The digressions of Alison Salt

"We talk because we are mortal:/ words are not signs, they are years./ Saying what they say,/ the words we are saying/ say time: they name us./ We are time's names. / To talk is human." Octavio Paz

So much has been written on the subject of identity in recent years that I hesitate to broach the topic. But the question of what constitutes selfhood is one that has occupied my thoughts over the years a great deal. It has, of course, provided fodder for writers and academics alike for time immemorial, yet it remains an open question, an enigma that can never be resolved. Most recently thought has seized on the concept of identity as being something fluid, something that is modified, renovated, and rescripted with the accumulation of new experiences in the material world. While I do not refute this understanding, it has long been my belief that identity is essentially unstable, I have some hesitation in accepting the implied premise that identity is merely a potage of experience, desire, memory, and imagination. The question that arises is one that addresses what we might call the essence of a self. Can we claim that there is some fundamental nature that functions to give a framework to a selfhood? If so, how do we define it? How do we even recognize it?

I want to begin this discussion by suggesting that identity is largely formulated through language with the means and ends being a desire to compose a narrative that has a plot. As such, the construction of identity can be understood as a literary event. We perceive and understand the world and ourselves by way of a narrative that involves the organization of experience into a temporal succession. We seek cause and effect, beginnings and conclusions, motives and operations as ways of moulding the raw stuff of life into something comprehensible. Desire as such, is integral to the process of sense-making. It is what drives us forward and onward and functions as the motor of actions. This assertion is complicated by the psychoanalytical understanding that desire is inherently unsatisfiable and linked to memories that are inaccessible to the consciousness. Thus our desire for significance and narrative is one that arises from the unconscious and phantasmic scenarios of satisfaction. As intriguing as this proposal is, it offers little in the way of helping us identify some core of a selfhood. Are we to understand identity as something that arises from the reproduction of infantile need and quest for gratification? I would hope not. Such a proposition seems to reduce the complexity of the human to early childhood experiences with little regard for the roles of imagination, emotion, individuality, potentiality and affect in the construction of identity. It disregards the accumulation and impurity of experience. We are in continual contact and interaction with the material world, shaping and being shaped by language, tools, and the geography in which we live. Thus, to assert the concrete cornerstone of character is largely borne of infantile experience neglects the potentiality, the possibilities of one’s own existence. It seems to crystallize identity and designate it as something that lies within, but always out of the reach of consciousness. It cements character while positioning it outside of one’s control. This is an unsatisfactory model of character for a number of reasons, primarily, as mentioned earlier, it negates the possibility of experience having an indelible effect on one’s selfhood. Surely traumatic events leave some residue upon one’s character that cannot be reduced to a psychoanalytical model that focuses on infancy. What I am suggesting is that affect, that is the experience and repetition of sensation and action, surpasses and undermines what we often regard as identity while supporting, energizing. and containing it. Paradoxical to be sure, but it is in our interactions, our desire for sense-making, our search for meaning and individuality that the notion of identity is challenged and defined. This seems to lead us back to my initial discomfiture with selfhood defined as a hodgepodge of beliefs, experience and drive for wish fulfillment, yet I want to suggest that this discussion has not been entirely a fool’s errand, that some understandings have arisen. The first is that identity is under constant construction, it is not something cemented in early life experiences with little interaction or malleability, nor is it the sum total of encounters with the world. Identity seems to reside within the vocabulary, the syntax in which we use to narrate our movement through the world. Language facilitates the composition of identity, yet it extends beyond any one individual, entering what we might call the realm of the non-human. It relies on the human to exist, yet it surpasses the human in its timelessness and endless potentiality. What I would like to suggest is that identity is an intersection between language, affect, and desire. That our relationship with words and syntax, our movement through the material world, and our desire for narrative and sense-making are the primary constituents of what we might regard as selfhood. Thus the framework upon which the essence of selfhood rests is one that is build out of one’s familiarity and use of language. We are the language we speak. Just a few, scattered thoughts on this Sunday afternoon.