Identity and Discourse

How do collective identities come to be made and solidified through the application of essentially social technologies? How does this reordering of identity come to be adopted by those it is imposed on, and further perpetuated by those inhabiting a locale? Are the “old fictions” of previous identities these “new fictions” supplanting normatively superior to the new identities, or at least more “original”?

Identity, as we have come to know through the contributions of various 20th century philosophers, is socially constructed, and, without having a completely solid empirical foundation, is subject to reformulation by societal forces. “Original” identities can therefore be influenced by “new” identities that were not natively formed by the subjects they are imposed on. As outlined in many of the readings for this week, social technologies (and by that I mean techniques used to influence existing societies or build new identities where there were none) have been semi-consciously and consciously used by those seeking to generate a sense of belonging among certain peoples. For Anderson, the census, mapmaking, and museums were used by early colonizers of South and Southeast Asia to impose ordered categories where they found none. This was likely done to reduce complexity (in that areas which housed thousands of distinct “peoples” were categorized to reduce the total groups to something more manageable for colonial rule), but had the further effect of perpetuating the new identity among the previously fractious people. The census assigned the categories, maps solidified identities within geographic borders, and museums carried forth the new identity from generation to generation.

In much the same way, Alatout’s explanation of how groundwater discourse was used to, at first, bring immigrants to the newly constituted Israel and, later, to centralize control over the Israeli people and territory illustrates that interpretations, as opposed to the wholesale manufacture, of physical objects can be used to establish identities and how those identities relate to the structures of power. Groundwater discourse was reformed to emphasize scarcity, and so logically needed a regulator of these scarce resources to be distributed efficiently. In this way, social relations in Alatout’s example were constituted by technical measurements, much the same way as Anderson outlined in his example. The fact that a physical thing was used in Alatout’s example to accomplish this, as opposed to a social fiction in Anderson’s example, doesn’t negate the fact that socio-technical structures were ultimately used to accomplish both effects on identity.

In a way, I’ve answered the first two questions I posed above. Identity is a discourse, and so is formed, imposed, and perpetuated through argument, whether that argument is expressed purely through language or in societal power relationships through the aforementioned socio-technical structures. What about the last question? Can we consider any certain identity discourse normatively superior to another, in and of itself? Or is an identity discourse rendered “bad” or “good” through how it is created/perpetuated? Scott’s and Anderson’s articles seem to imply a negative normative judgment of the new discourse without considering how that new discourse was adopted. I’m not sure if I agree with this. Can we really render a normative judgment on a discourse itself?