Commitment and Complicity in Cultural Theory and Practice

Commitment and Complicity in Cultural Theory and Practice Begüm Özden Firat, Sarah De Mul and Sonja Van Wichelen Thi...

Author: Begum Ozden Firat | Sarah de Mul | Sonja van Wichelen (editors)

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Commitment and Complicity in Cultural Theory and Practice

Begüm Özden Firat, Sarah De Mul and Sonja Van Wichelen

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Commitment and Complicity in Cultural Theory and Practice Edited By

Begüm Özden Fırat Assistant Professor, Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, Istanbul, Turkey

Sarah De Mul Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Leuven, Belgium and

Sonja van Wichelen Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for Cultural Sociology, Yale University, USA


Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Begüm Özden Fırat, Sarah De Mul and Sonja van Wichelen 2009 Chapter 4 © Columbia University Press 2007. Reprinted with permission of the publisher Individual chapters © contributors 2009 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin's Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–22195–6 hardback ISBN-10: 0–230–22195–5 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne


Contents Acknowledgments

vii

Notes on Contributors 1

viii

Introduction: Commitment and Complicity Begüm Özden Fırat, Sarah De Mul, and Sonja van Wichelen

1

Part I Rethinking Commitment 2

Commitment as a Nonperformative Sara Ahmed

3

Commitment or Commitment-Kitsch? Rethinking the ‘Woman Question’, Agency, and Feminist Politics Sonja van Wichelen

4

‘Human’ in the Age of Disposable People: The Ambiguous Import of Kinship and Education in Blind Shaft Rey Chow

23

45

64

Part II Commitment and Complicity in the Production of Knowledge 5

The Middle East and the Disciplinary (Re)Production of Knowledge Andrea Teti

81

6

Empty Versatility and the Art of the Circular Reading Timothy Brennan

102

7

The Commitment to Face Mieke Bal

120

Part III 8

Putting Complicity to Work

The Necessity of ‘Terror’ Elleke Boehmer

139

v Begüm Özden Firat, Sarah De Mul and Sonja Van Wichelen

vi

9

10

11

Contents

Putting Complicity to Work for Accountability: An Australian Case Study Fiona Probyn-Rapsey Layers of Labor in Cultural Production: Notes on Aesthetics and Commitment from the Transparent Factory Octavi Comeron The Politics of ‘Contemporary Islamic Art’ Begüm Özden Fırat

Index

154

167 182

195


Acknowledgments The editors would like to thank the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam for hosting the International Workshop Trajectories of Commitment and Complicity: Knowledge, Politics, Cultural Production. This event evolved out of the yearly organized ASCA Theory Seminar. They would also like to thank the following people for their valuable input to this edited volume: Bregje van Eekelen, Marc de Leeuw, Saskia Lourens, and Ihab Saloul. They are grateful to Huibert Teekens (Cover design Studio Teekens) for his generous support and beautiful design of the cover. The authors would like to acknowledge permission to reprint ‘ “Human” in the Age of Disposable People: the Ambiguous Import of Kinship and Education in Blind Shaft’, from Sentimental Fabulations, by Rey Chow, reprinted in Chapter 4 by permission of Columbia University Press. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to reproduce copyright material. If any proper acknowledgement has not been made, we would invite copyright holders to inform us of the oversight.

vii Begüm Özden Firat, Sarah De Mul and Sonja Van Wichelen

Contributors

Sara Ahmed is Professor of Race and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Her publications include: Differences that Matter (1998); Strange Encounters (2000); The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004) and Queer Phenomenology (2006). She is currently writing a book on happiness, as well as a collection of essays on racism, diversity and language. Mieke Bal, a cultural theorist and critic, is Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences Professor (KNAW). She is based at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA), University of Amsterdam. Her areas of interest range from Biblical and Classical antiquity to seventeenth century and contemporary art and modern literature, feminism and migratory culture. Her many books include A Mieke Bal Reader (2006), Travelling Concepts in the Humanities (2002) and Narratology (3d edition in press). Mieke Bal is also a video-artist, her experimental documentaries on migration include A Thousand and One Days; Colony and the installation Nothing Is Missing. Her work is exhibited internationally. Occasionally she acts as an independent curator. Elleke Boehmer is best known for her research in international writing and postcolonial theory, and is the author of the world best-seller Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors (1995, 2005), the monographs Empire, the National and the Postcolonial, 1890–1920 (2002) and Stories of Women (2005), and of the acclaimed edition of Robert Baden-Powell’s Scouting for Boys (2004). Elleke Boehmer is the Professor of World Literature in English at the University of Oxford. Her study of Nelson Mandela appears in 2008, concurrently with the novella Nile Baby, to coincide with his ninetieth birthday in July. She has published three other novels, and many short stories. Timothy Brennan is professor at the Departments of English and Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. His most recent books are Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of Left and Right (Columbia, 2006) and Secular Devotion: Afro-Latin Music and Imperial Jazz (Verso, 2008). Rey Chow is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Brown University, where she teaches in the Department of Comparative viii Begüm Özden Firat, Sarah De Mul and Sonja Van Wichelen

Contributors ix

Literature and in the Department of Modern Culture and Media. Chow has authored six books and more than 70 articles and has edited two essay collections. Her book Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema (Columbia University Press, 1995) earned the James Russell Lowell Prize from the Modern Language Association, and her English-language publications have been widely excerpted and anthologized and/or translated. Octavi Comeron is an artist and researcher born in Barcelona. He is a teacher at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Barcelona and the author of the essay book Arte y postfordismo. Notas desde la Fábrica Transparente (2007). His artistic work has been internationally exhibited since the 1990s, receiving several grants and awards. Begüm Özden Fırat is an assistant professor at the Department of Sociology at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University in Istanbul, Turkey. Her areas of research include culture(s) of migration, cultural activism, radical arts and politics. She is currently coediting an anthology entitled Theorizing Cultural Activism: Challenges, Dilemmas, and Potentialities. Sarah De Mul is a Postdoctoral Fellow of the Research Foundation Flanders at the Department of Literary Theory at the University of Leuven, Belgium. She has taught and published on literature in Dutch and English with a particular emphasis on postmodernity and postcoloniality in relation to gender and ethnic identity and memory. Fiona Probyn-Rapsey is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. The Author gratefully acknowledges the support of the Discovery Research Scheme (Australian Research Council) and the Research and Development Fund (University of Sydney). Andrea Teti is a Lecturer at the Department of International Relations at the University of Aberdeen. His research interests focus on postpositivist political theory and Middle East politics. His publications include work on Egyptian domestic and foreign policy, disciplinary relations between Social Sciences and Area Studies, the politics of Islam, and democratization in the Middle East. Sonja van Wichelen is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Cultural Sociology, Yale University. Her publications include work on gender, religion, and politics, with a particular interest in Southeast Asia. She is currently working on the topic of ‘transnational adoption’ and is preparing a book together with Marc de Leeuw provisionally entitled Transformations of Dutchness.




1 Introduction: Commitment and Complicity Begüm Özden Fırat, Sarah De Mul, and Sonja van Wichelen

In this era dominated by the War on Terror, the concept of commitment and its corollary appeal to ‘speak up’ against threats of global violence have reemerged in various public settings. On the August 3, 2006, for instance, a letter was published in The Guardian, entitled ‘War Crimes and Lebanon’ which was signed by a number of distinguished intellectuals.1 While the ‘international community stood and watched’, as the petition read, the ‘state terror inflicted on Lebanon is being repeated in the Gaza ghetto’. The public intellectuals accused the governments of Israel, the United States, and the United Kingdom of committing war crimes in Lebanon and Palestine, and offered their solidarity to those who mounted a resistance against it and support to the victims. They declared: ‘For our part, we will use all the means at our disposal to expose the complicity of our governments in these crimes.’ Declarations of this kind bear reference to a notion of the committed intellectual as we have conventionally come to know it since Emile Zola’s letter ‘J’accuse’ (1898). Since then, commitment as involvement, as responsibility, or engagement has evolved into a colloquial concept which helped to define and position the public intellectual. It contributed to making visible a critical stance, aimed at, and leading at certain moments to, social change and more egalitarian relations. Hence, within this traditional configuration – later also represented by prominent figures such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Jürgen Habermas, and Noam Chomsky – the figure of the committed intellectual was anticipated to fight for truth, justice, freedom, and progress. Writing and speaking within the public sphere, the critical intellectual could denounce oppression and injustice by analyzing, exposing, and acting upon social misconducts. However, as this era has also illustrated, many notions which were previously deployed by mostly leftist intellectuals, have also been 1 Begüm Özden Firat, Sarah De Mul and Sonja Van Wichelen

2

Commitment and Complicity

mobilized by conservative and neoliberal forces. While ‘freedom’, ‘equality’, and ‘humanity’ have often been central concepts to committed politics and scholarship, these very same concepts have also been deployed globally in legitimizing contemporary wars.2 An exemplary case, for instance, was the feminist commitment in Laura Bush’s appeal to ‘free’ and ‘emancipate’ Afghan women during the US invasion of Afghanistan. By deploying feminism and women’s rights, the American first lady not only succeeded in accumulating support and legitimation for the War on Terror, she also contributed to redefining and appropriating feminist commitments.3 Since liberal objectives, formerly defined by progressive intellectuals and politicians, can now be deployed in conservative and neoliberal contexts, questions arise about the nature of commitment itself. More than anything, these instances invite us to reflect on the idea of commitment in terms of complicity. How can we distinguish different forms and norms of commitment? And to what extent are intellectuals there to safeguard progressive politics? What to do when commitment becomes a desirable fetish or a good in itself, when commitment becomes, so to speak, ‘commitmentkitsch’? This book ambitiously aims to open up a new realm where such pertinent questions can be discussed. It emerged out of an urgency to rethink the operation of commitment and complicity at a time when discursive politics are blurring and distorting not only social realities but also influential scholarship. The necessity of such an enterprise then, arises from an anxiety about our contemporary situation in which forms or methods of commitment – for example, environmentalism, feminism, antiracism – have been reappropriated and redefined by neoliberal and neoconservative forces. Today, more than ever, it seems urgent to reformulate commitment, so as to seek the ways in which it can be preserved as a critical practice and uncover instances in which commitment fails to operate, only to become an ethical rhetoric that serves the reconfirmation of the status quo. Such an inquiry requires raising ‘embarrassing questions’ about intellectual endeavor in our times (Said 1994: 9). For instance, the editors of this volume, working in the discipline of feminist and postcolonial theory, feel particularly committed to studying marginalized social and cultural groups, such as women or non-Western subjects. At the same time, however, we must recognize that our work is also firmly embedded within the European university system which financially enables us to voice our cultural critique. As a ‘commitment’ product to be marketed and consumed, the book Commitment and Complicity similarly acknowledges its complicity with a predominantly Western academic


Introduction 3

book business.4 Concurrently, this volume points to the necessity of a more carefully grounded understanding of the often complicit mechanisms involved in practices or discourses of commitment. Departing from diverse theoretical standpoints and historical contexts, the assembled chapters rethink the concept of commitment and its corollary complicity within the narrower realm of cultural theory and practice. By doing so, this book aims to articulate how the twin concepts – which so far have been taken as mutually exclusive – crystallize and manifest themselves at the intersections of politics, knowledge, and cultural production, and how they travel through space and time, institutions, and methods of analysis.

The trouble with being a committed intellectual Since its emergence at the turn of the twentieth century, the figure of the intellectual has been variously described, defended and challenged by many interlocutors. Concurrently, the intellectual’s commitment has been uncovered as a divided and duplicitous notion, one which is riven by contradictions lying at the heart of the intellectual project. It is not our purpose here to interrogate, or even fully enter, that debate. Instead, we roughly sketch a number of theorizations about the committed intellectual in order to finally move toward an understanding of a notion of commitment that is disentangled from the figure of the intellectual. This is to say that our aim is to reformulate the notion of commitment in a manner which is less closely, or rather, altogether differently related to subjectivity than how it has been conventionally perceived. ‘I shall tell the truth ... It is my duty to speak up, I do not want to be accomplice.’ Thus Emile Zola wrote in his open letter ‘J’accuse’ during the Dreyfus affair in 1898. The instance is conventionally accepted to signify the emergence of l’intellectuel engagé or the modern intellectual in public life. It implied a figure who publicly speaks out against state oppression, one who does so ‘in the name of humanity’. Since then, the engaged intellectual is considered to be a figure who descends from the ivory tower and transgresses his ‘more abstract and distantiated social role’ (as advocated by Julien Benda in La Trahison des Clercs (1927)) in order to express explicit political involvement in the public arena without abandoning his critical stance (Schalk 2005: 41). In the wake of the Dreyfus affair, the role of the intellectual was perhaps most explicitly and influentially connected to a notion of commitment by Jean-Paul Sartre in his idea of l’engagement. In ‘A Plea for


4


Intellectuals’, Sartre put forward the main tenets of a Marxist-oriented model of the engaged intellectual against the background of the Algerian war. Following Sartre, the intellectual is a ‘guardian of fundamental ends’, the custodian of emancipation, universalization, and ultimately, of the humanization of mankind. This role could be taken up only by criticizing the dominant bourgeois ideology of which the intellectual himself is part (1974: 266). In order to do so, the intellectual should set free from his class position and make alliances with, and speak for, the underprivileged classes. Like Zola, Sartre can be considered a proponent of a prototype of the ‘universal’ intellectual, a master of reason and insight, capable of knowing what justice and truth entails and defending it in the name of marginalized social groups. However, some of the main precepts of the classical figure of the intellectual, such as being the bearer of universal truth and the representative of the underprivileged, have been under severe attack since the post–Cold War period. Concurrently, the rise, demise and ongoing legacy of the figure of the committed intellectual have been much-debated since the last decades. Michel Foucault’s model of the ‘specific intellectual’ is a meticulous critique of the universalist assumptions underlying the classical conceptualization of the intellectual performed and promoted by Sartre. According to Foucault, the intellectual does not seek to represent marginal(ized) groups, as for him, ‘the masses no longer need him [the intellectual] to gain knowledge: they know perfectly well, without illusion; they know far better then he’ and ‘can speak for themselves’ (1977: 207). Avoiding the authoritative position of spokesman of universal knowledge, the intellectual works to take power within ‘specific sectors, at the precise points where their own conditions of life and work situate them’ (126). Thus the specific intellectual is ‘a savant or expert’ with a ‘direct and localized relation’ to knowledge (Foucault 1980: 128). S/he is specifically situated in respect to his class position, his conditions of life and work, and the specificity of the politics of truth in our societies. It is with regard to the politics of truth in society, that the intellectual’s position can take on a ‘general significance and that his local, specific struggle can have effects and implications which are not simply professional or sectoral’ (Foucault 1980: 132). Intellectual work, therefore, is ‘an activity conducted alongside those who struggle for power, rather than consisting simply of their illumination from a safe distance’. The intellectual should not propose a more adequate or true representation of the world, but rather, retrace how certain representations of the world have come to be assigned with a status of truthfulness (133).


Introduction 5

Foucault’s model has also been variously modified and criticized. For instance Edward Said, as opposed to Foucault, insists on the role of the intellectual as someone who ‘speaks truth to the power’ in her/his pursuit of freedom, truth and justice. In order to do so, Said’s intellectual is ‘always an outsider, living in self-imposed exile and on the margins of society,’ (Jennings and Kemp-Welch 1997: 1–2). To Said, The public intellectual ‘is an individual endowed with a faculty for representing, embodying, articulating a message, a view, an attitude, philosophy or opinion to, as well as for, a public ... whose raison d’etre is to represent all those peoples and issues that are routinely forgotten or swept under the rug’ (Said 1994: 9). Other postcolonial critics, such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, have criticized Foucault’s conceptualization of the intellectual from the point of its inherent Eurocentricism. In her acclaimed article ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ (1994) Spivak argues that Foucault’s approach implied a concealed Subject that pretends not to be geopolitically determined. Because of this disguised transparency, he ignored both ‘the epistemic violence of imperialism and international division of labor’ (84). Although touching upon third-world issues and attempting to disclose how society’s Others are constructed as other (66), Foucault systematically ignored the ‘question of ideology’ and his ‘own implication in intellectual and economic history’. While the above accounts attempted to define, criticize and reconfigure the role and sociopolitical engagements of the intellectual other ‘intellectual’ trends endorsed the figure of the intellectual as a position that cannot be sustained. In ‘The Tomb of the Intellectual’ (1993), Jean-François Lyotard argues that the grand narratives of emancipation and enlightenment, which had previously legitimated the idea of the intellectual, have undergone a process of fragmentation and decline in the postmodern world of the late twentieth century. As a result, there is no ‘universal subject-victim’ (6) with which the intellectual can identify. The notion of the intellectual can consequently no longer be sustained. Quite simply, to Lyotard, it ‘belongs to another world’ (7). In a similar vein, the French philosopher and media figure Bernard-Henri Lévy (1987) proclaimed the demise of the intellectual in postmodern times. The latter considered the end of the committed intellectual as a result of what he perceived as intellectuals’ disengagement from the public sphere and their retreat within the confines of the Ivory Tower of university buildings. Lévy’s stance exemplifies that the decline of the epistemological belief in universal ‘grand narratives’, to use Jean Francois Lyotard’s well-known phrase,


6


has challenged both the status and authority of the committed intellectual as it was perceived until then. At the same time, however, various contemporary theorists have attempted to write historical trajectories of the committed intellectual that inquire into the relevance and the possibilities of new cycles of intellectual engagement in our contemporary era. For instance, in Intellectuals and Politics in Post-War France (2001) David Drake focuses on the political involvement of French intellectuals, from Sartre and Camus to Bernard-Henri Lévy and Pierre Bourdieu, who used ‘their prestige to lend their weight to a particular political cause’ (2). Similarly, in War and the Ivory Tower (2005), historian David L. Schalk – an academic with a personal history as a young professor during the Vietnam War – retraces the modern European history of the intellectual so as to uncover its ongoing legacy and potentiality in postmodern times. Discussing the political activities of American and French Intellectuals during the Vietnam War and the Algerian Revolution, Schalk delineates three ‘stages’ – the pedagogic, the moral and counter-legal – through which intellectuals today can voice different forms of engagement (2005: 48–52). The above selective survey of the ways in which intellectual commitment has been defined and practiced by the figure of the intellectual, might help us to envision different modes and methods of intellectual commitment in our contemporary situation. As will be clear from what follows, such an inquiry, as we propose, requires two important critical moves. First, the questioning of an identitarian notion of commitment, which has so far led to a predominant focus on (white male) cornerstone figures, and second, the reconceptualization of commitment and complicity as a twin concept, the latter of which has so far been predominantly ignored in the European intellectual history of commitment.

How do you do commitment? In the history of commitment, at stake is a trend toward underscoring a singular figure of an intellectual who is defined by his political engagement. For Schalk for instance, ‘[t]here was, and perhaps remains, a symbiotic relationship between the intellectual and engagement’ (2005: 40) and in fact ‘the one may be impossible without the other’ (1997: 272). In doing so, however, commitment is promoted as an ontological category of being an intellectual. In this volume we intend to disentangle commitment from its alleged symbiotic relationship with the intellectual. Instead we argue for ways of expanding the notion to an understanding


Introduction 7

that stretches far beyond singular intellectual figures and which is much more firmly connected to the local framework and historical circumstances in which commitment is being practiced by individuals. Commitment has often been considered to imply taking up an identity position: the identity of a person who is committed to a cause. As an identitarian notion, however, commitment has often been dismissed as an undesirable form of partisanship. The intellectual’s identity of being a member of, or of being in alliance with oppressed groups, has been considered to yield a form of knowledge production, which is inherently subjective and biased. On the other hand, commitment has been celebrated as a moral stance or honorable ideal that is by definition worthwhile pursuing. Being committed is then a priori considered a virtue or quality which any self-acclaimed intellectual needs to possess. In both its positive and negative estimations however, commitment as being has prevented the notion from becoming the object of serious scrutiny. The predominant attention to the intellectual figure who is assumed to possess or proclaim committed viewpoints has resulted in the neglect of the tensions inherent to the notion of commitment itself. A tension surfaces when one asks how knowledge and methodologies produced in disciplines such as the humanities, can travel to make a difference in everyday politics. This involvement shows that conversely, as we mentioned in the beginning of this introduction, some of the constitutive conditions of various forms of commitment are premised on notions that can be deployed by hegemonic and imperializing structures. In light of such ‘hijacking’ of concepts, we envision a necessity to de-neutralize the terms we take for granted, and to define and contextualize them in order to illuminate what they do. Employing the concepts of commitment and complicity can lay bare the premises of these tensions and unpack normative positions. The strength of a committed scholarship then, lies in the scholar’s capacity to historicize and localize events, ideas, and concepts, to track down their complicities and to illuminate how they travel, adapt, translate, and transform. We thus propose to approach different conceptualizations of commitment according to the terms and discourses in which they operate. In order to bring back the notion of commitment to the realm of examination, a shift of attention is required from commitment as being to commitment as practice. In other words, we propose asking the question ‘how do you do commitment’ rather than centralizing the question ‘To what or how are you committed’. This approach seems a more productive and relevant one to address in our contemporary geopolitical condition. ‘How do you do commitment’ is an issue which prioritizes


8


issues of epistemology and methodology, rather than ontology and identity. It emphasizes that the relevance of commitment lies in the doing, rather than in being. It focuses, in other words, on how commitment is never a free-floating enterprise, but as a practice which is always already firmly localized within an institutional, political, and social constellation in which one intervenes. This surrounding in turn, informs one’s committed theory or practice. Let us take recent developments in feminist commitment as an example. Originally defined by the politics of first and second wave feminists, being ‘committed to’ the feminist cause implied a focus on the marginalization of women in the public, political, and private spheres – especially in relation to men and male power. Feminist research, therefore, was geared toward the eradication of social inequalities through the empowerment of women and the disclosure of patriarchal violence. However, as black, lesbian, and third world feminists have illuminated, mechanisms of exclusion are inherent to this normalized ‘feminist commitment’. These critics have argued that feminist commitments were defined by white, middle class interests and did not address issues such as hetero-normativity or whiteness.5 As they argued, in pursuing feminist commitments, white Western women were as much complicit in silencing black, lesbian and third world women as was the very male power block against which they reacted. As a result of black, lesbian, and third-world critiques, attachments to ‘multiple commitments’ in which different forms of marginalization and oppression were recognized to intersect, became the norm in feminist circles.6 In this manner feminists questioned and reflected upon their theories and practices as a means to make their feminist commitments more transparent. As a clear instance of this, Ien Ang (1995) published an essay with the suggestive title ‘I am a Feminist but ...’. At the same time, however, self-reflexivity has sometimes uncritically been embraced as a fruitful methodology to conduct committed scholarship. In his acclaimed article ‘Cosmo-Theory’ (2001), Timothy Brennan criticizes the way in which self-reflexivity is used in contemporary Western cultural theory as a means to reproduce Western hegemonic power structures in which the theorist – also the self-reflexive one – is embedded and enabled by. As Brennan says, it is nowadays bon ton in cultural theory to ‘decenter oneself’ by openly avoiding ‘complicity with Enlightenment power by remaining vigilant against repressive claims of universality’ (2001: 675). However, this self-reflexive gesture remains little more than only a gesture, when this decentered position becomes a view from nowhere. Not acknowledging one’s embeddedness


Introduction 9

in the West, at the same time when one critiques its intellectual legacy, the cultural theorist ‘continue[s] to speak under the protections and privileges [of the universalizing Western state] as though one were absolved from its actions’ (676). As these two instances of self-reflexivity clearly display, to voice one’s self-reflexivity does not directly translate into a productive practice. Therefore, it is important to safeguard the concept from being instrumentalized as an unproblematic cause for celebration. Redefining commitment as a practice rather than being enables us to expand the subject of commitment from the singular to diverse social agents such as institutions, organizations, movements, disciplines, and cultural products. Our point of departure is that first, intellectual work is embedded in certain institutional structures and disciplinary settings, which simultaneously enable and constrain its conditions. The university system, the global art world, or the literary field direct and facilitate the ways in which knowledge is produced and circulated. Second, the outcome of intellectual endeavor does not remain within the confines of the ‘ivory tower’. It has far-reaching repercussions in different realms, reverberating a tension between knowledge, world politics, and everyday life.

The specter of complicity The chapters collected in this volume dissect commitment so as to save the notion from becoming a politically and theoretically unproductive, self-explanatory good in itself. In line with the critiques of the modern intellectual as outlined above, this volume proposes to underline instances when commitment is accompanied by its corollary, namely complicity. Although complicity as a separate concept has been theorized in several studies, this analytically hooking together of commitment and complicity has scarcely been explored before. One of the few studies that links complicity with a notion of commitment is the work of Mark Sanders, who in Complicities: The Intellectual and Apartheid, focuses on the notion of complicity in the South African context and how this relates to a nation’s sense of collective responsibility.7 Sanders argues that a commitment to speak out (or in his terms, responsibility to speak out) is coupled with a determination or aspiration not to be an accomplice: ‘Responsibility unites with a will not to be complicit in an injustice. It thus emerges from a sense of complicity, the actively assumed complicity of one whose silence could allow their crime to go undiscovered’ (5). The acknowledgement of the latter (responsibility-in-complicity),


10


closely related with human responsibility and advocacy, is for Sanders, the minimal condition of any sort of committed practice. In this respect, intellectual commitment or responsibility (he uses the terms interchangeably) can only emerge when the intellectual recognizes her/his complicity and can ‘point to the limits of universalization inherent in, and risked by, particular commitments’ (15). In contrast to commitment, the notion of complicity has often had a negative meaning. It was either used as a purely legal notion of accusation, or used to stress the accommodating roles of knowledge, intellectuals, and cultural production in relation to violent regimes or other dominant power structures. Along with Sanders, this volume contends that when complicity is silenced, especially when preparing for an act of commitment, injustice remains facilitated and perpetuated. Rather than understanding complicity as a paralyzing condition, the concept is recognized as an enabling force for commitment. Yet at the same time, this volume is composed by its motivation to scrutinize complicity in everyday settings. As with previous studies on complicity, Sanders’ analysis of complicity in the context of South African apartheid regime is an indicative example of the phenomenon that utterances of complicity have often erupted after periods of catastrophe, such as the Holocaust, events of genocide, apartheid, or other forms of (state) violence. This volume, however, distances itself from such apocalyptic approaches in order to scrutinize the notion more carefully in more mundane circumstances. In such a way we hope to contribute to a new understanding of how commitment and complicity works in contemporary cultural events and practices. Following Spivak, we would like to propose a more general approach in which complicity can be seen as a productive force. She suggests for the postcolonial scholar a ‘productive acknowledgement of complicity’ (1999: xii). Recognition of complicity (with the capitalist West, for example) appears as a necessary basis from which to critique. She writes, ‘this impossible “no” to a structure, which one critiques, yet inhabits intimately, is the deconstructive philosophical position, and the everyday here and now named “postcoloniality” is a case of it’ (172). It seems that when we want to involve ourselves in some form of politics, advocacy or representation – albeit ‘symbolic’, ‘discursive’, or ‘real’ – complicity cannot be avoided. As such, politics is a site at which complicities are accumulated from a sense of commitment. This acknowledgement of one’s complicity with the structures that one inhabits can be considered the condition of intellectual commitment. Moreover, it is this acknowledgement of complicity which forms the necessary prerequisite


Introduction 11

for action and politics (Keenan 2002: 193–4). In such a way, intellectual engagement goes hand in hand with complicity and it is only by coming to terms with the latter that committed endeavors in its different manifestations can be productive. A more general productive understanding of complicity allows us to talk about ‘mundane’ forms of complicity, thereby establishing the inevitability of complicity as an inherent component of being human. The chapters in this volume map out such instances, instances in which explicitly articulated commitments collide into its corollary complicity. Hence, complicity is understood as a necessary flipside of a committed practice. This unintentional correlation between commitment and the way it can collapse into complicity asserts a new form of engagement not as a moral ideal, but rather as a suspiciously complicit practice. The specter of complicity is what the contributors in Commitment and Complicity have embraced in their analyses of commitment. Although diverse in their contexts and disciplinary theorizations, they all challenge previous understandings of commitment and attempt to confront their material with the usage of complicity – thereby bringing together their mutually enabling conditions. Each chapter engages with approaches to pressing issues which may tentatively be described as theoretical perspectives toward commitment and complicity.

Structure of the volume Having outlined usages and theoretical perspectives on the concepts of commitment and complicity, the collected chapters in this bookvolume aim to further complicate and problematize our understanding of the twin concepts in cultural theory and cultural practice. The book is structured in three parts with each part focusing on a distinct issue. Because these parts are overlapping and mutually constitutive they should be approached as analytical rather than exclusive categories. While the first part focuses on the question how to rethink the notion of commitment in the realm of public, institutional, and cultural domains, the second part engages with commitment and complicity in the production of academic knowledge. The final part of the book is devoted to a number of chapters that engage with the overall project of ‘putting complicity to work’ in their intellectual endeavors. Part I: Rethinking commitment Rethinking Commitment is arranged along the question of how we can find new ways of thinking about the practice of commitment. The three


12


chapters by Sara Ahmed, Sonja Van Wichelen, and Rey Chow evaluate how commitment has been deployed with respect to racism, feminism, and humanism. Although located in different disciplines, namely critical race studies, feminist studies, and film studies, the three accounts argue similarly that the object of commitment should not be taken for granted. In ‘Commitment as a NonPerformative’, Ahmed looks at how the term ‘commitment’ is adopted in official documents distributed at a number of British and Australian universities. She examines how institutional documents on race equality policies make claims about the institution or point toward the institution’s future actions. Ahmed suggests that institutional speech acts that commit the university to race equality are in fact ‘nonperformatives’: they ‘work’ precisely by not bringing about the effects that they name. She proposes that a discrepancy between such nonperformative texts and social action requires a new approach, which she calls ‘an ethnography of texts’. This approach considers texts not as ‘finished’ forms of action, as what they ‘do’ depends on how they are ‘taken up’, for instance by practitioners who use these documents to support their individual actions. Ahmed’s approach allows us to see that commitment is not situated in the official documents stating commitment, but in the practitioners’ acknowledgement of the complicity of these documents as a starting point for their commitments to diversity. Whereas Ahmed argues that an institutional commitment to antiracism does not necessarily ‘do’ the work of antiracism, Van Wichelen’s chapter scrutinizes feminist commitments in asking the ‘woman question’ in contemporary academic work on religion, especially Islam, and argues that this commitment can turn into a civilizational discourse when omitting to carefully trace the premises on which the ‘woman question’ is raised. In her chapter entitled ‘Commitment or Commitment-Kitsch? Rethinking the “Woman Question”, Agency, and Feminist Politics’, she observes the multiple ways in which in contemporary culture and politics, feminism is claimed or framed in such a manner that it contributes to violent representational frameworks that are grounded in the persistent dichotomy of East and West. She illustrates how some of these ‘feminist projects’ are folded into an act of advocacy in which the feminist theorist is ‘speaking for’ other women. This speaking on behalf of the other is premised on an ‘other-intendedness’, which makes it possible to simultaneously ‘portray and betray’ (Sanders 2002: 207). Instead of endorsing acts that are principled on recognizability, the crux for feminist politics lies not in including others so that the other becomes one of us, nor, is it to speak for the other as if we


Introduction 13

are able to know, recognize, or embody others’ well-being. Rather, Van Wichelen’s chapter suggests that the urgent call lies in the examination of how an idea of commitment to the feminist project is complicit and responsible for the convenient application of liberal and progressive feminist understandings of agency onto unrecognizable bodies. In ‘ “Human” in the Age of Disposable People: the Ambiguous Import of Kinship and Education in Blind Shaft’, Chow gives an in-depth analysis of the film Blind Shaft (2003) and turns to interrogate the commitment to humanism by asking the question whether humanism – as a concern for human beings finding themselves and becoming free in their humanity – still remains valid for critical thinking and practice when we are faced with the tragedies of ‘disposable’ people. Similar to Ahmed’s and Van Wichelen’s examination of commitment to antiracism and feminism, Chow’s analysis of the concept of ‘human’ leads to a blurring of its positive sign and to a new understanding of commitment. The film Blind Shaft was promoted as a Chinese story about the predicament of migrant workers dealing with the bankruptcy of Chinese socialism when China moves forward in capitalist global networks of production and exchange. However, Chow warns us to resist the ‘Western’ temptation of readily deciphering the message of a film such as Blind Shaft as, simply, an other-culture-speak, with the kind of neoliberal, egalitarian (but in fact discriminatory) undertone that comes across all too often in influential publications. Against this potential ready-made reading, Chow proposes a critical analysis of the film and argues that the moral portrayal of kinship relations in the film as the foundational import of conscience corresponds to a particular ‘Chinese sentimentalism’. This local portrayal is not so different than the ‘us’ and ‘them’ rhetoric prevalent on a global scale. She argues that such commitment to kinship bonds, so deeply rooted in Chinese societies, is precisely complicit with some of the worst xenophobic – indeed murderous – practices in the contemporary world. While Chow questions what kind of ‘conscience’ would be at stake when kindness is literally – and exclusively – directed at advancing one’s own kin(d), her ‘engaged’ analysis of the film Blind Shaft illustrates the inherent link between the operation of commitment and complicity in the performance of cultural artifacts. Part II: Commitment and complicity in the production of knowledge Knowledge, or knowledge production, has appeared as a common theme throughout many of the chapters and is at the heart of the


14


problem when attempting to reconcile commitment with complicity in academic scholarship. Hence, in this part, we focus more in-depth on the implications of considering the complicit nature of practices and theorizations of commitment, when engaging in the ‘sticky’ endeavor of producing knowledge. Timothy Brennan, Andrea Teti, and Mieke Bal demonstrate this ‘stickiness’ through different lenses, namely intellectual work in the humanities, knowledge production in Area Studies, and the quest for knowing in aesthetic theory. Drawn together, all three chapters deal with the ways in which constitutive forces of knowing are influenced by mundane factors in politics and economics that could hamper knowledge to become a transformative force in society. In ‘Empty Versatility and the Art of the Circular Reading’, Brennan focuses on the notion of labor in respect to contemporary intellectual work and explores the ways it has been invested in the form of a theory of the latest stage of capitalism. He criticizes the way in which the economic category of labor has recently entered the humanities in the form of what Brennan calls an ‘econo-poiesis’. With the term, Brennan refers to those cultural theories which turn economic categories into aesthetic artifacts, and which repeat motifs and rhetoric of the ruling media and policy circles who talk about labor in terms of ‘adaptability’, ‘creativity’, or ‘complexity’. Brennan contends that theory-intellectuals themselves often remain utterly silent about their economic role, even if their economic complicity becomes evident in their valorization of aesthetics of complexity, which characterizes theory as a labor-saving operation. Subsequently Brennan criticizes that currently valorized forms of theory, for instance by Jacques Derrida, operate on the basis of a set of economically suspect and hidden rules that are seldom openly acknowledged in Anglo-American cultural theory. In Teti’s chapter ‘The Middle East and the Disciplinary (Re)Production of Knowledge’, a similar form of complicity is apparent in the epistemic colonization of Middle East Studies by International Relations. Scrutinizing the disciplinary formation of Middle Eastern studies and hierarchical divisions between disciplines and area studies, Teti argues that at stake are discursive mechanisms that distort a commitment to knowledge about the Middle East. He also contends that the division into Disciplines and Area Studies entails a ‘double ventriloquism’, a double silencing of alterity: first through ‘Area Studies’ which interpret the truth of the Other, and then through Disciplines, which ‘generalize’ that knowledge by again silencing alterity. This ‘confessional’ relation sets up the study of the Middle East as a carceral space, again doubly, because ‘standards of (Western) scholarship’ are being used to interpret


Introduction 15

the Other and because the epistemic standards of social science are being used to ‘police’ Area Studies itself. The commitment to interpreting or knowing the Other is also central to Bal’s chapter ‘The Commitment to Face’, which focuses on the performance of the cultural artifact in understanding the contemporary culture of migration. Regardless of streamlined modes of knowledge production and their instruments, for Bal, her first commitment is to knowing in order to contribute to transform the social environment into a place of understanding. This commitment implies a weariness of the way our conventions and instruments of work are complicit with ideologies that hamper such knowledge. According to Bal, art practice could bear such a self-reflective critical posture that necessarily accompanies the commitment. In this respect, Bal’s ongoing video work Nothing is Missing can be considered not only a practice of research and analysis but also an imaginative way of engaging social issues. The videos consist of ‘moving portraits’ of migrants’ mothers who were left behind. These mothers speak to people close to them, intimates, but their relationship has been interrupted due to the migration of their child. The experience of the viewer in front of these videos brings forth an image-concept what Bal calls ‘interfacing’ that unravels in three interconnected levels: Intercultural relationality, inter-temporal thinking, interdisciplinary thought. It is through these levels Nothing is Missing engages with its viewer and performs its commitment to face. Part III: Putting complicity to work Finally, in the chapters collected in the third part Putting Complicity to Work, commitment is located in the scholarly practice of adopting complicity as an analytical tool in the study of highly politically charged contexts and phenomena, namely terrorism, Australian ‘whiteness’, the restructuration of the cultural field, and so-called contemporary Islamic art. By doing so, the chapters in this section offer the readers new ways of approaching complicity and the manner in which they could be understood or transformed to serve forms of commitment. Elleke Boehmer’s chapter challenges ‘terrorism’ as a self-explanatory term which at the present time has often been conveniently conflated with political Islam. She seeks an understanding of what she calls the ‘incorporated’ nature of terror, implying that Western hegemony as well as postcolonial resistance is complicit in continuing the endemic violence of the state. Hence, ‘The Necessity of “Terror” ’ discusses the operation of commitment and complicity in representations of terror as it functions under the colonial regime, seeking to historicize and


16


problematize terror. Boehmer argues that terror was, even had to be, the site for the critique of the modern colonial state and empire by postcolonial intellectuals such as Franz Fanon, Aurobindo Gosh, and Nelson Mandela. Since they have been branded as terrorists or terrorist sympathizers, Boehmer assesses to what extent the subject and motivation of violence is central to the revolutionary thought of these three intellectual thinkers. According to her analysis, the role of terror in postcolonial resistance theory is premised on the awareness that, long before terror became today the West’s primary enemy, the techniques and justifications of violence played an important part both in exercising colonial sovereignty and in theorizing the postcolonial condition. Due to what Boehmer calls the ‘incorporated’ nature of terror in the colonial and the contemporary state, both Western hegemony and postcolonial resistance are complicit in the continuation of the endemic violence of the state. Terrorism, therefore, covers forms of both commitment as well as complicity. Anticolonial resistance cannot be otherwise than violent because the colonial system state is violent. Within the framework of colonial resistance, Boehmer explains, violence emerges for subjects as a condition for self-making, rather than a means of (self) destruction. For intellectuals such as Fanon, Gosh, and Mandela, the commitment to political autonomy, resides not so much in the resistance to colonial techniques and the rationale of terror, but in the appropriation of similar logics in order to make possible the constitution of the postcolonial subject. With this, Boehmer not only complicates our understanding of terror as a mode of state and imperial power, but also our understandings of terror as a necropolitics, as a weapon of antistate insurgency. From the complexities of commitment and complicity in colonial history and our understanding of terror, Fiona Probyn-Rapsey’s chapter moves to commitment and complicity in relation to collective memory of Australian history. In ‘Putting Complicity to Work for Accountability: An Australian Case-Study’, Probyn-Rapsey looks at the ways in which ‘whiteness’ is involved in the cultural history of white fathers of Aboriginal children removed as part of the Stolen Generations, ProbynRapsey locates complicity as an important strategy for outlining historical responsibility and accountability. Her aims are twofold. On the one side she engages with the complicity of ‘whiteness’ surrounding the figure of the father, on the other, she is concerned with complicities of Australia as a nation. Her chapter allows us to ‘unsettle’ white privilege by putting self-reflexivity and an acknowledgement of complicity-inwhiteness to work. Corresponding to what has been mentioned in the preceding sections on the colloquial use of complicity, Probyn-Rapsey


Introduction 17

underscores the fact that complicity has always been regarded as something negative. Complicity is seen as that which should be avoided because it prevents from doing ‘good’ work. However, Probyn-Rapsey argues, an awareness of complicity can also enhance ideas of responsibility and accountability. She advocates a more thorough conceptual analysis of complicity in order to be able to turn it into a methodological tool for cultural critique and for responsibility. Whereas both of these first chapters deal with events and practices that have an explicit component of complicity – terror and whiteness – they both succeed in transforming the initial negative sign into a more transformative and productive force. Similar to the first two chapters, both Octavi Comeron and Begüm Özden Fırat attempt to confront their complicit realms, in this case globalization and the art world, with possibilities of turning these contexts into modes of inquiry. Both chapters assess how cultural products are in various ways entangled with material, institutional, and symbolic structures which help determine their meaning. Comeron questions the possibility of autonomous committed art under current global conditions, since, as he argues, at stake is the collapse of the border between cultural practices and economic and institutional interests in postindustrial societies, which transforms the layers of labor in cultural production. Comeron considers Volkswagen’s ‘Transparent Factory’ a charming image visualizing the blurring of the boundaries between culture and economy; work and spectacle; commercial strategies and culture; and production and representation. He argues that cultural production, and more specifically art practice, cannot stay aloof from symbolic effects of these transformations carried out by the operation of the Transparent Factory. Within the age of the Transparent Factory, Comeron contends, modernist understanding of autonomy of art based on clear boundaries, which brought the potential of radical and committed art, has become obsolete. The lack of distance between cultural/artistic practice and economic and institutional interests simultaneously transforms the layers of labor in cultural production challenging the notion of artistic activity as an exemption in relation with labor. Instead, the work of art should now be understood as an ‘empty space of labor’ that any decision about the form of labor takes place around it is an inherent part of the work and it gains its meaning from the relations it draws within the productive system. In ‘The Politics of “Contemporary Islamic Art” ’, Fırat expands on Comeron’s understanding of the artistic practice as an empty space of labor and discusses how such ‘emptiness’ is filled in respect to


18


non-Western art production in the global art world. Fırat focuses on the exhibitionary practices and promotion strategies of the recent artistic phenomenon of ‘contemporary Islamic art’ and examines the ways in which they are complicit with neo-orientalism. Within such context, Fırat analyzes the promotion of the seemingly committed art piece of Iranian artist Ghazel titled ‘Me Series’ by cultural critics who have become part of the prominent actors in the sphere of cultural production. Resonating with Comeron’s argument that the several layers of labor are co-responsible for the meaning of the cultural artifact, Fırat discusses the invisible link between commitment and complicity involved in cultural criticism. She argues that uncritical ‘concept dropping’ (such as, nomadism, hybridity, in-betweenness) prevalent among cultural critics could be complicit with sustaining hegemonic discourses instead of offering us new ways of seeing and criticizing the present.

Notes 1. Signers were Tariq Ali, Noam Chomsky, Eduardo Galeano, Howard Zinn, Ken Loach, John Berger and Arundhati Roy. The letter can be found at http:// www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/aug/03/syria.israelandthepalestinians 2. See also a critique of these reappropriations in the dictionary Shock and Awe: War on Words (2006), in which keywords such as ‘terrorism’, civilization’, ‘peace’, or ‘security’, are re-traced within their political trajectories of world-making words, projects, and images. Another important project is the Dictionary of War, which emerged out of a series of meetings collaboratıvely organized by multitude e.v and unfriendly takeover (http://dictionaryofwar.org/). 3. See Abu-Lughod (2002) for an excellent account of this legitimation. 4. Moreover, our academic publications circulate within a business in which our intellectual commitments become book products, marketed predominantly for largely Western consumption and profit making. On an individual level, then, we struggle to match our political views with a (predominantly Western, middleclass) context that is in many ways antithetical to them – a context that manufactures inequality, even as it claims to demystify it, and that is reliant on, even as it questions, unequal power relations dominating the geopolitical constellation today. In other words, despite its commitment to the eradication of unequal power relations, its complicity suggests that our academic work cannot be absolved from producing its own mechanisms of inequality. 5. For black feminist critique, see for instance hooks (1981), for critique of hetero-normativity see Butler (1990), and for a postcolonial feminist critique see Mohanty (1988). 6. See Crenshaw (1991). 7. Another recent work on complicity is R. J. Golsan’s French Writers and the Politics of Complicity: Crises of Democracy in the 1940s and 1990s (2006). Golsan focuses on the complicity of French writers and intellectuals in reactionary antidemocratic and racist politics in the 1940s and 1990s.


Introduction 19

References Abu-Lughod, L. (2002) ‘Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others’, The American Anthropologist, 104(3): pp. 783–90. Ang, I. (1995) ‘I’m a Feminist but ... “Other” Women and Postnational Feminisms’, in B. Caine and R. Pringle (eds.) Transitions: New Australian Feminism, St. Leonard’s, Australia: Allen & Unwin, pp. 57–73. Brennan, T. (2001) ‘Cosmo-Theory’, The South Atlantic Quarterly, 100(3): pp. 659–91. Butler, J. (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, London and New York: Routledge. Crenshaw, K. (1991) ‘Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color’, Stanford Law Review, 43(6): pp. 1241–99. Drake, D. (2001) Intellectuals and Politics in Post-War France, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Foucault, M. (1977) ‘Intellectuals & Power: A Conversation between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze’, in D. F. Bouchard (ed.) Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, pp. 205–17. Foucault, M. (1980) ‘Truth and Power’, in C. Gordon (ed.) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, C. Gordon (trans.), Brighton: The Harvester Press, pp. 109–33. Golsan, R.J. (2006) French Writers and the Politics of Complicity: Crises of Democracy in the 1940s and 1990s, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. hooks, b. (1981) Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, Boston, MA: Southend Press. Jennings, J. and Kemp-Welch, A. (1997) ‘The Century of the Intellectual: From the Dreyfus Affair to Salman Rushdie’, in J. Jennings and A. Kemp-Welch (eds.) Intellectuals in Politics: From the Dreyfus Affair to the Rushdie Affair, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 1–24. Keenan, T. (2002) ‘The Push and Pull of Rights and Responsibilities’, Interventions: The International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 4(2): pp. 191–7. Lyotard, J-F. (1993) ‘The Tomb of the Intellectual’, Political Writings, B. Readings and K.P. Geiman (trans.), London: U.C.L. Press. Mohanty, C.T. (1988) ‘Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses’, Feminist Review, 30, pp. 61–88. Said, E. (1994) Representations of the Intellectual, London: Vintage. Sanders, M. (2002) Complicities: The Intellectual and Apartheid, New York and London: Duke University Press. Sartre, J-P. (1974) ‘A Plea for Intellectuals’, between Existentialism and Marxism, J. Matthews (trans.), London: New Left Books. Schalk, D.L. (1997) ‘Are Intellectuals a Dying Species? War and the Ivory Tower in the Post-Modern Age’, in J. Jennings and A. Kemp-Welch (eds.) Intellectuals in Politics: From the Dreyfus Affair to Salman Rushdie, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 271–85. Schalk, D.L. (2005) War and the Ivory Tower: Algeria and Vietnam, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.


20


Spivak, G.C. (1994) ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in P. Williams and L. Chrisman (eds.) Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory a Reader, New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 66–111. Spivak, G.C. (1999) A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present, London and New York: Routledge. Zola, E. (1898) ‘J’Accuse’, L’Aurore, January 13.


Part I Rethinking Commitment




2 Commitment as a Nonperformative Sara Ahmed

In this chapter, I reflect upon institutional speech acts: those that make claims ‘about’ an institution, or ‘on behalf’ of an institution. Such speech acts involve acts of naming: the institution is named, and in being ‘given’ a name, the institution is also ‘given’ attributes, qualities, and even a character. By speech acts I include not just spoken words, but writing, as well as visual images, all the materials that give an institution an interiority, as if it has a face, as well as feelings, thoughts or judgments. They might say: ‘the university regrets’, or just simply ‘we regret’. More specifically, in this chapter, I examine documents that are authorized by institutions (such as race equality policies, which are often signed by say the VC on behalf of an institution), make claims about the institution (for instance, by describing the institution as having certain qualities, such as being diverse), or point toward future action (by committing an institution to a course of action, such as diversity or equality, which in turn might involve the commitment of resources). I will argue such speech acts do not do what they say: they do not, as it were, commit a person, organization or state to an action. My argument is simple: they are nonperformatives. They are speech acts that read as if they are performatives, and this ‘reading’ generates its own effects. For Austin, a performative refers to a particular class of speech. An utterance is performative when it does what it says: ‘the issuing of the utterance is the performing of an action’ (1975: 6). For Austin, conditions have to be in place to allow such words to act, or in his terms, to allow performatives to be ‘happy’. The action of the performative is not in the words, or if it is ‘in’ the words, it is ‘in’ them only in so far as the words are ‘in the right place’ to secure the effect that they name (that they are uttered by the right person, to the right people and in a way that takes the right form). Given this, as Judith Butler argues, 23 Begüm Özden Firat, Sarah De Mul and Sonja Van Wichelen

24


‘performativity must be understood not as a singular or deliberate “act”, but, rather as the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names’ (1993: 2, emphasis added). I want to suggest that speech acts that commit the university to equality are nonperformatives. A nonperformative is where they ‘work’ precisely by not bringing about the effects that they name. For Austin, failed performatives are unhappy: they do not act because the conditions are not in place that are required for the action to succeed (for example if the person who apologizes is insincere then the apology would be unhappy). In my model of the ‘nonperformative’, the failure of the speech act to do what it says is not a failure of intent or even circumstance, but is actually what the speech act is doing. Secondly, in this chapter, I want to suggest that the nonperformativity of institutional commitments requires a new approach to the relation between texts and social action, which I will be calling ‘an ethnog raphy of texts’. Such an approach still considers texts as actions, which ‘do things’, but suggests that ‘texts’ are not ‘finished’ as forms of action, as what they ‘do’ depends on how they are ‘taken up’. To track what texts do, we need to follow them around. If texts circulate as documents or objects within public culture, our task is to follow them, to see how they move, as well as how they get stuck. So rather than just looking at university documentation on diversity for what they say, although I do ‘do’ this, and such close readings are important and necessary, I also ask what they do, in part by talking to practitioners who use these documents to support their actions. This chapter draws on interviews with diversity and equal opportunities officers at 20 universities in the United Kingdom and Australia, an analysis of policy documents, as well my own participation in discussions within universities and policy conferences.1

Statements of commitment In the United Kingdom, we have had a proliferation of documents on race equality; race equality is increasingly being documented or even turned into documents. The circulation of race equality documents in the public sector is a direct result of the Race Relations Amendment Act (2000), which requires all public bodies to have and enforce a race equality and action plan. This is an important piece of legislation: race equality now becomes a positive duty; something that organizations ‘must do’ and must be committed to. The first specific duty under the Act for higher and further education organizations is that they must


Commitment as a Nonperformative

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write a race equality policy. The RRAA has fascinated me partly as it has generated a huge amount of documentation: the documentation is, as it were, one of the ‘objects’ of the act, what it ‘points’ toward. Such documents function as statements of commitment to race equality: indeed, such commitments are often made in the first sentences of the policies. Having a race equality policy, or even having a ‘good race equality policy’, is about making public an institutional commitment. The documents are read as signs of commitment and in turn seem to ‘commit’ the institution to doing something. Or do they? Let me quote from the opening paragraphs of two race equality policies: The Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000 (RRAA 2000) places a requirement on a wide range of public authorities, including all Further and Higher Education institutions, to promote race equality in a proactive way through all their functions and to publish a Race Equality Policy. This Race Equality Policy has been published to inform all xxx staff and students and all other partners of our institutional commitment under the requirements of the RRAA 2000. xxx recognises that by embracing diversity it can achieve its ultimate goal to become a ‘world class University’ and pursue excellence in research, teaching and clinical service. xxx values its diverse community and is opposed to racism in all its forms. The xxx is committed to the fair and equal treatment of all individuals and aims to ensure that no-one in the xxx community is disadvantaged on the grounds of race, cultural background, ethnic or national origin or religious belief. These are interesting documents to read in terms of how they imagine universities as subjects ‘with’ a commitment ‘to’ race equality. In the first one, the policy begins with law: it hence frames the institutional commitment in terms of compliance with law. In a way, then, the document names its commitment by framing that commitment as a requirement. The commitment, in other words, is named as a way of being subject to law. Commitment sounds very close to compliance. We commit insofar as we are required to do so. Commitment here is literally ‘under’ the law. We might note that whilst this institutional commitment is named, it is not named as a commitment to something; we are simply committed to whatever the law commits us to do.


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We might note here as well the ease with which both statements take up the language of diversity. Diversity enters such documents not only as something the university is committed to, but as a quality the university already has, by virtue of the kinds of staff and students that already exist within the organization. In the first statement, diversity is ‘embraced’ by being associated with being a ‘world class university’; it allows the university to measure up to what we could call its ego ideal or its ideal image. Diversity is taken in as an orientation toward the market, a way of being ‘world class’. We could rearticulate this statement as: we are committed to diversity insofar as we are committed to being world class. Diversity might even work through its proximity to the selfimage of organizations. This model of diversity simultaneously reifies difference as something that already exists ‘in’ the bodies of others (we are diverse because they are here), and also transforms difference into a property: if difference is something ‘they are’, then it is something we ‘can have’. It is this model of diversity as something others bring to the organization which we can see in the use of visual images of diverse organizations: images of ‘colorful’ happy faces, which show the diversity of the university as something it has embraced. The second statement seems to take us further, insofar as it names racism, and declares the organization as ‘being’ opposed to racism. Such a statement brings the organization into the policy as being antiracist. Declaring a commitment to opposing racism might function as a form of organization pride: antiracism, as a speech act, might then accumulate value for the organization, as a sign of its own commitment. Such a self-declaration could rather ironically participate in the concealment of racism within the university. A university that commits to antiracism, might also be one that does not recognize racism as an ongoing reality or if it did recognize such racism, would be more likely to see that racism as coming from ‘strangers’ rather than ‘natives’. It is as if the University now says: if we are committed to antiracism (and we have said we are), then how can we be racists? Declarations of commitment to antiracism could even block a recognition of racism. In one newspaper article about racism experienced by international students on a British campus, ‘Anxiety in the UK’ (2005), we can see exactly this mechanism at work. Students from Korea complained about racism experienced on campus, and about the failure of the College to respond adequately: ‘Students, particularly east Asian students, feel fearful of these attacks and are deeply concerned that something should be done. But, according to Jin, they have no proper channels of complaint and are worried that too much noise would have a negative effect on



27

their status at college’. The article shows us the multiple ways that racism can affect the experiences of Black and Asian students: it can involve direct violence, and also affect how students respond to such violence, fearing that reporting racism would lead to further marginalization. But the response of the College to this report was to deny the students’ charges: ‘the spokeswoman said: “This could not be further from the truth. The college prides itself on its levels of pastoral care” ’ (emphasis added). In other words, the self-perception of being good at communicating with international students enacts a failure to hear and communicate, and blocks the recognition of racism. Organizational pride prevents the message getting through. Such a speech act does exactly what it says that it does not do: it refuses to hear complaint by saying that it does hear complaint. If colleges have pride in their policies of pastoral care, then they also fail to hear about racism. Being committed to antiracism can function as a perverse performance of racism: ‘you are wrong to describe us as uncaring and racist because we are caring and committed to being anti-racist’. Antiracism might even function here as a discourse of organizational pride. As I have suggested, many of the race equality documents function as statements of commitment, and take a simple form ‘we are committed to’. Such statements of commitment might work to block rather than enable action, insofar as they block a recognition of the ongoing nature of ‘what’ it is the organization is committed to ‘opposing’. Statements of commitment to diversity function as a form of organizational pride, which translates quickly into diversity pride. The effects of such ‘diversity pride’ seem to be uneven. One diversity practitioner, who describes her organization as one that ‘that tends to pride itself on its equity credentials’, also suggested that ‘sometimes they are not acted on as well as they should be’. By implication, ‘being diverse’ does not necessarily translate into ‘doing diversity’. As another diversity practitioner puts it: so people see that as being an equity university but that doesn’t mean that we actually do anything, so we don’t actually have a lot of programs in place, we don’t actually have strategies in place to recruit students from low socio-economic backgrounds like most universities have to because we don’t have to do anything. To be seen as ‘being diverse’ leads to the failure to commit to ‘doing diversity’, as the organization says it ‘is it’, or even that it already ‘does it’, which means that it sees there is nothing left to do. So if organizations


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use diversity as a self-description or as a form of pride this can actually work to block recognition of the work that needs to be done to challenge inequalities. Diversity might work because it neutralizes the signs of struggle. It is because diversity does not seem to evoke such histories of struggle that many practitioners are critical of the institutional desire for this term. As one practitioner put it: I think the concept of diversity, in the way that it is now used in equality, rather than diversity as a word, which I don’t really think it has much relationship to, I think it’s used as a complete and utter cop-out. I think it’s a dreadful concept. Indeed, this practitioner felt so strongly about ‘the cop-out’ of diversity, that she refuses to describe herself as an equality and diversity practitioner, even though her job title involves both terms. She goes on to describe ‘diversity’ as a cuddly concept, that extends the university’s self-image as being good: So now we’ll talk about diversity and that means everybody’s different but equal and its all nice and cuddly and we can feel good about it and feel like we’ve solved it, when actually we’re nowhere near solving it and we need to I think have that, well diversity as a concept fits in much better with the university’s idea of what its doing about being the great benefactor. We could describe diversity as a politics of feeling good, which allows people to relax and feel less threatened, as if we have already ‘solved it’, and there is nothing else to do. The word diversity appeals to the selfimage of organizations as ‘being good’ and ‘doing good’.

Performing commitment Many of the race equality documents function as statements of commitment, and take a simple form ‘we are committed to’. Statements of commitment might block rather than enable action, insofar as they block recognition of the ongoing nature of ‘what’ it is the organization is committed to ‘opposing’. However, we can still ask the question, what do statements of commitment commit institutions to do? When asking practitioners about this process of writing race equality policies, I ask specifically about statements of commitment. What



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do they (or do they) commit the University to do? In the following exchange between myself and three interviewees from the personnel department of a University, we can see the hesitation that follows such a question (4): It’s a statement of commitment clearly as many of them are, do you feel that the statement itself commits the university to something? I would say yes but don’t say why. Yes it does, but my angle I suppose, is that you have to have reminders, examples, arguments all the time. And I think it’s a good working document that people can take with them. But people don’t like being told to read it. Yes they don’t like it. We don’t like being told we have to tick these boxes. It is true, but it exists and I think it’s a reference document and people will go back and read it if they wanted to find out something. But people don’t want to be told to read it. If we took statements of commitment as performatives, we would say that they commit you to something. But such performativity is far from taken for granted by practitioners. The first response is that the statement of commitment does ‘commit’, but for unknown reasons. This uncertainty is itself telling: for it suggests that commitment is in some way mysterious; it would need to be explained. In other words, the commitment does not simply follow the letter of the document. The word ‘commitment’ does not do what it says. The second response also is a ‘yes’, but a qualified yes: the statement of commitment does ‘commit’, but has to be supplemented by other forms of institutional pressure (reminders, examples, and so on). In other words, the commitment is not given by the document, but depends upon the work generated around the document. It is interesting that the next intervention begins with a further qualifier, a ‘but’: ‘but people don’t like to be told to read it’. If the statement of commitment does not necessarily commit the University to doing anything, then practitioners have to keep up the pressure; it is this pressure that can mean that documents don’t work. This is a telling pressure for diversity workers: you have to put pressure on the document because it doesn’t work, and the pressure on documents is what makes them


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not work. The compulsion to read the document means that it loses rather than gains currency. If people are required to read it, then they ‘don’t like it’. Indeed, the following utterance moves from ‘they don’t like it’ to ‘we don’t like being told to tick boxes’. The commitment itself becomes a ‘tick’ in the box. Now ‘commitment’ is usually described in opposition to the ‘tick box’, a tick box approach to diversity would be where institutions go along with the process, but are not ‘behind’ the action. For commitment to become a tick in the box is to suggest that ‘being behind’ can itself be a matter of institutional performance. We can ‘look’ as if we are committed by what we say that we do: we create an illusion of the behind. The final utterance redescribes the statement of commitment as a ‘reference document’ that people can use. This document then exists insofar as people refer back to it, as something that can help them to do things. Such documents by implication can only work if they are not obligatory: if people do not have to use them, then they might work. What this sequences of utterance shows is not only how documents of commitment are perceived as not commitments in and of themselves but how this lack of commitment in the document, which means that we have to committed to them to make them work, is what makes them less likely to generate commitment in others. So what work are these documents doing in their failure to bring about the effects they name? I would argue that such documents are forms of institutional performance. They are ways in which universities perform an image of themselves (as being committed), and they are also ways in which universities perform in the sense of ‘doing well’. My own experience of writing such a document as part of a race equality team was instructive. In working on this policy, we tried to bring a critical language of antiracism into the wording of the document. This meant that in the document we identified inequalities and racism as the history behind the document: in other words, we took up ‘diversity’ and ‘equality’ as terms within the document given they do not describe the institution. I was taught a good lesson, which of course means a hard lesson: the language we think of as critical can easily ‘lend itself’ to the very techniques of governance we critique. So we wrote the document, and the University, was praised for its policy by the Equality Challenge Unit (ECU), and the vice-chancellor was able to congratulate the university on its performance: we did well. At this meeting with staff, the vice-chancellor praised staff for their excellent work, referring to the letter from the ECU. It was a ‘feel good moment’, but those of us



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who wrote the document did not feel so good. A document that documented the racism of the university became usable as a measure of good performance. Here, having a ‘good’ race equality policy got quickly translated into being good at race equality. Such a translation works to conceal the very inequalities that the documents were written to reveal. The document becomes a fetish object, something that ‘has’ value, by being cut off from the process of documentation. In other words, its very existence is taken as evidence that the institutional world documented by the document (racism, inequality, injustice) has been overcome, as if saying that we ‘do it’, means that’s no longer what we do. The documents become forms of institutional performance. They are ways in which universities perform an image of themselves, for sure, but they are also ways in which universities perform in the sense of ‘doing well’. The RRAA is often described as moving beyond compliance, as involving an emphasis on good practice. Joyce Hill, the former Director of the ECU suggests: The word that we are very wary of is the word compliance and really as a group we’ve more or less vetoed its use haven’t we, tacitly at least. We’d far rather talk about meeting the requirements of or fulfilling the requirements of something. Because compliance does sound very much like a kind of minimalist tick box approach, look over your shoulder; see whether you can be done for not doing something as it were. Whereas as our approach is very much yes, of course, to meet the requirements of the legislation that’s the very least one can do, but to do that in a spirit of understanding what the legislation is really there for and to tackle the what it is really there for and not just what it actually literally says. So that you move into fulfillment, I feel, rather than compliance. So you move into the area of good practice and set standards which are in the good practice zone rather than the compliance zone. Although you set up your good practice zone in such a way that it embraces the compliance, wouldn’t you say that’s our general kind of tack? And consequently I think the word compliance is then an unhelpful word to use because it’s the sort of minimalist cop out phrase. This distinction between ‘meeting the requirements’, ‘fulfilling the requirements’ and compliance is crucial to the argument. To fulfill the requirements one would not only comply, as such compliance would be a ‘minimalist cop out phrase’. By implication, the cop-out


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of compliance does comply with the law, ‘as the very least one can do’, and might even meet its requirements. So the law does make possible a ‘tick box approach’ even if the spirit of the law takes us beyond such an approach. I would even describe the ‘tick box’ as a specter behind this law: the tick box is what we want to avoid in interpreting the legislation, and yet it is also what the legislation requires or even puts in place. Moving beyond compliance becomes a matter of compliance, but one that takes us into a different zone, described by Joyce Hill as the ‘good practice’ zone. In other words, the positive duty to promote race equality becomes associated with being good at race equality: here, going beyond the tick box becomes a matter of institutional performance. And yet, good practice is clearly a term used within a tick box approach, insofar as ‘doing well’ is presumed to be something that can be measured, distributed, and shared. An anecdotal example mentioned by a number of practitioners is of a university that had as its target that 100 percent of its staff be diversity trained, and then put diversity training on line so it could meet its target. Having met its target, online diversity training becomes a form of good practice.2 Good practice and the tick box approach can thus be seen as operating in the same zone rather than different zones: after all both are implicated in what Jill Blackmore and Judyth Sachs describe as ‘the performative university’: ‘one that focuses on measurable and marketable consumer satisfaction’ (2003: 141). Diversity and equality become ‘things’ that can be measured, along with other performance outcomes. A good example of this process can be taken from the ECU’s toolkit on communications, ‘Good Talking: The Higher Education Communicators Equality and Diversity Toolkit’, which includes as an example of good a university that had ‘produced institutional equality and diversity gifts and novelties that are in great demand’. 3 For diversity novelties to become a sign of ‘good practice’ is clear evidence of how diversity is being repackaged, as if it was a property of objects that can be passed around. So an organization even gets a tick for its novelties. The Act signals a shift within the public sectors toward seeing equality and diversity as performance indicators, as things that can be measured. Heidi Mirza has described this process as the ‘bureaucratization of diversity’ (2009: 121). Indeed, the RRAA has encouraged the shift towards seeing diversity and equality work as itself auditable. Audit culture not only measures performance, but it depends upon the reliability of such measurements. It also associates good performance with



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accountability, efficiency, and quality as assumed ‘goals’ for organizations (Power 1994: 1). Race equality would be something that can be measured, such that ‘doing well’ would become an indicator of institutional good performance: in other words, race equality would be a sign of accountability, efficiency, and quality: if we are doing ‘it’ well, or can be seen to be doing ‘it’ well, then we are doing well. Practitioners expressed mixed-feelings about equality and diversity becoming auditable. Some suggested that to audit equality and diversity would be a good thing, as universities only take seriously the activities that are audited, and that are attached to financial returns or penalties. As one interviewee describes: ‘I think it would be useful in the HE [Higher Education] sector because it wouldn’t have been done, just thinking about how they could operate and how they’ve been lagging behind, it was the push, you know you had to do it’. Audit becomes here a ‘stick’, which would compel action, as a compulsion which energizes, or which creates an institutional drive. Others suggested that audit would not necessarily work, given how audit culture involves an awareness of audit. As one director of personnel describes: an audit can establish if we have gone through processes, it can’t really determine whether we are altering culture here. It can perhaps show whether we are reaching various targets, say you know, the same teacher of leadership staff who come from various backgrounds over time. But the trouble is when dealing with audit you tend always to respond in terms of process you know, we’ve done this report, we’ve got a plan out and all that sort of stuff. And I could see that you could get a rough idea if universities were putting effort into diversity by doing that, but the trouble is that in universities we’ve got an audit aware culture in administrations. And so people are practiced at how to show auditors that processes are being gone through. So if diversity and equality were audited, then universities would be able to show they have gone through the right processes, whatever processes they actually have. In other words, you can become good at audit, which would mean the Universities who ‘did well’ on race equality would be simply the ones that were good at creating auditable systems. It is not that you audit something that is already in place. To audit is to create a system, for example, by generating documents that are auditable. As Michael Power argues audit culture is what ‘makes things


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auditable’ (1994: 33). Or, as Cris Shore and Susan Wright describe in their excellent account of audit in higher education: ‘The result has been the invention of a host of “auditable structures” and paper trails to demonstrate “evidence of system” to visiting inspectors’ (2000: 72). The document would be the paper in the trail. The auditable document ‘refers back’ to the terms set up for the audit itself. For instance, benchmarking works by generating documents that refer back to the benchmarks, producing a family of documents around the terms. It is not then that diversity and equality are simply ‘in’ the documents: rather they are terms used by documents, in reference to terms that have already been made. When we measure such documents, we might then be measuring how their terms correspond with other terms, such as those set up in the act itself. What does it mean for the correspondence of terms to be taken as measures of good performance? What is being measured when diversity becomes a measure of institutional performance? I asked this question to one diversity practitioner, whose university received an excellent rank for their race equality policy and she suggested that: ‘we are good at writing documents’. I reply, without thinking, ‘well yes, one wonders’, and we both laugh. Our wonder is skeptical: we wonder whether what is being measured is institutional competence in producing documents rather than what the university is doing in terms of race equality. As this practitioner further describes: I was very aware that it wasn’t very difficult for me and some of the other people to write a wonderful aspirational document. I think we all have great writing skills and we can just do that, because we are good at it, that’s what we are expert at. And there comes with that awareness a real anxiety that the writing becomes an end in itself, the reality is being born out by say for example, we were commended on our policies and when the ECU reviewed our Implementation Plans last year there were a number of quite serious criticisms about time slippages, about the fact that we weren’t reaching out into the mainstream and the issues hadn’t really permeated the institution and the money implemented in certain specific areas. And it wasn’t that there was hostility, it was much more of this kind of marsh mallow feeling. This is a fascinating statement about the politics of diversity as an institutional performance. The practitioner describes her skill and expertise



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in terms of writing a ‘wonderful aspirational document’. Being good at writing documents becomes a competency that is also an obstacle for diversity work, as it means that the university gets judged as good because of the document. It is this very judgment about the document that blocks action, producing a kind of ‘marshmallow feeling’, a feeling that we are doing enough, or doing well enough, or even that there is nothing left to do. Many practitioners and academics have expressed concerns that writing documents or having good policies becomes a substitute for action: as this practitioner goes on to say, ‘you end up doing the document rather than doing the doing’. The work that goes into doing the document ends up blocking other kinds of action. Or, we could make an even stronger argument: the orientation toward writing ‘good documents’ can block action, insofar as the document then gets taken up as evidence that we have ‘done it’. As another practitioner describes, ‘Well I think in terms of the policies, peoples views are “well we’ve got them now so that’s done, its finished” I think actually, I’m not sure if that’s even worse than having nothing, that idea in peoples heads that we’ve done race, when we very clearly haven’t done race’. The idea that the document is a doing could allow the institution to block recognition of the work that there is to do. The system of awarding organizations for their performance on diversity and equality not only risks concealing forms of inequality and racism, but also supports forms of organizational pride, which reorientate the politics of diversity work away from challenging how institutions constitute their identity and toward a promotion of that identity. Such promotional work means that diversity is now described by some as being about ‘R and R’ that is, about risk and reputation. Or we could say that diversity involves promoting organizations through remaking their image. In one of my interviews, we discussed a research project that had been funded as part of the University’s commitment to race equality, which is described as ‘perception data’ (data that gathers how people perceive an organization). This research project was a target met by the University under its action plan, so of course it is already a tick. What did the research reveal? Take the following exchange: OK yes. It was about uncovering perceptions um, about the xxx as an employer. ... xxx was considered to be an old boys network, as they called it and white male dominated and they didn’t have the right perceptions of the xxx in terms of what it offers and what it brings


36 Commitment and Complicity

to the academia. I think most of the external people had the wrong perceptions about the xxx. And I mean, quotes, there were such funny quotes like librarians they were sitting there with their cardigans you know. Um, and things like that, they were shocking reports to read really about how people, external people, perceive the xxx so we have to try to achieve you know, we have to try to make the xxx an attractive employer. The politics of diversity and equality have become a form of image management. Organizations aim to generate the right image, and correct the wrong one. According to this logic, people have the ‘wrong perception’ when they see the organization as white, elite, male, oldfashioned. What is behind the shock is a belief that the whiteness is ‘in the image’ rather than ‘in the organization’, or is an effect of what it does. Diversity and equality work hence becomes about changing perceptions of whiteness rather than changing the whiteness of organizations. A good performance would then be about being perceived as a diverse and equal organization that is committed to diversity and equality. The perception itself would be the achievement; it would be taken up as a sign of good performance. The perception then becomes taken up as if it is a description: as if being perceived as diverse is what ‘gives’ the organization such qualities.

Commitment and complicity In this final section, I want to suggest that the ‘nonperformativity’ of commitment is what enables practitioners to ‘do things’. Indeed, if anything practitioners start with their complicity in the languages used by organization to conceal what needs to be done. Complicity is a starting point. Practitioners use the term ‘diversity’ in quite different ways within their institutions: indeed, typically practitioners describe themselves as ‘translators’, as translating or even ‘switching’ diversity into different cases for different audiences. Some cases used by practitioners are based on a business model. But whilst practitioners might use the business case model when appealing to senior managers, they also tend to define diversity with a social justice framework for themselves. One practitioner, for instance, describes herself as both ‘a counter-hegemonic worker’ and a ‘whore’: as willing to use any language, including the lang uage of money and compliance, in the interests of enabling the transformation of social relationships of dominance and subordination,



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as a set of interests that remain for strategic reasons undeclared. As she puts it: I mean I am a complete whore when it comes to using any means that I can to get the stuff on the agenda to get things happening. I don’t care. So if I have to mount the argument about productive diversity because we can’t afford to lose people of talent and they need to be provided with opportunity to engage with the university so that we can maximise our bottom line if you like, I’ll use that argument, because the end effect is the same. If I’m in a situation where people are kind of anti the feminist thing but they are pro internationalism I don’t care, I will talk to them about the issues around globalisation and internationalism and the need for enhancing understanding of people of difference. I will use those discussions; I will use those terms, because those are the terms that they understand. This practitioner identified her mandate as ‘enabling cultural change’ and defines her project in terms of outcomes, ‘end effects’ or ‘things happening’. Different cases are used for different audiences (including the social justice and business case language). What was striking in our study was how much diversity work involves ‘switching’ between cases for diversity that might seem to rely on very different models and frameworks. Diversity and equality work is described as about ‘outcomes’ or ‘ends’. Some practitioners use whatever means available to them, to help them achieve such ends, and are willing to make arguments in whatever terms that work. One competence required for diversity work is the ability to work out what arguments will work for whom, and to make arguments that are not only ‘addressed’ to specific constituencies, but also to use the languages of such constituencies. Some diversity workers work by associating the word ‘diversity’ with the other key terms used by organizations to describe their strategic aims. For instance, diversity is used very differently across the different kinds of universities. For research led ‘old universities’, it’s associated with ‘excellence’ and ‘research’. For me I think that the, well certainly, our aim in the diversity project is to help the organization to see how diversity will help meet the strategic plans. So how can diversity help make us top ten in 2010? What will thinking about diversity enable a head of a school that is already very successful to be more successful. That would be my


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real aim and to live our vision for race, which is excellence through diversity. being a global university obviously we have to be good diversity people or we might shoot ourselves in the foot marketing wise ... being financially successful as a global university is being able to deal with (for the want of a better word) variety of people, so if you are going to go global you have to be able to engage with global citizens, some of them are like us and some of them aren’t. Practitioners within old universities use arguments about excellence and internationalism as these are the terms that such organizations take seriously. In the first quote, we can see the link between organizational pride and diversity pride. Diversity becomes a means of ‘making the top’ or achieving excellence. The ‘vision for race’ is a vision of organizational excellence. Clearly, this is a strategic argument; it is a technique used to encourage senior managers to take equality and diversity seriously. A question becomes whether issues that would not allow expressions of organizational pride might be put to one side in the pursuit of excellence. In the second quote, the term ‘diversity’ is associated with global targets, or even the ideal image of the university as ‘being global’. Importantly, diversity becomes a means by which certain others, who are ‘global citizens’, can be appealed to: it is about a variety of people, as a variety that takes some forms and not others. The discourse of global citizenship is indeed a useful one: it associates diversity work with the skills of translating across cultures and between differences: this new population is elite precisely ‘because’ it can speak to diverse people (see Ahmed 2000: 85). Diversity here is not associated with challenging disadvantage, but becomes another way of ‘doing advantage’ within the context of globalization. At the same time, if using the language of ‘global’ as ‘diversity people’ is detached from any social justice agenda, it does not follow that in practice it simply maintains social advantage. Such language is used to make diversity appealing to senior managers, but what then counts ‘in practice’ could involve other kinds of work. Indeed, doing the work of critiquing diversity and using the appeal of diversity do not even have to describe different kinds of work. I asked another practitioner why she found the word ‘diversity’ appealing. She argued that diversity appeals because: it obscures the issues ... It can, diversity is like a big shiny red apple right, and it all looks wonderful. This is an example actually a member of staff came up with in my focus group about gender issues, Begüm Özden Firat, Sarah De Mul and Sonja Van Wichelen


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she says but if you actually cut into that apple there’s a rotten core in there and you know that it’s actually all rotting away and it’s not actually being addressed. It all looks wonderful but the inequalities aren’t being addressed. I think that’s a good example in that diversity to me is a promotional exercise, there are some benefits to it, but they are that it’s a fashionable term at the moment so it can start to engage people and they want to know more. Again, the suggestion here is that the appeal of diversity is about looking and feeling good, as an orientation that obscures inequalities, like the obscuring of a rotten core behind a shiny surface. To recall an earlier argument, diversity as a term has a marketing appeal; it allows the university to sell itself, by presenting itself as a happy place, a place where differences are celebrated, welcomed, and enjoyed. Not only does this rebranding of the university as being diverse work to conceal racism, but it also works to reimagine the university as being antiracist, post-race and even beyond race: as if the colors of different races have ‘integrated’ to create a new hybrid or even bronzed face.4 At the same time, this practitioner also acknowledges that there are some benefits to diversity, in the sense it can ‘start to engage people’. It is given how diversity might make people feel good, that it can be a useful term, as it allows people in: once they are ‘in’, by implication, then we can do different things, or even use a different set of terms. In other words, the word equality, which is associated with the law, might be less useful, as people turn away from it, are threatened by the work that it asks them to do. If we use the word diversity, we might have a better chance of ‘getting through’. So it is precisely how diversity might work to conceal racism that might make it a term that can do things. In other words, what makes diversity useful is how it is appealing. If words do things, what they do depends on how they are being used, and how they can hook people, or bring them ‘in’. Indeed, most practitioners describe their work as a question of ‘what works’, of using whatever language works for the different audiences they speak to. Diversity work is strategic, even if it has certain political principles behind it. So diversity is used by some precisely because it’s a ‘cuddly’ term, which allows people to engage more easily with this kind of work. Some practitioners are hence positive about the term ‘diversity’ for the very same reasons others are critical of the term. As one interviewee describes: I think for me with equality, as I said there is some legal framework and I think sometimes over-emphasised. There’s a tension really Begüm Özden Firat, Sarah De Mul and Sonja Van Wichelen

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because you need to make people aware of the legality, but you want to go beyond that don’t you. You don’t want it to be about compliance, so for me, I actually think diversity is actually a far more positive word than equality so for me it’s about celebration. Whereas equality feels a bit more about oh you know meetings, legal requirements almost, I don’t know that’s just personal. Here diversity is something positive; it is about celebration, or even can be celebrated. This is why it is a useful term. Equality on the other hand evokes compliance, and meeting legal requirements. It is hence no accident that ‘diversity’ is described as having an energizing effect. For many practitioners the question becomes then not so much whether to use the term diversity, but how to use that term. If the success of the term is that it can be detached from the history of struggle, then its success might paradoxically depend on being reattached to those very same histories. Indeed, the nonperformativity of statements of commitment to diversity can still mean they have their uses. I asked another practitioner why such statements of commitment are useful: Oh that’s hard. I think you cannot not have them, if you don’t have them, well to me as a practitioner it’s a starting point, again it’s whether that gets fitted into practice. Commitments can’t come without other actions. So the commitment to me is about what the institution believes in and what it intends to do – it can’t stand alone it has to come with how you’re actually going to do it. I think if they weren’t there then, well I refer to them quite a lot as well know, if you’re trying to, let’s say there’s an issue that’s come up and somebody is not, maybe there’s an issue and perhaps they’re racist in what they bring up in their practice or something like that and it’s good to refer back to these documents, but actually you’re an employee of the university and the university has made a statement about this. So in terms of watching the other members of staff and in my own experience, I’ve used it for that. The sentence ‘commitments can’t come without other actions’ is instruct ive. For it suggest that commitment is an action, but it is one that does not act on its own, but depends on other actions, or on what is done ‘with it’. Commitment might be, in other words, a technology that can be used or deployed within specific settings. The work of commitment is how you act on the action: it is about what the



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action allows the practitioner to do. The statement of commitment is here also described as a reference point, something you can use, when challenging how people act within the institution. In other words, the statement of commitment does not commit the institution to anything, but allows the practitioner to support their claims for or against specific action. The statement functions as a supporting device. So although a statement of commitment can block action by constructing the university or organization as ‘already committed’ or behind race equality, they also can within specific settings support other actions, precisely given this illusion of being behind. Practitioners use such statements to challenge people within the organization, by showing they are ‘out of line’ with the direction of the organization, even if this line is itself imaginary and does not direct institutional action. We can return to one of the statements I cited earlier in the chapter: I’m inclined to be quite sceptical about whether they are used at all. I think there is a real soul, you’ve got a document and you put it on the Web, you do some advertising about it when it goes on, so people are aware of it, but the fact of having the document there, it’s useful in the sense that you are meeting leader obligations and it’s useful in tricky situations that you can use it to the foundation, you can use it to explicate the principles that the University is meant to be acting upon, so it’s not un-useful. But the idea that it’s bandied around and pawed over I think that would be naïve. What we can note here is the significance of the statement ‘you can use it to explicate the principles that the university is meant to be acting upon’. This is one of the uses that makes the documents not un-useful. So although a statement of commitment can block action by constructing the university or organization as ‘already committed’ or behind race equality, they also can within specific settings support other actions, again given this illusion of being behind. Documents do not simply have a referential or descriptive function: it is not simply that they describe principles that a university already has. Indeed, in a way, the documents might even perform a lie, insofar as they represent the university as if it has principles that it does not have. But this can be a useful lie: by producing the university as if it was a subject with such principles, the documents then become useable as it allows practitioners to make members of the university as well as ‘the university’ itself as an


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imagined entity, subject to those principles. Statements of commitment then might do something not as deeds, but because they can expose the gap between what organizations say and do: they might ‘do something’ insofar as they fail to describe what organizations do. If we consider the politics of commitment we can see that such statements of commitments create fantasy images of the organizations they apparently represent. The document says ‘we are committed to diversity’, as if saying it makes it so. In a way, our task must be to refuse to read such commitments as performatives, as if they bring into effect what they name. That is not to say that they do not matter, or that they do not do any work. They do. Indeed, this nonperformativity is what makes them tools, which can be used by practitioners, as things that work insofar as they fail to describe or produce what is ‘on going’ or ‘going on’ within organizations. In other words, by putting commitments in writing, as commitments that are not followed by other actions, such documents can be used as supportive devices, not as deeds, but by exposing gaps between words and deeds. Indeed, practitioners use commitments strategically, precisely insofar as they do not bring about the effects they name. You have to work around and with such statements of commitment. In a way then, commitment is about an interface between policy and action: you can commit yourself ‘on paper’, but that commitment does not ‘commit’ unless you act on and with the paper. Our research suggests that such actions depend on the work of committed individuals who aim to generate organizational commitment by redescribing organizations as ‘being committed’, by aiming to make the organization ‘catch up’ with what it says that it does. Diversity work plays what we could call a catch up game, working in the gap between what organizations say they do and what they do do, even when what they say covers over what they do. If diversity has surface appeal, if diversity is a cover, then we might have to go under-cover to challenge its appeal.

Notes 1. This research was undertaken as part of a wider project assessing the turn to diversity within the learning and skills sector (including adult and community and learning, and further education), as well as higher education in the United Kingdom, between 2003–5, under the auspices of the Centre for Excellence on Leadership (CEL), and funded by the Department for Further Education and Skills. I was codirector of this project with Elaine Swan, and the project team includes Shona Hunter, Sevgi Kilic, and Lewis Turner. My thanks to all my participants and to the diversity research team, especially Elaine Swan and Shona Hunter, for their continued support and good humor.



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2. The very desire for good practice could even be a means through which racism becomes concealed from view. In other words, the very desire to hear about ‘happy stories of diversity’ is what allows organizations not to hear about racism. Our experiences of researching diversity under the auspices of the CE were instructive. CEL – which trains leaders in the Further Education sector and also funds research into leadership – is what I call a ‘diversity proud’ organization. Their funding of our project was often cited as an example of their ‘commitment’ to diversity. Our experience of doing this research showed how commitment to diversity can convert very quickly to hostility towards diversity workers, especially those who talk about racism. Not only were we continually targeted with criticism (through informal modes of communication), but an attempt was made to discredit our findings. By not fulfilling the terms of their commitment (by refusing to tell ‘happy stories of diversity’) we became a bad object within the organization. This experience mirrored many of the accounts from diversity practitioners across the sectors. Diversity proud organizations tend to see discussions of racism as a threat to their reputation as ‘being committed’ to diversity. 3. See: http://w w w.ecu.ac.uk/publications/g uidancepublications/Good Talking.pdf. 4. It is worth noting here the powerful critiques of the ‘turn’ to diversity within higher education offered by feminist and critical management scholars. Such critiques have suggested that ‘diversity’ enters higher education through marketization: the term is seen as ‘coming from’ management, and from the imperative to ‘manage diversity’, or to value diversity ‘as if’ it was a human resource. Such a managerial focus on diversity, it has been argued, works to individuate difference and to conceal the continuation of systematic inequalities within organizations such as universities (Kandola and Fullerton 1994; Lorbiecki 2001; Kirton and Greene 2000; Deem and Ozga 1997: 33; Benschop 2001: 1166, for summary, see Ahmed and Swan 2006). For these scholars, amongst others, the institutional preference for the term ‘diversity’ is a sign of the lack of commitment to change, and might even allow universities to conceal the operation of systematic inequalities. We can ask, in light of these critiques, what does the word ‘diversity’ do?

References Ahmed, S. (2000) Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-coloniality, London: Routledge. Ahmed, S. and E. Swan (2006) ‘Introduction: Doing Diversity’, Policy Futures in Education, 4(2): pp. 1–10. Austin, J.L. (1975) How to Do Things with Words, J.O. Urmson and M. Sbisà (eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press. Benschop, Y. (2001) ‘Pride, Prejudice and Performance’, International Journal of Human Resources Management, 12(7): pp. 1166–81. Blackmore, J. and J. Sachs (2003) ‘Managing Equity Work in the Performative University’, Australian Feminist Studies, 18(41): pp. 141–62. Butler, J. (1993) Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’, New York: Routledge.


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Deem, R. and J. Ozga (1997) ‘Women Managing Diversity in a Postmodern World’, in C. Marshall (ed.) Feminist Critical Policy Analysis, London: Falmer. Kandola, B. and J. Fullerton (1994) Managing the Mosaic: Diversity in Action, London: IPD. Kirton, J. and A.M. Greene (2000) The Dynamics of Managing Diversity, Oxford: Butterworth: Heinemann. Lorbiecki, A. (2001) ‘Changing Views on Diversity Management’, Management Studies, 32(3): pp. 345–61. Mirza, H. (2009) Race, Gender and Educational Desire, London: Taylor and Francis. Pai, H-H. (2005) ‘Anxiety in the UK’, The Guardian, February 8. Power, M. (1994) The Audit Explosion, London: Demos. Shore, C. and Wright, S. (2000) ‘Coercive Accountability: The Rise of Audit Culture in Higher Education’, in M. Strathern (ed.) Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy, London: Routledge, pp. 57–89.


3 Commitment or Commitment-Kitsch? Rethinking the ‘Woman Question’, Agency, and Feminist Politics Sonja van Wichelen

In 2003 the Dutch director Adelheid Roosen launched her new play entitled The Veiled Monologues. Several years before, Roosen had performed as an actress in the Dutch version of Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues.1 Inspired by this play, and intrigued by the rise of Muslim women in the Netherlands and how this was changing the cultural landscape of her country, she developed a piece that would explore the topic of intimacy and sexuality of women with an Islamic background. After initial research for the play, in which she interviewed around 70 Dutch-Muslim women,2 she filtered the stories and assembled them in 12 separate monologues which were subsequently performed by different migrant actresses.3 On the one hand, the monologues concerned matters pertaining to love, desire, and intimacy, articulating ‘Muslim ways’ of lovemaking and sexual pleasure – often approached with candid humor. On the other hand, they tackled issues of violence and coercion, involving stories of forced marriage, female circumcision, and rape or incest. The Veiled Monologues proved to be a success. Following its popularity in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany, readings and performances of the play traveled to Turkey, Egypt, Jordan, Pakistan, Nigeria, and the United States.4 Roosen has been invited to numerous public events related to issues of multiculturalism, migration, and religion on the one side, and sexual freedom and feminism on the other. The majority of the responses were celebratory, suggesting that the performance succeeded in articulating the nuances and complexities 45 Begüm Özden Firat, Sarah De Mul and Sonja Van Wichelen

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of Muslim women’s lives. Rather than portraying overt orientalism, female victimization, or an inherent misogyny in Quranic scriptures, the play was received as giving both Islam as well as Muslim women a voice by narrating how Islam can empower women and how women navigate, resist, or instrumentalize religious or traditional customs and practices. I start my chapter with The Veiled Monologues because the play, in both its production and consumption, can stand for one of the many feminist investments in Islam today. It embodies multiple layers of inquiries that are symptomatic of feminism and feminist engagements in both contemporary politics as well as feminist theory. These inquiries belong to the so-called woman question in Islam. Looking at how Islam affects women’s lives, women’s rights, and gender justice, feminist inquiries have centered on two interlocking questions, namely whether Islam restrains women’s freedom and mobility (Is Islam bad for women?) and whether Islam is compatible with liberal democracy or liberal movements such as feminism (Is Islam bad for feminism?). I argue in this chapter, that such inquiries have often turned into civilizational discourses on the one side and culturalist discourses on the other. Here, the project of feminism is claimed, framed, or appropriated in such a manner that it contributes to certain problematic representational frameworks, often grounded not only in the persistent orientalist dichotomy of East and West, but also in the essentialism of group identities based on gender, ethnicity, religion, or culture. While in the public and political domain, this form of feminist commitment often resulted in feminism becoming an effective ideological pawn in the struggle over rhetorical and political power, in critical scholarship, it produced a clear deficit in feminist theory. This deficit is not new. It rehearses some of the earlier tensions in feminist theory in relation to difference, albeit based on race, class, culture, or sexuality. Religion is a new mode of complexity in this discussion. I would like to probe further into these new tensions in feminist scholarship by turning to the discussion on agency and politics in recent anthropological work which redefines agency as a modality of action rather than a capacity to subvert norms. Sympathetic to this theoretical critique of earlier feminist understandings of human agency, I would like to investigate what the consequences are for a critical feminist political practice. I contend that in the end, if we are to ‘save’ some form of feminist practice, we need to go beyond the ‘Woman Question’, and place individual agency within a broader social, political, and global context. Combining this perspective with


Commitment or Commitment-Kitsch?

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an acknowledgment of the dynamic between commitment and complicity in sustaining a viable feminist politics, this could open up new strategies in evaluating a politics or knowledge production that engages with difference.

Commitment or commitment-kitsch? For the past decade, the Western world has been witnessing an increasing myriad of images, narratives, and debates in media, culture, and politics that are speaking for or representing women in Islam. The Veiled Monologues is just one example of many instances in which authors, artists, public figures, and politicians have felt the need to engage with this topic. It is important to place this engagement in the broader framework of its dissemination and reception. The popularity of The Veiled Monologues does not only disclose the topicality of the play, but more vividly, its celebratory reception exposes how the West seems to have been longing for a certain knowledge (or affirmation) about the lives of Muslim women. Likewise, this has been illustrated by bookstores cashing in on ‘real stories’ of Muslim women.5 These books depict on their covers veiled or half veiled women, often in an orientalist setting and carry titles such as Fatwa: Living with a Death Threat or I Just Wanted to be Free. While some are told in defense of Islam, most of the narratives have dismissed Islam as a religion in which men and women can be equal and sum up ‘Islamic’ practices that are detrimental and oppressing to women’s lives. They have become a genre on their own, with an increasing appeal and demand for their production, marketing, and distribution. These phenomena coincided with increasing interests from popular media personalities (such as Oprah Winfrey) and political figures (such as Laura Bush) to commit themselves to the plight of Afghan women. These Muslim women were regarded and constructed as oppressed and in need of liberation – a liberation often powerfully symbolized by the lifting of the burqa (Abu-Lughod 2002; Whitlock 2005). We can also find a tremendous willingness in funding ‘woman-andIslam’ related topics in the academic world. In one of her articles, the anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod poses her discomfort with being invited to all kinds of meetings and events that ask her to be a spokesperson for women and Islam. She is wary of the underlying assumptions these different institutions have in inviting her (Abu-Lughod 2002). This similarly occurred to the Iranian scholar Afsaneh Najmabadi, who at a certain event was presented as a Muslim woman who would talk about


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postcolonial studies. In fact, she notes, she never identified herself in public as a Muslim woman, nor as a scholar that is concerned with postcolonial studies per se (1997: 65). Both Abu-Lughod and Najmabadi ask why they are – all of a sudden – invited so often to such public events considering that they have written about the topic for so long now. And why this frenzied interest in a feminist topic while feminism was never so willingly put on the general public’s agenda? A new global feminist commitment seems to have been established, which on the one hand feeds into a discourse of Muslim women victimized or disadvantaged by Islam, and on the other a discourse in which Muslim women are empowered by Islam. Examples of the first discourse include for instance the book The Trouble with Islam (2003) written by the Canadian Muslim Irshad Manji or the work of the former Dutch MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali – especially her film Submission Part One (2004) and her latest autobiographical book Infidel (2007).6 These popular works have in common that they incarnate a wake-up call about the state of Muslim women in Islam or the Muslim world today. As such, they call for the liberalization of women from Islam (Hirsi Ali) or a liberalization of Islam for Muslim women (Manji). They concern ‘liberations’ advocated in light of ‘troubling’ issues within Islam, such as the value of virginity before marriage, the allowance of polygamy in Islamic scripture, the practice of arranged marriage or circumcision, or the condemnation of same-sex love. Many of such wake-up calls are articulated from an experiential voice in which insider knowledge is constituted as authoritative through the writer’s status of local or native witness. With respect to the two examples above, the experiential knowledge of being (ex-) Muslim allegedly grants Irshad Manji and Hirsi Ali the authority to speak in the name of Muslim women. Away from the public sphere, we can see a similar trend in academic scholarship. Studies pertaining to Islam and gender have strongly relied on the notion of a ‘woman question’ in Islam. A strong discourse in this field of interdisciplinary studies claims the incompatibility of Islam with women’s emancipation.7 A consistent argument involves the belief that Islam as a religion, just like any other religion, should be seen as inherently oppressive to women (Winter 2001: 33). Here Islam – similar to Christianity, Judaism, or Hinduism – is a patriarchal belief system and as such, religion is a cultural means of ensuring men’s political domination of women. Second, early anthropological studies on women in Muslim countries have referred to the ‘backwardness’ and ‘primitiveness’ of a society which submits itself to Islamic law (Mohanty 1988). These studies ‘reveal’ to what extent Muslim women are curtailed in their rights



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and movements. The third issue central to arguing that Islam is bad for women involves the status of Islamism in contemporary politics – often collapsed with the question of fundamentalism and terrorism. In this perspective, feminist scholars have compared Islamist movements with fundamentalist and extreme right movements (Moghissi 1999; Winter 2001: 10). Conservatism and fundamentalism, they argue, are inherently misogynist. In situations where reactionary and dogmatic rules are applied and sustained, women’s rights can never prevail. As scholars have indicated, irrespective of whether or not they contain a genuine message, many of the works (or its authors), have often come to serve – or are used to serve – particular ideological interests in which inquiries into women’s well-being are framed within ethnocentric and orientalist representational frameworks.8 Feminism is at the heart of these inquiries and the problem with these feminist inquiries is that it draws us into oppositional binaries of East and West and is therefore conducive to securing dichotomies of Muslim versus Non-Muslim (or secular Muslim), oppressed versus liberated, backward versus modern. In such a way, the feminist plight for women becomes conflated with a ‘clash of civilizations’ in which not only the humanist liberal model of freedom and emancipation becomes the ultimate standard to evaluate women’s well-being, but which consequently, regards Western civilization as superior to non-Western civilization (Abu-Lughod 2002; Brown 2006; De Leeuw and Van Wichelen 2005). This discourse victimizes the Muslim woman and leaves little room for an alternative understanding of Islam and non-Western culture as capable of contributing to emancipatory processes. As a reaction and in contrast, another discourse emerges in this new global commitment, but it is one that elevates rather than victimizes the Muslim woman. Here, Islam or Islamic culture is approached as something to be explored in a positive way. With respect to scholarship this is illustrated by the popular work of Islamic feminist scholars. Concerned with Islamic theology and matters pertaining to women’s emancipation, they have argued that the Qur’an, as a holy text, is inherently gender equal but that its interpretation by male Islamic clerks has often been misogynist (Barlas 2002; Wadud 1999). The challenge for reform lies in a so-called ijtihad, an independent reasoning or religious interpretation of the Qur’an. In this respect, it would concern a reinterpretation of holy texts from a woman’s or a more gender-egalitarian perspective. Other scholars have argued from a sociocultural framework of Islam. Insisting that gender equality is possible within an Islamic framework,


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this perspective focuses on the reconfiguration of gender relations from social groups and movements in society. Most of these studies are concerned with the paradoxical ways in which the whole process of debating Islam and gender has come to empower women and has created a popular, but also an indigenous and local feminist consciousness.9 They also illustrate, for example, how women’s groups have operated successfully independent of – or in resistance to – the (theocratic) state (for instance in Iran or Malaysia) thereby suggesting that the existence of an authoritarian state does not necessarily imply the passivity of women with respect to women’s emancipation.10 The livelihood of an Islamic feminism in both local and global contexts is often referred to as a confirmation that Muslim women are not merely helpless, oppressed, or victimized subjects, but that they are women with agency able to resist or subvert conservative norms. Because of feminisms’ investments in seeing women empowered, this latter approach reveals a strong commitment to modern progressivist narratives informed by notions of freedom and equality as defined by secular, liberal, and progressive norms and values. The topics that are represented or studied in these feminist practices all engage with issues that link to liberal or progressive feminist concerns that ultimately lead back to values such as individual autonomy and sexual freedom. By singling out the will, strength, capacities, and strategies of Muslim women, and interpreting this empowerment as a struggle for autonomy and freedom, Muslim women are conveniently turned into recognizable subjects. The empowerment discourse in the study of other women often translates back to a familiar struggle in feminisms’ past. It neutralizes a threat of difference and brings feelings of relief that Muslim women are ‘just like us’. While valorizing ‘strong women’, this approach either impertinently dismisses and thereby silences unrecognizable women, or portrays them as most probably fallen into the trap of false consciousness. Recognizable subjects make tolerable others. And hence, both the empowerment discourse as well as the victimization discourse should be placed within the same liberal plane in which modernist and progressivist narratives of emancipation seem to have been defined as necessary components to reach feminist utopia. Many of the contemporary feminist commitments fall into either/or arrangements of these discourses. In their attempt to go beyond paradigmatic frameworks, some alternate and navigate between the two so as to come to a more complex and layered understanding of women’s lives. The Veiled Monologues is a good illustration of such an attempt that



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navigates between the two discourses, sometimes reaching nuanced and multilayered representations of Muslim women, but at the same time also reproducing images and ideas that affirm civilizational and culturalist discourses. At the level of text, the monologues display many different narratives of Muslim women’s experiences or strategies in relation to sexuality and Islamic or cultural norms. Nevertheless, they all narrate conventional issues pertaining to the ‘woman question’ in Islam, namely polygamy, virginity, female circumcision, homosexuality, etc. In such a way these texts risk reinforcing Western fascinations with such topics. At the level of reception, the play is primarily made for a Western audience (as also intended by the director), and functioned as a peephole through which the West can observe the intimate world of Muslim women. But rather than solely portraying Islam, Muslim, and Arabic culture as violent or misogynist, it is more often represented as a rich tradition that is woman-friendly and accommodating in feminine values (values that the West have ultimately lost). Hence, the performance places a mirror in front of the audience, pointing out how the West can learn from the East, for instance, how Muslim and Arab culture valorizes femininity and how women’s sexuality and sense of femininity have been affected by the passionless rationality of modern emancipation. The different narratives in the play inform the audience, in a somewhat pedagogic way, that Muslim women do have agency. They are not passive or helpless victims, but active agents navigating and resisting both sexism and homophobia in their own circles, while at the same time, also combating racism and xenophobia from their Western peers. The women in The Veiled Monologues are strong and powerful, inject the audience with their (cultural) energy, and leave their (feminist) audience with some form of recognizable closure about Muslim women. This is not to say that The Veiled Monologues should be regarded as an instance of commitment-kitsch. On the contrary, as I will argue further along this chapter, some of the monologues create meanings that I believe go beyond these discourses. There is a necessity however, to differentiate between the intentions of the maker, the textual strategies of the play, and the reception by different audiences.11 While processes of meaning-making can be more complex and ambivalent in one context they can be rigid and ideological in another. On all levels however, it is women’s agency that is contested. It is the question of agency that seems to form the crux to the feminist deficit.


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The feminist deficit: Agency and politics Agency is perhaps the most discussed issue within the field of Islam and gender, but it is also one of the most important concerns of contemporary feminist theory in general.12 As mentioned earlier, many studies, both in and outside the poststructuralist framework, have specified the many ways in which Muslim women have voiced against, actively resisted, or bargained with Islamic patriarchy. Going against the claim that these women are merely passive victims of religious ideology, these studies have illustrated that women do have agency in negotiating religious practices and identities. We see this perspective returning in much of the work on the representation and meaning of the veil. In these studies, scholars illustrate how the signification or experience of the veil is hardly univocal. While some studies present the phenomenon of veiling as ‘accommodating resistance’ (MacLeod 1991), others point out how veiling enhances a feeling of piety important in the modern and political configuration of female Muslimness (Abu-Lughod 1995; Göle 1996; Van Wichelen 2007). Moreover, studies have indicated that Muslim women need not be either passive or resisting: while some ‘bargain’ with Islamic patriarchy (Kandiyoti 1988), others identify with ‘revivalist ideals of motherhood, male authority, and the imagines of the body politic’ (Ong 1990: 258). One recent work that has actively engaged with the question of agency and which has important implications for the overall scholarship on feminist theory is the work of the anthropologist Saba Mahmood. In her work, Mahmood examines the conceptual relationship between bodily notions, the self, and moral agencies in women’s subjectivities through her study of women’s mosque movements in Egypt. According to Mahmood, existing notions of agency are inadequate in fully explaining the mechanisms of becoming female pious subjects. This problem is linked to the ways in which agency has been theorized within feminist theory. She argues for instance, [d]espite the important insights it has enabled, this model of agency sharply limits our ability to understand and interrogate the lives of women whose desire, affect, and will have been shaped by nonliberal traditions. In order to analyse the participation of women in religious movements, such as the Egyptian mosque movement, I want to suggest we think of agency not as a synonym for resistance to relations of domination, but as a capacity for action that historically specific relations of subordination enable and create. (2001: 203)



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Mahmood, thus, critiques modern and postmodern feminist scholarship for not reworking the concept of agency enough. According to her readings, the concept of agency in feminist theory still echoes a dependency on the idea of ‘resistance’ which includes the anticipation of a progressive shift or change. By looking at the ways in which women ‘submit’ or ‘surrender’ themselves and by locating how this pertains to a cultivation or constitution of a notion of self within structures of power, her work seriously attempts to find a way out of the ‘false consciousness’ trap.13 Ultimately, her main argument has the implication that feminism as politics, knowledge, or philosophy that privileges progressivist narratives, is ultimately complicit to the modern project. Secular reason and morality – as proclaimed by the philosophy of enlightenment and the paradigm of modernity – are not the sole anchors through which notions of self and agency are constituted. As such, the assumed basic goals of ‘freedom’ or ‘equality’ might very well not be basic goals for everyone (2004: 13). Feminist theory, she asserts, without exception of poststructuralist feminist theory, is still embedded in this project of modernism which privileges a notion of human agency based on progression (14). Consequently, it is complicit in imposing its ethical particularities onto alien bodies. The Muslim women in The Veiled Monologues became recognizable for the Western (feminist) audience through the ‘unveiling’ of two central feminist issues, namely sexual freedom and individual autonomy. We feel good after seeing the performance because we see strong women that (want to) resist and subvert norms.14 Applying Mahmood’s critique to this particular representation disturbs this feminist commitment and actually asks the question: What if the women are not strong women? What if they choose to remain in a certain status quo that we in the West would define as subordinating or oppressive? When we move back to the textual strategies of the play, however, we can identify stories that are more ambivalent and differentiated. One monologue, for instance, describes the complex and intimate ways in which women from different generations within one Somalian family relate to stories and experiences of female circumcision. Besides narrating stories of victimization, in which circumcision is ultimately deemed as a form of mutilation by a patriarchal and cultural norm, they also narrate stories of empowerment in which women struggle against and/ or subvert these norms. Most interesting, however, is the story of a mother who had come to live with her daughter in the Netherlands. Narrated as a dialogue between mother and daughter, the circumcised


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mother recounts feeling ‘denied’ in the eyes of her (uncircumcised) daughter and her daughter’s friends: Now that I live with you, and among your friends, their pity humiliates me. Circumcision is horrible, yes. But it’s me. It’s who I am. It’s part of my identity. That’s how it is and that’s how it’s supposed to be. Your friends look at me, with eyes ... what I see in them ... I have never felt like that. Their looks denies me. I am obliged to think it’s awful. I am obliged to blame my mother, but I don’t want to. That’s not who I am. I love myself, including everything That happened to me. (Roosen 2006: 48) Without valorizing circumcision, her story upholds that circumcision is part of her life narrative and of her being. If one can speak of resistance, it is a resistance against either/or. This text demands of the audience a validation of her agency – even though this agency is not resisting or subverting the (cultural) norms that allow for female circumcision. Mahmood’s reworking of agency touches the very heart of feminism for it scrutinizes the universality of ‘women’s emancipation’ or ‘gender equality’. Similar to notions of ‘freedom’ or ‘empowerment’ it forces to pose the question whether these are values that everyone wants to engage with. It is radical in that it insists on the need for the notion of agency to be detached from the goals of a progressive politics. Seriously deploying this perspective poses critical problems for the project of feminism as we have come to define it. Mahmood does not entirely explain the political consequences of this new understanding of agency for the project of feminism. Moreover, she does not make explicit whether the project of feminism is worthwhile saving.

Commitment to knowing Responding to poststructuralist perspectives on issues of Islam and gender, scholars have argued that such approaches have paralyzed the politics of feminism (Moghissi 1999; Mojab 2001). The sociologist Haideh Moghissi argues for instance that the new and dominant paradigm of



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postmodern feminist theory has blurred the clarity of political and ideological contexts: At philosophical and political levels there is a profound failure to draw a clearer distinction between the position of fundamentalists and that of a large number of anti-representational post-colonial feminists. At a tremendous cost to women in the Islamic world, concepts of universality, equality, modernity and human rights are lost, as the differences between the vocabulary and the stance of these two positions become less visible. (Moghissi 1999: 47) According to this perspective, poststructuralist feminist theory ultimately leads to a fragmentation of the women’s movement and enhances a cultural relativist attitude that closes possibilities of a (global) feminist politics. Although I do not find this critique doing justice to the ways in which poststructural theories have contributed to a more complex understanding of the concepts feminist scholars are working with – especially a concept so elementary as agency – I acknowledge the necessity to evaluate how these new theories of agency affect the political project of feminism. But rather than resorting to an anti-postmodern standpoint, it would be more productive to explore more closely what exactly it is that Mahmood’s theory of agency is challenging. Two main concerns can be extracted when delving deeper into the critique of Moghissi and how this critique translates to Mahmood’s reformulation of agency. The first concern is the way in which the new definition of agency can effectuate both progressive and conservative outcomes. In such a way it is possible for Moghissi to conflate poststructuralist views with that of ‘fundamentalists’. The other is that Mahmood’s perspective on individual human agency does not speak back to a political or normative imperative. By refusing to render the female subject as being either ‘victimized’ or ‘empowered’, the commitment to formulating a transnational feminist practice falls short because of incommensurable norms and values. Evolving out of these two main concerns, Moghissi’s commitment to remain attached to a (transnational) feminist political practice ultimately comes down to the question of how we can know or recognize the other. According to the anti-postmodern viewpoint, there is no room for recognition in postmodern theory, for difference makes the other unrecognizable. What is more, by acknowledging ‘difference’, in this case religious difference, a universal form of feminist solidarity is lost.


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The ‘commitment to knowing’ should be placed within the same plane as the universalism of ‘speaking for’ the other. According to the cultural theorist Sara Ahmed (2000), the universalism of ‘speaking for’ is premised on fantasies of absolute distance or absolute proximity. Returning to our two existing discourses of victimization and empowerment, we could interpret the first as appealing to the fantasy of absolute distance. In this scheme, by victimizing the other, the global feminist refuses to recognize her, resulting in the other becoming fixed as an object or as a sign. In contrast, including others on the basis of recognizability, which is the case when we interpret others as being empowered, ‘involves the fantasy that one can “get inside the skin of the other” (and speak for her) [and] assumes that the language of universal rights has got “close enough” to the truth of the others (well-) being’ (Ahmed 2000: 166). From this angle, Mahmood’s assessment entails the claim that feminist politics have too often spoken from ‘a position of knowledge that already knows what the undoing of inequality would entail [for the other]’ (Mahmood 2001: 224). Furthermore, habitually, the basis of recognizability for this feminist politics has primarily been premised on a secular-humanist worldview. Returning to our example of The Veiled Monologues, as many interviews with the director have indicated, Roosen’s intention with creating this particular play was to go against the prevailing prejudices against Muslim women in the Netherlands by answering the question: What do we really know about the Muslim woman? This ‘commitment to knowing’, discloses the director’s desire to get inside the skin of the Muslim woman, to unveil her, and to speak for her, so that others will get to know her too. She speaks from a position that possesses the knowledge to know the other woman and assumes that this ‘commitment to knowing’ is a feminist commitment based on what women all over the world share with each other. Although Mahmood rightly scrutinizes feminism’s ‘dual character as both an analytical and a political prescriptive project’ (206), she does not articulate what needs to be done with this prescriptiveness, or how it could be challenged. I would like to suggest that Mahmood’s problem with feminism being a prescriptive project, is that its prescriptiveness has been based on ‘absolute commitments’ based on dominant power relations – the same absoluteness inherent in the way contemporary feminist politics have been invested in ‘speaking for’ Muslim women. In the past, black and lesbian feminist critiques of feminism’s prescriptiveness have already indicated its complicity with dominant codes and norms in an existing web of racial and sexual power relations. Mahmood’s



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contribution involves feminism’s complicity with dominant norms of secularism or liberal understandings of religion and religiosity.

Beyond the ‘woman question’: Toward complicity as epistemology One way to challenge, not prescriptiveness as such (because that would be an oxymoron), but the ways in which we do feminism, would be to do away with ‘absolute commitments’, for instance, by approaching commitment as ‘partial’ which eventually defines the ‘Woman Question’ as being subjected to other ‘Questions’. This partiality, however, can involve the risk of moving in complicit realms, but rather than silencing this actuality, an acknowledgement of complicity could turn it into a productive force. With respect to the study of ‘other’ women – in this case Muslim women – it is necessary to go beyond the ‘woman question’ and examine instead ‘processes of entanglement’ (Abu-Lughod 1998). Going beyond the woman question does not mean that we dismiss important questions of uneven gender relations. Yet, it does attempt to disengage the woman question as a primary locus of research informing and facilitating the way in which we analyze our context-bound research material. Although the woman question has helped us to formulate a critical inquiry into male-dominated power structures and belief-systems, it has also blinded some scholars in seeing other power-relations at play that are vital in evaluating how issues pertaining to Islam and gender are embedded and embodied in historical, social, cultural, and political contexts. Hence, to attend to a feminist engagement within the context of a wider articulation of demands, it is helpful to develop feminist strategies – not based on inclusion – but on what the cultural theorist Ien Ang has called the ‘politics of partiality’ (2001). Instead of a politics based on universal representation, the ‘politics of partiality’ acknowledges that the category of ‘women’ is highly ambiguous. More radically, it acknowledges that other ‘identifications are sometimes more important and more politically pressing than, or even incompatible with, those relating to their being women’ (192). In such a way, recognition is realizable without succumbing to the absolute premise of recognizability. Partiality does not have to mean ‘halfheartedly’ or ‘inadequately’, but should be understood as a commitment to the idea that feminist pol itics or normative structures are constantly redefined and


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reconfigured by social, political, cultural, and religious forces. Political action follows then, from an informed spatial and temporal location. With respect to agency, this denotes that specific relations of subordination are to be explored before strategies of intervention can be announced or organized. This does not mean that we simply justify or tolerate relations of subordination, but that we learn to place them within an informed locality. It also does not mean that this informed locality is authentic or unique – it simply acknowledges the self-identifications of women with their different material and discursive realities. Partiality, I argue, involves complicity. However, it is through an acknowledgement of complicit structures that commitment is possible. The productive component of complicity lies in the acknowledgement that we cannot simply know the other, for the other is already known to us through the knowledge of a ‘we’. Following Ahmed: [T]he stranger is not any-body that we have failed to recognise, but some-body that we have already recognized as a stranger, as a ‘body out of place’. Hence, the stranger is some-body we know as not knowing, rather than some-body we simply do not know. The stranger is produced as a category within knowledge, rather than coming into being in an absence of knowledge. The implications of such a rethinking of the relationship between knowledge and strangers are far-reaching: it suggests that knowledge is bound up with the formation of a community, that is, with the formation of a ‘we’ that knows through (rather than against) ‘the stranger’. (2000: 55) Acknowledging complicity involves asking ourselves why we are fascinated by claims of incompatibility. What is it about feminist epistemology that we are drawn to examining women within dualistic and binary frameworks? Following Denise Riley, the historian Joan Scott calls these dichotomies ‘fictitious unities’ and argues that ‘even as they offer terms for identification, they create hierarchies and obscure differences that need to be seen (paradoxically, the fact that they are fictitious makes their effects no less real)’ (Scott 2003: 5). She further argues that: As feminists, we know that the ruses of essentialism in whatever guises they come ultimately perpetuate inequalities and militate against change. Women need not be the explicit object of debate for us to deploy our analytics of power to useful effect.



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But when they are, when women become the object of campaigns by the forces of good against the forces of evil, it is important to use our methodologies to read what’s going on. (Scott 2002: 8) Put in another way, it means that we need to scrutinize the idea that to engage in feminist theory necessarily includes a so-called committed politics. If feminists are ‘committed scholars’, how are we then to define this commitment? What are we committed to? And where does that commitment take us? As explained in the introduction of this volume, commitment can only emerge when the intellectual recognizes her complicity and can identify the confines of universal politics that are intrinsic to a committed political practice. In ‘putting complicity to work’, room is created to unwrap the dynamics involved in the different manifestations of ‘commitment-kitsch’, which arises from, not the desire to know the other (although this is often articulated as such in colloquial settings), but the desire to construct the other in order to constitute the Self. It is with such an understanding of commitment that we can evaluate anew how a feminist practice can be brought into action.

Conclusion I have attempted to explain how contemporary feminist inquiries focusing on the (in)compatibility of Islam with gender equality have often paralyzed rather than contributed meaningfully to fem inist theory. Instead it has created an impasse by forcing contrary and binary positions ending up in reproducing either/or arrangements. Afsaneh Najmabadi is right to observe that these forced divisions have demanded ‘contrary speaking positions: I must either speak as a Muslim woman or as a secular, anti-Islamic feminist’ (1997: 73). In exploring spaces that stand outside of these absolute dichotomies, she further argues that these spaces should resist acts of inclusion that are premised on recognizability but contends however, that these spaces that feminist scholarship is longing for are yet ‘unavailable intersections’ (74). As I have proposed in this chapter, one way of making such an intersection available is to scrutinize how the ‘woman question’ has been deployed as a mode of inquiry in feminist theory and practice. Agreeing with Najmabadi that we should resist acts of inclusions that are premised on recognizability, the urgent call lies not so much in the commitment to include the other so that the other becomes one of us, nor, to


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‘speak for’ the other as if we are able to know, recognize or embody the other. Such claims of feminist commitments in both theory and politics have been responsible for the convenient application of liberal and progressive feminist understandings of agency onto unrecognizable bodies. In articulating feminist engagements it is important therefore to look carefully at how these articulations are complicit to that which it strongly resisted in the first place.

Notes I would like to thank Marc de Leeuw, Sarah de Mul, and Nadia Fadil for their very constructive comments on an earlier version of this chapter. 1. The Vagina Monologues was a play written by Eve Ensler in 1996 and performed for the first time in October of the same year at HERE Arts Center in New York City. For the play she interviewed 200 women about their perspectives on sexuality and sexual violence. The play gained enormous popularity and traveled to 24 other countries in South America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. 2. These Dutch-Muslim women originated from countries such as Turkey, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Kuwait, Pakistan, Mali, Iraq, and Iran. Strangely enough, Indonesia – the biggest Muslim-majority country in the world and the most important former Dutch colony – was not represented. 3. Some of them were from Muslim countries such as Turkey. Occasionally, guest actresses performed a monologue – this included for instance the (former) Dutch MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali. 4. I saw the performance of The Veiled Monologues in March 2007 at De Brakke Grond in Amsterdam, the Netherlands (Dutch version) and in October 2007 at the Yale Repertory theatre in New Haven, United States (English version). 5. Fitting in more generally within the popular stream of ‘realist’ and ‘true life’ writings. 6. The film was a product she made together with the assassinated Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh. For a more detailed analysis see De Leeuw and Van Wichelen (2005). The autobiographical book Infidel was published by the American Enterprise Institute, a neoconservative think tank in Washington DC. The book became a New York Times bestseller. 7. See especially the academic discussion in the Journal of Women’s History initiated by the feminist scholar Bronwyn Winter (2001) and the discussion in Feminist Review on Islamic Feminism initiated by Shahrzad Mojab (2001). See also Shahidian 1999; Cooke 2000; Moghadam 2002, and Moghissi 1999. These discussions echo earlier feminist claims that culture (or multiculturalism) is ‘bad for women’. This debate, initiated by the political scientist Susan Moller Okin (1999), addressed the ways in which group-rights in a multicultural society created problems for women’s emancipation. Okin’s essay answers affirmatively to the question whether multiculturalism is bad for women and asserts that the West is complicit to misogynist practices of ‘barbaric’ cultures if it prioritizes the rights of minority cultures over that of liberal women’s rights in Western society. Cultural difference, she argues,



8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

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will ultimately lead to relativism, and relativism is bad for women because it weakens ‘our’ claims to gender justice. See for instance Abu-Lughod 2002, Göle 1996, Najmabadi 1997, and Yegenoglu 1998. See for instance Abu-Lughod 1998, Cooke 2000, and Najmabadi 1998. See in this case for example Ong 1999 and Mir-Hosseini 1999. Many thanks to Sarah de Mul for suggesting this important point. See especially Butler (1997), McNay (2000, 2004), and Mahmood (2001, 2004). Mahmood also illustrates this through the work of Judith Butler. Although Butler in her theory of performativity indicates that agency is not normatively pre-scripted, according to Mahmood, Butler does fall into this normative framework by often understanding agency as a subversion to norms. Another good illustration of this ‘unveiling’ but then with respect to African women is for instance the documentary made by Kim Longinotto and Florence Ayisi Sisters in Law, which portrays two female judges in Cameroon who are struggling against a patriarchal juridical system that condones spousal and sexual abuse. Internationally praised, the film was screened at more than 120 festivals around the world and was awarded with many prizes.

References Abu-Lughod, L. (1995) ‘Movie Stars and Islamic Moralism in Egypt’, Social Text, 42(Spring): pp. 53–67. Abu-Lughod, L. (1998) Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Abu-Lughod, L. (2002) ‘Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others’, The American Anthropologist, 104(3): pp. 783–90. Ahmed, S. (2000) Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-coloniality, London and New York: Routledge. Ang, I. (2001) On Not Speaking Chinese. Living between Asia and the West, London and New York: Routledge. Barlas, A. (2002) Believing Women in Islam: Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the Qur’an, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Brown, W. (2006) Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Butler, J. (1997) Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, New York and London: Routledge. Cooke, M. (2000) ‘Multiple Critique: Islamic Feminist Rhetorical Strategies’, in Laura E. Donaldson and Kwok Pui-Lan (eds.) Postcolonialism, Feminism, and Religious Discourse, New York and London: Routledge, pp. 142–60. De Leeuw, M. and S. van Wichelen (2005) ‘ “Please, Go Wake Up!”: Submission, Hirsi Ali, and the “War on Terror” in the Netherlands’, Feminist Media Studies, 5(3): pp. 325–40. Göle, N. (1996) The Forbidden Modern: Civilization and Veiling, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Hirsi Ali, A. (2007) Infidel, New York: Free Press.


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Kandiyoti, D. (1988) ‘Bargaining with Patriarchy’, Gender and Society, 2(3): pp. 274–90. MacLeod, A.E. (1991) Accommodating Protest: Working Women, the New Veiling and Change in Cairo, New York: Columbia University Press. Mahmood, S. (2001) ‘Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival’, Cultural Anthropology 16(2001): pp. 202–36. Mahmood, S. (2004) Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Manji, I. (2003) The Trouble with Islam: A Wake-Up Call for Honesty and Change, Toronto: Random House Canada. McNay, L. (2000) Gender and Agency: Reconfiguring the Subject in Feminist and Social Theory, Cambridge: Polity Press. McNay, L. (2004) ‘Agency and Experience: Gender as a Lived Relation’, The Sociological Review, 52(S2): pp. 173–90. Mir-Hosseini, Z. (1999) Islam and Gender: The Religious Debate in Contemporary Iran, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Moghadam, V.M. (2002) ‘Islamic Feminism and Its Discontents: Towards a Resolution of the Debate’, in Therese Saliba, Carolyn Allen, and Judith A. Howard (eds.) Gender, Politics and Islam, Chicago, IL and London: The University of Chicago Press. Moghissi, H. (1999) Feminism and Islamic Fundamentalism: The Limits of Postmodern Analysis, London and New York: Zed Books. Mohanty, C.T. (1988) ‘Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses’, Feminist Review (30): pp. 61–87. Mojab, S. (2001) ‘Theorizing the Politics of Islamic Feminism’, Feminist Review, 69(Winter): pp. 124–46. Najmabadi, A. (1997) ‘Teaching and Research in Unavailable Intersections’, Differences, 9(3): pp. 65–78. Najmabadi, A. (1998) ‘Crafting an Educated Housewife in Iran’, in L. Abu-Lughod (ed.) Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Okin, S.M. (1999) ‘Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?’, in J. Cohen, M. Howard, and M.C. Nussbaum (eds.) Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 7–26. Ong, A. (1990) ‘State versus Islam: Malay Families, Women’s Bodies, and the Body Politic in Malaysia’, American Ethnologist, 17(2): pp. 258–76. Ong, A. (1999) ‘Muslim Feminism: Citizenship in the Shelter of Corporatist Islam’, Citizenship Studies, 3(3): pp. 355–71. Roosen, A. (2006) ‘The Veiled Monologues’, Discordia Translations (trans.), Theater, 37(2): pp. 22–53. Scott, J. (2003) ‘Feminist Reverberations’, Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 13(3): pp. 1–23. Shahidian, H. (1999) ‘Saving the Savior’, Sociological Inquiry, 69: pp. 303–27. Sisters in Law (film) (2005) K. Longinotto and F. Ayisi (dirs.), 104 minutes, Cameroon/United Kingdom. Submission Part One (short film) (2004) A. Hirsi Ali and T. van Gogh (dirs.), Amsterdam, Column Productions, The Netherlands.



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Van Wichelen, S. (2007) ‘Gendering Muslimness: New Bodies in Urban Jakarta’, in C. Aitchison, M. Kwan, and P. Hopkins (eds.) Geographies of Muslim Identities: Representations of Diaspora, Gender and Belonging, Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 93–108. The Veiled Monologues (De Gesluierde Monologen) (play) (2003) A. Roosen (dir.), Amsterdam, Bos Theaterproducties. Wadud, A. (1999) Qur’an and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman’s Perspective, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Whitlock, Gillian (2005) ‘The Skin of the Burqa: Recent Life Narratives from Afghanistan’, Biography, 28(1): pp. 54–76. Winter, B. (2001) ‘Fundamental Misunderstandings: Issues in Feminist Approaches to Islam’, Journal of Women’s History, 13(1): pp. 9–41. Yegenoglu, M. (1998) Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.


4 ‘Human’ in the Age of Disposable People: The Ambiguous Import of Kinship and Education in Blind Shaft Rey Chow

The most massive form of poverty in today’s world is the one we see in underdeveloped countries, where the combination of the destruction of traditional activities, the domination of foreign financial institutions, the establishment of a so-called New World Order, and so on, leads to a situation ... in which millions of human beings are superfluous. Nobody needs them – they are, so to speak, disposable people ... they are facing – and we are facing once more – the prospect of an extermination whose forms are not only violent but specifically cruel ... Étienne Balibar (2002) (emphasis in the original) In China there is a shortage of everything – but no shortage of human beings! Owner/manager of a coal mine, Blind Shaft

Homelessness as a modern world condition In the essay ‘Letter on Humanism’ (1977: 217–65), published soon after Germany’s defeat in the Second World War, Martin Heidegger refers to the condition of homelessness as ‘coming to be the destiny of the world’ (243). By homelessness, Heidegger means something more than not having a roof over one’s head, even though the notions of dwelling and shelter are not at all excluded from his thinking. Heidegger’s assertion of homelessness as the condition – not merely of the defeated but also of 64 Begüm Özden Firat, Sarah De Mul and Sonja Van Wichelen

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the victorious – of the modern world is part of a critique of the status of humanism in the West. From Roman times to the onset of Christianity, to the Hegelian phenomenology of spirit, the Marxist theory of labor, and Sartrean existentialism, Heidegger writes, every type of humanism, understood ‘in general as a concern that man become free for his humanity and find his worth in it’ (225), has remained erroneously preoccupied with the ‘throng of beings unthought in their essence’ (235) and thus mired in metaphysics. In other words, despite considerable efforts by devoted thinkers, the concern with humanism has hitherto been ensnared – and limited – by a consistent failure to engage with the question of Being, that reservoir or reserve of irreducible surplus presence which sustains every human undertaking but which forever exceeds rational human consciousness. Defined in these terms, humanism is seen by Heidegger to have a relation to Being that is negative – in the form of a forgetting, an exile, a closing off – hence the condition of homelessness, which he specifies as ‘the symptom of oblivion of Being’ (242). ‘Yet Being – what is Being?’ he asks. ‘It is It itself’ (234). My concern in this chapter is not exactly to reconsider various notions of humanism in Western history as such, but rather to ask if and how the suggestive concepts proposed by Heidegger – specifically, homelessness and its implications for what it means to be ‘human’ – can be brought into dialogue with the film Mang Jing/Blind Shaft (2003). Directed and produced by Li Yang, who wrote the screenplay by adapting it from the novella ‘Shen Mu’ [Sacred Wood] by Liu Qingbang (2001),1 Blind Shaft appears in many respects to be just a Chinese story about the plight of migrant workers. (The film was released in early 2003 and won some major awards at film festivals around the world before an edited version was officially released in the People’s Republic late that year.2) But the culturally specific locality of the story is paradoxically also what lends it its abstract, philosophical resonance. What can a story like this bring to the interrogation of humanism – as the corollary of homelessness – that Heidegger initiated over half a century ago? Does humanism – as a concern for human beings finding themselves and becoming free in their humanity – still remain valid for critical thinking and practice, when we are faced with the tragedies of those who are described by Balibar as the ‘superfluous’ and ‘disposable’ people along the peripheries of the contemporary world? Or, are such human tragedies themselves the latest symptoms, as Heidegger wrote, of the oblivion of Being that in fact constitutes humanism itself? Heidegger’s austere deconstruction of the metaphysics of Western humanism, we should note, was framed by an affirmative urging, the urging that we remember, that we think of the ‘essence’ of man in terms


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of what he calls techne and poiesis. However, as David Farrell Krell, the editor of Heidegger’s Basic Writings, points out, this affirmative pedagogical reminder is not without its own problems. Krell puts it succinctly: Why, for instance, insist that there be an ‘abyss of essence’ separating humanity from animality? Perhaps most disturbing, can Heidegger invoke ‘malignancy’ and ‘the rage of evil’ without breaking his silence and offering some kind of reflection on the Extermination? And how can Heidegger’s thought help us to think about those evils that continue to be so very much at home in our world? (Krell 1977: 216, emphasis in the original) The point about the Extermination – that is, the European Holocaust of the mid-twentieth century – is especially salient because, in ways that resound with echoes of contemporary global conflicts, this is a point about the politics of dealing with human beings deemed to be lacking legitimate membership in a particular group, nation, or community – foreigners. Without question, Heidegger’s silence on the Holocaust is deeply troubling; at the same time, if by criticizing such silence what we intend to underscore is the ineluctable urgency of racial/ethnic violence in any account of humanism, it would be equally crucial to move beyond an exclusive focus on the antiSemitism of mid-twentieth-century Europe. In the twenty-first century and, indeed, long before then, racial/ ethnic violence has far exceeded the bounds of the Holocaust, in such ways as to necessitate a rereading of Heidegger’s universalist pronouncements with a much larger set of connotations. From the ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Eastern Europe to the aftermath of 9/11 such as the American implementation of so-called Homeland Security; from the wars led by the United States in the 2000s on Afghanistan and Iraq, to the renewed reinforcement of ‘secularism’ in France in reaction to the wearing of headscarves by Muslim schoolgirls, the question of the boundary between so-called us and so-called them continues to structure collective imaginaries and actions around the globe, from legislation and prohibition to penalization, mass resistance, and suicidal protestation and defiance. At once large and abstract, and quotidian and intimate, this question is also a question about homelessness and what it means to be human. It is from this perspective that I would like to discuss Li Yang’s film.

The ‘local’ tragedy Blind Shaft presents the chilling tale of two wandering coal mine workers, Tang Chaoyang and Song Jinming, engaged in the scam of making Begüm Özden Firat, Sarah De Mul and Sonja Van Wichelen


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large sums of money by murdering a coworker while in the mines, claiming damages by pretending to be kinsmen of the dead person, and then moving on to their next victim. The (privatized) mine owners/managers, who maximize profits by disregarding safety measures, are callously indifferent to the life and death of their workers, and often consent to some form of payment so as to be able to cover up an incident. After successfully performing their mournful acts of monetary transaction and receiving their ‘rewards’, Tang and Song see to it that all evidence is removed by collecting the belongings of the dead as they depart. At the first opportunity they flush the cremation ashes down a toilet. In this frame of mind, they next entice a 16-year-old boy, Yuan Fengming, into pretending to be Song’s nephew and going off with them to a new mine. Everything happens as usual, except that this time Song is beset with doubt because of Yuan’s tender age and because he suspects, after being shown a picture of the boy’s family, that they have already killed his father.3 As the time approaches for the murder to take place in the mine, Song becomes unable to act. Sensing that their conspiracy is about to dissolve, Tang takes matters into his own hands and whacks Song with a metal tool before proceeding to kill Yuan. Miraculously, Song regains consciousness and musters enough strength to strike Tang down before he is able to touch Yuan. The young boy manages to exit the mine just before the regular session of dynamite explosion begins, while the two older men are left behind. As Song’s designated ‘relative’, Yuan now must take charge of his remains – but the irony is that he is also, despite his reluctance, bound by the contract signed by the older men to accept a sum of 30,000 yuan as compensation for the death of his ‘uncle’. Obviously, this film can be interpreted as a local tragedy with an unexpected ‘happy’ ending. As the English synopsis on the DVD jacket indicates, for instance: ‘Blind Shaft presents a hugely ironic vision of the Mainland’s inexorable thrust towards “socialist” advancement with capitalistic characteristics ... The first half hour of the film is a stunning introduction into the dark side of China’s industrialization programme – essentially an exposé of the country’s reliance on and exploitation of migrant laborers ...’ The synopsis in Chinese spells out the ‘meaning’ of the ending more matter-of-factly: ‘The ending is contrary to expectations. Despite the brutality and hopelessness, a sense of humanity still remains’ (Blind Shaft 2003).4 As exemplified by the managers in charge of the mines, the major culprits here are the structural deficiencies that pervade the entire industrial production system in China, where working in coal mines is notoriously dangerous and where the death rate of workers is by far the highest in the world.5 When the leaders are selfish, corrupt, greedy, Begüm Özden Firat, Sarah De Mul and Sonja Van Wichelen

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and irresponsible, the film seems to say, can it be any surprise that the workers don’t give a damn about moral compunctions? If socialism, as a form of modern humanism, is about honoring the contributions and rights – and thus the basic dignity – of the downtrodden classes, Blind Shaft is first and foremost a stark portrayal of the bankruptcy of Chinese socialism at the turn of the twenty-first century, when China moves opportunistically forward, instead, in capitalist global networks of production and exchange. In one scene in which Tang and Song are entertaining themselves and prostitutes at a karaoke bar, they proceed to sing a familiar socialist song with which many Chinese mainlanders grew up, ‘Shehuizhuyi hao’ (‘Socialism Is Good’) – only to be mocked by their companions as ‘hicks’ because the lyrics have long been rewritten to reflect China’s current procapitalist thinking and lifestyles. The old and new versions go respectively as follows: Socialism is good, socialism is good! Socialist countries are high atop. Reactionaries have been overthrown; The imperialists have run away with their tails down! The reactionaries were never overthrown. The capitalists came back with their US dollars, Liberating all the people of China, Bringing about the orgasm of socialism!6 To this extent, when the two men carry out their murder schemes, they are, as Ban Wang points out, simply pushing the reifying logic of capitalism ‘to its grotesque extreme by using other human beings as a source of capital that can yield quick returns’ (Wang 2005: 10). At the heart of this local story is, of course, the typical Chinese intellectuals’ concern about the fate of China as a culture, as suggested in rather explicit terms by the names Tang, Song, and Yuan, which correspond to three major imperial dynasties in Chinese history. Even as the film addresses the Chinese situation with details scarcely known to the rest of the world, however, the obvious locality of its significance quickly morphs into a much larger, even if not immediately visible, picture. No matter how enormous it is, China is simply one player in the unstoppable, transnational processes of exploiting and depleting the earth’s resources so as to satisfy the insatiable demands of human consumption. China’s unprecedented need for energy such as coal is, in this regard, simply part of a vicious circle of ‘world trade’ in which



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we all participate, as is evidenced by the many goods in our possession labeled ‘Made in China’. At the level of nature – as captured on the screen in the desolate, inhospitable landscape – a kind of violence and cruelty is thus being staged in muteness even as our attention remains focused on the human story. There is a way in which the wretched lives of the migrant laborers – not only the makeshift livelihood and deplorable living conditions to which they have been reduced but also the level of depravity to which they have sunk – are a reflection of the bleak environment around them. Together, the laborers and the land form a pool of reserve energy which the world (ab)uses and abandons at will. To this extent, Blind Shaft can be viewed as a gritty, unsentimental documentary of the cesspool that human history has become.7 (There is, for instance, no music from beginning to end to soften things up.) China, where there is ‘no shortage of human beings’, as one coal mine owner/manager in the film puts it – where, in other words, the goods we want can always be produced dirt cheap – is simply the most extreme and egregious showcase of this universal waste dump. But wait, some readers may object, doesn’t the ending of the story give us a modicum of hope, when goodness in the form of remorse (on Song’s part) provides the unexpected twist and rescues the young man, who is symbolically a stand-in for future generations? No matter how small a turn it is, would it not be possible to reinvest a sense of humanism in Song’s change of heart? Could this not be seen as the beginning of a different pathway, even if it is to things we do not yet know for certain? In my view, all such approaches to the film, including the director’s own – which see it alternately as being about local problems of abject migrant labor, global problems of capitalist avarice and environmental debilitation, or a humanistic quest for goodness – are entirely valid but inadequate for explaining the film’s powerful affinities with modern world politics. While all these approaches tend to revolve around the assumption of a moral decline, of the disappearance of a viable value system that effectively monitors human behavior (toward other human beings and toward the earth), the film is, I believe, simultaneously performing another, much less comforting, kind of thinking that goes considerably beyond these more familiar moral concerns. Viewing the film from the domain of the West, it is especially important that we recognize this, and resist the temptation of readily deciphering the message of a film such as Blind Shaft as, simply, an other-culture-speak (or a kind of third-world-speak), with the kind of neoliberal, egalitarian (but in fact discriminatory) undertone that comes across all too often


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in influential publications such as The New York Times. In this spirit, I’d like to suggest that despite Li Yang’s conscious designs, Blind Shaft delivers nothing short of a dramatization, albeit on a small scale, of the predicament of human community formation in general.

Kinship as ‘conscience’ and education as ‘hope’ In a primary philosophical manner, the activity of coal mining reminds us of the inextricable relationship that humans have with nature, of the fact that it is through the excavation and channeling of nature’s energies that human developments – industrial, commercial, cultural – are possible. (The title Shen mu of the original story is, from this perspective, ecologically as well as fictionally suggestive: it refers to the mythic beginnings of the discovery of coal in that area – by some villagers who mistook the inflammable quality of black graphite-like material, churned up from the riverbed after a flood, for the presence of divine spirit.8) For Heidegger, this relationship between humans and nature is premised on a process of revealing, a bringing-forth (in cultural processes that he names techne and poiesis) that, importantly, never ends: The revealing that rules throughout modern technology has the character of a setting-upon, in the sense of a challenging-forth. That challenging happens in that the energy concealed in nature is unlocked, what is unlocked is transformed, what is transformed is stored up, what is stored up is, in turn, distributed, and what is distributed is switched about ever anew. Unlocking, transforming, storing, distributing, and switching about are ways of revealing. But the revealing never simply comes to an end. Neither does it run off into the indeterminate. The revealing reveals to itself its own manifoldly interlocking paths, through regulating their course. This regulating itself is, for its part, everywhere secured. Regulating and securing even become the chief characteristics of the challenging revealing. (Heidegger 1977: 16) Following Heidegger’s hints about revealing and bringing-forth, but not strictly complying with his insistence on the essence of humanity as such, we may ask: what is being unlocked, transformed, stored, distributed, and switched about in the events of Blind Shaft? Other than as a subject ordering the universe by various instrumental means, what kind of truth about ‘human’ is being revealed and brought forth?



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On close examination, I would contend, the story of Blind Shaft is not so much about good versus evil (about, for instance, the murderers versus their latest victim, or the poor miners/laborers versus the capitalist system, and so forth) as about the politics of human group formation. In Tang and Song’s practice of recruiting and murdering strangers, one feature repeats itself as an indispensable melodramatic ingredient: the person they pick must take on the fake identity of being related to one of them by blood (as Yuan has to become Song’s ‘nephew’), so that their eventual claim for damages can be justified. The strategy key to the entire scam is, in other words, the fabrication of a particular unit of social organization – namely, the kinship family – that appeals to others as something natural and authentic. Insofar as the accidental death of a kinsman is deemed a major loss, one that deserves due compensation, the kinship family stands as the inviolable basic social unit – what one might further specify as a kind of inalienable property or evidence of (self) ownership – that rationalizes human relations. Hence, when this basic social unit is perceived to be threatened or harmed (as in the case of a death), it is assumed that it needs, somehow, to be made up for as though it were a fatal injury. What enables Tang and Song’s scam to function smoothly, then, is not simply because they lie but because other people – the owners/managers of the mines in particular – are ready and willing to credit the nonnegotiable centrality of the kinship family. Tang and Song can get away with their murderous schemes because everyone else has always already been fully interpellated into the ‘reality’ of kinship ties.9

Why is kinship so important? Paradoxically, throughout the film these same men who kill nonkinsmen without compunction also reveal themselves as caring and responsible kinsmen: we see them chatting about their sons’ progress at school, sending money home, and contacting loved ones by long- distance phone, promising to be home for the New Year. Despite having to drift from place to place to find work, these murderers have nonetheless not neglected their obligations to their families. Li Yang’s interesting remarks on this crucial (because it is seemingly self-contradictory) dimension of the story are worth quoting at length at this juncture, as they point to what is perhaps most at stake in the interpretation of this film: When I was observing the miners, although their lives were hard, they were not morose or dispirited. They possessed a kind of humour, or a sort of magnanimous view of life – what the Chinese call renming


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(or an acceptance of fate). They want to change their lives but they can’t do it. Being poor citizens they are concerned about how to earn money safely and go home to feed their families. I adopt a sympathetic attitude [toward the two lead characters]. Because one of them wanted to free himself from the evil but couldn’t do it. Though we are confronted with his immense evil, humanity isn’t entirely obliterated and he’s capable of being touched by sentimentality or the benevolent side of humanity. [These two men] have a decent side – they are thrifty as shown by the fact that they are not willing to spend even five dollars watching a video, and they stay in cheap hotels – the first thing they do once they have money is to send some back to their families. Why are such people capable of evil? ... Why are these two people on the road to destruction? The family as a virtue has been passed down through thousands of years of Chinese civilization. Our traditionalist culture in respect to the family, its ethical values, has withstood the Cultural Revolution and foreign invasion. Why has it continued to be passed down the ages? I have constantly thought about this question. The family is a theme in the background, and because of this, you can’t say that conscience has been completely eliminated from the two characters. (Teo 2003: 7–8, emphasis added) Although, in terms of its documentary-like film language, Blind Shaft is on first viewing quite different from other contemporary Chinese feature films, Li’s reflections help clarify how it in fact shares with them a major tendency toward the sentimentalizing of kinship. By attributing to the kinship family – or more precisely, the emotional attachment to the kinship family – the foundational import of ‘conscience’, Li returns us to what I would argue as the very core of Chinese sentimentalism, a sentimentalism whose residual pull is experienced even by the most ruthless of murderers, who are (for Li) themselves victims of the chaotic changes sweeping through China. No less important is the fact that these murderers express their sense of familial attachment in the form of a concern for learning – specifically, for making sure that their children receive a good education. Kinship bonds matter, then, not only as an age-old cultural legacy that has ‘withstood the Cultural Revolution and foreign invasion’, as Li says, but also as a way to the future: such bonds present the possibility of extending one’s life through the secure (social as well as biological) survival of the next generation. Insofar as a redeemable sense of ‘good’ can be traced in the two evil men’s commitment to kinship and education, Tang and Song are not Begüm Özden Firat, Sarah De Mul and Sonja Van Wichelen


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so distinguishable from Yuan: the young boy, we are told, is interested in making enough money so he can return to school. In other words, despite their differences the three males are ultimately subscribing to the same value system in which it is believed that education is the best means of future success, and in which one should have no qualms about sacrificing oneself for one’s kin.10 Moreover, this value system is thoroughly steeped in patriarchy, at least insofar as it is enacted by Tang and Song (Yuan is working so that his sister can stay in school). Through the coal miners we are introduced to a world in which women function primarily as sex objects (prostitutes are a cheap form of entertainment in the towns near the coal mines); the males socialize by sharing cigarettes, drinks, food, baths, sex jokes, and even a hotel room for simultaneous acts of copulation; and a young boy like Yuan must, it is said, be given his initiation into sex (however reluctant he may be) before he can be killed off. The presence of good strong women (such as the young prostitute who was forced on Yuan and the older woman who sees him off at the end) notwithstanding, this is a world in which a projection of the future is made primarily through sons. In addition to caring about his own son’s education, we should remember, Song’s primary reason for hesitating to kill Yuan is that, with Yuan’s father (possibly) already dead, killing the son might mean driving the Yuan family line into extinction. As we move our attention to the vestiges of kinship as the moral – and ideological – backdrop of the story, the violence and cruelty that accompany group formation come into much sharper focus. For instance, although Tang and Song are not related by blood, they have in effect formed a secret, blood-like bond, which serves as the basis for their illegitimate undertakings. What makes their partnership work is none other than an implicit mutual consent to a demarcated interiority of relations, one that must remain firmly marked off from the exterior. The strict adherence to this differentiation between the inside and the outside, this boundary between ‘us’ and ‘them’, is precisely what coheres and sustains the aggression against the outsiders, even as the material wellbeing of the insiders (the ‘family’ or ‘kin’ group) is structurally dependent on – in fact, derived from – the labor, good will, and collaboration of these outsiders. Under this type of social organization, the survival of the insiders – the possibility for them of a future, so to speak – is contingent on the status quo, that is, the continued solicitation, exploitation, and extermination of the ‘foreign’ bodies that are considered as excess and disposable once they have served their utilitarian purpose. Begüm Özden Firat, Sarah De Mul and Sonja Van Wichelen

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In Song’s refusal to carry out the murder plot as planned, the blind and primal desire to continue an inside group’s existence ad infinitum at the expense of outsiders is, notably, interrupted. In this interruption – what amounts to an unprecedented recognition of the outsider’s equal right to life – lies a small but significant opening, whereby Yuan can, presumably, return home, resume his formal education, become a good citizen, and help transform his society. Following the logic of this briefly emergent, benevolent tolerance, it would perhaps be possible, finally, to view education as a type of human cultural activity that occupies the status of techne and poiesis, in what Heidegger would affirm as a positive instance of the challenging-forth of Being. Li, on his part, puts it in the form of hope: ‘As for the ending, vis-à-vis the boy’s fate, I wanted something open. ... A child is the hope of mankind ... He is also the hope of the story’ (Teo 2003: 9). Li’s deliberate intentions notwithstanding, however, the conceptual trajectory taken by the film remains intriguingly ambiguous as to the precise connotations and implications of education as a ‘solution’. For instance, the respect for education is, as I have noted, shared by all the characters, including the irrevocably ‘evil’ Tang (who appears to be semi-illiterate). Yet, if education is unquestionably valuable – the film compels us to ask – how is it that some who believe in it can at the same time be so cruel and indifferent to others, the ‘outsiders’? Can this simply be explained by, or blamed on, ‘causes’ such as the capitalist mode of production, globalization, China’s new social situation, etc. – or does not the answer need to be sought somewhere else? How can a supposedly enlightened belief in the virtue of learning – as the hope for the future – coexist so matter-of-factly with the cold-blooded practice of extirpating those who are not ‘us’ – simply for the sake of money? Is education really the solution to the magnitude of the problems unveiled? Reflected on these terms, the iterative references to education in the film are not unlike the refrains of humanistic platitudes that we encounter everywhere we turn, from the orations of politicians to the declarations of entrepreneurs and media personalities alike – even as the New World Order of inhumanity saturates international relations on a daily basis with incidents of torture, illegal detention, persecution, and numerous other forms of discrimination and brutality against helpless peoples. Exactly what are the power relations that sustain this alienation – not so much the existential alienation created by class or economic disparity (as is so poignantly portrayed in this film), as the disjuncture between the sign of a collective ideal (such as ‘education’), on the one side, and on the other, the violence and cruelty of actual human interactions?



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How do we come to terms with the copresence of these incommensurate human realities – a copresence that, to return to Heidegger’s terminology, seems to be at once the symptom of a certain oblivion and a revelation/bringing-forth that seems nothing short of a fracturing of the continuum of the ‘human’ as such? I am therefore inclined to seeing Blind Shaft as a specifically Chinese sentimental allegory about the very mutation of the concept of ‘human’ – that is to say, as the unconcealment of a process of species-differentiation that is happening at the rupture between the positive sign of human culture, ‘education’ (read: humanity-as-progress, or hope), and the ubiquitous biopolitical warfare around natural and other resources, and above all around kinship and other types of group survival – all of which being, of course, inseparable from education. To bring our reading of Heidegger up to date, perhaps this unconcealment must be recognized as our contemporary global condition of homelessness. In the context of Chinese sentimentalism, the most unsettling questions posed by this film’s narrative and characterization are these: Is kinship, defined as an inviolable interiority of familial/familiar relations as I have specified, in essence the last vestige of morality (and ‘humanity’) left in an utterly amoral world – in the sense that except for the protection and preservation of one’s kin, nothing else really matters? At the same time, is not such commitment to kinship bonds, so deeply rooted in Chinese societies as to be associated with, and reaffirmed as, ‘conscience’ itself, precisely complicit with some of the worst xenophobic – indeed murderous – practices in the contemporary world? What kind of ‘conscience’ are we talking about when kindness is literally – and exclusively – directed at advancing one’s own kin(d)? Ironically, then, the Chinese sentimental attachment to home (in the multiple senses of one’s blood family, kin, house, and so forth – all those ties marked off as the inside of a particular group as opposed to the outside) stands in this analysis as an instructive case in point of the modern and contemporary world condition of ‘homelessness’. As a defense against this dangerous and depressing condition, perhaps our only viable choice is to give allegiance after all to the collective cultural ideality of education (as the last-ditch custodian of Being). Even so, we should probably not forget Balibar’s warning about the inevitability of violence: [S]upposing ... that the counterpart to the experience of cruelty is always some sort of particularly demanding thirst for ideality – either in the sense of non-violent ideals, or in the sense of ideals of justice – how are we to deal philosophically and practically with what


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I consider to be a matter of incontrovertible finality: that there is no liberation from violence, no resistance to its worst excesses, especially no collective resistance ... without ideals? However, there is no guarantee, and there can be no guarantee, concerning the ‘good use’ and the ‘bad use’ of ideals – or, if you prefer, there are certainly degrees in the amount of violence which goes along with civilizing ideals; but nothing like a zero degree. Therefore there is no such thing as nonviolence. (2002: 144)

Notes 1. In an interview conducted in April 2003, Li Yang mentions that this story was given the Lao She Prize, the highest literary award in China. See Teo (2003). 2. See Guan Jingsong (2003). In this interview (conducted at the end of September 2003, when Blind Shaft was shown in Hong Kong for the second time that year), Li indicates that because of the film, which was initially banned, he has been prohibited by the Chinese authorities from all film, television, and commercial making activities. He also mentions his experience of being surrounded and threatened by gun-carrying mine owners and policemen when he visited a coal mine. Reportedly, however, in late 2003 the Chinese Film Bureau ‘suddenly approved what had previously been labeled an “illegal film” for release and distribution’ – apparently, by removing all explicit sex scenes and the subversive version of the song ‘Shehuizhuyi hao’ (‘Socialism Is Good’). For this update, see Michael Berry (2005). Berry’s interviews with Li Yang were conducted in May and November 2003. 3. This is presented as a fact rather than a suspicion in the original narrative. Li Yang explains the alteration as follows: In the film I left it a bit hazy. Maybe Fengming is his [the first victim’s] son, and maybe he is not. In the novel Liu Qingbang makes it clear that they are indeed father and son, but with a population of 1.3 billion people in China, I thought that was a bit too much of a coincidence. So in the film, I intentionally left this detail open-ended. (Berry 2005: 217) 4. From the back cover of Blind Shaft (2003). Translation from the Chinese mine. 5. See, for instance, details given in the investigative reports in Zhonghua tansuo, November 13, 2004, pp. 2, 4. A report in English sums it up this way: Two forces driving Chinese industrial development – cheap, poorly protected labor and rapid, some say even reckless, growth – fall especially heavily on China’s coal mines. They are often small, poorly equipped and poorly ventilated, but owners have been profiting from China’s strong demand for energy ... Work safety officials acknowledge that the hunger for profit and tax revenues among mine owners and local governments often outweighs safety concerns. (Buckley 2004) 6. These versions, translated from the Chinese, are as they appear in the English subtitles of the film, with my slight modifications. According to Li Yang, he



7.

8. 9. 10.

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and his crew found the lyrics on the Internet; see Berry (2005: 226). His point is that Tang and Song, like most people in China who received a socialist education, have been left behind by China’s new social situation. Li Yang’s account of his cinematic language is noteworthy: I intentionally kept the camera at eye level throughout the shoot, so there are hardly any shots above what would be a normal person’s perspective. By doing away with all high and low shots, I wanted to strip the film down to the simplest possible cinematic language. I didn’t rely on any bird’s-eye view shots or experiment with any other shooting angles. The audience is forced to see the film as if they are watching a documentary. (Berry 2005: 224) The only exceptions, he emphasizes, are the opening scene and the closing shot. See Liu Qingbang (2001: 430–1). There are copious references to kin relations in the original narrative. Li explains: When I asked coal miners about what kept them going regardless of the dangers of working in the mines, the response I got over and over was that they needed to send their kids to school. They would often tell me that the only way their situation can change is by making sure their children have a good education. It is this belief that often leads them to risk their lives. (Berry 2005: 222)

References Balibar, E. (2002) Politics and the Other Scene, C. Jones, J. Swenson, and C. Turner (trans.), New York and London: Verso. Berry, M. (2005) Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers, New York: Columbia University Press. Blind Shaft (2003) DVD, Hong Kong: Star Treasure Holdings Ltd. Buckley, C. (2004) ‘166 Still Missing from China Mine Blast’, The New York Times, November 29, A8. Guan J. (2003) ‘Jing mang, xin bu mang: zhuanfang dianying Mang Jing daoyan Li Yang’, Cream, 14: pp. 114–15. Heidegger, M. (1993 [1977]) ‘Letter on Humanism’, in D.F. Krell (ed.) M. Heidegger Basic Writings from Being and Time (1927) to the Task of Thinking (1964), New York: HarperCollins, pp. 217–65. Heidegger, M. (1977) The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, W. Lovitt (trans.), New York: Harper Colophon. Krell, D.F. (ed.) (1993 [1977]) Martin Heidegger Basic Writings from Being and Time (1927) to the Task of Thinking (1964), New York: HarperCollins. Qingbang, L. (2001) ‘Shen mu’, Buding jia gei shui, Changchun: Shidai wenyi chubanshe, pp. 359–448. Teo, S. (2003) ‘ “There Is No Sixth Generation!” Director Li Yang on Blind Shaft and His Place in Chinese Cinema’, Senses of Cinema, 27, http://www.sensesofcinema. com/contents/03/27/li_yang.html date accessed 2003. Wang, B. (2005) ‘Documentary as Haunting of the Real: The Logic of Capital in Blind Shaft’, Asian Cinema, Spring/Summer 2005: pp. 4–15.




Part II Commitment and Complicity in the Production of Knowledge




5 The Middle East and the Disciplinary (Re)Production of Knowledge Andrea Teti

Introduction Reading recent accounts of the ‘state of the art’ in the study of Middle East politics, one might believe there was a politically and intellectually unprecedented state of crisis, particularly in Middle East Studies (MES). Such narratives are dominated by the theme that the supposedly new – if not necessarily brave – world since ‘9/11’ can ill-afford an antiquated intellectual sectarianism and political partisanship of which MES is apparently doubly culpable. To strike a blow in defense of freedom, scholars are asked to abandon such academic parochialism and converge upon a common ground which, through the adoption of Social Science’s objective methodologies, would not only produce policyrelevant scholarship in the ‘War on Terror’,1 but also end the narrow factionalism of traditional academia. By virtually universal agreement, interdisciplinarity – understood as enquiry across fields under the epistemic umbrella of Social Science – is the key to such a common ground. Academics are asked to commit to this cause, their silence or reluctance construed as tantamount to complicity with the ‘enemy’. These claims, however, do not hold up to scrutiny: on closer inspection, these political and intellectual debates appear to be embedded into the very way in which Social Science is articulated as an intellectual enterprise. This chapter sketches some ways in which this articulation takes place. Methodologically, this analysis aims to retrieve the synchronic rules according to which the discourse around these issues operates (its ‘archaeology’) as well as its ‘genealogical’ dimension (Foucault 1992 [1984]: 11–12) exploring how it has been possible to produce and sustain 81 Begüm Özden Firat, Sarah De Mul and Sonja Van Wichelen

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this discourse on interdisciplinarity and on crisis. Thus, the specific construction of ‘interdisciplinarity’, the consequences of that formulation, and the persistence of both can be viewed as ‘principles of regularity’ in those discursive practices which produce a field’s intellectual history (Foucault 2002 [1969]: 191). The chapter’s starting point is the historical fact that neither proclamations of a ‘state of crisis’ nor proposed interdisciplinary solutions are unprecedented. Indeed, the grounds upon which such solutions are predicated arguably make a reconciliation of the ‘Area Studies Controversy’ within Social Science framework impossible. From this apparent contradiction, this chapter begins by analyzing two key features of the discourse through which knowledge about the Middle East is produced, namely interdisciplinarity and crisis. The role these two motifs play suggests a more general enquiry into Social Science as a way of organizing knowledge production, the central feature of which is the division of labor between Disciplines and Area Studies: while Area Studies are charged with data collection and interpretation to form a holistic picture of certain societies, Disciplines use these data to produce ‘law-like generalizations’.2 While the epistemic justification for Disciplines is the universalism of their methods and conclusions, Area Studies ground their legitimacy in a hermeneutic epistemology based on the distinctiveness of ‘areas’. Because neither of these standpoints can be compromised without challenging the very existence of these fields, epistemological divisions are clearly not simply the result of diverging intellectual interests or political recalcitrance: the way Social Science is articulated creates cross-disciplinary gaps, makes them impossible to bridge, and produces a hegemonic understanding of interdisciplinarity which, rather than facilitating intellectual reconciliation, polices and disciplines those gaps. Moreover, the epistemic alterity of Area Studies with respect to Disciplines coupled with the typically Orientalist culturalist alterity ascribed to the non-West give rise to a ‘double ventriloquism’ in Social Science: in the production of Social Scientific knowledge, alterity can be silenced both in an Orientalist passage from ‘native voice’ to Area Studies, and again in the universalizing transition into Disciplines. This particular articulation of the discursive space enveloping the ‘native voice’ suggests extending this analysis through a parallel with the subject positions found in the discourse of Confession (Foucault 1998 [1976]). The second half of this chapter argues this ‘confessionalism’ obtains at key points in Social Science: avowedly grounded in a ‘care for the Other’, hegemonic discourses at the level of Disciplines and


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of Area Studies are set up to fail in their duty of care for their respective Others. This apparent contradiction permits an application of discipline which contributes to the reproduction of the discourses themselves through what can be called a double politics of care-failure-discipline. Social Science as a way of organizing the production of knowledge is ‘performative’ in all these senses: it defines what counts as knowledge, organizes its production, and polices those boundaries through a confessional biopolitics of care-failure-discipline. It is these ‘spirals of power’ in which the commitment and complicity to which scholars are incited are caught.

The politics of crisis and interdisciplinarity The ideas that contemporary MES is in crisis and that this crisis is unprecedented have been Leitmotivs of debates at least since the mid1990s. On closer inspection, however, the field’s state of ‘crisis’ appears to be far from unprecedented: such calls have been regularly made since the field’s inception, but have regularly gone unheeded. Moreover, whenever a ‘crisis’ was claimed, ‘interdisciplinary’ scholarship has been suggested as a ‘solution’, and equally regularly has failed to materialize. This raises the question of why, if indeed there is a sense of political and intellectual urgency, this interdisciplinary convergence has not occurred. This approach reveals MES’ and IR’s shared roots within Social Science as a single framework for organizing, producing and validating knowledge, and highlights the consequences of that framework’s characteristics on the kind of knowledge produced, debates about interdisciplinarity included. As with other Area Studies, the way contemporary calls for interdisciplinarity are framed – namely, that the world since ‘9/11’ cannot afford intellectual-political sectarianism, and that striking a blow for freedom requires converging onto a common ground – often implies it is simply a matter of intellectual will for such research to appear, of rallying scholars to an intellectual banner (Khalidi 1994; Tessler 1999). By extension, those who ignore or refuse such suggestions are at best naïve, and at worst complicit with the ‘enemy’. This raises the question of why calls for interdisciplinarity remain unanswered. This section argues that the way these recurring debates have been framed actually makes the problem identified impossible to resolve. First, it will be shown that neither proclamations of a ‘state of crisis’ nor its interdisciplinary solution are unprecedented. Indeed, contemporary solutions and their antecedents virtually as far back as the origins of


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the field either side of the Second World War, arguably make a reconciliation of the ‘Area Studies Controversy’3 within a Social Science framework impossible (Mitchell 2003). Second, it will be shown that interdisciplinary enquiry is equally frequently singled out as the solution to that crisis, where the appropriate epistemic standards for such enquiry are argued by would-be reformers to be those of and objectivist, universalist and ultimately quantitative Social Science (Teti 2007). This construction of interdisciplinarity suggests a different understanding of the Area Studies Controversy. Thus formulated, interdisciplinarity cannot ‘bridge the gap’, but rather allows Disciplines to police, discipline and ultimately attempt to ‘colonize’ the knowledge produced in MES: posed in these terms, the debate about ‘crisis’ and the recourse to ‘interdisciplinarity’ cannot be resolved short of subsuming Area scholarship under the rubric of Disciplines’ epistemological commitments. Rather than aiding interfield reconciliation, the field’s history suggests ‘interdisciplinarity’ is associated with the legitimization of mainstream standpoints, policing those very boundaries they supposedly undermine, and disciplining dissent by delegitimizing epistemological alternatives. Although the field’s roots can be traced to the interwar period, the 1950s marked the crystallization of the Areas/Disciplines separation, as well as the first identification of the ‘gap’ between Disciplinary and Area scholarship. Two prominent prewar scholars, HAR Gibb and Harold Bowen, undertook a research project under the aegis of the UK’s Royal Institute for International Affairs (RIIA) which can be considered paradigmatic of how MES was understood. The project established a spatial, temporal, and empirical taxonomy which influences MES to this day. It is based on a tripartite temporal categorization – pre-nineteenth century, and contemporary world, a 12-fold sociopolitical taxonomy ranging from family and village, to government and religion. Insofar as it emphasized the ‘organic study of the life of Moslem societies, and the force, ideals and tendencies at work in them’ (Gibb and Bowen 1950: 3–14, emphasis added), the project also institutionalized the Orientalist representation of Islam as ‘a cultural unity, based upon a common cultural core which only the Orientalist was equipped to decipher’ (Johnson and Tucker 1975: 7; Mitchell 2003: 5). This represented a departure from contemporary conventional scholarship insofar as it focused on the contemporary world. Thus, in the early 1950s, ‘interdisciplinarity’ meant simply supplementing training in philology and ancient history with contemporary politics and history. This move was driven by scholars like Gibb, von Grunenbaum,



and Smith whose explicit intention was to establish ‘a new kind of Orientology’ (Halpern 1962: 111).4 Soon enough, however, this understanding was displaced by a positivistic definition which remains in place today, identifying ‘interdisciplinarity’ with the combination of Area Studies knowledge with Disciplinary methods. Binder (1958), for example, argued that any thorough understanding of regional and international politics required cross-fertilization between International Relations and Area specialists. This new approach was thought necessary because ‘while most Orientalists have remained interested in the past, Orientals themselves have become intent upon modernization’ (Halpern 1962: 111). The interdisciplinary ‘exchange’ notably involved no compromise for Political Science – it was to continue being fed empirical data – while MES was expected to overhaul its epistemic commitments and methodological tools. Henceforth, the function of MES would be, in the intentions of its reformers, to achieve a systematically organized body of knowledge, a data-gathering Cinderella to the analytical Disciplines (e.g. Gibb and Bowen 1950, 1957). During the 1960s, political and intellectual cleavages emerged which still characterize the field today, with critics of ‘traditional’ MES arguing it had devoted itself ‘to a kind of stamp-collecting, neglecting to identify the essential structures and relationships or to assay preliminary synthesis’ (Halpern 1962: 118). First, conventional scholarship is accused of focusing on over-particularistic variables. Dismissing ‘humanist’ scholarship, ‘Orientologists’ are criticized for emphasizing ‘words’ over ‘actions’: ‘traditional Orientologists suffer from the vices of their virtues: so great is their contribution to documentation that Middle Eastern actions are neglected’ (Halpern 1962: 116). Accusations of political bias were also used to delegitimize traditional scholarship, accused of being inadequate to the day’s urgent policy needs. Some European scholars, for example, had been involved in colonial administrations, and to their American counterparts this entailed a professional interest in internal divisions of colonial peoples incompatible with objective analysis of contemporary sociopolitical changes (Halpern 1962: 117).5 At any rate, lest the 1950s’ advances become the ‘Indian summer’ of MES, Halpern called for a ‘New Orientology’ based on an ‘interdisciplinary’ shared research agenda adopting the universalist methodological tools of Social Science ‘to advance valid comparative analysis among institutions and relationships across Middle Eastern time and space’ (1962: 118). Just how entangled MES’ history is in outright politics, however, is difficult to overemphasize. For example, North America’s first MES


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journal, Middle East Studies (1958–64) as well as the American Association for Middle East Studies (AAMES) which published it were both forced to close in 1964 following scandals linked to funding from political sources (Mitchell 2003: 10–11; Winder 1987: 59–60; Zartman 1970: 5). Nor did the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA), AAMES’ successor, prove more immune from politics, being suspected of partisanship – notably on occasion of both the 1967 and 1973 Arab-Israeli wars – to the point that the Association of ArabAmerican University Graduates (AAUG) was formed in 1967–8 in direct competition with MESA. The 1970s mark the crystallization of these political/intellectual divisions. The decade opens with MESA’s ‘New Orientologists’ concerned with displacing or co-opting remaining traditional Orientalists and the increasingly vocal ‘fringes’ in the AAUG. At MESA’s 1973 Research and Training Committee, Binder again accused MES of being ‘beset by subjective projections, displacements of affect, ideological distortion, romantic mystification, and religious bias, as well as by a great deal of incompetent scholarship’ (Binder 1976: 16) all of which would be cured thanks to an injection of social scientific methods, which would finally allow MES to ‘come of age’. Tellingly, the 1970s close with the publication of Orientalism and Arab Studies Quarterly, and the historic MESA debate between Bernard Lewis and Edward Said, the latter’s success symbolically sealing the failure of yet another attempt at ‘bridging the gap’ on Social Science’s terms. Thus, the decade closed with the consolidation of the political and intellectual div ision between a mainstream based on an ‘alliance’ between (materialist) Political Science and (interpretivist but essentialist) ‘Orientalists’ accepting the region’s sociopolitical unity and exceptionalism, and a politically ‘progressive’ intellectual opposition including Marxian, poststructuralist, and mainstream MES perspectives who reject such essentialisms. In the early 1980s, MES is again criticized for not moving beyond ‘inadequate conceptualization, overemphasis on historicism and the uniqueness of the Islamic-Arab situations, and neglect of a truly comparative outlook’ (Korany and Dessouki 1991: 2). Many critics also argue that ‘Arab politics can be understood in the same socialscientific terms as politics elsewhere’ (Green 1986: 613). Although these arguments evidence anti-Orientalist components in Disciplinary scholarship, they are also both dismissive of alternative, ‘unscientific’ approaches and, paradoxically, themselves imbued with Orientalist heritage. In just such a telling mix of Social Scientific and Orientalist



tropes, Green describes MES as a ‘pseudo-discipline’, at best an ‘oncology’ among Disciplines, since it ‘cannot make very encouraging prognoses, and wishes it knew far more than it does’, shortcomings attributed to the region’s sheer ‘complexity’ and ‘unpredictability’ (Green 1986: 611). Attempting to bypass post-Orientalist critiques while reprising well-worn interdisciplinary Leitmotivs, there are also calls for combining ‘old Orientology’s’ case study approach with Political Science. While MES was accused of remaining theoretically underdeveloped, what convergence had occurred apparently (again) produced a corpus of scholarship which would enable it to ‘come of age’ (Green 1986: 612). The 1990s provide no respite from ‘scientific’ refrains: yet again, a sense of ‘crisis’ – again supposedly unprecedented, this time courtesy of the end of the Cold War – leads to questions like the one providing the title for Rashid Khalidi’s MESA Presidential address: ‘Is there a future for Middle East Studies?’ (Khalidi 1994). Khalidi accepts both his predecessors’ diagnosis that MES is ‘theoretically underdeveloped’ and their prescription of greater ‘interdisciplinary awareness’. And although James Bill argues that the field has learned ‘disturbingly little’ since its inception, again, as they had in past decades, most scholars agree that opportunities for cross-fertilization abound: for Gause (1998), for example, the region affords ideal opportunities to study multifaceted security conflicts and balancing exercises, while for Korany the region is ‘an intellectual laboratory ... for both area specialists concerned with micro-level description and generalists interested in empirically based model-building’ (1999: 57). But these suggestions show no evidence of epistemic compromise. Indeed, although both post-Orientalist and Disciplinary scholarship reject the notion that political regularities are area-bound, deep tensions remain between them. Bates, for example, dismisses non-Disciplinary scholarship arguing that ‘the goal of the social scientist is not to achieve ... verstehen; it is to identify lawful regularities which ... must not be context-bound’ (1997: 123). Korany’s tournoure de phrase itself is revealing of the epistemic parameters through which Disciplinary scholarship continues to understand its relationship with ‘Areas’, as is Richards and Waterbury’s unabashed defense of modernization theory,6 and Laitin’s argument that Area Studies should provide ‘tantalizing’ data for theorists (1993: 3). Most striking however, is the ‘cure’ suggested among others by Khalidi himself: for him, MES’ ‘future lies in being part of the departments of comparative literature, political science, history ... These disciplines ... have more powerful institutional support, and most of them can claim to be more universal’ (1994: 5). This


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call is far from isolated (Heginbotham 1994: 33–40), with the Mellon and Ford Foundations declaring the post–Cold War obsolescence of ‘area approaches’,7 and both ACLS and SSRC dissolving their Joint Area Studies Committees (Bilgin 2004: 424). SSRC President Kenneth Prewitt justified the changes arguing for the imperative to ‘internationalize’ Area Studies, focusing instead on cross-regional and thematic inquiry (Abraham and Kassimir 1997) capable of speaking the language of Rational Choice Theory and aiming to find ‘globalisable’ – that is, universalist – analytical frameworks (Heilbrun 1996; Cumings 1997). Finally, the political attacks on MES after the Cold War and especially after 9/11 add a further dimension to this standoff: with the (neo)conservative right, Daniel Pipes and Martin Kramer accused MES of failing to provide a sufficient quantity and quality of policy-relevant studies, and of stifling ‘alternative’ (pro-US and pro-Israeli) scholarship. For them, not only have MES’s research failures been so severe that they advocate control over research through the reigns of National Security and Education Act ‘Title VI’ funding,8 but so biased against US interests are MES scholars that they encourage de facto blacklisting via websites like campuswatch.org. Given ‘interdisciplinarity’ so defined, it is perhaps unsurprising that, from Binder in the 1950s onwards, the terms of debates concerning this interdisciplinary ‘gap’ and its solution have remained substantially unchanged. In reaffirming the emancipatory potential of Social Science’s objectivity and de-emphasizing languages and histories in favor of quantitative methods, such calls predicate an interdisciplinary ‘encounter’ on an idea of universal knowledge which contradicts the foundations of Area Studies, relegating them to the status of junior partners (Rafael 1994). Epistemological and methodological differences between IR and MES, therefore, as between Disciplines and Area Studies generally, are rooted in different ontological – and thus epistemic and methodological – commitments. The foundations of interpretivist approaches undermine universalist claims since they imply ‘knowledge’ is neither spatiotemporally neutral, nor observer-independent. It is these epistemic differences which provide the greatest obstacles to interdisciplinary convergence.9 From this point of view, Khalidi’s call is entirely understandable: it is in line with Disciplines’ vocation to produce universal knowledge. Indeed, if a pattern may be discerned in these debates it is the ‘imperialist’ tendencies built into the fabric of the Disciplines/Areas dichotomy in the form of Disciplines’ universalist aspirations which seem to have translated into vibrant attempts to ‘colonize’ MES.10



Social Science as a mode of knowledge production This paradoxical role of interdisciplinarity suggests a more general enquiry into the way Social Science organizes the production of knowledge. Rooted in Positivism and ultimately in European Enlightenment, Social Science became prominent in the United States roughly during the interwar period thanks to private foundations and then to the 1958 US National Defense and Education Act (NDEA), which funded Area Studies to supplement the new superpower’s dearth of expertise and policy-related scholarship during the early years of the Cold War (e.g. Gendzier 1985; Hajjar and Niva 1997: 2–9; Johnson and Tucker 1975: 3–20; Mitchell 2003). The key features of Social Science as a way of organizing knowledge production were firstly, that what counts as ‘knowledge’ was understood to be ‘law-like generalizations’ invariant in time, space, or observation; and second, a division of labor between Disciplines and Area Studies in order to produce such knowledge. This division inscribed into the very foundations of academic enquiry a series of supposedly natural binary couplings such as theoretical/empirical and universal/particular which shape the way knowledge is defined and produced. Thus, while Area Studies are charged with the collection and interpretation of data to form a holistic picture of the societies under scrutiny, Disciplines such as Political Science – or, at least, their mainstreams – use this data in order to produce ‘law-like generalizations’ (Mitchell 2003: 2–5).11 Implicitly, this establishes a hierarchy between universalist/scientific knowledge-generating Disciplines and particular, data-gathering Area Studies (McCaughey 1984). This division of labor, however, also implies the epistemic primacy of Disciplines over Area Studies insofar as the goal of Social Science as a whole is tasked to the epistemologically universalist Disciplines rather than to ‘particularlist’ Area Studies. In this sense, then, a hierarchy is established between the two which makes it possible to argue that research conducted under the rubric of the latter should be ultimately subject to the epistemic priorities of the former. This, in turn, creates conditions for an ‘imperialism’ of the Disciplines whereby the research agenda of Area Studies becomes an object of scrutiny through the lens of Disciplines’ methodological privilege. Thus, Social Science establishes ‘sovereign structures of universal knowledge’ (Mitchell 2003: 9) in two senses that it pursues an unassailably objective and universal knowledge, and that it sanctions the ‘imperium’ of Disciplines over Area Studies. Thus, while the epistemic justification for Disciplines is the universalism of their methods and conclusions, Area Studies ground their


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legitimacy in a hermeneutic epistemology based on the distinctiveness of its ‘area’. Perhaps emblematic of the integration intended between Disciplines and Area Studies is a comment by Carnegie Corporation’s Pendelton Herring recognizing that indeed ‘the conceptual schemes upon which these disciplines are based are, in large measure, the product of Western thought and institutions’ but arguing that ‘if there be a provincialism within these disciplines, it will be quickly revealed when the expert applies his formulations to alien cultures’ (cited in Wagley 1948: 6–7). But if most Disciplines’ mainstreams share epistemological and ontological commitments not far removed from Comtean dreams of a ‘social physics’, it then becomes unsurprising that they mostly view regions like the Middle East as regions ‘like any other’ (Valbjørn 2004: 52), assuming regional politics can be understood using the same categories and variables as those deployed elsewhere,12 looking upon them as a variation upon a single set of universal laws.13 Conversely, Area Studies scholarship tends to view its geographical remit as a region ‘like no other’, emphasizing its distinctiveness sometimes to the point of Orientalism.14 The epitome of the holistic role which Area Studies was initially to take on in the production of social scientific knowledge was Gibb and Bowen’s RIIA-sponsored project aimed at the ‘organic study’ of Muslim societies, and the institutionalization of the (Orientalist) representation of ‘the Islamic [as] a cultural unity, based upon a common cultural core which only the Orientalist was equipped to decipher’ (Mitchell 2003: 5, Johnson and Tucker 1975: 7) which that study embodied. However, Area Studies such as MES quickly distanced themselves from this Social Scientific pas-de-deux, as the debate over ‘interdisciplinarity’ indirectly testifies. Indeed, in a sense, the division between Areas and Disciplines itself seems to have created the conditions for ‘forgetting’ their shared foundations in a single Social Scientific project. Area Studies soon began to de-emphasize the possibility of generalizing, particularly beyond original spatiotemporal contexts, by invoking both the specificity of the hermeneutic tools required to access and decode ‘local knowledge’, and those Orientalist representations of the non-Western Other as uniquely threatening and radically different. The latter in particular helped legitimize the intellectual necessity and political urgency of their endeavors. This Social Scientific division of labor, then, particularly in conjunction with its Orientalist heritage, created the very conditions for the gap between ‘humanistic’ Area Studies and social scientific Disciplines to



come about: insofar as this ‘gap’ is embedded in, and literally produced by, a particular way of organizing the production and validation of knowledge, its roots also begin to clarify its persistence. What allowed Disciplines and Area Studies to become autonomous fields was not simply their different realms of enquiry, it was the legitimacy and distinctiveness of their respective epistemologies and methodologies. It was the very nature of their object of knowledge which required Orientalists be endowed with, and frame their knowledge in terms of interpretive tools: language, history, and culture allowed them to decipher the ‘Arab mind’. Conversely, the distinctiveness and legitimacy of Disciplines is rooted in the universality of their methods and their results: to particularize either would undermine their ability to claim a separate ‘territory’ of society as their own, challenging their very raison d’être. To challenge these epistemic standpoints is to challenge the very existence of these fields.15 From this vantage point, it is easier to understand how and why different possible formulations of ‘interdisciplinarity’ will have different cross-field implications. Indeed, the history of the politics and of the epistemology of Social Science suggests that its continuing divisions are not simply the result of diverging intellectual or political commitments: the Social Scientific project itself is articulated so as to create specific kinds of interdisciplinary gaps, make them impossible to bridge, and produce a hegemonic understanding of interdisciplinarity which, far from reaching its avowed aim of intellectual reconciliation, polices and disciplines that difference. But the Disciplines/Areas division of labor and its ensuing hierarchies has further implications for the kind of knowledge produced. Specifically, it can be argued that the epistemic alterity of Area Studies with respect to Disciplines coupled with the typically Orientalist culturalist alterity ascribed to the non-West are at the root of a ‘double ventriloquism’: on the road to producing Social Scientific knowledge, alterity tends to be silenced both in the passage from the ‘native voice’ to Area Studies – as a result of the interpretive hermeneutics through which Area Studies claim access to the reality of a locality – and again in the passage from a truth of the Other constructed in Area Studies to Disciplines via the latter’s universalizing methods. The key to these ‘ventriloquisms’ is the claim to the possession by the respective speaking subjects of interpretive keys capable of revealing the truth behind their counterparts’ condition. MES’s largely hermeneutic epistemology implies that the truth of the Middle Eastern Other can be revealed only through the deployment of MES’s epistemic tools. Analogously, Disciplines’ universalist


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and objectivist epistemology becomes the filter through which the truth behind the holistic but ‘raw’ data gathered by Area Studies can be revealed. In both cases, the epistemic parameters through which the relation between knowledge production and its objects of interest is articulated is such that they place those objects ‘in a network of relations of power with those who claim to be able to extract the truth of these confessions through their possession of the keys of interpretations’ (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982: 174, emphasis in original).16 In this sense, the way in which separation between Disciplines and Area Studies and between Area Studies itself and the ‘Other’s voice’ are constructed within Social Science involves a double elision of Otherness: first through Area Studies’ hermeneutics, then through Disciplines’ silencing of hermeneutics itself. This has implications for Social Science’s claim to be able to produce universal, objective knowledge: paraphrasing Pendelton Herring, it appears that while it is recognized that Social Science’s conceptual schemes are indeed the product of Western thought and institutions, it is no longer clear that any provincialism within these disciplines will be quickly revealed through applications to alien cultures. In fact, since both the Disciplines/Areas separation and the constitution of the Middle East as a sociopolitically exceptional unit are rooted in the universalization and normalization of Western experience(s), the non-Western Other comes to be understood as deviation – both analytical and moral – from a Western-defined norm in precisely the way which Said’s Orientalism critiqued. Thus, for example, Halpern can argue that one should study Western societies through Disciplines, whereas ‘Areas’ are confined to the nonWestern world since ‘only a society that has already achieved a dynamic stability can afford to think of politics, economics, or culture as genuinely autonomous realms of existence’ (1962: 121). This stance not only reflects the Disciplines/Areas division of labor by taking it for granted, it also implies a specific, single trajectory from premodernity to modernity, and insofar as these notions of (pre)modernity are Orientalist, Halpern’s argument neatly illustrates precisely the ‘double ventriloquism’ at play in mainstream Social Science. Moreover, these kinds of moral-analytical biases tend to be obscured as a result of the objectivity and universalism (and instrumentalism) through which Social Science as a whole is legitimized. It is this ‘double b(l)ind’ and its associated ventriloquism in which the inertia of historical trajectories in the organization of knowledge production – particularly (inter)disciplinary scholarship – are rooted.



Confession and the double politics of care, failure, and discipline The initial problem this chapter considered – the debate over the purpose of post–Cold War and particularly post-9/11 MES – lead first to considering the history and politics of crisis and interdisciplinarity, and then to some features of the framework for the organization and production of knowledge within which MES is itself embedded, namely Social Science. The implications of these features – primarily Social Science’s ‘imperialism’ and ‘double ventriloquism’ – provide the basic and often assumed epistemic criteria through which contemporary debates about MES are articulated. Some features of the relationship which Social Science sets up between Area Studies and the ‘native Other’ and between Disciplines and Area Studies itself suggest an extension of this analysis, namely, the exploration of a parallel between these pairs of subject positions and those found in Michel Foucault’s analysis of confession. This analysis considers the way in which the relationship between sinner and confessor is set up with particular relation to sex as a cause of deviance, identifying a number of key elements, specifically: a ‘specification of individuals’ which posits an ultimately essential and deviant alterity; the production of knowledge through a ‘method of interpretation’ which disenfranchises the ‘confessing’ subject; and a series of ‘effects of power’ reinforcing and reproducing the hierarchy between sinner and confessor despite a nominal commitment to the former’s emancipation (Foucault 1998 [1976]: 18–25, 41–6, 58–67). Social Science can be argued to display precisely such ‘confessional’ characteristics in its articulation of relations between Disciplines and Area Studies, and between the latter and the ‘native Other’. This section sketches this parallel and considers some of its key implications. First, just as the construction of sexuality in the sinning/confessing subject, Disciplines and Area Studies provide a ‘specification of individuals’ (42–4) for their respective Others as inescapably deviant. For Area Studies, this alterity is epistemological, while for the ‘native Other’, it takes the form classically attacked by Said. Particularly for the latter, it is clear that this marks alterity with an ‘intrinsic latency and a general and diffuse causality’ (65–6). Analogously to Foucault’s description of sex, the nature and mechanism of that alterity which MES is charged with interpreting is ‘obscure; it was elusive by nature; its energy and its mechanisms escaped observation, and its causal power was partly clandestine’ (88), necessarily prone to unpredictable deviations from


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the ‘rationality’ of Normal politics, even when they appear to conform to the (Western) norm. Similarly, Area Studies’ hermeneutic epistemology cannot ultimately provide a safe grounding for ‘knowledge’ in Social Science – after all, ‘the goal of the social scientist is not to achieve ... verstehen’ (Bates 1997: 123). Moreover, because this alterity is credited with this inextinguishable and polymorphous causal power, the significance of singular events tends to be magnified insofar as they are read as manifestations of precisely that deviant causal power, tautologically demonstrating their deviant causality. Thus, ‘[t]he most discreet event – accident or deviation, deficit or excess – was deemed capable of entailing the most varied consequences’ (Foucault 1998 [1976]: 65) and Arabo-Islamic alterity, like sex, is indeed commonly adduced as explanation for a vast range of occurrences, from revolution and authoritarianism to dress codes, from patriarchy to terrorism; and in current debates over MES and its policyrelevance, formulations of interdisciplinarity sketched above effectively ‘screen’ hermeneutics out of Social Science knowledge.17 Finally, like Confession, both Disciplines and Area Studies in relation to their respective Others produce truth by means of a ‘method of interpretation’ (66–7), a grid which allows the Confessor to listen to its Other, whose ‘confession’ is required in order for the truth of that Other’s condition to be revealed. However, this confession is necessary but not sufficient to uncover truth: the ‘sinner’ cannot access the truth of its own position, but must have it revealed by the ‘confessor’: ‘[t]ruth did not reside solely in the [confessing] subject [...] It was constituted in two stages: present but incomplete, blind to itself, in the one who spoke; it could only reach completion in the one who assimilated and recorded it’,deciphering what was said (6). This confessional relation establishes the basic conditions for what counts as knowledge – and truth – about the Other. Specifically, the method of interpretation disenfranchises the confessing subject of access to the truth of its own condition by establishing a hierarchy of power and authority between Sinner and Confessor (Disciplines/Area Studies, Area Studies/native Other). Paradoxically, the Other can only access the ‘truth’ about itself through accepting the authority of – and thus the truth produced by – the Western Self, accepting the role of eternally confessing subject, and admitting an ‘original sin’ which by definition, by the depiction of its own nature, it can never transcend. Moreover, there is a particular relation between the truths Selfhood tells about itself and those it tells about its Other(s): the Other must ‘speak the truth [but since it is] oblivious to its own nature, we reserve



for ourselves the function of telling the truth of its truth [...] and we demand that it tell us [...] that truth about ourselves which we think we already possess’ (69). The ‘confessional’ relation between these pairs of subject positions derives from the combination of a truth of alterity which requires scrutiny, and the necessity of scrutiny by the Normal in order to reveal the sources, seriousness, solutions of deviance. Only thus may a progressive goal – for example, interdisciplinary and policy-relevant knowledge – become possible. However, just as the virtue gained through penitent confession is always thwarted by sexuality’s inherent deviance, an inescapably constant tendency to deviance is generated by the nature of the alterities constructed by Social Science, forever precluding both the full emancipation of non-Western Others, and the parity of hermeneutic epistemologies with Disciplinary universalism.18 Thinking about these pairs of relations within which the contemporary debates over MES are played out in terms of the confessional parallel provides an insight into their disciplinary politics. For Foucault, Confession is paradigmatic of biopower, a form of power which essentially revolves around the definition of, and care for the Self. There are, indeed, two bodies politic identified by Social Science’s paired discourses: the West and the ‘rest’. Moreover, the discourses which have these bodies as their objects are predicated on an avowed care not only for the Self speaking from the position of the Confessor, but also for its Others, attempting to shape their subjectivity so that they too would become ‘subjects in both senses of the word’ (60). These are discourses, then, which are grounded in a duty of ‘care for the Other’ inextricable from a duty of ‘care of the Self’. Yet, insofar as the emancipatory goals those discourses establish for both their Selves and their Others are unattainable, these discourses also set up their protagonists to fail: if the Other cannot be redeemed, the Self cannot fulfill its duty of care toward either its Other, or toward itself. But if in these discourses’ emancipatory goals is grounded the legitimization of the authority to guide the reformation of their Others, their failure to achieve these goals helps legitimize the disciplining of those failing Others. Moreover, since what is being targeted by these discourses is not the Other per se but a ‘Pathological’ deviation from the ‘Normality’ these discourses establish, dissent within the Self’s body politic also becomes a target of discipline. But its application, the attempt to correct, is as unable to achieve its objective as is reform: the initial assumption of an essential, insurmountable alterity provides the lynchpin of the reproduction of that discursive framework. Hegemonic discourses at these two


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junctures are set up to fail in their duty of care, but in so doing provide the grounds for an application of discipline which paradoxically aides the reproduction of the discourses themselves. From a double politics of care flows a double politics of failure and of discipline. It is this basic framework that both the post-9/11 discourse on, for example, Middle Eastern alterity and the debates about MES itself are ‘securitized’. The ‘confessional’ relation established through the construction of polymorphous, latent, and inextinguishable causality of sex in Foucault, is therefore mirrored as much in Said’s analysis of Orientalism as in the representations of crisis and of interdisciplinarity in debates over MES. Confession’s particular kinds of subject positions based on a pathological alterity coupled with the biopolitical imperative of reform transform the grid of intelligibility established in the construction, (re)presentation, and (re)production of the (Middle) East into the contours of a carceral space: the Arabo-Islamic Other becomes one knowledge of which is enjoined upon the Normal Self in order to assess and neutralize the risk of pathological alterity and to reform the (penitent) Other. Moreover, this carcerality is again double: mainstream universalist epistemologies in Social Science discipline not only the alterity of Area Studies, but also epistemic ‘dissent’ within Disciplines themselves; while mainstream Area Studies hermeneutics (which are by and large objectivist) police and discipline not only the non-Western Other, but also ‘internal’ epistemic dissent (e.g. poststructuralism) and oppose intellectually or politically motivated calls for reformation from Disciplines. In this sense, the relation between Disciplines and Area Studies as much as between the latter and non-Western alterity is one of a continuous surveillance and attempts at ‘colonization’ preventive of alterity’s dangerous ‘infectiousness’. The primary rubrics under which these relations should be read, therefore, are not those declared within the debates themselves, but rather the normalization of a pathological alterity.

Conclusion Moving from an analysis of the Leitmotivs of ‘crisis’ and of ‘interdiscplinarity’ in debates over the intellectual and political state of contemporary MES, this chapter has argued that the discursive framework in which these contemporary debates are located is rooted in a particular way of organizing and producing knowledge – Social Science – which displays markedly confessional characteristics. These characteristics result in a double silencing of alterity and in an only apparently



paradoxical series of contradictions and impasses which give rise to spirals of care, failure, and discipline which are at the heart of the disciplinary techniques which (re)produce Social Science. Social Science as a way of organizing the production of knowledge is ‘performative’ in all these senses: it organizes the production of knowledge, adjudicates what counts as knowledge, and polices and disciplines that which falls outside its a remit, doing so through an articulation of what is ultimately a confessional biopolitics of care-failure-discipline. This reading of Social Science clarifies the politics of epistemological debates in MES, and the roots of mainstream ‘recalcitrance’ in applying Disciplines’ theories and adopting its methods. In this biopolitics of Social Science, alterity plays a role closely mirroring that of sexuality in Foucault’s confession, ‘trac[ing] around bodies and sexes not boundaries not to be crossed, but perpetual spirals of power and pleasure’ (45). It is these spirals of power and pleasure in which the commitment and complicity to which scholars are incited are caught; it is this set of performative contradictions in which current debates about post-9/11 states of ‘crisis’ are embedded, and which, alongside more explicitly political differences, explain the ‘recalcitrance’ of Area scholarship, particularly MES, to accept the calls – or even the terms of debate – made for ‘convergence’ both intellectual and political. Insofar as the ‘exchange of discourses’ which the Area Studies Controversy and the debate over MES’ policy-relevance entail are part of Social Science’s performativity, they are not debates at all, but ‘questions that extorted admissions’ (44) confessional injunctions to ‘speak the truth [...] which we think we already possess in our immediate consciousness’ (69). In this context, to ask how knowledge and methodologies produced in certain fields can travel to make a difference in everyday politics is to remain within the reformatory/penitentiary framework in which Social Science’s confessionality cages scholarship. Commitment and complicity, in scholarship as in activism, are already part of ‘everyday politics’ to start with because scholarship itself is already part of the everyday. This chapter has simply outlined why and how certain kinds of knowledge and methodologies have become part of ‘everyday’ politics.

Notes 1. For example, discussions on H-MidEast-Politics (2003) over ‘Title VI’ funding, that is US Federal funding for Area Studies programs in the National Security and Education Act (NSEA). In debates over ‘Title VI’, figures like


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2. 3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11. 12. 13.

14.

Commitment and Complicity Martin Kramer and Daniel Pipes advocated tighter political control over research conducted by MES scholars, with particular concern that it be ‘policy-relevant’ and further US foreign policy interests. ‘Disciplines’ designates Social Science fields, while ‘discipline’, lowercase, indicates Foucault’s analytical category. This debate attacks Area Studies’ lack of theoretical sophistication, often arguing for the adoption/application of ‘social science’ – for example Anderson recognizes criticism towards MES for ‘the virtual absence of theoretically informed analysis’ (1990: 74) reducing ‘explanation’ to sequences of events, leaders, and elites, understanding which means reconstructing sequences of contingencies at best, and resorting to bankrupt concepts such as the ‘Arab mind’ or ‘Islamic civilization’ at worst. For a review, see Mirsepassi et al. (2003). During 1954–5 the ACLS’ Committee on the Near and Middle East considered directions for future research in Middle Eastern politics, sociology, history, economics etc. No proceedings were published. For some participants’ assessments of fields and desirable directions of change, see Rustow (1956) and Gibb (1956). Others responded that academics involved as advisors to the United States or Israel were themselves part of a (neo)colonial enterprise – MESA President Leonard Binder, for example, fought the 1948–9 war. See Mitchell (2003). Richards and Waterbury argue that Europe ‘shaped our understanding of development but has not provided a model that will faithfully be replicated in developing countries which may skip some stages ... or telescope others’, adding: ‘the process of class formation in the Middle East and elsewhere has varied considerably from that of Europe’ (1996: 37; emphasis added). In 1991, oversight for Area Studies centers’ funding was transferred to the US DoD. MESA protested NSEA’s administrative location and requirements of service, and in 1993 urged members to eschew NSEP funding. See MESA Newsletter (May 1994, February 1996). A 1981 R AND study of Title VI also previously argued Area Studies generally should become more ‘policy-relevant’, that is respond to the ‘national need’ as defined by government and business (Hajjar and Niva 1997). See also Kramer (2001), cf. H-MidEast-Politics (2003). Further complicating intellectual divisions between and within fields are the diverse political projects within which these commitments are deployed. As these (sub)fields’ genealogy shows, cutting across the mainstream/critical intellectual ‘axis’ is a progressive/conservative political counterpart. Other Area Studies experienced similar debates about viability, policyrelevance, and ‘interdisciplinarity’, and similar resistances. See Bates (1997a), Haugerud (1997), Lowe (1997). See also articles on Sociology (Camic), Linguistics (Gal et al.) and Anthropology (Stocking) in the special issue of Social Research (1995): 62(4). For example, Walt (1987), Brown (1984), David (1991). Where ‘culture’ enters social scientific analysis, it is usually taken as evidence of the region’s exceptionalism, its qualitative uniqueness in an Orientalist vein (e.g. Huntington 1993), rather than of its distinctiveness. Valbjørn (2004) distinguishes between culture-blind Disciplines and culture-blinded Area Studies. Teti (2007) argues Social Science’s roots in



15.

16. 17.

18.

the universalization of a contingent European experience render both Disciplines and Area Studies both culture-blind and culture-blinded. Epistemic and methodological debates within and especially between Disciplines and Area Studies are themselves inextricable from questions of ontology. Whether Disciplinary quests for law-like generalizations are even plausible depends on properties of sociopolitical ‘objects’ remaining invariant across space and time: such objects – for example ‘identities’ – cannot depend primarily on their being imagined as such. Were these properties not fixed, law-like generalizations would not be possible. As Said (1995 [1978]) showed, this is a basic gambit in Orientalist discourse. See also Mitchell (2003: 5). Concerns about Arabists ‘going native’ as evidenced in the ‘Title VI debate’, the recent formation of ASMEA (November 2007), or websites such as Campus-Watch.org and StudentsForAcademicFreedom.org can be understood as exercises in the surveillance of even the smallest manifestation of alterity. Such dynamics are arguably present in European discourse on the ‘Scramble for Africa’ and on the Mandates, and latterly on the possibility of participating in ‘normal’ politics for groups such as Hamas or Hizballah, or indeed Turkey’s AK Party.

References Abraham, I. and R. Kassimir (1997) ‘Internationalization of the Social Sciences and Humanities’, Items, 51(2–3): pp. 23–30. Anderson, L. (1990) ‘Policy-Making and Theory Building: American Political Science and the Islamic Middle East’, in H. Sharabi (ed.) Theory, Politics and the Arab World, London: Routledge. Bates, R.H. (1997) ‘Area Studies and Political Science: Rupture and Possible Synthesis’, Africa Today, 44(2): pp. 123–32. Bates, R.H. (1997a) ‘Area Studies and the Discipline: A Useful Controversy?’ PS: Political Science, 30: pp. 166–9. Bilgin, P. (2004) ‘Is the “Orientalist” Past the Future of Middle East Studies?’ Third World Quarterly, 25(2): pp. 423–33. Binder, L. (1958) ‘The Middle East as a Subordinate International System’, World Politics, 10(3): pp. 408–29. Binder, L. (1976) ‘Area Studies: A Critical Assessment’, in L. Binder (ed.) The Study of the Middle East, New York: John Wiley and Sons, pp. 1–28. Brown L. Carl (1984) International Politics and the Middle East, London: I.B. Tauris. Cumings, B. (1997) ‘Boundary Displacement: Area Studies and International Studies during and after the Cold War’, Bulletin for Concerned Asian Scholars, 29(1): pp. 6–26. David, S. (1991) ‘Explaining Third World Alignment’, World Politics, 43(2): pp. 233–56. Dreyfus, H.L. and Rabinow, P. (1982) Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Brighton: Harvester. Foucault, M. (1992 [1984]) History of Sexuality, Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure, London: Penguin.


100 Commitment and Complicity Foucault, M. (1998 [1976]) History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: The Will to Knowledge, London: Penguin. Foucault, M. (2002 [1969]) The Archaeology of Knowledge, London: Routledge. Gause, F.G. (1998) ‘Systemic Approaches to Middle East International Relations’, International Studies Review, 1: pp. 11–31. Gendzier, I. (1985) Managing Political Change: Social Scientists and the Third World, Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Gibb, H.A.R. (1956) ‘Problems of Modern Middle East History’, Report on Current Research, Washington, DC: Middle East Institute, pp. 1–7. Gibb, H.A.R. and H. Bowen (1950, 1957) Islamic Society and the West: A Study of the Impact of Western Civilization on Moslem Culture in the Near East, vol. 1, parts 1&2; London: Oxford University Press. Green, J. (1986) ‘Are Arab Politics Still Arab?’ World Politics, 38(4): pp. 611–25. Hajjar, L. and S. Niva (1997) ‘(Re)Made in the USA: Middle East Studies in the Global Era’, Middle East Report, 27(205): pp. 2–9. Halpern, M. (1962) ‘Middle Eastern Studies: A Review of the State of the Field with a Few Examples’, World Politics, 15(1): pp. 108–22. Haugerud, A. (1997) ‘Editor’s introduction’, Africa Today, 44(2): pp. 111–23. Heginbotham, S. (1994) ‘Rethinking International Scholarship: The Transition from the Cold War Era’, Items, 48(2/3): pp. 33–40. Heilbrun, J. (1996) ‘The News from Everywhere: Does Global Thinking Threaten Local Knowledge?’ Lingua Franca, 6(1): pp. 49–56. Hitti, P.K. (1941) ‘Arabic and Islamic Studies at Princeton University’, Muslim World, 31(3): pp. 292–4. H-Mideast-Politics (2003) http://www.h-net.org/~midepol/, date accessed June 9, 2008. Huntington, S.P. (1993) ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’ Foreign Affairs (71): pp. 222–49. Johnson, P. and J. Tucker (1975) ‘Middle East Studies Networks in the United States’, MERIP Reports, 38: pp. 3–20. Khalidi, R. (1994) ‘Is There a Future for Middle East Studies?’ MESA Bulletin, 29: pp. 1–7. Korany, B. (1999) ‘The Arab World and the New Balance of Power in the New Middle East’, in Michael Hudson (ed.) Middle East Dilemma: The Politics and Economics of Arab Integration, London: I.B. Tauris, pp. 35–59. Korany, B. and A.H. Dessouki (eds.) (1991) The Foreign Policies of Arab States, Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Kramer, M. (2001) Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America, Washington, DC: Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Laitin, D. (1993) ‘Letter from the Incoming President’, APSA-CP, Newsletter of the APSA Comparative Politics Section, 4(4): p. 3. Lowe, C.C. (1997) ‘Resurrection How? A Response to Michael O. West and William G. Martin’s Article’, Africa Today, 44(4): pp. 385–422. McCaughey, R. (1984) International Studies and Academic Enterprise, New York: Columbia University Press. McDonnell, L.S. Berryman and D. Scott (1981) Federal Support for International Studies: The Role of NDEA Title VI, Santa Monica, CA: RAND. Middle East Studies Association of North America (1994) ‘Update on the National Security Education Program’, MESA Newsletter, May 1994.


The Middle East and the Production of Knowledge 101 Middle East Studies Association of North America (1996) ‘NSEP Service Requirement Prompts Resolution from MESA’s Board of Directors’, MESA Newsletter, February 1996. Mirsepassi, A., A. Basu, and F. Weaver (eds.) (2003) Localizing Knowledge in a Globalizing World: Recasting the Area Studies Debate, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Mitchell, T. (2003) ‘The Middle East in the Past and Future Social Science’, in D. Szanton (ed.) The Politics of Knowledge: Area Studies and the Disciplines, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Rafael, V. (1994) ‘The Cultures of Area Studies in the United States’, Social Text, 41: pp. 91–111. Richards, A. and J. Waterbury (1996) A Political Economy of the Middle East, 2nd edition, Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Rustow, D.A. (1956) Politics and the Westernization of the Middle East, Center of International Studies, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University. Said, E. (1995 [1978]) Orientalism, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Social Science Research Council (1996) Items, March and June–September. Tessler, M. (1999) ‘Introduction: The Area Studies Controversy’, in Mark Tessler, Jodi Nachtwey, and Anne Banda (eds.) Area Studies and Social Sciences: Strategies for Understanding Middle East Politics, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, pp. vii–xxi. Teti, A. (2007) ‘Bridging the Gap: International Relations, Middle East Studies and the Disciplinary Politics of the Area Studies Controversy’, European Journal of International Relations, 13(1): pp. 117–45. Valbjørn, M. (2004) ‘Towards a “Mesopotamian Turn”? The Study of Middle Eastern International Relations within International Relations and Middle East Studies’, Journal of Mediterranean Studies, 14(1/2): pp. 47–76. Wagley, C. (1948) Area Research and Training: A Conference Report on the Study of World Areas, SSRC Pamphlet no. 6, New York: Social Science Research Council, pp. 6–7. Walt, S. (1987) The Origins of Alliances, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Winder, R.B. (1987) ‘Four Decades of Middle Eastern Study’, Middle East Journal, 41(1): pp. 40–66. Zartman, W.W. (1970) History of MESA: The Middle East Studies Association of North America, Inc, Mimeo: Middle East Studies Association.


6 Empty Versatility and the Art of the Circular Reading Timothy Brennan

By relying on a discourse of trade conditions, import percentages, financial instruments, and the creation of free labor (when, indeed, ‘labor’ enters the equation at all, which is seldom), traditional economic thought overlooks entire areas of potential inquiry. At key moments in the past, cultural theory called upon the sciences of psychology, literature, and ethnography to develop a revisionary understanding of profit and value. In this spirit, cultural theory’s work on affect, desire, and ideology in the work, for instance of Thorstein Veblen, Georg Simmel and Georges Bataille, although it is often posed today in terms of the wildly new, was really only returning political economy to its classical self. The likes of David Hume or Adam Smith would have found it very strange, for example, to investigate the economy without supplying a theory of human nature, and both did as the inaugural gesture of their famous studies. If psychological and emotional questions are not exactly banished from today’s economic calculations (they play a large role in ‘rational choice’ theory, for instance, and are at the very heart of claims to ‘immaterial labor’ and ‘human capital’ in business policy circles), they are quickly forgotten in debates over the forms of value that are quickly quantified and placed under ownership when imported under conditions of globalization.1 The contributions of cultural theory to economics raise difficult questions about the utility and scientific value of theory itself. There are certainly vast unexplored areas of economic inquiry opened up by the sensibilities of the cultural commentator, and yet the quest for relevance has found its own impasses, and created a new set of illusions about the role of the image- and information-intellectual in the field of labor. At the very moment that theory locates new ethereal sites that privilege the intellect in the production processes of capitalism (a view that 102 Begüm Özden Firat, Sarah De Mul and Sonja Van Wichelen

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exists as forcefully in mainstream business rhetoric as in radical wings of the intelligentsia), there is a general reluctance to look squarely at the intellectual’s role in the division of labor.2 Could it be that certain ideas rather than others have become prominent in theory as a result of their ability to obscure that role? But also, can it be that the ideas of moment, and the styles of their delivery, have a great deal to do with labor-saving operations – to a simplicity masked as complexity, which is a packaging that facilitates the ideas’ circulation? This line of inquiry would seem to demand not only an inquiry into the values cultural theory serves in the social production process but a look at its own and others’ systems of evaluation of the products it creates (why are some ideas prized more than others, and what is the price that they command?). Such an inquiry leads inexorably to an examination of the ongoing reliance by cultural theory on terms and metaphors derived from economics (the Maussian ‘gift’, Freud’s ‘libidinal economy’, Bataille’s ‘expenditure’, Lash and Urry’s ‘post-industrial society’, and the term ‘value’ as the register of an ambiguous middlerealm between economics and aesthetics). Less notice, however, would be its converse: that is, the persistent borrowing from cultural theory by economics (the use, for example, of the concept of ‘deterritorialization’ in legal theories of sovereignty, of ‘multiculturalism’ in corporate training programs, and postmodern tropes in chaos theory, which is now a large subfield in the usually placid economics journals).3 My turning to the economic should not be misunderstood as a partisan move back to a long-displaced, and now outmoded, tradition in cultural theory. On the contrary, the compulsion to do so is larger than any individual actor or position – one forced on us by a general inundation of society by economics as an everyday obsession, a new culture of economic forecasts, planning, and speculation, all following on the perceived new conditions of the neoliberal mainstream which postulates that there is now only one possible system. Never before has investing been such a populist activity; never before has charting the dips and rises of the market occupied the free-time of ordinary people; new sections of daily newspapers on shopping, real-estate speculation, hometrading, and innovative pension fund packages show that finance and investment have become a form of entertainment and cultural curiosity that involve people at levels that exceed any interest in their own financial security. The idea of living in a shareholder democracy, the idea that neoliberal ideology is not just popular in ruling circles but genuinely populist – these are the parameters, I am arguing, within which cultural theory has taken its recent shape.


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It is hardly surprising, then, that in cultural theory itself we have for several decades now seen a recoil from a still earlier theoretical emphasis on the mediations of language, the relative sophistication of discourses of representation over the naïve relationship to the object found in the natural sciences, and a vigorous focus on culture as a devised, artificial, constructed world of invented meaning. This current return to the economic in cultural theory, then, has to be seen as a countermovement of sorts to the earlier revolt within theory against the civic nature of collective political life. The stress then, of course (in the 1980s and 1990s), had been not only on the reviled normativity of the biopolitical order and the stifling epistemic regimes of education and the media (this stress remains strongly in place) but had rejected both in preference for a different normativity: that of textuality and its terrain of play, which promised an escape from the tyranny of various ‘economisms’. For the last three decades, in fact, cultural theory has been marked by a deliberate and ill-tempered rejection of discourses that stressed the economic determinations of culture, the economic roots of political ideologies, and any priority to the economic at all. The setting that prompts our investigation, then, has to do in part with the recent return to the discourses of the economic as launched within the very circles of theory that had before rejected them: the turn to ‘thing’ theory by art journals, to ‘material culture’ in certain wings of new historicist literary scholarship, to ‘real subsumption’ and ‘immaterial labor’ in the Deleuzian Marxism of new Italian political philosophy; and to the many-sided attempts – Kojin Karatani is only one of many recent examples – to establish Kantian aesthetics as the foundation for all economic discourse, and indeed, to locate in original political economy itself a displaced and frustrated aesthetics.4

The labored intellect ‘Labor’ particularly has emerged as an ambiguous term in intellectual circles. From its traditional usage in the nineteenth century as one of three primary categories within political economy – labor, capital, and rent – the term has experienced a division between the exalted content with which it was endowed by the cultural theorist and the rather more degraded meaning it takes on as a sociological description of the theorist’s social dilemma itself. These two halves of the fissure are intertwined. Summoned first as a grand economic category, it enters the conversation now in the form of a theory of the latest stage of capitalism in which ‘intellect’ is considered the key productive



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force, and in which, as a corollary, political activity is transformed into the art of living: to the Heideggerian life-artwork. Both aspects are found, to take one of many variations on this prevalent theme, in Paolo Virno’s contention that the economy today is ‘post-Taylorist’ and that in such an economy capitalism ‘puts to work ... states of mind and inclinations’, that ‘modern forms of production’ take on the shape of the ‘Intellect’ – a public intellect existing ‘outside of work, and in opposition to it’ (1996: 20, 26, 28). As I have argued elsewhere, this is the fundamental arche or ground of the products of ‘theory’ as generally understood today. But an economics of cultural theory implies that one has to evaluate such a claim on grounds other than those rhetorically prepared by a theorist such as Virno. At least part of his lament is much more general than his specific analysis of the latest stage of capitalism (from his point of view) implies. This imputed productivity of the intellect he speaks of is referring in part (and without his wanting to) to the hard work of thinking in a society that disparages theoretical effort as well as to the conditions of work under a regime of privatization involved in lowering the price of critical intellectual work (a process eagerly helped along by media intellectuals whose editorials mocking the humanities and applauding the defunding of the humanities have appeared in a variety of mainstream American and British publications). It is, then, also a more general lament of the intellectual in a society dominated by instrumental reason. As is true of Virno, the Heideggerian orientation of contemporary theory can be seen as a skewed attempt to resolve this dilemma. Heidegger’s philosophy (which deeply informs the new Italian thinking of Virno, Giorgio Agamben and Antonio Negri, much of late Subaltern Studies, some aspects of the writing of Alain Badiou, Julia Kristeva, Ian Hacking, and many other dissimilar spheres of contemporary theory) is prominent today primarily because of Jacques Derrida’s influence, but also because of the American inflected, demotic Heideggerianism, if you will, of Hannah Arendt, which has been influential especially in the social sciences and political theory. At any rate, Heidegger’s famous shift in philosophy from epistemology to ontology has through various mediations come to resemble a move from knowing to a more consequential, purportedly more materialist, ‘being’. What could not be solved as thought is muscled forth as the realization of thought in action, but only inactively: that is, as thought-as-action. Labor is in this way reconceptualized for the counterintuitive purpose of increasing the worth of primary intellectual work.


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But here we confront another paradox. To raise its value in the face of a disparaging or merely indifferent officialdom, labor has been made to seem by many of these thinkers paradoxically more expendable, more ethereal, and dispersed throughout the social strata without differentiation. The political consequences of this frequent move today are profound. If Antonio Gramsci, for example, had once famously pointed out in a frequently cited passage that even workers are intellectuals, today’s truism is that intellectuals are the only proletariat. This may sound overstated, but to various degrees, it is the claim embedded in a number of highly publicized and seriously debated positions today: that production is primarily the work of ideas, innovations, concepts; that the value of commodities is so highly abstracted from its original production as a material good that it circulates at the level of a dominating logic decipherable only by intellectuals; that cosmopolitanism is a universal condition, and equally shared globally and across all classes; or that the category of the ‘subaltern’ might well include, for racial or civilizational reasons, everyone from a Gujarati peasant to US-based history professors of Indian descent as well as foreign heads of state with non-European names. All of these, although quite differently, tend to blur the distinction between professional intellectuals and the lower orders (the disenfranchised) on whom a revolutionary transformation had traditionally depended. It would be too easy, although perhaps still worthwhile, to dismiss this questionable turn to aesthetics as politics or to the materialization of the immaterial realm of ideas on the grounds of a neo-German, French, or Italian ‘ideology’: that is, as the new ‘critical criticism’ of the intellectual anxiously divorced from the world of affairs and all too eager to substitute the mere idea of transformation for the transformative powers of critique.5 But there may also be a way to understand the current hypostasis of intellectual – which is also (apparently) to say ‘immaterial’ labor – as a symptom of a more particular commodification of knowledge rather than any resistance to it. In other words, among the possibilities I want to suggest is that there are fully economic, and even vulgar, reasons for the trend toward thinking of the economic in terms of econo-poiesis: the turning of economic categories into aesthetic artifacts. There is an economic aspect of intellectual labor that has not been foreseen by these traditions I am critiquing. Contemporary theory itself can be seen as a labor-saving operation embodied in the shift from archival or historical research to virtual textual readings; from the careful elaboration of a developed argument to the epigrammatic utterance – something evident



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in the rather too blithe way in which Arendt, Agamben, and Derrida, among others, employ etymologies as splicing operations for complicated material processes where the appeal to the Olympian serenity of antiquity emboldens their precepts without having to enter the messy world of documents, testimonies, or conflicting interests.6 This, moreover, corresponds to the desires of publishers, given production costs, for minimalist, small-scale books – not unlike the CDs in the recording industry on which only one song is really original and the rest are recyclings of earlier work. It is a very common publishing practice today to parcel out an overall thesis across a number of short ‘books’ in which small insights by major thinkers are blown up as programmatic statements that simultaneously maximize cover price. Examples of these can be found in the semi-routine monographs of Giorgio Agamben, Slavoj Zizek, Jean-Luc Nancy, Alain Badiou, and the late Jacques Derrida. Part of this labor-saving process is the valorization of complexity in contemporary intellectual arguments, where complexity is seen as an absolute and unchallenged value: a physical sign, as it were, of immense critical labor embodied in a tangible, finely wrought, verbal artifact.7 This, on the one hand, is a point of pride and an understandable riposte to a society of cheap slogans and mindless jingles. How can we at a certain level discount the importance or attractiveness of complex thought? What we may be missing, though, is this return to the fetish of intricacy as an economic function. For complexity, among other things, offers the critic an opportunity to utter politically dissident ideas in the form of an ironic dissimulation (which is itself economic to the degree that it is quite clearly a form of job protection in a regime of risk). On the other hand, an idealization of complexity permits politically conformist ideas to take the apparent form of dissident declarations – in which the labor of thought is seen as integral to the substance of the argument. Complexity is a use-value, in other words, the visible content as form of theoretical labor.8

Rupture as recycling The contrast I am about to pose below is not simply to remark on two antagonistic traditions – which would be banal – but to diagnose a tendency in the way theory has been passed down to us. I have often noticed in teaching courses in literary theory that to my students, Jacques Derrida is from the outset more instantly appealing, he rings more mental bells, and is more accessible than what to me is the more versatile and resilient thinking of Pierre Bourdieu, Karl Polanyi,



Theodor Adorno, or Raymond Williams – to take with this last a thinker that theory has very much left behind. I hope it is obvious in setting up this contrast that I might have chosen others, for it is the more general point that I am after: the dissimulation in a kind of theory about labor that masks its role in the division of labor and (on occasion) the lack of labor that went into it. That Derrida would be more accessible is paradoxical since the initial impression of most scholars would surely be that Derrida is more dense and more philosophically intricate than Williams, who by contrast would be taken to be a demotic writer, a populist, with an admirable if somewhat expository intelligence. It is, as we know the poetic evocations of Derrida that are so compelling, but the apparent sumptuousness of thought represented by him can be read as a simulacral discourse – in Baudrillard’s precise sense of the simulacrum: that is, the possession and display of what never existed. Let us look at an example of the writing of each. First, here is a fragment from Raymond Williams’ short chapter on ‘Language’ in the 1977 book Marxism and Literature: The whole question of the distinction between ‘language’ and ‘reality’ was eventually forced into consciousness, initially in a surprising way. Descartes, in reinforcing the distinction and making it more precise, and in demanding that the criterion of connection should be not metaphysical or conventional but grounded in scientific knowledge, provoked new questions by the very force of his skepticism about the old answers. It was in response to Descartes that Vico proposed his criterion that we can have full knowledge only of what we can ourselves make or do. In one decisive respect this response was reactionary. Since men have not in any obvious sense made the physical world, a powerful new conception of scientific knowledge was ruled out a priori and was, as before, reserved to God. Yet on the other hand, by insisting that we can understand society because we have made it, indeed that we understand it not abstractly but in the very process of making it, and that the activity of language is central to this process, Vico opened up a whole new dimension. (23) One may notice that in condensing a world of ideas – ranging from the personages of Descartes and Vico to the epistemological muddling of language and reality – Williams provides a synthetic view of a history of ideas that cannot be anthologized easily, nor cited in the form of an epigrammatic outburst or coinage. For that reason, it lends itself poorly to an apparent sumptuousness of thought. In a chapter of 20 pages,



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he traverses theories of language in pre-Socratic philosophy, through Plato’s Cratylus and the medieval trivium to Russian formalism by way of nineteenth-century comparative grammar. Williams demonstrates here how in Western philosophy language came gradually to be seen as a set of rules and laws – a daunting and alien entity above and outside the person rather than an activity. As Volosinov had argued in 1929 (and Williams is following Volosinov very closely here) the fixity of linguistic norms that were seen to trump the creative activity of speakers in a collective setting (rendering their creative manipulation of norms a mere illusion) – the reduction, if you will, of all language to langue – was the inheritance of nineteenthcentury philology, a paradoxical source for the Saussurean school given his famous departure from diachrony. Philology tended to derive its linguistic principles from the study of dead, finished, alien literary languages, giving the alien word ‘a grandiose organizing role’, seen as the product of a ‘conqueror nation of an old and once mighty culture’ that could be in this way enlisted on behalf of a ‘newcomer nation’ – a process very familiar in the Nietzschean and Heideggerian appeals to Greece. By contrast, Williams reminds us that language is actually constitutive. That is, if reality cannot be grasped except through the bond and bridge of linguistic interaction, it matters less that the sign intrudes in the process of meaning, forming a screen or barrier that ensures semantic indeterminacy than that the speaker and author exist for an audience, one that is local and specific, and on whose behalf linguistic norms are manipulated for a variety of often conflicting intentions. Structuralism and poststructuralism, Williams reasonably concludes, are naïve. They exalt a partial, hierarchically imposed and restrictive model of language in the rhetoric of polyphonic openings and play. They arrest the contexts of meaning, and abstractly efface the physical labor involved in the utterance, which is always to some degree a collective encounter in a medium whose norms are themselves transitory, and subject to the force of human creativity. Williams’ writing is deceptively straightforward at the level of the sentence. But apart from the volumes of prior reading required to appreciate his range of reference, his writing demands also a constant maneuvering and renegotiation, since the kinds of point being made are consistently different, the product of syntheses of earlier aspects of the essay building to a crescendo, and filled with not so little dissonances. Williams’ thinking is symphonic, and although, like any symphony, it conveys a single mood, it is extraordinarily difficult to analyze the intricate architecture of its individual components.


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Now let’s turn to Derrida in a passage from Donner le temps (1991, translated into English as Given Time I: Counterfeit Money, 1992), his most direct treatment of economics: To join together, in a title, time and the gift may seem to be a laborious artifice. What can time have to do with the gift? We mean: what would there be to see in that? What would they have to do with each other, or more literally, to see together, qu’est-ce qu’ils auraient à voir ensemble, one would say in French. Of course, they have nothing to see together and first of all because both of them have a singular relation to the visible. Time, in any case, gives nothing to see ... One can only be blind to time, to the essential disappearance of time ... Nothing sees the light of day, no phenomenon, that is not on the measure of day, in other words, of the revolution that is the rhythm of a sun’s course ... We will let ourselves be carried away by this word revolution. At stake is a certain circle whose figure precipitates both time and the gift toward the possibility of their impossibility ... Of this privilege of circular movement in the representation of time, let us take only one index for the moment. It is a note by Heidegger ... Some time ago I attempted a reading of it in ‘Ousia and Grammè’ ... (17 of French edition; 6 of English edition) There are several aspects of this passage, despite its daunting selfreflexivity, that make it attractive to those wrestling at an early stage with the wonders and lures of theory. First, it turns inward. It is a thinking that watches itself think, dramatizing (and flattering) the act of author and reader alike, and at the same time. Next, although billed as a philosophical reflection on economics, its métier is compulsively literary, and as such, a relief to many readers first testing the philosophical waters. It draws on a familiar (and comforting) hermeneutic repertoire that plays with syntax and double-entendre, indeed comments on the syntax of the very sentence that comments on syntax, moving our eyes and ears to the palpability of a language (in its very opacity) that, again, admires itself as it revels in the quirks of translation from French to English. Notice too, though, the coy intentions of his punning at the level of content, where much of his argument is slipped in, as it were, along the way of meaning rather than face-to-face with its interlocutor. The state of owning or possessing (to have: avoir) is here rendered as the state of understanding (to see: à voir). The professional thinker here plays the role, in this ordered scriptural terrain, of grand owner. Notice the separability here of agent and medium – precisely Williams’ earlier point.



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Only language lives, acts, and puns, not people. With the pretense of working with a mind of its own, his language allows the phrase ‘seeing time’ to slip over into the rather different phrase ‘disappearance of time’ (which apparently settles once and for all the conundrum about whether a tree falling in the woods makes a sound if no one is there to hear it). The haphazard colloquialism, ‘to see the light of day’ leads, again playfully, to the overliteral reading of ‘day’ as the ‘rhythm of the sun’s course’. So suddenly a problem of epistemology (individual, active, personal) is transformed cheekily into the peremptory given of natural science (cosmic, indifferent, evolutionary), and ‘seeing’ is a matter of the circular motions of the planets – a movement that leads to his grossest pun of all: revolution. Revolution, by playing on the meaning of ‘circle’, is, then, meant to be understood both as the very real, and indeed boring and eternal course of the heavenly bodies and, on the other half of the image, as the ‘impossibility’ of any social transformation. The student’s recognition of these kinds of points is prepared in advance of his or her reading of Derrida. Derrida is more understandable – more an intellectual home for them – from the start since, apart from the entertainment value of such writing found in its self-irony, he projects the security of conventional ideas. The knowledge he demands of us is knowledge ready to hand: the formal knowledge of metaphorical logic. The hero of his tale is the reader playing the role of writer into whom we as readers can again project ourselves. Insofar as he calls upon us to venture into intellectual history, he turns to the single figure of Heidegger, the philosopher whom Derrida has repeatedly turned to, and largely rephrased for over 30 years. Indeed, everything about this passage is a recap of the forms and contents of all of Derrida’s work for that same 30 years. He is attractive, in part, because what he has to say is always the same – a matter illustrated in this passage by the familiar Derridean practice of self-quotation. His philosophical depth is to that degree easily won, and he triumphs by giving us literally less to think about.

Sublime density One last quotation in the spirit of our forgotten past in this return to economic thought as econo-poeisis. Take this passage from the Ludwig Feuerbach (1843) everyone knows from Marx’s famous theses, but whom few actually take the time to read: To have articulated what is such as it is, in other words, to have truthfully articulated what truly is, appears superficial. To have articulated


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what is such as it is not, in other words, to have falsely and distortedly articulated what truly is, appears profound. ... Truthfulness, simplicity, and determinacy are the formal marks of the real philosophy. (162) To possess philosophical depth is by no means a guarantee of being taken serious philosophically. There is a preapproved canon, with its own set of signature styles, that must be first assumed and internalized if one is to be read as a theorist of mark. Theory is run according to an etiquette determined by a received ethics of intellectual work inherited from the Nietzschean tradition. Our valorized forms of theory, in short, operate only on the basis of a set of rules that are seldom acknowledged. In that spirit, and working off of the readings I have just given above, I would like to counterpose to these unacknowledged rules another set of rules. Rule 1: The work of Theory (capital T) is a prolegomenon to work that is consequential in theory (small t) – this latter understood in the generic sense of the importance of thinking about thought, of self-examination to arrive at methodological integrity, and the necessary abstraction that allows researchers to confront their object without naivety – which means, not as an entirely fresh or new enterprise untainted by general patterns and possibilities. My quarrel here, in other words, is not with theory, but with the tendentious colonization of theory by Theory (whose general features are alluded to in the first two sections of this chapter). Thinkers like Giovanni Arrighi, Joseph Schumpeter, Edward Said, David Harvey, Alexander Kluge, and so on, do not register as theoretical because they have already internalized theory’s lessons and expressed them in the investigation of an immanent set of unfolding social conflicts. The high Theorists of late (Nancy, Negri, Deleuze, Agamben) in this sense may be said only to luxuriate in a preliminary intellectual space. Rule 2: Theory is a systematic retelling in the form of a sumptuous defanging of revolutionary ideas – only one reason why its underlying theatrics involve an activism rendered as contemplation and illumination. The latest turn of the screw in Theory’s expansion upon the earlier generation of early poststructuralist thinkers has been to reject the mere ‘word’ and substitute for it the thing. In this act, it wishes to be mistaken for materialism. It now speaks also of incompatibilities, remainders, antinomies, possibilities. With these slogans it wishes to be mistaken for dialectics. The move from the textual to the ‘political’ in theory has thus been the move from a dynamic contradiction to a static



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paradox which, as Badiou for instance notes in Manifesto for Philosophy is precisely the incontrovertible findings of the mathemes of Godelian logic. Rule 3: Theory – or better, the theoretical affect – relies on the promise of revolution, a sudden crystallization of formerly unkempt or roughhewn ideas turned by the forces of genius after hard and heroic labor into a novum. What has not been grasped in this gesture is the Vichian (and later, Saidian) lesson that all reading is a re-reading, or Williams’ lesson that the residual is embedded in the emergent, and that history proceeds not in ruptures but continuities that combine in haphazard and aesthetically unpleasing fashion the antiquated, the resiliently contemporary, and the wholly unexpected and newly misrecognized. Rule 4: If Theory cannot justify its grandeur on the basis of rupture, then a criterion must be established for the predominance of the prolegomenous theorist over the situated theorist. The former did not displace the latter on the basis of a collective judgment, on a conflict of arguments, or on the prima facie (and therefore unconscious) suitability of the former’s ideas and formulations with a manifest present moment. It did so because of the lack of novelty lying at its core – its congruence, in other words, with the already existing prejudices of the Now. Rule 5: The making of a new pantheon by publishing houses like Duke University Press, Routledge, and the University of Minnesota Press is meant to suggest that we are seeing the expected shifts and expansions, the modulations and innovations of thought working its way along the paths of progress. Journals like New Formations and Radical Philosophy give the sense that we have entered a revolutionary era, and that the full flowering of ’68-ist thought is upon us, gloriously realized by unfolding world events. In a recent advertisement for what the press calls Routledge ‘classics’, for example, books by Judith Butler are placed alongside those of Aristotle, and Paul Gilroy shares space with Max Weber. Butler and Gilroy (and this is not meant to belittle their accomplishments) are the Aristotles and the Webers of today, or so Routledge implies. What, though, if we are living through a time not unlike the complacent late nineteenth century, whose heroes included John Phillip Souza, Edith Wharton, and Henry Adams; or a period like that of the nineteenthcentury French academy in painting – a period of paralysis, a vacuum: Jacques Derrida as the Herbert Spencer of our era. Rule 6: We are witness to a permanent confusion that supplies the fuel for theory as Event. The theorist, especially the young theorist, impelled by the sacrificial desire to penetrate the malaise of their own powerlessness,


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and desperate to solve the riddle of the social world without doing more harm, drinks in the plausible set of ideas emanating from a number of intellectual circles (which remain by him or her unanalyzed, uncategorized, and without origin).9 These have to do with virtuality, an amorphous and decentered power, a media-piqued desire, the subterranean expression of the ‘mass’ – features, in other words, that are associated both with corporate tyranny and with the corporation’s own most flagrant sales pitch. They are both at once, which makes it possible for the radical to be also institutionally welcome and valid. Concepts of globalization, biotechnology, internet hybridizations, post-political undergrounds, new diasporic enclaves, and so on all scream their complex (above all complex!) approximations of a shifting and mutating present. These all form the background noise, as it were, for an inquiry that does not, for the most part, assess the actuality of these models as they are inherited (again, atmospherically) from sociology and media studies, discursive geography, punk anthropology, and pop journalism of the Tom Peters school (that is, of the work of a corporate advisor and cheerleader). These ideas and inherited schemata are rather the point of departure for a much more demanding set of lucubrations in thought. They do not announce themselves as tarrying with the somewhat pedestrian practices of those who study labor statistics, quantify capital flows, keep track of ownership laws, or drag into their theses the time-tested and canonical opinions of social critics, economists, and sociologists. The response to the prospect of this kind of labor is never actually articulated, but what one is required to suppose, and to quietly affirm, is: ‘We already know this’. With this gesture, the complexities of theory side-step the necessary banalities of actual knowledge and therefore render complexity itself a game with such similar rules and predictable patterns that its simplicity in regard to the ever-shifting Real is manifest. A simple-mindedness, in fact, but also an aesthetic refuge and appeal. In this environment, challenges to Theory (capital T) cannot themselves be seen as theory (small t). They are consigned by the prolegomenous to a different arena, destined to be viewed by them as ipso facto assaults on insight in the name of the superseded, attacks on the avant on behalf of the stubborn, sectarian, and inflexibly old. They are portrayed as the outmoded (as Williams has been, and as Said is in danger of becoming). The prolegomenous theorist is invested in the sensuality of thought, unable to see it from the situated theorists’ vantage point as an irrelevant,



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pretentious, or embarrassing matter – as a display not worthy of the object of thought. He/she is blind to the particular theoretical force of work that often deploys propositions that are blunt precisely because of the precritical labor that has already been done. While this opens itself up to misunderstanding among the sensualists, who see only bluntness, it itself views the sensualists as involving themselves in a confused and wayward exhibitionism, as a ‘leading to’ thought that is, as yet, naively expressed, often through allusion and citation rather than argument or debate. This leads me to a final contrast I wish to draw in discussing the empty versatility of Theory: between the situated critic who abjures an investment in the sensuality of thought and the prolegomenous theorist who dramatizes thought as dissidence but is, in fact, destructive of it. Information capitalism in all its manifestations is, in fact, already a banality to the situated critic, and the only interesting question for him or her lies in the details, emphases, or quality of the predictions of future trends based on institutional knowledge. In the situated theorist’s eyes, then, the prolegomenous theorist fetishizes a banality (one, moreover, that has been inherited from the work of economists and sociologists, and more often than not poorly understood). The prolegomenous theorist finds portents in an everyday that is perfectly meaningless without political agency. The prolegomenous theorist, drawing on Spinoza, Kant, Nietzsche, Machiavelli, and Schmitt, complains (oddly enough) of the datedness of his/her adversaries, implying that they have not kept pace; this dwelling in a highly selective past does not, even for a moment, give the theorist pause when assaulting the putatively antiquated categor ies of any oppositional position. The situated theorist, by contrast, abandons the modernist illusion of creation ex nihilo, and finds in the prolegomenous theorist a bathing in thought as anodyne and the beatifying of the concept as Event. The frightening possibility that theory has a social function that it cannot control or direct, and that works counter to its aims, is not even entertained. For the prolegomenous theorist, social problems are solved by the very act of stipulating a poignant term. The reorientation of the Real follows immediately upon the utterance of a newly evoked reality. This is, and must be, a closed system, very much like a vacuum that the laboratory specialist prevents a mote of dust or germ from infecting the carefully prepared sterility of the experiment. Hence, the Saidian effort to trace the hidden fealty between the perennial modernism of beginnings and the disavowal of the places from which one’s theory traveled.


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It would be inaccurate to say that these two discourses of situated and prolegomenous theory fail to understand one another. The situated understands the prolegomenous only too well, since the very act of situating itself requires studying what has outmaneuvered it, and forced it into a defensive posture; whereas the prolegomenous ignores the situated with all the power and prejudice of its hegemony. In the end, each sees the other as simplistic. Against the widely accepted view at present, the charge of simplicity is infinitely reversible, and forcefully felt by both sides. It is sometimes possible to locate the single sentence, seemingly innocuous, where the prolegomenous theorist bends terminology to create an emotional or ideological bridge between discourses so that a premise can be slipped in that the rest of the argument will then go on freely to exploit. In this way, the Theorist acquires the capacity to speak in one register while appearing to operate in another, and to mobilize concepts forged in one milieu to service the expectations of an alien and opposed one. In the struggle over interpretations, the situated theorist is at a structural disadvantage. He or she is constrained to wrestle with concepts, compare the shadings of views to eliminate inconsistencies, weigh not only their topics’ conclusions but the environment of their composition. The prolegomenous, on the other hand, is driven by an immanent methodology in the service of a performative transcendence. He or she can move very rapidly from position to position, modeling their language on the needs they locate in a fickle, flexible market. A quotation can stand for a corpus with little guilt or pause. By the time the situated theorist has uttered a syllable, the entire ‘debate’ has shifted – although it never was a debate, and is instinctively set up this way to avoid competition, since the anachronisms of historical thought, agency, will, and civic life are already ‘known’, and no longer need to be attacked. My point in focusing on the problem of empty versatility has been, among other things, to suggest that this bridging of fashions where antieconomisms effloresce as new economic theories within the cultural (a process whose progenitors no doubt include, and centrally, Georges Bataille and Jean Baudrillard) has often taken place between radical political economic theory and some attempt to improve or update Marx by way of motifs drawn from Marxian canonical texts, or in a return to anthropology where the problematic essence of human character (usually captioned as its fundamental perversity) is once again probed as it had been in the earliest political economists with the goal of naturalizing the market. The distinctions upon which philosophy had always



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been based are now collapsed into a single one: thinking is being, being is labor, labor is a poeisis or making, and therefore economics is aesthetics under the regime of the General Intellect. I propose that it is better not to lose sight of the difference between reading laboriously in the hope of developing an approach that seeks an end (and that acknowledges its ends), and failing to do so out of the desire to run and dodge around points of contention for the purpose of pleasing the labored intellect. This pleasing is really a pacifying by means of the rhythms of a happily never-ending process, and thereby reassuring the intellect that its work will never be done, that there will always be employment. This is what is meant by Zizek’s argument that the unsettled, unsatisfied Lack is not the origin of Desire but Desire’s end. The alienation of the subject prompts its poetic reflection. For that particular natural resource to remain unexhausted, all must remain exactly as it was. And this, and nothing else, is the meaning of the modern turn from knowing to being, which is the ground for the return to the economic and its dissimulation of intellectual labor.

Notes 1. On the concepts ‘immaterial labor’ and ‘human capital’ as they are employed in business circles, see Jeremy Rifkin (2000). 2. Claims that labor is evanescent in the new economy can be found, among other places, in the work of Thomas Friedman, David Brooks, and Jagdish Baghwati. Work residing in ideas, concepts, and innovations takes on a new prominence is such theorists. The watchwords of yesterday – ‘efficiency’, ‘strength’, ‘stamina’, or ‘the workday’, are replaced by ‘intuition’, ‘adaptability’, ‘creativity’, ‘complexity’, and ‘play’. These trends in media and policy circles are repeated in cultural theory. For the first trend, see Robert Reich (2001), Peter F. Drucker (2001); for the second, Félix Guattari and Toni Negri (1990: 33–8); Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (1994). 3. On deterritorialization, see Martin Puchner (2004); on chaos theory in economics, see Tim Hayward and Judith Preston (1999); and James Gleick (1987). 4. For ‘Thing’ theory, see the special issue of Critical Inquiry 28(1) from Fall 2001; a sampling of the turn to ‘material culture’ in cultural anthropology and cultural studies can be found in Susanne Kuechler and Mike Rowlands, eds., Journal of Material Culture (Sage), which according to the editors ‘explores the relationship of artefacts to social relations’; for ‘real subsumption’, see Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000); for Kantian aesthetics as a model for political economy, see Kojin Karatani (2003). 5. The economic war over the price of ideas is explored outside the Marxist tradition in The Philosophy of Money (1900). There Georg Simmel describes how in a system of universal exchange (capitalism), where all relationships are mediated by money, ‘abstraction’ reigns. The interchangeability and


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6.

7.

8.

9.


indifference of all objects was precisely suited to the tyranny of the Intellect, now driven now to calculation (that is, distinguishing among objects based on numerical quantities). A year earlier in his Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), Thorstein Veblen reminded his academic colleagues that their profession descended from the priestly classes trained ‘in the service of a supernatural agent’, Intellectual work required ‘training for the domestic service of a temporal master’ (the ‘Lord’), and was based on ‘acquiring facility in subservience’. In such circles it was always highly valued to acquire knowledge with a (as Veblen put it) ‘spectacular effect, together with some sleight of hand’; ‘knowledge of the “unknowable,” owed its serviceability for the sacerdotal purpose to its recondite character’. There is a wonderfully revealing passage along these lines in Friedrich Kittler (1986: 202–3), where he relates that when Nietzsche’s eyesight began to fail him in later life, he enlisted a typewriter designer to fashion a letter-ball. It was at this moment that Nietzsche discovered the wisdom of aphorisms. That is, the shorter, less straining mode of expression corresponded to his failing eyesight. I examine this problem of ‘complexity’ (or rather, a specific kind of claim to complexity) as a philosophical ruse in more detail in At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now (1997: 66–78). That this complexity has generally taken the form of a Nietzschean poetics of the intellect (the demonstration in language of its own plasticity and play) is not to say that there have not been wars on other fronts – for instance, Badiou’s effort to bridge Continental and Analytic traditions in philosophy by appealing to the very emblem of the unintelligibly complex: namely, math. This move may be seen as to the decisive detour from political economy by the ‘neoclassical’ revolution, which in the work of Petty, Jevons, and Marshall steered away from questions of value to the mathematical operation of ‘Equilibrium’ and ‘Marginal Utility’. To the degree that complexity is a style, we cannot exempt Badiou and Zizek from our conclusions regarding thought’s sumptuousness despite their guerrilla encounter with the poetry of refuge and pure abstraction. My argument is that within this mode, the prolegomonal reigns.

References Brennan, T. (1997) At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Brown, B. (ed.) (2001) ‘Thing Theory’, special issue of Critical Inquiry, 28(1): pp. 1–22. Derrida, J. (1991) Donner le temps, Paris: Editons Galilée; Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Drucker, P.F. (2001) The Essential Drucker: Selections from the Management Works of Peter F. Drucker, New York: HarperCollins. Feuerbach, L. (1997 [1843]) ‘Provisional Theses for the Reformation of Philosophy’, in L.S. Stepelevich (ed.) The Young Hegelians: An Anthology, Daniel Dahlstrom (trans.), Atlantic Island, NJ: Humanities Press, pp. 129–55. Gleick, J. (1987) Chaos: Making a New Science, New York: Penguin.



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Guattari, F. and T. Negri (1990) Communists Like Us, New York: Semiotext(e). Hardt, M. and A. Negri (1994) Labor of Dionysus: A Critique of the State Form, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota. Hardt, M. and A. Negri (2000) Empire, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hayward, T. and J. Preston (1999) ‘Chaos Theory, Economics and Information: The Implications for Strategic Decision-Making’, Journal of Information Science, 25(3): pp. 173–82. Karatani, K. (2003) Transcritique: On Kant and Marx, Cambridge, MA: MIT. Kittler, F. (1986) Gramophon, Film, Typewriter, Berlin: Brinkman & Bose. Puchner, M. (2004) ‘Guantanamo Bay’, London Review of Books, 26(24): p. 7. Reich, R. (2001) The Future of Success, New York: Knopf. Rifkin, J. (2000) The Age of Access: The New Culture of Hypercapitalism Where All of Life Is Paid-For Experience, New York: J.P. Tarcher/Putnam. Simmel, G. (1978 [1900]) The Philosophy of Money, Boston, MA and London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Veblen, T. (1992 [1899]) The Theory of the Leisure Class, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Virno, P. (1996) ‘The Ambivalence of Disenchantment’, in P. Virno and M. Hardt (eds.) Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota. Williams, R. (1977) Marxism and Literature, Oxford and London: Oxford University Press.


7 The Commitment to Face Mieke Bal

Introduction What does it mean to endorse the idea that commitment is part of academic work? In recent decades, commitment, from a swearword, has become an academic program. But inevitably, it can only become productive if it is accompanied by a specific complement (commitment to ...) and an elaboration of how that commitment can be exercised to the benefit of society and the knowledge academics produce for it. For commitment within academic work cannot take the commitment to the production of knowledge, the academy’s primary task, lightly at all. For me, my first commitment is to know, regardless of streamlined modes of knowledge production and their instruments, in order to contribute to transform the social environment into a place of understanding. This commitment implies a weariness of the ways our conventions and instruments of work are complicitous with ideologies that hamper such knowledge. Hence, a self-reflective critical posture necessarily accompanies commitment. This commitment, for me, also goes to art practice, which I consider not only a practice of research and analysis but also an imaginative way of engaging social issues. When I began to make art, I had only vaguely intuited how much I would learn from it, including for my academic work. Now I know it has been crucial for that work. For the first time, I feel, my work touches something crucial I would not otherwise have had access to, yet needed to know. Hence, my commitment to academic research, to the social environment without which that research would have no meaning, and to the art that deploys the imagination to mediate between ‘life’ and its manifestations, has great emotional and intellectual meaning for me. 120 Begüm Özden Firat, Sarah De Mul and Sonja Van Wichelen

The Commitment to Face

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Of all the work I have done, Nothing Is Missing is probably the most exciting, illuminating project. This video installation witnesses to my desire to participate fully in the contemporary culture of migration. The idea of the installation is a gallery looking like a living room, where visiting is like a social call. Apart from a short introduction, the image on each of a variable number of monitors is a portrait, bust only, of a woman speaking. In some cases, we hear the voice of the interlocutor, in others not. Every once in while, one of the women falls silent, as if she was listening to the others.

Nothing Is Missing, installation shot (Photo by Astrid van Weyenberg)

The women speak to someone else; the speech situation is personal. Their interlocutors are people close to them, intimates, but the relationship with whom has been interrupted due to the migration of their child. Now that the presence of people from outside Western Europe in the fabric of European culture is evidently a permanent feature, it is worth stopping to consider what the life looked like that these migrants risked everything to leave behind. If we are to understand and value the contribution of migrant cultures to the European scene, we must first of all realize the enormity of the losses involved and the changes in the souls of individuals taking this drastic step. We must wonder, that is, why people think they must leave behind their affective ties, relatives,



friends, habitats, and habits, in short, everything we take for granted to constitute everyday life.1 This work has become so important for my reflections on contemporary culture because it is a work of facing; the word facing sums up the aesthetic and political principle of this ongoing video work. Through this installation, I attempt to shift laterally – and by this I mean, to dislodge but not make to disappear – both the notion of an individual autonomy that is almost ‘autistic’ of a vulgarized Cartesian cogito, and a subjecting passivity and nonpersonal view derived from the principle of Bishop Berkeley’s ‘to be is to be perceived’. Whereas the former slogan has done damage in ruling out the participation of the body and the emotions in rational thought, the latter, recognizable in the Lacanian as well as in certain Bakhtinian traditions, has sometimes overextended passivity and coerciveness into a denial of political agency and, hence, of responsibility.2 I try to shift these views in favor of an intercultural, perhaps best called ‘relational’ aesthetic. In order to elaborate such an alternative, both political and embodied, I have concentrated this installation on the bond between speech – as in not just ‘giving voice’, but also listening, and answering, all in multiple meanings – and the face, turning the classical ‘window of the soul’ into an ‘inter-face’. The medium of video, the medium of the moving image in, again, many different senses, is, I claim, eminently suitable to elaborate that bond in ways that return to aesthetics its old meaning of sense-based binding. Between ‘moving’ as a manifold quality of the image, and ‘binding’ as a specific conception of aesthetics, I wish to articulate my commitment to what I call a migratory aesthetics; let’s say, an aesthetic of geographical mobility beyond the nation-state and its linguistic uniformity.3 Facing, taken ‘at face value’ (Lakoff and Scherr 1984), is three things, or acts, at once. Literally, facing is the act of looking someone else in the face. It is also coming to terms with something that is difficult to live down by looking it in the face instead of denying or repressing it. Third, it is making contact, placing the emphasis on the ‘second person’, and acknowledging the need of that contact in order, simply, to be able to sustain human existence. Instead of ‘to be is to be perceived’ and ‘I think, therefore I am’, facing proposes, ‘I face (you), therefore, we are’. For this reason, facing is my proposal for an emblematic instance of an aesthetics informed by the commitment to know.4 In this article I will try to articulate a useful approach to culture in the contemporary moving world from the vantage point of the notion of commitment. For this, I will attempt to articulate what I have tried



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to do through Nothing Is Missing. I hope to argue that not only the intercultural collaboration between what can no longer easily be called ‘subjects’ and ‘maker’ was needed to make this work, and that the second-personhood of both parties had to be strengthened. I also contend that the academic discourse in the mobile intercultural aesthetics I have termed ‘migratory’ cannot be articulated without the participation of what anthropology used to term its ‘subjects’ or ‘local informants’. In the case of Nothing Is Missing, this means that the work cannot work aesthetically without the participation of the persons who tell the stories of the absent loved ones – the migratory subjects in the literal sense – whose stories in the ever-denser and more complex network of subjectivities Spinoza called, after the Stoics, ‘world citizens’.5 In the wake of a recent anti-Cartesianism, with lots of babies and bathwater issues, the concept of ‘second-personhood’ that feminist philosopher Lorraine Code has put forward (1991; 1995) is by now wellknown enough to allow me a shortcut through it. It means not only that we cannot exist without others – in the eye of the other as much as in sustenance of others – but also that it is from the interaction with others that we derive most fulfillment, and that is where I would start any attempt to develop an idea of the aesthetic; returning with ‘critical intimacy’ to moments of the past, such as the dawn of rationalism in the seventeenth century. In this I am only joining a growing group of scholars, many influenced by Deleuze, his Spinoza and his Leibniz, and his fellow ‘pre-posterous’ historian Bergson.6 Among these scholars, I limit myself here to the philosophers Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd (1999) who studied Descartes’ contemporary Baruch Spinoza. The line Spinoza – Bergson – Deleuze has led to extremely important and productive revisionings of the image, perception, and feeling, which we know from the work of Patricia Pisters (2002; 2005) and Paola Marrati, among many others. Gatens and Lloyd’s short book is important here, because it does three things at once that are relevant for my commitment to further aesthetics as an activity. First, the Australian philosophers invoke the relevance of Spinoza’s work for a reasoned position in relation to aboriginal Australians’ claim to the land that had been taken from them by European settlers. These claimants are not migrants since they stayed put while their land was taken away from under them, but that has turned them into diasporic subjects in their own place. Their claims, based on a culturally specific conception of subjecthood and ownership, make an excellent case for the collective and historical responsibility the authors put forward with the help of Spinoza. And this responsibility


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is my first specification of commitment. I call it an intercultural – as distinct from a universal – ethic. That this ‘intercultural ethics’ should be based on a seventeenthcentury writer who never met such claimants – although he can be considered a migratory subject – makes, second, a case for a historiography that I have termed ‘preposterous’ (1999). This conception of history is focused on the relevance of present issues for a re-visioning of the past as much as the relevance of the past for the present. In alignment with intercultural relationality, we could call it inter-temporal. In spite of its clumsiness, such a term helps remind us of the thick mutuality of relation, as opposed to a lean linearity of progress. Third, the authors make their case on the basis of the integration, an actual merging, of Spinoza’s ontological ethical and political writing, three philosophical disciplines traditionally considered separately. This, of course, exemplifies interdisciplinarity. I hope in this company I don’t need to argue for the indispensable mutuality and self-reflexivity implied in that term. Interdisciplinarity could be modeled on interfacing: I need to know you in order for us to exist together; cogitate, ergo sumus. Against this background – my search for an aesthetic alternative to a Berkeleyan masochistic passivity and a Cartesian autistic individualism as a ground for migratory aesthetics – the face, with all the potential this concept-image possesses, seemed an excellent place to start. But to deploy the face for this purpose requires one more negative act, the elimination of an oppressive sentimentalist humanism that has appropriated the face as the window of the soul, the key to identity translated into individuality, and the site of policing.

In the beginning was the face I said earlier that we need to start wondering why people think they must leave behind everything we take for granted to constitute everyday life. With this focus on loss, I aim to invert the latent evolutionism in the search for beginnings. Migration begins with loss, and my commitment is to understand that loss. To do this, I now wish to invoke the discourse of art history in this inter-discursive meeting of (embodied) minds. Given the centrality of the face in at least two major and enduring genres of Western art – the portrait and the self-portrait – it seems significant to note that none of the studies I consulted contained an entry on the face. What is not reflected on goes without saying; and that is as good a definition of



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ideology as any. This ‘naturalness’ of genre concepts is itself an important subject of analysis. Beyond the divide between history and theory, it helps us understand the cultural meanings of art. It is, I suggest, precisely because the centrality of the face is the product of historically changing ideologies such as humanism that it is not discussed in dictionaries. The faces on the walls of our prestigious museums embody the paradox of the comédien (Diderot). Instead of self-disclosure, we end up with role-playing, an eminently social activity. The faces we find so ‘normal’ figure some questions that lie at the heart of Western figurative art and the conceptions underlying it. How can we think an aesthetics that is ‘migratory’ – hence, that foregrounds mobility instead of stability and interface instead of single face – while taking into account that historically acquired facility we cannot simply pretend to shed? If I may be allowed a rather gross generalization, only justified by space constraints, I find that academic disciplines in the humanities, of which art history is only one example, remain firmly on the side of both individualism and documentary realism. Because it seeks to know positively, standard humanistic discourse projects realism onto its objects and individuality on those these objects are seen to ‘depict’. Thus, it collapses the subject and object of analysis. For our purposes here I see in this collapse an art-historical symptom of the autistic version of an autonomist cogito tradition. The point of the portrait is the belief in the real existence of the person depicted, the ‘vital relationship between the portrait and its object of representation’ (Brilliant 1991: 8). The portraits that compose Nothing Is Missing challenge these joint assumptions of individualism and realism and their claim to generalized validity. In order to do so with critical intimacy, however, the use of video is, again, significant. The women in this work are, of course, ‘real’, as real as you and me, as well as individual. And, at first sight, they have been documented as such. But at the same time, they speak ‘together’, from within a culturalpolitical position that makes them absolutely distinct and absolutely connected at once. As for the documentary nature of their images, again, this is both obvious and obviously false, since the situation of speech is framed as both hyper-personal and utterly staged. To achieve this undermining, doubly extremist effect I filmed the migrants’ mothers talking about their motivation to support or try to withhold their children who wished to leave and about their own loss to see them go. The mothers talk about this crucial moment in their past to a person whose absence in her life was caused by the child’s


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departure. The filming is, in one sense, excessively documentary. I staged the women, asked the relative to take place behind the camera, set the shot, turned the camera on, and left the scene. This method is hyperbolically documentary. To underline this aspect I refrained from editing these shots.

Portrait of Elena (Video still, Nothing Is Missing)

Aesthetically, the women are filmed in consistent though moderate close-up, as monumental portrait busts – the other side of the face of Brilliant’s focus on babies. The relentlessly permanent image is also meant to force viewers to look these women in the face, in the eyes, and listen to what they have to say, in a language that is foreign, using expressions that seem strange, but in a discourse to which we can all, affectively, relate. Third, the aesthetic concerns the nature of identity as a basis for communication. According to standard views of portraiture, this is based on the baby, enabled by seeing the mother’s face. The baby is invoked at the beginning of each video, when the relative asks about the birth-giving. But the birth is immediately framed within the situation of the ‘beginning’, not of life but of migration to come. Mostly, the women are alone or assisted by a neighbor, a situation



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evoked to the dismay of Western viewers who know the anxiety of this life-threatening situation firsthand, and in Massaouda’s case this is literally due to the migration of the husband. This baby-basis is challenged most explicitly by the simple fact that the figures speaking here are the mothers, the other side of that face gazing up at them; the holders of the inter-face. The face as inter-face is neither the idealized Madonna nor the autistic mirror image but an occasion – to allude to Gadamer’s term ‘occasionality’ – for an exchange that, affect-based as it may be, is fundamental in opening up the discourse of the face to the world.

Inter-facing The self-sufficient rationalism of the cogito tradition is in complicity not only with a philosophical denial of second-personhood but also with a subsequent denial of what faces, rather than expressing, can do – to use a verb derived from speech-act theory as well as Deleuzian conceptions of the face. In order to move from an expressionism to a performativity of the face, the three uses of the preposition ‘inter’ I invoked a propos of Gatens and Lloyd’s Spinoza need to be mobilized.7 Intercultural relationality as an ethics in its inscribed mobility of subjectivity posits the portrait, the face, as an interlocutor whose discourse is not predictably similar to that of the viewer. These women speak to ‘us’ – but mind the gap! – as they speak to their own relatives, again, across a gap. The first gap is that of culture as long as we continue to view cultures as entities instead of processes. The second gap is that caused by ‘the cultural’ conceived as moments and processes of tension, conflict, and negotiation.8 The people to whom the women tell their stories are close to them, yet distanced by the gap dug by the migration of the loved one. The daughter-in-law not chosen, of Massaouda, the son-in-law who took her daughter away, for Gordana, the daughter, granddaughter and greatgrandson of Ümmühan and the son himself, visiting for two weeks to help with the haying, for Elena: all are reaching out to the mothers across an unbridgeable gap dug by history. These interlocutors are caught in the aesthetics of a mobility ‘filled with’ gaps – if I may be pardoned this oxymoron. The two simultaneous situations of speech – between the mothers and the viewers, and between the mothers and their relatives – doubly mark second-personhood. There is a discourse to be addressed here, in the wake of humanism and the self-enclosure of vulgar Cartesianism. I am referring to the discourse of



intention, predominant in the humanities. Here, I have to skip this discussion, but its point is the untenability of a self-contained subject.9

Inter-temporality This concept of the gap lays the ground, in turn, for the second partner in the exploration of inter I am deriving from Gatens and Lloyd’s discussions, namely inter-temporal thinking, which comes with the preposterous foregrounding of the present as starting point. No babies are needed, nor need they be thrown out; instead, reversing that eternal focus of the child the faces here are those of the mothers. Instead of that idyllic connection, separation is the basis of the face. These women carry the history of their severance from the beloved child. They state their acceptance of that separation as a fact of the present. And, importantly, the concept of video installation firmly positions the co-presence or, as Fabian (1983) would call it, co-evalness, of the mothers with the viewer visiting the installation. Here lies one function of the acoustic gaps, the silences in the films. When the women do not speak, it seems the viewer’s turn has come to speak back to her. The inter-temporality also plays out in the belatedness of the viewer’s engagement. This belatedness questions the very possibility of commitment. To understand the need for this engagement in its inevitable belatedness, two distinct steps need to be taken. The first makes the move from individual to social, the second from past to present. If taken individualistically, that engagement cannot benefit any of the mothers, if only due to the temporal discrepancy between filming and viewing. Yet, in terms of inter-temporality, the commitment to that engagement built into the making of the work did cause all women to voice deep satisfaction with the fact that, for the first time in their lives, they had been asked to speak to their loss and grief, joy and hope. At the same time, the social nature of intersubjectivity holds a performative promise of the improvement of the social fabric the imaginary enactment of identification will help build. The images themselves fulfill a function in this inter-temporality. As Gatens and Lloyd recall: ... the complex interactions of imagination and affect [yield] this common space of intersubjectivity, and the processes of imitation and identification between minds which make the fabric of social life. (40) It seems obvious that this inter-action – this inter-face – cannot be exactly coeval. Instead it is, properly speaking, preposterous. But as the Begüm Özden Firat, Sarah De Mul and Sonja Van Wichelen


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women understood perfectly well, it is a speech-act of a particular kind. As a speech-act, the promise is as binding as aesthetics. Therefore, aesthetic work may be eminently suitable to ‘double-bind’ the women to a social world whose fabric allows their loss to be voiced, so that they can be relieved of the burden they carry too solitarily, instead of being caught in a double-bind that forces them to silence. This is where the affection-image Deleuze theorized as emblematically situated in the close-up, comes in with its typical temporality. The inter-temporality at stake here takes its starting-point from the present – the present of viewing (Deleuze 1986; Hansen 2003). Paola Marrati (2003) points to the crucial function of the affectionimage as the closest to both the materiality of the image and that of subjectivity. She writes: ‘Between a perception that is in certain ways troubling, and an action still hesitant, affection emerges’ (48). It is this image, she continues, that transforms the movement of translation in movement of expression, ‘in pure quality’ (49). This is why the affection-image remains closest to the present, while providing it with the temporal density needed to make the inter-face possible. Hence, the affection-image is the closest approximation to commitment. Gatens and Lloyd recall that Spinoza’s conception of affect is explicit in its inter-temporality. They write: The awareness of actual bodily modification – the awareness of things as present – is fundamental to the affects; and this is what makes the definition of affect overlap with that of imagination. All this gives special priority to the present. (52) But the present cannot be indifferent to the past. It is with us, and we are, therefore, in complicity. The authors continue: But there are two ways in which the present is involved in imagination and affect: first, the awareness of the immediate state of bodily modification, which applies, by definition, to all affects and to all imaginings; and, second, the special relation to the present which arises where not only the bodily modification but its causes are present – that is, where the affect relates to something here and now, rather than past or future. (52) The images that result from this are far from the documentary realism so common in humanistic discourse. Such images possess a ‘temporal density’ that is inhabited by the past and the future, while affect, hence, especially the affect produced by the close-up, remains an event Begüm Özden Firat, Sarah De Mul and Sonja Van Wichelen


in the present – an event of, to use a typical Spinozian-Deleuzian phrase, becoming. The inter-temporality of aesthetics, then, is a privileged aspect of art to situate its contribution to the binding aesthetics of mobility – the migratory aesthetics to which I am committed. This concerns the presence of the past. If we take this presence to the realm of the social, we can no longer deny responsibility for the injustice of the past, even if we cannot be blamed for it. For, without that responsibility the use of the vexed pronoun ‘we’ itself becomes disingenuous, even unethical. ‘Spinozistic responsibility’ is derived from the philosopher’s concept of self as social, and consists of projecting presently felt responsibilities ‘back into a past which itself becomes determinate only from the perspective of what lies in the future of that past – in our present’. This ‘pre-posterous’ responsibility based on memory and imagination makes selfhood not only stable but also unstable (82). This instability is a form of empowerment, of agency within a collectivitybased individual consciousness. In Deleuze’s work, this becomes the key concept of becoming. Becoming also defines our activities as scholars in the humanities. Hence, finally, interdisciplinary thought is needed to make the connection, in the present and across the cultural divide, between a number of discourses and activities routinely either treated separately or unwarrantedly merged. There are many issues here, of which I single out two: the place of language and that of psychoanalysis, the darling of some and a changeling for others. Of course, for many of us the conjunction of art history, film studies, and literary studies with psychoanalysis is both accepted and constantly put under erasure. I allege two reasons for suspending it in the present context. First, the often-heard complaint that psychoanalysis is typically Western because and to the extent that it is thoroughly albeit ambivalently individualistic seems nevertheless obvious. To shun that complicity with Western values I do not dismiss the theory but give full weight to the mothers’ enacted desire to refrain from self-expression. Even within a psychoanalytic framework, this reluctance forbids us to psychoanalyze them. First, the situation of filming, in the intimacy-with-gaps and in the absence of the filmmaker, could easily become a trap to solicit more self-expression than the women would want to endorse. Even if Ümmühan cries almost all the time, and the most rational of all, Gordana, breaks down at some point, a degree of modesty becomes us here. More importantly, it is at moments when they seem most reluctant to express themselves (in the Western sense of that word) that the performativity of their self-presentation is most acutely able to pierce



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through the conventional surface. Hence, a leap to the psyche might bypass these moments, while these moments are for me the keys to facing. One example of this must suffice. Massaouda offers a striking instance of a culturally specific reluctance that cautions us against psychologizing or psychoanalyzing her. Not coincidentally, this is the most strongly performative moment of the video. It is also a moment where performativity and performance in the theatrical sense of role-playing merge quite strikingly. As I have been able to see firsthand, Massaouda and her newly acquired daughterin-law, Ilhem, get along famously. But in their relationship remains the stubborn gap immigration policy has dug. This is partly due to Ilhem’s French nationality and upbringing, so that her Arabic cultural and linguistic identification is choice- and training-based.10 But also, and this is the point here, when Ilhem married Massaouda’s youngest son, his mother was not allowed to attend by the authorities who denied her a visa. Hence, not only had Massaouda not been in a position to witness who Ilhem was, but even more obviously, she had not been able to fulfill her motherly role as her culture prescribes it, which is to help her son choose his bride. At some point, Ilhem rather bluntly brings this enforced failure into the conversation. She ends up asking with some insistence what Massaouda had thought of her when she first saw her, after the fact, and, hence, in a kind of powerlessness. First, Massaouda doesn’t answer, which makes Ilhem anxious enough to insist, and to ask: did you find me ugly, plain? The older woman looks away at this point. The young woman insists. We will never know what Massaouda ‘really’ felt, but the power that the filming bestows on her, as if in compensation for her earlier dis-empowerment, is to either withhold or give her approval. She does the latter, but only after some teasing. The point about the performativity of the filming is that Ilhem would never have been allowed to ask this question and thus vent her anxiety. As for the mother, she was given, and performed, the power she had been denied, and she used it to first mark the gap, then to be kind, to help her somewhat insecure daughter-in-law. This interaction is thoroughly social, performative, and bound to the medium of video – to the making of the film. It would never have happened outside of the situation of video-making. It is a moment, in other words, that was staged, yet real, thus challenging that distinction. Nor can we pinpoint a psyche offering symptoms for interpretation. For this to happen there was, instead, a need for a culturally specific relationship between two women related by marriage and separated by the gaps of migration; and for a relationship to the medium that allowed the women



to overstep cultural boundaries. Thus, the suspension of the categories of the individual psyche and, in its wake, of intention demonstrates a level of interdisciplinarity I am particularly keen to point out. The filmmaking, performed by the women in their inter-face with their relatives, all but dictates the approaches it is appropriate to take to the resulting installation. The performance, including the moment of slight tension between Massaouda and Ilhem is a genuine form of research the results of which impinge on what we grope toward articulating as knowledge. The second example of the interdisciplinarity that is essentially, not coincidentally involved here, emerges from the linguistic situation. The spoken word is central to the installation in many ways and on many different levels, all of which converge in the attempt to turn a condescending act of ‘giving voice’ into an affirmation of our need to be given that voice in order to exist. First, the centrality of the spoken word impinges on the visual form. For, it is also in order to foreground the privileging of the voice of the mothers we rarely ever see or hear about, that the films consist of single shots and remain unedited. This presentation enhances the key idea that the women who were all but forgotten, hidden away in their modest situation ‘back home’, say what they wish to say. The effect of the camera, mitigated as it is by the intimate interlocutors is that they strike a tone of awareness of the public nature of their account, but simultaneously a ‘rhetoric of sincerity’ emerges: they speak about facing their children’s departure to the person who came back to them to allow that self-expression; this situation presupposes sincerity. At the same time, they are keenly aware of the public nature of the speech they are producing in front of a camera. While the rhetorical nature of their speech precludes a psychological interpretation, it does negotiate the distinction between the individual stories of loss and suffering, and the social nature of the structures that caused it, as well as of the situation of interlocution we face when viewing the work.11 Second, the translations presented as super-titles are also an example of the close bond between linguistic and visual aspects of the images. As I mentioned, the viewer is confronted with many different languages, foreign to most, and an emphatically visualized translation. The decision to place the translations over the image rather than underneath came to me when I reflected on possibilities to foreground the acts of speaking of the women who had never spoken about this issue. Placed, visually, above their faces, the language is both made important and presented as somewhat of a burden. English as the sole entrance port



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is denaturalized, both by this visual foregrounding and by the translations themselves. For, third, translations are as literal as possible, bringing out the poetry in the original languages without sacrificing to clarity. This method results in ‘accented’ English that maintains the bicultural status of the communication. The point is that the loss of the acoustic mirror of the mother tongue is a fundamental one that the host cultures need to acknowledge, address, and attempt to compensate for. Especially in the case of Massaouda, the daughter-in-law’s Arabic is accented, a second language partly learned at home from her parents, but further acquired in a commitment to grow closer to her in-laws.

Commitment to what? My commitment, then, is to this inter-facing which is, I propose, emblematic. For me, the term indicates an engagement with the unharmonious blend of the small cultural aspects of everyday life in a situation of generalized mobility that affects the lives of individuals in distinctive ways. In my view, inter-facing addresses specific issues of ‘binding through the senses’ the gaps or remainders of the mobility that has always been part of Western culture, although we didn’t realize it. In Nothing Is Missing, the heart of the work is the encounter with the faces. This is one reason why location has been visually understated. In order to avoid the exoticizing touristic gaze, barely any images of the environment are included. But, keeping the videos inside, so to speak, skirts the opposite risk, of universalizing intimacy and motherhood. I have tried to avoid this risk by bringing into the uniformity of the images a diversity of sound. This is clear, in the first place, from the way the women speak, and the things they say. Although the cultures have much in common, they are also distinct, a difference clearly expressed in the fact that although quite a few are Muslim cultures, they are so in different ways, with different relations between religion, state, and everyday life. The focus on the face embodies the act of facing in its three meanings, all three staged here as acts of mutuality. The face, then, isolated in the images and thereby made visible in its embodiment of mobility, allows me to wind up and speculatively extend my provisional conclusions. First, the emphasis on activity reflects back on the face itself. No longer the site of representation and expression, the face has become an agent of action, in the sense of speech-act theory merged with Deleuze: what can faces do, rather than how to do things with faces.


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The face faces, looking us in the face, which makes the viewer the interlocutor. It faces something that is hard to live down, here, what for all accounts and purposes, the West would have to see as tragedy; the tragedy of severance of the primary bond that humanism construes as defining of humanity: that between mother and child. In these videos of acting faces, the tragedy is qualified as larger than the individual. All four women speak in understated tones of the causes of the child’s departure in terms of tragedies for which Western cultures can assume some measure of historical responsibility. For example, Gordana speaks of war, Massaouda of hunger, Guilhermina of medical expenses, and Ümmühan of culturally sanctioned domestic violence. These tragedies are understated because they can neither be eliminated from the present, nor be allowed to overrule the existence of the mothers in an everyday that is also rich and happy. Hence, the discourse intimated in the installation’s title – the one on which Massaouda ends her final and hard-won openness about what matters most to her as a mother: that her son finds bread to eat. Facing them nevertheless fulfills the becoming of who we are in the present: according to the binding implied in aesthetics, facing these tragedies together so that ‘we’ can ‘be’ is part of our own potential of becoming. But how can we do that – how can commitment be more than theorizing although that theorizing is an integral part of it? Making contact, the third act implied in facing, facilitates that becoming – becoming world citizens, building our existence on mobility. This making of contact is suggested as an effect of the insistent facing in Nothing Is Missing. What faces can do is stage encounters. This is the point of the faces of the mothers in Nothing Is Missing, presented as busts; of making the images obliquely allude to the busts of Roman emperors and other dignitaries. That slight distance, then, provides the space for a freedom à la Spinoza. Such a freedom is, by necessity, ‘critical’ (Tully 1995). This is where commitment is demonstrably impossible without acknowledgement of complicity. Critical freedom is the practice of seeing the specificity of one’s own world as one among others. Intertemporally, this freedom sees the present as fully engaged with the past which, insofar as it is part of the present, we can freely rewrite. The act of inter-facing can do that. To this rewriting goes the commitment of the humanities self-critical of its complicities and aware of its responsibility to the past in and for the present.



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Notes 1. Everyday life is a complex notion. Here, I can only refer to Michel de Certeau’s seminal book (1984) and a more recent article by Colebrook (2002). 2. The most insightful, indeed brilliant engagement with Lacan remains Silverman (1996). On the ongoing relevance of Bakthin’s work for cultural analysis, see Peeren (2007). 3. The term ‘relational aesthetics’ has been introduced by Bourriaud (2005). 4. On the social and philosophical importance of the second person, see Code (1991; 1995). 5. The term ‘migratory aesthetics’ has been developed in two workshops organized by ASCA and the University of Leeds in 2004 and 2005. Two volumes have been published as a result of the workshops: see Durrant and Lord (2007) and Aydemir and Rotas (2008). On Spinoza more below. 6. On the concept of critical intimacy, see Spivak (2001) and my commentary (2002). 7. For a performative view of the face, see Rushton (2002). 8. For such a dynamic conception of culture as what I call here ‘the cultural’, see Fabian (2001). 9. See Bal (2002) ch. 7 for an in-depth discussion of intention. 10. For more background on this family, see Cinema Suitcase, Mille et Un Jours (2004, reedited 2006). 11. The term ‘rhetoric of sincerity’ refers to a volume with that title (Van Alphen, Bal and Smith 2009).

References Alphen, E. van, M. Bal, and C. Smith (2009) The Rhetoric of Sincerity, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Aydemir, M. and A. Rotas (2008) Migratory Settings, Amsterdam: Rodopi. Bal, M. (1999) Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Bal, M. (2002) Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Bourriaud, N. (2005) Postproduction. Culture as Screenplay: How Art Programs the World, New York: Lukas & Sternberg. Brilliant, R. (1991) Portraiture, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Code, L. (1991) What Can She Know? Feminist Epistemology and the Construction of Knowledge, Ithaca, NY/London: Cornell University Press. Code, L. (1995) Rhetorical Spaces: Essays on Gendered Locations, New York: Routledge. Colebrook, C. (2002) ‘The Politics and Potential of Everyday Life’, New Literary History 33: pp. 687–706. De Certeau, M. (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life, S. Rendall (trans.), Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Deleuze, G. (1986) Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam (trans.), London: Athlone Press.


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Durrant, S. and C. Lord (eds.) (2007) Essays in Migratory Aesthetics. Essays in Migratory Aesthetics: Cultural Practices between Migration and Art-making, Amsterdam: Rodopi. Fabian, J. (1983) Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object, New York: Columbia University Press. Fabian, J. (2001) Anthropology with an Attitude: Critical Essays, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Gadamer, H.G. (1989) Truth and Method, 2nd rev. edition, New York: Crossroad. Gatens, M. and G. Lloyd (1999) Collective Imaginings: Spinoza, Past and Present, New York: Routledge. Hansen, M.B.N. (2003) ‘Affect as Medium, or the Digital-Facial-Image’, Journal of Visual Culture, 2(2): pp. 205–28. Lakoff, R.T. and R.L. Scherr (1984) Face Value: The Politics of Beauty, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Marrati, P. (2003) Gilles Deleuze. Cinéma et philosophie, Paris: PUF. Peeren, E. (2007) Identities as Intersubjectivities in Popular Culture: Bakhtin and Beyond, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Pisters, P. (2002) The Matrix of Visual Culture: Working with Deleuze in Film Theory, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Pisters, P. (2005) ‘Micropolitics of the Migrant Family in Accented Cinema Love and Creativity in Empire’, in P. Pisters and W. Staat (eds.) Shooting the Family: Transnational Media and Intercultural Values, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, pp. 197–212. Rushton, R. (2002) ‘What Can a Face Do? On Deleuze and Faces’, Cultural Critique, 51(Spring): pp. 219–37. Silverman, K. (1996) The Threshold of the Visible World, New York: Routledge. Spivak, G.C. (1999) A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Tully, J. (1995) Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.


Part III Putting Complicity to Work




8 The Necessity of ‘Terror’ Elleke Boehmer

Violent sorrow is become a modern ecstasy (Macbeth – with thanks to Euan Fernie) The rhetoric and the realities of terror and terrorism press heavily upon the world around us. In this hyper-mediatized age, acts of terror almost immediately transmute into media events, and so appear ubiquitous, all-encompassing, all-justifying, and, moreover, are absorbed into the rituals of the everyday (Houen 2002; Zulaika and Douglass 1996). To demonstrate a radical political commitment means – perhaps more than ever before – to take a stand on our complicity, or our refusal of complicity, with ‘terrorist’ formations. In this context, where we confront what can be described as an outpouring of terror (as spectacle, as event), this chapter turns to history in order to investigate interpretations and representations of terror under the (quasi-)colonial regime, and relate these to the place of terror in some postcolonial resistance theory. The discussion is premised on the awareness that, long before terror became once again the West’s primary, self-consolidating enemy, the techniques and justifications of violence played an important part both in exercising colonial sovereignty and in theorizing the postcolonial condition. For Frantz Fanon, probably the leading anticolonial voice in defense of revolutionary assault, violence is how the colonized cleanse and remake themselves (Fanon 1985). It is their only recourse in the face of the continual, unremitting bludgeoning that is colonial rule. For Achille Mbembe, whose work in this respect is interestingly informed by Fanon, as well as by Thomas Hobbes and Giorgio Agamben, imperial and postimperial sovereignty depends on the right to kill, or, more precisely, to hold the subject in a state of continual confrontation with 139 Begüm Özden Firat, Sarah De Mul and Sonja Van Wichelen

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death. As he writes: ‘The colony represents the site where sovereignty consists fundamentally in the exercise of a power outside the law ... and where “peace” is more likely to take on the face of a “war without end” ’ (Mbembe 2003: 23). Although their views on the ethics of terror may differ, Mbembe cites Fanon’s vivid spatialization of necro-power in the colony: all is regulated by ‘the language of pure force’ and ‘the principle of reciprocal exclusivity’ (Mbembe 2003: 26). In such a colony, as well as in the postcolony, the Habermasian public sphere, if it exists at all, depends for its very existence not only on regulative communicative action but also on violent exclusion. Taking these stringent if not chilling remarks as prompts, those of us who are concerned with sovereignty and its complicities within the at-once-imperial and postimperial juncture that is our contemporary condition, ignore at our peril the histories, politics, and techniques of modern terror. Even if at this time of ‘war on terror’ it is widely assumed that we know what terror means (we are, it is said, all implicated in this ‘war’), in fact terror has been emptied of meaning as never before. To quote Said commenting in 2001 on the relationship of Islam and the West: ‘what is bad about all terror is when it is attached to religious and political abstractions and reductive myths that keep veering away from history and sense’ (Said 2001). Or, to cite the observation of the Times and Guardian journalist Simon Jenkins, in a review of David Runciman’s book The Politics of Good Intentions, the war on terror has become an ideal post–Cold War tool (Jenkins 2006: 11). It allows Western states to reinstate the condition, presumably taken from colonial times, of wielding sovereignty through war-without-end. In both situations, colonial and contemporary, terror becomes all-pervasive and completely nonspecific, as well as deeply contradictory (and hence difficult to objectify and oppose). To illustrate: the war on terror is at one and the same time without limit and without restraint, as well as unwinnable, as it has no distinct enemy; and yet it is waged, we are told, in order to be won; in order for a limit to be achieved. Interestingly, the unlocalized phrase ‘war on terror’ is a hostage to its own globalizing and imperializing ambitions, in so far as it implies that terror is everywhere, and hence it must constitute the primary mode of sovereignty of the counter-terroristic state itself. So, if we are to believe contemporary Western political rhetoric, terror has become the contemporary state of being to which, for the West, there is no exception (the word is used in the conventional sense), and to which there have been few exceptions for some considerable time.


The Necessity of ‘Terror’ 141

Western state power and the enemy’s power are both terroristic. This can be taken to mean that its hegemony imposes itself through terroristic means, as does resistance to it. In other words, there is no point in taking on this power, either combating it or contending with it, through nonterroristic means. Gandhi’s arguments in favor of passive resistance and noncooperation, for example, would have no purchase in this terror-bound situation. Here complicity with terror is inevitable and unavoidable. It is from this notion that the title of this chapter emerges: the recognition of the ‘necessity’ of terror (which, following Mbembe, could also read as the necessity or inevitability of inflecting conditions of death, and near-death, on the terroristic enemy). To say this of course does not necessarily equate with an argument in support of terror. In the context of the simultaneously imperial and postimperial states of sovereignty that we inhabit, I want now to consider more closely the apparent inevitability of terroristic resistance and commitments to violence under the conditions of ‘war without end’. Here the words of a commentator on the anti-Iraq war protests in London on March 18, 2006 are pertinent: ‘[Iraq’s] people have only known war, so it’s no wonder they’re turning to terrorism’ (The Guardian 2006). Ultimately this chapter would submit that, in as much as terror has been the medium of the modern state and the modern imperium, terror has equally been the site for the critique of the modern state and imperium. To an extent, it has had to be the site of the critique of the modern state. Under the prevailing conditions of sovereignty, other sites and other techniques have been rendered either unavailable or ineffective. Political commitment has had to take on the aspect of complicity with terror. At this point it becomes important to remember that, from as far back as the time of the French Revolution and its Terror, terror has served as a powerful site for the interrogation and appropriation of modernity as well as of power. Especially since the mass-production of explosives and armaments in the second half of the nineteenth century, the terroristic act has represented an-often-pressurized if not desperate attempt by marginalized and relatively powerless groups to seize hold of the rights and privileges of the modern state. Moreover, through such seizing hold, the terroristic act has also signified their claim to historical agency. Such attempts relate to the proverbial Benjamin-esque ‘moment of danger’ through which, according to the ‘Theses’, the contemporary continuum of history is made to explode, jolting us into seeing history not as the familiar and the humdrum but as a situation of unending and relentless struggle (Benjamin 1968: 253–64). Terror in this respect becomes the site at once of attack and critique, of commitment and


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complicity. In Terry Eagleton’s analysis in Holy Terror, ‘terrorism and the modern democratic state were twinned at birth. In the era of Danton and Robespierre, terrorism began life as state terrorism. It was violence visited by the state on its enemies, not a strike against sovereignty by its faceless forces’ (Eagleton 2005: 1). Eagleton’s exegesis of terror and its link with the sacred in this book is powerful, yet, as even this quotation betrays, it suffers to some degree from regarding terrorism as a metaphysical constant, and so misses the crucial connection between totalitarian and/or imperial state power and terror. To complicate our understanding of terror as a mode of state and imperial power – as a necro-politics – and as a weapon of antistate insurgency, any review of the anticolonial rationales of terror must begin with Fanon. This is not least because his theory of violence as a powerful, cathartic antiimperial force is cited by a range of contemporary and modern commentators on totalitarianism and terror, from Hannah Arendt and Thomas Pogge, to the many introductions to terrorism on the market at the time of writing. What is interesting about these short guides, as about Arendt, all of which take a stand against terror on the grounds of harm to ‘innocents’, is that they cite or implicitly acknowledge Fanon as the one who, their principles to the contrary, comes closest to occupying a viable position pro-terror. These commentators do not however agree with Fanon that all forms of modern power, especially the colonial, are terroristic, and therefore they are ultimately committed to citing his revolutionary idealism in order to dismiss it. Charles Townshend in his Very Short Introduction to Terrorism, for example, defines terror in terms of singularity and mechanics. Terror is a ‘free-standing, sufficient, and decisive political strategy’ that operates on a psychological plane and is hence attractive to the powerless and the unarmed, yet, he suggests, no war of national liberation has succeeded by this mechanism alone – it is too singular (Townshend 2002: 15). Though Fanon’s emphasis on the restoration of self-respect is key, liberation by ‘each and all’ through terroristic means for Townshend has ‘corrupting consequences that reverberate for decades’ (27, 95). Townshend would probably agree with a writer like Don De Lillo in Mao II – or indeed with Joseph Conrad in The Secret Agent – when they suggest that the figure of the bomb-maker unlike the policeman stands for a force that cannot be incorporated into state structures. By contrast, I would suggest that, pressing the implications of Mbembe’s argument, we in the contemporary globalized world have reasons for thinking that terror is a force that has been everywhere incorporated. To cite Benjamin again: ‘The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the state of emergency in



which we live is not the exception but the rule’ (Benjamin 1968: Thesis VIII). Or to turn to Sartre: ‘The whole regime ... [is] conditioned by a thousand-year old oppression’ (Sartre 1985: 21). By way of exemplification, consider how Mohammed Bouyeri’s murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam in November 2004 was widely represented both in the Netherlands and abroad. The Dutch government and media as well as right-wing internet sites immediately took the event not as a possible assassination, a one-off act, as for several good reasons it might have been taken, but as an act of terror, that is, as something which was ongoing and unremitting. Against this, a range of counter-terroristic security measures including ID cards for all, was believed justified and was rapidly put in place. It was a partially oblique yet assertive admission of the incorporated nature of terror (de Leeuw and van Wichelen 2007). In the light of this incorporation, it becomes important to ask whether Fanon’s influential argument in support of anticolonial violence does not build out of the premiss regarding the endemic nature of violence in the colonial state. To explore this question two rather different anticolonial figures can be cited as cases in point for the necessity of terror under necro-political conditions. The first, briefly, is Aurobindo Ghosh, the revolutionary leader in Bengal in the 1900s; the second is Nelson Mandela, especially in his early 1960s incarnation as leader of Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation). I will return to both in a moment. They are invoked because both move from positions of passive to active resistance and so, one might say, shift between two different strands of anticolonial logic, the Gandhian and the Fanonian, which are however misleadingly often both referred to simply as postcolonial theories of resistance. Fanon’s famous chapter ‘Concerning Violence’, based on his address to the 1958 All-Africa People’s Conference, forms the angry ‘beating heart’ of The Wretched of the Earth (Fanon 1985: 35). Fanon gives his central rationale for a violent anticolonialism in a short paragraph at the very beginning of the chapter, which forms part of his evocation of the manichean and compartmentalized colonial world. He writes: ‘The native who decides to put the programme [of outright rejection of the colonial world] into practice, and to become its moving force, is ready for violence at all times. From birth it is clear to him that this narrow world, strewn with prohibitions, can only be called in question by absolute violence’ (29, emphasis added). In the colonial world, Fanon continues, the victory of Western values is permeated with aggression. This permeation is total – as Mbembe, too, would agree. Therefore the


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only way to break the settler’s ‘flaunting violence’ is to ‘put him out of the picture’ (34, 35). As Fanon says again and again in his discussion of the native intellectual, compromise and conciliation are useless; there is no third way in this manichean situation; there is no possibility of a reform of the system. Moreover, there is no other way of defeating the native’s own inner ghosts and phobias. The entire structure of the occult society must be razed to the ground. Fanon’s relentless, sometimes circular reiteration of this position across the chapter is interesting. It constitutes a rhetoric of incitement, as Sartre spotted, but it also represents, as Arendt perceived, a possible difficulty, in that it does not easily allow us to imagine a world beyond this situation of implacable opposition; beyond violence. In terms derived from Eagleton, we do not see a way to a situation where the law will protect citizens. His repeated circularities, in which manichean image begets manichean image, and violence begets violence, are in their way a manifestation of the situation where violence has been, as we saw, everywhere incorporated. A similar difficulty besets Mandela’s justifications of African National Congress (ANC) violence against the apartheid state, as we will see. Though in several of his pre-1994 statements and speeches he introduces the finessing suggestion that the apartheid state might wear itself down by its own violence, for as long as the opposition is relentless in its opposition there is to the militant Mandela rarely a view forwards to a postviolence condition. In Fanon, in a commentary on the postcolonial economic situation, we do find this urgent protestation: ‘the under-developed countries ought to do their utmost to find their own particular values and methods and a style which shall be peculiar to them’ (78). Yet this will not happen, he acknowledges at the end of the chapter, without Europe itself remaking itself, cauterizing and expelling its own endemic violence, which can only come through conflict. As for Sartre in his famous Preface to The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon’s argument for anticolonial violence carries a historical force and power of conviction of its own (Sartre 1985: 20). Its reverberations, Sartre believed, would continue in its readers beyond the reading of the book. The idea that the endemic violence of the colonial state cannot be bargained with, and so must be combated outright, has, it is crucial to remind ourselves, a long and persuasive past as well as a reverberating future tense. Though the force of the argument as it were flowed through Fanon as through a vessel, it did not in fact originate with him. It is here that the Bengali revolutionary or ‘extremist’ Aurobindo Ghosh steps in, as a historical demonstration of how such ideas are



inherited, adapted, and passed on. It’s important to add of course that I might equally have cited the example of the Irish Fenians of the 1860s, or of the Russian anarchists of the late nineteenth century, or of internationalist groupings in several other revolutionary contexts. All would broadly have agreed with Aurobindo when he wrote, ‘Self-development from a state of servitude under an alien and despotic rule’ takes as its ‘indispensable preliminary’ ‘the forcible or peaceful removal of that rule’ (Ghosh 1948a: 2).

Aurobindo Ghosh To the Cambridge-educated, vehement nationalist Aurobindo Ghosh, for the nation to win its freedom from colonial oppression, all means were justified: assassination, sabotage, arson, violent overthrow. He began to argue in coded terms for antistate terror from about 1902; in less coded terms from the time of Curzon’s Partition of Bengal and the outbreak of swadeshi in 1905. Predictably, the full counter-terroristic arsenal of the Bengal colonial state was before too long marshaled against him and the cells of revolutionaries that he led, driving many into prison and into exile. This was to the extent that by 1910, in a move that bears strong resonances today, Ghosh, after a period of detention, and with imprisonment again threatened, shifted his subversive energies from the political stage into the realm of religious belief. Although across his long life he never forswore the principle that ‘In a subject nationality, to win liberty for one’s country is the first duty of all, by whatever means, at whatever sacrifice’ (Ghosh 1948a: 2–8), henceforth he saw that struggle as more effectively waged through spiritual means. Aurobindo’s support for anticolonial terrorism, though he would not call it that, is clearly laid out in his foremost seditious publication, The Doctrine of Passive Resistance (1910), first published as a series of articles in the journal Bande Mataram in 1907. Ignited by the 1905 Partition, the Bengal resistance in this period represented an interesting, intensely modern conjunction, an intersection between theories of anarchism imported from Europe, nostalgic notions of Hindu revival and self-sacrifice, and an admiration for modernizing Japan. In his booklet, in particular its officially proscribed final chapters, Aurobindo appears to suggest that aggressive resistance, as he calls it, will be a way not only of resisting the colonial state and expressing nationalist pride, but also of exploding Bengal into a self-determining, self-assertive modernity. He anticipates and agrees with Fanon therefore that violence is the most effective means not only of colonial overthrow but also of native self-making.



As a self-aware colonial mimic man, dressed in the ‘threadbare leavings’, in his words, ‘of our English masters’, Aurobindo was clear-eyed and prescient in his sense that colonization had deprived the colonized native of their selfhood (Boehmer 2002: 86–7). He agreed with an earlier generation of nationalists like the novelist Bankimchandra Chatterjee that the ‘tinkerings and palliatives’ (86) of a moderate Congress would be entirely ineffective in displacing such colonial domination: it had taken up house in the native mind itself, therefore a forceful expulsion was imperative. Unlike Bankim or even the seer Vivekananda, however, Aurobindo did not and could not at this stage camouflage his message through the use of Bengali, or through couching it in a cryptic language of spiritual discipline. Instead, where Fanon summoned Marx to his aid, Aurobindo and his collaborators like Sister Nivedita invoked the warrior ethic of the revised and modernized Bhagavad-Gita in order to put the case that ‘the answer of violence to violence is justified and inevitable’ (Ghosh 1948a: 29–30). ‘The morality of the Kshatriya justifies violence in time of war’ – and colonization without justice to him was war. Or as he said more explicitly in a speech some years before his final self-silencing, ‘We must take back our life into our own hands and the change must be immediate, complete and drastic’ (Ghosh 1948b: 52). Despite such fighting tones, for Aurobindo the path to outright resistance had crucially however to be a stage-by-stage incremental one. It would not be possible to wage an anticolonial struggle without having built in the people a capacity for self-reliance, which entailed a sense of self. He was once again thinking presciently, along Fanonist lines, when, in the Doctrine, he mapped out the three stages of nationalist resistance, each of which involved an element of self-making. The first stage represented noncooperation sustained by self-help; the second, active resistance without direct confrontation, as in boycott; and, the third, political violence. Throughout all three stages, however, he emphasized, no form of ‘force worship’ could go unaccompanied by spiritual revival: nationalism was in essence a spiritual discipline demanding sacrifice of different kinds, political and spiritual, from the devotee (ENP 111). In response to Arendt’s concern that Fanon’s support for violence as a means could mutate into an enthusiasm for violence as an end in itself, Aurobindo could conceivably have referred to the ‘complex’, ‘overflowing’ ‘living reality’ of the awakened nation as the gate through which political violence was productively transformed. This point of consummation however might in certain contexts not be as effective a get-out as first appeared. For Aurobindo the nation triumphant remains a warrior nation, aggressive, expansive,



fierce: it is difficult to see how such a nation could sustain itself in real terms without waging terror, whether on other nations, or on its own people.

Nelson Mandela As suggested earlier, the preincarceration Nelson Mandela shared with Fanon and his anticolonial precursor Aurobindo the conviction that the terrors of entrenched colonial power could only be overcome with force, and also that the implementation of such force should follow a stage-by-stage intensification, led by a vanguard of nationalist intellectuals. Yet even after his release, even when he came out in support of a negotiated settlement, Mandela chose to fly in the face of Western world leaders eager to brand him a terrorist and did not immediately lay down the recourse to arms. (As late as the mid-eighties, it is worth recalling, Margaret Thatcher denounced the ANC as a terroristic organization. Sampson 1999: 358–9). To keep minded of the unforgiving logic of his militancy, this section’s overview of the anticolonial activist’s inevitable complicity with a situation of terror-without-end, rounds off with a close reading of Mandela’s response to the 1976 Soweto Uprising – an uprising of course unanticipated and undirected by the ANC. His statement ‘We shall crush apartheid’ was smuggled out of Robben Island, and published by the ANC, almost as a kind of retrospective wishfulfillment, in 1980. When in early 1962, following the collapse of the Treason Trial, Mandela travelled around Africa marginally including Fanon’s adopted country Algeria, to canvas prevailing ideas on military resistance, he was already convinced that the only remaining recourse for the oppressed South African majority was violent retaliation. The path toward this decision had been a difficult one, sparking any number of delicate negotiations with more Christian and Gandhian ANC leaders (Sampson 1999: 150–1). However, after Sharpeville the previous year, and the government’s moves against a planned strike in May 1961, there appeared to Mandela to be no alternative. Against the uncompromising overlordship of the suprematist state, the ANC’s Gandhian arsenal of noncooperative responses, which had in fact never been sharply formulated as an African politics, had been exposed as ineffective. Unless more decisive action was taken, Mandela, Walter Sisulu, and others realized, the more militant, younger sections within the African National Congress would take matters into their own hands. It was necessary not only to withstand the wind but also to ride the



whirlwind. In Mandela’s own, often carefully coded words: [I]t is first and foremost by our own struggle and sacrifice inside South Africa itself that victory over White domination and apartheid can be won. (IDAF 1978: 118) And again: The freedom movement in South Africa believes that hard and swift blows should be delivered with the full weight of the masses of the people, who alone furnish us with one absolute guarantee that the freedom flames now burning in the country shall never be extinguished. (IDAF: 119) Reading these lines alongside those from Aurobindo, it is interesting how both leaders couch what is in effect a call to arms against the repressive state in a language of sacrifice to the nation. The address from which Mandela’s words are taken, which is entitled ‘A Land Ruled by the Gun’, was given in January 1962 in Addis Ababa in Mandela’s capacity as the leader of the ANC delegation to the PanAfrican Freedom Movement of East and Central Africa. The talk is interestingly omitted from a recent selection of his speeches, published to mark the first ten years of postapartheid South Africa (Asmal et al. 2004). Mandela’s intention in giving the talk, in asking a rhetorical question about what role to play (which immediately precedes my second quote), was to explain and justify to other African political groups and parties, the ANC’s controversial turn to violence. The Mark Antony-like question in full is: ‘Can anyone, therefore, doubt the role that the freedom movements should play in view of this hideous conspiracy?’ What is particularly revealing about the talk is how, like Aurobindo in the 1900s, and like Fanon in ‘Concerning Violence’, Mandela moves rhetorically through the different stages of increasing repression which the oppressed majority has suffered. He separates violence into four categories of incremental intensity – sabotage, guerilla warfare, terrorism, and open revolution. Following on from this steady buildup, the only answer to the question about the role of the freedom movements is clear. No one can doubt that freedom’s flames must be released, even if only through the channel of sabotage. As Fanon would have earnestly agreed, through violence the black man will achieve his humanity. It was, as this confirms, in the early 1960s that Mandela came out openly in favor of political retaliation as a justified response. However



it is possible to trace across the preceding decade his steady pathway toward this position, followed in the name of the oppressed nation, the nation unable to manifest and realize itself. From the early 1950s Mandela had marked himself out as a young leader who, increasingly impatient with the ANC’s widely championed nonviolent methods, worked intensively in certain areas to restructure the grassroots organization of Congress and so prepare the ground for ‘underground’ insurgency (Lodge 2006: 10). At meetings he repeatedly urged that Congress move beyond speeches and resolutions for the reason that leaders should give expression to the ‘mass movement’ of the people. In a notorious 1953 speech he was to be heard saying that ‘violence was the only weapon that could destroy apartheid’, as well as singing revolutionary songs inviting people to take up weapons against the enemies. (These songs included the famous line: Amandhla ngwethu nobungcwalisa nabo bobethu – power is ours, so is justice.) In the light of Mandela’s anticolonial radicalism if not near-Fanonism during this period it would seem persuasive to read significance into the fact that he established the Spear of the Nation grouping in the same year Fanon published The Wretched of the Earth, 1961. Yet, as regards Fanon’s direct influence on Mandela, tempting as it is to posit in the light of their joint commitment to armed struggle, it is unlikely that Mandela having no French would have read Fanon before his imprisonment. However, as Fanon gave his address on the necessity of anticolonial violence at the 1958 All-Africa People’s Conference, in retaliation at Nkrumah’s advocacy of positive action, stopping short of violence, it is likely that Mandela, on his horizon-expanding pan-African tour, would have been exposed to these ideas. He certainly refers to the 1958 Conference, and Nkrumah’s defensive Positive Action Conference of 1960, in ‘A Land ruled by the Gun’. And he would definitely have agreed with Fanon that colonial brutality, as graphically demonstrated at Sharpeville where police fired on a peaceful protest, to which Mandela also refers in the talk, had effectively exhausted the options available to nonviolence. The ‘Spear of the Nation’ manifesto, released in December 1961 following the militant Umkhonto we Sizwe’s first acts of sabotage, is unequivocal on the Fanonian imperative of retaliatory violence: ‘The people’s patience is not endless. The time comes in the life of any nation when there remain only two choices: submit or fight. That time has now come in South Africa’ (Meli 1988: 214). Some 14 years after this speech, just over the halfway point of his quarter-century-plus as a political prisoner, Mandela would remain uncompromising on the principle of ‘submit or fight’ (Asmal et al.


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2004: 43–6). In ‘We Shall Crush Apartheid’ his response to 1976 – with its overtones, of course, of ‘we shall overcome’ – Mandela begins with the Mbembe or Fanonist point that we cannot understand Soweto without the recognition that the colonial state, above all others, is based on the rule of force: The gun has played an important part in our history. The resistance of the black man to white colonial intrusion was crushed by the gun. Our struggle to liberate ourselves from white domination is held in check by force of arms. From conquest to the present the story is the same. Successive white regimes have repeatedly massacred unarmed defenceless blacks. Moreover, the apartheid state represents the acme of the colonial state in terms of its suprematism and its repressiveness: ‘Apartheid is the rule of the gun and the hangman’, and the ‘embodiment ... of all previous white suprematist regimes’. And so, Mandela asks, ‘what lies ahead?’ for the fighters and for those bereaved. Now that apartheid has failed, as the current violent situation makes clear, now that apartheid has been roundly rejected, what is to be done? In supplying an answer to this all-important question, Mandela becomes interestingly vague, not to say evasive. Even considering that this was a statement smuggled out of Robben Island, which had to an extent be written in the most sweeping and unspecific of terms, Mandela gives very little away, to a degree that in a leader could be seen as irresponsible. The children of Soweto had after all set out to make South Africa ungovernable. On the face of it Mandela’s statement could quite plausibly be read as suggesting that apartheid would by its own intolerable oppressiveness, destroy itself. ‘That verdict of 16 June is loud and clear: apartheid has failed’. Yet this was of course far from the truth. As a system of rule apartheid may have failed, but for 14 years after 1976 it remained very much in place as a system. Reading Mandela’s statement against the grain is predictably more revealing, though he remains frustratingly evasive. The enemy, he goes on to say, is deep-rooted, but even so ‘the prospects of victory grow bright’. This is surely in part because the youth have taken violent action. The violent state has called out a violent response. As regards what lies ahead, the lesson then must be to continue with such violent ‘revolt’; to meet arms with arms; to fight fire with fire. To aid this fight, Mandela has a single directive only, though his phrasing suggests he might have more: ‘The first condition for victory is



black unity’. As the struggle grows ‘sharper’, he elaborates, differences must be submerged. But beyond this, no second or further conditions of victory are given. Significantly, Mandela’s inability to suggest how the struggle is to move forwards, as well as what form victory is to take, is enacted and confirmed in a circularity that recalls us to Fanon’s, though it is considerably more concentrated. With respect to the youth revolt: ‘after more than 20 years of Bantu Education the [apartheid] circle has closed’. Apartheid will be squeezed by the pincer movement of the resistance within and the resistance without – but a pincer movement in itself signifies a circularity. As indeed does: ‘Between the anvil of united mass action and the hammer of the armed struggle we shall crush apartheid’. But lest this be seen as an outright endorsement of Soweto, he adds to his conclusion a further qualifying circularity: ‘For the guns that serve apartheid cannot render it unconquerable. Those who live by the gun shall perish by the gun’. These concluding sentences appear to suggest two things: that the apartheid state will destroy itself through the working out of its own necro-politics; and that the guns in question will not be turned on the rulers by the rulers themselves. Rather it is the ANC fighters who will carry those guns. What then lies ahead? What is to be done? So far I have briefly reviewed the case for anticolonial violence or aggressive resistance by three anticolonial political activists each one of whom was in his time branded a terrorist or a terrorist sympathizer. With respect to all three, Fanon, Aurobindo, and Mandela, it has been clear that their sense of the endemic violence of the colonial state formed a crucial premise for their justification for taking up arms, whether as revolutionaries, assassins or saboteurs. They all three of them would have agreed with Frederick Douglass’s words remembering his time as a slave: that ‘a man without force is without the essential dignity of humanity’ (Gilroy 1993: 63). Yet it has also been clear that their logic that unchecked state violence must eventually beget retaliatory violence leads them into a necro-political circularity as concerns conceiving of the postcolonial nation-state as a state postviolence. So is there then an alternative? The difficulty appears to be with the notion of violence as inhering to the repressive imperializing state as its dominant if not sole mode of sovereignty; of violence as everywhere incorporated. Is there any possibility of moving beyond this condition, but without jettisoning the argument that in order to assert justice against such a state, violence or terror is justifiable, and, for the oppressed, is a mode of self-making?



It may be that a key difficulty lies with the homogenizing abstraction of the necro-political argument itself, or, specifically, with the notion of the all-encompassing, agentless hegemony of the colonial state from which it derives. An all-pervading state terror, as we have seen, commits us to seeing radical violence and overthrow as an unavoidable, lastditch, equal but opposite response. In the political landscape that this argument assumes, antistate terror is mechanistically mobilized against the terror of the state. There is no alternative to such implacable reciprocity. Political commitment demands solicitation by violence. In reality however, apart from some situations of totalitarian violence, there are frequently alternatives on offer, varying combinations of armed conflict with negotiation, for example, which Mandela in his later career was rather effectively to explore. With respect to the antistate terror positions considered here, a different possibility would be to make pragmatic accommodations with the messy disjunctiveness of everyday life, which Fanon and Mandela in practice both very much tried to grapple with. In other words, we have first to resist a theory of terror that approaches terror, especially of the state, as a total system – which is how in Fanon and the younger Mandela it for understandable historical reasons asserted itself. Instead, the terror of the state, even of the colonial state, could more productively be seen as far more changeable, interrupted, accretive, spasmodic than the picture of the agentless system allows. Against such a state a more effective mode of defense than all-out terror might be the stochastic surprise tactics of guerilla action. With this in mind I’d like to end with Ngugi’s mythic evocation of the guerilla fighter Matigari in his eponymous novel. If this seems contradictory in the light of the somewhat programmatic makeup both of the novel and of the eponymous character, the contradiction is intentional. I want to point out that even this idealized portrait of the anticolonial fighter admits of a variegation of response. Matigari is relentlessly of the opinion that: ‘whether they imprison, detain or kill us, they will never stop we who toil from struggling against those who only feed on our toil. Between the producers and the parasites, there will never be peace, or unity, or love’. Yet at the same time he concedes: Since last night, I have now learned a new lesson – or, rather, learned a new and an old lesson. The enemy can never be driven out by words alone, no matter how sound the argument. Nor can the enemy be driven out by force alone. But words of truth and justice, fully backed by armed power, will certainly drive the enemy out. When



right and might are on the same side, what enemy can hold out? (Ngugi 1986: 138)

References n.a. (2006) ‘Anti-Iraq War Protest’, The Guardian, March 20, pp. 14–15. Asmal, K., C. David, and J. Wilmot (eds.) (2004) In His Own Words: From Freedom to the Future: Tributes and Speeches, London: Abacus. Benjamin, W. (1968) ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, Illuminations, H. Zohn (trans.), New York: Schocken. Boehmer, E. (2002) Empire, the National and the Postcolonial 1890–1920: Resistance in Interaction, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Boehmer, E. (2008) Nelson Mandela: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. de Leeuw, M. and S. van Wichelen (2007) ‘Transformations of “Dutchness”: From Happy Multiculturalism to the Crisis of Dutch Liberalism’, in G. Delanty, P. Jones, and R. Wodak (eds.) Identity, Belonging, and Migration, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, pp. 261–78. Eagleton, T. (2005) Holy Terror, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Fanon, F. (1985) The Wretched of the Earth, C. Farringdon (trans.), London: Penguin. Ghosh, A. (1948a) The Doctrine of Passive Resistance, Calcutta: Arya Publishing House. Ghosh, A. (1948b) Speeches, Calcutta: Arya Publishing House. Gilroy, P. (1993) The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, London: Verso. Houen, A. (2002) Terrorism and Modern Literature, from Joseph Conrad to Ciaran Carson, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. IDAF (ed.) (1978) The Struggle Is My Life, London: International Defence and Aid Fund. Jenkins, Simon (2006) ‘Him and Us’, review of David Runciman, The Politics of Good Intentions: History, Fear and Hypocrisy in the New World Order, TLS, February 24, p. 11. Lodge, T. (2006) Mandela: A Critical Life, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mbembe, A. (2003) ‘Necro-Politics’, Public Culture, 15: pp. 11–40. Meli, F. (1988) South Africa Belongs to Us: A History of the ANC, Harare: Zimbabwe Publishing House. Ngugi, W.T. (1986) Matigari, W. wa Goro (trans.), Oxford: Heinemann. Said, E. (2001) ‘Islam and the West Are Inadequate Banners’, The Observer, September 20, n.p. Sampson, A. (1999) Mandela: The Authorised Biography, London: HarperCollins. Sartre, J-P. (1985) ‘Preface’ to The Wretched of the Earth, Constance Farringdon (trans.), London: Penguin, pp. 1–26. Townshend, C. (2002) Terrorism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Zulaika, J. and W. Douglass (1996) Terror and Taboo, London and New York: Routledge.


9 Putting Complicity to Work for Accountability: An Australian Case Study Fiona Probyn-Rapsey

The twin concepts of commitment and complicity resonate strongly with a current project that I am currently working on: a project that aims to produce a cultural history of the white fathers of Aboriginal children removed as part of the Stolen Generations. Here I unpack how complicity can operate both as a methodological and navigational tool in relation to this particular project. Complicity is used here in both senses of the word, that is, in the sense of being ‘an accomplice to’ and also in the sense of ‘complex involvement’. I hope to show that the recognition of the complicity of whites and ‘whiteness’ in the history of the Stolen Generations is important for understanding responsibility for past and present injustice. In the first part of this chapter I provide some historical background on the Stolen Generations issue in Australia, then proceed to discuss aspects of my research so far. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how contemporary accounts of complicity are utilized within the project.

Historical background Bringing Them Home: The Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families, tabled before the Australian Federal Parliament in May 1997 by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC), found that as many as one third of Aboriginal children were forcibly removed from their families between 1910 and 1970 (1997). These people are now known as the Stolen Generations. Described as ‘one of the defining texts of the contemporary Australian social and political 154 Begüm Özden Firat, Sarah De Mul and Sonja Van Wichelen

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landscape’ (Rossiter 2002: 81), Bringing them Home brought international attention to Australia’s treatment of Aboriginal people and provoked widespread national debate. Much of that debate centers on the significance and even the truth of Aboriginal people’s very painful stories of removal, as well as questions of individual and collective responsibility and apology. Despite the number of testimonies and publications on and by members of the Stolen Generations, there is still a sense that it is an Aboriginal problem, suggesting that whites are neither part of the history nor intimately linked to the families affected by removal policies. Whites are not seen (by other whites particularly) to be part of the history. Responses have often taken the form of bringing out more accounts of Aboriginal stories in order to restate the events and the facts. But perhaps it is not a lack of information that is the problem, but how the problem is being articulated, that is, without a sense of how ‘whiteness’ and whites were and are specifically involved. Common reactions to the Stolen Generations stories included the claim that ‘it was in their best interests’ to be taken away and that those involved were ‘doing what they thought was best’. In 1999, two years after the publication of Bringing them Home, Prime Minister John Howard responded by tabling a ‘Motion for Reconciliation’ before Federal Parliament in which he stated that ‘present generations cannot be held accountable ... for the errors and misdeeds of earlier generations’ because ‘for the overwhelming majority of the current generations of Australians, there was no personal involvement of them or their parents’ (1999). What struck me as significant at the time was that his rejection of apology is couched in terms of accountability along ‘family lines’ (Thompson 2002), the complexity of which is precisely what is obscured and sometimes denied in white reactions to Stolen Generations history. John Frow argues that part of the reason why the Federal government’s refusal to apologize to the Stolen Generations was so shameful is that the Report is based on the principle that the 535 testimonials be given in order that they may be heard, that the ‘[l]istening’ be then seen as ‘a form of ethical responsiveness which recognizes a duty to the story of the other’ (1999). In order to secure this ‘ethics of listening’ it is important to understand more about the listener as well, and in particular how ‘whiteness’ (and its association with ‘goodness’) is implicated in a lack of response to the testimonies. There is a considerable and impressive field of work on Stolen Generations narratives (Bird 1998; Edwards and Read 1989; Frow 1999; Haebich 2000; HREOC 1997; Olubas and Greenwell 1999; Parry 1995; van Krieken 1999; Wilson and Link-Up NSW 1997). Most of the primary


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material relating to the Stolen Generations understandably concentrates on the separation of children from their mothers (Bird 1998; Edwards and Read 1989), as did the original policies of removal. Carmel Bird’s edited collection (1998) and the film Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002) continue to prioritize the mother/child relationship. While a focus on maternal loss has opened up space for understanding the profound losses endured by Aboriginal communities, such an emphasis has also, according to Brigitta Olubas and Lisa Greenwell, been co-opted by mainstream representations which universalize and privilege white maternity (sameness) over an ‘ethics of listening’ to and through difference (1999). The centralizing of white maternity in this presentation to the ‘broader community’ is not only problematic in its appropriation of the experiences of the Aboriginal people involved, but it also obscures the issue of white paternity. The issue of white paternity does not deserve more attention than that granted the Aboriginal mother/child, but denialist reactions to Stolen Generations history seems linked to the silence surrounding it. Consequently, this research seeks to enhance understanding of how whites figured in this history as a way of highlighting the complicity of not only white people but of the very concept and idea of whiteness itself. Situating ‘whiteness’ in relation to this history opens up the issue of generational and familial complicity, and not just at the level of the Government. As Anna Haebich observes: ‘in response to the question: “Who was responsible?” there is the indelible impression of generalized white complicity at all levels, so that it seems naïve in the extreme to point the “accusing finger” solely at government’ (2000: 287). It is not commonly recognized that the majority of Aboriginal children stolen had white fathers or grandfathers. This aspect brings questions of whiteness, paternalism, and complicity into sharp relief. Bringing them Home points out that Especially during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries relationships between European men and Aboriginal women were often abusive and exploitative. Many children were the products of rape. The European biological fathers denied their responsibility and the authorities regarded the children with embarrassment and shame. (HREOC 1997: 272) The white father makes a fascinating case study of discourses of whiteness and paternalism within twentieth-century Australia. Government agencies imagined that the white father’s ‘whiteness’ was strategically administrable as a biopolitical solution to what was



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referred to as the ‘half caste problem’, which included white fears of being out numbered in some parts of Australia (particularly NT and WA) by ‘non whites’. NT Chief Protector Dr. Cecil Cook’s plan to ‘breed out the colour’, announced and endorsed by a majority of Protectors in 1937 at the Commonwealth Conference (Austin 1997), actively relied on a succession of white fathers for Aboriginal children. They were to be harnessed as, in Thomas Kenneally’s words, ‘a powerful demolisher of tribes’ (1978: 47), a concept reflected in what Terry Goldie has described as ‘a society where the white father is recognized to be never kin and always less than kind’ (1989: 221). Deborah Bird Rose points out that assimilationists were not interested in establishing families of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal parents, but they were interested in the dissemination of whiteness through ‘blood ties’ (1991: 179–88). In other words, assimilationists privileged ‘blood ties’ to the biological white father above the social ties of a white father who may have moved into Aboriginal kinship networks, a connection that the State did not want to encourage. The privileging of ‘blood ties’ necessitated the control of women’s sexuality. Aboriginal women were strictly controlled in relation to movement, employment, residence, marriage, and motherhood and were in fact placed in positions where pregnancy to white men was likely (Haebich 2000; Sabbioni 1993) but ‘marriage’ very unlikely. Not surprisingly, Australia appears heavy with suppressed kinship networks. Small towns ‘know’ who is related to who but refuse to acknowledge the connections openly, big towns splash gossip in the national newspapers. Headlines surface from unacknowledged bloodlines: white fathers with Aboriginal children still disturb colonialism’s binary logic. Conservative commentators who might elsewhere celebrate Australia’s heroic achievement as a nation (including the policy of removal), are clearly moved and troubled by the white father, ‘we must ask why our culture allowed so many white men to feel they could leave their Aboriginal children like this’ (Bolt 2001: 21). Mining Tycoon Lang Hancock’s Aboriginal daughters and sons reappear in the late 1990s and make headlines (Egan 2003: 1). Some 90 years earlier Mrs. Aeneas Gunn’s novel We of the Never Never (1906) avoids scandal by omitting the ‘Little Black Princess’ Bett-Bett’s white father. Sally Morgan writes about her family connections with the Drake-Brockmans in My Place (1987). Four years later Judith Drake-Brockman replies to Morgan with WongiWongi: To Speak (1992) to refute ‘aspersions about Father’ (1992: 54). In her autobiography, Ella Simon won’t name her white father for fear of embarrassing him (1978). Less shameful stories are apparent. Some



autobiographies present the naming of a white father as an important acknowledgment of a hidden past. Daryl Tonkin (white father of nine Aboriginal children who managed to evade child removal policies of the 1930s) perceives himself to be a ‘villain in the eyes of most’ (1999: xiv) whereas his coauthor describes him as a ‘hero ... way before his time’ (xiv–xv). Tonkin is one example of a minority of fathers who hid their children from the authorities. Suzanne Parry notes that white men who fathered Aboriginal children in the early twentieth century were scorned, ‘but the greatest derision was reserved for those who attempted to incorporate an Aboriginal woman into a nuclear family’ (1995: 143). The policy of biological assimilation adopted at the Canberra Conference in 1937 was, according to A. O. Neville (Chief Protector of Aborigines in WA 1915–1940) to move Aboriginal ‘half castes’ ‘towards the white rather than the black’ (1947: 68). In other words, the elimination of Aboriginality was deemed the condition for legitimate white paternity. White men who did not participate in this scheme, who did ‘nothing to ensure their children’s future except as natives’ (53) were particularly dangerous in Neville’s eye, for they undermined the task of assimilation into whiteness by producing ‘white natives’ instead of, implicitly, native whites (for Neville did not object to ‘grafting’ whites on to Aboriginal roots) (58–9). This element of biopolitical management forms an important feature of the history of the Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal relations. Discourses of segregation and a desire to separate the races competed with the push to incorporate Aboriginality. As Patrick Wolfe observes, ‘white authorities have generally accepted – even targeted – indigenous people’s physical substance (synecdochically represented as blood) for assimilation into their own stock’ (2001: 10). To this can be added that it was white paternity that was positioned as a mechanism of assimilation into whiteness. In light of the settler desire for Aboriginality, it is significant that in recent biographies, white men’s relationships with Aboriginal women are cast as providing grounds for an antiracist white belonging because these men were often also critics of middle class whiteness (ProbynRapsey forthcoming). White men like Tonkin, Bill Liddle (see Randall 2003), and Matt Savage (see Willey 1971) might be described as being ‘transformed’, to use Bill Harney’s term (1958: 51), by their connection with Aboriginal kin and not surprisingly, they are also critical of the kind of middle class respectable whiteness by which they and their families were judged. Contemporary calls for Australians to embrace this particular kind of family story (where the white man is heroic in his resistance to white separatist culture) situate these narratives



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as having the potential to unite, to reconcile. In even broader terms, the recognition of kinship networks across Australia has been characterized by Chief Justice Jim Spigelman as advancing the process of reconciliation: ‘millions of Australians have Aboriginal ancestors, the reconciliation process will be substantially advanced if persons of whom that is true take steps to identify those origins and take pride in finding them’ (2005, ‘Charles Perkins Memorial Oration’). Other readings of Aboriginal and white family connections have also been positioned as grounds for reconciliation. Germaine Greer in Whitefella Jump Up (2004), builds her thesis for change on the recognition of long term histories of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal intimacy. In relation to this celebration of connections it is also important to note that Aboriginal writers do not necessarily perceive connections with white family members in the same way. On the whole, but with exceptions, like Lynette Russell’s A Little Bird Told Me (2002), Aboriginal life writings have not been particularly interested in celebrating mixed race identities – rather, it is an Aboriginal identity that comes to the fore. There are few references to white fathers and mothers in Aboriginal life writing. For instance, Melissa Lucashenko points out in the preface to Hilda Jarman Muir’s Very Big Journey (2004) that ‘It mattered little that her father was an unknown white man. This small girl had a name, a loving family, and a secure Aboriginal identity’ (cited in Muir 2004: xi). Jessie Argyle is quoted in Alice Nannup’s When the Pelican Laughed (1996) as saying ‘ “My father never claimed me”, Jessie said. “But I don’t care. I remember my mother and I got a life” ’ (cited in Nannup 1996: 120). Parry argues that ‘children born of rape were absorbed into an extended family that did not lack for the absence of the white male’ (1995: 143). One testimony from Bringing them Home evinces abject refusal of her white father, ‘I don’t want any of his blood in my body’ (cited in HREOC 1997: 240). White fathers in these cases are significant because they were major factors in removal from Aboriginal families. Life writings are commonly directed at mothers and grandmothers who were left behind, or in Morgan’s case, attempted to pass as white. Doris Pilkington Garimara’s Follow the Rabbit Proof Fence (1996) is one example as is Donna Meehan’s autobiography It Is No Secret: The Story of a Stolen Child (2000). Meehan’s father is mentioned only once in the book: ‘I was polite when I met him but didn’t feel any particular bonding’ (2000: 198). Aileen Moreton-Robinson notes that in Aboriginal women’s autobiographies ‘Indigenous and white men are not mentioned or featured as main characters in the texts; it is indigenous women’s relations with other Indigenous women that are given



significance’ (2000: 15–16). Also largely irrelevant is Bill Yidumduma Harney’s father Bill Harney. Hugh Cairns points out that His own recollection of W. E. is minimal. He told me he had heard about him sometimes, that his elderly father wished him well when they eventually met for a talk. But he responded matter-of-factly when mentioning a friend’s memory of his father, and quickly moved to a more interesting topic. (2003: xii) The writer is careful to indicate the lack of interest that Harney has for his famous father because the question of the white father evokes white interference on more than one level. Perhaps not surprisingly, whites follow the chain of whiteness in this story and are confused as to where it stops. The family ‘connections’ between Aboriginal and whites in Australia might be one explanation for why ‘Australia has never seriously entertained a policy approach which recognizes Indigenous Australians as distinct nations or peoples’ (Bradfield 2006: 80). This interest in ‘who the father is’ has given whites access to Aboriginal people and culture in an unprecedented way and has up until very recently, placed Aboriginal children in danger of being removed from their families. This removal was enabled by the white fascination for biological paternity as key to social identity. Malinowski argued in Anthropological work published in 1913 that fatherhood was not strictly biological in Aboriginal societies and that fathers of Aboriginal children were the husbands of their mothers. Mary Bennett talked about this to the Royal Commission in 1934: ‘I have often heard the simple children pray that God will bless their father and mother, and then I have realized that they mean their aboriginal mother’s aboriginal husband’ (1934). Bennett was arguing against child removal policies at the time. The knowledge that the children had fathers would have complicated the argument, used more in policy rhetoric, that removalists were rescuing ‘fatherless orphans’. An interest in white kin can preface interference yet again, the white reader, like the Aboriginal Protection Board, claiming white kin as his/her entry into a subject which concerns the intimate lives of Aboriginal people who hold whiteness at arms’ length. The lack of emphasis in these Aboriginal life writings on white kin may be indicative of not just lack of significance in their personal lives, but also indicate the weight of a historically overdetermined significance that led to white interference and removal. Spigelman’s call for Australians to take pride in their Aboriginal ancestors might also appeal to a time when these ‘ancestors’ were seen as ‘fatherless’ and thus could be claimed by



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a state anxious to step in and claim them. He calls on the nation to embrace these difficult histories, where individual family members cannot, will not, or do so ambivalently or with greater sense of the wounds that surround them. The enjoyment of these connections and the celebration of ‘Aboriginal ancestry’ rather than Aboriginal continuity seems to be largely a symbolic gesture aimed at displacing racist whiteness and separatism. As such, it is a powerful one; but it is also one that risks substituting specific lives and narratives for symbolic, archic reading which assign to these stories the power to regenerate the nation, to reorganize its racial divisions along the lines of fraternity, commonality and consensus, rather than privileging stories that are, to quote Stephen Kinnane ‘difficult to reconcile’ (2004: 379), or ones that necessitate a ‘gap’, a ‘moratorium’ between white and black (Scott and Brown 2005: 258). In short, narratives of ‘reconciliation’ can be seen as complicit, as perpetuating national, biopolitical interests in Aboriginality. Critical whiteness studies is a field that is gaining more and more attention within Australia (Hage 1998; McKay 1999; Moreton-Robinson 2000), and appears well placed for encounters with complicity. I am particularly interested in the ways in which this field relies on the selfreflexity that postmodern strategies makes available to the white critic, who, in critiquing whiteness (a part of themselves) must deal with complicity in one form or another (Probyn-Rapsey 2004). Complicity, when deployed colloquially does not have positive connotations. In fact, it is used always in a negative sense – it is loaded with the meaning of the bad act to which it refers. The term suggests fluidity between moral and ethical categories and it has mostly negative connotations – such as the arguments used to suggest that postcolonial critics are complicit with global capitalism (Ahmad 1992), or that feminists are complicit with patriarchy (Grosz 1993: 342). But awareness of complicity can also enhance ideas of responsibility and accountability. Complicity highlights the individual’s proximity to ‘the problem’ (such as colonialism), rather than separation from it and can remind the researcher that any knowledge produced is not necessarily always ‘good’ in advance, by ‘intention’ rather than effect. Complicity as a methodological and navigational tool in research resonates with a concern (some might see it as cynicism) that reconciliation is hopelessly bound up with the interests of the settler state. To conduct research that might, on the one hand, be seen as ‘reconciliatory’ (by enhancing white understanding of the complicity of whiteness in Stolen Generations history), and yet is also critical of reconciliation (because it so often coopts stories of ‘mixed race’ families as symbols of a unified nation) is thus irreducibility stuck with the


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issue of complicity. This critical condition (I say ‘critical’ because it is not simply resigned to but thought with or alongside) resonates, for me, with Elizabeth Povinelli’s question about the practice of critique itself: ‘how do we act politically when we know we will have been wrong?’ (1999: 633). In The Gift of Death (1995), Derrida suggests that avoiding complicity is impossible and that the point is to try to avoid the worst: I am responsible to the other as other, I answer to him, and I answer for what I do before him. But of course, what binds me thus in my singularity to the absolute singularity of the other, immediately propels me into the space or risk of absolute sacrifice. There are also others, an infinite number of them, the innumerable generality of others to whom I should be bound by the same responsibility, a general and universal responsibility. (1995: 68) Structural positions effect the capacity to ‘do justice’ (Butler 2004) to Others (but not all Others, in their infinite proliferation, see above), and the inability to bracket complicity in relation to particular actions like critique (Arendt 1964: 293), means that complicity is an ‘always already’ condition of our responsibility to others. Within postcolonial studies, Gayatri Spivak indicates that it is also a position that has yet to be fully realized ‘in order to act’ in a resistant and ‘response-able’ way (1999: 370). In his study of the relationship between South African intellectuals and apartheid, Mark Sanders argues that complicity means ‘not washing one’s hands but actively affirming a complicity, or a potential complicity, in the “outrageous deeds” of others. Once cultivated, this sense of responsibility would, in the best possible worlds, make one act to stop or prevent those deeds’ (2002: 3–4). Taking his cue from the discussion of moral responsibility in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which introduced the term ‘little perpetrator’, Sanders points out that the ‘projection of complicity through an owning of the “little perpetrator” is, however, the ethico-political response available to anyone’ (2002: 4). His reading of complicity in the work of South African intellectuals finds that complicity represents a ‘foldedness’ with Others: Whenever justice is invoked, as it always is, in the name of a specific cause, there will be the risk of doing injustice. This aporia imposes itself not only when the intellectual assumes a notional complicity with the perpetrator of crimes but also when he or she affirms a ‘foldedness’ in human-being when particular loyalties threaten to bar the general realization of that ‘foldedness’. (6)



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Sanders found in his study of the intellectual and apartheid a paradox that ‘while supporters [of apartheid] disavowed or sought to limit foldedness with the other, opponents, though striving to minimize acting-in-complicity with the agents of apartheid and its policies, tended to acknowledge, affirm, and generalize responsibility in complicity’ (9). That is, in order to contextualize responsibility it was necessary to acknowledge complicity, a proximity rather than a distance to the thing opposed. This is the process of ‘cultivating’ complicity to which Sanders refers and which I find useful as both a methodological and navigational tool that necessitates foregrounding both complexity of involvement and the role of critique. Finally, in the Australian context, where much public debate in relation to the Stolen Generations has focused on the question of whether or not ‘guilt’ or ‘shame’ are the appropriate terms for facing the past (Gaita 1997: 41–5), I find the term complicity to be more useful, more meaningful. Unlike complicity, guilt and shame can be contained and confined teleologically. In her critique of how quickly the Australian Nation was moved from shame to pride, Sara Ahmed points out that ‘Shame may be restorative only when the shamed other can “show” that its failure to measure up to a social ideal is temporary’ (2004: 107, italics in original) and that within shame ‘the transference of bad feeling to the subject in shame ... can become evidence of the restoration of an identity of which we can be proud’ (109–10). Guilt, shame, and complicity are measured by the extent of their reach, but in these descriptions there is an importance difference between them. The difference is in the structural relations that they connote: whereas guilt and shame are vertical, individualized, and deep, complicity is horizontal with pervasive breadth – as in a network. The former terms suggest a chronological relation through time; the latter a condition of being across time itself. Complicity, rather than guilt and shame, suits the network that settler Australians are located in: a settler colonial state. Colonialism is a structure that can reproduce complicity, rather than simply an event (Wolfe 1994: 97) to which guilt and shame may be confined. So in part it is the reproducibility of complicity (and how this resonates with discourses of family and Nation) that represents, in my research, its particular critical force.

References Ahmad, A. (1992) In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, London: Verso. Ahmed, S. (2004) The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.


164 Commitment and Complicity Arendt, H. (1964) Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, New York: Viking Press. Austin, T. (1997) Never Trust a Government Man: Northern Territory Aboriginal Policy 1911–1939, Darwin: Northern Territory University Press. Bennett, M. (1934) Submission to the Aborigines Royal Commission, National Archives, Canberra, Moseley 005/2, pp. 213–25. Bird, C. (ed.) (1998) The Stolen Children: Their Stories, Sydney: Random House. Bolt, A. (2001) ‘Painful and Hard Truth’, Herald Sun, February 23, p. 21. Bradfield, S. (2006) ‘Separatism or Status-Quo?: Indigenous Affairs from the Birth of Land Rights to the Death of ATSIC’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, 52(1): pp. 80–97. Butler, J. (2004) Undoing Gender, London: Routledge. Cairns, H. and B. Yidumduma Harney (2003) Dark Sparklers: Yidumduma’s Wardaman Aboriginal Astronomy, Merimbula: Private Publication, Hugh Cairns. Derrida, J. (1995) The Gift of Death, D. Wills (trans.), Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Drake-Brockman, J. (1992) Wongi-Wongi: To Speak, Perth: Hesperian Press. Edwards, C. and P. Read (1989) The Lost Children, Sydney: Doubleday. Egan, C. (2003) ‘Hilda: Hancock’s Other Daughter’, Australian Magazine, January 18, p. 1. Frow, J. (1999) ‘The Politics of Stolen Time’, Australian Humanities Review, 9, http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-February-1998/ frow1.html, date accessed April 10, 2000. Gaita, R. (1997) ‘Genocide and Pedantry’, Quadrant, 417(8): pp. 41–5. Garimara, D.P. (1996) Follow the Rabbit Proof Fence, St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Goldie, T. (1989) Fear and Temptation, Kingston: McGill Queen’s University Press. Greer, G. (2004) Whitefella Jump Up, London: Profile Books. Grosz, E. (1993) ‘A Note on Essentialism and Difference’, in E. Carter, J. Donald, and J. Squires (eds.) Space and Place: Theories of Identity and Location, London: Lawrence and Wishart, pp. 332–44. Gunn, Mrs. A. (1906) We of the Never Never, Sydney: Angus and Robertson. Haebich, A. (2000) Broken Circles: Fragmenting Indigenous Families 1800–2000, Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press. Hage, G. (1998) White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society, Sydney: Pluto Press. Harney, B. (1958) Content to Lie in the Sun, London: Robert Hale. Howard, J. (1999) ‘Motion for Reconciliation’, Canberra: Australian Federal Parliament. Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) (1997) Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families, Sydney: HREOC. Kenneally, T. (1978) The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Sydney: Collins. Krieken, van R. (1999) The Stolen Generations: Implications for Australian Civilization, Citizenship and Governance, University of Sydney, http://www.usyd.edu.au/su/ social/robert/arc/arcframe.htm, date accessed February 2, 2005. Kinnane, S. (2004) Shadow Lines, Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press.



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Malinowski, B. (1913) The Family Among the Australian Aborigines, London: University London Press. McKay, B. (ed.) (1999) Unmasking Whiteness: Race Relations and Reconciliation, Nathan, Queensland: Griffith University Press. Meehan, D. (2000) It Is No Secret: The Story of a Stolen Child, Sydney: Random House. Moreton-Robinson, A. (2000) Talkin’ Up to the White Woman, St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Morgan, S. (1987) My Place, Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press. Muir, H.J. (2004) Very Big Journey: My Life as I Remember It, Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press. Nannup, A.L. Marsh and S. Kinnane (1996) When the Pelican Laughed, Perth: Fremantle Arts Centre Press. Neville, A.O. (1947) Australia’s Coloured Minority, Its Place in Our Community, Sydney: Currawong Publishing. Olubas, B. and L. Greenwell (1999) ‘Re-membering and Taking up an Ethics of Listening: A Response to Loss and the Maternal in “The Stolen Children” ’, Australian Humanities Review, 15, http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/ archive/Issue-July-1999/olubas.html, date accessed July 10, 1999. Parry, S. (1995) ‘Identifying the Process, The Removal of “Half-Caste” Children from Aboriginal Mothers’, Aboriginal History, 192: pp. 141–53. Povinelli, E.A. (1999) ‘Critical Response II the Cunning of Recognition: A Reply to John Frow and Meaghan Morris’, Critical Inquiry, 25(3): pp. 631–6. Probyn-Rapsey, F. (2004) ‘Playing Chicken at the Intersection: The White Critic of Whiteness’, Borderlandsejournal, 13(2): n.p., http://www.borderlandsejournal. adelaide.edu.au/issues/vol3no2.html, date accessed May 10, 2004. Probyn-Rapsey, F. (2007) ‘Black Sheep Nation’, ACH: Australian Cultural History, 26: pp. 171–93. Randall, B. (2003) Songman: The Story of an Aboriginal Elder of Uluru, Sydney: ABC Books. Rose, D.B. (1991) Hidden Histories, Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press. Rossiter, P. (2002) ‘Imagining Responsibility: Who Are “We” Anyway?’ Continuum, 16(1): pp. 81–94. Russell, L. (2002) A Little Bird Told Me, Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Sabbioni, J. (1993) ‘ “I Hate Working for White People” (Investigation of the Effects of White Australia Policy 1901 on Aboriginal Women)’, Hecate, 2(19): pp. 7–23. Sanders, M. (2002) Complicities: The Intellectual and Apartheid, Durham: Duke University Press. Scott, K. and H. Brown (2005) Kayang and Me, Perth: Fremantle Arts Centre Press. Simon, E. (1978) Through My Eyes, Adelaide: Rigby Ltd. Spigelman, J. (2005) ‘The Charles Perkins Memorial Oration, Chief Justice of NSW Jim Spigelman, University of Sydney’, http://www.lawlink.nsw.gov.au/ lawlink/supreme_court/ll_sc.nsf/pages/SCO_spigelman271005, date accessed October 27, 2005. Spivak, G.C. (1999) The Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Thompson, J. (2002) Taking Responsibility for the Past: Reparation and Historical Injustice, Cambridge: Polity Press.


166 Commitment and Complicity Tonkin, D. and C. Landon (1999) Jackson’s Track: Memoir of a Dreamtime Place, Ringwood: Viking. Willey, K. (1971) Boss Drover, Adelaide: Rigby. Wilson, T. and Link-Up (New South Wales) (1997) In the Best Interests of the Child?: Stolen Children: Aboriginal Pain/White Shame, Sydney: Aboriginal History Inc. Wolfe, P. (1994) ‘Nation and MiscegeNation’, Social Analysis, 36: pp. 93–153. Wolfe, P. (2001) ‘Land, Labor, and Difference: Elementary Structures of Race’, The American Historical Review, 106(3): pp. 1–60, http://www.historycooperative. org/journals/ahr/106.3/ah0008 66.html, date accessed October 14, 2006.


10 Layers of Labor in Cultural Production: Notes on Aesthetics and Commitment from the Transparent Factory Octavi Comeron

Transformations of forms of labor and the blurring of boundaries between work and life are challenging many of our social parameters. Cultural institutions question their economic structures, and corporations turn themselves into cultural products. Subjectivity is becoming the landmark resource of capitalism, and immaterial labor increasingly overlaid upon material production. Conservative movements within the art market run parallel to institutional claims for the dissolution of the museum’s walls. In this multilayered, shifting context, commitment and complicity in artistic and cultural activities often twist into an ambiguous spiral fueled by the productive system, as the erasing of borders and boundaries that was once the committed reply of the avant-gardes to the rigid compartmentalizations of the industrial age now assumes the very same trajectory taken by the expanding postFordist factory. This chapter seeks to perform a critical reading of this new scenario by suggesting a political approach to the role of aesthetics at a time when most of the traditional borders have seemed to blur.

The Transparent Factory The only place in the world to turn production into a real experience. A transparency never seen before. Volkswagen, The Transparent Factory 167 Begüm Özden Firat, Sarah De Mul and Sonja Van Wichelen


In December 2001, the Volkswagen Company opened a new assembly plant in Dresden to produce its new car model, the Phaeton. The innovative concept-factory where this luxury-class car is made was given the name ‘The Transparent Factory’. In his welcoming speech held at the factory’s opening, Ferdinand Piëch, then Chairman of Volkswagen’s Management Board, explained the company’s commitment to the reshaping of forms of labor and technological society: History is being made here today with the opening of the Transparent Factory. Our customers and guests will be able to see and experience detailed craftsmanship and state-of-the-art technology in this factory. The Volkswagen brand will thus add a new dimension to the emotional connection with a completely new product market segment in the luxury-car class.1 Similarly, Management Board member Folker Weissgerber commented on the idea behind the new factory: ‘by making processes visible, we wanted to present the fascination with craftsmanship and technology as a “staging” of production, and, of course, as an attraction for customers and visitors’.

The Transparent Factory, Dresden Germany (Still from the Octavi Comeron’s video installation Die Glasërne Manufaktur, 2006)

In a reflection of the underlying philosophy of the factory, the new car is built behind glazed façades, which create a clean and light-filled atmosphere in the production area’s 24,000 square meters of parquetry


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floor. Glass bridges offer views of the work floor so that the customer can follow the production process. It is a quiet factory; there is no stomping or hammering, hissing or buzzing. Workers wear white gloves, aprons, and lab coats. No buttons, watches, chains, or other metal objects are allowed, and the workers use rechargeable portable electric tools to prevent accidents. There is no assembly line or conveyor belt. Horseshoeshaped devices hanging from ceiling tracks carry the auto bodies along. Chassis are moved across the parquet floor on pallets. Theatrical spotlights perched high above the workers light the floor. There is an unhurried pace to the process, an impression abetted by the lack of noise. In line with Volkswagen’s new approach, production in the Transparent Factory takes place on several levels and integrates educational and recreational services into the factory. Significantly, the factory has been placed not in an isolated industrial area but in the heart of Dresden. The factory’s landmark edifice is a glass tower, almost 40 meters high and visible from a considerable distance, where the finished vehicles are stored when they are ready for collection. The use of glass is a metaphor for the openness and cleanliness the Volkswagen Company aims to convey. But it also literally reflects the city around it. One side mirrors the Museum of Hygiene across the street, originally founded by the manufacturer of the disinfectant Odol. On the other side, the factory faces housing blocks built for workers in the former East Germany. Volkswagen is not the only company to recast its factories as showcases for its customers. In the same way, BMW has hired the internationally celebrated architect Zaha Hadid to design a showcase factory in Leipzig, where assembly lines snake around offices, mixing blue- and whitecollar workers. Similarly, Ford is reconditioning its River Rouge Plant, the birthplace of automobile mass production, as a ‘clean and green’ showcase. Such examples make it clear that nowadays brands, going further than merely the sponsoring of cultural events, stage themselves and their products as cultural icons in the open theater of the city. Hitler’s original plan for Volkswagen was for buyers to pick up cars at the factory in what was then called ‘Strength Through Joy’ [Kraft durch Freude] city. At the new VW factory, the ceremonial handing over of keys takes place in a room filled with white light. A door opens, and the finished car rolls down a ramp, through a garden, and out onto the street.

Factories, theaters, and museums Volkswagen’s Transparent Factory is a seductive image that can help us reflect on some issues at stake in relations between cultural practice


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and the productive system. Its parquetry and glazed façades indicate that the design of factories is shifting so as to be placed within the cultural sphere. Ironically, this transformation reverses the recent process through which museums are reshaping their appearance by ‘wearing’ buildings from the industrial age.2 The conceptual borders between factories and museums are blurring and their forms becoming interchangeable. In this context, artistic and cultural activities are increasingly focused on the socioeconomic transformations taking place due to capitalist strategies of production, probably because, more than ever, these speak to their fields’ own conflicts and issues. The axis of these processes is the profound mutation of forms of labor in post-Fordist society. The rise of ‘immaterial labor’ (cognitive, creative, relational or affective labor) has been mainly analyzed by Italian authors such as Maurizio Lazzarato (1996), Toni Negri (2002, with Michael Hardt), and Paolo Virno (2003). In the mid-1990s, Lazzarato defined the term ‘immaterial labor’ as ‘labor that produces the informational and cultural content of the commodity’ (1996: 133). The ‘traditional’ fields of this kind of labor were cultural activities, extending progressively to the service sector in a broader sense. But as we see at the Transparent Factory, the border between what has traditionally been called material labor (production of durable goods) and immaterial labor (production of meanings, relations, and affects), seems to have been eroded under the current forms of capitalism. Paolo Virno argued that the immaterial worker comes under the sign of the ‘virtuoso’, a player who performs a semiotic score (2003: 93). And that is precisely what the worker at the Transparent Factory performs on the well-lit parquetry for his viewers, while producing the most emblematic material good of the industrial age: a car. The worker at the Transparent Factory simultaneously carries out several layers of labor. In many ways he is a hybrid; he has retired his blue(-collar) overalls but does not wear business suits and ties, or the fashionable T-shirts and sneakers of the so called ‘creative class’. The change from blue to white overalls is significant. It shows that these transformations take place not only in the productive processes but also in the image of those processes within which we like to see our progress reflected. Analyses by authors such as Slavoj Žižek (2000a) and Doug Henwood (2003) have pointed out that the brightness of this image (with its apparent tendency toward ‘clean’ labor scattered abroad) is mirage-like and can obscure the view of our reality.3 The components to be assembled within the Transparent Factory arrive through subterranean tramcars carrying prefabricated parts from outside the city. Most of the workers who feed the theatrical machinery of the Transparent



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Factory still wear blue. Three thousand employees are directly involved in this production line outside the factory’s walls, while only 600 work under the spotlight. The real Transparent Factory has no limits, and its power resides in its capacity to decide what must be lit and what is to be kept in the shadows. Its transparency is not based on the modern aspiration to total meaning but rather on a more cynical aim. Representing more than a technological shift, the Transparent Factory reflects on the current processes of mystification and the fuzziness of the many categories involved in traditional social partitions: work and spectacle; commercial strategies and culture; production and representation; the public and private spheres; identity and market; subjectivity and branding. Factories, shopping centers, theaters, and museums are hybridizing. And a key point that must be noted is that forces from several directions, and often representing opposed interests, converge in this process. In what follows, I will discuss the ways in which cultural production, and more specifically art practice, as a field particularly sensitive to the symbolic effects of these transformations, is dealing with this new framework.

Borders, commitments, and complicities In ‘Basic Instinct: Trauma and Retrenchment 2000–4’ (2005), Anthony Davies analyzed a recent conservative turn made by the art community, a movement parallel to the business community’s retrenchment policies and a general political return to ‘core values’. Taking his cue from Ford Motors, which in 2001 announced a strategic turn in the wake of failed programs of diversification, Davies pointed out the welcoming of ‘Back to Basics’ strategies adopted by some corporations, expressing a desire for more traditional and safer business frameworks. In the art scene, that turn comes as renewed risk-aversion (after the enthusiastic alliances, networks, and interdependencies created during the 1990s among Creative Industries, the Third Way, and the New Economy, blurring the boundaries between business and art) and has ‘given way to the reinstatement of boundaries and increasing retrenchment’. But the forms of this conservative turn are not simple in any of the three areas focused on in this analysis. Regarding political shifts, Davies quoted the European New Right’s strategy of rebranding its fascist discourse as a critique of the ‘system’ in an attempt to be attractive to antifascists. Davies quotes from ‘The French New Right in the Year 2000’: ‘In a world where closed entities have given way to interconnected networks


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with increasingly fuzzy reference points, metapolitical action attempts, beyond political divisions and through a new synthesis, to renew a transversal mode of thought’.4 As a response to the construction of left-right coalitions that served right-wing interests, a clearer political positioning and a definition of basic ideological orientations emerged within activist communities. In the arts, the conservative return to more traditional media and circuits has come together with institutional policies – such as those of the Arts Council, England – and have encouraged artists ‘to become more entrepreneurial’, recommending involvement in ‘strategic initiatives to develop the market place’. The imperative is ‘to set standards of quality, articulate vocabularies of expertise, and cater reliably to the diverse markets spanning both “subsidised” and “commercial” art worlds’. This is the turn that can be seen, on the one hand, as a reaction to the complex context and fuzzy borders exemplified by the Transparent Factory image: an ‘instinctive’ retreat to safe borders and values. And to place a first instance of the ‘other hand’, in which the focus would be a sort of reflexive politicization of the dissolution of borders, I will transcribe some fragments of the MACBA’s (Museo d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona) informative newsletter Agenda of Winter 2006. It reads: We understand institutional critique as a tradition of artistic practices inside the museum arisen from the shifts of the 1960s, that seek to make the labor conditions of the institution and the relations of power which are implicit in it transparent, specially the exhibitionform. [...] At this time, we can affirm that the future of institutional criticism goes through its socialization beyond the borders of the museum, because if it is constrained within the limits of the museum and the exhibition it could easily turn into a new formalism.5 Furthermore, this critique aims to embrace ‘the educational structures and the health institutions’ – very Foucaultian – and ‘break the institutional borders between the diverse administrations’ (2006: 1). For a long time, the blurring of boundaries of artistic practice has been honored as a symptom of the legitimacy of authentic art, as well as a spontaneous effect of its sociopolitical commitment. In 1958, Allan Kaprow wrote that art exerts its highest power by ‘gathering in the crossovers, the areas of impurity, the blurs which remain after the usual boundaries have been erased’ (1996: 7). As is well-known, many artists have been working on that fusion of art and life during the past five decades. We are now used to progressive theory-debates around the arts placed



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beyond their borders, and a justified shadow of suspicion arises when any discourse tries to tackle the arts as a specific/differential practice. However, when the precarity, social conflict, politics – and aesthetics – of resistance and management strategies are used and discussed in and by museums, social forums, and corporations alike, the lack of distance between artistic practice and the economic and institutional interests in which they are immersed can be both a potentially powerful site to be explored and an exhibition of cynical transparency. If forced to take sides on one of the two positions briefly outlined here – the instinctive retreat back to an autonomous sphere or the aim to merge the arts into sociopolitical life – this chapter is clearly more closely in line with this latter tradition of thinking, a line of thought it seeks to expand on. But it should also be noted that there is a sort of discomfort experienced by many of us working in the art field. There is a kind of intellectual laziness in continuing to deliver this well-known blurring-of-boundaries discourse without trying to put a foot on ground that is not so safe. What I am suggesting here is that, in this context, maybe it is not a bad idea to perform a stronger revision of the ‘basics’ of art practice – but this time from within the complex scenario of the Transparent Factory. And if we seek to escape from the barren rhetoric of end and return, we may start by rethinking some of the ‘ticklish’ old questions.

Some basics of the aesthetics of borders The issues concerning the blurring of boundaries of the arts raised by Kaprow and MACBA’s text bring up two aesthetic problems. The first concerns the idea of place: What kind of place is that of arts practice? Why constrain art to ‘art places’? The second is related to artists’ work: What kind of labor does the artist do? Why constrain it to the production of ‘art objects’? These issues and questions, deeply rooted in Western art history, should be contemplated in their historical contexts. Spatially speaking, the notion of aesthetics inherited from modernity is based on a model dependent on the discourses of borders and boundaries within the arts – be it to defend, expand or dismantle them. These were the forces displayed in the conflict between the autonomy of art and its social immersion as advocated by Realism, Bauhaus or Situationism. Performing their discrepancies and diversity, these movements hardly avoided a permanent negotiation or confrontation with politically and culturally conservative models. The modern aesthetic theories – which ran parallel to notions of mass or national identity and


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the figure of the genius – were based on spatial models with fluctuations of their perimeter, their expansions or contractions being performed either by collectives or by art heroes. The notion of art conceptualized by these theories can be grasped in the metaphorical image of the forest fire. In a forest fire, the area burned by flames is different from the nonburnt area, but the main activity takes place precisely in the diffuse borders between the two. That was the modern relation between art and nonart activities which redrew the spatial idea of art through the expansion of its perimeter. The current suspicion regarding any attempt to explain the whole idea of art through aesthetics entails a distrust of models that homogeneously enclose our forms of creativity and life. We know that the cultural and artistic context is complex and diverse and spontaneously becomes linked to nonartistic/noncultural activities. A way to deal with this is the ‘binomialism’ found in artistic events close to critical practices, such as net-art, documental-art, public-art, screening-art, and so forth. Still, the second word – ‘art’ – in these definitions is used quite ambiguously. The ‘basic instinct’ that drives the emphasis on the medium deployed does not differ much from the old and safe categories of the fine arts. This assumes, at least partially, the legacy of the border-model, and reduces but does not resolve the problems of homogenization in each category. And worse still, the differences that these distinctions draw on for aesthetic thought – or, in other words, for the production of ‘cognitive mappings’ on a social as well as a spatial scale, as reclaimed by Frederic Jameson (1995) – are rather weak and lack political power. If the Transparent Factory says something clearly, it is that it is everywhere and has no limits. Art cannot be outside the Factory, and I suggest that artistic practice cannot keep pretending to have an inherent radicality and exhibit commitment by crossing the current weak borders within it.6 Regarding the kind of labor performed in arts practice, we should again go back in time. Michel Foucault placed the beginning of the Modern Age at the birth of three new notions: Language (from the theories of discourse and grammar), Labor (from the analysis of wealth), and Life (from natural history) (Foucault 1999). According to Foucault, this demarcation took place in the last decades of the eighteenth century, resulting in a transformation that allowed these three areas to be enclosed and governed by Power – and the instauration of biopower. On the flip side, in the modern imaginary the artist was a figure who navigated among labor, life, and language and performed them simultaneously and creatively.7 In a sense, the artist’s activity ran under the sign



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of Exception in relation to labor,8 as a parallel narrative to the notion of Autonomy built from its spatial concept. Because of this exceptional link between labor, life, and language, the artist’s activity could turn away from the ‘artist’s mediums’ without losing a distinctive specificity. But what we have started tracing, in short, is that this ‘exceptional’ labor which embraced labor, life, and language is now the labor form that current capitalism has made its own – and the one that the Transparent Factory openly exhibits.9 This points at a double weakening of the historical basis for aesthetic thought: on the one hand, there is a difficulty in tracing a spatial idea of the arts when the blurring of its boundaries comes not only from the arts but from the logic of capitalism; on the other hand, there is a difficulty in finding any differential form of labor in art practice when artistic labor is potentially identical to any nonartistic activity. But this does not imply the impossibility of an aesthetic thought corresponding to our time, or the inevitable sameness of commitment and complicity in cultural and artistic practice. In this scenario, any work of art is also a potential definition of work in the arts, if we understand art not as a commodity or an elite production of culture but, so to speak, a ‘transparent’, undefined and ‘empty’ space of labor. However, the idea of an empty space does not refer here to a space either of purity or one free from socioeconomic constrictions. When, in a text devoted to aesthetics, Negri defined art as ‘liberated work’ (2000: 54), as labor liberated from the market, he insightfully placed the idea of art in relation to labor and freedom, but failed to recognize that the basis of its political power resides precisely in art’s consciousness of its nonpurity. A transparent and empty space of labor stresses that any decision about the form of labor that takes place around the work of art is an inherent part of it, and that its political meaning comes from the relations it draws within the productive system.

Layers, commitments, and complicities Let us try to take a step further this problematization of the bordermodel in which – often elliptically – committed narratives of the artistic field are still based. In Looking Awry, Slavoj Žižek reminds us of a recurrent scene in cartoons, in which a cat, in his crazed persecution of a bird or a mouse, does not realize he is crossing the border of a precipice and keeps on running in the void until he looks down and sees that he is floating in midair (2000b: 77). The scene helps Žižek set out his issues with the Lacanian ‘Real’. However, within the framework


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of our problematization, the scene of the cat running in midair is similarly suggestive. It can be easily recognized in the ‘back to basics’ claim, where what the cat running into the void would represent are the unreal, banal or evanescent hybridizations performed both by political and relational arts and by the creative industries. But these in turn would argue, in their call to ‘cross and erase boundaries’, that the conservative keeping of traditional media and sites for the arts can be seen as having been a kind of running in midair ever since their historical conditions changed. In both interpretations the cat is seen as the figure who, blinded by its own discourse, overlooks its commitment to the real and avoids looking at reality. Nevertheless, if we think about what we have said regarding the Volkswagen assembly plant – as a representation of a spectral Transparent Factory that has actually erased most of the borders between productive economy and symbolic activity – what seems to be running in the void is the ‘cat scene’ itself, because there may no longer be any significant border left to cross or to defend. Then it could be that our own cultural work has lost part of its political power in the lack of coincidence between its narrative and the actual kind of labor we perform within it. Maybe I should present an example here before going any further. In an ‘artist’s talk’ at a recent academic meeting, the artist Ursula Biemann presented her work Black Sea Files (2005), a video-essay about the construction of the giant oil pipeline traversing the Caucasus.10 According to the artist (renowned for her works on gender and mobility), the ten files of the video ‘speak about grand ideas and sordid conspiracies, remote ordering systems and their prosaic local upshots, they read plans within plans, seeking to understand their strategic purposes, operational failures and the meaning they have in terms of human experience’.11 The video’s aim was to expose ‘the hidden matrix of this political space’: a committed unveiling of the hidden interests that shake up the ‘real’ lives of the people – oil workers, farmers, refugees, and prostitutes – who live along the pipeline. ‘File 6’ consists of a conversation in which Jula and Nara, two Russian prostitutes working in that ‘political space’, explain why they did not want to be filmed by Biemann (among their reasons was that their families did not know about their jobs). Obviously, the sequence was recorded with a hidden camera. When asked by the audience about the ethical problem at stake in showing this particular sequence, Biemann admitted that perhaps it was not very ‘politically correct’ but justified herself by saying that they had all been paid – or rather, almost all: ‘pimp 1’ and ‘pimp 2’ who spoke on the voiceover, and the owner of the house where the video was



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shot were remunerated, but not Jula and Nara, who ignored the deal. As she explained, this scene had probably been one of the most expensive parts of the video, and Biemann thought that it was particularly interesting with regard to the work’s final result. The scenario described here brings up the old issue of whether or not the end justifies the means. But the main point I want to address here is neither the ethical aspect of the work nor the possible unveiling of Biemann’s ‘hidden interests’ in shaking up the lives of the two prostitutes. I am rather interested in the multilayered labor performed in her work and the different values that these layers articulate. Her video, more than a work ‘performing the border’, to borrow the title of one of Biemann’s works, among video-art, academic research, and political commitment, displays an overlapping of these distinct fields and approaches. Like the one of the Transparent Factory workers, her work has many layers.12 And the several tiers of labor displayed by the video do not operate according to the same frame of conventions and meanings. Enacting its ethical denunciation of the ‘hidden’ interests of oil corporations and politicians in an academic context interested in the performativity of commitment, that sixth file was quite dubious, and can be seen as showing a cynical complicity with the very attitudes questioned in Biemann’s work. All of a sudden the speaker was seen as if (remembering our metaphor of the cartoon cat) she were moving her legs in midair suspension. But in Biemanns’s reply there was a shift from one discursive layer to another. Her answer was not a statement of political theory or social commitment, as was mostly articulated in her speech until that moment, but was instead offered according to the rules of an artist committed to her art13 – a discursive twist that would lift the problem literally out of place. This kind of discursive detour is rather usual in meetings and debates about cultural production. And perhaps it is not clear whether the different layers of cultural work (such as artistic/cultural values, social effects, politics of self-reflexivity, economic benefits, and so on) should be organized according to a hierarchy of priorities. The problem is that the effectiveness of the Transparent Factory lies in its having its priorities all too clear when managing these same layers: its priority is business.

Toward an aesthetics of layers If there is any possibility of political commitment being articulated in aesthetic practice in the era of the Transparent Factory, it remains in the production of difference. So far, I have been questioning the ways in



which we can critically deal with the issue of the new spatiality of capitalist production. By arguing that the singular spatiality of the shifts here analyzed for the debate of commitment and complicity is also a matter of aesthetics, I do not want to take the question back to one strictly concerning art-practices but rather extend it to the understanding of the role that aesthetics has in the production of forms of life within the current state of capitalism. To qualify the extent of this role, it can be useful to recall a meaningful distinction between the enterprise and the factory in contemporary capitalism as has been described by Maurizio Lazzarato (2004). He argues that factories create products – the objects and the subjects, – but enterprises ‘create the world within which objects and subjects exist’. As we have seen, this is what is at stake at Volkswagen’s Transparent Factory, where those two functions (the production of exclusive cars and the staged discourse that creates a ‘world’ for their workers, consumers and visitors) are integrated in the same place and openly exhibited. Lazzarato contends that capitalism is not a mode of production, but ‘a production of modes and worlds’. This production is the fundamental ground of enterprise’s (and Volkswagen’s Transparent Factory’s) economic production. According to Lazzarato, ‘the expression and effectuation of the worlds and the subjectivities included in there, that is, the creation and realisation of the sensible (desires, beliefs, intelligence), precedes economic production’. And the remark that follows in his argumentation is particularly eloquent in the context we have been tracing: ‘the economic war currently played out on a planetary scale is indeed an “aesthetic” war for many reasons’. But, I would like to stress, that battle is not only fought in the business arena, and has more than an economic dimension. Similarly, in his discussion of what he calls the ‘partition of the sensible’, Jacques Rancière touches upon the political dimension of that ‘aesthetic’ war by arguing that ‘the aesthetic field is now the battleground that was once the one for emancipation and the command over history’ (2002: 10). Our critical approach to the Transparent Factory should thus be understood as joining the intentions that can clearly be seen behind Lazzarato’s and Rancière’s affirmations: a close reading of the actual role of aesthetics goes far beyond the particular interests of the artistic community. The politics of the spatial models of artistic discourses and its relations to the productive system, as they have been discussed here, must be attempts to understand our time, to face our realities and to expand our desires. The current weakening of borders and boundaries described is not something that should automatically be bemoaned or celebrated, but explored in its potency.



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The basic arguments that I have tried to suggest in this chapter are, first, that aesthetic practice should not be understood as external to the Transparent Factory – because this outside no longer exists – nor be made to identify with it – because, as we know, its totalitarian space is just as powerful or vulnerable as it is its ‘staged’ regime of visibility. Second, we should maybe think about aesthetic practice less as a layer of our work (the one that produces forms) and more as the way – the form – of producing meaning by dealing simultaneously with the many ‘transparent’ layers of our work and world. In this negotiation among the diverse layers of any performed activity, the notions of commitment and complicity, by maintaining the logics of the Factory or by unveiling and discussing those logics to open differences within its unlimited space, find their antagonism. From this understanding, moving away from the useless border-model of the forest fire performed by the masses and the genius in the aesthetics of modernity, our time might collectively try out another metaphor: that of the earthquake, in which the production of spatial difference is made from unpredictable epicenters, expanding their effects outwards and leaving aside the idea of the border. That could be a means of exploring the political power of thinking in the arts and culture not from an ‘exceptional’ autonomy but nonetheless differentially. This time, from within the ubiquitous Transparent Factory. Performing differently its multiple layers and exploring many ways for that performance. Producing many differences – many ‘worlds’ – from many centers.

Notes 1. Cited at www.autointell-news.com (December 12, 2001). This section comprises an ‘assembly’ of quotes taken from the car magazines: www. autointell-news.com (December 12, 2001); www.autoweb.com (January 3, 2002); Metropolis Magazine (December 2002); El Mundo Motor (June 2, 2002); Diario Marca (March 17, 2003). Volkswagen’s official website of the Transparent Factory can be visited at: http://www.glasernemanufaktur.de. 2. Among the many examples of museums ‘occupying’ industrial buildings all over Europe one can cite the Tate Modern – the London gallery that retained a former power station with its huge turbine hall and its 99-meter high chimney – or the CaixaForum in Barcelona – the cultural center of La Caixa Foundation placed at the modernist building of a former textile factory. 3. A recent article by Steve Wright traced a map of the lacks and misunderstandings often displayed in the discourses of the ‘immaterial’: ‘Reality check: Are We Living In An Immaterial World?’, M30: 14.12.05, at http:// www.metamute.com.


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4. Alain de Benoist and Charles Champetier: ‘The French New Right in the Year 2000’, The Alain de Benoist Collection (at http://www.alphalink.com.au/), quoted in the referred Anthony Davies’ article ‘Basic Instinct: Trauma and Retrenchment 2000–4’ (2005). 5. MACBA (Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona): ‘El destí de la crítica institucional’. Ag, Winter 2006. 6. Just a brief remark: not all borders work in the same way and not all of them are in the process of disappearing. Obviously political frontiers do exist – for population movements, as a harsh instance. But they are more than ever arbitrary figures to be turned on and off by governments and economic interests. 7. This ‘three-dimensional’ role of the artist was not traced by Foucault in this way, but can be read between the lines in his text La pensée du dehors (published in 1966, the same year as Les mots et les choses), where he placed the birth of modern literature with the self-reflexive expression ‘I speak’, whose performativity actually links Language, Labor, and Life. That expression was for him the jump to the outside of Language that constitutes modern literature. And in a similar way, I suggest, the labor of the modern artist, performing these three new notions, can be read as a jump to the outside of Labor. 8. For this aesthetic notion of Exception in relation with the one of Labor, see: Jacques Rancière: La división de lo sensible. Estética y política. Salamanca: Centro de Arte de Salamanca, 2002. 9. Authors like Virno and Negri have often pointed out that the forms of labor in late capitalism have been modeled on the artist’s forms of labor as a strategy of inclusion of the worker’s subjectivity and life – which in the industrial age were outside the factory – into the ‘production line’ to increase the added value of its products and the worker’s commitment to the company. 10. The meeting was the International ASCA Workshop ‘Trajectories of Commitment and Complicity: Knowledge, Politics, Cultural Production’, held at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, March 29–31, 2006, Amsterdam. 11. See Biemann’s website at: http://www.geobodies.org. 12. I would like to specify that this idea of layer that I refer to does not correspond exactly to that of geological sediment, in which the materiality of each stratum covers the lower layers (and thus an archaeological or historiographical task would try to ‘uncover’ these buried tiers in an inverse path). Rather it refers to an idea of a virtual layer, as it is conceived in music – as in the ‘layers of sound’ that are mixed in the studio when editing a song – or as it is usually used in image or architectural-design software, allowing an individualized or simultaneous vision of the different layers as well as regulating their transparency or changing the order in which they cover each other, bringing them to the forefront or sending them back. 13. As we know, the artist’s exhibition of certain doses of malice or violence is accepted or even applauded (in Santiago Sierra’s work, for example), because this fits the established category of human self-criticism.



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References Davies, A. (2005) ‘Basic Instinct: Trauma and Retrenchment 2000–4’, http:// www.metamute.org/en/Basic-Instinct-Trauma-and-Retrenchment-2000-4, date accessed May 5, 2006. Foucault, M. (1999) Las palabras y las cosas. Una arqueología de las ciencias humanas, Madrid: Siglo XXI. Henwood, D. (2003) After the New Economy, New York: New Press. Jameson, F. (1995) El posmodernismo o la lógica cultural del capitalismo avanzado, Barcelona: Paidós. Kaprow, A. (1996 [1958]) ‘The Legacy of Jackson Pollock’, in J. Kelley (ed.) Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, Berkeley, CA and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, pp. 1–9. Lazzarato, M. (1996) ‘Immaterial Labor’, in P. Virno and M. Hardt (eds.) Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 133–146. Lazzarato, M. (2004) ‘Créer des mondes: Capitalisme contemporain et guerres esthétiques, Multitudes, 15, http://multitudes.samizdat.net/Creer-des-mondesCapitalisme.html, date accessed February 12, 2009. Negri, A. (2000) Arte y multitudo. Ocho cartas, Madrid: Editorial Trotta. Negri, A. and M. Hardt (2002) Imperio, Barcelona: Paidós. Rancière, J. (2002) La división de lo sensible. Estética y política, Salamanca: Centro de Arte de Salamanca. Virno, P. (2003) Virtuosismo y revolución. La acción política en la era del desencanto, Madrid: Traficantes de Sueños. Žižek, S. (2000a) ‘Bienvenidos al desierto de lo real’, http://aleph-arts.org/pens/ desierto.html, date accessed May 15, 2003. Žižek, S. (2000b) Mirando al sesgo. Una introducción a Jacques Lacan a través de la cultura popular, Buenos Aires: Paidós.


11 The Politics of ‘Contemporary Islamic Art’ Begüm Özden Fırat

In The Politics of Aesthetics (2004), Jacques Rancière argues that commitment in relation to art production is an aesthetically and politically vacuous notion. He suggests that artists can be politically committed in their works and thereby contribute to a certain type of political struggle. However, this does not mean that their works are committed, because commitment is not a category of art. He observes that ‘[t]he fact that someone writes to serve a cause or that someone discusses workers or the common people instead of aristocrats, what exactly is this going to change regarding the precise conditions for the elaboration and reception of a work of art?’ (2004: 61). This question addresses the conventional understanding of committed art most persuasively developed and defended by Jean-Paul Sartre, especially in his essay ‘What is Literature?’ (1948). The Sartrean model of litterature engagé is based on a social-realist model of writing. According to him, literature, and only its prose forms, can be regarded as a committed form of cultural production since it deals with language and meaning and can hence provide a purposeful reflection of the world. Writing from that particular position, the intellectual is able to express his allegiance to the cause of changing the social world reflected in his prose. In Sartre’s model, the artist has the responsibility to bring about political and social change by articulating his commitment via expressive means that are readily understood and unambiguous. He argued that only ‘meaningful’ art is capable of sustaining commitment and that the latter could which is only achievable through content. Theodor Adorno put forward his critique of Sartre’s position in his essay ‘Commitment’, which has as its original German title precisely the term for Sartre’s doctrine: engagement. Adorno’s contribution to the debate is a thorough critique of the Marxist model of engagement as 182 Begüm Özden Firat, Sarah De Mul and Sonja Van Wichelen

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espoused by Sartre and his followers, most notably Bertolt Brecht. While usually sympathetic to their politics, Adorno argues that such committed art as they practice is politically idle because, even if it is politically radical, it nonetheless accommodates the world. By pursuing a mimetic reflection of the world, this literature contains ‘a secret complicity with those being addressed’ that can be ‘released from their illusions only if that complicity is rescinded’ (257). In contrast to Sartre’s project of committed art, Adorno argues for the political effectiveness of autonomous art as exemplified by the works of Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett. Autonomous art, he argued, resists the pressures of consumption and is immune from overtly political statements based in mimetic techniques of representation, which, he thought, risk becoming mere propaganda. For Adorno, such art negates, rather than reflects on, empirical realities by its nonmimetic forms and hence gains effectiveness. Invoking his critique of the culture industry, Adorno contends that ‘[a]t present everything cultural, even autonomous works, is in danger of suffocating in cultural twaddle; at the same time, the work of art is charged with wordlessly maintaining what politics has no access to’ (258). In our contemporary context, we may not have fully moved beyond the dichotomy of committed versus autonomous art; nevertheless, historical and structural differences between today’s increasingly corporate and globalized artworld and the cultural sphere that had existed when Adorno was directing his critique on the failure of committed art should be acknowledged. The market-driven state of cultural production seems to render immaterial the distinction between engaged and autonomous art as artworks are conceived as nothing less – and nothing more – than marketable commodities.1 For instance, in Sweet Dreams: Contemporary Art and Complicity, Johanna Drucker, puts forward the term ‘complicit esthetics’ to explain the state of contemporary artistic practices. She argues that art today is complicit with the commercial culture and values of the mass media which, she contends, has become a kind of existential condition for all artists. Furthermore, the oppositional critique practiced within academic writing merely justifies the artwork on the basis of its alleged political correctness. The complicit structure of the artworld and the accommodating condition of the artwork therefore leaves hardly any space for a critical practice in the form of either autonomous or committed art. However, the theoretical and exhibitional attitude known as the new internationalism, emerging out of the geographical and economic globalization of the artworld in the early 1990s, provided a space where artistic engagement can be articulated.2 Resonating with the postcolonial turn,



the notion implied a geographical and representational paradigm shift, a moving away from previous Eurocentric exhibition practices toward those through which a ‘commitment to otherness’ can be displayed. The shift involved three structural changes: first, the inclusion of artists from previously neglected (mostly colonial) countries; second, the triggering of emergent institutional nodes in non-Western countries connected to the highly developed global network; and finally, the enactment of a discursive shift that prompted and required, in local and global exhibitions, the addressing of notions such as borders and boundaries, cultural difference and diversity, the other, multiculturalism, and hybridity. While the rhetoric of the new internationalism now appears to be largely outmoded, the material and conceptual shifts it brought about can still be observed in recent regional artistic categories such as contemporary ‘Latin American’, ‘Asian’, or ‘African’ art. These overarching exhibitionary rubrics, embraced by local and transnational exhibitions alike, not only enliven the art market but also appear to be spaces in which issues to which ‘politics has no access’ can be addressed. In what follows, I discuss one such recent exhibitionary phenomenon, namely ‘Contemporary Islamic art’, and the ways in which it might be complicit with existing hegemonic structures while seemingly providing a space for artistic engagement.

‘Contemporary “Islamic” art’ The exhibition Contemporary Art from the Islamic World was held in 1989 at the Barbican Centre in London. According to artist and art historian Wijdan Ali, it was the first of its kind, bringing the works of previously unknown contemporary Islamic art to European viewers (quoted in Abdallah, 2005: 2, FN. 2). The title of the exhibition, later taken up by an online journal focusing on cultural production in the Islamic world,3 attempts to cover a vast geographical territory on the basis of religion, but in so doing discards socio-political and cultural differences between regions. According to Monia Abdallah, the exhibition entitled Modernities & Memories: Recent Works from the Islamic World, held within the 47th Venice Biennale in 1997 and displaying the works of 13 artists from Asia to Africa, marked the beginning of the hyping of exhibitions focusing on region (2005: 3). Unlike these first two shows, which focused mainly on works by artists from the so-called Islamic world, exhibitions that followed mostly included artists who come from the area but live and work in the West.



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Eventually – at least if one is not naïve enough to believe in the cherishing of liberal multicultural ideals – one has to question the reasons behind this current interest in contemporary Islamic art practices within the artworld. Is art from the Islamic territories simply a new color added to the panoramic view enjoyed in the Western metropolises, in line with previous enthrallments with art from Latin America, Africa and, most recently, Eastern Europe and China? Following art critic and curator Gilane Tawadros, former director of the Institute of International Visual Arts (InIVA) in London, I would argue that this recent curiosity toward Islamic art should be contemplated within a historical and political context, which is, according to the author, hardly questioned by curators, critics, and artists. Tawadros appropriately asks: Is it a coincidence then that the military re-occupation of the Middle East by the new imperial power, America and its allies, has been accompanied by a renewed interest in the culture of the Middle East? Just as Napoleon arrived in 1798 with his army of academics, scholars, and artists to map out Egypt and its culture, so 200 years later, planes bring an army of curators to Teheran, Beirut, and Cairo to “discover” contemporary art in the Middle East and “make it totally accessible” to European audiences. (2004) Tawadros points at the complicity of institutional art with power structures and the ways in which it can serve the objectives of mainstream politics in the field of culture. However, in the 200 year span between the reign of Napoleon and the presidency of George W. Bush, the discourse of colonialism has to some extent changed, or at least the ‘artistic practice’ of it has. While in the nineteenth century, Western artists would travel to Islamic lands desiring to make the East totally accessible to their Western audience, the artworld of the twenty-first century purports to let the ‘Muslim other’ represent herself. This supposed interest in the self-representation of the ‘Muslim’ artist is considered to be inherently political as it lets the other speak back.4 However, the thematic axes for such ‘self’-representation are set by Western art institutions governed by curators and critics. As Dina Ramadan (2004) notes, local artists have to deal with issues, such as religion, gender, and state repression, that are deemed important by Western artworld constituencies, and these issues must be addressed in an ideologically appropriate manner. In Rasheed Araeen’s words, the artworld constructs its other ‘who is allowed to express itself only so long


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as it speaks of its own otherness’ (1999: 10). Analogous to Napoleon’s project of the ‘visual mapping of the Orient’ by visual artists, with the object of making it ‘totally accessible to European scrutiny’ in a legible visual language, today’s artworld makes the Islamic world culturally available to the Western viewer on Western terms of a domesticated otherness. In such a structure of the artworld, the ‘artist from the Islamic world’ becomes an ethnographer who both represents and translates the cultural or ethnic other for the Western viewer. In his article ‘The Artist as Ethnographer?’ (1999), Hal Foster argues that in the Western artworld artistic transformation as the site for political transformation has always been located elsewhere, in the field of the other – the cultural other, oppressed postcolonial, subaltern – and this field is the point where the dominant culture may be asserted. Consequently, he asserts that the culturally othered artist has automatic access to a transformative alterity. This artistic/political transformation is brought about by the artist by means of her privilege of being the cultural other. Ultimately, within the institutionalized artworld, the artist as ethnographer is asked to translate the experience of the other for the Western audience, to perform, so to speak, a poetic dialogue between cultures. Hence, as I will discuss below, the alleged intercultural movement (or dialogue) takes place within the artwork itself as a fait accompli through which the viewer is asked to confront fetishized and stereotypical views on the Muslim other. Just as cultural patrimony once held in Iraqi museums has already found its way to the Western art market following the US-led invasion, many new ‘discovered’ artists from the ‘Islamic’ world have exhibited their works for Western audiences in transnational exhibitions, biennales, and art galleries. In this sense, it is not coincidental that in 2003, in the wake of the invasion of Iraq by the US army and its allies, the number of exhibitions of contemporary art from the region has increased so as to establish ‘a real dialogue between the cultures’. Me series, a video work by Ghazel, was among many artworks displayed in different exhibitions concerning the cultural difference of Islamic cultures and their possible representations in the global/ Western art world. Me series, as I will discuss in detail in the following section, is an emblematic work consisting of the typical features of a desired ‘contemporary Islamic art’ which incorporates cultural symbols associated with Muslim cultures borne by the (diasporic) artist herself in an ironic manner so as to confront its audience’s stereotypical views.



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The real me Picture a woman carrying out ordinary daily activities: eating, smoking, riding a motorbike, cutting the grass, dancing, driving, or exercising. Or imagine her performing, perhaps, acts that are a bit more unusual, such as mountain-climbing, playing squash, or diving. Now, dress her up in a black chador to cover her while she does these things. Will the resulting images be commendable? Or perhaps they present a series of visual oxymorons? If so, then according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the images should express a situation that should be ‘in its superficial or literal meaning self-contradictory or absurd’ but it should also ‘involve a point’. Fortunately, Ghazel, who actually acts in ways that suggest the visual oxymoron, has thought of such images. The Me Series is a video triptych consisting of planned films collectively lasting almost 17 hours.5 Each short film in the series contains some ten autonomous scenes presenting the artist engaged with some activity. The installation of the series consists of the videos running simultaneously on three adjacent monitors, so that the installation comprises the random interaction of the images. These images can be seen as moving self-portraits of Ghazel, each presenting a single shot of the artist swimming, eating, smoking, exercising, biking, dancing, or boxing, acts that she performs while clothed in a tightly worn black chador. These ‘veiled video-diaries’ are accompanied by qualifying texts in English or French, or both, serving as subtitles commenting on the images. The texts are mostly uttered in the first person and usually refer to the images in an ironic manner. Both the use of the first-person pronoun and the irony suggested in the texts create an intimate relationship with the viewer that takes the form of a comedy of visual/textual daily confession by the artist. Ghazel was born and grew up in Iran and then moved to Europe for educational reasons. As her story goes, Ghazel left her motherland at the age of 19, four years after the Islamic Revolution, to France, where she now lives and works. She made her artistic debut in 1997, when the French Immigration Office denied her a permit of stay and asked her to leave France. In reaction, Ghazel made an announcement and printed posters in which, beside photographs of herself, the following text was printed: ‘URGENT, Woman, 33, artist of Middle Eastern origin and WP (without permit) seeks a husband, from EU, preferably France, contact e-mail ...’ She distributed these announcements in public spaces.6 The Me Series was exhibited for the first time in 2000. Between 1997 and 2000, Ghazel worked on completely different works in Iran that



have never been displayed in the West. After the series, she exhibited extensively in the West, most notably at the Venice Biennale but also in Havana, Tokyo, Zagreb, and Sarajevo. It is plausible to argue that Ghazel is a diasporic artist producing in and for the West and, to put it bluntly, her works deal with the representation of diasporic identity. Her contact with Iran allows Ghazel to be framed and promoted as an ‘authentic’ artist with poetic insight both into her country of origin and into her own diasporic experience.7 Almost all reviews of Ghazel’s work point out an ‘evident visual paradox’ incorporated in these videos, namely, the absurdity of a woman wrapped in fabrics who insists on conducting activities that require the body to move freely.8 Obviously, this alleged paradox does not emerge from just any body or any fabric. The tension takes place on the ‘culturally hybrid’ body of the artist and the veil – which has become one of the most contested cross-cultural symbols associated with the waitingto-be-emancipated Muslim women in the West. However, in the films, the veiled body is presented with a twist, as it is far from being the expected, passive body. On the contrary, she is physically assertive and seems to be actively participating in everyday life, not only in private but also in the public sphere by means of her sheer presence. Thus, in the Me Series, the stereotypical image of the solemn Muslim woman is replaced by a vigorous personality that quite easily transgresses boundaries. Wearing the ever-present chador, the woman climbs mountains, wins the big cup in ice skating, scuba dives, takes ballet classes, and goes to the gym – all signs of being a modern Western woman that can hardly harmonize with the stereotypical image of a Muslim woman donning the veil. As such, she trespasses over the invisible borders between West and East, modern and traditional, hence the boundary between ‘us’ and ‘them’. If these mundane border-crossings in a world where borders are said to be blurring create a visual paradox inherent in the films, then one should ponder the nature of this paradox. It is my contention that the paradox literally lies in the eye of the beholder, who is ultimately the Western viewer encountering the work in the art galleries or exhibition halls of various Western metropolises. The familiarity of these activities, which encourages the viewer to identify with the woman on the three monitors, intensify the paradox: just like the viewer, the veiled one enjoys swimming and takes care of her physical appearance. Simultaneously, the viewer is forced to disengage such identification with the image by means of the ever-present veil as the marker of otherness. In the viewer’s visual encounter with the veiled other, daily life, despite all of its familiarity, becomes uncanny



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via the other’s reclaiming of the everyday. The woman acts like anybody else, she walks freely in public spaces, confidently drives her car, even plays the guitar on the sidewalk, yet she always dons the veil. As Jananne Al-Ani suggests, the appearance of the veil in every episode, rather than making it an exclusive textual marker of cultural difference, actually ‘reduces its significance; it becomes banal and everyday as it does in any society in which it is omnipresent’ (2003: 103). Therefore, it is from the other side of the border – that is, in the West – that this everyday banality is seen as a paradoxical and troubled experience. While the series attempts to challenge a media-prompted stereotypical image of the Muslim woman by displaying its banality, it also gives a glimpse of the everyday life of an artist born in a Muslim culture who lives and works in the West. The autobiographical implication in the title – Me – underlines that the films peek into the artist’s life, presenting the viewer with what Ghazel calls her ‘parallel life’. As I argued above, the artistic category of contemporary art from the Islamic world undermines the authoritative voice of the Western subject as the expository agent by putting forward the authentic authority of the non-Western artist. In transnational exhibitions or biennales the ‘Muslim’ artist, such as Ghazel, is promoted as possessing an intimate knowledge of both Western and Eastern cultures, which reasserts values like authenticity, originality, and the singularity of the creator. The artist is not only bestowed with a genuine link to her community, giving her the imprimatur of authentic insights about it, but she is also given the authority to represent the real experience of the migrant. Such reading is sustained in the reviews of the video. For instance, Rose Issa, an expert on contemporary Islamic art, argues that by performing these eccentric veiled activities the artist ‘reflects on her multiple imperfect identities and her foreignness both at home and abroad’ (Issa 2004). This statement suggests that the artist maintains a confessional attitude so as to translate her ‘troubled’ experiences while dealing with the pressing dichotomies (such as unveiled/veiled, active/passive, visible/invisible, oppressed/emancipated) of cultural in-between-ness. Reverberating with Timothy Brennan’s argument that the phenomenology of the ‘third-world literature’ not only affects the reception but in part dictates the outcome that frames the hybrid artist in terms of ‘being rather than doing’ (1997: 203–04), it seems that contemporary art criticism embraces and promotes the works of non-Western artists in terms of a witnessing that allegedly reveals their paradoxical experiences. Like many other artists from the ‘Islamic’ lands residing in the West, Ghazel is given such authority because she is both an insider and a



‘privileged outsider’ to both cultures who has the ability to transgress cultural and geographical borders. In most of the reviews of her works, the artist is endorsed with the benefit of being a nomad.9 Aphrodite Désirée Navab, for instance, argues that Ghazel ‘pokes fun at herself, her cultures, and the ludicrous situations in which her nomadic life, between East and West, has placed her’ (2007: 47), and goes on to discuss the disposition of this nomadic life. As is well known, nomadism is one of the most widely circulating concepts among intellectual communities, though in most cases there is not enough critical reflection on its historical trajectory. This is precisely what is at stake in essays commenting on the Me Series. In these texts, the concept pops up without necessary attribution to a particular theoretical approach, taking the form of ‘concept dropping’, as it were, without reflecting on what the concepts do. Quite easily, Ghazel is presented as one of those nomadic subjects who has relinquished ‘all idea, desire, or nostalgia for fixity’ in favor of a nomadic consciousness of ‘an acute awareness of the nonfixity of boundaries’ and ‘the desire to go on trespassing, transgressing’ (Braidotti 1994: 36). By so doing, the artist is placed in a liminal space; she perpetually transgresses material and metaphorical borders, which in turn gives her a ‘peripheral consciousness’ representing the alleged reality of the itinerant worker, the illegal alien, the cross-border sex-worker, and other types embodying the various brands of displacement, diasporas, and hybridity which Braidotti calls alternative figurations of posthumanist subjectivity (1998). Through such ‘concept dropping’, as in the commentaries on the Me series, concepts indeed travel fast. However, in traveling with concepts one should be careful with shortcuts, since concepts are not empty signifiers; they help us understand experiences. Therefore, not only should such easy travel of concepts be rejected, but also the ‘easy travel between metaphor and the life conditions of groups of people’ – following Sara Ahmed, who writes ‘the representation of nomadism in terms of thought implies that it can be separated from the material social relations in which “thought” itself is idealized as the rational capacity of well-educated subjects’ (1999: 335). Such reflection is visibly absent in the reviews of Ghazel who, as a nomadic artist, is promoted as poetically and sarcastically translating the migrant experience in order to correct the stereotypical vision of Western viewers. At this point, one has to question the transformative potential of artworks such as Ghazel’s Me Series that engage with the viewer’s complicity with embedded stereotypes. In her essay ‘Acting



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Out’, artist Zineb Sedira asks how one could write about the subject of the veil in the West without worrying that one’s writing fortifies Orientalist fetishes and commodifies experience. She ponders whether ‘the artist, or indeed the curator, [is] responsible for reinforcing stereotypes of an audience’ (2003: 63–4). As a seemingly ‘committed’ product, the Me series engages with the Western viewer’s stereotypes and tries to challenge, displace, and revert them. Sedira’s concerns point in a direction where the work of the artist and the critic is not only to confront forms of stereotypical reading and replace them with a ‘correct’ one. They invoke the urgency and the necessity of stepping beyond the mere addressing of stereotypes and dichotomies and discuss what lies beyond such thinking. Achieving this in artistic practice one should transform the image, as bell hooks argues: [It] is not just a question of critiquing the status quo. It is about transforming the image, creating alternatives, asking ourselves questions about what types of images subvert, pose critical alternatives, and transform our worldviews and move us away from dualistic thinking about good and bad. Making a space for transgressive image, the outlaw rebel vision, is essential to any effort to create a context for transformation. (quoted in Sedira 2003: 64) This transformation necessitates the alteration of ‘the precise conditions for the elaboration and reception of a work of art’ (Rancière 2004: 61), which might be possible by performing commitment as a method rather than being committed to a particular cause through one’s art.

Notes 1. Here, I will not dwell on the structural changes that have occurred in the artworld since the 1980s. For a thorough discussion of the intimate relation between the artworld and the market see Wu (2003) and Stallabrass (2004). See also Octavi Comeron’s chapter elsewhere in this volume. 2. For the notion of the new internationalism see the edited volume Global Visions: Towards a New Internationalism in the Visual Arts (2003). 3. The Berlin ifa-Galerie’s online magazine ‘Contemporary Art from the Islamic World’ has been recently renamed as Nafas and can be found at http://universes-in-universe.org/eng/nafas/ 4. In this sense, exhibitions focusing on cultural production of the region are expected to make a political statement. An exemplary case is Maymanah Farhat’s sharp review of the Museum of Modern Art’s Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking (2006) in which among other points Farhat criticizes the curator’s apolitical stance (2006).


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5. Me Series is an ongoing project. At the time of writing, there were 620 scenes lasting almost 17 hours. Each ten scenes make a film, called ‘me 1’, ‘me 2’, and so on until ‘me 62’. 6. The Wanted project is a work in progress. Ghazel finally got her residence permit in 2003 and since then she has offered to marry an illegal man. For online images of Wanted (Urgent) see http://artefact.mi2.hr/_a01/artists/ghazel/ WANTED4/urgent.html. 7. It is worth noting that independent curator Rose Issa, who is a specialist on visual arts from the Middle East and North Africa, presents Ghazel as one of the much-celebrated Iranian artists who regularly travel between Iran and France for inspiration (2004). However, such promotion of the artist disregards her professional works and long / short term projects she has been involved with in Iran, such as The Correction Center for Delinquent Juveniles (girls): art therapy workshops/ Khaneyeh Sabz (House for street children): art therapy workshops, Tehran in 2000; Street Children Project, a four-month project, written and realized by the artist; in Tehran, in 1999 and The Correction Center for delinquent juveniles (boys): art therapy workshops, Tehran between 1997 and 1999. I would like to thanks Ghazel for directing my attention to these hardly mentioned works by her and providing me with the details of the projects. 8. See for example the research project on Ghazel’s work located at http:// www.curriculumsupport.education.nsw.gov.au/multicultural_art/artists/ construct_ourselves/co_art5_ghazel.html. 9. For example: ‘In her ongoing “Me”-series, Ghazel reenacts moments from her nomadic life and her observations. ... Each scene is accompanied by a caption in French or English, neither of which are her mother tongues. Full of irony and surreal humor, Ghazel’s performances highlight her position as an outsider both in the West and in Iran’ (Minority Report: Challenging Intolerance in Contemporary Denmark, Denmark September 25 – October 24, 2004); or ‘Though she refers to Iran and the West as home, she emphasizes that she is an outsider in both. The paradoxes she reveals are a constant reminder of her nomadic life’ (Camilla Canellas, Visiting Arts: Strengthening intercultural understanding through the arts, http://www.visitingarts.org.uk/features/01iran_london.html).

References Abdallah, M. (2005) ‘Analyse topique d’une catégorisation artistique. Etude des lieux communs dans l’art contemporain islamique’, Images re-vues, 1, http:// www.imagesrevues.org/Article_ Archive.php?id_article=5, date accessed March 5, 2008. Adorno, T.W. (2003 [1962]) ‘Commitment’, in R. Tiedemann (ed.) Can One Live After Auschwitz?: A Philosophical Reader, R. Livingstone (trans.), Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 240–58. Araeen, R. (1999) ‘New Internationalism, or the Multiculturalism of Global Bantustans’, in Jean Fisher (ed.) Global Visions: Towards a New Internationalism in the Visual Arts, London: Kala Press, pp. 3–11. Ahmed, S. (1999) ‘Home and Away: Narratives of Migration and Estrangement’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2(3): pp. 329–47.



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Al-Ani, J. (2003) ‘Acting Out’, in D.A. Bailey and G. Tawadros (eds.) Veil: Veiling, Representation and Contemporary Art, London: inIVA, pp. 90–119. Braidotti, R. (1994) Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory, New York: Columbia University Press. Braidotti, R. (1998) ‘Difference, Diversity and Nomadic Subjectivity’, http://www. let.uu.nl/~Rosi.Braidotti/personal/rosilecture.html, date accessed November 25, 2006. Brennan, T. (1997) At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now, Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press. Drucker, J. (2006) Sweet Dreams: Contemporary Art and Complicity, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Farhat, M. (2006) ‘Contemporary “Islamic” Art in Context. The Discourse of Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking’, ArteEast, http://www.arteeast. org/artenews/artenews-articles2006/without-boundary/artenews-withoutboundary.html, date accessed July 5, 2008. Foster, H. (1999) ‘The Artist as Ethnographer’, in Jean Fisher (ed.) Global Visions: Towards a New Internationalism in the Visual Arts, London: Kala Press, pp. 12–19. Issa, R. (2004) ‘The Fabric of Life and Art’, in http://archiv.hkw.de/en/dossiers/ iran_dossierroseissa/kapitel1.html, date accessed August 2005. Navab, A.D. (2007) ‘Unsaying Life Stories: The Self-Representational Art of Shirin Neshat and Ghazel’, Journal of Aesthetic Education, 41(2): pp. 39–66. The Oxford English Dictionary (1999), 2nd edition, Oxford University Press, www. oed.com, date accessed July 17, 2005. Ramadan, D. (2004) ‘Regional Emissaries: Geographical Platforms and the Challenges of Marginalisation in Contemporary Egyptian Art’, http://www. apexart.org/conference/ramadan.htm, date accessed July 12, 2005. Rancière, J. (2004) The Politics of Aesthetics, Gabriel Rockhill (trans.), London and New York: Continuum. Sartre, J.P. (2001 [1948]) What Is Literature? London: Routledge. Sedira, Z. (2003) ‘Mapping the Illusive’, in D.A. Bailey and G. Tawadros (eds.) Veil: Veiling Representation and Contemporary Art, London: inIVA, pp. 56–71. Stallabrass, J. (2004) Art Incorporated: The Story of Contemporary Art, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tawadros, G. (2004) ‘Curating the Middle East. From Napoleon to the Present Day’, Contemporary Art from the Islamic World, Issue 4, http://www.universes-inuniverse.de/islam/eng/2004/01/tawadros/index.html, date accessed June 15, 2005. Wu, C.T. (2003) Privatising Culture: Corporate Art Intervention since the 1980’s, London: Verso.




Index Aborigine, 158, 164, 165 Adorno, Theodor, 108, 182, 183, 192 aesthetics migratory aesthetics, 122, 124, 130 relational aesthetics, 135 agency, 13, 46, 50–5, 58, 60–1, 115–16, 122, 130, 141 Alterity, 14, 82, 91, 93–7, 99, 186 anticolonial, 16, 139, 142–7, 149, 151, 152 Area Studies, 14–15, 82–5, 87–101 Arendt, Hannah, 105, 107, 142, 144, 146, 162, 164 art world, 9, 17–18, 172, 186

confession(alism), 14, 82–3, 93–7, 187, 189 conservatism, 49 contemporary Islamic art, 15, 17–18, 184, 186, 189 crisis, 81–4, 87, 93, 96–7, 153 cultural production, 3, 10, 17–18, 167, 169, 171, 173, 175, 177, 179–84, 191 culturalist discourse, 46, 51

Bergson, Henri-Louis, 123 biopolitics, 83, 97 border, 17, 165, 170–80, 188–90 boundary, 65, 73, 99, 191, 193 capitalism, 14, 102, 105, 115, 117, 119, 161, 167, 170, 175, 178, 180, 181 care, 3, 10, 12, 27, 37, 60, 82–3, 93, 95–7, 115, 148, 152, 159, 160, 188, 190 civilization discourse, 18, 46, 51, 61, 72, 98, 100, 106, 164 Code, Lorraine, 123, 135 colonial state, 16, 143–5, 150–2, 163 colonialism, 157, 161, 163, 185 Africa, 9, 10, 60–1, 99–100, 143–4, 147–50, 153, 162, 184–5, 192 Australia, 12, 15–16, 19, 24, 43, 123, 154–65 India, 85, 106 commitment commitment to knowing, 54, 56 commitment-kitsch, 12, 45, 47, 51, 59 committed art, 17–18, 182–3 committed intellectual, 1, 3, 4–6 institutional commitment, 12, 24–5

Deleuze, Gilles, 19, 112, 123, 129–30, 133, 135–6 Derrida, Jacques, 14, 105, 107–8, 110–11, 113, 118, 162, 164 discipline, 2, 7, 9, 12, 14, 82–5, 87–100, 124–5, 146 disposable people, 13, 64, 65, 67, 69, 71, 73, 75, 77 diversity, 12, 23–30, 32–40, 42, 44, 133, 136, 173, 184, 193 education, 13, 24–5, 32–4, 42–4, 64, 70, 72–5, 77, 88–9, 97, 100, 104, 151, 169, 173, 187, 192–3 empowerment, 8, 50, 53–4, 130–1 equality, 2, 12, 18, 23–5, 27–8, 30–41, 49, 50, 53–6, 59 face, 15, 23, 26, 39, 110, 120–9, 131–6, 139–40, 142, 147 Fanon, Franz, 16, 139–40, 142–53 Foucault, Michel, 4–5, 19, 81–2, 93–9, 172, 174, 180–1 Gatens, Moire & Genevieve Lloyd, 123, 127–9, 136 Ghosh, Aurobindo, 143–6, 153 Heidegger, Martin, 64–6, 70, 74–5, 77, 105, 109–11 homelessness, 64–6, 75

195 Begüm Özden Firat, Sarah De Mul and Sonja Van Wichelen

196

Index

human, 10, 11, 13, 46, 53, 55, 64–76, 101, 102, 110, 117, 122, 163, 176, 180 humanism, 12, 13, 49, 56, 64–76, 85, 90, 124, 125, 127, 134 humanities, 8, 14, 105, 125, 128, 130, 134 humanity, 2, 3, 65–7, 70, 72, 75, 134, 148, 151, 134, 147, 151 intercultural, 15, 122–4, 127, 187 interdisciplinarity, 81–5, 87, 88–91, 93, 94, 96, 124, 132 inter-facing, 127, 133, 134 intertemporal, 134 Islam, 12, 15, 46–50, 51, 52, 54, 57, 59, 85, 140 Islamic, 17, 18, 45, 50, 51, 55, 59, 86, 94, 96, 98, 182, 184–7, 189, 192 kinship, 13, 64, 70–3, 75, 157, 159 labor, 14, 17, 18, 65, 67, 69, 71, 73, 76, 82, 89–92, 102–10, 105–6, 107, 167, 168, 170, 172–5, 180, 185 immaterial, 102, 104, 106, 117, 167, 170, 179 Mandela, Nelson, 16, 143, 144, 147–52 market, 26, 32, 103, 116, 142, 167, 168, 171, 172, 175, 183, 184, 186, 191 Mbembe, Achille, 139–43, 150 Middle East, 14, 81, 82, 85–7, 90–2, 96, 89, 185, 187, 192 migration, 15, 45, 121, 124, 126, 127, 131 migrant, 13, 15, 45, 65, 67, 69, 121, 123, 125, 189, 190 migratory aesthetics, 122, 124, 130, 135 migratory subject, 123, 124 modernity, 53, 55, 92, 141, 145, 173, 179 mother, 15, 53, 54, 125–8, 130–4, 156, 157, 159, 160 motherhood, 52, 133, 157

Muslim, 45, 46, 48, 49, 51, 60, 66, 90, 133, 185, 186, 188, 189 woman, 45, 46, 47, 49, 50–3, 56, 57, 59, 60, 188, 189 native, 26, 48, 93, 94, 99, 143–6, 158 native voice, 82, 91 necro-politics, 142, 151 new internationalism, 183, 184, 191 nomad, 18, 190 nomadism, 190 nonperformative, 12, 23, 24 Nothing is Missing, 15, 121, 123, 125, 126, 133, 134 orientalism, 46, 90, 96 neo-orientalism, 18 other/otherness, 5, 12, 13–15, 55–60, 82, 83, 90–6, 123, 155, 162, 163, 184, 186, 188, 189 paternity, 156, 158, 160 politics of partiality, 57 production of knowledge, 13, 14, 79, 120 progressivist narratives, 50, 53 race equality, 12, 23–5, 27, 28, 30–5, 41 racism, 12, 25–7, 30, 31, 35, 39, 41, 51 antiracisim, 2, 12, 13, 26, 27, 30 Rancière, Jacques, 178, 182, 191 recognition, 55, 57 recognizability, 12, 56, 57, 59 religion, 12, 45–8, 57, 84, 133, 184, 185 resistance, 1, 15, 16, 50, 52–4, 66, 76, 139, 141, 143, 145–7, 150, 151, 158 responsibility, 1, 9, 10, 16, 17, 122, 123, 130, 134, 154–6, 161–3, 182 Said, Edward, 2, 5, 86, 92–4, 96, 99, 112–15, 140 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 1, 3, 4, 6, 65, 143, 144, 182, 183 shame, 155–7, 163 Social Science, 15, 81–6, 88, 89, 91–8, 105 socialism, 13, 68, 76 speech act, 12, 23, 24, 26, 27, 127, 129, 133


Index Spinoza, Baruch, 115, 123, 124, 127, 129, 134, 135 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 5, 10, 135, 162 stereotype, 190, 191 Stolen Generations, 16, 154–6, 161, 163 terror, 1, 2, 15, 16, 17, 81, 139–45, 147, 151, 152 terrorism, 15, 16, 18, 49, 94, 139, 141, 142, 145, 148 translation, 31, 129 The Transparent Factory (Volkswagen), 17, 167–79 universal, 4, 5, 9, 10, 54, 55, 57, 59, 82, 84, 85, 87–92 universalism, 8, 56, 66, 84, 88, 91, 92, 95, 96

197

veil, 47, 52, 187–9, 191 The Veiled Monologues, 45–7, 50, 51, 53, 56, 60 victimization, 46, 50, 53, 56 violence, 1, 5, 8, 10, 15, 16, 27, 45, 60, 66, 69, 73, 74–6, 134, 139, 141–6, 148, 149, 151, 152, 180 state violence, 10, 151 war on terror, 1–2, 61, 81, 140 white white father, 154, 156, 158–60 white man, 158–9 whiteness, 36, 154–5, 157–8, 160–1, 165 whiteness studies, 161 Williams, Raymond, 108 woman question, 12, 45–6, 48, 51, 57, 59


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