Identity Crisis in a Society Driven World

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Identity Crisis in a Society Driven World
Abstract
This paper studies the individual as he or she is shaped by the society where they live in. A careful pursuit using an analysis of three different representations of how the society shapes an individual is used. The study involves an analysis of how power is induced by an individual or society toward another.
Keywords: Identity, Power, Society
Introduction
Identity is something that is personal, it is on the belief that man can choose for himself. How man constructs his identity identifies who he is. It is predicated on how one constructs his own desires, even in death. Identity is the longing to belong, as Cornel West termed. Humanity identifies to other people based on their race, gender, sexuality or class. Man can identify to a certain race but can be greatly negative toward other`s gender or class. The relationships between these identifiers are co-relational; this means that humanity is not determined by one single factor. This allows complex mixtures of the races, gender, sexuality and class. As humans start to develop their own identity, they realize and learn things that may have not been known to them before. Passing was understood as a phenomenon in which a person of one race, gender, sexuality or class and identifies him or herself as part of another. Passing is defined as "a deception that enables a person to adopt specific roles or identities from, which he or she would otherwise be barred by prevailing standards".Passing, therefore allows a person to develop an identity that is not his own, instead, he is identified based on the different race, gender or sexuality that he or she tries to portray. A man chooses who he or she is based on what society he or she is living in. Racial passing have long captivated the attention of American viewers and readers. Rather than studying race, gender, sexuality, and class as distinctive social hierarchies, new studies have focused into examining how these different concepts mutually construct one another. Studies like intersectionality allow researchers to identify the different outcomes of the interaction between these different concepts.[How you construct your identity is predicated on how you construct desire, and how you conceive of death: desire for recognition; quest for visibility; the sense of being acknowledged; a deep desire for association - affiliation (West).] [Kennedy (2003) provides a more precise definition and defines passing as ‘‘a deception that enables a person to adopt specific roles or identities from which he or she would otherwise be barred by prevailing social standards`` (Khanna and Johnson)] [The idea of the "passing plot" encompasses many different kinds of stories. I use the term to refer to narratives that focus on the consequences of being genotypically black for a character or characters who pass for white, at least intermittently. I have in mind texts such as: William Dean Howells's An Imperative Duty (1891), Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894), Charles W. Chesnutt's The House behind the Cedars (1900), James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), Jessie Fauset's Plum Bun (1928), Nella Larsen's Passing (1929), Fannie Hurst's Imitation of Life (1933), Oscar Micheaux's God's Stepchildren (1937), Willard Savoy's Alien Land, Alfred L. Werker's Lost Boundaries, and Elia Kazan's Pinky (all 1949) CITATION Val94 \l 1033 (Smith).]
As the similarities arise from identification, differences are brought into the surface as well. Differences arise not only physically but as well as ideologically. From the roots of racial, gender, sexual, and class differences, a much deeper difference differentiation can be attributed to ideologies. Ideologies are a much stronger form of identification that allows people to bond stronger or create major differences that can result to power struggles that can lead into war. Ideology is a system of different ideas and representations that can dominate a mind of man which then can influence a social group.
Ideology and Identity
Ideology is conceived as a pure illusion, a pure dream or much known as nothingness. It is a construction of man to influence and guide him, and in turn, actively or even passively other people who to be in agreement with the idea and are gravely shaped by these ideas to eventually embody it themselves. Man, in so far as his relationship to ideologies is tied up into which he is being influenced. In this matter, ideologies are influenced again by man`s race, gender, sexuality and class. The identity of man is determined by his ideology that is represented in the fantasized relationship between their different conditions of existence. These conditions are commonly known; too name a few, as religious ideology, ethical ideology, and political ideology. These different fields of ideology influence the everyday affairs of men. Sometimes, the influence stretch further and can already become harmful, both to the individual and to the people that are surrounding him. Despite the fact that we believe that ideologies are illusion made by man, we cannot deny the fact that these ideologies can create reality which is ‘interpreted` by man to discover what is real for him.[Ideology, then, Is for Marx an imaginary assemblage (bricolage), a pure dream, empty and vain, constituted by the ‘day`s residues` from the only full and positive reality, that of the concrete history of concrete material individuals materially producing their existence (Althusser).] [We commonly call religious ideology, ethical ideology, legal ideology, political ideology, etc., so many ‘world outlooks` (Althusser).]
From the perspective of man, one may significantly examine things like what it means to say that a practice is normative. Particular social norms, such as the different races, gender, and sexuality and class distinctions determine how a person identifies himself. Normative, how particular norms or normative practices function, and whether a particular norm is oppressive, but the necessity of the norm and normativity. In any argument in ethics and politics, ethical and political theory and practice must be accepted. Foucault referred to normalization as all power techniques originating with the norms.[I believe that one of the meanings of human existence - the source of human freedom - is never to accept anything as definitive, untouchable, obvious, or immobile. No aspect of reality should be allowed to become a definitive and inhuman law for us.1 ~ Michel Foucault] [Taylor, Dianna. "Normativity and Normalization." Foucault Studies (2009): 45-63.]
In light with the different norms that have risen in recent times being able to have an identity has become a pressing issue. In the past, people are identified with their own accomplishment or blunders while at present, people are identified based on the group they are with. Modernity gravely changed the notions of identity and has caused identifying oneself to be weakened. Identity has become undermined by the different developments in the past 20th Century. The query of "who one is" turned out to be an increasingly difficult question to respond to. Hybrid identities have spread, rather than reflecting an inherited sense of belonging, identity of a person is split to be able to be part of the different aspects of society. Instead of developing one`s own identity, a person chooses to identify to something rather than for him.
Corresponding to identification rather than developing an own identity, identities are reshaped by technologies of identification. The increased rate of technisizing of societies and the deterioration of identities make identification a complicated matter. People opt to identify to things that they perceive to be part of rather than developing something and believing on their own. Lack of identification is structurally sanctioned by placelessness. The roles of norms play an important role in identification as they set the boundaries in giving power to someone or taking it away.[Identities are ther...