In the US, black churches played a significant role in the Civil Rights Movement. That was true identity politics. — frank

No it was not, not in the slightest. It's in the name: civil rights. The stakes of the civil rights movement were quite clearly not that black people were owed political redress because they were black, but because they did not have equal civil rights. There was a politics of recognition at work here, but this was not a matter of a recognition of an identity, but of - what else - equal rights.

Let's take distributive power. We can divide the world up into income brackets, say, and look at what these people care about or what their life spans are or how many of them are in jail or some such. But then we can also do the same with identity -- and even, on the basis of said identity, point to distribution as a mechanism for discriminating against certain identities. — Moliere

This isn't what I understand as identity politics though. At least not the kind that everyone's talking about these days. See my post above for the specifics, but I'm talking about identity politics as a positive strategy of political redress or engagement. That people are discriminated against on the basis of identity is age-old and a fact of political life. So injudicious discrimination of distribution, even if on the basis of identity, isn't 'identity politics', or at least, it's the same name for a very different phenomenon that I'm not attempting to address. It still falls within the distributive paradigm of politics.

If you say so.

Do I have pretentions? Am I pretending? Am I being 'genuine'? Are these relevant questions? These seem like your hangups.

I'm not trying to talk to you, not here, not like this.

It's not the loss of identity-centric politics that worries me but the carrying over of the same conceptual doubling of the world. A stately and magisterial double, with the spice of paradox to enliven things. — csalisbury

What wouldn't you say this about, short of "I burned down my local bank yesterday"?

One of the failings of the OP was to not provide an account of identity politics itself, which I think has caused some confusion. The way I mean the term might be understood as 'label politics': the idea that, on account of one's identity falling under a certain label, one either ought to act in some manner, or be acted toward in some manner.

Two examples. The first from an ad I saw, just this morning, for a bank. The ad was just a picture of young girls playing rugby, all smiles, with the words 'moving forward together' or some such. Here the idea is something like: 'look, we support women doing things not traditionally associated with women, look how progressive we are'. As if the mere imagery itself was progressive in itself. I'm probably being unfair to the bank, who probably helps sponsor the girls rugby league, so is going in some way to put their money where their labels are, as it were. Still, the point comes across I hope. It's the effort of identification that is meant to do the political work here.

Second example. This from someone else, who was - rightly - complaining about a bunch of liberals who could not comprehend why gays might support Trump. The liberal logic (of identity politics) was something like: they're gay, so how could they support Trump? The idea, once again, was that the label itself ought to have borne the work of politics alone. As if the mere fact of 'being gay' ought to proscribe a certain way of acting, or of being acted upon.

The important point to make though, is that none of this means that either woman nor gays do not have political claims specific to them. It only means that they must be articulated in terms of addressing concrete problems and specific injustices faced by each. To agrue against identity politics is not to deny that there exists, or ought to exist, a 'politics of women', or a 'politics of homosexuality'. It turns instead on how those politics are practised. If this distinction is not kept under firm eye, any critique of identity politics can morph into a critique or denial that, say, women or gays have any specific political standing at all. 'Identity politics' is not just any kind of politics that has something to do with identity; it is a very specific use of identity.

@fdrake, this is a reply to your PM as well.

"stymy Parliament".

Interesting. I've always spelt this as 'stymie'. But apparently this is OK too. Cool.

8 outta 40 topics on the front page have anything to do with religion. It's a snapshot, but I think that's pretty reasonable, saying nothing even about the quality of those threads.

I also say this as someone who think theology is something like philosophy's inbred, pervert cousin whom we bring out into the open only with shame.

What a rollercoaster.

Zombie'ing this somewhat, but I keep coming back to this quote which I think says much better than I did, what I was trying to say. It's from Prathen Markell, where following Arendt, he speaks of what she calls the 'impropriety' of all actions, the fact that actions (even and especially 'my' actions) do not, and cannot belong to me as such:

[The impropriety of action] refers not to a contingent moral failing but to a constitutive feature of human action: the very conditions that make us potent agents—our materiality, which ties us to the causal order of the world, and our plurality, which makes it possible for our acts to be meaningful—also make us potent beyond our own control, exposing us to consequences and implications that we cannot predict and which are not up to us. Our acts, you might say, are always improper in the sense that they are never our property—neither as choosers, nor as the bearers of identities.

Action projects human beings into a world of causality, initiating sequences of events that, once begun, proceed without necessarily respecting the agent’s intentions. This fact of the causality of human action most obviously threatens our capacity to control the consequences of our actions, but in a sense it also limits our ability to control the very content of our actions, insofar as it prevents us from locating a natural and uncontroversial boundary between our actions and the events that follow from them.

...The fact that our action inserts us into chains of causality not wholly under our control can, of course, manifest itself in numerous ways, and is perhaps most strikingly visible in cases of natural disaster in which nonhuman forces undermine our plans (and often destroy us altogether) in unpredictable, sometimes even utterly meaningless ways. ... [Yet] even more important ... is the fact that human beings act into a world inhabited by a plurality of other acting persons: the fact of human freedom, which is the condition of the possibility of effective agency, also limits our practical capacities because it is not exclusively ours but is mirrored in others. Here, again, the point is not only that human plurality limits our control over the consequences of our action, but also that the meaning of our deeds is not wholly at our disposal, for the very terms through which we make assessments of significance are not exclusively our own, but intersubjective." (Bound By Recognition)

This last bit corresponds to what I said about how, if we were responsible only for what we can control, this would amount to nothing other than a solipsism.

From an interview with Alenka Zupancic:

"Social valorization of affects basically means that we pay the plaintiff with her own money: oh, but your feelings are so precious, you are so precious! The more you feel, the more precious you are. This is a typical neoliberal maneuver, which transforms even our traumatic experiences into possible social capital. If we can capitalize on our affects, we will limit out protests to declarations of these affects — say, declarations of suffering — rather than becoming active agents of social change. I’m of course not saying that suffering shouldn’t be expressed and talked about, but that this should not “freeze” the subject into the figure of the victim. The revolt should be precisely about refusing to be a victim, rejecting the position of the victim on all possible levels.

Valorization of affectivity and feelings appears at the precise point when some problem — injustice, say — would demand a more radical systemic revision as to its causes and perpetuation. This would also involve naming — not only some people but also social and economic inequalities that we long stopped naming and questioning"

Ahh, I just finished reading Patchen Markell's Bound By Recognition, which is bloody fantastic in it's own right, but it's closing remarks are super pertinent to alot of the discussion here:

"In theories of recognition ... the function of identity is to ground action. People give accounts of who they are both so that they can get clear about how to act, and because others, in their responses to these accounts, should (if all goes well) treat them with the respect or esteem they deserve, and which they need, if they are to be secure in their self-understandings, and if they are to be able to act in accordance with their identities without interference. ... The point of the recognition and of the identity that is its object is to decide a course of action. That is who he is, so this is what she must do. Identity is a rule.

But consider some of the other things an account of identity might do for someone, or might be expected to provoke in others. You might give an account of the identity of a loved one in order to come to terms with his loss, as in a eulogy, or in other acts of mourning. You might give an account of your own identity in order to clarify to yourself and to others (your view of) the nature and stakes of our shared situation, without necessarily expecting that this story will simply be accepted as the whole truth of the matter, or that—even if it were—it could serve as anything more than a preamble to the activity of political deliberation and judgment.

You might tell someone else who you are—loudly, perhaps—with the hope that by getting in his face you can complicate his own self-understanding, making it more difficult for him to go on living a certain kind of privilege unconsciously, but without expecting or even hoping to be locked in some sort of circle of mutual affirmation as a result. You might tell the world who you take yourself to be by publishing a manifesto, hoping that your story will draw an as yet unknown cast of others to join you in a political movement (whose specific aims you have not yet determined), and fully expecting that the resulting encounters will alter your sense of your own identity."

And:

"In the face of ... resiliently undemocratic distribution(s) of political power, I suspect, we increasingly seek solace in an interpretation of the principle of democratic legitimacy that focuses on recognition rather than action: cultivating identification with the state may help to secure at least de facto democratic legitimation by enabling us to recognize these remote and alien institutions as ours (and vice versa)—while still doing little to render them more accountable to us. In other words, the experience of identification comes to supplant the experience of action as the ground of whatever sense of connection many people now have with the states that claim them."

Hanna Pitkin - The Concept of Representation
Gilles Deleuze - Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty (includes Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs)

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:cheer: 'sup!

Some really interesting looking stuff here.

But outside the ivory tower (hehe, I've never sounded so Republican before), there are very few subjects that can not be easily, simply, and clearly explained. — ZhouBoTong

I agree. My quibble is with those who would take this as a general model to be universally applicable, so that anything that doesn't conform to this ease of communication is a mark of inadequacy. There is a space, a necessary one, for things to be hard-going. Not everything should be made easy, as though a matter of principle. There's a time and place. And we should respect those times and places. Just as we should respect situations in which simple explanation is warranted and necessary.

OK buddy.

Prove, apologies.

But most communication, most of the time, should be communicated with the goal of being understood by as many as possible. — ZhouBoTong

Absolutely not. If you have a paper trying to solve, say, the Riemann hypothesis, the goal of that paper is to solve the Riemann hypothesis, and not cater to everyone and anyone with a passing interest. This isn't to say anything goes. Ideally, one ought to write to be understood by those with the technical knowledge and background capable of understanding the problem, and your proposed solution. But 'as many people as possible'? No. Just as many as you need. We don't just communicate in order to communicate, we communicate to make a point, pursue a goal, get something done, solve a problem, etc. "As many people as possible" is not your problem. Many people are idiots.

And if that be the case then we could say that a symbiotic relationship could form between grades of power in particular, historical cases -- and a description would depend on the historical facts as well as the interpretation of the historian. — Moliere

Ah Ok. Yes. So long as such 'symbiosis' is understood in historical, 'evolutionary' terms - as coming into being as the result of the interplay of historical contingency and necessity, then I think the idea that different types of power can and do establish relationships among themselves is undeniable. Hell, the idea of a 'separation of powers' in a democratic state relies, despite its name, on this interplay of various kinds of powers. But I'm not sure I understand this move:

To bring this around to the beginning -- if we can form relationships between instances of power, then it becomes even easier to understand the formulation that all politics are identity politics -- the relationship gives us a sort of interpretive rule between instances of power (violence : race : identity : distribution). — Moliere

Could you unpack it?

Isn't vocabulary the biggest obfuscatator? — ZhouBoTong

Hardly. Presumed knowledge, unarticulated concepts, references allusive or explicit, condensed presentation of reasoning and so on do far more to make a work hard to read than any 'big vocabulary'. If anything an unfamiliar vocabulary is the lowest bar of entry - vocabulary can be looked up in a dictionary, and in some cases, if you don't know the words, it's very likely that you either A) should educate yourself better, and B) realize that you're trying to have a conversation which you are not fit for. It's like people are too afraid to appear stupid and have to require the world to bend to their own inabilities.

Violence would not be impotent, from a theoretical standpoint. It would just be another form of power - unless there was some relationship to a different, potent form a power that spells out its impotence. — Moliere

But that's just the argument: it's precisely because we can identify violence as one form of (the exercise of) power among others that we can understand it to express an impotency - to need to resort to violence is to have been unable to arrange or engage the situation in a way that would have rendered it unnecessary. It is to have been unable to set up relations of power in which a mere word or a turn of the finger would have produced the same result. Brought to the extreme, one might even indeed be able to divorce power from violence, but only to the extent to which the exercise of violence means nothing other than the abdication of power. This is the move someone like Hannah Arendt, makes, say:

"Rule by sheer violence comes into play where power is being lost; it is precisely the shrinking power of the Russian government, internally and externally, that became manifest in its "solution" of the Czechoslovak problem just as it was the shrinking power of European imperialism that became manifest in the alternative between decolonization and massacre. To substitute violence for power can bring victory, but the price is very high; for it is not only paid by the vanquished, it is also paid by the victor in terms of his own power. ... Politically speaking, the point is that loss of power becomes a temptation to substitute violence for power and that violence itself results in impotence. Where violence is no longer backed and restrained by power, the well-known reversal in reckoning with means and ends has taken place. The means, the means of destruction, now determine the end with the consequence that the end will be the destruction of all power." (Arendt, On Violence - published in 1969, to put her examples of Russia and Europe in context).*

I don't think much here would be lost if, instead of affecting a disjunction between power and violence - as Arendt does - one simply calls violence a low-grade exercise of power, one so poor in quality that it has exactly the effects of undermining the establishment of more secure, higher-grade regimes of power. In either case the point is the same: violence attests to an impotency.

*Arendt would make another addition to my list of those who quite easily acknowledge the link between violence and lack of control, or power. That this is so widely understood by anyone with any understanding of either, only makes me laugh at the some of the hysterics let loose in this thread over the idea.

his strikes me as at odds with your expression that violence is impotence, that power brings about circumstances where people do as you will and violence is the band-aid upon a failure of power. — Moliere

But why? One can distinguish between different grades or qualities of power (high quality, low quality) as it were, without enshrining one mode of (exercise of) power as primary or base. And I still resist any dichotomizing between some independent entity called a 'social life' and power which is supposed to work upon it from without: our social lives are defined in part, by the relationships of power among which they are established. Power and social life are internally related concepts, and I don't think the very idea of a social life can be made intelligible without at the same time understanding the relations of power which define it. Power is not some kind of secondary epiphenomenon that appears one day and accosts some innocent social life that would be all peaches and cooperation without it. If you exist in a society at all, you exist in and as relations of power.

This discussion was merged into On Antinatalism

Reducing the analysis to race (which is usually what is focused on by identitarians) discounts at least the economic or class distinction, and so the analysis is grossly wanting. — rlclauer

While I appreciate the gist of this, I'm not sure the right answer is to replace identity politics with, well, more identity politics, even if the 'identity' in question is class based rather than racial or sexual. To argue against identity politics needs to be more than just settling on the 'right' identity, or simply aiming to expand the notion of identity so that, if only it took into account X, Y and Z, it would finally come to a 'correct' understanding of identity. The point is articulate an alternative to identity politics altogether, not come to a better understanding of what constitutes identity.

Identity politics writ large is no different to identity politics writ small.

We can use the Marxist base/superstructure distinction if you want something relatively neutral. In any case the point is to explode the distinction: violence is just one kind of social action among others, one kind of exercise of power among others, that can come into play when the circumstances enable it. It's all base, if you will. There's no two level game here.

The point is to 'flatten' power: or at least understand the emergence of power relations immanently and historically, and not subject to some transhistorical rule which would posit any one kind of relation - whether it be some fantasy of a state of nature a la Hobbes or a state of Eden a la Un - as primary.

Coercive power leaches upon societal action; something that can be broadly understood as mutual activity, where we agree to something or work together. — Moliere

I think it'd be a mistake to equate societal action with mutual activity, upon which coercive power parasitically impinges. As though there were 'two levels', a pure good and happy one where everyone gets along, and a corruption from above which changes the character of this purity. Instead, coercive power ought to be understood as just another form of societal action: a species of a larger genera, and not two genera set off against each other.

The idea is that 'societal action' can be anything - coercive, encouraging, formalist, pedagogic, transactional, whatever. It's necessary to understand it warts and all. There is no 'essence' of society: there are certain predominant constraints which it needs to negotiate - resource scarcity, shelter, knowledge sharing, division of labour, geographic considerations, etc, but how this stuff happens is anybody's game. The idea that society is, at base, a bunch of happy people working together is no more viable than the obverse idea that society, at base, is a bunch of beasts all vying to kill each other. They're both idealizations, ahistorical and false to the facts.

Why bother with the lay writing? — ZhouBoTong

To make a point comprehensive. As the essay says, putting something in lay-writing often doesn't simply restate a point, but transforms it, or at least elaborates it in a different way. To weave between 'bi-lingual' writing is to make that writing comprehensive. One should speak to the lowest common denominator no less than the highest, each affording a new and different light on what is said.

Huh? I don't measure intelligence based on vocabulary — ZhouBoTong

Good. Neither do I, which I why I didn't speak of vocabulary, let alone even use the word.

I think it’s arbitrary to say that all politics is identity politics — NOS4A2

In the very general sense invoked at the beginning of the OP, and not in the narrower sense the rest of the OP specifies.

As for a distinction between identity politics and party politics, that seems very much like apples and oranges. A political party can indulge in many different kind of political strategy, of which identity politics is one. 'Party politics' doesn't so much designate a kind of politics so much as a political agent or actor, which can act in a myriad of ways. Hence why I offered participatory and distributive models as genuine alternatives to identity politics in the narrow sense.

You disagree with this? So far in this thread, you’ve debated with me against positions I’ve never expressed, and do not hold. — javra

Quick reply, will say more later - Apologies about my tone. It's not directed at you. I'm kinda using your posts to develop lines of thought, and some of what I say are implicit responses to others and other positions in this thread, with your comments as a foil. I haven't been trying to debate things you've said, though I can see how it's easily come off that way. Will try and keep myself more even in future replies.

Clausewitz's little quip about war being politics pursued by other means comes to mind. That this 'platitude' is not inverted, speaks to his brightness, I think.

One wonders too, when looking at a suicide bomber, whether he or she acts from a position of strength.

I'd agree that control isn't just people doing what you want. It's the ability to bring about the circumstances in which they would do what you want. Which is precisely why violence is such a marker of a failure of control. It means a failure to bring just those circumstances into play, which can only be compensated for by an outburst of force.

There's a great scene in Nolan's Dark Knight, where the Batman is giving Joker the beating of his life, only for the Joker to laugh in his face, telling him that "You have nothing, nothing to threaten me with! Nothing to do with all your strength!"; Violence here is impotence, and should be understood exactly on that model. Violence is very much a sign of underlying impotence.

As for the rest, I dunno, people are generally not very bright, and its nice to remind them of that every once in a while.

The only way to lend coherence to what you say is to understand control as cohesion. But that would be narrow to the point of vacuousness, if not - as above, straight contradiction.

Speak about Moorean puzzlement! "If they do what you want, you're not in control; if they don't, you are". Hmm.

So suppose you're going to beat your slaves or your kids. That's a form of violence, right? And it comes about precisely because of the control you have over the slave or child. — Snakes Alive

But this is strange reasoning. When I ask the kids to fetch a cup of tea, that I don't have to resort to violence (because they love me, because it's out of respect, because I reminded them how I took them to the park the other day) says far more about how I am in control of them than if I had to resort to violence. Even the very threat of violence would be nothing less than a sign of an incredibly unstable, fractured household. We quite straightforwardly associate violence with a loss of control ('he lost his cool and threw a punch'). That you find this strange is... strange.

I dunno. I can only speak for what I've studied. And in any case, the question is misconceived. It ought to be: in situations in which violence is exercised, does the agent of violence exhibit a high degree of control over it? (or something similar). And my answer would be, in the abstract, no. Otherwise they wouldn't have to resort to violence.

(see the work of Michel Wieviorka, if you're interested). — StreetlightX

John T. Sidel, Olivier Roy, Muhammed Hafez, and Fawaz Gerges would be other sources of interest.

Read the comment again.

Those in control often commit violence, every day, because they know they will get away with it. — Snakes Alive

Sure, but this speaks precisely to the thinness of that control. Those 'in control' would not need to commit violence, insofar as they are in control. I dunno what to tell you other than that this is fairly widely agreed upon by most who study the anthropology of violence (see the work of Michel Wieviorka, if you're interested). Your Moorean puzzlement is not much more than an Inca looking at an iPhone.

To be fair to you, the equation of violence with power is a fairly common one, it just has the distinct disadvantage of being objectively wrong.

What's not to get? Violence flairs at the edge of control, in conditions of instability and fragility. The powerful control with a flick of the wrist, not with a tantrum of violence.

To quote Corey Robin, from whom I draw inspiration:

"Everyone in politics tries to sidestep the critical role and need for argument, the need to craft a coalition and mobilize around a set of ideas and interests. Rather than build a case, people appeal to a condition. Identitarianism is not peculiar to a politics of race or gender or sexuality, not at all. The original identitarianism is nationalism or religion. There are terrible identitarianisms of class. (That's why I cringe every time someone depicts the working class as a brawny factory worker. Or of Joe Biden as somehow a "fighter for the working class." Or the notion that the working class is automatically something.)

All of these identitarianisms sidestep, as I say, the need for moral and political argument, the need to craft coalitions of interest and ideology that are not immediately apparent or present but that have to be created. I'm not against a politics based on conflict, on arraying one group against another. I'm against building those conflicts on spurious appeals to "you're one of us." Even if that "us" is an oppressed group. Kafka said, "What do I have in common with Jews? I don't even have anything in common with myself." All of us are divided in multiple ways, first and foremost within ourselves. That's what politics at its best does: to craft a commonality out of that preexisting division. Identitiarians begin with the most spurious identity of all--the undivided self--and build from there."

I'm not too far removed from the sentiment of your reply. In fairness, I was addressing that aspect of the OP where it's offered that all politics deals with some form of identity. As NOS4A2 commented since, though, "identity politics" typically connotes in most, or at least many, cases a biological commonality - rather than a more philosophical meaning of identity. — javra

Yeah, although I think this is a confusion, and a particularly dangerous one at that. There's a difference between "I advocate X because I am Y", and "I advocate X because of problems A, B, and C, that affect Ys". That there are issues that disproportionally affect, say Indigenous Australians, or First Nations people, and to engage in political action to address those issues is not identity politics.

It's all too often the case that those who complain about identity politics do so in order to disqualify any politics of race, gender or class, to which is usually opposed some mythical "good of all", or the "community" or "nation" or some such. Such efforts generally amount to nothing more than a kind of 'shut up and know your place' reaction, and are utterly toxic.

Moreover, a 'nation' or 'community' is, as I said, nothing if not just another identity, this time simply scaled up. Nationalism is the original identity politics. What matters is the 'logic' of identity politics, which does not discriminate by scale. The alternative is a 'problem'-based politics, a politics which addresses the problems and conditions which are faced in a life, one based not on 'who' you are, but on what enables (or disables) one to be who one is, or wants to be.