Reframing Latin America: A Cultural Theory Reading ... - BGSU Blogs

78 reframing latin america
Disruption of Identity
So where does the recent disruption of identity come from? What is displacing
this depth—the autonomous origin, point of reference, and guaranteed
continuity that has been so long associated with the language of identity?
What is it about the turbulence of the world we live in that is increasingly
mirrored in the vicissitudes of identity?
While, historically, many things have displaced or decentered the stable
sense of identity that I just described, I want to focus on four great decenterings
in intellectual life and in Western thought that have helped to destabilize
the question of identity. I’ll attach particular names to three of them,
just for convenience sake. I don’t want to say they alone did it, but it is quite
useful to summarize by hooking the ideas to a particular name. The fourth
cannot be attached to a single name, but is just as important.
Marx begins the de-centering of that stable sense of identity by reminding
us that there are always conditions to identity which the subject cannot
construct. Men and women make history but not under conditions of
their own making. They are partly made by the histories that they make. We
are always constructed in part by the practices and discourses that make us,
such that we cannot fi nd within ourselves as individual selves or subjects or
identities the point of origin from which discourse or history or practice originate.
History has to be understood as a continuous dialectic or dialogic relationship
between that which is already made and that which is making the
future. While Marx’s argument deconstructed a lot of games, I’m particularly
interested in his impact on the identity/language game. Marx interrupted
that notion of the sovereign subject who opens his or her mouth and speaks,
for the fi rst time, the truth. Marx reminds us that we are always lodged and
implicated in the practices and structures of everybody else’s life.
Secondly, there is the very profound displacement which begins with
Freud’s discovery of the unconscious. If Marx displaced us from the past,
Freud displaced us from below. Identity is itself grounded on the huge unknowns
of our psychic lives, and we are unable, in any simple way, to reach
through the barrier of the unconscious into the psychic life. We can’t read
the psychic directly into the social and the cultural. Nevertheless, social,
cultural and political life cannot be understood except in relationship to the
formations of the unconscious life. This in itself destabilizes the notion of
the self, of identity, as a fully self-refl ective entity. It is not possible for the
self to refl ect and know completely its own identity since it is formed not
only in the line of the practice of other structures and discourses, but also
in a complex relationship with unconscious life.