What if it's ALL constructed?

As I have most enjoyed looking at our two "Posts" this semester (Postmodernism and Post-Structuralism) I was fascinated by the following quote from page 139 of Barry's "Lesbian/gay criticism"chapter: "all identities, including gender identities, are 'a kind of impersonation and approximation...a kind of imitation for which there is no original.' As the text goes on to point out, if this "anti-essentialist" line is taken to its logical conclusion, "identity [is seen] as a a series of masks, roles, and potentialities, a kind of amalgam of everything which is provisional, contingent, and improvisatory" (140). If that is the case, than these identity based theories of culture and literature seem to be baseless...of course if Postmodernism and Poststructuralism are right, everything is meaningless, as there is not and cannot be a center, and even the idea of meaning as we have traditionally understood it is impossible because nothing is fixed.

So whither then the identity based politics and theoretical approaches we've encountered so very many times throughout our varied associations with literature in schools of whatever level? If this is true they would seem an inadequate way of facing the world, much less trying to understand it. An interesting point is made by Barry, which I am embarrassed to say I hadn't thought of, because it seems so obvious after the fact (that's how smart people work though, right? They challenge us by making new and complex ideas seem obvious and straight forward...if only I could do that....), that the opposite of identity politics is class politics. Duh! The opposite of the individual is the group, the opposite of individualism is collectivism, and the opposite of identity politics is group or class politics.

However, by the nature of the argument - one pulling on poststructuralist and postmodernist thought to demonstrate the failure of dualities - the idea of class politics as a replacement must also be questioned. Interesting. If we don't have identity or class politics (because the failure of one half of the duality must mean the failure of both if this self/other dichotomy is interdependent as Barry indicates [139]) what are left with? Would we stop beating each other over the head with meaningless labels and try to accomplish something? Heaven forbid.

The great result of the twentieth century's pursuit of theoretical knowledge is to prove over and over again that such knowledge is impossible, because, according to our greatest modern thinkers, we have no comfortable, accepted epistemological basis from which to know or understand anything, nor can we. Everything, including sexuality etc., is in post-structuralist freeplay, nothing is real: "everything is a model or an image, all is surface without depth; this is the hyperreal" (Barry 86). If followed to its logical extreme, modern thought cuts us all off from each other, denies our existence (If there is no individuality, no free-will, however limited, we don't exist at all, we are merely manifestations of outside forces. And, if nothing is real, and then what is doing the constructing of these identities that we don't actually have?), and leaves us with no possibility for proving otherwise, because modern thought invalidates all means of knowing. Reducing any claim to knowledge to an act of faith that must first arbitrarily choose its own givens and overcome postmodern/poststructuralist doubt over the very existence of reality itself.