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.
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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.
You can register for my course here.
