Identity as institution: power, agency, and the self
- PDF / 383,131 Bytes
- 19 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 47 Downloads / 205 Views
Identity as institution: power, agency, and the self Scott Marratto 1 Accepted: 21 October 2020/ # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract This paper addresses issues of agency and self-identity on the basis of a phenomenology of embodiment. It considers a tension in accounts of embodiment between, on the one hand, the body as the locus of subjectivity, lived experience, and agency, and, on the other hand, the body as constructed, as the site where discursive regimes of power are inscribed. In exploring this tension I consider Frantz Fanon’s and Sarah Ahmed’s phenomenological accounts of racism to illustrate the ways in which social power and violence come to be implicated in these conflicts within our embodied identities. I also consider Foucauldian “power” in relation to Merleau-Ponty’s concept of “institution.” I argue that only the phenomenological concept of institution, by drawing our attention to the ambiguities of lived embodiment, succeeds in offering us resources for thinking about the interplay between passivity and agency in the life of the subject, and, in particular, about a form of agency not wholly reducible to the effects of power. Keywords Merleau-Ponty . Phenomenology . Power . Embodiment . Institution . Agency
In his 1945 Phenomenology of Perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty famously observes, referencing Husserl’s Ideas II, that “consciousness is originarily not an ‘I think that,’ but rather an ‘I can’” (Merleau-Ponty 2012, p. 139). The implication is that our identity is revealed, first and foremost, implicitly, as the projective coherence of a situation, a coherence enacted through bodily agency. But Merleau-Ponty’s attention to the body as the locus of self-identity also foregrounds tensions or conflicts within that identity. First of all, there is the tension between the body as a self-determining subject of firstpersonal lived-experience (Husserl’s “I can”) and the body as public persona, determinately situated in a common space of visibility and shared meaning, exposed to the judgements, interpretations, and ingress, of others. As is richly brought out, for
This paper was first presented as a keynote at the conference Phenomenology and Personal Identity. Nov. 2830, 2018. Charles University, Prague.
* Scott Marratto [email protected]
1
Michigan Technological University, Houghton, MI, USA
S. Marratto
example, in Sartre’s famous analysis of “the Look,” it is in reflections on experiences of conflict between these two aspects of embodied subjectivity that the existential logic of self-identity is particularly revealed (Sartre 1984). A second tension brought out in Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of embodiment concerns habit. Incarnate subjectivity is at once a locus of agency and the product of a process of habituation such that much of what characterizes one’s ownmost personal style of judging and acting is in fact, paradoxically, automatic, implicit, unconscious. If the first tension is between an agent-self and a public-self, the second is between an agent-self and what we might call a habit-self
Data Loading...
