just a shot away
by jebni on August 15, 2006
I’ve always been a bit sceptical about my own relationship to Arabness as a vicarious “proxy ethnicity” — I’ve recently written long, soul-searching emails to various friends about this issue, and it’s always been funny when H introduces me to people as “my cousin,” to various double-takes. But I really am her cousin, and she’s mine — this is very important to me. And I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: in these times, being far away from our friends and family from Sydney’s Lebanese communities has been really distressing. I miss being a part of this palpable web of solidarity.
What relationship do these intimate solidarities have to more programmatic kinds of solidarity — the kinds you find expressed in political pronouncements? My ambivalent position of feeling both inside and outside a community presents me with my own small opportunity to unpack some possibilities: for a start, it’d be a terrible mistake to simply map the surface of deeply felt affiliations and practices of care (i.e. the apparent operations of “being part of a Lebanese community”, whether by birth or association) onto a supposedly “organic”, unitary representation of “the Lebanese community” on one level, and Lebanon’s national interests and its authoritative representation by particular groups on another. (Networks of care impode into niche-market structural narcissism, which in turn implodes into reactive nationalism.) This would be as ludicrous as reifying the complex way “family” has been important to me in this current crisis as an enthusiasm for “the family” and patriarchy.
Both of these reifying slippages are celebrated by totalising revivals of “anti-imperialism” as national(ist) resistance — the former in an explicit fashion, and the latter as both allegory and as the actual, patriarchal Law of the Politburos-in-waiting of various political cults. But those same slippages can just as easily happen in reverse when one opposes national interests and “the family” — it’s always easy to slide over the multiplicitous cultural practices that might be reified as those “things” when those “things” are of dubious value. And of course, it’s possible to mix it all up, as the ulimate in hypocrisy: before their current, international pandering to certain religious leaderships, Cliffites and other Leninoids were voting against allowing Muslim women to speak at anti-war rallies in Sydney, and branding brown people who spoke the word “Allah” in public as “fundamentalist hijackers”. The orientation changes, but the style of totalisation remains the same.
Meanwhile, the moralism of those with a vicarious investment in Third World nationalism reminds me of Michael Haneke’s film Caché, which I saw the other night. It’s quite riveting, and insistently attempts to puncture the comfortable world of bourgeois liberalism by rubbing its face in the gutter of France’s postcolonial abbatoir — a white literati family are “terrorised” by Lost Highway-style tapes of stalkery video surveillance that herald a repressed narrative related to the Algerian War of Independence. But after a while I realised that Caché is actually an appalling film, because by assuming a shared bourgeois liberalism with which one can empathise, and investing in a vicarious fantasy of “gritty reality”, it reinforces the very things it purportedly critiques. In fact, it actually unconsciously replays some of the most appalling Zionist apologetics, in which Arabs are only capable of “terrorising us with our guilt and their own victimhood”. This is what happens when you overinvest in reactive moralism as an anti-imperialist strategy: you continue to instrumentalise the big Other.
[ tags: film, lebanon, nationalism, war ]
4 comments
The first part of this is tremendously interesting, and probably one of the best uses I’ve ever seen made of the concept of ‘reification’.
I’d like to see the stuff about Trot attitudes to stuff, Trot totalisation, cashed out a bit more. This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately – I was thinking about posting about the RESPECT tactic tonight. Specifically, what is this ‘style of totalisation’ that remains the same?
When the SWP first made the Islamic turn very shortly after 9-11, I, qua anarchist, was all for condemning it. I remember talking about ‘Islamic fascists’ and other stuff I now take to be Islamophobic, univesalist garbage.
Which of course leads us to the last paragraph, where I start to lose you. Partly, this may be because I haven’t seen the film you’re referencing. Very likely, it’s because of unconscious resistance on my part to something that’s really striking straight at my juissance. It’s very important to me psychologically to condemn Western society on the basis of its imperialist foundations. But while I can agree that anti-imperialism has an integrated psychic function for me, it’s difficult for me to concede that there is anything wrong with it. [Excerpt tract of introspective and self-justificatory rambling]. Shouldn’t the French have this shit thrust in their faces? Shouldn’t we all? We’re (some, viz. the ruling class, massively more than others) benefiting from imperialism, from imperialist violence and imperialist exploitation, no? Sure, we don’t want to make out of this a ‘moralism’, because that only serves to attach us to it – the point is to change it.
by mark on 15 August 2006 at 4:39 am. #
Of course, I happen to agree with plenty of the SWP’s rhetoric about Islamophobia — hello, I’m as poco as they come, and most of it’s a no-brainer — but I’m sure this is a coincidence. It pains me because I think it’s plainly obvious that at least on an institutional level, their current line is actually yet another way of playing the game of representationalist politics. Pandering to Muslim leaderships is not “respect”, it’s a patronising and cynical power-play that hierarchicalises communities into “the community”. It doesn’t take much experience of conservative “ethnic leaders” speaking for “us” to know how that game works.
Meanwhile, in terms of Haneke’s film, I agree that the French bourgeoisie really does need its nose rubbed in the gutter. But it’s a question of how — in Caché, the Arab characters are reduced to tools for the self-mortification of middle-class colonial Euros, in a completely self-involved way. It doesn’t perform any kind of social desubjectification.
by jebni on 17 August 2006 at 2:58 pm. #
Yes, the SWP aren’t winning a lot of fans with this tactic. I’ve never much admired them, but I’ll say this for RESPECT: it keeps open a continuous line between outraged British Muslim opinion and some section of white British society, such that it serves to some extent to adumbrate the rejectionism which leads kids to blow up tube trains, and which then makes the whole ‘community’ (and I think there is one, though I entirely agree about the sancitification of ‘community leaders’) a target for the British state. There is a very serious danger of things turning incredibly nasty in the UK and across Europe and also here, as Conulla and the government’s reaction to it demonstrate, and the SWP is doing what needs to be done, which is to stand next to Muslims and say ‘If you take him, take me too’.
by mark on 18 August 2006 at 3:35 am. #
It doesn’t take much experience of conservative “ethnic leaders” speaking for “us” to know how that game works.
Yeah B, but it takes some experience of that, of being subjected to its restrictions, to sense – in one’s bones, as it were – that in these instances racism is being re-animated as a purported solidarity.
In any case, things have been nasty for a long time. Which has me wondering, for all the exoticisms and stupidities that were in play around anti-internment campaigns, I wonder why it was possible there (but not here) for people to show practical solidarity with those who were/are interned without asserting the proposition that if the camps should be closed then the politics of a (relatively small) group of those who were/are interned should be ascribed as the politics of all of those (potentially at risk of being) detained, and fealty demanded of everyone to these politics.
by s0metim3s on 18 August 2006 at 2:03 pm. #