Multicultural Immunisation: Liberalism and Esposito 9780748695409

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MULTICULTURAL IMMUNISATION Liberalism and Esposito

Alexej Ulbricht

© Alexej Ulbricht, 2015 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12 (2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ www.euppublishing.com Typeset in Palatino Light by 3btype.com, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 9539 3 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 9540 9 (webready PDF) The right of Alexej Ulbricht to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

v

1 Introduction The conflicted relationship to multiculturalism Multicultural immunisation

1 1 11

2 Liberal Thought on Multiculturalism A brief history of liberal political theory’s engagement with difference A tale of three liberals: Kymlicka, Parekh, Taylor

22 22 29

3 Multiculturalism as a Mode of Immunising the Body of Liberalism Community, obligation and emptiness The immunity paradigm Immunity in concrete: what it makes of people

45 46 50 55

4 Liberal Multiculturalism and Rights: Citizens, Humans and Other Subjects Citizens Humans

66 67 75

5 Disagreement and the Horizons of Consensus Liberal models of consensus The critique of consensus Fusing of horizons

89 90 93 105

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6 Recognition: Tolerant, and Cunning Recognition, or, the cunning cleansing of the wounded liberal subject Liberal recognition as a form of tolerance

115 116 129

7 Multiculturalism Beyond Immunity What must a multicultural polity do? What about totality? How to get there (with rhythm!) Music and the city

142 143 146 154 160

8 Conclusion Liberal multiculturalism as a process of immunisation Syncopation in the concrete

167 167 180

Bibliography

189

Index

207

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book developed out of my Ph.D. thesis, written at SOAS between 2009 and 2012. So first and foremost I want to thank my supervisor Stephen Chan, who helped me in times of both professional and personal stress, and without whom this work would not have been possible. Stephen managed to patiently indulge my whims whenever I decided that now would be a good time to prioritise writing on Eurovision or somesuch instead, but he always managed to rein me back in and get me to focus on the task at hand. I am immensely grateful for his support. I would also like to thank my examiners, John Hutnyk and Peter Thomas, and the other members of my supervisory committee, Rochana Bajpai and Laleh Khalili. Further thanks go to Timothy Campbell for his generous comments on the manuscript. I would also like to thank Tom Young, without whose influence I might never have become interested in political theory in the first place, for having faith in my ability, and for giving me my first teaching job despite my lack of experience. I also want to thank Bhaskar Mukhopadhyay at Goldsmiths who broadened my theoretical horizons immensely and who was always supportive of my work. I also would like to thank my friends and family for keeping me sane throughout the writing process. Phil Thomas, Nick Martin, Eleni Harlan, Matt Mahon, Ceri May, Shanti Ulfsbjorninn, Wiggy Cheung, Elisa Brewis, Steev Burgess, Richard Connor, Thomas Smith, Rory Steele and Tadaharu Hashimoto have always been there for me and I am grateful for their friendship. A special thanks goes to my wife, Cait Peterson, who has enriched my life more than anybody and who has supported me throughout. Finally, I would like to thank my parents, who were always supportive of what must have often seemed an overly obscure endeavour.

v

Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION

This book takes as its starting point the idea that there is a contradictory situation in the UK today, where there is at one and the same time great hostility towards minorities and a persisting idea that the UK is a place that welcomes and celebrates diversity. Often this is thought about in terms of two competing discourses, one of multiculturalism, and one of a backlash against multiculturalism. I will be arguing that rather than being a mere backlash, the hostility to otherness is already inscribed within liberal multiculturalism and liberalism more generally. It is my contention that liberal multiculturalism is best understood as a process of immunisation that attempts to protect liberalism against the perceived threat of a foreign Other. In order to argue this I will be engaging with the work of Roberto Esposito and others to demonstrate that various aspects of liberal multiculturalism can best be understood as a series of immunitary processes. I will be focusing on three types of processes in particular: rights, consensus, and recognition. However, before outlining my argument in more detail, I want to first engage in a little scene-setting and give some examples of the contradictory state of discourse on multiculturalism in Britain. This is not intended as a detailed and systemic inquiry, but rather as an illustration of the kind of discursive situation we find ourselves in. So I will start with some examples of the hysterical discourse around multiculturalism in Britain, and use this as a springboard for the theoretical argument that follows. THE CONFLICTED RELATIONSHIP TO MULTICULTURALISM On 5 February 2011 the British Prime Minister David Cameron gave a speech at the Munich Security conference in which he declared the failure of state multiculturalism.1 A few weeks later, on 14 April, Cameron gave another speech, this time to the Conservative Party Conference, 1

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about immigration, the need to curb it, and the failure of multiculturalism.2 Together, these speeches have been seen as the point at which the backlash against multiculturalism reached its highest level. The multiculturalism promoted by successive Labour governments was now being followed by a Tory clampdown (with Labour following suit in order to compete, as exemplified in various speeches by Ed Miliband).3 However, taking a step back, we can see that this is hardly an accurate portrayal. The situation under Labour had plenty of hardship to offer migrants, and the rhetoric too was not all rosy. If we look back at the leadership debates before the 2010 General Election we will find Gordon Brown saying ‘in future, when we do it, there’ll be no chefs allowed in from outside the European Union. […] I talked to some care assistants – no care assistants will come in from outside the European Union’, and in the very next sentence saying ‘we are a tolerant, we are a diverse country’.4 Moreover, this simultaneous hostility to and embracing of diversity was perfectly intelligible, rather than being perceived as contradictory. In fact, Cameron too, in his Munich speech, devotes some time to stating the value of Islam. The shift is in fact far less pronounced than it might seem and constitutes more of a shift of emphasis from one point of the rhetorical axis to the other than a backlash. The reason for this is that both parties are operating within the framework of a specifically liberal multiculturalism. What I want to argue is that what is generally perceived as the backlash against multiculturalism is not a backlash at all, but rather an inherent part of the logic of liberal multiculturalism. In this way we can make sense of the subtle shift in tone, but largely continuous shape, of multiculturalism from Labour to Conservative governments. We can also begin to make sense of a situation where, despite all manner of fears around immigration and multiculturalism, the idea that ‘we are a tolerant, diverse country’ prevails. In fact, the attitude goes further: the British imaginary conceives of the UK as a paradise for immigrants. Witness the following BBC report on the ‘jungle’ in Calais, from 2009, which claims: ‘Britain […] is perceived like “an Eldorado” in the eyes of people traffickers and illegal immigrants. In short, there’s a perception the UK is a soft touch – and a place where immigrants can prosper.’5 This is a noteworthy statement in several regards. Firstly, that the UK is ostensibly a place where immigrants can prosper is conceived of as a bad thing, since it means

Introduction

3

more immigrants will be attracted, who will then prosper. Secondly, despite the hostility exhibited in the framing of the statement, the idea that Britain presents an eldorado for immigrants is not questioned (and then there is of course some striking colonial imagery at work in both ‘El Dorado’ and the ‘jungle’). Marking the UK as an eldorado actually involves a curious but not uncommon inversion employed by the political groups of the far right: the idea of England being overrun by foreigners, of Britishness being destroyed, of ‘indigenous’ white Englishmen being the true oppressed of our age, of Britain effectively being colonised. This discourse is peddled most overtly by the BNP, although one can find traces of it in many places. While this discourse is highly dubious and often seems to border on the bizarre, it has been pervasive and very powerful. Now of course, the UK consists not just of the BNP. However, this far right discourse can intelligibly be seen as a kind of return of the repressed, as the breaking into the open of the excess, of what is often hidden in other, more benevolent discourses. We can find it implicit in all kinds of media articles and politicians’ statements (in fact, the BNP itself referred to Cameron’s Munich speech as an instance of the ‘Griffinisation’ of politics),6 and certainly there is hysteria about foreign presence even when it stops short of reverse colonial imagery. In fact, the idea of Britain as an eldorado is crucial to understanding the worries that have been stoked around ‘benefits tourists’ who come to the country to make use of the NHS.7 Before introducing the basic structure of my theoretical argument I want to take some time to focus briefly on the hysteria that exists around immigration and multiculturalism in the UK. This hysteria can broadly speaking be viewed in terms of four types of fears – over security, economy, culture, and nature. I will be illustrating each of these by way of some press reports on the town of Peterborough as well as giving some supplementary examples along the way. What emerges is a picture of a liberalism marked by its hostility to the Other, even as it asserts its commitment to diversity. * Peterborough may not seem the most intuitive place to use as a representative example, and yet in a way Peterborough focuses so much

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of what is interesting in current debates on multiculturalism. While there is no one, unified discourse of multiculturalism, looking at Peterborough can help us see a number of discursive themes that are present across the spectrum of liberal discourses on multiculturalism. Despite not being the kind of urban setting that might come first to mind when thinking of multiculturalism, Peterborough allows us to see all the major fears around immigration at work. In fact, from its Middle England location and pastoral setting to the way in which threats by other cultures are perceived, Peterborough is astoundingly representative in terms of illustrating British discourses on multiculturalism. Partly this is a selffulfilling prophecy; Peterborough has been hoisted into this position by the tabloid press, who frequently cite it as a location that illustrates what is wrong with multiculturalism. Peterborough has in a sense been constructed as a representative site of British multiculturalism. However, in filling out this role, Peterborough has in fact become representative in more ways than the scandal-mongers of the Daily Mail and Sun could have ever anticipated. That is, it allows us to see the hysterical nature of the fears surrounding multiculturalism, owing to the very lack of any precarity in this locale. So, while starting in Peterborough might risk making one complicit in a tabloid construction, I hope that the insight taken from this will make this a worthwhile risk to take. To give a little context for those unfamiliar with Peterborough: it is a city of 164,000 people in the east of England, situated on the River Nene, with its cathedral as its main landmark. In 1967, Peterborough was designated a ‘new town’, which triggered a steady growth process.8 More recently, it has again profited from a major redevelopment fund and has received £1 billion in funds for regeneration.9 Partly because of this regeneration project, Peterborough has been experiencing an economic boom, which was sustained through the economic crisis. This boom has also attracted a significant number of seasonal workers, who work in the fields surrounding the town, doing jobs most locals are no longer willing to do with the increase of service jobs in the city. Peterborough is a small city that might not be particularly noteworthy except in so far as it has actually been quite a success story in terms of post-war development. And yet, it has become for the British tabloid press something of a synecdoche for everything that is going wrong in multicultural Britain. And if we look at reporting about Peterborough, we can see the four fears that I have mentioned.

Introduction

5

Let me start by looking at fears surrounding security. Peterborough makes migration related headlines more or less regularly, but it was with regard to the issue of security that it first took on its current role in the press, in 2007. Peterborough has been a mainstay of reporting on the impacts of migration ever since Chief Constable Julie Spence warned of the need for more staff to deal with the impact of migration.10 Even though the police also stressed that there was ‘little evidence that the increased numbers of migrant workers have caused significant or systematic problems in respect of community safety or cohesion’, and that ‘“inappropriately negative” community perceptions about migrant workers often complicate routine incidents, raising tensions and turning them “critical”’,11 the tabloids had a field day. When reading the articles, one could be forgiven for thinking that Peterborough was a squalid urban ghetto, rather than a prospering provincial town. They paint a picture of a once tranquil and bucolic place disrupted by the ravages of immigration.‘Once a peaceful cathedral city, Peterborough has become a symbol of the changing face of Britain.’12 The article paints a dark picture: street battles between Iraqis and Afghans; Kurdish refugees firebombed; Lithuanians murdered. Even though much of the violence features immigrants only as the victims, the implication here is that they bring it on themselves; by their sheer presence they have unsettled the area, made it insecure, invited retaliations. The actual violence experienced by foreigners is sidelined by the perceived threat to the English. We encounter an array of elderly residents who dare not leave the house owing to violence and rowdiness (including an 82-year-old who ‘refused to give his name for fear of reprisals’). There are occasional moderating moments: we find the police saying that they are in control and that their figures on violent crime do not refer exclusively to migrants; and we find a young Lithuanian who is leaving Peterborough because he finds it an unwelcoming place. However, the overall picture is one of a once-peaceful town now overrun by muggings, robberies, prostitution and drug dealing.13 What we have here is a general fear that the presence of migrants leads to an increase in insecurity. An increase in diversity is equated with an increase in crime (see also the Daily Mail’s assertion that ‘one out of every five killers is an immigrant’).14 Moreover, diversity is also sometimes associated with obstruction of justice, such as in recent debates over the wearing of the burka in court.15 In the case of Peterborough this does

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not even take on the added war-on-terror dimension of associating the presence of multiculturalism with a tendency to breed terrorism. This is of course mainly because in Peterborough the majority of immigration is from Eastern Europe. If we want to see the added dimension of fear for security with regard to Muslims and terrorism, we need look only as far as David Cameron’s Munich speech. The very fact that Cameron used a speech at a NATO security conference as the forum to talk about multiculturalism is already testimony to the kind of securitisation we have witnessed over the past years. Multiculturalism is seen as a policy that allows for, or even encourages, radical Islamism. Cultural difference is immediately identified with a threat – multiculturalism and national security become intimately linked. Or think of the claim by Labour’s former immigration minister Phil Woolas that Britain’s presence in Afghanistan is a valuable way of curbing the number of asylum seekers.16 There is a general fear around multiculturalism as something that compromises security, both national security and the day-to-day security of citizens. * Back to Peterborough and this time to fears around the economy. Recall that Peterborough has, since the 1960s, again and again received massive government injections of money: the whole development of the town depended on it. However, when newcomers make use of government help, this becomes a problem. Reports about Peterborough play on the familiar motif of immigrants pushing in front, of being treated better than locals.17 In this case, a Czech family of nine allegedly received housing from the council two weeks after arriving in Britain. The message is: ‘while this Czech family are thrilled with their new council house, such largesse is ruining communities.’18 The picture that is painted is that not only are they getting things faster than locals, but they do not deserve it, as they cannot take care of what is given to them. The article mentions ‘a battered bench in the middle of the garden, which is littered with rubbish. Outside the kitchen door there are grubby children’s clothes and some beer cans.’The idea that people arriving from Eastern Europe do not respect the neighbourhood and cover the town in litter is one of the most frequently recurring motifs in the reports on Peterborough. Moreover, the family are insatiable and greedy, wanting a bigger house

Introduction

7

(currently, three bedrooms for nine people) even though the husband is (allegedly) on Jobseeker’s Allowance and they hardly speak any English. We then move to a more general picture. We encounter a whole list of outrages and overburdened services. ‘Too many babies!’, exclaim outraged GPs. Fish stocks are decimated by immigrant anglers (whose fishing, it is implied, is somehow less acceptable than that of locals). And again and again the benefits issue, the Inland Revenue office ‘besieged’ by ‘a queue of girls speaking foreign tongues’. And, as if the benefit scroungers where not bad enough, there is ‘a growing foreign underclass’ of squatters living in camps and makeshift houses. Again there are reports of squalor – in, however, a tone that seems to show more concern for the Peterborough cityscape that is being tarnished by it than for the people who suffer it. There is, of course, a contradiction here: immigrants are always presented as a unified mass, yet they seem to live in grandeur and squalor simultaneously, doubly ruining the city, economically and aesthetically. (Part of this contradiction may be lessened if we keep in mind that the different charges might be made by different discourses on multiculturalism; however, this is not necessarily the case and sometimes they do appear in tandem.) The issue of overburdened services, and of benefit fraud, is one side of fears around the economy. The other side is of course the by now very familiar claims of immigrants taking away jobs from natives. Thus we find the Daily Express claiming that 98 per cent of jobs are given to immigrants,19 and Gordon Brown’s erstwhile promise of ‘British jobs for British workers’.20 It is also with regard to this fear that we have pledges like those of the Conservatives that immigration will be brought down to the tens of thousands.21 This pledge illustrates very well that along with fears about the economy comes an obsession with quantity. There is a fear around the alleged mass, or flood, of people coming into the country – most recently with regard to Romanians and Bulgarians.22 Almost any time immigration and multiculturalism are criticised, there is the adjunct statement that it is not a matter of being against immigration, but of being against too much immigration – that immigration is something that should only be allowed in moderation, lest it overrun the British polity. The articles on Peterborough are symptomatic again: it is stressed that the immigrants are respected for being hardworking (despite most of the reports claiming exactly the opposite) and that the concern is only with their large numbers.

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It is also with regard to the obsession with quantity that we are presented with quasi-Malthusian arguments about the need to curtail the size of the population, and, in the case of MPs Frank Field and Nicholas Soames, a conviction that one can only begin to fight racism once there is a commitment to keep the population below a certain level.23 * Moving on, let us turn to fears around culture. There is a common fear with regard to multiculturalism that allowing diversity endangers local culture, that British culture risks being irrevocably lost. Thus in Peterborough residents bemoan the fact that ‘from health to schools to the fundamental character of the city, virtually every aspect of life has been affected’.24 Nothing is as it was. In a letter written by two Peterborough councillors to the three party leaders before the 2010 General Election, they long for times gone by, lamenting that ‘people would know their neighbour years ago but today there are 150 properties but between ten and 15 languages are spoken by households’.25 There is a kind of nostalgia for a lost unified community that probably never existed in the first place. Curiously enough, culture is in fact the area that reports about Peterborough focus on least, so I will turn to some other examples. One example, which would be cute if it did not stem from someone who was at the time in a position of power, is Phil Woolas’ demand that immigrants learn that most British of pastimes, queuing.26 In fact, there was actually something quite insidious about this demand by Woolas that immigrants become versed in ‘the simple art of taking one’s turn’, in that it taps into the whole discourse of immigrants taking away social services, of them skipping to the front of council housing waiting lists and so on. Woolas’ call for queuing is, however, not the most absurd instance of claiming a British institution under threat. Among the tallest of claims is probably the one in the BNP’s 2010 manifesto, that pubs were under threat owing to the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of the ‘indigenous’ population and the lack of interest among immigrant communities in maintaining this crucial aspect of British culture.27 There seems to be a general fear of what are deemed quintessentially British habits being replaced by other practices. It is the same worry that leads David Cameron to fear the replacing of good exercise with Indian dancing.28

Introduction

9

This is supplemented by a fear around visible markers of different cultural practices (recall the hysteria around the potential building of a ‘mega-mosque’ in London a few years ago).29 * Back to Peterborough, and let us turn to nature. The expression of this fear is not as common, but I think it is worth singling out because in its very absurdity it illustrates very well that we are really talking about a kind of hysteria rather than simple trepidation. Peterborough gets hoisted back into the news in March 2010, with the extraordinary headline ‘Slaughter of the Swans’, and the byline: ‘It was an inflammatory claim – Eastern European migrants living in makeshift camps accused of pillaging wildlife from a town’s river. The Truth, as locals reveal, is even more unsettling …’30 The mode is most eloquent here, since the Daily Mail is simultaneously admitting that previous claims of this nature were inflammatory and asserting that, given the truth, they were not inflammatory enough. The idea of immigrants eating swans has been a consistent image in tabloid reporting over the years, inaugurated by the Sun in 2003 and often repeated.31 This particular trope is usually associated with Eastern Europeans, although it has recently been extended to Muslims as well.32 The recurring nature of the swan theme is acknowledged thus: Stories of immigrants killing and eating swans […] have emerged with increasing regularity since Britain’s borders were thrown open […] Equally regularly, of course, such claims have been dismissed as urban myths spread by opponents of immigration, fabricated as part of some sinister racist agenda.33 The message is clear: the repeated reports are testimony to a truth, the accusations of racism are part of a conspiracy theory. This ‘truth’, then, is even worse than imagined. What does it consist of? The article paints a picture of bands of feral immigrants marauding by the riverside and killing the wildlife, finding the swans ‘a rich source of food’ and having adopted ‘the lifestyle of ancient hunter-gatherers’. The language adopts the tone of a nature documentary. Peterborough is described as a place where local people no longer dare walk in their parks and streets.

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Immigrants are reduced to a barely human primitive presence, that threatens not only English culture but the constitution of its very nature. Immigrants are considered to prefer destructive activities ‘rather than simply enjoying the spectacle of these majestic birds’. The immigrant presence not only denigrates the British eldorado, it eats it away, depleting it of its very beauty. The article cleverly weaves in an attack on immigrants for depleting economic resources into the point about them destroying nature – the riverside had recently been regenerated with National Lottery money, an investment rendered useless by the destruction inflicted on nature by the migrants. The immigrants are moved from the realm of culture into that of nature, and are simultaneously seen as predatory, as a threat to nature. They are a truly other presence that threatens the very constitution of the UK. * Yet despite all this often vociferous hostility, despite a climate that leads to vans telling migrants to ‘go home’34 and to them receiving texts from UKBA telling them the same,35 despite all this, the idea that Britain is a tolerant and diverse society that embraces all cultures is still present. The same Conservative Party manifesto that calls for the reduction of immigration states that immigration has enriched the nation.36 Similarly, Cameron, in his Munich speech, states: Our country has benefited immeasurably from immigration. Go into any hospital and you’ll find people from Uganda, India and Pakistan who are caring for our sick and vulnerable. Go into schools and universities and you’ll find teachers from all over the world, inspiring our young people. Go to almost any high street in the country and you’ll find entrepreneurs from overseas who are not just adding to the local economy but playing a part in local life. Charities, financial services, fashion, food, music – all these sectors are what they are because of immigration.37 This is the very same speech which is considered Cameron’s ‘death of multiculturalism’ speech. At the same time as multiculturalism is proclaimed dead, the praises of diversity are still sung. While the celebration might often be of things like festivals and cuisines, this does

Introduction

11

not take away from the fact that, despite all the hostility, in practice the idea still remains that Britain loves to celebrate its diversity – something that again became apparent during the Olympics, where the multicultural constitution of Team GB was celebrated. The British encounter with diversity sometimes seems akin to Zeno’s encounter with his beloved in Italo Svevo’s novel.38 Zeno is madly in love with Ada, and one night he thinks he is caressing her foot with his under the table. It turns out that he is mistaken, and it is in fact only the leg of the table he is caressing. As if this misrecognition was not enough, he discovers that the person he has whispered confessions of love to in the dark is in fact Ada’s sister Augusta, who Zeno finds repellent – however, he ends up marrying her (which in fact turns out to be the better fate for Zeno). It is as if in the UK there is, on the one hand, an idealised image of the exotic other, of colourful festivals, of vibrant diverse culture, and on the other an utter recoil and disgust when one finds out that there is more than just that idealisation. Similarly, we might perhaps see the flaring up of ever new incidents of racism (always designated exceptions and remnants of the past) as parallel with Zeno’s many last cigarettes – not at all as marking an end, but rather as being an endless continuation that is endemic. MULTICULTURAL IMMUNISATION I will be arguing in this book that all this can be best understood if we conceive of liberal multiculturalism as a mode of immunisation, as a way of immunising liberalism from the perceived threat of the Other. The category of immunity provides the key for making sense of the situation in which there is both great hostility to other subjects and celebration of diversity. It will allow us to see that a backlash against multiculturalism is already nascent in liberal multiculturalism, and that there is a certain kind of other-hostility that is inherent in liberal theories of multiculturalism. In order to make this argument I will start, in Chapter 2, by providing an overview of the breadth of liberal thinking on liberal multiculturalism. There is, of course, no one indivisible thing called ‘liberal multiculturalism’. The term refers to a whole range of theories which disagree on many things, but which nonetheless can be usefully thought about in conjunction. Liberal multiculturalism incorporates ideas of group-

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based rights, of institutionalised dialogue, of recognition of different ethno-cultural groups, and of differential treatment, among other things. They may differ in terms of the importance they attach to cultural belonging, in the precise targets of their theories (indigenous groups, national minorities, migrants) or their strategies for regulating coexistence. But what unites liberal theories of multiculturalism is that they see completely uniform treatment as being in some way unjust, that they accord some degree of value to the acknowledgement and preservation of difference. As such, they in some sense define themselves against the old model of the ethnically homogeneous state and against assimilation, and try to provide an alternative approach to the difference-blind approach of classical liberalism. How far these theories go in valuing difference is something that varies greatly. But there are always limits, for these are liberal theories, and they do not seek to take diversity so far that it undermines liberalism. That is, liberal theories of multiculturalism are distinct from more radical formulations that have attempted to make ‘multiculturalism’ a term of struggle, or a critique of the structures of civil society.39 However, given the dominance of liberal values in the world, it is really liberal multiculturalism that we think about when we hear ‘multiculturalism’, and it is certainly the only kind that we see implemented in liberal states. As such, these theories frame the ways in which we generally tend to think about multiculturalism in the West; they demarcate the realm of what is generally thought possible or desirable with regard to accommodating or recognising difference. What I want to argue is that there are significant shortcomings within this body of thought as a whole, and that these shortcomings lie at the heart of liberal multiculturalism, and in fact, liberalism more generally. When I say shortcomings this needs to be qualified: what I see as problems and shortcomings are not necessarily seen as such from the liberal perspective. However, from the perspective of what the name multiculturalism promises, the problems are extensive. Liberal multiculturalism is characterised by a certain hostility towards otherness, at the very same time that it is an attempt to accommodate it. There is an Other-hostile tendency at the heart of liberal multiculturalism. The socalled ‘backlash’ against multiculturalism is a tendency that was already present, if dormant, in the logic of liberal multiculturalism – this tendency is best understood in terms of an immunitary logic.

Introduction

13 *

What do I mean by an immunitary logic? Ideas of immunity have appeared in the work of Baudrillard, Derrida, Harraway, Heller and Sloterdijk.40 However, while their treatments of immunity differ, they tend to see immunity primarily in terms of auto-immunity. The most sophisticated theorisation of immunity qua immunity, or at least the one most useful for my purposes, comes from the Italian political philosopher Roberto Esposito. Esposito is useful, because he situates immunity both on a biopolitical horizon and in a direct relation with community. Furthermore, by allowing us to think of hostility and incorporation as part of the same operation Esposito’s conception of immunity provides a vantage that is distinct from other critiques of liberalism’s attitude to the Other. It allows for an altogether more dynamic approach. Esposito has theorised on what he calls the immunity paradigm in a trilogy of books: Communitas, Immunitas, and Bíos.41 In its broadest terms, the paradigm refers to the incorporation of a dangerous outside element into the body in order to strengthen it against that very element; that is, a partial inclusion of the Other (although Esposito prefers to speak of the outside) with the aim of keeping the Other at bay. He develops the concept as a way of thinking through a particular tension or antinomy in the concept of biopower. However, his starting point is an attempt to reconceptualise the notion of community, which will also be important for this argument. Esposito is a major figure of Italian political thought, but he is only gradually receiving attention in the English-speaking world. Apart from writing on biopower and immunity he has also, more recently, written on notions of personhood.42 The translation of his work on immunity has taken a somewhat odd form, with the last part of the trilogy, Bíos, being translated into English first in 2008, only four years after its original publication. Meanwhile the founding part of the trilogy, Communitas, originally published in 1998, was not published in English until 2010, while Immunitas, from 2002, was published in English in late 2011. While Esposito’s work is thus in the process of receiving more attention (starting with a special issue of diacritics all the way back in 2006), his is not yet a generally recognised name, certainly not in Politics departments in the UK, anyway. In utilising Esposito I will be focusing on his early work, as it is here that he develops a full theory of community and

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immunity. I am leaving his more recent work on personhood to one side. This is not because it is not worthy of attention, but because this book is driven by an attempt to apply concepts practically. The choice of Esposito’s early work is, then, a pragmatic one: it is this work that can best be utilised to think productively about liberal multiculturalism in a novel way. Esposito’s work emerges out of a particular Italian context. His trilogy of books, Communitas, Immunitas and Bíos, is in a way driven by the reception of Foucault’s work, and in particular the notion of biopower, in Italy.43 There have been two major strains of thinking on biopower that have emerged from Italy, that of Giorgio Agamben and that of Antonio Negri. Agamben, who owes as much to Heidegger as he does to Foucault, develops his conception of biopower over several works, the most famous of which is no doubt Homo Sacer.44 Agamben advances a negative conception of biopower that inscribes it into the sovereign state of exception that divides bare life and political life. Agamben sees the politics of modernity as a biopolitical space whose genesis is inextricably linked to the birth of the camps. He sees biopolitics as essentially a kind of thanatopolitics where the political in fact withdraws in favour of the biological. Negri, coming from the background of autonomist Marxism, and also deeply indebted to Spinoza, develops his conception of biopower primarily during his collaborative works with Michael Hardt.45 However, the conception is indebted to his previous readings on Marx and in particular on the notion of immaterial labour.46 Negri’s conception of biopower is an altogether more positive one. Hardt and Negri see biopolitics as productive. Biopower is both the scene where Empire exerts its power and also where new social singularities (rather than subjectivities), both in the forms of the multitude and otherwise, new democracy, and new understandings of the common emerge. For Negri, the biopolitical formation of the multitude overcomes the negative aspect of biopower and inaugurates a new concept of sovereignty – essentially, an affirmative biopolitics is opposed to (and triumphs over) a negative biopower.47 Esposito distances himself from both these readings. His own understanding of biopower – which he considers to be ‘external and nonconcentric’ to Agamben and Negri48 – is developed over the course of his trilogy. His project is to develop an affirmative take on biopolitics that accentuates neither only the negative nor only the positive and

Introduction

15

productive.49 Moreover, it neither renounces the historical dimension (which he sees Agamben as doing) nor collapses the philosophical into the political (which he sees Negri as doing). (Arguably, there is something of an affinity with Negri in terms of the project of an affirmative biopolitics; and between the operation of immunity in Esposito and Agamben’s notion of exclusive inclusion.) Esposito identifies a tension in Foucault’s work, of which Agamben and Negri represent the extremes; the theoretical apparatus for dialectically bridging this gulf is that of immunity. His conception of immunity in turn is developed out of a particular conception of community that is at odds with that of political philosophy. However, when I say Esposito’s work emerges out of an Italian context, it is important to remember that this is not just a philosophical context but also the context of a particular discourse on migration and multiculturalism in Italy. Italy has recently been the site of some very overt hostility towards otherness, especially that taking the form of discrimination against Roma and the establishment of ‘white towns’, as well as highly xenophobic election campaigning.50 However, Italy has also been interesting in that it has put the Schengen regime to a test. In the wake of an influx of refugees from Tunisia onto the island of Lampedusa, Italy issued a limited number of these refugees with temporary visas, without much scrutiny, but to much criticism.51 The prime motivation for this was the hope that these refugees would quickly move on to other Schengen states, in particular France, a situation that ultimately led to France temporarily closing the border with Italy.52 Both Italy and the countries criticising Italy were in effect driven by the motivation of having someone else deal with the refugees, allegedly a mass, really a trickle.53 The temporary opening of the border at one end of Europe was thus met by an immediate clampdown elsewhere, but one that put the very logic of the Schengen system into question (although the EU later ruled, rather absurdly, that both sides were in fact acting within their rights).54 While Esposito’s work is of course not a direct reaction to the situation of migrants or Roma (and was written before the current conflicts around Schengen), his work does emerge from a context in which the issues of borders, migrants and difference take an important place in political discourse. And in fact, Esposito does in part attribute the fact that so much thinking on biopower has been conducted in Italy

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to Italy being a country geographically and culturally on the frontier, situated between North and South, Europe and the Mediterranean.55 He sees Italy as existing on the border, and he considers the border the proper place of biopolitics, which itself is situated at the intersection of different discourses. However, there are other linkages to consider apart from the Italian context. Esposito’s early work is highly influenced by and shares a great deal with that of Jean-Luc Nancy, with whom he has been in dialogue.56 This is especially true of Communitas and Immunitas – by the time of Bíos, Esposito’s work had moved closer to that of Foucault and Deleuze. By his own account, this is due to an increasing feeling that deconstruction remained too caught up in language, and that it was time to move out of the Heideggerian horizon into the field of bíos and biopower.57 (Despite being outlined by Foucault, ‘biopower’ lay around unused as a concept for quite some time. When asked why it took a detour through Italy for the concept to really gain ground, Esposito attributed this to a crucial difference he sees between Italian and French philosophy: the importance that Italian philosophy has always given to the category of ‘life’.)58 Now for my purposes, it is in fact the first two works that are the most important, as these develop Esposito’s thought on community and immunity most extensively. While the biopolitical dimension haunts Esposito’s entire oeuvre, and is no doubt important for my work as well, I am less interested here in the precise negotiations that are going on with Foucault, Agamben, and Negri, and more in the configuration of community and immunity. However, this raises a question, since I am engaging with a part of the work which, while not exactly having been disavowed, has it would seem been moved on from. Except that it is not really so – Bíos is in a way an attempt to recast our readings of the first two parts, putting particular focus on things that were present in them but perhaps not yet prominent. When I say that I am more concerned with the first two parts, I don’t mean that I will be ignoring this realignment: I mean quite simply that I am less concerned with the debate with Agamben and Negri that Esposito throws up in discussing immunity now primarily as an issue of biopower. And in fact, the shift should not be overstated either. While there clearly is a shift, especially when Communitas is directly compared with Bíos, it does not take the form of a radical break. Foucault is there from the outset; nor do Derrida and Nancy completely disappear. Immunitas in a way stands between,

Introduction

17

and not just literally; Foucault is already major, but deconstruction is also prominent. And Esposito says himself that in so far as anything has changed, it is not his perspective on the category of immunisation but the theoretical framework within which it is inscribed.59 * What I want to do in the following chapters, then, is to look at liberal multiculturalism as a series of immunitary mechanisms that immunise liberalism against the Other, and any community with the Other. In order to do this I will first provide an overview, in Chapter 2, of the breadth of liberal thinking on multiculturalism. I will then elaborate, in Chapter 3, on what the immunitary paradigm is: how it relates to biopower, and especially how it relates to community, and the way in which Esposito reconfigures community. In the three subsequent chapters I will then turn to a series of themes (rights, consensus and recognition), and look at how they operate within the thought of a particular liberal thinker as a way of immunising liberalism against difference. This division is largely for reasons of presentation. If I am aligning one liberal thinker with one theme, this is not to reduce them to that theme. All liberal thinkers engage with these themes to a greater or lesser extent. At the same time, it is also a way of showing that different liberal thinkers are haunted by some of these issues more than by others. It is simply that some of these themes take on a particular importance in the work of one author, so that it seems permissible to use that author as the representative liberal for this particular area. I will begin, in Chapter 4, by looking at the issue of rights, both in terms of civic and human rights, and of how it figures in the work of Will Kymlicka. In Kymlicka we can in fact see an immunitary logic at work fairly openly. It is his express purpose that multiculturalism should strengthen liberalism, and strengthen individual rights. In the following chapter I will deal with the work of Bhikhu Parekh, and in particular the role that consensus plays in it. I will argue that the process of deliberation and consensus building that Parekh advocates is itself an immunitary mechanism that stands as a bulwark against any substantive intrusion of difference into liberalism. Finally, in Chapter 6, I will turn to Charles Taylor and look at his work under the theme of recognition and tolerance. Recognition lies at the heart of liberal multicultural

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politics, and I will argue that this very process too is marked by an immunitary logic. What I will be doing in these chapters is presenting different liberal processes as embodying an immunitary logic. But I will do so via the enlistment of other critical theorists. That is, I will enlist various forms of critique, and assert that what they help us identify is the immunitary paradigm at work within liberalism. There is thus in each case a triangulation going on between Esposito and, variously, Kymlicka– Balibar, Parekh–Rancière, and Taylor–Povinelli/Brown. What this triangulation will help to do is not just to designate liberalism as immunitary, but also to illustrate what happens to actual Other subjects when they become the subjects of an immunitary process. Following on from this substantive critique of liberal thinking on difference, Chapter 7 attempts to sketch out a possible path for thinking about difference and coexistence more productively. I suggest some possible beginnings for thinking about a political community that embraces substantive differences and is not overdetermined by an immunitary tendency. My contention is that an engagement with Henri Lefebvre’s work on rhythm can help us move towards cognitively mapping such a political community. CONCLUSION The aims of the book can hence be summarised thus:

• to provide an overview of liberal theories of multiculturalism • •

•

to suggest that these theories are best understood as a mode of immunising the liberal polity against difference to suggest that there is thus a certain kind of hostility to the Other inherent in liberal multiculturalism, and that what is generally understood as the backlash against multiculturalism has to be understood as a part of the operation of liberal multiculturalism to outline the beginnings of how to think a new politics of multiculturalism that can move beyond immunitary tendencies

There are essentially three parts to the book. Chapters 2 and 3 (along with this introductory chapter) serve as exposition. The second chapter looks at liberal theories of multiculturalism. The third chapter examines Esposito’s conceptions of immunity and community, and also looks at

Introduction

19

what it means to become subject to an immunitary process. These chapters will, in a way, stand separately at first, operating beside each other. It is in the second part of the book that the connection between these two corpuses of thought is made. They are brought into confrontation by an examination of three different immunitary processes at work in liberal multiculturalism. In the final part of the book, consisting of the last two chapters, I will attempt to explore how a community that escapes the liberal immunitary logic might be conceived. What should be clear by the end of the book is that a multiculturalism that is truly deserving of the name must move beyond liberalism. NOTES 111. Cameron, ‘PM’s speech at Munich Security Conference’. 112. Cameron, ‘David Cameron on immigration’. 113. BBC News,‘Miliband: People“lost trust”in Labour on immigration’; Mason, ‘Miliband shifts immigration policy, saying Labour “got it wrong”’. 114. BBC News, ‘First prime ministerial debate, 15 April 2010: Transcript’, pp. 3–4. 115. Mason, ‘Turning the tide of immigration’. 116. British National Party, ‘Cameron’s “war on multiculturalism” speech – another milestone in the “Griffinisation” of British politics’. 117. There are endless examples of this. For a representative one see Heffer, ‘Defy the EU and stamp out benefits tourism’. 118. London Gazette, no. 44,377, p. 8515. 119. Evening Telegraph, ‘Regeneration: journey towards Peterborough’s future’. 110. BBC News, ‘Police fears migrant impact’. 111. Travis, ‘Ministers to assess migrant groups’ impact on public services’. 112. Allen, ‘Peterborough: a city crumbling under pressure from immigrants’. 113. Hough, ‘Migration is ruining our peaceful city, say Peterborough councillors’. Rather amusingly, at the end of the list of ills in this article comes the rather parochial ‘an increasing number of drivers without road tax or insurance’. 114. Hickley and Benetto, ‘One out of every five killers is an immigrant’. 115. See for instance Hickey,‘Judge refuses to let Muslim defendant wear burqa in court’. 116. Dodd, ‘British soldiers in Afghanistan helping to curb asylum seekers, claims Minister’. 117. Reid, ‘City that can’t cope any more’. 118. All quotations in this and the next paragraph are from Reid, ibid.

20 119. 120. 121. 122.

123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130.

131.

132. 133. 134.

135. 136. 137. 138. 139. 140.

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Hall, ‘British Jobs pledge shattered as 98 per cent given to immigrants’. Jones et al., ‘British workers for British jobs says Brown’. Conservative Party, Invitation to Join the Government of Britain, p. 21. A fear that was rather hilariously undercut when a throng of journalists, along with two MPs, spent New Year’s Day at Luton waiting for what turned out to be one new arrival. See Davies and Malik, ‘Welcome to Luton: Romanian arrival greeted by two MPs and a media scrum’. Field and Soames, ‘Cowardice on immigration has allowed the BNP to flourish’. Allen, ‘Peterborough: a city crumbling’. The Councillors’ letter is quoted in full in Reid, ‘City that can’t cope any more’. Dixon (2010), ‘Learn to queue if you want to be British’. British National Party. Democracy, Freedom, Culture and Identity, p. 46. Guardian, ‘David Cameron: school sports targets result in “Indian dance” classes’. Johnston, ‘The shadow cast by a mega-mosque’. In the online edition the byline has been changed to ‘As carcasses pile up and migrant camps are built on river banks, Peterborough residents are too frightened to visit the park’, which is odd in so far as this is hardly less inflammatory or sensationalist. Malone, ‘Slaughter of the swans’. See the Sun, ‘Swan bake – asylum seekers steal the Queen’s birds for barbecues’; Hickley, ‘Sorry, poached swan’s off’; Lorraine, ‘Who ate all the swans?’; Daily Mail,‘Swan bake’. The original Sun article was taken offline after the amount of criticism it received. Grant, ‘Chef who throttled swan is spared jail’, p. 27. Malone, ‘Slaughter of the swans’, p. 8. These were eventually axed again. However, this was because they were deemed a ‘blunt instrument’ that was too ineffective rather than because of disagreement with the message. See Travis, ‘“Go home” vans resulted in 11 people leaving Britain, says report’. Travis, ‘UK Border Agency texts tell legitimate immigrants to leave UK’. Conservative Party, Invitation to Join the Government of Britain, p. 21. Cameron, ‘PM’s speech at Munich Security Conference’. Svevo, Zeno Cosini. See for instance Hamacher, ‘One 2 Many Multiculturalisms’, p. 295; Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, p. 353. Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil; Derrida, The Politics of Friendship; ‘Faith and Knowledge: the two sources of religion’; ‘Autoimmunity: real and symbolic’; Rogues: Two essays on Reason; Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women; Heller, A Theory of Modernity; Heller and Fehér. Biopolitics; Sloterdijk, Sphären (3 vols).

Introduction 141. 142. 143. 144. 145. 146. 147. 148. 149. 150.

151. 152. 153. 154.

155. 156.

157. 158. 159.

21

Esposito, Communitas; Immunitas; Bíos. Esposito, Third Person. Campbell, ‘Bios, Immunity, Life: the thought of Roberto Esposito’. Agamben, Homo Sacer; see also Remnants of Auschwitz; The Open; State of Exception. Hardt and Negri, Empire; Multitude; Commonwealth. See for instance Negri, Marx Beyond Marx; Insurgencies; Hardt and Negri, Labor of Dionysus. For a discussion of the difference between biopower and biopolitics see Lazzarato, ‘From Biopower to Biopolitics’. Esposito, ‘Interview’, p. 50. Esposito, Bíos, pp. 11–12. For instance: BBC News, ‘Italy rebuke on Roma fingerprints’; Hooper, ‘Southern Italian town world’s “only white town” after ethnic cleansing’; Israely, ‘An Italian town’s white (no foreigners) Christmas’. Spiegel Online, ‘Italien stellt Tunesiern Papiere für Weiterreise aus’. BBC News, ‘France blocks Italian trains carrying migrants’. Schmidt, ‘“Flüchtlingswelle” gibt es nicht’, p. 8. Die Tageszeitung, ‘Brüssel gibt Italien und Frankreich recht’, p. 10. This was essentially the EU refusing to deal with the general issue, since the specific influx of migrants was in the past. See also Braun, ‘Wenn Zwei sich streiten’. Esposito, ‘Interview’, p. 49. Esposito and Nancy, ‘Dialogue on the Philosophy to Come’; Esposito et al. (eds), Nichilismo e Politica. Nancy also wrote the preface for the French edition of Communitas, an English translation of which can be found in ‘Conloquium’. Campbell and Luisetti, ‘On Contemporary French and Italian Political Philosophy’, pp. 112–13. Ibid., p. 109. Esposito, ‘Interview’, p. 51.

Chapter 2 LIBERAL THOUGHT ON MULTICULTURALISM

In this chapter I will be outlining the ways in which liberal political theorists have dealt with the issue of multiculturalism. Concretely, this means looking at the ways in which liberal theorists gradually over time started to address the issue of difference. Since liberal ways of accommodating difference exhibit significant breadth, my larger inquiry will limit itself to three theorists: Will Kymlicka, Bhikhu Parekh and Charles Taylor. However, I want to use this chapter to showcase the larger scope of liberal thinking on multiculturalism, and also to justify why I will be picking these three particular theorists as representative liberals for the remainder of the book. A BRIEF HISTORY OF LIBERAL POLITICAL THEORY’S ENGAGEMENT WITH DIFFERENCE The general view is that liberalism has traditionally been unwilling to engage with difference. More specifically: it is concerned with ensuring freedom for people to be different in the sense of individual, private idiosyncrasies, but does not engage with difference as a category, as something that exists in the public realm, as something that confronts the state. Liberalism is concerned with individuals, with equality, and with freedom – and any protection of difference or culture is seen to be amply covered in these rubrics. Because of this: That the issue of cultural diversity rose to theoretical prominence in the form of criticisms of liberalism strikes many liberals as surprising. After all, liberalism, at least according to its own selfunderstanding, was itself a philosophy developed partly in response to issues of diversity.1

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23

And in fact, if we look at liberal thinking before World War II, there is quite a bit of liberal thinking on difference. Liberals were generally in support of rights for national minorities and criticised their unjust treatment in the multinational empires.2 Furthermore, while there were also plenty of liberals arguing for assimilation, issues of culture and difference were seen as something that needed to be talked about and that the state should be concerned with, rather than being private matters.3 Another way in which liberalism has traditionally thought about difference is through the issue of religious toleration (although of course this was generally a matter of inter-Christian toleration).4 However, it is undeniable that in its post-World War II incarnation liberal political theory has generally been hostile to the idea of accommodating difference. Giving differential rights to different groups goes against the core liberal principles of equality and individualism. While in practice liberal states had been willing to grant special rights to national minorities, this now smacked of ethnic conflict and Nazism. With the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, members of minorities were now meant to be protected by virtue of their position as individual human beings – Universal Rights rather than special rights were the order of the day.5 In practice this meant that on the level of policy, assimilation was the order of the day. That is, the extension of Universal Rights took the form of incorporating all groups into the same realm of individual citizenship. The polity could be constituted of subjects of different backgrounds, but the onus for change was on minority groups. Furthermore, ideals of universal equality notwithstanding, discrimination against minorities still continued, and many minorities were, at best, in the realm of citizenship in a formal sense only. In the area of academic liberal political theory, on the other hand, this meant that the issue of difference and special rights for minorities simply did not come up. This goes hand in hand with the dominance of US political theory after World War II. Will Kymlicka asserts that minority rights were never part of the liberal debate in the USA, because American liberals did not have to deal with the existence of colonies, and thus did not have to develop a view about the application of liberal principles to multi-nation states.6 However, it is of course untrue that the USA never had to deal with the governing of colonies; the Philippines were a US colonial possession until 1946, and Puerto Rico, Guam and the US Virgin Islands remain US territories to this day.7 In addition, the USA of course

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existed as a result of the colonisation of Native American territories. So it would be perhaps more accurate to say that the governing of colonised people never formed part of the national imagination of what it is that the USA does, and thus never became the subject of political theory. To go a step further, the US government has also, for certain groups, shown itself willing to grant special rights, for instance in relation to the Amish.8 So we might say that any accommodation of difference by the state, while practised, has been ignored by political theory, and as a result those treatments that have a tradition (the Amish) can continue unquestioned (‘that’s the way we’ve always done things’), while any newer groups demanding rights (immigrants) can be told that this is an impossibility (‘we are concerned with individual equality’). The sidelining of difference is in a sense cemented with the advent of John Rawls’ work.9 When Rawls’ particular analytical philosophy take on political theory that formed the basis of Theory of Justice became the dominant text of post-war political theory, the issue of difference was foreclosed for a considerable time. Rawls’ very approach to political theory was such that the issue of difference in liberalism simply did not arise. And so dominant was Rawls’ work that even where it was challenged, the terrain it staked out as that of political theory was accepted more or less unquestioned. Thus difference remained outside the purview of political theorists for a significant amount of time. Rawls’ Theory of Justice made assumptions about the closed character of the polity and its cultural homogeneity that put diversity off the agenda. For Rawls, while all citizens have a conception of the good, decisions about the shape of the polity need to be taken with no consideration of any of these conceptions, only of the fact that citizens will have some conception of the good. Conceptions of the good are thus individualised and dealt with on the grounds of human equality. Rawls’ model also relies on the assumption that everybody can accept that principles arrived at in the original position are the result of what rational people would choose if they were unaware of their conceptions of the good. That is, the model’s normative force derives from the fact that it can be said that this is what you would have agreed to. However, the model does not allow for the fact that its conception of rationality is not necessarily uncontroversial and universal. That is, in the original Rawlsian schema’s conception of what is possible a potential diversity of rationalities does not even exist.

Liberal Thought on Multiculturalism

25

It would take until the late 1980s for the issues of diversity and difference to make it onto the liberal agenda, whence they were to become a constant source of debate. Several factors are likely to have played a role in placing the issue on the agenda when it was placed there. Civil rights movements on the street were making claims based on identity and could no longer be ignored by theorists; feminism, critical race studies and postmodernism were all making inroads and put issues of identity firmly on the academic agenda. Finally, an important step in bringing the debate from the fringes to the mainstream of political theory lies in the unique factor of Canada. In Canada there was the situation of a very sizeable minority (the Québécois) demanding special treatment (in terms of language rights), but one where there was absolutely no threat to the order of liberalism. That is, Canada provided a locale where incorporating difference could be thought about without necessarily having to think about what to do with illiberal difference. Some of the most influential liberal writing on multiculturalism has, then, come out of Canada, although it has by no means remained limited to that country. Important works of the first wave of writing on liberalism and difference include Will Kymlicka’s Liberty, Culture and Community, Andrew Sharp’s Justice and the Maori, Iris Marion Young’s Justice and the Politics of Difference, Charles Taylor’s ‘The Politics of Recognition’, Yael Tamir’s Liberal Nationalism and James Tully’s Strange Multiplicity. Rawls too still formed part of the debate, and was now concerned with incorporating the demands for diversity into his model.10 (For an overview of how different brands of liberalism attempt to accommodate pluralism see David Miller’s ‘Citizenship and Pluralism’.)11 Not all these works deal exclusively with multiculturalism; Iris Marion Young, for instance, is as concerned with gender difference. However, what they all do is to put the issue of difference firmly on the agenda of liberal political theory. From then on, multiculturalism and group rights are on the agenda for good. Some authors refine their positions,12 edited volumes on multiculturalism abound,13 and new contributors continually hit the scene. Here I name but a few. Amy Gutman advances what she calls ‘deliberative universalism’ – a form of deliberation among reasonable perspectives.14 Veit Bader approaches the issue from the vantage of a critique of secularism.15 Joseph Raz argues for a multiculturalism embedded in a liberal public culture.16 Robert Goodin advocates a

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‘polyglot multiculturalism’ which aims to increase the number of minority cultures from which the majority culture can borrow, that is, multiculturalism is a way of increasing the context of choice for conceptions of the good.17 Jeremy Waldron argues for a cosmopolitan viewpoint and sees the need to protect a diversity of cultures, but not any one particular culture.18 Chandran Kukathas promotes a liberal multiculturalism understood as an archipelago of overlapping associations.19 Anne Phillips advances a feminist-informed model of multiculturalism.20 Bart van Leeuwen argues for mutual indifference as the basis of an ethics of multiculturalism.21 Finally, Bhikhu Parekh advances a more discursive multiculturalism that tries to establish a community of communities.22 Often, liberal theorists are more concerned with practical issues and problem solving than with coming up with a general theory of multiculturalism. Sometimes these can be issues of reconciliation for past injustices;23 more often it is about very specific demands for differential treatment by specific minority groups. A classic example is the issue of the wearing of headscarves in schools,24 often also used as the rubric through which simultaneously to analyse differences between French and Anglo-American liberalism.25 Another classic issue for political theorists is that of allowing Sikhs to wear turbans instead of motorcycle helmets.26 However, beyond these very famous examples work on multiculturalism has moved on to discuss topics as diverse as how to include members of the white working class27 and the functioning of multiculturalism in online communities.28 Multiculturalism has become a constant talking point, and rather than being seen by liberals to be hostile to liberalism, it is now identified with liberalism (although to be sure there are still many liberals who remain sceptical to hostile) and is among the liberal concepts ready for export from West to East, together with human rights and liberal democracy.29 Consequently, there has also been a growing literature on multiculturalism around the world.30 So much interest is there in the topic that a UNESCO journal on the topic was founded in 1998, the International Journal on Multicultural Societies (called Diversities as of 2010). However, sometimes it is merely the name of multiculturalism that is exported. In South Korea, for instance, what is being billed as ‘multiculturalism’ is really the kind of assimilationist policies that liberal theories of multiculturalism want to move beyond (or at least claim to).31 However, this does not mean that multiculturalism remains uncontested

Liberal Thought on Multiculturalism

27

within liberalism. Jürgen Habermas and Brian Barry have been among its most vocal critics. Habermas has spoken out against multiculturalism and in favour of a Verfassungspatriotismus, or constitutional patriotism.32 That is, for Habermas it is essential that there is a clear commitment to a core set of values that are embodied in the Constitution. This Constitution and these values are arrived at dialogically, but the outcome of this dialogue is universally and uniformly binding. That is, since the ideal speech community includes everyone, the conclusions it arrives at are universal, and as such there is no question of differential treatment and any move towards multiculturalism is to be opposed. Brian Barry, on the other hand, has argued passionately against multiculturalism in defence of equality.33 For Barry, the differential treatment afforded by multiculturalism stands in the way of achieving real equality, which is the uniform treatment of all. He sees multiculturalism as wrongly attributing the problems of minority groups to culture, and argues that these groups would be better served by the implementation of universalistic measures. Multiculturalism has also been criticised by liberal feminists for being harmful to gender equality.34 Others still argue for assimilation as being the better policy for dealing with difference.35 Stanley Fish criticises multiculturalism for being unable actually to accommodate difference. He distinguishes between boutique multiculturalism and strong multiculturalism: the first he sees as a superficial or insincere commitment to difference, the second as either self-contradictory or as a slightly more self-aware form of boutique multiculturalism.36 Sanjay Seth, similarly, argues that the pluralism that liberal multiculturalism aims for is a far cry from difference.37 There have also been attempts to find a middle ground between assimilation and multiculturalism: coming from a psychological background, Fathali Moghaddam has advanced the idea of ‘omniculturalism’.38 However, in practice he cannot really deliver on his claims to providing a third way, it is hard to see any difference between his omniculturalism and the positions of a modest liberal multiculturalism. Another ‘third way’ approach is ‘interculturalism’, which focuses on cross-cultural dialogue while guarding against selfsegregation of communities, but it too can suffer from problems of clear distinction.39 *

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As even this brief review indicates, there are a plethora of liberal approaches to multiculturalism. If we then begin to look into the realm of the practices of liberal states as well, the issue becomes even more complex, especially because there is no sharp divide between the theory and policy realms. This is not merely a conceptual point: it is also one about persons. Bhikhu Parekh, for instance, chaired the commission that came up with perhaps the most influential report on British state multiculturalism policies of the 2000s40 – and he is far from being the only person to move in both spheres. Given this diversity of approaches, all under the banner of liberalism, one can devote a lot of time to developing extensive typologies of multiculturalisms.41 However, to my mind, more important than arranging these into typologies are the vectors along which the various liberal theories differ: the importance accorded to cultural belonging, the importance of rights, the role of deliberation, and the precise targets of their theories. Broadly speaking, they distinguish between three different kinds of ‘minorities’ (the use of the term is problematic, even though this is rarely acknowledged by the writers in question): indigenous groups, national minorities, and immigrant communities. While all theories attempt to solve issues of difference within liberal society as a whole, there is usually a clearly identifiable main concern for one of these groups. The fact that they represent different positions on these vectors, and that each has a different one of the three groups as his main target, is part of the reason for making Kymlicka, Taylor and Parekh the main subjects of my analysis of liberal multiculturalism – a choice that I will explain in more detail shortly. One thing can already be said after this review, and I will be stressing it throughout the book: liberal thinking on multiculturalism is not in fact multiculturally constituted. The conceptual tools it resorts to are limited to those of American and Western European liberal thought. (There are a few exceptions: Jeff Spinner-Halev, for instance, draws on Hindu tradition.)42 Liberal multiculturalism develops liberal vocabulary, but what it does not do is expand it by drawing on other vocabularies. This is a great foundational limitation of liberal thinking on multiculturalism. For it means, almost inevitably, that minority groups that become the subject of multiculturalism are met by an entirely alien vocabulary, moreover one which (while universal from the liberal perspective) they can only perceive as a highly particular vocabulary that bears no traces of multiculturality.

Liberal Thought on Multiculturalism

29

Now there are, of course, reasons for this, and I will be arguing that these stem from the fact that the actual aim of liberal multiculturalism is not to create a truly multicultural polity but rather to immunise liberalism, through a limited and specific kind of diversification and hybridisation. Whether they are in support of or against accommodating diversity, liberals are keen to immunise liberalism against the dangers of the contemporary world. While traditional liberals are operating on an idea of purity, the multiculturalists are employing an idea of incorporation for which the term ‘immunisation’ can be used in its proper sense. My aim is to show that the reformed ‘difference-friendly’ liberalism is just that, a strategy of immunising liberalism that leaves its core unchanged. That is, it is a liberalism which does not have as its ultimate aim a diverse conviviality, but simply the strongest possible liberalism, only with the belief that this requires a certain degree of diversity. What this perspective does, moreover, is to reinterpret what some have identified as a waning commitment to multiculturalism,43 as part of the same immunitary mechanism. A TALE OF THREE LIBERALS: KYMLICKA, PAREKH, TAYLOR In order to make this argument I will be focusing on the work of three of the thinkers I have mentioned above: Will Kymlicka, Bhikhu Parekh and Charles Taylor. They will in a sense have to act as a synecdoche for the liberal multicultural project. However, given the great diversity in liberal thought about multiculturalism, I am not arguing that they represent each and every liberal position on difference. What I am arguing is that they provide a good representative sample of the kind of approaches towards difference we find in liberalism. Furthermore, I will only be focusing on one particular aspect of the work of each of these three thinkers. I will be looking at Kymlicka with regard to the role that rights play in his thought, Parekh with regard to consensus, and Taylor with regard to recognition. This is not in order to reduce any of them to being only one thing, but rather to highlight one particular aspect of liberal multiculturalism that can be seen particularly clearly in this thinker; especially in so far as it acts as a strategy of immunisation. This also means that what I will not be doing is providing an in-depth analysis of the whole thought of any one of these thinkers. Given the diversity of liberal thinking on multiculturalism I do not want

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simply to provide an account of three thinkers; rather, I want to isolate particular immunitary processes at work within them that help to provide a more general picture of the workings of liberal multiculturalism. * However, I want to take the time now to explain in a bit more detail why I have chosen to focus on these three particular figures, starting with Will Kymlicka. Kymlicka has been active both as an academic and in the realm of policy. He has worked as a policy analyst, and has also been a member of advisory groups on multicultural best practice around the world.44 Going back to something I mentioned earlier, and that takes us right down to more empirical ground: liberal theories of multiculturalism tend to be concerned with indigenous groups, national minorities or immigrant communities. And while the ‘or’ here is usually inclusive, there does tend to be more focus on one than on the other. In Kymlicka’s case we can say that his model is most concerned with indigenous groups – or at least, that it takes indigenous groups as its starting point for thinking about difference and multiculturalism. That indigenous groups are the first port of call for Kymlicka’s theory should not surprise us. He emerges out of a Canadian context, where the issue of how the state should deal with the First Nations has had an important role in public discourse. There are over 630 First Nations in Canada, and they have historically been excluded from the Canadian polity. However, this gradually began to change after World War II, with a series of acts which first stopped the prohibition of indigenous practice and which eventually led to the granting of some rights of self-government. In 1996, the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples issued a report proposing to take this further by making the First Nations responsible for their own jurisdiction and deal with the federal government on a nation-to-nation basis.45 These suggestions have not been uncontroversial, however, and there is considerable debate as to how many and what kinds of rights should be accorded to First Nations.46 Kymlicka is perhaps also the most prolific liberal writer on multiculturalism. He has devoted a number of books to the topic, and, if we count on top of this all the volumes on multiculturalism he has edited, the pile of Kymlicka books on multiculturalism becomes so large that it quickly becomes apparent that no discussion of liberal multiculturalism

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can ignore him. Of his major monographs, Liberalism, Community and Culture, Multicultural Citizenship, Politics in the Vernacular and Multicultural Odysseys, I will be focusing in this section mainly on the second and fourth.47 I take Multicultural Citizenship to be Kymlicka’s most definitive statement on multiculturalism. Politics in the Vernacular acts as a corrective and as a response to criticism, and it will feature in the chapter on Kymlicka, but I am ignoring it for the purposes of this brief summary. Multicultural Odysseys, on the other hand, needs to be mentioned in this section because it introduces an international element into Kymlicka’s thought. I am letting his 1989 book Liberalism, Community and Culture fall more or less by the wayside since, even though important at the time, it has been somewhat superseded by the sheer quantity of Kymlicka’s subsequent writing on multiculturalism. So what does Kymlicka’s theory of multiculturalism consist of? Kymlicka distinguishes between two kinds of claims made by ethnic groups. On the one hand there are internal restrictions that protect the group against internal dissent by members, and, on the other hand, there are external protections that protect the group against external decisions (MC, 35). The former are what are seen to be critical, as they are seen to be potentially oppressive, placing group solidarity above individual freedom; the latter are acceptable or even positive group rights. When it comes to external protection, Kymlicka sees groupdifferentiated rights as concomitant with individual liberties; in fact, he thinks they can promote such liberty (MC, Ch. 5). Internal protections, on the other hand, reduce the ability of people to act on their preferences about the good life (MC, 204). That is, Kymlicka holds a view of culture that is unashamedly individualist. It is a matter of individual choice. Group rights thus have their justification because they increase the scope for individuals to exercise their individual right to pursue the good life. The reason this choice is important is that according to Kymlicka, people do require an attachment to a societal culture. A societal culture provides its members with meaningful ways of life across the range of human activities, in both the public and the private sphere (MC, 76). Kymlicka sees societal cultures as being generally territorially concentrated and based around a shared language. Culture is a shared vocabulary of tradition embodied in social life. For Kymlicka, it is only truly embodied (and thus only truly culture) when it is embodied in institutions. It is this particular distinction that makes immigrants a secondary concern

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for Kymlicka, seeing as they arrive without institutions; they thus have less claim to protective rights. Societal cultures, then, provide the context within which meaningful choices about the good life can be made. For Kymlicka, cultures are not valuable in and of themselves, but rather because access to a societal culture is what provides people with a range of meaningful options (MC, 83). It is precisely as a mechanism for enabling choice that protecting culture finds its place in a liberal individualist framework. However, at the same time Kymlicka also asserts a valuable connection to one’s own culture. He does not merely claim that people need access to a societal culture, but that they have an entitlement to their particular societal culture (MC, 86). Meaningful choice requires that we do not simply have our frame torn away from us and replaced by another. Another important aspect of Kymlicka’s work is that he in effect argues that the task of multiculturalism is not nearly as great as is often thought, because most cultures are in fact already liberal. That is, he does not in fact see most of the demands of groups as being in opposition to liberalism. Even demands that are framed in terms of tradition may in fact be the expression of a modernising project that is consonant with rather than opposed to liberalism (MO, 145, 152). Where cultures do clash with liberalism, the process of multiculturalism is meant to make them compatible. This is not a covert part of Kymlicka’s project; he states outright that liberal multiculturalism is ‘inevitably, intentionally, and unapologetically’ transformational of cultural traditions (MO, 99). Kymlicka does not see multiculturalism as the right to preserve ‘authentic’ cultural traditions, as this can inhibit constructive relations between cultures, erode the freedom of individuals within groups, deny universal human rights, and threaten the space for civil debate (MO, 103). However, he does stress that the onus for change is on both majority and minority cultures – both must become more liberal (either by changing, or by living up to liberal ideals more fully). Kymlicka’s multiculturalism is above all about inclusion in the polity and entails a diversity of origins, but not necessarily a diversity of practices. Different practices are allowed, but need to stay within certain limits, and these limits are prescribed by liberal norms. That is, for Kymlicka multiculturalism is the expression of a pluralistic nationbuilding (MO, 84). He thus sees liberal multiculturalism chiefly as a project of citizenisation. Multiculturalism is above all a matter of rights;

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the mode by which it proceeds is by giving special rights to minority groups. Furthermore, there cannot be a blanket rule as to what kind of rights groups get. The infrastructure of multiculturalism is built around the targeted element of minority rights: that is, different groups are allocated different rights (MO, 78). It is also through its functioning as a set of rights that liberal multiculturalism has been able to disseminate worldwide. Kymlicka sees the diffusion of multiculturalism and minority rights as a natural evolution of universal human rights norms (MO, 6). This is important in so far as it associates multiculturalism – often seen as the result of a particularism – with a universalism. Kymlicka sees minority rights and multiculturalism discourse as having proliferated precisely because of their appeal to universalist ideas (MO, 45). Thus the securing of minority rights can be seen as a precondition for the maintenance of universal human rights, for development, for peace and security, et cetera. Far from being relativist, minority rights reaffirm universalism. Simultaneously, Kymlicka sees the advent of international human rights norms as one of the preconditions for the development of multiculturalism around the world (MO, 88–92). He sees multiculturalism as part of the development of the logic of human rights, specifically of the logic of equality of both individuals and peoples. He sees the struggle for differentiated minority rights as a local configuration of civil rights liberalism, and as being in this way connected to the project of human rights. Kymlicka’s whole model centres on rights. So it is in consideration of this that I have chosen to focus on his work in Chapter 4 from the perspective of civic and human rights. It is important that these things be thought together. Multiculturalism is for Kymlicka the task of creating a plural citizenship. The means of doing this is via a system of groupdifferentiated rights. These rights are part of the larger project of universal human rights. Thus, Chapter 4 will be looking at both the rights of the citizen and human rights. I hope to show that in the realms both of citizenship and of human rights, rights follow an immunitary logic that ultimately seals off liberalism from the Other. This immunitary logic is necessarily reproduced in the rights-based approach to multiculturalism purported by the likes of Kymlicka. *

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I wish now to turn to Bhikhu Parekh, the only non-Canadian of the three thinkers I am dealing with. Again, I will provide a brief sketch of his model on multiculturalism, before focusing more fully on one particular aspect of his work in Chapter 5. Of the three possible subject groups of multiculturalism, we can say that he is most concerned with immigrants. This is perhaps unsurprising since the British context out of which Parekh emerges has generally been far more concerned with the issue of immigration. Ever since post-war immigration brought significant numbers of people from the former colonies into the UK, there have been debates about the effects this might have on the country, and how best to respond to these. I gave a few examples of the tone this debate currently has in Chapter 1. Parekh’s work emerges out of this context, and he has made his impact both in the academic world and in the world of policy (with his involvement here eventually earning him a peerage, making him Baron Parekh). He was chair of the commission that produced what is generally dubbed the ‘Parekh Report’, even though he in fact wrote the report along with twenty-three other people.48 The report became something of a doxa for those in Westminster who wanted to promote a multicultural politics. The report had a powerful impact on how multiculturalism was talked about, although, with the further shifts that have occurred since then, Parekh has since considered it something of a failure49 (although as I will be arguing, this shift is a consequence of the immunitary effects that some of the liberal concepts Parekh relies on inevitably bring with them). The Parekh Report laid out a model for a Britain as a community of communities at ease with both the world and its internal differences. Parekh developed the theoretical considerations that led to the recommendations of the Parekh Report more fully in Rethinking Multiculturalism published the same year, and develops these ideas further in A New Politics of Identity.50 Parekh is more historically informed than Kymlicka, and is well aware of both the particularity of liberalism and the colonial baggage and exclusive practices that have historically accompanied it.51 However, he also believes that liberalism can successfully be decolonised and that a properly inclusive liberal multiculturalism can be developed. He sees his theory as in some senses going beyond liberalism, although he acknowledges it is heavily indebted to it. However, in my view it is not really that he goes beyond

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liberalism, just that he goes further than a good proportion of liberals. Certainly, if we look at his interlocutions with Kymlicka and Taylor around the release of his book, they place him in the liberal canon, and he too agrees with them on almost everything.52 What kind of theory does Parekh advance, then? Broadly speaking, Parekh develops a dialogical theory that ends up relying on something approaching an ideal speech community with a commitment to certain values. Let us look at it in a bit more detail. For the purposes of this section I will be mainly focusing on the two works from 2000, although in the chapter on Parekh and consensus I will be engaging with his later work as well. Parekh stresses that a theory of multiculturalism cannot simply be a liberal theory of multiculturalism. Liberalism rightly presents for him the expression of a particular culture and as such cannot provide the sole basis for theorising a multiculturalism that is worthy of its name (RM, 13–14). For Parekh, a multicultural society needs to face two conflicting demands: it should foster a sense of overall unity, and it should promote diversity (RM, 196). The second demand is meant to rule out any move towards assimilation. Parekh contends that these demands are best met by a theory of institutionalised dialogue, influenced by both Habermas and Gadamer. For Parekh, a multicultural society requires a consensually agreed upon constitution that lays down the ground rules of society; it ought not to be derived from abstract principles of fairness (RM, 207). The job of the constitution, for Parekh, is the laying down of the basic principles of the structure of authority; it creates a common ethical life, and a body of common principles that shape policies and political discourse. This common culture does not remain fixed, and does not constitute a place of complete agreement; rather, it is a space with which different cultures can to some extent identify. Common culture, for Parekh, does not just refer to agreement on procedural matters, but refers also to forging a genuine commonality of substantive values (FMB, 53–4). The multicultural common culture requires cultural mixing in both the public and the private realms. Parekh also stresses that the development of such a common culture cannot be officially engineered; however, laissez-faire does not favour its emergence either. In his ideal, then, the state should not directly intervene in intercultural interaction, but rather ensure the equality of the conditions of interaction. Common culture, then, grows out of the interactions of the various cultures within it (RM, 219–24).

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These interactions are to the benefit of both minority and majority culture; they are meant to be mutually enriching (FMB, 9). However, there is also historical work to be done. In order for such a common identity to be forged, the history of majoritarian culture has to be read contrapuntally. In the concrete case of Britain this means contesting the notion that it is a place that has been inhabited by its current inhabitants since time immemorial, and contesting the dissemination of Englishness as the assumed identity of everyone within the UK (FMB, 15–23). That is, certain conceptions have to be thrown out in order to clear the way for the functioning of the kind of institutionalised dialogue that Parekh envisages. Parekh’s vision is grounded in a pluralistic conception of human rights culture. International human rights standards are meant to provide the framework within which to negotiate conflicts and to provide a set of minimum guarantees (FMB, 90–1). Parekh does not want human rights to be understood in narrowly individualistic terms: they should also be concerned with rights that people have as members of groups. When rights claims conflict, these conflicts are meant to be resolved by reference to the shared conception of collective well-being, which is the result of the institutionalised dialogue. In other words, we are talking of a pluralistic conception of human rights, with certain minimum standards. Now the reason Parekh has no problem grounding his ideas in human rights culture is that he asserts that human rights provide an ethical language that belongs to no particular group. They go beyond a body of ethics agreed within one nation or religion and speak the language of global citizenship (FMB, 95). Moreover, the minimum standards are meant to be culturally neutral, since they are the result of the institutionalised dialogue between cultures. However, there are problems here. For one thing, Parekh already sees current human rights standards as the outcome of such a dialogue, which is not a wholly uncontroversial opinion, to say the least. More generally, the assertion that the outcome of institutionalised dialogue will be culturally neutral is problematic both in in terms of consensus (which I will be looking at in Chapter 5), and in terms of rights (which I will be looking at in relation to Kymlicka in Chapter 4). So, Parekh’s work deals with both rights and with consensus. However, I will be looking at it in detail only from the perspective of

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consensus. It should not be too hard to see why. Rights may form an important part of Parekh’s thought on multiculturalism, but dialogue is the centre-piece of his theory. Parekh relies on a certain kind of institutionalised dialogue and the consensus (in some ways his is somewhat of an overlapping consensus in Rawls’ sense, although it is not meant to be) that arises from it. The reaching of consensus is significant, in that it is the source of the rules for ordering society multiculturally, but also in that the process of deliberation is meant to enrich and change the parties to the deliberation. As I will be arguing in Chapter 5, this particular liberal conception of deliberation and consensus brings with it its own immunitary logic, one that ensures that the consensual outcomes are always such that they strengthen a liberal model of the polity. * Finally, I want to turn to the work of Charles Taylor. Like Kymlicka, Taylor comes out of a Canadian context. However, unlike Kymlicka, he is less concerned with indigenous groups but rather with national minorities. Specifically, he is concerned with the issue of Québec (from where Taylor himself originates). Like that of the First Nations, the issue of the Québécois national minority has been long-standing. The debate around Québec has centred mainly on the role of the French and English languages, French and English legal traditions, and self-governance and the possibility of secession. Québec is recognised as a distinct society and nation within Canada, yet it is not clear what exactly this means. Thus, there is ongoing debate about what kind of special rights should exist with regard to Québec.53 Since Taylor emerges out of this context and is concerned with this situation, the terms of this debate have naturally shaped his particular take on multiculturalism. Thus, in this triangulation of liberal thinkers we have one each for each of the three subject groups (though this does not mean that their focus is exclusively on one of these groups – only that their thinking is clearly formed by concern for one of them). Taylor is by far the most philosophically sophisticated of the three thinkers I am dealing with. His approach to multiculturalism is informed by his particular (rather spiritualised) take on Hegel, and by his writing on identity and authenticity.54 There is also a dialogical component to his work that takes inspiration from an engagement with Gadamer.55 Consequently, Taylor’s

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work provides a very rich and nuanced engagement with what recognition is and how it should operate. However, philosophical trajectories aside, Taylor has also at times moved into the policy realm. Here he has been more concerned with how the Québécois themselves deal with ethnic and religious minorities; that is, his policy work has been concerned more with immigrants. He was one of the chairs of what has been dubbed the ‘Bouchard–Taylor commission’, which officially took the rather cumbersome name Commission de consultation sur les pratiques d’accommodement reliées aux différences culturelles (CCPARDC).56 However, his main academic text on the issue, ‘The Politics of Recognition’, remains more concerned with recognition of the Québécois within Canada. In an earlier essay, Taylor used the term ‘inspired adhocracy’ to describe the ideal of what multiculturalism should be.57 That is, multiculturalism can only hope to provide provisional accommodations on particular issues. It can only ever be the constant ad hoc formulation of temporary measures. However, in the ‘The Politics of Recognition’58 Taylor does give more substantive treatment to the issue of recognition and multiculturalism that seems to go beyond adhocracy. Since this particular text is by far his most influential on the topic, I will mostly be limiting myself to it rather than dealing with the more policy-oriented report, or Taylor’s later work on secularism.59 So what does Taylor’s approach entail? Again, as with Kymlicka and Parekh, what I will be providing here is a basic overview of Taylor’s argument. A thorough engagement with the aspect of recognition within that argument will follow in Chapter 6. Taylor begins his inquiry by tracing a genealogy, going back to Rousseau, Herder and Hegel, of how our current understandings of recognition and identity have come to be, and how they have come to be thought together. Taylor sees two main changes leading to our current understanding of recognition and identity. The first is the collapse of old social hierarchies and the replacement of monarchical honour (held by some) by the notion of human dignity (held by all equally) (PR, 26–7). The second is the development of individualised identity in the eighteenth century, and the corollary notion of authentic identity, that there is a self one can be true to (PR, 28). To be authentic is to find one’s own originality, to realise one’s distinct potentiality (PR, 31). This applies to a people as much as to individual people. The connection between identity and authenticity arises because of

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the dialogical character of human life: that is, through our being immersed in language (PR, 32). Thus our identity is formed in dialogue and struggle with what others want to see in us; it is not worked out in isolation, but is the result of dialogical negotiations with others. And it is in the nature of negotiations that they can fail: thus the problem of misrecognition or lack of recognition arises. It is modernity, through the break-up of social hierarchies and through the ideal of authenticity, that provides the conditions in which recognition can fail (PR, 35). Bringing us into the present, Taylor sees recognition as operating on two planes: on the intimate plane, where individual identities are formed in exchange; and on the social plane, where we have a politics of equal recognition. Within the public sphere, Taylor distinguishes between two different meanings of a politics of equal recognition. One is a politics of universalism, emphasising equal dignity and equalisation of rights and entitlements; the other is a politics of difference in which everyone should be recognised in their distinct identity (PR, 37–8). In the second politics we have a universal demand for recognition that takes the form of a valorisation of particularity. While the second politics flows out of the first, it is for Taylor also to some extent a reversal, precisely in so far as at is not seen as an expedient for removing historical inequalities, but rather as the project to preserve differences and cultures. The two models entail a different conception of value. The politics of equal dignity considers as worthwhile universal human potential, a shared human capacity, rather than anything any specific humans make of it. The politics of recognition entails that one accord equal value to all actualisations of this potential, that one value all cultures equally (PR, 42). This presents a serious problem for Taylor. Taylor acknowledges that the politics of equal dignity has been used in the past to assimilate minority groups into the majority identity, thus denying them their authenticity. For Rousseau, recognition could only be achieved in a society with a common purpose (PR, 50). Taylor suggests that in following a Kantian trajectory, equal freedom and dignity can be separated from common cause and non-differentiation. Similarly, Taylor agrees with critics who have asserted that rigidly procedural liberalism is intolerant of differences, but he asserts that by following another trajectory this can be avoided (PR, 61). Thus Taylor advocates a liberal politics which is concerned with an equality of rights accorded to citizens but which also incorporates diversity.

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To illustrate how a politics of rights can go together with respect for difference, Taylor brings up the case of Québec, giving a number of examples that relate to language use, signage and education. (Québec is a convenient example because it seems to offer the case of a fairly unproblematic and successful liberal handling of difference. However, though we should not deny or underestimate the cultural difference between Francophone and Anglophone culture, we should remember that we are not dealing here with especially substantial difference. We are not talking about profoundly different conceptions of the good, and there is no clash here between liberal and non-liberal culture. Of course there is cultural difference, but it is difference that is relatively easily reconcilable.) For Taylor, a politics of rights that incorporates difference is a matter of distinguishing between fundamental rights that cannot be altered under any circumstances, and forms of uniform treatment that can be changed according to cultural preference. Taylor separates the essential from the inessential, and is willing to make changes that leave the essential unchanged. The assumption here is that the fundamental rights are somehow not culturally specific or contestable, or at least not reasonably contestable (reasonableness is here defined from the standpoint of liberalism). In this way, recognition too is split into differences that can be recognised, and those that cannot. What Taylor is trying to do is to find a balance between protecting political principles and avoiding marginalisation. The reason he does this in the way he does is that he sees multiculturalism (in its more radical form) as an extension of the politics of recognition that demands the recognition of the equal worth of cultures (PR, 64). However, he is sceptical about this. For him, an assumption of equal worth can only be the starting point when approaching a new culture, but a starting point that has to be scrutinised, and that might not survive this scrutiny (PR, 69–70). Some cultures will turn out to be more worthwhile than others. Taylor then draws on Gadamer to advocate a ‘fusing of horizons’ in which we intensively engage with other cultures, discover value in them, and learn new forms of valuation from them, but do not assume that these values are equal. So in Taylor’s model we can recognise the value of other cultures and also accommodate their practices, provided that they do not conflict with the fundamental rights of liberal culture. In this brief summary of Taylor’s work I have essentially identified

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three aspects of his theory of multiculturalism: recognition, rights, and fusion of horizons. These aspects also happen to broadly correspond with the three processes of immunisation I am analysing. (While a fusion of horizons is not the same thing as consensus, there are certainly similarities in the way the concepts are deployed in liberal multiculturalism. I will be suggesting that this is in fact somewhat of a misuse of the concept ‘fusion of horizons’. This misuse is more pronounced in Parekh than it is in Taylor, but in any case many of the criticisms that I will be making of Parekh’s consensus model apply to Taylor as well.) However, in Chapter 6 where I deal with Taylor in more detail, I will be focusing only on the aspect of recognition. I will also be linking Taylor’s approach to recognition to discourses of toleration. Recognition might seem at first the uncontroversial aim that a politics of multiculturalism should have, but, as we will see, it too is constituted by an immunitary logic. CONCLUSION In this chapter, I have outlined some of the breadth of liberal thinking on multiculturalism, first in very general terms, and then in somewhat more detail with regard to Kymlicka, Parekh and Taylor. The purpose of this exercise is, in a sense, to get the exposition out of the way. Furthermore, I have thus far presented liberal theory largely on its own terms, and have given only indications as to what my critique will latch on to. In Chapters 4 to 6 critique will move to the forefront, and I will be moving directly to analysing the workings of certain processes with regard to rights, consensus and recognition, using Kymlicka, Parekh and Taylor as examples of how liberals utilise these processes. What I will be arguing is that all these processes are governed by some form of immunitary logic, something I have already flagged up several times. However, I have so far given only a brief and incomplete account of what I mean by an immunitary logic. In the next chapter, I will deal with this last preliminary by laying out exactly what I mean when I talk of immunity, and how I intend to utilise the concept.

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NOTES 111. Laden and Owen, ‘Introduction’, p. 8. 112. See for instance Barker, National Character and the Factors in Its Formation; Hobhouse, Social Evolution and Political Theory. 113. Consider for instance the difference in views between John Stuart Mill and Lord Acton on the issue: Mill, ‘Considerations on Representative Government’; Acton, ‘Nationalism’, pp. 285–90. 114. Perhaps most famously: Locke, ‘An Essay Concerning Toleration’. For an account of how classical liberal conceptions run into problems in pluralist societies see Gray, ‘Pluralism and Toleration in Contemporary Political Philosophy’. 115. For an example of this kind of view see Glazer, ‘Individual Rights against Group Rights’. 116. Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, p. 56. 117. For a rich collection of accounts of how US colonialism shaped the modern American state see McCoy and Scarano (eds), Colonial Crucible. For an account of US involvement in the Philippines and Puerto Rico see Go, American Empire and the Politics of Meaning. For just the Philippines see Kramer, The Blood of Government. 118. See for instance Kraybill (ed.), The Amish and the State. 119. Rawls, A Theory of Justice. 110. Rawls, Political Liberalism. 111. Or for a more recent overview see Crowder, Theories of Multiculturalism. 112. For instance Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship; Politics in the Vernacular; Young, Inclusion and Democracy. 113. Some of the better ones: Laden and Owen (eds), Multiculturalism and Political Theory; Kymlicka (ed.), The Rights of Minority Cultures; Kymlicka and Norman (eds), Citizenship in Diverse Societies; Gutman (ed.), Multiculturalism: Examining the politics of recognition; Goldberg (ed.), Multiculturalism: A critical reader; Gagnon and Tully (eds), Multinational Democracies. 114. Gutman, ‘The Challenge of Multiculturalism in Political Ethics’. 115. Bader, ‘Religious Pluralism: Secularism or Priority for Democracy?’; ‘Religions, Toleration, and Liberal Democracy’. 116. Raz, Ethics in the Public Domain. 117. Goodin,‘Liberal Multiculturalism: Protective and Polyglot’. Goodin in fact makes a distinction between ‘protective’ and ‘polyglot’ multiculturalism and says that he is not arguing for the superiority of either, but there is a strong implication that he supports the latter. 118. Waldron, ‘Minority Cultures and the Cosmopolitan Alternative’; ‘What Is Cosmopolitan?’.

Liberal Thought on Multiculturalism 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124.

125.

126.

127. 128. 129. 130.

131.

132.

133. 134.

135. 136. 137.

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Kukathas, The Liberal Archipelago: A theory of diversity and freedom. Phillips, Multiculturalism without Culture. van Leeuwen, ‘Dealing with Urban Diversity’. Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism. Kymlicka and Bashir (eds), The Politics of Reconcilliation in Multicultural Societies. See for instance Galeotti, ‘Citizenship and Equality: The Place for Toleration’; Terray, ‘Headscarf Hysteria’; Thomassen, ‘(Not) Just a Piece of Cloth’. See for instance Laborde,‘The Culture(s) of the Republic’; Gunn,‘Religious Freedom and Laïcité; Wiles, ‘Headscarves, Human Rights, and Harmonious Multicultural Society’. For instance Modood, Not Easy Being British; Parekh, ‘British Citizenship and Cultural Difference’; Tatla, ‘Sikhs in Multicultural Societies’. This particular issue actually has a much longer history of being dealt with: see Beetham, Transport and Turbans. Kenny, ‘The Political Theory of Recognition: The Case of the “White Working Class”’. Siapera, ‘Multiculturalism Online: The Internet and the Dilemmas of Multicultural Politics’. For an account of this see Kymlicka, Multicultural Odysseys. See for instance on India: Bajpai, Debating Difference; on various Asian cases: Kymlicka, and He (eds), Multiculturalism in Asia; on Eastern Europe: Kymlicka and Opalski (eds), Can Liberal Pluralism be Exported?. For an account of some multicultural policies see Kim, ‘The Directions of Multicultural Education for Korean Youth’; for some critical assessments see Han, ‘The Archaeology of the Ethnically Homogeneous Nation-State and Multiculturalism in Korea’; Lee, ‘Mixed Race Peoples in the Korean National Imaginary and Family’. Habermas, ‘Struggles for Recognition in the Democratic Constitutional State’; ‘Equal Treatment of Cultures and the Limits of Postmodern Liberalism’. Barry, Culture and Equality; ‘The Muddle of Multiculturalism’. See for instance Okin, ‘Feminism and Multiculturalism: Some Tensions’; Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?; Shachar, ‘On Citizenship and Multicultural Vulnerability’; Multicultural Jurisdictions; Deveaux, ‘Conflicting Equalities? Cultural Group Rights and Sex Equality’; Cultural Pluralism and Dilemmas of Justice. Knight, ‘Liberal Multiculturalism Reconsidered’. Fish, ‘Boutique Multiculturalism’. Seth, ‘Liberalism and the Politics of (Multi)Culture: Or, Plurality Is Not Difference’.

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138. Moghaddam, Multiculturalism and Intergroup Relations; ‘Omniculturalism’; Moghaddam, and Breckenridge, ‘Homeland Security and Support for Multiculturalism, Assimilation, and Omniculturalism Policies among Americans’. 139. See for instance Cantle, Interculturalism; Meer and Modood, ‘How Does Interculturalism Contrast with Multiculturalism?’. 140. Parekh et al., The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain. 141. As for instance in Banting, and Kymlicka, Multiculturalism and the Welfare State. 142. Spinner-Halev, ‘Hinduism, Christianity, and Liberal Religious Toleration’. 143. Parvin, ‘Integration and Identity in an International Context’. Some have argued that rather than a full-scale retreat we are witnessing a ‘civic rebalancing’. See Meer and Modood, ‘The Multicultural State We’re In’. 144. Kymlicka, Multicultural Odysseys, p. 7. 145. Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, People to People, Nation to Nation. 146. For Kymlikca’s more in-depth take of specifically the Canadian situation see Kymlicka, Finding our Way; for some general history on Canada’s relations with its First Nations see Lutz, Makúk; for an account that opposes special rights for First Nations see Flanagan, First Nations? Second Thoughts. 147. Henceforth, Multicultural Citizenship is referred to in the text as MC and Multicultural Odysseys as MO. 148. Parekh et al., The Future of Multi-ethnic Britain, henceforth referred to in the text as FMB. 149. Parekh, ‘Revisiting the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain: The Parekh Report 10 Years On’. 150. Rethinking Multiculturalism is henceforth referred to in the text as RM. 151. Parekh, ‘The Cultural Particularity of Liberal Democracy’; ‘Decolonizing Liberalism’. 152. Taylor, ‘Multiculturalism and Political Identity’; Kymlicka, ‘Liberalism, Dialogue and Multiculturalism’; Parekh ‘A Response’. In fact, the whole exchange is more or less one big mutual exultation. 153. For some accounts of the Québec issue see Taucar, Canadian Federalism and Québec sovereignty; Maclure, Québec Identity: The challenge of pluralism. 154. Taylor, Hegel; The Ethics of Authenticity. 155. With whom he also engages in Taylor, Philosophy and the Human Sciences; and ‘Comparison, History, Truth’. 156. See the final report: Bouchard and Taylor, Building the Future: A time for reconciliation. 157. Taylor, ‘The Rushdie Controversy’. 158. Henceforth cited in the text as PR. 159. Taylor, A Secular Age.

Chapter 3 MULTICULTURALISM AS A MODE OF IMMUNISING THE BODY OF LIBERALISM

Having staked out an outline of liberal thinking on multiculturalism, I turn now to the issue of immunity. As I indicated in Chapter 1, my particular take on immunity takes its lead from the work of Roberto Esposito. I will be arguing that Esposito’s conception of immunity can be used to describe what is at work in the logic of liberal multiculturalism. However, in order to fully make sense of what immunity means for Esposito, it will be necessary to turn first to his specific conception of community. In any case, this conception itself provides a powerful critique of the assumptions at work in liberalism. In this chapter I will be explaining both what community and immunity mean in Esposito, and also how this can help us see liberal multiculturalism as a series of immunitary mechanisms. So in terms of Esposito, I will be engaging principally with his trilogy on immunity, consisting of Communitas, Immunitas and Bíos.1 However, in order to make the link to the operation of multiculturalism, I will also be looking at Julia Kristeva’s work on abjection and Michel Foucault’s work on delinquency, and will argue that these help us see what happens to actual subjects when they become the subject of immunisation. In the subsequent three chapters, I will relate these ideas directly to the liberal literature on multiculturalism. So, I will now turn, in the first two parts of this chapter, to Esposito’s conceptions. The third part will show what happens to actual subjects when they become the subject of an immunitary paradigm. I will conclude by stressing how all this can be operationalised in order to talk about liberal multiculturalism (though I will also be flagging this up as I go along).

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COMMUNITY, OBLIGATION AND EMPTINESS I want to start by looking at the notion of community, something I will also return to in the very last chapter. In Communitas, Roberto Esposito takes us on a tour that traces a genealogy of the importance of community in Western philosophical thought through Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant, Heidegger and Bataille (and uses the prisms of fear, guilt, law, ecstasy and experience respectively to shed light on their thought). However, I am more interested in Esposito’s own thoughts on the subject of community, and the way in which he reconceptualises it. If we want to place him in this genealogy, we can observe that he presents his conception as the anti-Hobbesian one, and he sees precedents for it in both Heidegger and Bataille. Esposito argues that community is not translatable into a political-philosophical lexicon, except by completely distorting it. That is, there is something in the very grammar of liberal political philosophy that prevents us from thinking community properly. However, political philosophy in fact often sees the question of community as one of its prime objects: It is this reduction to ‘object’ of a political-philosophical discourse that forces community into a conceptual language that radically alters it, while at the same time attempts to name it: that of the individual and totality; of identity and the particular; of the origin and the end; or more simply of the subject with its most unassailable metaphysical connotations of unity, absoluteness, and its interiority. (C: 1) Esposito argues that these suppositions have led to political philosophy generally thinking of community in terms of wider subjectivity, and that this goes for the communitarians as much as for straight-up liberals. Another assumption these conceptions share (while ignoring that they make it) is that they take community to be a property belonging to subjects that joins them together; that denotes them as belonging to the same totality, or as being a substance produced by their union (C: 2). Community is conceived of as a quality that is added to subjects, making them both subjects and subjects of community. However, community is also conceived of as a property in the sense of something that can belong to and be lost by a group. It can be a lost origin or a destiny; it can link

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arche and telos. Community is thus doubly tied to a semantics of property. From this follows one of the paradoxes of community: that which is common among the members of a community is that which is properly their own; they own what is common to them all (C: 3). Esposito hopes to escape this dialectic. He wants to advance a conception of community that sees it in terms neither of wider subjectivity nor of property, but rather in terms of emptiness and debt. Since he has diagnosed that the focus on subjectivity and property is constitutive of the grammar of modern political philosophy, this involves trying to find a point of departure from this language. Esposito sees the hermeneutic support for this as lying in etymology. So the perspective from which Esposito approaches community is through the etymology of the Latin term ‘communitas’. He sees this path as leading to a radically different concept of community. However, he also cautions that in thinking about community anew, one has to step very carefully, and not think it in a way that falls back into a romanticist, racist conception of the term.2 I need to stress from the outset that my main interest is not in the veracity of Esposito’s philological inquiry, nor am I in a position to verify it. While we should of course not simply take his philology for granted, and should ask some questions on the way, my main interest is in the perspective that it opens up.3 If I am advocating a shift in our conception of community in line with Esposito it is not because Esposito is closer to the true meaning of community, but because Esposito’s approach opens up paths for a different politics around community from the liberal approach. Taking the etymological path is not about mere linguistic play, it is about creating a gap from which new potentialities can emerge. That is, the choice of Esposito’s conception is not based on asserting that this is the absolute truth of community, or in retrieving the original meaning of community, but rather is an explicitly political choice as a motor for critique. The project I am engaged in is futureoriented rather than concerned with finding and restoring origins. * What, then, does Esposito discover in the etymology of communitas? The first meaning of communitas and communis is that which is not proper (in other words, that which is common). It is what belongs to many or

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to everyone; it is what is public or general rather than private or particular (C: 3). This is a meaning that can also be found in the Greek koinos and the Gothic gemein. It is also in this sense that communis is the opposite of proprius, that which belongs to one. However, there is another meaning to be added, one that transfers a semantic complexity from its originary term ‘munus’. This term oscillates between three meanings that seem to move the term away from the public–private binary into the area of obligation. These three meanings are onus, officium and donum (C: 4). The first refers to duty in the sense of an obligation or responsibility, the second to duty in the sense of post or office. However, the sense in which the last term refers to the area of duty and obligation is not as immediately clear. Donum refers to a gift, and the sense in which it is a duty needs to be explained. According to Esposito, munus is to donum as species is to genus; it is a gift, but a particular kind of gift that is distinguished by its obligatory character (C: 4). Acceptance of the munus creates an obligation. Esposito sums it up thus: In short, this is the gift that one gives because one must give and because one cannot not give. It has a tone so clearly of being obliged as to modify or even to interrupt the one-to-one correspondence of the relation between the gift giver and the recipient. […] All of the munus is projected onto the transitive act of giving. It doesn’t by any means imply the stability of a possession and even less the acquisitive dynamic of something earned, but loss, subtraction, transfer. (C: 5) Thus the munus is the obligation that is contracted with respect to the Other and that invites a release from that obligation. The munus is characterised by a reciprocity of giving that assigns one to the Other in an obligation (C: 5). This may seem to resemble potlatch in some sense, but the munus indicates only the gift that one gives, not what one receives; the focus is on loss and giving that one is duty-bound to, rather than on a cycle of giving. Another difference is that the munus is not connected to a sense of rivalry.4 Esposito relates this meaning of munus to the collective communitas. And by doing so, he wants to question the widespread equation of communitas with res publica. For Esposito, the community is not a thing

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that is held in common. It is not a totality of persons united by a property; rather, it is an obligation or a debt (C: 6). That is, it is constituted by a subtraction, by a lack and a limit that is configured as an onus for those that are affected. The subjects of the community are united by obligation rather than property, and the way this obligation is thought about and configured is in terms of owing something rather than being owed something. That is, the state of being in debt trumps that of others being in debt to you. Esposito also introduces here the contrast between communitas and immunitas. The communis is he who is required to fill out an office; those who do not have to perform an office are immune, and in that sense remain ungrateful. The communitas is bound by the sacrifice of compensation, while the immunitas is the beneficiary of dispensatio. This distinction (and it is not a matter of a simple opposition) between communitas and immunitas is essential to Esposito’s work, as we will see in due course. Thus community is constituted by a negative obligation, rather than an identification. Subjects encounter only the void that constitutes them as missing from themselves. From this perspective the common is no longer constituted by property or by what is proper, but rather by what is improper. More drastically, it is constituted by the other to whom we are in debt. The subject is subject to a voiding that removes what is properly its own and that decentres it. The subject is thus altered by the negative property of community (C: 7). In the community, subjects find themselves in a circuit of mutual gift-giving that finds its specificity in its indirectness with respect to the subject–object relation and the ontological fullness of the person (C: 7). That is, they are not proper subjects at all, or rather are subjects only of their proper lack and of their lack of the proper.‘It is the originary munus that constitutes us and makes us destitute in our moral finiteness’ (C: 8). What this means is that the community is not a group of subjects, a collective subject, or an entity, but rather the very relation that interrupts the identity of subjects and makes them no longer individual subjects.5 The consequences of this are far-reaching. Community can no longer be thought of as simply a body or corporation of individuals formed into a single unity. Nor is it a case of an intersubjective recognition, a way of making the individual subject. On the contrary, it is an interruption and a disturbing of the subject. The subject of the community is exposed, is vulnerable. As such it is also in need of protection (and this is the role

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that immunisation plays). This exposure is not painless: the debt of the munus brings with it a fear of the loss of borders (C: 8). Communitas is thus both the most suitable dimension of man and also the one with the most disintegrating potential. That is, community is a condition of life, but it is also constituted by fear of loss and loss of life. Modern political philosophy reacts to this fear of death, to the unacceptable nature of this munus, and this reaction takes the form of immunisation (C: 12). For Esposito, immunisation can be taken as the explicative key of the modern paradigm. THE IMMUNITY PARADIGM Esposito sees immunisation as a category of interpretation that cuts transversely through any languages of particularity and realigns them on the same horizon of meaning (I: 1). It is a term that operates on the interstices of medicine, politics and law (and in his book Esposito delineates its development in all these areas in turn). In the most basic of glosses, immunisation refers to a protective reaction against a risk. Esposito of course borrows the concept-metaphor of immunisation from the field of medicine and runs with it. The location of this risk is always on the border between inside and outside – something or someone enters into an individual or collective body and transforms or contaminates it. The risk takes the form of contagion. This threat of contagion is in fact constitutively inherent in every form of life. However, under the paradigm of immunisation the rate of contagion is perceived as ever increasing and as ever more general – contagion is seen to spread uncontrollably into every productive area of life (I: 2–3). Esposito sees this as the dispositif of our time – the ever more diffuse risk of the common is answered by the ever more compact defence of the immune (I: 5). But what exactly is the relation between community and immunity? They do not form a simple opposition. Esposito again delves into etymology: the Latin immunitas is a negative term that takes its meaning from what it negates and what it lacks – from the munus (I: 5). Immunitas is the exemption from the duty and obligation of the munus. This exemption is both a dispensation and a privilege. Immunity is an exception from a general rule to which others are subject. Immunity is not only a private but a comparative concept; its focus lies not on freedom as such, but on differentiation from the situation of others. This means that what

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it actually negates is not so much the munus as the communitas of those who carry the munus. Immunity is always personal and individual – belonging to someone (I: 6). Immunity interrupts the social cycle of giving, it is an antisocial praxis. However, the opposition to community does not exhaust the meaning of immunity. The previous trajectory relates mainly to the juridical meanings of immunity; however, there are also meanings that stem from the biomedical realm and that combine with the first meanings. In medical terms, immunity is the resilience of the organism against a particular disease. What makes the medical conception of immunity important to Esposito, however, is the development of immunisation – and the move from natural immunity to acquired immunity (I: 7). Immunisation was developed out of the discovery that a weakened form of an infection can provide protection against a more virulent outbreak, so that the injection of a non-lethal amount of viruses can stimulate the development of antibodies that can neutralise their pathogenic consequences in advance. This has a profound effect on the immunity paradigm. Immunity here is not an action but a reaction – a counter-action that prevents another force from unfolding. Immunity presupposes the existence of an ill that needs to be fought, both in the sense that the ill is the occasion of taking the risk of immunisation and in the more important sense that its functioning depends on utilising the ill (I: 7–8). It produces in a controlled form the ill that it is meant to protect against. Thus a relation is forged between the protection and the negation of life. In the process of immunisation life fights its negation by making recourse to that negation, it is a strategy of neutralisation (I: 15). In this way a danger is met not by keeping it away from the borders, but by enclosing it within your own borders – a dialectical exclusion through inclusion. Here the poison is not defeated by the organism when it leaves the body, but when it becomes a part of it. In this way: ‘the immunitary logic is based on a non-negation, on the negation of a negation. The negative not only survives its cure, it constitutes the condition of its effectiveness’ (I: 8). Immunity is structurally aporetic. The process of immunisation achieves its object (the preservation of life) through a reversal. However, if life can only be protected through the insertion of something that stands in contradiction to it, this means that the protection of life goes hand in hand with a limitation. Life becomes subject to another power (I: 8).

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This has implications for the issue of biopower. As I indicated in Chapter 1, Esposito sees the immunity paradigm as being able to dialectically bridge the gulf between Agamben’s and Negri’s biopolitics, and thus resolve a tension in Foucault between a continuist and a discontinuist thesis on how totalitarianism relates to biopower.6 Immunity provides the interpretive key here. Biopolitics, for Esposito, emerges with the political categories of modernity, even as it surpasses them, and it is immunity that links modernity and biopower together. Under the biopolitical regime politics builds a relationship to life by emptying it of any qualitative dimension and reducing it to bare life (I: 14). The body regains centrality and becomes the location of the relation between politics and life. In order to be preserved life is pressed into the boundaries of the body. Biopolitics places the body at the centre of politics and the possibility of disease at the centre of the body, making it both the edge from which life has to keep a distance and also an inner fold that dialectically leads back to itself (I: 15–16). For Esposito, this antinomy is present in all discourses of modernity and drives them towards their dissolution. Immunity and community are simultaneously opposed and connected. The one does not only make the other its contrastive backdrop, but rather also makes it its object and its content. Immunity presents itself as a negative modality of community, but present-day community presents itself as thoroughly immunised – saturated by its own contradiction: The category of immunity is inseparable from that of community: as its inverse mode, it cannot be eliminated. This is borne out by the fact that there is no community without some kind of immunitary apparatus. (I: 16) Once you strip away its negative potential, the immune is not the enemy of the communal, but rather something more complex that both implies and drives it (I: 18). Immunity is the inner border that cuts through community. It is both constitutive and destitutive – in that it constructs and reconstructs community through destituting it (I: 9). Immunity and community stand in a negative dialectical relationship to each other. For Esposito, this negative dialectical character of immunity is particularly apparent in the sphere of the law, which he considers an immunitary dispositif of the entire social system. The immunitary

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mechanism is no longer a function of the law; rather, the law is a function of the immunitary mechanism (I: 9). This relates to the relationship between force and the law. It is not so much that law forms part of the immunisation against the threat of external force, but rather that force is incorporated into the apparatus of the law, that itself forcibly suppresses it. The law preserves life within an order that precludes its free development – in trying to anticipate any acts that might contravene it the law simultaneously protects and constrains life (I: 10). For Esposito, politics fully enters the immunity paradigm when it makes life the immediate subject of its functioning, that is, when politics becomes biopolitics (I: 112). Politics immunises life against the danger of its extinction and in order to do so politics has to place life under the regime of the body. In order for this to happen life requires an organic representation that ties reality to the potentiality of a corporeal configuration (I: 113). What this configuration requires is clear conceptions of the borders of the body within which life can be contained. The borders form the frontier against those things that threaten to withdraw life from itself. Within the realm of the body life is protected, and can grow and develop. However, the flipside of this is that the body is also where the fear of death makes itself most noticeable (I: 113). Thus the body is both the site and the implement of politics’ fight for life. Esposito argues that the individualism of liberal political philosophy gives the analogy between body and state an increasingly immunitary meaning. This is due to complications in the relationship between life and the political body. Revolutions, wars and unrest make the political body an increasingly fragile figure – it is this very precariousness that requires a pre-emptive protection of the body politics. However, the death of the body politics is not considered a natural death but rather an induced one, and as such it is preventable (or at least deferrable) – and this is what necessitates a strategy of immunisation (I: 114). The body politic can survive the death of the bodies that constitute it; it feeds on their lives and deaths, and as such it can incorporate its own excorporation; death already inheres within the living body politic, and forms part of its immunisation (I: 115). The health of the body requires the use of every potentiality, of every ill that just as drastically requires elimination (I: 118). Negativity needs to be embraced in order to in turn be negated. (However, this also means that through immunity life is dependent on relations – it cannot be preserved on its own.)7

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Esposito argues that if the corporeal metaphor is central to political theory, then what also becomes central is the metaphor of disease – medical and political discourse meet in the problem of the preservation of the body (I: 121–2). It is from the perspective of disease that the preservation of the body attains its central position – disease provides a negative definition of what constitutes the healthy. Esposito’s example is very straightforward: in a situation in which riots and revolutions are perceived as the greatest ill, the control of the head, of the sovereign, is ranked above the other parts of the body; in a situation in which tyrannical rule by a despot is feared most, a balance of the different parts of the political organism is held up as the greatest good. And from the sixteenth century onwards, disease becomes associated with externality, and the prevention of encroachment; political theory too, becomes less concerned with the health of the political body in general and increasingly focuses on the need to prevent infiltration through barriers and other apparatuses of immunisation (I: 123). These preventative apparatuses can minimise encroachment by external elements (‘seeds of disease’); however, crucially, they can never completely eliminate it. The metaphor of disease takes its proper immunitary form through two steps. The first is a dialectical one – disease is no longer seen as exclusively bad in so far as it strengthens the mechanisms of selfdefence. The second is the move away from the classical study of the humours and miasmas inaugurated by Paracelsus. Whereas previously the sick body was an out-of-balance body that had to have its equilibrium restored in a logic of compensation, with Paracelsus a homeopathic logic of similarity is introduced (I: 124–6).8 Same is healed by same, not by opposite. This means that sickness and health are no longer arranged in direct frontal opposition but are, rather, in a dialectical relationship. The one is still the opposite of the other, but it is also the instrument of the other. This logic of immunity increasingly finds its way into political treatises on the body politics. The concept metaphor of the body moves to a representation of an integrated system in which even the destructive elements can serve to strengthen the whole (I: 127). This shift towards an immunitary logic is also a shift back to the Platonic pharmakon as written about by Derrida9 (and Esposito explicitly states that Derrida describes the pharmakon in a form that reflects the logic and vocabulary of the immunitary paradigm).

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IMMUNITY IN CONCRETE: WHAT IT MAKES OF PEOPLE What does all this mean in relation to liberal multiculturalism? Put simply, liberalism sees the Other as a threat, but it does not counter this threat by simply attacking or banishing it. Rather, in order to negate the threat, it incorporates a part of it, thus immunising itself. Liberal multiculturalism constitutes this act of immunisation for liberalism. That is, liberal multiculturalism can be characterised as a series of processes that partially incorporate the Other in order to protect the body of liberalism against more fundamental change. In the three chapters that follow I will be trying to show that rights, consensus and recognition are three such immunitary processes. In the rest of this chapter I want to show why liberal multiculturalism as a mode of immunisation is to be criticised. I will be looking at what happens to actual subjects when they become subject to an immunitary process. That is, what happens to the Other subjects that are incorporated, and what happens to Other subjects who remain outside the liberal body politics? In order to do this I will be engaging mainly with Kristeva and Foucault. * In engaging with Kristeva’s conception of abjection we can apprehend a dimension of what immunitary processes mean for actual subjects. I want to argue that the process of immunisation is both a reaction to a feeling of abjection and a rendering abject. There is in liberalism an abject horror of and obsessive fascination with the culturally different and the migrant. Why is this? For Kristeva, the abject is something that exists at the border of self and Other. What the process of immunisation does is to supplement the Other into the self in order to protect against the Other – in so doing it blurs the boundary between self and Other (even as in other ways it also fortifies the border). The Other becomes part of the self, but this only increases the abject horror towards the Other. The very fact that there is difference inside the liberal polity increases the unease around difference, and shores up hostile reactions against it. This point needs to be elaborated somewhat. Kristeva’s notion of abjection is more subtle than I have just suggested. What, then, does abjection consist of? Kristeva has theorised about the concept in her

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essay Powers of Horror.10 If, as I have outlined in Chapter 1, there is an attitude constituted by fear in relation to migration and migrants, then abjection is indeed the proper area of inquiry when looking at multiculturalism. Kristeva says that ‘the phobic has no other object than the abject’ (PH: 6). For Kristeva, abjection emerges from ambiguous spaces. Abjection is a ‘revolt of being’ directed against a threat that emanates from an exorbitant inside or outside – the abject is radically excluded and draws one to the place where meaning collapses (PH: 1–2). In fact, the abject is not so much the object of the phobic as it is a case of symbolicity being cathected by a drive that is not object-oriented. Abjection sits at the intersection of phobia, obsession and perversion; it is in fact a revolt within the being of language. As such it is a productive category that breeds culture and symbolicity (PH: 45). Abjection assumes a key position in the subject’s constitution, understood as the slow laborious production of object relation: It [abjection] seems to be the first authentic feeling of a subject in the process of constituting itself as such. […] Abjection of self: the first approach to a self that would otherwise be walled in. Abjection of others, of the other. […] a stifled aspiration towards an other as prohibited as it is desired – abject. (PH: 47) Abjection is rooted in the collapse of the border between inside and outside, when the integrity of the self is no longer guaranteed. Abjection then takes the place of the Other (PH: 53–4). The incorporation of a part of the Other into the self, the blurring of the distinction between self and Other, leads to a reaction of abjection. It has as its result an increase in hostility towards the Other both in so far as it is inside and in so far as it is within. This initial destabilising of boundaries is what we can see in the process of immunisation, where a part of the other is incorporated into the self. Esposito refers to immunisation as an ‘escalating interiorization of exteriority’.11 However, as the Other then becomes abject, it is met with a hostility that results in a panicked clamping down of the border, a hostility to the abject Other. This closing down of the border is something that Esposito has described as the most violent version of immunisation.12 Abjection is a way in which a particular territory gets claimed because

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of the intrusion of the other. Kristeva says: ‘thus braided, woven, ambivalent, a heterogeneous flux marks out a territory that I can call my own because the Other, having dwelt in me as alter ego, points it out to me through loathing’ (PH: 10). It is the intrusion that leads to a heightened self-awareness. Abjection occurs when an Other settles in the place that will be the subject. It is a rendering ambiguous that at the same time is constitutive for the self. The Other is abjected both because it is different and threatening but also because it is so powerful in its constitutive function. This is why the process of immunisation, that incorporates Other subjects into liberalism, results in these subjects being abjected. Speaking of corpses as one of the most extreme forms of the abject, Kristeva refers to the abject as ‘something rejected from which one does not part’ (PH: 4). What causes abjection is the disturbing of identity, positions and rules. The abject ‘simultaneously beseeches and pulverizes the subject’ (PH: 5). Abjection emerges out of ambiguity. It does not radically cut off the subject from what is threatening to it. Rather, through abjection the subject feels in perpetual danger (PH: 9). It is this feeling of constant beseechment, of fear of contagion, that is precisely what Esposito describes as leading to the emergence of the immunity paradigm as the dispositif of our times. Yet the abject exerts a fascination, even as it is horrifying. For Kristeva this is because through the process of sublimation the abject is edged with the sublime. It is not that they are the same, but that they are brought to being by the same subject and speech. Neither sublime nor abject has an object proper (PH: 11–12). In so far as the abject is an Other subject, then, it also exerts a fascination, a fascination that with regard to the issue of multiculturalism we might call exotic fascination. The preservation of festivals and costumes, or the mysterious allure of foreign women – things that have been part and parcel of the Orientalist operation from the very start.13 It is this abject fascination that allows liberalism to claim a genuine interest for Other subjects even as it is hostile to them. Speaking in terms of immunitary processes, this might perhaps best be accounted for in the dependence on death that the protection of life takes on in immunity. That is, the external is an absolute necessity for the preservation of the internal, and as such immunitary societies become obsessed with the variants of contagion to the point of fetish.

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Now, this fascination exists within a climate of general suspicion of the Other. I think Kristeva’s observation on how the abject is edged with the sublime can account for the occasional existence of crazes and obsessions with particular aspects of the Other. However, I think the idea that is also present in her work, that the abject can be positively pushed into the realm of the sublime, that it can ‘collapse in a burst of beauty that overwhelms us’ (PH: 210),14 is something that is precluded or at least limited by the immunitary paradigm. While immunity does create the kind of ambiguity that can lead us to the sublime, its protective function would seem always to push this ambiguity into the terrain of the abject. This double pull in fact goes some way towards accounting for, on the one hand, positive statements about multiculturalism, and, on the other, policies that lack the same commitment, as well as the ‘backlash’. Since the protective dimension of immunity is overdetermining, the instances of celebration of otherness (of shifting into the sublime) are isolated and limited and henceforth take on the appearance of mere rhetoric. So, abjection emerges from places of spatial ambivalence between inside and outside, and where there is ambiguity of perception (between pleasure and pain) (PH: 62–3). Kristeva argues that abjection emerges out of these uncertainties with regard to primary narcissism and that as such it can serve as an explanation of the incest dread that Freud speaks of in Totem and Taboo.15 She sees the logic of prohibition and exclusion exhibited in the incest taboo as taken further in the concept of sacred defilement (itself a sacralised version of filth), which is the excluded on which religious prohibition is based (PH: 65). The exclusion of filth becomes part of the founding of the ‘self and clean’ subject, and with the exclusion of filth as an object it is asserted as abject. Filth is a category of the boundary. Kristeva gives the examples spittle, blood, milk, urine, faeces and tears; matter that exits the body, existing quite literally on the edge of the subject. Pollution occurs where there are clear lines of structure, and where these are blurred (PH: 69). Filth represents a risk to the symbolic order (recall also that in Esposito contagion has become a dominant metaphor of contemporary times that fuels immunitary logic). Kristeva really sees two forms of abjection in filth: excrement and its equivalents (which include infection and disease) stand for a danger to identity from without; menstrual blood, on the other hand, stands for the danger issuing from within identity (PH: 71). For the purposes of

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talking about Esposito and immunity, it is the former which is of more interest, although this is not to say that the two types of defilement have nothing in common. Ways of and rituals for purifying these instances of filth and defilement are in essence a form of immunisation. Kristeva reads different social institutions, but especially the institutions of religion, as a way of grappling with abjection: For abjection, when all is said and done, is the other facet of religious, moral and ideological codes on which rest the sleep of individuals and the breathing spells of societies. Such codes are abjection’s purification and repression. (PH: 209) She thus specifies these institutions as a series of immunitary mechanisms to contain the threat of abjection. However, as a result, when that abject which they repress returns, ‘the return of their repressed make [sic] up our “apocalypse”’ (PH: 209). That is, when the immunised body encounters that which it has immunised against, that which it has incorporated in order to eliminate, this is a moment of profound crisis that leads to fear and hostility. It is precisely this that we see happening in relation to migrants. * If what is abject has to be immunised, and what becomes subject to immunisation is rendered abject, what happens to these abject Other subjects? They are the subject of hostility and fear, yes, but how does this fear realise itself? Turning to Foucault can help us see one important way in which this happens. Esposito engages extensively with Foucault’s work on biopower, but there is another Foucaultian concept which can usefully be related to the immunity paradigm (although Esposito does not do so), and that is delinquency. I think that delinquency can give us a handle on what the immunitary mechanisms of liberal multiculturalism make of the actual Other subjects that have become abjected – it turns them into delinquents. Foucault’s notion of delinquency is elaborated in Discipline and Punish and takes as its starting point the fact that prisons do not seem to reduce the crime rate – why is this? For Foucault it is not a mistake or shortcoming of the prison system; rather, it is an intended effect. Foucault

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says: ‘the prison cannot fail to produce delinquents. It does so by the very type of existence that it imposes on its inmates.’16 The prison both makes possible and promotes the organisation of a milieu of delinquents; moreover, the conditions that free inmates find themselves in (difficulty in finding work, limitations on residence, etc.) lead towards recidivism, and further aid the formation of this milieu (DP: 267). The prison also indirectly creates delinquents by throwing the families of the inmates into destitution (DP: 268). The formation of these milieux is commonly seen as a failure of the prison system, with the cure being its reform. But Foucault notes that this reform, no matter whether it is 1850 or 1950, is always along the lines of the same penitentiary principles. That is, the cure is more of the same. However, this is not merely a process of farcical repetition. Rather, it is evidence of the carceral system, which Foucault defines thus: One should think […] of a simultaneous system that historically has been superimposed on the juridical deprivation of liberty; a fourfold system comprising: the additional, disciplinary element of the prison – the element of ‘super-power’; the production of an objectivity, a technique, a penitentiary ‘rationality’ – the element of auxiliary knowledge; the de facto reintroduction, if not actual increase of a criminality that the prison ought to destroy – the element of inverted efficiency; lastly the repetition of a ‘reform’ that is isomorphic, despite its ‘idealism’, with the disciplinary functioning of the prison – the element of utopian duplication. (DP: 271, my italics) The carceral system operates far beyond the physical walls of the prison; it is a whole discursive structure. Of the four features Foucault identifies, it is the third one that I am interested in here. The prison may fail to eliminate crime, but it is extremely successful in the production of delinquency. Foucault asks what is served by the failure of prison, who benefits from the formation of a delinquent class? If all the ‘failures’ of the prison system are not a contradiction but a consequence of it, then the purpose of the prison is not so much to eliminate offences but rather to distinguish, distribute and utilise them: the transgression of the law becomes assimilated into a general tactics of subjection (DP: 272). The prison gives rise to a particular form of illegality, distinguishable from others, which it can isolate and organise

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in an enclosed but penetrable milieu. It establishes an open, and secretly useful, illegality that is both refractory and docile, a form of illegality that symbolically sums up all others but that makes it possible to leave unseen those practices that one wishes to or must tolerate (DP: 276–7). This isolated form of illegality is delinquency. Delinquency is an effect of penality that makes it possible to differentiate and supervise illegalities. It is an economically less dangerous, and occasionally usable, specific form of illegality. It is a form of illegality that has been enclosed and organised by the carceral system and which takes on a crucial role in relation to other illegalities. For Foucault, the juridical opposition between legal and illegal is thus less important than the opposition between illegalities and delinquency. There are several advantages to delinquency: it is possible to supervise it; the life of delinquents can replace the spectacle of the gallows as a discouraging example; the controlled illegality of delinquency can act as an agent for the illegality of the dominant classes (Foucault gives the examples of setting up prostitution rings, and prohibition); and it can be used to infiltrate parties and workers associations (DP: 278–80). ‘Delinquency, solidified by a penal system centred upon the prison, thus represents a diversion of illegality for the illicit circuits of profit and power of the dominant class’ (DP: 280). Moreover, delinquency also paves the way for a comprehensive system of surveillance – both through the provision of informants and also, more importantly, by authorising a generalised state of policing (DP: 281). This is really what brings us to the prime use of delinquency – it serves as a validation for the state apparatus. The very fact of delinquency necessitates a state and a whole array of disciplinary and surveillance technologies to combat it. A whole apparatus of power is required and called upon by the fact of delinquency. Delinquency is part of a triple ensemble police–prison–delinquency, that forms a perpetual circuit in which there are always more delinquents: ‘police surveillance provides the prison with offenders, which the prison transforms into delinquents, the targets and auxiliaries of police supervisions, which regularly send back a certain number of them to prison’ (DP: 282). That is, the carceral system continually reproduces the justification for its own existence. Delinquents are presented as close by and ever present, to be feared everywhere (DP: 286). It is this constant threat that needs to be rallied against and necessitates the protective presence of the state.

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Thus, delinquency is both an object and an instrument of the police, operating both against and with it. Delinquency does not operate in a separate realm from the law. Rather, the delinquent is from the very outset in the law, at the very heart of the law. […] Although it is true that prison punishes delinquency, delinquency is for the most part produced in and by an incarceration which, ultimately, prison perpetuates in its turn. […] The delinquent is an institutional product. […] In short, the carceral archipelago assures, in the depths of the social body, the formation of delinquency on the basis of subtle illegalities, the overlapping of the latter by the former and the establishment of a specified criminality. (DP: 301) In so far as delinquency validates and strengthens the state, we can see a very direct link to the immunitary paradigm: a hostile element is incorporated into the body politic in order to strengthen it. In fact, with regard to governmentality Foucault says as much: The fundamental objective of governmentality will be mechanisms of security, or, let’s say, it will be state intervention with the essential function of ensuring the security of the natural phenomena of economic processes or processes intrinsic to population.17 In fact, a link can be made here to supplementation in Derrida’s sense as well. A supplement inscribes the notion that the original term is selfsufficient.18 Delinquency, seemingly external to the state, helps consolidate the notion of a strong state that can fight delinquency. However, the supplement also threatens: it can point to the emptiness of the first term and show up its deficiencies.19 This is a risk that is clearly present with delinquency. Furthermore, the supplement may pervert the original term or signal a regression into an unnatural state of evil.20 The utilisation of delinquency can be seen as doing just that. Thus, when Foucault says is not the supposed failure part of the functioning of the prison? Is it not to be included among those effects of power that discipline and the auxiliary technology of imprisonment have induced in the apparatus of justice, and in society in general? (DP: 271)

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he is in fact inscribing delinquency into a logic of supplementarity. The importance of this will become apparent shortly. Why this excursus into delinquency? Not to merely say that the prison and delinquency are modes of immunisation (which they are), but to say that immunisation, in so far as it refers to the body politic itself, produces a delinquent class. Beyond the medical conceptmetaphor of the body politic, we are talking of actual bodies of migrants. When immunitary logic is extended towards actual processes of migration, and when some migration is allowed against the perceived ill of uncontrolled migration, this is not merely the incorporation of a concept but of actual groups of people into the political community, and these people have to make their existences. Through their association with the outside ill, these groups are constituted as delinquents within the political community – they have a use to the apparatuses of state and capital, but this use is disavowed, or played down in a discourse that emphasises threat and sees migrants predominantly as a problem to be dealt with. (If we really want to push the medical metaphor to breaking point: low-skills migration as the vaccination, large numbers as the encroachment of death from outside, xenophobia as antibodies, and high-skills labour as probiotics.) Furthermore, the existence of this delinquent class justifies a whole apparatus of surveillance and disciplinary apparatuses (or rather, to take it properly into the now, apparatuses of control).21 Esposito says himself that in the immunological practices of the social body risk is created artificially in order to control it.22 On the one hand there are such things as community cohesion programmes, Prevent, attendance monitoring at universities, and the whole apparatus of securitisation that goes under the name of ‘anti-terrorism’. All these relate to those who, while legitimately in the polity, form part of the delinquent class in so far as they are still associated with a threat, with instability. They only cease being part of the delinquent class once they are seen to be fully incorporated into the body, that is, when they are in fact fully liberal. On the other hand, for those delinquents who remain outside of the body of the liberal polity, the mode of securitisation takes the form of ever stricter border controls and visa regimes. What the immunitary mechanisms of liberalism do is form a class of delinquents that can be utilised but that always remain in a sphere of illegitimacy and as such subject to hostility.

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All liberal theorising on multiculturalism has to be seen as an immunitary mechanism to cope with the ‘problem’ of migration and difference. Even when liberals talk of the advantages of a multicultural polity, this takes precisely the form that a more differentiated liberalism is a stronger liberalism, and so on. However, the idea of this being a problem that needs solving is always there. If we conceive of the immunitary operation as a supplementary one, this makes perfect sense. The supplement is subject to constant hostility and subjection, its very existence is considered intolerable.23 At the same time, getting rid of the supplement is an impossibility; it can never be given up, without it there is no first term.24 That is, the incorporation of the Other is necessary and constitutive of the liberal polity, yet this leads to abjection, to which liberalism then reacts by turning other subjects into delinquents and justifying an apparatus of securitisation. CONCLUSION Over the course of this chapter I have been outlining an understanding of immunity. I have done so in a way that I hope makes clear how the category of immunisation can be made useful for talking about liberal multiculturalism. I have also sketched some of the processes that immunisation involves when it relates to actual subjects. This immunisation leads to abjection, delinquency and securitisation. Over the next three chapters I want to flesh this out further. While I have been talking about immunisation in general in this chapter, I will now turn towards three aspects of liberal multiculturalism and argue that what we can see at work in all three of these areas are processes of immunisation. These processes have dire effects for those that become subject to them. Again, I have outlined this in a general way already, and will concretise it further over the next three chapters. My argument is that liberal multiculturalism consists of a series of immunitary mechanisms and that, given what these processes do to actual Other subjects, this makes it an unethical way of engaging with the Other. Liberal multiculturalism is not deserving of its name, in so far as its engagement is limited to a selfstrengthening, Other-hostile immunisation of the liberal body politic.

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NOTES 111. The first two are henceforth referenced in the text as C and I respectively. 112. Esposito, Terms of the Political, p. 37. 113. And actually, Esposito’s use of Latin is not in any sense controversial, and is in line with what you will find in a standard Latin dictionary. Esposito’s work is more of an exercise of reminding us of those meanings that have made up the term ‘communitas’ that have got forgotten on the way. 114. On potlatch see Mauss, The Gift. 115. Esposito, ‘Community and Nihilism’, p. 27. 116. Esposito, Bíos, pp. 41–4. 117. Bonito Oliva, ‘From the Immune Community to the Communitarian Immunity’. 118. See also Pagel, Paracelsus. 119. ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, in Derrida, Dissemination. 110. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, henceforth cited in the text as PH. 111. Esposito, Terms of the Political, p. 41. 112. Ibid., p. 63. 113. See Said, Orientalism, pp. 102–3, 118 and passim. 114. On this idea see also MacCannell, ‘Kristeva’s Horror’, pp. 86–92. On the relation of abjection to love see Kristeva, ‘L’abjet d’amour’. 115. Freud, Totem and Taboo. 116. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 266, henceforth cited in the text as DP. 117. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, p. 353. 118. Derrida, Of Grammatology, pp. 144–5. 119. Ibid., pp. 145–6. 120. Ibid., p. 147. 121. In line with the shift from disciplinary society to societies of control that Deleuze sees as having taken place and that he argues was seen by Foucault as well. See ‘Postscript on Societies of Control’ in Deleuze, Negotiations. 122. Esposito, Terms of the Political, p. 62. 123. Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 148. 124. Ibid., p. 154.

Chapter 4 LIBERAL MULTICULTURALISM AND RIGHTS: CITIZENS, HUMANS AND OTHER SUBJECTS

In this chapter I will be looking at the importance of ideas of citizenship and human rights for liberal multiculturalism. A look at some of the antinomies and exclusions present in these discourses will show that these are carried over into liberal multiculturalism. This is necessarily so, because multiculturalism celebrates these doctrines as a success, and reproduces the problems that arise from them with gusto. What is being promoted in both these areas is a certain conception of the subject and a legalistic stress on rights. I will argue that the practices of discourses of civic and human rights in fact constitute an immunitary operation that strengthens the body of liberalism. In order to look at these processes I will first turn to the issue of citizenship. Starting with how it features in liberal multiculturalism, and will then look at some of its antinomies, drawing especially on the work of Étienne Balibar. I will then turn towards human rights. I will argue that human rights discourse has to be seen in conjunction with citizenship and multiculturalism, both because liberal multiculturalists advocate both and because there are certain exclusions at work in human rights discourses that are connected with citizenship – or rather, that it utilises inclusion and exclusion in a way that can best be understood as immunitary. This will necessitate looking at the deployment of human rights and at how they are exclusive in terms of both their conception and their praxis. While it may at times seem as if we are moving away from the topic of multiculturalism, it in fact always remains there in the background. The exclusions of citizenship and human rights discourse belie certain aspects of liberal multiculturalism, for in its celebration of human rights and citizenship it necessarily supplements certain exclusions into itself. In terms of liberal theorists, my focus in this chapter will be on Kymlicka, not because his work is solely determined by the notion of citizenship 66

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and rights discourse, nor because he is the only liberal theorist of multiculturalism who focuses on these things, but rather because in Kymlicka we can see a very good example of the kind of work rights and citizenship discourse performs in liberal multiculturalism. In particular, we can observe how notions of group-differentiated citizenship as advanced by Kymlicka serve to immunise rather than to open up liberalism. CITIZENS Liberal models of multiculturalism tend to present themselves as projects of citizenisation, of incorporating minorities into the realm of citizenship. Kymlicka sees multiculturalism as a way to ‘combine the enduring aspirations and functional needs for nation-building with the equally enduring demands to accommodate diversity’1 – that is, as a way of pluralistic nation-building. In fact, he sees multiculturalism and nationbuilding as providing legitimate conditions for each other. Kymlicka’s method is to avert the traditional liberal fear that multiculturalism undermines citizenship by arguing that on the contrary it enables it. He asserts that multiculturalism is not about groups withdrawing from society, but about including them in it; it is a policy of integration – into society and into the sphere of citizenship – in which immigrants exhibit their commitment to mainstream institutions.2 Poly-ethnic rights take the authority of the larger polity for granted.3 Multiculturalism is here seen as in fact being the extension of the logic of the equality of citizens. Charles Taylor has called this a refusal of any second-class citizenship; one that adds the ability to live one’s differences to the socio-economic factors that can constrain and reduce people to second-class citizens.4 Multicultural society faces two conflicting demands from the perspective of liberalism. On the one hand, it needs to promote diversity, but on the other it still needs to foster a sense of overall unity that holds the polity together. It is the latter dimension that is ensured through the mode of citizenship. Now Kymlicka’s theory (and those similar to it) is not one of outright assimilation as a precondition for citizenship. Rather, he argues for a diverse concept of citizenship that incorporates the constituents of the multicultural polity into its realm – he refers to this as group-differentiated citizenship. He does not see group-differentiation as being at all at odds with the ideal of citizenship – in fact, he sees it as

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something that is already and has always been present in liberal practices.5 However, even this more diversified conception inscribes certain exclusions, and this has something to do with the antinomic nature of citizenship. In so far as liberal multiculturalism is about bringing people into the realm of citizenship (even if it is a diversified one), it is to a great extent about instilling certain liberal values. The diversity it seeks often amounts merely to a diversity of backgrounds, not a diversity of practices. There is a certain assimilationist underbelly to multiculturalism: no exclusion of others as long as they suspend their otherness (and even then this equality tends to be formal rather than substantive). The reason for this is that the very idea of citizenship is structured around exclusions and is problematic for an inclusive politics. In order to assess this properly it will be necessary to take a brief look at the development of the figure of the citizen, which will also require us to look at the figure of the subject. Étienne Balibar has made several points about the citizen and the subject that need to be taken into account here.6 Balibar asserts that one of the mistakes of the modern philosophical tradition, from Hegel to Heidegger, is that it asserts that it is with Descartes that philosophy becomes conscious of subjectivity.7 Standard accounts see Descartes as providing the first major break with the Aristotelian tradition and as inaugurating the modern subject. This project is taken further by Hume, and comes to fruition in Kant. The Cartesian ego is seen to inaugurate the subject, the cogito sum as an indivisible formation that liberates philosophy from theology – Descartes as the first subjectivist thinker. Even Heidegger will maintain this view, though he will occasionally waver between seeing the sovereignty of the subject as being established in Descartes’meditations and seeing it as being merely implicit in Descartes and becoming explicit only with Leibniz.8 Balibar asserts that this history is materially wrong, that it is a retrospective obfuscation. Far from originating with Descartes, the subject in the modern philosophical sense originates with Kant in the course of the three Critiques. It is also within this Kantian schema that the subject is connected to the notion of the citizen. Descartes can only think of the freedom of the subject in so far as the subject is the subjected being; from the perspective of the autonomous subject it is a contradiction in terms.9 For Descartes the essential concept is that of substance, conceived in relational rather than univocal terms. Descartes’ thinking thing

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is in fact such a relational substance rather than a subject. However, the human individual is subject to a divine sovereignty. For Descartes the ‘subject’ remains the subjectus – the subjected being.10 Given this, it is clear that in identifying the birth of the subject here, Kant ‘in one and the same historico-philosophical operation discovers the subject in the substance of the Cartesian cogito, and denounces the substance in the subject (as transcendental illusion)’.11 In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant lists the three transcendental questions ‘what can I know?’,‘what must I do?’, and ‘what can I hope?’;12 these are later summarised in the single question ‘what is Man?’.13 Kant distinguishes these cosmic questions from scholastic ones, which are of interest only to theoreticians.14 The practical questions connect knowledge, duty, theory and morals with the existence of humanity; these questions are therefore in fact cosmopolitical rather than cosmological. The question ‘what is man?’ concerns the experience of man as a citizen of the world. According to Balibar: The Kantian question already involves and predetermines a formal answer: ‘Man’ is a (the) citizen of the world; his ‘essence’ is nothing other than the horizon within which all the determinations of that universal ‘citizenship’ must fall.15 In this way two conceptual paradigms are combined within the structure of philosophical language: (1) That the human subject is able concretely to meet the essence of its ‘humanity’ only within a civic, or political, horizon […] and (2) that the ‘citizen’ belonging to any human institution and subjected to it, but particularly to the legal state (and probably more precisely the legal nation state), can ‘belong’ to that institution and state as a free and autonomous subject only inasmuch as every institution, every state, is conceived as a partial and provisional representative of humanity, which in fact is the only absolute ‘community’, the only true ‘subject of history’. The metaphysical aspect of the question ‘what is man?’ is thus inextricably linked with its civic and cosmopolitical content. The traditional equation in modern philosophy of the subject and the essence of man

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thus relies on a third term to mediate – that term is ‘citizen’, and it links the history of metaphysics to that of politics. Balibar advances two main theses on the development of the subject and the development of successive figures of citizenship. The first is that the history of the subject in the West is governed by an objective play on words – that subjectification is intimately linked with subjection.16 That is, a subject is always also subject to some kind of authority. The freedom of the subject is a becoming-free that always starts from and maintains a relationship with subjection. The subject is from the very beginning the subjectus, a person or individual submitted to power, whose model is political, and whose concept is juridical.17 His second thesis is that there have been two great breaks in the history of the ‘problem of man’ as citizen and as subject.18 However, this does not mean that the old forms simply disappear with the emergence of the new; rather, they continue on in morphed, often more covert ways. The first takes place in the transition from Aristotle to Augustine and brings about a unified category of subjection and the interpretation of this subjection of the subject as obedience. The emergent figure, with the passing of antiquity, is that of an inner subject that is responsible, and accountable before an Other that ‘interpolates’ him. Thus: The ‘subject’, for the first time bearing that name in the political field where it (he) is subjected to the sovereign, the lord, ultimately the Lord god, in the metaphysical field necessarily subjects himself to himself or, if you like, performs his own subjection.19 This subjection becomes the precondition for any reciprocity from the subjecting authority. The relationship of obedience that the subject enters makes those who obey into members of a single body. While this obedience institutes a command of higher over lower, it comes from below – the subjects will their own obedience. They do so since, under the Christian theological schema, this willing of obedience is inscribed in the economy of their creation and salvation (taken both individually and collectively).20 The second break occurs with the declaration of secular and democratic social organisation in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Man as such is now equated with the citizen defined by his rights, without any pre-established limitation. This inverts his relationship

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to the law. He is no longer called before it but – at least in principle – constitutes the law and declares its validity. For Balibar, the 1789 Declaration is one of the rights of the citizen rather than the rights of man.21 The figure of the citizen that emerges with the 1789 Declaration of Rights is no longer the subjectus, but not yet the subjectum. However, from the outset it exceeds its own institution (it has a universalising moment); Balibar calls this the hyperbolic proposition of the Declaration.22 The development of this proposition is characterised by antinomies, of which there are three principal ones. The first conflict exists around the idea of equality. The idea of citizen’s rights entails that each citizen has as many rights as the rest. However, if that is the case two kinds of equality open up, a formal/symbolic and a substantive/real equality. In the first case, each citizen is merely said to be equivalent to every other in principle. Or if it is real, then citizenship will not be realised until the conditions of all individuals are equal. The difference is that between a striated (liberal-capitalist) society and a classless society. This antinomy reproduces within the field of citizenship the all-or-nothing of the subject and the citizen: Symbolic equality must be nothing real, but a universally applicable form. Real equality must be all or, if one prefers, every practice, every condition must be measured by it, for an exception destroys it.23 Furthermore, both sides of this alternative, Balibar goes on to say, are at odds with the constitution of society. That is to say, civic equality is indissociable from universality but separates it from the community. In order to constitute a community a supplement (either one of symbolic form, or one of substantial egalitarianism) is needed; this supplement is already a part of the citizen’s becoming-a-subject. The second antinomy relates to the sphere of the citizen’s activity, the fact that he is, in principle, both legislator and magistrate.24 There is a shift from the old representing before the sovereign (i.e. the Prince) to the representation of the sovereign in its deputies in so far as the sovereign is the people. The act of election singularises each citizen in the very same instance that it unifies him into the body of citizens. This idea of citizenship institutes the idea of sovereign will. (Contrast the Aristotelian take on activity, that did not imply such a will; here election

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appeared aristocratic while the drawing of lots was democratic.)25 This idea is of course problematic, and has since brought us well-known debates about binding mandates, and what happens to the will of the sovereign between elections. However, in the sphere of activity the antinomy really centres around the law. Citizens are both legislators and subjects of the law. The citizenship is indivisibly above any law, for this is the condition of it legislating and constituting. However, in so far as these laws once formulated are binding, in so far as he is a subject, the citizen is necessarily under the law.26 The Jacobin solution to this problem was to assert that the citizen was neither above nor below, but on the same level as the law (but also not equivalent to it). There is thus an exact correlation between the absolute activity of the citizen as legislator and his absolute passivity in being obedient to the law. However, this balance becomes upset once a distinction is made between passive and active citizens, which is almost from the outset. The third antinomy exists with respect to the individual and the collective. The institution of a society based on equality is problematic, because while the proposition that citizens are equal makes reference to the fact of society, there is conceptually either too much or too little to bind a society.27 The principle of equality demands that it cannot be limited, for otherwise those who hold it would in fact be holding privilege. That is, it immediately strikes on the plain of universality. This is where the antinomy with society is rooted. For a society is necessarily defined by some particularity, by some exclusion, at the very least in name. The existence of ‘all citizens’ requires that someone should not be a citizen of the polity.28 In fact, even Kymlicka recognises this when he refers to the fact that the principles of equal worth and equal liberty stand at odds with citizenship, which differentiates groups.29 Kymlicka sees this as evidence that citizenship is naturally inclined to the kind of group-differentiation he suggests. However, I would follow Balibar in seeing this more critically. While equality can maintain differences, it cannot be differentiated. Once equality becomes split in this way there is nothing that prevents exploitative differential treatment of groups – in which case, the value of the ideal of equal citizenship for organising the polity becomes questionable. This problem comes to the fore in the organisation of a society, once there is officialdom and hierarchy, in which inequalities

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reinsert themselves, subverting the principle of equality of citizenship. Thus the proper trajectory of citizenship would be anarchy, but this is not how it is realised under liberal democracy.30 Thus in fact, citizenship must be inaugurated by a positive institution.31 The figure of the citizen emerges from these antinomies, bridging many of the categories of modern social and political thought: The citizen properly speaking is neither the individual nor the collective, just as he is neither an exclusively public being nor a private being. Nevertheless, these distinctions are present in the concept of the citizen. […] they are suspended, that is, irreducible to fixed institutional boundaries which would pose the citizen on one side and a noncitizen on the other.32 The citizen cannot be thought without these distinctions, yet he does not rest within one side of them. It is this new, contradictory figure that Kant seizes on. Thus, the moment at which Kant produces (and retrospectively projects) the transcendental ‘subject’ is precisely that moment at which politics destroys the ‘subject’ of the prince, in order to replace him with the republican citizen.33 This new subject is now accountable, because he is a legislator accountable for the consequences of the law he has himself made.34 Subjecthood was asserted because the principle of subjection had been overturned – there could no longer be any voluntary servitude. Thus citizenship ‘is not one among other attributes of subjectivity, on the contrary: it is subjectivity, that form of subjectivity that would no longer be identical with subjection for anyone’.35 Thus Balibar’s answer to Jean-Luc Nancy’s question ‘who comes after the subject?’ is simple: after the subject comes the citizen.36 The citizen (defined by rights and duties) is that figure that puts a principal end to the subjection of the subject. However, if the citizen comes after, displaces the subject, it is in the form of a rehabilitation. Balibar is in fact avoiding Nancy’s question, but in doing so he makes us aware of an often forgotten genealogy. For Balibar, the subject is first of all the subjectus; the subjectum is equivalent to the citizen. Balibar is in effect

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saying ‘after the subject comes the subject’, but what is signified by the name of the subject has been transmutated. The Kantian operation inserts the citizen into the name of the subject in the moment the subject (as subjectus) dies. However, this poses the problem of the scope of subjecthood, as most citizens will never achieve this state. True subjectivity, and true citizenship, can in fact never be extended to all citizens – but any form of subjection is counter to real citizenship. If the Declaration of the Rights of Man is a hyperbolic proposition, it is so because its wording exceeds its enunciation. The citizen is a paradoxical figure of both universal sovereignty and radical finitude.37 If we look at the enunciation of citizenship we can see the exclusions from the very start. There is the question of property and whether it is guaranteed by or necessary for citizenship; similarly, there are questions as to the gender and race of the citizen.38 For our purposes it is particularly the latter point that is important. The philosophers of the time talked figuratively of the move to citizenship as the throwing off of slavery, while at the same time all around them were slaves.39 The extent of the universality of the Declaration became readily apparent when Touissant L’Ouverture demanded the realisation of these rights for the people of Haiti. While over time more and more groups are incorporated into the sphere of citizenship (but again, in the formal rather the substantive way), the rule of supplementation dictates even here that there will always be a new supplement outside. The immigrant currently takes this position; while simple pigmentation may no longer be a ground for exclusion from citizenship, origin still is. This logic of supplementation hints at the immunitary dimension at work here. The challenges of an external Other are met by an inclusion, and thus cease being a threat. As such they strengthen the body of liberalism. However, as some groups are included others are excluded. Liberalism is in fact strengthened against these groups. Speaking concretely about immigration: existing residents are brought into the sphere of citizenship and at the same time the number of new arrivals is cut drastically to protect against future demands for inclusion. In fact, Kymlicka asserts that immigrants have far less claim to group-differentiated citizenship than other minorities do – and that they only have any rights at all because global resource inequality does not let us speak of migration as a fully autonomous choice.40

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The question of citizenship in fact extends further into the very question of humanity. With the ascent of the figure of the citizen the humanity of humans becomes determined by the inalienable character of their ‘rights’ – which is to say that humanity is identified with the practice of self-emancipation from domination by means of a collective access to politics.41 The question of the subject is immediately a question of right, and in this question of right the representation of man – which forms the teleological horizon of man – oscillates.42 Man here is a juridical figure. This aspect of citizenship will become important shortly when we turn towards human rights. HUMANS There is a double connection between human rights and multiculturalism. On the one hand the connection arises through the linkages between human rights and citizenship and the subject, and on the other hand there is the connection that is made by writers on multiculturalism themselves. Human rights is seen both as an example of a universally shared set of values that can provide guidance for the core values of the liberal multicultural polity, and also a model for the dissemination of a concept that can serve as an ideal on how to spread multiculturalism. In fact, Kymlicka asserts that liberal multiculturalism constitutes a new stage in the working out of the logic of human rights.43 If, however, the formation of international human rights norms is considered an example of the successful creation of a global ethics, this is highly problematic. Without falling into the facile argument that human rights are merely Western we can see that there is an aspect of their deployment that is, and in their current form they certainly cannot be said to be the outcome of a global dialogue. That is, their actualisation takes place under conditions of what Gayatri Spivak has called ‘global class apartheid’ – a set of relations in which certain groups are constantly reinscribed as subjects of aid, whereas other groups are destined to be the subjects that right the wrongs.44 There are exclusions that are structurally inherent in the concept of universal human rights. But there are also exclusions that arise from the practical deployment of human rights (although there is of course an argument to be made that this deployment is a necessary corollary of the exclusions inherent in the structure of human rights). And if liberal

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theorists of multiculturalism see the dissemination of human rights discourse as a successful model that is to be emulated (as Kymlicka does in Multicultural Odysseys), then these exclusions are likely to be replicated. In fact, we can see in the other-hostility exhibited in the spread and deployment of rights discourse a good example of a particularly aggressive immunitary logic at play. The limits of liberalism are projected externally in the name of including everyone in the sphere of guaranteed rights, but in fact this really serves to strengthen the liberal body. Rights discourse is presented as an internationally shared discourse. As such, it both is a model for how liberal multiculturalism can also become such a shared discourse and can provide the basis for the core values that guarantee the unity of the liberal polity despite the diversity that group-differentiation allows it. Kymlicka asserts that there is a consensus on human rights and liberal democratic values that cuts across ethnic lines (and thus ensures that multiculturalism is not a means of protecting intolerable practices).45 Moreover, there is, he asserts, a trend towards ever greater convergence on these values – this is the transformation that a more inclusive multicultural liberalism is meant to support. This also means that, in so far as agreement on basic human rights provides the breeding ground for liberal multiculturalism, there is a need to further promote and enforce the dissemination of human rights culture. In this way liberal multiculturalism becomes inextricably entwined with both the content and the spread of human rights. That is, the liberal model needs to be projected externally and intensified internally – eradicating substantive otherness in the process and re-creating bland liberal multiculturalism on a world scale. There are certain parallels between the exclusions inherent in the concept of citizenship and those inherent in the human of human rights. Human rights beg the question of what exactly is meant by ‘human’, of what it means to be included in the sphere of the human. As Talal Asad has noted, the human, that is, the bearer of human rights, can be distinguished from the non-human, and yet the human is only ever tautologically defined as the bearer of those rights.46 And in fact, despite the universal claims of human rights, the world is not a place where humanity or rights are universally shared.47 Humanity in the sense of human rights must refer to less than the species homo sapiens – Richard Rorty asserts that the ‘human’ in ‘human rights’ refers to ‘people like us’ rather than to humanity as such.48 It is in this context that we can view

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the homogenising effect of the universalising of human rights, since this would necessarily proceed by creating more ‘people like us’. It is in this way that human rights are ethnocentric (even if the genesis of this ethnos may be variegated). Rorty defends this kind of expansionist ethnocentrism because it seeks to incorporate everyone in the same ethnos and is in this sense inclusive (and the ‘we’ of this ethnos is ‘liberals’ not ‘humans’, which he deems an impossible identification).49 However, this is a highly dubious move, as it is premised precisely on the exclusion of certain types of ethnos, and attaches no value to any culture but its own. (In fact, it has been argued that with regard to cultural difference within the polity Rorty is much closer to Brian Barry than to any of the liberal multiculturalists.)50 One could do well to remember Naoki Sakai’s insight that ‘they are just like us’ is still a very different statement from ‘we are just like them’.51 So even as the sphere of ‘like us’ is expanded to spread rights across the world, this does not lead to an actual egalitarianism (the ethnocentrism preserves its core even as it incorporates the periphery). However, the point about ‘humanity’ in fact referring to ‘people like us’ is an important one. It is this idea that is captured by Hannah Arendt in her oft-quoted statement: The conception of human rights, based on the assumed existence of the human being as such, broke down at the very moment when those who professed to believe in it were for the first time confronted with people who had indeed lost all other qualities and specific relationships – except that they were still human.52 The point is that there needs to be precisely more than mere species belonging for somebody to be included in the community of human rights. Arendt would say that what is needed is the state, as the institution that guarantees these rights. Werner Hamacher puts the paradox well: the claim to universal validity suggests that human rights are ‘not permitted to depend on any historical or empirical instance, on any particular people, nation, or government’. However, in practice these rights are ‘placed under the legal and executive sovereignty of exactly the same historical powers – the powers of national governments’.53 That is, in the very instance of their inalienability they are made dependent on a particular (alien) power to guarantee them.54

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If, then, human rights require more than mere humanity – if in fact they require something like the state – one can look at their expansion in terms of the expansion of citizenship. As we have seen, modern citizenship is characterised by its universalising moment. For Balibar this means that it has come to be seen as a universal right to politics rather than a privilege. This universality is both extensive – it has a cosmopolitical horizon – and intensive – it has as its subject common humanity and thus excludes exclusion in principle.55 That is, in principle, it should be extended to all of humanity (properly understood). There is thus an equation of the rights of man with the rights of the citizen.56 However, these rights of citizenship are never in fact devolved around the entire globe, precisely a limiting of the human. Or to put it in terms from earlier, the statement of universalism is from the very start hyperbolic. It is belied by its praxis – and its praxis is no contingent coincidence but stems inherently from the concept. The very process of foundation inherent in rights is inherently antinomic – that is, it is destined to contradict itself. There is something inherently exclusionary about universalism (which is not to say that it cannot ever be used in an emancipatory or progressive way, only that it always brings with it exclusions as well).57 This can be seen as part of the complicity between particularism and universalism observed by Sakai.58 Universalism depends on organising the world into a number of particularities that are then subjected to the central universalism.59 When human rights discourse claims universality: The moment of otherness is deliberately transformed in order to maintain its putative centrality as the initiator of the universal and the commensurability of universal and particular values. This no doubt amounts to the annihilation of the other in its otherness.60 So universalism certainly excludes otherness, but it is would also be exclusive even if the world were completely ‘Western’ and liberal. Universalism is inherently exclusive; thus ‘human rights discourse speaks of the universal in a mode that is always less and other than universal’.61 That is, it can achieve, or strive to achieve, an extensive universality – that of disseminating its discourse around the world – but it cannot implement the consequences of an intensive universality. It can integrate into a set of global class relations but it cannot implement

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a set of egalitarian relations that would be required by the hyperbolic statement. Moreover, these relations remain gendered and racialised in a way that belies the ostensibly egalitarian and culturally neutral content of universal rights. The only right that applies truly to everyone, even the excluded, is what Arendt has called the right to have rights, that is, to belong to humanity.62 The right to have rights is not conditional on anything. For this reason Hamacher has argued that it is not a right at all – it does not depend on any definition of humanity to be acknowledged, since the consequence of its realisation is the incorporation into the sphere of the human.63 The right to have rights consists in the claiming of the ability to be connected to others; it does not consist in a judgement on whether such a connection exists.64 This relates to Lyotard’s idea of the right to interlocution as the human right. For Lyotard, the human community is defined not by species belonging, but by interlocution, by being a speech community – functioning by signs rather than by bodily signals as with animals.65 The human ‘we’ results from interlocution and interlocution depends on the existence of an Other. These signs, these human sentences, are always addressed to an Other either implicitly or explicitly. The Other remains present to each human as possible interlocutor, what thus makes human beings alike is that they carry within them the figure of the Other.66 The distinguishing characteristic of interlocution is the relation of simultaneous similarity and disparity introduced between the speakers; they are in conversation, but as one talks the other must be silent.67 If one addresses a human they are immediately given the status of interlocutor, themselves capable of addressing the first speaker. If any human can be an interlocutor then every human must be able to do so – that is, have a right to take part in the conversation – for someone who does not speak remains outside the human community.68 Strictly speaking, though, this is not a right but merely a capacity. In order to have an authoritative right there must be a duty, and this is the duty to take part in interlocution. Interlocutory capacity changes into a right to speak only if the speech can say something other than the already said. Thus for Lyotard the right to speak is connected with a duty to announce something new (there is a certain parallel here with the idea of active citizenship).69 Thus the right to have rights only becomes meaningful when one tries to actualise it and become part of humanity.

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Before that it is meaningless, apart from keeping open the option of future meaning. However, if the only truly universal human right consists in the right to have claims to humanity, then a human being only has rights in so far as he or she is other than a human being.70 It further follows that those who have not actualised this right – that is, those whose ‘human rights’ (in the common definition) are not being honoured – are outside the sphere of humanity. Which brings us back to the fact that human rights with substantive content, as we usually encounter them, are connected more to civic rights than to humanity as such, and are thus connected to the nationstate. The universal character of human rights is made precisely the responsibility of sovereign states, not of universal humanity – human rights depend on national rights, it is the state that turns norms into law, and it is the state that restores rights.71 Locating human rights in the nation-state also serves to mark out certain actions as human rights abuses while others are not. Thus if human suffering is incurred though outside intervention, the principle of sovereignty can allow responsibility to be cast off onto the national government of the country in which the suffering is occurring.72 However, this transfer of authority to national governments also means that they are able to define the standard of human rights within their own borders and mark themselves out as particular representatives of the idea of humanity.73 The limit of the ‘human’ within ‘human rights’ is thus deeply connected with the vesting of rights in nation-states. This is the mode in which the deployment of human rights serves to privilege certain cultural practices over others. The standard of human rights takes as its norm Euro-American societies. Implementing human rights culture thus results in emulating these. This is not because human rights are inherently Western conceptually, or because the history of the West is that of human rights, but rather because the sphere of the realisation of human rights is an international system that remains structured along global class lines, which are heavily influenced by colonial lines, where the former metropoles can still be identified as standard bearers. Human rights depend for their interpretation and application on the system of sovereign nation-states, with its global inequalities in power and wealth.74 As these power relations begin to change, human rights discourse becomes increasingly identifiable with trying to maintain the status quo, of cementing the inequalities, and protecting the privilege

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of those societies that posit themselves as the models of human rights culture. It is thus impossible to talk of human rights without at the same time talking of the liberal project and its immunising tendency. * Human rights discourses also have a great effect on shaping strategies of resistance and bearing grievance. The dissemination of human rights culture leads to the framing of all grievances in terms of rights claims. Advocating a politics of rights reinforces a tendency that underlies the spread of rights discourse throughout the world. In many ways, rights have become the only way of articulating strategies of resistance. However, such a dominance of a single vocabulary would seem a priori to exclude certain concerns and ways of dealing with them. It is part of the ideology of liberalism in which, according to Žižek: We ‘feel free’ because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom […] all the main terms we use to designate the present conflict […] are false terms, mystifying the perception of the situation instead of allowing us to think it.75 That is, the discourse of human rights only allows us to articulate certain kinds of problems in certain kinds of ways (no question of implicating global capital, for instance). But it is more than a simple illusion of freedom; as Rorty notes, it also provides the illusion that we can force those in power to do certain things, rather than being dependent on their whims.76 One should also remember that rights, while clearly having a political project, do define themselves as a kind of anti-politics and as such have a depoliticising effect.77 This brings to mind Max Frisch’s dictum: People that do not concern themselves with politics have already carried out the political positioning that they wish to avoid. They serve the ruling party.78 It is precisely as Žižek says: unfreedom in the guise of freedom, politics (of domination) in the guise of moving beyond politics. In providing a vocabulary in which to articulate grievance and resistance, liberalism in

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fact immunises itself against this very resistance. Resistance is channelled into acceptable forms. Any critique that goes beyond these acceptable forms can simply not be articulated. If we think of this in terms of multiculturalism we can easily see the immunitary operation at work. As long as multicultural demands are articulated within the framework of rights (even if group-differentiated), the kinds of demands that can be articulated are limited. Liberalism in fact immunises itself against the demands of minorities by dictating the way demands can be formulated. Rights can in fact contribute to domination. While rights discourse does provide a means of protection in the face of capitalist transformation with its individualising tendencies, legal rights culture also facilitates such capitalist transformation.79 Human rights culture conceives of itself as a form of individual empowerment, but as such the only form of empowerment it conceives is a liberal individualist one.80 There is an equation of empowerment with negative liberty; as such its anti-political stance seeks to make its subjects free of all collective determination of ends.81 What this ignores, of course, is that, rather than being empowering, negative liberty can leave one alone and powerless: ‘Human rights culture’ therefore is not simply a persuasive and reasoned language that comes down from a transcendent sphere to protect and redeem individuals. It articulates inequalities in social life everywhere and at all times.82 As Wendy Brown notes, rights are not simply attached to subjects but are part of their production and regulation; they are an aspect of governmentality.83 Moreover, the subjects produced by human rights work are not autonomous reflexive subjects, but rather subjected subjects being equipped only with a kind of technical proficiency.84 Rights enact power through an individualising operation. This is not to say that they cannot also act as protection against certain uses of power – they clearly can. However, in so far as modern human rights are designed as an individual shield against power, their use as a vehicle for popular governance is problematic.85 Rights discourse reduces culture to a mere set of individualised options.86 This makes it highly problematic as a model for a multiculturalism that deserves that name – but it is also precisely the reason why it is such an attractive model for the liberal multiculturalists.

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However, rather than seeing the rights discourse model as a problem, liberal multiculturalists embrace it. International human rights standards provide the framework within which to negotiate conflicts and to provide a set of minimum guarantees. Kymlicka posits that groups essentially do not disagree with the core values of society, but only with the institutions they are subject to. That is, they agree with the principles of human rights but not with the institutions that enforce them.87 Disagreements between groups can then be solved by creating new institutions to enforce the same values and standards.88 Kymlicka reinforces the idea of rights as the language in which to solve disagreements. When rights claims conflict, these conflicts are meant to be resolved within a shared conception of collective well-being. That is, while civic rights are group-differentiated, there is a shared agreement on universal human rights, on the grounds of which an agreement can be reached. Essentially, the shared values embodied in human rights culture are meant to provide for what we more traditionally might call responsibility. However, while it is often claimed that human rights balance rights and responsibilities, responsibilities are in fact most notable by their absence in most human rights declarations.89 The idea that human rights provide a frame within which to balance one right against another is problematic, since the logic of human rights prevents precisely that. Once one is in the discourse of rights there is no question of giving up a right, especially when this right is part of our very humanity (although it is of course true that in practice rights are played off against another). Rights entrench positions (no question of allowing a right to be breached), and do not allow space for productive conflict (the reconciling of rights claims can only lead to one being obliterated, not to mixture or compromise).90 And thus, when a group has had its rights ignored (on the count of responsibility), they breed resentment, as it is now a matter of being denied what one is entitled to. Rights are characterised by their great flexibility of content, which is no doubt one of the reasons for their ubiquity and also why such a wide array of groups feel inclined to deploy them. While rights are fuelled by universalist claims (however flimsy), these claims to universality themselves do not provide any content to the rights.91 This emptiness and flexibility of rights has proved to be a historical advantage in their deployment as part of the liberal project.92 However, there is a certain problematic in the open-endedness of rights, as the content, claimant

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and addressee of rights can on principle be extended endlessly, leading to such a proliferation of rights that they start to lose their meaning.93 This can in the final effect lead to such abstruse claims as ‘the work of a human right is that it is held by each individual against the whole world’.94 This really leads to the issue of who can guarantee such rights, which leads us back to the state, back to the liberal project, and to intervention. That is to say, although rights are endlessly flexible, ‘the general thrust is the same: first, to delegitimise existing practices. […] Second, to sanction new practices that gradually corrode or dissolve obstacles to the liberal project.’95 In practice, rights discourse appears always to be structured along liberal lines. This is not to say that rights can never be used for purposes of resistance. As Foucault notes, power always works both ways.96 However, in their current deployment they are certainly an aid to the liberal project. We can trace the rise of rights discourse to the need for a new language of global management in the face of the devolving of sovereignty to more and more entities.97 Jean Luc-Nancy also notes the importance of human rights for the sovereignty of international law in establishing the legitimacy of decisions on a global scale. Human rights allow a country to take leave from its neutrality and designate as an enemy, and act against, governments that are deemed to be a danger to the good of all peoples.98 All this is not to say that human rights cannot also work as a strategy to aid the excluded, to better the position of immigrant communities in the UK. It is to say that when this happens it is not because of any inherently liberatory nature of human rights, and that, on the contrary, there are great dangers of liberal co-option and backhanded exclusion in employing legalistic rights discourse in struggle. The configuration of rights discourse means that it is a liberal tool that can sometimes be latched onto, recoded in ways that go beyond liberalism, but one should be sceptical as to how far one can go down this path. Rights discourse as it exists today is almost completely overdetermined by its immunitary function for liberalism. As such it appears to be lacking as a major component of a theory to accommodate difference. Any hope of political subjecthood that it promises to Other subjects is likely to be turned into a subjecting movement that either excludes them from the sphere of citizenship, or includes them at the cost of any substantive difference.

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CONCLUSION This chapter has had several aims. I hope to have shown that the notion of rights acts as a process of immunisation for liberalism, and that it does so in the form both of civic rights and of human rights. In fact, there is good cause for arguing that human rights can only usefully be thought of in relation to their connection with civic rights. Discourses both of civic rights and of human rights are marked by certain exclusions, even as they aim to include. Moreover, they press languages of resistance into the form of rights claims. These are the two axes on which liberalism immunises itself against the Other through the use of rights discourse. These modes of immunisation are replicated in liberal multiculturalism in so far as it relies on a notion of group-differentiated civic rights and counts universal human rights both as part of its core values and as a successful model for the dissemination of a concept. However, in so far as these immunitary processes exclude Other subjects from access to the full subjecthood promised by citizenship, and leave them subjected instead, this is a dehumanising move against those excluded. Those immigrant subjects that are not included in the liberal polity in the process of immunisation are left subjected and in a way outside of the human community. However, this is not the only way in which liberalism stunts the subjectification of Others. In the next chapter, I will turn to issues of consensus and dialogue in liberal multiculturalism and argue that here too we have an instance of liberalism’s immunising tendencies preventing proper political subjecthood from forming. NOTES 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116.

Kymlicka, Multicultural Odysseys, p. 85. Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, pp. 176–8. Ibid., p. 181. Taylor, ‘The Politics of Recognition’, pp. 37–9. Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, p. 174. Balibar addresses the issue of the subject in several essays, but the line of inquiry is originally prompted by Jean-Luc Nancy’s question ‘who comes after the subject?’ in Cadava et al. (eds), Who Comes After the Subject? 117. Balibar, ‘Subjection and Subjectivation’, p. 5. 118. For both views in one see Heidegger, Nietzsche Seminare 1937 und 1944. 119. Balibar, ‘Citizen Subject’, pp. 35–6.

86 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125.

126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137. 138. 139. 140. 141. 142. 143. 144. 145. 146. 147.

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Ibid., pp. 34–6. Ibid., p. 36. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 630–4. Kant, Logic. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 658. This and the following quotation are from Balibar, ‘Subjection and Subjectivation’, p. 6, emphasis in original. Ibid., p. 8. Balibar, ‘Citizen Subject’, p. 38. Balibar, ‘Subjection and Subjectivation’, p. 9. Ibid., p. 10. Balibar, ‘Citizen Subject’, p. 41. Ibid., p. 44. Ibid., p. 46. Ibid. Ibid., p. 47. Aristotle, The Politics, pp. 286–7. A very different value is also applied to activity, with the best democracy being one based on an agrarian society where the people are busy and rarely attend the assembly (p. 368). Balibar, ‘Citizen Subject’, p. 49. Ibid., pp. 49–50. Ibid., p 50. Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, p. 124. Balibar, ‘Citizen Subject’, p. 51. Balibar, Politics and the Other Scene, p. 107. Balibar, ‘Citizen Subject’, p. 51. Ibid., p. 39. Balibar, ‘Subjection and Subjectivation’, p. 11. Ibid., p. 12. Balibar, ‘Citizen Subject’, p. 38. Ibid., p. 55. For an account that focuses in particular on the class and race issues see Balibar and Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class. Sala-Molins, Dark Side of the Light. Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, p. 99. Balibar, ‘Subjection and Subjectivation’, p. 12. Balibar, ‘Citizen Subject’, p. 39. Kymlicka, Multicultural Odysseys, p. 89. Spivak, ‘Righting Wrongs’, p. 530. Kymlicka, Multicultural Odysseys, pp. 99, 160. Asad, ‘What Do Human Rights Do?’, § 12. Balfour and Cadava, ‘The Claims of Human Rights’, p. 279.

Liberal Multiculturalism and Rights 148. 149. 150. 151. 152. 153. 154. 155. 156. 157. 158. 159. 160. 161. 162. 163. 164. 165. 166. 167. 168. 169. 170. 171. 172. 173. 174. 175. 176. 177. 178. 179. 180. 181. 182. 183. 184. 185. 186. 187. 188.

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Rorty, Truth and Progress, p. 168. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 198. Bacon, ‘Liberal Universalism: on Brian Barry and Richard Rorty’. Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity, p. 165. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 299. Hamacher, ‘The Right to Have Rights’, p. 350. Ibid., p. 350. Balibar, ‘Is a Philosophy of Human Civic Rights Possible?’, p. 312. Ibid., p. 313. Ibid., p. 314. Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity, p. 163. Ibid., p. 169. Ibid., p. 165. Balfour and Cadava, ‘The Claims of Human Rights’, p. 282. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 298. Hamacher, ‘The Right to Have Rights’, p. 353. Ibid., p. 355. Lyotard, ‘The Other’s Rights’, pp. 136–8. Ibid., p. 136. Ibid., pp. 137–8. Ibid., pp. 140–1. Ibid., pp. 141–3. Ibid., p 136. Asad, ‘What Do Human Rights Do?’, § 11, 13. Ibid., § 9; this is also why Western countries are less often identified with human rights abuses, the starting point of Asad’s inquiry. Hamacher, ‘The Right to Have Rights’, p. 350. Asad, ‘What Do Human Rights Do?’, § 50. Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, p. 2. Rorty, Truth and Progress, pp. 181–2. Brown, ‘The Most We Can Hope For’, p. 453. Frisch, Tagebuch 1946–1949, p. 290, my translation. Asad, ‘What Do Human Rights Do?’, § 43. Brown, ‘The Most We Can Hope For’, p. 455. Ibid., p. 456. Asad, ‘What Do Human Rights Do?’, § 43. Brown, ‘The Most We Can Hope For’, p. 459. Spivak, ‘Righting Wrongs’, p. 527. Brown, ‘The Most We Can Hope For’, p. 461. Young, ‘Rights as Discourse and Practice’, p. 32. Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, p. 40. Ibid., p. 169.

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189. Young, ‘Rights as Discourse and Practice’, pp. 24–5. 190. See for instance John Gray’s notion of agonistic liberalism, which is developed in reaction precisely to the incommensurable nature of rights, and against liberal legalism in Enlightenment’s Wake, especially Chapter 5. See also Slavoj Žižek’s formulation that every human right can be used to justify a violation of the ten commandments, and that it is structurally impossible to prevent only the misuse, Žižek, ‘From Politics to Biopolitics … and Back’. 191. Young, ‘Rights as Discourse and Practice’, pp. 29–30. 192. Ibid., p. 30. 193. Ibid., p. 33. 194. Waldron, Liberal Rights, p. 23. 195. Young, ‘Rights as Discourse and Practice’, p. 36. 196. Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An introduction, p. 101. 197. Young, ‘Rights as Discourse and Practice’, p. 36. 198. Nancy, Being Singular Plural, pp. 123–4.

Chapter 5 DISAGREEMENT AND THE HORIZONS OF CONSENSUS

In this chapter, I will be looking at issues surrounding dialogue and consensus in liberal theories of multiculturalism and arguing that in the liberal approach these act as processes of immunisation. Models based on dialogue and consensus (whether overlapping or otherwise) take on an important role in many theories of liberal multiculturalism, as they offer a way of moving beyond state neutrality and narrow proceduralism – approaches that are generally viewed critically by liberal multiculturalists. However, the models of dialogue and consensus building that step into their place bring problems of their own and also reproduce some of the problems associated with proceduralism and neutrality in a backhanded way. So I will be looking here primarily at consensus, but even as I analyse how consensus operates, the figure of the subject that I looked at previously will continue to exert its hauntological presence. Similarly, the term ‘core values’ will already start to appear, foreshadowing what I will be dealing with in the next chapter. I will start by looking at how liberal theories of multiculturalism figure consensus into their working, in particular as they advance a certain kind of dialogical model. As I have stated before, I will be focusing here on the work of Bhikhu Parekh. I should reiterate that, as with Chapters 4 and 6, this is not because it is only in Parekh that consensus is important, nor because it is only consensus that is important in Parekh. Rather, it is because we can find in Parekh a very good illustration of the kind of work that ideas of consensus perform in liberal theories of multiculturalism. I will begin, then, by outlining how consensus figures in Parekh’s theory. I will then turn to Jacques Rancière’s critique of consensual politics. Rancière places great value on dissensus and dispute, which he sees as the basis for the assertion of subjectivity – I will be looking at how this process of subjectivisation operates. In the 89

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course of doing this I will also be using this perspective to show how consensus functions as a process of immunisation. I will conclude by looking at the liberal claim that theories of multiculturalism strive towards a fusion of horizons. Parekh claims to be aspiring to a Gadamerian fusion of horizons. I will argue that rather than aiming for a real engagement and fusion in Gadamer’s ideal, liberal multiculturalism merely produces a kind of hyper-consensus that is marred by the same problems that will already have been outlined. The processes of deliberation and consensus building that liberal multiculturalism advocates turn out to be an immunitary mechanism that stands as a bulwark against any substantive intrusion of difference into liberalism. LIBERAL MODELS OF CONSENSUS Several liberal theories of multiculturalism use some kind of speech community model to focus on developing a consensus from which political values emerge. Of the three thinkers I am looking at, Bhikhu Parekh is perhaps the best example of this. Parekh suggests a dialogical theory, which he relates to both Habermas and Gadamer. It is Habermasian in so far as it posits a certain kind of communicative action as the model by which to construct the polity, and Gadamerian in so far as it envisages a certain kind of fusion of horizons.1 It is a theory of institutionalised dialogue rather than one that follows the idea of locating oneself in a transcendental realm and then deliberating about social justice (as one would find in Rawls). Parekh finds all the existing models of political integration lacking, precisely because they do not establish a satisfactory relationship between unity and diversity. It is thus essential to forge such a relationship – and this is done by dialogue. Parekh’s dialogical model stresses consensus and common culture, which take on paramount importance in forging the relationship between unity and diversity.2 Thus, a common culture [f]orms the basis of a shared way of life and underpins and gives the state moral and emotional roots. […] The multiculturally constituted common culture fosters a common sense of belonging among citizens and provides a shared language and body of overlapping values […] it cherishes and cultivates, through educational and other institutions an appropriate body of intellectual and moral

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virtues necessary to sustain a multicultural society. […] In such a society unity and diversity are not confined to public and private realms respectively, but interpenetrate and permeate all areas of life. Its unity therefore is not formal and abstract but embedded in and nurtured by its diversity.3 Such a shared culture grows out of the interaction of the various cultures within it and unites them around a common way of life. This common culture then forms the basis of interactions between the various, themselves hybrid, cultures. Moreover, this call for common culture is a call to all groups within society; it is expressly not an assimilationist call. That is, it is about integration, but integration by everybody, not just by minorities. To this end, Parekh states: ‘we’ cannot integrate ‘them’ so long as ‘we’ remain ‘we’; ‘we’ must be loosened up to create a new common space in which ‘they’ can be accommodated and become part of a newly reconstituted ‘we’.4 What emerges together with, and shapes, common culture is a consensually agreed on constitution that lays down the ground rules of society. The stress here is explicitly on consensus; Parekh’s ideal of a constitution should precisely not be derived from abstract principles of fairness.5 The job of the constitution for Parekh is the laying down of basic principles of the structure of authority – it creates a common ethical life and a body of common principles that shape policies and political discourse. Parekh stresses that the common culture does not remain fixed, that it does not constitute a place of complete agreement, only a space that different cultures can identify with to some extent. The multicultural common culture requires cultural mixing in both the public and the private realm (a distinction that is never questioned by Parekh). Parekh also stresses that the development of such a common culture cannot be officially engineered, However, a laissez-faire approach does not favour its emergence either. In his ideal, then, the state should not directly intervene in intercultural interaction but rather ensure the equality of the conditions of interaction. In situations in which there is a dispute between a cultural community and a state institution Parekh advocates an approach broadly termed ‘consensus through intercultural deliberation’.6 This involves a dialogue

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between different groups, shows respect for minority viewpoints, involves people in the decisions that affect them and deepens the understanding between communities. This approach requires certain rules, and a shared commitment to these rules as well as respect for certain values such as compromise, tolerance, respect for individual dignity, and deliberative decision-making – that is, both procedural and substantive shared values. This is notable because most liberal theories valuing difference would advocate only the sharing of some procedural values since the others could not be agreed on. This is of course where the ostensibly Gadamerian aspect of the theory comes in, that this is meant to be a fusion of horizons rather than a mere coexistence. I will return to this particular aspect later. So, Parekh’s model is one of an institutionalised dialogue where there may be disagreement on some things, but where there is consensus on how to handle these disagreements and also a consensus on certain core values that act as the glue for a continuing commitment to agree on procedures.‘When there are legitimate disputes, and there are bound to be many, they should be resolved by a consensus based on discussion, conducted in a spirit of charity and goodwill.’7 Thus a dialogically constituted multicultural society is held together by a strong notion of the common good.8 Multicultural society is, then, held together by a strong commitment to the political community. But what does this required sharing of substantial values lead to, other than the typical operation of allowing only certain cultural practices? The key sentence is that ‘subject to the constraints of these values, different individuals and communities should be free to lead their self-chosen lives’.9 Depending on how these values are conceptualised, these constraints may be all too constraining (this is a theme that I will return to in detail in the next chapter on recognition). This does not mean, of course, that I am advocating here the return to some bland, ostensibly neutral proceduralism, but it does hint at certain limitations in consensus that need to be overcome, and a possible path here is provided by models of dissensus, to which I will turn shortly. Parekh states that a multicultural society is both dialogically constituted and geared towards keeping the dialogue going.10 However, what he ignores is that this process takes place under certain conditions which mean that it is not open-ended, and that it preferences certain outcomes. Parekh presents this kind of consensus as unproblematic, so in order to

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identify the ways in which it is problematic I will be turning to Jacques Rancière’s critique of consensus. Rancière analyses the way in which consensus shuts down politics and constrains political subjectivisation (and in this way I will also be picking up some of the threads from the previous chapter). The towering figure of consensus ignores the fact that the practice of the political realm necessarily means that there will be disagreement, but that now this disagreement is rendered invisible by the consensus regime. The liberal consensus regime operates as a process of immunisation that incorporates the Other into liberalism. But while dialogue incorporates other subjects into the body of liberalism, the process of dialogue obliterates their differences. Liberalism is strengthened, but it does not in fact become more inclusive of other subjects. THE CRITIQUE OF CONSENSUS The concept of consensus is fraught with problems. Jacques Rancière asserts that consensus is a particular distribution of the sensible that reduces politics to the order of the police. (Rancière has a very specific definition of this term, to which we will turn shortly.) Consensus is a strategy of denying political subjectivity through the proposition that every part of the population can be accounted for in its specificity and incorporated into the political order. It thus ignores the part of no part and shuts down the productive arena of dissensus; it is through the staging of dissensus that political subjectivity is asserted, in a process that confronts the established framework of perception. For Rancière, democracy and consensus are a contradiction in terms. He conceives of ‘postdemocracy’ as a more appropriate term for today’s liberal democracy.11 The hallmark of this post-democracy is that under its regime, ‘A good democratic government is one capable of controlling the evil quite simply called democratic life’.12 Consensus is essential to this operation. It is that practice which under the name of democracy effaces the forms of democratic action.13 It is a democracy that has eliminated dispute and reduces everything to the interplay of state institutions and interests: According to the reigning idyll, consensus democracy is a reasonable agreement between individuals and social groups who have understood that knowing what is possible and negotiating

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between partners are a way for each party to obtain the optimal share that the objective givens of the situation allow them to hope for and which is preferable to conflict.14 However, this presupposes that the parties doing the negotiating are given, that the ways in which they obtain their share are given, and that what the share consists of is given. Thus: Consensus is a certain regime of the perceptible: the regime in which the parties are presupposed as already given, their community established and the count of their speech identical to their linguistic performance. What consensus thus presupposes is the disappearance of any gap between a party to a dispute and a part of society. […] It is, in a word, the disappearance of politics. Under the system of post-democracy any dispute or dissensus gets transferred into a problem.15 Moreover, this is done under the guise of ‘really doing politics’. Thus dispute is moved from the arena of political struggle to that of technocratic governance. ‘This is supposed to lead to the formation of opinion in the sense of a solution that imposes itself as the most reasonable, that is, absolutely the only one objectively possible.’16 This relies on a certain measurement of opinion that has evolved as demoscopy, which has become a mainstay of the media. The advent of the science of opinion brings with it that: The equality of anyone and everyone becomes identical to the total distribution of the people into its parts and subparts. The effectiveness of the sovereign people is exercised as strictly identical to the calculations of a science of the population’s opinions.17 The science of opinion does not only have opinions as its object – it creates its object, thus: It is a science immediately accomplished as opinion, a science that has no meaning except in terms of this process of specularization where an opinion sees itself in the mirror held up by science to reveal to it its identity with itself.18

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That is, the consensus regime determines what the consensus is not so much in the sense of assessing it, but in the sense of creating it. Liberal discourse posits what is reasonable and agreed on by all – and these opinions introject themselves into the populace. This does not mean that everyone in fact agrees with these opinions, but that what is manufactured is the very idea that this is a universally shared consensus. Consensus relies on the illusion that it incorporates everyone, that no one is left outside. Thus: ‘The so-called consensus system is the conjunction of a determined regime of opinion and a determined regime of right, both posited as regimes of the community’s identification with itself, with nothing left over.’19 Consensus is a way of creating the impression that nothing and no one is excluded. * Before proceeding any further, I need to explain two terms in Rancière’s thought: ‘distribution of the sensible’ and ‘police’. These terms are essential for understanding Rancière’s critique. I will start with what is meant by the distribution of the sensible (le partage du sensible). When Rancière refers to the distribution of the sensible, he refers to the implicit laws that govern the modes of perception within a society. ‘Sensible’ refers here not to that which makes sense but to that which is perceptible. This distribution produces a set of self-evident facts that delineate the way the world is thought about (in that sense it does have the effect of delimiting what makes sense).‘A distribution of the sensible therefore establishes at one and the same time something common that is shared and exclusive parts.’20 Thus, space, time and forms of activity are distributed in a way that determines the common and the way in which people relate to it. The distribution refers both to what is included and to what is excluded. Partition has to be understood both as what separates and what includes, but also as what allows participation.21 The distribution of the sensible is what provides the space in which possibilities take place.22 It establishes a set of horizons and determines what can be thought, said, made, or done. The order of the police, then, refers to a particular kind of distribution of the sensible. It is a symbolic constitution of the social whose essence lies in a certain way of dividing up the sensible.23 It is a mode of the distribution of the sensible that does not recognise lack or supplement

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– under this distribution society is totally made up of groups occupying determined spaces and performing specific actions.24 The order of the police is a distribution that prevents the emergence of politics (which would consist of such a supplementation). It is an order that is fully saturated. For Rancière, it is the effect of consensus to reduce politics to the order of the police. However, the distinction between politics and the police should not be seen as an exclusivist opposition. Rather, it takes effect in a reality that always retains a part of indistinction. It is a way of thinking through the mixture. There is no world of pure politics that exists apart from a world of mixture. There is one distribution and a redistribution.’25 That is, these orders need to be seen as different distributions of the sensible rather than as separate worlds. In a response to critics who charge him with isolating politics through the politics/police distinction, Rancière argues that, in so far as he does, this it is simply in order to separate it from attempts to see politics as the direct effectuation of a single principle of community.26 Thus in his article ‘Ten Theses on Politics’ Rancière argues against Arendt’s notion of the political life that marks an opposition to the social.27 For Rancière, the marking off of a specific realm for political acts is what constitutes the order of the police. In this order, politics is done only by those destined to do politics. Thus the aim of the politics/police distinction is that it ‘puts into question every principle that marks out positive spheres and ways of being’.28 * So consensus, before being the virtuous act of reasonable individuals discussing their problems, is a particular regime of the sensible. It is a ‘particular mode of visibility of right as arkhe of the community. Before problems can be settled by well-behaved social partners, the rule of conduct of the dispute has to be settled, as a specific structure of community.’29 This is precisely what the liberal models of multiculturalism fail to see. The rules of conduct required by a liberal multicultural polity, in order to arrive at a consensus, entail from the very outset a specific structuring of the community. Such a structuring goes beyond simple

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procedural issues; it is a structure that entails from the outset certain exclusions (that are then obfuscated) and that closes down the political realm. This closing down of the political that removes people from their political subjecthood in the very movement of their inclusion in the democratic consensus is, for Rancière, connected with the changing figure of the proletariat. In antiquity, ‘proletarii’ referred to those who do nothing but reproduce their own multiplicity, and as such they were not counted. In modernity, this figure became a political subject and the uncounted suddenly became counted in an operation that distanced productive and reproductive bodies from themselves. Over time, this figure was transformed into an ultra-political subject. However, under the consensual post-democratic regime the term ‘the proletariat’ is eradicated, and the community is sent back on itself: pre-democratic and pre-political (this will become important again shortly, when we turn towards immigrants).30 This factor of the counted and the uncounted is important. Consensus implies that everyone is counted – that everyone is included. However, this amounts to the prohibition of the subjectification of those who are not represented by the consensus – of the part of no part, the count of the uncounted: Exclusion is no longer subjectified in this continuum, is no longer included in it. Beyond an invisible, unsubjectifiable line, you are simply out of the picture and from then on you are countable only in the aggregate of those present.31 Consensus can never incorporate all, However, with the arena of political dispute closed, the part of no part can no longer express its dissent from the reigning distribution of the sensible. Thus their subjecthood is impaired and they become excluded. While consensus is carried out under the name of including everyone, this ‘“fight against exclusion” is also the paradoxical conceptual place where exclusion emerges as just another name for consensus’.32 Consensus closes down dissent, and those not in accord with it are simply excluded from the social rather than included as dissenting elements. Thus consensus moves political disagreement out of the realm of the political into the realm of technical problems to be solved. Consensual

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politics allows for a model of the ‘small’ state. However, in this process of the ‘shrinking’ of the state, ‘what it tends to make disappear by becoming so modest is certainly less its own apparatus than the political stage for exposing and processing conflict.’33 What is removed is not in fact the power of the state but the power of the people. Under the consensus-regime, the state seems finally to have heeded Brecht’s call that it elect another people.34 For: The ideal of an appropriateness between the managerial state and the legitimate state is affirmed through the removal of the demos and of the forms of dispute associated with its name and its various figures.35 In this guise it becomes possible to further the reign of exploitation under the name of equality. The only kind of equality that remains is the ‘equal exchange’ of market services, the only freedom is that of ‘free’ labourers. Rancière is simply bringing an old Marxist insight into the present era of liberal democracy and its consensus regime. Marx observed that democratic freedom is reduced to free labour.36 Rancière says: ‘Marx’s text, revised and corrected, says in a word: the equality of human rights expresses the “equality” of the relations of exploitation, which is tantamount to accomplishing the ideals of which democratic man dreams.’37 The ‘democratic’ man refers in this instance to the postdemocratic man of liberal democracy. In this sense, consensus disempowers the demos. This also has consequences for the relation of the consensual post-democratic order to the Other: Democratic government […] is bad when it is allowed to be corrupted by democratic society, which wants for everyone to be equal and for all differences to be respected. It is good, on the other hand, when it rallies individuals enfeebled by democratic society to the vitality of war in order to defend the values of civilization, the values pertaining to the clash of civilizations. The thesis of the new hatred of democracy can be succinctly put: there is only one good democracy, the one that represses the catastrophe of democratic civilization.38

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Or put differently, democracy is good when it exacts the humble obedience of individuals for the purposes of the post-democratic state, whose interests are determined by global capital and entail a spreading of the post-democratic regime into areas where different distributions of the sensible still reign. Consensus is not a state of peaceful convergence in which all persons are included in a mutual worship of how little difference there is between them. Rather: New forms of racism and ethnic cleansing, ‘humanitarian’ wars and ‘wars against terror’ are at the core of the consensual times. […] Consensus is not peace. It is a map of war operations, a topography of the visible, the thinkable and the possible in which war and peace are lodged.39 Consensus is the expression of a fighting creed under the image of a peaceful deliberation concerned with the well-being of all parts. However, this means that consensus is highly concerned with appearances. The consensual regime must at all times retain the impression that it incorporates everyone: Consensus, therefore, is the machine of vision and interpretation that must ceaselessly set appearances right, put war and peace back in their place. Its principle aims to be simple. War, says the machine, takes place elsewhere and in the past: in countries that are still subjugated to the obscure law of blood and soil, in the archaic tensions of those who cling to yesterday’s struggles and obsolete privileges. But because ‘the elsewhere’ avers that it is ‘here’ and the ‘past’ that it is ‘today’, the consensual machine must continually redraw the borders between spaces and the ruptures of time.40 Consensus is not a static order. It is the constant process of obscuring the operation of the post-democratic regime in the guise of being the constant process of pleasing everyone. It is a distribution of the sensible that reinforces the post-democratic regime, for it asserts that there are no alternatives. Consensus is thus closely linked with the end of utopia, with the feeling that what there is is all there is, and that more cannot be struggled for. It projects the image that there is nothing more to be

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attained, so that all that is left to do is for individuals to better their lot by being incorporated into the consensual order. * The shift of the meaning of the term ‘proletariat’ mentioned earlier becomes important here. For it has a great effect on the conceptualisation of the immigrant worker, and it is in relation to the immigrant that we can observe the way consensus copes with otherness and works as a mode of immunisation. Consensus points the finger at the otherness of the foreigner. It is within a particular distribution of the sensible that one can talk about the undesirability of immigrants in terms of their allegedly too-high number. This undesirability is not a self-evident fact: Clearly, the cutoff point of undesirability is not a matter of statistics. […] Today’s immigrant is first a worker who has lost his second name, who has lost the political form of his identity and of his otherness, the form of a political subjectification of the count of the uncounted. All he now has left is a sociological identity, which then topples over into the anthropological nakedness of a different race and skin. 41 Thus, he or she has lost his/her identification with a mode of subjectification which is that of the people or proletariat – both a subject of a wrong and a subject giving form to a dispute about that wrong (I will be talking more about this form of dissensus shortly). With the loss of this proletarian identification with a mode of subjectification that operates by adding ever more subjects, the immigrant is moved into a different sphere and is suddenly constituted as the excess, the too many, and becomes the phobia of the community. Thus, ‘the wiping out of these political modes of appearance and subjectification of the dispute results in the abrupt reappearance in the real of an otherness that can no longer be symbolised’.42 And what was once the figure of the worker is now split into two figures, that of the immigrant and that of the white working-class racist. While the figure of the white working class then remains within the liberal consensus, the immigrant excess becomes the subject of an immunitarian paradigm. Not only is the political subjectification of the

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other cut off, but it also constitutes a threat that the internal remainder of the figure of the worker needs to be protected against. Moreover, rather than workers, we now have the white working class, and foreign labour that is perceived to threaten the livelihood of the white working class, as well as its cultural norms. That this threat to the livelihood of the white worker (taking away jobs, blocking up council housing waiting lists) is largely not grounded in reality is a secondary matter. As with the threshold of when the amount of immigration becomes ‘too high’ the impression is not grounded in empirical fact, but in the consensus operation that categorises one subject as part of the liberal consensus and one as part of the external excess. The immigrant is no longer perceived as a worker or as a fellow subject, but only as an external threat. At the same time as consensus produces the immigrant as a figure of fear for the community, it also offers solutions to immunise against the problem of the immigrant. This is precisely where institutionalised dialogue of the kind that Parekh offers is meant to step in. However, these modes of solution are from the outset limited: Well-meaning consensus in vain offers its roundtables to discuss the problem of immigrants. Here as elsewhere the cure and the disease form a vicious circle. Postdemocratic objectification of the immigration ‘problem’ goes hand in hand with fixation on a radical otherness, an object of absolute, prepolitical hate.43 Thus, in the post-democratic regime the figure of the Other is at one and the same time exaggerated as the subject of a racist rejection and disappears in its otherness in the problematisation of immigration. The consensus operation leaves the Other in a position of naked visibility, exhibiting a difference that is intolerable in a situation of consensus. The issue of the ‘science of opinion’ becomes pertinent again. The act of breaking down the population into component parts and the demoscopic operation of calculating the opinions of these parts have grave effects on modes of identification in general and opinions about immigrants in particular: It is the exhaustive breakdown of the interminably polled population that produces, in place of the people declared archaic, this subject called ‘the French’, who turn up, […] in a few decidedly

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uncompromising opinions about the excessive number of foreigners and the inadequacy of the crackdown on them.44 These opinions are at once simulated and real; they can be the playing field on which people live out and realise their racist fantasies. In late capitalism, where we are told that everything is within reach, we have to purge whatever is preventing us from reaching our desires, and this figure is deemed to be the Other. The crackdown by the state follows on as a reaction to these ‘scientifically’ measured opinions, leading to the full force of the law being executed against the immigrant presence. The ‘crackdown’ consists both in harsh physical reactions to those wishing to enter and those deemed to be here illegally and in harsh prescriptions as to the duty of integration owed by those who are settled here within what is deemed legitimate: In dealing with the problem of immigrants, the law, of course, proposes to act for justice and peace. By defining rules of assimilation and exclusion […], it claims to be bringing the particular into the sphere of its universality. By separating good foreigners from undesirables, it is meant to be disarming racism, which feeds off lumping everyone together. The problem is that this distinction itself can only be made at the cost of putting a face to this indefinable Other who excites feelings of fear and rejection.45 That is, the designating of some foreigners as undesirables is meant to have as its effect that the other foreigners become acceptable. They can become fully productive members of the economy and society. The immunitary consensus mechanism can thus strengthen the liberal polity while at the same time acting against the foreign excess. Nonetheless, the operation against the ‘undesirables’ cannot but project the accrued racist sentiment onto all figures of otherness. That is, even the part included through immunity can still face (weaker) versions of the hostility that affects the part of no part: The new racism of advanced societies thus owes its singularity to being the point of intersection for all forms of the community’s

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identity with itself that go to define the consensus model […]. So it is only normal that the law should now round off this coherence, in other words, turn its unity into the mode of reflection of a community separating itself from its Other.46 We thus find in the rule of consensus a distribution of the sensible that is wholly hostile to otherness and difference. * Rancière’s critique of consensus differs from other critiques (such as those found in Lyotard,47 Negri48 or Agamben49) in that they give consensus the name of (liberal) democracy and oppose it to some kind of heterogeneity, whereas Rancière wants to reclaim the name of democracy for the heterogeneous and the dissensual.50 This move can lead to some conceptual confusion when reading Rancière, but there is a salient political point here – a democracy that lives up to its proposition must embody the heterogeneity and disagreements of the demos, and as such there is something to be said for reclaiming the name from the liberal consensus regime. Thus for Rancière, political subjects are defined by the way their subjectification reconfigures the common. (Subjecthood exists only when it is enacted. Rancière refuses to ontologise heterogeneity; there is difference, but the shape of this difference is not fixed.)51 Subjecthood, for Rancière, is not a state that is attained, it is a process of confronting and rupturing the reigning distribution of the sensible – it is held in the moment rather than permanently. In this sense, subjecthood is a becoming rather than a being. The form that this becoming takes is disagreement and dissensus. For Rancière, disagreement means a determined kind of speech situation in which the interlocutors at once do and do not understand what the other is saying. Thus: Disagreement is not the conflict between one who says white and another who says black. It is the conflict between one who says white and another who also says white but does not understand the same thing by it or does not understand that the other is saying the same thing in the name of whiteness.52

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However, this is not a case of mere misconstruction or misunderstanding. Rather, it is a case of the contention constituting the very rationality of the speech situation. This disagreement is for Rancière what constitutes the realm of politics – disagreement is the rationale of politics: The structures proper to disagreement are those in which discussion of an argument comes down to dispute over the object of the discussion and over the capacity of those who are making an object of it.53 Real democracy is thus not those processes that we see in the parliamentary system or in the legitimate state. Rather: Democracy is, in general, politics’ mode of subjectification if, by politics, we mean something other than the organization of bodies as a community and the management of places, powers and functions. Democracy is more precisely the name of a singular disruption of this order of distribution […]. It is the name of what comes and interrupts the smooth working of this order through a singular mechanism of subjectification.54 This process of subjectification takes the form of the staging of a dissensus. As I have said, subjecthood is for Rancière something that needs to be constantly asserted – dissensus is the form that this assertion takes. A dissensus is more than a mere difference or conflict of opinions, interests or values; it is a division of the ‘common sense’, a dispute about the given and about the frame that determines what we see as given.55 How is such a dissensus enacted? Rancière gives the examples of the suffragettes, agitating for the equal rights that should already have been given to them on the basis of the letter of the Universal Declaration. He sums their actions up in the statement ‘they acted as subjects that did not have the rights that they had and had the rights that they had not’.56 That is, those rights which they should have had anyway were absent. But their ability to protest about this acted to assert that they in fact had the rights that they were not supposed to have according to the letter of the law. Dissensus, then, is a confrontation of the order of the common

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sense, a taking of action that cannot but alter the distribution of the sensible by demonstrating the kind of action that according to the reigning distribution of the sensible should not exist at all. The consensus regime tries to shut down any chance of dissensus in order to safeguard the status quo of post-democratic society. This is precisely the operation of liberal theories of multiculturalism. They promote the idea of a consensus about procedure and core values, but in doing so they shut down the paths of subjectification for those who they are allegedly accommodating. Under liberal multiculturalism, cultural groups can at best remain tolerated, and always remain at the mercy of a state that protects them and sets down what kinds of differences are acceptable. For a true subjecthood to be attained, these groups would need to be able to stage disputes and dissensus of their own. A truly multicultural polity would consist of a productive play of disagreements. However, this possibility is shut down entirely by the liberal theories. FUSING OF HORIZONS To conclude this chapter I want to return to the issue of a ‘fusion of horizons’. Parekh states that this is where his dialogical model of consensus brings us to. If you will, his is a Habermasian method to arrive at a Gadamerian end-point. However, we should look closely at this; a true fusion of horizons entails more than simply arriving at a consensus. While liberal multiculturalism may utilise this philosophical term, it is perhaps more accurate to say that what is here termed a fusion of horizons is in fact a kind of hyper-consensus. Moreover, this drift into more abstract realms serves as a way of sidestepping the issue of the material conditions on which this fusion (which is perhaps merely an extreme consensus) takes place. It is these conditions that from the outset determine the outcome such a ‘fusion’ may have. The fact that Parekh sees international human rights standards as the outcome of such a moral dialogue on a global scale should perhaps be of concern here (considering some of the things outlined in the previous chapter). As I mentioned in passing before, there is from the outset something rather counter-intuitive about marrying Habermas and Gadamer in the way Parekh claims to do. This is especially so if we consider that a major point of disagreement between these thinkers is the role of tradition and

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the role of the theorist within it. For Gadamer, we are irretrievably steeped in our own tradition and biases, whereas Habermas sees critical theory as being able to help us step outside them (at least partially). Gadamer absolutises tradition in a way that is problematic for Habermas and that one would think Parekh would not be overly comfortable with either.57 There is also another issue to consider, which is the question of how far Gadamer’s theorising on how to approach historical texts can simply be transposed onto a process of different cultural groups approaching each other. I feel that Parekh is more than anything simply utilising the name ‘fusion of horizons’, using it to denote the reaching of some quasi-Archimedean standpoint. However, his theory lives up neither to what that name seems to promise nor to what Gadamer had in mind. Gadamer’s fusion of horizons does not really entail reaching such an ersatz-Archimedean standpoint. Gadamer’s hermeneutic method does have as its aim enabling the knowing subject to overcome its particular standpoint and achieve general results.58 But it is somewhat different from what Parekh has in mind. Gadamer states that when we comprehend a text, we project a meaning forward onto it the moment we begin to understand it. This understanding, however, only emerges because we approach the text from the very start with the expectation of a certain meaning. Everything that follows in our engagement with this text is the refining of this preconception.59 That is, it is in the very nature of trying to comprehend that we have to deal with preconceptions and prejudices. However, we cannot cling to these prejudices dogmatically; approaching the text thus entails a certain kind of openness to the meanings of the Other.60 This openness entails putting the meanings of the Other in a relation to one’s own. A hermeneutic consciousness needs to be receptive to the otherness of the text from the very start. Thus: ‘It is a matter of being aware of one’s own prejudices, so that the text will show itself in its Otherness and thus come to the opportunity of playing its factual truth off against one’s prejudices.’61 However, it is not a matter of simply getting rid of your biases. For Gadamer that is neither possible nor desirable. Rather, it is a way of overcoming the dominance of your own fore-meanings and gaining a sensitivity towards the alterity of the text: That is why the hermeneutically trained consciousness must be, from the start, sensitive to the text’s alterity. But this kind of alterity

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involves neither ‘neutrality’ with respect to content nor the extinction of one’s self, but the foregrounding and appropriation of one’s own fore-meanings and prejudices. The important thing is to be aware of one’s own bias, so that the text can present itself in all its otherness and thus assert its own truth against one’s own foremeanings.62 However, this is very different from consensus. It does not entail reaching any agreement, whether on core principles or on more than that. In fact, it is much closer to Rancière’s dissensus. It retains a certain idea of antagonism. Moreover, it also has nothing to do with institutionalised dialogue, or even any dialogue. It is not about mutual interaction so much as the individual theorist’s interaction with the text. In fact, Gadamer explicitly states that the fusion of horizons is not a conversation. In arriving at the idea of a fusion of horizons, Gadamer says: We must place ourselves in the other situation in order to understand it. […] This is not a true conversation – that is, we are not seeking agreement on some subject – because the specific contents of the conversation are only a means to get to know the horizon of the other person.63 This may seem helpful to Parekh in the sense that he does assert that there will not be full-scale agreement; however, he does want agreement on certain core principles. The fusion of horizons leads more to understanding than to agreement. In Gadamer’s conversation the Other becomes intelligible, but that does not mean we are in agreement with it. It is about widening your own horizon through an engagement with text, rather than about two horizons becoming one. In fact, Gadamer asserts that in this process of fusion we are making our own standpoint unattainable.64 Gadamer argues that there is no such thing as fixed horizons. Any process of understanding already entails multiple horizons: There is no more an isolated horizon of the present in itself than there are historical horizons which have to be acquired. Rather, understanding is always the fusion of these horizons supposedly existing by themselves.65

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More than that, it is not only that there are always already multiple horizons involved; it is that these horizons are in fact projections of our own. What we do is project a historical horizon, which is then overtaken by our present horizon, in understanding which we simultaneously project and supersede the other horizon – this is what is meant by fusion of horizons. Bringing about this fusion in a regulated way is the task of what Gadamer calls historically effected consciousness.66 A fusion of horizons is a way of interpreting a text from your own background, not a making same of positions. * In Parekh, on the other hand,‘fusion’ seems to take a position more akin to that traditional liberal pastime of finding a standpoint of neutrality. Witness the following statement: Although he [the political theorist] has no Archimedean standpoint or a God’s-eye view available to him, he has several coigns of vantage in the form of other cultures. He can set up a dialogue between them, use each to illuminate the insights and expose the limitations of others, and create for himself a vital in-between space, a kind of immanent transcendentalism, from which to arrive at a less culture-bound vision of human life and a radically critical perspective on his society.67 Thus, the fusing of horizons seems to assume that there is some kind of fused mid-point from which the best decisions can be made. However, it seems that in this process of fusion liberalism always remains paramount, even though Parekh writes: The dialogically constituted multicultural society both retains the truth of liberalism and goes beyond it. It is committed to both liberalism and multiculturalism, privileges neither, and moderates the logic of one by that of the other.68 This suggests that Parekh’s theory is meant to be a way of valuing both the universal and the particular without absolutising either.69 It remains unclear why liberalism gets to be the term to interplay with multi-

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culturalism – what privileges it over radical democracy, socialism etc., and why are there two poles at all? Why not three or more? This is just a long-winded way of saying liberal multiculturalism, even if Parekh does say on the same page that this perspective privileges no cultural perspective, liberal or otherwise. Furthermore, this allows multiculturalism to not be confined by liberalism and liberalism to not be confined by multiculturalism at one and the same time. In any case, this dialogical approach seems rather at odds with the way in which Gadamer was thinking about fusion of horizons. Now one could say that this is perhaps not a problem for Parekh’s model. Maybe the fusion of horizons is simply meant to broaden our perspective so that we can then enter into a Habermasian dialogue with an ideal attitude that will then help us reach a consensus more easily. The agreement aspect of Parekh would then simply be the Habermasian part of his theory. But this is problematic in several ways. Firstly, if we take Gadamer seriously, then this consensus can never arrive. So we might question what the point is of bringing Gadamer into the equation at all, if we simply end up following Habermas. Secondly, Parekh implies that a fusion of horizons is in fact the outcome rather than the precondition of his model of institutionalised dialogue. This (and the fact that Parekh devotes no real time to actually explaining his use of Gadamer) leads me to suspect that Parekh is far more concerned with the image that the phrase ‘fusion of horizons’ conveys – a fundamental coming together and merging of perspectives. This is in fact how he utilises it. So I think it is fair to say that Parekh’s use of ‘fusion of horizon’ does not really correspond to Gadamer’s. But I also want to argue that in so far as Parekh is simply utilising the image of the fusion of horizons, his theory also falls short in terms of living up to that image. In the first instance, even if we grant that a fusion of horizons is taking place, this fusion is purely about the core values of the polity. There is no fusion of horizons about the process by which this fusion should take place (i.e. a model of institutionalised dialogue with a view to consensus). That is, the process that is meant to enable a fusion of horizons remains fully within the particularity of Western liberalism. This is a point that has come up again and again in the course of my inquiry: how far can we really term ‘multiculturalism’ a process whose rules are completely determined by one culture, and where other cultures only enter after the rules of the game have been set? Further doubts about

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the process of arriving at a fusion of horizons might arise if we consider a statement of Parekh’s that anticipates the commission he was to eventually lead. Parekh mentions that he suggested to the Runnymede Trust forming a commission that would help develop a national consensus. That is, the Parekh Report is itself an example of the kind of dialogue Parekh advocates.70 However, we might be forgiven for being somewhat sceptical about seeing the Parekh Report as the expression of a fusion of different horizons. There are other issues too. There is the question of under what conditions the fusion of horizons that Parekh advocates actually takes place. What are the power differentials in this process? What are the material conditions? And if the conditions are of gross inequality, then can there be a true fusion of horizons on equal grounds? Whether Parekh’s institutionalised dialogue is enough to sufficiently level the playing field is questionable. Then, there is the issue of what the possible outcomes of the fusion of horizons are. In an earlier piece, Parekh states that although majority and minority cultures should adapt to each other, and although minority cultures must be allowed to develop in a direction of their own choosing: Those minority practices and values that offend the basic values of British society must obviously be changed; and if they do not do so voluntarily, the law may need to intervene.71 But this is hardly the basis for a truly open dialogue. A fusion of horizons should surely entail at least the possibility for a change of valuation that may lead to these practices not being seen as offensive. Furthermore, and perhaps more importantly, do ‘basic’ British values that offend minorities similarly have to be changed as a matter of course, or is this something that has to be fought long and hard for, if indeed it can be achieved at all? Even though there is meant to be an open process of dialogue and a fusion of horizons, certain principles are beyond discussion. This is an issue that I will be turning to in more detail in the next chapter. We can again see that what is at work here is an immunitary process. The fusion of horizons does not in fact put liberal values at risk. What it does is give potential new perspectives to liberalism (but never in a way that challenges liberalism). Other practices and valuations are utilised

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in a way that strengthens liberalism. Liberalism is immunised through this partial incorporation. In fact, I think it should be clear that this fusion of horizons does little to deserve the name. It operates in the same manner as the consensus regime that Rancière describes. This, in combination with the terminological confusion that arises from the difference between Parekh’s and Gadamer’s fusion of horizons, is why we can more accurately label what is going on in Parekh as a form of extreme or hyper-consensus. This is borne out in another assumption that continues throughout Parekh’s work. Parekh’s model always assumes that minority cultures will become liberal of their own accord. Liberalism still has a privileged position. In fact, he sometimes seems to assert that minorities are already for the best part liberal. Or rather, that those parts of a group that are not liberal are on the fringes of that group – this is essentially what he does in his lecture on Muslims in Europe.72 Now Parekh is walking a tightrope here: his assertion of the liberalness of most European Muslims is a result of his trying to defend them against virulent xenophobic attacks. And it is of course right and important to counter portrayals of Islam as some kind of democracy-hating, inherently terrorist threat. But in the course of this defence he goes too far, simply asserting that those who are non-liberal do not really embody the tradition, and that the tradition is in fact wholly reconcilable with liberalism, thus devaluing any sincere attempt at multiculturalism. Perhaps it can be strategically justified, but it remains highly problematic. In any case it is difficult to see a willingness to fuse horizons in an attitude which starts by delegitimising all parts of a group that do not comply with liberalism. CONCLUSION Consensus and dialogue often form an essential part of liberal theories of multiculturalism. The process of dialogue is meant to be an act of active inclusion of the Other, and the resulting consensus is thus meant to share broad support in terms of its needing actually to be implemented. However, consensus does not live up to its inclusive ideal. As I hope to have shown, it in fact entrenches exclusions and leads simply to disagreements being rendered invisible. Moreover, in doing so it blocks the political subjectification of those who disagree, of those who

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remain uncounted within the consensus regime. It immunises liberalism in so far as the process of dialogue incorporates the other, but this incorporation does not in fact lead to a substantial change within liberalism. It leads only to a strengthening of liberalism, both in so far as it widens its vocabulary and in so far as institutionalised dialogue can be pointed to when accused of not listening to minorities. As a result of the exclusionary nature of the consensus regime, the content of the consensus is at least in part predetermined. Certain core liberal values are simply not up for questioning. This is the theme I will be focusing on in the next chapter. NOTES 111. A theory of multiculturalism that uses these two thinkers as its poles is counter-intuitive in two ways. Firstly, there is the fact that Habermas and Gadamer have a whole controversy named after them and their disagreements; secondly, the fact that Habermas has himself been a critic of multiculturalism, and within his own discursive model envisaged constitutional patriotism (‘Verfassungspatriotismus’) as a way of dealing with difference. See Habermas,‘Struggles for Recognition in the Democratic Constitutional State’ and ‘Equal Treatment of Cultures and the Limits of Postmodern Liberalism’. 112. Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism, pp. 219–24 and passim. 113. Ibid., p. 224. 114. Ibid., p. 204. 115. Ibid., p. 207. 116. Parekh et al., The Future of Multi-ethnic Britain, pp. 52–3. 117. Ibid., p. 54. 118. Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism, p. 341, even though on the very same page Parekh also critiques other liberal models for abstracting away culture and uniting groups in terms of shared political or economic interests. 119. Parekh et al., The Future of Multi-ethnic Britain, p. 54. 110. Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism, p. 340. 111. Rancière, Disagreement, p. 95. 112. Rancière, Hatred of Democracy, p. 7. 113. Rancière, Disagreement, pp. 101–2. 114. This and next quotation are from ibid., p. 102. 115. Ibid., p. 107. 116. Ibid. 117. Ibid., p. 105. 118. Ibid.

Disagreement and the Horizons of Consensus 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137. 138. 139. 140. 141. 142. 143. 144. 145. 146. 147. 148. 149. 150. 151. 152. 153. 154. 155. 156. 157.

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Ibid., pp. 102–3. Rancière, Politics of Aesthetics, p. 12. Rancière, Dissensus, p. 36. Rancière, Politics of Aesthetics, p. 42. Rancière, Dissensus, p. 36. Rancière, ‘Dissenting Words’, p. 124. Rancière, Dissensus, p. 207. Ibid., p. 206. Ibid., pp. 27–44. Ibid., p. 207. Rancière, Disagreement, pp. 107–8, my italics. Ibid., p. 121. Ibid., p. 116. Ibid., p. 115. Ibid., p. 109. Brecht, Bertolt, Buckower Elegien, p. 29. Rancière, Disagreement, p. 107. Marx, Capital, Volume 1, pp. 382, 415–16. Rancière, Hatred of Democracy, p. 20. Ibid., p. 4. Rancière, Chronicles of Consensual Times, pp. vii–viii. Ibid., pp. viii–ix. Rancière, Disagreement, p. 118. Ibid., p. 119. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., p. 120. Ibid. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition. Negri, ‘Crisis of the Crisis-State’; The Savage Anomaly; Hardt and Negri, Labor of Dionysus. Agamben, What is an Apparatus?; The Kingdom and the Glory. Rancière, Dissensus, p. 213. Ibid., p. 217. Rancière, Disagreement, p. x. Ibid., p. xii. Ibid., p. 99. Rancière, ‘Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man?’, p. 304. Ibid., p. 304. For a detailed account of the Habermas–Gadamer debate see Mendelson, ‘The Habermas–Gadamer Debate’; for a collection of the original contributions to it see Apel et al., Hermeneutik und Ideologiekritik.

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158. For a more successful attempt of thinking this cross-culturally, see Chan, ‘Encountering the Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer’. 159. Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, p. 271. 160. Ibid., p. 273. 161. Ibid., p. 274, my translation. 162. Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 269. 163. Ibid., p. 303. 164. Ibid. 165. Ibid., p. 306. 166. Ibid., p. 307. 167. Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism, p. 339. 168. Ibid., p. 340. 169. Parekh, A New Politics of Identity, p. 3. 170. Parekh, ‘Integrating Minorities’, p. 21, n. 15. 171. Parekh, ‘British Citizenship and Cultural Difference’, p. 198. 172. Parekh, European Liberalism and ‘the Muslim Question’, pp. 14–20.

Chapter 6 RECOGNITION: TOLERANT, AND CUNNING

In this chapter I will be looking at liberal multiculturalism from the vantage of recognition. Recognition is a central aspect of liberal multiculturalism, and the move towards recognition is in a sense the very rationale behind according attention to groups in liberalism at all. I will be arguing that while recognition is meant to be the mode of incorporating groups in the multicultural polity, it comes with its own provisos and pitfalls and in fact acts as a process of immunisation. In order to do this, I will be engaging primarily with the work of Elisabeth Povinelli and with what she calls the ‘cunning of recognition’. This term refers to a series of subterranean operations which accompany recognition and which put the subject of recognition in a difficult if not impossible position, while strengthening the liberal polity at the same time. In terms of liberal theorists of multiculturalism, I will be concerned in this chapter with Charles Taylor, whose essay ‘The Politics of Recognition’ was one of the most influential early texts in the literature on multiculturalism. Again, I focus on Taylor not because he is the only theorist for whom recognition is important (in fact, as I mentioned above, some form of recognition is arguably the motivation in all theories of multiculturalism), nor because recognition is all that is important in his work. Rather, it is because his treatment on recognition has been highly influential and functions very well in illustrating a particular strand in liberal multiculturalist thinking. In the second half of the chapter I will be linking liberal ideas of recognition with liberal discourses of tolerance. Both recognition and tolerance discourse have as a central component the proviso that no protection, respect or recognition should be given to cultural practices that are abhorrent. It is this proviso, and the fact that definitional hegemony over abhorrence lies with liberals, that says much about the Other-hostility of liberal approaches to difference. In looking at 115

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tolerance, I will be engaging mainly with Wendy Brown’s work on how liberal tolerance discourse acts as a process of governmentality. I will be arguing that tolerance and recognition operate in very similar ways, and can both be best understood as liberal processes of immunisation. RECOGNITION, OR THE CUNNING CLEANSING OF THE WOUNDED LIBERAL SUBJECT Let me start with Charles Taylor’s account of recognition. Taylor begins his inquiry by trying to trace a genealogy of how recognition and identity have come to be thought together. Taylor sees two main changes leading to this. The first is the collapse of old social hierarchies, and the replacement of monarchical honour with the notion of human dignity,1 the difference being that honour was held only by some, whereas dignity is said to be held by all equitably, which results in a politics of equal recognition. Second is the development of individualised identity in the eighteenth century.2 Connected to this individualised identity is the notion of authenticity – that there is a self that one can be true to. (When we go into the territory of cultural practices this becomes crucial as the idea of an authentic culture.) Taylor traces this notion of the authentic individual from Rousseau through to Herder. To be authentic is to find one’s own originality, to realise one’s distinct potentiality.3 This applies to a people as much as to individual people. The connection between identity and authenticity arises because of the dialogical character of human life; that is, through our being immersed in language.4 Thus our identity is formed in dialogue and struggle with what others want to see in us. Our identity is not worked out in isolation but is the result of dialogical negotiations with others. And it is in the nature of negotiations that they can fail, thus leading to the problem of misrecognition or lack of recognition. Modernity provides the conditions in which recognition can fail, through the break-up of social hierarchies and through the ideal of authenticity.5 Thus there are two planes on which Taylor sees recognition as operating: on the intimate plane where individual identities are formed in exchange; and on the social plane where we have a politics of equal recognition. Taylor goes on to focus on the public sphere, and distinguishes between two different meanings of a politics of equal recognition. One is a politics of universalism, emphasising equal dignity and equalisation

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of rights and entitlements; the other is a politics of difference in which everyone should be recognised in their distinct identity.6 The politics of equal dignity operates by assimilating various groups into the majority identity and thus denies them their authenticity. The politics of difference demands that we recognise the unique identity of individuals and groups. That is, we have a universal demand for recognition that takes the form of a valorisation of particularity. While the second politics flows out of the first, it is for Taylor also to some extent a reversal, precisely in so far as at is not seen as an expedient for removing historical inequalities but rather as the project to preserve differences and cultures. The two models entail a different conception of value: the politics of equal dignity considers as worth universal human potential, a shared human capacity, rather than anything any humans make of it. The politics of recognition entails that one accord equal value to all actualisations of this potential, that one value all cultures equally.7 This presents a serious problem for Taylor. Taylor’s mode of exposition sets up the inquiry as a disinterested comparison of the politics of equal dignity and the politics of recognition, but it is clear which one he favours. Unwittingly, he thereby provides quite a good illustration of how the ostensibly neutral politics of equal dignity operates. Taylor acknowledges that there is a certain tradition of liberalism, going back to Rousseau, that makes freedom dependent on the common purpose of society; however, he suggests that a liberalism more in the tradition of Kant separates freedom from common cause and non-differentiation. Such a model, then, would be more concerned with an equality of rights accorded to citizens,8 although, as we have already seen, equal citizenship is not as unproblematic an ideal as it might seem. However, for Taylor a politics of equal rights need not result in a politics of homogenisation. Similarly, Taylor agrees that rigidly procedural liberalism is intolerant of differences, but asserts that there can be a liberal politics that incorporates diversity.9 For Taylor, a politics of rights that incorporates difference is a matter of distinguishing between fundamental rights that cannot be altered under any circumstances, and forms of uniform treatment that can be changed according to cultural preference. This operation is one aspect of what Elisabeth Povinelli has called the cunning of recognition.10 At the heart of this cunning lies a proviso that we can see at work in Taylor’s distinction between fundamental rights and (changeable) forms

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of uniform treatment. Recognition relies on the – sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit – proviso that no protection should be given to cultural practices that are abhorrent; and what constitutes abhorrence is always decided by liberals (or by consensus, which as we have seen in the preceding chapter does not necessarily improve matters). At the end of the day, liberal multiculturalism always requires that all groups buy into certain ground rules. Certain practices are deemed to be selfevidently reprehensible, but this self-evidence arises only from the position of liberalism. Liberal theories of multiculturalism thus privilege liberal forms of life and always carry with them an underlying suspicion of the Other, which is seen as potentially tyrannical, abhorrent and barbaric. Povinelli’s observations on recognition emerge from a study of Australian state multiculturalism’s attitude towards aborigines.11 There are of course significant differences in the way liberalism deals with immigrant populations. However, in the relations between liberal multiculturalism and indigenous groups we can see in more extreme forms some of the conceptual apparatus that is rallied by liberal multiculturalism in its encounter with difference. The difficulty of transference is further compounded by the fact that, even when we talk of indigenous groups, the situation is very different from place to place. The situation of the Canadian ‘First Nations’ (a situation that Kymlicka devotes a lot of attention to, Taylor less so), for example, is of course wholly incomparable with that of aboriginal peoples in Australia – these are two very different singularities. However, in the liberal imagination, such singular experiences are precisely lumped together in the form of a generic agency-less object in need of aiding (one can again evoke Spivak’s term ‘global class apartheid’ to describe what is at work here). That is, liberal theorists are more concerned with working out a general framework of dealing with groups than with the contingent situations of particular groups. I will turn to this again shortly, but I wish first to proceed by examining what we can glean from Povinelli’s work. Povinelli’s starting point is a contradiction in Australian law: that on the one hand, in order to assert land claims under the Native Title Act, groups have to show evidence of the continuity of ‘traditional’ beliefs and practices among them, while on the other hand some of the practices of ‘customary law’ are prohibited by common and statuary law and by the general sense of what is decent and what is repugnant.12

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Indigenous subjects are thus subjected to contradictory obligations and must performatively enact and overcome this impasse as a condition for recognition. However, negotiating this impasse is a difficult task that can tear subjects apart. They are placed in a situation where, caught between conflicting obligations, they can neither be themselves nor cease to be – caught in a discursive impasse of different moral orders.13 These conflicting obligations are not limited to indigenous subjects, either; they apply to the settlers and those who implement policy as well. There is a conflict between what the law compels them to do and what they feel is right. This works on several levels: on the one hand it applies to those administering policy that they feel is wrong and discriminatory (this applies especially to the past); on the other, it applies to those who acknowledge the sense of multicultural policy but cannot shake off their revulsion at so called traditional practices (this is the attitude of more interest to this inquiry). These subjects discover that their reasoning and affect are out of joint. They are torn apart by the tension between wanting to be tolerant and feelings of abhorrence.14 This reaction of abjection already hints at the fact that minority subjects might have become subject to a liberal immunising process (but more on that shortly). * There is a certain colonial legacy to liberal thought, but, as Povinelli notes, while liberalism is intertwined with colonial thought, liberal multiculturalism also operates on a somewhat reverse logic to the colonial one. Nominally, colonialism operated by inspiring colonised subjects to identify with the colonisers, while multiculturalism dominates by inspiring minority subjects to identify with an impossible object of authentic self-identity: Indigenous subjects are called on to perform an authentic difference in exchange for the good feelings of nation and reparative legislation of the state. But this call does not simply produce good theatre; rather, it inspires impossible desires: to be this impossible object and to transport its ancient prenational meanings and practices to the presence in whatever language and moral framework prevails at the time of enunciation.15

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This seems to me a more extreme or hyper-concentrated forms of what migrants face. They are not forced to identify with an ancient culture, but they are supposed to remain connected to it, not be westernised (to maintain their societal culture, to use Kymlicka’s term). The difference here is that indigenous groups have on them not just the onus to be different, but the onus to be primitive as well. Australian multiculturalism is meant to be a redress for colonial harms. This is not the immediate rationale of British multiculturalism. However, the issue is relevant in so far as many of the groups coming to Britain were themselves once victims of British colonialism: in fact, when asserting the case for recognition this colonial dimension should be stressed. Moreover, in both cases we can see the operation of a certain logic of guilt, of having to right wrongs (again), but also of superiority, of being poised to right wrongs, of being the unique subject destined to right wrongs. * So there is a double aspect to the cunning of recognition – on the one hand it demands an impossible identification; on the other hand, the scope of what is recognisable is curtailed from the outset. The Australian courts placed indigenous subjects under a dual conditional to realise their native title: on the one hand they must embody their traditions and customs, and on the other hand these customs may not be in conflict with the common law. Povinelli argues that in this way, within the discursive architecture of multiculturalism indigenous subjects are thrown ‘between the whirlpool Charybdis of distinct culture and the monstrous Scylla of repugnant culture’.16 Let me start by focusing on the first aspect. In order to lay claim to Native Title, indigenous groups have to prove that they are still living by their traditions. But there are questions here as to what constitutes tradition, what constitutes a loss of it, and what is simply an inevitable alteration over time. Liberal hegemonic domination in postcolonial multicultural societies in fact functions by inspiring subjects to identify with a lost indeterminable object.17 Liberal society has changed dramatically over the last hundred years, yet very similar degrees of change in aboriginal society would be deemed to be a loss of tradition and thus to undermine any retributive claim.

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There are additional problems here. Not only is what constitutes tradition identified with a distant past, but what the past was like is also determined largely by the colonial archive, rather than any account given by indigenous groups.18 These accounts are taken as authoritative, since they are the only written record of the practices of groups from that time. Even though these are accounts filled with prejudice, the contention is that we can abstract the judgement away from them and stick to the factual. Oral records of what constitutes tradition, passed down to the present day, are deemed insufficient, on the other hand. This is to say that liberal multiculturalism does not even extend far enough to incorporate the modes of preservation and record keeping of another culture. Rather, a particular Western conception of what is a reliable source is insisted upon, even though these are the very accounts that were used to originally justify the position that Australia’s land may have been populated, but not owned.19 The only difference is that the practices described are now deemed legitimate. The liberal state thus lays claim to being the better judge of traditions than the groups whose traditions they are meant to be. This empowering of anthropology over actual cultural memory and practice comes with obvious consequences. Not only does it put indigenous groups on a decidedly unequal footing vis-à-vis the state, but it also helps constitute indigenous subjects as failures, incapable of embodying their traditions, and incapable even of determining what these are. Thus, ‘the very discourses that constitute indigenous subjects as such constitute them as failures of such – of the very identity that identifies them’.20 In this way recognition becomes at once ‘a formal meconnaissance of a subaltern group’s being and of its being worthy of national recognition and, at the same time, a formal moment of being inspected, examined, and investigated’.21 This process of inspection constitutes minority subjects as failing to live up to their cultural heritage. Such misrecognition can in fact have dire effects, Taylor too stresses that misrecognition can be damaging, leading to the internalisation of a distorted inferior image.22 In the very same instance, however, the state is posited as embracing tradition, as valuing it and recognising it. Thus: Not only are indigenous people scarred by loss in their discursive passage into being, the historical and material pressures on them

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to identify with the name of this passage (tradition) affectively constitutes them as melancholic subjects, and the more an aboriginal person identifies as a traditional person, the more he or she believes public incitements that the nation is embracing them.23 The liberal state forces indigenous people into a kind of stunted subjectivity that at once has to lament its own lack and be grateful for the stance taken by the state towards it. However, it does this at one and the same time as it advances processes that contribute to the liberalisation of cultures and thus to their inadequacy to live up to tradition, which is itself fixed in an impossible way by the liberal state. The whole process puts the indigenous subject in a curious relation to time and change. The demands of the process are in fact of a capitalist nature, demanding a particular kind of social abstraction. The form of the demand is that the real-time nature of social negotiation be abstracted into a social form that can break the horizon of social space and time. Indigenous persons and their legal and anthropological counsel must abstract out of the ongoing diachronic unfolding of social relationality an objective, synchronic structure. And they must not only present a synchronic structure, but also characterise that structure as determining ongoing social life.24 This position is an impossible one to maintain. Indigenous subjects are required to negotiate a bind between an idealised unchanging traditional practice, and a vibrant cultural practice that can confidently engage with the institutions of the liberal state. But the second demand necessarily leads to the obliteration of the first. The whole enterprise of arguing for the Native Title claim and demonstrating the continued existence of traditions in front of a court is an operation that makes sense only within liberal culture, not in indigenous tradition. Thus, in the act of claiming property an entire regime of liberal social relations is installed in indigenous social life.25 The whole idea of the Native Title claim as a juridical dispute imposes a certain structure of dealing with conflict on groups who would otherwise deal with it differently.26 But these groups are forced to leave the ‘traditional’ path of dispute resolution in the very instance in which they must prove that

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they still live their life according to traditions in order to win their claim. In fact, juridical process and its alleged impartiality can appear from a different perspective to be the expression of an inhumanity in the way the West deals with conflict.27 Liberal recognition does not allow multiculture to flow into its procedure. The ways of dealing with issues of difference are prescribed by Western liberal culture. In this way liberalism is immunised against other cultures. Not only is the liberal process strengthened, but liberal social relations are supplemented in for other cultural practices. At best, other cultures can be coexisted with, but the way of organising this coexistence cannot be informed by other cultures. For to do so would threaten liberal hegemony, would lead to a multiculturalism that does more than liberalise other cultures in an immunitary operation. In fact, to let procedure be tarnished by the Other in any way would be repugnant. Take the issue of violence: Western approaches tend to subordinate conflict in the name of peace through institutions that find their apotheosis in the notion of sovereignty and the state’s monopoly on violence, but what about possibilities for the controlled expression of violence that recognises the role of relatively independent and multiple perspectives in moving towards balance?28 Any instance of violence outside of the state’s monopoly becomes automatically repugnant. This hints at the important second aspect of the cunning of recognition: not all practices are subject to recognition. To be recognised practices need to be both traditional and acceptable to the liberal order. But how do the courts and non-Aboriginal citizens distinguish between indigenous traditions that deepen and strengthen liberal national traditions and indigenous, but nevertheless repugnant, practices? The fact is, what constitutes the real content of the customary, the good and the repugnant is never specified.29 It is deemed to be selfevident, and it is self-evident from the perspective of liberalism. * Liberalism privileges certain ways of thinking, and presents other ways of thinking and acting as both dangerous and wrong. When dealing with

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other cultures, or other modes of rationality, there is always a proviso hovering above acceptance and recognition – this proviso is ‘unless they are repugnant’. What this proviso does is that it ‘interprets specific instances of cultural practices and indexes where public reason no longer applies’.30 There is seen to be an obvious limit to what can and cannot be recognised. Certain things simply cannot be tolerated in a civilised society. This act of abhorrence operates in several ways. One of its effects is to strengthen the community of mainstream liberal society. The existence of certain subaltern practices produces the experience of a national collective will through the experience of a communal aversion to a practice whose occurrence is deemed wholly unacceptable within the borders of civilisation.31 Thus Povinelli writes, with regard to particular indigenous practices: State and public figures trumpeted the shame of allowing such practices of savagery and barbarism, of ignorance and superstition, to take place within its borders. The phrase ‘such practices’ acts to expand the field of shame and cast a pall over unnamed subaltern practices where no national-popular collective will would be possible and over entire continents where such practices are imagined to occur.32 Thus we have the creation of an amorphous and abject Other of the kind that I have been arguing gets produced by immunitary processes. The community can then coalesce around and against the groups within that represent this same difference (which is only the same in the liberal imaginary). This hostile coalescence, along with the apparatuses of security it justifies, illustrates well how the liberal immunitary process of recognition renders other subjects as delinquent. So what we are seeing here in the act of recognition is in fact the extension of the state’s discriminatory powers, not its restriction. The state takes on the power to denote which differences are acceptable and unacceptable, and what kind of cultural difference qualifies as a rightsand resource-bearing identity.33 The only permissible different practices need to stay within certain limits, and these limits are seen to be selfevidently prescribed by liberal norms. This is precisely the proviso of recognition: recognition of difference, provided it is not repugnant.

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Recognition is premised on the condition that only certain things are recognisable. And what is outside the sphere of recognition is repugnant, is inhumane. Liberalism cannot recognise certain things. (This is also an aspect of arguments such as those made by Gayatri Spivak in ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ – it is not just a question of whether the subaltern has access to the resources needed to be capable of expressing itself, it is also a question of liberals being able to comprehend what is being articulated.) But it is not only that liberalism can only recognise certain practices; it is that this limitation immediately works against other practices. In this way: The ethics of humanist recognition is already determined in the last instance. A mandate hovers over a practice – construct social connectivity as you will, according to your customs, but construct it so that a human being is apparent or risk the consequences of being inscribed in humanism’s internal contradiction, dehumanization.34 That is, if your practices are unrecognisable, are repugnant, then you are not only not receiving recognition but also being thrown out of the sphere of equal citizenship, and out of common humanity (in line with what I have been saying in Chapter 4). * This is the impossible position that recognition leads to: a demand to be authentically different while at the same time remaining within the realm of what is acceptable within liberalism, that is, to remain the same. Moreover, this operation occurs despite the best intentions of many of those involved in pushing forward liberal multiculturalism. There are two things at work here. Firstly: National subjects find that no matter the heroic rhetoric of enlightenment understanding, ‘their ways’ cannot cease to make ‘us’ sick. And the sickness scatters the self (I, us) across contrasting obligations to public reason and moral sensibility.35

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That is, regardless of their intentions, liberal subjects cannot but feel repulsed by what is, from their perspective, self-evidently repugnant. Secondly, even in so far as liberals overcome their repugnance and try to help excluded subjects be included into the multicultural polity, these very intentions in fact help to strengthen the appearance of liberal institutions and procedures as self-evident goods.36 Žižek has made the same observation with regard to humanitarian aid workers – the more sincere their commitment, the more they have internalised the ideological operation that firmly divides the roles of helper and helped, good institutions and bad, and the more they act as instruments of the very structures of oppression they sincerely want to change (although one needs to be careful in drawing too much of a parallel: the compression involved in a situation of emergency means that it does not lend itself to easy comparison).37 However, in liberal discourses the role of intention takes on rather the opposite role. Far from being the expression of a repressive ideology, good intentions are pure, and are in fact the expression of a benign practice. ‘Courts and publics do not blame shameful events on bad people but on the good intentions of good people.’38 Discrimination and domination are not seen to be the result of people acting maliciously or of the system being biased. Rather, they are seen as good-willed attempts that have proven to be misguided, but were understandable from the perspective of the time. Any undesirable practices are retrospectively said to not form part of liberalism proper, but rather to be contingent operations. The core of liberalism is beyond any suspicion of wrongdoing. Thus, from the perspective of the law ‘moral codes change but the repugnant, whatever it is, is and is always presumed to be a stranger to the real being of the common law’.39 However, this operation cannot operate perfectly smoothly, and one of its consequences is that a continual shadow of doubt hangs over present policies. If what was once common sense can now be identified as repressive, then how can we ensure that the good-willed actions we take now will not turn out to be equally repressive? Immunitary tendency notwithstanding, multicultural logic adds a degree of uncertainty to liberalism that is irrevocable. No matter what values are asserted, they are now haunted by the knowledge that this choice may one day seem outmoded, ridiculous, and oppressive.40 This uncertainty points at something. Liberal multicultural policies

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are to a certain extent influenced by a particular kind of postcolonial melancholia, both sadness at certainties lost and guilt at atrocities committed. At the same time, the act of creating retribution for these atrocities is also meant to cleanse liberalism, and to uncover its true, benevolent core. Povinelli argues that what the retributive aspect of Australian multiculturalism is also about is the rightness and authority of the common law.41 It is a defence of the wounded liberal subject.42 To atone for past injustices is an operation that is meant to resuscitate the common law and the liberal subject, creating a new nationalism, one free of association with colonialism and fascism. The slate is wiped clean. Moreover, the very fact that there is still difference to be recognised serves as testimony that past injustices cannot have been too damaging. Thus a particular kind of nationalism is revived in the act of repentance: What national reformations are accomplished by this traditional survival? A perdurant ancient law wiped clean of the savage history of modernity burnishes the tarnished image of the settler nation and the torn imaginary between it and its citizens in […] important ways: (1) The survival of good indigenous traditions transforms liberalism’s bad side into a weak, inconsequential historical force. […] (2) When good traditions appear before the nation, liberalism’s good side also appears as a strong supporting force.43 In fact, this cleansing of colonial history is an area where we can draw quite an explicit connection with how liberalism deals with immigrants and not just indigenous peoples. Recognition of difference and multicultural policy atones both for the history of colonial involvement in parts of the world that are now sources of immigration, and for the history of racism towards immigrants in the UK. It forms an attempt at cleansing liberalism of its openly exclusionary past. This process of cleansing is another way of immunising liberalism. Liberalism is strengthened by becoming disassociated from its injustices. These injustices become the contingent results of misguided acts of the past, rather than being part of the core of liberalism. In the Australian case this meant separating common from statutory law and attributing to statutory law that it is the carrier of the prejudices of the time in which it is formulated. Common law is cleansed of these associations. Even

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though the courts acknowledge both the good and the bad of Australian history, only the good constitutes the being of common law.44 The act of cleansing and separating the allegedly epiphenomenal from the pure core is an operation whereby liberals can reflect on past bigotry and prejudice, and expunge these malices from the core of liberalism, without having to implicate this core in the production of that malice.45 In this way, past cultural discrimination becomes a matter of ‘shameful, though excisable, cancers on the root good of the common law’.46 Liberal principles are seen as fundamentally pure, and a true recourse to such liberal principles as civic equality, freedom, etc. allows liberalism to cleanse itself of any past aberrations. What happens in liberal multiculturalism is essentially that the very tools that have in the past led to exclusions and to racial and cultural prejudice are used to free liberalism of this prejudice, without these concepts ever themselves becoming subject to a fundamental critique.47 In this way liberalism is immunised against its critique, through a strategic condemnation of past exclusions. Liberal multiculturalists decry past injustices perpetrated by liberalism. But in aligning their own liberalism with this critique they translate liberation struggles against liberalism into further legitimation for liberalism.48 However, what this means is that the sources of discrimination are not addressed and remain largely intact. The liberal state and its courts reserve for themselves the right to discriminate against any practices considered repugnant and to determine when cultural difference ceases to be recognised difference.49 In fact, even in lamenting past ills liberalism immunises itself. By referring to the shame of ‘our’ law and ‘our’ nation and the good of recognising ‘their’ laws, ‘their’ culture, and ‘their’ traditions, an understanding of the nation as confronting its own discriminatory practices is entrenched, while at the very same time notions of ‘us’ and ‘them’ are preserved.50 As a result of this discourse, liberals can posit that, rather than requiring fundamental change, state apparatuses, law, principles of governance, and national attitudes need merely to be adjusted to be truly accommodating of otherness.51 Thus, in fact the ideal of liberal multiculturalism is ‘a form of difference that is maximally other than dominant society and minimally abrasive to dominant values’,52 an easily palatable Other that acts within certain limits prescribed by liberal norms and does not challenge liberalism. For in fact, liberals cannot shake their suspicion

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that the Other is ultimately up to something repugnant. This suspicion is evidence of an entrenched Other-hostility. It cannot be excused by references to specific practices, not just because the definition of abhorrence remains with liberals but also because the suspicion of abhorrence is racist regardless of any actually existing abhorrent practices.53 The more accurate forms of the multicultural proposition would thus be ‘“you be yourself for me” and “you be yourself in such a way that I can recognise you without being undone”’.54 LIBERAL RECOGNITION AS A FORM OF TOLERANCE It is in this operation that the politics of recognition often slips into the mode of tolerance, which denotes only conditional allowance of other practices, and can even be used to mobilise against the allegedly intolerant Other. Multiculturalism suddenly becomes a noble gesture that goes beyond the call of duty, whose beneficiaries should be glad that any of their practices are tolerated at all, let alone the abhorrent ones. Liberal tolerance is thus mobilised against the Other. This is exemplified in citizenship tests,55 but of course also manifests itself in foreign interventions of the ‘white men saving brown women from brown men’ sort. Thus tolerance can manifest itself in the form of oppression; it perpetuates the struggle for existence and closes down alternatives.56 To be clear, this is not a point about defending any particular practice, and singing the praises of FGC, sati, or whatever; it is rather about questioning the conditions and motivations under which liberal tolerance (or feminist concern, or freedom from bodily harm, etc.) is mobilised in these contexts.57 Any commitment to progressive politics here is either insincere, or wholly overdetermined by liberalism’s immunitary processes, and remains concerned with tolerance only in the strict sense of the disavowed hostile side of tolerance, but not in the sense of its official expression. When liberal tolerance is mobilised to move against ‘fundamentalism’, a false opposition is maintained, in so far as the ‘fundamentalism’ that is mobilised against is also a symptom of the mobilisation of tolerance.58 That is, liberalism to a certain extent produces the very things it mobilises against. Moreover, like Disneyland in Baudrillard, the focus on the alleged intolerance of the other serves to detract from the intolerance of the self. Thus Muslims will be decried for being

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homophobic, as if homophobia were not still widespread in the UK, to name but one example. Let me turn in more detail now to what is entailed by discourses of tolerance. Wendy Brown provides what is perhaps one of the most incisive accounts on tolerance in her book Regulating Aversion. Brown stresses that the term ‘tolerance’ does not have, and never has had, a unified meaning, referring rather to an array of practices, subjects and conflicts. There is thus a limited value in the exercises of some more analytical theorists in trying to define tolerance in a narrow and firm way.59 Brown’s book is, then, an investigation of how tolerance discourse constructs and positions liberal and non-liberal subjects, about its normative operation and the rendering oblique of this operation. Brown makes a provisional distinction between tolerance as a personal ethic and as a political discourse, and her concern is predominantly with the latter (although this is not to imply that the two terms are unrelated). Tolerance is for Brown more than anything a particular practice of governmentality. As such it inscribes the normalcy of the powerful and the deviance of the marginal and responds to, and thus contains, non-liberal standpoints that challenge the standing of universal liberal principles.60 In this way, what happens in discourses of tolerance is in fact very similar to what goes on in liberal recognition. Tolerance as a practice of governmentality has significant cultural, social and political effects that exceed its ostensible aim of reducing conflict or of protecting the weak. In this way it exceeds its formal goals and self-representation. Tolerance is involved in the formation of subjects and contributes to forming particular articulations of citizenship, justice, nationhood, and the limits of the political. It functions as a supplement to formal liberal equality and liberty, and can also overtly block the pursuit of substantive equality and freedom. Tolerance, rather than alleviating, can in fact contribute to circulating racism, homophobia and other prejudices.61 This is not to say that tolerance exclusively does these things, but rather to say that they form part of the operation of toleration and are not mere incidental side-effects: that in fact, rather than being simply a way of protecting others (despite our disapproval), tolerance immunises liberalism and this mobilises hostilities against non-liberal subjects. Tolerance is a ubiquitous feature of liberal discourse, but it is not in fact codified in legal practice, and thus remains a shifting and unstable

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term. This is also because tolerance is seen to be the expression of virtue rather than the enactment or deliverance of a right. It is something that is generously given but can always be withdrawn as majority society sees fit. Tolerance as a norm furthers understandings of how people ought to coexist, but this norm never gets enshrined legally. In fact, tolerance is a negotiation with the law. In order for something to fall within the purview of tolerance, it must be in a realm not claimed by the law, must be a matter of the private not the public sphere; it is something that relates to individually chosen practices.62 Some have said that this means from the outset that nothing of any public significance can be tolerated.63 In so far, then, as the legal and the political are generally closely linked if not collapsed into one another in liberal democratic thought, the practice of tolerance occurs in a space remaindered by liberal legalism, outside of what is considered formally political.64 Brown thus sees tolerance as a mode of depoliticisation; as a political operation that moves the production and regulation of identities out of the political realm in order to obscure the processes of governmentality at work in this operation. This is done by making what are political issues (marginalisation, inequality, racism, etc.) appear as personal issues, or as natural, or cultural. Thus: Tolerance of this sort does not simply address identity but abets in its production; it also abets in the conflation of culture with ethnicity or race and the conflation of belief or consciousness with phenotype. And it naturalises as it depoliticises these processes to render identity itself an object of tolerance.65 As such, tolerance is often invoked in a manner that equates or conflates non-commensurable subjects and practices, including religion, culture, ethnicity, race and sexual norms. In tolerance talk, ethnicity, race, religion and culture become interchangeable.66 This is an attitude that is very pronounced in liberal multiculturalism. As we have seen again and again, cultural groups can only be seen by liberals in abstract terms, not with regard to their historical specificity. The action of tolerance inscribes a certain kind of superiority in its dispensers and marks its objects as somehow deviant and in need of toleration. It does not simply involve refraining from interference with contingent dislikes, but involves also the enactment of a particular set

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of political, social and cultural norms. Subjects of tolerance are marked as inferior, deviant or marginal vis-à-vis those practising tolerance.67 Tolerance forms part of a civilisational discourse that identifies both tolerance and the tolerable with the West, and marks non-liberal societies and practices as candidates for an intolerable barbarism that is itself signalled by the putative intolerance ruling these societies.68 That is, tolerance forms part of the marking of the West as the culture of multiculture. This is also precisely the operation we have observed in the process of recognition: liberalism is cleansed, other subjects are marked out as beneficiaries of liberal kindness and are themselves always under suspicion of abhorrent behaviour. Moreover, there is a limit to both what is recognisable and what is tolerant, and once that limit is exceeded, all manner of force can be mobilised to move against those that breach it. Not only does tolerance render different cultures similar and reinscribe a hierarchy of tolerated and tolerant cultures, it also casts instances of inequality as matters of individual or group prejudice. And it tends to cast group conflict as rooted in an ontologically natural hostility of different cultural groups towards each other.69 This is another dimension of the depoliticisation of tolerance: the political genealogy of phenomena is rendered invisible and a personalised vocabulary is imposed on problems. But making tolerance purely a matter of the cultural attitudes and behaviour of individuals and groups (rather than of politics) reduces any attempt to redress inequalities to merely a matter of behaviour therapy, or of sensitivity training that helps groups get along better. The bounds of political action suddenly become limited to what Richard Rorty has called an ‘improvement of manners’.70 This behavioural move is also part of a culturalisation of politics, in which while both West and Other have culture, the Other is seen to be completely determined by it. Mahmood Mamdani has phrased it thus: ‘the moderns make culture and are its masters; the premoderns are said to be but conduits.’71 Under liberalism, the individual is understood to have access to culture; culture does not have the liberal individual.72 Liberalism posits that in liberal society cultures are a background, a matter of individual choice, that enhances life – the individual remains autonomous, and chooses from these cultures as and only when he wishes. Culture is seen as a lifestyle choice. Non-liberal societies, on the other hand, are deemed to be determined by their culture – here culture is seen as an oppressive force that determines all individual action.73

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This asymmetry centres on a notion of moral autonomy. Culture and autonomy are seen as being in opposition (culturally informed choice is not considered properly autonomous), and liberalism is what guards autonomy against culture. This autonomy that can only be ensured by liberalism is the very basis on which tolerance rests. What this means, then, is that ‘the making of a tolerant world […] literally requires the liberalisation of the world’.74 Non-individuated societies are seen to be incapable of it, because tolerance is the preserve of the morally autonomous individual. Liberalism posits itself as the only system capable of exercising true tolerance because it is above culture – but it is not above culture, it is culture. Thus, in the guise of cultural neutrality it in fact raises its own culture as the superior standard bearer that has the greatness to tolerate other cultures. Liberalism relies on a double ruse to distinguish itself from culture,‘on the one hand, casting liberal principles as universal; on the other, juridically privatising culture’, and in this way posits liberalism ‘as untouched by culture and thus incapable of cultural imperialism’.75 Of course, liberalism is neither above culture nor separate from other cultures. However, discourses of tolerance entrench notions of it being so. Moreover, while liberalism is seen to be above culture, this paradoxically gives it the cultural reserves to practise tolerance. What we can see at work here is a process of immunisation whereby liberalism strengthens itself against any practices it chooses to tolerate by constraining them within certain limits and by placing itself hierarchically above them. * Brown sees liberal conceptions of tolerance as deeply grounded in a particular reading of Freud.76 Freud, in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, and to some extent in Civilisation and Its Discontents, advances the figure of the submissive tribal follower, an identity that is gradually overcome in the ontogenesis of civilisation which brings with it the formation of individuality.77 Liberal theories of tolerance take this idea and turn it into the development of society from primitivism into a liberal cosmopolitanism, with the Freudian referent being sometimes explicit and sometimes implicit. In this way tolerance becomes something that is only available to liberal subjects, with organicist orders established

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as the natural limit of tolerance (that is, the culturalisation of tolerance is coupled with a psychologism).78 However, this reading is limited in so far as Freud outlines in Civilisation and Its Discontents not a dissolving of groups into individuals but a repression of individual instinct. Freud does not unequivocally tell the story of a move from group to individual; in many ways the individual is always already prior for him. Freud’s work incorporates a tension between an analytical individualism and a colonial historiography of development from organicism to individualism. In so far as this tension is resolved it is by seeing group belonging as causing de-civilisation rather than as being the result of a lack of civilisation.79 This is essentially the attitude towards group identity that is carried over into liberalism. Liberals take from Freud an account that pathologises group identity and articulates an ideology of the civilised individuated subject.80 Moreover, otherness is temporalised, and being other than liberal becomes associated with being uncivilised and of the past.81 What this attitude implies is that the individual must be both cultivated and protected in order to protect his/her autonomy from the danger of de-civilised formation as represented by non-liberal groups. It also means that being part of civilisation thus delineated signifies both being tolerant and being tolerable; what is outside of civilisation is neither.82 Non-liberal societies are thus rendered potentially intolerable (since they are slaves to culture and enemies to autonomy) and become the valid target for containment and hostility.83 That is, liberalism is simultaneously seen as being the only system that enables tolerance and elevated to the arbiter of what is and is not tolerable. There is an antinomy within liberalism in which culture is simultaneously claimed and disclaimed. Liberal societies regard themselves as representing the world-historical apex of culture and cultural production, while at the same time liberalism is meant to free individuals from the mandate of culture.84 In order to split culture in this way liberalism has to see it as something objectifiable that can be privately enjoyed, but as such it is impossible for liberalism to acknowledge culture as a public good or bond.85 This means that in a significant way liberalism lacks the conceptual apparatus to accord the kind of value to culture that a multiculturalism truly open to otherness would demand. Instead, liberal multiculturalism merely immunises liberalism through tolerance, marking out the non-liberal as threatening to autonomy.

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Thus, liberalism deals with the differences it encounters in two principal ways. Political differences that are at odds with liberalism are intolerable, and those differences that are tolerated are privatised and made into matters of individual belief or practice – they cannot retain any political dimension. What happens is this: The governmentality of tolerance deploys the formal legal autonomy of the subject and the formal secularism of the state as a threshold of the tolerable, marking as intolerable whatever is regarded as a threat to such autonomy and secularism.86 In such a way, the limits of tolerance become equated with the limits of civilisation and with threats to the values that underpin civilisation.87 Tolerance is produced as a civilisational discourse that advances two intersecting power functions: it defines the superiority of the West, and it marks certain non-Western practices as intolerable. In this way tolerance discourse legitimises liberalism’s illiberal treatment of certain practices. It thus legitimises aggression towards what is deemed intolerable without blemishing the civilised status of liberalism.88 What happens here is that power vanishes from view. The scene presents itself as one in which the universal tolerates the particular in its particularity, and in which the putative universal therefore always appears superior to the unassimilated particular – a superiority that is itself premised upon the nonreciprocity of tolerance (there is no question of the particular tolerating the universal).89 Tolerance positions self and Other in a strict hierarchy. In doing so it disguises the way in which it is in fact power that constitutes universal and particular. Moreover, the tolerant entity in this dyad is purified of all intolerance, whereas the tolerated is saturated with difference to the point of being at the very edge of what is tolerable.90 In this way: Tolerance conferred on ‘foreign’ practices shores up the normative standing of the tolerant and the liminal standing of the tolerated. […] It reconfirms, without reference to the orders of power that enable it, the higher civilisational standing of those who tolerate what they do not condone or share. […] It is only against this backdrop that tolerance withheld succeeds in marking the other as barbaric without implicating the cultural norms of the tolerant by this marking.91

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That is, toleration is a complex operation by which liberalism can posit itself as the sphere of enlightened autonomy, and the non-liberal as the site of primitive, barbaric and repugnant practices (this is an attitude that pervades liberalism and is particularly noticeable in liberal feminists, for instance).92 Now, we can in fact see some of these tendencies at work in Taylor. For one thing, in his distinction between essential and non-essential rights, which he makes in order to devise a working multiculturalism, he clearly embraces the proviso at the heart of recognition and tolerance. Now Taylor does reject the notion of liberalism as the neutral meeting ground of cultures, and rather sees it, rightly, as the political expression of one range of cultures.93 That is, Taylor is ready to accept liberalism as a fighting creed that has to draw the line somewhere. He does not go as far as explicitly linking this to structures of power, but he does go further than most liberals. Taylor is engaged in the attempt to find a balance between dealing with marginalisation and protecting political principles. While this attempt may be well-meaning rather than hostile towards other practices, it ends up reducing to not much more than the cunning of recognition and a process of immunisation at work. In distinguishing between essential core tenets of liberalism that cannot be questioned and forms of uniform treatment that may be adapted, Taylor is precisely inscribing the processes I have been describing. The designation of certain things as up for contestation and others as not is a form of toleration. Toleration can be extended to those things that are not deemed essential. Moreover, as a result, those extending the tolerance inscribe themselves in the position of the progressive subject group that takes account of others’ needs. Similarly, designating certain things unrecognisable because they are at odds with essential liberal values means that these practices are designated not just as non-liberal, but as inhumane and abhorrent. The working assumption here is that if a practice is of value we would embrace it, so if we do not embrace it, it must be harmful. However, the judgement of other practices is always made by the liberal state on its own terms. There is no multicultural engagement in determining what it is that might be recognised. Multiculturalism in its extreme form is for Taylor the extension of the politics of recognition in which we recognise the equal value of cultures and acknowledge their worth beyond their mere right to survival.94

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Taylor is massively sceptical when it comes to this demand. For him the logic behind multiculturalism is premised on the idea that we owe equal respect to all cultures.95 Now he is not unsympathetic to the conditions out of which he sees this demand arising. However, for Taylor what follows cannot be an assumption of equal worth. Such an assumption can be a starting point when approaching a new culture, but Taylor asserts that the claim has to be demonstrated concretely in actual study. That is, some cultures will turn out to be more worthwhile than others. Taylor is willing to extend the presumption of equal worth in a first encounter, but for him the multicultural claim also entails an absolute assertion of equal worth, and this he cannot brook. He finds this on the one hand an act of condescension and on the other a confusion of the realms of judging worth and taking sides.96 At the end of the day, liberal multiculturalism does have to make a judgement-call on what practices are within and without recognition, within and without tolerance. For Taylor it is crucial to stress both that some cultural practices are in fact better than others, and that liberals are in a position to judge which practices these are. That is, he is very critical of any theories that question this ability to judge or raise questions about the power structures that such judgements are made in – he refers to them as ‘half-baked neoNietzschean theories’.97 Thus his model, while concerned with providing recognition to Other practices, is also set on maintaining liberalism’s position to judge. Here too, liberalism is strengthened and immunised rather than opened up. CONCLUSION In this chapter, I hope to have shown that recognition, as it features in liberal multiculturalism, has much more in common with toleration than with actually recognising substantive differences from liberalism. Both liberal recognition and tolerance circle around a proviso that there is a certain limit beyond which difference is repugnant and can be neither recognised nor tolerated. More than that, it can be mobilised against. Both recognition and tolerance function as processes that immunise liberalism against challenges from the Other. The Other is included through tolerance or recognition, but those aspects that are unpalatable to liberals are curtailed. The inclusion of other subjects through recognition is thus conditional on the loss of substantive otherness. Furthermore,

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this process cleanses liberalism of responsibility for the injustices it perpetrates. The very fact of recognition shows that liberalism has atoned for past wrongs. The fact that liberalism is the theory that enables the autonomy required for tolerance shows that it is now an inclusive body of thought. Both these immunitary processes inscribe a hierarchy in which liberalism is lodged firmly above any other cultural expression. This is the third area of liberal multiculturalism in which I have identified liberal processes of immunisation at work. In the next chapter I want to look at the possibilities there might be for constituting a multicultural polity that escapes these immunising tendencies. NOTES 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 110. 111.

112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120.

Taylor, ‘The Politics of Recognition’, pp. 26–7. Ibid., p. 28. Ibid., p. 31; Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity. Taylor, ‘The Politics of Recognition’, p. 32. Ibid., p. 35. Ibid., pp. 37–8. Ibid., p. 42. Ibid., pp. 50–1. Ibid., p. 61. Povinelli, Cunning of Recognition. I am not interested here in assessing the details of Povinelli’s account of Australian multiculturalism and its history. Rather, I am interested in the theoretical observations she draws from it and the extent to which they might be useful for thinking about liberalism more generally. It is for this reason that I do not offer a more detailed examination of Australian multiculturalism. For a few other accounts see: Lopez, The Origins of Multiculturalism in Australian Politics; Theophanous, Understanding Multiculturalism and Australian Identity; Soutphommasane, Don’t Go Back to Where You Came From. Povinelli, Cunning of Recognition, pp. 2–3. Povinelli, ‘Consuming Geist’, pp. 511–12. Povinelli, Cunning of Recognition, p. 5. Ibid., p. 6. Ibid., p. 164. Ibid., p. 39. Ibid., p. 165. Povinelli, ‘Sexual Savages/Sexual Sovereignty’. Povinelli, Cunning of Recognition, p. 48.

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121. Ibid., p. 39. 122. Taylor, ‘The Politics of Recognition’, pp. 36–7. 123. Povinelli, ‘Settler Modernity and the Quest for an Indigenous Tradition’, p. 37. 124. Povinelli, ‘At Home in the Violence of Recognition’, p. 193. 125. Ibid., p. 188. 126. For some aboriginal ways of dealing with these see Graham et al.,‘Conflict Murri Way’; and Rose, ‘Conflict Resolution and Decolonisation’. 127. Graham et al., ‘Conflict Murri Way’, p. 89. 128. Ibid., p. 94. 129. Povinelli, Cunning of Recognition, pp. 47, 177. 130. Ibid., p. 12. 131. Ibid., p. 28. 132. Povinelli, ‘The State of Shame’, p. 577. 133. Povinelli, Cunning of Recognition, p. 185. 134. Povinelli, ‘At home …’, p. 197. 135. Povinelli, Cunning of Recognition, p. 5. 136. Ibid., p. 16. 137. Žižek, Slavoj, ‘From Politics to Biopolitics … and Back’, p. 512. A more nuanced and substantial reading of this phenomena, particularly with regard to feminist practice, can be found in Mohanty, ‘Under Western Eyes’; and with regard to ‘white men saving brown women from brown men’ in Chapter 3 of Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason; or in the better-known earlier version in ‘Can the Subaltern Speak’. 138. Povinelli, Cunning of Recognition, p. 154. 139. Ibid., p. 177. 140. Povinelli, ‘The State of Shame’, p. 578. 141. Povinelli, Cunning of Recognition, p. 53. 142. For more on the wounded subject see Brown, States of Injury. For the effects this has on the British polity see Gilroy, After Empire. For its effect on foreign policy see Gallagher, Britain in Africa under Blair. 143. Povinelli, Cunning of Recognition, p. 54. 144. Ibid., p.173. 145. Ibid., p. 159. 146. Ibid., p. 160. 147. Ibid., pp. 158–9. 148. Ibid., pp. 183–4. 149. Ibid., p. 163. 150. Ibid., p. 171. 151. Ibid., p. 184. 152. Ibid., p. 68. 153. Žižek, Violence, pp. 83–5. Žižek adapts this from Lacan’s remark that a wife

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154. 155. 156. 157. 158. 159.

160. 161. 162. 163. 164. 165. 166. 167. 168. 169. 170. 171. 172. 173. 174. 175. 176. 177. 178. 179. 180. 181. 182. 183. 184. 185. 186.

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paranoid about being cheated on by her spouse is still paranoid even if her suspicion happens to be true, because her suspicion is not in fact grounded in any observation (and because the paranoia represents a way of not coming to terms with the truth of the situation); see Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book VII, p. 54. Povinelli, ‘At home …’, p. 195. For a highly nuanced account of what is at work in citizenship tests see Butler, ‘Sexual Politics, Torture, and Secular Time’. Marcuse, ‘Repressive Tolerance’. Spivak, Critique of Postcolonial Reason, p. 296. Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, p. 76. For a good example see Cohen, ‘What Toleration Is’. Cohen’s piece is carefully argued, but in the end the attempt to find a single definition for tolerance ends up being overly individualist and fails to see that tolerance also operates as a political discourse. Brown, Regulating Aversion, p. 8. Ibid., pp. 9–10. Ibid., p. 12. Galeotti, ‘Citizenship and Equality’, p. 589. Brown, Regulating Aversion, p. 13. Ibid., p. 14. Ibid., p. 19. Ibid., pp. 13–14. Ibid., p. 6. Ibid., p. 15. Rorty, Achieving our Country. Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, p. 18. Brown, Regulating Aversion, p. 170. Ibid., p. 153. Ibid., p. 154. Ibid., p. 23. Ibid., ch. 6. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents; Mass Psychology and Other Writings. Brown, Regulating Aversion, p. 156. Ibid., p. 158. Ibid., p. 163. Helliwell and Hindess, ‘The Temporalizing of Difference’. Brown, Regulating Aversion, p. 182. Ibid., p. 166. Ibid., p. 167. Ibid., p. 168. Ibid., p. 173.

Recognition: Tolerant, and Cunning 187. 188. 189. 190. 191. 192.

193. 194. 195. 196. 197.

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Ibid., p. 191. Ibid., pp. 178–9. Ibid., p. 186. Ibid., p. 187. Ibid., p. 203. As criticised by Third World Feminists, see especially Mohanty, ‘Under Western Eyes’; but also Mahmood, Politics of Piety. For standard versions of the liberal feminist account see Okin, Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?; and Shachar, ‘On Citizenship and Multicultural Vulnerability’. For accounts of how this operates with regard to a specific case see: Ehrenreich, ‘Intersex Surgery, Female Genital Cutting, and the Selective Condemnation of“Cultural Practices”’; Shweder,‘When Cultures Collide: Which Rights? Whose Tradition of Values?’. Taylor, ‘The Politics of Recognition’, p. 62. Ibid., p. 64. Ibid., p. 66. Ibid., pp. 69–70. Ibid., p. 70.

Chapter 7 MULTICULTURALISM BEYOND IMMUNITY

Over the course of the last three chapters, I presented a series of critiques of different liberal theories of multiculturalism. In what follows I want to outline at least the beginnings of a theory about how to move beyond the limitations of liberal multiculturalism. What is needed in order to constitute a multicultural community that is not completely overdetermined by its immunitary tendency to strengthen the liberal body politic? It is my contention that escaping the immunitary paradigm here requires moving beyond liberalism. This is not to say that liberalism is completely reactionary or without merit, but to say that, when it comes to cultural plurality, liberalism hits the limits of what its progressive tendency can arrive at. Now, moving outside of liberalism alone does not mean moving outside of immunity; however, I want to argue that it is the first condition for escaping the destructive effects of the immunitary paradigm at work today. In the first part of the chapter I will be focusing primarily on some of the lessons that we have to draw from the critiques I have outlined in the previous chapters. I will be outlining the kind of things that a new conception of community will need to do in order to break with its immunising tendencies. In the second part, I will be outlining some possible conceptual paths towards its doing so. This outline will necessarily remain somewhat speculative. Rather than offering a detailed programme, it is meant to provide something of a horizon by which to orient this work, and to point up promising paths for thinking and organising cultural coexistence. That this non-liberal conception will not itself become subject to immunitary processes is not guaranteed, but it at least offers the potential for providing a line of flight from the immunitary paradigm in a way that liberalism cannot (and does not really want to). This section on a new conception of community will take up the bulk of the chapter, not because it is the only thing needed for a 142

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new politics of multiculturalism, but because it is this aspect which requires the most conceptual work. WHAT MUST A MULTICULTURAL POLITY DO? It has been my contention throughout this work that liberal multiculturalism does not constitute a multicultural polity that is truly worthy of the name. Drawing on the critique I have outlined in the past chapters, I now want to suggest some things that need to happen for a theory of multiculturalism to truly lead to a multicultural polity. First and foremost is a point that I have raised repeatedly over the course of the book: namely that liberal multiculturalism, even in its most far-reaching manifestations, is not multicultural in its process. That is, it conceives of difference (or the fact of pluralism, if you prefer) as a problem or issue to be solved and of multiculturalism as a method of doing so. The intended outcome is a polity that is multicultural in its constitution, but that lives within a liberal framework (and arguably whose practices too have been liberalised). The process by which multicultural organisation is itself organised is wholly determined by liberal principles. This means that a tendency to liberalise other cultures is built into liberal multiculturalism from the outset. A truly multicultural polity must allow the processes of several cultures to flow into its means of organising coexistence. If it does not, multiculturalism will always preserve the logic of toleration since it is a matter of liberal principles doing the work of accommodation. Now what does this mean concretely? As I have outlined in Chapter 4, with reference to Kymlicka’s work, there is a tendency in liberal multiculturalism to press issues into the language of rights (both civic and human). However, as an approach to conflict this is both legalistic and individualising. Constituting the process of multiculturalism multiculturally would mean in the first instance moving beyond the language of rights. Gayatri Spivak has argued that the politics of rights needs to be sutured with a politics of responsibility.1 I have argued elsewhere that moving beyond the constraints of liberalism requires abandoning rights altogether in favour of a new politics of responsibility.2 However, for the task of simply creating a multicultural polity this need not necessarily be the case. There may still be a place for rights since diversifying the process does not mean completely obliterating liberal culture. However,

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what needs to go is the primacy of rights, and the tendency to translate all grievances into rights claims. If rights cannot be made to work alongside other processes then they will have to be moved beyond in the process. Diversifying the process of multiculturalism is the first step to truly opening up the liberal polity to difference. However, it is also a great risk from the perspective of liberalism. Opening liberalism up in this way will lead to a breaking down of the distinction between the liberal body politic and the non-liberal outside. It amounts to disabling the immunitary mechanisms of liberalism. If the process is no longer determined by liberalism, then it can no longer act as a process of liberalisation – rather, it would be a process of substantive multiculturalisation that would undo the idea of liberal culture standing somehow apart from or above other cultures. Diversifying the process is thus a process of breaking down boundaries. However, even as boundaries are blurred, this does not and should not lead to one amorphous mass. The aim here is not consensus, and it is not complete fusion either. Another lesson to take from the critiques of multiculturalism I have made is that a model of multiculturalism cannot be universal in its aspiration. That is, it is not a matter of creating one model and implementing it everywhere equally. Kymlicka talks about the dissemination of a particular model of multiculturalism; this cannot be the aim here. The uniform application of a particular set of principles would inevitably by biased towards a particular cultural grouping. Multiculturalism needs to be multiculturally constituted, but it must also be constituted differently everywhere. Which part of different cultures’ processes for regulating coexistence flows into multicultural process and how these processes are combined will differ according to the particular cultures that are present in a particular locale. This is necessarily so, because I am not talking here of consensus or a fusion that allows for a quasi-neutral standpoint. A satisfactory model of multiculturalism must always be locally constituted (so it is not a matter of liberals learning to simply appreciate the ‘Confucian way’, say, and factoring this into their static models of multiculturalism). Once boundaries are blurred and the process multiculturalised it will also follow quite naturally that the mode of multiculturalism cannot be that of toleration. As I argued in the previous chapter, toleration as a discursive process entrenches hierarchies of power, with liberal culture

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putting itself in the superior position of doing the tolerating. Any move towards tolerance as a mode to regulating coexistence would lead to the privileging of some of the constituent cultures over others. Nor can a new politics of multiculturalism fall back into the mode of recognition. Liberal recognition ends up demanding impossible identifications of the subjects being recognised, and inscribes into other cultures a standard of authenticity and stasis that is not demanded of liberal culture. What must be arrived at is more akin to a constantly negotiable multiculturally informed process of regulating coexistence through temporary accommodations, similar in some senses to a modus vivendi. However, the agreements reached must be of a certain sort. The mode must not be one of arriving at a consensus. I have outlined various problems involved with liberal consensus in Chapter 5, but most important here is the fact that it stops subjectification – and that this is the case for liberal rights conceptions as well (see Chapter 4). A new politics of multiculturalism must enable the subjectification of other subjects as well as liberal subjects, and must do so in a way that does not make subjectification equal to liberalisation. This means that a new politics of multiculturalism must be organised dissensually. In fact, if the aim is not fusion and if the process needs to be multiculturally constituted, the result is necessarily dissensual. Multiculturalism must allow for different groups to insert themselves into the multicultural process through the staging of dissensus. Agreement on modes of coexistence is reached, but it is always renegotiated, and it does not entail consensus on core values to unite the polity (as it would in Parekh). What is forged is a mode of conviviality. Even as there is dissensus and disagreement, there is coexistence, and this coexistence needs to be organised so that it leads to conviviality. Conviviality combines a large degree of differentiating with a large degree of overlapping.3 It does not necessarily lead to everybody liking each other or to the complete elimination of xenophobic attitudes – Les Back writes about London as the site of both a profound realisation of multicultural diversity and a place in which enduring forms of racism have taken hold.4 But it does lead to a shared experience, and to the production of a certain shared locality, that allows true plurality to flourish. Lived conviviality goes far beyond liberal multiculturalism, even though its discursive expression is not always up to the standards of political correctness. Lived conviviality is people living alongside each other, interacting, and getting along

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– often despite explicit pronouncements that they do not get along.5 Conviviality is true multiculturalism on the ground; it is alive, ragtag, sometimes uneasy, and always dissensual. Crucially, the conviviality that has developed on the ground has been all but ignored by the liberal state.6 The task of a new politics of multiculturalism must be to place this conviviality centre stage. WHAT ABOUT TOTALITY? It is my contention that promoting such conviviality will require the thinking of new communal ontologies and a particular conceptualisation of totality. This is somewhat counter-intuitive, in so far as I have been consistently arguing that one of the problems with liberalism is that it is totalising. It claims to be the neutral meeting ground for cultures, when in fact it claims for itself hegemony for the organisation of coexistence. In fact, in so far as it breaks cultures down into individual preferences and atomises individuals it is even totalitarian. All the problems with liberal multiculturalism that I have outlined stem, at least in part, from a tendency in liberalism to see the world as a totality rather than constituted by incommensurabilities. If we see all this as problematic, then the seemingly logical next step would be to abandon the perspective of totality altogether; to let everyone be completely independently; to move to a perspective of complete relativism. However, I think to do so would not be the right way forward, mainly because it ignores three principal problems. First, we live in times of global capitalism and global imperial hierarchies; laissez-faire will simply lead to some ways of life losing out under the market and under inegalitarian power relations. It would be simply naive to say that different styles of life are best protected by doing nothing. Secondly, even if this were to work internationally, it is no help for multicultural polities. In so far as populations are dispersed and diversified across the globe, leaving things to themselves may simply lead to majority populations living out their xenophobic impulses on minorities. Thirdly, it ignores the fact that communities, cultures, people, etc., while not the same, are also not separate. It ignores the issue of connectedness, of the mutual constitution of communities. We need to conceptualise these connections, this mutual constitution, in a way that does not reintroduce a hierarchy among the constituent groups.

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In liberal theories, the way to ensure the constitution of a viable political community and to stress connectedness, takes the form either of some list of core values of the political community, of an overlapping consensus on procedure, or of some kind of liberal nationalism. Alternatively, a romanticist version of an identity (such as ‘Britishness’) is invoked and posited as the medium for forging a community based on tradition. Jean-Luc Nancy has argued that Enlightenment thought and romanticism can no longer sustain us, saying of them: They are contemporaries of ours and we see them wearing thin. One is worn thin to the point of being an extremely dull platitude; the other is stretched out toward the night of extermination.7 The exclusionary nature of a racial community is obvious. The appeal to traditional culture will not suffice either. The almost obsessive focus on memory cannot be a viable way to construct a future-oriented community. Reviving traditional culture can thus not be a viable way of forging community. Werner Hamacher notes: ‘The very concept of culture prohibits simple identification with it or with any of its forms. […] No culture can measure up to its claim to be culture.’8 That is, culture is always the necessarily unattainable attempt to reach itself. Culture can never be everything that it is supposed to be, it can never be attained – this is why recognition is insufficient for a new politics of multiculturalism. Thus according to Hamacher, culture is structurally always in crisis; it is ‘organised aporia’ but also the aporia of organisation itself.9 Culture cannot be conclusively appropriated for a certain cause, it cannot simply be claimed by the nation-state. The very idea of a national culture is problematic because it suggests singular cultural development distinct from other cultures. However, cultures always develop in interchange with other cultures: they are always enmeshed, interconnected, not separable except by overdetermination. In Hamacher’s words, ‘culture already means multiculture, and it means the culture of the multiplicity of cultures’.10 Thus, thinking community necessitates thinking it beyond the nation form. How, then, to construct a community that is not marked by exclusions without succumbing to a facile brand of cosmopolitanism that posits the emergence of a world society, and that ultimately reduces differences to triviality and has as its ultimate fulfilment the reduction

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of everything to its liberal form? Our problem is not just that we are caught up in the nation-state, culture and romanticism, but that even as we begin to be able to think beyond them we only seem to be capable of doing so in liberal-capitalist ways. What is needed therefore is a way of conceptualising this connectedness without overdetermining the singularity and plurality of its constituent parts in favour of some larger totality. To put it in slogan form: a totality that does not totalise. A natural step to make here might be to move towards a politics of hospitality as advanced by Jacques Derrida. However, it is my contention that a politics of hospitality, while not without its merits, is still too limited for a new politics of multiculturalism (and by extension so too is a particular Kantian response to the issue of diversity, since it is with Kant that this notion of hospitality originates). Derrida outlines a project of absolute hospitality in his essay On Cosmopolitanism. Derrida here calls for a genuine innovation in the duty to hospitality. In the text he calls for an ethics of hospitality (or rather states that hospitality is ethics) and then calls for the establishment of ‘cities of refuge’. These cities of refuge will give rise to a place for reflection on the questions of asylum and hospitality.11 Hospitality in Kant excludes any form of residence, and is rigorously defined as law, and thus tied to state sovereignty. Derrida hopes that an innovation in the ethics of hospitality can arise in a place between the law of unconditional hospitality and the conditional laws of a right to hospitality.12 However, he is not clear on how this might come about, beyond the call of establishing cities of refuge. The idea of the city of refuge is interesting and resonates to a certain extent with some of what I will be proposing at the end of this chapter with regard to Lefebvre (although I will be talking of the city as a model). Derrida calls for the opening of cities of refuge. These cities are meant to be autonomous and independent from the state and from each other, but allied according to a new form of solidarity yet to come.13 They are supposed to reorient the politics of the state, and also to transform the way in which cities belong to the state. These open cities of refuge, united by solidarity, are meant to revive the duty of and right to hospitality.14 The hope is that the city, equipped with new rights and greater sovereignty, could open up possibilities beyond those available in international state law.15 Cities of refuge would operate on an ethics of hospitality and open their doors to

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all that seek refuge, and would protect them from the sovereignty of the state without questioning and without even asking for identification.16 There is, however, something quite limited in this call by the International Parliament of Writers. All the utopian aspects notwithstanding, it seems to be concerned more with damage limitation or a reaction to a situation than with attempting to change the situation that makes places of asylum an urgent necessity. Cities of refuge seem as feeble a way of tackling geopolitical and material inequities as the New International Derrida proposed in Specters of Marx,17 especially in so far as Derrida posits ‘intellectuals, scholars, journalists, and writers’ as those most in need of refuge.18 However, Derrida also skilfully outlines many of the difficulties with a politics of hospitality in Of Hospitality. I contend that taking these lessons seriously should lead us to try to move beyond hospitality rather than hope for a reinvigorated hospitality. Under hospitality, the guest always remains a foreigner, rather than becoming part of the political community.19 This suggests a degree of separateness that simply ignores the long history of global connectedness. Derrida stresses that the question of the foreigner comes from the foreigner, is of the foreigner, and is in many ways not a question for the local.20 In so far as the notion of hospitality reinscribes this separation, it is an insufficient means via which to develop a new politics of multiculturalism. Derrida also identifies a series of aporias at the heart of hospitality. The first is that it must be asked for in a language that is not that of the foreigner, of the one who is asking hospitality. But if this is so, must we expect the foreigner to learn the language, and if they do are they still properly foreign and truly the recipient of hospitality?21 The second is that hospitality is extended to a particular name or family and is reciprocal. But absolute hospitality extended to a complete other would ask nothing in return and would ask no name, but as such it breaks with the traditional pact of hospitality.22 There is thus a question of who hospitality is given to. Can it be rendered to the Other before they are identified, or can it only be given to an identifiable or legal subject?23 Unconditional hospitality would dispense with law and duty and is thus in tension with a regulated hospitality that relies precisely on law and duty. As such, the one can pervert the other and this risk of perversion is irreducible.24 Moreover, in so far as a new politics of multiculturalism would be a way of coming up with a regularised form of dealing with

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difference, and in so far as it is precisely a politics, it stands at odds with the idea of unconditional hospitality. Finally, hospitality entails a certain assertion of mastery. Extending hospitality requires that you be in charge – that you are in a position to extend or deny hospitality.25 There is in fact an inherent limit to hospitality. Even though hospitality is meant to be for Kant an absolute value, it gets trumped by the demands of the categorical imperative. For Kant, morality and absolute veracity in fact trump the duty of hospitality.26 The person who extended hospitality to someone fleeing bandits is still duty bound to tell them of the runaway’s whereabouts if they ask. If, however, morality trumps hospitality, then it is easy to see how hospitality can slip into the same sorts of provisos we have observed time and again with liberal theories of difference. Hospitality may be extended, but not to what is deemed immoral by the host community (and again we have the problem here, that the idea of a host community separate from a guest is highly problematic). Hospitality thus invites the idea of the illegitimate guest, of the parasite.27 Hospitality, while perhaps the right attitude to take towards someone we encounter as Other, cannot be the ethic that we use to normatively construct the coming community. For hospitality maintains notions of inside and outside, and a claim to mastery, that do not meet the demands of an entangled diverse world. A conception of connectedness that hopes to escape the immunitary paradigm will have to move beyond hospitality. * So what might a new conception of connectedness look like then? How can we think of communities as complex and connected, but differentiated and informed by different practices, without drawing from this a claim to universality or ersatz universality? Let us take as a starting point a very classical conception of totality, that of György Lukács. Lukács famously emphasised the importance of the point of view of totality for revolutionary method in History and Class Consciousness. He stressed that in order to properly understand something we need to look at the whole of the process involved, rather than splitting it into individual atomised elements – to shirk totality is to lose sight of the process. For Lukács, the category of totality determines both the object and subject

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of knowledge; an individualist standpoint cannot lead to totality; the subject must conceive of itself as part of a totality.28 Furthermore, to disrupt the totalising point of view is to disrupt the unity of theory and practice.29 Letting go of totality leads, for Lukács, right back to unhistorical laws and abstract Kantian imperatives: it removes the urgency of the situation. This is as much a gesture against analytical philosophical tendencies to break everything down into ever smaller categories as it is against Lukács’ explicit target in this essay, nominally the social democrats who, failing to see totality, end up ignoring imperialism and supporting aristocracy. However, I do not want to follow Lukács too far, since for him the only subject that can conceive of totality is the class subject, and its consciousness is the party. Lukács’ imperative to pay attention to totality is important in that he captures the necessity of totality for thinking connectedness. However, in so doing he loses sight of particularity entirely – precisely what I want to avoid here. In his work, class overdetermines everything, and thus represses other subjectivities in the process of its liberatory struggle. Simply turning to Lukács as we move away from liberalism would only lead us to replace a liberal immunising tendency with a Marxist one. Lukács’ conception of totality is insufficient for a new politics of multiculturalism. In order to be able to turn to processes and totality without denying particularity I find it fruitful to turn to Louis Althusser. In his writings on contradiction and overdetermination Althusser emphasises the importance of looking at the total social body. He says: The ‘contradiction’ is inseparable from the total structure of the social body in which it is found, inseparable from its formal conditions of existence, and even from the instances it governs; it is radically affected by them, determining, but also determined in one and the same movement, and determined by the various levels and instances of the social formation it animates.30 That is, contradiction is affected on all levels of the social formations; it is simultaneously a determined and a determining factor of the total social structure. As a result contradiction is always overdetermined, either to inhibit it or to cause revolutionary rupture. The point is that simple categories or relations are never simple but always part of

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complex contexts; simple categories presuppose the existence of a structured whole of society: ‘simplicity is merely the product of a complex process’.31 They are part of the circumstances; Althusser draws on Lenin to see the ‘current situation’ as the structure of conjuncture, the paradoxical unity of the displacements and condensations of contradictions.32 This is the realisation that when we are speaking of existing conditions we are also speaking of conditions of existence.33 That is, we live in a time of global capital and interconnectedness; and interconnectedness is the condition of global capital and vice versa. The mode of investigation that Althusser suggests is to look at complex social wholes. This means taking the perspective of totality, but without totalising. It also means seeing the domination at work within the complex structured whole.34 This is essentially an argument against base–superstructure distinctions. Rather than reading one as the essence of the other, the categories disappear in favour of a new conception of the relation between determinate instances in the structure–superstructure complex, as this is what determines the essence of the social formation.35 Superstructure cannot be discounted; the secondary contradictions are essential to the principal contradictions. Superstructure and structure are essential to one another, just as there can be no production without relations of production and vice versa.36 In fact, breaking down this distinction is crucial in order to justify political struggle, which effects what according to base–superstructure distinctions should be done in the economic realm. What this means is simply taking into account mutual implication, and the connectedness of things. Althusser is not clear on where the social whole ends for him (town, region, nation, world), but whatever his intended remit, in times of global capital we might want to talk about global complex wholes as the appropriate field of investigation. That is simply to say that everywhere is implicated by global capital, which is not to say that there cannot be non-capitalist formations.37 Capitalism is fully capable of dealing with pockets of non-capitalism, of subaltern formations, or whatever you want to call them. To talk about complex wholes is to recognise that these different modes remain implicated, are part of the same whole. However, this is very different from saying that everywhere is the same.38 The complex whole is infinitesimally variegated, full of incommensurabilities, but entangled incommensurabilities: precisely not a simple

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unity, but a complex one. Complexity is essential to processes and their contradictions, which are irretrievably plural. Both the interconnectedness implied by the complex whole and the aspect of contradiction are vital because for Althusser a complex whole can simply not be imagined without contradictions.39 That is, the idea of dissensus is inscribed into the very notion of totality conceived of as a complex whole. Thus when we talk of the unity of social formations there is never original, simple unity, only structured complex unity – unity does not imply a simple essence. However, there is a basic problem in perceiving the complex totality that Althusser talks about, of perceiving both difference and totality; and it is in what Žižek calls parallax gaps. That is, while things are intimately connected, their very connection excludes the perspective of totality. We are caught in a double bind where we can acknowledge that things are connected in some form of totality but where the apprehension of this totality is an impossibility. To ignore the totality is not an option, but to talk about it without overdetermining it in such a way that some important aspects of it are ignored is not possible either. Žižek defines parallax as the confrontation of two closely linked perspectives between which no neutral common ground is possible.40 There is no shared space or mediation; the ontology is that of the Möbius strip, of space that is bent onto itself. Both sides are intimately connected, inseparable in fact, and yet they cannot be seen at the same time in their totality; the connection excludes the meeting. Yet owing to their close linkage, the shift from one to the other can be achieved by a shift in perspective. It is thus through looking at various nonreconcilable levels that we can come to approximate an understanding of what we are looking at. This is not merely a matter of fusing two different perspectives: ‘we do not have two perspectives, we have a perspective and what eludes it, and the other perspective fills in this void of what we could not see from the first perspective.’41 In parallax, the bracketing itself produces its object.42 It is through a singling out of particular aspects (the economic, the state, etc.) that these become distinct objects of study. As a result, various theories may seem to neglect either the state or the economy. The difficulty is that in trying to create a totality that incorporates all aspects we risk seeing nothing at all. We only have recourse to a variety of perspectives that are not immediately reconcilable. That is, the object is not representable but

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becomes determinable through the observation of incommensurable practices.43 It is a focus on the between of domains. The gap between the perspectives always remains; we can only hope to narrow it.44 To take the perspective of parallax is to acknowledge the undefinability of a thing as such, and to see that it is through shifting perspectives that we can approximate it. However, this is not to suggest that the object is simply there and changes owing to a subjective change in stance. Rather, subject and object are entangled; the subject’s gaze is already always inscribed in the perceived object.45 Within a parallax, the gap between different narratives is irreducible, the tension cannot be resolved; one has to look at the ‘truth’ of both of them.46 That is,‘“reality” itself is caught up in the movement of our knowing it’.47 Žižek sets up parallax as a series of couplets. Following Frederic Jameson, the concept can be expanded to include multitudes of incommensurabilities.48 We can also take from Jameson the view that what is needed then to properly apprehend totality is an adequate form of cognitive mapping.49 HOW TO GET THERE (WITH RHYTHM!) Finding this way of cognitively mapping a non-totalitarian totality is precisely the challenge at hand. The question is: how do we bridge the parallax gap that keeps us from seeing particularity and totality at the same time? Moreover, how do we avoid the pitfall of the new conception merely ending up in a parallax of its own with liberal conceptions of totality? That is, how to ensure that this is more than merely a change of perspective on what is essentially the same thing? I want to suggest that the most promising route to navigate these challenges lies in turning to Henri Lefebvre and his conception of rhythms. Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis could be an appropriate means for cognitively mapping the kind of totality that we need to capture to develop a new theory of multiculturalism. Through rhythms we can both negotiate the tensions within totality, and make a direct link to new conceptualisations of multicultural communities by using both the city and music as a model for a new politics of multiculturalism. Strictly speaking, rhythm is not totality as such, but in what follows I want to argue that it can do the useful work of totality – allowing us to think connection and interrelation on both an intimate and a wider scale – while helping to avoid the drawbacks. Rhythm and resonances can

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allow us to think connectedness, and do so dynamically and without imposing any kind of hierarchy. Thinking with rhythm can allow incommensurabilities to be linked through syncopation rather than fusion. The move to this alternative conception is in a way dialectical. Totality having been consistently negated, this negation is in turn negated. However, in sublating to a higher level the conception of totality that emerges is not really totality as such but a different way of thinking connectedness. The move towards rhythm dialectically bridges the parallax gap. Rhythm allows us to think connection and interaction without having to think integration and fusion also. Now, there can be no guarantee that this conception will be liberatory (I take seriously the Foucaultian point that any discourse can be both an instrument of and a stumbling block for power);50 however, it seems a promising alternative route to the liberal conception of totality – rhythms may take us beyond immunisation. Now, what exactly do I want to take from Lefebvre’s ideas on rhythm? Rhythmanalysis is meant to be more than the mere analysis of rhythms; it is intended as a new mode of analysis. The study of rhythms can proceed both from concrete to abstract and from abstract to concrete, and these moves can complement each other51 – this is a useful quality for what we are trying to do here. Rhythm is intended in Lefebvre as a concept enabling us to think of a whole range of different orders, both natural and social; it is thus conceived specifically with diversity in mind. Rhythm incorporates difference into its very concept (and also does so through repetition) – it thus seems well suited to thinking multiculturalism. Lefebvre cites certain concepts as central to rhythm, among them repetition and measure (R: 6). It is this repetitive nature that leads to the introduction of difference into rhythms. But where there is rhythm there is also measure, in the form of calculation, law, or obligation (R: 8). Rhythm links qualitative and quantitative, rational and irrational, continuous and discontinuous, linear and cyclical together (R: 8–9). Rhythm is meant to help us look at these couplets as more than just the dialogue of two voices, or the dialectic of three terms – rhythm can bring infinitely more things into play (R: 11), and does so without synthesising them. Lefebvre demonstrates his mode of analysis in the chapter on the view from the window. He analyses his view of the city in terms of manifold rhythms: traffic, pedestrians, noises, shadows, etc.52 The daily

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rhythms combine with the longer rhythms: plants blooming, the time of sundown, temperature, and so on. The individual rhythms are not directly connected, yet they come together to form an overall picture. This is the model for thinking about cultures in terms of rhythms. The crucial concept here is the idea of polyrhythmia – the simultaneous presence of several rhythms. By seeing things polyrhythmically you no longer perceive a collection of fixed things, but a series of beings each having its own time above the whole (R: 31). Rhythmanalysis transforms divergent things into an ensemble of meanings, it turns them from things into presences (R: 23). However, these beings with presence and with their own time, while connected, are not overdetermined by a particular rationale – rhythm does not impose a logic, nor do the bodies that form the rhythm impose a law on it (R: 33). Rhythm is unity in diversity (R: 77). However, the connections made by rhythms are not always in plain sight – rhythms both reveal and hide (R: 36). Lefebvre says that ‘the visible moving parts hide the machinery’ (R: 15). This gels well with Žižek‘s observation that the very fact of connection obscures our ability to see it. Lefebvre sees rhythm and the everyday as the place where we can still grasp an aspect of our reality and its connectedness. Rhythm is everywhere where there is place, time and expenditure and therefore where there is repetition, interference, birth, growth, decline and end (R: 15). These are concrete cases that allow us to think of sequences of connection. Rhythm cannot simply be captured in a series of images. Rather: It requires attentive eyes and ears, a head, and a memory and a heart. A memory? Yes, in order to grasp this present otherwise than in an instantaneous moment, to restore it in its moments, in the movement of diverse rhythms. The recollection of other moments and of all hours is indispensable, not as a simple point of reference, but in order to isolate this present and in order to live it in all its diversity. (R: 36) This role of memory is crucial. Living the present in its diversity requires it. This gives us a way of engaging with and valuing traditions, without reifying them – as both past and present diverse practices are important for grasping rhythm. Rhythms operate not just in the everyday but on a societal level as

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well. However, here is where there may be attempts to overdetermine other rhythms. Lefebvre describes capital as trying to impose a rhythm centred around the duality of production and destruction of all other rhythms on a world scale (R: 55). There is a potentially repressive aspect of rhythms – a disciplinary one. Rhythm and dressage form the basis of organisations such as the military, but are also present in the training of animals. On the other hand, movements may also alter rhythms to the positive: Lefebvre describes feminism as a movement that has modified the rhythms of a society impressed by virility and military dressage (R: 42). Lefebvre grounds his theory of rhythm in the body. The body presents numerous associated rhythms and it is to the body that the rhythmanalyst withdraws to get a sense of rhythm (R: 67). We can thus make a link between rhythms and biopower, which allows us to bring Esposito’s thought into direct play with Lefebvre’s. Immunity is that process by which a threat to life is utilised for the protection of life, in which negative and positive conceptions of biopower are dialectically bridged, and in which the body politics is strengthened against an outside. It is the attempt to shape particular rhythms in such a way that they will strengthen liberalism. And in so far as biopower seeks to control, discipline and regularise the body, immunity strikes at the very foundation of the rhythmanalytical project. However, rhythms, especially musical rhythms, are naturally opposed to regimentation. Lefebvre asserts that rhythms unfold and increase by diversifying themselves (R: 65). Musical rhythm has an ethical function – it illustrates everyday life and purifies it in catharsis (R: 66). It is thus in a combination of musical rhythm and rhythm as a means of analysing the everyday that I see the most potential for helping us think connectedness for a new politics of multiculturalism. According to Lefebvre, ‘the everyday reveals to be polyrhythmia from the first listening’ (R: 16). Thus we need to look at coexistence and connectedness in terms of polyrhythmia. Different communities become syncopated rather than fused; they are related, they interact, but they do not play to the same beat. Connection through syncopation is very different from any idea of overlapping consensus or common values. It focuses on the daily interactions of lived conviviality, and it is dissensual. It does not try to impose hierarchy or order, but neither does it try to separate and isolate. Syncopation is not automatically positive (Lefebvre cites Beirut as an example of polyrhythmia swinging into a destructive arrhythmia in which the

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rhythms of others suddenly make those of the self impossible (R: 99– 100)) but it is the most appropriate and promising form in which to think of connectedness for a multiculturalism that actually deserves its name. It is through syncopation that we can think the off-beat coexistence of actual communities in multicultural polities. * Thinking in terms of syncopation and rhythm will allow us to think new ontologies for the political community – ones that escape the immunitarian paradigm, that figure the munus differently, that are not exclusionary and not soaked in nationalist romanticism. I think that Jean-Luc Nancy’s idea of being-in-common can be usefully made to resonate with Lefebvre here, and it will also provide a link back to Esposito whose work on community was influenced by Nancy’s. Nancy proposes a new radical ontology that stresses the singular plurality of Being, and it complements an understanding of connection in terms of rhythm well. Liberalism represses the question of being-in-common – it has drained society of the figures on which community could be projected, creating a society without sociation.53 Within capitalism, being-together is reduced to being-of-market-value. Capitalism can expose beingtogether through its global circulations, but it also violates it in the process.54 Furthermore, economic inequalities can be recast in such a way that culture is considered a compensation for low economic status.55 Thus groups may be systematically disadvantaged, but their compensation lies in the fact that they are perceived as groups with culture whereas the mainstream is seen as being beyond culture. As such, antisystemic sentiment is contained. These are precisely the kind of immunitary practices that we have become very familiar with by now. Rhythm can be a way of getting us out of this immunitary operation and back to being-in-common. Nancy stresses that Being cannot be anything but being-with-oneanother; the consistency of our being is thus being-in-common, its essence is co-essence.56 Being is a relational concept – in some senses Being is community.57 Thus we are constituted by our with-one-another. Nothing pre-exists this being-with, existence itself emerges out of coexistence, the subject of social being is never already established; it makes sense mutually and only mutually.58 Rhythm can provide the

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cognitive mapping for apprehending this mutuality – what rhythm does is allow us to see co-appearance, making it the praxis and the ethos that is the very condition of thinking ‘us’.59 Co-appearance requires praxis; and to think of the community in terms of rhythm is precisely to think of it in terms of the diverse coexisting practices of myriad groups. Praxis is the necessary basis for forming community because ‘community […] has no other resource to appropriate except the “with” that constitutes it’.60 Singular beings are plurally constituted through sharing.61 Community is figured for others and through others, but if it is interaction and co-appearance then it does not belong to the self but to others.62 This brings us back to the issue of the munus, and of the genealogy of community that Esposito traced. Nancy’s is a conception that does not conceive of community as a property that is owned, but comes far closer to the idea of the munus as obligation – understood as constant interaction. The focus on being-with-another and polyrhythmia is, then, the attempt to embrace these obligations, rather than to attempt to immunise or seek exemption from them. Being-in-common is not limited to common being.63 That is, it is not about being the same; it is about co-appearing – about polyrhythmia. It is not about making things common in the sense of rendering them the same. On the contrary: The common, having-in-common or being-in-common, excludes interior unity, subsistence, and presence in and for itself. Being with, being together and even being ‘united’ are precisely not a matter of being ‘one’.64 Nor does it impose any kind of hierarchy. ‘Being-in-common does not mean a higher form of substance or subject taking charge of the limits of separate individualities.’65 Rhythm does precisely this work of coappearing without imposing a particular order. Community is what happens to us in the wake of society.66 People are irreducibly plural, whereas society is a singular concept. Singular differences are infra-individual; we all differ from each other rather than a generality – concepts such as culture and ethnos only bring these differences into relief, even as they try to abolish them.67 The question is how to account for the singular plurality of individuals without drifting into a bland individualist liberalism that ignores the importance of

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community, and the dependence of people on the social and the common. How to forge community without overdetermining the plurality of people? We do it by staging co-appearance as syncopation rather than as fusion or unity, and by rooting it in everyday conviviality. The recourse to syncopation and rhythm is to a certain degree a recourse to locality. There is a logic of the nearby that underlies every group: the world always appears according to a local turn.68 Being-social remains wholly within the act of association; thus the multitude needs to be sublated into a larger totality or something doing the work of totality. This is precisely the place for rhythm, and for thinking of the political community polyrhythmically.69 The resultant community must provide an ontology ‘for each and every one and for the world “as a totality”, and nothing short of the whole world, since this is all there is (but, in this way, there is all)’.70 This totality has to be a complex whole – it cannot reduce things to the same, but in its inclusiveness it should acknowledge the interconnectedness of everywhere. This perspective can emerge from rhythm. It is a vision of connectedness that is on the ground and embedded in practice – that is in tune with the people. We can take to heart here Fanon’s assertion that the people take a global stance from the very start.71 Nancy asserts that the meaning of Being starts with everydayness.72 This is something that it shares with rhythmanalysis, and that allows us to think of Nancy’s radical ontology of togetherness (and with it an idea of community centred around interaction and obligation rather than on property) as intimately connected with Lefebvre’s work on rhythms. Syncopation and rhythm allow us the possibility of embracing the munus, rather than immunising ourselves against it, of structuring a political community that is irreducibly plural in its singularity: one that furthers plural ways of being, rather than imposing a regime of securitisation and harsh immunitary mechanisms. MUSIC AND THE CITY To better illustrate what I have envisioned here in quite abstract terms, I want to suggest that, in turning to rhythm as the structuring logic of the political community, we are making both music and the city our model. The case of the Berlin-based band RotFront will illustrate my point. The praxis of RotFront manages to combine a multicultural ethic

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with a focus on the everyday and on ecstatic communion in a way that can serve as the model for the syncopated multicultural polity. RotFront was founded in Berlin in 2003 by a Ukrainian,Yuriy Gurzhy, as the Emigrantski Raggamuffin Kollektiv RotFront. Gurzhy had already made a name for himself by organising the popular Russendisko night together with the writer Wladimer Kaminer. Russendisko (also the name of Kaminer’s first book from 2000 and a 2012 film loosely based on it) first brought contemporary Eastern European music (rather than musealised folk music and kalinka) to the attention of a wider German populace. It also launched a highly successful career for Kaminer’s autobiographical books, full of always cheery vignettes of his life as an immigrant in Berlin arriving in 1990 at a time of extreme flux, as well as observations about the particularities of German habits. Kaminer is now a household name; he has released twenty books, makes frequent media appearances, and is in every way a prolific public figure. The same cannot be said of Gurzhy, who remains mainly known as an adjunct to Kaminer, although his practice with RotFront is far more interesting as a model than Kaminer’s prose which, while entertaining, is often over-reliant on stereotyping (although always very prescient in mocking the obsession of Germans’ with the ominous ‘Russian soul’). RotFront became something like the house band for the Kaffee Burger, which also housed Russendisko. It is a constantly changing collective of musicians, sometimes as many as fifteen at a time, that combines a mix of styles and languages in wild live shows (and eventually a debut album in 2009). The group combines elements of ska, reggae, klezmer, polka, hiphop and rock to form a unique blend of sound. Styles and languages shift constantly. It is this diversified practice, this syncopated community, this off-beat co-appearance, that I think provides a model for the multicultural polity. As the band says on its website: Breaking through borders is the real mission of RotFront – in that sense we are a political band. Politics is not explicitly sung about, however, we show in our own example how natural and harmonic the exchange between different nationalities, musical styles and cultures can work. […] The lyrics in Russian, Hungarian, German and English tell of the everyday in Berlin, of the adventures of immigrants in a big city.73

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Urbanity, and the focus on an everyday conviviality and interaction, are exactly what makes RotFront a model, although I would contend that the communion is syncopated rather than harmonious. Take the song ‘B-style’ from the band’s debut album. It locates the band firmly in its urban Berlin setting. Berlin is the site of locality that transcends different nationalities and cultures. The River Spree is likened to the ocean, the houses to mountains. However, this vision of home is not a unified one. District after district is listed, as examples of diverse existences, before the song concludes with the statement ‘Berlin is not a city it is a homeland’.74 While the band itself seems to remain caught up in the language of nationhood, what it conveys here actually sublates any idea of nation. Home is the site of everyday conviviality, and this locality transcends any hierarchical ideas of isolated identities. The idea, however, is not a cosmopolitanism that moves us away from any cultural attachments. The mode is not that of a world traveller like George Dibbern, who disavows all national attachments to declare himself a friend of all people.75 Such a citizen-of-the-world attitude may be admirable for some (and unlike the contemporary transnational elite, Dibbern saw it through to its logical conclusion, giving up his passport and the security of any state protection), but it forgets the value of cultural attachments and of diversity. Attachments to culture remain important even as a hierarchy or unitary model is disavowed. The coexistence that RotFront lives for us does not imply leaving behind all attachments; rather, it puts them into convivial play. The diversity of practices is embraced at the same time as a connection is, and this is done without homogenising or imposing a hierarchy. Diversity is channelled into a chaotic polyrhythmia of styles – it is an ecstatic expression of mixture. There is a certain exuberance at work in RotFront that speaks well to what we have been dealing with. For Nancy, the question of community is inseparable from the question of ecstasy.76 This ecstasy lies in communication – that which communicates within community and that which community communicates.77 RotFront is an example of how a diverse, plural community can result in ecstasy. Conviviality emerges in the performance: it is a thing of praxis. It is only through the praxis of co-appearance that the process of multiculturalism can be multiculturalised, can become truly diverse. A good approximation of what such co-appearance might look like in our theory production can be found in a work like Stephen Chan’s The End of Certainty, that

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seeks to develop a multicultural ethic through a thorough engagement with different philosophical traditions, without privileging one and while taking them seriously.78 In terms of on-the-ground multiculturalism, the city in a way provides the model for the dissensual chatter that emerges in a new politics of multiculturalism based around syncopated interaction. The city is a space of great diversity, of interaction, of engagement without domination. This is why Lefebvre calls for a right to the city, understood as the right to urban life, as something that exceeds any right to visit or hospitality.79 Placing the focus on the city as a model stresses the idea of locality that is essential both to rhythm and to being-with. This focus on locality also means that a new politics of multiculturalism is different everywhere, since all the localities are different. It is not a model that is uniformly expanded across the globe. Of course, the city is not a straightforwardly utopian place. Recall Les Back’s point about London as the site both of extreme diversity and of extreme hostility to diversity. Lefebvre too is aware that the city can be premised on exclusions, on a mass of subjugated people supporting a small elite.80 Moreover, the contemporary transnational elite is increasingly independent of being tied to one particular locale.81 So when I am invoking the model of the city, it is not so much in order to invoke how particular cities have so far regulated diversity, nor is it to take the material inequalities of the city as a model. Rather, it is a model in a more abstract and idealised way – as a diverse apparition, full of different parts that interact and form a wider whole, without sacrificing diversity and without imposing a hierarchy. CONCLUSION In this chapter I have tried to stake out the beginnings of possible ways of moving beyond the immunitary paradigm to a new politics of multiculturalism. Such a new politics of multiculturalism needs to multiculturalise its own process – the means of dealing with difference cannot be derived merely from a liberal conceptual vocabulary. Moreover, it must further everyday conviviality and be rooted in the local – it is not a project to be universally and uniformly implemented. At the same time, in order to avoid the disintegration of the political community, and to avoid leaving cultures at the mercy of market forces, it has to

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conceptualise connectedness in some way. It has been my contention that the idea of rhythm is the best way of thinking this connection. Rhythm allows us to think co-appearance in a way that stresses the importance of being-with another, and this is in tune with Nancy’s and Esposito’s conception of community. Moreover, the idea of syncopation allows us to think of co-appearance in a way that entails neither fusion nor hierarchy, but diverse existence. Thinking co-appearance in this way, together with a diversification of the process of regulating coappearance, seems to me the most promising way forward for a new politics of multiculturalism. In the concluding chapter, I will seek to concretise these thoughts, while linking them to what has gone before. NOTES 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127.

Spivak, ‘Righting Wrongs’. Ulbricht, ‘The Western, the Human, Rights and Responsibility’. Gilroy, ‘Multiculturalism in Times of War’, p. 28. Back, ‘Researching Community and Its Moral Projects’, p. 205. Ibid., pp. 209–12. Gilroy, After Empire, p. 124. Nancy, Being Singular Plural, p. 63. Hamacher, ‘One 2 Many Multiculturalisms’, p. 284. Ibid., p. 286. Ibid., p. 296. Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, p. 23. Ibid., pp. 21–2. Ibid., p. 4. Ibid., p. 5. Ibid., pp. 6–7. Ibid., p. 18. Derrida, Specters of Marx. Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism, p. 6. Derrida, Of Hospitality, p. 73. Ibid., p. 3. Ibid., pp. 15–17. Ibid., pp. 23–7. Ibid., p. 29. Ibid., p. 135. Ibid., pp. 149–55. Ibid., p. 71. Ibid., p. 59.

Multiculturalism Beyond Immunity 128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137. 138. 139. 140. 141. 142. 143. 144. 145. 146. 147. 148. 149. 150. 151. 152. 153. 154. 155. 156. 157. 158. 159. 160. 161. 162. 163. 164. 165. 166. 167. 168.

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Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, p. 28. Ibid., p 39. Althusser, For Marx, p. 101, italics in original. Ibid., p. 196. Ibid., pp. 178–9. Ibid., pp. 207–9. Ibid., pp. 201–2. Ibid., p. 111. Ibid., p. 205. See for instance Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, p. 38. Althusser, For Marx, p. 205. Žižek, The Parallax View, p. 4. Ibid., p. 29. Ibid., p. 56. Jameson, ‘First Impressions: The Parallax View by Slavoj Žižek’. Žižek, The Parallax View, p. 382. Ibid., p. 17. Ibid., p. 19. Ibid., p. 28. Jameson, ‘First Impressions: The Parallax View by Slavoj Žižek’. Jameson, ‘Cognitive Mapping’. Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An introduction, p. 101. Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, p. 5, henceforth cited in the text as R. Lefebvre may have been inspired here by Louis Aragon’s 1926 novel Paris Peasant. Nancy, Being Singular Plural, pp. 43, 47, 49. Ibid., pp. 73–5. Gilroy, Darker Than Blue, pp. 20–1. Nancy, Being Singular Plural, pp. 3, 26, 30 and passim. Nancy, The Inoperative Community, p. 6. Nancy, Being Singular Plural, pp. 29, 56, 83. Ibid., p. 71. Ibid., p. 63. Nancy, The Inoperative Community, p. 25. Ibid., p. 15. Ibid., p. 29. Nancy, Being Singular Plural, p. 154. Nancy, The Inoperative Community, p. 27. Ibid., p. 11. Nancy, Being Singular Plural, p. 8. Ibid., pp. 9, 80–1.

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169. I have argued elsewhere that this might also be the place where we can locate Fanon’s ‘New humanism’; see Ulbricht, Being Wretched. 170. Nancy, Being Singular Plural, p. 54. 171. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 14. 172. Nancy, Being Singular Plural, p. 9. 173. From their web page http://www.rotfront.com/de/band/; my translation. 174. RotFront, Emigrantski Raggamuffin, track 2, my translation. 175. He develops his own particular cosmopolitan ethic in Dibbern, Quest. 176. Nancy, The Inoperative Community, p. 6. 177. Ibid., p. 19. 178. Chan, The End of Certainty: Towards a new internationalism. 179. Lefebvre, Writings on Cities, pp. 158–9. 180. Ibid., p. 161. 181. Spivak, ‘Megacity’.

Chapter 8 CONCLUSION

In this last chapter I hope to tie together some of the threads from what has preceded, and also to concretise some of the things I mentioned in the previous chapter. I will start by recapping the main markers of my argument. I will then turn to the more concrete: What does all this mean in practice? Where does what I have said leave us? The answers to these questions are always going to be to a certain degree unsatisfactory, as they cannot be given with any large degree of certainty, and drawing concrete prescriptions out of theoretical inquiry is not always easy. However, I will do my best to delineate a path that I find promising on the basis of the work done in the previous chapters. LIBERAL MULTICULTURALISM AS A PROCESS OF IMMUNISATION It has been my contention that liberal multiculturalism constitutes a process of immunising liberalism from the perceived threat of a foreign Other by partially incorporating it. Or more accurately, liberal multiculturalism consists of a series of such immunitary mechanisms. There is no one single liberal multiculturalism; rather, there is a spectrum of theories that try to grapple with the issue of difference from a liberal perspective. It was never going to be possible to provide a comprehensive account of how all these different approaches serve to immunise liberalism. I have therefore made some pragmatic choices about which theorists to focus on. And even within these theorists I limited myself, since I did not want to write a book on Kymlicka, Parekh and Taylor, but on liberal multiculturalism as a mode of immunisation. So I identified within each of these thinkers’ theories a particular feature, not because it is the only aspect of their work, but because their work serves particularly well to illustrate how such a feature operates. In this way 167

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the work of Kymlicka, Parekh and Taylor has served as an example of how three particular forms of immunisation (rights, consensus, recognition) operate within liberal theories. I have traced out a brief overview of liberal approaches to difference. Liberal multiculturalism emerged as a broad term that describes a whole series of ways in which liberals cope with difference. Liberal multiculturalism does not exhaust the strategies of how liberals approach difference. However, I was interested in it in so far as it is meant to be that form of liberalism that is most amenable to difference. My argument has been that despite this fact, difference is only incorporated in so far as it strengthens liberalism – in the couplet ‘liberal multiculturalism’, ‘liberal’ is the clearly dominant term. Kymlicka, Parekh and Taylor were singled out as representative of the spectrum of liberal multiculturalism in several ways. Firstly, in so far as liberal multiculturalism often distinguishes between three main targets (indigenous groups, national minorities, immigrants), each of these groups forms the main concern for one of these theorists. While their focus is not exclusive, it is fair to say that the form of Kymlicka’s work is shaped largely by a concern with the issue of indigenous groups, that of Taylor by a concern with national minorities, and that of Parekh by a concern with immigrants. Secondly, these three were singled out because they furnish good examples of how rights, consensus and recognition operate in liberal multiculturalism. Again, it is not that Kymlicka is wholly determined by rights, Parekh by consensus and Taylor by recognition, nor is it that the work of these theorists is the definitive take on how these concepts operate in liberal multiculturalism. They simply provide very good illustrations of how these concepts actually operate within liberal theories of multiculturalism and how this operation is in fact an immunising one. * I argued that, in so far as Kymlicka’s project is one of creating a plural citizenship though a system of differentiated rights that form part of a larger universal human rights project, it was following an immunitary logic. Discourses of civic and human rights operate on an immunitary logic that is reproduced in theories of multiculturalism that rely on them. That is, while the utilisation of rights discourse may be meant to

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guarantee a certain degree of inclusions and access to culture, it in fact imposes certain exclusions as well, and can in fact limit the amount of cultural choice. For Kymlicka, multiculturalism and nation-building provide the conditions for each other. His is a project of bringing minorities into the sphere of citizenship. It is the incorporation of groups through allowing them to display their commitment to mainstream institutions. Kymlicka’s ideal is of a group-differentiated citizenship that allows for a diverse political community that provides the maximum framework of choice for individuals. However, even a diversified ideal of citizenship still inscribes certain exclusions. The diversity of group-differentiated citizenship is more of a diversity of origins than of actual diverse practices. Citizenship-focused models of multiculturalism are to a great extent about instilling liberal values in diverse groups. The inclusion of Others is premised to a large extent on the suspension of their otherness. There are a number of antinomies at work in the idea of citizenship that undermine the idea that it can provide the sphere in which all cultural practices can flourish equally. The figure of the citizen is intimately connected to that of the subject. It is the modern free subject as inaugurated by Kant. However, the subjectification entailed in citizenship always remains connected to particular forms of subjection as well. Once rights of citizenship become universal in their aspiration, they start to exceed their own institutions, they become hyperbolic. This opens up a gap between conceptions of equality: either equal citizenship is something that is had only in principle or it is something that is only realised when there is full equality. However, the full absence of subjection that citizenship and subjecthood entail is not in fact achieved by most citizens. There are always new supplementary groups outside the realm of even formal citizenship. There is also an antinomy in citizenship around activity and the law. Citizens are both legislators of and subject to the law. The citizen is thus absolutely active as legislator and absolutely passive in obedience to the law. However, this balance is upset once there is a distinction between passive and active citizens, which is almost from the outset. Once such a distinction is made, hierarchy reinserts itself into supposedly equal citizenship. Another antinomy arises with respect to the individual and the collective. Equality requires that it cannot be limited, otherwise some would

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in fact be holding privilege. However, society is defined by some kind of particularity – it requires an outside. That is, in so far as citizenship differentiates groups it stands at odds with the principles of equal worth and equal liberty. However, once equality becomes differentiated there is nothing to prevent exploitative forms of differential treatment – thus making questionable the value of the ideal of equal citizenship for organising the diverse polity. Citizenship can always be expanded to include new groups, but it also always maintains exclusions. Demands for inclusion may be met by the liberal state, but this is done to exclude others. The question of citizenship is tied up closely with the question of human rights, because the extension of citizenship depends in part on the extension of what is considered ‘the human’, and because it is actual states that have to guarantee human rights, making citizen’s rights in effect those human rights that are exercised, and because both revolve around the question of the subject. Human rights are also often used by liberal theorists as an example of a universally shared set of values that can provide a model for liberal multiculturalism. Liberal multiculturalism is strongly tied with the project of universal human rights as a project of both the external projection and the internal intensification of liberal values. Human rights also entail certain exclusions in that they operate on a limiting of the sphere of the human. There are exclusions that inhere conceptually within human rights and there are exclusions that arise from the practical deployment of human rights discourse. Human rights beg the question of what it means to be included in the sphere of the human. Despite the universal claims of human rights, humanity is not something that is universally shared. The ‘human’ of human rights is better defined as ‘people like us’ than as the species homo sapiens. Species belonging alone does not suffice for being included in human rights. Rights are dependent on some kind of state authority, and their expansion can be seen in terms of citizenship, which brings with it the exclusions already mentioned. In terms of deployment, there is simply the fact that human rights discourse operates in a world of global class relations, not in an egalitarian sphere. The deployment of human rights discourse is thus shaped by these hierarchies. Rights talk also affects the way grievances are expressed. The dominance of human rights language leads to a situation where all grievances are translated into rights claims. However, this immediately imposes a

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particular kind of individualist, legalistic approach, and cuts off the path to compromise and mixture. Liberalism immunises itself against resistance by allowing grievances to be made only in terms of one kind of vocabulary. However, this vocabulary prevents certain cases from being made at all, and allows others to only be solved in a certain way – a liberal one. If multicultural demands are articulated in a rights framework, then liberalism can immunise itself against the more radical demands that minorities might make. In this way the immunitary process involved in rights can in fact contribute to the domination of minorities. * Parekh, on the other hand, provided a model that places consensus at its heart. Parekh argues for a model of a community of communities in dialogue with each other that come to agreement on certain core values for society. It is a dialogical theory that develops a commitment to a particular set of values. It is meant to meet the demands of both unity and diversity. I argued that, in relying on a certain notion of consensus, Parekh ends up reproducing an immunitary tendency that is present within all Habermasian approaches and is rooted in the fact that for Parekh it is essential that there is a consensually agreed-on constitution that lays down the basic principles of the structures of authority. However, the particular way by which consensus operates strengthens liberal models of the polity. (Parekh, also, makes reference to Gadamer, but as I argued, his actual commitment to Gadamer is minimal, revealing more of an interest in the label ‘fusion of horizons’ than in the actual concept. I also argued that even with regard to living up to what the label promises he does not do a very good job.) Dialogue and consensus are meant to substitute for any pre-given universalism or abstract principles. The community is seen to need core values to keep it together, but if these are the result of a consensual dialogue then these are truly everyone’s. However, this consensual approach is not as straightforward as it looks, and in its own way constitutes an immunitary mechanism. A dialogically constituted multicultural society is meant to develop a strong notion of the common good that keeps it tied together. However, these common values end up putting constraints of their own on the community, as they provide the border of what is permissible.

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This is meant to be unproblematic because the common values are arrived at consensually. However, in practice consensus does not live up to everything that it promises. Firstly, it ignores the conditions under which consensus is arrived at. The process takes place in concrete circumstances; the skills of articulation are not equally distributed. Thus certain outcomes are more likely than others as some groups are better equipped to enter the dialogical process than others. The dialogue used to arrive at consensus entails a particular structure of the community, which in turn entails certain hierarchies and certain exclusions. Consensus implies that everyone is counted, which amounts to the prohibition of the subjectification of those not represented by the consensus. Consensus can in fact be used to silence the disagreement that is present in the polity. In a consensus regime the idea that there is disagreement cannot be brooked. Political contestation is thus replaced with technocratic governance. Disagreement is seen as a problem to be solved. However, this is done under a certain regime of the perceptible where the community, the parties to the dispute and the speech acts are presupposed as given. Thus political dispute is changed into an aggregation and calculated reconciliation of opinions. However, in this act of measurement and aggregation the consensus regime does not so much reflect as shape and create what becomes the consensual opinion. The idea of liberal values as a universally shared consensus is manufactured, as is the impression that truly everyone is incorporated. The result is that any disagreement is now excluded altogether, because there is ostensibly consensus by all. What occurs is the hindering of the subjectification of those who disagree. I have followed Rancière in arguing that subjecthood is something that needs to be constantly asserted, and that the staging of dissensus is the form that such an assertion takes. The staging of dissensus is a confrontation of the order of common sense; it is a taking of action that changes the distribution of the sensible. In so far as political subjectivity is asserted through such a staging of dissensus, consensual models shut down political subjecthood in an attempt to safeguard the status quo. Those that cannot stage their dissensus are effectively excluded from political subjecthood. Rather than being included in society as dissenting elements, those who disagree are excluded altogether. Moreover, the process by which agreement is reached is not up to

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any debate or deliberation. It is simply asserted. Thus there is nothing multicultural about the process by which cultural fusion is meant to be arrived at. It is a process whose rules are completely determined by one culture, and into which other cultures enter only after these rules have been decided. Dialogue incorporates other subjects into the body of liberalism, but in this process substantive difference is eradicated, leaving a strong liberalism that, again, is diverse only in the origins of its constituents but not in its actual practices. In fact, once the immunitary procedure of dialogue has taken place any remaining otherness becomes the subject of great hostility. The consensus operation leaves the Other in a position of visibility where its difference is intolerable. Liberal theories of multiculturalism promote the idea of a consensus on core values and on procedure, but in doing so they shut down the paths of subjectification for those who are being accommodated. Cultural groups remain tolerated at best, and remain at the mercy of a state authority that decides what kinds of difference are acceptable. At most, new perspectives are added to liberalism in order to strengthen it, but core liberal principles are never at risk. * Finally, we have, in Charles Taylor’s work, a theory that puts recognition at its centre. Taylor tries to incorporate a politics of rights with a respect for difference. His model relies on distinguishing fundamental rights from forms of uniform treatment, of which only the latter are culturally specific. Thus recognition can be given to different practices, as long as they do not infringe on fundamental rights. I have argued that this is an inherent feature of any politics of recognition, or at least any liberal theory of recognition. Recognition always includes the proviso that some things are beyond being recognisable. I drew a connection between recognition and toleration in that both inscribe a similar kind of immunitary logic into liberal multiculturalism. While recognition is meant to be a mode of incorporating groups into the multicultural polity, it in fact comes with its own limitations and trappings, and turns out to act as another process of immunisation. The notion of recognition is closely tied with the ideas of authenticity and identity; that there is an authentic identity, but that our identities are

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formed in dialogue with others, and are thus dependent on recognition. Thus there is a necessity for a politics of equal recognition on the social level, in order to avoid the profound trauma that can arise from misrecognition or lack of recognition. The specific form this takes is a politics of equal dignity, but one that is revised in order to be amenable to difference. Such a politics is a matter of distinguishing between fundamental rights that cannot be infringed under any circumstances and forms of uniform treatment that can be changed according to cultural preference. This division is a crucial part of how recognition operates under liberalism – certain things are placed beyond the pale. Both recognition and toleration entail the proviso that they should not be extended to practices that are abhorrent, and the definitional hegemony of what constitutes abhorrence remains firmly with liberals. Liberal recognition requires that certain ground rules are accepted by all. Liberal multiculturalism privileges liberal forms of life, and other practices are treated with suspicion: as being potentially repugnant, and barbaric. However, this in fact places other subjects in a difficult position, where on the one hand there is a suspicion that they are not properly living their traditions (which would be abhorrent) while on the other hand it would not in fact be permitted for them to live these traditions. This is the double aspect of the cunning of recognition; it demands an impossible identification while also curtailing what is recognisable. At the same time, liberal subjects are torn between the conflicting poles of an ideal of tolerance and an actual abhorrence towards other practices There is also the question of who decides what the traditions of a group are. In current liberal multiculturalist practice, there is the assumption that we know what other cultures’ practices consist of, that we understand them, and that we can thus judge (a) whether they are something we want to recognise, and (b) whether they are something that is still being practised properly. Other subjects are forced into a kind of stunted subjectivity where they lament their own lack and at the same time are thankful to the liberal state for the stance it takes towards difference. At the same time, in the process of formal recognition by the liberal state, liberal social relations are supplemented into the process of other cultural practices. The way in which difference is dealt with, the terms on which recognition is given, are set down by liberal culture, and as such it immunises itself against other practices. Again we have an example of the fact that liberal multiculturalism is not multiculturally

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constituted. Rather, a liberal mode of problem solving is introjected into the processes of another culture in the very movement that is supposed to lead to multicultural accommodation. Furthermore, certain things are beyond being recognisable – so what we have here is in fact not any kind of restriction of the state’s discriminatory powers, but rather the extension of these. The state takes on the role of deciding what does and does not constitute an acceptable difference and what kind of acceptable differences might qualify as a rights- and resource-bearing identity. Recognition is premised on the idea that only some things can be recognised, and that that which cannot be recognised is inhumane. Thus it is not only that liberalism cannot embrace all practices; rather, those that cannot be recognised are immediately rallied against. Practices that cannot be recognised lead to the groups that perpetuate them being thrown out of the spheres of common humanity and equal citizenship. As a flipside to this, while the Other is always under suspicion of repugnance, the liberal polity is always beyond it. Any failings or bad effects of liberal values and politics are seen to be contingent failings; the fundamental core values are beyond reproach. This is strengthened all the more by the idea that liberalism is the ideology that does the recognising and tolerating. It is in the position to judge others, and it is so in part because of the fact that its core values are beyond reprimand. Liberal multiculturalism also immunises liberalism through an act of cleansing it of its postcolonial guilt. The fact that other practices are there to be recognised and that the recognising is being done is testimony to the fact that liberalism is reformed; it can thus disassociate itself from exclusions perpetrated in its name in the past. Injustices can be purged from the core of liberalism without having to implicate core liberal principles in the production of these injustices at all. The strategic condemnation of past exclusions immunises the liberal core against future critique. Like recognition, tolerance denotes only a conditional allowance of practices, and can in fact be used to mobilise against other practices. Liberal tolerance establishes a hierarchy between those doing the tolerating and those being tolerated. Moreover, liberal tolerance can be mobilised against minorities (for instance, harsher visa regimes for minorities that are seen to be intolerant of homosexuality). Tolerance acts as a particular form of liberal governmentality. It inscribes the

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normalcy of the mainstream and the deviance of the marginal – nonliberal standpoints are safely contained. Tolerance is extended to groups on all manner of grounds (belief, ethnicity, practices) and as such it actually blurs distinctions, it contributes to liberalism’s tendency to see cultural groups only in abstract terms rather than in their specificity. In establishing itself as the culture of tolerance, liberalism in fact places itself above culture. It is in the unique position of being able to tolerate others, since it is not hindered by cultural bias. It is also in a position to denote that which is simply intolerable, and as such subject to containment and hostility. Thus liberalism immunises itself against any change by attempting to place itself outside of culture altogether, and is consequently not even theoretically in a position where it would have to mix with other cultures. Political differences with liberalism are rendered intolerable. Meanwhile differences that are tolerated are relegated to the private realm, made into matters of individual belief. They thus lose their political dimension and liberalism is immunised against the potential challenges. * In the course of this account, liberal multiculturalism has emerged as a series of processes that partially incorporate the Other in order to protect the body of liberalism against more fundamental change. All this means that liberal multiculturalism is not multiculturally constituted. It is simply an immunitary mechanism. And in becoming subject to an immunitary operation, actual Other subjects become part of a delinquent class. They are subject to ever-tightening regimes of securitisation, and are rendered abject. However, this all happens in connection with a genuine impulse towards incorporation, only one that is more concerned with strengthening liberalism than with protecting that which is incorporated. Under the immunitary paradigm the polity tries to secure itself against the threat of contagion from the outside. The component parts of liberal theories of multiculturalism emerged to be a set of strategies designed to defer or prevent the perceived deterioration of the polity through a partial incorporation of that which allegedly threatens it. Thus, highly skilled labour and good liberal minorities (and of course the very rich) can be incorporated into the polity, whereas the unskilled, and the nonliberal, are subject to repressive schemas.

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I argued that in practice this immunitary operation has grave consequences. Those that become subject to it are rendered delinquent and abject. Immunisation is both a reaction to the abject beings, and an abjection of beings. The foreign is perceived as abhorrent and needs to be kept at bay, but its partial incorporation renders those incorporated subjects abject and thus subject to a whole repressive mechanism. These abjected subjects are turned into delinquents – into an illegal, criminal class, that justifies a state apparatus to deal with them. They provide a useful illegality (something well illustrated with illegal workers). Delinquency calls into being a whole apparatus needed to manage it. In the case of immigration we have UKBA, Frontex and such organisations. I have argued that all liberal theorising on multiculturalism needs to be seen as an immunitary mechanism to cope with the problem of difference. Any advantages of cultural diversity are conceptualised in terms of a strengthening of liberalism rather than through an actual commitment to diversity. There is thus an inherent limit to any politics of multiculturalism that bases itself on these liberal principles. It inscribes into its very heart a certain hostility towards the Other. * My suggestion in indicating the beginnings of how to move forward has been that in order to have a chance of escaping these immunising tendencies we have to move beyond liberalism. But this alone of course guarantees nothing. A politics of multiculturalism that truly deserves it name and that is truly amenable to difference has to do several things. Simply moving outside of liberalism is not enough, and for subjects that become subject to repression of their difference through a Marxist immunitary process, say, the fact that it may be more progressive than liberalism in other ways will be no great consolation. In fact, how to approach difference is an under-theorised aspect of many radical movement that seek to move beyond liberalism. Something like the Occupy movement needs to contend with these issues as well. How to regulate the coexistence of diverse groups? While Occupy tries to proceed by means of consensus-based decision-making, we have already seen that this leads to all manner of issues (even if the critique of liberal ideas of consensus cannot be transferred one to one). The question of how to incorporate difference and dissensus into such a

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movement is an interesting one. It would take us too far to deal with this issue in detail in this book; however, clearly the question of doing progressive politics without overdetermining difference in the name of unity is a pressing one. So moving beyond the confines of liberalism is merely the first step. One of the things that is essential for a new politics of multiculturalism is that its process must be multiculturally constituted. That is, it cannot simply be a matter of the liberal state deciding on the situations where cultural input is required and then allowing different groups into the process. Rather, the different groups that enter a dispute bring with them not only a particular conception of the good, and a particular set of cultural practices, but also a particular mode of dealing with disagreement. Allowing these modes of dealing with disagreement to come together is a core part of what a new politics of multiculturalism needs to do. The means of organising coexistence needs to be multicultural if it is to avoid falling into the logic of toleration. Secondly, a new politics of multiculturalism cannot be universalist in its aspiration. The aim is not to arrive at some general cultural mid-point of fusion or consensus. It cannot be a matter of simply devising one model and applying it everywhere equally. Multiculturalism needs to be constituted differently everywhere. There can be no firm general rule on which aspect of different cultures’ conceptual apparatus for regulating coexistence is to be used. That would amount to taking a particular position of judgement and sorting everything into good and bad. Rather, depending on the particular locale, on the actors present, and on the kind of issues with regard to which coexistence is being organised, different aspects of different processes will have to come to the fore. Thus a new politics of multiculturalism is both extremely local and extremely flexible. It is a local, constantly negotiable, multiculturally informed process of regulating coexistence through ever new temporary accommodations. Such a politics would be organised dissensually. Groups can insert themselves into the multicultural process through the staging of dissensus. Thus any agreements that are reached are always up for renegotiating. Allowing for dissensus, and allowing for dissensus to be staged meaningfully and effectively, means that a new politics of multiculturalism is amenable to the political subjectification of Other subjects. Moreover, it allows for political subjecthood to mean more than simply becoming liberal.

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These dissensual negotiations, this multiculturalised process, will result in a mode of conviviality. Conviviality leads to a certain shared experience, to the production of a shared locality. And it is this feeling of locality that can in turn provide the basic unit on which arrangements for regulating coexistence are made. I suggested that the best way to foster such conviviality is through the development of new communal ontologies based around rhythm and syncopation. Such a conception is necessary since complete laissez-faire or relativism would leave different cultural practices vulnerable to the ravages of the market-place. Furthermore, without such a new ontology we might simply end up with majority cultures dominating minority cultures. And lastly, it is also normatively desirable, in that it stresses that while they are not all the same, people are not completely separate either. Thus there is a need for conceptualising connectedness without reintroducing any kind of hierarchy on the constituent groups in the way liberal (and other) conceptions of totality do. I feel that rhythm is the best potential path to conceptualise connectedness without overdetermining the singularity and plurality of the constituent parts of the community in favour of a larger totality. Rhythm allows us to think connectedness in a dynamic and nonhierarchical way. Rather than attempting to fuse incommensurabilites, rhythm connects them by syncopating. The different cultural rhythms interact but they do not lose their distinct identity. Conceptualising the community in terms of rhythm inscribes difference and repetition into it from the very outset. A polyrhythmic conception allows us to see a variety of things that are connected but that also have their own time above the whole. Rhythm allows for a certain kind of unity in diversity. In becoming syncopated rather than fused different communities interact, but they are not made to march to the same beat. Syncopation allows us to focus on everyday interaction. It is dissensual, and nonhierarchical, yet it does not separate or isolate. Syncopation puts the issue of being-in-common at the forefront. Rhythm provides a cognitive mapping of mutuality and togetherness. It allows us to think the praxis of co-appearance. It also allows us to think of the mutual obligations and debts that arise from our coexistence. This whole rhythmic conception is undergirded by a recourse to the nearby, a commitment to locality that is crucial to the day-to-day conviviality that fuels the new politics of multiculturalism.

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This may all sound rather esoteric at times. Since in the previous chapter this was left fairly in the abstract, I want to take the rest of this chapter to focus on practices that we might consider as some kind of an example of polyrhythmic syncopation at work. These examples will necessarily be imperfect and modest. They are merely seed corns of the kind of coexistence we might hope to see in the future. SYNCOPATION IN THE CONCRETE What does day-to-day conviviality, what does polyrhythmically syncopated coexistence look like? It can have many guises of course, and since we can in the present not see much of it in institutional settings or in formal politics, the concrete examples I can give come from the everyday. I have already mentioned music as a model in the last chapter, but let us look at some simple everyday events. I will be mentioning a few examples from London, starting with an individual encounter and moving up to a borough-wide action. I will then end with another artistic example. Syncopation can be as simple as a chance encounter, such as one that I recently witnessed at New Cross Gate station. While waiting for the Overground, a young white British hipster girl (given the area, most likely a Goldsmiths student) came to the platform carrying a hula-hoop. She was approached by an elderly South Asian woman who proceeded to take the hoop and perform a series of tricks with it. They each took turns doing various tricks with the hoop, until the train arrived – and then went their separate ways. The rest of the station of course watched enraptured as the dreary wait for the Overground was lightened up and everybody boarded that train just a little bit happier, even if nothing lasting remains from the encounter. Now, this is a modest and trivial example by any standard. The engagement between the two was limited and I do not want to draw too much from it. However, there is something here, and it lies in the fact that a brief moment of community was forged, in the action, in the encounter. There was no imposition of particular order here: the terms of engagement were equal. And as quickly as the community was forged it went its way again. There was no attempt at fusion here, just a brief syncopation of experiences. Such syncopation is the daily stuff of a convivial society – and it happens all the time at the micro level.

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Another example, from my previous place of residence: Camden Town. Go into any shop in Camden that deals with things locals need rather than with extracting money from tourists, and you’ll find extreme diversity among the customer base. Any given queue will include a range of people from punk to hijab-wearer. Now in these settings, we have of course an existing side by side, rather than the forging of any community (apart from perhaps a shared annoyance at the hordes of tourists pouring in for the market). Nonetheless, we can take a slight step back and see that within a very small radius in Camden (which is not even generally considered a particularly diverse neighbourhood), you’ll find a cluster of Greek tavernas, a cluster of Portuguese cafés, a Greek church occupied by a Korean congregation, an old English butcher’s shop now run by Spaniards, the English Folk Dance Society, hangouts for Goths and punks, and all manner of places belonging to various cultural and subcultural groups. Now the conviviality that is forged here may not include a substantive liking, but there is more togetherness and lived coexistence, more multiculturality, here than in any party policy document on community relations. Another common example that illustrates multiculturality is markets, and not without reason, since there is something here. Whether it is Deptford, East Street, Brixton or Brick Lane, they act as meeting points, often in areas deemed to be problem areas. They may not be the site of a genuine liking, but they are a place of interaction. On the level of expression we might still find all kinds of trepidation and hostility. But the actual praxis pays heed to the fact that here people have to arrange themselves. White butchers and fishmongers may think what they like about immigration, but they also realise that they live in a time when immigrant groups are the only ones in Britain who have not deserted small shops in favour of big supermarket chains, or who even know what to do with meat and fish bought in an unprepared form. This reliance puts both groups in a common space, where there may not be amicability, but where at least there is encounter, and a sense of dependence on the other. Moreover, these are spaces where arrangements are not mediated by the state, so they are made on an ad hoc basis between different people. Sharing a space can lead to conviviality, and so can sharing a cause. I mentioned earlier the risk of difference being overdetermined in favour of unity. But a cause can also be the occasion for bringing different

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groups into play and leading to a syncopated community that works towards the same goal. Take as an example the campaign to save the A&E department at Lewisham Hospital in 2012 and 2013.1 The campaign achieved a wide level of support throughout the borough that cut across all groups. The demonstrations to save the Department did not just attract a large number of people; they attracted a large range of people. On the day there was an incredible diversity of ages, cultural backgrounds and class backgrounds – rather than just an assortment of professional activists. What was crucial here is that the whole community came together to further this cause. However, the unity of the campaign did not demand the abnegation of diversity. Moreover, it did not require any unity beyond the expedient goal. It forged people’s connectedness, but without imposing any kind of hierarchy. It coalesced around an issue of immediate local relevance and around the kind of basic provision of services that is needed to maintain any kind of functioning community. It was an ad hoc movement in which different groups had to stage their dissensus outside of and against the state, but also engaging with the mechanisms of the state (such as judicial review). Let me finish by taking an example from film. Aki Kaurismäki’s 2011 film Le Havre tells the story of a local working-class community coming together to help a young refugee boy escape from the French border police and travel on to England to join with his family. The film initially focuses on Marcel Marx, a former writer turned shoeshiner and protagonist of Kaurismäki’s 1992 film La Vie de Bohème. One day, he comes upon Idrissa, a young boy from Gabun. Idrissa escaped when the shipping container he was hiding in with other illegal migrants on the way to England was searched by French immigration officials. The incident has hit the local media, and everybody in town knows that there is an illegal on the run from the authorities. Marcel decides to take in Idrissa and hide him. Marcel wants to help Idrissa join his mother in London, and in helping Idrissa his whole neighbourhood comes together. Vendors who usually take issue with him for not paying for things give him free supplies, and all manner of neighbourhood members help to hide Idrissa from the authorities and to raise money for paying off a boat to take him. Meanwhile Marcel has to travel to Calais to meet Idrissa’s grandfather in a deportation camp in order to find out where exactly Idrissa needs to go. In the end Idrissa successfully

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but narrowly manages to escape, when even the Inspector Monet, who has been working on the case, helps to hide Idrissa from the French border police. Now the story is in effect a modern fairytale both in its aesthetic and in the excessive kindness displayed by virtually every character. However, there are useful things we can take from it. Kaurismäki avoids many of the pitfalls that stories of this kind usually have. Idrissa does not get educated by the elderly Western man who takes him in. It is not a case of him being brought into the liberal mainstream. Nor does Idrissa teach Marcel or the neighbourhood about nature, or some originary value that they have lost in their urban setting, as is often the case in fish-out-of-water films with a non-Western protagonist. Rather, it is simply the story of a poor, local working-class community coming together, and interacting with the refugee community for the expedient goal of helping Idrissa. There is a coming together against the racist reprisals of the French border police. The point is made in a powerful visual way. Everything about Le Havre is held in a nostalgic vein. The softness of the picture, the colour scheme, the clothing, the cars, and the pastimes of all the characters exude a warm nostalgia for a type of community that is under threat, if it is not lost already. The only exception is the French border police, whose presence is a brutal hyper-modern intrusion that is violent in its appearance as well as its actions. Le Havre expresses a community of those neglected by the liberal state, and one that is defined by localism (although it extends hospitality). It is a diverse community, including various settled illegal migrants. It is not defined along any lines of racial exclusions, but rather by a localism. And it syncopates with the inhabitants of the refugee camp to rectify an injustice perpetrated by the French liberal state. This is a syncopated community in action. It is a community staging its dissensus against the common treatment of migrants and that asserts its own understanding of justice. And in fact, it is specifically against the contemporary immunitary regime of the liberal state. An interesting case is the character of the local police inspector, who is resentful of the fact that he has to spend his time chasing after asylum seekers, and who ultimately helps Idrissa escape the French border guards. Inspector Monet is a man who has chosen responsibility to the community and to its syncopated interactions over the imposition of the state view of right. Tellingly, Monet, like the other

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members of the community, is always shown in old-fashioned clothes and vehicles, unlike his colleagues form the border police. What Le Havre provides a model for is the way that connections are forged, against the liberal consensus, but without imposing any new hierarchy and without forcing a fusion. There is a temporal sense of community, and a lasting sense of connection and mutual obligation, but there is not the attempt to shoehorn everyone into one uniform community. Moreover, it is a case of a local, grassroots-led initiative. It does not rely on any form of institutionalised dialogue. It is a case of a neglected community linking up with other groups and asserting itself beyond and against the dictates of the liberal state. * Syncopating does not mean imposing a new kind of hierarchy; it is the absence of the imposition of hierarchy. Polyrhythmic coexistence can be as simple as the common space of local markets or of hula-hooping on an Overground platform. In other spaces it may be more contested, as it will involve negotiations within institutions, for instance in matters of schooling, policing, etc. Here, syncopation requires of mainstream and liberal society that it be able to accept the account communities give of themselves, that it should not negotiate only up to a point, and that it should not impose a consensus, but rather should live with disagreement. This does not mean that everything has to be endlessly deliberated, but it does mean that there is space for staging dissensus. And that where there is disagreement it is taken seriously and listened to. So we have a day-to-day conviviality in which people can put their foot down in institutional settings. Moreover, they can do this vis-à-vis both mainstream society and their own communities. Communities interact polyrhythmically, but they are themselves polyrhythmic. It is not a matter of simply passing the right to dissensus over to some kind of community leader. (This is a term worthy of its own extended critique. After all, who are the leaders of the liberal community? ‘Community leader’ is certainly not the term we tend to use for our elected representatives. Rather, it belies a certain assumption about other communities being both monolithic and strongly hierarchical.) Creating a space for staging dissensus should also be the occasion

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for thinking about welfare programmes and redistribution. Getting involved and staging dissensus also requires having the necessary resources to do so. It is not just a matter of dissensus being allowed and listened to; it is also a matter of people having the time and means to stage it effectively. That is, a new politics of multiculturalism cannot fully flourish in situations of precarity. Implementing it needs to go hand in hand with the satisfaction of basic economic needs and the provision of people’s welfare. Regulating coexistence in a way that respects people’s difference is not a trade-off for redistributive programmes –the two are not in opposition. Well-being requires both economic safety and the preservation of difference. What all this results in is a form of hyper-localism. Disputes have to be staged within the neighbourhood, within a locality. The fact of convivial interaction on this local level is what provides the necessary sympathy and community for people to come to an arrangement (which need not be a consensus on values). And it allows the process of the different groups in the locality to flow into the process of reaching such an agreement. In cases where local arrangements are not practical, since the issue might require a larger scale, things are more difficult, but this ethic of conviviality and syncopated community will make arrangement more practical on a national level too. Such agreements will not be perfect. The more we scale up, the more we risk losing groups and practices in the process, the more we risk making the staging of dissensus ineffectual, and the more we risk losing sight of the way our rhythms syncopate. But at the very least, if we take the local experience as a guide then the agreements that are made on a national level will be preferable to the current mode where they are decided solely by liberals and their immunitary processes. However, in what I have outlined, clearly local decision-making is preferable, certainly when it comes to actual issues of regulating coexistence. Coexistence happens locally, so its organisation should be regulated locally, but on an even footing. Of course, the population that makes up the locality is not fixed, it is always in flux. However, if we are not operating under an ideal of fusion, but under the idea of syncopation, we ought to be able to avoid local community fears of being overrun by an Other. Once the Other is no longer perceived as a threat to be immunised against, but as just another rhythm to syncopate with, this defensive securitised operation should disappear.

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Most issues of coexistence should be in some way devolvable to a local level. Or in the case of institutions that operate nationally, the type of arrangements and accommodations that are needed can be made locally. Take schools for instance. If a particular group in a particular locality takes issue with some part of schooling, they can stage that dissensus, and this can be accommodated. However, this does not need to be rolled out nationally. Rather, in other localities there might be other disagreements to raise. The ideas here do not entail the dismantling of the national state, but what they do entail is that the decisions of the state are in a sense provisional and subject to alteration on the local level on the basis of the multiculturally constituted ethics on the ground in that particular locality. However, one area where this cannot be so easily devolved down is in the state’s policy towards immigration. Here the state is in a position to regulate the extent to which diversification and, eventually, conviviality can take place on the local level. The liberal state may still clamp down on its borders here. From the perspective of a new politics of multiculturalism such a move is of course impermissible, and a state that has implemented diverse, multiculturally constituted, local arrangements on issues of coexistence should not be prone to such a clampdown. However, it might nonetheless be, perhaps the creation of modes of arrangements was seen by the state as an exercise in damage control. On this point it has to be said that if the commitment to diversity is sincere, then an opening up of borders, and a dismantling of restrictive visa regimes, necessarily follows – anything else would run counter to this commitment. Now there is of course no foundational reason why there has to be such a commitment to diversity. To commit oneself to this value is a conscious political decision, rather than arising from any kind of universal law. If one has no interest in a politics of multiculturalism, then there is of course no need to follow along with any of this. My argument has been that if liberal multiculturalists are sincere about wanting to accommodate difference, then they must go further than they have gone, and in fact they must cease to be liberals, at least with regard to how the coexistence of different groups is organised. That such a commitment to diversity is to my mind a normatively good thing is another matter. If we accept that we have no recourse to universal foundations, and accept that our own values are arrived at through a political, voluntaristic choice, then we should be cautious

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about imposing our values on others. If we do not want our children to be educated religiously, then perhaps we should concede to religious parents that they feel just as uneasy about their kids being raised nonreligiously. And we should concede that in both cases we are not really concerned with any kind of autonomy of the child. Moreover, since there is no Archimedean point, no place of neutrality on which to conduct education, say, there will always be some kind of values among which it is conducted. This is why a locally and dissensually organised coexistence seems to be the fairest way to organise, to allow for all groups to assert their subjecthood, not just a few individual ones. Does this mean, then, that we have to leave behind all forms of political assertion? I do not think that it does. Firstly, in many ways a new politics of multiculturalism allows different political points to be asserted far more easily. What it makes more difficult is their universal implementation. On that count I am afraid things will become more unpalatable for those who want to assert a particular value. They will have to come to terms with the fact that what they are doing, if they want to make all groups adopt a value, is precisely asserting themselves, and overdetermining other values. A new politics of multiculturalism does not allow for the illusion that we are merely helping people realise what they would have believed anyway. Perhaps this will not be a hindrance, perhaps certain values would be worth this, but it would make it painfully clear that if one wants to assert something in such a way, one would be introducing a new immunitary mechanism. If one wants to truly respect the practices of different groups, then one will have to content oneself with patient coexistence, and hope that the political value that one pursues might develop the kind of appeal to make it spread across different groups. The polyrhythmic syncopated organisation of community may not immediately appeal to revolutionaries; at the same time it is a structure of existence that is inherently geared towards enabling the existence of heterodox thought, and as such there is also something very radical about it. CONCLUSION I hope to have provided a convincing account of why the conceptual tools of liberalism are altogether insufficient for organising a multicultural polity. Liberalism, rather than being genuinely concerned with

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incorporating difference, is only concerned with strengthening liberalism. Its means of engaging with otherness are nothing but a series of immunitary processes that strengthen liberalism against an outside that it fears through the partial incorporation of some of that outside. This does not mean that there are not many liberals who are genuinely concerned with the well-being of minorities, but that, in so far as they remain within liberalism, their efforts are wholly overdetermined by this immunitary tendency. Moreover, it helps us to comprehend the situation in which there seems to be an ever-increasing process of securitisation of ethnic relations at one and the same time as there is the constant reiteration of a commitment to a diverse polity. Thinking of liberal multiculturalism in terms of an immunitary process allows us to understand the ‘backlash’ against multiculturalism as really being part of the same liberal attitude to difference that is present in liberal theorising on difference all along. I have tried to sketch out the modest beginnings of what a theory of multiculturalism that escapes these immunitary mechanisms might look like. By creating a multiculturally constituted process, by applying it differentially and locally, by placing dissensus at its centre, and by thinking of community polyrhythmically we may be able to move beyond thinking of the organisation of coexistence in ways that immunise one form of life against the other. It is by no means guaranteed that this will be successful. However, an attempt to move in this direction would be an attempt to form a polity that is genuinely multicultural. It would be a polity that puts the convivial everyday interactions of its members centre stage. It might not be immune to contestation, but it would be a genuine radical attempt at organising multiculturalism multiculturally. NOTE 111. Information available at [last accessed 13 December 2013].

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OTHER MEDIA Emigrantski Raggamuffin, CD, composed by RotFront. Germany: Essay Recordings, AY CD 21, 2009. La Vie de Bohème, film, directed by Aki Kaurismäki. France, Germany, Sweden, Finland: Sputnik Oy, Pyramide Productions, Films A2, Pandora Film,1992. Le Havre, film, directed by Aki Kaurismäki. Finland, France, Germany: Sputnik Oy, Pyramide Productions, Pandora Film, 2011.

INDEX

abhorrence, 115, 118–19, 124, 129, 132, 136, 174, 177 abject, 55–9, 64, 119, 124, 176–7 Agamben, Giorgio, 14–16, 103 Althusser, Louis, 151–3 Arendt, Hannah, 77, 79, 96 assimilation, 12, 23, 26–7, 67–8, 102 Australia, 118, 120–1, 127–8 backlash, 1–2, 10–12, 18, 58, 188 Balibar, Étienne, 68–75, 78 being-in-common, 158–9, 179 biopower, 13–17, 52–3, 157 border, 15–16, 50–3, 161, 186 British National Party, 3, 8 Brown, Wendy, 82, 130–1, 133–6 citizenship, 23, 66–76, 78, 84, 117, 125, 169–70, 175 city, 148, 154–6, 160–3 colonialism, 3, 34, 80, 119–21, 127, 134 community, 5, 8, 34, 63, 69, 71, 77, 79, 85, 92, 94–7, 100–4, 124, 147, 149–50, 169, 171–2, 181–4 Esposito’s conception of, 13, 15, 45–52 new forms of, 142, 158–62, 179, 180, 183–5, 187–8

consensus, 36–7, 41, 89–105, 109–12, 144–5, 147, 157, 171–3, 177–8, 184 Conservative Party, 1–2, 7, 10 conviviality, 29, 145–6, 157, 160, 162–3, 179–81, 184–6, 188 cosmopolitanism, 133, 147, 162 cunning of recognition, 115, 117, 120, 123, 136, 174 ‘death of multiculturalism’ see backlash delinquency, 59–64, 124, 176–7 Derrida, Jacques, 13, 54, 62, 148–9 dissensus, 89, 92–4, 100, 103–5, 107, 145–6, 153, 157, 163, 172, 178–9, 182–8 Esposito, Roberto, 13–18, 45–59, 63, 157–9, 164 Fanon, Frantz, 160, 166n69 fear, 3–9, 50, 53, 56–7, 59, 101–2 Foucault, Michel, 14–17, 52, 59–62, 84, 155 Freud, Sigmund, 58, 133–4 fusion of Horizons, 41, 90, 92, 105–11, 171

207

208 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 90, 92, 105–9, 111, 112n1, 171 guilt, 120, 127, 175 hospitality, 148–50, 163, 183 humanity, 69, 75–81, 83, 125, 170 ideal speech community, 27, 35, 90 identity, 25, 36–9, 46, 49, 57–8, 100, 116–17, 121, 124, 131, 133–4, 147, 173, 175, 179 immunity, 13–16, 45, 50–5, 57–9, 64, 102, 142, 157 indigenous groups, 30, 118–24, 127 intervention, 80, 84, 129 Kant, Immanuel, 68–9, 73–4, 148, 150–1, 169 Kristeva, Julia, 55–9 Kymlicka, Will, 17, 23, 25, 29–35, 37, 66–7, 72, 74–6, 83, 118, 143–4, 169 Labour Party, 2, 6–7 Le Havre, 182–4 Lefebvre, Henri, 18, 154–60, 163 legalism, 82, 84, 131, 143, 171 liberal feminism, 25, 27, 136 London, 9, 145, 163, 180–2 Lukács, György, 150–1 Lyotard, Jean-François, 79, 103 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 16, 73, 84, 147, 158–60, 162, 164 nationalism, 127, 147 Negri, Antonio, 14–16, 103

MULTICULTURAL IMMUNISATION

orientalism, 57 parallax, 153–5 Parekh, Bhikhu, 17, 26, 28, 34–7, 41, 89–92, 105–11, 145, 168, 171 particularism, 33, 39, 50, 78, 117 Peterborough, 3–9 Povinelli, Elisabeth, 115, 117–29 procedure, 35, 39, 89, 92, 97, 105, 117, 123, 126, 147, 173 Québec, 25, 37–8, 40 Rancière, Jacques, 89, 93–104, 107, 111, 172 Rawls, John, 24–5, 37, 90 rhythm, 18, 154–60, 162–4, 179–80, 184–5, 187–8 rights civic rights, 80, 85, 143, 168; see also citizenship group-differentiated rights, 23, 26–7, 31, 33, 67, 72, 74, 76, 83, 85, 168–70 human rights, 23, 33, 36, 66, 75–85, 98, 105, 168, 170 Rorty, Richard, 76–7, 81, 132 RotFront, 160–2 security, 3, 5–6, 62–4, 124, 160, 176, 188 Spivak, Gayatri, 75, 118, 125, 143 subjecthood, 73–4, 84–5, 97, 103–5, 169, 172, 178, 187 supplement, 62–4, 71, 74, 130 swan eating, 9, 20n30 syncopation, 155, 157–8, 160–4, 179–87

209

Index Taylor, Charles, 35, 37–41, 67, 115–18, 121, 136–7, 167–8, 173 tolerance, 23, 61, 105, 116, 129–38, 144, 173–4 totality, 46, 49, 146, 148, 150–5, 160, 179

universalism, 33, 39, 71–2, 77–8, 83, 116, 171, 178 violence, 5, 123 Zeno Cosini, 11 Žižek, Slavoj, 81, 88n90, 126, 153–4, 156