The Critique of Universalism and the Politics of Identity

These discourses provide the necessary legitimation for the “extra-disciplinary” spaces and institutional interstices privileged by postmodern cultural studies. In other words, the categories of “heterogeneity” and “difference” operate in postmodern cultural studies in the interest of institutional reformism and establishing a political economy of institutional values capable of legitimating and protecting the work already being done. The effectivity of these categories as an oppositional and anti-hegemonic force in relation to the discourses that previously prevailed in the humanities has been the critique of liberal humanism they provided. This critique, in fact, has been the source of their apparent radicality—and, hence, the resistance to them—and their current legitimation. This critique has amounted to an undermining of the claims of universality made by and on behalf of liberal humanism. For example, postmodern theorists have pointed to the ways in which liberal humanist understanding of subjectivity have evaded its discursive and institutional construction, while feminists have pointed to the implicit masculinity of this supposed “universal” mode of subjectivity.

At the same time, postmodernism has assimilated Marxism to this critique of liberalism, thereby enabling the elimination of Marxism as a governing discourse in cultural studies. Baudrillard, for example, has argued that the Marxist category of labor, understood, ahistorically, as the basis for social relations, simply reproduces the abstract liberal subject, who only needs to be “liberated” from external restraints (in this case, the rule of capital) in order to realize “his” true nature and desire. In addition, postmodern culture studies, following the analyses of Laclau and Mouffe, have argued that the understanding of “the” proletariat as a unified subject “for-itself” is not only unable to deal with the actual heterogeneity of the proletariat (which calls into question the validity of the category itself) but encourages a “vanguardist” politics based upon the real, objective interests and “putative” class consciousness of the working class.

The extension of the critique of liberalism to Marxism has enabled postmodern cultural studies to establish a theoretical space in which it can make a claim to have “superseded” existing discourses on society and culture, and therefore legitimate its institutional “independence." (Angela McRobbie, for example, notes with relief that the “debate about the future of Marxism in cultural studies has not yet taken place. Instead, the great debate around modernity and postmodernity has quite conveniently leapt in and filled that space” [719].) However, the very “inflexibility” of the anti-Marxism insisted upon by cultural studies provides the clearest possible proof that it is not at all “beyond left and right” but has become a force of the liberal center, developing new ways to suppress revolutionary knowledges. Contrary to the claims of Baudrillard, Laclau and Mouffe, the category of labor in Marxism does not project an “identity” but rather accounts for the basis of the capitalist social order and thereby explains what subjects—however they “identify” themselves—are struggling over and why. The supposedly “anti-authoritarian” opposition to vanguardist politics is therefore really advanced in the interest of preventing such knowledges from being publicized and thereby making social transformation possible.

For example, the argument in support of working class unity, and therefore of a specific kind of “homogenization” of working class revolutionary practices should be understood not as an a priori claim or a moral imperative, but as the theorization of the conditions of possibility of combined and transformative practices under historically determinate and transient conditions. Such an understanding does not “deny” the heterogeneity of the working class, or the “remainder” that exceeds any particular combined practice. Rather, it takes this heterogeneity and excess as a site of critique of the historical limitations of any practice. Furthermore, Marxist understandings are interested in inquiring into their own institutional conditions of possibility: in other words, what is at stake is not primarily a defense of Marxism as a “better” discourse or theory than postmodernism. Rather, what is at stake is the use of Marxism in relation to the totality of political and social forces. Marxism as a mode of critique is therefore not interested simply in “proving” that it is “still” one viable position among many others available in the academy or elsewhere, but rather in entering into contestation with other positions by pointing out their complicity with global capitalist interests and institutions. The truth of Marxism is therefore in its explanation of all social phenomena as effects of the global political economy and, therefore, its struggle against all practices which support existing social relations by obscuring the class antagonism underlying them.

For example, postmodern critiques of the “universal” liberal humanist subject formulate this critique in terms of a “de-stabilization” of the discursive categories—like essentialized forms of identity, or self-present consciousness—upon which that subjectivity depends. In this way, these discourses take “credit” for this “destabilization,' [sic.] and are able to evade their complicity with the attempts of late capitalist crisis management to develop modes of subjectivity appropriate for changed historical conditions. I would argue that it is the emergence of collective modes of practice and public mechanisms for reproducing labor power which have produced a crisis in the liberal humanist subject. In other words, the target and “model” of cultural categories under late capitalism is no longer the individual property owner presupposed by “classical” liberalism, but the subject charged with circulating within and managing late capitalist institutions involving extensive divisions of labor and therefore an objectification of tasks and subjective capacities. The “valued” subject under such conditions is no longer the autonomous individual capable of tending to “his” own property, which presumably bears his own personal imprint, but one able to situate him/herself into a wide variety of essentially interchangeable collective practices which are indifferent to the personal qualities of the individual except insofar as “individual differences” correspond to some classification determined by the needs of the institutions and the stability of the system.

In this case, the “de-stabilization” of the liberal subject is one aspect of a process which also involves the “re-stabilization” of the private individual on the terms set by the collectivized structures of late capitalism. The category of the “bricoleur,' [sic.] for example, enables the privileging of individualist modes of “free” activity which take into account the institutional limitations of late capitalism. That is why this category is so useful for legitimating the creation of “islands” of extradisciplinary practice for the subject of postmodern cultural studies, that is, the petit-bourgeois intellectual attempting to make use of his/her monopoly on the production and legitimation of valued knowledges to position him/herself advantageously within late capitalist institutions. Within this framework, it is also possible to see that the “differences” or pluralized “identities” privileged by postmodern cultural studies aid in the segmentation of “heterogeneous” sections of the global workforce; heterogeneous, that is, in relation to the varied needs of a global capitalist order. Thus, I would argue that postmodernism's “universalizing” critique of "universals” simply takes one historical form of universality as absolute in the interest of resisting the possibilities of producing new modes of universality on the basis of a conscious realization of the collectivization of social relations.

The logical consequence of the prevailing tendency in cultural studies is therefore the replacement of classes by “identities” as the agents of social transformation. However, rather than a transcendence of class politics, “identity," as the product of an identification produced by affiliations grounded in common conditions and struggles, marks the site of a contradiction. The social identities most often evoked in postmodern cultural studies, in particular those articulated around the categories of race, gender and sexuality, are the products of the representation of new forms of collective labor power which take shape in late capitalism. With the entrance of previously excluded groups or classes into the economic and cultural institutions of the capitalist order, and the more favorable conditions of struggle this provides, categories such as “women” and “black” cease to be merely the signs marking the subordination of groups designated as “inferior” or “external” to the social order. Rather, these categories take on a new meaning, representing the demand that outmoded forms of authority be eliminated in the interest of democratizing all social relations. However, this transformation in the significance of terms, if it is not resituated within a global analysis, tends to reproduce those very categories which these struggles have problematized, and to do so in abstraction from the overall development of the relations and forces of production.

In other words, cultural studies is constituted by the very contradiction that is articulated by its privileged categories of “experience” and “identity." That is, cultural studies and related political and intellectual tendencies articulate the contradictory situation of subordinated classes, intellectual work, and emancipatory politics under the conditions established by the regime of private property as it becomes dependent upon the publicly organized reproduction of labor power. Cultural studies has never superseded this contradiction, which is why, as is evident in Stuart Hall's narratives of cultural studies, each new “identity” or “problem” that confronted cultural studies (feminism, race, the linguistic turn, etc.) has induced a “crisis” which brings this contradiction to the fore (see, for example, the discussion in “Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies"). Furthermore, each such “crisis," instead of enabling a sustained critique of the basic assumptions of cultural studies, instead reinforces the hegemony of the culturalist or experiential pole of cultural studies. Thus, McRobbie's celebration of a cultural studies which is in the process of becoming an ethnography of “identities," with which the investigator identifies in an appreciative way, in a sense returns cultural studies to the practices initiated by Richard Hoggart in The Uses of Literacy and Speaking to Each Other, in which a working class individual “destabilizes” academic discourse by analyzing the working class culture with which he identifies from a distance.

But categories like “instability” (the basis for the formation and consolidation of “identities” according to postmodern cultural studies) only take on meaning insofar as they are measured against some standard of “stability," i.e., against the subordination of the term to meanings required by the ruling class. That is, it only takes on significance in relation to global class struggles. To take “de-stabilization” as a necessarily “progressive” move is to misrecognize its significance, since the ruling class itself requires such “de-stabilizations” in order to reform and up-date its modes of reproducing the relations of exploitation upon which its existence depends. All the notion of “destabilization” enables one to do is assert that “more” ("identities," “antagonisms") is “better."

Thus, the very possibility of establishing criteria according to which one kind of social change could be considered more “desirable” than some other kind is undermined as a result of the replacement of “class” by “identity." Furthermore, contrary to the economistic understandings of class which writers like Hall “accept” in order to dismiss, Marxism understands classes not only as a position within an economic system but in relation to the antagonistic possibilities regarding the arrangement of the entire social, political and cultural order which follow from the class struggle. The primacy of working class power in Marxist theory and practice, as I argued earlier, is not a result of the exceptional degree of suffering experienced by the working class, or any moral virtues they possess, but the fact that the proletariat “organized as the ruling class” represents the potential for exploiting the socialization of the forces of production created by capitalism in the interests of freer, more democratic and egalitarian social relations. However, this criterion regarding the possibilities represented by any struggle or agent is excluded from the category of identity, which can only reverse the criteria or values contained in the dominant system. This idealizes those agents in the form in which the dominant culture has produced them, leading to a utopian or moralizing politics. “De-stabilization," which opens the possibility of local reversals and revaluations in the interest of a more favorable insertion within the existing order, becomes the limit of oppositional politics. This does not mean that the social identities imposed upon subjects due to their imbrication within a culture based on exploitation do not have a (secondary) role in political struggles: their significance is in the necessity to indicate, analyze, and oppose the reproduction of reactionary forms of authority in myriad ways within all practices, including oppositional ones.

The replacement of “class” by “identity” and “ideology” by “culture” furthermore requires an attack on conceptual abstraction. Postmodernism takes abstraction to be an instance of domination insofar as it attempts, first, to establish a critical position outside of the object under investigation and, second, insofar as it attempts to reduce the intrinsic heterogeneity of the object to a single aspect or category taken to be the principal one. Politically, this is understood as an imposition of a rigid grid of interpretation upon the irreducibility of the experience of the oppressed, and a violation of that experience through an exclusion or devaluation of the self-representations produced by oppressed groups themselves.

However, abstraction does not imply a suppression of difference or heterogeneity. Rather, it provides a reading of heterogeneity in terms of a hierarchy of contradictions. This in turn enables a politics based upon critique and contestation, through the identification and analysis of social possibilities which take shape in uneven and combined opposition to other possibilities: what postmodernism takes to be the variety of self-representations, none of which can make a claim to “correctness," can then be shown to be the effect of the subordination of one social possibility to another which nevertheless registers its effects: for example, the subordination of more radical feminisms to a hegemonic liberal one, which must nevertheless respond to the pressure of the former by “decentering” its own authority. The significance of conceptual abstraction therefore lies in the necessity to comprehend the possibilities of global transformation which are concealed within an apparently “self-evident” local “self-representation."