Transindividuality and Difference

When using the concept of intersectionality the mainstream feminist discourse has often been accused of “misreadings, misuse and trespass.”¹ However, when Jennifer C. Nash was asked why she titled her book Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality she insisted that the “after” in the title had nothing to do with any calls for abandoning intersectionality and its promise.² She claims that the use of the word “after” rather stemmed from the need to reimagine the relationship between intersectionality and Black feminist discourse. She furthermore argues against the usual criticism that addresses the misappropriation of the concept, and not because there was anything wrong with the concept itself, at first place.³ Given the harsh criticism of the “appropriation” of intersectionality from the position of privilege by “white feminists” without the acknowledgment of its provenience in Black feminism and also the newly emerging issues when intersectionality is deliberated in the frame of the neoliberal academic world,⁴ it is not surprising that such debates were dubbed “intersectionality wars.”
The ongoing debates regarding intersectionality were recently picked up by Kimberlé Crenshaw, who initially coined the term intersectionality in the theoretical context thirty years ago.⁵ Crenshaw addressed the “conflicts over the narrative” on “what the story is” and “who gets to tell it.”⁶ In the same speech Crenshaw objects to the debates that instead of focusing on the problems intersectionality had pointed out, they focused on criticizing the concept itself: “No, it was intersectionality itself that was being interrogated and intercepted, asked to justify itself as an interloper in the gated community of established ideas.”⁷
Regardless of the ongoing criticism of the widely spread use of the term intersectionality in mainstream feminist texts, Nash voiced her criticism against the “territorial” defensive guard of intersectionality in terms of protection of the historic legacy of Black feminist discourse. She objects to the treatment of “white feminism” as the villain for its alleged misappropriation because in her view this prevents both “Black” and “White” feminism from having rich discussions about the troubled intersections between race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexuality, class and other pre-fixed categories of identity and subjectivity.⁸
Although it doesn’t refer directly to the theoretical legacy of Black feminism and intersectionality Jonathan Horowitz’ two-channel video sculpture The Soul of Tammi Terrell (2001) is one of the most memorable art works that could exemplify the issues of intersectionality. The work consists of the 1960s footage of the pop stars Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell singing the song “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” that is juxtaposed with a TV screen presenting two scenes from the movie Stepmom (1998). In the two scenes edited together the main characters, the mum dying of cancer (played by Susan Sarandon) and alternatively the stepmom (played by Julia Roberts), lip-synch the same song with their two children (son and daughter). During the first excerpt the son and the mother refer to each other as “Tammi” and “Marvin.”
The original press release offered a very short description of the work which referred to the coincidental fact that Tammi Terrell died of cancer in her real life (at the age of 24),⁹ so it directs the audience toward reading the work in the context of the debates about the intersection between life and art, reality and fiction. However, the press release didn’t offer any biographical information or reference to the intersections between race, gender, sexuality, and age. For example there was no overt political mention of the fact that all main film characters and actors of Stepmom are White, nor were there any details about the troubled life of the young Black singer Terrell who suffered sexual abuse since early age (first at the age of 11 by three unknown boys, and later by her famous male colleagues – Black singers such as James Brown). However, Horowitz’s oeuvre is known for his subtle and indirect political commentaries. Thus, the question of relevance of the eventual new interpretation of an artwork that was not originally inscribed by its author is not so relevant here, although it does come to mind. Yet it is very difficult to answer whether the potentiality of rereading and reinterpretation should be held as a richness of this art work or as a limitation since the intersection of race, gender, sexuality, illness, and class (e.g. the movie’s family’s middle class) can be read in two opposite ways: as completely missing, or as giving just an indirect hint.

Transindividuality: Asymptotic and Fluid Identities
Starting from the assumption that the concept of intersectionality itself doesn’t prevent, but rather invites ever more complex discussions regarding the ways in which identity and subjectivity overlap, crisscross, or implicate each other, in this text I want to introduce yet another concept that might help shed more light on the importance of the relation between identity, subjectivity, and intersectionality: the concept of transindividuality.
In his book The Politics of Transindividuality, Jason Read offers a very extensive elaboration of the historic philosophical provenience of the term that according to him is rooted in Spinoza’s philosophy.¹⁰ He also addresses the more recent Marxist socio-political backdrop for understanding the otherwise hermetic concept coined by the French philosopher Gilbert Simondon, but in his conversation with Jeremy Gilbert, Read proposes an abridged and clearer explanation of the concept when he suggests that “transindividuality is a way of addressing the mutual constitution of the individual and the collective. That is, rather than see individuality and collectivity as a kind of zero sum game, in which individuality is developed through a refutation of collectivity and collectivity through a suppression of individuality, it is necessary to understand the way in which collectivity is nothing other than a particular way of being individuated and individuality is a particular articulation of collective habits and ways of being.”¹¹
The concept of identity and the ability to define and understand the points of intersection between different identities and their relation with collectivity is a stumbling stone among philosophers, and social and political scientists due to their different understanding of the status of the human subject and the conscious experience. The question whether one is able to transcend and understand the other’s identity is a question that resonates with the rhetorical question “what is it like to be a bat” that Thomas Nagel asked long ago in his renowned eponymous text. ¹² Although Nagel was specifically interested in the radical difference of the conscious experience between humans and animals and his example was a bat this question was also a powerful and viable metaphor for the impossibility to understand any other than oneself, human or animal, and his question is even more relevant today.
If one knows everything physical about certain beings this still doesn’t mean that one can be certain that they are conscious (in the sense that we consider ourselves a conscious species). In his book The Conscious Mind, David J. Chalmers states that “from the physical facts about a bat we can ascertain all facts about a bat except the facts about the conscious experience. Knowing all the physical facts we still do not know what it is like to be a bat.”¹³ Agreeing with this does still not imply that we should give up on trying to get closer to those unfamiliar “others” and quit the attempt to explore the question “what it is like to be” other than ourselves.
Given all accessible information, the problem of our unique experience (which also forms the basis of the artistic imagination) remains unsolved. It can obviously help us to try to understand “what it would be like for us to behave as a bat behaves”, but it will not help us to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat.¹⁴
According to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, there is no method that permits us to extrapolate completely from our own condition to the inner life of another creature since one is determined by one’s own bodily structure and innate capacity, which sets limits to the experience.¹⁵ Phenomenology has never engaged in any attempts to overcome such limitations with empathy, solidarity, or other agencies that are as human as are of animals. The question of transferring data pertaining to one's inner experiences is closely related to the question of evidence for the existence of other minds.
The questions “what kinds of minds are there” and “how do we know” emerge from the fact that each of us knows only one mind from the inside and no two of us know the same mind from the inside.¹⁶ The substantial disagreements among phenomenology and other philosophical theories about the existence of other minds comes from the priority given by phenomenologists to the impossibility to confirm the coincidence of one's inner with one's outwardly observable capabilities.¹⁷ The concept of the subjective and non-transferable character of experience is evident and is an inescapable obstacle to any complete understanding of and communication with each other, also due to the inability to represent totally one’s own experience to others.
Selma Selman’s work You Have No Idea (2016) doesn’t provide an ultimate answer to the question of how to approach and understand the different identity and experience, e.g. attached to her as a Romani woman artist. The artist on the contrary exhausts herself and her voice by shouting the statement “You Have No Idea” as loudly as she can in a kind of warning that the answer is not easy.¹⁸ She ponders the urgency to address the complex historic, socio-political, and cultural background, which determines Roma as the more general and common denominator for different traditions, communities, and subgroups.
What does it mean to belong to the Roma community and to be called by this name while being a woman artist, and what really belongs to Roma and to the mere name of the Roma in historic, cultural and socio-political terms, takes a lot of challenging the misunderstandings, stereotypes and controversies. The political relevance of the meaning of the umbrella term “Roma” (that stands for Sinti, Kale, Manushes, Gitans/Gitanos, and other Roma) supplements and even surpasses its linguistic and cultural meaning. The right to determine and decide the position towards the name Roma from which Roma could utter their statements of belonging, or non-Roma could act as agents of empowering and solidarity with Roma, intersect with sexist stereotypes regarding Roma women as exotic, or Roma preference towards nomadic life.
Selman’s performance and video could be interpreted in relation to the debates of intersectionality between different socio-political layers. It also questions the issues of the impossibility of communication, understanding and isolationism. I propose, though, to paraphrase the question and ask several other questions. For example: is it really so difficult, and why this would be an issue at all, to understand another kind of being when the identity of any of us is a complex quality difficult to define and understand from the outside as it is from the inside? Are Roma, indigenous people and other people of color, gays, or transsexual really so different that we cannot grasp the differences between “us” and “them”? Isn’t Selma Selman’s question an invitation to yet another essentialization because one is afraid of any possibility of intersection on any level? And if this is true, what made this communication and mutual understanding so difficult in historic and cultural terms? Is this really not the question that addresses the radical difference or impossibility of communication with a certain hierarchy or violence involved on basic human (and not cultural) level?
As in Gayatri C. Spivak’s answer to the similar cultural question from the end of her essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” it’s all about the listening to the specific voice while aiming towards rapprochement of another human being although the complete mutual understanding even within the same ethnic, cultural, gender, sexual, class, is doomed to failure from the outset. Every human mind can be culturally redesigned (think of neuroplasticity) so that our ability and desire to be engaged in “presenting ourselves to others, and ourselves”¹⁹ and “representing ourselves in language and gesture, external and internal” make us different from the others.²⁰
Although Nagel and Chalmers warned us that all relevant physical facts are not enough to provide us with proficient answers to the question “what is it like to be” different, this does not mean that we should not listen, empathize, and co-exist.²¹ Proximity and empathy are the necessary aporetic and asymptotic relations to strive for, even when one is conscious of the approximate impossibility. Ultimately this should be something to take from Selman’s work although she seems to deny that this is happening, at least for now.
This brings us to the work Ready To Rumble?! (2014) that is a collaboration between the two women artists Jamika Ajalon and Marion Porten. The work that consists of live-talk-performances, posters, photography and video directly addresses the issue of intersectionality between gender, race, and sexuality in the arts. According to the artists’ statement the two women started to work together in 2013 in the context of “Black and White feminism, the agency of Women Of Colour, intersectionality* and the (in)visibility of racist structures among feminist movements in history and present time.” During their real-life conversations they investigated the issue of Critical Whiteness and Queer women (Porten is white, Ajalon is a woman of color, but they both self-identify as queer).²²
The artists quote Crenshaw’s definition of intersectionality as “a concept often used in critical theories to describe the ways in which oppressive institutions (racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, xenophobia, classism, etc.) are interconnected and cannot be examined separately from one another” on their websites. During one of the discussions that unraveled around Harriet Tubman (the icon of the “Underground Railroad” who freed first herself, and other enslaved people in the US before the Civil War), Ajalon and Porten decided to restage the famous poster of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol in boxing gloves. This became the central element of their project in parallel to their discussions regarding feminism, queerness, and art. The process of the staging of the poster motivated further discussions regarding the issues with which the women artists were often confronted: empowerment vs. violence, acts of solidarity and representations of race by juxtaposing Black and White women's bodies. In this sense the artists also play formally: e.g. with the issue of politics of light-setting in relation to skin color in films (for example in terms of low/high contrast).

Name, Identity, Transindividuality
One of the most obvious questions to be asked in regard to intersectionality is how identity relates to name, or more precisely: Who has control over the naming and renaming, or how can power be used to reproduce and distribute certain dominant cultural and moral principles? The internalization of derogative names as bearers of the regimes of representation, identification, self-essentialization and self-racialization create a threatening vicious cycle, from which one most urgently needs to seek a way out. Unlike the assumed equation between name and identity that is a commonplace in nationalist discourses in the view of Gilles Deleuze, the first moment of giving/receiving a name is in itself “the highest point of depersonalization” because it is then that we acquire “the most intense discernibility in the instantaneous apprehension of the multiplicities” belonging to us.²³ Deleuze’s warning could lead us to some answers through his understanding of our lives as the sum of little “becomings” that inform and shape our identities, but that ultimately create idiosyncrasies that no longer fit within these identities.
According to Gilbert Simondon, the process of individuation is never concluded, since the multiplicity of the pre-individual can never be fully translated into a singularity; whereas the subject is a continuous interweaving of pre-individual elements and individuated characteristics.²⁴ The only way to defeat imposed identities that oppress us is to free our sub-individualities and combine them with others to form a multitude of possible and potential multiplicities. Multiplicities thus formed will always be “greater” than the society of control, in that each of us is greater than any individual or collective label or name that might be assigned to us (“man,” “woman,” “student,” “lesbian,” “White,” “Black,” “Roma”), because we are, each of us, more than the names we are given.
The project Lexicon of Tanjas Ostojić is the most recent artistic research project by Tanja Ostojić that draws a complex psycho-geographical map of relations between proper name, ethnic identity, subjectivity, belonging, and transindividuality. The project consisted of a long-term quest for other women also bearing the name Tanja Ostojić and the artist’s communication and encounters with the women whom she located in Bosnia, Slovenia, Serbia, Montenegro, Germany, etc. The informal collective of 33 members named Tanja Ostojić from different countries formed a Facebook group; a handmade drawing of a map that traced the cross-border movements of Tanja’s name-sisters; and several public events of discussions, embroidery and pottery workshops took place in the frame of the project.²⁵
The artist’s initial aim was to look at the various phenomena affecting women originating from ex-Yugoslav republics, including migration, displacement, transition and labor after the dissolution of Yugoslavia. Through the project Lexicon of Tanjas Ostojić the artist intentionally created a community that functions as a kind of arbitrary framework for various relations established very loosely for the duration of this project – and potentially beyond, in a similarly contingent way to which they were initially established, and beyond any controllable societal conditions and institutions.
Taking into account the intersections of ethnic, cultural, religious, gender, and sexual differences, the artistic research into the complex inner biographical and historical layers of the accidental “homonymy” enabled Tanja Ostojić to draw a transindividual and psycho-geographic grid which traces the places of origin, years of birth, professions, ethnicities and various itineraries and movements of the women she contacted, all named Tanja Ostojić. Their name, their belonging to the now non-existing country Yugoslavia, and therefore the presupposed regional identity were just contingent arbitrary starting points. The initial similar conditions inevitably affected the different destinies of the women bearing the same name and intersected as a kind of grid of the divergent life paths of the 33 women who nevertheless have completely different experiences.
The utopian belief in complete belonging intersects with the potential of not belonging.²⁶ Not belonging is especially implied in the notion of regional belonging, where the national is supposed to meet the cosmopolitan halfway. While the phantasm of belonging to a nation, and of belonging in general, is based on a positive and utopian hope, the very actuality of belonging, for example belonging to a region, is defined by the potential of belonging without belonging, or belonging without having something in common.²⁷
The EU is neither a nation nor a region, but belonging to it functions as a kind of supra-belonging. Within such a political and cultural context, the notions of ethnic and regional identity intersect in unpredictable ways. Of all the emphatic expectations and phantasms emerging among different peoples and nations in the new Europe, the very desire and projected hope to belong to the EU has become the most urgent. The regional identity appears to be a kind of aporia, a specific form of disjunctive identity that, as a certain political compromise, a kind of “dangerous supplement”, a “class of classes”, overarches belonging to a nation with belonging to a European Union. The hierarchized intersection between minoritarian and majoritarian ethnic identities within one state border is also a relevant agency that resonates with the issue of dominance of one race.
The EU comprises of different nations and identities that intersect because there is no single pure nation-state. For example, in 2019, after the twenty-year long dispute with Greece known as the name-issue, the Former Yugoslav Republic Macedonia even changed its name because of the unconfirmed promise of the country’s admission in EU. Hierarchized intersections can be addressed critically through culture and art that cherish transindividuality rather than fixed identities that intersect through inevitably controlled and politicized agendas, which is what the far-right, right-wing, ultranationalists, and neoliberals have in common. Therefore, intersectionality is problematic only in terms of who has the control over the back-and-forth traffic at the points of intersections.