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Versions of this paper have been presented to to ESRC Seminar Series ‘Ethnicity, Diaspora and the City of the Third Age’, University of Leicester, 1st December, 2000; Understanding the Social World (2), University of Huddersfield, 5th September 2000 ; Peterhouse Theory Group, University of Cambridge, 14th November 2000.
Shifting identifications in a British multi-ethnic inner city area, the 1970s to the 1990s – a sociological analysis
Dr Max Farrar
School of Cultural Studies
Leeds Metropolitan University
Introduction
The aim of this paper is to analyse and explain the marked shifts in constructions of identity among ethnic groups of African descent, and of Indian sub-continental descent in a British inner-city over the past twenty or thirty years. The paper argues that three major changes have taken place during this period. Firstly, where a significant proportion of the local population constructed their identities around a commitment to radical politics in the early 1970s, and to reformist politics in the 1980s, by the late 1980s the dominant orientation was towards professional and entrepreneurial identifications. Secondly, during the same period, there was an increase in the numbers of mainly young people of whom sociologists might speak of as adopting criminal identifications. The actual proportion of these people in the local population is tiny, less than 1%, but the effects of their activity have been extremely significant. Thirdly, there has been an uneven and discontinuous move towards the construction, particularly among those of Asian descent, of particularised ethnic identities, while among others, most noticeably those who adopt the identity ‘black British’, we find some evidence of what have been called hybrid identities.
A word or two is required about the theory and method employed in this research. This paper arises from my recently completed doctoral thesis titled ‘Constructing and de-constructing ‘community’. A case study of a multi-cultural inner city area: Chapeltown, Leeds, 1972-1997’ (see Farrar, 2000 for a longer version of the thesis). The association between the thesis title and the title of this paper is deliberate; it signifies the position I occupy within sociological theory, and its synergies with some of the theories advanced by theorists and researchers in social psychology, ‘race’ and gender. In the thesis I argue that ‘community’ is a social imaginary in the sense outlined by Cornelius Castoriadis. Castoriadis defines the social imaginary as:
the unceasing and essentially undetermined (social-historical and psychical) creation of figures/forms/images, on the basis of which alone there can ever be a question of ‘something’. What we call ‘reality’ and ‘rationality’ are its works (Castoriadis 1997 p. 3).
I want to suggest that ‘identity’ might also be profitably treated as a social imaginary in Castoriadis’ sense, with its emphasis both on the social and psychological construction of identity, and on the active making of real life as a product of the human imagination. This view, which I will attempt to connect with the theory of the self advanced by George Herbert Mead and the concept of ‘identification’ as promoted by Stuart Hall, will help us bridge the yawning divide between the essentialist and the anti-essentialist arguments about ethnic identity.
The research method adopted here has been somewhat eclectic. In the thesis, historical evidence, economic analyses, census data and newspaper reports are used, but the primary method has been participant observation. It is this material, gathered by interviews, by attending public events, by daily, intimate contact with people of all ages, ethnicities and class positions continuously over the past 28 years, which provides the basis for my analysis of shifting identities. Whereas some participant observers make rather confused claims to objectivity, I offer no concessions whatsoever to positivism. On the contrary, this work rests on an epistemology derived from Weber’s argument that there can be no ‘“presuppositionless” copy of “objective” facts’ (Weber 1949 p. 92) and Schutz’s view that humans’ ‘common sense’ ideas are the template upon which reality has inevitably been pre-interpreted (Schutz 1954 p. 242). Researchers, contrary to popular belief, are also human, operating with the peculiar forms of common sense that have been sanctified by the particular orthodoxies of our academic disciplines. My ‘data’, then, is laden with the values I have developed in my political life and their allied sociological concepts and theories. I do not, however, accept that this research is purely subjectivist, just one account to be placed alongside any others that might be generated by application of alternative values and concepts. It can be tested on the grounds of what Weber called ‘causal adequacy’¾does it make sense/ is it plausible, and does it entail some generalisations or predictions which may or may not be born out in the passage of time (Weber 1964 pp. 97-9)? Thus I broadly align myself with the epistemology that Martyn Hammersley (1992) calls ‘subtle realism’,
Self, identity and identification
Now I need to clarify the approach I take to the concepts of self, identity and identification. I follow George Herbert Mead (1934) in stressing that the self is actively constructed. In sociology there has been a clear move away from the concept of ‘self’ to one of ‘identity’. Locating himself in the school of thought established by Mead, Richard Jenkins defines identity as:
the systematic establishment and signification, between individuals, between collectivities, and between individuals and collectivities, of relationships of similarity and difference . . . Social identity is no more essential than meaning; it too is the product of agreement and disagreement, it too is negotiable (Jenkins 1996 4-5).
He argues that ‘[i]dentity can in fact only be understood as process. As “being” or “becoming”’ (ibid. p. 4), a process of personal and social change. This somewhat existentialist approach reminds us of how closely linked are the concepts of self and identity and it immediately provokes the question of whether or not we should conceptualise a particular ‘state of being’ as fundamental, or essential. Because of his stress on active inter-personal construction of self and change over time, it has been argued that Mead’s work contains an early statement of what is now characterised as an anti-essentialist sociology of self and identity (Dunn 1997). Deploying the terms used above, the anti-essentialist version of Mead’s work would emphasise the ‘becoming-ness’ of identity.
When we turn to an explicit statement of an ‘anti-essentialist theoretical framework’ of identity we hear that identity is ‘an ensemble of “subject positions” . . . constructed by a diversity of discourses’, where ‘the subject’ is considered to be ‘multiple and contradictory . . . and precarious’ (Mouffe 1995 pp. 33 - 4). In this type of analysis, based on the celebrated anti-humanism of the structuralists and post-structuralists, a concept such as ‘the self’ is banished in case it is used as a back door through which an essentialist notion of the human being might re-enter social theory. The argument provoked by this school of thought is extremely valuable in puncturing the conservative implications of much of the functionalist approach to self and identity (usually transmitted via role theory), and in shaking up those versions of Marxism and Nationalism which rest on unwarranted assumptions about the authenticity and integrity of those individuals or groups who claim to occupy vanguard positions within the working class, ‘race’ or nation. But Mouffe’s statement conjures up a picture of formless agents with no possibility of constructing the self on more than the most short-term basis. Similarly, Judith Butler’s assertion that identity is a mere performance, a fabrication of discourse, dispenses with human agency altogether (Dunn 1997). So there are two objections to this approach, one empirical and one political. I challenge anyone to locate actual human beings, apart from those with definable mental illnesses or serious neuroses, whose everyday lives indicate that their identities are ‘multiple and contradictory and precarious’. Secondly, to dispense with the theoretical possibility of a more-or-less unified self is to dispense with the political possibility of concerted action for progressive social transformation at the level of the individual or the collective.
A more subtle theory of identity is required. It would start, along with Mouffe et al., with the role of diverse discourses in the process of identity construction. Stuart Hall made an early intervention in this discussion in his 1989 essay ‘New Ethnicities’. Hall carefully qualified his statement that ‘regimes of representation in a culture do play a constitutive, and not merely a reflexive, after-the-event, role’ in the formation of subjectivity, identity and politics. He wrote:
My own view is that events, relations, structures do have conditions of existence and real effects, outside the sphere of the discursive; but that it is only within the discursive, and subject to its specific conditions, limits and modalities, do they have or can they be constructed within meaning (Hall (1989 p. 443).
Hall has advocated a ‘strategic and positional’ concept of identity’, actually preferring the concept of ‘identification’. The latter, acknowledging its origins in Freud, allows questions of agency and politics to reappear in the sociology of identity, though Hall is quick to assert that he has no intention of reverting to a notion of agency which implies a ‘centred author of social practice’ (Hall 1996, p. 2). Rejecting the essentialising notion of an inner ‘true self’, Hall (like Jenkins) stresses that identity is ‘constructed through, not outside, difference . . . and is constantly destabilised by what it leaves out’ (ibid. pp. 4-5). He proposes a complex definition of identity which may be designed to encompass both discursive impositions of identity and the possibility of independently formed subjectivity:
I use ‘identity’ to refer to the meeting point, the point of suture, between on the one hand the discourses and practices which attempt to ‘interpellate’, speak to us or hail us into place as the social subjects of particular discourses, and on the other hand, the processes which produce subjectivities, which construct us as subjects which can be ‘spoken’ (Hall 1996 pp. 5 - 6).
Hall argues that this ‘suturing has to be thought of as an articulation, rather than as a one-sided process, and that in turn places identification, if not identities, firmly on the theoretical agenda’ (ibid. p. 6). Hall tantalises us here, rather than explains, how these ‘processes which produce subjectivities’ might be theorised, but this approach might help us get beyond ‘deafening row over “essentialism” versus “anti-essentialism”’ (Back 1996 p. 7).
Paul Gilroy has offered a bridge between the warring positions. The opposition between the rigid positions of the 'unashamed essentialists' and the theoretical anti-essentialists has become, he argues, 'an obstacle to critical theorising' (Gilroy 1993 p. 101). He suggests that, instead, we should see the reproduction of cultural traditions not as 'the unproblematic transmission of a fixed essence' but as a response to the 'destabilising flux of the modern world' (p101). He opposes the 'radical constructionist' view that black identity is 'vague and utterly contingent . . . to be reinvented at will' It is 'lived as a coherent (if not always stable) experiential sense of self', the outcome of complex social practices (ibid. p. 102). Yet he refuses to adopt the ‘lazy alternative’ of ‘strategic essentialism’. Attempting to grasp the complexity of identities which have continuity but which are simultaneously developing and transforming he has coined the term ‘the changing same’ (Gilroy 1997 p. 335).
To make further progress, several steps are required. First, we acknowledge that human identity is not simply determined through discourse, but that there is some process by which each person has some autonomy in producing his or her self in interaction with the discourses to which he or she is subjected. This assertion rests on the postulate that humans are inherently creative, that their inherent sociality includes an in-built capacity to engage imaginatively and originally with their social and psychological environment. Such an assumption clearly embraces a limited form of essentialism. But, second, we should accept that the construction of the self is a process of becoming which proceeds by a series of identifications, some of which run concurrently, some of which are discarded, some of which are constructed anew at different stages of one’s biography. Third, we note that some of these identifications take on foundational characteristics, when people speak of their identities as grounded, or fixed. While some might argue that these claims to a fixed identity are based on shallow theoretical foundations, it is observable that many people behave as though their identities are fixed, and these identities often seem to stay in place for long periods of time. It is equally often observed, however, that once seemingly fixed identities suddenly, or slowly, collapse, and a new process of identity-construction is undertaken. At the level of individual psychology there must be some sense of stability of the self for the human to participate effectively in society, since effective participation requires relatively coherent and predictable action. Following Giddens’ (1991) discussion of ontological security, it is arguable that a reasonably coherent sense of self is a prerequisite for the continuities in social interaction that enable social life to attain some level of orderliness. Such statements are fraught with danger, since they conjure up monolithic (and usually politically conservative) notions of ‘proper’ ontological security and ‘proper’ social order. I return to this problem below, in the discussion of criminal activity in Chapeltown. At this point, I merely want to stress that, in the theory suggested here, identity is not theorised as essential in itself, but nor is it understood as entirely contingent, perpetually in flux. What is required is a way of thinking about the self, and therefore about identity, which allows for both stability (as stressed by the essentialists) and change (as stressed by the anti-essentialists).
Castoriadis’ concept of the social imaginary, and the theory he advances in The Imaginary Institution of Society, provides the opportunity to reformulate the notion of identity in a way which takes us beyond the essentialist/anti-essentialist debate. If we accept that all human action rests on the formulation of social imaginaries, it would follow that each of us will compose a personal imaginary ¾which, according to one’s point in history and theory, might be named a soul, a self, a psyche or an identity¾in order to place ourselves in the world on a solid enough footing to enable effective action. Identity is then treated as a form, or even as a self-representation, whose shape, because it is an imaginary, may be changed as time passes, as the contextual conditions (psychological, sociological, economic, political and so on) change. To be sure, Castoriadis asserts that there is ‘at all stages of psychical life, [a] tendency towards unification, the immediate or mediate reign of the pleasure principle, the magical omnipotence of thought, the requirement for meaning’ (1997 p. 302). But this does not imply that unification is ever complete. As Hall argued, the ‘centred author’ is a myth, but it is a myth which many people think is a reality, or, if they know it to be unachievable, it still remains a longed-for state which motivates some of their action.