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Toward an Alternative Universal
In seeking an alternative to these idealist, regulative approaches to the universal, both epistemologically and empirically, here I’d like to turn to Laclau’s intervention on this issue. Refusing the rigid opposition of universalism versus particularism as well as the idealized notions of universality/particularity that simultaneously drive a polarized debate and undergird its impasse, Laclau attempts to conceive the universal by situating the relation between the universal and the particular in the field of political articulations.14 Universality/particularity, placed in this context, is constructed through such political processes, rather than emerging out of one term’s indissoluble essence or some transcendental logic. The relationship between the two, therefore, is not one of mutual exclusion but mutual, irreducible contamination, which inexorably invalidates the positions of both ideal universality and pure particularism, thus undermining the binary oppositions of the universal/particular as well as true universalism/false universalism (cf. Torfing, 168; Zerilli, 10). But if, as we’ve mentioned, almost all parties involved in contemporary debates about universalism agree that the universal is little more than an “inflated particular”—an inflation which is certainly deemed of a political nature, then how is Laclau’s position different from those sketched out earlier? Maintaining that the universal is an ineluctable category, both theoretically and politically, Laclau undoubtedly can’t concur with the dismissal of universality by many poststructuralists and postcolonialists, as he is also rather critical of the penchant for pure particularism he sees in the latter (to which we will return later). On the other hand, Laclau’s notion of the universal is distinct from that of the “new universalists” of the debate, as he swiftly rejects some sort of ideal universality—either a universality devoid of any trace of particularity or an idealist vision of universality as an all-inclusive receptacle of all particularities—expressed or clandestinely presupposed in the recent wave of the “return” of universalism, whose theoretical edifice, as we’ve seen, is inconsistent with its politically progressive agenda.
For Laclau, some ineradicable remainder of particularity always imbricates the universal (just as the universal is an irreducible dimension in the constitution of any particular identity); he even goes as far as to say that “the universal is no more than a particular that at some point has become dominant,” sounding like a typical anti-universalist denouncing the legitimacy of the universal (Emancipation(s), 26). However, taking this statement to interpret the universal, as Schor does, to be nothing but an inflated particular, hence a false universal, is missing Laclau’s point (22). As Zerilli specifies, “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). This “contaminated,” partially particular universal can “stand for” all the particulars and thus functions as a universal only when we forego the idealist conception of the universal—which, as suggested above, is secretly shared by the anti-universalists and their universalist counterparts—because there is no such thing as ideal universality. It would also require that we conceive of the formation of universality not according to a representational logic (the universal fully, adequately representing the particulars) but through what Laclau and Mouffe call “articulation,” which is defined as “any [discursive] practice establishing a relation among elements such that their identity is modified as a result of the articulatory practice” (105). For the notion of representation, rendered sufficiently problematic since the advent of poststructuralism, is likely to lead us to another impasse like the postulation of ideal universality. As Laclau perceives, the “modern idea of a ‘universal class’ and the various forms of Eurocentrism are nothing but the distant historical effects of the logic of incarnation,” since they always posit a certain privileged agent whose particular body is “the expression of a universality transcending it.”15 But the constitutive inconsistency of Enlightenment universality lies in its cancellation of this operative logic through its disavowal of such particularity embedded in the universal: “if everything has to be transparent to reason, the connection between the universal and the body incarnating it also has to be so; in that case, the incommensurability between the universal to be incarnated and the incarnating body has to be eliminated. We have to postulate a body which is, in and of itself, the universal” (23). Such a postulation would be to fall back on the illusion and pitfalls of pure, ideal universality.
To say that the universal is constructed through political articulations is to underline that the universal is not a preexistent entity to be discovered, nor an a priori principle to be followed or applied, but emerges via a chain of equivalences out of the various demands of particular groups. As Laclau points out, “the universal emerges out of the particular not as some principle underlying or explaining the particular” (28), but through a certain contingent articulation of the particular demands of particular groups into a relation of equivalence, which is established as a result of “all of them being antagonized by the dominant sectors” (54). “[This] ‘something identical’ shared by all the terms of the equivalential chain,” emphasizes Laclau, “cannot be something positive (that is one more difference which could be defined in its particularity), but proceeds from the unifying effects that the external threat poses to an otherwise perfectly heterogeneous set of differences (particularities)” (57). One prime example is the colonial situation, as Laclau and Mouffe point out:
In a colonized country, the presence of the dominant power is everyday made evident through a variety of contents: differences of dress, of language, of skin colour, of customs. Since each of these contents is equivalent to the others in terms of their common differentiation from the colonized people, it loses its condition of differential moment . . . . Thus, a relation of equivalence absorbing all the positive determinations of the colonizer in opposition to the colonized, does not create a system of positive differential positions between the two, simply because it dissolves all positivity: the colonizer is discursively constructed as the anti-colonized. In other words, the identity has come to be purely negative. (127–128; emphasis in original).
Universality constructed or articulated through such equivalential relations is distinct from what we have explored so far. This universal—that “something identical” knotting together the equivalential chain—is not a common ground with positive, specified determinations, therefore it cannot represent any objective relations articulating the commonalities of the particular terms, or any communitarian essence; rather, it can only signify the “absent fullness of the community, which lacks . . . any direct form of representation and expresses itself through the equivalence of differential terms” (Emancipation(s) 57; emphasis mine). It is important to note that though universality is fundamentally incommensurable with particularity, as Laclau insists (see, for example, 34–35, 57), this universal can still only be expressed in the particular. Such universality thus highlights something which is inherently unrepresentable by means of any particularity—namely, the unreachable communitarian fullness—or foregrounds the limit of the logic of representation, because the universal is not based on any differentiable, positive characteristics, but on some radical negativity or exclusion.16 The operation in which a certain particular emerges, through an equivalential relation and on an antagonistic ground, to assume this universal function and articulate such impossible universality is precisely what Laclau calls “hegemony.”
One can sense that the universal, as Laclau conceives of it, has a radically contingent character and transformative function; as he argues: “the universal does not have a concrete content of its own (which would close it on itself), but is an always receding horizon resulting from the expansion of an indefinite chain of equivalent demands” (34). Whatever particularity there once was would be somehow “diluted” or hybridized in the process of equivalential aggregations resulting in eventual and inevitable universalization, which further complicates the interpenetration of the universal and the particular, since the differential identities of the particular terms of the chain wouldn’t remain intact either. The universal is therefore subject to or has to open itself to contingency and transformation, since “it is essential that the chain of equivalences remains open: otherwise its closure could only be the result of one more difference specifiable in its particularity” (57). “The open character of the chain,” continues Laclau, “means that what is expressed through it has to be universal and not particular” (ibid.). The place of the universal, which brings to the fore not the communitarian ground but precisely its impossibility or absence, is an “empty place” in which particular terms are necessarily engaged in hegemonic struggles for and articulations of universality, as Laclau argues: “the impossibility of a universal ground does not eliminate its need: it just transforms the ground into an empty place which can be partially filled in a variety of ways (the strategies of this filling is what politics is about)” (59).
This Universal Which Is Not One17
To work toward an understanding of universality/particularity that serves as the theoretical groundwork for the further inquiries of this book, I’d like to underscore a number of things in our exploration of the universal so far, place them under the aegis of the postcolonial problematic, and illuminate them with other discourses on the universal/particular as well as the central historical event to be examined in this book—Toussaint’s Haitian Revolution.
First of all, antagonism is the precondition of universality: This universal is based on what Laclau and Mouffe define as “antagonism,” a radical negativity or exclusion, which stems from the positing of some threatening otherness as its outside and which brings about the dissolution of all positive, differential determinations that characterizes the “emptiness” of universality. The universal consisting in such exclusion or negativity must divest itself of positivized or differentiable identities; otherwise, it would only be another particular and not a universal. One crucial point not to be mistaken is that antagonism, as Laclau conceives of it, is not reducible to antagonistic relations between particular sectors in a given social order; rather, antagonism is precisely the internal limit of the social itself (cf. Žižek, “Discourse,” 253):
Antagonism as the negation of a given order is . . . the limit of that order, and not the moment of a broader totality in relation to which the two poles of the antagonism would constitute differential—i.e. objective—partial instances. . . . The limit of the social must be given within the social itself as something subverting it, destroying its ambition to constitute a full presence. Society never manages fully to be society, because everything in it is penetrated by its limits, which prevent it from constituting itself as an objective reality. (Laclau and Mouffe 126–127; emphasis mine)
“Society doesn’t exist”—if we adopt Žižek’s patently provocative phrasing when he comments on Laclau—because antagonism does (“Discourse,” 249). It is important to note that in Laclau’s political theory, antagonism is not only what prevents society from reaching a communitarian fullness—a utopian society with no strife, conflict, or unsatisfied demands—but is also what is constitutive of the social. That is, antagonism, which signals that there is something fundamentally antagonized and excluded, points to a radical absence of the fullness or impossibility of the community, yet this exclusion or impossibility is precisely the precondition of the social, much in the way that a certain primordial repression necessarily precedes the very constitution of the subject—exclusion as the price to be paid for access to the socio-symbolic order.18 Universality predicated on antagonism therefore signals precisely the impossibility of pure universality (where the universal finds its ideal incarnating body), or the absence of any communitarian fullness, or universal ground.
This conception of universality has at least the following ramifications that are particularly relevant to our exploration and deserve more elaboration: This universal, first and foremost, is divisive, or a “contestatory universal” (MacCannell, “Stage Left,” 41). It is divisive and contestatory not only because it is split between its universalist function and irreducible, ineradicable particularity, but also because this universal brings to the fore the inherent fissure or gap that constitutes the current hegemonic constellation, which strives to suture it. But how can a universal claim to be at once universalizing and dividing? Invoking Fanon, Hallward argues that “every emergence of a new figure of universality . . . must begin as no less divisive: there can be no new mobilisation of the universal interest that does not immediately threaten particular privileged beneficiaries of the old status quo” (xv, emphasis in original). Furthermore, the divide opened up by this new universal is not between particular sectors of society, but between social and non-social, between a given socio-political field and what is radically excluded so that the social order can be established. Citing Marx’s particular example of the weavers’ revolt in Germany, Juliet Flower MacCannell interprets this view of antagonistic universal as the result of the radical exclusion of “a class so fully devastated, so excluded, so dehumanized, and so dispossessed that it is not merely relegated to haunting the society that denies it all standing, but is forced to becoming the universal” (“Stage Left,” 40; emphasis in original).19 The universal character of this particular revolt, continues MacCannell, lies in the following message: “no one should suffer as we are suffering. This no one is a critical, negative universal. It conceals no petty self-interests. It has no particular content, even though its coming into existence depends entirely on the particular that has been squeezed down to become no more than a universal shout: ‘No one should have to suffer this way’” (40–41; emphasis in original).
This, too, was the message Toussaint saw in the precepts of the French Revolution, whose universalist vision and ramifications have been widely acknowledged, even though those who drafted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen and those who championed its precepts hardly took into account the slaves, at least not in practice (we’ll have more detailed discussion of how the question of colonial slavery was “forgotten” in Revolutionary France in Chapter 2). No other group in history was more dehumanized and farther removed from anything that might have consisted of a social fabric than the displaced African slaves. Since Toussaint, slave revolts and decolonization movements have gained a universalist dimension and been fought in the name of universal emancipation—which is why the revolt Toussaint led was not a mere revolt, like the numerous slave insurrections before it, but a Revolution (cf. Blackburn, Davis, and Genovese). The emancipatory message that resonated in the hearts of black slaves across the Western hemisphere in Toussaint’s time, and later echoed on a global scale by the colonized peoples in the mid-twentieth century, however, amounted to little more than a resounding “No!” Stemming from the most drastic forms of oppression, it didn’t need to have a specific, particular, positivized content to mobilize a constituency that was as diverse geographically as ethnically and linguistically.20
The struggle between Toussaint and post-Bastille France, therefore, was not a showdown between two particular forces within the same (existing) socio-political field; rather, it was an arena in which a given socio-symbolic order was confronted with what was foreclosed or precluded from it—an exclusion which was nevertheless constitutive of this order. For, as mentioned earlier and as will be further discussed in the next chapter, colonial slavery was what essentially funded the bourgeois Republic, yet had to be extricated from or disavowed by post-Bastille socio-political discourse so that the existence and functioning of the bourgeois order could be maintained and justified in the first place. It was a struggle, therefore, between an emerging universal defined by nothing more than a radical exclusion, a not-yet-specified antagonism, and an old universal that ossified into a particular, privileged sector within the status quo, which presupposed a radical exclusion of some element or antagonism that was constitutive of it.
Cast in Étienne Balibar’s conception of the three moments, meanings, or modalities of universality—universality as reality, as fiction, and as ideal—the confrontation between these two universals here can be seen as that between ideal universality, which is premised on the notion of the “unconditional” (65) and sets in motion the destabilizing process of “insurrection,” in the name of egaliberté, against the status quo (64), and fictitious universality, by which most people, except those experiencing “internal exclusion” (55), reinforce their identification with their immediate social roles—hence solidifying universality as reality—by virtue of their imaginary identification with the ideological fiction of a higher order of belonging (such as State or Church). This new universal thus lays bare the universalist pretension of the existing socio-symbolic discourse and counters it precisely on the grounds of universality. In the case of Toussaint, the combative universal he appeals to follows that very same universalist logic put forth by the precepts of the French Revolution. As Hardt and Negri indicate, Toussaint simply “takes the Declaration of the Rights of Man to the letter and insists on its full translation into practice” (118). Toussaint’s revolution is, I argue, a radical mimicry, as he turns the universalism of the French Revolution against it by pushing its lofty, universalist discourse till it reaches its internal limit, by being more Jacobin than the Jacobins.21
In other words, Toussaint’s struggle exemplifies what Slavoj Žižek describes as a confrontation “between the social and its exteriority, the non-social” (Contingency, 92). The limit between these opposing camps, “the limit that separates society itself from non-society,” again, has to be an internal limit instead of an external one (ibid.). If it’s an external limit, it would only constitute another difference between particular elements within the same socio-symbolic edifice.22 Such positioning of the internal limit, as at once radically outside and penetratingly internal, is precisely why this non-social element, this “constitutive exclusion,” or what Žižek calls, à la Jacques Rancière, “the part of no part,” can claim a universal status (Ticklish, 188). The radical exclusion of such a peculiar element, which entails the deprivation of its place in society and in the available representational system—hence, any specified, positive, particular content vis-à-vis the given socio-symbolic field, is crucial in its transformation into a universal, as MacCannell points out: “It is only in realizing their exclusion from the human that the universal is born, and that the human can be reconstructed” (40). The existing social order can thereby be restructured because “such a universal,” argues MacCannell, “offers what nothing ‘in’ society can: a standpoint to seize society as a ‘whole’” (41; emphasis in original). But, once again, this antagonistic universal opposes the existing social field not from without, but from within. For if this universal is born out of what we’ve called radical antagonism, which is foreclosed yet constitutive of the social, everything in society, we recall, would be penetrated by such antagonism as the internal limit of the social (Laclau and Mouffe, 127). The postulation of a radical “outside” does not result in the universal’s differential relationship to the existing order, which is a relationship defined by the particularities of the terms; rather, the deprivation, degradation, and exclusion of the slaves, the plebs, the wretched (Fanon), or the subaltern (Spivak) is so total and profound that it divests itself of any particular, postivized content (of their antagonism) and cancels out any (previous and potential) differential relations with the “social.” It is only in this sense that it becomes a universal, since, as Laclau reminds us, that “something identical” shared by the terms of the equivalential chain which stems from radical antagonism and which gives rise to a universality “cannot be something positive (that is one more difference which could be defined in its particularity)” (Emancipation(s), 57). Now that I’ve deployed two terms—and names—frequently invoked in postcolonial discourse, let me dwell here on how our latest reflections on the (alternative) universal can shed light on some of the related issues in postcolonial criticism and theory.
