Submitted by Bezotcovschina in discussion
So, here: https://raddle.me/wiki/postleft, I see:
- Identity Politics
critiquing identity politics insofar as it preserves victimization-enabled identities & social roles (i.e. affirming rather than negating gender, class, etc.) & inflicts guilt-induced paralysis, amongst others
critiquing single-issue campaigns or orientations
and, honestly, I don't understand, what it means. I would like to hear some examples of what fit and what doesn't for both of points.
An_Old_Big_Tree wrote
Sure, I can give this a little shot before I start work. To start, there's an essay that gets recommended pretty often on this topic, I don't think it's great because it's overly basic in the way that it engages these questions and in so doing leaves room for shitty people to have bad politics in relation to identities. It's called Against Identity Politics: Spectres, Joylessness, and the contours of ressentiment. There's also been some discussion about it on the site if you wanna search around, but I think much of it has been deleted over time.
When you see 'preservation' or 'conservation' of values in relation to victimisation, what is being talked about is the Nietzschean idea of resentment. There was a 101 write up about that here, some time ago.
This side of the resentment paradigm applies to the oppressed portion of a social hierarchy.
This side of it applies to the oppressor portion. For example, white people allowing guilt about their positionality/privilege to prevent them from acting, to cause them to not move unless authorised by PoC.
This is obviously complicated because most white people have terrible politics, but for me, if you are alive, there are almost definitely things you can do to destroy oppression, regardless of your positionality, without waiting for permission. Doing it right is the problem.
This is a problem with people who focus on just one axis of oppression, instead of all of them. In short, they invariably do a bad job with at least the others, reproducing this shit world as a result. This is bound up in 'identity politics' insofar as certain identities are being considered of primary importance, rather than the destruction of all, as fully as possible, always.
The central question of 'identity politics' is how (if at all possible) do we utilise the identity categories that we have to destroy those categories, in a way that does not simply reproduce them.
If, for example, we are queer, and we start giving that positive content - so that queerness means having coloured hair, having certain types of sex, whatever. Say we build a whole counter-culture that gives content to 'queerness'. Although we've broken away from the norms of cishetness, we haven't broken away from the root cause, which is the processes of building normative structures that define us ahead of time. There will always be people suffering on the margins of normative structures, and so the anarchist's task is to destroy that way of being entirely.
It's round about here that I'd start talking about how there are specific ways of relating to norms that are anarchistic, and others that are not. (I typed the word 'transcendent' into the search, and there's this write up [linked in the first link of this comment also], and this write up that will help, if anybody wants to look further into this topic).
These are both Nietzsche and Stirner-derived positions. My favourite version of which comes from Deleuze, and my preferred recent take on resentment comes from Mbembe in Critique of Black Reason, linked in w/decolonial.
Happy to elaborate on things more if anybody asks, gotta stop now though because this took too long!