Identity Constructs

I always feel like I’m being reduced to something akin to the ingredients in an omelet whenever other people deign tell me who I am. It isn’t merely that I bristle at the idea of being labeled or typecast, but also that someone is summing me up by reducing the tangled cogitative undergrowth of discourses and concepts that have combined to form an original and nuanced identity into a series of prefabricated categories culled from an index of ‘subjectivities.’ It is as if there is an official set of categories for human identities outside of which no idea, dream or fantasy may reside. It doesn’t matter what wing of which political ideology has created and honed such constructs, they are invariably reductionist, caricatures that shrink one’s humanness into something that can be conveniently relegated to any number of pre-organized identity boxes, like parcels dropped in marked post-office slots.

This reduction of consciousness into a gestalt of Desubstantialization has created a typology that, while using the language of ‘subjectivity—a word that I mistakenly believed referred to the ineffable, irreducibility of an individual’s experience of the world—is more similar to modern conceptions of demographics, or even the simplified crudeness of most psychiatric categories. And, while its intention may be thematically distinct from those aforementioned organizing schematics, it’s results have a similar tendency to reduce the nuanced machinations of ideation, memory and identity into a finite listing of ethnic, racial, gender and sexual containers, which tend to generalize idiosyncratic qualities into a generic, stock, nomenclature for various gradations of individual existence.

This is primarily attributable to the fact, that, as with the development of so many concepts of human diversity—intended to give dignity and depth to marginal narratives of ‘selfhood—the notion of ‘subjectivity’ has gradually over time become a formulaic caricature of the indefinable range of diverse combinations of experience that it once set out to embrace. As a consequence of its rapid assimilation into the emerging disciplines of American Studies, Woman’s Studies, Subaltern studies, and even generalized theoretical paradigms, it has become a somewhat inflexible and calcified formula, which has ironically supplanted ‘diversity’ with a one-size-fits-all assortment of experiential dioramas.

Much of this transformation can be reduced to orthodox interpretations of the work of two philosophers whose contributions to modern thought were inherently anti-orthodox. One of these thinkers was Michael Foucault, specifically his assertion—which was made partially in the Nietzschean tradition of ‘philosophizing with a hammer’—that the modern conception of the individual was little more than an epistemological construct born at the intersection of contemporary meta-discourses and the subjectivizing aspects of language. In the concluding paragraph of The Order Of Things, Foucault asserts that, as contemporary identity constructs are dissipated over time, “that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea” [p387]. While this provocative prediction has been taken somewhat literally by both adherents and detractors, it is not entirely clear that Foucault was simply dismissing the poignant vagaries of individual existence; but, rather that he was emphasizing the way in which complex lines of discourse have created modern identity constructs. The latter is a finessing of the former, but does not necessarily over-ride or negate it as the ethological basis for a sense of self.

This, admittedly, existentialistic subtlety is rarely considered in contemporary classroom discussions of ‘subjectivity,’ which rely as much on Martin Heidegger’s radical phenomenological precept of ‘Desubstantialization—filtered through a postmodern matrix of Julie Kristeva and Franz Fanon—as they do on Foucault’s speculation-turned-dictum. Inevitably, however, as with all multi-nuanced facets of philosophical argument, the complexities that are necessary in order to fully understand the import of such ideas, have often been glossed over as they have hardened into a canon of essentialized ‘truths’ about identity formation. The new gatekeepers of these truths tend to react to any attempt to seriously interrogate their theoretical foundations with accusations that attribute such inquiry—especially when it is done outside of the narrow parameters which have become pre-conditions for any sort of legitimate discussion on the topic—to Logical Positivist bias (the basis of Cartesian thought), revisionist modernism, and even ‘intellectual error.’ Such rigidity in categorizing any hint of skepticism is sadly reminiscent of orthodox Marxists from the mid-Twentieth Century—whose ideological tunnel-vision led to a tragic reliance on the paradigm of ‘economic determinism’ as an obligatory model for social change; and worse, to convoluted defenses of the excessive authoritarianism practiced by most so-called ‘communist’ states. Similarly, the way in which ‘Identity’ precepts are now constructed within the hermetic realm of Cultural Studies’ is in danger of reducing such ideas to mere catechism, parroted on undergraduate and graduate level papers, with the same obsequious deference to authority once seen in medieval seminaries whenever students were called upon to discuss the lives of animals or the motions of planets.

It need not be mentioned that such reliance on ‘truth concepts’ has a devastating impact on the continued growth of any intellectual discipline. It can gradually lead to a dissipation, which in retrospect would reduce even the most important facets of what should be a thriving community of inquiry, into the skeletal lizard carcass of a desiccated fad. This would not do justice to the disciplines that fall within the rubric of Cultural Studies, or to the value of a broad conception of ‘subjectivity,’ as there is much essential insight inherent in these practices and conceptual models. It is an all too familiar case of a vibrant dynamic approach to raising questions about cultural institutions and rituals; which, in creating its own intellectual meta-paradigm becomes an example of the institutionalized and un-reflected-upon processes that it has often astutely deconstructed within the larger culture.

One of the characteristics of ideology is that it tends to codify epiphanies and concepts into categories of ethical certainty. This hardening of moral reasoning into a set of rigid and instrumentalized practices is similar across the political spectrum, and always results in a congealing of attitudes into formalized orthodoxies. The resulting pieties tend to mitigate the effects of nuance and ambiguity on moral reasoning, resulting in a form of casuistry which can petrify into inflexibility. The principle effect of such ethical inelasticity is a shrinking appreciation of the complexity of a culture’s moral flash-points. Paradoxically, this obsessive focus transforms the analysis of cultural tribalism into proactive practices which mistake an unyielding and self-righteous inexorability for a form of justifiable moral action. Once the moral ambiguities in one’s understanding of cultural dynamics have disappeared, it is inevitable that aesthetic complexity is diminished as well. This is probably because without an essential element of mystery to give existence a transcendent dimension of fullness, it quickly calcifies into a series of discrete, sanitized truths. The interconnectedness of such ethically totalizing truth structures is mediated by an empiricism that can become overly oppressive as it single-mindedly focusses on the object of its gaze like the laser blast from a cartoon ray-gun.

Foucault has pointed out that Art, which always transcends the boundaries of language, exists, and defines the limits of a discourse. However, the parameters that define what can be said, and which circumscribe the interpretation and expression of the latter, do not exclude the possibility of innumerable hybridized sensibilities. Of course, in a social field as richly endowed with the products of so many cultural and personal cross-pollinations as ours, a reduction of anthropological phenomenon to schematic categories aimed at indexing such currents reduces them to caricature. This is primarily because such processes are closer to the quantum fluctuations of electricity than they are to the Newtonian certainties of geometric measurements.

By applying a rigid paradigm of ‘subjectivity to questions of human identity, theorists do not acknowledge the agency of individuals to reinscribe their environments creatively. This is equivalent to neurological research paradigms that reduce the concept of ‘mind’ to the physiological platform of brain upon which it sits. The problem in this unspoken reverse syllogism is that mind is conceptual, and therefore more than the sum of its parts, while brain—despite the fact that it emits an electro-chemical shadow of mental processes—is physical, and easier to reduce to predictable schematic rhythms and patterns. The mistake is in assuming that the residue of thought is qualitatively reducible to its neurochemical signatures; this would be as absurd as claiming that the meanings signified in various examples of literature can be extrapolated by reducing individual letters and punctuation marks to a set of distinct laws of communication. In fact, such laws exist, in a sense, and define elements of syntax and sentence structure, but require a complex intellectual act to translate into the variegated and infinite dimensions of meaning that are opened up through creative readings and hermeneutical interpretations. And, while both structure and import are intertwined, one cannot simply be reduced to the other through the imposition of some casuistic grammatical law of standardized appearances; rather they require readings, and, invariably more words, in order to qualify as actual discourse—otherwise, they are mere symbols without benefit of translation or evaluative interpretation.

Similarly, most identity constructs operate laterally and horizontally, rather than according to some linear causality; thus, they embrace myriad thematic and formal qualities, which cross-pollinate with one another to form an infinite lattice-work of potential identities. The problem is that access to those very discourses of marginality, becomes occluded—and, ,marginalized, as it were—when a stylized meta-gestalt emerges to frame and explain those esoteric ways of speaking the world. The development of these intellectual methods of mediating identity constructs can quickly become oppressive and dogmatic, despite their having evolved in order to better understand the ontological validity of the cultural, and individual apertures they seek to explore. The calcification that results from this tendency to name, hierarchize and organize such fluid identity perceptions into strict indexes, is both a reflection on the persistence of a rather rigid Linnaean model of taxa—applied in reified form to social and cultural phenomenon as automatically as it is applied to flora and fauna in the physical environment—and characteristic of the rapidity with which the  conceptual outgrowths of idealism can become tyrannically single-minded in its zeal to define social identity constructs. The ironic consequence of this systematization is that hybridized and marginal identities that do not fit the formulas implicit in this method of reasoning are excluded, and often unacknowledged.

In The Primal Mind, Jamake Highwater, points out that “what [liberal people] fail to take into account is the great variety of ways in which members of a single culture respond to the same things, let alone the vaster differences that exist between cultures.” [The Primal Mind, pp.7-8, italics mine.] The rapid cross-pollinations within the parameters of even a single social group have become far more obvious, as electronic mass communication has grown in size and sophistication. It may be that such combinations have become more prevalent due to the existence of a greater variety of cultural information and styles available to almost anyone who can access the internet; but, it is far more likely that such diversity, even within cultural spaces formerly believed to be largely homogenous, is merely more visible now and has always existed. This view makes sense as human beings have both an insatiable curiosity and the innate ability to recontextualize language and ideas. It is this basic creativity, part of but not confined to the rubric of various marginalized cultural gestalts, which is the defining characteristic of humankind.

Surely, as we all manifest these abilities in distinct and unusual ways, there should not be a quota imposed over the meaning of difference. The human species has proven far more diverse than that, and deserves the integrity of having all of its differences acknowledged as parts of the complex, and sloppy mosaic which comprise its cumulative multi-cultural, heritages. We are overflowing multitudes of oddly nuanced ideas, feelings and textures, rather than compartments into which discrete identity constructs can be poured, salted or spooned like the ingredients in a soup or omelet. And, finally, we deserve the right to define ourselves outside of, rather than strictly in relation to, the accumulation of pre-codified concepts, when it comes to being who we are in our own unplanned and constantly moving way. Perhaps it is as much a question of personal itinerary as of personal identity. To that end, we are all intrepid sensorium-saturated organisms, absorbing everything outside of ourselves through those small submarine-windows of perception with which nature has endowed us. It is only natural that such complex apertures be appreciated as partially self-invented repositories of information, meaning and imagination, none of which can ever be accurately measured without reducing them to incomplete caricatures of their natural grandeur. That grandeur must be respected through the acknowledgement of its natural and immeasurable proportions.

JZRothstein (final edit) 1/6/2014