1
Benjamin, during the period in which he was working on
Baroque Drama, jotted down some observations about identity and philosophy.
“The principle of identity is expressed “a is a”, not “a remains a”. It does
not express the equality of two spatially or temporally different stages of a.
But also, it cannot express the identity in general of a spatial or temporal
thing, then every such identification would presuppose identity. The ‘a’ whose
identity is expressed in the relation of identity is thus something beyond
space and time.” (GW VI 28)
Locke tried to make the transition from “is” to “remains”
without an appeal to substance. In doing so, he released the power of
identification – and the enigma of the process of identification. In a sense,
Locke not only provides us with a code to the ideology of early capitalism, but
also, unwittingly, with the dialectic that undermines it.
As Pierre Force has noted, Rousseau, in The Second
Discourse, devises a new use for the term, identity – he makes it into a
process of projection, and thus is the first to use “identification”
in the psychological sense that became part of the ordinary language of the
second half of the twentieth century.
“Even should it be true that commiseration is only a feeling
that puts us in the
position of him who suffers – a feeling that is obscure and
lively in Savage man,
developed but weak in Civilized man – what would this idea
matter to the truth
of what I say, except to give it more force? In fact,
commiseration will be all the
more energetic as the Observing animal identifies himself
more intimately with
the suffering animal. Now it is evident that this
identification must have been
infinitely closer in the state of Nature than in the state
of reasoning.”
The issue of personal identity travels to France by way of
Locke’s translators and readers – such as Condillac. But Rousseau’s idea of an
identifying self is a definite marker, an intersigne on the way to
understanding character under capitalism. That is, to understanding how
character can unfold itself in seemingly disparate semantic segments to occupy
a certain space of symbols and capacities in those societies that we name by
using a temporal adjective as a noun for a condition – modern – as if the modern
had been hived off a world clock and existed in a new framework altogether.
Personal identity is not only consistent with the Lockian principles of
property and self-interest, but also with the kind of identification that, as
Rousseau saw, makes the discourse of self-interest, in a sense, impossible.
Rousseau’s discovery is made in spite of Locke, but we can see it working its
way through that English plain prose as he comes to terms with the seemingly
esoteric problems posed by imagining metempsychosis. Just as
selfishness can become an acid that so dissolves the self that one is left with
an absolute Berkeleyian idealism, personal identity inevitably begins to pose
the problem of the maker of persons, the cause, the projector. When the critics
of modernity, operating under the unconscious conviction that they live in the
modern, face this bifurcation, they tend to make a temporal move – to place
those schemas of identification under the rubric of the pre-modern, as though
the pre-modern was some head on, self evident phase before the modern – rather
than the product of the later. But I propose that viewing the pre-modern as
something generated within modernity, and not as a byproduct but as a shadow
and double, an emergent and undeniable force in the matrix.
2.
"Art of Projection (Projektionskunst) – the exhibition
of a proportional extended visible image, which with the help of a magic
lantern or of recent projection instruments is thrown as the magnification of
certain objects on a white surface" - Meyer’s Conversation Lexicon of 1908
“We get behind the demons, as it were, when we recognize
them as projections of hostile feelings, which the survivors cherish against
the dead.”
“The process completes itself rather through a particular psychic mechanism,
that we are used to calling “projection” in psychoanalysis. The hostility, of
which one knows nothing and wants to know nothing, has been thrown out of the
inner sphere of perceptions [inneren Wharnehmung] into the outer world, by
which one releases its from one’s own person and shoves it off on another
person. Not we, the survivors, are glad that we are free of the dead one; no,
we mourn him, but he has, curiously enough, become an evil demon, to whom our
bad luck is pleasing, and who seeks to bring us into the realm of death. The
survivors must now defend themselves against the evil fiend…” – Freud (my
translation)
Oh the monsters! Under the opera. Under the pornographic novel. Under the
constitutions. And under the monsters, the great grind of life in the old
order, on the great estates – taxes and labor duties without end in Hungary,
Moldavia, Wallachia, Poland… Slavery in Santo Domingo., famine in Bengal…
Freud takes the term from Bleuler, seizes it in a leonine pounce. For here, on
the surface, in the shimmer of everyday life of verbal slips, infantile dirty
jokes, the herky jerky motion of trams, office politics and thick, thick
drapes, here it is that you find the denials, the “I hate to say this”, the “I
don’t mean to criticize” – the I don’t mean in general. The demiurge
unconscious stirs. Is it awake or asleep?
For Freud, the demons are a projection-creation, and projection itself is the
expression of ambivalence. Here, of course, everything seems clear. Locke’s
blank sheet of the mind – that white surface - has now been extruded – a screen
- as part of a technical process in which images are thrown against it and
exaggerated in size. And if we were living in a world that was simply
determined, this would suffice. But we are, always, living in a world that has
been overdetermined.
For in that world (and aren’t we working in Nemesis’ wake?) the living live
with each other in a whisper of suppressed desires, hostilities, purposes, and
purposive inattentions – knowing or suspecting what we claim we never knew or
suspected, each about each. While one aspect of projection involves transmuting
the satisfaction that one has survived the dead and their hostility, another
aspect involves the denial that the formerly living loved one had definite
moments of hostility, or definite moments of the wrong kind of love. Those evil
eye fugues.
And what do we know about other people anyway? Freud notes that projection, in
the narrow psychoanalytic sense, is part of a greater system of projection.
“The Projection of unconscious hostility by the tabu of the dead on the demons
is only a single example out of a series of processes, to which must be
attributed the greatest influence on the shaping of primitive spiritual life.
In the above mentioned cases, projection serves to close a conflict of
feelings; it finds a natural application in a number of psychological
situations that lead to neurosis. But projection is not created as an
instrument of defence, it also comes into play, where there is no conflict. The
projection of inner perceptions (Wahrnehmungen) to the outside is a primitive
mechanism that, for instance, also underlies our sense perceptions – and that
thus, in the normal course of things, has the greates part in the shaping of
our outer world. Under not yet satisfactorily fixed conditions, our inner
perceptions of feeling and thought processes become sense perceptions projected
outside, applied to the shaping of the outer world, while supposedly remaining
in the inner world. This may hang together, genetically, with the fact that the
function of attention originally was not turned to the inner world, but instead
to the stream of stimuli from the outer world, and of endopsychic processes
received only reports about the developments of pleasure and pain. Only with
the development (Ausbildung) of an abstract thought language, through the tying
together of the sense remnants of word ideas with inner processes, did these
themselves become perceptible.”
The trope of the abstract being taken from, projecting, the material – that
place where we begin the white mythology – is transformed, here, into a
relation of the outer and the inner. Although the inner, Freud carefully notes,
isn’t some counterprojection of the outer. If it becomes perceptible, it was
operating before the moment of perceptibility.
3.
I was first made aware of my identity as a cis white man at
some point in my fifties. Cis-, that transforming prefix, was, until this point,
not something I had been called, or had called another.
The cis identity is a curious one. It is late to the
identity table – identity by assignment of sex at birth was never a part of the
identikit when I was born in 1957. And yet, isn’t the cis identity – the white
male cis identity – the blank against which all identities define themselves in
the present moment? The white male cis
has played a fundamental historical role: enslaver, colonizer, oppressor,
capitalist roader. You don’t have to look back too far – in fact, you don’t
have to look back at all. The men’s room that runs the U.S. at the moment, in
all its shitty ignobility, is a caricature of the type.
And so: is this my identity? Or is this projection?
When I look at this as the identity that I can’t escape –
when I look at it historically, not existentially – I see a type that, at one time, was defined
by two utopias – the one, an international of labor solidarity, and the other,
an avant garde that dreamed of abolishing the dominant identities and identity
itself, using as its tools critique and transgression. Those utopias are in bad
shape today – the former the victim of neoliberalism and the latter ossified,
by academia’s absorption of the avant-garde, into routines of griping.
Yet I don’t feel, somehow, existentially burdened by all
this. I’m still the happy go lucky, Casper-the-ghost colored graphomaniac
buzzing my way deathward and singing a happy song.
Identity? Projection? Identity as projection, projection
from an identity, exteriority as a plot of interiority: anxieties that dog us
on the path to the good, the true, and the beautiful. But I’m still of the opinion
that this is the Dao, the path of all cis- trans- and bird and beast and
flower, in spite of present circs.
