Returning to totality: Settler colonialism,decolonization,and struggles for freedom

Abstract

A unifying feature of the most prominent social movements that emerged in the 2010s is their dissatisfaction with explaining injustices on a case-by-case basis. In Canada, movements against settler colonialism express a similar orientation. This elicits a return of totality thinking, which enables one to grasp the connections between what appears as isolated or fragmented moments that in fact constitute and are constituted by a larger whole. Drawing on Marxist and Indigenous theorists, we reconstruct an approach to totality and a conceptualization of settler colonialism as a totality. Through an immanent reading of John Borrows’ approach to decolonization, we justify the importance of this concept for politicizing the persistence of unfree forms of interdependence. Finally, just as individual struggles point toward the totality, totality thinking draws attention to the unity-in-separation of different struggles, enabling a politics of “immanent universalism” as an alternative to both abstract universalism and particularism.

Introduction

A unifying feature of many social movements that emerged in the 2010s, such as Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, and Extinction Rebellion, is their dissatisfaction with explaining injustice on a case-by-case basis. Movements against settler colonialism in Canada express the same dissatisfaction. One example, which began in 2009 and remains ongoing, involves the Unist’ot’en and Gidimt’en Camps on Wet’suwet’en territory in Northern British Columbia. These camps and associated checkpoints were organized to renew Wet’suwet’en forms of life and to block the construction of a new pipeline—approved by the provincial government, along with some band governments—that would transport liquified natural gas intended for the global market. The police have enforced court-mandated injunctions demanding corporate access to the land on multiple occasions, including in February 2020, when dozens were arrested, all on land that is unceded to any settler government. In solidarity with land defenders, a movement threatening to #ShutDownCanada emerged across the country, including an occupation of the British Columbia legislature alongside the offices of Members of Parliament, as well as ferry, port, rail, and road blockades across the country. Here we see how an isolated action of organizing a camp can have its significance magnified, to the point where many regard the invasion of the camp as a moment that reflects something larger, something which gives the lie to state promises of reconciliation. As the Unist’ot’en Camp declared just after the 2020 arrests:

Canada invades. Invades on behalf of industry. Invades during ceremony. Canada tears us from our land. Tears us from our families, from our homes. Takes our drums away. Takes our women away. Jails us for protecting the land, for being in ceremony, for honouring our ancestors… We have had enough. Enough dialogue, discussion, negotiation at the barrel of a gun. Canada comes to colonize. Reconciliation is dead (Unist’ot’en 2020).

How are we to understand the implications of such a statement? In this essay, our contribution is to argue for a reconstruction of the dialectical concept of totality to help theorize the problem of settler colonial domination, particularly the role of the settler state along with Indigenous resurgence as a practice of struggle.

What do we mean by a dialectical concept of totality? At its most basic, such a conception refers to the specific relational nature between parts and whole. We dismiss any view for which the parts exist independently, only to collide with one another haphazardly. In the case we mentioned above, totality thinking would not refer to the truism that a plurality of actors—governments, bureaucrats, corporations, judges, lawyers, police, consumers—combine to produce a result. Rather, as we use it, totality helps to grasp the relational nature between politics and economics that led to the invasion of the Unist’ot’en Camp. For example, because Indigenous dispossession in this place was and remains animated by the imperatives of capitalist accumulation, and because capitalist accumulation required not just generalized dispossession of wage laborers but the specific dispossession of Indigenous peoples, this gives rise to the specific form of the Canadian state as a settler colonial capitalist state. When we speak of the form of the Canadian state, we refer less to an unchanging essence and more to a process (see Burnham 1993, 225). As the history of Indigenous-state relations illustrates, the form changes in response to struggle but in a way that seeks to channel or disorganize struggle in order to stabilize accumulation and so settler colonialism (Burnham 2001, 107; Simpson 2017, 46).

Although we focus on Canada in this article, we are keen to stress that we do not view the nation-state in isolation from or externally related to the international state system and the world market. Despite the passage of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007, the international state system continues to legitimize settler state sovereignty, most importantly through Article 46.1 of that Declaration. ¹ We understand that nation states operate as what Peter Burnham describes as “circuit managers” that remove “blockages” in the flow of capital both nationally and internationally (2001: 108). The “blockage” in our opening case referred to the resurgence of Wet’suwet’en forms of life at the Unist’ot’en and other associated camps. Removal can take various forms, such as police enforcing an injunction, to channeling struggles into modes of non-transformative redistribution like resource revenue sharing or impact and benefit agreements. In any case, it is the state’s role as circuit manager that undermines its promises of reconciliation and which compels Indigenous resurgence to confront settler colonialism as a moment of a totality.

The version of totality thinking we defend has an additional set of features. The totality is “negative” because it is neither a unified and non-contradictory whole, nor is it expressivist in the sense that it possesses a singular logic that all its parts work to fulfill. Instead, a dialectical totality contains well-developed contradictions and social struggles that produce a discontinuous and non-functionalist whole. Dialectically speaking, the totality amounts to a “unity-in-separation,” a term which indicates how the totality’s parts compose a relational whole that remains divided by conflicts and antagonisms. We will elaborate on this below when we explain the benefits of totality thinking compared to a structural approach, especially in terms of treating “economics” and “politics” as unities-in-separation rather than discrete structures.

It can be difficult to give a name to the totality because, on the one hand, it is made up of so many parts, while on the other hand, it is something more than just the sum of those parts. To be sure, a generic term like “society” will not do. Our approach generally is to treat prominent parts like capitalism, settler colonialism, patriarchy, white supremacy, and heterosexism as moments of the totality. Because we are committed to reconstructing totality thinking as a response to the predicament of settler colonialism, we sometimes speak of a settler colonial or settler colonial capitalist totality but with this wider view in mind.

We divide what follows into four sections. While contemporary social movements evoke a return of totality thinking, how are we to orient ourselves to this revival given longstanding objections to the concept? Our first section reconstructs the endeavor of totality thinking. We draw on Marxist theorists to lay out four orienting provisos that inform the rest of the article, including our claim that totality thinking is superior to structural accounts of domination, struggle, and resistance. The second section elaborates a conception of settler colonialism as a moment of a totality within Indigenous Critical Theory. In the third section, we further develop and defend totality thinking by drawing out the relationship between experience and totality. This allows us to enrich the concept of a settler colonial totality, initially sketched in section two, by engaging with renowned Anishinaabe legal theorist John Borrows, a sympathetic yet influential critic of such an approach. Even though we share Borrows’ critique of deterministic approaches that eclipse experience and the possibilities for transformation, we recover an approach to totality that better appreciates the reality of constraints that it helps to impose. Totality thinking reveals unfree forms of interdependence that will not be overcome by sidelining civil disobedience. In our fourth section, we argue that the critical purchase of totality thinking for emancipatory struggles such as decolonization is its ability to not only track unfree forms of interdependence but to foreground the unity-in-separation of social struggles that forms the basis for counter-hegemonic articulations. We describe our version of totality thinking as “immanent universalism” and conclude by sketching its advantages and limits.

Reconstructing totality

The concept of totality was once a mainstay of social criticism on the left, particularly among Western Marxists (Jay 1984). Of the many functions that totality played for different theorists, one that comes close to capturing the general purpose is Fredric Jameson’s assertion about how “the only way to understand a fact which is part of a total system is to begin with an idea of the totality” (1969–1970, 141). It is precisely this kind of comment, one that invokes a relation between part and whole, that caused totality to fall into disrepute. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe struck back against totality by claiming “[s]ociety is not a valid object of discourse” (1985, 11) because it possesses no unifying principle that ties together its different parts. If the parts do not fit together as a whole, there is no “society” of which to speak. They even argued that the term “‘social formation’, when used to designate a referent, is meaningless,” purportedly because there is such a degree of “openness and indeterminacy” to the social that neither it nor its agents can constitute a formation (1985, 144). Even worse, in its pretensions to universality, totality was said to “transform[] certain social categories into depositories of political and epistemological privileges” (192), leading to a politics of “classism” (177) and the eclipse of difference. Even when totality was applied in feminist politics, Iris Young claimed that it produced its own exclusions (1994, 718). Totality thinking seemed unable to account for the plural subjects of resistance found in new social movements, with their need for coalition politics and counter-hegemonic articulations.

We appreciate why Laclau and Mouffe moved against deterministic views about historical laws, or about how the economy alone determined one’s social position and political outlook. Although the reliance on totality fell out of favor, it never disappeared. At the time, Stuart Hall declared (we think rightly) that Laclau and Mouffe treated “society as a totally open discursive field” (1986, 56) and therefore missed out on the constraining and regulating effects historical forces have on discursive articulations. Additionally, what they either ignored or failed to grasp was that features of social life such as the discontinuity between certain component parts, or the non-identity between the parts and the whole, were already recognized in sophisticated versions of totality such as Theodor Adorno’s. Indeed, a variety of thinkers have continued to insist on the appeal and necessity of totality thinking.

Following Georg Lukács, Kathi Weeks regarded totality as providing the dialectical framework needed to think feminist systems theory and standpoint theory together (1998, 90–93). Her aim was to overcome the restrictions produced by treating these positions in isolation, and to register those moments of turbulence experienced by subjects operating within systemic or structural constraints. Indeed, Kevin Floyd (2009) details how totality thinking is defined by an effort to trace systematically obscured connections and a refusal to fetishize the particular. Even though efforts to think the totality are always situated ones, they nonetheless offer an understanding of social reality that would otherwise be unavailable (2009, 12). Kaniska Goodewardena (2018, 446) not only catalogues the emergence of different projects that rely on totality thinking, including Marxist, feminist, Indigenous, and anti-colonial, he explains how they must not be interpreted as the triumph of epistemological pluralism over totality thinking. Rather, the existence of multiple projects utilizing totality represents a common effort to overcome nominalist thinking that treats structures, subjects, and political standpoints as individual and separate from one another. It follows that the last thing we should do is rank the various projects of totality. In Jameson’s assertive rendering, we must not allow efforts to think the totality from different standpoints such as the working class and new social movements to devolve into a “metaphysical polemic about the ultimate priority” of this or that perspective. We must aim, rather, to produce “an inventory of the variable structures of ‘constraint’” existing within the “absent common object” that is the totality (2010, 221). This emphasis on constraint is revived again by Marina Vishmidt and Zoe Sutherland (2022, 82) in an effort to contrast it to functionalist explanations that inevitably end up producing a vision of society that is overly unified and therefore struggles to account for the existence of radical politics. The superior alternative is the notion of a negative totality that is contradictory and fluctuating, full of objective constraints and struggles to overcome them.

Beyond this literature, we now add some orienting provisos regarding totality thinking that spill unavoidably into considerations for political critique. In our first proviso, we contend that the process of representing a totality involves a degree of abstraction to the extent that neither the totality nor many of its parts can be completely verified in an empirical sense (Jameson 1990, 38; Chambers 2014, 24). Jameson long ago established how the sheer complexity of postmodern life makes it impossible for individuals to map the various social totalities to which they belong (1991, 51–54), often leading to a disorienting existence that can thwart the impulse to agency. Individuals can experience genuine helplessness when confronted by a massive urban setting or the labyrinths of state bureaucracy, let alone the inhuman scale of global capitalism and finance. Such immobilizing outcomes are all the more likely when the idea of totality is absent. Yet just because the totality is to some extent unrepresentable does not mean it is unknowable. Insights into the totality show up in what appears as more isolated phenomena such as the lives of individuals, public policies, institutional logics, and the features of political struggle. Indeed, as Adorno noted, we often come to learn more about totality thanks to moments of resistance—including our attempts to institute practical, concrete reforms ([1968] 1999, 49-50). The parts should be regarded as moments of the whole, at once constituting the totality and constituted by it. There is no choice then but to pursue the totality from the position of something specific.

For our second proviso, which builds on the first, we insist that totality thinking involves the interpretation of individual experience. As Adorno writes: “… the supremacy of totality, which is indeed abstract, but also escapes the general concept in a certain sense, can only be encountered in the experience of the individual and in the interpretation of this experience of the individual” (quoted in Heitmann 2018, 600; see also Adorno 1976, 12). The need to interpret the experience of the individual indicates that we are not suggesting an uncritical valorization of experience. Adorno, who follows Hegel in this regard, is deeply suspicious of accepting immediate experience at face value without subjecting it to a process of second order critique (Hegel [1830] 1975, §12). For example, when lived experience is treated as coextensive with an official discourse, say about the purported successes of reconciliation, then any reliance on experience for political insight becomes troublingly orthodox. This is why totality thinking moves from the “immediate observation of phenomena towards an understanding of their deeper social causes” (Adorno 1969–1970, 148). Concrete social situations are reflections of “deeper antagonisms” which provides the wider context for such conflicts (145). Refreshing totality thinking through empirical research into experience is one way to ensure that it retains its dynamism and its focus on the experience of social antagonisms (Adorno 1976, 26–7).

Our third proviso communicates an essential incongruity about the nature of totality: despite amounting to the whole, the totality remains incomplete and negative, and therefore constitutes a regulating force but not a completely determining one. When Adorno writes that totality “is not an affirmative category but rather a critical category,” he is interested in how totality thinking aims “to salvage or help to establish what does not obey totality, what opposes it or what first forms itself as the potential of a not yet existent individuation” (1976, 12; also 1973, 146–48). The properly negative dialectical relationship between the totality and its parts is both ongoing and discontinuous: “… the totality of society is maintained not by solidarity but by the antagonistic interests of human beings, by its antitheses” (1968, 44). The parts cannot be totally assimilated by the totality—and hence are discontinuous—because they never obey it completely. This is demonstrated by the social movements we noted above. They recast the social totality as something negative and contradictory by showing how their own existence—as movements and as the individuals who compose them—is non-identical with the totality’s own aims and purported identity. Adorno put the matter this way:

[W]e might say that history is discontinuous in the sense that it represents life perennially disrupted. However, because history constantly repeats this process of disruption, and because it clings to the resulting fragments instead of its deceptive surface unity, the philosophical interpretation of history, in other words, the construction of history, acquires a view of the totality that the totality fails to provide at first sight. At the same time, history detects in these fragments the trace of possible developments, of something hopeful that stands in precise opposition to what the totality appears to show ([1964–5] 2006, 91).

We included this challenging passage because it signals our point about how the totality is a regulating force without being a determining one. The ability to experience and interpret the features of damaged life as unavoidable in this historical moment, rather than as unavoidable aspects of life as such, prompts us simultaneously to historicize what we experience and abstract from it a broader and more critical sense of the totality. This is despite that some of Adorno’s phrases, taken in isolation, communicate a sense that all prospects for political transformation have disappeared. Such a view fails to appreciate Adorno’s forceful position that we must be open to “the experience of the blindly dominating totality and the driving desire that it should ultimately be something else” (1976, 14). A totality can dominate without imposing an awesome causality upon its parts because that would leave no room for the resistance or agency that remain possible. But there is no stepping outside the totality either; one way or another, it informs and regulates features of our existence.

Our fourth and final proviso explains the relationship and distinction between totality and structure. We argue that these must not be conflated, and that while structures undoubtedly belong to the totality, the latter is broader and more capacious than discrete structures. Indeed, the totality is both uniquely distinct from structures and something whose presence is always in them. Sartre put the matter this way:

A totality is defined as a being which, while radically distinct from the sum of its parts, is present in its entirety, in one form or another, in each of these parts, and which relates to itself either through its relation to one or more of its parts or through its relation to the relations between all or some of them. ([1960] 2004, 45)

It is the totality’s radical distinction from the sum of its parts, according to Sartre, that makes it distinct. Moreover, even though we might imagine ourselves capable of avoiding or escaping some of those parts, there is no escaping the totality to which they all belong.

Two quick examples will suffice to elaborate this point. Take the limitations that emerge when we treat democracy and capitalism in traditional bourgeois fashion as discrete structures. Democracy is then restricted to the standard institutions and processes (elections, parties, legislatures, etc.), while capitalism’s boundaries are drawn according to formal economic activity (firms and markets, production and consumption). Approaching democracy and capitalism as components of a totality allows us, we think, to see them more easily (and rightly) as contributing to a social order far beyond their traditionally demarcated roles. Important political implications follow. If advocates of democracy focus only on the standard democratic structures, and not on democratic practices in other places like the family or the workplace, then we overload formal democracy with expectations it cannot fulfill. A democratic society cannot be said to exist if it is full of undemocratic practices outside of formal politics, which of course limit what formal democracy can achieve in the first place. Similarly, by regarding capitalism as central to entire social orders, some on the political left should no longer be satisfied with reforming markets or regulating mega-firms because that would not account for how, depending on where you live, putatively “non-economic” areas of life (education or health care or the family) belong to the capitalist universe. One additional consideration is how political and economic practices informed by totality thinking should include a transnational sensibility, for the obvious reason that neither the totality nor its parts have ever neatly obeyed national borders. In sum, we think structural analysis is essential; we also think that we need a concept for what exceeds individual structures (or perhaps for what structures or mediates the structures), and for us that is totality.

Totality and the critique of settler colonialism

We want to start making good on our claim that grasping a totality as part of struggles for justice means investigating actual instances where it shows up, in this case in relation to settler colonialism. We also want to illustrate how totality thinking is present already in the work of Indigenous Critical Theorists such as Glen Coulthard and Leanne Simpson, especially when they theorize settler colonialism as a social formation. The additional benefit of this brief survey is that it enables us to further clarify the distinction between structure and totality, leading to a more extensive defense of totality for understanding settler colonialism in the following section when we examine a more explicitly anti-totality thinker like Anishinaabe legal scholar John Borrows.

Canada’s Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP) captured how settler colonialism takes settlers’ ways of life and substitutes it in place of Indigenous practices.

Successive governments have tried – sometimes intentionally, sometimes in ignorance – to absorb Aboriginal people into Canadian society, thus eliminating them as distinct peoples. Policies pursued over the decades have undermined – and almost erased – Aboriginal cultures and identities. This is assimilation. It is a denial of the principles of peace, harmony and justice for which this country stands – and it has failed. (RCAP 1996).

Assimilation as official state policy has disappeared in Canada and been replaced by an alternative set of policies (multiculturalism and cultural recognition), proposals (especially “reconciliation” between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples), and aspirations (such as viewing Indigenous-state relations as between equal nations). Despite these developments, Anishinaabe theorist Leanne Simpson articulates how the particulars of settler colonial practices have changed not necessarily in spite of their dominance but to maintain it: “[S]ettler colonialism as a structure necessarily has to shift and adapt in order to meet the insatiable need of the state for land and resources. The processes of colonialism don’t necessarily look and feel the same every time, but we can’t be tricked. . . . The intention of the structure of colonialism is to dispossess” (2017, 46). In this respect, certain particulars of colonialism can change without fundamentally altering the totality itself. Simpson registers how this twin dynamic of continuity and change occurs through rather than against experience: “I certainly do not experience [settler colonialism] as a historical incident that has unfortunate consequences for the present. I experience it as a gendered structure and a series of complex and overlapping processes that work together as a cohort to maintain the structure” (47). Already, Simpson’s references to structure invoke our distinction with totality: she regards settler colonialism as being ordered in gendered, capitalist, and anti-democratic ways. It is, then, no longer simply a structure but an instance of the totality’s social order.

Our reading of Simpson also alerts us to how her work modifies and, in our view, improves upon Patrick Wolfe’s now famous treatment of settler colonialism. Wolfe regards settler colonialism as not just a historical feature of countries such as Canada, the United States, New Zealand, Australia, and Israel/Palestine but as an enduring structure where the elimination of Indigenous peoples is an organizing principle of these societies (2006, 388). Our reference to the invasion of the Wet’suwet’en territory is such an example. Although Wolfe does not ignore resistance—like Simpson he states that resistance can provoke change (2016, 272) —he downplays it for a variety of reasons (see also O’Brien 2017). As a settler, Wolfe does not want to “instruct” the colonized how to resist (2016, 271). While the reality of how colonialism endures raises the possibility that some strategies of resistance are in fact unrecognized features of colonial subjection (188, 200).

As one of the leading theorists of Indigenous resurgence, Simpson does a superior job foregrounding Indigenous resistance and experience. Resurgence is a theoretical tradition and description of a tendency within Indigenous politics. Both are defined by an emphasis on renewing Indigenous forms of life rather than (or at least alongside) negotiations with the state and corporations. Even though Wolfe understands the constitution of settler colonialism to be one of complex causation (2006, 390, 392), he does so inconsistently. Indeed, this complexity drops out when he shifts to the now infamous logic of elimination as the principle of settler colonial societies (399). Simpson restores this complexity with a subtle but telling move: “I understand settler colonialism’s present structure as one that is formed and maintained by a series of processes for the purposes of dispossessing, that create a scaffolding within which my relationship to the state is contained” (2017, 45; emphasis added).

We suggest that the distinction between totality and structure can help capture Simpson’s theorization of settler colonialism contra Wolfe. Simpson sees settler colonialism as co-constituted by heterogeneous forms and sources of domination including cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, the state, and anti-Blackness—“a structure of processes” (35) that invokes the social order of the totality itself. Additionally, a negative and discontinuous conception of totality is open to registering the modes of constraint and the “driving desire” for change that we developed earlier through Jameson and Adorno, and witnessed above in the intensity of Simpson’s condemnation of settler colonialism. This relationship between the totality and a second order level of experience—the type that has undergone critical reflection and is not taken as a given in its immediacy—takes us beyond an issue-by-issue analysis by gesturing, through material examples, to the common object of totality that so often eludes us.

Glen Coulthard is another Critical Indigenous Theorist whose work involves an analysis of settler colonialism as a moment of the totality including what we referred to earlier as the unity-in-separation of capitalism and sovereign state power:

[I]n the Canadian context, colonial domination continues to be structurally committed to maintain – through force, fraud, and more recently, so-called “negotiations” – ongoing state access to the land and resources that contradictorily provide the material sustenance of Indigenous societies on the one hand, and the foundation of colonial state-formation, settlement, and capitalist development on the other (2014, 7).

We note here how this history of settler-state formation, along with its commitment to capitalist development, is hardly limited to the Canadian case. A dialectical figure emerges that combines features of dependence, antagonism, and production: the dependence of the capitalist state on Indigenous land and resources; the antagonism posed by the state toward Indigenous forms of life and vice-versa; all of which produces the specific and contradictory political terrain animating the settler colonial moment of the totality. This speaks to the specifically negative character of this totality maintained by antagonism rather than solidarity (Adorno 1968, 44).

The mediations involved in this totality benefit from another figure of dialectical analysis, namely that something can be simultaneously true and false—which is exactly how we should treat the view that Indigenous peoples are parts of the settler state. It is true in the sense that colonization involves this aforementioned dependence of the capitalist state on Indigenous land and resources, antagonism of the state toward Indigenous cultures and ways of life, and production of a contradictory settler colonial totality. But it is false in the sense that Indigenous forms of life challenge and disrupt the process of colonization. Coulthard invokes something like Adorno’s negative totality and contrasts it with a more affirmative conception of totality, characterized more by solidarity than antagonism: “[u]nderstanding ‘culture’ as the interconnected social totality of [a] distinct mode of life encompassing the economic, political, spiritual, and social is crucial for comprehending the state’s response to the challenge posed by our [the Dene Nation’s] land-claim proposals” (2014, 65–6). The Dene cannot be recognized properly by the colonial state without also acknowledging “alternative Indigenous economies and forms of political authority.” The colonial state, according to Coulthard, will only allow institutionalized accommodations of Indigenous practices so long as they are “reconcilable with one political formation – namely, colonial sovereignty – and one mode of production – namely, capitalism” (66). The colonial state’s unavoidable participation in global capitalism means that alternative modes of life are impossible to achieve without anti-colonial struggle.

Coulthard’s understanding of culture as a totality further draws out the political implications of totality thinking. He cautions resurgence theorists and practitioners from assuming the possibility of avoiding or escaping some of the parts at the expense of a view of the totality to which they belong. Coulthard argues that a resurgence of Indigenous forms of life risk becoming “parasitic” on capitalism when (at the individual level) wages or (at the collective level) resource revenue sharing is required to fund resurgent practices (2014, 171). The effect of which is to de-economize Indigenous self-determination and de-politicize capitalism: “… in the end [such practices] would still remain dependent on a predatory economy that is entirely at odds with the deep reciprocity that forms the cultural core of many Indigenous peoples’ relationships with land” (ibid.). Coulthard’s work presents settler colonialism as part of a contradictory totality that demands a politics of resurgence that does not lose sight of that totality as an object to be transcended. Bearing our various distinctions between structure and totality in mind, we want to offer a more concrete defense of totality contra an influential yet explicitly anti-structuralist thinker of decolonization in Canada: John Borrows.

Borrows and the experience of totality

The groundbreaking Anishinaabe legal theorist John Borrows is a proponent for the greater recognition of Indigenous law in Canada, whose influence extends to other settler colonial states. He offers an attractive vision of freedom and decolonization as autonomy-within-interdependence. Because of this orientation towards interdependence, Borrows refuses to limit the scope of what Indigenous political claims can embrace. Instead, he argues that Indigenous peoples’ political visions that include respect for land and other-than-human relations are generalizable and therefore bear on non-Indigenous peoples as well. His work is characterized by a pragmatic approach to decolonization that he claims is more likely to bring about a free form of interdependence compared to the “abstract metaphysics” of the structural turn.

What is contentious about Borrows’ approach is that his caution against essentializing traditions extends to theoretical frameworks such as structural critique as well as political strategies such as direct action. He argues that structural critique and direct action risk essentializing and reifying Indigeneity by presenting a false picture of freedom as something that is enjoyed in isolation from others (2016, 14; Borrows and Tully 2018). His methodological critique of the structural turn feeds on and relates to political questions of direct action and the politics of decolonization more generally. We focus on Borrows’ account not only because he is responding to the structural turn—something which we aim to move beyond. He also allows us to clarify the advantages of treating settler colonialism as a central component of a larger totality, and further explain why this is necessary to understanding settler colonialism and the politics of decolonization—a commitment that we share with Borrows. Our (re)turn to totality likewise has political implications that we develop in the next section.

In Freedom and Indigenous Constitutionalism, Borrows describes his method as “physical philosophy,” or akinoomaagewin in Anishinabemowin, which begins from “the middle of the complex state in which we find ourselves, and working [from there] towards a better state” (2016, 10). As Borrows elaborates: “Akinoomaagewin is derived from observation and practice; learning in this way does not stem from identifying first principles and deducing conclusions from abstract propositions” (10–11). While this approach abandons the “fictitious certainty” that comes with starting from “abstract metaphysics,” “materially focused philosophies” such as physical philosophy “are more responsive to contextual political realities, which develop through time” (55). Borrows presents physical philosophy as a pragmatic, postmetaphysical, anti-foundationalist approach, in contrast to “grand theories” and “essentialized political, social, or legal classifications” more generally (47). Elsewhere he describes his book’s thesis as one of “resist[ing] deterministic structuralism and universalism in Indigenous affairs” (55) which he sees as “a fictional, misleading invention to manufacture certainty out of ambiguity” (164 fn12).

Here we can see how Borrows’ treatment of the structural turn intersects with the provisos we elaborated above. Borrows treats structure—and no doubt totality—as abstract, unverifiable and therefore not real. Any reference to a totality must appear for Borrows as an implausible “metaphysical certainty.” Yet our first proviso elaborated how the moment of abstraction in totality thinking scarcely renders the totality unknowable (indeed, abstraction helps to provide us with a sense of the whole), while our third proviso detailed how the totality is always negative and incomplete—the furthest thing from a metaphysical certainty. In fact, in keeping with our second proviso about the interpretation of experience, we share Borrows’ concern about “fictitious certainties” that ignore the imperative to account for experience. We too would describe totality thinking as a “materially focused philosoph[y]”. Nevertheless, Borrows’ repudiation of what we call totality thinking trades on an untenable dichotomy between experience and totality. Thus, contrary to our third proviso, Borrows’ position rules out totality on the grounds that it supposedly represents the determination of individuality and experience by structures. We insisted on a more nuanced and dialectical position whereby the totality is negative and incomplete, regulating without being a determining force. We arrive, naturally, at our fourth proviso: structures and the totality are not equivalent; the latter is broader and more capacious (it is not merely a structure of structures), and therefore is qualitatively unique. With our provisos in mind, we elaborate how the experiences that inform Borrows’ reading of civil (dis)obedience illuminate two things: settler colonialism as a moment of totality and the desire that the totality should become something else. ² Our point is that the illumination of totality and the desire for transcendence are foreclosed by Borrows’ post-metaphysical, anti-foundationalist, and pragmatic method which derides totality as a “grand theory” and dismisses the desire for its transcendence as a form of essentialism that privileges independence over interdependence. Our approach draws out the critical purchase of totality thinking to make sense of how colonialism appears in Borrows’ text and to make good on his commitment to freedom.

Borrows argues that Indigenous civil (dis)obedience or direct action (he uses these terms interchangeably) has had mixed outcomes. It can “establish a less oppressive reengagement” with Canadians and the state by opening democratic space focused on the “harmonization” of interests, but it has also “result[ed] in further oppression and undermine[d] people’s attempts to lead a good life” (51–2). Borrows’ worry is that too much focus on direct action may displace “other avenues to freedom” (54), such as engagement and negotiations with state and corporate power (103). Indigenous civil (dis)obedience even becomes “a false tradition when detached from specific political contexts and idealized as a universal solution” (52). The examples Borrows selects as failed instances of civil (dis)obedience do show that it can produce “further oppression” (51–2), which he understands as harmful divisions within Indigenous communities. What we find much less convincing is his takeaway that civil (dis)obedience amounts to a “false tradition” rather than simply pointing out that it does not always deliver the desired policy or social transformation. More to the point for our purposes though, we argue that Borrows’ examples demonstrate settler colonialism’s place in the totality through the experiences he describes.

Consider Borrows’ discussion of the Algonquins of Barriere Lake (2016, 88–94) and their struggles for self-determination and jurisdiction over what they claim is unceded territory beyond the boundaries of their 25-hectare reserve in Northern Quebec. Initial Algonquin actions included, in 1988, camping on Parliament Hill in Ottawa in an attempt to initiate a dialogue with the state (they were charged with trespassing and their tents and possessions seized); and in 1989, erecting a blockade on a road used for clear-cut logging (the logging company secured a court injunction and Quebec police in riot gear dismantled the blockade). But these setbacks did not seem to last for long. This and other Indigenous civil (dis)obedience contributed to the willingness of the federal government and Quebec’s provincial government to sign the 1991 Trilateral Agreement with the Algonquins. The agreement was hailed by the RCAP and the United Nations for its wide-ranging conditions. These included providing the Algonquins with a central role in sustainable resource management, a share of revenues, and new funding that would allow them to map their traditional knowledge about the land. Despite being signed, the agreement was never implemented. In what amounted to a flawless performance of the totality, where settler colonialism and global capitalism worked as one, Quebec denied that the Algonquin’s laws were compatible with its own for land co-management and determined that it was unwilling for its forestry and tourism industries to lose any money as a consequence of shared sovereignty (91).

Canada’s federal government acted with little more honor than did Quebec. For example, it refused to support the fees for consultants and lawyers that the Algonquin incurred to try to save the agreement, used the resulting financial strain to impose third party management, and then relied on the Indian Act to replace inherent customary governance in favor of a delegated elected band council (92). Blockades were resurrected again in 2008, 2010, 2011, and 2012 but had no effect on the status of the defunct agreement. How should we interpret this history? Borrows rightly asserts that “the provincial and federal governments are largely responsible for the inordinate pressure they have created within the [Algonquin] community,” pressure that has produced “allegations of bitter infighting and lateral violence [that] have challenged the community’s ability to break through colonialism’s constraints” (93). He captures how the spirit of contemporary colonialism aims to diminish and divide Indigenous communities. And yet the deeper political lesson Borrows wishes to draw has to do with Indigenous strategy. He cautions multiple times how “civil (dis)obedience has failed to secure a broader recognition of Algonquin law” and therefore should be demoted beneath other practices. “Good ideas such as sovereignty and tradition are important goals for living a good life,” Borrows explains, “but in this case they seem to be insufficient to facilitate further freedom. I would argue that the parties must move beyond abstract ideas and coercive physical force to advance their goals” (94). We contend that Canada and Quebec did achieve their goals, which is precisely why the original Trilateral Agreement was not implemented. It is also hard to see how the agreement’s failure comes down to abstract aims when it was full of concrete material policies, including a three-stage plan for implementation. Nor do we think that a negative response by the state to the Algonquin’s physical action was decisive. The agreement only came about after the Algonquin engaged in civil (dis)obedience and were subjected to greater force in response.

We think the state’s recalcitrance and the violence experienced by the Algonquins at Barriere Lake are best explained by the existence of a daunting totality of the kind we described with Simpson and Coulthard, in which settler colonialism occupies a principal role. Indeed, such an analysis is offered by Shiri Pasternak who foregrounds the totality that shapes the “internal dispute” over authority within the Algonquin community (2017, 172). First, Pasternak locates the replacement of the Algonquin customary governance in the long-standing aims of the Canadian state to substitute Indigenous political authority with a subordinate elected municipal system (161–2). This is a material instance of the state’s desire to permit only pacific forms of difference within an overarching totality. Second, Pasternak thinks the motive for pacification that drives Quebec and its logging companies is rooted in their dependence on Indigenous peoples’ land for revenue and profit (174), as well as in the federal government’s concern to protect the so-called “comprehensive” land claim policy as an answer to Indigenous peoples’ concerns. Whereas the Trilateral Agreement model involved co-management to ensure the protection of the Algonquin form of life along with modest resource revenue sharing, the comprehensive land claims model requires the extinguishment of around 95 percent of Indigenous peoples’ territory in exchange for “certainty” about their remaining rights (5, 29, 173, 185). Once again we see how dependence produces antagonism.

It is one thing for Borrows’ analysis of civil (dis)obedience and the totality to fall short in an example where he thinks direct action failed. We think that some of his accounts of more successful civil (dis)obedience are also insufficient because he misses how the democratic space that is opened remains highly circumscribed. This indicates the necessity of totality thinking for his own aims of achieving free interdependence.

Take the case of the Mi’kmaq community at Burnt Church, New Brunswick (Borrows 2016, 78–84). Violence and direct action were carried out by settlers and the Mi’kmaq beginning in 1999 in response to the Supreme Court’s Marshall decision that upheld Mi’kmaq treaty rights to fish and earn a moderate living. Four years passed before state responses to the decision were implemented. These came primarily in the form of 21 commercial fishing licenses and money for the development of Mi’kmaq fisheries. In return, the band agreed to operate according to the authority of Fisheries and Oceans Canada. Borrows recounts how “most prominent leaders” in the struggle portrayed the deal as a “sell-out” because “it did not recognize Mi’kmaq sovereignty and traditional values” (78). Borrows’ response to the conflict demonstrates his relative neglect toward structural concerns or to reading the role of the totality. “[T]he community seems to have eventually prioritized specific economic development agreements with Canada over broader explicit anti-colonial objectives. The wider group’s decision to settle for immediate physical benefits as opposed to ‘holding out’ for more structural change demonstrates the difficulties encountered in securing more abstract metaphysical victories through direct action and civil (dis)obedience” (79).

We do not see why Borrows prefers to impugn civil (dis)obedience or so-called metaphysical victories rather than the colonial powers who oppose Indigenous sovereignty or the redistribution of resources. Nor do we agree with his suggestion that critiques of Indigenous engagement with the state and negotiations with corporations necessarily rely on “theoretically pure conceptions of Indigeneity or ‘Indianness’” (103). It is, of course, all too easy to regard participating in capitalist economic development as a departure from essential Indigenous traditions rooted in pre-colonial forms of life, as if they ought to stay frozen in time. A convincing alternative, one that Borrows’ account helps make visible, is to argue that participating in capitalism constrains Indigenous freedom by alienating the relational form—freedom with others—that Borrows himself sees as “essential” to Anishinaabe people. While it is scarcely our intention to deny the necessity of redistributive measures for Indigenous peoples—and many others—who struggle to exist within settler colonial capitalism, our point is to draw attention to how this totality circumscribes the realization of freedom by subordinating traditions and sovereignty to the imperative of capitalist accumulation. Indeed, both Nancy Fraser (2003, 72–8) and Coulthard (2014, 34–5, 52) have argued for a distinction between “affirmative” and “transformative” models of redistribution that is helpful here. Whereas an affirmative model of redistribution entails accommodations within the totality, “…‘transformative’ models of redistribution are those that seek to correct unjust distributions of power and resources at their source; that is, they not only seek to alter ‘the content of current modes of domination and exploitation, but also the forms that give rise to them’” (Coulthard 2014, 52; quoting Day 2005, 4). A critique of redistribution—whether negotiated with the state or directly with corporations—is not necessarily grounded in an “essentialist” concern that freezes Indigeneity, nor in an ontological endorsement of independence over interdependence (see also Borrows and Tully 2018). Borrows misses the substance of the critique: that a form of redistribution might be challenged because it is de-politicizing, especially if it eschews questions of production and sovereignty and thereby maintains a dependent relationship and ignores how capitalism violates the ethical imperatives of Indigenous forms of life as Coulthard maintains. Borrows may regard this clarification as remaining overly concerned about the nature of a totality that is fundamentally capitalist, and therefore at odds with his method of physical philosophy. But that position risks depoliticizing our unfree forms of social interdependence, making it easier for unfreedom to persist.

In sum, compared to the “abstract metaphysics” and “fictitious certainty” of the structural turn, Borrows prefers his physical philosophy on the grounds that it is “more responsive to contextual political realities” (55). He thinks that a structural approach functions to obstruct his vision of decolonization as a free form of interdependence. By challenging the dichotomy between experience and totality and examining his claims more closely; however, we have shown how the experiences described in two of his cases disclose the reality of the totality identified by Simpson and Coulthard and recounted above. We see the persistence of an unfree form of interdependence in precisely the way Coulthard describes: accommodations must fit within the overarching imperatives of the totality and its settler colonial features. With this we are also reminded of Adorno’s remark about how an abstraction such as totality is experienced in those moments of counter-resistance to the attempts to institute practical, concrete reforms.

Totality and political struggle

In this essay, we have drawn attention to the return of totality thinking while distinguishing it from the structural turn by attending to Indigenous movements and theories against settler colonialism. We have argued that totality thinking includes not only specific concrete experiences but also that it possesses a major advantage (compared to Borrows’ approach) which allows us to identify the persistence of a totality that relies on settler colonialism as an unfree form of interdependence. Importantly, this whole is marked by moments of discontinuity that are registered by the very Indigenous political movements and intellectual traditions that the totality seeks to re-absorb. To ignore settler colonialism’s place in the totality is to ignore the persistence of unfree forms of interdependence and the challenges that a decolonial politics faces, such as overcoming how state sovereignty and transnational market imperatives subordinate Indigenous forms of life. As we argued at the outset, the purpose of this reconstruction is to think with Indigenous movements for the ends of decolonization. When it comes to the politics of decolonization, identifying a totality is the first step towards politicizing it. Above, we have joined Indigenous movements in their politicization of forms of interdependence such as redistribution, economic development, and certain kinds of shared decision-making, specifically when such forms separate out questions of political authority and freedom or do not deal with them adequately.

Deploying a concept of totality to theorize the problem of settler colonial domination is only one step in the politics of decolonization. After all, one of the concerns with totality thinking is that it cannot imagine possibilities of resistance and agency—that totality is too totalizing a concept. This concern treats the description of an existing totality simultaneously as its source, as if mentioning the word is what conjures the real thing. To combat this charge, our reconstruction of totality emphasized moments of discontinuity and resistance. Still, a question lingers: while keeping in mind the non-identity between theory and practice, what does the concept of totality offer the politics of decolonization beyond identification and politicization?

We first want to stress the inadequacy of two opposed ways of thinking about—and therefore organizing—politics. For decades, the prospects of a politics based on abstract universality has been rightly derided because categories such as “worker” or “woman” are too often insensitive to the complexities of identity and the details of local lived conditions. The extreme alternative has been to treat identity and lived conditions as particular and hyper-local; the cliché that “all politics is local” became for many a sign that “any effective politics is exclusively local,” one which lost the pertinent regard for how all local politics is also a politics of the totality. Recognizing the need to think with and beyond the particular and the local is scarcely new. Indeed, one of the great strengths of Borrows approach is his refusal to particularize Indigenous peoples’ claims. One of his concerns with structural critique and the politics of resurgence is that it sometimes appears to him as a politics of separation. Nevertheless, there are different ways to think with and beyond the particular and the local.

In the context of settler colonialism, Métis Socialist Howard Adams recognized the need to think beyond both the local and the national almost half a century ago.

One of the characteristics of oppressive cultural action that is almost never recognized is the emphasis on a local view of problems rather than on seeing them as parts of a larger whole… The more isolated and individualized people are, the easier it is to keep them divided. Intensifying the local and individual way of life of the oppressed hinders the colonized in perceiving reality critically, and keeps them isolated from the common problems of oppressed people in all Third World areas ([1975] 1989, 154–5).

And as the politics of difference was displacing theories of totality, Himani Bannerji (1995) insisted on the particular and local as a starting point, one that must continue on to an analysis of the whole (66–7). Without a conception of the whole, “we can’t ‘see’ the overall social relations and common sense which organize” experience—in Bannerji’s case, the sexist racist experiences of non-white women (71). As for political struggle, without an account of the whole, “it becomes difficult to keep other oppressions in sight, or to think beyond our own advancement” and so “the task of overall change, that of re-organizing social relations of inequality as a whole, becomes peripheral to the main project” (71).

The inadequacies of abstract universalism and hyper-localism demand that we name an alternative. We suggest “immanent universalism” to capture the following features of a politics of totality: the familiar experience of identity and political organizing as local phenomena; the act of locating local phenomena within the framework of the totality, which is the companion task of marking how the totality shows up materially, such as in the cases we discussed through Borrows; and finally political organizing primarily from below, rooted in “the full scope of everyday life” (Singh 2014, 59) and reflected universally insofar as people possess shared fates and political interests in relation to the totality in which we all live. To provide a concrete example of this dynamic, the political aim of decolonization amounts to a shared fate for all who aspire to overcome settler colonialism; at the same time, such an overcoming would reconstruct people’s everyday lives differently, depending on their social positions under the current totality. We have no intention of ignoring the rich differences between people, but nor do we see these as unsurmountable obstacles to political action. As Cinzia Arruzza rightly observes, our entanglement in the totality means that “insofar as the capitalist world is a ‘world’ rather than a contingent patchwork of disjointed fragments, the notion of universality cannot be evicted from a transformative politics” (2017, 848). The totality forms the basis for counter-hegemonic articulations which aspire to transform the differently experienced constraints it imposes.

We would be remiss not to acknowledge that immanent universality is far from a conceptual panacea capable of charting a short path to transformative political practice. We acknowledge Adorno’s worry “that every citizen of the wrong world would find the right one unbearable” because we are “too impaired for it” (1973, 352). But this seems far less true of those people he recognizes as possessing the “driving desire” for a totality rooted in freedom rather than domination. Returning to the politics of reconciliation that we began with, we can see a glimpse of both this impairment and this desire for universal emancipation in the intervention of Métis scholar and activist Chelsea Vowel (2020). As blockades were erected across Canada in solidarity with Unist’ot’en land defenders, they were criticized as threatening non-Indigenous people’s well-being and safety. Vowel contests the purported harm blockades enact, contextualizing the charge in the racist trope of the “savage” threat, while recounting the specific threats to well-being and safety faced by Indigenous peoples in particular. Importantly, Vowel does not dismiss concerns of well-being and safety voiced by non-Indigenous people but redirects them to their proper source: state attacks on labor rights and education, the environmental consequences of extractive capitalism, housing costs, and precarious employment. In so doing, Vowel both names the impairment—settler disempowerment—that leads to identification with the colonial totality contra Indigenous peoples; and she gestures to how joining up with the particular struggles of Indigenous peoples to overcome settler colonialism can contribute to the reconstruction of non-Indigenous lives in an emancipatory direction. Vowel’s achievement here is to illustrate the kinds of sources of solidarity that Adams and Bannerji seek out in the context of totality thinking. And even though Vowel focusses on solidarity within the contested nation-state of Canada, a politics of immanent universalism is not bound by national borders. Immanent universalisms asks one to locate local phenomena in the framework of the totality. In this case, attacks on labor rights, austerity, rampant extractivism, and precariousness would have to be further located in the framework of the international state system and the global market. This is what makes universalism immanent.

Conclusion

The revival of totality thinking is supported by the fact that even though it became marginalized once the heyday of Western Marxism passed, it did not disappear. Political developments have given an urgency to totality thinking that it seemed to have lost, even though the associated theoretical positions could, we think, have helped to make sense of politics all along. The four provisos that we articulated—how a totality can be represented; its unavoidable association with experience and interpretation; its incomplete and negative nature; and its distinction from structure—articulate the main theoretical features of totality thinking. Theorizing the specific social formations that belong to the present totality led us to a discussion of Indigenous Critical Theory and settler colonialism. Scholarship by Leanne Simpson and Glen Coulthard, among others, contributes implicitly and explicitly to the project of grasping the material consequences of settler colonialism as part of the totality. We continued exploring these consequences by engaging with John Borrows’ approach to understanding instances of Indigenous civil (dis)obedience when confronted by relations of unfree interdependence with the colonial state (Canada and its provinces in these examples). We challenged his position that Indigenous experiences of unfree interdependence are separate from concerns regarding the totality, and similarly his claim that challenging unfree relations does not profit from engaging with the totality. In both instances we think we demonstrated otherwise.

Our final section on totality and political struggle reconnected with the observation we made in the opening. Our time is characterized by a plurality of movements—Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, Extinction Rebellion, Occupy Wall Street, and Indigenous movements against settler colonialism—that identify the limits of explaining capitalist, racist, patriarchal, ecological, and colonial injustices on a case-by-case basis. This alerts us to how a totality is marked by multiple moments of discontinuity that are sites for increased politicization. While these movements are all unsatisfied with case-by-case analyses, it is a live question on whether issue-by-issue approaches are satisfying. Amidst the resonances and the conflicts between these movements, the significance of totality thinking for political struggle emerges. Totality thinking can help articulate these movements of discontinuity by mobilizing their critiques against shared but differently experienced forms of unfree interdependence, experiences that may feel local but are as transnational in scope as the totality itself. Our point here is straightforward: totality thinking and what we described as immanent universalism helps to disclose the unity-in-separation of social struggles that forms a basis for counter-hegemonic solidarity. This alone is far from capturing all that totality thinking enables, but if it were, its justification would be equally secure.