social scientists. What a departure, too, from our academic training as social scientists that would have us bolster every argument from all sides with ‘hard’ (empirical) evidence.9 What’s more, while writing, we found we could barely keep up with the accelerative dynamic of contemporary politics, and we felt dismayed by the shrinking duration of any given event or debate’s ‘half-life’.
What else have we learned through trying to not mutually silence one another; trying to actualize a commitment to tarrying with complexity instead of striving (even with the best critical intentions) to reduce it and square it away? Once again, that differences, distinctions and categories per se are not the problem. On the contrary. It is precisely because we value differences that we must pinpoint how they are deployed for the purposes of domination, how they get pressed into service in the reproduction of social inequalities, of the uneven distribution of precariousness.
What function does the state-authored production and politics of cultural difference serve? It seems to have become, once more, central to how societies make and remake themselves. This is the question to which we hope to contribute a partial answer, and its range cannot be overestimated. We are acutely aware that if this book were to set out to, somehow, comprehensively reconstruct the phenomenology and internal mechanisms of two constitutive configurations of power – racism and sexism – as well as their ambiguous link with feminism – it would constitutively fail.10
What we do hope to contribute, however, is a reminder that racism and sexism cannot in any way be extrapolated from the various groups or individuals their prejudice designates. Neither race nor gender are realities inherent to bodies, even though they are coupled with specific physical traits, written (and read) into bodies, and ontologized as corporeal.11 The challenge is to understand sexism and racism as highly agile, heterogeneous, dynamic, constantly mutating figurations; expansive representations; power practices that can be linked together in diverse and even contradictory ways.12 With this challenge in mind, we direct our inquiry into the power-freighted business of the production of differences in contemporary German society. What are the circumstances in which they are made ‘relevant’?
Above all, it is important for us to remember that cultures are ‘humanly made structures of both authority and participation, benevolent in what they include, incorporate, and validate, less benevolent in what they exclude and demote,’ as Edward Said contends in Culture and Imperialism.13 Dissident imaginations grow – like politics – in the field of power. Culture is not, after all, an ‘iron cage’14 that condemns us to behave in accordance with the rule. Culture can be, among other things, reflective, sceptical and critical; it comprises not just conformity but dissident action. Instead of thinking about identity in terms of difference, then, we want above all to differentiate between differences and think about differences within difference. In this sense, it would be a gross (and, it has to be said, symptomatic) misunderstanding if our criticism of ‘fundamentalist’ language were to be read as a plea for silence or an endorsement of censorship. On the contrary: take this as a call to talk … about the way we talk.
A book never owes its existence to its authors alone, and this is definitely the case with our book. We have registered, as references, the traces of myriad others, but we cannot and do not claim to have provided a definitive map of all the knowledge on which we built. Our editor, Mascha Jacobs, accepted the challenge of crafting a coherent text out of a manuscript in two voices, ensuring that both voices remained distinctly audible. Ina Kerner, Ilona Pache, Jasmin Siri, Imke Schmincke and Michaela Volkmann read our first drafts and provided comments: we would like to thank them for their ever-critical, ever-comradely support. Sabine Hark thanks Ilona Pache in particular for her incessant encouragement and unwavering confidence in the relevance of our project, and for the sheer serenity of her shared life with this author. Paula-Irene Villa thanks Michael Cysouw for much in general, and for his kind enabling of her intensive writing periods in particular. Karin Werner and Anke Poppen from transcript publishing house, who came up with the idea for this book. Without them it would not have been written. Last but not least, we would like to thank Sophie Lewis for her thoughtful and considerate translation.
‘The Rotten Present’: A Plea for Friendship with the World
‘I wish to defend this entire rotten age, the rotten present. It’s all we’ve got. It’s the only life that is available to us. It, and no other, harbours the substances that may unleash our powers.’1
– Christina Thürmer-Rohr, 1987
‘SEEING WHAT’S BEFORE US’
‘Can’t you see what’s before you?’2 What it means to be asked this question, typically in tones of irritation, is a matter the philosopher Nelson Goodman discusses in his book Ways of Worldmaking. He personally liked to answer the question: ‘That depends.’ That is to say, the statement ‘the earth moves’ is just as true as the statement ‘the earth stands still’, since both statements simply depend on their own distinct frame of reference.3 Is Goodman here legitimating the ‘post-truth’ era in which, according to a great number of journalists and commentators, we now live, defining truth in terms of whatever generates the most clicks? On the contrary: what may appear at first glance to be a radically relativistic position that does not want to know the difference between opinions and facts is, in reality, a conscious exercise in ‘irritating those fundamentalists who know very well that facts are found, not made, that facts constitute the one and only real world, and that knowledge consists of believing the facts’.4
Above all, Goodman’s reflections constitute a plea for examining the conditions that make statements of fact possible, for clarifying ‘what is before us’ in the first place and guarding against the ‘view from nowhere’. Second, despite or perhaps because of the growing importance of a certain epochal ‘post-facticity’, Goodman makes it possible to think about what it means that facts are not simply given: that is, that they are not outside the social unfolding of history. We create ‘world-versions’ – and thus facts – he writes, ‘with words, numerals, pictures, sounds, or other symbols of any kind in any medium’.5 And, Friedrich Nietzsche reminds us, ‘it is enough to create new names and estimations and probabilities in order to create new things in the long run.’6 Although we do contend, therefore, that worlds are produced and not simply found, we do not espouse the view, critically described by Pierre Bourdieu and Judith Butler, that the existence of things depends entirely on their names, that is, on ‘performativity’s social magic’.7 We simply deem that our perception of the world, and the way we designate it, shapes what we perceive and how, at a fundamental level; and that it determines what, as far as we are concerned, it really is. Indeed, according to philosopher John Searle, our ‘entire institutional reality’ is created by ‘linguistic representation’.8
The consequences of this are no more, and no less, than this: reality and language, perception and truth, facts and interpretations are not only interlinked, but constitutive of one another. That is no trivial insight, and it demands awareness of the complexity and, sometimes, inscrutability of the relationship – inscrutability being, as it is, one of the essential characteristics of the modern era. The philosopher Bernhard Waldenfels contends that, in modernity, there is no longer any form of order that exists a priori while still encompassing the observer.9 Waldenfels, here, is essentially describing the condition of contingency. That is: it is equally possible for all things to be one way as it is for them to be another, because there is no necessary reason for anything existing. Not our actions alone, but even the sphere in which these actions
