tool for dismantling racialized, ethnocentric or heteronormative definitions of gender and femininity.24
Thus, ‘what appear as separable categories are, rather, the conditions of articulation for each other.’25 The resultant questions have been raised again and again in the history of feminist theory, as in Judith Butler’s formulation: ‘How is race lived in the modality of sexuality?’ and ‘How is gender lived in the modality of race?’26 And, equally: ‘How do colonial and neo-colonial nation states rehearse gender relations in the consolidation of state power?’ and ‘Where and how is “homosexuality” at once the imputed sexuality of the colonized, and the incipient sign of Western imperialism?’27
Ultimately, feminism has to be understood as a project defined by its internal contradictions, discontinuities and antagonisms; as a struggle over meanings. Feminist thought has no unitary canon, but rather represents a generative field full of disparate movements. More than the sum of its parts, feminism is not only the aggregate of disparate critical analyses of gendered social inequalities and exclusions, dominant discourses and cultural regimes; it is the materialization of a process of recognizing the situatedness of all knowledge production.
Of course, this principle of critical self-reflexivity – this fundamental methodological doubt – also informs many of the branches of the humanities and social sciences we borrow from in these pages. Indeed, all the ‘critical traditions’ (by which we mean disciplines that cleave to Marx’s orientation towards immanence in the broadest sense) – as well as the newer fields of systems theory, actor-network theory, science and technology studies, and cultural studies – direct their practitioners not to reify their own categories and to be wary of their (at least implicit) normative power. And yet, unfortunately, ‘problematic’ categories (and what would an unproblematic category look like, anyway?) do not simply give up and go away. Quite the contrary. We are stuck with negotiating the manifold problems of categorization and classification precisely because we know their power to generate worlds, and because, in the end, we think that concepts can actually mount a resistance to power.
Our reflections, in summary, are guided by the hypothesis that ‘Cologne’ is bound up in a series of highly effective ideological operations – mainly objectifications of difference – which now serve to shore up social hierarchies in Germany. We will test this hypothesis in the following chapters. Once again, we do not argue for denying differences, ignoring them, or even abolishing them. Quite the reverse: we urge remembrance of the fact that sociality itself would be impossible without differences – even as it is governed by them. The point, for us, then, is to develop an ethics of difference that is aware of its own sociality: an ethics that does not pretend differences exist in and of themselves, outside of social practice. This mode of relating would defend against the dehumanizing operations of contemporary fundamentalist differentiation which give us, for instance: ‘the black person’, ‘the asylum seeker’, ‘woman’, and ‘man’. It would simultaneously value the way that differences make practice and perception – not least the practice of critical differentiation – possible.
A MATTER OF CONCERN
We seek to distance ourselves equally from those who would have us believe that the world consists of opinions as from those who deem knowledge to be a simple matter of acquainting oneself with the facts. As urgent as it is – and it is, indeed, more urgent than ever before – to combat lies with facts, in truth, reality is not (only) made up of facts. For the simple reason that facts do not make up the whole of worldly experience, as Bruno Latour contends, real-ness has to be ascribed to them. We, as authors, do not therefore rely solely on matters of fact; rather, we adopt ‘a realism dealing with matters of concern’.28
‘Cologne’ is one such matter of concern, in the first place because, well, it concerns us. Second, as it clearly isn’t reducible to its punctual components, the sum of certain localized happenings, it cannot be reduced to a fact. To continue with Latour’s framework, however, we know that several conditions have to come together at once in order for a ‘matter of concern’ to take shape in a lasting way. Additional forces have to be in play; simple occurrences alone do not make reality. A ‘matter of concern’ comes into being as a result of media attention, political interpellation, cultural, religious, governmental and other interpretation, police action, scientific expertise, and much, much more. Since the world is not found but made – we make it – it behooves us to understand the mechanisms behind this making, this gathering up of the necessary components to turn mere objects into a public ‘thing’. Only then will we appreciate the opportunities afforded us to remake the world otherwise. And, after all, we must do so, for, as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie reminds us, ‘It does not have to be like this.’29
We are constantly hearing from those who profess to know exactly what the nature of the reality we inhabit is. We, by contrast, want to start by asking nothing but questions. If it is the case that ‘it is enough to create new names and estimations and probabilities in order to create new things in the long run’, then we must recognize that the world is constantly evading us, reforming itself ahead of us, just outside our grasp. As researchers, we are, in fact, ourselves part of this very process. Our scholarship is part of the creation of new things – including new perspectives on the world. Just like public politicking and media discourse, our endeavours manufacture worlds and (in Ian Hacking’s phrase) ‘make people up’.30 Words do things. It really cannot be stressed often enough.
Whenever words and concepts coagulate into operations of categorical classification, they risk generating what Sighard Neckel and Ferdinand Sutterlüty call ‘qualitative judgments of otherness’ (qualitative Urteile der Andersartigkeit) targeting individuals and groups – that is to say, drawing symbolic lines of membership or exclusion.31 They produce and reproduce – in ways always intimately bound up with whatever news developments, media narratives and political agendas are circulating in the contemporary political conjuncture – entire modes of social valuation. And, ultimately, these words and concepts flow – mediated by culture – back into the social reservoir of knowledge. This collective reservoir of meanings is what all members of society then inevitably draw upon when forming their notions of ‘self’ and ‘other’: making ‘judgments of otherness’ and deciding who is entitled to what, what is collectively owed to whom, and who isn’t even worth our attention.
INTERROGATING DIFFERENCES
Critical thinking must always, for these reasons, ensure it is not participating in the ongoing, violent process the nineteenth-century philosopher Hedwig Dohm referred to as Versämtlichung (otherization) of the world. Versämtlichung describes the epistemic mechanism by which – irrespective of the cause or political banner under which it takes place – we construct, ossify and maintain imaginary others. To avoid it, we must constantly question – indeed, call into question – all evidence, superficial or otherwise, of non-negotiable identity-based differences wherever they arise. Differences, be they markers of sexual, gendered, cultural or ethnic variation, should not be taken for granted or regarded as indisputable. Rather, we should understand them as contingent realities that are the product of specific historically and institutionally situated struggles. Differences, in other words, are the result of specific discursive strategies, practices and modalities of power. They are always provisional, but this does not mean they are in any way ephemeral or fleeting.
For example, in statistical and bureaucratic settings, social traits are not only attributed to social groups, they inevitably also act as a post-hoc rationalization of inequality, contributing to the consolidation of uneven geographies, especially when these (as signifiers of difference) have coagulated into full-blown categories of essentialized identity.32 As the feminist social theorist Regina Becker-Schmidt contended some time ago, in order to really understand social inequality, we first have to understand the social force of attribution itself.33
To do that, it is
