A paper for presentation at Bi Con 98, and working towards the book, Marginalia: edge identities and the virtual community
This paper has a lot to do with beginnings: it speaks about the commencement of a particular type of queer politic in the Sydney communities and signifies the first public enunciations of certain concepts which I am working towards in the form of a book, to be called Marginalia: edge identities and virtual communities.
Categories are traditionally placed in opposition to an undifferentiated mass. Without categories, we will be in the morass, the mire, the shit, swamped, overwhelmed. Ego is represented as erect, dry, towering  Magritte’s rock held high and safe above the teeming waters below. Lacan notes that dreams of the “I” usually represent it as “a fortress or stadium  its inner arena and enclosure, surrounded by marshes and rubbish tips”. Men suffering from shell shock were given treatments until they dreamt of themselves as fortresses and were then pronounced cured.
The pre-existence of undifferentiation allows for its “opposite”, identity, to exist as a negative relativity (not-Man, not-Child, not-Heterosexual). “We have only to understand the mirror stage as an identification,” says Lacan.
What happens if we change the terms of reference? Let us talk about hyperdifferentiation instead. In order to maintain the patriarchal binary oppposition (Same/different), the third option, hyperdifferentiation (diferrent/different/different over and over in a loop, a supermolecular loop) must be misnamed and presented as fearful, a teeming, wet, undifferentiated unconscious that must be carefully dried out and marked out in well organised categories for easier sorting.
The “history” which I am about to relate to you is a story which I am going to read critically. It is my story, my history, and I’m sure there are some here who “were there” and for whom this history is different from “their story”. Nonetheless, I am attempting to relate a theoretical formation and not so much a political history, although the two are intertwined. I also feel that our oral traditions as queer and feminist communities are not as strong as they should be.
What I want to examine are the twin ideas of community and identity. In particular, I want to examine some of my own experiences of identity/community:
For those of you who don’t know me and feel it is important to know the position from which a person is speaking, I generally describe myself as someone who desires people with long hair, regardless of their genitals.
So: Once upon a time, both far and near to here, in 1991, there was a conference called Queer Collaborations. It brought together “non-heterosexual students” as the poster said, and had a debate within its extensive program on bisexuality. This particular session was one of the most heated and intensely discussed sessions of the conference. After it, five of the participants (if I remember correctly, myself, Norrie-May Welby, Cath Lawrence, Adrian Miller and Anna Brown) decided to form a group to address some of the issues that had come up in the conference.
There were tensions within the group to start with: some members came from an academic philosophical position which argued for a postmodern fluidity of identity, while others came from a political practical position of activism with its discourse of rectifying imbalances.
That aside, the group in the end agreed on a number of things: it would be a collective, and decisions would be made by consensus; it would be open to anybody of any gender and sexuality; it would attempt to provide a place for people of all persuasions, but particularly bi and trany, to socialise without fear or prejudice; and finally, it would lobby politically for changes with regards to gender and sexuality discrimination. The thing even had a name: Love Is Boundless or LIB, an attempt at a cute pun, so we could call ourselves Queer LIB, and have it come out as Queer Love Is Boundless.
Meetings were held, parties were had, t-shirts were printed. The whole thing was growing and became more and more successful. Finally, a Mardi Gras Fair Day stall had us all set for our first visible non-“gay & lesbian” Mardi Gras Float. We had a ball and we tossed cards off the back of the truck. These cards, printed at one of those el cheapo machines at a railway concourse, read “LIB  for a queer community with out prejudice. Bi people and Tranys welcome.”
At next month’s meeting, response was overwhelming. At first, we were enormously pleased. However, then discussion started. People didn’t like the name of the organisation, and someone proposed a vote. Over the protests of some of the original members that the group was a collective and wasn’t run by votes, the meeting decided to change the name of the group to Sydney Bisexual Support Network, as you can imagine, a group with a very different agenda. Over the next couple of weeks, things got somewhat ugly, with some people extremely happy that the group was back on a sane footing, and others distraught at the change. While everyone saw the need for the new group, many members were confused as to how the old group had been simply “taken over” instead of having a new group form. The worst was when I said to one long time member of the group “I’m going to start LIB again: this isn’t LIB,” and got told “Rosanne, face it: LIB is dead. We’ve taken over. Just let it lie.” I left the group, others who had previously left when it had been LIB returned, happier with the new structure, and from there someone else would have to take up the chronological political history, because I was no longer in the loop. If you are interested, you should probably talk to Cath Lawrence.
After that, the little mermaid walked painfully on her new legs which cut her like knives, and longed for her old life in the sea. The end.
What is the point of this story? As i said, what I want to examine are the twin ideas of community and identity. Specifically, I want to examine the difference between identity and practice, a concept of “truth-in-labelling” if you will, and how communities are policed.
I posit the following:
- that identity relates to notions of similarity;
- that identity relies on uniform opposition to an Other;
- that identity creates community; that the dominant group does not form an identity since it has nothing to oppose and therefore does not form community but is rather seen as Society or Culture;
- that community is useful as a shelter against society but fails in times of change;
- that it is therefore necessary to develop meaningful alternative models of resistance to homogenous society or the heterogenous communities.
How does an identity form? I posit that the notion of identity appeals to a Lacanian idea of the Same. For Lacan, identity is established in what he calls the “mirror stage:, when the little boy sees himself in the mirror. “We have only to understand the mirror stage as an identification” he says. Identity in this version is essentially a phallic concept. It is also at this stage that the little girl is supposed to identify herself as lacking. Do you identify with my story? How?
How is it that you, that I, that we, create this/these identities? It is a question that is often asked in queer circles: how do you identify? But far too often, people answer with names rather than processes.
Let me start by defining some terms: when I say the names “gay” or “lesbian” or “straight” I am specifically referring to a set of identities that have been constructed. However, the processes  sleeping only with men, sleeping only with women, fucking anything that moves, fucking only men with short hair in toilets and the woman i’m married to, fucking only effeminate men and butch women, wanking about blonde bitches in high heels  these are a set of practices, as opposed to identities.
So how does identity arise? How do you identify? You find a mirror of/for yourself and say “that is (like) me”, you make a simile, from a similar, a sameness  and then: “that is not (like) me”. Identity is static. Identity is only stable while standing in front of that mirror.
A gay identified person is someone who specifically positions himself within a set of gay ideologies. To my eternal frustration at the inadequacy of labelling and the fear of policed communities, such a person may frequently have bisexual practices and not be willing to admit it. The same goes for the straight-identified person who sneaks out to have sex with same sex partners. These are both closets. Identity is dangerous insofaras it hides practice.
Practice is much easier to do, though less easy to describe if you’ve already fallen into the identity trap. Practice makes it necessary to talk about processes, interactions, connections, links, flows.
Freud and Lacan argue that without identity, there is only undifferentiated mass. But, according to Cathryn Vesseleu, “both Irigaray and Deleuze are critical of [Freud’s] systematic reduction of [sexual] difference to a principle of identity”. From a Deleuzian point of view, the development of the “I” is about speeds and intensities.
Conclusion
When identity is talked of, community is not far away. Community can be defined as all the people who see themselves as the same as you, that they are all different in the same way from the great Same which is Society, the one non-defined term, the white, middle-class, heterosexual man. So, all communities are of necessity communities of the oppressed: the queer or gay or lesbian communities, the women’s community, the Croatian community in Australia but not in Croatia, the black communities practically everywhere. For a long time these have been argued as positive, reinforcements of identity and reassurances of sameness even within difference from the Same.
It is for this precise reason that community is problematic: it is a bastion against undifferentiation, a footsoldier in the service of the grid, carefully marking out the boundaries between categories, according to what the mirror says, according to what you look like.
If, on the other hand, praxis is used, then community is replaced by constituency. Constituency describes the helix of all who partake in a certain praxis, like a mathematical set in a Venn diagram. Instead of choosing to be (a) part of one communtiy, a person can exist across multiple constituencies, because a person has multiple practices. In every act or crossing (trans-action), we become constituent of that group.
We change the group by partaking in it, because the group does not exist outside of the people who constitute it, and is influenced by the confluence  the flowing with  of which other circles overlap, which other constituencies are affected/effected by the participants. Instead of the stasis in community, with rules of conformation like a border with a guard patrolling it, constituency experiences continual flow and change.
This is best demonstrated on-line in an Internet chat room, where the concept of what makes up “gaySM” changes according to who enters and leaves the room at any given moment.
So, how does this relate back to the story? From my telling, LIB was an attempt to overflow the categories and boundaries and establish a contituency. There were no real membership rules: LIB was whoever was in it. However, according to Deleuze, the State machine will always reterritorialise the lines of flight, new points of departure must always be established, spiralling, and so the desire to be the same, to belong to a community, reasserted itself. Rather than do away with category, the oppressed bisexual group sought solace  note the use of the word “support” in the original name the group came up with to start with  in the sameness of their difference. The danger, as Massumi points out, is that this group now begins to police its edges, to determine what it means to be a “good” bisexual. Reclaiming this stable position in front of the mirror does not destroy the mirror, and the whole show will just start again: there are already people uncomfortable with the terms and struggling on the knifeblades of our labels.
The only option for escape is to speak through the cracks in the mirror of identity, widening them slowly, allowing chaos to seep in unnoticed.