‘Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might
appear to others that what you were or might have been was not
otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be
otherwise.’
I confess I have not worked out the logic from that, but I came across it and thought it was an Interesting take on our topic from circa 1865! These issues have been around a long time!
This stole all my focus this morning! Maybe this will help others, it's how I made sense of it: replace "not otherwise than" with "anything but", "them" with "others", and messing with tenses & grammar.
A: the appearance of [(what you were) or (could have been)] = (what you had been)
"Never imagine yourself as being anything but A, as others believe A is true."
Could also replace the "it" for the thing it's substituting, "[what] would have appeared to others to be otherwise".
"Never imagine yourself to be anything but what would have appeared to others to be otherwise."
Seems like an argument for sincerity/profilicity to me! I am very open to the possibility that I horribly misinterpreted this though 😂
“I quite agree with you,” said the Duchess; “and the moral of that is—‘Be what you would seem to be’—or if you’d like it put more simply—‘Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.’”
“I think I should understand that better,” Alice said very politely, “if I had it written down: but I can’t quite follow it as you say it.”
Definitely authenticity/profilicity related.
Having just finished "The Annotated Alice", I can't over emphasize how great the Alice books are.
I think that the onion metaphor for sincerity, like all real metaphors, doesn't fit its subject perfectly. You pointed out the conflicts that might occur due to the clashing of different social roles but we should also not forget that, at least traditionally, the roles of sincerity were thought to have significant correlation between each other; that is why they usually came in a bundle. Onion layers are too distinct from each other in comparison.
On importance of choice in authenticity, I think economic development is a very important driving force here. The strictly vertical view of development, poor to rich, usually misses the horizontal expansion of alternatives and the leeway required to use them.
In thinking about the peach and onion metaphor, I think more in terms of us being a large box that is composed of many smaller boxes. Some of the boxes correspond to the various roles we have. Each one has its own logic, vocabulary, expectations, and so on. It's a way to help us organize and interact with our world. With the onion, when we remove layer after layer we reach a point when there is nothing left. But the different roles do not consume us. There is always someone who is moving the boxes. There is someone to decide which box to open, and when, and how much of its contents to use. That someone isn’t itself a role.
I too have been thinking about the peach and onion metaphor, but I want to chose a different vegetable analogy drawn from Native American culture: the Indigenously named “three sisters”: beans, corn, squash. Each “sister" remains distinctly itself (corn is not beans is not squahs) while being constituted through the relationship. So too, a collectivist/communal/relational society that doesn’t center individualism, sees identity as emerging through relations and interactions with the community.
I have a much longer post about my concerns with M&D’s centering of individualism, as I think it excludes cultures that don’t adhere to Western, liberal notions of a distinct individual.
Nice analogy. I do think that community and relationships can have a profound effect on a person and their sense of identity. There is much wisdom in Native American culture and its traditions that everyone can benefit from. I also think all the other traditions also have wisdom that is worth exploring. It is a shame that non-Western traditions are largely excluded from the conversation. {My post on Ramose's paper highlights a perspective from Africa.}. I think this is something that needs to be corrected.
I had some issues with the chapter „Paradoxes of Authenticity“. Here the authors state: „Authenticity wants to be observed as authentic“ (p.174 line 6)
In my experience I can be fully authentic just by myself. When I play an hour of guitar alone, I am expressing myself in a way that I would call authentic. However, I do not feel the need to be observed in this situation. I can derive joy and fulfillment (validate my identity?) just from playing.
I agree. It sounds like they’re trying to smuggle profilicity into their description of authenticity. Sometimes authenticity might want to be seen and observed as being observed, but that isn’t a central feature of it.
Intimacy is what I think the authors' argument is missing. Human beings need intimacy. The "chronically online" person who communicates primarily through profilicity on second-order observational platforms is deprived of intimacy. The rest of us must disconnect ourselves from culture more broadly in order to have the time and energy for genuine intimacy, or live an in uncomfortable middle ground where we begrudgingly conform to public opinion in order to remain on second-order platforms. It's a losing situation for everybody, and the only escape is behind a massive wall of social, political, and economic reform.
Agreed, at least if they did then I haven't noticed, which seems like a pretty critical oversight to me. Why do we form identities? We don't just need them in abstract - like they said, identity formation is largely an illusion. I feel like the common trend is balancing the needs of the self with social connection/belonging. That's why even the "self-driven" authentic person wants to be validated by other authentic individuals.
It also makes me think about what others [you] have mentioned about their neglect of collectivist cultures. Despite acknowledging that identity is validated by others, their reasoning for why people pursue different modes of identity formation assumes their personal values or morals exist in a vacuum without care for others.
I'm not sure I see as big of a difference between Authenticity and Profilicity as the authors suggest there is. Maybe Profilicity is just an extension of Authenticity. The step from Authenticity to Profilicity seems to me to be a further receding into the self and moving away from the physical world. The major difference I see between Sincerity and Authenticity is the perceived choice of identity rather than it being given to us. I don’t buy that in the age of Authenticity there really is much of a choice when forming identities. If there is, it is much more like being dealt a hand of cards and playing those cards within a set of rules set out by society.
As others have mentioned above, I don’t think the peach and onion metaphor are all that great at describing identities. There seems to be an inner self at our center that acts in the world, but that is totally detached from any sense of identity. Like an onion, once you peel away the layers of identity there is no identity left. However, like the peach there still is that inner self that observes and acts in the world. In my view, identity is more like a multilayered garb that is placed over you and allows you to act in the world and be reliably perceived by others.
The movement from Sincerity to Authenticity allows the idea of the individual to take front stage in our perception of identity. Instead of thinking of ourselves in terms of our family, community, and society, we recede further into the self. There, we are led to believe that we can truly discover ourselves. But there is no self to discover. Our inner self just is. Maybe it’s more like an essence which cannot be truly known, even by ourselves.
The movement from Authenticity to Profilicity may be just another step in the direction of the self. Through second order observation, we can detach ourselves from the physical presence of the other. This way we can construct our discovered identity how we see fit and have more freedom to present it to the world how we would like. However, I still think this is all an illusion. To the extent that choice may be present, it is very limited and likely influenced by things out of our control. This gets into the idea of free will, and while I’m not willing to totally give up free will, I do think it is very limited when it comes to identity.
I’m not a philosopher and have only taken a class in logic while in college, so none of this may make any sense, but his is what I’ve been stuck on thinking about the past few days.
I’m wondering whether profilicity can account for subjectivity or identity formed through interaction with AI.
“Being-seen-as-being-seen” seems to assume a human audience, but with AI we’re interacting with systems that continuously model and mirror us back to ourselves.
That’s not just second-order observation—it’s more recursive, where the profile becomes an active participant in shaping subjectivity.
Can profilicity account for that, or is it limited to human audiences—rather than human–AI interactions?
I realized the other day that people have been communicating with an unknown audience far longer than the mass media mentioned in the book. An example that would have certainly existed before the printing press: a merchant in a busy trading town attempting to sell his wares to people from places of which he knows neither. To me, such an example shows that the idea of a "general peer" may be more broadly representative of impersonal communication. Perhaps this could also explain why the pervasiveness of impersonal communication makes many of us so uncomfortable. We've had hundreds, maybe thousands of years to develop a sense for this type of language, and we intuitively know that it's coming from someone who probably doesn't have our best interests in mind.
If Authenticity is about being uniquely personal to beliefs that you hold most dear that have been acquired by looking inwards but paradoxically as this chapter has explained also by basing parts of our identity on observations of others. The chapter goes into the idea of fashion being a typical use of external authenticity that one can produce. If this is true then would that make a fashion brands based only on one designer the truest form of Authenticity. Lets use a well known brand that was started by a family called Gucci. There was a point in time where the classic green and red stripe brand that we know as Gucci was not a stable and barely even a brand at all. At what point in time is Gucci at it most Authentic. Is it when it is unknown and less imitated and somewhat "unique" or is it now (The present) when the brand is well established as serving a specific type of clientele that uses the authenticity of this brand that has been established over a long period of time as a way for they themselves to be inauthentically authentic. A question I still have pertaining to Authenticity is: Does Authenticity associated with consistency over time or is it more localize in time?
At the same time we started "You and Your Profile", I was teaching a class on Native American Identities. Importantly, I am not Native, have no connections to any tribe, nor is the content of the class my area of academic specialization. (FYI it is applied ethics and philosophy of art.) The course came about through a number of random circumstances which I don’t have space to describe so I’ll skip ahead…
What I found as I read the early chapters of "You and Your Profile" was that it felt like Moeller and D’Ambrosio were describing a historical progression—from sincerity, to authenticity, and now profilicity—in which we generally rejected one for the next. Obviously, this isn’t entirely true (and they don’t subscribe to such a historical progression): each of us sits in numerous roles simultaneously—father, spouse, teacher, volunteer, rec-soccer player, book study participant, and so on. But their description of profilicity made it appear that in our contemporary “differentiated society” one must recognize that second-order observation is the way to go and as such, society no longer runs on role-based sincerity or individualistic authenticity. Equally important is the core assertion that “dedication to a supposedly unified underlying self is no longer functional or even credible. Instead, people are required to develop the flexibility to adapt to different ‘working environments’” (67). Identity has to be flexible, and profilicity can do just that.
But the authors don’t state whether this applies to all societies or just those where mass media is in play. Is theirs a descriptive claim or a normative one? Or both? As I read it, they assume the centrality of individualism. As was pointed out in the Zoom chat, they continually talk about “I” and “me”, not “we” and “us”, in describing how identity is formed. This clearly disregards non-individualistic societies; in particular, Native American and Indigenous peoples who are more communitarian, relational or “collectivity” based. M&D fail to acknowledge (at least thus far) that identity might be formed in relation to we/us, and this fails to acknowledge such we/us societies as *actually* existing, as in, present-tense—they have and continue to exist in the face of erasure, integration, assimilation, and capitalistic exploitation. So how does profilicity occur when the individual isn’t the main player?
The readings, films, and stories my students and I have encountered in the class have really complicated the concept of identity and the process of identity formation. I agree that there is no singular, fixed, unchanging essence that defines identity. Yet obviously, there is something that lingers and remains across time. There is a tie that binds “me” to past, present, and future “me.” There is something stable, though I can’t fully describe what it is. So many Native people have talked about who they are, what they care about, and what they fight for in terms that *do* point to some stable piece of identity. And this got me wondering if it has to do with that relational interplay between individual and community. I don’t believe that the individual is fully subsumed by the community, but neither does the group lose track of a sincere or authentic individual. As an example of this, we had an Onondaga storyteller come to the class and share the Haudenasuanee sky-woman origin story and talk about his personal history of coming to be a part of Onondaga culture. He described a hierarchical foundation that moves outward from clan, to tribe/nation, to confederacy. (This roughly tracks town, state, country.) For him, identity has moved from clan-as-central to either tribe/nation-as-central or confederacy-as-central. In listening to him talk, I got the idea that in being Turtle clan and Onondaga and Haudenosuanee, his individuality wasn't “sacrificed” but instead was actually inseparable from the community. To me, this speaks to a fundamentally different metaphysical understanding of the world and the individual’s place within it. Humans aren’t apart from non-human animals and ecosystems, or the social/cultural/political systems they devise; instead, humans exist within and as a part of them. Relationality is fundamental. So identity is built upon that very “other” metaphysical framing.
This kind of relational metaphysics made me think of the “three sisters” — the traditional Haudenosaunee companion planting of corn, beans, and squash. (I mentioned this elsewhere.) Just as each plant supports the others, individual identity in a communal framework emerges through being in relationship with, support from, and contrast against the group. Crucially, the corn doesn't become the bean or the squash. Each remains distinct, but none thrives in isolation. This seems to me a far better metaphor for identity than either Rosemont's peach (a hardcore self) or his onion (layers with nothing underneath). The metaphor of the three sisters suggests a third option: identity that is genuinely constituted through relationship without being dissolved by it.
We are currently reading Tommy Orange’s "There There," which explores an urban Native experience across about a dozen characters, all moving towards an encounter at a powwow. At numerous points, characters ask the question of what it means to be “Native”. It is an expression of a tension, a confusion, even a contradiction: can I be white and Native? Can I be Native without knowing my tribe? Can I be Native without knowing the language or wearing regalia or dancing or living on traditional land? But each of these characters believes that there is something that makes them “Native”; there is something stable that opens the door to that space of their shared identity. Are these characters each striving for sincerity (as a son, a grandmother, a friend, a community member)? Are they reclaiming or returning to or rediscovering some authentic Native self that has been stolen, assimilated, or exploited (i.e., the “Real Indian” as the character Orvil describes it)? For profilicity (now that I think about it), Native peoples are continually aware that they are seen-as-being-seen. They live under a constant colonial gaze, a white gaze, a stereotyping gaze, and thus Native people must inhabit an identity that they understand is continually built on (what seems to me to be) second-order observation. Orange writes (as the character Orvil) that he is “waiting for something true to appear before him—about him. It’s important that he dress like an Indian, dance like an Indian, even if it is an act, even if he feels like a fraud the whole time, because the only way to be Indian in this world is to look and act like an Indian. To be or not to be Indian depends on it.” What Orange is saying here is something echoed by Hillary Weaver in her article “Indigenous Identity: What Is It, and Who Really Has It?” There, she writes that Native identity is formed through three facets: self-identification, community identification, and external identification. Native identity has and continues to be influenced by the US federal government and settler colonialism, which have exerted “a shaping force in indigenous identity by defining both Native nations and individuals.” As I see it, this external-colonial gaze is operating under something like a second-order observation logic, but it is doing so from a position of *coercion* rather than choice.
I’m rambling now, so I’ll finish up. I know that M&D claim that profilicity isn’t unique to social media and instead arose most obviously alongside the widespread implementation of mass media and its specticality. And whether or not it has actually been more prevalent historically (as some people in the Zoom chat asserted) I don’t know. But what is evident to me is that their descriptions wholly disregard the experiences of individuals and communities that reject or fall outside of Western, liberal, Enlightenment notions of individualism. A profilicity that is built on “I” and “me” cannot account for people whose very metaphysics begins with “we”; where identity, like the three sisters, is a relational achievement, not an individual performance.
Ok. I’m out.
(Note: In the Zoom call, Jared was talking about there not being a singular essential self. In talking about how a fixed self doesn’t exist, he actually made the ironic comment that there wasn’t a “there, there”. I picked up on that instantly!)
The Duchess told Alice:
‘Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might
appear to others that what you were or might have been was not
otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be
otherwise.’
I confess I have not worked out the logic from that, but I came across it and thought it was an Interesting take on our topic from circa 1865! These issues have been around a long time!
This stole all my focus this morning! Maybe this will help others, it's how I made sense of it: replace "not otherwise than" with "anything but", "them" with "others", and messing with tenses & grammar.
A: the appearance of [(what you were) or (could have been)] = (what you had been)
"Never imagine yourself as being anything but A, as others believe A is true."
Could also replace the "it" for the thing it's substituting, "[what] would have appeared to others to be otherwise".
"Never imagine yourself to be anything but what would have appeared to others to be otherwise."
Seems like an argument for sincerity/profilicity to me! I am very open to the possibility that I horribly misinterpreted this though 😂
Here is the full text - kind of gives the answer:
“I quite agree with you,” said the Duchess; “and the moral of that is—‘Be what you would seem to be’—or if you’d like it put more simply—‘Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.’”
“I think I should understand that better,” Alice said very politely, “if I had it written down: but I can’t quite follow it as you say it.”
Definitely authenticity/profilicity related.
Having just finished "The Annotated Alice", I can't over emphasize how great the Alice books are.
I think that the onion metaphor for sincerity, like all real metaphors, doesn't fit its subject perfectly. You pointed out the conflicts that might occur due to the clashing of different social roles but we should also not forget that, at least traditionally, the roles of sincerity were thought to have significant correlation between each other; that is why they usually came in a bundle. Onion layers are too distinct from each other in comparison.
On importance of choice in authenticity, I think economic development is a very important driving force here. The strictly vertical view of development, poor to rich, usually misses the horizontal expansion of alternatives and the leeway required to use them.
Yes, and they reflect an assumption that some are more ‘core’ than others, even if there is no final core.
In thinking about the peach and onion metaphor, I think more in terms of us being a large box that is composed of many smaller boxes. Some of the boxes correspond to the various roles we have. Each one has its own logic, vocabulary, expectations, and so on. It's a way to help us organize and interact with our world. With the onion, when we remove layer after layer we reach a point when there is nothing left. But the different roles do not consume us. There is always someone who is moving the boxes. There is someone to decide which box to open, and when, and how much of its contents to use. That someone isn’t itself a role.
I too have been thinking about the peach and onion metaphor, but I want to chose a different vegetable analogy drawn from Native American culture: the Indigenously named “three sisters”: beans, corn, squash. Each “sister" remains distinctly itself (corn is not beans is not squahs) while being constituted through the relationship. So too, a collectivist/communal/relational society that doesn’t center individualism, sees identity as emerging through relations and interactions with the community.
I have a much longer post about my concerns with M&D’s centering of individualism, as I think it excludes cultures that don’t adhere to Western, liberal notions of a distinct individual.
When you write that, please let me know and I'll link to it.
Should be up now. Sorry for the different profilic responses. I’m sure there is some deep, psychological point that it reveals.
I plan on posting in later today.
Nice analogy. I do think that community and relationships can have a profound effect on a person and their sense of identity. There is much wisdom in Native American culture and its traditions that everyone can benefit from. I also think all the other traditions also have wisdom that is worth exploring. It is a shame that non-Western traditions are largely excluded from the conversation. {My post on Ramose's paper highlights a perspective from Africa.}. I think this is something that needs to be corrected.
I didn't understand the onion - if there are just layers, who is choosing which layer to display?
I don't agree with the peach - our individual core identity changes - I don't have the same self-center that I did as a teenager.
I had some issues with the chapter „Paradoxes of Authenticity“. Here the authors state: „Authenticity wants to be observed as authentic“ (p.174 line 6)
In my experience I can be fully authentic just by myself. When I play an hour of guitar alone, I am expressing myself in a way that I would call authentic. However, I do not feel the need to be observed in this situation. I can derive joy and fulfillment (validate my identity?) just from playing.
Yes, and in fact sometimes your authenticity might demand not being observed. I felt that point was lacking in support.
I agree. It sounds like they’re trying to smuggle profilicity into their description of authenticity. Sometimes authenticity might want to be seen and observed as being observed, but that isn’t a central feature of it.
Check out what David Foster Wallace had to say about postmodernist irony. The world needs a lot more sincerity, authenticity, and realistic optimism.
Intimacy is what I think the authors' argument is missing. Human beings need intimacy. The "chronically online" person who communicates primarily through profilicity on second-order observational platforms is deprived of intimacy. The rest of us must disconnect ourselves from culture more broadly in order to have the time and energy for genuine intimacy, or live an in uncomfortable middle ground where we begrudgingly conform to public opinion in order to remain on second-order platforms. It's a losing situation for everybody, and the only escape is behind a massive wall of social, political, and economic reform.
Do they even talk about intimacy? I don’t remember seeing it come up, at least not in a substantive way.
Agreed, at least if they did then I haven't noticed, which seems like a pretty critical oversight to me. Why do we form identities? We don't just need them in abstract - like they said, identity formation is largely an illusion. I feel like the common trend is balancing the needs of the self with social connection/belonging. That's why even the "self-driven" authentic person wants to be validated by other authentic individuals.
It also makes me think about what others [you] have mentioned about their neglect of collectivist cultures. Despite acknowledging that identity is validated by others, their reasoning for why people pursue different modes of identity formation assumes their personal values or morals exist in a vacuum without care for others.
Edit - that was you who mentioned collectivism!
I'm not sure I see as big of a difference between Authenticity and Profilicity as the authors suggest there is. Maybe Profilicity is just an extension of Authenticity. The step from Authenticity to Profilicity seems to me to be a further receding into the self and moving away from the physical world. The major difference I see between Sincerity and Authenticity is the perceived choice of identity rather than it being given to us. I don’t buy that in the age of Authenticity there really is much of a choice when forming identities. If there is, it is much more like being dealt a hand of cards and playing those cards within a set of rules set out by society.
As others have mentioned above, I don’t think the peach and onion metaphor are all that great at describing identities. There seems to be an inner self at our center that acts in the world, but that is totally detached from any sense of identity. Like an onion, once you peel away the layers of identity there is no identity left. However, like the peach there still is that inner self that observes and acts in the world. In my view, identity is more like a multilayered garb that is placed over you and allows you to act in the world and be reliably perceived by others.
The movement from Sincerity to Authenticity allows the idea of the individual to take front stage in our perception of identity. Instead of thinking of ourselves in terms of our family, community, and society, we recede further into the self. There, we are led to believe that we can truly discover ourselves. But there is no self to discover. Our inner self just is. Maybe it’s more like an essence which cannot be truly known, even by ourselves.
The movement from Authenticity to Profilicity may be just another step in the direction of the self. Through second order observation, we can detach ourselves from the physical presence of the other. This way we can construct our discovered identity how we see fit and have more freedom to present it to the world how we would like. However, I still think this is all an illusion. To the extent that choice may be present, it is very limited and likely influenced by things out of our control. This gets into the idea of free will, and while I’m not willing to totally give up free will, I do think it is very limited when it comes to identity.
I’m not a philosopher and have only taken a class in logic while in college, so none of this may make any sense, but his is what I’ve been stuck on thinking about the past few days.
Definitely makes sense! I've been thinking some similar things...just need to get them into a post ha.
I’m wondering whether profilicity can account for subjectivity or identity formed through interaction with AI.
“Being-seen-as-being-seen” seems to assume a human audience, but with AI we’re interacting with systems that continuously model and mirror us back to ourselves.
That’s not just second-order observation—it’s more recursive, where the profile becomes an active participant in shaping subjectivity.
Can profilicity account for that, or is it limited to human audiences—rather than human–AI interactions?
I realized the other day that people have been communicating with an unknown audience far longer than the mass media mentioned in the book. An example that would have certainly existed before the printing press: a merchant in a busy trading town attempting to sell his wares to people from places of which he knows neither. To me, such an example shows that the idea of a "general peer" may be more broadly representative of impersonal communication. Perhaps this could also explain why the pervasiveness of impersonal communication makes many of us so uncomfortable. We've had hundreds, maybe thousands of years to develop a sense for this type of language, and we intuitively know that it's coming from someone who probably doesn't have our best interests in mind.
If Authenticity is about being uniquely personal to beliefs that you hold most dear that have been acquired by looking inwards but paradoxically as this chapter has explained also by basing parts of our identity on observations of others. The chapter goes into the idea of fashion being a typical use of external authenticity that one can produce. If this is true then would that make a fashion brands based only on one designer the truest form of Authenticity. Lets use a well known brand that was started by a family called Gucci. There was a point in time where the classic green and red stripe brand that we know as Gucci was not a stable and barely even a brand at all. At what point in time is Gucci at it most Authentic. Is it when it is unknown and less imitated and somewhat "unique" or is it now (The present) when the brand is well established as serving a specific type of clientele that uses the authenticity of this brand that has been established over a long period of time as a way for they themselves to be inauthentically authentic. A question I still have pertaining to Authenticity is: Does Authenticity associated with consistency over time or is it more localize in time?
At the same time we started "You and Your Profile", I was teaching a class on Native American Identities. Importantly, I am not Native, have no connections to any tribe, nor is the content of the class my area of academic specialization. (FYI it is applied ethics and philosophy of art.) The course came about through a number of random circumstances which I don’t have space to describe so I’ll skip ahead…
What I found as I read the early chapters of "You and Your Profile" was that it felt like Moeller and D’Ambrosio were describing a historical progression—from sincerity, to authenticity, and now profilicity—in which we generally rejected one for the next. Obviously, this isn’t entirely true (and they don’t subscribe to such a historical progression): each of us sits in numerous roles simultaneously—father, spouse, teacher, volunteer, rec-soccer player, book study participant, and so on. But their description of profilicity made it appear that in our contemporary “differentiated society” one must recognize that second-order observation is the way to go and as such, society no longer runs on role-based sincerity or individualistic authenticity. Equally important is the core assertion that “dedication to a supposedly unified underlying self is no longer functional or even credible. Instead, people are required to develop the flexibility to adapt to different ‘working environments’” (67). Identity has to be flexible, and profilicity can do just that.
But the authors don’t state whether this applies to all societies or just those where mass media is in play. Is theirs a descriptive claim or a normative one? Or both? As I read it, they assume the centrality of individualism. As was pointed out in the Zoom chat, they continually talk about “I” and “me”, not “we” and “us”, in describing how identity is formed. This clearly disregards non-individualistic societies; in particular, Native American and Indigenous peoples who are more communitarian, relational or “collectivity” based. M&D fail to acknowledge (at least thus far) that identity might be formed in relation to we/us, and this fails to acknowledge such we/us societies as *actually* existing, as in, present-tense—they have and continue to exist in the face of erasure, integration, assimilation, and capitalistic exploitation. So how does profilicity occur when the individual isn’t the main player?
The readings, films, and stories my students and I have encountered in the class have really complicated the concept of identity and the process of identity formation. I agree that there is no singular, fixed, unchanging essence that defines identity. Yet obviously, there is something that lingers and remains across time. There is a tie that binds “me” to past, present, and future “me.” There is something stable, though I can’t fully describe what it is. So many Native people have talked about who they are, what they care about, and what they fight for in terms that *do* point to some stable piece of identity. And this got me wondering if it has to do with that relational interplay between individual and community. I don’t believe that the individual is fully subsumed by the community, but neither does the group lose track of a sincere or authentic individual. As an example of this, we had an Onondaga storyteller come to the class and share the Haudenasuanee sky-woman origin story and talk about his personal history of coming to be a part of Onondaga culture. He described a hierarchical foundation that moves outward from clan, to tribe/nation, to confederacy. (This roughly tracks town, state, country.) For him, identity has moved from clan-as-central to either tribe/nation-as-central or confederacy-as-central. In listening to him talk, I got the idea that in being Turtle clan and Onondaga and Haudenosuanee, his individuality wasn't “sacrificed” but instead was actually inseparable from the community. To me, this speaks to a fundamentally different metaphysical understanding of the world and the individual’s place within it. Humans aren’t apart from non-human animals and ecosystems, or the social/cultural/political systems they devise; instead, humans exist within and as a part of them. Relationality is fundamental. So identity is built upon that very “other” metaphysical framing.
This kind of relational metaphysics made me think of the “three sisters” — the traditional Haudenosaunee companion planting of corn, beans, and squash. (I mentioned this elsewhere.) Just as each plant supports the others, individual identity in a communal framework emerges through being in relationship with, support from, and contrast against the group. Crucially, the corn doesn't become the bean or the squash. Each remains distinct, but none thrives in isolation. This seems to me a far better metaphor for identity than either Rosemont's peach (a hardcore self) or his onion (layers with nothing underneath). The metaphor of the three sisters suggests a third option: identity that is genuinely constituted through relationship without being dissolved by it.
We are currently reading Tommy Orange’s "There There," which explores an urban Native experience across about a dozen characters, all moving towards an encounter at a powwow. At numerous points, characters ask the question of what it means to be “Native”. It is an expression of a tension, a confusion, even a contradiction: can I be white and Native? Can I be Native without knowing my tribe? Can I be Native without knowing the language or wearing regalia or dancing or living on traditional land? But each of these characters believes that there is something that makes them “Native”; there is something stable that opens the door to that space of their shared identity. Are these characters each striving for sincerity (as a son, a grandmother, a friend, a community member)? Are they reclaiming or returning to or rediscovering some authentic Native self that has been stolen, assimilated, or exploited (i.e., the “Real Indian” as the character Orvil describes it)? For profilicity (now that I think about it), Native peoples are continually aware that they are seen-as-being-seen. They live under a constant colonial gaze, a white gaze, a stereotyping gaze, and thus Native people must inhabit an identity that they understand is continually built on (what seems to me to be) second-order observation. Orange writes (as the character Orvil) that he is “waiting for something true to appear before him—about him. It’s important that he dress like an Indian, dance like an Indian, even if it is an act, even if he feels like a fraud the whole time, because the only way to be Indian in this world is to look and act like an Indian. To be or not to be Indian depends on it.” What Orange is saying here is something echoed by Hillary Weaver in her article “Indigenous Identity: What Is It, and Who Really Has It?” There, she writes that Native identity is formed through three facets: self-identification, community identification, and external identification. Native identity has and continues to be influenced by the US federal government and settler colonialism, which have exerted “a shaping force in indigenous identity by defining both Native nations and individuals.” As I see it, this external-colonial gaze is operating under something like a second-order observation logic, but it is doing so from a position of *coercion* rather than choice.
I’m rambling now, so I’ll finish up. I know that M&D claim that profilicity isn’t unique to social media and instead arose most obviously alongside the widespread implementation of mass media and its specticality. And whether or not it has actually been more prevalent historically (as some people in the Zoom chat asserted) I don’t know. But what is evident to me is that their descriptions wholly disregard the experiences of individuals and communities that reject or fall outside of Western, liberal, Enlightenment notions of individualism. A profilicity that is built on “I” and “me” cannot account for people whose very metaphysics begins with “we”; where identity, like the three sisters, is a relational achievement, not an individual performance.
Ok. I’m out.
(Note: In the Zoom call, Jared was talking about there not being a singular essential self. In talking about how a fixed self doesn’t exist, he actually made the ironic comment that there wasn’t a “there, there”. I picked up on that instantly!)
Hiya! Really hoping u will give this a read!
https://substack.com/@thingstothinkhq/note/p-190912443?r=6r75kq