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All content in this area was uploaded by Madhu Prabakaran on Aug 28, 2019
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Content uploaded by Madhu Prabakaran
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Madhu Prabakaran on Aug 28, 2019
Content may be subject to copyright.
On Identity Politics
P.Madhu
Identity bias is deeply ingrained in understanding the social ever since the social is
problematized. Cults, religions, races, nations, cliques, orders, castes and genders often
claim superiority to themselves and thereby inflict inferiority over others. At the species
level, homo sapiens claim themselves as superior. The claims continue to modify
relations among humans and their relation with the other species and things.
Identities are not mere descriptions. They are associated with claims of superiority and
inferiority. Often such claims are ‘essentialized’: the occupants of various positions
within the social space
1
were deluded to believe they are in their respective position
because that should be ‘naturally’ so. Human species is believed to be ‘naturally’
superior to the others.
Historically, there are times in which one section occupies higher position in the social
space within the set of rules constructed for social mobility. At other times, when the
rules of social mobility go under discursive transitions, the social space is transformed
repositioning the orders of mobility. Within the transformed space the privileged may
be turned underprivileged and vice-versa, all within emergent patterns of social, cultural
and symbolic capitals. The transformation of the social space and the transition of
mobility patterns deserve serious sociological attention than what usually claimants of
various types of identity politics do.
The enunciative principles of various discursive formations that defined the rules and
practices of social mobility within a given social space has to be studied meticulously
rather than resorting to simplistic assumptions of identity politics. Unlike serious
studies, the adventures of Identity politics short circuits understanding the social with
simplistic sloganeering. The identity politics academics is fundamentally narcissistic and
hence replaces the careful analysis of processes with preoccupations of villains, heroes,
victims, conspirators, good ones and bad thugs.
1
In bourdieu’vian sense.
Identity politics is methodologically defective. Monoliths of identities are non-existing
social realities. All that appears as monoliths are constituted by multiple fields of
exterior relations
2
. All that appears as entities are consequent of processes elsewhere.
Therefore, essence of an entity does not lie within. Any claims of identity essences are
therefore methodologically defective. Identity politics is methodologically flawed
whenever it proposes the ‘us versus them’. It is doubly flawed because such claims of
narcissistic too. All claims of narcissisms are methodologically unsustainable. Further,
any claim of identity essence can be done only at the cost of neglecting interplaying
genealogies of identities
3
. Conditions and trajectories of the possibilities of identity
formations and not identities themselves are methodologically tenable. In other words
not the identities per se but the micro-politics of their formation and continuation are
methodologically viable.
Identities are methodologically unviable even within the strictly empirical sense. Identity
claims are generic, least applicable to the particulars. The particulars are always distinct
and different from the generic identities within which they are bracketed
4
. For this
reason, identities do not actually represent those whom they claim to represent.
Identity claims when made as politics, inherently it is flawed with representing a
dominant minority within the identity bracket than the entire range of members within
it. Practically, identity politics is politics of hegemony of a voiced within the identity
bracket. A ‘minority politics’
5
within the identity bracket would make identity politics
unviable. Minority politics within the identity bracket is the politics of the unvoiced
within the bracketed identity. The identity politics co-evolves with other methodological
fallacies of appeal to emotion, alleging conspiracy within the sociological processes,
reductionism and tending to be prematurely revolutionary without closely looking at the
micro processes constituting and sustaining the identities. However, it is successful to
some extent because it has generated a sense of justice in real world politics among the
deprived. A scholarly genuine approach to identities would be of greater merit because
that would liberate one from the clutches of identities of one’s own and that of the
other. It will be instrumental in nullifying all claims of identities and consequent social
and political dominations. Identity politics is methodologically unviable. However,
demystifying and undoing identities is methodologically tenable and politically sensible.
2
In Deleuze’ian sense.
3
In Foucaultian & Nietzsche’ian sense.
4
In Weberian sense.
5
In Deleuze’ian sense. See my paper on ‘minority politics’.