To render identity consumable

How a (possibly) honest impulse becomes a managerial exercise

What is identity really? The question is surely important given how much conflict is fostered for its sake. The word identity refers to the fact of being who or what or how a person or thing is. It’s personal identity that is my main focus here, though, not the identity of non-human things. Identity is a person’s unique existence and presence. This unique being must naturally transcend any specific presentation or representation or performance of its being.

We recognize a person’s identity via difference—through his being different from other things and the consciousness that perceives him. His identity also manifests itself through the differences contained within himself. A person is shown through the parts of himself, certainly; and yet he is always more than the mere accumulation of those parts. If anyone comes along and tells me that identity is a construction, that word construction tells me that the picture they’re starting with is not that of an ontological or essential unity but the more scientific or perhaps architectural picture. They’ve conceptualised identity as built up out of fragments. To be clear, I reject the idea that identity is a construction, although people certainly have ideas and abstractions and representations of identity that are constructed. If anything identity is what questions, and sometimes destroys, constructions.

Still, if you want to know how to disenchant the world, and especially how to disenchant the miracle of identity itself, all you have to do is take the ‘constructed’ view as the only thing of any ontological significance. Another way to disenchant the world is to take that further; take a component part or some component parts of that identity and render it or them equal to the whole or even more significant than the whole. I’m not recommending this, by the way. I’m just pointing out how this happens.

Identity always involves a return to itself—to its own unique being. Identity is a repetition of sorts, although, as I’ve already hinted, this repetition tends to involve and include elements of difference—differential elements. Identity, as this should show, is a temporal and perceptual phenomenon. For example, one daisy is like another, but there is no mechanical precision in that daisy’s likeness to another daisy. One daisy looks like another daisy but it is most decidedly not that other daisy. I am like my past self. And yet, at the level of cells and thoughts and several other things, I am not an exact copy of my past self. And so identity involves both repetition and difference.

Put differently, identity includes non-identity without being totally destabilised as identity. This is because, as Heraclitus observed, everything flows. Identity is far more organic than is typically noticed. However, this is not to say that it is merely ‘fluid’—that designation is a mere theoretical trick. Yes, everything flows. But, to risk misusing Heidegger’s notion, everything also things. In every moment, there is enough stillness that we can discern something—or, more importantly, someone—stable. Heraclitus knew this. The minute we refuse to acknowledge continuity in identity, we annihilate the possibility of thought itself. There is continuity, and it is this continuity—and especially this continuity in the manifestation of identity—that we must take seriously, but never at the expense of the inherent depth of identity itself.

I’m reminded of a strange moment a few years ago when one of my students saw me in a mall corridor as I was about to walk past her. The look on her face was one of complete surprise—almost horror. This surprised me, too, although I was more amused than horrified. I casually said hello and she responded with a nervous greeting—as if she’d seen a ghost. I saw the same student the following day and asked her why she had looked so nervous. Her honest answer was that she didn’t actually imagine that I went anywhere. I was her professor and nothing more. I joked that it is usually the case that when professors stop giving classes, they dissolve into thin air only to reappear when required the next day. We laughed together about this and quite a few of her classmates admitted that they, too, gave very little thought to what their professors did outside of work. Interesting, isn’t it, how thoughtlessness can often be more fundamental to how we interpret people than thought itself? It is when thoughtlessness fails that we begin to allow identities to be themselves. In a way, thoughtlessness—or perhaps the unthought and unarticulated—is a condition for the manifestation of real identity.

This example is quite instructive. At that moment in the shopping mall, the student, who I will give the pseudonym Maria, recognised me. She had identified me correctly. I was, right before her eyes, the fact of being me. I was myself and, mercifully, both of us knew it. However, at the same time, in that moment of recognition, Maria was confronted with the fact that she had, in her classes with me, misidentified me as some sort of strange being who only exists during work hours and not afterwards. This misidentification had been corrected after a moment of cognitive dissonance.

In a way, this is just an exaggerated case of what we all experience in identifying anyone, especially as we deepen our understanding of them. When we’re right, we identify someone as that specific someone. They are recognisable as themselves and not as someone else. At the same time, our identification of that someone always carries with it the possibility, if not the actuality, of misidentification. Such a misidentification must be there, in a sense, since it is what opens up the possibility that we may discover yet more about them. Such is the delight of any relationship. In relating to each other, we are in a position to behold the continuous and manifold disclosures of their specific identity. The fact that identity is a phenomenon and is therefore bound up in perception means that we can and do allow identity to recede and show itself. I experience this often as those I love are made manifest in a renewed way as the wonders they themselves are. At the heart of this is an experience of self-denial or perhaps self-constraint. I did not make them. They transcend me. Any possibility of solipsism is overthrown.

Naturally, we bring all sorts of assumptions to our encounters and can even mistake those assumptions for what we encounter. What appears doesn’t tell the whole story, although only occasionally do we get confronted with this fact. Phenomenologists and contemplatives alike attempt to suspend identity, judgments and mental representations included. They suspend their assumptions about who someone is thought to be for the sake of encountering them anew in their fullness. To suspend identity in this way is one way to reclaim a sense of how our ignorance is never completely dispelled by any particular encounter. Sometimes our ignorance is a gift to embrace in the encounter: I do not know something about this or that person—but I recognise them as a person. Metaphysical and ethical universals—“Thou shalt not kill” or “Love thy neighbour as thyself” and so on—therefore apply.

As this shows, another way to think about the presence of misidentification within identity is that all identification includes concealments—but not just concealments. The being of this or that specific identity is never revealed to us except as that which also always hides. I think of that marvellous moment in Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday (1907), when Gabriel Syme calls out: 

“Listen to me … Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of the world. We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal. That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud. Cannot you see that everything is stooping and hiding a face? If we could only get round in front—”

Of course, if we ever did “get round in front” we would be faced with more hiddenness. The revealing doesn’t mean only more disclosure only but also more mystery, and therefore also a further invitation to go deeper. Identity is therefore not a mere surface—like a photographic image or a label—that asks us to reflect it back to itself. Identity is an invitation, not narcissification, not ossification, and not reification. I was reminded of this in my conversation with Maria. She had discovered that I did in fact exist outside the classroom. Whatever fixed image she had of me as ‘just a professor’ had to go. But this only raised more questions about me for her. I was a far stranger being than she had initially imagined. I was strangely normal, for starters, but that only confronted her with more possibilities. So, yes, something was revealed; but all that proved was that the story had just begun.

I think this exposes something vital about identity that goes not only unacknowledged but is actively resisted in something like identity politics, which seems to me to follow the strictest rules of univocal materialisation and violent hermeneutics: even if everything is not as it seems, for the identitarian, everything is what you say it is. Against this, mystery founds identity. Identity, in other words, is naturally geared towards inviting us beyond immediacy into the anti-environment that grounds it. The greater the revelations, the deeper the mystery. This is why the most interesting people are the most interested people. Their concern is not themselves but their worlds; they recognise, as everyone should, their fundamental enworldedness. Their focus is on sharing in being, not the insanity of demanding a specific mode of recognition that denies their actual identities.

This is why, as I have discovered, the better I come to understand people, the less comfortable I am with viewing them as reducible to their biographies and labels and pronouns. This is particularly pertinently shown in grief. The pain of losing someone is at least partly owed to the fact that the loss is real; their identity was in them, not in anything we think or say or thought or said about them. We can try to ‘sum up’ or recapitulate their lives in eulogies and conversations, and this is a kind of resurrection—a recognition of the profound reality beyond our words. This is why so many eulogies tend to revolve around giving the lost loved one back to God: this is an act of re-grounding identity (the whole life of the person) in Transcendent Otherness or giving the gift back to the Giver. Such a thought is echoed in Christ’s words that to find your life you must lose it. To find anyone’s life, you may need to lose them. Identity is not found in clinging to identity. Rather, clinging to identity is what ensures its obliteration.

Even where the lives of those we grieve can still be disclosed, what remains is this (absent) sense of the glory of a person’s life—glorious precisely because it is mysterious in its very essence. The eulogy beautifully, if painfully, accepts that loss is an inescapable part of the act of identifying but this is not to say that this only applies to those who have died. Loss is an inescapable part of every true act of identifying. We ‘name’ the lost, and we ought to be confronted in that naming with how identity transcends naming.

This is not to say that we cannot know and recognise what identity is. In fact, the more we step into the mystery, the more we know it—and the more likely we are not to mistake it for something it is not. I recognise things and people easily, just as you do, but my comprehension of them is intertwined with perplexity. Identity does not annihilate that perplexity but is that perplexity. Wonder remains the beginning of philosophy and wisdom knows to return to that place of wonder—and wondering. Wonder cannot ever really be done away with, after all, although it can be and often is ignored or forgotten. It remains no matter how much intellectual effort we apply to our knowing. Often our perplexity expands as we give more attention to what we are trying to understand. There is always more mystery than certainty.

Two dangers are found here, though. The first is to confuse our inability to articulate identity perfectly with the idea that there is no identity. We don’t have to consign everything to the category of the unknowable even if there are so many unknowables. In reality, what we often call the unknowable is simply the irreducible. It’s helpful to keep in mind how mystics talk about the false self and the true self. Part of the discovery of the true self—in the so-called second half of life—is the discovery of this irreducibility. This is not, however, the discovery that now boundaries and limits are irrelevant. The discovery of the true self is not equal to becoming an unhelpfully fuzzy thinker.

The second danger, which is opposite to the first and also happens to be the more common one in the barren and barely inhabitable land of identity politics, is to confuse static categorisations (or sociological designations or bureaucratic insistences, etc) with identity itself. Imagine that Maria, from my example earlier, had seen me in a mall and then simply denied that I could be one and the same person as the guy who showed up in her class to teach her. Of course, other possibilities were open to her. Maybe she could really have mistaken someone else for me. For instance, I may have had a twin brother or a lookalike, or maybe Maria’s eyes needed testing. Perhaps she was no longer who she was and was only, at that moment, doing an imitation of a former self.

What is more likely though is that there was, as there always is, a necessary and inescapable, although somewhat bridgeable, gap between identity and recognition. And yet there is a trend these days—in both academic discourse and popular discussion—to conflate identity and recognition, and to conflate identity and representation. Naming stops being like eulogising and turns into a kind of murder or suicide. What is the endgame of such a procedure? Put differently, where does this lead? It seems to me that the chief aim is to maintain the illusion of narrative homogeneity or narrative conformity. This provides a false but partially effective sense of stability in a complex and uncertain world. It’s the same aim present in the managerial stance that refuses to accept anything but the most basic formulation of an issue. Why is narrative homogeneity so important? Existentially, this can manufacture a sense of belonging, a sense of empowerment, a sense of meaning—if only very superficially and temporarily. Generally speaking, shallow people and those fond of hubristic self-assertion find this kind of affirmation sufficient. The trouble: this occludes and even annihilates real identity. Identity is lost in the name of identity.

In any case, existential reasons are not the only or even main ones in play. The more likely result of all this univocalising is to fit in with the terms of the managerial revolution that happened ages ago, the results of which we are now living with. As narrative-confirming representations obliterate identity, real people get viewed through codes and pixels and algorithms and bureaucratic practices. People start to resemble data. And what’s worse is that they start to view themselves through the terms set up by bureaucracies.

One might assume, for argument’s sake, that the shift towards something like identity politics began as an honest impulse to accommodate people from all walks of life, the point of which was to allow their identities to shine forth in their fullness. Whether or not this is true is debatable. Certainly, the result of such an impulse, if it once existed, is precisely the opposite. What is true is that any chance of honesty and authenticity is soon squashed by the managerial impulse to have all the right boxes ticked. Reasons are given: the powermongers don’t want to offend, victimised, marginalise, control, etc, etc. But the real reasons are more insidious. As Nietzsche points out, justice is often thinly disguised revenge; and in the name of so-called equality, envy gets to level the playing field to fit the lowest common denominator. To put the point more plainly: identity politics is nihilism.

In the terms of this all-too-brief discussion of a very large issue, in the name of identity, a name most definitely taken in vain, people enforce the hell of the same. In the name of identity, we get flatlandish mediocrity. The chief function of managerialism is controllability and, especially these days, marketability. What is desired is not identity but consumable identity. The aim is not human flourishing but branding. What is desired is not otherness but consumable otherness. The aim is not to allow reality to manifest itself but to shut reality down in the name of the simulacrum. Genuine otherness—the otherness exemplified by every unique person in their very personhood—is now obsolete. We know this by how quickly bureaucracies and online mobs are to cancel anyone honest enough to point out how the ideological status quo of narrative conformity makes everything worse. As a strategy for making people miserable, it is pretty close to being the best one on the market.