I’m not sure if I’m following the point or wandering offtopic into the fields, but I thought I’d try.
But most models of 'tolerance' don't have any more productive way of dealing with the ways in which tolerating a new form of something shifts, sometimes in ways which are scary or painful to the individual, the old form.
Entirely. Flawed starting example: it’s fairly futile for me to suggest that fundementalist Christianity leave me alone if I leave it alone - proselytizing is at the heart of its belief. To change tack even to ‘tolerance’ would play merry hell with the faith.
I know that’s a faith/belief rather than an identity. But I feel very similar about many identities - that they are rigidly defended, that they frequently automatically co-opt one into a world view (and that the co-opting of others is an intrinsic part of many identities).
Briefly, other people's identities, the kinds of claims they make, affect the way we think of our own identities. I don't think this is an avoidable thing, but I do think it should form part of the way we think about antagonism and identity politics.
I’m interested in how many identities are about reaching out and incorporating other people into your model, whether explicitly or not. I wonder a lot whether claiming identity automatically includes other people (with whom one identifies, claims similarity, or uses to identify against).
If the 'tolerance' model doesn't work, I also feel there are flaws in other models for co-existence. For example, in fluffy pomo circles (see below), I think people are going for self-identification, not imposing your meanings on other people, using labels but not expecting everyone who uses them to share an understanding of what they mean. This isn’t ‘tolerance’; it’s much more about admitting that your own view is partial (as in ‘a frgament’ and also as in ‘interested’, biased’). And you end up with a (possibly productive and hopeful) blur in which everyone identifies as something but admits that definitions of that something is multiple and changing, instead of constant and concrete.
That’s a difficult fucker. And I’m not sure it works in the way it’s often assumed to. Concluding anecdote: I was at a workshop last Summer in which the organiser said they always respected other people’s self-definition of gender, but reserved the right to think that gender as a whole was fictive. I wanted to know how they negotiated this, because some people’s identities depend on other people being involved. For example, my mother’s idea of “woman” probably includes me. If I start absenting myself from that definition, I trample all over her definition while claiming to respect her/it. In fact, I’ve imposed my understandings of gender - localised, cultural, individual and fictive - over hers - universal, a-historical, biological - before we even start the debate.
So using self-definition and a deconstructed idea of identity is not a magic short-cut through those discussions.
Or maybe the psychic stuff could actually be the engine, the drive for creating new alliances and new, provisional, forms of identity?
This could be good, but I’m wary (I'm thinking about the mainly 'good' things that identity politics provides on the pyshcic side - a sens eof belonging, community, same-sidedness). I feel that these kind of psychic rewards (that a totalising scheme of identity provides) are immediate and powerful for many people, and then lead to a whole bunch of exclusion, paranoia, and false expectations. So while I adore the idea of generating that kind of enthusiasm and sense of belonging and so forth around the idea of strategic and provisional alliances and identities, I don’t know if it’ll catch on, or if it can avoid getting bogged down. I personally feel perky and cheerleaderish about it, but can one take “I am woman, hear me roar” and effectively replace it with “I am forming an allegiance with other strategically chosen individual identities, hear us deconstruct”? And expect it to still pack a punch?
Ultimately I fear that possibly destabilised identity will only have instinctive appeal for people who’ve been effectively marginalised by identity already, and thus deconstructed-identity will become, functionally, an identity itself.
Sorry about the length of the post - overall, I’m optimistic but wary. |
