by
Grant Farred[i]
Identity
politics was founded as a critique of the grand narrative, charged
with inaugurating a different mode of struggle. Instead of the Great
White Man theory of history and politics, identity politics demanded
thinking the political in its specificity; it undertook, in the wake
of the post-War anti-colonial struggles and the anti-Establishment
turmoil that rocked Western societies in the 1960s, the thinking of
the Other. Identity politics sought to rearticulate the extant
political categories by, inter alia, complicating the workings of
class with race; attending to gender and sexual orientation in the
campaign for national liberation; foregrounding the constitutive
importance of ethnicity in political struggles. However, from its
inception identity politics has been haunted by the question of how
to think the specific against the grand political narrative.
At
stake, in a moment when identity politics appears neither efficacious
nor obsolete but still too easily mobilizable, are the political
consequences of thinking specifically. As incendiary pronouncements,
in the name of race (or party) solidarity, proliferate, the politics
of identity presents itself as an urgent issue for South Africans.
How does the critic of a Malema or a Miyeni or a Manyi argue against
the expediently racialized narrative? Identity politics is an
instrumentalist strategy, containing within its genetic structure
always the potentiality (and, often, the intent) for silencing its
adversaries, even those who can lay claim to the same identity. The
politics of identity is grounded in the principle of exclusion
bequeathing as it has to us the term, before itself an apologia,
already a demarcation of its political limits, “strategic
essentialism.”
Identity
politics makes one thing, above all else, immanent: the political
cannot be thought narrowly. It is not without its transient virtues
but it is, at best, a partial response. Identity politics can never
provide a political thinking adequate to anything except its
specificity – a malevolent self-interest, in many instances –
which is itself, a priori, linked to larger political questions;
thinking for a specific identity or interest group is, before itself,
already linked to larger political intentions. Malema’s
pontifications make him perpetually visible; Miyeni underwrites,
literally, that cause; Manyi derogates. Through this, identity
politics reveals the indivisibility of politics. The lesson of
post-apartheid South Africa, whatever its failings, is that a
politics organized around identity, whatever formation it takes,
cannot be sustained; there is always political work to be done beyond
and in addition to a particular mobilization.
The
only way to commit to identity politics, in even its best
articulations, is to acknowledge its insufficiencies and to work for
its liquidation in doing it. Barack Obama’s presidency is
inconceivable without the Civil Rights movement; Obama’s presidency
is only conceivable because he recognized the need to simultaneously
mobilize and exceed that mode of US politics. Fighting for an
identity amounts to conducting a Gramscian war of position in a
spirit approaching bad faith; an “ethical” bad faith entirely
absent from the politics of those conducting identity politics in
contemporary South Africa.
If
a return to the grand narrative is neither feasible nor desirable,
the challenge of how to think politically remains. In this respect,
there is at least one valuable aspect of the grand narrative that is
now worth considering. Because of its propensity for the universal,
the grand narrative requires, of necessity, the imperative to think
abstractly – against, beyond, with specificity. It demands thinking
in terms that, while it may often be grounded in the present (the
basis for its thought), requires a conceptual imagining that exceeds
the immediacy of the now, that refuses the strategic essentialism of
the current conjuncture and exposes its (pernicious) limitations.
In
its stead, a political thinking is proposed that admits everything –
all political categories (specificities), all modes of being – into
its thought. Such a politics risks everything. It is only through
such an “abstraction” of politics that it becomes possible to
think politics as a course of human action at once aware and far in
excess of a specific set of interests named “race” or “sexual
orientation” or, worse, a particular people’s party.
It
is in its infelicity to the abstract, in its inability to think
everything at once, that both the grand narrative and identity
politics fail politically. The grand narrative and identity politics
are different in that they are infelicitous in different ways. The
grand narrative ignores the specific because it believes that it
already incorporates the specific within its broad ambit; identity
politics fails in its rejection, a historically valid argument that
is philosophically lacking, of the universal that cannot admit of how
it is inextricably bound up in the universal. In their differences
they reveal, unknowingly, their similarity. The grand narrative and
identity politics cannot meet the standards of the abstract because
they are both myopic. Identity politics commits itself to seeing, in
the main, one thing; the grand narrative commits itself to seeing
everything while overlooking much or, worse, too much.
Only
an abstract thinking of politics takes as its project the need to see
everything. It is only such an abstraction that makes possible a
radical politics. That is, a politics of the impossible – an
omniscient politics that cannot conceive of anything outside it –
is the only politics worthy of thought because it is founded upon the
possibility of not only seeing and understanding everything, but of
attending fully to the entirety of human experience. Advocating for
such a politics is not an argument for utopia but committing to a
politics that excludes nothing (not critique of a right wing
Afrikaner nationalism or a virulent black nationalism), that
struggles for everything, all the time. This is a politics that, in
the cause of struggling for everything, prioritizes nothing – in so
doing, of course, it prioritizes everything. Unlike the grand
narrative or identity politics, in this politics everything matters.
Everything is the only order of business for a truly radical
politics. There is nothing but a powerful materiality about such an
abstract thinking of everything. Why should anyone settle for less
than everything?
[i]
For Leonhard and Richard.
