THE POLITICS OF THE VEIL Joan Wallach Scott PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS ! Princeton and Oxford Copyright © 2007 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 3 Market Place, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1SY All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Scott, Joan Wallach. The politics of the veil / Joan Wallach Scott. p. cm. — (The public square) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-691-12543-5 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Muslims— France. 2. Islamophobia—France. 3. Racism—France. 4. Hijab (Islamic clothing)—Law and legislation—France. 5. Muslims—Cultural assimilation—France. 6. Secularism—France. 7. Culture conflict— France. I. Title. DC34.5.M87S36 2007 305.6!970944—dc22 2007013953 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Adobe Caslon and Helvetica Neue Printed on acid-free paper. ∞ press.princeton.edu Printed in the United States of America 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 CONTENTS Foreword vii Acknowledgments xi Introduction Chapter 1 ■ 1 The Headscarf Controversies 21 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 ■ Chapter 5 ■ ■ Racism 42 Secularism Individualism ■ Sexuality Conclusion Notes 175 185 Index 199 90 124 151 INTRODUCTION On March 15, 2004, the French government passed a law that banned the wearing of “conspicuous signs” of religious affiliation in public schools. Article 1 is the key provision: In public elementary, middle and high schools, the wearing of signs or clothing which conspicuously manifest students’ religious affiliations is prohibited. Disciplinary procedures to implement this rule will be preceded by a discussion with the student. There is also an explanation of what counts as “conspicuous”: The clothing and religious signs prohibited are conspicuous signs such as a large cross, a veil, or a skullcap. Not regarded as signs indicating religious affiliation are discreet signs, which can be, for example, medallions, small crosses, stars of David, hands of Fatima, or small Korans. Although the law applied to Jewish boys in skullcaps and Sikh boys in turbans, as well as to anyone with a large cross around his or her neck, it was aimed primarily at Muslim girls wearing headscarves (hijab in Arabic; foulard in French). The other groups were included to undercut the charge of discrimi- 2 INTRODUCTION nation against Muslims and to comply with a requirement that such laws apply universally. The headscarf, or, as it was soon to be referred to almost exclusively, the veil (voile), was considered inimical to French custom and law because it violated the separation of church and state, insisted on differences among citizens in a nation one and indivisible, and accepted the subordination of women in a republic premised on equality. For many supporters of the law, the veil was the ultimate symbol of Islam’s resistance to modernity. France is not the only country to worry about girls or women in headscarves. Similar legislation has been proposed in Belgium, Australia, Holland, and Bulgaria. In Turkey, which presents a different set of issues—a secular state since 1923 (modeled on the French republic), it has a majority Muslim population—a ban applies to elected officials, civil servants, and school and university students. In Bulgaria, which has long had a significant Muslim minority, a law to prohibit headscarves is still being discussed, but its proponents seem driven at least in part by a desire to be acceptable “Europeans.” In Germany, most of whose Muslims come from Turkey, many regional states prohibit teachers (though not students) from wearing the hijab. The European Court of Human Rights has weighed in on the matter too, ruling in a Turkish case that governments are within their rights when they prohibit headscarves in schools. This ruling is meant to apply to all European countries, not only to Turkey. A dissenting note has been sounded by the UN committee charged with implementing CEDAW (the convention outlawing all forms of discrimination against women): in 2005, it expressed concern about the effects of such bans on women’s access to schools and uni- Introduction 3 versities. Still, there seems to be a consensus about the meaning of the headscarf and the challenge to secular democracy that it represents, even though the girls and adult women who wear them are decidedly a minority within diasporic Muslim populations. Indeed, the numbers do not explain the attention being paid to veils. In France, just before the law was passed, only 14 percent of Muslim women polled wore the hijab, although 51 percent declared that they actively practiced their religion.1 In the Netherlands, which proposed outlawing the burqa (the fullbody covering worn by women), it is estimated that only fifty to one hundred women wear it, out of a population of about a million Muslims.2 Similarly, in England, where the niqab, which covers a woman’s entire face except for her eyes, was the focus of controversy in 2006, the number of wearers is tiny, though BBC news reported an increase in sales of niqabs in reaction to ex–foreign secretary Jack Straw’s proposal to ban them. Banning the headscarf or veil is a symbolic gesture; for some European nations it is a way of taking a stand against Islam, declaring entire Muslim populations to be a threat to national integrity and harmony. The radical acts of a few politically inspired Islamists have become a declaration of the intent of the many; the religious practices of minorities have been taken to stand for the “culture” of the whole; and the notion of a fixed Muslim “culture” obscures the mixed sociological realities of adaptation and discrimination experienced by these immigrants to the West. My question in this book is, why the headscarf? What is it about the headscarf that makes it the focus of controversy, the sign of something intolerable? The simple answers offered by 4 INTRODUCTION politicians who pass the laws and some feminists who support them is that the veil is an emblem of radical Islamist politics. In the words of the Australian Brownyn Bishop, “it has become the icon, the symbol of the clash of cultures, and it runs much deeper than a piece of cloth.” In addition, it is widely argued that veils stand for the oppression of women. So insists Margaret De Cuyper of Holland: “Women have lived for too long with clothes and standards decided for them by men; this [the removal of the veil] is a victory.”3 These answers don’t explain enough. Headscarves (or veils) are worn by only a small fraction of Muslim women, the vast majority of whom have assimilated in some way or another to the Western values and dress of the countries in which they now live. Moreover, veils are not the only visible sign of difference that attaches to religious Muslims, not the only way a religious/political identity can be declared. Men often have distinctive appearances (beards, loose clothing) and behavior (prayers, food preferences, aggressive assertions of religious identity tied to activist politics), yet these are not considered to be as threatening as the veil and so are not addressed by legal prohibition. The laws do not go on to challenge the structures of gender inequality in codes of Muslim family law; these codes have been allowed to stand in some Western European countries, and are left to religious authorities to enforce, even if they are not the law of the host country. Even more confounding, concern with gender inequality seems limited to Muslims and does not extend to French or German or Dutch practices that also permit the subordination of women. It is as if patriarchy were a uniquely Islamic phenomenon! What is it about the status of women in Islam that invites Introduction 5 special remedial attention? Why has the veil been singled out as an icon of the intolerable difference of Muslims? How has insistence on the political significance of the veil obscured other anxieties and concerns of those obsessed with it? How has the veil become a way of addressing broad issues of ethnicity and integration in France and in Western Europe more generally? To answer these questions we cannot take at face value the simple oppositions offered by those who would ban it: traditional versus modern, fundamentalism versus secularism, church versus state, private versus public, particular versus universal, group versus individual, cultural pluralism versus national unity, identity versus equality. These dichotomies do not capture the complexities of either Islam or “the West.” Rather, they are polemics that in fact create their own reality: incompatible cultures, a clash of civilizations. A number of studies argue convincingly that the Islamic headscarf is a modern, not a traditional, phenomenon, an effect of recent geopolitical and cultural exchanges that are global in scale. The French sociologist Olivier Roy, for example, describes the current religiosity of Muslim populations in Europe as both a product of and a reaction to westernization. The new Islamic religiosity, he maintains, parallels similar quests for new forms of spirituality in the secular environments of the West. “Islam,” he writes, “cannot escape the New Age of religion or choose the form of its own modernity.”4 I would add that while present-day Islam is undeniably “modern,” there is not one universalizing form of its modernity, and it is especially the differences that matter. I agree with Roy that today’s Islam is not a throwback to earlier practices, nor does it emanate from bounded traditions or identifiable communities. 6 INTRODUCTION There is not, Roy insists, a single Muslim “culture” which corresponds to the sociological and demographic profiles of the immigrant populations now residing in Europe. Indeed Islam is historically decentralized; unlike Catholicism, with its headquarters in Rome and a single figure of authority at its head, Islamic theology is articulated through continuing debate and interpretation, much like Jewish theology. Moreover, there is no single theology, but a plurality of them. Among Muslim immigrant populations, there are, to be sure, attempts to establish group identifications, but these are voluntary, Roy says, since they do not correspond any longer to fixed places—territories, states—or even to institutions like the family. In fact, voluntary groupings tend to divide generations; religiosity is one way for children to declare their independence from family constraints. It is also a way for dominated groups to insist on the legitimacy of their religion. The contexts within which populations assert Islamic identity need to be specified. What does establish Muslims as a single community, a “virtual” community in Roy’s description of it, is “specific legislation” that serves to “objectify” them.5 Various judicial and legislative decrees in Western Europe, prominently among them the French law banning Islamic headscarves, are examples of this objectification. The intense debates about passing such laws serve another purpose as well: they offer a defense of the European nationstates at a moment of crisis. As membership in the European Union threatens national sovereignty (borders, passports, currency, finance) and calls for an overhaul of social policy (the welfare state, labor market regulation, gender relations), as globalization weakens the standing of domestic markets, and Introduction 7 as former colonial subjects seek a permanent place in the metropole, the question of national identity has loomed large in Western Europe. Depending on particular national histories, the idealization of the nation has taken various forms. In France it has taken the form of an insistence on the values and beliefs of the republic, said to be a realization of the principles of the Enlightenment in their highest, most enduring form. This image of France is mythical; its power and appeal rests, to a large degree, on its negative portrayal of Islam. The objectification of Muslims as a fixed “culture” has its counterpart in the mythologizing of France as an enduring “republic.” Both are imagined to lie outside history—antagonists locked in eternal combat. This dual construction, France versus its Muslims, is an operation in virtual community building. It is the result of a sustained polemic, a political discourse. I understand discourse to refer to interpretation, to the imposition of meaning on phenomena in the world; it is mutable and contested, and so the stakes are high. Discourse is an important way of characterizing what I am studying; I use the term to counter the notion of culture that was employed in the debates. Culture in those usages implied objectively discernible values and traditions that were homogeneous and immutable; complexity, politics, and history were absent. Culture was said to be the cause of the differences between France and its Muslims. In fact, I argue that this idea of culture was the effect of a very particular, historically specific political discourse. Creating the reality one wants requires strong argument and the discrediting, if not silencing, of alternative points of view. Outlawing the veil, even though it was worn by very few students in French public schools, was an 8 INTRODUCTION attempt to enact a particular version of reality, one which insisted on assimilation as the only way for Muslims to become French. The presentation of what it meant to be “French” required suppressing not only the critics who were themselves French (and not Muslim) but also the Muslims (many of whom were French citizens) who offered conflicting evidence about the meanings of their religious identifications and of the place of the headscarf in them. The study of political discourse is best undertaken through close readings of arguments advanced in their specific political and historical contexts. Without history we aren’t able to grasp the implications of the ideas being advanced; we don’t hear the resonances of words; we don’t see all of the symbols contained–—for example—in a piece of cloth that serves as a veil. For that reason this book is centered on the politics of headscarf controversies in France—a country whose history I have been studying for almost forty years. There are, of course, insights I offer that have more general application. These insights are based on my belief that we need to recognize and negotiate differences, even those that seem irreducible—an outlook many French commentators would dismiss as American and multiculturalist (synonymous in their view). To be sure, my ideas are an expression of my political outlook, but it’s not so much an American way of thinking as it is a particular understanding of what democracy requires in the present context. There are many Americans who do not share my views, just as there is a significant minority in France, many of whom I cite in the course of this book, who do share them. These reflections about processes of politics and the handling of differences are not confined to national contexts; they Introduction 9 have wider application. The objectification of Muslims; the attribution of their differences to a single, inassimilable culture; the idea that a secular way of life is being threatened by “fundamentalists”—all this is evident in the reaction of Western European leaders to Muslim immigrants in their midst. Still, the specific ways in which these ideas are expressed and implemented as policy differ according to national political histories. These histories are critical for our understanding of the “Muslim problem” in Europe. For that reason I have confined my analyses to France, not only to gain the depth this issue requires, but also to highlight the local nature of the imagined general conflict between “Islam” and “the West.” It is, of course, true that there is a global dimension to these conflicts, the more so as the Middle East becomes a central strategic concern of American foreign policy, the site for the enduring “war against terrorism,” and as identification with a transnational Islam becomes the basis for rallying political opposition to the West in general and to the United States in particular. But, I argue, the situation of Muslim immigrants in Western European countries can be fully grasped only if the local context is taken into account. So, for example, a nation’s policy for naturalizing immigrants plays a part in its reception of Muslims; the experience of Pakistanis in England differs from that of Algerians in France; that of Turks in Germany is different yet again, while Bulgaria’s Muslims are not immigrants at all. We don’t learn very much by lumping all of these cases together into one Muslim “problem.” In fact, we exacerbate the problem we seek to address. I think that exactly this kind of heightening of difficulties was produced in France by the ways in which politicians, public intellectuals, and the media re- 10 INTRODUCTION sponded to the fact of a growing population of Muslim “immigrants” in their midst—immigrants whose diversities were reduced to a single difference that was then taken to be a threat to the very identity of the nation. This book is a study of the political discourse of those French republicans who insisted that the only way to deal with what they perceived to be the threat of Islamic separatism was to ban the headscarf. There are not many Muslim voices in this book, in part because there weren’t many to be heard during the debates. The headscarf controversies were largely an affair of those who defined themselves as representatives of a true France, with North Africans, Muslims, and “immigrants” consigned to the periphery. I do consider the many meanings the veil may have for Muslims and arguments among them about how and whether to assimilate to French standards, but only briefly and then as a way of highlighting the inconsistencies of French characterizations of them. This is not a book about French Muslims; it is about the dominant French view of them. I am interested in the way in which the veil became a screen onto which were projected images of strangeness and fantasies of danger—danger to the fabric of French society and to the future of the republican nation. I am also interested in the way in which the representation of a homogeneous and dangerous “other” secured a mythic vision of the French republic, one and indivisible. I explore the many factors feeding these fantastic representations: racism, postcolonial guilt and fear, and nationalist ideologies, including republicanism, secularism, abstract individualism, and, especially, French norms of sexual conduct taken to be both natural and universal. Indeed, I argue that the representation of Muslim sexuality as unnatural and oppressive Introduction 11 when compared to an imagined French way of doing sex intensified objections to the veil, grounding these in indisputable moral and psychological conviction. ! In France many of those who supported a ban on headscarves insisted they were protecting a nation conceived to be one and indivisible from the corrosive effects of communautarisme (which I have translated as “communalism”). By that term, they do not mean exactly what Americans do by “communitarianism.” In France communautarisme refers to the priority of group over national identity in the lives of individuals; in theory there is no possibility of a hyphenated ethnic/national identity—one belongs either to a group or to the nation. (In fact, of course, there are French Muslims who were recognized as such at the end of the Algerian War, but that history was conveniently forgotten in the outburst of republican myth-making associated with the celebration of the bicentennial of the French Revolution in 1989.) American multiculturalism was offered negatively as the embodiment of communalism. Consisting of a multiplicity of cultures, riven by ethnic conflict and group identity politics, the United States is depicted as unable to grant individuals the equality that is their natural right. That equality is achieved, in French political theory, by making one’s social, religious, ethnic, and other origins irrelevant in the public sphere; it is as an abstract individual that one becomes a French citizen. Universalism—the oneness, the sameness of all individuals—is taken to be the antithesis of communalism. And yet, paradoxically, it is a universalism that is particularly 12 INTRODUCTION French. If America permits the coexistence of many cultures and grants the legitimacy (and political influence) of hyphenated identities (Italian-American, Irish-American, AfricanAmerican, etc.), France insists on assimilation to a singular culture, the embrace of a shared language, history, and political ideology. The ideology is French republicanism. Its hallmarks are secularism and individualism, the linked concepts that guarantee all individuals equal protection by the state against the claims of religion and any other group demands. French universalism insists that sameness is the basis for equality. To be sure, sameness is an abstraction, a philosophical notion meant to achieve the formal equality of individuals before the law. But historically it has been applied literally: assimilation means the eradication of difference. That is why the French census makes no record of the religion, ethnicity, or national origin of its population; such figures would represent France as fractured and divided, not—as it claims to be—a united, singular entity. The ideal of a nation one and indivisible harkens back to the French Revolution of 1789, which (after several years of bloody conflict) replaced a feudal corporate regime, characterized by hierarchies of privilege based on birth and wealth, with a republic whose citizens were deemed free and equal individuals. At the time, not all members of the population were considered individuals—women and slaves lacked the requisite qualities—but the ideal stood and became part of the national heritage, inspiring the claims of excluded groups for equal rights. I will talk more about the dilemma faced by excluded groups claiming the rights of individuals in chapters 2 and 4. Here I want simply to underscore the idea that French individualism achieves its universalist status by positing the Introduction 13 sameness of all individuals, a sameness that is achieved not simply by swearing allegiance to the nation but by assimilating to the norms of its culture. The norms of the culture, of course, are anything but abstract, and this has been the sticking point of French republican theory. Abstraction allows individuals to be conceived as the same (as universal), but sameness is measured in terms of concrete ways of being (as Frenchness). And ascriptions of difference, conceived as irreducible differences, whether based on culture or sex or sexuality, are taken to preclude any aspiration to sameness. If one has already been labeled different on any of these grounds, it is difficult to find a way of arguing that one is or can become the same. In the last two decades or so, this contradiction has been exposed and challenged. The requirement of assimilation has come under attack by groups demanding recognition of their difference. Since women, homosexuals, and people of North African origin (stubbornly referred to as immigrants long after many had become citizens) were discriminated against as groups, it was as groups, they argued, that they must receive their rights—or as individuals whose difference from the norm is acknowledged and respected. The leaders of the feminist mouvement pour la parité insisted that discrimination against women in politics would end only when it was understood that all individuals came in one of two sexes. Sex, unlike ethnicity or religion, they argued, was universal. It divided all humans and so could not be abstracted: even abstract individuals were sexed. These feminists called for (and won) a law requiring equal numbers of women and men on the ballots for most elected political offices. The leaders of the gay and lesbian movement demanded the same rights for homosexual as for 14 INTRODUCTION straight couples, including the right to be considered families. They gained the equivalent of our domestic partnership contracts, but not access to adoption or reproductive technology. In effect, the law implies that families can be formed only by two individuals of the opposite sex—the cultural norm of the heterosexual nuclear family must remain in place. North Africans, many of whom are Muslims, claimed that the only way to reverse discrimination against them was to consider their religion on a par with that of Christians and Jews. If individuals with those commitments could be considered fully French, so could Muslims, even if the requirements of their religious beliefs led them to pray and dress differently—women wearing hijabs, for example. There was, of course, great contest about what these beliefs entailed, including whether the Koran even required women to cover their heads. There was also disagreement about the wisdom of passing a law banning the foulard; many Muslims told pollsters they did not oppose such a law even as they protested the discrimination they felt it would encourage. But whatever the controversies were among Muslims, what united them as a group was the desire to be considered “fully French” without having to give up on the religious beliefs, communal ties, or other forms of behavior by which they variously identified themselves. The reaction of politicians and republican ideologists to these demands for the recognition of difference was swift and uncompromising. They insisted that the way things had always been done was the right way and that the challenges from groups such as women, homosexuals, and immigrants would undermine the coherence and unity of the nation, betraying its revolutionary heritage. Even as they granted that discrimina- Introduction 15 tion might exist and allowed some measures to correct it, they did so in ways that would not endanger the bottom line: the need to maintain the unity of the nation by refusing to recognize difference. After much debate, it was established that the exception was sexual difference. Embodied in the nuclear family, it was considered to be a natural difference, the foundation not only of French culture but of all civilized cultures. As for Muslims, their claims were rebuffed on the ground that satisfying them would undermine laïcité, the French version of secularism, which its apologists offer as so uniquely French as to be untranslatable. Any word has specific connotations according to its linguistic context, of course. Nevertheless, laïcité, the French version of “secularism,” is no less translatable than any other term. It is part of the mythology of the specialness and superiority of French republicanism—the same mythology that paradoxically offers French universalism as different from all others—to insist that laïcité can only be used in its original tongue.6 Laïcité means the separation of church and state through the state’s protection of individuals from the claims of religion. (In the United States, in contrast, secularism connotes the protection of religions from interference by the state.) Muslim headscarves were taken to be a violation of French secularism and, by implication, a sign of the inherent non-Frenchness of anyone who practiced Islam, in whatever form. To be acceptable, religion must be a private matter; it must not be displayed “conspicuously” in public places, especially in schools, the place where the inculcation of republican ideals began. The ban on headscarves established the intention of legislators to keep France a unified nation: secular, individualist, and culturally homogeneous. They vehemently denied the 16 INTRODUCTION objection that cultural homogeneity might also be racist. Yet, as I show in chapter 2, there is a long history of French racism in which North African Muslims are the target. The veil plays a particularly important part in that story. ! One of the fascinating aspects of the headscarf controversy was the way in which words became conflated with one another. Muslim women in France wear what they refer to as a hijab; in French the word is foulard; in English, headscarf. Very quickly, this head covering was referred to in the media as a veil (voile), with the implications that the entire body and face of its wearer were hidden from view.7 As I will argue in chapter 5, the conflation of headscarf and veil, the persistent reference to hidden faces when, in fact, they were perfectly visible, was a way of expressing deep anxiety about the ways in which Islam is understood to handle the relations of the sexes. It was also a way of insisting on the superiority of French gender relations, indeed, of associating them with higher forms of civilization. Although I do not want to reproduce that anxiety (rather I want to analyze it), I have found it impossible to make a rigorous or consistent distinction in my own terminology. My using “veil” and “headscarf ” interchangeably reflects the way in which the words were deployed in the debates. A similar set of conflations came with the word Muslim, a religious identification often (though not always) signified for women by the veil. Although it designated followers of the religion of Islam, “Muslim” was also used to refer to all immigrants of North African origin, whatever their religion. Sociol- Introduction 17 ogist Riva Kastoryano tells us that since at least the 1980s “immigrant,” in France, has been synonymous with North African. Moreover, little distinction is made between North Africans, Arabs, and Muslims, although not all North Africans are Arabs, not all Arabs are Muslims, and not all Muslims in France come from North Africa. In the political discourse of French republicans, however, the different meanings are hard to distinguish, the terms bleed one into another. As with “veil,” “Muslim” evokes associations of both inferiority and menace that go beyond the objective definition of the word itself: “Muslims” are “immigrants,” foreigners who will not give up the signs of their culture and/or religion. Invariably, too, the religion they are said to espouse is painted as “fundamentalist,” with incontestable claims not only on individual comportment but on the organization of the state. In this discourse the veil denotes both a religious group and a much larger population, a whole “culture” at odds with French norms and values. The symbolism of the veil reduces differences of ethnicity, geographic origin, and religion to a singular entity, a “culture,” that stands in opposition to another singular entity, republican France. For a small piece of cloth, the veil is heavy with meanings for French republicans who are worried about schools and immigrants, freedom and terrorism. Having an opinion about it serves to establish one’s credentials on the heady topics of individualism, secularism, and the emancipation of women—it is an ideological litmus test. Banning the veil also became a substitute solution for a host of pressing economic and social issues; the law on headscarves seemed as if it could wipe away the challenges of integration posed for policymakers by former colonial subjects (most often perceived as poor and beyond re- 18 INTRODUCTION demption even if some were established members of the middle class). In a fascinating way, the veil in republican discourse served to cover a body of intractable domestic issues even as it revealed the anxieties associated with them. Getting beyond that veiling is the purpose of this book. The answer to the question “why the veil?” then is complicated. Or perhaps a better word is “overdetermined.” There were many reasons why French policymakers focused on the veil, even as they emphasized just one (the protection of women’s equality from Islamist patriarchs). These reasons went beyond defending modernity against traditionalism, or secularism against the inroads of religion, or republicanism against terrorists. In this book I explore these reasons by treating separately the topics of racism, secularism, individualism, and sexuality, although all four were actually intertwined. To make sense of the complex fabric of French republican discourse on the veil, though, I have had to separate its interwoven strands. Each strand contributed to drawing and fortifying a boundary around an imagined France, one whose reality was secured by excluding dangerous others from the nation. At the same time, the political discourse of embattled republicanism created a firmer community of identification for Muslims than might otherwise have existed. The veil became a rallying point— something to defend as a common value—even for those who did not wear it. My insistence on history and complexity is not just a scholarly indulgence; it has urgent political implications. Simple oppositions not only blind us to the realities of the lives and beliefs of others but create alternative realities that affect our own self-understanding. A worldview organized in terms of good Introduction 19 versus evil, civilized versus backward, morally upright versus ideologically compromised, us versus them, is one we inhabit at our risk. It leaves no room for self-criticism, no way to think about change, no way to open ourselves to others. By refusing to accept and respect the difference of these others we turn them into enemies, producing that which we most feared about them in the first place. This has happened in France and, with local variation, elsewhere in the West. Indeed, the French law seems to have inspired other countries to follow suit in what is fast becoming a consolidation of sides in a clash between “Islam” and “the West.” The inability to separate the political radicalism based in the religion of a few from the religious and/or customary practices, or simply the ethnic difference, of the many has alienated disaporic Muslim populations, even those who want nothing more than to become full citizens of the lands in which they live. And it has secured “us” in an inflexible and thus dangerously defensive posture in relation to “them.” I have not used the word toleration to talk about how we should deal with those radically different from ourselves because, following political theorist Wendy Brown, I think toleration implies distaste (her word is aversion) for those who are tolerated.8 I want to insist instead that we need to acknowledge difference in ways that call into question the certainty and superiority of our own views. Instead of assimilation we need to think about the negotiation of difference: how can individuals and groups with different interests live together? Is it possible to think about difference non-hierarchically? On what common ground can differences be negotiated? Perhaps it is the common ground of shared difference, as French philosopher 20 INTRODUCTION Jean-Luc Nancy has suggested. Nancy argues that it is wrong to think of community as a shared essence, a common being, because that “is in effect the closure of the political.” Instead, he says, we must recognize that we all share “being-in-common,” which “has nothing to do with communion, with fusion into a body, into a unique and ultimate identity.”9 Common being presupposes sameness while “being-in-common” says only that we all exist and that our very existence is defined by our difference from others. Paradoxically, it’s difference that is common to us all. We must stop acting as if historically established communities were eternal essences. This is one of the challenges of our time—one that French leaders were unwilling and unable to meet. Their story is for me an object lesson in politics, an example of the misuse of history and the blinding effects of hysteria. We need to think about the limits of their approach in order to develop alternatives to it—alternatives that will, of course, vary according to national context, but that will in each case allow for the recognition and negotiation of difference in ways that realize the promises of democracy. Hybridity, or the Cultural Logic of Globalization M ARWAN M. K RAIDY T EMPLE U NIVERSITY P RESS Philadelphia Hybridity without Guarantees 7 Toward Critical Transculturalism Cultural experience or indeed every cultural form is radically, quintessentially hybrid, and if it has been the practice in the West since Immanuel Kant to isolate cultural and aesthetic realms from the worldly domain, it is now time to rejoin them. —Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism The claim that hybridity is symptomatic of resistance to globalization is troublesome, and the less forceful assertion that cultural mixture reflects the lightness of globalization’s hand is misguided. Hybridity as a characteristic of culture is compatible with globalization because it helps globalization rule, as Stuart Hall once put it, through a variety of local capitals. Hybridity entails that traces of other cultures exist in every culture, thus offering foreign media and marketers transcultural wedges for forging affective links between their commodities and local communities. As a discourse of intercultural relations, hybridity conjures up an active exchange that leads to the mutual transformation of both sides. Mainstream public discourse frames this exchange as benign and beneficial. The sheer repetition of the word “hybridity’’ in hundreds of media outlets and dozens of academic disciplines gives hybridity an aura of legitimacy and hides its inherent contradictions as it mystifies globalization’s material effects. Hybridity, then, is not just amenable to globalization. It is the cultural logic of globalization. As the cultural logic of globalization, hybridity is not posthegemonic. By now this book has substantiated the claim that hybridity does not implicate the relenting of inequality. Whether in Lebanese television reception, in Mexican television production, or in U.S. journalistic discourse, unequal intercultural relations shape most aspects of cultural mixture. In many instances there are causal links between politico-economic power and cultural hybridity. This, however, does not mean that hybridity is tantamount to an effect of dominance. The processes and outcomes of hybridity are too convoluted to be explained by an always already 148 Hybridity without Guarantees 149 direct politico-economic causality. Consequently, in order to understand the complex and active links between hybridity and power, we need to move beyond commonplace models of domination and resistance. Critical transculturalism is designed to help us accomplish this task in international communication. A reiteration of this book’s cardinal argument is in order before we put forward the framework of critical transculturalism. The congregation of postcultural imperialism approaches to international communication and culture, which first emerged under the banner of audience activity and can now be identified by the cultural pluralism or cultural globalization rubrics, have been either unwilling or unable to focus at once on the discursive and textual aspects of international communication while at the same time emphasizing material structure. The move from the monoculture of imperialism approaches to the multiculture of pluralism perspectives will remain incomplete until it considers structure and meaning in tandem in the current global transculture. The corporate view of this transculture elaborated in Chapter Four should be replaced with a critical and humanistic vision. It is with that objective in mind that I now propose critical transculturalism. Critical transculturalism is a framework that focuses on power in intercultural relations by integrating both agency and structure in international communication analysis. The following is critical transculturalism in a nutshell, visually captured in Table 1. Critical transculturalism takes a synthetic view of culture, unlike cultural imperialism’s holistic premise and cultural pluralism’s view of culture as a merely pluralistic entity. Whereas in cultural imperialism agency is located in the global structure of capitalism, and in cultural pluralism agency is found in local individuals or communities studied contextually, critical transculturalism considers that social practice, acting translocally and intercontextually, is the site of agency. In terms of the relation between structure and agency, cultural imperialism sees it as a dialectical determination of the latter by the former, and cultural pluralism as a dialogical interaction between the two, whereas critical transculturalism conceives it as a lopsided articulation in which the dialogical aspects of communication must be analyzed concurrently with its dialectical dimensions. Finally, whereas cultural imperialism focuses on the production and distribution stages of the media communication process, and cultural pluralism emphasizes message/text and reception, critical transculturalism takes a more integrative approach that considers the active links between production, text, and reception in the moment of cultural 150 Chapter 7 Table 1 Critical Transculturalism in Comparative Perspective Cultural Imperialism Cultural Pluralism Critical Transculturalism Conception of Culture Holistic Pluralistic Synthetic Conception of global culture Monoculture Multiculture Transculture Central trope Dominance Resistance and/or adaptation Hybridity Site of agency Structure Individuals and/or Social practice community Scope of agency Global Local and contextual Translocal and intercontextual Empirical focus Material/ Institutional Discursive and/or textual Material and discursive and textual Relation between structure and agency (process) Dialectical Dialogical Dialectical and dialogical Relation between structure and agency (outcome) Determination Interaction and intertextuality Articulation (lopsided) Media focus Production and distribution Reception and text/message Production, text, and reception reproduction Too strong Mediator/ Referee Relation of state to Too weak external forces reproduction. In the following pages I emphasize the differences between cultural imperialism, cultural pluralism, and critical transculturalism.1 In contrast to multiculturalism’s reference to the coexistence of plural cultures (or cocultures), transculturalism characterizes a mixture of several cultures. The former establishes boundaries of recognition and institutionalization between cultures; the latter underscores the fluidity of these boundaries. When the Chicago Cultural Studies Group (1992) coined the term “corporate multiculturalism,’’ it was referring to the “great danger [that] lies in thinking that [U.S.] multiculturalism could be exported multiculturally’’ (p. 550). Along the same lines, Chapter Hybridity without Guarantees 151 Four explored the rhetorical claims of a corporate transculturalism elaborated in (mostly) U.S. public discourse, including its advocacy of free trade, individual consumerism, and reduction of culture to economic variables. No wonder, then, that the discourses of globalization and corporate transculturalism are so compatible. “[S]o convinced are people that global capitalism is relentlessly opposed to local cultures and diverse identities,’’ Zachary (2000) writes, “that they fail to realize that among the most vigorous proponents of mongrelization are the world’s biggest, richest, most profit-hungry corporations’’(xx). Indeed! The shift in public discourse from multiculturalism to transculturalism, from the recognition of cultural difference to the celebration of cultural fusion, is at its core economic. Critical transculturalism reclaims the notion of hybridity from doctrinaire free marketeers. It redefines cultural fusion as a social issue with human implications, from its earlier definition as an economic matter with commercial implications. People’s identities may be refracted through individual consumption, cultural and otherwise, but consumption alone is not tantamount to being. Hybridity theory, and cultural theory at large, cannot consider people merely as individuals who constantly recreate themselves by way of consumption. Rather, agency must be grasped in terms of people’s ability to accomplish things in the world they inhabit. If culture represents the meanings, ways of action, and ways to evaluate the value of actions in a society, and if cultural hybridity entails a change in those meanings and actions, then attention ought to be paid to hybridity’s ability or inability to empower social groups to have influence over the course of their lives. Ultimately, then, the value of a theory of hybridity resides in the extent to which it emphasizes human agency. Critical transculturalism emphasizes the relation between hybridity and agency. The former is its conceptual core and the latter its central concern. This framework focuses on the links that communication processes create between power and meaning in the context of cultural transformation, and with the material and discursive consequences of these links. Whereas structure is the site of agency in the cultural imperialism thesis, and agency is located in the individual/community for the cultural pluralism perspective, in critical transculturalism agency is sited in social practices. By “practices’’ I mean, following Stuart Hall, “how a structure is actively reproduced” (1985, p. 103, my emphasis). Understood as practices, communication processes harnessed to express different kinds of hybridity serve to reproduce social, political, and 152 Chapter 7 economic structures. When hybridity is posited as a naturally occurring and globally desirable condition in public discourse, it reproduces the prevailing global order. Even the hybridity articulated by Maronite youth who themselves see it as an empowering identity can be perceived to be hegemonic by other Lebanese confessions. This brings us to the issues of volition and intention: whether hybridity is self-asserted or ascribed will determine to a large degree its relation to agency. In this regard, Bakhtin’s distinction between intentional and organic hybridity in language can be usefully applied to culture. Intentional hybridity, characteristic of, for example, the novel, is the result of an artistic intention and stylistic organization. It is therefore “a semantic hybrid . . . not . . . in the abstract . . . but rather a semantics that is concrete and social” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 360, emphasis in original). In contrast, organic hybridity is “unintentional, unconscious hybridization” (p. 358) that occurs and changes historically when several languages—and, for our purposes, cultures—enter into contact: “The image of a language conceived as an intentional hybrid is first of all a conscious hybrid (as distinct from a historical, organic, obscure language hybrid); an intentional hybrid is precisely the perception of one language by another language, its illumination by another linguistic consciousness. An image of language may be structured only from the point of view of another language, which is taken as the norm” (p. 359). Intentional hybridity is therefore primarily a communicative phenomenon. Its intentionality increases the possibility that it will become a process of othering, where identities are projected by powerful social agents onto others who are less powerful. The necessity of translation, of rendering meaning cross-culturally, raises the issue of who controls the means of translation. Communication is central in the formation of hybridities because it strengthens the agency of those with the means to translate and name the world, while weakening the agency of other participants. In other words, whether hybridity is self-described or ascribed by others is primarily a communicative process. The means and ability to communicate are therefore an important determinant of agency in intercultural relations that form the crucible of hybridity. Based on the central relation between hybridity and agency, critical transculturalism has three foundational pillars: a conception of culture as synthetic, an emphasis on the translocal and intercontextual links between hybridity and agency, and a commitment to an epistemology with multiple methodologies—discursive, textual, and empirical. Hybridity without Guarantees 153 Critical transculturalism advocates doing away with the view that cultures are stable and autonomous units, because the holistic view of culture is an obstacle to a critical approach to international communication. Though notable scholars have advanced a nonholistic view of culture (Appadurai, 1996; Bakhtin, 1981; Benhabib, 2002; Hannerz, 1992; Marcus, 1998), social analysis and conventional wisdom still reinscribe what Benhabib called the “reductionist sociology of culture’’ (2002, p. 4). This approach presupposes that (1) cultures are homogenous units, (2) culture is congruent with nationality or an ethnic group within a nationality, and (3) cultures are for the most part separate from each other and interactions between them are epiphenomenal. While studies conducted from the cultural imperialism perspective adhered to these premises to varying degrees and focused on intercultural power differences, research done under the cultural pluralism/globalization umbrella rejected the holistic view of culture but for the most part neglected power. Indeed, cultural holism explains what I believe to be the fatal flaw of “cultural imperialism,’’ namely the equivalence between politicoeconomic dominance and cultural homogeneity (Kraidy, 2004). This assumption has been challenged, if only indirectly, for example, in postcolonial criticism and even—as discussed in Chapter Two—within the critical political economy tradition itself. However, the tendency to equate homogeneity with dominance, rooted as it is in the conflation of culture with its political economy, has empowered opponents of critical approaches to international communication to associate hybridity with pluralism and resistance. To reclaim power as a major and legitimate focus of research, it is important to view cultures as synthetic entities whose hybrid components are shaped by structural and discursive forces. Critical transculturalism differs from both cultural imperialism and cultural pluralism in that it rejects what anthropologist George Marcus called the “fiction of the whole’’ (1998, p. 33) but at the same time emphasizes that intercultural relations are unequal. In order to understand the intricate entanglement of structural and discursive elements in relations between cultures, we shall revisit our conception of the local. Shifting Geertz: The Local Is Not What It Used to Be When Clifford Geertz (1983) wrote that “the shapes of knowledge are always ineluctably local, indivisible from their instruments and their encasements’’(p. 4), he was explicitly stating an implicit tradition in anthropology to treat the local as an autonomous site, sometimes recognizing 154 Chapter 7 but rarely dissecting the local’s enmeshment in supralocal networks. In the two decades since Geertz’s pronouncement, social scientists have focused on “the local’’ as a conceptual issue (see, for example, D. Miller, 1995; Mirsepassi, Basu, and Weaver, 2003; Rosenau, 2003), especially as the opposite of “the global’’in globalization theory. In international communication, where the local/global dichotomy has become pervasive, the local is treated as the site of meaning construction, power struggles, and social action, ranging from an individualistic emphasis on “resistance’’ to a focus on social aspects of communication, for example, in research on alternative media.2 Rather than consider the local and the global as opposites, it may be more helpful to think of them as mutually constitutive, a perspective advanced in terms of “glocalization’’ (Kraidy, 2003b; Robertson, 1994), “interpenetrated globalization’’ (Braman, 1996), or “distant proximities’’ (Rosenau, 2003). However, it is Appadurai’s claim that local knowledge is “not only local in itself but, even more important, for itself’’ (1996, p. 181) that enables a productive contrast to the Geertzian view on the local. The local knowledge envisioned by Geertz was, as his definition quoted earlier demonstrates, “local in itself.’’ In other words, its locality was primarily empirical. Local knowledge “for itself’’ à la Appadurai, however, foregrounds the political nature and uses of local knowledge. (Chapter Three offers historical examples of how local knowledge of cultural and racial mixtures was local for itself.) Locality, then, is not naturally formed, waiting for the anthropologist to interpret it. Rather, locality is shaped by myriad forces, including the people who inhabit it and the anthropologist or media scholar who studies it. This is not a radical constructivist proposition. The local is primarily although not exclusively a physical reality in nature and matter. The insight that local knowledge is also “for itself’’ fills a major gap in the Geertzian “culture-as-text’’ legacy, namely its relative neglect of material power. In this regard, it is important to stress that the exercise of power in the realm of the local is not the exclusive prerogative of the global. The local itself is often the scene of power struggles between local actors, who are themselves embedded in larger external networks. In other words, the local is at once a site of empowerment and marginalization. This point is overshadowed by the recurrence of romantic views of the local, alternately defined as “a residual category overtaken by development . . . [or] a haven of resistance against globalization’’ (Haugerud, 2003, p. 61). This view elides the fact that the local itself is pervaded with power and inequality, a fact with troublesome Hybridity without Guarantees 155 implications for those studies in communication and cultural studies that glorify local cultural hybridity as resistance. Critical transculturalism, then, considers that (1) the local is intricately involved in supralocal relations and that (2) exogenous and endogenous circuits of power pervade the local. For these two reasons, I prefer to conceive of locality in terms of translocality (Kraidy and Murphy, 2003). A translocal approach focuses on connections between several local social spaces, exploring hitherto neglected local-to-local links. A translocal approach reformulates Galtung’s “wheel model” (1971) of cultural imperialism, where the hub and rim are metaphors for, respectively, the center and periphery, by shifting the focus of research on connections between several points on the rim of the wheel, without predetermining that such connections must necessarily spring from the hub and through the spokes. This suggests an alternative approach to hybridity than, for example, the one spun in the Washington Post articles analyzed in Chapter Four, where various countries’ hybridity is a function of their relation with U.S. popular culture, positing the United States at the center of cultural exchanges and all other cultures in various peripheral positions.3 In contrast to this hub-through-spokes-to-rim model, a translocal perspective calls for an analysis of how these different nations’ hybrid cultures are shaped by their mutual interaction, in addition to their links with the West. While there is a risk of overemphasizing these local-to-local connections, lapsing into another romanticization of the local that would obscure supralocal power plays, a translocal perspective, at least analytically, allows us to remove the West from the center of intercultural relations. International communication research would benefit greatly from more emphasis on local-to-local, “East-to-East,’’ or “South-to-South’’ interactions and exchanges. The objective of this decentering is not to deflect attention from Western power, but to pave the way for the construction of alternative perspectives on hybridity and locality that are not confined to global-to-local links that reinscribe dependency. Thinking of international communication and hybridity in terms of translocality, then, keeps issues of power high on the agenda.4 The consideration of hybridity in tandem with power is perhaps best captured by the term “intercontextuality,’’ (Appadurai, 1996), which allows us to understand text and context to be mutually constitutive. As used here, “context’’ does not refer merely to a natural environment or a social setting where practices are put in motion and texts find their interpretative frames. Rather, I employ “context’’ as a constitutive and constituting force in the sense elaborated by critical communication 156 Chapter 7 scholar Jennifer Daryl Slack (1996) when she wrote that “context is not something out there, within which practices occur or which influences the development of practices. Rather, identities, practices, and effects generally, constitute the very context with which they are practices, identities or effects’’ (p. 125, emphasis in original). Using the notion of intercontextuality, we can maintain that hybridity is always already permeated with power, without, however, arguing in favor of a generalized hegemonic outcome. In other words, while most hybridities tend to be structured in dominance, the resulting hybrid forms and identities are not always and not necessarily reflective of total dominance. Critical transculturalism views the relationship between structure and agency in terms of a lopsided articulation. Articulation, according to Stuart Hall (1986), “is both a way of understanding how ideological elements come, under certain conditions, to cohere together in a discourse, and a way of asking how they do or do not become articulated, at specific conjunctures, to certain political subjects’’ (p. 53).5 Our attention, then, needs to be redirected from debating the political and theoretical usefulness of hybridity, to analyzing how structures and discourses operate in a variety of contexts to shape different hybridities, and how, in turn, hybrid cultural forms—as we have seen, for example, with Tele Chobis in Chapter Five—reflect at once the presence of hegemony and its limitations. While some, perhaps the most powerful, politico-economic structures are global, it may be helpful to pay more attention to the role of the state as a regulator of communication processes that shape hybridity. Critical transculturalism, as mentioned earlier, considers social practice as the site of agency whose scope is both translocal and intercontextual. The state, even as its economic prerogatives have been frittered away under globalization, retains most of its political, legal, regulatory, and military power. In these domains, the national state mediates between not only the global and the local, but also the local and other locals. It is therefore helpful to reappraise the role of the state in international communication, and to explore the implications of this role for the issue of cultural hybridity. Policy Matters: Hybridity and the State It is widely agreed that globalization challenges the Westphalian nationstate from “above’’ and facilitates internal dynamics that challenge the state from “below,’’leading to the conclusion that the nation-state may be a threatened form of political organization. However, many advocates Hybridity without Guarantees 157 of globalization depict the state as a problem to be solved, an argument in different versions, from liberal economics to “cultural globalization,’’ in both public and scholarly settings. Criticism of the state is present both in academic discussions of cultural globalization (as discussed in Chapter Two) and in public discourse (as analyzed in Chapter Four), or both, for example, in free flow views hostile to the New World Information and Communication Order, analyzed in Chapter Two. Contra these depictions of the state as bureaucratic, protectionist, and authoritarian, which reflect the views of transnational capital, it may be productive to contemplate a positive role for the state. Recently, perhaps as a reaction to globalization’s hostility to the state, the nation-state has emerged as an explicit theoretical and empirical concern in international communication (Braman, 2002; Curran and Park, 2000; Morris and Waisbord, 2001). States have always been preoccupied with the mass media because electronic signals ignore territorial borders and breach sovereignty. The state’s role has traditionally been that of a protector of the nation, but, as discussed in Chapter Five in regard to British television exports, states have increasingly been acting as mediators between national spheres and global processes. In the international system, however, most states speak for their nation as a unified cultural entity, even when national diversity is acknowledged, based on the faulty holistic premise discussed earlier in this chapter. My advocacy for a renewed local knowledge leads me to focus beyond the state’s mediating role between the national and the global and consider the state’s role in administering the local, in all its diversity, within the national space. The local, that always already hybrid realm, is where relations between political, social, cultural, and economic forces take concrete forms in people’s lives. And in terms of media, the links analyzed in Chapter Six between audience perceptions and media policy in Lebanon indicate that hybrid cultural identities have important implications for media policy. I will therefore conclude with some normative reflections on hybridity as a locus of interaction between the national and the local. Situating hybridity in fields of power as I have striven to do brings to the surface the tension between cultural politics of recognition and social demands for distribution, a tension that reflects the materialist-idealist divide and that is inherent between the local and the national. In many academic and intellectual quarters, these two visions—recognition and redistribution of justice—have had a conflictual relationship, the former associated with the New Left and the latter with the Old Left, the first with “cultural studies’’ and the second with “political economy,” 158 Chapter 7 recognition with discourse or representation and redistribution with material resource allocation. To many, this competition has been asymmetrical, with the notion of recognition ascending at the expense of the redistributionist view, as captured by political theorist Nancy Fraser (1997): “Claims for the recognition of group difference have become increasingly salient in the recent period, at times eclipsing claims for social equality . . . . Empirically, of course, we have seen the rise of “identity politics,’’ the decentering of class, and, until very recently, the corresponding decline of social democracy. More deeply, however, we are witnessing an apparent shift in the political imaginary, especially the way in which justice is imagined . . . . The result is a decoupling of cultural politics from social politics and the relative eclipse of the latter by the former’’ (p. 2). With its simultaneous emphasis on the material and discursive aspects of hybridity, critical transculturalism aims to recouple cultural and social politics. Cultural research and criticism concerned with social justice examines how socioeconomic structures enable, hinder, or even cripple individual and social agency. For example, by “creating’’ a multiracial option, the 2000 U.S. Census undoubtedly encouraged people who believed they fit in one of the older categories to see themselves in terms of this hybrid identity. In other words, the institutionalization of a category by the state legitimizes it in the eyes of individuals and groups, thus enhancing its appeal for people whose mixed identity predisposes them to select the multiracial identity. From a critical transculturalism perspective, however, the fact that structure and ideas are reciprocally formative entails no necessary outcome. As we saw in Chapter Six, Maronite youth gravitated toward television content that is theoretically counter to the political sentiment prevalent in their community. Whether this “subversive’’ consumptive behavior coalesces in real action at the social or political level; whether, to put it differently, segments of Maronite youth enact real social agency; and whether, in an extrapolation beyond the scope of this book, other Lebanese communities do the same and initiate an indirect dialogue stimulated by media content, depends to a major extent on the state. States must devise competent media and cultural policies for hybridity to act as a progressive political reality that mitigates tension, averts conflict, and enhances representative democracy. These policies must coordinate public and private interests without systematically privileging the latter. In the United States, for example, with the exception of public broadcasting, the primacy of commercial interests in Hybridity without Guarantees 159 broadcasting is clear, and this logic permeates both how the system works and how it is engaged by social movements. Negative media representations of minorities, for instance, are not monitored or sanctioned by the state; rather, activist groups address stereotypical media depictions by organizing commercial boycotts. Because media corporations recognize the rising purchasing power of certain groups, they often accommodate their demands, whether these are ethnic groups, such as African Americans and Hispanics, or more recently the gay community. The situation is different in less commercial media environments. In Latin America, states tend to follow a preservationist approach to culture, and cultural policy thus concentrates on traditional folk art and crafts and elite plastic arts. In the past, media and popular culture were neglected by policy, and when included, they were treated according to the same “preservation of culture’’ logic, an approach now giving way to market considerations in the wake of economic liberalization (Garcı́a-Canclini, 1995/2001). In western Europe and Canada, on the other hand, commercial considerations have overshadowed public broadcasting ideals, but well-enshrined social democratic values and the laws these values have inspired have arguably worked against too rapid a change and mitigated the impact of liberalization. In the Arab world, the media are caught between the exacting demands of markets and the repressive tendency of states. Lebanon, its freewheeling economy and relatively free civil society notwithstanding, is no exception to this combination of laisser-faire media economics combined with authoritarian state control over content. This tension is mediated by a system of political patronage and partitioning of media and other resources perhaps best captured by the phrase “oligarchical capitalism,’’ in which media resources are distributed along sectarian lines and controlled by the elite of each confession. This system, as explained in Chapter Six, devolves power and control to the confessional level, so that leading politicians in each group have a monopoly over public expression. Instead of enhancing the prospects of constructive dialogue between communities, this rigid structure concentrates the ability to communicate in the hands of unaccountable political leaders. Therefore, oligarchical media capitalism hardens pluralism into enclavism where recognition and redistribution are perfectly (at least in theory) aligned under elite control, and it preempts hybrid identities from developing into progressive political energy. An alternative policy must be imagined, at least from a normative, if not yet practicable, point of view. In the United States, where public 160 Chapter 7 advocacy and electoral campaigns are largely determined by the financial means of the contestants, and where ethnic minorities are increasingly targeted as cultural-economic enclaves or electoral enclaves (when justified by population size as in the case of Latinos), public discourse could benefit from a more vigorous regulatory policy. The establishment of public financing of elections, for instance, could help ethnic minorities reclaim a sense of agency that is less dependent on financial power they do not have. It could also help bring about a true diversity of opinion by helping third parties reach critical mass. Throughout the Western world, the combination of social marginalization and diasporic media can push immigrants toward enclavism. In the case of Lebanon, whose situation is applicable to other pluralistic societies (including Iraq) in the non-West, instead of allocating media resources along sectarian lines, why not decentralize the system and allow truly independent stations to emerge? In Lebanon, these media outlets could express various ways of being a Maronite, a Shiite, or a Sunnite, exposing the internal diversity of all confessions. By highlighting intraconfessional diversity, this approach undercuts the system’s raison d’être, which has hardened into dogma, and makes possible the development of alternative social, political, and media structures. A national audiovisual space could be rehabilitated by revamping Télé-Liban, making it a public, not a state/privately owned, institution, committing public funds, and possibly levying a special fee on private broadcasters to raise necessary monies. In the words of Garcı́a-Canclini (referring to Latin America but applicable elsewhere), political and economic conditions must favor the expansion of multicultural media that express multiple points of view, in a framework that promotes the “collective public interest rather than commercial profitability’’ (1995/2001, p. 133). A media system where a strong national public service shares the airwaves with a variety of local, regional, and national stations not exclusively based on sectarian calculations has the best chance of enhancing political life and public discourse across confessional and other potentially explosive boundaries of affiliation. The legal and jurisdictional pluralism advocated by Seyla Benhabib (2002), as discussed in Chapter Three, provides a conceptual framework that I find applicable to media policy in complex, multicultural countries. The merit of her model is that it recognizes and encourages fluidity in cultural identity and mixture between groups, while guaranteeing equal rights to all. In Benhabib’s view, as long as the system she describes adheres to the three normative requisites of (1) egalitarian Hybridity without Guarantees 161 reciprocity, (2) voluntary self-ascription, and (3) freedom of exit or association (elaborated on in Chapter Three), it is compatible with universally acknowledged human rights and democratic standards. The fulfillment of these conditions leads to a “complex cultural dialogue’’ (Benhabib, 2002, p. 22) that repudiates the idea that cultures are discrete and separate entities, historically unchanging wholes into which birth alone secures membership. In contrast, the accomplishment of egalitarian reciprocity, voluntary self-ascription, and freedom of exit and association anchors the recognition of diversity between and within ethnic, religious, and linguistic communities and allows for transcultural mixtures that are bound to take shape with sustained cultural exchange. These positive developments, when they occur at the national level and thus allow for increased translocal exchanges, make the local and national realms less vulnerable to capture by the seductive discourse and reductive structures of globalization. This, in turn, enhances the prospects that hybridity, a condition that is constituted in part by communication, fulfills its social and political potential, mitigating social tensions, expressing the polyvalence of human creativity, and providing a context of empowerment in which individuals and communities are agents in their own destiny. Only then can the unsavory implications of hybridity as the cultural logic of globalization be mitigated. And only then can hybridity—albeit without guarantees—be a progressive, hopeful discourse. CHAPTER 33 The Politics of Recognition CHARLES TAYLOR I A number of strands in contemporary politics turn on the need, sometimes the demand, for recognition. The need, it can be argued, is one of the driving forces behind nationalist movements in politics. And the demand comes to the fore in a number of ways in today’s politics, on behalf of minority or “subaltern” groups, in some forms of feminism and in what is today called the politics of “multiculturalism.” The demand for recognition in these latter cases is given urgency by the supposed links between recognition and identity, where this la!er term designates something like a person’s understanding of who they are, of their fundamental defining characteristics as a human being. The thesis is that our identity is partly shaped by recognition or its absence, o"en by the misrecognition of others and so a person or group of people can suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people or society around them mirror back to them a confining or demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves. Nonrecognition or misrecognition can inflict harm, can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, and reduced mode of being. Thus, some feminists have argued that women in patriarchal societies have been induced to adopt a depreciatory image of themselves. They have internalized a picture of their own inferiority, so that even when some of the objective obstacles to their advancement fall away, they may be incapable of taking advantage of the new opportunities. And beyond this, they are condemned to suffer the pain of low self-esteem. An analogous point has been made in relation to blacks: that white society has for generations projected a demeaning image of them, which some of them have been unable to resist adopting. Their own self-depreciation, on this view, becomes one of the most potent instruments of their own oppression. Their first task ought to be to purge themselves of this imposed and destructive identity. Recently, a similar point has been made in relation to indigenous and colonized people in general. It is held that since 1492 Europeans have projected an image of such people as somehow inferior, “uncivilized,” and through the force of conquest have o"en 465 466 Contemporary Sociological Thought been able to impose this image on the conquered. The figure of Caliban has been held to epitomize this crushing portrait of contempt of New World aboriginals. Within these perspectives, misrecognition shows not just a lack of due respect. It can inflict a grievous wound, saddling its victims with a crippling self-hatred. Due recognition is not just a courtesy we owe people. It is a vital human need. * * * * * We can distinguish two changes that together have made the modern preoccupation with identity and recognition inevitable. The first is the collapse of social hierarchies, which used to be the basis for honor. I am using honor in the ancien régime sense in which it is intrinsically linked to inequalities. For some to have honor in this sense, it is essential that not everyone have it. This is the sense in which Montesquieu uses it in his description of monarchy. Honor is intrinsically a ma!er of “préférences.”1 It is also the sense in which we use the term when we speak of honoring someone by giving her some public award, for example, the Order of Canada. Clearly, this award would be without worth if tomorrow we decided to give it to every adult Canadian. As against this notion of honor, we have the modern notion of dignity, now used in a universalist and egalitarian sense, where we talk of the inherent “dignity of human beings,” or of citizen dignity. The underlying premise here is that everyone shares in it.2 It is obvious that this concept of dignity is the only one compatible with a democratic society, and that it was inevitable that the old concept of honor was superseded. But this has also meant that the forms of equal recognition have been essential to democratic culture. For instance, that everyone be called “Mr.,” “Mrs.,” or “Miss,” rather than some people being called “Lord” or “Lady” and others simply by their surnames—or, even more demeaning, by their first names—has been thought essential in some democratic societies, such as the United States. More recently, for similar reasons, “Mrs.” and “Miss” have been collapsed into “Ms.” Democracy has ushered in a politics of equal recognition, which has taken various forms over the years, and has now returned in the form of demands for the equal status of cultures and of genders. But the importance of recognition has been modified and intensified by the new understanding of individual identity that emerges at the end of the eighteenth century. We might speak of an individualized identity, one that is particular to me, and that I discover in myself. This notion arises along with an ideal, that of being true to myself and my own particular way of being. Following Lionel Trilling’s usage in his brilliant study, I will speak of this as the ideal of “authenticity.”3 It will help to describe in what it consists and how it came about. One way of describing its development is to see its starting point in the eighteenth-century notion that human beings are endowed with a moral sense, an intuitive feeling for what is right and wrong. The original point of this doctrine was The Politics of Recognition 467 to combat a rival view, that knowing right and wrong was a ma!er of calculating consequences, in particular, those concerned with divine reward and punishment. The idea was that understanding right and wrong was not a ma!er of dry calculation, but was anchored in our feelings.4 Morality has, in a sense, a voice within. The notion of authenticity develops out of a displacement of the moral accent in this idea. On the original view, the inner voice was important because it tells us what the right thing to do is. Being in touch with our moral feelings ma!ers here, as a means to the end of acting rightly. What I’m calling the displacement of the moral accent comes about when being in touch with our feelings takes on independent and crucial moral significance. It comes to be something we have to a!ain if we are to be true and full human beings. To see what is new here, we have to see the analogy to earlier moral views, where being in touch with some source—for example, God, or the Idea of the Good—was considered essential to full being. But now the source we have to connect with is deep within us. This fact is part of the massive subjective turn of modem culture, a new form of inwardness, in which we corne to think of ourselves as beings with inner depths. At first, this idea that the source is within doesn’t exclude our being related to God or the Ideas; it can be considered our proper way of relating to them. In a sense, it can be seen as just a continuation and intensification of the development inaugurated by Saint Augustine, who saw the road to God as passing through our own self-awareness. The first variants of this new view were theistic, or at least pantheistic. The most important philosophical writer who helped to bring about this change was Jean-Jacques Rousseau. I think Rousseau is important not because he inaugurated the change; rather, I would argue that his great popularity comes in part from his articulating something that was in a sense already occurring in the culture. Rousseau frequently presents the issue of morality as that of our following a voice of nature within us. This voice is o"en drowned out by the passions that are induced by our dependence on others, the main one being amour propre, or pride. Our moral salvation comes from recovering authentic moral contact with ourselves. Rousseau even gives a name to the intimate contact with oneself, more fundamental than any moral view, that is a source of such joy and contentment: “le sentiment de l’existence.”5 The ideal of authenticity becomes crucial owing to a development that occurs a"er Rousseau, which I associate with the name of Herder—once again, as its major early articulator, rather than its originator. Herder put forward the idea that each of us has an original way of being human: each person has his or her own “measure.”6 This idea has burrowed very deep into modern consciousness. It is a new idea. Before the late eighteenth century, no one thought that the differences between human beings had this kind of moral significance. There is a certain way of being human that is my way. I am called upon to live my life in this way, and not in imitation of 468 Contemporary Sociological Thought anyone else’s life. But this notion gives a new importance to being true to myself. If I am not, I miss the point of my life; I miss what being human is for me. This is the powerful moral ideal that has come down to us. It accords moral importance to a kind of contact with myself, with my own inner nature, which it sees as in danger of being lost, partly through the pressures toward outward conformity, but also because in taking an instrumental stance toward myself, I may have lost the capacity to listen to this inner voice. It greatly increases the importance of this self-contact by introducing the principle of originality: each of our voices has something unique to say. Not only should I not mold my life to the demands of external conformity; I can’t even find the model by which to live outside myself. I can only find it within.7 * * * * * This new ideal of authenticity was, like the idea of dignity, also in part an offshoot of the decline of hierarchical society. In those earlier societies, what we would now call identity was largely fixed by one’s social position. That is, the background that explained what people recognized as important to themselves was to a great extent determined by their place in society, and whatever roles or activities a!ached to this position. The birth of a democratic society doesn’t by itself do away with this phenomenon, because people can still define themselves by their social roles. What does decisively undermine this socially derived identification, however, is the ideal of authenticity itself. As this emerges, for instance, with Herder, it calls on me to discover my own original way of being. By definition, this way of being cannot be socially derived, but must be inwardly generated. But in the nature of the case, there is no such thing as inward generation, monologically understood. In order to understand the close connection between identity and recognition, we have to take into account a crucial feature of the human condition that has been rendered almost invisible by the overwhelmingly monological bent of mainstream modern philosophy. This crucial feature of human life is its fundamentally dialogical character. We become full human agents, capable of understanding ourselves, and hence of defining our identity, through our acquisition of rich human languages of expression. For my purposes here, I want to take language in a broad sense, covering not only the words we speak, but also other modes of expression whereby we define ourselves, including the “languages” of art, of gesture, of love, and the like. But we learn these modes of expression through exchanges with others. People do not acquire the languages needed for self-definition on their own. Rather, we are introduced to them through interaction with others who ma!er to us—what George Herbert Mead called “significant others.”8 The genesis of the human mind is in this sense not monological, not something each person accomplishes on his or her own, but dialogical. The Politics of Recognition 469 Moreover, this is not just a fact about genesis, which can be ignored later on. We don’t just learn the languages in dialogue and then go on to use them for our own purposes. We are, of course, expected to develop our own opinions, outlook, stances toward things, and to a considerable degree through solitary reflection. But this is not how things work with important issues, like the definition of our identity. We define our identity always in dialogue with, sometimes in struggle against, the things our significant others want to see in us. Even a"er we outgrow some of these others—our parents, for instance—and they disappear from our lives, the conversation with them continues within us as long as we live.9 Thus, the contribution of significant others, even when it is provided at the beginning of our lives, continues indefinitely. Some people may still want to hold on to some form of the monological ideal. It is true that we can never liberate ourselves completely from those whose love and care shaped us early in life, but we should strive to define ourselves on our own to the fullest extent possible, coming as best we can to understand and thus get some control over the influence of our parents, and avoiding falling into any more such dependent relationships. We need relationships to fulfill, but not to define, ourselves. The monological ideal seriously underestimates the place of the dialogical in human life. It wants to confine it as much as possible to the genesis. It forgets how our understanding of the good things in life can be transformed by our enjoying them in common with people we love; how some goods become accessible to us only through such common enjoyment. Because of this, it would take a great deal of effort, and probably many wrenching break-ups, to prevent our identity’s being formed by the people we love. Consider what we mean by identity. It is who we are, “where we’re coming from.” As such it is the background against which our tastes and desires and opinions and aspirations make sense. If some of the things I value most are accessible to me only in relation to the person I love, then she becomes part of my identity. To some people this might seem a limitation, from which one might aspire to free oneself. This is one way of understanding the impulse behind the life of the hermit or, to take a case more familiar to our culture, the solitary artist. But from another perspective, we might see even these lives as aspiring to a certain kind of dialogicality. In the case of the hermit, the interlocutor is God. In the case of the solitary artist, the work itself is addressed to a future audience, perhaps still to be created by the work. The very form of a work of art shows its character as addressed.10 But however one feels about it, the making and sustaining of our identity, in the absence of a heroic effort to break out of ordinary existence, remains dialogical throughout our lives. Thus, my discovering my own identity doesn’t mean that I work it out in isolation, but that I negotiate it through dialogue, partly overt, partly internal, with others. That is why the development of an ideal of inwardly generated identity gives a new importance to recognition. My own identity crucially depends on my dialogical relations with others. 470 Contemporary Sociological Thought Of course, the point is not that this dependence on others arose with the age of authenticity. A form of dependence was always there. The socially derived identity was by its very nature dependent on society. But in the earlier age recognition never arose as a problem. General recognition was built into the socially derived identity by virtue of the very fact that it was based on social categories that everyone took for granted. Yet inwardly derived, personal, original identity doesn’t enjoy this recognition a priori. It has to win it through exchange, and the a!empt can fail. What has come about with the modern age is not the need for recognition but the conditions in which the a!empt to be recognized can fail. That is why the need is now acknowledged for the first time. In premodern times, people didn’t speak of “identity” and “recognition”—not because people didn’t have (what we call) identities, or because these didn’t depend on recognition, but rather because these were then too unproblematic to be thematized as such. * * * * * The importance of recognition is now universally acknowledged in one form or another; on an intimate plane, we are all aware of how identity can be formed or malformed through the course of our contact with significant others. On the social plane, we have a continuing politics of equal recognition. Both planes have been shaped by the growing ideal of authenticity, and recognition plays an essential role in the culture that has arisen around this ideal. On the intimate level, we can see how much an original identity needs and is vulnerable to the recognition given or withheld by significant others. It is not surprising that in the culture of authenticity, relationships are seen as the key loci of self-discovery and self-affirmation. Love relationships are not just important because of the general emphasis in modern culture on the fulfillments of ordinary needs. They are also crucial because they are the crucibles of inwardly generated identity. On the social plane, the understanding that identities are formed in open dialogue, unshaped by a predefined social script, has made the politics of equal recognition more central and stressful. It has, in fact, considerably raised the stakes. Equal recognition is not just the appropriate mode for a healthy democratic society. Its refusal can inflict damage on those who are denied it, according to a widespread modern view, as I indicated at the outset. The projection of an inferior or demeaning image on another can actually distort and oppress, to the extent that the image is internalized. Not only contemporary feminism but also race relations and discussions of multiculturalism are undergirded by the premise that the withholding of recognition can be a form of oppression. We may debate whether this factor has been exaggerated, but it is clear that the understanding of identity and authenticity has introduced a new dimension into the politics of equal recognition, which now operates with something like its own notion of authenticity, at least so far as the denunciation of other-induced distortions is concerned. The Politics of Recognition 471 II And so the discourse of recognition has become familiar to us on two levels: First, in the intimate sphere, where we understand the formation of identity and the self as taking place in a continuing dialogue and struggle with significant others. And then in the public sphere, where a politics of equal recognition has come to play a bigger and bigger role. Certain feminist theories have tried to show the links between the two spheres.11 I want to concentrate here on the public sphere, and try to work out what a politics of equal recognition has meant and could mean. In fact, it has come to mean two rather different things, connected, respectively, with the two major changes I have been describing. With the move from honor to dignity has come a politics of universalism, emphasizing the equal dignity of all citizens, and the content of this politics has been the equalization of rights and entitlements. What is to be avoided at all costs is the existence of “first-class” and “second-class” citizens. Naturally, the actual detailed measures justified by this principle have varied greatly, and have o"en been controversial. For some, equalization has affected only civil rights and voting rights; for others, it has extended into the socioeconomic sphere. People who are systematically handicapped by poverty from making the most of their citizenship rights are deemed on this view to have been relegated to second-class status, necessitating remedial action through equalization. But through all the differences of interpretation, the principle of equal citizenship has come to be universally accepted. Every position, no ma!er how reactionary, is now defended under the colors of this principle. Its greatest, most recent victory was won by the civil rights movement of the 1960s in the United States. It is worth noting that even the adversaries of extending voting rights to blacks in the southern states found some pretext consistent with universalism, such as “tests” to be administered to would-be voters at the time of registration. By contrast, the second change, the development of the modern notion of identity, has given rise to a politics of difference. There is, of course, a universalist basis to this as well, making for the overlap and confusion between the two. Everyone should be recognized for his or her unique identity. But recognition here means something else. With the politics of equal dignity, what is established is meant to be universally the same, an identical basket of rights and immunities; with the politics of difference, what we are asked to recognize is the unique identity of this individual or group, their distinctness from everyone else. The idea is that it is precisely this distinctness that has been ignored, glossed over, assimilated to a dominant or majority identity. And this assimilation is the cardinal sin against the ideal of authenticity.12 Now underlying the demand is a principle of universal equality. The politics of difference is full of denunciations of discrimination and refusals of second-class citizenship. This gives the principle of universal equality a point of entry within the 472 Contemporary Sociological Thought politics of dignity. But once inside, as it were, its demands are hard to assimilate to that politics. For it asks that we give acknowledgment and status to something that is not universally shared. Or, otherwise put, we give due acknowledgment only to what is universally present—everyone has an identity—through recognizing what is peculiar to each. The universal demand powers an acknowledgment of specificity. The politics of difference grows organically out of the politics of universal dignity through one of those shi"s with which we are long familiar, where a new understanding of the human social condition imparts a radically new meaning to an old principle. Just as a view of human beings as conditioned by their socioeconomic plight changed the understanding of second-class citizenship, so that this category came to include, for example, people in inherited poverty traps, so here the understanding of identity as formed in interchange, and as possibly so malformed, introduces a new form of second-class status into our purview. As in the present case, the socioeconomic redefinition justified social programs that were highly controversial. For those who had not gone along with this changed definition of equal status, the various redistributive programs and special opportunities offered to certain populations seemed a form of undue favoritism. Similar conflicts arise today around the politics of difference. Where the politics of universal dignity fought for forms of nondiscrimination that were quite “blind” to the ways in which citizens differ, the politics of difference o"en redefines nondiscrimination as requiring that we make these distinctions the basis of differential treatment. So members of aboriginal bands will get certain rights and powers not enjoyed by other Canadians, if the demands for native self-government are finally agreed on, and certain minorities will get the right to exclude others in order to preserve their cultural integrity, and so on. To proponents of the original politics of dignity, this can seem like a reversal, a betrayal, a simple negation of their cherished principle. A!empts are therefore made to mediate, to show how some of these measures meant to accommodate minorities can a"er all be justified on the original basis of dignity. These arguments can be successful up to a point. For instance, some of the (apparently) most flagrant departures from “difference-blindness” are reverse discrimination measures, affording people from previously unfavored groups a competitive advantage for jobs or places in universities. This practice has been justified on the grounds that historical discrimination has created a pa!ern within which the unfavored struggle at a disadvantage. Reverse discrimination is defended as a temporary measure that will eventually level the playing field and allow the old “blind” rules to come back into force in a way that doesn’t disadvantage anyone. This argument seems cogent enough—wherever its factual basis is sound. But it won’t justify some of the measures now urged on the grounds of difference, the goal of which is not to bring us back to an eventual “difference-blind” social space but, on the contrary, to maintain and cherish distinctness, not just now but forever. A"er all, if we’re The Politics of Recognition 473 concerned with identity, then what is more legitimate than one’s aspiration that it never be lost?13 So even though one politics springs from the other, by one of those shi"s in the definition of key terms with which we’re familiar, the two diverge quite seriously from each other. One basis for the divergence comes out even more clearly when we go beyond what each requires that we acknowledge—certain universal rights in one case, a particular identity on the other—and look at the underlying intuitions of value. The politics of equal dignity is based on the idea that all humans are equally worthy of respect. It is underpinned by a notion of what in human beings commands respect, however we may try to shy away from this “metaphysical” background. For Kant, whose use of the term dignity was one of the earliest influential evocations of this idea, what commanded respect in us was our status as rational agents, capable of directing our lives through principles.14 Something like this has been the basis for our intuitions of equal dignity ever since, though the detailed definition of it may have changed. Thus, what is picked out as of worth here is a universal human potential, a capacity that all humans share. This potential, rather than anything a person may have made of it, is what ensures that each person deserves respect. Indeed, our sense of the importance of potentiality reaches so far that we extend this protection even to people who through some circumstance that has befallen them are incapable of realizing their potential in the normal way—handicapped people, or those in a coma, for instance. In the...
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