The Idea of Identification

Chapter 1: Origins of an Idea

Chapter 1 ORIGINS OF AN IDEA If we think of identity as a mark of a separate and unified subjectivity, identification is rejection of separateness; it denies the others difference by allowing the subject the excitement of trespass, the thrill of being the other. Art provides us repeated access to such psychic thrills. —Elin Diamond, “Rethinking Identification: Kennedy, Freud, Brecht” You persuade a man only insofar as you can talk his language by speech, gesture, tonality, order image, attitude, idea, identifying your ways with his. —Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives Identification can be given any one of many characterizations: common ground, inhabiting, projecting, becoming, associating, connecting , and so on. In cinematic terms, identification seems to create a momentary freeze frame: a temporary pause in a world unfolding at twenty-four frames a second. In that short space the brain seems to give us time to take in and absorb a place, a person, or a thought that we already “know.” One could alternatively describe identification as the “replay” of a familiar “tape,” or the match to a familiar form already in the memory. Whatever the metaphor, we strive to find the right words to account for the extension of identification from its literal Latin root idem—meaning “same”—to the much broader but elusive capacity for empathy. In some ways tracing the intellectual history of so central a human impulse is arbitrary. No single source, faction, or culture can lay claims of exclusivity or discovery to the human tendency toward identification. We have, instead, a long series of complementary and sometimes contradictory systems of thought—ranging from Freud to film theory—which treat the subject as primary to 1 2 THE IDEA OF IDENTIFICATION our understanding of how humans establish patterns of significance in their lives. In their finer details these systems agree on very little. But one thing is certain: experience in its many forms leaves its calling card behind, marking specific moments or events as obvious touchstones to our identity. And while we are only at the beginning of a long quest to map the neuroscience of “higher” cognitive processes ,1 we have a long history of interest in identification that spans from ancient rhetorical theory to modern cultural studies. All of these fields start from the same premise: as individuals we possess a staggering range of symbolic resources that allow us to consider another person’s experiences and recognize them as our own. These include the cues of our sensory world—sight, sound, smell, touch—as well as the linguistic tools for communicating these experiences to others. Just in the realm of language, an educated adult may have a vocabulary of forty thousand words, and an intensely verbal person’s can reach over one hundred thousand.2 We also possess a brain that has an enormous predisposition for visiting and revisiting linkages. Events and feelings accumulated over time strike chords of recognition, providing a consciousness of similarity that is regularized in a kind of “library” of personal rituals. What neuroscience calls “associative learning”3 builds structures of relationships that may exist as latent thoughts held by our long-term memory, or new thoughts that are a part of our immediate consciousness. Memory obviously gives the brain a significant amount of power to generate associations. Our love of replication, imitation, and ritual keeps many of them close at hand. Even the impressionistic and abstract products of the arts can trigger a richer range of associations than might seem possible. In physical terms, the image conveyed on the canvas comes to us as light and color measured in angstrom units. Music can be reduced to the sound equivalent of cycles per second, or hertz. But the brain adds much more as associations begin to build up in the memory and are triggered in recall. The cliché that childhood comes with its own “soundtrack” is intuitively true. For nearly all of us memories of adolescence are easily recalled in the context of the popular music of the period. The same principle of association works in other forms of music that carry programmatic associations. For this writer the deliberate rhythmic inflexibility in the last movement of Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony suggests the machine-age modernism 3 Origins of an Idea of the 20s: a style of rude dominance over the land also captured in...