I think you’re right to connect this to fetishization in the marxian sense, although my friend’s tradition is more symbolic interactionismy. The idea of contingent enactment through performance makes the connection. The point is that an idea becomes ‘real’ in treating it as such. In this sense, identity is something like a script. That’s not very human, as both Marx and Goffman might say.

The call (for selves or others) to recover from identity (by changing script) is implicit in a whole range of critical positions. Feminists call on men to recover from normative masculinity, for example, and Beauvoir (like Nietzsche before her) thought women needed to recover from femininity. It gets especially tricky when the identity in question, like being “Black,” in the U.S. context, is being asserted as a proud rejection of ascribed stigma. This can create important leverage to challenge and overthrow oppression. But the identity accordingly contains oppression and conflict as essential components, so ‘recovering’ from it would seem to be critical for the longer-term recovery from oppression; the alternative is to “reinforce an essentialized understanding of themselves as fundamentally disordered.”

And in your own work, I imagine there are a variety of identity-laden histories it would be helpful if suburbanites recovered from.

Cheers!

Here’s a quote from the project description:

“[T]he social- psychological process of identifying with a disorder label tends to, over time, create a self-perpetuating dynamic that increases the salience of the disorder identity by narrowing the complexity of one’s self-concept and discouraging an orientation toward change (i.e., recovery). That is, as individuals construct autobiographical narratives around the disorder label, their understandings of their current experiences, interpretations of the past, and expectations for the future increasingly reinforce an essentialized understanding of themselves as fundamentally disordered.”

Obviously anger is mixed in with this process and must be transformed for the “13th step” to occur.

I’m a professional historian, but I’ve been known to remark that anyone who feels traumatized by a history from before their birth should sue their historian. What hurts and angers us is our knowledge and interpretation of the past in the present, not the past itself. The language of ‘scarring’ is diagnostic of this sort of interpretation, but it is not essential. (Lest I be misunderstood, I am not myself unfamiliar with unpleasant history, but I do find it doesn’t need to haunt me.) Of course, the therapeutics of history look different than ‘the truth’, but what can you do. My touchstone for this, by the way, is Watzlawick, Weakland and Frisch, _Change: Principles of Problem Formation and Problem Resolution_, which is an essentially Wittgensteinian analysis of problems as games and solutions as different games.

Anyway if my friend’s approach seems interesting to you, in print see Howard, J. 2006. “Expecting and Accepting: The Temporal Ambiguity of Recovery Identities.” Social Psychology Quarterly 69(4):307-324.

Off to bed…

I mentioned this to you backchannels, but wanted to put something here about it, because I think it’s interesting. Sara Ahmed talks about anger a bit, and the political significance of happiness (her next book). She marks that often, particularly in relation to multiculturalism in the UK, the anger of immigrants is treated as not a response to the problems of multiculturalism, and its injustices, but as the bar to a happy, multicultural society. This often gets configured as it being the angry immigrant’s responsibility to get over, to leave behind their anger in order that ‘we can move into the future together,’ as these things are so often expressed. But this bizarre sense of futurity that is grounded on and, indeed, constituted by, the refusal to acknowledge suffering… well, it seems to be motivated by a real inability to imagine a real future, complex, variegated and open to (re)negotiation, rather than singular, completed, and unified… (and they say phallocentrism’s dead )

Not to be too self-obsessed, but there’s an interesting point here in relation to suffering, I think, which is that it is seen as bad form, politically, to keep insisting on one’s suffering, particularly, but not only, after the injustice that caused it has been altered. Once the cause of the suffering is alleviated, it seems, the suffering is reinscribed as individual and as no longer a collective or communal responsibility. This fascinates me, because in some sense it assumes that present justice erases past injustice, and that the future is bought off the repudiation of the past, and of, in fact, the flow of that past into the future; that is, of history… Anyway, random thoughts (and excessive italicisation. I think it’s a thesis-related issue… ;-P).