1. Recognition and “identity”
We have to start destructuring and realigning social relations of domination, as Cornell and Murphy posit in “anti-racism, multiculturalism and the ethics of identification”.
Rethink multiculturalism to facilitate change.
Question identity in relation to recognition, subjectivation, and identification.
Cornell and Murphy said that a politics of recognition is not just tied to an authentic identity but also bestowed on strategic or provisional identities. People whose identities are in process or are changing. It aims to disconnect a claim to authentic identity from a demand for recognition.
Identities can be produced through self-cultivation.
C&M “affirm the value of self-representation and self definition” in constructing an identity (moving beyond stereotypes, etc). However, there are limits, “at least for those in dominant positions” (I would think that there would be more limits to those in subordinate positions).
Race as a concept may be fluid, but the social reality still is what it is. There are real limits to identity but no limits on imaginative identifications, like identifying “with racialized, minoritarian cultural phenomena” – like the “I had an abortion” or “I am a Jew” thing.
Sets of restraints on this; one from without, one from within. The “structure of recognition” means you have to be acknowledged by an other in order to be a subject. From within, you’re limited by your own “structures of identification.”
The subject only becomes a subject by being recognized by another subject. Identity is bestowed by an other, and can be taken away as well.
Things I don’t understand:
“Identity comes only as a result of a dual motion of the internalization, or introjection of otherness, and the projection onto the other of some fundamental similarity or identification with the subject.”
• introjection = an unconscious psychic process by which a person incorporates into his or her own psychic apparatus the characteristics of another person or object.
I’m not sure if I’m confusing other with Other, or if I just don’t get that concept.
Subject-projection structure of recognition and subject as creature of internalization (taking in another’s representations of the subject as part of the subject’s identity).
(Is internalization an active or passive process?)
This is the “uncontested discourse of minority cultures.”
Nietzsche focuses on forces or wills, not identity – action and activity. “What marks the subject as such is its capacity to act and be acted upon, to do rather than to be, to act rather than to identify.”
2. Imperceptibility
Totally don’t get this part:
“It is one of Nietzsche’s most profound insights that will, subjectivity, consciousness, the human, identity, are not causes, and that causation is indeed a habit or explanatory model that puts the subject’s position as a being of habit at the center without adequate recognition of that which ‘causes’, produces the very fiction that is the subject. A subject is not produced through the recognition of another subject, for the subject is itself a productive and activating fiction”.
(That last sentence seems to directly contradict what she said before about “the subject can only become a subject as such through being recognized by another as a subject.”).
(So those things are not causes; causation puts the subject at the center, but without recognizing that which causes?)
According to Nietzsche, we only see events as having been caused by intentions. “Every event is a deed, … every deed presupposes a doer”.
Nietzsche might help us understand that politics, subjectivity, and the social are consequences of “active and reactive forces that have no agency, or are all that agency and identity consist in.” (Not sure I understand the second part of that sentence).
“What is it that subjects seek? To be recognized?” by whom? “From whom do oppressed groups and individuals seek identity through recognition?”
I don’t understand this:
“While two equal self-consciousnesses seek recognition from each other, the dialectic rapidly transforms this apparent or provisional equality into the very structure of lordship and bondage.”
Majority doesn’t bestow identity. If this is true, and the majority is concerned with “non-recognition” and “non-comprehension” of minority, “then why is recognition necessary and what does it confer?”
(Not sure I understand – if she’s saying that the majority is concerned with NOT recognizing, and that that makes it seem like recognition isn’t necessary… I don’t think that follows. Regardless of whether the majority does or does not bestow identity, isn’t their recognition crucial? Or does “recognition” here mean something more intellectual than I’m thinking?)
Instead of a “desire for recognition” as a “condition for subjective identity,” we need different assumptions to cover identity politics without resorting to language of recognition.
(so we want to make identity possible without relying on recognition?)
C&M want politics without identity but say we still need a concept of recognition.
Grosz thinks we need to be able to talk about identity without having to talk about recognition.
Aligns the desire for recognition with “the annihilation of identity without the other”. Says that we depend on the other. We need to change those things.
Political struggles as pragmatic – can’t be chalked up to a lack of recognition.
Your identity isn’t how you present yourself, but what you do. (Does this imply that identity formation isn’t conscious?)
Big focus on force.
“force is always engaged in becoming”
“force is always a relation of intensity”
“it is differences in the quantity of forces that produce differences in quality”
“each force seeks its own expansion” so forces end up “in relations of hostility and competition with each other”.
“force is that which produces competition and struggle”.
Let’s rethink the subject in terms of force.
Forces act THROUGH subjects to create them (we talked about this earlier in the term I think).
Theoretical choice: ascribe to a theory of a subject that wants to be affirmed through relations (this is the basis of performativity, the idea that performances produce, don’t express, identity), or the theory of the impersonal with the inhuman forces.
Instead of looking at feminist politics as a struggle of rights, they may better function as a “mode of rendering the subject the backdrop to a play of forces”.
Feminism “is not simply the struggle to liberate women,” but “to render more mobile, fluid, and transformable the means by which the female subject is produced and represented. It is the struggle to produce a future in which forces align in ways fundamentally different from the past and the present.”
“it is a useful fiction to imagine that we as subjects are masters or agents of these very forces that constitute us as subjects, but misleading”
“instead of a politics of recognition, in which subjugated groups and minorities strive for a validated and affirmed place in public life,” we should “consider the affirmation of a politics of imperceptibility, leaving its traces and effects everywhere, but never being able to be identified with a person or an organization.”
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