identity work

Everywhere I see identity work.

As I drive people slap bumper stickers on their cars, which proclaim what they are or what they love. Most of these loves are rather trite affectations such as "I love skiing" or "I love New York." And while I cannot deny that the person slapping this bumper sticker on his or her car actually feels this way I always must return to the big question.

"What is love?"

What is any emotional state for that matter? I have heard this elsewhere and I believe it myself. The majority of our childhood is spent being taught how to understand and act to specific stimuli. Central to this teaching is being furnished the words for what it is we are feeling. I cannot help but thinking that my nieces are learning how to be sad or depressed simply to feed a certain response mechanism set in place by their parents and grandparents. It's a very strange set of affairs that a somewhat pathological behavior would get molded into an acceptable condition such as being tired or feeling sick in order to give that pathological behavior a somewhat more acceptable window dressing.

These statements of one's feelings and their cliched plastering on car rear ends provides an effective introduction to the work we all do to connect with something other than us, be it a process, a group, a belief, or a companion human or otherwise.

For me love is a violent and sometimes possessive statement of affect. This is because love has become a sink for so many institutions that desire conditions for human bondage, and thus they tack phrases onto affirmations of love such as "in sickness and in health" and "til death do you part." These steep a romantic relationship into absolutist talk. And while the pictures are being processed and placed into a memorable portfolio other institutions are busy placing incentives upon the married couple to go into debt together because together they can get a better percentage than they otherwise could.

It sounds to me like companies are finding ways to insinuate themselves into loving relationships through financial transactions and contractual obligations. They do this knowing that they can position the responsibility to pay on time to make it equate the responsibility to one's spouse or lover.

Clever ruse.

Marriage is one of many relationships that are central to the identity work that most humans engage in and find rewarding. Identities are faces and feelings plastered onto any number of things. Identities are names, iconography, slogans, mission statements, invested with an emotional connection to bond individuals to larger entities. Identities are ready-made lifestyle choices replete with numerous consumer choices to accessorize and mobilize the lifestyle into representative activities. Buying cars, boats, bikes, sporting equipment, building muscles, tattooing skin are all identity choices. In modern societies they are a veritable connective tissue, the integument tethering people to objects, ideas, behaviors, and future-placed commitments. Identities are a form of control and manipulation because they are access points to the psyche and soul of each individual. Identities mediate experience of self, other, and world. In the pop neuroscience argot identities are a constellation of neural networks that are self-supportive and, importantly, are pleasure producing. We satisfy identity work through self-improvement via diet, exercise, surgery or some combination of these. Identity work is central to cosmetic neuropharmacology whereby 'patients' con their psychiatrists into prescribing them a performance enhancing brain drug.

Identities are the consumer gloss of citizenship. People pick pre-arranged political sides, passionately support abstract causes, and burp sound bytes that have long-lost any true personal meaning but instead short circuit any critical thinking about the issue they gloss. In some glassy building groups of experts in psychology, marketing, and human behavior use a powerful set of tools to generate new identities every day. These identities are the stuff of social control, feeding human behavior into a cycle of work all day, spend on 'free' time, stay up all night, and drug to maintain. Identity work is performed at its most ostentatious during leisure activity, but it's performed all of our lives.

A babe is born and is often assigned a color based upon its gender. This baby is given gender-specific toys and addressed, consciously or not, in sex-specific ways. All of these support the healthy and arbitrary development of the addressee, which takes up residence between the ears of the baby. And this addressee begins to adopt the language in media res as one that is already overwhelmingly invested with significance, history, and a sense of duty to it. So this adult-in-training goes about languaging into a world presupposed by languaging. "What and why" are often heard, and the issue settles into the child's adolescence by the circular argument's coda, "because." End of story.

This adult goes about its manufactured life, mistaking its manufactured identity for one that it made itself. Sooner or later, through designs built into the program of society, whether by accident or by fateful choice, lifestyle, or duty, the identity that was made over the course of its life dies. And then this life gets placed into a box, dressed in clothing acceptable to its audience, and is remembered one last time before it is interred into the soil. There the identity slowly degrades into the sundry elements that make up the bulk of our universe: hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, and so on. And the little worms with no identity go about their "lumbrical" labor passing this once meaningful entity through their lengthy tube-like bodies.

And so in the end, identity work is an overcompensation for a more base understanding that all life--owing to the chances of evolution and the substrate of physical reality--is merely tubes. Except in our case our tube is bi-directional. Into it goes all the food and out of it come all the waste, but the one exception is that we also belch out the ideologies by which we live out our tube-lives without ever realizing it as such.

Identity work is such a chore, but its dark horizon is shaped by something the symbolism underlying identity work presupposes--the identity of no thing.

And we all 'wanna' be somebody.