Wounded Attachments

Brown tweetz - By identifying with the oppression you have experienced we reproduce and maintain it and fail to see the larger picture of systemic oppression.

Watch this lecture: Wendy Brown: Feminist Change and the University

Summary

Wendy Brown works with issues of identity, feminism, intersectionality in this piece.

Here they make the claim that identity politics was borne out of a specific history, where by identify is structured by resentment by the 'sufferings of a subordinated sovereign subject'. And then goes on the question if we can prevent ourselves from reproducing those conditions whilst identifying with our oppressive concepts as gender and race, leading to self-subversion.

Essentially, Brown makes the claim that IP is the depolitization of class struggle - instead of thinking of the whole system and us all as parts with in it with different roles, we each identify as one struggling part against the rest.

Ressentiment

"the triumph of the weak as weak" not only have you been oppressed in the first instance, but then by identifying with this oppression, and internalising it, we reproduce and maintain it.

Revenge as a "reaction," a substitute for the capacity to act, produces identity as both bound to the history that produced it and as a reproach to the sentiment which embodies that history.

"These disciplinary productions work to conjure and regulate subjects through classificatory schemes, naming and normalizing social behaviors as social positions. Operating through what Foucault calls "an anatomy of detail,"."disciplinary power" produces social identities (available for politicization because they are deployed for purposes of political regulation), which cross-cut juridical identities based on abstract right. Thus, for example the welfare state's production of welfare subjects themselves subdivided through the socially regulated categories of motherhood, disability, race, age, and so forth-potentially produces political identity through these categories.

Thus, disciplinary power pohncally neutralizes entitlement claims generated by liberal individuation, while liberalism politically neutralizes rights claims generated by disciplinary identities.

Whereas the Marxist critique of the social system as a whole demanded a total transformation of the system, identity politics require a golden standard to which all other identifies must compare themselves. This golden standard, which Brown considered is the middle class, saves capitalism from critique, and renders class invisible.

This is like trying to play chess whilst identifying as a single piece, rather than playing the whole game, or indeed acknowledging that there is a game beyond the pawn vs other. .

The way we discuss privilege is a form of resentment, not a calling in or acknowledgement of differences, but a shaming of fortune.

Suggests that there is some Foucauldian developmental trajectory of power relations that we are uniquely immersed in, that led to this point in identity politics:

As the grim experience of reading Discipline and Punish makes clear, there is a sense in which the gravitational force of history is multiplied at precisely the moment that history's narrative coherence and objectivist foundation is refuted.

Questions and thoughts

Identities and the new nation states with the same dangers

Resentment and revenge is not the only reactive response to suffering. What of other reactive responses, can we ever do anything other than reactivity?