BUTLER, Judith. Restaging the universal: hegemony and the limits of formalism.

In:
_____; LACLAU, Ernesto; ZIZEK, Slavoj. Contingency, hegemony, universality:
contemporary dialogues on the left. London, New York: Verso Book, 2000, p. 11-43

Certain key concepts of progressive social theory have received new and varying
articulations in our work, and we are all commonly concerned with the status and
formation of the subject, the implications of a theory of the subject for the thinking
of democracy, the articulation of 'universality' within a theory of hegemony. Where
we differ, to my mind, is perhaps first and foremost in our approaches to the theory
of the subject in a consideration of hegemony, and in the status of a 'logical' or
'structural' analysis of political formations in relation to their specific cultural and
social articulations. – p. 11

My understanding of the view of hegemony established by Ernesto Laclau and

Chantal Mouffe in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985) is that democratic polities
are constituted through exclusions that return to haunt the polities predicated upon
their absence. That haunting becomes politically effective precisely in so far as the
return of the excluded forces an expansion and rearticulation of the basic premisses
of democracy itself. – p. 11

I understood the 'incompletion' of the subject-position in the following ways: (1) as

the failure of any particular articulation to describe the population it represents; (2)
that every subject is constituted differentially, and that what is produced as the
'constitutive outside' of the subject can never become fully inside or immanent. – p.
12

Zizek has suggested - and Laclau has partially agreed -that the Lacanian 'Real' is but
another name for this 'incompletion', and that every subject, regardless of its social
and historical conditions, is liable to the same postulate of inconclusiveness. (…)
That founding and defining limit thus founds the subject at a necessary and
irreversible distance from the conditions of its own traumatic emergence. – p. 12

In other words, should not the incompletion of subject-formation be linked to the

democratic contestation over signifiers? Can the ahistorical recourse to the Lacanian
bar be reconciled with the strategic question that hegemony poses, or does it stand
as a quasi-transcendental limitation on all possible subject formations and
strategies and, hence, as fundamentally indifferent to the political field it is said to
condition? – p. 12-3

If hegemony denotes the historical possibilities for articulation that emerge within a
given political horizon, then it will make a significant difference whether we
understand that field as historically revisable and transformable, or whether it is
given as a field whose integrity is secured by certain structurally identifiable limits
and exclusions. If the terms of both dominance and opposition are constrained by
such a field of articulability, the very possibility of expanding the possible sites of
articulation for justice, equality, universality will be determined in part by whether
we understand this field as subject to change through time. My understanding of
hegemony is that its normative and optimistic moment consists precisely in the
possibilities for expanding the democratic possibilities for the key terms of
liberalism, rendering them more inclusive, more dynamic and more concrete. If the
possibility for such change is precluded by a theoretical overdetermination of the
structural constraints on the field of political articulability, then it becomes
necessary to reconsider the relation between history and structure to preserve the
political project of hegemony. – p. 13

Moreover, social transformation occu rs not merely by rallying mass numbers in

favour of a cause, but precisely through the ways in which daily social relations are
rearticulated, and new conceptual horizons opened up by anomalous or subversive
practices. – p. 14

The Kantian presumption that when ‘I’ reason I participate in a rationality that is
transpersonal culminates in the claim that my reasoning presupposes the
universalizability of my claims. Thus the procedural approach presupposes the
priority of such a rationality, and also presupposes the suspect character of
ostensibly non-rational features of human conduct in the domain of politics. – p. 15

What is universal is therefore what pertains to every person, but it is not everything
that pertains to every person. Indeed, if we can say that conceptions, states of
consciousness, feelings, what is specific and living, also pertain to every person, we
have apparently identified a universal feature which does not fit under the rubric of
universality. Thus, the abstract requirement on universality produces a situation in
which universality itself becomes doubled: in the first instance it is abstract; in the
second it is concrete. – p. 17

Thus, Hegel objects to the formulation of abstract universality by claiming that it is

solipsistic and that it denies the fundamental sociability of humans: 'for that is just
what freedom is: being at home with oneself in one's other, depending upon oneself,
and being one's own determinant . . . . Freedom [in this abstract sense] is only
present where there is no other for me that is not myself' (para. 24, Zusatz 2). This,
is in Hegel' s view, a merely 'formal' freedom. For freedom to become concrete,
thought must 'immerse itself in the matter’. – p. 18

On the contrary, formalism is itself a product of abstraction, and this abstraction

requires its separation from the concrete, one that leaves the trace or remainder of
this separation in the very working of abstraction itself. In other words, abstraction
cannot remain rigorously abstract without exhibiting something of what it must
exclude in order to constitute itself as abstraction. – p. 19

The categories are shaped by the world it seeks to know, just as the world is not
known without the prior action of those categories. And just as Hegel insists on
revising several times his very definition of 'universality' , so he makes plain that the
categories by which the world becomes available to us are continually remade by
the encounter with the world that they facilitate. – p. 20
In the section of The Phenomenology of Spirit called 'Reason', Hegel makes it clear
that universality is not a feature of a subjective cognitive capacity, but linked to the
problem of reciprocal recognition. Moreover, recognition itself is dependent on
custom or Sittlichkeit: 'in the universal Substance, the individual has this form of
subsistence not only for his activity as such, but no less also for the content of that
activity; what he does is the skill and customary practice of all' (para. 351).
Recognition is not possible apart from the customary practices in which it takes
place, and so no formal conditions of recognition will suffice. Similarly, to the extent
that what Hegel calls the 'universal Substance' is essentially conditioned by
customary practice, the individual instantiates and reproduces that custom. In
Hegel's words: ' the individual in his individual work already unconsciously performs
a universal work . . . ' (ibid.). – p. 20

The implication o f this view is that any effort to establish universality as

transcendent of cultural norms seems to be impossible. Although Hegel clearly
understands customary practice, the ethical order and the nation as simple unities,
it does not follow that the universality which crosses cultures or emerges out of
culturally heterogeneous nations must there fore transcend culture itself. In fact, if
Hegel's notion of universality is to prove good under conditions of hybrid cultures
and vacillating national boundaries, it will have to become a universality forged
through the work of cultural translation. – p. 20

Although the individual works and lives under a regime which calls itself
'universality' and 'absolute freedom', the individual cannot find himself in the
universal work of absolute freedom. Indeed, this failure of the individual to find a
place in this absolute system (a critique of the Terror that anticipates Kierkegaard's
critique of Hegel himself) exposes the limits to this notion of universality, and hence
belies its claim to absoluteness. In Hegel's view, to perform a deed one must become
individuated; universal freedom, deindividuated, cannot perform a deed. All it can
do is to vent its fury, the fury of destruction. Thus, within the condition of absolute
terror, actual self-consciousness becomes the opposite to universal freedom, and the
universal is exposed as qualified, which is to say that the universal proves to be a
false universal. – p. 21

Hegel is clearly exposing what happens when a faction sets itself up as the universal
and claims to represent the general will, where the general will supersedes the
individual wills of which it is composed and, in fact, exists at their expense. The 'will'
that is officially represented by the government is thus haunted by a 'will' that is
excluded from the representative function. – p. 22

Although universality at first denoted that which is self-identical to all human

beings, it loses that self-identity as a consequence of its refusal to accommodate all
humans within its purview. It becomes not only split between an official and a
spectral universality, but it becomes dismembered into an estate system which
reflects the divided character of the will and the discontinuities inherent in this
version of universality. – p. 23
Once the transience of individual life is understood as crucial to the operation of
abstract universality, universality itself vanishes as a concept which is said to
include all such life: 'this vanished immediacy is the universal will itself' (para. 594).
– p. 23

Thus we can come to some preliminary conclusions about Hegel's procedure here:
(1) universality is a name which undergoes significant accruals and reversals of
meaning, and cannot be reduced to any of its constitutive 'moments'; (2) it is
inevitably haunted by the trace of the particular thing to which it is opposed, and
this takes the form (a) of a spectral doubling of universality, and (b) a clinging of
that particular thing to universality itself, exposing the formalism of its claim as
necessarily impure; (3) the relation of universality to its cultural articulation is
insuperable; this means that any transcultural notion of the universal will be
spectralized and stained by the cul tural norms it purports to trans cend ; and (4) no
notion of universality can rest easily within the notion of a single 'culture', since the
very concept of universality compels an un derstanding of culture as a relation of
exchange and a task of translation. – p. 24-5

Zizek offers us a tool which we can use in a great variety of contexts to see how a
transexemplary identity-constituting function works. A set of fears and anxieties
emerges, a name is retroactively and arbitrarily attached to those fears and
anxieties: suddenly, that bundle of fears and anxieties becomes a single thing, and
that thing comes to function as a cause or ground of whatever is disturbing. What
first appeared as a disorganized field of social anxiety is transformed by a certain
performative operation into an ordered universe with an identifiable cause – p. 26-7

What is necessary for this act of symbolization to take place is a certain linguistic
function of positing, which retroactively confers necessity on the object (signified)
through the name (signifier) that it uses. – p. 27

The identity that the name confers turns out to be empty, and this insight into its
emptiness produces a critical position on the naturalizing effects of this naming
process. – p. 28

Similarly, this happens when we think we have found a point of opposition to

domination, and then realize that that very point of opposition is the instrument
through which domination works, and that we have unwittingly enforced the
powers of domination through our participation in its opposition. Dominance
appears most effectively precisely as its 'Other'. – p. 28

There I suggested that the performance of gender creates the illusion of a prior
substantiality - a core gendered self - and construes the effects of the performative
ritual of gender as necessary emanations or causal consequences of that prior
substance. – p. 29

A particular identity is understood to be one that is tied to a specific content, such as

gender, race or ethnicity. The structural feature that all these identities are said to
share is a constitutive incompleteness. A particular identity becomes an identity by
virtue of its relative location in an open system of differential relations. In other
words, an identity is constituted through its difference from a limitless set of other
identities. That difference is specified in the course of Laclau's exposition as a
relation of exclusion and/or antagonism. Laclau's point of reference here is Saussure
rather than Hegel, and this implies that the differences which constitute (and
invariably limit) the positing of identity are not binary in character, and that they
belong to a field of operation that lacks totality. – p. 30-1

What becomes interesting is the role that this limitless field of differentially based
definitions plays for Laclau in the theorization of universality. When the chain of
equivalence is operationalized as a political category, it requires that particular
identities acknowledge that they share with other such identities the situation of a
necessarily incomplete determination. They are fundamentally the set of differences
by which they emerge, and this set of differences constitutes the structural features
of the domain of political sociality. If any such particular identity seeks to
universalize its own situation without recognizing that other such identities are in
an identical structural situation, it will fail to achieve an alliance with other
emergent identities, and will mistakenly identify the meaning and place of
universality itself. – p. 31

This failure to fill the place, however, is precisely the futural promise of universality,
its status as a limitless and unconditional feature of all political articulation. – p. 32

To argue in favour of sexual difference could mean arguing in favour of

particularism , but it could also be - if one accepts the foundational status of sexual
difference to all humanity - appealing directly to the universal. Zerilli understands
Scott to be offering a reverse, but complementary, formulation to Laclau's. Whereas
Laclau shows that the structural incompleteness of every particular claim is
implicated in a universal, Scott shows that there is no possibility of extricating the
universal claim from the particular. – p. 33

The claim to universality always takes place in a given syntax, through a certain set
of cultural conventions in a recognizable venue. Indeed, the claim cannot be made
without the claim being recognized as a claim. But what orchestrates what will and
will not become recognizable as a claim? (…)Thus, for the claim to work, for it to
compel consensus, and for the claim, performatively, to enact the very universality it
enunciates, it must undergo a set of translations into the various rhetorical and
cultural contexts in which the meaning an d force of universal claims are made.
Significantly, this means that no assertion of universality takes place apart from a
cultural norm, and, given the array of contesting norms that constitute the
international field, no assertion can be made without at once requiring a cultural
translation. Without translation, the very concept of universality cannot cross the
linguistic borders it claims, in principle, to be able to cross. Or we might put it
another way: without translation, the only way the assertion of universality can
cross a border is through a colonial and expansionist logic. – p. 35
A recent resurgence of Anglo-feminism in the academy has sought to restate the
importance of making universal claims about the conditions and rights of women
(Okin, Nussbaum) without regard to the prevailing norms in local cultures, and
without taking up the task of cultural translation. This effort to override the
problem that local cultures pose for international feminism does not understand the
parochial character of its own norms, and does not consider the way in which
feminism works in full complicity with US colonial aims in imposing its norms of
civility through an effacement and a decimation of local Second and Third World
cultures. – p. 35

Spivak does not mean by this claim that the subaltern does not express her desires,
form political alliances, or make culturally and politically significant effects, but that
within the dominant conceptualization of agency, her agency remains illegible. The
point would not be to extend a violent regime to include the subaltern as one of its
members: she is, indeed, already included there, and it is precisely the means of her
inclusion that effects the violence of her effacement. There is no one 'other' there, at
the site of the subaltern, but an array of peoples who cannot be homogenized, or
whose homogenization is the effect of the epistemic violence itself. The First World
intellectual cannot refrain from 'representing' the subaltern, but the task of
representation will not be easy, especially when it concerns an existence that
requires a translation, because translation always runs the risk of appropriation. – p.
36

In this sense, the task of the postcolonial translator, we might say, is precisely to
bring into relief the non-convergence of discourses so that one might know through
the very ruptures of narrativity the founding violence of an episteme. – p. 37

But what does happen, then, when a disenfranchised group proceeds to claim
'universality', to claim that they ought properly to be included within its purview?
(…) the positing of new forms of universality does not produce this effect for
everyone, and many of the current struggles over national sovereignty and the
proper limits for extending group rights affirm that the performative effects of such
claims are hardly uniform. – p. 38

The assertion of universality by those who have conventionally been excluded by

the term often produces a performative contradiction of a certain sort. But this
contradiction, in Hegelian fashion, is not self-cancelling, but exposes the spectral
doubling of the concept itself. And it prompts a set of antagonistic speculations on
what the proper venue for the claim of universality ought to be. Who may speak it?
And how ought it to be spoken? The fact that we do not know the answers to these
questions confirms that the question of universality has not been settled. As I have
argued elsewhere, to claim that the universal has not yet been articulated is to insist
that the 'not yet' is proper to an understanding of the u niversal itself: th at which
remains 'unrealized' by the universal constitutes it essentially. The universal
announces, as it were, its 'non-place', its fundamentally temporal modality, precisely
when challenges to its existing formulation emerge from those who are not covered
by it, who have no entitlement to occupy the place of the 'who', but nevertheless
demand that the universal as such ought to be inclusive of them. At stake here is the
exclusionary function of certain norms of universality which, in a way, transcend the
cultural locations from which they emerge. Although they often appear as
transcultural or formal criteria by which existing cultural conventions are to be
judged, they are precisely cultural conventions which have, through a process of
abstraction, come to appear as post-conventional principles. The task, then, is to
refer these formal conceptions of universality back to the contaminating trace of
their 'content' , to eschew the form/ content distinction as it furthers that
ideological obfuscation, and to consider the cultural form that this struggle over the
meaning and scope of norms takes. – p. 38-9

'Seeking recourse' to an established discourse may, at the same time, be the act of
'making a new claim,' and this is not necessarily to extend an old logic or to enter
into a mechanism by which the claimant is assimilated into an existing regime. The
established discourse remains established only by being perpetually re-established,
so it risks itself in the very repetition it requires. Moreover, the former discourse is
reiterated precisely through a speech act that shows something it may not say: that
the discourse 'works' through its effective moment in the present, and is
fundamentally dependent for its maintenance on that contemporary instance. The
reiterative speech act thus offers the possibility - though not the necessity - of
depriving the past of the established discourse of its exclusive control over defining
the parameters of the universal within politics. This form of political perform ativity
does not retroactively absolutize its own claim, but recites and restages a set of
cultural norms that displace legitimacy from a presumed authority to the
mechanism of its renewal. Such a shift renders more ambiguous - and more open to
reformulation – the mobility of legitimation in discourse. Indeed, such claims do not
return us to a wisdom we already have, but provoke a set of questions that show
how profound our sense of not-knowing is and must be as we lay claim to the norms
of political principle. (…)That universality is not speakable outside of a cultural
language, but its articulation does not imply that an adequate language is available.
It means only that when we speak its name, we do not escape our language,
although we can - and must - push the limits. – p. 41