Transcendental
Capitalism
and
the national distribution of hope
and
the national distribution of hope
(Chapters One and Two
of
Against Paranoid Nationalism Pluto Press 2003)
Against Paranoid Nationalism Pluto Press 2003)
Ghassan Hage
Chapter One
Transcendental capitalism and the roots of paranoid
nationalism
Introduction
The majority of the polls published in the media are clear:
Westerners, on the whole, are suffering from compassion fatigue in the face of
the increasing number of asylum seekers heading towards their shores. In
Australia, at the very least, 50 per cent of all people support conservative
Prime Minister John Howard’s ‘tough’ stand on the asylum seekers issue. Some
say it is up to 70 per cent. While the Prime Minister’s capacity to ‘be in
touch with the views of ordinary people’ is celebrated by some, it is
interesting to note that the ‘non-ordinary people’, the minority opposing this
stand, see themselves as a moral opposition. They oppose in the name of things
like ‘compassion’ and ‘hospitality’ rather than in the name of a left/right
political divide. This has become a pattern in the last ten years or so.
Whether dealing with issues of poverty, or indigenous rights, or the conditions
in the asylum seekers’ detention centres, a small-“l” liberal, largely but not
solely middle-class population, supported by churches and human rights
organisations, increasingly perceives itself as the outraged defender, the last
bastion of a decent and ethical society. Now that the ‘moral majority’ is in
power it has been shown to be clearly less moral than it initially claimed;
instead, we have a ‘moral minority’ in opposition. It argues that with the
increased worldwide implementation of a dogmatic neo-liberal social and
economic policy, by left and right governments alike, ethics and morality have
been thrown out the window. Interestingly, conservative intellectuals, who in
Australia are more often than not newspaper commentators who have mas-tered a
slightly comical neo-tough journalistic style of the ‘hey softie, let me tell
you about what reality is really all about’ variety, seem to agree, despite
themselves, with the liberals. They argue that there is no place for ethics and
morality in a world where people, such as the incredibly rapacious asylum
seekers, can viciously ‘exploit our compassion and generosity’. Consequently,
the disagreement is not about the lack of ethics and morality in social life.
Everyone agrees on that. The question is how should one react in the face of
such an ethical vacuum. The small-“l” liberals see themselves as courageously
fighting to maintain a glimmer of ethical life within society. The incredibly
pragmatic neo-tough conservatives condemn the soft liberals for being naïve.
Considering themselves very ‘ordinary’ despite their high-profile middle-class
jobs (and in a way they are often right on this point), these conservative
populists like to portray themselves, like John Howard, the Prime Minister they
support, as incredibly in touch with ‘ordinary’ people (it is rumoured that
they actually imagine themselves to have encountered such people in the streets
from time to time). As such, they are particularly down on the small-“l”
liberals, whom they see as being from privileged class backgrounds and unable
to see the relationship between their pompous airs of tolerance, compassion and
hospitality and their comfortable lifestyles.
But it is not clear why the assertion that a certain ethical
point of view is the product of middle-class comfort makes such a view less
ethical. It is more ethical to be hospitable to needy people than not to be. It
is more ethical not to be racist (that is, to consider a group of people as
less ‘human’ in one way or another than you are) than to be one. It is also
more ethical to be a racist and acknowledge it than to be one and deny it. The
list is a long one … It is more ethical to acknowledge that the West is reaping
the benefits of the colonisation and decimation of innumerable indigenous
societies than not to do so. And it is more ethical not to marginalise and
vilify a whole ethnicised or racialised ‘community’ under the excuse of
fighting crime than to do so.1 No amount of ordinary neo-tough huffing and
puffing against imaginary threats of political correctness can change this.
Nevertheless, it is also true that small-“l” liberals often
translate the social conditions that allow them to hold certain superior
ethical views into a kind of innate moral superiority. They see ethics as a
matter of will. And they see the voters falling for the paranoid
‘zero-tolerance against crime and asylum seekers’ packages of the competing
political parties as not wanting – rather than not being able – to offer
marginalised others the kind of hope they ought to be offered as fellow human
beings. For there is no doubt that this is, at least partly, what we are
talking about when it comes to discussing hospitality towards asylum seekers,
or compensation for the colonised indigenous people of the world, or compassion
towards the chronically unemployed: the availability, the circulation and the
exchange of hope.
Compassion, hospitality and the recognition of oppression
are all about giving hope to marginalised people. But to be able to give hope
one has to have it. This is why the conservatives, populist as they are, are
right in this respect. Those who are unable to give hope to others, who see in
every Indigenous person or refugee someone aiming to snatch whatever bit of
hope for a decent life they have, are not immoral people as such. They are just
people who have very little hope to spare or to share. And so the conservative
supporters of neo-liberalism might feel triumphant for being in touch with the
great popular majorities who are unwilling to be hospitable to the asylum
seekers. But only idiotic neo-tough ones find reasons to celebrate this. For
such a situation, more than anything else, begs a rather sad question: why is
it that the great majority of the population of the Western world are left with
so little hope for themselves today, let alone for sharing with others?
National capitalism and the distribution of hope within society
To think about and with hope as a social category is both an
ex-ceptionally exhilarating and an exceptionally frustrating exercise. It is
exhilarating because, as I hope to show (even if briefly) here, thinking about
human subjects as ‘hoping subjects’, and thinking about societies as mechanisms
for the generation and distribution of hopefulness and social opportunities,
allows us a fresh and enriching angle from which to examine and understand our
social nature and the nature of society. Furthermore, once one has hope within
one’s field of vision, one discovers the astounding degree to which the
constellations of feelings, discourses and practices articulated to hope
permeate social life. But perhaps because of this, to think about hope is also
exceptionally frustrating, in that it sometimes seems as if one is examining
something as vague as ‘life’, given the multitude of meanings and
significations associated with it. Not only is the language of hope associated
with aspirations as different as ‘hoping for an ice-cream’ and ‘hoping for
world peace’; there is also a considerable difference between hoping as an
affective practice, something that one does, and hope as an affect, something
that one has. There is also a considerable difference between hope as a
momentary feeling and hopefulness as an enduring state of being. As Farran et
al. point out: ‘Hope has often been described as an elusive, mysterious, and
“soft” concept. Part of this elusiveness is due to the fact that the term is
used as a verb, a noun and an adjective …’ Furthermore, they argue, after
Averill et al.: 2 ‘The concept of hope is also elusive because it can be
expressed as a way of feeling (affectively), as a way of thinking
(cognitively), and a way of behaving or relating (behaviourly).’3
What makes hope even more difficult is that it is associated
with many other concepts that have approximately similar significations, and
these both clarify and blur what it actually means. For instance, optimism,
fear, desire, wishing, wanting, dreaming, waiting and confidence are among many
other terms all associated with hope and hoping. Nevertheless, despite the
plurality of meanings, attitudes and practices that constitute the discourse of
hope, there is still something important that unifies them: all those terms
express in one way or another modes in which human beings relate to their
future.
In his Principles of Hope, Ernest Bloch goes further, saying
that hope means that people are essentially determined ‘by the future’.4 Here
‘the future’ is not so much a ‘science fiction’ construction as the future that
one can already detect in the unfolding of the present. It invites a more
complex conception of the present. It is, as Erich Fromm has put it, a ‘vision
of the present in a state of pregnancy’.5 The nature of our hope depends on our
relation to this state of pregnancy. While the social sciences, and
particularly the analysis of nationalism, pay particular attention to people’s
relation to the past, it is interesting to note that not many perceive the
importance of our relation to the future. As Kenneth Nunn, from a general
psychological perspective, has rightly pointed out: ‘The construction of the
perceived future has not been elevated to a faculty of brain function in the
same way as the construction of the perceived past, namely, memory. Despite
this, anticipation, planning, foresight and the executive functions are pivotal
to human adaptation.’6
Another difficult aspect of hope is that there can be
different views as to its moral worth. There is, of course, the classical dark
version of hope – the Pandora tale. Pandora, whom the God Zeus sent to bring
misery to all humans for having accessed the heavenly fire, arrived with a box
containing all the ills of the world. When the box was opened, all those ills
spread into the world, except hope, which remained in ‘our possession’ (in the
box). Hope here is the worst of all human ills: if it wasn’t for hope, our
subjection to a miserable life full of those ills that escaped into the world
would lead us to suicide. It is only because we continue to have hope that we
continue to suffer and endure the ills. As Friedrich Nietzsche put it, ‘hope is
the worst of all evils, for it protracts the torment of man’.7 Here hope is
perceived as the force that keeps us going in life. In that sense, it is not
defined any differently from more positive conceptions of hope; it is the
depressed version of life as full of ills that makes hoping in it such a
miserable affair. More analytically pertinent is the sociological difference
between ‘realistic’ and ‘unrealistic’ hopes, which captures the extent to which
hope is grounded in ‘the pregnancy of the present’ as opposed to being totally
detached from reality. As the psycho-analyst Anna Pontamianou argues:
As the vehicle of a state of trusting expectation, or even
conviction, that what is expected can or must come to pass, the feeling of hope
is a psychic strategy. On the one hand, this strategy remains attached to
reality testing, because it acknowledges when our hopes are but lures and
illusions, whereas, on the other, it tends to short-circuit the reality
principle, which, of course, hands down the verdict that our internal wishes do
not necessarily correspond to what can be found in the external world. At any
rate, by introducing fulfilment of the wish as probably and sometimes even as
practically assured, our hopes keep alive in the mind the image of a good
object to come, able and willing to respond to our demands. 8
This possible disjuncture between wishes and reality has led
to a range of moral evaluations of hope throughout history. For most of the
philosophers who see hope negatively, hope is considered a variant of a
commonsense conception of ‘religious hope’, the hope to end up in heaven. This
has often been seen as a hope that detaches people from their social reality
and makes them less committed to act to change their circumstances. It raises
the issue of the relationship between hope and passivity/activity. The negative
views of hope, here, are often along the line of Karl Marx’s characterisation
of religion (and presumably religious hope) as ‘the opium of the people’. This
kind of hope breeds passivity. Fromm also criticises passivity-inducing hope
and exemplifies it as the man in Franz Kafka’s The Trial, who is waiting for
permission to enter heaven’s door but never takes the initiative to enter.9
Here hope is seen not only as working against reality but also against the
knowledge of reality which can lead to its (hope’s) demise. It breeds
anti-intellectualism. This antagonism between hope and knowledge is represented
best in Jean Anouilh’s Antigone, where the heroine screams: ‘We are of the
tribe that asks questions, and we ask them to the bitter end – until no tiniest
chance of hope remains to be strangled by our hands. We are of the tribe that
hates your filthy hope, your docile, female hope.’10
Pontamianou has usefully characterised the difference
between the hope that induces an active engagement with reality and the hope
that breads passivity and disengagement by using the Nietzsche-inspired
differentiation between ‘hope for life’ and ‘hope against life’.11 As we
examine the social distribution of hope, it is always useful to remember that
society not only distributes hope unequally; it also distributes different
kinds of hope. The importance of this difference will be examined in Chapter 3.
In the analysis of the unequal distribution of social hope below, I will be
referring mainly to a hope that is ‘for life’, a hope that allows people to
invest themselves in social reality.
National capitalism and the distribution of hope within
society In a lecture presented in London, Slavoj Zizek, the Slovenian
philosopher and psychoanalyst,12 reflected on the inability of the British left
to dent Margaret Thatcher’s electoral appeal among the working classes with
their usual strategy – emphasising the massive inequalities her policies were
generating. For Zizek, the opposition, in its preoccupation with inequalities
in the distribution of wealth and the distribution of goods and services, left
out of its sight the very area where Thatcher’s strength resided: her capacity
to distribute ‘fantasy’. ‘Fantasy’, in Zizek’s ‘Lacanese’, is the set of
subliminal beliefs that individuals hold that makes them feel that their life has
a purpose, that they have a meaningful future. Fantasy, here, covers important
elements of what has been referred to above as hope.
What Zizek’s point implies is that social hope, as a
perception within society of a better future already potentially existing in
the pregnancy of the present, is capable of overriding the determining powers
of the inequalities experienced within this present. This capacity for hope
clearly works well with capitalism. Not least because the yet-to-come of life
offers exactly the kind of space in empirical reality that is most open for
ideological intervention. Thatcher, for example, distributed hope: first
through a racist ideological strategy that emphasised the causal power of the
British character, and second through highlighting the viability of the small
shopkeepers’ dreams of rising above their situation and experi-encing upward
social mobility. Her message was simple and clear: if you ‘possessed’ the
‘British character’, you possessed the capacity to experience upward social
mobility even if, in the present, you were at the bottom of the heap. The
British character did not give you immediate equality and the good life, but it
enabled you to hope for a future good life. You could look at your Pakistani
neighbours, living in the same conditions you were living in, and say: ‘Sure
we’re in the same hole, but I’ve got the British character, so I can at least
hope to get out of this hole, while these black bastards are hopelessly stuck
where they are.’
Here lies the magic of national identification and the
capacity to utter the national ‘we’. ‘I’ as an individual can live most of my
life watching sports on TV, but as an Australian I can still claim with
confidence that ‘we’ are a sporting nation. ‘I’ as an individual can be hopeless
at playing cricket (as indeed I am), but that doesn’t stop me from telling an
English colleague (on a good day!) that ‘we thrashed you last night’ (as indeed
I do). ‘I’ can be uneducated and yet can confidently claim that ‘we are highly
educated compared to the people of Afghanistan’. The national ‘we’ magi-cally
enables the ‘I’ of the national to do things it can never hope to be able to do
as an individual ‘I’. As importantly, the ‘we’ is also transformed into an
aspiration. The child uttering ‘we are good at football’ sets himself or
herself on the road of ‘trying to be good at football’. The imagined ‘we’, in a
kind of noblesse oblige, actually becomes causal in influencing the capacity of
the person who is trying to be what ‘we’ all are. Through this magical quality
all collective national identities work as a mechanism for the distribution of
hope.
But capitalist society does not produce and distribute hope
only through the mechanism of national identification. It also does so through
its ability to maintain an experience of the possibility of upward social
mobility. First we have to note how capitalism hegemonises the ideological
content of hope so it becomes almost universally equated with dreams of
better-paid jobs, better life-styles, more commodities, etc.13 But second, and
as importantly, despite the fact that capitalism on the whole works towards the
inter-generational reproduction of class locations, there are always enough
stories circulating of people who have ‘moved on’ (thanks to hard work, or to
education, or even to a lottery ticket!) to allow for the belief in the
possibility of upward social mobility. The power of these hopes is such that
most people will live their lives believing in the possibility of upward social
mobility without actually experiencing it.
This capacity to distribute hope in the midst of massive
social inequality has been the secret of the nation-state’s enduring ability to
sustain capitalist accumulation. Jules Michelet, the 18th century observer and
historian of the rise of nationalism, relates to us nicely, in his famous
description of the ‘birth of a Frenchman’, how the nation worked as an
apparatus for the distribution of hope. No sooner was the person born as a
‘Frenchman’, he informs us, than he was immediately ‘recognised’ and ‘accounted
for’ as a person. Through his inclusion as part of a national society, the
nation-state provided him with a recognition of his moral worth, and he could
immediately ‘claim his dignity as a man’. At the same time, Michelet stresses,
the national subject is made to feel in ‘control over the national territory’;
no sooner is he born than he is ‘put … in possession of his native land’. But
most importantly, the sense of being included, being accounted for and being in
control all add up to what is in a sense the finality of the process: the
national’s capacity to receive what Michelet called ‘his share of hope’.
We should remember that in the history of the West, access
to a share of ‘dignity and hope’ was not always open to the lower classes. The
rising bourgeoisie of Europe inherited from the court aristocracies of earlier
times a perception of peasants and poor city people as a lower breed of
humanity. The lower classes were ‘racial-ised’ as innately inferior beings
considered biologically ill-equipped to access human forms of ‘civilisation’ –
which included, particularly, ‘human dignity and hope’. ‘Human’ society within
each emerging nation at that time did not coincide with the boundaries of the
nation-states. Its borders were the borders of ‘civilised’ bourgeois culture.
Bob Miles, relying on Norbert Elias’ classic work, The Civilising Process,14
has examined the way racist modes of thinking originated in the West in
categorising the working classes.15
This has also been examined by Tzvetan Todorov, in his analysis of the
French racist thinker Frederic Le Bon. Le Bon, in his Les lois psychologiques
de l’évolution des peuples (1894), exemplifies the way European thought
racialised the working classes and excluded them from the sphere of
civilisation. He argues that ‘The lower strata of European society are similar
to primitive peoples’, and that ‘it is enough … to let time intervene, to see
the upper strata of society separate themselves intellectually from the lower
strata by a distance as big as that which separates the White from the Black,
or the Black from the monkey’.16
What Michelet’s work describes to us is the important
historical shift that began in the late 18th century and continued throughout
the 19th century: the increasing inclusion of nationally delineated peasants
and lower classes into the circle of what each nation defined as its own
version of civilised human society. But this de-racialisation and civilisation
of the interior went hand in hand with the intensification of the colonial
racialisation of the exterior.17 Now skin colour, in the form of European
Whiteness, was emphasised, more than ever before, as the most important basis
for one’s access to ‘dignity and hope’. Michelet captures the birth of the
ideal imaginary of the European nation-state proper: a state committed to
distribute hope, to ‘foster life’ as Foucault has put it,18 within a society
whose borders coincide with the borders of the nation itself.
Through his emphasis on the relationship between dignity and
hope, Michelet also illustrates another important way in which national society
works as a mechanism for the distribution of hope. This is a mechanism that is
not specific to capitalism but is an intrinsic quality of any society: the
production and distribution of a meaningful and dignified social life. If hope
is the way we construct a meaningful future for ourselves, as was established
above (with the help of Ernst Bloch and Erich Fromm), such futures are only
possible within society, because society is the distributor of social
opportunities for self-realisation. We can call this hope societal hope. That
society is a distributor of these forms of societal hope, these social routes
by which individuals can define a mean-ing for their lives, is a point
implicitly but powerfully present throughout Pierre Bourdieu’s work.
Responding to a critique of the anthropological basis of his
work which assimilates it to a utilitarian vision of human beings as always
aiming to accumulate capital,19 Bourdieu has argued: ‘It is not true to say
that everything that people do or say is aimed at maximizing their social
profit; but one may say that they do it to perpetuate or to augment their
social being.’20 Bourdieu is offering a conception of being that is inspired by
Spinoza’s ideas of conatus and joy21 (as augmentation of being); this gives us
a key to his general anthropology and sociology. In positing the idea that
humans aim to accumulate being, Bourdieu is first of all undermining the
holistic, and commonsense, phenomenological idea of ‘being’ as an either/or
thing (epitomised by Shakespeare’s ‘to be or not to be’). Indeed, for Bourdieu,
being is not an either/or question, but a more or less one: some people have
more being (a life that is more meaningful, satisfactory, fulfilling, etc) than
others. To paraphrase him, we could say that there is no communism of being in
society. Being is not equally distributed among the population. While some
people inherit ‘a lot of being’, others have to scrape the bottom of the barrel
to get even a bit of being.
At the heart of Bourdieu’s anthropology is the idea that
people are not passive recipients of being; they struggle to accumulate it. At
the heart of his sociology is that being, a meaningful life, is not, unlike
what is posited by religious thought, something given prior to social life.
Life has no intrinsic meaning. Rather, it is society that offers individuals
the possibility of making something meaningful of their lives: ‘doomed to
death, that end which can-not be taken as an end, man is a being without a
reason for being. It is society, and society alone, which dispenses, to
different degrees, the justifications and reasons for existing.’22 This is made
particularly explicit in his philosophical work Pascalian Meditations. ‘The
social world,’ he argues, ‘gives what is rarest, recognition, consideration, in
other words, quite simply, reasons for being.’23
For Bourdieu, therefore, society is primarily a mechanism
for the generation of meanings for life. It does so by offering people the
opportunities to ‘make a life for themselves’, to invest and occupy and thus
create and give social significance to their selves. This is what Bourdieu
calls illusio:24 the deep belief in
the importance of our life pursuits, our future, and thus the deep belief in
the importance of our social selves. The key to a ‘decent’ society is above all
this capacity to distribute these opportunities for self-realisation, which are
none other than what we have been calling societal hope.
It is, of course, quite clear that under capitalism,
government has always given primacy to the interests of capitalist investors.
But thanks to the nation-state’s being a mechanism for the distribution of
hope, the interests of investors were made compatible with a commitment to the
construction of a viable society within national boundaries. Hospitality
towards migrants and refugees in this national system was also part of this
dual economic/ social logic. They represented an extra source of (often cheap)
labour, but their reception was also represented as a commitment to an ethic of
the good society in general.25 The fact that they were received at all
reflected something positive about the quality of life within the host society
and legitimised it in the eyes of its nationals as capable of producing a
surplus of hope. This was so even when this surplus was itself the product of
the colonial plundering of resources and destruction of existing social
structures – which undermined the hopes of millions of people in what became
known the Third World. The vacuum of hope left behind is still felt today
within the societies of the colonised, in terms of the hopelessness found in
some colonised indigenous societies and in terms of the migration generated by
dysfunctional colonially produced nation-states that are unable to provide a
sufficient ‘share of hope’ to more than a small minority of their citizens.
Until recently, the capacity of the great majority of
migrants to settle in Western societies was dependent on the availability of a
Western ‘surplus of hope’. This surplus is the precondition of all forms of
hospitality. But it is clear today that while the West is producing a surplus
of many things, hope is not among them. As Bourdieu points out, while society
is certainly defined through its capacity as a distributor of ‘meanings of
life’, any society’s actual capacity cannot be taken for granted at any time,
and hope and meaningfulness are not always offered. Capitalist societies are
characterised by a deep inequality in their distribution of hope, and when such
inequality reaches an extreme, certain groups are not offered any hope at all.
‘One of the most unequal of all distributions, and probably, in any case, the
most cruel, is the distribution of symbolic capital, that is, of social
importance and of reasons for living,’ he tells us. For him ‘there is no worse
dispossession, no worse privation, perhaps, than that of the losers in the
symbolic struggle for recognition, for access to a socially recognized social
being, in a word, to humanity’.26 Elsewhere, he speaks of ‘social ageing’ as a
social situation where the possibilities that life has opened before us become
fewer and fewer.27 By the same token, a situation where the possibilities of
life are nil is akin to social death. For, as he puts it, ‘The competition for
a social life that will be known and recognized, which will free you from
in-significance, is a struggle to the death for symbolic life and death.’28
This opposition to social death is perhaps what marks
Bourdieu’s ‘radical phase’ in the 1990s. As he saw it, capitalist societies
have always been marked by an unequal distribution of hope. Yet they have
offered the ground for struggles towards more equitable distributions. What
characterised neo-liberal economic policy in his eyes was not that it was
shaped by a society marred by inequality, but that the very idea of society, of
commitment to some form of distribution of hope, was disappearing. This has
been perhaps the most fundamental change that global capitalism has introduced
to Western and non-Western societies alike. In the era of global capitalism,
the growth of the economy, the expansion of firms and rising profit margins no
longer go hand in hand with the state’s commitment to the distribution of hope
within society. In fact, what we are witnessing is not just a decrease in the
state’s commitment to an ethical society but a decrease in its commitment to a
national society tout court. Many social analysts today debate the decline of
national sovereignty and national identity as a result of ‘globalisation’. Yet
the greatest casualty, and the one that has most bearing on the quality of our
lives, is neither the decline of sovereignty nor of identity as such, but the
decline of society. This is hardly ever mentioned. When the society of the past
saw the possibility of social death, the welfare state intervened to breathe in
hope, for there was a perception that all society was at stake wherever and
whenever this possibility arose. Today, not only does the state not breathe in
hope, it is becoming an active producer of social death, with social bodies
rotting in spaces of chronic underemployment, poverty and neglect. We seem to
be reverting to the neo-feudal times analysed by Norbert Elias,29 where the boundaries
of civilisation, dignity and hope no longer coincide with the boundaries of the
nation, but with the boundaries of upper-class society, the social spaces
inhabited by an internationally delin-eated cosmopolitan class. Increasingly,
each nation is developing its own ‘third world’, inhabited by the rejects of
global capitalism.
Transcendental capitalism and the shrinking configuration of
hope
It is well understood today that what characterises the
global corporation most, and what sets it apart from its multinational and
national predecessors, is the absence of a permanent national anchorage point
that the corporation sees as its ‘true home’. In the era of the dominance of
colonial or international capitalist enter-prise, capitalism had a specific and
stable national base, partly because it was physically difficult to relocate
the great majority of industries. This was so even when a company’s operations
had spread to wherever it was able to exploit resources and labour. With the
rise of the big multinational companies we began to see a shift. The
multinational firm, as its name implied, was no longer associated with a single
nation-state. It had core bases in many parts of the world, but wherever it
was, it operated within a nation-state framework. The most important political
aspect of global capitalism is the end of this reliance on a nation-state
framework of operation.
In a way, global capitalism is simply the intensification of
the tendencies of multinational capitalism towards capital accu-mulation outside
the traditional industrial sector. But there are also changes: now there is a
clear dominance of the finance sector and a massive expansion of the services
sector. These developments have been accompanied by the rise of a relatively
new field of capital accumulation: the information sector. Partly because of
the above changes, and partly because of the use of computer technology in some
of the more traditional sectors, the global firm is now characterised by an
almost complete loss of a specific national anchoring. It is not that, like the
multinational corporation, it has anchors in many nation-states; rather, it
hasn’t any. Wherever it locates itself is considered a home, but on a
conjunctural, non-permanent basis. Capitalism goes transcendental, so to speak.
It simply hovers over the Earth looking for a suitable place to land and invest
… until it is time to fly again. It is here that a significant phenomenon
emerges. The global/ transcendental corporation needs the state, but does not
need the nation. National and sub-national (such as State or provincial)
governments all over the world are transformed from being primarily the
managers of a national society to being the managers of the aesthetics of
investment space. Among the many questions that guide government policy, one
becomes increasingly para-mount: how are we to make ourselves attractive enough
to entice this transcendental capital hovering above us to land in our nation?
This involves a socio-economic aesthetic: how do we create a good work
environment – a well-disposed labour force and suitable infrastructure? It also
involves an architectural and touristic aesthetics: how do we create a pleasing
living environment for the culturally diverse and mobile managers and workers
associated with these global firms, so that they will desire to come and live
among us for a while?
The global aestheticised city is thus made beautiful to
attract others rather than to make its local occupants feel at home within it.
Thus even the government’s commitment to city space stops being a commitment to
society. This global urban aesthetics comes with an authoritarian spatiality
specific to it. More so than any of its predecessor cities, the global city has
no room for marginals. How are we to rid ourselves of the homeless sleeping on
the city’s benches? How are we to rid ourselves of those underclasses, with
their high proportion of indigenous people, third world-looking (i.e.
yucky-looking) migrants and descendants of migrants, who are still cramming the
non-gentrified parts of the city? Not so long ago, the state was committed, at
least minimally, to propping up and distributing hope to such people in order
to maintain them as part of society. Now, the ideological and ethical space for
perceiving the poor as a social/human problem has shrunk. In the dominant modes
of representation the poor become primarily like pimples, an ‘aesthetic
nuisance’. They are standing between ‘us’ and the yet-to-land transcendental
capital. They ought to be eradicated and removed from such a space. The
aesthetics of globalisation is the aesthetics of zero tolerance.
As the state retreats from its commitment to the general
welfare of the marginal and the poor, these people are increasingly – at best –
left to their own devices. At worst, they are actively portrayed as outside
society. The criminalisation and labelling of ethnic cultures, where
politicians and sections of the media encourage the general public to make a
causal link between criminality, poverty and racial or ethnic identity, is one
of the more unethical forms of such processes of exclusion. This is partly why
globalisation has worked so well alongside the neo-liberal dismantling of the
welfare state. The state’s retreat from its commitment to seeing poverty as a
socio-ethical problem goes hand in hand with its increasing criminalisation of
poverty and deployment of penal sanctions.30
Societal hope, which is, as I have argued, about one’s sense
of the possibilities that life can offer, is not necessarily related to an
income level. Its enemy is a sense of entrapment, of having nowhere to go, not
a sense of poverty. As the state withdraws from society and the existing
configuration of hope begins shrinking, many people, even those with
middle-class incomes – urban dwellers paradoxically stuck in insecure jobs,
farmers working day and night without ‘getting anywhere’, small-business people
struggling to keep their businesses going, and many more – have begun suffering
various forms of hope scarcity. They join the already over-marginalised
populations of indigenous communities, homeless people, poor immigrant workers
and the chronically unemployed. But unlike these groups, the newly marginalised
are not used to their state of marginality. They are not used to being denied a
share of hope by society. So they don’t know how to dig for new forms of hope.
They live in a state of denial, still expecting that somehow, their nation and
their ‘national identity’ will be a passport to hope for them. ‘Deep down’,
they know that their national society is no longer ‘servicing’ them, but like a
child whose mother has stopped feeding her, the very idea of such a reality is
too hard to accept and to think. Struggling with it generates trauma. They
become self-centred, jealous of anyone perceived to be ‘advancing’ (being cared
for by the nation) while they are stuck. They project the fear that is inherent
in the fragility of their relationship with their own nation onto everything
classified as alien. Increasingly, their attachment to such a non-feeding
nation generates a specific paranoid form of nationalism. They become
vindictive and bigoted, always ready to ‘defend the nation’, in the hope of
re-accessing their lost hopes. They are not necessarily like this. Their new
life condition brings out the worst in them, as it would in any of us. That is
the story of many of those in the Western world who are anti-asylum seekers,
who are running towards the right and extreme right ideologues who still
promise a ‘good nation’.
Paranoid nationalists are the no-hopers produced by
trans-cendental capitalism and the policies of neo-liberal government. They are
the ‘refugees of the interior’. And it is ironic to see so many of them
mobilised in defending ‘the nation’ against ‘the refugees of the exterior’.
Global rejects set against global rejects constructing what is perhaps the
greatest phobic international order instituted since World War II.
CHAPTER 2
On worrying: the lost art of the well-administered national
cuddle
Introduction
Since the rise of paranoid nationalism in the last 15 years
or so, its affective expression, ‘worrying about one’s nation’, has become such
a dominant cultural trend in most Western societies that it is sometimes
uncritically equated with what it means to be attached to the nation. The
culture of ‘worrying’ which was initially most pronounced among supporters of
extreme-right, anti-immigration movements, such as the Front National in France
and Pauline Hanson’s One Nation in Australia, has now become the dominant cultural
form of expressing one’s belonging to the nation. Nowhere has this generalised
culture been as intense as it has been in the Australia of the Tampa crisis and
the detention centres. This is perhaps because no other society has
ideologically legitimised, even institutionalised, the culture of worrying to
the extent that the conservative government of John Howard has (see Chapter 5).
‘Worrying’ clearly denotes the prominence of a dimension of fear about the fate
of the nation that is only minimally present in the affective practice of
‘caring’. Thus the difference between the two can simply be the result of the
presence or absence of a threat: our caring turns into worrying when something
is threatening what we care for. Indeed this is often the case when worrying is
a relatively fleeting sentiment associated with a specific threat to a specific
relation, and where the threat is external to the caring relation. In such
cases ‘caring’ emerges as the norm to which one reverts after the disappearance
of the threat and the worrying it has caused.
The problem with cultures of national worrying is that they
are not of such a fleeting nature. Of course national worriers do posit threats
– threats that are located, either literally or symbolically, outside the national
subject-national society relation – as the source of their worrying. Migration,
illegal refugees, crime, paedophilia, ‘foreign investment’, etc are often
cited, and one can imagine why they can be a matter of concern for some people.
These sorts of threats do not, however, explain what is beginning to look like
a structural entrenchment of the culture of worrying. Indeed, worrying has
become such an enduring mode of relating to the nation that if the nationalists
ever ceased ‘worrying about the nation’ it would be hard to remember what the
‘caring about the nation’ one is supposed to return to means. That is, worrying
today exerts a form of symbolic violence1 over the field of national belonging.
It eradicates the very possibility of thinking of an alternative mode of
belonging.
In this chapter, I aim to recover the significance of the
relation of care that can exist between the nation and its citizens. I will
argue that the cultures of worrying and caring about the nation do not reflect
the existence or absence of a threat to the nation as much as they reflect the
quality of the relation between the nation and its citizens. Extending the
argument developed in the previous chapter, I will emphasise the way society
works as a mechanism for the distribution of hope and examine the relationship
between this distributional capacity and the prevalence of either caring or
worrying. As I will show, understanding the ethics of care provides us with an
important conceptual site from which we can capture the pathological nature of
a nationalism consumed by worrying.
On dispositional hopefulness
In the previous chapter I argued that by being a mechanism
for the distribution of social opportunities, society operates as a distributor
of social hope among the population it encompasses. Given its location within
society, I called this societal hope. Social hope, however, does not refer only
to these societal routes for self-realisation. As implied by a statement such
as ‘I am hopeful but the situation is hopeless’, hope also refers to a
disposition within individuals. Farran et al. differentiate between hope as a
state and hope as a trait. They argue that:
As a state, it reflects the present feelings that persons
have about a particular situation, it may fluctuate over time, and it can be
influenced through growth or intervention. As a trait, hope functions as a more
enduring attitude or approach to life, and is less subject to fluctuation in
response to life’s vicissitudes.2
The dispositional hopefulness that concerns us here is, in
Farran et al.’s language, more like a trait than a state. It is an enduring
disposition rather than a fleeting feeling. But if hopefulness is a
disposition, what does it dispose the body/the self to do?
For most social and psychological researchers who have
worked on this issue, hopefulness is above all a disposition to be confident in
the face of the future, to be open to it and welcoming to what it will bring,
even if one does not know for sure what it will bring.3 Spinoza importantly
points out that hope (unlike wishing, for example) is an ambivalent affect,
always laced with fear. For him hope is like a combination of desire for and
fear of the future in which the desire for the future is more dominant.4
One can extract from Spinoza a conception of the hopeful
disposition as nothing more than the will to live – come what may – that is
inherent in the human body. It can be linked to Spinoza’s theory of conatus,
that ‘each thing, in so far as it is in itself, endeavours to persevere in its
own being’.5 We can call this raw disposition to embrace life as it unfolds,
conatic hope. It is a dis-position denoting what Spinoza would call an
‘appetite’ for life.6 It is well captured by the popular saying, ‘Where there’s
life there’s hope.’ This kind of hopefulness emerges most clearly when humans
are confronting desperate situations. This is why one finds it captured most
powerfully in the literature analysing human beings’ ‘fighting spirit’ in the
face of fatal illnesses7 or in concentration camps.8 But this desire to
confront life and live it, even if it is an intrinsic property of all human
beings, cannot be separated from the effect of society on its development.
Indeed, in some cases society ends up extinguishing it – this is the case with
suicides.
Galina Lindquist, an anthropologist doing her ethnographic
work in contemporary Russia, describes how some small business people (such as
her informant, Olga) rely on visits to urban magicians who give them enough
‘hope’ (in the form of ‘cosmic advice’, charms, spells, amulets, etc) to
confront the deep un-certainties of a market characterised by an acute absence
of trust. For her, hopefulness is the ability to cope with what is beyond one’s
control and a belief in the possibility of a minimum sense of agency despite
all. In this sense, it is the perceived capacity to exercise some mastery over
life, and it stands in opposition to helplessness.9 As Lindquist points out:
‘Magical means are the very few left to a woman like Olga to exert power over
others in this society, to exercise agency … Olga is learning to have
confidence in her own self.’10
Magic, then, gives Olga hope in the form of a capacity to
confront the uncertainties of the market; she does not know what the future
will bring but she has some ‘magical’ confidence that she is on the right path.
Such hope ‘sustains people like Olga and helps them to arise and continue after
absorbing the hardest blows’.11 Thus even though the social conditions of the
Russian market are, so to speak, hopeless, magic allows Olga to reach a
hopefulness that is within her regardless of what the social situation is like.
Lindquist ends up defining hope as ‘a stubborn confidence without any
substantial ground, an ineradicable human faculty’.12 We can see that
Lindquist, here, ends up with a definition of hope close to what we have called
conatic hope. Though one senses a contradiction in this definition. For if this
hope was, as Lindquist says, an ‘ineradicable human faculty’, why did Olga need
a social means in the form of magic to find it within her? This does not so
much negate the idea of a conatic hope as awaken us to the fact that even when
we say that the disposition for hopefulness is inherent in all people, this
does not mean that it is present in the same way in every single person. The
intensity with which this inherent disposition of hopefulness is activated
within an individual depends on the material and symbolic social conditions of
its activation.
So society is not only a mechanism for the distribution of
societal hope; it also functions as a mechanism for the distribution of
hopefulness, through the provision of certain social conditions which, once
internalised by individuals, activate their conatic hopefulness and allow it to
flourish. Olga’s story, by emphasising their lack, already gives us a sense of
what some of the social conditions that activate this hopefulness can be: they
are the negation of the conditions whose presence magic is trying to compensate
for. These are, according to Lindquist, ‘lack of trust’, ‘a society where the
dangers of social interaction are pre-eminent’, ‘where the mechanisms of
security and control are dramatically reduced’, and where there are no
sanctions for breaching contractual relations.13 Although Lindquist is speaking
of the ‘market’ in a strictly economic sense, I would like to suggest that these
conditions are equally important in defining more generally ‘the market of
life’. A society that can induce and distribute a dispositional hopefulness, a
lasting and enduring hopefulness, is precisely a society where the opposite of
the conditions mentioned by Lindquist prevails.
The distribution of hopefulness and the art of the
well-administered cuddle: on caring and worrying
In its examination of the dynamics of early childhood,
psycho-analysis has already shown us that the internalisation of ‘good social
relations’ as a means of developing a healthy sense of hopefulness begins with
the internalisation of a ‘good mother– child’ relation. Within Kleinian
psychoanalysis, for example, hope has been explicitly linked to the infant’s
internalisation of the good breast. As Anna Pontamianou argues, ‘Hope is
conditional upon the idea of a breast which it is possible to find, as opposed
to non-breast, non-existence of breast, or destructive fragmentation of the
other and of self.’14 A well-internalised breast allows us to develop a
capacity to wait for the object of our desire with minimum anxiety, even when
this object does not show up when expected. That is, the internalisation of the
good breast allows the development of exactly that capacity to ‘face the
uncertainties of the future’ which, I suggested above, is an essential
characteristic of hopefulness.
Hopefulness, then, is a ‘historically’ acquired sense of
security in facing what the future will bring – historical in the sense being
the product of an internalisation of the history of one’s relation to the
breast and the objects of desire that come to replace it later in life. It is
also an enduring disposition, in that it is not likely to be modified just by
the odd occasions where the object doesn’t ‘turn up’. It is thus a confident
belief that ‘of course the good object will come, or of course my mother will
feed me, even if I am a bit worried that she hasn’t shown up yet (Spinoza’s
fear)’. This ‘bit of worrying’ takes over, however, when the history of the
child’s relationship to the breast is such that it leads to an insecure form of
attachment, an attachment overshadowed by the fear of the bad breast. We can
begin to see here the relationship between worrying and hope-deprivation.
Clearly, there are elements in this foundational
breast–child relation that offer us some key insights into the imaginary
relationship between the national citizen and the ‘breast of the motherland’.
Above all, it allows us to appreciate how the social hopefulness of the
national subject is produced through an internalisation of the certainty that
their national society will care for them. Worrying emerges when this certainty
disappears, and when the national’s answer to the question ‘Will my society
care for me?’ is an insecure ‘I don’t know.’ Then anxiety sets in.
But despite these insights, it is clear that the Kleinian
breast– child relation is of limited value in understanding the national
subject–national society relation; not least because, at this early stage in
life, the passivity of the child in this relation makes it an unsuitable model
for understanding the active role the national subject plays in relating to the
nation. Taking a later stage in the parent–child relationship offers us a
better understanding of the development of hopefulness within the nation, and
of its complexities.
One can note, when watching children who have only recently
began to walk confidently play with others in a playground, how often such
children go back to the parental lap for a ‘reassuring cuddle’ before resuming
their play. More often than not this parental cuddle lasts a bit longer than
the child desires. And one can see children, especially when they have
‘returned to the lap’ in the middle of some very involved game, battling to
free themselves from a cuddle they initially sought but now find restraining.
They wildly struggle to free themselves, screaming with all their body: ‘Hey,
I’ve only come for a little reassuring cuddle. No need to suffocate me. I want
to move on …’
This situation emerges when the parent’s desire to reassure
the child is overcome by more narcissistic desires. In such a situation we have
an interaction between two different desires: the desire of the child to make
contact with a reassuring presence and the desire of the parent to treat the
child as a cuddly and perhaps soothing possession. To begin with, each wants
the other as an object that satisfies their own needs; to be just that and
nothing more. The child wants the parent to be around but not so around as to
restrict their movement. The parent wants the child to stay long enough for
them to ‘get a cuddle’. But this is only at the beginning. What is crucial is
that with time, both parent and child start learning to seek what they
themselves need and to try to give the other what the other needs.
For the children, the cuddle they seek is an energising
cuddle. It is a cuddle which replenishes their capacity to face the world (the
game they are playing). Confident with the caring presence of the parental lap,
they are ready to confront the uncertainties of the future (as they present
themselves in the playground). The cuddle represents the essence of the
relation between caring and hope-fulness. That is, the cuddle acts like
Lindquist’s magic. It activates conatic hopefulness in the child. The caring
cuddle also represents the essence of what it means to be ‘at home’, and opens
up for us the significance of the relationship between hopefulness and
homeliness.
Although one often finds in the literature on ‘home’ and
‘homeliness’ an equation between ‘home’ and the mother, the mother’s lap and/or
particularly the mother’s breast (see next chapter), there is an enduring
assumption that home and the mother’s breast represent security in the form of
immobility as well as in the form of an enclosure. Such homeliness is perceived
to stand in opposition to openness and movement, which are somehow associated
with homelessness. As Paul Chilton and Mikhail Ilyin argue:
The concept of ‘security’ seems
in English to be understood by accessing base concepts of fixedness and being
inside an enclosing space or a container. This basic cognitive schema is also
an important component of the ‘house’ metaphor.15
Yet this is at best an incomplete definition of both
security and homeliness. Alone it provides an imaginary of claustrophobia
rather than of homeliness and security. For what is security if it isn’t the
capacity to move confidently? And what is ‘home’ if not the ground that allows
such a confident form of mobility, i.e. that allows us to contemplate the
possibilities that the world offers confidently and move to take them on. A
home has to be both closed enough to offer shelter and open enough to allow for
this capacity to perceive what the world has to offer and to provide us with
enough energy to go and seek it. This is why there is always a subliminal
psychological value to the ‘room with a view’. This also explains the homely
ontology of glass and the reasons for its popularity in the construction of
houses. Is it not the ideal medium for the embodiment of this double movement
of closure and openness that is the essence of homeliness, providing a shelter
from the outside without becoming a claustrophobic inability to see what the
outside has to offer?
It is precisely that double movement that the child seeks in
the parental cuddle. It is a cuddle that manages to simultaneously embrace and
protect and allow the child to contemplate the future and move towards what it
has to offer. Working towards ad-ministering such a finely tuned cuddle is part
of the essence of parental care in all walks of life. After their initial
tendency to ‘suffocate’ the child with a claustrophobic embrace, parents soon
learn that their child needs different kinds of embraces at different times,
and they then aim – according to their ability and their own history – to
become both physical and metaphorical providers of this range of hope-inducing
cuddles.
The more parents are capable of providing such caring
embraces to their children, the more likely the latter are to develop a sense
of security which will make them less dependent on these cuddles and more
capable of moving into the world confidently and securely, without needing a
constant direct physical relation with their parental ‘home’. They acquire
something similar to what in attachment theory is called an ‘internal secure
base’:16 a sense of confidence and homeliness that is internalised as a place
in the psyche, and which allows one to move away from parental care without
losing the sense of homeliness it provides. As Jeremy Holmes puts it: ‘the
child no longer is wholly dependent on the physical presence of the care-giver
but can be comforted by the thought of “mum-and-dad”, or “home”’.17 The child
de-velops the capacity to move further and further away from the parents and to
live more and more without needing an actual ‘cuddle’, since the latter has now
become internalised.18
Another equally important effect of the caring embrace is
that the child who has internalised such an embrace becomes more amenable to
allowing himself or herself to become the object of parental desire: s/he
becomes more disposed to allow the parent to get out of the cuddle what that
parent wants to get out of it. Care essentially generates an inter-subjective
and reciprocal ethics that is intrinsic to its nature: there is no caring
without caring back. And the way one has been cared for shapes one’s capacity
to care for others. As Holmes puts it:
As care-givers, to put ourselves
in the other’s shoes, we take a small fragment of our own experience and
amplify it so that it fits with that of the person in our charge. In this way,
our own experience as receivers of care is used when we become care-givers
ourselves.19
It is precisely this kind of caring relation that national
societies are ideally imagined to have with their members. Nation-states are
supposed to be capable of providing a nurturing and caring environment and of
having a considerable mastery in the art of border management. They are
supposed to be able to operate between the two never-to-be-reached extremes:
where openness becomes lack of protection and where protection becomes
claustrophobia. Likewise, by being cared for, citizens ‘care back’ through
their active and affective participation in the nation. It is this relation
which the uncaring penal state of transcendental capitalism and its paranoid
obsession with border controls is no longer allowing us to even think of as a
mode of attachment to the nation.
Worriers cannot care about their nation because they have
not been and are not being cared for properly by it. Because of the insecure
relationship they have with their own nation, they substitute a national
belonging based on the defence of a good national life they cannot access
(worrying) for a national belonging based on the enjoyment of such a good life
(caring). The primary source of worrying, therefore, is internal to the
relation. As Holmes argues: ‘In insecure and especially disorganised
attachment, the body becomes a vehicle for an introjected “alien” other from
and with which the individual can neither peaceably separate nor harmoniously
co-exist.’20 That is, the threatening object in the discourse of worrying is
intrinsic rather than extrinsic to the national subject–national society
relation. It is nothing but the manifestation of the national subject’s
relation to the motherland, the subliminal fear that ‘she’ is going to abandon
us. It is in this sense that worrying is part and parcel of paranoid
nationalism.
Conclusion: all overboard
During the ‘children overboard’ case, the government made
people believe that asylum seekers were throwing their children overboard to
gain access to Australian soil and the right of refuge. As this was later
proven to be a lie, it was argued that it is xenophobia that allowed
Australians to believe such stories. But is it really so? What kind of people
believe that a parent (even an animal parent, let alone a human from another
culture) could actually throw their child overboard? Perhaps only those who are
unconsciously worried about being thrown overboard themselves by their own
motherland?
