Nate particularly asks about the issue of doing identity work in situations
where identity development may be at best a by-product, where students,
say, do not have a lot of choice about tasks, or where other goals are
foremost and identity development indirect or automatic.
I think what I am trying to say in the paper is that USUALLY identity
development is a by-product in this sense; I don't think we have much lore
in our culture about how to go about doing identity development as such
(except perhaps for the impulse to try new things to see if they are 'us').
But we are always in the process of 'doing identity' as we do other things,
and which things we do, or how passionately or seriously or interestedly we
engage with them, often makes more sense when viewed in terms of how they
sustain or advance identity projects than otherwise. What we are conscious
of, I think, is how much we like doing something, how good we feel about
doing it, how competent or fascinated, how 'right' it feels for us. These
feelings are a manifestation of dispositions, with longer timescale
relevance to our lives beyond these moments of activities, which constitute
identity. Identity as lived, as well as, or more than, identity as
articulated. I think there is often a great difference between who we would
say we were if asked, what we would identify with, and how we tend to act
and what we tend to feel while acting. There are very limited terms to say
our identities, but vast richness in the semiotics of action and feeling,
to enact identities which are much more specific than we could have words
to name.
Identity, at root, is bodily. It is however also a key link between the
bodily and the discursive; which is probably why it is so much an
intellectual issue just now when the great problem of our times is becoming
the issue of articulating the bodily, the felt-material, with the
discursive-representable. There are such great slippages today for many
people between what our cultures let us say about who we are and what we
feel and how we actually do feel and behave. 'Identity' means who/how we
feel we really are/do, and that cannot be captured by the discursive, by
what/who we can say we are, though there must be a discursive part to it. I
think many of us share the intuition that our bodily-material integrations
with the rest of the ecosocial system are what enable us to feel things we
cannot say, and ultimately to say new things because we have first felt
'them' (the said and the felt can never be quite the same, of course).
Identity is a key part of the advancing struggle for new meaning, meaning
that is meaningful for us because it speaks from what we have already felt.
The role of identity then is mainly about our affective engagement with
tasks and activities, even with discursive activities like talk; with
topics and school subjects, with sports activity or home activity, with
career activity, sexual activitities, etc. In these ways (and many others)
the body carries meaning forward for us from task to task and activity to
activity, linked by feelings and dispositions and habits, some of which
have discursive representations.
There are fundamental problems here for any science that limits its sense
of valid knowledge to the discursive. Or of valid ways of coming to know to
discursive practices. This issue comes up again and again in the history of
the human sciences (I think of Polanyi's "tacit knowing" in the last
generation; Freudians before that). The discursive is the tip of the
iceberg, whether in learning, knowing, feeling, identity, or teaching. A
very long tradition that has suppressed the bodily-affective 9/10-ths,
denigrated it, feared it, identified it with women, children, primitives,
serfs, working class people, non-Europeans, etc. has kept us safely from
articulating identities and practices of real human power, especially in
education, and produced a degree of alienation that is already turning
explosive.
What does this mean on the historical timescale?
JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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