The Reactionary Anti-Reflexive Turn

I am looking at the photo of two police officers in Galveston, Texas. They have a black prisoner, hands tied behind his back. He’s on foot and they’re walking him on a leash. The photo and the way it invoked slavery caused an outrage. The police apologised said that the officers ‘didn’t have any malicious intent’. But how ‘un-reflexive’ - that is, how lacking in critical self-awareness - one must be to not realise today, in 2019, that to be a white person riding your horse wearing a cowboy hat and dragging behind you a black handcuffed person looks bad? 

I am also looking at a photo of a mob, in Lebanon, carrying placards that say ‘Employ only Lebanese People’ and ‘Syrians, go back where you come from’. I see Lebanon’s minister of foreign affairs, Gebran Bassil, encouraging these people. I cringe. Is this minister who is continuously dealing with Lebanese immigrants not aware of the history of ‘go back where you come from’? How can he not be aware that the Lebanese who have migrated to all corners of the globe have been subjected to that very same taunt everywhere they’ve been? But you know you are losing the battle when the president of the United States himself so lacks reflexivity as to use exactly this kind of language.

Recently, I watched The Final Quarter, a film about the booing of the indigenous footballer Adam Goodes in Australia.The film makes clear how racist the booing was. But there was no clear sense as to why the crowd kept on booing well after many were pointing to the racist nature of the booing. To me it became clear that the crowd was booing Goodes precisely because they were being told not to boo him. More than wanting or not wanting to be racist towards Adam Goodes, they didn’t want to be told to reflect on the nature of their racist booing. That is, the crowd were booing the politics of reflexivity itself.

I am thinking these events in terms of reflexivity because, at the moment, I am teaching my students about the work of Pierre Bourdieu, a sociologist who has most elevated reflexivity to a social scientific technique. Bourdieu-ian reflexivity demands that social scientists reflect systematically and rigorously on the way they collect and analyse data and the way their relation to what they are researching is part of the very constitution of the object being analysed. Bourdieu differentiates between structural reflexivity which involving analysing the social position from which one is gazing at the world and biographical reflexivity which is the analysis of one’s personal formative history. But the two are nonetheless related and to me, Bourdieu’s reflexivity was the ultimate stage in a university education marked by a continuous examination of oneself and one’s prejudices. Becoming aware of the way we are marked by our position within the relations of exploitation and domination that structure society was by far the most personal dimension of getting an education. It meant that education was never just about acquiring positive knowledge about the world, it involved working on oneself to become better. 

I come from a middle-class Lebanese Catholic culture that saw itself as uncritically pro-western in its outlook. It is a culture which bristled with all forms of classism (looking down at poor people and seeing them as responsible for the state they are in), sexism, racism (towards Muslims and Arabs whom we were encouraged to think of as 'not us' and as backward, but also towards blacks) and homophobia. As such, as I saw it and still see it, there was endless room for reflexivity and for bettering myself. Most importantly, I internalised the firm belief that reflecting on oneself and working on oneself to be less sexist, less racist, less homophobic, less transphobic was, firstly, a never ending job  –  I will always have traces of these structures in me and have to continuously work on myself in this way, and, secondly, it was a good thing  –  it was good for society and it was good for me personally to work on myself in this way. And it is this firm belief in the goodness of reflexivity and critical self-awareness that makes me look with alarm at those un-reflexive moments described earlier. It seems that they are an increasing trend that is part of the backbone of the turn towards reactionary politics today. As with the boo-ers of Adam Goodes, there is a revolt against an imaginary super-ego and a reactionary sense of liberation from ‘having to watch oneself and be careful lest we hurt someone.’

I am not alarmed because some people are unable to be reflexive. One of the advantages of a Bourdieu-ian education is that it invites you to be reflexive about reflexivity itself. Reflexivity needs some social conditions for its flourishing and indeed, the university has been one of the main places where these conditions exist. There is no point assuming that people who are reflexive are so simply as a matter of will, or worse still, because they are morally superior people. Being overworked and worried and tired and feeling besieged in daily life does make one less open to reflexivity. Even in the most mundane of ways. I myself can say that I am less willing to be receptive to a reflexive critique of my residual sexism vis a vis domestic labour if I am feeling tired and irritated after a long working day.

An inability to reflect on the social conditions that allow one to be more multicultural, non-sexist, etc. is a form of non-reflexivity that is specific to the liberal middle-class. Rather than seeing its ‘openness to change’ as the product of its ‘life of ease’ this middle class sees itself as morally superior. It uses its liberalism as a mode of asserting forms of class distinction and superiority over working class people. The latter are portrayed in the process as vulgar and unable to be reflexive. This, in fact, is not true. There is a long tradition of reflexivity and openness to change among the working classes. Except it is less ‘show offy’ than middle class ‘openness’ and not as good to use in the United Colours of Benneton-type ads of glossy magazines. As such this very down to earth, matter of fact and non-declarative working class reflexivity is kept out of the visual culture of global capitalism. It is made invisible. It is one of the unfortunate aspects of the history of reflexivity that this invisibility has made it evolve predominantly in the form of a de-facto alliance between reflexive intellectual culture, middle class forms of anti-sexism, anti-homophobia and anti-racism etc. and global capitalism. This alliance has been most detrimental to the spread of reflexive politics outside of urban liberal spaces and blunted its progressive political potential. 

To be clear though, the main problem today is not the people who are not reflexive enough but can be. It is those who defensively think that reflexivity is a bad thing and who are encouraged to do so by various media shock jocks and politicians. For such people being invited to reflect on one’s sexism or racism is not seen as an invitation to ameliorate oneself. Rather it is lazily experienced as a mode of being put down and victimised. Lazily, because it is a license to not do anything at all. While some of the classist modes in which this demand for reflexivity have been made have contributed to its rejection, there is no doubt that anti-reflexivity is also a reflection of the self-interest of a greedy section of the population who sees itself as deserving more and who has put its desire for economic social climbing before all else. This population has grown to see those who make demands of reflexivity as political enemies who have nothing truthful to say. Their demands to be sensitive when speaking about people’s weight, people’s physical appearances, etc.. are laughable examples of ‘political correctness’. Invented, but occasionally real, examples of a lazy political correctness gone wild were used to delegitimise what in essence is a good down to earth reflexive politics. One can laugh at the effort to use ‘s/he’ instead of ‘he’ and show an awareness of the gendered nature of politics. But is it anything more than an effort to be considerate and aware of the way gendered relations of power mark our lives and our writing and an effort to combat them? Even an invitation to reflect on better ways to relate to nature in the face of global warming is seen today by the anti-reflexive mob as an elitist pack of lies, and as yet another strategy by this elite to victimise ‘ordinary people’ and stop them from accumulating wealth. For, as seen from this anti-reflexive perspective, the reflexive elite is alarmist and interested in propagating guilt. In fact, there is nothing to be guilty about and everything is really ok: it is ok to use plastic, it is ok to mine for coal, it is ok to be sexist and, most of all, let’s not forget, “it’s ok to be white.” The last thing needed is someone telling us we need to critique ourselves.

We have had several years now of the legitimisation of this smug self-satisfied rejection of the reflexive imperative in the form of rejecting ‘political correctness’, or rejecting ‘navel-gazing’ as John Howard, in Australia, scornfully called it. It can be said that anti-reflexive culture as an ascendant force has seized power in several parts of the world. We are also seeing it aiming to enter the university in the guise of the need for programs that educate people in ‘Western Civilisation’. The idea that to celebrate certain Western texts is a defence of ‘Western Civilisation’ while the reflexive writing that critiques those texts for their racism and sexism is an attack on Western Civilisation is intellectually poor, for what is the reflexivity I am talking about other than a finer moment in Western civilisation (though one should be aware that there are other reflexive traditions)? The idea is in fact so obviously intellectually poor that one feels that it would be quickly recognised as such by many more people if it wasn’t so ‘financially rich’. But this is true of the whole anti-reflexive tradition. 

Response to decent people re: my Guardian 'where are you from' piece

I am more than used to the internet reactions of the white supremacists who always reduce a complex argument to something simplistic enough to allow them to produce their now ritualistic  'you've got be kidding' and 'how can you be so dumb' and all that. They never strike me as interested in discussing anything so I am not addressing myself to them that's for sure. But it seems that a number of decent genuinely concerned people actually took my recent article in the guardian to be of the order of 'if you're white you should never ask people where they come from'. 

Fortunately for the world, I don't believe I am powerful enough to tell people what to do and what not to do in life. 

It goes without saying that I accept as I pointed out in the piece that lots of people ask 'where are you form' for very simple and social reasons. and I am sure no one is about to stop because of this piece. 

I also accept the even more obvious fact, I feel ridiculous to have to say it, that lots of people, all over the world and in variety of circumstances, and not only people of non-White European ancestry ask others 'where are you from'? Indeed, let me say that I have asked lots of people where they are from. I mean... really... that's hardly what is interesting here.

What I am pointing to is what happens when you say something as mundane in the midst of existing racial relations of power and those relations of power inscribe themselves in what you are saying whether you like it or not. In such situations, as an academic I spend a lot of time thinking and researching how this process of inscription happens. 

But as someone also engaging in public discourse, I believe I can make people benefit from my research and thinking and make them reflect on some of the complexities that are inherent in what they are doing. So I guess from a behavioural point of view my article did have an invitation for white people to see the complexity inherent in the question that they ask. and so perhaps those who are convinced by what I am conveying will be more subtle and more sensitive when they ask their question, especially when they have the desire to follow it up with the even more inquisitive power-pregnant 'yes, but where are you really from?'.

so you can guess from the fact that I am asking people to be more subtle and more sensitive that I am not addressing myself to the white right internet mob who are anything but.

Also it is unfortunate that in order to shorten the piece we had to remove the middle part of this section which adds complexity and make those who are recipient of and oversensitive to the question 'where are you from' also reflect on why they are over-sensitive to it:

"My students from non-White European ancestry invariably hate being asked this question. This is so even though they recognise that more often than not the person asking it means them no harm, and is simply and genuinely, or thinks it’s polite to be, interested in where they are from. We’ve often reflected together about this and about what bothers us about the question ‘where are you from?’ I try to add some complexity by noting that I have met in my research some working class people from non-White European ancestry who have complained to me about the opposite. Their complaint takes the form of: ‘I have worked for x years in this place and no one has bothered asking me where I am from.’ And so I suggest that maybe the question bothers people like us, people with high educational capital, because we have high cosmopolitan aspirations. In a bar enjoying ourselves with similarly cosmopolitan others we want to be one of the cosmopolitan crowd and, in such environment, the question ‘where are you from?’, even when well-meant, often abruptly makes us feel singled out, alienated and provincialized. But we all agree that it would be different if the relation between the questioner and the questioned was not as structured by racial relations of power to the extent that it was: it is more often than not that the questioner is of White European ancestry and the questioned is of non- White European ancestry. And because of this the question necessarily, and regardless of the intent of the questioner, ends up carrying in it the power and entitlement of the questioner."

Get it into your head: the extreme right does not want to debate you.

The Lebanese village of Ehmej is a place dear to my memory. There a friend had, and maybe still has, an old-style house with rooms supported by stone arches, what they call '3a2d' (see photo), with a particularly acoustic friendly room where my friend had put the best of the best sound equipment and where we drank all kind of things and smoked all kind of things and listened to definitely not all kind of things. We listened to what we considered seriously good music, or at least music that we took very seriously: from Zappa and Mahavishnu to Bartok, Telemann and Wagner.

After I came to Australia, whenever I go back to Lebanon, going to Ehmej was like a ritual which involved a reunion with friends and a reunion with the space. In my case this was more significant than the usual diasporic return pilgrimage. It was so because I was changing significantly. I was transitioning from a right wing Christian Maronite Lebanese to a left wing Australian (I had not become part of a Lebanese left wing culture yet at that time - this happened later while I was writing my PhD). The space made up of my old friends (who were mainly Maronites), and Ehmej acquired a particular importance to me, not least because I could be myself and didn't have to hide my changing world views as I had to do in my parental home. I am simplifying what is a very complex situation, but in an important way, Ehmej was a bubble that allowed me to continue to exist in Maronite Lebanon where my roots and friendships were, amidst the deep divisions of the Lebanese civil war, and despite not belonging there politically anymore.

And yet one day the inevitable happened: here we were listening to some music and smoking some hash when some friends of friends joined us. at first it was much the same, endlessly talking about music, but soon the conversation moved from music to migration, and this guy started explaining why he needed to migrate by producing a classical Maronite war trope: the Palestinians want to take over Lebanon and make it their own country as a substitute to Palestine and they want to kick 'us' out of Lebanon.

'This is just nonsense' I couldn't help myself from saying.

He turned to me as if I had just denied the most fundamental truth that was at the basis of his existence, which probably was not far from the truth.

'Fuck off right, I don't know who you are but fuck off. we don't need to hear this bullshit here' he said.

'well. I am interested. what evidence you have that the Palestinians want Lebanon as a substitute to Palestine. Why would they still be teaching their kids that the most important thing on earth is returning to Palestine if what you say is true. have you got any evidence other than the fact that you believe this to be true?' I insisted.

'you want proof. I'll go to my car and get my gun. will that be proof enough?' the guy said in a seriously threatening tone.

I was scared. But I gathered enough courage to say 'forget it. I don't do gun things. I prefer to just talk'.

My friends were equally upset even if not in the same way that someone was bringing 'the war' and guns into that space. The guy clearly did not belong and was never invited again.

To me, it was a rude awakening: living in Australia as a student and taking intellectual 'revolutionary' politics seriously, spending nights debating and arguing about Marx and world politics, has lulled me into thinking that revolution was a long intellectual debate, involving shouting matches at the worst. In Ehmej, that evening, and for all my revolutionary Marxism, I realised there and then that I was just a silly Australian student. I was not, and more importantly, I was glad I was not, as I didn't want to be unless i absolutely have to, a warrior. For if I was going to be a warrior, it meant that comes a time I'd have to stop having 'interesting debates', and settle things by force.

This is something I think about often today as I witness the rise and rise of extreme right wing culture. I hear the right wingers speak, and spout their half baked 'truths' about the environment and about refugees, etc. and I know that these views are an insult to any kind of rigorous, empirically backed, intellectual thinking, and I have this initial intellectual urge to want to debate them, but then I smell in what they say the whiff of that guy I met in Ehmej long ago, and who wanted to go and get his gun. and suddenly I am facing the sad truth: Notwithstanding all these 'interesting' Q&A that are trying to convince us otherwise, these extreme right guys and girls don't want to have a 'rich conversation' with me or anybody else who disagree with them. They want to beat us, and even beat the shit out of us when they can get away with it (metaphorically and non-metaphorically).

The Kiss of the Chiclets Girl

I didn't sleep very well last night and ended up having this in-between dream and recollection thing. I think most of it is true recollection:

I am ten-years old or so. I am sitting in the front passenger seat of our car. my younger sisters are at the back. My mum is driving and my dad is not around. It's Christmas and we're driving through Beirut's Hamra Street looking at the street's reputed xmas decoration. It must have been 1967 or 1968. It's a cold rainy night and 'Nights in white satin' is playing on the car radio.
There's a lot of traffic and the car is almost stationary. I am looking at all the decoration and all the shoppers. Its sparkle sparkle everywhere made more sparkly by the wet road. It had just rained but its not raining now and I have the window open. my hand is resting on the car windowsill. night in white satin, sparkle sparkle. Suddenly the dark face of a girl my age was struggling to look through the window. She was selling chewing gum 'Chiclets', a common Beiruti mode of begging-as-if-one-is-not-begging. 'Allah y khalleelik yeh' (May god keep him safe for you) she said to my mother hoping we would give her some money. Mum ignores her but I was connecting to her face which I found beautiful. And then she said to Mum. 'Allah yehr-so' (may god protect him) and suddenly she kissed my hand.
I was a bit shocked and withdrew my hand. My mum saw her kiss my hand and she screamed at her: W'lee! -untranslatable I think, but an equivalent of 'You' (said with a tone to imply You little shit). Rooheh N'ebreh (Go and get buried). I on the other hand, didn't want her to go and get buried at all. I was still feeling the kiss. Too young to think 'sex' but definitely felt it as libidinal/sexual experience. I certainly didn't dwell on the structure of inequality and humiliation that constituted the kiss both as something pleasurable to me and as an intrusion in the eyes of my mother. Mum was fuming and I was dreaming of her face and the car moved: Night in White Satin, Merry Christmas, Sparkle Sparkle.

Regarding #FourCorners on International Students as Cash Cows - Free Advice to White People (take it whichever way you like):

Dear White People,

When you are talking, writing, or making a film, about non-white people, a non-racist take will *not* come to you naturally, no it won't; it is not your default position, no its not; no matter how nice or how well meaning you are (and I'll generously assume that you are).

A take on racialised people where racism has been minimalised as much as possible is something you need to labour on - a lot -,  this includes (but not only) listening carefully, interacting and integrating the voices of the racialised that you are talking about, and most importantly, thinking them as part of the people you are addressing as opposed to 'talking about them'. Even the most seasoned anti-racist writer, and i humbly include myself here, will easily lapse into racism without a continuous intense, reflexive and vigilant labour. you might think that's a lot to do and it is, but you need to think of it as the price you pay for all the privileges that you otherwise get from the racist structure in which you are positioned. there is no easy and comfortable path away from racism; easy and comfortable is the path you are already on because of racism.

When you haven't laboured on what you are doing in this way,  when you have not reflected and sweated and subjected what you are doing to a stringent critique, it will merely reflect your structural position within the power structures, That is, it will turn out to be racist (yes it will).

Palestine and the point of radical non-belonging (forthcoming in The Journal of Palestinian Studies مجلة الدراسات الفلسطينية)

The radio presenter was an exceptionally nice person, and an as-liberal-as-they-come journalist. I liked what she did and she liked the way I spoke about issues of multiculturalism and anti-immigrant racism in Australia.  She interviewed me many times and considered me as a regular on her program. I felt that she liked me personally, and I liked her. So, all in all, I felt that I had a really good professional relation with her. That’s how it was, until she decided to interview me about Palestine. She clearly thought that what I was saying was unacceptable and harsh and not in the realm of what she judged to be reasonable and her reaction was to ask me: ‘But do you accept Israel’s inherent right to exist?’ I found the question/request irrelevant and repugnant, not least because for the first time she was treating me not as a professor with some expert knowledge to convey but as some kind of political representative of an essentialised Arab intransigence. Our relationship never recovered.

Meeting people with whom one gets along just fine about everything until the issue of Palestine comes to the fore is a common occurrence for many academics and activists who forefront the question of Palestine in the global struggle for justice. Such people are often thought of as not being ‘radical enough’ as if all they need is a strong push along the spectrum of radicalism. Similarly, the American pro-Palestinian left has a name for such people. They call them PEPs (Progressive Except for/on Palestine). This categorisation also makes it as if Palestine is at the extreme end of what is nonetheless a continuum, an uninterrupted line of degrees of progressivism that goes from the least to the most progressive, and along which all progressive people are positioned. Both the idea of ‘not radical enough’ and PEP makes it as if all ‘progressivism’ is of the same kind, and that it can have a single unit of measurement. Yet, this sense of continuity is belied by the abrupt nature of the experience I am describing above. There are very few accounts of people smoothly gliding along the progressive line when it comes to Palestine. Narratives of an encounter with PEP people is often of the form of ‘everything was going well until I uttered the word Palestine’, ‘I liked this politician and thought she was exactly my kind of politician and suddenly she started talking about Israel’, ‘I really identified with the group and its urban and sexual politics, for an hour I felt I was in heaven, I thought that finally I had found a group I could belong to and then the question of Palestine came up and it took a split second for me to feel all alone again’. It is this abrupt break in the sentiment of comradeship, togetherness and commonality and the sudden feeling of being alone and on the outside of what you were seconds before part of that I want to refer to as the radical point of non-belonging. 

It was not by coincidence that I began to understand the colonial and structural nature of this radical point of non-belonging while reflecting on the positioning of Indigenous people vis a vis Australian society. I had often noticed over time that a similar experience of non-belonging is expressed by indigenous Australians. An indigenous colleague explained to me explicitly how when meeting with self-declared anti-racist and supportive white people in government one feels a sense of collective belonging and a genuine shared concern by all to ‘close gaps’ and work towards better living conditions for indigenous people. “If by chance the conversation moves to colonial questions of land and reparation” my colleague said, “all but a handful of whites immediately start looking at each other in ways that makes you feel: nah, they don’t think I am part of them… and I don’t want to be part of them either’.

This colonial question came to the fore analytically in my own thinking when I was speaking at a conference on the ‘Geographies of Inequality’ organized in my own university in Melbourne. In my presentation I was reflecting on the difference between what I termed distributional inequality and extractive inequality in relation to Indigenous Australians. I began by pointing out that from a general perspective, these two orders of inequality are very different kind of realities. Extractive inequality assumes a direct relation between subjects doing the extracting and subjects from whom things are being extracted, while distributional inequality assumes no necessary relation between the unequal parts. Extractive inequality is produced by the very relation between the two unequal parts. As with Marx’s concept of exploitation, one part grows and gets more at the expense of diminishing the other. With distributional inequality the relation is of an epistemological rather than an ontological order. It comes into being through it being noted a posteriori via a process of comparative observation. There is no necessary experience of a relation between the two unequal parties. That is, an observer can declare two groups as having an unequal possession of x or y without the groups themselves noticing that they are unequal or having anything to do with each other - in the same way one can state that the amount of oxygen on the Earth’s and on Mars’s atmosphere are unequal.

In much the same way, distributional inequality involves people who are individualized through their relation to the state, mainly citizens. These citizens can be individuals or collectives but, again, there is no actual relations between them (they exist in a form of what Jean-Paul Sartre referred to as seriality). Because of its essentially comparative nature, distributional inequality partakes in the order of abstract value at the same time as it involves abstract state-defined subjects (citizens). Extractive inequality, on the other hand, involves the pulling out of concrete value (labour, land, resources) out of others. As such it partakes in the order of people with concrete particularities relating to each other as such. In my presentation, I argued that we can have a better understanding of the positioning of Indigenous people vis a vis Australian society by reflecting on the way the distributional and extractive orders of inequality come to co-exist within a settler-colonial society like Australia. It was here that the question of the radical point of non-belonging came to the fore.

In his depiction of the impact of French colonialism in Algeria Pierre Bourdieu examines the way capitalist modernity, as introduced by the French, deprived the Algerian peasants of their socio-cultural reality. Bourdieu makes clear that this is not a case of the Algerian peasants becoming like French workers or the French underclass dominated within French capitalist society. Rather than being dominated within that reality they were dominated by that reality. It was a domination that undermined the world to which the peasants habitually operated. Bourdieu’s point was that colonialism does not just position the colonized peasants unfavorably in society, it actually robs them of their own reality. This differentiation between ‘being dominated within a reality’ and ‘being dominated by that reality’ offers us a paradigmatic colonial situation that articulates itself to the differentiation between the order of distributional inequality and the order of extractive inequality examined above when this extractive order is also a colonial one. This is so because, from the moment of colonization, settler colonial society and the colonial state face the colonized in an on-going colonial relation of extraction. Such a colonial relation is by definition a warring relation in which the colonized is positioned politically as an enemy outside the social order. At the same time, settler-colonial society sooner or later aims to ‘integrate’ the colonized subject as a citizen who, more often than not, becomes an underclass withinthe social order. The specificity of indigenous politics in Australia arises precisely because Indigenous society is enmeshed in both those realities. On one hand, we still have a colonial situation and an extractive order of inequality where non-indigenous Australians are still subjugating and dispossessing Indigenous Australians of land and resources, with the state being party to this subjugation and dispossession. On the other hand, we have a post-colonial society of citizens governed by a post-colonial and managerial state that relates to all the inhabitants of Australia as citizens, its Indigenous people included. Indigenous people struggle for more services, more income, more recognition, and in the process they are constructed as citizens struggling against distributional inequality. But they also struggle as colonized people to re-gain whatever it is possible to regain from what has been extracted from them, particularly in the form of demands for land return and for reparations. To be sure, what is shown here for analytical purposes as a neat division presents itself in real life as a difficult entanglement. It is nonetheless an entanglement structured around a clear polarity: In so far as they are citizens Indigenous people are part, even if the most disadvantaged part, of Australian society.  In so far as they are colonized they exist outside of, and in a warring relation/relation of enmity with, Australian society. It was as I was reflecting on this issue that it became very clear to me that I was dealing with the structural grounds behind the experience of the point of radical non-belonging. It is radical because the colonial outside in which one is positioned is not any outside. It is known by philosophers and psychoanalyst as the constitutive outside. To occupy this outside is to have a unique vantage point of radical lucidity vis a vis the inside. This is not only true of Indigenous Australians but of all those whose radicalism is grounded in an anti-colonial conception of justice. Needless to say this includes one’s positioning towards the Palestinian struggle. 

In Palestine the order of distributional inequality and the order of extractive inequality are mapped into different geographies. For instance, the Palestinians outside Israel in the West Bank and the Gaza strip are almost exclusively subjected to an extractive inequality, while the Palestinians inside Israel have to negotiate both. The Palestinians inside Israel can struggle for colonial and for distributive justice. The Palestinians in the Occupied Territories can only struggle for colonial justice. But for all of us who identify with the Palestinian struggle but are living outside of Palestine, we experience Palestine primarily as a global extractive colonial phenomenon in which the whole of the Western world is implicated. Zionists might well be the direct colonisers, but we all know from the way this has been historically facilitated and from the way it continues to be facilitated that Palestine is a Western colonial project. Indeed Palestine is one of the few places where ‘the West’ can still come into being as a collective colonizing force in history today. It is because of this that those of us whose opposition to Israel is an opposition to an extractive colonial order will always be on the outside of the West as a whole when it comes to this point.For, to be clear, the point of radical non-belonging is precisely the point where belonging to the inside of society turns suddenly into a belonging to its outside. It is where one stops experiencing oneself, and where one stops being experienced by others, as a citizen-insider and become instead a colonial enemy-outsider. This is why identification with the Palestinian struggle is not merely a question of being ‘more progressive’. Such an identification requires not just ‘more’ of the same but a move from distributional citizen-inspired progressivism to an anti-colonial progressivism. It is not a path that any Western progressive person can smoothly move along by being a little bit more radical. It requires a fundamental shift in one’s political outlook and positioning. It requires of the progressive person to become an ‘enemy’-outsider, a variety of what radical Americans rightly and positively call ‘race traitor’. It is because not many Westerners are willing to make that leap that those of us who identify with Palestine as a colonial space of struggle end up being on our own with a sense of being besieged by the very reality to which we otherwise feel to fully belong to. And like all besieged people, we dig tunnels. Even as besieged intellectuals our writing takes the form of tunnel digging, aiming to reach an outside of the space of besiegement.

“The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace the criticism of the weapons, material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses.”So have we been taught by Marx. The sentence is often used to highlight Marx’s materialist concerns: he is after a theory that has an effect in the material world not a theory that floats around in the ideological realm changing minds while leaving the social world intact. While this dimension is often commented, it is less often noted how foundational the sentence is in staging the fantasy of viability, to use a psychoanalytic concept, of the politically committed intellectual theorist. Along with the equally famous ‘Philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point is to change it’ it has drawn the structure of what a radical theorist should aspire for if their intellectual life is to be considered viable, that is, worthy of being lived. And it has indeed been the case that, for those of us intellectuals/theoreticians who aspire to have a political impact on reality, nothing is more important than finding a collective subject who will be ‘gripped’ by our ideas, and, in the process, is transformed into a material force. As besieged intellectuals located in the West at the radical point of non-belonging this becomes the aim of tunnelling.

Throughout the modern era radical intellectuals had two potential material-force-to-come: ‘the working-class’ and ‘the colonised’. They fused or oscillated between the two, western intellectuals leaning more towards connecting with their working classes and non-western intellectuals leaning more towards the colonised. In many ways, one of the features of post-modernity is a crisis of this fantasy of viability as radical intellectuals witnessed a gradual disappearance of their relation not only to ‘the working class’ and ‘the colonised’ but to any potential collective subject. A material-force-to-come became increasingly hard to define and while there has been occasional social forces that have emerged here and there, they were fleeting short-term events. None proved to be a structural and enduring feature of society in the way ‘the working-class’ and ‘the colonised’ were. In the west, the ecological movements are perhaps the only exception as far as endurance is concerned. But ecologists are hardly uni-directional in their political aspirations. They included an entanglement of conservative, reformist and radical social forces within them. 

This global crisis of intellectual relevance certainly affected similarly-minded Arab intellectuals who are also having, indeed who have always had, difficulty finding the Arab ‘working-class’. Furthermore, like many non-westerners around the world, and perhaps with a specifically bitter twist, Arab radical intellectuals have seen the hopes of Arab anti-colonial struggles turned into post-colonial militarist and/or authoritarian nightmares. There is however one reality that has made things particularly different for Arab intellectuals: it is the reality of settler-colonialism in Palestine. If colonialism in the rest of the world is turning post-modernist and post-colonial, Arab intellectuals are among the very few who are still faced with what largely remains, at least in many of its core dimensions, a very modern and very straightforwardly colonial phenomenon. It is what marks the anachronistic peculiarities of Israel: it is a violent settler society based on forms of outright land-theft that are more characteristic of eighteenth and nineteenth-century European colonialism. And yet it is a reality that is unfolding today before our very eyes. Perhaps it is because of this that, despite also featuring forms of political decay characteristic of the post-colonial era, the Palestinian struggles against Israeli colonialism continue to embody and inspire a certain modernist form of anti-colonial hope. It is particularly so for us besieged intellectuals located in our western radical point of non-belonging as we ferociously tunnel in search of a sustainable and sustaining attachment: There is always a feature of Palestinian resistance to colonialism that we can always latch onto, if nothing other than the defiant gaze of Palestinian children facing the weapons of the army of occupation. 

Arendt, Foucault and Cultures of Exterminability

Let me begin with this long, but I hope the reader will agree, significant, quote from Etienne Balibar. In many ways, this work will be a conversation with the points and issues it manages to raise:

What is strikingly similar in Arendt and Foucault …, is the fact that neither of them believes that processes of mass extermination, or more generally elimination, ever were possible in history, especially in Modern history… without their victims being so to speak prepared for elimination, i.e. progressively and institutionally marked as potential, future victims, and collectively pushed into a social symbolic corner where they acquired the status of ‘living corpses’, or masses of individuals who are neither completely ‘alive’ nor yet, already ‘dead’… Both Foucault and Arendt agree that this preparation for elimination is associated in Modern Europe… with the use of the category of ‘race’… Both… write in their own manner long genealogies ‘ending’ with singular events, (but) insist on the fact that a preparation, which can be explained or at least interpreted in a causal manner, is not an acting out, an actual process of elimination, or mass elimination, which requires a political supplement, a mutation of the political. Without preparation, you cannot have elimination, but with the preparation, you still don’t have the elimination itself, only its conditions of possibility.(pp.32-33)

From Etienne Balibar, Difference, Otherness, Exclusion, in parallax, 2005, vol. 11, No. 1, pp. 19-34.

In this work, I am calling this preparatory state described above, where the other is considered exterminable but not yet subjected (and will not necessary be subjected) to extermination, a state of exterminability. I will also use variations such as culture of exterminability, or, as in the title, spectres of extermination. The latter is to denote the fact that we are talking about a state where extermination does not exist beyond being a tendency or a hovering possibility, but as such, exists enough as a socio-cultural reality to leave its imprint on our daily lives.

I will be arguing that today we, in many parts of the Western world, have moved towards such a state and such a culture, our exterminable other being an imaginary group increasingly delineated with the usage of the signifier ‘Muslim’. Being imaginary rather than empirical, the group behind this signifier encompasses both more and less than what a dictionary definition of ‘Muslim’ will yield. It is located in a space that is a meeting ground between a number of explicit or implicit others belonging to the long history of Western colonialism in the Islamic world:  ‘Arab’, ‘Muslim’, ‘Middle Eastern’, ‘Sand Nigger’, ‘Third World Looking’, and many others new and old. I will deal with the haziness and perhaps also the laziness of this classification later. Suffice to say here, that though we know very well that ‘Muslim’ does not correspond empirically to any phenotype, this has not stopped the Western collective imagination from creating and imposing an ‘imaginary Muslim’ that we are all complicit in creating, sometimes the Muslims among us included. That is, regardless of how many Muslims who do not fit the imaginary stereotype we have come to know, when we read or hear the words ‘a Muslim man’ or ‘a Muslim woman’ a ‘third world looking’ (see Hage 2000) phenotypical image does come to our mind. Certainly not an image of a tall blond blue-eyed person, that’s for sure. For, empirically, tall blond blue eyed Muslims do exist. They are not even a ‘rare’ occurrence. Yet, we in the West, are no longer able to imagine their existence. This, as I will argue, is itself part of the racializing process that constitutes the culture of exterminability. We do not want to consider exterminable those who so ‘spunkily’ look like us. 

I am primarily interested in how this western classification of ‘the Muslim’ as exterminable emerges both conceptually and historically. That is, I want to examine the grounds which allow for such a classification to be both logically and socio-culturally acceptable. How do we human beings generally allow ourselves to think of other human beings as exterminable, and, how do so many in the Western world, at this time in history, come to allow themselves to think of ‘Muslims’ in their imaginary particularity as exterminable?

But exterminability is not only about the preparation of those who can be exterminated to learn how to internalise their possible fate (whether to resist it or accept it), it is also about the construction of those who can become exterminators to begin thinking of extermination as possible and indeed as ‘do-able’. So I am also interested, and perhaps even more so, in how so many citizens of the Western world are being slowly prepared to consider extermination in such a way: to live with and be indifferent to it, or even to consider participating in it. These can range from a routinisation of the killing of certain Muslim others to the creation of a ‘warrior habitus’ among the citizens of Western nations. I argue that the emergence of the Western exterminator is the product of a change in the way the Western nation-state is experienced and the way it interpellates its citizens. It is a change that brings to the fore a cultural formation that was always part of Western nationalism, though in a more latent state. 

Needless to say, I am aware that the idea that we in the West are laying the grounds to make the extermination of Muslims acceptable will immediately make many wise and down to earth people, who like to keep ‘a sense of proportions’, edgy and/or dismissive. They will probably consider me an ideologue and an alarmist. Like the man who sent an e-mail attacking me when I first proposed my thesis on exterminability at a public lecture at Sydney, they might say that I am being ‘way over the top’ and am ‘dangerous’, so much so that I am the only one who ‘needs to be exterminated for propagating such views’. 

Perhaps I am being alarmist and ‘over the top’. I do not say this cynically, or to be dismissive of views other than my own. I seriously think that there is a possibility that I might be an alarmist. In a certain way, this possibility is grounded in the very notion of exterminability. Indeed, this possibility, according to Balibar, is precisely that which stops exterminability from being extermination… yet. After all, I am talking about us being haunted by spectres and asking people to believe in their existence. Nonetheless, I have come to feel that we have reached a state where the potentiality of exterminability has become serious enough to say: better be an alarmist than let this happen to us in silence… if it is to happen. 

Given their interest in the role of intellectuals in relation to the social processes they are analysing, both Arendt and Foucault invite us to think of how an intellectual should face the possibility of extermination. Should she or he wait till it becomes actual extermination in order to be on the safe ‘empirically proven’ side of things or should they risk being ‘alarmist’ when they have grounds to smell a whiff of extermination in the air. 

Well… it so happens that I smell that whiff. And perhaps it is so because I am hearing impaired, but I put a lot of trust in my nose. Perhaps also it is because I grew up as a Christian Lebanese in Beirut and have experienced the dark side of anti-Muslim enmity during the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990) and how very ‘normal’ people can turn into exterminators literally overnight; And perhaps because I am now constantly reminded of this in the way people discuss ‘torture’ in such an easy going manner. Or perhaps because, unlike others, I have not accustomed myself to the way people have routinised listening or watching in the media about the killing of Arabs and Middle Easterners in Israel, Iraq and Afghanistan – I have still not recoverd from the way the Israeli airforce got away with wiping half of Lebanon, half of a nation state that is, with relative indifference; Or perhaps because I have been stung by the incredible site of thousands of young ‘Aussies’ bashing a couple of hapless ‘Lebanese - third world looking people’ on a beach in Australia’s ‘most cosmopolitan city’; Or perhaps because I was stung again by hearing non-alarmist and very down-to-earth media commentators pontificating in the most blissfully Australo-ignorant and parochial, and yet ever so arrogant, way about how ‘understandable’ the crowds’ behaviour was and that many of these young people were not really racist at all but were just ‘making a point’. Perhaps because of all of the above I want to risk being an alarmist.