Precarity, identity, universality: What is the question?
Hypothesis: Underlying identity politics is something else: an anxious sense that applies to much of individual experience in capitalist society. This is the sense that in the world one encounters great obstacles of social cause and import that threaten one's pursuit of happiness through worldly success. This is a very broad and fundamental experience of life in modern society and is characteristic of the modern capitalist subject. Much 'bourgeois' theory celebrates it.
In conditions of precarity, identities are seized upon as sites of potentiality for beleaguered capitalist individual subjects.
An identity gives you a role in the society and its politics, and it gives you something conceptually tangible that serves both positive and negative polarities. Your identity gives you the potentiality of friends and enemies, as in Schmittian political theory.
It is common now to say that not only does trying to succeed in society involve obstacles and anxieties; it also involves recognizing oneself as hated, and because of one's identity.
This experience is very broadly shared.
Thinking for modern subjects begins not with an attempt to understand the All or Essence of Being (what is), as with ancient thought, nor (merely) with the individual's moral anxieties. Modern philosophy is practical more than theoretical (at least in the first and last instances) and always starts with something like a situation.
It starts today with recognizing that we are all in the shit, and we wonder what is to be done about it.
This contrasts with various earlier standpoints, including:
What is the essence or origin of what is?
What is the good life and how can I/we realize it?
What can I know?
What is the meaning of the things we say?
What kind of being am I? (Among the available options for categories of persons?).
Given that I am an X, what must I do?
Aristotle begins the Metaphysics by saying that everyone desires to understand -- not anything in particular but everything in general. This is the ancient approach to philosophy: it seeks a theory of what is because it is. It starts from the point of view of an encyclopedic theorizer (such as Aristotle was so magnificently) who wants to understand the whole of the natural and social worlds in order to best manage them. It is the point of view of oikonomia or household management, which can be extended to societies with governments. This is also the point of view of an abstract pursuit of happiness as such. The starting point was aristocratic, later priestly. In medieval Jewish thought, it applies to the aristocratic character of the scholar and the priestly notion of the role of the Jewish people. Metaphysics served ethics, of which politics formed a part; ultimately the question was how to manage both self and society, for the aristoi or best. And since noblesse oblige (privilege obligates), which is surely true wherever it exists, divine election or chosen-ness indicates a hierarchy not of enjoying privilege (and oppressing others by mere virtue of that fact, as in some of the more fascistically inclined left-liberalisms today) but of a greater task and responsibility (which follows from having both a more detailed set of social norms and a moral injunction to study and think about things). But philosophy, especially in the modern world (in particular, post-French Revolution) belongs to everyone; or rather, to anyone. (That is why today “the Bantu Tolstoy is Tolstoy,” not, or not only, a local set of myths and rituals and reflection by participants and observers on their contemporary meaning).
The X that people are supposed to understand themselves to be in liberal/progressive identity politics is any particular identity: given by nationality, ethnicity, religion, sexuality; and given as giving one's essential character as a person, and as necessarily and avoidable presented. You cannot choose your gender, sexuality, family, class, nation, etc. You are thrown into the world as this X, bearer of the property that defines this class of persons and yourself as a member of it, and the question is about what it means to be this; it is posed as a question that one must answer by developing, but the question is based upon the posit of a property as defining one's essence as a person of a particular type, the origin of the property being social facticity not as such (that you happen to have been born in the place and time where you were) but classifications whose origin is in modern capitalist and state bureaucracy.
The Heideggerian insight that we are thrown into the world (and a particular one as well as generally into 'world' as such) and that our only essential property is to be a question for ourselves or find our form of life to be, this is in identity politics appropriated in a contradictory matter, since the being in question of the defining trait is certainly allowed (there are a theoretically infinite number of ways of being anything in terms of any such trait), but the question of who one is and must be is at the same time treated as unproblematically given. So if you are Jewish, gay, American, whatever, that is given and the fact and meaning of that identity are not in question, except that your manner of realizing or performing it is. Since modern subjectivity since Shakespeare (and Machiavelli) is recognizably in a certain way theatrical, the idea of identity politics is that some divine social theorist implicitly has decided (or nature on Darwinist principles has), though really it is the society and its government, has decided what you are, and you are born with that identity, which is a theatrical role. You can play it any way you like, the only thing you may not do is publicly disavow the social identity you are "assigned" (the use of this metaphor with sex and gender is interesting; it implies, simply, a naturalized bureaucracy -- which in a way is what social Darwinism was and is, a theory that there are social types by virtue of genetics and heredity). You can petition to have the assignment changed, and it fits with the fact that our society increasingly is managed by doctors that the change is effectuated by them, and requires modifying one's actual physical self or body. But what if nature and body were not as determining as is thought, and you could play on the stage of life any part, or any of many? The question of course here is not whether you could simply disavow and deny your gender, ethnicity, or any other property you may be said empirically to have. The question, already posed by St. Paul, is that of any of these properties mattering in some deep metaphysical and ethical sense. The question is not whether gay people are really gay, Jews really Jews, etc.; it is whether any such predicative identity can be said to be essential to oneself as a person.
In our political culture, such essential qualities are often seized on as points of departure and to rely upon in facilitating a resistance to being subjected to society and capitalist or modern social alienation, which includes finding one's desires or projects opposed. Our late capitalist society is one of precarity.
And all identity politics today is at best a weak and inadequate response to precarity and precarization.
Identities qua political are falsely generic. The true genericity is neither a subset based on a particular quality, nor a totality that includes all individual persons and all subsets thereof. The true genericity is not the everyone in a territory, but the anyone.
Truths of every kind, including e.g. in mathematics where they have unquestionable universality and are changeable though their history and sociology is no part of them, are putatively true for everyone (they must be posited as such) and recognizably true for anyone. Just as the reader of a book or viewer of a film or other artwork is the reader/viewer as anyone. If a book is published or a film shown, not everyone will see it, but anyone can. But do I not, you ask, understand it only as the particular and finite person I am with my finite and non-universalizable point of view? Actually, no. In a film, the filmmaker chooses what you will see. There is an objectivity given in the facticity of the images, unlike in actual life where you can always say "this is how this appears to me." Of course, you can develop your own interpretation of the artwork based on your experience, but what you cannot deny is that the artwork itself is singular and given as it is. In a film, the images are in the film, and so the meaning of the film is also something objective in a way.
There is a singular universality. The film may present a point of view (the author's, or a character's). This point of view is part of an experience that is particular to some person. But the film makes it visible to others. If your experience is well enough presented and represented, I as viewer or reader can understand it, though of course only as you express it, and in an idiom (or language) sufficiently shared that I can know what you are saying. I cannot, of course, be you. For the same reason that I can watch an actor playing Oedipus appear to tear his eyes out; he does not actually do so, yet I can understand what this experience is by understanding what it is like, how it is made to appear, how it is put forth in a common language. And this is a potentiality of art more or less unique to it. In a way it is less real than everyday life and in a way it is more real. It may be a heightened experience, within its frame. It may seem to present something like a truth to the viewer. This is related to how we can understand each other through language, even though we don't see with the same pair of eyes, embodied and dependent on our mortal bodies and finite position in space and time. There are beings like us who only have their experience, perception, and ability to do certain things (some even use tools much as we do), and if we followed some forms of Buddhism or relativism, we might as well eschew using language to understand things. After all, since there is no hierarchy permissible any more in nature and society, human rights are animal rights.
Imagine an Auschwitz like camp where the people in it are instead of being murdered (or slaughtered with the proper techniques, which respect the human and divine in them?) are carefully tended to as far as their bodily needs are concerned, and the enumeration of those needs essentially is their rights. Their ‘human rights’. Imagine a global regime of rights and sanctions. Law is not thought about, as it was in Jewish culture when it was separate and autonomous, or is it might be by philosopher; simply, norms are enforced, and political factions merely argue, as American conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats do today, about what these norms that are enforced with little or no tolerance for deviation, what they ought to be. This of course is similar and related to ethical/political notions of a universal truth of particularist relativism, which is a ingenious reflex of American republican and “democratic” post-colonial global imperial hegemony: paradigmatically, we Americans believe all people are equal and every particular form of life ought to be allowed maximum expression, especially when and as it is politically inconsequential and anodyne. In fact, this means that everyone can wear their local colors (and maybe is asked to: herein lies the great difference today between the United States and France) precisely because you leave your particularity at the factory gate when you enter, abandoning all particularity along with your luggage, whether your path is the gasworks or the work house. Nothing in the animal rights of human being subject to humanitarian regimes of needs and sanctions excludes the possibility of degradation, as biopolitics becomes, inevitably, thanatopolitics.
Universality, or genericity, is both constructed and found to be true. It is a political act to construct certain truths. The most important truths are those about the social world we live in. The starting point is the shit that you are in yet not uniquely and so idiotically. General knowledge is useful but secondary. This is another way of saying that something like philosophy is still possible and urgently needed today.