Harnessing Natural Energy - The Question of Identity

"Romantic Concept of Identity"


"Life is a theatre, self is ‘a multi-sided die,’ enacting its many roles through impression and expression management, and dramatic realisation. Success requires, 'belief' in the part one is playing." The idea of performative quality of human life is embraced by the inner dynamics of the individual psyche (romanticism) - emotional rather than cognitive - fuelled with the natural energy of love, loyalty, devotion, duty, attachment, and respect that sustain the powerful sense of “belonging“.

For Locke a person is a ‘thinking, intelligent being that has reason and reflection and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing in different times and places, which it does only by that consciousness which is inseparable from thinking, and it seems to me essential to it'(Locke 90).

Our sense of self is a continuous history of my body and consciousness, a sense of continuity. During 1950s with romantic idea of culture as the soul of society, “identity” was linked to popularisation of psychotherapy. For Ericsson identity was the very core of personality. The identity had to be nurtured in its relationship with culture. You had to understand where you belonged to know who you are. Sartre had other concerns with the idea of free rational person reflecting on ones life; he contested the bad faith of taking the identity from the shelf, ready made - of stereotyped group - as he termed the authenticity of identity. Identity notion today is updated as the story or narrative one tells of oneself that make sense - a relation between an individual and something else, a nation or a fault line that distinguishes oneself.

In the sociological traditions of symbolic interactionism and phenomenology, or their contemporary derivative referred to as social constructionism, a sense of self as a human individual cannot develop without social processes. Interactions with others, the symbolic exchanges of gestures and language in which meanings are negotiated and shape the inner dialogue of the self. Social constructionist authors argue that what we feel, as well as what we think about our feelings, how we hold ourselves physically are profoundly influenced by social interaction to the society which we are connected most with the sense of belonging.

Recently there has been the “cultural turn” in describing a shift in explanatory emphasis from the presumed to be determining power of social structures to a claimed diffusion of power in language cultural signifiers and discourse. Recent work has often stressed that individuals have multiple or hybrid identities and even with in one setting may appeal to a range of identities, moreover, it has become common to emphasize the process of making and claiming identities, identities are not attributes that people have or are but resources that people use, something that they do, Stuart Hall (1996).

Other theoretical approaches widely adopted in sociology, acknowledge the possibility of tacit knowledge, things that are learned more by practice and doing than thinking, and are not fully accessible to conscious thought. Many practices of language use and rules of social interaction are unconscious practices that bracket off and take for granted many aspects of both identity and social reality. As humans, we are all born or brought up into social setting where systems of symbolic interaction predate our existence. While language, customs and all humanly constructed systems are only sustained through creative use and are constantly open to change , a sense of their existence as prior to the self can result in them being taken for granted as unchanging frameworks for social interaction. However, unconsciously learned and habitual practices, in theory, always remain open to being brought back into conscious thought and to being recognized as potentially able to be changed. Identities are maintained as well as produced through social interaction, they are always open to challenge and renegotiation in social interaction.

As Goffman 1969, Strauss 1969, and Berger and Luckmann 1966 classically documented, in social interaction humans sometimes consciously and sometimes unconsciously present different faces to others. This can be experienced as deliberately doning a mask or as enjoying or playing up an authentic aspect of the self. The term identities can be used to encompass facets of the self that are only in play in some social contexts and not others. Identities need not be experienced as a constantly defining characteristic of the self, although some identities may be experienced in this way.

Hence, identities are never as profoundly fixed as psychoanalysis suggest. In this respect, some extra weight is placed on the emotional potency of parental or other caring relationships while personal relationships are viewed by social constructionists as more significant for identity than other relationships through out life. For example, a particular weight is given to interactions with ‘significant others’, emotionally important ‘others‘. The enhanced significance of ‘significant others’ is because these are emotionally charged relationships that people care more about than others as well as because they have involved more meaningful social interaction.

With civil right movements of 1965 the identity became political. The revival of ethnicity in post war US were thought of as what label are used to characterize identity. The state was not unitary and was made up of separate cultured groups each of which had their own identities. The key here for identity politics became the question of representation. The term multiculturalism that came first in Canada, pointing out to groups on what they had in common, how they could be integrated and insisted on recognition. However, Europeans fear of the danger of religious ethnicity and think religious should be thought of as a private matter. Political identity however, with US stressing her superiority, pursuing one formulation of cultural domination over weaker culture groups, is concerned with identities that are compelled to behave in particular way where cultural relativism is taken for granted, and difference is a key value.

The identity politics today has a lot going for it - it challenges an old notion of identity of nation and people for other identities both sub national and trans-national. Political psychologists, on the other hand, are attempting to integrate political scientists interest in social change and institutional development with psychologists interest in “cognition“, “emotion” and “personality“. The essentially normative character of both political and psychological analysis has been widely recognized. In closely related fashion, politics consists of a contest for the definition and realization of the good and psychology addresses what is healthy and normal. Political psychology tend to design and integrate the interests and concerns of political science and psychology. In this context, a number of research concerns include social change and democratization, ideology, altruism, social and political identity, voting behaviour, mass media effects and international integration. Political psychology offer an integrative analysis of political life - one which considers the interrelationship between political organization and culture on the one hand and individual thought and emotion on the other - for a broader definition of the sense of identity and social reality.



"I sometimes hold it half a sin
To put in words the grief I feel;
For words, like Nature, half reveal
And half conceal the Soul within.


But, for the unquiet heart and brain,
A use in measured language lies;
The sad mechanic exercise,
Like dull narcotics, numbing pain.


In words, like weeds, I'll wrap me o'er,
Like coarsest clothes against the cold:
But that large grief which these enfold
Is given in outline and no more."

Lord Alfred Tennyson
The Oxford Book of English Verses, 2004


References;
- Dunn, John. Locke. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984
- John Locke (1632-1704 British Empiricist) Of Identity and Diversity
- Burman, E & Parker, I (Eds.) (1996) Discourse Analytic Research. London: Routledge
- Burr, V. (1995) An Introduction to Social Constructionism. London: Routledge
- Davies, B & Harre, R (1990) Positioning: the discursive production of selves
- Parker, I (1992) Discourse dynamics. London: Routledge
- Understanding the Self. London: Sage/OUP
- The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Goffman (1959)
- Iyengar, Shanto, 1993, "An Overview of the Field of Political Psychology"
- Professor Adam Kuper:Identity politics, The British Academy, April 2005.
- The British Academy, Identity Politics Seminar, April 2005