Pierluca Birindelli
Sociologia
FrancoAngeli
Narrative Identity
A Personal Roadmap
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Pierluca Birindelli
Sociologia
FrancoAngeli
Narrative Identity
A Personal Roadmap
ISI Florence and Gonzaga University in Florence contributed to the publication of this
book.
Copyright © 2022 by FrancoAngeli s.r.l., Milano, Italy
All right reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted, reproduced, translated, adapted, reworked or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,
without written permission from the publisher.
Contents
Introduction
p.
11
1. Late-Modern Identity
»
13
2. Homo Oeconomicus and the Solitary Explorer
»
23
3. Finding a Safe Place
»
30
4. What Complexity and What Differentiation
»
35
5. The Criteria of Choice Dilemma
»
43
6. Recognising Oneself and Being Recognised
»
48
7. Concepts and Images of the Self
»
53
8. The Field of Identity and its Dissonances
»
59
9. Acceptance and Realisation of the Self over Time
»
65
10. Choices: Faltering Identities and False Selves
»
73
11. Authenticity and Existential Project
»
83
12. Youth: Dreams, Media and Social Reality
»
90
13. Narrations and Memory: The Scripts
»
101
14. Self-Narrative: Processes and Objectives
»
109
15. Erfahrung in the Erlebnisgesellschaft
»
120
References
»
127
5
This book is dedicated to my great friend Helen: I would never have finished nor even started this work, and many others, without her. Of course,
this is not why she is my friend. It’s because she has all my respect and
admiration. She is altruistic, brilliant, profoundly reflexive and happy at
the same time. This is quite extraordinary: a reflexive-happy-giver.
7
Acknowledgements
This book was supported by faculty development grants from Gonzaga
University in Florence and International Studies Institute (Florence).
I would like to express my gratitude to the people who provided support, talked things over, read the manuscript, and offered comments. In particular, I wish to thank Aelmuire Helen Cleary, Andrea Smorti, Arto Noro,
Jason Houston, J. P. Roos, Keijo Rahkonen, Sergio Caruso, and Stefano
Baldassarri. Special thanks go to all the young people and international students that I met over the years for their time and their trust.
9
Introduction
As a sociology researcher I began collecting and studying young people’s life stories in the late 90s, while I was writing my dissertation. I’ve
continued to do it for the past 30 years. I’ve never counted how many selfnarratives of different kinds—autobiographies, full and partial autoethnographies—I’ve read, but definitely more than 1,000.
Why young people and the passage to adulthood? Why narratives? Because I believe that the liminal ‘shadow line’ between youth and adulthood
is probably the richest and most promising interpretative field for understanding the lives of both young people and adults and the societies and
cultures they live in. And I also believe that it’s hard to challenge the conviction that narratives offer the most potent insights into what’s going on in
peoples’ lives.
But beyond these ‘scientific’ motivations, there are also personal ones.
In my youth I struggled to become an adult. Why all this struggle? A simple answer came to my mind just now, while writing this introduction. In
early adolescence I was expecting to find more ‘good’ human beings in the
world, more guides. That didn’t happen. However, this book is not about
morals or ethics. I’m not a philosopher or a priest, and somehow I came to
terms with life and people the way they are.
As a sociology student at university I wanted to understand more about
this challenging life-passage, also from an introspective angle. So, I began
to keep a diary and later I wrote my autobiography. Was this helpful? Yes
and no. Because my approach to the world—myself included—is neither
therapeutic nor instrumental, but aimed simply at knowing a bit more. Although I’ve never been afraid to put myself on the line and engage in debate, I haven’t found any of those clear-cut, strategic answers that are supposed to help you live a better life. I did become more aware of who I am
and, as a result, of who ‘they’ are: the so-called ‘others’. But I don’t believe
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there’s a causal link between self/other awareness and wellbeing. On the
contrary, I see no link at all. Most of the people I know who are living a
‘happy life’ possess a tactical awareness limited to the scope (making the
most of their life) or are not self-aware at all.
This book reflects on personal identity, which for me can only mean
narrative identity. It includes some passages from the autobiographies and
autoethnographies of young people that I collected (Birindelli 2006, 2014)
and from my own. It’s a personal ‘identity roadmap’, accompanied by the
suggestion (in the second part) of writing or telling your own story as a way
of becoming a bit more self-aware.
This book is grounded in sociological thought. But sociology alone was
not enough to make things clearer to me. It seems to me that at times sociologists use the concept ‘identity’ in the same way that some friends of
mine use ‘awareness’: to get what they want. Sometimes the concept itself
is not addressed, so that questions tend to remain within the boundary of
the discipline.
Since I was using the term ‘identity’ extensively to interpret the collected life stories, I felt the need to question the concept and cross various disciplinary boundaries. I mainly moved into the territories of psychology,
psychoanalysis and narrative studies. However, this book is certainly not an
exhaustive anthology or textbook on narrative identity in late modernity.
It’s simply my small, personal, hand-crafted roadmap, travelling from one
book to another in an attempt to chart an intellectual and critical territory
useful for my fieldwork and myself.
In this roadmap you will find mostly classic or late-modern authors up
to the early 2000s. The reason for this is simply that I understood them better than other, more recent, scholars. For instance, scholars who tried to
shed light on the life of individuals in the social and cultural passage from
modernity to late modernity were able to paint an extensive and profound
portrait. When the debate moved into the framework of cultural globalization and cosmopolitanism, I felt that things started to become less clear and
convincing.
I am not sure if this interpretative roadmap of narrative identity will be
useful to the reader, but I hope so.
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1. Late-Modern Identity
The sense of identity is a crucial aspect in the life of every individual.
We perceive, organise, plan, choose and act through our self-awareness—
or lack of it. Following a hermeneutic path that starts with literature and
then branches out into the vast array of social science disciplines, one cannot fail to be intrigued by the richness and evocative power of the numerous representations, images, and metaphors relating to individual and collective identities. However, extracting a clear meaning from this wealth of
material is no simple matter. The attempt to address the identity of an individual or a group has by now become a daunting task that calls for an uncommon critical capacity to manoeuvre between a multitude of lexical and
theoretical ambiguities. To define identity more clearly, I have adopted a
multidisciplinary perspective, using approaches, theories and concepts belonging to sociology, psychology, psychoanalysis, and narratology.
Put simply, the subject of these reflections is individuals thinking about
themselves and the past life paths that led to the present. Then there is the
life plan aspect: awareness of self-identity develops also on the basis of the
aspirations and expectations that we cultivate for the future. Here therefore,
identity is understood as ‘narrative identity’. Narrative identity (Ricoeur
1984, 1985, 1988; Bruner 1990; Burke and Stets 2009) is always a retrospective interpretation of the past and an anticipation of the future.1 It is a
tale capable of binding the three times of existence as these were understood by Saint Augustine: the present of past things, the present of present
1 For a detailed analysis of the concept of identity, with different disciplinary approaches, see among others James (1890/1983), Cooley (1902), Mead (1934), Lewin (1935), Erikson (1956, 1982), Berger and Luckmann (1966), Laing (1969/1990), Kohut (1971), Sennett
(1977), Koselleck (1979/2004), Dennet (1991), Gergen (1991), Perinbanayagam (2000),
Jenkins (2008), Burke and Stets (2009). On the narrative approach see among others Burke
(1945), Bruner (1991), Ricoeur (1991, 1992), Ezzy (1998). For a review of the biographical
approach see Miller (2005).
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things, the present of future things. It is a psychological, sociological and
anthropological mechanism not based on an ‘entity’: identity is a process
not a thing. Identity is made up of the relations that the individual—also
through intersubjective inside-outside group recognition—establishes,
through memory, between the different and shifting perceptions of oneself
in relation to the ‘Other’, and to the wider sense of belonging to a (national,
regional, transnational, global) collective identity (Birindelli 2008).
The identity process is a progressive construction of (and through) the
individual and collective memory framework (Halbwachs 1980), and consequently through the cultural repertoire of stories contained therein. Substantially, this is the shared meaning of ‘identity’ within social sciences,
which speak of identity or of identity crisis depending on the solidity or the
fragility of this construction.
Identity is the human capacity—rooted in language—to know ‘who’s who’
(and hence ‘what’s what’). This involves knowing who we are, knowing
who others are, them knowing who we are, us knowing who they think we
are, and so on: a multi-dimensional classification or mapping of the human
world and our places in it, as individuals and as members of collectivities.
(Jenkins 2008, 5)
‘Substantially’ does not mean unanimously. Using ‘identity’ and ‘collective identity’ as heuristic concepts means partially disagreeing with
those who (Brubaker and Cooper 2000; Brubaker 2004) make a distinction
between non-existent groups and real ‘groupness’. Jenkins feels this distinction doesn’t make much sociological sense since groups are constituted
in and by their ‘groupness’: being social constructions doesn’t make groups
illusions, and everyday life is full of real encounters with small groups and
manifestations of larger groups: ‘It is the distinction that Brubaker draws
between groups and “groupness” that is an illusion, and it does not help us
to understand the local realities of the human world’ (Jenkins 2008, 12).
What is at stake here is also the question of common sense brought to
our attention by Alfred Schutz (1962/2012, 44): sociological models not
only need to be scientifically adequate, they must also be commensurate
with common sense. When a scholar forces concepts that are too rigid onto
the ambivalences and haze of social reality, there is the risk of ending up
further away from it, replacing the ‘reality of the model’ with a ‘model of
reality’ (Bourdieu 1990, 39). By seeking unambiguous ‘really real’ analytical categories, Brubaker takes a broadly sensible argument to a logical extreme that is less sensible: attempting to impose theoretical order on a human world in which indeterminacy and ambiguity are the norm.
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Social scientists must aim for the greatest possible clarity, but their concepts must also reflect the observable realities of the human world (Jenkins
2008, 9–10). Malesevic (2002, 2006) too argues that identity—more precisely ethnic identity—is a confusing analytical concept: it means too much
and includes too many different dimensions. But the dumping of the term
‘identity’ for the sake of analytical clarity is not an appropriate solution
(see Ashton et al. 2004, 82). As Jenkins puts it ‘the genie is already out of
the bottle’ and not only is ‘identity’ an established concept in social sciences, it is also a widely-used construct in common parlance and public discourses, from politics to marketing and self-help (Jenkins 2008, 14).
In this book I want to focus more on the conscious identity, activated by
subjects’ reflection on their own temporal continuity and difference from
others. Here, the unconscious identity is conceived as a series of elements
that influence individuals’ behaviour and reflections. However, if the unawareness is excessive, it will be conceptualised as absence: a hole in the
knitted fabric of one’s biography.
As noted above, the word ‘identity’ belongs both to scientific language
and to common parlance, and this capacity for penetration and circulation
in a myriad of social ambits has to be borne in mind. Every context and culture that addresses the subject of identity alters its meaning, so that an already inherently elusive concept is pervaded by a multiplicity of styles and
rationales. ‘Encrustation’ is a useful metaphor to illustrate the concept’s
lack of purity and transparency, although one should also beware of eliminating this through over-simplistic approaches. Any topic discussed with an
interest that raises doubts and perplexities is a vanguard issue. It is best to
tolerate the uncertainty and ambiguity of this interpretative process until a
shared outpost is built on this insidious terrain in the hope that over the
years it may develop into a fortress, obviously one with the drawbridge
permanently lowered.
To map out the ambivalences mentioned above, we can ask some simple
questions. The identity of who and of what? To which individuals or
groups does this term apply? In common parlance, through the media arena,
identity is often linked with adjectives: gender, party, crisis, youth, national, culture and so forth. This immediately introduces a split in the use of the
term: individuals and groups, personal and collective identities. What I am
dealing with is individual identity, fully aware of the fact that collective and
individual identities interact and assume different meanings depending on
the relations between them.
The ease with which this concept is bandied about and freely yoked to
others would appear to suggest that it requires no opening-up or explana15
tion. Often, however, it is used not because its meaning is clear and generally accepted, but rather on account of its evocative capacity and the feelings it arouses. Changing one’s identity, becoming someone else, is something that has always fascinated human beings. In the same way, in all
communities, people without a recognisable identity have always kindled a
combination of interest and hostility, a sense of discomfort caused by the
difficulty of encapsulating them in specific and reassuring definitions.
Ways of radically changing one’s identity have also always existed, such as
shutting oneself up in a monastery, adopting a religion or joining the Foreign Legion. These and other classic modes of identity transfiguration have
now been joined, on a massive scale, by physical alterations such as slimming diets, bodybuilding and plastic surgery. All this is related to one of
the fundamental processes of identity construction, namely self-acceptance,
which will be dealt with later on.
Now, to test the difficulty of a clear definition of the term identity, let’s
take a look at two generally accepted meanings in an Italian and in an
American language dictionary. In the Garzanti Italian dictionary, ‘identità’
is defined as ‘the set of physical and psychological characteristics that
make a person what he or she is, different from everyone else: defending
one’s own identity; identity crisis, a contradictory notion that the individual
has of him or herself; it may constitute a pathological state.’
This immediately brings up two interesting points. On the one hand, a
concept of identity understood as the sum of physical and psychological
characteristics given a priori and on the other hand, a vision of identity as a
problem or crisis, which concentrates on the pathological aspect. So, we are
dealing with a concept that emerges and is specified at the very moment in
which its precariousness, inconsistencies and instability are perceived: the
identity is in crisis or, at the very least, has to be defended.
Let’s take another definition, this one from the American Heritage Dictionary: ‘The set of behavioural or personal characteristics by which an individual is recognizable as a member of a group; the personality of an individual regarded as a persisting entity.’ Here the definition of identity as a
socially acquired process makes clearer reference to an individual’s belonging to a group, after which the personality of the individual and its persistence is mentioned. This meaning, on the one hand creates ambiguity
through the use of the terms ‘personality’ and ‘identity’ as if they were
synonyms, while on the other it uses concepts such as ‘persistence’, which
means continuity but not change. Additionally, the term ‘entity’ cannot be
associated with a dynamic concept of subjectivity; on the contrary it suggests the idea of an immoveable individual essence.
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Even the language of the scientific community tends to create ambiguity. In addressing the question of identity, the arguments appear to evoke
something which is implicit but that, in actual fact, is not explicitly understood. This can be discerned, for instance, in the work of scholars adopting
a narrative approach to the subject of identity, who frequently use as synonyms the terms history, biography, autobiography, experience, memory,
recollection, account and story. They also use in the same way terms such
as ‘identity’ (qualified by the adjectives social, personal, individual), ‘individuality’, ‘subjectivity’, ‘personality’ and ‘Self’.2 Sometimes the reason
for this is to avoid repetitions that are considered stylistically inelegant.
People adopting such narrative approaches aspire to a mellifluous prose and
are reluctant to strip their communicative content to the bare bones.
Some writers even resort to evocative terminology. These ‘magic
words’ are usually polysemic and used as shields against possible criticism.
Examples are ubiquitous terms such as ‘hybrid’ and ‘half-caste’. These are
words that indicate something indefinite in social reality: the scholar
evokes the complexity of reality, albeit without helping us to understand it.
One telling example of this is the famous expression ‘Generation X’, which
was used by sociologists in the 1990s to indicate a generation of young
people deemed unfathomable or, more simply, not very well understood.
Even ‘Millennials’ (aka ‘Generation Y’) is clearly evocative rather than explicative. One might have hoped that the labelling would end with ‘Generation Z’, being the last letter in the alphabet. But apparently we have returned to go with ‘Generation Alpha’.3
One of the reasons why the term ‘identity’ is not easily intelligible and
does not enjoy autonomous theoretical status is because it overlaps with
other terms. In the analytical axis stretching from the individual to society,
the pivot of investigation—and hence of the consequent reconstruction of
ideal types—is shifted towards the society that conditions the individual.
Social scientists have sketched out numerous personality types of a social
character, portraying in great detail the socio-cultural environment that
stimulates or inhibits the development of particular values, attitudes and
aims guiding the behaviour of the actors. Conversely, the interior and exterior means proper to the various types of identity tend to be very vaguely
Writers who explain the meaning of the keywords of their argument help the reader.
The need to create a glossary is, nevertheless, an indicator of the state-of-the-art of a discipline.
3 I shall return frequently to the subject of the condition of youth and the passage to
adult life: focusing what lies beyond the Shadow Line (Conrad 1917) can help to clarify the
concept of individual identity tout court.
2
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defined (Rositi 1983, 27)4: very often behaviour or attitudes that contribute
to define identity are also reutilised to delineate the means. Examples of
this are the inner-directed and other-directed types of Riesman (1950), the
authoritarian personality of Adorno (1950), the Philistine, the Bohemian
and the creative man of Thomas and Znaniecki (1918–1920/1958), Simmel’s metropolitan type (1902/1964) and Schumpeter’s entrepreneur
(1929). These scholars emphasise the influence of the cultural context on
the individual’s psychological organisation and models of action: it is the
socialised aspect of the individual that is investigated. The attainable roles,
the more or less creative paths accessible within a particular social milieu
are the fundamental elements for understanding the acquisition of a social
identity.
The specificity of identity profiles, and the set of issues this brings to the
fore, is derived from and moulded by the conditioning of the social context.
From here, the attempt to comprehend the dialectic between social conditioning and the uniqueness of the subjective path and the capacity for selfreflection proceeds with a delicate and precarious analytical balancing. The
knife-edge route is a rugged crest between two abysses that exert a dangerous attraction for those prone to vertigo. On one side is the cliff of the idealistic and Promethean representations of human beings, stressing their free
will, total independence, and bordering on an image of omnipotence: the
possibility of individuation within an array of alternatives standing out
against backgrounds cleared of all restrictions and constraints. The other
cliff face is populated by determinisms, the notion of a ‘recipient individual’ at the mercy of a social order—either subtle or coarse—that eliminates
personal choice. Individuals’ potential is locked up within the narrow enclosure of natural and cultural limitations. The two concepts could be
summarised as infinite possibility versus infinite frustration.
In this scenario the concept of identity emerges as a possible way of understanding the social action of an individual in its uniqueness, without reducing it to a mere response to external stimuli, or conversely as the manifestation of a perfect free will. One might say that the concept of identity
takes on a shade of conciliation, a compromise (or a conflict) between the
individual and society. This dialectic between the constraints and freedom
of the social actor is not easy to unravel, but is nevertheless a route to be
followed, especially by constructing new hypotheses and carrying out reRositi also hints at the potential risk of the quest for an ‘optimal identity’: formulating
a complete and systematic definition of the concept of identity—often supported by a dehistoricised theory of personality or cognitive development—can block or slow down the
production of ‘new images of man’.
4
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search in the field. This route was already pursued long ago by the founding fathers of sociology (Durkheim, Weber and Simmel), and is now assiduously frequented by the social sciences in general and by sociology and
social psychology in particular.
The emergence of the identity issue was closely tied up with the question of its construction in Western industrialised societies, and within the
conceptual framework of the passage from a modern to a late-modern
world. The intensification of functional, cultural and symbolic differentiation in the late modern age,5 and the ensuing complication of orientation in
social worlds, renders the models of identification supplied by the traditional institutions and agencies of socialisation less effective. At the same
time the central question of identity construction—Who am I?—becomes
increasingly urgent.
What emerges is a dynamic that is apparently antithetical but substantially consequential. On one side the need to respond to the identity request
is more pressing, while on the other side the means to do so go up in
smoke. The places, cultures and ideas through which the late-modern individual can plan and give a strong meaning to life projects are no longer
clear, visible, certain or reassuring. The causal link could be reversed: if the
objective answers embodied in traditional institutions lose their capacity to
provide life with sense and meaning then the individual is forced—and at
the same time free—to seek different modes and criteria of self-definition.
Thus, we have greater autonomy in the process of individuation and less
security in existential planning.
‘Individuation’ is the process of constructing an individuality starting
from a common nature. For Jung, the end and meaning of existence are expressed in this process:
Individuation, therefore, is a process of differentiation, having for its goal
the development of the individual personality. Individuation is a natural necessity inasmuch as its prevention by leveling down to collective standards
is injurious to the vital activity of the individual. (Jung 1921/2017, 411).
If the sense of identity becomes precarious and unstable, the individual
constantly experiences a sense of uncertainty as regards self and social realWe can make distinctions between: functional differentiation, which is produced by the
divisions of work and of technique and by the segmentation and multiplication of life environments in the structure of society; cultural differentiation, which can be understood as a
diversification of the needs and a change in the expectations of individuals; and symbolic
differentiation, which is not separate from cultural, but places emphasis on the multiplication of the demands for meanings to refer to.
5
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