Risking Difference: Identification, Race, and Community in Contemporary Fiction and Feminism

7 Toward Cross-Race Dialogue

170 RISKING DIFFERENCE 170 Chapter 7 Toward Cross-Race Dialogue Cherríe Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa, and the Psychoanalytic Politics of Community In this final chapter I brave the conventional wisdom that psychoanalysis is antithetical to community by using Lacan’s three registers—imaginary , symbolic, and real—to explore the problematics and possibilities of identification in a multicultural community. It would seem that in such a community being able to identify with someone from a different cultural or racial background would facilitate hearing what she has to say and seeing things from her point of view. Yet even the most partial or benign identification with the other risks occluding her specificity as a separate subject, since, as Roy Schafer says, “merging is involved in every identification, even in the higher-level identifications” (153): identificatory processes tend toward a unity of self and other that erases difference and threatens the perception of the other as other. Feminists have argued both sides of this issue. Crossing disciplinary boundaries, I invoke the theories of standpoint epistemologists Sandra Harding and Paula Moya and feminist political theorists Seyla Benhabib and Iris Marion Young to help me explore two competing needs of a pluralistic community: on the one hand, hearing what the other says in her own terms requires temporarily adopting her perspective ; on the other hand, hearing what the other says in her own terms requires some corrective to the imaginary tendency to draw the other into identification and so confuse her perspective (and interests) with one’s own.1 Aligning psychoanalytic ideas with principles of standpoint theory, discourse ethics and political analysis enables me to approach the following question from a richer and more complex theoretical base. If TOWARD CROSS-RACE DIALOGUE 171 imaginary processes of identification were sufficiently tempered by symbolic functions and by an acknowledgment of the real as it operates in community, could identification be modulated so that one could identify with the other’s perspective without usurping or distorting it?2 I begin with an assumption: that it is a good thing, even a responsibility , for a human being (who is inescapably social, who necessarily lives within a community) to understand persons from different cultural backgrounds. But the effort to understand immediately engages us in the traps of “knowing” and “identification.” Cognitive processes work by fitting new information into established mental schemas, so there is a built-in tendency to assimilate the other to the same. I can understand you fully only by subsuming your experience into cognitive structures based on my experience, not on yours. And “knowing” another person may become bound up with identification. As both Freud and Lacan have asserted, identification is integral to the constitution of the ego; and as the present text has claimed throughout, that early tangle of self and other, that early desire to be the other, leaves as its legacy a strong desire to identify with the other. Striving for understanding triggers not just cognitive processes, but the unconscious desire to feel what the other feels, to experience what the other experiences, to be the other. If cognitive processes tend to reduce the new to the familiar, unconscious processes of identification tend to reduce the other to the self. Therefore , a respect for the other’s otherness requires both a limit on our expectation of what we can know of another person and a conscious brake on identification. In this chapter I address the problematics of knowing through an evocation of the Lacanian real as it would operate in community; and I theorize various ways that an emphasis on the symbolic, if translated into social institutions and procedures, could counter imaginary desires for identification. In what specific ways does the symbolic block the imaginary tendency to reduce the other’s complexity to an illusory perfection and wholeness? What role does the real play in an encounter with someone from a different culture? I approach these questions through a simulated “dialogue” between an Anglo reader (myself) and two Chicana feminists’ texts: Cherríe Moraga’s “From a Long Line of Vendidas” and Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera. Although they are to be sure literary transactions, these readerly dialogues are meant to model ways that imaginary, symbolic, and real processes inflect identification in the embodied conversations that take place in feminist communities.3 172 RISKING DIFFERENCE “LIKE YOU/NOT YOU...