Oppression and Disarray - on Representation

jordanbarton

Hello, TPF!

This is my first post, and, after briefly exploring r/philosophy, I have found that perhaps reaching out to a new community of learners would benefit me as I seek to evaluate whatever it is I should evaluate. In this, I say greetings, and in doing so, let us begin.

This question is a bit free-form, so mind my lack of technical attribution or formal inquiry; after all, this is my first post, and what better way to wade the water than in simply sparking a conversation, albeit it a rather complex one.

I would like to begin a discussion regarding the premise of historical ontological representations in political discourse, specifically how oppressive structures have presented themselves in articles of specific or general identity. To further elaborate, let me posit a question that came to me in originally posing this overall question:

A big question concerning anti-blackness and afro-pessimism is the idea of historic dialectics, at least in my perspective. Framing a question of blackness at odds with the representational real is crucial to Wilderson's analysis of structural violence (this being the idea of black flesh as criminal flesh, or of historical anti-blackness in terms of historical pedagogy). But where does identity sever from representation in an instance of oppression, be it in sustained environments of violence or in things like microaggressions?

Does identity become material in oppression as a survival tactic (e.g. "Black Lives Matter" ultimately posing the instance of living as black as an event of oppression), or is identity a constant factor of the real? Is identity a tool utilized to cultivate stories of survival as a mechanism to express systems of ontological status and disarray (presumably in a epistemological sense) or a factor literally tied to perceptual notions of identifying flesh/culture/etc., even in an oppressive system?

I won't elaborate too far onto my own position as of now, as that would ruin the purpose of conversation and generate lecture, but I seem to find the most validity in a purely historical sense in the prior epistemological method. I see this as a position of historical materialist pedagogy, wherein the orientation of the subject of the oppressed is specific to a relationship between the material and thus a relationship with the structures of oppression that merit response. In this response, as a rebellion, in a way, I see that identity (especially in Wilderson) is primarily a factor in describing the boundaries between oppressed and non-oppressed, via a delineation between the degrees of identity to which oppressed subjects have use to claim. This means to say that, identity in a post-political sense, framed upon dialectics, is not a subject of physical or metaphysical representation, but rather a politics of contingency that seek to utilize ontological representations of life/living/dead by framing subjects as forces against their oppressive structures. In this, I am not only seeking to find debate but also actual instances of this factor of ontological representation, especially in stories regarding identity and its representation.

I hope I am doing this thing right, and hope this discussion to be fruitful. I will respond to all genuine arguments, but will, of course, ignore those demonstrated as thoughtless.

Thanks, I am excited to see where this goes!

J. H. B

unenlightened

Hi there, welcome to tpf. I'm having difficulty understanding your language, partly because I need to educate myself re Wilderson, which I'll do a bit of later. I'm an old white dude in a mixed race family in the UK, and my education stops more or less at Fanon and Friere.

There, and with the experience of my daughter at 4yrs demanding to be collected from school by her white father, not her black mother, and cutting off her 'unacceptable hair' and hiding it under the bed. And today, Christmas eve, as she heads out to her job in retail, aged 25, with straightened hair, the same instruction - if we need milk, send me not mummy.

Such is the inescapable reality that becomes the inescapable psychology, what one can readily call 'impersonal identity'. When the Nazis declare you to be a Jew, it doesn't matter how you see yourself in the least. Or rather, it is most important. You had better understand that this imposed reality cannot be denied, cannot be transcended, cannot be resisted. Seek refuge or die.

We laugh, amongst ourselves, at the stupidity of it all - we, the family - and we adapt to the real unreality of impersonal identification that divides us, me as oppressor, my wife and children as oppressed. And sometimes we cry, because we are caught in our most intimate relations, in our personal identities, in this same contradiction.

And then, there is another layer. We live in Wales, which has been called 'The oldest colony'. My wife is Welsh, in the sense that her mother was a welsh-speaking white woman, in the sense that this is her home. Yet the reawakening of a national identity as it manifests in the community, excludes her again. I am irredeemably English, and so consistently an oppressor, but my wife finds herself excluded from the oppressed Welsh, and identified, all unwilling as part of the English oppressors and colonials. And so we arrive at the wonderful world of competitive identification as oppressed. And we find that the oppressed become in fact ( by impersonal identification) and by personal identification as oppressed, themselves the oppressors.

In this looking-glass world, I find myself concluding that identity is oppression, even, and especially, identification as oppressed. The revolution keeps going round and round, liberators become dictators, as if there were no fundamental division between oppressor and oppressed, as if the poor were as greedy as the rich, as if we were all the same human race.

And then you get shit like this: and you think, no, sometimes the oppressors have such a fantastic line in bullshit that they must be a different species - lizards or something.

jordanbarton

Hey, @unenlightened

Thank you for your response. This is in fact exactly what I was looking for. In that, the narrative you give concerning your daughter and the easily discernible identity politick that concerns your relations is exactly why I tend to weigh an epistemological framing of identity.

This is a situation that I like to claim alongside Wilderson’s argument concerning the “red, white, and black,” although his particular analysis concerns the perpetuation of whiteness in American media. It seems this same situation of disarray surrounds the narrative lessons you voice. This is less a claim of an “impersonal identity,” in a way that could be associated with some kind of innate, programmed racial psychology, as much as it is a claim surrounding politics that recreate oppressive structures. This is where I agree with your observation as such a cycle as, frankly, cyclic. The oppressor must become the oppressed, but this is where my question reasserts itself - by what means is this end accomplished? Is there a material time-bomb waiting to go off in all of our (even nonmaterial) relations, or do we just tinker with the ontology machine long enough to see our strife become the villain?

This specter of disarray in ontology is a beast of its own nature, which of course requires an analysis of equally viable psychological factors, but I would ask you, where can we draw the line? In the stories you have presented, is it a conflict of the flesh itself, or the innate representations of that flesh? When we laugh, should we scoff at life representationally or physically?

Thanks :)

unenlightened

Unfortunately, I think there is only one solution to the paradox of identity, which may be too mystical for some tastes. So I might as well repeat myself from elsewhere...

self-consciousness, far from being an illuminating principle, as traditional philosophy has held, on the contrary shuts the human being in on himself and thus results in opacity rather than enlightenment.

Gabriel Marcel, The Existential Background of Human Dignity (1963), p. 34.

There is an aspect of truth to this, and there is an aspect of utter nonsense equivalent to the argument that because we have eyes, that are sensitive to light, we cannot see anything. There is an inevitable shutting in of consciousness in the sense that sensitivity is limited; I am feeling this body, and seeing from this point of view, and not another's. This is a feature of bodies, not of consciousness, that this body is disconnected from that body.

But in talking of consciousness, one is distinguishing the experiencer from the experienced, and if one does that rigorously, then the experiencer has no qualities, and thus no identity. One can no longer talk of my consciousness as being other than your consciousness, as they are identical featureless arenas of experience, and only the play of experience distinguishes them. All points of view are identically points, and only the view varies.

To fully understand this, to 'realise' it, which is to make the reality of it present in consciousness at every moment, is to see through the opacity of self, or rather to see that the opacity of the other is simply a limitation of embodiment; that I am also there, seeing that, and saying from the limitations of that view, “self-consciousness, far from being an illuminating principle, as traditional philosophy has held, on the contrary shuts the human being in on himself and thus results in opacity rather than enlightenment.”, temporarily blinded by having eyes.

Oppression and Disarray - on Representation

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