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Christopher Pollmann[*]

Personal Identity –

Fortress of the Individual in a World of Performance?

The Self, Law and Social Power

Identity is a central feature for philosophical investigation as well as for political action. Philosophers have focussed on the distinction between qualitative and numerical identities in order to examine under which conditions two phenomena can be considered the same. In particular, they have been wondering whether different life stages can belong to one and the same human being, i. e. to which extent a phenomenon stays numerically identical in spite of change due to time.[1] I do not wish here to pursue this metaphysical question, partly because I doubt whether a universally, transculturally valid answer can be found. My objective is to explore some of the reasons why identity is so important[2] and how it is achieved, as far as the individual human being is concerned. Thus, I start from – and defend – a conventionalist position for answering the metaphysical identity question: I would claim that ”materially” and from an ”objective” point of view (if such existed), no phenomena are numerically identical, but that to a varying extent, identity is needed and therefore socially constructed.[3] However, this construction is usually so much embedded in a culture, its language, material practices and beliefs that it is widely unconscious.[4]

On the political level, the quest for national identities developed in central and Eastern Europe in the 1980ies and 90ies while various categories of people in the Western world and particularly in the US sought to be recognized as African-American, gay or lesbian, handicapped or belonging to a tribe like the Mashpee[5]. Political and academic reflection about collective identities proliferated. The latter’s tendency to provoke conflict as in former Yugoslavia was well pointed out, but the apparent desire of people to identify with a group was hardly put into question. Likewise, it was and is widely accepted as natural and evident that human beings need a personal identity. I do not claim the contrary and recognize even that in most of the contemporary world, personal identity is a condition for survival[6]. For discriminated black people for instance, rights culminating in the autonomous self promise the end of oppression.[7] Notwithstanding these positive meanings, I would like to examine to which extent the importance of personal identity is due to capitalist requirements and by which means it is constructed. In order to do so, I will mainly draw on Critical Theory, psychoanalysis, legal history and linguistics. The transdisciplinary character of my paper implies that I will lack some of the tools the established disciplines mobilized here procure. However, I may also have the chance to escape their disciplining effects...

My overall hypothesis is that personal identity is a fortress holding the human being with her contradictory psyche together while separating people from each other, thus allowing them to meet today’s imperatives of competitive performance and permanent control.[8] Indeed, performance and control seem to become our most common ambition as society disintegrates into its smallest particles, individuals[9] (I). I will then turn to the means of identity construction, which may lie in the reification of human life (II).

As far as the terminology of self and identity is concerned, some remarks may clarify a complex situation. Self is a synonym for the individual, designing its mental aspect, unified existence and reflexive status in a static way.[10] Identity concerns a dynamic: It means stability and continuity of the entity considered in space and over time. For many theorists, self refers to the individual perspective, to private self-definitions while social identities result from public definitions. Both terms can be employed interchangeably though, because the two perspectives usually correspond.[11] Nevertheless, they possibly translate different goals: Self shows the individual’s need that her self-perception relates to her material life, whereas it is a social and especially a legal concern that individuals stay identical for others and can be identified[12] (individuals themselves probably do not need to bother about this, because when they change, it usually happens gradually and in such a way that material and mental change take place at the same time).

Before starting properly, let me say that I warmly welcome comments, critique and advice. Moreover, I would like to beg readers to excuse errors of vocabulary, grammar and style in my English.

I. The Atomization of Society requiring Performance and Control

The disintegration of society obliges human beings to take care of themselves and, for this objective, to be productive and to gain power upon other people (A). The success of this enterprise depends, however, on their ability to discipline themselves (B).

A. The Birth of the Subject – Recognition of Power as Basic Principle of Human Relations

The atomization of society (to which the term ”individualism” refers in a more positively connoted way) means that contemporary human beings are increasingly deprived of the quasi-organic bonds with the natural and human environment which characterize ”traditional societies” and allow their people to share activities and products in a way that everyone is taken care of[13]. In contemporary Western society, human beings can therefore less and less rely on each other.[14] Under these conditions, everyone is supposed to organize and obtain her own living. (I do not want to romanticize traditional societies or diabolize the industrialized world If my analysis and terminology nevertheless contain and convey value judgements, this may be due to my assumption that occidental society is organized in a way that does not make its long-term survival very likely.)

At the same time, division of labor, development of technologies and exchange by contract imply that human beings have presumably never been so much in contact with – and so dependent on – each other as in capitalist society. That is why they are required, I would claim, to take an instrumental attitude towards other people and to look permanently for – more – power. « Individualization has left nothing else than the decision to pursue but one’s own goals. [...] The birth of the subject is paid for by the recognition of power as the principle of all relations. »[15] Obliged to define itself, the subject – as well as groups trying to gain an identity – will demarcate themselves from the Other, because this is the surest, if not the only way of showing who they are. Demarcation implying depreciation of the Other, power is thus inevitably lodged in identification and the concept of identity.[16]

Furthermore, due to the atomization of society, individuals can less and less rely on their natural and human environment to find satisfaction in life. In particular, as personal relations tend to become instrumental, they are less likely to satisfy people’s narcissistic desires. One may therefore imagine that the individual also seeks power in order to reassure herself. Power – along with numerous objects of consumption – thus replaces human beings as an object of affective investment. This mechanism is probably at work from birth onwards: In spite of the contemporary tendency to fulfil all their wishes, I assume that in our atomized society children even more than elsewhere experience unmet affective needs as well as the anxiety that they might not be met again in the future. That creates the ambition of control which goes along with a basic belief in the controllability of the world in general and of the personal situation in particular.[17]

In this context, power is not only the possibility to command, but also authority, leadership, money, recognition, intellectual influence, seduction, ... In this wide sense, power seems to be the principal goal in every single human relation. This permanent claim of ”place” is all the more effective and perverse as it is carefully hidden in our unconsciousness, mainly by various religious and moral devices concealing the inevitable selfishness under the claim of possible selfless behavior. (That is why the emancipation from collective domination and exploitation and the individual becoming conscious about her need of power probably go along with and condition each other.)[18]

B. Self-discipline, principal Condition of Successfulness

When I look at myself and at my colleagues, I can notice that many of us work to an extent that we often consider not ”having time” for something we would like though to do. In a slightly different perspective, contemporary elites, unlike the ruling classes of former times, spend most of their life working instead of enjoying their privileges. This is somewhat startling on a social as well as an individual level: In the Western world, societies have never been as rich as today, and for many of the ”workaholics”, there is no objective pressure to work that much (I for instance could easily work half of what I do without apprehension). This paper is also an effort to explain this astonishing situation; competition, the desire of power and self-discipline seem to be major causes.

Power makes us think of relationships between people. That is of course true – «all competition is legalized injury»[19] –, but the importance of power starts ”earlier” and more fundamentally with the restraint individuals exert upon themselves. It is self-discipline that constitutes the self as the unity of one’s capitalist existence.[20] Self-discipline allows the competitive individual to cope with the problem of being alive and therefore subject to the up and down of unbound nature[21], to its strength and weakness, to conflicting desires and resistances. Being alive is a problem, because it hinders success in performance as well as in the exercize of power. In order to produce or to create efficiently, the individual has to deploy physical or mental force, which its body may not ”naturally” be willing to accomplish. To dominate somebody else requires to control oneself[22], not only to push one’s body to exert the required influence without going too far, but also in order to overcome obstructive feelings like empathy, joy, sadness, disgust or fear. Self-control means to abandon playfulness, which is thus reserved, to childhood.[23] Prolonging the signification of civilization worked out by Norbert Elias[24], personal identity could therefore be a means to fix and to control contemporary human life, which, as life, does not easily support the demands of industrial society. «Through the logic of identity thought seeks to bring everything under control, to eliminate uncertainty and unpredictability [...]»[25], and this concerns foremost the thinking individual herself.

Feelings can be fluid, disparate and contradictory, but action presupposes a unified, coherent and reliable actor. In Western society, individual human life seems to be increasingly dominated by an imperative of action and of planning the future, requiring the control of feelings.

II. Reification of Human Life in order to Control it

As the etymology tells us, identities aim to give stability and continuity to human beings[26], although and because no life can be – completely – stable. Anyway, individuals and groups are psychologically, socially, culturally, etc. much too diverse and heterogeneous to be materially stable and coherent.[27] Therefore, our self and our internal substance, coherence and permanence are probably illusions. However, they could be necessary mental constructions in a society defined by individualism, productivity and (ex)change. One may even imagine a sort of transfer from society to the individual: As stability and continuity are decreasing in social reality, they are imagined and localized upon the single human being. Identity questions are sharpened by social change.[28]

We have seen that the objective of identity construction seems to be making human life compatible with the research of an always higher material and mental output as well as with the continually more frequent encounter of other people. This goal seems to be pursued by the reification of human life, particularly present in the legal installation of the person as distinct from its body thus evacuated (A). Reification is reflected as well as organized in our – the European – languages (B).

A. The Distinction of Person and Body and the Evacuation of the Latter

On the path towards global mastery and control of human life, the human body and spirit are serious obstacles. The human body, first: As a living entity, it is mysterious, if not sacred, because it is fascinating and incomprehensible, but also a sometimes terrifying nuisance (consumption, excrements, decay in case of illness or death)[29]. It hosts sensations, emotions and sentiments, which may be contrary to the ambitions of production and performance. Thus being more or less unpredictable, the living human body cannot easily be controlled. In order to submit it, the Roman civilization has undertaken to distinguish it from mind and to evacuate it from public concern. For this objective of disembodying social life and its law, Rome has separated the world into two categories: persons and things.[30] The body was implicitly considered a thing. However, this somewhat cynical classification, inevitable consequence of the distinction between person and body in a system only knowing persons and things[31], did not need to be openly admitted; contemporary legal discourse usually avoids this conclusion[32]. Largely, the body could be forgotten by abandoning its divine character to the priest and its physical triviality to the physician.[33] The body is indeed widely absent from law.[34]

Censoring the body did of course not eliminate it. The distinction between person and body has therefore been supplemented by the objectification of the body. We inhabit our body the same way we live in a house.[35] The body is commonly considered a prison but also a sanctuary for the spirit and sexual relations are dealt with as a prerogative upon the other’s body, granted by the contract of marriage.[36] We may add that European languages have cut the connection between body and life, still noticeable in the old-fashioned German Leib, which derives from Leben (life), and that Western medicine treats the human body as machinery.