Encyclopaedia of Democratic Thought

B. Clarke & J. Foweraker (eds)

London: Routledge, 2000

identity, political

Our contemporary world is marked throughout by the increasing importance of questions

of identity. During the last thirty or forty years, for example, identity crisis has become
a fitting subjective description of our psycho-social malaise. Most important, both
national and international politics are now - especially since the collapse of the discursive
imaginary of the Cold War - primarily concerned with the attempts of various
collectivities to claim or re-claim their lost, oppressed or threatened identity, be that of an
ethnic, religious, sexual or any other type. In relation to democracy, a first wave of
theorists celebrating this political action of new *social movements and identity groups as
reinvigorating modern democracy has been followed by a wave of scepticism
highlighting the potential threat to democracy posed by certain versions of identity
politics.

It is impossible to understand what political identity is and to discuss identity

politics and its relation to democracy without first defining identity. This in itself is not
an easy task. The genealogy of the concept reveals a tumultuous history. The category
emerges for the first time with Aristotle where tautotes has the meaning of shared
identity. In Latin, identitas from idem means the same. From antiquity onwards the
concept acquires a variety of significations: mathematical (where identity, as in aa, is
distinguished from mere equation, a=b), philosophical (as discussed in Montaigne, Kant,
Locke and Hegel through to contemporary philosophers), anthropological and
sociological (as discussed by, for example, G. H. Mead and E. Goffman), psychological
and others. The psychological conception of identity is of some importance here. It is
associated with the work of Erik Erikson in the period after the end of the Second World
War. It is Eriksons work which seems to have prompted the first wave of public interest
into questions of identity. As David Riesman points out in the foreward to the 1960
edition of his acclaimed book The Lonely Crowd, the current preoccupation with
identity in this country (the United States) is clearly related to the great impact of Erik
H. Eriksons work (Riesman in Mackenzie 1978: 35).

From a political point of view, Eriksons importance is not so much due to his
definition of identity as to the fact that the concept of political identity emerges for the
first time with reference to his work. This birth of political identity appears to occur
around 1960, in the work of the American political scientist Lucian Pye who deliberately
adapted the concept from Erikson (Mackenzie 1978). What is involved in this adaptation?
Although Erikson always spoke of individual identity Pye transfers it, at first
metaphorically, from the individual to the collective, political level. For example, it
seems that he is the first to speak of an identity crisis referring not to individuals but to
what he calls the first and most fundamental stage of political development leading to
the formation of a modern nation-state (Pye 1966: 63). He also refers to national identity,
collective identities etc. (Pye 1966: 25)

Two crucial questions emerge from this brief conceptual history:

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1. Does the current preoccupation with identity mean that identities are a modern or even
a twentieth century phenomenon? It would be unwise to conclude anything of the sort.
First of all the exploration of the meaning of identity is not a modern innovation; as
already mentioned, this activity starts with Greek and Latin antiquity. Nevertheless, it is
important to stress that modernity, and especially late modernity, signals a quantitative
change vis-a-vis pre-modernity. Identity is no more the subject of detached philosophical
analyses or mathematical treatises, a rare and isolated topic of inquiry, but a matter of
intense and sustained public discussion, the focus of media attention, a thoroughly
politicised issue. However, what underlies this quantitative shift (the proliferation and
increasing centrality of issues of identity) is another more qualitative kind of change. In
pre-modern societies identity issues did not emerge in the same way because identity was
usually considered as a given; it was largely taken for granted. It was seen as determined
by an immutable social topography guaranteed by mythical or religious forces (the power
of a taboo or the will of God). This was an era of a non-reflexive objective reason:
identity was something assigned by what the community defined and obeyed as its
unifying principle. This does not mean that identity was not an issue. It was simply more
likely to surface in a theological discussion about the nature of the Holy Trinity rather
than in any other culturally, socially or politically significant form. Modernity, by
proclaiming the Death of God and by advancing individualisation and *capitalism,
radically disrupts this stability. It involves a multitude of dislocations of traditional
practices and types of behaviour and initiates a period of constant change. What these
quantitative and qualitative shifts reveal and reinforce is the social and political character
of identity.

2. What is the exact relation between identity, the social and the political in the modern
age and especially in late modernity? If, as a result of social transformations taking place
in modernity, identity is not considered anymore as given, then it can only be the result of
social processes of construction and sedimentation. Hence the expression social
identity. Furthermore, if identity is understood as the result of social construction then
this also opens up the possibility of a political contestation and re-articulation of identity.
Hence the expression political identity. In our century and as a result of this
transformation, a multitude of groups began to question their traditionally established
identities. Women, for example, contested their location within patriarchal
representations of the social, which were previously taken as, more or less, given and
entered the political arena, first in Western democracies and then globally. The same, of
course, applies to other groups, such as homosexuals, indigenous people, ethnic
minorities, etc. This process is clearly associated with the emergence of new *social
movements and the development, during the last twenty years, of a distinct type of
identity politics.

It is possible then to discern two movements leading to the current preoccupation

with identity and identity politics. First, the social character of identity is recognised.
Human identity cannot be but social identity. But this development although it goes a
long way towards shaking determinist assumptions of the naturalist or theological sort,
does not preclude an appeal to social determinism. If it were possible for agents to have
an always already determined location within the social structure - if, for example, their
identities were to be thought as a priori given by their location within class structure - the
problem of their identity would still be seen as a question of people discovering or
recognising their true, essential identity and not of constructing it (Laclau 1994: 2). Under
these conditions the second movement, the politicisation of identity, cannot take place. In
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order for the political character of identity to emerge the obviousness of social identities
has to be put into question. This also explains why, since the early eighties, it is as an
alternative to class politics that identity politics has been increasingly dominating
political discussions on the democratic left. This radical questioning of social, and
especially class determinism and essentialism, is surely one of the defining characteristics
of democratic societies of the end of the twentieth century. The more the foundation of
the social is put into question, the less the sedimented social practices are able to ensure
social reproduction and the more we recognise that a dimension of construction and
creation is inherent in all social practice. The latter do not involve only repetition, but
also reconstruction (Laclau 1994: 3-4). In societies which do not rely on any kind of
naturalist, theological or essentialist social foundation, the construction and continuous
reconstruction of identity can only be a radical institution, an institution constitutive of
social practices, in other words a truly political institution. The political dimension of
identity becomes fully visible only when it is recognised that there is no such a thing as a
natural, essential or intrinsic social identity.

This is not, however, an unproblematic conclusion. For, if identities are socially

and politically constructed; if the outcome of construction is not guaranteed by any
essential ground; if the collapse of the essentialist grounding of identities makes possible
the radical questioning of any identity, its de-structuration and even its destruction; if, in
other words, due to the absence of a universal ground, no identity can totally transcend
the historical and political conditions of its emergence; doesnt this mean that identity
itself becomes impossible? The answer can only be affirmative in the sense that the
continuous political construction of social identities never results in a closed, self-
contained and absolute identity. Identity, at both the personal and political levels, is only
the name of what we desire but can never fully attain. This might explain a current trend
in contemporary theorising of using the term identity claim in addition to that of
identity, where identity claims are of a normative and not of a descriptive nature. If the
full realisation of identity is impossible and cannot correspond to any representable state
of biological, social or other existence, then we must attach greater significance to
identity claims, claims of always incomplete subjects and collectivities to something - an
image of themselves they aspire to but can never fully attain.

What is the political practice which supports and sustains our attempts to
materialise these identity claims? What is the name of this practice which, although it
always fails to produce a full identity, plays a crucial role in structuring our lives? The
name of this practice is identification. The psychoanalytic category of identification with
its explicit assertion of a lack at the root of any identity is the key term for understanding
this process. One needs to identify with something, a political ideology or ethnic group
for example, because there is an originary and insurmountable lack of identity (Laclau
1994: 3). It is Freud who singles out identification as constitutive of both subjectivity and
politics. This is the unsettling conclusion of psychoanalytic theory which destabilises any
identitarian metaphysics: political subjectivity depends on identification but identification
never results in the production of full identity. Here identification becomes a term
almost synonymous with identity claim. Normative identity claims cannot be fully
satisfied because identifications are never brought to full closure; identifications are
inevitably failed identifications. In that sense identification is simultaneously the
condition of possibility and impossibility of identity. On the one hand it brings a sense of
identity into being [but] it also immediately calls identity into question Identification
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is a process that keeps identity at a distance, that prevents identity from ever
approximating the status of an ontological given, even as it makes possible the formation
of an illusion of identity as immediate, secure, and totalizable (Fuss 1995: 2).

The paradoxical nature of identity revealed in the role of identification is

something constitutive of our subjective and political predicament: life without the drive
to identity is an impossibility but the claim to a natural or true identity is always an
exaggeration (Connolly 1991: 67). This ambiguity is inscribed in any attempt to define
identity. Whether one consults the Oxford English Dictionary, philosophical dissertations
or sociological textbooks the result will be the same: identity is commonly defined
according to two fundamental criteria, sameness and difference. What does sameness
mean? Sameness is usually defined as continuity, that is to say as unity or consistency in
and across time. My identity is what guarantees that I am the same person I was yesterday
and that I will be the same tomorrow, at least in my essential characteristics. It has
become gradually evident however that identity cannot be defined without reference to
what stands outside its field. What creates my identity, what defines sameness, is that I
differ from the identities of others. Identities are relational and differential. It is possible
to ground this observation in a variety of ways. Take structural linguistics and semiology
for example. Here, we can argue that since identities are meaningful they must abide by
the rules governing systems of signification (language and cultural semiosis). Now, we
know from Saussure and from the whole structuralist and poststructuralist tradition that
the meaning of a particular element within a system of signification can only arise via its
differantiation from other elements within the same system. I cannot understand what
father is without situating this signifier within the familial significations embodied in
signifiers such as sister, mother, brother, etc. It follows then that, as William
Connolly has successfuly put it, difference requires identity and identity difference
(Connolly 1991: ix).

This inherent ambiguity of identity has profound political consequences:

1. First of all, the realisation of the ultimate impossibility of full identity can be
detrimental for any version of politics of identity. How is then possible to inscribe the
limits of my identity claims, limits which are becoming visible in one or the other form,
without committing political suicide, without, in other words, putting in danger the
*hegemony of my discourse? The most common way in which political ideologies
perform this slight of hand is by constructing scapegoats. If identity itself is a slippery,
ambiguous and insecure experience then the political creation and maintenance of the
ideological appearance of a true identity can only depend on the production of scapegoats
(Connolly 1991: 67). Thus I can be persuaded that what is responsible for the
impossibility of realising my (universalised) identity, what is limiting my identity, is not
the inherent ambiguity and *contingency of all identity, its reliance on processes of
identification, its social and political conditioning, but the existence or the action of a
localisable group: the Jews, the immigrants, etc. If, the ideological argument goes, this
group, this anomalous particularity, is silenced or even eliminated, then full identity will
be possible. The next step is of course Auschwitz and the Gulags. If universalist political
identities can lead in such a direction this does not mean that particularist identity politics
fare any better. The particularism of identity politics can also very easily take an anti-
democratic direction. This sort of particularism involves the political construction of an
identity around an issue or a specific geographical, ethnic, sexual or social location in a
way that does not link up with other identities within the public arena. This effectively
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negates even the minimum common ground necessary for democracy to function (Laclau
1991: 58).

2. These dangers are always present in identity politics but they are not the only ones.
An identity politics, premised upon an essentialist and simplistic conception of identity,
also puts in danger its potential to radically transform the status quo. The politics of
homosexuality is an interesting case in point. Homosexual or gay identity politics (at least
from the early 1950s to the end of the 1970s) although articulated a different position vis-
a-vis homosexuality, a position defending the normality and the rights of homosexuals,
did not question the existence of a distinct and uniform homosexual human type. In that
sense it did not differ much from the essentialism characteristic of discourses opposing
and condemning homosexuality (Seidman 1995). Queer theorists (including Diana Fuss
and Judith Butler) have questioned the existence of such an essential, unitary identity, as
well as the democratic productiveness of an identity politics articulated along essentialist
lines. Another example is feminist politics. Today it is increasingly realised that a
feminist politics understood as realizing the equality of a definable empirical group with
a common essence and identity, women can only lead to a particularist politics with
limited effectivity. What the radicalisation of plural democracy requires is discarding the
essentialist idea of an identity of women as well as the attempt to ground a specific
feminist politics (Mouffe 1995: 329).

Given that identity claims are of crucial importance in politics, how can we
minimise the dangers entailed in their exaggeration? Is it possible to mediate between
extreme universalism and extreme particularism? What form of political order emerges
when we break away from the essentialism of some versions of identity politics? It does
not seem likely that we are entering a post-identity era. Identity seems to be the necessary
point of reference for the articulation of our ultimately impossible political aspirations.
From this point of view, there is no point in negating identity. What is really at stake is
the possibility of acknowledging within identity the impossibility of its full realisation, its
own ambiguous and always uncertain character. At least two projects in contemporary
democratic theory attempt to explore this new terrain: democratic *agonism as articulated
by William Connolly and *radical democracy as conceptualised by Ernesto Laclau and
Chantal Mouffe. Here I will only refer briefly to the first of these two theoretico-political
interventions. Connollys agonistic democracy can be described as a democratic
imaginary which disturbs any dogmatisation of identity by being attentive to the
ambiguity inherent in its constitution. Democracy requires contingent identities alert to
their own political constitution, identities that strive to curtail the problem of evil
installed in the demand for surety of identity (Connolly 1991: 120). On the other hand, it
is only in a democratic environment that such an attitude towards identity formation can
be cultivated. In that sense, the experience of democracy and the experience of
*contingency in identity can sustain each other (Connolly 1991: 200).

YANNIS STAVRAKAKIS
DEPARTMENT OF GOVERNMENT
UNIVERSITY OF ESSEX

BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Connolly, W. (1991) Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox,

Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Baumeister, R. (1986) Identity: Cultural Change and the Struggle for Self, New York:
Oxford University Press.
Dean, K. (1997) Introduction: Politics and the End of Identity in Dean, K. (ed.) Politics
and the End of Identity, Aldershot: Ashgate.
Fuss, D. (1995) Identification Papers, New York: Routledge.
Jenkins, R. (1996) Social Identity, London: Routledge.
Laclau, E. (1991) God Only Knows, Marxism Today: 56-59.
Laclau, E. (1994) Introduction in Laclau, E. (ed.) The Making of Political Identities,
London: Verso.
Lance, M.N. and Tanesini, A. (2000) Identity Judgements, Queer Politics, Radical
Philosophy, 100: 42-51.
Mackenzie, W.J.M. (1978) Political Identity, London: Penguin.
Mouffe, Ch. (1995) Feminism, Citizenship, and Radical Democratic Politics in
Nicholson, L. and Seidman, S. (eds) Social Postmodernism: Beyond Identity Politics,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pye, L. (1966) Aspects of Political Development, Boston: Little, Brown.
Rajchman, J. (ed.) (1995) The Identity in Question, New York: Routledge.
Seidman, S. (1995) Deconstructing Queer Theory or the Under-theorization of the Social
and the Ethical, in Nicholson, L. and Seidman, S. (eds) Social Postmodernism: Beyond
Identity Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.