k-punk

DESECRATED CULTURE (NO VALUES)

Land: "The infrastructure of power is human neurosoft compatible ROM. Authority instantiates itself as linear instruction pathways, genetic baboonery, scriptures, traditions, rituals, and gerontocratic hierarchies, resonant with the dominator ur-myth that the nature of reality has already been decided."

Further to our discussion of the end of multi-culturalism a while back, I was pleased to see David Aaronovitch launching an attack on Faith schools in the Observer yesterday.

For those not aware of the background, last week a Muslim group published a report identifying widespread Islamophobia within Britain. One of its recommendations was that there should be more Muslim schools.

Aarnovitch is right to be distrustful of the agenda behind this report. As he argues "an abuse of the term 'Islamophobic' is becoming a new weapon for attacking those who want to see a non-denominational, equal education system." Part of the problem is that the authors of the report have colluded in the racialization of Islam, in the equivocation of a religious affiliation with membership of a particular racial and or cultural group. In this, they duplicate the logic of the racist anti-immigrationists who worry that immigration must mean the (further) dilution - or in their terms, contamination - of British culture. The BNP likes to present itself as having no essential problem with other cultures. Both the Muslim lobby and the BNP could happily subscribe to that version of multiculturalism which wants cultures to be preserved in a their . The horror they share is of miscegenation, of cultural mixing and hybridization.

'Islamophobia' is an emotive term, and, again, Aaronvitch is right to be suspicious of the work that it is doing. There seems to be a surreptitious reversal of Voltaire's famous dictum, the credo of liberalism ('I disagree with what you say, but I would defend to the death your right to say it'), since the anti-Islamophobic lobby almost seem to be suggesting, 'If you don't agree with what I believe, you want me dead.'

But what is meant by 'Islamophobia'? If it means a persecution of individual Muslims, it is of course utterly deplorable and in every way indefensible. But if it means an opposition to a set of religious (and political) doctrines then it is not only acceptable, but, in my view, desirable - as desirable as opposing the autocracy of Roman Catholicism. These two things - a defence of individual Muslims and a hostility to Islamic doctrine - need to be kept apart. Such subtlety is, naturally, beyond the wit of foaming-at-the-mouth racists, but that is no justification for trading on their equivocation. Indeed, it is the most compelling reason for resisting such an equivocation.

There are very real reasons to oppose Islam. As Aaronvitch further argues, "What is going on here, I think, is an attempt to protect the young from modernity. ... It was argued by a pro-faith school columnist that at least the two great faiths - Catholicism and Islam - permit equality to believers and co-religionists. But they don't. If they did there would be women priests and women imams. My fear is that this emphasis on faith schooling is an attempt, albeit unconscious - to return us to the days before feminism, an attempt which affects all of us." Quite.

The relationship between Islam, Catholicism and patriarchy is not contingent but necessary. It is in the very nature of monotheistic religion. 'God the father' is not an accident of language which can be spirited away with a politically-correct rejigging of semantics. Monotheism is, in its very nature, a worship of gerontocratic male authority. This is one reason to be phobic about it.

Islamic absolutists have exploited an aporia in the philosophical logic underpinning multi-culturalism. This logic, cultural relativism, quickly leads to a paradox, in that it is forced to defend the very cultures which would totally reject the tolerance to which it is constitutively committed.

Some have responded to perceived cultural fragmentation by invoking mythical "core British values" to which new immigrants must swear alliegance. There are no such values. If anything defines British culture it is its lack of values. Britain was the first host of capitalism, and as such it was the first country to be literally desecrated, desacralised, by kapital. This desecration is to be celebrated, not reviled. Islamists share with the BNP a hostility to multi-national capitalism (it is not for nothing that al-Qaeda targeted the WTC, the symbol of global capital). Authoritarians of every stripe have known from the very beginning that capitalism is destructive of all ROM authority. That is what Deleuze and Guattari mean when they say that the primitive socius and the State do not 'precede' capitalism, since the virtual threat of capitalism, 'The Thing, the unnamable', is what produces the prohibitions and taboos which define them from the very beginning.

This is in no way to champion capitalism. Rather, it is to argue, with Deleuze and Guattari, that the "revolutionary path" is not to be found in mournful retrenchment, a projected "return" to pre-capitalist territorialities, but by forcing capitalism through to the "schizophrenic" limit it is always drawn towards but must always inhibit.

Kapital delivers the death of God. The ethical challenge it imposes is precisely the one that Nietzsche anticipated. We can either pretend that the fatality has not occurred and resurrect God and his authoritarian cults in new forms (Nietzsche saw this happening in what he called the 'modern values' of liberalism and the democratic movement) or we can face the radical desacralization of a universe in which we are 'falling, falling without limits'.

"A season in hell - how can it be separated from denunciation of European families, from the call for destructions that don't come quickly enough, ... from this prodigious migration, this becoming-woman, this becoming-Scandinavian or Mongol, this 'displacement of races and of continents,' this feeling of raw intensity that presides over delirium as well as over hallucination ans, and especially this deliberate, stubborn, material will to be 'of a race inferior for all eternity': [Rimbaud:] 'I have known every son of good birth, I have never been of this people, I have never been Christian, ... yes my eyes are closed to your light. I am a beast, a Negro." - Anti-Oedipus

Posted by mark at June 14, 2004 07:15 PM | TrackBack