When we read media reports about the recent events in Germany -- mass
demonstrations in Chemnitz where large crowds confront each other -- it
seems that what we have are two camps where one stands on an extreme
right-wing and possibly racist ground, while the other "argues for
multiculturalism" (see, e.g., Kloth and Ringle). This latter term has been
much debated the last few years, and it is interesting to note that already
in 1997 the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek made good use of the term.
To Žižek multiculturalism is not the kind of saving grace that stands
between the righteous few and the racist hordes. Rather, it is the very
ideology of a eurocentrist and multinationalist perspective where every
specific culture is reduced to nativism. For Žižek multiculturalism is
complicit in a kind of "empty universality": a gesture that makes claims to
the values of universalism while in actual fact eradicating every local
expression.
To explain multiculturalism Žižek begins with the difference between our
traditional notion of imperialism and the way multinational corporations
function today:
"With the direct multinational functioning of Capital, we are no longer
dealing with the standard opposition between metropolis and colonized
countries; a global company as it were cuts its umbilical cord with its
mother-nation and treats its country of origins as simply another territory
to be colonized" (43).
He then goes on to show how we can consider the advent of imperialism as
going through three stages of exploitation:
"At the beginning (ideally, of course), there is capitalism within the
confines of a Nation-State, with the accompanying international trade
(exchange between sovereign Nation-States); what follows is the
relationship of colonization in which the colonizing country subordinates
and exploits (economically, politically, culturally) the colonized country;
the final moment of this process is the paradox of colonization in which
there are only colonies, no colonizing countries — the colonizing power is
no longer a Nation-State but directly the global company" (44).
He then shows how the idelogy -- dominant way of thinking -- that
accompanies this last stage of imperialism should be referred to as
"multiculturalism, the attitude which, from a kind of empty global
position, treats each local culture the way the colonizer treats colonized
people — as ‘natives’ whose mores are to be carefully studied and
‘re-spected’. ... Multiculturalism involves patronizing Eurocentrist
distance and/or respect for local cultures without roots in one’s own
particular culture" (ibid.).
Now how is it that multiculturalism isn't opposed to racism but actually
complicit in a sophisticated, purportedly "universalist" form of racism?
Zizek explains that "multiculturalism is a disavowed, inverted,
self-referential form of racism, a ‘racism with a distance’ — it ‘respects’
the Other’s identity, conceiving the Other as a self-enclosed ‘authentic’
community towards which he, the multiculturalist, maintains a distance
rendered possible by his privileged universal position. Multiculturalism is
a racism which empties its own position of all positive content (the
multiculturalist is not a direct racist, he doesn’t oppose to the Other the
particular values of his own culture), but nonetheless retains this
position as the privileged empty point of universality from which one is
able to appreciate (and depreciate) properly other particular cultures —
the multiculturalist respect for the Other’s specificity is the very form
of asserting one’s own superiority" (ibid.).
See
Slavoj Žižek, "Multiculturalism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Multinational
Capitalism", New Left Review I/225, September-October 1997, 28-51;
and
Kloth, Martin and Anna Ringle, "March ends, but anti-immigrant protesters
hold ground in Chemnitz," DPA International, 1 Septemper 2018, from
http://www.dpa-international.com/topic/march-ends-anti-immigrant-protesters-hold-ground-chemnitz-180901-99-785225
Mvh. / Yours sincerely,
Torgeir Fjeld
http://torgeirfjeld.com/
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