The tyranny of geopolitical reality in Syria

In a keynote I presented to the international cultural studies association Crossroads (#XR2016) yesterday, i used the Syrian predicament as an example of the analytical importance of thinking in terms of multiple realities, and particularly the productivity of thinking politics as a struggle between realities not just a struggle over a single reality.

The world of international relations and geo-politics is an order of life where states or sub-state groups are agents interacting with other states. In such a world human actors whether foreign affairs, or diplomatic corps, or military, officials do play a variety of roles. but these are channelled in the final analysis towards giving shape to what is the action of a nation-state assemblage, unless such national assemblage is too weak to act.

This geopolitical world of nation states is different from the world of individuals and citizens facing their state apparatus in so far as it is a governmental apparatus. The two worlds are clearly interrelated but they are nonetheless different worlds, different realities or different orders of life, each having what Aristotle would call their own particular 'individuality'. This is slightly similar to the classic Durkheimian differentiation between the order of social facts and the order of individual facts.

Left politics occurs and has a separate dynamic in each of these worlds and realities. In the geopolitical domain left politics is defined by degrees of opposition to the imperialist design of the colonialists.
In national space it is defined by struggles against inequality, exploitation, injustice, despotism, etc... and for better public health and schooling.

Ideally, a leftist politics should succeed in making the struggles occurring within each of these domains complement each other if not even fuse with each other. Practically this has rarely been the case.
Because of its ontological autonomy geopolitical anti imperialism has been used by an assortment of national bourgeoisies and petit-bourgeoisies, bureaucratic, military and police personnel as a governmental as a mode of carving for themselves a space of capitalist accumulation, which is opposed to western imperialism, but has little time for popular aspirations for freedom, justice etc...
Likewise it facilitates movements expressing a desire for freedom, justice, etc. devoid of any internationalist anti-imperialist dimension and easily récupérable by alternative reactionary formations.
The Syrian state today deploys geo-political reality against the reality where popular demands for justice are being formulated. It deploys it as a way of making its petit-bourgeois 'anti-imperialist' problematics drown the problematic of popular liberation. That some radical Marxists in the west fall for this cheap trick that basically institutes a tyranny of geopolitical reason at the expense of popular aspirations is beyond me. 

But one must recognise that the difficulty also lies in the absence of a political/ military force that represents that dimension of the popular revolution that is both liberationist and anti imperialist in its ethos. This dimension exists among the population but on the whole its only means of *public* expression is among some of the intelligentsia of the Syrian diaspora.

Peter Dutton and the Lebanese Sunnis

Take a sociological fact: one the most socio-economically deprived parts of Lebanon's population live in the north-western suburbs of Tripoli, Lebanon's second biggest city after Beirut. They live in deplorable conditions: the highest number of people per square meter in Lebanon, the lowest level of education in the whole country. And yes, fertile ground for the growth of Islamic fundamentalist of all kind of looney tunes variety, no doubt. but i understand that the number of young males who joined the police force, and even the number of males who became hairdressers from this milieu exceeds the number of males who became Islamic fundamentalist. So it's definitely not a sociological fact to just choose to emphasise the Islamic fundamentalist credentials of this group. 

Polemic: When Australia, under Fraser's government offered to have an intake of Lebanese amid the civil war. It made sense to take the most economically deprived part of the population. it's called humanitarian help. Now I know that today's rampant neo-liberal instrumentalism makes it inconceivable that one takes people like this. I know that today you are supposed to take the least needy people. people who represent a net asset gain. but. still, humanitarian help used to happen. some of us still remember it.
So yes, along came the most deprived of the deprived and yes, they came with the possibility of Islamicos among them. But do we have any statistical evidence of how this cohort developed as a totality. That is, *beside* not as opposed to the believable fact that there might have been a few home-grown Islamic fundamentalists that popped up from among them?
how many coiffeurs for instance? I'd be very interested. I've got this theory about Lebanese coiffeurs. Have you noticed how many of them there are in the world? Lebanon has unleashed way more coiffeurs on the word than Islamic fundamentalists and yet no one wants to talk about this. The destruction of western civilisation they have been responsible for far exceeds... (I'd better stop since my cousin in Lebanon is one so I'l wait to have more empirical evidence before pronouncing myself on this matter)

Take a second sociological fact: Peter Dutton was born in the working-class Brisbane suburb of Boondall. almost the equivalent (relatively speaking, of course) to Tripoli's working class suburbs. 

Take a third sociological fact: Beside coiffure, the Tripoli people from those suburbs who manage to get out of poverty commonly do so by getting some military education and joining the police force. Now, what do you know: Peter Dutton also rose from his working class background by getting a military education and becoming a police officer. 

Concluding Polemic: Now perhaps Peter Dutton has a lot more in common with the people he is attacking than meets the eye. Perhaps *he knows* he has a lot in common: working class, military education, low cultural capital, zero cosmopolitanism, tendency towards cultural fundamentalism.
Are we to blame the whole suburb of Boondall for the fact that the Liberal Party has unleashed someone like Peter Dutton on us. indeed on the whole world. of course not. Likewise, let's leave this poor Sunnis of Tripoli alone. They have enough problems surviving as it is. I mean they have to deal all the time with all the filthy Lebanese politicians for god's sake. It is just not fair to add some of the filthiest of all Australian politicians to this.

By the way, the brilliant Lebanese novelist Jabbour Douaiheh has written a novel called 'The American Neighbourhood' (available in English) on that part of Tripoli the is being talked about here. It is about an Islamic fundamentalist from the neighbourhood who returns after failing to go through a suicide-bombing mission in Iraq. go and read it if you are interested in intelligent fiction about this socio-economic milieu. Intelligent fiction is nicer and way more informative than Dutton's non-intelligent pseudo-sociology.

Trumpontologies 1

There are various intellectual trends that are increasingly seeing the world as a plurality of worlds, realities or ontologies, such as 'the ontological turn' in anthropology. I think that those who see this trend as a mere 'intellectual choice' or 'fashion' with no basis in reality are really mistaken. The popularity of the ontological has to be itself explained ontologically, not epistemologically. Or at least to put it in a Marxist language it has to be explained materially not idealistically. 

This is not unlike the way Marx regarded the upside down nature of the reality of the commodity as an ontological issue not an epistemological one. It was a situation where, as Godelier put it, 'It is not the subjects deceiving themselves it is reality that is deceiving them'. Likewise, we can say it is not the analytical subject increasingly opting for ontological difference it is reality that is increasingly presenting itself as ontologically differentiated.

To continue flirting with Marxist analogies, perhaps it is only in the era of dynamic capitalist accumulation that 'All that is solid melts into air'. when this dynamic stalls, all that is melting into air slowly becomes solid.

Like a volcano emitting it's lava capitalism has been burning every thing that is in its way. Now that its 'driving heat' is slowing down the lava is becoming solid turning to rock. Cultures that were being transformed are solidifying mid-way through their transformation. To a certain extent western multiculturalism reflects the cultural beginning of this stalling of the transformative/assimilationist drive that was western/capitalist modernity. It marks the rebirth of culturally essentialist 'resistance' in the face of a stalling processes of capitalist globalisation. The french essentialism of Le Pen and the Islamic essentialism of ISIS are both 'Lava rock formations': evidence of the cooling down of the melting (pot?) processes that fuelled and drove capitalist modernity.

This also links up with the work I have done on stuckedness (see Alter-Politics): for example, the processes of people identifying themselves as 'middle class' in the US relied on the existence of some minimal upward class mobility which kept the belief in the possibility of such a mobility alive. Once this social mobility despite its minimal nature actually stops, the belief in its possibility dies, people experience themselves stuck and their social cultural world becomes frozen. What was a process of social transformation and change comes to a halt and people feel imprisoned in their social locations. Is that not one defining characteristic (needless to say, among many) of the ontological reality that is the Trumpist life-world?

Gaia

All I said was ‘woof!'

I was not asking you to look at who was walking down the footpath past our front door!

That would have been more like ‘woof’ with a little bit more oonf and intentionality. Which again is very different from the more intense ‘woof’ which says I know who is coming and they’re not my friends. If you paid attention this woof was a little bit more low key which did not involve me even moving a single muscle in my body. my head is still resting on the mat, my body’s muscles are very relaxed. maybe there was a minor movement of my paw but this is it. This has always meant: ‘somebody is passing by, it is not worth worrying about it, but might as well make sure they know that I am here and that I know that they are passing by'. 

So, let's be clear, it is is not my fault if you rushed to open the door and tripped and hit your head on the wall.

You are always so big on ‘teaching me’ things. And I am supposed to know the difference between slow down and stop and go and come here and come here  now I said, and even complex formulations like how many times do I fucking need to fucking say: you don’t bite the fucking ham sandwich when I am fucking holding it in my fucking hand. 

I have to learn all this and all the subtleties in intonation you are capable of, and you can’t tell the difference between one woof and another. 

So, let me repeat since you are refusing to accept this and you are still giving me these dirty looks: it is not my fault that you rushed to open the door and have cut your head open needing a couple of stitches. I can live with you using me as your emotional punching bag. projecting on me whatever mood you’re in. But you need to take some responsibility for your inability to understand me. Would you understand it better if I said ‘you need to take some fucking responsibility for your fucking inability to fucking understand me’? If you still can’t at the very least stop pretending that you are so intellectually and morally superior.

Just accept it. it was you who rushed, you who fell, you who fainted, you who had to be taken to hospital two hours later, you who gave yourself stitches, you who didn’t end up taking that Uber that came for you.

And no, I recognise an Uber when I hear one, no its not like any other car, an uber has a far more ambivalent arriving sound. I can’t tell you a lot more about what makes its arrival sound so specific. I would have woofed differently had it been the Uber you were waiting for. So no it is not me that made you miss your job interview. and yes the world is not going to be the same even you try and understand my woofing. had you done it in the past, perhaps.

woof. in case you’re wondering, this woof means you still have my sympathies as a fellow creature. but you sure have fucked things up for yourself.

"I will fight for this naked breast"- Ghassan Hage

I have already read a lot of facebook commentary about the French PM saying that the naked breast represents France better than the headscarf. While I find it as ridiculous as any of my facebook friends, it actually brought home to me how scholastic so many intellectual reactions to Islamophobia and other things produced by politicians, including those like Pauline Hanson in Australia, Trump in the US, etc... are. Indeed I think that scholasticism is increasing, especially among intellectuals, today. It is a way of escaping a reality that is hard to fathom, a reality where we come to terms with how desperately politically inefficient at convincing and mobilising those who disagree with us we intellectuals have become. Scholasticism, in Bourdieu's term, means that we discuss what politicians say as if it is a statement of logic or an analytical statement. we discuss it, analyse it, agree with it or laugh at it and ridicule it as if the world is one big facebook discussion page and, most importantly, as if the sole purpose of an enunciation is to exist as an object of facebook, or tutorial room, discussion in terms of its coherence and its logic. To use Bourdieu again, we project into the object our particular relation to the object. We take the way a statement presents itself to us as intellectuals (ie, as an object of intellectual inquiry) as the way it presents itself to everyone in the world. But politicians are not analysts and they don't make statements aimed at being sophisticated, they make statements aimed at being politically efficient. So, while its fine to make fun of what the French PM says, or what Trump says, etc... some of us increasingly forget to ask: how good are they at doing what they are doing? What are the conditions of political efficiency of statements like this?

I happen to think that the French PM statement is an exceptionally powerful and skilful political statements. it is simple, metonymic, and manages to condense all the differences that French Politicians in their embrace of Islamophobic culture are competing to mobilise politically today.

I have written before how so many western values today are being re-deployed in a phallic manner. Instead of caring about how democratic the West is, more and more Westerners care more about 'flashing their democracy' to the other and say: 'look at my democracy it's better than yours'. Instead of enjoying their jokes they enjoy showing off that their sense of humour and capacity to be irreverent towards religious symbols is so superior to that of the other. And now, in this latest installment, some French people want to show off the naked breast of their women in a phallic manner. It is a masculine appropriation of the feminine for warring purposes and it is very efficient. It actually reminds me of Yassin Al Haj Saleh's analysis of a photo showing ISIS combatants in a region under their control pinning a poster which shows a fully covered woman with the caption; 'Your veil is my blood'. The French PM is now introducing a similar warring appropriation of the feminine: 'your naked breast is my blood', that is, I will fight (in a masculine way) to protect it.

We can ridicule what we have come to here, and maybe we should do so between us to comfort each other, but we need to always remember that we intellectuals, or intellectually savvy people, ridiculing something has not political efficiency whatsoever, Indeed, it even works at making what we are ridiculing more efficient.

Especially we intellectuals, should not shy away from confronting the fact that we have no political authority whatsoever today among those who are mobilised in such a phallic way. indeed we are the opposite of an authority: people go out of their way to embrace everything we laugh at and everything we criticise. Enough to drive anyone into the comforting refuge of scholasticism.

Nice - Urgent

The Nice attack, more so than any terrorist act before it, is bound to change the way the fear of Muslims will circulate in everyday life in the West.  More so than bombs that are specifically designed to kill, have no other usage, and need to be hidden from view, and more so than the planes that were used in the 9/11 attacks on New York, trucks are everyday objects that we encounter at every moment of our day. The attack will therefore inevitably accentuate the feeling that the ‘Islamic danger’ lurks anywhere at any time. There is no need to smuggle illegal substances, to learn how to technically build bombs, or how to use them, anything can be used to hurt people as long as there is a Muslim willing to hurt you. One cannot help trying to imagine how much ‘willingness to hurt’ that truck driver had in him to continue zigzagging and killing people for so long.

The space of suspicion will now become wider. It will no longer be someone-looking-Muslim on a plane, or someone-looking-Muslim with a backpack. Now the bearded man driving their truck from the wholesaler to the local shop, the someone-looking-Muslim who made an extra noise while driving his motorbike, etc… all of them will be looked at suspiciously. And the space of suspicion will not only be restricted to ‘trucks’ but will extend to any object that can potentially be transformed into something that hurts people. Terrorists are succeeding in making our societies become more and more nervous, more and more paranoid, and this always means more and more venomous and fascistic. And that is without the likelihood of achieving much else.

Today’s Islamic fanatics are operating with a well-established and understandable warring logic. They understand that wars always involve two boundaries. The first boundary is the one created at the point of contact that separates friends from enemies. The second, equally important, is the one separating the space of war from the space of peace. Each society that is at war aims to protect its citizens not just from the enemy but from war itself. That is, it aims to create a space where its citizens don’t even experience a state of war. It is that space that the terrorists try to infiltrate. They see the West as waging a colonial/religious war against the ‘Islamic world’. But they also see that this war is always being fought in ‘Islamic’ territories while westerners can enjoy a peaceful life on their own lands. They think that it is a major achievement to disrupt that state of peace. From their perspective it appears as a just re-distribution of violence but it joins a long history of practices of collective indiscriminate ‘revenge’ in being anything but just.

Fanatic terrorists are not going to ‘learn from history’ anymore than anyone else has done so before them. But if they were open to learning they would recognise that what they are trying to achieve on a world scale has been tried by Palestinian terrorists in their war of liberation against Israeli colonialism. And that is a struggle that has far more legitimacy and roots in popular struggles than their’s.

The Israeli government tries to protect Israelis from Palestinian warriors, but it also tries to protect them from the very idea and fact that there is a war between Israelis and Palestinians. The more successful they are the more Israeli citizens are capable of happily sipping wines and coffees in Tel Aviv oblivious to what is happening in Gaza and the West Bank. This is also true in a certain way of the Arab citizens of Israel despite all the discrimination against them. They might not be oblivious to what is happening elsewhere in Palestine but they are nonetheless capable of benefitting from the Israeli success in carving out a space which is not a war zone. They are capable and they do benefit from such a space. When terrorists strike, they indiscriminately strike in that space.

Whenever Palestinians succeed in hurting Israelis through an act of terrorism, some Palestinians still rejoice feeling that as long as there is a will to fight and as long as there is a capacity to hurt, there is a hope of liberation. But over sixty years of this petty kind of hope at the sight of revenge attacks that have taken variety of forms, including ploughing trucks through crowds, many Palestinians are wondering if such violence-derived hope in the face of the formidable violence of the Israeli machine can actually take them anywhere. They are looking for alternative paths. The Boycott Divestment Sanctions movement is an expression of such an alternative path.

Thus, it can be said without a shadow of a doubt that today terrorism is the least useful part of the Palestinian struggle. It might have brought recognition at some point in history. It might have given Palestinians a sense of purpose and disallowed them to feel entirely defeated. But in the last analysis it has outlived its usefulness and failed to achieve its goal. All it is now doing is contributing to give legitimacy to the inevitable and continuing drift of Israeli society into increasingly fascistic forms of Zionism.

This ‘French Tunisian’ truck driver is a hater in a way that is way more vile than all the racist haters of western society that are raising their heads everywhere are. All he has done is given them reasons and alibis to hate more and perhaps to hate like him. He has assassinated more than eighty people and driven us more inevitably than ever towards the Israelification-to-come of our societies and our souls.

Those who see themselves engaging in progressive politics can no longer simply ‘critique’ the government drift to the right, the curtailing of freedoms and the racist profiling that anti-terrorist legislations have institutionalised. They urgently need to engage with, formulate and push for radically different anti-terrorist policies themselves. What does a non-discriminatory anti-terrorist policy look like? Does it even exist? How can it be implemented? How can it be articulated to a foreign policy animated by an alter-colonial desire? Is that remotely possible? I have always operated with a sense that such questions are impossible to ask without serious radical change. But perhaps the urgent need to fight the global Israelification-to-come that we are facing makes it urgent to ask them and make them yield practical policies ‘before’ rather than ‘after the revolution’ as it were.

Why I don't give an eff about and will not 'debate' the 'findings' of the Chilcot inquiry

In February 2003, millions of us around the world demonstrated against the Iraq war. Most of us were not 'pacifists' nor were we 'pro-Saddam' but we thought that the very idea of a western invasion of Iraq was pure madness. The Sydney Morning Herald graced me with some space on its Opinion page to say just this (click below for the 'historical record')

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/02/16/1045330467168.html

We all knew our leaders and many of our journalists were not misguided or misinformed. We all knew they were just lying. And they went ahead and did what they did. And they got what they wanted to get. which was no different from what other colonialists before them got in the past. and they caused the horrors that we are still living today. which are no different from the horrors that colonialists before them have caused in the third world in the past.

It is very tempting to participate in the debates following Chilcot's 'findings', to get some satisfaction from saying 'I told you so' and to have some grounds on which to incriminate Blair, Bush and that other globally forgettable entity that no one is mentioning except for us here in Australia - whatever that Western arse licker's name was. But from past histories of 'inquiries' nothing much of consequence will happen. Quite the contrary, it is the colonialists who will end up getting all the satisfaction from discussing the 'findings'.

White (ie,white colonialist) inquiries into white evil are cleansing rituals in which white people routinely forgive themselves for the evil that they have done. they do so precisely by participating in a cleansing 'debate' around the 'findings'. And in the process they also manage to re-assert their racial superiority over the barbarian other. For let us not forget: White Inquiries are technologies of racial distinction: 'The inquiry, as with the innumerable Israeli inquiries into the interminable massacres in Gaza or the inquiry into the Sabra and Shatila massacre during the Lebanese civil war, always works to project a sense of ‘distinction’ from the barbarians whose worst sin is not that they behead people but that they do so without having inquiries afterwards.' (from Alter-Politics, p.21)