Identity, Development, and Desire: Critical Questions

Jay L. Lemke

University of Michigan

The concept of “identity” is increasingly being asked to bear a heavy theoretical burden in discourses concerned with education, learning, development, and the relation of the individual and the social. I would like to raise a number of critical questions about the concept of identity in hopes of stimulating discussion in the education research community about its uses and limitations and how it might be refigured, elaborated, or superseded by alternative conceptualizations.

From the perspective of a sociocultural and historical analysis, we need to understand the ways in which the concept of identity functions in contemporary discourses as a mediating term between social-structural approaches and views of lived, interactional experience (Lemke 1995). In this role the notion of identity inherits many features of earlier discourses framed in terms of soul, psyche, persona, personality, selfhood, subject, agency, etc. We also need to understand in what sense postmodern notions of identity embrace multiplicity and hybridity of social identities across both diverse human relationships relationships and social categories such as gender, sexuality, class, culture, race, ethnicity, etc.

What are the implications of specifically relational notions of identity (e.g. Gergen 1994) for its multiplicity and hybridity? How can identities be unitary or integrative when they function as part of our relationships with diverse members of our communities (elders and juniors, same gender and nonsame gender, same and nonsame class, ethnicity, etc.)?

If identities are enacted or performed (Butler 1993), how are they influenced by feelings of desire and fear? What is the role of the body and physical interaction, dependence, and vulnerability in shaping identity (body to body; body to environment, tools, foods, threats)?
Is a single notion of identity protean enough to apply across different timescales of human activity? If not, how is the identity we enact across a momentary interaction to be distinguished from the sort of identity that we perform over decades (Goffman 1961, Harre 1979)?
Do we construct identities only from fixed semiotic options provided by our culture and its constraints? If not, how can we innovate new kinds of identities that potentially subvert the normative formations of our communities? What role do transgressive identities play in social and cultural change?
Finally, what is the politics of the notion of identity? How does the spread of discourses framed in terms of this concept advance the interests of some in society over those of others? How do they re-inscribe existing power relations and/or challenge them and offer alternatives?

My aim in this paper will not be the impossible task of comprehensively reviewing social theories of identity, but the more specific one of raising challenging questions for those of us who use this currently fashionable concept in our research and analysis.

In particular, I will suggest and open for discussion three principal theoretical proposals:

That the multiplicity and hybridity of postmodern identities is not new or exceptional, but is rather the contemporary realization of the more general principle (Lemke 2002) that in identity development we learn how to perform diverse relational identities in interaction with diverse others across the significant social divisions within our community, particularly age and gender, but also class, ethncity, 'race', religion, etc.

That the notion of identity needs to be more scale-differentiated: that is, we need a range of differentiated concepts from that of identity-in-practice on the short timescales of situated small-group activity, to notions of identity appropriate to larger institutional scales and lifespan development. Identities across timescales are integrated by means of the material continuity of bodies and other socially meaningful material constructions across time (Lemke 2000)

That identities on all scales shape and are shaped by desires and fears rooted in human embodiedness and its subsistence needs, affordances for pleasure, and vulnerabilities to pain. The phenomenological experience of unique selfhood overflows social semiotic categories, both structural and agentive, as we create feeling as well as meaning for ourselves and others across the multiple timescales of our lives