Identifying Identity with Russell McCutcheon

“Identifying Identity” offers a series of responses from members of Culture on the Edge to the following claim made by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg:

David Kirkpatrick expressing his ideas about how a person only has one identity

Russell McCutcheon:

It’s no accident, of course, that “integrity” has a direct relationship with the Latin adjective “integer,” as in the word we today use to name whole numbers, in distinction from their parts, i.e., fractions. And so it carries with it the connotation of being complete, perfect, even unblemished. But there was a time when this modern sense of the word might have described not Mark Zukerberg’s apparently ideal person—one who is, I guess, consistently, transparently, and rigorously themselves in all occasions—but, instead, one who was able to moderate that apparent self, all depending on the requirements of the setting, something determined by the other social actors involved (e.g., it’s not “a black tie event” until someone shows up in a black tie). I’ve written on this classical sense of pietas before, I know, but it seems relevant once again to point out that wholeness might instead be the social fiction created by the artful management of the innumerable fractions, some of which may have no common denominator; for the quality of consistency or uniformity is surely the last thing one wants—whether in ancient Rome or in Facebook’s headquarters—when moving from interacting with social superiors at work to the barista at the corner coffee shop to friends at the bar or family at home. These once taken for granted distinctions are obviously challenged not just by the eternal present of the virtual world, where we post and tweet and, now, yak anonymously, but, more importantly perhaps, by Facebook’s own quest to monopolize ownership of that world and thus ownership of the means whereby we produce those selves. Continue reading “Identifying Identity with Russell McCutcheon”

Identifying Identity with Vaia Touna

“Identifying Identity” offers a series of responses from members of Culture on the Edge to the following claim made by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg:

David Kirkpatrick expressing his ideas about how a person only has one identity

Vaia Touna:

Zuckerberg’s idea on the one identity and the integrity of maintaining one identity made me think of the times when, talking with friends, one hears: “That’s so you!” or “Come on, you are not that person.” Whether one is or not “that person” friends think, I think that who we are doesn’t derive from the inside of us and neither it is “expressed” monolithically onto our behaviours; instead, as Theodore Schatzki wrote in his 2010 book, The Site of the Social: “Identity is a complicated affair”—an affair that involves both me and the way I perceive who I am and act in different situations, but also by the way my friends perceive with whom they think they are interacting and thus the way they expect “me” to act in different situations. Because sometimes they tell me that I’m not being me. No doubt different friends have different ideas of who we are, even on Facebook, for I have no doubt that my posts, whether messages, pictures, etc., are interpreted like texts by different friends in various ways, creating an idea of me that is in some occasions different from what I think of as myself, and over which I have no real control or at least I have up to a certain extent (for I could have not posted this picture or that update).

The question, then, is: Does this largely uncontrolled interpretive variety minimize my integrity as a person?  And even if it does, then it seems to confirm that my self and its integrity are social and not personal, no?

To read the other posts in this series, search the Real Name tag.