THE POLITICS OF DIFFERENCE, COMMUNITYAND THE ETHIC OF UNIVERSALISM
With the emergence of a postmodern political culture there has been a shift in left politics from a politics of equality to a cultural politics. This new cultural politics isconcerned with differences between individuals and groups, how these are created andsustained, externally imposed and culturally represented via an inherently political process of identity formation and the constitution of subjectivity. It is difficult toaccommodate this ‘new’ politics of difference within the meta-narrative of the goodlife and the good city defined by this thesis. This meta-narrative is constituted on the basis of a social and spatial justice defined in terms of a universal ethic. The greater stress upon the differences between individuals in the new cultural politics has theeffect of diluting and even displacing the fundamental concern with equality betweenindividuals. The new cultural politics evades being canalised into the global channelsof resistance and are structured according to categories of class, gender, race,ethnicity, nationality and so on, each an exclusive identity. This fosters substantialconflict between new and old social movements, each being separately defined andorganised according to one of these specific categories. According to the old politics,organised around a struggle to overcome inequality in the universal interest, suchdiversity would be conceived as undermining the political and organisational power of channelled struggles. In the new politics, such multiplicity is embraced as offeringnew opportunities. The construction of a meta-politics and meta-ethics mustacknowledge the heterogeneous nature of reality by creating and sustaining an open,adaptive, coalition building politics.