Paris,Friday,13 November 2015: Modest thoughts of an interculturalist

The social media are full of Not-in-my-name declarations (Horton, 2015), written by Muslims in the wake of the Friday, 13 November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris. People who do not want to see their faith and religion hijacked and abused for aims of terror and horror—for horrorism, as the philosopher Cavarero (2009) has so aptly called the gratuitous violence against the defenseless.

In June 2015, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks published a book titled Not in God’s Name (Sacks, 2015). In this book, he rebukes all those who ‘kill in the name of the God of life, wage war in the name of the God of peace, hate in the name of the God of love, and practise cruelty in the name of the God of compassion’. The Rabbi is certainly not the only religious leader (inside and outside the monotheistic fold) condemning acts of horroristic violence in the name of the Lord—Pope Francis (ABC 13 Eyewitness News, 2015) has stated, in the wake of the Paris attacks: ‘I don't understand these things. They are difficult to understand, carried out by human beings’. This I find a remarkably honest and intelligent statement by somebody who must know about matters religious, since it does not fall into the religion-cum-culture trap.

Not in my name and not in God’s name—and not in culture’s name, I would hasten to add, from the point of view of an interculturalist. After all, we, who talk about culture and communication all the time, should have something to say by way of distancing ourselves from violence committed in the name of religion (and, often by implication, culture), and by advocating communication in the name of nonviolence, peace and integration. I started this discussion, already in January 2015, after the Charlie Hebdo attacks (Praxmarer, 2015).

Why should this touch us? I think it does, in more than one way. Not only because a certain tradition of essentialist culturalism, delimiting and defining culture in terms of nationality or passport or origin, or of supposedly inherited and identitarian traits, still haunting our field of study, easily lends itself to the interpretation of this and other (violent) acts in terms of ‘culture’. The temptation is indeed great to attribute this and other forms of violent behavior to an imaginary conceptualization of essentialist, homogeneous and most vaguely value-guided culture as a unit of analysis, which has reigned so supreme (also) in the field of study called intercultural communication. ‘Islamic culture’ is such and such, see their values, their norms, rules of behavior, conventions, traditions, etc., … and therefore intolerant, aggressive and prone to violence. To the point where ‘their’ culture invades ‘our’ culture and forces ‘us’ to submit to ‘them’—Fallaci (2004) as well as Houellebecq (2015) have painted such scenarios for Europeans. Similar voices could be added, here, such as the one of Sarrazin (2010). Not to forget the most successful coup d’Etat culturel of them all, this time in the established Republic of Social Sciences, namely Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations, published in 1993 still with a question mark, in 1996 as affirmative statement and as authoritative analysis of an epoch of contemporary World Order (Huntington, 1993, 1996). Huntington’s hypothesis came at the right place (the US, as the global superpower of our age) and at the right time (end of the so-called ‘Cold War’; need to create a new legitimizing ideology of world order under the old hegemon). With a single stroke, all historical, economic, social, ideological and other differences and inequality became reduced and reducible to one overarching dimension and variable: culture (and, by implication, civilization). Adiós, history, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, psychology, economics, politology, etc.—¡Viva la Cultura! Where first there have been historically, socially, economically, politically as well as ideologically distinct worlds (The First, the Second, the Third, sometimes also a Fourth), as well as centers and peripheries, now there was suddenly utter clarity as to how to categorize and taxonomize the world: major civilizations…. What a setback, even measured by our own ethnocentric and hegemonic ‘Western’ standards of thinking—and how eagerly this was repeated mutatis mutandis also by many an interculturalist.

Little wonder, then, that the cultural argument could be turned, in the public debate and realm, into a very reactionary one, and is being used by rightwing, xenophobic, populist and nativist parties of many colors, shapes and forms to exclude immigrants and to extoll phantasmal national identities, so well described as ‘imagined communities’ by Anderson (1983). Perhaps it is good to remember, in this context, that when people, entire nations and societies imagine themselves as states, identify with states, see themselves as states, become states and act as if they were the state, their autonomy, their freedom and their rights are usually usurped and curtailed by the very object of their adulation. In the name of security, but also in the name of identification with the state, this will most likely happen in the wake of the terrorist attacks in Europe and elsewhere, should no other than étatique reactions to terrorism come forth.

On this last point, I cannot not mention how problematic I find that so many people run around with the Tricolore, even substitute their pic on facebook with that flag. Also, I find it most ambiguous and at times pathetic when notoriously rowdy crowds, such as soccer fans, sing or bawl the Marseillaise—by the way a rather vindictive piece of lyrics, as one commentator has observed (Marshall, 2015). Here from the text, where one line says, ‘Can you hear them in the countryside coming to slit the throats of your wives and children?’ While the chorus cries out, ‘To arms, citizens… let’s water the fields with impure blood’. My point here is that waving flags and singing national anthems is only one, peculiar, form of solidarity. To my understanding, this harks back far too much to an exclusive and singular, imagined and idealized national identity, which is poison to any discourse in the name of culture (viz. Remotti, 2010) and more often than not utterly exclusive rather than inclusive—and not without violence (viz. Sen, 2016). In the name of national identity, unity, and glory, almost always, more bad than good has been done—depending of course whose perspective you take, and on whether you are one who does or one who is done to. Better than the Marseillaise, perhaps, Le Chant des Partisans (1943), if one really wants to evoke glorious and martial French history at this sad moment for Paris and France, or less state-centered forms of solidarity altogether.

One other point, which I would like to bring up, is the social media and other (mainly in one way or another mediated and rarely directly face-to-face) outpour of solidarity. That for marketeering journalists ‘Only Bad News are Good News’, we all should know by now. The globalized news market, as any other market, including the social science market, has constantly to create its own supply with which to create demand. In the news market, nothing better than a mix between personalized tragedy and consolation (and then of course revenge and justice). Not to speak about the solidifying effects of acts of horrorism on ingroup belongingness and identity. I think that Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others (2003) is still one of the best analyses of, and reflection upon, the outpour of solidarity (or schadenfreude, as another reaction) with the pain and misery of others.

At any rate, it is also instructive to see how selective these acts of global solidarity are. The big wave of global solidarity with the centers started with September 11 2001 in New York, then Madrid, London, Paris and Paris again, and some minor (minor only for the cynical body count) episodes in between. But what about the many acts of social violence in the periphery of our globalizing world, in African countries, the Middle East, Asia, India, etc., of which the last one happened barely one day before the Paris attacks in Beirut? However, we should not engage too much in a number game, which is not to the point when looking at horrorism and regarding the pain of others. As Neiman (2004: xi) tellingly observed: ‘Many people yearn for measures of absolute weight. (…) would we be helped by putting the genocide at Auschwitz at 1.0 on a scale that left the genocide in Cambodia at 0.87? (…) Comparing makes sense only with regard to particular goals: preferably preventing future ones. Once we are facing evils, trying to measure them is a matter of abstraction at best, political calculation at worst’. Precisely, ‘preventing future ones’, also by trying to analyze the ones of the past and those happening under our very eyes.

To come back to my concern: what does Intercultural Communication (IC), as an academic field of study, a body of knowledge, a corpus of data, a tradition of thought have to say to these acts of violence? One would imagine that we should have to say something, we, who always talk about communication and culture—just as one would imagine that also a doctor of medicine, no matter how specialized they may be, has some idea about what ‘health’ is, should or could be, overall.

One reason that we have so precious little to say is that our core categories, communication and culture, and we might as well take in the ‘inter’, don’t have the explanatory power needed to come to terms with such phenomena—nor should they be called upon to have, as a fellow tradesperson might readily object. The answer to this question of course depends on what type of IC one wants, which topics of research and investigation one deems important, which methodologies one follows, in which environment one works and elaborates one’s theories, to what end and for whose benefits one wants to (or has to) do research, theory, method and teaching. Questions, these, that all social science researchers are facing. In a broader sense, it is also the question of the place and function of the universities, as (still) seats of erogating, gaining, propagating and disseminating knowledge—again, of course, this depends on your view of the ‘good society’ and the role of the university therein.

Perhaps our discipline—if IC is such—would have more to say about the social crimes (here intended as crimes against society, akin to crimes against humanity) committed in Paris in January and November 2015, if the focus of our studies would have been socially deeper and broader. For instance, focusing more on communication between (culturally and otherwise (self-)defined) individuals and groups from the global peripheries in the centers, rather than focusing on the center-culture in the periphery or another center. ‘Focusing’, here, means taking up the concerns of the concerned, which is, of course, first and foremost, a question of methodology of research. I would just like to mention one noteworthy and very concrete initiative, which I think is pertinent to this point of our discussion. Helfern helfen (http://www.intercultural-campus.org/en) is an initiative of the intercultural campus of the University of Jena in Germany, which assists volunteers who in turn assist refugees and migrants in cultural matters, putting at their disposal the expertise of academics.

Intercultural competence, one of the favorite approaches in intercultural communication studies, also yields relatively little in terms of explaining social crimes (or less dramatic and traumatic social disruptions and anomalies, for that matter). To explain and understand more, we would have to see competency not chiefly as a mere or mainly personal capacity, ability and skill, but in relation to structural, institutional, historical and wider social contexts; we need to start thinking not chiefly in terms of interculturally competent individuals, but also about interculturally competent societies.

Likewise, intercultural dialogue, or rather the absence thereof, a tenet which is sometimes invoked when trying to come to terms with supposedly culturally inspired violence, has little explanatory potential in this regard. True dialogue, as all intercultural communication perceived as human understanding, presupposes the recognition of culturally or in different terms defined others as human beings with an inalienable right to exist. Holenstein (2003) calls this prerequisite the principle of hermeneutic fairness or equity. With people who deny or exclude this equity of recognition to others, such as racists and terrorists, there can be no dialogue, and consequently this approach cannot work, neither in theory nor in practice.

Besides focus and purpose of our research, we could perhaps have also laid more emphasis on research into interculturally peacemaking language (not to worry, no other ridiculous acronym proposed, such as ICPL or the like). Linguistics has certainly been (one of) the high road(s) of intercultural communication, in as much as it has a solid theoretical, empirical as well as methodological grounding. Never mind the problematic connection between culture and language and thought, pace Sapir-Whorf and the various esprit de la langue à la Marc Fumaroli, but pace also good old Wittgenstein—language is something you can reasonably ‘scientifically’ research, compare and conclude upon. But why did we not do more research on the natural languages’ potential to be conducive to a peaceful living together of, well let’s say it very weakly, ‘different cultures’? Would that not have been a very worthy intercultural topic, that is, linguistic understanding versus linguistic non- or misunderstandings? A number of critical incident, conversation analysis or other episodic studies could most likely have been analyzed quite differently if the axis of analysis were not revolving around misunderstanding but around the potential and possibilities, also linguistically, of understanding.

Perhaps on this we can learn something from creators and smiths of words and language: ‘The systematic looting of languages can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and subjugation. Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of the mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity driven language of science (my emphasis); whether it is the malign language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek …. It is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerability …—all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not permit knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas (my emphasis)’. (Morrison, 1993). These lines speak loud and clear to who even only faintly thinks that language has to do with culture and communication and should, ideally, be aimed at human understanding. Just as Amos Oz, who says: ‘The moment we are precise with our nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs, we are closer to doing justice, in a small way. Not universal justice. Not international justice. But the way I describe a person, a mode of behavior or even an inanimate object, the closer I am to the essence, the more I evade either exaggeration or incitement … Words are important because they are one of the main means by which humans do things to each other. Saying is doing’ (Meyer, 1998). Or JMG Le Clézio, who provides a noteworthy rule of communication for peaceful cohabitation stating ‘Coexister, c’est comprendre ce qui peut offenser l’autre’ (Le Clézio, 2014). And just as many other masters of word and thought have taught us: language, also social science language, is important for human, and hence also intercultural, understanding.

In the end, however, it seems that unfortunately still Humpty Dumpty commands in the social sciences and beyond: ‘When I use a word’, Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more or less’. ‘The question is’, said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things’. ‘The question is’, said Humpty Dumpy, ‘which is to be master—that’s all’. (Carroll, 1865). Exactly, which is to be master—which word, that is, which language, an open language or a closed one, a forbidding one or a welcoming one, an oppressive one or an emancipating one—that’s all.

Language can be only a small contribution to what interculturalists, supposedly specialists in communication and culture, linguistically oriented or of other approaches, can do to act against social violence, and, more generally, promote communicative understanding among people who define themselves as culturally diverse. Speaking a clear, understandable and adequate language, which is not ‘the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity driven language of science’, but ‘permits knowledge (and) encourages the mutual exchange of ideas’, as Toni Morrison so masterly put it.

Perhaps these modest thoughts can also be a meaningful expression of solidarity with the victims of social violence and horrorism, in Paris and elsewhere.