Identity versus Subjectivity

The realisation that "we all have multiple identities" at some point in one's scholarly and personal development promises a lot but delivers little. Faced with a global political context in which serious cases of violence and inequality operate along the axis of "identity," and in which exclusivist claims acquire the negative epithet of "identity politics," a recourse to a more indeterminate notion of the self can point the way "out" to a more tolerant, pluralist and cosmopolitan path. Unfortunately, several unhelpful conflations between terms are thrown up in the process, obscuring the dynamics of the lived experience of recognition.

One distinction has been helpfully framed by Dipesh Chakrabarty as identity vs. identification. His critique of Amartya Sen's Identity and Violence shows that the assumption that recognising "multiple, contextual identities" can prevent sectarian violence is misguided because what counts is, in fact, "the external and surface signs by which I or others might identify myself as a member of a particular group: my skull cap, my turban, my beard, my name, my clothes, my circumcised or uncircumcised penis." Thus, during the Gujarat riots Muslims would conceal their real names, and Hindu shopkeepers would take care to paint images of Hindu gods on their storefronts to avoid being targeted. While the "complex sense of identity" that marked their "normal everyday life" did not disappear, it became less relevant than the largely symbolic conventions of identification.
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/section?content=a918280932&fulltext=713240928 [in South Asian History and Culture, Vol. 1, Issue 1 (January 2010): 149-154]

Chakrabarty's argument is welcome, but it understates the particularised nature of the identity discussion itself. When we speak of identity, we have been led to speak exclusively of an elective affinity. I am Indian because I say I am, but I am also a Sikh, schoolteacher, city-dweller, parent, and so on. In fact, only some of these "identities" merit the name. Whether we like it or not, there is something immutable about identity that all the multi-culti well-wishing in the world cannot make go away. Chakrabarty and Sen would both refuse to acknowledge the dark secret that what makes a Muslim a Muslim, much like what made a Jew a Jew, is not just an uncircumcised penis as a "sign" or an assumption of the name. An entire history, place-based and kinship-based, made one known as a Muslim or Jew. Escaping this complex of material and symbolic factors entails either a radical and never-quite-possible displacement (moving far away where one's new neighbours don't know you or your relatives, and carry no prejudices to boot), or a multi-generational process of re-signification. Of course I am not claiming that identities are stable, and that people take on the attributes of the natural communities into which they are born. But moving from one identity to another is hard work in the real world, and may never be complete. Presumed alterities (being a Jew or Muslim "within" the "body of a nation"), once configured, persist through time.

Moments of crisis like 1947, 1984 or 2002 expose the impossibility of simply assuming the identity one likes. A Muslim hacked to death cannot appeal to "also being a schoolteacher and a father" to save his life. This is Chakrabarty's point. But my explanation for this phenomenon would be that "schoolteacher" is less of an identity than a subjectivity. Most of the categories by which we identify ourselves and recognise others share the common characteristic of being more amenable to being "worked on." I make myself, rather than am, a schoolteacher -- through repetition of certain meaning-making activities. To an extent, this is Foucault's point about categories like "homosexual" (the result of distinct ethical projects), and it can be applied to religion (Saba Mahmood thinks Muslim-ness works this way, through cultivation of the self). I am not claiming that identity and subjectivity are hermetically sealed concepts; they do lie on a continuum and sometimes a category can fall under one or the other. But I do maintain that those categories which are the least malleable and the more susceptible to being "coded" in the signs of identification proposed by Chakrabarty should be seen as more identity than subjectivity. This also means that, for a pluralistic and tolerant future, we need to start thinking in general about subjectivity more than about identity.

In my own case, my identity can be approximated as something like, a Romanian (with some mixed ancestry) child of professionals from Bucharest. This can be dispelled only with great difficulty. My name, my life history, and my education all conspire against easy adoption of other identities -- American, Indian, rural (should I choose to live in a village), labouring (should I choose to start working with my hands). However, being a graduate student, an intellectual, someone interested in Indian history -- all these things are subjectivities, which I carefully work on every day. They are less open to being challenged, but also less politically powerful. When I am concerned with the security and mobility of my person, nationality and class background come into play. This is partly why I would prefer to bypass the reduction of debates about forms of being and belonging to the terrain of identity, and to refuse both its privileges and challenges.

The Lesson of Gujarat, or How to Talk about Events

That the recent tragedy at Fort Hood should raise the spectre of anti-Muslim hysteria in the U.S. is by now commonplace. But the real stakes of the debate, namely the precise consequences of a certain way of thinking about events and their repercussions, are obscured by placing the focus of the debate around "how much Islam has to do with it." Framing the shootings of U.S. servicemen by this individual Hasan in the language of "terrorism" or "Islamic fundamentalism" is undoubtedly problematic. But to respond, those of us who wish to re-frame the issue are inevitably forced into a kind of obscurantist cul-de-sac that allows no discussion of Islam or Muslims whatsoever: that this is an isolated act of a "mentally unstable" person, that religion has "nothing to do with it." What we grapple with, in essence, is the singularity of the act and its relationality to a wider field of discourses, or ways of talking about things (in this case, Islam and Muslims).

Here is what I mean: whenever such events occur and are disseminated through the media, as they inevitably will in our globalised age, we should avoid the temptation of seeing them as exceptions, as acts that stand alone in the world, infinitely contingent. Instead, we should accept from the start that they will immediately feed into a vast discursive terrain of things being said, worked out and worked over, about macro-categories we are uncomfortable with, yet ignore at our peril. We should follow this event through the discursive terrain and see where it lands, and thus make visible the consequences of its particular path. The relational consequences of singular events are often so jarring that they might yet enable many (with the exception of those who are willing to pay the price), to look at the terrain anew and be made aware of the treacherous channels through which information travels and is re-directed, of how events acquire meanings.

I will use the example of the 2002 Gujarat massacres to make my point. Here, a much-disputed and yet very "real" event, the burning of 58 Hindus in a train coach in Godhra, happened in all its garish and horrifying singularity. Whether it was deliberate arson by a mob or something else, whether the categories of Hindu victims and Muslim attackers should be deconstructed, are all important yet tangential issues. Trying to disentagle religion and politics, local contexts and broad phenomena etc. etc. from the charred remains of this event, though ethical and honest in a scholarly sense, is mere impotence in the face of what happened next, when as many as 2,000 Muslims were massacred while the state not only stood by, but actively aided and encouraged the violence. A confrontation between certain individuals at a certain point in time was a spark to a fire that burned along the axes of Big categories, "Hindu" and "Muslim," all across Gujarat. In Amitav Ghosh's novel The Shadow Lines, the traumatic riots in Calcutta and Dhaka of 1964, which so decisively shape the characters' lives, can be traced back to an incident in far-away Kashmir over a stolen relic. Singular events become relational to contexts far distant in time and place. If we have a truly political, indeed moral, task in our complicated world, where information travels at once faster and more insidiously than ever, it is to break the links that are formed in this way.

What would it mean to think of Godhra, minutes or hours after it happened, with the bodies of 2,000 innocent people in mind? What would it mean to follow the contention that an individual Hasan stands in for a "Muslim problem" that must be faced, to its logical conclusion, to a widespread and concerted effort by individuals and the state to "deal" with it? The consequences of thousands of lives lost when so many minds are fixed (or being fixated) onto a category, in this case of the problematic Muslim that must be dealt with, are not worth the mental leap. There are those who will say that such violence is the inevitable result, or collateral damage, of whichever side they think is to blame acting wrongly. Yes, 2,000 Muslims died, but that's because they started it. This is, I would hope, only a small minority of those who are engaged in the conversation. The task for scholars, activists, and all of us concerned about these issues is to show that the price to pay, of creating a climate for civil violence, is far more de-stabilising to the security and internal peace of communities than a singular act unavenged, or a problematic category not properly dealt with. This is especially true in the United States, where the potential for reprisals is always high yet, with almost no exceptions, since September 11th no serious and sustained civil violence has occurred. India's lessons, from the Sikh massacres of 1984 to Gujarat and on, are vital in this regard. Communal bloodshed on general lines, visited upon individuals whose only connection to singular events from another place and time lies in the relation with those events constructed in people's minds, is a price too steep to ever pay. To suppress this urge to relate the singular, to think of unrealised consequences instead of the real and visceral event that has just happened, is admittedly difficult but it is also urgent.