ABSTRACT
In her monograph Identification Papers, Diana Fuss (1995) puts the question precisely: “What … is political about identification? What role does identification play in the world of social interaction we call politics?” (p. 8). In an incisive introduction she spells out the promise and pitfalls of attempting to harness the power of identification for politics. On the one hand, identification with the struggle of oppressed or exploited groups has provided the basis for coalition building, which (contra the assumption of identity politics, that only those who have directly experienced a particular form of oppression can effectively fight against it) has arguably been responsible for whatever successes have been achieved by movements for the civil rights of women and minorities. For instance, in the summer of 2008 supporters of Barack Obama took to wearing t-shirts announcing “My middle name is Hussein” in an effort to counter the Islamophobic baiting of the candidate. These individuals could be seen to be trying to recover, even promote, a vilified identification with Islam from which the candidate had gone to some lengths to distance himself. Fuss cites other academics and activists, among them Barbara Harlow, Douglas Crimp, and Elin Diamond, who have placed political hopes in the fostering of identifications across lines of race, gender, sexuality, or citizenship. For instance, Crimp (1993) cites his experience in ACT UP to argue for the power of politically productive identifications to
be made across identities, as he notes the unpredictability with which such identifications are made:
A white, middle-class, HIV-negative lesbian might form an identification with a poor, black mother with AIDS, and through that identification might be inclined to work on pediatric health care issues; or, outraged by attention to the needs of babies at the expense of the needs of the women who bear them, she might decide to fight against clinical trials whose sole purpose is to examine the effects of an antiviral drug on perinatal transmission and thus ignores effects on the mother’s body. She might form an identification with a gay male friend with AIDS and work for faster testing of new treatments for opportunistic infections, but then, through her understanding that her friend would be able to afford such treatments while others would not, she might shift her attention to health care access issues. An HIV-positive, gay Latino might fight homophobia in the Latin community and racism in ACT UP. (pp. 316-317)
Nevertheless, grounding political hopes in the possibilities for expanded identifications has its limits. For one thing, there is the danger of succumbing to an overly voluntarist notion of identification, which after all is a largely unconscious process. Butler adds a further cautionary note, noting that any identification is assumed “through a set of constitutive and formative exclusions” (cited in Fuss, 1995, p. 9); any identification implies and includes disidentifications, those things that I am not. The potentially regressive political effects of such exclusions are evident, for example, in considering what is implied by identifying oneself as “an American,” as this designation implicitly defines one apart from and in a sense against all other “nationalities.” Finally, Fuss is attuned to the sense in which identification represents an appropriation of the other, noting that Freud’s very theorization of the concept took place in the historical context of colonialism, a colonialism that Freud as a subject of the Austro-Hungarian empire identified with (notwithstanding and in some important ways at odds with his Jewish identity; see Editor’s Introduction, this volume). She maintains that
every identification involves a degree of symbolic violence, a measure of temporary mastery and possession. … identification operates on one level as an endless process of violent negation, a process of killing off the other in fantasy in order to usurp the other’s place, a place where the subject desires to be. (Fuss, 1995, p. 9)
Noah Glassman (personal communication, November 2008) wonders whether this formulation of Fuss’s might contain an unintended appreciation
of Winnicott’s (1969) clinical concept of object usage, even as the aim or outcome appears to be somewhat different from what Winnicott had in mind. Where Fuss sees a desire to usurp the other’s place, Winnicott posits destruction of the (m)other in fantasy as a necessary step in the acceptance of the other’s independent existence and the creation of a shared sense of reality. This latter is to be regarded as a developmental achievement and a prerequisite to the ability to identify with another subject. Perhaps Fuss’s more malign rendering of the process reflects a disciplinary difference, reflecting the gap between the abiding concerns and preoccupations of cultural studies and clinical psychoanalysis.
