Absolutely relative: David Aaronovitch and the cultural elite. posted by Richard Seymour

The title is regulative rather than constitutive - which is to say, I start with Aaronovitch and wander off in various directions before coming back to the main theme.

David Aaronovitch on Frank Furedi's new book, Where Have All The Intellectuals Gone?:

Furedi denounces a number of enemies. The pursuit of universalist truths has been given a knocking by the rise of postmodernism, he argues. After all, if there can be no truth, why search for Truth? The postmodernists have created an alibi for philistinism through their relativism. Nothing is better than anything else, everything is a - more or less - equally valid narrative.

There is an irony in Furedi's complaint, and one he doesn't acknowledge. It is, of course, that the postmodernist intellectuals (including Anderson's Foucault) are precisely the kind of people who Furedi says he wants to see more of - intellectuals creating universalist theories on the basis of what appears to them to be true. So one possible answer to the question of whatever happened to intellectuals is that many became postmodernists, and have driven everybody else - as intellectuals always have - round the bend.

The ex-Marxist Aaronovitch is presumably attempting a bit of dialectical foreplay here, for those two paragraphs blatantly contradict one another. Either postmodernism is anti-universalist, culturalist, relativist, or it is not. Either Foucault was an intellectual "creating universalist theories" on the basis of what appeared to him to be the case, or he was a poststructuralist who stressed the very specific configuration of cultural facts or the 'locality' that his analysis was based on.

At any rate, Furedi is right about postmodernism (if not much else). The abandonment of universalism, the levelling of all theories into so many narratives of equal validity has had a pernicious impact on intellectual culture. Not to bore anyone with Marxist argot, but this has a specific class dimension (that dirty 'c' word), or so it seems to me. I am not here reciting Alex Callinicos' argument that postmodernism reflected a detumescent revolutionary fervour, the anti-climax of 1968 and all that, although I happen to think his argument is sound. It is simply that the reduction of class to just one more aspect of the multiculturalist mantra (race, class, sexuality, gender, ethnicity) and then, perhaps, its ultimate exclusion leaves us with a set of concerns that are wholly compatible with those of the upper-middle class yuppie who wishes to affirm his liberal (even anti-capitalist) credentials. To speak of class war sounds faintly ugly - intolerant, even - while even the Cosby-sweater wearing jello-pudding eating golf pro can passionately expound on abortion rights, gun control, affirmative action, gay rights etc. One can even talk vaguely of economic divisions, provided it is understood as a marginalised or socially excluded under-class while the majority are understood to be "middle class". (Hence, the Colombia Journalism Review recently noted the absence of representation for America's working class in the media, while at the same time pointing out that the 'poor' were comparatively well covered). For the investment banker, society must be polyglot rather than polarised, and such polarisation as does persist must result from the machinations of ancient ideologues, dangerous extremists, outmoded trade unionists etc., not a natural condition of capitalist production.

The point about class qua universalism is that it structures the whole way in which racism, womens' oppression etc. works. For instance, why should it be that 70% of the 1.2 billion people living on less than a dollar a day happen to be women? (David Held, Global Covenant: The Social-Democratic Alternative to the Washington Consensus, 2002, p 37). I haven't the statistics to hand, but I am willing to guess that you could say that most of those also happen to be non-white. It is not merely that class, race and gender intersect - it is that class is the universal dimension that cuts across all of these forms of oppression.

What is fake about postmodernism is precisely what is wrong with liberal universalism, the universalism of global capitalism. Insofar as it maintains that everyone has the right to their specific cultural enjoyment, their religious rituals, their shopping experience, their dumbed-down books and television, it misses the underlying class dimension of such questions. Race riots did not explode in Bradford because of a communication failure or (even worse) "tensions" in "deprived communities". Bradford, Oldham, Burnley etc have been zones of racist violence because the far right have benefited from the disintegration of industry, the dessication of working class institutions that reflected self-confidence and the abandonment at the level of national politics of any real hope of amelioration. Predictably, abandoning class politics has left the space open for multicultural canards which can always be given a malicious twist by David Blunkett and, worse, the BNP (hence BNP political ads that include an embittered Hindu relating his narrative of pain at the hands of the ebon-dark, invariably evil Muslims).

There is always a point of failure in liberal universalism, and in today's situation, that point is reached when tolerance has to contend with intolerance. If the logic is, "since everyone has the same right to their specific cultural experience, their beliefs and so on, let us create a neutral framework in which everyone can practise their beliefs without harming others", the limit becomes clear when there is an apparent threat to this neutral framework. One of Pim Fortuyn's many complaints against Muslims was that they were intolerant to gays like him, while Le Pen's Fronte National and the BNP are given to suggestions that the Muslims are enemies of peace, disrupt the modus vivendi while they themselves are merely defending the threatened livelihoods of ordinary whites etc.

So, when David Aaronovitch complained that Respect had tricked Muslims into thinking that they were uniquely targeted for oppression, while ignoring the noble Nato crusade for Muslims in Kosovo in 1999, the obvious answer is that the demonisation of Islam is now the universal ideological strategy of imperialism, from Israel to - dare I say it? - Russia. It is also, contiguously, the means by which a politician might displace the properly class element of any issue by giving an inkling of the darklings in our midst. Whatever the problem (housing, education, inadequate social security), the answer is likely to be fewer Muslims (or at least fewer immigrants). The oppression of Muslims therefore says something about our society and politics as a whole, and the point about Respect is that it universalises that experience as a specific dimension of class politics rather than pandering - as some have stupidly suggested - to "Islamic particularism".

Back to the cited article. Aaronovitch, in one of his less interesting moments, attempts a snipe at Perry Anderson :

But why is this retreat happening, and who's responsible? Anderson initially blames America - or rather, the impact of neo-liberal 'economic arrangements that began in the era of Thatcher and Reagan', and are now swamping all that was best about France. Including its cinema, reducing all that Truffaut to bloody Amelie.

The conflation between America and neo-liberalism is a commonplace, but not one for which Anderson can be held responsible. Rather, Aaronovitch displays a little bit of customary liberal paranoia in depicting America as being under attack when in fact it is not. However, is there not something sweet about that gesture? Don't we often see America defended against 'anti-Americans' as the scene of multiracial tolerance, cultural variety and openness etc? In the same way, when Christopher Hitchens complains that those who oppose US military ventures are in fact, "anti-American ... anti-cosmopolitan, anti-globalisation", isn't it clear that what is actually being defended is global capitalism, since Hitchens and Aaronovitch seem to believe it is coextensive with human rights, racial tolerance etc? Could this by why David Aaronovitch celebrates the decline in critical thinking as "just a new style of democracy"?