The Indivisible Globe, the Indissoluble Nation

Ironically, Bhabha’s expansive reference to generic “nations, races, communities, peoples” betrays his well-meaning, legitimate attempt to valorize the particular, to recuperate the “differential, often disadvantaged, histories” of the hitherto marginalized, just as the “geopolitical divisions of East and West, North and South” not only reveals the “antagonistic” moments or divisions over issues of cultural difference, but, under the aegis of this inclusivist rhetoric, also implicitly envisages an all-encompassing globality which houses a thriving multitude—differences that make up the whole or consist of an underlying Sameness.6 This further exemplifies how “many writings on postcolonialism,” as Loomba points out, “routinely claim to be describing ‘the postcolonial condition’, or ‘the postcolonial subject’,” despite their emphasis on “concepts like ‘hybridity’ and fragmentation and diversity” (Colonialism, 15; emphasis mine). Such a theoretical short-circuit or inconsistency—and the disavowal of its existence or relevance—arises, I argue, from an indifference or reluctance to engage with the inescapable problematic of the universal/particular, and is certainly not an inconsistency peculiar to Bhabha.7

Edward Said, the preeminent postcolonial critic/theorist who is credited with founding the field of postcolonial studies, or at least its contemporary instantiation—a mode of analysis that draws heavily on Western critical theory—is an exemplary case in which the postcolonial intellectual occupies what Said himself terms as “the counterpoint,” mediating, in a somewhat facile and serene manner, “an array of opposites, negatives, oppositions” (Culture and Imperialism, 59–60).8 Critics of Orientalism have pointed out “the profound paradoxes, even confusions, within the argument of Orientalism,” despite the book’s status as a ground-breaking study and its far-reaching influence (Moore-Gilbert 43). For instance, James Clifford, Dennis Porter, and Robert Young have all called attention to the contradictions resulting from the incompatible methodologies and epistemological positions deployed in this work: the underlying humanism and Said’s recourse to the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, on the one hand, and his anti-humanism, à la Foucault, on the other. The originality of Orientalism lies primarily in its laying bare the complicity of Western scholarship and academic productions of knowledge about the Orient with the material and political institutions that dominate their objects of study—hence a rejection of the liberal humanist understanding of the “disinterested” pursuit of knowledge. Cast in the language of universalism/particularism, Said’s book discloses how the universalist discourse of Orientalism is implicated in its own particularity while posing as the transcendent agency which represents or speaks on behalf of the particular objects organized under its purview.

Yet the Foucauldian linking of “the will to knowledge” to the exercise of power also entails Foucault’s conception of power as a ubiquitous and impersonal force or network of relations which operates through a multiplicity of channels and sites and which “dissipates” down into the very constitution of the subject, thereby hindering agencies or sites of resistance, if not foreclosing them. Reinstating agency and intentionality of power to his project, and envisaging a mode or strategy of resistance quite different from the particularistic, localized “guerrilla wars” at the margins inspired by a largely Foucauldian vein of thought, Said “clearly inscribes a model of agency and intentionality drawn not just from Marxism [mainly Gramsci], but from a humanist tradition to which, judging by the generous praise accorded to scholars like Erich Auerbach, he remains deeply attached” (Moore-Gilbert, 37). We recall, however, that this humanist tradition and its pretentious claim to a universal agency in the discursive formation of Orientalism is precisely what Said sets out to critique in the first place. This contradiction would seem impossible to mitigate unless one distinguishes “good” Orientalists, a prospect Said sometimes does concede in Orientalism (e.g. 326), from the throng of accomplices in that imperialist enterprise of cultural domination. Such a distinction would also allow for the opposition between a “good humanism” and a bad one, and, by extension, a desirable universalism and the Eurocentric one that has been rightly denounced. Unlike most postcolonial critics, Said does not demur from the rhetoric of universalism. The problem, however, is that much of Said’s universalist penchant derives from his “unflinching adherence to the traditional virtues of a disinterested, broadly humanist criticism” (Hallward, 52).

This penchant still persists in his later works, and appears even more incongruous in relation to his post-Orientalism writings in which he increasingly favors and valorizes the inclination of “fragmenting, dissociating, dislocating, and decentering the experiential terrain covered at present by universalizing historicism” (“Orientalism Reconsidered,” 102). Placing the accent on “discrepant experiences,” “each with its particular agenda and pace of development . . . coexisting and interacting with each other,” Said strives to “think through and interpret together” these experiences from a “contrapuntal perspective” (Culture and Imperialism, 31–32; emphasis mine).9 Said’s attempt to articulate disparate particulars or heterogeneous elements in the same breath or under the same scheme results in a curious “eclecticism, which,” argues Bart Moore-Gilbert, “is perhaps both the strength and the weakness of Culture and Imperialism,” in which Said’s continuing recourse to the humanist tradition is evident. Thus T. S. Eliot is juxtaposed with Frantz Fanon, and the frequent references, “without demur,” to writings by conservative critics, which coexist in the book with more left-leaning, materialist paradigms of cultural analysis, or even mentions of Deleuze, sometimes come “close to reinscribing some of the problems involved in the older humanist model of a ‘common culture’—but this time on a global, not national scale” (71). It is clear, though, that Said endows the “contrapuntal critic” with some sort of privilege or “disinterestedness” that transcends his/her own particularity and that does not clearly account for the critic’s interconnectedness vis-à-vis the myriad of elements he/she mediates and coordinates (Hallward, 58–60). While it would not be fair or accurate to characterize Said’s appeal to a universalism as merely falling back on that (Western) humanist model he still invokes from time to time, Said’s work does foreground, albeit without openly acknowledging it, the inherently contradictory tendencies necessarily opened up by, and operating in or even fueling, contemporary metropolitan postcolonial discourse—at once (patently) particularistic and (inadvertently, inevitably) universalizing. This constitutive paradox is rendered even more conspicuous as the field of postcolonial studies or the postcolonial mode of cultural analysis and production assumes a paradigmatic status. Before we further pursue this paradigmatic postcolonial problematic, I’d like to place it under the broader rubric of recent critical reconsiderations of the universal.

In Search of a New Universal: Horizons and Impasses

Up until 1990, Cornel West, known for his activist stance, could still celebrate the “postmodern politics of cultural difference” with unequivocal optimism and enthusiasm by pronouncing that it set out “to trash the monolithic and homogeneous in the name of diversity, multiplicity and heterogeneity; to reject the abstract, general and universal in light of the concrete, specific and particular; and to historicize, contextualize and pluralize by high-lighting the contingent, provisional, variable, tentative, shifting and changing” (3). This statement, which might as well be read as a manifesto of postcolonialism, represents postmodernist cultural studies at the height of its power as well as the fast-rising popularity of postcolonial studies; but if it heralds the paradigmatic status and hubris of postcolonialism since the early 1990s, it also anticipates the increasingly glaring fissures opened up by the constitutive contradiction between elements once loosely grouped under the banner of postcolonialism: Do these injunctions not point to some generalized, and universalizable principle? How can one not sense the irony of this proclamation’s recourse to some sort of binarism (homogeneity/heterogeneity, the general/the specific)—postmodernism’s sworn enemy? More importantly, how does one reconcile the concrete with the shifting—how does particularity, as mentioned above, manifest itself through, or in spite of, the changing? Since the early 1990s more and more scholars have begun to seriously call into question the premises of postmodernist/poststructuralist model(s) and rethink particularly, as if in a dialectical move, what had been unanimously dismissed—hence the resurgence of the question of the universal back to the top of theoretical and political agendas. In fact, as some remind us, the term/concept “universal” is not endemic to Enlightenment thought (it dates back to classical philosophy) and has always remained a central or ineluctable category in French feminism as well as other strains of modern and contemporary European philosophy, despite the postmodern dismissal or suspension of the universal (cf. Schor, Scott).

Naomi Schor identifies an event in late 1991 that served as the watershed for the “return of universalism within the precincts of the American academy”—a conference on “Identity in Question,” co-sponsored by October and the Collège International de Philosophie and held at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York (28). Although the force of recent reconsiderations of universalism couldn’t have been shaped out of just one single occasion, the weight of the venue of publication of the conference proceedings—a special issue of October 61 (1992)—and the celebrity of the panelists bespeak its benchmark status. One prime example of the effects of this turn of events, as Schor specifies, is the change of positions of Judith Butler, who had been a prominent anti-universalist yet came to recognize, shortly after Gender Trouble, that “identity is essential to politics and that the category of the universal cannot be done away with” (27). This “return,” of course, is hardly an outright reversal of the earlier trend. The unqualified glorification of the particular as well as the unthinking denunciation of the universal may have been curbed, but that doesn’t lead to reinstating Enlightenment ideals on the contemporary intellectual scene. A more plausible reading of this putative return to universalism in critical thought is that it reflects, as Linda Zerilli points out, “a growing consensus that poststructuralist political theories are incapable of generating a viable alternative to the collective fragmentation that characterizes late modernity,” and that “poststructuralism is critically valuable but politically bankrupt” (3). A logical corollary following this realization of the inadequacy of the poststructuralist denunciation of the universal would be to admit the “necessity of universalism.”10 What remains to be contested in theoretical endeavors in the wake of this “reconciliation of sorts between those who refuted these [Enlightenment, universalist] ideals and those who sought to realize them” (ibid.), therefore, still concerns a vexing question, one that has been raised time and time again in history, though with perhaps unconscious certainty: How does one conceive of the universal? Now we may have to rephrase it more subtly: How do we conceive of the universal in such a way as to bridge the gap between theory and practice, to address the challenges of our time? What is this (new or necessary) universal or what does one mean by “universal”?

The common denominator in the recently revived reconsiderations of the universal, including the still persistent and rampant poststructuralist suspicion of it, is that the “old universal” was in fact a “pseudo-universal,” whose duplicity and many vices we need not recount here. This universal is also an “inflated particular”—which is why it is false—whose cover has been blown not only by exposing its particularity (white, male, European, straight, etc.)—but also by highlighting other excluded or incommensurable particularities. “To speak of a false universalism,” however, as Schor points out, “logically implies that there is such a thing as a true universal, unless, that is, one simply assumes that all universalisms are by definition false” (22, emphasis mine). In other words, unless one is prepared to accept the wholesale poststructuralist dismissal of universalism, one is bound to confront the binary opposition of “true universalism” versus “false universalism,” besides the already troublesome one between universal and particular. It’s not that we should reject all binary oppositions in the good old spirit of poststructuralism, but the task of constructing a radically different universal requires more than substituting a new universal in the place of the old and would seem insurmountable, especially when one still clings to the idea of a false universal as an inflated particular, or the ideal of a true universal in which each particular can find its place—a universal that, as Zerilli puts it, “could someday be One” (10).

Invoking an alternative and ideal universal, Schor states that “the goal is to arrive at a new universal that would include all those who wish to be included, and that would above all afford them the opportunity to speak universal while not relinquishing their difference(s)” (42). Such an all-inclusive universal as a new, authentic universal, according to Zerilli, is also what is envisaged by many who share the renewed interests and efforts in postulating a universal (3). However, few are specific enough in delineating this all-encompassing universal beyond staking out a general direction and the widely felt need for universalism. “What form shall this new universal take? How will it differ from the old?” Schor asks. But even Schor herself cannot offer satisfactory answers to these questions, as she confesses when concluding her essay of feminist intervention: “Reinscribing universalism on the agenda of feminism is, relatively speaking, the easy part. Determining what might constitute a specifically feminist universal of our time . . . presents a far more daunting challenge” (43; emphasis in original). Like many other attempted returns to the universal, Schor’s above-quoted statements characteristically reflect the inherent tension or contradiction in the conception of universality, new or old. Not only is there a discernible discrepancy between the “specifically feminist universal” and a non-specific, generic “universal that would include all those who wish to be included”; but the professed open-ended universal seems to amount to little more than ameliorating the enlightenment model of universality that was never truly realized (thus ending up as a way of completing the “unfinished project of modernity,” as Habermas would have it). If indeed this new universal is an ever-expanding ground with no apparent boundaries or exclusions, how will it be different from the formalistic idea of abstract universality that underlies the Kantian notion of some formal a priori framework with its contingent, shifting contents? If such a universal cannot be free from exclusions, on what basis does it conceive its exclusion/inclusion without repeating the (undeclared) exclusionary logic or epistemic violence of Enlightenment thought which had been rightly renounced? How will this new universal with its inevitable exclusions live up to the billing of a universal that “would really be inclusive of all people, regardless of race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nationality, and whatever attaches to the ‘embarrassing etcetera’ that, as Judith Butler reminds us, inevitably accompanies such gestures of acknowledging human diversity” (Zerilli, 3–4)? Similar to Bhabha’s definition of postcolonial criticism quoted earlier, the thrust of this all-encompassing universalism seems to lie, paradoxically, in an insistence on differences, particularities, and marginalities.

The theoretical impasse we seem to inescapably encounter in rethinking the universal results in part from an insistence on an ideal universality (hence the distinction between true universalism and false universalism) as well as insufficient reconsiderations of the relationship between universal and particular. Based on the strains of thought on the universal/the particular I will underscore in the following pages, this book maintains that the universal cannot be determined solely on an empirical basis, nor deduced from a logical, teleological, or a priori epistemological principle. To say that the universal can be deduced according to some transcendental governing principle or epistemological ground would mean that the universal can be determined in advance, or that the universal is embodied by a certain entity which is destined by nature to assume that role; to derive the universal from empirical phenomena wouldn’t preclude the prospect that this universal is theoretically fallible (or fallibilistic) as soon as a case which is not taken into account, whether in the present situation or in the unforeseeable future, indicates otherwise. The former falls back on or risks repeating the Enlightenment notion of the universal because universality thus conceived either results from some underlying essence along the line of a certain unconditioned principle, or operates in the precinct of “a regulative idea” which, even if it’s “empirically unreachable,” has an “unequivocal teleological content” (Laclau, Emancipation(s), 55). One prime example would be the classical Marxist concept of the “universal class,” in which the proletariat is designated as the agent who serves this role merely by virtue of the capacity emanating from its social being.11

As opposed to this epistemologically regulative universality, there is another kind of regulative universality which is merely empirically generated and hence “would be better named ‘regularities’ or ‘tendencies’” (Hallward, 179). Immanuel Wallerstein, for instance, proposes to construct “a new universalism based on a foundation of countless groups,” with an empirical approach not unlike that in his construction of the “world system” (“Revolution,” 231). In their opposition to the particularizing inclination in postcolonialism (along with postmodernism), Marxist critics such as Aijaz Ahmad, Arif Dirlik, or Neil Lazarus seek to identify an overriding universality in capitalism, whose ambition, scope, and historical developments seem to deserve the name. Lazarus et al. further make clear in their manifesto essay “The Necessity of Universalism” that this necessary universalism has to be firmly grounded in the observable historical consequences of capitalism (85; cf. Lazarus, 16–17).12 As compelling as their analyses of the universality of capitalism are, and as important as empirical knowledge is to any theorizing move, the empirical approach to the universal is, however, flawed on two fronts: It is methodologically unsound and fallible, since a universality premised on empirical examples, which can hardly be exhaustive, is likely to be undone by one single exception, whether under the rubric of present circumstances or in the unknown future. Moreover, identifying universals empirically may wind up affirming the status quo, since it can call universal that which, rightly or wrongly, is taken for granted or is already universalized (rather than envision what is universalizable but not yet universalized). The empirical universal therefore may not be as politically progressive as those committed to radical politics would like it to be.13 It must be added that the empiricist formulation of universality is, in a sense, an idealist one too, even though it appears to open universality to the irreducible contingency of empirical, historical phenomena. For its aspiration for a universal encompassing all “actually existing” examples amounts to an idealism of inclusion—an idealism, which, being vulnerable to its own subversion by the contingency of experiences themselves, would fall prey to the poststructuralist trap of totally dispensing with the universal: “we can’t have a universal unless we can have a true universal, which has been proved to be impossible in practice as well as in theory.”