Slavoj Zizek has quite recently identified one of the many issues with tolerance, diversity and multi-culturalism, and why it may not be working - Ah! I hear the SJW sickles being sharpened from here. Hear me out, please. Zizek coins the term, Decaffeinated otherness.
Now, Zizek’s a funny guy and a self-proclaimed antagoniser, so a certain amount of salt needs to be pinched into his ideas at times. That said, let’s take this idea of decaffeinated otherness and run with it. What Zizek is criticising here is the unthought-through virtue signalling of statements like ‘we’re all the same’, ‘there is no race’. You see, we cannot have diversity as well as this level of complete acceptance of similarity. If we’re all the same and there is no race then there’s no diversity. True? You can’t have both. The same can be claimed in terms of gender, sexuality, class. There’s an increasing trend of people who want a kind of totalism on these ideas - and a hypocritical one at that. So what is decaf otherness? In short, this is the desire for diversity without conflict. We want total acceptance of otherness to the point that the other becomes obliterated, yet, at the same time, we want to cling to diversity. We want the signs of diversity without the divergence of diversity. With it just being the sign or the performance of diversity, It is a simulacra, and can never be more than that. Diversity and tolerance are, by necessity, fraught bedfellows. Let’s take them by turn and see. Diversity insists upon a smorgasboard of contrasts and differences - in the way one looks, speaks, behaves, thinks. It is only natural that conflict comes from this. Not isolated conflict, of course - I have black friends - oh god did he just say that? - but non-the-less conflict is present. A Priest or Imam won’t face a crowd of gay, pro-choice, buddhist feminists, without at least internal and / or unspoken conflict occurring. A liberal won’t sit with members of the EDL without at least some spoken/acted or unspoken/unacted clash. Diversity may well be very good in a great many ways, but it is definitely not without ripples, without collision, clash. There is no diversity without divergence. These collisions and conflicts are okay though - we just practice tolerance. Cool. Let’s just pick this scab a wee bit too to make sure we’re not just going blind. Tolerance, at a core level, is about accepting behaviour regardless of its difficulty. It is, again, fraught. Tolerance requires the same level of differentiation and divergence. It requires otherness. To tolerate is to say: “I don’t agree, but I allow”. In this, we are keeping the other at a safe distance, we are accepting their difference and tolerating it through distancing, muting, blinkering. Tolerance then, is merely muted intolerance. Not too far removed from Zizek’s Decaffeinated Other. Another impact this has is one of identity. To what extent do we extend tolerance in the face of intolerance? Can tolerance of one thing act as a negation of self or community? There’s been tons of thinkers, writers, philosophers and psychoanalysts who have constructed (yes I use the term constructed with thorough knowledge of its implications in these cultural identity issues) theories around our sense of self, our subjectivity and how it is formed through, at least in part, a recognition of difference. Kristeva, for example, suggests that the subject comes into being through a series of distancing acts that separate the I from the Other. Lacan’s Mirror Stage is rooted in the subject’s recognition of themselves as separate from the mother, an entity that is cut away. Foucault has laid bare how sense of difference and otherness is fundamental to the regimes of truth that enable self-awareness and our negotiation with our cultures. Kenneth Burke argued that Man is the creator of the negative, how we understand life through good/bad, right/wrong, straight/gay, black/white dichotomies. So, otherness and difference is fundamental to our sense of being, our sense of community. This is a blog, we don’t have time to pick apart all of these theories. In essence, I want to argue that part of self-identification, our sense of being, is based on the recognition of difference or otherness. For example, I recognise my gender, class, race, sexuality, along with many other markers of my identity, in part, by noticing it as different in/than others. So, in order to maintain a sense of individuality, of being, the act(s) of differentiating / separating is a linchpin. If we are all the same there is no self, if there’s no self there’s no order - or totalitarian order in the case of Stalin et al. We might well end up like the pool of perverse flesh, fucking and devouring itself at the end of Brian Yuzna’s classic body horror, ‘Society’ (1989). This is a case for diversity - we cannot be without the other, the other upholds the self. It is also a case for clash, collision, divergence, for this too upholds the self, upholds the community. Now, I’m not calling for unfettered intolerance, or seeing intolerance as a potential radical politics. Just a call to arm ourselves against unthinking on these matters. We cannot get a truly diverse, multi-cultural system to work without embracing the fact that significant clashes and conflicts are intrinsic to it. Without that embrace, we risk losing our sense of culture, of place, of community, of sexuality, race, gender. It doesn’t matter if we see these things as biological or cultural constructions, the result is the same - we risk the makeup of our identity.
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