What is Identity Politics All About?
The less we are allowed to think about something the more troubled we should be about whatever it is we are not allowed to think about.
If thinking about something implies the possibility of questioning assumptions and the arguments based on them, thinking about identity politics can be risky business. To disagree with, or even just question, propositions put forward by members of a movement aimed at redressing real and often severe forms of injustice can easily be seen as colluding with those who would perpetuate injustice. If to think is to doubt, the temptation simply to go along with what is being thought for us as a substitute for thinking for ourselves can be hard to resist. Yet, the less we are allowed to think about something the more troubled we should be about whatever it is we are not allowed to think about. In other words, the most important thing for us to think about is why we are not allowed to think about it.
One way to begin to think about what is not to be thought about in identity politics is to bring into the discussion a distinction broadly applicable to social movements and their political expression (Levine). This is the distinction between two kinds of mental processes: those that are reality connected and those that operate on the plane of fantasy. Typically, social movements engage both processes, with the fantasy process, because it is the locus of emotional meaning, often providing the energy driving the movement.
For identity politics, fantasy processes are of considerable importance. So, if we are to think about identity politics, we need first to identify the fantasy associated with it. This fantasy is present in its rhetoric and program but not identified there as such. After all, those who see themselves as part of a movement do not imagine the ends they identify with it to be indicators of the presence of fantasy any more than any of us see in our everyday pursuits and the ostensible reasons we do what we do the work of fantasy even though that work is always present.
A good place to look for fantasy is in the movement’s integrating theme or idea. Let me begin, then, with a brief statement of the main motivating idea that defines identity politics:
Identity politics is the struggle for justice on the part of a group of people with a shared identity who have, because of their shared identity, been deprived of essential rights and opportunities by those who hold power in society and use that power to secure those rights and opportunities exclusively for themselves.
The term “deprivation” introduces into the account of the lives of those affiliated with the movement the element of victimization. It is not simply that they find themselves less well off than others; it is that they find themselves less well off than others because they have been deprived by them. Taken by itself, this proposition may or may not be the expression of fantasy. It may be a statement about what has actually occurred. Where the fantasy element makes its presence felt is when significant aggression is mobilized to protect the statement from doubt and enforce acceptance of it; in other words, when we are not allowed to test whether it is true or not against reality.
A relevant case in point is the way identity politics sometimes deals with the matter of inequality. Within the world of identity politics, inequality is an expression of injustice. The two are inseparable. In the rhetoric of identity politics, this connection is not subject to reality testing. We are not allowed to ask the question: What caused this or that specific instance of inequality (of income, educational attainment, treatment by the police, and so on) because the answer to that question has been predetermined: the cause is injustice. To ask the question about causation is to allow the possibility that inequality and injustice might not always be the same thing; there may be factors other than injustice involved in accounting for inequality. The possibility of other factors may or may not affect the judgment that it is important to lessen inequality, but it could lead in a different direction when we consider what policies might be effective in achieving that goal. It would be ok to do that, but only if a fantasy construction is not at stake and therefore no fantasy needs to be protected.
The fact that we are not meant to ask the question about causation is a good indicator that we are operating on the level of fantasy.
The fact that we are not meant to ask the question about causation is a good indicator that we are operating on the level of fantasy. This observation might lead us to redouble our efforts to subject the claim about injustice and inequality to reality testing in an attempt to break out of the terms of the debate established when we move it onto the plane of fantasy. But you cannot dislodge fantasy by throwing contrary evidence at it. Doing so misses the point: equating inequality and injustice is not a statement about the kind of reality that can be tested in the usual way. It operates on an entirely different plane, a plane that has its own kind of reality and its own kind of truth. Were we to go ahead and test the proposition against reality in the usual way, we would, I suspect, discover that it is sometimes true and sometimes not. But there is not much point in doing so since exploring the truth of the proposition in this way draws us away from rather than closer to the truth it contains. What sort of truth is that?
The truth of fantasy is the truth of memory. And the truth of memory is the truth of origins, of how we got to be the way we are.
In response to this question, let me offer the following brief proposition: The truth of fantasy is the truth of memory. And the truth of memory is the truth of origins, of how we got to be the way we are. And we know that our account of how we came to be who we are is true because we were there.
The truth of memory is an interpretation of our origins connected to our memories of them. This interpretation exists in the form of the emotions attached to the memories. As it turns out, because the truth of memory refers to early formative experiences and the emotions attached to them, causation always means intent.
Intent plays a large role because of the primacy in early experience of being cared for and attended to. Being attended to is an expression of the capacity of the child to provoke a response from his or her caretaker. Once the idea takes root that the child must exert influence over his or her environment if care is to be provided, projection enters into the matter of causation as the power of the child to cause care is linked to the power of the caretaker to provide care, or to refuse to do so. The interpretation of experience associated with the use of memory to discover truth, then, follows the logic of subjective causation: Whatever happens in the world happens because someone makes it happen. And this is exactly the logic we see operating where inequality and injustice are treated as the same thing.
If we think about truth as the truth of memory, it follows that appeal to it will run into difficulties when we encounter people who do not share our memories. Where people different from us exist, so does another kind of truth, a truth linked to what Freud refers to as the “reality principle,” which is essentially the truth of a world existing outside the subjective reality of personal experience. Objective truth, then, is the truth of an adult world if by that term we have in mind a world of different and separate subjectivities, and therefore different memories and different emotions connected to them. Problems arise when we attempt to use the method of knowing linked to the child’s world of subjective causation to explain phenomena in an adult world understood as a world of different people, a world in which causation can take a different form.
This is where the phenomenon of the group can come into play. Groups overcome the problem posed by differences between people by creating a world in which people are all the same, or, if they are different, they suppress those differences so they can avoid the experience of being in a world where the truth of memory is not shared.
To understand how this works in the specific context of identity politics, we need to take a closer look at the connection between personal experience and group experience. Group or shared experiences take on importance for individuals when they are connected to their personal experiences and the memories shaped by them. To matter to us, something must engage or provoke an emotional response, and emotional responses are an aspect of memories, which means they engage the residue in the mind of personal experiences. These memories of personal experience can then be linked to memories others have of their personal experiences as part of the attachment of the individual to a group. The emotional energy in the group depends on the power of the personal connection to personal experience, which may, then, be intensified by group processes. Because group processes intensify emotions, they also intensify the experience of memory and tend to make the truth of memory predominate in the way causation is perceived.
Personal experiences can become shared group experiences simply by being interpreted that way. One reason to join a group is to facilitate the interpretation of personal experiences as something other than personal, something existing outside the individual and therefore objective. Sometimes this interpretation is well grounded. Sometimes it operates as a defense aimed at creating distance between the individual and his or her personal experiences, especially those in which the individual feels diminished in some significant way. Sometimes individuals feel diminished in their encounters with those outside their group because those outside their group seek, through what they say and do, to create that feeling in them. Sometimes individuals feel diminished in their encounters with those outside their group because of projection onto them of attitudes originating internally.
Because of this, identity politics involves raising the stakes by making the worth of identity contingent on the outcome of the policy-making process.
We can consider the interactions between members of different groups, to the extent that projection is involved, a signature form of the conflict fostered by identity politics. Identity politics focuses conflict not primarily on specific policy goals, but on the matter of self-esteem. Because of this, identity politics involves raising the stakes by making the worth of identity contingent on the outcome of the policy-making process.
The involvement of projection in identity politics tends to make politics a zero-sum game. This follows from the use of politics to determine where the badness lies. Projection is a process meant to assure that the badness lies outside. If the intent is to support projection, then the result is to assure that policy making will be a zero-sum game. Thus, outside the frame of reference of identity politics, correcting discriminatory policies and practices need not be a zero-sum game, while, within that frame, it is almost inevitable that it will be.
We can see these forces at work in the insistence that movement in the direction of greater equality must mean a transfer of a fixed pool of wealth, income, and opportunity from those who now enjoy them to those who do not. While this conclusion might follow in a stationary economy with a fixed capacity to create income, it does not follow in a dynamic economy where increasing the incomes and opportunities of previously excluded groups can as easily be conceived as a method for increasing the overall level of production, employment, and income, especially if we take a longer view of the problem. Assuming, however, that distribution of income and opportunity is a zero-sum game indicates that the goals of the group extend beyond correcting an inequitable situation to finding someone to blame and transferring pain and suffering onto them so they will understand what it feels like to be a member of a disadvantaged group. This is the moment in the process where conflict intensifies and politics becomes a way to legitimate aggression. Meaningful policy goals become secondary; and the likelihood of adverse consequences increases.
We can understand the insistence that the problem be defined as a zero-sum game if we understand the connection between truth, memory, and identity politics. If people are different from you and therefore do not share your memories, yet you need to have your (subjective) truth become their truth and therefore the truth, then you must find a way to make other people have your memories, which can only happen if they can have your experience, which is the experience of deprivation and victimization. Out of this logic emerges both the goals and methods of the movement we associate with the term identity politics when the fantasy element in it comes to predominate.
The idea that reality can be described as a zero-sum game may be more a hope about reality than a description of it. The hope is fueled by the conviction that we cannot rid the world of the badness there, but we can make someone else hold it for us. Yet, the attack on thinking that is so much a part of identity politics suggests otherwise. So far as the attack on the thinking capacities of others is an expression of an internal prohibition on thinking for ourselves, imposing that prohibition on others will not relieve ourselves of it but only indicate how powerful it is internally.
The weaker the capacity to contain emotions and think about them the greater the power of the impulse to act out those emotions, not only in relations with those outside the group but also internally.
This means that the group is held together by the attack on thinking internal to it. And this quality of group life intensifies the aggression active in the group and therefore the pressure toward enactment of prohibitions on members. The aggression mobilized internally against thinking means the presence of significant limitations on the capacity to contain thoughts, ideas, memories, and the emotions attached to them within the group. The weaker the capacity to contain emotions and think about them the greater the power of the impulse to act out those emotions, not only in relations with those outside the group but also internally.
Perhaps the most significant form this acting out takes is in the relationship between parents and children. To the extent that, to preserve that relationship, thinking must be repressed, the result is the formation of memories of aggression against thinking that, when directed outside the parent-child relationship, shape the kinds of activities we associate with identity politics.
References
Levine, D. (2017) Psychoanalysis, Society, and the Inner World: Embedded Meaning in Politics and Social Conflict. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.