immanence

Based on its title and on the snippets I saw being quoted, I fully expected to dislike Lee Jones’ article “Charlottesville and the Politics of Left Hysteria,” posted a few days ago at The Current Moment.

Instead, I’ve found it nuanced, cogent, and well worth reading. I myself have tried to broach this topic of the two lefts — the economic (or economistic) left, and the cultural or identitarian left — before (see here). The argument I’ve made there applies to this article as well. I think Jones is more or less correct in arguing that identitarian politics have a down side, which is that they can easily degenerate into a politics of resentment. What he misses is that they can have an up side as well — which is that they can generate a politics of meaning, and that is exactly what the economistic left has lacked. 

Jones writes that

“the analytics of political economy have been replaced with an analytics of identity. Once, the left understood socio-economic and political inequality to stem predominantly from gross inequalities in wealth, maintained by circuits of capital, ideology and state coercion. Today’s identitarian left attributes it to the uneven “privilege” of different identity groups, which is assumed to flow from continued prejudice (even if it now lurks “implicitly” in the subconscious). This leads to attacks on “privileged” groups – notably “cisgender” white men – and a politics of “calling out” prejudicial behaviour. That “whiteness” masks enormous disparities in wealth and power is disregarded.”

“The real question,” he continues,

“is how the left can win over a majority to a programme of radical social, political and economic change that addresses both economic disparities and the gross inequalities suffered by minorities. Both are required because they interact, producing vast disparities in household income, poverty, unemployment and incarceration rates among ethnic groups. But this cannot be tackled by setting identity groups against one another, turning the struggle for equality into a zero-sum game.”

This is all perfectly lucid: to the extent that identity politics detracts from building a politics that would unite people around egalitarian goals, one could argue that it is misguided. But the assumption that all identity politics is always and only a politics of resentment built on pitting groups against each other — and that it cannot be a way of mobilizing for larger ends — is not necessarily accurate.*

“Identity” is not as expansive a term as “meaning,” which is what I’ve proposed in its place (just as “labor” is not as expansive as “livelihood“). A politics of identity suggests a fixity according to which you are either this or that — a member of an oppressed minority (or more than one) or of a privileged majority (or more than one) — and that that defines you and what you should be doing. Such a politics appeals to those who think they can benefit from it, but not necessarily to those who feel threatened by it. So they develop their own (e.g., white nationalism).

A politics of meaning, on the other hand, suggests that you start from the acknowledgment that what gives your life meaning will likely not be the same as what gives others meaning, but that both will need to be taken into account if we are to build a common world together. The trick is to bring together an understanding of the global situation — and of the forces that have made it so unequal for people — with desires that would be powerful enough to overcome and transform it. As I wrote earlier, if the left reclaims the terrain of meaning,

“it can give rise to a cosmopolitics that would connect the economic struggles that continue to structure our world to the cultural struggles that define that world for most people and most communities today. And if it regains the open-ended positivity of that kind of vision — as opposed to, say, a vision of resentment, animosity, jealousy, and grievance — then it gains the power to win converts via the imagination, which is, after all, the most powerful vehicle for political action that there is.”

So the issue, I think, is that we see what is going on not just for its limitations — its “fascist threats” or its leftist “hysterias” — but for its possibilities, which are what make it open-ended and hopeful. Hope, of course, is cheap, and the trick is to make its object — a better world — both conceivable and realizable. If we can do that, we can generate enough “meaning” to spread a sense of agency through a population as dispirited as twenty-first century humanity seems to be.

I concede that we’re far from making it seem realizable. But conceivable? That may be an adequate task for us now.

*This article has been updated to correct a significant typo, where the word “accurate” was originally written as “inaccurate.”