DlyLM-FaHCE-UNLP Literatura inglesa clásica y moderna -2020

A summary of Stuart Hall’s "Who Needs Identity?" with some additions

The aim of this summary is to help you reread Hall’s text. You should consider these questions,
reflect upon them, and only then, go through the summary.

Guiding questions:
1. What is the meaning of identification, what does the term suggest, if compared to
“identity”?
2. To develop his arguments, Hall takes into consideration some concepts by other authors
like Derrida’s difference/différance, and Althusser’s ideological interpellation. Explain them
and their relevance for the question of identity.
3. Explain the concept of specular constitution of subjectivity. What is Hall’s position as
regards the implications of this view?
4. What is the role of discourse in the constitution of the subject?
5. Hall devotes part of his article to the analysis of Michel Foucault’s philosophy as regards
the subject and identity. Explain the different stages that Hall identifies in Foucault’s work,
the main ideas and problems in each.
6. What is Judith Butler’s contribution to the discussion of identity?

Hall starts by identifying some ways of considering the question of identity. A deconstructive
approach of identity stresses the need to detotalize and deconstruct (not replace) concepts of
identity which have become no longer adequate. An approach that places identity as central to the
questions of agency (not the unmediated subject, but on the contrary -following Foucault-
materialized in discursive practices) and politics (instabilities and politics of location). Hall, then,
stresses the need to reconceptualize the subject "thinking it in its new, displaced or decentred
position within the paradigm" (16).

The question of identification resides in the rearticulation of the subject with the discursive
practices, taking into account the subjectification of the discursive practices and the politics of
exclusion. Identities are never unified but fragmented and fractured; “never singular but multiply
constructed across difference, often intersecting and antagonistic, discourses, practices and
positions” (17). Identities are located in the sense that, as they are built within discourse, we must
understand them in the specificity of each historical site, discursive formation and enunciative
strategy (17).

Identification is constructed on the basis that one shares something with another person or group,
or with an ideal. But this construction is seen as a process which is never completed. Identification
is always in process. It is “conditional, lodged in contingency” (what cannot be known in advance).
For instance, once an action is started, one cannot truly know all the potential consequences,
risks, etc, especially because one is traversed and located, and one’s identity is built in reference
to anOther. Identification requires what is left outside, its constitutive outside (what one is not) to
consolidate the process. Identities are formed through difference. Thus, every identity has
something at its margin: an excess, a something more, the unspoken “other”, what it lacks (18).

It is important to note the distinction the French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1939-2004) makes
between difference and différance (19). In French the verb “differer” (Latin verb “differre”) has
two meanings: 1) to be other, discernible,“not identical”, and 2) to put off until later, to postpone.
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In English these meanings lead to two separate words: differ and defer. And these meanings are in
the distinction made by Derrida: difference (differ) and différance (defer). Within the discussion of
identity, “difference” stresses the Other that is always on the basis of identity construction:
“différance” stresses the fact that the identity is never completed, but always in process.

Hall also takes a concept from the French philosopher Louis Althusser (1918–1990), that of
“ideological interpellation” (19) In a study of the relation between the State and the Subject,
Althusser posits that states and regimes keep control by reproducing subjects who take their
position in society as natural, while in fact these identifications are instantiated by “ideological
state apparatuses” like family, schools and church. These apparatuses provide the subject with
categories with which to identify. The subject is thus “hailed” or “interpellated” by identifying with
those categories and embracing the practices proposed by these apparatuses.

Althusser’s interpellation draws on Lacan’s (1901-1981) idea that the constitution of subjectivity is
specular (like a mirror); the subject looks at itself as an Other, in a division into both subject and
object. But the question that arises is, if the subject depends on the specular image to start
constituting an identity, does that mean that there was nothing of the subject before, that the
individual was a “tabula rasa” before becoming a subject? That could be (and sometimes is) a
reading, one which Hall does not agree on.

The British sociologist Paul Hirst (1946-2003) is another voice that questions “interpellation” in
terms of a specular image. If the individual becomes a subject in its recognition in the Other, then
the individual must be required to have the capacity to perform before its constitution, within
discourse, as a subject; thus, the theory of the subject’s constitution at the specular image could
presuppose an already constituted subject (21), thus enabling the reading of the theory as a
paradox.

But Lacan’s is one of the many theories of subject formation. Hall both considers and goes beyond
these ideas. He proposes that identity is conformed by both the psychological and the social
components, the former associated with theories of the Other, what the self lacks and the drives
that move the subject to that other; the latter associated with the discursive formation and
practices. That is, the term identity arises at the articulation of both the psychological and the
social (20).

Another important source used by Hall is the French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-1984), for
whom the subject is produced as an effect through and within discourse, within specific discursive
formations, and with no existence or continuity between one subject position and another (23).
But his view of the subject becomes more complex and rich with the introduction of “power” as a
central category, as emerges in the double-sided character of the subject: subjection and
subjectification (24); that is, the subject is always subjected.

In a 1982 article, Foucault describes his work as focused on three modes of objectification that act
in the way that human beings are constituted into subjects. That is, how is it that a human person
becomes a subject? Instead of considering the specular image, Foucault observes that there are
modes by which the person is objectified (and thus acknowledged as a subject):

1-Science objectifies the person in different ways, according to the field and theory. Consider the
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way in which the subject may be objectified as “the speaking subject” by grammar and linguistics,
or as “the productive subject” by economy; etc.

2-There are “dividing practices” that, in the act of dividing, objectify the person. The subject is
divided within himself or divided from others. For instance, the mad and the sane, the sick and the
healthy, etc.

3-Ways in which the human being turns into a subject. For instance, the way in which persons
recognize themselves as subjects of “sexuality.”

Hall’s reading of Foucault consists of three points: the stages in Foucault’s thoughts, the problems
that still remain in his concepts about the subject, and the conclusion about Foucault’s
contribution to the discussion on identity.

Three stages are distinctive in Foucault, which Hall identifies -the first two reflecting the titles in
F’s books- as the archaeological, the genealogical and his later work.

Stage 1: the subject is produced as an effect through and within discourse. By means of their rules
of formation and enunciation, discourses construct subject positions. This view does not take into
account “how the social positions of individuals interact”: the person occupies any of these
positions (which are a priori categories) and becomes subjected. In Hall’s view, it is a one-
dimensional concept.

Stage 2: introduces the concept of “power”. While the human subject is placed in relations of
production and signification, he is equally placed in power relations (1982). Power is expressed in
a “double-sided character of subjection and subjectification”(24). Foucault uses the word
“assujettissement” (subjection or subjugation) to suggest that the genesis of the subject includes
two sides: subjection and self-constitution. The self-constitution of the subject is “a derivative of,
or a complement to, the constitution of subjects through normalizing power and subjugation”
(Harrer, 2005:78).

Before turning to the third stage, Hall mentions the problems that still remain in the discussion of
the subject formation:

Problem 1: in the first two stages the body is deconstructed and reconstructed in terms of
discourse, “constructed, shaped and reshaped by, in the intersection of a series of interdisciplinary
discursive practices (24). The subject is emptied of the materiality that a body provides. Besides, if
taken to an extreme, everything is discourse and nothing exists outside.

Problem 2: though later the body is introduced (as a docile body regulated by the normalizing
regimes), there is no theory of the psychic mechanisms or interior processes by which
interpellations might be produced, negotiated or resisted (25).

Stage 3: in his later work, Foucault recognises that it is not enough for the law to summon,
discipline, produce or regulate, but there must be a corresponding production of a response from
the side of the subject (25). That is, the subject is presented as less passive, while before the
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subject was the result of discursive practices, or normalizing/disciplining regimes and practices. In
this stage, Foucault considers “the production of the self as an object in the world, the practices of
self-constitution, recognition and reflection, the relation to the rule , alongside the scrupulous
attention to normative regulation, and the constraints of the rules without which no
subjectification is produced” (26).

What is missing in this more complete view of the subject?

-The notion of agency. Foucault gets closer to the concept when he speaks of “aesthetics of
existence,” which might be understood as a kind of performativity. But there is no clear reference
in Fpucault to volition or intention (27).

-Foucault’s work considers historically specific discursive practices, normative self-regulation and
technologies of the self (devices, mechanisms), but “understanding the relation of the subject to
discursive formation as an articulation” is required (27).

-Foucault’s consideration of psychoanalysis as “another network of disciplinary relations”

prevented his work from engaging with the unconscious, thus running the risk of “an
overemphasis on intentionality” (27)

Judith Butler (1956-) draws on Foucault but also contests him from a different ideological
perspective. Like Foucault, she considers that the subject as discursively constructed and that
there is no subject outside the law, but she develops some concepts that were missing in Foucault,
such as “the complex transactions between the subject, the body and identity”, drawing together
Foucault’s philosophy and a psychoanalytic perspective (27) .

The subject, for Butler, is produced in the course of its materialization, which is an effect of power
(28). Introducing the concept of performativity, she understands that the repetition of a norm
materializes the subject, but leaves some fissures from which the norm can be contested and
resignified (1993:10). Agency implies the possibility of breaking the ritualised standard and makes
possible the inscription of new meanings, the resignification of established meanings. The process
of subjectification is a permanent construction that is never closed; an ongoing process of
identifications and disidentifications. Identities are installed and abandoned along the process,
producing multiple and moving identities (Butler, 2006: 22). The construction of identity is not a
simple act, but a complex and unstable process (Butler, 1993:10). Hall observes that in Butler’s
thoughts there is a connection between the process of assuming a sex, identification, and the
discursive practices by which the norms enable or foreclose identifications. For Butler, all
identities operate through exclusion, through the discursive construction of a constitutive outside
and the production of marginalised subjects (the abject) (28).

As regards Butler’s philosophy and contributions to the discussion of identity and subject
formation, I would like to add that in works developed later than Hall’s article, Butler expanded
her concept of agency by adding the intersubjective relations; that is, while still acknowledging
the role of discourse and norms, she added to her analysis the importance of connections
between the subject and the outside. In her consideration of what is “human” and what makes a
life liveable, the body is seen as the site of human vulnerability (Butler, 2004:43). But the body is
never limited by self-sufficiency, on the contrary, it is traversed by a world of spatial, temporal and
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social relations (Butler, 2010: 83)

Hall concludes this chapter stressing the political significance of discussing the question of identity,
as well as the need to acknowledge the necessity and the impossibility of identities, and the
confluence of the psychic and the discursive in their constitutions (29).

References

● Butler, Judith (1993) Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”, New York:
Routledge.
● ------------------ (2006[1990]) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity , New York:
Routledge.
● ------------------ (2010) Frames of War, London and New York: Verso.
● Foucault, M. (1982) “The Subject and Power”, Critical Inquiry, 8(4), 777-795,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343197
● Hall, Stuart (1996) "Who Needs Identity?", in Hall, Stuart and du Gay Paul (eds), Questions
of Cultural Identity, London: Sage
● Harrer, Sebastian (2005) “The Theme of Subjectivity in Foucault’s Lecture Series
L’Herméneutique du Sujet”, Foucault Studies, No 2, May 2005, pp. 75-96.