Symbolic identity Symbolic identity provides markers of what one is to plaster over the question of who one is. This obfuscation is not avoidable: there is no subjectivity without a symbolic identity attached to it. It is impossible to avoid having an identity. This is what allows us to have a way of relating to others and of navigating our social situation… Sinking into a symbolic identity, in contrast, allows one to avoid confronting political questions as political. These questions appear to have ready-made answers from the perspective of a symbolic identity. In this sense, symbolic identity is always an avoidance of the problem of emancipation. This is a point that Alenka Zupanstresses in What IS Sex? According to Zupan “ (emancipatory) politics begins with ‘loss of identity,’ and there is nothing deplorable in this loss.” Identity enacts a depoliticization of the subject. All identity is conformist. (…The more effort I make to align myself with a symbolic identity, the more I experience my misalignment with it. This is because the diligence with which I pursue identification bears witness to its absence, not its presence. If I really were identical with my identity as a professor, I wouldn’t have to spend so much time dressing like a professor, talking like a professor, and walking like a professor.) Time/space, freedom As the source of space and time, the subject (as Kant conceives it) cannot belong spatially or temporally to the world. The world is not, for Kant, inherently spatial or temporal, since these forms are the contributions that subjectivity brings to its encounter with externality. After making this point about space, Kant comes to the same conclusion about time. During this discussion, he refers to the subject as the basis of the experience of temporality. According to Kant, “Time is… merely a subjective condition of our (human) intuition (which is always sensible, i.e., insofar as we are affected by objects), and in itself, outside the subject, is nothing. Nonetheless it is necessarily objective in regard to all appearances, thus also in regard to all things that can come before us in experience.” Although the form of temporality derives from the subject, it is not subjective in the sense that one could opt for it or not. It gives our experience a requisite form that structures it for us, which is why Kant insists on time as objective rather than merely subjective. But the forms of space and time also show that the subject is necessarily out of place and out of time in its existence. Subjectivity can be responsible for temporality because the subject is not itself subjected to time. The Kantian subject is its self-division. It is self-conscious because it relates to itself from a distance rather than just being identical with what it is. Its self-division manifests itself most significantly in subjectivity’ s relationship to freedom and determination. Rather than theorizing the subject as either free or determined, Kant insists — and believes that he proves — that the subject is free and determined at the same time. The point is not that some of the subject’s actions are free while external causes determine others but that every action is simultaneously free and determined. When one considers the subject from a theoretical point of view, it is determined. But when one thinks of it from a practical standpoint, as a being in action, it is free. The attempt to discern which of these approaches accurately apprehends the truth of the subject misses Kant’s point, which is that both are equally true. Oppression …oppression cannot be equivalent to the experience of alienation, since alienation is universal. Those who are oppressed are not fated to be alienated subjects with no possibility of overcoming their alienation. The forces of oppression do not thrust oppressed groups into an unrelenting alienation. Instead, oppression sets both the oppressing and the oppressed groups into their symbolic identities, so that everyone has a proper place. The lure of an oppressive system for the oppressor is that it will provide a definite social location for everyone, with the illusory promise that no one will continue to experience alienation. The oppressor and the oppressed become nothing more than their symbolic identities. The aim of oppression is to transform all subjectivity into self-identical entity. That said, an oppressive society is not magically composed of self-identical beings. No one escapes the divide of alienated subjectivity, not even in the most oppressive society imaginable. But to be oppressed is to be positioned, pushed into an identity without a clear path to get out of it. Oppression works to make self-division invisible even as it relies on this self-division. Most people know what oppression looks like. It is a social order that leaves a mass of people in poverty, condemns a certain group to a denigrated position relative to others, or ostracizes some for who they are. To regard someone in an oppressive way is to classify the person as a substantial entity or as a whole. It is to refuse to allow this person to exist as a divided and contradictory subject with desires that are at odds with themselves. One does this to create the illusion that both oneself and the other are self-identical beings. One indication of the existence of oppression is the reduction of a group to a collective identity with definite desires or ways of being. In the oppressed situation, all subjects become reducible to a consistent symbolic identity. Identity overwhelms subjectivity in the oppressive viewpoint, which is why people tend to identify those in an oppressed position in a collective way, with statements such as “They smell bad” or “They are lazy” or even “They are destroying our nation.” One collectivizes others in this way when one refuses to recognize them as alienated from themselves and thus irreducible to any such identity. …The lure of a stable identity seduces some, but oppression occasions resistance because alienation is not without its own appeal. Existing as an alienated subject gives one autonomy from external determinations. Alienation indicates that one is not identical with any symbolic identity. It signals that one can act contrary to the expectations inherent in one’s identity. The fight against oppression is a fight to assert one’s alienation against the oppressive enforcement of an identity. To strive to embrace one’s alienated subjectivity is to be engaged in the fight against oppression of all stripes. Racism Racism permits modern subjects to act in ways that violate the moral edicts that modern philosophy articulates. All the moral philosophers of modernity, no matter what their specific philosophical stripe, condemn the buying and selling of people as if they were nothing but material commodities. And yet, under the spell of racism, slave owners and traders have engaged in this activity, and most of them have still considered themselves good, moral people. This is possible because they don’t believe that they are dealing with subjects when they buy and sell slaves. Racial difference indicates, for those ensconced in a racist social structure, an absence of subjectivity. Modernity compels subjects to view all other subjects as their equals, but the concept of racial difference changes that outlook. The human rights that modern society espouses count only for those who belong to this society. Those on the outside don’t count. They are nothing but a symbolic identity that has no status within the social order. European racism unevenly distributes the impact of modernity. It allows some to regard themselves as modern while consigning others to a premodern status. In The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon sees the denigration of the racial other as the underside of modernity. He claims, “This Europe, which never stopped talking of man, which never stopped proclaiming its sole concern was man, we now know the price of suffering humanity has paid for every one of its spiritual victories.” As Fanon points out, the values of modernity don’ t apply to everyone equally. Racism enables those invested in it to see the racial other as a self-identical being that can be terrorized without compunction. Dialectics Dialectics is the exploration of the contradictions that inhere within every identity. Whatever seems identical is ultimately revealed, through a dialectical interpretation, as self-divided and involved in what is other to it. For Hegel, contradiction is ontological, and alienation is the way that contradiction manifests itself in the subject. The subject attains freedom through the alienation that generates and sustains subjectivity. Hegel pursues a dialectical interpretation of the subject to bring out the emancipatory power of its alienation. Realm of freedom If we could have a realm of freedom distinct and separate from the realm of necessity, we should go to any lengths to bring this realm about. But if the realm of freedom always remains embroiled within the realm of necessity, how we bring it about matters just as much as its eventual emergence, since it will never fully emerge. Understood in this way, the realm of freedom is not a future to be achieved but a way of struggling within the realm of necessity. How we fight matters more than what we accomplish. The public In the history of the bourgeois public sphere that Habermas relates, it develops primarily in privileged spaces, such as coffee houses and salons. When one enters these spaces, according to Habermas, one retains one’s private identity while at the same time turning that private identity toward the public. Private people form a public by advancing their own opinions in a place where every opinion ideally has an equal weight. Habermas’s understanding of the public sphere, as important as it clearly is, undersells both the breadth of the public and the alienation required to produce it. The public occurs through the encounter between alienated subjects who turn away from their private concerns to engage with others. When we are in the public, we are alienated from our private selves. This alienation is what constitutes a public no matter where it occurs. Through this shared alienation that distances us from our social positions, we discover the basis for universal equality. As public, alienated beings, no one has any more status than anyone else. The recognition of alienation connects us to everyone else. The barrier to the recognition of alienation that constitutes the public is our investment in the idea of community. No one can avoid being part of a community, just as no one can avoid alienation. But the problem concerns where our investment lies. When we invest ourselves in a community and in the symbolic identity that a community provides, we fail to attend to the alienation that undermines all communal identity. The investment in community is an investment in having a social place. It is an investment that obfuscates our displacement and thereby hides the public. To believe that one belongs to a community is to fail to recognize the universality of alienation, a universality in which everyone is equal. A community provides a larger context in which the subject is not simply alone with itself but has others to provide support for its identity. As a form, a community promises belonging, no matter what its size or what its specific content. It never delivers on this promise, however, which is why the public emerges. Community seems secure, and the public seems dangerous. But community and the public exist in a dialectical relation: the public exists through the community’s failure to fully constitute itself. There is a public because there is no self-identical community. Further, there is community because no one can exist purely in a state of alienated subjectivity. Community All community depends on at least one particular being excluded. In this sense, every community is a gated community, no matter how open and welcoming it appears. Rather than being an oxymoron as some critics label it — “If it ’s gated, it’s not really a community” — the gated community has a paradigmatic status relative to all other communities. Communities form through keeping people out. If they fail to do this, if they are open to everyone, they cease to be communities and become public. It is impossible to conceive of a community that avoids the act of exclusion. --

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