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[published in 2009: S. Clegg and M. Haugaard (eds) The Handbook of Power,

London: Sage, pp. 194-209.]

POWER AND IDENTITY

Nigel Rapport

The individual is something quite new which creates new things,

something absolute; all his acts are entirely his own.

Ultimately, the individual derives the value of his acts from

himself; because he has to interpret in a quite individual way even

the words he has inherited. His interpretation of a formula at least

is personal, even if he does not create a formula: as an interpreter

he is still creative.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The Will to Power

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Introduction: The human and the status of culture

Are human beings the same inasmuch as they all inhabit different cultural

worlds, or is their being human something that exists over and against their

inhabiting such worlds? Do they become human within culture or does their

humanity transcend cultural particularities? Clifford Geertz (1973:22) has called

this the 'recurrent dilemma' of social science: how to square generic human

rationality and the biological unity of mankind (‘humanism’) with the great

natural variation of cultural forms and social structures (‘structuralism’). The

history of social science in its entirety may, according to George Stocking

(1992:347), be viewed as ‘a continuing (and complex) dialectic between the

universalism of “anthropos” and the diversitarianism of “ethnos”’, between

recognising human consciousness as foundationally individual and free, and as

collective and culturally given.

If consciousness, its form and content, is not separate from the symbolic

discourses and social practices in which it is culturally and socially embedded,

then not only may identity --human, individual, whatever-- be seen as

subordinate to cultural matrices (which may remain unconscious), but the

notions of ‘humankind’, ‘humanism’, ‘human nature’, ‘human dignity’, and so

on, may be deemed historically contingent and culturally specific products.

'Man', as Michel Foucault put it, 'is only a recent invention, a figure not yet two

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centuries old' (1972:115). However seriously one takes Foucault's historical

claim, the implication is clear: humankind and humanism are ethnocentric

(mythical, teleological) concepts ripe for deconstruction. Far from being

transcendent, humanistic values, methods and truths are part of particular

discourses which have created the world in a certain image so as to serve certain

interests and ends. 'Humankind' --'the subject' or 'subject-effect', better-- is ever,

inevitably and inextricably enculturated: hence multiply and partially

constructed, conditioned, elicited, politicised and gendered. Even the existential

certainties of the Western humanist --whereby, in David Lewis's words

(1982:55), '[m]y distinctness, my being me, is quite unmistakeable to me, there

can be nothing of which I am more certain'-- amounts to a culturally derived

(and rather unusual) 'metaphysics of presence'.

There are a number of possible responses to this structuralist (or

‘culturalist’) critique. One is simply to say that treating 'ethnos' as an absolute is

plainly wrong. Science, medicine, history, literature, diplomacy, the market and

travel prove the existence of a universal humanity, and of an inherent

individuality of consciousness and experience through which it is embodied (cf.

Rapport 1997a). Another response, as adumbrated philosophically by Richard

Rorty (1992), is to admit that a humanist perspective is historically recent and

culturally specific but to argue, notwithstanding, that as a way of knowing the

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world it offers the best prospectus for a diversity of cultural world-views being

able to live peaceably alongside and through one another: it is the most powerful

way of construing ontologically secure human identities. In what she calls a

'tactical humanism', Lila Abu-Lughod (1991:138) arrives at a similar position.

Humanism may be a local discourse (despite its erstwhile claims) but it still has

more global reach than any other and it carries most moral force as a language of

equality. Of course, the discourse has suffered from being misapplied and

abused. In the past, promoting and celebrating ‘heroic’ individual identities has

occurred at the same time as an ignoring of others' systematic oppression;

positing individuals' autonomy has co-occurred with a masking of the

inequalities of social-structural positioning; placing humankind at the centre of

the world has co-occurred with a justifying of an exploitation of nature; and

respecting an universality of human dignity and individual integrity has co-

occurred with a denying of humanity to specified 'others' (women, children,

natives, slaves, Jews). However, this abuse notwithstanding (and no discourse,

finally, can protect itself from abuse), humanism offers social science the best

hope for describing both the universality and the universal particularities of

human experience, and for speaking truth both to the social-structurally powerful

and the powerless. In particular, humanism offers an escape from concepts

which can become imprisoning essentialisms. 'Culture', 'society', 'community',

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‘nationality’, 'ethnicity', 'gender' and 'race' structure the world according to

certain fixed and determinate notions of identity. So-called ‘identity-politics’

impose sameness, categorizing people as alike and stereotyping their collective

characteristics; equally, identity-politics make and maintain alterity, creating

differences between people, and implying fundamental separations which

inexorably translate into hierarchy and inequality (Amit and Rapport 2002).

To write 'against culture' (and other such homogenising categorisations) is

to eschew regarding people as 'typical examples of a genus' (Watson 92:139). It

is, in Abu-Lughod's phrasing (1991:157), to produce humanistic 'ethnographies

of the particular': precise narratives of the existence of particular individuals in

particular times and places. Paradoxically, the very particularity of human lives

is a property they hold in common, over and against their cultural and other

differences. The individual discloses the human. ‘Humanistic narratives’ portray

the efforts to make meaning that are common to the lives of Everyone. Through

the stories of particular lives, of individuals amid the histories of their own

particularities, social science can offer a global authority to the possible

authenticity of individually conducted lives. Counterpoised to the identity

politics of structurally over-determined identities can be lodged the ‘existential

power’ (Rapport 2003) of individual practice . . .

The above paragraphs demonstrate the reflexive nature of the social

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sciences: the way in which information and value overlap (Bateson and Ruesch

1951); and the way in which models, theories and analyses are consequential

upon the social life they observe, re-entering the world as participatory

components that give rise to new structurations (Giddens 1990). Interpretations

of the nature of the human, the cultural, of identity and power, are to be regarded

as much as pragmatic and strategic instruments as matters of information. What

is the most powerful way to regard identity, and for what purposes? How is

power to be identified, and to what ends?

The style of this chapter is perspectival. It provides a point of entry into

current debates. At the same time it argues for a particular stance in these

debates. The consequences of a humanist perspective on the nature of power and

identity are such, I argue, that it best provides for fulfilment, dignity and

satisfaction --the realizing of individual capacities for life-- both as regards

individuals in themselves, and in their relationships with others. The chapter is in

two main parts. The first elaborates on the nature of power and its origin; the

second examines the nature of identity, the relational character of both power

and identity, and the consequences of a politics of identity.

I. The Nature of Power: Humanist and Structuralist Perspectives

Power can be conceived of existentially as an inherent attribute of individuals as

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active beings, beings who, through their ongoing activity-in-the-world, create

and recreate meaningful environments in which they live. Ralph Waldo Emerson

and Friedrich Nietzsche refer in this connection to individuals' native 'force',

John Dewey to their 'impulse', Max Weber to their 'will'. Residing within

individuals, and lent to the relations and groupings to which they lend their

allegiance, a notion of 'existential power' compasses the force, the will, the

energy, in a word the agency, whereby individuals produce effects in their worlds

--effect worlds, in fact. Such existential power is at once something metabolic,

physiological, something pertaining to individuals acting as embodied physical

organisms, and something more particularly intelligent, pertaining to the capacity

to sense and make sense (cf. Barnes 1988:4).

Gregory Bateson defines individuals as 'energy sources' (1973:126). While

individuals' bodily boundaries are permeable, and while they may be dependent

on energy-transfers across these borders, inasmuch as they exist, individuals

have an inescapable physical and experiential separateness which differentiates

and distinguishes them from the rest of the world. As discrete centres of energy,

individuals begin, from before birth, to become distinctly themselves: to accrete

identities and personalities. This takes place through activity-in-the-world,

through movement and through assessment of what the senses relay to be the

results of that movement. Bateson refers in this connection to the individual

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'organism-plus-environment' and 'organism-in-its-environment' (1973:423,426),

and James Fernandez to a human 'phenomenological subjectivity'

(1992:127,134-5). Activity-in-the-world leads to a development of a personal,

environing 'sensorium' in which individual human beings dwell.

Two things are further to be stressed: not only does the energy behind this

activity-in-the-world remain individually based, it is also individually directed.

From the moment the individual energy source begins moving in its environment

and becoming itself (its selves), a unique history of embodiment, of worldly

engagement, unfolds and grows which compasses its own logics, its own habits,

its own ways of doing and being, and its own purposes. Of course, the individual

organism-plus-environment is not alone in the world. It is discrete but not alone.

It has embarked upon its distinct voyage of activity-in-the-world (-in-its-world)

and sense-making, but it is surrounded by a plurality of other things-in-the-

world, inorganic and organic, some engaged in comparable voyages to its own.

On this view, social science might be broadly described as the study of the

effects that human beings as energetic things-in-the-world have upon one

another. This is a far from singular or easily generalisable matter (which is why a

respect for the individual case goes to the very heart of social science as a

project). Since each individual centre-of-energy is driven by its own metabolism,

within its own embodiment, along its own historical course of activity-in-the-

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world, how each will react to other things is not determinable; more specifically,

it is difficult, if not impossible, to predict how one human being will affect

another human being with whom it comes into contact. This is so for three

reasons: firstly, to repeat, because each is set upon its own life-course, each is

engaged in furthering a life-world whose direction and logic has been distinct

from the moment 'it' began; secondly, because each engages with others from the

position of outsider: each is dependent on bodily sense-making apparatuses

which are discrete and distinctive to itself, which imbue it with its own

perspective on the world and no other; and thirdly, because the sense-making

procedures of each is characterized by a creativity --a 'randomness' even

(Rapport 2001)-- which makes their generation of perspectives unpredictable

even to themselves.

An appropriate way to conceive of human social life, Emerson suggests, is

as a proportionate meeting between individuals' 'native force' and social

conventions: '[l]ife itself is a mixture of power and form' (1981:280). Georg

Simmel speaks therefore of a 'reciprocal influence' between sociocultural form

and individuals' vital 'impulse' (1971:24). However, as they deal with and

employ conventional social and cultural forms as means and modes of

expression and communication, it is individuals' native force which drives them

to accrue and maintain senses of themselves and their worlds, and it is an

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individual intelligence which determines what that exchange of forms signifies.

This means that the forms of social exchange cannot be treated as things-in-

themselves. ‘The sociocultural’ is not a distinct ontological domain so much as a

phenomenological space shot through --continuously affected and effected-- by

the diversity of individual interpretation and intention. The fact that there is

unpredictability and that the consequences of individual meetings may be

unintended must not, contra Giddens (1976:155-60), lead us to conceptualise

‘action’, ‘pattern’ or even ‘structure’ as distanced and distinguishable from

individual actors and moments. It is always by way of the latter that the social

forms are animated, given complexity and depth (cf. Rapport 1990).

A 'prosperous' social life, Emerson concludes, depends on how 'sweetly'

individuals are able to effect the meeting between their intrinsic force and

personal interpretations of the surface conventions which act as both buffers and

points of contact between themselves and others: '[w]e live amid surfaces, and

the true art of life is to skate well on them' (1981:280).

The power of the institutional

The above introduces a very different concept of power to that characteristically

presumed by a structuralist social science. This might posit power as something

residing in, and deriving from, abstract and impersonal entities and forces such

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as 'social structures', 'languages', 'discourses', 'unconscious drives' 'habituated

practices' and 'institutions', and from categorial designations such as 'class',

'gender', 'ethnicity', 'nationality'. These abstractions are seen to be responsible for

real effects, and as controlling those individual human ‘functionaries’ that live

within their compass, whether or not the latter are aware of their so being

controlled. Indeed, recent ‘post-humanist’ thought has claimed that such

impersonal forces are responsible for giving rise to the consciousness of human

beings tout court --responsible for our conceiving of the possibility of there being

something called ‘individuals’ or 'persons' with ‘experience’ and 'power’-- thus

collapsing any distinction between social structure and agent, cultural form and

will. Under a structuralist dispensation, the impersonal often becomes an

'anthropomorphized agent', assuming many shapes -- 'vector, instrument,

technology, technique, discourse' (Kurtz 2001:29)-- but always eluding the

control of human agents.

Nor is this conclusion so far removed, in outcome, from more traditional

functionalist and structuralist theorizations which saw social order as emanating

from a system of normative control (a set of external sanctions or a system of

interiorized morality), and where the power of one individual over another

derived from the institutional contexts and practical routines by which they

found themselves encapsulated. 'Interactional', 'organizational' and 'structural'

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'modalities' condition the settings and contexts in which individuals exercise

their potency and capability, Eric Wolf concludes (1999:5). Timothy Earle

(1998:951) speaks even more plainly: 'four sources of power exist: social,

military, ideological, and economic', and maintaining a social position 'depends

on using one or more of these power sources' --of which 'the economic is

primary'. At best, a hierarchy of kinds of power is admitted in a structuralist

social science in which existential 'modalities' come to be thoroughly

overwritten. Questions such as how individuals deal with life, how they make

meaning in the midst of everyday routine and change, suffering and good

fortune, become questions largely of social determination. As Michael Jackson

sums up, in the rush to depict the 'political power' of techniques of influence and

oppression, a recognition of the 'existential power' to act and constitute identity is

lost (1996:22); a focus on 'institutional processes of governance' eschews a

broader conceptualization of 'the power to do, the capacity to achieve things or

projects' (Eves 1998:20-1). Under a structuralist dispensation, in short,

individual agency comes to be overwritten, more or less vulgarly, by social

structure and institutionalism, hierarchy and history, habitus and hegemony.

A different place to begin, in considering such seemingly impersonal,

structural or institutional facets of power, is with the vital distinction between the

forms of social reality and the force, the will, behind them and the significance,

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the meaning, they carry. There is no way that such experiential dualities (form

and force, form and meaning) can properly be elided or eschewed. Form should

never be seen as overwriting content; they are, as Simmel insisted (1971), 'co-

present dualisms'.

There are both political or institutional and existential or personal

manifestations of power. The distinction is clearly borne out by the different

ways individual incumbents of the same political office, functionaries of the

same institution, fulfil (define, maintain, extend, subvert, personalize,

anonymize) their role. But the relationship between the institutional and the

existential is not a mutual one: not a relationship between equal things, between

things that are equally things. Rather, there is a fundamental sense in which the

institutional can be understood as conditional upon the existential.

The structuralist argument regarding the power of the institutional is often

framed in terms of language. The power of language over its individual speaker-

hearers --individuals as 'inhabitants', willy-nilly, if not prisoners, of discourses,

language-games or symbolic codes-- is taken to be paradigmatic of the

institutional or structural as such (cf. Ray 1989). By contrast, an existentialist

appreciation might begin with a description of language as an institution whose

very nature is to function in 'ironic mode' (Martin 1983:415), there being no

certain or necessary accordance between what individuals appear to say and

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actually say, between the linguistic meanings of different individual users, or

between linguistic expression and the way the world is. Linguistically formulated

social structures, norms and codes are dependent on and determined by their

being continually animated by individual speaker-hearers for particular purposes

at particular moments (cf. Rapport and Overing 2000:117-126).

Of course, there is significant give-and-take between the two emphases.

Without the institution of language individuals would not have the medium

through which to express and hope to communicate their meanings and to

metacommunicate notions of register and code; perhaps they would not have the

means even to formulate such meaning, certainly not with the same ease.

Notwithstanding, there is something ontologically and qualitatively distinct in the

agency with which each individual is responsible for imbuing language with

meaningfulness, relevance and validity, through their continued, intentioned use

of it --without which the institution would simply remain inert cultural matter--

and so maintaining language's role as a synthesising process in social life. To

claim for the institutional something akin to its own animating force and

function is hypostatization (cf. Haugaard 1997:165). It is humanity that speaks

--in the shape of individual utterances of individual language-users-- not

language as such.

George Steiner (1975) offers an apposite formulation (echoing Simmel

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and Emerson) when he describes social life as exhibiting a 'dual

phenomenology'. In social interaction there is a common surface of speech-forms

and notations, of grammar and phonology --the conventions of collective public

exchange-- resting upon a base of private meanings and associations, meanings

which derive from the 'irreducible singularity' of personal consciousness, from

the specificity of an individual's ongoing, articulate somatic and psychological

identity (Steiner 1975:170-3). Speaking a language does not translate into that

language possessing agency or achieving hegemony, then, determining or

causing meaning, or eliminating the interpretive work of individual speaker-

hearers. Linguistic norms and routines may institutionalize (also hierarchicalize)

certain conventional avenues of expression but they in no wise determine what is

meant as individuals partake of the language from within the personalizing

contexts of their world-views (cf. Rapport 1993:161-77).

Linguistic usage is never unmediated by a creative individual

improvisation of its conventions. Individuals at once partake of language's rules

and routines (take part in the continuing constitution of socio-cultural milieux to

which linguistic interaction gives rise), and make these into instruments of their

own ongoing, changing understanding and use. Whatever the order and sense

--the power-- purportedly instantiated by the institutional logic of the language as

such, the individual speaker-hearers partaking of its rules and routines animate

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them according to their own mental and bodily (verbal and behavioural) presence

in those routines. Individuals in interaction can thus be seen to be both assisting

in a continuing collective performance --in the performance of an institution--

and, at the same time, creating, extending and fulfilling ongoing agendas,

identities, world-views, life-projects, of their own. There can be worlds of

difference between shared grammatic-cum-paradigmatic competency --shared

institutional membership-- on the one hand and shared cognition or mutual

comprehension on the other.

Likewise, there can be worlds of difference between individuals’

constructions of themselves and how they are described by others. These may

bear little relation; others’ interpretations are beyond individuals’ capacity

directly to control, even possibly to influence. And while the structuralist

inference is that here, therefore, individuals are subsumed by the logic of an

impersonal domain, an institutional habitus which itself acts in the effecting of

an autonomous, public world of meaning (Derrida 1982:316), there is no call, to

repeat, for such hypostatisation. The fact that it is within the gift of others to

make of individuals ‘heroes’ or ‘terrorists’ (Leach 1977), ‘innovators’ or

‘deviants’ (Haugaard 1997:175), does not alter the nature of original, individual

acts of self-authorship, nor the ongoing individuality of serial acts of

interpretation by others. ‘The public’ is no more a thing-in-itself than ‘the social’

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(cf. Rapport 1994:26-8). One continues to distinguish conceptually, absolutely,

between self-knowledge and other-knowledge and posits the relationship

between these as indeterminate: unpredictable, oblique, random, ultimately

unknowable. A ‘public reputation’ is not something individuals can control; but

nor is it something that controls them: public exchange is never unmediated by

continuing acts of individual interpretation. All manner of affirmation and of

delegitimisation, of affection and of violation, may be visited upon the individual

by others, but none, barring death, touch upon the absolute capacity (necessity)

of individuals to make their own sense. Individual speakers and hearers, actors

and others, are 'condemned', in Jean-Paul Sartre’s elaboration (1975:352), to go

on making their own sense.

There is a dialectic between the existential and the institutional, but the

existence of such relations should not obscure our recognition of the ontological

priority of the existential, also its qualitative distinctiveness. The existential

possesses an instrumental priority, inasmuch as the power of the institutional is

dependent on the animating work of individual functionaries (individuals who

are active in the world, inter alia as institutional role-players). The role-player is

never to be seen as subsumed within the logic of the institutional --the 'content'

collapsed into the 'form', in Simmel's terminology-- for the individual always

possesses the power --the existential awareness, the ironic capacity and

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proclivity-- to say, ‘Here I am partaking of an institution, playing a particular

language-game'. Sometimes individuals ‘play’ better than at others, and

sometimes the playing is more trying, intrusive, than at others, but there is no

moment at which individuals do not possess the capacity --and experience the

mixed emotions-- of recognising both where the logic of the institution (as

personalized by fellow-players) would take them, and the distinctive, individual

place they nevertheless stand, emotionally and cognitively, in relation to it. It

may not always be a simple matter determining how to reconcile these positions

--how to act, what to say, how to seem-- both as institutional players and as

themselves. However, it is never difficult for individuals to see themselves both

present and detached. They are conscious players in the game --however

reluctant, however conventionally disempowered-- but never played

unconsciously by it. To begin to understand the 'power' of institutions --to

categorise, normativise, hierarchicalise, exclude-- is to see institutions being

worked, and resisted, and negated, for all manner of purposes and in every

moment, by wilful individuals. ‘We human beings’, as Victor Turner summed

up, ‘are all and always sophisticated, conscious, capable of laughter at our own

institutions’ (cited in Ashley 1990:xix).

One needs to have a conception of existential power as a 'real quality', a

'concrete thing', prior to and independent of anything else (Helms 1993:9). The

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individual energy, will and force which underlie the work of interpretation in

linguistic usage underlie equally the extent to which institutions as such gain

animation in public life, and continue to manifest a structural power.

II. The Relationality (or Extensiveness) of Identity and of Power

Alfred Whitehead (1925) was sufficiently blunt when he wrote:

The misconception that has haunted philosophical literature

throughout the centuries is the notion of 'independent existence'.

There is no such mode of existence; every entity is to be understood

in terms of the way it is interwoven with the rest of the universe.

Under a structuralist dispensation, the above is interpreted as meaning that there

can be no autonomous individual actor subsisting as a free-thinking and

sovereign entity. There is an insistence that people only assume the identity of

individuals (to the extent that they do) within a socio-cultural milieu, as a result

of socialization and enculturation: as part-and-parcel of the ways in which

processes of structuration engender a reproduction of other socio-cultural

identities --languages, modes of production and practice, systems of exchange,

institutions and organisations, cosmologies and ecologies. People are the sum of

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their social exchanges, of the natures elicited from them by their relationships.

A short riposte to this is that it confuses individuality with individualism.

It conflates a particular sociocultural conceptualisation of individual identity and

the universal, biological nature of selfhood (Rapport and Overing 2000:178-

195). ‘Individualism’ pertains to a particular ideology of identity, concerning the

value and dignity of the human individual, his or her rationality and self-

knowledge, right to privacy, freedom of conscience and of contract (cf. Lukes

1990). ‘Individuality’, by contrast, refers to a universality of the human

condition whereby individuals engage with others by virtue of discrete sense-

making apparatuses (nervous systems and brains), possessing discrete centres of

consciousness in discrete bodies. There is a distinctiveness that pertains

universally to an individual's unique position vis-à-vis the rest of the world, a

unique intentionality. Not only is an individual's being-in-the-world universally

mediated by very particular interpretative prisms which distance him or her from

it, then, but while intrinsically 'of the world', the individual also inexorably

comes to know the world as 'other'.

To agree with Whitehead’s prescription, then, is not necessarily to adopt a

structuralist perspective. One can agree with an emphasis on the relational nature

of identity while insisting that the forces directing and interpreting relations are

individual ones; there is always a relationship between individual and world but

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it is, first and foremost, of ongoing individual construction and interpretation.

(Social science, to repeat, may be described as the study of the effects, intended

and unintended, direct and tangential, which human beings have upon one

another as energetic things-in-the-world.) The individuality of consciousness and

of agency is a human universal, whatever may be the status of individualism as a

social norm.

Power as embodied

A recognition within social science of the relational qualities of power and its

exercising is widely attested. Edmund Leach (1977) spoke of power as

transactional, something pertaining to that liminal interface or contact zone

between human beings; while Richard Adams (1977) described power as the

ability to influence the conduct and decision-making of others through the

control over energetic forms in the latter's environment. Power as a relationship

is basic to the way many theorists have sought to define power as such. For

Floyd Hunter (1970):

[Power describes] the acts of men [sic] going about the business of

moving other men to act in relation to themselves or in relation to

organic or inorganic things.

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For Max Weber (1947):

Power is the probability that one actor within a social relationship will be

in a position to carry out his [sic] own will despite the resistance of other

participants.

And for Robert Dahl (1957):

A has power over B to the extent that he [sic] can get B to do

something that B would not otherwise do.

There is insufficient appreciation in these definitions, however, that perhaps the

first and paradigmatic relationship in the exercise of power concerns individuals'

relations with themselves. Before effecting relations with other 'organic and

inorganic things' (Hunter) and 'overcoming others’ resistance’ (Weber), an

exercise of power may be said to effect the identity of individuals as such.

Paradigmatically, power concerns relations between two or more distinct states

of consciousness within the individual (cf. Rapport 1997a:30-42). Viewed

existentially, the individual body is the paradigmatic site of that 'liminal interface

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or contact zone' (Leach) between two states of being, the original site of 'getting

something done’ (Dahl). Here is situated a 'controlling' of 'energetic forms’ such

that individuals may have effects on environments (Adams). Fundamental to our

understanding of power, in short, might be an appreciation of those processes of

identification whereby individuals effect a change to themselves: to their

conscious senses of self and world, to the personal sensorium that is their

relations with the world.

The exercise of power may well entail a relationship, but it is to be

recognised that the relationship may be of two, very different kinds: with

individuals' own selves; with others. The former, I would argue, is foundational

inasmuch as it may proceed without the latter but not the other way around. An

individual may attend wholly to the self --may intend the self-- and have an

impact upon others not at all or only indirectly. To engage with others and seek to

wield power over them is epiphenomenal upon a prior relationship an individual

has with himself or herself. For, only as a self, active in the world towards an

ongoing accruing of meaning and identity, does an individual construe otherness

and relate, consciously and intentionally, to other things-in-the-world.

Rather than the simple (structuralist) proposition that power entails a

relationship between social things, a number of more complex possibilities now

suggest themselves. Through the exercise of existential power the individual

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identifies the self and also particular relationships with an environing world: the

individual achieves selfhood and construes otherness. But the relationship with

otherness may be of a variety of kinds. It is possible for individuals to exercise

their power by endeavouring to use others, but also by using only themselves. It

is possible for individuals to use others in such a way that it becomes impossible

for these others ever to use themselves, but also to use others in such tangential

or accidental ways that it neither assists nor even affects others’ use of

themselves. It is possible for individuals to use others in ways these others can

find comprehensible, but also to use others such that the usage is impossible to

understand. It is possible for individuals to model their intended use of others

upon their use of themselves, and alternatively upon criteria very different or

diametrically opposed.

In short, individuals may wield power over themselves, in the advance of

their ideas, their sensibilities or their strength, independently of --with effects

quite distinct and in manners quite different from-- attempts to influence others

(in advance of their reputation, their wealth or their patronage). Moreover, the

relationship between individuals' effecting of power over themselves and their

affecting of others cannot be easily specified or determined. There is no logic, to

repeat, intrinsic to the effects which energetic things-in-the-world have upon one

another: their relationship takes no necessary form, for its significance is a

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matter of interpretation. In important respects power per se is a matter of

interpretation, residing in the eye of a beholder.

It is necessary to treat the power of the individual on the one hand, and the

identities and relationships to which that power gives rise on the other --both

within the individual body and without-- as phenomenally and analytically

distinct. Existence, as per Sartre’s famous summary (1956), precedes essence.

This is not to take issue, to repeat, with an emphasis on the relational nature of

identity or the extent to which, in Bateson’s words (1973), 'things are

epiphenomena of the relations between them', but rather to insist (as Bateson

also does) that it is the 'energy sources' of individual physical organisms which

possess the intrinsic power responsible for construing relationships and

perceiving things in the first place. The things and relationships which are

identified in this way will be many and varied (human and non-human, organic

and inorganic) and changeable (things and relationships will come and go), but

the exercise of individual power that goes into their making continues to exist for

the lifetime of the energetic body.

Identity as extensive

The word ‘identity derives from the Latin, ‘identitatis’, whose root is ‘idem’:

‘the same’. Identity suggests that something is the same as itself. To make sense

26

of this notion is to consider a thing as intrinsically plural --at the least dual. The

concept of identity, one might say, treats thingness extensively. Insofar as

something comes to have an identity, a thing is recognised as containing within it

the potential, even the necessity, of extension.

The extensiveness of identity might be of a number of kinds. It might be

temporal; in spite of the passing of time, one recognises that something has

retained its identity: ‘I have the same dribbling skills in football as I did 20

years ago’. Extension might be spatial: ‘Radio reception is as bad in the

bedroom as in the kitchen’. Extension might be situational: ‘Emilie is as

composed engaging the University Principal as she is undergraduates’.

Whatever the nature of the extension, identity posits a claim to sameness

between two or more existential moments where --it is also claimed-- difference

might be anticipated as occurring. Identity might be described as a relationship

which is consequent upon the power of construing sameness.

Identity entails acts of judgement, then: ‘I adjudge this thing

(person/object/relationship/situation) to be the same as that’. In turn, such

judgement calls for criteria of assessment and distinction: ‘I know that this is the

same as that, and also different from another, in this way’. In saying this,

moreover, a third figure has necessarily entered the picture. If the thingness of

identity presumes at least a dual phenomenology, then the act of distinguishing

27

between whether the second thing is the same as the first or different introduces

a third figure. Most commonly, indeed, attributions of identity are found in full

fields, or systems, of classification that individuals and groups construct around

themselves. The fullness and diversity, the particularity and historicity of these

systems of classification was, indeed, the place this essay began. ‘Culture’ is the

term social scientists have employed to convey the multiplicity of human systems

of classifying identity and their complexity. Cultural systems of symbolic

classification compass specific ranges of samenesses and differences. The

systems can possess great historical depth. They can represent generations of

hard-won practical experience; they can also represent traditional flights of

human fancy tied to human imaginations religiously passed on (‘This is the

number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin’; ‘This is the

physiological feature responsible for the essential distinction between Male and

Female / between White and Black / between Human and Animal’). The ways in

which human individuals and groups have allocated identity to the world and its

things, and have made and adjudicated their claims are legion.

The particularity of our species turns on our creative capacity for making

the world into different kinds of places by our symboling work and by our own

malleability: our capacity to form ourselves into the kinds of being who could

exist in the very different systems of symbolic classifications of identity which

28

we continue creating.

The consequences of identity

The particular way in which human beings do come to construe identity is not

merely incidental. Flights of fancy they may be, traditions of imaginative

creation, but such is the adaptability of the species, its capacity to live in a world

which goes beyond both the seeming limits of an instinctual animality and the

seeming limits of a natural ecology (we repress libido, we modify genes, we

make deserts bloom), that our acts of construing identity and of constructing

cultural systems, are responsible, in large, for the worlds we actually inhabit. Our

decisions on how to act and why derive from our reliance on systems of

classification: ‘It is “good” not to “associate” with “evil” “folk”’; ‘“Meat”

“affords” a “healthy diet” for “children”’; ‘“British citizens” are “subject to”

the “sovereign”’. Significantly, we evaluate our own identities and those of

others on the basis of the identifications we and they decide to make in the

world. ‘We know right from wrong: they do not’; ‘We only holiday in Cannes’;

‘We could never vote Conservative’. In short, systems of classification translate

into significant distinctions between proper and improper, insiders and outsiders,

better and worse. They are powerful means of manifesting human identities,

individual and collective, to oneself and to others. From our identifications we

29

accrue the contents of selfhood, and justifications for action.

The lesson from ethnography is the relativity and contingency of these

identifications: systems of classification are multiple and contradictory (Rapport

1997b). Even the same individual, the same group, will invest at once in a

number of different modes of assigning identity. Between individuals and groups

the contrariety increases exponentially. We must be wary of this relativity: the

human capacity to live any number of different lives under the aegis of different

classificatory systems does not make such systems all equal, or always necessary.

Nietzsche referred to the systems as ‘illusions’. Art, religion, even a science of

discrete things, offered comforting illusions concerning the world’s patterning

and constancy; it was thus that human beings overcame a potential nausea in the

face of the world’s actual randomness, chaos, entropy, meaninglessness,

absurdity (cf. Rapport 1999).

All the same, we should not be taken in by our own fictions, Nietzsche

urged. We should adopt an ‘ironical’ stance even in regard to values and

vocabularies we deem ‘final’ and of absolute value in our lives (cf. Rorty 1992).

We might then oscillate or zigzag between identifying with clear-cut systems of

classification --benefitting from the proportion, direction, ambition, progress and

propriety which they give to individual and collective lives-- and, alternatively,

recognising the truth of their fanciful and contingent status. The true constancy

30

of the world, Nietzsche concluded, beyond identifiable things was entropy and

flux: ‘the real immortality, that of movement’ (1994:125). As well there was the

constant capacity of human beings, together and alone, to go on creating the

illusion of identity, of systems of classification, to suit their purposes of leading

proportionate, directional, progressive lives.

Identity politics

Aware of the dangers of forgetting the illusionary, constructed nature of systems

of classification and identity--the homogenising of identity, the stereotyping,

hierarchicalising and othering-- Ernest Gellner has wondered whether

‘categorization [even] between consenting adults [is] to be allowed to all?’

(1993:3). His point is a serious one: 'We are all human (...). Don't take more

specific classifications seriously’. The power to construe identity in a world of

movement, entropy and flux is a fundamental human capacity. We must be wary,

however, of the achievement of identity giving onto the ‘fundamentalism’ of an

unironical performance of social life (cf. Kateb 1984:351).

‘Culture’, explains Gellner (1995:6), may be defined as,

a collectivity united in a belief (...). That is what the term means. More

particularly, a collectivity united in a false belief is a culture. Truths,

31

especially demonstrable truths, are available to all and sundry, and do not

define any continuity of faith. But errors, especially dramatic errors, are

culture-specific. They do tend to be the badges of community and

loyalty. Assent to an absurdity is an intellectual rite de passage, a

gateway to the community defined by that commitment to that

conviction.

Like Nietzsche, Gellner would preserve a space --experiential, practical, moral--

beyond the illusions of culture. Our true humanity, our constancy in a world of

flux, is to be found in our existential capacities to go on creating meaning. This

we might truly value.

The irony is that as social science has called for deconstruction of a

conceptualisation of culture inherited from German Romanticism --ultimately

from Johann Herder-- which posits essentialist collective identities (in analogy

with natural species), so the political currency of ‘culture’ and commensurate

categorisations (‘ethnicity’, ‘nationality’, ‘religiosity’, ‘gender’) as symbolic

capital has spread. We have entered an era of ‘culture wars’: political lobbying

and violence on the basis of exclusive ascriptions and their ‘rightful’ entailments.

This is not coincidental. Notions of culture, race, tribe, nation, religion, gender

and class as bespeaking intrinsic homogeneousness and solidarity, delimitation

32

and differentiation, reflect widespread anxieties concerning people’s ability to

grasp and influence forces that impact upon their life-worlds:

Cultural and ethnic identity have become the catchwords for many of

those disadvantaged by colonial and postcolonial inequalities in the

distribution of power, (...) imagin[ing] they can recapture something of the

integrity and authenticity they feel they have personally lost. [Jackson

2002:107]

Eliding the personal and social, the biographical and historical in this way

empowers the anonymised, the historically marginalised and excluded:

embedding individual being in a transcendent field of Being.

How is social science to respond to this? Does one applaud the

politicisation as 'romantic authochthonization' (Malkki 1995:52-63)? Or does

one insist that essentializing arguments concerning identity threaten a free and

mobile society, our individual capacities to construe and practice newly achieved

identities on a continuing basis? In place of 'an ironing out of difference in the

name of some notion of common humanity' (Jackson 2002:114), existing

inequalities come to be reversed, and new discriminations devised: a kind of

‘inside-out colonialism’ (Gellner 1993). Kinds of cultural fundamentalism are

33

deployed in community- and nation-building, dividing the world into true

belongers and believers --and foreigners, infidels and apostates-- on the basis of

different origins and essences. Here are reified categories which admit neither

synthesis nor resolution.

'Any kind of identity thinking is insidious’, Michael Jackson concludes

(2002:115), ‘because like all reification, it elides the line that separates words

and worlds, language and life'. Reducing the world to simplistic, generalised,

category oppositions abolishes vast areas of human experience and capacity.

Collective nouns and identity terms traduce the open-endedness and ambiguity of

life, spawning dangerous illusions of essential difference and threatening

inhumanity and intolerance being visited on iconic others (cf. Sen 2006).

Conclusion: Decolonising the human subject

There is nothing 'primordial' or necessary in the way that discontent with the

liberal world flows into fundamentalism and chauvinism, Brian Barry explains

(2001:4), merely a political expediency. The tendency towards identities of an

absolutist and exclusivist kind --fundamentalist religion, ethnic nationalism--

represents a highly contemporary, ‘modern’, choice: the strategic use of purist

thinking (cf. Bauman 1998, Zizek 2005). Lobbying on the basis of such

essentialism has reaped political and statutory rewards. It is also --to recall the

34

hermeneutic circle of human reflexivity-- a kind of social modelling which

works well in a particular kind of milieu: a world constructed on the basis of

clear-cut classificatory structures. It is the efficacy of essentialism as an

instrument of a kind of identification, one might say, to presage and reinforce

this kind of world. But what if one wished to practise and to secure a different

kind of being-in-the-world, one more attuned to what one deemed the fullness of

human capacities?

The issue is a moral as well as epistemological one. It comes down to the

nature of the anthropological concrete, where this chapter began. What can one

assert as being the constituent units of humanity, ontological and agential, and

potentially rights-bearing? Distinct, cohesive cultural communities, or individual

members of milieux (communitarian and other, cultural and other)? Is

membership of a cultural community a contingent relationship, an option, and

'culture' a possible instrument --an idiom, a rhetoric, a resource, a vehicle-- for

social synthesis and self-expression? Or is cultural membership foundational and

determinate? The position taken in this chapter has been that it is proper,

descriptively, analytically and morally, to treat the power of the human individual

on the one hand, and the social relationships and communities to which that

power gives rise on the other, as distinct. Individual power is ontologically prior

to its effects, distinct from the 'essences' of sociocultural identity, relationship,

35

system and change that it creates. Classes and categories, the matter they are

seen to contain and the relations they are seen to exhibit, should never be

confused or conflated with the energy and will behind them, the power that

speaks through them. By way of the particular forms of things and relationships,

individuals express and effect any number of personal states of affairs, make and

remake the identities of their personal sensoriums. This is at once an ontological

state of affairs and a matter about which we must be politically ‘correct’.

It is apposite to recall a distinction which Isaiah Berlin (1990) urged

between ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ freedoms. Negative freedom was freedom from

imposition; positive freedom was freedom to gain particular goods (health,

wealth, spiritual purity). Negative freedom was more fundamental, Berlin

concluded, since it avoided any conceptual imposition concerning what freedom

might entail. This chapter has dwelt on distinctions that might, equally, be

ranked: existential power over against structural power; identity as extensive

over against identity as essential. A recognition of power as a human, individual

energy--a capacity to act in and on the world-- and of identity as an achievement

of sameness and difference --an ongoing interpretation-- are foundational of

appreciating power and identity in their varied sociocultural conceptualisations.

Anthony Cohen (1994:180) has advocated a social-scientific championing

of the individual as the anthropological concrete which he calls 'decolonising' the

36

human subject:

We must make deliberate efforts to acknowledge the subtleties, inflections

and varieties of individual consciousness which are concealed by the

categorical masks which we have invented so adeptly. Otherwise, we will

continue to deny people the right to be themselves, deny their rights to their

own identities.

Michael Jackson concurs: it is necessary to 'annul' the use of culture as

discursive means to classify, define and explain human experience. Culture is to

be deemed 'an idiom or vehicle of intersubjective life, but not its foundation or

final cause' (Jackson 2002:118-25). To do justice to our existential power --our

human nature-- to make sense of the world, and to go on doing so, is perhaps to

constitute individuals as 'migrants of identity' (Rapport and Dawson 1998). A

constitutional pluralism based on human-individual capacities to move between

selves, communities, systems of classification, within a liberal-democratic

framework, establishes the rights of people, individually as well as collectively,

to create and develop identities of an ongoing diversity, strangeness and vitality.

37

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