I just googled "empowering nihilism" to find the Hooks article we read so I could refer to it without finding my paper copy and, much to my surprise, the very first thing that came up was my own blog entry from a few weeks ago. Oh boy.
At any rate, what I really wanted to talk about here is Hooks' exploration of the post-modernist condition of lost identity and hopelessness as something that could be useful to women, as well as blacks, in terms of being a starting point for producing empathy. Women have been losing their identities as feminism and social constructs progress, just as Hooks talks about in terms of the black experience. If everyone in post-modernism is losing their identity, because we no longer know what is real anyway, perhaps there is an opportunity here to point out what it is like to be without definition. Do white (propertied) men suffer a loss of identity in the post-modern paradigm? I would argue that they do. The question is, do they recognize it?
Yesterday in our zine group, John said something that got me thinking about all of this. Basically he was talking about the need for someone to recognize their own situation before they can empathize with someone else. Do any of us truly recognize our own loss of identity as it happens? I think many of us cling to the social constructs of our gender, race, status, etc, because there is nothing but a black hole beyond that. What are we if we are not defined? This brings up another question for me. Is this similar to never being outside of the ideology? If we lose (or reject) one identity, do we instantly step into another? What I am getting at is that perhaps there is an opportunity for empathy inherent in the post-modern point of view, but it requires self-awareness.
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Postmodernism... *heavy sigh*
The very notion of identity is so problematic. Nobody has a single identity. And most people never really reflect on the meanings of the identities that they claim as their own. Identities seem to function as these empty, taken-for-granted artifices or mere descriptors until they are pushed into the realm of politics where we must justify their significance and then we suddenly realize the very idea of identities didn't make much sense in the first place. All women have/are/are united by _______. I can't fill in that blank. Does that mean the idea of women as a group is useless? I don't think so, but it certainly makes things a lot more complicated.
I'm not sure that we are losing our identities so much as identities are changing. I don't think anyone is less likely to label themselves a woman or a man or a black person etc. I just think the meanings behind those labels are becoming less stable.
I think that individuals are always already in identity categories no matter how much they try to escape them; postmodernism however, works to break down these fixed identities into a more fluid space. Thus, this poses a problem--if there are no identities, such as ‘women’, how can there be feminism or any kind of political movement? Linda Alcoff discuses the concept of "identity politics" as a necessary point of departure but also recognizes that one’s identity is always constructed. She suggests the notion of “positionality” which allows for an individual to be defined by the external context in which they are in rather then by a fixed set of attributes. This subject positionality allows for a relative identity category, which can change and move in any given external situation, while still offering the ability of an individual to take on an identity, such as the identity of ‘women’ in Alcoff’s case, for a political moment such as feminism.
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