Alexander Bard wrote:
"And a last word concerning class versus sub-identity: My native South
Africa is heading toward a class war or a race war. A class war is exactly
what South Africa needs, a race war would be disastrous. Need I say more?
You get the picture."
Indeed.
But you know, as we're such a resilient interpretative community here on
nettime, we should put a finer point on our concepts.
On the one hand, *identity* can designate an us/them divide whose only
logical conclusion is war, suppression or extermination. Increasingly this
is being whipped up as white identity, a fence at the border, hate crime,
the West vs. the Rest, etc.
On the other hand, *identity politics* (a term which was hardly invented by
Marc Lilla, but goes back at least to the 90s and probably the 70s) has
been an extraordinarily progressive and transformative force in the United
States, in Britain, and surely many other countries where colonial history
left a mixed-race population and a legacy of unquestioned white privilege.
How exactly do you stand up to a system whose dynamic class structure
continually remakes the balance of social power, while continually
exploiting the labor of some people who are reviled in every other possible
way (blacks), trying to extirpate the very existence of other people who
were clearly there first and should have all the rights (indigenous
people), and maintaining the sexual submission of fully half the population
(women)?
To judge by recent history, you do it by saying "Me too, I am part of the
oppressed, and we are not going to take it anymore." If at that point some
old white guy says, "No, you're wrong," well, it's just proof of concept.
Which is why your ideas are going nowhere, dear Alexander.
In France, identity politics was never developed, despite the intensely
mixed urban population and the huge postcolonial overhang. It was repressed
with notions of universality, whether liberal or leftist. The result has
been a sclerotic society, unable to draw vitality from its youth and
crucially unable to negotiate the incredible tensions produced by the
continual bombing of the Middle East, not only by the US and Britain, but
also by France's very own Mirage jets. This inability to have democratic
confrontations about the de facto oppression of specific groups has been a
sad story that has done a lot of damage to French society, imho.
Conversely, recent years in the US have seen incredible progressive
upsurges of blacks, native Americans, women, Spanish-speaking people,
queers of many kinds, Muslims, and others. This has been impressive to live
through. I too have had to explore who I am, why I am, and what can be done
about it. While there is no reason to presume that everything advanced
under the banner of identity politics is valuable, the overall effect has
been to reawaken and pursue the Civil Rights Movement, which is substantial
egalitarian and emancipatory politics that heads inevitably toward
socialism.
In the US context it's clear that the new theme and practice of white
identity is a response to the great successes of identity politics.
So do we now reject identity politics and all that it has accomplished?
Impossible.
There is a dialectic at work here. Identity politics has been met by white
identity, raising the specter of sanguinary us/them conflicts. But from
negation something new can arise, which preserves the old intention by
transforming it in every way.
And it's damn interesting, though excruciating, to experience this
dialectical negation concretely, through a full spectrum of debates,
confrontations, political campaigns, attacks, murders, legislative
maneuvers, troop movements, and who-knows-what-else-is-coming.
What I see is that the reactionary side wants to impose an us/them
conflict. The progressive side is at once back to the wall and flush with
success -- a really weird position to be in.
As intellectuals we should all be trying to push the dialectical movement
forward in words and images, so that it can help articulate the rapidly
changing concrete realities. In effect, this would culminate in a new
universal and a new grand narrative. But we would no longer use those
words. Instead we would fill that space with the new forms.
The above does not require creating a straw-man concept ("identity
politics"a la Marc Lilla, a catch-all phrase equated with everything that
has gone wrong since 1980). Nor does it mean bashing past successes and
abounding in the direction of the extremist right, which is doing all it
can to reduce identity politics to a war.
It does mean examining all that has been gained and all that has been
recently lost through the theory and practice of identity politics, in
order to figure out what works and what doesn't, and ultimately (not
immediately) reach new first principles that can be used in any given
situation.
In this way we might get to what Ari and Alexander are rightly looking for,
namely a way to take on the whole system of oppression that is now showing
its real face, both bloodthirsty and suicidal.
But we would get there concretely, in the future, and not through a
solipsistic return to an idealized past.
There's a lot of work to do there, and I am urgently curious about who is
doing it, in which directions, through which struggles, etc.
best to all, Brian
On Tue, Oct 30, 2018 at 6:23 AM Alexander Bard <[email protected]> wrote:
> Dear Florian, Brian & Co
>
> Thanks for excellent postings on the future of the left. This is precisely
> the discussion I was looking for. However I think identitarianism is quite
> easy to define. It is simply a series of sub-categories that deny any
> superior category that ties them together. Laclau and Mouffe defined it
> quite clearly in the 1980s with their hegemony theory. What they heralded
> though as the route out of the hellhole of the grand narrative(s) and
> admitted would be a competition between subcultural sub-identities (the
> identities that fight over who should be seen and heard in identity
> politics, who is the biggest current victim) I believe was a terrible
> mistake. Let's use some Freud, Kristeva and Girard here to understand why
> I'm so strongly opposed to Laclau and Mouffe.
>
> A tribe or a nation is lead by a grand narrative of where it comes from
> and where it is heading. This is the priestly or shamanic storytelling of
> where and when the tribe has to move/adapt to change. The vague goal is
> some kind of utopian vision (the journey being more important than the goal
> etc), the past is retold as to cherish the wisdom of the elderly and the
> energy of the young so as to keep the whole tribe/nation on the move and
> adaptable to change without patricides or matricides (costly revolutions or
> bloody coups) being necessary. Any other identities are then sub-identities
> to this overarching collective superidentity (tribe, nation, religion,
> party, state etc).
>
> The loyalty toward the superidentity is achieved either through what
> Kristeva calls the authentic phallus (the fetish that lifts the collective
> upward) or through the false phallus (the abject that unifies the
> superidentity through hatred) to complement the mamilla that secures
> everyday survival. Often cited examples are Moses and the Promised Land for
> a fetish and Hitler and the Jew for an abject. With three main disastrous
> fake-phallic projects to deal with in the west (Hitler, Stalin and
> Colonialism) it is no wonder that The West had to go through an iron bath
> of critical analysis to deal with all three simultaneously from the 1940s
> forward.
>
> But in doing so, the baby (grand narratives) was thrown out with the
> bathwater which made us all terribly sensitive toward a return to the very
> roots of these three fake phalluses and then naively started building a
> forth one. I'm not kidding, but Identitarianism is as Rousseuian as the
> previous three (Steven Pinker describes the dilemma beautifully in "The
> Blank Slate"). Postmodernism became its own grand narrative as an
> anti-narrative and that is why Identitarianism is what it is and why it is
> so dangerous. It does not even see its own blind spot (you need Hegel to do
> that, we must stop bad-mouthing Hegel).
>
> The Identity Left denied the possibility of vision and its own capacity
> for adulthood (the journey to The Promised Land is of course the journey
> from childhood to adulthood), eternally infantilized itself, and did so by
> sloppily adding an abject to unify all its various self-victimization
> cults, namely around The White Heterosexual Male. It was consequently only
> a matter of time before The White Heterosexual Male stood up and made
> himself the victim and there you have the equally Rousseauian Extreme
> Right, Trumpism etc. At least the Extreme Right in Europe, Florian, is
> distinctly male and working class, in Sweden all Sweden Democrats are
> former Social Democrats for example. And what are the middle classes if not
> second generation working class anyway?
>
> Now we are stuck with the Charlottesvilles of the world and the only way
> out is a new utopian vision. The Right has its own clumsy version of this
> vision and it is its tech heroes Elon Musk and his vain trip to Mars,
> biohacking, transhumanism and the lot. Libertarian tax-free utopias devoid
> of nation-state attachments. And they can't even make Facebook a
> customer-friendly experience. Enough said. Silicon Valley ideology is not
> even individualistic, it is outright autistic. We can surely do better than
> that. Now if the Left could recognize that we, again, have to try to build
> a grand narrative proper to unite The Left through empowerment and not
> entitlement, remove ourselves from the grand tits of welfare-states and
> consumer societies, then we must be able to beat the shit out of the
> right's utterly mediocre visions of banal self-improvements, sexbots, space
> travel and whatever nonsense next they come up with.
>
> What can man and machine really do together? What can biological and
> machine intelligence achieve together? Why is the tribe way stronger than
> the dividual? This is The Left I want to be part of. Identitarianism has no
> place in it, because identities are fine as sub-categories of tribe and
> class. But they are not the top of the hierarchy. Because is they remain
> so, we are heading straight for the disaster. Identitarianism must go. Or
> at least it is not part of "The Left" that I want to be part of. There
> Vision, Narrative and Empowerment are everything. And Marx beats Nietzsche
> through a return to the tribe. Marx believed in the potential of the
> proletariat. He was right. Who are the cultural engineers that based on
> open source build our tomorrow today? They are the new proletariat. How do
> we unleash their power?
>
> Brian is of course absolutely right about ecology. But ecology is
> dystopian in itself. So what is the Hegelian turn when ecology becomes
> utopian? Its collectively technologically achieved reversal? Personally I'm
> investing in a tech start-up that locks in carbon in smart and cheap new
> ways. With the very same people that I build a tantric whorehouse with in
> Holland. That's my activism. What is yours? Can we inspire each other? And
> a last word concerning class versus sub-identity: My native South Africa is
> heading toward a class war or a race war. A class war is exactly what South
> Africa needs, a race war would be disastrous. Need I say more? You get the
> picture.
>
> Best intentions
> Alexander Bard
>
> Den mån 29 okt. 2018 kl 23:10 skrev Florian Cramer <[email protected]>:
>
>> The problem with all debates of "identity politics" is that there is no
>> clear definition of it, not even by Mark Lilla who popularized the term in
>> 2016. (Lilla, by the way, doesn't even speak of or for the "left", but of
>> two types of "liberalism", one that he supports and one that he rejects.)
>> "Identity politics" is a textbook strawman argument which any decent
>> analytic philosopher should be able to tear into pieces with propositional
>> logic. What's more, the term has become a reactionary meme now that
>> political movements, such as "Aufstehen" in Germany, are being founded on
>> the premise of reinvigorating the left by ridding it from "identity
>> politics". This is where the strawman becomes a red herring.
>>
>> All this is mostly based on the fiction that the working class defected
>> to the extreme right after established left-wing politics no longer
>> represented it. It's a fiction because, at least in Europe, research has
>> clearly shown that most voters for the extreme right come from the middle
>> class and vote for these parties because of shared core values (in short,
>> an understanding of the rule of law as law and order, and an understanding
>> of democracy as the execution of the will of the people who represent the
>> majority population), not policies.
>>
>> If Lilla and others were more consequential, they would have to
>> historically denounce the political left as "identity politics" as such.
>> One could call the French Revolution "identity politics" of the bourgeois
>> (versus the aristocracy), the 19th century workers' movement "identity
>> politics" of the working class (which an old-school Jacobin might have
>> rejected precisely on the grounds that the republic had declared everyone
>> to be equal), the feminist movement "identity politics" of women, the black
>> civil rights movement "identity politics" of African Americans, the gay
>> pride movement "identity politics" of queers etc.etc.. In the end, those
>> who deplore "identity politics" express a nostalgia for a simple, binary
>> past that never existed. Worse, they patronize groups of people to which
>> they neither belong, nor are in touch with.
>>
>> Maybe there could be a more precise notion of "identity politics" in the
>> sense of political choices purely made on the basis of one's group identity
>> instead of one's political interests. Examples could include trade union
>> members who voted for Clinton, Blair and Schröder in the 1990s out of token
>> loyality to "their" party, or the blind support of openly destructive and
>> malicious politics on the basis of ethnic loyality in areas with ethnic
>> conflicts. In my hometown Rotterdam, for example, a right-wing populist
>> party has been the strongest political force for one and a half decade
>> simply on the basis of white ethnic voter loyalty (in a city whose majority
>> population is now non-white), never mind the fact that this party is
>> chasing its own voters out of the city by aggressively gentrifying
>> traditional neighborhoods. Did Lilla and his epigones ever call this
>> "identity politics"?
>>
>> -F
>>
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