8 Consequences Of Making Identity A Site Of Production

Ideological forces once told people who they were; now they tell us we are nothing without sustained productive effort

1. Fingers Are Not Eyes

Before capitalism, identity was typically assigned. As Roy Baumeister details in "How the Self Became a Problem: A Psychological Review of Historical Research," an individual's social purpose was largely defined by gender and caste, and the design of society was oriented toward strengthening and clarifying those definitions, reinforcing boundaries. Writes Baumeister: "The community was considered to be as much a stable unity as any living organism is. No person should therefore desire to change his or her station, any more than a finger should wish to be the body's eye (to use Augustine's famous simile)."

2. Depleting the Imagination

Such stasis was not conducive to economic growth or wealth. Incentives to work were tied entirely to coercion or religious ideas of duty. Material deprivation left little energy and substance for the imagination to work with. It must have made far more sense and been more harmonious and pleasurable for people to devote what little imaginative power they had to prayer than to futile fantasies about richer lives or better opportunities.

3. Learning Aspiration

Capitalism gradually chipped away at this stasis and made identity a site of production and a source of incentive. (In Baumeister's terms, the self became "a problem." The nature of this problem was giving away identities for free rather than using the "self" as a site from which to extract labor.) Capitalism taught that one could experience pleasure in imagining what one can become rather than merely satisfaction in fulfilling what station has been assigned to one. Vicariousness became a much more salient pleasure, and envy a more ambiguous vice.

4. Duty Now for the Future

New forms of entertainment became necessary to help people deal with the ambiguities about who they were and who they could become. Advice manuals flourished, as well as other forms of media meant to supply models for living. These showed how to live a life oriented toward consumption rather than duty (or rather, the new duty was to consume) and were themselves consumer goods to be collected, circulated.

5. Convenience Over Community

The newly identity-less needed to learn to experience insecurity as opportunity for vicarious indulgence and the thrilling autonomy of choice, rather than a reason for angst and despair over a life without clear purpose. They needed to learn that individualism led not to isolation but control, and that convenience was more than enough compensation for any loneliness. As sociologist Colin Campbell has argued, this entailed the promulgation of the "Romantic ethic" that dignified the pleasures of acquisitiveness and the hedonistic imagination. Though often rooted in physical sensation, these hedonistic pleasures must be "renaturalized" and made to seem essential to life's meaning.

6. Self-production and Love

The new emphasis on individual potential and the introspective contemplation of future pleasures elevated the significance of passionate love. Baumeister argues that "medieval persons did occasionally feel passionate attractions to each other, and there was some limited recognition of passionate love as a powerful state, but it did not have a central place in medieval life," whereas the rise of capitalism saw love begin to be regarded as necessary to personal fulfillment. It may be worth interpreting "love" as another name for the productivity of identity. The incentive to have a self, to make one, may be experienced and understood as falling in love with another person and trying to hold their attention by becoming lovable.

7. Making Experiences Into Products

We are now becoming accustomed to the requirement to not just make a self — and supply that labor — but to make a specifically productive self, one whose felt "reality" is contingent on how it well it can make products of its experiences. The self is a machine for converting what it senses and thinks into media objects that can be circulated and capitalized upon.

8. The Will to Be

We may be reaching an inflection point at which the demand to make experiences productive becomes so explicit that we try to resist it—that we regard it as a temptation rather than a mode of fulfillment. This will change the way we think of the exhaustion self-production brings on: It will feel like ego depletion rather than ego completion. We will since our will has been sapped rather than gratified by the production of identity and related experiential goods. This perceived loss of will might make us more susceptible to manipulation generally, or at least provide a new explanation for why the selves we work so hard to make end up making so little sense to us.