Limitations and Expansions of the Notion of Identity
Many of the defects in common uses of the notion of Identity can be remedied, but we need to understand its limitations and to begin to develop a sense of what alternative notions and discourses might be useful successors to the discourses of identity we now use.
Identities across Timescales
We cannot, I think, usefully maintain that identity-in-the-moment, or identity-in-practice is identical with identity-across-events or with identity-across-the-lifespan. The main theoretical motivations for this are two:
Judith Butler’s notion of identity performance (1993) incorporates the notion that the longer-term aspects of identity are maintained and reinscribed in us as we act in the moment in particular ways. They are also, therefore subject to change for the future through our active agentive choice to perform in some ways and not in others. We perform a pre-existing identity, i.e. we continue a previous pattern of response to certain types of situations, to the extent that the actual situation now presents us with the affordances to do so, and the “figured” (Holland 1998) opportunities and expectations to see ourselves as performing some such aspects of our continuing identity. Some situations can be construed as fitting typical cultural scenarios in which we can take on some culturally recognizable identity, both because the scenario seems relevant and because the material affordances to enact our identity are present. The situation may fit the scenario of “being a good father” or “acting tough” both situationally and materially. To play the role of a father it helps to have someone present who can be construed as a son or daughter, or someone present who can observe our action and interpret it as relevant to our status as a “good father”. We have an opportunity to renew our identity as a good father … but therefore also an opportunity not to do so. We may try to perform our part and “fail” in our own eyes or those of others, or we may choose not to perform this part, with potential consequences for how we see ourselves and how others see us in the future.
But the longer term aspects of our identity are not determined by a single performance. They constitute patterns across time, across situations, even across clusters of situation types (e.g. all the types of situations in which acting the “good father” makes sense).
We can perform longer-term identities through how we enact an identity-in-practice, and we can constitute and change longer-term identities in the same way. The longer-term identities inscribed in our habitus (Bourdieu 1997, 1990) constitute dispositions for action in the moment, and are themselves constituted through many actions across many moments. If these dispositions are positional and structural, similar for persons of the same social class background, gender, etc. it is because of the similar life opportunities, access to situation types, expectations of others, etc. that we encounter repeatedly in living the kind of lives typical of our caste, generation, etc. We are more likely to have certain choices in clothes, foods, discourses and not others presented to us or available to us, and to consistently choose within this range of choices, developing a habitus which distinguishes us in our later ‘spontaneous’ choices from those whose life trajectories led them to develop dispositions in a different range of opportunities.
What does it take for momentary actions to add up to a consistent longer-term identity? It takes both the recurrence of the opportunities to enact these identities, e.g. access to situations, material affordances/resources, presence of particular others or types of others, etc. and the will to enact that identity on each such occasion. Bourdieu emphasizes the automatism of our dispositions, especially when events demand responses on shorter-timescales than those on which we can deliberate about how to respond. He emphasizes as well the typicality of our responses, over longer timescales in our lives, and despite the occasional exception. Most of all he emphasizes the similarity and difference of dispositions, not according to individuality, but according to similarity and difference in the typical opportunities and demands of lives lived in different positions in society.
Bourdieu (1987) also makes use of the notion of a life-trajectory in which we may change our social position, and shows that, even so, dispositions are associated with typical such trajectories. The dispositions of the parvenu are not those of ‘old money’. The end of the trajectory may be the same, but the pathway was different, and it is the pathway that shapes the habitus.
What links the longterm to the short is precisely recurrence: of persons with whom we can continue to enact some relationship in which our role is significant to our identity; of objects, including diaries, favorite books and films, familiar furnishings and clothes, through which we can continue to express aspects of our identities; of situation types in which we can recognize familiar scenarios and roles we can perform. Take all these things away and there is still the recurrence of our own bodies across moments, in respect not just of memory and embodied habit and habitus, but also of our physical characteristics: perceptual acuities and saliences, motor skills, physiological needs and dependencies, body hexis and body image. Change all these, over sufficient time, and replace them with other opportunities, demands, and characteristics … and identity itself will mutate. Keep us long enough outside all links to our native culture and engaged with another culture and we will in many respects “go native” or at least diverge from who we were. Take away our children, and our identity as fathers or mothers will eventually fade. Suspend us in a sensory deprivation tank and eventually even core aspects of identity with long histories from infancy may fail to maintain themselves for us.
Meaningful human action is always a site of heterochrony: the intersection of processes and practices which have radically different inherent timescales. In each moment we act in response to the events of the moment before, producing the conditions and affordances of actions by ourselves and others in the moment next-to-come. At the same time, how we act in response to momentary events depends on both relatively automated and relatively volitional processes of identity maintenance (habit, habitus, and habitual conscious preferences) that have been ongoing over much longer periods of our lives and which therefore are also adapted to their typical and recurring conditions on longer timescales. Those recurrent situation types, in turn, depend (in regard to frequency, invariant features across events, etc.) on much larger-scale patterns in the social ecology which make them more likely to happen, and to happen to us, as a function of our (possibly changing) position within that ecology. Which kinds of other persons, with what dispositions, in which sorts of recurrent situations we are likely to experience depends on our place in systems and processes whose coherence is defined and whose stability is determined on much longer timescales and much larger extensional scales in space and quantities of matter, energy, and information involved than the momentary.
Finally, it is important to recognize that there are not simply momentary-agentive and longterm-positional components to the genesis, maintenance, and change of identity. These are merely extremal zones along a continuum, or at least a spectrum of timescales (because relevant timescales may clump in a discrete spectrum rather than spread evenly across time; cf. Holling, Gunderson, & Petersen 2002). Some aspects of our identities may persist for days or weeks, but not longer, as we travel, as we create intense but transient personal relationships, as we “try on” identities in play or game environments (cf. computer role-playing games, e.g. Gee 2003; internet communities, cf. Turkle 1995) and communities in which we participate only on these timescales. Other aspects may develop and be maintained over months and years, or decades and “periods” of our lives, across which we may change occupations, spouses, countries, religions, political commitments, etc.
Fear and Desire in the Construction of Identity
The maintenance and development of identity is always also a material process, however symbolically mediated it may be by the value systems and cultural meaning relations of a “figured world”. Its continuity inheres in the persistence of material bodies, both our own and those of the landscapes and artifacts of our world. But the materiality of the human body makes it dependent and vulnerable: to thirst, starvation, pain, and death. We are dependent on ecosystems and social cooperation (whether directly voluntary or consequential on participation in a social system) for water, food, shelter, protection, and defense. Our desires begin with the needs of the body, our fears begin with the vulnerability of our bodies. And our identities are built in response to these primordial desires and fears, as well as to those additional desires and fears which our cultural worlds elaborate on their foundation.
We are what we fear, we are what we desire. Who are we? Is the basic question of identity … who by natural gifts and weaknesses, who by membership and affiliation, who by social positioning, by financial, social, and cultural capital, who by what we have and what we lack, what we desire and what we fear. Values and ambitions, search and avoidance are clearly grounded in fear and desire. So, one can persuasively argue, I think, are our beliefs about ourselves, others, and the ecological world we are a part of. Belief systems are more collective than individual, they are features of communities (which all have many, not necessarily consistent beliefs and webs of beliefs; cf. Bakhtin’s 1935/1981 heteroglossia). Our own identities-by-belief are positional as well as individual. We find ourselves always somewhat unique in our resources and vulnerabilities relative to particular circumstances. We try to find among the beliefs available in our community some that will serve us in achieving our desires and avoiding the pains we fear. Across time and situations, we come to have persistent fears and recurrent desires, and these as much as anything define our longer-timescale identities.
The role of desire in the construction of identity has been developed by feminist theory (e.g. Butler 1993), but the complementary role of fear is perhaps something less palatable to our own identities, beset as we are as vulnerable individuals by threats and assaults from an ungentle world and an anti-communitarian society. Underlying fear is the vulnerability of the physical body to pain. We fear pain more than we fear death, if only because death is unknowable and unexperienced, whereas pain is only too real in our lives. The primary socialization of children in much of American and Western European society (I do not speak for other societies in this matter) is based on pain and the threat of pain. In our efforts to control and shape the behavior of children “for their own good”, but most often for our good, and indirectly for the good of the currently dominant social order, we hurt children’s bodies and we threaten to repeat the inflicting of pain. We may belittle the degree of pain involved, but the reactions of children indicate that, combining physical and emotional (which is bodily by other means) pain, for them it is substantial. We learn these lessons early in our identity construction: pain matters, fear matters. We begin both to conform and to dissemble. We construct identities of “good boy” and “bad boy”, often embodying both in unstable tensions, and we project identities which we do not necessarily feel.
The pains of adolescence and adult life are manifold, and most are related to socialization, to pressures to conform to particular identities. The threats and beatings of the boy who seems to be a “sissy” and who may or may not identify as gay. The emotional abuse of youthful early sexuality, feared by adults and proscribed by the dominant social order, leading to frustrations, exaggerated desires, conformity to norms in promise of licence for sexual satisfaction by individuals and institutions loom large. Later in adulthood (though biologically we are adult from puberty, whatever our social norms may prefer us to believe), we may suffer the pains of poverty, of criminal abuse, of emotional abuse by those with institutional power over our livelihoods, and always the threats of the powerful and of institutions to withdraw their support of us and leave us to pains of the powerless, the hungry, the homeless, or the dependent. We live in a very unjust society, where our present social order is enforced by far more aggregate pain than is in principle necessary for the maintenance of some supportive social order. Even if we are immunized from these regimes of pain by our social position, we are still subject to the threat of it “in the last instance” (what else enforces law? What else do police and prisons do?), and we know that most members of our society are not immune, they suffer.
What aspects of our identities are shaped by pain and fear?
Over what timescales? I believe these are important issues that our research on
identity has not at all adequately dealt with as yet.
The phenomenology of identity
Do we actually feel or directly experience our identities as such? My sense is that we do not. What we feel and experience is some positive or negative valence associated with actions that we sense as performing some aspect of who we are, of which we are distinctly proud or ashamed. Insofar as identity is an abstract and composite notion which sums over many aspects of who we are and what and how we behave or feel, it is an analytical tool rather than a phenomenological reality. Insofar as identity refers to a cumulative identity over longer timescales, rather than the identity-in-practice of action in the moment, it also cannot be phenomenological except insofar as we may feel an echo across time as we re-enact some part of us that we recognize as having been part of us before, and perhaps for a long time. There is certainly some phenomenological sense of self-recognition that is related to the continuity of identity, but it does not appear to be an experience of identity as such.
This issue is important for thinking about the description of identity. Identities are described in terms of abstract categories and types; they are not narrated as experiences are. Identities belong to the semiotic domain of the conceptual rather than to the phenomenological domain of the experiential. Nonetheless, we often try to use the concept of identity to link across these two modes of making meaning. I believe this is so because it has been very difficult for phenomenological accounts of self to gain legitimacy in academic discourse, where more semiotic accounts of nearly everything predominate.
What such phenomenological accounts add to anything we can say semiotically is a sense of how the experiential overflows categorizations, how it exceeds any typological account. The phenomenological gives an account of flow, the semiotic of structure or pattern. Flow, or process, takes into account how being and doing make us feel in time; they are dynamical perspectives, whereas semiotic accounts are aoristic: they take a stance which stands outside of time. Phenomenological accounts saliently include affect, which semiotic accounts rarely do. The uses of language which more effectively convey phenomenological experience are narrative and poetic, efforts to create blends and shades of meaning which may be unique rather than to instance typical and familiar meanings with well-known contrasts and associations. In visual media, the semiotic is represented best by the monological and definite abstract diagram or graph, the phenomenological by the emotive and polysemic work of visual art.
We know that rich and meaningful accounts of selves and lives, of lived experience in its qualities and nuances are not fully possible with the canonical tools of semiotic meaning-making. We need to extend our repertoire of semiotic resources to more fully develop their potential for gradation and nuance, for ambiguity and polysemy, or, to the extent that such resources do already exist, what is needed is better ways of combining the definitive and the evocative forms and genres available to us. Our dominant intellectual and cultural traditions have preferred to keep them separate, allocating social power to the categorically based representations and marginalizing those closer to the phenomenological realism of the experiential to mere amusements.
The insistence that identities are embodied, and that embodied experience is fundamental to our sense of self, has led us to want more phenomenologically authentic accounts of identity, or at least of the experiences associated with recognition and performance of aspects of identity. We are still a long way from knowing how to integrate the knowing of narrative, poetry, and art with that of analytical accounts of identity. Including this one.
Having tried to sketch out a somewhat broader prospective notion of identity, one that is coupled to complementary notions such as timescales, traversals, situation types, heterochrony, and the embodied bases of fear and desire, I want to return to three kinds of processes in which agency in the moment is given a greater scope to construct alternative identities and associated changes in sociocultural systems.