Insurgent multiplicities

Political universalism has been on the ropes since the very beginning (Olson, 2018). Ideas of a universal general will, originating in 17^th century theological debates, were rearticulated as political theology in the 18^th century by Denis Diderot and others. They quickly came under fire from the likes of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1987: 37), however, who criticized the “metaphysical ideas” manifested in such doctrines and gave them a concrete, material, contractarian meaning instead. Conceptions of a universal “rights of man” fared no better. They became entangled in the decades-long struggle over American independence and the French revolution. Those movements operated under the banner of universalist ideals, but in so doing only revealed how problematic universalism truly was. Thus when the third great revolution of the 18^th century erupted in colonial Haiti, universalist ideals were taken up only briefly, then quickly set aside (Olson, 2016: 124–131).

Massimiliano Tomba's (2019) Insurgent Universality is an insightful contribution to this arc. It mounts a sustained attack on universalism by embracing the fertile tumult of alternative revolutionary moments. Tomba refuses the glossy modernism of universalist ideals in favor of alternative modernities that can be reconstructed from other traditions and practices. He interprets them as concrete experiments of self-government, putting them forward as counter-modern antidotes to abstract universalism.

In particular, Tomba's argument derives its force from a contrast between universalism and what he calls insurgent universality. In his account, both of them are characteristics of concrete institutional and legal orders. Universalism privileges centralized power, national unification, abstract individuality, and homogenized collective identity. Insurgent universality, in contrast, operates in councils, assemblies, and associations.

Although universalism and insurgent universality have coexisted in dynamic tension for the past several centuries, universalism has been the dominant tendency. It won the day as a hegemonic doctrine by suppressing rich countertraditions of associative and group-based politics. Tomba attempts to reverse this hegemony by embracing the traditions that universalism has pushed aside. The strands of revolutionary practice that he focuses on favor the specific, the bounded, the territorial, and the local rather than homogeneity and abstraction. They are collective rather than individualist. They emphasize a politics of groups rather than abstract attachments to a nation.

Tomba's effort to recover these alternative modernities moves across a number of rich historical epochs: the French and Haitian Revolutions, the Paris Commune, uprisings in Algeria, the Russian Revolution, the Baku Congress of the Peoples of the East, and the Zapatista insurgencies in Mexico. He develops the idea of insurgent universality by focusing on particularly promising moments of associational politics during these revolutionary disruptions. His account of each era highlights its assemblies and councils, guilds and associations, revolutionary and agrarian communes, group-specific forms of political representation, and indigenous communities—the kind of collective politics that he documents being swept aside by revolutionary modernisms starting with the French Revolution.

Tomba highlights these moments, institutions, and practices of the past as elements of a future countermodernity. In this regard, the form of historicism at work merits comment. Temporality is a primary fascination of Tomba's work, and that fascination is on full display here. The movements he surveys form nested sets of references, each admiring or imitating ones that came before it. Tomba shows how these movements were telescoped onto one another or daisy-chained together. For instance, the Paris Commune of 1871 referred back to the French Revolutionary Commune of the 1790s and even further back: “Their practice was guided by communal traditions that came from medieval times to the present through the workers’ associations of the nineteenth century” (Tomba, 2019: 84). Similarly, he shows how a Russian declaration of rights in 1918 consciously looked back to precedents in the Paris Commune and the Jacobin Constitution of 1793 (120–121). Likewise, one of the Russian agrarian communes looked back to traditional village communes and Cossack assemblies. Thus, “The reactivation of different institutions, similar to those in use among the peasants, led to the formation of numerous communes of forty to fifty people, workers, sailors, and intellectuals, who took their fate into their own hands and reshaped the present by playing with time” (185). Mexican Zapatistas reproduce this architectonic as well. They see themselves as the inheritors of the Mexican Revolution of 1910, completing its legacy and fulfilling its potential (189).

In sum, Tomba identifies multiple sets of insurgent movements that see themselves as connected with previous ones across time. He finds each of these movements meritorious in its own right. It is all the more striking, then, that each of them seemed to share such a view of its predecessors as well. There is an impression here of an accumulating, interlinked counter-tradition. As Tomba describes them, each one seeks to “reactivate” the best in its predecessors. These fecund moments are joined together by his appreciation of them and a kind of isomorphism with his own position. Just as past insurgents attempted to emulate elements of what had come before them, so Tomba aims to reactivate various elements of the entire series that he finds valuable. Reactivation has a double reference, then. It describes both the nested lines of influence between revolutions and Tomba's own practice in calling this revolutionary series to our attention.

The idea of reactivation bears so much weight in Tomba's account that it merits close scrutiny. Presumably, reactivation refers to some way of bringing forward useful ideas, images, forms of life, or practices from previous eras. Those moments are sometimes referred to by Tomba as “roads not taken.” They are practices that were discarded, marginalized, or suppressed during their own time, but which might be “reactivated” in the present as alternative modernities.

If a road not taken is characterized above all by the fact that it was … not taken, however, how do we now take it? This is a particular concern because Tomba vividly shows that some of these roads were not taken because they were diverted, rerouted, or torn up. As a result, it is not clear exactly what challenges reactivation might pose. Tomba's rejection of universal history implies that we cannot draw a strictly linear, developmental, or progressive relationship between “the” past and “the” present. Rather, various eras exist in temporal succession, and relations of rupture and change connect or separate them. Once universal history has been rejected, the distinction between “the archaic” and “the modern” makes no sense. Social forms can be called archaic only if they are part of an irreversible historical sequence, typically a developmental one that portrays later forms as better and more complex. Since Tomba's arguments preclude such problematic notions of time, they seem to leave open the possibility that past forms of the social-political could simply be imported into the present.

However, the deep contextuality of Tomba's narrative cuts against that. He shows in great detail how the practices under investigation were situated in particular contexts, times, and places. They were part of the fabric of particular societies and cultures. This problematizes the idea of importing them into the very different context of our present, shaped as it is by the hegemonic modernities to which Tomba objects. Practices of the past can look odd and quaint when they appear out of context. Think of the strange anachronism and naïve nostalgia of the various Civil War reenactments, Renaissance Faires, Medieval Times, and Colonial Williamsburgs, with their chain mail, blunderbusses, butter churns, and horse-drawn carriages. Taking them as cautionary examples, we must conclude that reactivation cannot be a matter simply of reproducing some past practice in the present. Something more complex must be at stake.

If reactivation is not to be nostalgia for an unrepeatable past, how exactly do we locate these practices in the midst of a contextually and historically complex field of reference? One possibility is to think of reactivation as a purposefully counterfactual act. Here past practices would stand as counter-modernities precisely because they put pressure on the present. Their polemic force would be derived from a sort of critical dissonance between past and present. We would still have the challenge of figuring out how to create this dissonance in meaningful and effective ways, of course. Here we might talk about the work of refashioning that must go into “reactivation.” This would be the labor of rethinking and recontextualization that is needed to bring some promising aspect of the past forward into our present in a polemic and critical way.

Such work may be operating in the some of the episodes Tomba discusses. He narrates tensions within various revolutionary groups over their attempts to reactivate the past. Left Socialist Revolutionaries during the Russian Revolution accused their Bolshevik counterparts of an unhealthy obsession with the French Revolution, particularly the Revolutionary Terror (Tomba, 2019: 162–163). The Communards of 1871 had a similarly complex attitude towards the French Revolution. Although they saw themselves as “reactivating” nonmodern traditions of communal liberty (96), Tomba describes them as “moving in historical material, not the way one moves along the railroad tracks of progress but as in a huge building where some rooms of what-has-been contain different not-yets that have remained encapsulated and can be freed now” (86). He notes similar tensions between the French and Haitian revolutionary traditions. Tomba aptly characterizes Haitian maroon communities as imagining freedom quite differently from the understanding then current in the French Revolution. The implication is that such alternative visions “interrupted the continuum of a specific historical configuration of power [and] also disclosed and anticipated new political pathways, which indicated alternative trajectories beyond political modernity” (52). In sum, we can see clashing imaginaries and temporalities at work in these past movements. The tensions between them seem fertile in many ways, perhaps tracing out what a politics of reactivation might look like. They also require us to think in greater detail about their intellectual, cultural, and political effectivity, however, and how it might be brought to bear on the present.

Let us consider what would be involved in reactivating such imaginaries of freedom. Regarding the last example, for instance, I have argued elsewhere (Olson, 2015; Olson, 2016: 110–166) that the most radical conceptions of freedom coming out of a half-century of revolutions in Haiti (1791–1844) displayed a dazzling array of alternative modernities, counter-modernities, and non-modernities. However, they were largely silenced as forms of subaltern thought and practice, and remained illegible, ineffective, lost, and forgotten. They did not “interrupt the continuum of a specific historical configuration of power” so much as succumb to it. This provides us with an important caution. Alternative modernities don’t always succeed in opening up new spaces or exceeding the bounds of the political given. Tomba's careful historiography reveals that such visions are frequently pushed aside through power, domination, and subordination. When we seek to reactivate them, we must somehow create new conditions of possibility for them, ones that were denied in their original context.

Here, then, is a puzzle that I very much share with Tomba, and about which I would love to hear his reflections. I greatly appreciate the way he has parsed out these forms of lived heterogeneity, temporal diversity, and conceptual difference. As roads that were not taken, however, can we still take them, and if so, how? How exactly do we put these insurgent moments to use, while avoiding the traps of universalism that he has so thoughtfully identified? I believe that to reactivate them now, we must give careful thought to the actual work of reactivation: what it would take to recontextualize such visions in the present and avoid the pitfalls of that originally eclipsed them.

To some extent, the answer to such questions might lie in a normative register. We may be able to reactivate contents of the past by exploiting the normative tensions they create with the present in some way. In this sense, we could read Tomba's call for reactivation as an implicitly normative one. His work does indeed put forward a particular vision of the social, one consistently emphasizing groups, councils, assemblies, the bounded localism of the imperative mandate, and the creative temporality of peasant and village life. It consistently accords privilege to the local, the plural, the immediacy of association, the non-dogmatic, and the non-linear. In this it is at least cryptonormative—and I hasten to add, in the very best sense of the word. By cryptonormative, I mean an implicit appeal is being made to some kind of normative ideals, but they operate without explicit articulation or declaration. In skillful hands this can be a powerful way to illuminate and persuade (Olson, 2014).

Several normativities can be said to operate within this book. Depending upon one's perspective, they may be rooted in (1) nostalgia, (2) self-legitimation, (3) anti-universalism, and/or (4) the “democratic excess.”

First, Tomba focuses on revolutionary movements that emphasized the associative fecundity of groups. There is a potential to see these normative accents as nostalgia for worlds destroyed by modernity. It might seek a return to a bygone world of guilds, agrarian communes, and friendly societies—the old social forms of village life and town urbanity. Here Gemeinschaft might serve as a rebuke to Gesellschaft, celebrating pre-modernities rather than putting forward counter-modernities.

That is to say, when the imaginaries being brought forward for reactivation are consistently of a gemeinschaftlich type, one worries that the force of the argument is driven by a kind of romantic anti-modernism, even if such visions are explicitly repudiated. If this is the case, one might fear that nostalgia itself—perhaps for a past not as rosy as it is now imagined—could be driving the energy behind the counterhistory. In this case, an implicit appeal to a cozy vision of an idealized past would aim to recreate the past in a sentimental rather than critical manner.

Second, alternatively, there could be an implicit normative force in Tomba's choice of specific moments and events. The prestige of these moments in an imaginary of revolutionary change could exercise a powerful attraction. The French Revolution, the Paris Commune, and the Russian Revolution, for instance, all have great charisma. They rivet our imagination because of the enormous currency that revolution has in our political culture (Olson, 2016: 10–11). Participants in the past movements Tomba surveys could have been attempting to tap into this aura when they modelled their revolutionary acts on those of practitioners and traditions before them. Evoking the past can be a shortcut to self-legitimation, an effort to endow one's actions with the mantle of already-prestigious traditions from the past (Olson, 2017). “Reactivation,” then, could be an implicitly normative effort to tap the prestige of past revolutionary imaginaries to legitimate one's own actions.

Third, other interpretations are also plausible. The normative force of this work could be derived by contrast to universal history. Tomba is very clear about the problematic character of universal history, with its narratives of progress, implicit Eurocentrism, and tendencies towards abstract individualism. From this perspective, various alternative modernities and desynchronized, multi-paced temporalities might be valued precisely because they are not universal. This kind of normativity could be allied with an implicit critique of power. It might be signaled, for instance, by Tomba's (2019: 231) characterization of universalism as the “dominant modernity.” Visceral reactions against the cultural hegemony of the universal could make alternative modernities appealing. However, this normative strategy paints with such a broad brush that it valorizes pretty much any practices that are not universal. As a result, it would not resolve the question of what a critical idea of “reactivation” might look like.

Finally, another possibility, rooted in the book's emphasis on insurgency, is the implication that the movements under discussion are particularly good at fostering political interaction (“the democratic excess”) that is suppressed by political universalism (67). Here the political bears the normative weight. It has been displaced by linear history, with its rigid specification of world-historical winners and losers, and flourishes in the traditions Tomba narrates.

I think that Tomba's writing is in fact cryptonormative—again, in a sense I very much approve of—but it is unclear what form that actually takes. As a result, it is also unclear whether my questions about reactivation might be answered by being more explicit about the normative background that makes it appealing.

I would like to leave these intertwined questions open for Tomba's own response. He makes an effective case for the various assemblies, councils, alternative rhythms and temporalities that he so thoughtfully recovers from past revolutionary movements. They are valued for their specificity, multiplicity, plurality, and materiality. I very much share Tomba's appreciation for the rich potential of these moments. However, I will confess that I am correspondingly uncomfortable with calling them moments of insurgent “universality.” In the end, I believe that Tomba's arguments actually go much farther to displace universality than he credits them. In my reading, there is not much left to be said in favor of universality once we have embraced his subtle insights about insurgency. Agreeing with the spirit of Tomba's work rather than its letter, I am inspired by him to think further about insurgent multiplicities, which I see as the ultimate lesson of this rich book.