When I first saved the file for this review, the Microsoft Word program asked me for a file name. Without giving it much thought, I typed in ‘hope’ and watched as my laptop started ‘saving hope’. It struck me that the difficult but necessary operation of saving hope in the midst FIONA NICOLL of globalising neoliberalism encapsulates what Ghassan Hage’s Against Paranoid Nationalism is about. His ability to make theory accessible through clear, economical writing and an astute saving hope grasp of and dexterity with the white Australian imaginary makes Against Paranoid Nationalism a deceptively slim volume: it is a book densely GHASSAN HAGE packed with ideas and possible applications for Against Paranoid Nationalism: Searching for Hope in a Shrinking Society multidisciplinary researchers and teachers. Pluto Press Australia, Sydney, 2003 tion of Australian cultural and political dis- ISBN RRP 0-85036-533-3 $29.95 (pb) Hage has been tracing the racialised operacourse for some years now, and he by no means subscribes to the easy view that the transition from Paul Keating’s to John Howard’s Australia represents a radical rupture within white Australian subjectivity. It is just that with accelerating neoliberal economic and social reforms and the fundamentalist nationalism of John Howard things have become worse. Hage’s previous Pluto publication, White Nation, identified a propensity for white people to ‘worry’ about the state of the nation; this latest book examines the development of a full-blown paranoia based in a sense of diminishing hope for society and the self. Hage’s work is extremely sensitive to the psychic and material investments that whiteness has in a place where the major impetus to federate as a nation-state was to keep nonwhites out and Indigenous people out of sight and mind. As many cultural commentators F I O N A N I C O L L —SAVING HOPE 203 have observed, we are currently experiencing name of the ‘ordinary people’ by those that an uncanny return of this racialised order, with Hage describes as ‘neo-tough conservatives’. the incarceration of asylum seekers and attacks While he finds it puzzling that the neo-toughs on Indigenous-rights agendas, the latter having condemn the small ‘l’ liberals on this basis, conpreviously appeared to have been boosted with sidering that they also share the comforts of the High Court’s overturning of terra nullius in middle-class privilege, Hage does agree with 1992. Hage observes that a decade of discourse them in one respect—many ordinary Ausagainst political correctness has shifted the defi- tralians have lost a sense of generosity: nition of what constitutes a ‘racist’, so that ‘hatred of the coloniser [is] the only real racism Compassion, hospitality and the recog- there is’. (x) To understand this development, nition of oppression are all about giving he invokes Marx’s camera-obscura theory of hope to marginalised people. But to be able ideology to figure an upside-down picture of to give hope one has to have it … why is it reality. I think many Keating-era academics, like that the great majority of the population of myself, will relate to this when confronted, in the Western world are left with so little classrooms, with white Australian (and Ameri- hope for themselves today, let alone for can) students accusing Aboriginal activists and sharing with others? (9) intellectuals of ‘reverse racism’ for staking their Drawing on Bourdieu, he explains that claims to Indigenous rights. In Chapter 1, ‘Transcendental Capital and societies are mechanisms for the distribution of the Roots of Paranoid Nationalism’, Hage exam- hope. He distinguishes between hope against ines the phenomenon of ‘compassion fatigue’, life, which takes the form of escapist fantasy, whereby Australians who were once happy to and hope for life, which enables us to ‘invest extend ‘the Good Life’ to those coming from ourselves in social reality’. To the extent we can war-torn or poverty-stricken countries are now invest ourselves in the fantasy of a national ‘we’, supporting the government’s tough stance on Hage argues that we are able to hope for ‘the and treatment of asylum seekers. Against this experience of the possibility of upward social compassion fatigue stands a largely middle-class mobility’. (13) In spite of the fact that capitalopposition that defies simple political categori- ism actually tends to reproduce existing class sation as Right or Left and which is represented locations, it is vital for their cohesion that capiby churches and human-rights organisations. talist societies make social mobility appear to Their concern is that ‘with the increased imple- be a fantasy that could come true for anyone. mentation of a dogmatic neo-liberal social and Hage explains that the way European societies economic policy … ethics and morality have have managed to distribute this belief is been thrown out the window’. (8) Those con- through a process of racialisation, which from stituting this group are condemned as naive, the late-eighteenth century saw ‘the increasing middle-class ‘small “l” liberals’ assuming the inclusion of nationally delineated peasants and 204 VOLUME9 NUMBER2 NOV2003 lower classes into the circle of what each nation state. The state’s retreat from its commit- defined as its own version of civilised human ment to seeing poverty as a socio-ethical society’. (15) Prior to this, the working classes problem goes hand in hand with its in- were considered to be on the same level as creasing criminalisation of poverty and ‘primitive peoples’, but afterwards ‘skin color, deployment of penal sanctions. (20) in the form of European Whiteness, was emphasised, more than ever before as the most The reason for compassion fatigue becomes important basis for one’s access to “dignity and clear. Australians who used to experience the hope” ’. (15) hope offered by society are feeling increasingly In the early twenty-first century, Hage insecure but are living in a state of denial— argues, capitalism itself has increasingly taken ‘hoping that their national identity will be a a multinational form, and its investment in passport to hope for them’. (21) When these national societies is much more circumspect. Australians see others also trying to access the With the growth of the financial and services hope of a better life, they become paranoid and sectors in particular, ‘capitalism goes tran- vindictive, wanting to deprive asylum seekers scendental … [I]t simply hovers over the Earth and Indigenous Australians of the hope to looking for a suitable place to land and invest which they are clinging only too tenuously. … until it is time to fly again’. (19) To attract In Chapter 2, ‘On Worrying: The Lost Art of this global capital, governments focus on mak- the Well-Administered National Cuddle’, Hage ing the nation attractive, promoting aesthe- draws on Spinoza and Kleinian psychoanalysis ticised global cities, which have: to illuminate the different conditions that produce ‘worried’ and ‘hopeful’ subjects. Spinoza’s no room for marginals … As the state theory of the conatus as ‘appetite for life’ is con- retreats from its commitment to the gen- nected to Kleinian theory, in which hope is eral welfare of the marginal and the poor, ‘linked to the internalisation of the good breast’. these people are increasingly—at best— (24) The absence or unpredictable presence of left to their own devices. At worst, they are the breast causes the infant to worry. In the case actively portrayed as outside society. The of the national subject, this worry is articulated criminalisation and labeling of ethnic cul- through the question: ‘Will my society care for tures, where politicians and sections of the me?’ Hage goes on to examine the role of the media encourage the general public to ‘cuddle’ in the parent–child relationship. As make a causal link between criminality, opposed to the absence of physical affection or poverty and racial or ethnic identity, is one the suffocating bear hug, he argues that the of the more unethical forms of such pro- ‘well-administered cuddle’: cesses of exclusion. This is partly why globalisation has worked so well alongside manages to simultaneously embrace and the neo-liberal dismantling of the welfare protect and allow the child to contemplate F I O N A N I C O L L —SAVING HOPE 205 the future and move towards what it has to land. Indeed the loving nurturing interior offer … It is precisely this kind of caring acquires its qualities because it is also a relation that national societies are ideally secure ordered place … (37) The ‘good imagined to have with their members. father’ of the national imaginary has to Nation-states are supposed to be capable of protect and secure the availability of the providing a nurturing and caring environ- good breast of the motherland without ment and of having a considerable mastery undermining its ‘goodness’. (39) in the art of border management … Worriers cannot care about their nation This gendered national imaginary generates because they have not been and are not a particular type of relationship towards ‘the being cared for properly by it. (29–30) Others’ that are projected outside the family of the ‘we’. Using the psychoanalytic concept of He concludes this discussion of paranoid ‘avoidance’, Hage argues that paranoid nationalnationalism with reference to the ‘Children ists’ sense of hope in the motherland’s embrace Overboard’ case, asking: is a fantasy that works to protect them from recognising that the good breast is actually What kind of people believe that a parent being offered to ‘Mr Transcendental Capital’: (even an animal parent, let alone a human being from another culture) could actually The national subject develops a pathologi- throw their children overboard? Perhaps cal narcissism as s/he becomes unable to only those who are unconsciously worried cope with the view of the other, as it risks about being thrown overboard themselves puncturing his or her increasingly hollow by their own motherland? (30) ‘hoped for motherland’. Here in Australia, nothing characterises this hollow fantasy as Chapter 3, ‘Border dis/order: The Imaginary of Paranoid Nationalism’, continues the focus well as John Howard’s hope of a traditional 1950s-style Australian society. (43) on border protection by exploring the relationship between the ‘motherland’ and ‘fatherland’ In Chapter 4, ‘A Brief History of White Colonial Paranoia’, Hage addresses the historical in the national imaginary: specificities of Australian multiculturalism. He The fatherland’s ‘we’ delineates first of all highlights four key points of tension between the we of the national will ensuring the descriptive and prescriptive aspects of multi- motherliness of the interior … [T]here is culturalism in Australia: multiculturalism as no contradiction between the ‘order and simple acceptance of cultural difference or its border’ politics of the fatherland and the active promotion; multiculturalism as a mode loving and nurturing nature of the mother- of governing ethnic cultures or as the basis of a 206 VOLUME9 NUMBER2 NOV2003 national identity; multiculturalism as welfare, coverage of September 11 and the Bankstown helping NESB migrants adapt to existing gang-rape trials saw Lebanese/Arabs/Muslims national institutions or as a socio-economic constructed as ‘the new threat to Australia’s policy designed to address structural inequali- Western civilisation … a community of people ties produced around ethnicity; and multi- always predisposed towards crime, rape, illegal culturalism as a social policy aimed at affecting entry to Australia and terrorism’. (68) the life chances of migrants or as a form of cul- Chapter 5, ‘The Rise of Australian Funda- tural pluralism that enriches the nation as a mentalism: Reflections on the Rule of Ayatollah whole through offering culturally diverse life- Johnny’, shifts from a focus on white paranoia style possibilities. In conjunction with the High about Muslim fundamentalism to examine John Court’s Mabo decision and the economic un- Howard’s nationalist fundamentalism. Hage certainties experienced by formerly securely makes the provocative claim: ‘There is nothing, middle-class white Australians, Hage argues, logically speaking, that should stop us conceivthese tensions produced the conditions for a ing of a rational/bureaucratic/democratic polire-eruption of white paranoid nationalism. tics as being animated by a fundamentalist Reflecting on public media debate surrounding ideology’. (70) After identifying a highly variemulticulturalism, he suggests: gated set of values that the prime minister claims to be essentially Australian, such as ‘the It is as if what White paranoia is expressing fair go’, ‘tolerance’ and ‘decency’, Hage argues is fear that the new multicultural order that it is the focus on essence itself that makes threatens the old assimilationist dream of Howard a dangerous fundamentalist. He pre- an unquestionably European Australian sents the government’s dismissal of critical in- culture, but given the censorship that now tellectuals as ‘black arm-band’ as a symptom of disallows use of such ethnocentric lan- ‘political narcissicism’, and characterises the guage, this fear is expressed in terms of the logic of Howard’s fundamentalism as follows: loss of any core culture. (66) Detecting the Good essence becomes an And this, in turn, works to prevent recogni- exercise in emphasising the Good deeds of tion of the paradox that ‘[the assimilationists] Australians and silencing those who want are the ones who have not assimilated to a to emphasise the Bad deeds … Thus any changing society. This is exactly the closed- voice that attempts to insist that the mis- circuit logic that the White paranoid fantasy deeds committed in Australia’s past and needs if it is to be able to reproduce itself.’ (66) present cannot be so easily dismissed is As a consequence ‘Others’ continue to be pre- immediately considered a Bad voice … one sented as a ‘problem’ about which the national hell-bent on undermining the essential subject must perpetually worry. Hence media goodness of Australia and the pride of its F I O N A N I C O L L —SAVING HOPE 207 people … If someone emphasises racism, And this effectively makes ‘the traumas of the the response is that we have been essen- colonisers … the only “Australian” history tially non-racist. If someone emphasises someone assuming an Australian identity ought poverty, our response is that we have been to face [and it continues] the process of mar- essentially a class-free society. And as ginalising the history of the colonised … even happened lately, if someone emphasises at the very moment of expressing shame for our bad treatment of refugee claimants, colonisation’. (95) our response is that we have been essen- Hage explores the implications of this per- tially a welcoming country … don’t tell us sistent focus on the colonisers for migrant Aus- we are bad—we are essentially good. Go tralians’ orientations towards their adoptive and find someone really bad and tell them country’s history. Arguing against suggestions they are bad. (77) that becoming Australian makes migrants complicit in colonial theft, he writes: He finishes this chapter by citing Philip Ruddock’s threat to repeal the funding of a migrants have shared some important refugee-advocacy organisation critical of the realities with Indigenous people too. En- government on the basis that ‘We pay them to during the racist ‘White Australia Policy’, know better’. (78) for example … migrants are in a contra- In Chapter 6, ‘Polluting Memories: Migration dictory colonial location, and as such, they and Colonial Responsibility in Australia’, Hage are quite capable of relating to Australia’s addresses debates on national memory and history from within the imaginary ‘we’ of responsibility for the past arising in response to the colonised. Here, ‘becoming respon- the Mabo decision and the Bringing Them Home sible’ is no longer guaranteed to mean report into the stolen generations. He explores contributing to the coloniser’s postcolonial how white and other non-Indigenous Aus- trauma-therapy that is oozing out of the tralians are respectively positioned in relation ‘coming to terms with the Australian past’ to the affects of shame and guilt generated discourse; it might just as well mean through these debates. He highlights the inher- contributing to a struggle for Aboriginal ently problematic use of the national ‘we’ in sovereignty. (96) these discussions. With reference to Keating’s famous Redfern speech, he argues that in the The chapter concludes with an exploration of absence of an explicit recognition of a distinct the ambivalent position of migrants in relation Indigenous will (or sovereignty) white Aus- to the ‘gift’ of national identity. An anthrotralian projects of reconciliation are destined pological observation of an exchange between to ‘be a momentary cover-up of the reality of youths at the Australian Arabic Communities the forces that made Australia what it is’. (94) Council’s annual dinner highlights the fact that, 208 VOLUME9 NUMBER2 NOV2003 for migrants, guilt about the unreciprocated gift multiculturalism in highlighting images of of national life may be experienced in relation the Asian as a spunky mediatic ideal, a to the motherland from which the migrant classy investor, hardworking and clean-cut, comes, and is often mingled with resentment and repressing the image of the working- about the terms on which the host country class or the underclass Asian. (115) offers the gift of stolen land. Chapter 7, ‘The Class Aesthetics of Global Having demonstrated the relationship between Multiculturalism’, revisits themes addressed in middle-class professionals and processes of chapters 1 and 4 and examines national govern- self-aestheticisation, Hage poses a further quesments’ attempts to seduce transcendental capi- tion: ‘Can migrants be racist?’ He poses this tal through the promotion of aestheticised glob- question seriously—not simply to be provoal cities. After demonstrating how middle class- cative in the manner of neo-tough conserness mitigates some of the discriminatory vatives, who delight in performing the role of effects of white racism, he argues that the devil’s advocate. And he probes further still: acceptability and even desirability of middle- ‘Why should the victims of racism be any more class professionals from every corner of the or less racist than the perpetrators? Why should globe for various national governments con- they be seen as the repository of higher moral tinues to be underpinned by developmental values?’ (117) Two key points can be extracted racism, ‘primarily by aestheticising the self, from his investigation of this question: first, it which is itself achieved through a middle class is important to distinguish between groups that image-based aestheticisation of the “group” one have the power to enact and institutionalise happens to belong to’. He argues further that, their racist fantasies and those who lack this ‘along with the class aestheticisation of the self power; second, the idea that only white people comes the process of de-aestheticising the can be racist obscures the difference between other, the one who is being racialised nega- the micro-spaces in which non-white racisms tively’. (111–12) can occur (such as the local neighborhood or Hage argues that these processes of aestheti- within a small businesses) and ‘the macro Auscisation and de-aestheticisation create essences tralian public/national space … where Whitesuch as ‘Australian values’ or, more recently, ness gives one most power to discriminate’. ‘Asian values’, which then become the ground (118) Hage argues that both points needs to be addressed to prevent the emergence of a ‘defen- of: sive multiculturalism which sees any critique of racist thinking, racist practices and racist “one’s ethnic community” as a threat’. (119) institutions. It is because of this that there I doubt I will be the only reader who found has been an increasing complicity between Chapter 8, ‘Exghiophobia/Homiophobia: “Comes Asian developmental racism and global a Time We are all Enthusiasm” ’, the most F I O N A N I C O L L —SAVING HOPE 209 compelling chapter in the wake of September was able to receive the gift of social life from a 11, the Bali bombings, the ongoing crisis of society that extended care to him. ‘As an Arab Israeli– Palestinian ‘peace-processes’ and, most saying has it: the society that honours its memrecently, the invasion of Iraq. This chapter bers honours itself.’ (149) examines the relationship between exghio- Hage contrasts the social ethics negotiated at phobia—the fear of explanation—and homio- the pedestrian crossing to the neoliberal conphobia —the fear of the same. Hage reflects on cept of mutual obligation, which reduces: why the intellectual attempt to rationalise the actions of suicide bombers is treated as a desire the state’s obligation to a delivery of ser- to justify or even exonerate them. In the context vices and empties it of all that is ethical: of the wars currently being waged on terrorism honour, recognition, community, sociality, and illegal immigration by nations that see humanity. The fact that we might give the themselves as inheritors of ‘Western civilisa- unemployed some benefits but dishonour tion’, a social explanation is increasingly seen as them in the very process of giving it to an attempt to humanise essentially inhuman them, treat them as if they do not deserve and inhumane Others. Hage distinguishes this what they are getting, as if they are a lesser antagonism towards humanising explanatory breed of humanity, is immaterial to the frameworks from xenophobia: ‘what is really neo-liberal economic mind that has feared here is not the otherness of the other but colonised our governmental institutions: their sameness’. (141–2) we’ve given, we want something back. The final chapter, ‘A Concluding Fable: The (150) Gift of Care, or the Ethics of Pedestrian Crossings’, is based on an ethnographic account of He links this neo-tough stance to a psychoAli, a Lebanese factory worker and artist who logical theory, which argues that gifts consolimigrated to Australia after his sister and niece date a hierarchical power relationship between were killed when their house was shelled, and parents and children. Hage disputes the idea following which he developed shell shock. A that the child is a passive recipient of the symptom of the shell shock, for which he was parental gift of life and sustenance by pointing treated in Australia, was an obsession with to the very presence of the child as a gift to the pedestrian crossings. He loved the experience parents. He brings this argument to bear on the of all the cars stopping for him: ‘It made me feel relationship between nations and their citizens: important! I thought it was magical!! Can you imagine this happening in Beirut?’ (145) In When I interact with others and I fail to being able to stop the traffic and in gaining receive from them the gift of the common treatment for his shell shock, Hage explains, Ali humanity that we share, when I fail to see found his honour protected in Australia. He them as offering such a gift, it means that I 210 VOLUME9 NUMBER2 NOV2003 consider such others as less than human. ‘worry about the nation’ and will never Here we have the basic unethical founda- fully know the joy of care. (152) tion of all forms of racism … here we also have the unethical foundation of the policies of neo-liberal government. (151) As a white Australian researcher and teacher, I found the experience of reading Against Paranoid Nationalism strangely therapeutic, in He offers the pedestrian crossing as a figure for spite of my usual aversion to psychoanalytic an ethical sociality that neoliberal social and approaches to social and cultural phenomena. economic policies are destroying: It spoke particularly to my experience of teaching ‘whiteness theory’ to predominantly white Today the Western world is dominated Australian and American students who are by governments that neglect to create the often more traumatised by the revelation of necessary pedestrian crossings that make their privilege than they are by horror stories of our societies honorable civilised societies. oppression and discrimination against ‘Others’. They see it as unthinkable that the existing I’m often at a loss to address the confusion and national cultures ought to yield before the pain that the recognition of privilege provokes marginalised forms of social inhabitance in my students—particularly in a context where they constantly encounter. They treat the they feel (and are) victimised by the pressures unemployed, the refugee, the Indigenous of ever-increasing HECS and student-loan person as ‘getting something for nothing’, debts. So I’m grateful to Hage for giving me a and in so doing fail to perceive in them the text to recommend to them that will not only very humanity their presence brings. This help them to ‘get over’ the angst surrounding negation of the marginal others that come the recognition of their relative privilege but our way becomes a negation of our very which will, more importantly, inspire them to own humanity. (152) participate in the urgent project of ‘saving hope’ against the global rampage of neoliberalism. The book concludes by returning the paranoid national subject to the colonial source of his/her pathology: —————————— FIONA NICOLL works in the Department of Gen- der Studies, University of Sydney, and the CenThe pedestrian crossing is a social gift. It is tre for Cultural Research, University of Western also a piece of land; a piece of stolen land Sydney. Her book From Diggers to Drag Queens … And until we choose to face and deal was published by Pluto Press in 2001 and was with the consequences of our colonial short-listed for the NSW Premiers’ Award. theft, it will remain the ultimate source of our debilitating paranoia. We will always F I O N A N I C O L L —SAVING HOPE —————————— 211