Grossberg Subalternity Neoliberalism

The Figure ofSubalternity and the Neoliberal Future

Lawrence Grossberg

I began my research in cultural stud-ies by focusing on issues of popular music and postmodernity, but thetransversal paths that I mapped led me someplace else, to the intersectionof three questions: The constitution and limits of philosophical modernity,the growing political and experiential dominance of a (contradictory) newconservatism in the United States (as well as other advanced industrial na-tions), and the project of neoliberal capitalist globalization.1 Perhaps thiswas predictable from the outset of my career. After all, for me, culturalstudies, although it is not alone here, seeks better knowledge of the chang-ing configurations of the systems of domination, and the organizations ofacceptance, intimidation, apathy, and resistance, in order to offer new andbetter ways of understanding, responding to, and transforming them.

The Neoliberal Project: One ViewI am trying to analyze the changing balance of forces and the leadingtrajectories and logics pointing into our collective futures in order to askwhy “we” (here I mean primarily progressives in the United States) are“losing.”While Iwant to hold on to a certain “optimism of thewill,” I thinkwe need to spend more time appreciating how deeply pessimistic we mustbe as progressive intellectuals. It seems to me that, in the contemporarycontext, AntonioGramsci’s war of positions has become a relentless assault.Try keeping a list of all that happens—or at least all that you hear about—that you think should outrage and perhaps even mobilize a significantpublic response, but apparently does not. Youwill be quickly overwhelmed.Consequently, I think it is time we got to know our enemies better—both

N e p a n t l a : V i e w s f r o m S o u t h 1:1

Copyright 2000 by Duke University Press

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neoliberal and neoconservative—for I am sure that they know us betterthanwe know them and that they have used that knowledge to theorize thestruggle for power in the contemporary world. Moreover, there is a historythat has to be told about how the United States—led by the Left and theRight—got here if we are to figure out how to get out of this place. On theone hand, it might begin with the defeat of Barry Goldwater, and on theother, with the Left’s abandonment of Lyndon B. Johnson over the issueof Vietnam, despite his strong commitment to civil rights and antipovertyprograms.

In my previous work (Grossberg 1992), I have tried to talk aboutthe strategies by which a new and shifting conservative alliance has at-tempted to construct the acceptance of (or surrender to) a radical reorgani-zation of social, political, and economic spaces. I have argued that this hasinvolved a strategic and affective political struggle to restructure and trans-form the lived geographies of everyday life.2 Obviously, the simultaneity ofthe two projects also transforms the articulated relations among such spacesand geographies. Yet this diagnosis is inseparable from the broader analysisof the apparatuses and technologies of power that both constitute and char-acterize the structure and lived reality ofmodernity, wheremodernity itselfis always a differentially articulated and lived conjuncture of capitalism, thenation/state, colonialism, andmodernism (andwhere each is seen as a com-plex and even contradictory set of practices). Recognizing that modernityhas multiple and different trajectories, formations, histories, and possibili-ties, Iwill followPaulGilroy (1993) in talking about the formation ofNorthAtlantic modernity.

I am hypothesizing that we are witnessing a serious transforma-tion of modernity as a historical and geographical invention, an edifice orassemblage of reality, discourse, subjectivity, and power. Ironically, NorthAtlantic modernity is being challenged most significantly, I think, not byits explicit critics on the Left, but by neoliberal and neoconservative appa-ratuses attempting to restructure the forces of domination and exploitationthemselves. Consequently, I think it is necessary that the cultural Left thinkbeyond its current project of deconstructing the modern liberal subjectwithin a theory of difference. I will argue, given my preliminary analysisof the current vectors of political, economic, and cultural struggle, that theLeft should seek a new, more effective figure on which to build its ownvector of political desire.

Tobeclear, I amnotclaiming (ordenying) that thevectorsofchangeI will discuss here are the intended effects desired by neoconservatives or

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even neoliberals. I am claiming that the apparatuses and transformationsthat these political formations have helped to put in place are having sig-nificant effects, intended or not. At least some parts of the planet are beingmoved, perhaps unknowingly, and yet apparently without effective col-lective expressions of unwillingness, into another modernity. However, tounderstand these apparatuses and their effects requires us to go through, atleast in part, the trajectories and projects of these new conservative forma-tions. In fact, there are already competing trajectories and projects pointingtoward alternative modernities or at least alternative visions of the comingmodernity. These potentially contradictory projects or vectors of changeare often strangely related, even as they intersect, run up against, compete,and interact with the organizations and vectors of the existing apparatusesof modern power. For example, the emergent neoconservative formationof religious and moral discourses and practices (which may be pulling usout of Michel Foucault’s disciplinary society) supports, rearticulates, andcontradicts some of the new forms of the economization of society and thereconstruction of identity.

All I can do here is talk about one assemblage, neoliberal global-ization, pushing and pulling the world in a particular direction—an artic-ulation of a number of different vectors or apparatuses—in the emergentstruggle to establish a new balance in the field of forces. I need to emphasizeagain that this assemblage is best understood as the somewhat unpredictedand unpredictable result of a project. As I have said, while I believe thatparticular vectors or apparatuses are themselves the product of particularintentions, their effects, as well as the articulated unity of the assemblage,may not depend on any singular site of agency. Moreover, this one assem-blage is by no means the totality of the forces constructing and driving usinto a new future reality, nor does it constitute the totality of the field ofeffects leading toward that future.

By focusingon this one assemblage, thepossible result of an emerg-ing new diagram of domination and exploitation, and a new logic consti-tuting the balance of forces, I also want to raise the possibility of the failureof hegemony as themodern project. Hegemony involves, in any number ofdifferent forms, the project of, on the one hand, the nation coming into itsown, and on the other hand, the organization of the national popular.3 Stu-artHall’s analysis ofThatcherismis, forme, theparadigmcaseofhegemonicanalysis in cultural studies. Obviously, Hall’s theory of hegemony (at leastmy reading of it) has only a limited relationship to the theory of Ernesto La-clau and Chantal Mouffe (despite Hall’s acknowledged debt to them) since

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for Hall, at the very least, hegemony is rare.4 In my view (Grossberg 1998),hegemony is both rare, as an actual apparatus of struggle, following Hall,and universalized, when it is taken together with the category of ideologyto constitute the very ideology of North Atlantic modernity.5 Modernityestablishes its own political truth through its invocation of hegemony (andideology) as its distinctive (true and proper) practices. Violence then is con-structed as the means of last choice, only available when “the political” hasfailed. But the discourse (in which I include both beliefs and the conductsarticulated to and by those beliefs) of hegemony as distinctly modern itselfproduces the hegemonic distinction between ideology (and consensus) andviolence as both the ground and the effect of the power ofmodernity itself.6

The compelling analyses ofThatcherism inHall (1988) andClarke(1991) describe the successful but unstable and temporary alliance betweenneoliberalism and neoconservatism that characterized 1980s Britain as ahegemonicmoment. According toHall andClarke, this hegemonic projectattempted to change the direction of the nation by working through thenational popular to win consent without consensus. Yet they also point to alimit case of contemporary hegemony,which Iwould argue becomes visiblein one instance in the project inaugurated as Reaganism. Thatcherism hadat least a glimmer of this: it was partly about instantiating the impossibilityand even the nonreality of the social and of a social future. Thatcher isoften paraphrased to the effect that “there is no society, only individuals andfamilies.” Hence it was in part about negating certain forms of agency. Butthis of course made the project of Thatcherism self-contradictory.

In the case of the struggles in the United States from Reaganismthrough Clintonism (a line which marks the difference between Thatcherand Blair), I think that the project has attempted to capture leadership bya twofold strategy. On the one hand, it undermines the possibility of anysort of consensus. If hegemony attempts to eliminate some and to incor-porate other of the (existing) alternatives, Reaganism and post-Reaganismseem to depend upon a strategy of eliminating all (existing and imagin-able) alternatives—this is, after all, “the third way.” On the other hand, theproject attempts to create a geography of disinvestment anddepoliticizationthrough an “empassioned apathy.” This is a specifically constructed and or-ganized cynicism or nihilism, which can be taken up and lived ironically,selfishly, or earnestly. It is, if I may be allowed an oxymoron, a disempow-ering apparatus of empowerment (Grossberg 1992).

In this sense, the neoliberal project that I want to describe is nota hegemonic project. Indeed I do not think that it is about reconstituting

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the national popular at all, although it certainly still intersects with anddeploys such popular languages, logics, media, etc. And in the end, I thinkit is articulatedwith a new practice of popular interpellation. Paradoxically,I also do not think that it works primarily through ideology, although itconstantly deploys claims about the appeals of competing ideologies. (Andin that sense, real ideological struggles are still involved as a secondary fieldof struggle.)

At the same time, I amnot trying tooffer a theoryofposthegemony,nor am I claiming thatwe are living in a posthegemonic society. Rather I amsaying that I do not find the concept of hegemony a particularly useful wayto “cut into” the particular struggles and forces that concern me here.7 I dothinkwe should at least imagine the possibility thatwe aremoving (or beingmoved) into a new “modernity,” a newmodern assemblage, which is beingproduced by and producing a reconfiguration (in all its complexity) of thecapitalism–nation-state nexus,8 and which is itself operating outside of orat least at the limits of themodernist definition of the political as hegemony.

Neoliberalism and Globalization: Defining the problemI want to consider the project of what Massey (1997) has called “neoliberalglobalization,” where “globalization” is not immediately understood eitheras a singular planetary transformation or as the construction of a spatialdistinction between the local and the global. Instead, “neoliberal global-ization” refers to the struggle to transform the field of forces (whether inthe Gramscian or the Deleuzean sense). I will talk about this neoliberalassemblage as an economic project that transposes the site of the produc-tion of value from labor into the field of finance and that, simultaneously,challenges the modern mode of interpellation and subjectivity. I want totalk about its identity as a project—recognizing that it is not andmay neverbe completed—and as a partiality, since there is more happening in theworld. I want to avoid overreading closure and accomplishment off of theproject (or the assemblage), and consequently I want to avoid predictingthe direction of the future. After all, this vector is itself articulated to other,often apparently competing economic vectors and apparatuses—for exam-ple, a certain anticorporate capitalist ideology based in amoral conservativediscourse, as well as industrial (both Fordist and post-Fordist) and serviceapparatuses. At the same time, this neoliberal vector is articulated into alarger assemblage that brings together the economic, the political, and thecultural in specific configurations.

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Thus, while I talk about a challenge to what I will describe as theeighteenth- andnineteenth-century compromise (or contract) of capitalism,I do notmean to argue that it has been broken,merely that one vector of ne-oliberal transformation is, as it were, trying to break it, even as it is opposedby other competing vectorswithin both capitalism and other assemblages ofmodernity. Yet I dowant to insist that such vectors of transformation (forcesor tendencies, if you prefer) have effects, albeit effects that are always some-what unstable, often falling apart at the moment of their accomplishment.And I do think there is some reason to believe that this particular neoliberalproject (and the larger assemblages into which it is articulated) is uniquelypowerful and uniquely successful at the moment, even as other formationsof globalization are being actualized and still others are possible. I do thinkwe have to take seriously the possibility that capitalism is reconstituting it-self. This is not to say that everything about this reconfiguration (includingthe practices of capitalism) is new or that even the tools of the struggle arenew. On the contrary, many of the features and tools may be taken up fromolder formations, or theymay be rearticulations of older strategies. But thatneed not negate the possibility that something—especially about the natureand relations of value, wealth, labor, and subjectivity—is changing.

I amnot concernedwith ruptures; I donotwant to thinkwithin thedichotomy of continuities and discontinuities. Instead, I am concernedwithcontexts and their transformations. I believe that the theoretical, empirical,and analytical tools one uses have to be chosen in relation to the contextbeing investigated and the questions being posed. One has to ask why theintellectual left has produced so little in the way of a useful diagnosis of thecontemporary political, economic, and cultural landscapes, where “useful”implies the possibility of imagining both effective strategies of oppositionand affective popular alternatives. Perhaps at least we need to entertain thepossibility that we arewitnessing and trying to understand transformationswith (old) tools that emerged in response to different transformations, toolsthat we should now admit may have been inadequate in the first place. Forexample, if some versions of cultural studies at one point in their historiesbracketed political economy in order to put culture on the agenda, it isclear that questions of political economy must be brought back. Yet thiscannot be done by simply appropriating the existing ways of doing politicaleconomy, which treat the economy as if it existed outside of culture ordiscourse. One must discursify both economics and the economy (Gibson-Graham 1996; Grossberg 1997). On the other hand, this cannot be doneby treating the economy as if it were nothing but a discourse, whether

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of economic, postmodern, or globalization theory. One must “economize”cultural studies.

Meaghan Morris (1988, 186) has written that “things are too ur-gent now for the Left to be giving up its imagination.” Morris calls forspeculation, thinking, and an imaginative effort that “does not have to givea pragmatic account of itself before it has barely begun to develop” (183).She suggests, and I think it is absolutely crucial that we at least consider thepossibility, that it might be “the tried and true paths” and frameworks ofthought—the things that we take most for granted—that have created theurgency that demands, more than ever, an imaginative response. (This iswhat I would call, misappropriating Gayatri Spivak and AlbertoMoreiras,“cognitive failure.”) Insofar as (North Atlantic) modernity is implicated inthe struggles over the future in many complex ways, we have to accept thatit might be necessary to challenge our own allegiances to the intellectualand theoretical apparatuses of modernism.9 What follows then are imagi-nations, speculations, or what Foucault might have called fictionings, of atleast a small part of what is going on.

The production of such speculations must, however, be framed bytwo other commitments essential for cultural studies. First, the interestingquestions do not comfortably coincide with our disciplinary competencies,and therefore cultural studies demands not only an interdisciplinary ap-proach but also a willingness to speak outside one’s confident claims tomastery. This means one has to take the risk of making mistakes alongthe way and perhaps even of looking a little foolish at moments.10 Second,things are always more complicated than any one or multiple perspectivescan thematize, and so the appropriate logic for cultural studies is “yes,that is true, but so is . . . and so is . . . and . . . ” or, if you prefer, a logic of“and . . . and . . . and . . . ”11 To add to the difficulty, each additional “and”is going to transform the implications of all of the former statements.

Neoliberalism and Globalization: Defining the projectI have argued (Grossberg 1999) that neoliberal globalization involves theproduction of an assemblage articulating at least three relatively distinctapparatuses (recognizing that there are significant differences in how theyare effective and how they affect each other along a variety of dimensions).I want to consider the intersection of these three apparatuses—again I leavelargely unaddressed the question of the intentionality of each or of theirconnection12—as pointing to the project of restructuring the very groundon which identity, both individual and collective, is constructed, and hence,

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of the very possibilities of agency and social existence in the contempo-rary world. The three apparatuses involve three distinct but interrelatedprojects: (1) a restructuration of the economization of society and a changein the form of capitalist subjectivity; (2) the reconstruction of political andcultural practice around a new investment in identity through the pro-duction of difference, and an explicit appropriation of this colonial logicof negativity (à la Said) as the leading commodity logic within contem-porary capitalism itself; and (3) the production of a new lived geography(and a new mode of identification or interpellation) in which differences(and hence identities) are mapped onto an investment in (local) places, bothreal and imaginary. Insofar as such places are imaginary, this geographyincreasingly has come to define one logic or formation of the global mediaculture and the imagination of America—which is not the United States,and which functions not as a symbol but as a system (Yoshimi n.d.).13 Iwill begin by addressing the first of these projects, a new economizationof society and a transformation of the capitalist production of subjectivity,before moving on to the second. But I will discuss this second apparatusin relation to the possibility that “subalternity” might provide the means,from within modernity, to challenge the vector of the first apparatus.

I will begin by speculating about neoliberal globalization as aglobal economic project. Iwant to suggest that it is attempting, however im-possiblewemay think it is, tonegate—orat least amendandpartially retreatfrom—the labor theory of value. To put it simply, if labor is the primarylimit on profitability (and the accumulation of wealth), both as variablecapital cost and as the major source of demand in modern economies, ne-oliberalism proposes a simple answer: Eliminate labor from the equationby making labor into a fixed capital cost (as it were) and by tying demandto credit rather than wages. What is at stake here is creating a space withinwhich the value (and perhaps even the necessity) of labor can be radicallychallenged.14 It is accomplishing this—and I have no doubts that this isintentional—through a radical reconfiguration of the capitalist productionof wealth. In this project of economic reconfiguration (which is simulta-neously a reconfiguration of the discourses of economics),15 the motor ofchange, as it were, is the growing, determining power of financial—whatMarx called fictitious—capital, in which “money begets money” (DeleuzeandGuattari 1977).16 I believewhatwe arewitnessing is an effort to changethe relation between capital andmoney, where the latter is a representation(!) of value, and the former is value in process. The project of neolib-eral globalization involves a move from labor to money as the source of

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value, built upon a redefinition of the relationship between capital, money,and wealth. And this is being accomplished by allowing that which Marxthought impossible to happen: namely, the universal equivalent participatesin the relative form of value.17

The most common interpretations of the current transformationsof capitalism from the cultural (and some fractions of the economic) Leftstress the supposed growing flexibility of the practices of accumulationand/or production; they assume that we are witnessing a move from a nor-mative Fordist economy into a new post-Fordist one.18 Of course, such anoversimplified interpretation can be forgiven in the light of the fact thatmany economists admit to not understanding what is happening. WhenAlan Greenspan, the most influential economist in the world, allows instatements that “something [is] different,” then we might guess that some-thing is in fact very different.Wemove from the theoretical impossibility ofthe 1980s conjunction of recession and inflation to the 1990swith its oppositeconjunction of growth and deflation; we witness a series of internationalfinancial crises that, by any predictable economic model, should have burstthe speculative financial bubble and sent the vulnerable U.S. economy intorapid decline, but the bubble seems unbreakable.

Following a different path, I want to raise the possibility thatFordism—which, although it may not actually have been the determiningforce in the western nations between the wars, was to some extent domi-nant, if only ideologically—was something of an aberration in the historyof modern capitalism. Instead, I hypothesize that we are witnessing theemergence of a neomercantilist economy, a revision of and a return to acolonial organization of capital and capitalism. To put it another way, weare entering a postdevelopment organization of international capital, notbecause we have left the structural organization of postwar power behind,but because, without the cold war, capitalism has no interest in “develop-ing” undeveloped countries, no interest in helping them to modernize. Onthe contrary, they are being returned (through IMF and U.S. policies ofrestructuration) to the status of sites of colonial exploitation—as sources ofboth extraordinarily cheap fixed labor costs and of monetary speculationand augmentation.

Of course, as I have said, there ismore to the economy than just thisformation; at the same time, we are dealing with a particular political andideological construction of the economy,which is constantly celebrating the“triumph of the U.S. model,” based on a focus on short-term investmentsand profits, on the assumed omniscience, omnipotence, and beneficence of

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the market, and on the celebration of growth as the only valid measure ofeconomic success (leading to an absolute fear of inflation and a relative lackof concern for employment). This is perhaps the reason for the constructionover the past decades of an economic history built upon the rise and fall(destruction) of a series of economic miracles and models, leaving onlythe United States and its model standing in the end. No doubt part ofthe appearance of the success of the U.S. model results from intentionalattacks on competing models (miracles) and the regular misrepresentationof economic measures of success.19

The strongest presentation of such a hypothesis might lead to theconclusion thatMarx’s “fetishism” of themode of productionwasmistaken,but one could more easily argue that Marx’s understanding of the mode ofproduction was too narrow, for it rendered what one might call the modeof circulation (by which, for example, money is produced and on the basisof which mercantile or trade economies function) as at best secondary andat worst epiphenomenal. In a sense, I think we ought to have another lookat the arguments of Harold Innis (and others) “against” Marx, or, perhapsmore accurately, supplementing and localizing Marx. I realize that this isa controversial claim, because it suggests that Marx’s analysis of capitalismwas not only the analysis of a particular historical formation of capitalismbut also, in part, the product of his own historical and cultural location.But is it so odd to recognize that Marxism is itself a contextually producedand determined discourse? That is, not only was the capitalism that Marxdescribed and theorized a sociocultural product, so were the descriptionand the theory.

By emphasizing the circulatory relations of capitalism in colonialand mercantilist formations, as opposed to productive relations in Fordistand post-Fordist ones, I do not mean to suggest that imperialist and colo-nialist projects disappeared entirely duringFordism.Rather Iwant to arguethat in order to bring the two sides together in a consistent way, we needa much more nuanced exploration of the multiple forms of colonialism,imperialism, political intervention, and dependency (and their relations tothe “mode of production”) that have characterized twentieth century cap-italism. Nor do I mean to suggest that such financial circulations definethe totality of the economy or even the only project of global economictransformation (e.g., one would also have to talk about the movement ofjobs and peoples, in very specific and restricted ways, along paths that donot exactly map the flows of capital or money), and I certainly do not wishto make capitalism appear as a singular unified formation. Moreover, the

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specific assemblage that I am calling neoliberal globalization has to belocated within a larger set of struggles (economic, political, social, and cul-tural) that constitute the complex ground of neoliberalism and neoconser-vatism today. Changes in the practice and value of labor, for example, haveto be closely linked to the increasingly common if not popular rejection of a“dependency culture” and a “welfare state.”Moreover, at the very least, thisneoliberal neocolonialism is articulated to what Armand Mattelart (1994)has described as a “different principle of social organization,” mobilized inpractices of (1) deregulation; (2) coproduction or the growingTaylorizationof consumption through which value is added at the point of consumptionby fine-tuning responses to demand;20 and (3) holistic management.21

I believe that the revalorization and subsequent privileging ofmoney and of a monetary economy (but in a different form than previousformations) is being articulated (although it is unclear that this has to be thecase) to a devalorization and a devaluation of labor and labor power as thesource of value, and hence of wealth.22 We seem to be living in economiesthat either encourage seriously high unemployment or the proliferation ofpoverty-wage jobs. While both of these can be understood as the continu-ation of long traditions of the exploitation of labor, they may also suggestthat something else is going on. Evidence for this might be found in theemergence of discourses and practices that are less about exploiting labor orterrorizing itwith the threat of unemployment than about actually decreas-ing necessary labor to a point previously unimaginable. One can now beginto imagine advanced capitalist societies with heretofore unimaginably lowlevels of employment. It is one thing to increase profits by cutting laborcosts, either through relative or absolute exploitation and the productionof surplus value. But it is something else to erase labor itself, as if simplycutting the absolute cost of labor, often by simply disinvesting in or cut-ting back on production, were sufficient to increase profits. Yet there is asense in which it is sufficient, at least in the neoliberal monetary economy,even though it means giving up the connection to commodity production.Despite investors’ claims, the evidence suggests that there is an inverse cor-relation between the growth of the stock market in recent decades and thegrowing corporate debt burdens (produced through takeovers, stock buy-backs, increased payments to shareholders, etc.) on the one hand, and actuallevel of investment in productivity on the other (Henwood 1999).

What does it mean to have a discourse of global capitalism inwhich, as Enrique Dussel put it at the Duke conference, it would be aprivilege to be exploited because that would mean that you had a job? At

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the very least, I think that the meaningfulness of work and its relation tothe individual worker is being rearticulated. And at the most, I think onecan entertain the hypothesis, without going as far as Beck’s assertion (citedinMcRobbie 1998, 139) that “work [is] being threatenedwith extinction” bythe idea of “capital without jobs.” Yet it is clear that labor, as the source ofvalue, has become a site of struggle. Can the commodification of labor stillbe the “essence” of capitalism if we no longer have wage labor as its center?

In any case, insofar as labor is intimately connected to modernstructures of identity and forms of interpellation, then there may in factbe a crisis of identity, as many authors have claimed. Yet this crisis maynot take any of the forms that the Left has become so attached to in recentyears. I want to take seriously Foucault’s (1982, 212) warning that we needto think about “the different modes by which . . . human beings are madesubjects . . . subject to someone else’s control and dependence and tied to hisown identity by a conscience and self-knowledge.” If we are witnessing arevaluation of labor, then we must also look at this struggle in relation tothe complex cultural economy through which labor has been articulatedto identity: (1) in the form of a self-identification with one’s labor as asource of identity; and (2) in the form of a certain alienation from one’s ownlabor and the correlative production of a series or system of historically andsocially constructed subjectivities (e.g., the bourgeois subject, the citizen,etc.). As Du Gay (cited in McRobbie 1998, 83) argues, “The identity ofthe worker has been differentially constituted in the changing practicesgoverning economic life.”23

I realize that there are some critics who would argue that this ne-oliberal global project/assemblagehaspassed its zenith and is losingground.After all, the MAI has been (temporarily) defeated and there have been re-cent public statements of opposition to the IMF and its restructurationpolicies, even from such traditionally neoliberal sources as theWorld Bankand Business Week, which blamed the IMF and U.S. economic policy for aseries of “economic debacles.”TheAsian crisis has given rise to new calls forreregulation from some governments and even from some stock analysts(among themGeorge Soros).TheNation (22March 1999, 3) recently quotedthe head of Morgan Stanley’s Asian operations as saying, “It’s only a bit ofan overstatement to say that the free-market, IMF, Bob Rubin . . . model isin shambles.”

Yet it is important to keep in mind what has not happened: TheAsian crisis did not burst the bubble of the speculative financial economy!And the new apparatuses of regulation have not suddenly materialized.

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The various recent crises, especially the Asian crisis and the apparentlylimited retrenchment that followed,were temporary, and the effects appearless to have challenged the neoliberal project than to have disciplined anderased the challenge of Asian capitalism as an alternative model. The LeftBusiness Observer (no. 88, February 1999) recently quoted anMITeconomistclaiming “Korea is owned and operated by our Treasury now, and that’sthe positive side [of the Asian financial crisis].” We should remember thatthese “crises” are the product of the actions of finance capital and thatthey are being measured and judged, in the first instance, by the stockmarket. And almost all of the solutions being talked about are broadlywithin the scope of neoliberal strategies; the various crises have not ledto any serious questioning of the basic principles of this neoliberal financecapital project—the demonization of inflation, the fetishization of growth,the attack on labor, etc.

Most (post-Fordist) discussions of this neoliberal project assumethat it embodies an attempt to dismantle the corporate compromise put inplace after the Second World War. In this compromise, the state was tomediate a new contract between labor (in the form of unions) and corporatecapital. The latter agreed to allow labor to share the wealth (by tying wagesto profit and supporting the welfare state) while the former agreed to forgoany serious critique of or challenge to capitalism. While I don’t want todispute the claim that this compromise has been effectively underminedand that this marriage of convenience has been terminated, I also want tosuggest that the challenge of neoliberal globalization goes much deeper. Italso involves an attempt to dismantle the late-eighteenth/early-nineteenth-century compromise that is one of the grounds ofNorthAtlanticmodernityitself, and themeans throughwhich capitalism, colonialism, and thenation-state were articulated together into a single if somewhat fraught formation.

In order to clarify my argument, I want to turn to Georg Lukacs’s(1971) analysis of the conditions and consequences of the capitalist econo-mization of society in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He arguesthat the necessary commodification of labor power (the precondition ofcapitalism, as it were) was itself enabled by and produced a particular split-ting of the individual into commodified labor power on the one hand, andthe free (liberal, bourgeois, humanistic) subject on the other. We might saythat part of the project of capitalism was to disarticulate the possibilitiesof agency from labor power, the body, and the proletariat, and to identifyit instead with the “subjective excess” that was the necessary concessionof capitalism. Thus the first founding compromise that set the conditions

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of possibility of modernity in place was here: by ceding a realm of sub-jectivity and “the private,” capitalism colluded with the state to overseethe production of bourgeois civil society (and the possibility of its broaderdistribution) as the realm of freedom. In this way, in the popular imagina-tion at least, civil society was transformed from the space outside of statecontrol (which included the determinations of the economy) to the realmof freedom outside of any apparent external control. Consequently, cer-tain spheres of human life (at least for certain fractions of the population)were protected from certain kinds of operations of power such as—indeedespecially—commodification and state violence. (I am not saying that thecomplicity of capitalism in their production makes this subjective excess ofcivil society any less important or potentially oppositional.)

Capitalismgranted to laboraminimalvalueonlybydisplacing thatvalue onto an abstract set of rights, crystallized in the notion of citizenshipwhich, asDipeshChakrabarty (1992) has argued, provided the linkbetweenthe nation-state and capitalism as well as the site for the struggle againstthe colonial other. Here we might also think of Gilles Deleuze and FélixGuattari’s (1977) notion of the transition from the worker as slave to theworker as subject, from the public individual enslaved by machines (i.e.,internally implicated in the codes of the machine) to the worker subjectedto the machine while remaining external to it. In the case of the modernsubject, the individual literally becomes a private abstraction: “The personhas become ‘private’ in reality, insofar as he derives fromabstract quantities,and becomes concrete in the becoming-concrete of these same quantities.It is these quantities [or their equivalent as convertible abstract rights] thatare marked, no longer the person themselves: your capital or your laborcapacity” (251).

If modernity produced the fragments of an individual’s abstractexistence—worker, consumer, citizen, etc.24—it also produced the subjectas the articulated unity of those fragments. The individual of neoliberalglobalization can no longer claim the possession of such abstract rights,nor can he or she claim the (apparent) unity of the modern subject. For itis only as a specific site of capital production—or better, of the possessionof money—that such proprietary “property rights” can be asserted. Theindividual within the neoliberal project is no longer an abstract singularity.Neoliberal globalization is deconstructing the individual/subject and, as aresult, the very concepts of freedom, sociality, and individuality.Myhypoth-esis is that the changing economization of (civil) society, at least as a projectpartially realized as a result of the neoliberal assemblage, has two serious

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consequences for the nature of modern subjectivity. First, the individualityof the body of concrete labor is being replaced by a disposable affectivebody (which is to say, a rearticulated affective and bodily subjectivity). Inthat sense, I think one effect of neoliberalism’s project (and I am only talk-ing about one effect here) is the rearticulation of the economic subject asneither producer nor consumer but as something closer to a commodityitself, as “monetary subjects without money” who are merely “the shadowof money’s substance.”25 Such a subject is measured not by its “ownership”of labor power but by its relationship or lack of relationship to money andmonetary credit. The explosion of consumer debt and its role in the currentU.S. economy has been frequently commented upon; this might lead usto see the new economic subject as a consumer. But I wonder if the neo-liberal economic subject does not have to be understood more in relationto the growing “consumer credit” industry and the increasingly commonphenomenon of “prequalification” as the basis of economic identity.26

There is another side to this reconstruction of the modern liberalsubject. As the Japanese critic Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto (Polan 1996, 262) putsit: “In a new global capitalist formation, it is increasingly becoming clearthat capitalism doesn’t require any substantial supposition of a subject [as]the liberal autonomous individual of a capitalist entrepreneur.” I wantto extend Yoshimoto’s argument to suggest that neoliberal globalizationseems to require the very absence of “modern” subjectivity. Consequently,its project involves, at least in part, the attempt to deconstruct the modernabstract subject as the bearer of rights and freedoms.

At the same time, another assemblage within neoconservatism—one that foregrounds religious and moral discourses and priorities—is alsoapparently committed to deconstructing the modern liberal subject. How-ever, in this case, it is done in the name (if not the reality) of a reimagined,supposedly older, social collectivity. To complicate matters even more, it isnot only these two neoconservative assemblages that seem to be involved inthe deconstruction of subjectivity and identity. On the one hand, the newconsumer market is also defined in part by what I would describe as thefetishization and commodification of difference. As difference has becomea marketable commodity, it is not surprising that, as Meaghan Morris hassuggested, identity has become the major U.S. export. On the other hand,andmore obviously, significant fractions of the cultural Left are engaged ina process that Imight describe as the universalization of orientalism—as thereconstruction of the other into the different. Identity, understood within a

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multiple and fragmented economy of difference, has become the dominantbattleground on which politics is theorized and engaged.

The claim that all of these various assemblages are engaged in aproject of deconstructing themodern subject/individualmay seem counter-intuitive. But if it is correct it certainly raises serious questions for a culturalLeft that has invested so much of its theoretical and critical energies in pre-cisely this project. But I do notwant to claim that theories of difference haveto be renounced, or that the Left should be fighting for the modern subject.Most certainly, the critiques of themodern subject that have been offered bythe various Lefts through such theories have changed the terrain of politicalstruggle in significantly positive and important ways. On the other hand,I would like to claim that it is time to re-ask Audre Lorde’s question: canthe master’s tools be used to tear down the master’s house? Or, to put itdifferently, is it time to reevaluate our strategic options in the light of new(and better?) understandings of the nature of the contemporary struggle?

Any attempt to answer this question must begin by trying to un-derstand the neoconservative architecture of individuality, by exploring themechanisms of interpellation being put in place. In this effort, I want topoint to one possible articulation between the project of neoliberal global-ization as I have described it and the emergence, within the so-called globalmedia culture, of a specific and peculiar sort of lived geography. Let mepoint to two manifestations: First, there seems to be a growing symbolicreference to and investment in specific (real, semireal, and imaginary) localplaces. Themedia seem increasingly involved in the production of a hetero-geneity of “locales.” In fact, there is a growing industry (as well as a politics)of locality. Second, the separation between the symbolic “origin” of thisglobal culture as “America,” and the reality of the United States, not onlyin terms of the actual production of culture but also in terms of style andpolitical/emotional relations, becomesmore andmore important. Does thissuggest the constitution of a new structure of affective investment (identifi-cation) in, and the equation of, place and difference? This articulation, theconstructed equivalence of self and place, seems to be taking place in thelived geography of everyday life rather than in the space of ideology. I canonly speculate at this point that neoliberal globalization is reconstructingthe mechanism of subject production, replacing the ideological interpella-tion of the abstract modern subject with an affective interpellation of theself as located within a lived geography of places.

I assume, however, that such a rearticulation of the subject is partof a larger transformation of social life itself, and of the possibilities of

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transformation and agency within it. In fact, on another level, we mightconsider that both neoliberal globalization and the neoconservative (reli-gious) assemblage seem to renounce the modern “disciplinary” society infavor ofwhat appears on the surface to be a return to a society of sovereignty,with a growing emphasis on imprisonment, debt, and sin. Both are involvedin the articulation of what Deleuze (1992, 6) calls a society of control: “Con-trol is short-term and of rapid rates of turnover, but also continuous andwithout limit, while discipline was of long duration, infinite and discontin-uous. Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt.”27

How do we struggle against such radical projects (whether or notthey are intended to be quite so radical)? How do we struggle against aconservative effort to deconstruct (the conditions of possibility of) the lib-eral/modern subject? How do we contest the emergent neoliberal subjectwithout giving up the gains that have been made through the deconstruc-tion of modernity and the modern subject? I can, in the final section, onlysuggest a possibility: that we look to the concept of subalternity. This con-cept is crucial, as many postcolonial critics have argued, to understand-ing the formation of Atlantic modernity. It provides a link between thenational-political and the colonial projects of modernity by problematizingthe map of interpellation and subjectivity that has too often been used tochart the waters of modernity. Subalternity refers to the possibility thatvarious populations were never entirely and satisfactorily interpellated bythe compromise of capitalist modernity that Lukacs describes, populationsthat were never successfully subjectified into the (North Atlantic) modern.Or, to put it differently, it points to the multiplicity of compromises thatwere constitutive of the articulations of modernity and capitalism.

Neoliberalism and SubalternityThe question of the social contract of modernity—even if we recognizethat it is deployed differently in different places and for different popula-tions, and that it follows different trajectories and histories—leads us to thequestion of the subaltern, and of what the Latin American Subaltern Stud-ies Group (1996) calls the “subaltern social pact.” Following Chakrabarty(1992), I assume that subalternity is produced alongside what I have de-scribed as the first capitalist compromise. But what is the relation betweenthe subaltern social pact and the compromise that constructs the modernliberal subject? In other words, what discourse is it that produces the subal-tern as its subject (evenwhile denying the subjectivity of the subaltern)?Toooften, in writings outside of colonial and postcolonial criticism, including

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much of cultural studies, the figure of the subaltern appears as an untheo-rized and ill-defined category of the politically subordinate, or “the people”as the nonelite.

Subalternity, both a concept and a reality, is the product of a specificconfiguration of modernity. In fact, as postcolonial and subaltern theoristshave argued, there are two distinct but related figures of the subaltern. Thefirst functions within Gramsci’s analysis of hegemony and Italian history.Whether referring to those outside the hegemonic ruling block, or to thoseoutside the space of any possible hegemonic negotiation, it has been takenas the sign of the oppressed and silenced. The second has appeared in thework of the Subaltern Studies Group from India and been taken up byother colonial and postcolonial scholars. Sometimes, these are assigned torelatively autonomous geographies of modernity, but postcolonial theoristshave convincingly demonstrated that colonialism was (and is) constitutiveof Atlantic modernity and capitalism.

This implies that the two figures are intimately connected andthat, in fact, the latter (colonial subaltern) may help clarify the former (asthe multiplicity of subordinations of the people within the space of thenation). As a subject, the colonial subaltern cannot be explained simply as aproduct of a capitalist compromise, even if one postulates another capitalistcompromise different from that described above. Yet the subaltern subjectis equally as abstract as the liberal subject, and it is, I assume, the product ofa specific mode of interpellation, subordination, and subjectification. Thissubject is denied the possibility of its own modernity, even an alternativemodernity, by an interpellation that simultaneously imposes on and deniesto the subaltern subject the necessity of a singular modernity (and of asingular modern subjectivity).28

Critics and theorists have, sometimes implicitly and sometimesexplicitly, offered two ways of understanding the abstractness of the sub-altern subject.29 First, and most commonly, subalternity is taken to be aform of subjectivity affirmed in the particular but never in the collectiveor universal. The subaltern subject is abstract precisely because it is alwaysparticularized. This locates subalternity within the sphere of hegemonytheory by postulating the subaltern as the absolute other of hegemony itself,as that which exists outside the space of hegemonic politics. This fetishizesthe subaltern as the unrepresentable concrete, as the other, the negation, ofthe liberal (abstract) subject, and the authentic embodiment of locality itself.Rather than seeing the subaltern as the result of a distinctive interpellation,the subaltern is the product of the failure of interpellation (on the part of the

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subaltern itself) or the refusal to allow the subaltern to enter into the econ-omy of interpellation (on the part of the colonizers). The result, I believe,is that the figure of the subaltern constantly reenacts what Said describedas orientalism, the transformation of the radical otherness of the colonizedinto the different within the universe of comparison of the colonizer.

But the abstractness of the subaltern can also be understood as aninterpellated mode of subjectivity that is affirmed in its universality butnever in its particularity. The subaltern is abstract in its subjectivity ratherthan in the abstract unity constructed for it as the bearer of fragmented,abstract rights. As such, the individual subaltern is never individualizedbut, within the discourses of colonialism, always exists as the object of astrategy of differentiation and concretion. In the end, the colonized subjectremains, at some level, so radically other to the project of Atlantic moder-nity that not only do its own differences become irrelevant, but ultimatelyits difference from the colonizer remains unthematized. The subaltern is,we might say, a positivity rather than (merely) a negativity. Its universal-ity remains its greatest threat and its greatest power. So colonial discoursemust instead attempt to relativize and concretize that universality within alogic of difference and particularity. But the particularity, the locality, thedifference of the subaltern, I am suggesting, is what colonialism attempts toimpose upon another kind of universality, a universalitywithout particular-ity. At the same time, it is important to recognize that this subaltern being,this universal singularity, is not the precolonial condition of the colonizedpopulation but the product of the colonial encounter itself. It is as mucha modern interpellation as the capitalist interpellation which produces theliberal subject. It is the product of another mode of interpellation, produc-ing its own condition of abstractness, a universalization that is notmediatedby the problematics of identity, representation, or difference. And it revealsthe very multiplicity of modernity itself, and hence the very possibility ofalternative modernities.

My attempt is to place the subaltern as an ontological principle ofotherness, a refusal of the epistemological demand that reconstitutes theother as the different (Grossberg 1996; 1998), alongside the projects of anumber of authors who have challenged the particular configuration oflogics that constitutes the thought and politics of modernity. Dhareshwar(1989, 142–43), for example, warns against the desire for “an identity thatfully coheres with the narrative force of theory,” that takes the figures ofa theoretical system as the “storyline” for narrative identity. He argues(1990, 235) that “the fetishization and relentless celebration of ‘difference’

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and ‘otherness’ has displaced any discussion of political identity.” And hewonders whether we need to think of “the possibility and necessity ofan entirely different theoretical practice” (1989, 146). Thus the attemptto theorize the subaltern as a universal singular involves an attempt toconstruct “a formof knowledge [and, Iwould add, politics] that respects theother without absorbing it into the same” (Young 1990, 11) or the different.

Balibar Etienne’s (1995) distinction between symbolic or ideal uni-versality on the one hand, and both real and fictive universality on the other,may help clarify the vision of subalternity I am proposing here. Real uni-versality describes contemporary globalization and what is, according toBalibar (55), emerging on a world scale: “Minorities without stable or un-questionable majorities.” Fictive universality is “not the idea that the com-mon nature of individuals is given or already there, but rather the fact thatit is produced inasmuch as particular identities are relativized and becomemediations for the realization of superior and more abstract goals” (58).Fictive universality operates through “recognized differences, or otherness-within-the-limits-of-citizenship” aswell as the “virtual de-construction andre-construction of primary identities” (60):

Fictitious or total universality is effective as a means of int-

egration—it demonstrates its own universality, so to speak—

because it leads dominated groups to struggle against discrim-

ination or inequality in the very name of the superior values of

the community: the legal and ethical values of the state itself

(notably: justice). . . . To confront the hegemonic structure by

denouncing the gap or contradiction between its official values

and the actual practice—with greater or lesser success—is the

most effective way to enforce its universality. . . .

Now we should not forget the counterpart of this

form of universality: it is indeed normalization. This is where

things become of course more ambiguous. Hegemony liber-

ates the individual from immediate membership, but which

individual? It requires and develops subjectivity, but which

subjectivity? One which is compatible with normality. (61–62)

Ideal universality, as opposed to both real and fictive, is “not somuch testified to by actual words as by practical resistance, the irreducible‘being there’ of the dominated” (Balibar 1995, 64). Ideal universality “in-troduces the notion of the unconditional into the realm of politics” (65).

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Not only does it embody the demand for liberty and equality but also itrules out a priori any claim that these two values might be in contradiction.While these rights are individualized, as it were, they cannot be distributed;they can only be claimed and “conquered” through a collective process.Balibar (mistakenly, I think) slides from the fact that the claim “no libertycan be achieved without equality” can only be demonstrated negativelyto the claim that the transindividual character of ideal universality mightitself be negativity. But it seems to me that the “right to rights” and the“right to politics” which Balibar finds within this structure of universalityare precisely the assertion of the positivity of the fact of insurgency. Thusthere is no contradiction between the following statements: “Nobody canbe properly emancipated from outside or from above, but only by his/herown (collective) activity” (66); and “It can achieve its goals only if it becomesa general movement, if it aims at changing the whole fabric of society” (67).Their conjunction is a statement precisely of the universality of the singular.

Paul Gilroy has attempted something along the same lines to finda way of reconstituting universality;30 but in Gilroy’s terms, such a newuniversality would have to be postanthropological. In The Black Atlantic(1993), Gilroy, echoing not only Walter Benjamin but a tradition of black(and sometimes Jewish) diasporic writers who have lived in a condition of“double consciousness,” engages in “the battle to represent a redemptivecritique of the present in the light of the vital memories of the slave past.”This critique, Gilroy claims, “is constructed only partly from within thenormative structures provided by modernity itself” (71). The very idea ofthe diaspora, in its articulation to the racialized being of modernity, opensthe possibility of “a utopian eruption of space into the linear temporal orderof modern black politics which enforces the obligation that space and timemust be considered relationally in their interarticulation with racialisedbeing.” The Black Atlantic is

a non-traditional tradition, an irreducibly modern, ex-centric,

unstable, and asymmetrical cultural ensemble that cannot be

apprehended through the manichean logic of binary coding.

Even when the network used to communicate its volatile con-

tents has been an adjunct to the sale of black popular music,

there is a direct relationship between the community of listen-

ers constructed in the course of using that musical culture and

the constitution of a tradition that is redefined here as the living

memory of the changing same. (198)

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But memory here is not something in the past but a spatial memory that isa resource in and for the present.

In a more recent essay, Gilroy (1998, 57) has taken this argumenteven further:

Fanon’s call for the institution of a decidedly anti-racist, that

is post-anthropological universalism is a significant gesture. It

reveals his debt to the political imaginary of the western world

even in his greatest gestures of disavowal from that same tradi-

tion. What is most important about this stance is his insistence

that the lost grail of universalism can only be recovered at the

price of a reckoningwith the epiphanies of catastrophic colonial

modernity which travellers like him brought back with them.

That is our legacy today.

For Gilroy, the confrontation with the memory of racialized and what henow calls “camp existence”—as in two opposing camps, or concentrationcamps—is itself the opening for the possibility of a new universality. As hesays:

These examples demand more from us than just better ac-

counts of itinerant, travelling culture and an active scepticism

with regard to the consistency of the race concept, the claims of

nationality and the coherence of raciological thinking. Above

all the persistent problem of racial typology demands the inter-

connection of enlightenment and myth. What do we say when

werecognise that it is the contested ideaof integral andexclusive

culture that has supplied the veryprinciple of their articulation?

(1998, 59)

It is, of course, not coincidental that Gilroy often refers to blackand diasporic popular music in his work. Perhaps music is the site parexcellence for the universal singular. At the very least, I do think that theenormous popularity and power of black and diasporic music around theworld provides a certain evidence for my argument. For I take it that thistradition of music, based as it is in the history of links between modernity,colonialism, and racism, provides a compelling manifestation of the powerof the demand of the subaltern as I have attempted to describe it. Paradox-ically, rap may be its most successful articulation, for despite its appearance

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as the most specific form of diasporic and colonized people’s music, it hasbeen literally taken up by fans around theworld, across generations, classes,genders, and even races, as the most particular and the most universal. Andthis contradiction is at its heart: as one rapper put it, the blacker its sound,the more popular it becomes with nonblack audiences.31

Such music may provide us with the best possible example of deCerteau’s (1984) notion of a polemological politics, which takes the form ofa statement that “we are getting screwed.” But both Balibar and Gilroy arepointing to the possibility that such a statement can function as a positivedemand, rather than a negative protest, a complaint, or even the site of anantagonism. Such a statement canmake a universal demand that cannot becoopted because it is an assertion of the right of the singular to exist.

The search for a politics (perhaps an ethics?) of singularity, ofa belonging without identity, has driven a number of authors, includingEmmanuel Levinas andGiorgio Agamben. Agamben (1993) describes sin-gularity as amode of existence that is neither universal (in the sense of beingconceptual) nor particular (i.e., individual). He takes as an example of sucha mode of existence the existence of the example qua example itself, forthe example exists both inside and outside of the class it exemplifies. Theexample exists “by the indifference of the common and the proper, of thegenus and the species, of the essential and the accidental. [It] is the thingwith all its properties, none of which, however, constitutes difference. In-difference with respect to properties is what individuates and disseminatessingularities” (Agamben1993, 19).Moreover, the status of the example is notaccomplished once and for all; it is a line of becoming, “a shuttling betweenthe common and the singular” (20). In other words, the example is definednot by an appeal to a common universal property—an identity—but by itsappropriation of belonging (to the class, in this instance) itself. The examplebelongs to the set that exists alongside of it, and hence it is defined by itssubstitutability, since it always and already belongs in the place of the other.This is “an unconditioned substitutability, without either representationor possible description” (24–5), an absolutely unrepresentable community.This community, on which the example borders, is an empty and indeter-minate totality, an external space of possibilities. Thus, a singularity can bedefined as “a being whose community is mediated not by any condition ofbelonging . . . nor by the simple absence of conditions . . . but by belongingitself” (85). In other words, the example functions as an example not byvirtue of some common property which it shares with all the other possiblemembers of the set, but rather by virtue of itsmaterial relationship to the set

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itself. Any term can become an example of the set because what is at stakeis the very claim of belonging to the set.

Agamben turns this example toward the imagination of a newpolitics. He calls it “the coming community,” but it is perhaps more helpfulto think of it in Deleuzean terms, as the “becoming community.”

Because if instead of continuing to search for a proper identity

in the already improper and senseless form of individuality, hu-

mans were to succeed in belonging to this impropriety as such,

in making of the proper being—thus not an identity and an in-

dividual property but a singularity without identity, a common

and absolutely exposed singularity . . . then they would for the

first time enter into a community without presuppositions and

without subjects. (1993, 65)

In such a community, there is no common identity, no property that definesand unites the members apart from the fact that they are there, together,in that place. It is the fact of belonging that constitutes their belongingtogether. Such a singularity follows a metonymical logic of involvement, alogic of the next, rather than a synecdochal logic inwhich one termbecomesthe “proper” image of the whole. It is the product of the different processesof “individuation carried out through groups and people,” new modes ofindividuation and even subjectification, outside of any economy of identityand difference. Such a community defines a positivity based on exteriority,on the singularity of belonging.Andyet, preciselybyvirtueof its positivity, itcan, whether intentionally or not, come to define and embody a communityof opposition, not only in the particular but in the universal as well.

The subaltern as the coming community! It suggests that we giveup the subaltern as a subject position or even, at least in the first instance,as the epistemological subject of subjugated knowledges. It does not meanthat we should not look at the material and social understandings of theworld produced in diverse geohistorical contexts formed by the conjunc-tures of modernity, at the intersection of capitalism, the nation-state, andcolonialism. Their value remains, but not because they are the voices ofthe “people” and/or of the subjugated. They are knowledges that could notbe or would not be or perhaps simply were not entirely appropriated byor rearticulated to the disciplines of modernity. We need to open up theseknowledges, not because they are right or even immediately useful, but

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because they may return to us some of the power and possibility of imagin-ing alternative modernities.

ConclusionLet me conclude by returning to the trajectory of my argument, and tocultural studies and the neoliberal globalization as the contextwithinwhichI have raised the issue of subalternity. I have always defended culturalstudies as an academic project precisely because it attempts, through theproduction of knowledge, to help us imagine ourway out of the present andinto another future. Yet I think that much of the work in cultural studies isreaching something of an impasse in its ability both to diagnose the presentand to imagine the future. I have suggested that this is the result of thefact that the cultural Left is now facing an “enemy” (or more accurately, acoalition of enemies)32 whose very aim—to replace the complex articulationof Atlantic modernity—and whose very strategy—the deconstruction ofidentity and the celebration of difference—bear an uncanny resemblance toits own theoretical and strategic commitments.

By articulating subalternity to projects such as those of Balibar,Gilroy, and Agamben, I am attempting to draw upon postcolonial workin order to understand better both the limits of Atlantic modernity andthe possibilities for other modes of existence. Such a project is based in anontological claim before it claims any epistemological validity or utility.In the last instance, I am asking whether we must give up the question ofsubalternity as anepistemological orpolitical subject inorder to raise it againas a question of ethics and agency, as amatter of conduct and struggle. Evenbetter, I am suggesting that the figure of the subaltern may help culturalstudies rediscover the very question of the universal through the thoughtof the singular. In this way, perhaps, we can begin to imagine a differentrelationship among the exigencies of time and a different conception ofhistory itself (Grossberg forthcoming). In the end, it may help us find a newway of belonging—with space and time, and to each other.

NotesThis paper was first presented at the “Cross-Genealogies and Subaltern Knowledges”

conference at Duke University, October 15–18, 1998. I want to thankAlberto

Moreiras and Walter Mignolo for their invitation, friendship, and wisdom.

This paper is a modification of an argument I first made in “Speculations

andArticulations onGlobalization,”Polygraph 11 (1999). I alsowant to thank

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JohnClarke and JonBeasley-Murray for comments on this paper, andDoreen

Massey andMeaghanMorris for the enormous help and encouragement.

1. Although I believe neoliberalism is distinguishable from other neoconservative proj-

ects and formations, I also think that it must be seen both as one articulation

of and as within the contemporary neoconservative alliance.

2. This might be understood as a materialist version of the structure of feeling.

3. In that sense, for me, subalternity can move into the space of colonialism because it

describes a situation in which an entire population becomes the object of a

political project (in various degrees, ways, and places).

4. We can establish a continuum. At one end, Laclau and Mouffe (1985) hold what

Laclau himself describes as a “quasi-transcendental” notion of hegemony. A

slightly less universalizing position, perhaps themost common, equates hege-

mony with the politics of modernity (as consensus, etc.). Gramsci’s theory of

the national popular is even more specific, and I think finally Hall’s under-

standing ofGramsci as rare is themost specific. Forme, doing cultural studies

would force one toward the latter, more specific end of this scale, since for

me, cultural studies is radically contextual. It assumes neither its theory nor

its politics in advance but instead attempts to articulate both in response to a

political context. Therefore, Hall’s use of hegemony as the basis for a limited

contextual intervention is, it seems tome, the appropriate responsewithin the

practice of cultural studies at least. Thus I am defending a notion of useful

knowledge as a strategic response to a context, but I certainly do not equate

that with an instrumentalist/functionalist notion based on a singular logic of

use.

5. It is important to remember that, for both Hall and Laclau and Mouffe, hegemony

is not reducible to either ideology or culture, for it involves a struggle across

the entire social field (including political and economic) to rearticulate the

relationship of the state and the people. For Laclau and Mouffe, the entire

process can be understood discursively, while it is not at all clear that Hall

agrees with this.

6. I am grateful to Jon Beasely-Murray, Alberto Moreiras, and Brett Levinson for the

contributions to the posthegemony e-mail discussion group.

7. A concept is useful if, when rigorously applied and contextually articulated, and in

conjunction with empirical work, it allows one to imagine new possibilities.

8. In that sense, this paper can also be read as an argument about the rearticulation of

the state vis-à-vis the nation, the economy, and the regulation of social life.

9. I realize that there are at least two possible rebuttals here. The first says: By invoking

such a concept of the new, are you not merely reinscribing the modern? The

second says thatmaybe you have to wait for the new to get old in order to find

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the appropriate tools. The latter is, for example, a possible (although I believe

a mistaken) reading of Heidegger and Foucault.

10. I am grateful toWahneema Lubiano for always reminding me of this.

11. I am grateful to John Clarke for always reminding me of this.

12. I must admit to being undecided here. Sometimes I think it is a mistake to make

capitalism seem too rational and that neoliberalism is a solution to a problem

without an understanding of the problem. Other times, I think that at least

some of the agents in this struggle are acting according to a well-thought-out

plan.

13. I would connect this argument to a wide range of phenomena ranging from the

tragic consequences of revitalized ethnic conflicts around the globe to the

recent explosion of interest in and labor devoted to researching, writing, and

consuming books, magazines, videos, etc. on one’s own “home place,” as if

one were becoming a tourist at and of one’s own home.

14. Consider Alan Greenspan’s attacks on minimumwage.

15. Although how each is being transformedmay be significantly different; i.e., there is

no necessary correspondence.

16. In the global economy, the international money market now defines well over 95

percent of the international exchange of currency.Only twenty-five years ago,

it was well under 5 percent. The entire GDP of the United States—by far,

the largest and strongest economy in the world—is traded every three days

at most, and the equivalent of the resources of the IMF is almost traded every

day. Moreover, it is clear that these finance markets are mechanisms for the

transference of ownership and wealth. Investments in stocks, mutual funds,

hedge funds, etc., mean that the capitalist classes no longer have to risk their

investment in a single firm.And despite the constant claims that 50 percent of

U.S. households own stock, even in 1995 the top 5 percent of investors owned

95 percent of stock and mutual funds.

17. No doubt, this depends on lots of ideological work.

18. For a critique, see Clarke 1991.

19. For example, it is commonly claimed that the economy is successful as measured by

the growth in per capita income. Yet the figures commonly cited do not take

the growth of the population into account. When this is factored in, we find

that the rate of economic growth is in fact the slowest of the century, except

for the decade ofWorldWar I (Henwood 1999).

20. Mattelart’s most powerful example is the increasing importance of the emotional

labor, usually performed by and associatedwithwomen, performed at the site

of consumption itself. But one could also add the marketing of convenience

(e.g., in fast foods) as a contribution to the quality of family life. Or one could

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point to the growing emphasis placed on services, not only in the service

economy itself, but also within the commodity sales market.

Even more importantly, this may give us some insight into the

rather incomprehensible power and prestige of the stock market in deter-

mining global economic assessments and policies. This is especially difficult

to understand in light of the fact that many of the most basic principles driv-

ing the current financial boom seem to be based on ideas—such as those of

Franco Modigliani and Merton H. Miller, who claim that the value of a firm

is unaffected by its financial debt structure, and efficientmarket theory—that

seem to be empirically falsified by the very markets they are used to justify.

See Henwood 1997.

21. See John Clarke and Janet Newman (1997) here. For a rather frightening glimpse

of the influence of new age philosophy here, see Karen Salamon’s as yet

unpublished important work.

22. Tony Negri says “money has one face: that of the boss.” While I agree with much

of Negri’s writing on the emergence of new capitalist formation, I will not

follow him down the path of an exploration of the question of labor time. See

Hardt and Negri (1994).

23. In a very different context, biotechnology, Jeremy Rifkin (1998, 11) has also raised

the possibility of such a radical restructuring of modernity and the modern

subject: “In a littlemore than a generation, our definition of life and themean-

ing of existence is likely to be radically altered. Long-held assumptions about

nature, including our own human nature, are likely to be rethought. . . . Ideas

about equality and democracy are also likely to be redefined, as well as our

vision of what is meant by terms such as free will and progress. Our very

sense of self and society will likely change during what I call the emerg-

ing Biotech century, as it did when the early Renaissance spirit swept over

medieval Europe more than 600 years ago.”

24. I do not mean to oversimplify or ignore the complexity of the articulations of the

nineteenth-century subject of North Atlantic modernity.

25. Unfortunately, the origins of these phrases have been lost to me. I believe that they

are from the work of the German economist Kurtz.

26. I want to thank an anonymous reviewer for raising this point.

27. Two other quotes are worth citing: “This is no longer a capitalism for production

but for the product, which is to say, for being sold or marketed. Thus it

is essentially dispersive, and the factory has given way to the corporation”

(Deleuze 1992, 6). And again, “Perhaps it is money that expresses the distinc-

tion between the two societies best, since discipline always referred back to

mintedmoney that locks gold in as numerical standard, while control related

87


to floating rates of exchange, modulated according to a rate established by a

set of standard currencies” (Deleuze 1992, 5).

28. An alternative account might argue that the contradiction of the subaltern is that

the fragments are never articulated into an abstract unity because some of the

fragments themselves escape abstraction.

29. What follows is one contribution to an ongoing conversationwithAlbertoMoreiras.

See his very important paper “Hybridity and Double Consciousness” (1999).

30. Obviously, onemust be careful to distinguish such projects from the parallel attempt

to establish a new universality among certain thinkers on the Right.

31. I amsure that critics of cultural studieswill say that I amonce againfinding resistance

everywhere—but the subalterndemand isnot anact of resistancebutprecisely

one of hope. And they will say that I am once again making a political

mountain out of a cultural molehill—but I believe that the cultural molehill

can at least point the way to another mountain.

32. I do not mean to personalize enemies. They can be assemblages as much as people.

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