The Individualized Society by Zygmunt Bauman

Author:Zygmunt Bauman
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Wiley

11

Identity in the globalizing world

‘There has been a veritable discursive explosion in recent years around the concept of “identity”,’ observed Stuart Hall in the introduction to a volume of studies published in 1996.1 A few years have passed since that observation was made, during which the explosion has triggered an avalanche. No other aspect of contemporary life, it seems, attracts the same amount of attention these days from philosophers, social scientists and psychologists. It is not just that ‘identity studies’ are fast becoming a thriving industry in their own right; more than that is happening – one may say that ‘identity’ has now become a prism through which other topical aspects of contemporary life are spotted, grasped and examined. Established issues of social analysis are being rehashed and refurbished to fit the discourse now rotating around the ‘identity’ axis. For instance, the discussion of justice and equality tends to be conducted in terms of ‘recognition’, culture is debated in terms of individual, group or categorial difference, creolization and hybridity, while the political process is ever more often theorized around the issues of human rights (that is, the right to a separate identity) and of ‘life politics’ (that is, identity construction, negotiation and assertion).

I suggest that the spectacular rise of the ‘identity discourse’ can tell us more about the present-day state of human society than its conceptual and analytical results have told us thus far. And so, rather than composing another ‘career report’ of contentions and controversies which combine into that discourse, I intend to focus on the tracing of the experiential grounds, and through them the structural roots, of that remarkable shift in intellectual concerns of which the new centrality of the ‘identity discourse’ is a most salient symptom.

We know from Hegel that the owl of Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, spreads its wings, prudently, at dusk; knowledge, or whatever passes under that name, arrives by the end of the day when the sun has set and things are no longer brightly lit and easily found and handled (long before Hegel coined the tarrying-owl metaphor, Sophocles made clarity of sight into the monopoly of blind Teiresias). Martin Heidegger gave a new twist to Hegel’s aphorism in his discussion of the priority of Zuhandenheit over Vorhandenheit and of the ‘catastrophic’ origin of the second: good lighting is the true blindness – one does not see what is all-too-visible, one does not note what is ‘always there’, things are noticed when they disappear or go bust, they must first fall out from the routinely ‘given’ for the search after their essences to start and the questions about their origin, whereabouts, use or value to be asked. In Arland Ussher’s succinct summary, ‘The world as world is only revealed to me when things go wrong.’2 Or, in Vincent Vycinas’s rendition,3 whatever my world consists of is brought to my attention only when it goes missing, or when it suddenly stops behaving as, monotonously, it did before, loses its usefulness or shows itself to be ‘unready’ for my attempts to use it.

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