Identity

Identity is an expansive concept, which over time has come to encompass categories including race, gender, sexuality, and class, among others, collated along lines of external physical traits (race), material conditions (class), or more fluid articulations of “otherness” (gender, sexuality). Identity can be conceived of as the markers by which an individual articulates the very nature of that individuality—uniqueness, framed through both commonalities and differences with other people, or even philosophies (“I am a Marxist”); schools of thought (“I am a Lacanian psychoanalyst”); political parties (“I a Democrat” versus “I am a Republican”); or binaries around a particular issue (“I am pro-life” versus “I am pro-choice being the most enduringly volatile one of our current moment). This more open definition thus leaves space for fluid, contradictory notions of “collective identity” as opposed to “individual” ones, because identifying oneself with a particular race or class perforce means putting oneself in continuum with a host of other peoples, or excerpting oneself out of another continuum (as I said in class, being “Canadian” also partially means defining myself as “not-American,” because we are so superficially similar in bearing, ideology, etc.). Put another way, it seems impossible to craft an identity without establishing that identity as being in sympathy with at least some other pre-established norms of identity, or by the same token, against other norms. Identity, crafted completely de novo, seems an ontological impossibility.

In this entry, we will focus on identity as it relates to space and place largely because this is the way that it has been discussed in class—and the primary filter through which Harvey and Soja have established identity. From this spatial perspective, the concept of identity can be roughly understood as a sense of oneself or one’s place in the world, the universe, etc. It has been generally articulated as being tied to a specific geography or parcel of land. Writing in Postmodern Geographies, Edward Soja writes that identity has generally been expressed in “localisms or regionalisms or nationalisms” (p35), and that materialist Marxism has generally railed against identification (a natural, terminological offshoot from identity) tied to a particular locale in favour of a broader cohesion across class, a category of identity that transcends, for instance, national boundaries. To Marxists, geographical identity is a “dangerous fetter on the rise of a united proletariat, a false consciousness inherently antagonistic to revolutionary subjectivity” (p35) because it blunts the universal cause of the proletarian revolution.

Along this anti-revolutionary trajectory, Heidegger sought an identity bound to place and space as a way of dulling or escaping the rootlessness inherent in the collapsed space and velocitized time found in modern life, and so was seen by Harvey as an explanation (but not apology for) Heidegger identifying with Nazi myths. The Nazi idea of Vaterland, and their “counter-myth and environmentally-bound traditions” (Harvey p35) is a refuge from the frequently bewildering new spatial-temporal axes of the modern, aggrandized and perverted to the point where those not sharing identification with that place (on racial or religious grounds) means the eradication of all those who do not share with that purported ideal. Identity tied to space also has a temporal dimension in Nazism, because the space conceived is wrapped up in a time scale different to the modern; where modern time is fractured, accelerated, fleeting, and ephemeral, the National Socialist sense of time is heroic, mythological, and permanent.

As Soja sees it, avant-garde artistic practice breaks out of a rooted tradition, establishing a new “postmodern” identity as a radical break from “modern” traditions—this is enacted because avant-garde works give new forms of art that are “no longer confinable within inherited and established traditions” (p29). Accordingly, the postmodern “identity,” is one established as a radical break from previous norms, discontinuous and somewhat out of historical trajectory, something of a rootlessness in time because it is no longer tethered to an ever-accumulating past. This conception, however poetic it might be, could be viewed as a little bit specious insofar as a complete and total break from the past is impossible; moreover, “postmodern” art has also come to connote an acknowledgement of the past to the extent that it wrestles with, rejects, appropriates, and reconfigures it according to its own idiosyncrasies and desires. However, there is a sympathetic resonance between rootlessness in time, and the elimination of fixity in space given that the prior relations of one space with respect to another have been changed in the modern era of accelerated transportation, just as the relationship from the present time to the past has too been altered. Schivelbusch argues that the space destroyed by the railroad is “the space between points” (p37), meaning that what once defined one locale from another—the distance between them and the time together—have rendered null and void. “The isolation of localities, which was created by spatial distance,” Schivelbusch writes, “was the very essence of their identity, their self-assured and complacent individuality” (p38). When space collapses, so too does the “complacency” of individuality, and as bandied about in class discussion, the very parameters of what separates oneself from the rest of humanity, insofar as “others” are defined by their local customs, geographies, and practices, etc. must be rethought and reconfigured. As space collapses via the speed of transportation, the reach of accessible places conversely increases, and thus the sense of what is “local,” or what defines one’s identity can no longer be as firmly tied (for it cannot be obliterated completely) to the refuge of geographical specificity.

The best example of this geographical reconfiguration is perhaps found in the modern metropolis, where enclaves of culture are partially assimilated into the city’s cloth—integrated and living cheek-by-jowl, but not wholly homogeneous. As quoted in Harvey, Raban believes that in the city, “personal identity had been rendered soft, fluid, and endlessly open” (p6) because the city allowed the individual (perhaps as the flâneur?) to act as they pleased and become whatever they wanted. For Raban, the city-identiy flux works according: “Decide who you are and the city will become a fixed form around you” (p6); both identity and the city are reciprocally plastic, one reflexively defining and coalescing around the other in an unending metropolitan ballet.

Returning again to time, Lacan defines identity according to a temporal understanding, asserting that it is formulated through “a certain unification of the past and future with the present before me” (quoted in Harvey, p53); similarly, Hewison claims “the past is the formation of individual collectivity” (quoted in Harvey, p86), so this begs the question, if we agree with the “postmodern” as a rupture with the past (which as I have alluded, is problematic), how do we find identity in an age that has no fetters to time?