Our social identity is important for our sense of self-worth. But the very concept of social identity implies the exclusion of everyone else. In the political realm, that exclusion can quickly turn into oppression, but also resistance and rebellion, argues Andrew Bowie.

SUGGESTED READING Performativity and Black Lives Matter By Judith Butler Why is it that key contemporary social and political issues, especially those involving race, nationality, and gender, raise questions of ‘identity’? In simple terms, the assumption and assertion of an ‘identity’ has to do with the attempt to imbue one’s social existence with a particular kind of positive meaning. The difficulty is that using identity as a means of establishing one’s value can entail diminishing the identity of others, because they are excluded from that particular identity, be it a social, gender, race, or national identity. As such, the first thing to realise here is that the term ‘identity’ can involve various kinds of tension or contradiction, where different aspects of the same thing are incompatible with each other. Such tensions are exemplified in forms of social exclusion based on racial identities which contradict the norms of a just society. Capitalism itself involves contradictions, in that money, the means of making things equivalent in order to enable socially beneficial exchange, also destroys qualitative differences, with negative social consequences. Contradiction is even involved in explicating what is at stake in the very notion of identity, simply because identity has in key respects to rely on difference.

Identity as Difference

A tension is already evident at the most basic level of talking about identity. Take two very simple ways of expressing identity, ‘A = A’, and ‘A is A’, which could loosely be seen as ‘the same’, but which are not strictly identical. ‘A=A’ can be seen as expressing a relationship, and ‘A is A’ as a tautology. In the case of the relationship, the first and the second A have to be different for a relationship of identity to be expressed at all. Expressing identity, then, requires difference. This is crucial to understanding how ‘identity’ functions in real social contexts. For there to be difference, things have to exclude other things, and in social contexts exclusion is liable to involve types of oppression. At the same time, however, assertion of a group identity can also be a form of resistance, of refusing to be swallowed by ideas which claim universality without actually providing it, such as ‘All lives matter’.

For there to be difference, things have to exclude other things, and in social contexts exclusion is liable to involve types of oppression.

A tautology, while saying nothing informative, points to an important consequence. Leibniz famously maintains that the only strict form of identity is that of a thing with itself. Something is ‘numerically identical’ if we encounter it on different occasions and it is the ‘same one’ we encounter each time. In the empirical world, however, there is no strict identity between different things, there always being some, however minimal, difference between their properties. (This is probably not the case in the subatomic realm, but we don’t live in the subatomic realm.)

Identity as Abstraction