[Marxism] mistaken identity

[Sean Andrews]

On Sat, Aug 23, 2008 at 2:15 PM, Ghulam Mustafa Lakho
<gmlakho.advocate at gmail.com> wrote:
>  mistaken identity
> <http://www.kenanmalik.com/essays/humanist_culture.html> mistaken
> identity
....
> Ironically, though, the greatest Western cultural export is not Disney or
> Starbucks or Tom Cruise. It is the very idea of local culture.

This argument is quite worn--particularly in terms of saying, as he
practically does, that the rest of the world wouldn't know that they
had culture if it weren't for some over-anxious western academics.  In
other words, it is wholly a meta-understanding of the lived experience
of culture. More importantly, it pitches "culture" as something like
an individual form of identification rather than, as it often actually
means, a kind of what Chicago School sociologists called "symbolic
interactionism."  That is only one dimension of the concept, of
course, and an even more important dimension is left completely
unacknowledged here: that is the material and historical aspect of it.

....

> One expression of such equal treatment is the growing tendency in some
> Western nations for religious law - such as the Jewish halakha and the
> Islamic sharia - to take precedence over national secular law in civil, and
> occasionally criminal, cases. Another expression can be found in Australia,
> where the courts increasingly accept that Aborigines should have the right
> to be treated according to their own customs rather than be judged by
> 'whitefella law'. According to Colin McDonald, a Darwin barrister and expert
> in customary law, 'Human rights are essentially a creation of the last
> hundred years. These people have been carrying out their law for thousands
> of years'. Some multiculturalists go further, requiring the state to ensure
> the survival of cultures not just in the present but in perpetuity. The
> philosopher Charles Taylor suggests that the Canadian and Quebec governments
> should take steps to ensure the survival of the French language in Quebec
> 'through indefinite future generations'.

......

This anxiety, this ridiculous hand wringing over these different kinds
of laws is, on one hand, a patently xenophobic sort of rant that is
normally the purview of the far right and has become all the rage with
especially European intellectuals who simply won't allow themselves
the crass bigotry of their American counterparts.  The latter, on the
other hand, rely on the authority of the Other to shroud their own
with an air of legitimacy, pace Ayaan Hirsi Ali.  A very heated debate
around this topic can be found here:

http://www.signandsight.com/features/1167.html

Obviously there are issues to contend with here, but just as British
handwringing in India in the 19th century over the Sati, it is
generally the rhetorical use of some viscerally objectionable (to the
supposedly enlightened dominant-but-not-yet-totally-dominating
culture) practice in order to justify the forcible suppression of a
population in one form or another.  It is the kind of jurisdictional
jealousy that characterized the Tudor and Stuart era rise of the
absolutist state--especially in the way that the potential for
oppositional religious doctrines to challenge that state's authority
are a primary concern.  In the above hyperventilating, however, most
of this anxiety is simply assumed: instead we are supposed to simply
be shocked that anyone would suggest the Aboriginal people live
according to their own laws without even the tiniest bit of context
about why that might be a struggle: it is simply an epistemological
non-starter.  The possibility that the aboriginal laws in question
might have to do with reversing colonial inequalities or retaining
rights to land under communal forms of charter--things of such
trivial, meta-theoretical concerns as how people are able to live.

That this resistance is informed, in many cases, not by some
know-nothing desire to stagnate in some cultural framework but by the
clear observation of what has happened when other components of the
community have ceded their own understanding for the framework of "the
law of all peoples," aka the law of capitalist social relations.  It
is not an attempt to "deny such a capacity for transformation," but an
empirical observation of what has happened to others.  Thus the
resistance to oil exploration by communities in Ecuador is not just
because they are backwards or mystified by some obsessive nativism: it
is because they look at the misery and degradation--in real, material
as well as cultural and spiritual terms--that has resulted when other
similar communities have signed onto such attempts at
"transformation"--always with promises of education and health care,
infrastructure and jobs which never arrive or which end up only
serving the colonizing population.

the points made in the next portions of the post may point to some
generally murky precepts around what Raymond Williams called "one of
the most complex terms in the English language."

>
>
> The logic of the preservationist arguments is that every culture has a
> pristine form, its original state. It decays when it is not longer in that
> form. There are echoes here of the concept of 'type' that was at the heart
> of nineteenth century racial science. For all the talk about culture as
> fluid and changing, multiculturalism, no less than old-fashioned racism,
> invariably leads people to think of human groups in fixed terms. Both sides
> of the race debate have their own dialect of difference. The right has
> appropriated the language of diversity to promote its message of racial
> exclusion. Liberals often turn to the idiom of exclusion to articulate a
> pluralist idea of culture.

There is something to this, as Hardt and Negri point out in one of the
few unequivocally useful passages in Emprire, where they talk about
Imperial Racism.  But invoking Powell here is to turn the screw in the
wrong direction and misunderstand that the most central advocates of
the line of argument that is being advanced here are, in fact, the
intellectual descendants of Powell, or at the very least of the later
Liberal permutations of Peel's supporters.

> If the right has taught itself the grammar of diversity, liberals have
> adopted the idiom of racial identity. Will Kymlicka is anything but a
> xenophobe. Yet his pluralism leads him to adopt the language of exclusion.
> 'It is right and proper', Kymlicka believes, 'that the character of a
> culture changes as a result of the choices of its members'. But, he goes on,
> 'while it is one thing to learn from the larger world', it is quite another
> 'to be swamped by it'. What could this mean? That a culture has the right to
> keep out members of another culture? That a culture has the right to prevent
> its members from speaking another language, singing non-native songs or
> reading non-native books?

What it often means--and what this author, who seems only to see this
as a superstructural struggle over ideas--is the imposition of a set
of power relations under the banner of cultural "progress" and
"enlightenment."   Singh Mehta's recent book on "Liberalism and
Empire" tracks this (again, only most recently).  Perhaps some of the
criticism has become detached from this original politico-social
reality, taking the conversation in a more philosophical and therefore
less pragmatic direction.  But there are plenty of people who are
still considering these criticism and cogently working through some of
the contradictions that arise in practice.  Malik is basically making
a ridiculous, journalistic romp through these conversations to buffer
some sort of definition of Culture which would basically be what Louis
calls the "forced assimilation" argument.  The problem, of course, is
that it just presents a bunch of arguments that are supposed to appear
ridiculous to people that already think a certain way about them with
out exploring the implications fully.  For instance, most of the
anxiety over having sharia law has nothing to do with people in those
communities thereby saying that they should be able to break other
laws.  So what difference does it make except as a way of further
disciplining what is presumed to be a renegade population of generally
disenfranchised people?  In other words, it is just an excuse for
cracking down on the Muslim population.

A more nuanced and, to my mind, interesting exploration of the
intersection of culture and rights can be found in the work of Mahmood
Mamdani.  I have only started looking at it, but here is a good sample
from the introduction to the volume he edited, "Beyond Rights Talk and
Culture Talk: Comparative Essays on the Politics of Rights and
Culture."

<BLOCKQUOTE>
Imagine that a man slaps a woman in rural KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.
 At the same time, another man slaps a woman in a popular neighborhood
in Khartoum, and yet a third does the same in a classroom in the
Sorbonne in Paris.  All three women protest: the woman in Paris that
her rights have been violated, the woman in Kharthoum that her dignity
has been violated, and the woman in KwaZulu-Natal that custom has been
violated.  Every victim protests.  But the language of the protest is
different in each case.  How is one to understand this difference?

The Language of protest, I will argue, bears a relationship to the
language of power.  To understand why protest employs the language of
rights in Paris, dignity in Khartoum, and custom in KwaZulu-Natal, it
is worth recalling that power claims to uphold rights in Paris,
dignity in Khartoum and custom in  KwaZulu-Natal.  Is not the starting
point of protest to take power at face value, and to question its
claims and thus legitimacy?
<CLOSE BLOCKQUOTE>

This seems like a more interesting starting point than simply saying
that culture is something that we should be able to transform anytime
power requests it.

s