Columbia Press, 2020
There are conservatives who decry the Left by pointing to its so-called identity politics, and thereby give themselves a name for more tolerant and universalist values. Todd McGowan’s Universality and Identity Politics, while highly critical of identity politics in any form, will not give such conservatives much comfort or justification.
Although most ventures in identity politics that reject universality are conservative or reactionary, today we associate the term identity politics with leftist groups. This association of identity politics with the Left rather than the Right marks a significant conservative political victory, since the label instantly produces a misunderstanding of the nature of these political projects. (177-78)
Much of this book argues the point that when one looks deeper at left wing political stances, they are really appeals to universality, and that in so far as they drift into identity politics (or particularism, in other words) they engage in a mistake that betrays what the Left is really about.
Often, what people condemn as identity politics is really universalism in disguise. One of the key political battles involves distinguishing who is the real exponent of identity politics and who is engaging in a universalist struggle. The struggle between Left and Right is a struggle between the universal and the particular. This is how we should define Left and Right. But in order to see the contours of the struggle, we need to recognize that many of the projects labelled identity politics are often universal and that many calls for unity mask an underlying particularism. (178)
This is an excellent point. Isn’t patriotism usually a form of identity politics? Isn’t ‘MAGA’ identity politics in spades?
But how did the Left end up so often carrying the particularist football? a football which, as McGowan repeatedly asserts, does not rightly belong to its true self? We shall return to this issue, but first we must clarify what McGowan means by universality.
In an interesting move, both counter-intuitive and strangely liberating, McGowan does not found the idea of universality on the predictable idea of a ‘common humanity’ or something of the sort. The central idea is that universality is founded on what we all have in common: that we are all inevitably left out or alienated one way or another, even if not equally or in the same ways.
Universality cannot have a direct manifestation because it is constitutively absent and emerges in the form of a lack. (10)
Universal solidarity doesn’t leave anyone out because it takes those who don’t belong as its starting point. (68)
The shared absence of the universal rather than the shared possession of it bonds particulars together. (23)
Universality is the lack in every particular. (45)
Though I am not sure universality can be defined this simply, McGowan’s notion of universality is a powerful one. It may also help us all deal with the fact that while Left causes may be universalist, the temptations to particularism are within everybody.
Indeed, identity itself is seen as problematic in this book.
Identity is an obstacle to overcome rather than a foundation from which to base one’s politics. (18)
Must we, then, have no identity? For many, this will be a hard pill to swallow. But McGowan takes things a bit deeper here, presenting us with no simple banalities about us all being “the same under the skin” and so on, but instead positing a distinction between who one is, and what one is:
Rather than affirming my group identity, the universal reveals that I am not my identity, that there is a divide between who I am and what I am. It is this divide that makes political acts possible at all. When we lose sight of it and believe ourselves to be what we are, we may achieve some recognition, but we lose contact with the possibility of emancipation. (199)
I wouldn’t have minded if this book had gone further and discussed more the nature of personal being, if one may call it that, as opposed to identity (in other words, the who as opposed to the what). That being said, it is clear that one thing that comes under attack in this book is the conservative conception of self as the self-sufficient monad:
According to this position, individuals exist in a meaningful way outside the universality that constitutes them as individuals in the first place. Once one accepts this premise, the struggle is already over because universality will always appear as an impingement on the privilege of the individual. No argument about universality will ever ultimately prove convincing for those who see the isolated individual as the political starting point. The conservative victory occurs with the dominance of the image of two (or more) particular forces fighting it out for political supremacy. (33)
An insightful part of this critique of the conservative conception of the self is McGowan’s indictment of capitalism. ‘Capitalism,’ according to him, ‘engenders identity politics’ (24). In capitalism, the commodity form is capitalism’s structuring principle. ‘Individuals display their devotion to capitalism not by openly proclaiming it but by retreating into their isolated particularity’ (120).
Indeed, identity politics is not only practised by capitalism, it is essential to it. Capitalism inflicts upon the individual an empty isolation, an emptiness that craves to be filled with an identity. Without this kind of pacification, the working class would not accept the inequalities of the system. ‘The appeal to identity is capitalism’s secret sauce’ (147).
On the other hand, to come back to my earlier question, do we simply give up our identities?
… it is impossible to live without an identity. Even though identity is always ideological insofar as it obfuscates the self-division of the subject with an image of wholeness, it is nonetheless unavoidable. By emptying out identity through reducing subjects to a pure particularity, capitalism puts them in an untenable situation. This is why so many under capitalism seek an identity to give their subjectivity some content, and they often find it in religious, ethnic, or nationalist projects. (121)
Again, we have this quandary of the self. How does the who-I-am live with the necessity of the what-I-am, even though the latter seems to bind us to inevitable delusion of one sort or another? More exploration of this problem would have been good, though that might have made the book go a bit far afield and lose its focus.
But let us now return to the issue of how the Left came to end up in the realm of identity politics rather than its proper home of universality.
The suspicion about universality that the twentieth century produces creates a fertile ground for identity politics. That is, it derails the leftist emancipatory project from its proper course and shifts its struggle to the conservative terrain of identitarian battles. The dangers of twentieth-century totalitarianism were particular dangers. To theorize them as universal is to unwittingly turn the tide of history in their direction. (117-18)
McGowan argues that since World War Two the Left has joined the Right in condemning universality, rather than particularism, as the dominant problem. The Terror in the French Revolution, the depredations of Stalinism and Nazism, have been interpreted by many throughout the range of the political spectrum as the results of universalist practices, wherein the nightmare is caused by belief in values that apply to all, and which end up being forced on all.
But this interpretation of universality as the enemy is false, according to McGowan. Particularly interesting are his observations on Nazism here. Far from being rooted in some form of universality, where all are made to fit the same mold, Nazism practices at its root an intense particularism (such as racism and anti-Semitism). The universalist always wants converts and does not need enemies. The Nazi, on the other hand, is inconceivable without them. For the Nazi to be a Nazi, there must be those who are not, and can never be included in the Nazi ‘us.’
And this is also where Nazism and communism differ. Nazism’s nature is particularity. Communism is by its nature universalist. The Stalinist regime’s problem was false universality.
Stalin’s crimes were not crimes of the universal, nor were they just the crimes of one murderous leader. They were the result of an erroneous conception of universality, a belief that universal equality was an end to be fully realized through invention rather than a value discovered as the basis for the struggle for it. It is not universality but the Stalinist misconception of universality that led straight to the gulag. Stalin believed in his own particular capability to realize universality, but this belief in his own particularity would not have been so deadly had he not combined it with the dream that the revolution would permit everyone to belong. (107)
This situation, McGowan points out, is very different from the reigning interpretation of Stalinism, where the heart of the problem is seen as an insistence on universality to the point of erasing the particular.
Also:
When one conceives of universality as a realizable future that leaves no one out, it demands the erection of enemies that stand as obstacles to this realization. These enemies of the revolution are necessary to explain why we haven’t yet achieved universal equality. They will remain necessary as long as we fail to confront the impossibility—and undesirability—of a fully realized, all-inclusive universal. The fact that Stalin’s universality depends on enemies indicates that it is something less than genuine universality. Universality cannot have enemies and remain universality. (109)
I must admit that the discussion of the perversion of universality and communism under Stalin is illuminating, but not quite as illuminating or convincing as the discussion of Nazism. Does the conception of universality as realizable necessarily require the erection of enemies? I do not ask rhetorically.
Particularly good, however, is the discussion of how Nazism has been strangely de-politicized in our culture. This book points out that what Nazis hated about Jews and communists was their universalist tendencies, and that this fact is largely ignored. (This is in contradistinction to earlier, specifically Christian manifestations of anti-Semitism that faulted Jews for being too insular, too particularist.) McGowan also points out that the first people sent to the concentration camps (before death camps were established) were political enemies of the Nazis such as communists. ‘But communists do not figure in the most widely disseminated depictions of the Holocaust’ (94). Why? Because to highlight Nazi persecution of the political Left would show that Nazism was not an attack simply on Jews but on universalism. ‘Nazism saw communists as every bit as much the enemy as Jews. Both were political enemies, not just the victims of a universal evil’ (94). This goes against the dominant idea that it is universalism which is the problem, not the attack on it. One might also add that in the current regime of cultural capitalism it will not do to foreground the fact that the Left in Germany stood up against the Nazis earlier and with far greater determination than any other segment of the nation. (I have often noticed a strange double think in the mainstream literature about the Weimar Republic: liberals or conservatives in Germany who opposed the Nazis are rightly called heroic, while Left opponents of fascism, when they are noticed at all, are accused of ‘provoking’ the Nazis by their opposition.)
Though McGowan’s is definitely an idealistic work (as universality cannot help but be) there is a distinctly anti-utopian element in it. One wonders what McGowan would make of Christianity’s unabashedly utopian character in this context, for he does take a very positive stance towards Christianity as radically universalist (citing Paul in Galatians 3.28, for example).
This concern is to go afield of what the book discusses perhaps, but from my own Christian perspective I cannot help but note that the two great universalist systems, Christianity and communism, though they should be natural allies, are more often than not enemies. I would suggest that their union would be the particularist’s greatest nightmare, but a consummation devoutly to be wished. However, here we come up against McGowan’s anti-utopian stance again:
… the struggle does not aim at a universality to come….There can be no fully successful installation of the universal that doesn’t fundamentally betray universality. (75)
The universal is just another name for the impossibility of complete belonging. (79)
Statements like this are certainly compatible with some versions of socialism or communism, but not, in the long run, with Christianity. But this may not be a problem. From the standpoint of Christianity, and I would say from Judaism and Islam as well, the concept of faith means, among other things, that one need not give up an ounce of utopian hope: if perfection, in universality or anything else is not possible for humans, there is also the power of God in play, ‘whose power, working in us, can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine,’ says The Book of Common Prayer, quoting Ephesians. The religious need not make the mistake of Stalin.
Might I suggest that Christianity and communism are, as McGowan points out we all are, alienated: the latter from a transcendent realm of hope and power greater than human efforts, the former from a world it purports to save, usually claiming to be above politics, even when supporting the status quo.
CONCLUSION
This book, in short, is a knockout. It is a sound criticism of identity politics (whether presented as Left or Right) which gives no aid or comfort to the Right’s barrel-organing or childish catcalls about ‘special snowflakes’ and so on. This is a book that can be read profitably by liberals, conservatives, and leftists. It is a challenge to those who, wittingly or not, hold to particularist values.