Post by keir /
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To affinity and beyond…

May 17, 2007

As hinted at by Brian I’ve been wanting to post on the tension between identity politics and politics based on affinity.

In ” No Logo ” Naomi Klein (not someone regularly cited here) critiques the identity politics of her college days. She tells a familiar story of fracturing micro-struggles around representation of identities within both institutions and language. And how these were fundamentally outflanked by capital. As she puts it: “The need for greater diversity – the rallying cry of my university years – is now not only accepted by the culture industries, it is the mantra of global capital. And identity politics, as they were practiced in the nineties, weren’t a threat, they were a gold mine.“ If it’s an identity you’re after then capital is always selling.

Although identity politics had valid, minoritarian moments they also fitted too neatly with the rise of neo-liberalism in the 1980’s and its tendency to separate politics from economics. Another angle on this can be seen in New Social Movement theory. It was also tied to the identity politics of the 1980’s and early 90’s with its “post-material” concerns. I had to read some recently and it seemed so hilariously out of date I kept imagining it on one of these list programs alongside leg warmers and Spangles. For Klein, escape from the inward looking paralysis of those politics was one of the achievements of the anti-globalisation cycle of struggles.

Not that I’m saying identity politics are no more, I’m not even sure that it’s something that can be totally escaped but I present a couple of stories to illustrate potential problems. A couple of years ago I went to a talk by Jane Flax, a Freudian, Foucauldian, feminist psychoanalyst (don’t ask how she squares that circle). A big point she made was that you shouldn’t say either race or gender. The two oppressions overlapped so much that you had to say race/gender. I asked her why you didn’t have to say race/gender/class or (to stop the list growing and making page long sentences the norm) just power relations. She replied that she hadn’t come across a good analysis of class. Yeh, well whatever but she then went on to psychoanalyse the film “Monster’s Ball” and the failings of the race/gender category became uncomfortably apparent. Her analysis gave the impression that the problems of the world were caused by redneck men whose relationships with their fathers made them all psychologically abnormal. Now I’m not a shit-kicking country music type myself but it was so easy to see how this all worked out. By keeping class out of the analysis everyone in the room could declare themselves normal/healthy/pure but definitely not part of the problem. It fitted right into that wider liberal idea, we’re already saved and all we need to do is turn the rest of the world into us. Change the world without changing ourselves.

I should say though that simply (re)introducing class, as a category, doesn’t necessarily solve the problem. It can be easily subsumed into the identity game. Class has always had a very culturally based definition in the UK and class as identity was one of the central strands of the 1980’s – 90’s class struggle anarchist scene that we were part of. At it’s worst this tendency fell into deeply reactionary and fucked up positions, denying that there was a ruling class or even such an abstract thing as capital. Instead it declared that “the enemy is the middle class” because they denied a voice to the working class. One of the names the tendency gave itself was “openly classist” putting class alongside a list of isms, racism, sexism, speciesism. It was pure liberal identity politics. It’s funny to think back on that now and recognise it as an offshoot of the politics of woolly jumper wearing, middle class feminists (sic) but of course that was one of the political environments it emerged from and in reaction to.

Another strand that fed into the “enemy is the middle class” tendency was the quite necessary critique of the power held by experts. Unfortunately neo-liberals (or public choice as it was known in this context) were also attacking professionals seeking to replace their power with, the more easily manipulable, judgement of the market.

In fact the parallels get even worse. I was reading Thomas Franks book “What’s the matter with Kansas?” which charts the rise of the US conservative movement. In a way that story is more of a straight out ideological trick where the re-assertion of class power and a huge increase in inequality is achieved through the misdirection of attention on to cultural issues. It’s based on class as cultural identity although, of course, class can never be mentioned in the US of stateside. Still “the enemy is the liberal elite” is the US version of a disturbingly familiar world-view. It should act as a marker of just how fucked up identity politics crossed with ‘class as identity’ can get.

That doesn’t mean that there is an easy outside to identity politics. The whole counter-globalisation cycle of struggles can be partly seen as an attempt to escape liberal politics, trace out the links between the economic and the political and escape the paralysis of identity politics. There was a shift towards identifying a common enemy in neo-liberalism or even capitalism and an emphasis on working through problems by acting together. It’s a politics based on affinity, with movements grouping together through shared affect rather than shared ideology. What was important is what you do, not what you say. The priority became moving, taking risks, acknowledging the messiness of politics. Not worrying about shoring up behind you meant you could move faster and take more audacious leaps. I think that’s what the Zapatista slogan “walking we ask questions” means, we sort things out on the road, work out the destination as we go.

Identity politics can be seen as a compensatory power move that ends conversation in a certain direction. The aim is to deny a voice to certain people in order to allow the usually silent to speak, to let the sub-altern speak. That’s how it’s in tension with affinity politics. Identity politics is anti-affinity, its logic is to isolate and cut off conversation along ever deepening gradations of power imbalances. Until you have battles over who is the most oppressed. Which oppression counts most becomes important to work out because it determines who has the right to speak at all.

But it’s been pointed out in an article in Turbulence there are no shortcuts, that a politics based on affinity can’t sidestep the problems identity politics tries to address. Unless we address the material and structural basis of the old hierarchies they will just reassert themselves.

Of course striation is necessary and at certain points you need rupture to get things moving again. We can’t just all get along, as Rodney King put it. But rupture is a dangerous thing involving destruction. There is a smell of corruption that hangs over identity politics; it is an assertion of power that stops potentially productive encounters. Perhaps the way to avoid that corruption solidifying into paralysis is to recognize that there is no pure outside. We have to all change ourselves as we change the world.

4 Comments

brian May 17, 2007 at 1:08 pm

Great post, but it’s tempting to conclude that we can put identity in one column (bad) and affinity in the other (good). I know that’s not what you’re saying but it’s an easy leap to make.
It’s class that offers a key here (surprise, surprise). Class can be seen as a static thing, a sociological category we’re born into and from which there’s no escape (and from which we don’t want to escape). That’s the openly bonkers position. Or else we can (stroke beard) see it as a process, as a becoming.
Surely it’s much the same with identity. In fact maybe identity is the wrong word, or the word we should use when it has calcified, settled into a thing or category. Before that happens, there’s a whole process of becoming which is enormously productive. That’s the creative explosion we find at the birth of Black Power, or the second wave of feminism, or Queer Liberation or whatever. There’s an emphasis on changing ourselves as much as the world (as if it could be any other way!).
That minoritarian thrust doesn’t last, and when it settles down, it’s ripe for enclosure and commodification. Hence the huge amounts of local government money poured into Racism Awareness Training courses etc in the 1980s. Blimey, I’m coming over all Daily Mail here, so I’d better stop. But there is more to be discussed here, especially around affinity and the way it works…
David May 18, 2007 at 11:15 am

This is a really important problematic: how can affinity encounter difference in a productive way? Brian is of course right in suggesting the identities of identity politics tend to be fixed categories. In reality, we all take on multiple identities, which shift over time and depending on context. At one moment, you might be a woman, the next an educated and respected academic, say.

Sometimes books you read a long time ago stick in your memory. One of those books for me is D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. One of the things that makes this novel so exciting is Lawrence’s awareness of tensions and contradictions between the different “identities” and oppressions, here class and gender: Constance (Lady Chatterley) is an aristocratic woman, whilst her (male) lover, Oliver Mellors, is a gamekeeper.

I’ve been reading Horizontalism, a collection of accounts of various aspects of the movements in Argentina and how they’re grappling with so many of these issues. There’s loads of interesting stuff in there — enough for a whole post — but a few directly relevant to this affinity vs. identity politics question.

First, and this relates to the tendency amongst some people who believe in identity politics to attempt to measure oppression. This from the group Colectivo Situaciones:

“Some think, for example, that horizontalidad [“horizontalism”] is the number of minutes each person speaks, or a quantity of techniques that will make all communication work. The real question of horizontalidad is: What does it mean to organize ourselves?”

And the second quotation is from Paula, part of feminist and gay, lesbian, transvestites, transsexual and bisexual (GLTTB) collectives:

“What is it that makes a person different from me? If I only think about difference, then I am sort of pigeon-holing them and making a separation. Horizontalidad permits us to think not solely in terms of difference, but rather to live with other people and be able to have political discussions with them, without trying to define them. … [In the GLTTB movement] it wasn’t important if you were lesbian, transvestite, gay, heterosexual, or whatever. It wasn’t important. The question was not asked, and that’s interesting — no one asked, how do you identify yourself?”
Keir May 21, 2007 at 11:10 am

Here’s an important article on the process of calcification in identity.
brian May 21, 2007 at 11:48 am

Those quotes from Horizontalism also remind me that there’s a link in this to language. I can remember sitting in a painful meeting at the Hori-Zone on 7 July as people wrestled with the exact wording of a press release. Should we “wholeheartedly” condemn the bombings? And how to extend our “sympathy”? And who to? And how should we sign it? The problem was that by this time we were wholly on someone else’s terrain, where language was about precision, clarity and ticking the right boxes, an ‘us’ and a ‘them’ Not about changing the fucking world.