Universality and Identity Politics, by Todd McGowan (introduction)

INTRODUCTION Finding Universality

AF TER THE GULAG The promise of modernity is the promise of universal emancipation. When the revolutionaries in France name liberté, égalité, and fraternité as their watchwords, they put into precise terms the promise that appears with the dawning of the modern world.

With the break from tradition and traditional authority, modernity puts an end to any theoretical justification for depriving someone of freedom or establishing an unequal society. Universality means that everyone across all societies and within all societies shares in these values, that everyone is free, equal, and in solidarity, even if ruling social arrangements obscure this. Tradition provides an excuse for unfreedom and inequality, but modernity abolishes all such excuses. Any unfreedom or inequality becomes unjustifiable in the modern world.

But a quick look around the modern world indicates that rampant unfreedom and inequality are everywhere. From its origins, modernity has not kept the promise articulated in the French Revolution. And now, contemporary society stands as a monument to this failure. Young children labor under lethal conditions in the Congo mining minerals for iPhones. Workers in

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Vietnam assemble electronic equipment that costs thousands of dollars in exchange for starvation wages. Police gun down black individuals in the United States solely because they are black.

Networks of human traffickers trade thousands of women around the planet as sex slaves. Gay teenagers commit suicide at a rate four times that of straight teenagers. Right-wing populist leaders harden national divisions to protect the power of wealthy interests. The fact that these startling inequalities persist centuries after the dawn of modernity indicates that they are not just anomalies of the modern world but constitutive of it. In modernity, we accept inequality even though it has lost its political justification.

Inequality is not evident only in the signs of blatant poverty and distress. What makes clear the presence of inequality is what we see alongside the pervasive misery—the ostentatious display of luxury and wealth. What distinguishes the contemporary world is not just the massive divide between those who are successful and those who aren’t, but the obviousness of this divide.

Today’s society leaves nowhere to hide from inequality. The unequal exist in constant juxtaposition: the wealthiest neighborhoods in a city are often a short drive from the most impoverished, as a visit to Los Angeles or Baltimore will make abundantly clear.

Even when geographical distance separates profligate wealth and abject poverty, the instant communication of the internet evaporates this distance and permits both sides to see each other.

Given our technological advances, it has become impossible to miss just how widespread unjustifiable inequality is.

Despite the obviousness of inequality in contemporary society, universal equality has ceased to be a thriving political project.

This is perhaps the strangest feature of the current order. Rather than fight the massive inequality with a project of universal equality, we engage in struggles for justice for a series of

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groups—without ever defining justice, without ever naming the equality that would constitute justice. The absence of universalist claims today stands out and separates our epoch politically from prior ones. But the turn away from universality is not just one political development among many. To betray universality is to give up on the project of emancipation altogether.

This is what all the great political revolutionaries of the past have recognized. From the Jacobins in France to the suffragettes in the United States to the African National Congress in South Africa, the most significant political actors have seen universality as the absolute key to their struggle. This is why abolitionist hero Frederick Douglass participated in the epochal Seneca Falls Convention for women’s suffrage and why feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton joined the Anti-Slavery Convention. They were not practicing coalition-building. Both understood that one could not separate the emancipation of some from the universal project of emancipation.

The necessary universality of emancipation is what diminishes the grandeur of the American Revolution in the popular imagination relative to its French counterpart.1 Whenever anyone refers to the revolutionary spirit of the late eighteenth century, it is almost always the French Revolution, not the American, that serves as the touchstone. It’s not just that the American Revolution, despite coming first, didn’t generate a catchy slogan like liberté, égalité, and fraternité, nor have as many exciting beheadings.2 The problem is that the American Revolution betrayed the universality of emancipation by excluding slaves from its emancipatory project.

In 1794, when the Jacobins were in power in France, they made it a point to free the slaves of Saint Domingue (Haiti). In contrast, those who wrote the American Constitution took pains to avoid mentioning slavery or freedom for slaves in order to gain

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approval from the slaveowners who helped to craft it. Instead of addressing the issue head on, the document makes oblique reference to slaves by counting them as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of representation, according to Article I, Section 2.

Subsequently, in Article I, Section 9, the Constitution prohibits Congress from banning the slave trade until 1808, while still managing to avoid the mention of slaves or slavery. The final allusion to slavery occurs in the fugitive slave clause, from Article IV, Section 2, which prohibits slaves from fleeing to states without slavery in order to gain their freedom. But again, the authors of the Constitution managed to construct a fugitive slave law while circumventing the use of the term slave. As this quick survey reveals, slavery functions as the repressed content of the American Constitution. 3 It haunts the document but never explicitly appears. As this repressed content, slavery reveals the ultimate failure of American universality. Despite the universal claims of the Declaration of Independence—“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”—the Constitution exposes the American Revolution’s utter betrayal of universal equality.

The American experience shows how costly the violation of universality is. By giving up on universal equality, the U.S. Constitution inaugurates centuries of inequality for all Americans.

Black Americans clearly suffer from this inequality as both slaves and then as second-class citizens, but white Americans lose their own equality as well. One cannot exist as an equal in a society that institutionalizes inequality, especially if one is among the privileged class.

Through the 1960s, attempts to fight this inequality focused clearly on universal struggle. But eventually political struggle in the United States and around the world became more diffuse,

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and universal emancipation slipped into the background. Universality began to seem itself the badge of oppression, as if invoking the universal put one on the side of mastery and violence.

While a universal struggle nonetheless continued, it could not explicitly invoke the moniker of universal emancipation without becoming politically suspect. The loss of the moniker was not simply an insubstantial adjustment in the history of emancipation. The abandonment of the idea of universal emancipation has had catastrophic effects.

But this abandonment did not occur in a vacuum. Perhaps the main reason why the project of universal emancipation became suspect is its horrific failure in the twentieth century. The story of the twentieth century is the story of the egalitarian revolution gone awry. The victory of the Bolsheviks in Russia in 1917, Mao’s conquest of China in 1949, the takeover of Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge in 1975—all these events (and numerous others) seem to reveal that egalitarian projects are not exactly a good idea. If these movements show us what universal emancipation looks like, we should probably think twice about advocating it.

They lead to the Soviet gulag, the Maoist Cultural Revolution, or Pol Pot’s killing fields. The communist path to universal equality produced equality only in the very worst sense: all were equal in death.

But these failed projects of universal emancipation did not fail because of their universality. They failed because of their fundamental misconception about what universality was. In the twentieth century, universal emancipation turned into butchery at the moment when the political projects betrayed the universality that animated them. Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot all believed in the possibility of total belonging. To that end, they tried to create societies in which everyone could belong, failing to grasp that

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universality exists because everyone cannot belong—through the failure of a social order to become all-inclusive. We cannot invent universality as fully realized and present but must discover it in the internal limit that every society confronts. But these murderous projects viewed equality as a value to invent rather as a value to discover. This is the formula for the gulag.

The invention of equality required a violent uprooting of the past, which is why it led so easily to mass murder. This is the core problem of the communist experiment. Typified by Stalin, these regimes sought to break entirely with the past and to create a new person, one without any of the prejudices of tradition.4 But they missed the key fact that we do not need to invent equality out of whole cloth. We need only look for it in a disguised form in the gap that separates us from each other. Equality does not require liquidation of the old or creation of the new.

Redeeming the project of universal emancipation requires looking anew at what universality means. It requires a turn from invention to discovery. When we discover universality, we see it in what already animates our relations, even— or especially— when we seem at odds with each other. The discovery of universality reshapes how we relate to each other and gives our politics a form that it otherwise wouldn’t have. Turning to a viable conception of universality is politically requisite. Without universality, we have no way to orient our political struggle toward a widespread appeal.

The fear of universality on both the Left and the Right has created a vacuum today. The Right rightfully fears universality because it sees in universality the end of the privileges of wealth and status that it wants to sustain. The Left’s fear stems from a genuine desire not to repeat the experience of the gulag and the killing fields. But the abandonment of universality cuts the heart out of the Left.

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Emancipation is always universal if it is genuine emancipation. Struggling for freedom, equality, and solidarity for some and not others is not struggling for freedom, equality, and solidarity. If one’s struggle is not universal, if it does not have implications for everyone, there is no reason at all for others to join one in it. Nonuniversal struggle is a zero-sum game that leaves each group (and ultimately each individual) on its own and incentivizes other groups to work against the particular group’s struggle. What’s more, with the contemporary turn away from universal emancipation, we destroy the promise of modernity itself. We turn away from the important lessons of many of the key figures of modern Western philosophy.

EMANCIPATION THROUGH INTERRUP TION The basic idea of the modern Western philosophical tradition is that universality is emancipatory. It has become commonplace, with good reason, to critique this tradition for the racial and gender prejudices that it harbors. To some extent, the major thinkers of the West were trapped within an oppressive ideology that they could not think their way out of. According to this critique, theorists such as Kant, Hegel, and even Marx held onto racial and gender prejudices that they weren’t able to transcend.5 But at the same time, what this critique misses is that they had an insight into the possibility for universal emancipation that we are now in danger of losing. Their prejudices represent their own failure to accede personally to the grandeur of the universalist principles they held. They are particular failings. One can upbraid them for their prejudices only from the perspective of the universalist project that they articulate and that remains viable today.

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Emancipation occurs through universality and its ability to lift us out of our immediate situation. Our immediate situation is always unfree because it is given to us, either by the natural world or by the society into which we are born.6 There can be no immediate freedom. Freedom emerges when one begins to depart from the givens of one’s existence, not by hunkering down and attaching oneself to one’s identity.

Freedom lies in universality rather than in the particular identity that resists universality. Particular identity is a stumbling block to overcome, the site of prejudices and unthought inclinations, incapable of serving as the basis for emancipation. What I immediately am is not my essential self but instead what the ideological structure has made of me. Identity—conceived as singular or as an intersection of multiple aspects—is not a basis from which I can fight against ideology but the result of ideology’s operations.

This contrasts it with universality. The most important figures of modern Western philosophy from René Descartes onward see in universality an alternative to the particular positions that remain trapped in their isolation.7 These figures did not necessarily theorize universality correctly, but even in their failures, they touched on genuine universality and contributed something to a possible understanding of it. This universalist tradition is one that we abandon at our peril. Through a variety of thinkers, it makes clear that universality is not oppressive but rather the vehicle through which we can challenge ideology. What seems like universality acting in an oppressive fashion is always some particular identity passing itself off as universal, never the act of an authentic universality. While authentic universality alienates, it also emancipates through this alienation, which is what distinguishes it from all particularisms.

One of the universals of the French Revolution—solidarity— reveals the relationship between alienation and emancipation.

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While I might feel an inherent solidarity with those closest to me, like my parents, friends, and even colleagues, I don’t feel such a bond with those I don’t know. I might read about their suffering and think that this is unfortunate, but I lack the inherent solidarity that I have with those close by. When I take up solidarity as a universal value, however, I come to recognize myself in the suffering of would-be strangers. If I am to be faithful to the universality of this value, I cannot simply be what I was and remain in solidarity only with my intimates. Solidarity emancipates me from my parochialism as it alienates me from my particular identity. It demands that I include those outside my orbit in my conception of solidarity. By doing so, I cease to be who I was and become alienated, but I also become free of my local prejudices. Through this turn to universal solidarity, I lose the natural sentiment of solidarity with those close to me.

But this alienation creates an emancipating solidarity, one in which I take the side of those alien to me.

By making me other than what I immediately am, the universal opens up the possibility for me to act freely, to act against what my ideological programming tells me to do. Only universality accomplishes this because only universality gives me distance from my ideologically given identity. Although emancipatory political projects might look as if they are identitarian today, all emancipation is universalist, or it is not emancipation.

Even if this universalism remains unavowed and obfuscated, it is nonetheless a necessary condition for emancipatory or leftist politics.

Because the universal is not immediately there among the field of the given, it marks a point of freedom from the given. Unlike particulars, one discovers universality through recognizing what does not appear among what the social order authorizes to be perceived. Particulars are distinct individual formal positions, and identity is the content that fills these particular forms. Our

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perceptions follow the demands of the social order in the way that we focus on what fits and has a place within the social structure. We see what ideology demands that we see, picking out the particular entities that count and missing those that don’t.

But the recognition of the universal is the recognition of something absent in the social field. It is an absence that goes beyond any social authorization. Universality cannot have a direct manifestation because it is constitutively absent and emerges in the form of a lack.

Universality is an interruption in the socially authorized field of perception. No matter how clearly we observe, we can never see it. We cannot look directly at freedom or equality. They exist as universals precisely because they are not there to be perceived.

The universal plays a necessary role in constituting the field of perception, and yet at the same time, it disturbs this field. Universal freedom and equality exist in what interrupts the social terrain, in the fact that this terrain always has an absence within it. No social authority produces universality, contrary to what we might expect (and what its contemporary opponents contend).

Instead, it is the gap within the socially authorized visibility.

Universality cannot be reduced to any appearance, and yet it guides how we must conduct ourselves. The radicality of the universal lies in its imperceptibility.

KANT ’S STRANGE BEDFELLOW From the Enlightenment onward, universality comes to encompass freedom. Freedom becomes integral to political struggle, and emancipation implies universal freedom. Even if certain proponents of Enlightenment thinking try to restrict the range of their universal proclamations and thereby violate universality,

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they nevertheless articulate these proclamations in universal terms. When Thomas Jefferson, for instance, fails to include slaves among those “endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights,� he still writes the Declaration of Independence as an appeal to universality.8 The omissions like those that Jefferson makes are always historically contingent and thus emendable in the course of history.

This association of freedom with universality becomes fully visible with Immanuel Kant and then gains the form of a fully worked out political project with Karl Marx. In the mid-twentieth century, Simone de Beauvoir and Frantz Fanon extend the theorizing of universal emancipation to women and colonized peoples. But what holds all these thinkers together is their shared conviction that universality is liberating while particular identity represents an ideological trap rather than the site for potential political action.

Kant marks the great breakthrough in modernity when he links our freedom to the universality of the moral law. Kant rejects the idea that we are born free and then subjugated to society and shows instead that our identity is the site of our unfreedom because it is given to us. We do not spontaneously produce our identity from our own free act. Identity has an external origin. For Kant, nature and society violently impose our identity on us. Identity is not even ours but the project of external (natural and social) determinations. When we locate our subjectivity in a particular identity, we tacitly accept this external determination and thereby forsake the project of freedom. If I claim that I am Irish, for instance, I simply accept the fact of my ancestral heritage as who I am. Clearly, this identity is not the result of a free act. Or if I identify myself as a white male, this cannot possibly be an act of freedom on my part. I have just taken up the categories made available to me and inadvertently testified to my

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unfreedom. Kant’s position on identity politics and its absolute unfreedom is unyielding.

Our identity is, to put it in Kant’s terms, always pathological and bespeaks heteronomy rather than autonomy. What he means by this is that external forces, not ourselves on our own, produce identity for us. Even when we opt for an identity different from what the society initially assigns to us, we choose an identity because of how external forces recognize it. Identity is how I want others to see me and thus always involves a capitulation to one form of social authority or another. Despite the feeling that we really are this identity, it is not the product of our freedom.

It is a capitulation to the dictates of the social order. We do not make ourselves who we are, but social and nature determinants structure our identity. We need the intervention of another force to liberate us from the trap that identity creates for us.

We become autonomous, Kant believes, when we impose the universality of the moral law on ourselves. This is a violent, disruptive act. Without this encounter with universality, we remain trapped within what we are born into or what socially determines us. Unlike our particular identity, the universality of the moral law doesn’t derive from natural or social factors. It is not the determination of the social order but the law that emerges out of the individual’s alienation in language. The moral law is a moral law for speaking beings, and it alienates them from who they are. Its dictates do not take into account particular differences but instead enable the individual to distance itself from the trap of its identity.

Because it upsets our initial unfree situation, law isn’t the enemy of freedom but constitutive of it.9 Though this line of thought is counterintuitive, Kant clings to it because he understands that we require the universal law to break from all the

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external forces that initially shape us, often without our conscious awareness. His first formulation of the categorical imperative includes this explicit appeal to the universal. He writes, “So act that the maxim of your will could always hold at the same time as a principle in the giving of universal law.”10 The universality of the moral law is what frees us from the bonds of our identity and enables us to experience ourselves as singular subjects.

This encounter with universality enables one to think for oneself rather than thinking only in the terms one has inherited. It offers subjects a point from which they can act differently and not do what their identity prompts them to do. A revelatory instance of the emancipatory power of the moral law occurs in The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, a writer not known for his commitment to Kantian or any other type of morality.

The novel portrays a morass of amorality— characters use each other without a second thought, spend most of their time intoxicated, champion bullfighting, and revel in anti-Semitism. But at the end of the novel, one of the characters in the book performs an act that alludes to the Kantian moral law.

After conducting a brief affair with the young bullfighter Romero, Brett Ashley decides to leave him abruptly rather than stringing him along in a messy and drawn-out relationship that would surely end badly for him. In the novel’s final pages, she tells her friend Jake Barnes about this gesture. She contends that this kind of act is “sort of what we have instead of God.”11 With this statement, Brett locates her act on the level of universal morality like Kant’s. Her act is Kantian.

This act shows how the universality of the moral law lifts Brett out of the trap of her particular identity. She spends most of the novel mired in the malaise of her particular life, unable to free herself from continually doing what is expected of her. She has

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her identity, but she experiences this identity as inescapable until her moral act. The identities of American expatriate, divorcee, fiancée, and lover leave her stuck repeating the same behaviors.

Events, like the beginning of the affair with Romero, simply happen to her.

This changes with her final act, which she performs with an almost explicit reference to the moral law.12 The universality of this law enables her to break from the pattern that had defined her life and to assert her own singularity. Brett’s final act shows the relationship between universality and singularity. Although the universality of the moral law upends particular identity, at the same time it produces singularity. As we see in the case of Brett, the universality of the moral law enables her to become something other than what her world made out of her. Its uprooting universality allows her to become singular.

Kant’s own example of the moral law is just as striking. In order to evince the disruptive power of the universality of the moral law relative to the claims of particular identity, he points out that anyone could imagine not lying, when ordered to do so by authorities, to frame an innocent person, even if the refusal to do so would cost one one’s life. Our ability to imagine the possibility of not capitulating to the authorities demanding a lie testifies to the freeing power of the moral law. Even if in the end one lacked the courage and capitulated to the unjust authority demanding this lie, one could at least envision not doing so. This possibility is the moment of the break from authority’s stranglehold. Universality trumps particular identity—or at least has the power to trump it. In doing so, it enables us to see what we are in a way that identity, because it is simply given to us by our situation, does not.

Universality is the vehicle for the subject’s singularity because it enables us to exist not just in our particular given identity but

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to relate to it from a distance. Universality forges our singularity through its alienating effect that each subject responds to differently. Our singularity is neither our universality nor our particular identity. It is how we relate to our particular identity.

Universality creates the alienation from particular identity that makes a singular relation to our particular identity possible.

What is singular about me is not a unique combination of gender, ethnic, religious, and national particular identities. It is instead how I relate to these identities—my inability to exist comfortably as a man or my attempt to be as Irish as I can be while hiding my German identity. It might be my refusal to accept any identity as substantial, or the opposite extreme, a bad faith attempt to identify completely with my particular symbolic identity.13 Singularity derives from setting particular identity aside, and it is universality that makes this act possible. What defines us is not what we are as identities but who we are as subjects. The singularity of the subject becomes clear at the point when universality strips away the particular identity that obscures it and enables the subject to relate to its identity as if it were relating to something foreign. One’s singularity does not exist outside of the violence of the universal but through the uprooting that this violence performs on one’s particularity.

This is the case for Kant and for his unknowing follower Hemingway. The universality of law frees the subject because it emerges neither from the subject’s own private inclinations nor from the conventions of the social order. Kant attributes the moral law to reason, but his basic theoretical point is that we must locate law in another realm than either that of the particular individual or that of the society. Law enables the subject to act against all forms of compulsion keeping the subject mired in unfreedom. In the universality of law, Kant recognizes the

PRAISE FOR

Universality and Identity Politics “I used to be among those left-leaning academics who believe that universalism is problematic and that particularism represents a corrective to false universalism. Not anymore. Todd McGowan shows that a genuinely emancipatory politics is intrinsically universalist, and he reveals the various ways in which identity politics inevitably serves the conservative establishment and traps us into a conception of politics as a struggle of one identity against others. Universality and Identity Politics is a groundbreaking book.”

—Mari Ruti, author of Penis Envy and Other Bad Feelings: The Emotional Costs of Everyday Life “Passionately yet patiently argued, Universality and Identity Politics looks back at earlier debates surrounding the universal and mounts fresh defenses of it. More than timely, this book writes to the moment.”

—Joan Copjec, author of Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation “What is universality? With his signature exactitude, McGowan radiantly argues that universality is what we lack in common, the absent foundation for a nonetheless necessary sociality. Against the many theories conflating universality with positive content and violent oppression, Universality and Identity Politics illustrates how movements beyond the particular are indispensable for solidarity. Ceaseless catastrophes now rain down; McGowan boldly underwrites new political imaginings of equality and freedom.”

—Anna Kornbluh, author of The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space “In calm, level-headed formulations that are as elegant as they are clear, McGowan presents a crucial insight into all emancipatory political efforts.

Those who want to liberate themselves without at the same time aiming at liberating all others do not lead an emancipatory struggle. As a result, they do not even liberate themselves.”

—Robert Pfaller, author of On the Pleasure Principle in Culture: Illusions Without Owners

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