Transcript Identity and Ethics

Theorizing Identity
Alison Pullen and Carl Rhodes
University of Technology, Sydney
PhD Course
University of Aalberg
Perspectives on Identity in Learning and Education Research
14 – 17 November 2006
Identity as Project
The ontological project
• From “Who am I?” to “Who am I becoming?” (from being to
becoming)
• From unitary, essentialist, homogenous accounts to fragmented,
fluid and processual nature of identity – “Interrupting Identity”.
• Subjectivities are constantly in process and constructed and
reconstructed in discourse within specific interactions with the
“other” (Potter and Wetherell 1987; Mumby and Clair 1997).
• Identities, selves, are constituted through discourse which is a
patterned complex of everyday expression, rhetoric, institutional
formations and practice.
• Discourses vie with each other for supremacy in “identity work”.
• Identity therefore, is constructed through power, knowledge and
language.
Identity as project
The epistemological project
•
Retrospective – prospective accounting (Garfinkel 1967):
“Identities are constructed in terms of a conjunction of past and future, as an
explanation of previous events in a way that positions the constructor of the
account advantageously for future episodes” (Pullen, (2006) Managing
Identity).
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Identities are multiple, fluid, shifting, ambiguous, paradoxical, in flux,
relational, and in constantly in tension.
The political project
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Opening spaces for “alternative voices, new forms of subjectivity, previously
marginalized narratives, and new interpretations, meanings and values”
(Weedon 1999: 4).
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Identity or subjectivity? A difference in the name?
Processes of Subjective Identity
Context and Resources
(material, socio-economic,
symbolic and discursive)
time, place, body, sex,
gender, race, ethnicity,
sexuality, class, culture, lifehistory, psychodynamics etc.
Modes of subjective
identity formation
Incorporation
Disciplined subjectivity
Subjective identity
Resistance
Autonomy
Identity Events and
transformations
Narrative and storying
Masks
Event and évenement
Performativity
Identity politics and praxis
“We learned more from a three minute record
Than we ever learned in school”
Just The Working Life?
Factory
Bruce Springsteen (1978)
Early in the morning factory whistle blows,
Man rises from bed and puts on his clothes,
Man takes his lunch, walks out in the morning light,
It's the working, the working, just the working life.
Through the mansions of fear, through the mansions
of pain,
I see my daddy walking through them factory gates in
the rain,
Factory takes his hearing, factory gives him life,
The working, the working, just the working life.
End of the day, factory whistle cries,
Men walk through these gates with death in their eyes.
And you just better believe, boy,
somebody's going to get hurt tonight,
It's the working, the working, just the working life.
Manufactured Identities in (The) Factory
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‘Factory’ represents modern working identity as alienated and disembodied
The rhythms of the working day, located between the two blows of the
whistle, rings with the sadness and resignation of routine and repetition
The men work, not in fear of a boss or of surveillance, but because that is
who they are
And who they are, is informed by fear and pain – but they enter each day,
again and again, out of their own ‘free will’
But work is like a prison, the worker’s identity being that of a day prisoner
Their identity is depicted as being formed through the routines and
restrictions that anchor factory life
At work, identity is performed mindlessly and repressively, with the only
recourse to violent expression of repressed desire at the end of the working
day
Identity in the Moment
• The song Factory resonates with a view of work and identity taken
up by those in Organization Studies whose work has been informed
by Foucault
– An over exclusive focus on ‘modes of subjective identity formation’
(discipline)
– Taken for granted ness of ‘identity capital’
– Lack of attention to the potential and empirics of ‘identity performance’
• The danger is that identity is rendered through a ‘forgetting of being’
(Heidegger)
• But, even when habitual practices and identities revolve around a
very strict ‘regulatory ideal’ (Butler, 1993) the limits of those models
are likely to clash with the contingencies of the here-and-now
• The empirical challenge for identity research is how to deal with
identity performed in the unique moment of the present
“But the factory and the office are neither prison nor asylum, their social
architectures never those of the total institution” (McKinley and Taylor 1998: 175)
Presencing Identity
Heidegger’s (1991) concept of presencing can be used to understand a sense
of being confronted with life afresh ‘in the moment’
This happens when set ways of doing and saying prove inadequate, and we
face not just having to ‘make things up’ as we go, but also having to let things
be (Caputo, 1986, p. 18)
Presenting entails the idea that we do not act from within an originating ego
that is already fully formed, but rather that we as identities emerge as our
actions unfold through time (Schatzki, 2003) – as performed in the present with
memory of that past, and imaginings of the future
“Actions, intentions, projects, and ends are both tied to and altered in response
to the contingent flow of events that results from the intertwining and
conjunction of human doings with material ones. Actions, intentions, and ends
are never, therefore, stable” (Schatzki 2001: 109)
In other words …. Identity performance can always exceed the limits of identity
capital and the discipline of identity formation … and it is this excess that we
can consider identity in relation to ethics
Identity and Ethics
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There are ‘many agencies, and many ethical standards, whose presence casts the
individual in a condition of moral uncertainty from which there is no completely
satisfactory, foolproof exit … the modern individual [is] bombarded by conflicting moral
demands, options and cravings, with responsibility for actions landing back on her
shoulders’ (Bauman, 1993: 31)
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The formation of the self (identity), through its performance, IS ethics
– Action precedes self (performativity), rather than a pre-existing self performing
action – the ‘moment of the subject’ is ‘them moment of decision’ and action (cf.
Derrida)
– ‘Freedom is the ontological condition of ethics’ (Foucault, 1994) through which
people develop a sense of self and constitute themselves as moral subjects of
their action – a ‘practice of the self’
– Ethics is corporeal – it is in relation to the body as it is located in time and place –
an identity that is free (i.e. neither pre-existent nor pre-determined) becomes
ethical through an ‘aesthetics of the self’ (Foucault, 1984) that is practiced in
relation to others (Diprose 1994)
– This ethics is less about identity-as-given and more about the burden of self
formation (Butler, 2003) – where that self formation includes, but is excessive of
social discourse (Butler, 1990)
Ethics, Identity and Learning
Some concluding questions…
• What assumptions do educational programs make about the
identities of teachers, learners etc? What are the ethics of such
knowledge?
• What dominant societal and institutional discourses frame learning?
• What ethical issues arise when educational programs deliberately
seek to change a person’s identity?
• In what ways does education provide for models of the self which
seek to inhibit freedom and aesthetics, and hence privilege power
over ethics?
• In what ways does and can education and learning enable ethical
self-formation?
• How do learners engage with the demands while still retaining the
sense of ‘freedom’ and ‘particularity’ required by ethics?
• Is learning already a more flexible concept than identity in that it cuts
across subjective identity formation, identity capital and identity
performance?