The essentializing force characteristic of ‘fundamentalizing’ discourse becomes all intensified when it is oriented towards the active construction of difference. It is obviously at its most intense when the framework for distinguishing between things is restricted to, for example, them and us, foreigner and native, black and white. That is to say, selective specification in the description of a situation goes hand in hand with an equally selective de-specification of the complexity that is always – at least potentially – at the heart of any matter.
In the construction of these Manichaean differences, what is perhaps most striking is the heightening of polarized and polarizing attributions – what Gudrun-Axeli Knapp theorizes in terms of ‘reduction to a characteristic’. When the media reported on issues regarding the politics of sexuality, freedom of movement, gender, migration and culture, in connection with Cologne, they often did so in the terms – noted by Hedwig Dohm (on whom more later) – of a mass typologization of populations. As such, we were always hearing about ‘the’ refugees, ‘the’ women, ‘the’ Arab men, and ‘our’ culture.
The use of such terms obstructs our ability to perceive internal differences. Relationships, modes of existence and experiences that don’t fit into their typescript – because they are of a more inherently complex (which is to say, intersectional) nature – are rendered invisible, even though they are, empirically speaking, in the vast majority. But there is much else that these static, simplistic concepts of difference render invisible, namely the dynamics of differentiation as a process. Our vocabularies of difference tend to depict, as though already accomplished, the fact of one thing being different from another. They do not represent that thing coming into being. Depending on context, then, a decision to speak about gendering rather than gender, or about culturation rather than culture, can make a big difference.
This is not to say that concepts denoting difference are wrong, per se. Differentiation is neither meaningless nor dangerous in and of itself. It is, in fact, vital that we differentiate! We constantly rely on differences in order to operate on the most basic level, for without them, thinking and acting would be impossible. Differences are the product of social practices, and, as such, they form the basic structure for whole societies, which in turn makes them the enabling framework for social practices. However, there are fundamentally different kinds of differential assertion, and contrasting modes of differentiation, that need to be distinguished from one another – that is to say, differentiated.
Furthermore, the contexts in which differences are (differentially) put to use differ as well. Whether it is trivial or meaningful, merely informative or existentially freighted to articulate a single marker of difference – for example, male and female, young and old, hetero- and homosexual, native and foreign, self and other – will very much depend on the context and on the agency and powers of interpretation of the people or groups involved (whose own ‘differences’ are, as such, rendered relevant). What it means to designate somebody as gay or lesbian, for example – and make them publicly legible in this way – is entirely context-dependent. It could be vital information, an instance of discrimination, an irrelevant detail, or even a death sentence.
In order to understand how reality itself is constituted by means of markers of difference, we must grasp the mechanism by which subjects (in all their social complexity) merge into only one difference. This is to say, we should ask ourselves: What single difference is it that all the actors typically mentioned in connection with Cologne are supposed to embody? In answering this, we propose to apprehend ‘Cologne’, following Mouffe and Laclau, as a nodal point – that is, a nexus linking linguistic and non-linguistic elements, discourses, and practices in such a way as to call us into being as subjects according to a set of sexual, gendered and racializing hierarchies.6 What options for subjectivization, then, does Cologne call up? Which people does this ‘node’ render perceptible, visible, socially recognizable, audible – and as who, or as what? And how does that, in turn, end up shaping the potential for solidarity? What moral obligations does it establish, and towards whom?
We regard this book as a contribution to the understanding of culture and society initiated by Birgit Rommelspacher in her theorization of the matrix of domination. Her term Dominanzkultur refers to the structuring of the social as a vast network of – multitudinous, intertwined – dimensions of power, organizing our entire way of life into the binary categories of superiority and subordination and thereby determining our very actions, attitudes and feelings. One of our main emphases, in this book, is on the fact that there is no such thing as ‘Arab’, ‘patriarchal’, ‘Christian’, ‘Western’, ‘German’ or ‘liberal-democratic’ culture: that is to say, a cultural ‘status quo’ never actually exists in any homogeneous or secure sense. Culture is better regarded, instead, as the social space in which meaning arises and the process through which meaning gets generated. And, as a process of meaning production, it even includes all negotiations and contestations about signification and meaning. Culture is our making sense of the world and, thus, of ourselves. Culture, in other words, is contexts. And, once again, the contexts in question are culturally produced. They are, as we all know, ambiguous and ill-defined. They are without beginning or end, without clear boundaries, and without authenticity. Yet they cannot be silenced.
As glib as this riff on ‘culture’ may seem, we believe its substance is all-important. It is our duty to really grasp that culture is not the essential property, spirit or nature of a region, religion, ‘race’ or gender. For whenever we claim that something, say, a piece of our past, some quality or essence, is ‘our property’, we have already, in that moment – as the historian Joan Wallach Scott says – forsaken the future. Any attempt to ‘revise or reinterpret’ the identity thus suspended can then only be perceived as a threat to the very existence of ‘a national or racial or ethnic or sexual or individual self’ and not as an opening, that is to say, a possibility containing the promise that things could be different.7
We set forth our polyphonic thoughts against all those who think that the diversity of the world is, in and of itself, already marked by clear distinctions, clear divisions between good and evil, right and wrong, black and white, male and female, hetero- and homosexual. We seek to blast our ‘basso continuo’ of sheer scepticism – scepticism about the validity of any and all differential assertion – in targeted opposition to the unanimous refrain of all the different currents of fundamentalism that imagine themselves today as victims of some kind of censorship, aggressively corralled into a ‘political correctness’ by a fantasy feminist or hegemonic gay ‘lobby’. (Such fundamentalisms are typically religious, nationalist, white-supremacist, conservative and right-wing, but they can also be left-wing or progressive-identitarian.)
Our commitment to polyglossia – and to an attitude of consistent scepticism – thrives on the fact that we, as authors, espouse different perspectives. We have, in fact, consciously allowed these different points of view to remain visible in the text, instead of downplaying and restraining them in our composition and editing processes. They are interesting differences, differences shaped by our different institutional affiliations, personal affinities and social positions: our disparate ways of being in the world. They are in themselves very much a part of our political and personal relationship, our professional and collegial friendship, which has matured over the course of many years, and whose most important distillation is, we believe, this very experiment in ‘common thinking’ in different voices.
It is the experimental character of our collaboration that comes across most clearly in our essayistic writing. It is explorative, tentative, incomplete. It was an exercise in ‘thinking without a banister’, as Hannah Arendt put it8 – the results of which, we hope, are pleasurable to read. Created on paper and on screens, but also through chatting both online and across the kitchen table; in concentrated solitude; and through talking simultaneously, in parallel, with others, as well as to one another. Ours was a thought process actualized in the ‘in-between’: in the space between us two authors by the light of those differences that distinguish us (but do not separate us).
