Mervyn F.

Bendle

The crisis of ‘identity’ in high modernity

ABSTRACT

The concept of ‘identity’ is central to much contemporary sociology, re ecting a

crisis that manifests itself in two ways. Firstly, there is a view that identity is both
vital and problematic in this period of high modernity. Secondly, while this
awareness is re ected in sociology, its accounts of identity are inconsistent,
under-theorized and incapable of bearing the analytical load required. As a
result, there is an inherent contradiction between a valuing of identity as so
fundamental as to be crucial to personal well-being, and a theorization of
‘identity’ that sees it as something constructed,  uid, multiple, impermanent and
fragmentary. The contemporary crisis of identity thus expresses itself as both a
crisis of society, and a crisis of theory. This paper explores the diverse ways in
which ‘identity’ is deployed before turning to case-studies of its use by Anthony
Giddens and Manuel Castells. This strategy demonstrates the widespread and
diverse concern with identity before exploring how problematic it has become,
even in the work of two of the world’s leading sociologists.

KEYWORDS: Identity; globalization; Giddens; Castells; psychoanalysis

INTRODUCTION

The concept of ‘identity’ is central to much contemporary sociological

analysis. This concern with identity is indicative of a crisis that manifests
itself in two ways. Firstly, there is a pervasive sense that the acquisition and
maintenance of identity has become both vital and problematic under high
modernity. Secondly, while this awareness is re ected in many substantial
studies of contemporary society, their accounts of identity var y widely and
are often radically under-theorized and incapable of bearing the analytical
load that the contemporar y situation requires. This has arisen because of
the imperative under globalization to theorize people as possessing identi-
ties that are extremely adaptive to social change. As a result, there is an
inherent contradiction between a valuing of identity as something so

British Journal of Sociology Vol. No. 53 Issue No. 1 (March 2002) pp. 1–18
© 2002 London School of Economics and Political Science ISSN 0007-1315 print/1468-4446 online
Published by Routledge Journals, Taylor & Francis Ltd on behalf of the LSE
DOI: 10.1080/00071310120109302
2 Mervyn F. Bendle

fundamental that it is crucial to personal well-being and collective action,

and a theorization of ‘identity’ that sees it as something constructed,  uid,
multiple, impermanent and fragmentar y. The contemporary crisis of
identity thus expresses itself as both a crisis of society, and a crisis of theor y.
The crisis of identity involves a crisis of ‘identity’.

THE UBIQUITY OF ‘IDENTITY’

In this section and the next, we shall explore and conceptualize the diverse
ways in which ‘identity’ is deployed, before then turning to in-depth case-
studies of two theorists, Anthony Giddens and Manuel Castells, who have
made identity central to their analyses of globalization. This strategy
enables us to demonstrate the widespread and diverse concern with iden-
tity before exploring how problematic it has become even in the work of
two of the world’s leading sociologists.
A concern with identity has become pervasive since the 1950s and 1960s
when Erikson (1968) Ž rst popularized the notion of ‘identity crisis’ and
Goffman (1963) explored stigma as a ‘spoiled identity’. From the outset it
was a concept with roots in psychoanalysis, psychology and sociology and is
now ‘the most widely used concept these days in the social sciences and
humanities’ (Wrong 2000: 10). As Baumeister (1999: 3) points out, this
concern with identity re ects ‘a broader social trend in which the indi-
vidual self has become a fascinating problem, [re ecting] how the self has
actually changed in recent histor y to become more difŽ cult, challenging,
and important to explore’. In a very in uential study, Gergen (1991: 38)
highlights Erikson’s remark that ‘in the social jungle of human existence
there is no feeling of being alive without a sense of identity’. Consequently,
a search of a leading psychological database found over 31,000 items on
the self published over two recent decades (Baumeister 1999: 1).
This concern increased markedly through the 1980s and 1990s, to
include not only individual but also collective forms of identity. Within
social theory, issues relating to identity are present throughout Lemert’s
(1999) collection of readings, especially in the sections relating to recent
decades. Gitlin (1995) has shown how identity politics has impacted pro-
foundly on American culture, while Calhoun (1994) has explored their
implications for social theor y. Woodward (1997) provides an accessible
survey of the ‘crisis of identity’ at both the individual and collective levels.
Wrong (2000) explores the notion of ‘adversarial identities’ and their
relationship to multiculturalism. In Browning, Halci, and Webster (2000),
identity is invoked signiŽ cantly in discussions of the role of narrative in
society, postmodernity, globalization, intellectuals, nationalism, cultural
pluralism, the body, intimacy, social movements, and social inequalities.
Identity also has a central position in feminist social theor y (GrifŽ ths 1995),
the study of masculinities (Connell 1995), and of youth and adolescence
where Baumeister (1996) shows how detraditionalization increases choice
The crisis of ‘identity’ in high modernity 3

but problematizes identity formation. McDonald (1999: 203) argues that

for many young people marginalized by globalization, their identities can
no longer be constructed ‘within the imager y and culture created by pro-
ducers and employers’. Drifting in a post-industrial society and stalled in
adolescence, they struggle to establish coherent identities and constructive
relationships with others. Their identities ‘are propelled by contradictor y
social imperatives which may destroy the unity of the personality’ (Mc-
Donald 1999: 204). Touraine (1997: 81) relates fragmentation and loss of
identity to demodernization, while Heelas, Lash and Morris (1996) explore
the crisis of identity in terms of the detraditionalization characterizing high
modernity. Elliot (1996: 5ff.) explores ‘the ambivalence of identity’ under
postmodernity, while Kayatekin and Riccio (1998: 91) relate these pro-
cesses to globalization and argue that ‘the partial, fragmented nature of
such identities . . . creates the possibility of imagining and participating in
projects to change’ the system. This requires an ‘imagining [of] new ways
of living’, based on new identities that MacDonald (1999: 218) is optimistic
will emerge as marginalized groups respond to globalization.
Predictably under high modernity, a major area where there are dual
crises of identity and ‘identity’ is mental health, both in its institutional
form and its cultural representations. Increasingly, identities are seen as
stalled, with society’s ‘rites of passage’ failing and crucial transitions not
being made. Depression, anxiety and stress increase, and identity increas-
ingly breaks down to produce ‘dissociative identity disorder’ (Kluft and
Foote 1999). Central to this disorder is ‘the literal splitting of identity into
various parts and pieces (the alters), each displaying a distinct sub-person-
ality’. (Stone 1998: 330). In turn, this notion that identity can break down
into sinister ‘alters’ has spread throughout culture and ‘the idea of a
second self – of a horrible other living unrecognized within us, or loosed
somehow into the world beyond – is central to the vision of [contempor-
ary] Gothic’ (Edmundson 1997: 8). In this fashion, the sense of uncer-
tainty detected in the external world of the risk society is directed inwards
to create a sense of an unstable and untrustworthy self. This interrelated-
ness of representations of identity in mental health and popular culture is
a feature of modernity. As Gauchet and Swain (1999) show, psychiatry in
the early nineteenth centur y sought to provide the insane with the sense of
personal identity that would incorporate them into the individualist society
that was emerging. Similarly, Stone (1998), Hacking (1998) and Prager
(1998) demonstrate that identity and ‘identity’ are constructions linked,
psychologically, with memory in complex and unpredictable ways; and his-
torically, with the rise of discourses of pathology and institutional struc-
tures that make the relevant diagnoses possible. In high modernity this is
exempliŽ ed by the ‘politics of victimhood’ pursued in the confessional
mode, itself an ironic reversal of Goffman’s theor y of stigma, so that ‘one’s
hidden injur y becomes the ground for a claim of valued identity. Identity
can be claimed . . . only to the extent that it can be represented as denied,
repressed, injured or excluded by others’ (Rose 1999: 268, emph.add.).
4 Mervyn F. Bendle

Elsewhere, Valverde (1999 345) describes how politics in the USA is con-
ducted ‘largely in identity-based claims . . . Marginalized groups [deploy-
ing] experiential and historical knowledges of oppressed identities to
further their claims’. Appiah and Gates (1995: 1) address ‘the formation of
identities and the problem of subjectivities’, within a politics of identity
involving ‘multiple intersections of race, class, and gender [with] post-
colonialism, nationalism, and ethnicity’. Within such social  ux, identity is
discussed in terms of hybridity, double consciousness and subalternity
(Moreiras 1999). Bauman (1992) has addressed similar issues in terms of
‘soil, blood, and identity’, while the global dimensions of a crisis of identity
are described elsewhere as ‘a social fact arising from the collapse of the
Western Imperium and the subsequent collapse of its well-exercised theory
of world culture’ (Lemert 1997: 125). Friedman (1994) also relates the for-
mation of identities to globalization, with the histor y of identities recapit-
ulating the histor y of capitalism’s global conquests. This history in turn has
produced various diasporas, for which the construction of viable identities
is a fundamental issue. Indeed ‘displacement,  ight, exile and forced
migration . . . transform the terms in which identity needs to be under-
stood’(Gilroy 1997: 329).
These dynamics Ž nd their re ection at the level of histor y and theor y.
For Friedman (1994: 85), ‘history is the history of identity, [and] the ques-
tion of who “owns” or appropriates the past is a question of who is able to
identify him- or herself and the other at a given time and place’. Connell
(1997) makes a similar point in his critique of the formation of the reign-
ing canon of classical social theory, arguing that its foregrounding of
certain European theorists and their preoccupations with aspects of indus-
trial society systematically undervalues the signiŽ cance of the identity poli-
tics of gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity in the reconstruction of the
discipline within the framework of global imperialism, of which insti-
tutionalized sociology has been an important beneŽ ciar y.

CONCEPTUALIZING THE CRISIS

There is an obvious need to bring some order to this variety of applications

of the concept of ‘identity’, but is there a ‘crisis’ here, and if there is,
should it concern sociology or is it just a problem for psychoanalysis and
psychology? Indeed there is a crisis, and it must concern sociology because
analysis in these various areas is profoundly weakened by an excessive and
uncritical reliance on what has become a politicized, residual and under-
theorized concept. In fact this variety and imprecision is in itself an import-
ant component of the problem. As Gilroy (2000: 98) puts it: ‘the new
popularity of identity as an interpretative device is . . . a result of the excep-
tional plurality of meanings the term can harness’. Politically, the ability to
deŽ ne ‘identity’ in a  exible fashion makes it possible for groups to carry
out essential ‘gate-keeping’ functions, regulating their membership and
The crisis of ‘identity’ in high modernity 5

position in the political Ž eld. Moreover, its under-theorized and received

position in discourse also means that people can invoke ‘identity’ in a posi-
tive and compelling fashion without being required to specify adequately
the meaning they attach to the term, its theoretical provenance, ideologi-
cal commitments, or the source of its positive valorization. And where it is
theorized, it is generally in terms of the tradition of American ego-
psychology that has become fundamentally problematic, as we shall see
below in the cases of Giddens and Castells. There we will demonstrate that
it is not possible to simply treat ‘identity’ unproblematically as a received
concept from psychoanalysis or psychology – it has become far too integral
to sociological analysis and therefore requires adequate critical analysis
and theorization. This is particularly the case as identity and globalization
increasingly play their roles as the organizing polarities of social analysis
under high modernity.
While it is not possible here systematically to state the theories of iden-
tity that underlie all the works cited above, they all generally occupy the
conceptual space deŽ ned by the opposition between constructionism,
which is valorized, and essentialism, which is devalorized, and this re ects
a prior belief that the former leads to progressive social outcomes while the
latter reinforces oppression. It also facilitates a theorization of humanity as
endlessly adaptive and plastic. The dominance of constructionism can be
seen in a recent text (Finnegan 1997) that provides a convenient summar y
of how ‘identity’ is variously analysed in the social science literature. Suit-
ably modiŽ ed to encompass the literature reviewed here, this indicates that
identity may be seen: (1) In terms of similarity and difference involving
social, racial, ethnic or gender categories; (2) In contextual terms that var y
with one’s social situation, providing a multifaceted experience; (3) In cul-
tural categories re ecting contemporar y conceptions of identity; (4) In
terms of one’s subjective sense of self, possibly based on notions of an
‘inner life’; (5) In terms of the social performance of self-hood; (6) In
terms of ‘narratives of the self ’, understood as stories one tells oneself
about who one is; (7) In psychoanalytic terms, where identity and the self
are felt to be constrained by unconscious structures of the mind. All but
the last are generally constructionist in commitment, and even psycho-
analysis is deployed in a constructionist manner by theorists like Judith
Butler.
The various approaches to identity can also be seen in terms of ‘depth’
or ‘surface’ models of analysis. At the level of the individual, identity is syn-
onymous with the ‘core’ of personhood with which the actor is endowed.
This core may be conceived literally as a deeply embedded, foundational
and deŽ ning characteristic, or (more usually now) as something rather
more superŽ cial, plastic and manipulable – the Ž rst view would be charac-
terized as essentialist and the second as constructionist. Extreme versions
of constructionism, associated with post-structuralism and postmodernism,
reject the notion of a core altogether and see identity as entirely a product
of discourse and as inherently fragmented, multiple and transient. Here,
6 Mervyn F. Bendle

the exemplars are Michel Foucault or, more recently, Butler, whose per-
formative theory of gender formation underpins much contemporary
identity politics. Interestingly, a signiŽ cant reaction to this is presently
emerging from the ‘Lacanian left’, which reasserts precisely the irre-
ducibility of the ‘core’ or ‘kernel’ constituted by Lacan’s notion of the Real
(Zizek 1999).
Historically, the current crisis of identity may be related to four problems
of the self that characterize high modernity: (1) The problematizing of self-
knowledge: whereas in the pre-modern period the self had been regarded
as transparent and rather uninteresting, by the turn of the twentieth
century ‘the self was viewed as a vast inner continent that could only be
explored with considerable difŽ culty and possibly with expert help (e.g., in
psychoanalysis)’ (Baumeister1999: 3); (2). The valorization of human
potential: modern secularization placed a high priority on achieving self-
realization in this world, rather than being satisŽ ed with waiting for the
next; (3) The breakdown of hierarchies, the rise of individualism and
social mobility, and the potential for radical social change all provided
access to new identities to be pursued in this world; (4) A new  exibility of
self-deŽ nition: whereas identity had previously been deŽ ned in terms of
rigid and predictable social structures and processes, their decline meant
that identity and its deŽ nition must be based on shifting and non-absolute
foundations.
Taken together, this range of complex, interrelated issues illustrates the
conceptual burden that is being carried by the term ‘identity’, and why
arguments uncritically built upon it are problematic. This situation is
exacerbated because originally the notion of ‘identity’ explicitly contained
the idea of subsisting self-sameness. Consequently, models that emphasize
an almost unlimited degree of fragmentation,  uidity and plasticity of the
self are in tension with this core notion, an issue which Erikson himself
recognized right from the outset as corrosive of this entire approach to
understanding the self, as we shall see below.

CASE STUDIES

Some impressive efforts have been made systematically to incorporate

theories of identity into comprehensive analyses of contemporar y society.
In this section we shall explore several prominent accounts that reveal both
the strengths and weaknesses presently found in contemporary theoriza-
tions of identity, particularly where it plays a major role in the analysis of
globalization.
Several of the major notions of ‘identity’ noted above are integral to the
sociology of Giddens (1991: 32) and his analysis of ‘risk society’ in the
period of high modernity: ‘transformations in self-identity and globaliz-
ation . . . are the two poles of the dialectic of the local and the global in
conditions of high modernity’. Indeed, identity is central to Giddens’
The crisis of ‘identity’ in high modernity 7

theor y of individuation, re exive modernization and the emergence of

post-traditional societies embedded within a global system. According to
Giddens (1991: 5): ‘The more tradition loses its hold, and the more daily
life is reconstituted in terms of the dialectical interplay of the local and the
global, the more individuals are forced to negotiate lifestyle choices [from]
among a diversity of options’. In this fashion, ‘re exively organized life-
planning . . . becomes a central feature of the structuring of self-identity’
(ibid.). This prospective stance towards one’s life is accompanied by an
ongoing or retrospective ‘narrative of the self ’ understood as those ‘stories
by means of which self-identity is re exively understood’ (Giddens 1991:
242). Self-identity, in turn, is ‘the self as re exively understood by the indi-
vidual in terms of his or her biography’ (Giddens 1991: 244).
Central to Giddens’s notion of self-identity is trust, which relieves sus-
tains a sense of ‘ontological security’ in the face of ‘the chaos that threat-
ens on the other side of the ordinariness of everyday conventions’
(Giddens 1991: 37). This trust delivers an empowering conŽ dence in the
continuity of the self, the reliability of others, and in the surrounding social
environment. In this area, Giddens (1991: 38) draws on ideas from the ego-
psychology associated with Erikson – ‘identity’s architect’ (Friedman:
1999) – and the object relations theor y of Winnicott to argue that what
they call ‘basic trust’ ‘forms the original nexus from which a combined
emotive-cognitive orientation towards others, the object-world, and self-
identity, emerges’. The essential period is childhood, when the child
receives ‘a sort of emotional inoculation against existential anxieties,’ relat-
ing to future threats and dangers (Giddens 1991: 39). A stable self-identity
is established as the basis for ongoing interaction in a constantly changing
and unpredictable world. Where self-identity falls into crisis through
illness, deviance, anxiety or alienation, high modernity relies upon the
intervention of expert systems of trained professionals. This in turn
involves the ‘sequestration of experience’ by these expert systems as indi-
viduals and civil society lose the capacity, possessed by traditional societies,
to deal with such crises. In this fashion, society is disempowered and
deskilled in vital areas of intimate life and the acquisition and maintenance
of identity becomes both increasingly problematic and the preserve of
external and impersonal expert systems. Other analysts have called this
apparatus of identity management the ‘psy-complex’, deŽ ned as a insti-
tutional and discursive ‘network of speculations about the behaviour and
mental states of individuals and as a range of attempts to regulate how
people behave and think’ (Parker 1997: 123).
In a related analysis, Lash distinguishes between the construction of
identities in the ‘simple’ modernity of earlier periods and the re exive
modernity of the present time. Whereas social actors in the former come
under the sway of pre-given rules sourced in social institutions, this is no
longer possible in re exive modernity. People must live with the ‘risk . . .
ambivalence and contingency [that] is forced upon us with the relative
decline of institutions and organizations in this age of re exive
8 Mervyn F. Bendle

judgement’, and consequently, ‘individuals must Ž nd the rules to use to

encounter speciŽ c situations. They must innovate rules in a bricolage of
their own identities’ (Lash 1999: 3). By invoking Levi-Strauss’s notion of
‘bricolage’, Lash is suggesting that identities are constructed in a pragmatic
fashion out of whatever material lies at hand. Rather than being something
arrived at in a predetermined way and then sustained, identity becomes an
ongoing project of construction, change and development. Upon what
psychological substrate such a transient construction rests and how it
mobilizes the energies that are observably necessary to maintain an inte-
grated personality in dynamic conditions of social change is not explained.
Lash offers a similar analysis in a major study of the various aspects of
‘detraditionalization’ in high modernity (Heelas, Lash and Morris 1996).
There, identity appears many times as a key component of the social
dynamics discussed by the various authors. For example, as Heelas (1996:
4) explains, in traditional societies those who attempt to speak out-of-place
are invalidated: ‘Identities are inscribed, rather than being at stake for dis-
cursive controversy. Indeed, the authorial taken-for-grantedness of identi-
ties precludes . . . questioning those discourses which serve to legitimate
the order of things’. In a detraditionalized society, however, identity is con-
structed under the conditions of re exivity, where ‘people have acquired
the opportunity to stand back from, critically re ect upon, and lose their
faith in what the traditional has to offer’ (ibid.). In this type of analysis, the
emphasis shifts in the theorization of identity: identity is no longer seen as
involving the self ’s non-re ective and unquestioning ‘inscription’ within a
tradition; rather it is seen in terms of the self ’s acquisition of a re ective
and critical capacity not only with respect to the particular prevailing tra-
dition, but to all traditions. It involves a shift from the non-re ective,
passive level of acceptance and acquiescence to the meta-level of active
re exivity and critique. Again, what exactly it is that shifts, or forms the sub-
strate upon which the shift takes place is left unclear.
As with Giddens, identity forms one of the organizing polarities of
Castells’ (1997: 1) analysis of the Information Age: ‘our world, and our
lives, are being shaped by the con icting trends of globalization and id-
entity’. On one hand, we have ‘the network society’, generated by techno-
logical revolution, the transformation of capitalism, and the demise of
statism; and characterized by  exibility and instability of work, individual-
ization of labour, network forms of organization, a ‘culture of real virtual-
ity’ based on complex media systems, transformed material foundations of
life, space and time, and the rise of new cosmopolitan ruling elites. On the
other hand, Castells (1997: 2) believes that this profound transformation is
being powerfully challenged by ‘the widespread surge of powerful expres-
sions of collective identity’, be they gender, religious, national, ethnic,
territorial, or socio-biological identities. These identities are ‘multiple,
highly diversiŽ ed, following the contours of each culture, and of historical
sources of formation of each identity’. They may be progressive or reaction-
ary, and increasingly make use of the media and telecommunications
The crisis of ‘identity’ in high modernity 9

systems. Overall, these identities ‘challenge globalization and cosmo-

politanism on behalf of cultural singularity and people’s control over their
lives and environment’ (Castells 1997: 2).
Castells’ model of identity postulates an individual constituted by a
primary identity that is self-sustaining across time and space and that
organizes subsidiar y identities and social roles according to criteria of
meaning. Apart from Erikson and ego-psychology, Castells (1997: 7) cites
Calhoun (1994) to the effect that self-knowledge is always a construction
made in encounter with others, and invokes Giddens (1991) to claim that
‘identities are sources of meaning for the actors themselves, and by them-
selves, constructed through a process of individuation’. Individual identity
is constructed on the basis of cultural attributes that are given priority over
other sources of meaning by the actor herself, and while dominant social
institutions and social roles may be primar y sources of meaning, they only
form part of an individual’s identity ‘when and if social actors internalize
them, and construct their meaning around this internalization’. Identity is
therefore seen as an active process of construction, and Castells (1997: 7)
deŽ nes ‘meaning’ as ‘the symbolic identiŽ cation by a social actor of the
purpose of her/his action’.
This echoes Lash’s ‘bricolage of identities’. However, the particular
form any identity might take is a question of power relationships and
Castells speciŽ es three main types: legitimizing identity, which supports
systems of domination; resistance identity, which re ects the struggles of
those marginalized by those systems; and project identity, which involves
the construction of new identities that imply the transformation of the
overall social structure. These three types of identity give rise to three cor-
responding modes of collectivity: respectively, civil society composed of the
market and its legitimizing institutions; communities formed through col-
lective resistance to marginalization by market processes; and subjects,
which seek to stand outside of markets and communities, while constitut-
ing ‘the collective social actor through which individuals reach holistic
meaning in their experience’. (Castells 1997: 10) Subjects, in this sense, are
committed to the project of social transformation rather than just resist-
ance. In these two sets of triads, the related notions of project identity and
the transformative subject appear as the superior forms emerging out of
the others, with their precise relationships re ecting the prevailing level of
social development. At present, the second form of collective identity for-
mation, community, is the most important. Indeed, it is the central hypoth-
esis of his book that ‘the constitution of subjects, at the heart of the process
of social change, takes a different route to the one we knew during mod-
ernity, and late modernity: namely, subjects, if and when constructed, are
not built any longer on the basis of civil societies, that are in the process of
disintegration, but as prolongation of communal resistance’, to globaliz-
ation (Castells 1997: 11). In this fashion, Castells is proposing a radical
communitarian politics of identity as the path towards full subjecthood,
and the remainder of his book is an attempt to explore this possibility in its
10 Mervyn F. Bendle

various guises, including guerilla movements, militias, religious cults, en-

vironmentalism, gay rights and feminism.
Castells’s model shares much with the analyses of Touraine and Dubet,
particularly with respect to the third ideal type of identity formation – that
of project identity – which is presented as emerging most forcefully in the
face of considerable adversity. As McDonald (1999: 210) puts it, such a
sense of identity ‘seems to be most powerfully present when expressed as
an experience of suffering or the inability to make sense of identity’. It is
found ‘among groups who are dominated and for whom subjective experi-
ence is a problem more than a resource [and where] there is a struggle for
subjectivation that points to a recomposition of the social world’, around
more progressive principles of social life. One detects in this type of formu-
lation an echo of the utopian Marxist notion of a revolutionar y working-
class consciousness emerging out of a shared experience of group identity,
commonality of interests, exploitation and suffering. Absent however, is
the crucial historicism of Marxism, which links revolution and liberation
with the internal dynamics of history and reason. Instead, there is a volun-
tarism operating at two levels: at the level of the individual constructing the
relevant identity; and at the aggregate level of individuals working together
to achieve change. There is also a strong element of romanticism in these
theories of identity, a belief that oppression, struggle and resistance can
lead to personal growth and empowerment; as we shall see in a moment,
psychoanalysis suggests a more sombre outcome.

CRITIQUE

We turn now from a critical review of these representative modernist

theories of identity to some further critical comments about them that are
best treated together. Giddens’s (1991 35), position is resolutely rationalis-
tic and while identity can be seen as plastic and  uid, the self may be
exhaustively deŽ ned in terms of cognition and re exivity: ‘to be a human
being is to know . . . both what one is doing and why one is doing it . . .
Re exive awareness . . . is characteristic of all human action . . . agents are
normally able, if asked, to provide discursive interpretations of the nature
of, and the reasons for, the behaviour in which they engage’. Although this
generally accords with the ‘cognitive revolution’ in psychology and narra-
tivist theories of identity construction, it is essentially a retreat to a Car-
tesian view of the self that was undermined not just by psychoanalysis, but
also by Nietzsche and major streams of modern philosophy, both analytical
and continental, and by important streams of psychology. It is also incon-
sistent with our growing knowledge of the role of the emotions (Elster:
1999) and the historical experience of the twentieth century, which gives
abundant evidence of the power of non-rational forces (Glover: 1999).
Giddens’s model also represents a major shift away from classical
sociological theories of identity formation. To adopt a Durkheimian
The crisis of ‘identity’ in high modernity 11

formulation for the purposes of illustration, the traditional personality was

embedded in a comprehensive system of collective expectations about
behaviour within a closed system of mechanical solidarity. The modern
personality, on the other hand, is embedded in a shared system of norms
and values which guide decision-making in an open system of organic soli-
darity and conditions of ongoing change and increasing complexity. Both
these models place a strong emphasis on socialization and the reproduc-
tion of the social system. Giddens’s alternative model assumes that the
primary determinants of behaviour are neither social institutions, tra-
ditional expectations nor shared systems of norms, but rather information
derived from the environment by the actor and processed according to
rules of calculation, instrumental rationality, strategic assessment of con-
straints and opportunities, and risk management under uncertainty. This
seems a signiŽ cant retreat for sociology, and by marginalizing traditional
sociological approaches, this model of the re exive strategic actor is easily
accommodated within the ideology of the new ‘mode of social manage-
ment’, identiŽ ed by Touraine, ‘where strategy and  exibility replace norms
and function’ (McDonald 1999: 208).
Although Castells claims to be concerned with collective rather than
individual identity, his formulation derives much from Erikson. This is sig-
niŽ cant because Erikson (1968: 22) always insisted on the central concep-
tion of identity theor y – that identity is ‘a process ‘located’ in the core of the
individual and yet also in the core of his communal culture’. Erikson recognized
the essential need for a subjective sense of continuous existence and a
coherent memory, without which a person’s self is profoundly weakened
and easily threatened. Moreover, this sense of identity accrues from birth
and especially in the second and third decades, providing the individual
with bedrock conŽ dence ‘that somehow in the midst of change one is; that
is, one has an “inner sameness and continuity” which others can recognize
and which is so certain that it can unselfconsciously be taken for granted’
(Coles 1970: 165). This conception of the continuing self-sameness of iden-
tity is central to this entire stream of thought, as Yankelovich and Barrett
(1971: 126) make clear: ‘Whenever Erikson discusses identity he makes . . .
reference to this meaning – a person’s sense of sameness and continuity’.
At the very least, Castells and those who follow this approach would need
to show how the various social movements discussed (e.g., militias, cults,
environmentalism, feminism, gay liberation, etc.) impact upon this process
of intergenerational identity formation in a manner that supports the pro-
gressive outcomes they favours.
This is a very good example of how sociology cannot uncritically appro-
priate key terms from psychoanalysis or psychology without the risk of
importing fundamental difŽ culties into their analysis. Indeed, it is not
clear that an adequate awareness of the constraints associated with the vital
integrative and existentially constitutive role played by the presence of a
stable core identity exists in the work of Castells, Giddens, or the many
other writers cited above who assume an optimistic view of the self ’s
12 Mervyn F. Bendle

capacity to adapt to the challenges posed by globalization and its effects.

Indeed, they tend to assume an extreme plasticity of the self that dissolves
any real conception that there exists an ongoing core or substrate to the
personality at all; ‘identity’ becomes an elastic categor y that can be made
to accommodate whatever requirements the overall argument demands of
it. Indeed, identity or identities are taken fully to constitute the self, which
therefore has no real presence nor inhers in any thing other than these
transient and  uid identities. This becomes a particularly important issue
when identity is theorized to be fragmented and multiple and the question
arises as to what sustains a continuity of self in a world where such conti-
nuity is increasingly imperative.
Such constructionism is a strength in so far as it avoids pessimism about
the intractability of social problems and provides for maximum human
adaptation and hope for the future. However, it utilizes a very shallow and
under-theorized model of the human personality that radically generalizes
the notion of identity, dissipates its analytical power and is particularly
weakened by the absence of an adequate depth psychology with its alert-
ness to profound and possibly intractable psychic con icts with important
implications for the identities concerned. Indeed, the constructionist ten-
dency to relieve ‘identity’ of any suggestion of essentialism and to make it
 uid and multiple ‘leaves us without a rationale for talking about “identi-
ties” at all and ill-equipped to examine the “hard” dynamics and essential-
ist claims of contemporary identity politics . . . if identity is ever ywhere, it
is nowhere’(Brubaker and Cooper (2000: 1). By allowing the term to
become generalized and imprecise, it loses all conceptual power.
A further point arises. In succumbing to this lack of theoretical rigour
and choosing to ignore the potential existence of deeply embedded, poss-
ibly repressed or unconscious constraints on psychological and social adap-
tation, these theories re ect the Ž nal decay of the ego-psychology that has
signiŽ cantly in uenced their development. This tradition developed pri-
marily in the USA under the in uence of Anna Freud, Heinz Hartmann
and then Erikson and modiŽ ed the psychoanalytic model by maintaining
that the ego could become autonomous and equivalent to the id in the
determination of behaviour. It also postulated that the ego possessed a
degree of freedom from psychic con ict that made rational adaptation to
the environment possible without disabling disturbance from irrational
psychic forces. Whereas psychoanalysis had previously emphasized the
difŽ culties that the ego faces in attempting to minimize anxiety in the face
of ongoing psychic con ict, ego-psychology asserted the ego’s capacity
freely to adapt to internal and external challenges. The goal of therapy
therefore became the attainment of a strong, healthy, well-adapted ego,
ignoring the psychoanalytic insight that such an ideal view of the ego is in
effect a form of narcissism. This position contrasts with the European tra-
dition of thinking in this Ž eld, which re ected a vastly different experience
of modernity throughout the twentieth centur y to that which prevailed in
post-war America and is much more likely to conceive of the self in terms
The crisis of ‘identity’ in high modernity 13

of con ict and tendencies towards fragmentation. Rather than viewing

identity as a comparatively unproblematic project of adaptation to social
change, the original psychoanalytic tradition is alert to the trauma of social
change: ‘Sensitized to the ravages of weak and threatened egos [it] sees
identity in this sense as a tremendous achievement – made horribly clear
in those who lack it’ (Yankelovich and Barrett 1971: 126).
Possibly the most in uential critique of ego-psychology was that under-
taken throughout his career by Lacan, who saw it as the antithesis of true
psychoanalysis. Indeed Lacan’s own position and the in uence he has had
not only within psychoanalysis and other Ž elds but within postmodernism
and post-structuralism generally cannot properly be understood in iso-
lation from the ego-psychology that he so vehemently attacked. In particu-
lar, Lacan’s criticized ego-psychology because its stress on the ego’s
adaptive function overlooks the ego’s own state of alienation and also relies
on the assumption that ‘reality’ itself is an unproblematic realm to which
adaptation can be made. In fact, for Lacan – following Hegel on this point
– reality is substantially a product of the ego’s own projections and misrep-
resentations. As Lacan (1977: 236) points out: ‘it is hardly a question of
adapting to [reality], but to show that [the ego] is only too well adapted
[already], since it assists in the construction of that ver y reality’. Moreover,
Lacan emphasized the extent to which the ‘self ’ and ‘reality’ are not
‘natural’ entities but products of the symbolic order, are consequently radi-
cally de-natured, and therefore lack any ‘natural Ž t’ that can be legiti-
mately pursued through therapy. Indeed, if this situation is ignored and
adaptation is nevertheless pursued then the therapist is placed in a difŽ cult
position in which her own vision and relation to ‘reality’ is accepted as
given. The same point could be made mutatis mutandis with respect to soci-
ology, especially those analyses that regard detraditionalization and global-
ization as unproblematic, ‘natural’ developments within human histor y to
which people unproblematically can adapt. Much of the sociology dis-
cussed here could even be seen as a projection of fantasies about the
nature of the world and the self that are taken as realities. In Lacanian
terms, the boundaryless nature of globalist expansion and the radically
unproblematic ‘plastic self ’ are prime expressions of the imaginar y psychic
register.
Of the sociological theorists discussed here, Giddens makes the best
effort to relate his analyses to leading psychological and psychoanalytic
work in this area, and so the problems that exist there exemplify the depth
of the problems that exist generally in the sociological use of ‘identity’.
Giddens wants his model of the self to possess a ready capacity for adap-
tation to large-scale external change and therefore gives little recognition
to the constraining signiŽ cance of internal psychological con ict and
ambivalence. Indeed, he recognizes no signiŽ cant role for the unconscious
at all, at least as it is understood within the psychoanalytic tradition.
Instead, Giddens (1984: 41) offers his ‘stratiŽ cation model’ of the mind as
consisting of a ‘basic security system’, practical and discursive consciousness.
14 Mervyn F. Bendle

Indeed, Giddens (1984: 42) concluded that the psychoanalytic structure of

id, ego, and super-ego, ‘does not make sense’, because he (mistakenly)
takes this to imply multiple forms of agency within the consciousness of the
self. Instead, he offers his own conception of personality structure:
The ‘I’ is an essential feature of the re exive monitoring of action but
should be identiŽ ed neither with the agent nor with the self. By the
‘agent’ or ‘actor’ I mean the overall human subject located within the
corporeal time-space of the living organism. The ‘I’ has no image, as the
self does. The self, however, is not some kind of mini-agency within the
agent. It is the sum of those forms of recall whereby the agent re exively
characterizes ‘what’ is at the origin of his or her action. The self is the
agent as characterized by the agent. (Giddens 1991: 49–51)
This is good example of the loss of theoretical rigour that characterizes
contemporary discussions of identity. We Ž nd in this one short passage the
following notions: the ‘I’, the agent (and ‘mini-agency’), the actor, the
‘overall human subject’, the living organism, the image, and the self – all
bound together through the operation of ‘re exivity’. It is therefore difŽ -
cult here to resist Mestrovic’s (1998: 83) claim that ‘Gidden’s alternative to
Freud is completely vague and amounts to a cognitive, rationalist caricature
of the agent [that constitutes] an ideological catch-all, an idealized vision
of human empowerment’, which ignores the limitations to such empower-
ment identiŽ ed painstakingly over many decades by the psychoanalytic and
other traditions that are prepared to explore the depths of the self.
In his use of psychoanalysis, Giddens draws not only on ego-psychology
but also on Winnicott’s object relations theor y to discuss ‘ontological
security and existential anxiety’ in his major work on identity (Giddens
1991: 35ff.). However, he tends to mis-state or downplay considerably the
implications of the theories that he invokes. In fact, Winnicott had begun
his psychoanalytic career as a follower of Melanie Klein, who was his super-
visor. Klein’s view of the human person had moved a long way from
Freud’s, to invoke a dark vision of the mind ‘as beset with deep, psychotic-
like terrors, as unstable, dynamic, and  uid, and as always responsive to
“deep” analytic interpretations’ (Mitchell and Black 1995: 88). She devel-
oped her own system in terms of what she called the ‘paranoid–schizoid’
position, which arises in the earliest years and serves to protect the self
from anxiety and fear of malevalent invasion and violation by splitting the
self and the world into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ segments. For Klein, the main
problem of life is managing paranoid anxieties that one’s ver y existence is
endangered. Although Winnicott moved away from Klein, his own system
never shed this emphasis on the intractably tragic dimension of the human
person. He focused on the type of psychopathology he called ‘false self dis-
order’, in which the person is torn by internal con ict, beset by anxiety and
guilt, and lacks a sustaining sense of self. Like Klein, he emphasized that
the earliest years are absolutely critical if this tendency is to be overcome
and crucial here is the quality of mothering provided. Maternal failure
The crisis of ‘identity’ in high modernity 15

creates a lacuna in the child’s psychological development from which it can

never fully recover and which expresses itself in a split between the ‘true’
and ‘false’ self that cannot be reconciled – lack of integration and discon-
tinuity of experience come to characterize life. SigniŽ cantly, in this model
there is no romantic valorization of such psychic fragmentation.
Despite Giddens’s invocation of this type of psychoanalytical theory, it is
actually quite a distance away from his own position, with its underlying
optimism and expectation that human beings can adapt readily to radical
social change. In this he parallels Castells’ situation described above. As
Elliot (1994: 74) summarizes his assessment of Gidden’s work in this area:
‘Giddens’s whole vocabulary of self-organization . . . has a ver y different
intent from that proposed in object relations theory’. Whereas Giddens
regards the construction of an ongoing, stable identity as a relatively
unproblematic undertaking, psychoanalytic theor y, including object
relations theory, has always problematized all such notions that the self can
be ‘normalized’ like this. While the psychoanalytic tradition stresses the
deeply rooted fragmented nature of self-experience and the self ’s pro-
found underlying anxiety and dread at the threat of dissolution and engulf-
ment, Giddens pays little real heed, and sees such issues merely
metaphorically in terms of ‘emotional innoculation’ and ‘protective cocoon’
(Giddens 1991: 39,40).
Object relations theory follows psychoanalysis generally in focusing on
the most intimate areas of human life, which are seen as pivotal for the
healthy development of human identity. These continue to be only par-
tially understood and many of their most critical dynamics may be far more
intractable to radical change than advocates of globalization might like.
Again Giddens’s problem parallels that of Castells, and needs fully to con-
front the implications that object relations theory – which, after all, he
himself invokes – has for the complexities of child-rearing and identity for-
mation under globalization. That theory emphasizes above all else the pro-
foundly important role for healthy mental development played by parents
and expecially mothers in child-rearing – can this role really be taken up
by ‘caretakers’ in a globalized society? (Giddens 1991: 39) And is the
psychological cost worth paying if the only results are low-paid, insecure
jobs in a global labour force? As Elliot (1994: 75) concludes: ‘Giddens’s
theor y pays too little attention to the ways in which social systems of mod-
ernity disŽ gure and warp the unconscious constitution of the self’.
Finally, in addition to these problems produced by an insufŽ ciently criti-
cal appropriation and application of psychoanalytical theories in sociology,
there is the underlying issue of the historicity of ‘identity’ itself, a problem
that sociology, with its sophisticated theories of discourse and ideology
should be alert to. In fact, ‘identity’ is a cultural and historical artifact pecu-
liar to Western modernity and re ecting underlying processes of social
change. As Baumeister (1986) shows, identity only became a major issue in
Western societies from around 1800, in the shadow of the Enlightenment,
the Industrial and Democratic Revolutions, the decline of feudalism, the
16 Mervyn F. Bendle

erosion of religious authority and the rise of Romanticism. The underlying

value consensus of society was disintegrating and it became increasingly
incumbent on the individual herself to fashion an integrating worldview.
What was required was a model of the self that provided a sense of con-
tinuous personal self-sameness over time while allowing for adaptation to
rapid social change and differentiation. Modernity destabilized and dele-
gitimized existing external social structures: factors that underpinned a
sense of continuity (geography, community, employment, class, etc.) were
destabilized; whilst those that had provided a sense of differentiation
(ancestry, social rank, gender, moral virtue, religion, etc.) were delegit-
imized. This process intensiŽ ed during the twentieth century and was
exacerbated by the apparently irresistible expansion of postwar capitalism
and consumerism. Modernity produced a mass middle class whose sudden
af uence outpaced the social, cultural and psychological preparations that
might normally have been expected to precede its formation, creating a
crisis of identity for a vast section of society. Subsequently, there has been
a ‘hyper-differentiation’ under high modernity and globalization that
makes a stable identity even more desperately sought after and more difŽ -
cult to achieve.
It was also within this context that Erikson rose to great prominence,
ranking with Anna Freud and Heinz Hartmann in a 1966 poll as one of the
three most outstanding psychiatrists or psychoanalysts of their time – a
result notable for their shared commitment to ego-psychology and ‘the
problem of the continuing “I” . . . which has now become so acute for
psychoanalysis as well as for our civilization as a whole’ (Yankelovich and
Barrett 1971: 14). It is therefore a fact of some signiŽ cance for the assess-
ment of the theories of identity of Giddens, Castells, etc., that Erikson’s
status quickly declined after this high point of in uence in the 1960s
(Friedman 1999). Critiques came from various quarters: Marxists and
other radicals attacked ego-psychology’s simplistic political understanding
and its assumption that adaptation to society was a worthy goal; psycho-
analysts from other schools systematically attacked ego-psychology’s
theoretical foundations; feminists detected gender bias; Erikson’s inter-
disciplinar y approach exposed him to claims that his work lacked rigour;
and there was a general shift towards neuroscience and psycho-pharma-
cology in the study and treatment of mental illness. This situation was then
compounded by the in uence of Foucault and Lacan and the rise of post-
structuralist and postmodern theories of the identity that emphasized  u-
idity, fragmentation and multiplicity. Consequently, as we have seen above,
by the 1990s the concept of identity had become so variegated that it was
crippled by a lack of conceptual rigour. As Baumeister (1986: 265) con-
cluded his study of the histor y of the concept of identity: ‘a Ž nal reason for
the problematic nature of identity can . . . be suggested. Identity is a theory
of the self associated with an inadequate contextual framework and with a
concept that injudiciously blends reality and unreality’.
The crisis of ‘identity’ in high modernity 17

CONCLUSION

Giddens and Castells identify identity and globalization as twin organizing

polarities of contemporary social analysis. Both conceptual poles must be
adequately theorized if this analysis is to progress. This imposes an
inescapable obligation on sociology to theorize adequately the most inti-
mate dynamics of the self. It is not necessary to assume that the problems
with identity discussed here indicate that the theories cited are fundamen-
tally  awed. What would indicate this, however, would be signs that iden-
tity in the modern world is not at all as unproblematic as their arguments
insist. In fact, as we have seen in this paper and know from protests and
internecine violence around the world, this appears to be precisely the
case. Indeed, the present stage of high modernity is characterized not only
by an increasing tension between the demands on the self made by global-
ization and the capacity of the self to respond to them, but also by critical
imprecision and indeterminancy in sociological analyses of the situation.
An adequate response requires that critical and uncompromising analysis
be conducted at the interface of sociology with the key underlying models
of identity derived from constructionism, psychoanalysis and psychology.
This paper has sought to both establish this imperative and initiate such
analysis.

(Date accepted: July 2001) Mervyn F. Bendle

Department of Sociology
James Cook University

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