Postmo mongrels

It is not just that all this ‘ethnic’ thing does get to me, really; it is also that then, we still must play the multicultural postmo game to be somehow trendy and ‘right on’. No way! Check the clip. Ok: terrific fusion food but not my cup of tea. American kids in traditional Basque rustic cloths together with a pinch of authentic black radical Jamaican reggae salt is definitely not good grazing.

The question, obviously, is knowing whether there is something in multiculturalism that goes beyond the  Anglo-Saxon set up in which it kind of originated and then could perhaps be useful for other contexts. I’m afraid the answer is ‘I don’t think so’. What is multiculturalism? For Zizek multiculaturalism defines a specific cultural logic which all too “simply designates the form of subjectivity that corresponds to late capitalism“:

The ideal form of ideology of (this) global capitalism is multiculturalism, the attitude which, from a kind of empty global position, treats each local culture as the colonizer treats colonized people – as ‘natives’ whose mores are to be carefully studied and ‘respected’. […] In other words, multiculturalism is a disavowed, inverted, self-referential form of racism, a ‘racism with a distance’ – it ‘respects’ the Other’s identity, conceiving of the other as a self-enclosed ‘authentic’ community towards which the multiculturalist maintains a distance made possible by his / her privileged universal position. Multiculturalism is a racism […] from which one is able to appreciate (and depreciate) other particularcultures properly – multiculturalist respect for the Other’s specificity is the very form of asserting one’s own superiority (The Ticklish Subject, 1999, pp. 170-1).

And is there a worse racism than that based on (mis)using the supposed culture (mores) of the other as authentic ethnic native with the purpose of dwelling on the ‘civic’ political fantasy of a violence-free, harmonious society? Consider for instance Basque-Spanish film director Julio Medem’s documentary film La pelota vasca. La piel contra la piedra [roughly translated as ‘Basque ballgames: the skin against the stone’] (click here). The fact that a lot of water has gone under the bridge since it was first released in 2003  makes this exercise that bit easier. Medem’s position at the time was this: there are two irreconciliable political projects broadly represented by the authoritarian Spanish right-wing, on the one hand, and the Basque extreme radicals or something, on the the other… and here in the middle, the rest of us, i.e.: the majority must stoically endure the intolerant behaviour stemming from both these opposite warring factions. 

Of course, the situation has changed since, and not slightly. Now you have the human animals who are ‘legal’, on the one side, and then, on the other side, you have the inhuman beasts who are ‘illegal’. Anyway: despite the fact that everybody keeps paying taxes all the same, this is not the issue. This is far too political and we are talking about culture. The issue is the formal procedure that Medem activates in order to frame his documentary film. For me, what strikes as very odd is that in order to visualise the hard confrontational nature of the conflict taking place in the Basqueland he resorts to some universally practiced peasant and fishermen sports; from ball-games, tug-of-war, stone-lifting, wood-chopping and regattas to those that for obvious reasons I like better such as oxen-stone-pulling and, more specially, the many ram fighting shows I have witnessed over my extended travelling experiences in Texas, Nigeria, Canada, Indonesia… and even Irak (see here). 

It seems to me, however, that in order to better represent his topic, a trendy hyphenated, multiculturalist cosmopolitan traveller such as Medem himself should have made direct use of some more specifically Basque games. In order to frame the conflict, that is, I wonder why Medem did not come to re-present some extremely popular and specifically Basque games like, say, chess (tactics and strategy), football (collective and organised nature of the contestants), surf (individual effort) etc: climbing, skiing, golf, tennis…

 The problem here, you see, is that I maybe wrong but still think that what the majority of the people want is to be stupid like in Switzerland. At least I do. And this is no joke! This is very easy to understand. Together with the documentary film, Medem also published a book with the same title (Aguilar, 2003) in which the edited contributions of the participants in the film were reproduced at full length. Among all of them there is one, José María Satrustegi, who is presented in the book as being a humanist writer, ethnographer and member of the Basque Language Academy. He says the following:

I remember that when I was young I had great teachers and one time Nick Holmer came  from Switzerland and wanted to buy a house in [the Basque town of] Urdangarin and he told me: “Pray so that you don’t do what we, stupid us! have done in Switzerland. Very advanced and lovers of conversation and this and that but we have lost our veins. And what woudn’t we now give to recover those veins of ours. And there we are searching for them. You [Basques] will grow a good tree but if you loose your veins you will not be you, you’ll be something else. Like us.”

An yet is it not precesely that, exactly that, what we want? To be equal… normal… independent. How stupid!  I do. I want to be like you… equal…normal…independent… even boring… I want to take my beret off. I want you to stop looking at my as if I was a weird cannibal or something and I want to be able to conduct polite conversations even around a McDonald’s hamburger should that be possible considering that my kids are probably just about as noisy as yours. But you see, the problem is that there are many many very very clever multicultural citizens-of-the-world around, both inside like Medem and outside like Nick Holmer,  who don’t want that. What they want is that the very Basques who run one of the  admittedly smallest and powerless yet most advanced societies in Europe (and the world) should keep on beating drums like defeated native-Americans (or should I say native-Europeans. In any case notice how PC-PC I am and have avoided the inverted commas).     

 In another contribution to the same book Arnaldo Otegi is presented as the General Secretary of the banned pro-independence left party that does not condemn ETA attacks. 5 years on Otegi and the entire senior leadership of this political party are now in prison. This is what he had to say then:

We are neither better nor worse than the Spaniards, neither taller not more handsome: we are simply different. And nowadays the notion of difference is for us the rallying flag that the movement against globalisation reclaims. We think that the day when people from [the Basque towns of] Lekeitio or Zubieta will eat in hamburger bars, and everybody will listen American rock and dress American style and give up their language to speak English and when everybody will be stuck to the internet instead of enjoying the mountains, well for us that day the world will be so boring it won’t be worth living in it.

Well… nobody should get me wrong. I am all for militant discipline and just in case you are one of them heterodox arty-farty gutless wimp (which I’m sure you are not) I also back the strict orthodoxy of the Party line as much as I agree with Zizek when he says that discipline is the only thing left to those without power (see here in Spanish). However, on this one Otegi is wrong. And he is wrong because of this: as members of a socialist party, we should not argue on behalf of the Basque-Spanish regionalist political and cultural elite and the fears they want to spread regarding the supposed threat globalisation constitutes to small cultures and minority languages. Such is not necessarily the case. The case is rather, as Zizek puts it (at least in Welcome to the Desert of the Real, (2002) pp. 121-2 and Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle(2004) pp. 26-27) that when we hear the complaint according to which the recent trend of globalisation threatens national sovereignty we should also qualify this statement: whose sovereignty is most exposed to this threat? Arnaldo: it is not our own non-existing one but the sovereignty of those

[…] second rank (ex-)world powers, countries like the United Kingdom, Germany and France: what they fear is that once they are fully immersed in the newly emerging global Empire, they will be reduced to the same level as, say, Austria, Belgium, or even Luxembourg.

So the leveling of weight between larger and smaller nation-(state)s should be counted among the beneficial effects of globalisation. What we have to discern beneath the constant and contemptuous deriding of our own pro-independence political claims is nothing else but the contours of the  wounded narcissism of a once European ‘great nation’ still holding on to the anachronistic practice of pre-modern bull-fighting.

You know how it works now. It is all about respecting the other’s identity. So while I keep on soiling our local berets with a bit of global ketchup and I keep on doing the boring  internet bit in English, you (all of you)  hold it tight in there. Yes, I know. It is easy to say. And then  I guess that the food won’t be all that great. Still. Never mind. When they give you plain, white, watery rice just think you’re eating authentic paella. At the end of the day, they know only too well that when it comes to bullfighting us they don’t stand a chance. They will talk. It won’t be necessarily polite conversation but they will (have to) negotiate again.