Random Variable

I did not believe YouTube capable of producing constructive debate, but I’ve been proved wrong by vlogger GrandNarratives.

I’d like to draw some attention to the last part of Žižek’s recent class on the embedness of ideology, which was a response to another response by Sara Ahmed to his plenary talk on liberal multiculturalism that was given at the Critical Legal Conference last year.

Sara Ahmed took issue with Žižek’s claim that liberal multiculturalism as hegemony is an empirical fact. Here, she takes issue with what she claims is Žižek’s literal reading of multiculturalism. She utilises the concept of a non-performative, that is a performative that functions in its very opposite as a way of reading liberal multiculturalism. In this narrative, multiculturalism takes on a double bind: The racist reads multiculturalism to say that you can be racist, but that you assert your racism in the very way that you profess non-racism, and that this forms the basis of our late modern “civil racism.”

Žižek’s response is to re-describe liberal multiculturalism as fantasy. That is, racism is officially prohibited at the institutional level, but this prohibition becomes an ego-ideal, which must lead to outbursts against shamed racists, which takes on a class dimension. In the Shilpa Shetty Big Brother debacle, Jade Goody was villainised even though the majority of the racism came from Jo O’Meara. Jade Goody personified the working-class racist that liberals all like to dismiss. Another story comes from an incident involving the Roma in Slovenia. The travellers arrived at a small village, where the inhabitants turned to racist exclusionism. Liberals from around the country came to the Roma’s defence, but at no point did they say that the Roma could live next to them. When one looks at the content of the village racists arguments, one can discern real socioeconomic concerns tied in with class alienation.

When one looks over debates over Islam, liberals like to oppose an authentic religion against its bad fundamentalist counterpart. Here, Žižek rightly discerns that multiculturalism relies on the admission of Otherness, but the liberals are the masters who draw the line as to who the good Other is, therefore protecting “true diversity.”

Ahmed then claims that hidden behind liberal multiculturalism is an injunction to monoculturalism. Žižek counters by showing how things are really worse than this. The demand to become British is impossible. One cannot do it, and the liberals secretly enjoy it. This is experienced in conversations as “what about your own culture? I love your closeness to nature!”

Therefore, multiculturalism outputs two different types of racism. A reflexive racism that allows us to discern ourselves from the racist Other on the basis of class or the “intolerant Muslim,” and it also falsely elevates the Other as authentic to a fragile absolute.

So, how do we move beyond the deadlock? Žižek takes on a critical reading of Rowan Williams suggestion that Britain adopts a variant of Islamic Shariah courts. Williams is careful to emphasise two limitations on the adoption of Shariah; both parties must consent to a hearing in front of a Shariah court, and that there should be no conflict with UK criminal law. Žižek argues that nothing really radical happens. If you secede rights to ethnic communities on the basis that they have to assent to the process, then to have a truly free choice, you would need to be educated in making a choice between the rules of the different ethnic and religious groupings. For example, the moment a woman wears a veil as a part of her free choice, it is no longer a sign of integration with her community but an expression of her own individualism. The choice here is always a metachoice.

Beck used the principle of a “double religion” to describe the same thing at his recent lecture on the cosmopolitanisation of religion. He utilises Lessing’s ring parable to call for an ironist position with regards to one own religion—no one is sure that their faith is the one true faith, and therefore cannot proceed on exclusionary grounds. Last year, Beck had no answer as to how cosmopolitan realism could be engendered at the level of public debate, and yet it happened in the unlikeliest quarter—the Anglican Church.

Žižek actually likes this idea of a metachoice. Here, a theological project that authors like Saba Mahmood has discerned in involvements with religious institutions seems near unavoidable. This is probably where research needs to be directed today.

For Žižek, tearing ourselves from all of our roots is the precondition of the rehabilitation of the Left. But I would argue that it can also lead to its opposite—neofundamentalism. Olivier Roy has already documented how fundamentalists do tear themselves from their ethnic roots. In fact, turns to neofundamentalism are often a sort of “protest conversion”:

“Blacks, Latinos and persons of mixed race who find in radical Islamic groups a rebuke to racism and a way to fight a system they reject,…many belong to the same milieu as their Muslim friends; they live in impoverished neighbourhoods and are working-class dropouts, for example, Jose Padilla, Richard Reid and the Frenchman Lionel Dumont – who converted to Islam because ‘the Muslims are the only ones to fight the system’. Many are from racial minorities (such as Blacks, specifically from the Caribbean) that find in radical Islam a truly non-racist environment. To convert to Islam today is a way for a European rebel to find a cause; it has little to do with theology.”

The neofundamentalists live similarly to the noveau rich. Both want gated communities, and travel the world to exploit new opportunities and use the lingua franca of English to communicate. The tearing of one’s self from the roots presents both an opportunity and a threat. I agree with Žižek that capitalism has achieved a global universality—that is why we call it globalisation. The struggle is to locate commonalities in the struggles and divisions for a new mass Left.

Cosmopolitanisation involves civil society as much as it involves the state. The new social movements need to find a message compatible and responsive to the needs of ethnic communities. Powerful states need to work with ethnic communities to bring about change in countries from which they’ve and create a level playing ground of substantive equality with regards to life chances.

Swearing an oath to Britain is code to give up the struggle of the Global South. The post-materialism of the new movements is meaningless for those where the very ground of their material life is being taken away from them.

Cosmopolitanism is not a pedagogical intervention. Nor does it mean sushi on every high street in Britain. It involves deep-level structural and cultural changes in the way societies are organised. It is both an ideal to strive towards, but also our only option to proceed during the 21^st century.