Why has the notion of identity become so ubiquitous and central in sociocultural discourse in the last decade or two? What are its theoretical functions? I believe that the primary value of this notion for most sociocultural discourses is its function of mediating between the microsocial events in which human agency is foregrounded and the macrosocial structures in which aggregate relations and longer-timescale processes are most significant. Identity mediates between:
positionality in the social-structural system of social category relations based on power, exchange, distribution of resources, distribution of access, expectations, beliefs, values, opportunities, participation frequencies in various activity types, etc.
and
the habitus of embodied dispositions to actions of particular meaningful kinds of individuals who have lived over some extended period of time in the social-structural positions as above and experienced differentially and acted/performed differentially the repertory of options for meaning and action provided by the internally diverse culture/community (either on grounds of division of labor, classificatory sub-division, or embodied history of cross-group encounters, immigrations, conquests, etc.).
Identity gives us a way to link the phenomenological domain of lived, moment-by-moment experience and the semiotic domain of enduring cultural and social systems of beliefs, values, and meaning-making practices.
What the specific notion of identity adds to a basic sociological or cultural framework is the sense of Agency, that we construct our own identities out of the options afforded to us by our general positionality and our particular trajectory of experiences, encounters, options for action, etc.
Recent work by Dorothy Holland and her collaborators (1998) on identity-in-practice also wrestles with the contradictions between semiotic-analytic characterizations of identity and more phenomenological-experiential ones and provides empirical grounding for further discussions. Her dominant concern is to show how the longer-term, larger-scale social institutions of a culture can provide resources, material and symbolic, interactional and situational which identity-in-practice can use to re-construct both itself and, ultimately, these same social and cultural systems.
I will propose below a number of ways in which this can happen, including the role of anomalous and transgressive identities, the contradictions between lived experience and cultural norms, and the options opened to us for creating new identities and social relations by conflicts among social institutions and by the incipient reorganization of societies into larger global systems in which the dependence of individuals on particular institutions and organizations is greatly diminished.
Who benefits and who loses from the more widespread adoption of the concept of Identity and its associated discourses and discourse functions?
Superficially, within the academic discourse community, the concept of identity provides a way for scholars who use it to by-pass some of the persistent political conflict between more individualistic psychological paradigms and more socio-cultural ones. This largely benefits the socioculturalists.
More broadly in the wider community, discourses of identity highlight the differential opportunities and the legitimate anger of those who are positioned in subordinate statuses according to an “identity politics” which disguises itself as category-blind in order to perpetuate the status quo. Discourses of identity call attention to diversity of identities and so to the pressures to conform to socially approved identities, the benefits of doing so, the costs of not doing so, and who determines which identities are approved and who provides the benefits and exacts the costs and how.
Nevertheless it is also true that discourses of identity often tend to re-inscribe more fundamental cultural assumptions which in turn promote a longer-term status quo.
First, “identities” legitimate the dominant ideology of autonomous individuals as morally responsible for their actions and the life-consequences of their cumulative choices. This favors those who benefit from the dominance of a modern eurocultural bourgeois legitimation of a political-legal-moral economy in which powerful individuals are freed from communitarian responsibilities to pursue their self-interest at the expense of both the community as a whole and its less powerful members.
Second, identity-types (e.g. masculine vs, feminine, straight vs.gay, middle vs. working class, children vs. adults, White vs. Black, etc.), as previously said, tend to reproduce low-dimensional and highly biased oversimplifications of the high-dimensional space of diversity-by-degree of possible patterns of human self-presentation through action. This favors the power of those who benefit from illusory political alliances which group together different coalitions as members of the ‘mainstream’ or ‘majority’ or dominant category in each case, even though it is only this small powerful minority which is always included in all these coalitions. Every such reduction of the cultural model of human diversity results in the creation of one ‘superior’ group categorically contrasted with all other ‘naturally inferior’ groups, whatever the prevailing rhetoric of equality or democracy.
Third, traditional notions of Identity elide the significant role of fear, desire, anger and other powerful feelings in shaping forms of action and reduce identity-performance to a matter of rational conformity or non-conformity to a small set of fixed social identity options. This again benefits a small cultural minority which claims that it has a right to power and privilege because of its superior ‘rationality’, a claim which is undermined by every discourse that identifies the fundamental role of other modes of affect in shaping all human behavior and self-presentation.
Finally, notions of identity tend to emphasize invariance over change, unity over multiplicity, and neglect to examine whether notions of identity apply in the same sense at different timescales of activity or to units of analysis at different extensional or organizational scales. This benefits those who prefer an ideology of the inevitability of the status quo (invariance), sharp contrasts between superior and inferior identities and their associated dispositions for action (i.e. one such identity per individual), and the neglect of perspectives in which all apparent unity and stability is merely the contingent result of process of change at very many different timescales, occuring in and producing meta-stable units of organization at many extensional scales, from those below that of the single organism to those above, thus dis-privileging the unit of the individual moral and economic agent.