Communities

There is nothing I dislike more than communities. They are places where reasonable, intelligent people come to dilute their individuality and reveal their worst characteristics. A community always mirrors its weakest members. You can have a thousand smart people and three idiots come together, and as a result you'll get a community of 1003 idiots. Individual voices always merge within communities to create one shrill, annoying, unintelligent voice. A community does not exist until it figures out ways to exclude some people and marginalize others. You can always reason with an individual but almost never with a community.

To give an example, I was recently invited to join a review program. I'm sure that everybody has heard of these programs where you get products for review as part of promotional campaigns. Knowing me, it isn't hard to guess which reviewing program I've been asked to join. I'm not supposed to discuss the specific details of this program, so I won't. All we need to know for the purposes of this post is that I found out about this program last summer and then took measures to be asked to join because of the type of product that this program mostly sends out for review. My strategy worked and I will now be happily reviewing these mysterious products.

Yesterday, I decided to check out the forum of this reviewing community. Oy vey, people, is all I can say about it. The amount of self-congratulation for being part of a group that has limited access and the almost hysterical attempts to make sure that the access remains limited were daunting. There is a strict caste system based on how long one has been part of the community. "Newbies" are put through a system of trials where they have to prove that they are worthy of being included. As a result of this hazing, poor new members engage in massive sniveling aimed at ingratiating themselves with long-term members.

I'm sure all these folks who make up the community are perfectly nice, reasonable, intelligent people. It's just when they get into a community that a tiny speck of jerkdom that every person has multiplies and transforms into one huge jerk-fest of a community.

V.S. Naipaul's A Bend in the River: A Review

I want to begin this new year of blogging with a review of one of the most famous books by V.S. Naipaul, a controversial writer and a Nobel Prize winner. Before I begin, I want to warn you that if you are here with the goal of ripping off this review to pass it as an essay at school, you are making a huge mistake. Not only because plagiarism is always stupid and wrong but also because my reading of this novel is very different from what your teacher wants to hear. Feel free to see if I'm right at your own peril.

V.S. Naipaul differs from many other postcolonial writers in that his attitude towards independence is a lot more complex, painful, and honest than the usual starry-eyed "Yippee! We are finally free from the vile, horrible empire" we keep getting from the writers of the postcolonial reality. I am a postcolonial subject, too. Believe me, there is nothing I like more than denouncing the ills of imperial domination. This is why I have to admire Naipaul's courage in demonstrating the fallacies of an unconditional acceptance of independence.

A Bend in the River describes post-independence struggles of an unnamed African country whose experiences are in many ways similar to those of other newly independent nations irrespective of their geographical location. The process of creating a new, post-colonial identity is central to such nations. Naipaul realizes that the only way of analyzing the workings of identity formation is from a distance. This is why the first-person narrator of this story, Salim, is a perennial outsider in all communities he inhabits. As an onlooker, Salim is in the position to notice and analyze identity-related issues better than others. This capacity, however, results in his marginalization:

A Bend in the River is a story of Salim's efforts to accept unquestioningly the nationalistic discourse of the country where he comes to reside and his failure to do so. As hard as this character tries, he never manages to escape the realization that independence is a lot more problematic than anybody around him wishes to accept. In the novel, we see a gradual disintegration of a newly independent country that leads to an ever-growing violence.

So from an early age I developed the habit of looking, detaching myself from a familiar scene and trying to consider it as from a distance. It was from this habit of looking that the idea came to me that as a community we had fallen behind. And that was the beginning of my insecurity. I used to think of this feeling of insecurity as a weakness, a failing of my own temperament, and I would have been ashamed if anyone had found out about it. I kept my ideas about the future to myself.

Naipaul's writings have been very controversial because he verbalizes those feelings and experiences of post-colonial that we don't want to acknowledge even to ourselves. Salim's friend who is even more removed from his country of origin by virtue of his European education expresses some of these concerns whose mere existence is unacceptable to many:

I hadn’t understood to what extent our civilization had also been our prison. I hadn’t understood either to what extent we had been made by the place where we had grown up, made by Africa and the simple life of the coast, and how incapable we had become of understanding the outside world. We have no means of understanding a fraction of the thought and science and philosophy and law that have gone to make that outside world. We simply accept it. We have grown up paying tribute to it, and that is all that most of us can do. We feel of the great world that it is simply there, something for the lucky ones among us to explore, and then only at the edges. It never occurs to us that we might make some contribution to it ourselves. And that is why we miss everything. When we land at a place like London Airport we are concerned only not to appear foolish. It is more beautiful and more complex than anything we could have dreamed of, but we are concerned only to let people see that we can manage and are not overawed. We might even pretend that we had expected better. That is the nature of our stupidity and incompetence. And that was how I spent my time at the university in England, not being overawed, always being slightly disappointed, understanding nothing, accepting everything, getting nothing.

"Our stupidity and incompetence?" How dare he? Haven't we been schooled to proclaim ourselves as owners of alternative and much better forms of knowledge, inhabitants of a different kind of civilization? Haven't we been told ad nauseam that we have our own Prousts and Hegels? And if nobody knows or appreciates this special contribution of ours, that doesn't mean anything is wrong with the contribution. It just means the world is unjust and its system of values is all wrong. This is what we defend with everything we have while falling over ourselves in our rush to possess as many attributes of the hated colonial masters. Contempt and desire of that which is apparently so disdained are among the unavoidable attributes of the postcolonial experience.

Naipaul's analysis of every facet of how national identities are created and imposed is nothing short of brilliant. To give just one example, every national identity requires legitimizing heroic figures that embody the best characteristics of the nation. These figures are invented, distorted, mythologized and contested by groups within the country that struggle for the right to propose their own version of national identity. Naipaul demonstrates with absolute brilliance how such symbols of national identity end up robbing the national subject of individuality:

I studied the large framed photographs of Gandhi and Nehru and wondered how, out of squalor like this, those men had managed to get themselves considered as men. It was strange, in that building in the heart of London, seeing those great men in this new way, from the inside, as it were. Up till then, from the outside, without knowing more of them than I had read in newspapers and magazines, I had admired them. They belonged to me; they ennobled me and gave me some place in the world. Now I felt the opposite. In that room the photographs of those great men made me feel that I was at the bottom of a well. I felt that in that building complete manhood was permitted only to those men and denied to everybody else. Everyone had surrendered his manhood, or a part of it, to those leaders. Everyone willingly made himself smaller the better to exalt those leaders. . .  We have nothing. We solace ourselves with that idea of the great men of our tribe, the Gandhi and the Nehru, and we castrate ourselves.

As much as one might admire Gandhi, it does get annoying to encounter yet another set of pious platitudes every time his (or any other independence leader's) name is mentioned. Any national identity is based on a set of myths that fall apart under even a very superficial kind of scrutiny. This is why national identities are so bound with emotions: we have to be blinded by our deeply emotional response to our particular piece of painted fabric, venerated independence leaders, mythology of first oppression then liberation in order to buy these poorly constructed myths.

Naipaul has made himself hated by many when he started discussing the problematic nature of each newly-achieved independence, each nationalistic mythology. His honesty leaves me speechless, while his beautiful writing style makes me feel ashamed of everything I have ever written in English. We often believe that a great writer is somebody who makes us nod our heads and think, "Oh, this is so true." That isn't greatness, though. A true genius tells us things we never thought of before, makes us angry by an assault on widely-accepted trivialities. This is precisely the kind of writer Naipaul is. A Bend in the River is, in my opinion, his angriest and consequently his best novel.

Labeling Oneself

Recently, I have published excerpts from a very interesting post titled "What's Radical About the Poly-Pushers?" and received some interesting responses. The main reason why I brought this post to my blog is that the very idea of labeling sexuality seems very bizarre to me. Any collective identity takes away a lot more than it offers, but placing one's sexuality within the purview of a collective, especially when no political action is to be taken by that collective, looks like the main goal here is pursuing identity for its own sake.

If anybody were to ask me whether I am monogamous, polygamous, polyamorous, monoamorous, or any other variation thereof, my answer would be that I am none of  these things. I'm me, and my personal life belongs to nobody but me. I don't see how boxing myself into any collective identity, placing any kind of label upon myself would enrich my life. Sure, it will make things easier for other people because they would simply be able to dismiss my entire existence by packaging it into a single - mostly meaningless - word. Of course, if there were some significant political gains to be made there, I might have agreed to suspend my individuality for a brief period of time and would have donned the collective label while hating every second of the process.

Many people seem to think that learning to apply as many labels as possible to themselves is somehow invariably good. When I first saw bloggers present themselves as "I'm a heterosexual, cisgendered, traditionally abled, polyamorous, white, Jewish woman", I thought it was supposed to be a joke making fun of identity. When I understood, however, that people were doing this completely in earnest, I got kind of terrified. There is such a desperate yearning to dilute any kind of individuality with this accumulation of labels that it begs the question of why this person is so scared of leaving any part of herself uncategorized, unlabelled, not belonging to a group.

Obsession With Identity

On the margins of this article that I just got accepted for publication, my former thesis advisor wrote, "Why this schizoid obsession with identity?!?" She was right in that I have been studying collective identity for years with a scary dedication. The reason I'm so interested in collective identity is that I'm not comfortable with the one I have been assigned by being born into my culture. The Russian-speaking culture, that is.

Today, for example, we went to a Russian grocery store in St. Louis. I dressed with more care that I put into dressing for the opera. Then, I applied make-up for 40 minutes, which is something I never do unless I'm about to meet my fellow Russian-speakers. I know that people will be judgmental, they will stare and make disapproving sounds if you are not 100% put together. If you are a woman, that is. Nobody cares what you look like if you are a man. And then people will make strange comments, whose meaning I will not be able to decipher. Which will make me feel like a complete idiot.

This was the reason I left my country 12 years ago. I was extremely uncomfortable with my own people. And they aren't bad people, or anything. There are many great things about the Russian-speaking culture. The problem is that I always felt completely alien to it. When I moved to North America, I lost out financially. I don't think I will ever have the same level of economic well-being here as I had there. I obviously lost out in social status because an immigrant is always an immigrant. I really lost out in terms of food because now I have to schlep all the way to St. Louis to get my favorite food. But it was all worth it because now I'm around people I get. And who get me. And that's worth more than I can explain to anybody who has not experienced life in a culture where you feel you have no idea what people are doing and why.

So here is the reason why I study identity, trying to figure out how it works.

Meeting Ukrainians

I know I wrote about this before, but it still bugs me every time this happens. For some reason, people still believe that if I was born in Ukraine I must be really into meeting random Ukrainians with whom I have nothing whatsoever in common. It is as if the fact of being born in the same country somehow means that we must have things to discuss and a burning desire to discuss them.

I keep receiving gleeful communications from people I barely know, telling me that there is a group of Ukrainians coming by and why don't I join them for lunch. Yes, because I'm sitting here dying to have lunch with people I never even met.

This burning desire to bring people together based on their place of birth is as baffling as it is illogical. I left Ukraine for good 12 years ago. Never went back for a visit and have no plans to do that in the future. Ever. Doesn't it stand to reason to assume that if I were so totally into hanging out with Ukrainians, I would have never left the country? I mean, I don't have anything against Ukrainians, but what is there to talk about if we never even met?

Strangely enough, people who know that I'm ethnically Jewish don't do the same thing to me. Maybe it's because they realize how idiotic and anti-semitic it would sound if they were to say: "There is a group of Jews that is about to visit campus, so I'm sure you'd love to hang out with them. You Jews always have stuff to talk about, don't you??"

So now I have to schlep to this weird lunch with unknown Ukrainians and feel like a total idiot all the time I'm sitting there trying to get in touch with some latent Ukrainianness I'm supposed to possess.

When Did the Stereotypes that Sustain Mail Order Bride Business First Appear?

Countries where women are less attractive are no less disorderly than those where women are better proportioned and graceful. Even in Russia, which has the highest number of beautiful women than any other European country, the sexual excesses are not as uncontrollable as in other countries, and spousal loyalty is maintained a lot more strictly there.

                                                                                -Benito Jeronimo Feijoo, 1726. (Translation mine)

Thanks to my dear friend Olivier, who sent me this beautiful quote, I now know that the ridiculous stereotypes that make the entire mail order bride industry possible already existed in 1726. Even then, people believed in this myth of exceptionally beautiful and loyal Russian women. As a Russian-speaking, if not Russian, woman I find this too annoying for words.

Collective Identities

This is a re-print of a post I wrote at the beginning of my blogging career. I hope that more people read it now, and this will help us all avoid recriminations of the "I-thought-you-were-this-but-you-are-actually-something-else" kind.


People often ask me why I am so interested in collective identities as a category of analysis. I believe it's because I don't have any and feel very content living without any collective identification. So people who abdicate parts of their individuality (or even give their lives) in order to promote an attachment to a collectivity perplex me. Here is my position in relation to different kinds of collective identities:

• Gender identity: I love being a woman and believe that it is the best thing in the world (of course, I have never tried being a man, so my view must be a little biased.) However, the kind of femininity I practise is far from mainstream. I feel different from many other women much more often than I experience a solidarity with them. I identify myself as feminist but my feminism is very different from what it is generally considered to be in North America today. I have been told by "real" feminists that I am actually a male chauvinist in disguise. My theoretical findings on women's issues are often not very palatable to other feminist scholars.
• National identity: I strongly believe that any kind of patriotism is profoundly unhealthy, but many people talked about the insidious nature of nationalism before me, so I won't repeat their arguments.
• Linguistic identity: I don't have a native language. This has both positive and negative consequences. I could never engage in any creative writing because for that you really need a language you feel as your own on a very profound level. On the positive side, I move between different languages and different cultural spaces all day and every day. This is a very enriching albeit arduous way of being. Language is not just a way to organize words into sentences. Living in a language means adopting the whole civilization that comes with it.
• Professional identity: I love being a scholar and an educator. I do, however, find it difficult to meet colleagues whose view of the profession and our goals within it would coincide with mine.
• Local identity: In the past 10 years I have moved 8 times. And this summer I will be moving two more times. It is obvious that with this way of life it is hardly possible to preserve a strong sense of attachment to any locality in particular.
• Political identity: Some of my political views are so far to the left that some people might consider them radical. For example, I believe that women should have a right to abortion on demand at any stage of pregnancy whatsoever. At the same time, my political beliefs also rely on certain concepts that are considered to be deeply conservative. For instance, I am a strong believer in individual responsibility. As a result of these seemingly contradictory views, I have never been able to identify with any political party or program.

Sacrificial Womanhood

Any kind of collective identification requires some type of self-mutilation. The constraints of collective identity do not allow enough space for the incredible variety of human existence. That is why in order to belong we need to mutilate ourselves intellectually, spiritually, and often physically to fit into the mold and signal that we are part of the group. Female identity requires an even bigger amount of self-mutilation than other collective identifications.

I'm dropping out of grad school/leaving my job to follow my boyfriend. So what if I won't have a life and career of my own? At least, we will be together.

So what if I don't have an orgasm with this man? We get along well, and that's what matters.

I'm not going to have an elective C-section and avoid a long and painful labor. So what if my vagina gets torn to shreds in the process? It's not like I use it much anyways.

Who cares that my nipples are bleeding and I'm in pain? I'll keep breastfeeding until I drop dead because it's my duty.

I'm going to take on all kinds of boring and unfulfilling responsibilities at work. So what if they get in the way of my research and don't let me get tenure and promotion? Somebody's got to do it, and I'm always happy to be helpful.

So what if I don't feel like having sex right now? I don't want to upset my boyfriend or hurt his feelings. I'm just going to do it and hope it's over fast.

I come home from work dead tired and immediately start cleaning, doing the laundry, and cooking. Of course, I'm exhausted but if I don't do it no one will.

Sacrificing your interests, making your body serve everybody else's purposes except your own, suffering, accepting pain as your natural state of being - these are some of the most popular ways of signalling your belonging to female identity.


If anybody has their own version of why this happens, feel free to tell me in the comments. Then, I will propose my theory of the reasons behind the sacrificial womanhood.

Zygmunt Bauman's Does Ethics Have a Chance in a World of Consumers?: A Review, Part II

As I mentioned in the first part of this review, Bauman's vision of today's world is, at the very least, flawed. The impression his analysis often makes on me is one created by a person who is so afraid of certain aspects of life that he never ventures outside of his ivory tower. He hides from reality and theorizes about it from the
the place of his fear. As a result, a lot of what he has to say bears no relation to reality. For instance, Bauman sees us as constantly moving away from coercion and towards freedom. He observes (or he believes that he observes)

the ever more evident dismantling of the system of normative regulation, and thereby the releasing of ever larger chunks of human conduct from coercive patterning, supervision, and policing, and relegating ever larger numbers of previously socialized functions to the realm of individual "life politics."

                                                                                                                        I thought about this statement for a long while, but for the life of me I can't see how anybody can say that the world today is moving away from supervision and policing. I don't want to keep belaboring the point of those new airport scanners ad infinitum, but what about the US Patriot Act? If that is non-invasive and non-coercive, I honestly don't know what is.

Bauman spends quite a lot of time attempting to construct an argument on the basis of this perceived disappearance of coercion and its substitution with something else:

Coercion is being replaced by stimulation, forceful imposition of behavioral patterns by seduction, policing of conduct by PR and advertising, and the normative regulation, as such, by the arousal of new needs and desires.

I have no idea why Bauman needs to present PR and advertising on the one hand and policing and coercion on the other as mutually exclusive. Coercion and advertising are part of the same system, two sides of the same coin. The arousal of new needs and desires is a product of both PR and policing. If we know that we will be policed (say, at an airport), we are very likely to provide ourselves with a kit that will make the process of being policed easier. People who travel a lot nowadays have a special personal grooming and make-up kits that come in small bottles and that are packaged separately. Before your trip, you can just grab your pre-packaged kits and head to the airport. In a similar fashion, one could give many examples of coercion and stimulation working together to impose new behavioral patterns. Advertising often serves not so much to provoke new desires as to give us a justification for accepting the needs imposed on us by coercion.

Another topic where Bauman's argument is wide of the mark, is his description of an ideal employee for big corporations. For some reason, he has decided that in order to be competitive on the job market one has to be single, unattached, and not burdened with responsibilties:

Bosses tend nowadays to dislike having employees who are burdened with personal commitments to others-particularly those with firm commitments and especially the firmly long-term commitments. The harsh demands of professional survival all too often confront men and women with morally devastating choices between the requirements of their career and caring for others. Bosses prefer to employ unburdened, free-floating individuals who are ready to break all bonds at a moment's notice and who never think twice when "ethical demands" must be sacrificed to the "demands of the job."

Nothing in this statement makes sense. A commitment-free individual, unburdened with a mortgage and dependent family members, is the worst nightmare of repressive employers. Such an employee feels free to leave the second she feels unhappy with the conditions of her employment. A "free-floating" individual doesn't scare as easy as the one who is the only breadwinner for a group of people. If I have several mouths to feed, I am more likely to swallow a lot of shit coming from my bosses in order to keep my job at any cost. If, however, I don't owe anything to anybody, I will leave the company without a second thought and will have no trouble moving to a different city, state, or even country. This is precisely why we are so constantly brainwashed into marrying and having children. Free people pose the greatest danger to the system. Why Bauman would wish to claim the opposite is incomprehensible to me.

In his desire to signal his rejection of the way the world is today, Bauman allows his argument to become sloppy. For instance, the philosopher bemoans the lack of interest in politics in today's world:

All over the "developed" and affluent part of the planet, signs abound of fading interest in the acquisition and exercise of social skills, of people turning their backs on politics, of growing political apathy and loss of interest in the running of the political process.

He fails to mention, however, when that happy age of political participation that is "fading" today actually took place. I believe that any argument about things getting much worse absolutely has to mention the time period with which today's reality is being compared. Otherwise, there is no value to this line of reasoning.

To summarize, Does Ethics Have a Chance in a World of Consumers? offers an insightful discussion of identity construction. However, as soon as Bauman begins to theorize about the subjects of ethics and consumerism, he cannot avoid the need to massage reality into the confines of his flawed system.

Zygmunt Bauman's Does Ethics Have a Chance in a World of Consumers?: A Review, Part I

Zygmunt Bauman is one of my favorite contemporary philosophers. His interest in the mechanisms of identity construction is enough to make me follow his work with great dedication.

Bauman's recent Does Ethics Have a Chance in a World of Consumers? (Institute for Human Sciences Vienna Lecture Series) made a dubious impression on me. Everything Bauman has to say about identity is really good. Everything he has to say on other topics, however, is really not. This is unusual, since normally philosophers are provoked by the topic of identity into uttering strings of annoying platitudes. Bauman avoids this danger and talks about identity in a thought-provoking and profound way. The other subjects he addresses in Does Ethics Have a Chance in a World of Consumers? , though, are analyzed in a much weaker way. Unfortunately, a moment comes in everybody's life when our brain cannot process change as effectively as it used to when we were younger. As a result, we see any change in our world as at worst terrifying and at best negative. This is, sadly, what happens to Bauman. His fear of today's reality taints his analysis and robs it of any intellectual value. As I already explained, I have no patience with anybody whose sexism and racism do not allow them to recognize that life today is without a shadow of a doubt better than at any other point in history. Bauman's lamentations about some unspecified past when everything was better, fresher, and sweeter are a testimony to his nostalgia for his lost youth. This nostalgia is so strong that it overruns the obvious ethical considerations that should have helped Bauman remember that the current historical period he dislikes so much is characterized by an incredible progress in the rights of women, racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities.

In this review, I will first address the parts of Bauman's argument that I really liked. Then, I will proceed to discuss the much weaker second half of this book.

Bauman starts his discussion of identity formation by observing how much the task of creating an identity is linked to fear, anxiety, and constant insecurity:

Identities exist today solely in the process of continuous renegotiation. Identity formation, or more correctly their re-formation, turns into a lifelong task, never complete; at no moment of life is the identity "final" There always remains an outstanding task of readjustment, since neither conditions of life nor the sets of opportunities and threats ever stop changing. That built-in "nonfinality," the incurable inconclusiveness of the task of self-identification, causes a lot of tension and anxiety.

The idea that identity today is negotiable, fluid, and non-static has, of course, turned into something of a favorite platitude among the theorists of identity. What is different in Bauman's analysis is that his thinking does not stop there. He realizes that the qualities of fluidity and variability of contemporary identities do not in any way rob them of their potential to do harm. It is a given that everybody today moves seamlessly between identities. This mere fact, however, does nothing to alleviate the dreadful burden of identity.

By its very nature, collective identity requires a common enemy. The ever-growing complexity of today's world makes the need for this enemy stronger, instead of weaker:

The act of selecting a group as one's site of belonging in fact constitutes some other groups as alien and, potentially, hostile territory: "I am P" always means (at least implicitly, but often explicitly) that "most certainly, I am not Q, R, S, and so on." "Belonging" is one side of the coin, and the other side is separation and opposition-which all too often evolve into resentment, antagonism, and open conflict. Identification of an adversary is an indispensable element of identification with an "entity of belonging"-and, through the latter, also a crucial element of self-identification. Identification of an enemy construed as an incarnation of the evil against which the community "integrates," gives clarity to life purposes and to the world in which life is lived.

Consequently, when the world becomes less clear and more complex, a group needs to construct an enemy who is more and more evil with every passing day. Thus, those who believe that we live in a post-identity world are completely wrong. I have no idea whether these people even follow the news or turn on the television. There are no structures in place today that would dilute the strength of collective identifications. Just the opposite.

After this impressive discussion of identity, Bauman proceeds to talk about the actual subject of his book, which is the relationship between ethics and consumerism. And here, unfortunately, his argument begins to fall apart. In order to introduce the topic of ethics, the philosopher comes out with the following bizarre statement:

In order to have self-love, we need to be loved or to have hope of being loved. Refusal of love-a snub, a rejection, denial of the status of a love-worthy object-breeds self-hatred. Self-love is built of the love offered to us by others. Others must love us first, so that we can begin to love ourselves.

It honestly took me a while to realize that the author was completely serious in this statement. When I finally saw that no punch line was coming and this is exactly what he meant to say, I felt pretty embarrassed for Bauman. You cannot proceed to theorize on the basis of your psychological insecurities and neuroses. Of course, we can never escape them, but the least we could do is avoid projecting them onto the entire world. The kind of self-love that is so dependent on the aceptance and approval of others is beyond unhealthy. A theory constructed on the basis of this vision cannot convince anybody.

Everybody Wants to Be America

Here is a discussion I have been having with somebody at Opinion Forum:

Larry: 'There is no other place like this country.The dream of every foreign country I’ve visited is to be America."

Clarissa: "You couldn’t be more wrong, Larry. It is a myth that most people around the world want to have a life that’s all work, work, work, saddled with a 30-year mortgage, where you feel you have to kill yourself working to buy that new plasma screen TV, where there is little sex and even less fun, where people feel enormous guilt for relaxing even for a while, where neither healthcare or higher education are guaranteed to everyone, where you have to be pretty rich to go to college (or saddle yourself with enormous debt.)

Don’t get me wrong, this is a wonderful country, but the idea that people of all cultures would see this life as perfect and actually want it is truly wrong. I am an immigrant and people from my old country don’t envy me in the least. They think I’m an idiot for wanting to live here. Both my friends and I are right in our own way. Different cultures have different priorities. The very doubtful American prosperity that comes at such a steep price is hardly the envy of everyone."

I want to add: I consciously chose to emigrate to North America. I chose to live here and I love it. This doesn't, however, make me think that everybody in the world would want the same. people are different, their needs are different, what's good for me, might be intolerable for somebody else. I know many, many immigrants who bought into the myth of America while knowing nothing about the reality of America and are now truly miserable. I know immigrants who went back home and those who are saving money to go back home.

There is no way of life that's perfect for everyone. The idea that "everybody is jealous of the American lifestyle" is promoted by the likes of George W. Bush in order to justify American intrusion into world affairs and promote the kind of hysterical patriotism he needs to sustain its military adventures.

"Communism = Soviet Power + Electrification"

In the past 18 hours, I've had the chance to get in touch with my Ukrainian identity. The electricity suddenly went off in my apartment and we haven't been able to resolve this problem in spite of numerous efforts.

As a post-Soviet Ukrainian, I can't say I'm all that unaccastomed to living with no electricity (which means no air conditioning and no refrigerator in this sweltering heat). However, I'm not enjoying it any more than I did in my country.

To make the nostalgic experience complete, we should also have our water disconnected. Then, it would definitely feel like home.

P.S. For those who don't know, the title of this post comes from a famous quote by Lenin.

P.P.S. The electricity mysteriously went back on. This experience taught me two important things. First, overconsumption is the devil. Second, I don't miss Ukraine. I miss my real homeland, Canada, though. And not because there are no power outages there (sometimes, there are) but because it's an amazing place.

Collective Identities, Part II

As we have discussed in Part I of this post, part of the price we have to pay for collective identification is the renunciation of reason in favor of emotion. But, of course, this isn't all. Violence against ourselves or others is the most wide-spread way of marking our belonging to a group. Those who feel the most difficulty integrating themselves into their group will need to engage in the loudest, the strongest, and the most painful ways of proving their allegiance to the group. Verbal violence, physical violence, as well as emotional, intellectual, and physical self-mutilation serve as means to declare one's belonging. The apotheosis of collective identification is, of course, one's willingness to die for the imagined community, for a piece of painted fabric, for the sound of a song, for a line drawn on a sheet of paper.

So, why do we agree to pay the ultimate price for the illusion of identity? Obviously, nobody would engage in all these violent and self-mutilating practices for nothing. The most evident reason is that collective identity frees us - at least momentarily - from our cosmic loneliness. The illusion of not being alone in the universe is so precious that giving up reason does not seem such a huge price to pay.

However, this isn't all. I believe that the strongest lure of collective identity resides in the fact that it liberates it from the painful burden of our individuality. Subscribe to a group agenda and - voilà, no need to think, elaborate your own position, struggle with contradictions, etc. At the same time, the group will shoulder the responsibility for everything. You can have a point of view, a discourse, an agenda, and a ready-made enemy. And you will not even have to bear responsibility for any of it. No wonder that people would defend their collective identifications hysterically.

Collective Identities, Part I

As some people might already know, collective identities represent one of my main research interests. After I manage to get my book on the Bildungsroman genre published, I hope to finish my project on collective identities. So here are some of my thoughts.

In its capacity of an imagined community (Benedict Anderson's definition), collective identities need to create feelings of common interests and solidarity between people who have never met. This is, of course, a project that cannot be carried out through reason and logic. Applying the light of reason to identity will lead to its destruction. So, what's left? Emotions, feelings, passions. You manage to make people emotionally attached to their identity, and they will never stop to analyze its failings.

One of the easiest ways of creating emotional attachment to an imagined community is by fostering a sense of a common grievance. If the persecuting Other does not exist you need to create it. There cannot possibly be a collective identity without an Other (both external and internal).

After the Other is created (or chosen), you need to ascribe a certain set of characteristics and a certain discourse to it. Usually, the Other serves as a site onto which you can project the desires, the beliefs, the actions that are your own but that you don't wish to recognize in yourself. Think about the whole "Jews are greedy" stereotype. This characterization has nothing to do with the Jews. It has to do with non-Jewish people wanting to distance themselves from being perceived as greedy.

After the Other is located (or, rather, appointed) and endowed with a set of characteristics, you need to create the narrative of oppression. It doesn't matter how much grounding in reality it has (it can have a lot or none at all). What matters is that it should be as incendiary as possible. In view of a common grievance, people will put aside their differences and unite around what they perceive as a shared slight.

But what's wrong with this? one might ask. People will unite and defend their collective interests. That certainly sounds as a good thing.

Well, first of all, who's going to say if they have common interests and what those might be? And then, what do we do with the Other that we created and turned into the sum of all evils? And that our group now hates so deeply? Remember, we had to abandon reason and logic in order to create our group identity in the first place. How can we now hope to turn reason back on in order to promote a political agenda that will be REASONABLY satisfying to all of us?

(To be continued).

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Asexuality

A recent post at Feministing illustrates the point I was trying to make about tolerance that sometimes turns into a parody of itself.

The post responds to a message from somebody who feels asexual and finds anybody's touch "absolutely repulsive. The thought of sex makes me gag a bit." The response that the author of the message gets to her post takes the idea of political correctnes to the extreme that is even a little scary. The main idea of the response is "Asexual people of the world, unite!" Don't worry about beinng asexual, it says. You can always get together with other asexual people, date them, and form yet another neat identity group.

This attitude does not come exclusively out of the desire to show the world how tolerant and accepting one is. It is also the result of a deeply Puritanical view of sex, which refuses to see human sexuality on terms of a physiological process. If anybody found the idea of eating or sleeping (also physiological processes) "absolutely repulsive", we wouldn't be as likely to dismiss this problem with a lot of well-meaning but ultimately empty words. Nobody would (at least for now, I think) suggest to form an identity group around this problem.

Another problem that the response to this post brings to light, is the deep-seated fear that many Americans feel towards psychology as a field of knowledge. While several people suggested that the author of the post look for hormonal causes of her asexuality, nobody mentioned that it might be helpful for her to search for psychological causes.

Collective Identities

People often ask me why I am so interested in collective identities as a category of analysis. I believe it's because I don't have any and feel very content living without any collective identification. So people who abdicate parts of their individuality (or even give their lives) in order to promote an attachment to a collectivity perplex me. Here is my position in relation to different kinds of collective identities:

• Gender identity: I love being a woman and believe that it is the best thing in the world (of course, I have never tried being a man, so my view must be a little biased.) However, the kind of femininity I practise is far from mainstream. I feel different from many other women much more often than I experience a solidarity with them. I identify myself as feminist but my feminism is very different from what it is generally considered to be in North America today. I have been told by "real" feminists that I am actually a male chauvinist in disguise. My theoretical findings on women's issues are often not very palatable to other feminist scholars.
• National identity: I strongly believe that any kind of patriotism is profoundly unhealthy, but many people talked about the insidious nature of nationalism before me, so I won't repeat their arguments.
• Linguistic identity: I don't have a native language. This has both positive and negative consequences. I could never engage in any creative writing because for that you really need a language you feel as your own on a very profound level. On the positive side, I move between different languages and different cultural spaces all day and every day. This is a very enriching albeit arduous way of being. Language is not just a way to organize words into sentences. Living in a language means adopting the whole civilization that comes with it.
• Professional identity: I love being a scholar and an educator. I do, however, find it difficult to meet colleagues whose view of the profession and our goals within it would coincide with mine.
• Local identity: In the past 10 years I have moved 8 times. And this summer I will be moving two more times. It is obvious that with this way of life it is hardly possible to preserve a strong sense of attachment to any locality in particular.
• Political identity: Some of my political views are so far to the left that some people might consider them radical. For example, I believe that women should have a right to abortion on demand at any stage of pregnancy whatsoever. At the same time, my political beliefs also rely on certain concepts that are considered to be deeply conservative. For instance, I am a strong believer in individual responsibility. As a result of these seemingly contradictory views, I have never been able to identify with any political party or program.

Who needs gender stereotypes?

I've been trying to define why people are so attached to gender stereotypes and the whole discourse of the so-called male/female differences. It is self-evident that we will never be able to discover any gender differences that would transcend cultural, religious, linguistic, social, racial, class, educational, etc. divisions. As hard as we might try, we will never manage to prove that all women (or men) on the planet share anything whatsoever except the obvious physiological distinctions. Why, then, do people enjoy the stupid "Men are from Mars, women are from Venus"-type books, articles, TV shows, and stand-up comedy routines?

The first reason for this silliness is, of course, that it simplifies our understanding of the world around us. We divide the entire population of the planet into 2 huge groups, assign a list of characteristics to each of them, and immediately feel that the world has suddenly become so much more comprehensible. Who cares if these distinctions and the characteristics we assign to the genders have no basis in actual fact? Who cares if real people suffer their whole lives by trying to inscribe their complex personalities into the normative vision of gender? At least, we now feel so much more in control of the universe.

The second reason is, in my opinion, that this worldview gives people with miserable personal lives an explanation for their lack of personal happiness. Instead of looking at what they might be doing wrong in their emotional and sexual lives, they can put all the blame on gender differences. "Who can understand women?" they say. "Women are just too weird (emotional, incomprehensible, unreasonable, etc.)." Of course, women do the exact same thing.

Such people are particularly invested in promoting the discourse of gender difference. If this discourse gets debunked, they will have to deal with the unwelcome realization that their personal lives suck not because men and women are "essentially" different, but because they never took the trouble of learning how to confront their own personal issues and construct relationships with other people.

There might be other reasons for the almost religious belief in gender differences and I will definitely keep looking for them.