Predictably, in this moment, we are hearing proclamations on all sides of the inevitable collapse of the (supposedly naive and misguided) Willkommenskultur in Germany. Didn’t Cologne prove plainly that these individuals ‘we’ had hitherto welcomed in were neither willing nor able to respect ‘our’ values? (Our values, by the way, means equality between men and women.) Cologne is supposed to have definitively laid bare the fact that Germany’s excessive tolerance vis-à-vis men from ‘the Arab world’ (whatever that is) poses a danger and a threat to ‘our’ liberal, egalitarian, Western consensus. And particularly to ‘our’ women.
In other words, ‘Cologne’ has come to stand for the assertion that certain migrants cannot be integrated – they do not want to integrate themselves – simply because, in the end, there are insuperable differences between the cultures in question. Furthermore, Cologne establishes (or so it would appear) the need for comprehensive CCTV surveillance. It can be deemed responsible for the resurgence of populist political parties and for the erosion of civil society across Germany. Finally, Cologne seems to have secured a far greater degree of cultural receptivity to feminist concerns, although this new regard for feminism is intimately entangled with the culturalization of social inequalities, that is to say, with new forms of racism.
Paradoxically, we are seeing the mobilization of feminism and women’s rights by nationalist, nativist, xenophobic and populist parties and platforms – as well as by right-wing governments such as Hungary’s, Denmark’s or Poland’s – in justification of Islamophobic and anti-migrant policies. ‘Cologne’, in this sense, epitomizes the ambiguous inter-imbrications that exist in our present moment between racism, sexism and feminism. It symbolizes the urgent necessity of grappling uncompromisingly with these three terms, teasing out their differences and, perhaps, inherent entanglements.
In this book, we seek to do just that. We ask: How did this notion of an ‘incompatibility’ – between Islam and feminism, feminists and migrants, Germanness and sexism – come into being? What role has Cologne played here? What is the nature of the cultural fight this cipher mediates – sometimes tacitly, sometimes explicitly? And how is it that Cologne became what Jacques Lacan calls a ‘point de capiton’, a quilting point of signification in which the normal ambiguity of linguistic reference is stopped? Because that is exactly what Cologne now is: a privileged signifier; a static fixture within a xenophobic security discourse; a matter on which everyone supposedly agrees, even if elsewhere – about other matters – there can still be discussion and uncertainty.
The initial impetus to dwell with these questions came from our perception that Cologne had much to do with the rapid and radical polarization of public speech in Germany. We wanted to find out if our hunch was right and get a handle on the phenomenon, if so. At the time of writing, even those preconceptions about the event ‘Cologne’ now seem somewhat problematic – that is, they have become problematic in our eyes. But the book that follows tries to treat this difficulty as a challenge and an opportunity. It seeks to advance the (feminist) enlightenment of the present, in a time of increasing discursive nebulousness. Committed to a politics of intersectionality, informed by sociological insights, we argue against the narrowing of the window of political debate in the hope of contributing to the revival of ‘debate culture’ worthy of the name. Our goal is, in the first instance, to determine what our attitude should be vis-àvis the aforementioned phenomenon and all the questions it raises. We do not ask after the ‘objective truth’ of the night in Cologne. Our text is neither a piece of reportage nor a properly academic study. Rather, it is an explicitly speculative reflection on what ‘Cologne’ stands for in the political domain of the Federal Republic of Germany. We certainly do not pretend to have exhausted the topic, nor to have avoided any glaring gaps.
One such gap, a troubling one, is the fact that we, too, have largely ignored the experience of those who were subjected to sexualized violence on the New Year’s Eve in question. This omission comes down to our being primarily concerned with the tenor of public conversation about ‘Cologne’ and the question of the social and epochal shifts reflected therein. Once again, ‘the women’ had to be deemed irrelevant. This, of course, reproduces the social treatment of sexualized violence generally – and that it does so is not something we wish to downplay.
How are the voices of those who have survived sexual abuse – domestic, public or military sexual violence – to be made audible? This is a hugely important question. And although we do not explicitly pursue it here, we believe our text has something to contribute to the articulation of conditions of possibility for this audibleness. We firmly believe these voices deserve more of a platform, more care, and more attention generally – far more than the structure of this book allows. What follows simply pursues a different question, namely that of the violent, fundamentalizing logic of differentiation: the logic we call ‘other and rule’.
By ‘fundamentalizing’, we mean those discourses that routinely close down meaning itself through generalization and authoritarian reductionism: speech which tries to immunize itself against ambiguity and self-reflection. We are designating – to take up Lacan’s terminology again – those ‘quilting points’ in language where something has been firmly anchored as though through multi-layered tissue. In the context of Cologne, this involved setting up (implicitly, at least), a priori, the essential valences of groups of people, and the alleged ‘reality’ of their relating. By pre-establishing such commonsense knowledge, the mechanism generates useful shortcuts for reading causality into events: the actions of any given player can easily be extrapolated from the type. Basically, discursive fundamentalization is all about shoring up fixed cultural identities and their intrinsic connection to specific values – for example, the assertion that freedom, democracy, equality and enlightenment are exclusively Western values, and that the Islamic or Arab worlds, conversely, constitutively lack the ability to emerge, politically speaking, beyond their self-incurred minority.
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