Zee-to-the-izek
A newish article, though needless to say the arguments are not so new. Still quality, though. On the hijab:
The problem of pseudo-choice also demonstrates the limitations of the
standard liberal attitude towards Muslim women who wear the veil: acceptable
if it is their own free choice rather than imposed on them by husbands or
family. However, the moment a woman dons the veil as the result of personal
choice, its meaning changes completely: it is no longer a sign of belonging
to the Muslim community, but an expression of idiosyncratic individuality.
In other words, a choice is always a meta-choice, a choice of the modality
of the choice itself: it is only the woman who does not choose to wear a
veil that effectively chooses a choice. This is why, in our secular liberal
democracies, people who maintain a substantial religious allegiance are in a
subordinate position: their faith is ‘tolerated’ as their own personal
choice, but the moment they present it publicly as what it is for them—a
matter of substantial belonging—they stand accused of ‘fundamentalism’.
Plainly, the ‘subject of free choice’, in the ‘tolerant’, multicultural
sense, can only emerge as the result of an extremely violent process of
being uprooted from one’s particular life-world.
It seems to me this opens up the space from which Fanon’s discussion of the veil in A Dying Colonialism takes off. And on the ideology of human rights:
It is within this context that we can situate the most salient human rights
issue: the rights of those who are starving or exposed to murderous
violence. Rony Brauman, who co-ordinated aid to Sarajevo, has demonstrated
how the very presentation of the crisis there as ‘humanitarian’, the very
recasting of a political-military conflict into humanitarian terms, was
sustained by an eminently political choice—basically, to take the Serb side
in the conflict. The celebration of ‘humanitarian intervention’ in
Yugoslavia took the place of a political discourse, Brauman argues, thus
disqualifying in advance all conflicting debate. [9]From this particular insight we may problematize, at a general level, the
ostensibly depoliticized politics of human rights as the ideology of
military interventionism serving specific economico-political ends. As Wendy
Brown has suggested apropos Michael Ignatieff, such humanitarianism
presents itself as something of an anti-politics, a pure defence of the
innocent and the powerless against power, a pure defence of the individual
against immense and potentially cruel or despotic machineries of culture,
state, war, ethnic conflict, tribalism, patriarchy, and other mobilizations
or instantiations of collective power against individuals. [10]However, the question is: what kind of politicization do those who intervene
on behalf of human rights set in motion against the powers they oppose? Do
they stand for a different formulation of justice, or do they stand in
opposition to collective justice projects? For example, it is clear that the
us-led overthrow of Saddam Hussein, legitimized in terms of ending the
suffering of the Iraqi people, was not only motivated by hard-headed
politico-economic interests but also relied on a determinate idea of the
political and economic conditions under which ‘freedom’ was to be delivered
to the Iraqi people: liberal-democratic capitalism, insertion into the
global market economy, etc. The purely humanitarian, anti-political politics
of merely preventing suffering thus amounts to an implicit prohibition on
elaborating a positive collective project of socio-political transformation.
And on violence:
The starting point of Balibar’s text on violence is the insufficiency of the
standard Hegelian-Marxist notion of ‘converting’ violence into an instrument
of historical Reason, a force which begets a new social formation. [7] The
‘irrational’ brutality of violence is thus aufgehoben, ‘sublated’ in the
strict Hegelian sense, reduced to a particular ‘stain’ that contributes to
the overall harmony of historical progress. The 20th century confronted us
with catastrophes—some directed against Marxist political forces, others
generated by Marxist engagement itself—which cannot be ‘rationalized’ in
this way. Their instrumentalization into the tools of the Cunning of Reason
is not only ethically unacceptable but also theoretically wrong, ideological
in the strongest sense of the term. In his close reading of Marx, Balibar
nonetheless discerns an oscillation between this teleological
‘conversion-theory’ of violence, and a much more interesting notion of
history as an open-ended process of antagonistic struggles, whose final
‘positive’ outcome is not guaranteed by any encompassing historical
necessity.Balibar argues that, for necessary structural reasons, Marxism is unable to
think the excess of violence that cannot be integrated into the narrative of
historical Progress. More specifically, it cannot provide an adequate theory
of fascism and Stalinism and their ‘extreme’ outcomes, Shoah and Gulag. Our
task is therefore twofold: to deploy a theory of historical violence as
something which cannot be instrumentalized by any political agent, which
threatens to engulf this agent itself in a self-destructive vicious cycle;
and also to pose the question of how to turn the revolutionary process
itself into a civilizing force.
And finally, Jodi Dean makes a fine point about Hardt and Negri’s optimism and Gramscian pessimism as two sides of the same coin (with Žižek and Benjamin providing the necessary alternative).
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Tim, I would like you to, more than you do, either (a) write about people you know, and how they should act differently to make the world better or (b) personally and wordlessly storm capitalism somewhere.
I am aware that your recent post about UK rap partly addresses (a).
Hope you are well.
Comment by Tom @ 11/21/2005 5:28 pm
what kind of a bourgeois liberal demands either individual action or the assessment of others for their individual action?
Comment by geo @ 11/22/2005 9:37 am
Hm, interesting. In what sense exactly is Tim not writing about people he knows? He may not have met them, but one could argue that it is possible to ‘know’ someone better through their writing than, say, through the kind of mundane conversations most people have everyday in face to face conversations. Whether that person writes in academic journals, or blogs, or webforums, newspapers… Restricting the category of people you can claim to ‘know’ to only those you have met face to face would mean eliminating all those who you interact with mainly over the internet for a start. Do we ‘know’ the real person better through physical co-existence with them, or through their thoughts and ideas as communicated through the written word? And do I know Tim better now from reading his blog than from small talk at parties in Cambridge…?
Besides which, telling people he knows (in any sense) how to change the world would be a little presumptious, perhaps, rather than acting himself. And Tim is storming capitalism on these very pages, only if he did it wordlessly all we would have to look at is the picture of the girl’s face :)
Comment by moll @ 11/22/2005 11:55 am
Dear Tim
Only a very impolite bourgeois liberal demands anything, but I thought it would be alright to ask nicely.
I would be interested to know what you think about people you know because they might read it and do things differently. They don’t have to be people you have met face to face. Dick Cheney, however, is unlikely to read this and additionally is unlikely to do things differently.
Writing on your typical themes strikes me as an extremely sophisticated form of entertainment, but not as a terribly potent type of political action, which is possibly dissonant with what you would like to do.
I’m not sure that teling people how to change the world or offering assessment of others for their individual action is necessarily a bad thing. For example, I was playing netball earlier tonight, and a very helpful person pointed out that I shouldn’t point my elbows out so far, so I tucked them in, and then I threw the ball better.
I would also like to know in what ways you are acting to change the world.
love etc
Tom
Comment by Tom @ 11/22/2005 12:38 pm
Haha, yes, polite requests from bourgeois liberals always accepted. Though I don’t think you’re really a bourgeois liberal (are you?).
Anyway, I think you’re basically right about this blog being predominantly entertainment, though it’s a form of entertainment that can sometimes support political action (I would have done different stuff at, and in the run-up to, the G8 if it hadn’t been for the political philosophy I’ve encountered). I’m a bit sceptical about it directly accomplishing much of political value, though.
As for giving people advice, I’m enough of a structuralist to think it’s difficult to critique the behaviour of individuals politically (politics, like netball, is a team sport).
I hadn’t thought about this, but while training to be a primary school teacher, do you get taught to play sports so that you can then teach PE lessons? I suppose you should.
Also - nice blog you’ve got there, moll; wierdly, I feel like I’ve heard your “butt-fucking” story before.
Comment by Tim @ 11/22/2005 11:51 pm