Τώρα το είδα αυτό και θα ήθελα να κάνω μια προσθήκη.
Ένα άρθρο που αν και κάπως πιο γενικό, καταπιάνεται με πολλά από τα ζητήματα που συζητήθηκαν εδώ. Από τη μεριά του μη αφομοιωμένου, «τοξικού», «κοινωνικά παθογενή μετανάστη».
Proud Scum – The Spectre of The Ingrate
By Matthew Hyland
The term integration has been turned upside down. Once it was the demand for the white majority to integrate the racial other into ‘society’ by abolishing formal racism within the state and its institutions. Now, writes Matthew Hyland, the (culturally) racialised other is required to ‘integrate’ into the majority
At some point following the ‘riots’ late last year in France, that country’s interior minister and aspiring president Nicolas Sarkozy is reported to have threatened kicking out ‘those families who refused to integrate’. Regardless of whether he actually uttered it, the phrase exemplified a sleight of ideological hand that’s become all too familiar.[1] I mean the one where the terms of a question about what institutions do are inverted to make it sound like it’s about the behaviour or the character of single subjects. The point being, of course, to hold people retrospectively responsible for what has happened to them. The statement attributed to Sarkozy amounted to a proposal that the state should make use of its borders to distinguish which foreigners were adequately : henceforth, those whom the interior ministry had not chosen to expel would by virtue of this be shown (provisionally) not to have ‘refused to integrate’. It never would have been announced in quite that way, but it was already de facto policy thanks to the Sarkozy-ordered emergency provision of fast-tracking for deportation any non-citizen arrested (note: not convicted) near the ‘disturbances’.
As well as showing the workings of a mechanism commonly used in the rhetorical production of false social problems, the story also drew attention to a remarkable upheaval in the usage of ‘integration’, a term that has lately become a key banality of racial politics.
The racial integration famously demanded and gradually obtained by the American Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and ‘60s had a strictly circumscribed meaning: the abolition of formal racial segregation in institutions such as electoral politics, schooling, public transport and local administration in general. Integration in this sense could have been imagined by no-one but its stubbornest opponents to imply the breakdown of the wider economy of racism. (That is the object of the older, bloodier and ongoing struggle of which the limited Civil Rights/integration victory should be seen as one important episode.) There can be no doubt, though, that at the moment when the term entered popular political vocabulary, the sense – i.e. the direction – of the imperative to ‘integrate’ was clear. It was obviously directed at a racial majority: self-constituted ‘white’ America was forced to suffer a change of circumstances not willed by it, and the agent of alteration was the racial other whose minority (in the sense of ‘childhood’: supposed incapacity for rational, effective exercise of power) was a myth essential to that of whiteness.[2] It’s also crucial that at this stage the meaning of ‘integration’ entailed logically that it be demanded not of individuals, however personally bigoted, but of institutions in a chain of responsibility ultimately leading up to the nation-state itself.[3]
Returning to the Europe of 2006, in which the Sarkozy-phantom cited above and countless others warn foreigners to integrate or leave, we find that the sense (i.e. direction) of the integration-imperative has been upended over the last 40 years. The command to integrate is now incessantly delivered to presumed ‘others’ in the name of a majority. This reversal implies that of the other essential characteristic of the earlier meaning: the imperative is now delivered by the state and its secondary agencies to single subjects. (It makes no difference, incidentally, if a multitude of loudmouthed freebooters joins in the admonishing. Whether they notice or not, every time they talk about ‘getting tough’ they’re identifying with the state and invoking its protection.)
What was a transitive verb (e.g. ‘the state must integrate the school’), then, becomes intransitive, or implicitly reflexive (‘the alien must integrate [herself]’). Integrate herself into what? Into ‘society’, ‘the community’, ‘democratic values’, etc. That such names which aspire to the universal are standard aliases for the nation state, as Angela Mitropoulos has observed, is spelled out clearly in this case, where the act of (self-)integration required by ‘society’ is defined only negatively, by the state action policing its omission.[4] Rephrased this way, the Sarkozy doctrine at least reminds us that lack of intelligible content in a command certainly does not mean it isn’t backed up by (police) force. Rather, the law’s content remains permanently provisional, to be revealed only retrospectively in each particular instance by the agency delivering the consequences of non-compliance.
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