To: <s-acc@yahoogroups.com>

From: "Andrew Phelps" <starfish@northcoast.com>

Date: Sat, 6 Aug 2011 10:56:01 -0700

Subject: Re: [s-acc] Re: identity politics

 

Lmn:

You wrote:

Hi Andrew and others interested (and by this I name others positively, as people with different opinions whose very difference holds the dynamism of this social field)

I'm probably good with most of what you write here. I've certainly studied these matters considerably and engaged them online at length. [!]

Here "identity politics" is a pragmatic way of explaining the mentality of our "second wave" advocacy - that is, of explaining the "bad habit" of ego psychology and control oriented behavior as something we must engage as "lived experience upgrade." My post related to how SAMHSA appears to have lined up with "abuse denial" social dynamic and used the traditional "first wave" approach as a psychological ideal in their overview of the selection of Alternatives workshops.

The question of 'otherness' can be approached from (at least) two philosophical traditions. Painting in very broad strokes, philsophies based on desire for the Same or the Similar (homeostasic repetition) have tended to construct otherness in two interrelated way
  1. Otherness defined as an invisible negative, e.g. the 'other' is Not I and functions as both threat and symbolic prop and support to I (which may be further analyzed as a mask for a dominant subjectivity universalized as identity for all). If anyone is interested I can point to a lot of literature analyzing otherness named in the negative along gendered and racial axis of 'authorization'. Most famous, Luce Irigaray was expelled from the Lacan school (forgot its proper name) for writing Speculum of the Other Woman in which (building on Simone de Bouvoir's Second Sex) she analyses the history of philosophy from a position of otherness that is only named as excess in the system of thought in question but is also an essential outside to sustain the interior logic. Great move at the time but swiftly followed by incisive critique from postcolonial critics (Gayatri Spivak most notably) about the material conditions in which a) most subaltern voices don't get to write a book like Speculum at all) and b) calls to investigate the invisible props and supports for relatively privileged white woman to (always rhetorically) rescue brown women from brown men!
  2. Otherness defined as less than. Here difference is visible but is understood as differing from the Same and the Similar in a hierarchy of resemblance (and deviance from). Most notorious here is the 18 and 19 century contruction of racial difference along an axis of more or less human with white colonial men at the top of the pile. While I am oversimplying a great deal, this is kind of logic has been especially pernicious in MH and still the dominat paradigm. For those defined as other in the sense of less than, the pressing need is for difference to be both respected and regarded of equal status to those at the top of the pile.

The problem is that those regarded as 'less than' either tend to set themselves up as 'more than' in resistance (thus repeating the same awful cycle of defining anyone other to them as less than) or the 'less than' are invited to become the 'same as' and their radical alterity is lost. Is something like this going on in the identity politics in the situation at Anaheim you describe? - that is those othered as 'less than' are welcomed to assert their rights to be the 'same as'. As long as they are the same as ...

Generically, yes, I'd say. But this is the 25th Alternatives and the U.S. is in crisis. Yesterday the country's credit rating was downgraded by Standard and Poor's. Our conversation here relates to the tactical considerations involved in what we do at (and in regards to) Orlando.

There is writing on "identity politics" which is a topic engaged in ethnic politics and elsewhere. Bell Hooks, for instance, has gotten some attention HERE in that regard.

 

Best regards

Andrew