Relation identity
－is linked not to a creation of the world but to the conscious and contradictory experience of contacts among cultures;
－is produced in the chaotic network of Relation and not in the hidden violence of filiation;
－does not devise any legitimacy as its guarantee of entitlement, but circulates, newly extended;
－does not think of a land as a territory from which to project toward other territories but as a place where one gives-on-and-with rather than grasps.
Relation identity exults the thought of errantry and of totality. (144) What is highlighted here is the interdependence and chaotic network among people.
One’s experience and consciousness replace the inert monolithic root. In this statement, the poetics of relation provides a more explicit understanding of identity.
Moreover, Glissant further points out that the existence of others may be essential to our understanding of the relation identity. “We ‘know’ that the Other is within us
and affects how we evolve as well as the bulk of our conceptions and the development of sensibility” (Glissant 27). Through the rhizomic network, we are able to note how we are influenced by others. This statement responds to Spivak’s argument. Planetarity teaches us to reconsider the relation between human beings by thinking people are co-existing on the same planet. All of us are interdependent and mutually influenced.
For this reason, we can claim that others may play an important part in constituting our identity. Besides, the knowledge of others, as Glissant or Spivak suggests, should not be discussed from a political or national perspective. Planetarity pursues the understanding of others through their languages, and Spivak argues we free ourselves from thinking of the cartography-based division of people. In doing so, we are able to form a new collectiveness and relation among human beings. Similarly, relation identity argues against the “compact national entity” (Glissant 18) of root identity. It emphasizes that the relation with others is boundless, without limits. Glissant even accentuates uprooting may be similar to the spirit of errantry and exile, which “are experienced as a search for others” (18). In the journey, it is not difficult to find out the diversity of others, and in this light, we can look at our relation with others through a broadened lens. Deconstructing the political entity and re-examining the relationship with others are the main proposal of Glissant and Spivak, and this essential stand may well serve to look at the issue of the second-generation immigrants’ identity.
Lahiri’s works, for example, aim at depicting the second generation immigrants’
struggle against multiple cultural conflicts and their plight of having the hybrid identity. The second generation’s identity changes from “root identity,” an identity which the first generation tends to stick to, to “relation identity,” which sees identity as a system of relations and an aptitude for “giving-on-and-with” (Glissant 142). The root identity is hard to maintain for immigrants (especially for the second generation), the reason lies in “usually an outcast in the place he [the second generation] has newly set
anchor, he is forced into impossible attempts to reconcile his former and present belonging” (Glissant 143). In addition, the root identity leads to a generalization of universal value. It denies individual will and any other possibilities constituting one’s identity. Due to the complex background of trans-nations and displacement, to locate diasporic identity in the fixed history and territory, or a big totalitarian root, is not tenable. Therefore, relation identity is a form that challenges the generalized
universality and the hegemony of globalization by shedding lights on the importance of interdependency among human beings. Glissant argues the ecological vision of relation is one of the instances to solve the problem of the generalizing tendency of globalization. For example, Jeffery J. Santa Ana maintains that diasporic identity is easily commercialized and assimilated into American identity, thus losing its individuality and resulting in regionalism. It often falls into the pitfall of the totalitarian root, persisting in regionalism and territory. On the contrary, relation identity tries to show the connectedness of human beings since we all live on the same planet. Hence, we are able to discover the others’ existence and we are indeed related to them. Similarly, in Spivak’s view, planetarity advocates a type of inclusiveness and comprehensive collectivity which differs from capitalist uniformity. It pursues all diversity and stresses siblinghood and expects that all people can live together without hierarchy. The second-generation diaspora people tend to rid the limits of root and the restraints of territory. Instead, what really matters is how they interact with the world and widen their identity connection. Therefore, I believe by underlining the
importance of relation, it can offer some alternative to some problems about diasporic identity and globalization.
But how do we form a relation with others and further understand others?
Considering the nature of relation identity and the new collectiveness Spivak
maintains, I think the emotion of love plays an important role in binding human beings
together because it emphasizes resemblance, which leads to identification. I intend to borrow from the following works to support my arguments. Sara Ahmed’s works, including “In the Name of Love” and “The Skin of the Community: Affect and Boundary Formation,” are essential to my thesis, for they provide a theoretical base;
that is, we see love as a power of building siblinghood and relationship. Furthermore, to discuss affect and emotions of Asian Americans, I think Santa Ana’s essay
“Affect-Identity: The Emotions of Assimilation, Multiraciality, and Asian American Subjectivity” offers ample theories and examples, and it probes into the issue of how emotions affect immigrants’ attitude toward identities. Santa Ana draws on emotions to deal with Asian American identity from the perspective of commercialized emotions and schizophrenic feelings in the era of globalization, which is helpful in analyzing Lahiri’s works.
Incorporating these theoretical works, I attempt to explore how the emotion of love works to enable the building up of the relation between people in the following sections. In spite of the fact that love is my major concern, in the context of relation identity and planetarity I will not focus on the analysis of the types of love, such as racial love, familial love, erotic love, and so on. Neither do I try to plot the relation between these types of love. Rather, my main focus is how the pull of love towards others, for the characteristic of love plays an essential role in drawing people together.
In addition, I also question how others could become an object of love. Discussing from a boarder perspective, I intend to argue that the emotion of love can be transferred into a collectivity and help create an ideal. In my thesis, this ideal, I maintain, is aptly planetarity. Placing planetarity within the context of my above argument, I hope to underline how love and relation are essential to the formation of one’s identity and an ideal community.
From my point of view, the emotion of love could bind people together, and it
happens when the subject identifies with the object. In one chapter of The Cultural
Politics of Emotion entitled “In the Name of Love,” Sara Ahmed directly points out
that “love, after all, has often been theorised as a sticky emotion that sticks people together” (125). According to Ahmed’s definition, the pull of love towards others relates to the identification with them: “it is through forms of identification that align this subject with this other, that the character of the loved is produced as ‘likeness’ in the first place” (Ahmed, “The Skin” 108). Ahmed traces Freud’s example in analyzing how a little boy forms an ideal image from his father, and she believes identification is the earliest emotional tie with others. “A little boy will exhibit a special interest in his father; he would like to grow like him and be like him, and take his place everywhere”
(Freud, Group Psychology 60). The father is the ideal ego for the boy, and he serves as the image the boy wants to be. In the process of identifying with his father, the little boy has to imitate him and tries to be like him. Observing this case, Ahmed maintains identification is an emotional tie, and it is a “towardness” to others. She writes,
“Identification is a form of love; it is an active kind of loving, which moves or pulls the subject towards another” (“In the Name” 126). This act of loving is grounded on the sameness and likeness; therefore, we can claim: “I love or hate them because they are like me, or not like me” (Ahmed, “The Skin” 108). The quest for sameness in others may confirm the connection between others and me. It is the sameness and resemblance with others that form the bond and thus create the sense of identity, and it is this characteristic that makes the work of love possible.
In this light, I do believe that love not only can bind two people together but also can serve as the binding force among all human beings. Love helps us to find out the connection with others through tracing sameness, and thus it helps to imagine “the face of community made up of other ‘me’s” (Ahmed, “The Skin” 107). More precisely, love is a universal human emotion that pulls all people together, which enables us to
see what we have in common and further to imagine an ideal community. The ideal community will be formed “through their shared orientation toward an object”
(Ahmed, “In the Name” 130). Incorporating Freud’s theory into her own, Ahmed discusses how love works to connect people in the domain of family, nation, and culture respectively. By showing love, people are able to be with each other, and toward to the ideal object such as family or nation. Therefore, Freud claims that “love is the center of everything” (Freud, Civilization and Its Discontent 29). Love is essential, for it enacts as an affective bond which is crucial for the framing of subjectivity, sociality, and even civilization.
To be brief, love helps to form a community. In this thesis, I claim, planetarity is an ideal community and the object of love. To form this utopian community, we have to build the sameness and the collectiveness, which has to do with Spivak’s discussion of the uncanny. From Spivak’s point of view, the uncanny feeling which marks
“Other-in-the-Self” denotes not only the unhomely part but also the familiarity
between human beings, which is the true meaning of planetarity. As I discussed before, I claim that the unfamiliar part is the difference between each other, such as the
appearance, cultures, languages, and so on, while the similarity between human beings is the fact that we are the same species living on the planet, on loan. Having emphasized these attributes, Spivak goes further to highlight the fact that people are related. Extending her ideas to a broader scope, I argue, love binds people together because it enables people to see similarities among them, and it anticipates a
possibility of forging the longing for the collectivity among human beings. Through love, we are able to see the resemblance in others, and try to relate to them as well as embrace their difference. This kind of uncanny feeling, recognizing their difference while discovering love as the shared emotion of us, helps us conceive human beings are related and influenced by each other. In this way, I maintain that if we are aware of
our need for aligning ourselves with others, and everyone thinks so, the emotion of love will truly help map an ideal community. Thus, love becomes the shared feature required to keep people on the planet together. In other words, besides being the same species on the planet, the emotion of love is, I argue, the other similarity owned by all of the human beings. The community of the planet is formed by people’s mutual toward-ness grounded on love, and it will be achieved if people move toward it and keep it in mind. Ahmed maintains, because of the emotion of love, everyone is allowed to enter the ideal community: “by displaying ‘my love,’ I show that I am
‘with’ you. It is ‘love,’ rather history, culture or ethnicity that binds the [planet]
together” (“In the Name” 135). Roland Barthes’s line echoes Ahmed’s idea: “It is love the subject loves, not the object” (A Lover’s Discourse 31). In this sense, love is the unique factor which binds people together and makes people walk toward the planet.
As long as people bear planetarity in mind, they know it is essential to identify with others, and take them as one part of me, which is exactly what planetarity means and what love functions for. Jodi Dean’s lines also suggest love is an affect of solidarity with others: “I present reflective solidarity as that openness to difference which lets our disagreements provide the basis for connection…. [it is] the kind of solidarity that grows out of intimate relationships of love and affection” (17). Dean’s statement, for Spivak, is an appropriate way to think of planetarity as the new collectiveness and as the imperative for human beings to love each other in order to evoke the sense of planetarity. Furthermore, his notion of openness to alterity and difference may remind us of others again. The others should be any-body, without limits or conditions. It also suggests that based on sameness and an unconditional love, any-body can become one part of the community of lovers and the loved. In the name of love, we might step closer toward the goal of planetarity; besides, in the act of love, we learn that we human beings are closely correlated to one another.
Corresponding to relation identity, love stresses our bond with others, especially in the context of planetarity. We know our identity is built on the adding-on system. In the following chapter, I will focus on the argument that identity (especially the
second-generation diasporic identity) is not decided by ethnicity or history only;
rather, it is correlated to others on the planet, in which love plays a critical role. By incorporating Lahiri’s works into my theoretical frame, I hope to underscore the arguments elaborated in this chapter.