The Future of Difference. Sabine Hark
argue for denying differences, ignoring them, or even abolishing them. Quite the reverse: we urge remembrance of the fact that sociality itself would be impossible without differences – even as it is governed by them. The point, for us, then, is to develop an ethics of difference that is aware of its own sociality: an ethics that does not pretend differences exist in and of themselves, outside of social practice. This mode of relating would defend against the dehumanizing operations of contemporary fundamentalist differentiation which give us, for instance: ‘the black person’, ‘the asylum seeker’, ‘woman’, and ‘man’. It would simultaneously value the way that differences make practice and perception – not least the practice of critical differentiation – possible.
A MATTER OF CONCERN
We seek to distance ourselves equally from those who would have us believe that the world consists of opinions as from those who deem knowledge to be a simple matter of acquainting oneself with the facts. As urgent as it is – and it is, indeed, more urgent than ever before – to combat lies with facts, in truth, reality is not (only) made up of facts. For the simple reason that facts do not make up the whole of worldly experience, as Bruno Latour contends, real-ness has to be ascribed to them. We, as authors, do not therefore rely solely on matters of fact; rather, we adopt ‘a realism dealing with matters of concern’.28
‘Cologne’ is one such matter of concern, in the first place because, well, it concerns us. Second, as it clearly isn’t reducible to its punctual components, the sum of certain localized happenings, it cannot be reduced to a fact. To continue with Latour’s framework, however, we know that several conditions have to come together at once in order for a ‘matter of concern’ to take shape in a lasting way. Additional forces have to be in play; simple occurrences alone do not make reality. A ‘matter of concern’ comes into being as a result of media attention, political interpellation, cultural, religious, governmental and other interpretation, police action, scientific expertise, and much, much more. Since the world is not found but made – we make it – it behooves us to understand the mechanisms behind this making, this gathering up of the necessary components to turn mere objects into a public ‘thing’. Only then will we appreciate the opportunities afforded us to remake the world otherwise. And, after all, we must do so, for, as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie reminds us, ‘It does not have to be like this.’29
We are constantly hearing from those who profess to know exactly what the nature of the reality we inhabit is. We, by contrast, want to start by asking nothing but questions. If it is the case that ‘it is enough to create new names and estimations and probabilities in order to create new things in the long run’, then we must recognize that the world is constantly evading us, reforming itself ahead of us, just outside our grasp. As researchers, we are, in fact, ourselves part of this very process. Our scholarship is part of the creation of new things – including new perspectives on the world. Just like public politicking and media discourse, our endeavours manufacture worlds and (in Ian Hacking’s phrase) ‘make people up’.30 Words do things. It really cannot be stressed often enough.
Whenever words and concepts coagulate into operations of categorical classification, they risk generating what Sighard Neckel and Ferdinand Sutterlüty call ‘qualitative judgments of otherness’ (qualitative Urteile der Andersartigkeit) targeting individuals and groups – that is to say, drawing symbolic lines of membership or exclusion.31 They produce and reproduce – in ways always intimately bound up with whatever news developments, media narratives and political agendas are circulating in the contemporary political conjuncture – entire modes of social valuation. And, ultimately, these words and concepts flow – mediated by culture – back into the social reservoir of knowledge. This collective reservoir of meanings is what all members of society then inevitably draw upon when forming their notions of ‘self’ and ‘other’: making ‘judgments of otherness’ and deciding who is entitled to what, what is collectively owed to whom, and who isn’t even worth our attention.
INTERROGATING DIFFERENCES
Critical thinking must always, for these reasons, ensure it is not participating in the ongoing, violent process the nineteenth-century philosopher Hedwig Dohm referred to as Versämtlichung (otherization) of the world. Versämtlichung describes the epistemic mechanism by which – irrespective of the cause or political banner under which it takes place – we construct, ossify and maintain imaginary others. To avoid it, we must constantly question – indeed, call into question – all evidence, superficial or otherwise, of non-negotiable identity-based differences wherever they arise. Differences, be they markers of sexual, gendered, cultural or ethnic variation, should not be taken for granted or regarded as indisputable. Rather, we should understand them as contingent realities that are the product of specific historically and institutionally situated struggles. Differences, in other words, are the result of specific discursive strategies, practices and modalities of power. They are always provisional, but this does not mean they are in any way ephemeral or fleeting.
For example, in statistical and bureaucratic settings, social traits are not only attributed to social groups, they inevitably also act as a post-hoc rationalization of inequality, contributing to the consolidation of uneven geographies, especially when these (as signifiers of difference) have coagulated into full-blown categories of essentialized identity.32 As the feminist social theorist Regina Becker-Schmidt contended some time ago, in order to really understand social inequality, we first have to understand the social force of attribution itself.33
To do that, it is just as vital that we learn how to liberate difference, not just from the rigid dyad of the universal versus the particular, but from all essentializing mystifications: the ‘eternal feminine’, ‘Africa, the dark continent’, ‘men who don’t listen and women who can’t read maps’, and so on. Hedwig Dohm was amazed at the ‘incomprehensible contradictions’ that characterized male judgments about women in the nineteenth century. She wrote:
Woman is a potpourri of antagonistic qualities, a kaleidoscope that can bring forth any given nuance of character or colour if one simply shakes it up and down. According to the critical mass, the basic ground of the feminine spirit seems to be a fog of sheer chaos, a primal mist whence the voice of Man’s Creator can simply call into being whatever properties Man so happens to desire.
It is thus crucial that we learn to decrypt all binaries, perceiving that they bind opposites to one another in the act of defining and separating them. This endeavour not only constitutes an end in itself (for example, this is the entirely legitimate form it takes in academia, notably in gender studies) but, further, helps disembed and make visible the mechanisms of real-life domination inherent in discursive dualism. It is not, in that sense, sufficient to grasp the process by which social actors get ‘classified’; we must go beyond that and interrogate the conditions under which classificatory distinctions are hatched. Instead of accepting a given identity as a premise when thinking about difference – that is, presupposing that that identity exists, thereby removing it from criticism – as we’ve suggested, we have to think in difference about difference, and learn to differentiate between differences. What matters most to us is recognizing that some differences are harmless, even joyful, while others hold in place the poles of a global matrix of domination, as Donna Haraway attests.34 So, it is not so much whether but, rather, the question of how differences are activated politically that spurred us on when writing this book.
RESPONSIBILITY, SITUATEDNESS, ‘FRIENDSHIP WITH THE WORLD’
Totalizing ways of seeing – ‘the Muslim’, ‘the woman wearing a head-scarf’, ‘the economic migrant’, not to mention ‘feminists’, ‘identity politics’, ‘Germans and Islam’, ‘women and men’, ‘whites and blacks’ – are, needless to say, simply not an option for us. Not only do they mask the internal heterogeneity of all things, they deny the partiality and positionality of every speaking position. And, ultimately, any view that is not considered ‘partial’ is always going to invoke ‘the’ unmarked category, the putatively white, male, cis, heterosexual, able-bodied subjectivity that history has enforced as a self-evident universal. The peculiar power of this unmarked position lies, paradoxically,