The Rise of "Identity Politics"

...Alert to slights, they cultivate a cultural marginality both defensive and aggressive...

...Rabinbach is a professor of European history at Cooper Union, an editor of New German Critique, and the author of The Crisis of Austrian Socialism and, most recently, of The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity...

...Still, SPRING • 1993 • 173 Identity Politics the shadings are deeply felt, whence the intellectual polarization that shows up in debates about the complex of problems including the curriculum, diversity, and so on...

...Freedom as an endless meeting was only alluring to those who had the time and taste to go to meetings endlessly...

...In practice, it was tailored to students, young people collected at "knowledge factories" as the industrial proletariat had been collected at mills and mines...

...if you don't agree with P, it is (or more mildly, is probably) because you are a member of Y. And further: since X has been oppressed, or silenced, by Y— typically, white heterosexual males—justice requires that members of X, preferably (though not necessarily) adherents of P, be hired and promoted...

...Under Lenin, the party, this directive force that sees all and knows all and acts in the ostensibly general interest, becomes the incar174 • DISSENT Identity Politics nation of the Enlightenment's faith in the knowability of the human situation...

...Standards and traditions now are taken to be nothing more than the camouflage of interests...

...It seems to overcome exclusion and silencing...

...What began as an assertion of dignity, a recovery from exclusion and denigration, and a demand for representation, has also developed a hardening of its boundaries...

...The centrifugal surge, on campus and off, is the product of two intersecting histories...

...Moreover, in a world where other people seem to have chosen up sides and worse, where they approach you—even menace you—because you belong to a particular group, it seems a necessity to or find or invent one's strength among one's people...

...one belonged to a caucus...

...Feminist stirrings were greeted with scorn by unreconstructed men...

...But these, in turn, have taken place within the longer history that snakes forward throughout the West since the revolutions of 1776, 1789, and 1848...

...The point I wish to assert is that the thickening of identity politics is inseparable from a fragmentation of commonality politics...

...When academic conservatives resisted, they only confirmed the convictions of the marginal—that their embattled or not-yetdeveloping perspectives needed to be separately institutionalized...

...But these attempts at recomposing a sense of a unified revolutionary bloc were weak in comparison with centrifugal pressures...

...The political-intellectual experience of younger academics could be mapped onto other centrifugal dispositions in post-Vietnam America...

...We have to ask, Thickening compared to what...

...The passion that drove students— including Berkeley's Free Speech Movement —was the desire to support civil rights as part of a movement with a universalist design...

...One group after another demanded the recognition of difference and the protection of separate spheres for distinct groupings...

...Identity politics is a form of self-understanding, an orientation toward the world, and a structure of feeling that is frequent in developed industrial societies...

...And so, partly by default, from one revision to the next, Marxism remained the pedigreed theoretical ensemble hovering over all left-wing thought...

...Histories of the world and of America, of science and literature, are still reverberating from what can legitimately be called a revolution in knowledge...

...In the academy, the pioneering work in the early 1970s toward making women's studies legitimate, bolstering labor studies, rethinking the damage done by slavery and the slaughter of the Indians, opening up the canon to hitherto silenced traditions—all this work was done by scholars who had one foot in the civil rights and antiwar movements and who came to their specialties already bearing something of a universalist or cosmopolitan bent...

...In the nineteenth century, the right was the property of aristocracies who stood unabashedly for the privileges of the few...

...This identity politics is already a tradition in its second generation, transmitted and retransmitted, insti172 • DISSENT Identity Politics tutionalized in jargons, mentors, gurus, conferences, associations, journals, departments, publishing subfields, bookstore sections, jokes, and, not incidentally, in affirmative action and the growing numbers of faculty and students identified and identifying themselves as "of color...

...This cluster of feelings seems to answer the questions, Who am I? Who is like me...

...The founders of women's and black studies had a universalist base in either the Old or the New Left...

...They had no direct memory of either a unified left or a successful left-of-center Democratic party...

...By the time they arrived on campuses in the early seventies, identity politics was the norm...

...The specialists in difference may do their best to deny the fact that for a quarter of a century, they have been fighting over the English department while the right held the White House as its private fiefdom...

...The proletariat is his nation...

...Thus a curious reversal of left and right...

...It was more salient, more vital, more present—all the more so in the 1980s, as practical struggles for university facilities, requirements, and so forth culminated in fights over increasingly scarce resources...

...Such unity as had been felt by the civil rights movement began to dissolve as soon as legal segregation was defeated...

...and, finally, by trying to rethink society, literature, and history from the respective vantages of the silenced, asking what the group and, indeed, the entire world would look like if those hitherto excluded were now included...

...For these post-1960s activists, universalist traditions seemed empty...

...More grandly, in a revival of Enlightenment universalism, Students for a Democratic Society's Port Huron Statement spoke self-consciously in the name of all humanity...

...Such legitimacy as the left enjoyed in the West rested on its claim to a place in the story of universal human emancipation...

...Affirmative action has been successful enough to create a critical mass of African Americans who feel simultaneously heartened, challenged, and marooned...

...In the absence of plausible prospects for fighting the impoverishment of the cities, unemployment, police brutality, crime, or any of the economic aspects of the current immiseration, it is more convenient— certainly less risky—to accuse a liberal professor of racism...

...Here, in black and ethnic studies, women's studies, gay and lesbian groupings, and so on, each movement could feel the exhilaration of group-based identity...

...But their recruits, born in the early or later 1950s, did not...

...Throughout this period and beyond, believers in a common humanity clustered around the two great progressive ideals: the liberal ideal enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and, later, in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen...

...The communist party, like God, has its center everywhere and nowhere...

...If the population at large was incapable, by itself, of seeing the world whole and acting in the general interest, some enlightened group took it upon itself to be the collective conscience, the Founding Fathers, the vanguard party...

...The long overdue opening of political initiative to minorities, women, gays, and others of the traditionally voiceless has developed its own methods of silencing...

...At the outer limit, those who set out to explode a shrunken definition of humanity end by shrinking their definitions of blacks or women...

...But as the hitherto excluded territories were institutionalized, the lingering aspiration for the universal subject was ceded...

...This distinction is one of shadings, not absolutes, for differences are always thought and felt against a background of that which does not differ, and commonalities are always thought and felt in relation to differences...

...yet potentially inclusive language was in place...

...It also thrives in the society at large — in the media of the mass and the margins alike, in schools and in street lore...

...The New left was a movement-for-others searching for an ideology to transform it into a movement-for-itself, but participatory democracy was too ethereal an objective with which to bind an entire movement, let alone an entire society...

...When the early New Left set out to find common ground with a like-minded constituency, it reached out to the impoverished— the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee to sharecroppers and SDS to the urban poor, who, by virtue of their marginality, might be imagined as forerunners of a universal democracy...

...It is a search for comfort, an approach to community...

...Identity politics is intensified when antagonistic identities are fighting for their places amid shrinking resources...

...Two hundred years of revolutionary tradition, whether liberal or radical, were predicated on the ideal of a universal humanity...

...In this setting, identity politics promises a certain comfort...

...for if they would not, who would...

...Compared to "universalism," "common culture," "the human condition," "liberality," "the Enlightenment project" —the contrary position wears different labels...

...Identity politics turns necessity to virtue...

...Nationalist revolutions—from 1848 to the present—were to be understood as tributaries to a common torrent, the grand surge of self-determination justified by the equivalent worth of all national expressions...

...At the extreme, in the academy but also outside, "genealogy" has become something of a universal solvent for universal ideas...

...The legitimacy of racial animus on a national scale, the boldness of right-wing politicians, the profusion of straightforward race prejudice among students have all made the academic left edgier and more offensive...

...From these endeavors flowed genuine achievements in the study of history and literature...

...To accomplish its mission, this class to end all classes requires a universal midwife: the revolutionary...

...All men were supposed to have been created equal, workingmen of all countries were supposed to unite...

...176 • DISSENT Identity Politics Soon, difference was being practiced, not just thought, at a deeper level than commonality...

...But the divisions of race and then gender and sexual orientation proved far too deep to be overcome by any rhetoric of unification...

...If white supremacy was unacceptable, neither could male supremacy be abided...

...The idea of a common America and the idea of a unitary Left, these two great legacies of the Enlightenment, hollowed out together...

...There is, obviously, the last quarter century of America's social and demographic upheavals...

...This is more than a way of thought...

...Farther down a road already surveyed by Marx, Lenin makes intellectuals essential to the revolution, thereby securing the dominion of universal ideals...

...For its part, seized by the logic of identity politics, committed to pleasing its disparate constituencies, the academic left has lost interest in the commonalities that undergird its obsession with difference...

...Having dismissed Marxism for what C. Wright Mills called its "labor metaphysic," the New Left tried to compose a surrogate universal...

...Sooner or later, all disputes issue in propositions of the following sort: the central subject for understanding is the difference between X (for example, women, people of color) and Y (for example, white males...

...Thus, within fifty years, women—grossly subordinated in the antislavery movement—were working up a politics based on their constituting half of a human race that had been decreed to share equal rights...

...The left addressed itself not to particular men and women but to all, in the name of their common standing...

...If students and the poor were not saddled with "radical chains" in the system of production, at least they could be imagined with radical needs for political participation...

...Just as these cohorts have their clothes and their music, they have "their politics" — the principal, even the only form of "politics" they know...

...Identity politics presents itself as— and many young people experience it as—the most compelling remedy for anonymity in an impersonal world...

...Beneath this, they had become, willy-nilly, pluralists, a fact frequently disguised by the rhetoric of revolution hanging over from the late sixties...

...For the participants in these late-sixties and post-sixties movements, the benefits of this pursuit were manifold—an experience of solidarity, a ready-made reservoir of recruits...

...then by exhuming buried work and exploring forms of resistance...

...and the radical ideal that crystallized as Marxism...

...If there seemed in the late 1960s to be one big movement, it was largely because there was one big war...

...In separatist theory, they must be, and have always been, all the same...

...The proliferation of identity politics leads to a turning inward, a grim and hermetic bravado celebrating victimization and stylized marginality...

...For chronologically, the breakup of commonality politics predates the thickening of identity politics...

...But identity politics is more than a sensibility felt and lived by individuals...

...and in the student body, in the curriculum, on the reading list, and at the conference, distinctly represented...

...And therefore Marxism-Leninism, the universalist technology of revolution and rule later codified by Stalinists, is, if not the unshakable shadow of Enlightenment Marxism, at least its scion...

...After a genuflection to historical specificity, anatomy once again becomes destiny...

...Like the emigre Marx, he is at home nowhere and everywhere, free to teach people of all nations that not a historical event or a struggle against oppression rises or falls which does not have its part to play in the great international transfiguration...

...To every particular circumstance and cause, the universal priesthood of communists is charged with bringing the glad tidings that History is the unfolding of Reason...

...Whole new areas of inquiry were opened up...

...The thickening of identity politics is relative...

...In the end, Marxists could always ask rhetorically, what was the alternative that promised universal justice, a single humanity...

...The crack-up of the universalist New Left was muted for a while by the exigencies of the Vietnam War and the commonalities of youth culture...

...The universal solvent for particular differences would be the principle that "decision-making of basic social consequence be carried on by public groupings": that is, participatory democracy...

...The mission of insurgents was to promote their own interests...

...Seen from outside as fragments in search of a whole, the zones of identity politics came to be experienced from within as worlds unto themselves...

...In theory, participatory democracy was available to all...

...it was more a whole way of SPRING • 1993 • 175 Identity Politics experiencing the world...

...In fact, the ideal of participatory democracy was only secondary for the New Left...

...From this point of view, the intellectual radicalism of the early sixties can be seen as a search for a substitute universalism...

...Now one did not imagine oneself belonging to a common enterprise...

...In large measure, things fell apart because the center could not hold...

...The symbolic burden they bear is enormous...

...Today, the aspiring aristocrats of the academic right tend to speak the language of universals—canon, merit, reason, individual rights, transpolitical virtue...

...Even Marx, lyricist of the proletariat, ingeniously claimed that his favored class was destined to stand for, or become, all humanity...

...The issues are interrelated" was the New Left's approach to a federation of single-issue groups —so that, for example, the peace, civil rights, and civil liberties movements needed to recognize that they had a common enemy, the "Dixiecrats" who choked off any liberal extension of the New Deal...

...In the developing logic of identity-based movements, the world was all periphery and no center, or, if there was a center, it was their own...

...young people who were skilled in conversation, had time on their hands, and, uprooted from the diversities of their respective upbringings, were being encouraged to think of themselves as practitioners of reason...

...Separatism became automatic...

...But there is a hook: for all the talk about "the social construction of knowledge," identity politics in practice slides toward the premise that social groups have essential identities...

...Blacks began to insist on black leadership, even exclusively black membership...

...The defeat of the left was so obvious it was taken for granted...

...And since the demands of identity politics were far more winnable in the university than elsewhere, the struggles of minorities multiplied...

...All claims to knowledge are presumed to be addressed from and to "subject positions," which, like the claims themselves, have been "constructed" or "invented" collectively by self-designated groups...

...The profusion of social agents took place throughout the society, but nowhere more vigorously than in the academy...

...Such is the lyric of Marxism, the rhetoric that appealed to revolutionaries for a century after the death of the founding father...

...And yet, once the antifascist alliance was broken, the universalist promise of Marxism proceeded to unravel...

...Thus, by the early 1970s, the goals of the student movement and the various left-wing insurgencies were increasingly subsumed under the categories of identity politics...

...The sense of membership is both a defense and an offense...

...The more their political life is confined to the library, the more aggressive their language...

...Whom can I trust...

...But what was, at first, an enclave where the silenced could find their voices tends now to harden into a self-enclosed world...

...Some students carry the rhetoric of their particular group to campus with them...

...The initiative and energy went into proliferation—feminist, gay, ethnic, environmentalist...

...Lenin's Bolshevik party thrives on and requires this lineage, even if Lenin and Marx are not identical...

...Enter, then, the varieties of Marxism by which universalist students could imagine either that they were entitled to lead a hypothetical proletariat (Progressive Labor's Stalinism) or that they themselves already prefigured a "new working class...

...Historians of women are right to point out that the various founding fathers were not thinking of half the species...

...A good deal of the Cultural Left felt its way, even if half-jokingly, toward a weak unity based not so much on a universalist premise or ideal but rather on a common enemy —that notorious White Male...

...From 1935 to 1939 and again during World War II, the Popular Front could even conjure a new commonality—a cobbled-together antiFascist fusion...

...Difference was now lived and felt more acutely than unity...

...Where do I belong...

...New Board Member We're happy to announce that Anson Rabinbach has joined our editorial board...

...But note: the late New Left politics of dispersion and separateness, not the early New Left politics of universalist aspiration, were the seed-ground of the young faculty who were to carry radical politics into the academy in the 1970s and 1980s...

...Fights over appropriate language, over symbolic representation (whether in the form of syllabus or curriculum or faculty or even cuisine), over affirmative action and musical styles and shares of the public space are, to them, the core of "politics...

...From popular culture to government policy, the world has evidently assigned you a membership...

...After the late 1960s, as race and gender (and sometimes class) became the organizing categories by which critical temperaments addressed the world in the humanities and social sciences, faculty people working this territory came to display the confidence of an ascending class speaking predictably of "disruption," "subversion," "rupture," "contestation," "struggle for meaning...

...Identity politics in the strict sense became an organizing principle among the academic cohorts who had no political experience before the late sixties — those now in their twenties and early thirties...

...I shall group them all (at Robert Jay Lifton's suggestion) under the heading of commonality politics— a frame of understanding and action that understands "difference" against the background of what is not different, what is shared among groups...

...Marxism, in all its colorations, became the core of what may be called the idea of the left —the struggle to usher in and to represent common humanity...

...But identity politics is not simply a product of the academic hothouse...

...The very language of collectivity came to be perceived by the new movements as a colonialist smothering—an ideology to rationalize white male domination...

...This was more than an idea because it was more than strictly intellectual...

...There exists, Marx asserts in his early writings, a universal identity: the human being as maker, realizing his "species being" in the course of transforming nature...

...In general, their experience of active politics was segmented...

...Whether liberals or socialists, reformers or revolutionaries, the men and women of the left aimed to persuade their listeners to see their common interest as citizens of the largest world imaginable...

...q SPRING • 1993 • 177...

...The universalist impulse regressed...

...The power of the discourse of political rights was such that it could be generalized by extrapolation...

...But academic currents are not so insulated from the larger social world as parochial theory may presume...

...Each felt it had a distinct world to win —first, by establishing that its group had been suppressed and silenced...

...But the student movement's attempts at universalism broke down—both practically and intellectually...

...But much of the succeeding work tended to harden and narrow...

...Group self-definitions embedded in political experience merged with other historicist and centrifugal currents to form the core and the legitimacy of the multicultural surge, the fragments of the Cultural Left...

...With the audacity of a German idealist primed to think in first principles, Marx adapts from Hegel the idea that a "universal class" will give meaning to history—though not without help...

...P is the case because my people, X, see it that way...