This book by Marie Moran (SAGE Publications, 2015), is a notable contribution to the study of “identity” under capitalism, but also a great foundation to consider how the economic, social and political contexts have been determining the business and technical aspects of “Identity Management.”
Marie Moran, a lecturer at the UCD School of Social Justice, Dublin, builds her argument very thoroughly from the start, conscious of the debates and ideological fog which have so far confused the matter: .
“Even theorists who assert the socially constructed, inessential nature of personal and social identity nonetheless assume that the search for identity, or the collective or individual attempt to build, consolidate, mark or construct an identity – however ‘fluid’, ‘negotiated’ or even ‘fictive’ that identity might be – is a human or social capacity, that pre-existed our extensive current reflection on what exactly an ‘identity’ is. This assumption is not just academic. While writing this book, I was regularly met with the confident assertion that, while individual identities may change, ‘get lost’, or enter crisis, this fundamental sense of self – this capacity to ‘have an identity’ – is a constitutive and defining feature of personhood.” (Page 3, SAGE Publications, Kindle Edition)
This aspect –underlined by Moran–has been also evident in all discussions of “identity” as related to Information Security and Technology. In these areas, the notion of “identity” is taken as a given, as something pre-existing to the current state of affairs, independent of its relatively recent technological implementation. As the idea of “identity” stays unquestioned, the technological and business discourses remain limited to those implementations, and are incapable of even perceiving when and where Identity became a problem in itself.
As Moran correctly indicates, Identity as a problem is a recent manifestation:
“Against such assumptions, this book makes the perhaps surprising and controversial claim that identity never ‘mattered’ prior to the 1960s because it did not in fact exist or operate as a shared political and cultural idea until the 1960s. The very word identity, as we know and use it today, only emerged into the popular, scientific and political imagination and associated discourses in the second half of the last century. In historical perspective, the idea of identity, particularly as it is elaborated in the associated categories of ‘personal’ and ‘social’ identity, is a surprisingly novel one.” (Pages 3-4, SAGE Publications, Kindle Edition)
This fundamental clarification is in itself very valuable, but then Moran makes a second claim, which is even more relevant for Information Security and Identity Management:
“When we look closely at the contexts of usage of the ‘new’ term identity, we find that it emerged in two key spaces – firstly, in new patterns of consumption, particularly those associated with individualism, ‘lifestyle’ and distinction (where these in turn were underwritten by new popular psychological discourses of personal transformation and personal stability); and secondly, in a series of political shifts that responded to and shaped the politico-economic landscape of western capitalist societies, as demands for universal redistribution were gradually displaced by demands for group-based recognition.” (Page 4, SAGE Publications, Kindle Edition)
This centres the discussion on the historical context. Perhaps something that would be normal in informed debate but remains extraneous in business and technological exchanges.
Regrettably, in our professions, the social and economic context, the whole historical epoch has disappeared “Technology” is an absolute and unquestioned presence. As a consequence of that, an historical product -the technology itself– appears instead as a cause. In that sense, it can be said that in techno-centric discourse there is an inversion of causality, where the inception and dissemination of technology is not a result of historical processes but instead the cause of social processes. Using a crude illustration, we might say that in the techno-centric imagination, it is not social mobility which determines the adoption of the telephone, but the telephone which “causes” social mobility.
The where and when of “Identity” are never considered as being determined by historical processes, but instead as some permanent problem which “has” to be “solved” by means of technology.
In that way, the occlusion of history leads to blindness as to the real nature of the “Identity Problem” — despite the fact underscored by Moran, that Identity arises in “new patterns of consumption, particularly those associated with individualism, ‘lifestyle’ and distinction”.
To which I would add that Identity as facet of society and as a problem arises in the context of successive stages and layers of intermediation. First procedural mediation, for example through individuals or groups which mediate human activities, but then, later, increasingly by technological constructs which mediate between humans and their actions. And finally, through technological “entities” which themselves are constructs and operate as mediators of the mediators.
A clear symptom of the lack of understanding of the social drivers of Identity Management is the current infatuation with the so-called “internet of things” –where almost the entire Industry fails to see that all machine-to-machine interactions are effectively mediations, where the actual human agents are abstracted by the sheer complexity of the mechanical setup.
More specifically, within the disciplines of Information Security and Identity Management, “Identity” becomes a problem through the continued process of separation of the Natural Person and its representations and agents. This increasing distance between the Individual and her / his representations, this elongation of the chain of mediators, is the social cause of the Identity problem. The effect of this process generates a “space” of fragmented representations which we conventionally call “personas,” “identifiers” or “digital identities.”
It is in that sense that Moran’s book helps us to ground an analysis of Identity and Identity Management in the wider context of the Post-National Era.
(To be continued…)