Can Identity Politics Tolerate Hysteria?

There is one fundamental problem with identity politics.

It is the presumption that everybody has an identity.

To have an identity seems to imply two inter-related things:

1) To have an identity seems to imply having a taxonomy - a classification of organisms, lifestyles, sexual preferences etc. and so on but a classification of some aspect of a human being. But identity is not quite as simple as how someone would label say the jars and cans in their house. It's not that you are already a certain kind of person and then you are given a menu of identities to choose from and choose the one that is most appropriate for you - its far more complicated than that.

In effect having an identity means becoming a specimen of a specified type and so it also means conforming to a certain type. Transgender people might have surgery to have their sex re-assigned but they go through a long process of education and learning to become a man or a woman including things such as how to walk, how to use one's vocal chords, how to dress etc. all of which would be within prescribed definitions of what it means to be a man or a woman or a transgender person. One has the option of identifying as a hijra in India but not in Sweden.Thus it is not simply question of being free to adopt this or that identity. Every identity also dictates/ prescribes a set of norms, practices, beliefs and behaviours that you must now cite in order to perform or claim that identity.

The classic American liberal position seems to be to allow people the freedom of their particular identities. It is an insistence on difference wherein say a Native American should have the freedom to assert his or her particular identity as should say a Sikh person who should have the freedom to wear a turban, grow out one's hair etc. This insistance on granular differences and particularities makes impossible any struggle for a Universality or Universalism.

The classic liberal identity politics struggle would thus be a struggle for expanding the menu of identities recognized (let us have an asexual banner/ flag or a BDSM banner/ flag as well for the pride march). But such a politics cannot question the neccessity of having an identity and furthermore the necessity of having an identity as a pre-requisite to possessing rights. An anecdote I get from Sundar Sarukkai can clarify this:

Sometime in the 60s, a community in Maharashtra decided to break away from caste entirely. They refused to tick mark any caste box when a census of castes was taken in Maharashtra. So what happened? In the next census, a new field had been added to the census sheet - a field called ajatis! (casteless)

Can identity politics conceive of granting rights without pegging it to identity? Zizek calls this the hysterical question. Truly radical questions and formulations are hysterical in the literal sense wherein a hysterical person begins by questioning their identity. Can identity politics accommodate hysterical questions?

2) One has an identity in the same way one has property. As already discussed - an identity is not just a label - with it comes the right to make use of certain specialized privilege that belong to card carrying members of that identity alone.

This was a post on twitter where a white person was being criticized for wearing dreadlocks. Like land, dreadlocks now are the property of a particular community. People who are not members of this community who wear dreadlocks are guilty of "cultural appropriation". More charged versions of this debate include who has the right to say the "N word". In the N word debate - the word itself is seen as if it were a possession - a copyrighted possession that belongs exclusively to the Black community. How the n-word is being used i.e. the meaning of the word in a sentence does not matter. It does not matter whether one uses the word as an insult or is using the word in a completely friendly gesture. All that matters is a violation of copyright law - someone who does not have the right to use a word, used it.

If I can be blunt, I find this line of reasoning quite perverse. Any assertion of private property is a removal of a resource from common use. If one buys a piece of land and builds a fence around it - then that piece of land can only be used by 1 person whereas previously before anyone owned it, it was open to all.

Our cuisine, our language, our skin colour - every aspect of our history bares testament to the traces of exchanges and common usage between people of different "identities". If we had always allowed for this logic of squabbling over who owns what and who has exclusive access to this or that, only South Americans would be eating potatoes and only the Chinese would be drinking tea.

The term identity politics was coined only in the 1970s. I am sure that history or anthropology would have no trouble furnishing countless examples of how people conceived of themselves without conceiving of themselves as "having" or "possessing/ owning" an identity. I have not actually had the time to look into the literature on this topic but I can make up some examples (a practice I defended in an earlier post), to provide some sketch of what non-identity based claims and rights might look like.

A and B are members of a tribe who went though a gruelling initiation ceremony involving much pain and agony when they hit puberty. Among other things, the purpose of this ceremony was to bind everybody who shared the experience as brothers for life. A is now calling on B to ask for some help.

C writes to the pastor of a Church, protesting her innocence. She has been imprisoned for a crime she did not commit. C implores the pastor that he has sworn an oath to help all those innocent in need of help.

F arrives at the doorstep of G. They have never met before but F asks G to help him as they belong to the same gotra i.e. related by virtue of the fact that they both belong to clans descended from the same "mythical" ancestor - a bird with a lion's tail and deer's head.

One could argue that every case I've made up is an instance of some type of identity or the other. This is however our particular and peculiar way of looking at the world. What if I were to assert that in every case, these people did not think of themselves as "having" an identity.

Furthermore, in every case that I made up I tried to bring out an essential difference from the language of identity politics. Identity today goes hand in hand with the notion of rights - the inalienable rights of man etc to pursue "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" -a French idea that comes to us by way of the Americans.

The essential difference I made up in all my examples was a language of duties and obligations rather than rights. Having the freedom and right to do something is very different from having the duty and obligation to do something.

In conclusion: every system has its privileges and disadvantages. Many white Europeans and Americans feel discriminated against - they feel that every other culture gets to maintain their privileged status as something unique or distinct i.e. own pieces of cultural private property while every time they borrow something from someone they are accused of stealing whereas if someone were to borrow something from them - say a Black musician uses country music elements in a hip-hop song it is not seen as "cultural appropriation."

Liisa Malkki has argued in her article "National Geographic" that indigenous people as part of their identity package are often seen to have some privileged access to or knowledge of nature and this baggage of somehow having an "authentic" relationship with nature can be extremely constraining rather than liberating.

From the limited time that I spent in the Andaman Islands, I found that this was also a huge problem with much of the discourse there where both NGOs and govt depts insisted on giving the indigenous Andamanese not rights per se but only granted them indigenous rights i.e. rights given on condition of remaining indigenous. In this way identity can become a shackle rather than some great means of emancipation. Perhaps I will write about this some other time.