of identities that we encounter and that we allow inside keep the secret alive and growing, it will allow us to grow too, within the social world. To arrive at this conclusion, I look at a few theoretical approaches in Chapter Six, and then analyze Rudolfo Anaya’s Tortuga and Toni Morrison’s Beloved to demonstrate how identity can be understood as an open, not even necessary concept, once the individual (Anaya’s sick boy nicknamed Tortuga and Morrison’s Sethe) overcomes stagnation and allows others to contribute to his or her becoming.
CHAPTER TWO
A CLOSER LOOK AT THE THREE MODES OF IDENTITY AND FALLENNESS
Before giving some detail in relation to the specifics of each “fall” or understanding of identity and before showing how the falls revolve around the same flaw in conceiving this identity, I have to explain in more depth why identity is perceived as fallen. For purposes of deconstructing the concept of identity, I define it as that which functions within language to create the illusion that individuals can reach the wholeness that they have lost. This is, as many will recognize, a very basic concept in Lacan’s psychoanalysis; I will offer a refresher for Lacan’s theory, to help me explain why subjects of language identify with signifiers that, they believe, confer identity to them.
Identity is a territory to be defended. Any territory becomes a signifier and can therefore be appropriated toward identity. Along with the fact that identity is never reached in actuality, identity’s fallenness accounts for the violence of its pursuit. To return to the notion of a territory to be defended, humans have long exceeded the spatial territory as what they need to defend and what gives them security.
As “owning” a territory equals in many ways having an identity, the defense of this territory (which can be land, or a more abstract object) goes beyond purposes of survival. The origins of the desire to defend the territory are not as important as the degree of abstraction exceeding the biological necessities prompting its defense. If, initially, social identity may have been given by the common belonging to a piece of land and carrying out basic activities in a communal setting, the territory on which the community functions is perceived as property and as the place of social integration only when the absence of this territory becomes a possibility or is actualized, by threats from another tribe, another nation, another religion, and so on. As with any concept formation (to follow structuralist and poststructuralist explanations of meaning emerging from opposition or absence), the meaning of territory and the identification with it derive from conceiving of not being in its possession, or not belonging to it. Migration and conquest are two of the most important factors in making territory abstract and creating the grounds for the formation of the concept of identity as internalized territory.
Human communities have evolved in such a way that there is no community that has remained in possession (or in sole possession) of the territory that it remembers as its cradle. It is enough to recall the controversy surrounding the term “African American,” which identifies a community with a concrete territory that they do not physically belong to (Africa). Every community also functions by remembering, which makes the concept of identity strictly related to what the community remembers as having lost. The loss is either total, as in the case of entire populations driven away from their land (Jewish people, Native Americans, African slaves), or partial, as in the case of being conquered and occupied by a different community and assimilated into it (Roman infiltrations into other cultures, for instance); also a partial loss is the case of any mixing of nations, religions, or other kinds of communities in one territory due to migration, immigration, or other forms of cultural interaction. This conception of losing a territory to somebody else only matters, in terms of identity, if it is remembered—either through story, or through recorded history.
Given the plasticity of the world, territory has lost its physical importance not only in our age of mass communication and mass transportation, but also from the very beginning of this remembering. From Rousseau’s “liberty” to Heidegger’s “dwelling” in the home of truth (within language),1 the notion of territory has reached complex levels of abstraction. It may be that what still connects territory in its initial understanding (as land) to abstract territoriality is the tendency of communities once occupying the same territory to remain somewhat connected to each other and somewhat attached to their initial perception of themselves as identical to each other. Anything they carried with them in the initial loss, or fall from territory, or anything that remains theirs after being invaded, or after accepting others among them, will become a stake in preserving identity.
One might think of practices that become cultural, such as a common way to make pottery, or the weapons certain peoples use in killing their enemies; if these are recorded in any way, they are part of the identity of that community and become their cultural baggage. As history advances, these tokens of identity become even more abstract, and turn into ideas and ideologies. The gods embraced by the members of a community, the common fears, their way to perceive food, evil, love, hate, family, and any other concepts, also become tokens of identity. In linguistic terms, signifiers “represent” identity: for instance, the identity of citizens of the United States is represented through the flag, in its number of stars. Yet “real” America is not somewhere in the flag, since an actual identity behind the signifier is not an actual “presence,” as Derrida would say.
The struggle to purify the identity of a community is always doomed to failure: nobody will eliminate all foreigners from a country, or all pagans from a nation, or retrieve a land that waits for them empty. Faced with such circumstances, communities in this day and age have to decide what it is that can still be brought back from what is supposed to have been lost. According to this logic, if not the land, at least freedom could be brought back, the freedom associated with not having somebody else dictate the social order of that community (as in the case of diverse America still finding unity in the concept of freedom: the freedom to shop, the freedom to be fashionable, the freedom to react to threats, or any other freedom). If not complete unity against foreign elements, these communities will seek at least unity around a God, a social organization, or the history that unifies them.
In so many examples of conflicts between communities whose territories have been disputed throughout the centuries (such as Israel vs. Palestine, Pakistan vs. India, Hungary vs. Romania), these communities’ religions, degree of civilization, or other abstract territories are used as reasons to continue to identify with the disputed physical territory. When they have to settle for a smaller piece of land, they demand more “rights” to an abstract territory (their language to be recognized as official, their religion to be practiced freely). The violence of defending a territory can be justified by anything that is included in the process of identity production.
Even self-identity is a territory to defend, because the individual who creates meaning through “authentic” signifiers will still defend those signifiers as if they were his/her property, such as the “original” work of an artist. Meaninglessness or floating signifiers are also potential property or territory for those who circulate them in a decentralized market. As long as something “sells,” even an idea, it is a territory and it can be defended because it can be part of the process of identification. Even though postmodern identity appears as the attempt to divorce identity from territory, given that territory is already language, identity cannot become any less a stake in language, so that the same set of problems is maintained.
The starting assumption for the three modes of identity is that there is no subject outside of the system of language that defines territoriality, since it is the remainder of the initially lost reality. There is no circumstance in which subject, language, and meaning can be taken apart or define themselves in any way divorced from each other. The instability of one triggers the questioning of the others in such a way that, if there is no social space in which the subject searches for meaning, whether by identification or rejection, there is also no subject and no meaning because there is no framework in which to engage in identity definition. If
