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Trying to represent and perform identity in your pursuit of interests and curiosities is a bit like trying to have a full conversation with a cat, like it understands human language. Nature might respond somewhat to aspects of identity but the performance is largely lost on it.
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I think this is the deepest intellectual weakness of identitarianism. It forgoes genuine curiosity and general interestedness in the universe for a never-break-character identity performance that only works on other humans.
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I don’t think I have any strongly gendered or ethnic or racialized interests. The closest I come is probably vegetarianism/veganism, which has identity roots, and strongly modulates my food related curiosities and interests.
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I suspect when an identitarian viewpoint actually produces interesting, curiosity-provoking ideas, it does so by breaking out of the original category. For example, feminism and temporality.
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I don’t know much about feminism, but the “waves” model seems clumsy for describing at least the development of the philosophy. Perhaps it works for the politics. The philosophy seems to have developed more like parallel lineages with continuity of ideas across generations.
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“World viewed from X POV for the sake of viewing it from X POV” will never be interesting to intellectually alive thinkers even in group X. But if X morphs into a weird filter of general interest, then everybody gets interested, X or not X.
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World viewed from X POV, where I am a member of group Y is interesting to me. As a straight white dude much of my identity is implicit. The culture is shaped around it so it’s invisible. Seeing it from another’s identity which must be more explicitly defined is interesting.
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Not if Y is performing their identity 100% in generating that work. My assertion is that performance is a curiosity/interest blinding force. It’s only interesting if it is interested, ie if Y can break out of Y mode to look at world in ways X may not.
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Ok I think I’ve sorted it out, and I think we agree. I was not disagreeing just trying to say that if you are investigating identity it can be revealing to observe pure identity performers. Especially if you are of the unnamed class.
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Other identity groups have more explicit and legible definitions. Those definitions are often created in response to the default cultural identity. The default identity is assumed and implicit. So you can learn about the default identity by examining other groups.
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Yeah, sure. I experience that in India as a Brahmin male. I don't think the universal subject position is actually as unique or different from others as critical theorists make it seem. It is often the difference between view from exact top of a mountain, vs shoulder just below.
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The thing is that for any specific individual, the theoretical featureless universal subject position is contaminated by invisible minor identity variables, like say height or health condition or financial. There is no pure example of being on the top of the mountain.
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Or in Jungian terms, there is no such thing as 0% self, 100% shadow. Once you get away from that singularity position, it all becomes a matter of degree. For eg. I think I'm closer to a featureless person than half the white guys I meet, despite being nominally non-null identity.
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I wonder about that. The concept of the universal subject is very WEIRD. It seems to be that it assumes a homogenous culture with few niches/classes. I bet it expresses differently when the number and type of identity relations changes.
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WEIRD is just bad statistical sampling methodology for the most part. I don't think it has any mystically deep philosophically flaws from being a sample at the top of the mountain so to speak. You'd get different kinds of weird with other narrow samplings.
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