[Nettime-bold] Ghassan Hage: The Shrinking Society

["geert lovink" <geert@xs4all.nl>]

(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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