On Provocations: A Provocation
"I like to fiercely agree with one idea—and fiercely disagree with the next..."
Title: Universality and Identity Politics
Author: Todd McGowan
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Date: July 2020
Form: Provocation
Keywords: Universality, identity politics, psychoanalysis, continental philosophy
There’s a passage in the introduction to Sarah Schulman’s The Gentrification of the Mind that I often come back to, in part because it proposes an idea of good and bad writing that runs counter to the ideas I’ve internalized and that underlie much of my editorial practice:
…as a reader myself, I have always most enjoyed books that I can be interactive with. I like to fiercely agree with one idea—and fiercely disagree with the next. That kind of dynamic relationship requires a lot of ideas coming at once, from which the reader can pick and choose. Nothing bores me more than the one-long-slow-idea book, and I promise to never write one. (The Gentrification of the Mind, 17)
One way to think about the work a developmental editor does is turning a manuscript that has “a lot of ideas coming at once” into a “one-long-slow-idea book.” Schulman of course is very aware of this aesthetic preference (especially within scholarly publishing), and thanks her editor at the University of California Press for his willingness to let her book depart from the academy’s valuation of consistency and cohesion over eclecticism and accretion.
Unlike Schulman, I’m a fan of one-long-slow-idea books, and much of my editorial feedback for authors is oriented toward focusing a manuscript or book proposal around a single idea. (That’s usually how you sell a book!) But I’m also someone who thinks about genres a lot, and I want the world of academic publishing to be a place that’s generically capacious: that has room for one-long-slow-idea books that aim, gradually and methodically, to persuade a reader of the value of their contribution, and for short, fast, and fierce writing like Schulman’s. The important thing for writers and editors, I think, is to have a clear shared vision of which genre you’re pursuing, so that the slow and narrow books are sufficiently consistent and cohesive and the fast and loose books elicit the kinds of fierce responses—negative and positive—that Schulman seeks.
Todd McGowan’s Universality and Identity Politics shares characteristics with both these genres. It’s not slow, but it has one idea that runs through its 200+ pages. Or perhaps two: as the title indicates, it’s a book about universality and about identity politics. (As a sidenote here, McGowan’s titling practices are worth considering: both this book and his 2016 Capitalism and Desire have “X-and-Y” titles that couldn’t be more direct in identifying the particular nexus they analyze. I think this works really well!)
But it’s also, like The Gentrification of the Mind, a book that occasions both fierce agreement and fierce disagreement. In other words, it falls under the established genre of the provocation. Provocations tend to be wide-ranging: they often seek to shake off conventional boundaries between fields of thought and bring together disparate lines of thinking under a new rubric. They tend to be aimed less at persuasion and more at a kind of loosening or rejuvenation. They’re open rather than closed systems, provisional rather than perfected, and tonally they often reject calm rigor in favor of impishness, even trollishness. As such, the bad ones are pretty tiresome, often too enamored of their supposed rakish departure from contemporary mores to notice that the ideas they’re advocating are stale and reactionary. (The bad ones usually end up on Quillette.)
But there are plenty of good provocations! Here’s one (by two authors I’ve worked with, though not on this particular piece). And I think McGowan’s Universality and Identity Politics is another. Not coincidentally, one might glance at its title and assume that it’s a Quillette-ian screed against the excesses of the social justice left. It’s not, thankfully. McGowan is absolutely writing against identity politics, but his definitions of identity politics and of universality are such that he understands Nazism and contemporary white nationalism as emblematic of the former and anti-colonial struggles and Black Lives Matter as working in the service of the latter: BLM’s organizing against racist policing, he writes, “asserts universal equality by fighting at the site of the system’s evident inequality.”
I won’t get too far into the details of McGowan’s argument, but I do want to highlight its Schulman-ish tendency to provoke both fierce agreement and fierce disagreement. I think McGowan’s analysis of what’s reactionary about identity politics—in his sense of a politics premised on the enjoyment of shared identity with an in-group and shared ostracism of a perceived enemy—works fantastically as an analysis of the deeply conservative nature of TERF thinking. But, as provocative as I find his reframing of contemporary political struggles, I’m very much unconvinced by the way he seems to rewrite the work of a lot of the activists he professes to admire: because he holds that all forms of identity politics contain a reactionary seed, he wants to argue that the anti-racist or queer and trans movements that he likes have nothing to do with identity. I think it’s pretty self-evident that such movements can be emancipatory in a universalist way whilst still being concerned with questions of identity, and that this doesn’t make them reactionary.
But of course being “convinced” isn’t exactly the point of provocation. Provocations provoke, and I was indeed provoked. Which I guess brings me back to the earlier point about genre: that academic publishing is at its best when it’s generically capacious. McGowan’s publisher, Columbia UP, recently put out Eric Hayot’s new book Humanist Reason, the subtitle of which—A History. An Argument. A Plan.—makes claims to three different genres. This is great (and I think those periods in the subtitle are beautiful)! McGowan’s book doesn’t have a subtitle, but in my head at least it’s called Universality and Identity Politics: A Provocation.