Exclusionary worldview
Being recognized by others is inseparable from all human beings. Since its beginnings, philosophy has valued self-awareness, the search for true knowledge about oneself. Only through the recognition of others can men constitute themselves as persons. In its origins, “persona” meant “mask”, and through it, the individual acquired a role and a social identity. The struggle for the mask was the attempt at recognition.
Since the English colonial administration incorporated the fingerprint classification system, the definition of a person has changed. Identity shifted from being synonymous with “person”, a socially recognized subject, to a subject recognized by their biological data. In 1880, Bertillon discovered the anthropometric-photographic system of personal identification, soon used by all police forces and civil registries worldwide. With the creation of modern states, a person became identified by nationality.
Deportees in concentration camps under the Nazi regime were not recognized by their names or nationalities but by a number engraved on their arms. Today, in contemporary societies, a person is recognized by their DNA. In Europe, an international DNA registry of all its citizens is being prepared, conceived before the Covid-19 pandemic. As Giorgio Agamben rightly points out, the person is reduced to their “biometric” data, and identity is no longer synonymous with personhood. Even more, it is defined without the person.
The struggle of human beings to gain a space of social recognition has always existed. In times of great change, continuous crises, political instability, and a growing mass of refugees, human beings lose all their identification references: their country, their friends, their family, their language, their role in the society that saw them grow up. In the attempt to create new spaces of recognition in the societies refugees or immigrants arrive in, they often encounter the phenomenon of social exclusion. A constant feeling of humiliation invades them, and they become “the other,” seen by the dominant classes as inferior and despicable, and at best, they elicit compassion and pity.
For a human being to emerge and happen as themselves, they need to begin their process of constitution from a position, from a place. This is why I approach people with diverse histories who have lived long in communities that are not their original ones but have made them their own, and yet they continue to be treated as the other. In recent years, I have also met people belonging to various sexual identities who, despite the good intentions of governments and states, continue to suffer from permanent exclusion.
It is easy for me to recognize “the other” because I am one of them. It doesn’t matter where I have lived: in the suburbs of Stockholm, in the Chinese quarter in Barcelona, lost in villages in the Catalan countryside, in the old town of Panama City, or in the port district of Valparaíso. In the end, the question is always the same: where are you from? A question that has become part of my own structure, of my own being, and that inevitably follows me like an unforgiving shadow.
