[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
any sanity left; experience appears to suggest that, deprived
of a meaningful environment and relationships what we call
sanity, a sense of reality or orientation, becomes tenuous;
that is why Tarzan, at least initially, was more like an ape than
a human, until he returned to the human environment and
its network of relationships if we are to believe Edgar Rice
Burroughs.)
Identity inheres primarily not in some intrinsic essence, but
in relationships; it is, to use a term popular today, a product,
an outcome, a result of relationships. As Noelle McAfee has
suggested in her concept of relational subjectivity, even
individual identity presupposes a one-among-others, in effect
a community. Identity is a bit like a hologram, like those
ghosts in Disneyland s Haunted House that dance around you
and even sit on your lap. A hologram is itself empty ; it is
a creation of the light refracted from the original object but
only when this light is interfered with by another beam. It is the
interference between the two beams that produces the image.
Identity gets richer, more dense, the more relationships there
are, the more salient distinctions (in terms of similarities and
contrasts) can be drawn, the denser the network of affiliations,
disaffiliations, positions, and, what often follows, attendant
attitudes and actions. Identity is not just something one
41
has or assumes, but also something one lives or acts out.
I do not have children. Thus daddy is not part of my identity.
I do not get to act as a daddy, but to that extent I am, no doubt,
in some way poorer in my identity. Had I no friends, no
parents, no pets, no ties of any kind, I would be poorer still.
The simple fact is that, as Anthony Cohen has suggested, one
simply needs others similar enough in some relevant respect
and different in other respects for identity to arise as a useful
relevant notion at all. Since the relations that help constitute an
identity change (nothing stands still for long), identity is both
contingent and a process; it is always in the making.
Identity as Imagined. Since identity appears not to inhere
in any underlying essence, it is thus made or, as we like to
say these days, constructed. This construction is predicated
on identification a process that is both psychological and
rhetorical. As Ernesto Laclau notes, for lack of any defining
given content identity is created through identifying with
something ( Introduction 3); this identification is largely
a function of rhetorically induced relationships, that is,
adherences constituted through acts of imagination (Burke,
Rhetoric 20 22). While it may be argued that a family is
founded on some biological foundation of kinship, my sense
of being American is founded rather on an interpretation of
what it means to be American and on my identification with
others who fit that interpretation, as well as, perhaps primarily,
with a set of symbols and values presumably embodied in them
that constitute Americanness.
In his seminal book Imagined Communities, Benedict Ander-
son argued that a nation is an imagined political community
because members of even the smallest nation will never know
most of their fellow members, meet them or even hear of them,
yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion
(6, emphasis added). Communities, Anderson suggested,
inhere largely in a state of consciousness, a sense of horizontal
42
comradeship, a temporal simultaneity existing in and moving
through history. As a state of consciousness, the modern
national community is qualitatively different from religious
or dynastic communities, which relied on entirely different
sorts of relationships and affiliations (7). In fact, Anderson
claimed that all communities larger than primordial villages
of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined;
communities, he suggests, are to be distinguished, not by
their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are
imagined (6).
In his study of the Palestinian diaspora identity, Glenn
Bowman has argued that all communities and nations are
countries of words. All ideas of community, Bowman argues,
are imaginary constructions . . . All communities are countries
of words in so far as the rituals of inscribing borders, picturing
territories and populations, and thematizing issues salient to
those terrains and the communities believed to occupy them
occur within discourse . . . . the community is not a thing in itself
but a way of speaking, and thinking, about others who are like
us. People create communities rhetorically through thinking that
some people are like themselves while others are unlike them.
In this respect, demographic contiguity is only one element
among many that can be drawn upon in stressing similitude and
difference. (140)
In rhetorical terms, identification (and thus identity con-
struction) involves both identification (or what Kenneth Burke
calls consubstantiality ) and division (Rhetoric 20 21).
Identity as Symbolic. British anthropologist Anthony Cohen [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
zanotowane.pl doc.pisz.pl pdf.pisz.pl chiara76.opx.pl
any sanity left; experience appears to suggest that, deprived
of a meaningful environment and relationships what we call
sanity, a sense of reality or orientation, becomes tenuous;
that is why Tarzan, at least initially, was more like an ape than
a human, until he returned to the human environment and
its network of relationships if we are to believe Edgar Rice
Burroughs.)
Identity inheres primarily not in some intrinsic essence, but
in relationships; it is, to use a term popular today, a product,
an outcome, a result of relationships. As Noelle McAfee has
suggested in her concept of relational subjectivity, even
individual identity presupposes a one-among-others, in effect
a community. Identity is a bit like a hologram, like those
ghosts in Disneyland s Haunted House that dance around you
and even sit on your lap. A hologram is itself empty ; it is
a creation of the light refracted from the original object but
only when this light is interfered with by another beam. It is the
interference between the two beams that produces the image.
Identity gets richer, more dense, the more relationships there
are, the more salient distinctions (in terms of similarities and
contrasts) can be drawn, the denser the network of affiliations,
disaffiliations, positions, and, what often follows, attendant
attitudes and actions. Identity is not just something one
41
has or assumes, but also something one lives or acts out.
I do not have children. Thus daddy is not part of my identity.
I do not get to act as a daddy, but to that extent I am, no doubt,
in some way poorer in my identity. Had I no friends, no
parents, no pets, no ties of any kind, I would be poorer still.
The simple fact is that, as Anthony Cohen has suggested, one
simply needs others similar enough in some relevant respect
and different in other respects for identity to arise as a useful
relevant notion at all. Since the relations that help constitute an
identity change (nothing stands still for long), identity is both
contingent and a process; it is always in the making.
Identity as Imagined. Since identity appears not to inhere
in any underlying essence, it is thus made or, as we like to
say these days, constructed. This construction is predicated
on identification a process that is both psychological and
rhetorical. As Ernesto Laclau notes, for lack of any defining
given content identity is created through identifying with
something ( Introduction 3); this identification is largely
a function of rhetorically induced relationships, that is,
adherences constituted through acts of imagination (Burke,
Rhetoric 20 22). While it may be argued that a family is
founded on some biological foundation of kinship, my sense
of being American is founded rather on an interpretation of
what it means to be American and on my identification with
others who fit that interpretation, as well as, perhaps primarily,
with a set of symbols and values presumably embodied in them
that constitute Americanness.
In his seminal book Imagined Communities, Benedict Ander-
son argued that a nation is an imagined political community
because members of even the smallest nation will never know
most of their fellow members, meet them or even hear of them,
yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion
(6, emphasis added). Communities, Anderson suggested,
inhere largely in a state of consciousness, a sense of horizontal
42
comradeship, a temporal simultaneity existing in and moving
through history. As a state of consciousness, the modern
national community is qualitatively different from religious
or dynastic communities, which relied on entirely different
sorts of relationships and affiliations (7). In fact, Anderson
claimed that all communities larger than primordial villages
of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined;
communities, he suggests, are to be distinguished, not by
their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are
imagined (6).
In his study of the Palestinian diaspora identity, Glenn
Bowman has argued that all communities and nations are
countries of words. All ideas of community, Bowman argues,
are imaginary constructions . . . All communities are countries
of words in so far as the rituals of inscribing borders, picturing
territories and populations, and thematizing issues salient to
those terrains and the communities believed to occupy them
occur within discourse . . . . the community is not a thing in itself
but a way of speaking, and thinking, about others who are like
us. People create communities rhetorically through thinking that
some people are like themselves while others are unlike them.
In this respect, demographic contiguity is only one element
among many that can be drawn upon in stressing similitude and
difference. (140)
In rhetorical terms, identification (and thus identity con-
struction) involves both identification (or what Kenneth Burke
calls consubstantiality ) and division (Rhetoric 20 21).
Identity as Symbolic. British anthropologist Anthony Cohen [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]