Inspecting The Machinery of Identity Politics: A Conversation with Writer and Scholar Laurent Dubreuil

The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum

Society & Culture

4.7 • 855 Ratings

🗓️ 4 October 2020

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We hear about "identity" so often now that the word no longer carries much meaning. By extension, the term "identity politics" has become a culture war cudgel, recklessly deployed by race baiters on the right as well as some activists on the social justice left. But Laurent Dubreuil, a professor of literature and cognitive science at Cornell University, has studied identity in ways that plunge far deeper than standard discussions about tribalism and narcissism. He's interested in what an identity-based worldview-and the technology that feeds it- is actually, physiologically, doing to our brains. In this conversation, Laurent talks with Meghan about how social media has undertaken a collective cognitive reprogramming of human beings and the world at large that could have catastrophic effects. He also explains how part of the danger of Twitter is that it's based on "soliloquy," how academia's preoccupation with identity robs students of their rightful educations, and how the recent controversy surrounding the French-Senegalese film Cuties forebodes a time in which we might have to "say goodbye to the arts." Guest Bio: Laurent Dubreuil is a Professor of Comparative Literature, Romance Studies and Cognitive Science at Cornell University, where he founded the Humanities Lab and heads the French Studies Program. His comparative research explores the powers of literary and artistic thinking at the interface of social thought, the humanities and the sciences. He is the author of more than twelve books and in 2019 he released in French La dictature des identités, an essay on the current state of "identity politics 2.0" in the United States. Laurent's essay Nonconforming: Against the Erosion of Academic Freedom by Identity Politics, appeared in the September 2020 issue of Harper's.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The deep connection between this kind of identity politics and a hatred of the arts,
0:10.0	a hatred of creation, a hatred of anything new.
0:15.0	I mean, it's very deep. It's not a superficial link.
0:19.0	It's not that because of identities,
0:25.6	we, on the basis of the harm that is being done to us,
0:29.1	we are opposing this text or that painting.
0:32.3	That's how it looks like from the outside. But the moment you go into the inspection of the machinery, then you discover that the arts and that creation
0:42.9	in general have to go. They have to go from this viewpoint because they will bring new context,
0:49.2	they will bring complexity, they will give you objects of thought that could divide themselves and you could think of yourself
0:56.1	thinking of something you were not thinking before and even that very division within yourself
1:01.9	is a danger to the affirmation of our lives being based on a series of identities a equals A, B equals B, C equals C.
1:14.3	So there is this deep link against anything that will challenge this very, very limited logic.
1:23.6	Welcome to the latest edition of the unspeakable podcast. I'm your host, Megan Dow. My guest this week is author and scholar Laurent Du Bois.
1:33.0	Laurent is a professor of comparative literature, romance studies, and cognitive science at Cornell University,
1:39.1	and the author of many books of philosophy and literary criticism. He's the founder of Humanities Lab,
1:45.6	an intellectual forum at Cornell that explores ideas as they intersect between the sciences
1:50.7	and the humanities. The September 2020 issue of Harper's Magazine featured an essay of his
1:57.1	entitled Non-Conforming Against the Erosion of Academic Freedom by Identity Politics.
2:03.3	That essay talked about the inherent limitations of viewing the world through the prism of
2:07.7	identity and academia's ever-increasing role in encouraging that viewpoint.
2:12.7	But in fact, Laurent's work in this area plunges far deeper than standard discussions about identity politics.
2:19.6	He's interested in what this sort of worldview and the technology that feeds it is actually
	...

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