Dashtipour, P. (2009) ‘Contested Identities: Using Lacanian Psychoanalysis to Explore and Develop Social Identity Theory’, Annual Review of Critical Psychology, 7,

pp. 320-337

CONTESTED IDENTITIES: USING LACANIAN PSYCHOANALYSIS TO EXPLORE AND DEVELOP SOCIAL IDENTITY THEORY

Parisa Dashtipour

‘Social creativity’ in social identity theory

Social identity theory is broadly used as an explanatory tool across the discipline of social psychology (Brown, 2000) and it is probably the only model in the field which provides a rather meticulous illustration of ‘inferior’/devalued identities[1]. Rather than discussing recent developments of SIT or dwelling upon critiques against it, the aim of this paper is limited to provide a short review of the ‘social creativity’ notion and point to how Lacanian psychoanalysis might help to elaborate on some of its assumptions.

The idea in SIT is that people’s knowledge of their in-group and out-group and the way these are evaluated has an effect on self-image and action and that people have a motivation to “seek a positive social identity” (Turner et al. 1987: 30). A negative or threatened social identity will induce the adoption of various resistance strategies by the group (Turner and Brown, 1978; Tajfel and Turner, 1986). One of these strategies is ‘social creativity’[2]. This strategy is assumed to be adopted when group boundaries are not perceived to be permeable, and when the social power structure is believed to be legitimate. It involves an attempt to change the content of the negative social identity. For example, the group can introduce new dimensions through which they can compare themselves against other groups in more positive terms. They can also change the value of those aspects which are previously considered to be inferior and re-evaluate/reverse them. For example the ‘black is beautiful’ movement has attempted to do just that. In other words, this strategy is about re-assessing the content of the negative social category.

Reicher (2004) points out that contextual constraints determine whether the subordinate group will be able to engage in these strategies. These constraints are for example the actions of dominant group members and the existence of ‘cognitive alternatives’ to the existing power structure. Perhaps implicitly referring to the postmodern critiques of SIT (e.g. Billig, 1985, 2002; Wetherell, 1996), Reicher (2004) in his defence of the theory, claims that the social identity tradition is in essence one of social change and resistance. He claims that “flexibility is a function of varying social categories and is achieved through differing category constructions” (p. 936). Nevertheless, it has been acknowledged that those groups which are subordinated or negatively evaluated do not always demonstrate in-group favouritism and can in fact show preference for the out-group and discriminate against their own group, which often leads to devaluation and denigration of self and one’s group (e.g. Moscovici and Paicheler, 1978; Tajfel, 1981). Despite this acknowledgement, Reicher (2004) claims that minority members’ group actions are “aimed at challenging and dismantling current structures of inequality rather than creating and defending them” (p. 932).

There is well known evidence that shows how members of subordinated groups can in fact contribute to the inequality of their own treatment and status (see Clark and Clark, 1939; Bulhan, 1985; Marriott, 1998). This paper will argue that traditionally negative or stigmatized identities are sometimes identified with or desired, rather than done away with by members of devalued groups. Further, it is important to point out that re-evaluation of identity and the introduction of new and positive dimensions do not occur isolated from the society at large. Tajfel (1981) recognised that getting the characteristics of the group accepted by the wider society is indeed a problem and a struggle:

The battle for legitimacy […] is a battle for the acceptance by others of new forms of intergroup comparison. As long as these are not consensually accepted, the new characteristics (or the re-evaluation of the old ones) cannot be fully adequate in their function of building a new social identity (ibid: 297).

It will be argued here that there needs to be a dialogical understanding of inter-group relations and the ‘social creativity’ idea should be understood in relation to wider cultural ideologies and values which limit the contents used in the re-appraisal of the social identity in question.

Further, SIT mentions motivation for positive distinctiveness, a crucial dimension of identity, but it is also this dimension which has led to contradictory criticisms. Some social constructionist and postmodern approaches imply that this element of the theory is partly why it is an individualistic perspective (e.g. Wetherell, 1996). Others such as Billig (2002) suggest that the aspect of motivation is in fact not theorised enough in SIT. Motivation might be explained in individualistic or mechanistic terms, but it is problematic to assume that it is not important in processes of identification and categorisation. The inadequate theory of motivation in SIT might be due to the fact that the affective component of social identity is not pondered upon (Hogg and McGarty, 1990; Brown, 2000) and due to the theory’s excessive focus on cognition. It appears that a proper focus on motivational aspects of identities would not fit into the SIT tradition – a tradition which has the aims to criticise the ‘blood and guts’ model of prejudice. It is also a tradition which has the goal to exclude psychoanalysis – a perspective which views human behaviour and mind as contradictory and chaotic - and construct a rational model of the individual-society relation (Brown and Lunt, 2002).

From the above short overview, we can pose some questions which would appear to be inadequately answered by SIT. What do people use or identify with when they re-evaluate their group characteristics? What puts limits to the contents available for use when re-assessing the social category? Why do some group characteristics hold more than others? Why is a stigmatized/’inferior’ identity sometimes actively desired, rather than contested? It will be argued below that these questions can to some extent be resolved with recourse to psychoanalysis.

Lacanian psychoanalysis

Although some writers have attempted to include psychoanalysis in social psychological research (see Hollway and Jefferson, 2001; Frosh et al., 2003; Gough; 2004), Lacanian psychoanalysis has largely been neglected. Only a small minority have fruitfully drawn upon Lacan to show how it can help to expand upon social psychological perspectives (see Hook, 2005, 2006, 2008; Parker 1997, 2005, see also Parker, 2000, 2001; Stavrakakis, 2008). It is the argument of this paper that Lacanian theory can add to social psychological theories of contested identities.

Lacanian psychoanalysis views motivation as a fundamental aspect of human life, but here the more expansive term desire is used. We may understand SIT’s claim that people have a basic motivation to enhance self-esteem, as being an implicit acknowledgement of one of the basic facets of what makes us human: our desire to be recognised by an Other. But what radically differentiates SIT from Lacanian psychoanalysis is that the latter perceives identity as largely produced in imaginary and symbolic processes, that is, as a result of mirror-stage dialectics whereby an ego is substantiated by the taking in of ‘outside’ images, and the symbolic devices of discourse and language that pre-exist the subject, rather than being a matter of cognition. Thus, it is not about straightforward self-categorisation, but about how one has been defined withinthe socio-symbolic field of the Other, and how one attempts to, consciously and unconsciously, make sense of the co-ordinates within which one has been placed. The subject is not defined once and for all, he or she will never be complete, and will always remain as a lacking subject - lack here connoting that incompletion, desire and the inadequacy of full identificatory meaning are all hallmarks of the modern subject. Thus, a ‘positive self-esteem’ will never be once and for all achieved. Moreover, in Lacan, identity processes are always viewed in relation to someone else, it is always about identification with something or someone else, with images, or like-others, located in particular socio-symbolic co-ordinates. One of the original contributions of Lacan is his three levels or orders of subjectivity (or inter-subjectivity): the imaginary, the symbolic and the Real. These can in fact be fruitfully used asthree important dimensions of identification which, in very schematic terms we might link to the domains of a) cognition, meaning and (mis)recognition focused on substantiating an ego (imaginary), b) the operations of discourse, language and socially-codified laws and traditions (symbolic) and c) the extra-discursive realm which includes those intense libidinal affects (often understood in the terms of ‘jouissance’ or ‘enjoyment’) that escape the domestication of language (Real).

The imaginary, the symbolic and the big Other

The content of identities/social categories could not be re-evaluated without the use of images. The act of reversing or changing the content of social categories involves the work of visual schematisation - of representation. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the image which is sustained by the symbolic is the basis of identity in as much as it provides an external schematization of bodily/psychical self that affords the subject greater unity and cohesion.

Hence, in Lacan’s earliest theorization of the constitution of subjectivity, the subject takes on an external image, be it a reflected image of their own body, or the images/gestalts of like others in their immediate environment, the imaginary other. He is therefore alienatedby the taking on of animage which comes from the outside. As Lacan states: the subject “perceives the unity of this specific image from the outside, and in an anticipated manner” (Lacan, 1988: 166). Hence, he is not at the centre of thinking and action, although the effect is the illusion that he is. Continuous identifications with certain representations or images is an attempt to cover over a constitutive lack in the subject (Glynos and Stavrakakis, 2008) although this is never achieved: “The very image of man brings in here a mediation which is always imaginary, always problematic, and which is therefore never completely fulfilled” (Lacan, 1988: 166). Imaginary identification is identification with the lovable image (the ideal-ego), and it hence entails a narcissistic component. It is the image which appears likeable to us and signifies who we want to be. But importantly, this narcissistically-affirming image can function as a rival in those moments when it ceases to affirm and instead appears to challenge the subject’s ego. A subordinated group when engaging in ‘social creativity’ strategies is in partidentifying with an imaginary image, which provides esteem and cohesion for the group and a fantasy of fullness and eminence. The dependence on the symbolic is here concealed (Žižek, 1989).

Symbolic identification is with the position from which we are being seen, and from which we appear lovable or desired (the ego-ideal). This is “the subject’s identification with the Other’s ideal” (Fink, 2004: 117). We might approach the Other as Lacan’s means of insisting on the omnipresence of social mediation, as the ever-varying network of trans-subjective social structures and values underlying a given society. The Other can hence be viewed as the Other of language, of certain ideals, norms and ideology of a particular society or community and as a position, a presumed or posited point (or perspective) of authority, knowledge, validation. Therefore, it is this Other which constrains the option of images available in the process of re-evaluation of social categories. Not any set of attributes/images can function as the basis of an idealizing image (ideal-ego).We can say that it is the big Other which judges if a social identity or image is positive or negative, that it is the big Other which puts limits to who one can be (see Glynos, 2001; Daly, 1999, for a discussion of how ideology always comes with a dimension of fantasy which disavows alternative ways of seeing the world and a jouissance which ‘fixes’ subjects).

In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the ego-ideal is what he or she would need to be in order to be seen as lovable in the gaze of the Other, it is the standard, the bench-mark, derived from what the Other is thought to favour, against which the subject judges themselves and their image (ideal ego). Ideal-ego images are thus circumscribed by the degree to which they fall within the range of our parental or societal ego-ideals, which, in turn are put in play by the supposition of an Other.

Imaginary and symbolic identifications are thus importantly related. “Imaginary identification is always identification on behalf of a certain gaze in the Other [....] which gaze is considered when the subject identifies himself with a certain image?” (Žižek, 1989: 103). In symbolic identification it is not a matter of how we see ourselves in images, but “how we are seen by them” (Butler, 2005:53). We see ourselves through the way in which we fantasise that an Other is seeing us. When one speaks one imagines that one is being listened to by some Other.

The libidinal element of images

The symbolic and the imaginary are permeated by the Real, that is, the domain of the extra-discursive, which Lacan variously understands as the brute materiality of bodily or traumatic experience beyond the symbolic. Lacan (1988) states that the Real is

something which always lies on the edge of our conceptual elaboration, which we are always thinking about, which we sometimes speak of, and which, strictly speaking, we can’t grasp, and which is nonetheless there (p. 96).

This is the terrain of those extreme affects of pleasure-pain (or jouissance) that simultaneously thrill and pain the subject. Identities would not be so ‘passionately attached’ to subjects if they did not entail jouissance, that subliminal, libidinal residue of symbolic activitywhich attaches the subject to certain social identities. Jouissance exists in fantasy, in the “by-product of symbolisation” (Fink, 2003: 254). So there is a paradox here. Jouissance is in the domain of the Real, but it also penetrates and disrupts the symbolic. We may understand jouissance – transgressive libidinal enjoyment - as Lacan’s theorization of affect, his means of understanding those ‘subterranean’ passionate ties or bonds that underwrite moreovertly symbolic and rational discursive fidelities of group membership. Moreover, it is “a kind of fixity- something that holds the subject together and that provides it with a place” (Dean, 2006a: 17). Indeed, viewed this way, jouissanceputs limits on movement and change. Subjects identify with social groups and ideologies because of promises of jouissance. Members of a social group obtain a ‘taste’ of jouissance in bonding with one another, in bonding with the image of ‘us’. It is the reach for jouissance which makes us identify with political projects, social roles or consumer choices (Glynos and Stavrakakis, 2008) and which makes some group-images more desirable or fixed and resistant to change than others. For example, Stavrakakis (2007) claims that the reason why there is a failure to create a European hegemonic identity is because the project has failed to evokethe necessary passion orjouissance- the kind of libidinal bond that exists in other forms of national identity.One might point to the ardour present in certain national practices (celebrated sporting victories) or the jouissance involved in the problematisation of the food, the habits, the traditions of others (the way they speak, the oddity of their food, their strange work habits). The conclusions we can draw from this is that change in identities is less about re-evaluation of social categories/groups at a cognitive level than about a change in the jouissance attached to those categories. Change means a change in relation to our jouissance. It means a change in or the removal of the libidinal investments in images/representations. The problem which needs to be tackled is how to overcome the fantasies which promise jouissance (Dean, 2006b).

I will now suggest how we may implement the above arguments in research, by presenting a portion of a case study about a Swedish anti-racist magazine called Gringo.

Gringo[3]

As a response to the stigmatised image of ‘immigrants’ in the media, Gringo magazine was established as a supplement in the Swedish Metro, and published between 2004 and 2007. As the creator and chief editor, Zanyar Adami, writes in the first edition of the magazine, the aim of Gringo is to resist the biased and distorted image in the media of the residents in the ‘suburbs’- the areas in which inhabit a large number of people with immigration background in Sweden. The content of the magazine is usually around problems of integration, racism, multiculture, ethnicity and identity. However, it is not clear whether the aim of Gringo is social change or making a business product or both, and the magazine should be analysed in the context of “global commodification of urban and street culture” (Christensen, 2008: 238).

During its first few years, Gringo was both highly popular and unpopular and sparked an intense debate in the public sphere in Sweden because, among other things, of it’s sarcastic humour and its vulgar use of ‘suburb- language’- the dialects which are spoken by young people in these areas. According to the magazine’s own estimates, because it was a supplement in Metro, its number of readers was very high[4]and said to consist of young urban people, half of whom had an immigration background and the other half a ‘Swedish’ background. Moreover, Zanyar Adami was given a journalism prize in 2005 for creating Gringo. In 2007 Gringo’s publishing company, Latifeh AB, went bankrupt because of liquidity problems[5]. In 2008, the magazine was re-launched outside the Metro as a free magazine with a new chief editor.

The first version of Gringo which was published between 2004 and 2007 is used in the present research as a case study. The analysis has been multilayered, including coding and thematic analysis of the text as a whole which produced specific themes and from those themes, specific articles were picked out for an in-depth discourse analysis. This study is following the kind of research which has recognised the value of psychoanalytic tools in the understanding of media representations. In contrast to social psychology, psychoanalytic tools have been widely used within film studies (e.g. Cowie, 1997) and cultural studies (e.g. Hall, 1997). These have investigated identifications, fantasies, and desires in cinema representations or other media images and text. Further, Gilroy’s (2004) analysis of comedy in the British media draws on psychoanalytic notions to investigate how humour reveals psychic anxieties against cultural others. Moreover, Williamsson (1978) drawing from Freudian dream theory, studied the work of advertisements and showed the importance of the analysis of the form of ads and how the latter rely heavily on signifiers to evoke certain affects. The idea in the current research is to combine notions in discourse analysis and psychoanalysis in order to ‘diagnose’ the libidinal effects of discourse particularly in relation to identification.Gilroy (2004) for example is implicitly carrying out this kind of diagnosis when he is interpreting the “pathological character” (p.98) of English identity and culture and its relation to its colonial history and the current multicultural atmosphere. Rather than focusing on a national identity as Gilroy did, the aim of this research is to focus on a single magazine, and draw from Freudian and Lacanian ideas in order to investigate the contradictions, ruptures, and the libidinal energy of the text.