Some Reflections on the Opposition and Oppression

1.  We live at a time of great desperation for the opposition. I’m calling opposition what one might otherwise call “The Left”. I’m choosing to use this term as I think it better reflects the manifold currents and forms of revolt which exist today (in whatever protean or diminished form). By saying opposition (or those who oppose the status quo) I am demarcating my object by reference to the solidity of that which is opposed. The solidity or at least consistency of the Right being I think of far greater degree than the opposition. In this way it is at least possible to speak of a collection or set of forces without essentialising or creating false unities. This is all to the good as there is very little practical unity in the opposition and I see no virtue in covering over this fact with synthesizing theory.

Where might someone point to show a victory or even the signs of moderate progress? Is it even possible to show examples of the government’s program being hindered in any way? Perhaps I’m being too pessimistic, there was the reported delay in changes to disability living allowance and the victory for the campaign to save Lewisham hospital A+E. All in all though these appear to be only delays and minor set-backs in what continues to be a massive attack by neo-liberalism on working people and the welfare state. What’s more for every small local victory there seems to be a larger corresponding defeat. Witness the privatisation of Royal Mail with barely a shot fired; witness the slow dismantling of the NHS and its non-reporting by the BBC. And in recent weeks there’s been the Unite Union routed at Grangemouth and the end of ship building at Portsmouth.  Where is the opposition, and what is it doing?

At a time when you might expect alternative politics to be flourishing the traditional organised far left have gone from borderline irrelevance to total disarray. In truth the rise of so called horizontal and social media centred forms of organisation like Occupy, Anonymous, and UKuncut had already shown up the antiquated nature of the old revolutionary party model, attracting a layer of activists suspicious of central committees and prescribed cannons of revolutionary literature. These old groups could however still muster a decent demonstration or short lived united front campaign, and continued to recruit from the student body. This tenuous grip, however, has over the last year been almost completely relinquished though a number of splits and scandals centred on a series of rape allegations in the Socialist Workers Party. Although it was these allegations and their handling that was the occasional cause for the mass resignations which followed, the scandal also prompted wider criticism from within the movement of the Leninist party model and its relevance to contemporary struggles. Everything from feminism to attitudes towards social media and the integration of current “intersectionalist” forms of social criticism were now very publicly being discussed. All this against the background of an SWP leadership that seemed determined to go down with the ship.

Although the SWP is only one party (the largest on the far left though perhaps not for much longer) its continuing collapse has perhaps been more prominent than it otherwise would have been thanks to coverage by a group of social media activists and writers collectively monikered the “Twitterati” or “left commentariat”. I’ve made several references to these individuals before, in particular highlighting their role in the dissemination and operation of so called “privilege theory”. Beyond their interventions into the SWP crisis this group of journalists and some-time activists form a coherent group or faction within the opposition and have become something of a bête-noire for parts of the traditional left and other non-aligned movements fed up with their stream of liberal pseudo-radicalism. There is a whole counter-discourse to their online comments that seeks to challenge their preeminence and reveal the less than radical implications of their writing. I suppose I would count myself at least nominally in this latter group. Perhaps more disconcerting are the limited signs of an alliance between these individuals and some of the elements that split off from the SWP crisis. The taking up of privilege theory and a risible fixation on what one might call the politics of Miley Cyrus is indication enough of a lack of discernment amongst those involved and that there is very little worthwhile that might be salvaged from the splintering of the Leninist party. See this recent intersectionalist mash-up from Laurie Penny and the International Socialist Network’s Richard Seymour for more grist to this banal satanic mill.   

Keeping busy Penny has also broken new ground along with her commentariat buddy Owen Jones by appearing on Auntie’s flag ship political spectacle Question Time; thus making the leap to “official” opposition. Here I am fully in agreement with Russell Brand’s analysis the other week that participation in the mainstream political spectacle does little more than justify an irredeemably corrupt system. Although I note that Brand didn’t extend his criticism to establishment institutions like Question Time, appearing as he did on the show in June this year. If I was harsh I might say that Brand shares with Penny and the majority of the commentariat a propensity to never let principle get in the way of an opportunity for self-publicity. A recent defence of Jones and Brand along the lines that they are the people “most responsible for raising class consciousness in the UK in the last few years” totally obscures the question as to how their interventions direct and mold that consciousness and whether they offer a genuine opportunity for collective organization or just tokenistic rhetoric easily absorbed by our well oiled parliamentary democratic machine. While I support the critique of identarianism and its liberal moralizers, replacing identity with personality will not lead us out of the “Vampires Castle”. If we can steel ourselves away from the simplistic enjoyment of having aspects of our politics aired in the enemy’s camp we might better be able to address these questions. I don’t wish to labour on these people for any longer than is necessary. It is sufficed to post this excellent summing up from a denizen of that den of inequity known as Urban75.

“The bottom line is if you subscribe to any materialist analysis of the world, you are going to spend your political life being accused of sexism and homophobia by Laurie Penny unless you renounce your 20th Century misguided notions of socialism you're the enemy. Anyone too stupid, too uneducated, too technologically illiterate to partake in the narrow and elitist discourse of intersectionalism either at university or on twitter is a rape apologist, misogynist, privilege keeping piece of shit to these people. That this means they can pour scorn and contempt and effectively write off millions of people, for being white, being male, being healthy, being thin, being [insert non-transferable privilege category], it means they can politically rationalise their deep-felt hatred for anything that's not in their tiny fucking bubble. And whilst they do this the left withers and dies, unable to win support from anyone outside this exclusive club, and the far-right wins the support of millions of alienated people all throughout Europe.”

2.  For all the talk of oppression and privilege (and there is little else besides talk), there is a remarkable lack of discussion on precisely what constitutes a thing or state of affairs as oppressive. If I’m short in stature (which I am) in a room full of people six foot plus I may well feel self-conscious but am I oppressed? How about the relationship between teacher and pupil, or father and child, both of which entail considerable disparities between the individuals involved. Generally one knows if one is actively being oppressed; it’s a feeling much like a sickness without a discernible cause. Its symptoms can range widely: depression, outbursts of rage both righteous and undirected, self-loathing, shame, fear and despondency; the effects can manifest physically too.  Sometimes though these feelings are not linked by the sufferer to an agent or structure responsible and are instead directed towards some perceived personal failure. The government wants us to think this way about people on benefits and the disabled and those who never manage to “get on”. People like this we are told are simply lazy or lack the requisite ambition or will to spend every waking minute selling themselves. Since they blanket the media and are enforced through policy these ideas begin to be internalised even by people who are most harmed by them. There begins the the cognitive dissonance and misrecognition that are the signatures of what Marxists call ideology.  Ideology, as Louis Althusser diagnosed in the 1960s isn’t simply an epistemic error. It is not the case that the subject perceives a social world and then misunderstands it; rather ideology is the frame or constitutive matrix of understanding through which the social world is viewed and into which we as subjects are “interpolated”. It is coextensive with any situated perspective and since it is not an error of reason it cannot be reasoned away. Thus construed, misrecognition, as we learn from Jacques Lacan is always first and foremost self-misrecognition, and since ideology is in effect “in” the subject, gives to the subject a place and ground for understanding,  it can never be totally eliminated and altering it is no small task. The effects of oppressive conditions on the ideational content of representations and their concomitant influence on conduct was known long before the advent of Marxian and psychoanalytic jargon. One of the most influential instances was Mary Wollstonecraft’s analysis of the effects on women of their subservience to men.

“It is vain to expect virtue from women till they are, in some degree, independent of men; nay, it is vain to expect that strength of natural affection, which would make them good wives and mothers. Whilst they are absolutely dependent on their husbands they will be cunning, mean, and selfish, and the men who can be gratified by the fawning fondness of spaniel-like affection, have not much delicacy, for love is not to be bought, in any sense of the words, its silken wings are instantly shrivelled up when anything beside a return in kind is sought. Yet whilst wealth enervates men; and women live, as it were, by their personal charms, how can we expect them to discharge those ennobling duties which equally require exertion and self-denial” (Wollstonecraft 1995 pg230)

These insights apply to the situation of women in the late 18^th century ideas inherited from the classical Republican tradition, a tradition which viewed liberty in a manner far removed from our own, even from those who today make most use of the term ‘oppression’. For Wollstonecraft and for the classical theorists of liberty what made power (any power) intolerable was not its mere existence but its arbitrariness. It was the unchecked, arbitrary power that men had over women that Wollstonecraft correctly diagnosed as putting them into a state analogous to slavery. Slavery is of course a state of domination in which even if you happen to be under the yoke of a mild mannered benevolent master you are still thoroughly dependent upon their grace and thus totally unfree. In such a state even if you are left unmolested your conduct, much like the conduct of the fawning women described by Wollstonecraft is affected. You won’t do anything to antagonise your master/husband; you will do or say whatever you can to keep him onside, and you certainly won’t speak out even if you feel you have just cause. We can easily imagine this transposed to political absolutism where bowing and scraping ministers of state tell the King only what he wants to hear for risk of reprisals. Under such relations of domination free-speaking (distinct from the formal right of free-speech) or speaking truth to power (Parrhesia as the Greeks called it) is extremely difficult and this in turn puts the fate of the polis itself into jeopardy. For if truth is foreclosed by fear and unchecked power corruption and barbarism naturally follow. The same goes for the possibility of individuals forming any freely assumed ethical disposition; insofar as such an ethos is dependent on a degree of autonomous will free from the fear of arbitrary interference we can say with Foucault that ‘the slave has no ethics’ (Foucault 1997 pg286).  

There are at least two important conclusions to draw from this: firstly, in distinction to the theory of negative liberty a person under a relation of domination does not actually have to be interfered with to be rendered unfree. The existence of arbitrary power over a person is sufficient. Thus you may work for a thoroughly generous and pleasant boss who you have never seen as much as raise his voice to anyone, but since in your workplace you have no grievance procedures or protection from being arbitrarily sacked, and there is no right to appeal or tribunals system in your country you are still very much in a relation of domination relative to him.  Secondly, since it is arbitrary relations of power and not power per-se that we are dealing with here, the notion of ‘oppression’ which we see being used so often needs qualification. Is the Niqab oppressive? Are high heeled shoes? I have seen both described as such. Since I think it is specifically relations of power we are talking about when we talk of social oppression it seems something of an abuse of language to describe any item of clothing as in-and-of-itself oppressive. As I elaborated in my previous post the political significance of the Niqab has been wildly interpreted by different parties; indication enough that rather than having any fixed meaning in-itself the multitude of meanings map onto the contours of a social antagonism that reveals the workings of power not just on the political but also the ethical landscape of our society. The example of high heeled shoes also calls out for an analysis along these lines and would no doubt yield a very different complex of power relations and normative imperatives compared to the Niqab. It is for this reason that subsuming both under an undifferentiated concept of gender oppression is highly unproductive, not least as it ignores the different ethical forms of subjectivity that are implicated in both cases.

It is this ethical side to power, how power affects the possibility of constituting ourselves as ethical beings which is often missing from discussions on oppression both in the intersectional and more conventionally Marxist camps. Wollstonecraft was acutely aware of the relationship between power and ethics and like the classical authors she studied saw the possibility of attaining virtue and the Good Life in being free from the sort of arbitrary power that women in her time were subjected to. In the modern era of neo-liberal individualism and freedom from all regulation whatsoever the notion of liberty that comes quickest to contemporary minds is best summed up by a gentleman from Iowa I encountered at the base of the Statue of Liberty last year. He told me liberty was “doing what you wanna do when you wanna do it”. We can laugh but in truth much of what neo-liberal society teaches us can be summed up by that pithy phrase. Freedom is freedom from the obligations and constraints that necessarily accompany life in a political community. From this perspective there is no room for the possibility that power might be enabling as well as constraining. The person of liberty is no longer the citizen of a properly constituted city but a paranoid loner holed up in an isolated farm house, gun under the pillow.

 3.  This kind of extreme libertarian thought is what animates the more conspiratorial wing of the opposition. Clowns like David Icke and Alex Jones (both of whom have received attention from the mainstream media in the last twelve months) are its most conspicuous adepts. But fellow travellers ranging from 9/11 truthers to full on reptilian New World Order lunatics can be found in or around pretty much all of the recent non-aligned movements from Occupy to Anonymous. Perhaps the most disheartening trend of the last few years has been the growth of this kind of conspiratorial analysis over more rationalist and socialist forms.  They are in effect the opposition that best mirrors our contemporary situation.  It is here that you can find most of the theoretical flux between overtly right wing positions like that of the US Republican Tea party and nominally more progressive forces like Anonymous. Both are likely to view power, whether in the form of the state or corporations as intolerable in and of itself, although the Tea Party do tend to focus on the former (by a bizarre twist of logic they tend to view the latter as an emanation of individual free enterprise even in the case of multinationals). The denuding and diminishing of communality implicit in this form of thought engenders  such “progressive” alternatives as the Free Man on the Land movement; a bizarre fantasy construct of legal theory where saying the right words in court or signing your name in capital letters will exempt you from taxation or paying for electricity.  For these people being compelled to contribute to a joint pot that might keep the street lights on or provide for universal healthcare and fire-fighters is tantamount to having ones kidneys removed. The legal mysticism that marks out the Freemen is the only unique part of a mind-set that is remarkably common in the US and increasingly prevalent here. Right across this spectrum of libertarian thought it is the simplistic view of power as purely a force of constraint which leads to their very similar and ultimately non-political form of politics; that is, a politics without political community, a politics of the wilderness.

The Republican (or neo-Roman) idea of liberty which has recently been given new impetus by the work of Quentin Skinner and Philip Pettit ¹ offers a way out of this deadlock. It offers activists a way of thinking about power in society that bypasses the liberal and libertarian dualism of freedom and constraint. It suggests that power whether in the form of a properly constituted state or in any of the multiple forms of collectivity can be used to enable individual liberty rather than hinder it. Labour laws, employment tribunals, legislation guaranteeing sick pay and restricting the ability of bosses to arbitrarily sack people are all ways in which power can be deployed in such a way as to free people from potentially dominating relations. Pettit has gone so far as to describe such a strategy as anti-power. Insofar as the power of the state is deployed against the power of employers to nullify to an extent some of their ability to dominate individuals this kind of relationship is antagonistic (on the distinction between antagonistic and agonistic relations see the final section here). The collective power of trade unions is supposed to work in a similar way. The limit I think to this theory is that while it views power in a more positive light it still views its nature as essentially restrictive, albeit in this case by restricting the arbitrary power of some groups in order to enable the liberty of others. Pettit’s work is also notable for his focus on the notion of deliberative democracy and the important role of public contestation of power in both its statist and private form. This nod to the classical humanist emphasis on civic participation is for me one of the most attractive features of the neo-Roman theory.  From the side of the subject however it holds onto the liberal notion of the self-constituting individual endowed with rights whose ability to realise the Good corresponds to the degree in which they can maintain those rights and free themselves from interference, in this case arbitrary interference.

To counter this limitation I think that Foucault’s work, and in particular his later writing on the relationship between power, ethics, and what he called technologies of the self, offer significant advantages over and attenuation of the neo-Roman theory. As we’ve already seen in the discussion of Wollstonecraft Foucault shares with the theorists of republican liberty the idea that freedom equals non-slavery, with special weight being given to the insight that conditions of slavery or domination negatively affect the ability of subjects to constitute themselves as ethical beings. The principle difference between him and more analytic theorists like Pettit is in his insistence that power is always already there, that one is never outside it, that there are no margins for those who break with the system to gambol in (Foucault 1980 pg141). Furthermore he proposed the provocative thesis that power was not solely restrictive but “generative”, i.e. that individual subjects were at least partially constituted through it rather than just oppressed by it.  He also departs from the liberal enlightenment tradition in his critical attitude to the supposed subject of Rights and sceptical approach towards the kind of juridical consensus based deliberation favoured by Pettit. He notes that the institutional and communicative practices of such a deliberative model while pertaining to a universal and neutral form of communicative discourse are themselves the result of numerous struggles and social conflicts, the facts of which when obscured tend to background differences in communicative idioms and privilege the viewpoint of dominant groups. Thus any consensus reached in this way cannot be the basis of a power relation, but, at best its instrument or result. In itself such procedures cannot guarantee our freedom from arbitrary power.

Foucault’s anti-humanist and more holistic approach also bears upon the relationship the subject has to themselves in the sense of not being a slave to ones appetites or desires. Freedom, or rather ‘practices of freedom’ have the form of being a type of self-mastery in conjunction with others so as to minimize relations of domination. Crucially though unlike the Marxian promise of disalienation under communism such resistance against domination does not hold the possibility of a revelation that would uncover a true or authentic subjectivity beyond the view of power. There is no return to itself in the uncovering of humanity’s species being, rather the subject is always first and foremost the subject of power. But that does not mean that we are mere docile bodies, thoroughly subjectivized by impersonal forces around us. While the subject is always in-and-of power it is also the resisting subject, the subject of contestation and counter-conduct who refuses a form of governance and seeks to test its limits, and in doing so opens up new possibilities of subjectivity and forms of life.

4. There is a distinction which Foucault mobilised late in his life between relations of power and states of domination which I think could be well deployed in the intersectional discussions on oppression. The latter are states of such utter subjection, where the disparity between the parties is so great that negotiation or contestation is negligible or absent. These states are closest to those which animated the classical Republicans and led to the comparisons with slavery. Relations of power on the other hand require a degree of freedom on the side of the subject in order to function, where the dynamic between the parties admits of a degree of fluidity and changeability. It is these kinds of relations that predominate in liberal society, which as the French philosopher argued, entails at its heart a productive / destructive relationship with freedom. As he precisely diagnosed: “Liberalism must produce freedom, but this very act entails the establishment of limitations, controls, forms of coercion, and obligations relying on threats etcetera” (Foucault 2010 pg64). Thus it seems we have an admission from Foucault that freedom in the negative tradition, as non-interference, still has a place in his theory. A space of non-interference in which relations of power can be contested is a necessary condition for what he calls games of truth and practices of freedom to be conducted. As such: “liberation from states of domination is sometimes the political or historical condition for a practice of freedom” (Foucault 1997 pg283).

Within this hybrid theory of liberty and domination that is neither negative nor fully positive self-mastery is not so much a set of prescriptions identified with a teleological conception of the Good, the achievement of which would enable an individual to be considered free; but rather it is a constant technique or “care of the self” through which an individual gives themself the rules of law, the techniques of management, and also the ethics, the ethos, the practice of self, which would allow these games of power to be played with a minimum of domination”(Foucault 1987 pg18). As highlighted by the Canadian philosopher James Tully, to contest a rule within a relation of power is not the prolegomenon to freedom but the practice of freedom, the enlightenment ethos itself (Tully 2009 pg127).

If we apply this idea to the sorts of “oppressive” relations held up in recent intersecionalist discussions, say physical attractiveness, we can see that it is difficult to construe the relationship between the relevant parties as being either a state of domination or in itself oppressive. Attractive people may have some advantages over people considered less attractive but that in no way means they have the ability to arbitrarily interfere with the lives of others. We could well consider the normative criteria of physical attractiveness arbitrary but the relation of power between those individuals and the rest of society is clearly not. Thus an appropriate approach to the disparity between those considered attractive and those who are not isn’t a kind of liberationist politics where the yoke of pretty people is to be overthrown. Rather, it is the more complex system of relationships that produce the arbitrary norms of physical form that should be tackled. This might involve contesting forms of cultural authority like the media and fashion industry that promote particular body images; struggles for recognition of different body forms in public life; and of course attacking the wider and all pervasive culture of commodification that runs through much of how we think about ourselves and our place in the world. A great deal of this is dependent on democratic forms of contestation and thus also implies the possibility of alliances with similar minded individuals and further struggles in other areas of social life to enable progress to be made². Crucially, activists engaged in these sorts of struggles should recognise them as just the sorts of games of truth and practices of freedom that Foucault theorised. They are struggles that take place within power rather than just against it. They are fought not in the name of an essential identity but instead towards the possibility of an autonomous subjectivity, capable of renewal, always critical, with the possibility of thinking and acting differently. Or again: such practices aim not at self-liberation but rather the possibility of, and care of the self, with all the ethical implications that follow.

Taking this all into account I hold that the concept of oppression in circulation in much of the opposition’s discourse is inadequate. Firstly it holds the false promise of a world “beyond oppression”, which I take to mean the deactivation of all power, and thus to be impossible. Secondly the current trend for movements against social “oppressions” of various kinds has led to the elevation of the identarian category of ‘subject who is being oppressed’ (always singular, always essential). To the familiar class, racial, and women’s oppression we have now a huge spectrum of persons (or ‘wheel of oppression’. You can find it on Google) vying for status as oppressed identities to the detriment of all forms of collective solidarity. From where amongst these atomised micro sects of the “oppressed” do we find the potential for new forms of communality?  As I have tried to show there is another story which mobilises a tradition of politics and theory that gives us a more differentiated and I think more productive approach to power and domination in modern society. It takes the classical Republican insights regarding the undesirability of relations of domination and how those relations can affect the ethical constitution of an individual or community; and utilising Michel Foucault’s work we can see how power in social life is multi-faceted, dispersed, and does not entail merely repression but through our interactions with it constitute the possibility of living any ethical life whatsoever.

Our current political situation is a confusing spectacle. As I alluded to at the beginning the solidity of the Right, of the forces that are ranged against the opposition, represents a better starting point for talking about resistance to the status quo than the increasingly beleaguered term The Left. As should be clear from the above discussion, to describe some currents within the opposition as socialist, Left, or even progressive is way off the mark. With this in mind I think the distinction I have tried to present between states of domination and relations of power represents a much better theoretical frame through which to understand the terrain of contemporary politics than the undifferentiated catch all of ‘oppression’ to which seemingly anyone can attach their banner. Moving away from this term and the concomitant gamut of oppressed identities would permit the opportunity for a renewed focus on thinking community along the lines of resistance to arbitrary power and the necessary forms of democratic organisation needed to contest power relations including forms of government. Such thinking would ground community (whether a community of activists, or otherwise) in terms that eschew essence or identity and which put autonomy, ethics, and the overturning of domination at the heart of politics.

Notes:

1 - See Pettit’s Republicanism: A theory of freedom and Government for detailed exposition of his political theory. Skinner’s Liberty before Liberalism offers a concise genealogy of republican freedom.

2 – Whichever strategy is deployed I cannot see any justification for the sorts of terroristic moralising done by some purveyors of privilege theory. Are disparities between individuals in society significant? Very often. Are they morally significant? In most cases I cannot see how. The fact of someone being blessed with height or physical attractiveness, or even being born white or into a rich family is not in and of itself morally significant, and I cannot but loath the attitude that to be born into “privilege” of any kind is to be a priori morally culpable, no more than I am culpable for being born in London and not Mogadishu.

References:

Foucault, Michel 1980 – Power/Knowledge (London, Harvester Wheatsheaf)

Foucault, Michel 1987 - The Ethic of Care of the Self as a Practice of Freedom: an Interview with Michel Foucault on 20 January 1984: in J.Bernauer and D.Rasmussen (eds), The Final Foucault (London, MIT Press)

Foucault, Michel 1997 – Ethics:Essential Works of Foucault Vol 1 (London Penguin Books)

Foucault, Michel 2010 – The Birth of Biopolitics (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan)

Tully, James 2009 - Public Philosophy in a New Key: vol. 1, Democracy and Civic Freedom

(Cambridge University Press)

Wollstonecraft,Mary – A Vindication of the Rights of Men and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press)

Bigotry Unconcealed: The Islamic Veil Again

 “A king, a vainglorious Senate, a Caesar, a Cromwell must above all veil their plans in a religious shroud, compromise with all the vices, flatter all the parties, crush that of upright men and oppress or deceive the people, to reach the goal of their perfidious ambition”. (Robespierre – 5 February 1794, Speech to the National Convention in the name of the Committee of Public Safety)

The Liberal Defence of Unfreedom

So once again we find ourselves discussing the merits of defending freedom by enforcing unfreedom. In this instance it’s a familiar target and familiar debate; the Islamic veil, or more precisely the question of whether the niqab (this is the veil that covers the face revealing only the eyes) should be banned in public places. The occasion for this is a little obscure. A ruling last week by Judge Peter Murphy required a woman standing trial to remove her niqab in order to give evidence, although she could keep it on at other times during proceedings. The ruling appeared to be a fairly balanced compromise between religious freedoms and legal protocol and at no point did the judge raise the issue of the status of the niqab in general. On the same day however pompous Liberal Democrat home office minister Jeremy Browne raised the issue of a need for public debate on face veils and suggested a possible ban on wearing them in public places such as schools. The ostensible reason for this pressing urgency is the need for the State to protect a girl’s freedom of choice! Hence you see the confusion and the premises underlying Browne's clarion call to Liberal concern. For opponents, the niqab is a sign of religious conformity, one that “people should be able to call deeply offensive without being accused of being bigoted or islamophobic”. And most of all those who wear it have most probably been forced. By this token would not a ban on circumcision be a more pressing matter? Circumcision is after all one of the most important signs of religious affiliation for Jews, and is unlike the wearing of a headscarf or veil not something that can easily be undone. Furthermore unlike Muslim girls who only take up the niqab or hijab at puberty, circumcision is practiced on infants who have even less resources to resist. But no, such an argument misses a central point; that is for its opponents the niqab is not just a sign of religious affiliation but a threat to democracy and the “British way of life”!

The news from last week contained a characteristic hodge-podge of mixed justifications; protecting young girls from religious conformity, defending Liberal democracy from separatist practices, ensuring transparent legal processes, and of course the typically woeful polls of ‘the man on the street’ which elicited such pearls as “when in Rome, do as the Roman’s do”. JS Mill would be proud. What is undoubted though is that attacks on the veil have great symbolic value and play to a traditionally right wing audience fretting over the specter of “Islamification”. Such threats and calls for “debate” also serve to normalize the kind of discourse practiced by the likes of the EDL and BNP whose tactics tend to veer towards the firebombing of Islamic cultural centers rather than the sort of cozy question time discussions Browne might have in mind.   

France of course banned the niqab (and other full body coverings such as the burqa) in public places during Sarkozy’s presidency and issues on the spot fines and threats of arrest for women who defy the will of the Republic. But that ban was only the latest salvo in a long running battle over the status of traditional Islamic dress. The issue initially reached a crucial point in 2004 when the hijab, the headscarf that only covers the hair was banned under a law which banished “conspicuous signs” of religious affiliation from French state schools. The debate which preceded the enacting of the law, which focused around a commission led by the unfortunately named Bernard Stasi is one which the current crop of defenders of liberal values at Westminster would do well to study.  That there was even a commission set up at all was demonstrative of how times had changed from 1989 when the French Conseil d’Etat declared that the hijab was not in itself incompatible with laïcité and made reference to the European Convention against Discrimination in Education. Laïcité is the particularly French gloss on separation of church and state, which in France has an especially thick reading when applied to the public sphere, including state schools. It should however be noted that it was designed to apply most of all to public officials (including teachers) rather than school children themselves. 

Misrecognising the Other
It was Sarkozy (the Rat Man again!) who raised the issue in 2003 in the wake of the “war on terror” when he insisted that Muslim women pose bare headed for identity photographs. “The new Republic, down with hats!” cried philosopher Alain Badiou in an ironic response. As Joan Wallach Scott observed in her book coving the controversy, the tough stance taken against the hijab was a sign of unwillingness or impotence on the side of the government to address a problem it shared with many other European states: how to adjust national institutions and ideologies that assume or seek to produce homogeneity to the heterogeneity of their current populations (Scott 2007 pg40). Their approach can arguably be said to have backfired as it was reported that in the years during the controversy more girls took up the hijab, construing the decision as an act of defiance at western attacks on Arab countries and the demonization of their faith. But more than that, what was particularly indicative of the supposedly neutral establishment position was the attitude shown to the women who wore the hijab.

In the numerous articles and reports that were produced during the years of controversy and consultation (particularly around the Stasi report of 2003) the voices of the girls wearing the hijab were rarely included. Also of note was that where Muslim girls were able to voice their opinions in favour of the hijab and deny being under the yolke of their male elders, their statements were all too often accused of having no rational basis and the girls of being under a veil of religious ignorance. The hijab, for philosopher Alain Finkielkraut (1), made the girls blind and deaf, losing the senses that connect them to the world and preventing them from developing their rational faculties. And Jacques Chirac writing in L’Express back in 1994 conflated the hijab and the full face veil while making associations between its wearers and militant Islamism when he stated that “wearing the veil, whether it is intended or not, is a kind of aggression”. Here we see a strange ambiguity, also in evidence in the UK, where Muslim women are seen as both victims and threats.

As has also been the case in the UK, the public discourse in France was heavily skewed in favour of characterising Muslim girls as an undifferentiated group under patriarchal subservience. The debates did not provide an effective process of contestation for those who would be affected by the legislation, and ignored the counterfactual testimony of those who did speak of readily of adopting the hijab as an autonomous decision fully compatible with liberal democracy and freedom of religion. All too often the Islamic community as a whole was characterised along stereotypical and racist lines that associated it with pre-enlightenment values that could not be integrated into French culture. The clash of civilizations rhetoric that in the UK frames any discussion of Islam and which reaches its extreme with the crusader ideology of the EDL is a natural consequence of systematic stereotyping and objectification which goes unchallenged day after day  in the media. Another French philosopher (that's quite a few for this post) Etienne Balibar has termed this kind of prejudice racist internationalism (Balibar and Wallerstein 1991 pg 61); a multifaceted prejudice founded upon a mythological conflict between the ‘modern European forces of enlightenment’ and a supposedly pre-modern barbarity that is both threatening at the margins of nations and degrading them from within.

Misrecognising Ourselves
Finally, what also distorts this discourse and undermines the establishment claim to be upholding some kind of universal liberal ideal is that the view of Muslim women presupposed by those who argue for State intervention is primarily influenced by a western social historical perspective, in particular by construing a normative account of what a liberated female should look like and be able to do. The claim that the open liberal version of emancipated femininity offered by western democracy is more egalitarian than others is disputable when its prevailing norm is drawn along lines of sexual availability, the seemingly unconditional imperative to reveal and promote ones physical form, and not least the ever expanding panoply of images offered by media, advertising and pornography that serve to fix women as mere objects of a male gaze and slaves to self-absorbed consumerism. “The leitmotif of their messages revolve around the idea that when Muslim women are free to sleep with as many men as they want to, then they will be integrated. Liberty is measured by the number of sexual acts they engage in” (Scott 2007, pg165). Taking this into account could the wearing of the niqab not equally be construed as an effective act of resistance against our overly sexualised culture?

The virtual and objectified version of the Muslim community that the debates in France constructed and the media here maintain, are seemingly mirrored by an equally virtual notion of the objectively neutral and eternally virtuous liberal state whose polity of abstract equals is to be ranged against the elements of communal inequality lurking in “broken boroughs” and divided Northern towns of Britain. What this liberal ideology is unable to witness is the ways in which formal abstract equality before the Law has nevertheless left many of the patriarchal structures and stereotypes in place, and is constantly skewed by very concrete racism congealing as a byproduct of the “war on terror”.  ‘Visibility’ might just as well be the signature of this controversy, drawing together as it does discourses on security and democracy. Today CCTV is ubiquitous in towns and cities, technologies of observation and security have become such an everyday part of life that people barely recognize let alone question its presence. We are required to hand over an ever greater quantity of personal information to government and corporations. Biometric data is incorporated into travel documents; online activity is monitored and scrutinized by service providers and state agencies. We are encouraged to become our own jailors by being vigilant and reporting suspicious activity wherever we may go.  Transparency, visibility and security have become synonymous as operators in modern democracy. This permanent state of observation engenders just the sort of paranoia that the Committee for Public Safety suffered from during the Terror when Robespierre spoke of treachery and those who covered their plans under a religious veil. What is revealed is safe and good, what is hidden challenges not only the orthodoxy of transparency but the security of the state itself. There is predictable collateral in this ongoing war against the concealed, and nowhere has the articulation of security and transparency into a single apparatus been more marked than in the controversy over the Islamic veil.

The rumblings over the niqab witnessed this week may well die down, but the underlying causes of this intolerance; the spectacle of anti-Muslim propaganda pumped out by the media, self-interested politicians selling out to the Right, and above all the never ending State of Exception that is the “war of terror”, have yet to be addressed. From the perspective of a power that desires the permanent visibility and observation of citizens, the figure of the veiled women cannot but provoke anxiety. She, who by the calling of a higher identity takes up the invisibility that we all supposedly have before the Law; and yet by this display she unveils the fear and prejudice that is the truth of our “neutral, liberal“ democracy.

1)      – Finkielkraut testimony to the Debre commission in Aline Baif, “Le debat sur la laicite scolaire,” ProChoix, nos. 26-27 (Autumn 2003), pg 89

-Balibar,E and Wallerstein, I 1991 - Race, Nation, Class Ambiguous Identities (London, Verso)
-Scott, Joan Wallach 2007 - The Politics of the Veil (Woodstock, Princeton University Press)

The Desire of Luc Ferrari

I’m currently working on couple of projects but owing to the summer break and the toings and froings that this period naturally lends itself to they’ve been slow to develop. One is a two part essay with the broad title In Defence of Political Spirituality. This is firstly a response to a fairly recent text on Michel Foucault’s writings on Iran; a series of writings which I think have great import for our times, and particularly for ongoing events in the Middle East. Secondly this piece will address some aspects of Foucault’s later writings on spirituality and its relationship with other discourses like science, theology, and philosophy. The critique the authors of the above mentioned text make of Foucault hinges on what I argue is a misunderstanding of this admittedly strange idea; it is nevertheless an idea I consider worth defending.

The second project is a reanimation of my occasional musical endeavours in the form of a piece of electronic composition. The inspiration for this was a visit last month to the little Italian border town of Ventimiglia and my love for a certain French composer; Luc Ferrari (1929-2005). Ferrari has always been my favourite of the early electronic music pioneers.  Like Iannis Xenakis and Pierre Henry, Ferrari’s first electronic works were produced under the guidance of Pierre Schaeffer the founder of the style of electronic composition called Musique Concrete, and later the composing and theoretical collective Groupe de Recherches Musicales. Ferrari’s works from this period (roughly 1958-63) exhibit the abstraction and dislocation characteristic of Schaeffer’s school, with the latter’s signature acousmatic approach to sound (the isolation and transformation of recorded sound distinct from its source to create an uncanny effect) central to their style. But it wasn’t until the technology allowed Ferrari to take his recording gear out into the environment that he really found his voice. When he did it sounded very different to that of his contemporaries. Heterozygote of 1963-64 was the turning point. Where the Musique Concrete style would take a recorded sound, say a fragment of conversation, and transform  it through tape manipulations into something a little alien; in Heterozygote Ferrari collages numerous little snippets of incidental sounds, conversations and instrumental sources leaving them untreated. The results of this comparatively long form type of composition were a prototype for what he would later call anecdotal music.

The series of composition which fully realized this new direction (and much more besides) were the Presque Rien’s (Almost nothing) the first of which, Presque Rien #1 le lever du jour au bord de la mer, is one of the classics of tape composition and a precursor for what we now call field or environmental recordings. It consists of a daylong ‘out of the window’ recording Ferrari made whilst staying in a fishing village on the Adriatic. This long recording he edited down to a twenty two minute piece of almost poetic inspiration. The village wakes amid the slow buzz of cicadas, an antiquated van clatters into life and moves off into the distance. There are birds, dogs and other wildlife, people at work, and the occasional unintelligible voice. Being devoid of any conventional musical sounds or even any overt manipulation of the source Presque Rien encourages an entirely different form of listening, one that highlights the narrative quality of everyday sounds, the suggestive poetic juxtaposition of elements within an environment, and places a far greater demand on the listener’s imagination.The link below goes to an almost full version of Presque Rien n.1. For some reason the YouTube add-on to Blogger can't find it to imbed it in the text. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKq-LRYv1Q4

It’s often taken to be the case that this piece was Ferrari’s attempt to realize John Cage’s famous statement that music was all around us if only we had the ears to listen. But I think there’s something more going on, and besides Cage’s use of environmental and concrete sounds never approached the subject matter with the degree of sensuality that Ferrari injects into his work. He wasn’t interested in abstracting the absolute quality of sound from its source, or opening up the composition to total indeterminacy as Cage had done. The anecdotal form which Ferrari termed this style of tape composition takes Schaeffer’s original insights on the uncanny quality of everyday sound and romanticizes it. Ferrari, something of the dandy, stands in stark opposition to Xenakis’s brutal modernism or Pierre Henry’s rendering of ancient religious texts into strange minimal concrete melodramas. Ferrari’s concerns were much more with what Andre Breton called the Marvelous; that strange aspect of an object beyond its everyday qualities suggestive of other more poetic meanings.

Like Max Ernst Ferrari deployed unconventional techniques to his objects of choice, rendering them displaced, in unfamiliar circumstances, open to metaphorical readings. In the fine tradition of surrealism he doesn’t construct narratives but rather rearranges objects from everyday life, highlighting possibility, movement, and emotion. But what make me love him most is that he creates sensual, dare I say sexy tape compositions, brimming with desire. Recall that for the surrealists one important facet of the marvelous is that it’s not so much found as “encountered” by chance. In the sleeve notes to a CD of sonic “souvenirs” he writes “the cycle des souvenirs also means that all the elements are structured in cycles which when superimposed, produce chance encounters. That’s why everything is turning. In this turning of sound and image, memory is written in a distorting mirror, but one where everything is true”.  Like Breton in Nadja he takes on the role of the flaneur stalking the streets with his microphone in search of a soul in limbo. His marvelous object might be something quite small like the cicadas in the Presque Rien’s or it might be something very loud like the fireworks in Promenade Symphonique Dans Un Paysage Musical Ou Un Jour De Fete A El Oued En 1976 (1976-87). But more often than not, like a thread in the labyrinth, it is a feminine quality that draws his attention. It could be the female voices that enter into Presque Rien Avec Filles (1989), the dialogue and building eroticism between the two young women at the centre of the astonishing Danses Organique (1973), or perhaps simply the sound of his wife Brunhild, an ever present companion on Ferrari’s travels. One of my favorite compositions of his from the 1970s is Place Des Abbesses (1977), named after a square halfway up the hill of Monmartre, situated suggestively between the Sacred Heart of God and the Pigalle area of sex shops and license; Breton would no doubt have approved.

Ventimiglia, to draw the discussion full circle, was the subject for the fourth of the Presque Rien series. It involved Ferrari and his wife recording their assent into the medieval part of the town. By this point in his career Ferrari had expanded his ideas on the form of the Presque Rien and now introduced what he called the lie or perversion into the concept. This involved a greater degree of intervention on his part into the raw material of the recording, adding effects or even (as he makes clear on this occasion) entirely foreign sounds into the mix to evoke an element of fantasy and interpretation within the anecdotal form. My composition which will be formed around a thirty minute recording I made whilst descending the medieval town with my partner will also include a considerable amount of fantasy and interpretation. The thing which struck me most when listening to my raw material and Ferrari’s piece was the similarity in the natural sound world considering the twenty-three year gap between the recordings; children playing in the square in front of the church, violin practice wafting out of an open window high above us, a scooter passes by, snippets of TV, radio, conversation, and the bells from the tower of San Michele Arcangelo ringing out at noon.  Here are a few photos of the area which might suggest the sort of sound environment we encountered.

Finally this is in fact the second Ferrari ‘tribute’ piece I have attempted. The first of which I titled Presque Quelque Chose (Un Voyage à la Cathédrale Avec des Oiseaux). This was recorded in Paris in 2006 and documents life around the street where I used to stay in the 15^th arrondissement and a little journey around the Ile De La Cite, including a mass at Notre Dame Cathedral! In hindsight it’s a little rudimentary and the material (crowds, cars etc) a little mundane. Though, I still rather like how I used a flock of pigeons taking flight as a “jump cut” to change locations. If anyone is interested it can be downloaded here. I’m planning for this new piece to be quite different and more complex. After a period of inactivity after his death in 2005 there has recently been several re-releases and new interpretations of his work coming out. Under the guidance of his widow Brunhild, Ferrari’s considerable oeuvre now has a website worthy of it which collects archive material and other resources well worth checking out. www.lucferrari.org.