mediations through which the current constitution of a society and, in particular, its political-economic structures and its history, are expressed.64 Moreover, according to Rommelspacher, the dominant culture determines all behaviour – ‘the attitudes and feelings of all people who live in any given society’65 – and mediates between the individual and social structures. In Western societies, or so her book Dominanzkultur contends, this dominant culture is also a domination culture, which is to say, a culture ‘primarily characterized by different traditions of domination in all their different dimensions’.66 What we are scrutinizing, then, is these many and particular ‘forms and modes of domination’ which, as Beate Krais and Gunter Gebauer show, are encoded in our worldviews, constantly confirmed to us by our systems of reasoning, and transmitted to us via the social institutions that, in themselves, produce culture.67
Culture, then, is not a specific constellation of traditions, mores, myths and cuisines made up of various, alternately regional, religious or historical essentialisms. Culture is both the complex location and form of production of social knowledge and meaning. It is an unevenly available and authoritarian sphere that is productive of inequality – thus paradoxically not ‘merely cultural’,68 as Judith Butler says, but linked to all kinds of concrete material issues that determine access to resources. It is also, on the other hand, a place where societies and their members make sense of these circumstances, and thus provides the (only?) possibility of changing these conditions. Culture is form that is simultaneously indestructible and always in flux. Culture is the circulation of meaning and signification, which are constantly being limned and remade anew by that circulatory movement.
Prime among the relations of inequality culture reproduces (inequality of access, of participation and of interpretation) are: sexism and heteronormativity, racism, and class. These, however, are not to be understood as social divisions operating independently, but rather analyzed as a complex intersectional constellation. It does not make sense to categorize them, as many have unsuccessfully sought to do, in terms of ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ contradictions; nor to classify them, for example, as ‘vertical’ versus ‘horizontal’ axes of inequality; ‘ascriptive’ traits as opposed to socio-structural inequalities; or neatly partitioned struggles for ‘recognition’ on the one hand and ‘redistribution’ on the other. This is a decidedly erroneous approach that fails to recognize the extent to which visibility, recognition and representation are systematically connected to the flow of resources, power and opportunity.
For the aforementioned French sociologist Michel Wieviorka, the cultural and the social are always already ‘mixed’ to begin with when it comes to the contemporary formulation of the social.69 Power relations simply cannot be mapped according to a hierarchy in which the precise configuration of ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ contradictions can be precisely established. People are never simply one thing or the other, never ‘first’ a privileged researcher and only then female, lesbian or heterosexual, for example, with or without living children, with or without proletarian roots or ‘some kind of migration background’. Identities – understood as relations to the self, as the question ‘who am I?’ – are not constative things: they are neither given nor fixed. Rather, they are expressions of social relations. It’s up to us what we do with them.
NO BLUEPRINTS
For all these reasons, we strongly oppose any attempt to interpret a given social position as a blueprint for an identity, or even for attitudes. If you are white, for example, you may not necessarily think or act in racist ways, but you have to acknowledge that you benefit from the accrual of a racist dividend. This dividend will differ again, depending on your positioning along other axes such as age, physical appearance, religion, gender, sexual orientation, education level and citizenship. Again, those who belong to an educated elite do not necessarily have to ‘be’ elitist; the point is that they should acknowledge and strive to be accountable to the fact that they systematically benefit from these privileges, even where they are not consciously deployed. Institutional privileges do not function in the same way for everybody.
In a spirit of friendship with the world, we must recognize one thing – a necessary and often unmanageably complex-seeming characteristic of this ‘rotten present’ – namely, that one is always multiply situated within these constellations. That one exists within an educational elite does not, for example, simply negate one’s ‘migration background’ or a childhood spent among a majority-Catholic German rural proletariat; likewise, being a lesbian does not negate one’s whiteness. In keeping with this complexity, the conversation about difference must free itself once and for all from the ‘positional fundamentalism’ that is currently spreading its reach on both the Right and the Left. The question of the inter-imbrication of divergent, often equally intimate, sometimes contradictory divisions in contemporary society must finally be brought to the centre of the discussion.
Modes of scholarship dedicated to the use and development of the Marxian concept of ‘articulation’ strike us as particularly useful here. Given the enormous wealth of theoretical literature and empirical research premised on ‘articulation’, we will only gloss the concept very summarily. The important thing to note is that what we (in the German context) would call ‘articulation theory’ deals in conditions, relations and dynamics rather than categories and group identities. It inquires above all into the contingent social production of difference, for example, via race, nation, geography or gender.
Instead of beginning with a preconstituted category of female oppression, for example, articulation theory focuses on precise historical instantiations of that relation, pinpointing specific institutions, forms of knowledge, practices and norms that produce ‘woman’ as a racialized (and heterosexualized) category. The same goes for the category ‘race’. Racism, argues race theorist Avtar Brah, ‘is neither reducible to social class or gender, nor wholly autonomous. Racisms have variable historical origins but they articulate with patriarchal class structures in specific ways under given historical conditions.’70
Articulation refers to a practice: a practice of linking two or more ‘relational figurations’, for instance, gender, class or ethnicity. It is, to be precise, a form of connection-making that does not necessarily give rise to any unity; and if it does do so, that unity needs to be understood as neither essential nor determinate nor necessary nor permanent, as Stuart Hall shows.71 Articulation denotes, then, not so much a straightforward relation between given entities as a nexus transforming the identity of the linked elements.
Articulation itself is a transformative process. For example, when they become articulated, gender and race do not remain unchanged; they are never simply added together. Our social identities are not merely the sum of the social positions to which we belong, such that one might boil oneself down to an additive equation [white + female = me]. Rather, the ‘I’ of any subject is (re)produced as white within shifting parameters of femininity and masculinity, and rendered female within shifting parameters of race, sexuality and class.
Laclau and Mouffe emphasize another dimension of articulation we’ve already touched upon, that is, the construction of ‘nodal points’. The function of nodal points is, to fix meaning, to get the incessant movement of the social to stand still, to foster new differences and call up new subjectivities. Nodal points provide us with a reality, or rather a way of seeing. It is through nodal points that realities become reality. For Fredric Jameson, the articulation ‘is thus a punctual and sometimes even ephemeral totalization, in which the planes of race, gender, class, ethnicity, and sexuality intersect to form an operative structure’.72
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