°Race matters, 1
Preliminary notes.
To pose the question of the materiality of race is also, if one is inclined to trace the genealogy and circumstance of this question, to pose the question of multiculturalism’s ‘failure’. This failure is understood – and there are conservative and liberal versions of this – as the failure of multiculturalism to sufficiently deliver on its promise of a redistribution or expansion of recogntion and rights when confronted with what are said to be intractable racial differences.
However, this putative failure was always the very condition of multiculturalism, contained in the specific structure of its promise, its accounting of success and failure, its normative ledgering of difference and identity. Multiculturalism is a theory and policy of social order, of the restoration or institution of that order (and its boundaries) grounded in the recognition and management of differences-in-unity. In that policy, and in that process of managing the passage from the ostensibly particular differences of the otherly-complexioned to their integration into the apparently neutral terrain of social identity (citizenship), distinctions were always made between proper and improper forms of difference.
What multiculturalism promised, then, was recognition (and rights) as the reward for appropriate expressions of difference – which is to say, both appropriate and appropriable: differences that can be appropriated as property; competition as the proper expression of difference (or conflict); relation conceived entirely in the register of exchange. Multiculturalism is, in other words, a particularly contractual version of the promise, not an assurance that the state or its institutions will recognise differences so much as a transaction over which differences will not disturb the social ordering (and valuations) of difference.
Makes me think immediately of France’s policies for a French Islam, which Sarkozy is rekindling. The French state has historically had favorable relations with immigrant Islamic leaders when it came to such issues as preventing unionization of the migrant workers, even as it denied Islam as a site of political agency, or even cultural difference. And by extrapolation, isn’t this also the manner in which the global state redistributes cultural and ethnic difference? An Islam that “the US would want to see,” a British Islam, an Islam that can get along with the Israeli state… etc.
And to ask the question from the reverse side (from the side of difference): what is it within difference that so lends itself to re-shuffling? How to decipher and disclose that something which always lends itself to exchange, as you put it, with power?
pomegranade [July 19, 2007 @ 3:53 pm]
That’s so very right, pom.
The gist of the above is from some writing over a decade old, but I thought returning to the question of multiculturalism would be a good point of departure for writing something for darkmatter.
And you’re right to ask about the relation between difference and exchange. A couple of things have been swirling around in my head these last few days. A line from a song: “Ain’t no deals, we got nothing to sell”. The entire lyrics, the video clip, and some more on the events the song is about. And Gillian Cowlishaw’s essay “Disappointing Indigenous People: Violence and the Refusal of Help”, which ends with this:
As for what it is about difference that lends itself to exchange - or (maybe we should ask) has to be lent to exchange as a condition of capital and profit -, perhaps the question has to run to the difference between M and M’, and what lies between, as potentiality. I’m still mulling, obviously. But I’ve been planning to go back to Harry Chang’s work on a materialist theory of race, but turn it around the question of contractualism, basically.
s0metim3s [July 20, 2007 @ 12:04 pm]
Looking forward to seeing these thoughts expanded. Seems to be pinning down what someone like Badiou could only vaguely identify (judging by the quotes here: http://antigram.blogspot.com/2007/07/there-are-no-jews-there-are-no-greeks.html )
The metaphorics of ‘negotiation’ - so crucial to the ‘race relations’ industry, and to multiculturalist theorists such as Homi Bhabha - seems particularly pertinent here. The term ‘Negotiation’ is ambivalent here, evoking both a geopolitical-military discourse (the truce) and the language of the market (the deal). In The Location of Culture, Bhabha repeatedly opposed this pseudo-concept to *negation*, ignoring the very obvious negation implicit in his privileged term.
kenoma [July 20, 2007 @ 1:34 pm]
Indeed. And, voila:
s0metim3s [July 21, 2007 @ 3:45 pm]
That’s the one.
Great blog, by the way.
kenoma [July 22, 2007 @ 2:07 am]