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1 Introduction: Who Needs 'Identity'?

Stuart Hall

There has been a veritable discursive explosion in recent years around theconce.J2t of 'id entib" at the same moment as it has been subjected to aS;;;ching critique. How is this paradoxicaI development to be explained?And where does it leave us with respect to the concept? The deconstruction has been condu cted within a variety of disciplinary areas, all of them,in one way or another critical of the notion of an integral, originary andunified identity. The critique of the self-sustaining subject at the centre ofwestern rnetaphysics has been comprehensively advanced in philosophy. The question of subjectivity and its unconsciousprocesses of formation has been developed within the discourse of apsychoanalytically influenced feminism and cultural criticismo The endlessly~ . ! j g r f Q ~ . j i y ' ~ has been adv anced in celebrato ry ,vri.tt.n!2.2(j!;Q.atmodernism. Within the ant i-essentialist critique of ethnic, racialandnationaI 'Oceptions of cultura l ide ntity and the 'politics of location' sorneadventurous theoretical conceptions have been sketched in their mostgrounded forms. What, then, is the need for a further debate about'identity'? Who needs it?There are two ways of responding to the question. The first is toobserve something distinctive about the deconstructive critique to whichmany of these essentialist concepts have been subjected. Unlike thoseforms of critique which aim to supplant inadequate concepts with 'truer'ones, or which aspire to the production of positive knowledge, thedeconstructive approach puts key concepts 'under erasure'. This indicates tha they are no longer serviceable - 'good to think with' - in theiroriginary and unreconstructed formo But since they have not beensuperseded dialectically, and there are no other, entirely differentconcepts with which to replace them, there is nothing to do but toto think with them - albeit now in their detotalized ordeconstructed forms, and no longer operating within the paradigm inwhich they were originally generated (d . Hall, 1995). The line whichcanceIs them, paradoxically, permits them to go on being read. Derridadescribed this approach as thinking at the limit, as thinking in themterval, a sort of double writing. 'By means of this double, and preciselystratified, dislodged and dislodging writing, we must also mark the


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difference.

effects'.

(p. 208).

interval between inversion, which brings low what was high, an d the conditional, lodged in contingency. Once secured, it does not obliterateirruptive emergence of a ne w 'concept', a concept that can no longer be The total merging it suggests is, in fact, a fantasy ofand never could be, included in the previous regime' (Derrida, 1981). incorporation. (Freud always spoke of it in relation to 'consuming the , ,lIdentity is such a concept - operating 'under erasure' in the interval other' as we shaII see in a moment.) !c.l:entification is , then, a process of I I!between reversal and emergence an idea which cannot be thought in the articulation,a suturing, an over-determination not a subsumption. There./Jold way, but without which certain key questions cannot be thought at islways 'too much' or 'too littiei"::'an over-determination or a lack, bu taH. never a proper fit, a totality. Like all signifying practices, it is subject to the

t . 1 .' A second kind of answer requires us to note where, ip :re:lation towhat 'play', of diffrance.-ltDeys the logic of more-than-one. And since as a:1' set of problems, does the i ~ ! ! 4 ! { C i b i l i t y o ( t h e cn


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self hiding inside the many other, more superficial or artficially imposed"selves" which a people with a shared-historyand ancestryhol.d..incommon' (Hall, 1990) and which can stabilize, fix or guarantee antinchanging ,oneness' or cultural belongingness underIying all the othersuperficial differences. It accepts that identities are never unified and, inlate modern times, increasingly fragmented and fractured; never singularbut multiply constructed across different, often intersecting and antagonistic, discourses, practices and positions. They are subject to a radicalhistoricization, and are constantly in the process of change and transformation. We need to situate the debates about identity within all thoseh,tQrically specific devel opme nts and practices which have disturbed therelatively 'settIed' character of many populations and cultures, aboye alln relation to the processes of globalization, which 1 would argue arecoterminous with modernity (Hall, 1996) and the pr ocesses of forced and'free' migration which have become a global phenomenon of the so-calledpost-colonial' worId. Though they seem to invoke an origin in a historicalpast with which they continue to correspond, actually identities are aboutquestions of using the resources of history, language and culture in theprocess of becoming rather than being: not 'who we are' or 'where wecarne from', so much as what we might become, how we have beenrepresented and how that bears on how we might represe nt ourselves.Identities are therefore constituted within, not outside representation.They relate to the invention of tradition as much as to tradition itself,which they oblige us to read no t as an endless reiteration but as 'thechanging same' (Gilroy, 1994): no t the so-caBed return to roots but acoming-to-terms-with our routes'. They arise rrom the narrativization ofthe self, but the necessarily fictional nature of this process in no wayundermines its discursive, material or poltical effectivity, even if thebelongingness, the suturing into the story' through whch identities ariseis, partly, in the imaginary (as well as the symbolic) and therefore,always, partly constructed in fantasy, or at least within a fantasma icfield.Precisely because identities are constructed within, not outside,

'1 discourse, we need to understand them as produced in specific historicaland institutiona l sites within specific discursive formations and practices,

. by specific enunciative strategies. Moreover, they emerge within the playof specific modalities of power, and thus are more the product of themarkin g of difference and exdusion, than they are the sign of an identical,naturally-constituted unity - an 'identity' in its traditional meaning (thatis, an all-inclusive sameness, seamless, without internal differentiation).Above aH, and directly contrary to the form in which they areconstantly invoked, _ i ~ ~ n t i t i e s are constructed through, not outside,difference. This entails the radically disturbing recognition that it is onlythrough the relation to theOther, the relation towhatitis not, to preciselywhat it lacks, to what has been called its constitutive outside that the'positive' meaning of any term - and thus its 'identity' - can be

constructed (Derrida, 1981; Laclau, 1990; Butler, 1993). Throughout theircareers, identities can function as points of identification and attachmentonIy because of their capacity lo exclude, lo leave out, lo render 'outside',abjected. Every identity has al its 'margin', an excess, some thing more.The unity, the internal homogeneity, which lhe term identity treats asfoundational is not a natural, but a constructed form of dosure, everyidentity naming as ils necessary, even if silenced and unspoken other,that which it 'lacks'. Y s . I ~ u (1990) argues powerfully and persuasivelythat 'the constitu tion of a social identity is an act of power' since,

If . . . an objectivity manages to partial ly affirm itself it is only by repressing thatwhich threatens it. Derrida has shown how an identity' s constitution is alwaysbased on excluding somethingand establishing a violent hierarchy between thetwo resultant poles manJwoman, etc. What is peculiar to the second term isthus reduced to the function of an accident as opposed to the essentiality of thefirst. It is the same with the black-white relationship, in which white, of course,is equivalent to 'human being'. 'Woman' and 'black' are thus 'marks' (Le.marked terms) in contrast to the unmarked terms of 'man' and 'white'. (Laclau,1990:33)

So the 'unities' whch identities proclaim are, in fact, constructed with inthe play of power and exclusion, and are lhe result, not of a natural andinevitable or primordial totality but of the naturalized, overdetermined~ ~ ~ s of 'do_sure' (Bhabha, 1994; Hall, 1993).

If 'identities' can only be read against the grain - that is to say,specihcaly not as that wh ich fixes the play of difference in a point of originand stability, but as that which is constructed in or through diffrance andis ~ ~ : > n s t a n t l y destaE1Bied by what it leaves out, then how can weunderstand its meaning and how can we theorize its emergence? Avtar~ ~ ! : : __ (1992: 143), in her important artic1e on . ' D i f f ~ r e n c e , diversity anddifferentiation', raises an important series of questions which these newways of cnceptualizing identity have posed:

Fanon notwithstanding, much work is yet to be undertaken on the subject ofhow the racialized 'other' is constituted in the psychic domain. How ispost-colonial gendered an d racialized subjectivity to be analyzed? Does theprivileging of sexual difference' an d early childhood in psychoanalysis limit itsexplanatory value in helping us to understand the psychic dimensions of socialphenomena such as racism? How do the 'symbolic order' and the social orderarticula e in the formation of the subject? In other words, how is the linkbetween social an d psychic reality to be theorized?' (1992: 142.)What follows is an attempt to begin lo respond to this critical but troublingset of questions.In SOrne recent work on this topic, 1have made an appropriation of theterm identity which is certainly no t widely shared and may not be wellunderstood. 1 use 'identity' to refer to t h ~ l 1 l e e t i n g point, the point of

r suture. between othe--one hand the discourses and p ; a C l : i l t e ~ which~ t t ~ m p t to 'interpellate', speak to us or hail us into place as the sodal~ ! > l e c t s of parlicular discourses, and on the other hand, .the processes


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7Questians a f Cultural Identitywhich produce subjectivities, which construct us as subjects which canbe 'spoken'. I 9 ~ n t i t i e s a r e t h u ~ 9 j n t s , o f t e m p o r a r y aHaJ;:flment to thesJ!.bject pos itio ns which discursive practices construct for us (see Hall,1995). They are the result of a successful articulation or 'chaining' of the. ~ u b j e c t into the flow of the discourse, what Stephen Heath, in his pathbreaking essay on 'Suture' called 'an t ~ ! ~ ! s . e c t i < ? I ! ~ _ 9 8 1 : 106). 'A theoryof ideology must begin not from the subject but as an accoupt of su~ t l f i n g effects, the effecting of the join of the subject in structures ofmeaning.' ! . ~ ~ n t i t i e s are, as it were, the positions which the subject isobliged to take up while always 'knowing' (the language of consciousness here betrays us) that they are representations, that representationis always constructed across a 'lack', across a division, from the place ofthe Other, and thus can never be adequate - i de nt ic al - t o the subjectprocesses which are invested in them. The notion that an effective suturing of the subject to a subject-position requires, no t only that thesubject is 'hailed', bu t that the subject invests in the position, means thatsuturing has to be thought of as a n . . . E ! ! j c _ u . z . q ! ~ C ! n ~ rather than a one-sidedprocess, and that in tu m places identificatian, if not identitie_s, firmly onthe theoreticaCagenda. .

The references to the term which describes the hailing of the subjectby discourse - interpellation - remind us that this debate has a significant and uncompleted pre-history in the arguments sparked off byAlthusser's 'Ideological state apparatuses' essay (1971). This essay introduced the notion of interpellation, and the speculary structure of ideology in an attempt to circurnvent the economism and reductionism of theclassical Marxist theory of ideology, and to bring together within oneexplanatory framework both the materialist function of ideology in reproducing the social relations of production (Marxism) and (through itsborrowings from Lacan) the symbolic function of ideology in the constitution of subjects. Michele Barrett, in he r recent discussion of thisdebate, has gone a considerable way to demonstrating 'the profoundlydivided an d contradictory nature of the argument Althusser was beginning to make' (Barrett, 1991: 96; see also Hall, 1985: 102: 'The two sides ofthe difficult problem of ideology were fractured in that essay and, eversince, have been assigned to different poles'). Nevertheless, the ISA sessay, as it carne to be known, has tumed out to be a highly significant,even if not successful, moment in the debate. ]acqueline Rose, for example, has argued in Sexuality in the Field af Vis ion (1986), that 'thequestion of identity - how it is constituted and maintained - is thereforethe central issue through which psychoanalysis enters the politicalfield' .

This is one reason why Lacanian psychoanalysis carne into English intellectuallife, via Althusser's concept of ideology, through the two paths of feminismand the analysis of film (a fact often used to discredit all three). Feminismbecause the issue of how individuals recognize themselves as male or female,the demand that they do so, seems to stand in such fundamental relation to

Intraductian: Wha Needs Identity?the forms of inequality and subordination which it is feminism's objective tochange. Film because its power as an ideological apparatus rests on themechanisms of identification an d sexual fantasy which we all seem toparticipa e in, bu t which - outside the cinema - are for the most part only everadmitted on the couch. If ideology is effective, it is because it works at the mostrudimentary levels of psychic identity and the drives. (Rose, 1986: 5)However, if we are not to fall directly from an economistic reductionisminto a psychoanalytic one, we need to add that, i ! ~ d e o l o g y is effective, it is

because it works at both 'the rudimentary levels of psychic identity and thedrives' and at the level of the discursive formation and practices which~ S t i t u f e the sQd;tJ field; an d that i t is in the articulation of thesemutuanyc:onstitutive but not iderltical fields that the real conceptual: p r o b i ~ ~ ~ l ! e : The term i d e n t ~ t y , - which ~ r i s e s preci.se.lyat the 'p0int ofintersection between them - IS tbus the slte of the dlffIculty. It IS worthadding that we are unlikely ever to be able to square up these twoconstituents as equivalents - the unconscious itself acting as the bar or cu tbetween them which makes it 'the site of a perpetual postponement ordeferral of equivalence' (Hall, 1995) but which cannot, for that reason, begiven up.

Heath's essay (1981) reminds us that it was Michael Pecheux wh o triedto develop an account of discourse within the Althusserian perspective,and who in effect, registered the unbridgeable gap between the first andthe second halves of Althusser' s essay in terms of 'the heavy absence of aconceptual articulation elaborated between idealagy and the uncansciaus,(quoted in Heath, 1981: 106). Pecheux tried 't o describe with reference tothe m e c h ~ - r 'tIle setting in position of its subjects' (Heath,1981: 101-2), using the Foucauldian notion of discursive formation as thatwhich 'determines what can an d must be said'. As Heath pu t Pecheux'sargument:

Individuals are constituted as subjects through the discursive formation, aprocess of subjection in which [drawing on Althusser's loan from Lacanconceming the speculary character of the constitution of subjectivity] theindividual is identified as subject to the discursive formation in a structure ofmisrecognition (the subject thus presented as the source of the meanings ofwhich it is an effect). Interpellation names the mechanism of this structure ofmisrecognition, effectively the term of the subject in the discursive an d theideologcal, the point of their correspondence (1981: 101-2).

'correspondence', however, remained troublingly unresolved.ellation, though it continues to be used as a general way of-.ubing the 'summoning into place' of the subject, was subjected tocritique. It depended, Hirst argued, on a recognitionm effect, the subject would have been required to have the

to pedorm befare it had been constituted, within discourse, as a'This something which is no t a subject must already have thenecessary to support the recognition that will constitute it as a1979: 65). This argument has proved very persuasive to
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many of Althussers subsequent readers, in effect bringing the wholefield of investigation to an untimely halt.

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The critique was certainly a formidable one, but the halting of aH furtherinquiry at this point may turn ou t to have been premature. Hirst's critiquewas effective in showing that all the mechanisms which constituted thesubject in discourse as an interpeHation, (through the speculary structureof misrecognition modelled on the Lacanian mirror phase), were indanger of presupposing an already constituted subject. However, sinceno one proposed to renounce the idea of the subject as constituted indiscourse as an effect, it still remained to be shown by what mechanismwhich was no t vulnerable to the charge of presupposition this constitution could be achieved. The problem wa s postponed, no t resolved.Sorne of the difficuties, at least, seemed to arise from accepting too muchat face value, and without qualification, Lacan' s somewhat sensationalistproposition that everything constitutive of the subject no t only happensthrough tbis mechanism of the resolution of the Oedipal crisis, bu thappens in the same momento The resolution' of the Oedipa l crisis, in theover-condensed language of the Lacanian hot-gospellers, was identicalwith, and occurred through the equivalent mechanism as, the submissionto the Law of the Father, the consolidation of sexual difference, the entryinto language, the formation of the unconsciousas well-after Althusseras the recruitment inlo the patriarchal ideologies of late capitalistwesternsocieties! The more complex notion of a subject-in-process is lost in thesepolemical condensations and hypothetically aligned equivalences. (ls thesubject racialized, nationalized and constituted as a late-liberal entreI preneurial subject in this moment too?)Hirst, too, seems to have,assumed what Michele Barrett calls 'Althusser's Lacan'. However, as he puts t, 'the complex and hazardous processof formation of a human adult from 11a small animal" does not necessarilycorrespon d to Althusser' s mechan ism of ideology. . . unless the Chld. . .remains in Lacan' s mirror phase, or unless we fill the child' s cradle withanthropological assumptions' (Hirst, 1979). His response to this issomewhat perfunctory. '1 have no quarrel with Children, an d Id o no twish to pronounce them blind, deaf or dumb, merely to deny that theyposses the capacities of philosophical subjects, that they have the attribulesof "knowing" subjects independent of their formation and training associal being s.' What is at issue here is the capacity for self-recognition. Bulit is an unwarrantable assumption to make, that 'recognition' is a purelycognitive let alone 'philosophical' attribute, and unlikely that it shouldappear in the child atone fell swoop, in a before/after fashion. The slakeshere seem, unaccountably, to have been pitched very high indeed. Ithardly requires us to endow the individual'small animal' with the fullphilosophical apparatus to account for wh y it may have the capacity to'misrecognize' itself in the look from the place of the other which is all werequire to se t the passage between the Imaginary and the Symbolic inmotion in Lacan' s terms. After aH, following Freud, the basic cathexing of

zones of bodily activity and the apparatus of sensation, pleasure an dmust be already 'in play' in however embryonic a form in order foriany relation of any kind to be established with the external world. The re isatreadya relation to a source of pleasure - the relation to the Mother in the.Imaginary - so there must be already something which is capable of'recognizing' what pleasure is. Lacan himself noted in his essay on 'TheMinor Stage' that 'The child, at an age when he is for a time, howevershort, outdone by the chimpanzee in instrumental intelligence, cannevertheless already recognize his ow n image in a mirror.' What is more,the critique seems to be pitched in a rather binary, before/after, either/orlogical formo The mirror stage is not the begnning of something, bu t theinterruption - the loss, the lack, the division - which initiales the processthat 'founds' the sexually differentiated subject (and the unconscious)and this depends not alone on the instantaneous formation of sorneinternal cognitive capacity, bu t on the dislocating rupture of the look fromthe place of the Other. For Lacan, however, this is already a fantasy - thevery image which places the child divides its identity into twO. Furthermore, that moment only has meaning in relation to the supportingpresence an d the look of the mother wh o guarantees its reality for thechild. Peter Osborne notes (1995) that in The Field Of The Other Lacan(1977) describes the 'parent holding him up before the mirror', with thechild looking towards the Mother for clJnfirmation, the child seeing her asa 'reference point .. . not his ego ideal but his ideal ego' (p. 257). Thisargument, Osborne suggests, 'exploits the indeterminacy inherent in thediscrepancy between the temporality of Lacan' s description of the child'sencounter with its bodily image in the mirror as a "stage" an d thepunctuality ofhis depiction of it as a scene, the dramatic point of which isrestricted to the relations between two "characters" alone: the child an dits bodily image'. Howeve r, as Osborne says, eitherit represents a criticaladdition to the 'mirror stage' argument - in which case, wh y is it no tdeveloped? Or it introduce s a different logic whose implications remainunaddressed in Lacan' s subsequent work.The notion that nothing of the subject is there until the Oedipal dramais an exaggerated reading of Lacan. The assertion that subjectivity is notfulIy constituted until the Oedipal crisis has been 'resolved' does no trequire a blank screen, tabula rasa, or a before/after conception of thesubject, initiated by a sort of coup de thtre, even if - as Hirst rightly noted- it lea ves unsettled the problema ic relationship between the individual'and the subject. (What is the individual 'small animal' that is no t yet asubject?).

One could add that Lacan's is only one of the many accounts of theformation of subjectivity which takes account of unconscious psychicprocesses and the relation to the other, and the debate may look differentnow that the 'Lacanian deluge' is somewhat receding and in the absenceof the early powerful impulsion in that direction which we were given byAlthusser's texto In his thoughtful recent discussion of the Hegelian


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origins of this concept of 'recognition' referred to aboye, Peter Osbomeha s criticized Lacan for 'the way in which the child's relation to the imageis absolutized by being abstracted from the context of its relations toothers (particularly I the mother)', while being made ontologicalIy constitutive of the symbolic matrix in which the 1 s precipitated in a primordialform . . .' and considers severa! other variants (Kristeva, Jessica Benjamin, Laplanche) which are not so confined within the alienatedmisrecognition of the Lacanian scenario. These are useful pointersbeyond the impasse in which this discussion, in the wake of ' Althusser'sLacan', has left us, with the threads of the psychic and the discursivespinning loose in our hands.

Foucault, I would argue, also approaches the impasse with whichHirst's critique of Althusser leaves us, but so to speak from the oppositedirection. Ruthlessly attacking 'the great myth of interiority', and drivenboth by his critque of humanism and the philosophy of consciousness,and by his negative reading ofpsychoanalysis, Foucault also undertakesaradical historicization of the category of the subject. The subject isproduced 'as an effect' through and within discourse, within specificdiscursive formations, and has no existence, and certainly no transcendental continuity or identity from one subject position to another. Inhis 'archaeological' work (Madness and Civilization, The Birth of the Clinic,The arder of Things, The Archaeology of Knowledge), discourses constructsubject positions through their rules of formation and 'modalities ofenunciation'. Powerfully compelling and original as these works are, thecriticism levelled agains t them in this respect at least seems justified. Theyoffer a formal account of the construction of subject positions withindiscourse while revealing little about why it is that certain individualsoccupy some subject positions rather than others. By neglecting toanalyse how the social positions of individu als interact with the construction of certain 'empty' discursive subject positions, Foucault reinscribesan antinomy between subject positions and the individuals who occupythem. Thus his archaeology provides a critical, bu t one-dimensional,formal account of the subject of discourse. Discursive subject positionsbecome a pror categories which individuals seem to occupy in anunproblematic fashion. (McNay, 1994: 76-7). McNay cites Brown andCousins's key observation that Foucault tends here to elide 'subjectpositions of a statement with individual capacities to fill them' (Brownand Cousins, 1980: 272) - thus comingup against the very difficulty whichAlthu sser failed to resolve, by a different route.

The critical shift in Foucault's work from an archaeological to agenealogical method does many things to render more concrete thesomewhat 'empty formalism' of the earlier work, especially in thepowerful ways in which power, which was missing from the more formalaccount of discourse, is now centrally reintroduced and the excitingpossibilities opened up by Foucault's discussion of the double-sidedcharacter of subjection/subjectification (assujettsement). Moreover, the

oi questions of power, and the notion that discourse itself is a:"lative and regulated formation, entry into which is 'determined byconstitutive of the power relations that permeate the social realm', 1994: 87), brings Foucault's conception of the discursive forcloser to some of the classical questions whi ch Althusser tried tojddress through the concept of 'ideology' - shorn, of course, of its classeductionism, economistic and truth-daiming overtones.In the area oi the theorization of the subject and identity, however,,certam problems remain. One implication oi the ne w conceptions ofelaborated in this body of work is the radical 'deconstruction' ofbody, the last residue or hiding place of Man', an d its 'reconstruction'

in terms of its historical, genealogical and discursive formations. Thebody is constructed by, shaped and reshaped by the intersection of aseries of disciplinary discursive practices. Genealogy's task, Foucaultprodaims, 'is to expose the body totally imprinted by history an d theprocesses of history's destruction of the body' (1984: 63). WhUe we canaccept this, with its radically ,constructivist' implications (the body becomes infinitely malleable an d contingent) 1am not sure we can or oughtto go as far as his proposition that Nothing in man - not even his body - is 'sufficientIy stable to serve as a basis for self-recognition or for understandingothermen.' This isnot beca use the body is sucha stable and truereferent for self-understanding, but beca use, though this may be a 'misrecognition', it is precisely how the body has served to functon as the signifierof the condensation of subjectivities in the individual and this function cannotsimply be dismiss ed because, as Foucault effectively shows, it is not true.Further, my own feeling is that, despite Foucault's disclaimers, hisinvocation of the body as the point ofapplicationof a variety of disciplinarypractices tends to lend this theory of disciplinary regulation a sort ofI displaced or misplaced concreteness' - a residual materiality - and in thisway opera es discursively to 'resolve' orappear to resolve the unspecifiedrelationship between the subject, the individual and the body. To pu t itcrudely, it pins back together or sutures' those things which the theory ofthe discursive production of subjects, if taken to its limits, would irretrievably fracture and disperse. 1 think 'the body' has acquired a totemicvalue in post-Foucauldian work precisely because oi this talismanicstatus. It is almost the only trace we have left in Foucault's work of a'transcendental signifier'.

The more well-established critique, however, has to do with the problem which Foucault encounters with theorizing resistance within thetheory of power he deploys in Discipline and Punish and The History ofSexuality; the entirely self-policing conception of the subject whichemerges from the disciplinary, confessional and pastoral modalities ofpower discussed there, and the absence of any attention to what might in~ way interrupt, prevent or disturb the smooth insertion of individualsln!o .the subject positions constructed by these discourses. The subnuSSlOn of the body through 'the soul' to the normalizing regimes of truth


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16 17uestions of Cultural IdentityParadoxicaHyI as in aH other identities treated politically in a foundationalmanner, this identity lis based on excIuding 11different" women .. . andby normatively prioritizing heterosexual relations as the basis for feministpolitics'. Ihts 'unitY'1Sou!erolEgues, is a 'fictive unity', 'produced and restrained by the very structures q,ower through whiCh emancipation issought'. Significantly, however , as Souter also argues, this does not leadJtl,ltlex to argue that all notions of identity should therefore be abandonedbecause they a r e o , t h e o r ~ t i c a } l y f ! ~ . w . : e d . r n d e e d , she takes the specularystructure of identification as a criticai part of her argumento But she acknowledges that such an argument does suggest 'the necessary limits ofidentity politics'

In this sense, identifications belong t() the imaginary; they are phantasmaticefforts of alignmenl;loyaJty,'ambiguous and cross-corporeal cohabitations,they unsettle the 1; they are the sedimentationof the 'we' in the constitutionofany I, the structuringpresent of aIterity in the very forrnulationof the I. lsientifi9 J ~ Q n s . are n ~ v e r fuIly a n ~ finally made ~ ~ e y are incessantly recontltuted,and, as such, are subject to the volatile !ogic of iterability. They arethat whicn Sconstantly marshalled, consolidated, retrenched, contestedand, on occasion,compelled to give way. (1993: 105)The effort, now , to think the question of the distinctiveness of the Iogic

within which the racialized and ethnicized body is constituted discursively, through the regulatory normative ideal of a 'compulsive Eurocentrism' (for want of a different word), cannot be simply grafted on to thearguments briefly sketched aboye. But they have received an enormousan d original impetus from this tangled and unconcIuded argument,which demonstrates beyond the shadow of a doubt that the question, andt l : ~ . ! h ~ o r i z a t i o n , of identity)s l matt,er of considerable poltical s j g ~ ~ i l n c e , and is only likely to be advanced when both the necessity ~ n d the'impossibility' of identities, an d the suturing of the psychic and .------=cursive in their constituti0I1:' . ~ r e fully and unambiguously acknowJectgeo.

ReferencesAlthusser, L. (1971) Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, London: New Left Books. Barrett, M (1991) The Politics of Truth, Cambridge: Polity. Bhabha, H. (1994) 'The Other Question', in The Location OfCulture, London: Routledge. Brah, A. (1992) 'Difference, diversity and differentation', in J. Donald and A. Rattansi (eds), Race, Culture and Difference, London: Sage (126-45). Brown, B. and Cousins, Mo (1980) 'The linguislic fault', Economy and Society, 9(3). Butler, J. (1990) Gender Trouble, London: Routledge. ButIer, J. (1993) Bodies That Matter, London: Roulledge. Derrida, Jo (1981) Positions, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Foucault, M. (1970) TheOrderofThings, London: Tavistock. Foucault, M. (1972) The Archaeology ofKnowledge, London: Tavistock. Foucault, M. (1977) Disciplineand Punish, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Foucault, M. (1981) The HstoryofSexuality Volume 1, Hannondsworth: Penguin. Foucault, M. (1987) The Use of Pleasure, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Foucault, M. (1988) The eare of the Self, Hannondsworth: Penguin.

lntroduction: Who Needs Identity?M. (1984) 'Nietzsche, genealogy, history', in P. Rabinow (ed.), The Foucaul!

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HALL Introduction