The previous essay explained the foundations of how we think of ‘identity’ in the present, and presented a way to conceptualise a ‘true’ identity. This essay will dive into the contemporary usage of the word ‘identity’ – a usage that often obscures true identity. We will explore why the term is so ambiguous in our society in two ways – by looking at how sub-identities are practically raised to the level of identities and vice versa, and by looking at how ambiguities in language helps this to happen.
In the first essay, we also redefined identity – or rather made its definition fit its historic arc of meaning. This new definition is that your identity is ‘what makes you what you are’. Some would say that identity is rather ‘what/who you are’. But this continually changes, and has little relationship to our experience of our personal identity, that is, our personal sameness; how we know we are ourselves. In the first essay, these observations led to the idea of a ‘true’ human identity as an integrating and unifying force, that can be thought of in a basic way as your consciousness. This is what makes you what you are, and is how you know you are yourself. Meanwhile, sub-identities were defined as those aspects of yourself that are integrated and unified.
It is sub-identities that will be the subject of this essay, but they will be constantly compared to this ‘true’ identity. It should not be thought of as an isolated core or unit inside the body. I am offering ‘consciousness’ as a simple way of thinking about it because it is our consciousness that, in normal life, allows us to know ourselves and integrate reality into our understanding. But consciousness dissolves, in many different ways. The reality behind this true identity, which of course I do not fully understand, will be expanded upon in the third and last essay.
We saw in the first essay how the U.S. was gripped by the idea of a teenage ‘identity crisis’ in the 1950s and 60s. If the beginning of the popularity of the word ‘identity’ was through this idea, the end of its popularity in our time will be through a multiplicity of crises of identity. The mid-20th century identity crisis involved a breakdown in knowing who you are, especially who you are in relation to society. The popular solutions that were found to this problem, however – solutions that were bound up with the technologies of the time – were often just a manifestation of the same problem.
That is, the ‘true self’ that would solve the problem of the breakdown of identity was found precisely in the fragments of the breakdown. For the majority populations of the west, ‘who you are’ had been deconstructed or fractured such that what constituted ‘who you are’ could be separated out, one from the other, creating the various sub-identities that are the focus of so much contemporary discourse. These sub-identities were raised up or focused on as the discovered objects of a ‘real’ identity. Thus personal identity, our ‘true self’, had in popular culture begun to be found through sexuality, through identification with an ethnicity or culture, through an authentic and non-alienated creativity or profession, through an aesthetic or political stance.
At the same time as this was happening, the postmodern and post-structuralist movements questioned the idea of essential or core identity. These two trends, often contradictory, nevertheless manifest themselves in our lives side-by-side. Our identity, whether it is true, illusory, constructed or natural, is broken apart – whether through the economic and social structures of capitalist individualism, or through the loss of our previous integrating social, ideological and spiritual belief systems, or through specific ideological assault, or through systematic oppression and degradation. Then the fragments that this identity held together are raised up as new identities, which are of course even more fragile.
Because in practice sub-identities cannot replace our cohering human identity – they cannot perform the function of organising and cohering our everyday experience, our sense of self and so forth – they are raised up another level above us, as overarching identities. Thus instead of providing us with a coherent sense of ourselves in and through ourselves, sub-identities like skin colour, gender, sexuality, class, become the highest banner, container or guiding principle for 'who we are'. They can provide an 'I am' which is higher than any other, even though they obscure any form of ‘I am’ which approaches truth.
It is against this background that ‘identity politics’, specifically for example the theory of ‘intersectionality’, performs its own focusing and raising of sub-identities. These are thought of as vectors of oppression and inequality, and as the purpose of many political movements is to fight against or eliminate oppression and inequality, so these sub-identities become the focus of identity politics.
That a focusing on, or raising of, sub-identity over identity is a problem should be obvious. The wholeness of a person will tend to be ignored – and everything that is reliant on or derived from this wholeness will thus be neglected – their ethical responsibility, their future potential, their growth and so forth. The tendency to ignore these aspects is certainly present in the amorphous political movements and discourse around identity.
Nevertheless, this criticism is superficial, and misses the point. As we noted at the end of the last essay, the ‘raising’ of sub-identities to identities cannot simply be dismissed as incorrect. This phenomenon happens for real, even justifiable reasons. This essay will look at why and how the ‘raising up’ of sub-identities happen, both historically and in our contemporary language.
The first way is that the sub-identity is focused on from the outside, by the rest of society, such that the person must live 'under' it. One example is the Black experience in the Caribbean and U.S.
Black identity
An account of how a Black identity grows from this experience might be as follows. This account is limited to the 18th-20th centuries, ending in say the 1970s, and does not in any way exhaust Black experience or limit it. It is a brief sketch of how a sub-identity can become a higher identity.
Let’s imagine an individual on the west coast of central Africa in the 18th century. His identity is his integrating consciousness, but this will be in an intimate relationship with other, higher, identities. These would be his family/ancestors, tribe, village, or religious/philosophical system (remembering that these would themselves blend into each other; their separation is a modern heuristic). His sub-identities are all the parts that make up himself, including things that are at this time mostly meaningless or arbitrary, like skin colour or eye colour. Skin colour is thus a sub-identity, but is not significant or salient. ‘Black’ is not a sub-identity or identity at all at this point in time.
This individual, like the famous account of Olaudah Equiano1, is kidnapped by a roaming group of west African slavers or chancers who are passing through his village. In time he is taken from the often quite mild slavery systems of west Africa, into the horrific experiences of institutionalised transatlantic slavery. Through these experiences this individual loses the connection to his social higher identities quickly, due to being separated from cultural and social structures. Sometimes perhaps higher identities survived for a while, as in the case for instance of Ashanti rebel groups in Jamaica. But in this case, as in the majority of others, it is traumatically destroyed within a relatively short time.
Through the course of this person’s institutionalised slavery, various grave crimes required his dehumanisation. Skin colour had become a way of differentiating between different peoples, that could specifically separate the enslaved from the slavers. Skin colour or hair colour has often played a part in differentiation between groups, but in this case the differentiation was bound up with the institution of slavery itself. Ideology based around skin colour (i.e. a form of racism), justified the oppression. Thus skin colour, infused with negative creations and projections, became the most important way of referring to the oppressed people as a group – and also often the oppressors. This is the creation of the modern idea of the 'black and white races'.
Once these are created, skin colour becomes a 'mark' through which somebody is 'fixed' into place – when an individual sees another with dark skin, they are designated as a ‘Black person’, and because of this designation, this individual makes certain assumptions, has certain reactions, etc.
At first, within the midst of the horrors of slavery, and deprived of the higher identities of their ancestral culture, many people must simply 'go along' with this racist structure, and live within it. For this person, 'the Black race' might be a type of higher identity, equivalent to a tribe, but a 'negative' or 'cursed' tribe – Erikson uses the term ‘anti-identity’. Of course many lived through this while maintaining various forms of the imperishable inner light, while others simply rebelled and faced death. Christianity was offered as a higher identity, but one that was difficult to fully embrace, due to the hypocrisy of the ‘Christians’ who had enslaved you.
After slavery ends, in the face of an equality that is theoretical, possible, and yet also practically impossible, the people experience various new forms of oppression. But parallel to this they experience new forms of seeing 'who they are' – Franz Fanon in 'Black Skin, White Masks' describes how the ‘person of colour’ (a phrase Fanon uses to ‘neutrally’ indicate those who are judged according to colour, while keeping the name ‘Black’ or ‘Negro’ separate – the term was taken up in U.S race theory and activism largely due to Fanon’s use) in the post-slavery colonial state sees himself in relation to the white man, desires what he has, in certain ways desires to become him and/or vanquish him. But in the social context which 'grants' at least a little freedom, he is also able to start a
“passionate research … directed by the secret hope of discovering beyond the misery of today, beyond self-contempt, resignation and abjuration, some very beautiful and splendid era whose existence rehabilitates us both in regard to ourselves and in regard to others.”2
Thus, to discover their higher (ancestral/national) identity. By this stage the position which the people hold in society means that they are not only marked as 'black' from the outside – it is often in their interest to 'identify' as Black, to embrace this as an 'I am'. This is important because this sub-identity is 'marked' or 'pressed' from the outside already, and thus is a part of social life. But at the same time the lack of an overarching identity, due to being alienated from the available 'American', ‘French’, ‘British’, ‘Caribbean’, and maybe Christian identities, means it is necessary to create one, a part of this as Fanon says being 'rehabilitated to ourselves and others'. The overarching identity, actively created, is the 'creation of the people' or naming of the people. This could be Black nationalism, but much more frequently it will be a vaguer idea of blackness, the Black people, as an overarching and unifying name.
Thus we have a part of the story of Black identity through the 20th century; a dialectical struggle (i.e. two different trends or drives that negate or are in conflict with each other) between the escape from a sub-identity that is pressed on to the people, towards the creation of an identity which is necessary for the health of the group. But because the idea of the group is informed by the mark, the creation of the latter must involve the return of the significance of the 'mark' of the former, that is, skin colour – the necessity of the creation springs from this mark, and requires its redeployment.
We should say as an aside that many of the great thinkers and writers of Black identity in the 20th century were aware of and underlined this contradictory condition – and thus that the tension between the two has always been a conscious part of the movement, at least at the highest levels. Again Fanon:
“Without a Negro past, without a Negro future, it was impossible for me to live my Negrohood.”
“The Negro is not. Any more than the white man. .. Both must turn their backs on the inhuman voices which were those of their respective ancestors in order that authentic communication be possible.”3
Higher identity becoming sub-identity
But sub-identity can also be raised to an overarching identity without significant pressure from the outside. This can happen because there is a void to fill, a lack of a suitable higher identity. Again keeping our attention on the 20th century, and following on from the discussion of Black identity – a 'White identity', at least in Europe, is an example of this second type of transformation. Often of course on the modern individual there will be a combination of these two influences – a certain amount of external pressure that reifies a sub-identity, combined with the need to fill a void that should be providing purpose and direction; an identity above them.
It should be clear that some Black people might feel alienated from a higher British or U.S. identity, but for the majority populations of the West it often seems that the higher identities available to them have either lost their power and efficacy, or don’t seem available, or are in the process of being ‘brought down’ by themselves or others.
We think of things being brought down as being destroyed, but in this case higher identities that are ‘brought down’ can instead become sub-identities. Someone might lose, or never have, a belief in or participation with for instance a higher British identity, and yet still maintain a stamp, i.e. a passport or a legal status, which marks them as 'having' that identity. Somebody might 'nominally be a Christian' while living within an entirely materialist worldview, i.e. while not being within the higher identity of 'Christian' at all. Tribal identification, where the name of the tribe survives but the ordering structure of the tribe’s culture is functionally dead, also fits this pattern.
Thus the raising of sub-identity is mirrored by a lowering of higher identities. The two should be thought of as bound together, each effecting the other – another dialectical relationship similar to that already mentioned, between the sub-identity ‘black’ and the higher identity ‘Black’. Such a dialectical relationship of course does not result in stability – the two sets of identities are not simply going to switch and remain where they are. As we have remarked, the raised sub-identities have little ability to perform the functions of identities. Thus the picture would seem, on the face of it, to be chaotic – a continual revolution or turning of identity. In the third essay, we will try to make some sense of this situation.
And of course higher national identities can still be very powerful. As this is being written during the outbreak of the conflict in the Ukraine, we should note that national or ethnic identity is absolutely critical to the situation there. The Ukrainian and Russian national/ethnic identities appear to be the main cause, battleground and object of the conflict, and will remain so long after the military battles have ceased. This dramatic importance does not reflect a ‘truth’ of a Ukrainian or Russian personal identity, rather the conflict is between two higher, overarching, cohering identities that individuals can live under or through. One can change their attachment or loyalty to, or identification with one of these identities. People who strongly identify with such overarching identities might be offended at this suggestion – they might see themselves as unalterably Ukrainian, or British ‘til they die – but it’s precisely because such things can change that loyalty to them has such meaning. If the belonging to these things were such an innate property, it could never be taken away from them – as the Ukrainian identity might ultimately be.
Sub-identity becoming identity through language use
The impetus to fill a void in which higher identity should be is empowered by the ambiguous position that the word ‘identity’ holds in our language. The following section will look at how the ways in which we use the word continually brings us to think of sub-identities as ‘identities’, and thus as if they represent our true self. This will be intertwined with a reminder of why this usage is always missing something.
As with the popular creation of identity, or transformation of sub-identity into identity above, we are not criticising the different language uses as ‘wrong’. Words always have ambiguity to them. How the word ‘identity’ is used will inevitably change however, and perhaps we can help it change in a helpful direction.
As people have absorbed the popular meaning of ‘identity’ post-Erikson, they have naturally tended to see their ‘persona’ or their social identity as ‘their identity’ – this is generally how Erikson used the word, after all. The idea of ‘an identity’ then takes on the flexible characteristics of the persona: it is something you can construct, something you can hide behind, something you can shelter under. ‘An identity’ becomes something as strategic and fakeable as an ID card – another ‘identity’ which clearly has little to do with the reality of your whole self. An online identity or profile is quite a pure example of this idea.
This conception of identity is powerful because it does echo what we have acknowledged higher identities as doing – just as a man in 1960s America might shelter and organise himself under a constructed higher identity of ‘Black’, so might I shelter and organise myself under the ‘identity’ of my persona – whether that is my profession, or my role as ‘father’, or my online profiles, etc.
We should remember that these public identities are just as real, and also just as fake, as for instance a corporate identity. A ‘corporate identity’ is how the corporation is seen by the rest of the world – a combination of its logo, icons, slogans, products, advertising strategies, name, etc. Corporate identities are constructed very carefully, and are critical to the success of the business. But these identities do not reflect what the business ‘really’ is – think of the way that Amazon will be seen by one of its workers, or by its leadership. The worker will see a hidden side to Amazon – part of its internal organisation, its internal workings, norms, practices. Leaders within Amazon can see even more of it – its supply chains snaking across the country, its huge volume of products, the massive amounts of money passing through it. Beyond these appearances, what makes Amazon what it is, i.e. its true identity, would be the ideas and actions that created it, plus its current organisational rules, principles and practices.
The problem isn’t the importance of the public identity for either the corporation or the person (it is important) – the problem is that we are letting this use of the word ‘identity’ obscure its true meaning, its reference to what a thing is; or in the human world, that which makes a thing what it is.
These mobile, mask or profile-like identities reflect something of the first OED definition, “The fact of being who or what a person or thing is”. This type of identity is a product of human knowledge about somebody or something – a proof that something is what it is. Thus your ‘profile’ or various potential categories like profession, skin colour and sexuality might be thought of as ‘identities’ because they are used in a very superficial way to ‘identify’ someone. Perhaps our institutions are moving increasingly towards categorising and ‘identifying’ people through their politically significant sub-categories or their profiles, but at the moment this trend is nothing compared with the ‘real’ methods of state and institutional identification – assigned numbers, codes, documents, DNA sequences, fingerprints and so forth.
With the dictionary in mind, we can see that one could simply use the word ‘identity’ in line with the OED second definition, “characteristics that make a person who they are”. Again we should consider how much sense this makes to people. Some sub-identities are clearly very important to how we exist in the world. Our sex, the bimodal difference in bodies that relate to how we generate new life, is the prime example. We saw above how apparently meaningless characteristics, e.g. skin colour, can become important due to social construction or context. Sex differences exist pre-social construction, and so they are a necessary condition that will play a part in our lives (while ‘race’ can be a constructed or imposed condition).
But the nature of our true identity means that we can be free from the determination which our sex would impose on our identity if it were ‘just’ the unity of the body. Our bodies are sexed, but our cohering power of identity, our unifying consciousness, allows us to be ‘free’ of sex’s determining power. If we interpret this freedom in one way, we could see it as allowing us free choice and total power over our bodies. The alternative is to view ‘freedom’ from such a powerful determining force as an extremely difficult path, undesirable for most. Rather than a simple matter of choice, it is more likely to be a matter of serious practice, for instance the way of the monk or ascetic.
Skin colour and ancestry are also easily considered as “characteristics that make a person who they are”, and also as things that don’t change, thus an identity, a sameness. My skin colour affects my life and how people treat me, thus it is an identity, something that makes me what I am. My ancestry will not change – my ancestry clearly remains the same from one moment to the next, thus it is an identity. My ancestry affects my life and who I am, so it is an identity.
While some of this is contextually true, effective human identity always transcends these aspects. One may be a Black man in Britain, and this may be politically important or even a politically uniting name, but if that man goes to Africa this aspect of him will almost certainly change or seem to change. His skin colour remains the same, but its name or how it is perceived will change. How will ‘Black’ be an integrating identity in Africa, when the people there do not perceive themselves as all being the same colour, nor act in a unified way even within ethnic groups? Even if this man remains in Europe for his whole life, knowing that he is ultimately not bound or determined by his skin colour will be an essential realisation.
Ancestry is a different matter. On the one hand it is even more changeable – not the fact of ancestry, our real ancestors and the seed which was passed on by them – but the interpretation or naming of that ancestry. One who names his identity as Afro-Caribbean could do some reading and instead decide that it is more meaningfully described as West African. Or similarly decide that it is more accurately described as Bantu, or Ashanti. Or suddenly find out that ‘in fact’ 10% of his genetic code is European in origin, and so forth. Or decide that the inheritance and meaning of our ancestors cannot be described by ethnic names, but by something else entirely.
But this is an extremely modern account of ancestry. We should recognise that that which ‘comes to us through our father and mother’ would have, in the past, constituted almost the whole of a person’s identity. This inheritance parallels the duality of higher identity and sub-identity which we have continually returned to. Thus we inherit most of our physical characteristics from our ancestors, which are sub-identities, but we also inherit, or are given, higher identities by them. They give us a name – a short name which refers to the wholeness of our identity, but also, for the majority of human history, a longer name which tells the story of who we are, through the story of who they and their ancestors were. The identity of a tribe would be very similar to the totality of this story.
Thus Treebeard’s name, in Lord of the Rings, is the same as his story, and is continually growing:
“I am not going to tell you my name, not yet at any rate… For one thing it would take a long while: my name is growing all the time, and I’ve lived a very long, long time; so my name is like a story. Real names tell you the story of the things they belong to in my language”4
Stories should certainly be at the forefront of our minds when thinking of identity – the individual’s identity, which is the cohering, bringing-together consciousness, will often take the form of narrative. In the past, the individual’s story might be thought of as the continuation of their ancestors’ story, or father’s and mother’s story – not understandable or meaningful, or capable of giving identity, without what had gone on before them.
In the contemporary world, we can still see how powerful this form of higher identity is – how people can be driven for their whole lives to find out who their father or mother was, if they did not know them (this is the story of Dean Moriarty in ‘On the Road’) – or be haunted by ‘who my father really was’ if this is different to who they thought he was. This was, incidentally, a driving force for Erik Erikson – he found out when a teenager that the person who he believed his father had been, was in fact not his real father. This made him question who he was, and contributed to his focus on, and reinvention of, ‘identity’.
In cases like these the connection with the higher identity of the parent or parents has been broken completely. But although most people have not experienced this complete break with the identity of their ancestors, a general breaking of this form of identity has been going on for a long time. Thus our higher identity is no longer chiefly provided by our immediate ancestors and family, or the story of our tribe, but through various other means. After this ancestral story ceases to become inextricable from your integrating consciousness, it becomes a sub-identity.
From a Christian perspective, this was probably necessary – or rather, perhaps Christian culture has caused this break in ancestral culture over the centuries. This must be one of the meanings of Christ’s difficult saying, that one who does not hate their father and mother cannot follow him – because identity must be found in and through him. But this will be covered in the 3rd essay.
Let’s illustrate some of what we’ve discussed through a contemporary example, that I at least would have found ambiguous or confusing. British politician David Lammy was quoted by the Independent, "I want my identities recognised appropriately ... I'm of African descent, African-Caribbean descent but I am English."5 Lammy’s reference to multiple ‘identities’ seems problematic when we have the old ‘common sense’ assumption that your identity is just who you are. To some it might echo the meme of the proliferation of gender identities, etc.
This essay should show us how much sense Lammy is actually making. These ‘identities’ could be parts of Lammy that contribute to ‘who he is’, either as internal influences or ‘marks’/ ‘stamps’ that have some political or social significance. They could also be overarching identities that he lives within, or underneath. These possibilities are not cleanly distinguishable, and reflect the dialectic I mention above. The point is that he is supported in using ‘identity’ in this way by many different aspects of how the word is used in contemporary language.
Lammy was responding to a woman who said that he couldn’t be Afro-Caribbean and English at the same time – if we’re generous to her, we could take this as saying that you cannot live within two overarching identities at once, which makes at least some sense. If either English or Afro-Caribbean were truly all-encompassing higher identities, and combined meaning with the practical ordering of life, this might be true. But they are not, and the ambiguity between the sub-identity and the higher identity in combination with this fact means that we can see the sense in Lammy’s statement.
Of course what we have also tried to do in this essay is to see past these ‘identities’, and see how their naming as such, however understandable, distracts and even detracts from that which enables Lammy to speak of them, to integrate their meaning into himself, and to maintain and be himself – that is, his true identity.
Closing
Throughout this essay, I think we have managed to illustrate the confusion around the word identity, yet also break through that confusion to an extent. Ambiguity in language is never going away, and a cleaner understanding of the word does not eliminate it. But the definition of identity that I have provided allows us to orientate the ambiguity, and to remember that which is most important, through everything – to remember our true identity through everything that obscures it.
We should remember that, as I touched upon in the first essay, the usage of ‘identity’ in modern times is a popular phenomenon, and the word was seized from the hands of logicians and analytic philosophers. Thus the people took the word, fuelled initially by a kind of social justice, but quickly raised it even higher and perceived that it could refer to the most profound and mysterious of concepts and entities. Their usage unveiled a thread of meaning which had always been associated with the word ‘identity’, and had been touched upon by various philosophers, but only found true life through modern popular discourse.
This is a triumph of intuitive popular culture. However, the danger in such free experimentation is now becoming clear, and the word is becoming hated in all of its ambiguity and flexibility. This hatred is linked to the sense of confusion, the sense of being lost, and most importantly the cultural conflict that surrounds all of these feelings and all of the topics we have touched upon.
The thread of meaning that was discovered is that identities cohere and order that which is below them, into wholes. But this was only ever implicit in the popular usage, and thus people have forgotten the true identity behind, and above, the temporary ones, the masks, our physical properties, our desires. Our personal higher identity is obscured by these sub-identities – which are not problems in themselves, only becoming so when they distract us from our true self. Meanwhile the higher identities that are external to us – nations, corporations, and potentially ideologies and new religions – can be apprehended by this new meaning of identity. This is of vital importance, as they wither, or grow and mutate, around us at a shocking rate and scale.
It is these two things that we will be exploring in the next essay in this series – the nature of this true personal identity, and how to make sense of the higher identities that surround us.
Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, 1989
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, Grove Press, 1963, p.210
Franz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, Pluto Press, 2008, p.106 & p.180
J. R. R. Tolkien, The Two Towers
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/david-lammy-lbc-african-caribbean-english-b1824029.html