The permutation is a form of Orientalist co-optation that does not resolve the links. Orientalism is a global racial dynamic that is not reducible to exclusion.

Cultural racism, as Hardt and Negri have stated, is one of proximity to a normalizing Whiteness. While the deterritorializing global capitalism of Empire furiously traverses national, cultural and racial borders, paying little heed to place, its multicultural ideology seemingly appreciates (requires) the difference (distance) of the Other. Slavoj Zizek asserts that: multiculturalism is a disavowed, inverted, self-referential form of racism, a “racism with a distance”—it “respects” the Other’s identity, conceiving the Other as a self-enclosed “authentic” com- munity towards which he, the multiculturalist, maintains a distance rendered possible by his privileged universal position (1997: 44; emphasis added). It is precisely the “empty point of universality” of multiculturalism that enables it to respect the specificity of the Other by maintaining the proper distance and asserting its own superiority. If we accept that global capital- ism articulates a contemporary Orientalism, we need to withstand, as Zizek argues, merely exposing the (false) universality of multiculturalism as harboring Eurocentricism in the masking of its own particularity. Instead, he asserts, that the “particular cultural background or roots which always support the universal multiculturalist position . . . conceals the fact that the subject is already thoroughly ‘rootless,’ that his true position is the void of universality” (1993: 44). Zizek concludes by contending that rather than pointing out the particular characteristics of the universal subject (white,male,heterosexual, etc.),which represses and subordinates differences, “identifying universality with its empty point of exclusion” (1993: 51) is more likely to challenge extant capitalist hegemony. However, if contemporary Orientalism operates by an inclusive hegemony (which has no outside), we need to interrogate further “what” occupies the void of universality. In his analysis of multiculturalism, Zizek falls short of marking the empty place of the universal as a positionality of Whiteness itself. Our contention is not an attempt to identify the particularities of Whiteness, because its own inscription has no content. Rather, Whiteness as an “absent presence” seeks to stand for, and be a measure of, all of humanity. It operates as a universal point of identification that strives to structure all social identities. We should not therefore confuse or conflate Whiteness with particular white identities. In discussions of Whiteness, as Dyer (1997) points out, there is often an immediate action to identify the specific characteristics of white identities, to highlight their gendered, ethnic or class location, for example. However, the effect of such a move results in only further securing the hegemony of Whiteness. In this respect, Whiteness functions like an “empty signifier” (see Laclau 1994), such that it needs to fill or hegemonize the empty place of the multicultural universal in order to uphold its authority. But what happens when contemporary Orientalism irrupts into the cultural hegemony of Whiteness?