The Identitization of Meaning.

Today, I would like to talk about the phenomenon I call “identitizing.”

Identitizing is taking a thing (it could be anything, a book, movie, song, experience, food, anything at all) and grounding the importance, significance, and meaning of that thing in terms of the social identity of either the person who made the thing or the person interpreting the thing. Identitizing as a concept accepts the following two ideas:

1. A thing is valuable, important, meaningful, worthwhile, worthy of respect, or significant only because it is socially connected to some sort of social identity such as: sex, gender, sexual orientation, race, religion, or disability status.

2. The ability to fully understand the thing (to get it) is a product of whether or not a person has the correct identity (IE, the correct, sex, gender, sexual orientation, race, religion, or disability status).

Before we discuss identitizing, here are some examples so you can see what identitizing looks like in the real world:

I think the emergence of identitizing is what happens when the flattening of meaning that occurs in a postmodern world meets the widespread acceptance of identity politics. I’d like to explain how this occurs, and why I think identitizing leads to greater social fragmentation.

On a postmodern view of the world there is no inherent meaning to anything. As I explained in my first essay on deconstruction:

”The first thing that we need to understand is that deconstruction does not seek to show that things are true or false, good or bad, or better or worse. Deconstruction does not operate at the level of describing how the world is or at the level of truth telling. Deconstruction operates at the level of MEANING.

The primary purpose to which deconstruction is put is to blur, attack, subvert, undercut and otherwise take apart the ideas, beliefs, words, texts, thoughts, concepts, claims, assertions, ideologies, art and discourses that make up our society by going after them at the level of MEANING. In other words, anything that can be understood to mean something can have that meaning challenged, subverted, blurred, unsettled, uprooted, or otherwise taken apart by deconstruction.”

The problem with this is, as I explained in the second half of my essay for American Reformer Jesus and John Wayne Among the Deplorables, deconstruction has no stopping point. The idea being that once you accept the legitimacy of the postmodern worldview, and the deconstructive method of intellectual engagement that comes with it, there is no way to prevent deconstruction from taking apart the meaning of anything and everything. Once you accept the postmodern worldview it follows that there is no such thing as objective meaning. As postmodernism thinks that meaning is always a matter of interpretation and we are all limited by our own perspective and biases, there is no single, objective, absolute, universal, correct way to interpret anything. Once you accept that view you are left in a world where there isn’t anything all that has inherent objective meaning. There is no immovable pillar on which meaning and significance rests which can ground it objectively. Everything can be interpreted and reinterpreted endlessly from a nearly infinite number of points of view.

All of this means that in a postmodern world nothing is seen to be inherently good, true, beautiful, right, excellent, wonderful, valuable, or worthwhile. Meaning gets totally flattened out.

This is where identity politics comes in.

The Social Justice ideology that we call “wokeness” (what Wes Yang calls the successor ideology) has made heavy use of the postmodern worldview in forming it’s theories. Woke theorists realized early on that if they took postmodernism to its logical conclusion they would erode the basis for their social justice claims. This was a problem because if there is no objective, absolute, universal meaning (or truth) then why should we accept the claims of wokeness? The solution for this was to ground all meaning, significance, and truth claims in a combination of identity and experience.

To make a very long story very short, the idea is that one cannot deny nor deconstruct the experience that another person has, and as such you cannot “deny my experience” as the saying goes. The woke theorists then tie experience to identity in the following way: They claim that all experiences are interpreted by people from their own perspective, and that perspective is a product of their social position as determined by their sex, race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, etc. The conclusion that they come to is that the only thing that cannot be deconstructed is experience interpreted through identity as identity is understood by wokeness. This is why the woke will often preface everything they say with some version of “speaking as a trans, black, disabled, woman of colour….” they are establishing the identity through which they are interpreting their experience of being oppressed in society.

With all that on the table, we can now see why the woke “identitize” everything.

As we have seen, the postmodern worldview of the woke hollows out the meaning of everything by deconstructing it. However, the things which they typically exempt from deconstruction are experience and identity. What this means is that the only thing which can be used as an anchor for meaning is identity. The only legitimate way to interpret anything is through the lens of various social identities that one has, and as such, the only way for anything to have meaning that is not instantly deconstructed is to tie that meaning to identity in some way. The result of this is that every single thing that they find meaningful needs to be connected some identity or other in order to have social legitimacy.

So, instead of just enjoying a movie, the woke will enjoy a movie as a black/white/hispanic/gay/trans/straight/asian/ person. Emotions are thought to have value insofar as they are felt as a Black/white/hispanic/gay/trans/straight/ person. Genre’s of music have value because they come out of a black/white/hispanic/gay/trans/straight/ culture. Fashion is meaningful because it is produced by black/white/hispanic/gay/trans/straight/ people. And, if you don’t “get” something, the reason that you don’t “get” that particular thing is because it’s a black/white/hispanic/gay/trans/straight/ thing, and since you are not a black/white/hispanic/gay/trans/straight/person you wouldn’t understand.

This means that there are no universal things which bind us together as people. There are no universal human emotions that we can reference to understand each other. There are no universal experiences that we can share. There is, ultimately, no absolute, universal, objective point of reference from which we can create shared meaning. The only way for anything to have any meaning that isn’t instantly deconstructed is to insulate that meaning from deconstruction by tying it to identity. Identity is the lamb’s blood on the doorway of experience that causes the deconstructive angel of the death meaning to pass over whatever meaning a person wants to protect from deconstruction.

Thus, as we slip deeper and deeper into postmodernity it will become increasingly difficult to try to create shared meaning and communicate.  The identitization of meaning is going to lead to further fragmentation as people increasingly accept the false premise that they can only grasp the meaning that their racial, sexual, religious, or gender identity allows them to grasp.

At some point the need to communicate is going to require that people break to strangle hold that wokeness has on meaning and interpretation. We simply cannot continue as a society if we think that the communication of the deepest meaning of life is impossible for people of different social identities. That way madness lies.

Thank you for reading,

Sincerely,

Wokal Distance.