It is only relatively recently that the left has awakened to the possibilities of diversity. Cynical observers have said it awakened to these possibilities precisely because they were so possible. Class had proven intransigent as an opportunity to mobilize dissent outside the system or leverage power within it. Gender, ethnicity, and race looked more promising.
The first symptom of difficulty is the narrowness with which the left defines diversity. The only real plenitude that counts in the left's scheme is that which has an explicitly oppositional quality. Thus, women's groups are "diversity," but country and western line dancing groups are not. Both of these groups may equally engage the individuals within them, both may represent a very substantial shift in cultural categories and social rules, both may mark differences that will continually breed differences, but it is only when the group is explicitly at odds with the mainstream that it qualifies as interesting.
This makes for every kind of intellectual difficulty. It means that no sooner has the left embraced plenitude as something to be taken seriously than it forswears the better part of the phenomenon. Intellectual difficulty begets political difficulty almost straight away. Earnest and pragmatic, the left is almost always the last to know. Innovations arise, blossom, put their stamp upon the world, but it is years before the left takes notice. Restricted to political categories, wedded to fixity, it cannot glimpse the implications of plenitude's cultural developments.
This is true even of the Marxists who descend from the Frankfurt School and claim to care about contemporary culture. I expect there is no one on the left capable of giving a good account of line dancing. Yet line dancing provides an interesting and dynamic site for the transformation of gender, class, outlook, and, yes, politics. It is on the dance floor that cultural categories and social rules are being re-examined and, sometimes, reinvented.
There is a deliberate narrowness to the left's definition of plenitude. It is interesting to observe, for example, that the "Diversity Librarian" at the University of Michigan is responsible for collecting only in the following areas: minority studies, sexual orientation studies, and multicultural studies. This so diminishes the scope of the problem as to invite astonishment. Diversity overflows these categories. Real diversity happens everywhere--outside the designated political categories of the left, and its intellectual categories as well.
But there is a more chilling aspect to the left's notion of diversity. Too frequently, it isn't very diverse. No sooner has a gender, racial, or ethnic group been identified than it begins to get hedged in by orthodoxies and high-church rigidities. George Wolfe is the writer and director of Jelly's Last Jam, the director of Angels in America, and the producer of the New York Shakespeare Festival. He is both black and gay. In some communities, this definitional versatility is held against him, as he noted in a 1995 interview. "If I'm including something new, if there's a play that has a gay theme, the response is, `He's not black anymore, he's doing that homosexual thing.'" What Wolfe is describing is cultural "silencing"--in effect, expulsion from a group based on perceived transgression of its official boundaries.
But plenitude is a restless creature. It will not forgive fixity. It will not endure stasis. It will not allow identity politics to insist on certain orthodoxies because these are "good to think" and variously clarifying of what the emergent group might become. Plenitude resists conformity, orthodoxy, conventions, and rules. The transgressive energies out of which new groups come will continue to course through them even after the moment of creation. We cannot close Pandora's Box behind us. And this is the last thing we would want to do. Plenitude is breaking through the orthodoxy imposed by a middle-class, centrist, bourgeois society, and with this change come opportunities of liberation of every kind. To resist this force is not just pointless. It is wrong.
Plenitude is a force for the infinitely divisible. It will use groups as its vehicle as long as this is possible, but it will make individuals the unit of agency the moment it is impossible. Plenitude has found a friend in individualism, and there is good evidence that it will be a lasting affair. When the left insists on the primacy of the group over the individual, it commits an error from which there is no recovery. Plenitude makes the individual the locus and an engine of much of its innovative activity. It will happily create a world that is an addition of individuals. Groups will cease to matter. Pity the ideological operation that has put groups, and especially particular groups, at the center of the exercise.
More problematically, everyone must necessarily belong to many groups. We may be gay, but we must also be many other things. Necessarily we are only one kind of gay among many, and almost certainly we will not be that kind of gay for very long. The left presupposes a world in which certain definitions of the individual are privileged and frozen into place. The irony is that the left has used the idea of diversity to attack the idea of difference. This leaves it hopelessly at odds with the world plenitude has wrought.
In sum, right and left have not distinguished themselves on the issue of plenitude. Both of them can claim certain victories in this decade. But neither party has got this issue right. Never mind. Plenitude will have its way with them as well.
Our world is filling up with differences. And this is a good thing, for some of these differences advance the cause of human dignity. Plenitude embraces those who would otherwise be persecuted for their difference. Better, plenitude dispenses with "permission." No one needs the liberal generosity of the mainstream to exist. It is enough merely to stake out a social space and to occupy it. Plainly, this is to the good.
But plenitude should also give us pause. It has a darker side. It is capable of creating horrifying aberrations. Plenitude allows (encourages?) the "mustering" of paramilitary groups who cultivate their own deeply skewed notion of the world. It forgives (encourages?) a world so decentered that even the bombing of federal office buildings in Oklahoma City can seem plausible. Plenitude permits (encourages?) the monstrous.
We have a choice. Plenitude can create the glorious or the monstrous. It depends on what we do with difference. It depends on what difference becomes for us.
Traditionally, difference has been a path to identity paved with hostility and antagonism. It has given us a "sharpener" of identity and a recipe for action: find the odd man, the odd group, the odd nation, the odd culture, and then: mock, repudiate, assault, and, too often, exterminate. (Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Amin, Pol Pot eliminated difference by eliminating people, tens of millions of them. They made our century a slaughterhouse.) This approach to difference has used it to sharpen identity through contradistinction. We are what the other is not. Worse, our path to definition may be found through acts of differentiation, antagonism, and hostility against the other.
By this reckoning, things look rather grim. More difference can only mean more antagonism. If we are filling up with differences, we will find ourselves surrounded by otherness and increasingly called upon to challenge it. New and emerging identities will put our own in question. Our identity will depend upon the defacement of their identity. Plenitude's world has the potential to make us smaller, meaner, more loathing, and more loathsome. And we are the God-fearing folk. It will be worse for others, the bigots and the hatemongers. These people will find themselves so provoked by the rising tide of plenitude that any act of opposition will seem tolerable (and psychologically necessary).
Editor's Note: We invite comments and request that they be civil and on-topic. We do not moderate or assume any responsibility for comments, which are owned by the readers who post them. Comments do not represent the views of Reason.com or Reason Foundation. We reserve the right to delete any comment for any reason at any time.
nfl jerseys|11.15.10 @ 9:07PM|#
nxthfg