Abstract
In this chapter, Jan Zienkowski provides a heuristic for analysing large-scale interpretive processes or logics articulated by activists and intellectuals who seek to construe an alternative mode of politics and subjectivity within the Flemish/Belgian minority debate. In a series of case studies, he demonstrates how people deal with problems of ideological misrecognition and interpellation when dominant discourses do not correspond to one’s sense of self. The analyses show that feelings of misrecognition frequently function as catalysts for the development of political awareness. However, the articulation of a preferred mode of politics and subjectivity requires the careful articulation of a complex interpretive logic that articulates multiple identities, experiences, signifiers, narratives and other ideological elements of discourse.
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Notes
- 1.
N-VA (New Flemish Alliance) (Dutch : Nieuw-Vlaamse Alliantie): a popular right wing, neoliberal and ethically conservative Flemish nationalist party chaired by Bart De Wever.
- 2.
Vlaams Belang (English: Flemish interest)—the successor of the far right VB (English: Flemish bloc) that was condemned for racism .
- 3.
Wim van Rooy and his son Sam van Rooy co-edited a book called De Islam : kritische essays over een politiek religie (English: Islam: critical essays about a political religion ). Even though they describe their work as a critique of ideology, their book has been welcomed as “critical” by some and condemned as “islamophobia collected” by others (Carpentier 2011). I fully agree with professor Zemni that this book constitutes an illustrated guide of contemporary culturalist discourse on Islam in Flanders and in the Netherlands . It is worth noticing that Sam van Rooy got kicked out of Geert-Wilders’ anti-Islamic Party of Freedom (PVV) after posting a YouTube clip of some Muslim women that walked past him in burkas in the Netherlands. This was the comment he posted alongside the clip: “Suddenly that scum passed by. So I decided to film them right away. Or should I consider it to be normal that my peace and quiet in Scheveningen is being spoiled by that type of imported backwardness out of the Islamic sandbox” (Carpentier 2011).
- 4.
On March 31, 2010, the writer Benno Barnard was invited by the non-confessional service of the University of Antwerp in order to give a lecture titled Long live God. Away with Allah (Dutch ; Lang leve God. Weg met Allah). This lecture was interrupted by a group of Muslims who reportedly shouted “Allahoe Akbar” (English: God is Great). The extremist Muslim website of Sharia4Belgium called on Muslims to come to this lecture, and to respond to “this provocation” by Barnard . According to Benno Barnard , it was only due to the presence of his own bodyguards and of the police that he did not end up in a hospital after this lecture (GVA 2010). Barnard framed this incident as a breach of free speech and democratic principles. According to Jan Blommaert , Barnard ’s response is indicative of the way Muslims have been represented in Flanders throughout the last decades. In this sense, the men of Sharia4Belgium are depicted as so-called typical Muslims— that is, “guys who are either against free speech, who avoid or obstruct public debate, and who rob someone of his democratic right to speak”. According to Blommaert , little has changed since Edward Said published his critique of the way Muslims are represented in Western media in Covering Islam (Said 1981, Blommaert 2010b). The moderate Muslim is still considered to be an exception—if considered at all. Benno Barnard was also present at the presentation of De Islam: kritische essays by Wim and Sam van Rooy at Flanders’ biggest book fair (de boekenbeurs) in 2010. Sharia4Belgium dissolved itself in 2012. In 2015, Fouad Belkacem was sentenced to 12 years of jail because of hate crimes and inciting violence with respect to non-Muslims . Several members of Sharia4Belgium have left Belgium to wage Jihad in Syria.
- 5.
The book Orientalism launched Edward Said ’s intellectual career. In this book, he explicitly acknowledges his debt to Michel Foucault . However, in contrast to Foucault, Saïd believes in the deciding influence that individual writers may exert on a discourse. Said describes orientalism as a discourse based on an ontologic and epistemological dichotomy between the Orient and the Occident (Said 2005, 27). His book is both a description and a critique of orientalist ideas, notions and practices that have survived until this day. As Zemni points out, Said may be labelled as a linguist in the sense that he was part and parcel of what we may call a linguistic or discursive turn in the social sciences. As such, he contributed to disciplines as diverse as literary theory, the history of ideas, music, the sociology of intellectuals and political analysis. Islam was a continuous point of interest to Said . But it should also be noted that Said ’s interest in this topic was closely connected to other issues such as the role of the intellectual in the public sphere. To Said , critical intellectuals should be involved in “the creation and the critique of borders – physical, national, cultural and spitritual” (Turner 2004, 173–174). Said was a prominent critic of Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations (Meeks 2003, 137). He explicitly wrote that taking up the role of an intellectual implies going beyond the suffering of particular nations and cultures. Intellectuals should explore the universal aspects of human suffering and oppression in order “to universalize the crisis, to give greater scope to what a particular race or nation suffered, to associate that experience with the suffering of others” (Said 1994 cited in Turner 2004, 174).
- 6.
Sartre emphasised the systematic nature of colonial practice(s) and discourse(s). His approach is closely related to the Marxism of the anti-colonial movements. As such, it articulated the universal principles of Marxism with the local conditions of (post-)colonial contexts. Interestingly, Sartre ’s emphasis on colonialism as a system went hand in hand with an affirmation of the significance of individual subjective experience (Young 2006, xix-xxi). Sartre acknowledges that Western humanism and human rights discourse in general “had worked by excluding a majority of the world’s population from the category of the human”. However, contrary to anti-humanists such as Althusser, Sartre refused to do away with the concept of humanism altogether. Quite the contrary, he attempted “to articulate a new anti-racist humanism, which would be inclusive rather than exclusive, and which would be the product of those who formed the majority of its new totality” (Young 2006, xvii). Young points out that even though Lévi-Strauss ’ and Althusser’s critiques of Sartre “enabled the later postcolonial deconstruction of the ethnocentric premises of European philosophy, it was Sartre’s work, particularly of the 1940’s, that was most influential on postwar French anti-colonial intellectuals” such as Césaire, Fanon and Memmi (Young 2006, xviii). Interestingly, in his book on the debate about Islam , Sami Zemni argues for the figure of an intellectual engaged in a practice of humanist critique. This type of humanism is never finished. It involves a view of history that includes other perspectives than those of Western man. It involves a plea against types of universalism that consider forms of diversity to be deviations. It is a plea against unidimensional and homogenising thought. At the same time, Zemni describes this type of humanism as a plea against relativism . Consequently, Zemni’s humanist critic is someone who builds intellectual bridges without shying away from potential conflict with majorities and/or minorities (Zemni 2009, 13–19).
- 7.
The Gulf War did not take place is a compilation of three essays written by Jean Baudrillard. These articles were originally published in the French newspaper Libération (Baudrillard 1995). Stephen Pfohl provides us with a book review that summarises some of the key themes addressed by Baudrillard. Baudrillard did not question the horror of the First Gulf War. But he did wonder whether ‘war’ was still a useful term to describe this event: “promotional, speculative, virtual: this war no longer corresponds to Clausewitz’s formula of politics pursued by other means” (Baudrillard quoted in Pfohl 1997). In order to understand Baudrillard’s statement, we have to link these articles to his criticism of hyperreality. According to him, we are becoming increasingly immersed in an endlessly mediated and symbolic deterrence of images and simulations. These make it ever more difficult to contact the real. Note the Lacanian overtones here. Pfohl paraphrases Baudrillard as follows: “No matter how deadly its violence, this campaign operated more to deter contact with the ‘real’ exigencies of history, than – as would be the case with a ‘real war’ – to open history to the agonistic challenge of enemies pitted in general economic struggle with one another.” Pfohl criticises Baudrillard for his rather “hyperbolic language and sweeping terms”. As such, he makes a point quite similar to Zemni: “The situated complexities and contradictions of Western people’s lived reactions to conflicts within the oil-rich Persian Gulf is not well served by such homogenizing language. Nor will Baudrillard’s exhortation to oppose the simulated illusions of media ‘realism’ by becoming ‘more virtual than the events themselves’ be hailed by many critics as a meaningful strategy of activist resistance” (Pfohl 1997, 139–141).
- 8.
In 1996, the mathematical physicist Alain Sokal sent the bogus article Transgressing the boundaries: towards a hermeneutics of quantum gravity to the journal Social Text (Sokal 1996b). As soon as this parody of postmodern and poststructuralist discourse was published, Sokal revealed his hoax in the journal Lingua Franca in an article called A physicist experiments with cultural studies. In this second publication, Sokal asked himself the following question: “Would a leading North American journal of cultural studies – whose editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew Ross – publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions?”. He also explained the procedure he used in order to write this text. Sokal was motivated both by intellectual and by political reasons. Intellectually, his article constituted a charge against “a particular kind of nonsense and sloppy thinking: one that denies the existence of objective realities, or (when challenged) admits their existence but downplays their political relevance”. Politically, Sokal points out that his anger is triggered by the fact that “most (though not all) of this silliness is emanating form the self-proclaimed left” he considers to turn towards “obscuritanism” in “one or another form of epistemic pluralism” (Sokal 1996a, 4). In collaboration with Jean Bricmont , Sokal would outline his critique in a more systematic way (Sokal and Bricmont 1997).
- 9.
Homi Bhabha is a postcolonial writer who is probably most famous for his book The location of culture. Within this book, Bhabha challenges a multiplicity of aspects related to cultural boundaries. His writings are heavily laced with references to thinkers such as Jacques Lacan , Michel Foucault , Gayatri Spivak, Stuart Hall, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe . His notion of intertextuality is borrowed from Bakhtin and Kristeva. In The location of culture, he writes that “Culture is heimlich, with its disciplinary generalizations, its mimetic narratives , its homologous empty time, its seriality, its progress, its customs and coherence . But cultural authority is also unheimlich, for to be distinctive, significatory, influential and identifiable, it has to be translated, disseminated, differentiated, interdisciplinary, intertextual , international, and inter-ratial” (Bhabha 1994, 195). He explains how “in the moment of liberatory struggle, the Algerian people destroy the continuities and constancies of the nationalist tradition which provided a safeguard against colonial cultural imposition. They are now free to negotiate and translate their cultural identities in a discontinuous intertextual temporality of cultural difference” (Bhabha 1994, 55). Differently put: “Cultural diversity is also the representation of a radical rhetoric of the separation of totalised cultures that live unsullied by the intertextuality of their historical locations, safe in the Utopian-ism of a mythic memory of a unique collective identity ” (Bhabha 1994, 50).
- 10.
For more information on the Dutch notion of inburgering , see Sect. 4.3 on The rise and fall of a Dutch binary pari: allothons vs. autochthons .
- 11.
In the original Dutch formulation of this statement, Naima stressed the determinate article in front of Islam : “de Islam” [English: “the Islam”]. By doing so, she ironically referred to Islam as a supposedly homogenous and singular entity. In English, inclusion of this article may seem strange, but considering its meaning, I have nevertheless chosen to incorporate it into the translation.
- 12.
Like the FMV chaired by Mohamed Chakkar, VOEM is an umbrella organisation. It grew out of the Organisation for Islamic Teachers in Flanders called VILV and has existed since 1996. VOEM associates sport clubs, women’s associations and youth groups. It explicitly states that the common point of reference for these organisations is a “Muslim identity or the fact of having Muslims as a target group”—regardless of the “nationality” involved. Its goals include “building a colourful, open, free, liveable and tolerant society”; “contributing to a positive representation of Muslim communities”; “stimulating inter-religious dialogue”; and “helping Muslims to find their place in Belgian society”. The organisation issues a yearly Emancipation Prize to persons or organisations that have made significant efforts in fostering the emancipation of Muslims . In addition, VOEM organises lectures, debates, workshops, visits to Museums, cooking classes and other activities in order to reach these goals (see VOEM).
- 13.
Fatima Mernissi is a Moroccan sociologist. She is also a well-known Islamic feminist who argues that the Koran does not justify an unequal treatment of men and women.
- 14.
In Flanders , the notion of special education (Dutch : buitengewoon onderwijs) is used in order to refer to educational facilities for people who are unable to participate in the regular educational circuit because of learning difficulties, behavioural problems and/or physical, mental or sensory disabilities.
- 15.
Nadia relies on her social scientific background and uses the framework of Pierre Bourdieu in order to understand the feelings of uncertainty people from the second generation of Moroccan migrants experience when climbing the socio-economic ladder. She makes uses of notions such as habitus , capital and distinction. Pierre Bourdieu distinguished between cultural, social, economic and symbolic capital. Together, these forms of capital determine the place an individual may occupy in a specific social field. It also determines his or her habitus. Cultural capital pertains to sets attitudes with respect to learning, to cultural products (e.g. books and films) and to its institutional variants (e.g. degrees). Social capital is a notion that designates the whole of potential resources available to an individual located in a network of relationships of mutual recognition and support. It pertains to the benefits of group membership. Economic capital is capital that can be turned into money at any given point. In specific contexts, these forms of capital can be exchanged with each other. Symbolic capital is important as well. It pertains to the capacity of people to exert an influence on their world by influencing the representation of their reality. It provides individuals and groups with the symbolic power to determine what sort of habitus should function as the norm in a particular social field. For instance, Bourdieu argued that within the education system, middle-class norms supporting a middle-class habitus tend to prevail (Bourdieu 1986).
- 16.
Het Belgische migrantendebat been reworked and translated into English as Debating diversity
(Blommaert and Verschueren 1998).
- 17.
The new Moroccan family code is commonly referred to as the Mudawana. The adoption of a new family code in 2004 was hailed as a significant step towards equal rights for men and women who have the Moroccan nationality. The Mudawana governs matters such as marriage, divorce, child custody and inheritance. The 2004 reforms have sparked a public dialogue on gender equality in Moroccan families (Zoglin 2009, 964–965). Both the new and the old family codes are grounded in Islamic principles. For a detailed overview of the legal aspects regarding this reform, see Foblets (2008). For an analysis of the events leading to the 2004 reform along with a preliminary analysis of its impact upon the Moroccan population, see Zoglin (2009).
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Zienkowski, J. (2017). Self and Politics in Activist Discourse. In: Articulations of Self and Politics in Activist Discourse. Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40703-6_5
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