A Free Left Blog

While writing The Tribe I found two of my main interests, in the existential background to life and in mass immigration as a phenomenon, fusing and coming together in ways that I am still exploring and finding interesting. I think this coming-together has helped me to address one of the fundamental questions of our time in the book, namely, Why is mass immigration such a troubling phenomenon for ‘host’ communities or people? Even using this word ‘phenomenon’, which I know annoys some people in its vagueness, helps to guide us towards the sort of answers I have been coming up with. It helps because it does not limit how we address what is going on in the act of describing it. For one thing, it helps us to avoid locating the source of trouble in immigrants themselves, as if there is something wrong with them. But it also avoids locating the troubles in what I am calling here, for want of a better word, ‘host’ communities or people – as if there is something wrong with them...

Especially with the rise and rise of feminism as social power, talk of ‘objectification’ is getting quite an airing at the moment. It’s an interesting concept, well worth pondering for a little while here. Firstly, let’s look at the idea that objectification is something we need to eliminate or reduce. When we say we shouldn’t objectify people or treat them as objects, it is far from clear how else we should deal with them. After all, each of us is a subject, but another person to us appears as an object – in physical terms but also in how we define them beyond the purely physical – for example as happy, sad, engaging, or annoying. It is difficult to see how we can describe other people and deal with them through language without treating them as objects. To do so would renounce our capacity to do anything relating to others – in other words to be subjects – while in a superficial sense leaving ‘the other’ as something like a ‘pure subject’ –a being with ultimate power (so...