page 4
RB: Which leads me to ask what you think about what just happened in Abu Ghraib?
HB: Well, I think this is one of the most important and forgotten political and ethical issues in moments such as the ones we are living in, is always to ask yourself, how does the violence outside, whether it’s a just war or not, how does it affect the soul of the society within? This was a question that Jean Paul Sartre put to the French people during the Algerian war. The practice in the name of your country, the practice of violence outside, there may be circumstances in which it is necessary, I don’t want to suggest that it isn’t, I think you can take a pacifist position, I think that’s also a very well considered position, but if you use violence of this kind where you lock up people irrespective of who they are based purely on the sense of fear and anxiety, if you think you can do that when you are involved outside of your own country in a campaign of violence, even if it can be justified in certain ways, you always have to ask yourself, what is it doing within my own country, within my own culture, to my own people? And I think people don’t ask those questions enough. They project outside but they don’t question within. And I think that’s the main issue. And I think what’s happened recently is what’s been feared all along. And it’s part of a continuum.
There’s Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and they’re not the same thing and I don’t want to suggest they are but they have to be seen in relation to each other because I think in some way the same legal principle applies that people who are not represented are locked up and once they’re locked up they become the subject of the most sadistic practices in the name of security. So do you see where security now becomes a cultural issue? We are not here talking about the questioning of these people.
I think any society, any country, however much it feels itself pushed, if it resorts to torture, even selectively, is putting itself, the moral and political fabric of its own country, in great danger. I know there is an argument afoot now, a long article in last week’s New York Sunday Times by Michael Ignatieff on the whole notion of the lesser evil. This is an argument now: if you feel you have to resort to torture now, under certain circumstances, to be able to uncover a major terrorist attack, isn’t that the lesser evil? And I think, you know, in the world in which we live, this argument should be made and we should actually have to think about it. But we should think about it very hard. And we cannot think about it if groups of people are locked up and kept outside of any surveillance or security. And by that I’m talking about the prisoners who are outside of a benevolent surveillance force and also the jailers. So in that situation you cannot even begin to debate what is a lesser evil. So there must be a much greater disclosure for us to even participate in such a discussion.
But my earlier point about the whole notion of security, leading to developing a cultural edge, is very apparent here, these prisoners were made to perform, to simulate I assume, sexual acts and were then photographed in that position with the knowledge that these particular acts were repugnant to the culture. Now, whether this was a stereotype of what it means for men to be naked together in that culture, I don’t know, because it would be quite easy to suggest that for the average Westerner, the idea of homoerotic acts among Muslim males is the worst kind of thing in the world and I’m sure that on the other side, the Muslim world wouldn’t stand up and say anything different, they’d say it is repugnant. One way or another, the important issue really here is that there was a deliberate use of the violation of certain ethical, moral, religious and cultural practices and violation of that to humiliate people.
The other question then is why were the photographs made? And the videos? The first part of this is the use of certain cultural aspects as part of a political project of humiliation and governance if you like. The other side of it is my second argument. That such acts always reflect back on the culture itself. So what is this whole culture of taking photographs of people in humiliated and sexually deeply compromised positions without their consent and making representations of it. I think people in cultural studies should be studying these issues: what is that a mirror of? These photographs and these videos, what do they mirror? It’s got nothing to do with the prisoners. They mirror something about the institution of the army, they mirror something about militarisation, they mirror something about the uses of pornography without consent, that’s the issue, I’m not against pornography if there is consent, but the uses and the creation of pornography without consent. And I think it says, don’t you, a lot about the society for whom these photographs and videos were made, don’t you?
RB: Absolutely.
HB: The vicarious, voyeuristic violence. And of course, you know, it’s violent pornography, it’s a billion dollar business in the world. I don’t even want to say Western or non-Western, just in the world today.
RB: So, back to the World Social Forum.
HB: Well I think that the World Social Forum is an extremely important contemporary phenomenon and extremely important event. It brings people from a whole range of cultures and countries who are involved in non-profit NGOs, political leadership, grassroots leadership, what some people call globalisation from below. I feel that it’s an incredibly important voice that has to be heard and is being heard alongside the world Economic Forum.
I think clearly there are various kinds of globalisation in the world today. There’s a globalisation which is about the reinvention of the politics of privilege, but there is also a globalisation which uses some of the same technologies to create another voice, a voice of fairness and justice, and that I think is the most important contribution of the World Social Forum. After all, you know, Globalisation has been so characterised by right and left as the transmission of finance capital, the impossibilities of outsourcing. You know, when finance capital circulates, it touches different societies in different ways and some people profit and others don’t and I think that each moment of the success of the global also has to be assessed in terms of who is losing out, not only the gains but who is losing out. And I think that those people and those places that lose out have to have a sense of solidarity and have to emerge to voice what is happening to them in this whole process of globalisation if indeed globalisation is going to be successful.
And here again, I feel rather like Walter Benjamin, that you know, all great moments of civilisation are also moments of barbarism. At the same time, moments of barbarism. And we’ve got to keep that double vision alive if we are going to make any kind of human progress at all. We cannot protect ourselves from the profound antagonism and ambivalence and from the contradictions which we ourselves inhabit as we experience major historical change or transition. We can’t make life easy for ourselves.
RB: What are you speaking on tomorrow night?
HB: I’m speaking on the double vision of the global. The sort of thing we’ve talked about but more extended. A little bit about my experience leaving to study English at Oxford and what I felt that did for me and what it didn’t do for me and why I started working in this field of post-colonial studies.
RB: And why did you?
HB: Well, I wanted to either work on Robert Lowell for my thesis or VS Naipaul. And my tutor said well, lots of people work on Robert Lowell; nobody has worked on VS Naipaul. And I believe that mine was probably the first dissertation on Naipaul. I started working on Naipaul, and I started feeling that there was something about the Caribbean-Indian displacement that spoke to me in my own experience and so I worked through that.
And then in the talk I speak about two forms of cosmopolitanism, one a form of majoritarian global cosmopolitanism and another notion of cosmopolitanism that I call vernacular cosmopolitanism. The cosmopolitanism that does not come because you’re a master of the world and you want to learn about other worlds but it’s the cosmopolitanism of the refugee or the migrant or the cosmopolitanism of the minority, of women who are in a process of minoritisation even if they’re not a minority. Where you have to learn, to put it metaphorically, various languages, you have to be able to learn about translation because you survive that way. It’s not that you become sovereign. So then I make this distinction within cosmopolitanism.
And then I talk about Adrienne Rich and use a poem by Adrienne Rich where she talks about global historical trauma to elaborate my notion of globalisation and cosmopolitanism and what it means to make an intervention into the histories and events of globalisation that you may not want to support without being a luddite and saying this is all wrong, we need to get back to some earlier form.
RB: I meant to ask you about hip-hop and hybridity but that’s a whole other topic.
HB: That’s a whole other topic, but it’s very much part of the work on vernacularisation that I’m interested in, you know what I call vernacular cosmopolitanism.
[break]
One other thing that’s important there when you ask about migrants and migration, I actually talk about Article 27 of the convention and what is very interesting there is that it’s supposed to be for the protection of minorities but minorities are always protectable by international bodies if they behave like little nations. When you have, for instance, your own work, people who are forming collectivities because they’re involved in the intersection of gender, sexuality, culture, then they’re new emergent groups and this is exactly what the International convention feared, that you’d have new groups, new identities, new identifications emerging which would rock the boat [very animated] of the common citizen, so I actually talk about that briefly tomorrow, just in passing, but that’s why I think that if you had the text, it would be good.