Soundings a journal of politics and culture |
We have put together this issue of Soundings at a time when
ethnic hatred is again devastating regions and blighting lives in what was
once, with care and difficulty, held together as Yugoslavia. And at a time,
too, when NATO, on a mission of bringing to an end such violence across
lines of difference, is pursuing its aims by bombing. The contrast between
what we are trying to say here in this issue of Soundings and what is being
done today in Europe - and in part in our name - is shocking.
The second half of this issue is devoted to the exploration of 'transversal
politics', defined by Cynthia Cockburn and Lynette Hunter in their introduction
as 'the practice of creatively crossing (and re-drawing) the borders that
mark significant politicised differences'. How different from the ethnic
cleansings of Milosevic, from the failure of 'the West' to see beyond the
politics of partition, and from the violence which is asserted by both to
be the only road to a solution. As Nira Yuval-Davis explains, transversal
politics is an attempt to find a way of doing things which is neither the
imposition of a single universal which refuses to recognise that there really
are 'differences', nor the retreat into those differences as tightly-bound,
exclusivist and essentialist identities. Neither Milosevic nor 'the Allies'
in their various guises - which seem always to imagine the world in terms
of drawing lines, dividing, allocating - remotely begin to recognise either
these complexities or the political possibilities to which they might, just,
give rise. And while in ex-Yugoslavia all sides pursue their aims by physical
violence of various kinds, transversal politics experiments with talking,
creative writing, theatre, joint projects. It would be naïve to argue, even
to imagine, that the latter kind of politics could be simply transferred
to the situation in the Balkans today. (Although it might be noted that
one of the groups which contributes to the project of transversal politics
is based in Bosnia, and brings together women of Bosnian Muslim, Bosnian
Serb, Bosnian Croat and mixed backgrounds - see also Cynthia Cockburn's
photo-essay in Soundings 3.) But juxtaposing the two approaches throws into
stark clarity the restricted terms in which 'our leaders' imagine the possibilities
of international politics. And how can Blair condemn bombings in Brixton,
Brick Lane and Soho, and Clinton the shootings in the Columbine school,
when they themselves are 'solving' things through violence?
The contributors to the transversal politics discussion would themselves
not argue that they have a 'solution' to the difficulties of doing politics,
of talking across differences. They recognise quite explicitly that this
is tentative, experimental (although it is also suggested that some aspects
of recent years' political dialogue in Northern Ireland - and granted the
difficulties in which it is presently mired - 'have reflected the beginning
of a shift in 'establishment politics' too towards transversal politics').
And this tone of exploration, of the recognition of difficulties, of the
recognition and examination of failures, is again in shocking contrast to
the performances we are forced to witness on what is called the world stage.
Pragna Patel presents an account of her involvement in Southall Black Sisters
which faces up to the difficulties which have been encountered, which tries
to learn from failures, and which sees self-reflexivity as part of the very
process of politics. Compare that with the assertive strutting of Robin
Cook; the macho posturing, the refusal to admit the slightest doubt.
The danger of writing like this about experiments such as transversal politics
is that they can come to seem almost bland or idealistic - that they may
be arguing that if only we were nice to each other, and kept on talking,
then all would be well. This is not how it is. As Nira Yuval-Davis argues,
transversal politics does not assume that each and every conflict of interest
is reconcilable. And here again the contrast with 'formal politics' is revealing.
For while in Kosovo the Blair government interprets antagonisms as running
so deep that they can only be solved by military intervention, back home
here in Blighty his vision is of a politics which refuses to recognise real
conflicts of interest at all - 'a politics without adversaries' as Chantal
Mouffe put it in an earlier issue of this journal.1 If anything is bland
and idealistic, it is this. And while New Labour scatters the word 'community'
through its documents and its pronouncements without a thought for the complexities
and conflicts which it is thereby covering up, transversal politics declares
itself perennially sceptical about the term. It is precisely New Labour's
bland official use of 'community' and 'multiculturalism' which can refuse
to recognise, and in that lack of recognition thereby reinforce, the processes
of marginalisation and oppression which cross-cut such unproblematised 'identities'
.
These issues of the complexities of identities and differences are ones
which have formed a continuing strand of reflection and debate within the
pages of Soundings. Andreas Hess presented a position statement in issue
11; the theme of Windrush Echoes (issue 10) explored the negotiation of
certain black and white identities in post-war Britain; the proposals for
new forms of social settlement and public sector provision (The Public Good,
issue 4) confronted issues of difference in the context of demands for 'universal'
provision. The dismal horrors of the daily living-out of antagonisms are
brought home in this current issue by Nick Jeffrey's detailed and thoughtful
account of Stephen Lawrence's London.
It may indeed be that this question of what Bruno Latour calls 'coexistence'
is now more centrally on the agenda (or should be) than it has been heretofore.
In his opening article for this issue, Latour argues that a key problem
for any serious left party must be 'to explore coexistence between totally
heterogeneous forms of people, times, cultures, epochs and entities'; that
we must remodel the project of modernity away from the old universalisms
and towards 'the new obligations of coexistence'. Once again, and as with
the project of transversal politics, the aim must be - he argues - to reject
both the more obvious, and opposed, alternatives on offer and strike out
for something different. In this case the formulation is that we must reject
both the current form of globalisation ('that is, in effect, Americanisation')
and the reactive retreat into new localisms. Throughout his article, Latour
is arguing for a reestablishment, and redefinition, of the differentiation
between Left and Right (again, a proposition which clearly distinguishes
this issue of Soundings from any form of Third Way politics); and key to
this redifferentiation, he proposes, must be an exploration by the Left
of the connections, rather than the oppositions, between locality and globality.
In this refusal to take as given currently dominant forms of economic globalisation
Latour is also reflecting another of the continuing themes of this journal.
And he is doing so too when he explores the basis on which such globalisation
is justified. His fierce arguments against the division between a realm
of (incontravertible, uncontestable) Science and a realm of Politics, and
the imagination of economics as a Science, lying within the former realm
(and being thus incontravertible too), precisely agrees with and develops
the arguments we made in the Editorial to Soundings 10.2 It is this removal
of the economic from the realm of the political which enables the current
form of globalisation to be presented to us as an inevitability. Economics
must be brought back into the realm of the political; we must, in Latour's
words, collectively appropriate the means of calculation.
One element which Latour brings to all these proposals which is rather newer
to the pages of Soundings is that this task of reinventing modernity (which
would be quite different from the 'modernising' proposed by Blair - the
very difference itself undermining Blair's project by demonstrating that
there is more than one way to 'modernise' ) is a task particularly appropriate
to the Left in Europe. It is a proposal for a European Left, to set against
a future of a world of untrammelled Americanisation (presumably aided by
Blair), which is both extraordinarily attractive and, given what is happening
in the south-eastern part of this continent, extraordinarily brave.
And not just 'far away' in 'the Balkans'. The crime against Stephen Lawrence
was one among many; the London bombings shattered streets which in one way
or another stood for some kind of coexistence. Latour argues that we are
moving from an era when 'succession' most marked our political imaginations
to one in which issues of simultaneous coexistence are more prominent. A
move, he says, from time to space. Perhaps another way of putting that is
to say that we have moved from an assumption that there was one grand History
going on, to a recognition that there are in fact many. It could be argued
that a real recognition of space throws into relief the existence of those
multiplicities. Space in that sense is about simultaneity: co-existence.
It is also, of course, in part, the changing spatialities of our times which
have made the potentialities and the problems of such coexisting multiplicities
acute political issues in today's Europe. The combination of ethnic diversity
and economic dereliction (two different aspects of two rather different
periods of 'globalisation') in certain boroughs of south London is what
Nick Jeffrey documents in his article. In contrast it has been pointed out
by many a commentator that the bombs in Brixton, Brick Lane and Old Compton
Street picked out with unnerving geographical precision locations which
could each be seen, in different ways, as having a confidence in asserting
a non-exclusive difference.
The women's projects in Bosnia, Israel, and Northern Ireland, in Southall,
in Eritrea, and in all the other initiatives documented with such life under
the theme of 'transversal politics' demonstrate, if cautiously, the necessity
and possibility of continuing to assert such confidence. They also demonstrate
that for new ways of 'doing politics' we must look somewhere else than Millbank
and other such places; somewhere else than the excited small circles of
advisors and journalists who - creating that self-referential circuit of
debate, which so rarely questions its own terms or recognises just how tame
and conservative it really is - occupy so much of our broadsheets, airwaves
and television screens. In Soundings we have always recognised that 'the
political' is far more than this.
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