Conflicting Institutional Demands on Identity
Identities are contested not just in the sense that there are struggles over the kinds of identities we are allowed to CLAIM for ourselves, but there are also struggles over the kinds of identities we can CONCEIVE for ourselves, and which identities in that system of heteroglossic practice we will strive to establish IN ourselves.
This thesis of struggle and contestation over identity recognizes that the technologies of the Self, as described by Foucault, are both technologies by which we can make identities for ourselves, and technologies by which social institutions, through the practices they afford for us and the practices of control exercised by others playing roles within them, attempt to shape and control our identities.
Governments try to make us docile and conforming citizens by manipulating the mass media and the flow of information, and by creating images of wise and courageous leaders, and loyal and patriotic citizens. They work to define what the identity of “good citizen” consists of, in general, i.e. for the longterm and irrespective of specific events, but also in the short term, e.g. what being patriotic means when the government decides to have a war, or what being a good citizen means when the government decides the ordinary citizen should use less energy to keep the costs down for owners of energy-intensive industries.
Corporations try to make us docile and predictable consumers through advertising media and marketing strategies, selling us not just products, but lifestyles which incline us to want products, trying to get us to identify with certain stereotypical pseudo-identities which fit our consumption preferences into more predictable market-segment categories.
Corporations and other institutions also try to make us “good employees”, who care about the interests of the institution, whose behaviors are relatively predictable, and who see ourselves through the role-identity lenses of the good worker, supervisor, manager, often specified by professional role identities such as the good researcher, professor, attorney, physician, minister, or less professionalized as the good secretary, ….
This second aspect is also an agenda of professional organizations, which define ethics and proper behavior explicitly, but also work to create images of idealized practitioners of various professionalized roles.
Institutions offer us pseudo-identities, their practices and material settings us afford us and constrain for us various opportunities for action and interaction, and their norms and practices embodied in others, constantly monitor us, evaluate us, and work to control us and push us, by promise and threat, to conform to their stereotypes.
Schools work to make us over in their image of the good student. Families work to make us conform to their image of the good child, the good mother or father, the good brother or sister, the good boy and the good girl. In doing this, each institution is embedded in its cultural and political-economic (i.e. ecological) relations to other institutions. It is not just families which are selling an image of the good son or daughter, but also Hollywood, the television networks, their owners and sponsors, magazine advertisers, fiction writers, journalists, etc. The degree of convergence among these views of a particular identity is not simply a function of some miraculous invisible hand of shared or common Culture. It is the product of interests and the domination of some interests over others. It is governed by ideology that serves interests, and as Bourdieu (1990) argues regarding the limited autonomy of various social fields, such as the academy or the arts, much of the convergence is a product of the interests of those who dominate the dominant field of political economy.
This view of identity asks us to imagine that identities are not purely matters of internal feeling states or personalized discourses. Identities are contested public terrain. As Foucault argues, modernism has found more and more ways to take the inner soul, which was private, if publicly accountable under older forms of Christianity, and make it into a more public terrain of identity, under surveillance and subject to control by outside interests.
We often celebrate hybridity as an opportunity for people to escape from the prescribed role identities of particular cultures or institutions and fashion their own unique sense of self, along with more unique modes of behavior. But we should also recognize that hybridity represents a compromise by the individual among the pressures and forces of multiple cultures and institutions which are seeking to control our identities. Increasingly in the modern, mobile world, people are under pressure to conform to the identity stereotypes of more than one traditional community, ethnic, or national culture. Increasingly we participate in multiple institutions, each of which has its own ideas about who we should be. Yes, we can sometimes play these off against one another to gain some space of greater freedom, but just as often or more often I think, we hybridize merely to reconcile the conflicting pressures.
WHEN does hybridity enhance our freedom of action and construction of meaningful selves? If we shuttle among institutions all of which are more or less subservient to the same dominant interests, then the difference among the identities demanded by these institutions are not likely to be differences from which we can productively expand a greater space of freedom to conceive and pursue our own interests and agendas.
There is a Nepalese woman in Holland’s book who scales the wall of a house to participate in an interview despite the possible strictures of her Hindu caste status (thus avoiding entering the first floor and passing through a kitchen she might ‘treif”). We can see her as creatively enacting a potential identity outside her traditional culture, afforded by the presence and practices of a Western interviewer from a very different cultural world. But we can also see her as constrained by the conflicting pressures of two cultures, Hindu and Western, each making demands on her, and forcing her to improvise a very uncomfortable compromise. Is she taking the first steps toward liberation? Or is she just being more constrained by the additional demands of new cultural forces? Is the liberated, anomic Western female identity, dependent on clothes and cosmetics (as described for US college students in another chapter of Holland’s book) in a competitive consumerist culture of romance to find a prospective partner, a better choice for a shy, conventionally unattractive, poor young woman than the relative security of a system of arranged marriages? WHEN does the divergence between cultural systems genuinely offer us a space of greater freedom to create our own identities, and when does it only offer us either a choice of equally constraining alternatives, or perhaps worse, double the constraints and conflicts we labor under?
Bhabha (1994) recognizes the ambivalent affordances of post-colonial situations in which we can strive to create a cultural ‘third space’. The tensions between pre-colonial and colonial cultures can be very destructive, tearing people apart, at the same time that they can also be very productive of creative post-colonial hybridity. But how do we transform conflicting demands for conformity into resources for creative freedom?
I do not want to fetishize creativity and individual freedom in this discussion. They are themselves ideals of Western culture that fit only too well with the interests of those who want a mobile workforce untied to local communities and a consumer unbound to tradition and free to buy new products. What matters in regard to the stake that each of us has in the “identity wars” are the resources our culture and institutions make available to us to work past the contradictions between who we feel we are and want to be and who society demands that we become. Each of us is more individually unique by temperament and biography than is allowed by any system of stereotypical identities-on-offer. No prêt-a-porter, ready-to-wear identity for sale by the institutions whose interest are served by conformity to such identities will comfortably fit a real and unique human person.
We may well wish to support the family or the community in some respects, but not in others. We may well find ourselves comfortable and comforted by the norms and practices of some institution or community, or we may not. We may want to take up some of its affordances but not others. There may be feelings we have for which there are no recognized institutional or cultural channels of expression, or none which are allowed as appropriate to our social position. There may be desires we have which are taboo because they run counter to institutional interests, or even because their suppression is part of some long-evolved strategy of social control that has nothing much to do with us personally (e.g. homophobia arguably has far more to do with strategies for controlling the identities of young, working-class heterosexual males than with suppressing anyone’s sexual activity).
Modernist social systems and institutions demand and probably require narrow conformity to a certain very limited range of stereotypical identities. Much of this is the product of the effort to create very large-scale social systems and institutions. That effort was motivated by the enormous concentration of resources it affords for those in control of the systems and institutions. Its consequence is largely that modernist systems and institutions have grown increasingly rigid and intolerant of unpredictable or divergent behavior. Mass production, mass culture, mass consumption, mass conformity. Only a very superficial level of trivial diversity is tolerated. No institutions encourage uniqueness or non-conformity, least of all schools.
The only resources that modern society affords for innovation or individualization of identity are its internal conflicts and cleavages and its intersections with radically different cultures. In time past, we were most often the captives of a small number of institutions. One family, one school, one company, one church, one local community. Today we are far more likely to live as part of multiple families through divorce, remarriage, foster care, etc. both in our youth and throughout our lives. Because of social mobility, we are much more likely to move around from school to school in our youth and community to community throughout our lives. We no longer expect to spend our lives working in one company or university, or even pursuing one career or line of work. We are even more likely to shop around from church to church, if not actually change religious affiliation more than once during our lives. We are exposed through mass media and communications, as well as travel, to a wide range of social institutions and their norms and cultures. While most of these institutions of all kinds show a certain convergence of culture because of their common domination by dominant interests, and their common historical heritage, there are inevitably also contradictions and conflicts among them. The more institutions we visit in our lives the more likely we are to encounter and recognize these internal contradictions and conflicts, and thereby acquire at least some independent freedom of vision with regard to possible values and identities.
Of course we encounter institutions not just in themselves, but mainly through their constituents: people, artifacts, media, discourses, practices, settings, etc. Somewhere in these, especially in the least “designed” of them, usually people, we encounter contradictory elements and potential models for being different. One can never make a person or an artifact or discourse that includes ONLY the features we are seeking to build in. There will always also be ‘accidental’ features and side-effects not under our control, or even always visible to the surveillance of designers who are focused on particular other features. There are always things about unique individual people, artifacts, discourses, and settings that do not quite “fit” with their institutional roles and functions.
In late modern society we are also increasingly globalized, at least in the immediate sense that people, discourses, and media from other cultures with whom we share less common historical heritage and fewer values, practices, norms, etc. come more and more often into our lives and communities. We hear other languages spoken on the street and on television. We meet or at least see and hear people born and raised in distant cultures. The traditional natural barriers to significant learning from such people or sharing with them of resources for identity development act in the first instance: we don’t understand their languages, we find their practices strange and often distasteful, we feel uncomfortable and anxious around them, we worry about our inability to predict their behavior, we fear the unknown and uncertain. As it has always been, at first meeting.
But if we work together with them, if we live nearby, if our children play together, if our joint participation in social institutions throws us together long enough, then some individuals will start to get used to each other, like each other, share with each other, learn from each other. This becomes easier when the differences are attenuated but not lost: when we encounter second-generation immigrants, or immigrants who have been living among us for a long time already. If we belong to a more affluent stratum of our society, we will also visit other cultures on their own terrain. I do not underestimate our ability to travel and remain within our own culture, but equally, and particularly for younger travelers there is more and more opportunity for genuine encounters with other ways of looking at the world and acting in it, for other identity possibilities.
All this is little enough, but it is far more than existed for most people even in the recent past. The result is a gradual de-articulation of culture. What was once a seamless whole, each part reinforcing the others, has increasingly become for many people a loose collection of different elements: norms, values, discourses, institutions, identities, roles, artifacts, settings … each of which does not HAVE TO be joined with all the others in a consistent and stereotypical pattern. We can see this as an irony of consumer capitalism, which has produced for us all a strategy of dis-articulation, of “mix-and-match”, to increase its overall consumer appeal and profitability. You don’t have to make the large resource commitment as a consumer to buy the whole package, you can just buy the parts that you want. Once this strategy is turned back on the culture itself, its hold on us is enormously weakened: the various elements do not necessarily any more reinforce one another.
Schools, parents, mass media, and youth culture all war with one another. Our society becomes more and more factionalized and fractionated. If, like me, you believe that our society had long since become a pathological one, creating far more pain and suffering for its members than was required for maintaining itself as a positive and supportive environment for us, sacrificing the interests of each to those of a very few to an extent that was no longer necessary to maintain basic social stability, enlarging the scale of monolithic institutions far past the point where their main effects were dehumanizing and dangerous to ecological sustainability … you will be happy to know that things are beginning to fall apart.
There is no immediate danger of a total collapse. We are tightly bound to one another by a complex economic system of mutual inter-dependence in which we all have a stake. We will continue to transact and participate in institutions that are necessary to keep us alive and/or comfortable. But at the same time we are less and less persuaded of the legitimacy or necessity of any of these institutions or the norms, values, conventions, discourses, and practices associated with them. We are more and more prepared to disengage our loyalty, to pick and choose, to mix and match.
There is a lot of talk of people’s “multiple identities”. We can mean this in various senses. At short timescales, we may enact somewhat different identities in different social settings, playing different roles with different partners. At longer timescales we may continue to develop for ourselves identities that are useful to us, or required of us, as we participate again and again in the same institutitions, communities, social networks, or communities of practice. None of these identities however is necessarily a creative or unique individual hybrid. In many cases all of them may be stereotypical identities which we mix and match to our strategic advantage, or just to navigate the compromises demanded by conflicting social pressures on us. When and how does this multiplicity become a resource for genuinely creative construction of unique identities?
One useful perspective on this issue is represented by a view of personal identity development that looks at the internal diversity of all human communities. We learn to be the people we are largely by the ways we interact with various other members of our community. Communities are diverse in age, in genders and sexualities, in social classes and occupations, in ethnic, cultural, linguistic and in what is unfortunately still too often called “racial”, subgroups. We learn to interact more or less effectively, if not always comfortably, with across most of these differences from whatever our own location is in social space at the time. That means that we learn expectations about the behavior and responses of these other members of our villages. We even learn to some extent to mimic or imitate them, and certainly to stereotype and parody them. We cannot do this except by learning to some degree to act like them, to be like them. We acquire some part of the identity kits that enable people to be people of particular kinds. We may not “identify” with these other identity competencies, but we do acquire them. We may not have the competence in the full ‘active’ sense of being able to pass for a person of this kind, but we do acquire it very often in the “passive” sense of being able to interpret the behaviors of others sufficiently well for the purposes of ordinary life and social interaction.
And so here too are resources for our own identity building. For the most part there are emotional factors and pressures that lead us to “identify” only with one or a few of the available social-types in our communities. We are strongly shaped by family and significant others, by early friendships, and of course by the institutional forces of divide-and-conquer that work so hard to polarize identities into incompatible camps. We are not allowed to assume identities that are socially polarized as conflicting and incompatible, at least not in terms of public performance and often also not in terms of emotional identification. But we do know these identities in many ways, and we can and do sometimes play at them, or in private try them on for complex emotional reasons we may not even understand ourselves. I believe there is a great deal of covert identity transgression in people’s private and fantasy lives which is itself part of the work of resolving the lack of fit between our unique feelings and dispositions and the ready-to-wear identities that are useful to social institutions with which we share only limited interests.
If you are asked, as we so often are, “what do you do?”, how do you feel about any particular reply that you give? How adequate as a representation of your identity do you feel any of the stereotypical, culturally named, institutionally sanctified options available to you as answers really are? In multi-ethnic New York, there is a common social question: “Lemke, so what kind of name is that?” which is part of the effort to simplify social relationships by fitting each person to one of a small number of ethnic-religious groups, mainly those that have been or are of political consequence in the city’s alliances of interest. I can claim several such identities, but none of them are ones that I feel much identification with. It is taboo to ask people about their sexuality beyond some overt markers of gender, but I would feel equally unsatisfied with any of the possible conventional answers. We don’t usually ask people more simply, Who are you? in any sense other than asking for their name, but if it was asked, and you were to try to name your identity or identities, could you do so in any way that was satisfying to you?
Imagine some answers of the sort: “I’m an educator” “I’m a teacher” “I’m an American” “I’m a mother” “I’m a lesbian” “I’m a hacker” “I’m a goth kid” “I’m a researcher” “I’m a physicist” “I’m a theoretician” “I’m a Catholic” “I’m a liberal” “I’m Jewish” “I’m a twin” “I’m a woman” … and think not so much about how each leaves out a lot that you also are, but about how good a fit you really feel with your generic identities? How much more would you want to say to qualify such an answer? How would you get closer to saying who you really feel you are, what you really feel your identity is in terms of nationality, occupation, sexuality, cultural disposition, religion, ethnicity, etc. How much of your identification with these categories is based on the need to find allies against prejudice or opponents? Or to gain acceptance in social circles or institutions? Or to increase your status? Or not to offend your family or colleagues? Or not to have to deal with unresolved ambivalences in your own feelings?
What language of identity do we have that lets us go beyond institutionally defined stereotypical identities? Or longer lists of them? What can we say about who we really feel ourselves to be, socially and personally, that is not couched in the language of these institutional stereotypes? If those stereotypes are sold to us in the interests of the institutions that benefit from conformity to them, what kinds of identities are imaginable from what we regard to be our own interests, especially those of our own interests which are NOT supported by social institutions, and which may be in conflict with those of the social institutions around us?
Paolo Freire in some very wise passages in his classic Pedagogy of the Oppressed (2000) asks us to try to speak an authentic word, to try to name ourselves outside the realm of names given to us by social institutions and the interests of power. To say something about our lives, our problems, our feelings, our social condition, our anger, our desires, our selves that was not put in our mouths to serve some else’s interests. Can we do it?
Bakhtin (1935/1981) with regard to discourse, and others (e.g. de Certeau, 1984) for practices more generally, give us some hope for strategies of appropriation and re-accentuation of existing discourses and practices. These may well have originated with the interests of powerful institutions and social groups, but they can often be re-articulated in our own interests to speak and enact our more fully authentic selves. Doing so, however, requires that we act from some critical stance, whether based on our personal conflicts with the demands of these institutions, or from some alternative perspective afforded us by our encounters with other institutions or cultures, often as mediated through persons. This re-articulation, when it occurs in new communities of discourse and practice, can begin the process of production of the kind of “third space” described by Bhabha (1994) .