Beyon Identity

Beyond ``identity''

ROGERS BRUBAKER and FREDERICK COOPER
University of California, Los Angeles; University of Michigan

``The worst thing one can do with words,'' wrote George Orwell a half a century ago, ``is to surrender to them.'' If language is to be ``an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought,'' he continued, one must ``let the meaning choose the word,and not the other way about.'' 1 The argument of this article is that the social sciences and humanities have surrendered to the word ``identity''; that this has both intellectual and political costs; and that we can do better. ``Identity,'' we argue, tends to mean too much (when understood in a strong sense), too little (when understood in a weak sense), or nothing at all (because of its sheerambiguity). We take stock of the conceptual and theoretical work ``identity'' is supposed to do and suggest that this work might be done better by other terms, less ambiguous, and unencumbered by the reifying connotations of ``identity.'' We argue that the prevailing constructivist stance on identity ^ the attempt to ``soften'' the term, to acquit it of the charge of ``essentialism'' by stipulatingthat identities are constructed, £uid, and multiple ^ leaves us without a rationale for talking about ``identities'' at all and ill-equipped to examine the ``hard'' dynamics and essentialist claims of contemporary identity politics. ``Soft'' constructivism allows putative ``identities'' to proliferate. But as they proliferate, the term loses its analytical purchase. If identity is everywhere, it isnowhere. If it is £uid, how can we understand the ways in which self-understandings may harden, congeal, and crystallize? If it is constructed, how can we understand the sometimes coercive force of external identi¢cations? If it is multiple, how do we understand the terrible singularity that is often striven for ^ and sometimes realized ^ by politicians seeking to transform mere categories intounitary and exclusive groups? How can we understand the power and pathos of identity politics?
Theory and Society 29: 1^47, 2000. ß 2000 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

2 ``Identity'' is a key term in the vernacular idiom of contemporary politics, and social analysis must take account of this fact. But this does not require us to use ``identity'' as a category ofanalysis or to conceptualize ``identities'' as something that all people have, seek, construct, and negotiate. Conceptualizing all a¤nities and a¤liations, all forms of belonging, all experiences of commonality, connectedness, and cohesion, all self-understandings and self-identi¢cations in the idiom of ``identity'' saddles us with a blunt, £at, undi¡erentiated vocabulary. We do not aim here tocontribute to the ongoing debate on identity politics.2 We focus instead on identity as an analytical category. This is not a ``merely semantic'' or terminological issue. The use and abuse of ``identity,'' we suggest, a¡ects not only the language of social analysis but also ^ inseparably ^ its substance. Social analysis ^ including the analysis of identity politics ^ requires relatively unambiguousanalytical categories. Whatever its suggestiveness, whatever its indispensability in certain practical contexts, ``identity'' is too ambiguous, too torn between ``hard'' and ``soft'' meanings, essentialist connotations and constructivist quali¢ers, to serve well the demands of social analysis. The ``identity'' crisis in the social sciences ``Identity'' and cognate terms in other languages have a longhistory as technical terms in Western philosophy, from the ancient Greeks through contemporary analytical philosophy. They have been used to address the perennial philosophical problems of permanence amidst manifest change, and of unity amidst manifest diversity.3 Widespread vernacular and social-analytical use of ``identity'' and its cognates, however, is of much more recent vintage and more...