The Future of Difference. Sabine Hark
in the shadow of the particular, the ‘marked’, and the divergent, which we force into the light. It is imperative to constantly ask, then, why what we see is what we see; where are we seeing from; and what are the limits on this seeing?
Once again: what we are describing here is a practice of critical, self-reflective positionality. By no means do we mean to vindicate, in this, a trivial relativism. At stake is our ability to see what is available for us to see, to perceive what we have been taught to perceive, and to know that something is missing. This means becoming willfully alert and curious with regard to that which is hidden (in part because we are hiding it). It means making things into matters of concern. Relativism, on the other hand, is a way of claiming to be nowhere and everywhere the same. According to Haraway, relativist accounts of the relation between identity and positionality are usually just a way of denying responsibility and of preventing us from critically responding to it.35
In contrast, Haraway’s theorization of situatedness insists on shared responsibility for the practices that give us power – the authors of this book, for example, are called to account for our responsibility as privileged workers and intellectuals. This isn’t about a ‘fundamentalism of positionality’ that seeks to derive an inescapable standing in the world from a given position occupied by the speaker within the space of the social.36 ‘Positionality’ does not imply that a particular social position – female, Jewish, lesbian, middle class, Catholic, working class, migrant, refugee, white, Bavarian – inevitably entails any particular opinions, attitudes or beliefs stemming somehow, ineluctably, from the position in question. It certainly does not define the experiences that can be lived by individuals positioned thus. Quite the reverse: we understand positionality to be all about recognizing that social positioning does things to us – things we cannot really help – in dynamic and complex ways. What we can do, however, is adopt an attitude vis-à-vis our positionality, cognizant of the fact that it is in our power to do things with it in return. In fact, it is probably impossible not to.
The alternative to, on the one hand, epistemic totalitarianisms that lump the world into opposites and, on the other, relativisms that do not care about it at all, can only be ‘partial, locatable, critical knowledges’.37 Solidarity is the name for this web of connection in politics; in the field of epistemology, it is called dialogue, conversation, debate. Our book is committed to it. We hope this will contribute to ‘a more adequate, richer, better account of a world’ but also a ‘critical, reflective relation to our own as well as others’ practices of domination and the unequal parts of privilege and oppression that make up all positions’, to quote Donna Haraway again.38 For us, this has as much to do with ethics and politics as it does with epistemology, knowledge or truth.
Regrettably, responsibility is widely thought instead ‘in terms of the obligation to answer for oneself, to be the guarantor of one’s own actions’, to quote Achille Mbembe’s critique.39 What we require is a different stance – seeking to think not so much about as with the world – namely, a stance of empathy qua intellectual orientation. This intellectual empathy embraces the influence of the world, neither grasping all random feeling willy-nilly nor attempting to defend itself against vulnerability, against touch. Nevertheless, it enacts ‘resistance to that which is forced upon it’, as Theodor Adorno writes in Negative Dialectics.40 It raises the question, posed by Judith Butler, of whether one can ‘lead a good life in a bad life’ – that is, a world in which ‘the good life is structurally or systematically foreclosed for so many’.41 It demands that we do ‘sciences from below’, making sense of the world through epistemic processes that centre the perspective of the most marginalized.42 One thing to centre, to give just one example, might be the phenomenon known as ‘household air pollution’, which, according to a World Health Organization (WHO) study, accounts for the premature death of some 4 million people annually, most of them women and children.43 Scientifically and politically, such forms of slow violence would certainly become public ‘things’, ‘matters of concern’, under a regime of radical empathy. Christina Thürmer-Rohr had a memorable name for the epistemic commitment we are talking about. She called it ‘friendship with the world’.44
DOUBT IN DOUBT
To espouse friendship with the world is to modulate how we act every bit as much as how we think (insofar as we would even wish to establish a difference between the two). It is to hesitate before passing judgment, but it is never indifference. It is to be sceptical of affective reactions without, however, cynically rejecting affect. Cynicism serves, in a sense, to augment its bearer, helping her gain a putative distinction vis-à-vis whatever it is othering. But it can offer nothing by way of justice to those who will suffer from the resultant loss of solidarity. The attitude to the world that we want to foster, in contrast, seeks to acknowledge what is known while, at the same time, defamiliarizing and alienating that knowledge – re-examining things from perspectives different from one’s own – and thereby expanding one’s perception of the world. This, in turn, demands that we challenge ourselves, as far as possible, always to spell out our reasoning, instead of relying on local and available repositories of common sense and general truths.
Hannah Arendt, following Immanuel Kant, referred to such a disposition, premised on the ability to take others’ perspectives into account, as an ‘expanded’ practice of thought.45 Instead of adding to the great number of urgent diagnoses people are producing at the moment – instead of generating value for the seemingly ever-intensifying ‘attention economy’46 – we trust ourselves, even at this troublesome juncture, to doubt. We are seeking to go against the grain of what Pierre Bourdieu calls ‘doxa’, that is, the ensemble of that which is taken for granted and unquestioned.47 Instead of inferring contexts for things, we think it more apt to ask: What is it that is brought into context for us, such that an emergency, an urgence (urgency) or ‘state of exception’,48 in Foucault’s terms, is created?
And what is the precise nature of this ‘emergency’ situation anyway, which is supposedly caused by excessive liberality around questions of identity, too much political correctness, too little attention to the social mainstream, too much consideration for the concerns of sexual, gender and racial minorities – all of which, so its proponents claim, is what made right-wing populism possible?49 What kind of ‘emergency’, when the challenges associated with immigration and integration have to be negotiated primarily as a matter of internal security to be tackled, among other things, by a garment police50 – and when the topics of terrorism, sexual wrongdoing and Islam must be treated as an indissoluble unity?51 Meanwhile, the right-wing violence that has long been endemic to the country, such as the murders committed by the neo-Nazi National Socialist Underground (NSU), are not regarded in this way.52 Rather, they are routinely treated as non–ideologically motivated acts by individuals.53 Why does the everyday, systematic dimension and massive scale of sexual violence against women, and of violence against refugees (their persons, shelters, dwellings) – including violence against people perceived as migrants – not constitute a ‘state of emergency’ in the same way as did the violent attacks in Cologne?
Should we agree that it is an ‘emergency’ that Germany is a divided country,54 a society in which, as Oliver Nachtwey contends, ‘collective fear of downward mobility seems to be universal’55 – driving citizens into the arms of the far-right Pegida and AfD? Or should we not first ask: Whose precariousness is visible and perceptible to us, and whose is not? Whose vulnerability do we take seriously and understand as our own? Is the embitterment of the alienated, predominantly white, heterosexual, ‘autochthonous’ German middle class the only form of resentment that counts?
And, finally, why should we entertain for a second the idea that an individual’s gender performance, deemed deviant in the eyes of the presumed majority, somehow leads to widespread insecurity, aggression and violence? If this were the case, would not lesbian, gay, bisexual, intersex, trans and genderqueer people, whose sexuality is relentlessly called into question and rendered permanently insecure, by the same logic, be especially violent and aggressive? And wouldn’t everybody then have to demonstrate