The Failure of Neoliberal Hospitality
published in Obieg magazine, issue 11
Avenir Institute, Theoxenia, digital print, 2019.
The term “hospitality” has many distinctive definitions and origins. In Ancient Greece, one of the most important protocols of social life was called theoxenia. Xenos (θεός – “god”; ξένος, – “alien,”“foreign,” “strange,” “unusual,” “guest”) is an ambiguous term that had been used in Greek poetry from at least Homer onwards. The interpretation of it fluctuates from “stranger” to “guest friend” all the way to “enemy.” Further I would use “xenos” as the term referring to “newcomer” that isn’t defined from the perspective of the host’s understanding of an identity. Xenos is not a particular fixed identity such as guest, stranger, enemy, Other, visitor, partner, etc. – but it is all of them and much more at the very same time.
Theoxenia as a protocol of relating to the Other played an incremental role in the narratives that came down to us from Ancient Greek poets. In the last book of Homer’s The Iliad the king of Troy Priam comes to the camp of Achaeans to claim the body of his fallen son Hector and the Greek hero Achilles, abiding by the rules of theoxenia, allows him to stay and provides him with food, a warm bed,and entertainment despite the hostilities on the battlefield and his own personal rage over the death of Patroclus.
The respect towards an unknown Other was a subject of special importance since (s)he/them could have been a disguised god. In the first book of The Odyssey, Telemachus welcomes Athena (masked as a humble maiden) into his home and protects her from the advances of Penelope’s rude suitors. He exercises the ritual of theoxenia and earns her favor, which leads to a change of heart in the goddess towards aiding his father Odysseus, who was abandoned by Athena for stealing a sacred statue of her from Troy’s temple in order to bring victory to Achaeans in the 10-year war. The return of Athena’s favor and further aid to Odysseus was justified by his son’s respect of theoxenia.
Gerard Lairesse, Hermes Ordering Calypso to Release Odysseus, oil on canvas, circa 1670.
Let’s have a closer look at the key differences between hospitality and theoxenia. Hospitality in a neoliberal democratic Western-led world is one of the industries with key performance indicators,production, quality standards, is immediately and contractually reciprocal, and has attached to it an economy of profit.
First, theoxenia is unconditional. It is offered to anyone without imposition of the host’s moral,ethical, and political understandings as if they are universal or have prevalence in this geopolitical context. The mourning Achilles welcomed Priam into his camp without expecting reciprocity and wasn’t plotting a stratagem to use the king of Troy for the sake of some future act of revenge. He didn’t attempt to demonstrate moral or ethical superiority by being generous towards the enemy. He obeys theoxenia as if it were an answer to the equation of two plus two or following a health ritual like brushing your teeth before going to bed. In order words, his approach there is beyond selfish: it is cultural rather than opportunistic, pitiful, or predatory. Hospitality, on the other hand, is strictly reciprocal. The Cambridge dictionary defines hospitality as “the act of being friendly and welcoming to guests and visitors” or “food, drink, entertainment, etc. that an organization provides for guests or business partners.”4 Guests, visitors, and business partners are identified and sorted into the categories of newcomers. None of them are meant to stay longer than a specific period of time and are meant to recognize, as dominate, the host’s order of things, all the written and unwritten rules. The exchange and the dialogue should happen according to conditions established by the host. Conditionality of hospitality presumes that the guest, visitor, or business partner is meant to bring the value that is recognizable within the axis of the host’s understanding.Therefore, the unexpected is not expected and unwelcome. A stranger cannot be the subject of hospitality. The Other is meant to be categorized – and this is the first form of violence inflicted on him/her/they by the “hospitable” host.
Second, theoxenia protects the condition of perpetual peace and excludes psychological or any other form of violence. The contemporary political interpretation of the term hospitality is closely related to terms like integration, assimilation, and tolerance. All three of them are presuming, although not admitting, an act of violence on the subjectivity of a xenos. The agencies of integration and assimilation demand from the Other to assume traditions and norms of the society, in which her/him/them are integrating as the new fundamentals. Ultimately, they violently break the subjectivity that the Other had before the integration or assimilation process had begun. The tolerance of a host towards a guest, on the other hand, is a mental construct of the borders of acceptable freedom within the cage of subjective reality defined as the principal within the society that is tolerating a guest. Telemachus protects Athena disguised in a clothes of a poor woman from the drunk suitors thereby risking his life in order to prevent an act of rape that is not unordinary towards a woman of unknown provenance in Ithaca. He places the respect of theoxenia over “the normality” of the order, preventing the violence even as it is justified by local norms, therefore he stands up against the local habits. The industry of hospitality is violent against the cultural subjectivity of the one subjected to it. The conditions of the host are the default form of the engagement between host and him/her/they. Xenos is meant to be assimilated, pacified, educated,or being performed on another act of the psychological and often physical violence. Hospitality,therefore, is a condition of strict distinction between “the good” and “the bad,” “the useful” and “the useless” and most importantly – “the friend” and “the enemy.” Hospitality is falling into the orbit of the political relations as they were defined by Carl Schmitt who famously claims that “the specific political distinction ... is that between friend and enemy.”5 In the perpetual war of the sociopolitical imaginaries and competing world images, the genuine hospitality is meant to be provided only to those who either comply with host’s understanding of the reality or share it.
Third, theoxenia is transnational, transcultural, and universal. While contemporary hospitality is distinctly different among the people belonging to the same tribes – racially, socially, politically,ethnically, linguistically, etc. – theoxenia is equal in the face of any otherness. Trojans are foreigners to Achaeans, Achilles however treats Priam as a relative of his own. Hospitality is a multiplicity of nationalized cultural forms, where expectations of the format and particular rituals turned into mechanistic habits at best or into tradable forms of service at worst. Hospitality is compared to other fictionalized “national” things: food, dress, folklores, etc. The transcultural and cosmopolitan nature of thoxenia can be seen as the precursor of universal human rights and equality. The disguised Athena is a traveler of unknown origin, the ultimate foreigner, but she receives the protection of the prince of Ithaca. For that the latter is rewarded not in the immediate form of a tangible resource, such as payment which “closes” the deal, but with Athena’s aid to his father Odyssey who eventually makes it back home and reunites with his son and wife. Theoxenia is performed without the expectation of an immediate or, in fact any, gain. It is a principle of living a life that cannot be therefore reduced to an industrial form. Theoxenia cannot be traded and compensated in similar reciprocal transaction, while hospitality is exactly that.
Joseph Natoire, Telemachus listening to Mentor [disguised Athena] or The Story of Telemachus. Oil on canvas, circa 1725-75
The failure of hospitality is structural rather than positional. Hospitality is analyzed and looked at as a continuation of theoxenic tradition from the ancient world. It is perceived as a positive achievement of the sociopolitical and cultural progress of Europe that led to the cultural openness, wider horizons of social learning and readiness for cultural exchange. I disagree with that. I think hospitality shares the aesthetic resemblance with theoxenia, ritually, and mechanistically, but it is an entirely different behavioral phenomenon. Theoxenia’s elements however were partly incorporated by monotheistic religions that followed the decomposition of the Ancient world, including Christianity and Islam. The presence of the remnants of theoxenia in there makes cults often more attractive than neoliberal societies and the ISIS recruiters sensed it.
The trouble with hospitality is that it is perceived as an essential and exhaustive concept of interaction with the Other. It is dangerously false. In the face of planetary challenges such as climate change, the resurgence of narrow mindedness, nationalism, and imperialism it is the time to get rid of this tribal understanding of the world and explore the universal protocol of humanity within all of us.
Notes:
[1] Katrin Elger (2009) Survey Shows Alarming Lack of Integration in Germany, Spiegel Online,January 26, 2009:http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/immigration-survey-shows-alarming-lack-of-integration-in-germany-a-603588.html
[2] Thérèse De Raedt (2004) Muslims in Belgium:a case study of emerging identities, Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, 24:1, 9-30,https://doi.org/10.1080/1360200042000212160
[3] Anna C. Korteweg (2017). The failures of ‘immigrant integration’: The gendered racialized production of non-belonging. Migration Studies,Volume 5, Issue 3, 1 November 2017, Pages 428–444, https://doi.org/10.1093/migration/mnx025
[4]https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/hospitality
[5] The Concept of the Political. Expanded Edition (1932), trans. by G. Schwab, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
Theoxenia as Politics for Shared Futures
The term ‘hospitality’ has many distinctive definitions and origins.
In Ancient Greece one of the most important protocols of diplomacy was called xenia. Xenos (ξένος, “alien”, “foreign”, “strange”, “unusual”, “guest”) is an ambiguous term that had been used in Greek poetry from at least Homer onwards. The interpretation of it fluctuates from ‘stranger’ to ‘guest friend’ all the way to ‘enemy’.
Xenia as a protocol of relating to the Other played incremental role in the narratives that came down to us from Ancient Greek poets. In the last book of Homer’s The Iliad the king of Troy Priam comes to the camp of Achaeans to claim the body of his fallen son Hector and the Greek hero Achilles, abiding by the rules of xenia, allows him to stay and provides food, warm bed and entertainment despite the hostilities on the battlefield and his own personal rage over the death of Patroclus, his closest confidant and lover.
The respect towards unknown Other was a subject of special importance since (s)he/them could have been a disguised god. The protocol of ancient hospitality could be more accurately defined as theoxenia (θεός “god”), a hospitality towards a possible god who can appear in a disguise of a humble stranger. In the first book of The Odyssey, Telemachus welcomes masked as a maiden Athena in his home and protects her from the rude suitors of his mother. He exercises the ritual of xenia and earns her favour and this act led to change of the heart of the goddess towards his father Odysseus, cursed by her for stealing a sacred statue of Athena from Troy’s temple in order to bring the victory to Achaeans in the 10 years war. Athena’s aid to Odysseus further was earned by his son’s act of hospitality.
There are several key differences between hospitality in contemporaneity and the ancient Greek protocol of theoxenia.
First of all, theoxenia is unconditional. Mourning Achilles neither welcoming Priam in his camp in hope for a reciprocity or while plotting a stratagem to use the king of Troy for the sake of some future act of revenge, nor he shows in this way his moral and ethical superiority by being so generous towards the enemy. He simply obeys the sacred rule of hospitality as if it would be an answer to the equation of two plus two. In order words, his approach to hospitality there is beyond selfish: it is ritualistic and cultural rather than opportunistic, pitiful or predatory.
Secondly, theoxenia protects the perpetual peace and excludes psychological or any other form of violence. Allow me to elaborate here. The contemporary political interpretation of the term hospitality is closely tied with terms like integration, assimilation and tolerance. All three of them are presuming, although not admitting, an act of violence on the subjectivity of a guest/stranger. The agencies of integration and assimilation demand from the Other to assume traditions and norms of the society, in which her/him/them are integrating, as new fundamentals. Ultimately, they violently break the subjectivity that the Other had before the integration or assimilation process had begun. Tolerance of a host to a guest, on the other hand, is a mind construct of the borders of acceptable freedom within the cage of subjective reality defined as principal within the society that is tolerating the guest. Telemachus protects disguised in a clothes of shallow woman Athena from the drunk suitors of his mother Penelope, risking his life, in order to prevent the act of rape that is considered not far beyond ordinary towards the woman of unknown provenance in Ithaca. He places the respect the protocol of theoxenia over the normality of the socio-political order, preventing the violence even as it is justified by local norms, therefore he stands against the local tradition and identity.
Thirdly, theoxenia is transnational, transcultural and universal. While contemporary hospitality is distinctly different among the people belonging to the same tribes - racially, socially, politically, ethnically, linguistically, etc - theoxenia is equal in the face of any otherness. Trojans are foreigners to Greeks, and all foreigners are considered Barbarians by the Achaeans, having different norms and understanding of justice. Achilles however treats Priam as a relative of his own. Disguised Athena is a traveller of unknown origin, an ultimate foreigner, but she receives protection of the prince of Ithaca.
Contemporary hospitality is cruel, selfish, hostile and reciprocally economical. We talk about migrants and refugees, nomads and travellers (relating to them as ‘tourists’) as a livestock on the meat farm, economic items, the biomass that is meant to be violently integrated, assimilated, serviced and entertainment if they have money; and at the best tolerated by our ‘normalised’ orders of the societies. The condition of perpetual peace is simply impossible as the inflicted on the Other violence internalises in the form of deep sleeping trauma, which will eventually reemerge. It is not surprising to me, for example, that sociologists from the Berlin Institute for Population and Development report “that foreigners who come to live in Germany tend to remain strangers, even after 50 years and three generations in some cases”. It is not the failure of integration, as it is wrongly portrayed by the analysts - but the failure of hospitality.
There is a better way to understand, teach about and explain hospitality than elaborating inevitability of cultural, social and political violence, that is meant to be inflicted on the Other who found themselves in the geopolitical space of your norms. In the face of Pangaeac challenges such as climate change, resurgence of narrow mindedness, nationalism and imperialism - it is the time to rid off tribal understanding of the world and explore the universal protocol of humanity within all of us.