After Identity, Politics: The Return of Universalism

Author(s): Eric Lott

Source: New Literary History, Vol. 31, No. 4, Is There Life after Identity Politics? (Autumn,
2000), pp. 665-680
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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 After Identity, Politics:
The Return of Universalism

Eric Lott

The category of totality continues us

haunting
through the effects that derive from its very
absence.
Ernesto Lac lau, Emancipation s)1

For Ralph Cohen, main man

The Five Days That Shook the World in Seattle not only made
mainstream media outlets for once withdraw their obituaries for
the left but produced reflections in such places as The New Yorker
on the return of anarchism to American politics. I write with the din of
the August 2000 Democratic National Convention in my ears, where TV
commentators now the "anarchist" on who
pin appellation protesters
don't fit the crafty profiles they normally reserve for people apparently
unhappy with the teeth-gritting harmony of North American life.
Obviously the latest way to traduce a left seemingly exhausted by its own
identitarian navel-gazing and now (re-) awakening to the possibilities of
wrecking shit, "anarchism," though shorn of its noble history in such
serves a rather terrific role in the First,
usage, present conjuncture.
media people have to say the word, let it charge around their mouths;
plus, since they use it as pretty much a synonym for anarchy as Matthew
Arnold meant it, they and their audiences are thus required to imagine
the that is, that the natural, the necessary smooth
unimaginable, opera
tions of daily life could conceivably just go all to hell; and finally, for
those (even Democrats) who fancy they wouldn't mind seeing a thing or
two shaken up a little, "anarchism" is a reminder to all that once the ball
gets rolling you can never tell what might happen.2
If anything, anarchists galvanized rather than derailed the great
ensemble of organizations that descended on the World Trade Organi
zation meetings in late 1999, then on the World Bank inWashington in
April 2000. Who knows what would have happened if they hadn't? For
this ensemble was produced out of a great variety of activist causes,
interests, and (lord knows) strategies that in the streets found united
front expression in the campaign against the WTO. And it did so not by

New Literary History, 2000, 31: 665-680

666 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

or universalizing in advance the fight against the chief

prioritizing
institutions of global capitalist control, as though that fight essentially or
(as an aged Engels famously wrote) "in the final instance" underlies all
left activisms; not by simply and somewhat penitently deciding to "go
back to class," as is now often urged by left and liberal fundamentalists of
many types; and not, if the street-theatrical dimension of the Seattle
protests is any indication, by engaging in "real" politics over against
cultural politics. All of which, of course, we've been warned must
on the left right about now?or else. No, the battles in Seattle
happen
were a of what Ernesto Laclau to
probably great example attempts

explain, or anyway sum up, in his latest text, Emancipation(s). For all the
aura of an
totalizing elite-body-with-its-fingers-on-the-pulse-of-global

capitalism, the WTO/Wo rid Bank is in fact a particularism?US capital

ist hegemony, or maybe NATOpolitan capital, as E.P. Thompson often
had it?dressed up as a global given. The achievement of the left in this
case may just have been not to privilege economic dominance as such
and an exclusive cohort to intervene on this and this one
organize plane
alone, but rather to accommodate a host of mutually indifferent or even
movements around a
typically antagonistic momentarily converging
common Commitments in common among orthodox marxists,
objective.
socialists, AFL-CIO rank-and-file, social democrats,
lay anti-corporate
a whole of environmentalists, no-sweat
anarcho-syndicalists, spectrum

shop activists, various offshoots of the 50 Years Is Enough campaign,

pierced post-grunge malcontents, and others, Iwould argue with Laclau
in mind, were not "discovered" at last as some sort of essence
preexisting
but were "articulated" into a claim of or that
totality universality
nonetheless cannot be fixed If it were,
and is not
its political final.
would be either a totalitarian closure or a pre-given unity
grounding
(anti-global-capitalists or whatever) waiting to be realized. And in that
case, as Laclau radical would be
argues, democracy impossible.3
Thiskind of situation, I think, iswhat one gets "after" identity politics:
a politics of
participatory discrepancy that comes about as a congeries of
new social movements collide, and sometimes collude in broad,
jostle,
transmovement desires. This is not, I hasten to add, what ismeant by the
unfathomable locution "coalition," which, when its users even
pause
to

reflect what it's supposed to mean, usually just signifies something like
for the unsentimental,
working together?or, working-together-despite

truly-enormous-differences. Sure, it happens; but history?that is to say

(as it is when is invoked), my own personal experi
usually "history"
ence?is full of coalitions that don't really coalesce, strategic commonal
ity sought at the expense of internal clarity, and political projects that
get subordinated to the other groups' coalitional priorities (as in Jesse
"coalitions" with the 1980s Democratic Party). And as my nod
Jackson's
AFTER IDENTITY, POLITICS 667

to the new social movements suggests, I'm not at all convinced that the
latter are (or should be) all that different from what so-called identity
politics has usually been: movements in which the politics matters more
than the motivating identity. There probably is in all "identity" activisms
that tautological urge (which Walter Benn Michaels has been best at
deconstructing) merely to confirm the identity in question; but this has
been the aim?or at any rate the activist
rarely primary importance?of
identity politics. Maybe just clearer about this now, but I don't
we're
know. Michaels has restricted himself to the cultural domain of identity

politics, which (as he has well shown) is often enough the realm of the
self-identity pleonasm. Identity-based political movements are usually
quite another thing. There the issue isn't who is boosting a program but
what the program is: Kwesi Mfume and Louis Farrakhan both see
themselves as black interests, and surely the NAACP and the
promoting
Nation of Islam overlap on a point or two; but no one would (or anyway
should) mistake the secular civil-rights urgency of the former for the
theological petit-bourgeois patriarchalism of the latter. Which is why, if
we're in any sense "post"-identity politics, it's only because (as ever) the
identity is less in question than the politics?the politics, above all, of
participatory discrepancy.4
Not that this will settle the hash of anyone who believes identity
is so over. movements, as many have observed, have
politics Identity-based
often run on exclusivist for and in
energies (no-gurls-allowed, example),
any case risk essentializing political urges in marginalized bodies rather
than extensively disrupting the normative regimes that produced them
in the first place. These are heavy burdens, no doubt. But with optimism
about the lessons of intersectionality?nobody will be represented in
total by just one movement; no movement will capture the entirety of a
given human being?and with questions about the praxis potential of
anti-normativity, I turn instead to the activist or conse
organizational
quences of identity politics, and new social movements generally, "after"
identity. In particular it is the way the category of totality continues to
"haunt" us its very absence, as Laclau it, that interests me
by puts (E 13).
If it is legitimate, after Derrida's Specters ofMarx, to pursue "hauntological"
investigations, this one flits around the various returns in recent social
and political theory of "universalism" as both a substitute for and an
antidote to the lost, often lamented, of
category totality.
In what I consider
something of a breakthrough essay for Walter Benn
Michaels, "Political Science Fictions" (in this issue), one finds superb
clarifications of the basic point. Michaels condemns (once again) any
political positions that depend on the category of Pat
identity?from
Robertson's anti-Semitic lunacy all the way over to antiphobic,
antiessentialist constructions of difference?not because (as he argued
668 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

in Our America) they're illogical, but because they do not necessarily

theorize the moment of ideological antagonism or political stance.
Basing your politics on difference, he observes, doesn't
quite rightly
make it antagonistic to anything, just different from all other positions.
It's the moment of what Michaels calls "disagreement" that constitutes
politics, and disagreement is not a differential or category
particularist
but a "universal" one. By which Michaels means that you believe your
position is right not because of your group's particular difference from
others but because (politicallyspeaking) of its assumed sameness: you
believe what is right is right for everyone, not just your particular
movement or group. Political are still not foundational or
positions
given, of course, but come out of the historical experience of human
communities; no one can tell (and so who cares?) whether or not they
are True; and one believes them right for all, they're definitely
though
not guaranteed to be right for all time. But as Michaels shows, and as
Laclau elaborates with greater political impact, they're universals all the
same, and they're the important if not the only thing on which to stake
your claim. It is right at this point that the conceptual clarity Michaels
affords on a certain occlusion of even ideol
depends history, practice,
ogy. Yet as Laclau and many others have some kind of universal
argued,
ism is politically necessary to advance a politics of social movements
beyond the recognition of pure difference; and for Laclau, is already
logically entailed in any identity movement anyway. Just what this
universalism is supposed to look like is the burning question.
As Linda Zerilli observes in a remarkable diacritics essay, universalismo
comeback follows the perceived political inadequacy of postmodern
theory?with its focus on subject position, difference, and new social
identities?to draw account of an collective or
up any overarching
united front. One chief here
is surely the 1995 issue of
instance
differences devoted to universalism, in which critics as various as Naomi
Schor and Neil Lazarus unequivocally call for its return in the desire for
a politics worthy of the name. The among these and other
perception
writers is that a widespread turn to the theorizing of identity?say, the
CUNY "Question of Identity" conference that resulted in an issue of
October under the same title, the "Identities" issue of Critical Inquiry (now
a book) edited by Henry Louis Gates and and many
Anthony Appiah,
other publications?badly hobbled the search for a workable unifying
left political ideal. (Remember that writers all over the map were in the
early '90s loudly indulging the notion that the Soviet bloc's collapse had
forever destroyed the idea of socialism.) Even your TV people lately
make much of the left's disunity, what with all these different groups
yelling so loud, and on top of that "anarchism."5 The longing for
something to replace Lukacsian marxism's "universal class" or Subject of
 AFTER IDENTITY, POLITICS 669

history has for over a decade been as keen as the prospects for its arrival
are slim?thanks to the of the new social movements, not
particularisms
to mention the deconstruction of universalist philosophical ideas gener
ally. This is the context that has fostered the acrimonious impatience of
anti-postmodern socialists from Barbara Ehrenreich to the Nation's
Katha Pollitt to the Socialist Review's Barbara Epstein to Ellen Meiksins
Wood, author of The Retreat from Class and other books, close affiliate of
the New Left Review (itself an orthodox holdout) and Monthly Review', that
has witnessed the social-democratic turn to the crudely defined ques
tions of "money" and liberal-nationalist policy, most notably in Michael
Lind, author of The Next American Nation, and Todd Gitlin, who specifically
calls for a "left universalism" in his The Twilight of Common Dreams', and
that embraced Gayatri Spivak's so-called "strategic essentialism," an idea
which nonetheless roots political struggle in marginalized identities and
whose resulting insufficiency is lately giving rise to the ideas (and
languages) of universalism. As the foregoing examples suggest, a lot of
this talk amounts to "universalism" not in Laclau's sense but as a

variously reactionary stand-in for old-fashioned totality.6

Meanwhile, though, many current theoretical projects may in fact be
measured by the degree to which they try to think through a "universal
ism" that would be totality's successor. To say the least, not all of them
are equally successful or thoroughgoing. But seen this way, Walter Benn
Michaels's neopragmatist critiques of identity, Paul Gilroy's elaboration
of a diasporic "black Atlantic," Lisa Lowe's postnationalist deconstruction
of US reliance on and political exclusion of Asian labor, Lauren
Berlant's of anti-normative the
explorations citizenship, exchanges
between Judith Butler and Nancy Fraser on the relations between queer
recognition and economic redistribution, Robyn Wiegman's attention
to the institutional half-life of women's studies (in this issue) and the
limitations of so-called whiteness studies, Lisa Duggan's attempts to
suggest alternative discourses to redescribe the state, Michael Denning's
wide-net mapping of the inter-World War US left, the post-Gramscian
accounts of hegemony by Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, among others, all
(in my view) constitute a contemporary to totality's
political response
passing. And whether successful or not, they are in any case
symptomatic
of a moment in which, to take an aerial view, the project of imagining
some kind of nonessentialist left front is as attractive as it is parlous given
the intractable difficulties attending universalism (and for that matter
particularism as well). Left and labor historians have faced similar
predicaments. Among these are the still unassimilable gen
apparently
der critique by Joan Scott of E.P. Thompson's work on the English
working class, Robin Kelley's somewhat contradictory impulses regard
ing the role of the Communist Party USA's paternalist oversight of black
670 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

struggles North and South, Ellen M. Wood's dismissal of post-Gareth

Stedman Jones work on languages of class, or a whole range of other
recent examples. The idea of a left made whole is so seductive yet elusive
that one glimpses in it Laclau's suggestion that the political universal is
less a given than a constitutive lack?the empty site of a political desire
whose fulfillment is less important (and impossible anyway) than its
generating of a broad democratic field of would-be hegemonic attempts
to it.7
capture
Laclau's intervention in Emancipation(s) is precisely to pursue the
prospect of a politically forceful universalism shorn of the dead weight
of essentialism: a serious theoretical rationale for new social movements.

Laclau insists on the political necessity of universalism, but only as a

category definitively decoupled from its classical philosophical basis,
even a dialectical marxist one. He a return to the idea in a
proposes

strictly political sense that has nothing to do with the quest for Truth or
a true Subject or an end of historical contradiction in the rule of a
universal class. I haven't the to out the intricate
space lay conceptual
of Laclau's discussion, but its most move is to argue
elegance important
that the only acceptable political notion of the universal?and therefore
of the organizational that of an empty signifier, not a
imperative?is
present, given, or essential fullness waiting for troops but an impossible
ideal whose very emptiness and lack creates a pluralized, difference
based competition on the part of various particularisms in a democratic
social-symbolic field to assume the position of the universal organiza
tion. This competition goes by the Gramscian name of hegemony, and
its outcome is never in advance or, once achieved, for a
guaranteed
of time. The balance of forces constituting a
given length hegemonic
bloc are to drift, the
always subject change, antagonism, overturning;
balance is never complete or fixed; the universal as an empty place is
what is politically and contingently occupied by a particularism cunning
or to have made its concerns the most
persuasive enough universally
and or alliances, established to
urgent; multiple engagements according
what Laclau terms a "chain of equivalence" (E 40-45), may together
constitute a leading hegemonic force?the promise of which, I would
we saw in Seattle and D.C.
argue, Washington,
To some, even like a "highly theorized
this can look hostility to
as Timothy Brennan puts it in a recent issue of Cultural
organization,"
as a way beyond the metaphysics
Critique? What certain theorists pursue
of totality, attempting to account for and promote the recent turns left
activism has taken, others like Brennan see as a betrayal of the great

ghost that keeps haunting with its absence. Indeed, Brennan charges the
"cultural left" with having no "organizational imaginary" at all (OI 88).
This powerful yet characteristic challenge to the ideas I've been elabo
AFTER IDENTITY, POLITICS 671

rating not only amounts to a widely-felt sectarian resentment on the left;

it is also against such positions that a reconstructed universalism will
have to stand or fall. Plus, if there's nothing to be learned from a
brilliant political interventionist like Brennan?the author of the formi
dable books Salman Rushdie and the Third World: Myths of theNation and At
Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now as well as many great essays in
political theory and criticism?well then there's probably nothing to be
learned.9

According to Brennan, the "cultural left"?a vaguely defined congress

of cultural studies practitioners, feminist critics, queer theorists, and
others?has abdicated its responsibility to formulate theoretical and
cultural projects within a political framework of organized intervention,
above all at the level of the state.10 Brennan savages the "cultural left" for
having no organizational forethought to wield against the coup attempt
by an expertly organized New Christian Right in I affaire Clinton. Much
more than this, however, Brennan the "cultural left" with
charges
muddling the legal, political, cultural and
struggle against sexual
harassment such that the right could appropriate a late-1990s anti
harassment climate within which the President's activities could be
found, let us say, not
unimpeachable.
The organizational naivete of campus feminism is Brennan's polemi
cal backbeat, and he sees the commitment to anti-harassment as
though
valid and Brennan nonetheless institu
"utterly important," challenges
tional policies "drawn up so broadly as to include consensual sex and all
relationships of 'unequal power,'" where the "rights of willing sexual
partners are denied in the name of protecting adult women from their
own free choices" (OI 86, 87, 88). One might well ask of Brennan's essay
how it is that anti-harassment themselves can be made
policies respon
sible for what Brennan himself says was Kenneth Starr's criminal
of them?and indeed how our anti-harassment climate
manipulation
can seem so much more burdensome than the violations it was
everyday
about to curb. In any case, Brennan further attenuates his
brought
critique of the left" through a dismissive
"cultural analysis of Judith
Butler's essay "Merely Cultural," one of her most powerful pieces, and
perhaps her only attempt to discuss queer politics in the context of
political economy. And he impugns my recent critique in Transition of
what I call "boomer liberalism"?a new cadre of liberal moralists from
Richard Rorty and Todd Gitlin to Sean Wilentz and Joe Klein?for
underestimating the importance of the boomers' central tenet: that the
"cultural left's" interest in marginalized identities and rarefied theory
blocks its engagement with the "real" politics of class, taxes, and laws.11
Surprisingly for such a powerful socialist theorist and cultural critic,
Brennan agrees in many respects with the terms of the boomer analysis;
672 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

he too is exasperated with what he sees as the self-flattering and frivolous

Tennis Court Oaths of a "cultural left" way too complacent to mount a
case current "real-world" I
public against exploitation. strongly suspect
that, given the choice, Brennan
align himself instead with a strain
would
of anti-postmodern socialist thought that has pretty much given up on
trying to think a new radical
egalitarianism through the key legacies of
poststructuralism?difference, undecidability, plurality, and the new
social movements. Fraser's well-known of
Nancy vocabulary "recogni
tion" (of hitherto marginalized groups) and "redistribution" (of social
wealth and other capital) perhaps best captures the components in
volved in these debates; where Fraser means them to indicate two axes of
left redress with regard to social injustice, axes that are
complexly
related through multiple mediations, the boomers as well as the socialist
class fundamentalists (as I would call them) simply posit the primary
of redistribution over the cultural" matter of
importance "merely

recognition. In the hands of the boomers, I have argued, the new

of redistribution becomes a crude, almost instru
rallying cry apolitical,
ment on the part of liberals with which to assert a self-serving,
bourgeois
sectarian hegemony over a bad left that is supposedly too self-involved
and culturally mesmerized to notice "actual" social injustice. It is indeed
pertinent just here to decode the terms "cultural left" and "real left" in
Rortian and boomer usage: the "real left," it is clear, is that of social
democrats who see their main in a
political?organizational?chance
Democratic Party true to the principles articulated by Bill Clinton in
1992-93. As I argued in a 1994 Social Text essay on Cornel West, the only
political group in a position to qualify or soften the harder edges of
Clinton-Gore-Lieberman's Democratic Council?the very
Leadership
coffin of the New Deal?was the Democratic Socialists of America, of
which Rorty was at last check a member and which, at least up into the
moment of Clintonista and perhaps still, was avowedly in favor organiza
tionally, as its leaders Michael Harrington and Irving Howe put it in
1984, of pushing the Democratic Party?what they called the "left wing
of realism"?a couple inches to the left. At quite some distance from
such rousing social democratic utopias, class fundamentalists like Brennan
nonetheless turn the pure privileging of redistribution into a left dissent
from much of
the theory and analysis of political conjunctures and
prospects by socialist critics today.12
Of course, Brennan wears this fact like a badge of honor. Yet his and
others' talk of the commonsense "realness" of laws and money strikes me
as not only crude but Even in less dismissive accounts of new
spurious.
social movements based not on class but on identities formed by
histories of injustice, there is a striking a priori sense of voluntarism
about the investment in this cause or that movement or the other
AFTER IDENTITY, POLITICS 673

issue?as though determining the most fundamental question were a

matter of the writer's strength of feeling rather than a studied or

analytical sense of the ever-unstable balance of forces in a hegemonic

bloc at a given moment. Another way to put this is to say that at this
moment of political "choice" an implied or abstract universalism re
turns: as in such common as "dude, class has
conversation-stoppers
always been the most important social category in Pittsburgh" or
whatever. (Even, or activists in a chosen movement such as
especially,
our University of Virginia Living Wage Campaign must understand the
way other organizations?let us say the local NAACP?intersect, poach
on, establish a conjunctural priority over, or otherwise inhabit one's
own; often this is critical to a campaign's success.) Certainly it is rare to
find analysts actually attempting to justify their insistence on the
fundamental primacy of class, let alone trying to weigh the political
force and reach of various bases in order to understand
organizational
a great variety of interests
the way might work with or against one
another in a given political situation. Here is how Brennan presents it:
"Partaking in [the organizational] imaginary means 'finding a rational
solution in human practice and
in the comprehension of this practice'"
(OI 82). Rhetorically interesting, this, in that it performs the analytical
obtuseness of which I speak. I recognize the charge of Feuerbachian
contemplative subjectivism Brennan intends by quoting from Marx's
famous Theses. aside the incoherence of a "rational"
Leaving imaginary,
though, the unspecified content of this "reason" forces one to conclude
default that the main axis of Brennan's "solution" is,
by organizational
? la Marx, labor. But what
labor? Heavy industry, paper-pushing, emo
tional work, psychological effort, child-rearing, performative multitasking?
But this is all "postmodern" blather, no? Marx said it?it must be true!
I don't mind acknowledging that this gesture is a satisfying distance
from boomer social democrats like Paul Berman, who not long ago, at a
University of Virginia symposium hosted by Richard Rorty, pronounced
Marx's economic ideas with an air of certitude.13
"wrong" unconvincing
Nor does Brennan hesitate to drop some decent science in the direction
of the Rortian moralists; he scores nativist ... ;
"Rorty's patriotism
Berman's right-wing fascination with left-wing causes and celebrities;
Gitlin's Zionism and his apologies for US imperial intervention in Iraq,
Latin America, and elsewhere" (OI 99). Rorty, for Brennan, is a "Cold
War liberal," Berman an "Orwellian spook" (OI 99). Why Brennan
seems more comfortable with this crowd than with Judith Butler,
Ernesto Laclau, or Slavoj Zizek is beyond my reach. There's way too
much enthusiasm for the allegedly engag? "realism" of these and other
writers. "The 'boomers' are Brennan, about the
right," says "amateurish,
unserious, and self-indulgent" work of the "culturalists" (OI 98).14
674 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

up Brennan's "culturalist"
Taking charges against knowledge-produc
tion, it's very hard to get the word "amateurish" out of my head when
reading most of Rorty's published statements about politics (he actually
likes late Orwell; do we really want to argue about this?), the word
"unserious" when Gitlin's sackcloth-and-ashes stuff on canon
perusing
busters, or when across a Berman celebration of
"self-indulgent" coming
Jacksonian Democrat Whitman as a "revolutionary socialist" (another
utterance from the Virginia symposium). Is this the tough-minded
realism Brennan says the left lacks?
It thus seems significant that Brennan's major charge is that these
writers don't all stack up in the same "boomer liberal" group, and that by
creating a false unity among them Iweaken my own position: "Joe Klein
and Greil Marcus?not to mention Jim Sleeper and Richard Rorty?
simply do not belong together in any meaningful sense that is not so
abstract as to include a much larger list still, if not everyone," and I have
to say I am tickled by that last crack (OI 98). Rorty, to be sure, is no
boomer but rather the group's eminence blanc. My attempt was to identify
these apparently disparate thinkers as a group in order to better combat
them; which is to say that my initial urge itself followed an organizational
commitment. We can debate the role of the intellectual all lifetime long,
but surely one time-honored and I believe defensible position is that it's
the left intellectual's role to take out bourgeois thinkers in the same
autonomous realm of debate and This often
relatively polemic. requires
the sort of organizational thought Brennan himself has deployed to
effect. Of course I'm not at all that this is one's role?
great saying only
that this definition, in short, makes it alright for Todd Gitlin to have
crossed a Berkeley affirmative-action picket line, which he celebrates at
some length in The Twilight of Common Dreams. But I am that it
arguing
might be important to imagine the ways in which Joe Klein and Greil
Marcus not only belong in the same group but are in certain ways
versions of each other, though it be part of each's profile to construct a
sense of absolute singularity for himself. Both writers are examples of a
Jewish male left-liberal pop sensibility that drifted rightward as steadily
as their went neoconservative, with
preceding generation especially
to race.15
regard
There is as well register or level of analytical
the issue of discursive
abstraction, which
Brennan, like Rorty, unfortunately elides in the rush
to stump for For both writers the nearly overt assertion is
"organization."
that the time and place for theory are gone. Rorty's Achieving Our
Country more or less advocates policy-wonking as theory's successor;
Brennan's veers oddly close to this stance.
"Organizational Imaginary"
Names are dropped (Alexandra Kollontai, Karl Kautsky, CL .R. James)
AFTER IDENTITY, POLITICS 675

but no one is cited as exemplifying the kind of organizational theoretical

discussion for which Brennan calls. This leaves something of the
that other sorts of discourse are wanted?when it seems to
impression
me in fact that both policy commentary and political theory have their
situationalpurposes though they operate in different temporal frames,
dimensions, and rhetorical scales. In any case Butler on
polemical
political economy doesn't count; Brennan dismisses her "Merely Cul
tural" in a fast clean starts to articulate
paragraph. "Theory suddenly
itself as applied theory, stressing the practical, translating itself into the
of a Brennan "Butler's ... is a locus
mimicry program," writes; essay
classicus of this move" (OI 96). To say the least, Brennan might do a lot
more to spell out Butler's "classical" inadequacy. While I agree with
Nancy Fraser that Butler in "Merely Cultural" too quickly moves queer
politics (whatever that is; it is certainly not one thing) directly onto the
terrain of political economy?collapsing the relatively autonomous
spheres of redistribution and recognition, which both, for Fraser, have a
material dimension?Butler, even if succumbing to peer pressure here,
puts forward an eye-opening account of the parallel trajectories of queer
thought and queers' fate in the "booming" political economy of the late
millennial United States. Indeed, Butler's linking the discursive gestures
of queer theory to the often obscured consequences of political wheel
ing and dealing is itself a bit of a tour de force. And she does it with
heft to constitute a politically theoretical rallying cry. Ironically,
enough
"Merely Cultural" is full of injustice-system instances crying out for
organizational energies. At any rate, suffusing the exchange between
Butler and Fraser is a sense of the critical importance of locating a (non
foundational) universalism to authorize real-world interventions into
regimes of capitalist heteronormativity.
By contrast, Brennan's universalism is totality in the old sense.
Nowhere is this clearer than in his grand invocations of the Third
International as his organizational ideal. Brennan savages
accordingly
Laclau and Mouffe's Hegemony and Socialist Strategy as a study of marxist
history and theory that "borders on fraud" because it "superimposes the
Second International onto the Third supposing (correctly) that its
readers would not know the difference" (OI 96). Regardless of Brennan's
little lessonsin Leninism, Laclau and Mouffe are quite explicit about
their inquiry into the problematics attached to Second International
figures like Rosa Luxemburg and Eduard Bernstein being precisely an
intervention into marxist theory and historiography. Displacing Leninism
is the point: "Leninism evidently makes no attempt to construct, through
a mass identity not predetermined law of
struggle, by any necessary
history. On the contrary, itmaintains that there is a 'for itself of the class
676 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

accessible only to the enlightened vanguard?whose attitude towards

the working class is therefore purely pedagogical. The roots of authori
tarian politics lie in this interweaving of science and politics" (HS 59).
Calling such an articulated intellectual dissent a "fraud" is a tad, shall we
say, overstated; holding certain truths to be universally self-evident has
indeed been known to make the idea of opposition seem flat-earth
fatuity. At the very least one might note that Laclau's interest in the
concept of hegemony is rooted in the determinate conditions of
Peronism, an authoritarian with more than a few
Argentinian populism
things to teach political thinkers faced with Thatcherism and Reaganism.16
Simply reckoning the Third International's priorities the correct ones?
indeed to it (without elaboration) as "the first political
referring
movement to understand and to organize what today
comprehensively
are called the 'new social movements'" (OI 96)?Brennan feels he
needn't much about its or future
specify contemporary prospects.
Laclau and Mouffe do, though: "Whereas the democratic practice of
hegemony increasingly calls into question the transparency of the
process of representation, the authoritarian practice has laid the ground
for the relation of to become the basic mecha
representation political
nism. Once relation is conceived as a relation of
every political represen
tation, a substitutionism moves from class to
progressive party (represen
tation of the objective interests of the proletariat) and from party to
Soviet State (representation of the world interests of the Communist
movement). A martial of class thus concludes in an
conception struggle

eschatological epic" (HS 59). How strange to realize that one of the
thinkers Brennan cites approvingly in his essay, C.L.R. James, spent a
chunk of his life battling some of the Third International's
significant
gravest problems: Stalin on the Negro question; the CPUSA's intellec
tual as well as of autonomous black in the
practical handling struggles
United States; the banality of proletarian art.17
Brennan's safe-and-sound fundamentalism has the sometimes bizarre

effect of him
into ingenuous or unguarded assumptions, as
luring
the revolutionary horizon were enough to dull
though having glimpsed
the other senses. This is true with to mainstream labor
particular regard

organizing and African-American struggles for happiness. Criticizing my

wariness about the boomers' overenthusiastic investment in the resusci

tated AFL-CIO under president John Sweeney?I argue that the labor
imaginary in boomer liberalism pivots
on the fossilized notion of a

primarily white and male workforce?Brennan asks: "Does [Lott] really

suppose, though, that the AFL-CIO is not organizing blacks and women
or that the union movement is not theorizing the newly recomposed
labor force, making it the center of its discussions?" (OI 101). How
rhetorical the question! I myself confess to major doubts about the
AFTER IDENTITY, POLITICS 677

answer. Despite the hype, despite the funds newly devoted to recruiting
and organizing, despite notable recent struggles and even whopping
victories in California and on the eastern seaboard, the fact remains that
in the weeks before the Seattle WTO meetings Sweeney was on record as
supporting our pro-NAFTA President's trade policies. The Teamsters are
now run by the egregious James Hoffa, Jr. The Labor Party's Tony
Mazzochi, formerly of the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers, realized
he had to leave the established union movement to push forward the
interests of workers. And while unions a little farther from the center
have been inspiring of late (service workers, communications workers),
the national leadership will soon, if it hasn't yet, throw its newly hefty
weight behind the Democratic nominee, AI Gore, hardly your strongest
political friend of labor in recent memory.
Bring up the idea that race-specific struggles might depart from "non
racial" centralized bodies such as the AFL-CIO and you might get
another na?ve performance: "does [Lott] really suppose that the likes of
Gitlin or Sleeper would oppose black activism in the form of a modern
A. Phillip Randolph? That would be nonsense, for clearly they would
not" (OI 101). On this point I am surer than the last?Gitlin, Sleeper,
and the rest would almost certainly demur from such a thing, and might
indeed oppose it. My Transition essay goes to some lengths to demon
strate Gitlin's absolute indifference (at best) and sometime anxious
hostility (at worst) to post-King black movements; and for his part,
Sleeper inspires zero confidence when it comes to the idea of black
political demands by any group. Lip-service to the Civil Rights Move
ment is de rigueur in this social-democratic domain, but it hides a nasty
vein of ressentiment about constraints on white privilege. The point is the
left's difficulty imagining a universalism that
potentially hegemonic
would be black-led and race-centered, which C.L.R. James never tired of
arguing and which Laclau's work helps best to theorize.18
Some sort of reinvented anarchism or anarcho-syndicalism lay behind
the book on the 1956 Hungarian uprising that James co-wrote with
Cornelius Castoriadis and Grace Lee, Facing Reality. In it one finds a
defense of revolt in the workplace whose organizational design follows
the patterns learned on the shopfloor and in the office. The book has
important things to say in the context of the debates around universal
ism in the 1990s. Its hopes are pinned on all workers but not on any
abstract or idealized class fundamentalism; it is opposed to "bureau
cratic state power" but seeks a universalist socialism "embracing the
whole of the working population from bottom to top, organized at the
source of all power, the place of work, making all decisions in the shop
or in the office"; and it has no patience for "intellectuals and radicals"
who are "constantly looking for political parties, political allegiances,
678 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

and political slogans of the old type" associated with Third-International

vanguardismo9 Forty years later, surely it's time to ventilate the willed
universalisms of both the social-democratic and Leninist variety.

University of Virginia

NOTES

1 Ernesto Laclau, Emancipation s) (London, 1996); hereafter cited in text as E.

2 See Alexander Cockburn, Five Days That Shook the World (London, 2000); William
Finnegan, "After Seattle: Arnarchists Get Organized," The New Yorker, 17 April 2000, 40-51.
3 See "After Seattle: A New Internationalism?" Special issue of Monthly Review, 52.3 (July
2000); 50 Years is Enough: The Case Against the World Bank and the International Monetary
Fund, ed. Kevin Danaher (Boston, 1994).
4 See my "Cornel West in the Hour of Chaos: Culture and Politics in Race Matters," Social
Text, 40 (Fall 1994), 39-50 for a more elaborated critique of certain left coalitions; Walter
Benn Michaels, Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (Durham, N.C., 1995).
5 CNN commentary on the Democratic National Convention, 17 August 2000.
6 See Linda Zerilli, "This Universalism Which Is Not One," diacritics, 28 (Summer 1998),
3-20; Naomi Schor, "French Feminism Is a Universalism," differences, 7 (Spring 1995), 15
47; Neil Lazarus, Steven Evans, Anthony Amove, and Anne Menke, "The Necessity of
Universalism," differences, 7 (Spring 1995), 75-145; October, 61 (Summer 1992); Critical
Inquiry, 18 (Summer 1992); Barbara Ehrenreich, promotional blurb, back cover of Alan
Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science (New
York, 1998); Katha Pollitt, Reasonable Creatures: Essays on Women and Feminism (New York,
1994); M. Wood,
Ellen The Retreat From Class: A New "True" Socialism (London, 1986);
Michael Lind, The Next American Nation (New York, 1995); Todd Gitlin, The Twilight of
Common Dreams (New York, 1995).
7 Walter Benn Michaels, Our America; Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double
Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass., 1993); Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American
Cultural Politics (Durham, N.C., 1996); Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to
on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, N.C., 1997); Judith Butler, "Merely
Washington City: Essays
Cultural," New Left Review (Jan.-Feb. 1998), 33-45; Nancy Fraser, "Heterosexism,
Misrecognition and Capitalism: A Response to Judith Butler," New Left Review (March
April, 1998), 140-50; Robyn Wiegman, New Literary History (this issue) and "Whiteness
Studies and the Paradox of Particularity," boundary 2, 26 (Fall 1999), 115-51; Lisa Duggan,
"Queering the State," in Lisa Duggan and Nan Hunter, Sex Wars: Sexual Dissent and Political
Culture (New York, 1995), pp. 179-93; Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of
American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London, 1996); Ernesto Laclau and Chantai
Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London, 1985), hereafter cited in text as HS; Joan
Scott, Gender andthePolitics ofHistory (New York, 1988), pp. 68-90; Robin Kelley, Race Rebels
(New York, 1994); Ellen M. Wood, The Retreat From Class; Ernesto Laclau, Emancipation(s),
pp. 28, 36-46. Meanwhile, the new work of Paul Gilroy, I'm sad to report, in also talking
about the dead-end of identity, finds in such "essential blackness" movements as Garveyism
a potential for fascism. Frankly the moral blindness here is rather remarkable. It wasn't

exacdy me that the Nation of Islam, for example, might in its exclusionary
troubling
tendencies become a fascist front threatening to stage a state takeover. As Laclau casually
observes, the much more plausible outcome of this kind of identity praxis is not fascism
but apartheid p. 27). All Gilroy does is show, from a cultural perspective,
(Emancipation(s),
the politics as wrong as Michaels did
the way Michaels's argument plays out, while getting
AFTER IDENTITY, POLITICS 679

in the first place?only without the liberating turn to a restricted universalism of political

disagreement. Gilroy simply calls for open communities, coalitions, and so on, without an
sense of how these might work (Paul Gilroy, "Black Fascism," Transition,
organizational
81/82 [Winter/Spring 2000], 70-91).
8 Timothy Brennan, "The Organizational Imaginary," Cultural Critique, 43 (Fall 1999),
81; hereafter cited in text as OI.
9 Timothy Brennan, Salman Rushdie and the Third World: Myths of the Nation (New York,
1989) and At Home in theWorld: Cosmopolitanism Now (Cambridge, Mass., 1997). This seems
the place to salute a comradeship of nearly two decades over which Brennan has been a
a partner, a board, and a and
pal, sparring sounding challenging inspiring political
thinker. At least a dozen years ago, Brennan was
urging much greater attention to state

analysis in cultural studies, pointing to the unjust neglect of Stuart Hall's

the Crisis:
Policing
Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (London, 1978) as symptomatic of US appropriations
of Birmingham work. Another key Brennan essay from this moment, however, is his head

turning critique of Hall, "Black Theorists and Left Antagonists," Minnesota Review, 37 (Fall
1991), 89-113.
10 Brennan surprisingly echoes the recent screeds of Richard Rorty in disdaining the
"cultural left's" alleged "looking, discovering, uncovering, and interpreting the dramas of
subversion that take place, as it were, in everyday life," critical work that
automatically
amounts to little more than what Brennan terms "political abstention" ("The Organiza
tional Imaginary," pp. 94, 82). A mere "praxis of spectatorship," this work is overinvested
in the puny resistances of postmodern consumerism; at best (which is to say,
hardly better)
it is driven by an anti-statist, and individualist, anarchism, writes Brennan, too devoted to
Bataille, Deleuze, and Foucault to think concretely about the way "cultural or
expressions
alternative forms of perception link constituencies" and move them toward a "set of
goals"
(p. 95). See Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century
America (Cambridge, Mass., 1998). Rorty is only the most visible and reductive of recent
writers decrying the pointlessness of what he too calls the "cultural left"; Brennan's
critique is far closer own views and yet oddly aligned with Rorty's
to my
emphases.
11 Judith Butler,
"Merely Cultural"; Eric Lott, "Boomer Liberalism: When the New Left
Was Old," Transition, 78 (Spring 1999), 24-44.
12 Nancy Fraser, Justice Interruptus: Essays on the 'Post-Socialist" Condition (Minneapolis,
1997); Eric Lott, "Cornel West in the Hour of Chaos"; Harrington and Howe in
quoted
Mike Davis,Prisoners of theAmerican Dream: Politics and Economy in theHistory of the US Working
Class (London, 1986), pp. 256-60. Of course, I don't deny Brennan's that left
point
intellectuals could use more self-consciousness. And this isn't merely a
organizational
matter of being franker about the political commitments that follow from one's cultural

theorizing (who hasn't been shocked in the last generation or so by radical

putatively
theorists' surprising practical political decisions on the ground in New Haven and
elsewhere?) or, inversely, calling out social democrats for deceptively relying on marxist
theory, for example in the work of Ross Posnock (The Trial of Curiosity: Henry James, William
James, and the Challenge ofModernity [New York, 1991]) or Jackson Lears (No Place of Grace:
Anti-Modernism and the Transformation of American Culture [New York, 1981]). (I confess it
a certain
does afford microsatisfaction to roll one's eyes at Richard Rorty's use of a James
Baldwin remark a book,
to title Our Country, that has zero to say about the
Achieving
problems of race in "our" country.) Yet to notice the recent fate of the universal is often to
see organizational at work, at least in some pupal phase, for in it one finds the
thinking
issues of normativity and exclusion, totality and difference, particularity and collectivity
that inhabit the impulse to organize wherever on the left it is found.
13 Paul Berman, "Does America Have a Democratic Mission?" A conference
sponsored
by the Theory Seminar at the of Virginia, 19-21 March 1998.
University
 680 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

14 Leave aside for now the essential "culturalism" of Rorty (Achieving Our Country spends
most of its time quoting Great Democrats?Herbert Croly, Walt Whitman, John Dewey);
Gitlin (The Txuilight of Common Dreams surveys school curricula, political-correctness
debates, and identity-politics intellectuals, just like the cultural-studies promoters he
decries); and Berman (obsessively focused on intellectuals and their dramas, A Tale of Two

Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968 [New York, 1996] not excepted).
15 Having acutely honed in on the moral-political predicaments of the 1970s?Marcus in

Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock V Roll Music (New York, 1975; rpt. 1982, 1997)
trying to make sense of the Me Decade's class and racial contradictions through Elvis and
Sly Stone, Klein a left-of-Carter in Woody Guthrie: A Life (New York,
pursuing populism
1980)?they bottomed out, politically if not aesthetically in explicit, racially
speaking,
dubious, and culturally conservative paeans to Bill Clinton: Marcus's Invisible Republic: Bob

Dylans Basement Tapes (New York, 1997) and Klein's Primary Colors: A Novel of Politics (New
York, 1996). If you ever read their columns in the Village Voice, Art Forum, and Nexvsxveek, you
know that Marcus hates rap and Klein hates welfare mothers. Jim Sleeper thinks (in Liberal
Racism [New York, 1997]) that left-leaning race-consciousness is racist. Richard Rorty talks
about race when he talks about it at all (see my "Boomer Liberalism," 36-38).
disturbingly
Can I get a witness?
16 See Ernesto Laclau, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory: Capitalism?Fascism?
Populism (London, 1977); Jon Beasley-Murray, "Peronism and the Secret History of
Cultural Studies: Populism and the Substitution of Culture for State," Cultural Critique, 39

(Spring 1998), 189-217.

17 Do, however,see the fine on C.L.R. James in Brennan's At Home in theWorld
chapter
(pp. 208-58), which, while still not addressing these issues, does mount a critical case

against the political productiveness of James's American sojourn from 1938-1953, when
the latter's disdain for the Third International was at its height. For some of James's

polemics, see C.L.R. James and Revolutionary Marxism: Selected Writings 1939-1949, ed. Scott
McLemee and Paul Le Blanc (Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1994); Marxism for Our Times:
C.L.R. James on Revolutionary ed. Martin Glaberman
Organization, (Jackson, Miss., 1999);
C.L.R. James on the Scott McLemee
"Negro Question,"ed. (Jackson, Miss., 1996).
18 Sleeper, for Christ's sake, gets angry at the message on historian Robin Kelley's
answering machine. He complains about "skilled race pros"?he names Kelley and Cornel
West?who find in every
"racism leaf that falls" but lead successful academic careers.
Writes and quite unskilled
this less successful race pro: "such are the wages of oppression"
(Liberal Racism, p. 19). For more on my views of the matter, see Eric Lott, "Cornel West in
the Hour of Chaos" and Eric Lott, "Public Image Limited," Transition, 68 (Winter 1995),
50-65.
19 C.L.R. James, Grace Lee, and Pierre Chaulieu [Cornelius Castoriadis], Facing Reality
(1958; rpt. Detroit, 1974), pp. 6, 20, 87.