The politics of plenitude

Reason, August-Sept, 1998 by Grant McCracken

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.