If Not Identity Politics, Then What?
During a recent public round table discussion, I was dismayed when a particularly well spoken civil rights activist made the claim that 'all politics is identity politics'. The problem wasn't that he was wrong. He was in fact quite right about that. The problem was what the statement was meant to imply. Now, people like to complain alot about 'identity politics'. Most people don't really understand what it is, and as a result and precisely because they don't, alot of people also have no idea what counts as an alternative to identity politics. That is: if not identity politics, then what? What other kind of politics is there?
Now, the civil rights activist's point was quite simple: all politics has an effect on the identity of those involved, therefore, all politics is identity politics. This is, in some sense undeniable. But here's the issue: this doesn't mean that identity politics exhausts what politics can involve. All politics is identity politics, but all politics isn't just identity politics. It's like how all humans have noses, but that doesn't mean that humanity is defined by their noses. So again, how do we cash this out? If not identity politics, then what? As examples of 'what else', we can consider two approaches to politics that are not immediately oriented to questions of identity: (1) Distributive politics; and (2) Participatory politics.
Let's begin with distributive politics. Distributive politics involves how societal goods are allocated in society. Societal goods might include: access to means of justice (courts, lawyers, legal information), availability of education (schools, libraries, funding for schools), ease of access to 'life-goods' like housing, electricity, water, food, and jobs, or else social and geographic means of mobility (transport, infrastructure like roads and highways, fuel), etc. Distributive politics is, in many ways, the most basic aspect of politics. Political fights simply often begin over who has access to what.
Now, just like how identity politics does not exhaust the scope of politics, neither does distributive politics. The main critique of distributive politics is that it doesn't put into question who is doing the distributing. Both democratic and fascist societies concern themselves with the distribution of goods. However, making it a question of who does the distributing, is a question of participatory politics. Who 'participates'. Politics at this level involves contests over who has the power of distribution, and how accessible and changeable that power is. A totalitarian state generally 'fixes' who has power here: an unchangeable state. A democratic state allows who has power to change: parties, at its most limited, 'the people', at its most expansive.
Alot of the above is, in many ways, politics 101. But it sometimes takes a little bit of 'back to basics' insofar as there seems to be alot of confusion about what politics can consist in. Neither distributive nor participatory politics exhaust what count as politics either, any more than identity politics. The last thing to add is that none of this implies identity politics is 'bad'. Only that it is one kind of politics among a range of possible political action, and that it is a question of tactics as to when and where it ought to be employed.
Now, the civil rights activist's point was quite simple: all politics has an effect on the identity of those involved, therefore, all politics is identity politics. This is, in some sense undeniable. But here's the issue: this doesn't mean that identity politics exhausts what politics can involve. All politics is identity politics, but all politics isn't just identity politics. It's like how all humans have noses, but that doesn't mean that humanity is defined by their noses. So again, how do we cash this out? If not identity politics, then what? As examples of 'what else', we can consider two approaches to politics that are not immediately oriented to questions of identity: (1) Distributive politics; and (2) Participatory politics.
Let's begin with distributive politics. Distributive politics involves how societal goods are allocated in society. Societal goods might include: access to means of justice (courts, lawyers, legal information), availability of education (schools, libraries, funding for schools), ease of access to 'life-goods' like housing, electricity, water, food, and jobs, or else social and geographic means of mobility (transport, infrastructure like roads and highways, fuel), etc. Distributive politics is, in many ways, the most basic aspect of politics. Political fights simply often begin over who has access to what.
Now, just like how identity politics does not exhaust the scope of politics, neither does distributive politics. The main critique of distributive politics is that it doesn't put into question who is doing the distributing. Both democratic and fascist societies concern themselves with the distribution of goods. However, making it a question of who does the distributing, is a question of participatory politics. Who 'participates'. Politics at this level involves contests over who has the power of distribution, and how accessible and changeable that power is. A totalitarian state generally 'fixes' who has power here: an unchangeable state. A democratic state allows who has power to change: parties, at its most limited, 'the people', at its most expansive.
Alot of the above is, in many ways, politics 101. But it sometimes takes a little bit of 'back to basics' insofar as there seems to be alot of confusion about what politics can consist in. Neither distributive nor participatory politics exhaust what count as politics either, any more than identity politics. The last thing to add is that none of this implies identity politics is 'bad'. Only that it is one kind of politics among a range of possible political action, and that it is a question of tactics as to when and where it ought to be employed.
Comments (201)
Although there can be a kind of politics regarding access in totalitarian states. Russian czars, though ruling an absolute monarchy, were generally power brokers for the aristocracy. In the USSR, the leader was similar to a czar in this way, except instead of aristocracy there were just competing members. Here politics is similar to what we mean by "office politics." It's an on going drama probably most basically fueled by something primal.
Politics is about power. That's why every alien demands to be taken to your leader. One talks to the organ-grinder not the monkey. Power is the fundamental unit of identity. Are you someone, or are you a nobody?
Politics therefore is a corruption of 'societal action', which without coercive power would be inescapably cooperative.
Perhaps, but the converse does not hold.
Quoting unenlightened
But this is naive. All societal action is power bound, and the attempt to say it isn't is just unreflective and unacknowledged wielding of power. Perhaps the most dangerous use of it of all. It's only cults and religions which believe in the unfallen Eden of power-free relations.
"No it isn't", he says naively in an unreflective wielding of power.
There! That's changed everything by sheer puissance and pouvoir!
Except I suspect it hasn't changed anything because it is not a wielding of power. But it is a social action.
And it might therefore change something by means of a cooperative and mutual understanding. Philosophy is not politics, and when it is political it is corrupt. And I don't have to believe in an unfallen Eden or claim to be enlightened to notice corruption.
I wonder if saying that all politics is identity politics is a way of denying fluidity in favor of static identities. That's what an identity essentially is: a super-temporal name for a temporal and so ever changing eddy in the current.
It's a way of denying that we ever make any progeess toward our goals. Do we?
To some degree. Established identity can be a bulwark against harm or unwanted change. To call upon identity is to potentially call upon a very rich texture of histories and culture to shore up a political claim. But that's the danger in it too: it has the effect of binding one to it ever more closely. It's reactive and comes from a position of weakness. This is not a fault, necessarily. The hurt are always in a position of weakness.
Oh come on, man! That's a power play itself, comparing me to fucking Stalin. A power mad ideologue says that he holds a view, and behaves in a totally contradictory way. and that proves the view false. Start making sense and back off with the insults so much.
No. life's too short and I withdraw my cooperation. work it out on your own, or not.
Politics is about force, and which groups get to kill which other groups if they don't obey. So it's always going to be identity politics since there's always a group with the gun.
I suspect what people mean by identity politics when they rail against it is that the groups along which people identify are things like race, gender, etc., rather than class (as leftists would like), nationality (as nationalists would like), religion (as the religious would like), etc.
Sometimes. Even often.
Quoting Snakes Alive
Sometimes this too. But there are plenty of other ways in the politics plays out, as I tried to relate.
I don't see the examples you identify as antithetical to what I said – in the end, it's still about who gets to kill who (or some proxy for it, like imprisonment).
A shallow but increasingly common view of politics I suppose. How depressing.
So yeah, for most people politics is a quasi-natural predicament they're born in ("death and taxes"), or something that consumes them (like a tidal wave). Is the average person a "political actor?" Maybe in the sense that they tend to be complicit, which they can hardly be blamed for.
There's no killing a wealthy black man because he has the same allies a rich white guy has.
Same with women: there's no glass ceiling for a rich Evanka.
Money is power, not guns.
If you're still paying taxes it's because you don't have an accountant who can fenagle you out of it.
Society doesn't run on the threat of violence. If it did, there would be no civilization. Most people are just immersed in doing their thing, whatever that is. Society runs on big dreams.
As for politics as predicament - that's another interesting one. A problem to be solved, rather than a field of life to be negotiated. Of course those who want to 'solve' politics have always been the willing to do the worst.
But then, I don't think all things run because of politics, and this is supposed to be about politics. I don't see what politics there is without guns. If no one's threatening to shoot you, it's not politics. Like this forum – the reason this discussion isn't political is because unenlightened left, since no one could do anything to him.
And you're right that we pay taxes because our accountants can't get us out of it, but you didn't continue the chain of reasoning far enough. Since we don't, then not doing so results in an audit...resisting an audit results in an arrest...resisting an arrest results in being shot.
Oh – my bad!
But why are you shilling for our ideology online, then?
Quoting StreetlightX
I'm not sure any one quality unites the ones willing to do the worst, except maybe that they could.
It's not yours! Jeez. Americans.
Quoting Snakes Alive
No, but a distaste for politics has always been a bad sign of things to come.
In that case money acts as a shield against the power of a gun, so yes, there's power in violence.
It's in politics that the immense power of money shows up. If anything, race, sex, and
sexual orientation are ways to distract the voters so they don't pay attention to the way they're voting against their own interests.
I hate to break it to you, my friend. We're living in your head rent-free, as the kids say.
Quoting StreetlightX
In my own life, I have always found overtly political people to be most repulsive in their personal lives. But maybe that is just anecdote.
In any case, there are always bad (and good) signs of things to come. Maybe the point is to make them less bad (prevent the genocides?) by having everyone be political in the right way – the democratic way, I assume! But then, democracy has never, ever, ever prevented genocide. Ah, but real democracy has never been tried...
If the answer to that is "everyone," I don't get how it would be identity politics.
For example, say that we're trying to figure out how to provide free health care for everyone. How is that identity politics?
A common definition of "identity politics," by the way, courtesy of Oxford, by way of Wikipedia, is "Identity politics is a political approach and analysis based on people prioritizing the concerns most relevant to their particular racial, religious, ethnic, sexual, social, cultural or other identity, and forming exclusive political alliances with others of this group, instead of engaging in more traditional, broad-based party politics."
So this seems like one of those silly "I can make moves to interpret anything as x" games.
I like to think of democracy as qualitative. Most of them, where they exist, are in poor health, getting worse. Some exhibit signs of pathology. What's not been tried are efforts at healthy ones.
Huh? I didn't cite the passage (of mine) you quoted as a question of identity politics.
And that wasn't the idea (I wasn't saying you had suggested that as a definition of identity politics)
If our answer to "who" etc. is "everyone ," then how would it amount to identity politics? (And then for clarification, I cited a common definition of "identity politics" to make it clear that an "everyone" answer wouldn't fit the definition)
I'm not convinced. It's increasingly clear that politics is often thought of in institutional terms. And from the responses here - 'corruption, force to kill' - its understood very badly indeed.
I don't blame you for it, though – the Americans got to you. The good news is, since you aren't one of us, you don't have to believe this nonsense. I think at the end of the day, only an American really believes it anyway...we have to, it's the logic of our empire.
:chin: I didn't say it would 'amount to identity politics'.
Then not all politics is identity politics.
This is fair. I mean, I like to think that I believe in a roughly understood set of societal and institutional arrangements, held together by a certain ethos, mutually perpetuated, but I suppose that's what a fanatic would say. I'm OK with that. As someone somewhere said, if you're not a radical, you're not paying attention.
That's... my point.
He wasn't right. He was wrong.
I know I said otherwise in my previous post, but if I were to give a shot at that "what is politics" question, I would say it's about social structures and our acts to influence them.
I don't know if I could live with that!
I've studied democracy most of my adult life. Political philosophy was my way into philosophy. The notion of it is far richer than what Americans think. If anything, Americans are pretty awful at the whole thing. Europeans are somewhat better, but even then...
Also, a casual acquaintance with anywhere that isn't a democracy helps one realize quite quickly the value of even a very shitty one. It's something of a privilege not to be 'able to live' with what you speak of.
Way to not stereotype.
Yeah. It's one of the reasons I listed - without citing - Raymond Geuss's view of it: politics as a question of who does what to whom for whose benefit. It's worth quoting him properly:
"To think politically is to think about agency, power, and interests, and the relations among these. Who—which individuals or the bearers of which offices, positions, or roles—has control of employment
in the society, and who have lost their jobs? Will those who have lost their jobs have access to alternative modes of subsistence or not? Who will provide those alternatives, and what exactly will they be (provision of cash payments, vouchers, or jobs in the public sector by the government, or of shelter and food by charities)? Are the unemployed organised, and capable of collective action, or are they disorganised and inert, and if they are organised, what form does this organisation take? What concretely has one party done to the other: How exactly will the policeman punish me? Will he give me a warning, impose a fine, hit me with his truncheon, or take me to jail? Will he also expect a bribe? Finally, who benefits and who does not from the transaction in question? Who derives distinct positive benefits from any individual action or type of action in a given society will often be an extremely complex question." (Philosophy and Real Politics)
One of the reasons I like it too is because politics here is a 'question' and not so much an 'answer'. Geuss' answer to 'what is politics' is something like: 'take a look and see'. It's a nice, Wittgenstein inspired position.
Americans'll live. Probably at the expense of everyone else, but they'll live (unless of course you're a bit off-white, in which case you might be shot by a cop instead).
Europe hasn't had to provide for its own defence, so one would expect it to be better at democracy than the US (and better than it is).
But there are different modes of identity association. The humanitarian often associates him/herself with a humanitarian identity, where all other humanitarians (regardless of ethnicity, nationality, social class, etc.) are part of his/her identity and group. The racist, nationalist, or rich guy/gal might in turn associate with his/her particular race, country, rich frat club, etc. as being #1.
How about this idea in regard to politics and identity association:
There’s a “checks and balances of power among all people” identity association in political pursuits. Wishy-washy to some, but its what the American forefathers had in mind. As one example, tmk, the second amendment wasn’t about killing deer with machine guns but about granting the general populous the power to overthrow central governments by force were the government to become overly corrupt. BTW, since most people aren’t allowed to own fully armed Apaches, and the like, in their backyards, this potential to overthrow a corrupt government by armed force is nowadays nonexistent – regardless of how many semiautomatics one might own. Wasn’t the case some 200+ years ago.
In contrast, there’s the “winner takes all” identity association in political pursuits. Here, one is inclined to do anything so as to become the winner at the expense of all those that are other.
The first is about optimal cooperation among people that are not perfectly innocent and, hence, somewhat corrupt themselves – or at least hold the potential to so become (namely, each and every human that has ever been). The second is about screwing over all those who are deemed other – via, at best, subjugation.
As to identity, identity is about “who am I”. Some will look to their skin color and proclaim to have discovered who they are. Some will more readily associate who they are to tendencies of intention and the personas that follow suit. Both of these, however, will constitute identity affiliations.
But all this is very limited, no? An expansive politics can well include questions like: "who could I be?". The whole question of what you call 'association' is 'backward' looking, at it were. Its anchor is in the past. I 'am' this history or body that has made me (past tense), who I am; and given this, how do I proceed? That's how I understand identity politics in the most broad sense. But politics doesn't have to be about 'association'; that a community wants better roads, or better school curriculums, is largely not a matter of 'associating' oneself with anything at all. A democratic politics might expand the question further: "who could we be?". What kind of possibilities can be made available for us, in ways that will change who 'we are', and how should we cultivate them?
One of the reasons I listed what I called distributive and participatory modes of politics as alternatives to identity politics - apart from them being quite basic aspects of politics - is that they can be articulated in the future tense in a far better way than identity politics can. Generally, societal goods are not simply goods for their own sake, but for what they enable one to do. Build that business, write that novel, till that farm, without worrying too much about 'who you are'. Similarly with participatory politics. It's one centred on 'action', and not 'identity' and 'association'. Again, this is not to 'badmouth' either, but just to indicate how much richer politics can be (and in fact is).
But it also seems unethical. If I would not vote against someone on the grounds of his race, gender or sexuality alone, then by the exact same token I would not cast a vote in his favor for the exact same reason.
Avoid identity politics at all costs.
The community is just another identity.
A community is more bound by the land, proximity and common enterprise rather than identity.
What are these if not markers of identity?
I was under the impression that the “identity” in “identity politics” pertained to people who shared a common, mostly biological characteristic such as skin-color, gender, orientation etc.
Limiting affinity and common cause only to those who share the same skin color, but not, say, your neighbor, seems to me to be a perversion in politics.
Alot of people are under that impression. But the logic is exactly the same, and it's simply arbitrary to think identity stops at biology.
This is one of the reasons I explicitly tried to outline some other models of politics in the OP. People simply don't really have a very good grasp of what politics can involve other than claims underwritten by identity, and even those who say things like 'avoid identity politics at all costs' list nothing but identity politics as an alternative!
I understand that, but - that is the leftist gesture since at least Negri & Hardt (now 20 years old.) Reconceptualization.
The invocation of Wittgenstein (via Guess) . "What is politics? Well, look!"
This is the final conceptual twist. It says focus on what's in front of you instead of finding an essence. This itself can be essentialized. So that it becomes a gesture. But to avoid that, and actually focus on what's in front of you, requires, as you say, tactics.
Because it's hard to look, right? I'm so far from the levers of distribution I don't know where to begin. And feeling that far from it, it's also hard for me to understand what participation is, or could be, for me. Everything is gauzy and multiform and I don't even know what you do to get to close to power.
I think probably most people feel this way. Definitely on here. I mean let's be honest. Free-think all you want on forums, we're not the most politically potent group of people. This is probably also true in (most of ) academia, to an extent. At least the humanities, I mean. Science is different. Some theoretical physicists might get a pass, but, through institutional pressures, you - hypothetical and didactic avatar/aspect of the manyheaded corporate flow - can goose a biologist to p-hack and cherry-pick to satisfy your darkest desires. Movies are so dumb they're right here. The bullied remain susceptible to bullying, rare willful feynmans nonwithstanding. At a fundamental level, everyone goes home at night and assumes the utilities are working. You can be objective when it doesn't matter to power. When it does, it gets really messy.
So what are the tactics? To understand power, I think, requires that you go beyond concepts. It can only be understood experientially. Exactly because power is always the guessian thing. When you get close to actual distribution and participation things get reallll affective, to the point where you have to let 'affect' fade from your mind. (e.g, people love the 'the wire' because it simulates, or models, a flow they can remain distant from, yet feel in control of, having seen it modeled. the 'encounter' becomes high-level entertainment. This is the 'vox' model.)
What haunts me (& what I think should haunt everybody) is submitting in order to be allowed a well-air-conditioned room, where we conceptually 'world-build' a new, ideal order - or second-order world-build the conceptual contours of how to think of first order ideals.
If you're going for the actual source of distribution and participation, you have to go underground. If you're doing it publically in published papers, well, what's actually happening, from the distributionist/particpatory lens?
If we need an emblem of where we are now its, as I've said before, columbia grads ranciering themselves into meaninglessness at Zucotti.
If we really mean the guess thing (invitation) lets post about how to actually affect distribution, specifically. But of course we can't really do that on here, so what is this?
Its identity. and not even politics.
As @Snakes Alive said, all of this bottoms out somewhere at someone with a gun. That may only be one aspect (the same thing can be seen in many different lenses, with multiple linchpins) but the gun is a big one. Maybe not the master-knot, but at least one major part of it. And you can almost sense the invisible presence of the gun, mediated by however many concentric, distancing, circles of political impotence, in what we say on here. For us, it seems to come down to saying what won't get us in hotwater. We can say what we want about distribution so long as it doesn't fuck with Nestle. It's easy not to think about that when we're posting in innocuous places nestle doesn't care about. I don't know what sustains you economically but I sense you won't bite the hand that feeds (this is a provocation & invitation to prove me wrong thru [examples].) And what else is there politically real besides that biting?
There's a legitimate way out here and its to focus on philosophy or literary criticism. Or gardening, or religion, or meditation. But focusing on the political, as a theorist, is fraught, and has to be sustained with extra-scholastic efforts, otherwise it's just building models in a designated model-space, safe and away.
Or: who's a good exemplar of 21st leftist who has broke this mould?
I'm not too far removed from the sentiment of your reply. In fairness, I was addressing that aspect of the OP where it's offered that all politics deals with some form of identity. As @NOS4A2 commented since, though, "identity politics" typically connotes in most, or at least many, cases a biological commonality - rather than a more philosophical meaning of identity. This in parallel to how "power" typically connotes a capacity to do with some other(s) as one pleases - rather than the more formal meaning of "ability to do or accomplish", something ubiquitous to most all living beings most of the time.
Still, approaching things from a more philosophical perspective of identity (this being the only way I can make sense of the statement that all politics concern identity):
Quoting StreetlightX
I did mention tendencies of intention, which are always about goals toward which one proceeds. By 'association' I, in part, meant to address affinity toward other. Things such as empathy, compassion for, and sympathy. Some guy looses in politics. If I feel bad because of this, a part of me (my identity) holds an affinity toward the guy (his identity - including the intentions he has), and I will hold the belief that our identities in some measure overlap. If I don't feel bad about his loss, I in no way associate, or maybe better said, relate, to him, nor his present goals in life, and likely not to the life history that his past goals would have produced. Don't know. Maybe we interpret human identity too differently, this from a philosophical pov.
But yes, some build their personal sense of identity around conserving those aspects of the past they deem to have been of greater benefit for them and their ilk. Others build it around goals toward which they seek to progress. As per your example, such as that of living in a better community of people (a personality type which I happen to associate with, btw). Nevertheless, these two senses of identity, imo, are not always neatly separated from each other. Conservatives do seek to proceed so as actualize their goals. Progressives will learn history and maintain their roots, such as by not forgetting about people such as Martin Luther King, for one example.
Eh, maybe I'm rambling. If there's anything in this post worth furthering, do let me know.
First, I agree with the sense of political powerlessness. Secondly, darn it but stifling talk about how things could improve is the biggest means of creating hopelessness in people. Not knowing what ideals to aspire toward is like being a chicken running around without a head that nevertheless wants to get somewhere meaningful. And there's no way to find and then agree upon these ideals if individuals don't talk to each other about them. The more people start talking about politics in big picture terms, the more empowered they become by comparison to not so talking about politics. And in light of things such as global warming, I'd welcome more big picture political talk.
Quoting csalisbury
Chomsky, Banksy, Amy Goodman, and if you like professional comedians, Bill Hicks. I've got a few others on my mind, but why wouldn't any of these suffice? (Or was the mold-breaking you referred to that of not engaging in extra-scholastic efforts while still effecting change?)
It's main target is to attack the underlying idea of citizenship, that we as citizens ought collectively through our representatives decide on the political agenda and decisions that the state takes. That we could do this as citizens and could have more ideas than just fighting for more power and spoils to 'our tribe' is directly attacked and tried to be refuted by the supporters of identity politics. Identity politics refutes the idea of people being individual citizens and tries to put us in a mold based on our race, gender, sexuality or wealth or whatever is deemed to be our 'identity'.
And American believe it and other countries too are inflicted with this as well. The easiest way is simply not to listen to others as individuals, but simply insist that they are talking as (add race), (add sexual preference), (add priviledge status) and so whatever they would be saying is just identity politics done consciously or unconsciously.
Because we surely cannot think about anybody else than of our kind that share our 'identity'.
I want to say that having power is partly a matter of recognizing the power you have. Democracy could be seen as a set of rituals that call attention to one's power whereas a tyranny is a set of rituals that denies power to the people. It's about what people are telling themselves maybe more than what's actually happening.
A relay. A differential gear. A catalytic molecule. Plug it in, see what happens. Maybe nothing. Maybe something, somewhere. The rest is blackmail.
The tricky word here is "power". If power be the fundamental unit of identity, then as your OP suggests this would make sense of why someone might claim that all politics is identity politics -- because power makes up identity.
If power is a system of ownership, as your distributive model would have it, then insofar that we believe ownership and identity are different then we might have some leverage to say that there is at least a difference in emphasis, even if identity is always involved.
But "power" is one of those words that is easily reified and not easily defined -- kind of like freedom, or a host of other concepts that are so simple they become hard to describe or speak of.
We might even go so far as to say that "power" has different forms -- distributive power, identity power, decision-making power, bodily power. . .
And then one thing I'd like to posit is there is a difference between coercive power, and power tout court -- power is not a dirty word, because there are more forms of power than hierarchical and violent flows or foundations. Power flows from the barrel of a gun, said a man wise in the ways of doing politics, but not all power does -- hence why things like petitions, demands, marches, and strikes can work to effect change.
((that being said, I do believe that coercive power is part of doing politics, but there's still a meaningful distinction to be made))
I totally agree with the above. The irony of those 'realists' who like to say that power flows from the barrel of a gun (tout court) is the total impotency of that idea when it comes to accounting for most of anything that has happened on the planet, ever. They are not worth taking seriously. And as anyone who has even a minimal acquaintance with humans knows, expressions of violence are more often than not expressions of a lack of power, or at least a deep fragility in what power there is. There are few bigger fantasists of reality than 'realists' about power.
And you're right too that power is not a dirty word: power simply 'is': that we live in a world with others at all implicates us into relations of power, and the point is to cultivate healthy relationships of power, rather than diseased ones. Those who think we can do without power effectively want a community of dead bodies.
The one thing I'd add to your list is constitutive power: power not merely to coerce or manipulate but actively create and bring into being. As Foucault showed a long time ago, this is perhaps one of the most dominant forms of power operative today. Power is multi-pronged and multivalent, and any understanding of the world needs to match that richness.
Yeah, although I think this is a confusion, and a particularly dangerous one at that. There's a difference between "I advocate X because I am Y", and "I advocate X because of problems A, B, and C, that affect Ys". That there are issues that disproportionally affect, say Indigenous Australians, or First Nations people, and to engage in political action to address those issues is not identity politics.
It's all too often the case that those who complain about identity politics do so in order to disqualify any politics of race, gender or class, to which is usually opposed some mythical "good of all", or the "community" or "nation" or some such. Such efforts generally amount to nothing more than a kind of 'shut up and know your place' reaction, and are utterly toxic.
Moreover, a 'nation' or 'community' is, as I said, nothing if not just another identity, this time simply scaled up. Nationalism is the original identity politics. What matters is the 'logic' of identity politics, which does not discriminate by scale. The alternative is a 'problem'-based politics, a politics which addresses the problems and conditions which are faced in a life, one based not on 'who' you are, but on what enables (or disables) one to be who one is, or wants to be.
"Everyone in politics tries to sidestep the critical role and need for argument, the need to craft a coalition and mobilize around a set of ideas and interests. Rather than build a case, people appeal to a condition. Identitarianism is not peculiar to a politics of race or gender or sexuality, not at all. The original identitarianism is nationalism or religion. There are terrible identitarianisms of class. (That's why I cringe every time someone depicts the working class as a brawny factory worker. Or of Joe Biden as somehow a "fighter for the working class." Or the notion that the working class is automatically something.)
All of these identitarianisms sidestep, as I say, the need for moral and political argument, the need to craft coalitions of interest and ideology that are not immediately apparent or present but that have to be created. I'm not against a politics based on conflict, on arraying one group against another. I'm against building those conflicts on spurious appeals to "you're one of us." Even if that "us" is an oppressed group. Kafka said, "What do I have in common with Jews? I don't even have anything in common with myself." All of us are divided in multiple ways, first and foremost within ourselves. That's what politics at its best does: to craft a commonality out of that preexisting division. Identitiarians begin with the most spurious identity of all--the undivided self--and build from there."
...What?
Your explanation here doesn't really help me. Lots and lots of violence is done with control – in fact those in control often commit violence, every day, because they know they will get away with it.
Sure, but this speaks precisely to the thinness of that control. Those 'in control' would not need to commit violence, insofar as they are in control. I dunno what to tell you other than that this is fairly widely agreed upon by most who study the anthropology of violence (see the work of Michel Wieviorka, if you're interested). Your Moorean puzzlement is not much more than an Inca looking at an iPhone.
To be fair to you, the equation of violence with power is a fairly common one, it just has the distinct disadvantage of being objectively wrong.
Who says this?
Edit: Nvm, I see now. Did you edit that? I totally didn't see it, twice.
Quoting StreetlightX
John T. Sidel, Olivier Roy, Muhammed Hafez, and Fawaz Gerges would be other sources of interest.
Who do you think commits the most violence in the world?
Would you describe those organizations or people as powerful, or not?
Do you see violence, as you suggested earlier, only on the model of a 'tantrum?' That implies a lack of control, but not all violence takes the form of a tantrum.
So suppose you're going to beat your slaves or your kids. That's a form of violence, right? And it comes about precisely because of the control you have over the slave or child (and control over the violence).
But this is strange reasoning. When I ask the kids to fetch a cup of tea, that I don't have to resort to violence (because they love me, because it's out of respect, because I reminded them how I took them to the park the other day) says far more about how I am in control of them than if I had to resort to violence. Even the very threat of violence would be nothing less than a sign of an incredibly unstable, fractured household. We quite straightforwardly associate violence with a loss of control ('he lost his cool and threw a punch'). That you find this strange is... strange.
Presumably, if they do it voluntarily, you aren't in control of them.
If I have a kid or a slave that I can beat whenever I want, then I am in control of them and the violence. The threat of violence is further often what cements this control, and is an artifact of it.
And people that you beat up often do what you want, involuntarily – so you are in control of them.
How is this difficult?
Do people actually experience the choices they make like this? Honestly most of the time whenever I choose something my hand is tipped or forced by circumstance. Whether that's at work in how I choose to approach the problems I've got to solve (you can't choose how you have to work the coffee machine), in my personal life in how I deal with conflict, provide support and share in joy, my choices are carried along by circumstance and necessity. They're formed in an interplay of my capacities, responsibilities, and the broader social contexts they are embedded in.
A lot of socialisation is learning what to do, and what you can do, voluntarily. Where is this choice outside of action and circumstance? Why would it ever occur? Nowhere, no reason.
But 'no reason' is part of the point, right? No sufficient reason or cause, responsibility for choices made in that case. Sufficient reason or cause, responsibility diminished or annihilated. The nowhere is just as important. Such choices occurring nowhere and never means that the account of choice and freedom is more to do with context severed imagination, a fan fiction of the soul with the one true pairing of humanity and absolute freedom, but there aren't absolutes here. Not in this fucking muck.
It may be that we are just talking at cross purposes, but in any case I don't think the interaction is going to be helpful. I'm not sure what's so hard about understanding that (i) "control" does not mean "people do what you want" (they can do what you want accidentally, or voluntarily, or even against your wishes), and (ii) violence is so utterly obviously linked with control that I find talking about denials of the point tedious.
Like what? When my hand is "not tipped by force or circumstance?" Sure.
Quoting fdrake
That sounds...really awful. If you really live that way, there might be something wrong.
Quoting fdrake
If this is true about your own life, that's really sad. But I don't think there's much metaphysical baggage to be gotten from it. It would be nice if you lived in circumstances such that, at least once in a while, you did things without being forced to. Never to do anything in that way, to the extent that you start seeing ordinary freedoms as "fan fictions" and doubting whether you have a "soul," etc. sounds really crushing. Many people might live in such physical or psychological circumstances, but it's not all of them, and if you do, it might be better to think about escaping them rather than metaphysicalizing them.
What choices do you make when you're at work?
There are a lot of things I'm forced to do, but they're not 100% of my life, or so prominent that I doubt whether I choose anything or whether I have a soul, or anything like that. Where people are in that kind of situation, we should see it as a bad state of affairs, not a metaphysical insight.
There's a great scene in Nolan's Dark Knight, where the Batman is giving Joker the beating of his life, only for the Joker to laugh in his face, telling him that "You have nothing, nothing to threaten me with! Nothing to do with all your strength!"; Violence here is impotence, and should be understood exactly on that model. Violence is very much a sign of underlying impotence.
As for the rest, I dunno, people are generally not very bright, and its nice to remind them of that every once in a while.
So you don't choose the projects. They're tailored to current research interests of the institution and society at large, and ultimately what you can generate funding for or not.
You don't choose whether to be a perfectionist or not, you tailor it to the needs of the project and your time constraints and your efficacy in the subject area. EG: it takes me much longer to develop a new math structure or methodology workflow than just to do some stupid data analysis contract work using canonical methods that people just want p-values from.
You choose from the menu and what's available in the stores for lunch. I had chocolate humus recently, it was nice. Like a mousse.
Your students' work quality constrains the grades you give them. Their background and circumstances and available effort at the time constrains their performance.
What positions are available and fit your background - you don't choose that.
Precisely what you decide to research? The specifics, maybe. See the first point. How you solve a technical or conceptual problem is an exercise of your capacities, and you can learn more, sure.
Try dropping all your research projects and see if you've still got your job you love.
What you read - still, what's available, what you have the background to understand, the required effort to learn something new in an adjacent field or a new perspective in your familiar one.
You're having a terrible day, you won't feel like being friendly to people. Or you might be perverse and feel like being super duper nice because you're having a bad day. I do that.
Your work life sounds very typical to me. I see about as much freedom in it as mine. I'mma go be free at the coffee machine some more and see if that changes how its grinder works.
One wonders too, when looking at a suicide bomber, whether he or she acts from a position of strength.
If you wanna talk about the choices people make, you have to think about what choices are available to them. It's very rare that people can choose what choices are instantaneously available to them. You live within a lifestyle, lifestyles live within social circumstances. You can edit your lifestyle through personal choices, and it's a slow process, like learning or conflict or love, but you're not gonna edit your social circumstances through your personal choices. It's at the moment that your choices gain political clout, and you make choices to try for them to gain political clout, that you can begin to feel their chains on you.
But those chains are also shackling your brothers and sisters, those you share your life with and probably don't even know their names and faces, just that they've got the same fucking problems and deal with the same shit as you in lots of ways. And how do you go about addressing that stuff? Political activity, organisation, theorising. By trying to be part of that rogue object that modifies its surroundings, or that point of light that illuminates the boundaries choices are made within.
But you gotta take the surroundings as a conceptual given to theorise them and politically act for their transformation; have to know the bubble our choices are made in to burst it for some end. So you wanna do politics? Part of it is negotiating identities, but the sphere of political transformation is as broad as the sphere of human activity; infinite variation within our little tethers of human nature. Politics of distribution and access (even epistemic access/privilege) enmesh with politics of identity as soon as people act together, and we always do.
The bubbles we make our choices in have a habit of resonating with each other, being formed as emergent corpuscles of whatever is driving our social order. You wanna change our social order? You may as well make a personal choice to pop a cloud with the freedom of your mind. This is like theta healing for society.
Condemned to be free, yeah, condemned to live as dice cast by an invisible hand.
Assuming there is some politics of identity to mesh with? Where roles are established and accepted, there may be no politics of identity, not because there are no identities, but because there's no conflict over it.
Or are you thinking of identity in a different way?
Sure. But of course. 100% thumbs up. But the tone and overall content of your reply puzzles me. Its as if it was written by a person other than that which wrote this in the OP:
Quoting StreetlightX
You should notice that in all my posts in this thread I did not sanction that all politics is identity politics – not even to the minimalist degree the OP does. I’ve only addressed the notion that all politics concern (the philosophical notion of) identity. To me this shouldn’t have been a news flash, especially not from the person who wrote the OP.
Since you seem familiar with anthropology, you’ll be acquainted with the anthropological distinction between organized Politics and “politics with a small ‘p’”. The latter basically translates into human interaction. It can well be argued to be about ability to obtain what’s wanted in the context of interactions between two or more persons. All wants that hold value will hold value to egos – such that the human identity of these is primarily composed of the wants they value and seek to satisfy. Not their nation, skin color, or the girth of their wallet – which, however, is among the more common ways we interpret identity in the context of identity politics. So, hence, all politics pivots around two or more identities that cooperate, conflict, or are neutral in respect to each other – and is thereby fundamentally about identity – but not all politics is what we commonly understand as identity politics.
Organized Politics is only a more structured version of the same.
You disagree with this? So far in this thread, you’ve debated with me against positions I’ve never expressed, and do not hold. To go back to my first post, for example, I’ve explicitly stated the two (philosophically pertinent) identities of those who value a checks and balances of power and those who value a winner takes all attitude. Let me know of an “identity politics” which doesn’t have a winner takes all attitude toward those who don't fit into the specified 'identity'.
BTW, in reference to statements such as:
Quoting StreetlightX
How on earth do you equate nation to community. Like sex and love, its swell when they co-occur, but they’re two different things.
Quick reply, will say more later - Apologies about my tone. It's not directed at you. I'm kinda using your posts to develop lines of thought, and some of what I say are implicit responses to others and other positions in this thread, with your comments as a foil. I haven't been trying to debate things you've said, though I can see how it's easily come off that way. Will try and keep myself more even in future replies.
I think it’s arbitrary to say that all politics is identity politics. Sure I can agree that identity can be expanded to include all types of groups, but identity politics was always contrasted against the ideological or party politics the polity usually organized around.
In the very general sense invoked at the beginning of the OP, and not in the narrower sense the rest of the OP specifies.
As for a distinction between identity politics and party politics, that seems very much like apples and oranges. A political party can indulge in many different kind of political strategy, of which identity politics is one. 'Party politics' doesn't so much designate a kind of politics so much as a political agent or actor, which can act in a myriad of ways. Hence why I offered participatory and distributive models as genuine alternatives to identity politics in the narrow sense.
There are identities that are differentially effected by political circumstances in any society there's... society... in; which is all of them. Whether organising along these lines (through common problems or community identity signifiers) is effective, or how it works, really depends on the circumstances doesn't it? So does how they're effected.
Used to be the gays couldn't marry, were pathologised, hanged, discriminated against in the workplace... I mean, if you don't see that as different treatment for different people due to identity I haven't got a clue how to make you drink the kool aid here.
Yazidis and Isis was another identity politics example. You know, racially motivated genocide is definitely identity politics.
Does this really need explaining?
So you've changed the usual meaning of "identity politics."
No, I don't need an explanation for that.
What do you think the usual meaning is?
-- Oxford Dictionary
This argument fails. Suppose you have a white CEO, and a white gas station attendant. Are you going to argue that they both benefit from "white privilege" and should, as you highlighted, be restricted from access to the goods of distributive politics? Of course not. Change my example to a black CEO and black gas station attendant. Now factor in that the CEOs parents were Harvard professors, and the gas station attendant was raised by a single mother who dropped out of high school.
Reducing the analysis to race (which is usually what is focused on by identitarians) discounts at least the economic or class distinction, and so the analysis is grossly wanting.
So the way we cash this out is to point out that all politics might be identity politics, but what does one mean by identity, and how complete of a picture does this supposed identity give us about a particular group or individual. Furthermore, if you are taking a particular group, and there is a high degree of variation within the group, how useful is it to refer to this as one particular identity?
Identitarianism as it is currently practiced suffers from reductionistic thinking. It is not entirely useless, but must be tempered in order to generate coherent representations of human beings.
I think you're right Frank, OP and fdrake are misunderstanding the choice to interpret politics through the lens of the different groups involved and actual identity politics where the politics were motivated by the identity of the groups involved. Unsurprising when you know anything about either of them.
If it doesn't succeed in creating some new realization about identity and politics, it just falls flat. It's just bullshit that does the opposite of its intention: it creates confusion.
A thought that might proceed from the slogan is: how is society suffering from identity strife? Do politicians, in their work to be elected and govern, help or make it worse? Is there such a thing as a false identity problem that's used as a political vehicle? When and if that happens, how are identity groups affected?
Does the slogan mean anything to you? Or not?
"All politics is identity politics" is not a statement of fact, it's an interpretation and I make negative assumptions about why it exists. Mostly that it's used as a counterargument to criticism against identity politics. As if it's redundant to say identity politics is a problem because "all politics is identity politics". OP doesn't give a name for the person who said this or the context so maybe I'm wrong.
Honestly, the criticism of identity politics has a lot to do with the groups that are being selected for political controversy. Race, gender, sexual orientation, a list of things you've neither chosen for yourself and something that everyone has. If you believe in group histories, if you think in terms of groups rather than individuals - then it's necessary to right the wrongs of the past. These identities can't be ignored, it's immoral to ignore them.
So, I see no problem with factory workers caring about how factory workers are treated or people of a city asking for a better deal for their city but the leftist narrative of caring for disadvantaged groups or the alt-right narrative of caring about racial and cultural hegemony, can't be considered necessary. I'd rather people are politically motivated by their beliefs on what works best or by their conscience.
An argument against identity politics is that engaging in it is a way to diminish your power. Democracy favors unity. An issue that creates unity has power. By choosing fragmentation (which leftists seem to love to do for some reason), they show that they don't really care about their agendas. It's just the grand-standing and venom spewing that's really important.
Saying that all politics is identity politics is not the answer to this particular criticism.
Quoting Judaka
I agree. The concept of civil rights is a pretty amazing innovation, though. We haven't worked out all the kinks yet.
If violence is impotency, and power is getting others to do, and there's a distinction between coercive power and other sorts of power -- then that gets along quite well with the notion that coercive power leaches upon societal action; something that can be broadly understood as mutual activity, where we agree to something or work together.
No?
I think it'd be a mistake to equate societal action with mutual activity, upon which coercive power parasitically impinges. As though there were 'two levels', a pure good and happy one where everyone gets along, and a corruption from above which changes the character of this purity. Instead, coercive power ought to be understood as just another form of societal action: a species of a larger genera, and not two genera set off against each other.
The idea is that 'societal action' can be anything - coercive, encouraging, formalist, pedagogic, transactional, whatever. It's necessary to understand it warts and all. There is no 'essence' of society: there are certain predominant constraints which it needs to negotiate - resource scarcity, shelter, knowledge sharing, division of labour, geographic considerations, etc, but how this stuff happens is anybody's game. The idea that society is, at base, a bunch of happy people working together is no more viable than the obverse idea that society, at base, is a bunch of beasts all vying to kill each other. They're both idealizations, ahistorical and false to the facts.
Rather than "leach" let us say "parasite" -- and what is a parasite? An organism who benefits from another organism. The host has surplus energy and the parasite re purposes said surplus energy into their own reproductive line -- rather than the reproductive line of the host.
Now is "parasite" quite right to say, if we are stripping the moral language? Perhaps we could say that it is a kind of symbiosis. We have certain qualms about allowing tapeworms to continue living in ourselves, but in a descriptive sense the tapeworm is a symbiote to the human. The human, and other animals as well, are host to its lifecycle.
In this way, perhaps, we could imagine that violence is a symbiote to (What is the genera? Perhaps not social action or mutual activity. But then is the amorphous power the genera? Or what?)
Because it seems to me that there's something here. There's the rhizomatic power, and there's the notion that violence does require something from us that's more basic than the political act of violence. It needn't be an essence.
I actually work in a field not quite so dependent on grant funding, which is part of why I went into it.
The rest of the post is just a reiteration of some such fallacy as, "Your choices are not infinite or unlimited – ergo, you have no choice."
I hope this vapid inversion of platitude is not the best philosophy has to offer!
Ahem.
We often think that people who live in dangerous neighborhoods are fearful for their safety. But anyone who's not a moron knows that it is precisely those who live in the safest neighborhoods of all that are fearful! For in order to be fearful, there must be some insecurity over one might possibly lose. But those in dangerous neighborhoods take the reality of their danger for granted -- hence, since they will at some point be robbed or mugged, their apprehension takes on the character of awaiting an accomplished fact, and so they cannot be fearful for their safety, since as we know fear is directed only towards that which is (projected as) non-actual. Only the one who does not take their assault as an accomplished fact can feel such fear -- but such a person must be in, or take themselves to be in, relative safety, since this is precisely the locus of treating the assault as non-actual.
Am I a philosopher yet?
The point is to 'flatten' power: or at least understand the emergence of power relations immanently and historically, and not subject to some transhistorical rule which would posit any one kind of relation - whether it be some fantasy of a state of nature a la Hobbes or a state of Eden a la Un - as primary.
While I appreciate the gist of this, I'm not sure the right answer is to replace identity politics with, well, more identity politics, even if the 'identity' in question is class based rather than racial or sexual. To argue against identity politics needs to be more than just settling on the 'right' identity, or simply aiming to expand the notion of identity so that, if only it took into account X, Y and Z, it would finally come to a 'correct' understanding of identity. The point is articulate an alternative to identity politics altogether, not come to a better understanding of what constitutes identity.
Identity politics writ large is no different to identity politics writ small.
I'd say that even if we flatten power that different interations of power can develop relationships with one another. So violence can develop a relationship to, say, identity -- and has done so historically. There are conditions of violence -- one of which, if it be political violence, is organized activity. It is merely a kind of organized activity. And so violence is a symbiote to this larger body -- closely, even physically related, enmeshed in our social lives, but would not exist without our social lives, without surplus energy to fuel a new kind of organism.
So it's not so much a base/superstructure type of description, but rather a description of different instances of power and the relationships they can or do develop.
I would like to point out that I have not posited any such state; I made a distinction.
But why? One can distinguish between different grades or qualities of power (high quality, low quality) as it were, without enshrining one mode of (exercise of) power as primary or base. And I still resist any dichotomizing between some independent entity called a 'social life' and power which is supposed to work upon it from without: our social lives are defined in part, by the relationships of power among which they are established. Power and social life are internally related concepts, and I don't think the very idea of a social life can be made intelligible without at the same time understanding the relations of power which define it. Power is not some kind of secondary epiphenomenon that appears one day and accosts some innocent social life that would be all peaches and cooperation without it. If you exist in a society at all, you exist in and as relations of power.
In theories of white privilege, to provide a more academic example, all classes of white people are said to benefit from white privilege. Therefore, class becomes, non-consequential to the identity.
Well, if power is flat, then violence is just another instance of power, one of many expressions of our social world. I haven't posited that power acts upon or is outside of a social world. I've targeted violence as having a relationship to other forms of this flattened power -- a power where violence is not a necessary correlate or property.
Violence would not be impotent, from a theoretical standpoint. It would just be another form of power - unless there was some relationship to a different, potent form a power that spells out its impotence.
"In southern Italy, the agricultural day labourers, the semi-employed bracciante, eat only once a day or even, sometimes, once every two days. In this situation, hunger ceases to exist as need (or rather, it appears only if it suddenly becomes impossible for the labourers to get their single meal every one or two days). It is not that hunger has ceased to exist, but that it has become interiorised, or structured, as a chronic disease."
But that's just the argument: it's precisely because we can identify violence as one form of (the exercise of) power among others that we can understand it to express an impotency - to need to resort to violence is to have been unable to arrange or engage the situation in a way that would have rendered it unnecessary. It is to have been unable to set up relations of power in which a mere word or a turn of the finger would have produced the same result. Brought to the extreme, one might even indeed be able to divorce power from violence, but only to the extent to which the exercise of violence means nothing other than the abdication of power. This is the move someone like Hannah Arendt, makes, say:
"Rule by sheer violence comes into play where power is being lost; it is precisely the shrinking power of the Russian government, internally and externally, that became manifest in its "solution" of the Czechoslovak problem just as it was the shrinking power of European imperialism that became manifest in the alternative between decolonization and massacre. To substitute violence for power can bring victory, but the price is very high; for it is not only paid by the vanquished, it is also paid by the victor in terms of his own power. ... Politically speaking, the point is that loss of power becomes a temptation to substitute violence for power and that violence itself results in impotence. Where violence is no longer backed and restrained by power, the well-known reversal in reckoning with means and ends has taken place. The means, the means of destruction, now determine the end with the consequence that the end will be the destruction of all power." (Arendt, On Violence - published in 1969, to put her examples of Russia and Europe in context).*
I don't think much here would be lost if, instead of affecting a disjunction between power and violence - as Arendt does - one simply calls violence a low-grade exercise of power, one so poor in quality that it has exactly the effects of undermining the establishment of more secure, higher-grade regimes of power. In either case the point is the same: violence attests to an impotency.
*Arendt would make another addition to my list of those who quite easily acknowledge the link between violence and lack of control, or power. That this is so widely understood by anyone with any understanding of either, only makes me laugh at the some of the hysterics let loose in this thread over the idea.
I would say "yes" -- in which case we could say that low-grades can depend upon high-grades, and high-grades can also come to depend upon low-grades (Why is it the police officer can resolve conflicts with a talk? Because they have the authority to wield violence in the name of the state).
And if that be the case then we could say that a symbiotic relationship could form between grades of power in particular, historical cases -- and a description would depend on the historical facts as well as the interpretation of the historian.
To bring this around to the beginning -- if we can form relationships between instances of power, then it becomes even easier to understand the formulation that all politics are identity politics -- the relationship gives us a sort of interpretive rule between instances of power (violence : race : identity : distribution).
Ah Ok. Yes. So long as such 'symbiosis' is understood in historical, 'evolutionary' terms - as coming into being as the result of the interplay of historical contingency and necessity, then I think the idea that different types of power can and do establish relationships among themselves is undeniable. Hell, the idea of a 'separation of powers' in a democratic state relies, despite its name, on this interplay of various kinds of powers. But I'm not sure I understand this move:
Quoting Moliere
Could you unpack it?
"In theories of recognition ... the function of identity is to ground action. People give accounts of who they are both so that they can get clear about how to act, and because others, in their responses to these accounts, should (if all goes well) treat them with the respect or esteem they deserve, and which they need, if they are to be secure in their self-understandings, and if they are to be able to act in accordance with their identities without interference. ... The point of the recognition and of the identity that is its object is to decide a course of action. That is who he is, so this is what she must do. Identity is a rule.
But consider some of the other things an account of identity might do for someone, or might be expected to provoke in others. You might give an account of the identity of a loved one in order to come to terms with his loss, as in a eulogy, or in other acts of mourning. You might give an account of your own identity in order to clarify to yourself and to others (your view of) the nature and stakes of our shared situation, without necessarily expecting that this story will simply be accepted as the whole truth of the matter, or that—even if it were—it could serve as anything more than a preamble to the activity of political deliberation and judgment.
You might tell someone else who you are—loudly, perhaps—with the hope that by getting in his face you can complicate his own self-understanding, making it more difficult for him to go on living a certain kind of privilege unconsciously, but without expecting or even hoping to be locked in some sort of circle of mutual affirmation as a result. You might tell the world who you take yourself to be by publishing a manifesto, hoping that your story will draw an as yet unknown cast of others to join you in a political movement (whose specific aims you have not yet determined), and fully expecting that the resulting encounters will alter your sense of your own identity."
And:
"In the face of ... resiliently undemocratic distribution(s) of political power, I suspect, we increasingly seek solace in an interpretation of the principle of democratic legitimacy that focuses on recognition rather than action: cultivating identification with the state may help to secure at least de facto democratic legitimation by enabling us to recognize these remote and alien institutions as ours (and vice versa)—while still doing little to render them more accountable to us. In other words, the experience of identification comes to supplant the experience of action as the ground of whatever sense of connection many people now have with the states that claim them."
I don't mean to stifle talk about how things could improve. What I'm trying to stifle is a threat I see lurking in the OP. That threat is a move from identity-based concept-webs to distribution-and- participation-based concept-webs. It's not the loss of identity-centric politics that worries me but the carrying over of the same conceptual doubling of the world. A stately and magisterial double, with the spice of paradox to enliven things.
The insinuation is that this conceptual spirit is meant to keep change and consequence at bay, and will continue to do so, but under the banner of the thing it evades.
The reason is obvious : mastering a certain way of talking is a way of belonging, which is privileging identity, which is, (see @StreetlightX's post above mine) a barrier to action.
Everything in the OP signals belonging to a certain stratum of discourse. I see it as belonging to the realm of recognition and identity.
"In other words, the experience of identification comes to supplant the experience of action as the ground of whatever sense of connection many people now have with the states that claim them."
Chomsky is an exemplary air-conditioned modeler. Banksy is an aesthete, and made shrewd use of an anti-corporate aesthetic that gibed with the radiohead-era zeitgeist. Now he does gallery shows and stunts at Sothebys. I don't know Amy Goodman and will look her up.
Sure.
Let's take distributive power. We can divide the world up into income brackets, say, and look at what these people care about or what their life spans are or how many of them are in jail or some such. But then we can also do the same with identity -- and even, on the basis of said identity, point to distribution as a mechanism for discriminating against certain identities.
So we have two ways of looking at a groups and their power, but depending on the emphasis we could look at Race : Distribution, or Distribution : Race -- the one could serve a bolstering point for the other, just depending on the directionality of our function between the two sets. (to make this a little more formalistic)
If that be the case then depending on the historian -- or in the case you cited, an activist -- they can look at the exact same historical facts, but come away with a different story -- one in which those who have less must deal with x, or in the other case where those with this identity have to deal with x.
At least that's what I had in mind. There are cases where it is more obvious to apply a certain interpretive lens than another interpretive lens, but then we can always -- through the relation between instances of power, or as I'm putting it here through our interpretations of historical facts and the relationships that can be established between these interpretations -- describe a historical situation in one set of terms or another: identity, decision-making, distribution, etc.
Two examples. The first from an ad I saw, just this morning, for a bank. The ad was just a picture of young girls playing rugby, all smiles, with the words 'moving forward together' or some such. Here the idea is something like: 'look, we support women doing things not traditionally associated with women, look how progressive we are'. As if the mere imagery itself was progressive in itself. I'm probably being unfair to the bank, who probably helps sponsor the girls rugby league, so is going in some way to put their money where their labels are, as it were. Still, the point comes across I hope. It's the effort of identification that is meant to do the political work here.
Second example. This from someone else, who was - rightly - complaining about a bunch of liberals who could not comprehend why gays might support Trump. The liberal logic (of identity politics) was something like: they're gay, so how could they support Trump? The idea, once again, was that the label itself ought to have borne the work of politics alone. As if the mere fact of 'being gay' ought to proscribe a certain way of acting, or of being acted upon.
The important point to make though, is that none of this means that either woman nor gays do not have political claims specific to them. It only means that they must be articulated in terms of addressing concrete problems and specific injustices faced by each. To agrue against identity politics is not to deny that there exists, or ought to exist, a 'politics of women', or a 'politics of homosexuality'. It turns instead on how those politics are practised. If this distinction is not kept under firm eye, any critique of identity politics can morph into a critique or denial that, say, women or gays have any specific political standing at all. 'Identity politics' is not just any kind of politics that has something to do with identity; it is a very specific use of identity.
@fdrake, this is a reply to your PM as well.
What wouldn't you say this about, short of "I burned down my local bank yesterday"?
I wouldn't say this about an ontologist or metaphysician or someone doing a dissertation on Wittgenstein. Or a dissertation on Rawls. I understand being hemmed in.
A political theory that has pretensions to changing things - I don't know. I don't feel wrong saying 'I'd know it when I see it." That's how it's always worked.
I don't particularly like Nick Land, or accelerationism, or any of that - but its very viscerally obvious to me why younger people cleave to that sort of thing. The alternatives are limp.
[ i burned down my local bank yesterday ] is [absurd thing] which yeah i agree - with the caveat 'short of [impossible, absurd thing]' has always been the charge levelled against all sorts of people contributing to certain events, events presumably important to the thinkers you mention, which would be cited in a heartbeat, in a different context
'local banks'
For the moment, I am content to live the weird life I'm living and see everything change faster that I can understand. I am content to carve out a space and wait. I'm not happy, and I don't like it, but it's what I can do now. What I am not content to do is carve out that space and pretend that it's something politically meaningful. It isn't. It gives me a gut-reaction nausea. I am open to a political leader. I'm not open to old politics in drag.
No one needs to burn down a local bank, they just have to direct people in a way that is somehow actually politically meaningful.Chalk my responses up to the hysterics of someone who thought a certain kind of political talking would eventuate in some meaningful deliverance, and the subsequent realization that it constitutively cannot.
Sure, I'm saying this and that, what do you want me to [BURN DOWN A BANK]?
I don't know dude, you're the radical. Maybe start a micropress? But maybe the truth of it is that youre gentrifying something. If not, then, no, don't burn down a bank, but what is the fruit of this Guess revelation if not just an essentialization of non-essentialization. Shit or get off the pot.
I'm not trying to talk to you, not here, not like this.
You're not trying to talk to anyone. That's the problem.
This isn't what I understand as identity politics though. At least not the kind that everyone's talking about these days. See my post above for the specifics, but I'm talking about identity politics as a positive strategy of political redress or engagement. That people are discriminated against on the basis of identity is age-old and a fact of political life. So injudicious discrimination of distribution, even if on the basis of identity, isn't 'identity politics', or at least, it's the same name for a very different phenomenon that I'm not attempting to address. It still falls within the distributive paradigm of politics.
Yes, still, every drop in the bucket counts, is my concise view. I get most worried when no body talks about anything – outside of pounding their fist on tables in support of duckspoken stances or else cheering for such individuals to succeed.
Amy Goodman is the leading figure of Democracy Now, a publicly supported, non-corporatized, left-leaning news organization. On occasion they go overboard (by my tastes) but generally speaking, whats not to admire about news organizations that aren’t governed by corporate cash. The Intercept also comes to mind as an investigative news organization of the same ilk.
Thanks for clarifying your stance in relation to political talk, btw.
Gathering together is often the first step toward making a problem known and providing a base for action. In the US, black churches played a significant role in the Civil Rights Movement. That was true identity politics. Was it successful? We now know that a specific Cold War problem was the greatest factor in bringing about change. But to this day, people think that gathering and marching is supposed to bring pressure.
Talking about this is apt to be immediately labelled as fascist, when it's just an attempt to peal away the emotion and look at it mechanically.
I'm guessing that every community has its own story surrounding identity. So mechanics will vary?
No it was not, not in the slightest. It's in the name: civil rights. The stakes of the civil rights movement were quite clearly not that black people were owed political redress because they were black, but because they did not have equal civil rights. There was a politics of recognition at work here, but this was not a matter of a recognition of an identity, but of - what else - equal rights.
Civil rights has been the aim of most identity politics.
If you're looking for a historical antecedent to identity politics, you'll find in good old nationalism.
So we're just not talking about the same thing. What is the goal of the kind of identity politics you're talking about? The goal is to just be separate? Could you give an example of that?
Btw, I also see your kind of identity politics as contradictory: politics is a path to a united voice. If you want to be separate, you don't engage in politics, you move to Liberia.
I've written plenty in the thread. You're welcome to read and engage.
Quoting frank
This too is utterly wrong and bizarre. The very essence of politics is the management of antagonism between competing claims. There is no politics without this disunity. It's no accident that one of the most famous - if not still hotly debated - definitions of politics was Carl Schmitt's declaration that politics begins with the demarcation between friend and enemy. Politics is as much exiling your minorities to Liberia or confining them to ghettos as it is in achieving a 'united voice'. Unity is anti-poltical. There's a good reason why fascist politics is very much about the elimination of politics - all the better for 'unity'.
Peace is anti-military, yet it's the goal of every war. As it stands, I don't really understand the definition of identity politics used in this thread. So we'll leave it there?
That much is clear.
He thinks the threat of some kind of violence keeps people in the struggle. I say it's that we just fundamentally care about each other.
We're both right.
Neither do I.
Quoting StreetlightX
How about looking up "identity politics" in the dictionary?
Identity Politics per Merriam Webster:
So identity politics has to do with emphasizing a particular feature or property of an individual as opposed to several features or properties of an individual. So if you think of yourself as a black man, or a homosexual more than you see yourself as a human being, then you would probably vote for things that help black men, or homosexuals rather than what helps all of humanity. Essentially, identity political voters are self-centered one-issue voters. How do you see yourself? What is the primary characteristic that defines what you are? Is it your race, your sexual preferences, religion, or is that you are a democrat, republican, socialist, liberal, or do you consider yourself a human being first and foremost and all those other qualities are secondary?
No Frank. I'm not offended, I'm on strike.
This is not at all a good definition of identity politics. Identity politics is not at all about groups promoting particular interests over general ones. If anything, that's just a definition of politics as such: all politics is the advancement of particular, competing claims in and of society. What is new in identity politics is the basis upon which such claims are advanced, a basis precisely understood as 'identity'. Here is an actual political scientist writing on the topic:
"What makes identity politics a significant departure from earlier, pre-identarian forms of the politics of recognition is its demand for recognition on the basis of the very grounds on which recognition has previously been denied: it is qua women, qua blacks, qua lesbians that groups demand recognition. The demand is not for inclusion within the fold of “universal humankind” on the basis of shared human attributes; nor is it for respect “in spite of” one's differences. Rather, what is demanded is respect for oneself as different" (Sonia Kruks, Retrieving Experience).
Or else to quote yet another political scientist, Corey Robin: "[Identity politics] tries to sidestep the critical role and need for argument, the need to craft a coalition and mobilize around a set of ideas and interests. Rather than build a case, people appeal to a condition. I'm not against a politics based on conflict, on arraying one group against another. I'm against building those conflicts on spurious appeals to "you're one of us." Even if that "us" is an oppressed group. ... All of us are divided in multiple ways, first and foremost within ourselves. That's what politics at its best does: to craft a commonality out of that preexisting division. Identitiarians begin with the most spurious identity of all--the undivided self--and build from there."
This is a reprise of what I said earlier: "There's a difference between "I advocate X because I am Y", and "I advocate X because of problems A, B, and C, that affect Ys". That there are issues that disproportionally affect, say Indigenous Australians, or First Nations people, and to engage in political action to address those issues is not identity politics." People - and apparently dictionaries - often confuse the two, and it is harmful and mystifying.
It is not identity politics to argue on the basis of particular interest. That's a vapid understanding of identity politics. Democracy itself is the accommodation and adjudication of particular interests, without which it would not have any raison d'etre. Identity politics is to argue for particular claims on the basis of identity, rather than the articulation of concrete problems: the imbalances of power, of unjust social burdens, inequity of participatory access and so on. All of these can disproportionally affect particular identity groups, without attempts to redress those issues as being identity politics. Simple rule: if you're arguing on the basis of identity, that's identity politics. If you're arguing on the basis of an injustice that affects who you are and who you can be, that's just politics as such.
As Kruks wrote, identity politics works on the basis of particular identities (as she writes, "it is qua women, qua blacks, qua lesbians that groups demand recognition), and not just some generic, unspecifiable distinction between 'us and them'. To equate identity politics with exclusion is to equate identity politics with politics, and argue for the extinction of the latter. Politics is founded on exclusion:
"What characterizes democratic politics is the confrontation between conflicting hegemonic projects, a confrontation with no possibility of final reconciliation. ... To conceive such a confrontation in political terms requires asking a series of strategic questions about the type of ‘we’ that a given politics aims at creating ... This cannot take place without defining an adversary, a ‘they' that will serve as a 'constitutive outside' for the we’. This is what can be called the ‘moment of the political’, the recognition of constitutive character of social division and the ineradicability of antagonism. Theorists who are unable or unwilling to acknowledge this dimension cannot provide an effective guide for envisaging the nature of politics." (Chantal Mouffe, Agnostics: Thinking The World Politically).
No wonder Haidt ends on a bunch of platitudes about 'working together' and 'creating trusting environments'. He doesn't want the end of identity politics. He wants the end of politics. Coming from a social psychologist, it's not that surprising.
I'm sure you don't want to resort to a priori examinations of meaning. Let's just look at how people actually do use the terms. What we've established is that there's more than one meaning to "identity politics." That way we don't end up declaring both the Oxford and Merriam Webster dictionaries to be wrong.
Because the term actually came into use in the US during the Civil Rights Movement, the way the average American uses the term may by influenced by that.
And given that the 'average American' is a black hole of stammering vacuity, its best not to use that as our index of anything worth anything.
It's the other way around. Your definition is not good at all. Your definition is way to general. If identity politics is just politics, then what use is the word, "identity politics"?
As I explained, identity politics is a form of modern tribalism.
Quoting StreetlightX
It's not about recognition of their identity as a woman, black or lesbian. It is about the recognition of equal rights. Their identity is what is recognized and the reason they are being denied equal rights, so their identities are recognized, but not their equal rights. It shouldn't be about one's identity. That is divisive. It should be about equality under the law, despite one's identity. You shouldn't get special treatment because of your identity either. We see it all the time when the wealthy and elites get a pass instead of doing the time for their crimes.
Or as I said on page 2, "So this seems like one of those silly 'I can make moves to interpret anything as x' games."
"Well, if we define identity in this way instead, and . . . "
Identity politics isn't just politics, that's the point. You'll excuse me if I take the word of a political scientist over some internet rando.
You've seemed to have about 25-30 different points in this thread, none of which seem to be the same as anything you've explicitly said.
It's too bad we can't just directly speak with the "particularly well-spoken civil rights activist" in question.
She says, "But those who want to single out 'identity politics' soon run into a problem: all politics is grounded in identity. All politics requires that we build coalitions around a shared picture of reality, a shared image of the future, deeply rooted in our image of ourselves, and what justice or progress might look like."
So, first she's equivocating.
But even aside from that. Not all politics fits the description she gives above.
For example, there are monarchs or dictators who make laws. That doesn't require building a coalition around a shared picture of reality. Of course, one could also redefine politics as necessarily having coalitions built around a shared picture of reality, but then it's going to turn out that we're not really saying anything aside from announcing the unusual ways in which we're going to be employing terminology.
That's not the only counterexample. It's just one of many we could give, for every aspect of her description.
But the equivocation--which is straw-manning in context--is the bigger problem.
There is a difference between voting for a politician because we share an “image of the future” and voting for a politician because she is a woman. The latter is how I think most conceive of identity politics.
You'd think so, but then people in this thread :groan:
Just one political scientist. They don't all agree. If you're only interested in the idea of one political scientist and not the rest of us "internet randos" then why did you even bother posting this thread?
:roll:
Quoting StreetlightX
Unfortunately, political agency has been increasingly reduced to action via consumerism. Take for example the very first question regarding climate change in last night's presidential debate. The moderator asked Cory Booker, a vegan, if people should follow his diet. Rather than tackle corporate-based structural issues that are the predominate source of the problem, the solution is formulated, exclusively more or less, as a burden on the individual consumer.
Ah of course this was written in 2001. A good rule of thumb with Hitchens is that by and after the 90s most of his political thought is vapid and can rightly be ignored.
-but this is a philosophy forum!
If the philosophy leads you to the singular, the concrete, then its exhausted itself conceptually and can only say the same thing in different ways, leading finally to a decadent rococo self-complexifying. Its a machine that feeds on contemporary events (I'm guilty here too) as grist for the mill. If the singular thing is to be believed then theory is a ladder to be kicked over, tho used when appropriate.
-but Kant on the french revolution
No
It may not be what you're talking about -- but doesn't that make sense of why someone might say "All politics are identity politics"?
I don't know if I'd say that assumptions about groups -- like "Gays are against Trump" or "We are a progressive bank because we have a picture of women playing rugby" -- are exactly what I'd call identity politics either. But there is a sort of short-circuiting going on when all that we have are the display of identities linked to some kind of political support. But, as I said, I'd say that this sort of mistake -- and I'm willing to call it a mistake -- isn't what identity politics is about.
So how are we moving beyond identity politics then? Or do you just mean to point out this as a kind of mistake?
But is this not just 'consuming' the debate, to satisfy one's demand for examples of corporate consumerism to attack? Isn't this a shoring-up of identity? Atheists like to make the move of saying the proper reaction to theological talk is not to disprove God, but to just leave that conservation be and go on with what matters to them. so
Because what happens is basically a confusion of process for product: identities (black, woman, gay, American) are results, products of an articulation arrived at in the course of complex social, historical, and cultural negotiation and development. One of the (necessary) means by which this negotiation takes place is politics, making it one (inescapable) ingredient that goes into the final, baked cake that is identity. Now, politics does alot more than just bake identity-cakes (not all politics, not most politics, aims merely to shape identities), but that it does, is inescapable. In is in this sense that one might say that 'all politics is identity politics': if you engage in politics (or if politics engages you), you end up, whether you like it or not, articulating the contours of identity (among other things).
But this is very different from taking identity as the explicit site of political action, of taking identification itself as a kind of political process: "I am woman, therefore, vote for me"'; "We put rainbow flags on our advertisements, so buy our products". This obscures process for product: this is what it means to engage in 'identity politics', where identities themselves are taken for (stand-in for) the very process which produce them. There's a interview with Deleuze where he talks about the difference between what he calls 'majorities' and 'minorities', which, for our purposes can be understood as those with established identities ('majorities'), and those who remain in the process of articulating theirs ('minorities'):
"The difference between minorities and majorities isn’t their size. A minority may be bigger than a majority. What defines the majority is a model [read: identity -SX] you have to conform to: the average European adult male city-dweller, for example … A minority, on the other hand, has no model [Identity - SX], it’s a becoming, a process. ... When a minority creates models [Identities] for itself, it’s because it wants to become a majority, and probably has to, to survive or prosper (to have a state, be recognized, establish its rights, for example). But its power comes from what it’s managed to create, which to some extent goes into the model, but doesn’t depend on it. A people is always a creative minority, and remains one even when it acquires a majority [an identity]. It can be both at once because the two things aren’t lived out on the same plane." (source, my bolding)
This confusion of process for product is what confuses so many people about identity politics, which is in many cases just assumed to be 'any kind of politics which has any bearing at all on identity'. Which is completely stupid because it's a confusion that ends up just equating identity politics with politics tout court, and then you end up in the disastrous situation where politics itself is taken for 'the problem' (because 'everyone knows' identity politics = bad boogeyman). This is why anyone who thinks this is just merely a verbal dispute is pretty dumb, insofar as the stakes for thinking politically - for understanding what it is we are even talking about when we talk about and of politics - are pretty high.
Sure. Politics is a branch of ethics and since there is no objective morality then there is no objective, one-size-fits-all political system.
In this sense, politics about promoting ones own self-interests. So we dont promote our identity, we promote our self-interests, which could be goals that we share with others that might have different identities. So it is improper usage if terms when you want to call all politics as such as identity politics.
When you see whites marching with blacks or straights marching with gays they arent promoting an identity. They are promoting the idea of equal treatment under the law.
:chin:
This is like rudimentary politics: don't waste your energy on stupid shit.
Apparently this is hard for some people.
I would think that inviting people to do things would be really easy.
Do you believe that a person who ascribes to the belief "All politics is identity politics" thinks of identity politics in this way, or in the other way:
Quoting StreetlightX
?
Quoting StreetlightX
I take it that your target is not a person who ascribes to identity politics, then, but a person who -- perhaps on the periphery of political action -- calls this mistaken move of flipping process for product identity politics. Am I right?
I don't think that this is merely verbal. Just because there are, in my way of framing the issue, translation rules between different instantiations of power which allow us to reframe historical facts into different frames that does not, at least as far as I'm concerned, imply that these are merely verbal disputes. I think history is important, though I believe we can translate facts into different frames.
The act of translation, I'd say, does not occur in some realm of thought alone -- but has real consequences too.
Couldn't say. Although I like to imagine that its something to do with watching certain people squirm.
Nah they're all fucking idiots.
what a wonder stuff like zuccoti fails. Lets regroup and figure out why the fucking idiots didnt listen to us. Can't they see we see them as equals?
There's no rule. But that's half the problem: the equivocation and indistinction, intended or not, between the two senses of 'identity politics'. I mean, you can almost describe the pattern in which this plays out: some idiot - say, Jonathan Haidt - rails on about identity politics, and then some well-meaning lefty chimes in with 'but all politics is identity politics!', and then the Haidt gets flustered, and by this point the audience is thoroughly confused, and everyone is worse off.
Quoting Moliere
Well, a bit of both. The confusion itself is dangerous, insofar as it makes people politically incapacitated. But, so too is there alot of danger in identity politics itself, which is reactionary in a literal sense: identity politics becomes a primary mode of political engagement when other avenues of such engagement dry up - deprived of any meaningful ability to engage in the process of creating or participating in the creation of identity (shaping the power relations which give rise to them - Deleuze's 'minority becomings'), one falls back upon shoring-up and entrenching already established identity labels.
This is something I quoted from Patchen Markell earlier in the thread: "In the face of ... resiliently undemocratic distribution(s) of political power, I suspect, we increasingly seek solace in an interpretation of the principle of democratic legitimacy that focuses on recognition rather than action: cultivating identification with the state may help to secure at least de facto democratic legitimation by enabling us to recognize these remote and alien institutions as ours (and vice versa)—while still doing little to render them more accountable to us. In other words, the experience of identification comes to supplant the experience of action as the ground of whatever sense of connection many people now have with the states that claim them."
So in some sense identity politics is a 'weapon of the weak': I don't necessarily mean this in a disparaging sense - when you're out of options, you make do with what you have. But it's important that it's understood that it's a weapon of the weak, to understand its specificity and the tactical danger of it's employment. Wendy Brown makes a similar point, although she puts it in terms of 'postmodernity':
"In the absence of orienting instruments, to avert 'existential bewilderment" inhabitants of postmodernity - substituting (poorly) for more comprehensive political analysis - resort to fierce assertions of "identities" in order to know/invent who, where, and what they are. Drawing upon the historically eclipsed meaning of disrupted and fragmented narratives of ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, region, continent, or nation, identity politics permits a sense of situation - and often a sense of filiation or community - without requiring profound comprehension of the world in which one is situated ... Identity politics permits positioning without temporal or spatial mapping. ... In this respect, identity politics, with its fierce assertion and production of subjects, appears less as a radical political response to postmodernity than a symptom of its ruptures and disorienting effects". (States of Injury)
If the thread has so far focused more on 'what' identity politics is over the nature of it's effects, that's mostly because there's been confusion over the former, even though the latter is important and interesting too.
I would think that a proper report covers both.
I think I'd offer another alternative reading, here. I'd say that the intent behind calling all politics as identity politics is to call into question those sorts of politics which are claiming to be identity-neutral. So it's not a well-meaning sort of intent, but rather a challenge to the notion that identity can be escaped when dealing with politics -- as is often claimed. But generally this sort of politics does have some identity that it privileges: to use Deleuze's terms you've introduced, there is a majority which does not need to express its identity, and so can appear formal, but which is everywhere always expressed, and so it is not a strict formality.
So calls to go back to our constitutional democracy, for instance, are seen as white and male, as are calls to focus on the real problem, that of overthrowing the bourgeoisie.
So if we are to move beyond identity politics I think the target has to be this challenge -- can we demonstrate that in this move that we aren't just re-establishing an invisible, unspoken identity at the center of our new political language?
Quoting StreetlightX
But does it actually politically incapacitate, or is it just this facile sort of appeal to identity politics that is politically incapacitating?
I think that identity politics can be a primary mode of political engagement regardless of what other avenues are available -- because recognition is an important part of doing politics. If one is not recognized for what they are then they won't be treated as they feel they should be treated -- not that recognition necessarily implies appropriate treatment, but it's a part of the process. Hence why you had Marxists interested in raising class consciousness. Coming to be recognized, and even more fundamentally, coming to recognize yourself as a certain sort of identity is a part of the political process. Else, you'll be making bourgeois appeals for why you are worth more money when that language is saturated in standards that are more or less rigged against someone in your position as a proletarian.
This is more than a off-hand recognition that identity must always be a part of our political lives. Building a proletarian class who knew its historic mission was a part of the political program before what we tend to call identity politics today was a "thing".
So I guess I'd lay the challenge out as two-fold: One, we have to address the person who is speaking about the ubiquity of identity and demonstrate how this new approach is unlike political tendencies which claim, on its surface, to be non-identitarian while silently privileging a certain identity. And, two, we have to look at what identity politics actually has to offer such that people are mobilized by it, rather than writing it off as a mere conceptual mistake -- there is something to it that is talking to people, and its talking to people, at least on its face, because they feel their identities are objects of political persecution or privilege, depending on which side you fall upon.
How do you move beyond identity politics when its an object that speaks to people? When it's been used to mobilize even supposedly identity-neutral programs?
Quoting StreetlightX
It's all good. I agree the latter is interesting too.
Because youve complicated a simple issue.
Like I said people with different identities come together to support a single idea that they share. When a straight person marched with a gay person does that make the straight person gay? Or does that make them both different identities supporting one idea of being treated equally?
Does your identity define your ideas or do your ideas define your identity? I can see how we can share ideas but I don't see how we can share identities. It seems to be identities are individualistic and unique and something that we can't share, so it is ideas that we do share and is what brings different identities together.
The substance of politics is ideas, not identities.
Two things I guess: first, that identity politics is a 'subclass' of the politics of recognition, and does not exhaust it. One can be recognized for one's achievements and contributions, or else one can be recognized for one's "humanity", regardless of one's specific identity. In fact, you'll often find liberals - those who advocate for the universality and equality of rights - as being among the first to denounce identity politics, precisely insofar as the the recognition demanded by identity politics is not universal but particular. This is why those who say that 'identity politics is about equal rights' couldn't be more wrong, and just plain stupid: equality swamps identity, it de-particularizes and liquifies it. Nothing unites a liberal front quite like identity politics: From Mark Lilla to Martha Nussbaum, Christopher Hitchens to Stephen Fry, you'll find each inveighing against the apparent horror that is identity politics at each and every turn.
So yeah, the first point is not to confuse the politics of recognition with identity politics. The former casts its net far wider, and in a manner that can be diametrically opposed to identity politics. That being said, precisely because the politics of recognition can be understood to be a more generic (in the sense of species-genera) form of identity politics, it too shares in some of its more unsavoury elements. In particular, the same blindness to the participatory dimension of politics, generally taking for granted the agency of recognition ('what' or 'who' does the recognizing - usually the state), without making it a site of political contestation in itself (consider some of the responses in Frank's recent thread on democracy: almost all the commenters there take the state (and law) as the only site of democratic agency. As of this post, the word 'power' hasn't been mentioned even once. It is a catastrophic failure of civic education and understanding. Reading it is an excercise in shame).
So I want to both 'defend' recognition as encompassing far more than identity politics even as I still reckon recognition is itself a limited paradigm of politics. That said, your point is well taken: recognition is indispensable. Recognition provides points of orientation, like little stable flags in shifting sands, and which serve to help make sense of the social relations we compose us. But everything turns on how we use recognition: whether we cluster around those points of recognition (identitarian or otherwise) because we're too scared or too incapacitated to do anything else (recognition becomes the end of politics, both as goal and as termination), or if we use those points as starting blocks, places from which to create and alter the relations of power which determine which flags of recognition are planted where. The point is not to abolish recognition - as if that would possible or even desirable - but to put it to use in a different way.
Without going too much into it, what's at stake in all of this is nothing less than the exercise of political freedom, one that cannot be guaranteed or fixed in advance by any agency of recognition, liberal or otherwise.