Date: Wed, 06 Feb 2002 22:13:33 +1100
Subject: AUT: civil society and Islamophobia


Another reason I'm interested in "civil society" and its possible collapse
is the current war-context of extreme anti-Arab racism and anti-Islamic
racialisation. 

"Oriental" societies, and Islam in particular, have always been
characterised in Western supremacist discourse as having a propensity for
despotism, and this is sometimes *specifically* explained as an absence of
civil society. But whether or not the term is technically used, the general
idea is that such a layer of society provides a mediating and liberal
ambivalence that is a racist marker for civilisation itself. (Marx and
Gramsci are not immune from a touch of these stereotypes.)

Of course, I think all this has always been a defensive projection of
Western capitalism's uncertainties about insurgent class struggle, which is
that which needs to be "mediated" in the first place, and the spectre of
"oriental despotism" is just the return of the Western capitalism's
repressed despotism. (Bryan Turner clumsily touched on this issue in
"Orientalism and the Problem of Civil Society in Islam" [in Turner's
_Orientalism, Postmodernism and Globalism_, 1994].)

So what about the current context? If civil society has effectively
collapsed and is merely being simulated, perhaps there's a double dose of
racist reaction within Western capitalism: hysterical Islamophobia in
repressed recognition of everybody's loss of civil society itself -- we are
all despotic barbarians! --  and a further edge of reaction, unchecked by
any "moral geometry", due to the effects of liberalism having no layer in
society in which to flourish.

Hmmm...


Ben



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