We Live in a Post-Identity World

"Wherefrom does the receding characteristic of identity stem? The answer is, from the aporetic constitution of identity."

(Vahabzadeh: 2003, pg. 94).

In the 1960's-70's, the shift in Western political praxis from the totalizing social movements of the modern era to the particularistic New Social Movements of the post/late-modern era involved a shift toward a politics of identity, that is to say, a politics in which difference became more important than similarity, or sameness. For a cadre of activists who believed that the familiar was the source of solidarity and power, this was profoundly distressing. However, are these two experiences really that different? I will argue that, in fact, it is only possible to distinguish the content of particular identies from the prior standpoint of totality (structure), and that in contrast to both, the new forms of distinction or otherness are more futural and indeterminate patterns than present-at-hand differences. That is, identity is the other face of universality, and cannot govern action and change within this dialectic.

Identity as a symbolic referent is backward-looking, and tends to deny its own emergence and affectivity in praxis. "Identity/experience emerges in the configurative moment of identification/articulation - the moment of decision. This implies that the 'original' modes of presence of the discursive terrain are of little significance to the current articulation" (Vahabzadeh 2003: pg. 88). What this means is that identity can never be definitively grounded in a past event or "peril," and always integrates new elements. Identity involves self-knowledge, yet it cannot effect genuinely transformative change, according to Vahabzadeh, because "knowledge of categories of being and of the event of unconcealment can never be attained before the event. Experience, as the summoning of discursive elements, replaces such beforehand, verifiable knowledge" (pg. 94). Rather, "experience, identity, the summoning of discursive elements, destiny, social imaginary, action, and (categories of) being all leap forth at one and the same time in one single event" (ibid).  Vahabzadeh's work thus shows how identity can have significance when situated within action, and the conflict and struggle this entails, but not according to an 'essence' or 'agency' aiming at a pre-defined goal or fulfillment. In a section of his book Articulated Experiences (2003), entitled "The Aporias of Identity," Vahabzadeh states that:

The concept of 'receding signfied' shows that action will never turn into agency. It is obvious that the aporetic character of identity radically challenges all versions of agency in favour of the genuine resuscitation of actor; 'genuine' because it is nontelic action itself that defines actor's being, and not any structurally designated mode of performance."

(pg. 95).

This makes it clear that movement actors must move away from both prospective and retrospective modalities and loci of practice if they are to enact transitional experiences. This can only be achieved, however, once the universal-particular relationship of revolution/citizenship is reversed in the identity politics of new social movements, which now privileges civil society over the state (pg. 156-7). For Vahabzadeh, the particularities that are thence released allude to the inadequacies of party and institutional politics, yet are destined to become singularities through anarchic action. That is, the fragmentation is only temporary and from the perspective of totality, since the actors are in a process of sharing different experiences, i.e., creating a genuine sociality.

While identity and identity politics are often associated with postmodern theory, post-structuralists and post-Marxists have critiqued these terms from a different angle. For post-anarchist Richard Day, identity politics "faces certain impediments that are inherent t:o the politics of demand" (2005: pg. 14). Rather than seeing the new social movements based in particular self-identities, Day writes that "it is difficult to understand how striving to improve the situation of queers, women and people of colour, or working against military and ecological destruction, can be seen as individualistic pursuits" (pg. 69). Rather than achieving private self-interest, "the burnout rate of activists in these movements would also seem to suggest that their struggles are no more pleasurable than those associated with class warfare" (ibid). Day proposes a politics of affinity that challenges many of the hegemonic features of the politics of identity:

A politics of affinity...is not about abandoning identification as such it is about abandoning the fantasty that fixed, stable identities are possible and desirable, that one identity is better than another, that superior than another, that superior identities deserve more of the good and less of the bad that a social order has to offer, and that the state should act as the arbiter of who gets what.

(pg. 188).

Some have gone further into non-identitarian praxis. About the founding affect of social movements (that is, the scream of refusal), John Holloway (2002) writes:

The scream is an expression of the present existence of that which is denied, the present existence of the not-yet, of non-identity. The theoretical force of the scream depends not on the future existence of the not-yet (who knows if there will ever be a society based on the mutual recognition of dignity?) but on its present existence as possibility.

'We scream' does not begin with a unified 'we' prior to the scream. Like Vahabzadeh's radical phenomenology, for Holloway, any identity emerges through 'discourse' despite referring to an originating arche. Holloway thus states that "rather than starting with the multiple identities (women, blacks, gays, Basques, Irish and so on), we need to start from the process of identification that gives rise to those identities." He calls this context of identifiation "the social flow of doing," which expands the Marxist concept of labour to any creative social activity and its alienation or fetishization under domination: "Identity is perhaps the most concentrated (and most challenging) expression of fetishism or reification. The breaking of the flow of doing deprives doing of its movement. Present doing is subordinate to past done. Living labour is subordinated to dead labour. Doing is frozen in mid-flight, transformed into being." Holloway adds that "the rule of identity is the rule of amnesia" - we forget not just the origin of things but the existence of past struggles. "What is important in thought that takes identity as its basis is things as they are, not things as they might be or as we wish they were. There is no room for the subjunctive in the scientific discourse of identitarian thought." Indeed, the closure of different possibilities involves a flattening of temporality into the present, which `particular` identities seek to fulfill.