Theorizing Identity

Alison Pullen and Carl Rhodes University of Technology, Sydney

PhD CourseUniversity of Aalberg

Perspectives on Identity in Learning and Education Research14 – 17 November 2006

Identity as ProjectThe ontological project

• From “Who am I?” to “Who am I becoming?” (from being to becoming)

• From unitary, essentialist, homogenous accounts to fragmented, fluid and processual nature of identity – “Interrupting Identity”.

• Subjectivities are constantly in process and constructed and reconstructed in discourse within specific interactions with the “other” (Potter and Wetherell 1987; Mumby and Clair 1997).

• Identities, selves, are constituted through discourse which is a patterned complex of everyday expression, rhetoric, institutional formations and practice.

• Discourses vie with each other for supremacy in “identity work”.

• Identity therefore, is constructed through power, knowledge and language.

Identity as project

The epistemological project

• Retrospective – prospective accounting (Garfinkel 1967):“Identities are constructed in terms of a conjunction of past and future, as an explanation of previous events in a way that positions the constructor of the account advantageously for future episodes” (Pullen, (2006) Managing Identity).

• Identities are multiple, fluid, shifting, ambiguous, paradoxical, in flux, relational, and in constantly in tension.

The political project

• Opening spaces for “alternative voices, new forms of subjectivity, previously marginalized narratives, and new interpretations, meanings and values” (Weedon 1999: 4).

• Identity or subjectivity? A difference in the name?

Processes of Subjective Identity

Context and Resources (material, socio-economic,symbolic and discursive)

time, place, body, sex, gender, race, ethnicity,

sexuality, class, culture, life-history, psychodynamics etc.

Modes of subjective identity formation

IncorporationDisciplined subjectivitySubjective identityResistanceAutonomy

Identity Events and transformations

Narrative and storyingMasksEvent and évenementPerformativityIdentity politics and praxis

“We learned more from a three minute recordThan we ever learned in school”

Just The Working Life?

Early in the morning factory whistle blows,Man rises from bed and puts on his clothes,Man takes his lunch, walks out in the morning light,It's the working, the working, just the working life.

Through the mansions of fear, through the mansions of pain,I see my daddy walking through them factory gates in the rain,Factory takes his hearing, factory gives him life,The working, the working, just the working life.

End of the day, factory whistle cries,Men walk through these gates with death in their eyes.And you just better believe, boy,somebody's going to get hurt tonight,It's the working, the working, just the working life.

FactoryBruce Springsteen (1978)

Manufactured Identities in (The) Factory

• ‘Factory’ represents modern working identity as alienated and disembodied

• The rhythms of the working day, located between the two blows of the whistle, rings with the sadness and resignation of routine and repetition

• The men work, not in fear of a boss or of surveillance, but because that is who they are

• And who they are, is informed by fear and pain – but they enter each day, again and again, out of their own ‘free will’

• But work is like a prison, the worker’s identity being that of a day prisoner

• Their identity is depicted as being formed through the routines and restrictions that anchor factory life

• At work, identity is performed mindlessly and repressively, with the only recourse to violent expression of repressed desire at the end of the working day

Identity in the Moment

• The song Factory resonates with a view of work and identity taken up by those in Organization Studies whose work has been informed by Foucault – An over exclusive focus on ‘modes of subjective identity formation’

(discipline)– Taken for granted ness of ‘identity capital’ – Lack of attention to the potential and empirics of ‘identity performance’

• The danger is that identity is rendered through a ‘forgetting of being’ (Heidegger)

• But, even when habitual practices and identities revolve around a very strict ‘regulatory ideal’ (Butler, 1993) the limits of those models are likely to clash with the contingencies of the here-and-now

• The empirical challenge for identity research is how to deal with identity performed in the unique moment of the present

“But the factory and the office are neither prison nor asylum, their social architectures never those of the total institution” (McKinley and Taylor 1998: 175)

Presencing IdentityHeidegger’s (1991) concept of presencing can be used to understand a sense of being confronted with life afresh ‘in the moment’

This happens when set ways of doing and saying prove inadequate, and we face not just having to ‘make things up’ as we go, but also having to let things be (Caputo, 1986, p. 18)

Presenting entails the idea that we do not act from within an originating ego that is already fully formed, but rather that we as identities emerge as our actions unfold through time (Schatzki, 2003) – as performed in the present with memory of that past, and imaginings of the future

“Actions, intentions, projects, and ends are both tied to and altered in response to the contingent flow of events that results from the intertwining and conjunction of human doings with material ones. Actions, intentions, and ends are never, therefore, stable” (Schatzki 2001: 109)

In other words …. Identity performance can always exceed the limits of identity capital and the discipline of identity formation … and it is this excess that we can consider identity in relation to ethics

Identity and Ethics• There are ‘many agencies, and many ethical standards, whose presence casts the

individual in a condition of moral uncertainty from which there is no completely satisfactory, foolproof exit … the modern individual [is] bombarded by conflicting moral demands, options and cravings, with responsibility for actions landing back on her shoulders’ (Bauman, 1993: 31)

• The formation of the self (identity), through its performance, IS ethics– Action precedes self (performativity), rather than a pre-existing self performing

action – the ‘moment of the subject’ is ‘them moment of decision’ and action (cf. Derrida)

– ‘Freedom is the ontological condition of ethics’ (Foucault, 1994) through which people develop a sense of self and constitute themselves as moral subjects of their action – a ‘practice of the self’

– Ethics is corporeal – it is in relation to the body as it is located in time and place – an identity that is free (i.e. neither pre-existent nor pre-determined) becomes ethical through an ‘aesthetics of the self’ (Foucault, 1984) that is practiced in relation to others (Diprose 1994)

– This ethics is less about identity-as-given and more about the burden of self formation (Butler, 2003) – where that self formation includes, but is excessive of social discourse (Butler, 1990)

Ethics, Identity and LearningSome concluding questions…

• What assumptions do educational programs make about the identities of teachers, learners etc? What are the ethics of such knowledge?

• What dominant societal and institutional discourses frame learning?• What ethical issues arise when educational programs deliberately

seek to change a person’s identity?• In what ways does education provide for models of the self which

seek to inhibit freedom and aesthetics, and hence privilege power over ethics?

• In what ways does and can education and learning enable ethical self-formation?

• How do learners engage with the demands while still retaining the sense of ‘freedom’ and ‘particularity’ required by ethics?

• Is learning already a more flexible concept than identity in that it cuts across subjective identity formation, identity capital and identity performance?