As soon as we seek to possess and venerate a ‘culture’ (even assume its its nature as thing with boundaries that has internal integrity or unity, wholeness and exclusive definition) we are already in deep water. Even ‘pride’ is problematic except as a claim for recognition for a culture that has been marginalised and is at threat of return to marginalisation. That last sentence of course is in recognition of the meaning of GAY PRIDE, a thing misunderstood by its enemies who say, why not STRAIGHT PRIDE then? The point is that that gay people in the 1960s and 1970s in the modern world, but of course before that time too in enclaves or in defence of a non-exclusive sexual practice, were asserting their recognition in a world we felt that made us invisible.
In doing so (for it is the fate of groups that must assert themselves at first in part by opposition), we may have drawn the boundaries too exclusively. As I implied already, this happens with social movements defined by attempts to wrest power from otherwise hostile hegemonic forces but rarely to long-term advantage if it becomes codified as an exclusive identity guarded by the lookout for a supposed fifth column within its ranks, and often taking seriously military metaphors like this. The best of that movement was defined by the rainbow motif, as a symbol of diversity in one thing and of having open arms to the widening of that diversity. That strand of beauty is threatened by exclusion – the stuff common to the movement that based on binary conceptions of both gender and sexual orientation names itself gender-critical or attempts to assert a rigidly and ideologically defined (but claimed wrongly to be a biologically based) conception of sexual orientation. That retrograde movement under various misleading names including radical feminism and an LGB (without the T) Alliance has sought to exclude from culture identities thought to be medically defined when seen as valid at all – notably the trans, non-binary and intersex groupings within our open culture of rainbow colours which touch without merging but work cooperatively – open to other expressions of that diversity that do not demand recognition at the cost of another’s exclusion from the bounds of our human-beingness.
pride in your own culture ‘becomes codified as an exclusive identity guarded by the lookout for a supposed fifth column within its ranks, and often taking seriously military metaphors like this’.
And we see that assertion most in versions of both nationalism and the aggressive defence of its boundaries and statehood – in Brexit discourse in particular or even, on the left, in the ‘socialism within one state’ posture fed by some aspects of Leninism and all of Stalinism in the Soviet Union, after the Second World War, and renascent in the left version of Brexit. The example in the picture above revives the metaphor of the fifth column used often in war-time where the forces of rigid order use an external threat as an excuse for internal conflict, particularly against the marginalised (as represented in that poster for 1940s USA), although ostensibly with an anti-fascist message. And let’s remember hat there is an anti-fascist message there too and it was needed, for fascism is the monster that nationalism creates to set in comparison an image of its own fairness, justice and honour – and, in the case of the poster whiteness against people of colour, by which it meant people different.Complexities abound.
One of the finest examinations of the tendency of communities to invent a unitary culture in which to take pride and mutual co-ownership (the state is me and I am the state – is a thought that can belong to more than absolute monarch like Louis XIV if France -whether he said it or not) is in Benedict Anderson’s famous rallying call from the intellectual anti-nationalist Left, Imagined Communities[1]. Anderson’s book talks about the institutionalisation of ‘imagined’ ethnic boundaries as that was performed through the mixed agency of political cartography, the population ‘census’ and museums in European states. These acts, he says, created an imagined national identity that defined itself in literal opposition, often by binary constructs of familiar – unfamiliar, native -alien and so on, to ‘otherness’ in the shape of foreignness and migrant sub-populations. To Benedict, served the role of cementing nationalism and statehood into an assumed integrity that it did not in any objective sense possess. But this applied to other ‘communities’ as well, especially those of identity and therefore married well with the dynamics of gender, heteronormative and gender bias. It depended this mechanism often on labels intend to exclude, as in the LGB without a T movement.
So what makes me proud cannot, in my view, ever be less than suspicious if it denotes a community thought to be simply and singly defined and whose borders are not porous. Such communities in the jargon of psychology are those with fuzzy boundaries – soft and malleable, expansive walls with lots of gate entries for access – where security is a thing felt internally and which opens to exploration of limits. What security is in such a state of communal and individual being is not represented by equivalents of the police and army. Of course it is an impossible ideal but ideals can be approximated and modes of justice and necessary treatment of violence against otherness are needed too.
What interests me enough to evoke pride is paradoxically a sense in some groups that borders are for crossing not excluding, for feeling secure without pathological isolation. And moments of recognition of such groupings have occurred in my life. That they are transitory is not proof of their fallaciousness – but a recognition that change and inclusion are themselves the springboards of appropriate pride and ever emergent selfhood and community. In truth, one has to admit that the evidence thus far in research in social psychology in relation to the the flexibility or plasticity of boundaries between self and other does not lend always support to my wishes – the article at the previous link on this very subject tentatively suggests that boundaries only melt in terms of self resemblance between the other and the self contemplating that otherness. But those concepts are themselves quite plastic – exactly, for instance, what constitutes resemblance (the history of art film and the novels of Kafka are littered with odd examples) for instance. And that is only one piece of research in a wide field where epistemological and ontological assumptions are rife and sometimes definitive of results.
Let me just keep believing then. LOL.
With love
Steve
[1] Anderson, B. (2016 Revised Ed.) Imagined Communities; reflections on the Origin and spread of Nationalism London, Verso.
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