Department of Hispanic StudiesGuest Research Seminar

Wednesday 16 March 2011Imanol Galfarsoro

Dept of Sociology & Social PolicyUniversity of Leeds

“Cultural Theory & Identity Politics:

Who said Basque difference?”Strathcona LT7

4.00pm

Refreshments availableAll welcome

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READING BEFORE SEMINAR

Antagonism, Contingency, Universality… and Absent Centre: Towards the Radical Emptying of Basque Ethnic Substance in Joseba Sarrionaindia's Tales from seven count[r]ies     

Academic Conference: London- KCL, 12-14th April, 2010; Association of Hispanists of Great Britain and Ireland; Parallel Session: 1 Monday 12th April 10.30-12.30 . Basque Panel: Nationalism and Multiculturalism: On the Politics of Antagonism, Hegemony, and Terror. With Joseba Gabilondo and Juanjo Olasagarre

Over the celebratory aesthetics of an increasingly exhausted cultural post-

politics of identity and difference, this paper places emphasis on the ethics of

political subjectivity organised around concrete and contingent articulations of

the individual, the particular and the universal. Therefore, the contents of this

paper are located along the flow of a transitional intellectual movement that is,

slowly but surely, shifting emphasis from identity and cultural politics to

political culture, including a newly re-invigorated critique of political economy.

Along repeated appeals to the virtues of politics and political analysis proper,

the form that this paper takes, on the other hand, relies on the interventionist

Imaginary of my own political subjectivity. Hence, it is from within the concrete

perspective of this imaginary dimension that I seek to argue for the possibility

of an absolute political indifference to Basque cultural difference.

In addition to the theoretical analysis on culture, politics and ethics

outlined throughout, another rather more ‘empirical’ means chosen to argue

for the possibility of political equality as opposed to cultural difference is this;

namely to frame a short book by Joseba Sarrionaindia published in 2008

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within the context of a broad critique of multiculturalism. In this respect,

however, the actual contents of the book entitled Tales from seven count[r]ies

of the world remain highly irrelevant to our argument. What is to count, mostly,

is the single fact of the book being organised around seven children narrators

who recount popular stories of their respective places of origin, from a

migrant-marginal perspective and whose exotic names only will be at the

center of our attention in due course.

Yet before proceeding further, the workings of two major fallacies are

required to be exposed, which often short-circuit all things Basque in

particular, but also European or Western in general. We often hear, and so it

seems, as a consequence, that direct political and intellectual intervention in

rich, First World countries amounts to a capriciously shameless game played

out from an extremely privileged position. As Slavoj Zizek states:

Every exclusive focus on First World topics […] cannot but appear

cynical in the face of raw Third World poverty, hunger and violence.

The symbolic efficiency of this widely mobilised piece of propaganda is all too

obvious in the concrete Basque situation. For when we hear that “There are

much more important things going on in the world” the main aim, obviously,

remains to disarm the legitimacy of an ongoing political struggle. Yet as Zizek

continues:

On the other hand, attempts to dismiss First World problems as trivial in comparison with “real” permanent Third World catastrophes are no less a fake – focussing on the “real problems” of the Third World is the ultimate form of escapism, of avoiding confrontation with the antagonisms of one’s own society. (The Parallax View, 2006, p.129)

Hence, Zizek grasps well the structure of the split that informs this specific

and subjective intervention (of mine), and which is worth repeating again:

Yes, the formal aspect of this paper is constrained to the concrete theme

that structures this ‘Basque panel’ on “nationalism, multiculturalism and the

politics of antagonism, hegemony and terror”.

Yet, the overall content presented here wants to account also for an

individual fidelity to the universality of a particular struggle in such a way that,

as Zizek himself explains:

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A particular, localized socio-political struggle is at the same time the struggle in which the fate of the entire universe is being decided (Conversations with Zizek, 2005, p.)

Therefore, the fallacy ultimately leading towards NOT confronting the

antagonisms of one’s own society has to be disarmed; not least, more to the

point of this intervention, that which rather than nominating multiculturalism as

a critical, radical, discrepant and even revolutionary question (for overcoming

racism, discrimination, exploitation etc as was the case until recently -see

Barnor Hesse, 2000; Goldber, 1994; Mc. Laren, 1997) nowadays predicates

instead the multicultural as a post-political adjectival solution (under the

dominant liberal guise of smoothly managing the mosaic diversity of a given

nation). In this sense the questions that Zizek formulates in his book on

Violence and the answer he proposes are applicable to our case:

Why are so many problems today perceived as problems of intolerance, rather than as problems of inequality, exploitation or injustice? Why is the proposed remedy tolerance, rather than emancipation, political struggle, even armed struggle? The immediate answer lies in the liberal multiculturalist’s basic ideological operation: the ‘culturalisation of politics’. Political differences – differences conditioned by political inequality or economic exploitation- are naturalized and neutralized into ‘cultural’ differences, that is into different ‘ways of life’ which are something given, something that cannot be overcome. They can only be ‘tolerated’ (V, 2008, p. 119).1

As soon as we plunge into the question of multiculturalism, therefore, the

opportunity arises of dealing with the second fallacy alluded to earlier. Talking

of terror, obviously, and “even armed struggle”, in addition to Zizek’s remarks,

this also allows bringing to the fore some new relevant reflections, first this

time by Ernesto Laclau and then by Alain Badiou. In his book On Popular

Reason, Laclau states the following:

There is an ethical imperative in intellectual work, which Leonardo [de Vinci] called ‘obstinate rigour’. It means, in practical terms – and especially when one is dealing with political matters, which are always charged with emotion – that one has to resist several temptations. They can be condensed into a single formula: never succumb to the terrorism of words. (PR 2005, p. 249)

Laclau then quotes Freud’s appeal not to concede to faint-heartedness, a

main form of which “in our time is the replacement of analysis with ethical

1 Here Zizek borrows from Wendy Brown’s Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (2006). On this issue see also: walter ben Michaels, 2006, 2008.

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condemnation” (249). The theme of “Basque terrorism” (sic.) is particularly

prone to this type of exercise. As such, needless to say, there is nothing

wrong in condemning terrorism, but always following Laclau:

The problem begins when condemnation replaces explanation, which is what happens when some phenomena are seen as aberrations dispossessed of any rationally graspable cause. (250)

One is well aware of the obvious political interest for not trying to diminish the

discursive appeal to the negative emotional connotations of terrorism. In the

context of Spanish grand-national rule, Basque terrorism works wonders as

an emotionally charged fetish.

Yet, to the Imaginary dimension of my own theoretical intervention here

and the practical ‘impossibility’ of properly, let alone rationally grasping the

Real traumatic kernel of political violence in the Basque country, a third

dimension must be added. This dimension accounts for the very Symbolic

order which, in order to sustain political apartheid, is also informed by a

permanent state of emergency (Agambem, 199x).

In this context, Laclau’s appeal to the value of rigorous rational

explanation can hardly be met. Instead Alain Badiou’s uncompromising

outburst on his Ethics (2001) may fill in the void. Badiou reacts angrily against

the “ethical ‘delirium’” and the “moralizing sermons” that are still “busily

confusing politics with the hypocrisy of a mindless catechism”:

The enemy dominates everywhere [he continues]. The presumed ‘rights of man’ [are] serving at every point to annihilate any attempt to invent forms of free thought […] The infamies of Western capitalism as the new universal model [are imposed by] the intellectual counter-revolution in the form of moral terrorism. (E., liii- lv).

But beware! For if anywhere, for Badiou the blackmailing effect of this very

moral terrorism shows itself at its best when the universal reality of the market

economy meets with the ethics of alterity2 and the relativistic fantasies of

liberal multiculturalism. For Badiou multiculturalism wants to respond to the

apparent complexity and multiplicity of being and “its great ideal is the

2 We are referring here to Derrida’s ‘ethical turn’ (1993, 1994, 1995) through his readings of Emmanuel Lévinas’ ethics of the other (1948, 1972) Derrida’s idea of openness to the “alterity of the Other” is understood to be crucial to the multiculturalist debates on identity politics and the politics of difference and multiplicity

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peaceful coexistence of cultural, religious and national ‘communities’, the

refusal of ‘exclusion’ (26). However, always according to Badiou, the world is

not as complex as we are often made to believe. If fact, as he claims in “Saint

Paul: The Foundation of Universality”, ([1997] 2003) our world is perfectly

simple. On the one side, the rule of abstract homogeneization imposed by

capital has finally configured the world as a vast, extended market (world-

market). On the other side, a culturalist and relativist ideology accompanies

the ongoing process of fragmentation into a myriad of closed identities. This

affirmation of identity always refers back to language, race, religion or gender,

and demands the respect and recognition of one’s own communitarian-

cultural singularities. Yet the false universality of monetary abstraction and

homogeneity has absolutely no difficulty in accommodating the kaleidoscope

of communitarianisms – of women, homosexuals, the disabled, Arabs! In

other words, both processes, i.e: financial globalization or the absolute

sovereignty of capital’s empty universality and identitarian protest or

celebration of particularist differences are perfectly intertwined: the two

components of this articulated whole are in a relation of reciprocal

maintenance and mirroring. Moreover, through the infinite combinations of

predicative traits, communitarian identities are turned into advertising selling

points -Black homosexuals, disable Serbs, moderate Muslims, ecologist

yuppies… (9-13).

Therefore, as Badiou claims: certainly, the empirical existence of

differences cannot be denied as such: “there are differences. One can even

maintain that there is nothing else” (98). And back to the Ethics, moreover:

Infinite alterity is quite simply what there is. Any experience at all is the infinite deployment of infinite differences. Even the apparently reflexive experience of myself is by no means the intuition of a unity but a labyrinth of differentiations, and Rimbaud was certainly not wrong when he said: ‘I am another’. There are as many differences, say, between a Chinese peasant and a young Norwegian professional as between myself and anybody at all, including myself. (E 25-26)

Hence when always according to Badiou “Contemporary ethics kicks up a big

fuss about ‘cultural’ differences….

What we must recognize is that these differences hold no interest for thought, that they amount to nothing more than the infinite and self-evident multiplicity of humankind, [as obvious in the difference between me and my cousin from Lyon

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as it is between the Shi’ite ‘community’ of Irak and the fat cowboys of Texas]. (E 26)

Enter here Zizek’s own take on [his Universal Exception (2006) of ]

“Multiculturalism, or, the cultural logic of multinational capitalism” (UE, pp.

151-182). Very much in tune with Badiou, for Zizek, multiculturalism

constitutes (or defines), a specific postmodernist cultural logic with regard to

identity politics, which all too “simply designates the form of subjectivity that

corresponds to late capitalism”:

The ideal form of ideology of (this) global capitalism is multiculturalism, the attitude which, from a kind of empty global position, treats each local culture as the colonizer treats colonized people – as ‘natives’ whose mores are to be carefully studied and ‘respected’. […] In other words, multiculturalism is a disavowed, inverted, self-referential form of racism, a ‘racism with a distance’ – it ‘respects’ the Other’s identity, conceiving of the other as a self-enclosed ‘authentic’ community towards which the multiculturalist maintains a distance made possible by his / her privileged universal position. Multiculturalism is a racism which empties its own position of all positive content [while] retain[ing] this position as the privileged empty point of universalism from which one is able to appreciate (and depreciate) other particular cultures properly – multiculturalist respect for the Other’s specificity is the very form of asserting one’s own superiority (170-1).

Following Žižek’s argument, first stated in his seminal work The Ticklish

Subject (2000, p. 216), multiculturalism does not conform a recipe containing

any kind of subversive potential for progressive, let alone ‘radical’ identity

politics. The (still) ongoing and largely self-serving celebration of dispersed,

fragmented, plural and hybrid or hyphenated identities do not conform

effective forms to challenge ‘fundamentalism’, to contest ‘essentialism’ or to

disrupt ‘fixed identities’.

On the contrary, set against the entire project of cultural studies which,

with the celebrated ascendancy of contemporary post-structuralist, post-

colonial, post-Marxist and post-national discourses, rests on the radical

pluralization of cultural identities, for Žižek this form of identity politics

amounts “ultimately (to) fight(ing) a straw-man” (27). It amounts to fighting a

straw-man because the empty point of universality to which Žižek alludes in

clear reference to Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s Hegemony and

Socialist Strategy (1985) is already occupied or filled in by a particular

content. In the case of British multiculturalism, to put an example close to us,

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there is no such a thing as the Anglo-Saxon (or English) ethnic minority

competing for recognition at a level par with African-Caribbean, Muslims, Gay

and Lesbian, people with disabilities, Scots, Welsh, Irish… in order to define

what Britishness is. It is rather this particular content (Englishness) which has

historically exerted the hegemonic function and succeeded in overwhelmingly

calling the shots, so to speak, by both stepping outside the chain of

differences and secretly filling in the empty point of universality through the

very medium of the (supposedly neutral) British national institutions (state,

media, cultural establishment etc). Britishness is thus the absent centre, the

unmarked political sign; it is as Stuart Hall pointed out in the “Conclusion” to

Un/settled Multiculturalism “the empty signifier, the norm, against which

‘difference’ (ethnicity) is measured” (2000: 221). This is indeed still so

regardless of some new reactive English identity consciousness raising

exercises on compensatory grounds (i.e.: if the Scots have St Andrews why

not St George? If the Welsh have an Assembly we also want a Parliament,

etc.

So finally, talking of local nations and the state in Britain, what about

then Joseba Sarrionandia’s global Tales from seven count[r]ies of the world

(2008)? Is there any way of establishing a comparison between the legendary

pragmatism of always triumphant Britishness and the no less legendary

propensity to Basque subordination and the narcissism of the loser? The

question is less mind-boggling or foolish than it seems. For if only taking a

look to the clear-cut multiculturalist strategy Sarrionandia deploys in his Tales

(open-minded spirit of respect and tolerance of the other, celebration of

diversity and minority-marginal cultures, hybridization, multicultural education

etc) does he not, mutatis mutandi, deploy the same anglo logic of the

unmarked empty signifier or absent centre? In other words: by reproducing

and respecting the particular mores and customs of other ‘native’ cultures,

does not Basqueness secretly occupy a privileged universal position?

Certainly, a first objection to this argument could stem from drawing

attention to three particular narrators whose ‘Basque’ origins are all too clear,

namely Zize Larralde from West African Republic of Cape Verde where a

community of political refugees still persists: Silvia Mariñelarena from Spain

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whose Basque sailor antecedents are given to us, and Marie Jeanne Borthiry

whose rural background in the French Basque side is central to her account.

The obvious objection would consist of pointing out how these three

hyphenated Basque identities interrelate just at the same level par of

marginality as xibaro Diego Armando Carrera, Saharan Mohamet Tagit,

Japanese Osamu Akutagawa and Eskimo Margaret Atatakhak, and that

hence the multicultural logic of Basque ethnic subordination still persists.

However a closer look also allows the possibility of forcing a new

interpretation whereby the tales put together in this book could reveal

imaginary accounts of a bygone past. A past namely where the images of the

Basque refugee, sailor and farmer fill in the mythical-fantasmatic image of the

‘authentic’ internal Other, much like the English bowler hat and umbrella

wearing gentleman or the heroic King’s buccaneer who, if anything, also

contribute to securing the hegemony of a universalised particularity.

Sarrionaindia, therefore, under the guise of reclaiming a position of

marginality also gives, nevertheless, a giant step towards removing the

cultural qua ethnic vestiges of Basqueness from the surface level of external

appearance as well as, most importantly, allocating the privileged empty

space of universality to carve out its own course, as it were, towards the

hegemony of the civic and the political. In other words, Sarrionandia

envisages the Imaginary possibility of a truly post-independence scenario

whereby the Real of antagonism in its surface national form has already been

deprived of its traumatic qua violent-subjective kernel, whereby, that is to say,

the substance of ethnicity has already dissolved into a civic symbolic order

hegemonised by a new unmarked, empty signifier qua absent centre. As

Zizek states in a recent paper called “Multiculturalism; The reality of an

illusion”: The truly unbearable fact for a multiculturalist liberal is an Other who

effectively becomes like us, while retaining its specific features.3 Thank you.

3 S. Zizek “Apendix: Multiculturalism: The reality of an illusion” http://www.lacan.com/essays/?page_id=454 , accessed 22/03/2010

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