for the seemingly ever-intensifying ‘attention economy’46 – we trust ourselves, even at this troublesome juncture, to doubt. We are seeking to go against the grain of what Pierre Bourdieu calls ‘doxa’, that is, the ensemble of that which is taken for granted and unquestioned.47 Instead of inferring contexts for things, we think it more apt to ask: What is it that is brought into context for us, such that an emergency, an urgence (urgency) or ‘state of exception’,48 in Foucault’s terms, is created?
And what is the precise nature of this ‘emergency’ situation anyway, which is supposedly caused by excessive liberality around questions of identity, too much political correctness, too little attention to the social mainstream, too much consideration for the concerns of sexual, gender and racial minorities – all of which, so its proponents claim, is what made right-wing populism possible?49 What kind of ‘emergency’, when the challenges associated with immigration and integration have to be negotiated primarily as a matter of internal security to be tackled, among other things, by a garment police50 – and when the topics of terrorism, sexual wrongdoing and Islam must be treated as an indissoluble unity?51 Meanwhile, the right-wing violence that has long been endemic to the country, such as the murders committed by the neo-Nazi National Socialist Underground (NSU), are not regarded in this way.52 Rather, they are routinely treated as non–ideologically motivated acts by individuals.53 Why does the everyday, systematic dimension and massive scale of sexual violence against women, and of violence against refugees (their persons, shelters, dwellings) – including violence against people perceived as migrants – not constitute a ‘state of emergency’ in the same way as did the violent attacks in Cologne?
Should we agree that it is an ‘emergency’ that Germany is a divided country,54 a society in which, as Oliver Nachtwey contends, ‘collective fear of downward mobility seems to be universal’55 – driving citizens into the arms of the far-right Pegida and AfD? Or should we not first ask: Whose precariousness is visible and perceptible to us, and whose is not? Whose vulnerability do we take seriously and understand as our own? Is the embitterment of the alienated, predominantly white, heterosexual, ‘autochthonous’ German middle class the only form of resentment that counts?
And, finally, why should we entertain for a second the idea that an individual’s gender performance, deemed deviant in the eyes of the presumed majority, somehow leads to widespread insecurity, aggression and violence? If this were the case, would not lesbian, gay, bisexual, intersex, trans and genderqueer people, whose sexuality is relentlessly called into question and rendered permanently insecure, by the same logic, be especially violent and aggressive? And wouldn’t everybody then have to demonstrate the utmost understanding for that aggression? In short, then, is the dominant description of a current ‘state of emergency’ actually an accurate or useful description? That is to say, does it provide answers to the big questions concerning the society in which we actually live: What holds it together? What links exist between inequality, domination, integration and social conflict? And how might we (re)establish social bonds?
To be frank, we do not have answers to these questions either. Nevertheless, we believe that the question of what constitutes the exception – the sense of urgency justifying emergency measures – must be made far clearer than it has been previously. That being achieved, those of us who do not want to settle for a strategy of reductivism – or who have no desire to combat facts with affects, and statistics with feelings – would be hard-pressed to avoid treating matters of concern (that is, the things that concern us) with compassion, empathy and the determination to differentiate.
‘MORAL-SOCIAL SCIENCE’
Any good analysis of complex realities therefore requires of us an empirically oriented mode of thought – but one that is capable of appreciating the mutually contingent nature of various differences. It requires, in other words, ‘a moral-social science in which moral considerations are not suppressed and set aside, but systematically blended with analytical reasoning’, in the formula of Albert Hirschman.56 Of course, as Christina Thürmer-Rohr already advanced thirty years ago – in her analysis of the entanglements of femininity, feminism and patriarchal rule – categories like sensitivity, care, empathy, compassion and tenderness are neither context-free nor morally innocent.57
Rather, they are components of a relational morality which, albeit beautiful, is ultimately an abstraction. So even values like morality, dignity and respect must be critically unpicked, precisely because we cannot do without them as we go about the urgent task of reviving democracy. ‘In what social location’, we must ask, are empathy, concern and compassion to be found? How can they be tied to analyses that take us beyond mere fleeting affect? ‘Whom do they serve, whom do they benefit, who mobilizes them, whom do they fail, do they break, to whom do they turn to their opposite?’58
One way of summing this up is to stress, once again, the importance of understanding that our entire way of life is predicated on relations of subordination and its opposite, superordination: the fixing of things within endless hierarchies. These often subtle yet violent differentiations determine almost everything – actions, attitudes and feelings – for all of us. And, as we’ve stated, it is not the differences themselves that are the problem here, but the dominational logic of (de)humanization that subtends them and inflects the things they designate: man, African, victim, woman, human, queer, foreign, citizen, and so on.
DOMINATION CULTURE
Our book seeks to contribute to an understanding of the mechanism we call ‘othering and ruling’. We are convinced that difference is not, in and of itself, the problem: rather, the problem is the way differences are anchored, made meaningful and roped into everyday political life. And it is precisely for this reason that we feel it is crucial to understand the difference between at least two different kinds of differences. On the one hand, there are differences that are themselves committed to the knowledge that nothing on earth, especially not the human, is thinkable in the singular; as Hannah Arendt writes, ‘Not Man but men inhabit this planet.’59 On the other hand, differences are often conceived and motivated by domination. The latter kind of differentiation is best understood as driven by the will to misunderstand the many and ‘reduce them to quantity – to the number one’, in Christina Thürmer-Rohr’s formulation.60
We advance the notion of ‘othering and ruling’ so as to highlight a mechanism we take to be a core part of what the German theorist Birgit Rommelspacher calls ‘domination culture’.61 Rommelspacher’s framework designates a comprehensive social logic made up of an intricate web of mutually interacting dimensions of power. Above all, the term ‘domination culture’ focuses on the sphere of culture: the domain in which, today perhaps more than ever, the production and reproduction of difference, discrimination, segregation, vulnerability and danger are negotiated. And, finally, ‘domination culture’ sums up Rommelspacher’s contention, which we’ve already alluded to, that our entire way of life is couched in ‘categories of subordination and super-ordination’.62 This includes, of course, the way we create images of other people, and represents a tendency that has rapidly taken on an unprecedented virulence, what with the worldwide right-wing and populist-conservative capture of liberal democracy in recent years.
The French sociologist Michel Wieviorka, too, has long presented similar arguments, emphasizing the pre-eminence of culture. For Wieviorka, economic inequalities and social injustices aren’t just things that affect people; rather, as dimensions of discrimination and segregation, they define the most fragile and the most vulnerable in cultural terms that can then all too easily be expressed as natural characteristics (i.e., naturalized).63 Whenever we speak of ‘cultural differences’, we cannot, according to Wieviorka, remain silent for long on the subject of social hierarchy, inequality and exclusion. Questions of cultural right (or rights), moreover, simply cannot be discussed without involving social injustice in
