The Future of Difference. Sabine Hark
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NO BLUEPRINTS
For all these reasons, we strongly oppose any attempt to interpret a given social position as a blueprint for an identity, or even for attitudes. If you are white, for example, you may not necessarily think or act in racist ways, but you have to acknowledge that you benefit from the accrual of a racist dividend. This dividend will differ again, depending on your positioning along other axes such as age, physical appearance, religion, gender, sexual orientation, education level and citizenship. Again, those who belong to an educated elite do not necessarily have to ‘be’ elitist; the point is that they should acknowledge and strive to be accountable to the fact that they systematically benefit from these privileges, even where they are not consciously deployed. Institutional privileges do not function in the same way for everybody.
In a spirit of friendship with the world, we must recognize one thing – a necessary and often unmanageably complex-seeming characteristic of this ‘rotten present’ – namely, that one is always multiply situated within these constellations. That one exists within an educational elite does not, for example, simply negate one’s ‘migration background’ or a childhood spent among a majority-Catholic German rural proletariat; likewise, being a lesbian does not negate one’s whiteness. In keeping with this complexity, the conversation about difference must free itself once and for all from the ‘positional fundamentalism’ that is currently spreading its reach on both the Right and the Left. The question of the inter-imbrication of divergent, often equally intimate, sometimes contradictory divisions in contemporary society must finally be brought to the centre of the discussion.
Modes of scholarship dedicated to the use and development of the Marxian concept of ‘articulation’ strike us as particularly useful here. Given the enormous wealth of theoretical literature and empirical research premised on ‘articulation’, we will only gloss the concept very summarily. The important thing to note is that what we (in the German context) would call ‘articulation theory’ deals in conditions, relations and dynamics rather than categories and group identities. It inquires above all into the contingent social production of difference, for example, via race, nation, geography or gender.
Instead of beginning with a preconstituted category of female oppression, for example, articulation theory focuses on precise historical instantiations of that relation, pinpointing specific institutions, forms of knowledge, practices and norms that produce ‘woman’ as a racialized (and heterosexualized) category. The same goes for the category ‘race’. Racism, argues race theorist Avtar Brah, ‘is neither reducible to social class or gender, nor wholly autonomous. Racisms have variable historical origins but they articulate with patriarchal class structures in specific ways under given historical conditions.’70
Articulation refers to a practice: a practice of linking two or more ‘relational figurations’, for instance, gender, class or ethnicity. It is, to be precise, a form of connection-making that does not necessarily give rise to any unity; and if it does do so, that unity needs to be understood as neither essential nor determinate nor necessary nor permanent, as Stuart Hall shows.71 Articulation denotes, then, not so much a straightforward relation between given entities as a nexus transforming the identity of the linked elements.
Articulation itself is a transformative process. For example, when they become articulated, gender and race do not remain unchanged; they are never simply added together. Our social identities are not merely the sum of the social positions to which we belong, such that one might boil oneself down to an additive equation [white + female = me]. Rather, the ‘I’ of any subject is (re)produced as white within shifting parameters of femininity and masculinity, and rendered female within shifting parameters of race, sexuality and class.
Laclau and Mouffe emphasize another dimension of articulation we’ve already touched upon, that is, the construction of ‘nodal points’. The function of nodal points is, to fix meaning, to get the incessant movement of the social to stand still, to foster new differences and call up new subjectivities. Nodal points provide us with a reality, or rather a way of seeing. It is through nodal points that realities become reality. For Fredric Jameson, the articulation ‘is thus a punctual and sometimes even ephemeral totalization, in which the planes of race, gender, class, ethnicity, and sexuality intersect to form an operative structure’.72
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