Saturday, January 20, 2007
(9:45 PM) | Amish Lovelock:
The difference between "or" and "and"
In a few months no doubt the avid viewers of British television channel Channel 4 will be treated by Endemol to a special 2 hour docu-soap involving Jade Goody travelling to India on a good-will tour and Shilpa Shetty visiting Bermondsey (maybe they won't do the second). Throughout the whole thing there will be neatly edited clips of speeches made by Gandhi in Manchester, former Indian army troop testiments on how we all fought fascism together, the Kumar's may pitch in, they'll be stuff from Mandella no doubt, tears all round, and nobody will be "a racist," despite the fact that nobody was "a racist" in the first place and all were capable of practicing racism.The posts on this at K-Punk and Foucault is Dead are nearly spot-on. That "under the cover of defending a housemate from racism, the media and the public have indulged in a slew of class hatred" is true. That the "British middle class resent their enjoyment of this jouissance and therefore develop a classist jouissance of their own" is true also. I can see that the need to "play-down" the moralizing division between "racists" and their "tolerant" counterparts made into some of the most bizare political capital I've seen recently by Gordon Brown and Ken Livingstone is necessary to catch this classist element. That moralizing division blurs the important similarities that exist between the two positions too. Tolerance is not about making those invested with the fantasy of governmental power less so, but inviting them not to exercise their power. Jade acts so we don't have to, we must be charitable and protect her victims, poor "sexy Indian babe" etc...
While Goody's is a conatus characterized by "miserable self-denigration and low self-confidence" "concealed behind borish bravado and conspicuous hedonism" molded and rewarded by Endemol, I don't see the need to take the "playing down" of the moralizing accusation to the following level:
While Goody and her compatriots have certainly bullied Shetty, I agree with Foucault is Dead that the treatment of the actress has not been straightforwardly racist. There have been racist remarks, but the central dynamic appears to be resentment and jealousy rather than racial hatred. There are certain structural similarities with racism in that the housemates who have attacked Shetty have done so on the basis of fantasies about the enjoyment of the other: Shetty, for instance, is held to have been given privileged treatment by Big Brother.
It is pleasing that the debate around the programme has concerned whether or not racism has happened rather than whether racism is acceptable or not. But it is worth thinking about why postmodern media abominates racism (at the level of discourse; it has, of course, done little to tackle racism and a structural problem) but is worryingly silent about class.
"Straightforwardly racist"? Does the label "racism" require "straightforward racism" or "racial hatred"? Is that what the last chapter of Tarrying with the Negative says? The postmodern media abominates racism because of the money involved in racism litigation, probably because of something to do with the legitimizing ideology of the postwar British regime, and to keep the relationship between the classist and racist joussance that everyone is talking about intact. In this sense, not "straightforwardly racist" sounds a lot like Goody's "I'm not a racist but..."
Lets not say "classist joussance" or "racist joussance" but and. Wouldn't it be great if someone actually understood Goody's words to mean "I'm not a racist, but I was being racist"? You know, I think even she might agree with that.
