The fateful triangle

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The fateful triangle. Race, Ethnicity, Nation is a collection of three 2017 posthumous under the title The Fateful Triangle. Race, Ethnicity, Nation , the “Du Bois Lectures” given by Stuart Hall at Harvard in April 1994 . For Hall, “life with difference”, “ the problem of the twenty-first century”, could only be examined with the question of the interaction of race , ethnicity and nation .

In order to describe and analyze these complex real-historical and symbolic relationships, Hall combines the terms of various undogmatic Marxist currents, whereby the explanations often reach an enormous level of abstraction - the value of these diagnostic efforts is shown in their astonishing prognostic accuracy and topicality, which these texts still 25 years after Have emergence. This makes Hall's approach one of the most productive theories today.

Race - the moving signifier

For Hall, the focus of the first lecture is the question of the vitality of the biologically associated race paradigm and its necessary integration into a discourse analysis that also takes into account the social legacy of colonialism and slavery , since biologism is far from becoming obsolete.

"Race" distributes life chances

Race is "the heart of a hierarchical system that produces differences", a "discursive system for the production of otherness". Structuring societies with racial criteria "has material effects on how power and resources are distributed, symbolic effects on how groups are hierarchized in relation to one another, and psychological effects that influence the interior" of each subject. These binary differences ( we here - the others there ) are a fundamental, “deep defense system” that aims at polarization and division in order to “ fix every identity in the habitat assigned to it.” This requires permanent “discursive work”. that fasten the sliding boundaries of the fuzzy, albeit fatal, racial discourse.

The European Enlightenment had relatively early rejected the assumption of a double creation ( we: humans - the others: only human-like animals ) and "rationalized" the difference: The distribution of social power was now due to the new contrast between culture (we) and barbarism (the others) legitimized.

"Body" will remain a ground for attribution

The biological race discourse has been refuted by research (the genetic variance within human groups is greater than that between races or ethnic groups), but it is still determining the fate of the groups involved. Despite the now plausible explanation of difference through the socio-historical legacy of a group as a result of colonialism , slavery , poverty, educational and power distance, etc., selected physical differences become “ signifiers of difference” and are charged with certain meanings that legitimize discrimination.

"All of our eyes" takes the obvious physical differences in skin color, stature and hair growth as evidence of something significant, as evidence of the existence of races, and this "epidermalization fixes the" truth "of racial difference with its physical inscription ." The biological trace in Because of its usefulness, race discourse will therefore not disappear entirely despite contradicting scientific results. It is therefore not enough to neglect the biological race approach and move on to the socio-historical as the only one if one wants to explain the vitality of the biological assumptions - the obvious physical differences must also be theoretically integrated in the concept of this discourse.

"Race" is a discourse effect

Hall understands this constantly changing, “sliding” interplay of physical characteristics and everyday discrimination against the background of socio- historical disadvantages as a “racial discourse ” that organizes and regulates the “social practices of men and women in their everyday interactions with one another (-t) ". The body description “black” is already “an essentially politically and culturally constructed category”, the black body is already a discursively reshaped body, and this construction, referring here to Ernesto Laclau , is central to the constitution of hegemony .

This socially effective discourse sunk so deeply into the souls of the anti-racists that protagonists of the resistance made the truth or the value of a work of art dependent on the artist's "right" skin color and thus only turned racism on its head: " the paradigm paradoxically remains the same. "

Discourse Analysis Terms

Hall is looking for a theoretical solution to the problem of the gutting or emptying of the content of the concept of race by the life sciences while at the same time blurring it for all circumstances that seem to justify discrimination . The linguistic concept of the signifier used by him stands for a racial mark or a badge. For the aspect of shifted and shifting references to body and race, Hall also uses the rhetorical concept of metonymy and the metaphorical concept of the chain of equivalence . Race as a signifier moves in a discursively wanted, loose coupling to the other two central categories of the discourse, ethnicity and nation. Both relationships of race, that of the signifier to the signified and that to the other two leading constructs, are summarized by Hall in his concept of the floating or sliding signifier.

Ethnicity and Difference in the Global Age

In the second lecture he examines the “return of ethnicity ” and cultural differences under the influence of the unifying globalization , which he also evaluates as the cause of a new and very mixed, “hybridized” cultural diversity.

In contrast to the first, more theoretical lecture, Hall now examines historically and empirically “how identities can be constructed and mobilized by shifting signifiers in political struggle”, but also can be transformed into an expanding “fragmenting field of antagonisms”. The construction and deconstruction of identities (what defines us, what belongs to us? Who can we become?) Is, with reference to Jacques Derrida , a central arena of cultural policy.

Cultural difference establishes identity

By “ ethnicity ” Hall understands a certain type of difference or agreement (common languages, traditions, religious convictions, customs, rituals that connect individual groups) under which the term race “should possibly be theoretically subsumed” Ethnicity, which is always in danger of "letting culture slide in the direction of nature", was very controversial in the USA in the 1960s and 1970s, but is now returning (1994) with the waves of immigration from Central and South America Caribbean and Asia returned in a positive revaluation.

In the US, the melting pot myth failed because of reality. In Great Britain, the first generation of immigrants and their descendants after World War II had to abandon the “liberal-assimilationist dream” ( you are one of them, if you become like us ), from the hope of equality based on universal equality, because of ongoing racism and say goodbye to patronizing multiculturalism before “cultural difference as a positive focus on identity and identification” could be reconfigured, and difference affirmed and celebrated in the 1960s and 1970s.

Division of minorities

This "return of ethnicity" was a discursive shift that both constructed and fragmented identities, demarcating them from one another. So were z. B. the self-labeling of groups as "black" or "black British" or " African American " temporarily to political signifiers, to badges or banners, which initially linked discreet identities with one another. But the new “politics of cultural difference” since the 1980s broke the “political unity of blacks and other ethnic minority groups” to the point that ethnic groups even arranged themselves socially, hierarchically, taxonomically and separated themselves from one another. In doing so, they adopted a racial construction of the social world.

Contribution to global difference

Ethnicity as a form of cultural identity is originally tied to places, scenes or landscapes of lived traditions, rituals and languages ​​that are networked and thus also delimited by globalization and global consumerism . Hall, however, contradicts the thesis of a trend towards global homogenization, which leads “to the collapse of all strong identities”: He points to new forms of symbolic tribalism , the marketing of locality and the emergence of increasingly mixed, hybridized forms of identity, whereby “in fact more and more "Difference" is produced and negotiated in our world. He describes this parallel, complex development as the “reconfiguration of ethnicity under the conditions of global postmodernity”. In addition, even under the conditions of original accumulation, capitalism has always been able to achieve its successes through the "exploitation of difference" between the western centers and the post-colonial states in South America, the Caribbean, Africa and Asia - so difference does not go away se of homogenization. In addition, the production of new ethnicity is by no means a mere return to backwardness, but also, e.g. B. the Rastafaris , a policy of resistance.

Nations and Diaspora

In the third lecture Hall deals with the selective construction of national cultures , which transnational capitalism undermines with the global migratory movements it has triggered. With the relocation of peripheral ethnic groups to the centers, the western, “white” identity falls into a deep crisis, which on the one hand leads to racist and nationalist defensive actions, on the other hand to new cultural adaptations of those who have arrived in their diaspores , to a hybridized ethnicity.

National identity as a permanent discourse

The nation-states of the West have both socially and historically modernized their societies and surrounded them with national cultures - both sides together form a national identity as a symbolic, as an “imaginary community”, a mythological whole of more or less coherent narratives. A supra-individual, national identity functions like a “container for shared experiences” of collective catastrophes and triumphs, whereby the subjects who identify with it also participate in the relevance of the nation and its “mythological time”.

A national culture is constructed discursively and an identity discourse has to solve various tasks: From the existing different elements of the subcultures of a society (belonging to different classes, ethnicities, races, genders), attitudes and behaviors up to gender formation and sexuality have to be selected and strengthened that work best for the hegemonic interests . Others, however, have to be suppressed if they disturb this alignment. And “the unevenness of a turbulent and controversial history” would be reinterpreted narrative into a meaningful and “timeless continuity” “and in this way (the) triumph could still be seen as a catastrophe.” National culture gradually permeated by racism, using the example of Americaness and Englishness as well as the World War II battles on the Somme and around Dunkirk and the Falklands War .

Globalization destabilizes national identities

The western nation-state as a form of development of capitalism is paradoxically being robbed of its influence today by the globalization it promotes and its national cultures associated with it are weakened. National identities would be dissolved through a) the powerlessness of modern nation-states, through b) the flows of transnational capital and c) above all through global migration movements . These would cause a “fundamental destabilization of white identities”, a “global phenomenon of the utmost importance”.

As a result of the migration, the cultures touch each other in new contact zones, in which the immigrants globally in their diaspores, i.e. the places to which they have dispersed, also have to deal with the still dominant national cultures. In these contact zones, a new cultural mixture or hybridization arises. New cultural forms would also contain traditional, more or less present cultural traces, a “mixture of identities”, a “fabric of differences” that could never be finally fixed. Cultural diaspora formations become politically progressive elements by the fact that they cross and break the established or newly established “contours of race, ethnos and nation.” These cultural mixes activate ideological defensive actions to stabilize the balance found in national identity.

New nationalisms as rescue attempts

This migration movement "from the global south to the global north", "from the periphery to the center" undermines the delicate balance of subordination for all time. This consistently leads to a “slow dissolution of what has stood for ´the West´ for so long”. The threatening disintegration of national identities results globally in the defensive restoration of the nationalistic absolutisms that are being closed and in the cobbling together of new cultural identities to ward off different influences. This can be seen in the English criticism of Europe, in the revival of racist politics and violence, in the revival of all forms of fundamentalism and in the electoral successes of nationalist parties in Western and Eastern Europe - there even with tendencies towards ethnic cleansing because historically an ethnically homogeneous nation could only be enforced after their actual mixing and after the collapse of the Soviet Union. But here, too, Hall points out that ethnicity and nation would have occasionally played progressive political roles.

reception

Andreas Eckert upgraded in time online on 26 September 2018 his review Stuart Hall as well leading black public intelectual his generation with an impressive expertise in the field of culture and media studies. His analyzes are more topical than ever.

Susanne Billig praised the surprising topicality and impressive clarity in Deutschlandfunk Kultur on October 2, 2018, but criticized the convoluted linguistic and sociological jargon.

In the Süddeutsche Zeitung of November 16, 2018, Valentin Feneberg also criticized the hindering “post-structuralist undergrowth”, which in some areas makes progress considerably more difficult, even if the effort is worthwhile.

In the taz from 17./18. November 2018 Christian Werthschulte confirms that the lectures are "strikingly topical". In a sense, Hall foresaw Brexit and Thilo Sarrazin .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Stuart Hall: The Doomed Triangle. Race, ethnicity, nation. With a foreword by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Translated from the English by Frank Lachmann . Ed .: Kobena Mercer. Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-518-58725-6 , pp. 211 .
  2. ↑ Hall: The Fateful Triangle. Race, ethnicity, nation. Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2018, p. 105 f .
  3. ↑ Hall: The Fateful Triangle. Race, ethnicity, nation. 2018, p. 57, 69 .
  4. ↑ Hall: The Fateful Triangle. Race, ethnicity, nation. 2018, p. 103 .
  5. ↑ Hall: The Fateful Triangle. Race, ethnicity, nation. 2018, p. 69, 78 f., 80 f., 88 ff .
  6. ↑ Hall: The Fateful Triangle. Race, ethnicity, nation. 2018, p. 56 f., 63, 76 f., 85 ff., 103 .
  7. ↑ See also racism without races
  8. ↑ Hall: The Fateful Triangle. Race, ethnicity, nation. 2018, p. 61 f., 81 ff., 88, 101 f .
  9. ↑ Hall: The Fateful Triangle. Race, ethnicity, nation. 2018, p. 55 ff., 63 ff., 68 f., 79, 88 f., 95 f., .
  10. ↑ Hall: The Fateful Triangle. Race, ethnicity, nation. 2018, p. 93, 126 f .
  11. ↑ Hall: The Fateful Triangle. Race, ethnicity, nation. 2018, p. 59 f., 95, 165 .
  12. ↑ Hall speaks the problem of cultural appropriation , the cultural appropriation on. Compare also Hanno Rauterberg : How free is art?
  13. ↑ Hall: The Fateful Triangle. Race, ethnicity, nation. 2018, p. 79, 85 ff., 167 .
  14. ↑ Hall: The Fateful Triangle. Race, ethnicity, nation. 2018, p. 17th f., 146 ff., 184 .
  15. ↑ Hall: The Fateful Triangle. Race, ethnicity, nation. 2018, p. 104 ff., 119, 142, 166 f .
  16. ↑ Hall: The Fateful Triangle. Race, ethnicity, nation. 2018, p. 104 ff., 110, 112 .
  17. ↑ Hall: The Fateful Triangle. Race, ethnicity, nation. 2018, p. 104 ff., 111 ff., 116 ff . Including Achille Mbembe in the taz on May 12, 2020:.. Served "Earlier theories of difference and identity as a lever of fighting for equality and justice today is no longer the case, you are taken over by the inertia forces and turned into instruments of absolute division been. " taz.de
  18. ↑ Hall: The Fateful Triangle. Race, ethnicity, nation. 2018, p. 123 ff., 129 ff., 135 ff .
  19. ↑ Hall: The Fateful Triangle. Race, ethnicity, nation. 2018, p. 151 ff .
  20. ↑ Thus certain "male values" (self-discipline, self-denial, emotional rigidity, ...) became a type of British-imperial masculinity, which made the Empire, 100 times the size of Great Britain, temporarily controllable. (Hall: The fateful triangle : race, ethnicity, nation. P. 154 f.)
  21. ↑ Hall: The Fateful Triangle. Race, ethnicity, nation. 2018, p. 153 ff., 160, 165 .
  22. ↑ Hall: The Fateful Triangle. Race, ethnicity, nation. 2018, p. 136, 160 f., 176 .
  23. ↑ Hall: The Fateful Triangle. Race, ethnicity, nation. 2018, p. 175 ff., 180 ff .
  24. ↑ Hall: The Fateful Triangle. Race, ethnicity, nation. 2018, p. 161 ff .
  25. ↑ Andreas Eckert: Unsightly differences. Zeit-Online, September 26, 2018, accessed May 18, 2019 .
  26. ^ Susanne Billig: Knee-deep in racism and nationalism. Deutschlandfunk Kultur, October 2, 2018, accessed on May 18, 2019 .
  27. ↑ Valentin Feneberg: Become what we are. Süddeutsche Zeitung, November 16, 2018, accessed on May 18, 2019 .
  28. ↑ Christian Werthschulte: The truth about racism. The daily newspaper, November 18, 2018, accessed on May 18, 2019 .