Post-institutional Society and Traversal Identities
I have argued elsewhere (Lemke 2002c, 2003) for another important linkage between shorter-term identities and historical changes in the organization of society. As society becomes more tightly organized, more interdependent, at larger and larger scales (cf. globalization), the stability of many individual institutions (in the sense of persistent organizations) becomes less critical to the overall sustainability of the (transnational and global) social ecology, and the functional need for tight linkages between individual lives and such organizational institutions also becomes weaker. Organizations come and go on shorter timescales, more easily substitutable in the larger more stable global patterns. Individuals move among institutions and organizations, also on shorter timescales, and more of the meaning of our lives is made across institutions rather than within them.
This phenomenon shows itself in the greater number of careers and organizations we work in, the greater number of families and relationships we form and live in across a lifetime, compared to a generation ago, and also, at shorter timescales, in the ways in which our identities may depend less on being a student in a school, a manager in a company, or even a father in a family, and more on our particular style of juggling these institutional identities as we move among institutions in the course of a year or even a day. As we make meaning across (substitutable) institutions, repeatedly, along the course of our traversals across these institutions, we develop ways of linking and combining them, or relating them to one another, of distributing our time and attention among them. These styles are to some extent personal, but they are also in part positional. There may even be emerging in our post-modern society new divisions based on similar “lifestyles” that consist in our ways of living across the affordances of particular institutions. We gain in this process a greater power to create our own mixes and combinations of the situational affordances of traditional institutions, and so our own identities.
The process of re-assortment of significance among levels of organization of a complex dynamical system, when a new level of organization emerges in between of other prior levels is well known. The new level, here quasi-global networks of sustainable interdependence among more substitutable, less persistent organizations and institutions, weakens the coupling matrix among units at the next lower level (the elements which come together to make up an organization, leading to shorter lifetimes for organizations and more transience among their components, including people). At the same time, the greater combinatorial freedom of these components may lead to the emergence of other new levels of organization among them, such as perhaps the new lifestyle castes.
From the perspective of the individual, institutions become relatively less important to identity, and recurrent styles of traversals and linkages we make among and across institutions become more important. Similarly, the units of the organizations and institutions, both practices and persons (as well as artifacts), may develop more identity-relevant connections and recurrent joint activities unrelated to the institutional matrices in which they may have initially combined. In some cases they will continue to depend on those matrices for the affordances needed for their new relationships and activities, or they may find substitutes that enable them to continue independently of any particular organization or institution. In time, and with aggregation of mutual inter-dependence for the sake of sustainability (ecological relations) of these initially ad hoc, trans-institutional formations at the multi-individual scale, new organizations or institutions may emerge that look quite different from those of modernism (e.g. they may be more spatially distributed, they may involve more asynchronous interactions, their timescales of change of practices or substitution of persons may be shorter, etc.).
We are nowhere near any closure of this discourse on identity. I hope, however, that the preceding arguments have open up further space for discussion and development of our ways of using this important concept, ways that make more explicit how agency and positionality play off one another, how the multiplicity of identity mirrors the diversity of communities, how changing opportunities for making identities are connected to changing institutional and social configurations, how identities are made across multiple timescales and in the spaces created by the conflicting demands of institutions, and how identities are grounded in embodied experience, fear, and desire.