Today it is actually impossible to offer resistance against global power that is politically effective at the same level. In the same way, it is impossible to articulate a reflexively effective critique at the local level. Local, political essentialism makes all critical thinking mute, just as reflexively universalist critique leaves every locally effective political act untouched. Seeking to overcome this division can be a noble task, but it is not the task of critique. It is not there to balance a world again that has lost its balance, but rather to probe the depth of the crisis in which this world finds itself.
To probe the depth of the crisis is, it turns out, to return to the question of culture; if culture is to be the stage for new productions—of subjectivity, of modes of relation—we need a better sense of the scope of scenography, of collaborative choreographies, of performative practices. And indeed of dominant articulations of the global over and against which a different politics ofthe universal (such as the common) could be articulated.
In his reflections on a politics of the universal, Étienne Balibar turns to the question of "the institution of the universal, or even the institution of the universal as truth."11 What complicates the task of critique is that “certain forms of universality at least derive their institutional strength not from the fact that the institutions in which they are embodied are absolute themselves, but rather from the fact that they are the site ofendless contestations on the basis of their own principles, or discourse." Balibar, following Hannah Arendt, proposes “equaliberty"—the right to have rights—not as another institution ofthe universal but as“the arch-institution, or theinstitution that precedes and conditions every other institution" in modern democracies. But if equaliberty, democracy, civic universality as the pursuit of equality and liberty are the horizon of a democratic politics of the universal, their “simultaneous realization is rarely seen or only visible as a tendency, as exigency."
In the current call for democratic control of financial markets and processes of financialization, arguably the most influential figure of the global and perhaps the most dominant dónamic of universalization today, activists not only call the self-universalization of regimes of financialization into question but quite literally interruptit through occupations that establish a cartography of sites through which the institution of financialization as the dominant figure ofthe global occurs.12 Financialization is an instance of the global whose advocates have not failed to present it in the terms of the inevitability ofa progressive universalization ofits practices and policies, of the universal as truth. In the course of a series of financial crises, these truth claims have been visibly unmade, giving rise to contestations that are perhaps endless onlyinsofar as theydon't envision a politics beyond a
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