The Indivisible Globe, the Indissoluble Nation

Difference and Equivalence

In their attempts to valorize and thereby include the hitherto excluded, many postcolonial critics seem to be primarily driven by a glorification of and preoccupation with particularity, otherness, and most importantly, a logic of difference; the flip side of this penchant is, of course, “the postcolonial aversion to universals” or the “‘universalizing’ condemnations of the universal” of postcolonial theory, as Hallward puts it (176). Much has been said about the limits of particularism in radical politics—and that’s the theoretical background of our earlier discussions of the recent reconsideration or even return to the universal in critical theory. Here, I’d like to first examine such postcolonial preoccupations in terms of the logics of difference and equivalence, which Laclau, following a structuralist/poststructuralist vein of thinking, employs in his critique of particularism. In the contemporary cultural milieu of celebrating difference, no one would seem to contest the idea that all identity is differential, that the identity of a group (ethnic, racial, religious, etc.) constitutes a difference. Yet this also means that no particular group leads a “monadic existence,” but is always situated in a wider community or a larger context, since “part of the definition of its own identity is the construction of a complex and elaborated system of relations with other groups” (Laclau, Emancipation(s), 48; emphasis mine). So far this view of differential identity appears to be similar to Said’s conception of cultural identity, and by extension, hybridity, as always implicated in an elaborate web of interconnection, occupying a nodal or “contrapuntal” point at which different cultural elements intersect. Laclau’s point, however, is that the logic of difference is necessarily entangled in the logic of equivalence. For, as Laclau argues, the very assertion of a given group’s right to their difference already posits or appeals to some universal principle or equivalential relation, and “there is no particularism that does not make an appeal to such principles in the construction of its identity” (26). In the case of the political discourse of rights, “if it is asserted that all particular groups have the right to respect of their own particularity, this means that they are equal to each other in some way” (49; emphasis mine). Where the logic of difference is not contaminated by the logic of equivalence, where the pure logic of difference holds sway, we encounter the notion of “separate developments” lying “at the roots of apartheid”—in which case the mere assertion of particularity ends up “sanctioning the status quo in the [unequal] relation of power between the groups” (27, 49; emphasis in original).

It is noteworthy that the postulation of some universal principle is not merely the implementation of regulating norms and principles which transcend the particularism of any group—this, however, is what Said’s inconsistent, mostly humanistic universalism appears to advance. If the universal emerges out of a radical antagonism that is nevertheless constitutive of the social, it is to be conceived as the interruption or subversion of differential identity, because, we recall, universality is expressed through an equivalential chain in which the dimension of equivalence is privileged “to the point that its differential nature is almost entirely obliterated” as a result of confrontation with radical exclusion or antagonism (ibid. 39). That is why Laclau writes, in a quite Lacanian way, that “the universal is part of my identity as far as I am penetrated by a constitutive lack, that is as far as my differential identity has failed in its process of constitution” (28).23 Based on the conception of antagonism as the internal limit of the social, Laclau points out that “all political identity is internally split, because no particularity can be constituted except by maintaining an internal reference to universality as that which is missing” (31; emphasis mine).

Postcolonial theorists, who in general are wary, or even critical of the strong, sometimes essentialized identity claims in the broader postcolonial criticism and literatures24 as well as in identity politics, adopt a different approach to undermine differential identities and their systematic certainties. Although this approach is also premised on a similar line of thinking regarding the insurmountable problematic of representation (Spivak) and the necessary incompletion of identity or subjectivation (Bhabha)—a poststructuralist contribution postcolonial theorists acknowledge—it is still largely bound by a logic of difference, not only because of the postcolonial theoretical resistance to universalization based on a logic of equivalence, but also due to own its tendency to generate more particularistic categories derived from the existing particularities whose fixed identities and epistemological certainties they seek to deconstruct or subvert. Take, for example, Bhabha’s conception of the “third space,” which is closely related to (or metonymic to) his well-known, yet ever elusive, terminologies of “in-between-ness” and “hybridity”:

If . . . the act of cultural translation (both as representation and as reproduction) denies the essentialism of a prior given original or originary culture, then we see that all forms of culture are continually in a process of hybridity. But for me the importance of hybridity is not to be able to trace two original moments from which the third emerges, rather hybridity to me is the ‘third space’ which enables other positions to emerge. This third space displaces the histories that constitute it, and sets up new structures of authority, new political initiatives, which are inadequately understood through received wisdom. . . . The process of cultural hybridity gives rise to something different, something new and unrecognisable, a new area of negotiation of meaning and representation. (“The Third Space,” 211)

Under the rubric of our preceding discussions, I’d like first to query whether this “third space” is itself another difference accounted for in the current terrain of cultural embattlement (or “translation”), rather than the undermining or subversion of the differential identities of the “two original moments.” For if those moments or existing identities constituting the “binary closure” are to be subverted in “the process of hybridity” beyond recognition, and everything leveled down to the same plane, then the designation “third space” has little meaning.25 In much of his work, Bhabha undoes colonial discourse by demonstrating that mimicry can be deployed as a means of disrupting colonialist surveillance and authority by creating ambiguous identities that elude the gaze of the colonizer. However, the legitimacy of such mimicry as a strategy of resistance seems to hinge on a colonial control presumed to be airtight; its radicality appears to dissolve once it’s removed from the reach of prohibition, since, as Bhabha himself points out, “the visibility of mimicry is always produced at the site of interdiction” (Location, 89).

A more sympathetic reading of Bhabha has to be proposed here, too, since Bhabha at times seems to border on positing, quite uncharacteristically and perhaps unwittingly, a new universal that redefines and restructures the given socio-symbolic field (“This third space . . . sets up new structures of authority, new political initiatives”).26 For, as mentioned earlier, both the initial particularity of the agent assuming the role of the universal and the differential identities of the terms entering the equivalential chain will somehow be “hybridized” in the process of universalization. This reading, however, appears to run counter to Bhabha’s overall theoretical endeavor of anti-universalism. Furthermore, his conception of the “third space” as “a new area of negotiation” and his frequent references to the process of “reinscription and negotiation” (see, for instance, Location, 191) in the production of cultural identity never seem to make clear whether, in the actual arena of cultural embattlement,27 the reference is to a space (or an agency?) in which mediating between (existent) particularities takes place, or where the existing social field confronts its radical outside: in other words, whether it is a (re)negotiation between the “particulars,” or, more radically, between the social and the non-social, the “part of no part,” the socially unrepresentable, which Bhabha’s occasional invocation of “something new and unrecognizable” seems to suggest. If this process of hybridity or negotiatory space points to the former, then it is likely that the particular terms from which the third term derives would not be undermined—the hybrid can be accommodated and reduced to another difference, however fleetingly, juxtaposed with the originary particularities and constituting a merely differential relation. What we have, then, would be a proliferation of differences in an expanded socio-cultural field whose infrastructure remains relatively intact. One also has to be wary, as Laclau cautions us, that the model of negotiation—as ambiguous as this term has become—would lapse into an even worse scenario, in which “the agreement concerns only circumstantial matters, but the identity of the forces entering it remains uncontaminated by the process of negotiation” (Emancipation(s), 32).

Articulation, Agency, and Misrecognition

Rather than indulging in the celebration of what appears to be an infinitely complex, indeterminable, yet ultimately conciliatory space of negotiation that absorbs antagonism, I’d like to propose “a contingent intervention taking place in an undecidable terrain,” an intervention taken up by a hegemonic agent who articulates radical antagonism (ibid., 89). We understand, from our preceding analysis, that radical antagonism is irreducible to the antagonistic relations between the particulars within a given socio-political order; however, the gap or fissure opened up by constitutive antagonism (which is not merely another internal difference) can only be mapped, in a distorted way, onto a particular difference within the social (Žižek, Contingency, 92), since the universal emerges not simply out of struggles or “negotiations” between particulars, but points to something beyond the particulars that, nevertheless, can only be articulated through some particularity. The agency which assumes the universal function, therefore, is itself a particular, an intra-social difference onto which a fundamental difference (between the social and the non-social) is mapped and through which radical antagonism as well as a new universality are articulated. The equivalential chain that sustains this antagonistic universal, I argue, is not based on a logic of incarnation or representation (according to which the represented is coextensive with its agent), but on a profound misrecognition of the antagonism to be articulated; it is an articulation which does not necessarily reflect the positivity or objective differential relations of the social because antagonism, as constitutive and indissoluble, tends to dissolve objectivity into the social (but not totally). This universal therefore does not go beyond the well-documented problematic of representation; rather, it only foregrounds such a problematic, since the indispensable role of agency it presupposes represents, first and foremost, the impossibility of universal grounds.

Such impossibility of communitarian fullness, of full representation, is also famously figured in Spivak’s subaltern, who is no less excluded and unrepresentable than the non-social elements we’ve enlisted so far. For Spivak pushes the logic of difference and the notion of representation to their limits, to the point where one has to postulate not only a constantly self-differentiating difference, but an absolute alterity, impenetrable to anyone who has the audacity to represent her—hence rendering suspect any form of agency seeking to “include” the subaltern. With her eye trained on the most excluded among the excluded, Spivak’s insistence on relentlessly tracking or evoking the subaltern figure seems to suggest that radical antagonism be either left intact on the unfathomable fringe of any socio-political representation; or that it be fully, adequately represented, i.e., that antagonism coalesces on a coextensive content able finally to give the subaltern its due. For the latter, no representational system available, as the critic is well aware, can do the trick. Moreover, doesn’t Spivak’s theoretical probing of the subaltern itself demonstrate that subalternity can be somehow articulated, though certainly not without some degree of complicity with the socio-symbolic edifice that forecloses it? Spivak’s ethical injunction on the subaltern question—which reads, from the subaltern perspective, “[since] we can be represented; [therefore] we must not represent ourselves”—is a “catachrestic rewriting” of Marx’s formulation: “[they] cannot represent themselves; they must be represented” (Larsen, 207; cf. Spivak, “Subaltern,” 276–277).28 Without the slightest intention of contesting the insurmountable problematic inherent in representation, I’d like to paraphrase Spivak and propose the following: The subaltern cannot speak; she cannot be represented, but she can be, and always has been, articulated, not only because her “constitutive exclusion” is the precondition of the socio-symbolic order vis-à-vis which she is subaltern, but also because she can be articulated in such a way that she (mis)recognizes her plight in the articulation and that may thus transform both her and the socio-symbolic order.29

Let me conclude this chapter—and introduce the next—by looking at, as an instance, the articulation of revolutionary ideals in the case of Toussaint and the Haitian Revolution. Toussaint and many other former slaves who devoted their lives to the liberation of all were profoundly impacted by the French Revolution, as they apparently identified with the proclaimed ideals of liberty and equality. Yet their identification, I argue, was based more or less on a misrecognition; or rather, the precepts of the metropolitan Revolution got articulated and transmuted in their part of the world in such a way that what united them was scarcely a unified message with a positivized, particular content: In the age of revolution (circa 1770–1823), writes David Brion Davis, revolutionary ideology took a myriad of forms, yet the “vague and often confused idea of revolution continued to spread.” For example, in the Caribbean, British slaves “sometimes imagined that their masters were resisting and suppressing the king’s efforts to free them; in 1790 this conviction sparked a revolt in Tortola” (76). Robin Blackburn also notes that, to the extent that “liberty and equality had become the religion of the formerly enslaved,” the emancipatory message “might be conveyed in a variety of idioms—French, or Kréyole or some African language—and with a variety of political or religious inflexions—royalist, Republican, Catholic, voodoo—so long as slaveholder power was broken” (259). During his initial success against the French troops, Toussaint didn’t have any specified goal other than overthrowing slavery in the colony of San Domingo.30 After granting universal liberty to all the inhabitants of San Domingo (which was the first polity in the Americas to have done so), Toussaint went on to realize more specific goals of rebuilding war-torn San Domingo and meet the increasingly concrete demands of a diverse constituency, ranging from blacks to Mulattoes to the whites, which for some time Toussaint managed to satisfy (James, Black Jacobins, 251–256). In the later stage of his tenure, however, Toussaint was not able to raise any specific issue or slogan around which he could rally, as effectively as before, the black masses who had single-mindedly and willingly followed all of his commands, even though his authority and popularity were rarely challenged (cf. James, especially Ch. XII; Miller).31

As exemplified in Toussaint’s case, it is precisely because the articulation of universality is based on misrecognition, and because what is to be expressed in the universal is an impossible object—the absence of communitarian fullness—that the place of the universal can only be filled temporarily and partially by the agency assuming the universal function. This “un-fulfilling” of the universal agent, paradoxically, is what gives it a universal character, since the filling of the place of universality—its coinciding with the agent’s ineradicable particularity—can only mean it’s a particular fully recognizable in its particularity. The place/placing of the universal is at once precarious and indispensable, both impossible and necessary, and it is for this reason that universality is always subject to contingent, contestatory articulations.

1 Huggan suggests that the rise of postcolonial studies in the 1990s be seen as “partly the offshoot of a wider institutional phenomenon—the so-called turn to cultural studies in an increasing number of English (among other humanities) departments at Western universities,” or even “an analytical attempt to globalise the already wide scope of cultural studies” (240). Loomba’s book Colonialism/Postcolonialism further places the recent boom of postcolonial studies under the aegis of historically situated anti-imperialist critiques produced in modern as well as contemporary socio-cultural movements and phenomena, such as the history of decolonization and the “revolution” within the “Western” intellectual tradition (Marxism, 1980s colonial discourse analysis, etc.).

2 A notable exception to this unanimous avoidance of the designation “essentialism” would be Spivak’s proposal of “strategic essentialism,” which is echoed among cultural critics and theoreticians (e.g. Laclau, Emancipation(s), 50–51). However, numerous instances in Spivak’s writings, ever elusive themselves, disprove the notion that she would by this term endorse the common understanding of using essentialism strategically, as a tool to reach some common political goal. Her self-reflexive, relentlessly self-deconstructing tendency in what she calls a “self-separating project” (Postcolonial Critic, 21) and more recently, her affirmation of some sort of ineluctable yet productive “complicity” (Critique, xii, 3–4, 9) in any resistance certainly mark a sharp distinction from those insisting on maintaining strong, politically salient identity claims.

3 A crude, sometimes caricaturing, sometimes heuristically motivated characterization which has been circulating around for quite some time has been to identify behind Bhabha, Said, and Spivak—who Robert Young calls the “Holy Trinity” of postcolonial theorists—the monumental figures of Lacan, Foucault, and Derrida, respectively. Those sympathetic to postcolonial theory and those critical of it both seem to accept this linkage to poststructuralism/postmodernism: students and those who have no prior local and historical knowledge of colonialism recognize in postcolonial discourse the familiar and paradigmatic terminology and themes of postmodernism and accept it on this ground, while on the other hand, there are others maybe equipped with the necessary socio-historical knowledge of colonialism—for example, Marxists and many Third World intellectuals not trained in Western academia—who reject postcolonial studies, especially the theory part, precisely because of its postsructuralist association. See Moore-Gilbert for a distinction between French poststructuralist theory-inspired “postcolonial theory” on the one hand, and on the other, the “wider field of postcolonial criticism” that is, generally speaking, averse to or skeptical of “theory.”

4 For a similar itemized summary of the general critiques of postcolonial studies, see Hallward, xv. For more refined marshallings of such attacks on postcolonialism and/or detailed analyses of one or more of these critiques, see Ahmad, Cooppan, Dirlik, Loomba (Colonialism), MacClintock, and Shohat. This list, of course, can’t be exhaustive.

5 This “definition” originally appeared in an article of 1992 whose title serves a clear purpose—“Postcolonial Criticism.” The original passage was slightly revised and included in an essay called “The Postcolonial and the Postmodern: The Question of Agency,” collected in The Location of Culture.

6 Here I am drawing on Slavoj Žižek’s explication of Badiou’s critique of multiculturalism, which often describes itself as premised on the Deleuzian “rhizomatic multitude.” In his writings on Deleuze, Badiou has characterized him as “the most radical monist in modern philosophy” (Žižek, Totalitarianism, 238, 269).

7 I shall return to tackle some other issues raised in Bhabha’s work, specifically his appropriation of Lacanian psychoanalysis, in Chapter 2. Spivak’s relentlessly particularistic and singularizing approach will also be discussed later in the book, with the emphasis on her admitted “complicity” in the totalizing/universalist schemes she sets out to deconstruct.

8 Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman claim that Said’s Orientalism “single-handedly inaugurated a new era of academic inquiry: colonial discourse, also referred to as colonial discourse theory” (5). Thanks to Spivak and Bhabha, the other two of the “big three,” Said’s status as the founding figure of the (sub)field of postcolonial theory is further consolidated in their acknowledgement of Orientalism as a work that “inaugurated the postcolonial field” (Bhabha, “Postcolonial Criticism,” 465), or as “the source book in our discipline” (Spivak, Outside, 56). Before Said’s intervention, there had certainly been a well-developed body of work on colonialism and postcolonial situations that was diverse disciplinarily as well as geographically (by Third World intellectuals such as Fanon and C. L. R. James besides the Western ones) yet that didn’t garner as much currency as its post-Orientalism counterpart. For this last point, see Ahmad, Lazarus, Loomba (Colonialism), among others.

9 In Said’s conception, the “contrapuntal” position, in accordance with its musical connotation, connects, synthesizes, or coordinates discrete yet now related elements. Hallward comments that such contrapuntal perspective can only be “the perspective of the whole” (58, original emphasis), since, according to Said himself, counterpoint is the “the tying together of multiple voices in a kind of disciplined whole,” as distinct from their “simple reconciliation” (“Criticism, Culture, and Performance,” 26).

10 This happens to be the title of an essay in a special issue on universalism in difference 7.1 (Spring 1995). The forthright message of this particularly long piece by Lazarus et al., moreover, is also indicative of the overall consensus of the articles in the same issue—a significant theoretico-politcal intervention by itself, though there are definitely nuances in the positions of individual essays.

11 One can also find a more recent case in Habermas’s idea of the aseptic space of free communication which presupposes its own universal rules and whose teleological end (of unimpeded communication) ensures the participant’s intelligibility to the Other (and vice versa).

12 This capital-driven universality, of course, is to be combated, not defended, and it cannot be effectively combated through the partial and particularistic struggles that postcolonialism seems to embrace. Both Dirlik and Lazarus argue that one should develop concepts or a universalism that can match capitalism’s total reach and implications and systematicity—a universalism which they defend (Dirlik, 105; Lazarus et al., 75; Lazarus, 23–24, 61–62). Similarly, Ahmad postulates universality as a result of “the global operation of a single mode of operation” (In Theory, 103).

13 Take patriarchy, for example. Patriarchy could be empirically determined as a universal prior to the exceptions discovered (or until the exceptions could no longer be ignored). While it was, and still is, a preponderant tendency regulating most societies, locating universals in such tendencies and regularities would be theoretically fallible and politically hazardous.

14 Zerilli observes that Laclau, like Hannah Arendt, attempts to “shift the discussion of universalism from the terrain of philosophy to that of politics.” For Laclau, the question of the universal, therefore, is a “question of political community after metaphysics” (7).

15 Examining the historical forms of the conceptions of the binarism universality/particularity in ancient Greek philosophy, Christianity, and Enlightenment thought, Laclau seeks to demonstrate the emergence and limits of the logic of incarnation underlying the idea of representation. In classical philosophy (particularly that of Plato), the universal and the particular are absolutely incommensurable, with an “uncontaminated dividing line” separating the realm of reason (universality) and irrationality (particularity). The particular either “eliminates itself as particular and transforms itself in a transparent medium thorough which universality operates,” writes Laclau, “or it negates the universal by asserting its particularism (but as the latter is purely irrational, it has no entity of its own and can only exist as corruption of being)” (Emancipation(s), 22). This unbridgeable gap between the universal and the particular is overcome and these two incompatible orders are somehow brought together by Christianity in the logic of incarnation, by which the universal, as “mere event in an eschatological succession,” is incarnated in a “finite and contingent succession” of worldly events—a revelation. Here God is the “only and absolute mediator,” and since God’s designs are inscrutable, the relationship between the two orders, between the universal and the particular, has to be opaque and incomprehensible to humans. Enlightenment thought sets out to demystify Christian eschatology and thus interrupt the logic of incarnation by replacing the arbitrary, unfathomable divine intervention with a universal, “rational grounding that has to be fully transparent to human reason” (ibid., 23). And then come the now familiar critiques of Enlightenment rationality, ushered in by Adorno and Horkheimer’s “de-demystification” of an enlightenment repeating the very mythic gesture it seeks to do without and culminating in the postmodernist debunking of its universalist pretensions and inherent contradictions. Later in Emancipation(s), Laclau proceeds to a similar historical re-examination of the concept of universal/particular, with emphasis on individual philosophers—Plato, Hobbes, Hegel, and Gramsci—who represent “four moments” in the thinking of ruling and universality (60–65).

16 It comes as no surprise that this universal representing the absent fullness of community is often taken to be the “true” communitarian ground or “essence” of the community in reality; this fundamentally false universal thus assumes, in effect, the function of the “true” universal, however temporarily, tenuously, or erroneously. This once again resonates with Zerilli’s comment on Schor that “a universalism could be false in the sense of never fully devoid of particularity and yet still stand for that which we call universal” (20).

17 Here I am borrowing the title of Zerilli’s essay, “This Universalism Which Is Not One.”

18 Without such socially constitutive antagonism, we would have “the reconciled society,” whose existence requires “the emergence of a social actor whose own particularity would express the pure essence of humanity” and therefore allows for “the full realization of a pure universality” (Laclau, Reflections, 78).

19 Here MacCannell is explicating Žižek’s, or rather, a Lacanian, conception of the Universal in light of Marx. There are, of course, nuances between the Marxian formulation of the universal and the one we’re advancing here. It goes without saying that Marx, in much of his writings, privileges the proletariat as the agency destined to incarnate the universal and carry out its universalizing function, whereas the discourses of universality we’ve enlisted do not exclusively attribute this radically excluded element to the proletariat. The difference, I think, lies mainly in who or what it is that is so systematically excluded and rendered outside the social or even the human, and whether such a non-social element is still considered a class, as part of society. Marx’s ambivalence and inconsistency with regard to the status of the most victimized and oppressed strata of society—and hence their candidacy for the agency of universality—is revealed most explicitly in his notion of the lumpenproletariat, which he considers even more heterogeneous vis-à-vis the existing order than the proletariat, and which represents less the emergence of a new class than the unfixing of all class differentiation. See Peter Stallybrass’s discussions of Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire. I shall return to the question of the lumpenproletariat in Chapter 4.

20 It was common practice for owners to mix slaves of different tribal and regional origins so as to prevent mass communication and, hence, mass uprisings on their plantations.

21 More detailed elaborations of Toussaint’s mimicry will follow in Chapter 2.

22 Or, rather, this non-social would be swiftly co-opted in an expanded yet structurally intact universe, and we would have another antagonistic fight between particularistic forces that pose themselves as “false universals,” as postmodernists and many postcolonialists would have it.