Categorization and the charade of identity

In their post from last week, Bryan and Zach argue that the panoptic and the biopolitical, as the two complementary forms of power theorized by Foucault, are irreconcilably enmeshed in one another.  To me, this claim is not wildly contentious in and of itself—I’d argue that many of us, as critics, defer to Foucault on this point.  Further, though, Bryan and Zach argue against Nancy Armstrong and claim that “identity and … our relationship to the biopolitical and the panoptic” are not reducible to gender, race, class, or any other easily extricable heuristic of identification.  This may be true enough in an abstract sense—as commentators on Bryan and Zach’s post suggest, the formal constraints of chapters, articles, or blog posts are sometimes the primary or only reason (right or wrong) for isolating single vectors of identification for analysis.  But should we dismiss the notion that the “charade” of isolating identities can be critically productive?  This is a question we have grappled with previously:  what kind of longevity do fields like Chicano/a studies, African American studies, feminist and gender studies, or queer studies have (if “longevity” is an accurate barometer of critical value)?

Implicitly, Bryan and Zach raise a question that Jasbir Puar addresses within the realm of contemporary queer studies, namely, whether the stabilizing qualities of an intersectional analysis of identity (taken as a “standpoint epistemology”) preclude political and critical utility.  Of course it’s true that identities as such are capitalist-neoliberal fictions, but I would argue, alongside Puar, that there is no outside of identity (because, similarly, there is no outside of power or capital).  Our critical methods require revision when they treat identity as a means of naming difference, not when they use identity, charade though it may be, as a tool for interrogating subjection.  Puar, for example, at times advocates Deleuzean assemblage in place of intersectionality, noting that assemblage theory conceives of “[c]ategories—race, gender, sexuality— … as events, actions, and encounters between bodies, rather than as simply entities and attributes of subjects.”  These categories are constantly in flux and in re/negotiation, not in a performative sense, but in the sense that a single subject’s gendering, for instance, is neither constant nor generalizable.  The biopolitical and the panoptic may work “upon all members in a society, simultaneously,” as Zach and Bryan argue, but identity as a product of such subjection may still be singularly categorized at a particular moment, encounter, or event.

Consider Mel Chen’s “Toxic Animacies, Inanimate Affections.”  Her discussion of the “toxic sensorium”—her own “set of states and experiences” that have been categorized as heavy metal poisoning (273)—demonstrates the fleeting or highly contextual quality of what Chen calls “individuated property-assignation” (274), a version of the categorization that Puar mentions.  This property assignation occurs, for Chen, by encounter and event.  Despite her disclaimer, Chen very self-consciously produces a narrative of herself as the “perfect” toxified subject (273) because this is the only categorized subject that can emerge from the narrative she presents.  This is not to say that her turn to the first-person is “fiction” in a derogatory sense, but only that it is one autobiographical fiction among multiple, simultaneous narratives of the categorized (identified) subject.  Consider also Claire Vaye Watkins’ performative, fictionalized self in “Ghosts, Cowboys.”  Watkins makes only allusive gestures to categorization as a form of subjection, but her production of a “fictional” self-as-narrator who, in turn, narrates simultaneous “fictional” histories of herself and her family suggests the critical necessity of fabrication.  Of course these forms of inquiry are, at some level, charades, but does this mean that they cannot participate in what Chen calls “knowledge production” (273)?

word count:  614