I don’t think there is such a significant difference between Sara Ahmed’s astute analysis of liberal multiculturalism and Slavoj Žižek’s critique. In rather simple terms, Žižek would argue that liberal multiculturalism and liberal monoculturalism are two mutually constitutive modalities of contemporary global racism. The more substantial difference, and maybe this is effectively implied in Žižek’s elevation of liberal multiculturalism as being hegemonic, as a critique of liberal-left positions, is what do we do politically – the issue that is rightly raised by Ben Pitcher. Here Žižek’s position is quite clear and consistent – he does not see multiculturalism as a site of hegemonic struggle. There is no progressive form of multiculturalism for him. In fact, by marking it as the master signifier of politics, we end up with contemporary modes of liberal racism, sexism…(i.e. others remain as others to be tolerated, but deprived of their radical Otherness…)

Žižek’s argument is really about the broader ‘cultural turn’ in politics. If we want to hold on to a politics of multiculture then what form does it have to take now? What is the relation between culture and politics? Hasn’t the fantasy been that multiculturalism can articulate particular, at times contradictory and oppositional struggles, into a hegemony of progressive social politics? Does this become impossible when progressive projects such as feminism and anti-racism are themselves how racism and sexism operates? e.g. liberal white feminist critique of Muslim patriarchy becomes the justification for Islamophobia etc. Of course this has always been the challenge (and maybe the limitations) of hegemonic politics but aren’t we now in a situation that the very grounds in which the hegemonic struggle takes place is contained within the contours of liberal-capitalist ‘post-political’ democracy. A space, exemplified by liberal multiculturalism, where differences are allowed but as long as they don’t challenge this order. Culture, in whatever radical constructionist, anti-essentialist way we understand and mobilise it, comfortably operates within and is the predominant ideological form of liberal democracy.

I think this is the challenge Žižek poses – how do we conceive of politics in this context. For him the only universal hegemony is global capitalism and without opposing that all other struggles will be easily incorporated into its logic. In that, even progressive multiculturalism in its form of radical (deconstructive) particularism, is how global power operates. (See Hardt and Negri for example).

Žižek’s position is that instead of struggling over cultural differences in the form of trying to hegemonise the field by creating shared consensus, that to be truly progressively multicultural we need to struggle over what we oppose – a politics of negation. Instead of trying to find common shared elements, we should fight politically and unconditionally over say anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-capitalism etc. This does appear to end up as a standard left position. One of the questions to ask is how is culture conceptualised and situated in these struggles. The orthodox left tends to see culture as an ideological problem, as best as form of (nationalist) resistance. Žižek, through his Hegelian-dialectical Lacanism, offers a more complex understanding of culture, subjectivity and ideology that questions conventional representational, as well as immanent materialist, politics. He is advocating a dialectical politics of division and confrontation – we need to take sides and fight for our position. And crucially, the political antagonisms are not between cultures but within and across cultures. Maybe this is a universalism after the (multi)cultural turn?

The game of hegemony involves a kind of popularization that involves passing off radical ideas as commonsensical. Of course, this is a territory that can also be contested by one’s political enemies. Alternative or contradictory interpretations can indeed overtake and overwhelm an ‘original’ meaning, yet not entirely destroy an association with that meaning. As a result, the particular meaning that is instantiated after such a contestation often looks like, but is not (to put it crudely) the thing we ‘originally’ had in mind.

This is exactly what has occurred with the concept of multiculturalism, as described above. The meaning of multiculturalism has, in certain respects, effectively become ‘detached’ from a progressive politics, and has been articulated to some quite reactionary agendas: multiculturalism has indeed been hegemonized from the right. It has, in Ahmed’s terminology, been turned into a ‘liberal monoculturalism’. And yet there remains a lingering identity here, for this monoculturalism continues to operate under the guise of multiculturalism: it is a ‘non-performative speech act’ that names, resembles, but does not actually bring about a progressive politics. It is, in other words, quite possible for us to recognize and take seriously the discursive hegemony of ‘multiculturalism’ (a la Žižek), and yet maintain (following Ahmed) that there is often a profound disjuncture between what the concept ‘says’, and what it ‘does’.

The real problem that faces is us what to do next. One possibility would be to give up on the concept of multiculturalism as soiled goods; the other would be to recognize that such a manoeuvre would be to prematurely give up on the concept in the midst of hegemonic struggle – it would be to transform a temporary setback into a permanent defeat.

For the reason why the concept of multiculturalism is being used at all in the contemporary politics of race is because progressive political struggle has made it hegemonic. That the term has been co-opted to reactionary ends does not detract from, but actually reinforces this fact. To recognize that the hegemony has been hegemonized is surely proof that the concept remains in contestation, that its meaning is not fixed now for all time.

Why is it important that we continue to contest the concept (or, put another way, why should we consider it a problem to concede multiculturalism to the right)? The central issue here is one resources. Although theoretically infinite, the critical resources available to us are effectively limited by their contextual and institutional elaboration. The institutionalization of a certain politics means there is a particular character to the rights claims of anti-racism: this is the hard fought for territory on which progressive struggles have been focused. To give up on the concept of multiculturalism as (weak/corrupted/co-opted), is effectively to hand over a key conceptual resource of progressive struggle to the right. The point is that there are only so many resources at our disposal, because such resources need to be developed and refined over time. Though there is always a progressive position to take ‘beyond’ or ‘behind’ a divested resource, it will invariably lack the hegemonic quality of the divested resource itself by virtue of its novelty and institutional immaturity (this is the problem of ultraleftism).

This is not to say that it is impossible for a progressive anti-racist politics to reinvent its conceptual resources: this is of course an absolutely necessary process that enables the modification of a progressive politics in the context of historical change. What’s problematic – and what is of course troubling about the position that appears to be taken by Žižek here – is an inattentiveness to the pragmatics of conceptual reinvention, and the failure to recognize precisely how long the institutional elaboration of a politics takes. If we are to describe the politics of multiculturalism in terms of a theory of hegemony, then we should recognize the full implications of hegemonic practice: in this case, that even a first defeat remains very much a part of an ongoing struggle.