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).