Language Policy and Identity in Mauritania. El Hacen Moulaye Ahmed
Such distinction reveals that the “I” stands for the individual’s own perception of himself or herself, and the “me” reflects his or her interlocutor’s perception about him or her. Elsewhere, Mead added that the “me” embodies the “generalized other,” “the organized community or social group which gives to the individual his [sic] unity of self” (1934, p. 154). As a result of the dialectical relationship between the two aspects of the self, the “I” and “me,” Mead asserted that individuals are characterized by different identities. Every individual has multiple identities since his or her identity is constructed through their relationship with different interlocutors who keep changing. The self is not a stable entity across time, but it changes as the context changes. Indeed, Mead said: “a multiple personality is in a certain sense normal. . . . There is usually an organization of the whole self with reference to the community to which we belong, and the situation in which we find ourselves” (pp. 142–143). Mead’s view about identity construction has similarities with the postmodernist perspectives which are introduced next since both of them perceive that the individual is able to change his or her identity in line with the changing social context. Nevertheless, “Mead’s concept pointed out to the differing variants of a single identity, “parts of the self,” (1934, p. 142) and not of multiple, fragmented identities, postmodernist view.
From symbolic interactionism, we move on to what Mehdi called “cultural constructivism” (2012, p. 39). “A media culture has emerged in which images, sounds, and spectacles help produce the fabric of everyday life, dominating leisure time, shaping political views and social behavior, and providing the materials out of which people forge their very identities” (Kellner, 1995, p. 1). This is the culture of the postmodern, in which one seizes no essence (depth) and is shaped incessantly by the whims fashion. As such, postmodernist called for the death of “metanarrative” and thus meta-identity, of a grand sense of self, for they assert that people have fragmented multiple selves instead of fixed and stable ones. In Kellner’s words, “once upon a time, it was who you were, what you did, what kind of a person you were—your moral, political, and existential choices and commitments, which constituted individual identity. But [sic] today it is how you look, your image, your style, and how you appear that constitutes identity” (Kellner, 1995, p. 259). It is clear that postmodernist theorists believe neither in a true self nor in continuity in or unification of our selves.
Drawing a comparison between modernism and postmodernism, Bauman (2002) remarked that “[i]ndeed, if the modern ‘problem of identity’ was how to construct an identity and keep it solid and stable, the postmodern ‘problem of identity’ is primarily how to avoid fixation and keep the options open.” He added: “in the case of identity. . . . The catchword of modernity was creation; the catchword of postmodernity is recycling” (p. 18). Clearly, the postmodernist identity is flexible and uneven that its meaning in the sense of “sameness” and continuity has to be replaced with “difference.” It is an unattainable phenomenon.
“[I]dentity,” though ostensibly a noun, behaves like a verb, albeit a strange one to be sure: it appears only in the future tense. Though all too often hypostasized as an attribute of a material entity/ identity has the ontological status of a project and a postulate. To say “postulated identity” is to say one word too many, as neither there is nor can there be any other identity but a postulated one. Identity is a critical projection of what is demanded and/or sought upon what is; or, more exactly still, an oblique assertion of the inadequacy or incompleteness of the latter. (Bauman, 2002, p. 19)
Such citation summarizes postmodernist view of identity. Identity, for postmodernist, is fragmented and characterized by loss and uncertainty.
With the construction of identity, the postmodern perspectives are mainly concerned about the “I” and “we,” and “us,” for, as Mehdi observed, “it is the intense winds of fashion and power blowing inside us that shape our identities” (2012, p. 40). Baudrillard expressed this view by saying that there is no “other” out there in the society that can identify us in the process of interaction. Put in his words, “[i]t’s no longer possible either to hope to come to existence in and through the eye of the other for there is no longer a dialectic of identity . . . everyone is . . . called upon to appear, just appear, without worrying too much about being” (Baudrillard cited in Gane, 1993, p. 41). It is clear in the citation that postmodernists distance themselves from the interlocutor when it comes to agency. Thus, as mentioned earlier, they consider social actors as irrelevant to the “moral” and “political growth” of the individual (Mohanty, 2000, p. 32). It is revealed also in the citation that they attain the distinction between “I” and “me.” However, this distinction is not meant to distinguish between two stable blocks, the self and the other, that might construct a stable and unified identity. In contrast, the distinction directs attention to the multiplicity of the self as a result of the plurality of the other, the context. This is because, as argued earlier, the postmodern subject is conceptualized as being fragmented and his or her identity as permanently shifting, as one that is “formed and transformed continuously in relation to the ways we are represented or addressed in the cultural systems which surround us” (Hall, 1992, p. 277). “It is from this position that the postmodernists and poststructuralists say that identity is in reality a myth, illusion, a construct of discourse and power, ‘false consciousness,’ a prototype of society’s reigning cultural scripts” (Mehdi, 2012, p. 40).
It is worth noting that the postmodernist proposition of a fragmented identity does not mean that they do negate the existence of an identity. Instead, they see that the individual holds a privileged identity vis-à-vis the society. However, the construction of this identity is promoted through the experiences or interpretations “thereof, that strengthen people’s individual identities (or their placeholders)” (Simon, 2004, p. 65). However, the postmodern perspective of identity did not remain unchallenged. Postpositivist realist, for example, maintained:
Postmodernist conceptions—which tend to deny that identities either refer to, or are causally influenced by, the social world—have been unable to evaluate the legitimacy or illegitimacy of different identity claims. Because postmodernists are reluctant to admit that identities refer outward (with varying degrees of accuracy) to our shared world, they see all identities as arbitrary and as unconnected to social and economic structures. This renders postmodernists incapable of judging the male patriarch (whose identity claims might include a belief in his own gender superiority) as being more or less credible than, say, a woman (whose identity claims might include a belief in her own disadvantaged position vis-a-vis a “glass ceiling”). My point . . . is not to say which one of these individual’s identity claims is more justified, but simply to suggest that the issue is at least partly an empirical one: the different identity claims cannot be examined, tested, and judged without reference to existing social and economic structures. (Moya, 2000, pp. 10–11)
The postpositivism realists’ discontent with postmodernist view about the discontinuity, uncertainty and fragmentation of identity is clear in the above citation. They claim to be the first organized block that gives an alternative to the essentialist, interactionist, and postmodernist views about identity (Moya, 2000, p. 11).
The postpositivism realist viewed that identity is both real and constructed. They “show . . . how identities can be both real and constructed: how they can be politically and epistemically significant, on the one hand, and variable, nonessential, and radically historical, on the other” (Mohanty cited in Moya, 2000, p. 12). To how question to this view, the leading scholar of postpositivsm realist, Mohanty added “individual knowledge is based on cognitive theoretical grounds on which knowledge is constructed. In effect, people construct their knowledge from the resources they have with group knowledge from personal and social experiences, and interactions based on cognitively mediated processes” (Mohanty cited in Liggett, 2010, p. 93).
Mohanty (2000) further asserted the epistemic privilege of the oppressed is partially influenced and shaped by social location “and that it needs to be understood and revised hermeneutically” (p. 58). It seems that postpositivist realists deny the postmodernist irrelevant social actors and thus the fragmentation of identity. For them, the individual can understand his or her identity only when s/he sets it against