What difference does ‘difference’ make? Identity,difference and the multicultural city

An identity/difference manifesto: Towards cosmopolis

While there is a great deal of literature that seeks to articulate how planning should respond to issues of ethnic ‘identity’ and ‘difference’ (e.g. Amin, 2002; Fincher and Iveson, 2008; Qadeer, 1997; Qadeer and Agrawal, 2011; Reeves, 2005), Sandercock’s (1998, 2003) two-volume Cosmopolis series is by far the most influential and widely cited; it established both the tenor and the terms of debate for much of the subsequent literature on this topic. In outline, advocating a ‘Radical Planning Model’, Sandercock calls for a paradigm shift in planning practice, one which tends to mirror the contours of the shift discussed above, that is, from ‘identity’ as ‘sameness’ (and oneness, constancy, etc.) to ‘identity’ as ‘difference’ (and ‘multiplicity’, ‘contingency’, etc.). Where once planning was dominated by a single ‘Enlightenment epistemology’ (Sandercock, 1998: 61–62) it now needs to embrace an ‘Epistemology of multiplicity’: ‘we need to acknowledge . . . the many other ways of knowing that exist; to understand their importance to culturally diverse populations’ (Sandercock, 1998: 76). Where once it was assumed that planning operates in the public interest, it now ‘seems more useful to talk about planning for multiple publics, or for a heterogeneous public’ (Sandercock, 1998: 206, emphasis in original). For too long, planning has proceeded on the basis of normative values derived from the dominant culture, masquerading as universal whilst failing to fit all cultures (Burayidi, 2000, 2003; Qadeer, 1997; Qadeer and Agrawal, 2011; Sandercock, 1998, 2003). Planning can no longer adopt the perspective ‘of impartiality or treating everyone the same during the process’ (Harwood, 2005: 367); instead, there is ‘the need to include the views of people from different cultural backgrounds with values, needs, interests, perspectives and aesthetic sensibilities that differ from those of the urban design and planning professions’ (Sandercock and Kliger, 1998: 129). Where once planning sought to be ‘comprehensive’, ‘[t]oday, planning is no longer seen as being exclusively concerned with integrative, comprehensive, and coordinating action and is increasingly identified with negotiated, political, and focused planning’ (Sandercock, 1998: 205). And where once:

planning was a project of state-directed futures . . . there is now a thriving, community-based planning practice in which planners link their skills to the campaigns of mobilised communities, working as enablers and facilitators. Rather than speaking for communities . . . this new-style planning is geared to community empowerment (Sandercock, 1998: 205).

Sandercock’s paradigm shift is accompanied by clarion calls for the ‘right to difference’ (Sandercock, 2003: 103) and for ‘a planning which celebrates and facilitates diversity and difference’ (Sandercock, 1998: 119). It is necessary to listen to ‘[t]he ‘voices from the borderlands’ [which] are the voices of the multicultural city, of those who have been marginalised, displaced, oppressed or dominated’ (Sandercock, 1998: 119) and thence nurture ‘identity politics as a politics of difference’ (Sandercock, 1998: 122). The quest is to revalorise ‘difference’, to transform its valency from negative to positive. Suggesting that ‘[t]he difference that is defined by (those in) power always means absolute otherness. It is an essentialising difference . . .’ Sandercock argues that:

By asserting a positive meaning for their own identity, oppressed groups seek to seize the power of naming difference itself, and explode the implicit definition of difference as deviance in relation to an (always socially constructed) norm. Difference now comes to mean not Otherness but specificity, variation, heterogeneity. In such a relational definition of difference, the previously ‘universal position’ of privileged groups becomes relativised (Sandercock, 1998: 123–124)

While Sandercock (1998, see especially 185–187) seeks to tread carefully around certain problems she associates with ‘identity’ and ‘identity politics’, it is not clear that her proposed solution avoids the identified pitfalls. The relational/relativised understanding of difference that is proposed, however contingent and fluid, is reliant upon a same as/different from construct (how else can the ‘difference’ be discerned?), which in turn presupposes some or other essential (or ‘specific’) set of qualities defining each of the ‘different’ ‘identities’.

Needs and social justice

Two additional themes in the literature on planning in multicultural societies warrant mention, namely, the different ‘needs’ of different ethnic groups and relationships between identity/difference and ‘social justice’. Sandercock addresses these themes both implicitly and explicitly, for example: ‘A politics of difference is a politics based on the identity, needs, and rights of specific groups who are victims of any . . . oppression’ (Sandercock, 1998: 185). However, they are perhaps more fulsomely addressed in the work of others. The notion of addressing society’s ‘needs’ is something of a mainstay of planning, so it is not surprising to find arguments that ethnic differences entail that some immigrant groups have special ‘needs’ (e.g. Kaplan, 2018; Qadeer, 1994) stemming from ‘differences’ in ‘living styles, communicative routines and cultural traditions’ (Thompson, 2003: 277; see also Kaplan, 2018). Adaptations to the built environment are often construed in terms of ‘need’, that is, as a product of immigrants attempting to meet their needs (Ehrkamp, 2005; Rishbeth, 2004; Shiohata, 2012; Wood, 1997) or else as ‘expressions of identity’. Similarly, ‘ethnic streets’ are widely construed as existing to satisfy the particular ‘needs’ of particular ethnic groups for specific products or services (Kasinitz and Zukin, 2016; Lo, 2009; Nasser, 2004; Sandercock, 2000; Zhuang, 2015; Zukin et al., 2016). These special needs are very often focused on food such as halal or kashrut products (Gabaccia and Gabaccia, 2009; Jordan and Collins, 2012; Warde and Martens, 2000). In parallel, there exists a large literature on the formation of ethnic shopping malls (Lo, 2009; Wang and Lo, 2007; Zhuang and Chen, 2017).

Meanwhile, Fincher and Iveson provide a neat synthesis of debates concerning social justice and ethnicity:

Published in a series of articles by Nancy Fraser, with responses by Iris Marion Young and others, we see in this spirited intellectual conversation the ways that questions about the principles underlying contemporary notions of social justice have arisen from the critique levelled by analysts of the cultural politics of identity at political economies of inequality focused on class. Redistribution is often understood to be the remedy for inequality rooted in class, and recognition the remedy for the failure to treat all social or identity groups as equivalent in their diversity (Fincher and Iveson, 2008: 10).

In Fincher and Iveson’s account, the debate between Young and Fraser eventually settled upon agreed concern that ‘economy’ and ‘culture’ have become polarised. As Fraser puts it, ‘the two paradigms of justice do not communicate’ (cited in Fincher and Iveson, 2008: 11). Accordingly, Fincher and Iveson identify both ‘redistribution’ and ‘recognition’ (along with ‘encounter’) as key normative principles that should inform planning’s engagement with diversity in the city.

Logics of social value

From the preceding overview, it is clear that much of the literature on the multicultural city views many immigrants as in some senses vulnerable and/or marginalised – ‘voices from the borderlands’ – and that ‘identity’ and ‘difference’ are amongst the most relevant terms to account for these issues. Key techniques that immigrants do, can or should employ to combat this state of affairs include strategically enacting or performing multiple and/or hybridised identities, according to the contingencies of circumstances. Yet when viewed from within Baudrillard’s oeuvre the selected terms of engagement can only appear curious, if not misguided. They precisely mirror the key ‘values’ of the capitalist system; in reproducing those terms (and values) in the context of ethnicity, authors (re)produce the very mechanisms that create the vulnerability and marginalisation they are seeking to challenge.

With respect to capitalist societies, Baudrillard distinguishes three logics of social ‘value’:

Three points warrant some emphasis. First, this is not a static classification: Baudrillard (1981: 123) goes so far as to outline ‘a hypothetical general conversion table of all values’ which marks out ‘the respective fields and the transit from one to the other’. For example, UV – SV involves the transfiguration of use value into sign value though activities such as conspicuous consumption (the destruction of utility) and advertising (a cultural system of differentiation, more or less divorced from objective and practical qualities). Or, travelling in the opposite direction, from SV – UV, signs are rendered in terms of personal satisfaction or need (this fashionable jacket makes me stand out from the crowd and it keeps me warm). Second, although the respective logics might supersede one another, over time, in terms of structural predominance, they do not succeed one another. Each superseding phase invokes the preceding as its ‘alibi’, its naturalised and mythologised ‘origin’. Thus, UV becomes the contrived ‘ground’ for EV (the economy exists to serve people’s needs and desires) and UV and EV both function as mythical ground for SV (I don’t care that this jacket makes me stand out from the crowd, it was a bargain and it keeps me warm). And third, each of the three logics shares at least one thing in common, namely, the necessity of producing what Baudrillard refers to as ‘distinctive material’. Capitalist exchange relies upon the assignation of positive value to objects which, in turn, depends on the ability to distinguish this-not-that. It is predicated on different objects (and different subjects) being discrete, atomistic, autonomous and distinct(ive) (By contrast, that which is neither this nor that is intolerable to the capitalist machine, is unable to be computed.).

For Baudrillard, the designation of this-not-that and constructions of positive and autonomous identities are invariably underpinned by dichotomous splits: binary oppositions enable us to distinguish between male and female, white and black, good and evil, order and disorder, the real and the imaginary, etc. (with one term in any opposition invariably privileged) . Baudrillard examines the operations and effects of disjunctive splits across multiple domains, but is especially concerned to underscore how constructions of the linguistic subject (in Saussure’s analysis) and of the economic object (in Marx’s analysis) follow the same form: the manner in which identity is constructed in Western societies mirrors the construction of the economic object. Thus, the linguistic subject is founded on a split between signifier and signified (and sign and referent); meaning is then argued to derive from the reference between signifier and signified (and/or sign and referent). Similarly, the economic object is born from a split between exchange value and use value; an object’s exchange value is then argued to derive from that object’s utility relative to the utility of other objects.

In both cases, one term in the opposition appears to be grounded in reality, the other a mere representation of that reality. We assume the reality of objects precedes their representation in signs, and we assume that real utility resides in real objects whose relative value is represented via exchange value. Yet these assumptions conceal the manner in which reality/representation distinctions are themselves effects of disjunctive splits, along with the degree to which the order of the terms is reversible: perhaps it not that signs come to represent a reality that precedes them but rather: ‘It is our ability to represent – to recount, to reconstruct in writing, speech and other media – that persuades us that there is a ‘real’ of which our representations are a copy or approximation’ (Pawlett, 2007: 82). Both cases are also animated by an abstract principle of equivalence that enables ordered and regulated exchange of both meaning and economic goods:

in the sphere of language or representation a relation of equivalence between signifier and signified, and between sign and referent, enables ‘meaning’ to be produced, exchanged and accumulated. The signifier ‘tree’ invokes the same ‘thing’ whether it is used by a child, a horticulturalist or a poet (Pawlett, 2007: 41)

Economic exchange is similarly predicated on a principle of equivalence associated with money: a jar of coffee is ‘equivalent’ to ten dollars which is ‘equivalent’ to two bottles of milk, for example. And both cases are informed by a logic of identity/difference, same as/different from.

Crucially, Baudrillard finds the same form manifest in distinctions between ‘subject’ and ‘object’. Subject and object are first split, construed as autonomous entities. This poses the problem of their relationship, which is then resolved through a principle of equivalence: the subject has ‘needs’ (and desires) which are met via the ‘utility’ of objects, which find their ‘equivalence’ in the ‘utility’ of objects. Baudrillard is damning in his condemnation of this ‘solution’:

What speaks in terms of need is magical thinking. The subject and the object having been posited as autonomous and separated entities – as specular and distinct myths – it then becomes necessary to establish their relation. This is accomplished, of course, with the concept of need . . . the operation amounts to defining the subject by means of the object and the object in terms of the subject. It is a gigantic tautology of which the concept of need is the consecration (Baudrillard, 1981: 70–71).

‘[T]here are only needs’, Baudrillard concludes, ‘because the system needs them’. The notion of ‘needs’ grounds the subject in ‘reality’: we assume that needs are ‘natural’, that they lie close to the essence of humankind. Likewise, we assume, in Marx’s terms, that there is something ‘concrete’ about use value, given its capacity to satiate our ‘natural’ needs. Yet, again, these assumptions conceal that needs and utility are themselves effects of socially sanctioned disjunctive splits, along with the degree to which the order of the terms is reversible:

rather than preceding economic exchange value as the point of origin from which all economic systems and modes of production derive their meaning and raison d’être, the notion of needs, the notion of use value, follows the ideological construction of exchange value. Use value acts as an ‘alibi’ for exchange value, providing a naturalised rationale for its existence (Grace, 2000: 12, emphasis in original).

Pawlett further clarifies Baudrillard’s contention that the notion of ‘needs’ is intrinsically ideological:

To speak of needs, uses or wants is already an abstraction because it covertly assumes a great deal. It assumes an already existing, taken-for-granted individual separated from other individuals and separated from the world. It assumes that this ‘individual’, itself an abstraction, will naturally abstract or break down the world into useful things (and less useful things) and make use of the useful things to survive and reproduce. This assumes a natural scarcity and of competition for these scarce resources. It assumes that all of these components – ‘objects’, ‘individuals’, ‘scarcity’, ‘usefulness’ and ‘competition’ – exist in nature or reality, independently of social or cultural meanings and representational practices (Pawlett, 2007: 32).

Shifting logics of social value

The Twentieth Century shift from production to consumption as the animating force of capitalism has been remarked upon by many (Baudrillard was amongst the first), and its basic contours are now well understood. However, minimal attention has been directed towards Baudrillard’s contention that this shift was accompanied by – indeed, was underpinned by – a shift in the logic of social value. Baudrillard argues that at the structural level, production of value is no longer underpinned by EV and its principle of equivalence (even if it persists in a kind of shadowy afterlife), having been superseded by SV and its principle of difference. Baudrillard (1993a: 6) explains this shift through reference to Saussure’s identification of two dimensions of exchange:

To determine what a five-franc piece is worth one must . . . know: (1) that it can be exchanged for a fixed quantity of a different thing, e.g. bread; and (2) that it can be compared with a similar value of the same system, e.g. a one-franc piece (Saussure, citied in Clarke, 2010: 236).

Clarke (2010: 236) clarifies: ‘The first dimension corresponds, by analogy, to the functional capacity for a linguistic sign to refer to something; the second corresponds to the structural system of differential terms capable of allowing such reference in the first place’. The first dimension relies upon a principle of functional equivalence: the equivalence between five francs and a loaf of bread, the equivalence between the sign ‘tree’ and the object to which it refers. By contrast, the second dimension is underpinned by a principle of difference: the difference between five francs and 1 franc; the difference between the sign ‘tree’ and the sign ‘dog’. Baudrillard’s contention is that the ‘value’ arising from exchanges, whether linguistic or economic, is increasingly generated from this second, structural and differential dimension.

Put simply, in what Baudrillard terms the ‘classical’ configuration of capitalism, oriented to production, the principle of equivalence offered potential advantages of ordered and regulated exchanges, coupled to more or less determinate identities and roles. However, such advantages are decidedly constraining where the goal is to see a proliferation of consumption. Far better to have society populated by subjects who possess what Hardt (1998: 36), after Deleuze (1992), dubs ‘a ‘whatever identity’, or rather an infinitely flexible placeholder for identity’. Subjects who prize difference, who seek to endlessly differentiate themselves; subjects whose ‘identities’ are fluid, always shifting, only ever coalescing fleetingly from within a matrix of differences; subjects who are ever ready to consume their way to a new ‘identity’. Be who you ‘are’ today, be someone else tomorrow.

Baudrillard (1994) characterises the catalyst for this shift in terms of ‘implosion’, a notion he appropriates from Mcluhan who used it to refer to ‘the pulling out of the spaces between components’ (cited in Genosko, 1999: 94). The terms that were held apart to generate and maintain the sense of ‘grounded’ exchanges in theirs ‘classical’ form collapse into one another, fusing unstably. First and foremost, this implosion is apparent between the logic of economic production (as analysed by Marx) and the logic of representation (as analysed by Saussure). Though the underlying forms of these logics were always homologous, their content could be distinguished within the ‘classical’ era (Pawlett, 2007: 41). But with the shift from production to consumption, the economic object and the sign fuse to become the sign-object: we now consume objects less because they are useful, and more because of what they signify. More generally, this implosion is evident in relation to numerous binary dichotomies, indeed, almost any that come to mind: ‘the commutability of the beautiful and the ugly in fashion, of the left and the right in politics, of the true and the false in every media message, the useful and the useless at the level of objects, nature and culture at every level of signification’ (Baudrillard, 1993a: 8–9). Where the principle of equivalence (between signifier-signified, sign-referent, object-use) functioned to stabilise meaning and identity, the principle of difference and its accompanying ‘implosion’ functions to make meanings and identities increasingly indeterminate.

Notwithstanding the preceding, there remains a sense in which binary disjunctions still play a crucial role. However, these are not disjunctions that exist in directly oppositional terms through references to signifieds or referents. Rather, they are disjunctions that come pre-packaged and pre-coded through reference to modelled or staged social relationships. The disjunction is located ‘inside’ of a pre-existing model that needs only be chosen or enacted. Pawlett illustrates this (along with a number of the preceding points) using the simple example of a bottle of shampoo:

We do not really ‘consume’ this individual object (plastic bottle with brightly coloured ‘funky’ label with indeterminate chemical gunk); instead we consume the social relationship established between ourselves (as desirable, fashionable, etc.) and others in society who will recognise us as such. This process positions us within the code, at the very least above those who do not use a designer shampoo. Signs exist only in relationships of coded connections to other signs: they operate in combinations or commutations, readily interchangeable precisely because they are arbitrary, abstract and plastic (Pawlett, 2007: 174, emphasis in original).

The disjunction in question here, between ‘self’ and ‘other’, is notably different to the one which might operate where a principle of equivalence were in play. The ‘self’ produced through this act does not link to some signified or referent, say, ‘worker’, that stands opposed to some ‘other’, say, ‘capitalist boss’. Indeed, there is no direct opposition between ‘self’ and ‘other’; these poles have collapsed into the model requiring only their enactment, their ‘performance’ (through consumption).

The code

A key dimension of Baurdrillard’s argument here is that consumption is systematically socio-cultural and systematically differential:

A consumer is never isolated, any more than a speaker . . . Language cannot be explained by postulating an individual need to speak . . . Before such questions can even be put, there is, simply, language . . . on which is articulated the individual intention of speech. Similarly, consumption does not arise from an objective need of the consumer, a final intention of the subject towards the object; rather, there is social production, in a system of exchange, of a material of differences, a code of significations and invidious values (Baudrillard, 1981: 75, emphasis in original).

‘The implication’, as Clarke (2003: 62) notes, ‘is that any individual use of goods (like an individual utterance) is subordinate to the system of objects (analogous to the system of language)’. As should be already clear, this comparison of consumption with language is not mere metaphor. Our use of language is predicated on language first using us: to make meaning, we can only make the distinctions language allows; we also may be obliged to make a distinction where language forces the distinction. A code of arbitrary, conventional rules frames the meaning we make. Likewise, a code of arbitrary, conventional rules and models underpins capitalist exchange. Pawlett clarifies:

By ‘the code’ Baudrillard intended not particular codes of meaning (English, French, Morse) or particular modes of the interpretation of meaning (dominant, resistant, plural) but rather the condition of possibility of all coding . . . Signs produce social meanings and values on a scale or grid whereby all points can be measured and compared. To clarify, it is not that every ‘thing’ can be converted into sign form, it is rather that the very process of transcription or coding produces ‘things’ within a scheme of identities and differences (Pawlett, 2013: 133, emphasis in original).

It is the (capitalist) need for measurement and comparison of all ‘things’ – for discrimination between ‘things’ (and people), for discrimination between the values of things (and people) – that produces the need for ‘identities’ and ‘differences’. From this perspective, to celebrate, nurture and respect (even just to tolerate) ‘identity’ and/or ‘difference’ is to celebrate, nurture and respect (or tolerate) the code and the broader system of consumption it underwrites. It is to reproduce and endorse the very terms – the very form – of the code’s operations, a form that integrates and differentiates, a form which functions to ‘discriminate’ identities:

Consumption is not ordered around an individual with his personal needs, which are then subsequently indexed, according to demands of prestige or conformity, to a group context. There is, first, a structural logic of differentiation, which produces individuals as personalised, that is to say, as different one from another, but in terms of general models and a code, to which, in the very act of particularising themselves, they conform . . . The basic logic is that of differentiation/personalisation, viewed in terms of the code (Baudrillard, 1998: 92).

For Baudrillard (1990: 159), the reign of the principle of difference ushers in a ‘combinatory, aleatory and ludic universe’ where the imperative is to ‘do’ oneself ‘differently’, to ‘play’ with one’s identity, to ‘play’ with the combinatory possibilities of pre-coded models. All this play presents as ‘freedom’ and ‘choice’, even as it is utterly constraining.

It is certainly possible to move around within the code, there are freedoms within the code, and, of course, power relations and constraints. Indeed, we are enjoined to manoeuvre within it . . . The code entreats us to ‘be’, to verify ourselves, to be through self-coding; indeed, to take responsibility for oneself is to be self-coding (Pawlett, 2007: 153)

In short, the imperative is to operationalise pre-coded models, to perform them and, in the process, to perform ourselves. As Pawlett intimates, this is by no means a passive process devoid of agency; it is one which is utterly dependent upon active participation.

Radical Planning?

Baudrillard’s account of the shifting value structures of capitalism would appear to cast much of the discourse on the multicultural city in a new light. In some cases, commentators seem to rehearse and entrench certain of capitalism’s key ‘alibis’ (e.g. the importance of addressing different ‘needs’ when the latter’s primary function is to ground and naturalise exchange value); in other cases, commentators present as critical insights what might be regarded as normative descriptions of the current machinations of capitalism; in both cases the readings appear to be from capitalism’s song sheet. In key respects, the basic terms of engagement – ‘identity’ and ‘difference’ – are problematic in so far as they uncritically reproduce the fundamentals of the mechanism by which discrimination is enacted in capitalist societies. The identity/difference dichotomy opens onto a schema (the code) that is discriminating in its essence, ensuring ‘integration within a sliding scale of values’ (Baudrillard, 1998: 94) where everything might be differentially and hierarchically compared/contrasted; same as/different from. As Baudrillard (1993b: 131) writes, ‘[t]here is no such thing as the proper use of difference’. Indeed, ‘a sliding scale of values’ in the form of the code is a necessary correlate of the relational/relativised understanding of difference Sandercock propounds. When outlining ‘the range of existing or possible policy responses addressing the integration of migrants’, Sandercock (2003: 151) repeatedly calls for ‘integration initiatives’. However, so long as ‘differences’ are promulgated, these initiatives will be rendered redundant by the code: the latter already integrates all differences, albeit in a hierarchical manner.

Observations construing immigrant identities as fluid, hybridised and multiple (often presented as a self-conscious attempt to avoid ‘essentialising’ identity) would appear to be marching in step with the latest capitalist tune of ‘difference’: anything other than fluid, hybridised and multiple identities present as a hindrance to contemporary consumption. As Baudrillard says of Jakobson’s account of ambiguity, in a critique that might be applied no less to many other post-structuralist accounts of language, meaning and identity:

Ambiguity is not dangerous in itself. It does not change the principles of identity and equivalence in the slightest . . . it merely produces floating values, renders identities diffuse, and makes the rules of the referential game more complex . . . the positions of the respective subjects have not been lost, in some sense they expand indefinitely – subjects become unsettled in their subject-positions. . . . work loose in their respective positions, but the structural grid . . . remains the same (Baudrillard, 1993a: 216, emphasis in original)

Likewise, accounts of immigrants ‘strategically’ performing or enacting different identities amounts to a normative and precise description of what the capitalist machine would have them do: abstract, coded models remain just that until they are performed or enacted.

The insistence by some that immigrants have different ‘needs’ (and/or desires) and that these must be recognised by planners, amongst others, can only be seen as misguided when situated within Baudrillard’s understanding of capitalism’s shifting value structures. On one level, it misses where capitalism has moved: the importance of establishing the subject-with-needs (and the corollary of useful objects) is part of a bygone era of capitalism; the strategic stakes have shifted elsewhere. On another level, it functions to operationalise one of capitalist’s key ‘alibis’, shoring up a naturalised myth of origins: the ‘reality’ of pre-given, autonomous subjects with ‘identities’, ‘needs’ and ‘subjectivities’ set over and against discrete objects. In doing so, it ensures that the immigrant is, from the off, consecrated as an economic agent, able to be integrated into the capitalist system (whereupon it might be subject to the discriminatory mechanisms of ‘identity’ and ‘difference’). It is one thing for empiricist, economic geographers to suggest that, say, the different ‘needs’ of immigrants are reflected in ‘ethnic’ consumption spaces. It would seem to be another thing to present the recognition of different ‘needs’ as approximating a ‘radical’ approach to planning. Finally, arguments that there are imperatives to ensure that ‘economic’ and ‘cultural’ dimensions of identity/difference and social justice are connected only allow commentators to locate themselves where capitalism already moved some time ago. For Baudrillard, the form of the ‘economic’ and of the ‘cultural’ were always homologous; for at least half a century they have been inextricably intertwined.

Underpinning many of the issues here is the apparent unwillingness of commentators to relinquish the concept of ‘identity’ altogether, along with the associated idea that there is an underlying ‘reality’ to subjects and objects – they are what they are, however enduringly or fleetingly – which might be grasped outside of representational practices. Hall’s ‘second’ understanding of identity, for example, subjects identity to the play of history which is tantamount to saying that the concept of identity transcends history. The concept of identity endures throughout history; it is apparently impossible to imagine places or times where people did not construe themselves in terms of ‘identity’. Yet this is precisely what Baudrillard contends, that notions of ‘identity’ and ‘difference’, as societal structuring mechanisms, are relatively recent inventions.

For Baudrillard, the current terms of debate concerning racism and discrimination are part of the problem (more precisely, they reproduce the problem). ‘Identity’ and ‘difference’ are products of the code and the latter is an inherently discriminating and discriminatory mechanism (same as/different from). What if the quest to avoid ‘othering’ by respecting, tolerating, celebrating or understanding difference or different identities in itself marches in step with racism and discrimination? To make racism disappear perhaps it is necessary to make ‘difference’ disappear, not in order to usher in the ‘same’, but in order to play host to the Other:

Racism does not exist so long as the other remains Other, so long as the Stranger remains foreign. It comes into existence when the other becomes merely different – that is to say, dangerously similar. This is the moment when the inclination to keep the other at a distance comes into being (Baudrillard, 1993b: 129)

The imperative here is to allow the other to remain as Other (to the code), to resist efforts to codify the Other as merely different, to resist efforts to codify the Other at all. Or as Baudrillard puts it:

The Black revolt aims at race as a code . . . The revolt of women aims at the code . . . This position of revolt is no longer that of the economically exploited; it aims less at the extortion of surplus value than at the imposition of the code, which inscribes the present strategy of social domination (Baudrillard, 1975: 134–135, emphasis added).