Regulation of the particular and its socio-political effects

Introduction of a certain type of democracy was a prelude to war in the Yugoslav federation. In Iraq, and before that in Afghanistan, war was a prelude to democracy. Are we to rectify our perhaps too archaic a notion of “democracy”? Should we reconsider it in the light of the statements like the one made by President Bush who claimed that while elections in Iraq may not have been completely up to our democratic standards, it was nevertheless a miracle that they had happened at all?(1) Or should we let our reflection to be led by indications closer to social realities, and start from the observation that in all the three cases mentioned above, the establishment of democracy has been accompanied by the emergence of supposedly traditional social divides along the lines of ethnicity and religion?
Creation of new states in Central and Eastern Europe, and wider in the area of the former Soviet Union, has been justified as the exercise of the right to self-determination by the acts of “national sovereignty”. The result, however, has been the imposition of the “sovereignty” of the majority ethnic group, which immediately triggered analogous claims by the minority ethnic and/or religious groups now deprived of an adequate constitutional status, and actually exposed to various practices of ethnic cleansing. It was as if the establishment of democratic constitutional arrangements produced, as its immediate effect, the destruction of the very presuppositions of such arrangements – the autonomous political sphere and its complement, the “abstract individual” emancipated from her or his personal circumstances (like those of ethnicity, religion etc.). Instead, a new logic has been instituted, which, although consistently articulated to the proto-juridical frame of the human rights, imposed a matryoshka(2)-like structuring of the social field where bigger ethnic groups contain smaller groups and those contain even smaller groups – all of them struggling, with the same arguments and within the same ideological horizon, for recognition and for their collective rights.

Identity and »the politics of recognition«

Social groups – from those who have formed a state to provide for their needs down to those who, for the same purpose, request from this very state special arrangements – struggle for their “identity”. Their identitary strategies likewise affirm particular cultural elements within a universalistic juridical institutional frame.(3) Hence the internal tension of identity constructions: on one hand, their cultural contents are of »contingent«, »arbitrary« and particularistic nature, on the other hand, they are constituted by their articulation into a universalistic construction.
Identitary strategy consists in bringing a culturally backed particularistic group »claim« under some general principle. In this sense, it is not different from any standard rhetorical procedure which presents a particular proposition as compatible with, or even deducible from, a principle or, rather, a topes presumed to be »general« (i.e., not specifically dependent on any particular situation) and shared by the audience and the speaker. However, the specific feature of the identitary strategy is that the consumption under a general principle is performed in the name of »identity«, and that the addressee's consent as to the adequacy of the subsumption is required in the form of recognition of identity. The request of recognition of identity entails the contention that, if recognition is not granted, something most harmful or even existentially endangering may happen to the identitary group: it is suggested that, in the absence of recognition, the very »identity« of the group is put to risk.(4) This, in turn, favours the claimants' self-styling in the mode of a victim, the argument being that what is promoted as a general principle, is in some way denied to them.
Obviously, the construction of »human rights« offers a privileged support to this type of revendications. To be able to exploit the human rights background, the claimant group has to argue that what they claim to be a lesion to their identitary essence, constitutes a violation of their human right. To establish this connection, identitary strategists have to profile themselves, within the construction of human rights, as the other – i.e., as the instance which represents the limit to everyone's exercise of their own human rights and liberties.(5) Identitary claimants subsume their cause under the universal principle of human rights by what may be called the »hypochondriac turn«: this turn consists in inscribing oneself into the field defined by the universal principle, as the wronged other. Or, in other words, the turn consists in locating oneself into the specific exterior defined by the universal principle as the zone of violation. Contrary to the popular belief according to which identitary ideologies are presumed to be incapable of »the relation to the other«, I would rather suggest that they, from their very inception, appropriate the »position of the other« - specifically, the position of the wronged, of the offended, of the victimised other. Identitary strategies are exercised from this »position« of the wronged other, which is already established within, and by, the dispositif of the human rights.(6) We should therefore abandon another popular prejudice about the identitary strategies according to which they presumably contradict the idea of human rights. Quite the contrary, identitary politics practice this doctrine.

Formalisation of the identity-formation

The mechanism of identity-formation can be formalised.(7) The same formalisation will show that the culturalised pseudo-political discourse transforms the social support of a state (which, in the modernity, used to be the “nation”) into an identitary community. I will present the mechanisms of identity-formation with the help of the examples chosen for their simplicity.

(1) Albanians are fighting against the mono-ethnic Macedonian state which excludes
their participation to its structures.
(Arbën Xhaferi, chairman of the Democratic Party of Albanians, at the time vice-prime minister of the Macedonian government, as quoted in Delo, Ljubljana, 20. 3. 2001)

The interesting feature in (1) is the tension between the generalist description of the Macedonian state (introduced by the use of the learned expression »mono-ethnic«), and the particular case for the Albanians; it is this particular case which is the explicit point of the utterance.
To conduct our analysis, we will adapt the conceptual apparatus proposed by Oswald Ducrot(8). We will present the relevant elements of Ducrot's theory and adapt them for our purpose while analysing the utterance (1).
The topos initially evoked in (1) may be reconstructed as:

T [P: »the more a state is mono-ethnic« -> Q: »the less it allows allo-ethnic participation«].

The evocation of the topos T is evident, and it is explicitly stated that P of T applies to the Macedonian state. The argumentation consequently seems to be:

1. evocation of the topos T which links together two properties, P and Q, in such a way that the possession of the property Q is presented as the consequence of the possession of the property P: T [P: »the more a state is mono-ethnic« -> Q: »the less it allows allo-ethnic participation«];(9)
2. application of the topos T to the case at hand, to the case of the Macedonian state: »Macedonia is a mono-ethnic state«; or: »T & P of T applies to the Macedonian state«; this is the argument proper which leads to:
3. the conclusion: »consequently, Q of T applies to the Macedonian state«; or: »Therefore: Macedonian state does not allow allo-ethnic participation to its structures«.

Schematically:

T [P-> Q]
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Argument: T & Macedonian state is P
|
V

Conclusion: Therefore: Macedonian state is Q

The argument seems to point towards a general conclusion about a particular state, the Macedonian state. Contrary to this easy passage, the speaker not only specifies the first term within the predicative paradigm »mono-ethnic / allo-ethnic« (by pointing out that it is specifically the Macedonian state that is mono-ethnic); he also specifies the second term: the mono-ethnic Macedonian state does not allow the Albanians to participate to its structures. But this specific conclusion does not follow from the argumentation presented above. We must accordingly assume an implicit introduction of a supplementary topos, which introduces the additional specification of the second predicate of the paradigm and in this way accounts for the specified character of the conclusion.
Such a supplementary topos can be construed as a topical inversion of T:

T' [P': »the more a community is allo-ethnic in a mono-ethnic state« -> Q': »the less it is allowed by the mono-ethnic state to participate to the state-structures«].

The implicit supplementary argumentation, which leads to the explicitly stated conclusion, would then be:

1. the background topos: T' [P': »the more a community is allo-ethnic in a mono-ethnic state« -> Q': »the less it is allowed by the mono-ethnic state to participate to the state-structures«];
2. the argument: »the Albanians are P' = an allo-ethnic community in the mono-ethnic Macedonian state«;
3. the conclusion: »therefore, the Albanians are Q' = not allowed to participate to the state-structures of Macedonia«.

Schematically:


T’ [P’ -> Q’]
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Argument: T’ & the Albanians are P’
|
V

Conclusion: Therefore: Albanians are Q’


»The Albanians« should be read »we, the Albanians«. The application of T' (the »inverted« initial topos T) to the specific case is therefore an »identitary« application. It articulates the identitary inscription of a »we« into the general field opened by the general topos T.
However, in order to construe this articulation between a general topos and an identitary »we«, it is necessary to insert a mediating topos T': this »inverted« topos presents, in general terms, what it means to be the victimised party within the field opened, in general terms, by the initial topos T. The »inversion« by the means of which T' is generated from T, is what we have called the hypochondriac turn.
The utterance (1) is an example of identitary strategy: it subsumes an identitary »we« under a general topos T' which explains what it is like to be the wronged other within the horizon of an initial general topos T of which T' is an inversion. Besides relying upon the typical rhetorical para-logics, the utterance (1) exerts important »moral« pressure upon its audience: both the identitary nature of the »application« of the topos (i.e., of the argument proper) and the moral prestige of the two topoi themselves (the doctrine of human and minority rights) present the argumentation as a request for identitary recognition. In our analysis, though, the »recognition« takes no high-flown metaphysical paths: what is to be recognised is simply the appropriateness of the subsumption of a »we« under a general common-place on the theme of the wronged other.(10)

A part of the argumentation is not explicitly stated. Yet, without this »not stated« section, the argumentation cannot reach its explicit conclusion: the general conclusion about the particular Macedonian state is necessary for the particular Albanian case to be inserted under the general topos about victimisation. The argumentation then seems plausible, esp. since the focal opposition »monoethnic / alloethnic« appears to be, or, rather, is presented as being, »lexical«, and the argument therefore seems »analytical«, i.e., trivial, self-evident. Still, considering that, in strict »lexical« terms, the opposition to »mono-ethnic« is »poly-ethnic«, something more is needed for the argument to run smoothly. This additional element is the same as the one which provides for the dramatic relevance of the attribution of the adjective »monoethnic« to the noun »state«: it is the conception of the state as »ethnically blind«, as the warrant of human rights etc. A »monoethnic« state is then a monstrosity which, in clear violation of its own concept, treats its Albanian citizens as »alloethnic«, and victimises them. By appealing to the universalist notions of contemporary politics, utterance (1) requests the recognition of the Albanians as the victimised party, and pleads for the condemnation of the »monoethnic« Macedonian state as the perpetrator. The argument sets all the dramatis personae upon the scene and establishes appropriate relations among them – and it will work if its audience: 1) shares its universalist juridical-political background; 2) acknowledges to the speaker's group the status of the victim in the terms of the universalist normative background.
The condition 1) is secured by the present global ideological hegemony; the fulfilment of the condition 2) seems to depend upon a judgement about »facts«. What matters, though, is that the judgement about »facts« under 2) is to be passed by the same instance which is supposed to »share« the universalist ideological background under 1). The »addressee«, supposed to »share« the universalist background, is also supposed to have the competence of its »application to the facts«(11). This means that (1) invests its »addressee« with a privileged access to the ideological background of its own operations: it installs the »addressee« upon the structural position of the »subject-supposed-to-know«.(12) Submission to the hegemony of a universalist ideology is an immanent feature of identitary revendication: what is more, identitary revendication defines its »addressee« as the »hegemon« of this hegemony, it promotes its »addressee« to the position from where a legitimate »recognition« can be conceded. Since the »hypochondriac turn« is only completed if recognised as justified, and since the recognition can only come from the »subject-supposed-to-know« of the universalist ideology, submission to the hegemony and to its concrete, »material« Träger is an essential component of the identitary operation.

From hypochondria to »risk society«(13) and to apocalyptic revelation(14)

Identitary hypochondria seems one of several possible strategies under the hegemony of universalism – the one which negotiates an affirmation of culturalist nativism with the submission to hegemonic universalism. Strategies that do not take the nativist detour, and directly take the universalist position, while keeping the hypochondriac turn, assume the voice of a »cosmopolitan« hypochondriac community, i.e., of an »imagined global community« of possible victims. At this level, it is almost impossible to avoid a certain »reflexivisation« of the mechanism: for if we are all united in our status of possible victims, any harm that may befall us is, regardless to the contingency of its empirical origin, imputable to our lack of vigilance. The alienating blackmail is perfect: we are permanently under the threat, and if occasionally the threat materialises, we are guilty of negligence. Guilt and anxiety, what better cement of domination could one imagine? You either live in anxiety or you die in guilt. Or others die and you survive in guilt. So you better anticipate upon your guilt, to escape anxiety; but anticipated guilt is present anxiety.
This is really a »reflexive« modernity: in classical situation, the individual was facing an impossible dilemma which, retroactively, generated her or him as a subject; now, the existence of the subject is nothing but this palpitation between two impossibilities. At the wake of our modernity, Corneille's Chimène was torn between genealogical loyalty and the loyalty to her emerging bourgeois Ego: an impossible dilemma which could only be resolved by having recourse to the alibi of the monarchic authority. But if Chimène needed complex ideological backgrounds to construe cette généreuse alternative(15) with which she addressed the king, nothing so redundant is needed any more: the »ideological background« is now the alternative itself. We have finally reached the founding moment of the social contract where the effect precedes the cause.(16)
The case of »reflexive modernity« is indeed argued for in classical terms, but negatively: »modern societies, having dissolved all givens and transformed them into decisions«(17). Since the 18th century »nature« has been colonised by the humanity, humanity is only facing itself as a decision-making instance. The »reflexivity«-hypothesis seems to be spelled out in the classical terms not so much to appeal to sociological rationalism or to profit from some popular Heideggerianism than covertly to impose an implicit hypothesis of a different kind – one regarding a certain »interior« absence and not the absence of »exterior«. This simultaneously vague(18) and seemingly precise talk about »decisions«, further specified as »the socialisation of shared risks or shared risk definitions«, actually suggests that there is no antagonistic contradiction within contemporary society or societies. All the possible risks then come as a sort of »collateral damage« to the global development. This, in turn, opens the possibility to envisage the rational construction of a world community around the possibility of involuntary self-inflicted harm.
The following is a blueprint for argumentation within this horizon:

(2) The promotion of human rights is not just a kind of international social work. It is indispensable for our safety and well being because governments which do not respect the rights of their own citizens will in all likelihood not respect the rights of others either. … Such regimes are also more likely to trigger unrest by persecuting minorities, offering a safe haven for terrorists, smuggling drugs or clandestinely manufacturing weapons of mass destruction.
(Madeleine Albright, at the time Secretary of State)(19)

This is a scheme that can be filled-in as needed: »Governments who violate human rights of their citizens, are a threat to others as well. And X is such a government. Consequently, X is a threat to others as well. – Whoever is facing such a government, is threatened by it. And we are facing such a government. Consequently: we are in danger.«
This seems satisfactory, and offers a plausible argument for preventive war. However, socialisation of risk has been achieved through »de-antagonisation« of society, and this has seriously reduced the chances for a rational explanation of the danger. This blank can metonymically be filled-in by enumeration of »shared risk definitions« (the familiar list: terrorism, weapons of mass destruction…); or it can metaphorically be acknowledged and fuel the development of an apocalyptic vision:

(3) God is not neutral.
(George W. Bush, jr., 20. 9. 2001.)

The analysis must explain why the spontaneous interpreter understands (3) as meaning: »God is with us.« Restitution of the argumentative chain shows why: »The harder the evil presses, the more God protects the victims of the evil. And the evil is now pressing hard. Consequently, God is protecting its victims. – The more one is a victim of the evil, the more God protects one. And we are now victims of the evil. So: God is protecting us.« The rest is lexical: »If one is protecting somebody, then one is not neutral; and God is protecting us. Therefore, God is not neutral.«
This digression was necessary to show that identitary strategy enters into a wider context of strategies possible within a universalist ideology. We can now return to our more immediate concerns.

Victimisation and identification

Victimisation in the terms of the hegemonic universalist ideology then functions as the einziger Zug of Freudian identification, as the »single trait«(20) around which »identity« will be constructed. Construction of identity is a cultural operation, a fabrication of a patch-work of elements fished out of the Sargasso Sea of freely floating autonomised cultural débris (21) it needs an anchorage, though, and this point of attachment comes from the »outside«, from the hegemonic ideology, as the recognition of victimisation. Once this solid core has been provided in universalist terms, the remaining work of the identity construction will be carried out by the idiosyncratic powers of the native consciousness. This perfect fit between the particular (native) and universal (hegemonic) is mediated by the status of the victim – claimed from a particularist position, but already in universalist terms, and recognised from the universalist hegemonic position.(22)
This mechanism not only inserts a »native« identitary group into a universalist hegemonic context without lesion to its cultural idiosyncrasies – it is also constructive of the native group itself. Social construction of identity which makes various identitary features crystallise around the »single trait« of victimisation stabilised in the hegemonic ideology integrates the identitary community in formally the same way as the psychological identity integrates the host of Ego-identifications into a solid Ego under the auspices of the Ich-Ideal. This, then, is a situation where mechanisms of social cohesion are the same as the mechanisms of individual psychic integration.(23)
But we should give its full import to the fact that construction of identity is only made possible by a heterogeneous universalist element which comes from an ideology whose privileged mode of existence is juridical.(24) This feature provides for another conversion which completes the one we have noted in the dimension of the relations between the psychic and the social, and which gives its full meaning to the transformation of the psychic process, individual by definition, into a form of sociation, i.e., into a mechanism of social cohesion. Juridical apparatus, especially in its modern form (with the abstract, free and equal individual etc.), essentially keeps individuals apart.(25) In an identitary community, though, elements of juridical ideology, such as human rights, provide support for the mechanisms of recognition and secure foundations for the identity construction. In such a community, what separates individuals as individuals, binds them together as a group.
The form of individual freedom (limitation of its performance by the freedom of the other) becomes the core-element of the contents of collective belonging. Correlatively, the contents of socialisation (individual psychic processes of Ego-integration) become the form of the mechanisms of social integration. What used to be the support of the »autonomous political sphere« and the medium of a certain political articulation of social tensions and conflicts (freedom and equality of abstract individuals), now becomes the axis of »culturalisation«(26) of those tensions and conflicts. »Culturalisation« is the imposition of a relatively arbitrary set of »native« ideological (»representational«) elements, disconnected from the practices they have initially mediated,(27) as the social link, constitutive of the identitary group. This »set« can only hold together if it is amalgamated around the core of the identitary construction – the heterogeneous universalist element; the articulation to the universalist core-element is also the absolute condition for the identity-construction to be imposed as the (ideological) mechanism of social cohesion.

Identity as a mode of ideological interpellation

We can now see that »identity« is what Simmel's stranger has: more precisely, “identity” is what the stranger has for the native – for Simmel takes care to give a relational, or topical, description, and not to substancialise a social relation(28). The native's relation to the stranger:
1. is a more abstract relation than the relation to the members of the native's own group, and is based on the commonality of more general qualities;
2. stresses, on the background of the general shared features of humanity, »that which is not common«;
3. is not individualised and takes the stranger as a representative of her or his group of origin.

With the stranger, then, what is individual and particular, operates as an element of distance; and what is collective and general, is an element of closeness.(29)
Conceived in this way, identity is not a property, it is a relation: the relation between the individual who »has« identity, and the individual who perceives this individual as »having« an identity. If the two individuals are distinct, the identity is an »ascribed« one. If it is the same individual who figures on both sides of the relation, then the identity is an »assumed« one. If both modalities coincide, then it is a »recognised« identity.

The »ascribed« identity of Simmelian stranger also entails the reference to the »generally human«(30); it entailed the »native« element as well – and not only on the side of the »object«, of the »native« features ascribed to the stranger. Since these features in the stranger are those which are »non-common«, their perception presupposes a »native point of view«, the perspective which distinguishes between the »familiar« and the »strange«, the »common« and the »non-common«. The ascriptive perspective(31) then presupposes a happy cohabitation of the particular and the general view, the »native« standpoint and the one which perceives the »humanly common«. It presupposes an instance from where it is possible naively to arbitrate about both dimensions. Contrary to this, the assumed identity presupposes a separation of the two perspectives, the »native« one and the »generally human« one. It is promulgated from the »native« instance, and appeals to the »generally human« one: its construction will not be completed until it is sanctioned by the »general« instance. This sanction is the »recognition« - the access to the »generally human«, granted by the »general« instance.
In less descriptive terms, in conceptual terms of the theory of ideological interpellation: in identitary construction, the »native« subject-supposed-to-believe is separated from the instance of the subject-supposed-to-know, and appeals for its recognition. A direct identification with the subject-supposed-to-know is not possible, and needs the sanction of its »representative« to be consummated. On one side, this means that even the identification to the subject-supposed-to-believe will not be possible until it acquires the recognition, since already on the »native« level, the core element of the identity-construction is the one borrowed from the »general«, more exactly, from the universal domain, controlled by the subject-supposed-to-know. On the other side, though, as the instance of recognition is not only »general«, but »universal«, any collage of identitary features can, in principle, pretend to its blessing, under the condition that it is centred around some universal element (e.g., around a plausible pretension of violation of a universal »right«) – i.e., under the condition that it is not self-sufficient. The actual recognition, then, cannot depend upon any ratiocination in the terms of the identity construction proper, nor even in the terms of the universalist background, but depends upon conditions external to the frame where the problem is articulated – like relations of power, perceptions of the »interests« of the involved parties etc.(32)
»Identity« is then a type of ideological interpellation which, to succeed, needs neither to support its identification with the subject-supposed-to-know by the unconscious desire(33) nor to squeeze the interpellated individual into a vel-situation(34). To succeed, identitary interpellation does not need to strike upon an unconscious fantasy in the interpellated individual; but neither does it need to present itself as the solution to the apories of a pluralistic socio-ideological context. Its subject supposed to believe is appended to a belief-background that has the structure of Ego-integration. Structuration of this background, though, can only be completed by the incorporation of a universalist element as the axis of its articulation. While incorporation of the universalist element completes the identitary construction – it also makes its »validity« depend upon the sanction which can only come from the universalist field. In this sense, identitary individual yields to the ideological interpellation even before s/he has been granted the »right« to identify with the subject-supposed-to-know (of the universalist background) which supports the interpellation. Identitary interpellation is, sit venia verbo, a vel-alternative »in action«: identitary construction is incomplete until it incorporates the universalist element; this means that the identitary individual cannot identify with her or his (native, local) subject-supposed-to-believe until the belief-background to which this subject is ascribed is recognised by the subject-supposed-to-know of the universalist background; once the recognition granted, identity is saturated – but it still remains within the register of »belief«, i.e., of the possible, the conditional. As a consequence, identitary interpellation traps the interpellated individual into an incessant oscillation between the possible and the necessary, between the conditional and the unconditional. Until s/he completes her or his identity with a universalist element, it is only »possible, conditional«; after the inclusion of this element, the identity makes itself depend upon an external sanction; if it succeeds to obtain the sanction (»recognition«) – it is recognised precisely as a »native« identity, i.e., as something »possible and conditional«, appended to a subject-supposed-to-believe which, again, needs the sanction of the »necessary and unconditional«. »Recognition« cannot be given once and for all, it structurally has to be reiterated, gained, »deserved« again and again.(35) Identity, then, is the state of being constantly blackmailed. It is an ideal ideology for the »comprador« political classes, as it can equally well mediate both their disciplinary local activities and their servility upon the global scene.
I have schematically resumed the Althusserian »ideological interpellation«(36)as the inversion of Lacan's scheme of the analytical process(37):


D demand (of sense)
I identification
T point of transference (subject supposed to believe/know)
-φ position of the subject (the unconscious fantasy or a vel-alternative)
i ideological interpellation

The interpretation starts from the addressee’s “demand of sense” (D), which is confronted with a “sense / nonsense” alternative; the interpreter solves this alternative by identifying her/himself (I) with the subject supposed to believe (T) “all that is necessary to believe” for a particular string to “make sense”; from this quasi-neutral pivotal point of communication (to which both the addresser and the addressee implicitly appeal), the “sense” comes back to the addressee. This back-lash of the interpreter’s demand of sense is, in general, the “sense” of the utterance; in certain cases, though, the “return” of the sense to the addressee takes the form of ideological interpellation (i).
The conditions of a “happy” interpellation are suggested by the very scheme we have borrowed from Lacan: if, at the point of the “sense / nonsense” alternative, the individual is located as subject (-φ) i.e., if the individual is, at that point, squeezed into what Lacan calls a “vel-alternative” (of the type: “give your money or I take your life!”), then the process does not proceed directly to the point of identification (to the “subject supposed to believe”), but takes an unconscious loop and is mediated by the individual’s (unconscious) desire (d). (The same happens if the utterance activates an unconscious fantasy in the interpreter.) In this case, the identification is no more “conditional”, it becomes unconditional, the background beliefs are assumed as necessary, the identification is consequently with the “subject supposed to know”, and the interpellation succeeds.



Our general theory sets the condition: »no interpellation without (unconditional) identification«, or »no interpellation without identification to the subject-supposed-to-know«. In the general formula, then, it is the transformation of identification from »conditional« to »unconditional« that provides an unproblematic transformation of the subject-supposed-to-believe into the subject-supposed-to-know. Identitary interpellation specifies the general formula by maintaining the distinction between the two »subjects-supposed-to…«. Identitary formula would then be: »no identification to the subject-supposed-to-believe without identification to the subject-supposed to know; but with the identification to the subject-supposed to know, you only get identification to the subject-supposed-to-believe; but then: no identification to the subject-supposed-to-believe without identification to the subject-supposed to know … etc.«.
What strikes us as a very specific feature of the identity-interpellation is that what, in interpellation »in general« and, indeed, in the various specific forms of interpellation we have hitherto investigated(38), are ideological mechanisms which operate on the level of the individual, are here displaced into the extra-individual, into the social dimension. The social counterpart of the individual vel-alternative is the aporetic regressio ad infinitum we have noted in the preceding paragraph and which operates on the level of the identitary community, not “within” its particular members; the social counterpart of the individual fantasy in the hypochondriac turn which, again, is articulated in a we-mode, and not individually.
This inversion in the location of interpellative mechanisms, their displacement from “the individual as subject” to “the group as identitary community” can best account for the inversion of the whole problematics of interpellation we have occasionally been already noting: while, in other types of interpellation, different ideological discourses and apparatuses struggle to “catch” the individual – in identitary interpellation, the individual has always-already yielded to interpellation, but without any certainty that the trans-individual, “social” conditions for the identitary interpellation are secured at all. While, in other types of interpellation, the theoretical problem, accordingly, is to define the conditions of a “happy” interpellation – with identitary interpellation, given that it seems to be always-already successful on the individual level, the theoretical problem seems to be to define the larger social conditions where identitary interpellative mechanisms can be deployed at all. This, of course, is an over-simplification, but it will help us to advance in grasping the specificity of identitary interpellation.
The general “interest” an individual has to yield to ideological interpellation is the satisfaction of her or his “demand of sense”: s/he cannot understand others, nor her- or himself, without the fixation provided by interpellation. The general philosophical principle of “charity of interpretation” cannot, in itself, secure this task – not because some utterances, discourses of intersubjective relations would be too “exotic” for the principle to be stretched to cover them, but because too many utterances, discourses and relations may be too “un-exotic”, too “common”, too binding not to exact decisions impossible without the “fixation” which interpellation provides. Identity statements, usually imbedded in some more general ideology (totemistic, genealogical, familial, communal, corporate, political, etc.), perform precisely this kind of “fixation” of social relations. Georges Devereux, who starts from a rather “technical” notion of identity(39), underlines that “it must be possible for ethnic identity to be enunciated, and it has to be enunciated, by an auto-ethnographer”(40). This condition of reflexivity holds for our type of identity as well; it logically originates from a statement of the type: A says: “I am a P.” Such a statement provides the speaker with an important social “anchorage”, for it affirms the identity of sujet d’énonciation, the subject of enunciation, the speaker as a concrete individual being, and of sujet d’énoncé, the “social individual”, the individual as member of a group. This “fixation” provides the speaker both with the control over her or his utterances – and the access to her or his “social being”. It is her or his tie to social ties. If the identity statement is embedded in some other ideology, it is only the effect of the ideological interpellation having been successfully performed upon the speaker as a particular individual. As a consequence, it submits the interpellated individual to the obligations of the group-membership, and to the fear of eventuality that the group withdraws its authorisation for further identity statements. If the background ideology is an identitary one, though, its interpellation confronts the interpellated individual directly with the anxiety as to the very existence of the identitary group. Since the tie to her or his social ties, and, it should hardly be added, to her- or himself, comes to the individual through her or his belonging to the identitary group – the eventuality that the group will not be able to constitute itself presents an immediate danger to the individual.(41) “If we do not have the right (~s pertaining to an identitary group) – I cannot be my (identitary) Self.”
The social tie which binds together identitary communities comes from the threat of losing, or not being able to achieve, their specific form of sociality. It is a tie which founds itself on the possibility of its own absence.(42)

Identitary ideology in social struggles

As already noted, identitary ideology, by constructing social aggregates under the threat of the loss of elementary mechanisms of intersubjectivity, is a powerful mechanism of domination. As such, it has amply been used by political classes to destroy Yugoslav federation, to wage wars, and to fabricate social consensus as the basis for the new political constructions(43) whose primary effects were the installation of new forms of exploitation(44), inequality(45), discipline and control. Identitary ideology is now an important component in these newly imposed political constructions. It fits well into the status of »limited sovereignty« of these new entities, reproduces their dependence on the international level, and mediates their disciplinary action over their own populations.
Contemporary debates mostly focus upon the tension between the »citizenship principle« and the »identitary principle« which identitary ideological constitution presumably introduces into the »body politic«. The remedy proposed is to separate the two domains and, at the same time, to reformulate the identity-complex. Accordingly, »citizenship« as the political domain is separated from the cultural domain, which, in turn, is re-constituted upon the principle of »cultural diversity«. As »cultural diversity« is deduced from »cultural rights«, though, and as »cultural rights« are supposed to be part of (individual) human rights, reformulation of the cultural sphere submits it to constitutive principles of the modern juridical-political sphere, and the presumed »separation« is rather an annexation of culture by the political sphere. This does not mean that identitary construction has been superseded by some universalist political construction: it only means that the identitary construction has been more or less rigorously articulated to a universalist juridical-political frame. In other words, and in the light of the theory we have tried to present above, it is at this point that the identitary construction has actually been completed. Not only does the standard solution to the identitary problem complete the logic of identitary construction, it also deeply contaminates the supposedly »autonomous« political sphere with this logic. But here, in the political dimension, the standard solution does bring a solution: not the solution to the problem it is supposed to confront – but a solution to a problem it does not pose. Contamination of the traditional political sphere by the logic of identitary construction brings a solution to the crisis of the liberal democratic political model – it replaces political processes by juridical and para-juridical procedures, transforms political confrontations into cultural struggles, dissolves the relics of the »political sphere« into a »civil society« composed of various identitary groups, and submerges the relics of the »public sphere« under a flood of authenticist and solipsist identitary discourses. What seemed to be an annexation of the identitary culture to the »political sphere« proves to be »culturalisation« of politics, and its replacement by apparatuses and procedures of Foucauldian(46)»governmentality«.(47)



(1)The logic of this reasoning reminds one of a joke related by Freud in Jokes and their Relations to the unconscious: “In the temple at Cracow the Great Rabbi N. was sitting… Suddenly he … exclaimed: ‘At this very moment the Great Rabbi L. has died in Lemberg.’ … At last it was established … that the Rabbi L. had not died … he was still alive. A stranger took the opportunity of jeering at one of the Cracow Rabbi’s disciples..: ‘Your Rabbi made a great fool of himself that time, when he saw the Rabbi L. die in Lemberg. The man’s alive to this day.’ ‘That makes no difference,’ replied the disciple. ‘Whatever you may say, the Kück from Cracow to Lemberg was a magnificent one.’” (S.E. VIII, p. 63.) – The stranger believes that a vision needs to be true if it is to be a vision – as we may believe that elections should be democratic if they are to be elections; the disciple, to the contrary, knows that a vision only has to happen to be fascinating – as Mr. Bush knows that elections, to generate legitimacy, only have to take place.
(2)Matryoshka is the Russian wooden folk-art doll: when one opens it, one finds inside it a smaller likewise doll which, in turn, contains another yet smaller doll …
(3)“Identity” may even be promoted to the status of a legal category. This is a particularly strong tendency within those legislations which otherwise enforce the neo-liberal submission of cultural sphere to the mechanisms “free market”, i.e., in the post-socialist legislation. – The following is the example of Slovenia. According to the implicit philosophy of the Council of Europe suggestions (which have later been built into the Slovene “Law on the enforcement of public interest in culture” /Uradni list RS, no. 96-4807/2002, November 14, 2002; also in: Predpisi s področja kulture /Regulations in the area of culture/, Ljubljana: Uradni list, 2003), the “natural life” of culture is provided by the invisible hand of the “free market”. However, the law explicitly considers the eventuality that the self-regulated cultural market may fail to provide goods and services of sufficient quality, or in sufficient quantity, or may not provide for their sufficient accessibility, on certain points of public interest. It is upon these points of ”public interest” that the state and the local communities should intervene. The horizon of the public interest is generally defined as “the cultural development of Slovenia and the Slovene nation”, and is further specified as “securing the conditions for: cultural creativity; accessibility of cultural goods; cultural diversity; Slovene cultural identity; common Slovene cultural space«. In a program document (National Program for Culture 2004 – 2007), special state responsibility for vulnerable groups (specified as disabled, children, immigrants) is formulated as the “enforcement of cultural rights as a dimension of human rights”, and materialises in “securing the conditions for authentic expression of cultural needs of various minority ethnic communities, vulnerable groups … and the basic conditions for conservation and development of their cultural identities”. (Italics mine.)
(4)Hence “the politics of recognition”. See: Charles Taylor (1992), “The politics of recognition”, in: Multiculturalism, Amy Gutmann, ed., Princeton: Princeton University Press (second expanded edition: 1994).
(5)“La liberté consiste à pouvoir faire tout ce qui ne nuit pas à autrui: ainsi, l’exercice des droits naturels de chaque homme n’a de bornes que celles qui assurent aux autres membres de la société la jouissance de ces mêmes droits.” (Art. 4 of the Déclaration of 1789.)
(6)This position of the “wronged other” is inscribed in the field of human rights by the “structuring” opposition “tout homme / nul homme”: everybody should be included, is (by nature) included within the horizon of human rights; correlatively, nobody should be excluded, can be excluded from this horizon. It is inscribed also as a “structured” effect, punctually, by the figure of “autrui”, “autres membres de la société”.
(7)To conduct our analysis, we will adapt the conceptual apparatus proposed by Oswald Ducrot in: Oswald Ducrot (1996), Slovenian Lectures / Conférences slovènes, Igor Žagar, ed., Ljubljana: ISH. – We will develop Ducrot’s theory, a theory of argumentation in language, so as to embrace problems of argumentation in discourse. Ducrot epistemologically supports his theory of argumentation with the reference to the work of Mikhail Bakhtin. Since Bakhtin’s is a theory of discourse, not of language, we will obviously elaborate our extension of Ducrot’s theory within the epistemological direction taken by Ducrot himself, while taking into account also other contributions of the same school: Pavel N. Medvedev (1928), Formalnyj métod v literaturovedenii, Leningrad, Priboj ; Valentin N. Vološinov (1929), Marksizm i filosofija jazyka, Leningrad, Priboj ; Mikhail M. Bakhtin (1963), Problemy poétiki Dostoevskogo, Moskva, Sovetskij pisatel’. – The general concept under which these problems were elaborated by the «Bakhtin’s school» is the concept of “orientation towards another discourse”, ustanovka na čužoe slovo.
(8)Oswald Ducrot (1996), Slovenian Lectures / Conférences slovènes, Igor Žagar, ed., Ljubljana: ISH.
(9)The topos evoked remains on the level of the “background”; schematically, we will mark this by writing T above the horizontal line under which we will present the [argument -> conclusion] chain.
(10)Yet, this simple rhetorical turn accomplishes a major political shift: from the concern for the minority rights (in general) in a “mono-ethnic” state, it transfers the emphasis upon the confrontation between two (particular) “ethnic” formations. This displacement has been denounced in the following terms: “La logique qui a prevalu au Kosovo s’est repetée en Macedoine, ou la mosaique ethnique, confessionnelle et linguistique est particulierement complexe. … le dialogue politique favorisé par la communauté internationale s’est reduit à un face-à-face entre représentants macedoniens et albanais, ‘oubliant’ les Turcs, les Roms, les Serbes, les Vlachs ou les Macedoniens musulmans, appelés Torbeši. Dans le conflit, des méchanismes de reduction de la complexité sociale à un affrontement entre deux ‘grands’ nationalismes se mirent en oeuvre, de même qu’une assimilation des petits groupes à ces ‘grands’ nationalismes.” (Jean-Arnault Dérens, “Les ‘petits peuples’ oubliés des Balkans”, Le Monde diplomatique, juillet 2003, p. 16.)
(11)This “application to the facts” of the universalist ideology, or the assessment of the “facts” in the terms of the background universalism, is a delicate, if not an impossible task: it has to measure an absence, and to invent the measure of an absence (“which alloethnic individual, excluded from the state structure, makes the state monoethnic?”). (If the utterance (1) approaches a well-known sorites on the side of its interpretation, it nears pragmatic paradox on the side of its production: its enunciation, at least to some extent, falsifies it.) The decision about the “facts” cannot be “fully motivated” and will always suffer of some sort of insufficient support: it is consequently an act of power, and has to compensate its relative arbitrariness by a position of authority. This is precisely our point here: revendication of the recognition of identity invests the instance to which it is addressed, with the authority of arbitration about the proper “use” of the universalist juridico-political apparatuses.
(12)In this sense, the plea for a recognition of identity is the inversion of ideological interpellation in the Althusserian sense: if the Althusserian interpellation endeavours to ellicit, from its “addressee”, the interpellated individual, an unconditional identification to the “subject-supposed-to-believe” of its belief-background, i.e., to promote its “subject-supposed-to-believe” into a “subject-supposed-to-know”, identitary revendication poses the interpellation as always-already consummated on the part of its speaker, and situates its “addressee” upon the structural locus from where the identitary speaker has always-already been interpellated (upon the locus of the “subject-supposed-to-know”). Identitary speech is the contemporary counterpart to la servitude volontaire.
(13)Ulrich Beck (1992), Risk Society, London: Sage; same (1999), World Risk Society, Cambridge: Polity Press.
(14)Lewis H. Lapham (2003), “Une grande lumière est apparue au président”, Le Monde diplomatique, vol. 50, no. 592, July 2003.
(15)“She asked the king to give him (= Rodrigo de Bivar, “el Cid”) to her for husband, for she was much taken by his qualities, or to punish him according to the laws for the death he had afflicted to her father.” - Corneille opens his “Avertissement” (1648) to Le Cid by quoting the passage in Spanish.
(16)“Pour qu’un peuple naissant pût gouter les saines maximes de la politique et suivre les règles fondamentales de la raison d’Etat, il faudrait que l’effet pût devenir la cause, que l’esprit social qui doit etre l’ouvrage de l’institution presidât à l’institution même, et que les hommes fussent avant les lois ce qu’ils doivent devenir par elles.” (Jean Jacques Rousseau (1960) [1762], Du contrat social ou Principes du droit politique, Paris: Garnier, p. 262.)
(17)Ulrich Beck (2000), “The cosmopolitan perspective: sociology in the second age of modernity”, British Journal of Sociology, vol. 51, no. 1, January-March 2000, p. 95.
(18)To be fair, the players on this field are identified few lines above: “state, business and a society of citizens”, idem, p. 94.
(19)Madeleine Albright (1998), “Menschenrechte und Außenpolitik”, Amerika-Dienst 25; quoted from: Ulrich Beck, idem, p. 82.
(20)Sigmund Freud, “Group psychology and the analysis of the Ego”, S.E., XVIII, p. 107; also: “point of coincidence” (ibidem), “common quality” (108).
(21)The constitution of the modern “autonomous cultural sphere” can theoretically be presented in various ways. An explicit classical attempt is the one proposed by Georg Simmel (cf. his texts: “Das Geheimnis…”; “Die Grossstädte…”; Philosophie des Geldes; Engl. Transl. in: The Sociology of Georg Simmel, Kurt H. Wolff (ed., tr., intro.), The Free Press, New York; Collier Macmillan, London, 1964 [1950]). In a kind of historical dialectical process, Simmel binds together the expansion of »money economy«, the emergence of the modern public sphere (»publicity« which encompasses »politics, administration, and jurisdiction«), and the polarisation between the »objective culture« and the individual culture. For Simmel, »cultural differenciation«, »culture which outgrows all personal life«, are inseparably linked with the constitution of the modern state as a sphere of, as he puts it, »publicity«, with the correlative imposition of the money economy as the dominating form of exchange – but also with the growth of modern individualism. Simmel emphasises the integrative character of the »cultural ideal« – and, most importantly, links its integrative force to a suspension of »the inherent value« of the elements which form the cultural »ideal«. The cultural sphere constitutes itself by a process in which particular »achievements« »evaporate« out of the regions of their origin, and coalesce to form a separate and autonomous domain. These »achievements« are liberated from their particularist boundedness and transformed into the »glue« of human relations, by a certain suspension of, or abstraction from, their original, authentic and particularist »inherent value«. Thus, the »ontological mode« of culture as an autonomous social sphere is constitutively distanciation from »origins«, is suspension of »authenticity«. – Simmel's insight suggests the image of a Sargasso Sea of uprooted »achievements«, both integrated into a humanising »cultural ideal« and crashing down upon the individual as »an overwhelming fullness of crystallised and impersonalised spirit«. – An alternative way to present the constitution of the modern “culture” would be to explain it as a consequence of the expansion of the commodity exchange: the history of modernity can be described as progressive annexation of one social sphere after the other into the generalised commodity economy. Commodity exchange, as the dominant form of exchange, over-determines all other forms of exchange – simply by imposing the necessity to the individuals to apprehend all kinds of exchange as economic exchange. This is the result of the historical constitution of economy into an »autonomous« social sphere, the dominant social sphere. The counterpart of this historical constitution is the autonomisation of other »social spheres«, and of the cultural sphere among them. The modern sphere of culture would then be the dumping ground of ideological elements made superfluous by their substitution with the commodity fetishism as the dominant symbolic mediator of social practices. Culture, as it has historically emerged with modernity, is something like a cabinet de curiosités, stuffed with »native representations«, abstracted from practices and processes of their origin.
(22)This “fit” is the ideological counterpart to the chain of dependency as classically analysed by Andre Gunder Frank in Underdevelopment and Capitalism in Latin America.
(23)It is only from this point on that the term “identity” can be considered to possess theoretical conceptual value. Thus admitted into the field of theory, the concept immediately calls for further elaboration, though. The situation is not one of the invasion of the social field by psychological mechanisms – which would require, as the epistemological counterpart, the abandonment of sociological conceptuality to the profit of some psychological or psychoanalytical conceptual apparatus. What we have just described is rather what Georg Simmel calls “the autonomisation of contents”. In the chapter “Die Geselligkeit (Beispiel der Reinen oder Formalen Soziologie)”, in: Grundfragen der Soziologie (1917), Simmel first establishes the distinction between “the content, … the material … of sociation” (defined as: “Everything present in the individuals … in the form of drive, interest, purpose, inclination, psychic state, movement…”) and the form which is sociation (Vergesellschaftung) itself (“Sociation thus is the form … in which individuals grow together into units that satisfy their interests.”). Simmel then proceeds to describe a phenomenon which he calls “the autonomisation of contents”. Although he considers this process to be essential, he only describes it as already given, without asking what may be the reasons for its emergence: “But it happens that these materials … become autonomous in the sense that they are no longer inseparable from the objects which they formed and thereby made available to our purposes. They come to play freely in themselves and for their own sake; they produce or make use of materials that exclusively serve their own operation or realisation.” (Quoted from: The Sociology of Georg Simmel, Kurt H. Wolff, ed., London and New York: The Free Press (1950), pp. 40 ss.) – What Simmel does not explicitly state, but what is implicit already in the quoted passage, and what even more obviously follows from the examples he is giving, is that the “contents”, by “autonomising” themselves, convert themselves into “forms” of sociation. This region of Simmel’s theoretical elaboration may well be an ingenuous anticipation-in-action of what much later Merab Mamardašvili developed under the concept of “converted forms”. (At one point, Simmel actually uses the expression translated as “this complete turnover”, but then banalises the idea into the transition from a situation where “the material determines the form” to a situation where “the form determines the material”.) – Identity-formation, then, is a type of sociation where processes of identification and Ego-integration, otherwise the “material” of various forms of sociation, become themselves the “form” of social integration of individuals.
(24)The central component of the presently hegemonic ideology is actually the “proto-juridical” condition of contemporary juridical apparatuses: the ideology of the human rights. It is the complex of human rights which nowadays occupies the position of what Althusser called “le petit supplément d’idéologie morale” without which the Law (le Droit) could not exist. This shows the capacity of the modern juridical ideology to structure its “supplement” according to its own logic; this logic is one of abstraction, homogenisation, which permits the presently hegemonic ideology to avoid to be caught in any particular moral ideology, and, consequently, to hegemonise them all; it is therefore via its supplement that the juridical ideology now performs its “dominant” role in the domain of “practical ideologies” (cf. Louis Althusser (1995), Sur la reproduction, Paris: PUF, esp. pp. 99 and 203).
(25)“Die Konstitution des politischen Staats und die Auflösung der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft in die unabhängingen Individuen – deren Verhältnis das Recht ist … - vollzieht sich in einem und demselben Akte.” (Karl Marx (1958), “Zur Judenfrage” (1843), Marx – Engels Werke, I, Berlin: Dietz, p. 369.)
(26)Boris Buden (2002: Kaptolski kolodvor, Beograd: Centar za savremenu umetnost) writes of “culturification” of political conflicts, while Tonči Kuzmanić (2002: Politika, mediji, UZI in WTC, Ljubljana: Mirovni inštitut) speaks of “disappearance” of politics from political apparatuses.
(27)This accounts for the paradoxical “traditionalism” of identitary ideologies.
(28)“For, to be a stranger is naturally a very positive relation; it is a specific form of interaction.” The Sociology of Georg Simmel, Kurt H. Wolff (ed., tr., intro.), The Free Press, New York; Collier Macmillan, London, 1964 [1950], p. 402.
(29)“[the stranger], who is close by, is far, and … he, who also is far, is actually near. … is near and far at the same time…” (idem, pp. 402 and 407).
(30)The relation to the stranger is “founded only on generally human commonness” (Simmel, op. cit., p. 407).
(31)The one which, on the background of the general shared features of humanity, »stresses that which is not common« (ibidem).
(32)Denunciations that the actors involved in these transactions do not act “consistently” do not make much sense, since the field itself is structured so as to exclude any possibility of “consistency”. This is most probably one of the important sources of violence, so frequent in “identitary” situations.
(33)See the concluding remarks to my text “Ideology and Fantasy”, in: Ann Kaplan and Michael Sprinker (1993), The Althusserian Legacy, London - New York: Verso.
(34)See my text “Should the theory of ideology be conceived as a theory of institutions?”, in: Alojz Cindrič (1998), Čarnijev zbornik – A Festschrift for Ludvik Čarni, Ljubljana: Oddelek za sociologijo Filozofske fakultete v Ljubljani.
(35)What has widely been interpreted as “neo-nationalism” seems rather to be identitary politics. E.g., “nationalist” post-communist political classes have engaged in a long-term “politics of recognition”: first, they struggled for the recognition of their new states; then, accession to EU, entering NATO etc. have been styled as “struggles for recognition”; the same endeavour has been evoked as the motive for entering the coalition invading Iraq, for the Vilnius declaration, for participation to the occupation of Iraq …
(36)As first proposed in: Louis Althusser (1970), “Ideologie et appareils ideologiques d’Etat, La Pensee, no. 151, juin 1970; reprinted in: Louis Althusser (1976), Positions, Paris: Editions sociales. English translation in: Louis Althusser (1971), Lenin and Philosophy and Other essays, London: New Left Books.
(37)In: “From historical Marxisms to historical materialism: toward the theory of ideology”, in: John Rosenthal (1991), ed., in collaboration with Radhika Lal, Marxism and Contemporary Philosophy. Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, vol. 14, no. 1, New York: New School for Social Research.
(38)The “extremist” interpellation via individual fantasy; the “national” interpellation via “the nation as a zero-institution”, cf. my papers quoted above.
(39)“Quite simply, /ethnic identity/ is a tool of triage and labeling.” (“L’identité ethnique: fondations logiques et dysfonctions” (1970), in: Georges Devereux (1985), Ethnopsychanalyse complémentariste, Paris: Flammarion.)
(40)Idem.
(41)In the words of Ubu-Roi: “Il n’y a pas de Polonais sans Pologne.”
(42)In this sense, identitary community is distinct from the Freudian Masse. We can now sketch the relation between the two. Freud distinguishes three modalities of identification: “First, identification is the original form of emotional tie with an object; secondly, in a regressive way it becomes a substitute for a libidinal object-tie, as it were by means of introjection of the object into the ego; and thirdly, it may arise with any new perception of a common quality shared with some other person who is not an object of the sexual instinct. The more important this common quality is, the more successful may this partial identification become, and it may thus represent the beginning of a new tie.” (S.E. XVIII, pp. 107-108.) The Masse-formation proceeds from a combination of the second and the third modality of identification. It starts from a particular inflexion of the modality no. 2 in which the regressive “introjection” puts the object not in the place of the ego, but in the place of the ego ideal (which, actually, is defined as “a differentiating grade in the ego”) – and is completed by the modality no. 3 when individuals who share this common quality identify with each other on its account. “A primary group of this kind is a number of individuals who have put one and the same object in the place of their ego ideal and have consequently identified themselves with one another in their ego.” (Idem, p. 116.) – The Freudian Masse is constructed through two processes on the level of individual psyche. Contrary to this, our construction of the identitary group is transindividual from the very beginning, since the instances of the “subject-supposed-to-…” with which individuals identify (“in their ego”) are intersubjective instances.
(43)Cf. John Rosenthal, “Le fantôme de l’autodétermination”, Les temps modernes, 2002.
(44)This is a clear case where ideology, in its “material existence”, importantly, if not decisively, participates to the installation of a new type of “relations of production”. It has been reproached to Althusser, among others by Hall (op. cit., p. 12), that he led the theory of ideology back into the classical dead-end by “normatively” (ibidem) defining its “function” (sic!) as “to reproduce the social relations of production”. Althusser’s formulation is different: reproduction of relations of production is, to a very large degree, secured (assurée) “by the exercise of the state-power in the state-apparatuses, the repressive apparatus on one side, and the ideological state-apparatuses on the other” (Louis Althusser (1995) (1970), “Ideologie et appareils ideologiques d’Etat”, in: Sur la reproduction, Paris: PUF, p. 286; translation mine). – Schematically, installation of new relations has been achieved: 1. by replacement of former relations by new ones (privatisation, denationalisation, re-definition of the general function of the state from protector of labour to the agent of capital), enacted primarily by the repressive state-apparatuses; 2. by re-articulation of the existing apparatuses, performed mostly by ideological apparatuses. Identitary ideology, in its “material existence” (apparatuses, discourses, images…), has an over-determining role in these processes: 1. It “represents” the violent replacement of one type of social relations (of production) by another type as the advent of a historical telos (the national state) which, at the same time, is a “return” to a presumed state of “normality” and “authenticity” (liberal capitalism). The new political construction is presented as a “true expression” of identitary authenticity to which the identitary community is presumed to have a fundamental “right”. Here, identitary ideology, playing on two of its components, the “native” “subject-supposed-to-believe” and the collective “right”, “represents”, in Althusser’s words, “the imaginary relation of individuals to their real conditions of existence”. – 2. It attempts to unify the re-articulation of existing ideological elements under its domination. Here, it “interpellates” individuals. In this dimension again, a “replacement” is at stake – identitary ideology attempts to “replace” the national ideological construction. In this, it can only fail, though: the instance that could take over the “program managing” operations formerly performed by the “nation as a zero-institution”, the native “subject-supposed-to-believe”, is not autonomous and depends upon an external recognition; but even in the case that this recognition is granted, the “native” instance can only engage in composing a “native culture” – whose collage is limited in its principle. The result is paradoxical: identitary ideology can only work if supported by statist (or, in the case of non-recognised identities, by para-statist, “civil-society”) constraint, and the more successful it is, the more it weakens its statist or para-statist political construction by submitting it to the conjuncturally determined representative of the universalist sanction.
(45)In all the “post-communist” countries where identitary ideology has been of primary importance during the past decade, social inequalities have been rising after the change of the system. Cf. Rastko Močnik, »Social change in the Balkans«, in: Balcanis, no. 3, vol. II, 2002.
(46)“Maybe what is really important for our modernity – that is, for our present – is not so much the étatisation of society, as the ‘governmentalisation’ of the state.” (Michel Foucault, “Governmentality”, in: The Foucault Effect. Studies in Governmentality, Graham Burchell et al., eds., Harvester-Wheatsheaf, London etc., 1991, p. 103.)
(47)This structural transformation already is the object of a positive policy-notion: “the increasing tendency to conscript communities as agencies of cultural governance” (Tony Bennett (2001), Differing Diversities. Transversal Study on the Theme of Cultural Policy and Cultural Diversity, Strasbourg: Council of Europe Publishing, p. 18). Bennett specifies the process in the terms of governmentality, and offers a “political” classification for it: “A noted recent tendency has consisted in the increased emphasis that is placed on communities of various sorts (ethnic, indigenous, regional, neighbourhoods, lifestyle communities) to assume responsibility for organizing and managing themselves and their members. This renewed stress on the role of communities as an intermediary between the state and its citizens has been strongly associated with the political agendas of the ‘third way’ and, in more general terms, needs to be seen as a response to the concern to roll the state back out of the lives of its citizens that has been such a marked characteristic of neoliberalism.” (Idem, p. 49.)