Being-Somebody or Something?
Identity in the era of communicative capitalism
The call to be-something
“The personal is political.” Words uttered in darkness. Our being is in the world, and we cannot be without or outside of it. We are being-in-the-world, but all the while we are alienated from it. Yet the most fundamental contradiction of postmodern philosophy is the call to be-something. To be fair, it did not originate from within the philosophical school, but the school adopted this postindustrial proposition during the rise of neoliberal economics.
The call to have an identity by which a person can be known is a peculiar property of modern liberalism. It demands at the same time that the other defines the “I” (as Freud would say, “das Ich”) as the “I” becomes something in social space aside from its activity. In postmodernity, the Being-something creates distinct units that are as opaque as they are powerful, often referred to as identities.
Yet the etymology of the word indicates that the originally intended sense has instead been reversed in the (post)modern age. Originally, Merriam-Webster asserts, the word likely derived from the Latin idem-et-idem. This translates literally to “same and same.” In this sense, identity is a marker of the uniformity of the object under observation. Yet it has…
