From: Rakesh Bhandari (rakeshb@stanford.edu)
Date: Thu Mar 20 2003 - 18:43:03 EST
Capital,Civilization,Barbarians,Multiculturalists
Aziz Al-Azmeh
Almost exactly one hundered years after the Communist Manifesto, the
spectre of Communism again haunted the old powers of Europe and
elsewhere, and compelled them to enter into a holy alliance under the
signature of freedom, and under the title of the Cold War. Several
times over the previous century, this particular spectre had haunted
much of Europe, to which the response was chauvinism, jingoism,
nationalist mystification,the domestication of Social Democracy, in
addition to to police and military action, most notably following the
First World War.
This time, the response was materialist. The Keynesian consensus
following World War 2, and the New Deal preceding it, led to the
relative humanization of capital : the "shameless, direct, brutal
exploitation" of which Marx and Engels spoke in 1848, hitherto
masked, contrary to the statement of the Communist Manifesto, by
religious and political illusions, was now materially ameliorated.
Correlatively, the history of capitalism was rewritten as a history
of benign democracy, and the fascistoid right-wing ideologies and
practices, social and political, that had predominated in Europe and
the United States, precipitating the Second World War, were in
varying ways excised from memory. At the same time rise to
prominence, against stiff opposition, anti-racist and anti-colonial
movements and ideologies, all of them nourished by the universal
ideas of self-determination and of social improvement, deriving
sustenance from historicism in both its Marxist and positivist
variants. Thus arose programmes of national liberation, and of
economic, social, and cultural development, all informed by a
universalist humanism.
It is no accident that there is a fully-fledged reversal of these
global trends, which have now come into predominance after the
world-historical events of 1989. To the natural theology of the
market, both in metropolitan countries and in territories under the
dominance of international financial institutions, naked exploitation
has, in the way of all ideologies, been consecrated as a right
deriving from the natural condition of social relations, described in
terms of perfectly elastic market conditions. I am not concerned here
with the impact of this on internal European and North American
conditions, but with the re-barbarization of outsiders, which
sometoimes takes on the benign appearance of multi-culturalism,
premissed on a culturalist differentialism, and correlatively on
pronouncing upon "communities", religions, and nations in terms of
unhitorical predispositions. It is unsurprising in this context that
we should constantly come across distanciating admiration of this
sort for all manner of bizarre or dangerous political phenomena, such
as political Islamism or Hinduism, deemed fitting and appropriate --
indeed, natural, fated -- for some other, more colourful, less
civilized peoples. The slogan under which this is officiated is the
right to anti-modernism, a right no longer considered as the
sentimentalist philistinism which it is, and as what it was regarded
by left-wing movements, but as a matter arising from nature.
Industrial civilization is taken for a condition of disenchantment.
The history of the colonial and post-colonial periods is here taken
for a time of change unwarranted, indeed rendered impossible, by an
infra-historical nature inhering in Muslims, Hindus, and others.
A cardinal principle for the cognitive regime of modernity is
historicism. This implied the valorization of history by associating
substantive notions of change with the passage of time. Historicism,
calling up names like Hegel and Marx -- as distinct from the
historist doctrine, which was also perfected in Germany and provides
the conceptual bedrock of notions of Hindutva as of Islamism -- is a
notion of history and society as provinces of consequential change,
not of substantive abidance or of naturalistic fatalism within the
boundaries of self-subsistent and self-consistent cultures, or
culture-nations, and historicism took on many forms, not least those
of evolutionism, of progressivism, with or without teleological
implication.
Yet the malaise of civilization and of progress was always the
leitmotif of retrogressive and repressive social and political
forces, and of great salience to the jingoist anti-Communism of the
past century, and there were under the regime of modernity, grosso
modo, two distinctive tempers that have dwelt upon the misfortunes of
civilization in general. One rationalist, yet despairing of the
historical possibility of rationality and its generalization within
society and among societies. The other is historist,
anti-rationalist, indeed irrationalist, decrying reason and progress
because they damaged the natural constitution of society, and is
generally associated with conservatism. This second temper has often
-- and still is -- been associated with some form of
anti-industrialism or romantic and pietistic anti-capitalism, and
sometimes celebrates a prelapsarian past -- of national vigour and
simplicity, of order and hierarchy, of pure and primal religious
life, or simply of life according to nature -- as a time of plenitude
and harmony. Notions of pre-colonialist Arcadianism among
conservatives in the South, today duplicated and somewhat
impoverished by post-modernist communalists in India and elsewhere.
We may characterize the former temper as rationalist, the latter as
Romantic, the one associated with Jacobinism, the other with various
forms of romantic chauvinism.
Against the Enlightenment, accelerated by the French revolution and
the internationlization of the republicanist model of social and
political organization through Napoleonic action and example in
Europe, Ottoman lands, and Latin America , a profound seam of
anti-Enlightenment speculation and action was in place. In Europe,
most particularly in Germany and England, with Burke, Hamann, and
Herder among countless lesser others, it took the form of a diffuse
but often virulent anti-Gallicism; in France itself the Enlightenment
was vigorously combatted after the Revolution by royalists and other
Catholics like de Maistre and Bonald in terms which became standard
statements of hierarchical organism, and this was of course countered
by very strong positivist and evolutionist tendencies.
Despite these tensions and antagonisms, the boundaries were not
always fast and firm, and German organismic and vitalist theories of
nations and cultures were nevertheless resonant and deeply
influential. This is not least because historism, by substituting a
particularistic and incommensurable anthropology of the Volksgeist
for history, posits a natural history of society to which time is
somehow incidental and insubstantive, a natural history which, in
certain inflections, might also be regarded in the spirit of certain
Enlightenment notions of deterministic naturalism: these were
manifestly important for Gobineau and to all subsequent racialist
theories. The consequence of this is of course a thesis which goes
very much in the opposite sense to Popper's famous but ignorant
critique of historicism, for it is historicism which makes it
possible to think of human liberty concretely, and not some
ahistorical liberalism or English pragmatic beliefs in the crooked
timber of humanity.
Generally speaking, civilization was thought, in this perspective, to
be something very precarious, resting uncertainly and improbably on a
seething magma of barbarity, of primal humanity that, by virtue of
the nature to which it is fated, eluded the dream of rational life,
but which, in a social-Darwinist world, was saved from
self-destruction by Malthusian mechanisms, held to have been
incontrovertible mechanisms for the regulation of the inferior
proletariat well into the writings of a Keynes, sand certainly, as
applied to the South today, in the beliefs and practices of many
international organizations. This primal humanity eluded the
generalization of civility, the acquisition of a distinctive sense of
time and temporality, the internatization of external coercion, and
many other collateral processes of civilization.
Yet this restless human magma did not consist only of uncouth
rustics, drunken tradesmen, and domestic servants, but crucially
constituted crowds, imposed universal suffrage upon reluctant
authorities, participated in revolutions, manned barricades, set up
communes, executed priests, fulfilled the spectral promises made in
the opening passage of The Communist Manifesto. It made a spectacle
of historical change, and this was regarded by its betters as
evidence of irrationality unrelated to social conditions of eruption.
And it was indeed by means of irrationalist suggestions that this
Geenie on the streets was wrapped up and domesticated, by means of
jingoism, imperialism and war -- the Geenie without, the colonial or
the primitive, had not yet arrived as an active agency. But
Barbarians both inside and outside were alike, for Frazer as for many
others: Adolphe Blanqui was only one of very many nineteenth century
Frenchmen to compare Algeria and other colonies with various parts of
France as yet uncivilized.
Of course, those who despaired of civilization, most particularly
conservatives, took the short step from indicating the parlous
fragility of civilized order to affirming inevitable, cyclical or
linear decline, degeneration, and atrophy. There was a large body of
writing on degeneration around the fin-de-siècle and up to the end of
the Second World War, a fevered time by all accounts, most
particularly after the First World War and the revolutionary waves
that followed it. Albert Freeman declared the industrial proletariat
of American Taylorism and Fordism to be submen. For his part, the
prominent Zionist Max Nordau , who changed his original surname
(Sµdstern) from one that indicated the uncertainty of the South to
one implying Northern virility, was by no means the only one to speak
at length of decadence, of decadent art and poetry; he utilized
physiognomic and other theories of criminality current in the late
nineteenth century, particularly writings of Lambroso, to expostulate
on biological degeneration, in a manner fully anticipating the
equally romantic cultural policies and the culture criticism of
Entartung (degeneration) of National Socialism. Degeneration of the
lower orders of society came metaphorically to stand for their
uncertain subordination in an age of revolution. Alexis Carrell,
celebrated eugenist and winner of the Nobel Prize for medicine who,
after a career in New York laboratories, became the cultural and
scientific oracle of the Maréchal Pétain at Vichy, deplored the
proletarian degeneration of the energetic and intelligent northern
stocks, emasculated by massification, and incapable of improvement or
elevation. I mention this person because he is of particular interest
to me; Carrell's once-famous book, L'Homme, cet inconnu, has been
highly influential on some prominent radical Muslim fundamentalist
thinkers (Qutb in the Arab World, Mawdudi in India and Pakistan,
Shariati in Iran) of the 1950s and 60s, who appreciated both his
ramblings about degeneration, and his staunch belief in a small
guiding minority.
Let us move more than half a century ahead, to the close of the
millennium, to the present moment of deregulation and
neo-globalization . The intervening period witnessed the rise of
means other than authoritarianism and warmongering to deal with the
barbaric magma below and to assimilate it. This was the Keynesian
consensus that followed from the Second World War and from the vigour
displayed by the Soviet Union -- the necessity of employment for all,
the welfare state, the New Deal, later in the United States Johnson's
Great Society and the idea of affirmative action or positive
discrimination. In the case of Keynes himself, this must be seen
against the background of private ideas contained in his
correspondence, which regarded the proletariat as a degenerate mass,
for whom the Keynesian programme of employment and welfarism may be
regarded as a programme for social prophylaxis.
Yet these developments entailed not only the socialization and
elevation of the commoner, but also his consequent de-Barbarization.
In the Third World -- and I am here starting my change of key -- this
was the great era of the UNESCO, the UNDP, of national independence
and non-alignment, of comprehensive development programmes, all of
which led to the predominance of another discourse on outsiders, the
de-Barbarizing discourse of universal development, of take-off,
except amongst circles in Europe which were then thought to be
hopelessly anachronistic. The Barbarian outsider, the colonial, was
becoming an ex-colonial, and was no longer generally inert and only
furtively active in his unreason. The Barbarian outsider was being
elevated and assimilited in his turn
The great change of the 1980s, in which the Keynesian basis of the
post-war order was jettisoned, became possible, with indecent haste,
once the alternative historical Jacobin project available since the
Bolshevik revolution was no longer available -- capitalism had taken
over socialist ideas just as as nineteenth-century authoritarians
like Gladstone and Bismarck took over ideas of universal suffrage.
While Keynesian policies and ideas were triumphant, the more archaic
fundamentalism of free market economics was confined to the margins:
Friedrich von Hayek, most abidingly, no less that the younger Milton
Friedman who, as early as 1968, was speaking of a "natural" rate of
unemployment ("The Role of Monetary Policy", in The American Econ.
Rev., LVIII, 1968, 1-17). Today, in the name of a tawdry natural
theology of the market, is being reproduced just this turbulent
magma, within Europe and without, constituting what Toynbee called a
new proletariat, internal and external, which owes nothing to
civilization: with remarkable prescience, Toynbee used the term "the
post-modern age" as early as 1954 (he had already used it in 1939,
but only loosely and for immediate convenience), to designate the
decline in the modernist European middle classes of the nineteenth
century from about 1875, and the rise of these protoplasmic
proletariats &emdash; these were historical processes that
precipitated the events of 1917-1920, the rise of National Socialism,
and the Second World War. All these events interrupted the post-1875
trend identified by the great British historian, and were compounded
by the social prophylaxis of Keynesianism, leading to its
century-long delay.
With the collapse of Communism and of the Western Keynesianism
correlative with it came the almost total disappearance of the notion
of economic and social development for countries of the South. This
was replaced by notions of structural adjustment in the economy and
an emphasis on romantically anti-state, and therefore anti-national
locality in social development, or attempts to reformulate community
of various descriptions and amplitudes in the image of a national
state. All this was made in terms, and in the name, of a market
regarded to be the natural as well as the desirable state of mankind.
Equally of the order of nature in this perspective are various areas
of deregulation, which have come to comprise state, culture, and
society in deliberate involution: all of these are of course matters
familiar from the cant of what we may call culturalist
conservationism on a world scale. In the same breath, structural
marginality and the existence of large permanent rates of
unemployment, the segmentation of the labour market, geographical,
ethnic, and other forms of segregation, became facts of life, facts
of nature. Toynbee's proletariat becomes a vast metaphor for
socio-cultural and consequently political marginality, both internal
and external.
With this came the remarkable revival in the West of extremist
nationalism and militant racism, associated with a broad, effective,
quite diffuse, revival après la lettre, as it were, of the classical
repertoire of romantic, conservative, vitalist conceptions of society
and of history of which I have spoken. Notions of natural, almost
biological boundaries of inter-group sympathy, of the impossibility
of coexistence or integration, are all notions deriving from this
repertoire, and are freely used by politicians as if they were
matters of neutral self-evidence. What I am suggesting is that the
present moment is marked by a culturalist turn, which totalizes the
social inside as well as the social outside, and which sublimates the
notion of race into the notion of culture and of specificity, which
reifies international economic exchanges and political hegemonism by
recourse to the notion of cultural Difference, grounded in modes of
thought about society and culture that describe themselves as
post-modernist. Like the Kulturkritik I referred to and the
Lebensphilosophie associated with it, this position claims the
recovery of things hidden by civilization, the abiding pre-modernity
of others palatable to post-modernist taste, backwardness restituted
from the snares of the Enlightenment and the modernities it spawned,
a prior order of nature, a vital force, rising up as a mystery of
infra-historical organisms that dwell beyond time. Once deregulated
in this fashion, culture follows the market in its awakening, in its
irredentism, in its voracity. I am not making a rhetorical point
here: the privatization of culture entails its relegation, in
practice and in principle, simultaneously to foreign, global actors
like Non-Governmental organizations who have become primary
deliverers of cultural development aid (in the name of
multiculturalism, of local democracy, and of other shibboleths), and
to private retrogressive political forces internally, duly gentrified
in post-modern social theory, in the name of authenticity.
I know that the vitalist, organismic, romantic genealogy of seemingly
liberal post-modernism, is not immediately recognizable, and this is
unsurprising. Collective amnesia and the organized public manufacture
of memory made generalizable by formidable means of communication,
and the devalorization of lived historical memory in favour of the
virtual, are essential to post-modernist mystification, and this is
not lost on one of its prophets -- I refer to J.-F. Lyotard's best
book, Le post-modernisme expliqué aux enfants [Post-Modernism
explained to Children] , although I must say that this connection
with romanticism and pragmatism is celebrated in post-modernist
literary-critical histories of that particular calling. Standard
text-books of social or political theory give romanticism and
vitalism decidedly minor positions in the history of the nineteenth
and the first half of our own century, out of keeping with their
historical weight, although it must be said that this was not the
case in writings emanating from the Soviet Block, not all of which
was propagandist, and the most famous of which was of course Lukacs'
famous Die Zerstörung der Vernunft [The Destruction of Reason] .
Not unnaturally, this irrationalism, reinforced by the predominance
of pre-literate forms of communication, generates an atmosphere of
infernal conspiracy pervading public life: phantasmagoric scenarios
concerning the War of Civilizations, from Samuel Huntington to
lesser-known tinkerers with words, the demonization with definite
political purpose of, variously, the PLO, Saddam Hussein, and of
Muslims in general, as had been the case in the very proximate past,
with the demonization of Communism, with prohibitionism and other
public agendas in the political culture of the United States. These
are all instances of mass-hysterical phenomena, like Mc Carthyism,
various discourses on international conspiracies by Jesuits (in the
eyes of the Left in Catholic countries), of Freemasons (by Jesuits).
>From the Barbarian within I come again to the Barbarian without. We
have seen that the primitive, the Barbarian, the outsider, the
lagard, and a host of other antitheses or failures of civilization
are bound together, as a generic group of cultural categories, with
similar conditions of emergence in the civilized imaginaire. In
juxtaposition with a re-constitution, in conditions of the acute
post-Keynesian crisis I mentioned, of the tribally-conceived Northern
inside, riven with contradictions and indelibly marked by savagery as
I have indicated, as happily post-modern, as being beyond modernity
in the sole sense, as I see it, of being based on a modernity
accomplished and renewed, whose normative, epistemological, and
aesthetic equipment is no longer necessary for the maintenance and
management of the public order, normative functions having been
re-allocated to very thoroughgoing forms of the manipulation of
consent -- in conjunction with this is a culturalist construction of
outsiders, as being themselves also in the mode of return to origins
occluded. And just as notions of citizenship are being questioned,
most saliently in the United States, on grounds of communalism , so
also are people of the South regarded from this perspective, and
within the categories of North American multiculturalist practices;
in this way, members of various western intelligentsias present
themselves as midwives of the authenticity of others, construing what
they term 'civil society' by the invention of pre-civil conceptions.
Altogether, this re-Barbarization of the outsider takes the form of
liberal sensibility. In learned discourse it takes the form of
appropriating the anti-Orientalist theses of Edward Said: in this way
orientals, especially those who describe themselves, quite
implausibly but without any sense of irony, as post-colonial, in
objective complicity with fundamentalist priests of authenticity,
merge into the vicious cycle of this discourse of singularity:
orientals are thus re-orientalized in a traffic of mirror images
between post-modernists and neo-Orientalists speaking for Difference,
and native orientals ostentatiously displaying their badges of
authenticity, in a play of exotism from outside and self-parody from
the inside. In this context, the discourse of culturalist specificity
-- instead of that of economic and social inequality and inequity --
devolves to a post-1989 postulate concerning the congenital
incapacity for modernity in a world of deregulation, hence for the
economic, social, and political treatment of economic, political, and
social problems, arising from the recent forms of globalization and
deregulation, and giving rise to the spectres of terrorism and
immigration.
The re-Barbarization of the Southerner transforms him, beyond history
and the international inequity of resources, into tribal warrior,
refugee, asylum seeker or illegal immigrant -- as if these last were
crossing the Mediterranean over to the Shangri-La, when they know
full-well they are crossing the River Styx to lands of darkness and
intense unsociability. The Southerner thus re-Barbarized turns into a
terrorist and fundamentalist. Inept and incapable of development, he
becomes the pathetic victim of famine and anarchy, to which he is
culturally predisposed. Uncivilized and only superficially touched by
modernity, he becomes again prone to tribalism and to wars of
ethnicity and religion, all construed as the results of a natural
history beyond human agency. Once again, we encounter the banality of
irresponsibility, and we encounter a Barbarian construed as eternal
when this construal itself is based on a system of relations which is
mystified in the name of nature. Yet the midwives of Barbarian
authenticity do not speak with the voice of nature, for she has no
voice, but of naturalism and of a deterministic natural history of
the cultures of others, not of reality, but of virtual memory
marketed. The aesthetic of exotism and the ditinctions based on
wealth merge yet again.
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