Alienation: Identity or Lack of Identity?

A phenomenon that is not uncommon: I have noticed that amongst my friends who grew up in the South and eventually became alienated from the dominant Evangelical Protestant culture, there is marked difference between the manner in which those who were themselves from a Protestant background (such as myself) and those who belonged to a minority religion such as Catholicism or Judaism conceived of their alienation. The former tended to adopt secularism, atheism, or agnosticism while the latter became even more invested in their identities as Catholics or Jews. This shouldn't be surprising, for the Protestant, alienation takes the form of a lack - an absence of meaning and resonance, a dirremption from the culture to which he supposedly belongs. His status as an outsider is not due to an identity imputed on to him by the other, as would be the case with a Roman Catholic living in the "Bible Belt." The lapsed Protestant is an "insider-outsider." He "belongs" to the dominant culture in the traditional sense in which identity is understood, in that he is not considered as being in possession of any sort of differentiating characteristic, yet he is an outsider in that the rituals, practices, and concepts that comprise the dominant culture do not, in fact cannot have meaning. His alienation does not result from an identity, some otherness, but from an absence of meaning.

The Catholic or the Jew, on the other hand, finds himself in the condition that Sartre comments upon in Being and Nothingness; a meaning to his existence has been projected onto him from the outside, emanating from the Other, and he is in the position to either confirm or deny this meaning, to see himself within the terms that the other projects onto him, to see himself as a Catholic or Jew, or to reject them altogether. Most of my Catholic and Jewish colleagues living in the South chose to confirm this identity, to see themselves as Catholic or Jewish, and thus to explain their own personal experiences of alienation within the broader alienation of entire class of people with whom they identified.


Over the last few decades, quite a lot of scholarship from the Cultural Studies approach in the humanities has investigated the aforementioned form of alienation, alienation via identity - what it means to be black, queer, or Muslim in a culture that has established "whiteness," heterosexuality, and Christianity as its norms. What I believe has been ignored is the alienation that results not from de facto exclusions, but from reflexivity, or a simple inability to connect with one's own culture. In fact, I sometimes get the feeling that the focus on identity has even pathologized alienation from the culture or group to which one supposedly "belongs" as destructive to community or a shared sense of group solidarity. Nevertheless, this is the sort of alienation that has always interested me - that is, the question of what it is to exist on the margins of one's own culture, not as a member of an oppressed community but as nothing, nobody, from nowhere.



To be white, to be an Anglo-Saxon Protestant no less, no doubt comes with a great deal of unjust privilege - the police, potential employers, even passers-by on the street are going to be more likely to be generous in the assumptions about a WASP, less likely to harass him. But fitting comfortably within the norms of one's cultural, even if this only goes as far external appearance, is to be without identity, without the assumption that one shares any common experience with anyone at all. Whiteness in America is the lowest common denominator - it ranks only slightly above the breathing of oxygen in its ability to strike a chord of resonance within the other. Irishness, Italianness, Polishness, even WASPness - yes, but not whiteness. As far as a norm is what is negative, a mere absence of difference, whiteness is nothingness.

But it is not "white" alienation with which I am concerned, but rather the alienation of non being, the alienation of the one who cannot be anything, even that which the other projects onto him. As passe and cliched as it may appear in our current intellectual landscape, I am still interested in the alienation of the bohemian, the artist, the drifter, the loner - even the drunk, the addict, and the maniac -regardless of whatever other categories may be applied to him. His is a rupture that runs deeper, throbs more painfully, and is all the less tractable because he is never assured that anyone really is like himself, that he can ever share even the most basic intimacy with anyone.

On Auster and Urban Space, Continued from 9/9

One of Auster's many philosophical insights that he brings forth in The New York Trilogy is the observation that the self - and the narrative that is essential to the self - is not merely subject to change in time, but in space.

In his first Critique, Kant claims that the two pure intuitions, time and space, possess a sort of spatial character - the former being internal in nature, the latter being external in nature. There is a tacit dualism here - the mind as something internal, an "inside" that cannot even be appropriately conceived in terms of space at all (which of course begs the naive question "inside" of what? Not the body, since to occupy the body would make the mind part of the body, externality), the body, on the other hand is mere externality, a being with extension in space.

The previous passage from Auster can either be read as a departure or a confirmation of Kant's original claim - either the self is an externality, a space, a body, changing in space, or according to the contrary reading it is "nothing" once it becomes mere externality. It ceases to be a self at all, it becomes reified, but not exactly immutable. Like a piece of flotsam that is altered by the changing seas upon which it floats, it is altered by its movement through various spaces, but it has no power to shape itself, or to direct its course.

A scene in the first season of the hit television show Mad Men comes to mind - after Peter reveals Don's secret identity as Dick Whitman, Cooper recites a Japanese proverb: "A man is whatever room he is in." There is subtle, yet important difference in Cooper's words than our common knowledge that "a man is not who was so many years ago" or "he isn't who he once was." It begs the question: does self-hood not only require a narrative across time, a temporality, as the existentialists pointed out, but also a spatial understanding? Heidegger and Sartre conceived of space in reference to time; spatiality was dependent upon temporality. But is this necessarily the case?

Auster: The Self Across Urban Space

"Each time he took a walk, he felt as though he were leaving himself behing, and by giving himself to a seeing eye, he was able to escape the obligation to think, and this, more than anything else, brought him a measure of peace, a salutary emptiness within. The world was outside of him, around him, before him, and the speed with which it kept changing made it impossible for him to dwell on any one thing for very long. Motion was of the essence, the act of putting one foot in front of the other and allowing himself to follow the drift of his own body. By wondering aimlessly, all places became equal, and it no longer mattered where he was. On his best walks, he was able to feel that he was nowhere. And this, finally, was all he ever asked of things: to be nowhere..."

from City of Glass in The New York Trilogy