Communicating Contradictory Selves: a Critical Postmodern Perspective on Identity Formation

This thesis has been approved by

The Honors Tutorial College and the School of Communication Studies

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Dr. Yea-Wen Chen Assistant Professor, Communication Studies Thesis Adviser

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Dr. JW Smith Honors Tutorial College, DOS Communication Studies

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Jeremy Webster Dean, Honors Tutorial College

Communicating Contradictory Selves: A Critical Postmodern Perspective on Identity Formation

A Thesis Presented to The Honors Tutorial College of Ohio University

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for Graduation from the Honors Tutorial College with the degree of Bachelor of Science in Communication Studies

By Tyler Borchers

Contents

Acknowledgements v Introduction 1

1 Transgressing Language and Transforming Lived Experience 14 2 The Potentials and Pastiches of Postmodern Consciousness 30 3 Embodying Contradiction; Contradicting the Body 47

Conclusion 62 References 71 v

Acknowledgements

There are many people without whom this thesis would not have been possible: Dr. Chen, my advisor, whose insight was always profound, even when my own work was in its crudest form; Dr. Aden, whose initial guidance was indispensable to the development of my thesis topic; Dr. Smith, whose heartfelt encouragement enlivened my spirit when it was most weary; the Honors Tutorial College, including Dr. Jeremy Webster, Jan Hodson, Dr. Cary Frith, Kathy White, and Margie Huber, whose tireless work enriched my academic experience in untold ways; so many teachers and professors, including Jason Scott, Dr. Jerry Miller, Dr. Lynn Harter, Dr. Patty Stokes, Dr. Sarah Pemberton, Dr. Vincent Jungkunz, and Dr. Debra Thompson, whose patience and enthusiasm forever changed how I go about learning; my mom, my dad, my sisters, and brothers-in-law, whose love and support is a constant in my life; my nephews Jackson and Cooper, whose perspectives on the world are endlessly inspiring; and my close friends Spencer Smith, Matthew Farmer, Taylor Reinhart, Evan Swingle, and Joe Skyrm for providing necessary distraction from my writing. The pages that follow were nothing short of a collaborative effort, co-created by your influence, co-authored by your voices.

Introduction

“In a world tyrannized by scarcity, men and women nevertheless express in their practical lives not only what they need for material existence but some sense of their symbolic place in the world, of who they are, their identities.” Stuart Hall 1996, 234

Identity is power. The influence each of us has over our own identities and the identities of others is a reflection of our positions in society. Accordingly, identity formation is both a deeply personal and an intensely political act.

Within the critical tradition there is some debate over the availability of potential identities and people’s capacities to enact them. Postmodern thinkers such as

Kenneth Gergen claim that agency is at an all-time high, limited mostly by internal forces like our own imaginations. This perspective begins with the claim that in the past identity was usually inherited from one’s family or cultural ideology: “For most of human history, forming an adult identity was by all accounts a relatively straightforward process” (Côté and Levine 2002, 3). Relative to that history, then,

“identity formation has become a more difficult, precarious, and solitary process for which many people are unprepared in terms of their phylogenetic background” (3).

Yet the anxiety that accompanies this newfound agency is nonetheless borne out of a certain privilege. The postmodern perspective described above doesn’t fully acknowledge the oppressive forces that continue to arrest the development of co- cultural identities. From a critical race perspective, the construction of a minority identity is anything but solitary. It is instead a terribly public process in which some elements are socially predetermined while others are highly restricted, disciplined, and policed. How can we reconcile the claims that “choice has replaced obligation as the 2

basis of self-definition” (Côté and Levine 2002, 3), yet “being oppressed means the absence of choices” (hooks 2000, 5)? Can we assert with any seriousness that agency is proliferating for everyone when the subaltern still aren’t heard (Spivak 1988)? It is with this need in mind — to address a persistent academic debate over the conflicting experiences of identity formation processes and practices — that I write this thesis. By doing so, I hope this thesis will point communication scholars in new directions toward rethinking identity formation.

Conceptualizing identity is intuitively simple yet intellectually challenging.

Identity is simultaneously imposed and enacted, fixed and liminal, singular and fragmented. Marshal Berman wrote that to live a modern life was “to live a life of paradox and contradiction ... alive to new possibilities for experience and adventure, frightened by the nihilistic depths to which so many modern adventures lead, longing to create and hold onto something real even as everything melts” (1982, 25). In the past, self-contradiction has been conceptualized as weakness. The very language we use to describe it — fragmented, unstable, contingent — suggests its fragility, its propensity to shatter at any moment. Given the power of identity to shape reality, aversion to self-contradiction — to vulnerability — is understandable. Still, this aversion has not calibrated each of our thoughts and beliefs, actions and reactions.

Instead, it manifests when we reflect on our identities in the form of repudiation, distancing our self-concepts and the lived experiences from which they are derived. It is for these reasons that I will argue self-contradiction can serve as a more functional understanding of identity formation. In doing so, I hope to open a space within

communication studies that allows for more inclusive discussion of the self as contradictory.

Methodological Approach

I will craft my argument by entering into conversation with three primary texts: (a) Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, (b) Kenneth Gergen’s

The Saturated Self, and (c) bell hooks’ Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics.

Each of these texts significantly impacted my intellectual development as an undergraduate student-scholar, and I think they each coherently represent different

(yet intersecting) bodies of literature within the critical tradition that converge and diverge in fascinating ways. The psychological, sociological, postmodern and critical backgrounds of these authors will be supplemented by my own training in communication studies. Because this thesis is examining theory and lacks a concrete object of study, each of its chapters will focus on a key scholar and analyze a selected set of elements.

I write this thesis with an understanding that theorizing communication is both a scholarly pursuit and an everyday practice. Put simply, “we tend to think about communication when we encounter communication problems” (Craig 1999, xi). In acknowledgement of this point, I will insert personal narratives where they are helpful in illustrating various claims. The contours of my argument will take shape as I analyze the primary texts throughout my thesis. My concluding chapter will explore further applications of this perspective, delineate new horizons for future research and pose a new metaphor for understanding fragmented and contradicted identities.

Contradiction is the centerpiece of many academic subjects, both psychological and communicative. To underscore the unique lens of viewing identity formation as contradiction, I will establish how contradiction is distinct from other related concepts in the context of identity work from a communicative perspective.

Cognitive dissonance most commonly refers to the dissonance between an attitude

(e.g.: enslaving humans is immoral) and an action (enslaving humans), and deals with how people mentally resolve perceived dissonance (“Slaves aren’t fully human”)

(Leslie 2013). Similarly, ambivalence is the dissonance between two attitudes (e.g.: enslaving humans is simultaneously immoral and economical). Identity is broader than either of these concepts. It is made up of attitudes, actions and many more elements, such as associations. Yet the studies of cognitive dissonance and ambivalence do provide insight into my own research. First, both subjects are usually assumed to be problematic mental states, and their study examines how people rationalize dissonance. That we subconsciously determine that such dissonance is socially unacceptable and seek to resolve it illustrates how deeply engrained our concept of the cohesive self is. This is key to explaining people’s aversion to the contradictory self.

Second, these concepts are evidence that identity is frequently studied as a subject of psychology. Even accounts of identity fragmentation and contradiction can be found in psychology, diagnosed as dissociative identity disorder (and previously as multiple personality disorder). While psychological perspectives provide valuable context, they also highlight a crucial need to distinguish my research and illustrate going forward how identity is performed and negotiated interpersonally.

Mainstream identity theorizing conducted by communication scholars has convincingly explained how the self is performed. Case studies of particular minority groups have illustrated that a person’s potential for identity formation is determined by her social status. Yet intersectionality and multiculturalism have made mainstream concepts of identity even more static, suggesting that individuals permanently occupy specific and identifiable locations in society. Simultaneously, focusing on how identity is interpersonally communicated from one person to another leaves little room to imagine anyone containing multiple selves, let alone conflicting ones. With this project, I hope to create a space where mainstream communication research can conceptualize the self as nomadic, numerous and contradictory.

Using Robert T. Craig’s seven traditions of communication theory as a framework, I will situate my thesis within the critical tradition. According to Craig,

Communication conceived in this way explains how social injustice is perpetuated by ideological distortions and how justice can potentially be restored through communicative practices that enable critical reflection or consciousness-raising in order to unmask those distortions and thereby enable political action to liberate the participants from them. (1999, 147)

It will be specifically grounded in postmodernism and critical race theory. I want to make clear that this research is not intended to describe the world as it exists, but to develop a lens through which we might perceive it differently. As such, the usefulness of this lens to discern familiar experiences in new ways will vary by person and circumstance. Our understanding of the world is made richer by our ability to see it through many lenses, and thus our willingness to temporarily remove those that fit most naturally, or benefit us most, is vital. I also recognize that some theory does not

come so naturally, instead demanding a paradigm shift. The claim that any individual is not a holistic, harmonious self but many, often conflicting, selves challenges most

Western concepts of identity. This function of theory, to articulate what is not commonly understood, is especially important, and precisely for that reason requires a more convincing argument.

Finally, I offer two brief notes on vocabulary. First, this text prefers the term

“co-culture” over its alternatives. Co-cultural communication theory draws from muted group theory, standpoint theory and phenomenology to examine the ways in which “culture” can be better understood as a co-cultural process, and the ways various co-cultural group members communicate in and navigate through hostile environments. Mark Orbe noted that “In the past, researchers have used a variety of terms to describe co-cultural communication: intercultural (Sitaram & Cogdell, 1976); subordinate, inferior, minority (Stanback & Pearce, 1981); subcultural (Pearson &

Nelson, 1991); non dominant (Folb, 1994); and muted group (Kramarae, 1981)”

(1998, 1). Orbe developed the term co-culture partly due to a dearth of alternatives that capture how culture is co-constructed, represent the diversity of cultural experiences and positionality, and avoid reifying or condemning the subjects they modify to those same social positions.

Second, I have strived in the pages that follow to default to female pronouns when describing subjects without an assigned gender. Given the legacy of gendering males as default and females as deviant in written and spoken word, and given how tightly seemingly trivial linguistic choices are bound to powerful systems of

inequality, I think it is important to oppose such norms. Accordingly, I have also attempted to edit quotations of other authors that treat masculine pronouns as default.

This might be seen as a form of consciousness-raising, because it is purposefully conspicuous, meant to catch readers’ eyes and inspire brief moments of reflection. It might also be understood as a humble act of opposition in its own right. Because, of course, the grammatical is political.

Chapter 1: Transgressing Language and Transforming Lived Experience

Many Western-centered ideas about identity are rooted in Enlightenment ideology, which reveals two fundamental problems with our collective concept of identity: It is Eurocentric, and it is outdated. These flaws don’t persist by coincidence

— they maintain an oppressive system that significantly benefits the dominant hegemonic class.

Enlightened identity sought to embody modernist systems like the scientific method, republican governance, capitalism and industrialization. These systems manifested in our identities as ideals to strive for in everyday life: objectivity, rationality, possession and productivity. Bertrand Russell speculated in Portraits from

Memory, “that in time there would be a mathematics of human behavior as precise as the mathematics of machines” (1956, 15). Meanwhile, the identities available to those living during the Enlightenment became increasingly dichotomized, and the universal application of European standards for evaluating identity substantially contributed to the social construction of race and subjugation of Otherness. What was quintessence for Europeans was utterly unobtainable for those outside Europe, and to this day

people of color are “bombarded by a powerful colonizing whiteness that seduces us away from ourselves, that negates that there is beauty to be found in any form of blackness that is not imitation whiteness” (hooks 1996, 218).

In chapter 1, I will argue that the dichotomization of identity results in part from an aversion to self-contradiction. When potential identities are conceptualized as essential and defined in contrast to one another, deviation from one’s essence (calling oneself part rational and part irrational, at times civilized and at times barbaric, or occasionally superstitious but usually scientific) is inherently contradictory. These binaries constructed more than they reflected reality. For example, although today scientific advancement connotes social progress, for centuries science enabled and justified colonization. Technological superiority was essential to colonial aspirations, but so too was a concept of identity that could ‘scientifically’ warrant enslavement. As

Philippa Levine observed, “Colonial expansion and the growing prowess of medicine and science were intimately connected” (2003, 195). Indeed, savagery depends on science. In Modernity and the Holocaust (1989), Zygmunt Bauman argued that genocide, rather than a deviation from the path of modernity, is symptomatic of it.

That science, the engine of civilization, was used to carry out barbaric acts has long been contradictory. Only recently have scholars acknowledged it as such.

The mere imagination of an internally congruous self requires power. Identity construction is an exertion of power and control, both over oneself and others. Long before the advent of postmodernism, those with little control over their own identities recognized themselves as hybrids composed of often disparate parts. Because

“subordinate groups are made ‘inarticulate’ since the communication structures of the mainstream systems reflect a dominant perception of reality,” (Orbe 1998, 8) these experiences are often diagnosed metaphorically: as veils (Du Bois 1994) and double vision (Bhabha 1994), masks (Fanon 1967) and mystiques (Friedan 1963). Some authors described them plainly as problems lacking names . Given these accounts, belief in the consonance of one’s own identity is a demonstration of significant privilege. A compelling illustration of this point comes from Latin America, where

Spanish colonists obsessively tracked heritages and enforced identities through Casta paintings that instructed, for example, “From Spaniard and Mestiza, a Castizo is Born”

(Goldberg 2009, 208). During the colonial era, Europeans preferred the phrase “purity of blood,” in part because ancestry was more central to identity, but even as those words go out of fashion, their meaning is still relevant: Today we might overhear murmurs about the importance of “self-harmony.”

Further still, the Enlightenment concept of self isn’t as functionally useful as a contradictory one. More so today than ever before, our “positionalities are never final, they’re never absolute. They can’t be translated intact from one conjuncture to another; they cannot be depended on to remain in the same place” (Hall 1996, 264).

Dependence on a fixed concept of self will become incapacitating and unwieldy as we approach social saturation. Embracing the contradictory nature of self gives one access to a multitude of identities, each one uniquely equipped to manage new and inconstant circumstances. As Stuart Hall put it, “In a permanently Transitional Age we must expect unevenness, contradictory outcomes, disjunctures, delays, contingencies,

uncompleted projects overlapping emergent ones” (1996, 232). For these reasons, I will argue for a conceptual shift that transforms the way we frame identity from either/or thinking into a both/and logic.

Chapter 2: The Potentials and Pastiches of Postmodern Consciousness

Kenneth Gergen described one feature of postmodern consciousness as populating the self, which he defined as “the acquisition of multiple and disparate potentials for being” (1991, 69). This “infusion of partial identities through social saturation” (1991, 49) will be central to my thinking in this chapter. I will argue that as the self is further fractured, self-contradiction is felt by more people in more varied ways. Gergen thought self-contradiction was symptomatic of another term he coined: multiphrenia. “The vertigo of unlimited multiplicity” (1991, 49) is a predictable reaction to postmodern life, Gergen suggested, but failure to adjust to it would demand nothing short of a medical diagnosis. Thus, there are very real consequences when our essentialized notions of self are fragmented and we are unable to cope with the divergence and impermanence of what remains. In other words, “Modern man [and woman] is afflicted with a permanent identity crisis, a condition conducive to considerable nervousness” (Berger, Berger and Kellner 1973, 78).

Yet identity crises can be enforced externally just as they are internally.

Gergen’s perspective fails to appreciate the experiences of those whose identities are limited by more than their imaginations. The process of inscribing certain people with nonwhite identities involves socializing them into Euro-mimesis, a crisis not of unlimited multiplicity but of crippling limitation: “Those registered as racially

different, as bruised, are lured into Euro-likeness while warned that its inner treasures are almost always beyond their reach. White-likeness is a liking of what’s white, socially induced, a drive to be white-like, but also a grasping in the dark about its idealized experience, for its treasury” (Goldberg 2009, 217). Policing identity is itself an exercise in contradiction, an exertion of power that both destroys and rebuilds. For example, the process of deracialization involves first stripping the colonized of their identity, then imposing a new, dehumanizing identity that benefits the colonist. “Far from a project of purification, whitening becomes a process of proliferation through incorporation, of growth and expansion through ingestion of the indigenous, the devouring of the different as much as the ravaging of resources” (2009, 219).

Crucially, this thesis will analyze identity fragmentation and contradiction both as a feature of “postmodern life” and as political tools of oppression, resistance and transformation.

Chapter 3: Embodying Contradiction; Contradicting the Body

Here, I will consider the self in a broader context, as body and embodiment.

Despite Gergen’s claims, the most fundamental aspects of our identities — our genders, races and classes — don’t seem any more flexible. hooks warned against becoming preoccupied with the self isolated from its social context when she wrote “It is important for this country to make its people so obsessed with their own liberal individualism that they do not have time to think about a world larger than self”

(Mosley et al. 1999, 139). Keeping in mind that “Rituals of speaking are politically constituted by power relations of domination, exploitation, and subordination. Who is

speaking, who is spoken of, and who listens is a result, as well as an act, of political struggle,” (Alcoff 1991, 9) how can we communicate and enact our own identities in such a way that resists oppressive forces? Revealing the contradictory nature of the self does more than improve our psychological wellbeing. It demonstrates the absurdity of our most unrelenting preconceptions and stereotypes. hooks explains how the dominant hegemonic class has conceptualized black men and women in contradictory ways such that stereotypes that are inconsistent can be invoked individually to suit the immediate demands of the privileged class:

Within neo-colonial white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, the black male body continues to be perceived as an embodiment of bestial, violent, penis-as- weapon hypermasculine assertion. Psychohistories of white racism have always called attention to the tension between the construction of black male body as danger and the underlying eroticization that always then imagines that body as a location for transgressive pleasure. It has taken contemporary commodification of blackness to teach the world that this perceived threat, k real or symbolic, can be diffused by a process of fetishization that renders the black masculine ‘menace’ feminine through a process of patriarchal objectification. (hooks 2004, 74)

By admitting that the self is contradictory, we illuminate otherwise invisible discursive power and contribute to the deconstruction of damaging stereotypes. In this chapter, I will attempt to ground my argument more deeply in lived experiences. Otherwise, the abstraction of postmodernism would pose a very real threat of distracting critical thinkers from the subjects who are made victim by contradiction, who embody it, whose bodies feel contradiction with unique intensity. Thus, this chapter will directly explore the power of contradiction: how it is currently deployed to marginalize some, and how it may be harnessed as a de-centering force by the margins.

Conclusion

I will conclude with three personal narratives that convey the manner in which identity fragmentation and contradiction ruptured unexpectedly into my own life during my writing process. In doing so, I hope to briefly illustrate real-world applications for this perspective. I’ll go on to synthesize the texts and concepts that I have employed in the previous three chapters, then suggest further applications and future directions for this research. Finally, I propose a new metaphor for understanding the postmodern self: identity constellation.

Chapter 1: Transgressing Language and Transforming Lived Experience

“The violence of language consists in its effort to capture the ineffable and, hence, to destroy it, to seize hold of that which must remain elusive for language to operate as a living thing.” Judith Butler 1997, 9

“Language does not exist encased in glass and formaldehyde. And the perversion of words is not a cosmic felony, it is how language actually works.” Ta-Nehisi Coates 2013

“How new are these ‘New Times’? Are they the dawn of a New Age or only the whisper of an old one?” (Hall 1996, 223). Stuart Hall wrote those words in 1989 while reflecting on a British political and intellectual movement toward postmodernism. He rightfully questioned whether the ideas that characterized ‘New

Times’ actually originated much earlier, but his usage of the term ‘New Times’ telegraphed his answer. Yet the question remains compelling because postmodern thinkers such as Stuart Hall have often been in the awkward position of ‘coining’ terms to describe ancient experiences. Hall illustrated the contradictory nature of modernity a few pages later:

It is difficult to deny that, at the end of the twentieth century, the paradoxes of modernity seem even more extreme. ‘Modernity’ has acquired a relentlessly uneven and contradictory character: material abundance here, producing poverty and immiseration there; greater diversity and choice – but often at the cost of commodification, fragmentation and isolation. More opportunities for participation – but only at the expense of subordinating oneself to the laws of the market. Novelty and innovation – but driven by what often appears to be false needs. The rich ‘West’ – and the famine-stricken South. Forms of ‘development’ which destroy faster than they create. The city – privileged scenario of the modern experience for Baudelaire or Walter Benjamin – transformed into the anonymous city, the sprawling city, the inner city, the abandoned city… (Hall 1996, 228)

Like so many of the defining characteristics of these ‘New Times,’ identity fragmentation is not a new experience but is being experienced in new ways.

Fragmentation has arguably proliferated under modernity, but it is hardly a new feature of identity formation. As is often the case, the postmodern contribution has been one of clarification (the coining of the term ‘fragmentation,’ for example). But it is of paramount concern that we distinguish between the origin of a term and the experience it describes. Otherwise, we risk mistaking identification for ownership. As bell hooks put it, “Postmodernist discourses are often exclusionary even as they call attention to, appropriate even, the experience of ‘difference’ and ‘Otherness’ to provide oppositional political meaning, legitimacy, and immediacy when they are accused of lacking concrete relevance” (hooks 1990, 23). With this concern in mind, I think it’s important to begin by contextualizing and historicizing the concept of identity fragmentation as a prerequisite for identity contradiction.

Fragmentation is simultaneously a precondition to self-contradiction and arguably itself a contradiction. Given that Western identities have traditionally been conceptualized as consistent and consonant, identity fragmentation contradicts the dominant meaning of “identity.” It is enticing to imagine fragmentation as the mere splitting of, or appending to, the preexisting Western concept of identity, but the rigidity of that identity concept allows for no such manipulation. Instead, viewing fragmentation as a contradiction requires a paradigm shift, “a transition between incommensurables” (Kuhn 1996, 149), in how we understand our own identities and the identities of others.

Fragmentation is a precondition to self-contradiction because contradiction requires at least two components: (a) denying self-identity fragmentation and (b) relegating other-identity fragmentation. This is how the Western concept of identity avoids contradiction, by denying the possibility of identity fragmentation. Thus, the fragmenting of another’s identity relegates them to experience the world from a standpoint the Western subject doesn’t recognize. It also allows for the possibility of their identities to be turned inward against each other, cannibalizing one’s political power through self-contradiction.

In this chapter, I will argue that co-cultural group members, those considered to be marginal by the rest of society, experience a uniquely intense and malicious form of identity fragmentation. I will trace a co-cultural discourse of ‘consciousness’ as evidence that the contradictory nature of such experiences was deeply felt and profoundly understood by co-cultural group members long before the popularization of postmodernism. Later, I will consider how metaphorical language has informed both our understandings of present power disparities between social groups (co- cultural and otherwise) and our collective imagination of what transforming those disparities might entail and accomplish. Finally, I will explore the possibilities surrounding language and its perversion toward transforming the meaning behind the contradictory lived experiences of co-cultural group members.

Co-cultural Consciousness as a Site of Contradiction

“The world which brings consciousness into existence becomes the world of that consciousness.” Paulo Friere 1970, 82

In 1844, Karl Marx identified the alienation of laborers from their natural essence as an essential feature of capitalist systems of production. Marx distinguished four dimensions: Alienation of the laborer from (a) the product of her labor, (b) the act of producing, (c) herself as a producer and (d) other laborers. For Marx, alienation described the experience of being forced to behave in ways that contradict human nature. Yet I argue that his analysis can be reasonably adapted and applied to an understanding of identity that is more complex than “human nature.” Our identities are shaped in part by our proximity to certain objects, activities, attitudes, and persons.

The displacement of any person from her desired positionality splinters her self-image, severing her perceived place in society from her placement in society. I argue that the constriction of agency and the construction of alienation are two sides of the same coin.

The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 incorporates alienation into Marx’s broader critique of capitalism, making clear that alienation is a result of oppression. He’s less direct about how intentional alienation is specifically — that is, whether it’s deliberately deployed by the bourgeoisie against the proletariat, or simply a side effect of capitalism. I hold that both are true; one type of fragmentation is specifically targeted at and disproportionately felt by co-cultural group members while another relatively benign fragmentation is more universally felt. Marx’s theory of alienation is one example of how identities become fragmented as a result of unequal

social systems. It is a specifically class-based critique, although fragmentation can be weaponized in the name of myriad social constructs, including race and gender.

Double Consciousness

Nearly a century earlier in 1897, W.E.B. Du Bois articulately described the experience of identity fragmentation when he coined the term “double consciousness.”

To be African American, he claimed, was to be constantly aware of one’s multiplicity:

“It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness—an

American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder” (Du Bois 1994, 9). Du Bois seems ambivalent about the effect this has on

African American minds, on the same page claiming that African Americanism is defined by this “strife” to “merge” two identities and later explaining that he doesn’t wish for himself the loss of either identity because they are both distinctly precious.

However, he is very clear that the doubling of consciousness is socially produced and has negative social consequences — that it signifies the internalization of oppression, which further restricts the number of opportunities available to those oppressed. Yet even while decrying this double bind, Du Bois recognizes that double consciousness ought not necessarily be oppressive: “Here in America, in the few days since

Emancipation, the black man’s [and woman’s] turning hither and thither in hesitant and doubtful striving has often made his [and her] very strength to lose effectiveness,

to seem like absence of power, like weakness. And yet it is not weakness—it is the contradiction of double aims” (1994, 9). Du Bois not only acknowledged that his identities were contradictory, but he recognized an important feature of this contradiction: The Western conceptualization of identity in both 2013 and in 1897 is opposed to contradiction, but it doesn’t have to be. I argue that Du Bois’ double consciousness, the postmodern experience of fragmentation itself, is not inherently negative. Instead, it is the modern context that sullies the fragmented condition. The anxiety Du Bois identified is produced on top of fragmentation by a modernist ideology hostile to unpredictability. By revealing the relationship between fragmentation and modernity, we can imagine a post-modern world in which a doubled consciousness is valued as a heightened sense of awareness, an improved ability to perceive reality or an empowering condition.

Dual Consciousness

In 1952, Frantz Fanon developed another concept, dual consciousness, based on Du Bois’ double consciousness but distinct in several ways. Fanon coined dual consciousness in a book titled Black Skin, White Masks, suggesting that one consciousness (skin) is more authentic than the other (mask), but simultaneously less desirable. For Fanon, the “white mask” symbolizes the colonization of “black skin,” the impossibility of the colonized to maintain their own identities in a world ruled by colonizers. “A normal Negro child having grown up within a normal family, will become abnormal on the slightest contact with the white world” (Fanon 1967, 143).

Attempting to escape abnormality reveals how identities are made contradictory: The

colonized are humiliatingly forced to identify with a colonizing culture which defines both alternatives and imitations as inferior.

Significantly, Du Bois and Fanon both invoke metaphors to describe their experiences. Du Bois’ veil represented the obscuring forces that prevent members of each race from seeing those of other races for who they really are, while Fanon’s mask symbolized afro-insecurity and euro-mimesis. This similarity is not coincidental but is instead common when subjugated group members describe their experiences of oppression. It’s also not accidental: The languages that we use to communicate our experiences are products of domination, constantly reflecting, reconstructing and reaffirming a dominant view of the world. Language is value-laden, and when it is developed by people in dominant societal positions, it inevitably lacks symbols to adequately describe experiences of oppression. It’s no wonder, then, that Du Bois and

Fanon rely on metaphors rather than literal language to express themselves, because

“those experiences unique to co-cultural group members often cannot be effectively described within the constraints of the dominant communication structure” (Orbe

1998, 20). Thus, communicating a non-dominant identity is a contradictory performance. It requires oppressed people to express their experiences in a language specifically crafted to deny the existence of such experiences. These contradictions ensure that subordinate members of society are inarticulate, weakening their political identities.

False Consciousness

Ideology intersects language as another ubiquitous medium through which identities are contradicted. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels laid the groundwork for theorizing ideology in relation to other avenues of dominance in 1846, when they wrote that:

The class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, consequently also controls the means of mental production, so that the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are on the whole subject to it. (Marx and Engels 1976, 59)

Both double consciousness and dual consciousness are examples of this “mental production,” in which an additional identity is socially constructed, transmitted and applied to a preexisting identity. Du Bois and Fanon quite literally describe the experience of being conscious of both identities. But what happens if the identity produced through “intellectual force” is “mentally produced” to be so compelling that she who is subjected to it becomes unconscious of any previous identity? The result, often referred to as false consciousness, is that “The popular classes are duped by the dominant classes, temporarily ensnared against their material interests by a false structure of illusions, which would be dispelled as real material factors reassert themselves” (Hall 1996, 52). Because false consciousness is politically produced and not a random occurrence, a person’s “real” interests are often in direct opposition to their stated interests while under the spell of false consciousness. In other words, because false consciousness is politically produced and not a random occurrence, it doesn’t just replace “true” identities, it necessarily contradicts, or conceals, them in ways that are unconscious to the subjugated. Ideology alone doesn’t change people’s

positions in society (which inform their “real” political interests), but it does transform their minds, disconnecting them from their positionalities such that people’s stated interests are in constant contradiction with their material interests.

In examining false consciousness it is especially important to consider the characteristics of a “successful” ideology:

The first thing to ask about an ‘organic ideology’ that, however unexpectedly, succeeds in organizing substantial sections of the masses and mobilizing them for political action, is not what is false about it but what about it is true. By ‘true’ I do not mean universally correct as a law of the universe but ‘makes good sense.’ (Hall 1996, 46)

Ideology is the articulation of ideas that are politically beneficial to its producers and that are compelling (“make good sense”) to its adherents. These ideas need not fit together naturally— instead, they are made to seem naturally fitting through the process of articulation. “The so-called ‘unity’ of a discourse is really the articulation of different, distinct elements, which can be (re)articulated in different ways because they have no necessary ‘belongingness’” (Hall 1996, 53). Indeed, articulation can be a tool of oppression. But because it encourages the imagination of new connections between novel ideas, articulation offers more in the form of resistance to rather than the perpetuation of oppressive ideologies. Du Bois and Fanon understood this well. By rearticulating traditional symbols (the words “veil” and “mask”) to correspond with new meanings, they illuminated experiences of oppression that were indescribable before. In this way, metaphor can be used as a subversive technique of creating new language where it previously did not exist.

Transcending the Limitations of Language

“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” Ludwig Wittgenstein 1922, 74

Articulation

Articulation can both recreate systems of oppression and resist them. To be sure, oppression was not originally 'discovered' – it was articulated. Each rank within every social hierarchy originally fit no more or less in its position within that hierarchy than any other rank. Instead, identities were formed by cohering particular meanings with particular people, creating social categories where before there existed vastly diverse individuals. And those identity categories were ranked by articulating each one's particular worth. This normalized hierarchy is articulated as 'the social order,' itself a result of complex and intricate articulations in which socially constructed human categories are made to seem primordial, which would justify the established hierarchy of identities.

This understanding makes clear that the articulation of the social order directs the distribution of power, but just as important is that it ensures its own directness. It arbitrarily classifies an entire species of abundant diversity into restrictively discrete races, genders and sexualities. The social order replaces rich spectrums of existence with imaginary binaries demanding that we identify in opposition to one another and ourselves. This obsession with discursive boundaries, with constantly clarifying the divisions of humanity (all at the sake of real clarity) is an ever-present feature of our social identities because in order to reliably award and deny resources to particular social groups, they must be distinct and static. Hall wrote that “one way in which

power operates in the apparently decentred sphere of culture is through the struggle to harness it, to superimpose on it, to regulate and enclose its diverse and transgressive forms and energies, within the structure and logic of a normative or canonical binary”

(1996, 302). The essence of an identity concept that routinely transforms billions of people with innumerable lived experiences into lifeless stereotypes must be a fierce opposition to diversity.

This conceptualization of identity fosters an aversion to self-contradiction because it embraces diversity and complicates classification. Any identity that contradicts this organizing concept (for example, a trans person with male and female sexual organs) is a threat to the system of power distribution (do we afford him or her the power typically assigned to a he or she?), and threats to the system are systematically estranged (disempowered relative to both men and women in society).

These ‘unclassifieds’ are paradoxically the source of both disgust and desire for those positioned within a social order that assures relative dominance and domination:

The primary site of contradiction, the site of conflicting and mutually incompatible representation, is undoubtedly the ‘low.’ Again and again we find a striking ambivalence to the representations of the lower strata (of the body, of literature, of society, of place) in which they are both reviled and desired. Repugnance and fascination are the twin poles of the process in which a political imperative to reject and eliminate the debasing ‘low’ conflicts powerfully and unpredictably with a desire for the other. (Stallybrass and White 1986, 4)

Metaphors of transformation have the potential to reveal and subvert the binary social order organized in part out of an aversion to self-contradiction. The power of metaphor to articulate new perspectives and imaginations of the world contributes to the transformation of our realities. Traditionally, metaphors of transformation were

dramatically conceived as full-on reversals and substitutions of social roles. In fact, these metaphors were remarkably unimaginative in that they failed to reconceptualize identity as anything other than hierarchical. Simply flipping the social order reinforces the old paradigm of dominance. Yet Hall observed “the critiques of the binary-and- inversion structure of the classic metaphors of transformation have been followed by ditching them in favour of more lateral or horizontal metaphors – a movement now so fashionable in critical theory as almost to have acquired the status of the banal” (1996,

301). These metaphors don’t fully appreciate the constant micro-negotiation of language either. Language is a tedious process. It is maintained through countless daily encounters, most of which appear apolitical, ordinary and inconsequential. The dominant discourse is not a castle that can be toppled in a moment of insurrection.

Displacing discourse is an equally tedious project of disarticulating individual bricks and inflecting them with less oppressive meanings. In other words, “Since different accents coincide within the same sign, the struggle over meaning did not take the form of substituting one, self-sufficient class language for another, but of the disarticulation and rearticulation of different ideological accentings within the same sign” (295).

Metaphors of Difference

The ‘low’ is a contradictory identity precisely because it is defined in relationship to the ‘high.’ These contradictions reflect the ambivalence of a dominant hegemonic class that controls most means of identity construction. Here, distinguishing between Peter Stallybrass’ and Allon White’s ‘low’ and Edward Said’s

(1979) ’Other’ is necessary to better contextualize a discussion of identity

contradiction. Although they describe extremely similar identities, they suggest different social and symbolic meanings, especially for considering processes of identity contradictions. The ‘Other’ and the ‘Same’ constitute a more basic relationship of revilement. The ‘Other’ is not just defined by its difference but the undesirability of that difference. Thus, othering can manifest as exclusion and elimination. If ‘Sameness’ is central, ‘Others’ are peripheral.

In contrast, the symbolic relationship of ‘high’ and ‘low’ is more interdependent. This is obvious in some power dynamics. For example, a master derives constitutive power from slaves. She does not desire their elimination. Rather, they are her greatest asset, the source of her power. In other situations, the dominant benefit less directly from yet still show an intense fascination with the dominated. This explains why the dominated are often the focus of mass media, where political hierarchies are perpetuated. For example, the ‘high’ obtain sexual pleasure from the eroticization of the ‘low,’ as in the case of hypersexualized black femininity. They are entertained by the debasement of the ‘low,’ which was the impetus of minstrelsy. They even wonder at the spectacle of lowness in professional sports. Michael A. Messner illustrated the flexibility and contradiction of dominance in his explanation of how a single subject can be characterized as simultaneously same and other:

There is a curious preoccupation among middle class males with movie characters who are ‘working class tough guys’, with athletes who are fearsome ‘hitters’ and who heroically ‘play hurt.’ These violent ‘tough guys’ of the culture industry – the Rambos, the Jack Tatums, the Ronnie Lotts – are at once the heroes who ‘prove’ that ‘we men’ are superior to women and they play the role of ‘other,’ against whom privileged men define themselves as ‘modern.’ They are, in a very real sense, contemporary gladiators who are sacrificed in

order that the elite may have a clear sense of where they stand in the pecking order of inter-male dominance. (Messner 1990, 214)

In each of these cases, the ‘high’ maintain power by standing on the shoulders of the

‘low.’ Thus, the ‘low’ are not symbolically peripheral but central to the maintenance of hierarchy. By identifying them as such, the ‘high’ have not only ensnared the ‘low’ in a relationship of domination. They’ve also entrusted the low with its own, lesser power over the mechanism that raises up the high.

To be perfectly clear, ‘low’ and ‘Other’ are just two metaphors for illustrating power relations and political slippage. They are only distinct identities insofar as we are all capable of experiencing distinct identities. That is, a single person may often feel like or be treated as ‘low’ and ‘Other,’ and those experiences may or may not be distinct. They can each be conceptualized socially and symbolically, but I think the spatial distance of ‘Other’ clearly communicates its social element, whereas the ‘low’ invokes a symbolic hierarchy. This contradiction is what Stallybrass and White meant by “What is socially peripheral is so frequently symbolically central” (1986, 5).

Metaphors of Transformation

Foucault described the contradictory relationship each of us has with oppression, in which “The individual which power has constituted is at the same time its vehicle” (1980, 98). Indeed, the high and low live within each of us. At certain times, we are each Othered, and in certain contexts we are all marginalized. To be sure, subjugated groups have a more intimate understanding of these experiences. Yet the Western desire has been to oversimplify through essentialism — to freeze these

fluid identities into supposedly solid characteristics that define fundamental boundaries that separate people.

The alternative isn’t as straightforward but is ultimately more useful, as

William Ickes observed: “As much as we might like to eliminate such conflicting elements in our theories about human social behavior, our understanding might be better served by openly acknowledging and confronting them” (1993, 84). Indeed, we cannot hope to resist oppression in any form before confronting our own oppressive tendencies in all their forms. This requires not only constant self-reflection but an intense self-interrogation. Those behaviors that come most naturally to us, that we think least about in the bustle of daily life, are precisely the ones that we must question most moment-to-moment. bell hooks wrote that:

It is necessary for us to remember, as we think critically about domination, that we all have the capacity to act in ways that oppress, dominate, wound (whether or not that power is institutionalized). It is necessary to remember that it is first the potential oppressor within that we must resist – the potential victim within that we must rescue – otherwise we cannot hope for an end to domination, for liberation. (1989, 21)

The Western language of identity works to ensure that we think about ourselves in particular ways: as coherent, consistent and ‘complete.’ Not coincidentally, this is often how the West imagines language itself — not as an ongoing process of vigorous collaboration but as a finished product. This is a key feature of oppression: the manipulation of a medium that encourages creativity into an establishment of the status quo. Hall wrote about the Western “exercise of cultural power through the imposition of the norm in an attempt to freeze and fix meaning in language to the

constant eruption of new meanings, the fluidity of heteroglossia, and the way meaning’s inherent instability and heterogeneity dislocated and displaced language’s apparently ‘finished’ character” (1996, 297).

In this way, language is a useful lens for understanding the self. We each come into the world as mere utterances in a dialogue many lifetimes long. Making sense of our place in the world, like making meaning out of an utterance, is a process necessarily unfinished. There is no containing the self just as there is no self-contained expression. Whether we are conscious of it or not, our actions are always better characterized as moment-to-moment re-actions, always attuned to contextual influences. To speak is to respond, not only to those listening but to a vast collection and interaction of meanings. Clarifying one’s self means combining with others to make something new out of a language constituted of old words with uncertain meanings and infinite connotations. Meaning-making is always a cooperative activity.

Communication remains a terrain of creativity because it is shared. Yet the Westerner tends to be reluctant, when it comes to the communication of his/her identity, to relinquish that possessive individualism that assures her that her truly authentic self is somewhere ‘in here,’ if only she digs deep enough. A discursive consciousness recognizes that the meaning of self is always negotiated ‘out there’ with others, where all meaning resides.

Chapter 2: The Potentials and Pastiches of Postmodern Consciousness

“To be white, or straight, or male, or middle class is to be simultaneously ubiquitous and invisible.” Michael Kimmel 2010, 3

“Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes).” Walt Whitman 1921, 77

According to Gergen, identity fragmentation (and contradiction) is a feature of postmodern consciousness. The vicissitudes of the self are experienced by everyone touched by technological advancement. The proliferation of new technologies, which diminished spatial and temporal barriers to and afforded new possibilities for human interactions, led him to conclude that “the potential for new connection and new opportunities is practically unlimited” (1991, 75). Seen from this perspective, fragmentation has the potential to make our identities more versatile. A fragmented identity is a more flexible identity, establishing a “repertoire of potentials” (1991, 74) that can be invoked and reserved at will. Thus, the acquisition of new identities, like adding tools to a tool belt, makes us all better suited for responding to new and changing social situations.

Yet embedded in Gergen’s argument is a deep ambivalence about this new reality. His optimism toward postmodern consciousness is aroused by its “potentials,” but his assessment of its actual impact in the modern world is consistently negative.

He describes the self as “under siege,” overstimulated and exhausted by an excess of interactions that feel less and less complete. He writes that “daily life has become a sea of drowning demands, and there is no shore in sight” (1991, 75). He argues that as 31

we become more aware of the world around us, we also become less confident in our chosen paths. Paradoxically, the promise of unlimited possibility becomes a paralyzing force. As we accumulate increasingly disparate desires, acting on any one in a given moment means missing out on the rest (This is especially true as digital media make it easier to scrutinize such decisions and evaluate how our paths intersect and diverge with others’). Gergen diagnosed this dissonance as “multiphrenia.” Since then, many others have written about ‘twentysomethings’ and our uniquely intense

“fear of missing out” (Przybylski et al. 2013). For Gergen, the expansion of our worlds leads, inevitably, to “the expansion of inadequacy” (1991, 76), and of insecurity, anxiety and nervousness. Indeed, self-doubt appears to be a key feature of modern social saturation.

These problems are not inherent to postmodern consciousness. Instead, they arise when we try to make sense of postmodern experiences through a modernist conceptualization of identity. Thus, when Gergen imagines the ‘potential’ of postmodern consciousness, he is reconceptualizing identity completely. It is that lingering aversion to identity fragmentation and contradiction, that residual impulse to define difference and compete, which complicates experiences of postmodernity.

When thinking outside of a modernist paradigm, many of the problems associated with postmodern experiences of identity fragmentation and contradiction are no longer problematic.

Significantly, this is also true of the type of identity fragmentation and contradiction targeted at co-cultural group members discussed in the previous chapter:

Self-contradiction is only a force for oppression within the confines of a modernist conception of identity. Without a modernist standard, there is nothing necessarily wrong with self-contradiction. Thus, the project of reimagining identity has the potential not only to provide peace of mind but to dismantle systems of oppression.

In this chapter, I will explore how mass media images contribute to identity formation, first examining how producers of mass media negotiate their dual roles as subjective participants and objective observers in their social realities, and second, revealing how consumers of mass media glean from it vastly different messages based on their social positions. I consider popular culture a rich site of power, where meaning is simultaneously produced and consumed, where power is transmitted through the air in waves, and where, as John Fiske noted, contradiction thrives:

Popular culture is the culture of the subordinated and disempowered and thus always bears within it signs of power relations, traces of the forces of domination and subordination that are central to our social system and therefore to our social experiences. Equally, it shows signs of resisting or evading these forces: popular culture contradicts itself. (Fiske 2011, 4-5)

Having unearthed inequities embedded in the individualism of modernist identity concepts, I will propose alternative imaginations of identity that both build on and challenge Gergen’s fundamental concepts.

Mediating the Meaning of Self

“There is no ‘being’ behind doing, effecting, becoming; ‘the doer’ is merely a fiction added to the deed—the deed is everything.” Friedrich Nietzsche 1967, 45

As mass media become ever more ubiquitous, they play an increasingly intimate role in shaping our identities. Today, such influence is inescapable. We are

surrounded by media images and representations, so thoroughly engulfed that seemingly straightforward experiences like looking into a mirror have become unimaginably complex: Who is it that gazes back at me? The image resembles myself, but it is clouded by a fog of latent images, an inescapable side effect of mass media exposure. Since my first reading of Erving Goffman’s Stigma: Notes on the

Management of Spoiled Identity, his incisive definition of shame has stuck with me:

“The individual’s perception of one of his own attributes as being a defiling thing to possess, and one he [or she] can readily see himself as not possessing” (1963, 7). The perception is relatable, yet puzzling: It identifies a trait as both my own and somehow distracting from my true essence. This dual feeling is manufactured by consumption- oriented media images, which must not only treat all viewers as essential consumers but also inculcate inadequacy to inspire consumption. Relinquishing authenticity, as

Gergen suggests, frees us from this bind. Similarly, when we try to unveil racism and other forms of oppression, the objective of our digging should not be their ‘essence’, as Linda Kauffman observed, because “Instead, all one exposes are other representations” (1986, 314). Hence, we turn our attention to media representations.

Objectivity as Insecurity

“In the Western philosophical tradition, method has sought authority: how to produce an account of knowledge which is certain, which ends speculation and precludes skepticism, which has the power that no one else can as powerfully contest”

(MacKinnon 1989, 107). Methodology obviates scrutiny by posing as ‘just the way things are done.’ For example, in Western journalism there are strict methods for

determining ‘objective truths’ — methods that contain and conceal power. And while the products of these methods inspire robust conversation and critique, the neutral reputations of the methods themselves remain largely unscathed. Below, I will reveal how so-called modern methods exert power in journalistic storytelling and everyday communication.

As the first draft of history, journalistic stories do a great deal of work in shaping our understanding of the world. Journalistic style, too, works to shape which speakers and forms of speaking we consider worth listening to. Paradoxically, the

Western tradition has been to privilege the perspectives of those speakers most distant from their subjects. Thus, journalists are taught to be independent, dispassionate and to ensure their interests aren’t in conflict. This situates Western journalism in direct opposition to a critical methodology which adheres to “the authority of experience.”

As Theodor Adorno pointed out, “The detached observer is as much entangled as the active participant” (Adorno and Jephcott 2005, 26). The mere imagination of a

‘detached observer’ is evidence of the persistence of an Enlightenment ideology that has always understated the inescapability of our interconnectedness.

In Western journalism schools and newsrooms, humans are taught to write like robots. They are taught that every trait that makes them unique — their emotion, experience and opinion — is a weakness that should be suppressed. In contrast, the characteristics that are treated as journalistic values almost universally conflict with human expression: objective truth, independence from stakeholders (other humans) and impartiality. It should come as no surprise, then, to encounter news headlines like

“‘Robot Journalist’ Out-Writes Human Sports Reporter” published by NPR on April

17, 2011, and “Robot Journalist Will Snag Pulitzer By 2016, Predicts Robot-Journalist

Programmer” published by Julie Beck of Popular Science on September 12th of the same year. This is, after all, the defining fantasy of modernity: transforming humans into machines.

How did something as unique to humans as storytelling, with its creative demand and nuance, become so formulaic? How is it possible that “journalists believe themselves to be engaged in pursuing truth” (Kovach and Rosenstiel 2007, 41) by erecting a fictional, universal standpoint from which all is ostensibly observed? To do journalism is to participate in the production of idealized ‘detached-selves.’ Journalists rely on the concept of the detached-self to make sense of their work. That is, subjective selves do not meet the standards of Western journalistic practice, so journalists are taught to construct a new identity that individuates them from those without journalistic training, including their own, other selves. This process is observable when journalists insist on defining boundaries between journalists and non- journalists, as well as journalism and other forms of communication. Again, it’s clear why this distinction is so important: It warrants journalists greater authority over determining what is and is not “truth.” It privileges them as speakers not based on particular knowledge but on their supposed expertise in determining which knowledge is newsworthy. Linda Alcoff warned about the many problems with privileging certain speakers, writing in part that “The impetus to always be the speaker and to speak in all situations must be seen for what it is: a desire for mastery and domination” (1991, 24).

Journalism is a form of power, and its inequitable distribution depends on the establishment of difference through the detached-self identity.

What would a less ‘detached’ journalistic discourse look like? And how would it foster a more useful identity concept? First, it would acknowledge that journalism is a co-construction. We know from the detached-self identity that journalists deny involvement in their stories in order to lend them greater credibility. Hendrik

Hertzberg, writing about the publishing process at Newsweek in 1966, admitted as much: “The story would carry no byline; Newsweek, like Time at the time and The

Economist to this day, believed that anonymity confers authority” (2013). But journalists have also treated their sources as interchangeable parts, without meaningful attribution as co-authors of their stories. Lived experience has gone missing from our journalistic discourse because it is repudiated by journalists and otherwise banished to the dubious confines of quotation marks. By acknowledging their own constructive role and by giving their sources equal credit as co-constructors, journalists would connect their readers with other humans, not just knowledge. What journalists determine to be “fit to print” goes a long way towards shaping which stories each of us thinks are worth hearing. By telling people’s personal stories, journalists would be asserting the significance of listening to and learning from lived experience across the globe.

Journalists are a paragon of detachment, but it is a defining component of

Western identity. It is observable in the scientific method, the academy and even normative democracy. With their emphasis on rational thought and reasonable

discourse, Western democratic norms work to delegitimize other modes of decision- making. While voters go to the polls, alternative imaginations of democracy are suppressed as irrational and unreasonable. This is just another example of the Western tendency to impose a hierarchy on top of diversity, transforming difference into power. It illustrates not only how identities are divided but that they are divided against themselves.

Pastiche Performativity

The detached self is just one hue in the mosaic of selves contained in each of us. Gergen refers to this patchwork as a “pastiche personality,” and it is central to his idea of how identity looks under postmodernity. Pastiche personalities are not burdened with divorcing authenticity and artifice. Critics of the culture industry obsess over the insincerity of daily interaction (I’m reminded here of one of my favorite sentences, penned together by Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno: “The most intimate reactions of human beings have been so thoroughly reified that the idea of anything specific to themselves now persists only as an utterly abstract notion: personality scarcely signifies anything more than shining white teeth and freedom from body odor and emotions” [Adorno and Horkheimer 1997, 167]). Yet Gergen insists that these criticisms rely on the very same modernist worldview being critiqued. It is a modernist ideology, after all, that locates within each of us a true core, that has so much at stake in our continued belief in a real self, and that constantly evaluates the authenticity of utterances. According to Gergen, claiming that society is pervaded by the superficial and artificial requires an absolute belief in sincerity —

itself a concept produced by modernism. As faith in modernist values fade, so too do the impulses of ‘strategic manipulation,’ repetition and guilt that accompany authentic performance, as does preoccupation with timeworn questions about human ‘purpose.’

Gergen describes what identity can resemble after shedding the vestiges of modernity:

The somber hues of multiphrenia—the sense of superficiality, the guilt at not measuring up to multiple criteria—give way to an optimistic sense of enormous possibility. The world of friendship and social efficacy is constantly expanding, and the geographical world is simultaneously contracting. Life becomes a candy store for one’s developing appetites. (1991, 150)

But pastiche personalities don’t just draw from friendships; they also draw from cultural material, such as media images — often with unintended consequences. In the

United States, as televisions grew to occupy more U.S. Americans’ time and living room space, so too have they played an increasingly important role in the U.S.

American psyche. “According to cultivation theory, massive exposure to television’s reconstructed realities can produce perceptions of reality that are very different from those held by people who watch less television” (Cohen and Weimann 2000, 111). It is not without consequence that on a weekly basis U.S. Americans collectively imagine worlds in which a Modern Family is composed of whites and stereotypes,

Friends are racially homogenous and The West Wing appears to practice tokenism.

The relationship television has to social reality is that of a funhouse mirror: reflecting, yes, but also unrecognizably distorting viewers’ perceptions of their world.

This is significant because television, although most often understood as entertainment, is relentlessly educational. “The repetitive pattern of television's mass- produced messages and images forms the mainstream of a common symbolic

environment” (Gerbner et al. 1986, 18). Television plays an integral role in the formation of Gergen’s pastiche personality, as he freely admits:

If a mate announces that he or she is thinking about divorce, the other’s reaction is not likely to be dumb dismay. The drama has so often been played out on television and movie screens that one is already prepared with multiple options. If one wins a wonderful prize, suffers a humiliating loss, faces temptations to cheat, or learns of a sudden death in the family, the reactions are hardly random. One more or less knows how it goes, is more or less ready for action. Having seen it all before, one approaches a state of ennui. (1991, 71)

Pastiche performances threaten to render micro-aggressions, micro-inequities and other interpersonal acts of covert oppression, such as micro-contradictions, utterly invisible. Television instills its viewers with an arsenal of imitations, each of which is prone to emerge spontaneously without being consciously summoned. Gergen claims that pastiche performance should open doors to new opportunities, but when it’s mass culture being imitated, pastiches have the exact opposite effect, shoring up the status quo. As Gerbner and Gross put it, “television is a medium of the socialization of most people into standardized roles and behaviors. Its function is in a word, enculturation”

(2003, 126). By freeing us from thinking critically about our interactions, pastiche performance of mass culture manufactures consent for “how it goes.” In doing so, it is in direct opposition to a critical postmodern consciousness that tirelessly challenges existing social conditions.

Some of the most salient lessons television and film teach are instilled not by what is portrayed on screen but by what is missing. For example, what is conveyed to an African American audience when, as Whoopi Goldberg observed, “Before Uhura

[played by actress Nichelle Nichols in Star Trek: The Original Series], there are no

black people in the future” (Goldberg 2011). Whatever message was intended for co- cultural group members who weren’t represented in the possible futures reified in cinematographic science fiction (some of which are still regularly referred to as

“aliens” by the U.S. government), it was inherently threatening. Following the release of sci-fi film Logan’s Run in 1976, comedian Richard Pryor concluded about the future depicted onscreen: “Well, white folks ain’t planning for us to be here” (Pryor

1976).

This illustrates how television and film can communicate extremely racialized messages without explicitly addressing race in the plot that unfolds onscreen. As a result, the critical viewer is tasked with following at least two narratives simultaneously: the storyline played out by characters exists parallel to a meta-story about screenwriters, the world they create and how it relates to the world of the viewer. In this way, it is possible for whiteness to be central even in stories that consist of no white characters.

So while Gergen sees in his television screen a world ripe for imagination, in the case of co-cultural group members, “the screen was not a place of escape. It was a place of confrontation and encounter” (hooks 1990, 4). When African-Americans were portrayed onscreen in early 20th century cinema, the images weren’t “representative” as much as they were reconstructive. This trope, depicting blackness while divorcing it ever-further from the lived experiences of black people, was embodied by minstrelsy and proliferated to satiate a metastasizing fascination with blackness among white audiences. Faced with such blatant misrepresentations, African-Americans developed

a tradition, bell hooks argues, that presupposed the warped nature of media images and commanded their critique. So while the dominant experience television with relaxed imagination, subjugated people often meet it, as a matter of cultural survival, with rigorous interrogation. This standpoint is indispensable when confronting

Enlightenment ideals in an age of saturation. It is with this tradition in mind that we imagine a new, more critical postmodern consciousness that is less imitative and more interrogative.

‘Dividualizing’ the Individual

“We are rag dolls made out of many ages and skins.” Loren C. Eiseley 1978, 175

What linguistic prescriptions might we make to articulate identity fragmentation and contradiction? For those who study communication, questions about word use and meaning aren’t merely theoretical; they are the building blocks of our social realities. So how might we put language to work emphasizing the multiplicity and divisibility of our identities? Should we refer to individuals as ‘they’, as some queer theorists contend (Noble 2009)? Should we refer to individuals at all, or would we be better off exchanging it for the anthropological term ‘dividual’ (Deleuze

1992)? In this section, I will illustrate what postmodern consciousness might resemble in relational practices.

In a relational paradigm, everyday activities like spending time with friends and family take on a dramatic new meaning. What the postmodernist communicates to those she surrounds herself with is not just that they share that moment together, but

that they share in making meaning of each other. When we locate identity in the bonds between people, a burgeoning friendship might be understood as a mutual desire of both people to remake themselves more like the other. Not in the possessive sense that is so typical of consumption-obsessed capitalist systems; no, relationships demand collaboration, and the impetus for a new relationship, the impulse to remake oneself with the help of another, is a deeply felt admiration. When Gergen writes about the newfound potential for identity formation, the depths of our pool of props and people to draw from in our self-performance, there is an ambivalent sense that we’ve known this all along. What does it mean to build a relationship? It is not as though two fully- formed people encounter each other to produce a third something called a relationship.

Rather, the relationship makes them. There is no ‘me’ prior to ‘you,’ and increasingly under postmodernity, there is only ‘us’.

The insistence that there must be something behind all of the roles each of us plays in everyday life—that once you strip away the performative aspects of identity, if you could step outside social pressures and constructions, there, buried, you would find the pure ‘you’—is a modernist compulsion. Only under the influence of an extremely individualistic ideology is it explicable or desirable to tirelessly chase that illusory verisimilitude. Identity does not exist in a vacuum. In fact, it is only after the discovery of others that the self is imbued with meaning. George Herbert Mead’s theory of symbolic interactionism (1967) posits that self cannot exist except in relation to other selves, as a looking-glass self that constantly undergoes reflected appraisal.

Accordingly, the site of self-meaning cannot be found at our geographic position in

the world but in how we are socially positioned relative to others. This becomes more evident in moments of positional instability, when one of those relationships we rely on to give our self meaning goes missing:

When we lose certain people, or when we are dispossessed from a place, or a community, we may simply feel that we are undergoing something temporary, that mourning will be over and some restoration of prior order will be achieved. But maybe when we undergo what we do, something about who we are is revealed, something that delineates the ties we have to others, that shows us that these ties constitute what we are, ties or bonds that compose us. It is not as if an 'I' exists independently over here and then simply loses a 'you' over there, especially if the attachment to 'you' is part of what composes who 'I' am. If I lose you, under these conditions, then I not only mourn the loss, but I become inscrutable to myself. Who 'am' I, without you? When we lose some of these ties by which we are constituted, we do not know who we are or what to do. On one level, I think I have lost 'you' only to discover that 'I' have gone missing as well (Butler 2006, 22).

In 2010, shortly after I moved to college, my dad unexpectedly died at the age of 52.

In the days that followed, family and friends gathered to express their condolences for our loss. Yet in the weeks that followed his funeral ceremonies, ‘loss’ — quantifiable and recompensable — failed to capture the dynamic persistence of my grief. The mourning process was not just depressing; it was utterly disorienting. As much as I asked myself “What do I do without you?” I also asked “What am I without you?” As much as I mourned his passing, I also confronted my own passing on. For a moment, there was an impulse to fill that hole, to replace him with a crude surrogate in order to put off rebuilding my self — only to realize with piercing clarity in the next moment how impossibly irreplaceable our relationship was.

Mere loss cannot account for these experiences. Outside a relational conception of identity, it’s not immediately clear why the loss of a loved one presents

identity crises. I’m still here, my body unharmed, my consciousness uninhibited. Yet my self has permanently changed. When one of the stars that compose a constellation burns out, it inspires reflection. What do I resemble now? How might I rethink myself to manage this moment of upheaval? The pangs of sorrow that follow such ‘loss’ enforce a certain spontaneity, a state of ephemerality and transience (in line with the spirit of postmodern consciousness) that can be difficult to muster otherwise.

Regardless of my day-to-day plans, I’d often find myself weeping, searching or thinking. The individualistic self is unraveled in such moments. We all come to understand, as a matter of survival, the deeply relational character of our selves. More than just a confrontation with loss, we also lament the inevitability of transformation and the futility of the ‘individual’.

These moments of identity crisis, of instability and disorientation, help bring us to postmodern consciousness. But relinquishing one’s grasp on an identity concept, as in the case of letting go the Western concept of individuality, will not always come easily. Doing so holds people — those dividual bodies — responsible for more than just themselves. It demands that we take stock of our actions. Does our way of life pollute the waters of those downstream? It also insists our participation. Those with talents and skills are obliged to offer them to the community. But such relational accountability is not completely foreign even to Euro-America. The most intimate

Western social structures, for which the family serves as crown jewel, have a relational tint. But in broader public society — in political debate, among media representations and between passersby on the street — concern for the indirect

relationships we have with others is drowned out by talk of the individual. And where it can be observed, relationality in Western contexts smacks of bitter capitalism.

Not even the family can escape commodification. It could be said that familial intimacy is produced in part by the private ownership of children, who are not reared by communities but by parents who resemble property owners. To be sure, capitalism does insist on connection, but always connecting individuals with products. And when relationships between individuals are brought to the foreground, they are modeled after the relationship between consumer and commodity that capitalist structures are so proficient at reproducing. Indeed, children are acted upon at least as much as they interact with their parents. They are objects of parental manipulation as much as they are subjective selves. Yet children have much to teach us, as Jack Halberstam observed:

If, for the child, language is a playground where meaning is contingent, illusionary, motile, impermanent, and constantly shifting to keep up with the data flows that course across their inchoate consciousnesses, then maybe adults should improvise more, pick up terms, words, lexicons from children who, in many ways, live the world differently than we do, live it more closely, live it more intensely, and, sometimes live it more critically. (Halberstam 2012, xxv)

Children intimately understand relationality in a way that adults cannot in part because they “own” very little (including, perhaps, an understanding of what ownership means). As a result, they spend a great deal of time forging relationships with others, slowly coming to realize their social positions relative to those who surround them. It is always worthwhile to consider how one’s mind differs from that of a child. It is imperative that we make time for play, for childishness, because “the pre-socialized, pre-disciplined, pre-restrained anarchic child comes at the world a little differently

than the post-shame, post-guilt, post-recognition, disciplined adult” (Halberstam 2012, xxiv).

Chapter 3: Embodying Contradiction; Contradicting the Body

“Euro-American paradigms of so-called ‘postmodernism’ have neither much meaning nor salience, outside the narrow geographical confines of Euro-America where they developed.” Anthony D. King 1991, 8

“What woman here is so enamored of her own oppression that she cannot see her heel print upon another woman’s face?” Audre Lorde 1984, 132

It’s critical to question at this point who postmodern consciousness is ‘for,’ what it accomplishes, and to what end. Such concern is an ever-present feature of critical theory, and the world Kenneth Gergen constructs is far from beyond scrutiny.

David Morley locates the rift where postmodern grandiloquence tends to bump up against the interests of other critical traditions:

The tendency of theories of postmodernity to fall into a kind of formalist, post-structuralist rhetoric, which over-generalizes its account of ‘the experience of postmodernity’ so as to decontextualize and flatten out all the significant differences between the experiences of people in different situations, who are members of different social and cultural groups, with access to different forms and quantities of economic and cultural capital. The point is simply that ‘we’ are not all nomadic, fragmented subjectives, living in the same postmodern universe. For some categories of people (differentiated by gender, race and ethnicity, as much as by class) the new technologies of symbolic and physical communication and transport offer significant opportunities for interconnectedness. For those people, there may well be some greater sense of postmodern ‘opportunities’. However, at the same time, for other categories of people, horizons may simultaneously be narrowing. (Hall 1996, 329)

The universalizing disposition of postmodernism is troubling, especially when it comes to the celebration of supposedly newfound opportunity. If it is the project of critical theory not only to reveal power but subvert it, then it’s worth asking plainly:

What does all this talk of fragmentation and contradiction do for co-cultural group 48

members? Rather than helping, isn’t it discussed in a language and experienced from a perspective that is often exclusionary? Stuart Hall struggled with similar questions about the seemingly small impact of theory, writing “against the urgency of people dying in the streets, what in God’s name is the point of cultural studies?” (1996, 271).

Postmodernism also falls into myriad trappings of modernism, implicitly claiming ownership of ideas and discovery of experiences. Anthony King warned of postmodernism’s proclivity to assert its own new-ness, even in the face of evidence that its essence is, in fact, pre-modern:

The Eurocentrically defined cultural conditions of a so-called postmodernity—irony, pastiche, the mixing of different histories, intertextuality, schizophrenia, cultural chasms, fragmentation, incoherence, disjunction of supposedly modern and pre-modern cultures—were characteristics of colonial societies, cultures, environments on the global periphery (in Calcutta, Hong Kong, Rio or Singapore) decades, if not centuries, before they appeared in Europe or the USA. (2004, 79)

What, then, are we to make of postmodern consciousness? If its identity is relational, as it claims ours is, then how does it connect with other ways of experiencing the world? And what meaning(s) do those connections produce? bell hooks provides a key insight at this juncture: “The overall impact of postmodernism is that many other groups now share with black folks a sense of deep alienation, despair, uncertainty, loss of a sense of grounding even if it is not informed by shared circumstance” (1990, 27).

It is true that postmodernism is most often theorized with a Western audience in mind, and so it should not be surprising that its body of work is most legible to white, wealthy Euro-America. Missing from that analysis is the recognition that postmodern consciousness is composed of traditionally co-cultural experiences of alienation,

dislocation, and disorientation. Thus, certain experiences typically associated with oppression are now being felt more broadly. To be clear, this does not mean those people who “feel” postmodernity are oppressed or even suffering. On the contrary, it means precisely those people who aren’t oppressed have been given a glimpse into the domain of oppression. That Kenneth Gergen (whose grand theory of identity laid out in The Saturated Self makes mention of “oppression” only a handful of times) and bell hooks (whose stated purpose is “to critically intervene in a way that challenges and changes” [1990, 9]) describe their experiences in such similar detail, down to the very terminology, is remarkable. It marks an intersection of experiential knowledges that rarely meet. It creates an opportunity — a potential Gergen may have missed — for each of us to better understand, however basically, forms of oppression that aren’t directly targeted at us.

In the pages that follow, I will consider the body’s role as signifier of identity, how we embody a normative identity concept and how the body can be contorted into subversive performance. I explore new ways of identifying and being identified that

“build alternatives to a ‘double illusion’ created, on the one side, by a cultural essentialism that promotes such polarizing exclusivities as black nationalism; and on the other, by an unlimited cultural relativism that dissolves black subjectivity in a universal melting pot or pluralist jumble of equals” (Soja 1996, 141). Finally, I will investigate the power of contradiction, how it is deployed by as a repressive force and how it might be harnessed for liberation.

The Body Question

“It is quite wrong to try founding a theory on observable magnitudes alone. In reality, the very opposite happens. It is the theory which decides what we can observe.” Albert Einstein, transcribed by Werner Heisenberg in 1971, 63

There is one question I’ve repeatedly confronted when describing my thesis to friends and family. “It’s an interesting idea, multiple selves, but we all have one body, right?” The body question invites some enduring questions that I hoped to engage in this thesis. Is the relationship bodies have as signifiers of identity natural or naturalized? Is it ideology or the plain visibility of bodies that militates against us seeing self-contradiction? How might we extract or disassociate identity from the body in order to locate our selves elsewhere? It is with these questions in mind that I consider the physical body’s role in stabilizing an individualistic identity concept — and its destabilizing potential.

Embodiment is an increasingly precarious terrain because bodies are being cut up in more directions and by more devices than ever. For example, contradiction is reified online by conflicting avatars on various digital social media. How many web pages purport to ‘profile’ me online? And how many different ways are there to profile me, the friend, the photographer, the hopeful romantic, the micro-blogger, the television fanatic, the prospective employee? Are these various self-performances reconcilable? Are they even knowable? Some I voluntarily crafted, handing over my own information, but others I am unaware of, cultivated from a digital identity that has taken on a life of its own. Consider how Tom Chatfield puts synecdoche to use in order to convey the discursive surgery bodies undergo when they interact with digital technology: “We are metaphorically dismembered by our tools: regarded by the sites

and services we visit as ‘eyeballs’, as tapping and touching fingertips on keyboards and screens, as attention spans to be harnessed and data-rich profiles to be harvested.

So far as most screens are concerned, we exist only in order to be transfixed by their gaze. … Similarly, rather than you — your whole, embodied being — what the world really cares about is ‘you’ as represented by your avatar, profile, inbox, image, account, uploads, shares, likes, dislikes, group memberships, search history, purchase, orders and subscriptions” (2013).

Further, women living under misogynist patriarchy are rarely humanized in mass media imagery, yet magazine covers, billboard advertisements and music videos are saturated with often-detached female body parts used to sell products. The vending of women’s bodies consists of their being cut up into sex objects that are more easily digested, more easily consumed, by the marketplace. Women are further alienated from media depictions in their likeness by image-manipulating software such as

Photoshop, which distorts the popular imagination of female bodies, and in pornography where female bodies are digitally transformed into objects of a voyeuristic gaze. Jean Kilbourne drew attention to this discursive disjointing, astutely pointing out the practical implications of such objectification when she said that

“turning a human being into a thing is almost always the first step towards justifying violence against that person” (Killing Us Softly 4 2010).

Similarly, bell hooks wrote about racial contrasts in film, how white characters are brought to the foreground, made to stand out against blackness in the background, and how whiteness symbolically “dismembers black flesh” (1990, 198). Of course,

such dismemberment is not always merely symbolic. To embody blackness is to embody, in part, a legacy of dismembered flesh, “a history where black bodies—the younger, the better—will be bartered, sold, ‘worked’ by the highest bidder, and made to serve” (1990, 198). The more one studies representation, the more it resembles reality. Representations are ascribed to and inscribed on the same bodies they purport to represent. People embody the very representations that ostensibly represented them.

Under scrutiny, the stiff screen separating the three-dimensional world of corporeal materiality from the two-dimensional world of fictional representations loses its signal and definition, suddenly presenting only fuzziness and static noise.

Far from neutral harbingers of progress, new technologies are continually reinforcing normative whiteness as well, forcing nonwhites to choose between embodying whiteness as best as they can or facing discrimination from a faceless, disembodied machine. Because technology is developed by and interacts with humans, its programming necessarily reflects the political biases of its designers. Film stock emulsions have long been designed for white skin, which results in the distortion of black photographic subjects, who can be completely erased by the camera’s gaze

(McFadden, 2014). This problem remains unsolved, as consumer electronics with so- called ‘computer vision’ are regularly blind to nonwhite people. Face-tracking software used in computer webcams and video game consoles has been known to not

‘see’ black people, and face detection technology used in digital cameras has prompted photographers of Asian subjects “Did someone blink?” with every photo captured (Obasogie 2014). Although these technologies can be inconvenient or even

unusable for people of color, the key point is that they are features, not bugs. One is left to wonder if technology’s pernicious habit of only recognizing white subjects as people is not an honest and transparent encoding of the racial attitudes of that technology’s white architects. As technology becomes ever more central to everyday life, ‘users’ should be vigilant against the ways in which it might augment racial realities. In the meantime, similarly flawed technology is being harnessed by neoliberal governments in the form of biometric surveillance to identify threats, which impugns the implicit goal of recognition (by the state or otherwise), and suggests there may be power in “the nonrecognizable” (Blas 2013).

If it is the systematic marking and categorization of bodies that prepares them for differential treatment, androgynous embodiment that obfuscates bodily recognition should confound systems of power. Here, ‘androgyny’ refers most obviously to gender but might also be extended to other sites of discipline, like race, class, sexuality and age. Entangling seemingly discrete identities, double-marking oneself as bi-identified, or queering new identities with little relation to preexisting binaries can disrupt established hierarchy. There is a need for identities that are radically oxymoronic and unremittingly hyphenated because this is the paradox of progressivism: As historically subjugated groups, such as gay and lesbian people, seek state recognition, like the right to marry, they ensnare themselves in the state’s control. In this sense, liberation is repressive, and vice versa. A truly radical approach would strive to be unrecognizable to the system, unfit for categorization, inscrutable to the hierarchy,

marked not once but irrationally and illogically over and over again. We might think of this type of work as intentional disembodiment.

One feature of Mikhail Bakhtin’s carnival was a momentary liberation from hierarchy and, thus, from the conventional meaning of self. Carnivalesque experiences might then be described as out-of body, as disembodied. In his updated adaptation of

Bakhtin’s argument, Fiske cites professional wrestling as an example of such disembodiment. He argues that unlike traditional sports, which zoom in on the

(usually masculine) body, glorifying its beauty in slowed motion, professional wrestling exaggerates the grotesqueness of bodies. “If the body beautiful is the completed, formed social body, then the body grotesque is the incomplete, the unformed” (2011, 71). In this way, intentional disembodiment offers a powerful alternative, one that harnesses a spreading sense of incompleteness, of unformed self, which resists idealized aesthetics (beauty standards) and asserts itself, with the timidity of a body slam, “cleansed of, or liberated from, the social construction and evaluation of the body” (71).

The Power of Contradiction

“We take our shape, it is true, within and against that cage of reality bequeathed us at our birth; and yet it is precisely through our dependence on this reality that we are most endlessly betrayed.” James Baldwin 1984, 20

hooks often refers to “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” in order to emphasize that racism, classism and sexism (as well as every other -ism) interlock.

Understanding this function of power is a vital precondition to meaningful resistance.

Yet the meanings associated with these terms are so outmoded that they are often a disservice to the project of resistance. The first images that come to mind when I hear

‘white supremacy’ are pointed hats and swastikas. Similarly, ‘capitalism’ summons

Gilded Age tycoons and ‘patriarchy’ evokes the nuclear family, the presidency or even the Bible. These are old representations of oppression. Critical theorists shouldn’t be surprised when they write about ‘white supremacy,’ and are met with bafflement: “But we’ve done away with slavery! We got rid of organized white supremacy!” That these claims miss the point is not their speaker’s fault, because critical theorists have done could do a better job of articulating new meanings on top of old terms like “white supremacy.” They could do a better job of explaining that racism and other forms of oppression have gone covert. Most of society has stigmatized the wearing of Ku Klux

Klan garb, but removing a hat from a white supremacist’s head doesn’t dispel the feelings and thoughts buried inside.

The second problem with these terms is that they are far too simplistic. As outlined above, they imagine discrete “enemies,” which exonerates us from blame.

The solution to the problem of ‘white supremacy’ when imagined this way is to eliminate or marginalize KKK members and neo-Nazis. Once again, for many U.S.

Americans, this goal appears to have been achieved some time ago. The pushback encountered by those of us who continue to talk about white supremacy, capitalism and patriarchy is, then, partly caused by a semantic rift. We must continue to articulate

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s message that “the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner,

but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice” (2000, 72–73).

And before we can articulate the new ways in which power manifests itself today, we must begin to appreciate them ourselves.

Power is smart. It is cunning, evasive, flexible and highly responsive. When met with legitimate subversion, powerful systems are not apt to forcefully crush opposition as monolithic terms like ‘patriarchy’ might suggest. Often, participation in criticism further engrains us in the very systems we critique. Take as an example what

Sachi Sekimoto calls “the paradox of social construction and its deconstructive critique”:

The process of deconstructing my acquired socially constructed ‘Asian’ identity is integral to my experience of becoming Asian in the United States. Likewise, critiquing my social location as a woman is in itself a process of becoming a woman from a feminist standpoint, rather than liberating myself from an oppressive construction of gender. (2012, 227)

In other cases, normativity is redefined to absorb the threat, disarticulating it from its subversive power. This is how John Fiske explains the transformation of worn and torn blue jeans from a symbol of working class toil and rebellious youth into pre-made products, co-opted in the form of “style” for the leisurely lifestyle of higher classes of people (Fiske 2011). Power is always on the cutting edge, figuring us out. Capitalism incentivizes the transformation of popular culture (of the people) into mass culture (of production). Predictably, capitalist power responds to serious threats by reverting to its base instinct: consumption.

Perhaps most of all, though, power is contradictory. Consider the ways in which power is institutionalized through legal contradictions that allow for the

selective enforcement of law to discipline particular bodies: A web of mostly dormant laws, which in aggregate work to blanket as much U.S. American experience as possible (e.g.: jaywalking or speeding), ensures that the state has something on the books to arrest nearly anyone deemed by a police officer worthy of arrest, while everyone else is free to go on breaking the law. For example, one constitutive thread in this web of laws is the U.S. government’s “war on drugs,” which targets people of color while treating those spaces where illicit drugs are commonly used by whites, like university campuses, as demilitarized zones.

The power of contradiction can also be found within gender categories, as

Michael Messner explains:

Not only does the concept of patriarchy tend to view ‘men’ as an undifferentiated category, it tends to downplay the fluidity and contradictions that exist within and between gender categories. [Raewyn] Connell suggests instead that we utilize the term ‘gender order,’ which can be defined as ‘the current state of play’ in the dynamics of the power relations of sex, gender and sexuality (1990, 205)

In my reading, the term ‘gender order’ captures the complexity — the complexion — of power in a way that ‘patriarchy’ does not. In fact, we are already accustomed to thinking about capitalism as creating an ‘order’ of classes rather than binary categories, in part because wealth is more quantifiable than, say, gender performance.

But there is a gender order, and it is more convoluted than mere masculine dominance and feminine subordination. Messner explained “that at any given moment there are various masculinities — some hegemonic, some marginalized, some subordinated”

(1990, 205). The same logic might be applied to race or any other site of power to reveal a whole field of performative identities where there previously appeared to be

only a dichotomy. Recognizing race, gender and class as interlocking orders of vastly different identities that are empowered and disempowered in unique and complex ways, that overlap and contradict (what does it mean to perform a marginalized masculinity?), that dispose of subversion by osmosis, that are flexible and reflexive, emergent and dynamic and independent of individuals is to recognize a reflection of one’s self.

The same is true of our vocabulary for the liberation struggle (“liberation from what? We did emancipation. We did suffrage”). It confidently points us in a clear direction: What do we do about capitalist suffering? Socialism. What is the solution to patriarchal bellicosity? Feminism. And institutional racism? Anti-racism. According to this vernacular, questions posed by oppressive systems have obvious answers. Yet this doesn’t match with the contemporary experience of resistance, which is often uncertain and at times alienating. For example, consider the task of critical consumption: As the world has globalized, seemingly straightforward and unmeaningful actions, especially those involving the purchase and sale of commodities, have become hopelessly tangled. What is the critical consumer to do?

Research the production processes of each individual product she purchases to ensure they aren’t exploitive? Doing so is triply onerous: (a) exploitation comes in so many different forms and at so many different levels of the production process that determining whether something “is” or “is not” exploitive is impractical; (b) even if consumers investigate, such knowledge may not be widely available, and non-

exploitive product alternatives may not exist; and (c) only from a position of privilege would a consumer have the free time to be so diligent.

Christina M. Miller traced the movement of one such commodity, fresh-cut flowers, from field to storefront, revealing how thorny the subject of exploitation can be: “While it is true that the availability of ‘fresh’ cut flowers in the ‘developed’ world is intimately tied to exploitation of workers in the third world, the world is at a point in history where, in the words of Susan George (2004), ‘it’s almost a privilege to be exploited—at least you still have a job and a role’ (p. 6)” (96). Here, I see my own identity (as both an aspiring anti-racist and someone who will probably buy fresh-cut flowers in his lifetime) again facing contradiction, and noncontradictory alternatives are difficult to imagine. Food must be bought. Clothes must be worn. How could such basic needs contradict each of our identities as allies in the liberation struggle? As

Anita Sarkeesian often says, “It is both possible, and even necessary, to simultaneously enjoy media while also being critical of its more problematic or pernicious aspects” (2013). The same is true of most experiences in life.

Various exploitations are further obscured because they are interlocked. Not only must we vigilantly advance socialist, feminist and anti-racist movement, but we must be aware of how they interact, intersect, and interweave. Is our feminism racist?

Our socialism sexist? As long as these systems of power remain interlocked, our responses must be sensitive to these intersections, because their fates are intertwined:

No oppression can be dismantled alone. Just as our identities are relational, so too are our various struggles entwined. Those people absorbed in resisting power in just one

of its forms perpetuate power in all its forms. As Audre Lorde put it, “Without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression” (1984, 112).

We can illuminate the machinations of identity fragmentation and contradiction by getting at their source. Feminist theorists have written at length about the binaries and double binds that constrain women. Masculinity constructs women as both the virginal Madonna and promiscuous whore. And Stuart Hall noted how whiteness constructs the black, indigenous subject as both “noble savage and violent avenger” (1996, 446). In fact, many literary stock representations of racial and gendered minorities overlap with other, contradictory representations. Black femininity is bifurcated as nurturing mammy and emasculating sapphire. Enslaved black masculinity oscillates between carefree samba and bestial mandingo. East Asian masculinity vacillates from hardworking ‘model minority’ to duplicitous ‘Yellow

Peril.’ Whereas the vicissitudes of East Asian femininity are represented by the submissive ‘China doll’ and domineering ‘dragon lady.’

These representations tell us less about the subjects they purport to represent than about those who construct the representations. They reflect a deep ambivalence about ‘the Other,’ who is simultaneously a source of fear and fascination. Identity fragmentation and contradiction is in part a reflection of the ambivalence of those with the power to influence the identities of others. The violence of identity formation and reformation is not only a destructive erasure; it is also menacingly creative, a process of constant evisceration and renovation. And just as whiteness and masculinity deploy

representations whenever it is politically suitable, blackness and femininity could benefit from flipping the gaze. Because so long as privilege remains averse to self- contradiction, it will be politically powerful to remind those in power that they are doing the contradicting, that they are the source of contradictory representation, and that they too are self-contradictory.

Conclusion

While writing this thesis, I’ve had several encounters that challenged me to consider the real-world implications of the ideas in this text. This concluding chapter begins with three personal narratives, followed by a review of each previous chapter.

Then, I suggest further application of identity fragmentation and contradiction as well as directions for future research. Finally, I propose ‘identity constellation’ as a new metaphor for understanding postmodern identity formation. In the three personal narratives that follow, I hope to convey how identity fragmentation and contradiction can emerge in unexpected ways, interweaving the abstract with the ‘real.’ In the spirit of fragmented storytelling, I have intentionally left these three narratives to stand on their own, open to your interpretation:

On Halloween, a vestige of the carnivalesque activity Mikhail Bakhtin described as “life turned inside out” (Storey 1998, 251), my own life was turned upside down when I received word that my dear friend Spencer Smith had suffered a traumatic brain injury as a result of a car crash. I visited him in the hospital after he regained consciousness, and the person I interacted with modulated in and out of character. The term ‘identity fragmentation’ took on new meaning during our conversation, as I tried to coax a Spencer I recognized into momentary emergence.

Between those glimpses of recognition, Spencer took the form of a palimpsest, rewriting himself anew. I remember watching his parents instruct him as to who he was before the crash, who he was to them, and worrying: Who was authoring this new 63

Spencer? If it were anyone but himself — his returning memory — could he ever be whole? “Dickens,” he said when his dad asked him who his favorite author was

(Spencer was an English major). But hadn’t he told me it was Junot Díaz? (Spencer was also my confidant in criticism.) I couldn’t remember. Still, the inconsistency stuck in my mind: Spencer, son of Brad and Teri, was hardly the same person as Spencer, friend of mine. bell hook’s oft-repeated words echoed in my head: “Our struggle is also a struggle of memory against forgetting” (1990, 40). The fear that he would convalesce into a mere acquaintance weighed heavily on me.

“So what is your thesis about anyway?” his dad asked. The question hit me hard, and I looked to Spencer for support. He had been the first person I pitched my thesis topic to nearly a year earlier, but now he and his dad looked at me with matching curiosity. I sheepishly answered his question and changed the subject. Surely my thesis research should be more useful in this situation. If it isn’t about this, what could it possibly be about?

Witnessing Spencer’s rapid recovery over the next few months was equally puzzling: What can explain the persistence of self? Spencer was told by his doctors to expect “subtle differences” in his personality. Yet an ‘essence’ seems to have returned to him intact. He is not only recognizable to me but nearly identical to his former self.

How legible are jottings on the unreliability of self after observing the propensity of a clinically lost identity to gravitate back to its host unharmed? Does this refute fragmentation? Disprove contradiction?

Rather, I think it demonstrates the relationally dynamic character of our identities. My concern that Spencer’s recovering self-consciousness not be tainted by outside influences was an individualistic impulse that I did not immediately recognize.

Of course, Spencer didn’t recreate his identity alone. And attempting to temporally fix his sense of self in the past, as the familiar (and idealized) Spencer of old, was futile because the ground upon which we build our identities is constantly shifting. It was naive to think that his parents’ compassion, ever-present during Spencer’s hospitalization, was peripheral to his returning sense of self. It is those connections, after all, that define him.

Just as Spencer’s recuperation accelerated after returning home, so too is the formation of our identities context-dependent. Each of our identities is constantly remade in the same way Spencer re-membered his. Traumatic brain injury may be an extreme example, but it’s just as sensible to question why any of us seem to wake up as the same self we fell asleep. The answer has much to do with how we typically sleep: motionless, in synchrony with others, physically close to those whom we are symbolically proximate and physically distant from those whom we are symbolically distant. In other words, we wake up in the same bed, under the same social conditions, nearby those who shape us and far from those who don’t. It is a feature of how we sleep, not the nature of sleep, that we appear to awake unchanged. Relational forces are all that interrupt our dreams when we wake.

* * *

On February 10th, Stuart Hall died. Online, my social networks bore the trimmings of a funeral home. Friends and acquaintances who I didn’t know had ever heard of Hall gathered to mourn his passing. While The Guardian and The

Independent described Hall as “the godfather of multiculturalism,” my friends detailed how intimately he had impacted the direction of their lives. Some wrote that Hall forever changed the way they came at the world, that he’d inspired lifelong journeys in critical living. A former professor of mine whose tutelage deeply affected me divulged that without Hall’s influence, she might not have found herself in the academy. Hall’s students were everywhere, some of them now teachers themselves, with admiring students of their own. As Hall’s death “trended” online, I also thought of Kenneth

Gergen. His hypothesis about the communicative potentials brought on by technological advancement, made before the internet was widely available, seemed to be playing out on my computer screen. How likely was this collective memorial, put on by readers who had never met Hall in person but were nonetheless touched by his lessons, without the help of media technology? The digital world has shrunk the physical world such that even in death, Hall nurtured a critical community.

* * *

On the eve of Valentine’s Day, Facebook updated its longstanding policy that each of its users identify as either male or female. It added 56 “custom” gender identities, including androgynous, cisgender, intersex, gender fluid, genderqueer, non- binary, trans and two-spirit. The implication that only some genders are “custom” remains problematic (what does that make binary genders if not “natural?”), and the

added options are inconspicuous, appearing only after a user identifies her gender as

“custom” (much like in life, if you aren’t looking for gender variance, you probably won’t find it), but this policy change marked a shift in our popular understanding of gender. Facebook also added a single pronoun option to the old he/she binary: they.

This may only be meant as an androgynous alternative for users, but it may also signal that identity fragmentation has gone mainstream.

In the first chapter of this thesis, I historicized identity fragmentation, tracing its experience through W.E.B. Du Bois’ double consciousness, Frantz Fanon’s dual consciousness and Karl Marx’s false consciousness, demonstrating that

‘fragmentation’ was a key component of co-cultural experiences long before postmodernity. I described how the West articulates racial identity positions through metaphorical binaries, casting some as high and others as low, some as central and others marginal, some as the same and the rest Othered. Finally, I claimed that a truly transformative identity metaphor could break down the boundaries of these categories, open them up to subjective interpretations and appreciate their fractures, interconnections and contradictions.

I wrote chapter 2 from a postmodern vantage in order to locate the advantages and drawbacks of postmodern consciousness. I surveyed various media in order to expose how the consumption of news and entertainment can be simultaneously liberating and repressive, an experience of imagination and confrontation, depending on the consumer’s preexisting social position. I put forth a relational self-concept that

challenges not only normative individualism but other relational paradigms that emphasize interconnectedness when it is individually advantageous and ignore it when it asks sacrifice of us as individuals.

My third chapter directly addressed the intersection of postmodernism and critical race theory, proposing that the shared feelings of disorientation and instability they often describe can be the impetus of a new solidarity, a critical coalition of parties of vastly different experiences with power. I confronted the body question, perhaps the most obvious objection to identity fragmentation and contradiction, arguing that the body’s role as signifier of identity is not natural but naturalized. While bodies remain central objects of racial marking and subjects of racial experience, androgynous embodiment that confounds the logic of race, crossing its borders, suggests avenues of putting theory to action. Finally, I get at the power of contradiction — how it is weaponized by those who are dominant, and how it can be wielded by those in the margins.

In looking back on my thesis, I hope to have taken heed in bell hooks’ guidance: “I am sometimes awed, as in finding something terrifying, when I see how many of the people who are writing about domination and oppression are distanced from the pain, the woundedness, the ugliness. That it’s so much of the time just a subject—a ‘discourse.’ The person does not believe in a real way that ‘what I say here, this theory I come up with, may help change the pain in my life or in the lives of other people” (1990, 215). I sincerely hope that this thesis is applicable to some readers in this way. My primary audience has always been communication scholars, and my

intended application was to thrust contradiction into the conversation, to prove it as a terrain rich with discursive remains worthy of excavating. As I’ve written, though,

I’ve grown to appreciate how personally my subject matter affects so many people — and how insufficient it is to claim this thesis as merely an academic pursuit, meant only for scholars. Today, I hope that the ideas in this text amount to more than mere participation in a discourse. I hope it offers some release. Future research into the communication of self-contradictory identities as an exercise of power should look beyond Western horizons for inspiration. Having grounded the perspective, I think its theoretical direction might turn toward greater advocacy on behalf of those who have been wounded by the processes and practices described. These words should be put to work. They must prove their practical worth.

In the spirit of W.E.B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon, who used metaphor to describe the experience of identifying and being identified, I propose a new metaphor for understanding postmodern identity formation: constellation. I hesitate to describe any experience as ‘universal,’ but here I invoke the word in its most basic sense: To look up at the stars is to take in the universe. Stargazing is an ancient human experience. For hundreds of thousands of years, people have looked to the heavens as a way of looking back at themselves, to reflect on their part in the night sky. It can be humbling to confront infinity, and amateur astronomers often walk away from such encounters feeling small in stature and import. But the stars have more to teach us about our selves than our physical size.

To the untrained observer, stars appear disorganized. They seem irrational, without a logic. In fact, stars are alive with the same activity that gives life to humans.

Stars progress through life cycles of birth and death. They interact spatially — indeed, pulling each other through space in a gravitational dance, nurturing evermore activity on the surface of nearby planetary bodies. To survey the stars is to upend one’s perspective: Laying down to stare up at a nebula, one begins to appreciate her own nebulosity.

But stars are meaningless in nature. It is only once humans begin drawing lines between them, connecting celestial dots, that meaning is made of them. In doing so, our gaze shifts from the stellar to the interstellar, from ‘real’ stars to ‘imaginary’ hydras and chamaeleons among them. The night sky has been mapped by astronomers, a dynamic process sedimented into stone. In fact, constellations are chameleons of a different sort, many-faced and ever-changing. It is the human production of meaning mapped on top of nature that gives it the air of objectivity and fixity, coherence and purpose. Yet we know what it’s like to look up at the sky and see it for ourselves, to see our own subjectivity take form. Bodies, terrestrial and extraterrestrial, are anchored in our peripheral vision; our eyes are focused on the margins, on the darkness that gives meaning to the light. Constellations take their shape, as we do, around the meanings that bind them.

In this space, I find it more onerous to admit inconclusiveness. In fact, it is quite easy to conclude. I have written at length in this thesis about the Western proclivity for seeing ‘wholeness’ in self and others. It is this orientation that compels

us to crystallize identity, to box groups of people together and set them aside, to jump with excitement to conclusion in our everyday lives. Too few of these conclusions have actually been borne out. Bakhtin went even further, claiming that “nothing conclusive has yet taken place in the world, the ultimate word of the world and about the world has not yet been spoken, the world is open and free, everything is still in the future and will always be in the future” (1984, 166). In a culture abound with conclusions, there is an acute need for cross-examination. In a culture of inculcation and control, there is an urgency for the courage to let go. And in a culture of cherished individuality, it can be challenging to confess our fractures, and the manner in which others hold us together. The finality implied by this page is shallow; the perspective it surfaced and the dialogue it engages will remain radically incomplete.

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