R When right-wing extremists launch the culture war, they resort to procedures that they have continually refined in recent years. As if they had gone to the school of the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, to whom we owe the insight that the meaning of concepts is not fixed, they work persistently to shift the vocabulary with which we discuss political questions.
They are not just concerned with moving the “window of what can be said” to the right; Legal intellectuals also strive to strip politically significant terms of their original context of meaning and open them up to new uses. How this happens has Volker Weiss examined. In this context, the historian speaks of “resignification”: terms are “hijacked,” “shifts” and “reinterpretations” occur, so that the past is bathed in a new light.
According to Weiß, this “attack on history” is always also an “attack on society”. Something similar can be observed in the field of literature. The Germanist Thorsten Hoffmann explores the tactics used to wage the culture war from the right. He describes the attempt to ideologically appropriate classical texts as “hijacking”; As a “correction” he sees the effort to supplement the canon with books by supposedly defamed authors and to sort out texts by unpopular authors.
Knowing about these strategies, it is hardly surprising that recent publications talk about “right-wing identity politics”. Martin Sellnerthe poster boy of the Identitarian Movement, talks about it and the AfD member of the Bundestag Maximilian Krah. While Sellner relies on the aggressive pathos of the street fighter, Krah is civil and cultivated. They agree on a nationalist way of thinking that is characterized by defamation, agitation and degradation.
Betrayal of Black Women
This form of culture war should not go unchallenged. In order to be able to confront it, it is necessary to first go back to the beginnings Identity politics to remember and finally to find out how it came into danger of being co-opted by the right. It should be noted at this point that it is absurd to create a hidden proximity between left-wing identity politics and a right-wing political style, as some people do.
The term identity politics refers to conflicts within the US Women’s movement. While women’s rights activists tried to form a broad alliance in the 19th century – white middle-class women fought alongside black women, many of whom came from families that had been enslaved – the centrifugal forces subsequently increased. Black feminists were disappointed that white feminists showed little interest in their experiences of discrimination.
But because they did not see themselves represented by the male protagonists of the black liberation movements, they looked for new forms of political resistance. This is how the Combahee River Collective was founded in Boston in 1974. This coalition of black and lesbian women soon published the “Black Feminist Statement“, which is considered the founding document of the emancipation policy.
The fight against “racist, sexist, heterosexist and classist oppression” can only be carried out with any prospect of success, it is said here, if it is done with the knowledge that “the main systems of oppression are interconnected”. Neither the civil women’s movement nor the black liberation movements were interested in the concerns of those who are affected by both systems of oppression – sexism and racism – at the same time: black women.
The focus is on your own oppression
No “supposedly progressive movement” has given priority to its specific form of oppression. The members of the collective felt doubly betrayed: by the black “brothers,” for whom the concerns of women were of secondary importance, and by the white “sisters,” to whom the concerns of black women remained alien. This experience was at the center of their commitment: “We are aware that we are the only people who care enough about us to constantly fight for our liberation.”
Reflection on experiences of discrimination led to this new form of political struggle. “The concept of identity politics forms the basis for focusing on our own oppression. We believe that a profound and perhaps the most radical political stance arises directly from our own identities.”
Left-wing emancipation politics are repeatedly accused of absolutizing their own concerns, but the Combahee River Collective has never responded to exclusion with exclusion and has not countered resentment with resentment. The members of the Boston collective advocated a broad alliance policy; So they promoted a style of politics that had recently been adopted by Peter Unfried was described at this point as an “alliance of the diverse”.
The Black women and lesbians who gathered here did not want to essentialize their experiences. That’s how it was Audrey Lordeone of the founding members, was by no means happy when texts by black authors were not taken into account in seminars on women’s literature because such texts could supposedly only be taught by them themselves; White students were simply assumed to not be able to “find their way in.”
Separation instead of hybridity
Lorde commented: “I have heard this argument from white, otherwise very intelligent women; women who can easily teach and interpret works that emerge from the more alien experiences of Shakespeare, Molière, Dostoyevsky, and Aristophanes.”
Although the further development of gender studies owed much to French theoretical imports and some had pointed out that identity categories also had an “exclusive character,” there was a shift in the balance of power within the left around the turn of the millennium. Instead of continuing to celebrate the creolization of culture, the mixing and hybridity, those who used a rhetoric of authenticity gained popularity.
The ephemeral and ambiguous were no longer celebrated. There was now much greater demand for clearly addressable affected people, authentic representatives, reliable companions – in short: clearly tailored identities. This development illustrates a dilemma that characterizes all forms of emancipatory identity politics: it is that those groups that are attacked because of one characteristic have to invoke exactly that characteristic again in response.
They cannot avoid repeating the attribution, which is made with discrediting intent – if only to reject it. Hannah Arendt had already pointed out this fatal logic: Anyone who is attacked as a Jew must defend themselves as a Jew. If one takes this into account, it becomes clear what the danger of an identity hardening of this project is: If the concept of experience is exaggerated, understood exclusively and framed by simple world views, a logic of separation arises.
Wind in the mill of the reactionaries
Experiences of discrimination then no longer pave the way for people and groups who are also excluded. They are hardly suitable as a starting point for forging alliances across milieus in the fight against exploitation. Instead, they only bring together those who share certain characteristics, thereby encouraging the development of a wagon castle mentality. Solidarity, which has also often been observed in the past, is then usually understood exclusively and is often only practiced between those who have had identical experiences.
The fact that this also plays into the hands of reactionary forces Hito Steyerl captured more than 15 years ago. At the time, the artist recognized a multitude of “ego models,” a “cacophony of monads,” and saw hope for a “common language of emancipation independent of identity” dwindling.
It is precisely this tendency towards particularism that makes it easy for right-wing extremists to claim the term identity politics for their own racist practice and to turn it into the opposite: If emancipatory identity politics advocates dismantling privileges and opposing unequal treatment, fighting discrimination and defying ideologies of inequality, right-wing, authoritarian movements pursue the counterprogram.
They are trying to roll back democratization and liberalization. Right-wing, reactionary “identity politics” reacts to social modernization processes and the legal equality that was fought for for workers, women, homosexuals, immigrants and others. It aims at hegemony in political-cultural issues and seeks to relegate those who raise their voices and insist on reducing disadvantage, discrimination and exclusion to their places.
To prevent this from happening, not only solidarity is required; It is also about taking up the fight over concepts that is being waged by the right. And not only to remember that identity politics refers to an emancipatory project that is critical of domination, but also to ensure that the hijacking of the terms does not go unchallenged.