Around the conjunction of new social movements and identity. Exploring identity politics

Arítz Tutor-Antón

aritz.tutor@ehu.eus 0000-0001-5496-2369

Departamento de Sociología y Trabajo Social, Facultad de Ciencias Sociales y de la Comunicación.

Barrio Sarriena, s/n. 48940 Leioa (Bizkaia, Universidad del País Vasco/Euskal Herriko Unibertsitate), España.

KEYWORDS

Recognition

Difference

Materialism

Universalism

Particularism

INTRODUCTION

The rise of the so-called identity right or extreme right against LGTIBQ+ demands, against migrants or in the various forms of Islamophobia shows that currently the identity component plays a crucial role in the political role and social mobilization. It also shows a drift towards fundamentalist identities that essentialize and block the idea of alliances between different people.

OBJECTIVES

The article aims to study identity politics from the genealogy and umbrella offered by the theory of New Social Movements (NSM) and to analyze how the New Social Movements that put postmaterialist issues such as identity and the classic movements that fight for redistributive issues are related.

METHOD

For this theoretical research, a reading of the main authors and currents has been carried out in order to have a global vision of the state of the matter. From there, a hermeneutical work has been carried out, which has basically consisted of investigating, understanding, translating and interpreting. The strategy chosen to approach the bibliographic material has been to take as a basis the processual vision of Buechler and Melucci, which attempts to reconcile the structuralist and constructionist interpretations. Furthermore, to distinguish it from the traditional study of collective identity in social movements, we have looked at identity politics in NSM. Collective identity has always existed in all social movements, also in those of a (pre)modern or materialist nature, but now, conflicts are shifting towards the defense and vindication of identity and, on this premise, they demand identification. The meaning of action is found in the action itself, rather than in the intended objectives. We have organized these elements taken as analytical categories to carry out an analysis of identity applied to New Social Movements and help understand how identity is framed (and what it refers to) with respect to these axes (table 1).

MAIN RESULTS

The central position of social relationships and conflicts shifts from the field of work to the broader field of culture. This new approach to social movements reintegrates and rehabilitates the analysis of the cultural, identity and ideological dimensions of the mobilization, and also its political context, since social structures and cultural frameworks are inseparable. These movements return to the defense of the subject and expose subjectivation in the face of rationalization, since while the subject is based on his natural rights, the citizen does so on reason. Therefore, when we talk about New Social Movements, we talk about new political subjects that position themselves from a renewed episteme. This new paradigm under which the subject would be articulated would be postmaterialism. This new register of collective action is embedded in what Daniel Bell has called postindustrial society. The axis of understanding moves from the class struggle towards the identification of new forms of oppression, always from a prism that looks beyond material well-being, incardinated by culturally rooted demands and placing emphasis on quality of life. One of the palpable results of the postmodernist framework and the cultural orientation of the postmaterial has been the prodigal emergence of identity logics in social struggles and in conceptions about subjectivity and its insertion in the world. In this regard, the sociologist Michel Maffesoli establishes an interesting distinction between identity and identification. For this author, the first is of a historical order, it fully belongs to modernity, it is part of continuity, in the inheritance of models. For identity, the self is determined by birth, training, culture or social class and is transmitted through social mediation apparatuses – family, work, school, peer groups; It is a reproductive logic of models, where a transmission of values operates. Identity is a way of being. Identification, on the other hand, is more typical of postmodernity, of the order of what Maffesoli describes as labile or what Bauman calls liquid relations: something that is not subject to a fixed, irreversible contract, which can be revoked and replaced at any time. moment. In contemporary societies there is a continuous disconnection of the ties that connect individuals with collectivities, each person becomes the center of a tiny private universe and intermediate bodies and institutions lose importance as social mediators. Identification is linked to fashions, appearances, needs to respond, market demand (in economic and image terms), etc. The collapse of metanarratives generates floating, changing identities, subject to consumer trends.

However, at the same time, the limits of the NSM based on identity praxis become evident. The (new) social movements are much more shaped by social reality than the social reality shaped - performatively - by social movements, and although the evolution of modern society has changed the role of movements, creating new spaces for social action, everyday materiality continues to be decisive. As occurred with the excessive culturalization of disciplines and sociopolitical approaches, the fact of claiming difference by focusing only on the identity axis (and in the case of a specific identity or oppression) can weaken the possibility of connecting different expressions of normative rupture. The recognition of identity is depoliticized and begins to be developed within the framework of individuality, which makes it a personal compensation, rather than a challenge to exploitative relations. Given this, various authors and (new) social movements emphasize the importance of politicizing and providing a collective dimension to these identity claims. Along these lines, Fraser sees it necessary to distinguish between affirmative and transformative solutions. Affirmative solutions limit political action, since in terms of redistribution they remain in the defense of the liberal welfare state and at the level of recognition of multiculturalism. On the contrary, transformative solutions in redistributive terms mean a profound restructuring of production relations and at the level of recognition a deconstruction that destabilizes or blurs established identities. The true emancipatory struggle does not stop only at affirming identities, but also strives to transform them.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

One of the contributions of this research has been to verify that new social movements convey identity politics. In the study of (new) social movements, identity and collective identity have been widely studied, but today there are many identity dynamics that move in the conceptual axis of identification and in the political axis of isolation and exclusion. Identity taken in this way, as a matter of identification, implies differentiation practices that are carried out mainly through a discursive work of linking and marking symbolic borders.

Another contribution of this research has been to specify that material issues continue to be important and to make visible how, also, the NSM are open to alliance policies and bivalent struggles (recognition and redistribution). The struggles for recognition, difference and the vindication of identity can be valid as long as the bivalence of any person or group is respected, that is, the struggles for redistribution are linked with the struggles for recognition, as two faces of the same social reality. Only in this way will a real impact on the socio-political level and an impact and transformation of daily actions be achieved. The move away from particularism to reach solidarity, also in the case of the praxis of the NSM, combines difference with collectivity and the politicization of demands. In other words, it universalizes interests, through a concrete universality that is politically constructed from particularity.