Second, the emphasis, in the Idol shows and their brethren, on the disappointment and frustrations of the rejected contestants, mirrors quite precisely the emphasis on feelings of injury and exclusion which underlie many forms of contemporary identity politics. As Wendy Brown argues in States of Injury,
Politicized identity emerges and obtains it unifying coherence through the politicization of exclusion from an ostensible universal, as a protest against exclusion: a protest premised on the fiction of an inclusive/universal community, a protest that thus reinstalls the humanist ideal — and a specific white, middle-class, masculinist expression of this ideal — insofar as it premised itself upon exclusion from it.One of Brown’s central arguments in Injury involves a critique of the way in which minority groups’ struggles to regain certain rights can have the effect of ultimately constraining the limits of the identities which those groups are trying to affirm (as well as sanctioning the role of the law in adjudicating those rights).
More specifically, Brown argues that what we find at work here is a process of Nietzschean ressentiment, or a morality based on a codification of imaginary revenge which substitutes for direct resistance to an oppressive power:
Developing a righteous critique of power from the perspective of the injured, it [a politics of ressentiment] delimits a specific site of blame for suffering by constituting sovereign subjects and events as responsible for the “injury” of social subordination. It fixes the identities of injured and the injuring as social positions, and codifies as well the meanings of their action as against all possibilities of indeterminacy, ambiguity, and struggle for resignification or repositioning.Rather than being overcome, therefore, the injuries which these subordinated groups are protesting instead may come to define those groups themselves (which is part of the reason, for instance, why many women attempt to distance themselves from the narrow political goals and normative identities implicit in many feminist movements).
However, Brown’s reliance on a theory of ressentiment to make this critique introduces a potential paradox, insofar as any theory of ressentiment, as Fredric Jameson reminds us in Political Unconscious, is necessarily recursive:
What is most striking about the theory of ressentiment is its unavoidably autoreferential structure. . . . [The] theory of ressentiment, wherever it appears, will always itself be the expression and the production of ressentiment.That is to say, insofar as ressentiment describes a morality grounded on imaginary revenge against a superior force, a theory of ressentiment can be seen as precisely an example of such theoretical morality, wherein the “superior force” is none other than an earlier ressentiment-based morality which has subsequently become hegemonic and oppressive (like Christianity, for instance).
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