Photo by Anna Shvets from Pexels
By Laurel Daze, Edited by Ashley Chin & Danan Lee
“Let’s begin with a round of self-introductions.”
“Hi everyone, my name is Brendan[mfn referencenumber=*]fictional persona[/mfn]. I am from Singapore, and I’m a fourth-year Econs major. I go by he/him/his pronouns.”
“Ok, right, I’m Wei[mfn referencenumber=*]fictional persona[/mfn]. I go by she/her pronouns. I’m from China. Global Affairs major. That’s about it; nothing else really worth mentioning. I’m very excited to learn more about …”
The named are made subjects, becoming legible and identifiable by the coordinates of age, gender, nationality, etc. Each of these attributes confers a substantive concreteness to the individual: Brendan is the bearer of Brendan-ness, which consists of his fourth-year-ness, his Econs-ness, his Singaporean-ness, and his gendered persona, as denoted by pronouns of he, him, and his. Similarly, Wei possesses she/her/hers-ness, Global Affairs major-ness, Chinese-ness—whatever these attributes may mean to their interlocutors. Through these ritualistic invocations typical of self-introductions, participants make their “selves” knowable, the “reality” of one”s particularity is rendered visible with reference to culturally recognizable matrices of identity.
We might say that these substantive attributes and qualities make up a person, our diction in everyday parlance seemingly suggesting that personhood is reducible (or at least triangulable) to these coordinates. It is no surprise that in campuses like Yale-NUS College where students are routinely reminded—nay, commissioned—to “be themselves” and “discover themselves”, the idea of being true and authentic to oneself reigns supreme. The self, as imagined in these discursive environments, is coherent, unitary, possessing some kind of inner “truth” or essence of being. Corollary to this construction of “identity”, as well as the diversity of the student body, is the emergence of identity collectives[mfn]Yale-NUS students can formally register identity collectives under the Intercultural Engagement wing of the Student Affairs Office, receiving dedicated spaces and resources. Some formal identity collectives on campus include the InBetweeners (for self-identified low-income or first generation students), Women of Color Collective, and the ADHD collective (for neurodivergent students with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder).[/mfn]—spaces for individuals “of a shared identity to come together to support and hold space for one another through intentional community”YaleNUSCollege. “Identity Collectives.” Accessed June 10, 2021. https://studentlife.yale-nus.edu.sg/intercultural-engagement/identity-collectives/., to “build a community of solidarity and talk to each other as we heal, dismantle power, oppression and privilege, and engage in a committed process of collective liberation”YaleNUSCollege. “Identity Collectives.” Accessed June 10, 2021. https://studentlife.yale-nus.edu.sg/intercultural-engagement/identity-collectives/..
So the institution says. Yet when it comes down to it, are identity collectives really living up to the promise endorsed and envisaged by the college administration? Do they really “dismantle power, oppression, and privilege”? Sure, identity collectives are important, but when the rubber meets the road—consider what had happened to the petition by the Yale-NUS Class of 2021 to disinvite Mdm. Kay Kuok as its Graduation’s Presiding Officer due to her alleged commercial ties to Myanmar’s Tatmadaw—fancy words like “solidarity”, “accountability”, “collective liberation” (HA!) are just that—fancy words. My quarrel with identity collectives, however, is not that they must yield to the often paternalistic, sometimes derogatory and patronizing institution that keeps the lights on—almost all universities these days are dominated and controlled by private financial interests. The issue, rather, is that identity—from the Latin idem meaning “the same”—is riven with internal inconsistencies, ethical and political conundrums, and makes for a poor starting point for “collective liberation” (if we take this aspiration in earnest). In the following discussion, I will highlight some problems with “identity” discourse in universities like Yale-NUS (speaking, of course, from personal experience) and propose a shift in the language of ontology and practice of politics.
The issue, rather, is that identity—from the Latin idem meaning “the same”—is riven with internal inconsistencies, ethical and political conundrums, and makes for a poor starting point for “collective liberation” (if we take this aspiration in earnest).
The Trouble with Identitarian Reason
My modest proposal is that we jettison “identity”, and move towards articulating and practicing a politics of multiplicity, indeterminacy, and singular-plural being. I focus here on the issue of gender, specifically on the (mis)use of gender pronouns, and offer a new ontological footing for a politics of “strategic obfuscation” which aims to disrupt hegemonic gender and sexual taxonomies. Simply, this essay calls for a collective adoption of “them” pronouns in a post-genderist, post-identitarian spirit of deprivileging sameness and interpersonal difference. It offers a Deleuzian and Nancian critique (to be explained below) of self and being, and, by extension, a politics of illegibility, imperceptibility, indeterminacy.
Of course, I acknowledge that gender recognition, for some more than certain others (myself, for instance), is an everyday battleground for dignity and recognition. But these uneven topographies of recognition appear to have motivated the reproduction and reification of hierarchized entitlement and differentiated “response-ability”: some (having certain substantive qualities that others do not) are deemed more deserving than others of speaking about such issues, their opinions, under the aegis of fetishized “lived experience”, unfailingly valid. Meanwhile, the enfranchised (cisgender individuals, for instance)—those whose identities pass unmarked—are expected to stay in their lanes and keep quiet.
The slide into exclusionary subjectivism, to be sure, has little to do with the (mis)use of gender pronouns, but follows from the specious essentialism necessarily embedded in identitarian claims. What might otherwise have been “I am really this person” or “I am really a person” is lost to “I am really this kind of person” and “I am really part of this kind or group.” Such identitarian claims establish the foundation for an unyielding and ossified (mis)understanding of social reality, as though one’s attributes really, totally, directly translate into and overdetermine, one’s place in the (hostile) external world. By reiterating the restrictive and rigid moral organization of subjects endemic to modernity, the identitarian logic distributes membership cards according to its own geographies of subalternity.
To be very clear, I do not question the social and affective importance of identity collectives. My critique is directed at its political (dis)utility. This is evident in the fragmentary inarticulacy in the social field with the proliferation of sectional silos and identity bunkers (disproportionately on campuses), which insist that the prerogative to speech, to action must take place only on their terms and on their turf. Sadly, such defensive posturing comes at a time where broad-based alliances are needed.
One might refute such a claim, perhaps pointing to the popularity of “intersectionality” as a herald of greater (“woker”) political consciousness, of a mustering of political will to reach across aisles. But like “democracy” in the U.S. and “socialism” in China, the word is quickly becoming a form of ideological mystification that means everything and nothing. And even if it were to mean something, “intersectionality” has only served, as evident in its discursive instantiations today, to extend the logic of essentialization. More than a vogueish concept of academic purchase, “intersectionality” is a badge of honor that “peripheral subjects” pin on their lapels: the greater the possession of substantive marginality (being a woman, being a person of color, being differently abled, so forth), the greater the social esteem and deservedness (and pleasure, as Zizek argues) within these “counterhegemonic” ideological circuits. Quantifiable, standardizable gradations of subalternity emerge to determine hierarchies of qualification. Who said we’re post-modern?
The greater irony inherent in identitarian reason is that it relives—and seeks to relive—its own nightmare, for its legitimacy and coherence are dependent on the continual reference to and maintenance of its victimhood. In States of Injury, Brown introduces us to the concept of “wounded attachments”Brown, Wendy. “Wounded Attachments.” Political Theory 21, no. 3 (August 1993): 390–410. https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591793021003003., disclosing the jouissance of ressentiment[mfn]Jouissance (French for “enjoyment” or “pleasure”) is a psychoanalytic concept first introduced by Jacques Lacan. Ressentiment (French for “resentment”) was first conceptualised by Friedrich Nietzsche, and is a hostility felt by the “slave” type from being slighted. Importantly, “ressentiment is directed not at what the ‘slave’ type covets for itself … but at what it wishes for the other not to have and enjoy.”Protevi, John, ed. The Edinburgh Dictionary of Continental Philosophy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 2005. The jouissance of ressentiment is therefore the “joy” of “hostility”: the gatekeeper derives joy from preventing the other from claiming the identity.[/mfn]unacknowledged by identitarian apologists. The suffering is real, no doubt, but it is also constantly brought to bear on its subjects, endlessly recalled, renewed, and made more-than-real. The suffering sustains the collective, and the collective, in turn, nurses (paradoxically, in both senses of the term) its wounds. Let me quote Brown at length:
The will that “took to hurting” in its own impotence against its past becomes […] a will that makes not only a psychological but a political practice of revenge, a practice that reiterates the existence of an identity whose present past is one of insistently unredeemable injury. This past cannot be redeemed unless the identity ceases to be invested in it, and it cannot cease to be invested in it without giving up its identity as such, thus giving up its economy of avenging and at the same time perpetuating its hurt—”when he then stills the pain of the wound he at the same time infects the wound“.Brown, Wendy. States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1995.
Wendy Brown
If the leitmotif of (capitalist) modernity is, as Zygmunt Bauman argues, classificationBauman, Zygmunt. Modernity and the Holocaust. Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 2000., one must ask: would not the fostering of identities effectively support the work of the modern state? Are these identity collectives then volunteering themselves for examination, making themselves bureaucratically legible to the modern state[mfn]See Brown’s discussion of disciplinary societies on pp. 64-66 of States of InjuryBrown, Wendy. States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1995..[/mfn], its institutions, and the system of capital? Even where identity politics successively deploy Spivak’s “strategic essentialism”[mfn]”Strategic essentialism” refers to a tactical creation of a group/collective, and a corresponding downplaying of differences within said group in the interest of unity when pressing for suffrage and recognition.Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, Donna Landry, and Gerald M. MacLean. The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. New York: Routledge, 1996.[/mfn], we should attend to the fact that the discursive production of identities often prove useful in justifying and promoting consumerism and post-Fordist formulations of labor[mfn]Consider, for instance, hustle culture and its hydra-like identitarian normativities. It is also not without a sense of the tragicomic that we should be lectured on the importance of standing up for anti-racism by Nike—the same Nike that faces allegations of workplace racism, the same Nike that ruthlessly exploits cheap labor (often, obviously, people of color) all over the world. Identity politics makes woke-washing and woke capitalism all too easy. The problem, of course, is that it often stymies the impetus for a critique of capital.[/mfn]. These co-optations and co-articulations are ethically problematic, because they lend support to regimes of capital, systems predicated on alienation, domination, and unfreedom, systems that create those marginalities that lend force to identity collectives in the first place. (The promotion of corporate feminism by “Women in Business” in Yale-NUS, for instance, almost discounts—or conveniently forgets—the manifold structural oppressions enacted on women by capital. Moreover, it is not uncommon, and not at all surprising either, to find Career Services offices in neoliberal education institutions exploiting the language of identity to market jobs in ethically compromised industries like finance and consultancy.)
Even if we were to discount the gravity of these challenges and dilemmas, a fundamental contradiction remains: identities—if they are to remain identities—must either banish or trivialize differences to maintain their idealized concepts of “self”. Identity politics tend towards particularism; certain voices—perhaps by sheer numerical advantage—enjoy privileged representation, shaping the political agenda in ways that aggravate harms on the already unseen and unheard. Consider, for one, the fractious history of feminism(s)[mfn]Feminist thought has historically been separated into different “waves”, each responding to and/or attacking predecessors: First Wave Feminists like Mary Wollstonecraft argued for the education of womenWollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Unabridged. Dover Thrift Editions. Mineola, N.Y: Dover Publications, 1996., implicating the gender binary. But Second Wave Feminist Simone de Beauvoir would question, “what is a woman?” and introduce the idea that “one is not born, but rather becomes a woman”Beauvoir, Simone de, Constance Capisto-Borde, and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier. The Second Sex. First Vintage Books ed. New York: Vintage Books, 2011..[/mfn], its internecine moral-ideological conflicts, and the abortive efforts made to harmonize feminist claims, interests, and demands. Consider also the relevance (if not dominance) of “wrong body” narratives in motivating legal provisions and biopolitical interventions for trans people, effectively leaving out and speaking over sizeable populations of genderqueer[mfn]Genderqueer, sometimes used interchangeably with non-binary, refers to subjectivities which may not align with heterosexual or homosexual norms.[/mfn] individuals who do not or need not understand their selves in terms of a body-self/ body-mind disjunction.
Important and effective as they are in promoting the interests of marginalized peoples or in providing emotional salves for the violence they face daily, identity collectives are structurally undermined by the strength of their political aspirations. As explained by sociocultural anthropologist Gerald Creed, the idea of a “community” or “collective” is:
like a monster that will not be controlled: energized by progressive political goals, its dangerous side emerges to strange the unit(y) it was animated to support/foster. The Janus face of romance is gothic horror. Calling yourself a community and trafficking in the assumptions that are implied risks a subsequent exposure to those very assumptions, which is especially problematic when they are romantic ideals that can never be met.Creed, Gerald W., ed. The Seductions of Community: Emancipations, Oppressions, Quandaries. 1st ed. School of American Research Advanced Seminar Series. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 2006.
Gerald Creed
As an idealized self-same us-ness, identity demands a celebration of their distinctiveness. But its boosters, vaguely aware that “it takes all of us” to effect change, utter in the same breath that “we (now predicating a universal) are more alike than different.” At its heart are two irreconcilable tendencies: the first an instinctual defense of particularism (to be alike in collective distinctiveness) and the second an aspiration towards universalism (to see in the other one’s own likeness). In practice, as Alain Badiou warns us, the identitarian, however well-meaning, is ill-equipped to make their journey towards universalism: “this celebrated ‘other’ is acceptable only if he is a good other—which is to say what, exactly, if not the same as us? Respect for differences, of course! But on condition that the different be parliamentary-democratic, pro-free-market economics, in favor of freedom of opinion, feminism, the environment…”Badiou, Alain. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. Radical Thinkers. London ; New York: Verso, 2012..
Down with the Cis-tem
The point here is not that we should resolutely militate against any semblance of a coherent self, to forcefully transcend the “thrownness” [Heidegger’s Geworfenheit] of social existence. Rather than prescribing a way of “being”, I merely suggest that we speak in a new key and frame our political demands with tools from a different ontological apparatus, one more capacious and more trustworthy than the seductive “identity”. The position I take approximates gender abolitionism, which, to echo the cyberfeminists of subRosa, does not denounce or seek the eradication of gendered sympathies and ways of being, but only the “cis-tem” which continually imposes new restrictions on gendered becomings. The resultant political agenda may nonetheless speak to areas outside of gender, precisely because it deterritorializes what “selfhood” and “individuality” means. The goal here is not to suggest that everyone becomes ungendered (an impossible task in itself), but to make “gender laughable and obsolete in its frigidity and instrumentality”subRosa. 2005. “Useless Gender: An Immodest Proposal for Radical Justice,” in Yes Species. Chicago: Sabrosa Books, its utility as a vector of enduring signification inconsequential. Is it not a better world for all if nobody should find themselves compelled to defensively affirm one’s own existence along identitarian axes?
The goal here is not to suggest that everyone becomes ungendered (an impossible task in itself), but to make “gender laughable and obsolete in its frigidity and instrumentality”subRosa. 2005. “Useless Gender: An Immodest Proposal for Radical Justice,” in Yes Species. Chicago: Sabrosa Books, its utility as a vector of enduring signification inconsequential.
This world will not be inaugurated by banging at the gates of the “cis-tem”—even if “entry” (authorization and recognition) were granted, the grammar of classificatory legibility remains intact. The objective, therefore, would not be to expand the domain of legibility, to interpolate (and interpellate) oneself into liberal modernity—either through supplications or remonstrations—but to interrupt its processes, to introduce frictions to its planes of consistency, to make the legible illegible, the recognizable unrecognizable. In the context of gender identifications, the deliberate appropriation of the plural “them” to describe the ostensibly singular self may be one such act that throws a wrench in the well-oiled moral machinery of simple, unitary, and unchanging identity categories. Of note, however, is that “they” does not demand gender non-conformity or disidentification from the hegemonic gender binary—this is NOT a call to embody or perform “queerness” as a political project. In fact, conform, if you will, be as feminine or masculine as it is generally expected of you, for it is precisely the disjuncture between the visible embodiment of gender conformity (“ordinariness”, “normality”) and the disclosed plurality of they-ness that throws the cis-inquisitors into a tailspin.
No doubt, to refer to oneself by the plural “they” is but a small act of resistance, one without an imaginable “world-historical revolutionary potential”. Nonetheless, it presents, on one hand, new possibilities to destabilize the “commonsensical”, mark the unmarked, upset the “neutral zones” of hegemonic determinations, and on the other, new semantic openings to overcome the praxeological cul-de-sacs of “identity”. No, it can’t overthrow the cis-tem—not even close—but it may open doors and build bridges which are necessary for a truly trans-identitarian collective political struggle.
The use of “they” as a pronoun has often yielded expressions of outrage, anxiety, and frustration. Why, “purists” bemoan, should anyone be allowed to upset the sacred laws of English grammar? Why can’t we just “show empathy” (in other ways, of course) and “get along”? Why can’t we “stick to our own beliefs” and “address you in our own ways”? (Such displays of microfascism, adapted from comments found on Facebook, lend new meaning to the label “grammar Nazis”, especially since their intransigence about grammatical integrity is often but an excuse for intolerance.) One should not be surprised to find the ensuing debates going nowhere – irrespective of the arguments presented, the purist asseveration that “they” is strictly reserved to denote plurality remains.
To propose, as I do, that we should adopt “they” more widely, if not universally, especially where we do not or may not consider ourselves non-binary/ genderqueer, gestures towards disturbing the sedimented sensibilities and received notions about gender, identity, and towards questioning the very essence and integrity of “subject”. It asks, through the disjuncture between singular and plural forms, “Who are you, really?” In other words, the preferred approach of this proposal is not to defensively explain (and so discourage) the violence of misrecognition, but to launch an existential offensive which dissolves the unity of the interlocutor’s sense of self, to subject ordinary ideas of selfhood to interrogation and reveal its irreducible pluralities. It asks, “What does “you” posit? What makes you “you”? What is the totality of “you”?”
While “they” typically indexes the fluidity of gender (un)becoming and (dis)identification, the term might be taken further and extended to other domains of claims-making so as to de-ontologize and de-privilege the agentic subject altogether. “They” is multiply multiple, speaking to the variably overlapping ways of fluidity, to the constancy of change and contingency. “They” is conceivably transgressive: it refuses to be entextualized as a particular person, a particular way of being, or a particular type; it thumbs its nose at the assumptions and conventions of liberal humanism. In disrupting the everyday world of he’s and she’s, in interrupting the primordial rhythms of “Nature” and “Providence” and what-have-you, “they” asks with Donna Haraway, “Why should our bodies end at the skin, or include at best other beings encapsulated by skin?”Haraway, Donna Jeanne. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991. The discrete other, the singular-plural interlocutor, meets us not with an ethical demand (to recognize him/her/them as such), but a question: “Am I—all that I am, was, and could be—all that you see?”
“They”, therefore, designates indeterminacy and multiplicity, a “something” beyond the field of visibility and intelligibility. In this ontological register, we are assemblages, ceaselessly shifting constellations of endlessly differentiating elements. Against the commonplace notion of the self as a bounded whole, the Deleuzian “they” emphasizes affective flows, the networked relations and connections that assemble, disassemble, and reassemble assemblages[mfn]Assemblage is a concept popularized by Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, referring to groupings of different and diverse constituent elements (an assembly-ing of entities). A rhizome is a type of assemblage with lateral connection: each element is not only interconnected and interactive, but there is no hierarchy between elements.Protevi, John, ed. The Edinburgh Dictionary of Continental Philosophy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 2005.[/mfn]. This recognition, not of one’s absolute and concrete singularity, but of mutability, flux, unforeseeable becoming, accommodates various “lines of flight”: in our mutable relations to “gender-machines”, we may at times escape the limits of gendered imaginaries and at others blend into them, but we are always on the move, always becoming multiple, always resisting the fossilizing power of identitarian reification. “They”, in its very syntactical violation and its intimation of radical unknowability, declares a revolt against the tyranny of propriety and legibility. More importantly, it affirms creative freedoms, positive intensities, and fluid subjectivities—there is no real or meaningful sense of “self”, except, perhaps, in its always-becoming—without falling for the restrictive lexicon of authenticity and identity.
“They” as “being-with”
Complementarily, the term “they” might also be construed as a suggestion of Jean-Luc Nancy’s “being-with”. In contrast to the identitarian community which is always only a fantasy and which enacts a communitarian violence that carves out and enforces domains of similarity, the “they” that posits multiplicity and self-differentiating imperceptibility rejects any substantial notion of togetherness (e.g., sharing and being defined by certain gendered attributes and life-histories) and emphasizes “with” in “being-with”. As Nancy puts it, “‘Being’ doesn’t come first. Being-with is modified by ‘with’ … the ‘with’ is not simply an addition”Nancy, Jean-Luc. Being Singular Plural. Meridian, Crossing Aesthetics. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2000., for, according to Nancy, it is impossible to conceive of the singular without recognizing its separation from, and connection to, other singularities. The singular is inescapably joined to the plural, and is plural; singular and plural are co-constitutive. “They” seems apt for communicating this essential relation: “The singular is primarily each one and, therefore, also with and among all the others”Nancy, Jean-Luc. Being Singular Plural. Meridian, Crossing Aesthetics. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2000.. Like Deleuze’s rhizome and assemblage, Nancy’s theory of being-with sees exposure and relation as being always contextual, “trembling, mobile, and fleeting”, never decided a priori or in the abstract.
Understood in the Nancian frame, we share a common being insofar as we are together in being incommensurably singular: we are “just as singular as every other.” In turn, a different politics of relation is possible, which Zizek describes rather persuasively in an analogous argument (about solidarity with migrants):
The point is thus not to recognize ourselves in strangers, not to gloat in the comforting falsity that “they are like us”, but to recognize a stranger in ourselves […] Communitarianism is not enough: a recognition that we are all, each in our own way, weird lunatics provides the only hope for a tolerable co-existence of different ways of life […] If we want universal solidarity, we have to become universal in ourselves, relate to ourselves as universal by acquiring a distance towards our life-world. Hard and painful work is needed to achieve this, not just sentimental ruminations about migrants as a new form of “nomadic proletariat”.Žižek, Slavoj. The Courage of Hopelessness: Chronicles of a Year of Acting Dangerously. UK: Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Books, 2017.
Slavoj Zizek
“They” achieves or has the potential of achieving many things, but chief among which is its practical political capacity of actualizing the glitch that is always already present in discursive arenas claimed by “identity”, arenas which militate against open-ended fluidity and sheer multiplicity. The above—a brief exploration of Deleuzian and Nancian critiques and reformulations of being—furnishes a possible onto-poetics to a modest, but nonetheless possibly controversial and detestable, proposal. But if we desire the reassembly of gender machines (and other identity machines), is it not incumbent on us all—us strangers-in-ourselves, us strangers-in-unison, us singular-plural beings—to confound and disrupt (gendered) regimes of perceptibility and intelligibility, regimes foundational to structures and operations of governability and domination? The point then is not to dig in our heels and insist that we are so-and-so or such-and-such, but to suggest that we—all of us—are nobody, one in being no one.