On Dis-Identity Politics: How Our Social World is Continuously Created

The following is on a related, but distinct topic to my piece “Anti-Romulus” from two weeks ago. It also builds upon Mark Fisher’s sadly under-examined concept of “Dis-Identity Politics”, which he later abandoned for the rhetorically much weaker concept of the “Vampire Castle”, which I previously treated here. All that said, while I’m starting from Mark Fisher, I’m not committing to categorizing this piece as a “Fisher’s Ghosts” entry. It stands on its own, for now. Also, as long as I’m engaging in this sort of meta-discourse, please note that we published a book earlier this year, and would appreciate you taking a look at it.

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The oldest known mask, from pre-ceramic Europe. The mask has long been a concrete metaphor for the changeability of identity (image of an artifact kept at Musée Bible et Terre Sainte, taken from this website.)

In a piece from 2006, called simply “Dis-Identity Politics” which he published on the K-Punk Blog and which dealt, largely with the disappointing Wachowski sisters film V for Vendetta, Fisher wrote the following passage:

This brings us to subjective destitution, which, unlike Steve Shaviro, I think is a precondition of any revolutionary action. The scenes of Evey's subjective destitution in V for Vendetta are the only ones which had any real political charge. For that reason, they were the only scenes which produced any real discomfort; the rest of the film does little to upset the liberal sensibilities which we all carry around with us. The liberal programme articulates itself not only through the logic of rights, but also, crucially, through the notion of identity, and V is attacking both Evey's rights and her identity. Steve says that you can't will subjective destitution. I, however, would say that you can only will it, since it is the existential choice in its purest form. Subjective destitution is not something that happens in any straightforward empirical sense; it is, rather, an Event precisely in the sense of being an incorporeal transformation, an ontological reframing to which you must assent. Evey's choice is between defending her (old) identity - which, naturally, also amounts to a defence of the ontological framework which conferred that identity upon her - and affirming the evacuation of all previous identifications. What this brings out with real clarity is the opposition between liberal identity politics and proletarian dis-identity politics. Identity politics seeks respect and recognition from the master class; dis-identity politics seeks the dissolution of the classifactory apparatus itself. (Underlining mine)

I know I need to read Lacan, but when I see a graph like this, my instinct is to back away slowly.

This is remarkably dense for Fisher – normally, I must admit, I find his prose to be extremely lucid, but this passage, loaded as it is with Lacanian terminology, I found somewhat obtuse. Still, perhaps a look at “Vampire Castle” might be more enlightening.

Near the end, Fisher wrote:

So what can we do now? First of all, it is imperative to reject identitarianism, and to recognise that there are no identities, only desires, interests and identifications. Part of the importance of the British Cultural Studies project – as revealed so powerfully and so movingly in John Akomfrah’s installation The Unfinished Conversation (currently in Tate Britain) and his film The Stuart Hall Project – was to have resisted identitarian essentialism. Instead of freezing people into chains of already-existing equivalences, the point was to treat any articulation as provisional and plastic. New articulations can always be created. No-one is essentially anything.

As many misgivings as I have about this essay – it seems to have unnecessarily galvanized a branch of the anti-PC left that I wish would have remained inert – this passage has always struck me as a particularly insightful one, and reading it in concert with the dis-identity politics one makes it much clearer.

For our setting, think Bikini Atoll, but without the background radiation.

Consider: In the absence of other human beings, what identities do we possess? If you found yourself on a desert island, far distant from other human beings, would you still think of yourself as being an American or a Briton or a Catholic or an Atheist or anything of the sort? Or would, after a period, these identities simply slip from you like dead skin, leaving you just as a person trying to survive in the wilderness?

In such an environment, would you be rich or poor? What race would you be? While in this hypothetical you’re not disfigured and still in the possession of all of your parts, with no other human beings to be in relation to could you be said to fulfill the social cultural duties of a man or a woman?

Identity doesn’t appear from nowhere, it’s not inscribed on your person when you’re born. It is a product of interaction between people, a product of our discourse with one another.

If you discovered another human being on the other side of the island from you, who had been isolated from the rest of humanity for just as long, what identities would emerge from the sudden interaction? Perhaps you would be fearful, and in the interaction become enemies. Perhaps you would be friends, and in the interaction form an impoverished but much-desired sociability. At the moment of meeting, your identity would be rewritten, and you would become a different person.

This is part of why I get frustrated with both the anti-PC contingent and neoliberal identity politics. The one denies the obvious difference, and the latter ignores the socially constructed nature of these categories despite historic evidence of it. Originally, “white” in America simply meant “coming from the island of Great Britain, the Low Countries or the nation of France” (in short, the people whose settlement formed the foundation of the population in the 13 colonies.) Then this definition was expanded to Germans and Scandinavians, then to Spaniards, and finally to the Irish and Italians – and we have records of the Irish and the Italians being redefined as “white” in the past one hundred and fifty years, largely because they joined the coalition of ethnicities that agreed that there was such a thing as a “Black person” (I’m not going to use the term that they used, but please note that they didn’t use the term “Black person” at the time), and that such individuals as were described as “Black” needed to be violently suppressed. They already had a model for the other in the form of the Native American – the Native was the Other Without, the Black person was the Other Within. The product of this was White Supermacy, but the category of “whiteness” was an artificial thing and its borders are constantly being litigated (are Jewish people white? What about people who live in Spain or France but have principally Berber ancestry? What about Armenians?)

I can’t think of anything to add here, other than “whoops, all racism.”

How long do you think that people with Irish, Polish, or Italian descent would remain “white” should all non-white people leave the country? It’s my suspicion that the coalition of ethnicities that make up “whiteness” would dissolve in the absence of an other. For an extended examination of the category of whiteness as a philosophical concept, I recommend the title essay of Neoreaction a Basilisk, reviewed by Edgar here.

I suspect that this is part of where the so-called “Gay Panic” and “Trans Panic” comes from. Because of how our society conceptualizes things, the way that these people (members of the LGBTQIA community [henceforth “queer” for simplicity sake, don’t @ me.]) interact with others eventually came to be viewed as constituting an identity – which means that there was something it had to differ from. The identification of the first gay man or lesbian as such was the invention of the category of “straight”. The same can be said for the first public emergence of a trans person: this created the category of cisgender. Such a definition would be useless beforehand: identity only becomes meaningful in the moment of difference.

There are legends about the Scottish Clan Kerr, who trained to use their swords in their left hands, and built their strongholds to favor left-handed fighters. For an invading army, this must have been like slipping into a mirror world, a brief visit to a world clearly not designed with you in mind.

Consider, also, the treatment of left-handed people – a population about as common as gay people, and likewise evenly distributed and historically reviled. In the contemporary world, this is hardly seen as notable in most contexts, and is considered exceptionally useful in certain contexts (especially baseball, it seems,) but it historically came to be associated with evil and sickness (consider the use of “left-hand path” in occultism, or the connotations of the word “sinister.”) The presence of a left-handed person creates the identity of right-handedness, and – similar to the emergence of queer or cis identities – was viewed as an attack.

The vast categories of identity that define the movements of society – race, gender, sexuality, class – are a product of the social interaction of people. In almost every instance of one of these identities being imposed on an individual, they view it as an attack. Yet, bereft of these identities we feel deprived.

I have to ask why this is.

Let’s return to our hypothetical person marooned on a desert island, and address the other major philosophical concept in that passage from “Dis-Identity Politics”. What rights does such a person possess? Does it make sense to say that they have a right to life? No – a wild beast or simple accident might deprive them of life. How about property? No – there’s no other person to deprive them of what they might have on their person. How about liberty? Such a person might be considered to be completely free or perfectly unfree: depending on how we talk about liberty, either might apply.

It is only when this person is inserted into a social context that they must negotiate with another person what they are entitled to, because it is only in this context that they might have their hypothetical rights safeguarded or deprived. I don’t believe that these are something that a person inherently possesses. I believe they, like identities, emerge from the constant negotiation with others that makes up “society.”

Graeber: “[t]hose who have argued that we are the natural owners of our rights and liberties have been mainly interested in asserting that we should be free to give them away, or even to sell them.”

Pictured: John Locke, noted defender of slavery.

In Debt: the First 5,000 Years, David Graeber points out in his discussion of Early Modern economics and the intellectual climate surrounding them that “[t]hose who have argued that we are the natural owners of our rights and liberties have been mainly interested in asserting that we should be free to give them away, or even to sell them.” To this end, because I find the concept of slavery distasteful, I’m reluctant to engage in this line of reasoning.

Thus, in my thinking, “rights” and “identities” are two halves of the same complex of ideas. In the constant negotiation of our identities, an agreement gradually forms of what it is acceptable for us to do in regard to other people. As such, our rights tend to have to do with what social power is recognized as being connected to our identity, through its similarity or difference from a perceived norm. Some of these differences are conceived of as a deficit (racial and sexual minorities), some are conceived of as a credit (wealth comes to mind most clearly, but there are obviously other categories for what makes someone a social elite.) What is taken away by the deficit or added by the credit are rights.

This also handily explains why the appearance of a new axis of identity leads to reflexive hostility: the straight man, learning that someone is gay, is confronted with the realization that someone might treat him as women have historically been treated. The cis person, confronted with a trans individual, realizes that the rigid lines of gender identity are permeable and thus what they see as their rights are now negotiable.

In short, the problem isn’t the presence or absence of other identities, it’s the hierarchization of these identities, the idea that some identities are better – in possession of more rights – than others. The relationship between “contrasting” identities doesn’t need to be hostile: see the acceptance and accommodation for left-handed people, and the fact that (obviously) men and women must come to an understanding and respect at some point, even if it is not nearly as often as it should be (as the continued existence of misogyny clearly illustrates.)

So what is to be done?

I’m rapidly nearing 2,000 words here, and I’m not sure I can explain how to dismantle hierarchy before I have to publish this. The problem is a fault in the way human beings interact. I’ve spent a lot of pixels – here and elsewhere – railing against the idea of there being an essential, unchanging human nature, and I deeply believe that. This is, I admit, mostly what I want to be true: but I’ve been doing more and more reading in the field of anthropology lately, and I feel that I’m backed up on this. Because, seemingly, every time someone makes a broad, sweeping declaration about what human nature is, some anthropologist returns from an embedded study in the Amazon, or Subsaharan Africa, or the Arctic, or pulls up interviews with aboriginal Australians or Middle Eastern herdsmen, and blows a hole in the idea of some essential, unchanging essence of humanity. History is larger and stranger than we acknowledge.

…and I’m not the first person to note the problem of hierarchy in this whole business.

A number of these societies have invented social technologies to address the problem of hierarchization – rituals to shame the powerful and honor the humble, returning everyone to a baseline of social acceptance. These societies, seemingly, had no inclinations to advance to an industrialized level. I think it’s a mistake to say that they are necessarily more “primitive” just because they never smelted iron or stacked up bricks to make a courthouse or sent three men to the moon atop an office-building-sized tower of high explosives or erased a city with an atomic bomb.

I was about to suggest that we shouldn’t call them primitive because they never created a feedback loop of ecological devastation, but I realized that wasn’t entirely correct: the Classical Maya, Cahokia, Easter Island, and other civilizations I don’t know about, all did just that. And then their ancestors did their best to correct the issue. They didn’t deplete their environments in the same way that we did, but the tendency of centralized civilizations to drain their environs and cause widespread — even if unintentional — death is well-known.

A few weeks back, in a piece that was particularly pessimistic about the fate of America (and which, I will say, I still stand by – the Burn Down will be longer than I predicted, but I still believe it’s happening,) I quoted Tacitus, who wrote of Augustus and other emperors “they make a desert, and call it peace.”

All of these civilizations wrecked the world around them, they made a desert that encompassed the world that they defined as theirs, and then collapsed because they couldn’t make their civilizations continue.

And after the collapse, the survivors saw that the slate was wiped clean, the rights enshrined in their social contract were gone, their previous identities stripped away, and they began to negotiate what kind of world they would build on the edges of this desert while the land healed. And I cannot possibly know, but I would guess that the starting point most of these negotiations began with was something along the lines of “okay, well, we don’t want that to happen again.”

Surely, the societies produced through this negotiation and renegotiation weren’t perfect. No societies are. But it definitely seems that the tendency in most of these places is to build a more egalitarian and equitable society.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we just skipped the birth of the desert and started building a more equitable society now?

Perhaps it’s a mistake, but even if it doesn’t stop the collapse that we all feel is going to come eventually, it might be nice to practice a better way of doing things, just so we’re ready when everything comes tumbling down and we find ourselves, stripped clean of the identities that we thought would be with us forever and someone starts up the negotiations again.

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But let’s bring this back around to the present moment. What should we do at the moment? I think that the best course of action for all of us, individually (a dodgy proposition, admittedly — smacks of atomization, but still,) is to be conscious of the games of hierarchy we’ve been trained to play, and refuse to engage in them. No other person’s identity, on its own, is a danger to you. Be conscious of the tendencies to construct hierarchy and push it away — you’re going to fail (call me a bad anarchist, but hierarchy is unavoidable), but you’re going to improve the world a tiny bit by doing that.

The danger isn’t hierarchy itself, it’s static and unchanging hierarchies. That’s really the problem, when you get down to it. Once we’ve done this we can start with the real work.

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