...More generally, the issue which K is illustrating in this little bloggy thought experiment, therefore concerns the way in which not only are we all, as individuals, intimately bound up with specific personal histories which have helped shape us, but furthermore intellectual and ideology movements are frequently shaped, at various levels, by the collective social identities of their primary proponents. In an era of increasingly ubiquitous identity politics, an era which many scholars and activists increasingly find it useful to preface their arguments and analyses with (sometimes detailed) autobiographical statements of authorial identity, the act of developing a position under an assumed identity becomes, arguably, not an obfuscation, but rather a gesture of intellectual honesty—an openness to the question of whether the arguments being advanced can be disassociated from the presumptive voice that is ostensibly advancing them).These are Carlos' concluding remarks. There's a lot to say here, but let me refer you back to a previous post on traveling selves and identity (read past the stuff on Appiah and cosmopolitanism, if you like, and make sure to read the comments). I like the idea of autobiography being explicitly wrapped into theoretical and ideological positions as a kind of honesty about the experiential intersections that constitute an individual life, and thus about the history of one's position. But I dislike the discourse on identity. It's the term itself that bothers me. If individuals are relational entities, as I think they most obviously are, and if knowledge and understanding are intersubjective, as I think they obviously are, then talk of individual identities seems to set up a wrongly-cast discussion in the first instance.
Friday, January 05, 2007
Blogger ID
Carlos Rojas recounts and interprets a fascinating blog debate on blogger gender and virtual representations of identity.
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6 comments:
Helmut,
Thanks for this. Your earlier essay on Appiah and cosmopolitanism (published almost precisely a year ago) is fascinating. Regarding the relationship between autobiography and "identity" which you mention here, one of the things I find interesting about what K is doing in her blog is that she is provisionally assuming a fictional narrative persona (together with some of the distinct enunciative positions which that persona implies), even as she simultaneously, and very explicitly, reaffirms a (presumably genuine) autobiographical narrative which challenges some of the conventional identity schemata have come to play an influential role in many contemporary debates. That is to say, I see her as using a quasi-fictional narrative voice precisely in order to dissasociate autobiography from ossified and essentializing "identity" positions.
Maybe it wrongly casts some discussions, but identity politics and stereotypes do shape what we say and what we hear, and to point this out about blogosphere talk, where so much ideology gets hashed out, manufactured and disseminated these days, strikes me very worthy of addressing. I'm not satisfied with the conclusion in that excerpt (e.g. dishonesty seems as much or even more of a liability as honesty to me, which stays my anonymous digits at the keyboard whenever a conversation comes to rest on "being male/female/black/white/deaf/etc" comes up) What's the discussion you want to have, helmut, and how does this one tread on or preclude that one?
I tend to go with the idea that identity is simply a poor way to explain who we are. Certainly, people use the term and have different degrees of senses of belonging to various groups. But those groups are never monolithic, human individuals are potentially dynamic beings, and "identity" itself seems to fix the markers we use to describe ourselves in place.
An objection is to say that this is a theoretical position detached from actual practice. What I mean to say by the idea of "traveling selves" is that the TS is an empirical, practical reality that gives the lie to fixed notions of identity. In other words, our language is detached from our actual experience.
Helmut,
There isn't much you say here that I would necessarily disagree with. The issue I am raising with respect to "identity politics," however, is the rather specific one of whether people and groups sometimes rhetorically single out specific facets of their "identity" in such a way that it comes to function as a reductive, essentialist ground for the position they are trying to advance. Some of the uglier contributions to the "transgender" comment thread to which K alludes are good examples of some of the ways in which this essentializing rhetorical gesture may play itself out.
I've got you, Carlos. I have the same problem with "identity politics" used in this particular reductivist way. And I'm pretty much generally anti-essentialist. But it's even the term "identity" that bugs me in the first place. It works in the service of those who would run to the reductivist, essentialist side by suggesting some kind of unitary core, the function the "soul" used to have.
I like "identify" (the verb) and so I'm glad we have the noun at least for careful use. Republican voting by the working class seems like a familiar phenomenon, which ought to give the lie to "identity politics" as ineluctable. Ditto for non-black suburban gangsta rappers. But it figures in a lot discussions implicitly anyway. Because that creates ambiguity, I wouldn't want to generalize about what affect it has on a discussion for a participant not to disclose an identity that others might or might not significantly color their understanding or receptivity to what words your posting.
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