32 Identity Politics: Insiders and Outsiders

Chayanika Priyam

INTRODUCTION

 

The second half of the twentieth century saw the emergence of a new kind of social movements representing a break from older forms of mobilization. Second wave feminism, Black Civil Rights in the U. S, gay and lesbian liberation, American Indian movement sand the Caste based movements in India emerged, signalling a break from the past. The idea of human beings having an identity or identities came to the forefront replacing previous notions of character and in some cases subsuming ideological differences also. Identity as proclaimed is “socially constructed and some cases invented, hence it has an inter-subjective dimension” (White, 2008: 17). This inter-subjectivity can only be looked from the point of view of the context in which it emerges and the societal formation that shapes it. Since the 1950s, western societies seem to have become preoccupied with questions of identity. Evident first in the field of psychology, by the 1990s when caste based politics began to take shape, identity had become a central concern across a range of political, cultural, commercial and academic spaces, animating discourse and informing practice in disparate ways. Authoritative voices proclaimed identity to be the dominant political logic of the age (Brown, 1995; Fraser, 1997) as questions of cultural, ethnic, caste, religious and sexual identity took political centre stage, seemingly supplanting older class-based or ideological allegiances. The present module will first introduce what ‘identity’ is and proceed to deal with the multiple dimensions of identity. Then it will go on to discuss in detail the varied aspects of identity politics. The last section will discuss the contemporary debates revolving around the concept.

 

DEFINING IDENTITY

 

Identity as it exists in the present form is at once a social and a cultural phenomenon. It emerges from the consciousness that arises in an individual or a group who realize there is a threat that surrounds their existence on a given social premise. Identity, as Harvey notes in Spaces of Hope, “cannot be understood outside of the forces that swirl around it and construct it” (Harvey, 2000: 16). An identity emerges for each of us only out of efforts at control amid contingencies and contentions in interaction (White, 2008). Human interactions are complex phenomenon’s  to understand and comprehend. Thus identity is at once an inclusive and an exclusionary phenomenon. It includes all those who fall under the ambit of its realization and ‘others’ who don’t belong will either stay out of the ambit or make their own identity.

These efforts need not have anything to do with domination over other identities rather it’s about finding a clear footing among other identities (Dunn, 1998). Such footing is a position that entails a stance, which brings orientation in relation to other identities. An identity is “the set of meanings that define who one is when one is an occupant of a particular role in society, a member of a particular group, or claims particular characteristics that identify him or her as  a  unique person”(Burke, 2009: 3). As Stryker (2000) points out identities provide accounts for and of themselves, they jointly generate the device of values out of valuations from disciplines, and marked by distinction in type of tie. The meanings of values are to be inferred as much from the social architecture as vice versa. Within the discipline of sociology, identity has varied meaning and different connotation. For the sake of simplistic understanding three broad categorization of identity are discusses below.

 

Ø  The first view of refers to the cultural or collective view of identity in which the concept represent the ideas, belief, and practices of a group or collective. This view of identity is often seen in work on ethnic identity, although identity is often not defined, thus obscuring what is gained by using the concept (e. g., Nagel, 1995; Scheff, 1994). This view lacks the ability to examine individual variability in behaviour, motivation, and interaction.

 

Ø  The second view of identity grows out of the work of social identity theorists like Tajfel, (1981) and others (e. g., Turner, Hogg, Oakes, Reicher, & Wetherell, 1987) who see identity as embedded in a social group or category. This view often collapses the group/category distinction and misses the importance of within group behaviour such as role relationships among group members.

 

Ø  The third view of identity grows out of the symbolic interactionist tradition, especially its structural variant. This view takes into account individual role relationships and identity variability, motivation, and differentiation.

 

What the following views of identity theory have in common is a general set of principles that (Stryker, 1980) has enumerated as underlying the structural symbolic interaction perspective. According to Stryker these include certain specifications: 1) that behaviour is dependent upon a named or classified world and that these names carry meaning in the form of shared responses and behavioural expectations that grow out of social interaction. 2) That among the named   classes are symbols that are used to designate positions in the social structure. 3) That persons who act in the context of social structure name one another in the sense of recognizing one another as occupants of positions and come to have expectations for those others. 4) That persons acting in the context of social structure also name themselves and create internalized meanings and expectations with regard to their own behaviour. 5) That these expectations and meanings form the guiding basis for social behaviour and along with the probing interchanges among actors shape and reshape the content of interaction, as well as the categories, names and meanings that are used. The negotiated meaning that emerges from this social interaction is the shared component in these views of identity theory. Yet, despite the widespread assumption that it is the substance of identity rather than the word identity that is problematic, identity still remains demonstrably a complicated word.

 

VARIED DIMENSIONS OF IDENTITY

 

While the notion of identity is not new especially as a socio-political arena, a widespread concern with one’s personal identity, and its relations to “the others” among whom one lives, seems to have emerged with greater intensity with the Enlightenment, and to gain force throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century into our own time. George Herbert Mead’s viewed identity as dependent upon the recognition of others and thus brought further nuances into the notion of identity. Mead argued that human identities develop out of a three-way conversation between the I, Me, and generalized other. It is by “taking the attitude of the other that we learn reflexively to monitor our identities and present them to others” (Strauss, 1934: 18). Thus Identities are formed out of the constant ebb and flow of conversation between ourselves and others.

 

Charles Taylor on the other hand argues that the modern identity is characterized by an emphasis on its inner voice and capacity for authenticity, that is, the ability to find a way of being that is somehow true to oneself (Taylor, 1994). While doctrines of equality press the notion that each human being is capable of deploying his or her practical reason or moral sense to live an authentic life as an individual, the politics of difference has appropriated the language of authenticity to describe ways of living that are true to the identities of marginalized social groups.

 

Brubaker and Cooper (2000: 6–8) have recently tried to bring some order to this concept by identifying five dominant ways in which the concept of identity is currently used in social science and the Identity as Ideology humanities: (a) identities as non-instrumental forms of  social action; (b)identities as a collective phenomena of group sameness; (c) identities as deep and foundational forms of selfhood; (d) identities as interactive, contingent products of social action; and (e) identities as fluctuating, unstable and fragmented modes of the ‘self’. They argue that these five understandings of identity range from ‘strong’ to ‘weak ‘uses of the concept – while the first two conceptions operate with the common-sense, ‘hard’ uses of the term, the remaining three, which are often found in the social constructivist approaches (particularly in cultural studies, anthropology and sociology) work with very ‘soft’, flexible and contingent understandings of identity.

 From this brief examination of how identity politics fits into the political landscape it is already clear that the use of the term “identity” raises a host of philosophical questions. Logical uses aside; it is likely familiar to philosophers from the literature in metaphysics on personal identity, one’s sense of self and its persistence. Indeed, underlying many of the more overtly pragmatic debates about the merits of identity politics are philosophical questions about the nature of subjectivity and the self (Taylor 1989). The self is in constant interaction with the society and hence it is argued that the society/community is responsible for the othering and thus giving birth to identity. If all identity is produced in the context of community, many have sought to look at the ways society seeks to regulate and manage its production. Many have sought to criticize Mead’s views for neglecting the role of power and culture in helping shape identity, both of which is in the hands of the state in althusserian sense. The modern state apparatus has been involved in the regulation and monitoring of identities through a number of institutions, from prisons to the courts and from the education system to civil society (Althusser, 2008). These new modes of control and surveillance are related to the rise of identity politics over the course of the twentieth century. In opposition to the way in which many of the dominant features of modern societies have sought to police and control identities, many have used claims to identity as a means of organizing themselves politically.

 

IDENTITY POLITICS – ANOVERVIEW

 

The familiar narrative of identity politics tells us that identity politics emerged suddenly onto the political scene in the late 1960s, challenging both the older, politics of class, and the organisationof society in ways which systematically favoured some groups on accountof their identities and stigmatised and disenfranchised others. The main problem with this narrative is that identitypolitics have only a shallow history in the civil rights and freedom movementsof the 1960s. This perspective has been challenged and contended by a numberof ‘historians of identity’ who have uncovered a far deeper history to identitypolitics, tracing its motivations  and aims to the nineteenth century if not earlier(Hall, 1992; Calhoun, 1993; Kellner, 1995; Bauman, 2004; Nicholson, 2008). Nicholson, in particular, provides a particularly strong example of this kind ofrevision. In Identity before Identity Politics, she explores the ideational pre-historyof identity politics, and argues that though the movements themselves werenot new, their aims and emphases shifted during the 1960s, to focus directlyon ‘identity issues’ (Nicholson, 2008: 5).

 

She opens her history of identity politics with thefollowing passage: “During the late 1960s, certain political phenomena appeared on the US landscapethat altered the terms of the debate about social justice. The politicalmovements on behalf of African Americans and women took a distinctiveturn. Both of these movements had been a force in United States politicsprior to the late 1960s, most visibly in the earlier civil rights and women’srights movements. In these earlier incarnations, these movements had foughtfor legislation aimed at expanding the access black people and women hadto opportunities long denied them for reasons of race and sex. But in thelate 1960s, a new kind of emphasis emerged within both movements. Whilemany within these movements continued to work for the above goals, others, particularly those who were younger and angrier, began to articulate differentkinds of aims. Those who started calling their movement ‘Black Power, ’ insteadof ‘Civil Rights, ’ and ‘Women’s Liberation, ’ as distinct from ‘Women’s Rights, ’created a politics that went beyond issues of access and focused more explicitlyon issues of identity than had these earlier movements. Other activists, suchas those who replaced ‘Gay Rights’ with ‘Gay Liberation’ also made a similar kindof turn. The more explicit focus of these groups on issues of identity causedmany to describe this new politics as identity politics” (Nicholson, 2008: 1).

 

The notion identity emerges from the notion of politics of difference. The binary is already set with those belonging to specific identity staking their claim and those who don’t, contesting it or just accepting it in silence. The politics of difference is an argument against the essentialist beliefthat there is a fixed identity, instead promoting the celebration of multipleand diverse values within society as reflecting the nature of difference (Giddens, 1990). The politics of difference concerns the fundamental question of politicalsubjectivity. It makes way for the possibility of new theories regardingpolitical identity (and therefore the individual), a new approach withrespect to his or her participation in society (Parekh, 2008).

 

The second key claim is that this emergence of identity as a significantsocial, political and everyday concept cannot be understood separately from thecontext in which it emerged. When we look closely at the contexts of usageof the ‘new’ term identity, we find that it emerged in  two key spaces – firstly, “in new patterns of consumption, particularly those associated with individualism, ‘lifestyle’ and distinction (where these in turn were underwritten by newpopular psychological discourses of personal transformation and personal stability); and secondly, in a series of political shifts that responded to and shapedthe politico-economic landscape of western capitalist societies, as demands foruniversal redistribution were gradually displaced by an overarching demand for group-basedrecognition” (Moran, 2015: 127). These contending perspectives throw a new light on the origins and differentiated goals of identity based movements and thus it paves way for new theorization.

 

The scope of political movements that may be described as identity politics is broad: the examples used in the philosophical literature are predominantly of struggles within western capitalist democracies, but indigenous rights movement’s worldwide, nationalist projects, or demands for regional self-determination use similar arguments. Caste based movements in India to speak of the historical injustice done to them on more or less similar lines. Predictably, there is no straightforward criterion that makes a political struggle into an example of “identity politics; ” rather, the term signifies a loose collection of political projects, each undertaken by representatives of a collective memory and experience with a distinctively different social location that has hitherto been neglected, erased, or suppressed (Moore & Whelan, 2008). It is beyond the scope of this essay to offer historical or sociological surveys of the many different social movements that might be described as identity politics; instead the focus here is to provide an overview of the range of debates in the expansive social theory.

 

Indeed, the naming of identity politics as a problem did notoccur until the early years of the post-war period when rapid change, the growthof new subcultures, and pressures to assimilate into mainstream society madewho/what we were a major preoccupation within both intellectual and popular culture. Not thatolder notion of class conflict disappeared entirely. However, although an implicit model of class struggle still informed much of movement politics, issues of deprivation and oppression were redefined along new lines. Indicative of the shift from production to consumption in the economy, protest now focused less on the material relations of production than on consumption related issues of social, political, and cultural representation and power (Moran, 2015). The basic questions of the movements during the first half of 20th century like exploitation, equal rights and suffrage etc got a new way of articulation in the post war years. The larger question of equal rights got into the ambit of group recognition and the class arguments of the pre war years found their way into the new discourse in a truncated manner. The issue of exploitation and humiliation was gradually subsumed under the problem of exclusion, and questions of class power were supplanted by emphases on other forms ofpower. To venture a more comprehensive definition, “identity politics” refers to astrategy whereby individuals define themselves through identification with or membership in groups or categories regarded as the source of distinct feelings and experiences of marginalization and subordination. As Foucault rightly pointed out  “Each society has its regime of truth, its “general politics of truth”: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; themechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and falsestatements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques andprocedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of thosewho are charged with saying what counts as true . . . we cannot raise thebanner of truth against our own regime . . . there is no common measurebetween the impositions of the one and those of the other . . . each regimeis identified entirely with its imposed truth”. (Foucault 1980, p. 131)

 

Although the recognition of cultural difference is usually seen as asource of self-liberation and collective emancipation there is a darkerside to identity politics which has received far less attention. Instead ofa ‘celebration of difference’, many identity projects, couched as they arein discourses that reify and often institutionalised bypowerful structures of the modern state, tend either to reinforce groupcentric views of social reality or reproduce blinkered and discriminatoryforms of domination. The rhetoric of identity often becomes a potentdevice for the ideological justification of political inequality. This has in turn lead to a counter narrative of sorts within these movements i. e. entrapment of the larger goals within the ever narrowing boundaries of short term political gains. The narrowness of the vision, for its part is exhibited in the rigidity of new structure. Thus identity as a concept has not only acquired almost universal acceptance, it hasalso become a normative strait jacket. Today, a person is expected andrequired to have an identity. Even though there is profound populardisagreement on whether identities are essential or existential, primordialor constructed, singular or multiple there is almost no dispute over thequestion of whether identities exist or not. It is assumed that ‘identity’constitutes an indispensable ingredient of every human being so thatmaking the claim of not having or wanting an identity might be regarded as tantamount to treason.

 

RECENT DEBATES

 

While not all proponents of identity politics have gone beyond critiques grounded in the economic disparities that characterize capitalism, there are undoubtedly those who find that the  ideological/economic is no longer a productive site for social transformation. Chantal Mouffe and Ernest Laclau in their recent work emphasised the importance of “keeping in mind the universal values and goals without getting lost in the particular” (Laclau, 2008: 5). for this purpose they emphasise on the notion of radical pluralism that is at once a universal and a particular phenomenon. Laclau and Mouffe outline their idea about radical pluralism anddemocracy in this way:  “Pluralism is radical only to the extent that each term of this plurality of identitiesfinds within itself the principle of its own validity, without this having to besought in a transcendent or underlying positive ground for the hierarchy of meaningof them all and the source and guarantee of their legitimacy. And this radicalpluralism is democratic to the extent that the auto-constitutivity of each one of itsterms is the result of displacements of the egalitarian imaginary”. (Citedin Poster 1990: 138) Identity formation, then, takes place at a conjunctureof external and internal, contingent and necessary, processes thatinterconnect and emerge within specific historical conditions that are ingood measure not of our own making. It would be naive, then, toexplore identity formation outside the complex web of social-structural relations. In recent times, many writers have suggested that as we move from an industrial toa post-industrial society, traditional social identities such as class willdecline in social significance (Clark and Lipset, 1991; Pakulski and Waters, 1996).

 

Clark and Lipset, forexample, have posed the question, ‘Are classes dying?’, while in a bookentitled The Death of Class Pakulski and Waters have penned what is ineffect an obituary of the concept. If we look back given its origins in the new movements, beginning in the late sixties, theLeft’s preoccupation with identity has centred controversially on what hascome to be known as identity politics, a term characterizing those movements inwhich membership in oppressed and marginalized groups provides the basis of acommon identity for the making of political claims. The debates about identitypolitics, however, have often obscured the larger social and cultural transformationsbehind the rise of these movements and, more importantly, the broaderdestabilization of identity resulting from institutional and technological changein the West.

 

 

CONCLUSION

 

Though identity based movements brought range of new issues into the forefront of politics, over the time they have become entrapped in the localised narration and narrowed vision of their goals. The modern state for its part has its fair share in dissecting these movements into distinct entities and thus keeping them away from becoming a force to reckon with. It has come to a point where speaking of any kind of universal values is viewed with suspicion. This has led to rise of another kind of hegemony within these movements where a constant discourse of othering happens on a daily basis. The larger debate on the structural transformation of oppressive state machinery still awaits answers, because of a lack of unified response in a political praxis. Most theorization have got entangled in the cobweb of the above mentioned paradigms and thus unable to articulate a clear counter-narrative that will go on to challenge the dominant hegemony of the state. What is needed is a critical theory that is grounded in a fuller recognitionof how particular social structures and relations condition a diversity ofsocial and historical experiences and generate concrete social spaces that giverise to social, political, and cultural identities. In turn, these social spaces arethemselves productive sites, enabling the construction of new and potentiallyradical/transformative political subjects.

 

FURTHER READINGS

 

  • Althusser, Louis (2008) On the Reproduction of Capitalism, London: Verso
  • Bauman, Zygmunt (2004) Identity, New York: Polity Press
  • Brown, Wendy (1995) States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity. Princeton,
  • NJ: Princeton University Press.
  • Brubaker, R. and Cooper, F (2000) ‘Beyond “Identity”, Theory and Society’ 29 (1):1–37.
  • Burke, Peter (2009) Identity Theory, London: Oxford University Press
  • Calhoun, Craig (1993) ‘“New Social Movements” of the Early Nineteenth Century’, Social Science History, 17(3): 385–427.
  • Clark, Terry Nicholas & Lipset, Martin (1991) Are Classes Dying? , International Sociology Journal: Sage.
  • Dunn, Robert (1998) Identity Crises – A social critique of post modernity, Minneapolis:
  • University of Minnesota press
  • Foucault, Michael (1980) Power/Knowledge – Selected Interviews, New York: Pantheon Books
  • Fraser, Nancy (1997) Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the ‘Post-socialist’
  • Condition. London: Routledge.
  • Giddens, Anthony (1990) The Consequences of Modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press
  • Hall, Stuart (1992) ‘The Question of Cultural Identity’, in Stuart Hall, David Held and Tony McGrew (Ed), Modernity and its Futures, Cambridge: Polity Press.
  • Harvey, David (2000) Spaces of Hope, London: Verso
  • Hogg,    Michael (2006) “Social identity theory”, Pp. 111–36 in Contemporary social psychological theories, edited by P. J. Burke. Stanford: Stanford University Press
  • Kellner, Douglas (1995) Media Culture: Cultural Studies, Identity and Politics. Between
  • the Modern and Postmodern. New York: Routledge.
  • Laclau, Ernest (2008) The Making of Political Identities, London: Verso
  • Moran, Marie (2015) Identity and Capitalism, London; Sage
  • Moore, Niamh & Whelan, Yvonne (2008) Heritage, Memory and the Politics of Identity, Hampshire: Ashgate.
  • Nicholsan, Linda (2008) Identity before Identity Politics, London: Cambridge University Press Pakulski, Jan and Waters, Malcolm (1996) The Death of Class. London: Sage.Parekh, Bhikhu (2008) A New Politics of Identity, New York: Macmillan
  • Poster, Mark (1990) The Mode of Information: Post structuralism and Social Context. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
  • Strauss, Anselm (1934) The Social Psychology of George Herbert Mead, Chicago: Phoenix  Stryker,    Sheldon (2000) “Identity competition: Key to differential social movement participation?” Pp. 21–40 in Self, identity, and social movements, edited by S. Stryker, T. Owens, and R. White. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press
  • Stryker, Sheldon (1980) Symbolic interactionism: A social structural version. Caldwell, NJ:Blackburn Press.
  • Tajfel, Henri, and John C. Turner. (1979) “An integrative theory of intergroup conflict.” Pp. 33–47 in The social psychology of intergroup relations, edited by W. G. Austin and S.Worchel Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole.
  • Taylor, C. (1989) Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.Turner, John C., Michael A. Hogg, Penelope J. Oakes, Stephen D. Reicher, and Margaret S. Wetherell. (1987) “Rediscovering the social group: A self-categorization theory.” New York: Basil Blackwell. White, Harrison (2008) Identity and Control, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.