on a new sense of Britishness and the intrinsic virtues of a newly found British national identity, which becomes increasingly pervasive precisely under the appearance of the opposite.21

*** It has been argued that forms of built-in racism may easily take the guise of anti-racist policy making. Monocultural multiculturalism, as it were, would thus refer to how the implicit assumptions (dominant, racist . . . ) of a majority national culture contradict the explicit statements (respect of diversity, open minded anti-racism) of official discourses. Previously, border theory sought to disrupt standard European qua metropolitan-civilized discourses about the (barbarian) Other understood as both external exilic/foreign homo sacer and internal “unsophisticated” minority. In this context, anti-terrorist discourses of national emergency relying on a quasipermanent state of exception contribute to perceiving multiculturalism in new different ways. This will be further shown in the next and last chapter of this book, where the relationships between (post) nationalism and multiculturalism are studied in more detail.

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Chapter 6

The State is Dead. Long Live the State

In order to understand the role of nation-states in both modernity and (mostly) the Western world, Immanuel Wallerstein (1990a, 47) provides the main cultural and social co-ordinates of the present world-system. In doing so he also establishes the main difference between pre-modernity and modernity with regard to how political systems achieve legitimacy: Modernity as a central universalizing theme gives priority to newness, change, progress. Through the ages, the legitimacy of political systems has been derived from precisely the opposite principle, that of oldness, continuity, tradition. There was a straightforwardness to pre-modern modes of legitimation which does not exist anymore. Political legitimacy is a much more obscure objective within the realities of the capitalist world-economy, yet states of course seek constantly to achieve it. Some degree of legitimacy is a crucial element in the stability of all regimes.

Then, within the context of his overall cultural critique of imperialism Edward Said (1994, 21) refers to the underlying naiveté involved in thinking of traditional nation-states as benign integrative entities, for: [O]ne should not pretend that models for a harmonious world order are ready at hand, and it would be equally disingenuous to suppose that ideas of peace and community have much of a chance when power is moved to action by aggressive perceptions of ‘vital national interests’ or unlimited sovereignty.

Central to this chapter is a reflection on the new status of the nation-state and the discourse of post-nationalism within globalization. Several conflicting and always contingent discursive articulations are explored: between liberalism and multiculturalism, between liberal multiculturalism and (post)nationalism, between dominant liberal forms and alternative post-colonial forms of (post)nationalism.

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As this final chapter is more of a broad and mostly theoretical reflection on those articulations, the first section looks at certain forms of intellectual legitimization at work. In Britain, Third Way politics as well as the notion of sophisticated multiculturalism by Anthony Giddens show well how the articulation between multiculturalism and national identity takes place. In the rest of Europe and elsewhere it is Jürgen Habermas’s assessment of the post-national constellation, which is to be widely debated. Both these approaches find their political logic within the conceptual articulation of the liberal-democratic universe. As it will be shown, these sophisticated post-national discourses are always presented in anti-nationalist terms but are ultimately articulated from nationalist positions; from, positions, in other words, which only reject the nationalism of the Other. This is so because, after all, the word “nationalist” is stigmatized and is used to stigmatize, especially those who do have a state, those who exercise their nationalism in a daily and usually taken for granted, banal way, and because, as explained by Michael Billig (1995), this banal nationalism is well established and consolidated at the international level. In these cases the banal practice of nationalism is perceived in all its normality because nationalism is an ideology that historically stems from the state. Hence, the question of loyalty to the state and its relationship with the idea of multiculturalism is also an important concern of the second part of this chapter. After producing an analysis of the discursive articulations taking place between two different forms of postnationalism alluded to in the previous chapter (i.e.: liberal-democratic and post-colonial), the final part further looks at the question of the state and the various levels of post-political administrative management that emerge within the context of globalization. “Sophisticated” multiculturalism In order to understand what lies implicitly under the explicit discourse in which national identity and multiculturalism intersect, it is convenient to remember that it is through a series of discourse articulations that these two apparently contradictory concepts (nationalism and multiculturalism) are bound together, and that, in addition, these discursive articulations also take place within an ‘utopian’ horizon of discussion, which arises in the overall liberal market of ideas.

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In more concrete terms, it was Charles Taylor (1992) who elaborated these overall liberal-multicultural themes, seeking to reconstitute his now classic multicultural Politics of Recognition. Taylor saw the promotion of these multicultural policies as a key means—and even demand—to push liberal democratic institutions, and most particularly state-national governments, into accepting, understanding and recognizing the diversity of cultural traditions and their value. This allowed Habermas to speak (not least, in Taylor’s second edition of the same volume on the politics of multicultural recognition (1994)) of a dialogic politics aimed at building a free (civil) society based on a process of problem solving through clearly rationalist and consensus seeking approaches. Habermas’ post-national position is echoed in Anthony Giddens’ own notion of sophisticated multiculturalism (2006). Giddens places emphasis on the State understood to be the appropriate vehicle for stressing, “the importance of national identity, and national laws, but also the fostering of connections between different social and ethnic groups.” In a practical sense, by developing a narrative of Britishness and British national identity within the parameters of liberal multiculturalism, Giddens clearly linked and thus articulated nationalism and multiculturalism. He did so when suggesting that integration of diversity can only take place within the confines of a particular dominant national culture of a given state-national identity. In Giddens’ sophisticated multiculturalism, as a consequence, the multicultural Other is constituted as an external entity, as a subordinate minority of sorts (sub-national, cultural, racial, religious, sexual), which must be integrated into the moral values and civic codes of a given statebased dominant culture and society. This is indeed an approach to the management of difference, which remains beyond question not only for Giddens (“a fundamental responsibility is to obey the laws of the land”) but also, it is worth remembering here again, for Bhikhu Parekh himself, for whom the dialogic resolution to whatever historical demand and/ or cultural grievance should be negotiated according to “the operative public values,” which formalise legally “the way we do things here” (2006, 363–365).1 Other than the notion of sophisticated multiculturalism, Anthony Giddens (1994, 1998, 2000) formulated a Third Way political philosophy seeking to overcome the shortcomings of the New Right and the Old

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Left. As Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1983, xiv–xv) put it, the proponents of the Third Way claimed that, “[T]he notions of the Left and Right have become obsolete, and that what is needed is a politics of the ‘radical Centre.’”2 With the blurring of the frontier between Left and Right and the move towards the Centre, radical politics concern practical life issues, which by placing emphasis on the expert administration of a good and just society should be resolved through dialogue, negotiation and consensus. This “sacralization of consensus,” in Laclau and Mouffe’s words, refers to a specific form of ‘liberal’ and/or ‘progressive’ politics whereby, whether the ultimate decision taken should remain more or less rooted in civil society, community or the individual, or whether the state’s policy making should respond to a more or less interventionist or laissez faire agenda, what remains paramount, nevertheless, is to adhere to the notion that any right idea (pragmatic, utilitarian, egalitarian, pluralist) can only be achieved by offering well-grounded, reform-based, instrumental and realistic solutions with the purpose of tackling the issues that surround us and achieving the tolerant society we all should strive for. Although the emphasis on particular points may differ, what remains imperative is to find that middle ground or middle way between individual autonomy and communal solidarity, freedom and equality, cosmopolitanism and non-nationalist patriotism, between merciless capitalism (capitalism with a heart/human face!) and any form of right or left authoritarianism or religious fundamentalism. In short, the ultimate aim is always running away from unreasonable extremes and to try to occupy that highly sought for middle ground in order to strike the right compromising balance between the different options available. And it is in this precise context that Anthony Giddens’ notions of, and approaches to Third Way politics and sophisticated multiculturalism meet Jürgen Habermas’ theories on (1979) and the notions of a deliberative democratic and universalistic Constitutional Patriotism rooted in post-national politics (1997). The first thing that must be said about Giddens’ and Habermas’ approaches to the nation and multiculturalism is that both are presented as being pragmatic and utilitarian and both are based on a role given to the state’s integrative abilities. Yet, simultaneously, if we were to use a well-known binary in Ferdinand de Saussure’s structuralist linguistics (1945 [1916]) it seems that both these authors rather center themselves

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in privileging the synchronic realities of (or former dynastic) European states here and now. As a result, these present post-national approaches also advance their sophisticated arguments by either omitting references to the past or otherwise relegating the regrettable impurities of such states to the diachronic dustbin of history, as it were. Hence reflecting on the history of the nation-state and the future of a unified Europe, Habermas (2001, 102–103) reached this conclusion: If this form of collective identity was due to a highly abstractive leap from the local and dynastic to national and then to democratic consciousness, why shouldn’t this learning process be able to continue? . . . These experiences of successful forms of social integration have shaped the normative self-understanding of European modernity into an egalitarian universalism that can ease the transition to postnational democracy’s demanding context of mutual recognition for all of us—we, the sons, daughters, and grand children of a barbaric nationalism.

It seems here that, in re-evaluating the collective identity of the nation and nationalism, a two-fold implicit operation takes place in this analysis. First of all, a history of nationalism is mentioned in ways that Habermas would like to be generalized to all of us in order for everybody to internalize and share a blame, which is particular to his own (German) origins, so to speak. Secondly or, rather simultaneously, the whole history of European imperialism and colonialism is ignored as if it never happened. As a result, this history of Europe, which hence was never colonial or imperialist and which has now extirpated the ugly supplement of barbaric nationalism from its body politics, can claim, as a result, an evolution which is internal to Europe and which naturally and un-problematically generates multicultural societies. In addition, these multicultural societies are endowed with not only the individual rights of citizens but also with collective rights. As Habermas (74) himself puts it: Multicultural societies require a ‘politics of recognition’ because the identity of each individual citizen is woven together with collective identities, and must be stabilized in a network of mutual recognition.

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Hence, Habermas looks at resolving the politics of recognition in Europe following the North American steps of Charles Taylor, as mentioned earlier, yet simultaneously attempting a synthesis with John Rawls’s political liberalism (1993), namely, through a similar (neo) liberal ideological articulation; and, as expected, this ideological, and also hegemonic, articulation between the former’s alluded-to work on Multiculturalism and the ‘Politics of Recognition’ (1992/4) and the latter’s Theory of Justice (1971, see also 1999) establishes a would-be perfectly reasonable middle ground wherein each individual is primarily a citizen but is also endowed with collective rights. Post-nationalisms As noticed, Habermas’ account above ignores quite blatantly, and regrettably, the whole (post)colonial history of generalized exclusion of the migrant Other. In addition, when pushed into having to refer to the individual and collective rights of some concrete citizens and settled national communities, how and to whom his own politics of recognition should be applied appear to be quite arbitrary as well. To give a wellknown example, Habermas (72) clearly dismisses the Irish case as one not requiring such politics of recognition because the Irish question is a nationalist problem of the past: Here I am not referring primarily to nationalist conflicts such as those ( . . . ) in Northern Ireland. Nothing of the seriousness and gravity of those conflicts is lost if one sees them as the delayed consequences of a history of nation-building that has generated historical fault lines.

For Habermas, the Irish conflict could not fall into the category of problematics to be resolved under the appliance of the multicultural recognition formula. For the Irish case represents an anachronistic throwback belonging to a past era of national conflicts3 In other words, Habermas establishes a general theory of post-nationalism in Europe, but dismisses the cases that do not fit his theory. He fundamentally negates the principle of recognition upon which his theory is built. Habermas’ theory is multicultural and post-national in name. His aim, in practice, is to produce a theoretical framework instrumental to reorganize the

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existing European states along diversity lines that fit the needs and goals of neoliberal democracy and capitalism in Europe. In short, although for Habermas Europe constitutes the ultimate horizon of his post-nationalism, his position still remains nationalist. This is so because, retroactively, Habermas still upholds the State and its historical national identity, based on the history of its majority groups, as the only institutional locus of recognition. The complementary idea of patriotic constitutionalism only serves to implement Habermas’ nationalist agenda under an explicit state ideology. Through this stateideology, Habermas allocates the potential and possibility of applying the universal principles of an open democratic, modern and cosmopolitan citizenship to certain national formations, while the same civic and democratic potential is denied to other national formations. Beyond the post-nationalism of Habermas and the like, it has already been shown that post-colonial discourse has developed its own particular positions on post-nationalism also. The particular post-national dimension of radical identity politics draws from welldeveloped arguments and perceptions of the ways post-colonialism and globalization have destabilized nation-state formations. Likewise, postcolonial discourse disabled absolutely the very possibility of equating nation-state with a “pure” (one) race-ethnicity-culture-language. This, in turn, brought about a major crisis in the cultural and linguistic approaches organized by nationalist principles. To talk again for instance of the three main national formations around which European geopolitics have been organized for the last two centuries, languages such as English, French, German, etc, are no longer expressions of the singular identity of a particular nation.4 The work of theorizing the ongoing crisis and demise of these and other colonial/imperial nation-states as we historically knew them in modernity is at the same time to observe the ensuing emergence of a variety of global, post-colonial and post-national cultures along new dividing lines. As seen in part II, this emergence of global, post-colonial and post-national cultures is certainly also determined by market forces and consumption. Yet the divergent aesthetic and ensuing consuming tastes of a multiplicity of diversified identity allegiances (i.e., gender, class, subculture) adds to the overall political sense explored in part I; namely, a sense that it is no longer possible to develop a unique national narrative rooted to one language and one single territorial entity but

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there is instead ample room for speaking of trans-national flows and global difference, heterogeneity, hybridity, fluidity, diffuseness and notions of de-centerd fragmentation, which no nation could possibly hold together any longer. Certainly, the post-national critique, which derives from this ontological tradition around what has been named as post-modern identity politics, gives center stage to the ways of being of hitherto marginalized or subordinate/subaltern identities. Likewise this tradition finds that it is its intellectual duty to develop an approach to knowledge or epistemology, which is both firmly contextualized (always contextualize—Stuart Hall) and historicised (always historicise— Fredric Jameson). In addition, this very post-national critique has aimed, simultaneously, to transcend the dominant cultural tenets and aesthetic tastes historically over-determined by dominant cultural politics (institutionalized establishment). To do so, the intellectual tradition where this overall post-national critique is inscribed also develops a conceptual framework of its own, from which the productive division Paul Gilroy (2003, 67–68) established between ontological and strategic essentialism is worth bringing forward here. This division opposes nationalist and ethnically absolute, unitary approaches to culture and identity with a more pluralistic and complex representation of difference and particularity seen as internally divided by class, sexuality, gender, age, ethnicity, economics, and political consciousness. This allows constantly weighting the claims to any unified national identity against other contrasting, polyphonic varieties of subjectivity and identification. In addition, this division between the unitary and the pluralist standpoints leaves behind the very status once enjoyed by the building of not only physical (or territorial) but also symbolic national borders/boundaries in the writing of cultural histories, hence opening up new spaces for cultural critique. This kind of post-national critique makes a significant contribution to the task of overcoming standard essentialist representations of any territorially based (cultural) politics (for instance with regard to the officially established fields of literary studies—English, French literature, etc). This post-national critique also constitutes a healthy intellectual antidote to the prevailing, and all pervasive grandnationalist explanations of modernity, culture and identity; a remedy, in other words, which re-situates the different, differing and concrete

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localities of a given cultural formation within wider global contexts while simultaneously calling, as Paul Gilroy did, for the deployment of explicitly trans-national and inter-cultural perspectives. In this respect, just as we saw Gilroy standing against absolutist temptations (both ethnic and state-national) of fixing identity, this kind of post-national(list) critique also seeks to disrupt any strategy seeking to privilege nations as the main container for cultural and political identification. In short Habermas’ liberal-democratic post-nationalism and, say, Gilroy’s post-colonial post-nationalism privilege two different approaches to dialogue. In the former there is dialogue so long as it takes place within the confines, norms, and regulations established by majority cultures in already established nation-states—it is a vertical, top-down type of dialogue ultimately seeking sameness. In the latter it is rather Mikahil Bathkin’s polyphonic logic, which prevails—a horizontal logic inherent to a de-colonially oriented post-national dialogic imagination (Bathkin and Volishonov, [1929], Holquist and Emerdon, 1981, Mercer, 1998); a dialogue among differents, which captures the new de-territorialised, diasporic dynamics impinging upon identity and culture in all its geo-political and bio-political complexities. State of affairs The arguments above account for the distinct case of yet another important empty signifier (namely, post-nationalism), which here again, very much as in the case of multiculturalism, is articulated and filled in with two very different sets of meanings and / or significations stemming from two opposing intellectual traditions. On the one hand, liberal post-nationalism, and more concretely that theorized by Habermas, situates Europe along a straightforward historical teleology of redemption as it were, rooted in a classic Cartesian/rationalist ontology. European nation-states are understood as a middle-passage (that of modernity) in a civilizing evolution that takes Europe from pre-modern (archaic, obscurantist, based on religious prejudice) to post-modern qua post-national societies (in which liberal multiculturalism also plays a corrective role: discourse of tolerance, etc). In this context, the post-nationalist approach that resorts to Habermas’ ideology of Constitutional Patriotism is a doctrine based on the aim of rationally overcoming any issue of identity particulars;

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yet, simultaneously, such patriotism is nothing but a neo-nationalism of the grand European nation-state under the presumed cover of a purely humanist and rational democratic universalism. This Eurocentric brand of post-national discourse is co-extensive, rather un-paradoxically, to a re-nationalization of multicultural politics and the reduction of such politics to mere post-politics, that is to say: the administration and supervision (governance, policy making and legislation, criminal justice system) of cultural difference: ways of life of minority ‘ethnic’ cultures; sub-state national minorities, etc., which, in turn, link perfectly well with the idea named in this book as management multiculturalism akin to the liberal imagination. On the other hand, a different kind of post-national critique has also been discussed, which incorporates the legacy of poststructuralist, (post) Marxist, psychoanalytic, feminist, cultural and gay (or queer) studies, etc, and which allows no historical amnesia with regard to the Western violent imperial past (and present). This overall post-colonial critique, itself based on a rather more radical and interventionist approach to multiculturalism and identity politics proposes a new point of analytical horizon where the geopolitical dimension (the post-national) and the bio-political dimension (sex, gender, race, class, etc) converge within and through the various critical movements alluded to at the outset of this paragraph. Yet, that very distinctive radicalism of post-structuralist and post-colonial discourse is not itself without flaws. For instance, Slavoj Žižek disagrees with both post-national views— those promoted by the likes of Habermas and Giddens, certainly, but also those nurtured in post-colonial critique. In addition, Žižek’s anti-post-national discourse, as it were, is also instrumental to finally engage with a whole scholarly literature on the question, which became prominent in the 1990s. In order to provide concrete information as to the mystification hiding behind such post-national propositions, Žižek (2006a, 248) bluntly stated the following: The first myth to be debunked is that of the diminishing role of the State. What we are witnessing today is a shift in its functions: while partially withdrawing from its welfare obligations, the State is strengthening its apparatuses in other domains of social regulation. In order to start a business now, one has to rely on the State to guarantee not only law and order, but the entire infrastructure

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(access to water and energy, means of transportation, ecological criteria, international regulations, etc.) to an incomparably larger extent than a hundred years ago.

In this respect, it is also worth pointing out again that it is not only that states are not disappearing; it is also that even the nationalism that sustains big national-states is there to stay. Recall the notion of banal nationalism by Michael Billig (1995). As he suggested, nationalism is more than separatism at the peripheries of established nation-states. Instead, Billig argued, albeit it is often unexpressed, nationalism is not only ubiquitous but always ready to be mobilized in the wake of convulsive events. The obvious tension expressed so far with reference to the issue of state (and) sovereignty and the extent to which it has disappeared (dwindled etc), can be further summarized by counter-posing Žižek’s stated position to Michael Keating’s, who does indeed celebrate the outlook of a new territorial restructuring in the post-State era (2000, 2004). Keating’s overarching aim is to resolve the question of stateless nations such as Scotland (2009). In order to do so he reclaims the values of a possible pluri-national democracy (2001). Paraphrasing Keating’s thesis (vi–viii / 12): —We are now moving from the times where nation states were predominant to a new post-sovereign era. —In this post-sovereign era, instances and processes of institutionalization above and below the level of nation-states radically condition the instrumental action of conventional States. —As a consequence, the claim of small national formations to decide their own future should not mean that the objective is obtaining a new independent State based on the Westphalian logic and/or the parameters of nationhood prevalent in the nineteenth century.5 —For even if nation and state have been closely linked historically, nowadays, together with the demystification of the state this very link is losing its strength, which is something obvious, most notably in Europe. Both with regard to Europe as well as speaking more generally, we saw how Žižek disagrees with this vision that the state is an institution that is to disappear any time soon. Remarks about the total loss of the

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state as an institution under the globalization process do not seem very convincing. What rather happens is that states are reset to participate and compete in these global processes more effectively, and according to Zizek, more ruthlessly as well. The state, in other words, remains.6 Indeed talking of an instrumental approach to the administration of the modern (Western) State, these are the key cornerstones on which its main pillars stand: security (army, police), the corollary ability to administer justice to its citizens, social welfare (health, education), and also, as sketched in part II, the ability to secure a territorially based national market. In other words, the structural relationships between regional and national-state levels in the context of globalization do not equate to a zero-sum game, so that the existence and expansion of one level produces as a necessary effect a symmetrically correlative contraction of the other level. In fact, taking as an example the case of Scotland within the British union (Nairn, [1977] 2003), it could be argued that one of the reasons for confrontation and incompatibility between the idea of Britishness and Scottish national claims is the desire of Scotland to become a global player at a level previously reserved only for the national state . So what is new in this context is not that states stop playing the global role that has always been enrolled in their geopolitical agendas. They still do. It is rather that potential competitors stem now from ‘subnational’ positions, which want to interact directly and meaningfully with global institutions.7 Yet, standard theory in the 1990s (Camilleri and Falk 1992; Sassen, 1996, 1998) produced an overall vision according to which, together with the increasing process of globalization, a correlative decrease of state sovereignty followed. Accordingly, supra-state military alliances such as NATO were said to undermine the military sovereignty of nation states; the increasing weight of international law (on human rights, etc) goes hand in hand with a decreasing influence of the statebound judiciary; the crisis of the welfare state is amended with an ongoing and unbound process of privatization (hospital management, schools, etc); and finally, the process of globalization itself undermines economic sovereignty. In this context, if control of the economy and security are no longer dependent on the state, if justice is increasingly delivered under the banner of universal rights, if private hands increasingly handle social

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welfare, and the economy is as global as it is, run by supranational institutions (IMF, etc), then the ensuing question as to the practical usefulness of the State inevitably arises;8 and to this question, another standard answer, at least regarding Europe, is that the State now inhabits a kind of ghostly territory, halfway in-between these two levels: (a) the practical domain of local management (regional economies, city-regions) which leads to a greater control of resources by society itself and which, since it is socio-culturally closer to handle the issues of citizens, has likewise a better capacity to take more immediate action; and (b) the more uncertain, as it were, domain of global governance that would still rather function as a utopian vision envisaging the appropriation of certain key functions of the nation-state so as to configure some basic rules with regard to the global economy and universal security, etc. At this point it is perhaps worth recalling that these highly conjectural propositions were mostly put forward in what we characterized as the “happy” post-communist Clintonian 1990s, and on which part II of this book mostly focused. Now, some twenty years later, where a more pessimistic mood prevails (including a deep financial crisis), strong evidence also suggests the following: while solutions to global issues tend rather to stall far too easily, and as individual states refuse to relinquish their own prerogatives (recall the Kyoto ecology summit/debate on reducing carbon dioxide emissions, for instance), at the same time the relations of self-governed regional entities or cityregions with the global economy always remain heavily mediated by the state. In this respect, some early analysis, such as Ohmae Kenichi’s (1995), which described globalization as the creation of a borderless world in which sovereignty and the influence of nation-states was to disappear completely, have proven highly exaggerated. This awareness also prompted the corrective questioning of standard liberal postnational discourse (Smith and Bakker, 2008) together with the explicit acknowledgment that despite some weakening of their original powers, States, in effect, continue to have the ability to act relatively independently in the context of the progressive globalization of the world.

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In this sense, it could be argued that this State power is most visible in its political and cultural aspects rather than in the economic dimension. The fact remains that we are still a long way from the complete disappearance of national states as significant social formations. As a result, unlike the argument developed by Neil Brenner (1999, 431) in which the territorial organization of contemporary city, regional and state institutions/spaces should be viewed as the outcome of a highly conflicting dynamic of global spatial structuring, it seems that that the expansion of city-regions and sub-state regional entities is ultimately a re-territorialization of national state power, particularly in cases of multinational or multiregional states. In this context, speaking of the total loss of power of the states under the process of globalization does not seem ‘to fit reality.’ What happens, rather, is that although states might have required relinquishing power to sub-state formations (city-regions, small national formations) as well as taking part in supra-state organizations that (may) limit their sovereignty, all in all, states have, nevertheless, reconfigured themselves to participate and compete in these global processes more effectively.9

*** This final chapter began with Habermas formulating the idea of the (European) State’s integrative abilities by delving on notions of constitutional patriotism, rationally balanced deliberative politics and liberally constituted universalistic democracy. Giddens also spoke of sophisticated multiculturalism as an attempt to reformulate some Third Way politics located in a radical center able to articulate notions of social well-being as inscribed in concrete narratives of national identity (Britishness, in this case). The question here was not only that instead of being the rational outcome of a balanced deliberative democracy of sorts, such sophisticated multiculturalism of the modern nation-state constitutes rather a Eurocentric theatrical form of multiculturalism (as Madina V. Tlostanova and Walter D. Mignolo (2009, 137) think of it speaking from a de-colonial perspective), but also that within the strict coordinates of European thought, both Habermas and Giddens seem to forget the works of such philosophers of suspicion as Freud (fragmented subject),

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Marx (class antagonism) or Nietzsche (will to power) speaking to us of fundamental splits in both the realms of our psychological makeup as well as our societies and the ways knowledge is administered and organized along specific power formations. Certainly, multiculturalism is irremediably linked to such cultural and social processes deriving from post-colonialism and globalization precisely in such ways that, as explained above, make it fall beyond the level of control of nation-states. This does certainly not mean that, as often stated, (nation)states are institutions about to disappear any time soon. The task of the conclusion is to produce a brief re-evaluative summary of multiculturalism, including the symptomatic idea that being on the edge of the void is perhaps not such bad place to be in order to engage in politics proper.

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Conclusion According to Cynthia Willet some 15 years ago, “multiculturalism has not yet been fully theorized.” This could still be true nowadays as: [I]n part the lack of a unifying theory stems from the fact that multiculturalism as a political, social and cultural movement has aimed to respect a multiplicity of diverging perspectives outside of dominant traditions. (1998, 1—quoted in Hesse, 2000, 14).

To begin with, Willet’s suggestion that multiculturalism as a political, social and cultural movement rests on a plurality of subordinate positions deploying their claims and demands away from the dominant tradition must be qualified. In fact, in this book the contrary position has been emphasised throughout; namely that, overall, most multiculturalist controversies are ultimately contained within the ideological coordinates of the liberal-democratic imaginary. A main point of departure for this book was that the single most potent political philosophy, which over-determines nowadays the multiculturalist field of discursivity is precisely that of liberalism, albeit perhaps in its most socially and culturally benign and ‘progressive’ forms. In this book neither intention nor claim has been laid to construct a unifying theory. What was established in the introduction was the possibility for developing an overall threefold historical, sociopolitical and cultural approach to multiculturalism, to which a fourth speculative dimension has been added to deal, among other issues, with the all too important debate on the relations between universalism and particularism; a dimension, admittedly, which has found most of its sources in the traditions of continental philosophy rather than in AngloSaxon analytical philosophy.10 By means of this approach, a specific model and framework for the overall exploration of multiculturalism to proceed was also advanced. It was highlighted that throughout this book the main logics, nature and features of this model were to be carried forward through the study of what were loosely headlined and conceptualised as (1) Militant/activist/radical/critical multiculturalism, (2) Market/consumerist multiculturalism and (3) Management/ administrative multiculturalism.

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On the basis of this framework,11 if there was a further final, wrapping-up synthesis of the key arguments developed in the book to be made, this would have to start by saying this again; namely, that multiculturalism is a very controversial and contentious term widely used in our globalised societies—a term carrying various often contradictory meanings. In this book it has been amply shown how numerous authors engage in various aspects of the debate regarding multiculturalism (radical stances and struggles against discrimination; promotion of diversity, respect, tolerance; migration, gender and human rights; the markets and cultural consumption; politics, nation and governance; the issue of the relationships between universalism and particularism etc). These debates around multiculturalism have been presented through myriad articles and books where multiple and conflicting views have emerged. If anything what has been shown is how the notion of culture is, for obvious reasons, at the centre of the multiculturalist debate. From a general anthropological point of view one of the main risks of multiculturalism always was that to fall into essentialism and reductionism. This is the case when the cultures of the other (migrant, indigenous ‘first peoples,’ religious, cultural minorities) are apprehended as if they were straightforward and clear-cut entities, which then become the very embodiment of homogeneity often apprehended a-historically. An important risk of viewing culture in this way is that such homogenising and a-historical constructions of culture promote, consciously or not, certain forms of covert racism. As Sara Ahmed clearly showed, this often leads to the multicultural fantasy that ultimately informs and permeates Western monocultural hegemony; a form, in other words, of elegant racism as opposed to vulgar racism (Miriam Lee Kaprov, 1991, 1978) in which the fantasy of cultural harmoniousness speaks rather of a racism without races, a racism, in other words, which is based, precisely, on the rejection of otherness in the precise guise of its opposite; that is to say, in the guise that, now that the old times of colonialism are over, the other appears to be, in fact, duly respected. Without a doubt it is Slavoj Žižek, together with Alain Badiou, who appeared most at odds with this kind of multicultural politics based on (i) shaking the West’s sense of colonial guilt by promoting a shallow, ritualized praise of the post-colonial other’s culture by means of (ii) deploying a whole set of explicit statements that are favorable to

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the other, (benevolent, respectful, etc.) only to continue to maintain the implicit assumption of Western-European cultural superiority. To explain this Žižek and Badiou also interpret multiculturalism as the ideology of global capitalism. For these authors, if anything, multiculturalism facilitates the globalization of capital, hence repeating the same relational design that old nineteenth-century colonial empires imposed between the metropolis and the colonies. In this new approach the culture of the then natives now turned traveling migrants should be still studied and respected carefully. For Žižek and Badiou, however, whereas the colonizing powers represented concrete nation-states dealing with their own colonised others, multiculturalism nowadays arises directly from the universalizing dimension of capital; in short, from global companies. In this context, throughout Culture and Imperialism Edward Said also invites us to engage in the debate on multiculturalism with no fear. This he does by asking us to remember that the main tenets of Western enlightenment are based on promoting emancipation through integration and not separation; that is to say, that the very ideal at the center of the enlightenment project would not allow anybody to be excluded—hence the legitimacy of the struggles of subordinate peoples—a point that Jürgen Habermas, for instance, does not take on board since it appears that for Habermas completing the unfinished project of the enlightenment would require, so it seems, that former colonized Others to still abide by the universality of European qua Western values, which are presented to them as neutral and somehow context-free. As Said would point out, actually anticipating Žižek’s overall view on the matter, under the apparent defense of diversity and the promotion of pluralism, this kind of “sophisticated” multiculturalism aiming at remaining neutral (recall the co-ordinating role Giddens accords to the state) indirectly masks racism. It does so since this self-appointed neutrality speaks rather of a position above from which Western European culture looks down into the cultures of the Other. In this way the supposed respect for the other’s culture is more an affirmation of the superiority of Western culture overall. This is why Said’s critique of the West in Orientalism remains always valid. It is because the undeniable instances of discrimination of migrant populations and minority cultures as well as the persistent and increasingly explicit forms of

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racism in Western societies speak of a rather not-very-sophisticated variety of multiculturalism being dominant after all; a ritualized and procedural multiculturalism, as it were, which appeals to noble ideas such as respect and tolerance, or the universality of such values as non-discrimination and equality without ultimately responding to the question of coexistence in particular situations and contexts. This book is based on a desire to participate in a global debate but it is certainly not to promote a war of cultures à la Huntington, less so to proclaim the victory of the Western liberal political, economic and cultural model à la Fukuyama. In order to establish effective forms of intercultural dialogue what must be promoted are symmetrical situations in which whatever dialogic arrangements take place, critical and reflective ways of engaging with the other prevail in both, indeed all sides of the cultural debate. Uncritical, self-serving multiculturalism leads to the entrenchment of inward-looking cultures in rigid, static and monolithic parameters, which are dramatically incommensurable with those of other cultures. Any emancipatory politics stemming from our own PostMarxist re-articulation of the multiculturalist debate must advocate for flexible approaches to the defense of cultural difference free of reductionism and also within the general coordinates and/or orientations, which privilege discourses of social equality. The aim is not to produce only anti-discrimination politics tailored to the particular demands and interests of one’s own (group)-specific identity formation(s) but to renew the multidimensional contents of emancipatory politics through the constant reworking of universality understood not as a static notion but rather as a meaningful notion worth struggling over and for.12 According to Badiou an event emerges from the edge of the void and then breaks away from/ruptures with the current order of being, from the current order, that is, of things being as they are supposed to be by necessity. For some (see, for instance, Callanicos, 2007) this often airy way of discussing the possibilities of radical change may also be politically problematic in that it finds itself uneasily close to a miraculous and religious conception of the world (Badiou’s celebration of Saint Paul’s universalism comes to mind here), and seems thus to give a blessing, as it were, on all sorts of arbitrary voluntarism and moral relativism. Regardless, stating that one is sitting on the edge of the void also serves to end this book by summarizing the intellectual parallax and / or conceptual dialectics, as it were, informing this whole enquiry

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on multiculturalism. In a nutshell, it can be said that this enquiry has been ultimately articulated around the presentation of two main postMarxist approaches. The first post-Marxist approach, mostly dealt with in Part I, accounts for an array of theories (post-structuralism, post-colonialism, postmodernism . . . ), which have, over the least thirty to forty years, imagined, conceived and celebrated the emergence of a series of marginal cultural identities and invisibilized political subjectivities (feminism, subaltern, various social movements, cultural, sexual . . . minorities . . . ) as enacted from specifically de-centered points of enunciation: the edges, margins, borders . . . In this sense, it is still important to mention that, when addressing the issue of current, dominant discourses on (multi)cultural politics, the tradition and genealogy of cultural studies and critical theory is also key to the understanding of how, when and where radical forms of, and militant struggles for multiculturalism, among other struggles (feminism, ecology, etc) emerge(d) both within specific politico-social, counter-cultural, and subcultural activist practices as well as along the line of critical academic engagement. In this context, the ideas of methodological freedom within a critical context of carnivalesque transgression as it were, came hand in hand with innovating works on such notions as culture, diaspora and hybridity, subalternity, etc, by cultural theorists such as Stuart Hall, James Clifford, Paul Gilroy, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak and many others mentioned in this enquiry. This, in turn, also gave a sense of a transnational, globalized dimension to identity politics, which will be rather lost in the now conventionally nationalized post-political approaches to the management of cultural difference. The second post-Marxist approach that has been developed in Part II is certainly not linked to an overly optimistic sense of celebration (of difference, etc) but rather, on the contrary, speaks of a deep sense of failure and impossibility following the debacle of communism after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Therefore, the main vocabularies emerging are those around such terms as “void,” “impasse,” “gap,” “failure” or “cut” . . . Yet also of a continuous attempt to search / re-articulate new collective political subjects both in negative (Agambem’s Homo Sacer (1998) or indeed Zizek’s working class) as well as positive ways (e.g. Ranciere’s Demos (1999), Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s .

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Multitude (2004) Ernesto’ Laclau’s people (2005), or see also the weak thought of Gianni Vattimo’s Ecce Comu (2007) within the hermeneuticcommunist (2011) framework he develops with Santiago Zabala) It is on this account that a main aim and task of Part II was to show, through the works of, among others, Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek, the limits of the main ideological articulations established in Part I with regard, particularly, to how, by at best sidelining and at worst abandoning the notion of class, cultural studies and critical theory found it impossible to offer a coherent critique of capitalism. Likewise, in opposition to the radical approach to identity politics above, both the mass consumerist qua corporate dimension as well as the very political economy of market-led multiculturalism also made it legitimate to deploy a dialectic counterpoint to the political and philosophical shortcomings stemming from multiculturalist militancy and cultural advocacy politics, over-celebratory notions of pluralized cultural difference, anti-essentialist identity politics and radical multiculturalism (culturalization of politics, cultural relativism, mystification of migrant cultures. . . . ) In this respect, it is also clear that in order to give a final verdict as to the direction contemporary theoretical and political interventions should take, “sutures” qua articulations of meaning (in Ernesto Laclau’s sense) both within and between these two post-Marxist orientations should be encouraged. This implies likewise further developing a sense of critical skepticism with regard to the dialogic and consensual arrangements nurtured by the overall discursive articulation of liberal multiculturalism, as seen in Part III. Liberal multiculturalism, also understood as a state-centered project ‘from above,’ explicitly favors such notions as respect, tolerance and difference; yet, simultaneously, if only by ominous silence, implicitly promotes grand-national discourses centered on notions of national security relative, in turn, to a permanent state of emergency against the threats of migrant qua barbarian invasions. To sum up: In this enquiry a very contingent discursive articulation of our own has been operated between both the above Post-Marxist approaches. From these approaches it follows that in the structure of feeling of transformative politics and the language games of critical theory, the rhetorical struggle over the meaning of any political sign (democracy, freedom, equality, etc) requires never

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taking words in their apparent plain, taken for granted meaning. For instance, contrary to their apparently daunting nature, notions such as edge or void (can) account for situations whereby being on the edge of the void is ultimately not such a bad place to be. For being on the edge of the void also nominates the very anti-determinist idea and prospect that what is to come cannot be anticipated. On the other hand, seemingly crystal-clear notions such as multiculturalism are extremely ambiguous. In fact, multiculturalism, like nationalism itself, for the sake of the argument, can render both freedom and oppression legitimate depending what words and notions they are articulated with.

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Notes Notes to Introduction 1. Barnor Hesse’s quote also allows one to argue that multiculturalism as such remains mainly an Anglophone phenomenon, and indeed mainly Anglophone rather than even Western. To further prove this it suffices to bring into the equation another author who is to feature prominently in this book, Will Kymlicka. Both Hesse and Kymlicka represent quite markedly opposite ideological persuasions regarding multiculturalism yet, at the same time, both seem to agree as to which is the true geopolitical frame of reference in which multiculturalism operates. When framing, and also criticizing the actual reach of multiculturalism, Kymlicka (2009, 11) clearly speaks of a context, which is wider than the Anglo-Saxon realm and is in fact Western: “This is certainly true in the sphere of multiculturalism where the emerging norms and standards are heavily shaped by Western experiences and expertise, with minimal input from the rest of the world.” When stating the above, however, Kymlicka himself is well aware that the ‘cunning of imperialist reason’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1999) speaks of “global asymmetries [which] have led some commentators to suggest that we should replace talk of the [nebulous term] ‘international community’ with say, ‘Western powers,’ or even ‘American hegemony’” (10). For Kymlicka, in short, the American factor, (itself central to what is understood here as the Anglophone realm) overruns the wider Western dimension. Likewise, Barnor Hesse spoke of a “transatlantic configuration” of multiculturalism in the passage mentioned. He then further suggests (2000, 1) that “The political meanings of Western multiculturalism now have a transatlantic resonance.” Unlike Kymlicka, whose positions lean towards articulating liberalism and multiculturalism together, Hesse speaks from a rather more critical post-colonial perspective; from a position embracing forms of activist multiculturalism based on an agenda of radical identity politics; but just as much as ‘Western powers’ should rather be read as ‘American hegemony’ tout court in Kymlicka’s approach, one should also re-interpret Hesse’s transatlantic configuration and resonance of multiculturalism as something taking place in the United States, in the first place, and then producing an echoing effect in British multiculturalism, particularly, rather than in Western cultural politics, generally—a point that, though perhaps in an involuntary way, Hesse (2000, 13) himself does not fail to capture explicitly: “In contrast to Britain, the figuration of multiculturalism in the United States has produced much greater social reverberations and contested theoretical

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elaborations. What became known as the ‘culture wars’ in the United States during the mid-1980s into the 1990s, politicized and expanded the concept of multiculturalism beyond the parameters of ‘race’ and ethnicity, into the discourses of gender and sexuality conceived as socially repressed cultural differences.” Barnor Hesse also offers these bibliographic references to make his point: Foster and Herzog, 1994; Goldberg, 1994; Kincheloe and Steinberg, 1979; MacLaren 1997; Melzer, Weinberger and Zinman, 1998; Willet 1998. In turn, our point is that although multicultural societies are certainly part and parcel of global politics the rather Anglophone character of multiculturalism as an “ideology” so to speak appears to be clear and cannot go unnoticed. 2. In fact, focusing on this question of theory, in the Anglo-American academia, for instance, debates explicitly centered on multiculturalism become central only in the 1990s, both in the broad fields of the humanities (Goldberg, 1994; Willet (ed.), 1998; Smelser and Alexander; 1999; Barry, 2000) and the more specific / specialized academic disciplines ranging from political theory (Benhabib, 1996; Parekh, 2000; Kymlicka, 1995; Bennet, 1998, Young, 2000; Taylor and Gutman, 1994) and philosophy (Fay 1996; Willet 1998) on to educational studies (Kincheloe and Steinberg, 1997), media studies (Shoat and Stam, 1994) or cultural and social theory (Goldberg, 1994; Lemert 1993; McLaren 1994). In addition, only in the 2000s can multiculturalism be said to become a fully recognised, and institutionalised discourse (Laden and Owen, 2007; Shohat and Stam, 2003; Kelly, 2002; Parekh, 2006, 2008; Banting and Kymlicka (eds), 2006, Kymlicka, 2009; Benhabib, Shapiro and Petranovich (eds.), 2007; Modood, 2007; Philips, 2009, May and Sleeter, 2010). 3. In fact, Kymlicka himself confirms this when stating that his own place of origin “Canada was the first country to adopt an official multiculturalist policy” (107). He also refers to Donald Forbes to reinforce the overall liberal inspiration that this kind of multiculturalism promotes from and by the state. In Canada: “Multiculturalism appeals to the common understanding of freedom as choice” (Forbes, 1994, 94). Likewise, in the same association that takes place between liberalism and multiculturalism, Kymlicka also brings up James Jupp’s comments referring to Australia (107–8): “Canada is far from unique in the way it ties multiculturalism to liberalism. We see a similar linkage in Australia, for example. According to James Jupp—who played a pivotal role in defining Australia’s multiculturalist policy—multiculturalism in Australia: “Is essentially a liberal ideology which operates within liberal institutions with the universal approval of liberal attitudes. It accepts that all humans should be treated as equals and that different cultures can co-exist if they accept liberal values” (Jupp 1995, 40). 4. It is important to insist on the fact that unlike standard approaches to liberal multiculturalism concerned with “policies adopted or demanded

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by many different types of ethnocultural groups including ‘immigrants,’ ‘minorities,’ ‘national’ groups, and ‘indigenous peoples’” as Kymlicka would put it (2009, 18, see also Parekh, 2000, 2008) radical identity politics also included gender and sexual difference within the agenda of multicultural identity politics, not to forget class politics as well. 5. Here it is important to emphasize that this is indeed “as a matter of emphasis.” By linking Militant, Market and Management Multiculturalisms to the framework now presented a main methodological problem arises with this approach. It is that these two parallel dimensions will then be linked, articulated and structured in far too straightforward a threefold historical periodization. The issue is that this approach will irremediably lead to placing more emphasis on certain aspects and forgetting others. For instance, militant or radical multiculturalism has never ceased to exist, (one example is how, for instance, migrant groups and aboriginals in Australia create their own coalitions for action against the backdrop of still dominant Anglo-Saxon culture in Australia). Yet, in historical terms, this enquiry will see it as more pre-eminent in the second half of last century, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s when cultural and identity politics were understood in an extended way encompassing questions of ethnicity, gender, class, etc. Likewise, what is termed as market multiculturalism is always present by necessity (1960s ‘happy hippies’ or 1990’s ‘stressed yuppies’ paying for calming-down lessons in transcendental meditation, or even today’s street markets selling both local and multicultural produces being three clear instances, say). Yet in this study, the notion of market multiculturalism concretely speaks of a moment where a clear de-politicization of culture takes place as the globalizing opening up of (cultural) consumption increases from the 1990s onwards, after the fall of communism. Finally management multiculturalism is also alwaysalready there—for instance quite explicitly in Australia and Canada, as it has already been mentioned, in the 1970s—but in this study it refers to a further twofold closing down—not only of the very meaning of multiculturalism as a concept, only encompassing now a restricted meaning, but also of wider political expectations for change. This overall lowering of cultural, social and political expectations is simultaneous with a post-2001 ‘war on terror’ context—a context where discourses of national security prevail as a (rather obsessively over-suspicious) state of national emergency keeps a vigilant supervising eye on the administration of cultural diversity. 6. Covering these three main areas of the social formation in one way or another, see Althusser, 1976; M. Poulantzas, 2001) and also Gramsci (1973) Notes on Politics (“The Modern Prince,” “State and Civil Society” & “Americanism and Fordism”) pp.123–320. 7. Note also how in the procedural framework used in this book, the cultural and social theories developed are linked to both historically aligned

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enquiry (Collingwood, 1946) and non-foundational (Sayyid and Zac, 1998) forms of philosophical investigation (Wittgenstein, 2001). This way of intersecting social and cultural theory with philosophical speculation (P. Winch, 1958) and history (Wright Mills, 1959) opens the way to re-situate the contents of various multicultural controversies and themes within a broader historicized context, in socio-political terms and through a wide examination of the key polysemic notion of culture. 8. As Albert Schutz explains (1976, 91–105), linguistic and cultural description is a process analogous to the experience of any foreigner learning the culture of the native group in the host society. Schutz noted that in the weeks and months following the immigrants’ arrival in the new place of residence, what they previously took for granted as knowledge about that society turns out to be unreliable if not obviously false. In addition, areas of ignorance previously of not importance come to take on great significance, overcoming them being necessary for the pursuit of important goals, perhaps even for the foreigner’s very survival in the new environment. In the process of learning how to participate in social relations in the new society, foreigners gradually acquire an inside knowledge of it, which supplants their previous external knowledge. Schutz continued to argue that by virtue of being forced to come to understand the culture of the host society in this way, the foreigner acquires a certain objectivity not available to the inside members of a culture. This form of what, for other methodological purposes, Schutz conceptualized as gentle perspectivism, allows the foreigner noting how the inside members of a culture are quite unable to see their culture as anything but a reflection of ‘how the world is.’ In other words, the inside members of a culture are not conscious of the deep-rooted, fundamental assumptions, many of which are distinctive to that culture, that is to say, fundamentally context-specific and culture-bound sets of beliefs that shape their vision. Schutz conceptualized this “taken-for-granted-ness of one’s own culture as “the natural attitude” (1972; see also, 1970, 1976). One consequence of such “natural attitude” is that regarding multiculturalism, “cultural integration” and / or “social inclusion” a highly naturalized and (almost) unconscious approach to the values, customs, laws, language and culture of the “host society” also emerges. Worth mentioning here on this question is how Bhikhu Parekh himself comes to underline this highly ‘naturalized’ position. He does so when stating that “the operative public values” of a nation are those giving legal form to “the way we do things here.” Needless to say, this, in turn, offers the foreign other a highly liberal and individual(ist) choice: . . . and if you don’t like it, you . . . [leave]!

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Notes to chapter 1 1. Raymond Williams (1921–1988) was born in the Welsh border village of Pandy and also wrote a novel called Border Country (1960). Yet for all the border theories and mythologies of the margins surrounding Williams, when discussing culture, community and the academic ‘discipline’ which came to study both critically—cultural studies—he was certainly at the center of it all. Standard accepted accounts situate the ‘real’ foundational moment of cultural studies in Britain as directly linked to two of his seminal works; we are referring here to Culture and Society ([1958] 1963) and The Long Revolution ([1961] 1965) which, together with Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy ([1957] 1970) and E.P. Thompson’s The making of the English working class (1963) are conventionally considered to be the key texts that pioneered cultural studies. Yet Williams himself ensured that the origins of cultural studies were traced back to the turn of the twentieth century. This he did in the article “The Future of Cultural Studies” (1989, 151–162) in which he further linked cultural studies to grass-root initiatives such as the formation of the co-operative movement and the creation of Adult Education centers to discuss culture (cinema, etc.) with working class participants. As an intellectual and academic project, cultural studies first emerged in post-WWII Britain with the aim of protecting and reviving the specific culture of the British working class against what was then perceived as a threat: (American) consumer and mass culture. 2. This distinction was formalized by Ferdinand Tönnies (1887 [1944, 1957]) through his notions of Gemeinschaft (ideal, utopian community, unity of being, sense of social righteousness, commitment to common good) and Gessellschaft (bureaucratic, systematic, contractual . . . society). Emile Durkheim (1960b, 1997 [1892/3]) also gave an account of this rupture and presented it through a somehow inverted metaphoric process in defining basic forms of social relation: organic (capitalist, modern, urban) vs. mechanic (pre-modern, pre-capitalist, traditional, rural; where social relationships were carried out in a mechanical or “machine-like” manner). 3. In passing a point by Pierre Bourdieu (1979) is relevant here as he argued the value of high culture would also lie not so much in one’s ability to make distinctions in judging works of art, but in the fact itself that such ability confers “distinction”—this point will become relevant later on when referring to the nature of the dominant multicultural gaze into the ‘ways of life ‘ of the subordinate others. 4. These were attainable through myriad stories, traditions, books, personal diaries, etc—For a more detailed take on the production of diaspora literature see also King, Connell and White, 1995.

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5. Overall Gilroy’s is a good reminder of what Michael Billig (1995) called banal nationalism, which will become more relevant as a concept in the third part of this book and is also part and parcel of nation-state based Left politics. In regards of what Gilroy terms as ethnic absolutism Janna Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur (2003,4) state that Gilroy disputes “African diasporic conceptions [ . . . ] portraying African diasporic individuals everywhere—scattered across several continents- as linked by a common heritage, history and racial descent.” In other words, Gilroy addresses the issue of Black nationalist strategies that emerge in the diaspora itself by contesting the Afro-centric perspective and the idea that Africa provides diaspora black peoples with the possibility of a return to some sense of a unifying past origin and a true, authentic pre-modern homeland. In terms of Gilroy’s bibliographic production, The Black Atlantic sits in-between another classic of cultural studies “ It Ain’t No Black in The Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and nation” (1992) and “Between Camps: Nations, Cultures and the Allures of Race” (2000). While the former deploys a severe critique against both ethnocentric British cultural studies, as it were, as well as the racist attitudes in Britain regardless of the right/left political divide, in the latter Gilroy continues to suggest the idea of diaspora as a tool to overcome life in entrenched camps (nations). Simultaneously, Gilroy’s search is also on for a more global and unifying planetary humanism transcending both liberal humanism and over-indulgence on the politics of difference. Although emphasis shifts from one work to the other, all three books remain constant in exploring the relations among race, class and nation within the evolving historical context of modernity as product and outcome of the Western enlightenment project. 6. According to Clifford, the notion of traveling is handled in two different ways within the field of anthropology. First, the ethnographer moves in the literal sense to the extent that he or she must leave home in order to carry out research work: “Ethnographers, typically, are travelers who like to stay and dig in (for a time), who like to make a second home/workplace” (99). Secondly, at the epistemological level, the ethnographer finds the need to describe knowledge as contingent and partial: “Every focus excludes; there is no politically innocent methodology for intercultural interpretation” (97). 7. As a preliminary taster of this critique it can be already said that with the emphasis placed on a sense of permanent mobility, fluidity and process conveyed by the experience of nomadic traveling, room for skepticism soon widens. The crucial point here is that far too superficial an understanding of nomadic wandering and hybridity (another key term in the semantic field

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of traveling cultures) leads to an interesting paradox: is it not that by way of never being in one place and always being ‘in-between places,’ comfort and refuge may be sought in this very constant state of inbetweenness with indeed, little of the adventure, risking and daring that Edward Said would demand from an exiled spirit, involved in the process? In this respect, to the extent that Edward Said was a Palestinian intellectual in exile, he (1994, 43) was likewise extremely demanding on himself: “There is no real escape, even for the exile who tries to remain suspended, since that state of inbetweenness can itself become a rigid ideological position, a sort of dwelling whose falseness is covered over in time, and to which one can too easily become accustomed.” With no possible evasion from the necessity of continuous self-assessment, appeals to the nomadic and the hybrid become problematic on one main account. Nomadic exaltations of travel often rely on a wellknown mystification of journeying conceived of as free movement. Within the context of Western nomadic journeying any sense of constraint is lost. 8. In fact, the notion of structure of feeling was first used by Williams in his A Preface to Film (with Michael Orrom, 1954), then developed in The Long Revolution (1961), and extended and elaborated throughout his work, in particular Marxism and Literature (1977) 9. Talking of modernization, for instance, the body of narrative fiction also known as the industrial or social (problem) novels, published in the Victorian England of the 1840s and referred to as the “Condition-ofEngland novels” (from “Condition of England Question” raised by Thomas Carlyle in “Chartism,” 1839) would be one such example of the structure of feeling; a specific cultural articulation in literary terms, as it were, which emerged in middle-class consciousness out of the development of industrial capitalism in the process of sharing the particular concern of the social consequences of the industrial revolution in England at the first half of the nineteenth century. 10. It is worth reminding that in terms of its own historical unfolding and evolution, the early origins of cultural studies must be linked not only with the emergence in post-World War II Britain of a coherent group of Marxist historians and cultural critics, but also with other traditions of thought, namely the critical theory of the Frankfurt School in Germany. Although stemming from a different point of departure (history and literary studies vs. philosophy and psychoanalysis) both approaches challenged the main tenets of traditional ‘dogmatic’ Marxism (base/superstructure paradigm, historical determinist teleology, the question of the subject of history) and opened the way for the study of culture on its own ‘autonomous’

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terms. Subsequently, the slow in-roads towards institutionalization (Adult Education, Open University) will also coincide with the New Left’s post-1968 heterodox, non-dogmatic and, sometimes, ‘anti-theoretical’ controversies with and against the ‘linguistic turn’ of French structuralism. This, in turn, will prepare the ground for a crucial stage retrospectively seen as decisive and also foundational in most accounts of the emergence of cultural studies as a well-defined intellectual formation and academic project. It has already been mentioned that Raymond Williams (1989, 151– 162) brings back the origins of cultural studies to the turn of the twentieth century. Be that it may, Dennis Dworkin (1997) situates the “proto”-origins of cultural studies with the formation of the Communist Historians Group with Eric Hobsbawn as their main figurehead in the 1950s. It has already been pointed out also that standard accounts situate the ‘real’ foundational moment of cultural studies with the path-breaking works by Richard Hoggart ([1957] 1970), E.P. Thompson (1963) and Raymond Williams (1958] 1963; [1961] 1965). It is, however, with the creation and establishment of the now mythic Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies/ Cultural Change that a further and decisive development is to take place in the consolidation of cultural studies, understood now as widely linked to the post-Marxist and post-structuralist breakthrough of the 1970s. This together with the irruption of feminism and post-colonial studies will also culminate a double displacement of cultural studies both ideologically and territorially: away from Marxism to Post-modernism and from Britain to the United States (and then elsewhere). Although the bibliography on cultural studies is far too wide, it is still worth recalling some relevant/ seminal introductory collections of articles that followed the opening up of the field as a self-consciously constituted academic project during the late 1980s and early ’90s. In this respect, Grosberg, Nelson and Treicher (eds.): Cultural Studies, 1992, constitutes a kind of foundational selection of key texts and authors, among which Stuart Hall’s chapter “Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies” (277–294) is a relevant reference for this overview. For other important books, collections and debates: During (2005); During (ed.) (1993); Frow, 1995; Storey (ed.) (1996); Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (eds.) (1996); Curran, Morley and Walkerdine (ed.) (1996); Grossberg (1997); Sardar and Van Loon (1998), Inglis (1993), Mercer, (1994) Barker (2000), Bowman (3d) 2003, Bowman 2007. 11. On discussing “the de-colonial option” Madina Tlostanova and Walter Mignolo (2009, 141) further specify this particular genealogy in

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this way: “Around the 1970s a radical transformation of intellectual and scholarly fields took place due to the impact of decolonization struggles in Asia and Africa, the emergence of dictatorial regimes in South America, and the Civil Rights movement in the US. In the ‘Third World’ the concern was with the geopolitics of knowledge and, consequently, with the decolonizing of imperial knowledge. In the US the concern was with the body-politics of knowledge. It was the moment of the creation of women studies, ethnic studies, Chicano/Latino/a studies, African-American Studies; Queer Studies, Asian-American Studies, etc. The post-colonial studies emerged mainly in the US in this particular context. The novelty was that it put the geopolitics of knowledge on the table of an already subversive scenario centered on the body-politics of knowledge. The postcolonial theories and/or postcolonial studies entered the US carrying in their hands the books of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan.” While Tlostanova and Mignolo (142) further specify the de-colonial project, they also account for the specific political and cultural mood to which this study refers in this Part I as follows: “De-colonial thinking and de-colonial option have a different genealogy of thought and emerged in a different historical context: not in the US of the civil rights movement but in the Third World bourgeoning with histories, sensibilities and still open wounds of global coloniality. [ . . . ] De-colonial thinking was also unavailable in Europe, where Marxism, structuralism and post-structuralism occupied all the intellectual debates at the time. Decolonial thinking was going on in Maghreb, in sub-Saharan Africa and in India, but not in France or England. De-colonial thinking entered Europe with the massive immigration from South Asia, Middle East, Maghreb. In the US, today’s massive migration is just joining the de-colonial thinking processes that can be traced back—in their conceptual awareness—to the 1970s, if not before.” For subaltern studies see: Guha & Spivak (eds) 1988; Guha (ed) 1982, 1989; Spivak, 1887, 1988, 1993, Mignolo, 1995, Rodriguez 2001, Rodriguez & Lopez (eds) 2001. Notes to chapter 2 1. Another very important theme that has not been mentioned but was also key to this overall radical structure of feeling promoted by and around cultural studies is that of carnival. Here it is worth mentioning how in the broad fields of cultural studies Mikhail Bakhtin’s work ([1968, 1970]) also opened the way for what was once a highly celebrated world of carnivalesque reversal and subversive excess in academia. Along the wide, and maybe even wild, literature prompted by this carnival motif of risk and excess, feminist scholar Mary Russo (1994) celebrated the radical explosion of post-colonial and post-structuralist writing as follows: “There has been, as well, a carnival

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of theory at the discursive level [ . . . ] This has included all manner of textual travesty, ‘mimetic rivalry’, semiotic delinquency, parody, teasing, posing, flirting, masquerade, seduction, counter-seduction, tightrope walking, and verbal aerialisms of all kinds.” This ‘methodological freedom’ within the critical context of carnivalesque transgression was also linked to Bakhtin’s dialogic imagination and key term of heteroglossia, which referred to a world that had already become “polyglot, once and for all and irreversibly”; to a period when “national languages, coexisting but closed and deaf to each other (had come) to an end” (in Holquist and Emerson (eds.) 1981,12). Bakhtin was discussing this multicultural questions if there is one, during the first third of the twentieth century. As to the carnival motif, however, the obvious shortcoming would be that, historically, these transgressive reversals are already duly contained within the official calendar of festivities, as it were. 2. On those debates Gilles Deleuze’s work on nomadic thought (1977) was widely quoted but, all in all, Deleuze’s view had little to do with the idea of free, ungrounded and/or unbounded travel. For Deleuze, being, feeling and acting as a nomad keeps a precise political dimension. Nomadicism, for Deleuze, means opposition to central power (See also Foucault, Deleuze, 1979). It was in this sense likewise that Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s (1980) notion of Rhizome and the rhizomatic accounted for, and offered the possibility of generating some form of nomadic symbolic (dis)order, as it were, whereby connectivity, heterogeneity and multiplicity constituted valid principles from and with which to articulate resistance and challenge both Western nomadic exaltations of post-modern mobility and innocent liberal visions of multicultural traveling, understood as the process of joyful journeying seeking to meet the quaint other. Against these views, the Deleuzian idea of nomadicism equates to the idea that displaced (groups of) people are able to contest authority and develop a critique that originates from a particular place—the margins, the edges, the less visible spaces. By qualifying the nomadic-postmodern as ‘western’ it is also meant that forms of traditional nomadic traveling are rather subjected to fixed and repetitive itineraries. In other words, unless external factors enter into the equation the few remaining ‘authentic’ nomads are people moving from one place to another on a very routine and custom-led basis. This can be seen, for instance, in Smadar Lavie’s ethnographic monograph (1990) on Bedouin identity moving across borders under Israeli and Egyptian rule. Here it is clearly shown that the actual ‘traditional’ nomadic experience of the Bedouin people in the South hardly fits the postmodernist metaphoric meaning extension of the original concept in the North. 3. In fact, the emergence of what was known as Second Wave feminism and its engagement with, and critique of Marxist social sciences, psychoanalysis, deconstruction or post-modernism constitutes a concrete

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case for illustrating the kaleidoscopic and contradictory nature of a broader militant, activist moment anterior to the historical demise of really existing socialism that we are dealing with in this section. Within the parameters of feminism itself, as well as within the logic of a specific, internal feminist history of ideas, prior to this moment, First Wave feminism is generally historicized as encompassing women’s struggles for equality of individual and collective rights during, broadly speaking, the historical period marked out by two seminal works: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the rights of women (2010 [1892]) and Simone de Beauvoir’s The second sex (1949). On this basis it is not surprising that what is then known as Second Wave feminism takes on board the traditional claims and demands against political, social and economic marginalization, including a critique of the linguistic problematic (Irigaray, 1985, 2004; Cameron, [1985] 1992; Cameron (ed.) [1990] 1998). In addition, a radical engagement with issues of female (oversexualized) re-presentation in dominant culture is also produced (Delmar, 1986). Most tellingly, a feminist critique of Marxist sociology (Hatmann, 1979; Barret, 1980) is also generated on the need for a better understanding of the relationships between class stratification and gender differentiation, class society and patriarchal society, the public and the private (the personal is the political!). On the other hand, beyond the specific intellectual engagement with Marxism and some specific struggles against ‘external’ threats (Butler, 1990 [2001]), feminism, much like Marxism itself, cannot be understood without addressing the ‘internal’ debates and struggles taking place within the global women’s movement as a whole. It is in these internal debates and struggles that the complex intersections of gender with class or with ethnicity and sexuality are re-articulated in a variety of critical ways. In addition to the class vs. gender or otherwise class & gender question in Marxist feminism, the range of these debates and struggles covers a wide spectrum of critical feminist (identity) politics. It is these identity politics which Teresa de Lauretis (1993 see also: 1987, 1989, 1994, 2007) places under the same roof of a feminist House of Difference where the “invention of a conceptual imagining of a ‘continuum’ of experience” (88) is still possible regardless of two main diverging drives (the erotic and the ethical) speaking of different and often contradictory approaches to feminism. From the divide de Lauretis establishes, on the one hand, the ‘conventional,’ so to speak, feminist ‘ethical’ critique can be found where, paraphrasing Rosalind Demar (1986, 13) feminism is defined as an active desire to transform the position of women in society. Yet as Pamela Abbot and Claire Wallace (1993, 212) would also suggest, although all feminists agree on the fact that understanding the subordination of women and struggling for emancipation is necessary, this does not imply that there is agreement as to the causes of such subordination and the ways to achieve emancipation. It is in this context, for instance, that

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in the race vs. gender debate, a strong womanist critique by subaltern women of colour can be also found which is directly addressed against white, middle class feminism’s ‘totalizing’ inclination to speak on behalf of all women (Evans (ed) 1984, Bobo 1988; Collins, 1990; Wallace, 1992; hooks, 1992; Moraga and Anzaldua, 1983; Anzaldua, 1987; Spivak, 1988, Mirza, 1997). On the other hand, the feminist critique steered by the ‘erotic’ drive also mentioned by de Lauretis spills over into other specific feminist struggles engaged in the lesbian question (Freedman, 1985; Fuss, 1992; Kosofsky Sedwick, 1990) as well as the problematic yet productive alliances of lesbian-feminism with queer theory (Dorenkamp and Henke, 1995; Schor and Weed 1997; Garber, 2001; Whisman, 1986). These debates, moreover, also had a strong voice in the sex wars that took place around the thorny issue of pornography (MacKinnon, 1987; Kipnis, 1992; Dworkin, 1981; Parmar, 1988; Rubin, 1984; Ross 1989; Abelove, Barale, and Halperin, (eds.) 1993). Likewise, a feminist separatist critique of theory also emerged in this context, where theory was understood as a tool of male domination (Spender, 1980; Rich, 1980; M. Barrett, 1980, see also Frye, 1983 on the question of reality and feminist theory). Sketchy of necessity, this bibliographic mapping nevertheless gives an account of a split feminist territory. In the words of de Lauretis (1993, 85–86) these splits “have marked feminism as a result of the divisions (of gender, sex, race, class, ethnicity, sexuality, etc) in the social itself, and the discursive boundaries and subjective limits that feminism has defined and redefined for itself contingently, historically, in the process of its engagement with social and cultural formations.” 4. This problematic relationship to which MacKinnon refers speaks of a rather ‘unhappy marriage’ between Marxism and feminism (Hattmann 1979; Sargent (ed.) 1980) despite the obvious input of Marxist feminism (Barret, 1981). In addition feminism engages in critical discussion, to mention only the most obvious ones, with sociology (Abbott and Wallace, 1993), political theory (Mouffe, 1995), psychoanalysis (Mitchell, 1974; Wright 1992; RaphaelLeff and Perelberg (eds.) 1997; T. Brennan (ed) 1989), deconstruction (Elan 1994; Barnard, 1993) and post-modernism (Morris, 1988; Hutcheon, 1989; Lovibond, 1989; Soper, 1990; Nicholson, 1995) or even pragmatism (Rorty, 1990). 5. Overall, Louis Althusser‘s structuralist Marxism accounts for an important moment in the evolution of (post)-Marxist cultural critique. Althusser’s work is crucial for posterior studies on culture and identity since he also placed special emphasis on the workings of ideology, most particularly through the very sophisticated, yet negative and gloomy theory of the ISAs and the notion of interpellation or hailing (Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, 1976) which are to be widely used in all walks of critical theory at the time and beyond. Althusser moves ideology away from the

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domain of ideas and locates concrete ideological practices within specific state apparatuses. Ideology is a practice and not the consequence or outcome of false consciousness, which can be somehow resolved with the overturn of the economic base. Ideology takes place though practices, which are alwaysalready present and all classes take part in it. Hence, ideology cannot be explained with Gramsci’s notion of consent in the sense that subordinate or subaltern classes accept the hegemonic ideas of the dominant ruling classes. The potentially hopeful implications hidden underneath the Gramscian notion of hegemony (the possibility of counter-hegemony) all but disappear since Gramsci’s consent becomes participation in Althusser’s vocabulary. Participation means that all classes take part in these ideological practices although this does not mean that ideology no longer works only in the service of the dominant classes—it does; it rather means that modern power is not maintained any longer by the use of almighty and excessive force but through hidden means. In other words, instead of being overly regimented, manipulated and directed to follow specific paths, we are rather incorporated into the system, the system co-opts all forms of potential threat. According to Althusser, ideology is ultimately more influential and determinant than Marx ever thought. Ideology is totally and completely inserted within the ways of thinking and living of all classes, and it is precisely to further insist on this question that Althusser mobilizes his famous notion of interpellation. Interpellation is for Althusser the most overwhelming and yet shrewd ideological practice that can be, in that it is practiced through every act of communication. Interpellation has the ability to place us in any ideological category that does not really or necessarily belong to us (such as the majority of the law-abiding, hard working people, as proud citizens of the nation, as responsible consumers, moderate Muslims, good multiculturalist subjects, etc). Through interpellation, the object of ideology is the constitution of subjects. Ideology hails human beings as subjects, but the political trajectory of the word subject does not necessarily suggest subject-ive agency. On the contrary, it rather expresses subject-ion, the process of being subject-ed. Although playing with words in regards of political subject-ivity, it could certainly be said, to help Chantall Mouffe here, that there is also something active in being an object of interpellation, namely that one can also object to it! With regard to the possibility of meaningful social change, nevertheless, if for nineteenth century Marx revolutionary change was necessary and for early twentieth century Gramsci possible, in the political and cultural vision developed later in the twentieth century by Althusser it is most unlikely. As agency takes place through the mentioned ideological practices and interpellations, it also responds to the demands of the state apparatuses: the Ideological State Apparatuses (ISA) (legal system, political parties, mass media, schools, family, church) and the Repressive State Apparatuses

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(RSA) (police, prisons, army.), which constantly hail and incorporate agency by means of either the Velvet Gloves of hidden ideological persuasion or, if necessary, the Iron Fists of the state, which turn ideology into concrete practices and rituals. As a consequence, determination and stasis are overwhelming in the proposals of Althusser, for whom placing the notion of an effective and creative social agency at the centre of any theoretical project for change only amounts to basing one’s accounts on voluntaristic ideas and false pre-suppositions. For Althusser, the subject must be situated as a historical product within concrete and determined social relations, and not by making use of a context-free ontology of sorts, which would speak of an essential and permanent subject of history, as the previous generation of European humanist Marxists seemed to suggest. 6. According to Stuart Hall (39) this particular slogan was coined by political theorist Andrew Gamble on behalf of Thatcherism. 7. Together with what is known as Thatcherism or the Thatcher era must be put also, needless to say, the Reagan years as well as the corollary ideology of economic rationalism in Australia. This is, in other words, the most prosperous time of neo-liberalism. In addition, later references to Thatcher stemming from the social-democratic Third Way speak of the paradoxical sources from which her political and economical legacy are re-claimed. 8. In this sense, the very individualist subject of Thatcherism, that single, autonomous subject only exists as such through subjection not only to the State (Althusser, 1976, 1983) but also to a surrounding symbolic order which itself constitutes a realm that is far from neutral or normally given. As Paul Taylor (2010, 41) suggests following Slavoj Žižek’s works, rather than there is no such thing as society “[P]araphrasing Margaret Thatcher, there is no such thing as the individual. What appears to be a self-contained, autonomous entity, a person-in-herself, is innately dependent upon external elements for her own self-definition. Individuals can only exist as individuals to the extent that they have successfully internalized an external symbolic order—one’s status as an autonomous subject presupposes a state of subjection” (emphasis mine). 9. Unless we are speaking here of psychosis as the ultimate outcome of neo-liberalism’s individualist logic radicalized to the point of refusing all social bond. This, in passing, would speak of another dimension of silence, that of madness, which again would be closer to the silence of the foreigner that that of the structural silence that subaltern politics denounce. In passing, also, another ‘failure’ of Thatcherism, which is not dealt here with because it would be giving too much weight to the tyranny of current affairs, is obviously how David Cameron’s Conservative thinking nowadays speaks of big society as being key for (national) cohesion. 10. Here mention should be made first to the impact legendary figure of the British right, Enoch Powell, had on the British debates regarding

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immigration. Worth recalling also is the legendary Tebbitt Cricket Test, which best epitomizes the multicultural problematic of the time. No coincidence either that the Tebbitt’s test in Britain coincides with the English vs. Hispanic linguistic question in the United States as well as the official disdain for aboriginal communities in Australia despite much heated debate on multiculturalism. Regarding the mentioned senior Conservative politician Norman Tebbitt, it must also be said that despite his always polemical inputs into the debate on multiculturalism, the occasional acuteness of his comments is also worth if not praising at least emphasizing. It is in this sense that as Jaqueline Rose (1996,149, quoted in Žižek, 2006a, 155) states, Tebbitt will turn out to be quite right himself in explaining, for instance, New Labour’s first 1997 electoral victory in Britain: “Many traditional Labour voters realised that they shared our [Conservative] values—that man is not just a social but also a territorial animal: it must be part of our agenda to satisfy those basic instincts of tribalism and territoriality.” All in all, however, the very insidiousness behind the alluded Cricket Test coercing British citizens of Afro-Caribbean descent into choosing between two national cricket teams in exclusionary terms confirms that Barnor Hesse (2000, 3) is right in both quoting and despising MP Lord Tebbitt’s unapologetic rightwing rant against multiculturalism (Guardian, 8 October 1997): “Multi-culturalism is a divisive force. One cannot uphold two sets of ethics or be loyal to two nations, any more than a man can have two masters. It perpetuates ethnic divisions because nationality is in the long term more about culture than ethnics [sic]. Youngsters of all races born here should be taught that British history is their history, or they will forever be foreigners holding British passports and this kingdom will become a Yugoslavia.” 11. This also allows for a quick summary historical reconstruction of how multiculturalism evolves and is understood as a concept from the 1960s to the 1990s. In order to frame the post-colonial narratives of governance and management of difference in regards of cultural / ethnic difference, Hesse with the help of Floya Anthias and Nira Yuval-Davis (1992, 58–59) discern(s) three main responses (or general policy-making approaches) with regards to race-relations and in Britain: 1/ up to the early 1960s assimilationist policies sought to counteract the “expulsionist framework of the conservative orientation”; 2/ from the early 1960s onwards integrationism accounted for what it could be argued that a weak variation of the assimilationist approach corresponds to the American melting pot politics; 3/ by the early ’70s a self-proclaimed multiculturalism would begin developing the notion of hyphenated identities and the discourse of diversity, tolerance and respect of difference as we still understand them today. From here on, discussions on multiculturalism will speak of the different modes to be found on each side of the Atlantic divide, particularly in the Anglo-Saxon world. As already

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shown in the Introduction, this is how Barnor Hesse (2000, 13) speaks of a more extended notion of multiculturalism in the United States through what became known as the culture wars from the mid-1980s into the 1990s. This is how and when the concept of multiculturalism became politicized and expanded beyond the parameters of ‘race’ and ethnicity into the discourses of gender and sexuality, which were also conceived as socially repressed cultural differences. This, according to Hesse, produced much greater social reverberations and contested theoretical elaborations in contrast with Britain, where the figuration of multiculturalism remained anchored on issues of ‘race’ and ethnicity. It is within this framework, finally, that Hesse ( 6) reconsiders the social, political and intellectual meanings of multiculturalism in the West but particularly across the British / American transatlantic axis, and locates “the post-war genealogy of British multiculturalism” deployed by Anthias and Yuval-Davis into a further threefold temporal sequence, which accounts for “successive governmental, liberal responses to ‘non-white’ immigration and its relation to a public reconfiguration of British national identity”: 1/ from the 1960s to the 1980s multiculturalism “valorized the incidence of harmonious cultural difference in the social, particularly where this meant the decontestation of ‘race’ and ethnicity and their conflation with the individualist ethos of nationalist liberal democracies”; then 2/ from the mid-80s onwards multiculturalism “became increasingly and diversely unsettled by ethnically marked and cross-culturally mobilized interrogations of the nation’s imagined communities”; and 3/ as “the urban vernaculars of multiculturalism were gradually transformed into a critical concept” and once multiculturalism became “a contested frame of reference” throughout the 1990s, as already said “the concept of ‘multiculturalism’ entered the American and British lexicons of western cultural studies in various portentous guises.” Notes to chapter 3 1. Žižek, Badiou and Laclau do not only share this idea that capturing an objective point of reference beyond the symbolic order is impossible (for it is discourse which constitutes such reality); hence they also agree that the subject itself can not be defined a priori from any transcendental meta-discourse but comes into play in each unique situation with its own means and language— the materiality of this concept (of subject) is expressed in how heterogeneous registers are articulated, which are impossible to prescribe for every case. Yet this does not mean that Laclau, Žižek and Badiou succumb to the tenets of what they understand overall as post-modern relativism, according to which all political positions could be sustained and/or are indeed sustainable. On the contrary, for Laclau, Žižek and Badiou everything is not worth the

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same. All in all, therefore, major convergences emerge from the ways these three authors articulate fundamental questions around such notions as the subject, politics and truth and, in addition, they also share the fundamental vocabularies of Lacanain theory (petit object a or point of caption as nodal point (articulation), the concept of master-signifier as the culmination of a process whereby a particular element assumes the universal structuring function within certain discursive field, or the deployment of the ImaginarySymbolic-Real triad etc). Beyond these similarities, however, major differences emerge as well their own points of departure, levels of analysis and scope of intervention are quite different: Laclau works specifically on the fields of political theory and the social sciences while taking some elements from psychoanalysis and, above all, rhetoric and linguistics; Žižek intervenes in the broad fields of culture and politics and does so from a perspective that, albeit mostly limited to philosophical speculation, also borrows from psychoanalysis, scientific discourse and cultural critique; finally, Badiou addresses philosophical problems as such, and discusses classical concepts extensively with authors from within the tradition (Plato, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger), but, at the same time, he also borrows from mathematics, logic, psychoanalysis, etc. 2. Daniel Bell’s earlier announcement of The Coming of Post-industrial Society (1973) and The End of Ideologies (1962) are perhaps also worth remembering again in this context. 3. Come to this point it is worth mentioning that a main critique of this ethical turn stems, precisely, from within the ranks of feminism and it is Peter Dews himself (108) who brings to our attention the book of collected articles The Turn to Ethics (Edited by Marjorie Garber, Beatrice Hansen and Rebecca I. Walkowitz 2000). While in the introduction to this book we are told how ‘the de-centering of the subject brought about a re-centering of ethics” (viii-ix) the uneasiness or confusion as to the scope, necessity and validity of the ethical discourse is also clear. As Judith Butler admits in her contribution to the same volume: “I do not have much to say about why there is a return to ethics, if there is one, in recent years, except to say that I have for the most part resisted this return, and that what we have to offer is something like a map of this resistance and its partial overcoming” (15). In her contribution, Chantal Mouffe also complaints bluntly about ‘the triumph of a sort of moralizing liberalism that is increasingly filling the void left by the collapse of any project of real political transformation” (86). Yet, by the same token, it is no less true that Derrida’s idea of openness to the “alterity of the Other” is crucial to the multiculturalist debates on identity politics and the politics of difference and multiplicity that were at the origin of feminism’s own ‘ethical’ critique against the construction of a pervasive notion of the ideal, autonomous and sovereign subject of the enlightenment

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project—recall de Laureatis’ distinction between the ethical and the erotic dimensions of the feminist global house of difference. On the other hand, Badiou’s own positions against the very moralizing ethics of liberalism that Mouffe despises, or in favor of the politics of universalism and truth, constitute just as relevant a critique of both overlapping variants of radical and liberal multiculturalism. 4. As Evil runs the show in the standard ethics of human rights the Good (i.e. thou shall not this or that (kill, steal, etc) depends on, and stems from identifying first and then combating Evil, and not the other way around as Badiou’s own ethics propose, i.e.: we first find ourselves seized and shaken by the Good of a particular truth in a given, concrete situation and then we make sure to combat the evils that are always bound to lurk around that informing/structuring truth. Evils, in other words, are inherent to that truth and consist of falling within the grasp of three fundamental dangers (i) the terror stemming from a “simulacrum” of truth unable to broaden a given particularist appeal (ethnic, cultural, religious . . . ) with the significance of a gesture towards universality; (ii) the betrayal of a truth deriving from lacking the nerve and commitment required to pursue its implications as far as it takes; and (iii) the disaster of making the power of a truth absolute (tantalization) : Evil, if it exists, is an unruly effect of the power of the truth (61). That is to say: the possibility of evil accounts for a perversion, which is not external but intrinsic to the ethical realm (see 72–87). 5. Against these forms of postmodern cultural politics and ethics of difference and otherness, ‘more-than-modern’ Badiou disagrees with the propensity for overusing the prefix ‘post’ in the now classic pre-modernity / modernity / postmodernity periodization. For him, instead, there are two main moments in modernity: the classical period (say from Renaissance humanism to enlightened rationalism) and the romantic period to which we still belong. The whole deconstructive mode would fit perfectly the romantic mood—emphasis on differe/ance and diversity, ethical othering. . . . 6. In this context the figure of Saint Paul should also be mentioned as a model in the eyes of Badiou for thinking a new kind of universalism— one which according to Dews “would no longer be vulnerable to charges of abstraction and formalism but would rather express the scope of an experience of truth which cannot be detached from a singular situation” (109). But again, by mobilizing Paul’s celebrated and lapidary statement in the epistle to the Galatians (3.28): “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female,” Badiou is not claiming that there are NO differences. For Badiou, who also sees himself through the concrete universality of the militant, solitary, nomadic poetthinker of the truth(-event), Saint Paul is instrumental in understanding our contemporary situation / world. This is so not only because Saint Paul’s

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radical Universalist stance constitutes an “unprecedented gesture (which) consists in subtracting truth from the communitarian grasp” (2003: 5), but also because he “provoked—entirely alone—a cultural revolution upon which we still depend” (15). Yet the concrete universality of truth does not eliminate, as already stated, the empirical existence of differences (“there are differences. One can even maintain that there is nothing else”). In other words, by “becom(ing) all things to all men” Saint Paul does not stigmatise differences, customs, opinions. Instead he appropriates diversity and particularity and accommodates difference to the immutability of the principles he holds dear. Hence when Saint Paul himself asks “If even lifeless instruments, such as the flute or the harp, do not give distinct notes, how will anyone know what is being played on the flute or the harp? (Cor. I.14.7), then as Badiou continues: “Differences, like instrumental tones, provide us with the recognizable univocity that makes up the melody of the True” (106). 7. Defining multiculturalism as the ideal cultural logic of capitalism is a deliberate allusion to American Marxist critic Fredric Jameson’s now classic work on Postmodernism (1991). In order to unveil the underlying unity of capitalism and modernity in their interrelated historical evolution, Jameson identifies three main technological breakthroughs (steam-driven motors, electric & combustion motors, nuclear power & electronic revolution), which are then linked to three main stages of capitalist development and organization (market, monopoly / imperialism, and later multinational) in turn associated with three main cultural logics (Realism, Modernism and Postmodernism). 8. This position on multiculturalism Žižek first stated in his seminal work The Ticklish Subject (1999, 216), 9. In the case of British multiculturalism, for instance, there is no such thing as the Anglo-Saxon (or English) ethnic minority competing for recognition on a par with African-Caribbean, Muslims, Gay and Lesbian, people with disabilities, Scots, Welsh, Irish, etc, in order to define what Britishness is. It is rather this particular content (Englishness) which has historically exerted the hegemonic function and succeeded in overwhelmingly calling the shots, so to speak, by both stepping outside the chain of differences and secretly filling in the empty point of universality through the very medium of the (supposedly neutral) British national institutions (state, media, cultural establishment, etc). In this sense, the Anglo-Saxon- ‘ethnic’ dimension of British-ness both disappears and yet works as the alluded-to absent center, unmarked political sign and/or norm against which the other ‘differences’ are measured. To a large extent this is still so, regardless of some new reactive ‘English identity’ consciousness raising exercises on compensatory grounds (e.g., if the Scots have St Andrew why not St George? If the Welsh have an Assembly we also want a Parliament, etc). A potential Scottish independence would certainly

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change the parameters of English ‘ethnic’ invisibility. 10. In a nutshell, this political fantasy is that ‘liberal’ and / or ‘progressive’ politics seek negotiation and consensus and refer to a specific form of gradualist, reform based, utilitarian politics. 11. As Žižek puts it: “Those in power often prefer ‘critical’ participation, a dialogue, to silence—they would prefer to engage us in a ‘dialogue,’ just to make sure that our ominous passivity is broken” (2006a, 212). 12. Here one should not be misled into thinking that either boutique or strong multiculturalists do somehow follow Baudiou’s universalist predicament. For one should note that Saint Paul’s radical universalism (There is no Jews or Christians, Masters or Slaves, Men or Women . . . ) is defined around a primordial structuring struggle or antagonism. Saint Paul’s is, in two words, a struggling universalism, it is certainly not a sort of blissful universalism based on an idea of harmonious human co-existence in which, as Henry A. Giroux (1992, 207) would put it, for instance: “History, power and agency now dissolve into the abyss of liberal goodwill, New Age uplift thinking, and a dead-end pastoralism; and cultural differences dissolve into a regime of representations that universalize harmonizing systems while eliminating the discourse of power, conflict and struggle.” In passing, this approach to what is known to be a rather more ‘weak’ and pluralistic form of universalism (as opposed to the original ‘strong’ form of liberal, unitary universalism) is also shared by both (multicultural) liberalism and New Age holism. This is so as Western forceful consumerist individualism meets benevolent Oriental wisdom and alternative qua now complementary medicine through discourses of health and hedonism, which are not entirely alien to the overall boutique multiculturalist predicament. Yet more to the point, universalism is also associated with progress and science, which, again, rather un-paradoxically now, also involves a keen holistic realignment as Žižek (2006a, 216) explains: “Much more worrying than the ‘excesses’ of Cultural Studies are the New Age obscurantist appropriations of today’s ‘hard’ sciences which, in order to legitimize their position, invoke the authority of science itself (‘today’s science has outgrown mechanistic materialism, and points out towards a new spiritual holistic stance . . . ).” Accordingly all these developments speak of a rather overly expanded and / or all-encompassing (scientism and holism), rational (‘we all have the ability / faculty to think rationally’) and universalist (‘deep down we are all one!’) spirit of boutique multiculturalism. 13. In reference to Kymlicka’s discussions of multiculturalism from a liberal perspective, Fish comes to argue that Kymlicka’s answer to the question of “how liberals should respond to illiberal practices” also responds to the same distancing logic enacted in the conventional discourses of respect and tolerance, of which more in the next chapter. When Kymlicka asks himself the standard question as to “how should liberals respond to

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illiberal cultures?” (1995, 94) his own answer is that since liberals should eschew illiberal practices, they “should not prevent illiberal nations from maintaining their societal culture, but should promote the liberalization of these cultures” (94–95). Or put otherwise: “Liberal reformers inside the culture should seek to promote their liberal principles through reason or example, and liberals outside should lend their support to any efforts the group makes to liberalize their culture (2007, 168).” In the end, this would simply amount to respecting the culture of the other by trying to change it. Yet according to Fish, in his inability to see the contradiction between maintaining a tradition and setting out to change it: “[K]ymlicka is trying to be a strong multiculturalist but turns boutique when the going gets tough. He would reply that by “promote” he means persuade rather than impose and that rational persuasion is always an appropriate decorum” (6). With comments such as this Fish seems to undermine any possibility for the multiculturalist’s benevolent liberal gaze aiming at softening the sharp edges of the other’s culture without paying the price of utter inconsistency. Notes to chapter 4 1. This mood and moment is well documented as according to a variety of authors, multiculturalism becomes normalized (West, 1992, 1993) into depoliticized and consumerist patterns (Giroux, 1994; Jacoby, 1994a/b; Zelizer, 1994, de Oliver, 2000) of a ‘Disneyfying’ and United Colors of Benetton-like (Mitchell, 1993) commodification of cultural difference including the hedonist qua ludic, corporate and imperial (Matuštík, 1998) approach to cultural difference. 2. Here it is also worth noting Terry Eagleton’s overall critique of NorthAmerican academia in its radical, post-colonial version when he affirms that (2003a,163) “A good deal of post-colonialism has been a kind of ‘exported’ version of the United States’ own grievous ethnic problems, and thus yet another instance of God’s Own Country, one of the most insular on earth, defining the rest of the world in terms of itself.” For Eagleton that the specific and dominant cultural politics of multicultural otherness is located within a specific geographical context says a lot about the whole multiculturality debate: “Nothing is more indigenously American these days than otherness. Openness to the other is a rebuke to a parochialism of a nation which finds it hard to distinguish between Brighton and Bogotá; but it is also a piece of parochialism in itself, rooted by and large in the intractable ethnic problems of the United States. These home-grown concerns are then projected onto the rest of the globe rather like a version of nuclear missile bases, so that post-colonial others find themselves obediently adopting the agenda of a largely American-bred cult of otherness.” (3)

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3. Consider also here Spivak’s intention behind the notion of multicultural tokenism (with Sneja Gunew, 1993), which is directed against dominant ‘paternalistic’ approaches to the cultural diversity of the subordinated others and is a warning against uncritical celebrations of difference and authenticity. As to the tolerance/respect debate Terry Eagleton as ever has a mind of his own for, on the one hand, not only “Historically speaking, there has been a rich diversity of cultures of torture, but even devout pluralists would be loath to affirm this as one more instance of the colorful tapestry of human experience. Those who regard plurality as a value in itself are pure formalist, and have obviously not noticed the astonishingly imaginative variety of forms which, say, racism can assume” (2000, 15). But also, on the other hand, and most importantly: “Tolerance is not just a question of style and it is perfectly compatible with passionate partisanship (2003, 175). 4. In Fish’s words, “when the pinch comes, and a question of basic allegiance arises,” the boutique multiculturalist must leave aside pluralistic caprice and must affirm instead the value of one’s universal identity. Important as tolerance of diversity and the respect of the other may be in what are often described as contemporary multicultural democratic societies, for the liberal boutique multiculturalist no particular identity (ethnic or otherwise) can constitute the foundation of recognition or equal rights;—a position that Fish summarizes further as follows: “That is to say, we have rights, not as men or women or Jews or Christians or blacks or Asians, but as human beings, and what makes a human being a human being is not the particular choices he or she makes but the capacity for choice itself, and it is this capacity rather than any of its actualizations that must be protected (1–2).” 5. Whether articulated around the question of modernity or the status of communicative action, the prominence of Jürgen Habermas in all key sociological and cultural debates that have taken place over the last decades is unquestionable. What remain questionable, as will become still clearer in section III, are the dialogic, rational-universalist and postnational views he develops along the way. For the time being, it suffices to say that, certainly, it is no coincidence if Habermas’s theories of post-nationalism and constitutional patriotism, leading to the (neo)liberal oblivion of the past in Europe (colonization, imperialism, world wars, etc), is also originally imported more specifically from Germany. Germany is a European country that, after its reunification, needed to refashion its history in such a way that to rid itself, as it were, of the country’s’ past histories (Hitler, etc) becomes paramount so as to then open the new imagined German nation to the ideology of (neo) liberal democracy. 6. Turning the ironic mode on for a second, this cold vision of the market forgets that a financial dealer in futures in the City of London also does his standard weekly shopping in a big suburban shopping center while

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fulfilling likewise some ethical and humanitarian obligations in the evening and simultaneously indulging in some multicultural transactions finding time to consume fair trade products and buy ethnic food in trendy and/or authentic street markets. Notes to chapter 5 1. See also: Culture and Imperialism, (1993) and for more on this metanarrative of domination see: Stuart Hall on “The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power” (1992b, 265–320). 2. Here some lateral reflections (on subject matter and method) arise from looking at such ancient beginnings of Western civilization. Sure, multiculturalism as a concept was as much inexistent in ancient times as communism was in the Spartacus-led slave revolt. Nevertheless, if we look backwards for a moment deep into the cradle of Western societies we all agree that fascination is always high with the great artistic and architectural creations and achievements of ancient Greek civilization; not least with the philosophical impetus of classical Hellenism’s celebrated propensity to observe a universalist sense of cosmopolitan citizenship. Yet, at the same time, classical Greek cultures and societies more often than not confronted the questions of slavery, the foreigners and the external barbaric other in pretty particular, not to say, literally, insular ways—of which point Julia Kristeva remind us vividly (1988, 61–94) in her contemporary plea to see ourselves as eternal foreigners. In addition, the celebrated resolution of the so-called Socrates dilemma offers a good example of another fundamental theme in present liberal multiculturalism, namely: the tense relationships between the universality of individual autonomy, dignity and consciousness, on the one hand, and the civic and collective duty to serve and defend one’s own particular (city)-state, on the other. It is well known that questions related to human wellbeing in ancient Greece always aimed at achieving the good of collective life and society as a whole. It is in this context that Socrates, himself a bearer of a dutiful fidelity to the city-state, will nevertheless introduce the idea of one’s own individual freedom of conscience constituting the ultimate moral kernel of human existence, for which he will die (Jaeger, [1933] 1990, 423). Such is thus the importance of Socrates’ dilemma that it should certainly be appreciated in its own intellectual terms as well as full ethical dimension since the individual freedom vs. collective duty clearly reverberates in today’s debates; and yet notwithstanding the relevance of this eternal dilemma, emphasis should still be placed on the obvious albeit necessary ‘materialist’ cliché according to which great ideas do not grow in a social and historical vacuum and, generally, they are indeed a response to a clear sense of crisis. To put it another way: the Socrates dilemma holds enough autonomy in

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abstract and timeless terms, as it were, for it to be understood and discussed regardless of Athens’ objective material conditions of political decay and military weakness. By the same token, however, it is also important to take these concrete material and historical conditions into account as well. For, clearly, Socrates’ own fate is by no-means context-free. Hence, when dealing with any contemporary and / or current multicultural controversies there is the fundamental dimension of concrete historical circumstances in which they take place that it is important not to loose sight of. In this sense it cannot be forgotten that Socrates’ death penalty was also a response to the emergence of Sparta as a new hegemonic power at the expense of Pericles’ Athens—a city, in passing, which is also relevant to bear in mind comprised just over 30,000 citizens out of 300,000 inhabitants. To put other more modern examples, this sense of crisis and threat of the new was just as much the case in Socrates and Pericles’s Athens as it was in the varying contexts of political and religious turmoil in Europe (e.g., Reformation, 30 years war, 1618–48). In this context, it is also worth recalling that these historical events lead John Locke to write A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689–90) and introduce a key distinction between the realm of private belief and a sense of secularism in public life, and Voltaire to write Traité sur la tolérance (1763) in order to redress the violent excesses of Catholic orthodoxy. Yet, likewise, what was collapsing was a whole feudal and pre-modern social organization to which in this case, the works of both Locke and Voltaire contributed. Hence, the overall point being worth repeating here again is the following: the dialectically informed methodological approach (Žižek calls this The Parallax View, 2006b, 2008) of this book (i) emphasizes critical perspectival ambiguity rather than one-sided awe with the prima facie associations and positive connotations of certain notions as opposed to others; and (ii) relies on the idea that although reality may only be readily available to us through the mediation of language, all discourses, idealist or not, are dependent, nevertheless, on (often unspoken) material conditions. 3. A claim which, particularly in the case of empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, for instance would also find preposterous since forms of Empire have always existed throughout history as well as sharing the following feature : “As Thucydides, Livy, and Tacitus all teach us (along with Machiavelli commenting on their work), Empire is formed not on the basis of force itself but on the basis of the capacity to present force as being in the service of right and peace (2000, 15). 4. For an explanation of what sophisticated multiculturalism is, see chapter 6. As a complement to the reflection on this doubly articulated other it has already been mentioned how Edward Said exposed the logic of Orientalism as establishing a West-us/East-them split. Yet Marxist (literary) critic Terry Eagleton (2000), who is himself of Irish descent, reminds us that

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the construction of the barbarian as the strange other is not always limited to a threat, which should be understood only as external to the West: “If the science of anthropology marks the point where the West begins to convert other societies into legitimate objects of study, the real sign of political crisis is when it feels the need to do this to itself. For there are savages within Western society too, enigmatic, half-intelligible creatures ruled by ferocious passions and given to mutinous behaviour; and these too will need to become objects of disciplined knowledge.” In fact, Edward Said himself is well aware of this and in the introduction of Culture and Imperialism speaks specifically of the Irish case falling into the same us vs. them orientalist / colonial / imperialist logic. In this context, it is worth remembering how this dominant attitude finds a paradoxical mirror image later on in the history of the humanities precisely under the guise of post-colonial and cultural studies. This is how Eagleton (1998, 324–325) informs us of certain methodological pitfalls and conceptual shortcomings within the realms of post-colonial studies by pointing specifically to the case of Irish studies in the ’90s: “Indeed much of the program of academic Irish studies is silently set by a postmodern agenda, with some interesting political effects. Nationalism, for example, is not much in favor because it is ‘essentialist,’ whereas feminism is firmly on the agenda because it is not. The truth is that some nationalism is anti-essentialist whereas some feminism is essentialist; but one should not allow such minor considerations to interfere with one’s comfortingly clear-cut oppositions. Nationalism is also upbraided for cutting across and concealing other kinds of social division; but then some feminism and ethnic theory can do this too, and for its own purposes quite properly so. The concept of ethnicity is much to the fore in such studies . . . since the Irish are of course ethnic. Ethnic for whom?” The point being that one is not really so clear any longer about the borders and boundaries splitting the West form the Rest, on the one hand, and Western dominant culture from the many alliances that take place at the lower level of subordinate and / or subaltern (cultural) politics across the world, on the other. 5. On Border Theory see also Giroux and McLaren (eds.) 1994; Giroux, 1992; 1993; Saldivar 1997; Fregoso, 1999; Mignolo, 1995, 2000. 6. In this respect, staying within the realms of the political Left, two contributions may serve to add to this ambiguity. First Simon During (1990, 138–139) refuses to concede to the still prevalent position that “nationalism is essentially a nasty formation.” In addition to this, he also vindicates the “right to make particular and local appropriations of reason” and allows enough room to deploy accounts of national movements, which are utterly “antagonistic to oppression”; and then Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri also introduce (2000, 106) a further distinction when they argue that “the right of self-determination of subaltern nations is really a right to secession

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from the control of dominant powers”; that “stated most boldly” as they put it: “It appears that whereas the concept of nation promotes stasis and restoration in the hands of the dominant, it is a weapon for change and revolution in the hands of the subordinated. “ Although little justice would be paid to Hardt and Negri’s (109) overall predicament and understanding of Empire as a universal order that accepts no boundaries or limits, should one not emphasize their point that the progressive functions of the concept of nation exist primarily when nation is not effectively linked to sovereignty, that is, when the ‘imagined’ nation does not (yet) exist, in other words, when the nation remains merely a dream. According to Hardt and Negri, as soon as the nation begins to form as a sovereign state, its progressive functions all but vanish, which is a claim that Benedict Anderson (13–15) himself reinforces when stating that: “By being imagined as sovereign, the nation dreams of being free regardless of the fact that, in the times of pervasive geographical and social mobility, one’s freed nation will certainly become another’s political prison.” 7. This belief linked up with Appadurai’s main thesis ([1990]2003) speaking of five different and interrelated types of imagined world landscapes, which would explain the nature of cultural flows in the global economy and which would, in turn, be undermining the future viability of nation-states. These are: ethnoscapes (people who move between nations, such as tourists, immigrants, exiles, guest-workers, and refugees), technoscapes (technology, often linked to multinational corporations), financescapes (global capital, currency markets, stock exchanges), mediascapes (electronic and new media), and ideoscapes (official state-ideologies and counter-ideologies). 8. In Imagined Communities Benedict Anderson uses a historical materialist perspective to produce what must have become one of the most quoted contemporary texts to date within the fields of cultural studies as well as the humanities and the social sciences at large. In historical terms, according to Anderson, key to generating and developing the modern idea of nation is the development of print-capitalism that favors the consolidation of new nation-(state)s as communities imagined through the medium of a written (and obviously read and disseminated) national narrative of common histories, symbols, myths and traditions shared by a specific national community 9. In this seminal reader, Homi K. Bhabha also reproduces a famous lecture Ernest Renan (1990, 13–18) delivered at the Sorbonne University, Paris, in 1882. For Renan, nations were the outcome of profound complications in history. Each nation came to be a soul or spiritual principle constituted by two temporal dimensions: 1/ the rich legacy of memories from the past, and 2/ the present-day consent that defines belongingness to a nation as a continuous process based on daily plebiscite. For Renan,

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therefore, the spiritual principle or basis on which nations are built derives both from will (or present consent) and culture / history, understood as the (mythical) repository of the past. 10. Slavoj Žižek frames the ambiguous and contradictory nature that defines the modern notion of Nation within the coordinates of modernization in similar terms. According to Žižek’s argument (2006a, 20–21) this ambiguity lies in the very fact that nations are often perceived wrongly as ‘leftovers from the past’ when in fact their place is constituted by the very break from the past. On the one hand, ‘Nation’ designates the modern community delivered of traditional ‘organic’ ties: a community in which the pre-modern links that connect the individual to a particular land, family lineage, religious group, etc, are broken; the traditional corporate community is replaced by the modern nation-state whose constituents are ‘citizens,’ that is, people as abstract members, not as members of particular land holdings, for example. On the other hand, ‘Nation’ can never be reduced to a network of purely symbolic ties: there is always a surplus that sticks to it: to define itself, ‘national identity’ must appeal to a contingent materiality of ‘common roots.’ In short, according to Žižek, ‘Nation’ designates both the instance by means of which traditional ‘organic’ links are dissolved and the ‘reminder of the pre-modern in modernity,’ the form long-standing organic deep-rootedness acquires within the modern post-traditional universe, the form ‘organic substance’ acquires within the universe of abstract and rational subjectivity. The crucial point is to conceive of both aspects in their interconnectedness: it is the new ‘bond’ brought about by the modern Nation that renders possible the disengagement from traditional organic ties. In other words, the ‘Nation’ is a pre-modern leftover that functions as the inner condition of modernity itself, as its inherent impetus to its progress. 11. Žižek’s comments in regards of the universalism of grandnational Left intellectuals in “‘big’ European nations also comes to mind here, particularly when he states that, “[C]learly, a nationalist bias is also discernible.” According to Žižek (2002: 121; 2004: 26–27): “We often hear the complaint that the recent trend of globalization threatens the sovereignty of the nation-state; here, however, we should qualify this statement: which states are most exposed to this threat? It is not the small states, but the second rank (ex)-world powers, countries like the United Kingdom, Germany and France: what they fear is that once they are fully immersed in the newly emerging global Empire, they will be reduced to the same level as, say, Austria, Belgium, or even Luxemburg. [ . . . ] The leveling of weight between larger and smaller nation-states should thus be counted among the beneficial effects of globalization. Beneath the contemptuous deriding of the new Eastern European post-Communist states, it is easy to discern the contours of a wounded narcissism of the European ‘great nations.’

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12. As Žižek points out (2004, 12), stating this centrality is hardly new or original: “Hegel was among the first to see in the geographical triad of Germany, France and England an expression of three different existential attitudes: reflective thoroughness (German), revolutionary hastiness (French), utilitarian pragmatism (English). In political terms, this triad can be read as German conservatism, French revolutionary radicalism and English liberalism. In terms of the predominance of one sphere of social life, it is German metaphysics and poetry versus French politics and English economics.” On the back of this (semiotic) triangle, Žižek goes on to show how these differences between France, Germany and, more widely, the broad Anglo-Saxon sphere of influence dominate, to a great extent, the geopolitics of our world in modernity. He then goes on to show how ideology is very much embedded everywhere in our everyday cultural and social practices. 13. In a footnote Will Kymlicka (2009, 73n12) explained why: “In Germany, for example, special education arrangements were set up for the children of Turkish guest-workers with the goal of preparing them to return to their ‘home’ (even if they were born in Germany), on the assumption that they did not really belong to Germany. This sort of ‘preparationist education’ clearly differs from what is typically understood as ‘multicultural education,’ and does not count as a multiculturalism policy.” To establish policies seeking to encourage Turkish workers to leave Germany can hardly count as multiculturalism, which even by the standard of a weak definition still remains both a political philosophy as well as a set of policies seeking to recognize and accommodate diversity as a fact of society. In this respect, Kymlicka (75n14) names this German approach “A form of pseudomulticulturalism [which] has sometimes been adopted for metics [that is, de facto long-term residents who are nonetheless excluded from the polis (Walzer 1983)] on the assumption that encouraging the members of a group that maintain their language and culture will make it more likely they will return to their country of origin.” This ‘preparationist’ form of pseudomulticulturalism, in Kymlicka’s words, is the antithesis of the idea based on fomenting multicultural citizenship as generally developed in the AngloSaxon countries. 14. For a more exhaustive view of these questions, see in Germany (Fulbrook, 1996), in France (Silverman, 1992), in Britain (Kushner, Jones and Pierce, 1998), and in Europe overall (Cesarini and Fulbrook (ed) 1998; Eder and Giesen (ed) 2001). 15. For instance traditional “anti-multiculturalist” positions historically nurtured in Conservative positions, ranging from Norman Tebbit to David Cameron, rest on calls to national identity and unity etc. However, the meaning of British national identity which was mostly based on, and revolved around an untold (or implicit) universalization of the particular

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English way of life has considerably shifted over the last decade or so as certainly, calls to national identity and unity seem to be more and more explicit and less and less the quiet outcome of a state-promoted ideology strategically under-scoring English qua British banal nationalism. In this respect British national identity seems also to work more and more as a reactive and defensive ideology in the face of the twin dangers of external globalization and internal sub-state national claims (the Scottish question being the clearest case in point). Likewise, for the last 10 to 15 years Labour politics are also relying on increasingly visible (and indeed constraining if not violent) forms of British nationalism, albeit always under the claim of the opposite. Recall that New Labour Home Secretary David Blunkett’s (in) famous Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Bill, not to mention the idea for the now functioning Britishness test he put forward, as well as the “Language Row” he provoked at the time, were all anterior (2002) to the London Bombings (2005). For background information on both see: BBC News (2002a): Blunkett confirms £1bn asylum bill, BBC News (2002b): Blunkett Language Row. Recall also Gordon Brown (2006) and his Key note speech at the Fabian [Society’s] Future of Britishness Conference, and more recently Ed Miliband’s rather unfortunate yes I know/but nevertheless interventions on Englishness (2012a) and Immigration (2012b). 16. In this context, it is worth revisiting Paul Gilroy’s ([1993] 2003, 52) diagnosis in the first chapter of this book with regard to the intellectual closure in which the English cultural studies string of his time had positioned itself in the 1970s. This diagnosis is now not only out of date but also incorrect. Let us repeat first what Gilroy stated at the time: “The statist modalities of Marxist analysis that view modes of material production and political domination as exclusively national entities are only one source of this problem [whilst] another factor, more evasive but nonetheless potent for its intangible ubiquity, is a quiet cultural nationalism which pervades the work of some radical thinkers.” This statement is now incorrect, obviously, because the potency of such nationalist ubiquity is nowadays not at all evasive and, if anything, more tangible than ever. Taking the British case as an example suffice to say here that Paul Gilroy’s concern should be extended from the realms of academia on to the wider social-political and cultural domains. In this respect is worth recalling not only British Left talisman Tony Benn’s lifelong praise of British democracy as opposed to European bureaucracy but just the same Left-wing cult popular singer Billy Bragg whose attempt to “reconcile patriotism with the radical tradition” (The Progressive Patriot, 2006, 16) gives a clear indication, for instance, of the all too tangibly ubiquitous presence of a major neo-nationalist repositioning that took place in Britain under New Labour, and from which it was also allegedly possible not only to overcome traditional, Conservative Middle England politics, but

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also to challenge the re-emergence of xenophobia together with the threat of Muslim fundamentalism. 17. As Sara Ahmed first reported (2008): “In his plenary talk at the Law and Critique Conference called ‘Walls’ that took place at Birkbeck College (14–16 September 2007), Slavoj Žižek repeatedly asserted that liberal multiculturalism—and its ‘politically correct’ premise of respecting the other’s difference—is hegemonic. When asked questions about this position from the floor, he stated insistently that it was an ‘empirical fact’ that liberal multiculturalism was hegemonic, and challenged anyone to prove otherwise . . . As a way of taking up his challenge” Ahmed posted her response in the web page Darkmatter post-colonial futures (19 Feb, 2008) response, which Žižek (2008) himself answered back in lacan.com (“Appendix: Multiculturalism: The reality of an illusion.”). 18. To discuss the relationships between multiculturalism and (anti)racism, Ahmed used in her response to Žižek a polemical example at the time (2007), namely, the case of late Jade Goody’s Big Brother story. For further background information on the story see: Wikipedia n/d : “Celebrity Big Brother racism controversy”. As the first paragraph goes: “The Celebrity Big Brother racism controversy was a series of events related to incidents of perceived racist behavior by contestants on the television series Celebrity Big Brother 2007 shown on British television station Channel 4. The incidents centered on comments made by contestants on this reality television show, most notably Big Brother contestant Jade Goody, glamour model Danielle Lloyd, and singer Jo O’Meara, which were directed towards Indian actress Shilpa Shetty. The screening of these comments on UK television resulted in national and international media coverage, responses from the UK and Indian governments, and the show’s suspension during the 2008 season.” Ahmed’s aim in bringing about this example was to point the finger towards the forms of covert racism that often hide behind the fantasy of anti-racist discourses. As she puts it: “Take Big Brother and the Jade Goody story. You could argue that Big Brother’s exposure of racism functions as evidence that political correctness is hegemonic: you are not allowed to be racist towards others. But that would be a gross misreading. What was at stake was the desire to locate racism in the body of Jade Goody, who comes to stand for the ignorance of the white working classes, as a way of showing that ‘we’ (Channel 4 and its well-meaning liberal viewers) are not racist like that. “ 19. Ahmed also unpacks this covert racism with a distance that reverberates in this liberal attitude when dealing, for instance, with the politically correct bureaucratic box-ticking imperative in the public administration (“You are asked to be a tick in their box by smiling with gratitude adding color to the white face of the organization. Diversity as an ego ideal conceals experiences of racism, which means that multiculturalism is a fantasy which supports

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the hegemony of whiteness”). Linked to the previous endnote and in order to further explain this dominant liberal perspective also comes to mind the classic Lacanian formula of the fetishist disavowal (je le sais bien mais quand même), which Žižek uses so often. In other words, this would amount to saying: yes, I know: unfortunately there is this open racism of the uneducated working classes but nevertheless: never myself, under no circumstances do I / we tolerate this kind of appallingly racist behavior, on the contrary we actively fight against it (see, for instance, how even footballers take part in our kick racism out of football campaigns). 20. It should be unnecessary to insist that the London bombing happened within the overall post 9/11 context, which also included the Madrid 11 march 2004 massive attacks. 21. Symptomatic in this respect are also the attempts at developing a minority-led, ‘bottom-up,’ ‘progressive’ and ‘alternative’ British patriotic predicament by the very ‘secular,’ ‘liberal,’ ‘cosmopolitan’ and ‘unprejudiced’ representatives of what are bureaucratically termed as the British Minorities Ethnics (BME) themselves (Muslim, Afro-Caribbean, etc). In this respect, notice how Trevor Phillips and Tariq Morood, to all intents and purposes of self-definition and self-portrayal, both progressive liberals and / or centerleft thinkers, are quite adamant in pointing us towards such a forced choice: to choose, that is to say, between British national identity or nothing else; or do we instead, as Morood (2006, 6) asks, albeit with a certain amount of sarcastic disdain ”[J]ust take the view that if inspiring and meaningconferring identities can be found elsewhere—in some internationalist movement—that’s just fine and if that’s at the expense of your country and its citizens, well they don’t really matter all that much in the ultimate scheme of significance?” Using some ironic play with acronyms the obvious answer to this question is to ask whether there is a case to suspect that ultimately the aim of this very elite of the British Minority Ethnics (BME) would not be merely to become duly recognized Members of the British Empire (MBE)! Notes to chapter 6 1. Here it is also worth mentioning the Parekh Report on The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain (2000) in which (i) a vision for Britain is provided whereby the national story and identities in transition are rethought in order to both achieve cohesion, equality and the respect of difference as well as dealing with various racisms, reducing inequalities and building a human rights culture; (ii) an overview is offered on a variety of issues (employment, immigration and asylum, the politics of representation, religion and belief) and institutions (police, criminal justice, education, arts and media, health and welfare; and (iii) ‘strategies for change’ in government and organizational

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leadership, legislation and enforcement. While the following controversies (in the media, etc) around the report are necessarily structured around issues of racial discrimination and immigration that pertain to the previous social imaginary of the black mugger (S. Hall, 1978, “Racism and Reaction” in, Five views on multiracial Britain, Commission of Racial Equality), most of the themes and debates internal to the liberal / social democratic concerns about social and cultural integration of minority / migrant groups within the structures of the national-state remain relevant within the global post 9/11 geo-political context. 2. According to Laclau and Mouffe: “The basic tenet of what is presented as the ‘third way’ is that with the demise of communism and the socioeconomic transformations linked to the advent of the information society and the process of globalization, antagonisms have disappeared. A politics without frontiers would now be possible—a ‘win-win politics’ where solutions could be found that favored everybody in society. This implies that politics is no longer structured around social divisions and that political problems have become merely technical. According to Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens—the theorists of this new politics—we are now living in conditions of ‘reflexive modernization’ where the adversarial model of politics, of us versus them, does not apply any more.” (1983, xiv-xv). The two key texts by Anthony Giddens we are referring to here are: Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics, 1994, and Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy, 1998. 3. With a theory tailor-made to his own concrete (German) measure of historical guilt and with no real or appreciable universal or liberatory dimension to account for, perhaps a bit of Derriadean hauntology (see chapter 2) would be appropriate here for it seems that Habermas is now quite unaware of his own Marxist past as a critical theorist. I owe the main thrust of this critique on Habermas’ post-nationalism to Joseba Gabilondo (2003). 4. Regarding this question, in passing, Etienne Balibar’s (2004) position, borrowed from Umberto Ecco, on his reflections about Europe and transnational citizenship is worth mentioning, i.e., that the language of Europe would not be any of the existing national languages but translation itself. (See also, Berman and Wood, 2005) 5. A standard approach to the study of the modern states places their actual birth in the Peace of Westphalia (1648), which ended the Thirty Years War. The Peace of Westphalia and a posterior series of Treaty(ies) in the seventeenth century are understood to be at the base of what eventually brought an end to supranational religious and political (empire) authority and the rise of individual, secular European nation-states. The “Westphalian” doctrine understood states as constituting independent sovereign entities, a vision which reached its peak in the nineteenth century. This doctrine was

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instrumental in the emergence and growth of (state)-nationalism under which individual states were thought of as corresponding to individual nations united by language and culture (recall Benedict Anderson’s notion of imagined communities). Here it is important to mention the (Woodrow) Wilson Doctrine and the rise of the principle of self-determination in Wilson’s tenure in office (1913–1921) as an official US foreign policy (see, Knock, 1992; Dudden (ed. 1957). In short, the Peace of Westphalia was key to modern international relations as the principles of state sovereignty and legal equality among individual states were meant to prevail over the idea of external intervention of one country in the domestic affairs of another. 6. This is how, using a linguistic metaphor, states could be understood as being the minimal meaningful units (lexemes / morphemes) for political intervention in supra-state structures such as Europe or the UN, which would constitute the wider level (phrases, paragraphs); whereas infra-state substate formations such as (city-)regions or small, stateless national structures remain discrete units, certainly, albeit unable to produce meaning only by themselves (like phonemes). The problem thus arises when discrete but meaningless phonemes want to become meaningful lexemes/morphemes able to contribute directly to a sense of the universal that no longer needs the mediation of the nation-state hitherto speaking on their behalf. 7. Here it is again worth reading the quote by Žižek (2002: 121; 2004: 26–27) in n11-chapter 5 (p141). 8. Here the search was/is mostly on for a ‘pragmatic’ approach to multilevel governance (Hooghe and Marks, 2001) as the “regional dimension” of city-regions (Taylor, 1995; Knox and Taylor (Eds) 1995; Sassen, 2001, 2002) and sub-state national and / or regional formations (Jeffery, 1997; Hooge and Marks, 2001; Sassen, 1996) intersects with the supra-State level of globalization (Sassen 1998; 2006, 2007). 9. In the latest research Saskia Sassen (2011) carries out, the main argument advocates for this idea, proposing that such a reconfiguration constitutes a “denationalization” of the state structures, which interact directly with globalization. Sassen seems to refer, in particular, to changes in local laws that occur in order to adopt global standards of accountability and arbitration, necessary for the proper functioning of the global economy. It is precisely those institutions and the local actors who perform these transformations, hence Sassen rightly reminds us that globalization occurs both in “national territories” and also in regional and urban areas. Notes to conclusion 10. For an interesting and strong critique of this standard division see Zabala (2011).

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11. Somehow tangentially here (although perhaps this could well be an abstract for another book), another way emerges to better understand and further frame the workings of what we name as Militant (radical) Managerial (liberal) and Market (consumer) Multiculturalism. This new framework would arise from considering some aspects of Jaques Lacan’s theory of the symbolic order together with Slavoj Žižek’s theory of the political ‘proper.’ The relevance of these two theoretical approaches combined stems from their joint ability to address several separate but interrelated questions: (i) the issue of radical multiculturalism’s (lost) political voice, (ii) the nature of the para-political desire that liberal-multiculturalism invests on the consumption of otherness; (iii) the dominant post-political administrative order which ultimately regulates the (lack of) voice of the subordinate other (migrant workers, national/cultural minorities, first (indigenous) peoples . . . ); and (iv) the need thus, from a self-proclaimed open, cosmopolitan and universalist perspective, for the other to be framed through the archepolitics of ‘communitarian’ particularist closure enabling a full yet ambiguous enjoyment of cultural difference. Methodologically, Lacan’s schema presented to us through the knot theory of the Borromean rings is instrumental to address these dimensions of multiculturalism. The Borromean knot is a very simple topological structure the only property of which is the mutual implication (connection/linkage) of its terms in non-smaller number than three. The most interesting point of this articulation is that it allows us to think about what a minimum consistency can consist of; that is to say, it is enough that one of the terms of the knot is not sustained so that the whole imbricated set up (which could be made of infinite terms) disperses itself. There is no hierarchic structure here, there is no one more important tan the rest, each of the terms is necessary in order to sustain the whole set. In addition, it provides us with another way of understanding the inter-position (the middle term, the in-between-two) in an alternate and non-rigid way: the Imaginary passes (it crosses) between the Symbolic and the Real, the Symbolic between the Imaginary and the Real, and the Real between the Symbolic and the Imaginary. We thus notice that consistency does not depend on anyone term in particular to operate as a connector or a mediator, but that each one acts in relation to the other two. Likewise, each one is interrupted by the other in their circular tautological closure. We can thus say that the terms show mutual solidarity. In other words, the internal modes of overlapping that take place in such rings and knots illustrate how relationship between dominant and subordinate cultures works at the interstices of the Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary dimensions of Lacanian theory. In addition, these dimensions or registers can be further discussed within the context of the various levels of multiculturalism already alluded to: militant-radical (civil society / Politics / [S]); managerial-administrative (state / Post-politics [R]);

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and economic-consumer (market / Para-politics / [I]). The combined effects of these individual elements thus allows us to mobilize the fourth dimension of Arche-political closure by which the majority / dominant culture ‘enjoys’ subordinate culture in a radically ambiguous / ambivalent way: jouissance of the other as symptoms of both desire and trauma—the enigma / stigma paradigm of exoticization and demonization of the other etc. 12.I owe much of the spirit and also a bit of the letter of these final remarks to the critical dialogues and exchange of papers with feminist thinkers and activists during the final stages of writing up this book. See Gardeazabal in Güemes and Basabe (2013) who in turn have lead me to the works of Miriam Lee Kaprow (already mentioned earlier) and Celia Amorós (2005).

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Index Abbot, Pamela 125 Abelove, Henry 126 Aboriginals 117 Absent center 48, 76-7, 133 Adorno, Theodor 67 Afro-Caribbean 129, 145 Agambem, Giorgio 73, 111 Agency 21-24, 26, 30, 127-8, 134 Agonic 50; Class (struggle) 8, 105 Ahmed, Sarah 86-9, 108, 144 Alexander, Jeffrey C. 116 Alexander, Larry 59 Al-Qaeda xiv Alter, Peter 80 Alterity 42-3 Althusser, Louis 30, 117, 126-8 Amorós, Celia 149 Anderson, Benedict 76, 80-2, 140, 147 Andrew St 133 Anglo-Saxon 85, 107, 115, 117, 129, 133, 142 Antagonism 23, 30-1, 45, 48, 50, 63, 134, 146 Anthias, Floya 129-30 Anti-racism xiii, 22, 86, 89, 144 Anzaldua, Gloria 78-80, 126 Appadurai, Arjun 76, 81, 83, 140 Arnold, Mathew 7 Articulation (hegemonic, discursive, contingent) v, xiv, 3, 21-35, 39, 41, 62, 64-6, 70, 84, 88, 91-2, 96, 110-12, 121, 131, 148 Assimilation(ism) 84, 129 Atlantic (Black) 11-13, 120; Divide xiii, 129; Transatlantic configuration/resonance xix-x, 115, 130

Australia xiii, 54, 116-7, 128-9 Badiou, Alain ix, 30, 39, 41-7, 4951, 52, 54, 56, 57, 60, 62, 64, 70, 87, 108-12, 130-33 Balibar, Ettiene 146 Bakker, Mark 103 Barale, Michele Aina 126 Barret, Michèle 126 Barry, Brian 116 Banting, Keith 116 Barker, Chris 122 Barnard, Malcolm 126 Barrett, Michèle 126 Basabe, Zaloa 149 Bathkin, Mikhail 99, 123-4 Bauman, Zigmunt 76 Beauvoir, Simone de 125 Bedouin identity 124 Beck, Ulrich 146 Bell, Daniel 22, 131 Benjamin, Walter 8, 67 Benhabib, Seyla 116 Benn, Tony 1436 Bennet, David 116 Bennington, Jeoffrey 82 Berman, Sandra 146 Bhabha, Homi K. xi, 76, 82-3, 140 Billig, Michael 76, 92, 101, 120 Black mugger 146 Blair, Tony 87 Blunkett, David 143 Bobo, Jacqueline 126 Body of thought, narrative fiction ix, 121; Dark 11; Foreign 15;Politics 95, 123;Racist 87, 144 Border ix, 18, 26, 39, 78, 83, 98, 103, 111, 119, 124; Theory v, 74, 76-80, 89, 119, 139; American (US)-Mexican border 39, 73;

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Border/shock cultures 78-79; Israeli-Egyptian 124 Boundaries (see also Borders) 13, 138, 140; Conceptual/discursive 18, 59-60, 126, 139; Cultural 60; National 98 Bourdieu, Pierre 115, 119 Bowman, Paul 122 Bragg, Billy 143 Brennan, Timothy 124, Brenner, Neil 104 British(ness) 33-4, 80, 89, 93, 102, 104, 115, 129, 130, 133, 142; Working class 119; Right 128 Brown, Gordon 143 Budha, Kishore vii Butler, Judith xiv, 77, 123, 129 Callanicos, David 110 Cameron, David vii, 128, 142 Cameron, Deborah 125 Camilleri, Joseph 102 Canada xiii, 54, 116-7 Capital(ism) xi, 25, 32, 39, 57, 63-4, 66, 69, 76, 91, 94, 97, 112, 119, 121, 133; Global v, 45-7, 50-5, 109, 140 Carnivalesque reversal/ transgression 111, 123-124 Carlyle, Thomas 121 Cartesian subject/ontology 25, 99 Castells, Manuel 22, 83 Cesarini, David 142 Chain of difference 133 Chen, Kuan-Hsing 122 Christian 134, 136 Citizenship, 55, 80, Universal 80; Cosmopolitan 84, 97, 137; Multicultural 142; Transnational 146 City-region 103-4, 147 Civil rights movement/struggles

xii-iii, 3, 123 Civil society xiii-iv, 3, 61, 70, 93, 94, 117, 148 Clifford, James 5, 11, 14, 16, 111, 120 Clinton, Bill 39, 65-66, 103 Cohen, Robin 10 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 7 Collingwood, Robin George 118 Collins, Patricia Hill 126 Common culture 88-9 Common sense 34, 86 Communism 65, 137 Communist Historians Group 122 Communist hypothesis ix Fall, collapse, demise, debacle of really existing socialism 41-42, 111, 117, 125, 141, 146; Hermeneutic 110; Postcommunism, 103, 111, 117, 141 Community v, 3, 5, 6-11 , 18, 21, 23, 83, 91, 94 Aboriginal 117, 129; Authentic 47; Corporate 141; Engagement 51; Global, Liberal 39; Imagined x, 76, 81-2, 130, 140, 147; International 55, 115; Modern 141; National 96, 140; Organic 33; Shi’ite 46; Utopian 119 Communitarian(ism) x, 10, 45, 84, 133, 148 Connell, John 119 Consensus (seeking) 32, 48, 58, 61, 70, 93-4, 134 Constitutional Patriotism 61, 70, 94, 99, 104, 136 Consumer, mass, popular culture xiii-xiv, 17, 39, 55-56, 67-70, 75, 119; Illiberal, inward-looking culture 60, 110, 134-5; Societal culture 135

index Cosmopolitanism 7, 74, 78, 84, 94, 97, 137, 145, 148 Counterculture 23 Cricket test 129 Critical theory 5, 23, 35, 67, 69, 111-2, 121, 126 Cultural Politics 3, 67, 84-6, 118, 129 Cultural Studies x-xi, 6, 11-3, 17-8, 21, 23, 26, 48, 67, 111-2, 119-23, 130, 134, 139-40, 143 Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies 122; Black British Cultural Studies xi; British Cultural Studies 17, 120; English Cultural studies 12, 17,143 Cultural authenticity 5, 11, Culture v, xii-xv, 3, 5, 6-10, 21-3, 26, 40, 41, 45, 51-2, 58, 64-5, 77-7, 97-8, 108-10, 118, 121, 137, 147 Culture industry 67 Culture of difference (pure, openended, radical) xv, 21, 26, 30-31, 45-6 Culture War(s) 110, 116, 130 Curran, James 122 Davies, James K. viii De-colonial option / project / thinking 99, 104, 122-3 Deconstruction 23, 28, 43, 124, 126, 132 Deleuze, Gilles 124 Delmar, Rosalind 125 Democracy 28-29, 39, 95, 101, 112, 143; Deliberative 104; Parliamentary 42; Participatory/ participative 49-50; Social 146; See also Liberal-democracy Demos 111

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Denationalization 147 De-politization of culture 50, 117 Derrida, Jacques 41-2, 123, 131 Desire 6,11-2, 43, 68, 86-87, 102, 110, 125, 144, 148-9 Deterritorialization 5, 99 Dews, Peter 43-4, 131-2 Diaspora (politics, cultures, communities, subjects) 3, 5, 1018, 21-4, 81-2, 111, 119-20 Dialogue (intercultural vs critical) viii, xi, 59-60, 83, 94, 99, 110, 134, 149 Dialogic Approach, arrangements, combinations, views 23, 57, 61, 108, 110, 134; Imagination 99, 124; Politics 93; Negotiation, resolution 61, 70, 74, 93; Engagement 70; Understanding 61 Differe/ance 132 Difference x, 30-1, 42, 45, 47-8, 589, 63, 77, 83, 86, 88, 91, 98,112, 132-6, 142, 148; Celebration of 77, 87-89, 111, 136; Cultural ix-x, 46, 52, 55-6, 58, 85, 100, 110-2, 116, 129, 130; Gender and sexual 117; Management of 75, 93, 129; (Multi)-Cultural ix-x, 13, 45-46, 52, 55-8, 65, 74, 85, 100, 110-2, 116, 130; Politics of 42, 51, 120, 131-2; Religious ix; Representation of 99; System of 30-31, Displacement 13, 18, 122 Distribution 25 Diversity 3, 8, 27, 48, 51, 54, 64, 85-9, 93, 97, 106, 108, 132, 133, 140, 142, 144; Celebration of 88; Discourse of 129 (Multi)Cultural xii, 41, 47, 53, 63, 82-85,

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117, 136; Politics of xiii Dominant-majority/Subordinateminority / Emergent-residual in culture 17, 22, 32, 34, 86, 93, 99, 110, 117, 125, 139, 148-9 Dorenkamp, Monica 126 Double consciousness v, 3, 10-14, 79 Douglas, Mary 69-70 Dubois, W.E.B. 11, 12, Dudden, Arthur P. 147 Durkheim, Emile 119 organic vs mechanic 119 During, Simon 122, 139 Dworkin, Andrea 126 Dworkin Dennis 122 Eagleton, Terry 46, 58, 135-6, 138-9 Ecce Comu 112 Eco, Umberto 146 Eder, Klaus 142 Education xii, 17, 32, 102, 116, 145; Adult 119, 122, 142; Preparationist vs Multicultural 142 Elan, Diane 126 Elites (elitism) xiv, 3, 8, 17 Business, corporate 54-5; Selected, cultural 6-7; Highlyskilled migrants 55; Minority Ethnics 145 Emerson, Caryl 99, 124 (E)migration v, vii-ix, 3, 18, 75-8, 85, 108, 113, 116-7, 122, 128-9, 131, 139 Empire(s) 78, 109, 138-41, 145, 146 Empty signifier xi, 30, 34, 44, 48, 63, 65, 99 End of (history, ideology, politics) vii, 29, 35, 39, 41, 42, 50, 131 Enigma/stigma paradigm 52, 92, 133, 139, 149

Engels, Friedrich 65 Englishness 33, 85, 133-4, 143 English way of life 143 Enlightenment 62, 64, 109, 120, 131 Entanglements 22 Enunciation 111 Equality 28, 29, 33, 83-4, 86, 88, 94, 110, 112, 145; Gender xiii, 125; Legal 145; Non-discrimination 108; Inequality 14, 29; Racial 146 Equality in difference 87 Erotic vs Ethic 125-6, 132 Essentialism 48, 65, 108 Strategic 27, 98 Ethics xii, 30, 39, 42-7, 52, 70, 125, 131-2; Of difference 132; Of human rights 132; Of liberalism 132 Ethical othering 132 turn 42-3, 131 Ethnic culture/difference 75, 100, 127 Eurocentrism 25 Eurocentric epistemologies 23, 100, 104 European, Western culture 109 Evans, Braziel Jana 120 Evans, Mari 126 Evil 43, 132 Exclusion 45, 59, 96, 129 Exile/exilic identity/experience 3, 5, 11, 13-16, 18, 60, 81-2, 89, 121, 140 Expulsionist framework 129 Extended/restricted definitions of culture 6 -7, 10, 17, 58, 117, 130 Falk, Jim 102 Fantasy 68, 86 Anti-nationalist, liberal, antiracist 84, 92-3, 134; Frictionless,

index harmonious multicultural society, of 48, 108, 144; Monocultural 86 Fay, Brian 116 Featherstone, Mike 67-68, 76 Feminism 25-6, 55, 111, 122, 124-6, 131, 139; Black 86; Chicana 79; First Wave 125; Second Wave 3, 125; Separatist critique 126; Global 24, 27; Lesbian 126; Marxist 126; Middle class 126; Women of colour 126 Feminist 23, 68, 100, 122, 124, 149; Movement 24; Struggles 124; Critique, Studies and Theory 18, 65, 79, 123-4 Fidelity 63, 137 First Peoples 56, 108 Fish, Stanley 39, 51-3, 56, 57, 5861, 70, 87, 134-6 Fiske, Jon 67 Forbes, Donald 116 Foreign(ness) 3, 5, 11, 15-6, 18, 31, 55, 89, 118, 128-9, 137, 147 Fortress Europe 39, 73 Foster, Hall 114 Foucault, Michel 123, 124 France, 14, 76, 84, 123, 141-2 Freedman, Estelle B. 126 Freedom 28, 49, 84, 94, 101, 111-2; Liberty 28-9; Methodological 124; Of conscience 137; Of choice 116 Fregoso, Rosa Linda 139 French vii, 30, 97; Particular 31; Anti-multiculturalism 85; Identity vii, 85; Literature 98; Politics of assimilation 84; Revolution 29, 84-5, 142; Structuralism 122 Freud, Sigmund 66 Frow, John 122 Frye, Marilyn 126

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Fukuyama, Francis 39, 41-2, 110 Fulbrook, Mary 142 Fuss, Diana 126 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 61, Gabilondo, Joseba viii, 146 Gamble, Andrew 128 Garber, Linda 126 Garber, Marjorie 131 Garcia Canclini, Nestor 76 Gardeazabal, Natalia, 149 Gay, Paul du 27 Gaze 119, 135 Gellner, Ernest 81 George St 133 German(y) vii, 76, 84-5, 95, 97, 136, 141-2, 146 Giddens, Anthony 74, 92-4, 100, 104, 109, 146 Giesen, Bernhard 142 Gilroy, Paul 5, 11-14, 16, 18, 26, 989, 111, 120, 143 Giroux, Henry A. 134, 135, 139 Globalization 10, 35, 41-2, 45, 49, 53-4, 75-6, 78, 81-3, 92, 97, 1049, 141, 143, 145-7 Goldberg, Dled 116 Goody, Jade 144 Governance/Governmentality xiii, 35, 75, 85 Gramsci, Antonio 23, 27, 34, 35, 117, 127 Greek culture/civilization 137-8 Grossberg, Lawrence 122 Guattari, Felix 124 Güemes, Ainhoa 149 Guest-worker 140, 142 Guha, Ranajit 123 Gutmann, Amy 59-60, 116 Habermas, Jürgen xiv, 51, 57, 5962, 70, 74, 92-97, 99-100, 104,

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109, 136, 146 Hall, Stuart xii, 5, 11-2, 15-6, 18, 22, 26-7, 32-5, 48, 76, 82, 98, 111, 122, 128, 137, 146 Halperin, David 126 Hansen, Beatrice 131 Hardt, Michael 111, 138, 139-40 Hartmann, Heidi 125, 126 Hebdige, Dick 67 Hegel, George Wilhelm Friedrich 30, 64 Hegemony 3, 23, 27-8, 31-2, 35, 41, 65, 77, 86 -88, 108, 115-6, 127, 145 Henke, Richard 126 Herzog, Patricia 116 Hesse, Barnor x, xii-iii, 35, 107, 115, 129-30 Heterodox 122 Heterogeneity 18, 62, 64, 98, 124 Heteroglossia 124 Hitler, Adolf 135 Hobsbawn, Eric 81, 122 Hoggart, Richard 13, 17, 119, 122 Holquist, Michael 99, 124 Home(land) 11, 15, 67, 120, 135, 142 Home and away dialectics 82 Homo sacer 73, 76, 89, 111 Homogeneity 5, 10, 45, 108 Homogenization 32, 45, 64 Hooghe, Liesbet 147 hooks, bell 126 Horkheimer, Max 67 House of difference 24, 27, 125, 132 Human rights, 28, 30, 43-45, 47, 54-5, 102, 108, 132, 145 Humanitarian Ideology 44 Intervention 78; Obligations 137 Huntington, Samuel P 41-2, 108 Hutcheon, Linda 126 Hybrid culture/hybridity/ hybridization 5, 18, 48, 76-9, 82,

98, 111, 120-1 Idealism 84 Identity politics x-xii, 3, 5, 19, 31, 23-7, 31, 41, 47-9, 54, 56, 74, 77, 82, 85-6, 97-8, 100, 111-2, 115, 117, 123, 131; Conservative, vii, 128; Capitalism, of 47; End of vii, 41, 50, 131; Fixed 22; Humanitarian, of human rights 44, 47; Hyphenated 48, 129; Ideology 46, 67, 114, 142; Liberal xiii, 34, 116, 136; Relativist 45; State 92, 97, 99, 140, 143 Unmarked 48, 76-7, 85, 133; Working of Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses 126-8 Imaginary 81, 86, 107, 131, 146 Imaginary-Real-Symbolic 80-82, 86 Impasse 55, 111 Indifference to difference v, 39, 42-6, 57 Indigenous populations 44, 56, 85, 108, 117, 135, 147 Individual(ism)/individualist ethos x, 7, 9, 23, 28, 33, 34, 55, 64, 84, 94, 120, 128, 130, 134, 141, 1467; Autonomy 94, 137; Choice/ liberty 68-70, 118, 137; Rights 95-6, 125 Inglis, Fred 122 Integration 14, 16, 74, 83-4, 87-8, 93, 95, 109, 118 Integrationism 129 Intercultural perspective 12, 55, 99 Interpellation 30, 86, 126-7 Contradictory 29-30 Intolerance 48-9, 80 Irigaray, Luce 125 Irish 85, 131; Question/conflict 96; Studies 139 Jacoby, Russel 135 Jaeger, Werner Wilhelm 137

index Jameson, Fredric 98, 133 Jeffery, Charley 147 Jews 134, 136 Jones, Sian 142 Jupp, James 116 Justice 43, 84, 102, Criminal 75, 100, 145; Global injustice 50; Theory of 96 Kant, Emmanuel 63-4, Kaprov, Miriam Lee 108, 149 Keating, Michael 101 Kelly, Paul 116 Kenichi, Ohmae 103 Kierkegaard, Søren 43 Kincheloe Joe L. 116 King, Anthony D. 10, King, Russell 119 Kipnis, Laura 126 Klug, Brian viii Knock, Thomas K. 147 Knox, Paul 147 Kosofsky Sedwick, Eve 126 Kristeva, Julia 11, 14-6, 137 Kushner, Tony 142 Kymlicka, Will xi, xiii, 39, 51, 52-6, 57, 60, 85, 115-7, 134, 142 Labor (market) xi, 32, 67 Lacan, Jacques 30, 34, 123, 131, 144, 145, 148 Laclau. Ernesto xiv-xv, 21, 26, 27-31, 33-5, 40, 41, 44, 48, 57, 61-3, 65-7, 70, 73, 77, 80, 94, 112, 130-1, 146 Laden Anthony Simon 116 Language 7, 8, 23, 44-5, 63, 97, 118, 130, 138, 142, 146-7; English 5, 8, 141; English vs. Hispanic 129; Games xiv, 62, 86, 112; Minority 53; National 97, 124; New, foreign, artificial 15-16;

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Philosophy of, 61-2; Promotion of 34; Row 143; Translation 15, 146 Lauretis, Teresa de 24, 27, 123, 125-6 Lavie, Smadar 124 Law, Ian vii Leavis, Frank Raymond 7, 17 Left, the 32, 35, 58, 83, 94, 120, 139, 146; Authoritarianism 94; British 86, 143; English 12; Factionalism of 24; Intellectuals 141, 145; Liberal 53; New 12-3, 122; Old 94-5; Western 35 Lemert, Charles 116 Lévinas, Emmanuel 42 Lévi-Strauss, Claude vii Liberal-democracy x, 28, 39, 49, 65, 74, 75, 92, 93, 97, 99; Ideology of 136; Imaginary 107 Livy 138 Lloyd, Danielle 144 Local culture 47 Locke, John 136 London bombings 76, 87, 143, 145 Lopez, Maria Milagros 123 Lovibond, Savina 126 Lyotard, Jean François xiv, 62, Lucy, Donna viii Machiaveli 138 MacKinnon, Katharine 25, 126 MacLaren, Peter 116, 139 Macmillan, Harold 32 Malinowsky, Bronislaw 7 Mannur, Anita 120 Marginal(ization) 13, 22-3, 32, 98, 111, 125 Marks, Gary 147 Marx, Karl 42, 66, 105, 127 Marxism x, 7, 23-5, 122-3, 162, 163, 165; Classical, dogmatic, orthodox, traditional 23, 65, 67,

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119, 120-1, 125 Marxist analysis & critique xiv, 12, 18, 48, 65, 67, 100, 111, 124-6, 143; eminism 125-26 Thinkers, historians 5, 30, 121, 128, 133, 138, 146 Matuštík, Martin 135 Maurier, Daphne de 64 May, Stephen 116 Mercer, Kobena 99, 122 Melzer, Arthur M. 116 Merkel, Angela vii, 85 Michaels, Walter Benn xi Mitchell, Juliet 126 Mitchell, Katharyne 135 Mignolo, Walter D. 104, 122-3, 139, Migrant (experience) 13, 15, 31, 55-6, 73, 81-2, 96, 108-1, 144-7 Mexican 78 Migrant culture 112; Migratory flows 75; Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Bill 143; Skilled 55; Turkish migrant/guest-worker 85, 142 Miletus, Thales of 40 Miliband, Ed 143 Mirza, Heidi 126 Modood, Tariq 76, 87-88, 116 Moraga, Cherrie 126 Morley, David 122 Morris, Meaghan 68, 126 Mouffe, Chantal xiv, 21, 25, 27-31, 33-5, 44, 48, 50, 61-2, 64, 65-7, 80, 94, 126-7, 131-2, 146 Multiculturalism Benetton, United Colors of 53, 135; Boutique v, 39, 42, 51-4, 58, 134-6; British 86, 89, 115, 130, 133; Commodification of 32, 41, 56, 69, 135; Disneyfying 135; Empirical 45, 77, 86, 88, 133, 144; Eurocentric 104;

Hedonist/ludic distraction/ consumption of 41, 56, 68-9, 134, 135; Liberal x-xiv, 6, 45, 48, 52-4, 56, 61, 70, 86, 89, 91, 93, 99, 112, 116, 132, 137, 144, 148; Market, consumer, corporate xiii-iv, 39, 40, 41-2, 52-5, 56, 57-8, 106, 110, 117, 148; Marxist v; Radical, militant xiii-iv, 3, 83, 110, 117, 148; Pseudo-multiculturalism 142; Social movement 39, 53-55; State multiculturalism vii, xii, xiii-iv, 100, 115; Theatrical 104; Tokenism, multicultural 136; Un/settled x, 130 Multitude 112 Muslim 85, 133, 145; Fundamentalism/terrorism 78, 144; Moderate 45, 127; Threat/ question 31, 75 Nairn, Tony 102 Narcissism, culture of 67 National identity/politics vii, ix, 9, 12-3, 24-5, 33, 45, 48-9, 61, 66, 70, 73-4, 79-89, 91-5, 103-4, 115, 141-3; Security/emergency/ exception-state of 73, 75, 89, 112, 117; Cohesion 128; Sportscricket 129 Nationalism x-xi, 34, 113, 139 Banal 76, 92, 101, 120, 142, 151, 137; Black 120; British 130, 1423, 145; Cultural 12, 143; Grandnationalism 78, 84, 112; Neonationalism 77-8, 141; Scottish 102, 141; Small national 101, 117, 148; State-national(ism) 12, 13, 76, 99, 101-2, 104; Sub-state/ Stateless nations 79, 93, 147 Negri, Antonio 111, 138, 138-40

index Nelson, Cary 122 Neutral(ity) 15, 41, 49, 109, 128, 133 New Age 134 Network society 22, 83 Nicholson, Linda 126 Noble ideals 93, 86 Nomadicism 5, 13, 18, 21-24, 1201, 124, 132; Nomadic Thought 124 O’Meara, Jo 144 Oliver, Miguel de 135 Oppression 25, 29, 80, 113, 139 Orientalism 8, 85, 109, 134, 138-9 Orrom, Michael 121 Other, the 41-3, 47, 50-1, 57-8, 61, 70, 75, 79, 85, 88, 92, 108110, 135, 148-9; Exoticization/ demonization of 149 Owen, David 116 Parekh, Bhikhu ix, xii, xiv, 93, 116118, 145 Parekh Report on The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain 145 Parmar, Pratibha 126 Parallax view 110, 138 Patriarchal(ism) society 25, 33, 125 Patriotism 94, 143 Paul, Saint 43, 109, 132-4 Perelberg, Rosine Joseph 124 Pericles 138 Perspectivism, Gentle 118 Petranovich, Danilo 116 Philistine 8 Picturesque 52, 63 Pierce, Sarah 142 Pluralism 3, 87, 109 Pluri-national democracy 101 Political correctness 144 Political economy 40, 52-53, 57,

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67, 112 Polyglot, Silence of 15, 124 Polysemic notion of culture 118 Postcolonial theory/ postcolonialism xi-ii, 18, 23, 35, 48, 74, 76-77, 91-2, 96-100, 105, 108, 111, 115, 122-3, 129, 135, 139, 144 Post-Marxist critique 25, 39, 48, 65, 100, 110-12, 122, 126 Postmodern(ism) 40, 47, 62, 124, 132-3, 139 Post-nationalism v, 57, 59, 70, 74, 75-6, 89, 91-5, 96-100, 136, 146 (Post)National culture 89, 93, 97 Post-politics 50, 100, 148 Post-structuralism 18, 23, 28, 48, 100, 111, 122-3 Poulanzas, Nicos M. 117 Powel, Enoch 128 Psychoanalysis 121, 124, 126, 131 Philips, Trevor 88, 116, 145 Queer studies, theory 100, 123, 126 Race and ethnicity x, xii, 22-3, 34, 116, 130 Radical centre 94, 104 Rancière, Jacques 111 Ranger, Terence 81 Raphael-Leff, Joan 126 Rationalist/m 57, 93, 99 128, 132 Rawls, John 96 Reagan, Donald 53, 78-79, 128 Recognition, politics of/struggles for xiii, 5, 43-5, 93, 95-7, 133, 136 Reductionism ix, 108, 110 Economic 23, 65 Renan, Ernest 140 Re-presentation ix, 7, 10, 23, 30, 82, 98, 125, 134, 145 Resentment, logic of 49, 57

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Resistance 25, 39, 48, 50, 54-5, 67, 69, 124, 131 Respect of difference 129, 145 Rich, Adrienne 126 Rimbaud, Arthur 46 Rodriguez, Ileana 123 Rorty, Richard 126 Rose, Jacqueline 129 Ross, Andrew 126 Rubin, Gayle 126 Russo, Mary 123 Said, Edward 11, 14-15, 16, 18, 77, 91, 109, 111, 121, 138-9 Saldivar, José David 139 Sarcozy, Nicholas vii Sardar, Ziauddin 122 Sargent, Lydia 126 Sassen, Saskia 102, 147 Saussure, Ferdinand 94 Sayyid, Salman (Bobby) vii, 75, 118 Schmitt, Carl 75 Schor, Naomi 126 Schutz, Albert 118 Segregation 84, 88 Shapiro, Ian 116 Shetty, Shilpa 144 Shohat, Ella 116 Sian, Katy vii Silverman, Max 142 Slater, Don 68 Sleeter, Christine E. 116 Smelser, Neil J. 116 Smith, Michael Peter 103 Sneja, Gunew 136 Social movement, New xii, 3, 111, 9-10, 31, 35, 53-55 Socialism 12, 28 Socrates (dilemma) 137-8 Soper, Kate 126 Sophisticated multiculturalism v, 74, 92-4, 104, 108, 138

Solidarity 28, 94, 148 Sovereignty 29, 45, 75, 91, 101-4, 131, 140, 141, 146-7 Spartacus slave revolt 137 Spender, Dale 126 Spivak Chakravorty, Gayatri 27, 111, 123, 126, 136 Stam, Robert 116 Steinberg, Shirley R. 116 Stigmatization 92, 133, 149 Storey John 122 Subaltern(ity) 17, 44, 77, 98, 111, 126-8, 139; Nations 138-40 Silence 16 Studies 5, 18, 27, 123 Subculture 67, 97 Subject ix, 30, 44, 56, 65, 130-1, 137; Autonomous 128; Cartesian, Unified, homogeneous and universal(ized) 23, 25, 44; Collective 73, 111; Constitution 127; Demonized 75; Diaspora/migrant/exile 11, 15, 18, 82; Formation 3; Fragmented 104; Individualist subject of Thatcherism 128; Multiculturalist 70, 87, 127; Of liberalism 34; Of history 121, 128; Position 18, 24, 30; Revolutionary 23; Rebellious, creative 68; Sovereign subject of Enlightenment 131; Ticklish 133; Traveling 14, 24, 25 Subjection/subjected 65, 124, 127-8 Subjectivity 3, 12, 21-3, 24, 27-8, 31, 47, 63, 98, 111, 127; Decentered 43, 131; Rational 141 Supra-state international institutions (Europe, UN) 55, 104, 147; Military alliances

index (NATO) 103 Symbolic (dis)order 30, 34, 41, 124, 128, 130, 131, 148; Borders/ boundaries 98; Eficiency 66; Frontier, Formation, Structure 75, 77, 82 Symbol(ization) 7, 29, 39, 62-3, 78, 84-5, 140-1 Symptom(atic) 58, 67, 105, 145, 149 Tacitus 138 Taylor, Charles 93, 96, 116 Taylor, Jenny Bourne 16 Taylor, Paul vii, 128 Taylor, Peter J. 147 Tebbit, Norman 129, 142 Thatcher, Margaret 32,, 53, 128 Thatcherism 22, 32-5, 66, 80, 128 Third Way politics 92-4, 104, 128, 146 Thompson, Denys 7 Thompson, Edward P. 13, 17, 119, 122 Thucydides 138 Tlostanova, Madina V. 104, 122-3 Tolerance/Respect, politics of v, 28, 42-3, 47, 50-2, 57-60, 80, 83, 86, 88-9, 99, 108-10, 113, 129, 134136, 138; Intolerance 48-9 Tönies, Ferdinand 119 Gemeinschaft vs Gessellschaft 119 Torture, culture of 136 Tourain, Alain 22 Tourism/Tourist fascination 47, 63, 140 Tradition 13, 66-7, 81, 84, 85, 119, Academic, intellectual 5-6, 7, 67, 98-9, 107, 111, 121, 131, 142; Cultural (organic) xii, 5, 8-11, 32-3, 51, 64, 93, 124, 135, 141; National 140 Traditionalist, conservative values

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32-4, 66, 119, 143; Political (liberal, radical, Marxist, Jacobin) xi, 28-9, 67, 85, 121, 125, 129, 143 Trans-national 3, 5, 11-13, 54-5, 76, 98-9, 111; Circulation of capital 50; Citizenship 146; Flows 76; Diaspora 11; Theories of 80 Trauma 149 Traveling cultures 14, 18, 21, 24, 121; Routed/Rooted 11 Treicher, Paula 122 Truth 46, 56, 57, 59, 66, 70, 131-33, 137 Truth-event 63, 132 Undecidability 41 Unity-in-difference 3, 26-27 Universal/(Particular) 23, 26, 44-52, 55-56, 75, 78, 87, 91, 131, 140; Abstract/concrete universalism 43, 57-60, 84, 132-3, 146-48; Constitutional (patriotic); Universalism 94; Contaminated universalism 624; Democratic universalism 100, 104; False, Empty universality of capital market 45, 50, 52, 57, 64; Militant, solitary, radical, struggling universalism 132-4; Paradox (impossibility/necessity) of Universalism xiv, 62; Political universality (shadowy existence of) 77-8; Rational Universality 136; Supracultural universal 51; Vacuous universalism 51; Utopia(n) 6, 9, 39, 66, 68, 92 , 103, 119 Universal citizenship 80, 137 Universal ethics (of truth) 39, 46, 132 Universal human rights 28, 31, 44,

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58, 102 Universal identity 136 Universal, particular, singular v, xv, 56, 57, 61-64, 107-110, 141-2 Universal security 103 Universal values, principles 84, 97, 109-10, 116 Universalism vs relativism x, 70 Van Loon, Boris 122 Vattimo, Gianni 112 Voice 116, 126, 148 Void , edge of 105 110, 113 Volishonov, Valentin Nikolaevich 99 Voltaire 138 Wacquant, Loic 115 Walkowitz, Rebecca I. 131 Wall(s) 75, 79, 144 Berlin Wall xiv, 22, 35, 39, 41-2, 73, 111; Israel-Palestine (West Bank) wall 39, 73 Wallace, Claire 125 Wallace, Michelle 126 Wallerstein, Immanuel 76, 91 Walzer, Michael 142 Weak thought 112 Weed, Elizabeth 126 Weinberger, Jerry 116 Werbner, Pnina 76 West, Cornel xi, 135 Westphalia, parameters, peace of 101, 146-7 White, Paul 117 Willet, Cynthia 107, 116 Williams, Raymond 5-9, 13, 16-7, 18, 21, 119, 121-2 Willis, Paul 7 Wilson, Harold 32 Wilson, Woodrow 147 Wilson Doctrine 147

Winch, Peter 118 Whisman, Vera 126 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 118 Wolfe, Tom 51, Wolff, Janet 23-4 Wollstonecraft, Mary 125 Wood, Michael 145 Woolf, Virginia 64 Wright, Elisabeth 126 Wright, Richard 13 Wright Mills, Charles 118 Young, Iris Marion 116 Yuval-Davis, Nira 128-30 Zabala, Santiago viii, 112, 147 Zac, Lilian 118 Zelizer, Viviana A. 135 Zinman, M. Richard 116 Žižek, Slavoj xiv, 39, 40, 41-2, 4750, 51-4, 56, 58, 62-4, 65-7, 70, 73, 77, 84-85, 86, 100-2, 109-9, 111-2, 126-7, 128-9, 130-1, 133, 134, 138, 141-2, 144-5, 147, 148