Warren, Kay, and Jean Jackson

Bueno para acordar con lo que dicen, pero un poco de identidad cliche. probablemente hay que reconocer que es solo una introduccion general, pero mas de lo que se viene repitiendo desde hace mucho.


Warren, Kay and Jean Jackson, eds. 2003. “Studying Indigenous Activism in Latin America.” In: Indigenous Movements, Self-Representation and the State in Latin America. Austin: University of Texas Press. Pp. 1-46.

The authors consider the problems of studying indigenous movements in Latin America as a tension between academic work, advocacy and positioning in the politics of representation. They point to the parallel emergence of indigenous activism and the need to turn form class base analysis to identity politics, which recognize ethnicity as a particular dimension. This perspectives has articulated with discourses emphasising positive and common aspects of an indigenous condition, these forms of essentialism that anthropologists have contributed to shape have been articulated in struggles with the nation state. However essentialism is also a limiting force when imposed as a norm that erases heterogeneities. They claim that there is no sense to making a value over these constructions but rather to understand their complexities and take into account the particular historical contexts and the contingencies in which identities are constituted. If the importance of the roles of the states in the processes of this conformation is something general across different Latinamierican countries, the form of this interaction is never homogeneous. The role of international agencies and economy has to be considered as shaping the differential outcomes, as these agencies have their particular agendas and approaches to the topic, for instance by considering ethnicity as a problematic and a right of the individual. Neoliberal policies of reducing state intervension in some cases perversely coincide with indigenous claims, however it does also be a force that further marginalizes and limits the groups possibilities of autonomy [multiculturalism is not discussed very much here]. Thus the processes of identification can be better understood in its conjuncture, as movements combining achievements of self-determination and of state subordination.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh - Provincializing Europe

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2000. “Postcoloniality and the artifice of History” in Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

The purpose of this chapter is to problematize the celebration of the subaltern studies as a “Indian” re appropriation of their capacity to represent their own history. “Insofar as the academic discourse of history –that is history, as a discourse produced at the institutional site of university - is concerned, “Europe remains the sovereign, theoretical subject of all histories” (27). All this other histories remain as variations of a master narrative of European history, a history made universal. Any subject position articulated as part of an “Indian” remains as subaltern. There is an asymmetric politics of ignorance, while European historian can ignore the “non western” works, it is impossible for subaltern intellectuals to reciprocate this gesture. The second symptom of subalternity is that even though the western theories presented as universal are shaped in ignorance to “the rest of the world” (only Europe is theoretically knowable, the other histories are “cases”), these theories are useful for third world intellectuals. By using these theories, the other histories become subject of a methodological and epistemological historicism: presented as previous stages in time and in conceptualization (ie the notion of pre-capitalist). The histories of third world become histories of a transition, of states of incompleteness, of a development towards a modern capitalist nation-state. The Subaltern Studies manifest itself claims to study the historic failure of a complete decolonization “ the failure of the nation to come to its own” “an inadequacy of the bourgeoisie and the working class”. The British rule shaped the desire to be a subject among the elite that would lead the nationalist movement, for them to be a modern individual meant to become European. In contrast the peasant and the working had to be modernized, characterized as ignorant, parochial, communal, imbued in false consciousness. He proposes to reread the narratives of transition in reverse and find “plenitude” where there is “lack”. The Indian individual is shaped mimicking the European “legal fiction of citizenship” (35) but the private self (as a deferred public self) still remains to be shaped–the autobiographic genre are never about an “interiority”. This “other constructions of self and community while documentable, will never enjoy the privilege of providing a metanarratives or teleologies of our histories.” (37) The attempt to use this other narratives to make a history based on the Indian difference turn to mythology of the peasant and the workers, but these narratives are ahistorical. History is thus “the site where the struggle goes on to appropriate on behalf of the modern (my hyperreal Europe), these other collocations of memory.” (37) If this histories are subordinated to a linear history towards citizenship, nation-state, and human emancipation in the terms of Enlightenment, and reaffirming European Enlightment project as the most desirable political community (and only project possible). But in many cases the collective mobilization towards nationalism was based on ahistorical structures of the kin and community (a community that was both ahistorical and particularly indina, but also the base for a political institutional community). This is a kind of double bind in which the Indian subject articulates itself: the “Indian people” subject of the modernization is also its object, the subject is the already modern elite and the object is the yet-to-be modernized peasant. This subject only existst as part of the metanarratives called Europe, that invents itself in this process: both in the coloniality and in the post coloniality. In this process the only possibility of self representation left is the mimicry (Bhabha) of a modern European subjectivity. The “Indian” subject, as anhistorical antimodern, subject cannot speak as “theory”, “this subject can only be spoken for and spoken of b transition narrative, which will always ultimately privilege the modern.”
Rather than making an “other” history he proposes to make a different alliance with the centre of modernity, and go against universalization. He proposes to provincialize Europe a way of exposing heterogeneity, contradictory, plural struggles and the forms of coercion in both sides. He proposes to show the process by which European reason was made as a valid knowledge outside Europe, a process not conceded to other “reasons” [nieztchean logic]. The acquisition of the term modern has o be considered as part of the colonial project, also it is something third world nationalism have contributed to shape. E proposes to unravel all the violence both foundational and quotidian that are the base to the modern state, a violence directly linked to forms of idealism. This project contrasts with a cultural relativism or to a rejection of modernity. This project cannot be realized within university, it is thus a project of impossibility, within larger “politics of despair”. It is a history that has to push to the limit of undoing itself by recognizing the impossibility of translation “so that the world may once again be imagined as radically heterogeneous. (…) To provincialize Europe is to see the modern as inevitably contested… to write over privileged narratives other narratives of human connections.” (46)

spivak

de a poco voy entiendiendo mas a spivak. en una notas viejas tenia una frase "spivak critica a foucault y deleuze confundir deseo con interes" y no tenia mucha idea de que queria decir con eso, o como eso se relacionaba a la discusion de sujeto, esta vez lo sigo poco mejor. cambie un poco el resumen viejo, pero no llego a releerlo detenidamente entero.
foto: lua (que no es para nada una sujeta unificada).

Spivak makes a critique to the problematization of the subject and to the representation of third world subject. She presents the impossibility of the subalterns to speak for themselves. She criticizes Deleuze and Foucault, for reproducing a unitary notion of subject one uniformly effected by power, but not showing any of the contradictions. Part of this problem she argue is to have gotten away form a discussion of ideology (In Althusser and Marx) and confusing desire and interest as the same. “Because desire is tacitly defined on a orthodox model, it is unitarily opposed to “being desived””(274) by ideology. This is because they are making a theory of western subject , and assuming that the other as privileged knowing subjects “they know far better than [the intellectual] and they certainly say it very well” (Foucault FD 206 in Spivak 274). With this move this authors assume a homogeneous and unitary subject and essentialyze their condition. They reproduce the representational realism, Deleuze says “the reality os what happenes in the factory”, detaching the intellectual form the social field consolidationg an international division of power. She critiques the division between theory and practice that I bridged in Deleuze in the asseveration of “theory as tool box”, but this does not recognize the situation of theory making, what are the politics of this practice.

She presents this as a problem of Deleuze of confusing the double sense of representation: as “representation as “speaking for” as in politics, and representation as re-presentation, as in the art of philosophy.” (275) She takes Marx and claim that he never tried to present a unified subject or unified class. The first sense implies that the subaltern can speak is of political representation. When a political leader claims to represent the subaltern he himself moves away form subalternity. He creates a principle of a totality he is supposed to be representing, in order to legitimize his position, and jumps to a level of hegemonic politics, which is different to the domain of the habit and politics of the subaltern. In a second sense when the postcolonial intellectual makes a symbolic representation of the subaltern, in this move intellectuals assume a unitary subject, uniformly constituted as effect of power relations, they assume a single form of power and a single form of subjectivity, confusing desire and interest as a single and not contradictory movements.

In this critique she is directly engaged with the Subaltern Studies Group. She celebrates their work as re-installing a focus on the subaltern as a negative other necessary for creating a the field of dominant politics;. However she criticizes their political project of giving voice to the voiceless as a recreating a relation in which the production of knowledge about the other imposes a form of power and recreates a dependence to a western “logos” that creates the other as an homogeneous totality, ignores the heterogeneous body politic of the subaltern, and recreate their subordination. She proposes that the intellectual should open a space so that the subaltern can be heard, search to speak to rather than listen or speak for. This learning implies a process of unlearning the privilege of the intellectual. She analyzes the widow sacrifice in India as an example in which there are different powers attempting to give a sense of it, but the widows are never able to speak for themselves. She follows a particular case in which a variety of circumstances, among them political positioning leads a young woman to suicide, this action is appropriated by men in her family, religious figure, political activists and intellectuals, each assigning meaning in regards to a particular aim. In this the complexity, contradictions and multiple lines transversing this case are lost.

grossberg el txt de 1996

Bueno cierro con esto, no la lista pero si la lectura lenta. Grossberg tiene una densiadad que me mata, pero una densidad que me hace pensar mucho y se pone a discutir cosas que siempre me quedan colgadas de mucho planteos. De alguna forma el tipo se hace cargo de todas esas preguntas que quedan despues de lecturas varias desde foucault a los estudio de identidades en general, toma todo y las piensa simultaneamente y con una lucidez enorme. Lo que no me daja tan contenta ahora es que arme un esquema tan complejo pero que cierre tanto. Es una maquina complejisima, pero una sola cosa, me parece, lo que propone. Hay algo del proceso que se me pierde en su postura, por ejemplo con la idea de movilidades estructuradas que vengo usando, y que siento que no me da mucho espacio para pensar movilidades no tan organizadas, o que se estan constituyendo y quizas sea eso algo que me intereza especialmente (aunque tampoco de certau sea una respuesta creo) . Tampoco la idea de inversion de afecto en lugares de pertenencia me trmina de convenser como unico foco (esta es una critica que otros, no me acuerdo quienes, le hacen). Me interesaria probablemente pensar en afectos del espacio y energias que se ponen en movimiento y se activan unas a otras sin necesariamente deslizarse sobre una estructura previa, aunque por momentos si lo haga.
Y mas fotos de Adams en Manzanar Relocation Centre


Grossberg, Lawrence 1996 'Identity and Cultural Studies: Is That All There Is?'. In: Stuart Hall and du Gay, Paul (eds) Questions of Cultural Identity. pp. 88-107. London: Sage.

Grossberg starts by questioning why have cultural studies reduced its focus mostly to the studies of identity and difference. He proposes a need to restructure the concept of identity and resituate it in the broader power configurations, by focusing in the concept of articulation and overcoming the idea of resistance. Multiculturalism does not only present historical tensions, but generate need for a ethic and normative re-articulation. A reconsideration of identity would demand to rethink three logics: of difference, of individuality and temporality. But to situate a critique within this logic form within modern logics implies failing to generate a critic of the broader normative systems of modernity. Thus he reframes identity in regards to the logics of: otherness, productivity and speciality. Cultural studies distinguish two modes of production of political identities as resulting from historical processes of configuration (not the theoretical frames). Identities is thus explored as: 1) processes of struggle for presenting positive aspects of identities, 2) multiple, complex, and unstable the way in which multiple lines of identification come together and the ways they are represented in particular contingencies are a focus of interest – point in which discourses as producers of identities are main centres of interest-, 3) it does not necessarily imply a unique theory, but a group of concepts that are loosely employed by different analysts. Some concepts. The notion of difference implies a dominant identity that is constituted in the negation of the subaltern, the subaltern is both necessary and destabilizing. This other can be either a supplement, in which the other is outside the field of subjectivity, a total exteriority, an excess (said, Llyotard), or a negative other within the field of subjectivity fixed as an exotic incomprehensible other (Bhabha). The notion of fragmentation points to the multiple lines of identification transversing any give subject position and the impossibility to predict articulations, the subject as a dis-membered and re-membered (Harraway). Hybridity, implying the simultaneous coexistence within two conflicting identities, is used at least in three ways: 1) subalternity as a third space always in-between identities, 2) as a permanent state of liminality a location in the frontier, 3) border crossing, in which identity is in the movement of transversing (Anzaldua). Diaspora is linked to this but focuses on the particular diachronic experience of transnational migration and the political struggles of maintaining a distinctive identity in the hosting society.
The concepts above have been criticized for: a) ignoring the diversity, contradictory and fragmented forms in which power and its discourses operate, b) ignoring the positivity of the subaltern with particular cultural production, c) ignoring the forms of power and subalternity within the subaltern, d) assuming the subaltern as generator of a particular and distinctive subjectivity, e) assuming subalternity (as other) as a model of all forms of domination, implies knowing subalternity is in advance, not needing to understand the specific configurations. Grossberg critiques these perspectives as they fail to produce a critique to modernity as it falls into its logics.
If identity is always constituted against an other, then these other identities are confined to produce their identities by mirror image of what is modern, then there is no escape to modernity. But modernity itself has constituted in base of difference rather than identity, as a difference always different to itself in time and space. The logics of production of difference are then fundamental aspects of the definitions of modernities. Theories of difference are traped in the discussion of negativity (derrida: a negative that threatens reason form within) and positvity (foucault, an autonomous other that affects reason)
He proposes to think through theories of otherness, in which the other does not need to be defined in regards to essential or transcendent terms, but rather by the contextual capacities of affecting and being affected. Theories of difference are then based in structuralist and post structuralist logics, while otherness uses a notion of difference as an effect of economies of power. Otherness allows to think both of difference and identity as historical constructions.
He critiques their readings of Foucault of Laclau and Mouffe and of Said, the former for assuming fixed subject positions from Foucault’s notion of “dispersion”, and the latter for presenting the other just as a form of representation, a means of separating self , and a form of knowledge that creates this other. The problem is that the relation between power and knowledge does not imply the inexistence of the other, is the reduction of that what is now the other with all its heterogeneity, into a semantic terms, a singularity that constitutes self. Theories that define post colonial subjectivity in terms of power effects (Spivak), loose the possibilities of thinking the correlation between subject, identity and agency. Thinking otherness form a positive, non-essentialist perspective allows to consider problems of effectivity, belonging, and change.
The problem of thinking culture as productive (following Renato Rosaldo’s provocation) has been to assume a the modern and singular logic of individuality and individuation as universal (generating the humanist figure of individual as a viril agent). This figure of individuality opens three dimensions that are taken unproblematized: 1) subject as a position that defines possibilities of experience and knowledge, 2) agent as source of activity, 3) self as a mark of social identity. The unification of these dimensions in the subject has given place to a series of paradoxes: how can the individual be an effect but also a cause, subjected and a subject, what is the capacity of agency. But according to Grossberg the unification of these dimensions is one of the operations in which power is shaped in modernity.
To unpack this problem we need to understand each of this dimensions of individuality (considering the bodies as well) as produced by distinct machineries, operating in different planes of the power effects. In this way the subject as the capacity to experience the world and know it, is universal, but as a capacity subjectivity is unequally distributed, as some people have the possibility to occupy different positions or to defend and authorize their existence. This last aspect is what Grossberg sees as a product of stratifying machineries, one that operate producing a relation between content – bodies and expression – subjectivity as value. Subjectivity is thus abstract, even if it is always codified in culture as difference. Self, as an embodiment of this codification, only comes to be after the process of inscription of difference, as the product of differenciating machines. Both structures articulate to possibilities of agency and power, but there is o direct correlation, agency is thus related to changing configurations, capacities of transformation under particular configurations.
In this sense subalternity is not a social position but a capacity of exercising power. Marginality is the vector that traces the possibilities of access, mobility and generating belonging to a particular configuration. Agency is thus a political problem, of how access and participation are distributed among the fields of self and subjectivity but not a question of identity. Agency is not an individual movement but rather the trace of trajectories that open fields of possibilities, agency results form what he calls territorilyzing machines.
The relation of identity and temporality is not based in the philosophical question of the relation of individual and reality, but in the question of consciousness as a mediation between experience and knowledge. When mediated by textuality, ‘the non temporal synchronicity of discourse (Bhabha) each of the planes of individuality is thus result of temporality subjectivity (consciousness of internal time), self (as a temporal construction of identity) and agency (as temporal movement of difference. To generate an alternative to modernity Grossberg proposes to rethink in terms of space.
This means that people experience the world from particular positions. A good example are the studies of diaspora in which movement and settlement generate multisided relations, which are more relations of belonging than of identification. These relations of closeness and separation are spatially constructed. In the same way the access to knowledge is partially determined by spatial positions, as the subject is always situated within a geopolitical organization of places. The subject can be considered as having a spatial existence defined in the vectors of movement, articulation likewise could be better understood as the intersection of different trajectories and the relations of habitation and empathy. The subject thought as spatialized can be fixed to space, have a many possibilities of movement, be able to access or not to particular places. Thus agency is the result of the relation between subjects and places, places that do not pre-exist but are the result of attempts to organize space. If subjectivity constitutes places as belonging, agency organizes the spaces and action form which people make strategic moves. Again, agency does not a result form the self, but is the product of the way space and movement are organized or mapped.
Grossberg is interested in making these shifts towards a spatial frame for subjectivity, not so much to rethink agency and change, but rather to think in the possibilities opened by forms of belonging based on singularity (Agamben) rather than identity, what Agamben calls the “coming community”. This implies al so a form of producing knowledge about the other without turning it into sameness or a radical other, that turn politics of difference into a fetishization or a celebratory relation with the other.
He takes Agamben’s notion of singularity as a mode of existence that is neither universal, nor particular, is not based on a concept nor in an individual, it is better an example that exists as within and outside the case it is supposed to belong. This belonging is in itself a production, an appropriation of the class. The example is defined in its capacity to be substituted is always replaceable, as such is always unrepresentable. The community is thus totally undetermined, it is defined not by specific qualities the absence of them, but by belonging itself. The examples have a metonymic relation with the totality. As such any term can be an example of the totality. He exemplifies with a Chinese demonstration in a park, it is not any quality nor a particular form of negation, but the fact of being there in that space in that moment, we can think the same of some movements for civil rights. A politics of singularity demands a definition of the places people can get to or access to places. In this way we can also redefine citizenship as an elective community, constituted within a variety of practices and which constitutes structured mobilities.

briones 2007 parte 2

Por algun motivo me fue imposible ser sintetica con este texto y el de grossberg, un poco por la densidad, por estudiarlo mas de cerca, y otro poco por que estan trayendo todas las lineas de la lista que estoy cerrando a una discusion que me ayuda a aclarar. Me quedo sin duda con un nivel amplio de discusion como este, quizas algoq ue no me cierre tanto es montar un andamiaje, que si bien flexible y que es mas que nada para pensar, en intuitivamente atravesaria mas. Me quedo pensando en las cosas que lei que critican a los estudios culturales, algunas sin ser tan elaboradas, otras que en la critica caen a un nivel muy subjetivista si bien dicen no hacerlo, y fianlmente otras que en el proyecto de crear conceptos como herramientas para pensar flujos, y contenidos y formas en devenir, no me dan muchas pistas metodologicas para pensar como poner esas herramientas a trabajar. el desafio seria entonces seguir a briones / grossberg en las dimensiones que abren, ver cuales me faltan, y pensar formas de ponerlos a dialogar para no usarlos como andamio. eso creo.



3. It is in this context of the discussion that Social Sciences incorporate the concept of performance. She presents Butler as bridging the gap Foucault leaves open between conscious everyday practice over the self and the psychoanalytic unconscious. She does this by getting away from narratives that propose to generate knowledge about the self, as these narratives veil the underlying dichotomy of self/other, and focus on the practices of signification. This position open the possibility of showing how for instance theories of a fragmented subject, reproduce the forms of oppression is trying to get away from. Butler thus gets away from any proposition implying identities precede practice, and proposes that it is in the act that the subject is constituted. In other words, the practices constitute the phenomena they seem to be expressing. This is different to existentialism that recognizes a pre discursive subject and of acts. Contrarily Butler’s subject and act are mutually and variably constituted each time. In this way she distances form Althusser’s foundational acts, in signifying chains to propose that each time is a re-foundation, and that the norms define intelligibility, this rules have substancialyzing effects and thus deflect themselves. It is only in the necessary repetition that any subversion is possible, in the sliding of meaning, accentuations and tone while repeating. This displacement is less the effect of strategic movements than of the multiple lines that transverse any disposition, (the superpositions are themselves what make any disposition unstable). But it is the emphasis in the performance as only practice, as a general “doing” that conducts to a “cliché performativity”. One problem is to equate performance with act, and with this the concepts looses the specificity of the emphasis in form and in the staging itself, it also looses the sense of Austin performative verbs, those that “do” instead of naming. If any action is preformative, we cannot see the non discursive dispotifs that also inscribe the rules. She then summarizes the implications of thinking identities following Hall and Grossberg, to set the base for a critique to notions of flexible identities. She criticizes the association between flexibility of identities as a form of articulation based on future rather than past, as future is not necessary more flexible. Mostly flexibility is problematic as it is not a quality equally distributed, to have more possibilities of movement and choice is something restricted to small sector of the world. There is a tension then between sedimentation and invention. Invention has the limit of : 1) the incapacity to transform or revert some processes (ie colonization), thus identities may be contesting power but also spaces of consent and frustration; 2) there are norms of what it is and is not debatable about the past , identities are exposed to “strategic forms of authentication”, that shapes the terms of articulation and the effectivity for gaining recognition; 3) the way of representing subaltern memories always implies the incorporation of dominant perspectives and logics. Tradition is then a complex result of practices of signification and simbolization in which continuity and change are ideas used to get recognized as a “contemporaneous different”.
4. Her final questions are what is the relation between subjectivation and subjectivity, and what mediates between subjectivation and identification. For this she takes the notion of fold of Deleuze in Grossberg, the interiority is only the exterior folded towards an “inside” that is only a second moment that creates a epistemological dimension not an ontological genesis. In sum there is no essential or pre given interiority. If this is combined with he notion of machineries what it is folded is the experience available as a result of the operating machineries, what is folded are the “mandates advice, techniques, norms to be human, the means through which self is constituted in different practices and relations” (Grossberg 2003 in Briones 70-71). She claims then that if the subjection operates through the inscription of the dispositif, subjectivity is linked to the fact that some parts of the fold are unstable part to be linked through a biography. Identification is a process in which some aspects of the fold are visualized as biography and the way these aspects are selected to make sense of the particular subject position. Subjectivity is thus the way this positions are inhabited and then made visible as social identities.
In this context performativity is the capacity of people to stabilize or generate lines of flight form social identities as they embody them. Agency is limited by structured mobilities that define possibilities of movement, access and empowerment. This limits to performativity, are the limits to constructivism as a theoretical approach. In other words, are the tension between the triple movement of the constitution of the subject, representation and act of theorization and the real, between capacities of agency and the performative realization of the real.
She points to the fact that most studies of identity come into being in a context of a politization of identities, in this she criticizes that this studies are implacable evaluators of the limitations defined in regards to desirable notions of subversion. In this she considers that the real would be a better starting point than the otherness that operates as “an excess, as a constitutive exteriority”.
What are then the effects of a cliché constructivism or performativity? The author warns against the tendency to analyze the processe of identification with the narrative force of theories we are using. Constructivism generally fails when it tries to generalize characteristics, rather than understanding conditions and machineries and its effects. It fails when it confuses contingency whit fluidity, necessary non correspondence as a critic to necessary correspondence, hybridity as emergent aspect of social interaction with hybrid identities. Hybrid identities confuses the multiple subject positions with the (necessary) fragmentation of identities, and because it postpones the discussion of why some subjectivations define hierarchies in the different folds, while other show more messy surfaces. Other problem is to read strategic essentialisms, in what we could understand as essentialist installations, to recognize a more dynamic political field rather than a strategies that swallows the subject (almost like Vonnegut’s epigraph of “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be”). Talking about installations let us understand the contrastive presentations of identities (with hard divisions between an us and other) as a non necessary discursive turn rather than as epistemological distinctions. To study identities as an us/them division veils the possibilities of understading different levels and the perforations that are more a regularity resulting form different articulations and the heterogeneity of any collective containing multiple subject positions. The theoretical emphasis in contrastivity then tends to find “problems” of identities something that is more a limitation of the theories, is more our limitations as users of those theories. Many analysis claim that indigenous identity politics of identity are dangerous as they close possible articulations with other groups, when it would be a better question to think which are the conditions and contexts making identities to emerge in those terms. Ultimately this theories frame the claims and are able to put into question the bases for the political claims.

An Interview with Lawrence Grossberg

dejo esto para verlo despues

briones 2007 en partes

photo: A. Adams. Baton practice, Florence Kuwata, Manzanar Relocation Center
Teorías performativas de la identidad y performatividad de las teorías. Tabula Rasa, Revista de Humanidades, Universidad Colegio Mayor de Cundinamarca, Colombia, 6: 55-83.

1. She proposes to think the effects of the naturalization in social sciences of the politics of identity in the context of posmodern theory and neoliberal governmentality. Following Brubaker and Cooper she proposes to think the effects of the unproblematized definition of identities as “constructed, contrastive, situational, fragmented, fluid and negotiated”. She does this in three movements, first considering the main discussions in the therories of identity, then how this theroies have been appropriated in the social sciences and then thinking what type of performance does the use of this theories imply. She considers social praxis as the site form where to generate and challenge theoretical debates. She takes as an axis of debate the tension between structure and agency, postulating that “subjects constitute as such by articulating their personal and collective identities (for themselves and others), but they do not do it at their wish, as the work of articulation unfolds under circumstances they haven’t chosen.” (my translation 59) . One of the problems of notion of identity is that if we take as a constant the contrastive nature, then identities are always contextual, and always result from its interrelation with other forms of articulation (class, ethnicity, gender etc). Deconstructive works have criticized this point by problematizing the subject and the effects of reticular forms power. The “other” of any identity becomes always an excess that overflows any identity and threatens it. Identity (any sense of us) is phantasmagorical, always excluding a part of what it is supposed to represent, and is an effect of power as it is constituted from difference (rather than vice versa). The problem with constructivist and essentialist perspectives is first that both perspectives are more heterogeneous than commonly accepted, and also that identity formations are historical and political decisions. Identity politics offer a correlation between identification and practice, and this logic is hard to abandon. Deconstructive approaches search to unsettle some of the key concepts which are detached from the paradigm of origin in order to think the limit and the in-between in order to make a radical critique to the theories of the subject. Hall does not abandon the subject nor does he propose its total malleability in regards to a context that construct it. She takes Halls proposition of rethinking the subject as a political and conceptual practice, in which social praxis does not generate direct correspondence between relation and representation. These theories have not just developed within the academy but have also accompanied and participated the so-called “new social movements”, which have justified strategic essentialisms (spivak), pointing to the risks of this (hall) or showing the internal disputes around them. All this happens in the context of a normative multiculturalism, that make hiper-visible cultural difference as a way of commodifying and fetishizing them. She finishes this section by proposing that is not that identity is in trouble, but rather it has always been a problem.
2. The proliferation of analysis of identities have generated some author to propose to abandon the concept altogether. Hall, proposes to redefine the category while keeping it while Brubacker and Cooper propose the use of intermediate concepts (identification, categorization, social location, self definition). She agrees to being more precise but not to make categorizations of multidimensional social practices. There are two fundamental movements to be made. One , developed mostly by L. Groddberg is to disaggregate, and think whether we are talking about subject, subjectivity, people, actors or agents. She proposes that each of this planes open a field of inquiry, unpacking the particular regimes, dispositif, technologies and practices. By resituating the concepts of subjectivity, self and agency under logics outside form the dominant logics of modernity, he propose to think this concepts as effects of three machines: differentiating, stratifying, and territorializing. The other movement, developed by Nicolas Rose, (following Foucault) proposes to maintain the tensions that constitute the subject, instead of dissociating subjection (subject as effect of social structures and the available subject positions) and subjectivity (as the way people occupy and identify with those positions).

peters y ansel adams

bueno sigo con los resumenes, me faltan entradas sobre el viaje de ida y los recorridos por la ciudad. , acompanyando dos amigxs locales en vancouver pero que de golpe aparecieron con nosotros caminando rapidito por el empedrado para ir a ver algo de musica al torcuato taso, perdidos en las callecitas del cementerio chacarita y buscando el mejor flan.


foto desconectada que encontre ayer, el laburo de ansel adams fotografiando a la comunidad japonesa gringa relocalizadadurante la segunda guerra, justo habia leido algo sobre espacio y relocalizacion, pero en canada y aca en las fotos vi la misma estructura espacial claro. un lugar en el medio de la nada, y una estructura de casas iguales en cuadrado, campos de cultivo cuadrados, y la gente sonriente que capturo este tipo.


Peters, Evelyn J. and Wilson, Kathi. 2005. “You Can Make a Place of It. Remapping Urban First Nations Spaces of Identity.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 23(3) : 395 – 413
The authors propose to rethink indigenous people internal migrations towards the cities through the literature and framework of transnationalism. These perspectives offer insights in how identities can be rethought in the creative articulations of migrants, who create links with more than one place (their places of origin and destination) and the general stretching of social relations that generate “identities of belonging to more than one place”. They analyze the experience of Canadian urban indigenous, who even without being foreigner unsettle state definitions and delimitations of place. Thus the indigenous movement towards the city challenges the national confinement of indigenous to reservations and the definition of “all other spaces” as settlers ones. If we follow Alonso’s logic (this is my connection not the authors) of the need of creating a particular space as a part of the modern nation building process, the division of indigenous and settlers spaces was one of the founding spatial divisions in Canadian state. The article is based on a series of interviews with urban indigenous people and their strategies to keep connected to their places of origin. They argue that the interviews help to understand the meanings and experiences of the migrants, including the “disjunctures between their expectations - produced through development discourses – and their actual experiences.” (397) As they mention in relation to Ecuadorian migrants to the city of Quito. “These narratives demonstrate how the Western frameworks of meaning that permeate migration theory limit our understanding of processes of mobility and identity construction.” (397) Indigenous urban migrations challenge the state not only by the travel but also by framing claims in a general aboriginality, and a continuity of habitation, displacing the notions of autochthony to a particular bounded land. They add to James Clifford explorations of diasporas the fact that the –rural “homes” of the contemporary indigenous result from a colonial construction of nation states. Even the authors show how the non-presence of indigenous in the city was a result of a spatial dimension of nation, they frame this relation as “relation with to the land” which they identify as an one of the salient elements informing indigenous identities, but it is not very clear how people define these lands, though they point to the tension of lands not just as the reservation territories but a more general and abstract mother earth especially while in the city. They quote other works that refer to the fact that indigenous in the city generally “return” home, some call this “dual-orientation pattern”. It is no doubt an interesting connection and the concepto of land aperas unpacked, yet whether the city is or not claimed as indigenous land appears unproblematized. They focus on how the relation with the land changes with migration and what are the impediments and facilitators for their visits to the reservations or rural communities of origin. They identify three strategies of urban indigenous, keeping connected in the city, traveling back to reserves and participating in urban “panindian” ceremonies. Despite this strategies indigenous marginality is reproduced Indirectly they point to the fact that is not just the presence of indigenous in the city what challenges state spatial delimitations, but also the travel, this “returns”, visits, and also the emphasis fo connection to “the land” -as they frame it- that disrupt the expected ways of being in the city.