08 Feb Contradictions and Multiculturalism

Today’s PhD school, Tracing Colonialism and Orientalism in Social and Political Thought, consisted of an introductory talk by Engin Isin, followed by a talk from Ian Almond, referencing his book,  The New Orientalists: Postmodern Representations of Islam from Foucault to Baudrillard (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007). They then opened the floor to students (after a short coffee break) and concluded before lunch with a closing set of remarks from Ian Almond, Enging Isin, Roberto Dainotto, and Bryan Turner.

We all enjoyed a lovely lunch together, then settled into round two: A presentation by Roberto Dainotto, referencing his book,  Europe (in Theory) (Duke University Press, 2007), followed by a Q&A with students and a closing discussion, again with all of the faculty present, and then final remarks from Engin Isin. Everyone went on for drinks, later. Unfortunately, I have been overwhelmed by a cracker-jack combination of jet-lag and social ineptitude, so I’ve come back to my hotel to blog about the lovely day. I won’t be giving a blow-by-blow of the day (as I did fill 14 notebook pages with notes), just more of some thoughts that arose for me with regard to my own work.

All students present were expected to read the two books that the professors referenced. I added Is Critique Secular?: Blasphemy, Injury and Free Speech by Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Saba Mahmood. The three, together, painted both a broad stroke for approaching the dialectical relationship between Europe and Islam / the Orient, as well as offered temporally specific and territorially bounded understandings of particularities.

In examining the texts of particular authors, there emerges deeply embedded contradictions about the Orient for many theorists, ranging from Marx to Zizek. This can be seen in the dual nature of the relation of Islam and Islamic people – the near-simultaneous denouncement threaded through unveiled racisms that are dependent on centuries old framings of Islam as both / either Apocryphal (from 12-13^th c. Franciscan monks to Baudrillard) and / or ushering in an era of creative destruction (16-17^th c. Protestant millenarians to Zizek). On the one hand, they represent the victim of colonization, heroic and romantic in their existence, on the other, barbarous and murdering. This internal contradiction of thoughts about people are what Ian Almond called the “competing discourses vying one another for primacy.” I wonder, though, how much Islam (or Muslims more generally) don’t come to stand in for our own internal contradictions – the very rooted struggles that we hold within the dialectical relationship between Islam and Europe, particularly, and within capitalism, more generally.

These contradictions emerge in relatively blinding ways in the health and development projects – they waiver between viewing their charges as simultaneously “victim” and “failure.” The recipients of corrective development are victims against which we do “good works” to assuage a kind of (cosmopolitan? [I’m still working this out]) guilt. At the same time, they are failures – failures against whom the capitalism system can come in and correct. The very construction of philnathrocapitalism is dependent on both of these discursive turns and holds the contradiction boldly. It is part apology, part paternalistic impulse.

Ian Almond went on to say, “multiculturalism is the lubricant for capitalism” in reference to the use of multiculturalism programs as a kind of soothing comfort to allow for a quiet life for those most engaged in global capital. I would go further to say that multiculturalism is a pivoting / pivotal point on which these contradictions can situate their trajectories. There was some discussion about his apparent “throwing away” of multiculturalism, that there is an “empiricism that cannot be ignored.” But I would argue that it is precisely the empiricism that is the failing. To assume that a certain number of people of color, or of particular sexual orientations, or of multiple abilities is enough multiculturalism to warrant keeping the term in circulation is to reduce us all (all of us who are not the white male student making the claim) to a numeric value that is devoid of the particularities of histories of oppression and marginalization. The turn to the “empiric” argument is a bastion of the theoretically-weak. It reduces the entire project of multiculturalism to a reductive racialized program of “filling in the boxes” to suit the capitalist imperative to its own embarrassing contradictions, to assuage centuries of guilt into a neatly ordered numbering project.

I did appreciate Bryan Turner’s attempts to step into the conversation in the discussion. He offered three ways of thinking about multiculturalism: as an empirical fact, as policy, as a celebration of difference. He was careful to point to the last of these as the one that holds the only appropriate framing of the word.

The conversation went on for quite a bit, and I’ll write more about it later…