On belonging to a country that cannot keep its children

“You've wasted the (people with) talents and given them to the foreigners" said a prominent banner in downtown Beirut on the very first day of the uprising. It made the Lebanese government responsible for the ‘brain drain’ caused by ongoing migration, and declared the latter a problem that could be avoided if it wasn't for the mismanagement of the economy by the political and economic governing elite.

I have noticed with interest the extent to which migration figured as a lament 'look what you are making us do', as problem 'our youth are all leaving' and a sign of governmental disfunction 'we shouldn't have to leave', in the discourse of the Lebanese uprising. 

Sometimes, migration has been a factor in the uprising without people being conscious of it as such. Take the way Tripoli, the capital of northern Lebanon has risen in prominence as one of epicentres of the protests. Tripoli for so long perceived by Beirutis as a poor, underdeveloped part of the country, festering with backwardness, poverty and Islamic fundamentalism rose in ways no one imagined it to be capable of. Not only did thousands descended to the capital's main square rejecting traditional sectarian politics just as much if not more so than they did in Beirut. They did so with style leaving Beirutis literally speechless: a local rapper got everyone grooving in the square. They were at it in their thousands and it was incredible to watch. A story that is not told is that these features of Tripoli's 'modernity' are impossible to disentangle from it being one of the key centres of migration to Australia and where Australian Lebanese continuously return. Tripoli has a rugby league team, hardly a home grown sport and it is impossible to go to Tripoli without hearing people speaking English with an Australian accent. And while the research is yet to be done, I would think that Tripoli's uprising is a diasporic phenomenon through and through. But so is Beirut's. I have often sat at street meetings where the conversation had to happen in English because the participants'm Lebanese wasn't good enough.

And yet, the man in the dark photo below was screaming "I don’t want to be in a situation where my relatives ring me and say 'your father's not doing so well' and I am too far to be able to do anything". The discourse about migration being something bad that happens to you has always been present in Lebanon, but it often took the back seat to an opposite celebratory discourse: migration as a sign of the Lebanese's adventurous and ambitious character something that runs in the Lebanese blood and has been inherited since the times of those trading, adventurous and ambitious Phoenicians. The uprising has definitely brought the discourse of migration as a social pathology to the forefront. One can hear it everywhere: we are demonstrating because "we're sick and tired to have to migrate", "I have just got my degree, why should I be looking for a job outside of Lebanon" and then there is this guy with a placard stating the names of all of his friends who have migrated and telling them that he is demonstrating 'because we want you back'.

But it was the woman holding a sign stating that she is demonstrating ‘For every drop of tears that has fallen at the airport’ that broke me. For the sign points not so much at a social problem but at a primal injury that is at the heart of Lebanon's diasporic culture. I have spent so much of my academic life researching this primal injury, that manifests itself most clearly precisely at the airport when one sees parents cry as they say goodbye to their children. I have analysed this injury but i've also analysed the Lebanese art of acting as if there is no injury at all, a whole culture of dissimulation that is itself a symptom of the depth of the injury.

For a time, I used to wonder at the reason why Lebanese migrants, despite their propensity to narcissistically over-valorise themselves and their achievements, always betrayed a sense of inferiority in the face of the inhabitants of the lands to which they migrated. I used to think that it was an internalisation of a developmental racism which made so many of them see westerners as superior. But then, not only was this shown to be again and again not true, it also failed to explain the presence of this sense of inferiority to people they actually racialise, people who they deemed in a racist way civilisationally inferior. Slowly the source of this sense of inferiority became clear. The immigrant might do very well socially and economically compared to the locally born but nothing will alter the simple fact that unlike the local, the immigrant belongs to a country that could not care for them. Or as put to me poetically by a Venezuelan Lebanese informant once: 'we are the people whose country could not keep them.' 

The bringing of this wound into the open is part of the incredible socio-political but also psychological 'revolution against one's own self' that's been unfolding in the streets of Beirut since the 17th of October.

That the President of the Republic allowed himself to tell the demonstrators a variant of the 'if you don't like it here leave' is a sign of how remote and disengaged from popular sensibilities this whole regime has been.

Hizbollah, zionism, geopolitics and democracy

As people in the Arab world increasingly face their destructive, corrupt and incompetent ruling classes, we should have no time for anyone who denies that Western Imperialism and Zionism remain the single most poisonous reality affecting all of the Arab world. But we also should have no time for those who use this to let the destructive, corrupt and incompetent ruling class continue in its rule. So much was made clear during the Arab Spring.

We should have no time for anyone who denies that Arab Nationalist movements emerged with a genuine desire to struggle against anti-imperialism and Zionism. But we should have no time for anyone who denies that Arab Nationalist movements failed to defeat Zionism and Arab nationalism became an ideology of elite reproduction and nothing more.

We should have no time for those who cannot see that zionism and imperialism have to be resisted at a macro, geo-political level. but we should also have no time for anyone who cannot see how geopolitical anti-zionism and anti-imperialism became, particularly in Iraq, in Syria and in Libya, the ideology for the perpetuation of international, regional and local economic and geopolitical interests that increasingly accommodated itself with a perpetual modus vivendi with Western imperialism and zionism and had little to do with the struggle against them.

The same goes for Lebanon. We should have no time for anyone who denies that Hizbollah and Hassan Nasrallah have a heroic past freeing Lebanon from Zionist occupation, for which all Lebanese should all be grateful. And we should have no time for those who think that Lebanon is better off without a resistance movement. But we should have no time for the pontifications of Hassan Nasrallah at the moment: While, in the short term, he certainly has traced a new heroic path of resistance to zionism, in the long term, he is walking along the same old well-worn path of the primacy of geopolitical anti-imperialist and anti-zionist sloganeering at the expense of people's aspirations for a decent life. 

Despite the tragic and murderous consequences of its Syrian involvement, for which it should one day be held accountable, there is still time for the resistance to trace for itself a path that differs from all the resistances that have preceded it.

We should have no time for anyone who denies that Hizbollah as a resistance movement has a better chance of contributing to the defeat of zionism, if that is really its main concern, if it allies itself to the Lebanese and to other Arab world's popular uprisings rather than struggle against them. It can also help protect those movement form zionism which will no doubt attack them when they look successful.

But at the moment we should have no time for anyone who denies that Hizbollah is moving in the same direction as Arab Nationalist movements before it prioritising the geopolitical and economic interests of its' own elite and that of it's international backers. That is, like all the Arab nationalist movements before it Hizbollah's anti-imperialism and anti-zionism have turned into a defence of an established elite and of a sclerotic geo-political status-quo. 

And we should say this as people who, let us repeat, have no time for anyone who denies that Western Imperialism and Zionism remain the single most poisonous reality affecting all of the Arab world.

على شفير الهاوية /“On the brink of the abyss” (English translation follows arabic text)

أنا عادة لا أكتب باللغة العربية. لكنني أريد أن أفعل ذلك لأن هذه القطعة مكتوبة على أنها نوع من ال 'شكراً' و 'merci كتير' للشعب اللبناني الذي منحني تجربة الانتفاضة أثناء وجودي في لبنان
و إذا كان في كلمات و جمل غلط.، طوّلو بالكم علينا ؛) 

هناك شيء جديد على ارض لبنان. لنفهم ابعاده علينا ان نفهم ما هو قديم. منذ صغري ولبنان ينتقل من أزمة إلى أزمة. ولدت سنة ١٩٥٧ و ما ان بدأت أتنفس حتى 'غطّسوني' بحرب ال٥٨ الأهلية. و من وقتها الأزمات لم تتوقف.

و ما يميّز الأزمات اللبنانية عن غيرها أنها في كل مرة هناك أزمة يأتي أشخاص، سياسيين و صحافيين ومفكرين، يحاولون إقناعنا انه 'هل مرّة الأزمة حادة و نحن على شفير الهاوية'. وتمرّ أزمة وتأتي أزمة جديدة وأحيانًا نفس الأشخاص يعودون يقولولن لنا 'انّو هالمرّة غير شي، وانو صحيح في عالم قالو من زمان انه نحنا كنّا على شفير الهاوية، بس هالمرة كتير غير شي، هالمرّة نحنا حقيقةً على شفير الهاوية'.

و حتًّى أيام الحرب الأهلية لما كنّا 'بنص دين الهاوية' كان هناك أشخاص يقولون 'انو اسّا في هاوية أعظم من هيك بكتير، و لازم ننتبه، لانّو نحنا هالمرّة 'حقيقةً، حقيقةً' على شفير الهاوية'. وهكذا بقينا بعد الحرب ايضاً ننتقل من شفير هاوية لشفير هاوية. 

تخيّل الأزمات السياسية والاقتصادية وحتى الأزمات البيئية بانها أزمات تضعنا على شفير الهاوية تخلق مناخ و ثقافة سياسية يصعب فيها التفكير في المستقبل بطريقة خلّاقة. فبلد 'على شفير الهاوية' مثل مريضة في حالة خطرة في المستشفى. لا يمكن ان نجلس معها ونتكلم عن مشاريع مستقبليّة. جلّ ما نتمنّى لها هو ان تبقى على قيد الحياة. و في لبنان كذلك بفضل تخيّلنا لنفسنا باننا على شفير الهاوية بشكل دايم أصبحنا نفتقر إلى فكر مستقبلي. كل ما يمكننا ان نفعله هو ان نستيقظ في الصباح و نهنّأ نفسنا: "شي لا يصدق! نحن لم ننفرط و نتفكك تماما بعد. الحمد لله". 

لهذا يمكننا ان نعتبر ان الفكر الذي يضعنا دائماً أمام شفير الهاوية كغيره من الافكار التي تضعنا أما كارثة وشيكة هو نوع من اداة تحكّم تعمل لكبح ولجم الخيال السياسي المستقبلي. فكرة 'إلخطر الوجودي' في إسرئيل مثلا تلعب الدور نفسه في إفقار الثقافة السياسية ومنع ظهور أي فكر يعبر عن إمكانية التغيير الاجتماعي جذري أو طفيف. ونرى شيء على هذا الشبه يمتد في ثقافات الأحزاب السياسية اللبنانية وخاصة ثقافة حزب الله.

كل هذا للفت النظر إلى الأزمة المرتبطة بالانتفاضة اللبنانية اليوم. فبدلًا من أزمة يشعر المرء بأنه يتعرض لها رغم ارادته و هي تتحرك بواسطة قوى خارجة عن سيطرته، لدينا هنا أزمة صنعها الشعب اللبناني بنفسه. واهم ما يميز هذه الأزمة هو انها لا تضعنا على شفير الهاوية ولا تلجم خيالنا السياسي بل بالعكس، نرى كل يوم و على ارض الانتفاضة نفسها مهرجان إبداع اجتماعي ثقافي و سياسي يرافقه ظهور العديد من الآفاق السياسية الجديدة. حتى لو لم يتمكنوا من تحقيق أي شيء آخر ، يجب أن نكون ممتنين إلى الأبد لأبطال انتفاضة ١٧ تشرين الاوّل
لتحرير خيالنا السياسي، حتى لو لفترة قصيرة، من كابوس 'شفير الهاوية'.

I dont usually write in Arabic. But I wanted to write this in Arabic because this piece is written as a kind of 'thank you' and ‘merci kteer’ to those Lebanese people who gave me the experience of an uprising while in Lebanon this October 2019. 

There is something new developing on the ground in Lebanon. To understand its newness and ramifications we have to understand the old. 

Since I was a child Lebanon has continuously moved from one crisis to another. I was born in 1957 and no sooner had I started breathing than I was in the thick of the 1958 civil war. Since that time crises have never stopped.

What distinguishes the Lebanese crises from others is that every time there is a crisis we get an assortment of people, politicians, journalists and intellectuals, trying to convince us that 'the crisis is particularly severe’ and ‘we are on the brink of the abyss'. Then, as we move from one old crisis to a new one, sometimes those same people come back and tell us, that this time its really different, and the crisis is really particularly severe’ and ‘we are genuinely on the brink of the absyss.’ 

Even in the days of the Civil War, when we were in what one would think right ‘in the middle of the abyss' there were people who were saying 'There’s a far greater abyss, and we need to pay attention, because this time we are really really really  'on the brink of the abyss'. After the war, in much the same way, we kept moving from one brink of the abyss to another.

Imagining political, economic and even environmental crises as always putting us on the brink, creates a climate and a political culture in which the future is difficult to think creatively. A country 'on the brink' is like a seriously ill patient in hospital, someone deemed to be ‘in a critical condition’. We do not sit in an intensive care ward with such a patient and talk to her about future projects. All we wish for her is to manage to stay alive and get better. In Lebanon, too, thanks to our own perception of being continuously on the verge of a precipice, we have been lacking in new future-directed political thought. All we do is wake up in the morning and congratulate ourselves: "Unbelievable! We have not completely disintegrated yet. Thank God for that."

That is why we can consider that this kind of thinking that always puts us before the brink of the abyss, and all ideas that position us before an imagined imminent catastrophe, as a governmental technique aimed at restraining the political imagination and limiting our capacity for thinking different radical futures. The notion of 'existential danger' in Israel, for example, plays the same role in impoverishing political culture and preventing the emergence of any thought that expresses the possibility of radical or even minor social change. We see something similar in the cultures of Lebanese political parties, especially that of Hezbollah.

All this to draw attention to the crisis associated with the Lebanese uprising today. Instead of a crisis that one finds oneself in against one’s will and that is moved by forces beyond one’s control, here we have a crisis that the Lebanese people have created and brought about themselves. And indeed, the most important characteristic of this crisis is that, precisely, it does not put us on the brink of the abyss, and it does not curb our political imagination. Quite the contrary, the uprising has been a festival of social, cultural and political creativity that is continuously opening up new political horizons. Even if they cannot achieve anything else, we must be eternally grateful to the heroes of the October 17 uprising for having freed our political imagination, even if for a short time, from the nightmare of the 'brink of the abyss'.

Regarding the joyfulness of the Lebanese uprising

For many years I've written, along with many others, about the way racism makes the racialised hate themselves. It just dawned on me that perhaps one can use this more generally to argue that a pertinent way of differentiating between forms of rule and domination has to do precisely with whether, or to what degree and how, they make the dominated/ruled/governed hate themselves. 

I don't think that it is necessarily the case that any form of rule and domination has to involve the production of self-hatred. Also, this is not about democracy versus dictatorship. Some democracies can produce more self-loathing than some dictatorships (I think. but I am open to debate on this issue). Nonetheless it is the case that, for instance, both the Lebanese ‘democratic’ and Syrian ‘authoritarian’ forms of governmentality, have treated their people with such contempt, even if in different ways and with different means. Both have made their people feel powerless and demeaned such that they have ended up not only hating their rulers but also hating themselves in the process. 

This is not always easy to see for, paradoxically, hatred of the self can express itself in a form of narcissism that only a trained eye with an intimate knowledge of its subject is able to recognise it for what it is, and to particularly discern in its resentful ethos the unhealthy pathology of self-hatred and lack of belief in the potency of one’s agency that is behind it. 

It is this background of self-hatred that explains why the moment of uprising is often marked by another kind of narcissism, a joyful and healthy one. After years of self-loathing and internalising one's lack of worthiness, suddenly one re-discovers something about oneself and about one's people and one's community that is worthy of love. Rather than each person mirroring to the other what they think is worse about oneself, they begin mirroring what is best.  A ‘rush’ in one’s sense of efficacy vis vis the world happens. it is that rush that Spinoza called Joy. and this has been nothing but a Joyful uprising so far.

Between The Bearable and The Unbearable: The Lebanese Revolution to Come

What is happening in Lebanon is truly special. It is special in terms of local and regional politics and it is special as a more specific instance of the struggle against the rule of neo-liberal capitalism in the world.

Lebanon's capitalism has always been extreme and reactionary. When people talked about laissez-faire capitalism, Lebanon's capitalism was described as laissez-tout-faire so bereft it was of any governmental control on capital accumulation. This is still the case, and in the neo-liberal age, Lebanese capitalism remains extreme and reactionary in its complete obliviousness to anything that can be called a 'public good'. It is also completely oblivious to the social and environmental consequences of the pathology of obsessive wealth accumulation by the Lebanese ruling class. The whole political system of sectarian patronage is articulated to this pathological economy. If anything trickled down in this system it is that pathological obsession with accumulation. The Lebanese believe in it the way they believe in Saints and their miracle. Not every prayer to a Saint has to produce a miracle for there to be a belief in the Saint’s capacity to produce miracles. Indeed not even a majority of prayers to the Saint have to produce miracles for the belief in the Saint to be pervasive. In fact, let us face it, not even a minority. It is enough to believe that a Saint produced a miracle once or twice for people to end up believing in him or her for a long time to come. In much the same way, not everyone who is going to have a relation of patronage with a Lebanese political leader is going to accumulate wealth beyond belief. Not even the great majority of the leader’s followers, or, yet again, a minority. It’s enough to have the example of a couple of people who have made it thanks to this political leader for people to believe in him. It is this kind of ‘belief’ and adherence that has been broken in the current uprising.

While neo-liberalism openly calls for less government it has been clear for a long time now that it nonetheless does have a governmental logic, and even a governmental culture. This governmental logic and culture has been circulating within all the global, national and institutional spaces touched by neo-liberalism. In a nutshell, it involves an experiment in pushing marginalized people to the limits of what constitutes a viable life. This, to be clear, does not just mean pushing people towards poverty: many poor people can still live a viable life. Neo-liberalism combines a politics of impoverishment, with an attack on people's self-worth, their sense of well-being, their sense of sovereignty over themselves and their sense of dignity. 

Neo-liberal technology of (lack off)/government is inspired by the techniques of governing prisons. It involves well-oiled and financed policing capabilities, while what is devoted to a politics of care for the growth and well-being of people is kept to an absolute minimum. It is well-established that neo-liberalism involves an inflation of the repressive, policing part of the state (what Pierre Bourdieu called the right arm of the state) at the expense of the welfare-oriented/left hand of the state. But the government of prisons involves more than this: it is the art of keeping people at the absolute limit of viability. This is what brings out the issue of the bearable and the unbearable. For to reach the limit of viability is to live within the confines of a bearable life. A prison aims to keep the life of prisoners bearable: that is, viable-but-only- just so as to not push the majority of people into mass revolt or mass suicide. One can see this logic played out best in the government of open prisons such as the detention camps where asylum seekers are kept and perhaps most iconically in Gaza where the technique of producing a bearable life is at its most 'scientific'.  It gets to the point whereby the Zionist government (in complicity with the Egyptian military dictatorship) allow into Gaza the absolute minimum amount of nutrition possible. This is based on a calculation of how much nutrition is needed per person for the Gaza population to just survive. At the same time, this nutritional politics is accompanied with a systematic politics of policing and repression as well as a politics aimed at demeaning and degrading people. It is a similar politics that we find in the centers for the detention of asylum seekers in Australia, the United States and Europe.

While we might think of Gaza, prisons and detention centres as exceptional and unusual, in fact neo-liberalism, everywhere around the world, has involved pushing people to this space at the limit of human viability where it experiments with the borderline between the bearable and the unbearable life: how far can we impoverish, how far can we ignore the wishes and aspirations of the people we are governing and not take them into consideration, how far can we walk all over them, demean them and make them feel alienated from power and from each other.

It can be said that it is this slow incarceration within the confines of a just viable, bearable life that is continuously hovering over the limits of the unbearable that the sectarian form of Lebanese neo-liberal politics and economics has subjected the Lebanese people to for some time now. The culture of contempt towards the governed that this type of governmentality produces was amplified in Lebanon by a political class imbued with a neo-feudal sense of entitlement, where even the corrupt stealing of, and profiteering from, public investments is considered an entitlement. Add to this, the particular personality of certain members of the government which exude a repellant form of arrogance and lack of any sense of understanding or empathy towards the governed. Add to this a week dominated by mismanaged fires that destroyed substantial parts of Lebanon's shrinking forests. All of the above, formed the background against which people ended up experiencing a government proposal for a tax on WhatsApp calls as the straw that broke the camel's back. 

Many people think that calling the millions of people descending on the streets 'the WhatsApp revolution' is demeaning of the significance of the uprising. I disagree. The sphere of personal communication has been for a long time one of the last spaces where people experience a certain sense of viability and self-worth in the face of the politics of the un/bearable. One only needs to note the serious joy on the faces of relatively poor people connecting and chatting 'freely' on their mobile phones to see the extra importance the availability of this relatively cheap mode of communication has acquired in their lives.

The sense of release, pride in oneself and others, and just pure happiness that one finds among the Lebanese who are demonstrating and that is entangled with the feeling of anger and frustration cannot be explained by a narrative that only concentrates on the struggle against ‘economic deprivation’. The Lebanese struggle shares its preoccupation with questions such as ‘life’ and ‘dignity’ with many other global struggles against neo-liberalism, from the Spanish Indignados to the Gilets Jaunes. This is so precisely because neoliberalism is always experienced not just as a subjection to poverty but also as a crushing of the totality of one’s economic and symbolic worth. A politics of viability is not easily identified as a politics of the left. Indeed, it can already be noted that the Lebanese uprising shares with the Gilets Jaunes a combination of many contradictory political tendencies all opposed to ‘politicians’, desiring more participation, more respect, etc.

However, the Lebanese uprising also constitutes something unique and specific vis a vis both Lebanon’s political history, and vis a vis the history of the global struggle against neo-liberalism. Regarding its Lebanese specificity, the current uprising has a strong proletarian and non-sectarian component which lacked in previous popular uprisings in Lebanon. A grass roots spontaneous politics that does not define itself as Christian, Sunni or Shi’a, etc. and that frees itself from the dominant forms of sectarian affiliations is unique in the history of Lebanon. It is revolutionary in itself, that is, it is revolutionary for simply coming into existence. It is particularly so in the way it has taken the form of a politics of irreverence towards ‘sacred’ political figures, the previous ‘Saints’ referred to earlier. It remains analytically to be seen, but along with the forefronting of questions of justice and corruption, perhaps this tendency has been helped by the particularly prominent role that women have played in the uprisings.

The uprising's global specificity also resides in this freeing of oneself from sectarian identification. Not to collapse the movement into a variant of western politics but simply to explain it better for a non-Lebanese readership: this freeing of sectarian identification would be the equivalent of Trump supporters waking up to themselves and deciding that Trump is part of the neoliberal system that is crushing them rather than the road to salvation. Except that in the Lebanese situations the belief in Trump like figures’ saving and redeeming qualities has a long institutional history and is even more difficult to break with.

It is of course not clear what the future of the uprising will be. It is yet to face many tests. Not least the tyranny of geopolitical reason that has cursed every social movement in the Arab world whereby every politics has to be measured not only in terms of a local reality shaped by internal politics but also a geopolitical reality shaped by global and regional political manoeuvres. Geopolitics is a kind of ‘reality principle’ whose face in Lebanon is principally Hizbollah the political party born out of the heroic resistance to the Israeli occupation of Lebanon, and that has slowly moved from being dependent on Iranian support to play its Lebanese politics to becoming a representative of Iranian geopolitical interests in the area. The Party’s recent history as far as its involvement in the Syrian uprising and its inability to even /mildly tamper the primacy of geopolitical reasoning is not promising, to say the least. We are yet to see in the Arab world a political authority that manages to be anti-Zionist and anti-imperialist in geopolitical terms, and that is also open, at the same time, to political movements with local democratic political aspirations.
Still, it is of course to be hoped that the Lebanese uprising will lead to the formation of an alternative political leadership that can help formulate and crystallise the million demands made by the demonstrators, while also managing to preserve their revolutionary spirit. But, regardless of the outcome, these Lebanese men and women who are occupying the streets of cities, towns and villages across Lebanon today are political heroes. As already noted, their politics is in itself a form of heroism. In engaging in this politics they leave a valuable inheritance that will be the basis, if not today, certainly in the future, for the emergence of an alternative kind of politics. For the production and passing on of such an inheritance future generations will be, as we are today, very grateful.

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."