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The Identity in Question
First published in 1996. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
- GenresPhilosophy
310 pages, Hardcover
First published October 24, 1995
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January 9, 2025
“Here is S. P. Mohanty, taking up an argument made by Cornel West against a notion of separate canons, of new canons entirely replacing old:
How do we negotiate between my history and yours? How would it be possible for us to recover our commonality, not the ambiguous imperial-humanist myth of our shared human attributes, which are supposed to distinguish us from animals, but, more significantly, the imbrication of our various pasts and presents, the ineluctable relationships of shared and contested meanings, values, and material resources? It is necessary to assert our dense particularities, our lived and imagined differences; but could we afford to leave untheorized the question of how our differences are intertwined and, indeed, hierarchically organized? Could we, in other words afford to have entirely different histories, to see ourselves as living and having lived in entirely heterogenous and discrete spaces?”
-Joan W. Scott
“The alternative, to treat identity as the unstable, never-secured effect of a process of enunciation of cultural difference, is often dismissed as impractical for pedagogy and political mobilization. But, as Denise Riley has persuasively argued, except for the "catastrophic loss of grace in the wording," it makes far more sense for feminist politics to have Sojourner Truth ask
"Ain't I a fluctuating identity?" and thereby recognize both the dangers and benefits of the collective consolidation implied in the category "women.' In a similar way, it makes more sense to teach our students and tell ourselves that identities are historically conferred, that this conferral is ambiguous (though it works precisely and necessarily by imposing a false clarity), that subjects are produced through multiple identifications, some of which become politically salient for a time in certain contexts, and that the project of history is not to reify identity but to understand its production as an ongoing process of differentiation, relentless in its repetition, but also— and this seems to me the important political point-subject to redefinition, resistance and change. Such an outlook might also call for a more complicated strategy than organizing political campaigns around identity groups (conceived in pluralist terms), and that, in the current context in this country at least, might be all to the good.”
-Joan W. Scott
“I'm not quite sure I like the terms radical and conservative for the Left. Of course, you can always speak in that way, but I think the basic problem with the Left is not that it is conservative, but that there is a complete lack of any idea of what politics is about. This is something that is true in the case of Duke, as it is for the followers of Le Pen in France. Because in fact people have been saying, "Look, there is a democratic impulse behind those movements." I wouldn't go so far as to say that. But clearly those people are saying that democracy doesn't work, that "Nobody has asked us to participate." So this is a phenomenon which is not particular to America, but is a basic crisis of liberal democratic societies. And one of the reasons that the Left is not able to understand this, and doesn't know how to provide an alternative to it, is that for a long time the Left has identified liberal or pluralist democracy with capitalism. The result is that here in America, particularly, you can't defend liberalism or pluralism. The issue, how-ever, is that we must distinguish between a pluralist democracy as a political form of society and capitalism. And by the way, we are now seeing how this distinction works, because of the effect it has in Eastern Europe, where they say, "We want pluralist democracy even if we have to buy capitalism with it."
Because we've been insisting that those things go together, we wanted to get rid of the whole package. But in this moment it is important to say that we are fighting for the principles of liberal, pluralist democracy, because I don't think there is anything more radical than liberty and equality for all. The problem is that those ideas are not put into practice in those societies which call themselves "liberal demo-cratic." It's for that reason that the Left has said liberalism is a sham, is pure ideology, and we must construct a society that will really be democratic. But the way in which radical democracy is understood in our work is to radicalize the ideas of liberty and equality, to extend them to more and more areas of social life.”
-Chantal mouse
“I call demystificatory criticism "prophetic criticism"- the approach appropriate for the new cultural politics of difference because while it begins with social structural analyses it also makes explicit its moral and political aims.”
-Cornel west
“In its emergence as a protest ages attached to its own exclusion, bon, politicized identity thus becomes attached to its own exclusion, boch because it is premised on this exclusion for its very existence as identity, and because the formation of identity at the site of exclusion, as exclusion, augments or "alters the direction of the suffering" entailed in subordination or marginalization, by finding a site of blame for it. But in so doing, it installs its pain over its unredeemed history in the very foundation of its political claim, in its demand for recognition as identity. In locating a site of blame for its powerlessness over its past, as a past of injury, a past as a hurt will, and locating a "reason" for the "unendurable pain" of social powerlessness in the present, it converts this reasoning into an ethicizing politics, a politics of recrimination that seeks to avenge the hurt even while it reaffirms it, discursively codifies it. Politicized identity thus enunciates itself, makes claims for itself, only by entrenching, restating, dramatizing, and inscribing its pain in politics, and can hold out no future—for itself or others-which triumphs over this pain. The loss of historical direction, and with it the loss of futurity characteristic of the late-modern age, is thus homologically refig-ured in the structure of desire of the dominant political expression of the age—identity politics. In the same way, the generalized political impotence produced by the ubiquitous yet discontinuous networks of late-modern political and economic power is reiterated in the investments of late-modern democracy's primary oppositional political formations.
What might be entailed in transforming these investments in an effort to fashion a more radically democratic and emancipatory political culture?
One avenue of exploration may lie in Nietzsche's counsel on the virtues of
"forgetting," for if identity structured in part by ressentiment resubjugates itself through its investment in its own pain, through its refusal to make itself in the present, memory is the house of this activity and this refusal.
Yet erased histories and historical invisibility are themselves such integral elements of the pain inscribed in most subjugated identities that the counsel of forgetting, at least in its unreconstructed Nietzschean form, seems inappropriate, if not cruel. 38 Indeed, it is also possible that we have reached a pass where we ought to part with Nietzsche, whose skills as diagnostician usually reach the limits of their political efficacy in his privileging of individual character and capacity over the transformative possibilities of collective political invention, in his remove from the refigurative possibilities of political conversation or transformative cultural practices. For if I am right about the problematic of pain installed at the heart of many contemporary contradictory demands for political recognition, all that such pain may long for more than revenge is the chance to be heard into a certain reprieve, recognized into self-overcoming, incited into possibilities for triumphing over, and hence, losing, itself. Our challenge, then, would be to configure a radically democratic political culture which can sustain such a project in its midst without being overtaken by it, a challenge which includes guarding against abetting the steady slide of political into therapeutic discourse, even as we acknowledge the elements of suffering and healing we might be nego-tiating.
What if it were possible to incite a slight shift in the character of political expression and political claims common to much politicized identity?
What if we sought to supplant the language of "I am" —with its defensive closure on identity, its insistence on the fixity of position, its equation of social with moral positioning —with the language of "I want?" What if we were to rehabilitate the memory of desire within identificatory processes, the moment in desire—either "to have" or "to be" —prior to its wound-ing??? What if "wanting to be" or "wanting to have" were taken up as modes of political speech that could destabilize the formulation of identity as fixed position, as entrenchment by history, and as having necessary moral entailments, even as they affirm "position" and "history" as that which makes the speaking subject intelligible and locatable, as that which contributes to a hermeneutics for adjudicating desires? If every "I am" is something of a resolution of desire into fixed and sovereign identity, then this project might involve not only learning to speak but to read "I am" this way, as in motion, as temporal, as not-2, as deconstructable according to a genealogy of want rather than as fixed interests or experiences 4O The subject understood as an effect of an (ongoing) genealogy of desire, including the social processes constitutive of, fulfilling or frustrating desire, is in this way revealed as neither sovereign nor conclusive, even as it is affirmed as an "I." In short, if framed in the right political language, this deconstruction could be that which reopens a language and practice of futurity where Nietzche saw it foreclosed by the logics of rancor and ressentiment.
Such a slight shift in the character of the political discourse of identity eschews the kinds of ahistorical or utopian turns against identity politics made by a nostalgic and broken humanist Left, as well as the reactionary and disingenuous assaults on politicized identity tendered by the Right.
Rather than opposing or seeking to transcend identity investments, the replacement— even the admixture—of the language of "being" with "want-ing" would seek to exploit politically a recovery of the more expansive moments in the genealogy of identity formation, a recovery of the moment prior to its own foreclosure against its want, prior to the point at which its sovereign subjectivity is established through such foreclosure and through eternal repetition of its pain. How might democratic discourse itself be invigorated by such a shift from ontological claims to these kinds of more expressly political ones, claims which, rather than dispensing blame for an unlivable present, inhabited the necessarily agonistic theater of discursively forging an alternative future?”
-Wendy Brown
“So what I'm calling for is not the surpassing of particularity, but rather a double movement: the insistence on identity and the subjection of identity-terms to a contestation in which the exclusionary procedures by which those identity-terms are produced are called into question. This seems to me to be the necessary and contingent place of identity within a radical democratic culture.”
-Judith butler
“I come into social being, but because a certain attachment to my existence is to be assumed, a certain narcissism takes hold of any term that confers existence, I am led to embrace the terms that injure me, precisely because they constitute me socially. One might understand the self-colo-nizing trajectory of certain forms of identity politics as symptomatic of this paradoxical embrace of the injurious term. As a further paradox, then, it is only by occupying—being occupied by—that injurious term that I become enabled to resist and oppose that term, and the power that constitutes me is recast as the power I oppose. In this way, a certain place for psychoanalysis is secured, in the sense that any mobilization against subjection will take subjection itself as its resource, and that an attachment to an injurious inter-pellation by way of a necessarily alienated narcissism will become the condition by which a resignification of that interpellation becomes possible.
This will not be an unconscious outside power, but rather something like the unconscious of power itself, in its traumatic and productive iterability.
If, then, we understand certain kinds of interpellations to be identity-conferring, then those injurious interpellations will constitute identity through injury. This is not the same as saying that such an identity will remain always and forever rooted in its injury as long as it remains an iden-tity, but it does imply that the possibilities of resignification will rework and unsettle that passionate attachment to subjection without which sub-ject-formation-and reformation-cannot succeed.”
-Judith Butler
“Still, conflict, alienation, reuni-fication, what used to be called the inauthentic, have to be given their due; nothing truly interesting is possible without negativity; error or ideology, false appearance, are also objective facts that have to be reckoned back into truth; the standardization of consumption is like a sound barrier which confronts the euphorias of populism as a fact of life and a physical law at the upper reaches of the spectrum.”
-Fredric Jameson
How do we negotiate between my history and yours? How would it be possible for us to recover our commonality, not the ambiguous imperial-humanist myth of our shared human attributes, which are supposed to distinguish us from animals, but, more significantly, the imbrication of our various pasts and presents, the ineluctable relationships of shared and contested meanings, values, and material resources? It is necessary to assert our dense particularities, our lived and imagined differences; but could we afford to leave untheorized the question of how our differences are intertwined and, indeed, hierarchically organized? Could we, in other words afford to have entirely different histories, to see ourselves as living and having lived in entirely heterogenous and discrete spaces?”
-Joan W. Scott
“The alternative, to treat identity as the unstable, never-secured effect of a process of enunciation of cultural difference, is often dismissed as impractical for pedagogy and political mobilization. But, as Denise Riley has persuasively argued, except for the "catastrophic loss of grace in the wording," it makes far more sense for feminist politics to have Sojourner Truth ask
"Ain't I a fluctuating identity?" and thereby recognize both the dangers and benefits of the collective consolidation implied in the category "women.' In a similar way, it makes more sense to teach our students and tell ourselves that identities are historically conferred, that this conferral is ambiguous (though it works precisely and necessarily by imposing a false clarity), that subjects are produced through multiple identifications, some of which become politically salient for a time in certain contexts, and that the project of history is not to reify identity but to understand its production as an ongoing process of differentiation, relentless in its repetition, but also— and this seems to me the important political point-subject to redefinition, resistance and change. Such an outlook might also call for a more complicated strategy than organizing political campaigns around identity groups (conceived in pluralist terms), and that, in the current context in this country at least, might be all to the good.”
-Joan W. Scott
“I'm not quite sure I like the terms radical and conservative for the Left. Of course, you can always speak in that way, but I think the basic problem with the Left is not that it is conservative, but that there is a complete lack of any idea of what politics is about. This is something that is true in the case of Duke, as it is for the followers of Le Pen in France. Because in fact people have been saying, "Look, there is a democratic impulse behind those movements." I wouldn't go so far as to say that. But clearly those people are saying that democracy doesn't work, that "Nobody has asked us to participate." So this is a phenomenon which is not particular to America, but is a basic crisis of liberal democratic societies. And one of the reasons that the Left is not able to understand this, and doesn't know how to provide an alternative to it, is that for a long time the Left has identified liberal or pluralist democracy with capitalism. The result is that here in America, particularly, you can't defend liberalism or pluralism. The issue, how-ever, is that we must distinguish between a pluralist democracy as a political form of society and capitalism. And by the way, we are now seeing how this distinction works, because of the effect it has in Eastern Europe, where they say, "We want pluralist democracy even if we have to buy capitalism with it."
Because we've been insisting that those things go together, we wanted to get rid of the whole package. But in this moment it is important to say that we are fighting for the principles of liberal, pluralist democracy, because I don't think there is anything more radical than liberty and equality for all. The problem is that those ideas are not put into practice in those societies which call themselves "liberal demo-cratic." It's for that reason that the Left has said liberalism is a sham, is pure ideology, and we must construct a society that will really be democratic. But the way in which radical democracy is understood in our work is to radicalize the ideas of liberty and equality, to extend them to more and more areas of social life.”
-Chantal mouse
“I call demystificatory criticism "prophetic criticism"- the approach appropriate for the new cultural politics of difference because while it begins with social structural analyses it also makes explicit its moral and political aims.”
-Cornel west
“In its emergence as a protest ages attached to its own exclusion, bon, politicized identity thus becomes attached to its own exclusion, boch because it is premised on this exclusion for its very existence as identity, and because the formation of identity at the site of exclusion, as exclusion, augments or "alters the direction of the suffering" entailed in subordination or marginalization, by finding a site of blame for it. But in so doing, it installs its pain over its unredeemed history in the very foundation of its political claim, in its demand for recognition as identity. In locating a site of blame for its powerlessness over its past, as a past of injury, a past as a hurt will, and locating a "reason" for the "unendurable pain" of social powerlessness in the present, it converts this reasoning into an ethicizing politics, a politics of recrimination that seeks to avenge the hurt even while it reaffirms it, discursively codifies it. Politicized identity thus enunciates itself, makes claims for itself, only by entrenching, restating, dramatizing, and inscribing its pain in politics, and can hold out no future—for itself or others-which triumphs over this pain. The loss of historical direction, and with it the loss of futurity characteristic of the late-modern age, is thus homologically refig-ured in the structure of desire of the dominant political expression of the age—identity politics. In the same way, the generalized political impotence produced by the ubiquitous yet discontinuous networks of late-modern political and economic power is reiterated in the investments of late-modern democracy's primary oppositional political formations.
What might be entailed in transforming these investments in an effort to fashion a more radically democratic and emancipatory political culture?
One avenue of exploration may lie in Nietzsche's counsel on the virtues of
"forgetting," for if identity structured in part by ressentiment resubjugates itself through its investment in its own pain, through its refusal to make itself in the present, memory is the house of this activity and this refusal.
Yet erased histories and historical invisibility are themselves such integral elements of the pain inscribed in most subjugated identities that the counsel of forgetting, at least in its unreconstructed Nietzschean form, seems inappropriate, if not cruel. 38 Indeed, it is also possible that we have reached a pass where we ought to part with Nietzsche, whose skills as diagnostician usually reach the limits of their political efficacy in his privileging of individual character and capacity over the transformative possibilities of collective political invention, in his remove from the refigurative possibilities of political conversation or transformative cultural practices. For if I am right about the problematic of pain installed at the heart of many contemporary contradictory demands for political recognition, all that such pain may long for more than revenge is the chance to be heard into a certain reprieve, recognized into self-overcoming, incited into possibilities for triumphing over, and hence, losing, itself. Our challenge, then, would be to configure a radically democratic political culture which can sustain such a project in its midst without being overtaken by it, a challenge which includes guarding against abetting the steady slide of political into therapeutic discourse, even as we acknowledge the elements of suffering and healing we might be nego-tiating.
What if it were possible to incite a slight shift in the character of political expression and political claims common to much politicized identity?
What if we sought to supplant the language of "I am" —with its defensive closure on identity, its insistence on the fixity of position, its equation of social with moral positioning —with the language of "I want?" What if we were to rehabilitate the memory of desire within identificatory processes, the moment in desire—either "to have" or "to be" —prior to its wound-ing??? What if "wanting to be" or "wanting to have" were taken up as modes of political speech that could destabilize the formulation of identity as fixed position, as entrenchment by history, and as having necessary moral entailments, even as they affirm "position" and "history" as that which makes the speaking subject intelligible and locatable, as that which contributes to a hermeneutics for adjudicating desires? If every "I am" is something of a resolution of desire into fixed and sovereign identity, then this project might involve not only learning to speak but to read "I am" this way, as in motion, as temporal, as not-2, as deconstructable according to a genealogy of want rather than as fixed interests or experiences 4O The subject understood as an effect of an (ongoing) genealogy of desire, including the social processes constitutive of, fulfilling or frustrating desire, is in this way revealed as neither sovereign nor conclusive, even as it is affirmed as an "I." In short, if framed in the right political language, this deconstruction could be that which reopens a language and practice of futurity where Nietzche saw it foreclosed by the logics of rancor and ressentiment.
Such a slight shift in the character of the political discourse of identity eschews the kinds of ahistorical or utopian turns against identity politics made by a nostalgic and broken humanist Left, as well as the reactionary and disingenuous assaults on politicized identity tendered by the Right.
Rather than opposing or seeking to transcend identity investments, the replacement— even the admixture—of the language of "being" with "want-ing" would seek to exploit politically a recovery of the more expansive moments in the genealogy of identity formation, a recovery of the moment prior to its own foreclosure against its want, prior to the point at which its sovereign subjectivity is established through such foreclosure and through eternal repetition of its pain. How might democratic discourse itself be invigorated by such a shift from ontological claims to these kinds of more expressly political ones, claims which, rather than dispensing blame for an unlivable present, inhabited the necessarily agonistic theater of discursively forging an alternative future?”
-Wendy Brown
“So what I'm calling for is not the surpassing of particularity, but rather a double movement: the insistence on identity and the subjection of identity-terms to a contestation in which the exclusionary procedures by which those identity-terms are produced are called into question. This seems to me to be the necessary and contingent place of identity within a radical democratic culture.”
-Judith butler
“I come into social being, but because a certain attachment to my existence is to be assumed, a certain narcissism takes hold of any term that confers existence, I am led to embrace the terms that injure me, precisely because they constitute me socially. One might understand the self-colo-nizing trajectory of certain forms of identity politics as symptomatic of this paradoxical embrace of the injurious term. As a further paradox, then, it is only by occupying—being occupied by—that injurious term that I become enabled to resist and oppose that term, and the power that constitutes me is recast as the power I oppose. In this way, a certain place for psychoanalysis is secured, in the sense that any mobilization against subjection will take subjection itself as its resource, and that an attachment to an injurious inter-pellation by way of a necessarily alienated narcissism will become the condition by which a resignification of that interpellation becomes possible.
This will not be an unconscious outside power, but rather something like the unconscious of power itself, in its traumatic and productive iterability.
If, then, we understand certain kinds of interpellations to be identity-conferring, then those injurious interpellations will constitute identity through injury. This is not the same as saying that such an identity will remain always and forever rooted in its injury as long as it remains an iden-tity, but it does imply that the possibilities of resignification will rework and unsettle that passionate attachment to subjection without which sub-ject-formation-and reformation-cannot succeed.”
-Judith Butler
“Still, conflict, alienation, reuni-fication, what used to be called the inauthentic, have to be given their due; nothing truly interesting is possible without negativity; error or ideology, false appearance, are also objective facts that have to be reckoned back into truth; the standardization of consumption is like a sound barrier which confronts the euphorias of populism as a fact of life and a physical law at the upper reaches of the spectrum.”
-Fredric Jameson
Read
September 29, 2014This is a very interesting book to read in and of itself. It is also a interesting book because it appears to capture, and even direct much of the discussion on identity from the early 90s and onward, much because of the influence of many of the contributors in the years following on from 91 (when the conference was) and 95 (when the book was published).
I am predominantly interested in Judith Butler for my research so I read her article with most care. However, I must say that there are wuite a few interesting papers in the book. Cornel West's first paper has a very interesting focus on recognition. I suspect that Butler must have become somewhat influenced by the emphasis on recognition in the conference and when reading the papers in the book. It is of course impossible to know (unless one asks her), but up until about 95 Butler writes very much about performativity and abject and leans very much towards an identity of difference. She doesn't completely move away from that after 95, but there appears to be a shift of emphasis in that post 95 her books is much about interpellation as forming the subject and the desire for recognition becomes essential.
This was my first encounter with Mouffe and Laclau. They have some interesting chapters in the book on politics and identity and on universalism. The latter is Laclau's subject. And if I recall correctly he is not completely ready to take leave of a concept of universalism just yet. Or maybe that was Stanley Aronowitz, or both (I don't have the book next to me at the moment of writing).
Anyway, this is pretty much a specialist book and I suppose not that many people will find it since it is about 20 years old now. Having said that, the chapters are rather accessible and there are many contributors that still have great influence.
I am predominantly interested in Judith Butler for my research so I read her article with most care. However, I must say that there are wuite a few interesting papers in the book. Cornel West's first paper has a very interesting focus on recognition. I suspect that Butler must have become somewhat influenced by the emphasis on recognition in the conference and when reading the papers in the book. It is of course impossible to know (unless one asks her), but up until about 95 Butler writes very much about performativity and abject and leans very much towards an identity of difference. She doesn't completely move away from that after 95, but there appears to be a shift of emphasis in that post 95 her books is much about interpellation as forming the subject and the desire for recognition becomes essential.
This was my first encounter with Mouffe and Laclau. They have some interesting chapters in the book on politics and identity and on universalism. The latter is Laclau's subject. And if I recall correctly he is not completely ready to take leave of a concept of universalism just yet. Or maybe that was Stanley Aronowitz, or both (I don't have the book next to me at the moment of writing).
Anyway, this is pretty much a specialist book and I suppose not that many people will find it since it is about 20 years old now. Having said that, the chapters are rather accessible and there are many contributors that still have great influence.
December 2, 2014
Papers submitted for symposium in New York, 1991. "Diversity" is a new term. Early, interesting discussions of multiculturalism and identity, with, amongst others, Cornel West, Joan Scott, Judith Butler, Homi K. Bhabha who discussed Toni Morrison, Sonia Sanchez, Derek Walcott. Cornel West talks about need to address the body and access to securities in any discussion about identity. Q&A significant part of text. Includes someone asking why there are no women of color on this panel about multiculturalism. Why aren't bell hooks, Michelle Wallace, Gloria Anzaldua up here speaking, "they are a train distance from this conference." She added, "there are no voices of women of color. None of the speakers recognizes his or her power position." Think now of Mia McKenzie, her work with BGD http://www.blackgirldangerous.org/.
August 7, 2013
A good book on Identity and Cultural study.
January 21, 2016
Some of these essays are definitely going to help with my introduction to my thesis...
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews