Theory & Event

Any political theorist of modern thought will eventually come up against the paradox of totalizing conceptions of history. The paradigmatic case is Hegel, of course, with his teleological and dialectical history of Geist, and the paradox can best be described as follows. On the one hand, one ignores Hegel at one’s peril, since the Hegelian Aufhebung takes itself to be capable of comprehending, totalizing, and folding back into the dialectic, all elements of history that would attempt to negate the Hegelian position. On the other, if one chooses not to ignore Hegel — that is, if one instead tries to grapple with or criticize the dialectic — one runs the risk of reconfirming the central importance of Hegelian history. Marx did the latter, on purpose, since for him Hegel had history right in terms of its dialectical movement and its teleological culmination, he simply had Geist doing all the things that Marx would reserve for material reality. Fukuyama aside, theorists today typically have much less faith that history has an end, that its movement is the advance of reason, or that all negative moments within it are just potential moments (yet unrealized) of future synthesis. How does one refuse merely to rework Hegel (thus staying within his purview) without being trapped by his totalizing clutches (since the dialectic lays claim to all)?

The stakes of a somewhat abstract question such as this turn out to be much higher when one asks it in the specific register of colonialism. In his introduction to Questions of Modernity, Timothy Mitchell delineates these stakes starkly. As Mitchell demonstrates with a list of fabulous examples — modern industrial organization (2), nationalism (4), the very concept of the modern (6), even the field of “British Literature” (3) all emerged outside the West before being taken up as central terms of the metropole that then worked to distinguish so-called center from so-called periphery — the “modern” is not simply the growth and “advance” of the West, something we now know well. The modern was produced through an interaction between West and other, a process whose product was then used, retroactively, to name those very categories of difference.

Recognition of this process logically leads theorists of both modernity and colonialism to expand our concept of the modern by making it into a global phenomenon. Here one can take one’s cues from Marx, who traced the origins of capitalist Europe to the colonial system (9), or one can simply study the wealth of recent literature on colonialism that serves to widen greatly our concept of the modern. According to Mitchell, however, such moves (while important) tend simultaneously to homogenize the concept of the modern, and reify the category of “the West.” That is, extending the history of the modern to the non-West tends to reconfirm the history of the non-West as really just another history of the West. All of those events and developments outside the West then get folded into the very history of the West that they were supposed to render problematic. One cannot challenge a totalizing concept of history by pointing out what it has left out, since in the very process of revealing this supposed remainder, the totalizing concept reasserts itself and reclaims as internal to itself, that which the investigator thought he or she had “found.” A reflexive and intuitive reaction to the problem of homogenization is to turn to sheer multiplication — hence the appealing idea that there are “multiple modernities” (xii). Partially as an effort to avoid the totalizing conception of the modern, scholars propose a whole host of local and regional developments of the modern. But if modernity’s meaning rests on its claim to singular universality, then what can it mean to simply make modernity plural (24)? If one takes this localization too seriously one begs the question of what makes the modern modern. And an answer to that question runs the risk of reaffirming a single underlying (totalizing) modernity. Hegel wins again.

What to do? The writer who has probably worked the hardest and longest to think...