Reply to Taxloss on Multiculturalism. posted by Richard Seymour

The blogger taxloss has proffered some thoughtful comments on my post about multiculturalism below .

Before I get to the meat of his argument, there is one point I want to make. Taxloss comments that I 'weaken' my point by 'straying into different territory' at the end of my post. Possibly, by talking about two different issues in the same discussion, I run the risk of diluting the impact of one of them. But I think the two were united by the theme of how to fight the far right, so it was a justified risk in my assessment. I'll take the risk of extemporising on some confluent themes in this response too.

So, to the argument. Taxloss says that I miss two key words in my exposition of multiculturalist logic: 'integration' and 'inclusion'. He is right. I didn't mention these points at all, and it never occurred to me. Segregation (which is recommended by the BNP), taxloss says, was never discussed as part of the multiculturalist argument - which is also true, although I didn't say that it was. Integration, he adds, was not designed to preserve or fetishise difference, but rather to demonstrate sameness. Oh, quite! Underneath it all, aren't we the same? Isn't 'race' and so on skin-deep, and aren't we really all pursuing our own version of the same human story? Set aside my sarcasm, which I will explain later, and allow me to say that I agree with taxloss here - to some extent.

The trouble comes when my interlocuter suggests that this is the authentic, positive multiculturalism that we should heroically defend. Of course, I am for including Muslims, but isn't the language of 'integration' nowadays precisely the form that 'respectable racism' takes? When David Blunkett avers that Asians don't speak English enough, and should speak it even in their own homes, don't we hear the authentic voice of authoritarianism and British nationalism? How far a step is it to say that Asians or Muslims don't integrate because they won't or can't, because their culture is incompatible with ours? Wasn't this precisely the appeal of Pim Fortuyn? These Muslims will not integrate into Dutch liberal society, accept my homosexuality and so on... In short, isn't 'integration' now the language of exclusion?

And again, when I protest against the fetishisation of difference, it isn't because I wish to see difference obliterated. To that extent, I am not that bothered about whether people choose to 'integrate'. I simply find it irrelevant from a political point of view whether one prefers the pie 'n' mash shop or the curry house. In fact, the only point at which such a thing would become relevant would be if the universal rights that we all are entitled to as basic, fundamental trumps over-riding anything else, were infringed on for a particular group - say, if curry houses were firebombed by racists.

This is what I mean when I say that culturalism must be displaced by universalism. This isn't about us having different cultures and you respecting my culture and me respecting yours, it is about social justice, about rights that we are all entitled to. The universalist (socialist) attitude to the oppression of gays or Muslims is to say that these are common strategies of exclusion and marginalisation which say something more fundamental about the society as a whole. We all want good housing, decent jobs, safety from bullying and so on, and being an anti-racist is a logical corollary of that.

As soon as you accept culture as the horizon of political discourse, the focus is shifted onto the terrain of whether this or that culture can co-exist, adapt to one another's existence etc. This precisely allows racists to say that "we aren't racists, we just think that different cultures can co-exist peacefully". Further, "integration? I'm quite sound with my white English culture, thank you very much. I don't feel any overwhelming need to 'integrate' with Asians." Oh, better yet, "inclusion? Exclusion! Attempting to include people of different cultures not only dilutes my culture, which I wish to defend, it is also unsustainable, dangerous, will lead to rivers of blood etc".

To which you will raise the perfectly solid and decent response: "but that is nonsense, these cultural differences are irrelevant, and what you really want to do is create an artificially homogenous state ruled by fascists. The real issue is that everyone should be free to live and work unmolested. The arguments of 'racial difference' are so much superstitious hocus-pocus, and the arguments about 'cultural difference' are a sublimated version of the same."

And you will be right, even though your response is precisely not that of a multiculturalist but a universalist.

There are a couple of other things I didn't mention, which taxloss doesn't pick me up on. I did not mention the word 'tolerance'. It is a commonplace of multiculturalist discourse that we ought to be tolerant toward the Other. John Gray, in his The Two Faces of Liberalism ( reviewed here ) approvingly cites Voltaire's comment: "What is tolerance? It is the appurtenance of humanity. We are full of weakness and errors; let us mutually pardon each other for our follies."

As a stipulation about human interaction, I happen to think this is invaluable advice and beautifully put. As a guide to race relations, it sucks. Zizek is better:

Liberal "tolerance" condones the folklorist Other deprived of its substance (like the multitude of "ethnic cuisines" in a contemporary megalopolis) - any "real" Other is instantly denounced for its "fundamentalism", since the kernel of Otherness resides in the regulation of its jouissance, i.e. the "real Other" is by definition "patriarchal", "violent", never the Other of ethereal wisdom and charming customs.

Tolerance, per se, is not a virtue. It just means putting up with something. To promote it as a virtue suggests that somehow other people are a burden - Jamaicans, Asians (both Muslim and non-Muslim), gays etc. are to be 'tolerated'. This is as misanthropic a notion as I have ever heard. And then there is the matter of what we shall tolerate (here I explain my earlier impertinence). Difference, of course, is what is to be 'tolerated', but the story of multiculturalism glides gently over whether such differences are horizontal or vertical. Aren't we deep down all the same? Big people, small people, black, white, Jew, Gentile, capitalist, worker, victim, torturer... The reason why this series would never be pursued to its conclusion is because at a certain point, it becomes clear (once again) that what is relevant is oppression. Sometimes, the answer to Rodney King's question "Why can't we all just get along?" is that there are some people we shouldn't get along with. DW Griffiths' film 'Tolerance' was precisely an attempt to justify the racism of his film 'Birth of a Nation' on grounds of the specific experience of the Southern whites, while the anti-racists were seen as intolerant, elitist etc.

In short, I mean to say as clearly as I can that every conceptual operation by which multiculturalism establishes its anti-racism can be appropriated with frightening ease by the far right. As a discourse, its focus is wrong, its arguments are flawed, and its value in combatting racism is dubious.