8 - Identity and Voices: A Language-Dialogical Take

Summary

Like a broad array of core notions in human and social sciences, identity is reformulated with regard to a general anti-Cartesianism. This leads to shifting reified entities to processes and results in a fundamental opening to dynamic plurality and to contextualizing any phenomenon. This shift can be read as a theoretical and as a societal shift in dominant industrialized countries, but it can also be used as a critique of traditional Western individualism that colonizes through psychological science what is otherwise done through markets and symbolic meanings of things, actions, and persons. In this reading, the term “identity” crystallizes the ideology of individualism. Thus, this chapter uses a nonindividualistic, performative-dialogic approach emphasizing the concrete experience of “languaging.” It broaches two issues emerging through processuality: How can we theorize continuity and coherence within change? How do we articulate the social and the individual to each other? Dialogism framing language and self builds the ground for developing identity as a process occurring in a field of mediated activities generated and shaped by language activities deployed onto that field. This process displays a call-and-reply dynamic of crossing and blending voices. An example illustrates this dynamic, highlighting identity as being called by voices of different types. Finally, the two issues are offered an answer by deconstructing the assumptions of sameness and homogeneity and shifting towards heterogeneity, plurality, and dialogicality that are contained by centripetal and centrifugal forces: identity is an interim, even fragile, stage that continues through the dynamic of call-and-reply of speaking voices.