Beyond the left and the right

College Literature, Spring 2000 by Manlove, Clifford T

Parini, Jay.1997. Some Necessary Angels: Essays on Writing and Politics. NewYork: Columbia University Press. $24.95 hc. xi 272 pp.

Ross, Andrew 1998. Real Love: In Pursuit of Cultural Justice. NewYork: NewYork University Press. $55.00 hc. #18.00 sc. ix 243 pp. Ziolkowski, Theodore. 1997. The Mirror of Justice: Literary Reflections of Legal Crises. Princeton: Princeton University Press. $49.50 hc. xiv 322 pp.

Take some scales and put on one side a gram, on the other a ton; on one side "I" and on the other "We." . . . It's clear, isn't it?-to assert that "I" has certain "rights" with respect to the State is exactly the same as asserting that a gram weighs the same as a ton. . . . And the natural path from nullity to greatness is this: Forget that you're a gram and feel yourself a millionth part of a ton. (Zamyatin 1993) The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself. (Le Guin 1974)

Literary and cultural criticism of the last twenty years has increasingly turned away from taxonomies of "Right" and "Left" and toward the problem of the relation of "global" to "local:' Paul Gilroy describes this shift with regard to the study of race in literature and culture in his interdisciplinary The Black Atlantic:

Regardless of their affiliation to the right, left, or centre, groups have fallen back on the idea of cultural nationalism, on the overintegrated conceptions of culture which present immutable, ethnic differences as an absolute break in the histories and experiences of"black" and "white" people. Against this choice stands another, more difficult option: the theorisation of creolisation, m tissage, mestizaje, and hybridity. (Gilroy 1993, 2)

Gilroy's project exemplifies a move in literary and cultural criticism towards an analysis of the relation of individual subjectivity to a network of groups that include, among others: race, gender, class, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, and disability. The "more difficult option" that Gilroy proposes is to localize, to particularize the almost inherently bi-polar nature of the global. While it might appear (particularly in light of the near-disappearance of communism and the relative decline of socialism, especially in Europe) that criticism and theory have, in the main, become "post" political, they are instead concerned with a different politics, governed by a collage of seemingly postmodern "identities." The postmodern individual's relation to the social might seem to disintegrate, but Gilroy's point is that the locality of subject is composed of varying mixtures of global social forces, which amount to more than the sum of their parts.

Left and Right, as they have been developed in the West, are of course spatial metaphors, which represent the domain of politics to be linear. Before modernity's preoccupation with representing politics in binary spatial metaphors in the late eighteenth century, politics was thought to negotiate the domains of the individual and the social. Aristotle opens his Politics with this definition: "Observation shows us, first, that every polis . . . is a species of association, and, secondly, that all associations are instituted for the purpose of attaining some good-for all men do all their acts with a view to achieving something which is, in their view, a good" (1946, 1). Prior to modernity, politics concerns the practice and development of a mutually beneficial relationship between society and those who qualify as individuals. Progressively collapsing the space between individual and society, the modern Left/Right political model finds its origin, in part, in the ancient, mythic conflict between sacred (valoriation and reification of tradition) and profane (revolution and leveling) that accompanies any development in what Aristotle calls "association."

During their eighteenth-century formation, neither the Left nor the Right makes much attempt to distinguish between the individual and society; each is a function of the other in both conservative and revolutionary politics. In the ideology of the Right, the individual's "freedom" is championed, yet society retains the power to regulate certain necessities, such as private property and the "free" market. On the other hand, for the Left, the individual owes her existence to society-"individualism" is an ideological function of conservatism-yet the revolution is led by a privileged "vanguard" and the cult of personality The late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury "debate" in the rising international Left between "communists" and "anarchists" presages the late twentieth century critical shift from a taxonomy of Rightness and Leftness to analyzing distinctions between discourses of individual and society

Poet lay Parini's Some Necessary Angels: Essays on Writing and Politics, literary historian Theodore Ziolkowski's The Mirror of Justice: Literary Reflections of Legal Crises, and cultural critic Andrew Ross's Real Love: In Pursuit of Cultural Justice each represent one of the three major moves that dominate political, literary, and cultural criticism in the final twenty years of the twentieth century: valorizing subjectivity, balancing subject and society, and championing social identity. Parini's essay collection represents political and cultural analysis in the form of the sovereign voice of the man of letters. Ziolkowski historicizes literature, finding the development of society and its laws in particular in individual literary cases. Ross passionately analyzes the various social texts produced by a network of"politics of recognition" ("identity politics") that putatively threaten to fragment society The writer Parini represents the "individual," Ziolkowski's focus on the law advocates a narrative of"balance," and Ross reveals the hidden power of the "marginalized group." Cutting across the modern division of Right and Left, these three works characterize the return, at the end of the twentieth century, to an analysis of the tensions between subjectivity and society