Coda: Multiculturalism, the Reality of an Illusion

      In a critical reading of my plenary talk at the Law and Critique Conference in 2007, Sara Ahmed challenged my claim that it is an “empirical fact” that liberal multiculturalism is hegemonic.⁴⁶ Her first step was to emphasize the distinction between the semblance of hegemony (ideological illusion) and actual hegemony:

      Hegemony is not really reducible to facts as it involves semblance, fantasy and illusion, being a question of how things appear and the gap between appearance and how bodies are distributed. To read hegemony we have to distrust how things appear. Indeed, what is striking about Žižek’s retort is how much his reading of “political correctness” and “liberal multiculturalism” involved a certain literalism, as if the prohibition of speech acts that are not based on respecting the other’s difference are “really” what is prohibited, or as if the prohibition is simply real by virtue of being articulated within public culture. So the speech act, “we must support the other’s difference,” is read as hegemonic, is taken literally as a sign not only that it is compulsory to support the other’s difference, but that we are not allowed to refuse this support. The speech act is read as doing what it says. In order to re-consider the effects of such injunctions and prohibitions, I have introduced a new class of what I call non-performatives: speech acts that do not do what they say, that do not bring into effect that which they name. Could the speech work to create an illusion that we do support the other’s difference, which might work by not bringing such support into existence?

      My point is double here. First, I agree with the category of the “nonperformatives,” but with a twist: they are performatives, even very effective ones, but different from what they claim to be. There are other theoretical notions we can use to describe this duality, such as the “pragmatic paradox,” the gap between the “subject of the enunciated” and the “subject of the enunciation,” the “double bind”; there are nonetheless differences between these notions. The “double bind” implies an unbearable subjective tension (the proverbial mother who explicitly enjoins her son to leave home and start an autonomous life, but whose message between the lines is a desperate call for him to stay; the father who tells his son to act autonomously, but if the son effectively does so, he thereby asserts his subordination to his mother, since he is following her injunction), while the “non-performative” works smoothly, enabling you, as it were, to both have your cake and eat it, in other words to assert your superiority over the Other in/through the very gesture of guaranteeing their equality and your respect for their difference.

      When I claim that multiculturalism is hegemonic, I claim only that it is hegemonic as ideology, not that it describes the reality of the predominant form of social relations—which is why I criticize it so ferociously. So when Ahmed writes that “multiculturalism is a fantasy which conceals forms of racism, violence and inequality,” I can only add that this goes for every hegemonic ideology. I do not confuse ideological fantasy and fact—they are confused in reality: the reality of what Ahmed calls “civil racism” can only function through (in the guise of) the illusion of anti-racist multiculturalism. And, furthermore, an illusion is never simply an illusion: it is not enough to make the old Marxist point about the gap between the ideological appearance of the universal legal form and the particular interests that really sustain it—as is so common amongst politically correct critics on the Left. The counter-argument that the form is never a “mere” form, but involves a dynamic of its own which leaves traces in the materiality of social life, made by Claude Lefort and Jacques Rancière, is fully valid. After all, the “formal freedom” of the bourgeois sets in motion processes of altogether “material” political demands and practices, from trade unions to feminism.

      Rancière rightly emphasizes the radical ambiguity of the Marxist notion of the gap between formal democracy, with its discourse of the rights of man and political freedom, and the economic reality of exploitation and domination. This gap between the “appearance” of equality-freedom and the social reality of economic and cultural differences can be interpreted in the standard symptomatic way, namely that the form of universal rights, equality, freedom, and democracy is just a necessary, but illusory expression of its concrete social content, the universe of exploitation and class domination. Or it can be interpreted in the much more subversive sense of a tension in which the “appearance” of égaliberté is precisely not a “mere appearance,” but has a power of its own. This power allows it to set in motion the process of the re-articulation of actual socio-economic relations by way of their progressive “politicization”: why shouldn’t women also vote? Why shouldn’t conditions at the workplace also be of public political concern? And on we could go. If bourgeois freedom is merely formal and does not disturb the true relations of power, why, then, did the Stalinist regime not permit it? What was it so afraid of? In the opposition between form and content, the form possesses an autonomy of its own—one could almost say: a content of its own.

      To return to Ahmed: how, then, does multiculturalism as fantasy function?

      In such a fantasy, racism is “officially prohibited.” This is true. We are “supposed” to be for racial equality, tolerance and diversity, and we are not “allowed” to express hatred towards others, or to incite racist hatred. I would argue that this prohibition against racism is imaginary, and that it conceals everyday forms of racism, and involves a certain desire for racism. Take Big Brother and the Jade Goody story. You could argue that Big Brother’s exposure of racism functions as evidence that political correctness is hegemonic: you are not allowed to be racist towards others. But that would be a misreading. What was at stake was the desire to locate racism in the body of Jade Goody, who comes to stand for the ignorance of the white working classes, as a way of showing that “we” (Channel 4 and its well-meaning liberal viewers) are not racist like that. When anti-racism becomes an ego ideal you know you are in trouble.

      The prohibition of racist speech should not then be taken literally: rather, it is a way of imagining “us” as beyond racism, as being good multicultural subjects who are not like that. By saying racism is over there—“Look, there it is! in the located body of the racist”—other forms of racism remain unnamed, what we could call civil racism. We might even say that the desire for racism is an articulation of a wider unnamed racism that accumulates force by not being named, or by operating under the sign of civility.

      The best example one can imagine of this was the presidential election in France in 2002, when Jean-Marie Le Pen made it into the second round: reacting to this racist and chauvinist threat, the entirety of “democratic France” closed ranks behind Jacques Chirac, who was re-elected with an overwhelming majority of 80 percent. No wonder everyone felt good after this display of French anti-racism, no wonder people “loved to hate” Le Pen; by way of clearly locating racism in him and his party, general “civil racism” was rendered invisible.

      Similarly, in Slovenia recently, a big problem arose with a Roma family who were camping close to a small town. When a man was