Stuart Hall

"Who Needs Identity”

Main argument: In discussing the ‘deconstructive’ turn in cultural studies, Hall
claims that, although it’s been “put under erasure,” we need to continue to discuss
‘identity’—preferably as ‘identification.’ Hall foregrounds the major fault line in the
‘subject-of-language’ approach to identity; i.e. between the social control and the
personal investment. He uses both Althusser (as well as how he uses Lacan) and
Foucault to illustrate such gap, and then Judith Butler is offered as one to bridge the
gap between discourse theory and psychoanalysis.

Part I: the deconstructive turn in cultural studies (pp.16-18)

1 The question: “Within the anti-essentialist critique of ethnic, racial and national
conceptions of cultural identity and the ‘politics of location’ some adventurous
theoretical conceptions have been sketched in their most grounded forms. . . . Who
needs identity?” (15)
Two answers
2. first: “to observe something distinctive about the deconstructive critique to which
many of these essentialist concepts have been subjected.
 ‘put under erasure’ “operating under erasure in the interval between reversal
and emergence” (16).

3. second:.
 “in its new, displaced or decentered position”;
 In “rearticulating the relationship between subject and discursive practice” the
question of identity or rather the question of identification (involving the
process of subjectification and the politics of exclusion) recurs.
 Identity seen from a poststructualist view: (16-17)
traditional Poststructualist/deconstructive
1. recognition of common origin or 1. a process of construction, a process
shared characteristics with another never completed, always ‘in process.’
person or group; or with an ideal, and
with the natural closure of solidarity
and allegiance established on this
foundation.
2. can be ‘won’ or gained, sustained or 2. With its determinate conditions of
abandoned existence, “identification is in the end
conditional, lodged in contingency.

3. essentialist, with “a stable core of the
self, unfolding from beginning to end
through all the vicissitudes of history
without change; the bit of the self
which remains always –already ‘the
same’, identical to itself across time”
Once secured, it does not obliterate
difference. [. . . ] Identification is, then,
a process of articulation, a suturing, an
over-determination not a subsumption.”
(17)
3. identities are a. “never unified, and,
in late modern times, increasingly
fragmented and fractured. [. . .]
b. produced in specific discursive
formations and practices by specific
enunciative strategies. [. . .]
c. constructed through difference” [and]
“in relation to the Other [. .. ] its
constitutive outside.”
d. Construction of social identity is ‘an
act of power’” (18)

Summarized Main Points: Hall’s definition of identity (p. 19)

1. “the meeting point, the point of suture（縫合）, between on the one hand the
discourses and practices which attempt to 'interpellate', speak to us or hail us
into place as the social subjects of particular discourses, and on the other hand,
the processes which produce subjectivities, which construct us as subjects Ideology re-
defined—
which can be 'spoken'. Identities are thus temporary attachment to the subject articulation rather
positions which discursive practices construct for us. than
interpellation.

2. The notion that an effective suturing of the subject to a subject-position requires,

not only that the subject is ‘hailed’, but that the subject invests in the position,
means that suturing has to be thought of as an articulation, rather than a
one-sided process, and that in turn places identification, if not identities, firmly
on the theoretical agenda.”
Part II: Hall’s response to issues of identity [or the gap between identity as the
results of social control and identity as that of social agency] brought up by
“Althusser’s Lacan.”
1. Althusser’s ISA’s article (“Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”) is
divided into two parts, “the materialist function of ideology in reproducing the
social relations of production (Marxism) and (through its borrowings from Lacan)
 the symbolic function of ideology in the constitution of the subjects.”
2. Hall’s formulation of the critical divide: ideology should work on two levels--
The rudimentary levels of psychic The level of discursive formations and
identity and the drives practices.

3. Hall’s introduction of the Althusser debate:

a. correspondence between interpellation and psychic misrecognition: Michael
Pecheux: registered the unbridgeable gap, and solves the problem by seeing
‘interpellation’ as the ‘structure of misrecognition.’
b. ideology as suturing -- Stephen Heath (1981) on suture called ‘an intersection’ –
ideology must begin “’as an account of suturing effects, the effecting of the join of
the subject in structures of meanings’” (19)
c. an already constituted ‘subject’ before interpellation: Hirst
4. Hall’s views: mirror stage re-interpreted;
a. part of the problem comes from taking at face value “Lacan’s somewhat
sensationalist proposition that everything constitutive of the subject not only
happens through this mechanism of the resolution of the Oedipal crisis, but
happens in the same moment.” (21).
b. “The mirror stage is not the beginning of something, but the interruption—the
loss, the lack, the division—which initiates the process that ‘founds’ the sexually
differentiated subject (and the unconscious) and this depends not alone on the
instantaneous formation of some internal cognitive capacity, but on the
dislocating rupture of the look from the place of the Other.” (22)
c. The mirror image supported by the mother—it is a fantasy, which “only has
meaning in relation to the supporting presence and the look of the mother who
guarantees its reality for the child.”
d. The mirror image as alienated misrecognition –not the only scenario; consider
the other possible readings of pre-oedipal stages such as those of Kristeva, J.
Benjamin and Laplanche.
Part III: Hall’s response to issues of identity [or the gap between identity as the
results of social control and identity as that of social agency] brought up by
Foucault.
1. Foucault’s work is divided into three stages:
a. 1. Archaelogical method: ‘empty formalist’ stage—“offer a formal account
of the construction of subject positions within discourse while revealing little
about why it is that certain individuals occupy some subject positions rather
than others.” (23)
 b. 2. Genealogical method: power and discourse as a regulative and regulated
formation, entry into which “determined by and constitutive of the power
relations that permeate the social realm.”
c. Critique (1) -- Body as ‘the transcental signifier’ in Foucault’s theory (24)
d. Critique (2) – ”the entirely self-policing conception of the subject which
emerges from the disciplinary, confessional and pastoral modalities of power
[. . . ], and the absence of any attention to what might in any way
interrupt, prevent or disturb the smooth insertion of individuals into the
subject positions constructed by these discourses.” (25)
e. 3. third shift to the ‘subject” – but he cannot make the move to consider
psychoanalysis.
Part IV: Bulter’s concept of gender as performance (linking “assuming” a sex with the
question of identification)

Source
1. The Identity Reader. Eds. Paul Du Gay, Jessica Evans &Peter Redman. Sage,
2000.