‘The question of ‘identity’ is being vigorously debated in social theory. In essence the argument is that the old identities which stabilised the social world for so long are in decline, giving rise to new identities and fragmenting the modern individual as a unified subject. This so-called ‘crisis of identity’ is seen as part of a wider process of change which is dislocating the central structures of modern societies and undermining the frameworks which gave individuals stable anchorage in the social world.’ (Hall, 1992: 274)
This unit is about identity; what it is, how it comes to be what it is, and what it means to those who have it. On one level the meaning of identity is self-evident. Your identity is who you are. Someone asks who I am and I’m (normally) happy to reply: Clive. My name is a pointer to who I am. Without a name a person is ‘lost’. Without a name to give someone we also struggle to ascribe an identity to them.
In May 2005 a ‘man with no name’ was found in the UK.
The mystery man, who has been unable to communicate with police or carers, was found wandering the streets in Sheerness, Kent, in a soaking wet suit. He stunned carers by drawing detailed pictures of a grand piano and giving a virtuoso classical piano performance. But he has not said a word since police picked him up on 7 April. (The Guardian Tuesday, 17th May 2005).
This is obviously an extreme example. Not only did the man have no name but he also failed to communicate verbally. The channels of communication which he did use (musical and pictorial), whilst they ‘stunned’ his carers, gave no clue to his identity. It seems the man needed a name first together with verbal communication to establish who he was – and to be identified by others for who he was.
Yet even then it may be insufficient to establish an identity. Have we ever asked the question (or been asked the question) “who am I really “who are you ?” That italicised really suggests that there may be more to who I am than my name and that that something more is something deep down inner to me and to which access is privileged. What then is that deep down thing? Is it a ’soul’, a ’self’, an ‘inner self’, an ‘ego’, a ‘personal identity’? I’ve used scare quotes for all these different terms because I want to warn you that such terms are contentious, sometimes confusing, and invariable debated. One of the tasks in the Unit is to look at who uses these terms and what they mean by them in order that we may understand more about the identity of identity.
But back to the real you. Newspaper horoscopes may suggest that Capricorns all share a core of indelible characteristics but many aspects of popular culture play with what looks like exactly the opposite idea. Radio and TV programmes offer ‘make-overs’ – of lifestyle, behaviour, and thought which implicitly (and often explicitly) suggest that we are free to experiment with our identity. The self is becoming a matter of choice … and risk. If you risk ‘coming out’ (of whatever closet) you get the prize and become a winner in the identity stakes. There are deep cultural assumptions suggested by such programmes about the way we are seeing the self today: a self is linked to role-playing, gender, choice, risk and above all consumption. The internet thrives on such assumptions and we often hear of bizarre incidents of identity ‘fraud’ and chat room identities which have dramatic consequences. One recent example, from the depths of suburban Altrincham, found one teenager plotting his own murder …
If popular culture is exploring (and at times exploiting) such assumptions, then the social sciences and humanities are the arenas in which the assumptions are theorised, discussed and tentatively ‘explained’. So, the self is ‘flexible’, ‘fractured’, ‘fragmented’ and ‘decentred’ (notice the scare quotes). For many, identity is beginning to be seen as the result, not the cause, of a series of narratives we ‘perform’, and as those narrative performances change so do our identities. One of the interesting questions from this point of view is the extent to which the individual is understood as the director of these performances. In constructing our ’selves’ we work with the resources both of the psyche and memory, but we also use wider cultural and social resources.
What role then does society have in fashioning our sense of self? Can we conceptualise the process by thinking that the self is fashioned from the inside out … or the outside in? In looking for answers to these questions we will somehow have to transcend the disciplinary boundaries that often limit the possibility of such answers. Our work will be necessarily inter-disciplinary and range across the social sciences.
But why does all this matter?
In 2003 BBC 4 broadcast a documentary titled, ‘The Century of the Self’. The summary brief described the programme as follows:
To many in both politics and business, the triumph of the self is the ultimate expression of democracy, where power has finally moved to the people. Certainly the people may feel they are in charge, but are they really? The Century of the Self tells the untold and sometimes controversial story of the growth of the mass-consumer society in Britain and the United States. How was the all-consuming self created, by whom, and in whose interests?
The century of the self – that is a big claim and if it’s true then the study of the self needs little justification. An understanding of the self will take us closer to an understanding of how the world works.
During the summer of 2005 the notion of self and identity took another turn. The debates in the wake of the London bombings revolved around the issue of collective identities – how selves join to create collective national, regional, religious, or hyphenating groupings – as well as the relationships and alliances between them. The debates about what it means to be British, British-Muslim, and Muslim which have filled endless column inches in the past few months are linked to questions about national, regional, religious and gender identity which have been raging for centuries.
Research on identity provides a window on social change. It can answer questions about what is happening to identities based on familiar social class hierarchies. Are identities based much more now on ‘life-style’ and consumer choices? It can explore whether traditional political and community commitments are being replaced by a more volatile and dynamic ‘identity politics’. The study of identity investigates how different images and narratives ‘grab hold’ of individuals. It explains why people act from one basis rather than another and why they invest in some affiliations and allegiances rather than others.
Issues of identity may be played out in popular culture, theorised in academic culture, but they can also be issues of life and death.
Who are you really?, is the starting point for an exploration of all these issues, and many more, as we move through the Unit and hopefully when we have completed it we will understand a little better how such a questioned could be approached … if not answered.
Hall, S. (Ed) (1992) Modernity and its Futures OUP
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