Can an Identity Be True and Not True?
On ‘constitutive tension’ in our concepts
A concept, Eric Calderwood says, may have a built-in “constitutive tension”: it claims to point to what’s “unique and specific” even while “that specificity is predicated on the deliberate blurring” of other relevant concepts. A concept that has such an internal tension “has no ontological stability and cannot hold up under its own weight” yet might still be “a powerful discursive tool.” Which is to say, you can tear open the concept, but even with that structural flaw, it’s useful. It might be useful precisely because of what it leaves open.
The book is Colonial al-Andalus: Spain and the Making of Modern Moroccan Culture, and Calderwood is referring to certain claims about Spain’s relationship with Morocco. He says that the concept of “Hispano-Arab culture”—though it had to blur “historical, geographic, ethnic, and linguistic boundaries”—nonetheless was politically effective “for asserting Spanish colonial power in Morocco.”
This passage reminds me of the challenges in discussing identity. Identity is:
- how we feel and think inwardly, and how we live and speak outwardly
- what’s happening right now, and how it connects to past and future
- the way we conform, and the way we rebel
