Liberal Multiculturalism is the Hegemony Its an Empirical... http://www.darkmatter101.org/site/2008/02/19/liberal-multic...

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Liberal Multiculturalism is the Hegemony Its an Empirical Fact A

response to Slavoj iek
by Sara Ahmed
19 Feb 2008 Comments (7) Print
Posted: General Issue [0] | Commons 5 Share 122

In his plenary talk at the Law and Critique Conference (2007)[1] Slavoj iek repeatedly asserted
that liberal multiculturalism and its politically correct premise of respecting the others
difference is hegemonic. When asked questions about this position from the floor, he stated
insistently that it was an empirical fact that liberal multiculturalism was hegemonic, and
challenged anyone to prove otherwise. I am writing this response as a way of taking up his
challenge.

It is worth stating from the outside how difficult it is to begin with empirical facts when trying to
establish what would be the best description of a hegemony, that is, the dominant way of ordering
things that reproduces things in a certain order. 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 the real. To read hegemony we have to distrust how things appear.
Indeed, what is striking about ieks 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 others 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 others difference is read as hegemonic, is taken literally as a sign not only
that it is compulsory to support the others difference, but 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, and that do not bring into effect what they name.[2] Could

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the speech work to create an illusion that we do support the others difference, which might work
by not bringing such support into existence?

So lets re-consider liberal multiculturalism as a fantasy. In one of his famous examples, iek
considers postmodernism as a fantasy that extends forms of violence. The postmodern
organisation wants to be friendly, wants to have the appearance of collegiality, wants not to be
seen as having authority over you. The postmodern leader wants to be your friend, a follower
amongst followers, we might even say. Quite rightly, iek argues that such postmodern forms of
authority extend the violence of authority precisely by concealing authority under the illusion of
friendship and civility. Force is all the more forceful when it no longer appears as force. Feminist
critics have long taught us this point that it is in intimate spaces predicated on fantasies of
equality, reciprocity and love that violence is more structuring, as it goes unnoticed and unnamed.

We can read multiculturalism as a fantasy in exactly the same terms. The multicultural
organisation wants to be seen as diverse; as bringing everyone together; as respecting difference,
as committed to equality. Such an organisation would use brochures of colourful faces; diversity
would be a sign of the very qualities or attributes of the organisation. In other words, diversity
becomes an ego ideal. The multicultural nation also takes diversity as an ego ideal, as if it has
achieved diversity because of its qualities or attributes. We can see this at stake in the making of
the multicultural nation: Britain is represented as being multicultural because of its national
character: as being tolerant, open, loving, hospitable, and so on.[3]

I would argue that multiculturalism is a fantasy which conceals forms of racism, violence and
inequality as if the organisation/nation can now say: how can you experience racism when we are
committed to diversity? In my research project on diversity in organisations, when Black staff
spoke about racism, organisations often responded by pointing to their race equality and diversity
policies, as if these policies were the point. Black staff spoke of how they deal with whiteness
everyday and how diversity and equality as organisational ideals get in the way of reporting these
experiences. You are asked to be a tick in their box by smiling with gratitude, adding colour to the
white face of the organisation. Diversity as an ego ideal conceals experiences of racism, which
means that multiculturalism is a fantasy which supports the hegemony of whiteness.

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.[4] You could argue that Big Brothers 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 gross 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 that. By saying racism is
over there look, there it is! in the located body of the racist other forms of racism remain
unnamed. 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. This
imaginary prohibition is taken up as if it is real, which allows individuals to declare that being

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racist is prohibited (the probation happens, but that is not the point). Racism then becomes a
minority position which has to be defended against the multicultural hegemony. The desire to be
seen as anti-racist is taken up as an expression of a prohibition, which is what allows racism to be
articulated as a minority position, a refusal of orthodoxy. In this perverse logic, racism can then be
embraced as a form of free speech. We have articulated a new discourse of freedom: as the
freedom to be offensive, in which racism becomes an offence that restores our freedom: the story
goes, we have worried too much about offending the other, we must get beyond this restriction,
which sustains the fantasy that that was the worry in the first place. Note here that the other,
especially the Muslim subject who is represented as easily offended, becomes the one who causes
injury, insofar as it is the Muslim others offendability that is read as restricting our free speech.
The offendible subject gets in the way of our freedom. So rather than saying racism is prohibited
by the liberal multicultural consensus, under the banner of respect for difference, I would argue
that racism is what is protected under the banner of free speech through the appearance of being
prohibited.

In fact, I want to put my argument in stronger terms. I would argue that the hegemonic position is
that liberal multiculturalism is the hegemony. This is why the current monoculture political
agenda functions as a kind of retrospective defence against multiculturalism. The explicit
argument of New Labour is that multiculturalism went too far: we gave the other too much
respect, we celebrated difference too much, such that multiculturalism is read as the cause of
segregation, riots and even terrorism. So now migrants must be British; we must defence
integration, as a defence against multiculturalism, which in turn is what threatens the well-being
of the nation. We have a return to national pride as a defence of Britishness, as if this is a minority
position. (One suspects that hegemonies are often presented as minority positions, as defences
against what are perceived to be hegemonic, which is how they can be presented as matter of life
and death.) Take the following quote from the Home Office report, Strength in Diversity: In
recent years weve focused far too much on the multi and not enough on the common culture.
Weve emphasized what divides us over what unites us. We have allowed tolerance of diversity to
harden into the effective isolation of communities, in which some people think special separate
values ought to apply.

Note also this involves a reading of the other as abusing our multicultural love: as if to say, we
gave our love to you, and you abused our love by living apart from us, so now you must become
British. We have a double fantasy here: both that migrants were respected or received with love (as
a description of the history of race politics in the UK on suspect we are talking here about history
as a national fantasy, or the nation as a historical fantasy) [5], and then that this love was abused.
Migrants enter the national consciousness as ungrateful. Ironically then racism becomes attributed
to the failure of migrants to receive our love. The monocultural hegemony involves the fantasy
that multiculturalism is the hegemony. The best description of todays hegemony is liberal
monoculturalism in which common values are read as under threat by the support for the others
difference, as a form of support that supports the fantasy of the nation as being respectful at the
same time as it allows the withdrawal of this so-called respect. The speech act that declares liberal
multiculturalism as hegemonic is the hegemonic position.

Notes

1. This conference was entitled, Walls and took place at Birkbeck College, 14-16 September
2007. See: www.criticallegalconference.com/programme.pdf []

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2. See Ahmed, Sara (2006). The Non-Performativity of Anti-Racism, Borderlands. vol 5, no 5.

www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol5no3_2006/ahmed_nonperform.htm []

3. See my chapter, In the name of Love, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 2004, Edinburgh
University Press for an elaboration of this argument. []

4. For further discussion of the politics of Big Brother and racism, see the editorial by Ashwani
Sharma and Sanjay Sharma, Celebrity Big Brother Dialogues: The Global Pantomime of Race.
site/2007/05/07/editorial-celebrity-big-brother-dialogues-the-global-pantomime-of-race/ []

5. In one speech by Trevor Phillips, for instance, We need a High-way code for a Multi-ethnic
Society he evokes the colonial as a good sign of British character: And we can look at our own
history to show that the British people are not by nature bigots. We created something called the
empire where we mixed and mingled with people very different from those of these islands.
Empire here become proof that British are not bigots, but are able to mix and mingle with
others. Indeed, empire itself becomes a sign of a British tendency towards happy diversity;
towards mixing, loving and co-habiting with others. The violence of colonial occupation is
re-imagined as a history of love (a story of mixing and mingling), whilst colonialism itself
becomes a happy sign of a certain national disposition. Here, diversity, mixing and
multiculturalism become happy insofar as they are gifts given by the British towards others.
Phillips gave this speech on October 3, 2005, to the Conservative partys Muslim Forum. See:
www.blink.org.uk/docs/Trevor_Phillips_speech_Nov05.pdf. []

Tags: multiculturalism, zizek

Sara Ahmed is Professor in Race and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths

All posts by: Sara Ahmed | Email | Website

Other pages visited by readers viewing this article:

Transgressing Virtual Geographies

Revisionist Multiculturalism and its Neo-Racist Proclivities
Obama and the Centrality of Race
Racism and Islamophobia
Abstaining for the BNP

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7 Responses

1. ben pitcher on 20 Feb 08 at 11:43 am:

Id add to Sara Ahmeds critique that the problem she describes is a problem innate to the
theory of hegemony, and that it highlights what we stand to lose by giving up on
multiculturalism as a form of progressive political practice.

The game of hegemony involves a kind of popularization that involves passing off radical
ideas as commonsensical. Of course, this is a territory that can also be contested by ones
political enemies. Alternative or contradictory interpretations can indeed overtake and
overwhelm an original meaning, yet not entirely destroy an association with that meaning.
As a result, the particular meaning that is instantiated after such a contestation often looks
like, but is not (to put it crudely) the thing we originally had in mind.

This is exactly what has occurred with the concept of multiculturalism, as described above.
The meaning of multiculturalism has, in certain respects, effectively become detached
from a progressive politics, and has been articulated to some quite reactionary agendas:
multiculturalism has indeed been hegemonized from the right. It has, in Ahmeds
terminology, been turned into a liberal monoculturalism. And yet there remains a lingering
identity here, for this monoculturalism continues to operate under the guise of
multiculturalism: it is a non-performative speech act that names, resembles, but does not
actually bring about a progressive politics. It is, in other words, quite possible for us to
recognize and take seriously the discursive hegemony of multiculturalism (a la iek), and
yet maintain (following Ahmed) that there is often a profound disjuncture between what the
concept says, and what it does.

The real problem that faces is us what to do next. One possibility would be to give up on the
concept of multiculturalism as soiled goods; the other would be to recognize that such a

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manoeuvre would be to prematurely give up on the concept in the midst of hegemonic

struggle it would be to transform a temporary setback into a permanent defeat.

For the reason why the concept of multiculturalism is being used at all in the contemporary
politics of race is because progressive political struggle has made it hegemonic. That the
term has been co-opted to reactionary ends does not detract from, but actually reinforces this
fact. To recognize that the hegemony has been hegemonized is surely proof that the concept
remains in contestation, that its meaning is not fixed now for all time.

Why is it important that we continue to contest the concept (or, put another way, why should
we consider it a problem to concede multiculturalism to the right)? The central issue here is
one resources. Although theoretically infinite, the critical resources available to us are
effectively limited by their contextual and institutional elaboration. The institutionalization
of a certain politics means there is a particular character to the rights claims of anti-racism:
this is the hard fought for territory on which progressive struggles have been focused. To
give up on the concept of multiculturalism as (weak/corrupted/co-opted), is effectively to
hand over a key conceptual resource of progressive struggle to the right. The point is that
there are only so many resources at our disposal, because such resources need to be
developed and refined over time. Though there is always a progressive position to take
beyond or behind a divested resource, it will invariably lack the hegemonic quality of the
divested resource itself by virtue of its novelty and institutional immaturity (this is the
problem of ultraleftism).

This is not to say that it is impossible for a progressive anti-racist politics to reinvent its
conceptual resources: this is of course an absolutely necessary process that enables the
modification of a progressive politics in the context of historical change. Whats problematic
and what is of course troubling about the position that appears to be taken by iek here
is an inattentiveness to the pragmatics of conceptual reinvention, and the failure to recognize
precisely how long the institutional elaboration of a politics takes. If we are to describe the
politics of multiculturalism in terms of a theory of hegemony, then we should recognize the
full implications of hegemonic practice: in this case, that even a first defeat remains very
much a part of an ongoing struggle.

2. ash sharma on 24 Feb 08 at 9:32 pm:

A few thoughts:

I dont think there is such a significant difference between Sara Ahmeds astute analysis of
liberal multiculturalism and Slavoj ieks critique. In rather simple terms, iek would
argue that liberal multiculturalism and liberal monoculturalism are two mutually constitutive
modalities of contemporary global racism. The more substantial difference, and maybe this
is effectively implied in ieks elevation of liberal multiculturalism as being hegemonic, as
a critique of liberal-left positions, is what do we do politically the issue that is rightly
raised by Ben Pitcher. Here ieks position is quite clear and consistent he does not see
multiculturalism as a site of hegemonic struggle. There is no progressive form of
multiculturalism for him. In fact, by marking it as the master signifier of politics, we end up
with contemporary modes of liberal racism, sexism(i.e. others remain as others to be
tolerated, but deprived of their radical Otherness)

ieks argument is really about the broader cultural turn in politics. If we want to hold on

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to a politics of multiculture then what form does it have to take now? What is the relation
between culture and politics? Hasnt the fantasy been that multiculturalism can articulate
particular, at times contradictory and oppositional struggles, into a hegemony of progressive
social politics? Does this become impossible when progressive projects such as feminism
and anti-racism are themselves how racism and sexism operates? e.g. liberal white feminist
critique of Muslim patriarchy becomes the justification for Islamophobia etc. Of course this
has always been the challenge (and maybe the limitations) of hegemonic politics but arent
we now in a situation that the very grounds in which the hegemonic struggle takes place is
contained within the contours of liberal-capitalist post-political democracy. A space,
exemplified by liberal multiculturalism, where differences are allowed but as long as they
dont challenge this order. Culture, in whatever radical constructionist, anti-essentialist way
we understand and mobilise it, comfortably operates within and is the predominant
ideological form of liberal democracy.

I think this is the challenge iek poses how do we conceive of politics in this context. For
him the only universal hegemony is global capitalism and without opposing that all other
struggles will be easily incorporated into its logic. In that, even progressive multiculturalism
in its form of radical (deconstructive) particularism, is how global power operates. (See
Hardt and Negri for example).

ieks position is that instead of struggling over cultural differences in the form of trying to
hegemonise the field by creating shared consensus, that to be truly progressively
multicultural we need to struggle over what we oppose a politics of negation. Instead of
trying to find common shared elements, we should fight politically and unconditionally over
say anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-capitalism etc. This does appear to end up as a standard
left position. One of the questions to ask is how is culture conceptualised and situated in
these struggles. The orthodox left tends to see culture as an ideological problem, as best as
form of (nationalist) resistance. iek, through his Hegelian-dialectical Lacanism, offers a
more complex understanding of culture, subjectivity and ideology that questions
conventional representational, as well as immanent materialist, politics. He is advocating a
dialectical politics of division and confrontation we need to take sides and fight for our
position. And crucially, the political antagonisms are not between cultures but within and
across cultures. Maybe this is a universalism after the (multi)cultural turn?

3. Kishore Budha on 29 Feb 08 at 7:04 pm:

I dont see a critique of Zizek here as his recent book Violence explains elaborately what
Sara Ahmed is attempting here. In particular the effects of Liberal Multiculturalism Sara
Ahmed refers to as is what he describes as objective violence.

4. Ash Sharma on 7 May 11 at 4:36 pm:

See Zizeks response to Ahmed Appendix: Multiculturalism, the Reality of an Illusion

http://www.lacan.com/essays/?page_id=454

External links to Post (Trackbacks/Pingbacks)

iek and liberal multiculturalism tabula rasa

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