Ignacio Sandoval Marmolejo - ias2117Semeiotic AnthropologyProf. Valentine Daniel12-23-2013

Identity and Projects in Modern Societies:

Emergent subjective organizations of the subjectivity in the context of modernity.

A tale about Theorists and Identities

How modernity altered the understanding of ourselves appears to be one of the central question for

social theory. Durkheim and Marx argued that the advent of modernity shift our comprehension on our

social places, and the change on these social positions implied a radical reorganization of the practices

that articulate society. In this scheme, roles and social classes would retain some of the salient features of

the old status structure, however we have to understand that their conceptualization of pre-modern society

is very different. Durkheim claims that modern societies were organized through organic solidarity, which

is based on social relations formed in the division of labor; traditional society is based in mechanic

solidarity, which is structured around kinship relations and a strong religions collective conscience.

Therefore, modern identity is formed through the unfolding of the individual articulating their experience

in the instable normative moral and the division of labor. For Marx the modern society was the capitalist

society, so the classes that are effect of social relations of production become the central source of

identity in modernity. So identity is the unfolding of working class’ interests and values as they struggle

against the capitalist class. In Marx’s Theory, identity is subordinated to consciousness, because the

working class have to achieve a clarity on its perception of the logics of capitalism and their interests. So

when consciousness attains such clarity, the workers are going to transform from “a class in itself” to “a

class for itself”. The capitalist society is going to create ideological entrapments to wreck the working

class’ achievements, creating alternative philosophies that could obscure or confuse reality.

Regardless the difference of these approaches, both implicit assume that roles or social classes

maintain some key features of status positions. With status position, we should understand the idea that

traditional societies were structured on a hierarchy of social positions, in which certain ascribed roles

were recompensed with prestige and other resources. This status position were important part of the

identity of people. So we could assume that traditional identity was stable, durable and have able to guide

people through the social world. That features are precisely the ones that Marx and Durkheim would

implicit assign to modern identities.

Clearly these structural approach failed to account the complexity of experience in modern society,

especially when defining identity’s causal powers. These authors relied in the pre-modern imaginary of

status positions are couldn’t create a comprehensive interpretation on modern identity. This lack of

interest would create a void of strong theorizing on identity within structural theorizing.

After interpretative and psychoanalytic theories challenged the weak conceptualizations on identity,

the poststructuralist approaches reach a hegemonic position in academia. They main proposition was to

understood identity as a never-ending, fluid and constructed social phenomenon. This proposition would

be used as methodological principle, theory on human subjectivity and final conclusion.

This short summary doesn’t start to cover the puzzling theoretical history of the concept and its social

implications, but from this point I would try to propose an eclectic, but informed way to understand the

place of identity within modern social formations. The conceptualization of the interplay between agency

and structure is going to be key in this effort. However they aren’t going to be conflate, but understood as

two different entities with different levels of emergency, and therefore analytical distinguishable. In other

words, I would try to understand the idea of modern identity, analyzing the effects of agents and

structures (material and cultural), without denying their particular realities or properties.

Why do I think that the last claim is important? Because postmodern and poststructuralist approaches

had argued that identities are mainly positions inside social discourses. These narratives were put in place

secret acts of violence, and they were fixed with highly adaptive logical chains of signifiers or meaning

(depending the radically of the argument). Poststructuralists argues that logics within social discourses are

there to cover the arbitrariness of power and knowledge, usually conflating them in one phantasmagoric

affect-producing concept/entity. Thus, our identities and self-definitions are only “make-believe”

artifacts, which are neither true nor false, because the regimes of truth and representation are almost

totally historical contingent. We are only part of western culture’s folds and twitches.

In this Kafkanian or Rilkean social world, agents could only alter these discourses through

performative and aesthetical tactical movements, which reorder and momentarily subvert these semiotic

mechanisms of domination. Postmodern resistance mean reimagining the performance of social positions

and identities, through recreating these bits and parts that society gives to them. The eventual collective

emancipation could be achieved through networks of subversive acts, and spontaneous and personal

political action; and if I may add, praying for social change.

I acknowledge that this is a very economical description, and I’m sure that different authors would

escape from this descriptive evaluation and counter argue with obscure references and bending their own

arguments. However, my intention here is to point out the following concerns about identity theory:

1) We should reexamined the properties of cultural systems (discourses), but also offer a more

consistent theory on agency and structural systems.

2) We might also considered discourses as open systems that are influenced by critical argument,

logical contradictions and complementarities, Moreover, discourses are related to something, so

they are able to be evaluated with para-discursive standards of practical adequacy.

What is modernity?

Modernity usually is a problem for social scientist, because its theorizing precludes a series of

ontological premises that highlights certain phenomena over others. This selective bias could conflate

descriptive theories with explanations, thus modernity is transformed in only a theoretical rope. For

example:

(a) A structural approach as Functionalism or Marxism would tend to represent modernity as a

structural phenomenon. They would highlight social differentiation and functional specialization

and the emergence of social systems. The emergence of complex coordination mechanisms, and

the rise of new classes and their social integration are understood as central modern problems.

The axis tradition-modernity would be represented as institutional transformations.

(b) Cultural theories as structuralism, hermeneutics or culturalism (and even Durkheim’s late work)

would understand modernity as an explosion of cultural logics and discourses. In some theories,

this divergence of cultural logic would retain some internal unity through a deeper and obscure

structure. Notwithstanding the cultural surface of societies were composed of chaotic, diverse

and divergent narratives that disorient the cultural agents. The axis tradition-modernity would be

represented as the loss of the traditional and unitary narrative.

(c) Subjective (whereas moral, interpretative or rational) approaches tend to portrait modernity as

the arrival of the open society, in which agents could act upon different course of action:

aesthetical, economic, political and so on. Agents within a modern society could recreate society

from their actions, because institutions are only a product of their collective practices. The axis

tradition-modernity would be represented as the end of social bindings and the unfolding of

liberty.

In contrast to these approaches, I argue that we should to understand modernity as the historical

transformations that happened to almost all social formations between XVI century and XX century,

which could imply several different and sometimes contradictory processes. This process could diverge in

each society, but I would argue that the theoretical semantic field of modernity seems to have three

defining characteristics:

(a) They construct modernity always in a reference to tradition. This analytic theoretical concept

represents the order to which we would/should comeback, reenact, escape or defy. It also depict

the social and systemic-institutional unity that seems lost in modern societies. At this point, we

could relate this absence to several theoretical insights that tried to put en question this unity:

Archer’s myth of cultural integration, Abu-Lughod’s critique to the concept of culture, the

poststructuralist malaise about the system of differences, or Merton’s internal critiques to the

Functionalist paradigm. The current state of social and cultural theorizing seems to agree that the

conceptual opposition of traditional and modern is misleading as analytic tools or metaphors.

Nevertheless, at the same time Tonnies’ opposition between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft still

haunt our narratives on the current social world and its historical transformations. We still talk

about disenchantment, the fight against ideology, double contingency and even the “hotness” of

our societies; all phenomena related to modern circumstances that we have to confront as human

and researchers.

(b) At the same time, there is the scandal of disorder. Different theories confront the fact that the loss

of order brings disorder, this is not only a mere logic exercise. Modernity is described as

revolution, demographic explosion, colonial brutality, technological accelerated innovation, wars,

urban decay, collective psychological malaise, and so on. Theorists from the XVIII century were

confronted to social disorder as a threat to society and its possibility of explanation. Even the

postmodern philosophers are afraid of complete contingency within our societies. Intellectuals

(maybe is a class interest?) attempts to identify an ethics and a procedure to bring order and

coordination. So, social theory reintroduces order into society with some kind of theoretical

device as communicative ethics, hegemonic logics, rationalities, the ruling class power, and so

on; even the postmodern approach with a post-humanist and fluid ethics tried to refund the social

link beyond pure power, pure arbitrariness, and pure violence. We should notice that the

reintroduction of order have always two faces: a defective order and an emancipatory order. We

shouldn’t forget Berman’s warning about modernity: “All that is solid melts into air”

We should notice that this introduction of order is twofold. One introduction is positive, because

is an ethical recommendation on how society could and should be coordinated. The other

introduction is negative, highlighting the orders that allow domination and deny the possible of

flourishment. However, both introductions are created to comment in the actual order and its

possibilities.

(c) And finally, the different narratives on modernity agree that modern society have a profound

influence in our social experience. While this influence may not be exclusive of modern societies,

I would argue that an academic consensus exists around the fact that modernity could accelerate

some processes within human subjectivity. These changes are usually conceptualize phenomenal

gaps. For example, Rational Choice Theory’s Modernity creates gap between our roles and our

moral stances (modernity as the coldness of detachment), or Weber’s Modernity create gaps

between our current corrupt state and the basics principles of human fairness, justice and

flourishment (modernity is the degeneration or our “souls”, even in a secular understanding). So

modernity as a concept brings a normative horizon that defied historicity and its moral flatness;

theorists indicate the fact that “new times require new moral engagements (against or on favor to

modernity)”.

The Crisis of Identity and Identity Crisis

We have seen how the description of modernity in different theories incorporates a normative

challenge, a disruptive disorder and the establishment of a fallible and temporal order. Although, we also

know through the anthropological and historical record that modernity had been “achieve” in different

societies through very divergent paths. Common western modern features appear in different historical

sequences; at the same time, the internal institutional importance of these institutions diverges between

social formations. In general, I‘m referring to the commodity markets, the secularization and

bureaucratization of the state, the rise of civil society and public space, the self-closure of legal

rationality, and the autonomy of cultural institutions as these institutions.

So we have a theoretical contradiction: diversity of modern social formation, but also remarkable shared

characteristics.

My argument is that beyond the expansion of certain economic and political phenomena (as

capitalism and imperialism), each social formation had to deal with historical and internal pressures

during the XVI century until today (and probably a couple of centuries more). These pressures were a

product of conflicting groups, which became active under certain material conditions. These groups

fostered a series on institutional innovation (as the one described earlier) that produce a massive

transformation of human experience, and at the same time, created more reflexive and active groups that

bided for power.

I acknowledge international context and the powerful effects of expansionist, commercial and

colonial interests. These phenomena are in part responsible of the incorporation of some central modern

institution as commodities markets, democratic/republican/liberal, and general and universal access to

education and media. Nevertheless, each social formation introduced these institutions under particular

conditions. Therefore, we would expect local adaptation, mimicry, functional equivalents and

conservative alternative institutional forms of the western European modern institutions. The

development of modernity is open to historical contingency, because is sustained by internal and external

struggles between social groups.

So, how could we argued for a trans-factual way to understand the transformations of identity in

modern society?

First, I would argue that the generations, who lived the more intensive period of institutional and

cultural transformation, were witness of a crisis of identity. The roles and positions that were fostered by a

stable network of institutions disappeared rapidly, as these institutions were transformed in the social

struggles. All of a sudden, people had new courses of action to choose. The urban centers appeared as a

world of possibilities. However, a series of terrible situations of misery, displacement and unrest fueled

the motivation to seek for new opportunities.

The history of capitalism shows us that individuals usually didn’t meet the economic, political or

cultural standards that were needed to fulfill the roles of their choices, but modernity promised that these

courses would remain open to second tries, people similar to them or even their own children. Therefore,

the culture of choosing and will was maintained, even when the immediate material conditions sometimes

would put severe restrictions to people’s aspirations.

Entire populations found themselves choosing, but also interpreting these new social roles and

positions. Despite the fact that some of these roles were highly restrictive and disciplinary, all new roles

required individual creativity to ensure that the institutional goals were meet. At the same time, the

meaning of being a worker, a squatter, a housewife or a student was being transformed and reinterpreting

with each institutional transformation. Of course, the rural world and the traditional urban site were the

main references, nevertheless this new social horizon was altering the status associated to the old and new

roles. Social mobility, upwards and downwards, was an important to the reconfiguration of the social

structure. Capitalist, professional and bureaucratic classes emerged within society, shattering the old

social structure. Social mobility was resisted by some of the old ruling classes, but educational,

bureaucratic and technical institutions fueled the recruitment for these new actors, even in the local levels.

At the same time, people were exposed to new ideas, even in the same institutions that in a pre-modern

setting fostered a more unitary and homogenous discourses (as the Catholic Church). New churches,

sciences, media and other novel cultural institutions broke the cultural homogeneity and promoted a

diverse set of narratives. The world was disenchanted, because we lost was the fluid and stable

cosmological common sense that covered everyday life and beyond. Despite the fact that didn’t mean that

we lose our acts of faiths, our cultural values, our rituals or our myths, a sense of homogeneity and

semantic closure was deeply affected.

So people found themselves organizing a series of new social identities, as they had a series of

new semiotic resources. They were part of a diverse group of position and roles in “modern and

traditional” institutions: ethnics or racial adscriptions categories, political categories (subject, citizen,

marginal), economical categories (worker, peasant, merchant, entrepreneur), and so on and so forth.

Albeit, half of these categories existed before, a new topography of identity surfaced. This triggered a

crisis of identity, as the old social mechanism of identity conformation was based on circumstances,

which were no longer existed. The inclusions of new categories and the loss of their practical and

discursive unity were the key causal effects that compel people to reformulate their self-identification and

social-identification strategies.

In this context, new macro-discourses emerged that tried to bring order into this topography of

identities: nationalism, liberalism, enlightenment, republicanism, Marxism, secularism, humanism,

religious reformism, and so on. Some of these discourses were in open contradiction between them, and

engage until today in cultural confrontation as secularism and religious thought, or Marxism and

liberalism. Other of them passed though historical fusions that produced new and integrated discourses as

liberalism-republicanism or conservatism-evangelisms.

The semantic causal power of these discourses rests on the fact that they can interpellate people in

an Althusserian way. These discourses don’t give roles to people, that is more a practical affair.

However, they say to people how they should understand their current roles and positions: “you shouldn´t

forget that first you’re… (a mother, a believer, a worker, a women)”.

Initially, this forced exercise of semiotic hierarchization within people’s internal conversation

would bring order to the crisis of identity. The discourses would give an anchoring point to think

ourselves, and would create ways to deal with the different aspects of people’s lives. We have to notice

that this order within identity was open and could be reversed in some measure to adequate to changing

institutional settings. Also, I would argue that the appeal of this mechanism have warned during the last

decades, in favor to more eclectic and instable mechanisms of identity conformation.

In that sense, the following generations would relive part of the crisis if great institutional and

cultural accommodations happened to their social formations. Some of these changes are described as

postcolonial modernity, late modernity, liquid modernity, individualization modernity, post-traditional

modernity, and so on. However, they usually lived in some kind of temporal stability achieved by their

parents, and also had discursive mechanisms described as a way to structure their identities.

This crisis of identity manifested itself as structural and cultural contradiction, which had an

effect on people, however what are the agents’ properties in this anthropological account?

Archer (2000) proposes that identity should be analytic separated between personal identity and

social identity. Personal identity is the product of people’s ultimate concerns, while social identity is the

constellation of social identities that people take upon themselves or in which people are involuntary

positioned in. Arches also argues that ultimate concerns are not only informed and conformed by social

discourses, but they have a strong component that emerges from our material and practical activities

throughout the world. In other words, people can learn new things (pleasure, pain, practical achievement

and practical failure) with partial autonomy of the discourses. Finally, Archer (2003, 2006, 2013)

following Peirce, claims that we have an internal conversation, a personal space that isn’t dominated by

social discourse. In the conversation, people can examine practical knowledge and social discourses.

Moreover, they can discuss their concerns, projects and practices, therefore these conversations have

causal implications for our actions.

The important point1 is that we have an internal conversation that creates a particular “me”, which

is independent of social positioning and social cultural dispositions (even the more particular ones). This

produces a tangible gap between us and the roles that we recreate and transform; a difference between

personal identity and social identity, between our continuous sense of self and the theories and

conceptualization of self.

The social identities that we are offered, against Santner, can’t be interpreted as the only way of

getting pleasure, because we are not only dealing with the social world, but we have relation with the

1 Following Sayer (2012), allow me to engage in first person here.

natural and artefactual orders of the world. We can get pleasure in our well-being or in practical

achievement, which are only symbolically mediated, not semiotically collapsed.

Now returning to the problem of the diverse integration of social identities, we can recognize that

a personal identity with defined (through internal conversation) ultimate concerns should be capable to

examine and integrate some kind of hierarchy of their social roles and positions, even if is a temporal one.

Actually, we have to avoid thinking in temporal as fallible or not good enough for our ontological needs.

Temporal only mean that our identity could acquire a new order, because sometimes new practical

endeavors require a new dovetailing of our ultimate concerns. It’s because human adaptability that people

who support the “citizen ideology” have at the same time, very different subjective intentions. This also

explain how they reproduce the citizenship discourse, meanwhile transforming other institutions.

The modernity problem (Archer 2013) could be sum up in this way: the morphostatic

organization in pre-modern societies didn’t produced so many different institutions, discourses and

opportunities to people, but when the morphogenetic society arrive at last in modernity, people were

confronted with a new set of complementary and contradictory identities; this produced a crisis on the

social mechanisms of identity conformation.

In Santner’s words (1996, 2003, 2011), our creaturely biopolitical body and our political

sovereign body were only external bodies to the self. There is an ontological gap (in most people) that

allow us to discern between these different options, even in classes with a more reduced range of

available alternatives, and serve as the starting point to new projects and practices. It’s clear in this point,

that I would argue that identity is more a practical and pragmatic affair, than an aesthetical and

contemplative matter. This don’t preclude that in some situations, they are concerns that are oriented to

more aesthetical o contemplative problems or media.

So, we shouldn’t confuse crisis of identity, which is produce between the structural and cultural

strata of reality and identity crisis, which is part of our own internal conversation about our ultimate

concerns and how to enact them in the world. In other words, we should differentiate between crisis of

social identities and personal identity crisis, keeping in mind that the latter could or couldn’t be related to

wider social phenomena.

Against Identity: what Archer (and other identity theorists) gets wrong

Usually when the discussion on subjectivity emerged in social theory, identity took the central

stage as the more stable subjective entity. This is important because theory always needs a device to

explain how subjectivity can influence social action in recognizable patterns of event. So following this

argument, a somewhat stable identity manages a series of normative, sensible and cognitive experiences

that “speak” to us, with the objective to shape our practices. So, subjectivity only achieve causal power

because is solidified in identities2 (whether they are product of a discourse or of our internal

conversation). Their main power is to interpellate us: “You shouldn’t do that…”, “You know that…”,

“You’re feeling this…”. Each of these normative experiences uses the pronoun “You” as a way of saying:

You’re being x, so you may considered this course of action (even what respect to discursive actions).

Why we should give to identity such privileged position in subjectivity theory? I would argue that

only empirical data could give this centrality to identity, and that we should refrain to give a priori a

theoretical preeminence to identity. Our practical engagements throughout the world are not confined to

reproduce or transform our social identities. Moreover, personal identity is also a temporal expression of

subjectivity that endures transformational processes. Identity is severely modify during life cycle and

social mobility processes. I would argue that is theoretical coherent to think that we live through

important phases of our lives without a defined personal identity, while at the same time, we position

ourselves in social identities that are largely contested or unscripted. The instability of personal and social

identities should create a context in which society “break” us, however this is no so common. In this

2 The other theoretical device to solidified subjectivity is logic or rationality, as we can see in the more action oriented paradigms as Weberianism, Hermeneutics or Rational Action Theory; however, while identity is more an analytic configuration internalized by real people, rationality and logic is a methodological principle to understand people action.

situation, we should ask ourselves how we don’t become fractured without the orienting and structuring

force of identity.

Society, through their cultural discourses and social institutions (that are separated only for

analytic reason), not only offers us social identities, but also collective projects. Sometimes these projects

are attached to social identities (liberal democracy - citizenship), but sometimes they aren’t (social

movement for education– protestor, student, consumer of education?). Despite that we could force the

argument and say that all collective projects are related to social identities, it’s clear that while some of

these social identities are fully, scripted and symbolically dense positions as citizen or worker, other as

“protestor” or “hobo” are empty signifiers and sometimes they don’t even respond to conventional signs.

In Archer’s scheme, identity is formed in its core by people’s ultimate concerns (our

commitments), that later foster a personal identity and a stance towards society. However, she gives little

attention in how ultimate concerns also originate projects that could be more important to people that

their identities. For example, if we considered people that are working to achieve upward social mobility

for them or their children, we could suppose that they aren’t nurturing a personal identity based on the

undesired, current or desired state. They are usually worried about their practical achievements and social

worth, and their cognitive efforts are oriented to nurture a project, not an identity. The problem for them

is what “we are doing”, not “who we are”. It doesn’t follow from this that orientation to projects don’t

produce some kind of stable identity, but we have to analytically identify what is the core of subjectivity

that have causal power on people’ actions.

I would argue that you can defined some kind of subjective and stable hierarchy between project

and identity, or the other way around. This hierarchy is empirically manifest as social tendencies in a

social unit of analysis, and in psychological markers in an individual level. So, this doesn’t mean that

everybody shared the same relation between project and identity, and that subjectivity diverges in the way

is semiotically organized. These different patterns don’t entail deviation of social norms or psychological

standards. We should expect that people have ill-defined identities when they are engaged in projects that

require great personal and social change.

Conclusions

We should recognize that agents and his/her subjectivity are a partially autonomous strata. From

that, is doesn’t follow that subjectivity couldn’t be affected by several social institutions, cultural

discourses, social system and other emergent entities. However, we should accept that people had

historically created these social entities, and their transformation or reproduction depend on human

activity or praxis. Identity and project are two practical routes to engage with society, and embody this

human activity; in other words, they are ways of organizing our subjective and practical experiences and

activities.

Therefore, is important, that we should not confuse between our personal identity (who I am in

relation to what I care the most) and our social positions (social positions and roles, that require certain

reenactment, sometimes passive and mechanical and sometimes active and creative). In this trans-factual

theory of identity, modernity posed a challenge to a couple of generation to rethink society and to

accommodate to new constellations of social positions and roles (a crisis of identity), but sometimes even

in more “colder” times we get confused between these different options, or even the lack of options. In

that moment, we live a personal identity crisis.

In this point, I recognize that I have postponed the question on how particular institutional

networks of domination as patriarchy, the capitalist mode of production or imperialism foster discursive

and practical sources of organization in society (domination), and how it’s seems that we incorporate

social discourses as internal and taken-for-granted dispositions (the old “enculturation” or discursive

inscription). But both topics are wider and complex to touch in this essay, and my current main point is

have being to accentuate the possibility to argue for an ontological separation between personal and social

identity, and the dual emergence of subjective as personal identities and personal projects.

Works cited

Archer, Margaret

2000 Being Human. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

2003 Structure, agency and the internal conversation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Pre

2007 Making our way through the World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

2013. The Reflexive Imperative in Late Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Santner, Eric

1996 My Own Private Germany. Daniel Paul Schreber's Secret History of Modernity. Princeton:

Princeton University Press.

2006 On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald. Chicago: University of Chicago Press

2011 The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty. Chicago:

University of Chicago Press.