[The argument thats usually framed as "identity politics" versus
"class politics" is one of the animating features of todays insurgent
left. Both this book and reviewer Gandesha seek to unpack this
arguments complexities.] [[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

INSURGENT UNIVERSALITY  
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Samir Gandesha
May 1, 2019
Radical Philosophy
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_ The argument that's usually framed as "identity politics" versus
"class politics" is one of the animating features of today's insurgent
left. Both this book and reviewer Gandesha seek to unpack this
argument's complexities. _

, Verso

 

_Mistaken Identity
Race and Class in the Age of Trump_
Asad Haider
Verso
ISBN: 9781786637376

In an editorial in the _New York Times_ written ten days after the
2016 presidential election, Mark Lilla (Professor of Humanities at
Columbia University) challenged the so-called ‘Whitelash’ thesis,
arguing that the reason for Trump’s victory wasn’t his ability to
translate economic insecurity into racism, but rather that the
Democratic Party under Hillary Clinton’s leadership was itself too
focused on identity questions. Identity politics, Lilla argued, were
more ‘expressive’ than ‘persuasive,’ and, as a consequence,
never won elections but often lost them. Lilla’s argument,
subsequently elaborated in his 2017 book entitled _The Once and Future
Liberal: After Identity Politics_, is that liberals within the
Democratic Party should spend less time emphasising gender, race,
ethnicity or sexual orientation – that is, what _divides_ Americans
– and more time emphasising the United States’ great
liberal-democratic institutions – that is, what Americans share _in
common_.

This was apparently oblivious to the way in which Trump had actually
won the election himself on the basis of a kind of White identity
politics (what has been called ‘identitarianism’). After all, 53%
of White women voted not for the White _woman_ but for the _White_
ethno-nationalist candidate. Nonetheless, since Lilla’s op-ed and
book, two other notable books have appeared on identity politics in
the wake of Trump’s election: _Identity: The Demand for Dignity and
the Politics of Resentment_ by Francis Fukuyama (author of the once
celebrated ‘end of history’ thesis), and _The Lies That Bind:
Rethinking Identity_ by the esteemed gay Ghanaian-English philosopher
Kwame Anthony Appiah. The former argues that the rise of identity
politics is the result of an excessive form of what the Greeks called
_thymos_ (θυμός) or ‘spiritedness’ entailing the desire for
recognition; the latter shows the fuzzy or imprecise nature of the
identity categories that are often taken as immutable givens or
essences.

The 2016 election is also the jumping off point for Asad Haider’s
book, _Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump_. The
book is divided into six short, crisply written chapters. The first
offers a genealogy of an identity politics initially theorised as
central to a revolutionary transformation of a racist,
patriarchal-capitalist order to its recent appropriation by the
Democratic Party. Absent a structural critique of capitalism, Haider
argues, identity politics ends up taking the bourgeois, heterosexual,
White masculinist ideal as normative. This is followed by a chapter
that poignantly shows how identity politics has not only become the
ideology of the prevailing neo-liberal order, as critics such as
Walter Benn Michaels and Adolph Reed Jr. have cogently argued, but
also short-circuits genuine movements on the Left seeking to transform
it. He provides the example of the counter-productive and occasionally
comical debates amongst people of colour on the campus of UC Santa
Cruz, where Haider was a graduate student, over the use of the word
‘occupy’ in reference to protests against the administration which
had recently raised tuition fees. He also considers the much more
serious political conundrum of the ‘Afro-Pessimism’ of Frank
Wilderson that was to exercise growing influence on #BlackLivesMatter
insofar as it refused to reciprocate the solidarity offered to the
movement by Palestinian activists. This, I think, is the most
important aspect of Haider’s argument but one that he fails to
develop fully enough.

The third chapter addresses the deep paradox of a tenacious attachment
among young activists to the idea of race, in spite of the fact that
it has been thoroughly de-mystified as possessing little or no
substance in biological terms, while the following chapter is a
fascinating reflection on the stand-off between Philip Roth and Amiri
Baraka, as well as a reflection on what is, for Haider, the exemplary
case of Rachel Dolezal. A White woman who passed for several years as
African American and, indeed, played a role in her local chapter of
the NAACP, Dolezal is exemplary, Haider argues, precisely because she
engages in ‘a peculiar introjection of white guilt.’

Chapter five seeks to understand the rise of Trump through Stuart
Hall’s pioneering work on authoritarian populism as well as Wendy
Brown’s development of Walter Benjamin’s notion of ‘Left-wing
melancholy’ – the full-scale embrace by the Left of its own
marginality and failure. Finally, the last chapter develops an
alternative that returns to the original spirit of the earliest
statement of identity politics by articulating a case for an
‘insurgent universality,’ based not on an abstract concept of
rights-bearers but, rather, on ‘particular and concrete individuals
– women, the poor, and slaves – and their political and social
agency’.

Overall, this is a bracing and valuable contribution _from the Left_
to the often vituperative debates swirling around identity politics.
Rather than focusing, like Lilla, on the Democratic Party, however,
Haider locates its origins in the earlier, pioneering work of the
Black lesbian feminist Combahee River Collective. At the same time,
Haider articulates a worry about the capacity of identity politics
today to serve as the basis for a radical political agenda. In
contrast, therefore, to Lilla’s rather patronising dismissal, Haider
engages in a genuinely immanent critique of identity; that is, he
criticises its contemporary _practice_ on the basis of its own
strongest _theoretical self-understanding_.

Accordingly, Haider defines contemporary identity politics as the
‘neutralisation of movements against racial oppression.’ This
relocates identity politics in a liberal agenda of seeking restitution
for victimhood by way of a juridical discourse. Quoting Judith Butler,
Haider maintains that ‘what we call identity politics is produced by
a state which can only allocate recognition and rights to subjects
totalised by the particularity that constitutes their plaintiff
status.’ Contemporary identity politics, in this view, remains
fatally trapped within the liberal-bourgeois institutions of the state
and its laws.

While Haider’s impulse to try to understand the intertwined nature
of race and class is correct, it is important to emphasise the way in
which race cannot in any straightforward way be understood in terms of
Stuart Hall’s Althusserian formulation – which Haider himself
draws upon – as ‘the modality in which class is lived’ (the
original formulation is from Hall et al.’s pioneering book _Policing
the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order_, published in 1978).
In contemporary identity politics, race, gender, ethnicity, sexual
orientation and other identities demand recognition and affirmation,
and in societies constituted, in part, by the mis-recognition or
non-recognition of these identities, this is perfectly understandable
and legitimate, to some extent at least. This is especially the case
with ‘trans’ and indigenous identities that have asserted and
re-asserted themselves, respectively, in recent years with particular
force.

Yet proletarian identity – not unlike the condition of homelessness
– cannot be understood in quite the same way. Thought in radical
terms, such a form of identity is not simply an empirical sociological
category but manifests a form of structural negativity that, as such,
demands its own _negation_; just as people who are homeless, far from
wanting their homeless condition to be recognised and affirmed, want
it to be eliminated through, amongst other things, the provision of
adequate housing. Capital cannot properly ‘include’ the
proletariat on the basis of whose un-remunerated surplus labour its
own expanded reproduction is premised. In other words, while other
identity categories have an interest in recognition and affirmation
that, arguably, can be met within capitalism, the proletariat simply
cannot. The realisation of proletarian identity is, ultimately,
negative rather than affirmative; proletarian ‘identity,’ unlike
most other identities, has an interest in _its own self-dissolution
along with that of class society as a whole_.

I would suggest that rather than an individualistic, rights-based
model, as Haider argues in invoking Butler, identity politics is based
on a particular reified account of experience. Identity politics
entails a _proprietary_ relation to a reified form of experience –
unchanging, fixed, substantive – that can be understood as the
possession or property of a given group that is, paradoxically,
constituted by that very form of experience. In German the word for
authenticity or _Eigentlichkeit_ is closely associated with the word
for property or _Eigentum_. Identity politics often makes a claim to
authenticity and such claims are closely linked to questions of
ownership rights. This is why identity politics is often embroiled in
questions of ‘cultural appropriation.’ One suspects that, despite
his telling anecdotes, it is far from clear that Haider fully
appreciates precisely how deleterious and fractious identity politics
can be for Left politics, a glimpse of which we saw in the treatment
of the Sanders campaign by Hillary Clinton and her backers at the
Democratic National Committee.

Such a proprietary relation to experience is especially well
exemplified by Hannah Black’s infamous open letter attacking White
painter Dana Schutz’s painting of Emmett Till, the African-American
boy beaten to death by White supremacists for allegedly looking the
‘wrong way’ at a White woman in 1955, and entitled _Open Casket_
(2016), during the Whitney Biennale in 2016. ‘The painting,’ the
letter reiterates several times, ‘must go.’ Co-signed by some 47
other artists, curators and critics, it demands not only that the
painting be removed from the exhibition but also that it actually be
_destroyed_. The key reason for this, according to Black, is that
Schutz has _no right_ to the experience of Black suffering. One
immediately wonders whether West German students required a
‘right’ to Jewish suffering to raise the question of the Holocaust
and collective German guilt in the tumultuous years of 1967-77. Why
Dana Schutz should be any different is far from clear.

Black’s letter is instructive because it makes a truth claim about a
particular representation of suffering without carefully attending to
the painting’s own sensuous particularity (as Zadie Smith precisely
does in her response to _Open Casket_ in a 2017 article in _Harper’s
Magazine_). The very premise of the claim confuses ontology with
epistemology: that the representation was bereft of truthfulness by
virtue of the fact that the race of the artist was simply wrong. The
claim has the status of an _a priori_ over an _a posteriori_, it is
apodictic rather than based on attention to the details of the framing
of its subject matter, its composition, use of colour, texture of its
brush strokes, and so on. It therefore rules out in advance the
possibility of a critical judgment of the work’s overall success or
failure. The claim, surely, is not simply that the work cannot
_succeed_ but that it also cannot _fail_. It ought not even be
permitted to fail. It rules out in advance Samuel Beckett’s claim
that art works can fail and they can fail better and they can fail
worse.

Artworks, as Benjamin and Adorno both suggested, are constituted by
both truth and falsity, and the work of criticism is to draw out their
‘truth-content’ (_Wahrgehalt_). When they fail better, they fail
in such a way that we can learn something from them, including, for
example, the conditions of their own (im)possibility. Perhaps, at some
level, _all_ artworks seeking to express or represent suffering must
fail in so far as such artworks remain deeply complicit with the world
that produces such suffering in the first place. Surely, it is the
role of art criticism to make such judgments about the nature of such
failures? Yet Hannah Black moralistically rules out such criticism in
advance by advocating the painting’s liquidation.

This demand for the work’s destruction is the logical conclusion of
the radical particularism of identity politics or the idea that
identity-based groups are unified by certain experiences that other
groups simply have no _right_ to. The relationship is one suggestive
of property ownership yet a relationship also overdetermined by a
sense that the loss of such property entails not just a monetary loss
but an ontological one – a loss of being itself. From this
perspective, claims or representations made by members of one group
about another are not simply to be addressed by judgments, and,
therefore, criticisms, because such claims and/or representations
constitute hateful and harmful attacks on these very groups. This is
also, for example, what came into play in the much-discussed case of
Rebecca Tuvel’s March 2017 _Hypatia_ article on ‘trans-racial’
identities and the open letter signed by over 800 hundred academics
demanding its retraction as opposed to its critical discussion.

If it is true that central to identity politics is a reified account
of experience, then a much more promising approach to it, I would
suggest, is be found in Frantz Fanon’s dynamic understanding of
experience. Given that Fanon’s work, especially _Black Skin, White
Masks_, is so central to identity politics in general, and to
Afro-pessimism in particular, (from which in fact the main tropes of
Hannah Black’s letter seem to be drawn), it is unfortunate that
Haider’s immanent critique of identity politics remains confined to
the U.S. Black radical tradition. Or to put it another way, it is
unfortunate that it doesn’t seek to engage in an immanent critique
of Afro-pessimism’s own rather one-sided appropriation of Fanon’s
thought. In what is surely one of the best accounts of Fanon’s
thought, _Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience_ (1997), Ghanaian
philosopher Ato Sekyi-Otu argues that it is within a
‘dramaturgical’ structure that we must seek to understand
Fanon’s narrative of liberation. ‘Thanks to this formal
characteristic’, he argues, ‘Fanon’s narrative can give credence
to the apprehension of a historical object in its immediate mode of
appearance, and yet prepare us for a comprehension of this object –
that is to say, a fuller knowledge of its appearance and its
conditions of intelligibility.’ Attention must be paid, therefore,
to the various speech acts that constitute the often contradictory
dramaturgical ‘stagings’ of experience itself.

Through a reading of the _Wretched of the Earth_ (rather than _Black
Skin, White Masks_), Sekyi-Otu charts the movement of experience
beyond the Manichean world constituted by the binary logic of
colonialism itself, a logic sedimented in the very architecture and
built environment of colonised space as brilliantly represented by
Gillo Pontecorvo in _The Battle of Algiers_ (1966). Once the armed
struggle commences, the colonial world, characterised by an
Aristotelian logic of mutual exclusivity, quickly gives way to a more
properly dialectical and temporal logic of mediation in which
difference between colonised and coloniser is transformed into an
internal differentiation of the colonised themselves. The
becoming-human of the colonised corresponds, paradoxically, with the
dynamic disclosure of difference within the colonised rather than the
static and reified difference constituting the Manichean world of the
colony.

The immediacy of _identity_ based on the supposedly ‘natural’ fact
of race now is fundamentally altered through what Marx called, in the
first volume of _Capital_, a transformation in the ‘dramatis
personae’ into _non-identity_; that is, divisions based on social
class between a nascent national bourgeoisie, on the one hand, and
workers and peasants, on the other, come into view. Sekyi-Otu
felicitously calls this the ‘dialectical enlightenment’ of the
post-colonial world, one in which:

Reason’s triumph, the faculty of dialectical disclosure, is in Fanon
achieved experientially through a corrosive destruction of the
rigidity and simplicity to which a racialised apprehension of the
world had reduced everything. Thanks to this ‘bitter discovery’ of
exploitative relations and distributive injustice as intraracial
facts, as human, all-too-human possibilities, the nascent postcolonial
subject is ready for a veritable political and epistemic
reorientation.

What is important to grasp is the centrality of a reified or static
understanding of _experience_ lying at the heart of identity politics.
If contemporary identity politics can be understood as _neo-liberal_,
it is because it internalises the logic of the value form at a
particularly deep level. This becomes especially clear in the example
of Hannah Black where we find precisely what Sekyi-Otu calls the
‘rigidity and simplicity to which a racialised apprehension of the
world reduced everything.’ It is such a ‘racialised
apprehension’ that grounds her demand for the destruction of an
artwork.

If the work opens up a world, in Heidegger’s sense, then, in
demanding _work_-destruction, Black nihilistically demands
_world_-destruction – the destruction of the structure of meaning
and of sense which the work generates, but also the basis on which
that very same work may itself be _criticised_, as exemplified by the
oppositional response of Black painter Parker Bright to _Open Casket_.
Such world destruction, at the same time, then, profoundly forecloses
the possibility of the ‘insurgent universality’ that Haider
champions. Indeed, it forecloses the very possibility of politics as
such.

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