‘Africa, the dark continent’, ‘men who don’t listen and women who can’t read maps’, and so on. Hedwig Dohm was amazed at the ‘incomprehensible contradictions’ that characterized male judgments about women in the nineteenth century. She wrote:
Woman is a potpourri of antagonistic qualities, a kaleidoscope that can bring forth any given nuance of character or colour if one simply shakes it up and down. According to the critical mass, the basic ground of the feminine spirit seems to be a fog of sheer chaos, a primal mist whence the voice of Man’s Creator can simply call into being whatever properties Man so happens to desire.
It is thus crucial that we learn to decrypt all binaries, perceiving that they bind opposites to one another in the act of defining and separating them. This endeavour not only constitutes an end in itself (for example, this is the entirely legitimate form it takes in academia, notably in gender studies) but, further, helps disembed and make visible the mechanisms of real-life domination inherent in discursive dualism. It is not, in that sense, sufficient to grasp the process by which social actors get ‘classified’; we must go beyond that and interrogate the conditions under which classificatory distinctions are hatched. Instead of accepting a given identity as a premise when thinking about difference – that is, presupposing that that identity exists, thereby removing it from criticism – as we’ve suggested, we have to think in difference about difference, and learn to differentiate between differences. What matters most to us is recognizing that some differences are harmless, even joyful, while others hold in place the poles of a global matrix of domination, as Donna Haraway attests.34 So, it is not so much whether but, rather, the question of how differences are activated politically that spurred us on when writing this book.
RESPONSIBILITY, SITUATEDNESS, ‘FRIENDSHIP WITH THE WORLD’
Totalizing ways of seeing – ‘the Muslim’, ‘the woman wearing a head-scarf’, ‘the economic migrant’, not to mention ‘feminists’, ‘identity politics’, ‘Germans and Islam’, ‘women and men’, ‘whites and blacks’ – are, needless to say, simply not an option for us. Not only do they mask the internal heterogeneity of all things, they deny the partiality and positionality of every speaking position. And, ultimately, any view that is not considered ‘partial’ is always going to invoke ‘the’ unmarked category, the putatively white, male, cis, heterosexual, able-bodied subjectivity that history has enforced as a self-evident universal. The peculiar power of this unmarked position lies, paradoxically, in its structural limitations. That which is ‘us’, that which is ‘normal’ – imagined as universal – enjoys the relative lack of scrutiny afforded by its place in the shadow of the particular, the ‘marked’, and the divergent, which we force into the light. It is imperative to constantly ask, then, why what we see is what we see; where are we seeing from; and what are the limits on this seeing?
Once again: what we are describing here is a practice of critical, self-reflective positionality. By no means do we mean to vindicate, in this, a trivial relativism. At stake is our ability to see what is available for us to see, to perceive what we have been taught to perceive, and to know that something is missing. This means becoming willfully alert and curious with regard to that which is hidden (in part because we are hiding it). It means making things into matters of concern. Relativism, on the other hand, is a way of claiming to be nowhere and everywhere the same. According to Haraway, relativist accounts of the relation between identity and positionality are usually just a way of denying responsibility and of preventing us from critically responding to it.35
In contrast, Haraway’s theorization of situatedness insists on shared responsibility for the practices that give us power – the authors of this book, for example, are called to account for our responsibility as privileged workers and intellectuals. This isn’t about a ‘fundamentalism of positionality’ that seeks to derive an inescapable standing in the world from a given position occupied by the speaker within the space of the social.36 ‘Positionality’ does not imply that a particular social position – female, Jewish, lesbian, middle class, Catholic, working class, migrant, refugee, white, Bavarian – inevitably entails any particular opinions, attitudes or beliefs stemming somehow, ineluctably, from the position in question. It certainly does not define the experiences that can be lived by individuals positioned thus. Quite the reverse: we understand positionality to be all about recognizing that social positioning does things to us – things we cannot really help – in dynamic and complex ways. What we can do, however, is adopt an attitude vis-à-vis our positionality, cognizant of the fact that it is in our power to do things with it in return. In fact, it is probably impossible not to.
The alternative to, on the one hand, epistemic totalitarianisms that lump the world into opposites and, on the other, relativisms that do not care about it at all, can only be ‘partial, locatable, critical knowledges’.37 Solidarity is the name for this web of connection in politics; in the field of epistemology, it is called dialogue, conversation, debate. Our book is committed to it. We hope this will contribute to ‘a more adequate, richer, better account of a world’ but also a ‘critical, reflective relation to our own as well as others’ practices of domination and the unequal parts of privilege and oppression that make up all positions’, to quote Donna Haraway again.38 For us, this has as much to do with ethics and politics as it does with epistemology, knowledge or truth.
Regrettably, responsibility is widely thought instead ‘in terms of the obligation to answer for oneself, to be the guarantor of one’s own actions’, to quote Achille Mbembe’s critique.39 What we require is a different stance – seeking to think not so much about as with the world – namely, a stance of empathy qua intellectual orientation. This intellectual empathy embraces the influence of the world, neither grasping all random feeling willy-nilly nor attempting to defend itself against vulnerability, against touch. Nevertheless, it enacts ‘resistance to that which is forced upon it’, as Theodor Adorno writes in Negative Dialectics.40 It raises the question, posed by Judith Butler, of whether one can ‘lead a good life in a bad life’ – that is, a world in which ‘the good life is structurally or systematically foreclosed for so many’.41 It demands that we do ‘sciences from below’, making sense of the world through epistemic processes that centre the perspective of the most marginalized.42 One thing to centre, to give just one example, might be the phenomenon known as ‘household air pollution’, which, according to a World Health Organization (WHO) study, accounts for the premature death of some 4 million people annually, most of them women and children.43 Scientifically and politically, such forms of slow violence would certainly become public ‘things’, ‘matters of concern’, under a regime of radical empathy. Christina Thürmer-Rohr had a memorable name for the epistemic commitment we are talking about. She called it ‘friendship with the world’.44
DOUBT IN DOUBT
To espouse friendship with the world is to modulate how we act every bit as much as how we think (insofar as we would even wish to establish a difference between the two). It is to hesitate before passing judgment, but it is never indifference. It is to be sceptical of affective reactions without, however, cynically rejecting affect. Cynicism serves, in a sense, to augment its bearer, helping her gain a putative distinction vis-à-vis whatever it is othering. But it can offer nothing by way of justice to those who will suffer from the resultant loss of solidarity. The attitude to the world that we want to foster, in contrast, seeks to acknowledge what is known while, at the same time, defamiliarizing and alienating that knowledge – re-examining things from perspectives different from one’s own – and thereby expanding one’s perception of the world. This, in turn, demands that we challenge ourselves, as far as possible, always to spell out our reasoning, instead of relying on local and available repositories of common sense and general truths.
Hannah Arendt, following Immanuel Kant, referred to such a disposition, premised on the ability to take others’ perspectives into account, as an ‘expanded’ practice of
