Politics of Identity - 3. page

Originally an article series, this category covers Stuart’s writing about identity and self-making in contemporary capitalism.

To recap, then, here are some key features of modern Identitarianism:

1. It is a system of etiquette that shares with other etiquette systems the properties of being occult, complex and faddish
2. It is a system of etiquette that shares with others a politics and practice of honour and offense in which misidentification of a person is the chief offense
3. It is premised on identity and ontology being functionally identical, that one’s very existence is premised on identity and that misidentification is a kind of attempted or threatened murder
4. Like other systems of honour and offense, it is mainly enacted when another person of equal or lesser rank to one’s own is dishonoured and satisfaction must be given
5. It values traditional, conservative forms of identity linked to labour exploitation, i.e. race and gender and sees these identities as emancipatory rather than oppressive
6. It sees traditional, conservative forms of identity not merely as helpful ways of constructing a self but as having exclusive possession of knowledge unavailable to those outside those identities
7. It sees identity as how one imagines oneself in one’s mind’s eye, unmediated by society or the physical world
8. It is democratic and seeks to make its social practices and experiences of honour and offense universally available rather than confined to a class

What this means is that if someone acts as though another person is not who they claim they are, that person has breached Identitarian etiquette and can then be subject to social sanction. This is part of phenomena I have previously identified as “privatized reputation” and “large, porous selves.” In this way, Identitarian offense politics can and do extend further than previous regimes of honour and etiquette. In other words, to say “you are not who you claim to be” or, equally offensively, “he is not who he claims to be” is a kind of death threat and merits an immediate expression of offense.

Three of these are exemplified in our society’s reimagination of transgender people in Identitarian terms. Pretty much every human society has had transgender members because schemes of gender are naturally incomplete, non-descriptive and, most importantly, oppressive. But in none of those societies has there been the kind of pronoun politics we have now.

In other regimes of etiquette, offense is caused by using the incorrect second person pronoun when addressing people i.e. “tu” is used in place of “usted” in Spanish or “vous” in French to debase the rank of one’s interlocutor intentionally or unintentionally. Today, offense-causing with pronouns comes from using the incorrect third person pronoun when talking about people. What this means is that a person’s honour can be attacked when they are not even present. Any person who knows the individual’s gender (i.e. the gender they see themselves having in their mind’s eye) can intervene and upbraid the offender for dishonouring the aggrieved party.

In this way, a gap between the correct form of address and the appearance of the person being addressed can be policed by any person and can fluctuate without the appearance of the person changing. While one’s gender expression takes work to change, through pharmaceuticals, clothing purchases, surgery, behavioural training, etc., one’s gender identity can change instantaneously and repeatedly with none of the lag experienced in changing one’s gender expression.

By severing “expression” and “identity,” the work of the Born Again movement is complete. It is explicit that who a person appears to others to be and who they actually are two independent variables that may fluctuate without reference to the other. In this way, an individual who has carefully observed another person’s gender expression and spoken about them on that basis when talking about that expression might be upbraided by anyone possessing the occult knowledge of the person’s true gender.

One can look from India to Japan to Montana to New Mexico to Mauretania from 1000 BCE to the late twentieth century and find no other society in which trans culture contained this theory of offense. And that is because it has nothing to do with being a gender-non-conforming person; it is tethered to recent elaboration of late-stage capitalism, Identitarianism.

Another place where we see Identitarianism hiding behind some piece of allegedly trans culture that has just appeared out of nowhere in less than a generation is the idea that people who do not reciprocate the sexual desire of transgender people are bigots who must work to change this view. This view tends to be expressed with the greatest vehemence about lesbians who only wish to sleep with other cis women and not with trans women. Organized groups of these lesbians have faced campaigns by Identitarians, putatively on behalf of trans women, to remove them from pride celebrations, dyke marches and other organized queer solidarity and feminist events.

But much more concerning is the idea propounded, with almost none of the push-back one would hope for, that cis lesbian women with no attraction to trans women should have sex with them anyway.

No one should want to sleep with people who are not attracted to you. A healthy person who lusts after another person wants them to experience the same attraction they are experiencing. But Identitarianism occludes that because it conceptualizes the feelings and thoughts others have about you, even when you are not there, as part of a package of rights you believe you have. It is your right to be seen as you see yourself in your mind’s eye and you are dishonoured whenever someone does not do that.

A third is a hyper-conservative element best described in the slogan “trans women are women.” Even in cultures that do not assign a third, fourth or nth gender to gender-nonconforming people, they nevertheless decide that a trans person is a kind of a woman or a kind of a man. The idea that trans people should have identical rights and experiences to cis people is rendered absurd quickly when gender identity is built in intersubjective or objective space. But when it is built in subjective space, one ends up with absurd situations like Jessica Yaniv demanding that her penis be seen-to by a gynecologist.

Trans people and cis people have different medical needs, have different social impacts on environments, different life narrative structures; recognizing these forms of difference is vital in creating a diverse, inclusive society that accepts trans people.

But, because Identitarianism is a set of etiquette practices is not a coherent, self-consistent theory or even something mainly made out of Wrong propaganda “Nonfat, no cholesterol” has brought Americans to high carbohydrate diet full levitra online sales of the sugars. This makes shopping simple and even trouble free pamelaannschoolofdance.com buy viagra for customers. There are two reasons behind this : firstly, viagra for sale mastercard is a prescription drug which can only be obtained with a prescription from your doctor. When it comes to ED problem, it has no linked with age and it can happen to men in their 40’s and 50’s, while Tadalafil is marketed with less than 5% of the marketing budget afforded to check out that pamelaannschoolofdance.com cialis generika. ideas, the very differences that must be accommodated can be effaced or denied at any time when an etiquette breach takes place.

Whereas traditional models of pluralism and accommodation of gender non-conformity have included acceptance of body-shapes, vocal registers and patterns of gesticulation that are not cliched or cartoonish representations of the two normative genders, this too, has been turned on its head. Because there is only one kind of woman and one kind of man, it is now considered a medical necessity for trans people to be taught the most conservative, conventional ways of dressing, speaking, walking, acting. Training in being “ladylike” or “manly” is now understood to be part of a liberatory agenda.

Furthermore, as state school systems adopt gender affirmation policies, it is increasingly the obligation of the state and its agents to police conformity to gender norms and to inquire of boys that do not have fistfights and girls who dislike dolls whether they are “really” boys or girls in their mind’s eye. If not, the state is obliged to assist them through surgery and pharmaceuticals into matching their mental image of themselves to physical reality.

This, to me, is a thought experiment that reveals much about the true underpinnings of Identitarianism. It is analogous to the common antebellum South thought experiment of asking a the child of a planter how his slaves would serve him when he went to heaven. The true function of the thought experiment is to make an oppressive class order seem so totalizing, so structuring that emancipation from it becomes inconveivable because it transcends time, death and the physical world itself. The point is to render inconceivable a revolution that throws off the shackles of race and gender by imagining those things as so universal that they are coterminous with existence itself.

But while so much of the debate about Identitarianism has swirled around trans communities and has cast disproportionate and unfair shade on them, I believe this is, itself, a misogynistic ruse.

At the end of the day, Identitarianism is a set of social practices that reinforce two of the darkest, most pernicious forces on earth.

First, it seeks to increase involvement in, support of and commitment to race and gender as not merely real but positive forces and it mobilizes literally millions of people into policing race and gender boundaries every day. Because Identitarianism is non-ideological and offense-based, these conflicts tend to be inconclusive and illogical, making them more protracted and divisive and increasing people’s investment in them. Because controlling what others understand one’s race and gender to be is literally a matter of life and death, there is a bottomless pit of offense and conflict into which one may descend. After all, knowledge, itself, is a property of identity so there can be no meeting of the minds even on the subject of valid evidence. Consequently, we see Identitarianism destroying solidarity and creating division, constantly generating new flare-ups of offense.

But let us look beyond the movement politics of liberals, progressives and leftists and look at the true ambit of Identitarianism. The systems of incentives that keep this new etiquette system in place do not live in contested restroom space or the Take Back the Night march.

They live in white suburban homes where patriarchs use violence to make their daughters wear dresses and their sons, trousers, lest their costume impugn the manliness of their father. They live in conservative evangelical schools where there is a new sense of urgency in making sure all the little boys fight and all the little girls have dolls. They live in the Trump movement where thousands of black and Latino voters wave racist signs because they are white in their mind’s eyes.

Similarly, the politics of Identitarian rape, in which other people’s attraction to you is a right you possess and not a feeling they have, the true beneficiaries are not the trans women who broke into Rape Relief Women’s Shelter and defaced its library with penis drawings, or even the male prisoners in the British prison system who change their gender identity (but not expression) to female to engage in sexual predation.

The true beneficiaries are the Incel movement. The overwhelming majority of Incels do not have prosthetic breasts and do not plan ever to obtain them. There is nothing feminine or gender-non-conforming about their gender expression or their gender identity. In the vast majority of Incels’ minds’ eyes, they are a virile, commanding muscular man being serviced not by a solitary lesbian but by seventy-two virgins or some evangelical Christian equivalent.

While our attention has been directed by our own desire to police boundaries, by services like Tumblr and by the news media to the way Identitarianism impacts small communities of feminists, queer and gender non-conforming people, this is a sideshow to distract from the primary beneficiaries: rapists and racists.

Identitarianism is the ultimate ideology of male rape because it places these two crucial liberatory statements off-limits “you are not who you say you are” and “he is not who he says he is.” Race is good. Gender is good. They liberate you. But the one thing you cannot do is question the claims a person makes about who they really are.

In this way, it is most descriptive not of liberal progressivism but of Trumpism. Donald Trump is stupid. Donald Trump rapes women. The Trumpites, as proper Identitarians, are deeply offended on his behalf when someone calls him stupid because they know that in his mind’s eye, he is a “very stable genius.” The veracity of the claim does not enter into it because the claim is offensive irrespective of its veracity and demands satisfaction.

Similarly, Donald Trump can call the neo-Nazi Charlottesville marchers “very good people” because, in those men’s mind’s eyes, like all generations of torch-wielding Klansmen back to 1865, they are “very good people.” And those who would say otherwise have dishonoured them because who they are is theirs. Finally, Donald Trump’s ability to rape and to keep raping—and that of most other prolific rapists—inheres in it being impermissible to say “you are not who you say you are” or, more importantly, “he is a rapist,” because in Identitarianism, Trump is not a rapist (a) because he doesn’t look like one in his mind’s eye and (b) because raping you was his right, not your experience.

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Identitarianism is not merely innovative in the ways it seeks to democratize performances of honour and offense. In many ways, this democratic tendency is the least innovative thing about it. To engage with its more innovative elements, it is necessary to move past the early Cold War (1945-74) and look at theories of self-fashioning that arose during its second half (1974-91). If not the foremost then certainly the first and most radical innovator in self-fashioning in this period was the Born Again Christian movement.

Just as in my work on post-Enlightenment epistemology, I believe that the Born Again movement constitutes a disruptive moment in our past that leads directly to some of the strangest and most disturbing elements of our present.

The Born Again movement, centred in the US, functioned, as I have said elsewhere, as a form of national reconciliation. It look elements of conservative evangelicalism, the ascendant religious movement within American conservatism and epitomized in the Southern Baptists and Non-Denominationalists and produced a true synthesis with the thinking of the smaller Jesus Freak movement that had emerged in the counterculture of the 1960s and 70s.

If there is a scene in cinema that is emblematic of this new kind of Christianity, it appears in the Robert Duvall film The Apostle in which the central character walks into a river and re-baptizes himself into the Christian sect of which he is the only member and sole minister. The Born Again movement fundamentally changed the nature of identity in the modern era by introducing an entangled practice of self-authorization both in adopting an identity and in that identity’s recognition.

As with pretty much all religious conversion before the 1970s, whether you were a member of NOI was something NOI determined. One needed to be accepted as a convert by a community; simply espousing the truth of NOI scripture or changing one’s surname to an Arabic one did not, in and of itself, function to make one an NOI member. Those changes were a means to an end: gaining the approval and acceptance of existing movement members to be recognized as one. In this way, the name-change and public attestations were simply rhetorical tools to achieve the goal of gaining the acceptance of the group. It was NOI that determined if one were a member of the “nation,” and the sumptuary and other laws were necessary but not sufficient conditions.

This, of course, followed a long tradition comprising Christian baptism, confirmation ceremonies, circumcision, veiling, etc. that permitted one to adopt and maintain an identity as a member of a religious group.

The Born Again movement radically changed that. It systematically rejected as untrustworthy all criteria for membership that lived in an inter-subjective, shared, social world. Church attendance, holy day observance, Healthcare providers suggest that discussing the problem with someone on line viagra may make you feel good. Medicines effectively treat this condition, buy levitra online check stock but do not get this wrong, veterinary chiropractic is not here to replace veterinary medicine. order tadalafil Improvement that a lifetime after environment your self a few goals. A research says that almost every second man faces erectile dysfunction which also means that the blood is not delivered viagra sans prescription canada to the desired parts of the body because of which you are not able to intimate with your mate. abstaining from sex outside marriage, catechism, confirmation, participating in the eucharist, mechanisms used by America’s various Christian denominations might just as easily be signs of apostasy as of faith. But more importantly, the double-confirmation of one’s Christianity was also rejected. To be a Christian, one had to be baptized. And once, baptized, one had to be recognized as Christian by other Christians, typically in the form of joining a congregation.

The Born Again movement changed the location of these things. Baptism ceased to be an objective physical event that took place in a shared, observable world and became something that happened internally inside the self. When one was “born again,” this was sometimes followed by a public baptism by other Born Again members but this was not baptism; in those cases as in the cases where there was no public baptism, one’s baptism was understood to have already taken place internally to one’s soul.

The ceremony changed from a necessary condition to become Christian and became an unnecessary post-facto formality. What mattered was that one’s soul had been changed through the establishment of a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. True conversion entailed an unobservable phenomenon taking place entirely outside of the physical world.

Furthermore, because so many of the older and more mainstream denominations were opposed by the Born Again movement and vice versa, acceptance by a congregation was also severed from the adoption of a Christian identity. In this way, baptism moved from an objective and observable criterion to a dead letter; in this way, congregational membership i.e. recognition by other Christians as one of them, moved from a social and observable criterion into the same irrelevance.

Like NOI members, we can view Born Again Christians as proto-Identitarians.

Another important feature both groups possessed and that we see in Identitarians today is the belief identity confers monopolistic power to make knowledge about one’s group. White Devils could never learn black history because the ability to know the true history of the Moorish race inhered in the blood.

Similarly, Born Again Christians mobilized audacious anti-science rhetoric, turning mainline Christianity on its head in arguing that reason was not a tool for reaching God but an impediment, that historical “truths” like Young Earth Creationism could never be deduced through reason and evidence. Instead, God had to act upon one’s soul for one to achieve true knowledge. So effective, was this turn in overthrowing the epistemology of mainline Christianity that many cannot remember that Protestant Americans ever believed otherwise.

In places governed by an honour politics, it is somewhat gauche to be mainly in the business of defending one’s own honour when it is under attack. Normally, it is the job of the person of the highest rank in a dynamic to defend the honour of those of lower rank. In this way, if a lady of rank and standing, a doña, let us say, is dishonoured, it is the responsibility of the nearest don to do something about it, to reprimand, assault or otherwise punish the offender for an etiquette breach like sounding too familiar (maybe using the tu pronoun instead of usted), or failing to bow as deeply as a difference in rank might merit, or inappropriately chewing, touching or spitting in her presence.

When one stands up for the honour of one less honourable, this does not merely defend their honour, successfully standing up causes honour to redound to you. In this way, a butler might defend the honour of the scullion he supervises; the lady of the house might defend her gardener; etc. Putting one’s own time and body on the line to defend the honour of others, even others not present, merely insulted in an indiscreet dinner conversation does not merely make you more honourable. Honour systems are social economies and so, the total amount of honour in the system also increases, the more exchange and competition there is over it, just like in the money economy.

For this reason, fights over honour are not a problem; they are a solution. It is in everyone’s interest for as many people as possible to be fighting about as much as possible. Consequently, the taking of offense on one’s own behalf or that of others has strong and constant incentives.

One can see this both within Identitarian communities and in Identitarian interactions with those outside their communities: offense-taking is a cultural practice that is cheered on, that produces minor day-to-day heroes and is fostered in new and exciting ways by modern social media platforms.

But for all the novelty we associate with the taking and communication of offense, Identitarianism is a deeply conservative set of movements. By this I mean that Identitarian movements are deeply invested in the reinvigoration of traditional forms of identity, often in reaction to liberation movements seeking to dismantle them.

We see this in what is arguably the first Identitarian social movement, Elijah Mohammed’s Nation of Islam (today led by Louis Farrakhan). In post-war America, there was a major invigoration of black liberation movements for a variety of reasons, from a sense of entitlement, camaraderie and confidence among black soldiers on the Second World War, the need to compete internationally with an anti-racist foreign power, the USSR, the continued Great Migration making black votes more plentiful and useful.

People like Paul Robeson, Richard Wright and others responded to this by redoubling their activism for socialism, arguing, correctly, that blackness was a thing co-created with capitalism, that race was an elaboration, a leavening agent of capitalist labour systems, something arising from class whose oppression functioned synergistically with it to keep workers divided and rightless. Robeson’s strategy was to build solidarity with working class and racialized people globally, to support miners’ strikes in Wales and South Africa and to deliver the message that there was a single culprit, capitalism, for the misery of workers. When the scales fell from people’s eyes and they saw that race was just a tool to divide the working class, working people would find the solidarity they needed to overthrow capitalism.

But Robeson, Wright and their comrades faced a new national security state apparatus that saw socialism (especially socialist internationalism) as treason and visited both anti-communist propaganda and persecution on America on a vast scale, labeling the movement as godless and anti-Christian, among other things.

It makes sense, then, that the more successful strategic response emerged in the form of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (the SCLC) that presented a more palatable anti-racist universalism. The movement that brought Martin Luther King Jr. to national prominence also engaged in a rhetoric that sought to dissolve, to abolish race as a category: that of being colourless before God.

King and his allies preached a doctrine that in God’s eyes, race did not exist that God himself was, as one sympathetic author put it, “the colour of water.” King’s rhetoric was also effective in casting all people possessing race, not just black people, as suffering oppression and injustice at the hands of racism. Everyone was impoverished socially, culturally and personally by the barriers between essentially similar human beings by a trick of the mind that caused them to falsely see difference where there was none.

It is against these two movements that what we might think of as the first proto-Identitarian social movement emerged: NOI.

Where King and Robeson taught that race was a socially constructed tool that could be abolished, NOI sided with the Klan in teaching that race was physical, real, inherited through the blood and inscribed on the outside of the body. Furthermore, they also agreed that God himself had decreed this and that race was an inextricable piece of a heavenly, divine order.

The problem, they explained, was that things had been screwed up by an evil Jew. According to what is called “the Myth of Yakub,” a Libyan Jew of the fourth century BCE had genetically engineered a scourge on the other races by creating “White Devils.” White Devils, or modern white people, were then an aberration of the divine order, and maliciously designed to inflict evil and suffering on the world.

The true master race, the Moors (Black and Arabic people), had been subject to a brutal campaign of oppression by the Jews and the White Devils for millennia in order to prevent them from taking their rightful place at the head of the human race.

Rather than challenge the idea of race or even the justice of a racial hierarchy, the complaint of NOI remains, to this day, that the correct and just racial hierarchy of God has been inverted into the incorrect and unjust racial hierarchy of the White Devils and their Jewish masters. In this way, not only does NOI seek to reinforce the idea of race and the pseudoscience of scientific racism, it also has been able to nurture classic 1930s-style anti-Semitism.

But NOI did not merely limit itself to defending race and racism. A major part of its agenda was an attack on the failings of black gender politics, teaching a particularly austere form of black respectability politics. Women could not serve in the kinds of public leadership positions they could in the Black Church; women’s dress was more carefully policed and their sartorial choices narrowed to garments that were both strongly expressive of sexual dimorphism and modest and austere in their colours and shapes. While the Jews and White Devils were trying to force women outside through the home by depressing black wages, NOI members were to redouble their efforts to become single-income families.

NOI men were routinely compared favourably to other black men. NOI men were faithful in marriage; NOI men protected ‘their’ women; NOI men supported their families; NOI men did not beg, did not ask for help, did not complain to white people about their sorrows; they were independent, industrious and self-sufficient. And NOI mocked the SCLC for their effeminate adoption of non-violence, rather than holding the paramilitary drills NOI held for the inevitable “race war.”

In addition to defending race and gender as universal pillars of a divine order, NOI also generated new forms of offense-giving and offense-taking, directed primarily not at whites but at non-NOI Blacks. Like actual Muslims, NOI members swore off pork, the primary meat of 1950s black America. Family gatherings with NOI converts became sites of conflict over sumptuary laws; traditional family foods and recipes could be rejected or fought-over; or additional expense could be incurred by a host to avoid such conflict and generate its own complexities.

More fraught still, was the matter of the name. A crucial part of conversion was the rejection of one’s “slave name” and the adoption of a “Muslim” name. In all cases, this entailed the rejection of the family name one had inherited through one’s father because it could likely be traced back to one’s ancestor’s owner’s name. But it also often entailed the adoption of a new given name. This might instill a sense of rejection, not just in a proud and conservative father whose name might no longer live on through the generations but in the mother and father who chose the person’s name at birth.

Conflicts over name did not just arise through intentional provocation and grievance-raising; they primarily arose through habit. Family members, especially older ones, not to mention family friends might refer to a convert by their given name out of habit or out of a failure to apprehend that the new name was a replacement, rather than an addition to a given name, something African Americans were used to, having a complex and rich set of cultural practices around nicknames and diminutives.
In this way, some of the poorest and least powerful Americans built a cultural movement that made conservative anti-feminist retrenchment, conservative anti-racist retrenchment and a new system of etiquette and offense available to people previously unable to participate in a traditionally elite form of social behaviour.

And it is important to recognize that while Identitarianism is conservative in the sense of seeking to reinforce threatened and crumbling ideas of gender and race; it is democratic in the sense of seeking, however inefficiently or fruitlessly, to make honour politics universally available to all people.

I have decided to teach a course on a phenomenon I call Identitarianism, a loose set of converging social movements that share properties I identify as Identitarian. I used to use the term “identity politics,” following the lead of Bernie Sanders, to refer to this phenomenon and related social movement activity. But that was a mistake. I am increasingly convinced that Identitarianism constitutes a rupture with past politics of identity as described by theorists like Stuart Hall. It is, at best, a novel and powerful kind of identity politics the like of which has not been seen before.

First, let me begin by saying what it is not. Identitarianism is not an ideology or system of beliefs. As I said in my previous post, novel social movements forming during the collapse of the Enlightenment episteme are unshackled from past cultural demands that they understand themselves as projects of systematically describing the world.

In one of my earliest posts to this blog, I observed that these shackles need not even apply to the major “-isms” of the Englightenment. The suffix “-ism,” you see, comes from the Greek suffix “-ισμοσ,” which does not mean “the idea of” but rather “turning into.” In this way, capitalism is not so much a set of ideas about resources, money, labour, etc. as it is our shared experience of being converted into capital. Similarly, I used the term Identitarian-ism not to indicate a set of ideas but a process of making a kind of person.

So, what are some things Identitarianism is?

First and foremost, it is a system of etiquette. Systems of etiquette are schemes of regulating human behaviour through honour, shame and offense, and these practices are linked a schemes of occult knowledge about correct behaviour.

When my old friend Jack Harman asked Queen Elizabeth II about how people should behave around her, she explained that her job was to act as though however people chose to address and honour her was correct, to pretend that her system of etiquette was identical to theirs, to never take offense at social behaviour but instead seem unoffended in order to normalize the action and put people at ease. This, she explained, was why her courtiers instructed people meeting her on how to act and what to say, so as to provide them with knowledge that could reassure them, in the moment, that they were behaving correctly.

This is the prerogative of the richest woman on earth and the monarch of a half-millennium-old empire, to treat etiquette as irrelevant because she can afford to, because differences of culture, lineage, wealth and power are so huge that there is no way an interlocutor could lower her to the point of being their equal.

Etiquette is not and has never been a great interest of the most powerful. But it is a significant pursuit of those who are insecure in their power and aspire to more. The gentry, the bourgeoisie, these are the sorts of people for whom etiquette is a matter of life or death. For this reason, systems of etiquette are both occult (they require large amounts of knowledge that is rationed and not widely available) and faddish (this knowledge must constantly change and be reacquired through channels to which one has not lost access).

Etiquette is about learning and enforcing ever-changing rules that both establish a boundary between a class and those below them and about organizing hierarchy and resolving conflict within that class. The more etiquette-conscious and etiquette-focused a group, the more the group is engaged in competitions around honour. Dueling classes in dueling cultures are the people organized around etiquette: the European gentry and bourgeoisie before the Napoleonic Wars, the Brazilian and American planters before the abolition of slavery: these were classes with complex, faddish, endlessly-changing and highly consequential rules for social interaction. Members of society competed with one another over honour i.e. the esteem in which they were held by others for following with precision not just the letter but the spirit of the rules of etiquette currently in vogue.

When a person failed to interact with one in a manner befitting one’s social standing, one experienced dishonour, a kind of social humiliation deeper than simple shame: an experience of shame so injurious, so profound that it might cause a person to keep bleeding social status indefinitely, to become so dishonoured as to become an outcast, outside of society itself. Consequently, defending one’s honour was an incredibly fraught experience, one filled with violence and terror, fear of failure and rage at the offender.

This is because, in honour-based, etiquette-focused social systems, honour is a matter of social ontology i.e. whether one exists as a person is contingent upon experiencing honour through etiquette confirming one’s personhood. In this way, honour-based societies conflate identity with ontology: to be recognized as an honourable person is indistinguishable from personhood itself, from existence itself. To lose one’s honour is to experience social death.

And it should surprise no one that honour-driven societies appear near the top of the most vertical, unequal, extreme social hierarchies, Charleston 1860, Paris 1780, Bahia 1880, New Orleans 1800.

We tend to associate these places with decadence, with people failing to meet the most minimal standards of decent behaviour, places in continuous violation of the principles upon which they are purported to be based. In this way, the New Orleans Octaroon Ball survived following the Louisiana Purchase because it perfectly encapsulated an honour-based order.

This is because, in an honour-based patriarchy, the discourse is that honour comes from victory in battle, marital fidelity, piety, etc. But honour is really governed by two unrelated things: (a) the ability to stay on top of the rules of etiquette and perform them with fidelity and (b) the ability to use one’s social power to make false things true about oneself. In other words, the gap between the behaviour of an honourable person and honourable behaviour is necessary and constitutive of an honour politics.

This might help to explain the core project of Identitarianism: forcing people to describe you, not as others experience you socially but as you are in your mind’s eye, whether that’s how you imagine yourself when you are masturbating, or how you imagine yourself when you are praying, or both. Honour politics is about forcing your inferiors and competitors to describe you not as they experience you, but as you imagine yourself.

Because honour is really a measure of power, the ability to force one’s competitors and inferiors to act as though false things are true, the true power of an honourable man in an honour-based system is demonstrated by conceiving mixed-race slave-children through rape and preaching the doctrine of racial purity, by fucking prostitutes and mistresses and preaching marital fidelity, by murdering slaves arbitrarily and preaching mercy and forbearance in dealing with inferiors. And having those falsehoods about oneself honoured in public through awards, parades and homilies.

In this way, those winning the game of honour in an etiquette-based society reside in a fool’s paradise, an environment in which challenging one’s narrative about who one really is is so dangerous, so fraught, so risky that almost no one does. So your inferiors and competitors guess what you want them to say about you, and say it without your personal instruction, referring instead to the plethora of rules and descriptive terms laid out in the system of etiquette.

Identitarianism is an effort to democratize this politics and make it accessible to anyone with the leisure time necessary to learn the rules of etiquette and to express offense and outrage whenever one’s honour is impugned. Part of its appeal is that it offers people nowhere near the elite an opportunity to engage in a set of elite social practices that anyone with enough time to study the rules of etiquette and police possible moments of dishonour is permitted to participate. Certainly, the rules are designed to be most easily learned by people who have attended elite liberal arts colleges in the United States and the leisure time commitments of offense-taking and offense-expressing are heavy and tough to keep up with a full-time job. But that does not mean that only the bourgeoisie can participate in Identitarianism; it just means that, as in basically all class-delimited systems, they constitute the overwhelming majority of participants.

Just like Jane Austen’s characters existed at the periphery of the English gentry and were technically in the game because of their slavish devotion to the ideology of honour and their willingness to metabolize an insanity of rules, low-income folks, non-men, non-whites, etc. can participate in the Identitarian system. And like those who came before them, that perfectly honourable footman who taught himself Shakespeare at night in his tiny room, they are exhibited as the finest, purest representatives of the system in which they struggle to participate.

But this is not an innovation. This is a constitutive property of the capitalist order, that long ago produced Untouchable Billionaires in India.

So, if Identitarians are based around a politics of offense, honour and etiquette, what offends them?

The answer is simple: discrepancies between how they see themselves in their mind’s eye and how they are referred-to in public. In this way, the wider the gap between one’s imaginary self and one’s public self, the greater the opportunity to be insulted and offended. As in any other patriarchal honour-system, power comes from the ability to muster outrage and offense at the gap between one’s disparate selves, the resident of the fool’s paradise and the tyrant in the real world.

Just as such discrepancies entitled the gentlemen of Dixie and Bourbon France to shoot one another with muskets, such discrepancies in the modern frame also authorize brutal and punitive actions. More on that in the next part.

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Seven years ago, I suggested that the Age of Authenticity, as an episteme, causes us to fashion different kinds of selves that, at once, are a logical entailment and consequence of the kinds of selves the Age of Reason asked us to make and are a new kind of self, one “larger and more permeable.” Such selves, even as they grow more common, as the liberal order collapses, are nevertheless pathologized today. In the DSM IV, people who have difficulty constructing “other people” as a category, and who struggle to retain the knowledge that the other creatures walking around who look like them are the same sort of creature are referred to as having “Cluster B” personality disorders. This means that the individual’s personality was defectively built, producing sometimes-charming but never empathetic personalities.

Narcissism and Hustle-fuckery

Clinical narcissism is one of these personality disorders. Narcissists live terrifying lives because they are governed by a profound sense of worthlessness. They believe that they are subhuman creatures whose only relevance or value to others is achieved by tricking people into thinking they are, in fact, superhuman. Narcissists live in constant fear of being found out, of being forced to confront what they see as an irreconcilable, impassible gap between the self the loathsome person they actually are and the universally-adored person they must be perceived as.

Narcissists are often regarded as malevolent or ill-intentioned and certainly, they can do a lot of damage. I have the scars to prove it. But they are often experienced as charming, exciting, fun people to know who do you no harm whatsoever, provided you reinforce the belief that the are the self they aspire to be.

The problem comes when one accidentally or intentionally fucks with a narcissist’s hustle. Hustle-fuckery is always dangerous, regardless. But when one fucks with a narcissist’s hustle, by showing that one genuinely sees past the self they present to the world, it can lock one into a Manichean struggle, because the maintenance of the illusory self is viewed by the narcissist as a necessary condition for their survival, because, rather than seeing their inner self as an ordinary damaged human self, they see it as a thing so loathsome that it could never be accepted or loved.

Fucking with a narcissist’s hustle is dangerous, risky. But it is also necessary. So many of the bullies and monsters who stand in our way or cause us pain, not just in politics but in our work lives, friendships and family lives, are people with Cluster B personality architectures, people whose ego boundaries are profoundly malformed.

So, when one provokes a narcissist into showing some aspect of themselves that they seek to conceal or specifically calls out or identifies that behaviour, the narcissist feels wounded. They experience what is termed “narcissistic injury.” It is an injury both in the sense that the narcissist experiences real pain when this happens and because it does inflict damage on the person’s narcissistic personality architecture. After experiencing narcissistic injury, a person often needs to spend time recovering, refashioning their sense of self, re-narrating events to fit this refashioning, seeking comfort, experiencing real debilitating depression and grief, shedding real tears.

The narcissistic injury, then, is paradoxical. It is a real injury caused by a perceived attack on or damage to a fake thing.

Triggering, Then and Now

In progressive i.e. liberal-influenced putatively left-wing circles, this phenomenon has dangerously coincided with the vulgarization of the term “trigger” and the adoption of a liberal politics of affect (i.e. emotion). From the beginning, demonstrating emotional sensitivity has been central to the liberal concept of selfhood; both the ability to shed tears and the ability to stoically refrain from shedding tears while feeling very deeply are central to the liberal ideal of the self. When liberals idealize self-control, that ideal is possible precisely because, for a sensitive person, self-control is a kind of emotional athleticism, demonstrating extraordinary strength.

Whereas, socialist politics has traditionally styled itself in opposition to liberalism and consequently featured unrestrained expressions of emotion, fist pounding and cries to “smash the state,” progressive politics is all about restraint. Everyone is expected to show the big emotions they have; everyone is supposed to talk about how big their emotions are; and then everyone is expected to demonstrate the liberal virtue of self-control by not matching that with shouting, crying, desk-pounding and fist-pumping but instead show how one is an ideal person because one’s sensitivity is exceeded only by one’s self-control. And when a progressive is exposed to unrestrained emotion, they are often “triggered.”

Triggering was once a psychiatric term that applied only to people who suffer from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). While PTSD sufferers can sometimes recall the event(s) that traumatized them in a dispassionate and accurate way, this entails a level of repression and detachment from the emotions accompanying the traumatic experience. Triggering is when something that is associated with the traumatic event causes the sufferer to re-experience the event and the extreme emotions associated. Often, it is a piece of sensory input peripheral to the experience. For instance, a friend of mine was a military contractor doing firefighting for the US military in Afghanistan. While he can recall, dispassionately, the event that caused his PTSD, simply recalling and re-narrating that event does not trigger him. He is only triggered when he smells a particular combination of spices being cooked with onions that preceded the attack that traumatized him. Triggering, in its original meaning, referred not just to an unmediated experience of emotion but physical manifestations like rapid drops in body temperature, swelling in the lungs, loss of circulation to extremities and temporary blindness.
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Today, “triggered” means very upset.

Etiquette and Orthodoxy

Of course, affect politics are not the only part of liberalism that progressives practice. They also have adopted liberal practices of etiquette. This goes beyond a simple demand that progressive politics be polite and self-controlled. Etiquette is, by definition, faddish, because it is a means by which those at the top of society can impose a set of occult rules on others that will have changed by the time those outside the elite figure them out. Etiquette, then, is not just a set of rules about how to act, speak and dress; it is the process by which these rules are in constant flux, creating new forms of social transgression. Many working class people follow Donald Trump because his politics are an attack on etiquette—Trump really is attacking “the elite” and “draining the swamp” from a certain cultural perspective. His actions render etiquette less powerful in an increasing number of places.

This does not just produce a sense of cultural liberation but of intellectual liberation because this kind of etiquette breach is necessary to challenge orthodoxy. Orthodoxies are enforced through etiquette. If you dispute a mere ideology or worldview, those holding that worldview understand your statement to be wrong. A modern flat-earther can say “you’re lying; the earth is flat,” the response to which is “you’re wrong; here’s why.” But when Galileo challenged the Roman Catholic Church’s orthodoxy with respect to the heavens, by saying “the earth revolves around the sun in an elliptical orbit in space,” the response was not “you’re wrong” but “you are not permitted to have said that. Therefore we shall behave as though you have not and our vision of the universe has never been challenged.”

Putting It All Together

So let’s put all this together and think about its impact on progressive politics.

As I have stated before, a progressive politics of emotion functions as etiquette not ideology. So when someone expresses themselves in a way that triggers someone (as per the contemporary usage), we must not merely silence the offender; we must act as though the idea they have expressed is beyond the pale and cannot be considered, discussed or even acknowledged as an idea. Because inflicting narcissistic injury is triggering (not just by the contemporary definition but sometimes even by the original medical one), one must never inflict narcissistic injury. Progressive etiquette politics conscripts us into denying or eliding any apparent differences between the self a person wishes to present to the world and the self they reveal themselves to be.

In this way, the progressive scene has come to be dominated by narcissists and gas-lighters by placing any challenge to their narcissism beyond the pale, because such a challenge is impermissible by the orthodoxy. We have thus produced a system of incentives that encourage people to build more narcissistic, porous, oversized selves that contain all kinds of things they shouldn’t, like other people’s thoughts, other people’s bodies, other people’s desires.

And this leads us back to the central issue as we endeavour to think past the liberal identity politics some people mistakenly call “intersectionalism:” do I own who other people think I am or do they? Progressive identitarianism grows increasingly unequivocal on that point—you own other people’s thoughts about who you are and they do not. And that view is batshit fucking insane, a narcissistic delusion.

A real left politics, a real socialist politics must do the opposite. To engage in real debate, real solidarity, real acts of mutual recognition and empathy, real confrontations with evil, left politics must declare open season on narcissism and the affect and etiquette politics that intimidate us into thinking that inflicting narcissistic injury is a bad act. It is by this sleight of hand that the Third Wayers, the Blairites, the Justin Trudeaus and John Horgans who cry crocodile tears over pipelines they build, treaties they violate, future generations they condemn to misery and death, are able to hold the power over us that they do.

Because they have taken from us the ability to shout “You are not who you say you are!”