The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

self‐constitution and the “stylisation of daily life” through an “aesthetic of existence”,
are key processes. It is in these “forms and modalities of the relation to self” that the
individual “constitutes and recognises himself qua subject”. 6
The deployment of such a concept of identity in a biographical project enables one to
move away from the idea of the intrinsic and ready‐made, stable and fixed self,
“unfolding from beginning to end though all the vicissitudes of history without
change”. 7 It also enables us to challenge essentialist identities created through a
voluntarist notion of agency which is seen as intrinsic to the subject, in Rosalind
O’Hanlon’s terms, “the virile figure of the subject‐agent”. 8
In the narrativisation of the self, identities need to be understood as constituted within
and through representation and, as Stuart Hall puts it, as “produced in specific historical
and institutional sites within specific discursive formations and practices, by specific
enunciative strategies”. 9 Following Lawrence Grossberg, it is the processes by which
each plane of identification and belonging ‐ the subject, the self and the agent ‐ is
produced and then “articulated into structures of individuality” that need to be
understood. 10 In the process of becoming, such identities emerge out of the productive
use of the resources of language, culture and history in the articulation of subject to
discursive formation. These identities, while not corresponding exactly to agency, may
influence and be articulated to questions of power and the possibilities of agency. The
question of agency, as a vector of identification, involves the possibilities of moving into
“particular sites of activity and power”. These temporary points of identification and
belonging are “strategic installations” for “fields of activity ... on socially constructed
territory”. They entail the articulation of maps of subjectivity and identity into specific
6See Stuart Hall’s discussion of Foucault’s approach to subjectivity and cultural identity in his article
‘Introduction: Who Needs Identity?’, pp 1‐17; see also Vincent Crapanzano, ‘“Self”‐Centering
Narratives’, pp 106‐113.
7Stuart Hall, ‘Introduction: Who Needs Identity?’, p 3.
8Rosalind O’Hanlon, ‘Recovering the Subject: Subaltern Studies and Histories of Resistance in Colonial
South Asia’, Modern Asian Studies, 22, 1988.
9Stuart Hall, ‘Introduction: Who Needs Identity’, pp 3‐5.
10Lawrence Grossberg, ‘Identity and Cultural Studies: Is That All There Is?’, in Stuart Hall and Paul du
Gay, eds, Questions of Cultural Identity, p 98.
14