Showing posts with label marc-édouard nabe. Show all posts
Showing posts with label marc-édouard nabe. Show all posts

23 Nov 2017

Notes on Identity Politics and Intersectionality

Marc-Édouard Nabe: Lawrence assis (2007)
Ink and watercolour (24 x 32 cm)


The ideal man! And which is he, if you please? 
There are other men in me, besides this patient ass who sits here in a tweed jacket. 


I'm not a fan of identity politics whose adherents, it seems to me, start off by affirming their difference, only to end by reinforcing a narrow, narcissistic and needy conception of self based upon a reactive morality that fetishizes victimhood and reinforces the very marginalization that they complain about via a process of auto-segregation. Thus, whenever I turn on the TV and hear some politician or activist begin a sentence with the words 'Speaking as ...' X, Y, or Z, I immediately want to throw something at the screen.

It's not that I demand people think of themselves as impersonal abstractions founded upon some fantasy of a universal subject. But I don't want them to speak either as if they were not only defined but determined by some piece of bio-cultural fate and had entirely forgotten the strategic (and ironic) nature of their essentialism. 

What, then, do I want?

I suppose it's a kind of ontological intersectionality. That is to say, I want individuals to acknowledge that the self is a crossroads amidst a dark forest; that the grammatical unity of the 'I' disguises a vibrant plurality of often competing forces. Of course, this is something that many poets, philosophers, and theorists have acknowledged, including D. H. Lawrence in his astonishing Studies in Classic American Literature (1923) ...

From the opening line of his chapter on Benjamin Franklin, Lawrence makes it clear what his theme is going to be: I am many men. And because his self is multiple (and non-ideal) in nature, he can never be perfected. At the very least, we are all of us double and the self we like to think we are and present to the world is twinned with "a strange and fugitive self shut out and howling like a wolf".

This, I think, calls for a queer politics; but it problematizes any naive (single-issue) identity politics. Those who would speak as if they were destined only by their race, gender, or sexuality, for example, deny their own complexity and, in so doing, restrict their own freedom; for how can anyone be free, without an illimitable background? 


Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'Benjamin Franklin', Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2002). 

The original 1923 text is available online thanks to the University of Virginia and can be accessed by clicking here.

Readers interested in the theory of intersectionality as conceived by Kimberlé Crenshaw and in how it's currently used - and misused - within contemporary debate, might like to read Eleanor Robertson's article 'Intersectional-what? Feminism's problem with jargon is that any idiot can pick it up and have a go', in The Guardian, (30 Sept 2017): click here

I realise, of course, that I would probably be one of the idiots that Robertson refers to; i.e. one who has appropriated a term without really caring about its origin, or showing due fidelity to its original meaning. 


20 Nov 2017

Becoming-Other (Part 2): Alien Sympathy and the Poetic Imagination (With Reference to the Work of D. H. Lawrence)

Marc-Édouard Nabe: Lawrence sauvage (2009)


In an essay entitled 'On Being a Man', Lawrence argues that it's very easy to know and to understand the other person as a person, but not so easy to know and to understand them as an impersonal Other who exists as a force of pure alterity and as an actual being in the world, independently of one's self.

For this requires what he calls a thought-adventure - an instinctive-intuitive process that starts in the blood and not in the mind and involves the taking of a double risk: "First, [one] must go forth and meet life in the body. Then [one] must face the result in [one's] mind."

To illustrate what he means, Lawrence asks us to imagine him sitting on a train. A stranger enters the compartment and is instantly recognizable as a white, middle-class, middle-aged, Englishman. With just a quick glance, says Lawrence, he can tell a great deal. The strangeness of the stranger - and thus the adventure of knowing him - is therefore strictly limited.

But what if the stranger is none of the above; what if, for example, they belong to a different race? Then, says Lawrence, he is unable to proceed quite so confidently with his characterization of the stranger:

"It is not enough for me to glance at a black face and say: He is a negro. As he sits next to me, there is a faint uneasy movement in my blood. A strange vibration comes from him, which causes a slight disturbance in my own vibration. There is a slight odour in my nostrils. And above all, even if I shut my eyes, there is a strange presence in contact with me.
      I now can no longer proceed from what I am and what I know I am, to what I know him to be. I am not a nigger and so I can't quite know a nigger, and I can never fully 'understand' him. 
      What then? It's an impasse.
      Then, I have three courses open. I can just plank down the word Nigger, and having labelled him, finished with him! Or I can try to track him down in terms of my own knowledge. That is, understand him as I understand any other individual. 
      Or I can do a third thing. I can admit that my blood is disturbed, that something comes from him and interferes with my normal vibration. Admitting so much, I can either put up a resistance, and insulate myself. Or I can allow the disturbance to continue, because, after all, there is some peculiar alien sympathy between us."

When it comes to the question of race relations, this, I think, is an absolutely crucial passage. If we wish to overcome common prejudice and the urge to stereotype, then, like Lawrence, we must allow our sense of self to be disrupted by the otherness of the Other and admit the peculiar alien sympathy between us.

This doesn't mean cultural appropriation, wearing black face, and pretending we are all one and the same under the skin, as idealists such as Boglarka Balogh pretend when they posit an ahistorical model of Humanity. It means, rather, exercising our poetic sensibility - as Lawrence exercises in an extraordinary verse found in Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923), in which he effects a becoming-negroid beneath the radiation of a dark, tropical sun:


Behold my hair twisting and going black.
Behold my eyes turn tawny yellow
Negroid;
See the milk of northern spume
Coagulating in my veins
Aromatic as frankincense.


The mistake that Balogh makes is that instead of peculiar alien sympathy, she substitutes an ideal form of moral sympathy that is rooted in her own ego. In other words, whilst she genuinely feels very sorry for people who are less privileged than herself, she lacks the ability to feel with them or be radically altered by the otherness of others. She can only see her own smiling face reflected in everyone and everything.

Ultimately, black people don't want white people to love them; for it's not a question of eros. And they don't care if white people fail to understand them; for neither is it a question of logos. They simply want a little respect and to be accorded what's proper to them as men and women; in other words, racial ethics is a question of thymos


Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'On Being a Man', Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 214-15. 

D. H. Lawrence, 'Tropic', Birds, Beasts and Flowers, (1923). This poem can be read in full online by clicking here.

Those interested in Lawrence's important concept of sympathy might like to see the essay on Walt Whitman in Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), in which he critiques the idea of merging into One Identity and exposes the danger of confusing sympathy with the Christian ideals of love and charity. The passage concerning the right conduct of a white poet with regard to a negro slave, obviously has particular relevance to our discussion above. Click here to read online.

To read part one of this post on the case of Boglarka Balogh, click here.