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 take place, contain a multiplicity of possible versions of themselves. And, ultimately, this quality of impenetrability, which marks the very practice of modern science, demands that we understand the production of knowledge as always open-ended and provisional – the latter being a paradigmatic expression of the norm of ‘organized skepticism’ advanced by Robert Merton.10 The opacity in question may even have intensified in recent years as a result of the increasing – or, at least, increasingly noticeable – complexity of the social.11
THE COLOGNE INCIDENT
Seeing what’s before us and determining what matters – that is the concern of this book. The occasion for it? Whatever transpired on New Year’s Eve 2015 in Cologne: a night that stands for a tectonic shift in Germany’s social fabric, albeit one whose reach remains as yet unknown. As we have noted, whatever actually transpired soon crystallized into an ‘event’, far in excess of the real incident(s). ‘Cologne’ is now the name of that event: the name for an ensemble made up of ‘words, numerals, pictures, sounds, or other symbols’ that has acquired the capacity to ‘create new things in the long run’.
Following Stuart Hall, we apprehend ‘Cologne’ as one element in a ‘regime of representation’ that encompasses ‘the entire repertoire of imagery and visual effects’ by which ‘difference’ is represented at any historical moment.12 Within any such regime, everyday differences – ethnic and cultural labels, for instance, or gender markers – are (re)arranged in complex ways so as to bring them under a unified provisional structure. It is by referring to this unified structure that people are able to make meaning and organize the world for themselves. ‘Cologne’ is the name of one such structure. But what is it, specifically, then, that ‘Cologne’ renders legible? ‘Cologne’ organizes the difference between ‘us and them’, which is to say, in Hall’s famous formulation, the relationship between ‘the West and the rest’.13
Regimes of representation, as Hall understands them, do not simply describe differences. On the contrary: the defining feature of any regime of representation is the way it produces difference. Regimes of representation govern by virtue of the fact that differences