Footnotes #1: Stuart Hall's 'Introduction: Who Needs Identity'
It feels fitting for the first footnotes to speak a bit about a big influence for my writing. I had a lengthy encounter with Stuart Hall’s writing during my dissertation research but have since returned as I work on essays for this journal. His introductory chapter in Questions of Cultural Identity, aside from establishing a genealogy of identity, diagnoses postmodern identity and carefully parses the troubling conclusions this form of identity leaves us with. Concepts of identity and the Self are complicated, diverse, and contentious. Writing about them without a thorough foundation is like playing with fire. Hall’s writing, especially in his summation of what identity means and its so-called crisis, really helped in conceptualizing this essay series without getting burnt. So, what does he say?
I use ‘identity’ to refer to the meeting point, the point of suture, between on the one hand the discourses and practices which attempt to ‘interpellate’, speak to us or hail us into place as the social subjects of particular discourses, and on the other hand, the processes which produce subjectivities, which construct us as subjects which can be ‘spoken’. Identities are thus points of temporary attachment to the subject positions which discursive practices construct for us (5-6).
I especially appreciate how Hall’s conception of identity understands people as socially positioned within the discourses of history, language, and culture. Living today it is clear we are not influenced by one or many sources, but we are constantly in a dialogue with the various sources we gain information from. We aren’t fixed beings, we change ourselves frequently (consciously or not), so a concept of identity that does not recognize its constant processes of reformation feels outdated. We’re part of so many groups and communities, and get our information from so many sources, all of which are subject to change. So, how could we have a singular and unchanging identity? A key is the characterization of difference, identity marks the inside from the outside, the us from the them, and is thus fractured, never unified.
The significance of this conception is that it respects the processes of becoming, rejecting a stagnant notion of being; it asks “not ‘who we are’ or ‘where we came from’, so much as what we might become, how we have been represented, and how that bears on how we might represent ourselves” (4). The poststructuralist reading of identity is and will be quite present in my writing. The importance of understanding meaning as never fixed is that it allows not only for change but also for the creators and authors to be interrogated, to recognize the multifarious and intertwined relations in which identity gains its (ephemeral) form.
In this piece of writing, and many others, Hall’s work imparts insightful ideas of identity. For an introduction, start here. Expect many of his ideas to be directly and indirectly included in my writing, especially in the identity series.