Someone thanked me the other day for posting on the Quebec situation. I said "there's no need for thanks, as we are all in this together, for Louisiana is set to decimate its universities via another round of budget cuts. Year after year, it's the same: http://theadvocate.com/news/2893882-123/college-leaders-blast-cuts. And of course it's completely artificial as in 2007 the Republicans pushed through huge tax cuts on the wealthy, which creates the revenue shortfall which is the pretext then for the expense cuts. The media let them off the hook by pretending there's a "budget crisis" when it's only a self-inflicted revenue shortfall. AFAICT, it's the same in Quebec, right?"
Now insofar as this is an Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science blog, here's a philosophical question: what's going on with the constitution of what I'm going to call here "serial identity," as in the title of the post? It's not quite "just" a relay of support, as in this great photo, but something more, or at least different.
It's not the assertion of collective identity either, as in this wonderful clip "We are Wisconsin":
It's also not quite "I'm Spartacus," either, which is the adoption of a single identity, a condensation of the collective, if you will.
What I'm after is the constitution of identity that links singular situations to an intense site, but with the knowledge that this site has been different in the past and will be different in the future. Because "on est tous québecois" echoes the Le Monde headline after 9/11: "nous sommmes tous américains," which echoes Kennedy's "Ich bin ein Berliner" (not a lingustic gaffe, by the way) and so on.
So "we are all ...." is not just serial in a spatial sense (we here in Louisiana are connecting to our brothers and sisters in Québec), but in a temporal sense as well (yesterday we were all Wisconsinites, tomorrow we will all be ....). And in this series it's precisely the openness of the ellipses which counts, which prevents the closure of the series.
I'd be grateful for help in pursuing this idea. I think there's a connection with a Simondonian / Balibarian sense of "transindividuality" at work here: identity is never complete, but is always as process of individuation from a metastable and pre-individual social field. (Jason Read, as always, is excellent in analyzing this concept.) So "we are all ..." is possible because our identity is never fixed once and for all, but is constituted -- and becomes richer -- the more we construct these links of serial identity.
That's where I'm at with this idea now, but comments would be very much appreciated.
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