<nettime> Grand narratives vs Identitarianism

This bogus standoff between Marxist and ‘Rousseauian' factions is not only shallow, but seems (despite calls for a grand unifying narrative for ’the left’) to be used to draw lines in the sand, fostering divisiveness, rather than a vision that will mobilise and empower. Perhaps some shadow of the point that Alexander is grasping for (badly and boringly in endless repetition of himself) was pre-empted and better articulated some years ago by Judith Butler, who argued in Frames of War:

"Left politics ... would aim first to refocus and expand the political critique of state violence, including both war and those forms of legalised violence by which populations are differentially deprived of the basic resources needed to minimise precariousness. This seems urgently necessary in the context of crumbling welfare states and those in which social safety nets have been torn asunder or denied the chance to emerge. Second, the focus would be less on identity politics, or the kinds of interests and beliefs formulated on the basis of identity claims, and more on precarity and its differential distributions, in the hope that new coalitions might be formed, capable of overcoming liberal impasses. Precarity cuts across identity categories as well as multicultural maps, thus forming the basis for an alliance focused on opposition to state violence and its capacity to produce, exploit and distribute precarity for the purposes of profit and territorial defence. Such an alliance would not require agreement on all questions of desire or belief or self-identification. It would be a movement sheltering certain kinds of ongoing antagonisms among its participants, valuing such persistent and animating difference as the sign and substance of a radical democratic politics.”

Coalitions and alliances are already forming across the left. This is what brought 640,000 people on to the streets in the UK, to animate and make visible their dissent to a British state that is as unlikely to acknowledge its colonial legacy as it is to acknowledge the effects of economic privatisation, austerity or the shambles otherwise known as Brexit. Alexander would have us believe that there are no viable visions of collectivity other than his own. Self-evidently, it’s not true.

Bests,

On 30 Oct 2018, at 16:33, Alexander Bard <bardissimo@gmail.com> wrote:

Dear David

I could not agree more. The difference between a Marxist and a Rousseuian analysis seems to be an issue of hierarchy and priority.

Class is the overarching category in Marxism. You can play around with identities as much as you like (which you and I have done both privately, publicly, spiritually and politically for years), some of which materially exist (gender) whereas others are nothing but social ghosts (race). However you always have to admit that they are secondary or sub-categories to class. or to rephrase that in what ironically appears to be controversial on Nettime in 2018: A wealthy black lesbian is better off than a poor white heterosexual man. As a matter of fact, she is probably also better educated and has a far higher attentional score in the sociogram too. This is what class is all about. Not about correcting what is attentionally wrong, such tactics belong in daycare centers and not in a civilized society of grown-ups.

What Rousseuians always disliked about the Marxist model is that it denies them the pleasure of creating competing victimhood cultures between the identities. Because that is what identitarianism is and does, both the "leftist" and the "rightist" varieties. From the French revolution on to the Chinese cultural revoluition and on to today's hegemonic struggles.

As for Brian Holme's otherwise brilliant and sincere summary of what he finds hopeful in current struggle, I'm afraid I believe Brian both wants to eat the cake and keep it. He just hopes there will miraculously appear a shared, unifying vision out of nowhere that suddenly makes The Left something distinctly different than The Right. I see no such thing. I rather see an emancipatory struggle that WAS great and empowering while it held on to proper class analysis having lost that class analysis core and therefore now resorted to the most vulgar form of political correctness obsessed with tonailty, etiquette, opposing free speech and genuine democracy and devaluing itself to an infantilized parody of its proud former self. I'm all for classical feminism with its strong and feminine women, classical LGBT struggle before queer theory made a parody of it, and the struggle against apartheid before it resorted to blaming others for its very own ills and shortcomings. But now I believe Marx and class analysis are more needed than ever. And a new grand narrative of man and machine and collective intelligence born out of that analysis.

Because we need vision and direction first and then we can we look at taking care of our respective attentional needs such as sub-identities. Which is why I'm all for and will be part of re-building a Marxist movement for the 21st century (Burning Man, Wikipedia, are such excellent examples that work). But I refuse to be a part of the screaming crowd of the Rousseauian identitarians. As a matter of fact, I find it both reactionary and bloodthirsty.

South Africa was just the first example of identitarianism gone wrong and going worse still. Is Jeremy Corbyn's UK next?

Best intentions

Alexander

Den tis 30 okt. 2018 kl 14:13 skrev David Erixon <dexo@me.com>:

One way of fighting “race” is to take the ethical position that “race” shouldn’t exist. Having lived in SA for years, seeing the Marxist analysis being applied with “race” instead of “class” means that “race” is being instilled rather than abolished. Instead of race issues becoming non issues (as in not being a factor) it’s being cemented. What caused the problem is not necessarily what will resolve it. And along the way, sadly, the real class issues are not being addressed.

Class and race is not the same thing, nor should it be. Of all the socially constructed phenomena, race is a phenomena that should definitely be destructed. Do we really believe that race can become a thing of the past, if we continuously keep reinforcing it? Then how? Or, are you suggesting that race exist as a biological reality, and that it is a real signifier for individuals as well as groups?

Now, just to be clear, I’m not against an intersectional analysis, I just don’t believe that intersectionality provides any kind of solution. We need another way forward.

And, by the way, ironically, so doesn’t the South African constitution. The notion of “race” is however too much of a power base for the political elite of ANC. That narrative feeds their power, so better keep that narrative alive.

All the best,

David

On 30 Oct 2018, at 12:14, Ian Alan Paul <ianalanpaul@gmail.com> wrote:

"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."

The inability to think race and class together in this case in particular says everything you need to know about the poverty and bankrupty of Alexander's position.

If your class analysis can't account for the way labor/capital has been sexualized and racialized historically, via colonialism, the gendered division of labor, etc., then your analysis has nothing do with the actuality of the world and instead only obscures it.

On Tue, Oct 30, 2018, 07:23 Alexander Bard <bardissimo@gmail.com> 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 <flrncrmr@gmail.com>:

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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