The Future of Difference. Sabine Hark
useful description? That is to say, does it provide answers to the big questions concerning the society in which we actually live: What holds it together? What links exist between inequality, domination, integration and social conflict? And how might we (re)establish social bonds?
To be frank, we do not have answers to these questions either. Nevertheless, we believe that the question of what constitutes the exception – the sense of urgency justifying emergency measures – must be made far clearer than it has been previously. That being achieved, those of us who do not want to settle for a strategy of reductivism – or who have no desire to combat facts with affects, and statistics with feelings – would be hard-pressed to avoid treating matters of concern (that is, the things that concern us) with compassion, empathy and the determination to differentiate.
‘MORAL-SOCIAL SCIENCE’
Any good analysis of complex realities therefore requires of us an empirically oriented mode of thought – but one that is capable of appreciating the mutually contingent nature of various differences. It requires, in other words, ‘a moral-social science in which moral considerations are not suppressed and set aside, but systematically blended with analytical reasoning’, in the formula of Albert Hirschman.56 Of course, as Christina Thürmer-Rohr already advanced thirty years ago – in her analysis of the entanglements of femininity, feminism and patriarchal rule – categories like sensitivity, care, empathy, compassion and tenderness are neither context-free nor morally innocent.57
Rather, they are components of a relational morality which, albeit beautiful, is ultimately an abstraction. So even values like morality, dignity and respect must be critically unpicked, precisely because we cannot do without them as we go about the urgent task of reviving democracy. ‘In what social location’, we must ask, are empathy, concern and compassion to be found? How can they be tied to analyses that take us beyond mere fleeting affect? ‘Whom do they serve, whom do they benefit, who mobilizes them, whom do they fail, do they break, to whom do they turn to their opposite?’58
One way of summing this up is to stress, once again, the importance of understanding that our entire way of life is predicated on relations of subordination and its opposite, superordination: the fixing of things within endless hierarchies. These often subtle yet violent differentiations determine almost everything – actions, attitudes and feelings – for all of us. And, as we’ve stated, it is not the differences themselves that are the problem here, but the dominational logic of (de)humanization that subtends them and inflects the things they designate: man, African, victim, woman, human, queer, foreign, citizen, and so on.
DOMINATION CULTURE
Our book seeks to contribute to an understanding of the mechanism we call ‘othering and ruling’. We are convinced that difference is not, in and of itself, the problem: rather, the problem is the way differences are anchored, made meaningful and roped into everyday political life. And it is precisely for this reason that we feel it is crucial to understand the difference between at least two different kinds of differences. On the one hand, there are differences that are themselves committed to the knowledge that nothing on earth, especially not the human, is thinkable in the singular; as Hannah Arendt writes, ‘Not Man but men inhabit this planet.’59 On the other hand, differences are often conceived and motivated by domination. The latter kind of differentiation is best understood as driven by the will to misunderstand the many and ‘reduce them to quantity – to the number one’, in Christina Thürmer-Rohr’s formulation.60
We advance the notion of ‘othering and ruling’ so as to highlight a mechanism we take to be a core part of what the German theorist Birgit Rommelspacher calls ‘domination culture’.61 Rommelspacher’s framework designates a comprehensive social logic made up of an intricate web of mutually interacting dimensions of power. Above all, the term ‘domination culture’ focuses on the sphere of culture: the domain in which, today perhaps more than ever, the production and reproduction of difference, discrimination, segregation, vulnerability and danger are negotiated. And, finally, ‘domination culture’ sums up Rommelspacher’s contention, which we’ve already alluded to, that our entire way of life is couched in ‘categories of subordination and super-ordination’.62 This includes, of course, the way we create images of other people, and represents a tendency that has rapidly taken on an unprecedented virulence, what with the worldwide right-wing and populist-conservative capture of liberal democracy in recent years.
The French sociologist Michel Wieviorka, too, has long presented similar arguments, emphasizing the pre-eminence of culture. For Wieviorka, economic inequalities and social injustices aren’t just things that affect people; rather, as dimensions of discrimination and segregation, they define the most fragile and the most vulnerable in cultural terms that can then all too easily be expressed as natural characteristics (i.e., naturalized).63 Whenever we speak of ‘cultural differences’, we cannot, according to Wieviorka, remain silent for long on the subject of social hierarchy, inequality and exclusion. Questions of cultural right (or rights), moreover, simply cannot be discussed without involving social injustice in the debate.
Rommelspacher understands culture in a very broad sense as the ensemble of social practices and shared mediations through which the current constitution of a society and, in particular, its political-economic structures and its history, are expressed.64 Moreover, according to Rommelspacher, the dominant culture determines all behaviour – ‘the attitudes and feelings of all people who live in any given society’65 – and mediates between the individual and social structures. In Western societies, or so her book Dominanzkultur contends, this dominant culture is also a domination culture, which is to say, a culture ‘primarily characterized by different traditions of domination in all their different dimensions’.66 What we are scrutinizing, then, is these many and particular ‘forms and modes of domination’ which, as Beate Krais and Gunter Gebauer show, are encoded in our worldviews, constantly confirmed to us by our systems of reasoning, and transmitted to us via the social institutions that, in themselves, produce culture.67
Culture, then, is not a specific constellation of traditions, mores, myths and cuisines made up of various, alternately regional, religious or historical essentialisms. Culture is both the complex location and form of production of social knowledge and meaning. It is an unevenly available and authoritarian sphere that is productive of inequality – thus paradoxically not ‘merely cultural’,68 as Judith Butler says, but linked to all kinds of concrete material issues that determine access to resources. It is also, on the other hand, a place where societies and their members make sense of these circumstances, and thus provides the (only?) possibility of changing these conditions. Culture is form that is simultaneously indestructible and always in flux. Culture is the circulation of meaning and signification, which are constantly being limned and remade anew by that circulatory movement.
Prime among the relations of inequality culture reproduces (inequality of access, of participation and of interpretation) are: sexism and heteronormativity, racism, and class. These, however, are not to be understood as social divisions operating independently, but rather analyzed as a complex intersectional constellation. It does not make sense to categorize them, as many have unsuccessfully sought to do, in terms of ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ contradictions; nor to classify them, for example, as ‘vertical’ versus ‘horizontal’ axes of inequality; ‘ascriptive’ traits as opposed to socio-structural inequalities; or neatly partitioned struggles for ‘recognition’ on the one hand and ‘redistribution’ on the other. This is a decidedly erroneous approach that fails to recognize the extent to which visibility, recognition and representation are systematically connected to the flow of resources, power and opportunity.
For the aforementioned French sociologist Michel Wieviorka, the cultural and the social are always already ‘mixed’ to begin with when it comes to the contemporary formulation of the social.69 Power relations simply cannot be mapped according to a hierarchy in which the precise configuration of ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ contradictions can be precisely established. People are never simply one thing or the other, never ‘first’ a privileged researcher and only then female, lesbian