geert lovink on Wed, 19 Sep 2001 18:19:12 +0200 (CEST)


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<nettime> Ghassan Hage: The Shrinking Society


(posted to nettime with permission of the author /geert)

From: "Ghassan Hage" <ghassan.hage@anthropology.usyd.edu.au>
Sent: Wednesday, September 19, 2001 5:11 PM

The Shrinking Society
Ethics and Hope in the Era of Global Capitalism
Ghassan Hage

Ethics and Hope in Australia Today

The majority of the polls published in the media are clear. At the very least,
fifty percent of all Australians support John Howard's 'tough' stand on the
refugee issue. While the Prime Minister's capacity to be 'in touch with the
views of ordinary people' is celebrated by some, it is interesting to note that
the 'non-ordinary people', the minority opposing this stand see themselves as a
moral opposition. They oppose in the name of things like 'compassion' and
'hospitality' rather than in the name of a left/right political divide. This
has become a pattern in the last ten years or so.  >From Mabo to the Tampa, via
the 'apology' for the Stolen Children and the conditions in the refugee
detention centres, a small-l liberal, largely but not solely middle-class
population, supported by churches and human right organizations increasingly
perceives itself as the outraged defender, the last bastion, of a decent and
ethical society. Now that the moral majority is in power it has been shown to
be clearly less moral than it initially claimed and instead, we have a moral
minority in opposition. It argues that, under John Howard, ethics and morality
have been thrown out the window.

Interestingly, conservative intellectuals, who in Australia are newspaper
commentators who have mastered a slightly comical neo-tough journalistic style
of the 'hey softie, let me tell you about what reality is really all about'
variety, seem to agree despite themselves with the liberals. They argue that
there is no place for ethics and morality in a world where people can viciously
'exploit our compassion and generosity'. Consequently, the disagreement is not
about the lack of ethics and morality in social life but about what to do about
it. The small-l liberals see themselves as courageously fighting to maintain a
glimmer of ethical life within society.  The incredibly pragmatic neo-tough
ones condemn the soft liberals for being naïve. Being very ordinary themselves,
they are like the Prime Minister they support, incredibly in touch with
ordinary people. As such, they are particularly down on the small-l liberals
whom they see as of privileged class background, unable to see the relation
between their pompous airs of tolerance, compassion and hospitality and their
comfortable life style.

But it is not clear why the assertion that a certain ethical point of view is
the product of middle class comfort makes such view less ethical. It is more
ethical to be hospitable to needy people than not to be. It is more ethical not
to be racist than to be one. It is also more ethical to be a racist and
acknowledge it than to be one and deny it. The list is a long one. It is more
ethical to acknowledge that we are reaping the benefits of the decimation of
indigenous society than not to do so. And it is more ethical not to marginalise
and vilify a whole community under the excuse of fighting crime than to do so.
No amount of neo-tough huffing and puffing against imaginary threats of
political correctness can change this.

Nevertheless, it is also true that small-l liberals often translate the social
conditions that allow them to hold certain superior ethical views into a kind
of innate moral superiority. They see ethics as a matter of will. And they see
Howard (and Hanson)'s people as not wanting rather than not being able to offer
marginalised others the kind of hope they ought to be offered as fellow
human-beings. For there is no doubt that this is what we are talking about
here: the availability, the circulation and the exchange of hope. Compassion,
hospitality and the recognition of oppression are all about giving hope to
marginalised people. But to be able to give hope one has to have it. This is
why the neo-tough ones are right here.  Those who are unable to give hope to
others, who see in every indigenous or refugee a person aiming to snatch
whatever bit of hope for a decent life they've got, are not immoral people as
such. They are just people who precisely have very little hope to spare or to
share. And so Howard's supporters might feel triumphant that 'more than fifty
percent' of Australia 's population are unwilling to be hospitable to the boat
people. But only idiotic neo-tough ones find reasons to celebrate here. For the
statistics, more than anything else, beg a rather sad question: why is it that
in Australia today 'more than fifty percent' of the population are left with so
little hope for themselves, let alone for sharing with others.

National Capitalism and the distribution of hope within society

In a lecture presented in London, the Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst,
Slavoj Zizek, reflected on the inability of the British left to dent Margaret
Thatcher's electoral appeal among the working classes with their usual strategy
of emphasising the massive inequalities her policies were generating. For
Zizek, in its preoccupation with inequalities in the distribution of wealth and
the distribution of goods and services, the opposition left out of its sight
the very area where Thatcher's strength resided: her capacity to distribute
'fantasy'. 'Fantasy' here is a psychoanalytic term for the set of subliminal
beliefs that individuals hold and which makes them feel that their life has a
purpose, a meaningful future. Fantasy, that is, is the psychoanalytic version
of what has been referred to above as hope.

Thatcher distributed hope primarily through a racist emphasis on the causal
power of the British character and through highlighting the possibility of the
small shopkeeper's dreams of rising above one's situation and experiencing
upward social mobility. Her message was simple and clear: if you 'possessed'
the 'British character', you possessed the capacity to experience upward social
mobility even if, in the present, you are at the bottom of the heap. The
British character did not give you immediate equality and the good life but it
enabled you to hope for a future good life. You could look at your Pakistani
neighbours living in the same conditions you are living in and say: 'sure we're
in the same hole, but, I' ve got the British character, so I can at least hope
to get out of this hole, while these black bastards are hopelessly stuck where
they are'.

This capacity to distribute hope (particularly the capitalist-specific dreams
of upward social mobility) in the midst of massive social inequality has been
the secret of the ability of the nation-state to provide such an enduring
framework for capitalist accumulation. Michelet, the eighteenth century
observer and historian of the rise of nationalism, relates to us well, in his
famous description of the 'birth of a Frenchman', how the nation worked as an
apparatus for the distribution of hope. No sooner was the person born as a
'Frenchman', he informs us, that he was immediately 'recognised' and 'accounted
for' as a person. Through 'his' inclusion as part of a national society, the
nation-state provided 'him' with a recognition of 'his' moral worth and 'he'
could immediately 'claim his dignity as a man'. At the same time, Michelet
stresses, the national subject is made to feel in 'control over the national
territory'. No sooner is 'he' born that he is 'put at once in possession of his
native land'. But most importantly the sense of being included, of being
accounted for and of being in control all add up to what is in a sense the
finality of the process: the national's capacity to receive, as Michelet called
it, 'his share of hope'.

We should remember that in the history of the West access to a share of
'dignity and hope' was not always open to the European lower classes. The
rising bourgeoisie of Europe inherited from the court aristocracies of earlier
times a perception of peasants and poor city people as a lower breed of
humanity. The lower classes were 'racialised' as innately inferior beings
considered biologically ill-equipped to access human forms of 'civilisation'
which included particularly 'human dignity and hope'. 'Human' society within
each emerging nation at that time did not coincide with the boundaries of the
nation-states. Its borders were the borders of 'civilised' bourgeois culture.
What Michelet's work describes to us is the important historical shift that
began occurring in the late eighteenth and throughout the nineteenth century:
the increasing inclusion of nationally delineated peasants and lower classes
into the circle of what each nation defined as its own version of human
society. But this de-racialisation of the interior went hand in hand with the
intensification of the colonial racialisation of the exterior.  Now skin colour
in the form of European Whiteness was emphasised, more than ever before, as the
most important basis for one's access to 'dignity and hope'. Nevertheless,
Michelet captures the birth of the nation-state proper: A state committed to
distribute hope, to 'foster life' as Foucault has put it, within a society
whose borders coincide with the borders of the nation itself.

It is no secret that under capitalism government has always given primacy to
the interest of investors. But thanks to the framework provided by the
nation-state, the interest of investors did not seem to contradict a commitment
to the construction of a viable society within national boundaries. Hope, as
Ernest Bloch has theorised it in his 'Principles of Hope' made people
determined 'by the future'. The capacity to dream a better future that is 'not
too far off' was capable of overriding the determining power of the
inequalities of the present. This worked well with capitalism.  Hospitality
towards migrants and refugees in this national system was also part of this
dual economic/social logic. They represented an extra source of (often cheap)
labour, but their reception was also represented as a commitment to an ethic of
the good society in general. The fact that they were received reflected
something positive about the quality of life within the host society and
legitimised it in the eyes of its very nationals as capable of producing a
surplus of hope. This was so even when this surplus was itself the product of
the colonial plundering of resources, and the destruction of existing social
structures which undermined the hopes of millions of people in what became
known the Third World. The vacuum of hope left behind is still felt today
within the societies of the colonised, whether in terms of the hopelessness
found in some colonised indigenous societies or the migration generated by
dysfunctional colonially produced nation-states unable to provide a sufficient
'share of hope' but to a small minority of their citizens.

Until recently, the capacity of the great majority of migrants to settle in
Western Society was dependent on the availability of a Western 'surplus of
hope'. This surplus is the pre-condition of all forms of hospitality. But it is
clear today, that while the West is producing a surplus of many things, hope is
not among them. This has been perhaps the most fundamental change that global
capitalism has introduced to Western and non-western Society alike. In the era
of global capitalism, the successful growth of the economy, the expansion of
firms and rising profit margins no longer go hand in hand with the state's
commitment to a distribution of hope within society. In fact what we are
witnessing is not just a decrease of the state' s commitment to an ethical
society but a decrease in its commitment to a national society tout court. We
seem to be reverting to the time where the boundaries of society coincided with
the boundaries of upper class society.  Hope stops where the investment of
global capital stops.  Global Capitalism and the shrinking configuration of
hope

It is well acknowledged today that what characterises the global corporation
most and sets it apart from its multinational and national predecessors is the
absence of a permanent national anchorage point that the corporation sees as
its 'true home'. In the era of the dominance of colonial or international
capitalist enterprise, partly because industries were in their great majority
physically hard to re-locate, capitalism had a specific and stable national
base. This was so even when its operations spread anywhere in the world it was
capable of exploiting resources and labour. With the rise of the big
multinational companies we begin to see a shift. The multinational firm, as its
name implied, was no longer associated with a single nation-state. It had core
bases in many parts of the world, though wherever it was, it was operated
within a nation-state framework. The most important political aspect of global
capitalism is the end of this reliance on a nation-state framework of
operation.

On one hand, global capitalism is simply the intensification of the tendencies
of multinational capitalism towards capital accumulation outside the
traditional industrial sector. Now there is a clear dominance of the finance
sector and a massive expansion of an economy of services. These are also
accompanied with the rise of a relatively new field of capital accumulation:
the information sector. Partly because of the above, the global firm is
characterised by an almost complete loss of a specific national anchoring. It
is not that, like the multinational corporation, it has many, but rather that
it hasn't got any. Wherever it locates itself, it is considered a home on a
conjunctural non-permanent basis. Capitalism goes transcendental so to speak.
It simply hovers over the earth looking for a suitable place to land and
invest. until it is time to fly again.

It is here that emerges a significant phenomenon. The global corporation needs
the state but does not need the nation. National and sub-National (like State)
Governments all over the world are transformed from being primarily the
managers of a national society to being the managers of the aesthetics of
investment space. For among the many questions that guide government policy one
becomes increasingly paramount: how are we to make ourselves attractive enough
to entice this transcendental capital hovering above us to land in our nation?
This involves a socio-economic aesthetic: How do we create a good work
environment such as a well-disposed labour force or a suitable infrastructure?
But it also involves an architectural and touristic aesthetics: how do we
create a pleasing living environment for the culturally diverse, mobile
managers and workers associated to these global firms to make them desire to
come and live among us for a while?

'Please come here Mr capital, please invest here' every government is begging.
'Even if you can't bind yourself to stay here forever, I can provide your
multicultural workers with the tallest buildings which offer unbeatable views,
I can provide them with the grooviest coffee shops you can imagine, equipped
with the latest Italian coffee making machines, the best baristas and the best
macchiatos. All of this is guaranteed if you come and invest here, Mr.
Capital'.

The global aestheticised city is thus made beautiful to attract others rather
than to make its local occupants feel at home within it. Thus even the
government's commitment to city space stops being a commitment to society. This
global urban aesthetics comes with an authoritarian spatiality specific to it.
More so than any of its predecessors, the global city has no room for
marginals. How are we to rid ourselves of the homeless sleeping on the city's
benches? How are we to rid ourselves of those under-classes, with their high
proportion of indigenous people, third world looking (ie, yucky looking)
migrants and descendants of migrants, still cramming the non-gentrified parts
of the city? Not that long ago, the state was committed, at least minimally, to
prop up and distribute hope to such people in order to maintain them as part of
society. Now, the ideological and ethical space for perceiving the poor as a
social/human problem has shrunk.  In the dominant modes of representation the
poor become primarily like pimples, an 'aesthetic nuisance.' They are standing
between 'us' and the yet-to-land transcendental capital. They ought to be
eradicated and removed from such a space. The aesthetics of globalisation is
the aesthetics of zero tolerance.  As the state retreats from its commitment to
the general welfare of the marginal and the poor, they are increasingly, at
best, left to their own devices. At worst, they are actively portrayed as
outside society. The criminalisation and labelling of ethnic cultures, is one
of the more unethical and lowly forms of such processes of exclusion. This is
partly why globalisation has gone so well with the neo-liberal dismantling of
the welfare state The state's retreat from its commitment to see poverty as a
socio/ethical problem goes hand in hand with the increased criminalisation of
poverty and the deployment of a penal state to fill in the void left by the
retreat of the welfare state.

Hope is not related to an income level. It is about the sense of possibility
that life can offer. Its enemy is a sense of entrapment not a sense of poverty.
As the withdrawal of the state from society and the existing configuration of
hope begins shrinking many people, even with middle class incomes, urban
dwellers paradoxically stuck in insecure jobs, farmers working day and night
without 'getting anywhere', small-business people struggling to keep their
businesses going, all of these and more have begun suffering from various forms
of hope scarcity. They join the already over-marginalised populations of
indigenous communities, homeless people, poor immigrant workers and the
chronically unemployed. But unlike them they are not used to their state of
marginality, they don't know how to dig for new forms of hope where there is
none, and they live in a state of denial, still hoping that their 'national
identity' is bound to be a passport of hope for them. They become self-centred,
jealous of anyone perceived to be 'advancing' while they are stuck, vindictive
and bigoted and always ready to 'defend the nation' in the hope of re-accessing
their lost hopes. They are not necessarily like this. Their new life condition
brings the worst out of them as it would of any of us. That is the story of
many of Howard's 'more than fifty percent'. They are the no-hopers produced by
global capitalism and the policies of neo-liberal government, the 'refugees of
the interior'.  And it is ironic to see so many of them mobilised in defending
'the nation' against 'the refugees of the exterior'. Global rejects against
global rejects. Only the lowly can rejoice at this sight.

Ghassan Hage is a senior lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sydney.
He is the author of White Nation: Fantasies of White Surpremacy in a
Multicultural Society, Pluto Press, Sydney: 1998. This article is based on
research conducted as part of an Australian Research Council Large Grant on
'Globalisation, Migration and the Quest for Viability'. More on Ghassan Hage's
White Nation: http://www.plutoaustralia.com/db/161.html. White Nation also
appeared as a Routledge title (New York, 2000).



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