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Identity is colonialism. That is, less laconically, the ideology of identity as constituted in this era functions as an Occidentalist colonialist agent of discursive hegemony. I’m not very apt at the post-modern idiom, but I think I phrased that cogently. I don’t here hope to persuade anyone to this vantage, but in hopes the actuality of the word might at least register my aloofness with a prospective posterity. I almost said “my dissent” here. But even to dissent with a hegemony is to invite absorption by mimesis. Hence the title to this paper is intentionally ironical.
Identity seems to mean the abstraction of persons as wholes into their parts, their ascriptive characteristics. Hence identity is a project of semiotic dismemberment of the person, a “deconstruction”, if you like. Identity, when ascribed to a person, stereotypes that person. As such, ascribed characteristics cannot help but render a person a caricature under this light. Complex human beings with deep inner worlds and peculiar vantage points are purged of nuance.
No matter which project identity is summoned to serve, whether liberatory or oppressive, identity thus quashes non-compliant voices under a form of semiotic irredentism. All “texts” must serve the identity or thei are inherently illegible to the totalizing lense of the identarian gaze. This is the way hegemonies work.
Social hegemonies hence militate against the inner world, denies the personal primacy of that inner world, even denies its existence. This is true of identity. Identity must deny the inner world to function as ideology, which by nature strip persons of agency. The world of ideas becomes a cartoon reduction of dimensions in human perspective. We cannot speak readily. We cease to speak organically so much as “speak as a”. This layer of intellectual abstraction builds alienation into the “voice” of all humans under identarianism.
Because identity in the postmodern cast denies the inner world, it must needs deny universality of human engagement. Without grounds for universality of engagement in the organic person, identity is enemy to the empathic. “You can never understand my viewpoint because you are other.” becomes the defeatist refrain of the apocalyptic postmodern, reifying its own despair of apocalypse into probable futures.
For libertory identarian projects, this apparent problem is solved because the etic goal is not human connexion in conversation of the good, but the enactment of status games on the field of abstracted identity. Indeed, identity abets status gaming by simplifying and speeding up categorization of persons. This aids the building of patronage networks. Identities hence have enormous social gravity, as bad-faith actors herd their subordinate networks into blocs built around pet identities.
Hence identity has something to do with authority. Identity strongly allows for bad faith action because its social cash is ultimately submission. Adept social gamers are rewarded for their bad faith actions in building their factions by identity by the functions of ideology in subsuming nuanced persons into identity blocs. This reward in social status buttresses authority of the voices of the faction leaders. Such leaders become mandarins in their blocs, dispensing authority as reward to subservient patronage networks, provided those networks remain submissively in line.
In most traditional societies known to me, both intimately and academically, identity as such does not exist. I speak here of organic community, of nations within the Dunbar limit formed by birth, adoption, fostering, and all the happy accidents of life. People as social animals are not traditionally constructed by abstract ascriptions so much as communal relationships.
This is not to deny empire in such societies; far from it. But traditionally, hegemonies must contend with the gravity of organic communities because persons in community don’t merely possess allegiance to their local networks but *are* constituted by those networks.
The cash of status in such societies is often ritual in matter, which inherently stimulates productivity of inner worlds if not always the externalizations of such worlds. Empires and such hegemonic systems must hence co-opt local networks by other means than constitution. Often this resolves to brute compulsion by patronage schemes’ militaries. More than this is indeed irrelevant to the economic lusts of actors at the top, so communities may be relatively free on the grounds of association so long as the constitutive social networks remain compliant in action.
Identity inverts this arrangement because its goal is to deepen the reach of ideology into organic language as well as the personal inner world. Communities cannot remain free of identity or identity could not formulate any legible hegemony. Hence the “signs” of identity slyly replace the standards by which communities police borders. The signal becomes replaced for the essence in primacy of ascription. Hence organic language degenerates and is absorbed by the discursive hegemony of identity. We cease to speak in personal relation but rather under aegis of banal characteristic. Indeed under the modern and postmodern idioms the voice can be suffered no other way. Rather than speaking from our constitutive relations, who we are and what we know, we speak from *what* we supposedly are. Our parts are all, our wholes are nought.
Communities are easily “deconstructed” to serve identity through their standards by tunneling under communities as networks of relation by the submission of personal inner voices to identity. Submission to authority thus becomes first about this conversion, this compliance of the inner world and the idiomatic compliance of the interpersonal community to blocs of identity. I can think of no more totalitarian project.
Because identity militates against personal complexity and organic community, it is antithetical as an ideology to the mixed, the liminal, the literally out-caste. In short, to use a reappropriated term, mestizaje may subvert the political legibility of identity as a hegemony. Here identity has a problem, if the half/out-caste is “read” as insoluble to the totalizing project of reducing the person to caricature.
But also in the contemporary mode, identity has solved the issue of mestizaje by implementing the arithmetic of intersectionality. As under identity persons are devolved to their abstractly ascriptive parts, the out-caste and half-caste can engage in the status games by compounding their identities. Rather than constitute grounds for identarian conflict within the person, intersectionality allows for enhancement of identarian social status.
The social game is enhanced rather than problematised when one can rack up multiple identarian merit badges. Indeed, this allows the bad faith actors who normally reach the pinnacles of social status games to “churn the waters” of discourse as they herd their suborned networks into finding new constellations of identities. If a particularly actor hasn’t enough “points” of identity in a given bloc, they formulate new denominations of identarian cash which “coincidentally” fit their own identities.
Thus mestizaje becomes a driver of identarian discursive expansion rather than counterproductive to most identarian projects. Half-castes can become the most fanatical of identarians if they can leverage their insecurities into the game of intersectionality. Identity enjoys this dynamic.
I’ve tried here to speak to the pathologies of identarianism in a mode which might fit any orientation on the superficial political spectrum. I think these dynamics are at play in neofascism as well as on the social left, if situated in a vastly different valuation of particulars. For instance, in discussing half-castes, I think of the mixed-caste wildcat mass shooters whose ideologies fell in racist or otherwise exclusive identarian blocs. Incels, Trumpists, conflicted anti-gay gays, &c. It’s often the half-caste who must go to such undisciplined extremes to prove their allegiance.
As identity is inherently destructive to the nuanced person, the liquid spiritual human being, these fanaticisms are inevitably self-destructive catharses. Identity destroys *especially* when it proclaims to liberate. We ought to further interrogate how identity does this, but I warrant it holds in manifold example. Identity as a project of Platonic abstraction/alienation cannot abide the “vacuum” of nuance, of the fecund mud of human reality. Hence identity is brittle, ever snapping into new arrangements to serve the sociopaths at the top of status pyramids.
In this brittleness, the subversion of the inner world, and the erosion of community, identity’s regimentation reveals its fundamental inability to cope with exigencies of communal and personal survival. By encouraging hypermodern alienation, fanatical catharses are the only schtick allowed by identity to the harried person in a time of crisis. The organic communities responsible for the tutelage of trust cannot compete with the hermetically sealed person under identarian regimes. The curation of this alienated, atomized, abstracted postmodern citizen thusly ever tends toward Holocaust.
Organic communities necessitate trust. They are malleable and adaptive. Ideological castes like identity build on noetic conformity. They encourage zeitgeists of suspicion and regimentation. The inevitable social outcome of these conditions is a state of war. As our world slides into the mistrustful delusions of Balkanism, it is up to organic communities, often nameless and signless, gloriously mestizo, to do the hard work of tending the waning embers of hope.
The true counterculture has become those few communal redoubts where we speak as people speak when they speak from their hearts. We must be nothing but ourselves, our wordless souls giving truth through the awkward polyglot voice. This speaking needs courage. When we speak from our hearts’ truths, we literally become outcastes. The threshold of courage our voices demand will only compound from here on out. We must build trust, good faith, and reconciliation by hook or crook. We must steal care for each other from the mouths of beasts. But if we wish to survive as a species we no longer have any choice than to choose the path of true humanity.
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