Identity Politics, Solidarity, and Judith Butler’s notion of the Body in “Mistaken Identity”

I just finished reading Asad Haider’s book Mistaken Identity and I want to use it as an excuse to work through a critique of Butler that I’d been trying to articulate elsewhere for a few months. So this isn’t quite a review of Haider’s book (which, incidentally I really liked) but instead a sort of expansion on one of the books major threads: namely, that the current discourse surrounding identity politics can be more productively reoriented toward some form of political solidarity, or what Haider terms “universalism.” It’s a basically good and productive goal, and I think it’s worth thinking about the theoretical feasibility of this move. Because, although Haider himself is much more directly interested in praxis, he justifies a lot of his argument on a notion of identity explicitly borrowed from Judith Butler, whose own theoretical work aims to pull off a similar translation from the precarity of individual identity toward some form of universal solidarity, the varying degrees of success of which serve as the occasion for the present writing.

So first a bit about Mistaken Identity itself: it’s book about identity politics and their function within both academic and activist discourse (as well as, implicitly, the trickledown from both of those discursive modes into online discourse). Haider helpfully traces the more explicitly socialist focus of the rhetoric for groups like the Combahee River Collective who were foundational in the development of what is now termed “identity politics,” and the gradual cooption of that rhetoric by people in positions of power (who, obviously, distance themselves from anything even remotely socialist leaning). In this way, he argues, identity politics has become sort of vague set of slogans divorced from specific political aims.

Throughout the book, Haider offers a helpful critique of identity politics without dismissing it out of hand (as seen in other recent critiques of identity politics like Angela Nagel’s Kill All Normies, which I’ll return to a little bit below). So while Mistaken Identity advocates for a class-focused socialism, the move here isn’t simply to say “class > race” but rather to argue that identity issues are both ends in and of themselves as well as a means toward a broader form of political solidarity, while simultaneously pointing out that identity-focused rhetoric can be disingenuously co-opted by people in positions of power to overemphasize the former at the expense of the latter. In this respect Haider follows fairly closely after Judith Butler, whose own work on gender and the “public dimension of the body” in books like Gender Trouble sort of inevitably (if somewhat awkwardly) gives way to a more global sense of identity (and the attendant forms of global solidarity and recognition) advocated for in her later work in Precarious Life and Frames of War.

In following Butler’s notion of relationally-emergent identity so closely, though, Haider ends up inheriting a lot of the same problems she runs into, and he doesn’t quite get into how tricky they are to resolve. So while for example the argument that intersectionally emergent identities ought to be leveraged to produce a kind of universal political solidarity works well as an aspiration (and, to be clear, I agree that this is a good goal for any serious leftist movement looking to mobilize all of this static energy presently engulfing our discourse on “identity”) the actual mechanics of that move are not at all obvious. In fact, Butler spends a lot of time trying to work this out for herself over the course of her writing: In her earlier work, Bulter’s “public dimension of the body” is implicitly a local one. Gender Trouble, for example, demonstrates how we perform our bodies in space on an ongoing basis, such that gender emerges as “the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame.” For Butler, “identity” is something that emerges relationally through performance: Other people see us performing this “set of repeated acts,” and that seeing informs both their understanding of who we are and, implicitly, their conduct toward us. This is a fairly localized conception of how identity emerges, and it lends itself well to a critique of microagressions and the kind of localized bits of interpersonal racism and sexism that many people are forced to put up with, but its less obvious at first glance how this is meant to produce meaningful kinds of social or political solidarity (nevermind solidarity on an international or even global scale). That is to say, if the emphasis is on performance (rather than relationality, or the cumulative effect of others’ perception of our own performance), discourse on “identity” tends to sort of atrophy: individuals become increasingly concerned with how their own performance is perceived by others, rather than how to build productive modes of relating to the world.

It’s on a fairly tenuous understanding of this conception of identity that Angela Nagel, for example, leverages her own critique of Butler, suggesting that microblogging platform Tumblr could be seen as “the subcultural digital expression of the fruition of Judith Butler’s ideas,” because it’s filled with “stories of young people explaining and discussing the entirely socially constructed nature of gender and [the] potentially limitless choice of genders that an individual can identify as or move between” (70). While I don’t think the writings of a handful of extremely online teens is necessarily the most useful or generous place to look for the “fruition” of Butler’s ideas, Nagel’s critique is instructive insofar as it begins to touch on how difficult it can be to usefully employ Butler’s emphasis on the performative nature identity in a context beyond these localized interactions with people, and toward something like Haider’s broader project of universality (which will necessarily require attention to people with whom we have very little localized engagement). A more substantive version of this critique is offered by Karen Barad in her book Meeting the Universe Halfway, which I’ll quote from here at length both because it indirectly refutes Nagel pretty nicely but also because it fleshes out the root of a problem that I think Nagel is actually reaching out for:

Butler cautions that this claim — that gender is performed — is not to be understood as a kind of theatrical performance conducted by a willful subject who would choose its gender. Such a misreading ironically reintroduces the liberal humanist subject onto the scene, thereby undercutting poststructuralism’s anti-humanism, which refuses the presumed givenness of the subject and seeks to attend to its production…However, despite these crucial elaborations, it is not all clear that Butler succeeds in bringing the discursive and the material into closer proximity. The gap that remains in Foucault’s theory [of discursive practices, which Butler herself leans on] seems to leave a question mark on Butler’s ability to spell out how it is that ‘the reiterative and citational power practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names’ can account for the matter of sexed bodies. Questions about the material nature of discursive practices seem to hang in the air like the persistent smile of the Cheshire cat (61–64)

To put that a little differently, Butler’s emphasis on performativity productively raises the relationally emergent nature of individual identity (which Nagel wholly misinterprets), but still places a premium on the performance or stylization of the body such that its actual materiality is figured as a sort of passive recipient of discursive inscription rather than an active constituent of the discourse itself. As a result, it’s not bodies themselves so much as the aggregate performative inscriptions imposed upon bodies that produces Butler’s conception of relational identity, which, as Barad describes, leaves a gap between the connotative power of a given performance and material conditions as such. In practical terms, this means that materiality in Butler’s account (i.e., both “material conditions” of a given class position in the Marxist sense as well as the actual bodies that iteratively constitute our society) is always mediated by performance, which inevitably leaves a kind of gap through which disingenuous actors can appropriate the discourse: Liberal commentators can obfuscate a more direct discussion of material conditions by rehashing the relative merits of various performative modes, policing language, etc. (phrases like “concern trolling” or, more to the point, “performative wokeness” gesture toward this kind of move).

This gap between performance and materiality is addressed somewhat indirectly in Butler’s later work, which moves to translate this same relationally emergent conception of identity onto a more global scale. In Frames of War, she ends up kind of hedging her earlier emphasis on performativity in discussing how identity emerges in a global context, arguing that “[the] differential distribution of precarity is at once a material and a perceptual issue, since those whose lives are not ‘regarded’ as potentially grievable, and hence valuable, are made to bear the burden or starvation, underemployment, legal disenfranchisement, and differential exposure to violence and death” (25). In this way, Butler seems to acknowledge the inherent blindspots of a discourse built on performativity, yet it remains unclear how, within her framing of identity, we can address materiality directly: actual human bodies are going to remain a kind of passive substance upon which performance is inscribed, whose status as ethically relevant becomes a function of some vast network of global perceptibility. It’s a problem of scale, with the implicit suggestion that some people are more relevant as global actors than others: In a global context, our romantic notion of the rights-bearing human is refracted into spectacle, human suffering is distilled into a potential catalyst for intervention, and actual material conditions become relevant only insofar as they can be perceived by (globally powerful) others.

Again, none of this is to suggest that Haider’s culminating gesture toward “universality” is misguided. It establishes a clear goal for leftists looking to engage with identity politics in a more productive way. What’s important, here, is to recognize what genuine Universality might actually entail. When Haider argues, for example, that “Universality does not exist in the abstract, as a prescriptive principle which is mechanically applied to indifferent circumstances. It is created and recreated in the act of insurgency, which does not demand emancipation solely for those who share my identity but for everyone; it says no one will be enslaved” (113), we ought to both recognize the usefulness on his emphasis on insurgent intervention on actual material conditions, but, simultaneously, raise the more complicated issue of what insurgency looks like outside of the well-worn conception of the humanitarian intervention offered by liberal humanism. If the project here is to move beyond the narrow conception of the rights-bearing, identity-wielding individual, we have to take seriously the idea that some other conception of the kinds of beings that iteratively populate the world will need to be described in its place.